GETTING SCHOOLED BY THE CANUCKS:

Obama, Canada's Harper will have plenty to talk about: The president ventures north for his first foreign trip in office. (Andrew Malcolm, February 1, 2009, LA Times)

[I]n the summer of 2007, candidate Obama told a labor (labour for Canadian readers) rally in Chicago that one of the first things he'd do in the White House is tell "the president of Canada" that he wants to renegotiate parts of the allegedly job-gobbling North American Free Trade Agreement.

Since he knows better now and has already won Ohio and Pennsylvania, that Obama promise may be, in a Nixonian kind of phrasing, no longer operative. But Harper, whose country is the U.S.' largest energy provider, and Obama will have plenty to talk about anyway. Both are political pragmatists. By Canadian standards, Harper is a conservative, which on the U.S. political spectrum would make him about as conservative as, say, Ted Kennedy.

Their two countries have by far the biggest bilateral economic relationship in the world, with about $1.6 billion in trade flowing back and forth each day. That's more than $1.1 million per minute, even better than Obama's fundraising.

And, as it happens, both countries' economies are in recession right now.

Don't tell Daily Kos, but Obama, like President Bush in Iraq, favors (favours) a U.S. troop surge of perhaps 30,000 into Afghanistan, which may take a little selling. A recent BBC America/Harris Poll shows barely one-third of Americans support such an order. Goodbye, honeymoon.

Also like Bush, Obama would like more NATO combat troops in Afghanistan, where Canadians have loyally fought since Day 1 of the ongoing but unsteady Taliban-overthrowing. But their costly casualty involvement is an increasingly emotional issue at home. Harper has vowed his country's military involvement there ends in 2011, period.

JUST AS DIRTY, BUT DISHONEST INTO THE MIX:

Obama preserves renditions as counter-terrorism tool: The role of the CIA's controversial prisoner-transfer program may expand, intelligence experts say. (Greg Miller, January 31, 2009, LA Times)

The CIA's secret prisons are being shuttered. Harsh interrogation techniques are off-limits. And Guantanamo Bay will eventually go back to being a wind-swept naval base on the southeastern corner of Cuba.

But even while dismantling these programs, President Obama left intact an equally controversial counter-terrorism tool.

Under executive orders issued by Obama recently, the CIA still has authority to carry out what are known as renditions, secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the United States.

Current and former U.S. intelligence officials said that the rendition program might be poised to play an expanded role going forward because it was the main remaining mechanism -- aside from Predator missile strikes -- for taking suspected terrorists off the street.

COLLABORATING WITH THE ENEMIES OF THE ECONOMY:

Summers vs Obama (Greg Mankiw, 1/31/09)

The analysis of Larry Summers:

Another cause of long-term unemployment is unionization. High union wages that exceed the competitive market rate are likely to cause job losses in the unionized sector of the economy. Also, those who lose high-wage union jobs are often reluctant to accept alternative low-wage employment. Between 1970 and 1985, for example, a state with a 20 percent unionization rate, approximately the average for the fifty states and the District of Columbia, experienced an unemployment rate that was 1.2 percentage points higher than that of a hypothetical state that had no unions.

SUCH A SELF-LOATHING ROMANTIC LIFE...:

A bad first date with Mr. Obama (Adrienne T. Washington, February 1, 2009, Washington Times)

Loretta J. Ross, national coordinator of the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective in Atlanta, joked that she was surprised "by the rapidity with which [President] Obama jettisoned the family planning" programs in his $819 billion economic-stimulus package.

"He's the date I had last night who forgot my name this morning," Ms. Ross said, noting how much support Mr. Obama received in the election from women, particularly women of color, who count on family-planning services such as contraception.

AND THEY'RE REJECTING AN IDEOLOGY THAT MADE THEM THE PINNACLE OF EVOLUTION:

Poll reveals public doubts over Charles Darwin's theory of evolution: Belief in creationism is widespread in Britain, according to a new survey. (Jonathan Wynne-Jones, 31 Jan 2009, Daily Telegraph)

More than half of the public believe that the theory of evolution cannot explain the full complexity of life on Earth, and a "designer" must have lent a hand, the findings suggest.

And one in three believe that God created the world within the past 10,000 years.

LET US REASON, THEY RAGED:

Bush Hatred and Obama Euphoria Are Two Sides of the Same Coin (PETER BERKOWITZ, 1/31/09, WSJ)

At first glance, Bush hatred and Obama euphoria could not be more different. Hatred of Mr. Bush went well beyond the partisan broadsides typical of democratic politics. For years it disfigured its victims with open, indeed proud, loathing for the very manner in which Mr. Bush walked and talked. It compelled them to denounce the president and his policies as not merely foolish or wrong or contrary to the national interest, but as anathema to everything that made America great.

In contrast, the euphoria surrounding Mr. Obama's run for president conferred upon the candidate immunity from criticism despite his newness to national politics and lack of executive experience, and regardless of how empty his calls for change. At the same time, it inspired those in its grips, repeatedly bringing them tears of joy throughout the long election season. With Mr. Obama's victory in November and his inauguration last week, it suffused them with a sense that not only had the promise of America at last been redeemed but that the world could now be transfigured.

In fact, Bush hatred and Obama euphoria -- which tend to reveal more about those who feel them than the men at which they are directed -- are opposite sides of the same coin. Both represent the triumph of passion over reason. Both are intolerant of dissent. Those wallowing in Bush hatred and those reveling in Obama euphoria frequently regard those who do not share their passion as contemptible and beyond the reach of civilized discussion. Bush hatred and Obama euphoria typically coexist in the same soul. And it is disproportionately members of the intellectual and political class in whose souls they flourish.

YOU KNOW WHAT IT'S EVEN FURTHER AWAY FROM?:

Iraq Holds Peaceful Vote In Hopeful Sign (Javno, January 31, 2009)

Iraq held a provincial election on Saturday without a major attack in the country, a sign that years of sectarian slaughter and insurgency may truly be fading into the past and greater security is taking hold.

However, the fact the election had to take place behind barbed wire and that four provinces did not participate were a reminder that Iraq is still a long way from joining the ranks of stable democracies.

HE'S A DEMOCRAT, OF COURSE THE CHARITABLE GIVING WAS BOGUS:

More Daschle Tax Issues (Jake Tapper, January 30, 2009, ABC News: Political Punch)

The report indicates that Daschle's failure to pay more than $101,000 taxes on the car and driver a wealthy friend let him use from 2005 through 2007 is not the only tax issue the former Senate Majority Leader has been dealing with since his December nomination prompted a more thorough examination of his income tax returns.

Mr. Daschle also didn't report $83,333 in consulting income in 2007.

The Senate Finance Committee Report also notes that during the vetting process, President Obama's Transition Team "identified certain donations that did not qualify as charitable deductions because they were not paid to qualifying organizations. Daschle adjusted his contribution deductions on his amended returns for 2005, 2006 and 2007 to remove these amounts and add additional contributions." This adjustment meant a reduction in the amount he contributed to charitable foundations of $14,963 from 2005 through 2007.

IT'S BEEN 5 DAYS IF THE UR SAYS IT HAS! (via The Other Brother):

Obama Administration Fails Its Own Transparency Promise Just Days Later (TechDirt, 1/30/09)

On inauguration day, the administration promised, among other things:

We will publish all non-emergency legislation to the website for five days, and allow the public to review and comment before the President signs it.

That's great! If only it actually happened. Jim Harper points out that Obama signed the "Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009" into law just a day after Congress sent it to him. This is a "non-emergency" law. The Whitehouse did put it on the website for review, but not for five days. And, it's especially troubling since there actually is a fair amount of controversy over the law.

RAISING THE BAR:

15-minute fried herbed chicken: This recipe requires so little time and tastes so good that it raises the bar on centre-of-the-plate weeknight food. (EVAN SUNG, THE NEW YORK TIMES)

1 medium onion, roughly chopped

1 to 2 tbsp mixed fresh herbs, such as tarragon and sage

2 tbsp tahini or peanut butter

1/4 cup olive oil, more for frying

Flour for dredging

6 boneless, skinless chicken thighs or 4 half-breasts

Chopped fresh parsley leaves for garnish

Lemon wedges for serving

DIRECTIONS

In a blender or the container of a food processor, combine onion, herbs and tahini. As you purée the mixture, slowly add just enough olive oil through the feed tube to make a thick, smooth paste; don't let it get too thin.

Put flour in a shallow bowl. Place chicken in another bowl. Rub puréed mixture over chicken, then dredge each piece in flour. Gently shake off any excess flour, coat again with paste and dredge once more in flour.

Heat 1/4 inch olive oil in a skillet; when it is hot, fry chicken for about 4 minutes each side, until well browned and cooked through; it will take longer if you use chicken with the bone in.

SPENCER'S VICTORY...:

Intellectual Selection: BANQUET AT DELMONICO’S: Great Minds, the Gilded Age, and the Triumph of Evolution in America By Barry Werth (DEBBY APPLEGATE, NY Times Book Review)

Darwin and Spencer shared two basic tenets. The first was the universality of conflict, or the belief that all beings are in competition for limited life-sustaining resources. The second was the principle of adaptation, that those beings who best adapt to their changing environment will be the ones most likely to dominate resources and to reproduce. For a generation raised to believe in a static and harmonic world, bound by the laws of nature and predetermined by God’s plans, these ideas were revolutionary.

Beyond this, however, the two men generally parted company. Darwin was a scientist and a ruthlessly inductive thinker who formulated his hypotheses over 25 years of painstaking observation of plants, animals and fossils. Spencer, by contrast, was a deductive polymath who prided himself on his ability to spin all-encompassing theories out of limited information. Spencer believed that his “universal law of evolution” could apply to everything in the cosmos, including human psychology, language, morality, race, government and society.

Perhaps their biggest difference, however, was the issue of teleology, or ­whether evolutionary development implied a design or purpose. “The forces behind Darwinian evolution were random, mindless, blind, but for Spencer survival of the fittest also meant survival of the best, suggesting a cosmic value system,” Werth writes. “Progress wasn’t accidental; it was imperative, even programmed.” As Andrew Carnegie, the steel baron, philanthropist and Spencer acolyte, liked to say, “All is well since all grows better.” Or in the sharper tones of the Yale political economist William Graham Sumner, “A drunkard in the gutter is just where he ought to be.”

It was Spencer’s wide-ranging attempts to apply the concept of organic evolution to society, rather than Darwin’s more cautious and narrow theories of biological change, that caught fire in the competitive, by-your-own bootstraps atmosphere of post-Civil War America. As Edward Livingston Youmans, the founder of The Popular Science Monthly and Spencer’s main American promoter, often observed, much of what was called Darwinism in the United States should actually be called Spencerism. This was especially true of what has become known, often pejoratively, as “social Darwinism,” or “the anti-philanthropic, anti-meddling side” of Spencer’s legacy, in Youmans’s words. Even so, by 1880 Spencer’s American followers had declared victory over Darwin in the race for popular influence.

THE UR VS THE DEMOCRATIC CONGRESS:

Obama to review 'Buy USA' policy (Allan Woods, 1/31/09, The Star)

The clause in a congressional bill, inserted into Obama's stimulus package by Democratic Representative Peter Visclosky of Indiana, has sparked alarm in Canada, which exports almost $6 billion in steel products to the U.S. annually.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has said the proposal would violate the North American Free Trade Agreement and World Trade Organization rules, but current and former Canadian politicians are urging the government to marshal its diplomatic forces to secure an exemption to the proposed bill.

The clause has also sparked fears of trade protectionism in China, Europe and even in the United States.

WHICH TELLS YOU WHO WON THE WAR:

Blair says it is time to talk to Hamas (Patrick Sawer, 31 Jan 2009, Daily Telegraph)

His comments came after he held talks with George Mitchell, the new US envoy appointed by Barack Obama to try and bring peace to the region following the punishing Israeli attacks on Gaza which killed an estimated 1,300 Palestinians.

Mr Blair appeared to criticise the previous Bush administration and its Israeli allies for their strategy of focusing all peace efforts on the West Bank.

He said: "It was half of what we needed. Yes, we do need to show through the change we are making on the West Bank that the Palestinian state could be a reality.

"The trouble is that if you simply try to push Gaza to one side then eventually what happens is the situation becomes so serious that it erupts and you deliver into the hands of the mass the power to erupt at any point in time."

AND HE'S NO GEITHNER:

Daschle failed to pay $128,000 in taxes: Obama's choice to lead Health and Human Services is the second Cabinet pick to run into tax problems, jeopardizing his confirmation. (Noam N. Levey, January 30, 2009, LA Times)

Former Sen. Tom Daschle, tapped by President Obama to lead his healthcare reform campaign, failed to pay more than $128,000 in taxes in the three years before Obama nominated him in December to head the Department of Health and Human Services.

The disclosure -- involving unreported income and the use of a car and driver provided to Daschle -- comes 2 1/2 weeks after Obama's choice to head the Treasury Department, Timothy Geithner, admitted that he had not paid about $43,000 in taxes.

JESUS AND SPEEDOES:

Wrestling and faith in Mongolia: From a growth in Christianity to a revival of Buddhism, Religious Affairs correspondent Robert Pigott reports on how Mongolians are replacing the all-embracing belief system that vanished with the fall of communism. (Robert Pigott, 1/31/09, BBC)

In the polluted sprawl of Ulan Bator - a communist-era name meaning "red hero" - there are some 200 churches and an estimated 200 more in the mountains, steppes and desert beyond.

Their congregations include many young professional and business people, led in services of swaying and clapping by bands of drums and guitars.

One of their members, Puje Chinggis, says his story is typical.

A confident and calm young man, Puje is now head of Mongolia's only internationally accredited Bible College, in a neighbourhood of Ulan Bator crowded with long wooden barracks, once occupied by Soviet troops.

But in his youth he adopted communism and, like many others, believed a perfect society would be accomplished in his lifetime.

Puje says many of his disillusioned generation were won over by the practical benefits offered by Christian organisations.

These include charities such as the Mission Aviation Fellowship, which flies missionaries and aid workers over Mongolia's vast distances - it is difficult to travel on the gravel tracks below. [...]

With socialism gone, Mongolia is rebuilding a national identity on its own history and traditions.

Pre-eminent among these traditions is wrestling. On Mongolia's national day I witnessed this sweaty, ritualistic, trial of strength between men wearing boots and tight-fitting briefs.

After a display of flexing muscles, the wrestlers gripped each other in a tense stand-off before a sudden struggle resulted in one of them falling to the ground.

An appreciative crowd roared its approval, and as the national anthem was sung, the event seemed to recall the past greatness of the Mongolian nation.

WELCOME BACK, AND WE'RE SORRY ABOUT THAT BOUT OF IDIOCY:

Somalia's new moderate Islamist president sworn in (AP, 1/31/09)

A moderate Islamist leader was sworn in as the country's new president Saturday after parliament elected him to stabilize a country wracked by violence and anarchy for nearly 20 years. [...]

[Sheik Sharif Sheik] Ahmed was chairman of the Islamic Courts Union that ran Mogadishu for six months in 2006 before Ethiopian soldiers drove them from power. His election raises hopes that he will bring many of Somalia's Islamic factions into a more inclusive government.

Analysts say Ahmed has a real chance of reuniting Somalis, given his Islamist roots, the backing of parliament and his acceptability to the West. But reconciling 10 million people and stopping 18 years of bloodshed remain a daunting task.

Ahmed headed the sharia courts movement that brought some stability to Mogadishu and most of south Somalia in 2006, despite being accused in the West of Islamist extremism, before Ethiopian troops invaded and drove it out.

"The conflict in Somalia will be resolved. We are urging our brothers in armed conflict to join us in peace-building," he told parliament. "We will govern the Somali people with honesty and justice, and give them back their rights."

NOW IS RACISM OVER?:

Michael Steele victorious at Republican National Committee meeting (Tom Baldwin, 1/31/09, Times of London)

Republicans last night showed that change can sweep through their party too as they faced up to the arrival of Barack Obama at the White House by electing a black chairman for the first time in their history.

Although Michael Steele insisted he was not framing his bid for the party leadership in terms of race, his victory at the Republican National Committee's meeting in Washington was immediately hailed as another break-through for African Americans.

WHAT'S ALL THE FUSS?:

Torre cannot hide behind author (Buster Olney, January 27, 2009, ESPN)

Some of the Yankees who found themselves on the receiving end of Joe Torre's seething scowl called it "The Stare" -- his face tight, his mouth frozen into a horizontal line, his dark eyes seemingly blackened by a slight inward tilt of his eyebrows. The Stare was reserved for capital offenses, for missing signs, for awful decisions.

Reporters sometimes got The Stare as well, most often when they asked questions Torre deemed to be driven by a quest for sensationalism, and the manager would chastise them bluntly, the way a fourth-grade teacher speaks to a wayward pupil. When I covered the team for The New York Times, he expressed particular distaste for ESPN, especially after Roger Clemens' beaning of Mike Piazza and the subsequent bat-throwing incident, because he felt the network replayed the ugliness over and over only to sell its programming.

In an honest moment today, Torre would aim The Scowl again -- into a mirror. Because this time, Torre is guilty of fostering and feeding on sensationalism, at the expense of former colleagues.

MATERIAL IN A SPIRITUAL WORLD:

Mind over Matter: a review of Why Us?, by James Le Fanu (Christopher Booker, 1/30/09, The Spectator)

As a medical doctor, Le Fanu argues that what we have been seeing here is the culmination of a process which has for so long driven our attempts to explain who we are and how we came to be on this earth in purely material terms. The watershed moment in this story was the publication, in 1859, of The Origin of Species, in which Charles Darwin laid out his thesis that the evolution of life could be explained solely by the process of natural selection, whereby an infinite series of minute variations gradually turned one form of life into another.

The greatest stumbling block to this argument was that evolution has repeatedly taken place in leaps forward so sudden and so complex that they could not possibly have been accounted for by the gradual process he suggested — the ‘Cambrian explosion’ of new life forms, the complexities of the eye, the post-Cretaceous explosion of mammals. Again and again some new development emerged which required a whole mass of interdependent changes to take place simultaneously, such as the transformation of reptiles into feathered, hollow-boned and warm-blooded birds.

As even Darwin himself acknowledged, these jumps in the story might have seemed to render his thesis ‘absurd’. He might therefore have hypothesised that some other critically important factor seemed to be at work, some ‘organising power’ which had allowed these otherwise inexplicable leaps to take place. But so possessed was he by the elegant simplicity of his theory that, waving such thoughts aside, he made a leap of faith that it must be right, regardless of the evidence — and in the increasingly materialistic mid-19th century, his thesis was an idea whose time had come. Thus has his belief that life evolved solely through a material process continued to possess the minds of scientists to this day.

What is psychologically fascinating about the mindset of the Darwinians is their inability to recognise just how much they do not know. As Le Fanu observes in a comment which might have served as an epigraph to his book, ‘the greatest obstacle to scientific progress is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge’. Blinkered in their vision, armoured in the certainty that they have all the answers when they so obviously don’t, neo-Darwinians such as Richard Dawkins rest their beliefs just as much on an unscientific leap of faith as the ‘Creationists’ they so fanatically affect to despise.

But the significance of what has happened in recent years, Le Fanu suggests, is that it has shown us where this fatally limited vision has led us to.

SOYLENT GREEN IS PELOSISM:

Nancy Pelosi's Modest Proposal (George Neumayr, 1.27.09, American Spectator)

The full title of Jonathan Swift's work, A Modest Proposal, was, For Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland From Being a Burden to their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public.

Change a few of the words and it could be a Democratic Party policy paper. Swift suggested that 18th-century Ireland stimulate its economy by turning children into food for the wealthy. Pelosi proposes stimulating the U.S. economy by eliminating them.

Other slumping countries, such as Russia and France, pay parents to have children; it looks like Obama's America will pay parents to contracept or kill them. Perhaps the Freedom of Choice Act can also fall under the Pelosi "stimulus" rationale. Why not? An America of shovels and scalpels will barrel into the future.

Euthanasia is another shovel-ready job for Pelosi to assign to the states. Reducing health care costs under Obama's plan, after all, counts as economic stimulus too. Controlling life, controlling death, controlling costs. It's all stimulus in the Brave New World utopia to come.

PEER GROUP:

Palin, Obama to share stage (JONATHAN MARTIN, 1/29/09, Politico)

In what could be a preview of the 2012 presidential race, Sarah Palin and President Barack Obama will share a stage together this Saturday night in Washington, Politico has learned.

The Alaska governor and former GOP vice presidential nominee, making her first trip to the nation’s capital since the election, will join the president at the Alfalfa Dinner, a venerable gathering of the city’s political elite.

THE LOVE THAT KILLS:

Meet the New Face of Al Qaeda: Few of the deadliest modern-day suicide bombers fit the stereotype of a mass murderer. Here’s a look at four once-average people who epitomize the changing profile of the terrorists we fear most. (Foreign Policy, May/June 2008)

Muriel Degauque

Country of birth: Belgium

Age: 38

Mission: Suicide bombing in Baquba, Iraq

Background: Friends remember Degauque, born a Catholic in the sleepy Belgian town of Charleroi, as an average student who was well-dressed and well-mannered. She converted to Islam after struggling to break addictions to alcohol and drugs. Her religious beliefs reportedly became radicalized after she married a Belgian Muslim who was known to local authorities as an extremist. Traveling to Iraq via Syria in 2005, Degauque died on November 9 of that year when she carried out a suicide bombing attack against a U.S. military patrol.

Why she matters: Terrorism experts believe Degauque was the first European Muslim woman to execute a suicide attack. European women who marry Muslim men are now the largest source of religious conversions in Europe, and European counterterrorism officials are increasingly concerned that female converts represent a small but potentially deadly element of the terrorist threat in Europe.

"HE KNEW MURPHY"

The Fastest Man on Earth (Overview and Index): Why Everything You Know About Murphy’s Law is Wrong (Nick T. Spark, Annals of Improbable Research)

This all began a few months ago, after I showed an article I’d written for an aviation history magazine to my neighbor. The article concerned some goings on at Edwards, the famed Air Force flight test facility, in the 1950’s. “You know,” my neighbor said, “You’d probably be real interested in talking to my father, David Hill Sr. He worked at Edwards, on a bunch of rocket sled tests in the 1940’s. In fact,” he continued proudly, “he knew Murphy.”

“Murphy?” I inquired, searching my memory for a test pilot of the same name. Yeager, Crossfield, Armstrong… It didn’t ring a bell.

“You know, Murphy,” he went on. “The guy who invented Murphy’s Law.”

I didn’t say it, but I was absolutely skeptical. Who wouldn’t be? One might as well claim to be friends with Kilroy, know the identity of Deepthroat, or the whereabouts of Amelia Earhart. The notion seemed outright laughable. Your father knew Murphy? Sure he did! If Murphy wasn’t some imaginary Irish folk hero, then he was probably a gentle sage who drank a lot of Guinness and lived back in the 1700’s. Needless to say I let the subject slide.

But a day or two later, I almost tripped over a slender book called Murphy’s Law and Other Reasons Why Things Go Wrong that had been left on my doorstep. The book cited Murphy’s Law and then listed literally hundreds of amusing corollaries. The extremely brief foreward to the volume included a letter written by an engineer named George Nichols. And this is where things got interesting. Nichols said he’d worked on a series of rocket sled tests at Edwards in the 1940’s with a Colonel John Paul Stapp and that Murphy’s Law emerged from these tests.

“The Law’s namesake,” Nichols wrote, “was Capt. Ed Murphy Jr., a development engineer… Frustrated with a strap transducer which was malfunctioning due to an error in wiring the strain gauge bridges caused him to remark — ‘if there is any way to do it wrong, he will’ — referring to the technician who had wired the bridges. I assigned Murphy’s Law to the statement and the associated variations…”

That appeared straightforward enough, and piqued my interest. I subsequently did some research and I discovered to my surprise that the story of the origin of Murphy’s Law was not something generally agreed upon. Accounts in fact varied wildly. Some sources gave the credit solely to Ed Murphy Jr., a man they praised for his wisdom, insight, and panache, but said almost nothing about. In other places, Nichols’ letter appeared — often word for word — explaining how he had come up with “the statement.” And at least a few writers suggested that Colonel Stapp, also known as “the Fastest Man on Earth,” had invented the Law.

It made my mind race. What were the real facts? Exactly who was Capt. Ed Murphy? What on earth was the point of Stapp’s rocket sled tests? And what the heck is a strap transducer? I decided I had to find out. How hard could it be? I thought. Murphy’s Law might be something of an urban legend -- like the story about the guy who strapped rocket bottles to his car and accidentally launched himself into a mountainside — but thanks to my neighbor I had apparently stumbled upon a real, living, tangible link. [...]

At one point an Air Force engineer named Captain Ed Murphy came out to Edwards. With him he brought four sensors, called strain gauges, which were intended to improve the accuracy of G-force measurements. The way Hill tells it one of his assistants, either Ralph DeMarco or Jerry Hollabaugh, installed the gauges on the Gee Whiz’s harness.

Later Stapp made a sled run with the new sensors and they failed to work. It turned out that the gauges had been accidentally installed backwards, producing a zero reading. “If you take these two over here and add them together,” Hill explains matter-of-factly, “You get the correct amount of G-forces. But if you take these two and mount them together, one cancels the other out and you get zero.”

It was a simple enough mistake, but Hill remembers that “Murphy was kind of miffed off. And that gave rise to his observation: ‘If there’s any way they can do it wrong, they will.’” Despite the fact that his people were apparently being blamed for the mistake, Hill shrugged it off. “I kind of chuckled and said, that’s the way it goes,” he sighs. “Nothing more could be done really.”

Murphy’s sour comment proceeded to make the rounds at the sled track. “When something goes wrong,” Hill says, “The message is distributed to everyone in the program.” The way the fat got chewed Murphy’s words —‘if there’s any way they can do it wrong, they will’ — were transformed into a finer, more demonstrative “if anything can go wrong, it will.” A legend had been hatched. But not yet born.

Just how did the Law get out into the world?

NOTHING COSTS....

...more than it used to: 1T for under $100.

A RETURN TO WILSONISM:

Obama Tells Arabia's Despots They're Safe: America's diplomacy of freedom is officially over. (FOUAD AJAMI, 1/28/09, WSJ)

Say what you will about the style -- and practice -- of the Bush years, the autocracies were on notice for the first five or six years of George. W. Bush's presidency. America had toppled Taliban rule and the tyranny of Saddam Hussein; it had frightened the Libyan ruler that a similar fate lay in store for him. It was not sweet persuasion that drove Syria out of Lebanon in 2005. That dominion of plunder and terror was given up under duress.

True, Mr. Bush's diplomacy of freedom fizzled out in the last two years of his presidency, and the autocracies in the Greater Middle East came to a conviction that the storm had passed them by and that they had been spared. But we are still too close to this history to see how the demonstration effect works its way through Arab political culture.

The argument that liberty springs from within and can't be given to distant peoples is more flawed than meets the eye. In the sweep of modern history, the fortunes of liberty have been dependent on the will of the dominant power -- or powers -- in the order of states. The late Samuel P. Huntington made this point with telling detail. In 15 of the 29 democratic countries in 1970, democratic regimes were midwifed by foreign rule or had come into being right after independence from foreign occupation. [...]

Where Mr. Bush had seen the connection between the autocratic ways in Muslim lands and the culture of terror that infected the young foot soldiers of radicalism, Mr. Obama seems ready to split the difference with their rulers. His embrace of the "peace process" is a return to the sterile diplomacy of the Clinton years, with its belief that the terror is rooted in the grievances of the Palestinians. Mr. Obama and his advisers have refrained from asserting that terrorism has passed from the scene, but there is an unmistakable message conveyed by them that we can return to our own affairs, that Wall Street is more deadly and dangerous than that fabled "Arab-Muslim Street."

SOME FOLKS ROOT FOR RAZ AL GUL:

Holy Terror, Batman (Mike Baron, 1/29/09, Big Hollywood)

In 2006, I had a minor low pressure area in my brain and conceived a P.R. campaign directed against Islamo-fascism which I posted on Nate Tabor’s “The Conservative Voice.” The results were swift and devastating. Like any other branch of the entertainment industry, liberalism is the default position of most comic book creators and fans. [...]

A couple true liberals, including Mike Gold and Jackie Estrada, wrote in to defend my right to pop off. I was saddened but not surprised by the majority of responses. As I mentioned above, liberalism is a fall-back position. It needn’t be examined and explained because it is the dominant culture. It makes people feel good about themselves without effort.

Occasionally a conservative voice breaks through what Emmett Tyrell calls the kultursmog. Frank Miller, creator of “Sin City” and “300,” has always had conservative views and is in fact working on a Batman graphic novel called “Holy Terror” in which Batman defends Gotham City from Al Qaeda.

Miller’s been riding high, with film versions of his “Sin City“ and “300.” His latest film, “The Spirit” (based on the classic comic by Will Eisner) went down in flames on its opening day with some of the worst reviews in history. A certain portion of fandom was waiting with sharpened knives. The schadenfreude on the message boards was thicker than the fog in “Sin City.”

Will this affect “Holy Terror?” I hope not. Frank has said “Holy Terror” is “bound to offend just about everybody.”

Well it won’t offend conservatives, but who counts them?

RESISTANCE IS UTILE:

Sticking It To Rahm: From their shared loathing of Rahm Emanuel to the insurgency led by the minority leader (“he took us by the throat”), the inside story of why not a single House Republican supported the President’s stimulus package. (John Batchelor, 1/29/09, Daily Beast)

"Rahm told the President that he can take care of Congress," a senior Republican reported to me. "He said, ‘These guys will roll over, they're afraid of being called the party of No. Believe me, I know them. They'll be easy.’"

The day before the vote, Emanuel sent the President to the Hill to meet with the House Republicans for a generous 90-minute question and answer session well received by the members. "He's charming," was the universal verdict, one prominent Republican told me. “The president was patient, he gave us plenty of time. But he didn't convince anyone. After he left, we looked at each other, and said, ‘How can they stick him with this garbage?’”

Since the beginning of his campaign for the presidency, Barack Obama has spoken repeatedly of “post-partisanship.” He promised that he would transcend the divisions of the past by uniting Democrats and Republicans alike. His actions, engineered by Emanuel, were intended to win enough Republican votes to claim not just a victory on the stimulus bill but also confirmation of his “post-partisan” leadership. The result, with not a single Republican voting in favor, despite Obama’s wining and dining, joking and cajoling, reveals a Washington as polarized as it has ever been. The dream of post-partisanship did not last one vote in the Congress.

