THE DOG HAS FRIENDS

'Dog is dead' sparked Najaf arrests (News Interactive, September 1, 2003)

TWO Saudis arrested after the Najaf attack in Iraq that killed leading Shiite cleric Mohammad Baqer al-Hakim were picked up after sending an e-mail saying "mission accomplished: the dog is dead", The Times reported today quoting a source close to the Iraqi inquiry.

The men were grabbed by a crowd and taken to the nearest police station after being seen sending the e-mail from an Internet cafe, the source said.

Isn't this precisely the kind of attentiveness and willingness to act that we need from the Shi'ites?

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HARDLY AUDIE

Rufus Wainwright Journeys to 'Gay Hell' and Back (ANTHONY DeCURTIS, August 31, 2003, NY Times)

"I'm a bit hesitant to talk about all this," he said. "I don't know what the impact will be. But I'm only doing it because it might help
somebody -- and to say that there is no such thing as casual crystal meth use!"

Mr. Wainwright, who is gay and has been out since he was a teenager, was not always convinced of that. Methamphetamine is one of a number of drugs -- including ecstasy, cocaine, K (or ketamine, an anesthetic) and alcohol -- to which he has turned over the years to bolster his confidence and to propel his quests for anonymous sex. Despite creating a body of work whose central theme is the search for true love, he has never been in a serious relationship, a consequence, he says, of having been raped by a man he picked up in London when he was 14.

Typically in recent years, he would get high, go online to discover willing partners and arrange meetings. Eventually Mr. Wainwright found himself drawn to a subterranean world that he described in the most lurid terms as a "gay hell."

"I'm not talking about a bar in the meatpacking district," he said.

Mr. Wainwright believes that crystal meth presents specific dangers -- and specific temptations -- for homosexual men, and that its use is a menace to their community. "Years of sexual insecurity, the low-grade discrimination you suffer, the need to belong -- speed takes care of all that in one second," he said. "It was a world where people are going so crazy that they're not making sense any more. If you wanted safe sex, you were a nerd, uncool. I was one of the nerds who did have safe sex, thank God. But I'm still mentally shattered by the whole experience."

"For years, and I mean thousands of years, the gay man's mind has been treated as perverted, clandestine and dirty," he went on, "and speed reinforces and glamorizes that as an ideal. And with drugs, what's more dangerous is more sexually exciting. On that drug I had really horrible thoughts that turned me on. I had a few of those real gay lost weekends, where everything goes out the window, where you want to make pornos or you want to have sex with children. I mean, your mind is just completely ravaged."

That's one heck of a progression: gay men are attracted to the drugs because the rest of us are mean to them and then it's the drugs' fault that they degrade themselves. A more direct conclusion would be that the drug use is consistent with, in fact complimentary to, the sexual deviance.

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CONVULSIVE THERAPY

Bombing Democracy in Iraq (REUEL MARC GERECHT, 8/31/03, NY Times)

The attack, which killed scores of Iraqis, including the prominent cleric Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim--and which came less than a week after a bomb went off at the home of Mr. Hakim's uncle, Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Said al-Hakim -- has convulsed the Shiite community. That should be of vital concern to the United States, whose fortunes in Iraq will rise or fall with the political sentiments of the Shiites, who make up at least 60 percent of Iraq's population.

These bombings were undoubtedly intended to terrorize Iraq's clerical establishment and to snuff out the growing dialogue between mainstream Shiites and Americans. Both ayatollahs had been talking directly to American officials and favored democracy. Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim controlled the only effective Shiite paramilitary force, but had chosen not to direct it against the occupation. This had angered Shiite extremists, notably the young cleric Moktada al-Sadr, leader of a violent faction known as the Sadriyyin.

There is already a lot of finger-pointing, but it may never be totally clear who planned the two bombings: the Sadriyyin, fundamentalist Sunni Muslims, Baath Party loyalists or agents of Iran's hard-core mullahs. Some American officials and Ahmad Chalabi, a member of the Iraqi Governing Council, quickly blamed anti-American Sunnis.

This may well be true, but it is important to note that the Baath Party loyalists and Sunni fundamentalists, at least until now, have kept their distance from the Shiite south, killing "collaborationists" and American G.I.'s only in the Sunni regions. Killing Americans in the south wouldn't be hard ? many operate there with light security ? and could be the best way to derail the United States' post-Saddam planning. Nor, according to Pentagon officials, have the jihadists coming over the Syrian and Iranian borders tried to attack Americans in the

This seems quite wrong. Who cares if we ever find out whether it was "the Sadriyyin, fundamentalist Sunni Muslims, Baath Party loyalists or agents of Iran's hard-core mullahs" that did the bombing; is't the point here that we want the mainstream Shi'ite community to oppose all those groups and to help us get rid of them?

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JUDGE OLSON'S BITTER FRUIIT

Blind to a nightmare (SCOTT FORNEK, August 31, 2003, Chicago Sun-Times)

He built a court system that became a model for the nation. He wrestled with ways to prevent crime, not just punish the criminal. He was a pioneer in the field of criminal psychology.

When he died in 1935, a Chicago Daily News editorial writer predicted that "the interesting thing about Judge [Harry] Olson's life and works is that no one can now write their epilogue, because the full fruit of the man's life may be borne in the future."

Nearly 70 years later, the epilogue has been written. And unfortunately for the judge's memory, some of that fruit is clearly rotten.

A new book paints a dark view of Olson, suggesting that he and other American proponents of the now discredited pseudo-science of eugenics helped fuel one of the most horrific nightmares of modern times.

In War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, award-winning investigative author Edwin Black connects the Holocaust and other Nazi war crimes to the American eugenics movement, a crusade for selective breeding that led to the forced sterilization of nearly 70,000 Americans deemed "unfit."

A best-selling writer on the Holocaust, Black does not blame Olson and his colleagues for the Nazi atrocities. But he does argue that they hatched the quest to create a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed master race here in the United States.

He points the finger at top scholars of the era, political leaders, self-styled reformers and the wealthy industrialists who funded it all.

"What we have here is corporate philanthropy engaged in ethnic cleansing," Black said.

And Olson's role was to help craft a U.S. sterilization law. It would be imitated by Nazi Germany--a feat Olson viewed with pride before his death in 1935.

"It was Judge Olson who helped proliferate and propagate these bizarre theories into every jurisdiction--local, state and national . . . and overseas," Black said. "He was a major mover in some of the most far-reaching persecution, oppression and genocidal campaigns the world has ever seen."

Despite Olson's prominence in the eugenics movement, he is a minor character in Black?s book, published by Four Walls Eight Windows and due out Sept. 7.

So the Sun-Times decided to take a look at Olson, poring over yellowed newspaper clippings, moldy letters and personal papers once stored in an Indiana chicken coop and musty documents on file at the Chicago Municipal Reference Library.

Was Olson a malicious race theorist or a would-be reformer with bizarre ideas about the mentally ill, caught up in a movement that spiraled out of control?

This is somewhat unfair in several ways: first, the connection between the euthanasia movement and the Holocaust is far more
important, but we don't like to talk about that because euthanasia is politically popular, while you don't have to worry about offending the few remaining eugenicists; second, whenever you lift a man out of his times and judge him by the standards of your own you are doing him a disservice. This article ends with the following passage:

Barry Mehler, director of the Institute for the Study of Academic Racism at Ferris State University, said he believes it is pointless to try to discern Olson's true motives, arguing that they are irrelevant to what he must ultimately be judged on.

"By the damage that was done to tens of thousands of victims in the United States, who were sterilized, by the millions of victims worldwide," Mehler said. "The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

"You don't judge people by their intentions. You judge people by the outcomes."

But if we accept this as true then the Justices who voted in favor of Roe v. Wade and thereby paved the way for forty million abortions must be held to be evil, rather than seen to be morally blind on the issue, which seems a fairer assessment. One's actions can result in evil without one being evil. There actually is a deffirence between those who have diminished the value that we place on human life by advocating things like eugenics, abortion, euthanasia, etc., and those who then used this dimishment as an excuse to engage in systematic murder. The distinction is of no consolation to the victims but is owed to the advocates.

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WE ALWAYS RUN THE EXPERIMENT

Girls get extra school help while boys get Ritalin (USA Today, 8/28/2003)

In classrooms nationwide, girls are pulling ahead of boys academically. Recent federal testing data show that what starts out as a modest gap in elementary-level reading scores turns into a yawning divide by high school. In 12th grade, 44% of girls rate as proficient readers on federal tests, compared with 28% of boys. And while boys still score slightly higher on federal math and science exams, their advantage is slipping.

Most startling is that little is being done to correct the imbalances. All of the major players — schools, education colleges and researchers — largely ignore the gender gap. Instead of pursuing sound solutions, many educators merely advocate prescribing more attention-focusing Ritalin for the boys, who receive the drug at four to eight times the rate of girls, according to different estimates. "Too often the first reaction to an attention problem is 'Let's medicate,' " says Rockville, Md., child psychologist Neil Hoffman. "Some schools are quick to recommend solutions before they've fully evaluated the problem." [...]

One fact explains why educators are ignoring boys' needs: You can't address a problem that you don't admit exists. The U.S. Department of Education concedes that no serious research is available comparing different instructional methods that might help boys. In fact, many education researchers are hostile toward research aimed at exploring gender differences in learning.

Last April, when Kenneth Dragseth, superintendent of schools in Edina, Minn., presented a paper describing his district's gender gap at the American Educational Research Association's annual meeting in Chicago, he says the reception ranged from chilly to hostile. Female education researchers in the audience questioned whether helping boys would mean hurting girls.

Their attitude follows years of lobbying by groups such as the American Association of University Women, which alerted educators to the fact that girls were being shortchanged academically in the fields of math and science. The extra attention helped focus schools on girls' difficulties, but it has made it too easy for educators to overlook the problems of boys. Among them:

--Boys and girls learn differently. The best research on boy-girl learning differences is produced more by accident than by design. The lack of data in this field can hurt girls as much as boys. For instance, as part of an ongoing 20-year dyslexia study focusing on Connecticut schools, Yale neuroscientist and pediatrician Sally Shaywitz discovered that schools were identifying four times as many dyslexic boys as girls. Yet when her team entered schools to screen children, it diagnosed just as many dyslexic girls as boys. Shaywitz found that the mostly female teaching staff was quicker to identify rambunctious boys than quiet girls.

