America Leaves Itself Behind

A world of trade deals without the U.S.

President Obama heads for Asia this week to talk about U.S. economic recovery and reform, and one theme that we expect he’ll hear from Asian leaders is this: America is leaving itself behind as the rest of the world tries to liberalize trade.

The numbers tell the story. At least 266 bilateral or regional trade deals are in force, according to the World Trade Organization, and there are roughly 100 more of which the WTO has not yet been formally informed. The U.S. is a party to only five of the 64 trade pacts that have taken effect since 2005—with Australia, Morocco, Bahrain, Oman and Peru.

In contrast, eight of those 64 deals involve the European Union (plus a round of EU expansion) and Japan has signed nine. Overall the U.S. has trade deals with only 17 countries including Canada and Mexico under Nafta. The EU has struck 29 deals on trade ranging from customs unions to larger free-trade agreements with 40 economies.

Of the deals the WTO knows about, an average of seven took effect each year in the five years after the WTO’s founding in 1995. For 2004-2008, the annual average rose to 15. Another 12 have kicked in this year. New Zealand and Malaysia signed a pact last week, for instance, and China and India are in talks. Oh, and there’s also the newly signed EU-Korea trade deal, and the one signed last year between Canada and Colombia.

These deals are proliferating for many reasons. Some countries are losing patience with the Doha round of global trade talks that has dragged on for eight years. Others view bilateral deals as a way of liberalizing beyond what Doha would accomplish—including areas like intellectual-property protection. These deals can also firm up alliances or build political influence, which is one reason China is aggressively pursuing trade deals with its neighbors.

The danger is that U.S. companies could find themselves on the wrong side of deals negotiated among other countries. The EU-South Korea pact, for example, will tear down almost all remaining tariff barriers between the two sides. It will also address such technical barriers as the excessive safety standards that Seoul has long used to block imports, and it will open Korea to European services. The U.S. has long tried to address these hurdles so American companies could gain better access to the world’s 13th-largest economy. The EU is now beating Washington to the punch—largely by copying the trade deal the Bush Administration negotiated with Seoul but that Congress refuses to ratify.

The same holds for Canada’s deal with Colombia. That deal eliminates Colombia’s average 12% tariffs on nonagricultural goods from Canada; U.S. exporters will still have to pay those tariffs even as Colombians keep tariff-free access to the U.S. under an earlier agreement. Over time Canadian farmers will gain tariff-free access to Colombia for most of their agricultural exports while farmers in Iowa or Nebraska will be stuck with tariffs of between 5% and 80%.

Bilateral trade deals are far from ideal as a way to promote global growth. Far better for governments to lower their own trade barriers unilaterally to all comers, or for all governments to sign a multilateral deal like the Doha round. A complex web of bilateral and regional trade deals can saddle businesses with the costs of complying with multiple sets of rules. This “spaghetti bowl” approach also distorts economies to the extent that businesses make trade and investment decisions based more on where they can get trade preferences than on the highest return on capital.

But when the U.S. sits on the sidelines, the rest of the world is going to find its own trading way, however imperfect. The nearby table shows some of the benefits U.S. companies will be missing.

A start to getting the U.S. back in the game would be for Congress to ratify the pending deals with South Korea, Colombia and Panama. Mr. Obama and U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk need to rethink their emphasis on trade “enforcement,” which is code for introducing higher barriers, and instead renew the push for more deals. Mr. Obama could also become a leading voice pushing for progress on Doha. Especially as other countries expand their own trading opportunities, the costs of Washington dithering are growing every day.

Editorial, Wall Street Journal

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Full article and photo: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703574604574500372712162380.html

Obama’s Iran Diplomacy Isn’t Working

The mullahs are tightening, not unclenching, their fists.

Five months after the first street protests against the sham re-election of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad rocked the regime to its core, it’s time to assess the Obama Administration’s “outstretched hand” policy. From the stalled nuclear talks to the Islamic Republic’s deteriorating human-rights situation, it seems the mullahs have tightened, not unclenched, their fists.

No doubt, the conservative hard-liners are under pressure. Mounting international criticism of the regime’s controversial nuclear program and the refusal of the pro-reform movement to submit to the repression have led to an increase in tension among the ruling elite. But rather than compromising, Tehran has resorted to the kind of repression and coercion that have helped turn Iran into an international pariah during the three decades since the Islamic revolution brought the ayatollahs to power.

This week’s decision to press espionage charges against three U.S. backpackers who were arrested last July when they crossed, apparently inadvertently, into Iran from Iraq is just the latest development in the regime’s campaign to silence its critics—domestic or foreign. Under Sharia law, Iran’s legal system, espionage is punishable by death. The three young Americans have become Iranian bargaining chips to pressure the White House.

President Ahmadinejad adopted a similar tactic last spring when Roxana Saberi, a journalist with dual American and Iranian citizenship, was also charged with espionage when her only offense was to have overstayed her work visa. Ms. Saberi’s detention took place as President Ahmadinejad was pondering how to respond to U.S President Barack Obama’s appeal for direct talks . Ms. Saberi’s release a few weeks later was the Iranian president’s clumsy goodwill gesture to the new U.S. administration. The three Americans currently languishing in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison may well experience a comparable “happy ending,” but only if Mr. Obama backs off from confronting Iran over its uranium enrichment activities.

The Israeli Navy’s interdiction of a vessel with hundreds of tons of Iranian weapons for Hezbollah, Tehran’s key ally in Lebanon, is yet another indication of the regime’s confrontational approach. Both Hezbollah and Hamas, its Palestinian client in Gaza, are regarded as vital strategic assets by Iran, to be activated against Israel in the event that the crisis over its nuclear program results in armed confrontation with the West.

Iran officially says it is still considering its response to the Oct. 1 offer by the six powers—the U.S., Russia, China, France, Germany and Britain—to ship uranium to Russia for further enrichment. But it is telling that the Revolutionary Guards thought it prudent to rearm Hezbollah in case their response fell short of international, and particularly Israeli, expectations.

The regime’s main priority, though, lies closer to home, where it still hasn’t managed to suppress the pro-reform genie that was let out of the political bottle during last summer’s election. It’s not that the mullahs aren’t trying hard enough. After Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader, confirmed Ahmadinejad’s victory, the regime’s security apparatus has moved with ruthless brutality to crush the opposition.

Iranian human-rights groups say that since the government crackdown began in late June, at least 400 demonstrators have been killed while another 56 are unaccounted, which is several times higher than the official figures. The regime has established a chain of unofficial, makeshift prisons to deal with the protesters, where torture and rape are said to be commonplace. In Tehran alone, 37 young Iranian men and women are reported to have been raped by their captors.

In addition, a series of show trials have been conducted by Iran’s Revolutionary Courts. Many of the accused are former high-ranking members of previous administrations who supported Mir Hossein Mousavi, the defeated presidential candidate.

Yet despite the brutality, the opposition refuses to be cowed. A group of Iranian lawyers, in cooperation with local human rights organizations, has drawn up a list of Revolutionary Guard commanders whom they accuse of war crimes during the post-election crackdown. And last week, crowds of pro-reform demonstrators hijacked the annual commemoration of the 1979 storming of the U.S. embassy in Tehran. Instead of the traditional “Death to America” slogans, the government was alarmed to hear Moussavi supporters chanting “Death to the Dictator,” a popular anti-Ahmadinejad refrain.

The protesters’ courageous defiance and calls for freedom have led Tehran’s clerical dictatorship to close ranks. President Ahmadinejad and the cabinet of hard-line conservatives he has assembled around him have not moderated their approach to the nuclear program. If anything, the regime’s attitude is even less compromising. Ayatollah Khamenei dismissed Mr. Obama’s diplomatic effort to build a new era of U.S.-Iran relations. The U.S. President’s promise of “change” was a “contradiction,” he declared at a recent rally at Tehran University. “If anyone violates the rights of the Iranian nation, the nation will firmly stand up to them and make them kneel down.” With the Iranian nuclear program making steady progress, it’s time for President Obama to acknowledge that his diplomacy has failed.

Mr. Coughlin is executive foreign editor of London’s Daily Telegraph and the author of “Khomeini’s Ghost: Iran since 1979.”

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Full article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704402404574527261228630446.html

Sarko the Freedom Fighter?

The French president shows contempt for Eastern Europe.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s claim that he took part in the demolition of the Berlin Wall has raised eyebrows throughout Europe. The photograph of the then 34-year-old Frenchman chiselling away at the ramparts of communist tyranny certainly looks good, although few believe Mr. Sarkozy’s assertion that it was taken on the very day the Wall fell.

Be that as it may, the political intent of President Sarkozy’s gesture is unmistakable: By posting his grainy picture on Facebook earlier this week, the French leader sought to portray himself as one of the architects of Europe’s unification. The son of refugees from Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe is, apparently, also a soldier for freedom.

Sarkozy claims to be an architect of European unification.

Only the reality is far more pedestrian. For Mr. Sarkozy’s European Union policy continues to adhere to the old French instinct of treating the former communist nations as just a gaggle of unruly children, who must be told how to behave. A Europe whole and free, a family of equal nations, is definitely not how the Élysée Palace sees things.

The latest indication came only last week when Mr. Sarkozy publicly rebuked Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The French president was angered by the fact that these four nations had the effrontery to meet in a regional conclave ahead of an EU summit to coordinate their positions. France and Germany regularly hold such preparatory meetings and hail these as an essential instrument in Europe’s “construction.” The Benelux nations have also coordinated their positions for decades. But if the East Europeans plan to copy such models of regional cooperation, Mr. Sarkozy now warns, “questions would be raised” on the continent.

The application of double standards to the former communist nations is, of course, an old European speciality. In one celebrated example immediately after the end of the Cold War, the foreign minister of postage stamp-sized Luxembourg—then holding the EU presidency—saw nothing ridiculous in warning Slovenia and Croatia that they could not secede from Yugoslavia because they were “too small” to be “viable” independent states.

The French, however, elevated such double standards to an art form. Paris continued to oppose the admission of East European countries into the EU for many years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. As the French saw it, East Europe remained part of the problem, rather than the solution to the continent’s strategic challenges. Few things grated in Paris more than the former communist states’ close affinity with the U.S.. That was regarded as the ultimate betrayal of European ideals. At the height of the trans-Atlantic dispute over the Iraq war, the then President Jacques Chirac told the East Europeans that they had “missed a good opportunity to keep quiet.” It was an outburst for which Mr. Chirac never apologized, and which no leader in Eastern Europe has ever forgotten.

Initially, Nicolas Sarkozy applied a fresh approach. He abandoned France’s instinctive anti-Americanism and ordered his troops to rejoin NATO’s integrated military structure. The East Europeans are no longer expected to chose between friendship with the U.S. or good links with France. Immediately after his election, Mr. Sarkozy travelled to Hungary in a pointed gesture of friendship to the region. He also vowed to enhance an existing “strategic” dialogue with Poland and seemed to share Eastern Europe’s worries about the ominous political developments inside Russia.

Still, old instincts die hard. When Russian tanks rolled into Georgia last summer, Mr. Sarkozy rushed to negotiate a ceasefire in Moscow without even bothering to consult other European nations. The French president subsequently boycotted an effort to deepen relations with former Soviet republics such as Ukraine, Belarus or Moldova, largely because he saw this as a distraction from France’s interests in the Mediterranean region. And when the Czech Republic took over the presidency of the EU from France last year—the first time a former communist country was at the helm of the Union—Mr. Sarkozy behaved as though he was still in charge, patronizingly saying that although the Czechs “were doing what they can” they were bound to make a hash of things.

But, by failing to take Eastern Europe seriously, the French president is missing a great opportunity. For the first time in more than a decade, Germany’s Social Democrats—who were perennially dismissive of East Europe’s needs—are no longer part of the ruling coalition in Berlin. The German government is poised to relaunch its Eastern diplomacy, threatening to leave France trailing behind.

France also has a golden opportunity to redefine Eastern Europe’s security arrangements. The latest Europe-wide opinion poll compiled by the German Marshall Fund indicates that support for President Barack Obama is now at its lowest precisely in central and eastern Europe. The president’s obsession with “resetting” relations with Moscow, his repudiation of previous plans to station missile defence systems in Poland and the Czech Republic and the cavalier manner by which this decision was conveyed—a summary phone call in the middle of the night, on the very anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland in World War II—told the East Europeans all they needed to know about the priorities of the U.S. administration.

Eastern Europe will remain loyal to its trans-Atlantic partner. Nevertheless, the East Europeans are also prepared to re-examine their European options. A France able to lead—and particularly one that does not seek to eclipse U.S. influence on the continent—would find willing partners among the former communist nations. Yet, nothing of the kind appears to be happening. Instead, the French remain obsessed with nurturing their links with Germany, despite all the evidence that the spluttering old Franco-German axis is no longer a sufficient motor for Europe.

Meanwhile, the EU remains a Western-dominated institution. Would the EU have ever contemplated discussions with Moscow if the Russians had unleashed a trade war with, say, France or Italy? Unthinkable. But this is precisely what the EU has done to East Europe: As Russia boycotted goods from Poland, stopped deliveries of oil and gas to Lithuania and unleashed a cyber war against Estonia, Brussels continued to dream of “new partnerships” with the Kremlin. The message was unmistakable: The East Europeans remain peripheral to the Union’s interests.

As the EU is about to appoint a foreign minister, the basic divisions between the eastern and western halves of the continent will become more pronounced. For no amount of bureaucratic tinkering will produce a common EU foreign and security policy, unless all the member states can agree on a viable stance vis-a-vis Russia.

This does not mean pandering to all of Eastern Europe’s foibles and weaknesses. But it does mean a dialogue between equals and an understanding—particularly coming from France and Germany—that East European fears about Russia are both understandable and largely justified.

A French president who himself hails from that region is uniquely placed to launch this new policy. For Eastern Europe deserves a better proof of Nicolas Sarkozy’s commitment to their freedom than just a grainy photo on Facebook of dubious provenance.

Mr. Eyal is director of International Security Studies at the Royal United Services Institute.

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Full article and photo: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704402404574527461476195886.html

The WSJ Guide to ObamaCare

A comprehensive collection of our editorials and op-eds.

Review and Outlook

November 9: The Lords of Entitlement

November 6: The Return of the Inflation Tax

November 6: The AMA Wants a Unicorn, Too

November 2: The Worst Bill Ever

October 28: The WellPoint Revelation

October 28: Lieberman Steps Up

October 22: Temporary Beltway Sanity

October 21: The Doctor Fix Is I

October 20: Health Costs and History

October 19: ObamaCare’s Tax on Work

October 19: Gag Order Admission

October 16: Cash for Oldsters

October 14: Your Massachusetts Future

October 10: The Stressed German Model

October 8: The Greatest Show on Earth

October 6: The War on Specialists

October 5: Opting Out of Medicare

September 30: Escape to Montana

September 29: Rhetorical Tax Evasion

September 28: Max’s Mad Mandate

September 25: Unsafe at Any Speed

September 24: Medicare and Gag Orders

September 22: Baucus Bludgeons Humana

September 21: Obama’s Nontax Tax

September 18: The Innovation Tax

September 17: Public Option Lite

September 16: Another Health-Care Invention

September 11: Medicare for Dummies

September 10: Obama Doubles Down

September 8: The Perils of BaucusCare

September 8: Whoa, Trigger

August 23: The Competition Cure

August 21: No Maine Miracle Cure

August 20: ObamaCare’s Contradictions

August 18: Whole Foolishness

August 18: The Public Option Goes Over

August 14: Obama’s Senior Moment

August 13: Billy and the Beanstalk

August 12: The Truth About Health Insurance

August 7: Drug Dealers

August 7: Health Reform and the Polls

August 6: ObamaCare’s Real Price Tag

August 5: Dems vs. Dems

August 4: Teeing Up The Middle Class

August 1: The Fat of the Land

July 31: Repealing Erisa–II

July 30: Fannie Med

July 28: No Help for the Blue Dogs

July 26: Dr. Obama’s Tonsillectomy

July 23: A Better Health Reform

July 22: Mr. Grassley’s Choice

July 22: Bullying CBO

July 20: Repealing Erisa

July 20: What’s Up, Docs?

July 18: Their Own Medicine

July 16: Big Pharma Gets Played

July 15: The Small Business Surtax

July 10: The Public Option Two-Step

July 7: Of NICE and Men

July 3: Everyday Low Politics

July 2: Why It’s Easy to Steal from Medicare

June 29: Obama’s Health Future

June 23: Government Health Care and Voters

June 19: ObamaCare Sticker Shock

June 17: Health Reform and Competitiveness

June 16: Obama’s Malpractice Gesture

June 8: Obama’s Health Cost Illusion

June 3: Why the Health Care Rush?

May 29: Taxing Health Care

May 19: How Washington Rations

May 13: Signing On to an Obama ‘Dream’

May 11: Republicans and the ‘Public Option’

May 5: Specter On Cancer

April 13: The End of Private Health Insurance

March 27: National Health Preview

March 21: Vindicating McCain

February 11: A Health-Tech Monopoly

January 21: The Latest Entitlement

December 29: Orszag’s Health Warning

December 9: The Obama Health-Care Express

December 1: Messing with Malpractice Reform

November 20: The Obama Health Plan Emerges

Commentary

November 6: John Shadegg: The No-Cost Path to Cheaper Health Care

November 4: Herbert Pardes: The Coming Shortage of Doctors

November 3: Fred Barnes: Major Congressional Reforms Demand Bipartisan Support

October 28: Betsy McCaughey: Doctors on Health-Care Reform

October 26: Arthur C. Brooks: Why Government Health Care Keeps Falling in the Polls

October 22: David Brady and Daniel Kessler: Public Opinion and Health Reform

October 21: Scott Harrington: Competition and Health Insurance

October 20: William McGurn: What Singapore Can Teach the White House

October 19: Norbert Gleicher: ‘Expert Panels’ Won’t Improve Health Care

October 16: Al From: Democrats Don’t Need the Public Option

October 14: Douglas Holtz-Eakin: The Baucus Bill Is a Tax Bill

October 9: Wendy Williams: Paying the Health Tax in Massachusetts

October 8: Mary Landrieu: Health Costs Are Crushing Small Businesses

October 6: Peter Suderman: The Lesson of State Health-Care Reforms

October 6: Thomas Frank: Health Care and the ‘Predator State’

October 5: Donald Palmisano, William Plested II and Daniel Johnson: What We Would Have Told Obama

October 2: Matt Miller: A Real Employee Free Choice Ac

October 1: Scott Gottlieb: How the U.S. Government Rations Health Care

September 30: Holman Jenkins: Why Obama Bombed on Health Care

September 28: Philip K. Howard: Why Medical Malpractice Is Off Limits

September 28: William Winkenwerder: Health-Cops Aren’t the Answer

September 27: Michael Leavitt, Al Hubbard and Keith Hennessey: Health ‘Reform’ Is Income Redistribution

September 26: John Fund: Congress Needs a 72-Hour Waiting Period

September 25: John F. Cogan, Glenn Hubbard, and Daniel Kessler: Doubling Down on a Flawed Insurance Model

September 24: Daniel Henninger: From Bismarck to Obama

September 24: Matt Alsante: The FDA Rejects Another Good Cancer Drug

September 22: Matt Blunt: How Missouri Cut Junk Lawsuits

September 18: Kim Strassel: Congress Veers Left on Health Care

September 18: David Rivkin and Lee Casey: Mandatory Insurance Is Unconstitutional

September 18: Deval Patrick: Massachusetts Is a Health-Reform Model

September 16: Rupert Darwall: Government Medicine vs. the Elderly

September 16: Max Baucus: The Senate Is Ready to Act on Health Care

September 15: Andrew Napolitano: Health-Care Reform and the Constitution

September 14: Scott Harrington: Fact-Checking the President on Health Insurance

September 12: William Healey: Heal for America

September 11: Grace-Marie Turner and Joseph Antos: Medicare Is No Model for Health Reform

September 11: Kim Strassel: The President’s Tort Two-Step

September 10: Mark Mix: Read the Union Health-Care Label

September 9: Daniel Henninger: It’s Still the Economy, Stupid

September 8: Sarah Palin: Obama and the Bureaucratization of Health Care

September 8: Holman Jenkins: A Bipartisan Plan to Wreck the System

September 4: John Shadegg and Pete Hoekstra: How to Insure Every American

September 3: Peggy Noonan: Coruscating on Thin Ice

September 2: Tom Daschle: Climbing the Hill on Health Care

September 1: Tom Coburn: What I Learned From the ‘Mob’

August 31: Jerome Groopman and Pamela Hartzband: Sorting Fact From Fiction on Health Care

August 28: Gary Locke: Fixing Health Care Is Good for Business

August 27: Betsy McCaughey: Obama’s Health Rationer-in-Chief

August 25: Thomas Frank: Health Care and the Democratic Soul

August 24: William McGurn: Saving the Obama Presidency

August 23: Fred Barnes: Republicans Have Obama Playing Defense

August 22: Kevin Ferris: Arlen Specter’s Dilemma

August 20: Michael Leavitt: Health ‘Co-ops’ Are Government Care

August 20: Heather Richardson Higgins: No Compromise on Health ‘Reform’

August 20: Daniel Henninger: In Government We Trust?

August 20: Peggy Noonan: Pull the Plug on ObamaCare

August 19: Scott Harrington: Health Co-ops: Slow Road to Government Care

August 19: Ronald Dworkin: An Anesthesiologist’s Take on Health-Care Reform

August 18: Martin Feldstein: ObamaCare Is All About Rationing

August 18: Jim Towey: The Death Book for Veterans

August 18: William McGurn: Harry Reid’s ‘Evil’ Moment

August 17: Andrew Klavan: The Panel

August 16: Craig Karpel: We Don’t Spend Enough on Health Care

August 14: John Cochrane: What to Do About Pre-existing Conditions

August 12: Alan Miller: Medicare For All Isn’t the Answer

August 11: John Mackey: The Whole Foods Alternative to ObamaCare

August 10: William McGurn: The Health-Care Grail

August 10: Dorothy Rabinowitz: Obama’s Tone-Deaf Health Campaig

August 6: Daniel Henninger: Why Obama May Fail

August 6: Peggy Noonan: ‘You Are Terrifying Us’

August 5: Arthur Laffer: How to Fix the Health-Care ‘Wedge’

July 30: Myrna Ulfik: Health Reform and Cancer

July 28: Theodore Dalrymple: Is There a ‘Right’ to Health Care?

July 24: John Fund: Health Reform’s Hidden Victims

July 24: Kim Strassel: How Obama Stumbled on Health Care

July 23: Betsy McCaughey: GovermentCare’s Assault on Seniors

July 22: Michael Boskin: Obama Needs a Move to the Middle

July 22: Bobby Jindal: How to Make Health-Care Reform Bipartisan

July 17: Kim Strassel: The Grassley Test

July 15: Philip K. Howard: Health Reform Requires Lawsuit Reform

July 15: Thomas Szasz: Universal Health Care Isn’t Worth Our Freedom

July 1: George Newman: Parsing the Health Reform Arguments

June 29: Scott Harrington: Reform Needs Healthy Life Incentives

June 26: John Calfee: The Dangers of Fannie Mae Health Care

June 25: Scott Gottlieb: Government Health Plans Always Ration Care

June 24: Robert Reich: Why We Need a Public Health-Care Plan

June 23: Mark Sklar: A Doctor’s Reflections on Health-Care Refor

June 22: David Rivkin and Lee Casey: Is Government Health Care Constitutional?

June 19: Betsy McCaughey: Dissecting the Kennedy Health Bill

June 19: Kim Strassel: Mr. Burd Goes to Washington

June 18: Daniel Henninger: ‘Public Option’: Son of Medicaid

June 17: Holman Jenkins: The Death and Life of Health ‘Reform’

June 15: Scott Harrington: The ‘Public Plan’ Would Be the Only Plan

June 12: Kim Strassel: Democrats and the Health Tax Taboo

Jun 12: Steven Burd: How Safeway is Cutting Health-Care Costs

June 9: David Gratzer: Canada’s ObamaCare Precedent

June 5: Betsy McCaughey: Obama’s Voodoo Health Economics

May 20: Grace-Marie Turner and Joseph R. Antos: The GOP’s Health-Care Alternative

May 15: Peter Orszag: Health Costs are the Real Deficit Threat

May 14: John Lechleiter: Health-Care Reform and the ‘Innovation Test’

May 12: Scott Gottlieb: How ObamaCare Will Affect Your Doctor

April 27: John E. Sununu: National Health Care With 51 Votes

April 17: Marc Siegel: When Doctors Opt Out

April 14: Kerry Weems and Benjamin Sasse: Is Government Health Insurance Cheap?

April 8: Jerome Groopman and Pamela Hartzband: Why ‘Quality Care’ Is Dangerous

March 14: Scott Gottlieb: Stem Cells and the Truth About Medical Innovation

March 12: Jerome Groopman and Pamela Harzband: Obama’s $80 Billion Exaggeration

March 6: Sally Pipes: Health ‘Reformers’ Ignore Facts

February 26: Max Baucus and Edward Kennedy: We Cannot Delay Health-Care Reform

February 9: Nadeem Esmail: ‘Too Old’ for Hip Surgery

January 20, 2009: Scott Gottlieb: Congress Wants to Restrict Drug Access

January 8: Scott Gottlieb: What Medicaid Tells Us About Government Health Care

January 7: Tim Price: The GOP Should Fight Health-Care Rationing

December 30: Sally Pipes: Obama Will Ration Your Health Care

December 10: Ezekiel Emanuel and Ron Wyden: Why Tie Health Insurance to a Job?

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Full article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704471504574441193211542788.html

Why We Need a Strong Individual Mandate

Otherwise, health insurance will cost everyone more.

After the House passed a sweeping health-care bill over the weekend, President Barack Obama called on the Senate to “take the baton and bring this effort to the finish line.”

He’s right. Lawmakers still have a long way to go to ensure that the bill that lands on the president’s desk fixes our system’s shortcomings.

One of the key issues to address is the individual mandate, which would require individuals to purchase health insurance. If the Senate fails to adopt a strong mandate as the House did, health-care costs will increase at a faster rate than they have in the past and as a result, vast numbers of Americans will remain uninsured.

Why will costs increase? Because in addition to the individual mandate, two provisions that have become part of every reform bill advancing in Congress require insurers to sell policies to anyone who wants it but without charging premiums based on a person’s health status. These provisions are aimed at making insurance affordable for anyone with chronic or other costly medical conditions.

The problem is that these provisions can make insurance a lot more expensive. Insurance is fundamentally a mechanism for spreading risk. If only high-risk people sign up, insurance will become very expensive for everyone who buys a policy. However, if a lot of low-risk people also pay into the system, there will be more money to take care of those who need expensive services than if fewer low-risk people pay in. If everyone carries insurance, in short, premiums will be a lot lower for everyone.

To make sure that more low-risk, lower-cost patients buy health insurance, the health reforms proposed in Congress also require everyone to carry insurance on a continual basis. But the problem is that the penalty for violating this mandate is too low to create a strong incentive to actually do so.

Sen. Max Baucus (D., Mont.), for example, is pushing a bill that would impose a $200 fine on anyone who decides not to buy insurance starting in 2013. By 2018, that fine would increase to $750.

This is way too low. By the time the mandate is in full force, the price of the average individual health-insurance plan is expected to be $5,000, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

With the price of insurance far outstripping the cost of the fine, there will be a compelling reason for many people to pay the fine and only buy insurance when in need of some form of pricey care. In other words, in the absence of a robust individual mandate, healthy, low-risk patients—12.6 million of them, according to a recent study from consulting firm Oliver Wyman—would opt out of the insurance market and wait until they are sick to buy insurance. Why pay monthly premiums if you can get insurance when you need it?

The net result of requiring insurers to sell a policy to anyone who wants it (and charge them the same regardless of their health conditions) is that high-risk patients and those who have bought insurance so that they can get immediate pricey services would make up a disproportionate share of the insurance pool. This will drive up the cost of health insurance. Without a strong mandate, the premiums for a newly enrolled family would increase about $3,300 each year within the first five years of reform, according to the Oliver Wyman study.

To mitigate the effect of easy access to coverage, the individual mandate must include a penalty somewhat comparable to the price of buying insurance.

Imagine that parking tickets were only 25 cents. Would drivers have much reason to feed parking meters? The answer, of course, is no. Paying a fine would be cheaper than putting a dollar or more into a meter. A weak individual mandate would have the same result. Cash-strapped Americans—particularly healthy ones—would pay the fine and still not get insurance.

Congress has rightly set out to both expand insurance coverage and reduce health-care costs for all Americans. But without an effective and enforceable individual mandate that guarantees the participation of everyone, neither goal is attainable.

Ms. Trautwein is CEO of the National Association of Health Underwriters.

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Full article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704402404574525923255957640.html

Justice and Guantanamo Bay

It is a mistake to try some detainees in federal courts and others by military commissions.

This past Sunday, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the administration will decide by Nov. 16 which Guantanamo detainees will be tried in military commissions trials, and which of them will stand trial in federal courts. But a decision to use both legal settings is a mistake. It will establish a dangerous legal double standard that gives some detainees superior rights and protections, and relegates others to the inferior rights and protections of military commissions. This will only perpetuate the perception that Guantanamo and justice are mutually exclusive.

President George W. Bush authorized military commissions in November 2001, and President Barack Obama ordered them stopped in January 2009. In the intervening seven years—which included a period from September 2005 until October 2007 when I served as chief prosecutor at Guantanamo—only three military commissions trials were completed.

Two of the three detainees convicted of war crimes have served their sentences and today they are free men back in their home countries. But the more than 200 that remain inside the detention center have never been convicted, or in most cases even faced charges.

The day after his inauguration, Mr. Obama ordered an evaluation of all the detainees to determine who should face criminal prosecution. Administration officials estimate that roughly a quarter of the remaining detainees will be recommended for trial in criminal courts.

In a preliminary report submitted to Mr. Obama in July, the Detention Policy Task Force recommended the approval of evaluation criteria developed by the Department of Defense and the Department of Justice. The task force stated its preference for trials in the federal courts, but added the decision would be based in part on “evidentiary issues” and “the extent to which the forum would permit a full presentation of the accused’s wrongful conduct.” A Washington Post editorial endorsed the proposal, arguing that there should be an alternative forum when a trial in federal court is “not an option because the evidence against the accused is strong but not admissible.”

Stop and think about that for a moment. In effect, it means that the standard of justice for each detainee will depend in large part upon the government’s assessment of how high the prosecution’s evidence can jump and which evidentiary bar it can clear.

The evidence likely to clear the high bar gets gold medal justice: a traditional trial in our federal courts. The evidence unable to clear the federal court standard is forced to settle for a military commission trial, a specially created forum that has faltered repeatedly for more than seven years. That is a double standard I suspect we would condemn if it was applied to us.

Military commissions satisfy the requirements of the Geneva Conventions, which are the source of the detainees’ rights. The rights in federal courts surpass the Geneva Conventions requirements and give detainees more than their status and the law demand.

The Obama administration could legitimately choose to prosecute detainees in either forum—federal courts or military commissions—and satisfy its legal obligations. The problem is trying to have it both ways: the credibility that comes from using federal courts with admissible evidence under the very strict rules of civilian tribunals, and military commissions for cases that are often comparable except for the fact that they depend on evidence (such as hearsay testimony) that is not normally admissible in civilian courts. What if Iran proposed the same for the three American hikers it is currently holding? We would surely condemn what we now stand ready to condone.

It is not as if double-standard justice is required to keep suspected terrorists off our streets. Those detainees who cannot be prosecuted can still be detained under rules the administration approves—likely in the next several months—for the indefinite detention of those who pose a threat to us during this ongoing armed conflict.

The administration must choose. Either federal courts or military commissions, but not both, for the detainees that deserve to be prosecuted and punished for their past conduct.

Double standards don’t play well in Peoria. They won’t play well in Peshawar or Palembang either. We need to work to change the negative perceptions that exist about Guantanamo and our commitment to the law. Formally establishing a legal double standard will only reinforce them.

Mr. Davis is the former chief prosecutor for the military commissions. He retired from the military in 2008.

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Full article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704402404574525581723576284.html

The Fannie Mae Dice Roll Continues

Losses of $400 billion are increasingly possible.

“I do think I do not want the same kind of focus on safety and soundness that we have in OCC [Office of the Comptroller of the Currency] and OTS [Office of Thrift Supervision]. I want to roll the dice a little bit more in this situation towards subsidized housing.”

—Representative Barney Frank, September 25, 2003

It was six years ago that Mr. Frank announced his famous dice roll on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the name of affordable housing. Mr. Frank got his wish, and the losses keep rolling in, with no end in sight as Washington finds new ways for the companies to serve political purposes.

Last week, Fannie Mae posted a quarterly loss of $19.8 billion—which believe it or not was an improvement on the $29.4 billion that it lost a year earlier. Last quarter’s results came with yet another request for government aid—$15 billion worth. That brings the total tab for Fannie and Freddie to $111 billion since they were put into conservatorship in September 2008.

It would be bad enough if Fannie and Freddie’s continuing losses were merely the product of bad bets made amid the housing bubble in 2006 and 2007. But the latest red ink is in large part the result of a deliberate choice to run their businesses at a loss over the past year to support White House housing policies.

The most recent losses include $22 billion of what Fannie Mae calls “credit-related expenses,” which in English means foreclosure costs and losses on loans that are “worth” more than the house. Of that amount, $7.7 billion comes straight from Fannie’s support of the Obama Administration’s mortgage-modification program. Fannie and Freddie have been buying mortgages out of the securities they were bundled into and are then modifying the terms, which invariably means taking a loss on the loan.

Through this program, taxpayers are directly subsidizing homeowners who borrowed more than they could afford, or more than their house is now worth, or both. The government is doing this under the cover of losses at Fannie and Freddie because Congress and the White House know these programs are both expensive and unpopular with the poor saps still paying their mortgages on time.

The dynamic duo’s delinquency rates also continue to climb, even on modified loans and on mortgages on which Fan and Fred have chosen to forbear from demanding repayment. The $400 billion that Congress has appropriated to keep Fan and Fred afloat, in other words, has quietly morphed from emergency aid into a $400 billion housing subsidy program. On current trends this will all be spent before President Obama is up for re-election, and, judging by the results so far, taxpayers will have little to show for it.

