The Valley of Darkness

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2009-05-14T09:11:00.002-05:00

Geek Alert! My 2+ Days at ReaperCon

2007-05-30T07:44:00.000-05:00

So May has been a busy month, with ReaperCon and the family vacation to Disney World on adjacent weekends. ReaperCon was an absolute blast. Went with my good buddy SpiderHam to two of the four day event.

Sadly, I have no pictures of my own, since my camera batteries were dead, and replacements weren't readily at hand. So, I stole some from SH...

Here I am painting. Note how SH cleverly hid my suckage behind the lamp.

SH and I at the Warlord Dungeon Crawl. It was a lot of fun getting to play with $1,000 worth of dungeon and accessories.

Definitely had a good time. I have a great wife, by the way. She gives me space to do my own thing, which, I think, is the only way I could do a marriage. I bought a bag full of bits, a couple t-shirts, four bottles of paint, and several chicken sandwiches from the on-site Sonic guy. In addition to painting and playing the dungeon crawl, we played a Warlord demo (I think SH is hooked and leaning toward's buying some Razig's Revenge - the undead pirate faction). I went to a couple painting classes with professional mini painters, and we both went to a "kit bashing" class where we built our own mini out of spare parts. We also did a speed painting competition, where we had 45 minutes to do a paint job on an out of production miniature (and I can see why it's no longer on the market - no offense to the sculptor). Oh, yeah, and we had to use a set of weird-ass colors they gave us.

The result of my speed painting efforts:

My self-built mini. It's not a terribly dignified pose, but he's very unbalanced...and also he falls backward.

All is well with the universe.

The bleak 2008 Field

2007-05-04T08:18:00.000-05:00

So the campaign is underway in earnest and it's time for me to start paying a bit more attention.

This test at SelecSmart.com gave me surprising results. I can't stand McCain, mainly because of the blatantly anti free speech Incumbent Protection Act. The only person I'm more disappointed with on that front is Bush, who disagreed, but didn't have the balls to veto, assuming instead that the Supreme Court would strike down the unconstitutional provision (it didn't).

	1.	Theoretical Ideal Candidate (100%)
	2.	John McCain (80%) Click here for info
	3.	Mitt Romney (77%) Click here for info
	4.	Chuck Hagel (75%) Click here for info
	5.	Tom Tancredo (74%) Click here for info
	6.	Kent McManigal (72%) Click here for info
	7.	Newt Gingrich (69%) Click here for info
	8.	Duncan Hunter (68%) Click here for info
	9.	Ron Paul (66%) Click here for info
	10.	Sam Brownback (66%) Click here for info
	11.	Fred Thompson (64%) Click here for info
	12.	Rudolph Giuliani (60%) Click here for info
	13.	Jim Gilmore (53%) Click here for info
	14.	Tommy Thompson (52%) Click here for info
	15.	Mike Huckabee (50%) Click here for info
	16.	Bill Richardson (36%) Click here for info
	17.	Hillary Clinton (32%) Click here for info
	18.	Joseph Biden (30%) Click here for info
	19.	Christopher Dodd (30%) Click here for info
	20.	Al Gore (28%) Click here for info
	21.	John Edwards (25%) Click here for info
	22.	Dennis Kucinich (22%) Click here for info
	23.	Wesley Clark (22%) Click here for info
	24.	Barack Obama (17%) Click here for info
	25.	Mike Gravel (16%) Click here for info
	26.	Elaine Brown (3%) Click here for info

This quiz, which may be a bit more accurate, puts Romney at only a 23% match. I was a bit surprised the libertarian Ron Paul only got 25%. It's telling that no one got over 50%, and I'm not surprised with the low agreement on social issues. Here are the top contenders.

Total

43%

Social

31%

Economic

50%

Sam Brownback
Republican Sr Senator (KS)

Biographical Profile
Sam Brownback's answers
Sam Brownback's stances

Total

40%

Social

31%

Economic

46%

John McCain
Republican Sr Senator (AZ); 2000 Primary Candidate for President

Biographical Profile
John McCain's answers
John McCain's stances

Total

38%

Social

19%

Economic

50%

Duncan Hunter
Republican Representative (CA-52)

Biographical Profile
Duncan Hunter's answers
Duncan Hunter's stances

Total

38%

Social

19%

Economic

50%

Tom Tancredo
Republican Representative (CO-6)

Biographical Profile
Tom Tancredo's answers
Tom Tancredo's stances

Total

35%

Social

50%

Economic

25%

Rudy Giuliani
Former Mayor of New York City; Republican Candidate for 2000 Senate (NY)

Biographical Profile
Rudy Giuliani's answers
Rudy Giuliani's stances

Total

35%

Social

44%

Economic

29%

Tommy Thompson
Former Secretary of H.H.S.; former Republican Governor (WI)

Biographical Profile
Tommy Thompson's answers
Tommy Thompson's stances

Genographic Project

2007-02-27T20:40:00.000-06:00

Very cool. This project sets out to map human migration throughout history with genetic markers. Now to convince the missus I should spend $200 to get paternal and maternal mapping done....

Charge!

2007-01-05T20:28:00.000-06:00

I finally finished my first batch of Crusaders from the Warlord line. Several learning points on these: 1) Doing a brown wash over the white undercoat is dangerous if you're going to have whites and very light colors in the end product. 2) This was my first time working with gloss varnish, which I understand protects the paint job much better than matte. I used three coats of spray matte finish and one coat of brush-on varnish, but you can still see too much shine on parts of the dirt and cloth. I wonder if you can mix matte and gloss....

First Diorama

2006-12-24T08:23:00.000-06:00

Not my best work, but definitely my most time consuming Christmas gift. I got this Old Glory antitank gun and crew for my brother in law and did my first diorama.

Suicide Solution (A Christmas Story)

2006-12-24T05:57:00.000-06:00

What a dipshit. With all the evil that has and is now being done in the name of religion, this idiot does the human torch thing over what a school district wants to call their winter break. It's not like the world isn't filled with serious examples of religion having veto power over reason and human rights.

Man Sets Self Aflame in Calif. Protest
Dec 23 10:48 AM US/Eastern

A man used flammable liquid to light himself on fire, apparently to protest a San Joaquin Valley school district's decision to change the names of winter and spring breaks to Christmas and Easter vacation.

The man, who was not immediately identified, on Friday also set fire to a Christmas tree, an American flag and a revolutionary flag replica, said Fire Captain Garth Milam.

Seeing the flames, Sheriff's Deputy Lance Ferguson grabbed a fire extinguisher and ran to the man.

Flames were devouring a Christmas tree next to the Liberty Bell, where public events and demonstrations are common.

Beside the tree the man stood with an American flag draped around his shoulders and a red gas can over his head.

Seeing the deputy, the man poured the liquid over his head. He quickly burst into flames when the fumes from the gas met the flames from the tree.

The deputy ordered the man to drop to the ground as he and a parole agent sprayed him with fire extinguishers.

"The man stood there like this," the deputy said with his arms across his chest and his head bent down, "Saying no, no, no."

The man suffered first degree burns on his shoulders and arms, Milam said.

Kern County Sheriff's Deputy John Leyendecker said the man had a sign that read: "(expletive) the religious establishment and KHSD."

On Thursday, the Kern High School Board of Trustees voted to use the names Christmas and Easter instead of winter and spring breaks.

D&D-Worthy Baby Names

2006-12-16T09:25:00.000-06:00

I was inspired by a pregnant friend's humorous baby name list (which includes Beorthilde - Shining Battlemaid), to look up some other names with bitchin' fantasy meanings worthy of a Dr Pepper-fueled, late-night, dice-rolling shindig.

Longwei - Chinese. Means "Dragon greatness." I know it's pronounced "way," but it's the closest to a good wang joke I could find.
Malandra - English. Blend of Malinda ("Dark Serpent") and Sandra ("Defender of Mankind").
Medousa - Just Greek for Medusa, but coolness factor added by the fact that in looks like it's being said by some thick-necked flunky from the Godfather.

Afreda - Unknown. "Elf Power." Eeeelf Poweeeeer!
Alva - German. Army of Elves.

Alberich - Norse. A mythic Dwarf.
Napoleon - French of Germanic origin. From "Sons of the Mist," - the name of a race of dwarves. Isn't it ironic, doncha think?

Oberon - Shakespeare. King of Fairies. (This is now my new pejorative for my little brother) :)

Eginhard - German. "Sword Power." Swooooord Poweeeeer!
Melvin - English. "Sword Friend." Who knew?

Gordon - Scottish clan name. "From the roomy fort." I wonder whether they were bragging, or trying to convince themselves.

Harvey - English. "Eager for battle; strong and worthy." Again, who knew?

Duncan - Scottish. "Brown Fighter." OK, nothing to do with the theme, but it's now the new name of my pooper-scooper.

1, 2, 3, 4, Could We Please Have A Fuckin' War?

2006-11-03T06:50:00.000-06:00

Alright, the war. I've been past the ever-present urge to stick a gun in my mouth for a while now, and until fairly recently I've been in a phase where I just take my goddamn pills and more or less try to ignore the larger world. Now I'm just pissed off.

Things I'm not going to address: 1. Myself. 2. The ridiculous, shit-for-brains arguments that have surrounded this issue (blood for oil, nuke 'em all, 911 conspiracies, presidential daddy issues, etc.). 3. Afghanistan, as in hindsight most everyone agrees on this one, some forgetting their prior drivel about a central Asian pipeline.

Premise 1: Governments rightfully exist for the protection of their citizens, both of their innate rights and of their physical safety.

Premise 2: Militaries are instruments of force.

Conclusion: The proper use of the military instrument is to employ force in pursuit of the rights and safety of citizens.

What's wrong with the war in Iraq:

Fundamentally, our error in Iraq is a failure from the beginning to properly employ the military instrument. Having made the decision to employ force, half-measures are a recipe for disaster. Failure to lean on Turkey as successfully as we did on Pakistan resulted in a massive reduction in the force brought to bear on Iraq during the invasion. Failure to see the long road ahead (mission accomplished, greeted as liberators, etc) led to an 'end to major hostilities' far too quickly and before the military instrument had been brought fully to bear throughout much of the country. Failure to stomach what had to be done in Fallujah for nearly a year created far more bloodshed than the eventual solution. The list goes on.

Underlying this failure is an unwillingness to face certain realities. Primary among these, is that force is the opposite of freedom. In fact, it's the opposite of reason, reason and force both being means. My meaning here is that the use of force is by definition a removal of the freedom of the recipient of that force. You can, contrary to the popular argument, "impose democracy at the end of a gun" (see Germany, Japan), but you cannot execute a military action (force) while at the same time extending freedom to the target of that action.

We have in this administration all the idealism of the Kennedy years tempered by none of the realism of Truman or Reagan, the latter of which combined realism and idealism fairly well, in my opinion. In their rush to create a democracy in the 'heart of the Middle East', they have hobbled our ability to win the war that still rages. Iraq now has a president who is literally three degrees of separation from Iran, which is one of the two great enemies of the U.S. and with which we are now engaging in a proxy war in Iraq. Sadr, without whom Talabani would not be in power, is Ahmadinejad's chief lieutenant in Iraq. We've just been ordered out of Sadr City in Baghdad by this puppet of a president--and complied!

We occupied and ran Japan for seven years. Their new constitution, imposed by us, went into effect two full years after the war's end. In it, we stripped the Emperor of all practical power, instituted three coequal branches of government, demilitarized the country, and enshrined human rights and nondiscrimination. This in a country with a very distinct, non western culture where people literally worshiped the Emperor as a god. Iraq is not Japan, of course, not the least because it is three separate non western cultures in conflict with one another, but this argues all the more for an approach more similar to Japan, 1945. Instead, we have a constitution a year after the conflict began created by a committee including the enemy! It enshrines Islam while paying lip service to freedom and human rights. While the conflict drags on, we kowtow to a government with which we're half-way at war, because we're apparently no longer made of the stern stuff that enabled our grandfathers to create thriving, economically powerful republics out of the dust of dictatorship.

Thoughts on common arguments:

WMDs:
They weren't there. Major failure of the world intelligence community, not an invention of Bush's addled brain. The administration's failure was in relying on this rational almost exclusively, even though it certainly wasn't the only reason for the war. We've been at war with Iraq since 1991. They never complied with the ceasefire agreement, attempted to assassinate two presidents, and were a rogue state in the center of an volatile region. A dictator has no more right to rule than a mugger has to mug, and anyone with a purpose other than to become the new dictator has a moral right (though not an imperative) to off the sonofabitch.

Saddam was bad / There are a lot of other baddies:
Both sides of this discussion are, of course, technically true. The administration flipped to this argument when the WMD branding evaporated. Everything they say in support of this argument is absolutely true. Saddam and his regime were unspeakably, undeniably evil, but that was not the only, or even the chief reason for going to war, which leaves them open for the standard response: Sudan, Zimbabwe, Cuba, China, North Korea, and others all have bad regimes doing bad things to their people, but we're not invading them. I doubt most who raise this argument actually favor intervention in any of these places, but that doesn't excuse the administration's sloppy and perhaps disingenuous argumentation. The real and justifiable reason we went to war with Iraq is that they were a threat to us and our allies. Reasonable arguments can be had about the severity the threat Iraq posed and how this compared to various other threats, but not the existence of the threat. The reality employers of the second argument should admit is that to actually intervene in a situation, we must have a reasonable chance of success when compared with the risks. Clearly we're not succeeding in Iraq, but few would argue that our probability of success vs. risk is better in Iran or North Korea. I would also argue based on the above premises that humanitarianism alone is not an imperative for use of the military instrument, which puts me at odds with both the administrations' argument an the instincts of many good folks on all sides of this issue.

Osama:
He's a motherfucker, but he's not the only one, or even, any longer, a principal. The folks most likely to use the 'there are bad regimes all over' argument usually also seem unnaturally focused on this guy while others plan and execute terrorism in planes, trains, and automobiles the world over--not to mention buses, restaurants, subways, and nightclubs.

Pull out now:
This is almost in the 'not to be addressed category', but I think it's a position arrived at honestly, though emotionally by a lot of people. The instinct is understandable, and one I share, "things are fucked up, let's get the hell out." The reality is, however, that a pullout would create a situation much more threatening to the U.S. and our interests than Saddam's regime before the invasion.

Stay the course:
The course is wrong! Fiddle or dance, shit or get off the pot, and so forth, already! This is pure political branding and it's as just as despicable as the opposition politicians' spurious 'bring the boys home' positioning. What we need is to win, to succeed. This recent bullshit about changing tactics is just that, bullshit. Of course we change combat tactics, what we need is to change strategy, to commit to victory even (or especially) if it means abandoning our altruistic fantasies.

Finally:

I don't have all the answers. There are a lot of hard and undesirable choices that need to be made, and I'm not sure what the right course is in every instance. My point is, I have a family to feed and it's ultimately out of my control--these are not my choices to make. What pisses me off is that the people we entrust to make the difficult choices that will affect all of us for decades aren't having an honest and open debate with the good of the country at heart about what we should actually do. Washington is full of Neros fiddling via soundbite while Baghdad burns.

Evolution for Dummies

2006-10-26T14:30:00.000-05:00

From a Scientific American list of 15 common attacks on evolution. I'll spare the more mundane or ridiculous items (semantics about 'theory', no one has seen evolution, etc).

6. If humans descended from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?

This surprisingly common argument reflects several levels of ignorance about evolution. The first mistake is that evolution does not teach that humans descended from monkeys; it states that both have a common ancestor.

The deeper error is that this objection is tantamount to asking, "If children descended from adults, why are there still adults?" New species evolve by splintering off from established ones, when populations of organisms become isolated from the main branch of their family and acquire sufficient differences to remain forever distinct. The parent species may survive indefinitely thereafter, or it may become extinct.

8. Mathematically, it is inconceivable that anything as complex as a protein, let alone a living cell or a human, could spring up by chance.

This explanation is good, but leaves out a key element--the vast amount of time over which natural selection has in which to work. Similarly to the vastness of space, the vastness of time is something we all have trouble wrapping our minds around. We can look at the numbers in scientific notiation, even read examples and comparisons, but at the end of the day time and space are too vast for us to really take their measure in a way we can internalize.

Chance plays a part in evolution (for example, in the random mutations that can give rise to new traits), but evolution does not depend on chance to create organisms, proteins or other entities. Quite the opposite: natural selection, the principal known mechanism of evolution, harnesses nonrandom change by preserving "desirable" (adaptive) features and eliminating "undesirable" (nonadaptive) ones. As long as the forces of selection stay constant, natural selection can push evolution in one direction and produce sophisticated structures in surprisingly short times. As an analogy, consider the 13-letter sequence "TOBEORNOTTOBE." Those hypothetical million monkeys, each pecking out one phrase a second, could take as long as 78,800 years to find it among the 26¹³ sequences of that length. But in the 1980s Richard Hardison of Glendale College wrote a computer program that generated phrases randomly while preserving the positions of individual letters that happened to be correctly placed (in effect, selecting for phrases more like Hamlet's). On average, the program re-created the phrase in just 336 iterations, less than 90 seconds. Even more amazing, it could reconstruct Shakespeare's entire play in just four and a half days.