Ritalin is in many ways the first great "success" of the age of bioengineering. Parents, teachers, schools, doctors, etc. have found a way to make boys more docile and easier to control. These are, of course, the people we'd expect to have the boys' best interests at heart, if anyone does, but they don't: they are self-interested. If there's a drug that will quiet the kids down then give it to them and the secondary effects be damned. Welcome to our future.

MORE (via Mike Daley):
Do the math: Girls tops on campuses (Kay Lazar, August 31, 2003, Boston Herald)

"I don't mind being superior, education-wise, to someone I'm dating,'' said Leann Gould, 23, a first-year law student at Northeastern, where women command a 64 percent majority of the law school's freshmen class.

"But I am concerned about finding a man who would accept this,'' she added.

For Northeastern sophomore Liz Schwartz, 19, a nation of less-educated men is not such a bad thing.

"There would be more opportunities for (women) if the guys weren't as qualified,'' she said.

Statewide, female students command a 57.5 percent majority among private and public colleges, according to the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities.

Even in schools that have traditionally attracted more men - males comprised 66 percent of MIT's undergrads a decade ago - women are gaining ground. Today, women make up 41 percent of MIT's undergrads, and they outnumber men in 15 of the school's 22 undergraduate majors.

Some schools with large female majorities are aggressively working to level the gender imbalance. BU, for instance, says it is "giving more weight'' in admissions to SAT scores - where men traditionally score higher - and redesigning its brochures from ones that show mostly women to images that are more mixed.

The point being that the SAT tests ability while the conferring of degrees expresses "qualification". Reducing emphasis on the former in order to achieve the latter was really a rather straightforward exercise in social engineering when you get right down to it.

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BOOKNOTES

George Washington's False Teeth: An Unconventional Guide to the Eighteenth Century by Robert Darnton (C-SPAN, 8/31/03, 8 & 11 pm)

A master historian's excavations into the past unearth a world that is unexpected and compelling.

The most famous character in eighteenth-century Paris, apart from the public hangman, was "Le Grand Thomas," a tooth puller who operated on the Pont-Neuf. A gigantic man seated high above the surrounding supplicants, he commanded instructions to his assistants and the "toothaches seemed to expire at his feet."

George Washington was not so lucky. He was
inaugurated as president in 1789 with one tooth in his mouth, a lower left bicuspid. The Father of His Country had sets of false teeth that were made of everything but wood, from elephant ivory and walrus tusk to the teeth of a fellow human.

With characteristic learning and bracing insight, Robert Darnton shows us that the Enlightenment had false teeth too?that it was not the Father of Our Modern World, responsible for all its advances and transgressions. In restoring the Enlightenment to human scale, Darnton locates its real significance as a movement, a cause, a campaign to change minds and reform institutions. So too with the French Revolution, another icon of the eighteenth century: Darnton explores its origins in the gossip, songs, and broadsides that formed the political nervous system of Paris in the Old Regime.

Figures that we think we know--Voltaire, Franklin, Jefferson, Rousseau, Condorcet--emerge here afresh, their vitality (if not their teeth) intact. Was the leader of the Girondists, Jacques-Pierre Brissot, a dedicated revolutionary or a police spy? Darnton shows the past to be an unruly place, sometimes confounding to the present, always unexpected, compelling, and rewarding.

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PRACTICING DECONSTRUCTION IS NOT CONSTRUCTIVE.

The Unbearable Complexity of Being (Joshua Green, Boston Globe, 8/31/03)

IT'S NOT EVERY DAY that a professor issues a public apology to his students for leading them astray intellectually. But in his most recent book, "The Moment of Complexity" (Chicago), Mark C. Taylor, a distinguished professor of humanities at Williams College, does just that.

Nearly 20 years ago, Taylor established himself as a preeminent American practitioner of deconstruction with his book "Erring: A Postmodern A/Theology." But in "The Moment of Complexity," which appears this week in paperback, he claims he will no longer teach students the paralyzing deconstructive conceit that "all they have to look forward to is the endless struggle to undo systems and structures that cannot be undone." Deconstruction, an unregenerate product of the Cold War, is addicted to futility, Taylor writes.

Here is Richard Posner on deconstruction:

Orthodox language theory regards all these impediments to perfect conceptual transfer, or "intersubjectivity," as impurities or corruptions that nomally, if not always, can be overcome. And this is the point against which decontruction mounts its theoretical assault: it insists that to regard those properties of signifiers that impede communication as secondary is arbitrary and culture-bound rather than, as the orthodox theorists suppose, logical or "natural." It is just as logical, just as natural, deconstruction insists, to subordinate the communicative function of discourse to the communication-impeding effects of the signifiers that the speaker or writer uses, and thus to attend to the "play of the signifiers," which is to say to the relations between the signifiers and other concepts besides the one intended to be signified. The practitioner of deconstruction may take an ostensibly serious prose passage and immediately get hiung up on the first word, which may be an unintended pun or a homonym or a false cognate or may contain a subordinate meaning (perhaps deeply buried in its root) at war with the surface meaning. Or he may become fascinated with the shape of the letters or the visual pattern that they make on the page. Or he may juxtapose passages that are unrelated at the level of commuication, in order to jar the reader out of his conventional response and into attending to the play of the signifiers. Or he may treat an earlier writing as a commentary on a later one. Moreover, consistent with his program of forcing attention to the noncommunicative aspect of language, the deconstructionist will insist on the problematic character of regarding an author as "present" in his text in the same way tat we suppose a speaker to be present in his utterance. He will point out that writing, by its permanence (relative to speech), can outlive the communicative occasion that brought it forth by outliving the author, the readers whom the author intended to address, and its original linguistic and cultural context. [Emphasis added.]

Posner, Richard, Law and Literature, A Misunderstood Relation (Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, 1988), at 212-213.

I would ordinarily make some snide comment about it taking Taylor twenty years to figure out that deconstructionism is not constructive, but to absolve him of any blame if any of his students were so far gone as to take this seriously. But Posner goes on to note "Cain's mordant comment on Derrida's contribution to Deconstruction and Criticism, . . . 'for readers with a lifetime to spare, there is also a 100-page essay by Jacques Derrida, dealing with a subject yet to be determined'" (Ibid., at 215 n.5 (citation omitted)), which makes me wonder if Taylor hasn't crammed a lifetime of learning into twenty short years.

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THE LIGHT SLOWLY DAWNS

Worried Democrats See Daunting '04 Hurdles (ADAM NAGOURNEY, 8/31/03, NY Times)

The race for the Democratic presidential nomination shifts into a more intense phase this Labor Day weekend, with some party leaders worried about the strength of their field of candidates and fearful of what they view as President Bush's huge advantage going into next year's election.

Many prominent Democrats said that Mr. Bush might be vulnerable, given problems with the economy, and continued American fatalities in Iraq. But they said he could be unseated only by an aggressive, partisan challenge that built on Democratic anger lingering from the 2000 election, and by a nominee who somehow managed to survive a complicated nominating fight that was pulling their party to the left.

This is not an election that the Democrats can win. If there's any question about that, consider this: if the election had been held any time over the past two months--while the daily killings of GI's in Iraq have been going on and while the economy has been flat--Mr. Bush would have gotten 54+% of the vote. In other words, given the conditions that Democrats hope for, the President would have been re-elected easily.

But it gets worse: Democrats are now counting on the economy staying in the doldrums and the Iraq situation being the same (and our primary foreign policy concern) a year from now. Those are absurd expectations and do not comprise an election strategy. They are a hope against history and against the interests of the nation. Add in the inevitability of a New Englander liberal as the nominee and you've the recipe for not just a Bush victory but an epic one. The only safe state for the Democrats at this point isn't even a state but the District of Columbia. George Bush will not only be competitive but could win everywhere else, including the home states of both Dr. Dean (when did that start?) and John Kerry--which both elected Republican governors just this past November.

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LATE, BUT WELCOME

U.S. and the Iraqis Discuss Creating Big Militia Force (DEXTER FILKINS, August 31, 2003, NY Times)

Iraqis involved in the talks said the force could consist of thousands of Iraqis already screened by the various political parties for prior affiliations with Saddam Hussein's government. Iraqi officials said such a militia could ultimately take control of Iraqi cities from American soldiers.

Some Iraqi leaders said a force of several thousand men, most of them with military experience, could be ready in little more than a month.

"The situation has changed, and there is a new receptiveness to the idea," said Mudhar Shahkawt, a prominent Iraqi exile who took part in the discussions today. "This force could move inside the cities and allow coalition forces to withdraw to places outside." [...]

The discussions about an all-Iraqi security force followed the devastating car bombing in the holy city of Najaf on Friday, when 82 people were killed and 95 were listed as wounded. Prominent among the dead was Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim, one of the most revered leaders of the world's 120 millions Shiite Muslims and a political moderate who had showed himself willing to deal with the American occupiers.

The attack, coupled with the repeated assaults on Americans and Iraqis here, has prompted leaders of several political parties to declare that they have lost confidence in the ability of the Americans to protect their leaders and sacred places.

Today, they began to demand that Iraqis become more involved in security. Indeed, some political leaders said they might be unable to keep their own followers from moving against their enemies, especially if the attacks continued.

"The knife is at our neck," Said Nael Musawi, a Shiite religious leader, told a group of American soldiers guarding the gate of the Coalition Provisional Authority headquarters in Baghdad, as thousands of demonstrators swirled about them. "I don't know how much longer I can control my people."

It';s an obvious failure of American policy that such a force wasn't put together immediately and power turned over more quickly, but this looks promising. One troublesome note: the Shi'ites should be encouraged to move against their enemies, not restrained from doing so. Reprisals for actions that occurred under Saddamite rule are a healthy thing.