The day before the crucial vote in the House, Minority Leader John Boehner told his troops that the Republican Party is no longer a bureaucracy. "He took us by the throat and told us, ‘You're no longer the majority, stop acting like it,’" a senior Republican told me about the run up to the vote. “‘If you've got an idea, get it on MSNBC. This is an entrepreneurial insurgency.’ He was kicking the ball around. He wants everyone involved. If there's an amendment, he told us to offer it. If you have 48 seconds for YouTube, get it up there. Get busy and resist in every instance.”

Emanuel, working with his old boss and ally, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, made it easy for the Republicans to resist. Every penny in the more than 600-page bill came from a Democratic wish list of pork that dated back to the beginning of the Bush administration.

IF YOU DON'T PANIC YOU HAVEN'T LOST ANYTHING:

Don't panic about your 401(k) losses. Here's why.: Stocks have a history of recovering before jobs do. (Paulette Miniter, January 30, 2009, CS Monitor)

Today's unemployment rate is 7.2 percent. The last time unemployment reached this level or higher thankfully wasn't the Great Depression, but 1992, when unemployment was 7.5 percent. If we reach 9 percent unemployment by this year's end as some economists predict, that would get us on par with levels of the early 1980s. That's also the last time we saw continuing jobless claims as high as they are now.

As bad as those numbers are, we should all be glad if the 1980s is our closest guide. The two recessions we had early that decade lasted almost two years combined, as figured by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The stock market's behavior back then also gives us hope. In the 1980 downturn, which lasted six months, the S&P 500 rallied 20 percent off its low before continuing jobless claims peaked, according to research by Bespoke Investment Group. Then in the 1981-82 recession, which took 16 months to get through, the S&P 500 had already rallied 38 percent by the time continuing jobless claims peaked in November 1982, according to Bespoke. Going back further, in the 1973-75 recession, when unemployment topped 8 percent, the S&P 500 had rallied 40 percent before continuing jobless claims peaked.

IT AIN'T OVER 'TIL THE FAT MAN BRAYS:

With Al Due Respect, We're Doomed (Dana Milbank, January 29, 2009, Washington Post)

The lawmakers gazed in awe at the figure before them. The Goracle had seen the future, and he had come to tell them about it.

What the Goracle saw in the future was not good: temperature changes that "would bring a screeching halt to human civilization and threaten the fabric of life everywhere on the Earth -- and this is within this century, if we don't change."

The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, John Kerry (D-Mass.), appealed to hear more of the Goracle's premonitions. "Share with us, if you would, sort of the immediate vision that you see in this transformative process as we move to this new economy," he beseeched.

"Geothermal energy," the Goracle prophesied. "This has great potential; it is not very far off."

Another lawmaker asked about the future of nuclear power. "I have grown skeptical about the degree to which it will expand," the Goracle spoke.

A third asked the legislative future -- and here the Goracle spoke in riddle. "The road to Copenhagen has three steps to it," he said.

Sen. James Risch (R-Idaho) begged the Goracle to look further into the future. "What does your modeling tell you about how long we're going to be around as a species?" he inquired.

The Goracle chuckled. "I don't claim the expertise to answer a question like that, Senator."

It was a jarring reminder that the Goracle is, indeed, mortal.

HOW MUCH HOPE CAN YOU HAVE WHEN THEY DON'TT GET WHAT THE SHOW IS ABOUT?:

There are some hopeful signs of life on 'Mars' (Maureen Ryan, 1/28/09, Chicago Tribune)

The bonus with “Mars” is that there’s only really one guy at center stage—there isn’t a whole island full of characters whose stories you have to keep straight. And as “Life on Mars’” lead character, detective Sam Tyler, Jason O’Mara is just terrific.

He’s been the best thing about the show since it began, but in the Nov. 20 episode (which I recommend viewing online at abc.com), he beautifully played all the notes in a complex, emotional story in which Tyler encounters his father. Guest star Dean Winters (“30 Rock,” “Rescue Me”) did an outstanding job as the senior Tyler, and the intriguing plot contained several surprising twists (however I didn’t closely examine the plausibility of any of it; time-travel stories, if I think about them too hard, give me a migraine).

“Lost” at its best -- and it’s certainly at its best this season -- is not really a show about “What year is it?” shenanigans; it’s a drama is about compelling people having realistic emotional reactions to extreme circumstances. “Life on Mars” appears to have learned this basic lesson, and there’s no doubt that O’Mara’s grounded portrayal of the flummoxed Tyler is worth paying attention to.

But that satisfying Nov. 20 episode, the last before the show's midseason break, featured relatively little of Tyler’s NYPD colleagues. Michael Imperioli, who plays the hotheaded detective Ray Carling, certainly deserves a Best Supporting Mustache Award (if that isn’t an Emmy category, it should be).

When the show’s well-chosen, retro soundtrack is playing, when the main story has an interesting emotional arc for Tyler and when Tyler and Carling are exchanging banter, the show feels close to achieving its potential as an unusual, intriguing action hour.

GOOD SENSE FROM THE BIG FAT IDIOT:

My Bipartisan Stimulus: Let's cut taxes, as I want, and spend more, as Obama would like (RUSH LIMBAUGH, 1/29/09, WSJ)

Yes, elections have consequences. But where's the bipartisanship, Mr. Obama? This does not have to be a divisive issue. My proposal is a genuine compromise.

Fifty-three percent of American voters voted for Barack Obama; 46% voted for John McCain, and 1% voted for wackos. Give that 1% to President Obama. Let's say the vote was 54% to 46%. As a way to bring the country together and at the same time determine the most effective way to deal with recessions, under the Obama-Limbaugh Stimulus Plan of 2009: 54% of the $900 billion -- $486 billion -- will be spent on infrastructure and pork as defined by Mr. Obama and the Democrats; 46% -- $414 billion -- will be directed toward tax cuts, as determined by me.

Then we compare. We see which stimulus actually works. This is bipartisanship! It would satisfy the American people's wishes, as polls currently note; and it would also serve as a measurable test as to which approach best stimulates job growth.

I say, cut the U.S. corporate tax rate -- at 35%, among the highest of all industrialized nations -- in half. Suspend the capital gains tax for a year to incentivize new investment, after which it would be reimposed at 10%. Then get out of the way! Once Wall Street starts ticking up 500 points a day, the rest of the private sector will follow. There's no reason to tell the American people their future is bleak. There's no reason, as the administration is doing, to depress their hopes. There's no reason to insist that recovery can't happen quickly, because it can.

In this new era of responsibility, let's use both Keynesians and supply-siders to responsibly determine which theory best stimulates our economy -- and if elements of both work, so much the better. The American people are made up of Republicans, Democrats, independents and moderates, but our economy doesn't know the difference. This is about jobs now.

GETTING BACK ON MESSAGE:

House Passes Stimulus Package (JONATHAN WEISMAN, GREG HITT and NAFTALI BENDAVID, 1/29/09, WSJ)

The package, which would cost more than the entire Iraq War, would reverse the Bush administration's approach to boosting the economy. That approach relied heavily on tax cuts that tended to put money in the pockets of middle-class and more affluent Americans. The $275 billion in tax relief offered in the stimulus package focuses more on lower-income families. It also includes business incentives to spur job creation and a $500 payroll tax holiday for workers.

The 244-188 vote was not what Mr. Obama had hoped for. A week of presidential wooing -- including a visit to the Capitol, a return visit to the White House by moderate House Republicans and a bipartisan cocktail party Wednesday night -- did not yield a single Republican vote. The president also lost 11 Democrats.

MORE:
How About a Payroll Tax Stimulus? (LAWRENCE B. LINDSEY, 1/29/09, WSJ)

And what of the plan being put forward now? As crafted, it is unlikely to produce the desired results. For a similar amount of money, the government could essentially cut the payroll tax in half, taking three points off the rate for both the employer and the employee. This would put $1,500 into the pocket of a typical worker making $50,000, with a similar amount going to his or her employer. It would provide a powerful stimulus to the spending stream, as well as a significant, six percentage point reduction in the tax burden of employment for people making less than $100,000. The effects would be immediate.

By contrast, the stimulus now under consideration would suffer from the usual problems of government spending. The Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation have calculated that only $170 billion, or about one-fifth of the $816 billion package will be spent in fiscal 2009. An additional $356 billion will be spent in 2010. That leaves $290 billion to be spent when even the most pessimistic forecasters think the economy will be in recovery mode.

AS MAVERICK TO CFR...:

Flat Tax, Anyone? (Steve Forbes, 1/29/09, Forbes)

Just a few days before Geithner's embarrassing revelation, the Taxpayer Advocate Service issued its annual report to Congress. (The service is part of the IRS and was designed to help taxpayers resolve complaints with the agency that can't be resolved through normal channels.) The report was an eye-opener as to just how horrifically complicated the code has become. Americans spend 7.6 billion hours a year complying with tax-filing requirements, the equivalent of 3.8 million full-time jobs. The code gets ever more complicated, expanding by about 1,000 words a day--with 500 changes last year alone. Nothing is simple. One example: Congress passed a law allowing beleaguered homeowners to exclude from taxable income home-mortgage debt that is forgiven by lenders. But the form is utterly bewildering, and the law itself is full of nitpicking rules about how much of the forgiven debt can actually be excluded.

THREE REELS OF SCOTCH 190:

Between Takes: The 'Kind Of Blue' Sessions (Ashley Kahn, January 29, 2009, Morning Edition)

This year marks the 50th anniversary of Kind of Blue, and Sony Legacy (which owns the Columbia catalog) has issued a 2-CD/1-DVD box set that includes the music, an ornate book, a vinyl copy of the original LP release and, for the first time, snippets of studio chatter. For listeners, it's the closest we can come to witnessing the making of a melodic masterpiece. For Davis and saxophonists John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley, pianists Bill Evans and Wynton Kelly, bassist Paul Chambers and drummer Jimmy Cobb, Kind of Blue was simply another day at work.

From his liner notes to the Kind of Blue reissue, excerpted below, music writer Ashley Kahn looks at the legendary sessions.

HEART OF THE DIVIDE:

Our Struggle for the Soul of our Nation (Robert P. George, January 22, 2009, The Public Discourse)

In the name of a generalized "right to privacy" allegedly implicit in the Due Process Clause of the Constitution's Fourteenth Amendment, seven justices created a license to kill the unborn.

These men probably had no idea that they were unleashing a struggle for the soul of the nation. Five had been appointed by Republican presidents -- two by Eisenhower, three by Nixon. Four of these five were regarded as "conservative," "law and order" judges: Warren E. Burger, Potter Stewart, Lewis F. Powell, and Harry Blackmun. All no doubt believed that legal abortion was a humane and enlightened policy, one that would ease the burdens of many women and girls and relieve the enormous cost to society of a high birth rate among indigent (often unmarried) women. They seemed blithely to assume that abortion would be easily integrated into the fabric of American social and political life.

They were wrong on all counts.

They were wrong about the Constitution. As William H. Rehnquist and Byron White, the two dissenting justices in the case, pointed out, it is absurd to claim that a right to feticide follows from the constitutional injunction that "no state shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law." If the Constitution can be read to imply anything about abortion, it is that unborn human beings are, like everyone else, entitled to "the equal protection of the laws." At a minimum, Roe and Doe were an outrageous usurpation of the constitutional authority of the people of the United States to shape law and policy through the institutions of representative government.

The Roe justices were also wrong to imagine that legal abortion would prove to be enlightened or in the slightest respect humane. On the contrary, the policy imposed by the Court has proven to be an unmitigated disaster. In the thirty-six years since Roe and Doe, abortion has taken the lives of more than fifty million unborn victims -- each a distinct, unique, precious human being. It has done immeasurable moral, psychological, and sometimes physical harm to women who are so very often, and in so many respects, truly abortion's "secondary victims." It has corrupted physicians and nurses by turning healers into killers. It has undermined the moral authority of the law by its injustice. It has abetted irresponsible -- even predatory -- male sexual behavior. Far from reducing the rate of out-of-wedlock births, particularly to poor women, illegitimacy has skyrocketed in the age of abortion. Now the abortion license has metastasized into widespread elite support for deadly embryo experimentation and even, in my home state of New Jersey, to the express legalization of the horrific and grisly practice of fetal farming -- the creation of human beings by cloning or other processes for the purpose of harvesting their tissues and organs at any point up to birth for experimentation and transplantation.

The justices were wrong, moreover, to suppose that America, as a nation, would learn to live with the abortion license. A notable effect of the Court's rulings was to energize the grassroots pro-life movement that had come into being a few years earlier to resist legislative efforts to liberalize state abortion laws. In the beginning, the movement and its leadership were largely Catholic. The mainline Protestant churches, if they concerned themselves with the issue at all, positioned themselves on the pro-abortion side. At a decisive moment, however, the Evangelical community became fully activated in the cause. Today, a common commitment to defending the unborn is at the heart of an unprecedented Catholic-Evangelical alliance that extends beyond abortion to issues of sexuality and marriage, education, welfare, crime and prison policy, international human rights, and the place of religion in American public life. Great Evangelical leaders such as James Dobson and Charles Colson stand arm in arm with their Catholic brothers and sisters in defending the right to life of every human being, irrespective not only of race, sex, and ethnicity, but also of age, size, stage of development, and condition of dependency. It is this alliance that stands in the gap today in the fight against cloning and embryo-destructive biomedical research.

Abortion and embryo-destructive research are at the heart of the divide between the nation's major political parties. When Roe and Doe were decided, many Democratic Party politicians -- and even some notable liberals -- were outspokenly pro-life. Teddy Kennedy, Jesse Jackson, Dick Gephardt, and Al Gore, for example, publicly proclaimed their commitment to defending the unborn against the violence of abortion. Soon, however, the number of pro-life Democrats began to dwindle and pro-life liberals became an endangered species. Some, including Kennedy, Jackson, Gephardt, and Gore, defected to the pro-abortion camp, evidently for political reasons. People of firmer conviction found themselves in many cases carried by the force of conscience out of the Democratic Party and into the Republican fold.

WE CAN NEVER THAN THE RAMONES AND THE CLASH ENOUGH...:

THE NPR 100: 'I Wanna Be Sedated' (Bob Boilen, December 4, 2000, All Things Considered)

I love The Ramones. I think The Ramones took rock 'n' roll back to its soul. In the mid-'70s, rock had grown into something big, fat, bloated. Bands like Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Yes and Kansas were touring huge arenas. Large truck convoys followed them, filled with light towers and smoke machines and other things that had little to do with music. Sometimes, I think the critical success of Sgt. Pepper in 1967 and the cultural impact of Woodstock two years later were both a blessing and a curse for rock 'n' roll. Big productions and new instrumentation may have given rock legitimacy, but in the process, they took away its intimacy and immediacy.

Along came Joey, Johnny, Tommy and Dee Dee, four guys from Queens with a passion for short, loud and fast songs with great hooks. They altered their first names, and each took on a new last name: Ramone. It was Paul McCartney's stage name during the Silver Beatle days.

On July 4, 1976, America's 200th birthday, The Ramones went to the Motherland. The group's performance at the Roundhouse in London jump-started the punk movement. It was The Ramones' way of thanking England and The Beatles for rescuing rock 'n' roll from the Bobby Rydells, Bobby Vintons, Bobby Darins and Bobby Vees who were making a mockery of it, subverting the spirit championed by young Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry and Little Richard.

Bands like The Sex Pistols and The Clash were just getting revved up. The Ramones' music was a call to brandish guitars, shift music back to the clubs and sing from the heart and the gut. And don't forget: This is supposed to be fun.

TEN FOR FIGHTING:

Ten Conservative Principles: It is not possible to draw up a neat catalogue of conservatives' convictions; nevertheless, I offer you, summarily, ten general principles. (Russell Kirk, adapted from The Politics of Prudence)

Being neither a religion nor an ideology, the body of opinion termed conservatism possesses no Holy Writ and no Das Kapital to provide dogmata. So far as it is possible to determine what conservatives believe, the first principles of the conservative persuasion are derived from what leading conservative writers and public men have professed during the past two centuries. After some introductory remarks on this general theme, I will proceed to list ten such conservative principles.

Perhaps it would be well, most of the time, to use this word "conservative" as an adjective chiefly. For there exists no Model Conservative, and conservatism is the negation of ideology: it is a state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the civil social order.

The attitude we call conservatism is sustained by a body of sentiments, rather than by a system of ideological dogmata. It is almost true that a conservative may be defined as a person who thinks himself such. The conservative movement or body of opinion can accommodate a considerable diversity of views on a good many subjects, there being no Test Act or Thirty-Nine Articles of the conservative creed.

In essence, the conservative person is simply one who finds the permanent things more pleasing than Chaos and Old Night. (Yet conservatives know, with Burke, that healthy "change is the means of our preservation.") A people's historic continuity of experience, says the conservative, offers a guide to policy far better than the abstract designs of coffee-house philosophers. But of course there is more to the conservative persuasion than this general attitude.

It is not possible to draw up a neat catalogue of conservatives' convictions; nevertheless, I offer you, summarily, ten general principles; it seems safe to say that most conservatives would subscribe to most of these maxims. In various editions of my book The Conservative Mind I have listed certain canons of conservative thought -- the list differing somewhat from edition to edition; in my anthology The Portable Conservative Reader I offer variations upon this theme. Now I present to you a summary of conservative assumptions differing somewhat from my canons in those two books of mine. In fine, the diversity of ways in which conservative views may find expression is itself proof that conservatism is no fixed ideology. What particular principles conservatives emphasize during any given time will vary with the circumstances and necessities of that era. The following ten articles of belief reflect the emphases of conservatives in America nowadays. [...]

First, the conservative believes that there exists an enduring moral order. That order is made for man, and man is made for it: human nature is a constant, and moral truths are permanent.

This word order signifies harmony. There are two aspects or types of order: the inner order of the soul, and the outer order of the commonwealth. Twenty-five centuries ago, Plato taught this doctrine, but even the educated nowadays find it difficult to understand. The problem of order has been a principal concern of conservatives ever since conservative became a term of politics.

Our twentieth-century world has experienced the hideous consequences of the collapse of belief in a moral order. Like the atrocities and disasters of Greece in the fifth century before Christ, the ruin of great nations in our century shows us the pit into which fall societies that mistake clever self-interest, or ingenious social controls, for pleasing alternatives to an oldfangled moral order.

It has been said by liberal intellectuals that the conservative believes all social questions, at heart, to be questions of private morality. Properly understood, this statement is quite true. A society in which men and women are governed by belief in an enduring moral order, by a strong sense of right and wrong, by personal convictions about justice and honor, will be a good society -- whatever political machinery it may utilize; while a society in which men and women are morally adrift, ignorant of norms, and intent chiefly upon gratification of appetites, will be a bad society -- no matter how many people vote and no matter how liberal its formal constitution may be. [...]

Sixth, conservatives are chastened by their principle of imperfectability. Human nature suffers irremediably from certain grave faults, the conservatives know. Man being imperfect, no perfect social order ever can be created. Because of human restlessness, mankind would grow rebellious under any utopian domination, and would break out once more in violent discontent -- or else expire of boredom. To seek for utopia is to end in disaster, the conservative says: we are not made for perfect things. All that we reasonably can expect is a tolerably ordered, just, and free society, in which some evils, maladjustments, and suffering will continue to lurk. By proper attention to prudent reform, we may preserve and improve this tolerable order. But if the old institutional and moral safeguards of a nation are neglected, then the anarchic impulse in humankind breaks loose: "the ceremony of innocence is drowned." The ideologues who promise the perfection of man and society have converted a great part of the twentieth-century world into a terrestrial hell. [...]

Ninth, the conservative perceives the need for prudent restraints upon power and upon human passions. Politically speaking, power is the ability to do as one likes, regardless of the wills of one's fellows. A state in which an individual or a small group are able to dominate the wills of their fellows without check is a despotism, whether it is called monarchical or aristocratic or democratic. When every person claims to be a power unto himself, then society falls into anarchy. Anarchy never lasts long, being intolerable for everyone, and contrary to the ineluctable fact that some persons are more strong and more clever than their neighbors. To anarchy there succeeds tyranny or oligarchy, in which power is monopolized by a very few.

The conservative endeavors to so limit and balance political power that anarchy or tyranny may not arise. In every age, nevertheless, men and women are tempted to overthrow the limitations upon power, for the sake of some fancied temporary advantage. It is characteristic of the radical that he thinks of power as a force for good -- so long as the power falls into his hands. In the name of liberty, the French and Russian revolutionaries abolished the old restraints upon power; but power cannot be abolished; it always finds its way into someone's hands. That power which the revolutionaries had thought oppressive in the hands of the old regime became many times as tyrannical in the hands of the radical new masters of the state.

Knowing human nature for a mixture of good and evil, the conservative does not put his trust in mere benevolence. Constitutional restrictions, political checks and balances, adequate enforcement of the laws, the old intricate web of restraints upon will and appetite -- these the conservative approves as instruments of freedom and order. A just government maintains a healthy tension between the claims of authority and the claims of liberty. [...]

Tenth, the thinking conservative understands that permanence and change must be recognized and reconciled in a vigorous society. The conservative is not opposed to social improvement, although he doubts whether there is any such force as a mystical Progress, with a Roman P, at work in the world. When a society is progressing in some respects, usually it is declining in other respects. The conservative knows that any healthy society is influenced by two forces, which Samuel Taylor Coleridge called its Permanence and its Progression. The Permanence of a society is formed by those enduring interests and convictions that gives us stability and continuity; without that Permanence, the fountains of the great deep are broken up, society slipping into anarchy. The Progression in a society is that spirit and that body of talents which urge us on to prudent reform and improvement; without that Progression, a people stagnate.

Therefore the intelligent conservative endeavors to reconcile the claims of Permanence and the claims of Progression.

THE SAVINGEST PEOPLE ON GOD'S GREEN EARTH:

401(k)s still lure cash despite big losses: Millions saw the value of the retirement accounts plunge an average of 27% last year, Fidelity finds in a survey, but nearly all continue to invest (Tiffany Hsu, January 29, 2009, LA Times)

Millions of workers watched the value of their 401(k) retirement accounts plunge an average of 27% last year, the first drop in five years, but almost all are continuing to invest, according to a Fidelity Investments survey released Wednesday. [...]

[E]mployees saved an average of $5,600 last year, up about $100 from the previous year, according to Fidelity, which is the administrator for 401(k) plans covering more than 11 million workers at 17,100 companies.

Other researchers have found similar trends. The Investment Company Institute found in a December survey of 22.5 million accounts that only 3% of employees stopped contributing to their plans. Some analysts said investors were hoping to take advantage of depressed stock prices that could rebound over the long term.

"Even though it's impossible to predict the markets, history tells us that they recover eventually," said Doug Fisher, Fidelity's senior vice president of retirement policy development. "So the overwhelming benefits -- tax benefits, employer matching -- of the 401(k) really entice participants to keep contributing."

CUE LEFTIE SHRIEKING:

Holder assures GOP on prosecution (Ben Conery and Eli Lake, January 28, 2009 , Washington Times)

Eric H. Holder Jr.'s confirmation as attorney general is speeding toward approval thanks in part to his private assurances to a key Republican senator that he does not intend to prosecute intelligence agency interrogators for their actions during the prior administration.

The assurances, reported by Sen. Christopher S. Bond, Missouri Republican, to The Washington Times on Wednesday, went beyond Mr. Holder's earlier public testimony in which he said he could not prejudge his actions regarding cases he had not seen.

THEY GET IT, WHODDA THUNK?

Revealed: the letter Obama team hope will heal Iran rift: Symbolic gesture gives assurances that US does not want to topple Islamic regime (Robert Tait and Ewen MacAskill, 1/29/08, guardian.co.uk)

Obama administration officials have drafted a letter to Iran from the president aimed at unfreezing US-Iranian relations and opening the way for face-to-face talks, the Guardian has learned. [...]

State department officials have written at least three drafts of the letter, which gives assurances that Washington does not want to overthrow the Islamic regime but merely seeks a change in its behaviour. The letter would be addressed to the Iranian people and sent directly to Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, or released as an open letter.

NOT TO MENTION THAT A FILM THAT WASTES CLIVE OWEN IS UNFORGIVABLE:

YOUNG AT HEART (Mark Steyn, 28 January 2009, National Review)

I write a lot about population issues – specifically, the demographic decline of the western world – and readers often respond, “Well, so what? Tokyo’s pretty crowded. It’d be kinda nice to have 20 per cent fewer people.” Maybe. But the 20 per cent who aren’t around won’t be the coots and codgers (there’ll be plenty of those); the missing folks will be the children who were never born, and the few who were but decided they didn’t want to spend their lives in a joint so tilted toward the geriatric. The eternal adolescence of contemporary pop culture is merely the most obvious example of how society’s self-image is invested in its youth. In star movie roles, everybody’s young. Not necessarily ridiculously young, like Dr Christmas Jones, the nuclear physicist played by Denise Richards a couple of Bond films back. But young. Because young people go to the movies and they don’t want to look at old people. But in Japan and Europe a generation or two down the road, everyone will be old. Will they still want to look at young people? And, if they do, will they even be able to muster enough young people to star, write, direct, compose the theme music? Or will there no longer be enough youthful energy in society to maintain a youth culture and its endless parade of novelties?

Think of a gated community in Florida: To be sure, once every so often they get up a party to go see Tony Danza in dinner theatre. Or, if that’s too dystopian a vision, picture the world as post-Habsburg Vienna: I used to love wandering through the record stores there – row upon row of Strauss and Mahler, and all the rock’n’rap confined to a couple of bins in the basement.

Two years ago, Alfonso Cuarón made a comically inept film of The Children Of Men, P D James’ novel about a world turned barren, a world in which people are not merely disinclined to breed (as in latter-day Europe) but unable to. The movie looked like a movie – which is to say that everyone in it was young: young transgressive leaders of young gangs pursued by young cops and young soldiers. Thus, did Mr Cuarón miss the point of Lady James’ novel. In the book, youth is in short supply: Roads crumble to tracks because the government workers are too middle-aged to maintain the rural districts. Youth is at a premium – as it will be in Japan the day after tomorrow, and Germany the day after that. The boringly conventional casting of the movie unintentionally confirms P D James’ thesis: a society without the young is so alien to all our assumptions even her adaptor couldn’t imagine it.

ZERO TOLERANCE:

NATO High Commander Issues Illegitimate Order to Kill (Susanne Koelbl, 1/28/09, Der Spiegel)

A dispute has emerged among NATO High Command in Afghanistan regarding the conditions under which alliance troops can use deadly violence against those identified as insurgents. In a classified document, which SPIEGEL has obtained, NATO's top commander, US General John Craddock, has issued a "guidance" providing NATO troops with the authority "to attack directly drug producers and facilities throughout Afghanistan."

According to the document, deadly force is to be used even in those cases where there is no proof that suspects are actively engaged in the armed resistance against the Afghanistan government or against Western troops. It is "no longer necessary to produce intelligence or other evidence that each particular drug trafficker or narcotics facility in Afghanistan meets the criteria of being a military objective," Craddock writes.

The NATO commander has long been frustrated by the reluctance of some NATO member states -- particularly Germany -- to take aggressive action against those involved in the drug trade.

LOUDER, PLEASE:

U.S. Needs an Immigrant, Rather Than Immigration, Policy (Tomás Jiménez, 1/23/09, San Francisco Chronicle)

[T]he Bush administration did more than any other in modern history to lay the groundwork for a much-needed immigrant integration policy. [...]

Under Bush's watch, the federal government, through the U.S. Office of Citizenship, started very quietly to do something about immigrant integration. Created when the Department of Homeland Security took over the nation's immigration apparatus in 2003, the Office of Citizenship has helped overhaul the citizenship test, publish preparation materials for the citizenship test in multiple languages, and created a Web site, www.welcometoUSA.gov, that contains information about everything from how to find an English language class to where to volunteer to help immigrants integrate.

But the Office of Citizenship has been working all too quietly. Rather than merely promoting citizenship and American civic identity, the office ought to implement initiatives that foster a form of integration that is mutually beneficial to immigrants and their adoptive country.

The Office of Citizenship should begin by helping immigrants learn English. If there is one thing on which people on all sides of the immigration debate agree, then it is that learning English is highly desirable. Though all evidence points toward high levels of English language acquisition over time, those who can't speak English suffer from diminished earning power, have a tougher time being involved in their children's lives, and can't fully participate in life in the United States.

LOOPHOLE?:

Loophole allows terrorist detentions: Shows new shades of Bush 'war on terror' (Eli Lake, January 28, 2009, Washington Times)

President Obama's executive order closing CIA "black sites" contains a little-noticed exception that allows the spy agency to continue to operate temporary detention facilities abroad.

The provision illustrates that the president's order to shutter foreign-based prisons, known as black sites, is not airtight and that the Central Intelligence Agency still has options if it wants to hold terrorist suspects for several days at a time.

Current and former U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition that they aren't identified because of the sensitivity of the subject, said such temporary facilities around the world will remain open, giving the administration the opportunity to seize and hold assumed terrorists.

WHY DO THEY HATE US? (via Glenn Dryfoos):

Bacon Explosion: The BBQ Sausage Recipe of all Recipes (Jason, December 23, 2008, BBQ Addicts)

The other day the guys from BaconToday.com contacted me in search for some barbecue bacon recipes. Of course I have plenty of great uses for bacon in a barbecue pit, but the longer I thought about it, the more I wanted to step it up a notch and clog a few arteries for those guys. Behold, BACON EXPLOSION!!! Here’s what you’ll need…

2 pounds thick cut bacon
2 pounds Italian sausage
1 jar of your favorite barbeque sauce
1 jar of your favorite barbeque rub

To kick off the construction of this pork medley you’ll need to create a 5×5 bacon weave.

NEVERMIND THE CENTAUR, HE WROTE OF THE UNICORN RIDER:

The late John Updike's insights into the Obama family (Steve Sailer, 1/27/09, iSteve Blog)

In my reader's guide to the President's autobiography, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, I point out the many parallels between the Obama family's history and the fictional life story of an African leader in the late John Updike's delightful 1978 novel about Africa, The Coup, in which the novelist ventured far from his Atlantic Seaboard comfort zone. It's testimony to Updike's powers that he could shed so much light on three people he had never heard of at the time: Barack Obama Jr. and his parents.