Having ruined the U.S. mortgage market, Fan and Fred have become the tools for its continued nationalization and a never-ending bailout of mortgage borrowers. This is one reason we advised former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson to put the companies into receivership and leave them in run-off mode when he had the chance.

Instead, Mr. Paulson placed them in conservatorship and sent them out to lend more and more. In the past year, they have all but erased the private mortgage market, at great cost to both the taxpayer and the integrity of the private financial system. They will roll snake-eyes for taxpayers for years to come.

Editorial, Wall Street Journal

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Full article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704402404574527440083580698.html

The Economic Uses of Al Gore

Sincerity is no substitute for disinterestedness.

Last spring Tennessee Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn asked Al Gore during a House hearing if his investments in green energy meant he would benefit personally from cap and trade.

“If you believe that the reason I have been working on this issue for 30 years is because of greed, you don’t know me,” Mr. Gore responded (and, yes, according to two reporters present, he sighed).

Mr. Gore is quite right that his arguments should be judged on their merits, not on his investments. He’s wrong to think his investments are irrelevant, and, even more, that sincerity is dispositive of anything. Sincerity is no substitute for disinterestedness.

Here are a couple questions: When so much of his position and prestige are invested in a predicted climate crisis, is Mr. Gore likely to be open to contrary evidence? Is he likely to be particularly fastidious about whether proposed steps will actually have an effect on global warming if they also happen to benefit his investments?

Ms. Blackburn’s challenge was in a sense late. Mr. Gore long ago jumped over to the side where salesmanship, by whatever means, was the trumping priority. As far back as 1989, he insisted there was “no dispute worthy of recognition” about the danger of manmade climate change. By now, he titularly heads a vast establishment with a stake in one side of the argument.

Notice, for instance, after a decade in which the earth appears to have stopped warming and even cooled, that global warming advocates have rushed to embrace a computer simulation that predicts this cooling (in retrospect, of course) and allows for indefinite future cooling, even while assuring that the world is destined to face disastrous warming anyway. Isn’t this what forecasters of doom have done since time immemorial when their deadlines for doom haven’t been met?

Mr. Gore’s own predictions of a climate catastrophe have not lessened, but every time he opens his mouth, the costs of meeting the emergency become easier and easier to swallow. They aren’t even costs anymore; as he says in his new book, they are “profits.”

Salesman in chief.

All policy salesmanship naturally defaults toward the proposition of huge benefits and negligible costs (i.e., free lunchism). Isn’t that where Al Gore is today?

Mr. Gore notes that he has poured his own money into two climate action nonprofits, but, whatever his self-felt motives, aren’t these nonprofits functionally propaganda arms (i.e., advertising) that benefit his for-profit investments?

The truth is, evidence of man’s impact on climate remains maddeningly elusive, in part because man’s impact on climate is so small as to be hard to disentangle from natural variability. This is not Mr. Gore’s position, of course. If anything, however, the case for action has become less closed since he pronounced it closed in 1989, if only because of the huge sums and manpower poured into the subject to little avail.

In retrospect, a significant moment was the falling apart or debunking of two key attempts seemingly well-suited to clinch matters for a scientifically literate public. One, the famous hockey stick graph, which suggested the temperature rise of the past 100 years was unprecedentedly steep, was convincingly challenged. The other, a mining of the geological record to show past episodes of warming were sharply coupled with rising CO2 levels, fell victim to a closer look that revealed that past warmings had preceded rather than followed higher CO2 levels.

These episodes from a decade ago testified to one important thing: Even climate activists recognized a need for evidence from the real world. The endless invocation of computer models wasn’t cutting it. Yet today the same circles are more dependent than ever on predictions made by models, whose forecasts lie far enough in the future that those who rely on them to make policy prescriptions are in no danger of being held accountable for their reliability.

For a while the media could patch over the scientific shortfall by reporting evidence of warming as if it were evidence of what causes warming. Inconveniently, however, just as temperature-measuring has become more standardized and disciplined and less reliant on flaky records from the past (massaged to the Nth degree), the warming trend seems to have faded from the recent record.

We could go on. But from our first column on this subject, we have been convinced that the scientific questions are interesting and irrelevant, since it was never in the cards that Western societies (or Brazil or India or China) would sacrifice economic growth for the uncertain benefits of fighting climate change. Unable to do anything meaningful about climate change, policy would therefore default to satisfying the demand of organized interests for climate pork.

Isn’t that, however much he may be distracted by feelings of sincerity, exactly the economic function of Mr. Gore today?

Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., Wall Street Journal

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Full article and photo: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704402404574527572868084330.html

Plant experts unveil DNA barcode

Identifying a plant’s DNA “barcode” will help tell is if it is being illegally traded

Hundreds of experts from 50 nations are set to agree on a “DNA barcode” system that gives every plant on Earth a unique genetic fingerprint.

The technology will be used in a number of ways, including identifying the illegal trade in endangered species.

The data will be stored on a global database that will be available to scientists around the world.

The agreement will be signed at the third International Barcode of Life conference in Mexico City on Tuesday.

“Barcoding is a tool to identify species faster, more cheaply and more precisely than traditional methods, ” explained Patricia Escalante, head of the zoology department at Mexico’s National University (UNAM), which is hosting the gathering.

In an effort to limit the impact on the planet’s biodiversity, Dr Escalante said it was vital to establish a reliable monitoring system.

“We need an accurate inventory,” she observed, “to recognize parasites of medical, economic or ecological importance.”

Mexican researchers, she added, were involved in a network to produce barcodes in key taxonomic groups , such as trees, fungi, bees and aquatic insects.

Cracking the code

“Biodiversity scientists are using DNA technology to unravel mysteries, much like detectives use it to solve crimes,” said David Schindel, executive secretary for the Consortium for the Barcode of Life (COBL).

“You start with a specimen that has been identified by a specialist, so you have a known species,” he explained.

“You then take a tiny piece of tissue; let’s say we are dealing with a mosquito, we’d take half of one leg, put it in a little tube and grind it up. You’d then extract the DNA.

“We are only looking at a tiny, tiny part of the whole genome – just 650 base pairs. In comparison, the human genome has three billion base pairs.

“So the next stage is finding that tiny little region, cutting it out and making millions of copies – which is known as magnifying – in order to analyse the region.

“What you get out of that process is a string of 650 letters – and if the process is working then you will get identical sequences or very, very similar sequences for the same species.”

The information is then added to a global database, which can be accessed by scientists around the globe.

DNA breakthrough

Researchers have been able to use this technique to identify animal species since 2003. But, until now, the system has not worked for plant species.

It has been necessary to identify a different region of DNA that also provided a number of important characteristics. These characteristics included:

• technologically easy to process

• readily obtainable from degraded material

• variable between species, but not too variable

A team of researchers had been assessing seven potential barcodes. This was then narrowed down to just two possibilities.

The announcement in Mexico will mark the end of the process, with the international biodiversity scientific community reaching an agreement on the best way to identify plants.

Dr Schindel said one of the benefits of the technology was the speed and ease of identifying species.

“Now – within just a few hours – you can get an answer,” he told BBC News.

This would lead to much more effective use of resources when it came to tackling problems such as crop pests or the spread of diseases, he explained.

It would no longer be necessary to wait for a specialist botanist to examine the sample in order to get an accurate identification of the species.

The technology would also allow species to be identified from a fragment of material.

Illegally harvested timber is often processed into furniture before being shipped overseas, making it very difficult to assess the origin of the wood.

However, identifying the timber’s “DNA barcode” would quickly reveal whether the wood was sourced from a legitimate source.

As part of the International Barcode of Life Project, scientists hope that five million specimens from 500,000 species will be catalogued in the next five years.

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Full article and photo: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8346635.stm

A globe redrawn

After the Soviet collapse

Welcome to the new world disorder

And goodbye to all that

TO RUSSIA’s once and possibly future president, Vladimir Putin, the collapse of the Soviet Union—two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall—was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century. It set off shocks that were felt across the globe. Russians who lived through the ruinous inflation and currency woes of the early post-Soviet years paid a heavy price. Yet few ouside Russia lamented the passing of the century’s last failed empire.

Even Russians had seen worse. For them, the 20th century had already brought the first world war, with the Bolshevik grab for power, followed by Stalin’s self-induced famine, which killed millions. By contrast, the end of the cold war was hardly devastating. The post-1945 nuclear stand-off between the Soviet Union and the West had brought a perilous stability, but had generated proxy wars from Korea and Vietnam to Angola, Central America and Afghanistan—a continuation of cold war by more traditional bloody means. Indeed the collapse of Soviet influence around the world went unmourned outside Russia, except by those who had relied on it to seize and hold power. Yet how had the end come so fast? And how would it refashion a world forged over four decades of superpower domination and rivalry?

Some credit Ronald Reagan’s “star wars” dream of a missile-defence shield with engineering the Soviet demise: superior technology had threatened the Kremlin with a new, unaffordable arms race. Yet the Soviet Union could still have overwhelmed such defences simply by turning out ever more rockets—one reason the defences were never built. In many ways it was the Soviet Union that lost the cold war, rather than America that won it.

Aside from raw military might, every other source of apparent Soviet strength had been hollowing out for years. Central planning worked when progress could be marked in tonnes of steel or cement, or tanks and rockets. But its perverse incentives also led to factories churning out stuff no one wanted, while shops were empty of the things they craved, from fresh meat to fridges. Subtracting value—producing goods worth less in real terms than the materials used to make them—could not go on for ever. Meanwhile, shortages created a crime-ridden black economy that, by some estimates, was worth as much as 30% of the real one, perhaps more.

Even without the fall of the Berlin Wall, and under Mikhail Gorbachev’s new management, the Soviet Union would have struggled in vain (Russia struggles still) to adapt this behemoth to the information age and the microchip. Abroad, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, Comecon, a trading block melded from the Soviet Union, seven European satellites, Mongolia, Cuba and eventually Vietnam, functioned only with massive Soviet subsidy and in worthless soft currencies. Imperial overstretch—financing guerrilla movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America and supporting cash-strapped and unloved regimes from Angola to Afghanistan—increased the strain.

Other recently expired empires, such as the British, Dutch, French, had left some residue for locals grudgingly to admire: habits of administration, a legal system, even just a useful language. Not the Soviet one. Its traces were quickly swept away as east Europeans dashed for freedom and free markets. But with it went a pattern of global order based on competition between the Soviet Union and America, and also in part on a battle for influence with a rising China within the communist and non-aligned worlds. As the Soviet Union deserted both battlefields, no corner of the world was left unchanged.

First the few pro-Soviet regimes, particularly Cuba and Vietnam, took a severe economic knock as friendship prices and raw-material subsidies first dwindled, then disappeared overnight. Trade links snapped. No longer able to sell its sugar, nickel and oranges at vastly inflated prices, or import artificially cheap Soviet oil, Cuba plunged into severe recession. By the mid-1990s its economy had shrunk by a third. Because it was bankrupt, Cuba was forced to stop propping up the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. It had to watch the fizzling of other Central American leftist insurrections. Funds were cut to Marxist movements throughout the continent.

Africa also felt the jolts. Cuban troops, originally shipped and airlifted in and sustained by Soviet military planners, were pulled out of Ethiopia in 1989 and two years later from Angola, where they had kept Marxist regimes in power. The communist threat collapsed across southern Africa as the war in Mozambique wound down. Concluding that communism, for long the great bogeyman of South African politics, no longer posed a threat, the country’s whites-only regime released Nelson Mandela from prison. It then allowed the free elections that swept away apartheid.

Yet if Africa had had too much big-power attention for its own good in the 1980s, after the Soviet collapse, arguably, it had too little. With the tussle for influence over, the world largely looked away as Rwanda was engulfed in genocide and Congo sank into interminable internal strife. Thus began a debate about who should keep the peace when there was none to keep.

In Asia, too, the proxy wars were over, but the thawing of the cold one still brought big changes. One loser was North Korea. In search of hard currency for its oil and weapons, Russia had already established new ties with more prosperous South Korea just before the Soviet collapse. A pragmatic China quickly followed. In Vietnam, loss of its Soviet backers led the regime to explore economic reforms and better relations with its neighbours—even, later, with America, its old enemy.

India had depended heavily on the Soviet Union for military hardware and political support against both China and Pakistan. America and China, with which India had once fought a disastrous border war, both had close ties to Pakistan. It took prickly India a long time but, having opened up to more Western investment, it then improved relations with America: a needed counterweight to a China that loomed larger as Russian influence and largesse fell away.

North-east Asia, meanwhile, was left trying to manage an awkward five-way balance between a rising China, a weakened Russia, a distracted America, an aspiring South Korea and an uncertain Japan. Despite healthy trade links, it still is.

In that cockpit of superpower rivalry, the Middle East, Soviet arms sales to Syria, Iraq and others had done nothing to advance the cause of peace between the Arab states and Israel. Now it was America’s moment: 1991 saw not only the success of the American-led coalition in the first Gulf war, but also the beginning of serious peace talks. Even the Palestinians’ leader, Yasser Arafat, realised there was no alternative now to American mediation, although Syria, Iraq and Iran rejected it. In the end Arafat too balked at a deal. Disappointment and then the September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, took America’s attention, as the world turned upside-down once more.

And the supposed unipolar moment, when America was left to bestride a single-superpower world? To successive American administrations in the 1990s, dealing with Somalia, Rwanda, a nuclear-capable North Korea, UN Security Council divisions over weapons inspections in Iraq, the spreading violence of al-Qaeda and the rise of China, the new world order seemed more like chaos and disorder. With hindsight, a confusingly multipolar world was in the making even then.

The Economist

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Full article and photo: http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?story_id=14793737&source=hptextfeature

A Dream Interpretation: Tuneups for the Brain

It’s snowing heavily, and everyone in the backyard is in a swimsuit, at some kind of party: Mom, Dad, the high school principal, there’s even an ex-girlfriend. And is that Elvis, over by the piñata?

Uh-oh.

Dreams are so rich and have such an authentic feeling that scientists have long assumed they must have a crucial psychological purpose. To Freud, dreaming provided a playground for the unconscious mind; to Jung, it was a stage where the psyche’s archetypes acted out primal themes. Newer theories hold that dreams help the brain to consolidate emotional memories or to work though current problems, like divorce and work frustrations.

Yet what if the primary purpose of dreaming isn’t psychological at all?

In a paper published last month in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Dr. J. Allan Hobson, a psychiatrist and longtime sleep researcher at Harvard, argues that the main function of rapid-eye-movement sleep, or REM, when most dreaming occurs, is physiological. The brain is warming its circuits, anticipating the sights and sounds and emotions of waking.

“It helps explain a lot of things, like why people forget so many dreams,” Dr. Hobson said in an interview. “It’s like jogging; the body doesn’t remember every step, but it knows it has exercised. It has been tuned up. It’s the same idea here: dreams are tuning the mind for conscious awareness.”

Drawing on work of his own and others, Dr. Hobson argues that dreaming is a parallel state of consciousness that is continually running but normally suppressed during waking. The idea is a prominent example of how neuroscience is altering assumptions about everyday (or every-night) brain functions.

“Most people who have studied dreams start out with some predetermined psychological ideas and try to make dreaming fit those,” said Dr. Mark Mahowald, a neurologist who is director of the sleep disorders program at Hennepin County Medical Center, in Minneapolis. “What I like about this new paper is that he doesn’t make any assumptions about what dreaming is doing.”

The paper has already stirred controversy and discussion among Freudians, therapists and other researchers, including neuroscientists. Dr. Rodolfo Llinás, a neurologist and physiologist at New York University, called Dr. Hobson’s reasoning impressive but said it was not the only physiological interpretation of dreams.

“I argue that dreaming is not a parallel state but that it is consciousness itself, in the absence of input from the senses,” said Dr. Llinás, who makes the case in the book “I of the Vortex: From Neurons to Self” (M.I.T., 2001). Once people are awake, he argued, their brain essentially revises its dream images to match what it sees, hears and feels — the dreams are “corrected” by the senses.

These novel ideas about dreaming are based partly on basic findings about REM sleep. In evolutionary terms, REM appears to be a recent development; it is detectable in humans and other warm-blooded mammals and birds. And studies suggest that REM makes its appearance very early in life — in the third trimester for humans, well before a developing child has experience or imagery to fill out a dream.

In studies, scientists have found evidence that REM activity helps the brain build neural connections, particularly in its visual areas. The developing fetus may be “seeing” something, in terms of brain activity, long before the eyes ever open — the developing brain drawing on innate, biological models of space and time, like an internal virtual-reality machine. Full-on dreams, in the usual sense of the word, come much later. Their content, in this view, is a kind of crude test run for what the coming day may hold.

None of this is to say that dreams are devoid of meaning. Anyone who can remember a vivid dream knows that at times the strange nighttime scenes reflect real hopes and anxieties: the young teacher who finds himself naked at the lectern; the new mother in front of an empty crib, frantic in her imagined loss.

But people can read almost anything into the dreams that they remember, and they do exactly that. In a recent study of more than 1,000 people, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Harvard found strong biases in the interpretations of dreams. For instance, the participants tended to attach more significance to a negative dream if it was about someone they disliked, and more to a positive dream if it was about a friend.

In fact, research suggests that only about 20 percent of dreams contain people or places that the dreamer has encountered. Most images appear to be unique to a single dream.

Scientists know this because some people have the ability to watch their own dreams as observers, without waking up. This state of consciousness, called lucid dreaming, is itself something a mystery — and a staple of New Age and ancient mystics. But it is a real phenomenon, one in which Dr. Hobson finds strong support for his argument for dreams as a physiological warm-up before waking.

In dozens of studies, researchers have brought people into the laboratory and trained them to dream lucidly. They do this with a variety of techniques, including auto-suggestion as head meets pillow (“I will be aware when I dream; I will observe”) and teaching telltale signs of dreaming (the light switches don’t work; levitation is possible; it is often impossible to scream).

Lucid dreaming occurs during a mixed state of consciousness, sleep researchers say — a heavy dose of REM with a sprinkling of waking awareness. “This is just one kind of mixed state, but there are whole variety of them,” Dr. Mahowald said. Sleepwalking and night terrors, he said, represent mixtures of muscle activation and non-REM sleep. Attacks of narcolepsy reflect an infringement of REM on normal daytime alertness.

In study published in September in the journal Sleep, Ursula Voss of J. W. Goethe-University in Frankfurt led a team that analyzed brain waves during REM sleep, waking and lucid dreaming. It found that lucid dreaming had elements of REM and of waking — most notably in the frontal areas of the brain, which are quiet during normal dreaming. Dr. Hobson was a co-author on the paper.

“You are seeing this split brain in action,” he said. “This tells me that there are these two systems, and that in fact they can be running at the same time.”

Researchers have a way to go before they can confirm or fill out this working hypothesis. But the payoffs could extend beyond a deeper understanding of the sleeping brain. People who struggle with schizophrenia suffer delusions of unknown origin. Dr. Hobson suggests that these flights of imagination may be related to an abnormal activation of a dreaming consciousness. “Let the dreamer awake, and you will see psychosis,” Jung said.

For everyone else, the idea of dreams as a kind of sound check for the brain may bring some comfort, as well. That ominous dream of people gathered on the lawn for some strange party? Probably meaningless.

No reason to scream, even if it were possible.

Benedict Carey, New York Times

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Full article and photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/10/health/10mind.html

Framed for child porn — by a virus

Of all the sinister things that Internet viruses do, this might be the worst: They can make you an unsuspecting collector of child pornography.

Heinous pictures and videos can be deposited on computers by viruses – the malicious programs better known for swiping your credit card numbers. In this twist, it’s your reputation that’s stolen.

Pedophiles can exploit virus-infected PCs to remotely store and view their stash without fear they’ll get caught. Pranksters or someone trying to frame you can tap viruses to make it appear that you surf illegal Web sites.

Whatever the motivation, you get child porn on your computer – and might not realize it until police knock at your door.

An Associated Press investigation found cases in which innocent people have been branded as pedophiles after their co-workers or loved ones stumbled upon child porn placed on a PC through a virus. It can cost victims hundreds of thousands of dollars to prove their innocence.

In this July 2, 2009 photo, Nathaniel “Ned” Solon talks on the phone-intercom at the Logan County Detention Center in Sterling, Colo. Solon admits he used the program to download video games and adult porn _ but not child porn. So what could explain that material?

Their situations are complicated by the fact that actual pedophiles often blame viruses – a defence rightfully viewed with skepticism by law enforcement.

“It’s an example of the old ‘dog ate my homework’ excuse,” says Phil Malone, director of the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. “The problem is, sometimes the dog does eat your homework.”

The AP’s investigation included interviewing people who had been found with child porn on their computers. The AP reviewed court records and spoke to prosecutors, police and computer examiners.

One case involved Michael Fiola, a former investigator with the Massachusetts agency that oversees workers’ compensation.

In 2007, Fiola’s bosses became suspicious after the Internet bill for his state-issued laptop showed that he used 41/2 times more data than his colleagues. A technician found child porn in the PC folder that stores images viewed online.

Fiola was fired and charged with possession of child pornography, which carries up to five years in prison. He endured death threats, his car tires were slashed and he was shunned by friends.

Fiola and his wife fought the case, spending $250,000 on legal fees. They liquidated their savings, took a second mortgage and sold their car.

An inspection for his defence revealed the laptop was severely infected. It was programmed to visit as many as 40 child porn sites per minute – an inhuman feat. While Fiola and his wife were out to dinner one night, someone logged on to the computer and porn flowed in for an hour and a half.

Prosecutors performed another test and confirmed the defence findings. The charge was dropped – 11 months after it was filed.

The Fiolas say they have health problems from the stress of the case. They say they’ve talked to dozens of lawyers but can’t get one to sue the state, because of a cap on the amount they can recover.

“It ruined my life, my wife’s life and my family’s life,” he says.

The Massachusetts attorney general’s office, which charged Fiola, declined interview requests.

At any moment, about 20 million of the estimated 1 billion Internet-connected PCs worldwide are infected with viruses that could give hackers full control, according to security software maker F-Secure Corp. Computers often get infected when people open e-mail attachments from unknown sources or visit a malicious Web page.

Pedophiles can tap viruses in several ways. The simplest is to force someone else’s computer to surf child porn sites, collecting images along the way. Or a computer can be made into a warehouse for pictures and videos that can be viewed remotely when the PC is online.

“They’re kind of like locusts that descend on a cornfield: They eat up everything in sight and they move on to the next cornfield,” says Eric Goldman, academic director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University. Goldman has represented Web companies that discovered child pornographers were abusing their legitimate services.

But pedophiles need not be involved: Child porn can land on a computer in a sick prank or an attempt to frame the PC’s owner.

In the first publicly known cases of individuals being victimized, two men in the United Kingdom were cleared in 2003 after viruses were shown to have been responsible for the child porn on their PCs.

In one case, an infected e-mail or pop-up ad poisoned a defence contractor’s PC and downloaded the offensive pictures.

In the other, a virus changed the home page on a man’s Web browser to display child porn, a discovery made by his 7-year-old daughter. The man spent more than a week in jail and three months in a halfway house, and lost custody of his daughter.

Chris Watts, a computer examiner in Britain, says he helped clear a hotel manager whose co-workers found child porn on the PC they shared with him.

Watts found that while surfing the Internet for ways to play computer games without paying for them, the manager had visited a site for pirated software. It redirected visitors to child porn sites if they were inactive for a certain period.

In all these cases, the central evidence wasn’t in dispute: Pornography was on a computer. But proving how it got there was difficult.

Tami Loehrs, who inspected Fiola’s computer, recalls a case in Arizona in which a computer was so “extensively infected” that it would be “virtually impossible” to prove what an indictment alleged: that a 16-year-old who used the PC had uploaded child pornography to a Yahoo group.

Prosecutors dropped the charge and let the boy plead guilty to a separate crime that kept him out of jail, though they say they did it only because of his age and lack of a criminal record.

Many prosecutors say blaming a computer virus for child porn is a new version of an old ploy.

“We call it the SODDI defence: Some Other Dude Did It,” says James Anderson, a federal prosecutor in Wyoming.

However, forensic examiners say it would be hard for a pedophile to get away with his crime by using a bogus virus defence.

“I personally would feel more comfortable investing my retirement in the lottery before trying to defend myself with that,” says forensics specialist Jeff Fischbach.

Even careful child porn collectors tend to leave incriminating e-mails, DVDs or other clues. Virus defences are no match for such evidence, says Damon King, trial attorney for the U.S. Justice Department’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section.

But while the virus defence does not appear to be letting real pedophiles out of trouble, there have been cases in which forensic examiners insist that legitimate claims did not get completely aired.

Loehrs points to Ned Solon of Casper, Wyo., who is serving six years for child porn found in a folder used by a file-sharing program on his computer.

Solon admits he used the program to download video games and adult porn – but not child porn. So what could explain that material?

Loehrs testified that Solon’s antivirus software wasn’t working properly and appeared to have shut off for long stretches, a sign of an infection. She found no evidence the five child porn videos on Solon’s computer had been viewed or downloaded fully. The porn was in a folder the file-sharing program labelled as “incomplete” because the downloads were cancelled or generated an error.

This defence was curtailed, however, when Loehrs ended her investigation in a dispute with the judge over her fees. Computer exams can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Defendants can ask the courts to pay, but sometimes judges balk at the price. Although Loehrs stopped working for Solon, she argues he is innocent.

“I don’t think it was him, I really don’t,” Loehrs says. “There was too much evidence that it wasn’t him.”

The prosecution’s forensics expert, Randy Huff, maintains that Solon’s antivirus software was working properly. And he says he ran other antivirus programs on the computer and didn’t find an infection – although security experts say antivirus scans frequently miss things.

“He actually had a very clean computer compared to some of the other cases I do,” Huff says.

The jury took two hours to convict Solon.

“Everybody feels they’re innocent in prison. Nobody believes me because that’s what everybody says,” says Solon, whose case is being appealed. “All I know is I did not do it. I never put the stuff on there. I never saw the stuff on there. I can only hope that some day the truth will come out.”

But can it? It can be impossible to tell with certainty how a file got onto a PC.

“Computers are not to be trusted,” says Jeremiah Grossman, founder of WhiteHat Security Inc. He describes it as “painfully simple” to get a computer to download something the owner doesn’t want – whether it’s a program that displays ads or one that stores illegal pictures.

It’s possible, Grossman says, that more illicit material is waiting to be discovered.

“Just because it’s there doesn’t mean the person intended for it to be there – whatever it is, child porn included.”

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Full article and photo: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/framed-for-child-porn-by-a-virus/article1356380/

‘Strategic reassurance’ that isn’t

The Obama administration’s worldview is still emerging, but its policies toward Russia and China are already revealing. Its Russia policy consists of trying to accommodate Moscow’s sense of global entitlement. So far that has meant ignoring the continued presence of Russian forces on Georgian territory, negotiating arms-control agreements that Moscow needs more than Washington does and acquiescing to Russian objections to new NATO installations — such as missile interceptors — in former Warsaw Pact countries. An aggrieved Russia demands that the West respect a sphere of influence in its old imperial domain. The Obama administration rhetorically rejects the legitimacy of any such sphere, but its actions raise doubts for those who live in Russia’s shadow.

The administration has announced a similar accommodating approach to China. Dubbed “strategic reassurance,” the policy aims to convince the Chinese that the United States has no intention of containing their rising power. Details remain to be seen, but as with the Russia “reset,” it is bound to make American allies nervous.

Administration officials seem to believe that the era of great-power competition is over. The pursuit of power, President Obama declared during a July speech about China, “must no longer be seen as a zero-sum game.”

Unfortunately, that is not the reality in Asia. Contrary to optimistic predictions just a decade ago, China is behaving exactly as one would expect a great power to behave. As it has grown richer, China has used its wealth to build a stronger and more capable military. As its military power has grown, so have its ambitions.

This is especially true of its naval ambitions. Not so long ago, our China experts believed it was absurd for China to aspire to a “blue-water” navy capable of operating far from its shores.

Yet the new head of the U.S. Pacific Command, Adm. Robert Willard, noted last month that “in the past decade or so, China has exceeded most of our intelligence estimates of their military capability. . . . They’ve grown at an unprecedented rate.” Defense Secretary Robert Gates recently warned that China’s military modernization program could undermine U.S. military power in the Pacific.

It is hardly surprising that China wants to supplant U.S. power in the region. To the Chinese, the reign of “the middle kingdom” is the natural state of affairs and the past 200 years of Western dominance an aberration. Nor is it surprising that China wants to reshape international security arrangements that the United States established after World War II, when China was too weak to have a say.

What is surprising is the Obama administration’s apparent willingness to accommodate these ambitions. This worries U.S. allies from New Delhi to Seoul.

Those nations are under no illusion about great-power competition. India is engaged in strategic competition with China, especially in the Indian Ocean, which both see as their sphere of influence. Japan’s government wants to improve relations with Beijing, but many in Japan fear an increasingly hegemonic China. The nations of Southeast Asia do business with China but look to the United States for strategic support against their giant neighbor.

For decades, U.S. strategy toward China has had two complementary elements. The first was to bring China into the “family of nations” through engagement. The second was to make sure China did not become too dominant, through balancing. The Clinton administration pushed for China’s accession to the World Trade Organization and normalized trade but also strengthened the U.S. military alliance with Japan. The Bush administration fostered close economic ties and improved strategic cooperation with China. But the United States also forged a strategic partnership with India and enhanced its relations with Japan, Singapore and Vietnam. The strategy has been to give China a greater stake in peace, while maintaining a balance of power in the region favorable to democratic allies and American interests.

“Strategic reassurance” seems to chart a different course. Senior officials liken the policy to the British accommodation of a rising United States at the end of the 19th century, which entailed ceding the Western Hemisphere to American hegemony. Lingering behind this concept is an assumption of America’s inevitable decline.

Yet nothing would do more to hasten decline than to follow this path. The British accommodation of America’s rise was based on close ideological kinship. British leaders recognized the United States as a strategic ally in a dangerous world — as proved true throughout the 20th century. No serious person would imagine a similar grand alliance and “special relationship” between an autocratic China and a democratic United States. For the Chinese — true realists — the competition with the United States in East Asia is very much a zero-sum game.

For that reason, “strategic reassurance” is likely to fail. The Obama administration cannot back out of the region any time soon; Obama’s trip this week, in fact, seems designed to demonstrate American staying power. Nor is China likely to end or slow its efforts to militarily and economically dominate the region. So it will quickly become obvious that no one on either side feels reassured.

Unfortunately, the only result will be to make American allies nervous. For an administration that has announced “we are back” after years of alleged Bush administration neglect in Asia, this is not an auspicious beginning.

Robert Kagan, a monthly columnist for The Post, is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Dan Blumenthal is a resident fellow in Asian studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

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Full article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/09/AR2009110902793.html

Why ‘Surge Light’ won’t work

Between World War I and World War II, Britain fought all across the Islamic world, battling insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, to name just two, and usually losing. This caused a fair amount of worry, introspection, angst and the usual commissions to determine why history was being so unkind. What the British discovered was what Pogo could have told them: They had met the enemy and it was them.

Nowhere is Britain’s interwar predicament better stated than in David Fromkin’s brilliant and invaluable book about the creation of the modern Middle East, “A Peace to End All Peace.” He writes, “What Britain faced in the Middle East was a long and perhaps endless series of individual and often spontaneous local rebellions against her authority. The rebellions were not directed by foreigners (as Britain usually suspected); they were directed against foreigners” — in other words, Britain herself.

The lesson that Britain learned the hard way now has to be learned all over again. The trick for the United States in Afghanistan is to eradicate al-Qaeda and suppress the Taliban — and do both in such a way that it does not go from self-proclaimed liberator to perceived oppressor. Can this be done?

Once again, Fromkin has something to say: “Perhaps if the British Empire had maintained its million-man army of occupation in the Middle East, the region’s inhabitants might have resigned themselves to the inevitability of British rule . . . but once Britain had demobilized her army, the string of revolts in the Middle East became predictable.” In other words, what we now call a surge might have done the trick, but Britain was out of men, out of money and out of sorts. It wanted to make war no more.

Somewhat the same thing applies today to the United States. Support for the war in Afghanistan is ebbing; it is opposed by the left and increasingly by the center, and what it would really take to achieve victory — smash the Taliban — are troop levels that now seem out of the question. If leaks from the White House mean anything, President Obama will opt for a mini-surge, doomed to be called Surge Light, which would mean an additional 10,000 to 20,000 troops and not the 40,000 or more that Gen. Stanley McChrystal would like.

Trouble is, the middling amount is also the muddling amount. It is neither here nor there — not enough to win but more than enough to run the risk of provoking the ire of the locals. It is a strategy designed to do nothing much but look like a strategy designed to do a great deal. It fools no one and will lead to either an escalation or a huge reduction in forces. It would be best to get to the latter option as soon as possible. After all, lives are at stake.

The president of Afghanistan is corrupt. He recently won a corrupt reelection. His brother is allegedly involved in the country’s vast, illicit drug trade without which Afghanistan would hardly have an economy at all. The country is often compared to Iraq where, for the time being, a surge did work. But Iraq is different. It always had a middle class and has, in just one telling statistic, a literacy rate of 74.1 percent. Afghanistan’s is a dismal 28.1. If there were such a thing as the Fourth World, Afghanistan would be in it.

Sooner or later, truly evil people either get talk shows or killed by pilotless drones. The latter will be the fate of Osama bin Laden and his band of monsters — and the sooner the better. The Taliban may well take over Afghanistan — a calamity for women and girls, among others — but not really more morally dismal than the United States standing by in 1991 as Saddam Hussein slaughtered Iraqi Shiites because it did not affect our national security. The real concern is Pakistan and its nukes. Should any of them go loose, we may learn the hard way what really caused the dinosaurs to become extinct.

There are many good reasons to put as much as we can in Afghanistan. But America has been at war there since 2001, at war in Iraq since 2003, and like Britain between the world wars, is out of both treasure and patience. Leave Afghanistan to the drones and the Special Forces. It’s no way to win, but it’s a good way not to lose.