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HUMANITARIANISM IS ITS OWN PENALTY

Condi's Phony History - Sorry, Dr. Rice, postwar Germany was nothing like Iraq. (Daniel Benjamin, Slate, 8/29/03)

In practice, Werwolf amounted to next to nothing. The mayor of Aachen was assassinated on March 25, 1945, on Himmler's orders. This was not a nice thing to do, but it happened before the May 7 Nazi surrender at Reims. It's hardly surprising that Berlin sought to undermine the American occupation before the war was over. And as the U.S. Army's official history, The U.S. Army in the Occupation of Germany 1944-1946, points out, the killing was 'probably the Werwolf's most sensational achievement.'

Indeed, the organization merits but two passing mentions in Occupation of Germany, which dwells far more on how docile the Germans were once the Americans rolled in—and fraternization between former enemies was a bigger problem for the military than confrontation. Although Gen. Eisenhower had been worrying about guerrilla warfare as early as August 1944, little materialized. There was no major campaign of sabotage. There was no destruction of water mains or energy plants worth noting. In fact, the far greater problem for the occupying forces was the misbehavior of desperate displaced persons, who accounted for much of the crime in the American zone.

I've seen and heard accounts of the German Werwolves, trained to resist the occupation, that are more sympathetic to the Administration's account, including a story on NPR yesterday, but frankly I don't care. The lesson I take from this is that, in this limited area, there is a price to pay for not bombing your enemy to the edge of existence, in not decimating his army and in not executing the top officials of his government. In not, that is, making it evident to the meanest intelligence and the most fanatical believer, that he has been beaten. I agree with the Administration in making this trade off, which, among other things, certainly lowered our combat deaths. But now the bill is due and we're going to be paying it for a while.

MORE:
On the history of the Werwolves, see: here and here, but see here. If Biddiscombe can be trusted, it looks like the Werwolves had successes, but mostly in occupied territory before the war was over. After the war, although they tried to continue to resist, they were opposed by the general population and didn't accomplish much. There is some indication that the Werwolves were more successful in the Russian sectors, where the population was much more eager to slow down the occupation and may even have killed a Russian general.

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OH, SO HE DOES KNOW THAT

Thrown aside: Pettitte, Yankees strong-arm Sox as Martinez falters (Bob Hohler, Boston Globe, 8/31/03).

Running baseball teams for nearly a quarter-century has convinced Red Sox CEO Larry Lucchino to emblazon one overriding principle in his formula for success.

'You need pitching, pitching, and more pitching,' Lucchino has said from Day 1 of spring training.

What he got yesterday was something else altogether. While his widely feared offense continued to rip apart opposing pitchers like so much confetti, several of Lucchino's hurlers, including the pep-less Pedro Martinez, served as little more than party favors for the Yankees, who romped to a 10-7 victory before 34,350 at Fenway Park.

Despite the triumph of evil, this was a great game to be at. Being at the Park was as much fun as ever, my son gets more and more from the game with each one he attends and the Sox kept it close until the end. This was a particularly good game for Boston's favorite sport, second guessing the manager. Arroyo looked good and should have been kept in. Pedro should have been yanked earlier. Embree makes you nervous just walking to the mound.

Grady Little has two bad habits. First, he makes things too complicated, pinch hitting and trying for tactical pitching changes. These don't work that well at the best of times and are dangerous when facing Joe Torre. Second, and a little contradictorily, he always waits a little too long -- one or two batters too long -- before yanking a tiring pitcher. Having said that, Pedro was pitching nicely in the first three innings, but the Yankees (they really are a great team, damn them) chipped away at him, fouling off as many pitches as they could and running up the pitch count. By the 4th, he had thrown almost 100 pitches and was in trouble. That's the sort of small thing that adds up to a championship. The Sox, on the other hand, rarely start a rally before having two outs, the sort of small thing that adds up to 85 years of frustration.

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WHO, OH, WHO, CAN SAVE US?

Worried Democrats See Daunting '04 Hurdles (Adam Nagourney, New York Times, 8/31/03)

The race for the Democratic presidential nomination shifts into a more intense phase this Labor Day weekend, with some party leaders worried about the strength of their field of candidates and fearful of what they view as President Bush's huge advantage going into next year's election.

Many prominent Democrats said that Mr. Bush might be vulnerable, given problems with the economy, and continued American fatalities in Iraq. But they said he could be unseated only by an aggressive, partisan challenge that built on Democratic anger lingering from the 2000 election, and by a nominee who somehow managed to survive a complicated nominating fight that was pulling their party to the left.

'It's going to be tough,' said Walter F. Mondale, the former vice president who lost his challenge to Ronald Reagan in 1984. 'You're trying to beat an incumbent who has all this money, and who has got the field all to himself, while all this infighting is going on in the Democratic Party.' . . .

"I think it is a weak field," said John Meyer, 41, an architect from Henniker, who said he was waiting to see if Gen. Wesley K. Clark would enter the race. "A lot of them are lackluster candidates." . . .

But many Democrats express reservations about both these New Englanders, and that is reflected in the failure of either to draw the institutional party support that typically rallies around a perceived winner. Some Democrats worry that Dr. Dean would prove an easy mark for Mr. Bush, given his liberal views and his lack of any experience in foreign affairs; others warn that Mr. Kerry is an awkward public figure who has run a timorous campaign. . . .

Associates of General Clark have said he has told them that he will probably join the race. But aides to most of the other candidates say he is too late to have a good shot, and they view him more as competing for a second spot on the ticket. . . .

Though the Labor Day weekend is a traditional demarcation point in American campaigns, the Democrats have spent much of the past eight months making policy speeches, raising money, nailing down supporters and traveling to states like Iowa, South Carolina, Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma and, of course, here in New Hampshire. But they are now preparing to move into a significantly more intense and higher profile part of the race. . . .

What is increasingly clear, several Democrats said, is that primary voters are not likely to choose someone who is promising to run a nuanced campaign against Mr. Bush. Dr. Dean has set the tone on that, as he made clear again today. . . .

One prominent Democrat said that while Mr. Bush was "eminently beatable," the Democratic nominating process seemed nowhere near producing someone who could do the job. "The trouble in 2004 is not that Bush is going to be strong, but rather than we are going to be weak," this official said.

There is so much here. Does anyone other than the Times, for example, still take advice from Walter Mondale, the only man ever to lose elections in all fifty states? There is also a lot that's not here. Has the Times not noticed that popular attention is being drained into California, making it even harder for the Democrats to make progress against the President and changing the traditional rule that people focus on the primary races after Labor Day? Why not mention the President's belief that August is a wasted month during which he doesn't bother to make policy speeches or counter attacks against him? Couldn't they spare a sentence for the effect on the Senate if Edwards has decided to give up a long-shot senate reelection for no shot at the presidency?

There is also less here than meets the eye. This is a column that gets written whenever a popular incumbent president is heading into reelection. Just in the nature of things, his party is solid and unified while the opposition has any number of second-tier people seeking its nomination. Because the president is popular, he looks like a giant compared to the pygmies running against him. Fighting an incumbent is always an uphill battle. The party is always split between those who think they need to draw sharp lines to show how empty the incumbent's platform is (Walter Mondale, anyone) and those who think they need to come as close as they can to the incumbent, while arguing that they will be more competent (Michael Dukakis).

The real point of this article, though, made at the beginning, the middle and the end, is that the best nominee is not running. The field is weak. Kerry is toast. Dean is muddling and too far to the right on various important issues. Gephardt will lose Iowa and drop out. Clark, who it might be thought is the kind of tough, strong candidate with a compelling story that the Democrat's need, is really only seeking the v.p. spot (true enough, as it happens). Does the New York Times know of any possible aggressive, partison candidate who could step in after Labor Day, who could rally and unify the party, who would not be wounded by vicious primary attacks, who could viciously attack the president, who could raise a lot of money, who could be strong not weak, who is not lackluster, who has a natural claim to build on Democratic anger lingering from the 2000 election and who can be presented as not too far left? Who is the New York Time's dream candidate and how do you spell Chapaqua?

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WHO AMONG US WAS NOT A RECIDIVIST?

Cyclist to stand trial for 'falling off bike' (Associated Press, 30th August 2003)

An 11-year-old boy in Greece is to stand trial after falling off his bike during a race.

The boy on the eastern Aegean Sea island of Chios has been ordered to stand trial on October 13 for allegedly violating eight articles of the penal code and one traffic violation for falling off his bicycle during an annual race. [...]

The island's prosecutor said the boy fell because he was "not driving carefully and with constant rapt attention" and ordered him to appear in juvenile court.

Lucky he wasn't trying to sell lemonade from the bike or he might get the death penalty.

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MORE CHOICE

Cole offers students new options: Kids select 'academy' best suited to individual interests (HEATHER LAKE, August 30, 2003, Antelope Valley Press)

Teachers and administrators at Cole Middle School are challenging the traditional methods of teaching by offering its student body a choice in how they learn.

When the bell rang at the start of this school year, 40% of the sixth- through eighth-grade student body were not only checking out who they would be sitting with in home room, but also who they would be sitting with in almost every class, until they graduate the eighth grade.

Beginning last December, students and parents were disseminated information about academies and asked to choose the one of three they thought was the best fit.

Two smaller academies, a Science and Technology academy and an Oral Written and Visual Arts academy, each contain 20% of the student body.

The remaining 60% of the students are in the Liberal Arts academy, so named in keeping with the "looping" theme, but basically a traditional learning option.

Looping is the name for the process that puts students with the same teacher for certain subjects year after year.

If all goes as planned, sixth-graders just starting at Cole will be the first group to graduate from the eighth grade having spent their entire middle school education not only with the same students but for the most part, with the same teachers.

This isn't necessarily the sort of school you'd choose for your kid, but imagine a system with hundreds of thousands of such experiments going on and the best ones being adopted by other schools.