For example, Updike's African scholarship student Hakim Félix Ellelloû bigamously marries a white American coed after a pregnancy scare in 1959, much as Barack Obama Sr. bigamously married a pregnant white American coed in 1961.

From my chapter on "Obama as a Man of Letters:"

Because Obama is a literary man, this is a rather literary analysis of his life and works. I've been intermittently comparing the Obama family saga to its eerie analog in John Updike's 1978 novel The Coup. Written at the gleeful height of Updike's powers, The Coup consists of the verbally dazzling memoirs of a hyperliterate American-educated official in the fictitious African country of Kush. The Coup was based on Updike's prodigious research into the lives of post-colonial African elites very much like Barack Obama Sr.

Two of Updike's children have since married black Africans. Updike's 1989 essay “A Letter to My Grandsons” is addressed to his daughter’s half-African children. In it, Updike explains to them that there’s “a floating sexual curiosity and potential love between the races that in your parents has come to earth and borne fruit and that the blended shade of your dear brown skins will ever advertise.” (I'm not sure that Updike's children and grandchildren truly wanted to read that, but if Updike is to churn out a book a year, in his voracious search for material he must occasionally mortify his progeny.)

After four seemingly pleasant years at an American college, Updike's protagonist, Hakim Félix Ellelloû, returns to Africa, winds up with a total of four wives, including his white American college sweetheart, turns against America and capitalism in the Cold War, and (here is where the lives of Ellelloû and Obama Sr. diverge) deftly climbs the ladder of government, becoming dictator in the late Sixties.

Ellelloû attempts to impose upon his homeland of Kush the three ideologies he acquired while studying in America: Marxism, Black Muslimism, and Islam (all of which have interested Obama Jr. to some degree).

Written at the nadir of American power and prestige during the Carter years, Updike audaciously prophesied American victory in the Cold War for the hearts and minds of the Third World. Ellelloû's radicalism destroys what little economic activity Kush ever had, and he's overthrown by pro-American forces in the titular coup.

Thirty years later, The Coup can now be read as a kind of Obama Clan Alternative History. In our world, Obama Sr.'s career back home in decolonized Kenya got off to a fast start in the Sixties, then foundered. What if, however, like Ellelloû, Obama Sr. had instead possessed the abstemious, observant, and cautious personality of Obama Jr.? It would hardly have been surprising if the elder Obama, if blessed with his son’s self-disciplined character, had become president of Kenya.

STOP THE UNICORN RIDE, I WANT TO GET OFF:

Planned Parenthood v. Obama (JOSH GERSTEIN, 1/28/09, Politico)

President Obama’s only been in office for eight days and some of his friends are already steaming mad at him.

The president of Planned Parenthood Action Fund, Cecile Richards, just sent an “urgent” email to supporters decrying Obama’s decision to jettison a family planning provision from the nearly $900 billion economic stimulus package to be voted on in the House Wednesday. [...]

“I’m stunned,” Richards wrote in the e-mail. “Removing this provision is a betrayal of millions of low-income women, and it will place an even greater burden on state budgets that are already strained to the breaking point.”

LESS THAN A COUNTRY, MORE THAN A NATION:

Israel's warring tribes: The greatest threat Israel faces is from within (John Lloyd, February 2009, Prospect)

One genuine and growing concern was that the ultra orthodox sects, a rising proportion of the Israeli population, are becoming increasingly detached from Israeli society. One evening, we were given a kind of “religious guided tour” through one of the main ultra-orthodox areas of Jerusalem, Mea Shearim, an area in which men and boys in 18th century shtetl dress strode about the streets or spoke animatedly with each other, and women were rarely visible. Most of these people play little role in Israeli life: their children are exempt from military service; they live, in part, on state handouts and they often have contempt for Israeli society. On the tour, our guide pointed to their expansion into the neighbouring districts.

The ultra-orthodox Jews, along with the Israeli Arabs (of whom Adam LeBor writes about in this month's Prospect), are the fastest growing parts of Israel’s population. The first wish to play little part in the society; the second are increasingly hostile to it.

And there are many other “tribes” in this fractured state; not least the settlers, whose tenacious grip on parts of the West Bank presents a continuing headache for the Israeli government. Only a few days before the seminar there had been violent riots in Hebron, where settlers had attacked both Israeli soldiers and Palestinians, calling the IDF [Israeli Defence Force] Nazis, and shouting that “the morals of the state of Israel are no different from those of gentiles of western culture.”

Speaking about the incident, David Ohana, a Moroccan-Jewish professor at the University of the Negev, said; “This is the politics of political despair, of breaking away from the Israeli project.”

Yet another tribe viewed by many attendees as socially destructive—if less apocalyptically so—was my own: the media. Yossi Shain, who teaches at Tel Aviv and Georgetown universities, said, to much agreement, that “this is the epoch of sensationalism in Israel. The media have developed a language of hyperbole. The indictment of political figures by the media on corruption allegations has become so pronounced that it may be that this is more dangerous to politics than actual corruption.”

WHAT DEBT?:

The Big Fix (DAVID LEONHARDT, 2/01/09, NY Times Magazine)

Surprisingly, the debt that the federal government has already accumulated doesn’t present much of a problem. It is equal to about $6 trillion, or 40 percent of G.D.P., a level that is slightly lower than the average of the past six decades. The bailout, the stimulus and the rest of the deficits over the next two years will probably add about 15 percent of G.D.P. to the debt. That will take debt to almost 60 percent, which is above its long-term average but well below the levels of the 1950s.

SHOULD HAVE BEEN MUZZLED:

James Hansen’s Former NASA Supervisor Declares Himself a Skeptic (Marc Morano, 1/27/09, Inhofe EPW Press Blog)

Washington DC: NASA warming scientist James Hansen, one of former Vice President Al Gore’s closest allies in the promotion of man-made global warming fears, is being publicly rebuked by his former supervisor at NASA.

Retired senior NASA atmospheric scientist Dr. John S. Theon, the former supervisor of James Hansen, NASA’s vocal man-made global warming fears soothsayer, has now publicly declared himself a skeptic and declared that Hansen “embarrassed NASA” with his alarming climate claims and said Hansen was “was never muzzled.” Theon joins the rapidly growing ranks of international scientists abandoning the promotion of anthropogenic global warming fears.

“I appreciate the opportunity to add my name to those who disagree that global warming is man-made,” Theon wrote to the Minority Office at the Environment and Public Works Committee on January 15, 2009. “I was, in effect, Hansen's supervisor because I had to justify his funding, allocate his resources, and evaluate his results. I did not have the authority to give him his annual performance evaluation,” Theon, the former Chief of the Climate Processes Research Program at NASA Headquarters and former Chief of the Atmospheric Dynamics & Radiation Branch explained.

“Hansen was never muzzled even though he violated NASA's official agency position on climate forecasting (i.e., we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind's effect on it). Hansen thus embarrassed NASA by coming out with his claims of global warming in 1988 in his testimony before Congress,” Theon wrote.

THE GOOD OLD CARTER YEARS?:

20 or 30 Years Ago? (Max Boot, 01.28.2009, Contentions)

“America was not born as a colonial power, and that the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago, there’s no reason why we can’t restore that. And that I think is going to be an important task.”

So said our new president in his interview Tuesday with Al Arabiya, the Arabic-language satellite news channel. At first the words washed over me. Then I did some simple math. Let’s see… 20 or 30 years ago… that would be 1989 or 1979.

What was happening in relations between America and the Muslim world back then? Not relying on memory alone, I consulted Bernard Grun’s reference book, The Timetables of History.

It turns out that in 1989 U.S. fighters shot down two Libyan jets over the Gulf of Sidra. The last Soviet troops left Afghanistan, creating a vacuum that would eventually be filled by the Taliban. Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for Salman Rushdie’s death for “blasphemy.” Hundreds died in Lebanon’s long-running civil war while Hezbollah militants were torturing to death U.S. Marine Colonel William “Rich” Higgins, who had been kidnapped the previous year while serving as a UN peacekeeper in Lebanon.

And 1979? That was an even darker year-in many ways a turning point for the worse in the Middle East.

SPEAKING TRUTH TO PLOWERS:

Obama Chides D.C. as Ice Storm Shuts Daughters’ School (Henry J. Pulizzi, 1/28/09, WSJ: Washington Wire)

President Barack Obama took a poke at his new hometown Wednesday, after a slick coating of ice forced his daughters’ school, Sidwell Friends, to close for the day along with many other schools in the Washington area. That wouldn’t happen in Chicago, Obama said.

“In Chicago, school is never canceled,” the president said. “In fact, my seven-year-old pointed out that you’d go outside for recess in weather like this. You wouldn’t even stay indoors.”

“We’re going to have to try to apply some flinty Chicago toughness to this town,” he continued.

WHEN BETTER THAN AN ECONOMIC SLOWDOWN TO FORCE PURSCHASING?:

House GOP Blocks Bill to Delay Digital TV Transition (FAWN JOHNSON, 1/28/09, WSJ)

House Republicans on Wednesday derailed an effort to delay until June the date when television stations must broadcast in all-digital format.

House Democratic leaders brought the bill to the floor under a procedure intended for noncontroversial bills, requiring a two-thirds majority to pass. With Republican opposition, the 258-168 vote didn't meet that threshold. [...]

Reps. Joe Barton and Cliff Stearns on Tuesday sent a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, asking her to reconsider the vote. "This is panic on the way to becoming law," the letter said.

BIRDIE, EAGLE...VULTURES:

Cuba's golf revolution: plans to make island a golfer's paradise: This round was Fidel Castro's way of demonstrating his scorn for the bourgeoisie. But the game he loathed survived his rule, though plans to make the island a golfer's paradise have foundered. (Leonard Doyle, 13 January 2009, Belfast Telegraph)

The return of Cuba's golfing glory days remains a gleam in the eyes of the mostly British and Canadian investors who have been encouraged by the government of Raul Castro to build luxury resorts. Foster and Partners developed plans for a marina and golf resort on the island's north coast, with three 18-hole courses and 1,500 upscale apartments. A spokeswoman said yesterday that it was just a feasibility study.

Other grand projects have been equally short-lived, despite the enthusiasm of the Cuban regime to see hordes of European and North American golfers forking out hard currency. Tourism in Cuba is run by the military and Raul Castro, who ran the country's defence forces before becoming Cuba's President, is said to have endorsed more than a dozen upscale golf projects.

But the devil has been in the details and, because Cuba does not recognise the rights of individuals to buy and sell property, it has 75-year leases for foreigners like those on offer in Dubai, which also bars foreign ownership of property.

But whether it is because international investors are reluctant to build resorts that might one day be nationalised by the government or because the Cuban government is wary of social upheaval if it allows luxury apartments to be built for foreigners, most of the golf projects have remained in blueprint form.

From the outset of the revolution, Fidel Castro and his allies set about destroying Cuba's legacy of fine golf courses which had catered to the gangsters, gamblers other high-rollers who treated the Caribbean island like their private playground.

What started as a popular uprising against Batista's thugs was soon being transformed by Fidel and his younger brother Raul, into a clone of Soviet-style communism, with collectivisation, land seizures and mass expropriations.

With the exception of Rovers Athletic,a ll of Cuba's golf clubs, including several gems designed by the US architect Donald Ross, were occupied by the military.

But in late 1962, shortly after the missile crisis threatened to engulf the world, Fidel Castro made a grand gesture aimed at mollifying US public opinion. He invited his fellow revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara for a game of golf intending to send a signal of friendship to President John F Kennedy.

Fidel and Che showed up in military fatigues and boots with photographers and reporters in tow. They stomped around Cuba's historic course at Colinas de Villareal, but their efforts to thumb their noses at the bourgeois sport turned serious as the competitive juices flowed. Both men were sons of privileged families and Che had worked as a caddy in his native Argentina while going to medical school.

The Cuban journalist Jose Lorenzo Fuentes, Fidel's personal reporter, was to cover the game. It would be his last day at work. Now in exile in Florida, he told The Wall Street Journal: "Castro told me that the headline of the story the next day would be 'President Castro challenges President Kennedy to a friendly game of golf'."

But neither man liked to lose and the game became intensely competitive. He said Che "played with a lot of passion", and he felt obliged to truthfully record the game's outcome. He wrote for the communist party daily Granma that Fidel had lost. The next day he was sacked and fled the country.

It was all downhill for golf after that ill-fated game. President Kennedy, the best golfer to occupy the White House, did not take up the offer. Instead, he tightened the already tough economic blockade, which to the fury of Cubans remains in force. Fidel ordered military barracks to be built on most courses, although the scene of his defeat by Che was earmarked for an arts college, which never got off the ground.

But somehow Rovers Athletic hung on for 20 more years, the British and Cuban flags flying alongside with portraits of Queen Elizabeth II and Fidel hanging inside the mahogany-lined clubhouse.

THE APOTHEOSIS OF SELFISHNESS:

Swiss way of assisting suicide is dying without dignity (Sharon Owens, 28 January 2009, Belfast Telegraph)

I used to be a tacit supporter of assisted suicide but after watching A Short Stay in Switzerland, I’ve changed my mind.

This harrowing drama starring Julie Walters was based on the true story of one woman who chose to end her life via the Zurich clinic Dignitas rather than die a lingering death from a progressive, degenerative condition. The woman in question was Doctor Anne Turner from Bath in England; by all accounts a wise and feisty (and wealthy) lady who knew her own mind.

But what she had to put her three grown-up children through was very painful to watch, even in drama form. And by the end, I was forced to agree with Doctor Turner’s best friend, who tearfully accused her simply of showing off. Is this the ultimate form of middle-class intellectual snobbery, I wondered? Or did Anne Turner do the right thing when she trailed her sobbing children off to a bleak and soulless flat in Switzerland and made them witness her swallowing an overdose of barbiturates, while a volunteer filmed the suicide on a hand-held video camera?

THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS SPECIES:

Plight of the pizzly bear: A leading filmmaker tells the story behind the discovery and cruel fate of the grizzly–polar bear (Mark Fletcher, 28th January 2009, Daily Mail)

There is on average one polar bear per 500 square miles. Even for the most active polar bear, finding a mate must be a problem.

For one lonely female, though, there was a very unusual solution. Her chosen mate was an awesome creature - most likely 8ft tall, weighing over 50st and capable of running at 35mph, with 9in claws and a very short temper.

And strangest of all, in contrast to her snowy white fleece, he had a rich-brown coat. For her mate was not a polar bear at all. He was a grizzly.

In normal circumstances, the paths of these two species never cross.

Grizzlies live far from the Arctic hunting grounds of their polar cousins. And even if some freak occurrence led to a female polar and a male grizzly meeting in the wild, the laws of nature would have dictated that they would run away at the sight of each other.

But in this case, at least, a rather more unusual course of action unfolded. And the result was a biological marvel: the birth of the first naturally born 'pizzly bear'.

PRODUCT OF LESSONS:

Ground Zero for the GOP: The first rematch of the Obama era will be the Virginia governor's race this fall (Jennifer Rubin, 02/02/2009, Weekly Standard)

While the Democrats are headed into battle, the Republicans have already settled on a candidate, Virginia attorney general Robert McDonnell. He is a 21-year veteran of the U.S. Army, a father of five (whose daughter just returned from service in Iraq), a Northern Virginia native, and a Catholic. He is conservative on social issues, but known for his bipartisan, workmanlike approach as AG and for his attempts to forge a deal on Virginia's knottiest issue: transportation.

Republican strategists think they finally may have a candidate suited to win across the state. McDonnell was the last statewide Republican candidate (in 2005) to win suburban counties like Prince William, Loudoun, Henrico, Chesapeake, and Virginia Beach. Even if he does not win Fairfax County--where one in seven Virginia voters lives--Republicans think he can get at least 45 percent of those voters while doing well in the outer suburbs and his home base of Virginia Beach and in more rural areas.

There is certainly nothing "Old Virginia" about McDonnell. He appears to be the quintessential Northern Virginia businessman. Trimly built and slightly graying, McDonnell, 54, is a departure from recent Republican candidates in Virginia. He looks much like the urban and suburban voters he is courting--polite, soft-spoken, and surrounded by an array of electronic gadgetry which allows him to keep up on paper work and communicate with his office during long days on the road. He is dressed neatly in a gray suit as he travels from stop to stop on a typical day of retail politics. Only a slight accent ever peeks through: There is no drawl, no cowboy boots, and virtually no talk about hot button social issues. He reiterates his strong pro-life record, from which he insists, "I will not deviate one iota," but stresses, "You gotta connect with voters on what they care about."

McDonnell is aware of the luxury of watching his opponents fight it out for six months. By the end of June, he jokes, the Democrats will be "broke, tired, and divided." Still, he is realistic: "At the same time the mainstream media love the chase. They're going to have the chase and I'm not." Still, he's not concerned that he will be out of the limelight. As attorney general he can make news--as he did with his recent appeal to the Supreme Court of a Virginia Supreme Court decision striking down a portion of an anti-spam statute that he championed. And an all-star lineup of GOP favorites from Arnold Schwarzenegger to Sarah Palin and Rudy Giuliani will draw crowds to his rallies while the Democrats squabble.

And he's making the most of his time by staying out on the trail, reassuring the base, reaching out to ethnic voters and honing the themes of his campaign. In remarks before the Mount Vernon Women's Republican Club, he rattles off his career highlights and reminds the group of his connections to Northern Virginia. He vows to make his campaign about "common sense conservative principles." The Virginia Republican party is clearly in need of help, and McDonnell makes no bones about it. He constantly asks, "What can we do better?"

As we travel between stops, McDonnell diverts his driver around the suburbs of Northern Virginia, pointing out his old elementary and high schools, and pulling up into the driveway of the modest Mount Vernon home where he grew up. The day is full of reminiscing--there is where he collected driftwood near a stream at Ft. Belvoir, here is where he would sled down the street ("If you got rolling and had enough wax you could go down this second hill"), and that's the house where his childhood friend, now an aide to one of the Democratic contenders, grew up. The message is clear: Unlike Terry McAuliffe, Bob McDonnell is a homegrown Virginian. More important, he is a Northern Virginian. And that is key--because that's where the votes are.

His emphasis on his Northern Virginian roots is only one indication that his campaign is the product of lessons learned from prior Republican defeats. If Republicans have been losing in Virginia's suburbs and exurbs, McDonnell is committed to campaigning in them and selling conservatism there. If Republicans were tagged as too ideological, he is emphatic: "We win by addressing quality of life issues." If Republicans did poorly with minorities, he says it is now "absolutely imperative to talk to members of new ethnic communities" and explain how Republican policies relate to their concerns. Indeed his schedule this day--visits with a Republican women's group, Hispanic leaders, and Korean community leaders--reflects the diverse electorate he needs to inspire. On the immigration debate, he is particularly blunt about Republican failures. We "haven't articulated that properly. The discussion didn't start with the proposition that we encourage lawful immigration." Declaring himself to be an advocate of immigration reform at the federal level he says that visa limits need to be raised while borders are enforced. He is emphatic that illegal immigrants who commit crimes need to be deported, but he returns to his central theme: "The message [must be] welcoming to new immigrants to come to America lawfully and pursue the American dream."

His meeting with a group of Korean-American community leaders in a law office in Annandale--the heart of the growing Korean community in Northern Virginia--is revealing. This is the face of the "new Virginia" which a McCain campaign aide referred to as "not real Virginia." Koreans are one of the largest ethnic minorities in the state, and McDonnell wants to make inroads here. First and second generation Korean-Americans pepper him with questions: "Why do you want to be governor?" What are Republicans doing to avoid the label as the "rich, white party"? One woman says that Democrats are able to say, "We are for average people."

McDonnell is candid without being defensive. "We haven't done nearly as well as we should engaging you." He smoothly moves to talking about Republican values as a natural fit for immigrant business people--low taxes, less regulation and litigation, hard work, responsibility, and education. He knows his audience well and gets approving murmurs and nods when he promises this group--which prizes education as a way up the ladder of success (and includes parents of many overachieving school age children)--to address the issue of making sure "kids with 3.8 [grade point] averages [can get] into UVA and Virginia Tech."

While pundits and Beltway insiders dwell on the fine points of policy, this crowd just wants attention for their community. An effervescent woman sporting a bright red blazer and a large gold elephant brooch implores McDonnell, "Just come for five minutes [to community events]. Eat our food. Shake our hands. They want more openness. .  .  . Don't be shy."

It is a similar scene later that evening at a gathering of regional Hispanic leaders, many veterans of past Republican campaigns. They aren't timid about reminding McDonnell of the challenge for Republican candidates. One attendee tells McDonnell matter-of-factly that he must make inroads with Northern Virginia Hispanics: "If we [end up] with over a 100,000 vote deficit from Northern Virginia, we'll be in trouble." He suggests that the group can help "craft a message" that is both conservative and appealing to Hispanic voters.

McDonnell begins his remarks with a welcome in passable Spanish, noting that his wife speaks Spanish and lived in Mexico. And he picks up on the offer, "Your wanting to help me craft a message is incredibly helpful. I understand we need to run a different kind of race." He acknowledges that Republicans haven't connected on the issues that Hispanics care about. He repeats the message of the day, "I do need your help."

After the meeting, Sergio, a professional in his mid-30s, tells me that Republicans' errors boil down to a "messaging mistake." He explains, "You ask people what Obama's message was? 'Change.' McCain's? You get 13 answers." And what of the argument that McCain's poor showing with Hispanics "proves" that immigration reform is a loser for Republicans? He smiles, "Look at any leader of color in the GOP. They will tell you that [if that's the view], we won't win a national election ever again."

MAKING IT EVEN FUNNIER...:

Natural Selection Not The Only Process That Drives Evolution? (ScienceDaily, Jan. 28, 2009)

The researchers identified fast evolving human genes by comparing our genome with those of other primates. However, surprisingly, the patterns of molecular evolution in many of the genes they found did not contain signals of natural selection. Instead, their evidence suggests that a separate process known as BGC (biased gene conversion) has speeded up the rate of evolution in certain genes. This process increases the rate at which certain mutations spread through a population, regardless of whether they are beneficial or harmful.

"The research not only increases our understanding of human evolution, but also suggests that many techniques used by evolutionary biologists to detect selection may be flawed," says Matthew Webster of the Department of Medical Biochemistry and Microbiology at Uppsala University.

WHY SARAH PALIN WAS THE ONLY QUALIFIED CANDIDATE:

Obama's White House: Big posts, overlapping tasks (CHARLES BABINGTON, 1/28/09, Associated Press)

President Barack Obama is building a White House staff so loaded with big names and overlapping duties that it could collapse into chaos unless managed with a juggler's skill.

It's an administration that seems "addicted to czars," says one longtime observer of government organization.

Obama has installed a White House health czar who doubles as secretary of Health and Human Services. The State Department now has "special envoys" for the Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and for climate change — areas already overseen by other officials.

Just for the environment, along with the new climate envoy Obama has an energy secretary, an Environmental Protection Agency director and a chief of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Hovering over them all is Carol Browner, a high-profile former EPA administrator in a newly created role some call "climate czarina."

The economic team is perhaps the most multilayered and ego-driven of all.

MAHMOUD WHO?:

Anniversary blues in Iran: As Iran’s Islamic Republic celebrates its 30th anniversary, its oil wealth is in decline and the confidence of the past decade looks increasingly brittle. But whatever happens in the June election America needs a fresh approach (Christopher de Bellaigue, February 2009, Prospect)

When Ahmadinejad took over from the reformist cleric Muhammad Khatami, who had completed his maximum of two consecutive terms, the economy was sclerotic but functioning. Khatami had dipped liberally into a rainy day reserve made up of surplus oil revenues, called the oil stabilisation fund (OSF), but his government had also made modest efforts to wean the economy off its dependence on oil and encourage Iranians, impenitent property-speculators, to invest their riyals into manufacturing. Ahmadinejad attracted those Iranians who felt excluded from the Khatami boom or saw it as a drift to western nihilism. He was elected not only because of his piety and humble style of living, but also because of his promise to distribute Iran’s oil revenues among the people. Once elected, this is exactly what he did. Through the state-dominated banking system, he doled out huge sums in loans (worth billions in US dollars) to young people, newlyweds and small businessmen. As he toured the country, where he was received rapturously by the poor, he pledged billions more for infrastructure projects and job creation. The president drew on Iran’s soaring oil receipts to fund his largesse.

According to central bank figures, the government has spent $130bn worth of oil revenues in the past three years. Khatami’s government, by contrast, spent $97bn from the same source over its entire, eight-year life. Repeatedly, senior economists and opposition politicians have warned of the baleful consequences of Ahmadinejad’s policies—with reason, it is now clear. Inflation, which ran at just over 10 per cent when he was elected, is nudging 30 per cent. Iranians’ purchasing power has been eroded, particularly when it comes to housing and food, where inflation exceeds the headline rate. (The president’s decision to reduce petrol subsidies, which most orthodox economists supported, has also had inflationary results.) A policy of encouraging loans to aspiring home-owners created a property bubble that burst in the autumn, leaving many defaulters in its wake. Non-performing loans have risen sharply since Ahmadinejad came to power and now account for some 20 per cent of banks’ exposure. For the first time in a decade, the middle classes are becoming less prosperous. Meat, fruit and vegetables have soared in price; Iranians struggle to afford their seasoned stews and saffron rice. Pistachios, formerly a staple snack in middle-class homes, are now a luxury. “Today it costs $100 to gather the extended family even for a modest meal,” grumbles a trader in the Tehran bazaar, “and for someone making $400 a month, a good wage, that’s a big sum. If you accept an invitation it’s customary to return the favour. So people aren’t accepting invitations any more.”

Ahmadinejad has failed to diversify the economy—an objective so urgent, it was enshrined in a five-year plan for all governments irrespective of ideological orientation. On the contrary, argues Saeed Leylaz, a prominent government critic, Iran’s dependence on oil as a source of budgetary spending has increased more than sevenfold since he came to power. The recent collapse of the oil price, from a midsummer peak of almost $150 to about $35 a barrel in mid-January, is reminding Iranians of their vulnerability to ill winds from abroad. Ahmadinejad demurs: there is no reason why “an Iranian should catch a fever if someone sneezes in the west.”

He claims that he can govern effectively even if the price falls to $5 a barrel. The International Monetary Fund is not so sure; in August the fund stated that Iran would face an “unsustainable” current account deficit if the oil price fell below $75. This, surely, is the rainy day for which the oil stabilisation fund was set up, to maintain government spending at a time of low oil revenues. Yet the OSF, having been repeatedly plundered by the government, is almost empty. Even if oil prices bottom out soon, it seems inevitable that 2009 will bring Iran sharply rising unemployment, persistent high inflation, and an increase in the kind of public disgruntlement that led bazaar traders to shut up shop in October in protest at plans to introduce VAT. (The government backtracked and the shutters came back up.)

According to Tahmasb Mazaheri, a former Central Bank governor, “bitter days” are in store. For the rest of the world, the question is how economic pain will affect Iran’s ability to withstand growing international pressure to abandon its longstanding pursuit of self-sufficiency in nuclear fuel—a status that would allow Iran to make a nuclear bomb. Iranians’ sense of immunity is at last being threatened—and at the tail-end of Bush’s bellicose presidency, when one might have expected it to be strongest. Many recall the last time an oil price slump coincided with a period of strategic peril—during the long and bloody war that Iran fought in the 1980s under Saddam Hussein. Economic as much as military setbacks obliged Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the first supreme leader of revolutionary Iran, to agree to a ceasefire with Iraq in 1988, a decision that he likened to drinking a “poisoned chalice.” Now, Iran’s adversaries hope, the clerics may buckle again. [...]

Obama and his team may want to wait for the results of the presidential elections in June before exploring their negotiating options. Yet that would be a mistake, for no Iranian president, Ahmadinejad included, has controlled foreign and nuclear policy. In the Islamic Republic, which is built on anti-American sentiment, the delicate process of engaging the US without undermining the official ideology is a job for the largely unelected establishment—made up of Khomeini’s successor as supreme leader, Khamenei, a handful of top officials and other senior clerics and military leaders. This establishment will remain, whatever the poll results.

NO MORE NATION-BUILDING, NOW THE HAWK IS LOOSE:

Aides Say Obama’s Afghan Aims Elevate War (HELENE COOPER and THOM SHANKER, 1/28/09, NY Times)

President Obama intends to adopt a tougher line toward Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, as part of a new American approach to Afghanistan that will put more emphasis on waging war than on development, senior administration officials said Tuesday. [...]

The officials portrayed the approach as a departure from that of President Bush, who held videoconferences with Mr. Karzai every two weeks and sought to emphasize the American role in rebuilding Afghanistan and its civil institutions.

They said that the Obama administration would work with provincial leaders as an alternative to the central government, and that it would leave economic development and nation-building increasingly to European allies, so that American forces could focus on the fight against insurgents.

UNFORTUNATELY, IT DOESN'T HAVE THE ENORMOUS UPSIDE OF Y2K...:

Apocalypse in 2012? Date spawns theories, film (CNN, 1/27/09)

Just as "Y2K" and its batch of predictions about the year 2000 have become a distant memory, here comes "Twenty-twelve."

Fueled by a crop of books, Web sites with countdown clocks, and claims about ancient timekeepers, interest is growing in what some see as the dawn of a new era, and others as an expiration date for Earth: December 21, 2012.

The date marks the end of a 5,126-year cycle on the Long Count calendar developed by the Maya, the ancient civilization known for its advanced understanding of astronomy and for the great cities it left behind in Mexico and Central America.

(Some scholars believe the cycle ends a bit later -- on December 23, 2012.)

Speculation in some circles about whether the Maya chose this particular time because they thought something ominous would happen has sparked a number of doomsday theories.

MORE BOUGHT THAN READ:

John Updike’s Dead: Do We Still Have To Pretend To Like His Books? (Ben Shapiro, 1/28/09, Big Hollywood)

Updike’s characters range from the unbelievable to the unbelievably patronizing. First, the unbelievable. I cannot claim to have read every novel Updike wrote – few can, since he wrote 25 of them – but his major works are stuffed to the gills with characters who speak as no person has ever spoken. In “Terrorist,” Ahmad, an American, half-Irish, half-Egyptian high school graduate seduced by Islamism, states, “There is nothing in Islam to forbid watching television and attending the cinema, though in fact it is all so saturated in despair and unbelief as to repel my interest.” Ahmad is American. No American speaks like this, even an American unlucky enough to fall in with the wrong mosque crowd.