Richard Cohen, Washington Post

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Full article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/09/AR2009110902600.html

Today in History – November 10

Today is Tuesday, Nov. 10, the 314th day of 2009. There are 51 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight in History

On Nov. 10, 1775, the U.S. Marines were organized under authority of the Continental Congress.

On this date

In 911, Conrad I was elected German king at Forschheim, after the death of Louis the Child, the last of the East Frankish Carolingians.

In 1444, Turkish forces defeated the Hungarians in the Battle of Varna, securing Turkey’s control over Constantinople (Istanbul) and assuring the Ottoman conquest in the Balkans.

In 1483, Martin Luther, leader of the Protestant Reformation, was born in Eisleben, Germany.

In 1775, the U.S. Marines were organized under authority of the Continental Congress.

In 1865, Henry Wirz, former commander of the infamous Confederate prison at Andersonville, Georgia, was hanged in Washington, D.C. Swiss-born Wirz was assigned to the command at Andersonville on March 27, 1864. When arrested on May 7, 1865, he was the only remaining member of the Confederate staff at the prison. Brigadier General John Winder, commander of Confederate prisons east of the Mississippi and Wirz’s superior at Andersonville, died of a heart attack the previous February.

A military tribunal tried Wirz on charges of conspiring with Jefferson Davis to “injure the health and destroy the lives of soldiers in the military service of the United States.” Several individual acts of cruelty to Union prisoners were also alleged. Caught in the unfortunate position of answering for all of the misery that was Andersonville, he stood little chance of a fair trial. After two months of testimony rife with inconsistencies, Wirz was convicted on all counts and sentenced to death.

In 1871, journalist-explorer Henry M. Stanley found Scottish missionary David Livingstone, who had not been heard from for years, near Lake Tanganyika in central Africa.

In 1917, 41 suffragists were arrested for picketing in front of the White House.

In 1918, Józef Pisudski, Polish revolutionary and first chief of state of the newly reconstituted Poland, arrived in Warsaw to declare Poland an independent state.

In 1919, the American Legion opened its first national convention, in Minneapolis.

In 1925, Richard Burton, British stage and film actor, was born.

In 1928, Japanese Emperor Hirohito was formally enthroned, almost two years after his ascension.

In 1938, Kate Smith first sang Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America” on her CBS radio program.

In 1938, Turkish statesman Mustafa Kemal Ataturk died in Istanbul at age 57.

In 1942, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, discussing the recent victory over Rommel at El Alamein, Egypt, said “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

In 1951, direct-dial, coast-to-coast telephone service began as Mayor M. Leslie Denning of Englewood, N.J., called his counterpart in Alameda, Calif.

In 1954, the U.S. Marine Corps Memorial, depicting the raising of the American flag on Iwo Jima in 1945, was dedicated by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in Arlington, Va.

In 1959, the nuclear submarine USS Triton was commissioned by the U.S. Navy.

In 1969, the children’s educational program “Sesame Street” made its debut on National Educational Television (later PBS).

In 1975, the ore-hauling ship SS Edmund Fitzgerald and its crew of 29 mysteriously sank during a storm in Lake Superior with the loss of all on board.

In 1975, the U.N. General Assembly approved a resolution equating Zionism with racism.

In 1975, the ore-hauling ship Edmund Fitzgerald sank during a storm in Lake Superior. All 29 crew members died.

In 1982, Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev died at age 75.

In 1982, the newly finished Vietnam Veterans Memorial was opened to its first visitors in Washington, D.C.

In 1989, the Fall of the Berlin Wall.

“Krenz, we’re breaking down your doors, we’re breaking down your doors!”

“I can’t believe it. I saw the Wall being built, and now I’m seeing it fall again – what does it mean? I don’t know what to think. Something like this is just unbelievable!”

“It’s wonderful – it’s the most beautiful day – I would never have believed it would happen so quickly!”

“We are happy!”

“We are thankful!”

Families and friends were reunited and complete strangers embraced as 600,000 East German citizens took advantage of their newly won freedom and streamed into the West.

The elite troops of the German Democratic Republic were in readiness, but the order to take action did not come. One thing was already clear to the leaders of the GDR at the huge demonstrations that took place earlier in Leipzig and Berlin: Beijing’s Tiananmen massacre was not to be repeated in the GDR. Peace was maintained.

For some people, like this East German officer at the Brandenburg Gate, the new reality took some getting used to: “We used to expel citizens who stood directly on top of the Wall – from this territory of our Republic.”

For others, the obvious was finally taking place. A West Berlin police officer greets his East Berlin counterpart: “A Berliner greets a Berliner. He’s seen me every day. Now he wanted to shake my hand, and we can finally see each other up close.”

And that evening in front of the Schöneberg City Hall, a huge rally was held including Berlin’s ruling mayor, Walter Momper, former mayor and ex-Chancellor Willy Brandt, Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, and Chancellor Helmut Kohl.

Walter Momper: “Fellow Berliners! Our entire city and all of its citizens will never forget this day, the 9th of November, 1989!”

Willy Brandt: “I was always convinced that the concrete division and the division with barbed wire and no-man’s land stood against the current of history. Berlin will live, and the Wall will fall.”

Hans-Dietrich Genscher: “My dear fellow citizens, at this hour, the eyes of the world are on our country and on this city! And many of our neighbors are asking us, ‘Which way do the German people want to go?’ I wish to say to them, ‘First and foremost, the German people want to live in peace with all of their neighbors!’”

Helmut Kohl: “And I appeal here and now to those in positions of power in the GDR: Give up your monopoly of power! Long live a free German Fatherland! Long live a free, united Europe!”

On the same evening, at a rally in East Berlin, the leaders of the GDR – led by Egon Krenz – tried to elicit trust, but the people streaming into the West weren’t interested:
“This is a beautiful day!”

“I think there is no going back – it has to stay like this!”

“I don’t want luxury – I don’t need it and I don’t even wish for it. I simply want to live freely. I just want to live – I don’t want anything more.”

In 1995, the writer and human rights activist, Ken Saro-Wiwa, is executed in Nigeria despite worldwide pleas for clemency.

In 1997, a judge in Cambridge, Mass., reduced Louise Woodward’s murder conviction to manslaughter and sentenced the English au pair to the 279 days she’d already served in the death of 8-month-old Matthew Eappen.

In 1997, WorldCom Inc. and MCI Communications Corp. agreed to a $37 billion merger.

In 1999, ten years ago, President Bill Clinton decided to delay and shorten a trip to Greece in reaction to growing security concerns and the prospect of violent anti-American demonstrations.

In 1999, investigators said the flight data recorder from EgyptAir Flight 990 showed things were normal until the autopilot mysteriously disconnected and the Boeing 767 began what appeared to be a controlled descent toward the Atlantic Ocean.

In 2001,the World Trade Organization approved China’s membership.

In 2004, five years ago, word reached the United States of the death of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat at age 75. (Because of the time difference, it was the early hours of Nov. 11 in Paris, where Arafat died.)

In 2004, President George W. Bush nominated White House counsel Alberto Gonzales to be attorney general, succeeding John Ashcroft.

In 2004, France, the United States and other nations began evacuating thousands of foreigners from Ivory Coast following attacks on civilians and peacekeeping troops.

In 2007, Six U.S. troops died in an insurgent ambush, making 2007 the deadliest year for American forces in Afghanistan since 2001.

In 2007, author Norman Mailer died at age 84.

In 2008, one year ago, President George W. Bush and his wife, Laura, welcomed Barack and Michelle Obama to the White House for a nearly two-hour visit; the president and president-elect conferred in the Oval Office, while the current and future first ladies talked in the White House residence.

In 2008, Miriam Makeba, the South African folk singer and anti-apartheid activist, died at age 76 after performing at a concert in Castel Volturno, Italy.

Today’s Birthdays

Actor Russell Johnson is 85. Film composer Ennio Morricone is 81. Blues singer Bobby Rush is 75. Actor Albert Hall is 72. American Indian activist Russell Means is 70. Country singer Donna Fargo is 68. Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., is 66. Lyricist Tim Rice is 65. Actress Alaina Reed Hall is 63. Rock singer-musician Greg Lake (Emerson, Lake and Palmer) is 62. Actress-dancer Ann Reinking is 60. Actor Jack Scalia is 59. Movie director Roland Emmerich is 54. Actor Matt Craven is 53. Actor-comedian Sinbad is 53. Actress Mackenzie Phillips is 50. Author Neil Gaiman is 49. Actress Vanessa Angel is 46. Actor-comedian Tommy Davidson is 46. Actor Michael Jai White is 45. Country singer Chris Cagle is 41. Actor-comedian Tracy Morgan is 41. Actress Ellen Pompeo (“Grey’s Anatomy”) is 40. Rapper-producer Warren G is 39. Comedian-actor Chris Lilley is 35. Rock singer-musician Jim Adkins (Jimmy Eat World) is 34. Actress Brittany Murphy is 32. Rapper Eve is 31. Rock musician Chris Jannou (Silverchair) is 30. Actor Bryan Neal is 29. Actress Heather Matarazzo is 27. Country singer Miranda Lambert is 26. Actor Josh Peck is 23.

Today’s Historic Birthdays

Henry Percy Northumberland
11/10/1341 – 2/20/1408
English statesman

Martin Luther
11/10/1483 – 2/18/1546
German religious leader and reformer

Robert Devereux Essex
11/10/1567 – 2/25/1601
English soldier

Francois Couperin
11/10/1668 – 9/12/1733
French composer

William Hogarth
11/10/1697 – 10/26/1764
English artist

Oliver Goldsmith
11/10/1730 – 4/4/1774
Irish-born English writer

Samuel Gridley Howe
11/10/1801 – 1/9/1876
American educator and social reformer

Francis Maitland Balfour
11/10/1851 – 7/19/1882
British zoologist and embryologist

Vachel Lindsay
11/10/1879 – 12/5/1931
American poet

El Lissitzky
11/10/1890 – 12/30/1941
American artist

John Phillips Marquand
11/10/1893 – 7/16/1960
American novelist

John Knudsen Northrop
11/10/1895 – 2/18/1981
American aircraft designer

Richard Burton
11/10/1925 – 8/5/1984
British stage and film actor

Thought for Today

“Men get opinions as boys learn to spell by reiteration chiefly.” – Elizabeth Barrett Browning, English poet (1806-1861).

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Full article:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/10/AR2009111000002.html

http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/index.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/default.stm

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/today/today.html

http://www.todayinhistory.de/index.php?tag=10&monat=11&dayisset=1&year=2009&lang=en

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The Short Life of a Diagnosis

THE Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association, is the bible of diagnosis in psychiatry, and is used not just by doctors around the world but also by health insurers.

Changing any such central document is complicated. It should therefore come as no surprise that a committee of experts charged with revising the manual has caused consternation by considering removing Asperger syndrome from the next edition, scheduled to appear in 2012. The committee argues that the syndrome should be deleted because there is no clear separation between it and its close neighbor, autism.

The experts propose that both conditions should be subsumed under the term “autism spectrum disorder,” with individuals differentiated by levels of severity. It may be true that there is no hard and fast separation between Asperger syndrome and classic autism, since they are currently differentiated only by intelligence and onset of language. Both classic autism and Asperger syndrome involve difficulties with social interaction and communication, alongside unusually narrow interests and a strong desire for repetition, but in Asperger syndrome, the person has good intelligence and language acquisition.

The question of whether Asperger syndrome should be included or excluded is the latest example of dramatic changes in history of the diagnostic manual. The first manual, published in 1952, listed 106 “mental disorders.” The second (1968), listed 182, and famously removed homosexuality as a disorder in a later printing. The third (1980) listed 265 disorders, taking out “neurosis.” The revised third version (1987) listed 292 disorders, while the current fourth version cut the list of disorders back to 283.

This history reminds us that psychiatric diagnoses are not set in stone. They are “manmade,” and different generations of doctors sit around the committee table and change how we think about “mental disorders.”

This in turn reminds us to set aside any assumption that the diagnostic manual is a taxonomic system. Maybe one day it will achieve this scientific value, but a classification system that can be changed so freely and so frequently can’t be close to following Plato’s recommendation of “carving nature at its joints.”

Part of the reason the diagnostic manual can move the boundaries and add or remove “mental disorders” so easily is that it focuses on surface appearances or behavior (symptoms) and is silent about causes. Symptoms can be arranged into groups in many ways, and there is no single right way to cluster them. Psychiatry is not at the stage of other branches of medicine, where a diagnostic category depends on a known biological mechanism. An example of where this does occur is Down syndrome, where surface appearances are irrelevant. Instead the cause — an extra copy of Chromosome 21 — is the sole determinant to obtain a diagnosis. Psychiatry, in contrast, does not yet have any diagnostic blood tests with which to reveal a biological mechanism.

So what should we do about Asperger syndrome? Although originally described in German in 1944, the first article about it in English was published in 1981, and Asperger syndrome made it only into the fourth version of the manual, in 1994. That is, the international medical community took 50 years to acknowledge it. In the last decade thousands of people have been given the diagnosis. Seen through this historical lens, it seems a very short time frame to be considering removing Asperger syndrome from the manual.

We also need to be aware of the consequences of removing it. First, what happens to those people and their families who waited so long for a diagnostic label that does a good job of describing their profile? Will they have to go back to the clinics to get their diagnoses changed? The likelihood of causing them confusion and upset seems high.

Second, science hasn’t had a proper chance to test if there is a biological difference between Asperger syndrome and classic autism. My colleagues and I recently published the first candidate gene study of Asperger syndrome, which identified 14 genes associated with the condition.

We don’t yet know if Asperger syndrome is genetically identical or distinct from classic autism, but surely it makes scientific sense to wait until these two subgroups have been thoroughly tested before lumping them together in the diagnostic manual. I am the first to agree with the concept of an autistic spectrum, but there may be important differences between subgroups that the psychiatric association should not blur too hastily.

Simon Baron-Cohen, the director of the Autism Research Center at Cambridge University, is the author of “The Essential Difference.”

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Full article and photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/10/opinion/10baron-cohen.html

A Word, Mr. President

If I were a close adviser of President Obama’s, I would say to him, “Mr. President, you have two urgent and overwhelming tasks in front of you: to put Americans trapped in this terrible employment crisis back to work and to put the brakes on your potentially disastrous plan to escalate the war in Afghanistan.”

Reforming the chaotic and unfair health care system in the U.S. is an important issue. But in terms of pressing national priorities, the most important are the need to find solutions to a catastrophic employment environment that is devastating American families and to end the folly of an 8-year-old war that is both extremely debilitating and ultimately unwinnable.

We have spent the better part of a year locked in a tedious and unenlightening debate over health care while the jobless rate has steadily surged. It’s now at 10.2 percent. Families struggling with job losses, home foreclosures and personal bankruptcies are falling out of the middle class like fruit through the bottom of a rotten basket. The jobless rate for men 16 years old and over is 11.4 percent. For blacks, it’s a back-breaking 15.7 percent.

We need to readjust our focus. We’re worried about Kabul when Detroit has gone down for the count.

I would tell the president that more and more Americans are questioning his priorities, including millions who went to the mat for him in last year’s election. The biggest issue by far for most Americans is employment. The lack of jobs is fueling the nervousness, anxiety and full-blown anger that are becoming increasingly evident in the public at large.

Last Friday, a huge crowd of fans marched in a ticker-tape parade in downtown Manhattan to celebrate the Yankees’ World Series championship. More than once, as the fans passed through the financial district, the crowd erupted in rhythmic, echoing chants of “Wall Street sucks! Wall Street sucks!”

I would tell the president that the feeling is widespread that his administration went too far with its bailouts of the financial industry, sending not just a badly needed lifeline but also unwarranted windfalls to the miscreants who nearly wrecked the entire economy. The government got very little in return. The perception now is that Wall Street is doing just fine while working people, whose taxes financed the bailouts, are walking the plank to economic oblivion.

I would also tell him that rebuilding the economy in a way that allows working Americans to flourish will require a sustained monumental effort, not just bits and pieces of legislation here and there. But such an effort will never get off the ground, will never have any chance of reaching critical mass and actually succeeding, as long as we insist on feeding young, healthy American men and women and endless American dollars into the relentless meat grinders of Afghanistan and Iraq.

We learned in the 1960s, when Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society was trumped by Vietnam, that nation-building here at home is incompatible with the demands of war. We’ve managed to keep the worst of the carnage — and the staggering costs — of Iraq and Afghanistan well out of the sight of most Americans, so the full extent of the terrible price we are paying is not widely understood.

The ultimate financial costs will be counted in the trillions. If you were to take a walk around one of the many military medical centers, like Landstuhl in Germany or Walter Reed in Washington, your heart would break at the sight of the heroic young men and women who have lost limbs (frequently more than one) or who are blind or paralyzed or horribly burned. Hundreds of thousands have suffered psychological wounds. Many have contemplated or tried suicide, and far too many have succeeded.

“Mr. President,” I would say, “we’ll never be right as a nation as long as we allow this to continue.”

The possibility of more troops for the war in Afghanistan was discussed Sunday on “Meet the Press.” Gov. Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania noted candidly that “our troops are tired and worn out.” More than 85 percent of the men and women in the Pennsylvania National Guard have already served in Iraq or Afghanistan. “Many of them have gone three or four times and they’re wasted,” said Mr. Rendell.

More troops? “Where are we going to find these troops?” the governor asked. “That’s what I want somebody to tell me.”

While we’re preparing to pour more resources into Afghanistan, the Economic Policy Institute is telling us that one in five American children is living in poverty, that nearly 35 percent of African-American children are living in poverty, and that the unemployment crisis is pushing us toward a point in the coming years where more than half of all black children in this country will be poor.

“Mr. President,” I would say, “we need your help.”

Bob Herbert, New York Times

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/10/opinion/10herbert.html

The Rush to Therapy

We’re all born late. We’re born into history that is well under way. We’re born into cultures, nations and languages that we didn’t choose. On top of that, we’re born with certain brain chemicals and genetic predispositions that we can’t control. We’re thrust into social conditions that we detest. Often, we react in ways we regret even while we’re doing them.

But unlike the other animals, people do have a drive to seek coherence and meaning. We have a need to tell ourselves stories that explain it all. We use these stories to supply the metaphysics, without which life seems pointless and empty.

Among all the things we don’t control, we do have some control over our stories. We do have a conscious say in selecting the narrative we will use to make sense of the world. Individual responsibility is contained in the act of selecting and constantly revising the master narrative we tell about ourselves.

The stories we select help us, in turn, to interpret the world. They guide us to pay attention to certain things and ignore other things. They lead us to see certain things as sacred and other things as disgusting. They are the frameworks that shape our desires and goals. So while story selection may seem vague and intellectual, it’s actually very powerful. The most important power we have is the power to help select the lens through which we see reality.

Most people select stories that lead toward cooperation and goodness. But over the past few decades a malevolent narrative has emerged.

That narrative has emerged on the fringes of the Muslim world. It is a narrative that sees human history as a war between Islam on the one side and Christianity and Judaism on the other. This narrative causes its adherents to shrink their circle of concern. They don’t see others as fully human. They come to believe others can be blamelessly murdered and that, in fact, it is admirable to do so.

This narrative is embraced by a small minority. But it has caused incredible amounts of suffering within the Muslim world, in Israel, in the U.S. and elsewhere. With their suicide bombings and terrorist acts, adherents to this narrative have made themselves central to global politics. They are the ones who go into crowded rooms, shout “Allahu akbar,” or “God is great,” and then start murdering.

When Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan did that in Fort Hood, Tex., last week, many Americans had an understandable and, in some ways, admirable reaction. They didn’t want the horror to become a pretext for anti-Muslim bigotry.

So immediately the coverage took on a certain cast. The possibility of Islamic extremism was immediately played down. This was an isolated personal breakdown, not an ideological assault, many people emphasized.

Major Hasan was portrayed as a disturbed individual who was under a lot of stress. We learned about pre-traumatic stress syndrome, and secondary stress disorder, which one gets from hearing about other people’s stress. We heard the theory (unlikely in retrospect) that Hasan was so traumatized by the thought of going into a combat zone that he decided to take a gun and create one of his own.

A shroud of political correctness settled over the conversation. Hasan was portrayed as a victim of society, a poor soul who was pushed over the edge by prejudice and unhappiness.

There was a national rush to therapy. Hasan was a loner who had trouble finding a wife and socializing with his neighbors.

This response was understandable. It’s important to tamp down vengeful hatreds in moments of passion. But it was also patronizing. Public commentators assumed the air of kindergarten teachers who had to protect their children from thinking certain impermissible and intolerant thoughts. If public commentary wasn’t carefully policed, the assumption seemed to be, then the great mass of unwashed yahoos in Middle America would go off on a racist rampage.

Worse, it absolved Hasan — before the real evidence was in — of his responsibility. He didn’t have the choice to be lonely or unhappy. But he did have a choice over what story to build out of those circumstances. And evidence is now mounting to suggest he chose the extremist War on Islam narrative that so often leads to murderous results.

The conversation in the first few days after the massacre was well intentioned, but it suggested a willful flight from reality. It ignored the fact that the war narrative of the struggle against Islam is the central feature of American foreign policy. It ignored the fact that this narrative can be embraced by a self-radicalizing individual in the U.S. as much as by groups in Tehran, Gaza or Kandahar.

It denied, before the evidence was in, the possibility of evil. It sought to reduce a heinous act to social maladjustment. It wasn’t the reaction of a morally or politically serious nation.

David Brooks, New York Times

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/10/opinion/10brooks.html

Confessions of an ObamaCare Backer

A liberal explains the political calculus.

The typical argument for ObamaCare is that it will offer better medical care for everyone and cost less to do it, but occasionally a supporter lets the mask slip and reveals the real political motivation. So let’s give credit to John Cassidy, part of the left-wing stable at the New Yorker, who wrote last week on its Web site that “it’s important to be clear about what the reform amounts to.”

Mr. Cassidy is more honest than the politicians whose dishonesty he supports. “The U.S. government is making a costly and open-ended commitment,” he writes. “Let’s not pretend that it isn’t a big deal, or that it will be self-financing, or that it will work out exactly as planned. It won’t. What is really unfolding, I suspect, is the scenario that many conservatives feared. The Obama Administration . . . is creating a new entitlement program, which, once established, will be virtually impossible to rescind.”

Why are they doing it? Because, according to Mr. Cassidy, ObamaCare serves the twin goals of “making the United States a more equitable country” and furthering the Democrats’ “political calculus.” In other words, the purpose is to further redistribute income by putting health care further under government control, and in the process making the middle class more dependent on government. As the party of government, Democrats will benefit over the long run.

This explains why Nancy Pelosi is willing to risk the seats of so many Blue Dog Democrats by forcing such an unpopular bill through Congress on a narrow, partisan vote: You have to break a few eggs to make a permanent welfare state. As Mr. Cassidy concludes, “Putting on my amateur historian’s cap, I might even claim that some subterfuge is historically necessary to get great reforms enacted.”

No wonder many Americans are upset. They know they are being lied to about ObamaCare, and they know they are going to be stuck with the bill.

Editorial, Wall Street Journal

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Full article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704795604574522680235765894.html

After the Fort Hood Massacre

Sorting the Hasans from patriotic Muslims in the U.S. military.

There are two irreconcilable views of Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan’s murder of 13 people last Thursday at Fort Hood, Texas. One is that Major Hasan should be seen as not much different than many other disturbed individuals, whose demons pitch them into homicidal frenzies. The other is that the Hasan murders raise hard questions about the ability of Muslims to serve at all in the American military.

Neither view is acceptable. It will be the job of public and military officials in weeks ahead to shape a policy response that recognizes the hard political and ethnic realities of the Fort Hood massacre.

The central reality is that 13 people are dead on American soil, all but one in service to the country as a member of the U.S. Army. Sergeant Amy Kreuger of Kiel, Wisconsin, enlisted explicitly in response to 9/11, she said, to oppose the forces that caused that day. These appear to be the same violent forces that turned Major Hasan into an instrument of terror.

So no, Major Hasan is not just another nut. He volunteered himself into a larger Islamic jihad, whose political weapon of choice is the murder of innocents across the globe.

The Fort Hood massacre makes clear, again, that Islamic terror is unavoidably a domestic U.S. problem as well. There is a strain in American thinking that deludes itself in believing that somehow this force will occupy itself mainly with blowing up marketplaces in faraway Pakistan or Afghanistan. On Thursday, their problem was our problem.

In the aftermath of these shootings, the best venue for exploring the domestic threat from radical Islam and what to do about it is Senator Joe Lieberman’s proposed hearings into the Hasan murders. News reports piecing together Major Hasan’s history suggest an association years ago with a pro-al Qaeda imam at a mosque in northern Virginia. That imam left for Yemen in 2002, and his lectures there in support of al Qaeda have appeared on the computers of terrorists suspects in the U.S., Canada and the U.K.

Investigators are collecting information from Major Hasan’s PC and his email traffic, with officials already noting that he spent time surfing radical Islamic Web sites. This sounds similar in some respects to the aborted car bombings in the U.K. in 2007, committed by Muslim doctors there who also spent evenings absorbing violent exhortations on Web sites. A Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty study that year documented the reach and sophistication of radical jihadi media on the Web—accessible to anyone with an Internet hook-up in Kabul, Islamabad, London or Fort Hood.

Before the Democrats came to power in the 2008 elections, one issue they pushed hardest through the policy debate was their opposition to domestic electronic surveillance in pursuit of Islamic terror activities. If the Hasan investigation concludes that he arrived at his pre-spree cry of “God is great!” after immersion in the world of violent Islamic Web sites and prior time spent at radical domestic U.S. mosques, then we would hope that the response of our lawmakers would be more than a shrug that these 13 dead are simply the price we have to pay for living in “our system.”

Likewise, Mr. Lieberman’s hearings could explore if the Army needs ways to muster out personnel such as Hasan or recruits ambivalent about fighting fellow Muslims.

Just as Americans can’t blink away the dangerous world of radical Islam, however, we also cannot pretend that we can field a military that doesn’t include Muslims. The unreality of attempting to fight this enemy without Muslim soldiers or operatives should be obvious. In Iraq, devout Muslims worked loyally as translators and guides for U.S. forces, sometimes dying to rid their country of the world’s common enemy, which is homicidal Islamic fanatics.

In recent years U.S. soldiers have fought a common enemy on behalf of and often alongside Muslims in Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait, Somalia, and elsewhere. The U.S. is fighting a sworn enemy today, just as in World War II American Germans, Italians and Japanese fought sworn U.S. enemies of the same race and religion. Many American Muslims will do the same if we stay focused on the real enemy, and show we have the will to do what’s necessary to find them and stop them.

Editorial, Wall Street Journal

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Full article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704402404574525743684356798.html

Dr. Phil and the Fort Hood Killer

His terrorist motive is obvious to everyone but the press and the Army brass.

It can by now come as no surprise that the Fort Hood massacre yielded an instant flow of exculpatory media meditations on the stresses that must have weighed on the killer who mowed down 13 Americans and wounded 29 others. Still, the intense drive to wrap this clear case in a fog of mystery is eminently worthy of notice.

The tide of pronouncements and ruminations pointing to every cause for this event other than the one obvious to everyone in the rational world continues apace. Commentators, reporters, psychologists and, indeed, army spokesmen continue to warn portentously, “We don’t yet know the motive for the shootings.”

What a puzzle this piece of vacuity must be to audiences hearing it, some, no doubt, with outrage. To those not terrorized by fear of offending Muslim sensitivities, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan’s motive was instantly clear: It was an act of terrorism by a man with a record of expressing virulent, anti-American, pro-jihadist sentiments. All were conspicuous signs of danger his Army superiors chose to ignore.

What is hard to ignore, now, is the growing derangement on all matters involving terrorism and Muslim sensitivities. Its chief symptoms: a palpitating fear of discomfiting facts and a willingness to discard those facts and embrace the richest possible variety of ludicrous theories as to the motives behind an act of Islamic terrorism. All this we have seen before but never in such naked form. The days following the Fort Hood rampage have told us more than we want to know, perhaps, about the depth and reach of this epidemic.

One of the first outbreaks of these fevers, the night of the shootings, featured television’s star psychologist, Dr. Phil, who was outraged when fellow panelist and former JAG officer Tom Kenniff observed that he had been listening to a lot of psychobabble and evasions about Maj. Hasan’s motives.

A shocked Dr. Phil, appalled that the guest had publicly mentioned Maj. Hasan’s Islamic identity, went on to present what was, in essence, the case for Maj. Hasan as victim. Victim of deployment, of the Army, of the stresses of a new kind of terrible war unlike any other. Unlike, can he have meant, the kind endured by those lucky Americans who fought and died at Iwo Jima, say, or the Ardennes?

It was the same case to be presented, in varying forms, by guest psychologists, the media, and a representative or two from the military, for days on end.

The quality and thrust of this argument was best captured by the impassioned Dr. Phil, who asked to consider, “how far out of touch with reality do you have to be to kill your fellow Americans . . . this is not a well act.” And how far out of touch with reality is such a question, one asks in return—not only of Dr. Phil, but of the legions of commentators like him immersed in the labyrinths of motive hunting even as the details of Maj. Hasan’s proclivities became ever clearer and more ominous.

To kill your fellow Americans—as many as possible, unarmed and in the most helpless of circumstances, while shouting “Allahu Akbar” (God is great), requires, of course, only murderous hatred—the sort of mindset that regularly eludes the Dr. Phils of our world as the motive for mass murder of this kind.

As the meditations on Maj. Hasan’s motives rolled on, “fear of deployment” has served as a major theme—one announced as fact in the headline for the New York Times’s front-page story: “Told of War Horror, Gunman Feared Deployment.” The authority for this intelligence? The perpetrator’s cousin. No story could have better suited that newspaper’s ongoing preoccupation with the theme of madness in our fighting men, and the deadly horrors of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, than this story of a victim of war pressures gone berserk. The one fly in the ointment—Maj. Hasan had of course seen no war, and no combat.

Still, with a bit of stretching, adherents of Maj. Hasan-as-war-victim theme found a substitute of sorts—namely the fears allegedly provoked in him by his exposure, as an army psychologist, to the stories of men who had been deployed. The thesis then: Maj. Hasan’s mental stress, provoked by the suffering of Americans who had been in combat, caused him to go out and butcher as many of these soldiers as he could. Let’s try putting that one before a jury.

By Sunday morning, Gen. George Casey Jr., Army chief of staff, confronted questions put to him by ABC’s George Stephanopolous—among them the matter of the complaints about Maj. Hasan’s anti-American tirades that were made by fellow students in military classes, as well as other danger signs ignored by officials when they were reported, apparently for fear of offense to a Muslim member of the military.

These were speculations, Gen. Casey repeatedly cautioned. We need to be very careful, he explained, “We are a very diverse army.” Mr. Stephanopolous then helpfully summarized matters: This case then was either a case of premeditated terror—or the man just snapped.

The general was not about to address such questions. He was there to recite the required pieties, and describe the military priorities . . . which are, it appears, a concern above all for the sensitivities of a diverse army, a concern so great as to render even the mention of salient facts out of order, as “speculation.’” “This terrible event,” Gen. Casey noted, “would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty.”

To hear this, and numerous other such pronouncements of recent days, was to be reminded of all those witnesses to the suspicious behavior of the hijackers who held their tongues for fear of being charged with discrimination. It has taken Maj. Hasan, and the fantastic efforts to explain away his act of bloody hatred, to bring home how much less capable we are of recognizing the dangers confronting us than we were even before September 11.

Ms. Rabinowitz is a member of the Journal’s editorial board.

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Full article and photo: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704402404574525831785724114.html

Italy and the Cross

A crucifix stands for more than heritage and culture.

Last week’s ruling by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) that crucifixes in Italy’s public school classrooms violate the “principle of the secularism of the State” has provoked a rare show of bipartisanship by the country’s political leaders.

“This is one of those decisions that often make us doubt Europe’s common sense,” said Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, affirming that his government would appeal the ruling.

Opposition leader Pier Luigi Bersani, head of the center-left Democratic Party, agreed more diplomatically that “on delicate questions common sense sometimes falls victim to the law.”

Few members of parliament or other office holders have defended the decision, and no one is predicting that crucifixes will disappear from classrooms any time soon.

Critics of the ruling have not, understandably, stressed the Fascist-era laws that put the crucifixes in schools. Instead they have highlighted the crucifix’s enduring importance as a symbol of Italy’s heritage and national identity—resources that they portray as threatened by the homogenizing forces of globalization and European integration (even though the ECHR is not in fact an EU body).

“This Europe of the third millennium leaves us only the pumpkins of the recently celebrated holiday and takes away the dear symbols,” said Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, who as Vatican secretary of state is the church’s second highest official after Pope Benedict XVI.

“[The crucifix] is certainly a religious symbol but its presence in the classroom does not mean adherence to Catholicism, it’s our history, the tradition,” said Education Minister Mariastella Gelmini. “The roots of Italy also pass through symbols, which if they are wiped out means part of ourselves is wiped out.”

Even in this secular age, no other force rivals religion as a unifying element in Italian national life. The country’s regions remain divided by severe differences in their levels of economic development, social structures and civic attitudes. As recently as the 1990s, a linguist friend tells me, half of Italians still didn’t speak the standard, school-taught version of their national language as well as their widely varying local dialects, and most continue to prefer dialects for everyday use.

Catholicism, however, is the declared faith of 90% of the population. A number of Catholic feasts such as the Epiphany, the Assumption, and All Saints’ Day are public holidays. And though only about a third of the baptized regularly attend Mass, social and family life generally follow the common rhythms of the church calendar.

Anyone who cares about Italy’s national identity and distinctive traditions (or those of the other 46 countries under the ECHR’s jurisdiction) must give serious weight to the cultural case for crucifixes in schools.

Yet Christians might want to hesitate before adopting this line of argument, because displaying their faith’s holiest symbol on these terms could come at the price of its trivialization.

A Muslim colleague of mine, long resident in Italy, told me on the day after the court’s ruling that he had no objection to crucifixes in classrooms. But he said he found all the talk about the object as a cultural icon to be demeaning, as if placing it on par with the regional costumes worn by folk dancers at holiday celebrations.