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AL QAEDA IN A QUAGMIRE

Al-Qaida operative arrested in Iraq: Man allegedly planned to use missiles on troops (JOHN HENDREN, 8/30/03, Los Angeles Times)

A man believed to be an al-Qaida operative, found with 11 surface-to-air missiles, has been arrested in Iraq by U.S. troops and has acknowledged that he had been training with Ansar al-Islam fighters to use the weapons against American forces, a senior U.S. official said Friday.

The arrest marks the first time the U.S.-led coalition has apprehended someone believed to be a member of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terrorist network who is operating in Iraq.

The unnamed suspect was captured during an Aug. 20 raid in Ramadi, west of Baghdad, the capital, along with two other unnamed men, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. At least one of the other two men was believed to be a member of the extremist group Ansar al-Islam, the official said.

Intelligence officials said they found the suspected al-Qaida member's account, given during interrogation, "credible."

Al Qaeda has an advantage in asymmetrical warfare, not in going face to face with our troops. Iraq may be their Vietnam.

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YOU PAID WHAT FOR WHO?

Bustamante receives $500,000 from Indians; FPPC has doubts (Alexa H. Bluth, August 30, 2003, Sacramento Bee)

A day after meeting with tribal gambling interests, Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante on Friday reported receiving a $500,000 campaign donation from a tribe -- the second six-figure contribution he has taken from Indians for the Oct. 7 recall election.

But it remains a matter of legal interpretation whether the $500,000 check Bustamante received Thursday from the Pechanga Band of Mission Indians and other large contributions he has received were proper donations under state campaign finance rules.

The state's Fair Political Practices Commission issued a statement late Thursday questioning the Democrat's practice of collecting large donations in an old campaign account for his recall efforts.

Seizing on what some believe is a loophole in the new Proposition 34 campaign finance laws, Bustamante has collected $1.1 million in the past week from Indian tribes and unions in his 2002 lieutenant governor's account, which he plans to transfer to the committee raising money for his recall bid.

Looks like the Indians' business sense hasn't improved any since they sold Manhattan Island for $24. At the rate they're paying they ought to be able to buy Penelope Cruz instead of Cruz Bustamante.

MORE:
Bustamante's MEChA past fuel for conservative critics (Philip J. LaVelle, 8/30/03, San Diego UNION-TRIBUNE)

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SORRY

YACCS

Friday, August 29, 2003 12:15 PM EST
Rate Your Music and YACCS are down due to a server failure.
Services are expected to return to normal in 24 - 48 hours.
Thanks,
Hossein Sharifi

We're painfully conscious of the fact that the comments here are superior to the posts and hope this situation will be rectified soon. Thank you for your patience and thank all of you who take the time to comment.

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NEGIOTIATING WITH THEMSELVES

WTO gives final approval to cheap drugs deal (AP, 8/30/03)

Following an impassioned appeal from Africa, the World Trade Organization on Saturday sealed a deal to allow poor countries to import cheap copies of patented drugs for killer diseases like AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis.

"All people of good will and good conscience will be very happy today with the decision that the WTO members have made," said Kenyan Ambassador Amina Chawahir Mohamed. "It's especially good news for the people of Africa who desperately need access to affordable medicine."

The United States has been trying to protect the interests of drug companies, which feared they could lose control of patent rights. U.S. concessions this week broke an eight-month deadlock on the issue.

The final breakthrough followed a meeting Friday during which representatives of many African countries pleaded with other diplomats to stop trying to win last-minute advantages for their own nations. [...]

But groups campaigning to give poor people better access to lifesaving drugs criticized the agreement.

"Today's deal was designed to offer comfort to the U.S. and the Western pharmaceutical industry," said Ellen 't Hoen of the medical aid group Doctors Without Borders. "Unfortunately it offers little comfort for poor patients. Global patent rules will continue to drive up the price of medicines."

Pretty pitiful that the developing countries had to plead with each other to stop mucking up the deal and the lobbyists who are supposedly trying to help them are still opposed.

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TWO TO TANGO

What are the roots of religious violence?: A professor travels the world for an answer a review of Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill By Jessica Stern (Jason Thompson, August 24, 2003, San Francisco Chronicle)

Fundamentalism makes life simpler, dividing the world neatly into jihadi and infidel, homeland and axis of evil. "Religion is a kind of technology," as Jessica Stern puts it in "Terror in the Name of God." "It is terribly seductive in its ability to soothe and explain, but it is also dangerous."
Religious violence springs from a desire to find a clear purpose in the confusion of a world dominated by American capitalism. Fundamentalism fills the "God-shaped hole" (Sartre's phrase) in secular modernity. Terrorist groups emerge in response to sociopolitical grievances, using religion to enlist desperate individuals who justify murder in the guise of martyrdom. Believers sublimate feelings of rage and hopelessness in the blissful experience of a divine-sanctioned mandate to avenge the perceived oppressor. Terrorism is less a military target than a powerful idea. [...]

For all its horrors, terrorism is comprehensible. Fundamentalism provides an insidiously seductive story that gives anomie an outlet. In the view of extremists, a New World Order has "created an engine of modernity that is stealing the identity of the oppressed." Religious terror strives to attack the industrialized world both physically and psychologically. The latter is more dangerous.

"Perhaps the most truly evil aspect of religious terrorism is that it aims at destroying moral distinctions themselves," Stern concludes. "Its goal is to confuse not only its sympathizers, but those who aim to fight it." The hardest battle is against the creep of spiritual dread. In that battle, through its explanatory power and lucid insight, Stern's book provides a valuable psychic shield.

Karen Armstrong, in her unintentionally hilarious book Battle for God, makes the point that:

We tend to assume that the people of the past were (more or less) like us, but in fact their spiritual lives were rather different. In particular, they evolved two ways of thinking, speaking, and acquiring knowledge, which scholars have called mythos and logos. Both were essential; they were regarded as complementary ways of arriving at truth, and each had its special area of competence. Myth was regarded as primary; it was concerned with what was thought to be timeless and constant in our existence. Myth looked back to the origins of life, to the foundations of culture, and to the deepest levels of the human mind. Myth was not concerned with practical matters, but with meaning. Unless we find some significance in our lives, we mortal men and women fall very easily into despair. The mythos of a society provided people with a context that made sense of their day-to-day lives; it directed their attention to the eternal and the universal. It was also rooted in what we would call the unconscious mind. The various mythological stories, which were not intended to be taken literally, were an ancient form of psychology. When people told stories about heroes who descended into the underworld, struggled through labyrinths, or fought with monsters, they were bringing to light the obscure regions of the subconscious realm, which is not accessible to purely rational investigation, but which has a profound effect upon our experience and behavior. Because of the dearth of myth in our modern society, we have had to evolve the science of psychoanalysis to help us to deal with our inner world.

Myth could not be demonstrated by rational proof; its insights were more intuitive, similar to those of art, music, poetry, or sculpture. Myth only became a reality when it was embodied in cult, rituals, and ceremonies which worked aesthetically upon worshippers, evoking within them a sense of sacred significance and enabling them to apprehend the deeper currents of existence. Myth and cult were so inseparable that it is a matter of scholarly debate which came first: the mythical narrative or the rituals attached to it. Myth was also associated with mysticism, the descent into the psyche by means of structured disciplines of focus and concentration which have been evolved in all cultures as a means of acquiring intuitive insight. Without a cult or mystical practice, the myths of religion would make no sense. They would remain abstract and seem incredible, in rather the same way as a musical score remains opaque to most of us and needs to be interpreted instrumentally before we can appreciate its beauty.

In the premodern world, people had a different view of history. They were less interested than we are in what actually happened, but more concerned with the meaning of an event. Historical incidents were not seen as unique occurrences, set in a far-off time, but were thought to be external manifestations of constant, timeless realities. Hence history would tend to repeat itself, because there was nothing new under the sun. Historical narratives tried to bring out this eternal dimension. Thus, we do not know what really occurred when the ancient Israelites escaped from Egypt and passed through the Sea of Reeds. The story has been deliberately written as a myth, and linked with other stories about rites of passage, immersion in the deep, and gods splitting a sea in two to create a new reality. Jews experience this myth every year in the rituals of the Passover Seder, which brings this strange story into their own lives and helps them to make it their own. One could say that unless an historical event is mythologized in this way, and liberated from the past in an inspiring cult, it cannot be religious. To ask whether the Exodus from Egypt took place exactly as recounted in the Bible or to demand historical and scientific evidence to prove that it is factually true is to mistake the nature and purpose of this story. It is to confuse mythos with logos.

Logos was equally important. Logos was the rational, pragmatic, and scientific thought that enabled men and women to function well in the world. We may have lost the sense of mythos in the West today, but we are very familiar with logos, which is the basis of our society. Unlike myth, logos must relate exactly to facts and correspond to external realities if it is to be effective. It must work efficiently in the mundane world. We use this logical, discursive reasoning when we have to make things happen, get something done, or persuade other people to adopt a particular course of action. Logos is practical. Unlike myth, which looks back to the beginnings and to the foundations, logos forges ahead and tries to find something new: to elaborate on old insights, achieve a greater control over our environment, discover something fresh, and invent something novel.

In the premodern world, both mythos and logos were regarded as indispensable. Each would be impoverished without the other. Yet the two were essentially distinct, and it was held to be dangerous to confuse mythical and rational discourse. They had separate jobs to do. Myth was not reasonable; its narratives were not supposed to be demonstrated empirically. It provided the context of meaning that made our practical activities worthwhile. You were not supposed to make mythos the basis of a pragmatic policy. If you did so, the results could be disastrous, because what worked well in the inner world of the psyche was not readily applicable to the affairs of the external world. When, for example, Pope Urban II summoned the First Crusade in 1095, his plan belonged to the realm of logos. He wanted the knights of Europe to stop fighting one another and tearing the fabric of Western Christendom apart, and to expend their energies instead in a war in the Middle East and so extend the power of his church. But when this military expedition became entangled with folk mythology, biblical lore, and apocalyptic fantasies, the result was catastrophic, practically, militarily, and morally. Throughout the long crusading project, it remained true that whenever logos was ascendant, the Crusaders prospered. They performed well on the battlefield, created viable colonies in the Middle East, and learned to relate more positively with the local population. When, however, Crusaders started making a mythical or mystical vision the basis of their policies, they were usually defeated and committed terrible atrocities.