And then there are the patronizing. Rabbit is Updike’s most famous creation, the subject of four of his novels. Rabbit is an adulterous creep, a selfish hedonist who has no concern for his wife or family. And, yes, Rabbit is a political conservative; in “Rabbit, Redux,” Updike makes a point of Rabbit’s support for the war in Vietnam and his flag decal. As Updike stated in a 2004 interview:

“People ask me what would Rabbit think of 9/11, what would Rabbit think of George W. Bush, and I just can’t say … I think Rabbit would probably have the same reaction to the invasion of Iraq that he had to Vietnam, that it may be a mistake but it’s our duty to see it through. If he were alive, he’d probably be in Florida most of the year by now and he might have a stars-and-stripes sticker on his car. After 9/11, he certainly would have put the flag up.”

The rube.

Updike himself was a political liberal. In 2007, he wrote a review of Amity Shlaes’ “The Forgotten Man” in “The New Yorker,” in which he castigated Shlaes for her criticism of FDR: The impression of recovery—the impression that a President was bending the old rules and, drawing upon his own courage and flamboyance in adversity and illness, stirring things up on behalf of the down-and-out—mattered more than any miscalculations in the moot mathematics of economics.” This is tremendous nonsense. There is little doubt FDR was a great politician, a phenomenal PR man. But Shlaes’ argument – that FDR lengthened the Great Depression – does not call for a rebuttal based on anecdotal reminiscences.

He was perhaps more successful in his 20 or so stories about Bech, the famous Jewish American novelist who suffers from writer's block and gets by on his past literary glories.

Updike joked that he invented Bech to grab some of the attention away from his major competitors. When he started his Bech stories in 1964, that list included Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, all acclaimed Jewish American writers.

"I created Henry Bech to show that I was really a Jewish writer also," Updike teased in a 1982 interview with Time magazine.

LAND OF THE LOST:

Israel's Strategic Incompetence in Gaza (Daniel Pipes, 1/08/09, FrontPageMagazine.com)

[F]rom what one can discern of the Olmert government's goal in its war on Hamas, it seems to be to weaken Hamas and strengthen Fatah so that Mahmoud Abbas can re-take control of Gaza and re-start diplomacy with Israel. Michael B. Oren and Yossi Klein Halevi captured this idea in a recent article title: "Palestinians need Israel to win: If Hamas gets away with terror once again, the peace process will be over."

Bitter experience, however, invalidates this thesis. For one, Fatah has proven itself a determined enemy intent on eliminating the Jewish state. For another, Palestinians themselves repudiated Fatah in 2006 elections. It strains credulity that anyone could still think of Fatah as a "partner for peace." Rather, Jerusalem should think creatively of other scenarios, perhaps my "no-state solution" bringing in the Jordanian and Egyptian governments
.
More dismaying even than Olmert's ineptitude is that the Israeli election a month from now pits three leaders of his same ilk. Two of them (Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Defense Minister Ehud Barak) currently serve as his main lieutenants, while two (Barak and Binyamin Netanyahu) failed badly in their prior prime ministerial stints.

Looking beyond Olmert and his potential successors comes the worst news of all, namely that no one at the upper echelons of Israel's political life articulates the imperative for victory. For this reason, I see Israel as a lost polity, one full of talent, energy, and resolve but lacking direction.

ELECTORAL GLIDE IN RED:

Redistricting is a hidden weapon for gloomy GOP (Aaron Blake, 01/27/09, The Hill)

In 2000, Republicans used redistricting to solidify their majorities. Now, with the party reeling from two straight election losses, the landscape for the 2010 round of redistricting could provide them opportunities to regain some of those seats and add some new ones.

The 2010 census could add multiple House seats to red-leaning states — as many as four districts to Texas and two each to Arizona and Florida. And it could subtract seats from blue-trending states like Michigan, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Most of the states slated to gain seats in reapportionment next cycle feature Republican-controlled state legislatures and governor’s mansions — the powerhouses that decide how to allocate congressional districts.

States expecting to lose seats are more of a mixed bag, with most facing split control in those branches of government, which generally results in compromise.

DESTROYING THE ECONOMY TO SAVE THE RACE:

Iowa: What Happens When a Town Implodes (Betsy Rubiner, Jan. 28, 2009, TIME)

During a bitter cold January week, penniless women and children stream into a Catholic church in the northeast Iowa town of Postville that has served as their refuge since May 12, when 389 workers were arrested during an immigration raid at the Agriprocessors Inc. meatpacking plant. The women are among 26 former Agriprocessors workers, most from Guatemala and Mexico, charged with immigration violations and fighting deportation. Released on humanitarian grounds but required to wear electronic ankle bracelets, the women, as well as about 59 children, now depend on the community, especially St. Bridget's church, which operates a Hispanic ministry from a worn brick house.

One woman needs medical care for her anxious 12-year-old son, who has started wetting his bed. Another needs legal help for her husband, arrested during a return visit to Agriprocessors by immigration agents last fall. "I am very sad and worried," says Irma Lopez, 28, a former Agriprocessors worker who remains in limbo with her young daughter while her husband is back in Guatemala, one of many arrested workers deported in October after serving five months in prison. "I worked since I was eight years old and now I feel worthless. I can work but I'm not allowed to."

Eight months after the Agriprocessors raid, Postville is still grappling with what its leaders call "a humanitarian and economic disaster," compounded by the recession and a harsh winter. Life isn't much easier for "legal" workers. [...]

Help has come primarily from community groups and churches, with donations from near and far. The local food pantry is now open Sundays, as well as Wednesdays, serving about 150 people. But some leaders say the help is not enough and worry about shortages and increasing hardships, especially evictions. In December, a citizen's group faxed a letter to state and federal leaders that said: "Postville is a community in turmoil, a broken, hurting place... If Postville was reeling after the raid, recent events have brought the town to its knees. What happens when a place implodes?"

THEOLOGY, DEMOGRAPHY, GEOGRAPHY, DEMOCRACY:

Obama, Iran and Afghanistan (Kaveh L Afrasiabi, 1/29/09, Asia Times)

An Afghanistan-centered dialogue may prove a productive first step on the complex path of US-Iran relations. In a way, this would be a back-to-the-past approach, with shades of how the US and Iran cooperated in the aftermath of 9/11 tragedy on a common anti-Taliban strategy.

"The difference between then and now is that the US officials are now distinguishing between the 'good Taliban' versus the 'bad Taliban' and hoping to sow divisions between them and reach a compromise with the former, perhaps as part of an emerging post-Karzai scenario," said a Tehran University political scientist. The scholar added that he believes Iran does not like this "new approach" and finds it "simplistic and defeatist".

In addition to the traditional reasons Tehran is opposed to the Taliban's resurgence is that the insurgents are involved in the opium business. The narcotics trade has skyrocketed in recent years, compared to the anti-drug stance during the era of Taliban rule. This is one of the key features of the "new Taliban" as far as Tehran is concerned, while partly blaming the rise on the British components of the coalition force put in charge of drug trafficking.

Tehran is pleased with Obama's prioritization of the war in Afghanistan and may be willing to allow NATO to use the Iran corridor to transport its goods from Europe, particularly now that Russia is sending mixed signals about its permission for such a route. Still, this is a risky proposition for Tehran and could cause a backlash in the form of anti-Iran terrorism or require a NATO commitment to assist Iran with its porous borders with Afghanistan.

MORE:
A battle before a battle (Syed Saleem Shahzad, 1/29/09, Asia Times)

Restive North-West Frontier Province is not the destination of choice these days. Those who travel there go for business or family reasons, and the flight I took from the southern port city of Karachi to Peshawar was half empty; clearly, the region is no longer on the tourist map.

After touring the city for an afternoon and speaking to a variety of people, I was struck by its eerie similarity to Baghdad when I visited that capital soon after the United States-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 - it has the distinct atmosphere of impending chaos.

That evening I chatted with a senior al-Qaeda member who told me that the group considered NWFP and southwestern Balochistan province as already wiped off the map of Pakistani as they were now militant country. Although not entirely accurate, it portends a chilling turn in the "war on terror" in which Washington will be more concerned over the stability and security of Pakistan rather than that of Afghanistan.

The indications are that a major battle will be fought in Pakistan before the annual spring offensive even begins in Afghanistan this year.

THE DISCIPLINE OF DEMOCRACY:

Sunni Anti-Qaeda Sheikhs Vie For West Iraq In Pol: `We are determined to participate to reclaim what we missed out on before`, the Sunni tribal leader said in Ramadi. (Javno, 1/28/09)

Anbar's overwhelmingly Sunni Arab population stayed away from the last vote, which took place months after two devastating U.S. military assaults on Falluja killed hundreds of people and left much of it in ruins.

The central government had to appoint local councillors, most allied to the Iraqi Islamic Party (IIP), the largest Sunni Arab bloc in parliament. Soon after, al Qaeda seized control.

But due in part to local chiefs, like Sulaiman, who eventually teamed up with the U.S. military, al Qaeda was driven out. By trading on their war hero image, the sheikhs hope they will now be rewarded at the polls at the IIP's expense.

"Our goal is to get rid of the IIP," Sheikh Hameed al-Hayyes told Reuters. "We will fight them with all the power we have."

Analysts say they stand a good chance.

"The working assumption is that the IIP will get wiped out in Anbar," said Toby Dodge, an Iraq specialist at London's International Institute for Strategic Studies.

The provincial vote, set to take place in 14 of Iraq's 18 provinces, will apportion 440 seats across the country to councils that elect powerful regional governors.

The Sunni boycott of the last vote also resulted in Kurds controlling the northern province of Nineveh even though they form only a quarter of the population there and in Shi'ites running Diyala province at the expense of Sunnis.

IS THERE A WORSE FINANCIAL DECISION YOU COULD MAKE...:

The case for doing nothing (EAMON JAVERS & JIM VANDEHEI, 1/28/09, Politico)

The Do-Nothing Crowd also points to some of the hidden upsides of the recession — developments they say are already helping position the U.S. economy for a recovery.

The most noticeable impact is that housing prices are coming down to a more sustainable level. For first-time buyers, this is reopening a path to homeownership that had been all but blocked by hyper-inflated prices. The National Association of Realtors reported this week that housing sales rose 6.5 percent from November to December, largely on the strength of bargain hunters snapping up foreclosed properties. That could be a sign that the housing market is on its way to a balancing point at which lower prices once again draw new buyers into the system.

In the meantime, weak companies that have problems competing are being weeded out of the system. For example, Circuit City announced that it would liquidate its stores and assets, laying off an estimated 34,000 employees. That’s not necessarily a tragedy, argues Cato’s Edwards. “The weak are getting weeded out. Circuit City had crappy customer service, and I’m glad that Best Buy will survive and Circuit City will not.” Ideally, the collapse of weaker competitors is an economic opportunity for the stronger survivors to gain market share — and hire new workers.

Another galvanizing effect of the downturn is that companies have been forced to face the reality that they haven’t been making products that customers actually want to buy. General Motors CEO Richard Wagoner, for example, conceded in testimony on Capitol Hill in December that his company had made mistakes, including “not moving fast enough to invest in smaller, more-fuel-efficient vehicles for the U.S. market.” As the old saying goes, imminent death has a way of focusing the mind.

An even better consequence of recession, say the Do-Nothings, is that American families are finally starting to pay down the dangerously high debt levels they’ve accumulated. One of the reasons last year’s economic stimulus failed, in fact, was that Americans used the money to pay off bills, not to spend on new products. In a country that had developed a negative personal savings rate, that’s probably a good thing.

And here’s something truly surprising: The recession might even be good for your health. The New York Times reported that Americans are drinking less alcohol, noting that a “study based on surveys by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 1987 through 1999 found that drinking in this country generally drops during economic hard times, especially among heavy drinkers.” That may be not due to a renewed sense of sobriety and responsibility, but rather to the decline in workers’ discretionary income. Still, liver surgeons will tell you that less drinking is probably healthy.

For all that, the Do-Nothings fully expect to lose the argument in Washington this week. The political momentum is all on the side of the stimulus. “Politicians feel a need to validate their own political authority, and they feel they have to do something,” says Robert Romano of the nonprofit group Americans for Limited Government.

NOTE THAT THE HEADLINE ALSIO WORKS IF CHANGED TO ""yOU":

Obama lawyers set to defend Yoo (JOSH GERSTEIN, 1/28/09, Politico)

In Democratic legal circles, no attorney has been more pilloried than former Bush Justice Department official John Yoo, chief author of the so-called torture memos that Barack Obama last week sought to nullify.

But now President Obama’s incoming crew of lawyers has a new and somewhat awkward job: defending Yoo in federal court.

Next week, Justice Department lawyers are set to ask a San Francisco federal judge to throw out a lawsuit brought against Yoo by Jose Padilla, a New York man held without charges on suspicion of being an Al Qaeda operative plotting to set off a “dirty bomb.

THEY'RE JUST NOT THAT INTO YOU:

Women’s Groups Protest Dropping Contraceptives Provision in Stimulus (Laura Meckler, 1/27/09, WSJ: Washington Wire)

Women’s and reproductive rights groups expressed dismay Tuesday after the White House and congressional Democrats agreed to drop a provision from the economic stimulus package that would have made it easier for states to expand coverage of contraceptives through their Medicaid programs.

IF A PICTURE TELLS A THOUSAND WORDS...:

...how many does it kill:

EL CONEJO SON MUERTE:

John Updike, Author, Dies at 76 (THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, January 27, 2009 )

John Updike, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, prolific man of letters and erudite chronicler of sex, divorce and other adventures in the postwar prime of the American empire, died Tuesday at age 76.

Updike, a resident of Beverly Farms, Mass., died of lung cancer, according to a statement from his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf.

Fittingly, a hundred years from now, when his novels are long forgotten and even most of his essays and criticism are too dated to be read, there is one piece that everyone will still know, Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu (John Updike, 10/22/1960, The New Yorker)

Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg. It was built in 1912 and rebuilt in 1934, and offers, as do most Boston artifacts, a compromise between Man’s Euclidean determinations and Nature’s beguiling irregularities. Its right field is one of the deepest in the American League, while its left field is the shortest; the high left-field wall, three hundred and fifteen feet from home plate along the foul line, virtually thrusts its surface at right-handed hitters. On the afternoon of Wednesday, September 28th, as I took a seat behind third base, a uniformed groundkeeper was treading the top of this wall, picking batting-practice home runs out of the screen, like a mushroom gatherer seen in Wordsworthian perspective on the verge of a cliff. The day was overcast, chill, and uninspirational. The Boston team was the worst in twenty-seven seasons. A jangling medley of incompetent youth and aging competence, the Red Sox were finishing in seventh place only because the Kansas City Athletics had locked them out of the cellar. They were scheduled to play the Baltimore Orioles, a much nimbler blend of May and December, who had been dumped from pennant contention a week before by the insatiable Yankees. I, and 10,453 others, had shown up primarily because this was the Red Sox’s last home game of the season, and therefore the last time in all eternity that their regular left fielder, known to the headlines as TED, KID, SPLINTER, THUMPER, TW, and, most cloyingly, MISTER WONDERFUL, would play in Boston. “WHAT WILL WE DO WITHOUT TED? HUB FANS ASK” ran the headline on a newspaper being read by a bulb-nosed cigar smoker a few rows away. Williams’ retirement had been announced, doubted (he had been threatening retirement for years), confirmed by Tom Yawkey, the Red Sex owner, and at last widely accepted as the sad but probable truth. He was forty-two and had redeemed his abysmal season of 1959 with a—considering his advanced age—fine one. He had been giving away his gloves and bats and had grudgingly consented to a sentimental ceremony today. This was not necessarily his last game; the Red Sox were scheduled to travel to New York and wind up the season with three games there.

I arrived early. [...]

The afternoon grew so glowering that in the sixth inning the arc lights were turned on—always a wan sight in the daytime, like the burning headlights of a funeral procession. Aided by the gloom, Fisher was slicing through the Sox rookies, and Williams did not come to bat in the seventh. He was second up in the eighth. This was almost certainly his last time to come to the plate in Fenway Park, and instead of merely cheering, as we had at his three previous appearances, we stood, all of us—stood and applauded. Have you ever heard applause in a ballpark? Just applause—no calling, no whistling, just an ocean of handclaps, minute after minute, burst after burst, crowding and running together in continuous succession like the pushes of surf at the edge of the sand. It was a sombre and considered tumult. There was not a boo in it. It seemed to renew itself out of a shifting set of memories as the kid, the Marine, the veteran of feuds and failures and injuries, the friend of children, and the enduring old pro evolved down the bright tunnel of twenty-one summers toward this moment. At last, the umpire signalled for Fisher to pitch; with the other players, he had been frozen in position. Only Williams had moved during the ovation, switching his hat impatiently, ignoring everything except his cherished task. Fisher wound up, and the applause sank into a hush.

Understand that we were a crowd of rational people. We knew that a home run cannot be produced at will; the right pitch must be perfectly met and luck must ride with the ball. Three innings before, we had seen a brave effort fail. The air was soggy; the season was exhausted. Nevertheless, there will always lurk, around a corner in a pocket of our knowledge of the odds, an indefensible hope, and this was one of the times, which you now and then find in sports, when a density of expectation hangs in the air and plucks an event out of the future.

Fisher, after his unsettling wait, was wide with the first pitch. He put the second one over, and Williams swung mightily and missed. The crowd grunted, seeing that classic swing, so long and smooth and quick, exposed, naked in its failure. Fisher threw the third time, Williams swung again, and there it was. The ball climbed on a diagonal line into the vast volume of air over center field. From my angle, behind third base, the ball seemed less an object in flight than the tip of a towering, motionless construct, like the Eiffel Tower or the Tappan Zee Bridge. It was in the books while it was still in the sky. Brandt ran back to the deepest corner of the outfield grass; the ball descended beyond his reach and struck in the crotch where the bullpen met the wall, bounced chunkily, and, as far as I could see, vanished.

Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the square of bases at the center of our beseeching screaming. He ran as he always ran out home runs—hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of. He didn’t tip his cap. Though we thumped, wept, and chanted “We want Ted” for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters.

MORE:

    -REVIEW: of The End of Time by John Updike: John Updike, Champion Literary Phallocrat, Drops One; Is This Finally the End for Magnificent Narcissists? (David Foster Wallace, October 12, 1997, NY Observer)

"Of nothing but me … I sing, lacking another song."
-John Updike, "Midpoint," 1969

Mailer, Updike, Roth-the Great Male Narcissists* who've dominated postwar realist fiction are now in their senescence, and it must seem to them no coincidence that the prospect of their own deaths appears backlit by the approaching millennium and on-line predictions of the death of the novel as we know it. When a solipsist dies, after all, everything goes with him. And no U.S. novelist has mapped the solipsist's terrain better than John Updike, whose rise in the 60's and 70's established him as both chronicler and voice of probably the single most self-absorbed generation since Louis XIV. As were Freud's, Mr. Updike's big preoccupations have always been with death and sex (not necessarily in that order), and the fact that the mood of his books has gotten more wintery in recent years is understandable-Mr. Updike has always written largely about himself, and since the surprisingly moving Rabbit at Rest he's been exploring, more and more overtly, the apocalyptic prospect of his own death.

Toward the End of Time concerns an incredibly erudite, articulate, successful, narcissistic and sex-obsessed retired guy who's keeping a one-year journal in which he explores the apocalyptic prospect of his own death. It is, of the total 25 Updike books I've read, far and away the worst, a novel so mind-bendingly clunky and self-indulgent that it's hard to believe the author let it be published in this kind of shape.

I'm afraid the preceding sentence is this review's upshot, and most of the balance here will consist of presenting evidence/ justification for such a disrespectful assessment. First, though, if I may poke the critical head into the frame for just one moment, I'd like to offer assurances that your reviewer is not one of these spleen-venting, spittle-spattering Updike-haters one encounters among literary readers under 40. The fact is that I am probably classifiable as one of very few actual sub-40 Updike fans . Not as rabid a fan as, say, Nicholson Baker, but I do think that The Poorhouse Fair , Of the Farm and The Centaur are all great books, maybe classics. And even since Rabbit Is Rich -as his characters seemed to become more and more repellent, and without any corresponding indication that the author understood that they were repellent-I've continued to read Mr. Updike's novels and to admire the sheer gorgeousness of his descriptive prose.

    -OBIT: American writer John Updike dies (Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, January 27, 2009, NY Times)

    -OBIT: John Updike, Author, Dies at 76 (THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, January 27, 2009 )

    -OBIT: John Updike: Prolific author who captured the spirit of middle America and is best known for his Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom series (Daily Telegraph, 27 Jan 2009)

    -OBIT: Acclaimed writer John Updike dies at 76 (Mark Feeney, 1/27/09, Boston Globe)

    -OBIT: John Updike dies: Pulitzer prize-winning novelist dies from lung cancer aged 76 (Helen Pidd, 1/27/09, guardian.co.uk)

    -OBIT: John Updike, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, dies of lung cancer at age 76 (Michelle Kerns, 1/27/09, Book Examiner)

    -OBIT: Novelist John Updike dies at 76 (Bob Hoover, 1/27/09, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)

    -Remembrances: Pulitzer Prize-Winning Novelist John Updike Dies (Talk of the Nation, January 27, 2009)

    -

    -

      -The
Centaurian (A HOME PAGE FOR JOHN UPDIKE INFORMATION AND  DISCUSSION)

    -WIKIPEDIA: John Updike

    -John Updike (kirjasto)

    -FILMOGRAPHY: John Updike (IMDB)

    -Life
& Times : John Updike (1932-- )  (NY Times)

    -FEATURED AUTHOR: REVIEWS OF JOHN UPDIKE'S BOOKS (NY Times)

    -Literary
Research Guide: John Updike (1932 - )

    -BIO: John Updike (Academy of Achievement)

    -AUTHOR PAGE: John Updike (Random House)

    -John Updike (Bookreporter)

    -John Updike (Poets.org)

    -John Updike (2008 Jefferson Lecturer on the Humanities)

    -PORTRAIT: JOHN UPDIKE (born 1932) [Alex Katz (born 1927)]

    -ESSAY: Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu (John Updike, 10/22/1960, The New Yorker)

    -ESSAY: The Writer in Winter: A literary legend shares his greatest hope: that his last book will be his best (John Updike, November & December 2008, AARP)

    -ESSAY: This I Believe (John Updike, NPR)

    -ESSAY: The Individual (John Updike, November 2007, Atlantic Monthly)

    -ESSAY: A sage for all seasons: Walden, Henry Thoreau's classic account of life in a simple one-room cabin in New England remains, 150 years on, an anti-establishment masterpiece and a testament to individualism (John Updike, 6/26/04, The Guardian)

    -ESSAY: Extreme Dinosaurs: A bizarre gallery of Mesozoic monsters prompts John Updike to ask: What has evolution wrought? (John Updike, December 2007, National Geographic)

    -REVIEW: AN OBSTINATE SURVIVOR: Robert Hughes takes on the life of Goya. (JOHN UPDIKE, 2003-11-03, The New Yorker)

    -ESSAY: Nineteen Forties (JOHN UPDIKE, 7/04/1965, NY Times)

    -ESSAY: Writers I Have Met (JOHN UPDIKE, 8/11/1968, NY Times)

    -ESSAY: Henry Bech Redux (HENRY BECH, 11/14/1971, NY Times)

    -ESSAY: Golf (John Updike, 6/10/1973, NY Times)

    -ESSAY: A FEW WORDS IN DEFENSE OF THE AMATEUR READER (John Updike, February 19, 1984, NY Times Book Review)

    -ESSAY: Andy Warhol: Artist, philosopher, impresario. He changed American culture. You can worship him for that. Or blame him. (JOHN UPDIKE, May 15, 2003, Rolling Stone)

    -ESSAY: The End of Authorship (John Updike, June 25, 2006, NY Times Book Review)

    -ESSAY: Smoke signals: It took John Updike two years to get his first short story published. Now, 50 years and 55 books later, he has compiled a selection of his earliest work, some of it out of print for decades. Here he reflects on the biographical echoes (John Updike, 1/10/04, The Guardian)

    -EXCERPT: First Chapter of The Terrorist

    -SHORT STORY: The Full Glass (John Updike, May 26, 2008, The New Yorker)

    -SHORT STORY: Outage (John Updike, 1/07/08, The New Yorker)

    -SHORT STORY: My Father's Tears (John Updike, 2/27/06, The New Yorker)

    -SHORT STORY: The Roads of Home (John Updike, 2/07/05, The New Yorker)

    -SHORT STORY: Elsie by Starlight (John Updike, 7/05/04, The New Yorker)

    -SHORT STORY: The Walk with Elizanne (John Updike, 7/07/03, The New Yorker)

    -SHORT STORY: Witnesses (John Updike, Bold Type)

    -POEM: Ex-Basketball Player (John Updike)

    -POEM: Venetian Candy (John Updike)

    -POEM: Returning Native (John Updike)

    -POEM: On the Road (John Updike)

    -POEM: Penumbrae (John Updike)

    -POEM: Saying Goodbye to Very Young Children (John Updike)

    -REVIEW: of Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger (John Updike, The New York Times Book Review)

    -REVIEW: of Aiding and Abetting by Muriel Spark (John Updike, The New Yorker)

    -REVIEW: of On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays and The Biographer’s Tale by A.S. Byatt (John Updike, The New Yorker)

    -REVIEW: of My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk (John Updike, The New Yorker)

    -REVIEW: of Peter J. Conradi’s Iris Murdoch: A Life (John Updike, The New Yorker)

    -REVIEW: of The Complete Works of Isaac Babel (John Updike, The New Yorker)

    -REVIEW: of Sinclair Lewis: Rebel from Main Street by Richard Lingeman (John Updike, The New Yorker)

    -REVIEW: of Atonement by Ian McEwan (John Updike, The New Yorker)

    -REVIEW: of Family Matters by Rohinton Mistry (John Updike, The New Yorker)

    -REVIEW: of Mortals by Norman Rush (John Updike, The New Yorker)

    -REVIEW: of Philip Larkin’s Collected Poems (John Updike, The New Yorker)

    -REVIEW: of Orhan Pamuk’s Snow (John Updike, The New Yorker)

    -REVIEW: of Robert Alter’s translation of The Five Books of Moses (John Updike, The New Yorker)

    -REVIEW: of Soren Kierkegaard: A Biography” by Joakim Garff and translated from the Danish by Bruce H. Kirmmse (John Updike, The New Yorker)

    -REVIEW: of Flashman on the March” by George MacDonald Frasier (John Updike, The New Yorker)

    -REVIEW: of Michel Houellebecq's The Possibility of an Island (John Updike, The New Yorker)

    -REVIEW: of The Annotated Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe (John Updike, The New Yorker)

    -REVIEW: of Walter Isaacson’s Einstein: His Life and Universe (John Updike, The New Yorker)

    -REVIEW: of Matthew Avery Sutton’s “Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America (John Updike, The New Yorker)

    -REVIEW: The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes (John Updike, The New Yorker)

    -REVIEW: of Flann O'Brien Novels (John Updike, The New Yorker)

    -REVIEW: of William Maxwell Novels (John Updike, The New Yorker)

    -REVIEW: of A Mercy by Toni Morrison (John Updike, The New Yorker)

    -REVIEW: of America, America by Ethan Canin (John Updike, The New Yorker)

    -REVIEW: of New Art City by Jed Perl (John Updike, The New York Times Book Review)

    -ESSAY: Wood v. Updike v. Baker (Sam Tanenhaus, 8/13/08, NY Times Paper Cuts)

    -ESSAY: John Updike's American Comedies (Joyce Carol Oates, Jun 11, 2003)

      -ESSAY: Feminist Critique of Updike's "A&P": Overcoming pre-assigned gender roles (Jill Douglass, Oct 15, 2008, Suite 101)

    -ESSAY: Art of the Feud (RACHEL DONADIO, November 19, 2006, NY Times)

    -INTERVIEW: with John Updike (Charlie Rose, 11/12/08)

    -INTERVIEW: John Updike: descent of man: John Updike, who has died aged 76, was interviewed last month by the Daily Telegraph's Mick Brown. In it, the author explores the subject of celebrity, recalls his first meeting with Barack Obama, and talks of the role of the writer. Here is the interview in full. (Mick Brown, 27 Jan 2009, Daily Telegraph)

    -INTERVIEW: with John Updike (The Diane Rehm Show, Jun. 5, 2006)

    -INTERVIEW: with John Updike (Fresh Air from WHYY, Oct-14-1997)

    -INTERVIEW: John Updike Explores Arab Immigrant Culture (Steve Inskeep, June 13, 2006, NPR: Morning Edition)

    -INTERVIEW: 'Did I actually write a soliloquy for a hamster?': This season's Updike is a sequel to The Witches of Eastwick, and he's already at work on the novel after next, a tale of ancient Rome. In a rare interview, he talks of women and witchcraft with Peter Conrad, before dismissing Sarah Palin as a 'bird-brain', doing a wicked impression of John McCain and endorsing Obama for President (Peter Conrad, 10/26/08, The Observer)

    -INTERVIEW: THE SALON INTERVIEW: JOHN UPDIKE: "As close as you can get to the stars" (DWIGHT GARNER, Salon)

    -INTERVIEW: Audio Interview with John Updike (Don Swain, Wired for Books)

    -VIDEO INTERVIEW: with John Updike (Spike)

    -INTERVIEW: with John Updike (Charlie Rose, 11/06/98)

    -INTERVIEW: An Interview With John Updike: In 'Terrorist,' a Cautious Novelist Takes On a New Fear (CHARLES McGRATH, May 31, 2006, NY Times)

    -INTERVIEW: Going Home Again (CHARLES McGRATH, November 19, 2000, NY Times)

    -INTERVIEW: John Updike's Latest Novel, 'Bech' Sequel, Draws on Himself (MICHIKO KAKUTANI, October 17, 1982, NY Times)

    -INTERVIEW: John Updike Completes a Sequel to 'Rabbit, Run' (HENRY RAYMONT, July 27, 1971, NY Times)