Such seemed to be the premise in one unexpectedly pro-crucifix quarter, the Web site of Britain’s Guardian newspaper. Assistant editor Michael White mocked the plaintiff in the ECHR suit, a Finnish immigrant to Italy, for lacking the “wit and tact to accept local traditions.”

“Where did [she] think she was moving to live? Thailand?” Mr. White wrote. “What will she campaign to ban next? Pizza, the media, bling, cheating at football?”

Mr. Bersani, the center-left leader, seemed to suggest that the crucifix should be tolerated because the passage of time had rendered it innocuous.

“Ancient traditions such as the crucifix cannot be offensive to anyone,” he said.

But if he is right, Christians should hardly rejoice.

Soren Kierkegaard, who foresaw so much of post-Christian Europe more than a century and a half ago, wrote that a society incapable of taking offense at Christianity is lost to the faith, because it endorses the “glorious results” of the church’s human history, instead of facing up to the original humiliation and sacrifice of God-made-man, which by worldly values are a scandal.

The crucifix represents both the instrument of Jesus’s execution and his broken body in all its suffering. Yet for Christians it is, in Cardinal Bertone’s words, a “symbol of universal love, not only of exclusion, but of welcome,” by virtue of the redemption that Christ’s suffering is held to have effected.

Perceptive non-believers are also sensitive to this symbol’s terrible power, whether they find it disturbing or inspiring or both.

The late Natalia Ginzburg wrote more than 20 years ago in the then-Communist newspaper L’Unità that the crucifix “represents everyone” because it is the “sign of human pain … And to be sold, betrayed and martyred and killed for one’s own faith, in this life can happen to everyone. It seems me a good thing that kids, children, know it from the time they are at their school desks.”

Politicians naturally avoid such discomfiting ideas for the safety of abstractions like heritage and culture, and so prefer to justify the crucifix as a token of national tradition, without going into gory details. But to regard the object in such a way is to obscure its essential meaning, and thus poorly serve Italian students and citizens of all persuasions.

Mr. Rocca is the Vatican correspondent for Religion News Service.

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Full article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704402404574525240708099168.html

In Defense of Hamid Karzai

Afghanistan’s failures are not the fault of its president.

In the matter of Hamid Karzai (this would be the feckless, warlord-backed, corruption-tainted and dubiously re-elected president of Afghanistan), it’s wonderful to observe how he has single-handedly created a new designation in the American ideological lexicon: the neo-neocon.

Who are the neo-neocons? They’re a bipartisan, single-issue group that has recently discovered the virtues—nay, the necessity—of clean, orderly, democratic governance.

On the left, they are the same folks who enthusiastically supported the Oslo Accords that brought about Yasser Arafat’s violent and kleptocratic rule. They were no less enthusiastic about underwriting the enterprise with billions in foreign aid, even as evidence accumulated that the money was being put to every use except improving the life of Palestinians.

On the right, they are the people who used to extol the virtues of Marcos, Pinochet, Musharraf and every other Third World strongman who happened to be “our SOB.” They’re also fond of citing Edmund Burke, et al., about the hopelessness of planting democratic trees in sandy Muslim soils.

Now the two wings of this new movement are improbably joined in making the case that the realities of Mr. Karzai’s compromised government hopelessly complicate our task in Afghanistan and fall far short of being something worth fighting for. What to do? On this key point, the neo-neocons aren’t quite sure, except to strike a pose of serious reserve about the war, tending in the direction of exit.

But just how bad, really, is Hamid Karzai? Let’s compare.

Is Mr. Karzai as bad as his immediate predecessor, Mullah Mohammed Omar, under whose medieval rule Afghanistan became not just a safe haven for al Qaeda, but a byword for Islamist barbarism? Is he as bad as what came before the Taliban: Four years of unrestrained civil war in which nearly all of Kabul was blasted to ruin?

The least-bad alternative.

Is Mr. Karzai as bad as the Soviet-backed governments of Mohammad Najibullah and Babrak Karmal, who applied the usual Communist methods of rounding up, torturing and killing tens of thousands of real, suspected or imaginary political opponents? Is he as bad as Mohammed Daoud Khan, who in 1973 overthrew the Afghan monarchy in favor of a repressive, but also incompetent, one-party system?

Or is Mr. Karzai a leader on a par with Zahir Shah, the last king of Afghanistan, who was politically weak and allegedly somewhat corrupt but essentially decent, civilized and well-meaning? Today, Zahir’s rule is remembered as a golden age in Afghan history.

These historical precedents are worth recalling because they are the templates of the kind of governance Afghans can reasonably expect. Would they have done better under Mr. Karzai’s main challenger in the last election, former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah? Maybe, but Dr. Abdullah is half-Tajik. And the brute reality of Afghanistan is that it would be even more difficult to govern under a non-Pashtun president, since Pashtuns are half the Afghan population and most of the trouble.

No wonder, then, that the announcement of Mr. Karzai’s re-election was greeted in Kabul with “a collective sigh of relief,” as the Washington Post reported last week. “I think people were fed up with this controversy over the election,” the Post quoted a running mate of Dr. Abdullah. “I think it’s a good thing that this is finished. Whether it’s legal or not, we can stop discussing this matter. Now he’s elected.”

That’s a usefully matter-of-fact rejoinder to all the hand-wringing in the West over whether Mr. Karzai has the requisite “legitimacy” to govern Afghanistan. It would be equally useful if some of Mr. Karzai’s more acerbic Western critics could ask themselves why matters went abruptly south in Afghanistan after several years in which they had gone swimmingly well under Mr. Karzai, including a thriving economy, girls back in school, people having access to health care and so on. The answer has a lot less to do with Mr. Karzai’s performance than with NATO’s.

How’s that? It is not Mr. Karzai’s fault that NATO insisted for years that the Afghan National Army be no larger than a constabulary force, leaving it in no position to join the battle against a resurgent Taliban. It is not his fault that foreign aid organizations consistently botched the delivery. Much less is it his fault that the former government of Pakistan essentially ceded its frontier provinces to the Taliban, which promptly turned them into havens of militancy.

None of this means that Mr. Karzai is a saint or even much of a statesman. But neither is he a despot, a fanatic, a sybarite, or an uncouth bigot—qualities that typify the leadership of countries for which the U.S. has also expended blood and treasure in defense of lesser causes. Our failures in Afghanistan so far have mainly been our own, and they are ours to fix. To blame Mr. Karzai is to point the finger at the wrong culprit in the pursuit of disastrous, dishonorable defeat.

Bret Stephens, Wall Street Journal

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Full article and photo: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704402404574525722665041310.html

The Man Who Made Pelosi Cry ‘Uncle’

Bart Stupak wins a ban on federal funds for abortion.

Not many folks in Washington have made Nancy Pelosi cry “uncle.”

Bart Stupak is one of the few. For months, the Michigan Democrat has been threatening to bring down any health-care bill unless the House was given the opportunity to vote to extend the ban on taxpayer dollars for abortion to the new federal programs being created. On Saturday night, Mrs. Pelosi caved and Mr. Stupak prevailed.

The result is one of the few, real up-or-down votes we ever get on abortion—and the only part of the health-care mess that shows any bipartisan consensus. In the end, 63 Democrats and Mr. Stupak joined all but one Republican on an amendment that does two things: prohibits federal funds for an abortion or for abortion coverage; allows (notwithstanding pro-choice propaganda) private insurers to offer abortion coverage so long as tax dollars are not involved.

Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich.

“Mr. Stupak and I have not always agreed on things,” Indiana Rep. Mike Pence, chairman of the House Republican Conference, told me. “But I commend him for his effort here. His willingness to dig in the way he did was admirable.”

What makes this interesting is that Mr. Stupak is no Blue Dog. Though some Blue Dogs joined him, the Stupak amendment in fact offers a striking contrast between the success of pro-life Democrats and the persistent failure of Blue Dogs. The pro-lifers came together, held their line, and got their way; the Blue Dogs never seem able to coalesce, and generally have been picked off individually.

Not that the press ever noticed. Up until almost literally the 11th hour, Mr. Stupak’s push for a vote was treated as a sideshow. Nor was President Barack Obama ever called to answer for his flatly contradictory public statements on the place of abortion (the preferred term is “reproductive health care”) in any health-care reform.

Mr. Stupak has just changed all that. On Sunday, the president of Planned Parenthood, Cecile Richards, sent out an action alert asking supporters to tell Mr. Obama to “make good” on his “promise to put reproductive health care at the center of [his] health care reform plan.” She should know: She was standing next to Candidate Obama in 2007 when he declared that “reproductive care is essential care, it is basic care, so it is at the center and at the heart of the plan that I propose.”

Unfortunately for Ms. Richards, during his recent appearance before a joint session of Congress, Mr. Obama promised something different: “no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions.”

Notwithstanding the president’s promise, page 110 of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s bill authorized the secretary of Health and Human Services to determine when abortion is allowed under the government-run plan. All Mrs. Pelosi’s preferred “compromises” left this undisturbed, using what in effect would be a money-laundering scheme to cloak the reality of a federal agency paying for abortion.

But Mr. Stupak stood firm, and Mrs. Pelosi realized something would have to give if she wanted to get a health-care bill passed. So she gave Mr. Stupak his vote—and his victory.

Now, some believe Republicans should have voted “present” on the Stupak amendment, on the grounds that the worse they could make the bill, the harder for Speaker Pelosi to get the magic 218 votes. That’s pretty short-sighted, for several reasons. For one thing, in September all but a few Republican House members signed a letter to Speaker Pelosi demanding such a vote. Had Republicans defeated a pro-life amendment they had asked for, they would have paid a dear price for their cynicism.

For another, it’s not even clear it would have worked. The Stupak alliance of Democrats was a broad one, from liberals like Minnesota’s Jim Oberstar to conservatives like Mississippi’s Gene Taylor. The danger of the cynical GOP strategy is that it could easily have backfired, freeing up Democrats to give Mrs. Pelosi her victory—and putting Republicans in the awkward position of being unable to press for funding restrictions they had explicitly defeated.

As it is, Democrats now have to make some decisions that may anger their Planned Parenthood wing. The fight itself will be interesting, judging from a claim by Diana DeGette (D., Col.) in yesterday’s Washington Post that 40 Democrats will vote against a final bill unless the Stupak amendment is stripped out. Of course, if it is stripped out, that will put even more pressure on those 64 Democrats who voted for the amendment.

“We won because [the Democrats] need us,” says Mr. Stupak. “If they are going to summarily dismiss us by taking the pen to that language, there will be hell to pay. I don’t say it as a threat, but if they double-cross us, there will be 40 people who won’t vote with them the next time they need us—and that could be the final version of this bill.”

William McGurn, Wall Street Journal

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Full article and photo: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704402404574525962492620186.html

40 years of Sesame Street: the good, the bad and the cuddly

It spawned ‘edutainment’

Before the Sesame Street gang came on the scene, TV for kids was an educational wasteland.

“[The show] was a total breakthrough,” says Daniel Anderson, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst who has worked as a consultant for the show. “It was the first program that really did extensive curriculum development based on the best education and child development expertise at the time.”

It also proved that TV can be a powerful medium for learning, he says. Studies show kids who watch Sesame Street , which gives lessons in digestible pieces that build on one another, do better in school. And while Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood made a clear cut to the Land of Make Believe, Sesame Street created a refreshing fusion of imagination and real life, a quality that encourages kids to learn, says Elizabeth Morley, principal at the Institute of Child Study Laboratory School at the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE). “This wasn’t adults talking to children, these were characters they could engage with,” she says. “A cookie monster! What child can’t relate to that?”

It helped kids with the social world

When Big Bird cried over a breakup with a friend, kids shed a tear along with him. And when mom and pop Snuffalupagus divorced, children from broken homes could relate to their daughter Snuffie. Sesame Street has been quick to turn social travails of the day into lessons for its tiny viewers, Prof. Anderson says.

When the actor who played grandfatherly grocer Mr. Hooper died in the 1980s, Sesame Street writers included it in the show as a lesson about death. “They could have had him move away or they could have just ignored the fact that he was missing,” Prof. Anderson says. The show addressed the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the recent financial crisis and even the obesity epidemic.

While teaching the ABCs and 123s are the key to the show’s success, lessons in emotional intelligence have been invaluable, Ms. Morley adds. “In any of the characters we could find the normal childhood range of emotions,” she says. “If we went back through the 40 years we would find almost any social issue was addressed.”

It helped fuel marketing to kids

While the not-for-profit television show was designed to sell kids knowledge, not stuff, the success of Sesame Street and its licensed characters made the kiddie market more accessible to advertisers, says Dimitri Christakis, a Seattle-based pediatrician and author of The Elephant in the Living Room: Make Television Work for Your Kids . “The interest was always there, but they provided the vehicle,” he says. “They created characters that got kids’ attention. That had instant recognition and that provided the hook that advertisers would need.”

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, companies started launching shows such as He-Man and G.I. Joe to sell their products, says Dale Kunkel, a professor of communication at the University of Arizona who studies children and media. “They’d said ‘You shouldn’t be criticizing us, because we’re just like Sesame Street . They promote their characters and we’re just doing the same thing.’”

While Sesame Street advertises its huge cupboard of toys and products (Tickle Me Elmo, anyone?), there’s a measured effort to only market them to adults, Dr. Kunkel says. “One place you’ll see them advertised … is in the late-night talk show [time slots].”

It sparked controversy

Could Sesame Street ’s ABCs spell ADHD? The show was one of the first to experiment with educational segments in bite-sized pieces – a move made based on research that showed kids are very attentive to TV ads, says Shalom Fisch, a New Jersey-based children’s educational media consultant who worked at Sesame Street for 15 years and co-edited G Is for Growing: Thirty Years of Research on Children and Sesame Street . Educators and parents voiced concerned that the fast-paced, quick-change approach was eating away at attention spans, but that’s never borne out in research, Mr. Fisch says.

“ Sesame Street has slowed down its pacing dramatically,” says Dr. Christakis, who has researched the impact of television on children’s attention spans. “It wasn’t a light switch, but if you look at pacing today versus 20 years ago, you’ll notice there’s a dramatic difference.”

Controversy also touched Sesame Street in 2006 with the launch of Sesame Beginnings, a series of episodes for kids under 2. The American Pediatric Society advises against television for tots and infants and the Canadian Paediatric Society is expected to follow suit.

It appeals to parents

That Billy Idol nod in “Rebel L” wasn’t meant for the kids. Sesame Street has intentionally won parents over with pop culture references and hip adult guests (think Monsterpiece Theatre and Leslie Feist’s 1234 sing-a-long). “ Sesame Street knows from its research that the child viewer learns more when they watch with a parent or adult guardian,” Dr. Kunkel says.

While Sesame Street set the bar for other educational shows, even high-quality ones such as Blue’s Clues or Dora the Explorer , don’t have that same parent-luring content, Dr. Kunkel adds. But Sesame ’s educational merits have led some parents to rely too heavily on Bert and Ernie as babysitters, says Matthew Johnson, media education specialist with the Media Awareness Network, a Canadian non-profit organization.

Linda Cameron, an associate professor of early childhood education at OISE, says she was initially wary of the show when her kids were young. “I was hesitant because of the pacing, of the overstimulation, of what that might do to kids’ brains,” she says. “But I fell in love. I fell in love with Ernie and Bert and Big Bird, they became my friends.”

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Full article and photo: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/family-and-relationships/40-years-of-sesame-street-the-good-the-bad-and-the-cuddly/article1355803/

Well met by clublight

Dating in the downturn

What online-dating sites are learning from pick-up artists

Was it the jokes or the teeth?

IN A dark underground room in central London, a group of men scribble intently in notebooks. They are in a class on “how to be funny” and they want to get it right. It has been a long day; they have already attended classes on teeth-whitening, self-esteem and personal finance as part of an intensive course on how to attract women. This evening they will put their work into practice as tutors assess their attempts to score dates in some of the city’s leading clubs.

The programme is run by Love Systems, an American firm that charges up to £3,000 ($5,000) for three-day boot camps. Other outfits offer similar “pick-up” courses, though they remain relatively small and almost clandestine. The real money in the “dating industry” is online.

Corporate cupids such as eHarmony, an American firm that claims to be responsible for 236 weddings a day in the United States, and Meetic, a French company which recently bought the biggest online-dating firm in Britain, Match.com, serve a British market worth almost £100m, according to Mintel, a research firm. Another, comScore, reckons 5m people visited British dating sites in September, more than a year earlier. It is, they say, something of a recession boom.

Mintel thinks the surge is being driven by the human tendency to re-evaluate priorities in dark times. The more sceptical say it is simple economics. It costs, on average, £30 a month to belong to an online-dating service, and free sites like plentyoffish.com and Smooch are springing up. Online dating is a cheaper way of meeting people than a night on the town.

Around 8% of Britons say they use dating websites, compared with 4%, on average, in the rest of Europe. But business analysts point out that America outstrips them all. Mark Brooks, an online-dating consultant, thinks this is because Britons are more sceptical than their transatlantic cousins. He regularly warns American firms eyeing the British market that overblown promises of true love are likely to repel rather than attract.

Mr Brooks also thinks online giants are missing a trick that the underground pick-up industry learned long ago. “You can meet the best people in the world and still screw it up because you don’t know how to date,” he says. “People need help, guidance, style counselling…feedback when a date goes wrong.”

Some are moving in this direction, though as yet they offer nothing like Love Systems’ face-to-face tuition. EHarmony, for one, has consultants on how to tweak a profile. More than 500,000 people have registered with its British branch since it opened in June 2008. Last month a National Dating Advice Line was launched, with instant guidance from dating “experts” at £1.50 a minute on matters such as what to text, what to wear and when to kiss. Another new firm, eLove, sets up personal matchmakers.

One way and another, the dating business is growing fast. Broadband access is increasing, webcam facilities spreading, phones getting smarter, techniques getting smoother. One danger, though, for the love merchants: if they make too many lifelong matches, they will find their client base significantly reduced.

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Full article and photo: http://www.economist.com/world/britain/displayStory.cfm?story_id=14823814&source=hptextfeature

New Computer Simulator Helps Design Military Strategies Based On Ants’ Movements

Researchers in Spain have designed a system for the mobility of military troops within a battlefield following the mechanisms used by ant colonies to move. The scientists have used settings of Panzer General, a commercial war video game, for the development of this software.

A researcher at the University of Granada has designed a new system for the mobility of military troops within a battlefield based on the mechanisms used by ant colonies to move using a commercial video game.

This work, developed at the department of Computer Architecture and Technology of the UGR, has designed several algorithms that permit to look for the best route path (this is, to find the better route to satisfy certain criteria) within a particular environment.

Specifically, this research work has developed a software that would allow the army troops to define the best path within a military battle field, considering that such path will be covered by a company and this must consider the security criteria (reaching their destination with the lower number of casualties) and speed (reaching their destination as quickly as possible).

To that end, the scientists have used the so called ‘ant colony optimization algorithm (ACO)’, a probabilistic technique used to solve optimization problems and inspired in the behaviors of ants to find trajectories from the colony to the food.

A mini-simulator

This work has been carried out by Antonio Miguel Mora García, and supervised by professors Juan Julián Merelo Guervós and Pedro Ángel Castillo Valdivieso, of the department of Computer Architecture and Technology of the UGR.

The scientists of the UGR have developed a mini-simulator in order to define the settings (battlefields), locate the unit and their enemies, execute the algorithms and see the results. In addition, the software designed by them offers a few tools useful to analyze both the initial map and the results.

To prepare this system, Mora García started from the battlefields present in the video game Panzer General™, defining later the necessary properties and restrictions to make them faithful to reality.

The research work developed at the University of Granada has also had the participation of members of the Doctrine and Training Command of the Spanish Army (MADOC), organism belonging to the Ministry of Defense, which in the long term could incorporate some of the features of the new simulator for the design of actual military strategies.

The UGR scientists point out that, apart form this application the simulator could also be useful to solve other actual problems, such as the search for the best path for a sales agent or a transporter to visit his clients optimizing fuel consumption or time, for example. “In addition -they say- it could also be useful to solve planning problems for the distribution of goods, trying to serve the highest possible number of customers starting from a central warehouse, considering the lowest possible number of vehicles”.

Part of the results of this research work has been presented in several conferences, both national and international, and published in journals including the International Journal of Intelligent Systems. The software designed for this research work is free software, and it can be downloaded though the Internet freely.

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Full article and photo: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091106102658.htm

In Turkey, fertile ground for creationism

Adnan Oktar, who as Harun Yahya is Turkey’s best-known and most assertive critic of evolution, says he is “following the path of Allah.”

Sema Ergezen teaches biology to Turkish students interested in teaching science themselves, and she has long struggled with her students’ ignorance of, and sometimes hostility to, the notion of evolution.

But she was taken aback when several of her Marmara University students recently accused her of being an atheist, or worse, for teaching anything but the doctrine that God created the Earth and everything on it.

“They said I was a liar if I called myself a Muslim because I also accepted evolution,” she said.

What especially disturbed — and amused — the veteran professor was that the arguments for creationism presented by some of the students came directly from the country where she was educated in the biological sciences years before — the United States. Translated and adapted for a Muslim society, the purported proofs that Darwinism and evolution were wrong came directly from American proponents of Christian creationism and its less overtly religious offshoot, intelligent design.

Ergezen’s experience has become increasingly common. While creationism and intelligent design appear to be in some retreat in the United States, they have blossomed within Muslim Turkey. With direct and indirect help from American foes of evolution, similarly-minded Turks have aggressively made the case that Charles Darwin’s theory is scientifically wrong and is the underlying source of most of the world’s conflicts because it excludes God from human affairs.

“Darwin is the worst Fascist there has ever been, and the worst racist history has ever witnessed,” writes Harun Yahya, the most assertive and best-known critic of evolution in Turkey, and long a favorite of more conservative American creationists.

The evolution-creationism battle is playing out against a backdrop of a much larger conflict between the forces of secularism — as represented by the Turkish military and many of the country’s more educated citizens — and forces, including the popular ruling party, that want to make religion more important in national affairs. The Islamic anti-evolution campaign is taking place in Turkey, and not Egypt or Saudi Arabia, because it is the Muslim nation where evolution has been taken most seriously. Like the Bible, the Koran says that God created the Earth and everything on it, and in many Muslim nations that ends the discussion.

But Turkey, which is officially secular, appears to be joining its Muslim neighbors on evolution. A recent survey, quoted in a 2008 article in the American journal Science, found that fewer than 25 percent of Turks accepted evolution as an explanation of how modern life came to be — by far the lowest percentage of any developed nation. In a year in which conferences worldwide are celebrating the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth and his contribution to science, the battle against Darwinian thinking in Turkey has become something of a rout, even among aspiring science teachers.

To many Turkish scientists and educators, this is a worrisome development. The founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, was an advocate of science, education and, some say, even evolution. Turkish science has been especially strong in the Muslim world. If Turks close their minds to evolutionary thinking, advocates say, it won’t be long before religion and politics shut off other scientific pursuits.

To John Morris, president of the Institute for Creation Research in Dallas, however, the news could hardly be more encouraging.

“Why I’m so interested in seeing creationism succeed in Turkey is that evolution is an evil concept that has done such damage to society,” said Morris, a Christian who has led several searches for Noah’s Ark in eastern Turkey. Members of his group have addressed Turkish conferences numerous times.

The Discovery Institute of Seattle, which researches and promotes intelligent design as an alternative to creationism and evolution, also sent speakers to Turkey after being invited by the Istanbul municipal government in 2007. President Bruce Chapman said the institute helped bring Turkish evolution critic Mustafa Akyol to a 2005 Kansas school board hearing on teaching critiques of evolution.

The most visible Turkish proponent of creationism is a former journalist named Adnan Oktar, who writes and appears daily on his own two-hour television show under the alias Harun Yahya. He and a revolving group of about 30 writers and young scientists have produced more than 200 widely distributed books and videos attacking evolution as equivalent to atheism, communism and worse.

In 2006, Oktar created an international stir when he sent a book of high-quality fossil images to biology teachers worldwide. Published on almost 800 pages of glossy stock, the “Atlas of Creation” sets out to show that creatures today are essentially the same as those that lived, and became fossilized, eons ago — an argument also found in American creationism. The source of funding for the book, which emphasizes North American fossil finds, remains murky.

Speaking in his home and television studio overlooking the Bosporus, Oktar asserted responsibility for “defeating” Darwinism in Turkey and said that Americans had helped him do it. But as he sees it, the student has become the teacher. He has created a far-reaching anti-evolution empire, he said, while American creationists and advocates of intelligent design still struggle to be heard.

The 53-year-old Oktar, dressed entirely in white, said he is not a scientist but an author “following the path of Allah.” He said that by aggressively attacking evolution, he has drawn persecution in the form of lawsuits, legal cases and police torture. He is awaiting a ruling on an appeal of his conviction last year on charges that his group — which some in Turkey liken to a cult — had become a criminal, moneymaking enterprise.

Being an advocate for evolution in Turkey has its costs, too. Aykut Kence, who earned his doctorate in evolutionary biology in the United States and now teaches at an Ankara university, has fought back-and-forth lawsuits with Oktar for years. He began to take the creationists seriously when they circulated leaflets with pictures of him and Mao Zedong, publicly equating Kence’s teaching of evolution to communism. His defense of evolution, he said, has cost him government funding.

After a decade in the trenches, Kence said he believes aggressive creationism “is part of a larger plan to convert people to a more conservative Islam.”

The Islamic-oriented government, elected in 2002 and reelected in 2007, has telegraphed its views on evolution by adding doses of creationism to a required public school course on “Religion and Morals,” proponents of evolution say. This year, the editor of one of the nation’s prominent science journals, Science and Technology, was fired by government officials over her magazine’s plans to put Darwin on its cover.

Some argue, however, that it is too early to write off Turkish science as being under the thumb of religion. Salman Hameed, a professor of science and humanities at Hampshire College in Massachusetts and author of the 2008 Science article titled “Bracing for Islamic Creationism,” said secular forces remain strong in Turkey, which is seeking membership in the European Union.

“I think it will be five to 10 years before Turks as a whole make up their mind,” he said. “The situation is quite worrisome, and that’s why I wrote the article. But I believe the issue is not settled at this point.”

Marc Kaufman, Washington Post

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Full article and photo: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/07/AR2009110702233.html

Prospect of More U.S. Troops Worries Afghan Public

“What have the Americans done in eight years?” asked Abdullah Wasay, a pharmacist in the town of Charikar who expressed impatience with the lingering war.

As Americans, including President Obama’s top advisers, tensely debate whether to send more American troops to Afghanistan, Afghans themselves are having a similar discussion and voicing serious doubts.

In bazaars and university corridors across the country, eight years of war have left people exhausted and impatient. They are increasingly skeptical that the Taliban can be defeated. Nearly everyone agrees that the Afghan government must negotiate with the insurgents. If more American forces do arrive, many here say, they should come to train Afghans to take over the fight, so the foreigners can leave.

“What have the Americans done in eight years?” asked Abdullah Wasay, 60, a pharmacist in Charikar, a market town about 25 miles north of Kabul, expressing a view typical of many here. “Americans are saying that with their planes they can see an egg 18 kilometers away, so why can’t they see the Taliban?”

Students at Kabul University protested last month against American forces, set off by a rumor that they had burned a Koran. Such suspicions are growing.

Such sentiments were repeated in conversation after conversation with more than 30 Afghans in Kabul and nearby rural areas and with local officials in outlying provinces. The comments point to the difficulties that American and Afghan officials face if they choose to add more foreign troops.

If the foreign forces are not seen so by Afghans already, they are on the cusp of being regarded as occupiers, with little to show people for their extended presence, fueling wild conspiracies about why they remain here.

The feeling is particularly acute in the Pashtun south, but it is spreading to other parts of the country. More American troops could tip the balance of opinion, particularly if they increase civilian casualties and prompt even more Taliban attacks.

The grass-roots view among Afghans is at odds with those of top Afghan officials, as well as many American military commanders, who strongly endorse a full-blown counterinsurgency strategy, including a large troop increase.

At a bazaar in Charikar, north of Kabul, many Afghans said they felt vulnerable to the Taliban, unprotected by their own government or the American forces.

The aim of sending more troops would be to help secure Afghanistan’s biggest cities and towns to make the population feel safe and in doing so to show that the foreign presence can bring benefits.

At the same time, the Americans support the idea of negotiating with moderate members of the Taliban, but would prefer to do so once the insurgency has been weakened. And, that, in turn, may also require more troops.

Interior Minister Hanif Atmar said he was in “full agreement” with Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the American commander of forces in Afghanistan, that a full-blown counterinsurgency strategy was necessary, including more forces.

“One piece of that strategy is a troop increase as a stopgap measure that will create an environment in which Afghan security forces can continue to grow and people will be protected against insurgents,” he said.

The mood on the street is darker and more wary. Mr. Wasay and several friends visiting his pharmacy were discussing the Taliban’s killing of a police chief in a rural part of the province. The rumor was that Taliban fighters had severed his head and delivered it to his son, according to one of Mr. Wasay’s friends.

True or not, the anecdote was part of a growing mythology of Taliban power and a general perception that neither the Afghan government nor American troops were protecting Afghans.

Daily life continues to be so precarious for many people interviewed, especially those outside Kabul, that they have come to believe that the United States must want the fighting to go on.

“In the first days of the war, the Americans defeated the Taliban in just a few days,” said Mohammed Shefi, a graduate student in the pharmacy school at Kabul University. “Now they have more than 60,000 forces and they cannot defeat them.”

Alex Thier, an analyst at the United States Institute of Peace, who has spent years working in Afghanistan, said the country’s mood was shifting. “What’s changed fairly recently was the confidence of the population as to whether we can actually achieve the job, even with more resources,” he said.

These doubts do not tally with some surveys, like the poll taken by the International Republican Institute, in which a majority of Afghans appeared to be positive about Americans and said they thought that the country was going in the right direction. However, the security environment in Afghanistan makes it a difficult place in which to conduct polls, and the survey by the institute, a pro-democracy group affiliated with the Republican Party and financed by the American government, was taken in July before the rampant fraud in the presidential election.

Zia Ahmet, a seller of tea kettles and pots just down the street from Mr. Wasay, was positive about the current international presence, but dubious about increasing it. “Instead of increasing foreign troops, it’s better to equip the Afghan National Army and the Afghan police,” he said, a view that was shared by almost everyone interviewed. “The local army are known in the villages, and they are more useful than foreign troops.”

A tribal elder in Balkh Province, in the remote north, said the insurgency had disrupted life for farmers and herders, and he repeated one of a growing number of conspiracy theories about the Americans’ intentions. In his version, the Americans were transporting Taliban fighters to the north and dropping them from helicopters at night, on the theory that the Americans wanted more fighting so they could stay in the country. Other versions have the British transporting the insurgents.

There is no truth to the accounts, according to American military officials in Kabul.

Graduate students at Kabul University were no less suspicious. “Those countries that are working with the U.S. and are friends of theirs are Saudi and Pakistan and those are the same countries the insurgents are coming from,” said Abdullah, a graduate student in the Faculty of Islamic Law who, like many Afghans, has only one name.

While the notions may seem absurd to Americans, they have added to an increasingly volatile public mood here. A story that American forces burned a Koran in Wardak Province brought hundreds of young people into the streets last month to protest the American presence, even though the story was roundly disputed by Afghan and American officials.

With less certainty about America’s continued commitment, there is a growing sense that the only sure way to peace is through negotiations with the Taliban. “They are the sons of this country, it is right to negotiate with the Taliban,” said Mohammed Younnis, a shopkeeper in Charikar who sells tea, sugar and grains.

“This government is Afghan, and the Taliban are Afghan; they should build the country together,” he said.

Alissa J. Rubin, New York Times

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Full article and photos: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/07/world/asia/07doubts.html

Today in History – November 9

Today is Monday, Nov. 9, the 313th day of 2009. There are 52 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight in History

On Nov. 9, 1989, communist East Germany threw open its borders, allowing citizens to travel freely to the West; joyous Germans danced atop the Berlin Wall.

On this date

In 1789, rhe Coup of 18–19 Brumaire began in Paris, marking Napoleon’s rise to power and the end of the French Revolution.

In 1872, fire destroyed nearly 800 buildings in Boston.

In 1918, it was announced that Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II would abdicate. He then fled to the Netherlands.

In 1923, the Beer Hall Putsch led by Adolf Hitler ended after 16 Nazis were killed on a march toward the Marienplatz in the centre of Munich, Germany.

In 1934, Carl Sagan, the astronomer whose books and television show informed millions of Americans, was born.

In 1935, United Mine Workers president John L. Lewis and other labor leaders formed the Committee for Industrial Organization, later Congress of Industrial Organizations.

In 1938, Nazis looted and burned synagogues as well as Jewish-owned stores and houses in Germany and Austria in a pogrom that became known as “Kristallnacht.”

In 1943, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration was created by a 44-nation agreement.

In 1953, author-poet Dylan Thomas died in New York at age 39.

In 1963, twin disasters struck Japan as some 450 miners were killed in a coal-dust explosion, and about 160 people died in a train crash.

In 1965, the great Northeast blackout occurred as a series of power failures lasting up to 13 1/2 hours left 30 million people in seven states and part of Canada without electricity.

In 1967, a Saturn V rocket carrying an unmanned Apollo spacecraft blasted off from Cape Kennedy, Fla., on a successful test flight.

In 1970, former French President Charles de Gaulle died at age 79.

In 1976, the U.N. General Assembly approved resolutions condemning apartheid in South Africa, including one characterizing the white-ruled government as “illegitimate.”

In 1996, Evander Holyfield scored a technical knockout of Mike Tyson to win the heavyweight boxing championship for a third time.

In 1999, ten years ago, with fireworks, concerts and a huge party at the landmark Brandenburg Gate, Germany celebrated the 10th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

In 1999, the flight data recorder from EgyptAir Flight 990 was recovered from the Atlantic Ocean and shipped to a National Transportation Safety Board laboratory in Washington.

In 2001, the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif fell to the northern alliance in the first major territorial advance for the rebels against the ruling Taliban.

In 2004, five years ago. Attorney General John Ashcroft and Commerce Secretary Don Evans resigned; they were the first members of the Cabinet to leave as President George W. Bush headed from re-election into his second term.