Logos had its limitations too. It could not assuage human pain or sorrow. Rational arguments could make no sense of tragedy. Logos could not answer questions about the ultimate value of human life. A scientist could make things work more efficiently and discover wonderful new facts about the physical universe, but he could not explain the meaning of life. That was the preserve of myth and cult.

By the eighteenth century, however, the people of Europe and America had achieved such astonishing success in science and technology that they began to think that logos was the only means to truth and began to discount mythos as false and superstitious. It is also true that the new world they were creating contradicted the dynamic of the old mythical spirituality. Our religious experience in the modern world has changed, and because an increasing number of people regard scientific rationalism alone as true, they have often tried to turn the mythos of their faith into logos. Fundamentalists have also made this attempt. This confusion has led to more problems.

We need to understand how our world has changed. The first part of this book will, therefore, go back to the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, when the people of Western Europe had begun to develop their new science. We will also examine the mythical piety of the premodern agrarian civilization, so that we can see how the old forms of faith worked. It is becoming very difficult to be conventionally religious in the brave new world. Modernization has always been a painful process. People feel alienated and lost when fundamental changes in their society make the world strange and unrecognizable. We will trace the impact of modernity upon the Christians of Europe and America, upon the Jewish people, and upon the Muslims of Egypt and Iran. We shall then be in a position to see what the fundamentalists were trying to do when they started to create this new form of faith toward the end of the nineteenth century.

Fundamentalists feel that they are battling against forces that threaten their most sacred values. During a war it is very difficult for combatants to appreciate one another's position. We shall find that modernization has led to a polarization of society, but sometimes, to prevent an escalation of the conflict, we must try to understand the pain and perceptions of the other side. Those of us--myself included--who relish the freedoms and achievements of modernity find it hard to comprehend the distress these cause religious fundamentalists. Yet modernization is often experienced not as a liberation but as an aggressive assault.

That "God-shaped hole" of Sartre's is mythos and the hole is real. Mere reason or logos can not fill our lives. It can't answer the questions that really matter to us--how should we live? why are we here?--instead it tries to answer questions that don't much matter--by what physical process did the tail become a coccyx? As Ms Armstrong says, the modernists have made the mistake of trying to make a faith out of reason and fundamentalists have made the mistake of trying to equate their faith with reason.

We've a tendency, especially the media and liberal elites who think that logos suffices, to look only at fundamentalism as the source of the problem, but to do so is to study only the reaction, not the action, that is the true precipitator of the crisis. If fundamentalism is one extreme, it's important to recognize that a thoroughly secularized and rationalized modernity lies at the other extreme. If the answer to how we should live and think about the world doesn't lie somewhere in the middle, then we'll all have to choose sides and modernity isn't as compelling a belief system as some folks would like to think.

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LIGHT FOR THE WORLD

J.R.R. Tolkien's Sanctifying Myth (Zenit, 8/30/2003)

Tolkien wrote in an oft-quoted letter to a close friend in 1953 that "The Lord of the Rings" is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. And Tolkien was a devout and practicing Catholic throughout most of his life. According to his son Michael, Roman Catholicism "pervaded all his thinking, beliefs and everything else."...

My personal favorite [Christian symbol] is the Elvish Lembas, translated as the "way bread" or "life bread." Even one piece of the bread can sustain a person for a day. Tolkien wrote that it "fed the will," and certainly without it, neither Frodo nor Sam would have made the journey across Mordor and up Mount Doom....

When Gandalf faces the Balrog, he not only accepts death, but he names his master, the Secret Fire. According to what Tolkien told a friend, the Secret Fire was the Holy Spirit....

True myth, [Tolkien held], drew its inspiration from the incarnation, death and resurrection of Christ. Tolkien wrote in his academic essay, "On Fairy-Stories," that to reject the Christ story is to lead to either sadness or wrath.

It seems true that the nations that have always rejected the Christ story -- Iraq, for example -- have mostly experienced sadness and wrath; while those that have accepted it, like the U.S., are happiest; and those that have increasingly rejected it, as in Europe, are experiencing life as increasingly dreary.

Christians will take this as evidence for the truth of Christian doctrine; unbelievers will argue that it may be a chance correlation. But at some point, the evidence piles up.

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INTELLECTUALS AS EPHRAIMITES

ON LANGUAGE: Bible (JEFFREY McQUAIN, August 24, 2003, NY Times Magazine)

"In religion,'' George Gray challenges a contestant on TV's ''Weakest Link'' game show, ''what is the third book in the Old Testament of the King James Bible?''

The player replies, ''Revelations.''

That's wrong on two counts. The third book of the Bible is actually Leviticus, which chronicles the laws and rituals overseen by the priestly Levites. Less obvious, however, is the mistake in saying ''Revelations,'' because the Bible contains no such book.

Instead, the final book of the New Testament is titled ''Revelation,'' without an ''s.'' This error has appeared frequently in print, from a Chicago Tribune quotation on ''the apocalyptic messages that are found in Revelations'' to Maureen Dowd's New York Times mention of ''a musical based on the Book of Revelations.''

Bible experts consider that kind of mistake a shibboleth, from a story in the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament) about using words as a test. In the 12th chapter of Judges, the conquering Gileadites are able to identify their enemies, the conquered Ephraimites, by making them say the word shibboleth, meaning ''ear of corn.'' Because of language differences, the Ephraimites pronounce it ''sibboleth'' and are immediately executed.

Today the penalties for mispronunciation tend to be less severe, although a shibboleth still acts to identify outsiders.

It's interesting the way George W. Bush uses nucular as a kind of shibboleth, the pronunciation alone marking him out as a good ole boy, not a wonk.

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NOTHING LIKE A DAME

Helen Mirren on sex and a life on screen (Demetrios Matheou, 03 August 2003, Sunday
Herald)

IT took a while for Britain to wake up to Helen Mirren, to afford her the respect and affection that it now does. The voracious wild child who burst on to the theatre scene with the Royal Shakespeare Company in the Sixties, then starred in such arty fare as Ken Russell's Savage Messiah (1972) or Lindsay Anderson's O Lucky Man! (1973), didn't enjoy the instant rapport with audiences of, say, Kate Winslet. There was something too wilfully maverick about her, something self-contained. On screen she would dare everything -- not least nudity -- but didn't belong to anyone. Helen Mirren was always her own woman.

But the first series of crime drama Prime Suspect (1991) took her into prime time and the public's consciousness in a way none of her films had. As the no-nonsense, short-tempered loner DCI Jane Tennison, she was playing her age, early-40s, without the faintest pretence to glamour or sweetness – and thereby won a legion of fans, both adoring males and women who saw her as a feminist icon. This time the critical plaudits she'd always had for her work seemed to make more waves -- not least the Oscar nominations for The Madness Of King George (1994) and Gosford Park (2001). And when, in June, she was made a Dame in the Queen's Birthday Honours List, Mirren's place as one of the country's most celebrated -- and now most loved -- actresses was assured. [...]

She was born Ilyena Lydia Mironoff, granddaughter of a White Russian general who came to England to buy arms for the Russo-Japanese war, then found himself stranded (or, as Mirren contemporises it, he and his family became asylum-seekers) when the Russian revolution started behind him. Her father was two years old.

The role in King George is pretty thankless, mostly moaning about his fate, but her work in Prime Suspect may be the best ever done for television by an actress, as she makes a difficult character quite compelling. MORE: -FILMOGRAPHY: Helen Mirren (IMDB.com) -AUDIO: Mirren Returns to PBS' 'Prime Suspect' (NPR Morning Edition, April 9, 2004)

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RECLAIMING MARRIAGE

The Next Sexual Revolution: By practicing what it preaches on marriage, the church could transform society. (Christianity Today, 08/27/2003)

First, we must admit that the church's current record is dismal. Divorce statistics inside the church are indistinguishable from those outside.

Second, we need to repent for allowing the Zeitgeist of expressive individualism to permeate the way many of our churches relate to marriage, divorce, and remarriage.

Third, we need to restore the community context of marriage. A married couple is more than the sum of its parts. It is a thread in a community fabric. Societies are built out of people who are loyal to one another and who work and sacrifice for the common good. Expressive individualism is a poor foundation for a society, and marriages so conceived do not build loyalties or give us practice in sacrificial service. Marriages and families are schools for service.

Fourth, we need to recover the sense of human limitation inherent in marriage and family life. This is the beautiful biblical picture: a two-gendered, complementary couple improving on and channeling nature, but neither conquering it nor twisting it. [...]

Fifth, churches must help their members recover the link between marriage and procreation. In the 1970s, the evangelical subculture rightly affirmed the delights of marital sex through popular books like The Total Woman and Intended for Pleasure. ("Fundies in their undies!" joked church historian Martin Marty in response.) Unfortunately, even in the church, the procreative dimension of sex has been sidelined by economic pressures, cultural ideals, and technological fixes. Churches need to celebrate the fact that every marriage is procreative by design.

Sixth, churches must continue to help their members learn the practical skills associated with all of the challenges of married life. [...]

The truth about marriage is embedded in nature, and nature has a way of reasserting itself. Inevitably, the Big Yellow Taxi factor will come into play: People will long for what once was. The challenge to the church is to be a countercultural outpost, modeling marriage as it should be for the world. Those with an impoverished understanding of marriage will be able to grasp it only when they see the real thing.

It's time to start the revolution.

When the Wife and I went to meet with the Justice of the Peace who was to marry us--made necessary by her being Jewish and me Baptist--we went over what he'd say in the vows. He read a few samples and we asked: "Where'd the 'til death bit go?"

JP: No one says that anymore.

Us: We're going to.

JP: You can't; it's not done.

Us: Put it in.

JP: It's too old-fashioned.

Us: You expecting to get paid?

Who can be surprised that in a culture where the people doing the ceremony don't take it seriously enough to make you swear the most solemn vow possible that the institution of marriage is falling apart. Bring back the death proviso and enforce it.