    -INTERVIEW: JOHN UPDIKE: The Art of Fiction (Interviewed by Charles Thomas Samuels, Winter 1968, Paris Review)

    -PROFILE: Animated ambitions: Before John Updike settled on writing as a career, he wanted to be a cartoonist and badgered his heroes to send him signed copies of their work. Jeet Heer recently uncovered one letter, sent to the creator of Little Orphan Annie, when Updike was 15 (Jeet Heer, 5/20/04, The Guardian)

    -PROFILE: Sunshine and shadows: A child of the Depression, John Updike wanted to be a cartoonist. Now an acclaimed and prolific literary writer, his novels and short stories reflect America's transition over half a century. He is innately conservative, with a deep religious faith, and his richly explicit prose is marked by compassion and humour. Next weekend he appears at the Guardian Hay Festival (James Campbell, 5/22/04, The Guardian)

    -PROFILE: Updike, laureate of lewd, backs sex on your mobile (John Harlow, 12/14/08, Times of London)

    -PROFILE: Writing too enjoyable for John Updike to consider retirement (JOHN MARK EBERHART, 1/03/09, The Kansas City Star)

    -PROFILE: Old Master in a Brave New World (Lev Grossman, May. 28, 2006, TIME)

    -PROFILE: John Updike on Religion (Benedicta Cipolla, November 19, 2004 , Religion & Ethics)

    -PROFILE: Updike and the Women: The Witches, The Widows, and the ambiguous bliss of misogyny (Emily Nussbaum, Oct 19, 2008, New York)

    -ESSAY: Among the reviewers: John Updike and the book-review bugaboo (By Wyatt Mason, December 2007, Harper's)

    -ESSAY: John Updike's literary via negativa (Christian Century, May 24, 1995)

    -ESSAY: The theological dimension in John Updike's fiction (John McTavish, April 2000, Theology Today)

    -ESSAY: Myth, gospel, and John Updike's Centaur (John McTavish, 1/01/03, Theology Today)

    -ARCHIVES: John Updike (The Guardian)

    -ARCHIVES: John Updike (NY Times Paper Cuts)

    -ARCHIVES: John Updike (The New Yorker)

    -ARCHIVES: John Updike (NY Review of Books)

    -ARCHIVES: John Updike (Find Articles)

    -REVIEW: of The Poorhouse Fair by John Updike (Donald Barr, NY Times)

    -REVIEW: of The Centaur by John Updike (Orville Prescott, NY Times)

    -REVIEW: of Pigeon Feathers by John Updike (ARTHUR MIZENER, NY Times)

    -REVIEW: of Telephone Poles and Other Poems by John Updike (X. J. KENNEDY, NY Times)

    -REVIEW: of Couples by John Updike (Wilfred Shhed, NY Times Book Review)

    -REVIEW: of Bech: a Book by John Updike (Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, NY Times)

    -REVIEW: of Rabbit Redux by John Updike (Anatole Broyard, NY Times)

    -REVIEW: of A Month of Sundays by John Updike (Anatole Broyard, NY Times)

    -REVIEW: of Picked up Pieces by John Updike (Anatole Broyard, NY Times)

    -REVIEW: of Rabbit is Rich by John Updike (John Leonard, NY Times)

    -REVIEW: of Bech is Back by John Updike (Edward Hoagland, NY Times Book Review)

    -REVIEW: of The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike (Margaret Atwood, NY Times Book Review)

    -REVIEW: of Witches of Eastwick (Greenman Review)

    -REVIEW: of Facing Nature by John Updike (Gavin Ewart, NY Times Book Review)

    -REVIEW: of Roger's Version by John Updike (David Lodge, NY Times Book Review)

    -REVIEW: of Trust Me by John Updkie (Marilynne Robinson, NY Times Book Review)

    -REVIEW: of Self-Conscious by John Updike (Denis Donoghue, NY Times Book Review)

    -REVIEW: of Just Looking by John Updike (Arthur C. Danto, NY Times Book Review)

    -REVIEW: of Rabbit at Rest by John Updike (Joyce Carol Oates, NY Times Book Review)

    -REVIEW: of Rabbit At Rest by John Updike (James Wood, guardian.co.uk)

    -REVIEW: of Odd Jobs by John Updike (Martin Amis, NY Times Book Review)

    -REVIEW: of Memories of the Ford Administration by John Updike (Charles Johnson, NY Times Book Review)

    -REVIEW: of Brazil by John Updike (Barbara Kingsolver, NY Times Book Review)

    -REVIEW: of The Afterlife by John Updike (Jay Parini, NY Times Book Review)

    -REVIEW: of Golf Dreams by John Updike (Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, NY Times)

    -REVIEW: of Toward The End of Time by John Updike: John Updike, Champion Literary Phallocrat, Drops One; Is This Finally the End for Magnificent Narcissists? (David Foster Wallace, October 12, 1997, NY Observer)

"Of nothing but me … I sing, lacking another song."
-John Updike, "Midpoint," 1969

Mailer, Updike, Roth-the Great Male Narcissists* who've dominated postwar realist fiction are now in their senescence, and it must seem to them no coincidence that the prospect of their own deaths appears backlit by the approaching millennium and on-line predictions of the death of the novel as we know it. When a solipsist dies, after all, everything goes with him. And no U.S. novelist has mapped the solipsist's terrain better than John Updike, whose rise in the 60's and 70's established him as both chronicler and voice of probably the single most self-absorbed generation since Louis XIV. As were Freud's, Mr. Updike's big preoccupations have always been with death and sex (not necessarily in that order), and the fact that the mood of his books has gotten more wintery in recent years is understandable-Mr. Updike has always written largely about himself, and since the surprisingly moving Rabbit at Rest he's been exploring, more and more overtly, the apocalyptic prospect of his own death.

Toward the End of Time concerns an incredibly erudite, articulate, successful, narcissistic and sex-obsessed retired guy who's keeping a one-year journal in which he explores the apocalyptic prospect of his own death. It is, of the total 25 Updike books I've read, far and away the worst, a novel so mind-bendingly clunky and self-indulgent that it's hard to believe the author let it be published in this kind of shape.

I'm afraid the preceding sentence is this review's upshot, and most of the balance here will consist of presenting evidence/ justification for such a disrespectful assessment. First, though, if I may poke the critical head into the frame for just one moment, I'd like to offer assurances that your reviewer is not one of these spleen-venting, spittle-spattering Updike-haters one encounters among literary readers under 40. The fact is that I am probably classifiable as one of very few actual sub-40 Updike fans . Not as rabid a fan as, say, Nicholson Baker, but I do think that The Poorhouse Fair , Of the Farm and The Centaur are all great books, maybe classics. And even since Rabbit Is Rich -as his characters seemed to become more and more repellent, and without any corresponding indication that the author understood that they were repellent-I've continued to read Mr. Updike's novels and to admire the sheer gorgeousness of his descriptive prose.

    -REVIEW: of The Terrorist by John Updike (Robert Stone, NY Times Book Review)

    -REVIEW: of The Terrorist (Michiko Kakutani, NY Times)

    -REVIEW: of The Terrorist (Jem Poster, The Guardian)

    -REVIEW: of The Terrorist (Tim Adams, The Guardian)

    -REVIEW: of Seek My Face (Galen Strawson, The Guardian)

    -REVIEW: of Seek My Face (Adam Mars-Jones, The Observer)

    -REVIEW: of Due Considerations by John Updike (Tim Adams, The Guardian)

    -REVIEW: of Still Looking: essays on American Art by John Updike (Geoff Dyer, NY Times Book Review)

    -REVIEW: of Widows of Eastwick by John Updike (Caroline Moore, Daily Telegraph)

    -REVIEW: of Widows of Eastwick (Christopher Tayler, The Guardian)

    -REVIEW: of Widows of Eastwick (James Walcott, London Review of Books)

WHAT WOULD THE OPPOSITE OF 9-11 LOOK LIKE?:

Animal Spirits Depend on Trust: The proposed stimulus isn't big enough to restore confidence. (ROBERT J. SHILLER, 1/27/09, WSJ)

The term "animal spirits," popularized by John Maynard Keynes in his 1936 book "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money," is related to consumer or business confidence, but it means more than that. It refers also to the sense of trust we have in each other, our sense of fairness in economic dealings, and our sense of the extent of corruption and bad faith. When animal spirits are on ebb, consumers do not want to spend and businesses do not want to make capital expenditures or hire people. [...]

So what must we do to revive our animal spirits and economic growth? We must be certain that programs to solve the current financial and economic crisis are large enough, and targeted broadly enough, to impact public confidence. Not only do we need a fiscal stimulus significantly greater than the proposal that is currently on the table, government action is also needed to take the place of the credit markets that seemingly worked so well when animal spirits were high. The Treasury and the Federal Reserve not only need a fiscal target, they also need a credit target. This should not be a dollar number, but rather a target for how the credit markets should behave. The goal should be that those who would normally receive credit in times of full employment can once again find it easy to do so, at rates with realistic risk premiums.

There are three ways to restore these credit markets. The Treasury and the Federal Reserve have been inventive in applying all three methods. The first is the extension of rediscounting. The Fed has invented many different special loan facilities. They have even invented ingenious ways to combine Treasury money to make very large-scale loans while still within the legal requirement that the Fed can only lend against safe collateral when using TARP funds for the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility, which will support consumer, student and small-business loans. But so far the total amount of such rediscounting has been small relative to the size of the credit markets. They need to be much larger.

Second, so far more than $250 billion of government money has been used to recapitalize banks. But just making the banks solvent is not enough. The banks, whose managers are suffering from the same flagging animal spirits as the rest of the economy, will not expand their credit much just because they are more solvent. The banks will only expand if they see profitable opportunities to grant loans and if their fear of failure is diminished. It will take much more than keeping the banks solvent to make them take on the disappeared credit flows.

And, finally, especially in considerably expanding the powers to support the lending of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, government-sponsored enterprises have replaced a significant portion of the mortgage markets. But the government should do much more here as well. For example, failed banks might be kept alive longer as bridge banks under government supervision with the purpose of making credit freely available.

The interventions so far have been in the right direction. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has been especially inventive and aggressive. But the theory of animal spirits and the loss of confidence tell us that a great deal more still needs to be done. Now is not a time for the timid. To meet our needed fiscal-policy target, the Obama administration's fiscal stimulus should be much greater. And to meet our credit target, the expansion of special loan facilities, recapitalization of banks, and use of government institutions to grant credit where it has dried up must be on a scale great enough to overwhelm further doubts about the economy.

DOING RIGHT BY THE ECONOMY:

Dudley Is Likely Pick for New York Fed (JON HILSENRATH, 1/27/09, WSJ)

In choosing Mr. Dudley, a low key but tenacious economist, the New York Fed's board has assured itself continuity at a critical time for the regional Fed bank. [...]

Most of the rescue programs developed by the Fed during the financial crisis -- from an effort to bolster the commercial paper market to a new special lending program for investment banks to efforts to help money market funds -- have run through the New York Fed's markets desk, where Mr. Dudley has a loyal following.

Mr. Dudley was chief economist at Goldman Sachs for a decade before joining the New York Fed. As a private economist, he sometimes took issue with the central bank for being too complacent. [...]

Coming out of the 2001 recession, Mr. Dudley correctly went against the consensus view on Wall Street and predicted an anemic economic recovery and slowing rates of inflation. In 2003, he won The Wall Street Journal's economic forecasting contest for those predictions.

IT'S NOT COLD IN SEABEARIA:

-SONG OF THE DAY: Seabear Sings a Twisted Icelandic Lullaby (Afton Woodward, 10/12/07, NPR)

For as small and remote as it is, Iceland has produced a surprising number of big names in music. Bjork and Sigur Ros serve as its best-known exports, but Seabear seems fated to find itself on that list. A solo project by Sindri Már Sigfússon that has grown to as many as seven members, Seabear plays shadowy, folk-infused ballads of love, loss and memory, all the while gently reminding its audience that life, while many things, is not but a dream.

MORE:
-BAND SITE: Seabearia
-MYSPACE: Seabear
-WIKIPEDIA: Seabear
-ALBUM DOWNLOAD: Singing Arc
-LYRICS: Seabear (Lyrics Mode)
-PROFILE: Seabear Gets Carried Away (Obscure Sound, 13 November 2007)
-Artist Profile: Seabear (Icelandic Airwaves)
-PROFILE: SEABEAR (Geordie, July 4, 2008, You Crazy Dreamers)
-REVIEW: Of The Ghost That Carried Us Away by Seabear (Laura Elise, Daily Vault)
-REVIEW: of Seabear —The Ghost That Carried Us Away (Erik Gonzalez, Three Imaginary Girls)
-REVIEW: Seabear The Ghost the Carried Us Away (Herohill)
-REVIEW: Seabear - The Ghost That Carried Us Away (IndieMuse)

LIKE THE YANKEES, THEY'RE GOING TO HAVE TO FIND A SHORTSTOP TO FIELD A COMPLETE TEAM:

Octuplets born in California (Raquel Maria Dillon, 1/27/09, ASSOCIATED PRESS)

Two of the newborns -- the world's second live-born set of octuplets -- were initially put on ventilators but their breathing tubes have been removed.

The mother, who was not identified, gave birth Monday to six boys and two girls weighing between 1.8 pounds and 3.4 pounds. The eighth baby was a surprise to the parents and doctors who had been expecting only seven children.

LET'S PUT IT THIS WAY...:

The CIA Vs. the Mullahs (Reuel Marc Gerecht, January 27, 2009, Washington Post)

Iran is perhaps the best and the most important barometer we have for judging how well the CIA can perform against a hostile Middle Eastern state with a terrorist track record that includes, according to the Sept. 11 commission report, abetting al-Qaeda. It is also probably the "easiest" hard target that Langley has. Unlike in Iraq under Saddam Hussein or North Korea today, the CIA can reach inside the Islamic republic if it really tries. Iran is an authoritarian theocratic state that believes in its civilizing mission to the Muslim world. Its borders are hardly porous, but a range of people -- Muslims, non-Muslims, business executives, academics, students, religious pilgrims and tourists -- travel there regularly.

More important, Iranian VIPs travel abroad. Members of the Revolutionary Guard Corps frequently receive scholarships for foreign study, usually in the West. Iranian scientists and engineers also go abroad. Iranian mullahs are not uncommon in foreign lands, where prolonged contact with them is possible. Although Iran's progressive intellectuals -- the people to whom Western journalists and scholars usually talk -- rarely have much influence and insight into the clerical regime, sometimes they matter, and sometimes they can be reached. The key is whether Langley has developed patient but aggressive measures that make it more likely that its operatives cross paths with interesting Iranians.

YET THE BRIGHTS CELEBRATE THE RETURN OF "SCIENCE":

The Tragedy of the Commons (Garrett Hardin, December 13, 1968, Science)

Population, as Malthus said, naturally tends to grow "geometrically," or, as we would now say, exponentially. In a finite world this means that the per capita share of the world's goods must steadily decrease. Is ours a finite world?

A fair defense can be put forward for the view that the world is infinite; or that we do not know that it is not. But, in terms of the practical problems that we must face in the next few generations with the foreseeable technology, it is clear that we will greatly increase human misery if we do not, during the immediate future, assume that the world available to the terrestrial human population is finite. "Space" is no escape (2). A finite world can support only a finite population; therefore, population growth must eventually equal zero. (The case of perpetual wide fluctuations above and below zero is a trivial variant that need not be discussed.) When this condition is met, what will be the situation of mankind? Specifically, can Bentham's goal of "the greatest good for the greatest number" be realized?

No--for two reasons, each sufficient by itself. The first is a theoretical one. It is not mathematically possible to maximize for two (or more) variables at the same time. This was clearly stated by von Neumann and Morgenstern (3), but the principle is implicit in the theory of partial differential equations, dating back at least to D'Alembert (1717-1783).

The second reason springs directly from biological facts. To live, any organism must have a source of energy (for example, food). This energy is utilized for two purposes: mere maintenance and work. For man, maintenance of life requires about 1600 kilocalories a day ("maintenance calories"). Anything that he does over and above merely staying alive will be defined as work, and is supported by "work calories" which he takes in. Work calories are used not only for what we call work in common speech; they are also required for all forms of enjoyment, from swimming and automobile racing to playing music and writing poetry. If our goal is to maximize population it is obvious what we must do: We must make the work calories per person approach as close to zero as possible. No gourmet meals, no vacations, no sports, no music, no literature, no art ... I think that everyone will grant, without argument or proof, that maximizing population does not maximize goods. Bentham's goal is impossible.

In reaching this conclusion I have made the usual assumption that it is the acquisition of energy that is the problem. The appearance of atomic energy has led some to question this assumption. However, given an infinite source of energy, population growth still produces an inescapable problem. The problem of the acquisition of energy is replaced by the problem of its dissipation, as J. H. Fremlin has so wittily shown (4). The arithmetic signs in the analysis are, as it were, reversed; but Bentham's goal is still unobtainable.

The optimum population is, then, less than the maximum. The difficulty of defining the optimum is enormous; so far as I know, no one has seriously tackled this problem. Reaching an acceptable and stable solution will surely require more than one generation of hard analytical work--and much persuasion.

We want the maximum good per person; but what is good? To one person it is wilderness, to another it is ski lodges for thousands. To one it is estuaries to nourish ducks for hunters to shoot; to another it is factory land. Comparing one good with another is, we usually say, impossible because goods are incommensurable. Incommensurables cannot be compared.

Theoretically this may be true; but in real life incommensurables are commensurable. Only a criterion of judgment and a system of weighting are needed. In nature the criterion is survival. Is it better for a species to be small and hideable, or large and powerful? Natural selection commensurates the incommensurables. The compromise achieved depends on a natural weighting of the values of the variables.

Man must imitate this process. There is no doubt that in fact he already does, but unconsciously. It is when the hidden decisions are made explicit that the arguments begin. The problem for the years ahead is to work out an acceptable theory of weighting. Synergistic effects, nonlinear variation, and difficulties in discounting the future make the intellectual problem difficult, but not (in principle) insoluble.

Has any cultural group solved this practical problem at the present time, even on an intuitive level? One simple fact proves that none has: there is no prosperous population in the world today that has, and has had for some time, a growth rate of zero. Any people that has intuitively identified its optimum point will soon reach it, after which its growth rate becomes and remains zero.

Of course, a positive growth rate might be taken as evidence that a population is below its optimum. However, by any reasonable standards, the most rapidly growing populations on earth today are (in general) the most miserable. This association (which need not be invariable) casts doubt on the optimistic assumption that the positive growth rate of a population is evidence that it has yet to reach its optimum.

We can make little progress in working toward optimum population size until we explicitly exorcize the spirit of Adam Smith in the field of practical demography. In economic affairs, The Wealth of Nations (1776) popularized the "invisible hand," the idea that an individual who "intends only his own gain," is, as it were, "led by an invisible hand to promote ... the public interest" (5). Adam Smith did not assert that this was invariably true, and perhaps neither did any of his followers. But he contributed to a dominant tendency of thought that has ever since interfered with positive action based on rational analysis, namely, the tendency to assume that decisions reached individually will, in fact, be the best decisions for an entire society. If this assumption is correct it justifies the continuance of our present policy of laissez-faire in reproduction. If it is correct we can assume that men will control their individual fecundity so as to produce the optimum population. If the assumption is not correct, we need to reexamine our individual freedoms to see which ones are defensible.
Tragedy of Freedom in a Commons

The rebuttal to the invisible hand in population control is to be found in a scenario first sketched in a little-known pamphlet (6) in 1833 by a mathematical amateur named William Forster Lloyd (1794-1852). We may well call it "the tragedy of the commons", using the word "tragedy" as the philosopher Whitehead used it (7): "The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things." He then goes on to say, "This inevitableness of destiny can only be illustrated in terms of human life by incidents which in fact involve unhappiness. For it is only by them that the futility of escape can be made evident in the drama."

The tragedy of the commons develops in this way. Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy.

MORE:
Evolution's Evolution: Darwin’s dangerous idea has adapted to modern biology (Rachel Ehrenberg, January 31st, 2009, Science News)

Subversive as it was, Darwin’s proposal that species can change was not the first. Naturalists and philosophers had long been contemplating life’s diversity. By the late 1700s, French naturalist Georges Cuvier had established that after great environmental change, some organisms got snuffed out, went kaput, extinct. A little later, zoologist and philosopher Jean Baptiste Lamarck proposed the notion of adaptation, explaining variation among organisms as a response to their environments. But Lamarck saw the change in organisms through time as a one-way path to perfection, from simple to increasingly complex, with humans at the pinnacle. His environment-caused variation was an excuse to explain why some organisms strayed from the “tendency toward perfection.”

It took Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace to recognize (independently) that variety was actually the spice of life, not its flaw. Both men had read the work of economist Thomas Malthus, who warned that food supplies could never keep up with growing populations. No matter what, some people would meet an early death. Darwin and Wallace both reasoned that beetles, birds and beech trees also have more babies than can survive and that variation among such offspring was important in determining who lived. Individuals who were better equipped for their environment than their siblings or neighbors would survive; the features that enabled their survival would be passed on to their kids.

Darwin called this process natural selection, and life evolved largely because of it, he argued in the Origin.

AND HAD BENEDICT BEEN POPE AT THE TIME...:

“So I Sent In My Resignation...”: Mary Ann Glendon, the scholarly, profound United States Ambassador to the Holy See during the past year, resigned her post this past week to allow Barack Obama, the new US president, to choose a new US ambassador to the Vatican to his liking. Now Glendon reflects on her year in Rome in an interview with our correspondent, Roman journalist Alberto Carosa. Glendon’s reflections give an insight into the work of diplomacy in Rome at the highest level (Albert Carosa, Inside The Vatican)

Can you also elaborate now about what you see as the common points between the Vatican and your country?

Ambassador Glendon: For the past several years, there has been a strong correspondence between the views of the U.S. government and the Holy See on the importance of strengthening the global moral consensus against terror (especially against the use of religion as a justification for violence); promoting human rights (especially religious freedom); fostering inter-religious dialogue; and working for peace in the Middle East and other troubled areas of the world. And of course President Bush and Pope Benedict XVI shared a common outlook on a wide range of social and cultural issues.

There is another area of common concern, however, where it seems to me that neither the U.S. nor the Holy See receives the recognition they deserve. I’m referring to their commitment to the relief of poverty, hunger, and disease. On those fronts, a natural partnership has grown up between the United States, as the world’s largest and most generous donor of humanitarian aid, and the Holy See, which oversees the world’s largest network of health care, educational, and relief agencies.

That community of interest intensified over the past eight years thanks to President Bush’s energetic embrace of one of the most important political ideas of the late 20th century, namely, that social services can often be delivered more efficiently, effectively and humanely through the mediating structures of civil society, than by government acting directly. President Bush has said he considers his initiatives with faith-based institutions as one of the “crowning achievements’ of his presidency, a presidency that saw the U.S. government double its aid to Latin America, quadruple it to Africa, and triple it worldwide. Through creative partnerships between government and faith-based organizations, America has provided the world with successful models for getting official aid to its intended beneficiaries with low transaction costs and high accountability.

These initiatives, permitting participating religious groups to maintain their principles and identity, are very much in the spirit of Pope Benedict XVI’s first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est ("God Is Love") where he wrote that “The state that would provide everything, absorbing everything into itself, would ultimately become a mere bureaucracy incapable of guaranteeing the very thing the suffering person—every person—needs: namely love and personal concern." The notion that charity is merely a social service, he pointed out, “demeans man and ultimately disregards all that is specifically human” (DCE, 28b).

And what about the differences between Rome and Washington? Will they be overcome one day?

Ambassador Glendon: By the time I arrived last year, there was no disposition to revisit the major difference that had arisen in recent years--that over the decision to take military action against the regime in Iraq.

WHAT'S IT TO US WHO DOES THE TORTURING AS LONG AS WE ACQUIRE THE INTELLIGENCE?:

Behind the Executive Orders (Jane Mayer, 1/25/09, The New Yorker)

Shortly before the signing ceremony, Craig said, Obama met with the officers in the Roosevelt Room, along with Vice-President Biden and several other top Administration officials. “It was hugely important to the President to have the input from these military people,” Craig said, “not only because of their proven concern for protecting the American people—they’d dedicated their lives to it—but also because some had their own experience they could speak from.” Two of the officers had sons serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. One of them, retired Major General Paul Eaton, stressed that, as he put it later that day, “torture is the tool of the lazy, the stupid, and the pseudo-tough. It’s also perhaps the greatest recruiting tool that the terrorists have.” The feeling in the room, as retired Rear Admiral John Hutson later put it, “was joy, perhaps, that the country was getting back on track.”

Across the Potomac River, at the C.I.A.’s headquarters, in Langley, Virginia, however, there was considerably less jubilation. Top C.I.A. officials have argued for years that so-called “enhanced” interrogation techniques have yielded lifesaving intelligence breakthroughs. “They disagree in some respect,” Craig admitted. Among the hard questions that Obama left open, in fact, is whether the C.I.A. will have to follow the same interrogation rules as the military. While the President has clearly put an end to cruel tactics, Craig said that Obama “is somewhat sympathetic to the spies’ argument that their mission and circumstances are different.”

JUST ACKNOWLEDGING THAT IT'S INDEFENSIBLE:

Del Toro walks out of 'Che' interview (Sonny Bunch, January 27, 2009, Washington Times)

"I'm getting uncomfortable," Benicio del Toro says after fielding a question on his new movie's portrayal of the Bolivian and Cuban revolutions. "I'm done. I'm done, I hope you write whatever you want. I don't give a damn." [...]

"He was a man full of hatred," says Armando Valladares, the Cuban dissident imprisoned by the revolutionary regime in 1959. Named a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International, Mr. Valladares is the author of "Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag" and a board member of the Human Rights Foundation. Speaking through Glenda Aldana, a translator who works for the HRF, Mr. Valladares points to Guevara's own writings as proof.

In his "Message to the Tricontinental," Guevara espoused "hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine."

"He took joy in killing counterrevolutionaries and was one of the most hard-edged, most Stalinist, pro-Soviet Communists of the whole leadership," says Ronald Radosh, a Hudson Institute adjunct fellow and author of "Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left."

MOCHA W:

Think Again: Barack Obama and the War on Terror (David M. Edelstein, Ronald R. Krebs, January 2009, Foreign Policy)

Yes, Obama, by his presence and personality, has changed the atmospherics of U.S. foreign relations. America's reputation around the world has for some time been at a nadir, so there is nowhere to go but up. But the United States' poor image abroad has not been the result of a marketing failure, and, thus, better public diplomacy will not lead to victory in the "Battle of Ideas." Anti-Americanism thrives, not because others misunderstand the United States, but because they perceive its aims and tactics all too well. The Bush administration's greatest perceived foreign-policy failures -- Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo, unimpeded global warming -- could not have been overcome with better public diplomacy, and recent improvements in trans-Atlantic relations cannot be credited to an improved sales pitch. The world is rightly waiting to see if Obama will match his words with actions. Public diplomacy can matter only at the margins.

As much as he might wish it, Obama does not enter the Oval Office with a clean slate. The sizable U.S. presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, combined with the aggressive hunt for al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan's tribal areas, will continue to rankle in the Arab and Muslim worlds. Elsewhere, criticism of U.S. foreign policy predated Bush -- the French expressed alarm at American "hyperpower" during the "good old days" of Clintonian multilateralism -- and will persist after he leaves office. Notwithstanding the financial meltdown and U.S. travails in Iraq, the United States remains the world's largest economic and military power by far. Its penchant for pursuing its global interests unilaterally lies at the root of many others' suspicions, and there will be times that even an Obama administration will chafe at and throw off any self-imposed shackles. When that happens, those high-flying expectations will come crashing back to earth.

BUT NOT MORE IMPORTANT THAN GOD'S:

National Sovereignty Is More Important than International “Justice” (John Laughland, 2009-01-23, Brussels Journal)

If, as is expected, the judges of the International Criminal Court in The Hague confirm the indictment for genocide of the president of Sudan (an indictment having been issued by the prosecutor in July 2008, which requires confirmation by the judges for it to be valid) then the principle of national sovereignty will have been definitively buried in international law. What used to be the uncontested cornerstone of the international system will have become a dead letter – and even a principle associated with the worst abuses of human rights. [...]

Human rights activist are, of course, eagerly awaiting the confirmation. For many years they have said that the fight for universal human rights is a fight against national sovereignty. On the face of it, it seems obvious that states do not have unlimited rights within their own borders and that they can be legitimately attacked or condemned if they abuse their own citizens. Not only is such behaviour shocking in its own right; it has a specially shocking quality akin to that of sexual abuse committed by fathers against their children. When a state abuses its own citizens, it breaks a very fundamental contract by violating its duty to protect them.

However, just as the original authors of the concept of the rights of man, the French revolutionaries, wanted to supplant the sovereignty of the king and replace it with their own sovereignty instead, so the proclamation that nation states do not have certain rights is in fact a proclamation that someone else, in this case the ICC but often “the international community”, has the right to adjudicate the matter. To say that Sudan does not have the right to commit genocide is a truism; to say that it is committing genocide and that a criminal indictment of the head of state is the best way to achieve peace in Darfur are political judgements.

They may well be true. But if they are then used to justify acts of violence – for instance military intervention in Sudan, or the capture and imprisonment after conviction of the Sudanese president – then such acts of violence, like all state or super-state acts, will themselves be based on sovereign decisions not susceptible to further counter-appeal or condemnation. In law, at least in the law of the countries leading any such attack or in the law of the ICC, they will not be criminal acts but instead acts of justice.

It may seem perverse to rehearse the niceties of constitutional argument in the face of mass death in the civil war in Sudan. But the creation of coercive supranational jurisdictions like that of the ICC – coercive because Sudan, unlike the signatory states of the ICC Charter, has not consented to it – poses two fundamental (and related) political questions. These two questions, indeed, are among the oldest in political philosophy; indeed, one can even say that they express the very essence of politics itself.

The first question is: “Who has the right to rule?” Do international judges in The Hague have the right to say who is a criminal in Sudan? More generally, is it better that international organisations have the right to rule, or should nation-states have this right? The question has to be decided one way or another because although there can be much interpenetration of international and national law, on all sorts of issues, the normal basis for this is consent by the nation-states concerned, who express their consent in the form of treaties. States can consent to very intrusive international regimes, for instance the European Union or the World Trade Organisation, but the ICC represents something qualitatively different – an international regime which exercises power outside the territory of those states which have consented to it.