11. Natural selection might explain microevolution, but it cannot explain the origin of new species and higher orders of life.

Evolutionary biologists have written extensively about how natural selection could produce new species. For instance, in the model called allopatry, developed by Ernst Mayr of Harvard University, if a population of organisms were isolated from the rest of its species by geographical boundaries, it might be subjected to different selective pressures. Changes would accumulate in the isolated population. If those changes became so significant that the splinter group could not or routinely would not breed with the original stock, then the splinter group would be reproductively isolated and on its way toward becoming a new species. Natural selection is the best studied of the evolutionary mechanisms, but biologists are open to other possibilities as well. Biologists are constantly assessing the potential of unusual genetic mechanisms for causing speciation or for producing complex features in organisms. Lynn Margulis of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and others have persuasively argued that some cellular organelles, such as the energy-generating mitochondria, evolved through the symbiotic merger of ancient organisms. Thus, science welcomes the possibility of evolution resulting from forces beyond natural selection. Yet those forces must be natural; they cannot be attributed to the actions of mysterious creative intelligences whose existence, in scientific terms, is unproved.

14. Living things have fantastically intricate features--at the anatomical, cellular and molecular levels--that could not function if they were any less complex or sophisticated. The only prudent conclusion is that they are the products of intelligent design, not evolution.

This "argument from design" is the backbone of most recent attacks on evolution, but it is also one of the oldest. In 1802 theologian William Paley wrote that if one finds a pocket watch in a field, the most reasonable conclusion is that someone dropped it, not that natural forces created it there. By analogy, Paley argued, the complex structures of living things must be the handiwork of direct, divine invention. Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species as an answer to Paley: he explained how natural forces of selection, acting on inherited features, could gradually shape the evolution of ornate organic structures.

Generations of creationists have tried to counter Darwin by citing the example of the eye as a structure that could not have evolved. The eye's ability to provide vision depends on the perfect arrangement of its parts, these critics say. Natural selection could thus never favor the transitional forms needed during the eye's evolution--what good is half an eye? Anticipating this criticism, Darwin suggested that even "incomplete" eyes might confer benefits (such as helping creatures orient toward light) and thereby survive for further evolutionary refinement. Biology has vindicated Darwin: researchers have identified primitive eyes and light-sensing organs throughout the animal kingdom and have even tracked the evolutionary history of eyes through comparative genetics. (It now appears that in various families of organisms, eyes have evolved independently.)

Today's intelligent-design advocates are more sophisticated than their predecessors, but their arguments and goals are not fundamentally different. They criticize evolution by trying to demonstrate that it could not account for life as we know it and then insist that the only tenable alternative is that life was designed by an unidentified intelligence.

Minis: First Commission

2006-10-16T10:58:00.000-05:00

So my buddy asked me to paint the cool 1940's sleuth mini he's using in his Star Wars game.

In process.

The finished product, and something for size reference.

Minis: Orcs and Goblins and Ogres, Oh My!

2006-10-16T00:23:00.000-05:00

Finally finished (that is to say stopped) several of my Reven figures.

A Queer Exhibit

2006-10-14T09:28:00.000-05:00

Birds and bees may be gay - museum exhibition

By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent Thu Oct 12, 6:52 AM ET

OSLO (Reuters) - The birds and the bees may be gay, according to the world's first museum exhibition about homosexuality among animals.

With documentation of gay or lesbian behaviour among giraffes, penguins, parrots, beetles, whales and dozens of other creatures, the Oslo Natural History Museum concludes human homosexuality cannot be viewed as "unnatural".

"We may have opinions on a lot of things, but one thing is clear -- homosexuality is found throughout the animal kingdom, it is not against nature," an exhibit statement said.

Geir Soeli, the project leader of the exhibition entitled "Against Nature", told Reuters: "Homosexuality has been observed for more than 1,500 animal species, and is well documented for 500 of them."

The museum said the exhibition, opening on Thursday despite condemnation from some Christians, was the first in the world on the subject. Soeli said a Dutch zoo had once organised tours to view homosexual couples among the animals.

"The sexual urge is strong in all animals. ... It's a part of life, it's fun to have sex," Soeli said of the reasons for homosexuality or bisexuality among animals.

One exhibit shows two stuffed female swans on a nest -- birds sometimes raise young in homosexual couples, either after a female has forsaken a male mate or donated an egg to a pair of males.

One photograph shows two giant erect penises flailing above the water as two male right whales rub together. Another shows a male giraffe mounting another for sex, another describes homosexuality among beetles.

One radical Christian said organisers of the exhibition -- partly funded by the Norwegian government -- should "burn in hell", Soeli said. Laws describing homosexuality as a "crime against nature" are still on the statutes in some countries.

Greek philosopher Aristotle noted apparent homosexual behaviour among hyenas 2,300 years ago but evidence of animal homosexuality has often been ignored by researchers, perhaps because of distaste, lack of interest or fear or ridicule.

Bonobos, a type of chimpanzee, are among extremes in having sex with either males or females, apparently as part of social bonding. "Bonobos are bisexuals, all of them," Soeli said.

Still, it is unclear why homosexuality survives since it seems a genetic dead-end.

Among theories, males can sometimes win greater acceptance in a pack by having homosexual contact. That in turn can help their chances of later mating with females, he said.

And a study of homosexual men in Italy suggested that their mothers and sisters had more offspring. "The same genes that give homosexuality in men could give higher fertility among women," he said.

Google Rocks

2006-10-04T17:17:00.000-05:00

I absolutely love Google. Finally a homepage you can get just exactly how you want it.

Minis: In process and terrain

2006-09-27T18:44:00.000-05:00

So I did the trees today. This is the grand sum of my terrain at present, save three more 2'x2' boards to make up the total 4'x4' playing area I'll use whenever I can beg, pay, sucker, or otherwise get someone to play with me. I'm also including a shot of minis in progress. I have a number in my office still in blister packs, and another $50 worth from eBay on the way (have I mentioned I love eBay?).

Middle East Media Research Institute

2006-09-16T08:29:00.000-05:00

I highly recommend MEMRI. Actual TV clips and analysis of Arab media throughout the Middle East.

But Michael Moore said Canada was the land of peace...

2006-09-13T16:38:00.000-05:00

From the BBC:

Gun rampage at Canadian college

Police said the gunman was killed during the incident

A gunman has been killed after shooting and injuring at least 20 people - three seriously - at a college in the Canadian city of Montreal.

The man entered the canteen of Dawson College, in central Montreal, during lunchtime and began firing.

Eyewitnesses described fleeing from the campus grounds as the gunman, clad in black, turned the gun on students.

Montreal's chief of police said the gunman was killed during the police intervention.

Terrified students and teachers from the college of 10,000 fled the campus, some with bloodstained clothes.

'Hiding in bushes'

An eyewitness described the moment that the gunman began shooting.

"He shot the people right next to us. They were all running, we were hiding in the bushes, there was debris flying from the bullets shot right next to us," she told CBC television.

Police with drawn guns were seen sheltering behind vehicles outside the site.

Professor Robert Soroka told Reuters news agency the shooting began at 1245 (1645 GMT), and said he heard about 20 shots fired over 30 minutes.

In December 1989 a gunman shot and killed 14 young women in Montreal's Ecole Polytechnique, before turning the gun on himself.

Interesting Tax Ruling

2006-09-07T07:51:00.000-05:00

A consumption tax has it's own issues, chiefly that research shows governments can get away with raising such taxes (value-added taxes are common in Europe) more easily because it is less visible. I'm not sure which argument I buy, but a consumption tax has always seemed fairer to me. The wealthy can't avoid it with lawyers and accountants the way they can avoid income taxes, so they end up paying more tax--something the left is behind. Since an income tax is at some level a tax on work, many conservatives like consumption taxes as well, seeing it as a way to get around the disincentive of an income tax.

What Can the Government Tax?
The answer, never set in stone, may be changing.

By Bruce Bartlett

Last week, a federal appeals court in Washington handed down an important decision relating to the definition of income for tax purposes. What is important about the decision is that it is the first in decades to say the Constitution itself limits what the government may tax. If upheld by the Supreme Court, it could significantly alter tax policy and possibly open the door to radical reform.

In the case, a woman named Marrita Murphy was awarded a legal settlement that included compensation for physical injury and emotional distress. The former has always been tax-exempt, just like insurance settlements. Obviously, it makes no sense to tax as income the payment for a loss that only makes one whole again; one is not being made better off and therefore there is no income. But under current law, compensation for non-physical injuries is taxed.

Murphy argued that just as compensation for physical injuries only makes one whole after a loss, the same is true of awards for emotional distress. In short, it is not income within the meaning of the 16th Amendment to the Constitution. The appeals court agreed, ruling that Murphy’s award for emotional distress is not income and therefore not taxable.

Tax experts immediately recognized the far-reaching implications of this decision for other areas of tax law. Tax protesters have long argued that the 16th Amendment does not grant the federal government the power to tax every single receipt that it deems to be income. Yet, in practice, that is what the Internal Revenue Service does.

The problem is that the very concept of income has never been defined in the tax law. It is pretty much whatever the IRS says it is. Tax analysts generally use a definition devised by two economists, Robert Haig and Henry Simons, which says that income consists of consumption plus the change in net worth between two points in time.

But the Haig-Simons definition goes far beyond that of the tax law. Most important, it includes unrealized capital gains. There also is no room in the Haig-Simons definition for things like 401(k) plans, IRA accounts, or other retirement savings, nor for lower tax rates on realized capital gains.

Under Haig-Simons, owner-occupied homes would be treated as businesses, with homeowners taxed on the implicit rent they pay to themselves, less depreciation. And if your home’s value increases over the course of a year, Haig-Simons implies that you should pay taxes on this event, even if you don’t sell your house.

Clearly, the IRS is not going to tax any of these events, nor would Congress allow it to do so. But because tax analysts implicitly accept the Haig-Simons definition of income, even though it appears nowhere in law, there has been a long-term tendency for the IRS to push the limit of what can be considered taxable income.

Now, a federal court has said there is a constitutional limit.

I would like to see the court go further in regards to the question of whether interest constitutes income. To economists, some portion of the interest we receive on our savings is merely compensation for loss — loss of the immediate enjoyment we would receive if we consumed our income today instead of saving it.

Think of it this way. Would you be satisfied receiving your paycheck a year from now instead of on payday? Of course not. You would be suffering a real loss if you had to wait a year to get paid for your work. But if you were offered, say, 10 percent more in a year, you might be okay with this. Collectively, our willingness to put off consumption today for greater consumption in the future is what determines the pure rate of interest.

But in the view of many great economists, such as John Stuart Mill, the future interest one receives is merely compensation for the loss of immediate satisfaction. Therefore, it is not income, and something more like an insurance settlement that simply makes us whole.

Obviously, market interest rates are more than simple discounts between the present and future, as my example implies. Interest rates also represent a return to risk and an adjustment for expected inflation. In principle, however, some portion of interest is the compensation for loss, and therefore not income.

Given the logic of the Murphy decision, it is quite possible that the risk-free, inflation-adjusted rate of interest could also be excluded from taxation on constitutional grounds. Following through on this logic consistently would revolutionize taxation and eventually lead to a pure consumption tax, which most modern economists favor.

I’m not predicting the Supreme Court will follow this logic. But for tax analysts, it does represent the opening of an interesting possibility.

Minis: Inaugural

2006-09-04T09:56:00.000-05:00

So, I've taken up paining fantasy miniatures this summer. I grabbed some paints and some unpainted minis I had around for D&D and went to town. Now I've bought around 30 models for Reaper's Warlord skirmish game. Part of me wonders why I never tried this before. I think the answer is I until now I couldn't unclench enough to just go for it without getting frustrated that it wasn't perfect. Anyway, here's the first Warlord model I've finished:

This is the River Troll after prepping (sanding off all the flashing and mold lines), and after a black priming coat (Krylon flat black).

Here he is with his basecoat (Reaper Master Series, Vallejo)....and after a wash for shading.

Here's the finished product after highlighting and basing work. The water is E-Z water. Inaptly named, I must say, at least for a delicate operation like this. You have to heat it and it cools/hardens insanely fast. Fine for doing little pools, I'm sure, but this was ambitious.

Hopefully, my photography gets better along with my painting.

Comic

2006-08-28T11:45:00.000-05:00

Great, like I needed another distraction...

2006-08-24T08:10:00.000-05:00

This is the "Office Supplies Trebuchet". Now I have to try it.

The Hulk, apparently

2006-07-31T22:21:00.000-05:00

Hulk		70%
Green Lantern		60%
Spider-Man		60%
Robin		55%
The Flash		50%
Superman		45%
Iron Man		40%
Supergirl		40%
Catwoman		40%
Batman		35%
Wonder Woman		30%

Click here to take the "Which Superhero am I?" quiz...

Religious Transmission

2006-06-13T05:49:00.000-05:00

So utlawgirl got me researching a bit this morning (I'm like dry tinder around a match in that regard) while I waited for an hour for a data report that should take five minutes (dammit!).

The topic is transmission of religion from parents to children. It's of course obvious and unsurprising that the vast majority of religious people share their religion with thier parents, rather than having chosen a religion after some sort of spiritual search or a comparative evaluation. Here are a couple bits of info on the subject (I have to work sometime, after all).

Regarding the second excerpt, elswhere in the paper a study is referenced that found parental religiosity was positively associated with "authoritative" (damanding and responsive) parenting and negatively with "authoritarian" (demanding and unresponsive) parenting.

This got me thinking about myself (that didn't take long!). I love my parents very much, but I'd venture that they likely fall into the authoritarian camp. I worry about this in my own parenting--that I'll enforce the rules but neglect the close relationship I'd like to have. This probably leads to leniency in some areas, of which religion one. I often wonder if I'm doing enough to explain my views to my son. After all, I'm in a 10% minority of the U.S. population, and of those that share my religious views, the vast majority share little else philosophically, tending to be leftists and relativists. Should I be doing more? In a very real sense, it almost seems silly to try to impart what I don't believe. The answer is probably to demonstrate and nurture an inquisitive and rational mind, open to many possiblilities. Still, religion is an ever-present reality he will encounter throughout his life, which seems to demand some some sort of action on my part. Thus far, I'm pretty much limited myself to short, honest answers when I'm asked what I think about something, and, when I hear something asserted, responding that some people believe that, others believe this way, still others think this. I never want this or any subject to be something about which he feels he can't talk to me. So often deeply-held parental beliefs are untouchable, unquestionable axioms for children, and that's the last thing I want to perpetuate.

A 2004 study of religion in Britain reports these statistics on religious transmission:

An HHS paper on measurement of family religiosity has this to say about transmission:

Transmission of Religiosity. The transmission of religiosity itself within families has been the focus of research on socialization, and is of interest as a special case of family communication. Many factors influence the transmission of religious beliefs and practices to children and adolescents, with parents and family generally being viewed as the primary agent of religious socialization (King, Furrow, & Roth, 2002). Some researchers have found that parents transmit their religious beliefs, affiliation, and activities to their children, and this is more likely to happen when parent-child relationships are warm and parental communication about religion is clear (Bao et al, 1999; Benson et al, 1989). Myers (1996) found that three factors aid in the familial transfer of religiosity: parental religiosity, quality of the family relationship, and traditional family structure. Of these factors, parental religiosity was the biggest determinant of offspring's religiosity.

Other researchers have added insights into the process of religious transmission. For example, Regenerus, Smith, & Smith (2004) find that parental religiosity is more strongly related to adolescents' religious participation (a behavior over which parents can maintain a certain level of control) than it is to their sense of the importance of religion. Erickson (1992) found that parents' religious influence and activity had an indirect influence on adolescents' religious commitments by directing them to other social influencers (peers, school, faith community) that have increasing salience during adolescence. Similarly, Martin, White, and Perlman's (2003) analyses found that parents have an effect on adolescent religiosity through peer influence.

Nothing Fails Like Faith

2006-06-07T18:34:00.000-05:00

Lioness in zoo kills man who invoked God

Mon Jun 5, 8:31 AM ET

KIEV (Reuters) - A man shouting that God would keep him safe was mauled to death by a lioness in Kiev zoo after he crept into the animal's enclosure, a zoo official said on Monday.

"The man shouted 'God will save me, if he exists', lowered himself by a rope into the enclosure, took his shoes off and went up to the lions," the official said.

"A lioness went straight for him, knocked him down and severed his carotid artery."

The incident, Sunday evening when the zoo was packed with visitors, was the first of its kind at the attraction. Lions and tigers are kept in an "animal island" protected by thick concrete blocks.

Markets Work for Education Too...of Course

2006-06-06T07:51:00.000-05:00

The Agony of American Education

How per-student funding can revolutionize public schools

Lisa Snell

Imagine a city with authentic public school choice—a place where the location of your home doesn’t determine your child’s school. The first place that comes to mind probably is not San Francisco. But that city boasts one of the most robust school choice systems in the nation.

Caroline Grannan, a public school advocate and super-involved parent, lobbied hard to wear down the San Francisco school district back in 1996 and get her son William, then an incoming kindergartner, out of his assigned neighborhood school, Miraloma Elementary, and into a “more desirable” alternative school called Lakeshore. In 1996 Miraloma had low test scores and a low-income student body bused in from other neighborhoods; its middle-class neighbors shunned it. Lakeshore had a better reputation and higher student performance.