In 2004, Kenny Chesney won the Country Music Association album of the year award for “When The Sun Goes Down” as well as entertainer of the year.

In 2004, Roger Clemens won his record seventh Cy Young Award.

In 2005, three suicide bombers carried out nearly simultaneous attacks on three U.S.-based hotels in Amman, Jordan, killing 60 victims and wounding hundreds.

In 2008, one year ago, Barack Obama’s transition chief, John Podesta, told “Fox News Sunday” the president-elect planned to review President George W. Bush’s executive orders on such things as stem cell research and domestic drilling for oil and natural gas.

In 2008, China unveiled a $586 billion stimulus package aimed at inoculating the world’s fourth-largest economy against the global financial crisis.

Today’s Birthdays

Former Democratic vice-presidential candidate R. Sargent Shriver is 94. Baseball executive Whitey Herzog is 78. Baseball Hall of Famer Bob Gibson is 74. Actor Charlie Robinson is 64. Movie director Bille August is 61. Actor Robert David Hall (“CSI”) is 61. Actor Lou Ferrigno is 58. Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, is 57. Gospel singer Donnie McClurkin is 50. Rock musician Dee Plakas (L7) is 49. Actress Ion Overman is 40. Rapper Pepa (Salt-N-Pepa) is 40. Rapper Scarface (Geto Boys) is 39. Blues singer Susan Tedeschi is 39. Actor Jason Antoon is 38. Actor Eric Dane is 37. Singer Nick Lachey (98 Degrees) is 36. R&B singer Sisqo (Dru Hill) is 31. Actress Nikki Blonsky is 21.

Today’s Historic Birthdays

In 1717, explorer Louis-Joseph Gaultier de La Vérendrye, who led the first European exploration across the Missouri R into the Great Plains, was born at Ile aux Vaches, New France. He died on November 15, 1761, while returning to France, when the ship, Auguste sank at sea.

Benjamin Banneker
11/9/1731 – 10/25/1806
American mathematician, astronomer, inventor and writer

Gail Borden
11/9/1801 – 1/11/1874
American businessman

Elijah Lovejoy
11/9/1802 – 11/7/1837
American abolitionist

Russian author. Ivan Turgenev was born in Oryol. The main aim of his literary work was to portray the problems of his time, particularly the system of serfdom in Tsarist Russia, which was in great need of reform. As a co-founder of Russian realism, he was an important cultural envoy between East and West. From 1856, he spent much of his time France and Germany and maintained contacts with Gustave Flaubert, Gustav Freytag and Theodor Storm. The Russian writer produced poetry, prose poems, dramas and novels, such as “Rudin” (1856), “Fathers and Sons” (1862), and “Smoke” (1867). Turgenev died on September 29, 1887.

Stanford White
11/9/1853 – 6/25/1906
American architect

Marie Dressler
11/9/1869 – 7/28/1934
Canadian-born American actress

Florence Sabin
11/9/1871 – 10/3/1953
American anatomist

Ed Wynn
11/9/1886 – 6/19/1966
American actor

Mabel Normand
11/9/1892 – 2/23/1930
American actress

Spiro Agnew
11/9/1918 – 9/17/1996
American politician; 39th vice president of the United States (1969-73)

James Schuyler
11/9/1923 – 4/12/1991
American poet, playwright and novelist

Dorothy Dandridge
11/9/1922 – 9/8/1965
American actress

Anne Sexton
11/9/1928 – 10/4/1974
American poet

Carl Sagan
11/9/1934 – 12/20/1996
American astronomer

Thought for Today

“I think charm is the ability to be truly interested in other people.” – Richard Avedon, American fashion photographer (1923-2004).

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Full article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/09/AR2009110900003.html

http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/20091109.html

http://www.todayinhistory.de/index.php?tag=9&monat=11&dayisset=1&year=2009&lang=en

http://www.britannica.com/eb/dailycontent/rss

http://www.history.ca/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis-Joseph_Gaultier_de_La_V%C3%A9rendrye

Keep calm and carry on

China’s reaction to Communism’s collapse

How Deng Xiaoping neutralised the country’s worst moment

But freedom stirs, even here

“THE East German people are now strengthening their unity under the leadership of the party.” So declared China’s Communist Party mouthpiece, the People’s Daily, in October 1989. A month later the Berlin Wall fell. Even today, China’s leaders find the memory painful.

China’s state-owned media have mostly avoided the subject, as they have also stayed silent about the anniversary in June of China’s own pro-democracy upheaval of 1989—tumult that was witnessed by Mikhail Gorbachev, Russia’s leader, and which was bloodily suppressed only when he had gone home. They are probably obeying instructions from the Central Propaganda Department of the party. The party’s keen interest in the cause of national unification (in its case, reclaiming Taiwan) has not helped ease its qualms about the fate of East Germany.

Yet China’s ruling party has devoted considerable energy to dissecting the causes of communism’s collapse in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Official publishing houses have produced several works analysing them and drawing lessons from them. The first shock over, the party was quick not only to cement ties with eastern Europe’s new democracies but also to develop strategies for avoiding their predecessors’ fate.

In late 1989 China’s anxiety was so profound and its diplomacy in such confusion that it was difficult to imagine it would ever come to terms with the new world order. Fresh unrest seemed unavoidable. It was far from certain that Jiang Zemin, a little known leader who had been appointed party chief in the wake of the Tiananmen Square unrest, was on firm ground.

China’s dogged insistence that nothing untoward was happening in eastern Eur ope ensured that its awakening would be harsh. In early October 1989, even after thousands of East Germans had fled their country, China sent a senior leader to East Germany’s official celebration of four decades of communism (a “glorious” 40 years, the People’s Daily called it). East Germany’s 77-year-old leader, Erich Honecker, was a conservative much respected by China’s own gerontocrats, and a backer of the crackdown in Tiananmen. His resignation that October was appalling to them.

It was an appeal for cool heads by China’s 85-year-old senior leader, Deng Xiaoping, that helped China’s rulers weather the storm. In September 1989 he told them—in a speech only published years later—to be “calm, calm and again calm” and to carry on with China’s (mostly economic) reforms. Mr Deng’s advice, and its later elaboration, remains China’s guiding philosophy. Its central message is often summarised as taoguang yanghui, meaning “concealing one’s capabilities and biding one’s time”. Mr Deng wanted China to get on with building its economy and avoid ideological battles. The economy, in effect, would save the party.

David Shambaugh, an American scholar, wrote in a book published last year that China’s most important conclusion from communism’s ruin elsewhere was that an ossified party-state with a dogmatic ideology, entrenched elites, dormant party organisations and a stagnant economy was a certain recipe for collapse. The Chinese party, he argues, has been “very proactive” in reforming itself and adjusting its policies to new conditions.

Not everyone is satisfied. A website set up by a German group to gather internet users’ comments on the Berlin Wall anniversary, www.berlintwitterwall.com, has been deluged with postings from Chinese complaining about China’s “great firewall”, as the country’s state-managed internet filtering system is often called. Access to the website has been blocked by China’s internet censors for several days.

But China’s media controls are not as impermeable as they were when the Berlin Wall fell. One magazine, Southern Metropolis Weekly—known for its risqué reporting—devoted 19 pages to the Berlin Wall in its October 30th issue. “Among those who love freedom, efforts will never cease to tear down walls that block and restrict interaction,” said one of the articles. Another said that no matter what difficulties Germans now faced, “there are probably very few who want to return to the days before the Berlin Wall’s collapse”.

When President Barack Obama comes to China on November 15th, he will diplomatically avoid any public suggestion that China’s party should disappear like its east European counterparts. In July, addressing a meeting of senior Chinese and American officials in Washington, Mr Obama noted that the tearing down of the Berlin Wall had unleashed a “rising tide of globalisation that continues to shape our world”. Perhaps to avoid embarrassing a crucial economic partner, Mr Obama did not mention the event’s impact on communism. Mr Deng’s strategy has paid off nicely.

The Economist

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Full article and photo: http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=14793745&source=hptextfeature

The next economic bubble?

When Nouriel Roubini talks, the world listens. Roubini is, of course, the once-obscure New York University economist whose dire warnings about a financial crisis proved depressingly prophetic. Last week, Roubini was shouting. Writing in the Financial Times, he warned that the Federal Reserve and other government central banks are fueling a massive new asset “bubble” that — while not in imminent danger of bursting — will someday do so with calamitous consequences.

Here is Roubini’s argument: The Fed is holding short-term interest rates near zero. Investors and speculators borrow dollars cheaply and use them to buy various assets — stocks, bonds, gold, oil, minerals, foreign currencies. Prices rise. Huge profits can be made.

But this can’t last, Roubini warns. The Fed will eventually raise interest rates. Or outside events (a confrontation with Iran, fear of a double-dip recession) will change market psychology. Then investors will rush to lock in profits, and the sell-off will trigger a crash. Stock, bond and commodity prices will plunge. Losses will mount, confidence will fall and the real economy will suffer.

“The Fed and other policymakers seem unaware of the monster bubble they are creating,” writes Roubini. “The longer they remain blind, the harder the markets will fall.” Haven’t we seen this movie before? Well, maybe.

Like home values a few years ago, asset prices have risen spectacularly. Since its March 9 low, the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index has gained more than 50 percent. An index of stocks for 22 “emerging-market” countries (including Brazil, China and India) has doubled from its recent low. Oil, now around $80 a barrel, has increased 150 percent from its recent low of $31. Gold is near an all-time high, around $1,090 an ounce. Meanwhile, the dollar has dropped against many currencies. Half of Roubini’s story resonates.

But the other half is less convincing: that prices, driven by cheap loans, have reached speculative levels. Remember that the economy seemed in a free-fall early this year. Terrified consumers and cautious companies hoarded cash, cut spending and dumped stocks. Since then, the mood and economic indicators have improved. Higher stock and commodity prices have mostly recovered the big losses of those panicky months. Today’s prices are usually below previous peaks. Oil’s peak was nearly $150 a barrel.

Similarly, the S&P 500, now around 1065, is a third lower than its peak on Oct. 9, 2007 (1565.15), and roughly where it was on Election Day 2008 (1005.75). By historical price-to-earnings ratios — the ratio of stock prices to per-share profits — these levels can be justified, if the economic recovery continues. With massive layoffs, business costs have been cut sharply. “The hope is that when consumers and companies start spending, the added sales will drop quickly to the bottom line [profits],” says S&P’s Howard Silverblatt.

Nor is it clear that cheap dollar loans are promoting speculation. “In the United States and Europe, banks are reducing lending,” says economist Hung Tran of the Institute of International Finance, a research organization of financial institutions. “You see hedge funds taking on less leverage [borrowed money] than in 2007.” What actually happened, he says, is that as investors became less fearful, they moved funds from cash into other markets, pushing up prices. He cites outflows this year from money market mutual funds exceeding $300 billion.

Indeed, that’s what the Fed wants, argues economist Drew Matus of Bank of America. Low interest rates on money market funds and checking accounts are “trying to force you to do something with” the money — either spend it or invest it. Depression prevention means supporting consumption and asset markets.

So, Roubini’s new bubble remains unproved. But this doesn’t invalidate his warning. We’ve learned that there’s a thin line between promoting economic expansion and fostering bubbles. With hindsight, lax Fed policies contributed to both the “tech” bubble of the late 1990s and the recent housing bubble, though how much is debated.

The most worrying signs of speculative excesses, says Tran, involve some Asian and Latin American developing countries. They’ve received sizable capital inflows (money from abroad). These have boosted local stock markets and reflect disaffection with the dollar. Their central banks — imitating the Fed — have also kept local interest rates low, fueling rapid credit growth. Some of their stock markets have exceeded previous highs. These countries face a dilemma. Raising rates may attract more “hot” foreign capital; keeping them low may encourage speculative borrowing in local currency.

But the dilemma arises from the Fed’s low interest rates and the weak dollar. The conclusion: how deftly the Fed navigates from its present policy matters for the world as well as the United States. If it’s too fast, it may kill the economic recovery; if it’s too slow, it may spawn bubbles — and kill the recovery.

Robert J. Samuelson, Washington Post

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Full article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/08/AR2009110817806.html

A high price for health reform

The House passage of health-care reform Saturday night should be a moment of celebration. In a country as wealthy as America, no one should have to go without medical care. As in other developed nations, everyone should have access to doctors, to medicine, to preventive services. The House bill would take America a giant step closer to that goal.

Here is the dilemma: The bill also could take America a step closer to bankruptcy. And for progressives in particular — for those who believe that government has a mission to help the poor and protect the vulnerable — that prospect should be alarming. If federal debt continues rising on its present path, hastened by a $1 trillion health-care bill, it is the poor and vulnerable who will be most harmed.

President Obama has acknowledged this dilemma and offered three broad answers: Health-care reform should not add to the deficit. It should control health-care costs. And, once reform is passed, the government will get serious about deficit reduction.

Unfortunately, the House bill fails his first test. True, the Congressional Budget Office has said that the bill is paid for. But the CBO is not allowed to count $250 billion in projected Medicare payments to doctors over the next 10 years, because the House — after first acknowledging that cost in its reform bill — decreed it had nothing to do with reform because lawmakers didn’t want to pay for it.

Nor is the CBO permitted to ask whether Congress will truly cut hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicare programs in coming years, as the House bill assumes. History suggests that legislators will not be deaf to the complaints of seniors and those who treat them when it comes time for the axe to fall.

As Post health reporter Ceci Connolly explained in a front-page story last week, the House bill also does not do much to lower costs. It includes some valuable pilot programs. But it doesn’t end the tax break for employer-provided insurance, a break that is both highly regressive and encourages spending. It doesn’t allow for much evidence-based medicine that could wring excess treatment out of the system. It doesn’t empower an independent commission that could make cost-control decisions that are too hard for Congress. It doesn’t target the cost of malpractice litigation and defensive medicine.

Obama’s third answer is welcome, but can he succeed? If he could not or chose not to raise revenue more substantially or reduce entitlement benefits while pleasing the Democratic faithful with universal health care, why would he fare better when he has no goodies left to offer?

The root difficulty is Obama’s insistence that the nation can afford a large new social program without raising taxes on anyone who earns less than $250,000 per year.

Under his plan, according to a CBO analysis, the government will be spending 24.5 percent of gross domestic product — the total value of the national economy — by 2019 while raising only 19 percent in revenue: a huge, unsustainable gap.

In the kind of fiscal crisis that might ensue, as progressive budget expert Robert Greenstein said recently, “the risk is high that the people with the least political power in this country could bear a disproportionate share of the burden even though, by and large, they’re lower on the income scale.” The government would spend more and more on interest payments while likely stinting on college scholarships, inner-city schools, and, above all, aid to the poor and near-poor here and abroad.

Expanded access to health care has rightly been a goal for decades. No civilized nation should allow sick people to go untreated. Yet neither should a civilized nation saddle its coming generations with a lower standard of living, a likely effect of U.S. profligacy if unchecked. No civilized nation should leave its government too bankrupt to help the poor.

Is there a way out of this dilemma? Cling to a hope that, as the bill winds through the Senate and conference, Obama puts his clout behind the progressive ideals of thrift and cost containment as well as universal access.

Fred Hiatt, Washington Post

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Full article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/08/AR2009110817808.html

Imprisoning a Child for Life

The United States could be the only nation in the world where a 13-year-old child can be sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole, even for crimes that do not include murder. This grim distinction should trouble Americans deeply, as should all of the barbaric sentencing policies for children that this country embraces but that most of the world has abandoned.

The Supreme Court must keep the international standard in mind when it hears arguments on Monday in Graham v. Florida and Sullivan v. Florida. The petitioners in both argue that sentencing children to life without the possibility of parole for a nonhomicide violates the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

The court came down on the right side of this issue in 2005 when it ruled that children who commit crimes before the age of 18 should not be subject to the death penalty. The decision correctly pointed out that juveniles were less culpable because they lacked maturity, were vulnerable to peer pressure and had personalities that were still being formed.

Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy said the practice of executing 16- and 17-year-olds violated the Eighth Amendment, conflicted with “evolving standards of decency” and isolated the United States from the rest of the world.

The Roper decision took scores of juveniles off death row. It also threw a spotlight onto state policies under which young juveniles were increasingly being tried in adult courts and sentenced to adult jails, often for nonviolent crimes.

The practice is even more troubling because it is arbitrary. Children who commit nonviolent crimes like theft and burglary are just as likely to be shipped off to adult courts as children who commit serious violent crimes. And the process is racially freighted, with black and Latino children more likely to be sent to adult courts than white children who commit comparable crimes.

The rush to try more and more children as adults began in the 1980s when the country was gripped by hysteria about an adolescent crime wave that never materialized. Joe Sullivan, the petitioner in Sullivan v. Florida, was sentenced to life without parole in 1989 — when he was just 13 — after a questionable sexual battery conviction. His two older accomplices testified against the younger, mentally impaired boy. They received short sentences, one of them as a juvenile.

The case of Terrance Graham has similar contours. A learning disabled child — born to crack-addicted parents — Mr. Graham was on probation in connection with a burglary committed when he was 16 when he participated in a home invasion. He, too, had older accomplices. He was never convicted of the actual crime but was given life without parole for violating the conditions of his probation.

These were two very troubled children in need of adult supervision and perhaps even time behind bars. But it is insupportable to conclude, as the courts did, that children who committed crimes when they were so young were beyond rehabilitation. The laws under which they were convicted violate current human rights standards and the Constitution.

Editorial, New York Times

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/opinion/09mon1.html

Life After the End of History

For most of the last century, the West faced real enemies: totalitarian, aggressive, armed to the teeth. Between 1918 and 1989, it was possible to believe that liberal democracy was a parenthesis in history, destined to be undone by revolution, ground under by jackboots, or burned like chaff in the fire of the atom bomb.

Twenty years ago today, this threat disappeared. An East German functionary named Günther Schabowski threw open his country’s border crossings, and by nightfall the youth of Germany were dancing atop the Berlin Wall, taking hammers to its graffiti-scarred facade. It was Nov. 9, 1989. The cold war was finished.

There will be speeches and celebrations to mark this anniversary, but not as many as the day deserves. (Barack Obama couldn’t even fit a visit to Berlin into his schedule.) By rights, the Ninth of November should be a holiday across the Western world, celebrated with the kind of pomp and spectacle reserved for our own Independence Day.

Never has liberation come to so many people all at once — to Eastern Europe’s millions, released from decades of bondage; to the world, freed from the shadow of nuclear Armageddon; and to the democratic West, victorious after a century of ideological struggle.

Never has so great a revolution been accomplished so swiftly and so peacefully, by ordinary men and women rather than utopians with guns.

Twenty years later, we still haven’t come to terms with the scope of our deliverance. Francis Fukuyama famously described the post-Communist era as “the end of history.” By this, he didn’t mean the end of events — wars and famines, financial panics and terrorist bombings. He meant the disappearance of any enduring, existential threat to liberal democracy and free-market capitalism.

This thesis has been much contested, but it holds up remarkably well. Even 9/11 didn’t undo the work of ’89. Osama bin Laden is no Hitler, and Islamism isn’t in the same league as the last century’s totalitarianisms. Marxism and fascism seduced the West’s elite; Islamic radicalism seduces men like the Fort Hood shooter. Our enemies resort to terrorism because they’re weak, and because we’re so astonishingly strong.

Yet nobody seems quite willing to believe it. Instead, we keep returning to the idea that liberal society is just as vulnerable as it was before the Berlin Wall came down.

On the right, pundits and politicians have cultivated a persistent cold-war-style alarmism about our foreign enemies — Vladimir Putin one week, Hugo Chavez the next, Kim Jong-il the week after that.

On the left, there’s an enduring fascination with the pseudo-Marxist vision of global capitalism as an enormous Ponzi scheme, destined to be undone by peak oil, climate change, or the next financial bubble.

Meanwhile, our domestic politics are shot through with antitotalitarian obsessions, even as real totalitarianism recedes in history’s rear-view mirror. Plenty of liberals were convinced that a vote for George W. Bush was a vote for theocracy or fascism. Too many conservatives are persuaded that Barack Obama’s liberalism is a step removed from Leninism.

These paranoias suggest a civilization that’s afraid to reckon with its own apparent permanence. The end of history has its share of discontents — anomie, corruption, “The Real Housewives of New Jersey.” And it may be that the only thing more frightening than the possibility of annihilation is the possibility that our society could coast on forever as it is — like a Rome without an Attila to sack its palaces, or a Nineveh without Yahweh to pass judgment on its crimes.

Humankind fears judgment, of course. But we depend on it as well. The possibility of dissolution lends a moral shape to history: we want our empires to fall as well as rise, and we expect decadence to be rewarded with destruction.

Not that we want to experience this destruction ourselves. But we want it to be at least a possibility — as a spur to virtue, and as a punishment for sin.

This was how the Soviet threat often played on the home front. Remove the stain of segregation, liberals argued in the 50s, or the Communists will win the world. Repent of your hedonism and pacifism, neoconservatives urged Americans in the 70s, or the West will go the way of Finland.

Neither group wanted the United States to lose the cold war. But they wanted to inhabit a world where America could lose, and pass into history, if we failed to live up to our ideals.

This could be why we don’t celebrate the anniversary of 1989 quite as intensely as we should. Maybe we miss living with the possibility of real defeat. Maybe we sense, as we hunt for the next great existential threat, that even the end of history needs to have an end.

Ross Douthat, New York Times

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/opinion/09douthat.html

Why the Berlin Wall Fell

From Truman to Reagan, the benefits of moral clarity.

In the debate over who deserves credit for causing the Berlin Wall to collapse on the night of November 9, 1989, many names come to mind, both great and small.

There was Günter Schabowski, the muddled East German politburo spokesman, who in a live press conference that evening accidentally announced that the country’s travel restrictions were to be lifted “immediately.” There was Mikhail Gorbachev, who made it clear that the Soviet Union would not violently suppress people power in its satellite states, as it had decades earlier in Czechoslovakia and Hungary. There were the heroes of Poland’s Solidarity movement, not least Pope John Paul II, who did so much to expose the moral bankruptcy of communism.

And there was Ronald Reagan, who believed the job of Western statesmanship was to muster the moral, political, economic and military wherewithal not simply to contain the Soviet bloc, but to bury it. “What I am describing now is a plan and a hope for the long term—the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history,” he said in 1982, to the astonishment and derision of his critics. Now, there was the audacity of hope.

All of these figures played their part, as did a previous generation of leaders who insisted that the West had a moral duty to defend the little enclave of freedom in Berlin.

Fulfilling that duty came at a price—71 British and American servicemen lost their lives during the Berlin Airlift—that more “pragmatic” politicians might have gladly forgone for the promise of better relations with the Soviets. Not a few NATO generals thought the defense of Berlin needlessly exposed their forces in a militarily indefensible position while giving the Russians an opportunity to blackmail the West as they advanced on strategically more vital ground, particularly Cuba.

Yet if the West’s stand in Berlin demonstrates anything, it is that moral commitments have a way of reaping strategic dividends over time. By ordering the airlift in 1948, Harry Truman saved a starving city and defied Soviet bullying. As importantly, he showed that the U.S. would not abandon Europe to its furies, as it had after World War I, thus helping to pave the way for the creation of NATO in April 1949.

By holding firm for 40 years, Truman and his successors transformed what was supposed to be the Atlantic alliance’s weakest point into its strongest. To know what the West stood for during most of those years, one merely had to go to Berlin, see the Wall, consider its purpose, and observe the contrasts between the vibrant prosperity on one side of the city and the oppressive monotony on the other.

Those contrasts were even more apparent to the Germans trapped on the wrong side of the Wall. Barbed wire, closed military zones and the machinery of communist propaganda could keep the prosperity of the West out of sight of most people living east of the Iron Curtain. But that wasn’t true for the people of East Berlin, many of whom merely had to look out their windows to understand how empty and cynical were the promises of socialism compared to the reality of a free-market system.

Yet it bears recalling that even these obvious political facts were obscure to many people who lived in freedom and should have known better. “Despite what many Americans think, most Soviets do not yearn for capitalism or Western-style democracy,” said CBS’s Dan Rather just two years before the Wall fell. And when Reagan delivered his historic speech in Berlin calling on Mr. Gorbachev to “tear down this wall,” he did so after being warned by some of his senior advisers that the language was “unpresidential,” and after thousands of protesters had marched through West Berlin in opposition.

It is a tribute to Reagan’s moral and strategic determination, as it was to everyone else who played their part in bringing down the Wall, that they could see through the sophistries of Soviet propagandists, their Western fellow travelers, and the legions of moral equivocators and diplomatic finessers and simply look at the Wall.

“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” George Orwell once said. That is what the heroes of 1989 did with unblinking honesty and courage for years on end until, at last, the Wall came tumbling down.

Editorial, Wall Street Journal

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Full article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704013004574515850127019522.html

Four Little Words

Reagan deliberately confronted criminal regimes with what they fear most: the publicly spoken truth about their moral weakness.

Ronald Reagan would embarrass himself and the country by asking Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, which was going to be there for decades. So the National Security Council (NSC) staff and State Department had argued for many weeks to get Reagan’s now famous line removed from his June 12, 1987, Berlin speech.

With a fervor and relentlessness I hadn’t seen over the prior seven years even during disputes about “the ash-heap of history” or “evil empire,” they kept up the pressure until the morning Reagan spoke the line. “Is that what I think it is?” I asked White House communications director Tom Griscom about a cable NSC Adviser Frank Carlucci had been nudging at us across the table during a White House senior staff meeting at the Cipriani Hotel in Venice. (Reagan had been attending a G-8 summit there and would shortly fly to the German capital.) With a shake of his head and a smile, Mr. Griscom confirmed the last-minute plea from State to drop the key sentence.

In the Reagan Library archives, similar documents chronicling the opposition’s intensity surface from time to time. I was gratified though not surprised to hear a few years back about one NSC staffer’s memo to Deputy National Security Adviser Colin Powell complaining that on multiple occasions, perhaps as many as five or six, I had declined as head of speechwriting—the writer talked about “a heated argument” between us—to remove the offending sentence.

Ronald Reagan: “Tear down this wall.”

And not only me. Shortly after the speech draft began making its review through the bureaucracy, the speechwriters, as Reagan true-believers, had deployed to do the interpersonal glad-handing that sometimes eases objections to speech passages. The Berlin event for us was the quintessential chance—in front of Communism’s most evocative monument—to enunciate the anti-Soviet counterstrategy that Reagan had been putting in place since his first weeks in office.

Well before a draft was circulated, I called the writer who had the assignment, Peter Robinson, and told him I was going to an Oval Office meeting.

Shortly before we walked to the West Wing, Peter told me what he wanted in the draft: “Tear down the wall.” I pushed back in my chair from my desk and let loose “fantastic, wonderful, great, perfect” and other inadequate exclamations. The Oval Office meeting agenda went quickly, with little chance to pop the question. But the discussion ceased for a moment toward the end, and I crowded in: “Mr. President, it’s still very early but we were just wondering if you had any thoughts at all yet on the Berlin speech?”

Pausing for only a moment, Reagan slipped into his imitation of impressionist Rich Little doing his imitation of Ronald Reagan—he made the well-known nod of the head, said the equally familiar “well,” and then added in his soft but resonant intonation while lifting his hand and letting it fall: “Tear down the wall.”

I had refused to talk to Peter until I was back in my office, such was my excitement. Slamming the door I shouted: “Can you believe it? He said just what you were thinking. He said it himself.”

So it was “the president’s line” now. And that made it easier, though not dispositively so, for the speechwriting department to fight off objections. But this is where the Berlin address was about more than the killer sentence.

As commentators have noticed, much of the rest of the speech is also memorable, with enduring ideas and stately cadences. Mr. Robinson, a Dartmouth and Oxford graduate, had been mentored in his career by such writer-luminaries as Dartmouth Prof. Jeffrey Hart and William F. Buckley Jr. This pedigree helped him understand how Reagan’s own conservatism, while less formally instructed, was powerfully ideational. Closer historical scrutiny of Reagan’s writings before the presidency, as well as the extent of his involvement in his presidential speeches, has revealed that he was more than merely a Great Communicator but also a man of ideas, a cerebral president.

And part of Reagan’s caring about larger ideas had to do with the nature of his foreign policy and the often overlooked rubrics he adopted. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has suggested that the Reagan years show that “containment” worked. In fact, Reagan explicitly and repeatedly rejected containment as too accommodationist, saying “containment is not enough.”

As part of this strategy, Reagan established offensive-minded, victory-conscious rubrics like “forward strategy for freedom,” “not just world peace but world freedom,” and “expanding the frontiers of freedom.”

Part of this was Reagan’s attempt to codify while in office a Cold War narrative developed by the anti-communist conservative movement that formed him over three decades even as he helped form it. That narrative saw liberal notions about how to handle communist regimes as provoking aggression or causing catastrophe: Franklin Roosevelt’s Stalin diplomacy, Harry Truman’s Marshall mission to China, John Kennedy’s offer of a “status quo” to Khrushchev in Vienna, Jimmy Carter’s statement that we have an “inordinate fear of communism.”

Reagan had the carefully arrived at view that criminal regimes were different, that their whole way of looking at the world was inverted, that they saw acts of conciliation as weakness, and that rather than making nice in return they felt an inner compulsion to exploit this perceived weakness by engaging in more acts of aggression. All this confirmed the criminal mind’s abiding conviction in its own omniscience and sovereignty, and its right to rule and victimize others.

Accordingly, Reagan spoke formally and repeatedly of deploying against criminal regimes the one weapon they fear more than military or economic sanction: the publicly-spoken truth about their moral absurdity, their ontological weakness. This was the sort of moral confrontation, as countless dissidents and resisters have noted, that makes these regimes conciliatory, precisely because it heartens those whom they fear most—their own oppressed people. Reagan’s understanding that rhetorical confrontation causes geopolitical conciliation led in no small part to the wall’s collapse 20 years ago today.

The current administration, most recently with overtures to Iran’s rulers and the Burmese generals, has consistently demonstrated that all its impulses are the opposite of Reagan’s. Critics who are worried about the costs of economic policies adopted in the last 10 months might consider as well the impact of the administration’s systematic accommodation of criminal regimes and the failure to understand what “good vs. evil” rhetoric can do.

Mr. Dolan was chief speechwriter at the Reagan White House for eight years and served in the George W. Bush administration as special adviser in the offices of the secretary of State and the secretary of Defense.

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Full article and photo: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704795604574522163362062796.html

Chávez’s Next Target: El Salvador

Twenty-first century socialism may have stumbled in Honduras but it is being tried again in El Salvador.

Fidel Castro learned a lot from Chilean President Salvador Allende’s failed power grab in 1973. And he used the lessons of that bitter defeat to coach Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez to dictatorship under the guise of democracy more than 25 years later.

Now Latin America’s revolutionaries may be experiencing another setback and this time they can’t claim that a military coup removed their would-be dictator. Instead, former Honduran president Manuel Zelaya was arrested by order of the Supreme Court and deposed by Congress. And despite enormous international pressure, the Honduran democracy has so far defended its rule of law.

Yet far from giving up, Castro protégés are already using what they learned in Tegucigalpa in El Salvador. Central America’s most promising free-market democracy is now fighting for its life.

Allende got the boot from his military because he had been trampling the constitution. The Supreme Court, the Bar Association and the Medical Association all denounced his disregard for the rule of law. According to James R. Whelan, author of a history of Chile titled “Out of the Ashes,” the lower house of its Congress passed a resolution on Aug. 22, 1973, that “said bluntly that it was the responsibility of the military . . . ‘to put an immediate end’ to lawlessness and ‘channel government action along legal paths . . . .’” Less than a month later, the military complied.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez welcomes El Salvador’s President-elect Mauricio Funes in Caracas.

The lesson from Chile for the hard left was that success depended on first getting control of the institutions with the power to check an aspiring tyrant. Now the leadership of El Salvador’s FMLN party, composed of many former guerrillas, is attempting just that.

It took some 20 years for the political party of the FMLN to get to the presidency. Many Salvadorans distrust it because of its violent history. But FMLN candidate Mauricio Funes ran as a moderate. The economy had suffered under former President Tony Saca of the center-right Arena Party. Disillusioned Salvadorans sought change.

Mr. Funes is still widely viewed as a moderate. Last week one former president, Alfredo Cristiani, told me in a telephone interview that he believes Mr. Funes is “genuinely not part of the group inside the FMLN that wants to take El Salvador to a dictatorship.”

Yet Mr. Cristiani is worried, and with good reason. There are plenty of extremists around Mr. Funes, starting with José Luis Merino, who is commonly believed to be the party’s de facto leader. His nom de guerre, “Ramiro,” showed up as an ally in correspondence among leaders of the Colombian guerrilla group FARC that were captured by the Colombian military in 2008.

A couple years back Mr. Merino explained in a media interview the FMLN’s political agenda this way: “It is to take power, to conquer the entire nation and, in that way, assure that the form of government does not change. Of course, not with bayonets or persecution. There are examples, like Venezuela, that is our model.”

The institutions that stand in Mr. Merino’s way are the congress, the Supreme Court and the electoral council. The party tried to wrest control of the high court’s constitutional panel, in collaboration with Mr. Saca while he was still president. Luckily, the backroom deal was challenged and the rule of law prevailed.

But the event showed that the FMLN really is following Mr. Merino’s “Venezuela model.” It also suggested that, just as critics have warned, Mr. Saca may be willing to help the FMLN. The former president knows that it is not uncommon for an incoming political party to investigate a former president. If Mr. Saca has anything to hide, the best chance of doing so would be to make sure there is no investigation.

Speculation about such political machinations increased last month when 12 Arena congressmen announced a break from their party. Calling themselves “independents,” they proceeded to vote with the FMLN against an investigation Arena wanted into abuses of agricultural subsidies.

What prompted the defection? Mr. Cristiani told me that a high-ranking member of the Christian Democratic Party (PDC) has told him that at least one PDC congressman has been offered $700,000 to vote with the FMLN. Separately, the secretary general of the PDC, Rodolfo Parker, has publicly warned of multiple offers from a middleman of between $300,000 and $500,000.