MORE:
-Make marriage matter more (Jim Wooten, 8/31/03, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

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5, 5, 5, 4?

20th suspect arrested in probe of terrorist cell (Stewart Bell, August 30, 2003, National Post)

A 20th person has been taken into custody in connection with an investigation into a possible al-Qaeda sleeper cell in the Toronto area, Canadian officials said yesterday.

Of course there's a 20th.

MORE:
Case of 19 terrorists unravelling (MARINA JIMENEZ, COLIN FREEZE and VICTORIA BURNETT, 8/30/03, Globe and Mail)

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ONE COLD WAR WAS ENOUGH, THANKS

Sovietizing the economy (Martin Hutchinson, 8/25/2003, UPI)

The United States economy has changed significantly since the September 11 attacks, in a thoroughly unpleasant direction. While Gross Domestic Product has risen by 4.6 percent (in real terms) from the third quarter of 2001, government consumption has risen by 8.2 percent, while private fixed asset investment has declined. As always, disaster has tended to "Sovietize" the economy, increasing the share of output absorbed by products and services that nobody wants. [...]

The September 11 attacks brought a major re-orientation to the U.S. economy. Some of it was reflected in public spending. Airport security was federalized, a new Department of Homeland Security was created, military reserves were called up, defense spending rose, and an airline bailout fund was created (the last being off-balance-sheet as far as the federal government was concerned.)

Other diversions of resources occurred in the private sector. Property insurance premiums rose, for the same or lesser amount of coverage. Airline charges rose, to cover the new security costs. New "security construction" was undertaken to make businesses more secure against terrorist attacks.

Still further costs of the attacks are not reflected in economic data at all. As anyone who has flown in the last year will tell you, the average check-in time for flights originating in the U.S. has lengthened by 30-60 minutes. For passengers, this is completely lost time, accompanied by a considerable amount of aggravation, yet it is not reflected in published data.

The Immigration and Naturalization Services has tightened up its controls, and introduced many new procedures, requiring students coming to the U.S., for example, to file a new application annually, rather than simply one for the course of study as a whole. As a consequence of this, and of tightened enforcement, students validly attempting to attend U.S. colleges are being sent back to their home country, at enormous deadweight cost to them and their families. Again this is not reflected in official economic statistics -- INS inefficiency, and that of the colleges, of course greatly increases this cost burden.

In all three ways, therefore, the disaster of September 11 has diverted resources to items people don't want. This is not the same as diverting them to the public sector. A Medicare prescription drug provision, for example, would provide senior citizens with goods they undoubtedly do want -- prescription drugs -- albeit in a manner that may be inefficient and economically damaging. Conversely, higher insurance premiums do not provide customers with any services they are not already getting, they merely increase the costs of those services. Disasters thus reduce the efficiency of the economy; they increase expenditure on services and goods that provide no additional value to their consumers, while apparently increasing economic activity.

This case was most famously expressed, though with dreadful timing, by Paul Kennedy in his book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers:

Once their productive capacity [is] enhanced, countries...normally find it easier to sustain the burdens of paying for large-scale armaments in peacetime and of maintaining and supplying large armies and fleets in wartime. It sounds crudely mercantilistic to express it this way, but wealth is usually needed to acquire and protect wealth. If, however, too large a portion of the state's resources is diverted from wealth creation and allocated instead to military purposes, then that is likely to lead to a weakening of national power over the longer term. In the same way, if a state overextends itself strategically--by, say, the conquest of extensive territories or the waging of costly wars--it runs the risk that the potential benefits from external expansion may be outweighed by the great expense of it all--a dilemma which becomes acute if the nation concerned has entered a period of relative economic decline.

But the problem with his particular application of the thesis--his argument, explicit or implicit, that the United States was forcing its own decline by waging the Cold War--was that the U.S. was not, in fact, in a period of economic decline and that, though the Cold War had indeed been a costly mistake, we were about to win it even as he wrote. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the current twenty year economic boom both unfortunately served to discredit an argument that has much wisdom to it. One result is that we are probably not paying as much attention to the Buchanacons as we should, though their hysteria admittedly makes it difficult to do so.

It is a worthwhile and well-justified task at the moment to confront terrorists and terror regimes, particularly Islamicists in the Middle East and the remaining Communist state (N. Korea, Cuba, China), but we should remain aware of the price we stand to pay in terms of retardation of our own economic development and moral compromise as we co-operate with despicable "allies" and we should limit ourselves to the doable, not necessarily the easily doable, but certainly the conceivably doable. So, for instance, toppling the Taliban was ridiculously easy, but building a stable democracy in Afghanistan seems little more than a pipe dream. Right now, the Afghan government has sufficient control and credibility that it has allowed us to duck out gracefully, but it seems unlikely that this government can endure in the long term, given the ethnic/tribal rivalries that have characterized that unhappy country's history. We should by all means lend them financial and political support and hope that they do manage to create a relatively liberal and democratic society, but if they do so it will be surprising and it will be because of their determination, not because of our continuing intervention. Nor is such a government truly necessary to our purposes. It will take less time, effort, and money to vanquish subsequent enemy regimes there than to try to prop up a friendly one.

Similarly, one has to be concerned about stories like the following, Get real: Driven by a neo-conservative dream, the US is loath to relinquish control in Iraq. But the price for Washington's stubbornness may be failure (Brian Whitaker, August 26, 2003, The Guardian):

Talk of impending failure in Iraq may sound like whinging when it comes from those who opposed the war, but last week the unspeakable seven-letter F-word was uttered by one of the bastions of US neo-conservative hawkery.

Under the headline "Do what it takes in Iraq", an editorial in the Weekly Standard called for a huge commitment of more troops, more money and more civilian workers to fend off disaster.

"Make no mistake," the magazine said. "The president's vision will, in the coming months, either be launched successfully in Iraq, or it will die in Iraq ... the future course of American foreign policy, American world leadership, and American security is at stake. Failure in Iraq would be a devastating blow to everything the United States hopes to accomplish."

Unfortunately for President Bush, this is true. He has left no face-saving escape route for himself or his country.

The neo-conservative solution is to devote to Iraq whatever it takes and for as long as it takes, for a whole generation if necessary. The Weekly Standard wants an immediate allocation of $60bn (£38.4bn) for reconstruction. If the Bush administration is serious, "then this is the necessary down payment," it said, while the official Washington line has been that reconstruction will be funded by Iraq's (still largely non-existent) oil revenue.

Only total commitment on a scale not seen since the end of the second world war can ensure US success in Iraq, the Weekly Standard insisted, but the problem for George Bush is that he can't give that commitment, at least not if he values his presidency.

This is absurd. The rebuilding of Europe didn't work out terribly well--as its cultural decline and economic stagnation demonstrates--but it had at least been an integral part of the West and there was some reason to believe it could be salvaged. Most importantly, the people of Europe obviously wanted our help and shared a substantial portion of our vision of how they might be saved (though not a large enough portion as things turned out). The same can hardly be said for Iraq and the idea that we should make a commitment comparable to the one we made in post-War Europe is deranged. It is the triumph of hope over reason and of ideology over self-interest.

Better to heed the counsel of a great scholar of the Middle East, Put the Iraqis in Charge: Why Iraq is proving much tougher than Afghanistan. (BERNARD LEWIS, August 29, 2003, Wall Street Journal):

What then should we do in Iraq? Clearly the imperial role is impossible, blocked equally by moral and psychological constraints, and by international and more especially domestic political calculations. An inept, indecisive imperialism is the worst of all options, with the possible exception of subjecting Iraq to the tangled but ferocious politics of the U.N. The best course surely is the one that is working in Afghanistan--to hand over, as soon as possible, to a genuine Iraqi government. In Iraq as in Afghanistan, a period of discreet support would be necessary, but the task would probably be easier in Iraq. Here again care must be taken. Premature democratization--holding elections and transferring power, in a country which has had no experience of such things for decades, can only lead to disaster, as in Algeria. Democracy is the best and therefore the most difficult of all forms of government. The Iraqis certainly have the capacity to develop democratic institutions, but they must do so in their own way, at their own pace. This can only be done by an Iraqi government.

Fortunately, the nucleus of such a government is already available, in the Iraqi National Congress, headed by Ahmad Chalabi. In the northern free zone during the '90s they played a constructive role, and might at that time even have achieved the liberation of Iraq had we not failed at crucial moments to support them. Despite a continuing lack of support amounting at times to sabotage, they continue to acquit themselves well in Iraq, and there can be no reasonable doubt that of all the possible Iraqi candidates they are the best in terms alike of experience, reliability, and good will. It took years, not months, to create democracies in the former Axis countries, and this was achieved in the final analysis not by Americans but by people in those countries, with American encouragement, help and support. Ahmad Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress deserve no less.

One suspects that we'd do best to make Mr. Chalabi's group share power pretty extensively with the Shi'ite majority, but all we're really looking for is a graceful way to get out, having fulfilled our mission already when we got rid of the Saddams. As Mr. Lewis says, we can stand by ready to help if the Iraqis choose to create and maintain democracy, but right now we're really just in the way and the worst option available is the neocon notion of trying to rebuild the whole place ourselves.

We're quite fortunate--though our good fortune, it must always be remembered, is the residue of brilliant design--in that our political, military, and economic power is so massive that we've been able to conduct a couple of wars on the cheap. It would be an ill-fated decision though that saw us devote ever larger portions of our economy to the essentially imperial task of trying to govern the Islamic world from Washington. The Buchanacons are wrong about the use of American military might, but right about the futility of nation-building and correct to worry about what such exercises will do to our own society.

By all means let us wage war on terror--including in N. Korea, Syria, and battles yet to come--but let us do so rapidly, ruthlessly, and efficiently, and let us be cognizant of the insidious way in which seeming military strength can conceal structural damage being done to an economy and a resulting decline in real power. The war on terror should be treated like a war, in which we confront and defeat enemies, and that shouldn't take terribly long--perhaps five or six years. Talk of turning it into a generational struggle, with us taking responsibility for the future shape of the Middle East is truly frightening. The neocons have long been looking for a national greatness project, some excuse for conservatives to wield a big government. But this is not a project that conservatives should support. Statism, under whatever guise, is destructive of society, of the economy, and ultimately of liberty.