Once, Grannan remembers, it was conventional wisdom in San Francisco that there were only five decent public schools in the city; if you couldn’t get your child into one of them, it was time to move to the suburbs or to find a private academy. But a lot has changed since 1996. Today Grannan could send her child to any school within the city. What’s more, she would happily send her kids to Miraloma, one of many elementary schools in San Francisco that now attract eager middle-class clients. Miraloma has a new principal with a parent-friendly attitude, has begun to raise its test scores, and is more diversified. Families now feel secure taking advantage of Miraloma’s longstanding positive attributes, including its small size and its sheltered and attractive setting.

Grannan’s more recent experience with her children’s middle school also reflects how San Francisco schools have changed. Her son William just graduated from Aptos Middle School, and her daughter Anna started sixth grade there this year. This school is now in high demand, but in 1996 parents considered it dirty, dangerous, and academically weak. Today it offers enriched language, arts, and music programs, and its test scores continue to improve.

Grannan is more than just a concerned parent. She is a founding member of the San Francisco chapter of Parents for Public Schools, a PTA board member, and a prolific writer whose articles about local schools appear in the San Francisco Examiner and other publications. She has argued passionately against both vouchers and charter schools, and would wince to be portrayed as a partisan of school choice. Yet she has become an avid supporter of the San Francisco system and the benefits it brings to San Francisco families.

San Francisco is one of a handful of public school districts across the nation that mimic an education market. In these districts, the money follows the children, parents have the right to choose their children’s public schools and leave underperforming schools, and school principals and communities have the right to spend their school budgets in ways that make their schools more desirable to parents. As a result, the number of schools parents view as “acceptable” has increased greatly in the last several years. In Grannan’s words, “Parents who are willing to go beyond the highest-status schools can now easily find many more acceptable options, and can avoid the fight for a few coveted seats in the most prestigious schools.”

Decentralization Rules

Give credit to Arlene Ackerman, San Francisco’s superintendent of schools since 2000. Ackerman introduced the weighted student formula, pioneered in Edmonton, Alberta, in 1976, which allows money to follow students to the schools they choose while guaranteeing that schools with harder-to-educate kids (low-income students, language learners, low achievers) get more funds. Ackerman also introduced site-based budgeting, so that school communities, not the central office, determine how to spend their money. Finally, she worked to create a true open-enrollment student assignment system that gives parents the right to choose their children’s schools.

In San Francisco the weighted student formula gives each school a foundation allocation that covers the cost of a principal’s salary and a clerk’s salary. The rest of each school’s budget is allocated on a per student basis. There is a base amount for the “average student,” with additional money assigned based on individual student characteristics: grade level, English language skills, socioeconomic status, and special education needs. These weights are assigned as a percentage of the base funding. For example, a kindergartner would receive funding 1.33 times the base allocation, while a low-income kindergartner would receive an additional 0.09 percent of the base allocation. In 2005–06 San Francisco’s base allocation was $2,561. Therefore, the kindergartner would be worth $3,406, and the low-income kindergartner would generate an additional $230 for his school.

The more students a school attracts, the bigger the school’s budget. So public schools in San Francisco now have an incentive to differentiate themselves from one another. Every parent can look through an online catalog of niche schools that include Chinese, Spanish, and Tagalog language immersion schools, college preparatory schools, performing arts schools that collaborate with an urban ballet and symphony, schools specializing in math and technology, traditional neighborhood schools, and a year-round school based on multiple-intelligence theory. Each San Francisco public school is unique. The number of students, the school hours, the teaching style, and the program choices vary from site to site.

The pressure to attract children has produced not just a greater variety of unique schools but new school capacity based on the specific demands of parents. For example, as demand has exceeded the number of available seats the district has added more Chinese and Spanish dual-language immersion programs. The weighted formula ensures that schools have an incentive to recruit and serve students with learning disabilities, limited English proficiency, and other difficulties.

All this diversity is useless if parents don’t know about it, so schools have an incentive to market their programs as well. Much of the marketing is done through a local chapter of Parents for Public Schools. The district and the chapters host school enrollment fairs, and the schools offer parent tours throughout the school year. Parents can select up to seven schools on their enrollment application. In the 2005–06 school year 84 percent of parents received one of the schools they listed, with 63 percent receiving their first-choice school. More than 40 percent of the city’s children now attend schools outside their neighborhoods.

Decentralized school management is a growing trend in the United States. To date the weighted student formula has been implemented in Cincinnati, Houston, St. Paul, San Francisco, Seattle, and Oakland. This year a weaker version that does not include school choice is being implemented statewide in Hawaii, and pilot programs are underway in Boston, Chicago, and New York City.

By contrast, most districts in the United States use a staffing ratio model, in which the central office directs school sites to spend their resources in a particular way, through allocations of staff and a small supplies budget. For example, a school might be sent one teacher for every 28 students. This system gives individual institutions little control over their financial resources and personnel choices. Under the weighted student formula, each school site receives a budget denominated in dollars instead of positions and decides what staff and nonstaff items to purchase with that money.

Oakland, which completed its first year of the weighted student formula in 2004–05, is taking the decentralized concept further than any district in the United States. Edmonton, San Francisco, and the others all charge each school not for the actual salary of each teacher but for “average teacher salaries” in the district. This means that, for the sake of school budgets, differences in teacher salaries are ignored; on paper, a first-year teacher costs the same as a 30-year veteran. This practice hides funding inequities within districts where more desirable schools are stacked with senior teachers and other institutions are staffed with less experienced instructors. In practice, schools with lower-paid teachers end up subsidizing schools with higher-paid teachers. In Oakland, by contrast, schools are charged the actual cost of their employees, so a school with more novice educators has more money left over to pay for training or supplies or even to hire another teacher and reduce class size—all of which could make a school more attractive to potential students.

Another way some districts go further than San Francisco is in the extent to which parents are allowed to choose their children’s schools. Edmonton’s system is particularly robust, allowing students to apply directly to any school in the system. Similarly, Cincinnati’s high school open enrollment system allows students to apply directly to 26 different high school programs on a first come, first served basis. Such systems stand in stark contrast to the form of choice embedded in the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Under federal law students in failing schools are guaranteed the right to transfer to a school that isn’t failing. But districts have not made a good-faith effort to implement public school choice. In New York City this year, for example, 11,000 kids applied to leave failing city schools, but only 2,250 city kids received one of their choices. Since the No Child Left Behind Act was passed, fewer than 2 percent of parents nationwide have used the law’s provisions to transfer their children to other public schools.

School closure is another prominent feature of the weighted student formula model. In Edmonton, if a school declines to the point that it can’t cover its expenses with the per student money, the principal is removed and the remaining teachers and facilities are assigned to a strong principal—or the school is closed altogether, and the staff is moved to other, more successful schools. The San Francisco school district closed five schools in 2005 because of underenrollment and is considering closing or consolidating 19 other schools.

Lifting All Boats

San Francisco’s system produced significant academic success for the children in the district. Miraloma Elementary, the school Caroline Grannan would not consider for her children in 1996, has seen test scores for second-graders in English language improve from 10 percent proficient in 2003 to 47 percent proficient in 2005. “Now’s the time to get in on the ground floor of one of the most up-and-coming schools in San Francisco,” one Miraloma parent recently wrote in an anonymous review for greatschools.net. “Student achievement is rising, parent involvement is soaring and the entire community is working very well together to improve the quality of every aspect of the school.…Parents are moving their kids from private schools to Miraloma because they like what they see. Yes, there is still work to be done but I am very confident that Miraloma will be the next Rooftop or Alvarado.” (Rooftop and Alvarado are two previously average schools that are now considered top-notch by parents due to high student achievement.) Greatschools.net had 19 similarly positive reviews for Miraloma.

Similarly, at Aptos Middle School, where Grannan’s daughter started this year, the share of students scoring proficient in English language increased from 29 percent in 2002 to nearly 50 percent in 2004–05. Aptos is also the most ethnically diverse school in the district: Its demographic composition in 2004–05 was 26 percent Hispanic, 32 percent Asian, 19 percent black, 13 percent white, 6 percent Filipino, 3 percent multiracial, and 1 percent Native American. Close to 50 percent of the students participate in the federal free lunch program, which is the standard proxy for poverty in public schools—schools with large free lunch populations generally have a more difficult time with academic achievement. California’s academic performance index (API) ranks a student body’s performance on several standardized tests. Aptos’ score has just risen from 6 out of 10 to 7 out of 10 (10 is best); it ranks 8 out of 10 when compared to schools with similar demographics.

Such gains have been made throughout the school district. Every grade level in San Francisco has seen increases in student achievement in math and language arts, and the district is scoring above state averages. (Fifty percent of San Francisco seventh-graders were proficient in language arts in 2005, compared to 37 percent proficiency statewide.) Even high schools, the most intractable of all schools, appear to be improving. Mission made Newsweek’s 2005 list of the nation’s top 1,000 high schools. Galileo has shown a big jump in test scores—its statewide API ranking jumped from a 3 to a 6 in just one year, while its ranking compared to similar schools climbed from a 2 to an 8. Balboa is on the radar for families who never would have considered it a few years ago.

These gains have been made even as students who used to be excluded from standardized tests are increasingly being tested. In the last year of Superintendent Bill Rojas’ administration, 1998–99, only 77 percent of the district’s students in the tested grades were included, with kids who were deemed likely to bring scores down left out whenever possible. In 2003–04, 98 percent of students in the tested grades were included.

San Francisco is not alone. William Ouchi of UCLA’s Anderson School of Management has done extensive research on the effects of school district decentralization throughout the United States. Ouchi and his team of 12 researchers studied three very centralized public school districts: New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago; three very decentralized public school districts that used the weighted student formula: Seattle, Houston, and Edmonton; and three very decentralized Catholic school systems: Chicago, New York City, and Los Angeles. In his 2003 book Making Schools Work, Ouchi found that the decentralized public school districts and private Catholic schools had significantly less fraud, less centralized bureaucracy and staff, more money at the classroom level, and higher student achievement.

He also found that most districts merely give lip service to local control. According to Ouchi, the money must follow the child. The only true local control occurs when the principal controls the school budget.

At John Hay Elementary School in Seattle, which Ouchi profiled, the principal controlled about $25,000 a year before decentralization and now controls about $2 million. The principal used her new freedom to hire 12 part-time reading and math coaches and set up a tutoring station outside every classroom, plus another station in a wide hallway, for “turbo-tutoring” the gifted children. Now the school teaches reading in groups of five to seven students while other classes are in larger sections, and every student who is behind grade level receives one-on-one tutoring.

During a four-year period following the change, the school’s standardized math scores rose from the 36th percentile to the 62nd, and reading scores rose from the 72nd percentile to the 76th. In third grade, black and white students now have identical reading scores, and all of them are at or above grade level.

Such gains also occur in other districts that have implemented public school choice and the weighted student formula. After Oakland’s first year of student-based budgeting, a majority of the city’s African-American students met basic reading standards at their grade levels in 2005—probably a first in recent district history. In addition, every grade level in Oakland saw increases in the number of students who were proficient in reading and math. Similarly, in 2005 Cincinnati public schools, where 70 percent of students are African-American, improved their state rating from “Academic Watch” to “Continuous Improvement,” and test scores were up for most students in most grade levels. Seattle also continues to see increases in student achievement and in 2005 reduced the number of schools rated “failing” under the No Child Left Behind Act from 20 to 18, even as the state raised the bar for proficiency.

As a result of these changes, parents are returning to public schools. In Seattle, the public school district has won back 8 percent of all students from the private schools since implementing the new system. In Edmonton, where it all began, the public schools are so popular that there are no private schools left. Three of the largest private schools voluntarily became public schools and joined the Edmonton district. (This has not held true in San Francisco, where families continue to leave the city, largely because of high housing costs. San Francisco’s private schools have lost enrollment as well, as the city’s child population reaches an all-time low of 11 percent.)

The Constraints of Public School Choice

Public school choice is not a panacea. In many districts there have been tensions between parents who want more choices and parents who want their children to have a guaranteed spot in a neighborhood school. In Seattle, the district recently considered abolishing the school choice system in favor of the traditional system based on a child’s address. The district’s reasoning is that busing students all over Seattle is complicated and expensive. So far, a parental outcry has staved off the plans to return to residence-based schools. Parents have suggested charging for transportation or leaving it up to families rather than killing off school choice.

In addition, unlike an actual market system in education, public schools are still strapped with myriad local, state, and federal regulations. No matter how decentralized San Francisco schools become, they still must comply with the No Child Left Behind Act and abide by silly state laws, such as the California statute that forbids parents from bringing home-baked cupcakes to school to celebrate their children’s birthdays with classmates.

Public school choice is at best a weak substitute for true school choice, where parents are not bound by excessive government regulations. In support of this point, Ouchi’s research found that the three Catholic school systems he examined—Chicago, New York City, and Los Angeles—were the most decentralized. They have very small central staffs, spend the least money per pupil, and have the highest student achievement. (While demographics do not affect the per-pupil spending or smaller centralized staff in Catholic schools, they probably contribute to higher test scores. For example, the New York City Catholic schools in Ouchi’s study have only 32 percent low-income children, compared to 74 in the city’s public schools.)

Ouchi’s findings reinforce the main criticism of decentralized public schools: Is it really necessary to stay within the bounds of the existing public school system and complete the difficult task of changing the system from within? A better alternative would be to move to a direct financing mechanism through vouchers, tax credits, or charter schools—an arrangement under which per-pupil funding immediately empowers parents and leads to the most decentralized schools of all, with 100 percent local budget control.

Yet the better alternative is not always the politically feasible alternative. School decentralization offers a compelling model for restructuring school financing, giving principals and parents true control over their schools, and offering real school choice to all students within the constraints of a public school system. It also gets parents used to the idea that schools need not be linked to real estate. And it demonstrates that even within a limited pseudo-market, when families become consumers of education services with the right of exit, schools quickly improve to attract them.

The San Francisco parents I spoke with probably would be alarmed by the market metaphor. In general, these parents do not support education tax credits or school vouchers. They are for public education. Yet San Francisco has adopted a school district financing system that mimics a school market and has led to a revitalization of the city’s public schools. And these parents have taken full advantage.

Caroline Grannan admits she probably could have worked the old residential assignment system to get her kids into good schools. But times have changed in the City by the Bay. When Grannan’s son William was applying for high schools, she was one of many middle-class parents now willing to send her child to Balboa High School, which not long ago was viewed as a low-performing, dangerous “ghetto school.” William ended up going to SOTA, the School of the Arts, to which students are admitted by audition. But as Grannan says, “Knowing that we were fine with Balboa if he hadn’t gotten into SOTA made the entire process much lower-stress.” The difference, she says, is “the comfort in knowing that parents have more than one option.”

Lisa Snell is director of education policy at the Reason Foundation.

Something's alive near the Dead Sea

2006-06-01T07:33:00.000-05:00

Unique Underground Ecosystem Revealed by Hebrew University Researchers Uncovers Eight Previously Unknown Species

Example of one of the unique crustacean species found in the cave (photo by Sasson Tiram)

Discovery of eight previously unknown, ancient animal species within “a new and unique underground ecosystem” in Israel was revealed today by Hebrew University of Jerusalem researchers.

In a press conference on the Mt. Scopus campus of the Hebrew University, the researchers said the discovery came about when a small opening was found , leading to a cave extending to a depth of 100 meters beneath the surface of a quarry in the vicinity of Ramle, between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. The quarry is operated by cement manufacturer Nesher Industries.

The cave, which has been dubbed the Ayalon Cave, is “unique in the world,” said Prof. Amos Frumkin of the Hebrew University Department of Geography. This is due mainly to its isolation from the outside world, since the cave’s surface is situated under a layer of chalk that is impenetrable to water. The cave, with its branches, extends over some 2½ kilometers, making it Israel’s second largest limestone cave. It is to remain closed to the public to permit further scientific research.

The invertebrate animals found in the cave – four seawater and freshwater crustaceans and four terrestial species – are related to but different from other, similar life forms known to scientists. The species have been sent to biological experts in both Israel and abroad for further analysis and dating. It is estimated that these species are millions of years old. Also found in the cave were bacteria that serve as the basic food source in the ecosystem.

“The eight species found thus far are only the beginning” of what promises to be “a fantastic biodiversity,” said Dr. Hanan Dimentman of the Hebrew University Alexander Silberman Institute of Life Sciences, another of the researchers involved in the project. He said that he expects further exploration to reveal several other unique life forms.

The animals found there were all discovered live, except for a blind species of scorpion, although Dr. Dimentman is certain that live scorpions will be discovered in further explorations and also probably an animal or animals which feed on the scorpions.

The underground cave includes an underground lake, in which the crustaceans were found. The lake is part of the Yarkon-Taninim aquifer, one of Israel’s two aquifers, yet is different in temperature and chemical composition from the main waters of the aquifer. The lake’s temperature and salinity indicates that its source is deep underground.