Mr. Saca denies any involvement in the vote-buying scheme, and surely Mr. Merino has enough motivations to act on his own. But rumors are swirling in the Salvadoran press about links between individuals close to Mr. Saca and alleged middlemen acting on behalf of Mr. Merino.

The Arena defection is no ordinary betrayal of the electorate. In Salvador voters choose a party ticket. Congressmen are named according to how many votes the party gets. These congressmen were not elected as individuals but rather as representatives of the elected party. With their votes the FMLN is now only one or two votes short of a two-thirds majority. If it gets that majority, the party can tell the moderate Mr. Funes what to do. Then Chávez acolytes will be well on their way to winning what their bedfellows could not in Honduras.

Mary Anastasia O’Grady, Wall Street Journal

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Full article and photo: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704795604574519852324673902.html

The Lords of Entitlement

Every medical insurance decision will be subject to rationing by politics.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi defied policy logic and public opinion late Saturday night, ramming through the House a nearly 2,000-page health-care leviathan that counts as the biggest expansion of the federal government since the New Deal. As President Obama likes to say, this was a “teachable moment” about our current government.

The vote was 220 to 215, with 39 House Democrats joining all but one Republican in opposition. Mrs. Pelosi had to cajole and bribe her way to the magic 218, and the list of her promises must be stacked to the ceiling.

The lone Republican, Joseph Cao, represents a Democratic-leaning Louisiana district and extracted a promise that Mr. Obama would increase Medicaid payments to his state, and even then he only voted after Democrats had already hit 218. Let no one suggest this was the “bipartisan” health reform that Mr. Obama has long promised.

The bill is instead a breathtaking display of illiberal ambition, intended to make the middle class more dependent on government through the umbilical cord of “universal health care.” It creates a vast new entitlement, financed by European levels of taxation on business and individuals. The 20% corner of Medicare open to private competition is slashed, while fiscally strapped states are saddled with new Medicaid burdens. The insurance industry will have to vet every policy with Washington, which will regulate who it must cover, what it can offer, and how much it can charge.

We have little sympathy for the insurers, or for that matter most of the other medical providers who signed on to this process only to claim now to be appalled by the result. The insurance lobby—led by Aetna CEO Ron Williams—made the Faustian bet that it could trade new regulations for more new subsidized customers who would face a tax penalty if they didn’t buy their insurance. The Pelosi bill includes the regulation but guts the tax penalty because it’s unpopular. Insurers will thus have to cover more sick people with fewer dollars, as healthy folk opt out of coverage until they are sick.

This writing was on the wall months ago, but the insurers chose to play an inside game rather than shape public opinion. Judging by their weekend statement—criticizing the House bill but vowing to seek “bipartisan” reform—they will now throw themselves at the mercy of the Senate. Good luck with that. The real victims are their customers, most of whom will pay more for insurance as the new mandates raise costs.

Mrs. Pelosi’s craftiest political turn was a last-minute compromise to strip federal funds from insurance plans that cover abortions. The deal—negotiated by Michigan Democrat Bart Stupak and supported by the National Right to Life Committee—gave cover to 40-some Democrats to support the larger bill.

However, as subsidized costs soar, government will have no choice but to ration medical care, starting with the aged and grievously ill. Is pre-natal life more valuable than the elderly? We’re reminded of the way pro-lifers supported Anthony Kennedy over Laurence Silberman for the Supreme Court in 1987 merely because Mr. Kennedy was a Catholic who claimed to personally oppose abortion. Mr. Stupak played the right-to-lifers like a Stradavarius.

The real importance of the abortion uproar is as preview of the politics that will dominate every medical coverage issue if ObamaCare becomes law. Every decision of what to insure or not—when an MRI can be used, or whether a stage-four breast cancer patient can get Avastin or some future expensive drug—will become subject to political intervention over moral disputes or budget constraints. Heretofore, these decisions have largely been made between a doctor and patient. This is the real “right to life” issue.

Perhaps the most unsurprising news in this drama was the collapse of the Blue Dog “deficit hawks.” Enough of them always cave in the end to give Mrs. Pelosi her way. It’s nonetheless worth noting the surrender of that most vocal scourge of deficits, Tennessee’s Jim Cooper, who voted aye on grounds that the bill can be improved in the Senate.

But Max Baucus’s Finance Committee bill includes a similar gimmick of making the numbers look good by using 10 years of new taxes to finance only seven years of spending (six in the House). The deficits explode in the second decade and beyond in both bills.

The House also contains a new government long-term insurance program that starts collecting premiums in 2011 but doesn’t starting paying benefits until 2016 and then runs out of money in 2029. North Dakota Democrat Kent Conrad called it “a Ponzi scheme of the first order, the kind of thing that Bernie Madoff would have been proud of” in an interview with the Washington Post in late October. Mr. Cooper has with a single vote made his entire career irrelevant.

Yet 39 other Democrats were given a pass on the vote, as the leadership knows how unpopular this bill is in most of America. They know this legislation is not the result of some national consensus in favor of expanding state power. Its passage was possible only because of temporary liberal majorities that are intent on fulfilling their dreams of a cradle-to-grave entitlement state. If they lose Blue Dog seats, or even their majority, in the short term, so be it. As the party of government, Democrats believe they will benefit in the long run from a much larger government.

Unless the Senate has an epiphany of common sense, Americans will be paying the bills for this willful exercise for generations to come.

Editorial, Wall Street Journal

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Full article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704402404574523613159447566.html

Obama leaning toward 34,000 more troops for Afghanistan

President Barack Obama is nearing a decision to send more than 30,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan next year, but he may not announce it until after he consults with key allies and completes a trip to Asia later this month, administration and military officials have told McClatchy.

As it now stands, the administration’s plan calls for sending three Army brigades from the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Ky. and the 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, N.Y. and a Marine brigade, for a total of as many as 23,000 additional combat and support troops.

Another 7,000 troops would man and support a new division headquarters for the international force’s Regional Command (RC) South in Kandahar, the Taliban birthplace where the U.S. is due to take command in 2010. Some 4,000 additional U.S. trainers are likely to be sent as well, the officials said.

The first additional combat brigade probably would arrive in Afghanistan next March, the officials said, with the other three following at roughly three-month intervals, meaning that all the additional U.S. troops probably wouldn’t be deployed until the end of next year. Army brigades number 3,500 to 5,000 soldiers; a Marine brigade has about 8,000 troops.

The plan would fall well short of the 80,000 troops that Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, suggested as a “low-risk option” that would offer the best chance to contain the Taliban-led insurgency and stabilize Afghanistan.

It splits the difference between two other McChrystal options: a “high-risk” one that called for 20,000 additional troops and a “medium-risk” one that would add 40,000 to 45,000 troops.

The officials, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss internal administration planning, cautioned that Obama’s decision isn’t final, and won’t be until after administration officials discuss it with the NATO allies at a Nov. 23 meeting of the alliance’s North Atlantic Council and its Military Committee.

Coalition forces now include 67,000 U.S. and 42,000 troops from other countries. The Army’s counterinsurgency manual estimates that an all-out counterinsurgency campaign in a country with Afghanistan’s population would require about 600,000 troops.

Although the administration privately is holding out little hope of persuading Canada or the Netherlands to abandon their plans to withdraw combat troops, much less getting additional allied troops, it wants to avoid creating the impression — at home and abroad — that the U.S. “is going it alone” in Afghanistan, said one military official.

In an interview last week with The New York Times, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner complained that the American administration is leaving its NATO allies in the dark about its new strategy.

“What is the goal? What is the road? And in the name of what?” Kouchner asked, according to the Times. “Where are the Americans? It begins to be a problem . . . . We need to talk to each other as allies.”

The officials said that Obama also wants to complete his Nov. 11-19 Asia trip and a state visit by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India, the arch foe of Pakistan, a key U.S. ally in the war on terror, before he announces his Afghanistan plan.

Administration officials also want time to launch a public relations offensive to convince an increasingly skeptical public and a wary Democratic Congress — which must agree to fund the administration’s plan — that the war, now in its ninth year and inflicting rising casualties, is one of “necessity,” as Obama said earlier this year.

“This is not going to be an easy sell, especially with the fight over health care and the (Democratic) party’s losses” of the governors’ mansions in New Jersey and Virginia last week, said one official.

Generating public, congressional and international support for a troop increase will require heavy pressure on Afghan President Hamid Karzai to crack down on endemic corruption and drug trafficking, surrender more power to provincial and local governments and improve public services, the officials said. Karzai won a second term last week when his first-round election opponent bowed out of a run-off.

“Another reason for the president to hold off for a bit on ordering more troops to Afghanistan is that we can tell Karzai that if he doesn’t act firmly now, there won’t be any support for a troop increase,” said one official. “That has the added advantage of being true, and it’s easier to hold off on sending more troops than it is to threaten to pull them out once they’re there.”

U.S. allies already have begun applying pressure. On Thursday, Kouchner called Karzai “corrupt,” and the next day, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said that if Karzai’s government didn’t attack corruption, international support against the Taliban-led insurgency would evaporate.

“Sadly, the government of Afghanistan had become a byword for corruption,” Brown said in a speech. “And I am not prepared to put the lives of British men and women in harm’s way for a government that does not stand up against corruption.”

As McClatchy reported last week, the Obama administration has been quietly working with U.S. allies and Afghan officials on an “Afghanistan Compact,” a package of reforms and anti-corruption measures that it hopes will boost popular support for Karzai and erase the doubts about his legitimacy raised by his fraud-tainted re-election.

The officials said that as of Friday, when Obama’s top military advisers met for at least the seventh time to discuss the strategy in Afghanistan, the president had spent nearly 20 hours in meetings on Afghanistan. The planned troop increase may be his best hope to balance the competing political, economic and international pressures his administration is feeling.

Republicans have pressed for a decision, and many at the Pentagon and in conservative political circles argue that Obama, who has little experience in military affairs, should back his commander and send him whatever troops he’s requested. The president, they note, called McChrystal the best general the military had to tackle Afghanistan when he appointed him to his post last summer.

Other military officers, particularly in the Army, warn that committing more troops to Afghanistan could risk “breaking” the force by reducing the time soldiers can spend at home between deployments, overtaxing equipment and destroying families. Those problems could worsen if Iraq’s January elections are delayed or disrupted, and with them the administration’s timetable for withdrawing U.S. forces from that country.

Many Democrats, meanwhile, are urging Obama not to send more troops to Afghanistan. Some in his own administration, notably Vice President Joe Biden, aren’t convinced that more troops would guarantee success and advocate instead more drone attacks and more training for Afghan forces.

Training Afghan troops, police and border guards, however, is proving to be a slow and frustrating process, hampered by corruption, illiteracy, ethnic rivalries and logistical problems, and carried out in the shadow of doubts about what kind of government the troops are serving.

Finally, Obama must reckon with domestic economic pressures. The unemployment rate reached 10.2 percent in October, the highest since 1983, and there are growing fears that changes in the nation’s health care system could send the federal budget deficit even higher.

Obama campaigned saying that he’d fund the Iraq and Afghanistan wars from the defense budget, but Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last week that the Afghan war — which some administration officials privately concede could cost $700 billion to $1 trillion — might require a supplemental funding bill next year. Among the cost estimates the Pentagon is considering is $1 trillion over 10 years, two senior defense officials told McClatchy.

Because of these pressures, it’s become “highly likely that the administration would send more troops,” said Paul Pillar, the director of Strategic Studies at Georgetown University. “Then it is a matter of degree,” particularly given the struggling U.S. economy.

For all the debate and deliberation, however, the proposed new deployments still may not answer the fundamental question about Afghanistan, Pillar said: Would a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan pose a threat to the United States?

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Full article: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/78516.html

The literate burglar

Author Allison Hoover Bartlett on the curious psyche of a rare-book thief

Allison Hoover Bartlett

Rare books provoke passion in collectors, who expend untold time and treasure in their pursuit. Some surrender their scruples, too.

Take the case of John Charles Gilkey, who stole rare volumes, many worth thousands of dollars, from frustrated dealers around the country. In his compulsion and his scholarly commitment, Gilkey set himself apart from the other criminals with whom he shared time in jail. He took classes and visited libraries to better understand the authors and works he planned to find and steal. He built a veritable library of stolen books – first editions of children’s classics; autographed copies of great novels such as Thomas Hardy’s “Mayor of Casterbridge” and Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man.” The extent of his thefts, and the whereabouts of many books, is still not fully known.

He might never have been caught but for the diligence of Ken Sanders. A ponytailed Utah bookseller whose shop was a countercultural hangout, Sanders found a new calling as an amateur detective when he volunteered to serve as security chair for the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America. As Sanders uncovered the patterns of thievery that eventually led him to Gilkey, he became as absorbed in the the hunt for his nemesis as he would have been in pursuit of a rare 17th century withcraft tome, or a signed copy of “Finnegan’s Wake.”

His pursuit is recounted in “The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession” (Riverhead), by Allison Hoover Bartlett. Her book delves into a world in which books are objects of meditation and desire, touchstones of memory, and talismans with almost magical powers. It’s both curious and moving to witness the struggles of these bibliophiles in a time when the book itself is in its season of economic, cultural, and technological turmoil.

Bartlett will appear in Boston at the Antiquarian Book Fair at Hynes Convention Center on Nov. 15. She spoke with us by phone from her home in San Francisco.

IDEAS: You’ve said you love reading but don’t share the collecting impulse yourself. Why do people dedicate their lives to hunting down rare books?

BARTLETT: The collector has this very deep appreciation for the book as a physical object that’s mixed with that other love that the rest of us have. And it seems to be almost something you’re born with. With lots of the collectors I met, it seemed like it’s an unidentified genetic trait. Because a lot of them grew up around collectors, their parents were collectors or their uncle was, and it just seems to be almost innate, like a musical ear.

IDEAS: For many collectors, you write, the goal is “to stumble upon a book whose scarcity or beauty or history or provenance is even more seductive than the story printed between its covers.” Aren’t they losing sight of something crucial?

BARTLETT: I don’t think they lose it so much. I think it just runs parallel to a love of the content. Most of the collectors I met, while they didn’t read the books they collected because they wanted to preserve the physical bodies, they were avid readers.

IDEAS: Like legitimate collectors, Gilkey’s motivated by a passion for books. What drove him to steal?

BARTLETT: I think that in many ways Gilkey is a loner, an outsider… He wanted the world to see him as a cultured erudite gentleman who revered literature. But there’s a lot of anger alongside that also; I think he’s frustrated that he’s not yet seen that way. And he has gone to prison repeatedly, I think five or six times at least for this. And what happens when he gets caught and goes to prison is, he wants revenge…. like OK, now I’m getting even, now I’m getting the book collection I deserve.

IDEAS: You write that “for Gilkey . . . having not paid for books… adds even more to their allure.”

BARTLETT: He told me at one point that he kept the books that he had stolen on a separate shelf from the ones that he had not. Although I’m not aware of very many books that he did not steal; if they were under twenty dollars at a library sale he might buy them.

IDEAS: You see movies about jewel thieves and art thieves where they’re stylish and debonair. Here, the thief becomes almost a book-world version of these characters – kind of an outsider intellectual, or a parody of a scholar.

BARTLETT: He’s so amiable and thoughtful, so soft-spoken – and there he is in his orange prison garb behind a glass partition. And it was that juxtaposition of the bookish and the criminal that made me think of “To Catch a Thief” and “Catch Me If You Can” and all those other movies where you have this character who is able to pass in a well-to-do, rarefied world, and pass as one of them, and steal them blind.

IDEAS: What made Ken Sanders such a dogged pursuer?

BARTLETT: I think he just felt very protective over his colleagues. These are people for the most part that don’t make a lot of money. They’re in this business because they love books… He would just become furious when he would hear of a theft and he was determined to figure out who this was.

IDEAS: What happens to rare books in the age of the e-book? What does the future of bibliomania look like?

BARTLETT: You know, the collectors have said, “It all comes down to this: you’ve gotta be able to smell it.” And as funny as that sounds, they’re getting to something essential, which is that reading a physical book is a sensory, intimate experience. And a lot of us don’t want to lose that, because smell is connected to memory, and memory is, as I said earlier – a book collection is a kind of memoir.

IDEAS: If you were going to start stealing books, what book would you go after?

BARTLETT: There’s a manuscript I describe in the first chapter by Flaubert, a handwritten manuscript. And I recently also saw a typed manuscript, but marked up, by Flannery O’Connor. And those are what really grab me. That’s the first time when I was working on this book that I thought, oh, now I understand what a thief feels, because I really want that and I’m sure I can’t afford it… If I could get an early draft of “In Cold Blood” with Capote’s notes all over it, that would just be gold.

IDEAS: There you go. There’s a little thief in every one of us.

BARTLETT: Oh absolutely. I’ve had several authors secretly admit to me that they’ve stolen books.

Matthew Battles is a frequent contributor to Ideas.

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Full article and photo: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/11/08/qa_author_allison_hoover_bartlett_on_the_curious_psyche_of_a_rare_book_thief/

Laughing babies

IN THE MATTER of forwarded Internet tidbits, I am, I’m afraid, reliably ungracious. Send me a link to something pertinent, shocking, or just plain LOL-hilarious that you’ve come across in the course of your 2.25 hours of daily Web-noodling, and I’ll ignore it. I don’t care if it’s the cleverest blog post ever, or footage of two polar bears in combat: the tiny current of excitation and interest that might have run twice around the world already will stop dead with me.

Why am I such a non-conductive grump? Because I’m 41, dammit, and my powers of concentration are weak. My attention span is not a span at all; it is a reed, a strand, a sliver. I need focus, that’s what I need. So: links, hyperlinks, amusing pictures, YouTuberies, and headlines from The Onion – nothing to me but the sound of the Great Blogger Below, the arch-manufacturer of distraction, tapping happily at his fireproof keyboard. Get thee behind me, Internet tidbits!

Or most of thee, at any rate, because there is one class of frivolous Web stuff for which I make an exception. Shoot me a link to a laughing baby, and – immediately, avidly – I’m there. If you’ve never seen one, these are micro-videos, generally less than a minute long and filmed under the most domestic of circumstances, of very small children laughing their heads off. A 9-month-old named Ethan, for example, seated on the floor like a miniature Diogenes, takes hold of a sheet of newspaper; his father, extending an arm from behind the camera, pulls it away; a brisk and delicious tearing sound is heard, and Ethan is left holding a ripped fragment. What could be funnier? Ethan literally collapses with merriment.

Repetition, of course, improves the joke enormously – an important element of the laughing-baby video is the unnerving sense that, with no change in the dynamics of the situation, the baby might just go on laughing forever. As his father proffers the newspaper again and then pulls it away (rip!), proffers it again and then pulls it away (rip!), Ethan’s delight seems to corkscrew in on itself, bearing down in spirals toward some white-hot point of airless, completely silent baby laughter.

Baby Ethan is very popular on YouTube, but the Elvis of infant mirth, the craze-starter, is William Nilsson, the Swedish baby filmed laughing in his kitchen. Ping! says his off-camera dad in a high voice and then Pyong! in a lower voice, while William sits in his high chair chuckling rosily and complacently, as if at some especially fine piece of dinner theater. Since the video was posted to YouTube in 2006 it has been viewed more than 95 million times. Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain has seen it at least once: when she visited Google’s London headquarters in October last year Her Majesty was ceremonially exposed to the laughing baby. You can find it (naturally) on YouTube – the Queen, surrounded by grinning Google-serfs, watching baby William with her most unreadable smile.

For Aristotle, laughter was what separated us from the beasts. Man, in his defining essence, was both animal syllogans and animal ridens – the creature who reasons, and the creature who laughs. This kind of thinking offends the modern mind: a study published this year in Current Biology makes the case that, since gorillas and baby bonobos can be induced (by tickling) to make laughter-like noises, laughter itself is no longer to be considered “anthropomorphically” but rather zoologically, as a cross-species phenomenon. The behavioral neurologist VS Ramachandran has speculated that laughter evolved as a response to false alarms: “The main purpose of laughter might be to allow the individual to alert others in the social group that the detected anomaly is nothing to worry about.” Relax – ha, ha, ha! – it’s a tree stump, not a saber-toothed tiger. Something like that. Then there’s the view that laughter comes straight from the mouth of God, and is synonymous with Creation itself: “at the seventh burst of laughter,” as a third-century Egyptian alchemical papyrus has it, “the soul appeared.”

Where along this spectrum can we locate our explosive, cackling babies? Their laughter is obviously pre-linguistic and innocent of the trappings of “humor,” and yet at the same time it has a peculiar quality of age or knowingness: they sound less like cherubim than like bawdy medievals, saluting with bronchial enjoyment some particularly monstrous and perennial punch line. Laughter has an ancient association with rebellion, too – revolt at the cosmic order, and the toppling of earthly idols. We might look again at the Queen’s encounter with baby William, at the expression of faint forbearance on her face as she stands there in her stodgy hat and coat, eavesdropping on his uproar. A crowned head discomfited by a laughing baby – now that’s a link worth linking to.

James Parker writes regularly for Ideas and is a contributing editor at The Atlantic.

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See also: YouTube (William Nilsson): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5P6UU6m3cqk&feature=player_embedded

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Full article: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/11/08/let_us_now_praise___laughing_babies/

Why fundamentalism will fail

A seemingly unstoppable force is being undone from the inside

IN 1910, A COHORT of ultra-conservative American Protestants drew up a list of non-negotiable beliefs they insisted any genuine Christian must subscribe to. They published these “fundamentals” in a series of widely distributed pamphlets over the next five years. Their catalog featured doctrines such as the virgin birth, the physical resurrection of Christ, and his imminent second coming. The cornerstone, though, was a belief in the literal inerrancy of every syllable of the Bible, including in matters of geology, paleontology, and secular history. They called these beliefs fundamentals, and proudly styled themselves “fundamentalists” – true believers who feared that liberal movements like the social gospel and openness to other faiths were eroding the foundation of their religion.

Protestant fundamentalism was not an isolated impulse. The same tendency had already appeared in Catholicism; beginning with Pius IX, who issued his famous “Syllabus of Errors” in 1864, most popes severely condemned all liberal Catholic efforts. Muslims hate having the word “fundamentalist” applied to them, considering it a foreign term. Nonetheless, when some 19th-century Koran scholars sought to rethink their faith in the light of science and democracy, an angry opposition resisted these new ideas. Then, as European colonial powers tightened their grip on the region, other thinkers, like the Egyptian Sayyed Qutb, scorned any such reform efforts as imperialist pollution.

The expansion of religious fundamentalism in recent decades has been notable, as people around the world have sought certainty in the face of dizzying change. In the second half of the 20th century, old-time religion drew Americans jarred by their country’s setbacks in Korea and Vietnam, or disoriented by the civil rights movement and youth revolt of the 1960s. In Europe, American-style fundamentalism failed to make much progress, but highly conservative Catholic parties and groups, sometimes called “integralist,” gained strength in some countries. In the Muslim sphere, as oil funneled immense riches to the elite, it also drove hordes of village people into angry urban poverty. When secular solutions failed them, many were attracted to the promise of a more equal society based strictly on the Koran.

As the 20th century ended and a new one began, fundamentalism has taken on more formidable shapes, both politically and religiously. Though most of its adherents work through spiritual and educational channels, the small minority that turn to violence have caught the media’s attention. If some seem ready to die for faith, others are ready to kill for it, gunning down abortion doctors in church, hijacking planes, and exploding bombs at weddings. For plenty of thoughtful people, fundamentalism has come to represent the most dangerous threat to open societies since the fall of communism.

However, the truth is that for all its apparent strength, the fundamentalist sun is setting on all horizons. Throughout the Muslim world growing numbers of people are becoming impatient with violent groups that, in the name of Allah, seem capable of killing but incapable of producing jobs, food, or health care. Observers on the ground report that popular support for the jihadist wing of the Taliban is falling off as it fails to address the real life problems that afflict people in Afghanistan. (The other parts of the Taliban are inspired less by fundamentalism than by tribal loyalties and a traditional aversion to foreigners.) Al Qaeda faces a similar dismal prospect. Dr. Audrey Kurth Cronin, a professor at the National War College in Washington and author of a new book, “How Terrorism Ends,” says, “I think Al Qaeda is in the process of imploding. That is not necessarily the end. But the trends are in a good direction.” In Iran, the fact that the clerics have resorted to beating and imprisoning their critics reveals the shakiness of their hold.

In America, the religious right, which started as a crusade, is becoming a niche. Randall Terry’s Operation Rescue, which stages demonstrations at abortion clinics, has just announced that it is nearly bankrupt. The shrillest TV evangelists are losing audiences to more moderate “evangelical-lite” preachers. Fundamentalist congregations are ceding ground to Pentecostals and mega-churches, which embrace a wider social agenda and teach the spiritual authority – not the literal inerrancy – of the Bible.

Surveys have shown that the rapid growth of evangelical Protestantism in Latin America has not produced a replication of the American religious right, but rather a moderate leftward tilt. A majority of Brazilian evangelicals, for example, voted for President Lula, who ran as a Workers Party candidate. In South Korea, Christianity has grown faster than anywhere in the world and now accounts for over a third of the population. But its theology tends toward moderate evangelicalism with an ecumenical bent.

The fading of fundamentalism marks a decisive change in global society. It has already freed Christians, Muslims, and Jews to explore what all three have in common as they now begin to cooperate in confronting nuclear weapons, poverty, and climate change. Thus, when a hundred Muslim scholars invited Christians two years ago to join in a quest for what they called a “Common Word’ on issues of justice, Christians from a wide spectrum of denominations responded favorably. Four important “Common Word” conferences have been held so far, involving hundreds of scholars and religious leaders. The king of Morocco has hosted a series of gatherings for mullahs, rabbis, and Christian clerics.

In the international political sphere, where our obsession with fundamentalism once prevented us from recognizing other developments, we can now begin to see the picture more clearly. With the more fanatical wings of their populations dwindling, countries where fundamentalists once wielded undue influence might become a bit easier to negotiate with. As the ranks of fundamentalists thin in the Muslim world, Western policy makers will be able to address insurgencies and terrorism as products of nationalist and tribal loyalties, amenable to political solutions, rather than as violent outgrowths of religion.

THE VARIOUS MOVEMENTS we lump together as “fundamentalist” differ from one another, but they bear some family resemblances. Each reaches back selectively into its own tradition and exhumes some text or rite or pattern, declaring it to be the bedrock of faith. For Protestant fundamentalists, it was a righteous society in which, they believed, a verbally inspired Bible had held sway. For Catholics, especially after Vatican II, it was the Latin Mass, the symbol of a changeless authoritative tradition. For Muslims it was the short era of the “rightly guided caliphs” who led Islam immediately after the death of the Prophet, before disunity shattered their community and outsiders warped their civilization.

But fundamentalist movements share another quality. They are inherently fractious, and this is one reason for their broad decline. When your view of reality is the only acceptable one, you cannot compromise. Almost from its inception, American Protestant fundamentalism split into warring factions. Its bellicosity toward “liberals and modernists” was quickly turned on fellow fundamentalists who were seen as not tough enough on the enemy. Since the Bible told them not to be “unequally yoked together with unbelievers,” the question of with whom one could properly associate became deeply vexed. The most ardent partisans seceded from their denominations, and soon began to quarrel about whether they should even fraternize with their fellow fundamentalists who wanted to remain in their previous churches to fight the “liberals.” The fundamentalists organized new seminaries to protest the older ones they thought had become “modernist,” but soon these new institutions split over fine points of doctrine.

Similarly, the modern religious right, the political arm of fundamentalism, foundered on its inability to compromise or build coalitions. Local branches of the Christian Coalition became furious with national office staffers for cooperating with others in order to pass legislation.

The same fragmenting logic eats away at Jewish “land fundamentalists,” who base their claims to the West Bank on a literal reading of the biblical book of Joshua (“conquer and settle”). They despise the Jews who disagree with them even more than the Palestinians whose terrain they claim. Some ultra-orthodox Jews still refuse to accept the legitimacy of the state of Israel, since only the Messiah is supposed to reclaim the Promised Land.

In Islam, a tendency to fractiousness appeared in the first years of its history when a dispute arose over who was to succeed the Prophet, who died without a male heir. This division between Shiites and Sunnis simmered for centuries, and burst into flames with the emergence of Islamic fundamentalism. The Wahabist sect, now centered in Saudi Arabia, and the rise of political Islam reopened old wounds. Today this internal strife fractures the Muslim world, and the vehemence it generates is directed first of all against fellow Muslims, and only secondarily against the West.

This tendency toward factionalism exists in other religious movements, of course, as it does in political, artistic, and cultural ones. But in religious fundamentalism such breakups become especially lethal because the stakes are so high: eternal salvation or damnation hang in the balance.

ANOTHER REASON WHY fundamentalists are faltering today has to do with the world outside. The fundamentalist world view is unbending and monochrome, but today’s world is variable and multi-hued, and the plurality is more and more visible. Thanks to the increase of immigrants from Asia and the Middle East, mosques and pagodas now share streets with churches and synagogues in Europe and America. People of the previous generation could retreat into a culturally isolated community and pull down the shades, but their children live every day with a heightened, web-enhanced awareness of a diverse world.

Their college roommates and office colleagues represent a range of religious backgrounds, and inherited prejudices can soften and melt when confronted with good, morally upright people from different belief systems. Virtually anywhere on the planet, it is hard to imagine the grandchildren of fundamentalists reconciling themselves to their tightly constricted spiritual world.

Fundamentalism is defined by its one-way-only exclusivism. But today spiritually inclined people view the once-high walls between religious traditions as porous. They borrow freely. Synagogues and churches incorporate Asian meditation practices into their services. Instead of a single churchly allegiance, people now assemble “repertories” of elements from a number of sources. They may attend Mass, take a yoga class, and keep a Buddhist devotional book on their bedside table. Clerics often denounce this as “cafeteria style” religion, but the current of religious history is flowing against them.

Father Thomas Merton, the leading Catholic contemplative writer of the 20th century, died while staying at a Buddhist monastery in Bangkok. Martin Luther King attributed his commitment to non-violence to Gandhi, who in turn said he learned it from Jesus and Tolstoy. The Dalai Lama has written a reverent biography of Jesus. For none of these profoundly religious men did the appreciation of other faiths weaken their anchoring in their own. In fact each said that it enhanced it.

The very nature of human religiousness is changing in a way inimical to fundamentalist thought. The most rapidly growing spiritual groups today focus not on someone else’s authority, but on a direct encounter with the divine. Whatever else it may mean that so many people call themselves “spiritual but not religious,” it suggests they still yearn for contact with the sacred, but are suspicious of the scaffolding, the doctrines, and hierarchies through which it has often been conveyed.

In Christianity, the fastest-growing wing of the church is the Pentecostal/Charismatic wave, which is spreading swiftly around the world, even in mainland China. It now numbers about 600 million, accounting for one in every four Christians. One writer has called them “main street mystics.” Young Jews have a growing interest in their Hasidic and mystical heritage. Among Muslims, it is the gentle but ecstatic Sufi version that is growing fastest, not the suicide bomber cults. All these movements, especially since they seem particularly attractive to the young, represent a fatal threat to fundamentalism.

The plethora of emerging new spiritualities has its own problems, of course. They are often intellectually incoherent or melt into a self-centered narcissism. They can become vacuous and faddish. (Madonna and other Hollywood celebrities are now “into Kabala,” the ancient Jewish mystical tradition.) They can become highly individualistic, lacking any vision of social justice. Esoteric and snobbish at times, they often fail to reach the poor and dispossessed people for whom Jesus, the Buddha, and the Jewish prophets had such concern.

But a tectonic shift in religion is underway, and the fundamentalist moment is ending. A new and promising chapter in the long story of human faith is beginning. Its untidiness often reminds me of the exuberant earliest years of Christianity. Maturity comes with time. Future historians may look back on the 20th century as a time when something called “fundamentalism” interrupted, but only briefly, the age-old human search for a way to live in the face of mystery, and to envision what Martin Luther King called a “beloved community.”

Harvey Cox, Hollis Research Professor of Divinity at Harvard University, is author of “The Future of Faith (HarperOne).”

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Full article and photo: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/11/08/why_fundamentalism_will_fail/

Can you relate?

The rise of a Hollywood-ism; plus, going R-free

“RELATABLE – WHAT IS that?” demanded the subject line of Christina Thompson’s e-mail. The message itself took a calmer tone. Thompson, who edits the Harvard Review and teaches writing and editing, has been hearing the word more and more often, she said, to describe “something one can relate to, as in ‘it’s a very relatable book.’

“I’m wondering where this comes from,” she wrote. “I’m sure it was not around when I was young.” And though we are all vulnerable to the Recency Illusion – the impression that a usage is newer than it really is – in the case of the new relatable, Thompson may be right.

There was an old relatable, too, dating to the early 19th century, when it was used to mean either “able to be told” or “able to be related to something else.” The pop-psych relatable is much more recent; it came along only after the 20th century had given relate its new sense, “to have an attitude of personal and sympathetic relationship to.” The Oxford English Dictionary’s first example of the usage, dated 1950, is an education journal’s reference to “the varying ways children relate to the teacher.”

Relatable, however, got its big break not in education or psychology but in Hollywood. By the late ’70s, it began to appear in print to describe the kind of character TV and movie audiences will respond to emotionally – or “relate to.” (As early as 1977, a Los Angeles Times reviewer was already applying the word to a novelist’s creations: “There isn’t a single likable or relatable character between the covers.”)

In the decades since, its universal adoption by the TV industry has inevitably pushed relatable toward mainstream status. In 1988, Billy Crystal told the New York Times that Bill Cosby’s albums were “relatable.” In 1995, the updated Nancy Drew was declared “very relatable.”

So is relatable respectable? Not quite, says Bryan Garner. In the new edition of Garner’s Modern American Usage, he ranks relate to 4 out of 5 (“Ubiquitous, but …”) on his language-change index. (He doesn’t deign to mention relatable.)

And plenty of readers – Thompson and me included – still hear relatable as entertainment-industry jargon, a word that only a callow youth would use in the context of classic literature. (Is Lear relatable? Becky Sharp? Captain Ahab? I guess we would have to concede that Austen’s leading ladies are “relatable” – but then, they’ve long since been transformed into screen stars.)