The second question is, “When is it right to use force?”

RATHER, AN ANTI-SOCIAL VALUE:

The End of Solitude: As everyone seeks more and broader connectivity, the still, small voice speaks only in silence (WILLIAM DERESIEWICZ, 1/30/09, The Chronicle Review)

What does the contemporary self want? The camera has created a culture of celebrity; the computer is creating a culture of connectivity. As the two technologies converge — broadband tipping the Web from text to image, social-networking sites spreading the mesh of interconnection ever wider — the two cultures betray a common impulse. Celebrity and connectivity are both ways of becoming known. This is what the contemporary self wants. It wants to be recognized, wants to be connected: It wants to be visible. If not to the millions, on Survivor or Oprah, then to the hundreds, on Twitter or Facebook. This is the quality that validates us, this is how we become real to ourselves — by being seen by others. The great contemporary terror is anonymity. If Lionel Trilling was right, if the property that grounded the self, in Romanticism, was sincerity, and in modernism it was authenticity, then in postmodernism it is visibility.

So we live exclusively in relation to others, and what disappears from our lives is solitude. Technology is taking away our privacy and our concentration, but it is also taking away our ability to be alone. Though I shouldn't say taking away. We are doing this to ourselves; we are discarding these riches as fast as we can. I was told by one of her older relatives that a teenager I know had sent 3,000 text messages one recent month. That's 100 a day, or about one every 10 waking minutes, morning, noon, and night, weekdays and weekends, class time, lunch time, homework time, and toothbrushing time. So on average, she's never alone for more than 10 minutes at once. Which means, she's never alone.

I once asked my students about the place that solitude has in their lives. One of them admitted that she finds the prospect of being alone so unsettling that she'll sit with a friend even when she has a paper to write. Another said, why would anyone want to be alone?

To that remarkable question, history offers a number of answers. Man may be a social animal, but solitude has traditionally been a societal value.

IF YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE AND WHAT YOU BELIEVE YOU DON'T WASTE TIME:

Bush's Personality Shapes His Legacy: Don't misunderestimate the ways he shaped life in the White House and beyond (BEN FELLER, 1/15/09, Associated Press)

Bush's style and temperament are as much his legacy as his decisions. One shaped lives, the other created indelible memories — positive and negative.

Call it distinctly Bush.

___

Don't be late.

Bush demands punctuality and disdains inefficiency. Every meeting better have a clear purpose. And it better not repeat what he already knows.

He is up early and in the Oval Office by 6:45 a.m. By 9:30 to 10 at night, it's lights out. He likes to be fresh and won't get cheated on his sleep.

In sessions with policy experts, Bush tends to ask questions that get right to the nub of a sticky issue. His top aides speak regretfully about how the country never got to see that side of him, even after all this time. They describe a man who is deeply inquisitive, not blithely incurious as much of the world thinks.

When Bush wants answers, guessing isn't advised.

"He can sniff it out a mile away if you don't have the goods," said White House communications director Kevin Sullivan.

Other people write Bush's speeches, but he'll kick out phrases that he thinks stray from a logical progression. It's about discipline.

You can tell the issues that really get Bush going, because he talks about them differently, more passionately: education, AIDS relief, freedom. They happen to be ones that can be viewed more clearly through a moral lens. That's how he sees the world.

Bush reads the Bible regularly. Another devotion: exercise. He makes time for a workout at least six days a week, wherever he is. And he goes at it hard, especially on his mountain bike on the weekends, when he pushes Secret Service agents to keep up with him. He is competitive and likes to stay in command.

Even eating is approached with sheer purpose.

Bush wants his lunch ready when he is, and wolfs it down. His tastes are clear: maybe a peanut butter and honey sandwich, a BLT, or a burger. Former White House executive chef Walter Scheib learned from Bush never to serve a grilled cheese sandwich unless it came with a side of French's yellow mustard.

The man from a land of cowboy boots orders proper dress in the White House. No jeans allowed in the West Wing. Coat and tie in the Oval Office.

"Orderliness in the process gave him confidence," said Peter Wehner, a former top Bush aide and now a senior fellow at the Ethics & Public Policy Center.

HIS RE-ELECTION REQUIRES..:

With Friends Like These: The left quadrant of Obama’s base wants to stay relevant by staying angry. And the right doesn’t have anything to do but get angry. So who’s his biggest problem? (John Heilemann, Jan 25, 2009, New York)

From the moment that Team Obama floated details of the plan, liberals have complained that the ratio of tax cuts to investment was seriously out of whack as a matter of sound economics; and also that, in political terms, it represented a sort of pre-capitulation to the Republicans both unnecessary and unwise. Leading the chorus of critics has been Paul Krugman, who observed the other day in his blog that the House had scaled back mass-transit spending in order to accommodate the tax cuts. “I feel a bit of post-partisan depression coming on,” Krugman sighed.

The liberal angst over Obama simmered throughout the transition, fired by a set of appointments, especially on economics and national security, so conspicuously centrist that it seemed to some Washington players almost designed to alienate progressives. “They didn’t throw any bones to the left,” says one prominent Democrat. “And they’re just too smart for that to have been an accident.” But the worries never came to a boil, and they may not for some time. Indeed, the left thrilled to the initial set of executive orders issued by Obama during his first two days in office, not least the one ordaining the closure of Guantánamo within a year and the one that included this: “All executive directives, orders, and regulations inconsistent with this order, including but not limited to those issued to or by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from September 11, 2001, to January 20, 2009, concerning detention or the interrogation of detained individuals, are revoked to the extent of their inconsistency with this order.” (A sweeter piece of bureaucratese has rarely been committed to paper.)

But it’s not hard to see where Obama and the left could be on a collision course. It didn’t go unnoticed in labor circles that when Obama’s transition website, Change.gov, morphed into whitehouse.gov, a number of progressive economic planks suddenly disappeared. Gone were mentions of fair trade. Gone was any reference to EFCA, the so-called card-check bill that would make it much easier to organize unions and is the highest of all priorities for organized labor. Though the promises enumerated there to gays and lesbians are many and explicit—civil unions and full federal rights, workplace non-discrimination, the repeal of don’t-ask-don’t-tell—you can bet that, especially after the Warren imbroglio, the LGBT community will be on lookout for foot-dragging. And there’s foreign policy, where Obama could incite liberal outrage if he doesn’t pull troops out of Iraq as quickly as promised or fails to intervene in Darfur.

As a practical matter, Obama’s management of ideological extremes will play out in his dealings with Congress. And here the difference between the House and Senate will test his dexterity. In the House, with its substantial Democratic majority and the absence of the filibuster, Obama can afford—and is sure to be pressured by his party—to build coalitions from the left toward the center. But in the Senate, a unified minority has the ability to bring his legislative agenda grinding to a halt. So the need for Republican cooperation is essential, and thus the imperative will be to stitch together coalitions from the center out. The tension between the two strategies is obvious; a hell of a balancing act is required.

Judging from Obama’s early moves, most old Washington hands have concluded that the new administration is focused mainly on the Senate. “Everything they’re doing seems to me to be about getting to 60 [votes],” says one such observer. “They forgive Lieberman. They play nice with Susan Collins. They play nice with McCain; I mean, my God, they appoint Janet Napolitano to Homeland Security so that McCain won’t have a serious opponent in Arizona and have to run more to his right. It’s almost diabolical.”

The left, no doubt, is quietly nervous about talk like this. They fret that Obama’s vaunted pragmatism could easily become a dispiriting kind of (dare we say, Clintonian) expedience.

APPARENTLY NOT AN ACCOUNT OF THE OBAMA MEETING WITH THE NEOCONS:

Zeus Cult Sacrificed Animals on Mountaintop Altar (Jennifer Viegas, Jan. 26, 2009, Discovery News)

EVERYTIME SADDAM KILLS A SHI'ITE...:

LETTER TO THE EDITOR: In child's letter to Obama, a small step to changing world (Boston Globe, January 26, 2009)

I WAS running around with typical errands - picking kids up from school, cleaning the house, laundry, paying bills, getting dinner - all the chaotic daily chores of a working mother. In the middle of my self-induced whirlwind, my 6-year-old son handed me a letter he wrote to the president at school: "Dear President Obama, Congratulations! Please make no more wars. I will not litter. Sincerely, Michael Goodwin."

In times such as these, with the economy struggling, people out of work, our healthcare and schools in disarray, and global turmoil, his letter made me stop in my tracks. As I hugged him, glad for this brief moment of peace, I thought, why not? It should be as simple as that. Make no more wars and I promise not to litter.

NOT MUCH OF A MORPH...:

Will Jimmy Carter Meddle in Obama's Foreign Affairs?: Ever since he left the White House in defeat 28 years ago, Jimmy Carter's freewheeling, freelance diplomacy has put him squarely at odds with his successors, but could he help President Obama? (Stephen Clark, 1/24/09, FOXNews.com)

At times, ever since he left the White House in defeat 28 years ago, Carter's freewheeling, freelance diplomacy has put him squarely at odds with his successors. While other ex-presidents have rode off into the sunset to enjoy, for the most part, quiet retirements, Carter has stayed busy writing best-selling books, conducting his own foreign policy and winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for his work.

His supporters hail him as a hero and his critics deride him as self-righteous and egotistical. But in recent years, Carter has lost support even among his defenders for comparing Israeli treatment of Palestinians to South African apartheid in a book he wrote -- and for meeting with Hamas leaders to discuss a peace deal.

"I think in my view, he's jumped the shark," said David Greenberg, a presidential historian with Rutgers University. "He passed the point of no return when he wrote the book."

Greenberg said he believes Carter has morphed from an angry and resentful ex-president after losing to Ronald Reagan to a self-righteous man who has damaged his reputation with his acts.

THIS IS NOWHERE NEAR PESSIMISTIC ENOUGH...:

The end of Russia?: On its present course, Russia is doomed, claims the distinguished historian, Yury Afanasiev. Why did reform change nothing? Why has the wheel of history turned back to autocracy? 500 years of oppression are reaching a terrible climax. In this important, excoriating essay, he challenges his people to face the truth about their history (Yury Afanasiev, 21 - 01 - 2009, OpenDemocracy)

The particular character of Russian power is as important as eternal war, militarisation and Orthodoxy. These are the key building blocks of ‘the Russian path'. Our government could write ‘force' on one side of its calling card, and ‘occupation' on the other. For its attitude to the population of its own country is that of a foreign occupier.

This kind of power took many centuries, maybe even many millennia, to establish itself in Rus', then in Russia. There were two different cultures in the vast expanses of our ancestral homeland. There was the Forest culture, a settled way of life, that of the ploughman, and there was the Steppe culture, that of the warrior, the nomadic cattle breeder, the historical phenomenon known as the Golden Horde. Contacts between these very different types of cultures, numerous wars and mutual borrowings from each other, opposition, conspiracies, betrayals, subjugations and conquests initially in Muscovy and then in Russia led eventually to the triumph of one over all the others.

This was the power brought in by the nomadic cattle breeders and warriors. This Horde power is so entangled with our national history that it has become our own. Its defining feature, apart from the words on the calling card, there is only one player - autocratic power, monologue not dialogue, dictatorship not discussion, a complete ignorance of compromise, utter rejection of agreement as a mode of communication. It is Manichaean, lacking in what Nikolai Berdyaev called the ‘culture of the golden mean'.

The divergence of European and Russian cultures, which was much debated by 19th century historians, began much earlier. The different social dynamics of the two cultures are already in evidence in the proto-Russian space when Lithuanian Rus' and Muscovite Rus' were neighbours. That co-existence and rivalry ended with the victory of Muscovy and the creation of a Russia dominated by ‘Horde power'.

These two cultures are quite distinct. One leads to the creation and development over a long period of the freedom of the individual. In the other, the space for the personality to emerge and develop is steadily reduced.

On one side you have the Magna Carta Libertatum (‘Great Charter of Liberties') and the Habeas Corpus Act. On the other, the ‘Great Yasa' of Genghis Khan. The former cultivates personality and society, the latter prioritises the state and other institutions. The social oppositions which stem from this are endless: democracy versus authoritarianism, agreement versus force, dialogue versus monocentrism, consent versus arbitrary decisions, horizontal ties in society versus the vertical of power etc.

The Magna Carta dates from 1214 (i.e. it was signed two decades before Batu Khan invaded Rus'). A whole range of freedoms protects the individual from the state in English law. Government bodies have no recourse to arbitrary arrest and punishment, obloquy, robbery and violence. This determined the agenda of constitutional guarantees, which were the subject of disputes with the monarchy over many centuries. These guarantees found their expression in the symbolic document known as Habeas Corpus.

Genghis Khan published his ‘Great Yasa' in 1206. [...]

[T]he financial and economic crisis radically changes an already oppressive situation. It reveals the fragility of the Putin regime's strategy, and his means of governing.

Rather than revenues from oil and gas flowing in as usual, capital is flowing out. Production is dropping, unemployment is growing. Unresolved problems of health, education and housing have been drastically aggravated. With oil prices below the $70 that was allowed for in the budget, the government will have to wring money out of the population, as the reserve fund and the gold supply is not going to last long.

How is the regime going to manage to do this while maintaining its strategy of facing down the West and America? How can the population be controlled, when 40% live in poverty, and 15-20% of this 40% are practically beggars? More than 60% of our fellow citizens live in small towns and villages. It is there, on the social periphery, that paternalistic attitudes are most entrenched. This population is almost totally lacking in the material or spiritual resources, or the social means to change its position and lift itself out of its chronic depression.

This chaotic mass of people is the bedrock of our corruption. This is inevitable, constantly driven back into poverty as it is , swelling the ranks of the unemployed, lacking all political organization, sustained by none of the structures of a civil society.

Corruption is increasing almost exponentially. It dominates almost all sectors of society and all levels of power, including (so we are being told) the highest levels, headed by the president and prime minister. It is one of the most destructive consequences of the lack of structural and functional differentiation in contemporary public life.

Movement means life, as we all know. Today's "God, Tsar and Motherland" personified by Putin asks us to agree that morning gymnastics Russian-style ("rising from our knees" to drums and fanfares) means movement, life. And everyone believes them. They go through the motion of those morning gymnastics. Keeping their clenched fist in their pocket. Ready to beat up anyone who falls down.

But we're going to fall down - and we'll fall down together.

If we go on like this we will very soon bring about the end of the cultural and historical phenomenon that is still known as Russia.

THEY HAVE TO WIN JUST TO DEMONSTRATE THE FARCE:

Razing Arizona: The Cardinals' presence in the Super Bowl is fluky and disgraceful. (Charles P. Pierce, Jan. 26, 2009, Slate)

We're going to hear about how they magically transformed themselves at the end of the season. We're going to hear about the remarkable comeback of Kurt Warner. We're going to hear about how marvelous it is for the National Football League that a Super Bowl championship is within the grasp of a team so thickly dripping with obvious mediocrity that it's a wonder Charlie Sheen isn't playing left guard. We are going to hear all of this because the NFL and its broadcast partners operate on the very simple premise that everybody who reports—or follows—their sport on television is a paste-eating moron.

This simple fact is that the very presence of the Arizona Cardinals in the Super Bowl is at best a fluke and, at worst, a disgrace. They played in a landfill of a division. They won their two playoff games because Jake Delhomme of Carolina turned the ball over six times and because the Philadelphia Eagles all looked at the newspapers last Sunday and discovered they were in the NFC championship game again. The Cardinals are a glorified Arena Football League team with a soft defense and a running game unworthy of the name. They are in the position that they're in because the NFL rigs its season worse than any carny rigs his wheel. For all the macho posturing of its principal propagandists, between the jiggering of the schedule and the conniving of the draft and the socialistic revenue schemes, and the desperate grab for any mechanism that will flatten out the differences between really good teams and really bad ones, the NFL is the league that comes closest to the biddy soccer league philosophy of making sure that everyone gets a trophy.

THE CLOUD COMES ROLLING IN:

Google's 'online' GDrive will make the PC redundant (Daily Mail, 26th January 2009)

The proposed new Google GDrive could kill off the personal computer, experts have warned.

The Google Drive service, which will reportedly launch later this year, allows users to store information online on Google's own servers rather than on the hard drive.

The process has been dubbed 'cloud computing' and is being seen as 'the most anticipated Google product so far'.

The GDrive would mean users would no longer have to worry about their hard drives crashing as their data could be accessed from any internet connection, a move that could effectively make PCs redundant.

A TRADE-OFF THE DARWINIAN RIGHT WELCOMES:

Markets Solve The Immigration 'Problem': A decline in foreign migrants is a bad sign for any economy. (John Tamny, 01.26.09, Forbes)

During the darkest days of the war in Iraq, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair was asked whether the United States' best days were behind it. Instead of piling on with the popular suggestion that the U.S. was a nation in decline, Blair calmly replied that failing countries usually repel rather than attract immigrants.

Far from indicating a country on the ropes, the foreigners seeking both legal and illegal entry into the U.S. in the last decade are a market signal pointing to a nation doing far better than elite thinking around the world has suggested. Simply put, countries that attract the washed and unwashed the world over are pictures of success; the countries that lose their limited human capital are failures. Cuba, North Korea and Zimbabwe do not have immigration "problems."

Blair's past thinking takes on new meaning when we consider a recent front page story from USA Today titled, "Fewer immigrants caught sneaking into U.S." Thanks to a weakened economic outlook stateside, the number of people "caught trying to sneak into the USA from Mexico is at its lowest level since the mid-1970s."

No doubt tougher border enforcement explains some of the above, but the bigger story here reveals the market forces that factor into all human activity. With jobs in the U.S. presently harder to come by, the number of migrants here has declined.

THE UP-SIDE OF THE INK BLOT:

GOP walks thin line in opposing stimulus (PATRICK O'CONNOR, 1/26/09, Politico)

Congressional Republicans face the tough task of opposing an economic stimulus plan proposed by President Obama – without opposing Obama himself.

So expect the GOP to heap plenty of blame on the congressional Democrats who authored the legislation while shielding the popular new president from any of the mud slung at his allies.

It helps that most Republicans genuinely dislike the initial draft offered by Democrats in the House, an $825 billion combination of spending and tax cuts that seeks to boost funding for programs long ignored by President Bush.

Over the last week, some Republicans have intensified their criticism of the $825 billion package as too big, too slow, and too wasteful to pull the country out of recession.

"There should be an endpoint to all of this spending - say, two years," Senator John McCain, the party's 2008 presidential nominee, said in an interview on "Fox News Sunday." He vowed to vote against the bill in its current form.

"We need to have a commitment that after a couple of quarters of GDP growth, we will embark on a path to reduce spending . . . to get our budget in balance," McCain said.

MORE:
GOP keeps 2010 in mind on stimulus (JOSH KRAUSHAAR, 1/26/09, Politico)

While their support is not critical for passage of the legislation in a Democratic-controlled Congress, the reticence of those most likely to cross the aisle suggests an emerging GOP political calculus that members who vote against the package won’t suffer political consequences in 2010.

Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), a leading GOP moderate who co-chairs the Tuesday Group, a caucus of moderate Republicans, spelled out his concerns in a memo last week to his House Appropriations Committee colleagues, replete with an 11-point rebuttal of the proposed stimulus.

In the memo, he argued that a similar level of job creation can be achieved for just $65 billion and that many of the items are wasteful and unrelated to economic stimulus.

Kirk said his office e-mailed a poll to his constituents — in a district that was easily carried by Obama — and 65 percent responded in opposition to the legislation.

EVEN JON STEWART WAS BOUND TO FIGURE IT OUT SOONER OR LATER:

CALIFORNICATING THE AUTOMAKERS:

Obama to Direct Shift in Emissions Regulations (JOHN M. BRODER and PETER BAKER, 1/26/09, NY Times)

President Barack Obama will direct federal regulators on Monday to move swiftly on an application by California and 13 other states to set strict automobile emissions and fuel efficiency standards, two administration officials said Sunday evening.

The directive makes good on an Obama campaign pledge and signifies a sharp reversal of Bush administration policy. Granting California and the other states the right to regulate tailpipe emissions would be one of the most emphatic actions Mr. Obama could take to quickly put his stamp on environmental policy.

BIGGER:

Three Ways of Living: The Introduction to Three Philosophies of Life (Peter Kreeft)

There are ultimately only three philosophies of life, and each one is represented by one of the following books of the Bible:

1. Life as vanity: Ecclesiastes
2. Life as suffering: Job
3. Life as love: Song of Songs

No more perfect or profound book has ever been written for any one of these three philosophies of life. Ecciesiastes is the all-time classic of vanity. Job is the all-time classic of suffering. And Song of Songs is the all-time classic of love.

The reason these are the only three possible philosophies of life is because they represent the only three places or conditions in which we can be. Ecclcsiastcs' "vanity" represents Hell. Job's suffering represents Purgatory. [1] And Song of Songs' love represents Heaven. All three conditions begin here and now on earth. As C. S. Lewis put it, "All that seems earth is Hell or Heaven." It is a shattering line, and Lewis added this one to it: "Lord, open not too often my weak eyes to this.

The essence of Hell is not suffering but vanity, not pain but purposelessness, not physical suffering but spiritual suffering. Dante was right to have the sign over Hell's gate read: "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."

Suffering is not the essence of Hell, because suffering can be hopeful. It was for job. Job never lost his faith and his hope (which is faith directed at the future), and his suffering proved to be purifying, purgative, educational: it gave him eyes to see God. That is why we are all on earth.

Finally, Heaven is love, for Heaven is essentially the presence of God, and God is essentially love. ("God is love.') [...]

Three Theological Virtues

These three books also teach the three greatest things in the world, the three "theological virtues": faith, hope, and charity.

The lesson Ecclesiastes teaches is faith, the necessity of faith, by showing the utter vanity, the emptiness, of life without faith. Ecciesiastes uses only reason, human experience, and sense observation of life "under the sun" as instruments to see and think with; he does not add the eye of faith; and this is not enough to save him from the inevitable conclusion of "vanity of vanities". Then the postscript to the book, in the last few verses, speaks the word of faith. This is not proved by reason or sense observation, as in the rest of the book. This word of faith is the only one big enough to fill the silence of vanity. The word that answers Ecciesiastes' quest and gives the true answer to the question of the meaning of life is known only by faith: "Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil."

Ecciesiastes has intellectual faith; he believes God exists. But that is not enough. "The demons also believe, and tremble" (James 2:19). Ecciesiastes proves the need for real faith, true faith, lived faith, saving faith, by showing the consequences of its absence, even in the presence of intellectual faith.

Job's lesson is hope. Job has nothing else but hope. Everything else is taken away from him. But hope alone enables him to endure and to triumph.

Song of Songs is wholly about love, the ultimate meaning of life, the greatest thing in the world.

These three books also give us an essential summary of the spiritual history of the world. G. K. Chesterton did that in three sentences: "Paganism was the biggest thing in the world, and Christianity was bigger, and everything since has been comparatively small." Job shows us the heights of pre-Christian hope and heroism. It is not strictly pagan, of course, but it is not yet Christian. Song of Songs shows us the spiritual center of the Christian era, the era the modern secular establishment has told such incredible lies about, the Middle Ages. Finally, Ecciesiastes tells us the truth about the modern, post-Christian world and world view: once the divine Lover's marriage offer is spurned, the modern divorce cannot simply return to being a pagan virgin, any more than an individual who spurns Heaven and chooses Hell can make Hell into Purgatory, hopelessness into hope.

THE FAITHFUL AND THEIR FREELOADERS:

Christian, Therefore Conservative (Edward E. Ericson, Jr., Winter 2002, First Principles)

In The Conservative Mind, Russell Kirk, one of the fathers of modern American conservatism, offers a credo consonant with these central Christian teachings: “Conservatives believe that a divine intent rules society as well as conscience, forging an eternal chain of right and duty which links great and obscure, living and dead.” The Politics of Prudence, Kirk’s late-in-life summation of the principles of conservatism, lists as the first principle, “The conservative believes that there exists an enduring moral order. That order is made for man, and man is made for it: human nature is a constant, and moral truths are permanent.” A conservatism that seeks “the restoration of the ethical system and the religious sanction upon which any life worth living is founded,” Kirk has said, “is conservatism at its highest,” and it is my kind of conservatism.

What this perspective seeks to conserve is, in a nutshell, Western culture. The West’s two fountainhead sources are Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian thought. The great tradition of Western culture has proven peculiarly absorptive; it has brought influences from many disparate sources into a rich conversation. But it is Christianity that has for centuries formed its core. And it is, above all, this core to which “conservatism at its highest” remains faithful.

According to this view, reality is objective, and its source is God. Human beings find meaning in life by attaching themselves to this reality and its transcendent source, not by trying to construct their own version of reality. This vision accords primacy to the individual, who bears God’s image, but it locates him within community, since we are all his image-bearers and thereby share a common human nature. Christian conservatism hews a middle path between the modern errors of individualism and collectivism. It places a premium on human liberty, but it distinguishes liberty from license by placing limits on liberty; it proposes an ordered liberty. Freedom is constrained by moral laws that are built into the universe. These laws provide norms for good behavior. The goal is to live a good life, and this means living in harmony with the universe as it really is.

Because human beings are at one and the same time both grand (via creation) and miserable (via the fall), our lives are open to high drama, even to heroism. As Solzhenitsyn avers, “the line dividing good and evil cuts though the heart of every human being.” Great literature is the record of this drama. Writers who are not Christian—the ancient pagans, for instance—glimpse this overall pattern. But Christianity gives the fullest, most intellectually satisfying account of it. And part of that account is that, in our fallen condition, we cannot be restored to our full humanity as God’s image-bearers apart from the redemption provided by Christ’s sacrifice.

The drama of our lives is to be played out in all spheres of human activity. These include politics and economics. However, as Solzhenitsyn says, “ . . . the state structure is of secondary significance. That this is so, Christ himself teaches us. ‘Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s’—not because every Caesar deserves it, but because Caesar’s concern is not with the most important thing in our lives.” So I reject the primacy of politics, which I think some conservatives share with liberals and leftists.

The longstanding Christian world view retains numerous adherents among the populace today. Among intellectuals, however, it headed into eclipse 200 years ago with the Enlightenment, which gave birth to the modern age. If Enlightenment thought played a certain, albeit limited, positive role in the founding of the United States, it was a disaster for Christianity; for it set in motion a rejection of God and a substitution of man for God. The Enlightenment promulgated what Solzhenitsyn has called “rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed and practiced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. It could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the center of all.”

DEFENDING THE AMERICAN DREAM:

Clint Eastwood's Libertarian-Conservative Vision (David Swindle, January 23, 2009, FrontPageMagazine.com)

The mildly racist Walt is horrified to see his neighborhood filled with Asian immigrants, the younger generation of which have resorted to gang life. Walt gradually sheds his prejudices, though, as a series of events bring him into contact with his neighbors. In teenage Thao, he finds a boy who respects his elders and is concerned about his family's honor. Walt begins to mentor Thao, teaching him in the ways of masculinity and setting him up with a construction job. Thao's opportunity to make something of himself, though, is threatened by gang members who seek to draw him into their lifestyle and react violently when he resists. The Korean War veteran realizes that his neighborhood has become a war zone. Walt, now invested in the boy's future, realizes that Thao's opportunity to participate in the American Dream is threatened and reacts to defend him. [...]

The urban setting of "Gran Torino" perhaps reminds viewers more of Eastwood's other iconic role as Detective Harry Callahan in director Don Siegel's "Dirty Harry" and its sequels. The film featured Callahan on the trail of Scorpio, a sadistic serial killer. When one of the murderer's victims was supposedly trapped with a limited oxygen supply, Callahan ignored legal bureaucracy and regulations, breaking into the killer's home without a search warrant and engaging in some "enhanced interrogation techniques" to try and push the madman into revealing the girl's location. It seems clear how a contemporary film might apply this attitude to a terrorist with knowledge of an impending attack. For portraying such a character the film was famously attacked by prominent film critic Pauline Kael as "fascist." [...]

Within Eastwood's films, though, we see the transition from libertarianism to libertarian-conservatism. One can start out with a vision of freedom – that we must have a society in which individuals have the opportunity to pursue their own destinies and "everyone leaves everyone else alone," as Eastwood likes to sum up his views. Yet one becomes conservative when he comes to the realization that that freedom must be defended from those who threaten it; it must be conserved. We see this first manifest in "Dirty Harry" when the Eastwood character goes to extreme measures to confront a sociopath who threatens a city's freedom.

It's ultimately in "Gran Torino," though, that this idea gets its clearest expression. We want a society in which the next generation has the same opportunities of individual liberty to pursue their dreams. In order for the next generation to enjoy that freedom, we must confront sociopaths and nihilists – whether they be international Islamofascists or just local criminal gangs – who would threaten that fundamental American Vision.

I watched Dirty Harry for the first time in thirty years recently, having just watched the great film Zodiac which references it. I'd remembered how awful the 70s were, but forgotten that the buried prisoner scenario was central to the plot. Interesting to consider that movies like this helped create a climate in which we punish crime with appropriately puritanical zeal, after a long period of liberal coddling, but that we see no similar movies about the war against the jihadis.

As it happens, I've also just finished Alex Berenson's thriller, The Faithful Spy, a three year-old bestseller that--at least according to IMDB.com--isn't even in production as a film. It includes a number of conservative, or "fascistic," themes. For one thing, it takes a deliciously savage view of the CIA and the way that bureaucratic concerns trump intelligence. For another, John Wells, the spy of the title, not only genuinely accepts Islam while he is undercover in Afghanistan but is appalled by the dissolution in American society when he returns. Heck, there's even a plotline that involves al Qaeda buying yellowcake in Iraq. But there's also a really fine scene where the terrorist who was caught making that purchase is tortured at a secret prison in order to find out what the material was for. This includes a mature discussion of the difference between torturing a confession from someone--useless, because torture is so effective that anyone will confess to anything--and torturing intelligence out of someone--useful for the same reason. Clint Eastwood is too old these days to play John Wells, but is Hollywood really bereft of anyone who takes Salafism seriously enough to make a film about the fight against it where we're the good guys and the unfortunately harsh methods we use to combat it are justified?