Among the interesting features of the discoveries thus far in the cave is that two of the crustaceans are seawater species and two others are of a types found in fresh or brackish water. This can provide insights into events occurring millions of years ago regarding the history of ancient bodies of water in the region.

In addition to Prof. Frumkin, who heads the unit for cave research in the Department of Geography, and Dr. Dimentman, others involved in the project are Prof. Dov Por and Prof. Aharon Oren of the Institute of Life Sciences, graduate student Israel Naaman, and several others. The Israel Water Commission has assisted in the research, as has Nesher Industries.

Yoel Feldschue, director-general of Nesher Industries, said today that Nesher will preserve the ecological ecosystem which has been revealed in the center of its quarry in order to avoid any damage to the important findings there. He added in that regard that he is hopeful that the planning authorities will enable the company to operate in alternate areas in order to help preserve the scientific site.

Workplace Fit

2006-04-23T07:39:00.000-05:00

A Jedi friend of mine recommended Live Career, which has a free career personality test. A portion of my results are below. I was a bit surprised that I scored as high as I did on Attentive and Creative, and as low as I did on Conventional (though the last is, I'm sure, mainly self-delusion--I'd like to believe I'm more orderly and less easily bored than I am).
Definitions

	Realistic (Doers) -
Realistic types like physical activity, working with their hands, and are mechanically-inclined. They enjoy working outdoors and do not mind dealing with physical risks on the job.
	Investigative (Thinkers) -
Investigative types enjoy the challenge of problem solving in mathematics, technology, and sciences, and the abstract and practical ideas related to these areas. Applied science, such as engineering, technology or computer science may also be of interest to them. They can be technically creative.
	Artistic (Creators) -
Artistic types are often thought of as original and creative by others. Such people enjoy expressing themselves in artistic ways such as acting, dancing, creating music or visual art, or by expressing their ideas either through discussion or debate.
	Social (Helpers) -
Social types are interested in helping to keep others emotionally or physically healthy, or in teaching others. They enjoy giving advice and working directly with people, either in groups or individually.
	Enterprising (Persuaders) -
Enterprising types are people-oriented. They like to talk to, influence and persuade others. They are confident, adventurous, assertive and show leadership.
	Conventional (Organisers) -
Conventional types enjoy supervising others in jobs where rules and tasks are well defined. They show careful attention to detail, are organized, follow instructions well and prefer jobs where their daily duties are regular and fixed.
	Attentive (Servers) -
Attentive types enjoy helping others, serving others' personal needs and looking after the comfort and well-being of others. They are happy in jobs requiring sociability, politeness, patience and a happy disposition.

Brother Rail Gun of Sweet Reason has spoken!

2006-04-15T08:19:00.000-05:00

Amusing column from the San Fransisco Chronicle:

JON CARROLL
- Jon Carroll
Friday, April 8, 2005

The following is the first communique from a group calling itself Unitarian Jihad. It was sent to me at The Chronicle via an anonymous spam remailer. I have no idea whether other news organizations have received this communique, and, if so, why they have not chosen to print it. Perhaps they fear starting a panic. I feel strongly that the truth, no matter how alarming, trivial or disgusting, must always be told. I am pleased to report that the words below are at least not disgusting:

Greetings to the Imprisoned Citizens of the United States. We are Unitarian Jihad. There is only God, unless there is more than one God. The vote of our God subcommittee is 10-8 in favor of one God, with two abstentions. Brother Flaming Sword of Moderation noted the possibility of there being no God at all, and his objection was noted with love by the secretary.

Greetings to the Imprisoned Citizens of the United States! Too long has your attention been waylaid by the bright baubles of extremist thought. Too long have fundamentalist yahoos of all religions (except Buddhism -- 14-5 vote, no abstentions, fundamentalism subcommittee) made your head hurt. Too long have you been buffeted by angry people who think that God talks to them. You have a right to your moderation! You have the power to be calm! We will use the IED of truth to explode the SUV of dogmatic expression!

People of the United States, why is everyone yelling at you??? Whatever happened to ... you know, everything? Why is the news dominated by nutballs saying that the Ten Commandments have to be tattooed inside the eyelids of every American, or that Allah has told them to kill Americans in order to rid the world of Satan, or that Yahweh has instructed them to go live wherever they feel like, or that Shiva thinks bombing mosques is a great idea? Sister Immaculate Dagger of Peace notes for the record that we mean no disrespect to Jews, Muslims, Christians or Hindus. Referred back to the committee of the whole for further discussion.

We are Unitarian Jihad. We are everywhere. We have not been born again, nor have we sworn a blood oath. We do not think that God cares what we read, what we eat or whom we sleep with. Brother Neutron Bomb of Serenity notes for the record that he does not have a moral code but is nevertheless a good person, and Unexalted Leader Garrote of Forgiveness stipulates that Brother Neutron Bomb of Serenity is a good person, and this is to be reflected in the minutes.

Beware! Unless you people shut up and begin acting like grown-ups with brains enough to understand the difference between political belief and personal faith, the Unitarian Jihad will begin a series of terrorist-like actions. We will take over television studios, kidnap so-called commentators and broadcast calm, well-reasoned discussions of the issues of the day. We will not try for "balance" by hiring fruitcakes; we will try for balance by hiring non-ideologues who have carefully thought through the issues.

We are Unitarian Jihad. We will appear in public places and require people to shake hands with each other. (Sister Hand Grenade of Love suggested that we institute a terror regime of mandatory hugging, but her motion was not formally introduced because of lack of a quorum.) We will require all lobbyists, spokesmen and campaign managers to dress like trout in public. Televangelists will be forced to take jobs as Xerox repair specialists. Demagogues of all stripes will be required to read Proust out loud in prisons.

We are Unitarian Jihad, and our motto is: "Sincerity is not enough." We have heard from enough sincere people to last a lifetime already. Just because you believe it's true doesn't make it true. Just because your motives are pure doesn't mean you are not doing harm. Get a dog, or comfort someone in a nursing home, or just feed the birds in the park. Play basketball. Lighten up. The world is not out to get you, except in the sense that the world is out to get everyone.

Brother Gatling Gun of Patience notes that he's pretty sure the world is out to get him because everyone laughs when he says he is a Unitarian. There were murmurs of assent around the room, and someone suggested that we buy some Congress members and really stick it to the Baptists. But this was deemed against Revolutionary Principles, and Brother Gatling Gun of Patience was remanded to the Sunday Flowers and Banners committee.

People of the United States! We are Unitarian Jihad! We can strike without warning. Pockets of reasonableness and harmony will appear as if from nowhere! Nice people will run the government again! There will be coffee and cookies in the Gandhi Room after the revolution.

Startling new underground group spreads lack of panic! Citizens declare themselves "relatively unafraid" of threats of undeclared rationality. People can still go to France, terrorist leader says.

Michael row the boat ashore, and then get some of the local kids to pull the boat onto the dock, and come visit with jcarroll@sfchronicle.com.

Don't Press the Button

2006-04-13T08:21:00.000-05:00

This is pretty interesting.

Oh Captain, my Captain

2006-03-28T07:17:00.000-06:00

You scored as Capt. Mal Reynolds. The Captain. You are the captain of the ship, so the crew are your responsibility. You just want to do the job, get paid and keep flying. Why is that always so hard?

Capt. Mal Reynolds

94%

Zoe Alleyne Washburne

75%

The Operative

63%

River Tam

56%

Inara Serra

56%

Jayne Cobb

56%

Hoban 'Wash' Washburne

56%

Simon Tam

50%

Shepherd Derrial Book

44%

Kaylee (Kaywinnet Lee) Frye

38%

Which Serenity character are you?
created with QuizFarm.com

Cartoons and the Right to Offend

2006-02-09T09:45:00.000-06:00

Cartoon Debate
The case for mocking religion.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Saturday, Feb. 4, 2006, at 4:31 PM ET

As well as being a small masterpiece of inarticulacy and self-abnegation, the statement from the State Department about this week's international Muslim pogrom against the free press was also accidentally accurate.

"Anti-Muslim images are as unacceptable as anti-Semitic images, as anti-Christian images, or any other religious belief."

Thus the hapless Sean McCormack, reading painfully slowly from what was reported as a prepared government statement. How appalling for the country of the First Amendment to be represented by such an administration. What does he mean "unacceptable"? That it should be forbidden? And how abysmal that a "spokesman" cannot distinguish between criticism of a belief system and slander against a people. However, the illiterate McCormack is right in unintentionally comparing racist libels to religious faith. Many people have pointed out that the Arab and Muslim press is replete with anti-Jewish caricature, often of the most lurid and hateful kind. In one way the comparison is hopelessly inexact. These foul items mostly appear in countries where the state decides what is published or broadcast. However, when Muslims republish the Protocols of the Elders of Zion or perpetuate the story of Jewish blood-sacrifice at Passover, they are recycling the fantasies of the Russian Orthodox Christian secret police (in the first instance) and of centuries of Roman Catholic and Lutheran propaganda (in the second). And, when an Israeli politician refers to Palestinians as snakes or pigs or monkeys, it is near to a certainty that he will be a rabbi (most usually Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the leader of the disgraceful Shas party) and will cite Talmudic authority for his racism. For most of human history, religion and bigotry have been two sides of the same coin, and it still shows.

Therefore there is a strong case for saying that the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, and those who have reprinted its efforts out of solidarity, are affirming the right to criticize not merely Islam but religion in general. And the Bush administration has no business at all expressing an opinion on that. If it is to say anything, it is constitutionally obliged to uphold the right and no more. You can be sure that the relevant European newspapers have also printed their share of cartoons making fun of nuns and popes and messianic Israeli settlers, and taunting child-raping priests. There was a time when this would not have been possible. But those taboos have been broken.

Which is what taboos are for. Islam makes very large claims for itself. In its art, there is a prejudice against representing the human form at all. The prohibition on picturing the prophet—who was only another male mammal—is apparently absolute. So is the prohibition on pork or alcohol or, in some Muslim societies, music or dancing. Very well then, let a good Muslim abstain rigorously from all these. But if he claims the right to make me abstain as well, he offers the clearest possible warning and proof of an aggressive intent. This current uneasy coexistence is only an interlude, he seems to say. For the moment, all I can do is claim to possess absolute truth and demand absolute immunity from criticism. But in the future, you will do what I say and you will do it on pain of death.

I refuse to be spoken to in that tone of voice, which as it happens I chance to find "offensive." ( By the way, hasn't the word "offensive" become really offensive lately?) The innate human revulsion against desecration is much older than any monotheism: Its most powerful expression is in the Antigone of Sophocles. It belongs to civilization. I am not asking for the right to slaughter a pig in a synagogue or mosque or to relieve myself on a "holy" book. But I will not be told I can't eat pork, and I will not respect those who burn books on a regular basis. I, too, have strong convictions and beliefs and value the Enlightenment above any priesthood or any sacred fetish-object. It is revolting to me to breathe the same air as wafts from the exhalations of the madrasahs, or the reeking fumes of the suicide-murderers, or the sermons of Billy Graham and Joseph Ratzinger. But these same principles of mine also prevent me from wreaking random violence on the nearest church, or kidnapping a Muslim at random and holding him hostage, or violating diplomatic immunity by attacking the embassy or the envoys of even the most despotic Islamic state, or making a moronic spectacle of myself threatening blood and fire to faraway individuals who may have hurt my feelings. The babyish rumor-fueled tantrums that erupt all the time, especially in the Islamic world, show yet again that faith belongs to the spoiled and selfish childhood of our species.

As it happens, the cartoons themselves are not very brilliant, or very mordant, either. But if Muslims do not want their alleged prophet identified with barbaric acts or adolescent fantasies, they should say publicly that random murder for virgins is not in their religion. And here one runs up against a curious reluctance. … In fact, Sunni Muslim leaders can't even seem to condemn the blowing-up of Shiite mosques and funeral processions, which even I would describe as sacrilege. Of course there are many millions of Muslims who do worry about this, and another reason for condemning the idiots at Foggy Bottom is their assumption, dangerous in many ways, that the first lynch mob on the scene is actually the genuine voice of the people. There's an insult to Islam, if you like.

The question of "offensiveness" is easy to decide. First: Suppose that we all agreed to comport ourselves in order to avoid offending the believers? How could we ever be sure that we had taken enough precautions? On Saturday, I appeared on CNN, which was so terrified of reprisal that it "pixilated" the very cartoons that its viewers needed to see. And this ignoble fear in Atlanta, Ga., arose because of an illustration in a small Scandinavian newspaper of which nobody had ever heard before! Is it not clear, then, that those who are determined to be "offended" will discover a provocation somewhere? We cannot possibly adjust enough to please the fanatics, and it is degrading to make the attempt.

Second (and important enough to be insisted upon): Can the discussion be carried on without the threat of violence, or the automatic resort to it? When Salman Rushdie published The Satanic Verses in 1988, he did so in the hope of forwarding a discussion that was already opening in the Muslim world, between extreme Quranic literalists and those who hoped that the text could be interpreted. We know what his own reward was, and we sometimes forget that the fatwa was directed not just against him but against "all those involved in its publication," which led to the murder of the book's Japanese translator and the near-deaths of another translator and one publisher. I went on Crossfire at one point, to debate some spokesman for outraged faith, and said that we on our side would happily debate the propriety of using holy writ for literary and artistic purposes. But that we would not exchange a word until the person on the other side of the podium had put away his gun. (The menacing Muslim bigmouth on the other side refused to forswear state-sponsored suborning of assassination, and was of course backed up by the Catholic bigot Pat Buchanan.) The same point holds for international relations: There can be no negotiation under duress or under the threat of blackmail and assassination. And civil society means that free expression trumps the emotions of anyone to whom free expression might be inconvenient. It is depressing to have to restate these obvious precepts, and it is positively outrageous that the administration should have discarded them at the very first sign of a fight.

Wal-Mart vs. the Elites

2006-02-01T11:38:00.000-06:00

This is just another in a long line of examples of how leftist political do-goodery damages the very people it purports to help.

Hard Line State
Big Labor's war on Wal-Mart claims casualties among poor Marylanders.

BY STEVE H. HANKE AND STEPHEN J.K. WALTERS
Thursday, January 26, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST

BALTIMORE--In Big Labor's war against Wal-Mart, "collateral damage"--in the form of lost jobs and income for the poor--is starting to add up. Of course, since the unions and their legislative allies claim that their motive is to liberate people from exploitation by Wal-Mart, these unintended effects are often ignored.

Here in Maryland, however, that's getting hard to do. The consequences of our Legislature's override of Republican Gov. Robert Ehrlich's veto of their "Fair Share Health Care Act" on Jan. 12 will be tragic for some of the state's neediest residents. The law will force companies that employ over 10,000 to spend at least 8% of their payroll on health care or kick any shortfall into a special state fund. Wal-Mart would be the only employer in the state to be affected.

Almost surely, therefore, the company will pull the plug on plans to build a distribution center that would have employed 800 in Somerset County, on Maryland's picturesque Eastern Shore. As a Wal-Mart spokesman has put it, "you have to take a step back and call into question how business-friendly is a state like Maryland when they pass a bill that . . . takes a swipe at one company that provides 15,000 jobs."

Unfortunately, in Somerset, the new law looks more like a body blow than a "swipe." The rural county is Maryland's poorest, with per capita personal income 46% below the state average and a poverty rate 130% above it. Somerset's enduring problem is weak labor demand that greatly limits its 25,250 residents' economic opportunities.

There are just 0.8 jobs per household in Somerset, barely half the 1.5 figure that applies to the rest of the state. Somerset's top 10 list of employers features sectors like food services (average annual compensation per employee: $9,637), poultry and egg production ($14,320) and seafood preparation and packaging ($19,190).

It is hard to exaggerate how much the planned distribution center might have meant to Somerset's economy. Using an input-output model, we forecast the "ripple effects" of the new income and spending that could have emanated from Wal-Mart's facility as follows:

• The center's 800 employees would have created an additional 282 jobs among "upstream" suppliers and "downstream" retailers and service establishments; all told, the center would have boosted county employment by 14% and private-sector employment by 20%.

• Total annual employee compensation in Somerset would have risen by $46.5 million, or 19%.

• Annual output (or "gross county product") would have risen by $128.3 million, or 19%.

• State and local tax receipts would have increased by $19.2 million annually; this would include $8.5 million in property taxes, $5.6 million in sales taxes, and $1.4 million in personal income taxes.

Those losses, though dramatic, probably understate the full extent of the damage in this case. They do not include forgone employment and income from construction of the facility and related infrastructure improvements. What is more, Wal-Mart's tentative plans for a second distribution center in Garrett County, in mountainous western Maryland, also appear dead. Garrett, with a poverty rate that is 70% above the state's, is only slightly better off than Somerset.

How could our legislators turn a blind eye to such areas? Partly, of course, they are simply eager for Big Labor's votes and money and therefore subservient to its interests. The Service Employees International Union actually helped draft what became known as the "Wal-Mart bill." Unable--so far--to organize workers at the company, the union's immediate national strategy is to limit Wal-Mart's competitive reach by raising its costs. Maryland was a shrewdly chosen place to kick off this campaign.