Another possible objection to relatable, though I haven’t heard anyone make it, is its formation: What it really means is relate-to-able. The 19th-century usagists campaigned fiercely against reliable on similar grounds: Obviously, their reasoning went, we don’t rely anything, we rely upon it. The right expression would be rely-upon-able.

But the people didn’t listen, and reliable settled into the language despite the mavens’ resistance. Relatable, which has met no such opposition, seems pretty certain to follow.

. . .

R-LESS IN BOSTON: Part one of Gary Lucia’s tale will be familiar to anyone who has spent some time in this region. At his workplace, he reported recently, he saw a non-working drawer labeled with a sign alerting the carpenter: BROKEN DRAW.

For people with nonrhotic, or r-less, accents – and that category isn’t limited to native Bostonians – the pronunciation “draw” (or perhaps “drawuh”) is entirely normal. And it’s no surprise that some of those people, after a lifetime of hearing “draws,” would slip into the phonetic spelling.

But part two of Lucia’s story has a plot twist. “I work in a commission-based store,” he writes, “so we have to sell enough to make our ‘draw’ before we start earning commission. Several co-workers not from Boston, hearing the Boston-accented employees saying ‘I have to make my draw,’ thought the Bostonians were saying ‘drawer’ with the local accent. So they started saying things like, ‘Just $500 more until I make my drawer!’ ”

Newcomers, add this footnote to your Wicked Awesome glossary: Sometimes “draws” are furniture, and sometimes they’re underpants. But when it comes to commission sales, a “draw” really is a draw.

. . .

REGARDING HENRY: In the Oct. 25 Word column, about the phrase “not to put too fine a point on it,” I mistakenly fingered Henry James as a heavy user of the expression. Not so, e-mailed Kirk McElhearn, who has just set out to re-read James’s fiction (he blogs about it at Reading Henry James), and who had the e-texts at his fingertips.

James did use “too fine a point on it” – the OED quotes him – but sparingly, not heavily, and perhaps only in his nonfiction. As McElhearn guessed, I was misremembering; James was indeed a heavy user of fine and, especially, in fine, meaning “to sum up, finally.” In fine, I am exposed as an inferior Jamesian with a faulty memory. Time to go back to the books!

Jan Freeman’s book, “Ambrose Bierce’s ‘Write It Right’: The Celebrated Cynic’s Language Peeves Deciphered, Appraised, and Annotated for 21st-Century Readers,” will be published next week by Walker & Co.

Jan Freeman, Boston Globe

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Full article: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/11/08/the_word_can_you_relate/

Today in History – November 8

Today is Sunday, Nov. 8, the 312th day of 2009. There are 53 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight in History

On Nov. 8, 1909, the original Boston Opera House first opened with a performance of “La Gioconda” by Amilcare Ponchielli.

On this date

In 1520, the Danish king Christian II began mass executions of Swedish nobles in what became known as the Stockholm Bloodbath.

In 1859, philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered a lecture in Boston in which he described abolitionist John Brown, condemned for his raid on Harpers Ferry, Va., as “the new saint awaiting his martyrdom.”

In 1861, U.S. Navy Captain Charles Wilkes commanded the crew of the U.S.S. San Jacinto to intercept the British mail steamer Trent and arrest Confederate commissioners James M. Mason and John Slidell. En route to Europe to rally support for the Confederate cause, the two men and their secretaries were brought ashore and imprisoned at Fort Warren in Boston Harbor.

The seizure of Mason and Slidell sparked an international controversy that brought the United States to the brink of war with Great Britain. Claiming violation of international law, Britain demanded release of the commissioners and ordered troops to Canada to prepare for a potential Anglo-American conflict. To avoid a clash, Secretary of State William H. Seward apologized for the incident. The diplomats were released in early January 1862, bringing the Trent Affair to a peaceful close.

In 1889, Montana became the 41st state.

In 1892, former President Grover Cleveland beat incumbent Benjamin Harrison, becoming the only president to win non-consecutive terms in the White House.

In 1895, German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen described the electromagnetic rays he had discovered as “X-rays”. With the help of this special type of short-wave radiation, Röntgen was able to illuminate the inside of the human body. The rays, which were subsequently named after him in German, “Röntgenstrahlen”, would revolutionize modern medicine.

In 1900, Margaret Mitchell, the American author of “Gone With The Wind”, was born.

In 1923, Adolf Hitler launched his first attempt at seizing power in Germany with a failed coup in Munich that came to be known as the “Beer-Hall Putsch.”

In 1929, New York’s Museum of Modern Art first opened to the public at its original location in the Heckscher Building on Fifth Avenue, a day after an invitation-only showing.

In 1932, New York Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated incumbent Herbert Hoover for the presidency.

In 1939, the play “Life with Father,” based on the stories of Clarence Day, opened on Broadway.

In 1942, Operation Torch, resulting in an Allied victory, began during World War II as U.S. and British forces landed in French North Africa.

In 1956, Comet Arend-Roland was discovered.

In 1960, Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kennedy defeated Vice President Richard M. Nixon for the presidency.

In 1966, Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California.

In 1966, Edward W. Brooke of Massachusetts became the first African-American to be elected to the U.S. Senate by popular vote.

In 1971, the album “Led Zeppelin IV,” which included the song “Stairway to Heaven,” was released.

In 1987, a bomb planted by the Irish Republican Army exploded as crowds gathered in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, for a ceremony honoring Britain’s war dead, killing 11 people.

In 1988, Vice President George H.W. Bush won the presidential election, defeating Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis.

In 1989, Virginian Douglas Wilder became the first African American to win a U.S. gubernatorial election, and, after he left office when his term expired in 1994, he was elected mayor of Richmond in 2004.

In 1994, midterm elections resulted in Republicans winning a majority in the Senate while at the same time gaining control of the House for the first time in 40 years.

In 1999, ten years ago, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators launched landmark talks, giving themselves an ambitious 100-day deadline to craft the broad outlines of a peace agreement.

In 1999, former President George H.W. Bush was honored in Germany for his role in the fall of the Berlin Wall 10 years earlier.

In 1999, President Bill Clinton participated in a “virtual town hall meeting” on the Internet, answering questions from prescreened online users.

In 2000, a statewide recount of presidential election ballots began in Florida. Vice President Al Gore telephoned Texas Gov. George W. Bush to concede the election, but called back about an hour later to retract his concession.

In 2004, five years ago, thousands of U.S. troops attacked the toughest strongholds of Sunni insurgents in Fallujah, Iraq, launching a long-awaited offensive aimed at ending guerrilla control of the city.

In 2004, the U.S. dollar was eliminated from circulation in Cuba.

In 2004, Jason Bay became the first Pittsburgh Pirates player to win the NL Rookie of the Year award, while Oakland shortstop Bobby Crosby took the AL honor.

In 2008, one year ago, Indonesia executed three Islamic militants for helping to plan and carry out the 2002 Bali bombings that killed 202 people, many of them foreign tourists.

In 2008, an accident on a Russian nuclear submarine undergoing a test in the Sea of Japan asphyxiated 20 people on board.

In 2008, Florence Wald, a former Yale nursing dean whose interest in compassionate care led her to launch the first U.S. hospice program, died in Branford, Conn., at age 91.

Today’s Birthdays

Actress June Havoc is 97. Actor Norman Lloyd is 95. Singer Patti Page is 82. CBS newsman Morley Safer is 78. Singer-actress Bonnie Bramlett is 65. Singer Bonnie Raitt is 60. TV personality Mary Hart is 59. Former Playboy Enterprises chairman and chief executive Christie Hefner is 57. Actress Alfre Woodard is 57. Singer-songwriter Rickie Lee Jones is 55. Author Kazuo Ishiguro is 55. Rock musician Porl Thompson (The Cure) is 52. Singer-actor Leif Garrett is 48. Chef Gordon Ramsay is 43. Actress Courtney Thorne-Smith is 42. Actress Parker Posey is 41. Rock musician Jimmy Chaney is 40. Actress Roxana Zal is 40. Singer Diana King is 39. Actress Gretchen Mol is 36. Actor Matthew Rhys is 35. Actress Tara Reid is 34. Country singer Bucky Covington is 32. Actress Dania Ramirez is 30. Actress Azura Skye is 28. Actor Chris Rankin is 26. TV personality Jack Osbourne is 24. Actress Jessica Lowndes (“90210″) is 21.

Today’s Historic Birthdays

Gustav X Charles
11/8/1622 – 2/13/1660
Swedish king (1654-60)

Edmond Halley
11/8/1656 – 1/14/1742
English astronomer and mathematician

Bram Stoker
11/8/1847 – 4/20/1912
Irish author; wrote “Dracula”

Gottlob Frege
11/8/1848 – 7/26/1925
German mathematician and logician

Herbert Austin, Baron Austin
11/8/1866 – 5/23/1941
Enligh automotive engineer; founder and first chairman of Austin Motor Company

Hermann Rorschach
11/8/1884 – 4/2/1922
Swiss psychiatrist

Margaret Mitchell
11/8/1900 – 8/16/1949
American author; wrote “Gone With The Wind”

Esther Rolle
11/8/1920 – 11/17/1998
American actress

Thought for Today

“Religion is an attempt, a noble attempt, to suggest in human terms more-than-human realities.” – Christopher Morley, American author-journalist (1890-1957).

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Full article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/08/AR2009110800003.html

http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/20091108.html

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/today/today.html

http://www.todayinhistory.de/index.php?tag=8&monat=11&dayisset=1&year=2009&lang=en

http://www.britannica.com/eb/dailycontent/rss

http://www.history.ca/

Walls in the mind

The world after 1989

The ex-communist countries of central Europe have fared well, mostly, since 1989. But they still have to shed their image as poor and troubled relations

PICTURE yourself in a smoky café somewhere in the middle of Europe—Prague, say—in late 1989. Sipping muddy coffee sweetened with gritty sugar, served by a sullen waiter at a greasy table, you are discussing the future with friends. Their ill-cut clothes are in dull blue, brown and green, the hallmarks of planned-economy tailoring. Your foreign gear stands out a mile.

In the café window, posters tell of a revolution won. One is a poignant death notice for “Comrade Fear”—the once omnipresent and omnipotent embodiment of the totalitarian regimes, newly toppled by candles, flags and courage. Another poster shows a simple starburst, with the words “Gloria in Excelsis Deo”. Religion, like so much else, is now a matter of free choice. But a third poster shows the task ahead. It depicts Europe divided by a cliff that runs along the old Iron Curtain. A precarious ladder leads from the gloomy east to the sunny western uplands. “Back to Europe”, it reads. Before the communist era, countries such as Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary were at the centre of the continent, not its impoverished and isolated backwater.

The cliff looks dauntingly steep. Climbing it means long queues at Western consulates before facing the suspicious officials inside them. Western Europe may have cheered the revolution, but it fears a flood of riff-raff from the east. Abroad, easterners feel like humiliatingly poor relations. Their savings and salaries are all but worthless. You buy the coffees without a glance at the bill. When easterners head west, they pack sandwiches.

Ghosts of the past are everywhere. Some are welcome. Old songs, long-banned, are on the radio again. Heroes once vilified by official propaganda are celebrated. Other ghosts are more sinister. Central Europe before communism was no paradise. What will emerge as the region defrosts? Will Hungarians be content with their constricted borders? Will the Germans, so brutally deported from Silesia and the Sudetenland after the war, now demand justice? Will it be safer to be a Jew—or more dangerous?

Nor are the more recent spectres of the evil empire laid to rest. Will the secret police, still hunkered in their bunkers, give up their power peacefully? What will happen to the millions of guilty secrets in their files? Scariest of all, what happens if the wind from the east changes? Hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops still occupy the region. Will they leave peacefully? Facing all those questions is a fragile new political elite: dissidents, oddballs, turncoat communists and university professors, blinking at the task of building justice and prosperity on the ruins of communism.

Central Europe 20 years later, if glimpsed from 1989, would have seemed a glorious pipe-dream. A generation has grown up in free and law-governed societies. Fears of economic ruin and political chaos have proved unfounded. Ten countries have climbed that cliff and joined the European Union. Two more, Croatia and Albania, have joined NATO.

For all the unsolved and new problems facing the region now, it is voters, not outsiders, who determine who rules and how. Judges, lawyers and police have shed the shackles of Communist Party control. Courts may be slow, politicians meddlesome and bribery a problem. But nobody can count on impunity.

The huge exception has been Yugoslavia, seen in 1989 as a template of multi- ethnicity and pluralism, a halfway house between centrally planned socialism and the harsh and distant world of Western capitalism. It is still an example, but a dreadful one. For a decade, the outside world was unable to stop rampaging ethno-nationalist militias turning ancient grudges into bloody revenge. Some 140,000 people died in wars in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo, as authoritarian politicians purged their countries of those they saw as subversive or subhuman.

That was far worse than anything witnessed in central Europe before the war, though it still pales by comparison with the horrors of the Nazi era. Even outside ex-Yugoslavia, authoritarian and bigoted ideas still haunt the political fringe. Explicitly racist parties come and go in some parliaments; in Slovakia, one is in the government. But in no country over the past 20 years have they gained full political power. That is cause for relief and pride.

The economic achievements are barely less astonishing. At the end of 1989 it was easy to imagine the region staying mired in poverty for decades. Only the over-60s remembered how a market economy worked. For decades official propaganda had lambasted capitalism as akin to cannibalism. Industry was state-owned and run by party placemen. Management meant hunting for resources and then hoarding them, not dealing with costs, customers and competition. Foreign trade involved haggling with state planners in Russian, not closing deals in English.

So even granted the will-power to stabilise the economy, privatise state property and liberalise markets, would it work? As Lech Walesa, Poland’s first freely elected post-war president, noted, it is easy to turn an aquarium into fish soup. Reversing the process is much harder.

Yet free prices, free exchange rates, free trade, free labour markets and privatisation have proved a colossal success. The profit motive—however ugly, sleazy or vulgar—unleashed the caged talents of millions of entrepreneurs. Foreign investors, at first deterred by scarce telephones, bumpy roads and obnoxious officials, have come in droves, bringing a huge transfer of management and technical know-how. The first wave came because of low labour costs. Membership of the EU attracted the next influx. The EU has improved life in other ways too, forcing the pace of reform as a condition of membership and providing billions of euros for modernisation. Borders once sealed by minefields are now just lines on the map. You can drive from the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean without even showing your passport. Water and air are cleaner than in 1989, transport faster and safer.

For the young, flexible and ambitious, the past 20 years have proved a bonanza. For the losers—the old, the timid, the dim—life has been punishingly difficult. Yet outside the former East Germany, nostalgia for the past plays no part in politics. Only in the Czech Republic does a Communist party still have a political role. Elsewhere, the former proletarian internationalists have rebranded themselves as slightly sleazy centre-leftists.

The third big achievement, alongside democracy and prosperity, is the partial restoration of public-spiritedness, trust, decency and kindness. Communism habitually imposed horrible moral choices: denounce your colleague, or your child will never go to university. It preached altruism but ingrained selfishness. Statistics can barely capture the legacy of 50 years of lies and fear. Freeing central Europe’s captive nations has proved far easier than freeing its captive minds. Most adults in the region spent their formative years under communism. Only when those in charge have no memory of totalitarian rule will communism’s shadow finally be lifted.

The biggest disappointment is the continuing power and wealth of the old system’s elite, who have proved much better at running the capitalism they decried than the socialism they preached. Party bosses and their secret-police henchmen successfully squirrelled money abroad, using it to buy assets cheaply in the chaotic years of the 1990s.

The western half of the continent can still seem far off when viewed from the middle. And vice versa. Toomas Hendrik Ilves, Estonia’s sharp-tongued, American-educated president, says Westerners privately regard people from ex-communist countries as “troublesome cripples whose views can be ignored”. Seen through the fug of a café in late 1989, 2009 looks pretty good. But central Europeans can be forgiven if they see the present a bit cynically.

The Economist

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Full article and photos: http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14793753

The week ahead

Barack Obama travels to Asia, taking in visits to Japan and China

• BARACK OBAMA begins a trip to Asia on Thursday November 12th. A visit to Japan could prove to be frosty, even though the country is America’s most important ally in the region, as the newly elected government has seemed unwilling to back American foreign policy, for example in Afghanistan. Mr Obama will also attend a summit of leaders from the Asia-Pacific region, the part of the world demonstrating the most robust economic growth. Most notable, the American president will spend four days in China, where talks may focus on international efforts to curb carbon emissions in the hope of limiting global climate change. Economic relations, in particular American concern about the weakness of the yuan, may also be discussed.

• CELEBRATIONS will be held in Germany, and elsewhere, on Monday November 9th to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Despite current economic difficulties in the region, opinion polls suggest that the populations in eastern and central European countries that had previously been subject to Soviet style rule remain resolutely committed to liberal democracy and capitalism.

• TENSIONS may grow again in Zimbabwe between president Robert Mugabe and the prime minister, Morgan Tsvangirai. A senior official in Mr Tsvangirai’s party, the Movement for Democratic Change, Roy Bennett, is set to go on trial on Monday November 9th, to face terrorism charges. Mr Bennett was arrested in February and accused of plotting against Mr Mugabe’s government.

• A SPECIAL European Union summit may be convened by Sweden towards the end of the week, in order to select individuals to fill two new continental posts. With the Lisbon Treaty at last ratified by all 27 member states, the way is clear to create a job of president of the European Council, who is supposed to speak on behalf of all member states on international affairs. In addition a high representative is supposed to serve as a sort of foreign minister for the EU. Despite much speculation that Tony Blair, Britain’s former prime minister, could get the top job, it seems almost certain that European governments will instead choose a low profile figure, such as Belgium’s little-known prime minister, Herman van Rompuy, to fill the post.

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Full article and photo: http://www.economist.com/world/international/displayStory.cfm?story_id=14832007&source=features_box_main

Small steps on climate change

The Copenhagen talks won’t yield a breakthrough, but progress is still possible.

FOR TWO YEARS, the Danish capital of Copenhagen has been a beacon for environmentalists seeking a breakthrough international treaty on climate change. But with the long-awaited Copenhagen conference now just weeks away, it has become clear that the talks will not produce a grand, new accord mandating global reductions in carbon emissions. The United Nations’ envoy conceded as much last week in Barcelona, the site of the last formal talks before Copenhagen.

According to some, the letdown can be explained in three words: the U.S. Senate. The United States is the only developed country that hasn’t offered a carbon-reduction target. Though the House passed major climate-change legislation over the summer, the full Senate hasn’t yet acted and almost certainly won’t before the Copenhagen conference opens on Dec. 7. With reason, American negotiators are loath to agree to a binding commitment without Senate approval.

Blaming the Senate, or the United States, is unfair — and potentially self-defeating. Other governments are far from consonant on a range of issues, such as how to structure a regime for verifying countries’ adherence to promised carbon reductions. And anti-American finger-pointing will only make it harder to extract the climate-change legislation from the Senate.

Even so, U.S. negotiators probably have to decide between two courses, neither of which will fully satisfy many of their counterparts.

One option is to offer no firm emissions target at the conference. That could still allow for a modest political declaration by the 192 participating countries announcing agreement on certain details of a new climate treaty, while pushing off formal negotiations for perhaps another six months. Ideally, work would proceed on some sort of framework into which future national commitments carrying the approval of national legislatures could be entered. This risks deeply disappointing the rest of the world.

The alternative is for American negotiators to offer a provisional target for reducing greenhouse gases based on the work Congress completes before the conference. If developing nations are ready to deal, the result could be a nonbinding but substantive agreement. The work of setting up institutions to monitor emissions, provide financing to poor countries and transfer green technology could begin immediately.

Some observers worry this path will result in less international pressure to reach a legally obligatory agreement later on. But at least the parties’ commitments would be credible, unlike those enshrined in the binding Kyoto Protocol of 1997, which countries flagrantly violated — and which the Senate refused to ratify.

There are good arguments for pursuing a big international agreement on climate change. Not least of them is that many countries’ commitments are contingent on others taking similar actions. But even if negotiators eventually succeed in producing a binding treaty, the commitments to emissions cuts now on the table are probably inadequate to prevent an unacceptable rise in global temperatures over the next several decades. That’s a problem the world will have to revisit, even if Copenhagen is a ringing success.

Editorial, Washington Post

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Full article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/07/AR2009110702651.html

Wheels of fortune?

The sober reality behind Detroit’s recent good news

AT LAST, THERE’S some cheerful news out of Detroit. General Motors, feeling confident after an improvement in sales during October, announced that it had enough financial strength to hang on to Opel, its European subsidiary, rather than sell it to a Russian-Canadian consortium. Chrysler rolled out a new turnaround plan. And, most promising of all, Ford — the only American carmaker to avoid a federally funded bankruptcy reorganization — announced a billion-dollar third-quarter profit, boosted by a substantial increase in its market share.

Now for the reality check. Annual sales of new cars in the United States are running at about 10 million, and while this should grow modestly in the next couple of years, the market is unlikely to return to the 1999-2007 average rate of 17 million per year. All automakers will be under tremendous pressure to preserve market share by producing popular, high-quality products. Yet the ability of the two taxpayer-backed members of the Big Three to do that is still questionable.

Chrysler, of which the U.S. government owns 10 percent, has lost 2 percentage points of its share of the U.S. market in the past year, and most of its new Fiat-supplied product line is a year or more away. GM owes its recent uptick to the government, not to any dramatic change in its product line. After the “cash for clunkers” program and continuing federal subsidies to its financing arm, GMAC, GM still found that about half the units it sold in October were heavily discounted 2009 models.

Though Ford didn’t get a bailout, its problems are not over. The United Auto Workers rejected a contract that would have matched the wage and work rule concessions the UAW gave GM and Chrysler. You can’t blame union leaders; UAW President Ron Gettelfinger had urged ratification. But the rank and file at Ford voted no. Apparently, three months of profitability were enough to persuade the workers that their jobs are safe even if they don’t lend Ford a hand — despite the fact that the company still carries about $27 billion in debt. No good deed goes unpunished: Ford’s reward for staying out of bankruptcy court, and off the federal dole, could be the least competitive labor costs in the United States. Someone needs to remind Ford’s workers that the hottest-selling Big Three passenger car right now is the Ford Fusion. It’s made in Hermosillo, Mexico — where no one belongs to the UAW.

Editorial, Washington Post

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Full article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/07/AR2009110702652.html

When E.T. phones the pope

A little more than a half-mile from the Vatican, in a square called Campo de’ Fiori, stands a large statue of a brooding monk. Few of the shoppers and tourists wandering through the fruit-and-vegetable market below may know his story; he is Giordano Bruno, a Renaissance philosopher, writer and free-thinker who was burned at the stake by the Inquisition in 1600. Among his many heresies was his belief in a “plurality of worlds” — in extraterrestrial life, in aliens.

Though it’s a bit late for Bruno, he might take satisfaction in knowing that this week the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences is holding its first major conference on astrobiology, the new science that seeks to find life elsewhere in the cosmos and to understand how it began on Earth. Convened on private Vatican grounds in the elegant Casina Pio IV, formerly the pope’s villa, the unlikely gathering of prominent scientists and religious leaders shows that some of the most tradition-bound faiths are seriously contemplating the possibility that life exists in myriad forms beyond this planet. Astrobiology has arrived, and religious and social institutions — even the Vatican — are taking note.

Father Jose Funes, a Jesuit astronomer, director of the centuries-old Vatican Observatory and a driving force behind the conference, suggested in an interview last year that the possibility of “brother extraterrestrials” poses no problem for Catholic theology. “As a multiplicity of creatures exists on Earth, so there could be other beings, also intelligent, created by God,” Funes explained. “This does not conflict with our faith because we cannot put limits on the creative freedom of God.”

Yet, as Bruno might attest, the notion of life beyond Earth does not easily coexist with the “truths” that many people hold dear. Just as the Copernican revolution forced us to understand that Earth is not the center of the universe, the logic of astrobiologists points in a similarly unsettling direction: to the likelihood that we are not alone, and perhaps that we are not even the most advanced creatures in the universe. This may not “conflict with our faith,” but it may conflict with the stories we tell about who and what we are.

The Vatican’s five-day conference is chaired by the religious leader of the highly regarded Academy, Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo. Scientists (many of them nonbelievers) are offering presentations on subjects as varied as how life might have begun on Earth; what newly found “extremophile” microbes living in harsh places on our planet might tell us about possible life on others; and how life forms might be detected in our solar system, or how their bio-signatures might be found on and around the many distant exoplanets.

Having overcome the giggle factor of most things extraterrestrial, astrobiologists are telling a scientific story to an audience that may someday use it to defend — or enhance — its faith.

The Catholic Church isn’t the only institution preparing itself for what could be a world-changing event. For instance, NASA’s National Astrobiology Institute, established in 1998, sponsored a meeting of scientists, ethicists, religious leaders and philosophers in February to brainstorm about the societal implications of astrobiology, and it is preparing a semiofficial “road map” of sensitive issues we’d need to address should the presence of life elsewhere be established.

Initial extraterrestrial discoveries — which many scientists believe are on the horizon, if not yet in reach — are likely to be of microbial life just below the parched surface of Mars, in the waters of Jupiter’s moon Europa under its thick crust of ice or in the liquid plumes of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Though it will be easy to dismiss extraterrestrial microbes as unthreatening to anyone’s worldview, cosmologists and astrobiologists generally contend that the existence of two separate geneses in one solar system would enormously increase the probability that life is commonplace in the universe. And as we know, under the right conditions microbes can evolve over eons to become dinosaurs, hummingbirds and us.

The possibility of extraterrestrial life is not much of an issue for Eastern religions, which tend to be less Earth-centric. Islam also has little problem with extraterrestrials because the Koran speaks explicitly of life beyond Earth, as do some newer Christian groups such as Mormons. It is in mainstream Western religious traditions, in which humans and God are central, where astrobiology poses the biggest challenge.

“I think the discovery of a second genesis would be of enormous spiritual significance,” says Paul Davies, a theoretical physicist and cosmologist from Arizona State University who is speaking at the Vatican conference. He believes the potential challenge to Christianity in particular “is being downplayed” by religious leaders.

“The real threat would come from the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence, because if there are beings elsewhere in the universe, then Christians, they’re in this horrible bind. They believe that God became incarnate in the form of Jesus Christ in order to save humankind, not dolphins or chimpanzees or little green men on other planets.”

Davies explained the tensions within the Catholic Church: “If you look back at the history of Christian debate on this, it divides into two camps. There are those that believe that it is human destiny to bring salvation to the aliens, and those who believe in multiple incarnations,” he said, referencing the belief that Christ could have appeared on other planets at other times. “The multiple incarnations is a heresy in Catholicism.” (As Giordano Bruno learned.)

Many Protestant scholars agree with Funes, saying that the discovery of extraterrestrial life would not pose a major challenge to their faith or theology, especially if it was not intelligent or morally aware. But on the evangelical side, there is a deep concern, one reminiscent of the battles over evolution. “My theological perspective is that E.T. life would actually make a mockery of the very reason Christ came to die for our sins, for our redemption,” Gary Bates, head of Atlanta-based Creation Ministries International, told me recently in a critique of the Vatican conference. Bates believes that “the entire focus of creation is mankind on this Earth” and that intelligent, morally aware extraterrestrial life would undermine that view and belief in the incarnation, resurrection and redemption drama so central to the faith. “It is a huge problem that many Christians have not really thought about,” he said.

The big question involves intelligent life. Astronomers say there are something like 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the known universe, and more planets are discovered orbiting some of them all the time. (On one day last month, the European Space Agency announced the discovery of 32 new extra-solar planets.) It is increasingly difficult to assume that our sun and planet are the only ones capable of supporting complex and evolved life — the kind of life that Christians might assume would be in need of salvation. Questions inevitably follow: Are Christianity and, to some extent, other religions only stories about life on Earth? And if they are not “universal” in a cosmic sense, does that diminish their significance?

Thus the conference on astrobiology at the Vatican — an institution that got Copernicus, Galileo and other men of science wrong and doesn’t want to do that again. In the words of Pierre Lena, a French astrophysicist and member of the Pontifical Academy who pressed for the astrobiology conference: “Astrobiology is a mature science that says very interesting things that could change the vision humanity has of itself. The church cannot be indifferent to that.”

Funes, an earnest priest-scientist with a wry sense of humor, seemed a bit nonplussed last week about the worldwide attention that his “brother extraterrestrials” comments from last year and the astrobiology conference have drawn. Speaking to me from the new Vatican Observatory headquarters outside Rome — the church also operates a telescope in Arizona — he didn’t retract his statements or express regret about them, and said he has not been chastised by higher-ups at the Vatican.

But he did emphasize that he was not speaking officially for the church, even though his 2008 interview ran on the front page of the official Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano. The church, he said, has no official position on extraterrestrial life or on theological issues it might raise. Just as some people write science fiction, Funes said with a mischievous smile, he is attracted to “theological fiction” — what might become important religiously if life beyond Earth is discovered someday.

“There’s no need for the church to speak on this point now,” he said. “But yes, that could certainly change.”

Marc Kaufman, a science and space reporter for The Washington Post, is on leave writing a book about astrobiology.

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Full article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/06/AR2009110601899.html

Bad climate for global worriers

Intelligent people agree that, absent immediate radical action regarding global warming, the human race is sunk. That is a tautology because those who do not agree are, definitionally, unintelligent. Britain’s intelligent prime minister, Gordon Brown, gives scary precision to the word “immediate.” By his reckoning, humanity now has about 30 days to save itself. He says that unless a decisive agreement is reached at the 192-nation summit on climate change that opens Dec. 7 in Copenhagen, all is lost.

So, all is lost. The chances of a comprehensive and binding treaty are approximately nil.

The fourth of five parlays preparing for Copenhagen occurred in Bangkok from Sept. 28 through Oct. 9, with delegates from about 180 nations participating. Remember diplomat George Kennan’s axiom that the unlikelihood of reaching an agreement is the square of the number of parties at the table? The meeting adjourned with, as usual, essentially no progress toward an agreement on reduced emissions by developed nations or on the money such nations should pay to finance developing nations’ efforts against global warming.

The New York Times reports that “the United Nations Adaptation Fund, which officially began operating in 2008 to help poor countries finance projects to blunt the effects of global warming, remains an empty shell, largely because rich nations have failed to come through with the donations they promised.” The fund has a risible $18 million, which might not cover the cost of the Copenhagen conference.

There conferees will experience more futility because of, among other things, two stubborn facts — the two most populous nations. On Oct. 21, China, the world’s leading emitter of greenhouse gases, and India, which ranks fourth — together they account for 26 percent of emissions — jointly agreed: They, with their combined one-third of the world’s population, will not play in what increasingly resembles a global game of climate-change charades. Neither nation is interested in jeopardizing its economic growth with emissions caps of a sort that never impeded the growth of the developed nations that now praise them.

But do not really embrace them. Recently, the U.S. House of Representatives took time out from fending off the world and exempted large cattle-, dairy- and hog-producing operations from an Environmental Protection Agency requirement for reporting greenhouse gas emissions. And 13 Great Lakes cargo ships were exempted from a proposed mandate requiring the use of low-sulfur fuel. When constituents’ interests conflict with global grandstanding, Congress’s rule is “act locally, think globally tomorrow, maybe.”

In their new book, “SuperFreakonomics,” Steven D. Levitt, a University of Chicago economist, and Stephen J. Dubner, a journalist, worry about global warming but revive some inconvenient memories of 30 years ago. Then intelligent people agreed (see above) that global cooling threatened human survival. It had, Newsweek reported, “taken the planet about a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age average.” Some scientists proposed radical measures to cause global warming — for example, covering the arctic ice cap with black soot that would absorb heat and cause melting.

Levitt and Dubner also spoil some of the fun of the sort of the “think globally, act locally” gestures that are liturgically important in the church of climate change. For example, they say the “locavore” movement — people eating locally grown foods from small farms — actually increases greenhouse gas emissions. They cite research showing that only 11 percent of such emissions associated with food are in the transportation of it; 80 percent are in the production phase and, regarding emissions, big farms are much more efficient.

Although the political and media drumbeat of alarm is incessant, a Pew poll shows that only 57 percent of Americans think there is solid evidence of global warming, down 20 points in three years. Gallup shows that only 1 percent of Americans rank the environment as their biggest worry. Two reasons are:

They are worried about their wages, which will not be improved by clobbering a weak economy with the costs of a cap-and-trade carbon-reduction regime. And climate doomsayers are learning the wages of crying “Wolf!”

In 2005, global warming worriers warned, as they tend to do after all adverse or anomalous environmental events, that Hurricane Katrina was caused by global warming and foreshadowed an increase in the number and destructiveness of hurricanes. As this year’s Atlantic hurricane season ends, only three hurricanes have formed — half the average of the past 50 years — and none has hit the United States.

George F. Will, Washington Post

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Full article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/06/AR2009110603075.html

Iran’s ‘Great Satan’ addiction

The Iranians have a word they use to describe a political impasse. They speak of it as a bombast, which means a dead-end street, or a knot that can’t be untied.

That’s a good description of the deadlocked debate in Tehran over the nuclear issue.

It has been more than a month since what was touted as a breakthrough meeting with the Iranians in Geneva over their nuclear program. But the Iranians now seem to be backpedaling — disavowing the tentative agreement that their own negotiators had signaled they supported.

“The feeling now is that the Iranians are unable to decide,” says a senior European diplomat involved in the talks. Abbas Milani, a Stanford professor who closely follows events in Iran, agrees: “They clearly want to back out of the deal.”

It’s a measure of the political turmoil in Tehran that the chief proponent of engagement with the United States over the past month has been the hard-line president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He has been attacked for his supposed willingness to make concessions to the West, including by some of the “green movement” reformers who defied him in the June presidential election.

The diplomatic stalemate is a setback for the Obama administration, which had made engagement with Iran one of its signature issues. As the administration is discovering, getting to “yes” with Tehran for now seems all but impossible. This reversal follows the breakdown in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, the other issue on which President Obama had attempted a bold new start, only to be enveloped by the bitter legacy of the past.

What comes next with Iran, if the negotiating impasse continues, is a new pressure campaign. First will be a debate over further U.N. sanctions. The crucial voices here will be Russia and China, which could veto any new punitive Security Council resolution. Both have publicly expressed their wariness about more sanctions.