THE BELONGERS VS THE BOMBERS:

Barack Obama and the American void: The president of the United States inaugurated on 20 January 2009 remains a political enigma. What are the true lineaments of his character, his vision, his faith, and his appeal? (Simon Critchley, adapted from remarks delivered at the American Political Science Association in Boston on 30 August 2008, OpenDemocracy)

There is something desperately lonely about Barack Obama's universe. One gets the overwhelming sense of someone yearning for connection, for something that binds human beings together, for community and commonality, for what he repeatedly calls "the common good". This is hardly news. We've known since his keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic national convention that "there's not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America - there's the United States of America."

Obama's remedy to the widespread disillusion with politics in the United States is a reaffirmation of the act of union. This is possible only insofar as it is possible to restore a sense of community to the nation. That, in turn, requires a belief in the common good. In the face of grotesque inequality, governmental sleaze, and generalised anomie, we need "to affirm our bonds with one another". Belief in the common good is the sole basis for hope. Without belief, there is nothing to be done. Such is the avowedly improbable basis for Obama's entire push for the presidency.

The obvious criticism one could make is that Obama's politics is governed by an anti-political fantasy. It lies behind the appeal to the common good, that "no one is exempt from the call to find common ground"; or "not so far beneath the surface, I think, we are becoming more, not less, alike". This, one might claim, is the familiar delusion of an end to politics, the postulation of a state where we can put aside our differences, overcome partisanship, and come together in order to heal the nation.

The same longing for unity governs Obama's discourse on race, with his call for a black-brown alliance and his appeasing remark that "rightly or wrongly, white guilt has largely exhausted itself". Obama dreams of a society without power relations, without the agonism that constitutes political life. Against such a position one might assert that justice is always an agon, a conflict, and to refuse this assertion is to consign human beings to wallow in some emotional, fusional balm.

One might add that the source of this longing for union is its absence. We anxiously want to believe, because we don't and we can't. The yearning for the common good comes from the refusal to accept that perhaps Americans have very little in common apart from the elements of a sometimes successful civil religion based around a sentimental, indeed sometimes teary-eyed, attachment to the constitution and a belief in the quasi-divine wisdom of the founding fathers.

It is hardly surprising that someone like Mr. Obama has led a professional life that involves submerging himself into the institutions of his society in search of the sense of belonging that has eluded him in a personal life defined by a broken family. He may not know what "race" he is or who his parents were but by rising to the top at Harvard Law School and of the American constitutional order he can prove beyond a doubt that he is quintessentially "one of us."

ESSENTIAL FRAMEWORK:

Local professor introduces Austen's 'Pride and Prejudice' (Nashua Telegraph, 1/18/09)

For [Thomas More College Professor of Humanities Christopher] Blum, who has garnered a national reputation for his authoritative scholarship on the British novelist, writes that the works of Austen are filled with a dramatic and often hilarious portrayal of virtues and vices in action. His introduction to "Pride and Prejudice" delves into the role of virtue in Austen's life and how Catholic morality is evident within her novel.

"Although Jane Austen herself never married, she plainly understood that marriage and family were the essential framework of the moral life," Blum said. "And it is indeed because of its creator's moral vision, and not merely for its fairytale-like ending, that 'Pride and Prejudice' is a work of such rare loveliness. As with each of Jane Austen's novels, it is a probing reflection upon love, marriage, family, and the search for stability and goodness . . . ."

While some readers have dismissed Austen's work as merely amusing, Blum said that she, in fact, addresses the central question of human life: How shall we live together in community – beginning with its most basic unit, the family? Austen examines human depths that are not sounded in the typical novel of manners or 19th century love story.

" 'Pride and Prejudice' stands apart from Austen's other novels for its sustained and focused consideration of the moral development of its heroine and hero," Blum noted.

However, Blum does not see in Austen's delightful tales allegorical treatises or moralizing tracts.

Blum's essay also examines Austen's quiet Christian faith, her picture of the hero Mr. Darcy against the standard of virtue which she would have known, and her treatment of feminine character in light of her contemporaries. He contends that Austen is "the last great representative of the classical tradition of the virtues."

TEXT OLD PHAROAH:

Revolution, Facebook-Style (SAMANTHA M. SHAPIRO, 1/25/09, NY Times)

[I]n Egypt, this time, the protests were different: some of the anger was aimed directly at the government of President Hosni Mubarak. In defiance of threats from the police, and in contravention of a national taboo, some demonstrators chanted slogans against Mubarak, condemning his government for maintaining diplomatic relations with Israel, for exporting natural gas to the country and for restricting movement through Egypt’s border with Gaza.

As the street protests went on, young Egyptians also were mobilizing and venting their anger over Gaza on what would, until recently, have seemed an unlikely venue: Facebook, the social-networking site. In most countries in the Arab world, Facebook is now one of the 10 most-visited Web sites, and in Egypt it ranks third, after Google and Yahoo. About one in nine Egyptians has Internet access, and around 9 percent of that group are on Facebook — a total of almost 800,000 members. This month, hundreds of Egyptian Facebook members, in private homes and at Internet cafes, have set up Gaza-related “groups.” Most expressed hatred for Israel and the United States, but each one had its own focus. Some sought to coordinate humanitarian aid to Gaza, some criticized the Egyptian government, some criticized other Arab countries for blaming Egypt for the conflict and still others railed against Hamas. When I sat down in the middle of January with an Arabic-language translator to look through Facebook, we found one new group with almost 2,000 members called “I’m sure I can find 1,000,000 members who hate Israel!!!” and another called “With all due respect, Gaza, I don’t support you,” which blamed Palestinian suffering on Hamas and lamented the recent shooting of two Egyptian border guards, which had been attributed to Hamas fire. Another group implored God to “destroy and burn the hearts of the Zionists.” Some Egyptian Facebook users had joined all three groups.

Freedom of speech and the right to assemble are limited in Egypt, which since 1981 has been ruled by Mubarak’s National Democratic Party under a permanent state-of-emergency law. An estimated 18,000 Egyptians are imprisoned under the law, which allows the police to arrest people without charges, allows the government to ban political organizations and makes it illegal for more than five people to gather without a license from the government. Newspapers are monitored by the Ministry of Information and generally refrain from directly criticizing Mubarak. And so for young people in Egypt, Facebook, which allows users to speak freely to one another and encourages them to form groups, is irresistible as a platform not only for social interaction but also for dissent.

Although there are countless political Facebook groups in Egypt, many of which flare up and fall into disuse in a matter of days, the one with the most dynamic debates is that of the April 6 Youth Movement, a group of 70,000 mostly young and educated Egyptians, most of whom had never been involved with politics before joining the group. The movement is less than a year old; it formed more or less spontaneously on Facebook last spring around an effort to stage a general nationwide strike. Members coalesce around a few issues — free speech, economic stagnation and government nepotism — and they share their ideas for improving Egypt. But they do more than just chat: they have tried to organize street protests to free jailed journalists, and this month, hundreds of young people from the April 6 group participated in demonstrations about Gaza, some of which were coordinated on Facebook, and at least eight members of the group were detained by police.

LET'S GO SUFI NOW:

Sufi rising (Philip Jenkins, January 25, 2009, Boston Globe)

In 1979, Iran had 100,000 Sufis; today, there may be 5 million.

Globally, the movement represents a close parallel to the explosive worldwide growth of charismatic and Pentecostal styles within Christianity. Both practice a passionate style of religion, and both have demography on their side. [...]

Always, these movements speak the language of peace, hope, and reconciliation, and condemn extremism. These are the Muslim voices that can compete with the calls to jihad and terror.

RESPECTFUL?:

Born to the Left, Aiming Her Camera Right (ELIZABETH JENSEN, 1/25/09, NY Times)

Many documentary makers labor for years to come up with just the right topic and nuanced approach, to coax interviews and to find money. But Ms. Pelosi, 38, has led a bit of a charmed life.

“Right America: Feeling Wronged,” subtitled “Some Voices From the Campaign Trail,” will be her fifth film for HBO. Her first was “Journeys With George” (2002), a look at George W. Bush’s first presidential campaign. Her total puts her in the company of HBO’s go-to group of documentarians, like Albert Maysles, Jon Alpert, and Alan and Susan Raymond.

But that’s not the company Ms. Pelosi keeps, or particularly desires; she’s more likely to be found at a Y.M.C.A. play date with her two toddlers and her husband, Michiel Vos, a Dutch television and radio commentator.

Her contrarian streak extends to her subjects. She is the daughter of Representative Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat, speaker of the House and one of the country’s most influential liberal politicans, yet she has chosen to look at aspects of American conservatism in four of her five films. Her parentage has sometimes worked against her — she was repeatedly harassed at McCain events last year — but she chooses to portray her subjects as nondidactically as possible.

The scorn she shows in her work is reserved for what she calls the news media’s inappropriate coziness with politicians, the topic of her 2005 book, “Sneaking Into the Flying Circus.” (Recently, at the request of Steve Zaillian, the screenwriter of “Schindler’s List” and “American Gangster,” she wrote the screenplay “On the Bus,” which she describes as a “a coming-of-age story about a young journalist who loses her professional virginity on the campaign trail.”) [...]

Ms. Pelosi became a filmmaker after working as a journalist. A graduate of Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles and the recipient of a master’s degree in communications management from the University of Southern California, she was hired in 1995 as a low-level producer for “Dateline NBC.” She got her break in 1999 when she was assigned to follow Mr. Bush as a campaign producer.

She did the job brilliantly, said Robert Calo, a friend and former colleague who is now a senior lecturer in the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. “Most people are very awed by it because they are very close to power,” he said, but she was not.

Instead of heading to the White House, the traditional track for producers when the candidates they are covering win, she quit to make “Journeys With George.” The tone of that film — a sometimes amused, sometimes appalled deconstruction of the campaign process and the journalism that accompanies it — meshed nicely with the rise of political satire in the Bush years, exemplified by “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart.”

“She deserves some credit for shattering the respectful world of political journalism,” Mr. Calo said.

While Ms. Pelosi takes her subjects seriously, he said, “there’s a sardonic kind of humor about public institutions that she brings. Maybe it’s because she grew up in a family that is an institution.”

OBAMEDIA:

Inauguration extravaganza sees journalists caught up in the moment: A comparison of Obama's celebration to Bush's in 2005 is a reminder that the media must guard against the bad habit of not asking questions. (James Rainey, January 25, 2009, LA Times)

When George Bush's people put on a $42-million inaugural program four years ago, many editorial writers and columnists around America came unglued.

A St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times commentator said the president needed to prove that his call for sacrifice "is more than just empty words." A Washington Post columnist suggested Bush & Co. should be ashamed of staging lavish parties in the face of their debacle in Iraq. A columnist at the New York Observer evoked images of Louis XIV.

It would have been nice, for the sake of consistency and fairness, if the commentariat had leveled a measure of that same attitude at last week's Obamapalooza, which cost roughly the same but drew a fraction of the blow-back.

SOMEONE REALLY OUGHT TO STUDY...:

Risk factors determined by medical stats (Judy Peres, January 25, 2009, Chicago Tribune)

Schwartz and Woloshin recalled an old magazine ad that proclaimed, "If you are over 35 and haven't had a mammogram, you need more than your breasts examined."

The obvious implication was that it's crazy not to get tested for breast cancer. But that ad failed to mention that, for a 35-year-old woman, the chance of dying from breast cancer over the next 10 years is only about 0.1 percent (or 1 in 1,000). And there is no evidence that mammograms save lives for women under 40.

A more recent newspaper ad from a respected cancer center carries this message: "The early warning signs of colon cancer: You feel great. You have a healthy appetite. You're only 50."

The ad—an attempt to scare readers into getting tested for colon cancer—suggests you might have the disease without knowing it. But how likely is that? And what benefit would you derive from getting tested?

In a new book, "Know Your Chances: Understanding Health Statistics," Schwartz, Woloshin and Dr. H. Gilbert Welch walk readers through the calculus.

Using the example of colon cancer screening, they suggest the first question to ask is, "What is my risk of getting colon cancer?"

You may have read that "colon cancer will strike about 150,000 Americans," which sounds like a lot. But there are 300 million Americans, and 150,000 out of 300 million is 0.05 percent, which seems a little less ominous.

If you believe the risk is worth thinking about, the next question would be, "What's the benefit of getting tested?" Clearly, a screening test will not protect you from getting colon cancer. But because of early detection, it might keep you from dying of the disease.

So, "What's my risk of dying of colon cancer?" The authors favor looking at risk in 10-year chunks because a decade is short enough to imagine but long enough to make changes that might reduce the risk. (Many organizations, including the American Cancer Society, speak of lifetime risk—the chance of something happening anytime between birth and death. That leads to relatively impressive statistics, such as "One in eight women will get breast cancer.")

Using the charts in the book, you can discover that a 50-year-old man, for example, has a 2 in 1,000 chance of dying of colon cancer over the next 10 years.

Which leads to the hard question, "Is that a risk I should try to reduce?"

One way to answer that is to compare your risk of dying of colon cancer with your risk of dying of other things. That 50-year-old man with a 2-in-1,000 risk of dying of colon cancer can compare that to his risk of dying of lung cancer (18 in 1,000 if he's a smoker) or heart disease (29 in 1,000 if he smokes and 11 in 1,000 even if he never smoked).

Deciding to stop smoking or go on a diet might be a reasonable approach for someone with limited time and money to spend on health.

Schwartz and Woloshin suggest that another way to answer that question is to consider the absolute benefit of the proposed intervention. Clinical trials have shown that screening can reduce colon cancer deaths by as much as one-third. That translates into lowering the 50-year-old man's chance of dying from 2 in 1,000 to 1.3 in 1,000—an absolute difference of 0.7 per 1,000.

RACE TRAITOR:

Nicholson to GOP:Rethink immigration (ALEXANDER BURNS, 1/24/09, Politico)

Former Republican National Committee Chair and Veterans Affairs Secretary Jim Nicholson spoke out on the GOP’s electoral challenges Friday, urging Republicans to reach out to Hispanic voters by reviewing their position on immigration.

“We have to better inform and motivate and align with the Hispanic voters,” Nicholson said in an interview with Politico. “That’s one of the key issues that the party and its leaders need to convene and, you know, have a very open, transparent discussion about developing a party position on.”

Nicholson, whose home state of Colorado turned blue in 2008 thanks in part to heavy Democratic voting among Hispanics, said Hispanics could be open to Republican ideas.

“The Hispanic voters…in this country are center-right, more conservative, more family- and work-oriented people,” he said. “We have to overcome some of the predilections that they have about Republicans so that we get more of their votes.”

WHO?

Inconsequential Joe: A return to the typical vice-presidency. (Philip Terzian, 01/05/2009, Weekly Standard)

Joseph Biden, the 66-year-old six-term senator from Delaware, who is nothing if not a quintessential politician of his time, is destined to be more typical than not. We know this for two reasons. First, because the Obama apparatus has not even bothered to say that Joe Biden will have unprecedented responsibilities during the next four years. And second, because the only significant story to emerge about Biden since the election has been the fact--duly reported in the press--that the Bidens beat the Obamas in their quest to acquire a puppy. (For the record, Biden's new dog is a German shepherd.)

In fact, it may be fair to assume that Biden will be the least
consequential vice president since Alben Barkley, the amiable 71-year-old Senate fixture from Kentucky, known popularly as the "Veep," who was so underwhelmed by his four years' service in the Truman administration that he subsequently got himself elected to the Senate again.

It is difficult to imagine either Hillary Clinton or General James Jones actively soliciting Joe Biden's judgment in foreign affairs, or -Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers consulting Biden on the economy. Similarly, if the neophyte Obama seeks advice on politics or policy, is Biden destined to be the one to set him straight, or whip the troops into line, or populate the White House and executive branch with Biden people? Will Rahm Emanuel be expected to "clear it" with Joe?

To ask such questions is to answer them--even without laughing. Indeed, if there were any doubt about the insignificance of Joseph Biden in Barack Obama's administration, it was answered with last week's announcement that Biden would chair a special, cabinet-level task force to assess the conditions of American middle- and working-class families. ("Is the number of these families growing?" asks the vice president-elect. "Are they prospering?") This is close to pure Democratic boilerplate. It might have been more entertaining to put Biden in charge of a White House council on change we can believe in, or appoint him to be the logorrhea czar, but no less humiliating.

CAN'T THE UR JUST GIVE THEM WAIVERS TOO?:

Dems wrestle with ethics problems (JOHN BRESNAHAN, 1/24/09, Politico)

“We are seeing again and again the gap between Democrats’ rhetoric during campaigns and their broken promises when they gain power,” said Michael Steel, press secretary for House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio). “Despite high-minded promises to ‘drain the swamp’ on the campaign trail, the Democratic leadership and the new administration seem to have no problem cutting deals with senior House Democrats who continue to wallow in the ethically questionable politics of the past.”

While top Democratic aides downplayed any link between Obama and the embattled reps, they conceded that having the Democratic lawmakers in charge of tax and defense policy in the House under investigation is not good for the new president or the Democratic leadership on Capitol Hill.

“It shows that it’s easier to talk about your ideals during a campaign than to apply them to your administration,” said a Democratic insider, speaking on condition of anonymity.

AFTER SHE LOSES THE DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY...:

Senate Choice: Folksy Centrist Born to Politics (MICHAEL POWELL and RAYMOND HERNANDEZ, 1/24/09, NY Times)

She won her first elected position in 2006, defeating a four-term incumbent in a traditionally Republican district that extends from the Hudson Valley flatlands to the mountainous North Country. Then, adopting the Charles E. Schumer permanent campaign-style of politicking, Ms. Gillibrand (pronounced JILL-uh-brand) became a ubiquitous and studiously folksy presence at malls and county fairs, racked up $4.6 million in donations — much of it from corporate political action committees — and swept 65 percent of the vote this fall.

In Washington, the new Democratic majority handed her two plum committee assignments, Agriculture and Armed Services, and she has a political portfolio not easily charted along a left-right axis. She earned a 100 percent approval rating from the National Rifle Association while also being showered with love and dollars by women’s groups like Emily’s List; she favors the English language-only movement as well as abortion rights; she voted in July 2007 to withdraw troops from Iraq and, this fall, against the Wall Street bailout bill.

Ms. Gillibrand’s political education took shape around her childhood dinner table. Her father, Douglas P. Rutnik, is a prominent state lobbyist who once dated Zenia Mucha, a senior aide to former Gov. George E. Pataki. Her grandmother Polly Noonan played a sophisticated brand of machine politics as a close adviser to the legendary Erastus Corning, mayor of Albany; Ms. Gillibrand has described licking stamps for campaign fliers as a child and listening to all that delicious political talk.

“What I admired so much about her was her passion,” Ms. Gillibrand said in a stemwinder of a speech Friday thanking political mentors as well as her husband, parents, grandparents, siblings, children and local supporters — many of them by name. “I thought, ‘Someday I may serve, someday I may be part of this.’ ”

In a way, Ms. Gillibrand began running as far back as the late 1990s, carefully piling up chits, according to Sarah Hoit, a friend from Dartmouth College who worked in the White House at the time. “She came to me and said, ‘Hey, I’d really like to run for political office.’ ” Ms. Hoit said. “We started giving her some political contacts.”

Ms. Hoit added: “She is a very careful planner.”

THUS THE UNICORN RIDER'S...:

Sad Men: ELSEWHERE, U.S.A By Dalton Conley (JENNIFER SCHUESSLER, NY Times Book Review)

Pity the poor Organization Man. Once upon a time, he ruled the American Century with his natty fedora and his quest for “belongingness.” Sure, every­one loves him in “Mad Men,” but these days his wife makes more money than he does, his kids take more meetings and the senior v.p. next door has started wearing age-­inappropriate indie rock T-shirts. Even his shrink finds his pre­occupation with the authentic self passé. And the sociologists can’t stop writing his obituary.

Dalton Conley is the latest. “A new breed of American has arrived on the scene,” Conley, a professor at New York University, declares in “Elsewhere, U.S.A.,” his compact guidebook to our nervous new world. Instead of individuals searching for authenticity, we are “intraviduals” defined by shifting personas and really cool electronics, which help us manage “the myriad data streams, impulses, desires and even consciousnesses that we experience in our heads as we navigate multiple worlds.” The denizens of our “Elsewhere Society,” Conley argues, “are only convinced they’re in the right place, doing the right thing, at the right time, when they’re on their way to the next destination."

YOU HAVE TO LOVE THE NOTION THAT HE'S GOING TO BE TOUGHER ON PAKISTAN...:

2 U.S. Airstrikes Offer a Concrete Sign of Obama's Pakistan Policy (R. Jeffrey Smith, Candace Rondeaux and Joby Warrick, 1/23/09, Washington Post)

Two remote U.S. missile strikes that killed at least 20 people at suspected terrorist hideouts in northwestern Pakistan yesterday offered the first tangible sign of President Obama's commitment to sustained military pressure on the terrorist groups there, even though Pakistanis broadly oppose such unilateral U.S. actions.

The shaky Pakistani government of Asif Ali Zardari has expressed hopes for warm relations with Obama, but members of Obama's new national security team have already telegraphed their intention to make firmer demands of Islamabad than the Bush administration, and to back up those demands with a threatened curtailment of the plentiful military aid that has been at the heart of U.S.-Pakistani ties for the past three decades.

The separate strikes on two compounds, coming three hours apart and involving five missiles fired from Afghanistan-based Predator drone aircraft, were the first high-profile hostile military actions taken under Obama's four-day-old presidency. A Pakistani security official said in Islamabad that the strikes appeared to have killed at least 10 insurgents, including five foreign nationals and possibly even "a high-value target" such as a senior al-Qaeda or Taliban official.

LEAVE IT TO THE rEALISTS TO SCREW UP OUR MOST IMPORTANT ALLIANCE:

India’s stealth lobbying against Holbrooke's brief (Laura Rozen, 01/23/2009, Foreign Policy)

When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton -- flanked by President Obama -- introduced Richard Holbrooke as the formidable new U.S. envoy to South Asia at a State Department ceremony on Thursday, India was noticeably absent from his title.

Holbrooke, the veteran negotiator of the Dayton accords and sharp-elbowed foreign policy hand who has long advised Clinton, was officially named "special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan" in what was meant to be one of the signature foreign policy acts of Obama's first week in office.

But the omission of India from his title, and from Clinton's official remarks introducing the new diplomatic push in the region was no accident -- not to mention a sharp departure from Obama's own previously stated approach of engaging India, as well as Pakistan and Afghanistan, in a regional dialogue. Multiple sources told The Cable that India vigorously -- and successfully -- lobbied the Obama transition team to make sure that neither India nor Kashmir was included in Holbrooke's official brief.

"When the Indian government learned Holbrooke was going to do [Pakistan]-India, they swung into action and lobbied to have India excluded from his purview," relayed one source. "And they succeeded. Holbrooke's account officially does not include India."

THE PROFESSOR AND THE MISANTHROPE:

STRIKE TWO -- HALL OF FAME FINALE DEPT. (Jayson Stark, 1/23/09, ESPN)

We know Greg Maddux is heading for the Hall of Fame. And I'm guessing Jeff Kent is also bound for Cooperstown one of these years. So how about this:

Not only did they end their careers in the same game last October, but the end of Maddux's career came when (guess what?) Kent pinch-hit for Maddux.

If any of you loyal readers can give me another set of Hall of Famers whose career ended on the same day, with one pinch-hitting for the other, let me know -- at uselessinfodept@yahoo.com.

COLD COMFORT TO HIS VICTIMS, BUT....:

Obama reverses Bush abortion-funds policy (LIZ SIDOTI and MATTHEW LEE, 1/23/09, Associated Press)

A White House spokesman, Bill Burton, said Obama signed the executive order, without coverage by the media, late on Friday afternoon. The abortion measure is a highly emotional one for many people, and the quiet signing was in contrast to the televised coverage of Obama's Wednesday announcement on ethics rules and Thursday signing of orders on closing the Guantanamo Bay prison camp and banning torture in the questioning of terror suspects.

His action came one day after the 36th anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade that legalized abortion.

FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF REDUNDANCY:

Economy in shock: It's failure overload: Tom Petruno, January 24, 2009, LA Times)

Any capitalist nation must be willing to embrace some level of economic Darwinism: the notion that the fittest survive while the less robust fall away.

DOUBLING DOWN:

Iran Ranks Students, Housewives As Employed (Javno, January 24, 2009)

Counting students and housewives among the ranks of the employed has helped lower Iran's jobless rate, an official at the statistics office said in remarks published on Saturday.

The government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is widely expected to stand for re-election in June, recently said the country's unemployment rate had fallen below 10 percent. [...]

An Iranian development economist this month said the unofficial unemployment rate was considerably higher than the official figure of around 10 percent.

Including also those who were under-employed, the rate was around 20-25 percent, the economist told Reuters, declining to be named.

A DAY LATE MAY BE BETTER THAN NEVER...:

What Does Obama Think Government Should Do?: He still hasn't told us. That's worrisome. (Jacob Weisberg, Jan. 24, 2009, Salte)

In 2009, looking out over the largest crowd ever assembled in Washington, D.C., Barack Obama framed the issue in terms of simple efficacy. "The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works—whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified," he said. "Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end."

This view is in keeping with Obama's nonideological approach to politics. To most of those listening, it surely came across as an expression of our new president's unsentimental good sense. Yet on rereading the speech in the less euphoric light of the next day, that passage seemed insufficient as a governing philosophy and, if taken for one, rather troubling. "Whatever works" is less a vision of the public sector's proper role than a place-holder for someone who has yet to figure out what he thinks that role should be.

ON THE UNICORN'S HINDER LEGS:

Conformity’s Seduction: Oh, yes, yes, yessssssss, we can! (Mark Steyn, 1/23/09, National Review)

How dazzling is President Obama? So dazzling that he didn’t merely give a dazzling inaugural speech. Any old timeserving hack could do that. Instead, he had the sheer genius to give a flat dull speech full of the usual shopworn boilerplate. Brilliant! At a stroke, he not only gently lowered the expectations of those millions of Americans and billions around the world for whom his triumphant ascendancy is the only thing that gives their drab little lives any meaning, but also emphasized continuity by placing his unprecedented incandescent megastar cool squarely within the tradition of squaresville yawneroo white middle-aged plonking mediocrities who came before him.

At a stroke—okay, that’s two strokes, like an Italian moped, but that just shows how cosmopolitan he is—Obama artfully charted a middle course between the Scylla of unmeetable expectations and the Charybdis of his own charisma, and chugged instead in the placid rhetorical shallows of “gathering clouds,” “raging storms,” “icy currents.” In a speech on climate change, this would send the crowd fleeing in terror to hole up in the hills and forage for berries. But, in an inaugural address, this was Obama’s most inspired gambit yet. Only a truly great leader would have the courage to reach for the skies in such leaden and earthbound prose.

Oh, well. So much for the consensus of the expert analysts.

SO THERE'LL BE ONE BIT OF COMMON SENSE IN YOUR IN-BOX:

Free Daily Chesterton Quote in your Email Box! (American Chesterton Society, 1/23/09)

You can sign up for the the free daily Chesterton quote emails at http://eternal-revolution.com/heroes/gk-chesterton-quotes/.

SUMMATION:

Wyeth's White Wonder: 'Snow Hill' is a conscious summary of his artistic life that is both somber memoir and playful recalibration (JOHN WILMERDING, 1/23/09, WSJ)

The setting was intimately familiar to Wyeth almost his entire life, a view looking down over the Kuerner farm and the nearby hills of the Brandywine Valley in Pennsylvania. The artist knew almost every inch of the roads, buildings and fields we see in the distance below. Historians and others may argue for some time whether his future reputation will rest on the landscapes or portraits (respectively descended from two of his artistic idols, Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins). "Snow Hill" is unusual in the merging of the two -- one open, silent and vast; the other intimate, animate and active. The foreground hilltop, receding valley, and broad sky constitute a painted tour de force of whites, off-whites and cream colors. Its poetic emptiness recalls the stark eloquence seen in but a few of Wyeth's other strongest compositions -- such as "Christina's World" (1949), "River Cove" (1958) and "Airborne" (1996).

Atop the hillside we view the improbable scene of a Maypole dance at Christmas time. The seven ribbons descending from beneath the tree above mark the artist's seven decades. In a surreal vision, Wyeth assembles prominent figures from his life and art who appeared in major paintings over the years. Holding hands from left to right across the foreground are Karl and Anna Kuerner, followed by William Loper and Helga Testorf. In the back right is the family friend and neighbor Allan Lynch, wearing his telltale hat with earflaps flying, and finally, partially obscured, a figure with billowing brown coat who recalls the artist's wife, Betsy, posing years earlier in the snowy courtyard of their Chadd's Ford farmhouse. In this enumeration we realize the group only comes to six, suggesting a missing seventh figure. Possibly Christina Olson, the most enduring of Wyeth's Maine subjects, made famous by his first masterpiece, "Christina's World," is not present, since her paralysis would keep her from dancing. Or perhaps the implied seventh individual might be the artist himself, participant in their lives and unseen orchestrator of this imaginary get-together. In any case, this is a witty and exuberant conjuring of artistic imagination.

Not surprisingly for Wyeth, however, there are notes of darkness beneath the celebratory gathering: Wyeth had lived through Karl Kuerner succumbing to cancer, Allan Lynch to suicide, and William Loper to madness. Even so, what we ultimately experience here is the enjoyment of art, life and creativity, an idea subtly but vividly conveyed by the air-touched ribbons. They contain the most intense colors and free-flowing brushstrokes in this picture. Wyeth once described how he approached their execution. In part remembering his childhood games with friends, dressing up as soldiers or medieval knights with play swords or sabers, he envisioned here addressing the painting like a fencer with an epee. With arm and brush extended, he swiftly moved to the surface and slashed each stroke of color from the apex down to the figures.

DON'T WE PRETTY MUCH HAVE TO ASSUME...:

If Not Gitmo, Then Where Should Detainees Be Held? (Sophia Yan, Jan. 23, 2009, TIME)

Pennsylvania Congressman John Murtha, a Democrat, is ready to see the captives moved to his state, saying they would be "no more dangerous in my district than in Guantánamo." His constituents are far from convinced. Some see an economic benefit, because building a maximum-security prison would provide jobs. But others don't want terrorism suspects in their backyard. Diane Gramley, president of the 12,000-member American Family Association of Pennsylvania, has described Murtha's idea as "ludicrous."