Some estimate that as much as a third of the state's economic activity stems from federal employment and purchases. Over 150,000 Marylanders--six times the population of tiny Somerset--are on the federal (nonmilitary) payroll; they are concentrated in central Maryland, near the nation's capital. Nearly 268,000 more Marylanders draw checks from state and local government.

With so many workers in a sector where revenues appear to arrive automatically and inefficiency never leads to bankruptcy, our state's resulting political culture is quite predictable. Many Marylanders are simply unmindful of the necessities of survival in the private sector: pleasing customers, controlling costs and satisfying shareholders. Thanks to the federal tax dollars collected from the rest of the country and spent in Maryland, the prevailing view of economic reality is inverted: The public sector is seen as the engine of prosperity, with the private one along for the ride.

Reflecting this culture, our legislators often behave as if business is a problem to be solved. On Jan. 17, they also overrode a gubernatorial veto of a $1-an-hour increase in the state's minimum wage. Like the health-care mandate, the hike is a job killer--though not in affluent areas of the state, where strong labor demand long ago pushed the going wage above the minimum. In those areas, the law is largely symbolic and enables well-meaning voters and legislators to conclude that they are "doing something for working families." Safely out of their view, however, at Maryland's impoverished margins, already weak labor demand will be further diminished.

What remains to be seen is whether Maryland will be a leading political indicator or an anomaly, for Wal-Mart bills have been drafted in 33 other states. Emboldened by success here, lawmakers in some states have set the threshold for companies to be hit with mandated health benefits as low as 1,000 workers.

In these upcoming battles, legislators should be mindful that companies like Wal-Mart are not the enemy but rather frontline soldiers in a real war on poverty. The profit motive leads them to seek out areas where there is much idle labor and put it to work. Where they are prevented or discouraged from doing so, the alternative job prospect is rarely a cushy spot in the bureaucracy. Rather, it is continued idleness and hardship.
Mr. Hanke, a professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University, served as a member of the Governor's Council of Economic Advisers in Maryland (1976-77). Mr. Walters is a professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland.

Hanson on Cake Having and Cake Eating

2006-01-27T11:12:00.000-06:00

Amoral Euphemism
Is “outsourcing” multilateralism?

Senator John Kerry has recently opined, “Why hasn't Osama Bin Laden been captured or killed, and how will he be destroyed before he next appears on tape to spread his disgusting message?”

Then the senator argued that bin Laden lives “because Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon didn't use American troops to do the job and instead outsourced the job of killing the world's #1 terrorist to Afghan warlords, this cold blooded killer got away.”

About the same time, Senator Clinton intoned of Iran, “I believe we lost critical time in dealing with Iran because the White House chose to downplay the threats and to outsource the negotiations. I don't believe you face threats like Iran or North Korea by outsourcing it to others and standing on the sidelines.”

This liberal saberrattling is born of an understandable desire to restore their lost credibility on national security, but they have failed to notice two problems with their newfound approach.

First, if the United States did seek to engage mostly indigenous Afghan troops or Pakistani soldiers, or if we did allow Britain, France, and Germany to run negotiations with Iran, then such “outsourcing” might be better described as “multilateralism.”

Such joint efforts are precisely what Democrat stalwarts like Kerry and Clinton prefer to the old “going it alone,” “unilateralism,” and “alienating our allies,” when the United States largely handles problems itself. I have no doubt that daily missile-firing Predator sorties across Pakistan, or American planes over Iranian nuclear sites, would be met by howls from Europeans, Middle Easterners, and, at the opportune crest of popular indignation, Kerry and Clinton themselves.

Second, the new bellicose language of Kerry and Clinton suggests that both have some better ideas about how to solve the problem of catching bin Laden and stopping Iran from going nuclear. But in both cases, there are, to be frank, only awful and God-awful choices. And if either presidential aspirant were intellectually honest, then he (or she) would describe the glum alternatives in detail when trashing the present policy.

Quite simply, to catch or kill bin Laden and Zawahiri, the United States — after the apparent failure, thus far, of diplomatic pressure on Pakistan, billions in debt relief, earthquake aid, cash largess, constant cross-border incursions, Predator attacks, and multimillion-dollar bounties on al Qaeda hierarchs — must put sizable troops onto the sovereign soil of Islamic and nuclear Pakistan. President Musharraf is a moderate dictator, an oxymoron reflecting the conventional wisdom that he is only as liberal (or at least claims to be) as his radical constituents will stomach — provided that he leaves the mullahs alone, pumps up national pride, sneers at India, and garners cash from the West.

If thousands of American troops go into the Pakistani borderlands to hunt down bin Laden in remote villages, expect Islamic unrest over “American imperialism.” If we do not move, there is no guaranteeing that missiles, agents, bribes, bounties, Pakistanis, earthquakes, weather, illness, or depression will kill bin Laden — and thus more of Kerry’s rants about incompetence and outsourcing.

Alternatively, a third choice — namely, supporting Pakistani democratic leaders and oppositional reformers to evolve Pakistan into a democratic partner against Islamic terrorism in the fashion of an Afghanistan, Iraq, or Turkey — would of course be derided as naïve, or conspiratorial “neocon” democratic engineering.

So the present policy is simple pragmatism — push, cajole, threaten, appease, and flatter Pakistan, as much as possible, to allow us to go after bin Laden, up to the point that there is not a blowup in the Pakistani street, an embarrassing military declaration of martial law, a nuclear exchange, or the creation of an Iranian-style nuclear Islamic republic right in between India and Afghanistan. Yet again, abandon our present pressure, and bin Laden & Co. may, with impunity, be putting the finishing touches on something to trump September 11.

Senator Clinton should drop the vague feel-good stump speech and get frank about Iran.

For real appeasement and outsourcing, look at her husband and current adviser. Bill Clinton praised Iranian “democracy” at Davos in 2005. He compared it favorably to American and Israeli-style voting, urged us to defer to the European negotiations, and apologized to the murderous theocrats for the shah, for Saddam, for CIA plots in 1953, and for anything else he could think of. They were not impressed. And so we still had an Iranian nuclear program began on his watch.

There are really only two bad choices, Senator Clinton. One is the present “outsourcing” course: Let the Europeans exhaust negotiations, pressure the Chinese and Russians to allow the matter to go to the U.N., bolster Turkey and the Arab Gulf states and advise them to build a regional coalition to contain the problem, hope that Ahmadinejad alienates the world even more. Then, perhaps, sometime during this process, a popular uprising or even a right-wing worried cleric will thwart the nuclear party in Iran before this latest Great Mahdi gets the bomb, and with it impunity through national adulation.

All that is slow, often humiliating, and easily caricatured work; but what Secretary Rice is now doing is pretty much what liberals and Democrats also prefer — except for, apparently, the exasperated and now hawkish Senator Clinton.

The other unmentionable alternative — if we set aside the real appeasement of letting the mullahs have the bomb, or the equally cowardly policy of gently suggesting that the Israelis do the deed, or some Lord of the Rings fantasy about a grand aerial armada of NATO, American, and Russian jets descending in bombing formation over the modern forge of Mordor — is a preemptive (or in-sourced) American “air strike.”

But the singular form of the noun “strike” is disingenuous, more so when it is cloaked in the now-squishy “no option will be taken off the table” lingo.

Instead, if she wants to raise the stakes and contemplate the consequences, the senator should at least apprise her upper-West Side constituents of what the word “strike” entails: Perhaps two or three weeks of messy bombing, shown on CNN round-the-clock. Unavoidable collateral damage served up hourly on Al Jazeera as “genocide”. Missed targets, followed by worries about retribution from terrorists, now armed with nuclear waste and righteous indignation, vowing to “avenge” the infidel attack. Shiite turmoil in Iraq. Investigations into overflights of Muslim airspace. Contention over American use of Turkish, Iraqi, or Kuwaiti facilities to attack another Muslim country. Iranian-backed Hezbollah incursions into Israel. Fierce denunciations from the Russians and Chinese. Private glee and public “remorse” from the Europeans. Pulitzer-prizes and whistle-blower adulation for CIA leakers and Washington Post up-and-coming reporters. More Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky rants, reverberated by yet more shrillness from Sens. Boxer, Durbin, and Kennedy. Sky-high oil prices with the attendant conspiratorial talk about oil grabs and Zionist plotting. And more still.

All that mess is what killing bin Laden and stopping Iranian nukes may well be about, if we don’t “outsource” responsibilities — however glib that sounds on a Democratic blog or thrown out as a gnarly bone to an oohing and aahing academic audience.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the author, most recently, of A War Like No Other. How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.

Multiculturalism and the Muslims

2006-01-10T14:20:00.002-06:00

I understand why the Right wants to control what we do in bed, watch on TV, etc--it's a religion thing. I also understand why the Left wants to control what we earn, how we spend, etc--it's a socialism thing. What I have difficulty with is why the Left, having rejected religion and therefore the social mores of the Right, has so whole-heartedly adopted subjectivism that their embrace of multiculturalism trumps the very concerns that cause them to break socially with the Right. It's a tragedy that two men can't get married in Texas, but Saudis lopping off homosexual heads isn't on the radar???

J

It’s the demography, stupid

By Mark Steyn
Most people reading this have strong stomachs, so let me lay it out as baldly as I can: Much of what we loosely call the western world will not survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most western European countries. There’ll probably still be a geographical area on the map marked as Italy or the Netherlands— probably—just as in Istanbul there’s still a building called St. Sophia’s Cathedral. But it’s not a cathedral; it’s merely a designation for a piece of real estate. Likewise, Italy and the Netherlands will merely be designations for real estate. The challenge for those who reckon western civilization is on balance better than the alternatives is to figure out a way to save at least some parts of the west.

One obstacle to doing that is the fact that, in the typical election campaign in your advanced industrial democracy, the political platforms of at least one party in the United States and pretty much all parties in the rest of the west are largely about what one would call the secondary impulses of society—government health care, government day care (which Canada’s thinking of introducing), government paternity leave (which Britain’s just introduced). We’ve prioritized the secondary impulse over the primary ones: national defense, family, faith, and, most basic of all, reproductive activity—“Go forth and multiply,” because if you don’t you won’t be able to afford all those secondary-impulse issues, like cradle-to-grave welfare. Americans sometimes don’t understand how far gone most of the rest of the developed world is down this path: In the Canadian and most Continental cabinets, the defense ministry is somewhere an ambitious politician passes through on his way up to important jobs like the health department. I don’t think Don Rumsfeld would regard it as a promotion if he were moved to Health & Human Services.

The design flaw of the secular social-democratic state is that it requires a religious-society birth rate to sustain it. Post-Christian hyper-rationalism is, in the objective sense, a lot less rational than Catholicism or Mormonism. Indeed, in its reliance on immigration to ensure its future, the European Union has adopted a twenty-first-century variation on the strategy of the Shakers, who were forbidden from reproducing and thus could only increase their numbers by conversion. The problem is that secondary- impulse societies mistake their weaknesses for strengths—or, at any rate, virtues—and that’s why they’re proving so feeble at dealing with a primal force like Islam.

Speaking of which, if we are at war—and half the American people and significantly higher percentages in Britain, Canada, and Europe don’t accept that proposition—than what exactly is the war about?

We know it’s not really a “war on terror.” Nor is it, at heart, a war against Islam, or even “radical Islam.” The Muslim faith, whatever its merits for the believers, is a problematic business for the rest of us. There are many trouble spots around the world, but as a general rule, it’s easy to make an educated guess at one of the participants: Muslims vs. Jews in “Palestine,” Muslims vs. Hindus in Kashmir, Muslims vs. Christians in Africa, Muslims vs. Buddhists in Thailand, Muslims vs. Russians in the Caucasus, Muslims vs. backpacking tourists in Bali. Like the environmentalists, these guys think globally but act locally.

Yet while Islamism is the enemy, it’s not what this thing’s about. Radical Islam is an opportunist infection, like AIDS: it’s not the HIV that kills you, it’s the pneumonia you get when your body’s too weak to fight it off. When the jihadists engage with the U.S. military, they lose—as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq. If this were like World War I with those fellows in one trench and us in ours facing them over some boggy piece of terrain, it would be over very quickly. Which the smarter Islamists have figured out. They know they can never win on the battlefield, but they figure there’s an excellent chance they can drag things out until western civilization collapses in on itself and Islam inherits by default.

That’s what the war’s about: our lack of civilizational confidence. As a famous Arnold Toynbee quote puts it: “Civilizations die from suicide, not murder”—as can be seen throughout much of “the western world” right now. The progressive agenda —lavish social welfare, abortion, secularism, multiculturalism—is collectively the real suicide bomb. Take multiculturalism: the great thing about multiculturalism is that it doesn’t involve knowing anything about other cultures—the capital of Bhutan, the principal exports of Malawi, who cares? All it requires is feeling good about other cultures. It’s fundamentally a fraud, and I would argue was subliminally accepted on that basis. Most adherents to the idea that all cultures are equal don’t want to live in anything but an advanced western society: Multiculturalism means your kid has to learn some wretched native dirge for the school holiday concert instead of getting to sing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” or that your holistic masseuse uses techniques developed from Native American spirituality, but not that you or anyone you care about should have to live in an African or Native-American society. It’s a quintessential piece of progressive humbug.

Then September 11 happened. And bizarrely the reaction of just about every prominent western leader was to visit a mosque: President Bush did, the Prince of Wales did, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom did, the Prime Minister of Canada did… . The Premier of Ontario didn’t, and so twenty Muslim community leaders had a big summit to denounce him for failing to visit a mosque. I don’t know why he didn’t. Maybe there was a big backlog, it was mosque drivetime, prime ministers in gridlock up and down the freeway trying to get to the Sword of the Infidel-Slayer Mosque on Elm Street. But for whatever reason he couldn’t fit it into his hectic schedule. Ontario’s Citizenship Minister did show up at a mosque, but the imams took that as a great insult, like the Queen sending Fergie to open the Commonwealth Games. So the Premier of Ontario had to hold a big meeting with the aggrieved imams to apologize for not going to a mosque and, as The Toronto Star’s reported it, “to provide them with reassurance that the provincial government does not see them as the enemy.”

Anyway, the get-me-to-the-mosque-on-time fever died down, but it set the tone for our general approach to these atrocities. The old definition of a nanosecond was the gap between the traffic light changing in New York and the first honk from a car behind. The new definition is the gap between a terrorist bombing and the press release from an Islamic lobby group warning of a backlash against Muslims. In most circumstances, it would be considered appallingly bad taste to deflect attention from an actual “hate crime” by scaremongering about a purely hypothetical one. Needless to say, there is no campaign of Islamophobic hate crimes. If anything, the west is awash in an epidemic of self-hate crimes. A commenter on Tim Blair’s website in Australia summed it up in a note-perfect parody of a Guardian headline: “Muslim Community Leaders Warn of Backlash from Tomorrow Morning’s Terrorist Attack.” Those community leaders have the measure of us.

...

For example, one day in 2004, a couple of Canadians returned home, to Lester B. Pearson International Airport in Toronto. They were the son and widow of a fellow called Ahmed Said Khadr, who back on the Pakistani-Afghan frontier was known as “al-Kanadi.” Why? Because he was the highest-ranking Canadian in al Qaeda—plenty of other Canucks in al Qaeda but he was the Numero Uno. In fact, one could argue that the Khadr family is Canada’s principal contribution to the war on terror. Granted they’re on the wrong side (if you’ll forgive me being judgmental) but no can argue that they aren’t in the thick of things. One of Mr. Khadr’s sons was captured in Afghanistan after killing a U.S. Special Forces medic. Another was captured and held at Guantanamo. A third blew himself up while killing a Canadian soldier in Kabul. Pa Khadr himself died in an al Qaeda shoot-out with Pakistani forces in early 2004. And they say we Canadians aren’t doing our bit in this war!

In the course of the fatal shoot-out of al-Kanadi, his youngest son was paralyzed. And, not unreasonably, Junior didn’t fancy a prison hospital in Peshawar. So Mrs. Khadr and her boy returned to Toronto so he could enjoy the benefits of Ontario government healthcare. “I’m Canadian, and I’m not begging for my rights,” declared the widow Khadr. “I’m demanding my rights.”

As they always say, treason’s hard to prove in court, but given the circumstances of Mr. Khadr’s death it seems clear that not only was he providing “aid and comfort to the Queen’s enemies” but that he was, in fact, the Queen’s enemy. The Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, the Royal 22nd Regiment, and other Canucks have been participating in Afghanistan, on one side of the conflict, and the Khadr family had been over there participating on the other side. Nonetheless, the Prime Minister of Canada thought Boy Khadr’s claims on the public health system was an excellent opportunity to demonstrate his own deep personal commitment to “diversity.” Asked about the Khadrs’ return to Toronto, he said, “I believe that once you are a Canadian citizen, you have the right to your own views and to disagree.”

That’s the wonderful thing about multiculturalism: you can choose which side of the war you want to fight on. When the draft card arrives, just tick “home team” or “enemy,” according to taste. The Canadian Prime Minister is a typical late-stage western politician: He could have said, well, these are contemptible people and I know many of us are disgusted at the idea of our tax dollars being used to provide health care for a man whose Canadian citizenship is no more than a flag of convenience, but unfortunately that’s the law and, while we can try to tighten it, it looks like this lowlife’s got away with it. Instead, his reflex instinct was to proclaim this as a wholehearted demonstration of the virtues of the multicultural state. Like many enlightened western leaders, the Canadian Prime Minister will be congratulating himself on his boundless tolerance even as the forces of intolerance consume him.