MORE:
Iraqis must be left to build democracy at their pace (David Warren, 8/30/03, National Post)

The issue in Iraq is...not whether the U.S. should stay or leave. It is instead the extent to which the U.S. should engage in "nation-building" there. As his critics remember, and his friends, too, George W. Bush campaigned against the whole idea of nation-building by Americans abroad.

What he has been trying to do comes perilously close to what he rightly campaigned against. Not nation-building, by the U.S., but a concentrated U.S. effort to enable nation-building to take place within Iraq, and Afghanistan, and soon elsewhere. I compared it myself, a year ago, to one of the labours of Hercules -- the cleaning of the Augean stables. He is trying to create the conditions for the "river of democracy" to wash through the Middle East; just as President Reagan before him tried to create those conditions for Eastern Europe.

The American role in Iraq should thus be limited to providing security, for the transition to an Iraqi government much more acceptable to Iraqis and to the world, than the horrific government that preceded it.

Leave it to America: There are now calls for greater UN involvement in Iraq. That’s the last thing the country needs (Mark Steyn, 8/30/03, The Spectator)

The Canal Hotel turned out to be a perfect microcosm of the UN: a group of naive internationalists refusing to take the murkier characters prowling the corridors at face value and concerned only to keep the US at arm’s length. Yet for Kofi Annan, the French, the Democratic party and the world’s media, the self-inflicted insanity of what happened to the UN in Baghdad apparently demonstrates the need for Washington to hand over more control of Iraq to the blue helmets because ‘they’ve got far more experience in these kinds of situations’. The UN’s track record at nation-building varies according to the strength of the local obstructionist. Mr Vieira de Mello did such a good job transforming East Timor from the brutalised province of a Muslim dictatorship to a functioning infidel democracy that whoever makes Osama bin Laden’s audio tapes these days added it to his list of grievances against the West. But the dapper diplomat did a less impressive job in Cambodia, where Hun Sen decided to hijack the state, King Sihanouk strung along, and the UN colluded in the subversion of its political settlement.

If Kofi got his hands on Iraq, as world opinion so devoutly wants, the Cambodian scenario would be more relevant than the East Timorese. The most determined obstructionists in this case would be Iraq’s Arab neighbours: Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia and co. don’t care whether the country winds up under another Baathist psychotic or a rent-a-rant mullah, or even a restored Hashemite as long as he’s at least minimally repressive. But they object very strongly to the idea of the Iraqi people living in liberty under a representative government with a free press, etc., because that’s not the kind of thing they want catching on. Putting the UN in charge of Iraq is a vote for ‘stability’ in the Middle East — the fetid cesspit stability of the Assads and Ayatollahs that, as argued in this space many times, is the principal ‘root cause’ of the region’s problems.

That’s why I’d rather the Americans stayed in control.

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THE MAN WHO RODE BUCEPHALUS

ALEXANDER THE WHO?: Face to face with history's Greatest (VICTORIA JAMES, Aug. 27, 2003, Japan Times)

The future conqueror of almost all the known world, who acceded to his father's throne at age 18 and died of fever aged just 33, claimed descent from the immortal Hercules. His mother, Olympias, stoked her son's god-complex by claiming she was impregnated not by Alexander's father, Philip II of Macedonia, but by a giant serpent.

All these myths collide in "Alexander the Great," an exhibition now showing at Tokyo National Museum in Ueno Park, which displays a number of representations of the great leader (statues, busts and coinage) in company of which he would doubtless have approved -- an extensive pantheon of classical gods and heroes.

Alexander was certainly divinely good-looking. Three images (one a nearly contemporaneous head of a statue, the others two Imperial Roman copies of third-century B.C. originals) clearly represent the same face over a period of time. The first is a beautiful boy with a head of curls; the next a youth with a resolute, firmly set chin; the third a mature man, his face filled out slightly though not a whit less handsome for it.

But Alexander's reputation didn't rest on his looks. At age 6 he is said to have received Persian envoys during his father's absence; at age 13 he began to study under Aristotle; at 16 he served as his father's regent; and, while still a teenager, in a wager with his father he subdued and rode a wild horse that no one had been able to handle. (The steed, named Bucephalus, became Alexander's warhorse.)

That was merely Alexander's grooming for greatness, and the beginning of the legend.

Nice short essay about Alexander, but for a fuller portrait we recommend the excellent biography by Peter Green, Alexander of Macedon 356-323 B. C.: A Historical Biography. Also, Baz Luhrmann is working on a biopic of Alexander's life, which might be great itself if he can pull it off.

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THE SKEPTIC?

The Domesticated Savage: Science reveals a way to rise above our natures (Michael Shermer, August 11, 2003, Scientific American)

One of the most striking features in artificially selecting for docility among wild animals is that, along with far less aggression, you also get a suite of other changes, including a reduction in skull, jaw and tooth size. In genetics, this is called pleiotropy. Selecting for one trait may generate additional, unintended changes.

The most famous study on selective breeding for passivity began in 1959 by Russian geneticist Dmitri Belyaev of the Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Siberia. It continues today under the direction of Lyudmila N. Trut. Silver foxes were bred for friendliness toward humans, defined by a graduating series of criteria, from the animal allowing itself to be approached, to being hand fed, to being petted, to proactively seeking human contact. In only 35 generations the researchers produced tail-wagging, hand-licking, peaceful foxes. What they also created were foxes with smaller skulls, jaws and teeth than their wild ancestors.

The Russian scientists believe that in selecting for docility, they inadvertently selected for paedomorphism--the retention of juvenile features into adulthood--such as curly tails and floppy ears found in wild pups but not in wild adults, a delayed onset of the fear response to unknown stimuli, and lower levels of aggression. The selection process led to a significant decrease in levels of stress-related hormones such as corticosteroids, which are produced by the adrenal glands during the fight-or-flight response, as well as a significant increase in levels of serotonin, thought to play a leading role in the inhibition of aggression. The Russian scientists were also able to accomplish what no breeder had ever achieved before--a lengthened breeding season.

Like the foxes, humans have become more agreeable as we've become more domesticated. [...]

A plausible evolutionary hypothesis suggests itself: limited resources led to the selection for within-group cooperation and between-group competition in humans, resulting in within-group amity and between-group enmity.

Well, yeah, except that the rational choices made by humans and applied to themselves and to silver foxes are actually the opposite of natural selection.

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I DON'T KNOW, BUT DO SOMETHING

Ice ages key to understanding change (Fred Pearce, 8/26/2003, Boston Globe)

We know about past levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere because researchers have been able to recover bubbles of ancient air trapped in ice. These bubbles reveal past temperatures and concentrations of gases in the air. They show that when the world was at its coldest, carbon dioxide levels in the air were low; and when it got warmer, they rose.

But they reveal something more startling. The changes between these two situations were not smooth and gradual. They were extremely quick. It is almost, Watson said, as if the planet has a rather crude thermostat, with just two settings -- ice age, and not ice age.

Put another way, there appear to have been two "stable states" for the planet's climate system. Once one of them broke down, the entire system switched within a few centuries to the other. [...]

None of this is proved. But whatever the precise mechanism, Watson said, we are left with the worrying fact that, in the past 2 million years or so, the world had two stable climatic states -- anchored at 190 ppm and 280 ppm of carbon dioxide. Why worrying? Because, Watson said, we have now slipped the anchors. By burning fossil fuels, we have forced up carbon dioxide levels to 370 ppm today. That is probably higher than for millions of years. And the level is still rising by almost 20 ppm a decade.

The question now is: How will the planet respond? Until now, climate scientists have mostly expected that a gradual rise in greenhouse gases will cause a gradual increase in temperatures. Now there are two other possibilities. The planet might find a way to keep temperatures down. Or it might make another jump -- to perhaps a third "stable state" about which we as yet know nothing.

How might that happen? Peter Cox of the British government's meteorological service, said that within 50 years, rainforests and their soils could begin to dry out and die as warming gathers pace. That would release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and accelerate warming. Others predict changes in the ocean circulation systems that reduce the oceans' abilities to absorb carbon dioxide from the air.

Nothing is certain in this. Climate scientists are being forced to acknowledge how little they know about how the planet works. But that ignorance, they say, should make us more worried rather than less.

The willingness of scientists to recommend radical courses of action despite "how little they know" is far more worrisome than the lack of knowledge itself.

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AL QAEDA VS. THE SHI'ITES?

4 With al-Qaida Ties Nabbed in Najaf Blast (AP, 8/30/03)

Iraqi police have arrested four men in connection with the bombing of Iraq's holiest Shiite Muslim shrine, and all have links to al-Qaida, a senior police official told The Associated Press on Saturday.

The official, who said the death toll in the bombing had risen to 107, said the four arrested men - two Iraqis and two Saudis - were caught shortly after the car bombing on Friday.

The bombing killed one of the most important Shiite clerics in Iraq, Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, who had been cooperating with the American occupation force.

The police official, who led the initial investigation and interrogation of the captives, said the prisoners told of other plots to kill political and religious leaders and to damage vital installations such as power plants, water supplies and oil pipelines.

The police official said the men arrested after the attack claimed the recent bombings were designed to keep Iraq in a state of chaos so that police and American forces would be unable to focus attention on the country's porous borders, across which suspected foreign fighters are said to be infiltrating.

It's almost too much to be hoped for that these bombings would be al Qaeda related. What could they achieve other than to turn the Shi'ites against them? This would be the best of all possible outcomes for our purposes and would put enormous pressure on the Iranians who are reportedly holding several al Qaeda prisoners.

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SPEECH?

Ashcroft to Defend Ban on Some Abortion Protests (ERIC LICHTBLAU, August 30, 2003, NY Times)

The Justice Department plans to go to court to defend a federal law that bans protesters from blocking access to abortion clinics, a move that is angering some opponents of abortion who have been strong supporters of Attorney General John Ashcroft.