And Murtha is rare among legislators on Capitol Hill in his willingness to have the suspects incarcerated in his district. Most are vociferously opposed to the idea.

THE ONLY THING THAT MAKES THE STORY IMPLAUSIBLE...:

WOODY ALLEN`S MOVIE: Penelope Cruz Didn`t Realise She Filmed A Comedy (Javno, 1/22/09)

Penelope Cruz didn't realise her new movie was a comedy until filming had finished.

The 34-year-old actress - who has been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of gun-wielding maniac Maria Elena in 'Vicki Cristina Barcelona' - couldn't understand why people were laughing during screenings of Woody Allen's latest project.

IT'S ALMOST LIKE THESE GUYS ARE HITTING THEIR STRIDE:

House Republicans Introduce Bill Banning Gitmo Detainees From U.S. Soil (Brian Montopoli, 1/22/09, CBS News)

“Closing Guantanamo Bay presents a clear and present danger to all Americans," said House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Lamar Smith. "These suspected terrorists must now be relocated and if they are transferred to military prisons in the U.S., they automatically will be granted rights far beyond those given to enemy combatants by any other country."

“The result is that many will petition friendly federal judges who may order their release into U.S. communities," he continued.

The legislation, known as the Enemy Combatant Detention Review Act, has the backing of Minority Leader John Boehner and other prominent House Republicans.

In addition to preventing courts from bring enemy combatants into the U.S., the bill requires that an alien captured and detained abroad during wartime cannot be admitted and released into the country.

AN ENCOURAGING PRECEDENT:

Lynn's appointment nowhere near settled (JEN DIMASCIO, 1/23/09, Politico)

The Obama administration Friday waived its ethics rules to ease the nomination of former Raytheon lobbyist William Lynn as deputy defense secretary, but the matter is nowhere near settled.

And Obama’s former presidential rival, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), could be the stopper. [...]

On Thursday, the Project on Government Oversight asked Obama to withdraw the nomination. And on Friday, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the Government Accountability Project and Public Citizen signed a letter to Levin and McCain, the committee’s ranking Republican.

Before the president’s ethics policy was issued, Lynn’s nomination wouldn’t have been questioned, the groups said. But the president’s new ethics rules changed all that, leading watchdog groups to “believe that Mr. Lynn simply could not effectively serve as the deputy secretary of defense.”

POLITICS IS NARRATIVE...:

The 'Magic Negro' (Dawn Mendez, 01.23.09, Forbes)

Intrigued by the term, I investigated further and discovered the phrase has been used to describe the stereotype of a saintly, nonthreatening black person who has no other interest in life--and serves no other literary purpose--than to further the happiness of whites by guiding them gently toward the light: true love, economic or personal fulfillment, whatever.

These transformations are accomplished, apparently, as result of his blackness or status as "the other." And the "magic Negro" wills these changes in his companion purely through self-effacing goodness and the absence of any personal life or defining characteristics. [...]

Watching Barack Obama take the oath of office on Tuesday, all too aware of the grave challenges ahead, I wondered whether the entire country--not only whites--now feel this man can magically bring about extraordinary change. (Why, exactly, were 200,000 Berliners driven to explosive delight last summer?)

To be sure, I consider Obama an exceptional person, intellectually gifted, but he's not perfect. I think he has few concrete accomplishments under his belt and even lacks true, defined political passions.

While I admire his oratorical skills, I do believe the praise he receives is out of proportion to his talent partly because, I feel, black politicians are expected to be great speakers. But in spite of all this, since his stunning upset victory in Iowa last January, he has been hailed--largely by the media--for his superhero-like status.

And now that he has ascended to the stratosphere, everybody, to a certain degree, believes in his magical powers.

PATTERSON'S PALIN:

Kirsten Gillibrand. Really?: Why New York Gov. David Paterson chose a senator with conservative views that clash with his own. (Joe Conason, Jan. 23, 2009, Salon)

Whether New York's rank-and-file Democrats are pleased, puzzled or apoplectic about the appointment of Kirsten Gillibrand to succeed Hillary Rodham Clinton, they cannot fault their new United States senator for being who she is -- an ordinary upstate politician, largely defined by poll-driven issues that fit the right-wing rural district she represented in Congress. The sole responsibility for choosing an avowed conservative Democrat belongs to Gov. David Paterson, who seems to have relied heavily upon the advice of Charles Schumer, the state's senior senator. [...]

Family and partisan liabilities aside, the new junior senator is energetic, telegenic, youthful and combative, qualities that may yet transform her into a Washington star. Yet she has displayed little of the independence and intellect that marked the legendary occupants of that seat, such as Robert F. Kennedy or Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

On the economic issues that ought to be uppermost in the mind of the man who chose her, Gillibrand has taken positions precisely opposed to his; as Paterson might observe, positions that were inimical to the interests of her state if not her district. Last year, she voted against the Wall Street bailout bill, presumably because that legislation polled poorly. Her Web site boasts that she has been "a strong supporter of the Pay-As-You-Go (PAYGO) rule, which bans deficit spending." That mindless notion would dictate a vote against the stimulus bill proposed by President Barack Obama and supported by the Democratic leadership in both houses, which will create the biggest budget deficit since World War II. And unlike most Democrats, she continues to support the Bush tax cuts.

Gillibrand is supple enough to earn high ratings from both the National Rifle Association and the American Civil Liberties Union. Her position on immigration reform hews to Republican orthodoxy ("no amnesty for illegal immigrants"), and although she claims to have supported "redeployment of troops from Iraq to Afghanistan," she voted with the Bush administration and against her own party leadership on funding the war. At the same time, she has strongly defended Social Security and Medicare against Republican incursions, endorses universal health insurance, and has worked hard to promote family farms, organic agriculture and alternative energy programs. She is, in short, a hybrid politician who has remained conservative enough to keep her seat while appearing progressive enough to raise money downstate.

“[A]ny attack on Gillibrand will likely focus on… her family and commitment to the region [and] her law firm work,” concluded the unnamed authors of the December 2005 document, obtained by Politico from a New York Democrat.

“Kirsten's family could cause her some political headaches. While her relatives have endured individual problems… the most likely attack she will face is that she is a product of Albany's political machine. The more voters learn about Kirsten’s family, the more they may not believe that she is a true political outsider, as she claims.”

The report flags a host of nagging, non-fatal problems. At the top of the list — Gillibrand’s work as a white-shoe lawyer representing corporations like Qwest Communications, which had been accused of financial misdeeds, followed by “headaches” stemming from her father’s lobbying work and his romantic involvement with a top aide to former Gov. George Pataki and also carpetbagger charges that might arise from her longtime residence in Manhattan.

There was even a passing mention of Gillibrand’s Montana hunting license, hinting at a Palin-esque penchant for sport shooting, and her $895,000 house in affluent Hudson, N.Y.

Within the high school gossip circle that is New York’s congressional delegation, Kirsten Gillibrand’s nickname is “Tracy Flick” — a not-so-flattering reference to the over-eager, blonde, bubbly and viciously competitive Reese Witherspoon character from “Election.” [...]

“Nobody really likes her,” sniped one New York City-area member, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“She's smart and capable, but she's rubbed people the wrong the way,” said another.

“I think she's going to get a serious primary in 2010,” opined a longtime state Democratic operative who supports Gillibrand.

Many members of the state’s congressional delegation skipped Gillibrand’s announcement in Albany, mostly citing other commitments.

And one notable absentee was sending a message: Pro-gun control Long Island Rep. Carolyn McCarthy says she’ll run against Gillibrand to protest the new senator’s pro-gun record and perfect NRA rating.

ACTUALLY, HE'S THE SECOND:

Iceland PM is first global political casualty of the crunch (Sophie Morris, 24 January 2009, Independent)

Iceland's embattled Prime Minister Geir Haarde may have become the first political casualty of the global credit crisis, announcing his resignation yesterday, and clearing the way for elections in May. Illness was the official reason for Mr Haarde's decision to quit, but few in the capital Reykjavik were in any doubt that his departure was linked to a week of intense and violent public protests at once prosperous Iceland's economic implosion.

OB MAKES GOOD:

MashiCal Combines Any iCal Feeds You Throw At It (Kevin Purdy, Jan 23 2009, Lifehacker)

If you're looking to combine all your iCal-feeding calendars—and you're not, say, a Google or Yahoo Calendar user—MashiCal could be your solution, as well as a way to separate your shared feeds from personal stuff.

TOO STABLE:

The Dilemma of Dealing With Terror Central: Could the war on terror intersect with an India-Pakistan war? (Ramesh Thakur, 1/19/09, YaleGlobal)

What then might be a way forward? One or both of two further equations need to change. First, the military must be brought under full civilian control. This cannot be done until the government accepts the evidence of the connections to Pakistan from the captured terrorist as well as satellite and cellular phone logs and intercepts. Outsiders, including India, cannot help if the government persists with denial well past the point of plausibility. The dossier provided by India, assembled with the help of the forensic skills of American and British agencies, is compelling. There is justification for Secretary Madeleine Albright’s description of Pakistan as an international migraine and the more popular label of it as the world’s terror central.

The second solution should be attempted only if the establishment of civilian supremacy over Pakistan’s military-intelligence services proves impossible. Like the Americans firing missiles into Pakistan from unmanned drones, India should adopt the policy of taking the fight into neighboring territory from where terror attacks originate. It should root out the human leadership and material infrastructure of terrorism through surgical strikes and targeted assassinations. India does not have such intelligence and military capacity today; it must embark on a crash course to acquire it. And combine it with escalation dominance capability: Pakistan should know that any escalation from the limited strikes will bring even heavier punitive costs from a superior military force.

This brings us to the need to change a final equation. Pakistan’s contributions to the war on terror on its western front are of lesser import than its fuelling of terror on its eastern front. Yet the rewards for the former exceed penalties for the latter. And much of the $10 billion US military aid has been directed by Pakistan at India, not the Taliban. India and the US together need to reverse the structure of incentives and penalties.

NEW STUDY REVEALS BOTOX DESTROYS BRAIN CELLS (via Bryan Francoeur):

MySpace Celebrity and Katalyst present The Presidential Pledge

So what exactly have these slackers been doing for the first 2 to 6 decades of their sorry lives? And would it be okay to leave people in slavery if John McCain had won?

THE HARSH TRUTH:

'Gran Torino' and the Drive Toward Liberty (Paulette Chu Miniter, January 24, 2009, Far Eastern Economic Review)

Most Americans can’t pronounce “Hmong,” let alone know what Hmong is. So it’s interesting that Clint Eastwood’s new film, "Gran Torino," is about the journey of Hmong immigrants in America.

The story of immigration in America is usually told as one of hard work and eventual success. But Mr. Eastwood’s "Gran Torino" is a much more cutting commentary with lots of rough language to boot. The film evokes the unfinished business of the Vietnam War to get its message across. Unfinished because America left Vietnam, and the people who fought alongside for their freedom, before the job was done. As the daughter of Vietnamese refugees myself, the message I took from the film has little do to with its racial stereotypes or slurs. Instead it’s about what happens when America abandons the ideals that so many people come here for. It abandoned “the freedom agenda” in Vietnam and then abandoned it again here. [...]

What becomes of these Hmong is at the center of "Gran Torino." Like many children of immigrants, Sue and her brother Thao are largely on their own in America. Their family lost everything, don’t speak English and are isolated from American culture. Their father is gone, perhaps dead. They live with their mom and grandmother in a blighted neighborhood of similarly poor Hmong. Street gangs have formed along Latin, black and most important to the film, Hmong lines.

Since thugs are at bottom cowards, they inevitably turn on their own people. The moral question for the rest of us is whether to look the other way and mind our own business, or not. In "Gran Torino," we watch the hero sacrifice all to choose the latter. Walt doesn’t flee the ghettoized ‘hood. He doesn’t call the police. Instead, he wages war.

Walt wages this war because he understands that peace can’t exist without freedom.

SOME GUYS JUST NEED KILLING:

Freed by the U.S., Saudi Becomes a Qaeda Chief (ROBERT F. WORTH, 1/23/09, NY Times)

The emergence of a former Guantánamo Bay detainee as the deputy leader of Al Qaeda’s Yemeni branch has underscored the potential complications in carrying out the executive order President Obama signed Thursday that the detention center be shut down within a year.

The militant, Said Ali al-Shihri, is suspected of involvement in a deadly bombing of the United States Embassy in Yemen’s capital, Sana, in September. He was released to Saudi Arabia in 2007 and passed through a Saudi rehabilitation program for former jihadists before resurfacing with Al Qaeda in Yemen.

His status was announced in an Internet statement by the militant group and was confirmed by an American counterterrorism official.

“They’re one and the same guy,” said the official, who insisted on anonymity because he was discussing an intelligence analysis.

WE'RE NOT ALL MAGICALLY POST-PARTISAN?:

Stimulus Plan Meets More GOP Resistance: Obama to Reiterate Appeal for Bipartisanship (Paul Kane, 1/23/09, Washington Post)

Just days after taking office vowing to end the political era of "petty grievances," President Obama ran into mounting GOP opposition yesterday to an economic stimulus plan that he had hoped would receive broad bipartisan support.

Republicans accused Democrats of abandoning the new president's pledge, ignoring his call for bipartisan comity and shutting them out of the process by writing the $850 billion legislation. The first drafts of the plan would result in more spending on favored Democratic agenda items, such as federal funding of the arts, they said, but would do little to stimulate the ailing economy.

The GOP's shrunken numbers, particularly in the Senate, will make it difficult for Republicans to stop the stimulus bill, but the growing GOP doubts mean that Obama's first major initiative could be passed on a largely party-line vote -- little different from the past 16 years of partisan sniping in the Clinton and Bush eras.

MUST SEE TV:

Dartmouth Men's Hockey to Battle Harvard on National Television (Dartmouth, 01/23/2009)

HANOVER, N.H. - The Dartmouth men's hockey is set to take on one of its oldest rivals on Sunday when the Harvard Crimson come to town. Game time is slated for 4:00 pm as the game will be broadcast live on ESPNU. The Big Green is looking at getting back at the Crimson for the 4-1 defeat in the first game of the season for both squads. [...]

THE RANKINGS
Dartmouth is still in the national polls, coming in at #18. The Big Green entered the polls after a victory over Colgate and a loss to Cornell on Nov. 21 and 22.

NO, I'M GEORGE BUSH!

President Obama 'orders Pakistan drone attacks' (Tim Reid , 1/23/09, Times of London)

Missiles fired from suspected US drones killed at least 15 people inside Pakistan today, the first such strikes since Barack Obama became president and a clear sign that the controversial military policy begun by George W Bush has not changed.

Security officials said the strikes, which saw up to five missiles slam into houses in separate villages, killed seven "foreigners" - a term that usually means al-Qaeda - but locals also said that three children lost their lives.

Dozens of similar strikes since August on northwest Pakistan, a hotbed of Taleban and al-Qaeda militancy, have sparked angry government criticism of the US, which is targeting the area with missiles launched from unmanned CIA aircraft controlled from operation rooms inside the US.

THE GOOD SORT OF DEFLATION:

Grover Cleveland: A model for President Obama?: Cleveland refused to "act" during an economic downturn and made the United States stronger in the process. (John Robson, , 23 January 2009, Mercator Net)

The latter part of the 19th century was a period of appalling economic crisis in America. 1873-1896 was known as “The Great Depression” long before the 1930s came along. Farmers faced falling prices, workers toiled in massive new factories for low wages and went home to seedy slums if they weren’t killed in industrial accidents; politics was explosive and fears or hopes of revolution were everywhere. It was also the most rapid economic growth the nation ever experienced. Because back then governments knew how not to do dumb stuff.

The statistics on economic growth in the period are extraordinary. Economic output quadrupled; manufacturing output increased six-fold. Railway track in operation rose from 53,000 miles in 1870 to almost 200,000 in 1900 and ton-miles of freight hauled increased ten times just from 1870 to 1890. By 1894 the United States was the world’s leading manufacturing nation, on its way to producing one third of the world’s manufactures by the start of World War I.

A few mores statistics if you’ll indulge me. On the eve of the Civil War total power available in the U.S. was round 13 million horsepower, two-thirds of it more or less literally, that is, produced by animals. By 1880 steam exceeded animal power; by 1900 steam engines accounted for two-thirds of the 65 million horsepower available. And while the 1880 census didn’t even mention electric power, by 1900 it was gaining fast on steam.

It wasn’t just quantity: This was the era of the phonograph, refrigeration, food canning, typewriters, the telegraph and telephone and the motion picture. In short, an era of unparalleled economic progress. [...]

A lot of things went wrong in the late 19th century. A lot of things always go wrong. Agriculture suffered terribly; the growth of industry created slums, dangerous working conditions and alarming new social and economic entities. But cheap food was good for workers if bad for those who produced it and in any case it was the inevitable result of the incredible success of American farmers in opening up new land and increasing yields with superior methods and equipment. And if industrial work was difficult, dirty and dangerous, it was a lot better than the lot that awaited many, especially immigrant workers, if they had not come to America’s cities.

The promise of industrialization was that it would relieve man’s estate by relieving material want, and if the first part was overdone the second, in late 19th century America, was not. Even with substantial population growth, real per capita income at least doubled during this “Great Depression.” And that’s because while many things went wrong, a major thing that went right was that the American government did not engage in wildly expensive attempts to prop up and preserve what was not working at the expense of what was, to freeze capital and labour resources in unproductive uses. The process of adjustment was painful, even brutal at times, but the cost of stagnation would have been far higher.

YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR:

Stop the Boondoggles, Six-Lane Highways, MPOs (James S. Russell, Jan. 22, 2009, Bloomberg)

Next, knock out the fourth, fifth and sixth expressway lanes. When roads get that big, there’s enough demand to support high-quality transit. The six rail tracks that tunnel into New York’s Penn Station haul as many people as 45 freeway lanes.

Walkable Downtowns

What should Obama support? Lots of innovation has been trickling up from municipalities. Beltway suburbs like Bellevue, Washington, turned their parking-lot acres into high-value suburban downtowns. Focused on transit, they’re appealing as places to walk, shop, work and live.

Some metro areas are aligning roads and rails (both freight and passenger) in corridors to support these emerging urban hubs. The San Francisco Bay Area could use some cash to finally finish a rapid-transit extension linking Oakland and the East Bay to San Jose and Silicon Valley. Without additional aid, underfunded and overburdened big cities will soon have to stop long-planned, often-deferred projects like New York’s Second Avenue Subway.

Little Parks

Express bus lanes and bikeways sharing “green streets” with cars can reduce auto dependency. In the best cases, each mode is physically separated from the others by planted buffers. These little Riverside Parks aren’t just pretty. They make pedestrian crossings safer and sop up storm water -- essential in an increasingly flood-prone era.

Dollars spent that get Americans out of cars will ease traffic, save money, reduce pollution, slow global warming and make us less vulnerable to volatile oil oligarchs.

Road projects do little more than rearrange the traffic jams.

ONLY THE NAMES HAVE BEEN CHANGED...:

Obama Sides With Bush in Spy Case (David Kravets, January 22, 2009, Wired)

The Obama administration fell in line with the Bush administration Thursday when it urged a federal judge to set aside a ruling in a closely watched spy case weighing whether a U.S. president may bypass Congress and establish a program of eavesdropping on Americans without warrants. [...]

Thursday's filing by the Obama administration marked the first time it officially lodged a court document in the lawsuit asking the courts to rule on the constitutionality of the Bush administration's warrantless-eavesdropping program. The former president approved the wiretaps in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

"The Government's position remains that this case should be stayed," the Obama administration wrote (.pdf) in a filing that for the first time made clear the new president was on board with the Bush administration's reasoning in this case.

BUT WON'T THEY FOLLOW THE COMMANDMENTS OF THE OBAMESSIAH?

Closing Guantánamo: Will Europeans take detainees?: Europeans, who have long pushed to close the controversial facility, are hesitant to take some of its inmates. (Robert Marquand, 1/23/09, The Christian Science Monitor)

[E]uropean states are not rushing to take detainees, a step considered essential to closing the camps.

Rather, on the eve of a Jan. 26 meeting of foreign ministers in Brussels that takes up the question, there's more temporizing than unity – and a possibility that some states that say they will take inmates considered wrongly detained may hide behind bureaucratic moves to tie such help to a collective EU agreement. Such agreement may be difficult. [...]

"The Europeans said for years they would assist inmates if only the Bush administration would decisively close Guantánamo," [Lotte Leicht, director of EU affairs at Human Rights Watch in Brussels] continues. "Now we have a new reality with a new president. So to say the EU can only help if we do it together may be a bad excuse not to, rather than a real effort."

THE ONE THING W WILL NEVER BE FORGIVEN IS HIS SUCCESS:

Changing the Verb of Homelessness (Daniel Allott, 1.23.09, American Spectator)

The man most responsible for the precipitous drop in homelessness is Philip Mangano, executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness. In a recent interview, Mangano talked to me about the secret to his success, which is rooted in his mission "to change the verb of homelessness. After 20 years of managing the crisis, our intent was ending the disgrace."

This small shift in emphasis has produced great results. Besides the 30 percent decrease in chronic homelessness (defined as homelessness of at least one year of a person with serious mental illness and/or drug or alcohol addiction), there was a 12 percent reduction in overall homelessness nationally (from 763,000 to 672,000). Also, there was an almost 40 percent decrease in the number of homeless veterans between 2001 and 2007.

In order to move from managing homelessness to ending it, Mangano recognized the need for his agency to get rid of the old strategies. Under President Clinton, funding was tripled for programs to decrease homelessness, but the number of homeless only increased. "We had been busy servicing homeless people," Mangano says, "spending more money without any results."

So when he was appointed by President Bush to lead the council in 2002, Mangano and his team implemented an approach to homelessness that was entirely appropriate for the administration of the first president with an MBA. "For many years," Mangano says, "the issue of homelessness was driven by anecdote, conjecture, guess work and feeling." But with Mangano at the helm, the touchy-feelyness was replaced by a results-oriented business approach rooted in evidence and data.

And, predictably, the evidence showed that moving chronically homeless people into housing units was the only reliable way to end chronic homelessness.

The council's "housing first" strategy was truly an innovation in compassion. But it also sounded expensive. And the seven consecutive years of record resources targeted to homeless people (this year's budget includes an unprecedented eighth year of record resources for homelessness) might make fiscal conservatives wince. But Mangano's position is: What's cheaper: putting homeless people in homes, or letting them cycle through shelters, hospital emergency rooms, jails and the street?

He says, "We discovered through our research that these are some of the most expensive people to the public purse, randomly ricocheting through very expensive primary health, behavioral health, law enforcement and court systems." The results of 65 cost studies revealed that the true costs of chronic homelessness are staggering, between $35,000 and $150,000 a year per person.

CUTTING OUT THE HIGHEST PART OF THE SOUL:

Francis Fukuyama as Teacher of Evil (Peter Augustine Lawler, Winter 2000, First Principles)

The aim of conservatives for some time now has been to resist what C.S. Lewis called “the abolition of man.” One effort at that abolition was communist ideology, another is the therapeutic pragmatism of Richard Rorty and others. But the most dangerous threat today comes from the science of biology. Denial of human distinctiveness is increasingly rooted in the homogenous materialism of evolutionary biology. And advances in biotechnology are providing the means to destroy what is qualitatively different about our species. Especially troubling is the uncritical acceptance of biological reductionism by writers often called conservative. Here I use Walker Percy’s defense of the goodness and mystery of the human being to expose the misanthropic implications of this reductionism in the influential writing of the “neoconservative” Francis Fukuyama. I present this effort as an example of what conservatives should be doing as the twenty-first century begins.

The philosopher-novelist Walker Percy says, contrary to modern thought, that the human being is by nature an alien. People, he adds, feel more like aliens than ever. Modern science has made great progress explaining everything but the human self and soul. Scientific experts tell people that they are fundamentally no different from the other animals, and so they should be happy in a world where lives are more free, prosperous, and secure than ever before. Their feelings of homelessness are either basically irrational or merely physiological. They can be cured through a change in environment, soothing therapeutic or ideological platitudes, or the right mix of chemicals.

The experts are evil, Percy contends, because they want to deprive human beings of their distinctive humanity, of their longings that point them beyond the satisfactions of this world and toward each other, the truth, and God. Their efforts may never completely succeed, but allegedly wise experts—from communist tyrants to therapeutic psychotherapists—have destroyed or needlessly diminished a huge number of human beings. The experts claim, in part, to be motivated by compassion. They want to provide the freedom from misery that the Christian God promised but could not produce in this world. The compassion they claim to feel for others they really feel for themselves. They, too, are aliens, and they want to free themselves from their trouble. They think that by reducing others to comprehensible or simply biological beings they can raise themselves to something like angels. They seek to be at home not in the world of human beings but through its complete transcendence. The world they have created is for angels and pigs, for theorists and consumers, not for human beings.

For Percy the best human life is to be at home with one’s homelessness or alienation, and so to be free to enjoy the good things of the world in consciousness of their limitations. This life is easier for Christians, who have an explanation for why the human being feels like an alien in this world. But it does not necessarily depend on religious belief. It is available to one who can tell the truth about one’s self and live well in acceptance of it. We are born to trouble, and doomed to failure and death. But we have compensations in the joyful sharing of what we can know with others, and in the love of one human being, one self-conscious mortal, for another. And those human goods are only given to aliens, to the beings with language, who can explain everything but themselves. Percy would restore the Socratic or psyche-iatric tradition against psychotherapy. People can be happier as human beings not through platitudes or drugs but through the search for the truth about their extraordinary natures.

From Percy’s perspective,a leading American teacher of evil over the last decade has been Francis Fukuyama.

NATIONS-R-US:

The Expeditionary Imperative: America’s national security structure is designed to confront the challenges of the last century rather than our ­own. (John A. Nagl, Winter 2009, Wilson Quarterly)

Our overly militarized response to Al Qaeda’s attacks, the global war on terror, could be more sensibly recast as a global counterinsurgency ­campaign. Insurgency is an attempt to overthrow a government or change its policies through the illegal use of force; Al Qaeda’s stated ­objective—­to expel the West from the Islamic world and re-establish the ­Caliphate—­can be usefully conceived of as a global insurgency. It would then take a global counterinsurgency campaign to confront this challenge. ­Counterinsurgency—­a coordinated use of all elements of national power to defeat an ­insurgency—­is a slow and difficult process, often requiring years, but it can succeed when well resourced and executed. David Galula, the great French counterinsurgency theorist and veteran of the Algerian War, estimates that a successful counterinsurgency strategy is 80 percent nonmilitary and only 20 percent military—­requiring not just armed forces but assistance to the afflicted government in the areas of politics, economic development, information operations, and governance. An ability to deliver such a coordinated response would be useful not just in the campaign against Al Qaeda, but also to confront emerging threats ranging from terrorists in Pakistan to 21st-century pirates.

Unfortunately, more than seven years into a global counterinsurgency campaign, the United States still lacks many of the nonmilitary capabilities required to secure, assist, and reconstruct societies afflicted by insurgency and terrorism. Prevailing in today’s conflicts will require more than just a few additional resources. It will require an expanded and ­better-­coordinated expeditionary advisory effort involving all agencies of the executive branch, and it must include a ­re-­created U.S. Information Agency to make the American case in the global war of ­ideas.

Defeating an insurgency requires winning the support of the population away from the insurgents, and unlikely as it seems, the “hierarchy of needs” propounded decades ago by humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow is never more applicable than in a combat zone. After obtaining basic security, people want to live and work under the rule of law, with a chance for economic progress. Many of the insurgents I fought as the operations officer of a tank battalion task force in Iraq in 2004 were not motivated by Islamic extremism but by hunger or at worst greed. At the time, Anbar Province was suffering from 70 percent unemployment, and the leaders of the insurgency were offering $100 to anyone who would fire a rocket-propelled grenade at one of my tanks. They would pay a $100 performance bonus if we were forced to call in a medical evacuation helicopter as a result. In this kind of conflict, development and reconstruction aid are perhaps our most valuable weapons. As the new U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (which Ihelped to develop) puts it, “Dollars are bullets.”

Unfortunately, many of the people who are firing America’s dollar bullets today are untrained in that task. Because of a shortage of U.S. diplomats and U.S. Agency for International Development officers willing and able to deploy to combat zones, American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are making daily decisions about the comparative economic benefits of giving microloans to small businesses and investing in water treatment plants. The military trained me well in how to coordinate close air support, artillery strikes, and tank and machine-gun fire, but I was left on my own in determining how to coordinate economic development in Anbar. Since my corner of Iraq included critical enemy support zones between the provincial capital of Ramadi and Fallujah, epicenter of the Sunni insurgency, my mistakes had strategic ­consequences.

In partial recognition of how badly my ­well-­meaning but poorly informed peers and I were conducting this critical aspect of counterinsurgency, the State Department developed provincial reconstruction teams (PRTs), first in Afghanistan in 2003 and two years later in Iraq. There are currently 26 PRTs in Afghanistan, each led by a lieutenant colonel (or Navy commander) and composed of 60 to 100 personnel. More than 30 teams now operate in Iraq. They focus on governance, reconstruction and development, and promoting the rule of law. In Afghanistan, several other nations in the International Security Assistance Force, including Britain and Germany, now contribute PRTs of their ­own.

Although the creation of PRTs was an important step in the direction of building the government we need to win the wars of this century, they lack sufficient resources. The team I visited in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in November was composed almost exclusively of U.S. Air Force personnel, with a sprinkling of civilian experts. In Iraq, the absence of civilian specialists is also a chronic problem.

The State Department is in the midst of further efforts to establish effective civilian control of the political, economic, and social dimensions of ­nation-­building operations. In 2004, it created the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization to oversee these efforts, but this office remains a poorly staffed and funded institution with fewer than 100 people assigned to accomplish its tasks of predicting, planning for, and mitigating the effects of state failure around the globe. To provide more muscle behind this new office, the Bush administration proposed a $250 million Civilian Response Corps, with 250 development and reconstruction experts from different parts of the government ready to deploy to a crisis within 48 hours and many more in ­reserve.

These are noble efforts, but they lack the required scale. Today, there are more musicians assigned to military bands than there are Foreign Service officers in the State Department. While a rousing rendition of John Philip Sousa’s “The Stars and Stripes Forever” always did wonders for my morale in a combat zone, having the economic and political expertise to persuade the people of Anbar not to shoot at me would have been even better.