That, by the way, is the one point of similarity between the jihad and conventional terrorist movements like the IRA or ETA. Terror groups persist because of a lack of confidence on the part of their targets: the IRA, for example, calculated correctly that the British had the capability to smash them totally but not the will. So they knew that while they could never win militarily, they also could never be defeated. The Islamists have figured similarly. The only difference is that most terrorist wars are highly localized. We now have the first truly global terrorist insurgency because the Islamists view the whole world the way the IRA view the bogs of Fermanagh: they want it and they’ve calculated that our entire civilization lacks the will to see them off.

We spend a lot of time at The New Criterion attacking the elites and we’re right to do so. The commanding heights of the culture have behaved disgracefully for the last several decades. But, if it were just a problem with the elites, it wouldn’t be that serious: the mob could rise up and hang ’em from lampposts—a scenario that’s not unlikely in certain Continental countries. But the problem now goes way beyond the ruling establishment. The annexation by government of most of the key responsibilities of life—child-raising, taking care of your elderly parents—has profoundly changed the relationship between the citizen and the state. At some point—I would say socialized health care is a good marker—you cross a line, and it’s very hard then to persuade a citizenry enjoying that much government largesse to cross back.

...

Go back to that list of local conflicts I mentioned. The jihad has held out a long time against very tough enemies. If you’re not shy about taking on the Israelis, the Russians, the Indians, and the Nigerians, why wouldn’t you fancy your chances against the Belgians and Danes and New Zealanders?

So the jihadists are for the most part doing no more than giving us a prod in the rear as we sleepwalk to the cliff. When I say “sleepwalk,” it’s not because we’re a blasé culture. On the contrary, one of the clearest signs of our decline is the way we expend so much energy worrying about the wrong things. If you’ve read Jared Diamond’s bestselling book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, you’ll know it goes into a lot of detail about Easter Island going belly up because they chopped down all their trees. Apparently that’s why they’re not a G8 member or on the UN Security Council. Same with the Greenlanders and the Mayans and Diamond’s other curious choices of “societies.” Indeed, as the author sees it, pretty much every society collapses because it chops down its trees.

Poor old Diamond can’t see the forest because of his obsession with the trees. (Russia’s collapsing even as it’s undergoing reforestation.) One way “societies choose to fail or succeed” is by choosing what to worry about. The western world has delivered more wealth and more comfort to more of its citizens than any other civilization in history, and in return we’ve developed a great cult of worrying. You know the classics of the genre: In 1968, in his bestselling book The Population Bomb, the eminent scientist Paul Ehrlich declared: “In the 1970s the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” In 1972, in their landmark study The Limits to Growth, the Club of Rome announced that the world would run out of gold by 1981, of mercury by 1985, tin by 1987, zinc by 1990, petroleum by 1992, and copper, lead, and gas by 1993.

None of these things happened. In fact, quite the opposite is happening. We’re pretty much awash in resources, but we’re running out of people—the one truly indispensable resource, without which none of the others matter. Russia’s the most obvious example: it’s the largest country on earth, it’s full of natural resources, and yet it’s dying—its population is falling calamitously.

The default mode of our elites is that anything that happens—from terrorism to tsunamis—can be understood only as deriving from the perniciousness of western civilization. As Jean-François Revel wrote, “Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself.”

And even though none of the prognostications of the eco-doom blockbusters of the 1970s came to pass, all that means is that thirty years on, the end of the world has to be rescheduled. The amended estimated time of arrival is now 2032. That’s to say, in 2002, the United Nations Global Environmental Outlook predicted “the destruction of 70 percent of the natural world in thirty years, mass extinction of species… . More than half the world will be afflicted by water shortages, with 95 percent of people in the Middle East with severe problems … 25 percent of all species of mammals and 10 percent of birds will be extinct …”

Etc., etc., for 450 pages. Or to cut to the chase, as The Guardian headlined it, “Unless We Change Our Ways, The World Faces Disaster.”

Well, here’s my prediction for 2032: unless we change our ways the world faces a future … where the environment will look pretty darn good. If you’re a tree or a rock, you’ll be living in clover. It’s the Italians and the Swedes who’ll be facing extinction and the loss of their natural habitat.

There will be no environmental doomsday. Oil, carbon dioxide emissions, deforestation: none of these things is worth worrying about. What’s worrying is that we spend so much time worrying about things that aren’t worth worrying about that we don’t worry about the things we should be worrying about. For thirty years, we’ve had endless wake-up calls for things that aren’t worth waking up for. But for the very real, remorseless shifts in our society—the ones truly jeopardizing our future—we’re sound asleep. The world is changing dramatically right now and hysterical experts twitter about a hypothetical decrease in the Antarctic krill that might conceivably possibly happen so far down the road there’s unlikely to be any Italian or Japanese enviro-worriers left alive to be devastated by it.

In a globalized economy, the environmentalists want us to worry about First World capitalism imposing its ways on bucolic, pastoral, primitive Third World backwaters. Yet, insofar as “globalization” is a threat, the real danger is precisely the opposite—that the peculiarities of the backwaters can leap instantly to the First World. Pigs are valued assets and sleep in the living room in rural China—and next thing you know an unknown respiratory disease is killing people in Toronto, just because someone got on a plane. That’s the way to look at Islamism: we fret about McDonald’s and Disney, but the big globalization success story is the way the Saudis have taken what was eighty years ago a severe but obscure and unimportant strain of Islam practiced by Bedouins of no fixed abode and successfully exported it to the heart of Copenhagen, Rotterdam, Manchester, Buffalo …

What’s the better bet? A globalization that exports cheeseburgers and pop songs or a globalization that exports the fiercest aspects of its culture? When it comes to forecasting the future, the birth rate is the nearest thing to hard numbers. If only a million babies are born in 2006, it’s hard to have two million adults enter the workforce in 2026 (or 2033, or 2037, or whenever they get around to finishing their Anger Management and Queer Studies degrees). And the hard data on babies around the western world is that they’re running out a lot faster than the oil is. “Replacement” fertility rate—i.e., the number you need for merely a stable population, not getting any bigger, not getting any smaller—is 2.1 babies per woman. Some countries are well above that: the global fertility leader, Somalia, is 6.91, Niger 6.83, Afghanistan 6.78, Yemen 6.75. Notice what those nations have in common?

Scroll way down to the bottom of the Hot One Hundred top breeders and you’ll eventually find the United States, hovering just at replacement rate with 2.07 births per woman. Ireland is 1.87, New Zealand 1.79, Australia 1.76. But Canada’s fertility rate is down to 1.5, well below replacement rate; Germany and Austria are at 1.3, the brink of the death spiral; Russia and Italy are at 1.2; Spain 1.1, about half replacement rate. That’s to say, Spain’s population is halving every generation. By 2050, Italy’s population will have fallen by 22 percent, Bulgaria’s by 36 percent, Estonia’s by 52 percent. In America, demographic trends suggest that the blue states ought to apply for honorary membership of the EU: in the 2004 election, John Kerry won the sixteen with the lowest birth rates; George W. Bush took twenty-five of the twenty-six states with the highest. By 2050, there will be 100 million fewer Europeans, 100 million more Americans—and mostly red-state Americans.

As fertility shrivels, societies get older—and Japan and much of Europe are set to get older than any functioning societies have ever been. And we know what comes after old age. These countries are going out of business—unless they can find the will to change their ways. Is that likely? I don’t think so. If you look at European election results—most recently in Germany—it’s hard not to conclude that, while voters are unhappy with their political establishments, they’re unhappy mainly because they resent being asked to reconsider their government benefits and, no matter how unaffordable they may be a generation down the road, they have no intention of seriously reconsidering them. The Scottish executive recently backed down from a proposal to raise the retirement age of Scottish public workers. It’s presently sixty, which is nice but unaffordable. But the reaction of the average Scots worker is that that’s somebody else’s problem. The average German worker now puts in 22 percent fewer hours per year than his American counterpart, and no politician who wishes to remain electorally viable will propose closing the gap in any meaningful way.

This isn’t a deep-rooted cultural difference between the Old World and the New. It dates back all the way to, oh, the 1970s. If one wanted to allocate blame, one could argue that it’s a product of the U.S. military presence, the American security guarantee that liberated European budgets: instead of having to spend money on guns, they could concentrate on butter, and buttering up the voters. If Washington’s problem with Europe is that these are not serious allies, well, whose fault is that? Who, in the years after the Second World War, created NATO as a post-modern military alliance? The “free world,” as the Americans called it, was a free ride for everyone else. And having been absolved from the primal responsibilities of nationhood, it’s hardly surprising that European nations have little wish to re-shoulder them. In essence, the lavish levels of public health care on the Continent are subsidized by the American taxpayer. And this long-term softening of large sections of the west makes them ill-suited to resisting a primal force like Islam.

There is no “population bomb.” There never was. Birth rates are declining all over the world—eventually every couple on the planet may decide to opt for the western yuppie model of one designer baby at the age of thirty-nine. But demographics is a game of last man standing. The groups that succumb to demographic apathy last will have a huge advantage. Even in 1968 Paul Ehrlich and his ilk should have understood that their so-called “population explosion” was really a massive population adjustment. Of the increase in global population between 1970 and 2000, the developed world accounted for under 9 percent of it, while the Muslim world accounted for 26 percent of the increase. Between 1970 and 2000, the developed world declined from just under 30 percent of the world’s population to just over 20 percent, the Muslim nations increased from about 15 percent to 20 percent.

1970 doesn’t seem that long ago. If you’re the age many of the chaps running the western world today are wont to be, your pants are narrower than they were back then and your hair’s less groovy, but the landscape of your life—the look of your house, the lay-out of your car, the shape of your kitchen appliances, the brand names of the stuff in the fridge—isn’t significantly different. Aside from the Internet and the cellphone and the CD, everything in your world seems pretty much the same but slightly modified.

And yet the world is utterly altered. Just to recap those bald statistics: In 1970, the developed world had twice as big a share of the global population as the Muslim world: 30 percent to 15 percent. By 2000, they were the same: each had about 20 percent.

And by 2020?

...

Can these trends continue for another thirty years without having consequences? Europe by the end of this century will be a continent after the neutron bomb: the grand buildings will still be standing but the people who built them will be gone. We are living through a remarkable period: the self-extinction of the races who, for good or ill, shaped the modern world.

What will Europe be like at the end of this process? Who knows? On the one hand, there’s something to be said for the notion that America will find an Islamified Europe more straightforward to deal with than Monsieur Chirac, Herr Schröder, and Co. On the other hand, given Europe’s track record, getting there could be very bloody. But either way this is the real battlefield. The al Qaeda nutters can never find enough suicidal pilots to fly enough planes into enough skyscrapers to topple America. But, unlike us, the Islamists think long-term, and, given their demographic advantage in Europe and the tone of the emerging Muslim lobby groups there, much of what they’re flying planes into buildings for they’re likely to wind up with just by waiting a few more years. The skyscrapers will be theirs; why knock ’em over?

The latter half of the decline and fall of great civilizations follows a familiar pattern: affluence, softness, decadence, extinction. You don’t notice yourself slipping through those stages because usually there’s a seductive pol on hand to provide the age with a sly, self-deluding slogan—like Bill Clinton’s “It’s about the future of all our children.” We on the right spent the 1990s gleefully mocking Clinton’s tedious invocation, drizzled like syrup over everything from the Kosovo war to highway appropriations. But most of the rest of the west can’t even steal his lame bromides: A society that has no children has no future.

Permanence is the illusion of every age. In 1913, no one thought the Russian, Austrian, German, and Turkish empires would be gone within half a decade. Seventy years on, all those fellows who dismissed Reagan as an “amiable dunce” (in Clark Clifford’s phrase) assured us the Soviet Union was likewise here to stay. The CIA analysts’ position was that East Germany was the ninth biggest economic power in the world. In 1987 there was no rash of experts predicting the imminent fall of the Berlin Wall, the Warsaw Pact, and the USSR itself.

...

To avoid collapse, European nations will need to take in immigrants at a rate no stable society has ever attempted. The CIA is predicting the EU will collapse by 2020. Given that the CIA’s got pretty much everything wrong for half a century, that would suggest the EU is a shoo-in to be the colossus of the new millennium. But even a flop spook is right twice a generation. If anything, the date of EU collapse is rather a cautious estimate. It seems more likely that within the next couple of European election cycles, the internal contradictions of the EU will manifest themselves in the usual way, and that by 2010 we’ll be watching burning buildings, street riots, and assassinations on American network news every night. Even if they avoid that, the idea of a childless Europe ever rivaling America militarily or economically is laughable. Sometime this century there will be 500 million Americans, and what’s left in Europe will either be very old or very Muslim. Japan faces the same problem: its population is already in absolute decline, the first gentle slope of a death spiral it will be unlikely ever to climb out of. Will Japan be an economic powerhouse if it’s populated by Koreans and Filipinos? Very possibly. Will Germany if it’s populated by Algerians? That’s a trickier proposition.

Best-case scenario? The Continent winds up as Vienna with Swedish tax rates.

Worst-case scenario: Sharia, circa 2040; semi-Sharia, a lot sooner—and we’re already seeing a drift in that direction.

In July 2003, speaking to the United States Congress, Tony Blair remarked: “As Britain knows, all predominant power seems for a time invincible but, in fact, it is transient. The question is: What do you leave behind?”

Excellent question. Britannia will never again wield the unrivalled power she enjoyed at her imperial apogee, but the Britannic inheritance endures, to one degree or another, in many of the key regional players in the world today—Australia, India, South Africa—and in dozens of island statelets from the Caribbean to the Pacific. If China ever takes its place as an advanced nation, it will be because the People’s Republic learns more from British Hong Kong than Hong Kong learns from the Little Red Book. And of course the dominant power of our time derives its political character from eighteenth-century British subjects who took English ideas a little further than the mother country was willing to go.

A decade and a half after victory in the Cold War and end-of-history triumphalism, the “what do you leave behind?” question is more urgent than most of us expected. “The west,” as a concept, is dead, and the west, as a matter of demographic fact, is dying.

What will London—or Paris, or Amsterdam—be like in the mid-Thirties? If European politicians make no serious attempt this decade to wean the populace off their unsustainable thirty-five-hour weeks, retirement at sixty, etc., then to keep the present level of pensions and health benefits the EU will need to import so many workers from North Africa and the Middle East that it will be well on its way to majority Muslim by 2035. As things stand, Muslims are already the primary source of population growth in English cities. Can a society become increasingly Islamic in its demographic character without becoming increasingly Islamic in its political character?

This ought to be the left’s issue. I’m a conservative—I’m not entirely on board with the Islamist program when it comes to beheading sodomites and so on, but I agree Britney Spears dresses like a slut: I’m with Mullah Omar on that one. Why then, if your big thing is feminism or abortion or gay marriage, are you so certain that the cult of tolerance will prevail once the biggest demographic in your society is cheerfully intolerant? Who, after all, are going to be the first victims of the west’s collapsed birth rates? Even if one were to take the optimistic view that Europe will be able to resist the creeping imposition of Sharia currently engulfing Nigeria, it remains the case that the Muslim world is not notable for setting much store by “a woman’s right to choose,” in any sense. I watched that big abortion rally in Washington in 2004, where Ashley Judd and Gloria Steinem were cheered by women waving “Keep your Bush off my bush” placards, and I thought it was the equivalent of a White Russian tea party in 1917. By prioritizing a “woman’s right to choose,” western women are delivering their societies into the hands of fellows far more patriarchal than a 1950s sitcom dad. If any of those women marching for their “reproductive rights” still have babies, they might like to ponder demographic realities: A little girl born today will be unlikely, at the age of forty, to be free to prance around demonstrations in Eurabian Paris or Amsterdam chanting “Hands off my bush!”

Just before the 2004 election, that eminent political analyst Cameron Diaz appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show to explain what was at stake:

“Women have so much to lose. I mean, we could lose the right to our bodies… . If you think that rape should be legal, then don’t vote. But if you think that you have a right to your body,” she advised Oprah’s viewers, “then you should vote.”

Poor Cameron. A couple of weeks later, the scary people won. She lost all rights to her body. Unlike Alec Baldwin, she couldn’t even move to France. Her body was grounded in Terminal D.

But, after framing the 2004 Presidential election as a referendum on the right to rape, Miss Diaz might be interested to know that men enjoy that right under many Islamic legal codes around the world. In his book The Empty Cradle, Philip Longman asks: “So where will the children of the future come from? Increasingly they will come from people who are at odds with the modern world. Such a trend, if sustained, could drive human culture off its current market-driven, individualistic, modernist course, gradually creating an anti-market culture dominated by fundamentalism—a new Dark Ages.”

Bottom line for Cameron Diaz: There are worse things than John Ashcroft out there.