A federal judge in Houston, in a little-noticed decision, declared this month that part of the 1994 law, known as the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, is unconstitutional because it exceeds the power of Congress to regulate commerce. The decision freed a man who had rammed a van through the front door of a Planned Parenthood clinic in Houston in a protest over abortion.

Anti-abortion leaders called the Texas decision an affirmation of the First Amendment rights of protesters. [...]

"It's very surprising, given the attorney general's stated position in support of the right to life," Colleen Parro, director of the Republican National Coalition for Life, said in an interview.

"Pro-life people expect John Ashcroft to be just and fair and act in the interests of the right to life whenever possible," said Ms. Parro, whose group is based in Texas. "If the Justice Department is standing up for this law, that is not going to give people confidence that John Aschroft is looking out for the babies. This will cause disappointment."

Mr. Ashcroft's stance on the clinic protection law became an issue at his Senate confirmation hearing in 2001. Critics said they were concerned that his strong opposition to abortion would color his enforcement decisions on abortion-related issues.

Mr. Ashcroft acknowledged at the hearing that he believed that the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion was "wrongly decided" and that he was personally opposed to abortion. But he added, "I well understand that the role of attorney general is to enforce the law as it is, not as I would have it."

You can't really expect the chief law enforcement official in the nation to defend your "right" to use a vehicle as a weapon.

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CROSSING THE LINE

Manslaughter Count Filed Against a Congressman (MICHAEL JANOFSKY, August 30, 2003, NY Times)

Representative Bill Janklow, who served four terms as governor of South Dakota before winning election to Congress last year, was charged in his home state today with second-degree manslaughter because of a traffic fatality there two weeks ago.

That felony charge, which carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a $10,000 fine, threatens to end a long and distinguished career that has made Mr. Janklow, a 63-year-old Republican, one of the most prominent politicians in the state's history. Before the accident, South Dakota Republicans were urging him to run next year for the Senate seat held by the minority leader, Tom Daschle. [...]

The prosecutor in the case, William J. Ellingson, the Moody County state's attorney, ruled out a charge of vehicular homicide, more serious than the manslaughter charge, after tests determined that no drugs or alcohol had been involved. In similar cases, Mr. Ellingson said, the manslaughter count has resulted in successful prosecutions.

Somehow, we draw a line between speeding, which it seems safe to say nearly every driver does, and running stop signs, which is unthinkable to most. And God help him if he'd been drinking. But he does deserve jail time and it wouldn't be surprising to see him resign from Congress before then.

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CASH OUT

Video Music Awards Celebrate 20 Years (Marla Lehner, August 29, 2003, Fox News)

The award-winners were a mixed bag. Missy 'Misdemeanor' Elliott, the female rapper who had a leading eight nominations going into the show, walked away with a moonman for best hip-hop video and the coveted video of the year award, beating out crowd favorite, Johnny Cash, as well as 50 Cent, Timberlake and Eminem.

Cash, who many were predicting would sweep the awards, was unable to make an appearance because he was hospitalized, and won only one award, for cinematography. His video of the Nine Inch Nails song “Hurt” was seen as a swan song for the 71-year-old crooner.

When Timberlake beat Cash for the best male video, he expressed shock over the decision.

“This is a travesty. I demand a recount,” he said. “My grandfather raised me on Johnny Cash....I think he deserves this more than any of us in here tonight."

Whoever Justin Timberlake is, that's a stand-up thing to say.

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WE NEED MORE CHAOS

Death and Hesitation in Iraq (DEXTER FILKINS, August 30, 2003, NY Times)

Until now, the Americans have enjoyed relative stability among the country's Shiite and Kurdish populations, in the south and north, as they have battled a ferocious insurgency in the central part of the country.

The killing of Ayatollah Hakim, by stirring up the country's Shiite population, threatens to spread the chaos. Much will depend, it seemed today, on whom the Shiites blame for Ayatollah Hakim's death: remnants of Mr. Hussein's government, composed mainly of Sunni Arabs, or radical members of their own religious group.

The Governing Council, a group of Iraqis representing the tapestry of Iraq's ethnic and religious groups, has long been seen as a central piece in the American plan to nurture democratic government here.

But in recent weeks, American officials have expressed frustration over what they describe as the reluctance of the 25-member Council to seize the reins of political power. The Iraqis, meanwhile, have complained that the Americans, while talking about democracy, have refused to turn over power where it matters.

A kind of paralysis has resulted, according to both Iraqis and American officials, with the Governing Council taking little action in its first six weeks. "On the Council, someone makes a suggestion, then it goes around the room, with everyone talking about it, and then by that time, it's late afternoon and time to go home," said an aide on the Council. "We don't get a lot done."

As they have done on several previous occasions, American officials stood back today and waited for the Iraqis to act, reluctant to upstage them. "The Iraqi interim government is in control of the situation," said a spokesman for the Coalition Public Authority, the American branch of the government. "We have issued a statement, and that is all we have for now."

The studied reluctance by American officials and military officers to move in place of the Iraqis appeared risky. Shiites, accounting for 60 percent of the population, are deeply divided between moderates and radicals; those divisions are now likely to grow. At the same time, the entire Shiite population is suspicious that Sunnis loyal to Saddam Hussein may be behind the killing, Iraqi analysts said. All these tensions could quickly lead to further violence.

The solution to these problems is the same as it's been all along: put the Shi'ites in charge and let them deal ruthlessly with the Ba'ath remnants and with their own extremists.

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NOT SO ANNOYING AFTER ALL

Arthur Miller joins run for Idiotarian on the Year (Thought Mesh, 27 August 2003)

[W]e have some commentary by playwright Arthur Miller. In it he compares his play The Crucible to Senator McCarthy.
Miller himself commented […]

“They would say to me, ‘this is all fraudulent - there never were any witches, but there are Communists’,” he said.

“I could only say that in 1692, if you had stood on the main street of Salem, Massachusetts, and said ‘there are no witches’, I wouldn’t want to be your insurance man.”

I know that cultural / literary figures today are expected to be almost completely disconnected from reality, but this is delusional even for the glitterati. If someone had said “there are no witches” back in 1692 (and I suspect that some did) it would have been true but politically incorrect. The analogy for McCarthy would have been for someone to announce in 1950 that there were no Communists and had it have been true and politcally incorrect. Miller seems to think that the only thing stopping people from admitting that Communists didn’t exist was fear of the political consquences, not the billions of people oppressed by Communists. Just who Miller thinks was running the USSR, Eastern Europe and China at the time isn’t clear. I’ve heard plenty of apologists for Communism but never before one who denied the very existence of it.

AOG making the signal point that the existence of a "witch hunt" doesn't disprove the existence of witches.

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MULTILATERALISM IN ACTION

Talks impasse threatens cheap drugs deal: Accusations of sabotage sour WTO negotiations (Charlotte Denny, August 30, 2003, The Guardian)

A deal to provide cut-price copies of life-saving drugs for the world's poorest people was on the brink of collapse yesterday in Geneva, after developing countries objected to a last-minute compromise worked out to pacify the US pharmaceuticals industry.

A marathon session of negotiations ended early yesterday morning with no deal amid bitter recriminations and accusations of sabotage. [...]

The compromise hammered out by the US and four key developing countries was supposed to be ratified by all 146 members of the WTO on Thursday night. But when the Philippines indicated it was unhappy with the requirements on developing countries to prevent smuggling, dissent swelled among developing countries, with 20 indicating they had problems with the draft deal.

In the fervid atmosphere following the collapse of talks at midnight, some trade envoys accused development lobby groups of stirring up developing countries to sabotage the deal at the last minute. Kenya, one of the four developing countries which cut the original deal with the US, held up talks for six hours until its Geneva representative was overruled by Nairobi.

The Philippines then is pro-smuggling?

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ORDINARILY, I'D STICK THIS IN THE COMMENTS.

Bustamante Proposals Bold Weight Loss Program For State (AP, 8/29/03)

ANAHEIM -- Standing at the gates of Disneyland, Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante said Friday that as governor he would propose an amendment to the California State Constitution to deal with what he called a burgeoning epidemic of obesity.

"Look at all these fat people," Bustamante said, gesturing to the lines waiting to enter Disneyland. "Californians are too fat. According to doctors I have spoken with, one-third of all Californians weigh too much, and ultimately those fat people will die. That will end up costing the state money that we don't have, and will threaten our pristine Californian environment as we have to dig wider and wider graves."

Bustamante unveiled a proposed new amendment to the state constitution, to be submitted to voters at the same time as the current recall question, that would cut gravity in half. "What we are proposing," Bustamante explained, "is to decrease what scientists call the 'acceleration of gravity' to 16 feet per second per second from 32 feet per second squared. This will cure our state weight problem in one fell swoop. We have been forced to take this action by the criminal neglect of the Bush Administration."

Bustamante went on to explain that fat Californians drive up gasoline prices because the added weight of having fat people in the car increases fuel consumption. He said that his proposal "will improve our health, reduce gasoline usage, reduce fuel prices, help our ailing aeronautical industry and should increase by 10% the number of games won by our California sports teams, except for the Clippers." Bustamante also claimed that last years electricity shortages were exacerbated because "fat people need more air conditioning."

Bustamante ended by noting that "The law of gravity is a cruel law, which I know well as it imposes its heaviest burden on our poor Latino communities. The people of California deserve to weigh less and I won't rest until they do. Our slogan is No on the recall, Yes on Bustamante, No to gravity."

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CAN THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD BE FAR BEHIND?

The lieutenant governor proposes amending the state Constitution to regulate gasoline prices. (Matea Gold and Elizabeth Douglass, August 29, 2003, LA Times)

Charging that international oil companies are manipulating the gasoline market, Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante said Thursday that as governor he would work to bring the industry under state regulation in an effort to control gas prices.

Bustamante, who compared the behavior of oil companies to deception in the electricity industry, proposed amending the California Constitution to define gasoline as a public utility and subjecting gas prices to approval by the state Public Utilities Commission. [...]

Hawaii approved a price cap on gasoline that is set to take effect in July,