Longman’s point is well taken. The refined antennae of western liberals mean that, whenever one raises the question of whether there will be any Italians living in the geographical zone marked as Italy a generation or three hence, they cry, “Racism!” To fret about what proportion of the population is “white” is grotesque and inappropriate. But it’s not about race, it’s about culture. If 100 percent of your population believes in liberal pluralist democracy, it doesn’t matter whether 70 percent of them are “white” or only 5 percent are. But, if one part of your population believes in liberal pluralist democracy and the other doesn’t, then it becomes a matter of great importance whether the part that does is 90 percent of the population or only 60, 50, 45 percent.

Since the President unveiled the so-called Bush Doctrine—the plan to promote liberty throughout the Arab world—innumerable “progressives” have routinely asserted that there’s no evidence Muslims want liberty and, indeed, Islam is incompatible with democracy. If that’s true, it’s a problem not for the Middle East today but for Europe the day after tomorrow. According to a poll taken in 2004, over 60 percent of British Muslims want to live under sharia—in the United Kingdom. If a population “at odds with the modern world” is the fastest-breeding group on the planet—if there are more Muslim nations, more fundamentalist Muslims within those nations, more and more Muslims within non-Muslim nations, and more and more Muslims represented in more and more transnational institutions—how safe a bet is the survival of the “modern world”?

Not good.

“What do you leave behind?” asked Tony Blair. There will only be very few and very old ethnic Germans and French and Italians by the midpoint of this century. What will they leave behind? Territories that happen to bear their names and keep up some of the old buildings? Or will the dying European races understand that the only legacy that matters is whether the peoples who will live in those lands after them are reconciled to pluralist, liberal democracy? It’s the demography, stupid. And, if they can’t muster the will to change course, then “what do you leave behind?” is the only question that matters.

This article originally appeared in
The New Criterion, Volume 24, January 2006, on page 10

The Pro-War Quiz

2006-01-09T13:31:00.000-06:00

My answers in bold.

The Pro-war Libertarian Quiz

How far are you willing to go to win the War on Terror?

Matt Welch

By now, we all know the pattern:

1) A new revelation is published or broadcast about a controversial new policy or by-product of the War on Terror. (Abu Ghraib/torture, extraordinary rendition, the outing of Valerie Plame, an alleged plan to attack Iran, secret propaganda in Iraq, FISA-free NSA surveillance of Americans, and so on.)

2) Some supporters of Washington's foreign policy wonder whether the reporter or news organization or leaker who revealed the information might be guilty of aiding and abetting the enemy.

3) The media, Democrats, and anti-war activists are criticized for piling on, for ignoring worse crimes committed by the enemy, and for hysterically exaggerating the underlying issue.

4) Think-pieces are written about how this controversial or possibly illegal policy should actually be legalized and embraced.

5) Some self-described small-government conservatives and libertarians exasperatedly ask if critics of the policy understand that we're at war, and explain how this latest kerfuffle illustrates why libertarians should never be invited to the grown-ups' table when discussing foreign policy.

I bring this up not necessarily to criticize supporters of George Bush's Executive-Power grabs, nor to play quien es mas libertarian (a game I generally lose), nor to belittle the real contributions to the debate they may have made during the previous go-rounds.

But rather, I'm interested in breaking the cycle for a moment, stepping back, and asking the Glenn Reynoldses and Thomas Sowells of the world one question: How far is too far in the War on Terror? I figure since their approach certainly has more resonance within the White House than mine, the answers would provide a more accurate weathervane than my feverish imagination. And given the eternal foreign policy divides within the libertarian big tent, it may help clarify the differences between camps.

The question is a bit open-ended, so here are 10 yes/no hypotheticals. My answer to every one is "no":

1) Should the National Security Agency or CIA have the ability to monitor domestic phone calls or e-mails without obtaining judicial approval?

2) Should the government have the ability to hold an American citizen without charge, indefinitely, without access to a lawyer, if he is believed to be part of a terrorist cell?

3) Can you imagine a situation in which the government would be justified in waterboarding an American citizen?

Yes

4) Are there American journalists who should be investigated for possible treason? Should Sedition laws be re-introduced?

Yes (in theory, I can't think of specific individuals) and No

5) Should the CIA be able to legally assassinate people in countries with which the U.S. is not at war?

Yes

6) Should anti-terrorism cops be given every single law-enforcement tool available in non-terrorist cases?

7) Should law enforcement be able to seize the property of a suspected (though not charged) American terrorist, and then sell it?

Seize Yes, sell No

8) Should the U.S. military be tasked with enforcing domestic crime?

9) Should there be a national I.D. card, and should it be made available to law enforcement on demand?

10) Should a higher percentage of national security-related activities and documents be made classified, and kept from the eyes of the Congress, the courts, and the public?

Ambivalent

My belief, crudely summarized, is not only that you do not need to imitate totalitarians to beat them, but that it doesn't actually help.

But that's just me; before the next scandal cycle of bloggery bickering begins, I'd love to know where my pro-war friends draw the line.

I'd love to know.

Associate Editor Matt Welch writes from Los Angeles. His work is archived at mattwelch.com, where he also blogs.

No Surprises

2005-12-04T13:19:00.000-06:00

The Movie Of Your Life Is Film Noir

So what if you're a little nihilistic at times?
Life with meaning is highly over-rated.

Your best movie matches: Sin City, L. A. Confidential, Blade Runner

If Your Life Was a Movie, What Genre Would It Be?

Guy Smiley

2005-11-27T09:05:00.000-06:00

Guy Smiley
You scored 60% Organization, 55% abstract, and 37% extroverted!

This test measured 3 variables.

First, this test measured how organized you are. Some muppets like Cookie Monster make big messes, while others like Bert are quite anal about things being clean.

Second, this test measured if you prefer a concrete or an abstract viewpoint. For the purposes of this test, concrete people are considered to gravitate more to mathematical and logical approaches, whereas abstract people are more the dreamers and artistic type.

Third, this test measured if you are more of an introvert or an extrovert.
By definition, an introvert concentrates more on herself and an
extrovert focuses more on others. In this test an introvert was
somebody that either tends to spend more time alone or thinks more
about herself.

You are mostly organized, both concrete and abstract, and more introverted.

Here is why are you Guy Smiley.

You are both mostly organized. You have a good
idea where you put things and you probably keep your place reasonably
clean. You aren't totally obsessed with neatness though. Guy Smiley is
your average Joe. He'll dress up and look nice for his game show, but
he's not a neat freak.

You are both a concrete and abstract thinker. Guy Smiley uses his
imagination to come up with ridiculous game shows. However he's
concrete enough to stick by his rules and perform his role as host. You
know when to be logical at times, but you also aren't afraid to explore
your dreams and desires... within limits of course.

You are both introverted. At first glance Guy Smiley may
appear to be an extrovert given he hosts a popular show. But in reality
he struggles to relate with other people. His prizes tend to just be
Guy Smiley merchandise. For whatever reason you are a bit uncomfortable
in social settings. You may have one or two people that you are close
with. You'd rather do things by yourself and you dislike working in
groups where things are always so inefficient.

My test tracked 3 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:

You scored higher than 55% on Organization
You scored higher than 61% on concrete-abstra
You scored higher than 7% on intro-extrovert

How now, France?

2005-11-11T16:14:00.000-06:00

Jonah Goldberg: never better than when discoursing on all things French.

Trouble in Gaulistan
Les Muslimerables? No. Les Invisibles

I tried. I really did. I wanted to deal dispassionately with l'affaire francaise. I even resolved to refrain, until my Schadenfreude wore off, from commenting on the situation in the country formerly known as "France." (Possible future names include: Paristine, Gaulistan, Frarabia, and the Algerian North Bank.)

Schadenfreude is a German word meaning to take pleasure at the misfortune of others. And much like La Resistance in '40 (and '41, '42, '43, '44 and '45), I just can't shake off the Germans in this case. Since my Schadenfreude seems inextricably linked to the duration of the French intifada, I can't wait any longer. After all, the troubles promise to go on long enough for the French to lobby the International Olympic Committee to add the "Peugeot Burn" to the summer games.

To be fair, which I have not been so far, I don't actually believe the current riots are about Islam. This puts me to the left of a great many conservative Nostradamuses who've prophesized for so long that France's north African and other Muslim "immigrants" are going to bring jihad to the home front. I don't think their predictions are necessarily wrong, I just believe that this is at best a dress rehearsal.

I put "immigrants" in quotation marks for the simple reason that most of the rioters are no such thing — they were born in France and hold French passports. Their parents or grandparents were from former French colonies. But the French establishment — a term I use in the most catholic sense possible, so as to include Katie Couric and her colleagues — has had a very hard time coming up with a useful vocabulary to describe these events. French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy came out of the blocks with "scum," but the uncharacteristic lack of nuance didn't go over well in a culture that has always believed there are two sides of the story for every murderer, never mind every window smasher.

We seem to have settled on "youths," which is as correct as "Muslims" and marginally more accurate than "immigrants," but it will hardly do. It's not as if airport screeners are going to keep a keener eye on young, blond Frenchmen named Jacques because a bunch of guys named Abdul and Hamid looted the local brasserie. And then there's the fact that these "youths" show no signs of being particularly pious Muslims. I don't mean to say that a devout Muslim would never break the peace — I think that theory has been sufficiently falsified in recent years so as to be inoperative, no?

Rather, these "youths" appear to be closer to nothing than they do to a specific something — except, of course, rioters. It is in the rioting that these kids get meaning. Rioting is how they appear on the Gallic radar system. They aren't Les Muslimerables so much as Les Invisibles.

The Islamic leadership in France would clearly and dearly love this to be a Muslim riot. They could then stop it and become true Left Bank Arafats, able to fire up a rent-a-mob whenever convenient and thereby shake down the government for one concession after another. That's why the French government is so desperate to prevent the imams from becoming middlemen. If the riots are stopped by Islamic clerics, they will become Islamic riots — even though they didn't start as that. And once the conflict is Islamified, the conservative Nostradamus scenarios kick in and we can all get ready for talk of "two-state solutions," the need to make Paris an "international city," and so forth.

Their being Muslim surely contributes to these kids' invisibility, but French racism and snobbery is more sweeping. Unlike in America, where snobbery, racism and anti-Muslim bigotry can all operate independently of each other, in France they're always linked in a menage a trios. If a resume arrives at the patisserie with the name Hamid on it, it gets trashed without the recipient wondering whether he was unfair to a Muslim, a black, an immigrant or even a French citizen.

But this type of young person is invisible for another reason. The French "social model" which pays wealthy, educated people not to work much — and prevents poor and desperate ones from working at all — simply has no solution for what to do with these surplus Frenchmen. So they get shunted off to the Islamic Bantustans surrounding the capital, where social pathologies fester.

Unfortunately, France is more likely to embrace Velveeta as the national cheese than to fix this system, and that spells long-term disaster for the country. Sarkozy had the right idea calling the rioters scum — not only because rioters tend to be exactly that, but also because calling them much of anything else would have politicized the rioters into "rebels." The long-term problem is that if you treat people like scum long enough, they'll become rebels. And that's when the battle for Gaulistan will truly begin.

Effects and Causes

2005-10-12T07:55:00.000-05:00

Why is it people seem incapable of considering causality carefully? Isn't it at least equally as likely that families in which husbands earn more can more easily afford to have a stay at home wife? Isn't it likely that men who earn more can more easily attract a mate, and that this may be the cause of married men earning more than single men, rather than some magical effect of marriage? It is also true that earnings tend to increase with experience, which tends to increase with age, and that the more we age, the more likely we are to be married.

People seem to be particularly uncritical about causality when pet causes or recieved/conventional wisdom are involved. Some favorites:

"Crime is down, but the prisons are fuller than ever." Do I really need to point out the flaw here? Maybe, just maybe, more of the people prone to committing crimes are in jail!?!

"Women earn $0.70 (or whatever) on the dollar compared with men." While there is no doubt some sexism involved, there are certainly other contributing factors which are a second-order effects of being a woman at best. For instance, women are the sex capable of bearing children and often choose to do so, taking time off from careers to facilitate thier choice. Women may be impacted by cultural gender roles which teach them to be more supportive and less assertive than men.

"We're having the Third Great Awakening!" Could it be that the trend towards conservative evangelical Christianity in the U.S. is not a result of the deity 'pouring out his spirit upon all flesh?'
Consider that the single greatest predictor of a person's religion is the religion of her parents. Consider also that the world over, religious fervor is directly related to a tendancy to breed, both of which are inversely related to education. So in the U.S. we have people who take their religion seriously and breed, increasing the numbers of the seriously religious. We also have people who don't take their religion as seriously, or, like Yours Truly, don't take it at all. These people tend to be more educated, and therefore more "liberal," since that seems to be the choice in our country -- anti-reason by virtue of religion or utopian politics. These folks tend to bear fewer children due to a focus on education/income and/or because of the rather effective, if sometimes questionable, means available to ensure the non-bearing of children.* Of course, evangelicals are having abortions too,** but at a lower rate, and this is more than made up for by the tendancy to breed. Given this, is it any wonder that demographics are shifting as they are?

* This has been described elsewhere as the "Roe Effect."
** About 20% of women getting abortions describe themselves as born-again/evangelical.

"The

Men Earn More If Their Wives Do THIS

There are many women who will not like this one bit. New research from Britain's Institute for Social and Economic Research has shown that married men make more money than their bachelor friends as long as their wives stay home and do the housework, reports Reuters.

Specifically, researchers Elena Bardasi and Mark Taylor found in a 13-year study of 3,500 men who held all types of jobs from unskilled laborers to professional and executive positions that when a married man's wife did not work outside the home and took primary responsibility for the cooking and cleaning, that man earned about 3 percent more than single men with similar jobs. But when the wife went to work or didn't do most of the housework herself, the married man's wage premium evaporated.

	Do This One Thing and You'll Make More Money [Netscape]

	Snooze, You Lose; Schmooze, You Win [Forbes]

	Why Attractive People Earn More Money [Netscape]

	10 Easy Steps to a Promotion [AskMen]

	How to Ask for a Raise and Get It [iVillage]

"It has been fairly well documented that married men earn more than single men," Taylor, a labor economist who teaches at the University of Essex, told Reuters. "However, our research established the wage premium is related to the wife doing the chores."

Why? Taylor has two possible explanations.
1. When a woman takes full responsibility for the household chores, it allows her husband to better concentrate on his paid work, which in turn increases his productivity. That has a positive impact on his wages.

2. When a man is married to a wife who does the household work, he then has time to sharpen his work skills, something that could trigger a higher salary.

Those Crazy Hajis

2005-09-13T17:58:00.000-05:00

From Jay Nordlinger today:

"Consider an AP report, about Gaza: "After rushing into the settlements, Palestinians set fire to empty synagogues in the Morag, Kfar Darom, and Netzarim settlements, as well as a Jewish seminary in Neve Dekalim. In Netzarim, two young Palestinians waving flags stomped on the smoldering debris outside the synagogue, and others took turns hitting the building with a large hammer."

So, any moment, Jews will start demonstrating, rioting, and killing. And the world will excuse them — right? — given what the Palestinians did to the synagogues and seminary. Just like the world understood when Christians demonstrated, rioted, and killed, after the PLO desecrated the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.

Oh, no, wait. Sorry.

But wait'll someone tries to flush a Bible down a toilet!"

No kidding. There's a tendancy to excuse ideas and behavior because they arise from religion. A similar tendency excuses all manner of things done by members of an approved vicitm group. In Muslims, these two unfortunate practices coincide.

War: What It's Good For

2005-08-28T10:43:00.000-05:00

Hanson remarks on crackpot commentary on the war from Left and Right, and interesting Pew research on Middle East public opinion highlighted by Jonah Goldberg.

I've personally heard enough stupidity about the war to last me a good while. Everything from (responding to Cindy Sheehan) "Waaul, the Bible saays you gotta let the dead lie" to (essentially), "Does it make me un-American that I like sugar and spice and everything nice?" I know people who, in all seriousness, can't fathom why we haven't nuked the whole of southwest Asia. I also know people who's biggest concern about the world--as militant Islamists disembody and disembowel, as clitorides are lopped by Muslim whackos, as rape is swept under the rug everywhere from Africa to the Vatican to the U.S. prison system, as humans slave and starve in North Korean concentration camps, etc--is the fact that we have a petrochemical-based global economy. I'm sick of people who have absolutely no sense of scale, whether it's of the 'lets annihilate billions to deal with totalitarian regimes and holy warriors,' or the 'let's buy a fucking Prius while the inhumanity and oppression continue' variety.

If you hold, as I do, individual freedom as good, then that which prevents or opposes freedom is evil. Death is not a pretty thing; the blood and brains and bits of a human should be disturbing to us as self-aware beings, but there is (goddammit) a moral difference between killing someone who lives, whether from simple power lust or the projected power lust if a god, to deprive others of their freedom, and someone who is simply trying to muddle their way through life.

eBay

2005-08-24T17:26:00.000-05:00

How the hell did we transact before the Internet? In the history of commerce, this is on par with the invention of writing, currencies, moneylending, and insurance. In much the same manner as I roar angrily away from the occasional gas station that doesn't have credit-card payment at the pump, I now dismiss companies with sub-standard web pages. I buy Xmas gifts almost exclusively online. I bank online. I research online. I quest for free pictures of nekkid ladies online. I even talk to myself, here, online.

I think I may have an obsessive streak. I used to check bank and investment accounts daily (now the missus has wrangled much of that away from me). I cut my pancakes in a square, rotating the plate. I fixate on something for a time, to the detriment of "serious" work, only to move on to a new fetish. I was one of those kids who couldn't step on a crack. In fact, cracks alone began not to be enough, so I imagined lines originating from the corners of buildings, mailboxes. Then it moved indoors as I stepped awkwardly around nonexistent lines extending from doorways, tables, desks. It was exhausting.

I've checked "My eBay" at least five times today. Have I been outbid? Will I get that item for 25% less than Amazon? How high can I go? What the hell is this guy's reserve price anyway? Will my wife kill me if I spend any more money on roleplaying books and music gear?

I think I've found the perfect drug.

Roleplaying Purity Test

2005-08-24T17:24:00.000-05:00

God...I haven't seen the sun in days....

Your Ultimate Roleplaying Purity Score
Category	Your Score	Average
Hacklust	72.64% Enjoys the occasional head-lopping	53.5%
Sensitive Roleplaying	72.15% Will talk after everyone important's been killed	54.5%
GM Experience	82.61% "Um... You guys are in a 10'x10' room..."	69.4%
Systems Knowledge	95.06% Played in a couple of campaigns	90.3%
Livin' La Vida Dorka	66.67% Goes nuts on the weekends	63.2%
You are 80.14% pure Average Score: 68.8%
Take The Ultimate Roleplaying Purity Test and see how you match up!

Mr. Picassohead

2005-08-16T16:10:00.000-05:00

Yes, I should be working, but I'm doing this instead. You may want to as well.

Faith-Based Math

2005-08-07T22:53:00.000-05:00

This guy's obviously not a statistician. It does not follow that because there are only two possible outcomes in a given analysis, the likelyhood of those two outcomes is equal. 'Either I'm actually a fairy princess trapped in the body of a nondescript human male, or I'm not,' would be a similar assertion. You might as well randomly assign a probablility of 99% to the existence of god.

At very least you should give a fair shake to the thousands of other gods currently and heretofore postulated. Can you really assign a higher probability to one over another?

Premise, like location, is critical.

Math Proves Christ's Resurrection?

It is faith, not proof, that makes Christians believe in Jesus Christ's resurrection, the central tenet of the religion. Until now.

Oxford University professor Richard Swinburne, a leading philosopher of religion, has seemingly done the impossible. Using logic and mathematics, he has created a formula that he says shows a 97 percent certainty that Jesus Christ was resurrected by God the Father, report The Age and Catholic News.

This stunning conclusion was made based on a series of complex calculations grounded in the following logic:

The probably of God's existence is one in two. That is, God either exists or doesn't.
The probability that God became incarnate, that is embodied in human form, is also one in two.
The evidence for God's existence is an argument for the resurrection.
The chance of Christ's resurrection not being reported by the gospels has a probability of one in 10.
Considering all these factors together, there is a one in 1,000 chance that the resurrection is not true.

"New Testament scholars say the only evidences are witnesses in the four gospels. That's only five percent of the evidence," Swinburne said in a lecture he gave at the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne. "We can't judge the question of the resurrection unless we ask first whether there's reason to suppose there is a God. Secondly, if we have reason to suppose he would become incarnate, and thirdly, if he did, whether he would live the sort of life Jesus did." He says that even Jesus' life is not enough proof. However, the resurrection is "God's signature," which shows "his approval of Jesus' teaching."

The calculations that Swinburne says prove the resurrection are detailed in his book, "The Resurrection of God Incarnate."

God and the Rule of Law

2005-08-03T08:37:00.000-05:00

Doesn't the argument that government officials being religiously neutral is an attack on religion, while acting in government office on the basis of faith is simply doing god's will prove the point of those of us who worry that mixing god and government will damage our pluralist tradition?

Catholic Justice
Quit tiptoeing around John Roberts' faith.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, Aug. 1, 2005, at 1:27 PM PT

Will Roberts keep the faith?

Everybody seems to have agreed to tiptoe around the report that Judge John G. Roberts said he would recuse himself in a case where the law required a ruling that the Catholic Church might consider immoral. According to Jonathan Turley, a professor of law at George Washington University, the judge gave this answer in a private meeting with Sen. Richard J. Durbin, D-Ill., who is the Senate minority whip. Durbin told Turley that when asked the question, Roberts looked taken aback and paused for a long time before giving his reply.

Attempts have been made to challenge Turley's version, and Sen. Durbin (who was himself unfairly misquoted recently as having made a direct comparison between Guantanamo, Hitler, and Stalin when he had only mentioned them in the same breath) probably doesn't need any more grief. But how probable is it that the story is wrong? A clever conservative friend writes to me that obviously Roberts, who is famed for his unflappability, cannot have committed such a bêtise. For one thing, he was being faced with a question that he must have known he would be asked. Yes, but that's exactly what gives the report its ring of truth. If Roberts had simply said that the law and the Constitution would control in all cases (the only possible answer), then there would have been no smoke. If he had said that the Vatican would decide, there would have been a great deal of smoke. But who could have invented the long pause and the evasive answer? I think there is a gleam of fire here. At the very least, Roberts should be asked the same question again, under oath, at his confirmation.

It is already being insinuated, by those who want this thorny question de-thorned, that there is an element of discrimination involved. Why should this question be asked only of Catholics? Well, that's easy. The Roman Catholic Church claims the right to legislate on morals for all its members and to excommunicate them if they don't conform. The church is also a foreign state, which has diplomatic relations with Washington. In the very recent past, this church and this state gave asylum to Cardinal Bernard Law, who should have been indicted for his role in the systematic rape and torture of thousands of American children. (Not that child abuse is condemned in the Ten Commandments, any more than slavery or genocide or rape.) More recently still, the newly installed Pope Benedict XVI (who will always be Ratzinger to me) has ruled that Catholic politicians who endorse the right to abortion should be denied the sacraments: no light matter for believers of the sincerity that Judge Roberts and his wife are said to exhibit. And just last month, one of Ratzinger's closest allies, Cardinal Schonborn of Vienna, wrote an essay in which he announced that evolution was "ideology, not science."

Thus, quite apart from the scandalous obstruction of American justice in which the church took part in the matter of Cardinal Law, we have increasingly firm papal dogmas on two issues that are bound to come before the court: abortion and the teaching of Darwin in schools. So, please do not accuse me of suggesting a "dual loyalty" among American Catholics. It is their own church, and its conduct and its teachings, that raise this question.

If Roberts is confirmed there will be quite a bloc of Catholics on the court. Scalia, Kennedy, and Thomas are strong in the faith. Is it kosher to mention these things? The Constitution rightly forbids any religious test for public office, but what happens when a religious affiliation conflicts with a judge's oath to uphold the Constitution? Some religious organizations are also explicitly political and vice versa—the Ku Klux Klan was founded partly to defend Protestantism—and if it is true that Scalia is a member of Opus Dei then even many Catholics would consider him to have made a political rather than a theological choice. The Church of Scientology is now a member of the American Council of Churches, and good luck to both of them say I, but are we ready for a Scientologist on the court rather than having him or her subjected to the equivalent of a religious test? I merely ask.

Another smart conservative friend invites me to take comfort from Justice Scalia's statement that a believer who finds his conscience in conflict with the law should forthwith resign from the bench. I wish I found this more comforting than it actually is. In the first place, Scalia's remarks had to do with a possible reluctance, on the part of a Catholic, to impose the death penalty. The church's teaching on this is not absolute and is not enforced by the threat of excommunication, though it's nice to know that Scalia regards weakness about executions as a "litmus." In the second place, it is not at all clear that Scalia admits the supremacy of the U.S. Constitution in the first place. In oral argument in March this year, on cases dealing with religious displays on public property (Van Orden v. Perry and McCreary County v. ACLU of Kentucky), he described the display of the Ten Commandments as "a symbol of the fact that government comes—derives its authority from God. And that is, it seems to me, an appropriate symbol to be on State grounds." At another point, he opined that "the moral order is ordained by God. … And to say that that's the basis for the Declaration of Independence and our institutions is entirely realistic." Display of the Ten Commandments, he went on to write, affirms that "the principle of laws being ordained by God is the foundation of the laws of this state and the foundation of our legal system."

To the extent that this gibberish can be decoded at all, it is in flat contradiction to the Declaration of Independence, which is unique precisely because it locates the just powers of government in the consent of the governed, and with the Constitution, which deliberately does not mention God at any point. The Constitution was carefully drafted and designed to guard against majoritarianism, another consideration ignored by Scalia when he opines that "the minority has to be tolerant of the majority's ability to express its belief that government comes from God." (Sandra Day O'Connor, in her last written opinion, phrased it much better when she said, "We do not count heads when deciding to uphold the First Amendment.") Speaking to the Knights of Columbus in Baton Rouge, La., in January, Scalia implored them to "have the courage to have your wisdom regarded as stupidity. Be fools for Christ. And have the courage to suffer the contempt of the sophisticated world." Whether for "Christ" or not, Scalia is certainly a fool. He should have fewer allies and emulators on the court, not more. And perhaps secular America could one day have just one representative on that august body. Or would that be heresy?

My laptop's shot, so sue me!

2005-08-01T08:49:00.000-05:00

Which Simpson are you?

My Metrosexual Quotient

2005-08-01T07:30:00.000-05:00

Perhapse this is not the most accurate thing out there, but it had really gay dance music, so here we go:

Choose Your Illusions

2005-07-29T13:03:00.000-05:00

Do We All Worship the Same God?

By Lee Harris

TCS

When the British philosopher Bertrand Russell was put in prison for his opposition to the First World War, he became quite friendly with one of his jailors. Once, during an amiable discussion, the jailor happened to ask Russell about his religion, whereupon Russell replied that he was an agnostic. The jailor reflected for a moment, then said, "Well, I don't suppose it matters what we call him -- we all worship the same God."

Believers always have the option of believing that they and other believers really do worship the same God. They can always assume that God will listen to everyone's prayers, and that it will not terribly concern him what exact words they use to invoke his attention. God, Allah, Gott, dieu, dios -- all of these names can serve equally well to connect us with the one supreme being.

The atheist or the agnostic, however, does not have this option. Non-believers, after all, do not believe that there is a supreme being who is able to recognize that the prayers of a Muslim and those of a Southern Baptist are really intended for His ear, despite the different names that are used. For the non-believer, it is all equally mumbo-jumbo no matter whose prayer it is. (Imagine several billion telephones ringing in a room with no one to answer them.) All religions are simply illusionary systems. This is what August Comte thought; it is what Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels thought; it is what Sigmund Freud thought. de

From the non-believer's point of view, it might seem utterly irrelevant to inquire into the specific nature of the different illusions that have animated different human beings under the guise of religion. For example, in the eyes of many modern atheists, all religions are simply bad, and all need to be outgrown by the human race. Furthermore, from their point of view, not only is religion something that mankind does not need in the future -- it was something mankind never needed at all. How much better off we would have been if, on our descent from the apes, we had never been tempted onto the pernicious paths of religious enthusiasm and devotion. How much wiser we would have acted if our early ancestors had immediately begun to arrange our lives with the orderly rationalism of Oxford dons, like Richard Dawkins.

From this point of view religion is bad, was bad, and will forever be bad. Nor does it make the slightest difference which religion we are talking about. All are evil, and none has ever served any useful purpose in promoting human progress.

Yet this purely dismissive approach to religion is not the only way in which non-believers can respond to religion, considered purely as a cultural phenomenon. At the turn of the nineteenth century, for example, there was a number of thinkers who argued that, even if all religions were illusionary, it still made a huge difference which illusion a group of people chose to cling to. The American philosopher William James, a profound student of religion, argued that a man's religious illusions were not mere phantoms without any impact on the world; on the contrary, he saw in these illusions one of the most powerful forces for the transformation of both individual human beings and of entire communities. Vilfredo Pareto, the Italian economist turned sociologist, made the same argument in analyzing whole societies, as did the French sociologist Emile Durkheim, as well as the German sociologists Max Weber and Werner Sombart. So what if there was no God, all these secular thinkers agreed in arguing -- the absence of a supreme being did not make men's religious faith a bit less capable of moving mountains or making deserts bloom or stifling economic progress or of producing capitalism.

The atheist, when confronted with two distinct religious illusions does not jump to the conclusion that they are both aimed at invoking the same supreme being. Instead of looking up toward the transcendent object of the illusion, he is able to look at the quality of the illusion itself, and to the practical and concrete consequences of this illusion on the lives of those who subscribe to it. Religious illusions, when approached from this direction, clearly reveal themselves as distinctive as different forms of social organization -- as distinctive as feudalism and capitalism, communism and meritocracy. Indeed, the atheist will quickly see that few things can differ more profoundly than the diverse ways in which human beings have imagined the nature of the Divine.

Leaving aside the social, economic, and political consequences of certain religious illusions, it is also possible for the atheist to analyze the illusions themselves in terms of the foundational metaphors upon which the illusions have been constructed. Starting from the premise first articulated by Xenophanes, and later developed by Feuerbach and Marx, the atheist can immediately see that the religious illusions of men will naturally reflect the immediate world, both natural and social, in which they have been reared and in which they must struggle to survive.

For a warrior elite, the gods will live lives very much like their own. There will be plenty of battles, much drinking and carousing, and a wanton disregard of all sexual proprieties. For those who must toil so that the warrior elite can live the same life as their indolent hell-raising gods, these gods will naturally appear to be capricious and dangerous -- forces to be appeased and placated, like the warrior elite itself.

On the other hand, consider those men who have created communities in which hard work, and not brute courage, is the key to high status -- what kind of god do you think they will project upon the heavens? Certainly not the worthless bums of the warrior pantheon. Indeed, the first step that such a community will naturally take in the religious field will be to debunk the gods of the warrior elite.

The semi-legendary Persian religious reformer Zoroaster is the paradigmatic example of this debunking process. In his eyes, the old gods of the warrior pantheon were nothing more than demons -- and as demons they deserved to be hated and reviled, and not worshipped and groveled before. In their place, Zoroaster offered an entirely new vision of a supreme god of light and truth -- a hardworking god who was constantly aiding and helping out the good peaceful hardworking people, and fighting valiantly against the demons from the dark side.

If you had asked Zoroaster if we all worship the same god, he would have quickly told you that no we don't. Some worship demons; others worship a god of light.

The atheist, on hearing Zoroaster's response, would say that neither the demons nor the god of light really existed; yet if he were a sociologist of religion, he would be bound to notice the difference in the way in which these two radically distinct illusions have manifested themselves in human communities. Indeed, he would be forced to conclude that there was in fact nothing that distinguished societies more than the illusions that they entertain about the divine. The Aztecs worshipped cruel and ruthless gods who demanded mounds of freshly ripped out human hearts; the Zoroastrians worshipped a god of light who spent day and night watching over men, struggling against evil and working always for the good. Both forms of worship were based, from our point of view, on pure illusion -- and yet what a profound difference it makes to a society which illusion it chooses to go with.

Few things matter more than how men chose to deceive themselves.

Headline Writers

2005-07-29T07:38:00.000-05:00

Once again, I'm irritated by a headline having little connection to the facts of a story.
On Netscape.com: "Discovery Wing Possibly Struck; Return Uncertain"
When you click: "Discovery's Astronauts to Inspect Shuttle"
...In which we learn that the return is not, in fact uncertain and they're not that concerned.

Why?

Down with the Memo

2005-06-27T21:00:00.000-05:00

Christopher Hitchens on the Downing Street Memo. Hitchens makes the great point that two wrongs don't make the first wrong any righter.

Philosophical Profile

2005-06-25T12:10:00.000-05:00

Inspired by the blog of someone much more schooled in philosophy than myself, and desperately trying to avoid doing any work, I have taken this philosophy quiz.

Rand and Aristotle are no surprise, but I wasn't expecting Kant to be so high. More reading is, as usual, in order.

1.	Ayn Rand (100%) Click here for info
2.	John Stuart Mill (78%) Click here for info
3.	Aristotle (68%) Click here for info
4.	Kant (65%) Click here for info
5.	Jean-Paul Sartre (59%) Click here for info
6.	Plato (59%) Click here for info
7.	Aquinas (58%) Click here for info
8.	Epicureans (58%) Click here for info
9.	Jeremy Bentham (55%) Click here for info
10.	St. Augustine (52%) Click here for info
11.	David Hume (48%) Click here for info
12.	Thomas Hobbes (48%) Click here for info
13.	Nietzsche (46%) Click here for info
14.	Prescriptivism (45%) Click here for info
15.	Spinoza (40%) Click here for info
16.	Stoics (39%) Click here for info
17.	Cynics (36%) Click here for info
18.	Ockham (25%) Click here for info
19.	Nel Noddings (11%) Click here for info

V Davis H on the Middle East

2005-06-17T12:25:00.000-05:00

Victor Davis Hanson on the Middle East on National Review Online

I have a man-crush on Hanson. I think he's my favorite Democrat.

LBJ v. Nixon

2005-06-07T18:44:00.000-05:00

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/edwards200506070751.asp

Setup

2005-05-27T09:53:00.000-05:00

Let's try this out, shall we?