Scrolling back to the Oct. 1 meeting in Geneva, it’s clear that the Iranians were hedging their bets. Initial reports had it that Iran had agreed to allow inspection of a previously secret nuclear facility at Qom, agreed to ship most of its stock of low-enriched uranium to Russia for further processing and agreed to continue broader talks about the nuclear program and other issues.

Of those three, only the first — the inspection of Qom — had taken place by Oct. 31, as expected. And it turns out that what the Iranians actually promised at Geneva was that they would not contradict the West’s announcement of the breakthrough, which isn’t the same thing as publicly endorsing it.

The prospect of a deal with the Great Satan produced a political frisson in Tehran. For the first several days after the Geneva meeting, the press was silent, seemingly waiting for a cue. Then the attacks began, and they intensified after an Oct. 21 meeting in Vienna that was supposed to hammer out details for the transfer of Iran’s uranium to Russia. Critics chided Ahmadinejad for giving away the nuclear store.

The most important criticism came from Ali Larijani, the speaker of parliament and formerly Iran’s top nuclear negotiator. “The Westerners are insisting on some kind of deception,” he said. Larijani wouldn’t have launched this assault unless he was confident of the backing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader.

And sure enough, Khamenei joined in the attacks last week, warning that negotiating with America would be “naive and perverted.” The leader was implicitly criticizing Ahmadinejad, who had characterized the Geneva deal as an Iranian victory.

Perhaps this is all an elaborate negotiating ploy, intended to enhance Tehran’s bargaining position. But reading the Iranian press, you get the sense that for Iran’s ruling elite, engagement with America remains a bridge too far. “America is still the Great Satan. Negotiations are meaningless,” thundered the hard-line weekly Ya-Lesarat.

Rather than speak up for dialogue with the United States, many of the reformists gathered around former prime minister Mir Hossein Mousavi decided instead to score political points against Ahmadinejad.

The past month has been a reminder that the very existence and legitimacy of Khamenei’s regime are interwoven with a defiant anti-Americanism. This legacy infects even the reformers who protest against Khamenei.

The challenge for President Obama, notes Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, is how to reach an accommodation with an Iran that needs America as an adversary. And how can Obama do that without betraying the opposition that promises Iran’s best hope for change?

David Ignatius, Washington Post

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Full article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/06/AR2009110603072.html

Listen to the dissidents

Barack Obama’s extended hand was whacked across the knuckles by the leaders of Iran, Syria and assorted other thuggeries last week. But the Obama administration did manage a good demonstration in Burma of how its brand of engagement can and should work.

Kurt Campbell, the State Department’s top Asia official, traveled to the isolated military dictatorship to talk with its corrupt junta. But Campbell also insisted on having a highly visible meeting with the leader of the country’s democracy movement, Aung San Suu Kyi, and then publicly called on her persecutors to grant her party more freedoms.

This is the balance that has been missing in Obama’s outreach to other authoritarian states. Demonstrators on the streets of Tehran underlined the president’s missing link Wednesday by chanting: “Obama, Obama — either you’re with them or you’re with us,” as Iranian police beat them, according to news accounts. Obama and his advisers need to take the dissidents’ message to heart.

The dissident — a hero and catalyst for enormous change in the Soviet empire, China, the Philippines and elsewhere only two decades ago — has become a largely neglected and absent figure in this administration’s diplomacy. Media coverage of political protest globally also seems to have waned since the end of the Cold War.

True, Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have made symbolic gestures toward the politically oppressed on their travels and in pro forma statements. But, as the president’s coming visit to China will again show, dissident political movements have not been incorporated into his strategy for changing the world. The president believes so strongly in his powers of persuasion that the transformative work once done by Lech Walesa, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Corazon Aquino, Wei Jingsheng and others now falls largely on his shoulders. Campbell’s meeting with Suu Kyi provided a useful corrective, for one country at least, to this tendency.

George W. Bush proved that it is possible to overdo support for dissident movements and the vilification of their tormentors, just as his father demonstrated that it can be underdone (see Bush 41’s effort to keep the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia from disintegrating). The Bush 43 administration, in fact, bears some of the responsibility for the eclipse of the dissident in the public mind. The focus of many journalists and political activists has recently been on U.S. human rights abuses rather than those of much more brutal foreign regimes.

So Obama’s decision to reach out and encourage hostile regimes to relax their grip internally made initial tactical sense, especially in Iran. The administration deserves some credit for the current political fluidity there. Removing the United States as a heavy-handed, threatening enemy helped expose President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s manifest failures of governance and helped meaningful dissent to surface and spread.

But the extended-hand tactic may have run its course there. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s highest authority, used inflammatory language to denounce Obama and the U.S.-originated proposal on uranium reprocessing given to Iran on Oct. 1 in Geneva. Even though U.S. officials claimed at the time that Iran had “accepted” the proposal — which effectively drops the long-standing U.S. demand for Iran to suspend its enrichment of uranium as a condition for negotiations — Khamenei said that its terms were unacceptable.

Meanwhile, protesters were voicing concern that Obama’s single-minded pursuit of a nuclear deal is conveying legitimacy to Khamenei and Ahmadinejad — at the dissidents’ expense. They did not seem to have been impressed by the general words of support contained in a message issued by Obama to mark not this political uprising but the 30th anniversary of the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, an event celebrated in Iran but not here.

Syria also served notice that its priorities have not been influenced by Team Obama’s repeated blandishments for better relations. Israel intercepted a major clandestine Iranian arms shipment destined for Syria and the Hezbollah guerrillas it supports in Lebanon. And As-Safir, a Syrian-controlled newspaper in Beirut, launched a vitriolic, sexist attack on Michele Sison, the able U.S. ambassador to Lebanon, that concluded by calling on its readers to “silence this chatterbox” — an ominous statement in a country where U.S. and European diplomats have been murdered.

Friendly, principled engagement is a useful tool — up to a point. It is probably worth exploring in Burma with new steps. But there also has to be a workable Plan B — something Obama will now have to demonstrate that he has developed for Iran and Syria.

Jim Hoagland, Washington Post

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Full article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/06/AR2009110603073.html

5 myths about the beauty of the ballot box

The United States has invested heavily in promoting free elections around the world, with the expectation that they in turn will promote legitimate governments and democratic ideals. It hasn’t always worked out that way — not in Iraq, not in the Palestinian territories and not, most recently, in Afghanistan. Dispelling some common myths about what elections can and cannot do in emerging democracies will help us face more realistically the difference between a ballot box and a magic bullet.

1. Elections usually produce legitimate governments.

After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, elections became an emblem of modernization: Dictators everywhere agreed to hold them. A few of the more naive rulers, such as President Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, were ousted in honest elections, having believed their own propaganda about their popularity. But many realized it was possible to adhere to form without substance. When my colleague Anke Hoeffler and I studied data on 786 elections in 155 countries from 1974 to 2004, we found that fraud may have affected the results in 41 percent of them. Perhaps that shouldn’t be surprising, since incumbent politicians who cheat to get reelected stay in office 2.5 times longer than they would have playing it fair and square. These sham elections do not fool the citizens, who view the resulting governments as illegitimate and do not hold the “elected” officials accountable.

2. The democratic process promotes peace.

We so want to believe that elections foster peace that we assume it must be true. Unfortunately, the effect of democracy on the risk of political violence depends on a country’s income. Above $2,700 per capita, democracies are less prone to violence than are autocracies. But most political violence happens in countries where income is far below that threshold; there, democracy is associated with a greater risk of bloodshed.

In recent years, elections have served as a de facto exit strategy for peacekeepers after a conflict has ended. The theory has evidently been that by establishing a legitimate and accountable government, a democratic election reduces the likelihood of continuing turmoil. But my research found that, although the risk of violence falls in the year before an election, it rises in the year after. This makes a certain sense, because in the run-up to balloting, efforts to gain power are diverted into politics; after a vote there is a winner who no longer feels pressure to govern inclusively and a loser who regards the outcome as fraudulent.

3. Fair elections can happen everywhere.

The apparent success of democratization in post-Soviet Eastern Europe helped persuade the international community that elections would work anywhere; all that was necessary was to topple the dictators. But evidence of stolen elections among the new democracies challenged that assumption. My research shows that election misconduct tends to be concentrated in countries that have low per capita incomes, small populations, rich natural resources and a lack of institutional checks and balances. Eastern Europe didn’t fit this picture because its population was already in the middle-income range, it was not resource-rich, and it had the advantage of prior democratic experience. Most of the countries in sub-Saharan Africa, however, have all the characteristics that undermine elections, giving them a mere 3 percent chance of an honest vote, according to my calculations. By this measure, Afghanistan is not exceptional; in fact, electoral misconduct there was almost inevitable.

4. Elections compel new democratic governments to overspend, worsening economic policies and performance.

When I investigated elections’ effect on economic policy in newly democratic countries, I found that populist pressure does cause policies to deteriorate somewhat in the year before an election. They certainly did in Ghana in 2008. But governments that face frequent elections have significantly better economic policies when they are averaged over the political cycle, and governments that become subject to elections improve their policies.

Unfortunately, there is a caveat: Elections in which there is misconduct have, at best, no effect on economic policy because governments are off the hook of accountability. For example, President Robert Mugabe chose to wreck the Zimbabwean economy precisely when he was facing contested elections. His policies were not even populist; he simply relied on fraud and intimidation to establish policies that benefited only a tiny political elite.

5. We can’t do anything about electoral misconduct.

If 41 percent of elections aren’t conducted fairly, disconnecting governments from true accountability, there is a problem. But the international community can take steps to help solve it. One of the main ways incumbents steal elections is through patronage financed by looting the public purse, as President Daniel arap Moi did in Kenya. So countries, such as the United States, that provide financing for democratic elections should make their aid conditional upon the government’s being both transparent and accountable to its citizens in its budget processes.

Beyond that, supporting governments can provide high-powered incentives for incumbents to keep elections honest. What incumbents fear most is not losing an election, but being overthrown by their own military. When the international community can protect a government from such a threat, it should do so, conditional upon the election being properly conducted. For example, the ousting of the properly elected president of Madagascar in 2008 by a coup could have been averted by prompt international military action. Ultimately, transparent budgets and security guarantees might be enough to nudge these elections closer to our democratic ideal.

Paul Collier is a professor of economics at Oxford University and the author of “Wars, Guns and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places.”

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Full article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/06/AR2009110601906.html

Call White House, Ask for Barack

The Israeli-Palestinian peace process has become a bad play. It is obvious that all the parties are just acting out the same old scenes, with the same old tired clichés — and that no one believes any of it anymore. There is no romance, no sex, no excitement, no urgency — not even a sense of importance anymore. The only thing driving the peace process today is inertia and diplomatic habit. Yes, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process has left the realm of diplomacy. It is now more of a calisthenic, like weight-lifting or sit-ups, something diplomats do to stay in shape, but not because they believe anything is going to happen. And yet, as much as we, the audience, know this to be true, we can never quite abandon hope for peace in the Holy Land. It is our habit. Indeed, as I ranted about this to a Jordanian friend the other day, he said it all reminded him of an old story.

“These two guys are watching a cowboy and Indian movie. And in the opening scene, an Indian is hiding behind a rock about to ambush the handsome cowboy,” he explained. “ ‘I bet that Indian is going to kill that cowboy,’ one guy says to the other. ‘Never happen,’ his friend answers. ‘The cowboy is not going to be killed in the opening scene.’ ‘I’ll bet you $10 he gets killed,’ the guy says. ‘I’ll take that bet,’ says his friend.

“Sure enough, a few minutes later, the cowboy is killed and the friend pays the $10. After the movie is over the guy says to his friend, ‘Look, I have to give you back your $10. I’d actually seen this movie before. I knew what was going to happen.’ His friend answers: ‘No, you can keep the $10. I’d seen the movie, too. I just thought it would end differently this time.’ ”

This peace process movie is not going to end differently just because we keep playing the same reel. It is time for a radically new approach. And I mean radical. I mean something no U.S. administration has ever dared to do: Take down our “Peace-Processing-Is-Us” sign and just go home.

Right now we want it more than the parties. They all have other priorities today. And by constantly injecting ourselves we’ve become their Novocain. We relieve all the political pain from the Arab and Israeli decision-makers by creating the impression in the minds of their publics that something serious is happening. “Look, the U.S. secretary of state is here. Look, she’s standing by my side. Look, I’m doing something important! Take our picture. Put it on the news. We’re on the verge of something really big and I am indispensable to it.” This enables the respective leaders to continue with their real priorities — which are all about holding power or pursuing ideological obsessions — while pretending to advance peace, without paying any political price.

Let’s just get out of the picture. Let all these leaders stand in front of their own people and tell them the truth: “My fellow citizens: Nothing is happening; nothing is going to happen. It’s just you and me and the problem we own.”

Indeed, it’s time for us to dust off James Baker’s line: “When you’re serious, give us a call: 202-456-1414. Ask for Barack. Otherwise, stay out of our lives. We have our own country to fix.”

The fact is, the only time America has been able to advance peace — post-Yom Kippur War, Camp David, post-Lebanon war, Madrid and Oslo — has been when the parties felt enough pain for different reasons that they invited our diplomacy, and we had statesmen — Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter, George Shultz, James Baker and Bill Clinton — savvy enough to seize those moments.

Today, the Arabs, Israel and the Palestinians are clearly not feeling enough pain to do anything hard for peace with each other — a mood best summed up by a phrase making the rounds at the State Department: The Palestinian leadership “wants a deal with Israel without any negotiations” and Israel’s leadership “wants negotiations with the Palestinians without any deal.”

It is obvious that this Israeli government believes it can have peace with the Palestinians and keep the West Bank, this Palestinian Authority still can’t decide whether to reconcile with the Jewish state or criminalize it and this Hamas leadership would rather let Palestinians live forever in the hellish squalor that is Gaza than give up its crazy fantasy of an Islamic Republic in Palestine.

If we are still begging Israel to stop building settlements, which is so manifestly idiotic, and the Palestinians to come to negotiations, which is so manifestly in their interest, and the Saudis to just give Israel a wink, which is so manifestly pathetic, we are in the wrong place. It’s time to call a halt to this dysfunctional “peace process,” which is only damaging the Obama team’s credibility.

If the status quo is this tolerable for the parties, then I say, let them enjoy it. I just don’t want to subsidize it or anesthetize it anymore. We need to fix America. If and when they get serious, they’ll find us. And when they do, we should put a detailed U.S. plan for a two-state solution, with borders, on the table. Let’s fight about something big.

Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/opinion/08friedman.html

Briefs grief

In Florida, Judge Patricia Kinsey ruled recently in the case of Albert Freed who sued a men’s briefs manufacturer claiming he was injured on holiday by their badly designed underwear. He claimed the briefs “gaped open and acted like a sandbelt on my privates”.

In a judgement she probably did not anticipate making while at law school, Judge Kinsey was required to engage in a detailed analysis of the relationship between male anatomy and male underwear. An alleged design defect supposedly exposed Freed to beach sand that had accumulated in swimming trunks he was wearing over his briefs. Judge Kinsey doubted the contention that the briefs had opened “whereupon the edges of the opening abraded his penis like “’sandpaper belts’”.

Why had Freed spent two weeks on holiday aggravating the problem without reporting it to his wife? He said he was so excited about this holiday to Hawaii – which he had won – that he did not want to complain about his debilitating pain until they got home. Asked in cross-examination why he had not inspected the problem early to assess the possible dangers, he replied that he was a “belly man” and could not see his penis.

The manufacturer called a scientist to show the briefs were safe but Freed, who represented himself, called no expert witnesses. The court, though, wanted some independent evidence about normal penile sensitivity and what was standard practice for men when adjusting themselves anatomically after donning briefs.

Extraordinarily, the sole man among many female spectators in the public gallery was asked by the court for his opinion and he obliged. More extraordinarily, the law report notes that the man was “a prominent male criminal defence lawyer” who was just passing time in the gallery. The judgment thanks the lawyer for being a “good sport” in giving evidence and for his “surprisingly candid testimony” when answering intimate questions.

Judge Kinsey dismissed the claim, noting that Freed had failed to prove the link between his alleged injury and the briefs’ design. “The uncontroverted expert testimony” she ruled “was that once a man’s genitalia are adjusted in his briefs, ‘vertical tension’ is far greater than ‘horizontal tension’ and there is no tendency for the fly to ‘gap’”. She also said that Freed’s peculiar method of dressing (he puts his briefs into his trousers and then pulls them both on together) might have aggravated his personal discomfort.

According to official data on accidents, underwear injures many Britons every year. In 2002, for example, 369 people were caused serious injury by underpants or knickers. Getting dressed or undressed in the dark or while impaired might explain those injuries. Less clear though is how 472 people were hospitalised by an item in the class “Hat, scarf, shawl, hankie”.

Professor Gary Slapper is Director of the Centre for Law at the Open University.

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Full article: http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/law/columnists/article6906203.ece

Bluffing at the Highest Levels

A new book on the history of poker finds a card shark in the White House.

When Harry S. Truman was sworn in to office, his poker buddies from the previous war were afraid he might stop playing now that he had been “promoted.” They need not have worried. The new chief executive even requisitioned a set of chips embossed with the presidential seal for use in the White House, though he tried to avoid being photographed gambling on its premises. The prudes of America would put up with only so much.

Truman had learned to play cards from his aunt Ida and uncle Harry on their Missouri farm back in the 1890s. In a letter to Bess Wallace, the woman he was courting, in February 1911, the sincere 26-year-old suitor wrote, “I like to play cards and dance . . . and go to shows and do all the things [religious people] say I shouldn’t, but I don’t feel badly about it.”

Harry S. Truman (seated, in bowtie) in 1956.

In France seven years later, Lieutenant Truman played about as much poker as Carl Grothaus, Bill Gill, Herb Yardley, Dwight D. Eisenhower and a million other doughboys did while in Europe. Truman received further artillery training in Montigny-sur-Aube, mastering the specs and capabilities of a new French 75mm cannon called the “Devil Gun” by the Germans, though he also had time to play stud and tour the Burgundian countryside.

Waiting to sail home after the Armistice was signed in November, Truman and his comrades passed that autumn in the mud near Verdun, much of the time in poker games that went on for decades after they were demobilized. The collection of army gear preserved at the Truman Library includes three dog-eared poker decks.

As a judge back home in Independence, Mo., Truman kept up with his army buddies mainly around the poker table. Many sessions took place across the street from his courthouse in a third-floor room at 101 North Main Street. The 18 regulars dubbed themselves the Harpie Club, after the harmonicas they played at memorial ceremonies, with Truman serving as their unofficial president. Until Truman moved to Washington as a senator in 1935, he seldom missed a session.

Truman’s preference for poker over fussier country-club pastimes helps explain the temperament of “Give ‘Em Hell Harry” during American labor disputes, hot wars with Japan and North Korea, and the cold war with Russia and China.

The chips Truman used in the White House.

Returning from Potsdam by sea, the commander in chief tried to relax in a week-long stud game with journalists aboard the battleship Augusta while awaiting news of the device he had ordered to be detonated above Hiroshima. Because Secretary of State James Byrnes bitterly differed with his boss about what to do next—and was not in the game—Merriman Smith, a UPI reporter who was, wrote that Truman “was running a straight stud filibuster against his own Secretary of State.”

After Japan surrendered, Truman and his poker cabinet often cruised the Potomac on weekends aboard the presidential yacht Williamsburg. “You know I’m almost like a kid,” he told Bess before one such outing. “I can hardly wait to start.” Shipboard meals were leisurely, with plenty of time for discussions of history and politics. But once the poker began, the stakes were dramatically higher than what Roosevelt’s cabinet had played for. Truman’s crew started with $500 in chips, with a one-time option to rebuy.

According to Robert G. Nixon, an International News Service war correspondent, the president “knew some of the wildest games that I have ever heard of. . . . . There was one that I’ll never forget. It was a seven-card game called ’seven card, low hole card wild, high low.’”

Apparently, if you hold “a pair of deuces as low hole cards, nothing can undercut you. You are a very lucky man on that hand. If you have a pair of treys or a pair of anything else, and you have matching cards up, you may think that you have three or four wild cards, but the last card that’s dealt down can turn out to be a deuce, undercutting the treys, and you’re dead. Your hand is worthless.” But Nixon emphasized that such games were all in good fun, that losers were encouraged to replenish their stacks from large pots, and that poker was the president’s “only means of relaxation—that and walking. Never did anything else. He never wanted anybody to get hurt in a poker game.”

Throughout his 88 years, Truman used poker as both a personal and political means of expression. His motto, “The buck stops here,” refers to the dealer’s button or placeholder, because during the 19th century hunting knives with buckhorn handles often served that function. It was the president’s folksy way of letting Americans know he was responsible for what happened on his watch.

Detail of Truman’s chips.

That the game keeps friendly competitors elbow to elbow all evening is one of the reasons it has endured for so long. It was a chance to drop the formality of office and kibitz with friends. One of the most famous examples occurred on March 4, 1946, when Winston Churchill joined Truman’s game aboard FDR’s old armored railroad car, the Ferdinand Magellan, for a trip to Fulton, Mo., where Churchill was to deliver his era-defining “Iron Curtain” speech.

Churchill had downed five scotches before the action began, and now he pretended that he hadn’t the foggiest idea how to play. That night Churchill lost steadily—so much, in fact, that when the great Brit left the table for a moment, Truman told his companions to let up a bit. “But, Boss, this guy’s a pigeon,” said General Vaughan. “If you want us to play our best poker for the nation’s honor, we’ll have this guy’s pants before the evening is over.”

Churchill was down $250 when he quit at 2:30 a.m. He needed to get some sleep before giving his speech.

The Cold War was just weeks away. The ability to read who was bluffing and who wasn’t would be more important than ever.

James McManus is the author of “Positively Fifth Street.” This essay is adapted from “Cowboys Full,” recently published by Farrar, Strauss And Giroux.

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Full article and photos: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703932904574511472981896400.html

Russia’s Conquering Zeros

The strength of post-Soviet math stems from decades of lonely productivity

It may be no accident that, while some of the best American mathematical minds worked to solve one of the century’s hardest problems—the Poincaré Conjecture—it was a Russian mathematician working in Russia who, early in this decade, finally triumphed.

Decades before, in the Soviet Union, math placed a premium on logic and consistency in a culture that thrived on rhetoric and fear; it required highly specialized knowledge to understand; and, worst of all, mathematics lay claim to singular and knowable truths—when the regime had staked its own legitimacy on its own singular truth. All this made mathematicians suspect. Still, math escaped the purges, show trials and rule by decree that decimated other Soviet sciences.

Three factors saved math. First, Russian math happened to be uncommonly strong right when it might have suffered the most, in the 1930s. Second, math proved too obscure for the sort of meddling Joseph Stalin most liked to exercise: It was simply too difficult to ignite a passionate debate about something as inaccessible as the objective nature of natural numbers (although just such a campaign was attempted). And third, at a critical moment math proved immensely useful to the state.

Three weeks after Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Soviet air force had been bombed out of existence. The Russian military set about retrofitting civilian airplanes for use as bombers. The problem was, the civilian airplanes were much slower than the military ones, rendering moot everything the military knew about aim.

What was needed was a small army of mathematicians to recalculate speeds and distances to let the air force hit its targets.

The greatest Russian mathematician of the 20th century, Andrei Kolmogorov, led a classroom of students, armed with adding machines, in recalculating the Red Army’s bombing and artillery tables. Then he set about creating a new system of statistical control and prediction for the Soviet military.

Following the war, the Soviets invested heavily in high-tech military research, building over 40 cities where scientists and mathematicians worked in secret. The urgency of the mobilization recalled the Manhattan Project—only much bigger and lasting much longer. Estimates of the number of people engaged in the Soviet arms effort in the second half of the century range up to 12 million people, with a couple million of them employed by military-research institutions.

These jobs spelled nearly total scientific isolation: For defense employees, any contact with foreigners would be considered treasonous rather than simply suspect. In addition, research towns provided comfortably cloistered social environments but no possibility for outside intellectual contact. The Soviet Union managed to hide some of its best mathematical minds away in plain sight.

In the years following Stalin’s death in 1953, the Iron Curtain began to open a tiny crack—not quite enough to facilitate much-needed conversation with non-Soviet mathematicians but enough to show off some of Soviet mathematics’ proudest achievements.

By the 1970s, a Soviet math establishment had taken shape. A totalitarian system within a totalitarian system, it provided its members not only with work and money but also with apartments, food, and transportation. It determined where they lived and when, where, and how they traveled for work or pleasure. To those in the fold, it was a controlling and strict but caring mother: Her children were undeniably privileged.

Even for members of the math establishment, though, there were always too few good apartments, too many people wanting to travel to a conference. So it was a vicious, back-stabbing little world, shaped by intrigue, denunciations and unfair competition.

Then there were those who could never join the establishment: those who happened to be born Jewish or female, those who had had the wrong advisers at university or those who could not force themselves to join the Party. For these people, “the most they could hope for was being able to defend their doctoral dissertation at some institute in Minsk, if they could secure connections there,” says Sergei Gelfand, publisher of the American Mathematical Society—who also happens to be the son of one of Russia’s top 20th-century mathematicians, Israel Gelfand, a student of Mr. Kolmogorov. Some Western mathematicians, Sergei Gelfand adds, “even came for an extended stay because they realized there were a lot of talented people. This was unofficial mathematics.”

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Math Stars

Besides Grigory Perelman and the Poincaré Conjecture, there are numerous other famous math solvers, and there are still problems to solve.

Andrew Wiles (1953-)

This Princeton mathematician resolved the most famous problem in numbers—Fermat’s Last Theorem—in 1995.

Leonhard Euler (1707–1783)

A Swiss mathematician who made so many contributions, particularly in the early foundations of calculus, that it gets hard to keep track of all that’s named for him.

Kurt Gödel (1906–1978)

This Austrian logician demonstrated that any reasonably powerful system of math contains true statements that can’t be proven.

The Riemann Hypothesis

To the enduring befuddlement of mathematicians, prime numbers—numbers divisible only by themselves and 1—exhibit no pattern at all: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13 are the first few. They aren’t evenly spaced but get scarcer the further out you go. No formula can tell you what the next one will be. In 1859, the German mathematician Bernhard Riemann discovered that a function—known now as the Riemann zeta function (expressed in the graphic above)—appeared to give signposts to where primes lie in the great field of numbers. It provided some order to the mystery. Riemann conjectured that these key signposts—”zeros” of the function—all lie on a single straight line out to infinity, that none are flung off in strange places. In the 150 years since, no one has proved his hypothesis. To a mathematician, the hypothesis looks like this: All non-trivial zeros of the Riemann zeta function have a real part equal to ½.

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One such visitor was Dusa McDuff, then a British algebraist and now a professor emerita at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. She studied with the older Mr. Gelfand for six months, and credits this experience to opening her eyes both to what mathematics really is: “It was a wonderful education… Gelfand amazed me by talking of mathematics as though it were poetry.”

In the mathematical counterculture, math “was almost a hobby,” recalls Sergei Gelfand. “So you could spend your time doing things that would not be useful to anyone for the nearest decade.” Mathematicians called it “math for math’s sake.” There was no material reward in this—no tenure, no money, no apartments, no foreign travel; all they stood to gain was the respect of their peers.

Math not only held out the promise of intellectual work without state interference (if also without its support) but also something found nowhere else in late-Soviet society: a knowable singular truth. “If I had been free to choose any profession, I would have become a literary critic,” says Georgii Shabat, a well-known Moscow mathematician. “But I wanted to work, not spend my life fighting the censors.” The search for that truth could take long years—but in the late Soviet Union, time seemed to stand still.

When it all collapsed, the state stopped investing in math and holding its mathematicians hostage. It’s hard to say which of these two factors did more to send Russian mathematicians to the West, primarily the U.S., but leave they did, in what was probably one of the biggest outflows of brainpower the world has ever known. Even the older Mr. Gelfand moved to the U.S. and taught at Rutgers University for nearly 20 years, almost until his death in October at the age of 96. The flow is probably unstoppable by now: A promising graduate student in Moscow or St. Petersburg, unable to find a suitable academic adviser at home, is most likely to follow the trail to the U.S.

But the math culture they find in America, while less back-stabbing than that of the Soviet math establishment, is far from the meritocratic ideal that Russia’s unofficial math world had taught them to expect. American math culture has intellectual rigor but also suffers from allegations of favoritism, small-time competitiveness, occasional plagiarism scandals, as well as the usual tenure battles, funding pressures and administrative chores that characterize American academic life. This culture offers the kinds of opportunities for professional communication that a Soviet mathematician could hardly have dreamed of, but it doesn’t foster the sort of luxurious, timeless creative work that was typical of the Soviet math counterculture.

For example, the American model may not be able to produce a breakthrough like the proof of the Poincaré Conjecture, carried out by the St. Petersburg mathematician Grigory Perelman.

Mr. Perelman came to the United States as a young postdoctoral student in the early 1990s and immediately decided that America was math heaven; he wrote home demanding that his mother and his younger sister, a budding mathematician, move here. But three years later, when his postdoc hiatus was over and he was faced with the pressures of securing an academic position, he returned home, disillusioned.

In St. Petersburg he went on the (admittedly modest) payroll of the math research institute, where he showed up infrequently and generally kept to himself for almost seven years, one of the greatest mathematical discoveries of at least the last hundred years. It’s all but impossible to imagine an American institution that could have provided Mr. Perelman with this kind of near-solitary existence, free of teaching and publishing obligations.

After posting his proof on the Web, Mr. Perelman traveled to the U.S. in the spring of 2003, to lecture at a couple of East Coast universities. He was immediately showered with offers of professorial appointments and research money, and, by all accounts, he found these offers gravely insulting, as he believes the monetization of achievement is the ultimate insult to mathematics. So profound was his disappointment with the rewards he was offered that, I believe, it contributed a great deal to his subsequent decision to quit mathematics altogether, along with the people who practice it. (He now lives with his mother on the outskirts of St. Petersburg.)

A child of the Soviet math counterculture, he still held a singular truth to be self-evident: Math as it ought to be practiced, math as the ultimate flight of the imagination, is something money can’t buy.

Masha Gessen’s latest book is “Perfect Rigor: A Genius and the Mathematical Breakthrough of the Century,” a story of Grigory Perelman and the Poincaré Conjecture. She lives in Moscow and is the author of three previous books.

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Full article and photos: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703740004574513870490836470.html

Why Doesn’t Exercise Lead to Weight Loss?

For some time, researchers have been finding that people who exercise don’t necessarily lose weight. A study published online in September in The British Journal of Sports Medicine was the latest to report apparently disappointing slimming results. In the study, 58 obese people completed 12 weeks of supervised aerobic training without changing their diets. The group lost an average of a little more than seven pounds, and many lost barely half that.

How can that be? Exercise, it seems, should make you thin. Activity burns calories. No one doubts that.

“Walking, even at a very easy pace, you’ll probably burn three or four calories a minute,” beyond what you would use quietly sitting in a chair, said Dan Carey, Ph.D., an assistant professor of exercise physiology at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, who studies exercise and metabolism.

But few people, an overwhelming body of research shows, achieve significant weight loss with exercise alone, not without changing their eating habits. A new study from scientists at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Denver offers some reasons why. For the study, the researchers recruited several groups of people. Some were lean endurance athletes; some sedentary and lean; some sedentary and obese. Each of the subjects agreed to spend, over the course of the experiment, several 24-hour periods in a special laboratory room (a walk-in calorimeter) that measures the number of calories a person burns. Using various calculations, the researchers could also tell whether the calories expended were in the form of fat or carbohydrates, the body’s two main fuel sources. Burning more fat than carbohydrates is obviously desirable for weight loss, since the fat being burned comes primarily from body fat stores, and we all, even the leanest among us, have plenty of those.

The Denver researchers were especially interested in how the athletes’ bodies would apportion and use calories. It has been well documented that regular endurance training increases the ability of the body to use fat as a fuel during exercise. They wondered, though, if the athletes — or any of the other subjects — would burn extra fat calories after exercising, a phenomenon that some exercisers (and even more diet and fitness books) call “afterburn.”

“Many people believe that you rev up” your metabolism after an exercise session “so that you burn additional body fat throughout the day,” said Edward Melanson, Ph.D., an associate professor in the division of endocrinology at the School of Medicine and the lead author of the study. If afterburn were found to exist, it would suggest that even if you replaced the calories you used during an exercise session, you should lose weight, without gaining weight — the proverbial free lunch.

Each of Melanson’s subjects spent 24 quiet hours in the calorimeter, followed later by another 24 hours that included an hourlong bout of stationary bicycling. The cycling was deliberately performed at a relatively easy intensity (about 55 percent of each person’s predetermined aerobic capacity). It is well known physiologically that, while high-intensity exercise demands mostly carbohydrate calories (since carbohydrates can quickly reach the bloodstream and, from there, laboring muscles), low-intensity exercise prompts the body to burn at least some stored fat. All of the subjects ate three meals a day.

To their surprise, the researchers found that none of the groups, including the athletes, experienced “afterburn.” They did not use additional body fat on the day when they exercised. In fact, most of the subjects burned slightly less fat over the 24-hour study period when they exercised than when they did not.

“The message of our work is really simple,” although not agreeable to hear, Melanson said. “It all comes down to energy balance,” or, as you might have guessed, calories in and calories out. People “are only burning 200 or 300 calories” in a typical 30-minute exercise session, Melanson points out. “You replace that with one bottle of Gatorade.”

This does not mean that exercise has no impact on body weight, or that you can’t calibrate your workouts to maximize the amount of body fat that you burn, if that’s your goal.

“If you work out at an easy intensity, you will burn a higher percentage of fat calories” than if you work out a higher intensity, Carey says, so you should draw down some of the padding you’ve accumulated on the hips or elsewhere — if you don’t replace all of the calories afterward. To help those hoping to reduce their body fat, he published formulas in The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research last month that detailed the heart rates at which a person could maximize fat burning. “Heart rates of between 105 and 134” beats per minute, Carey said, represent the fat-burning zone. “It’s probably best to work out near the top of that zone,” he says, “so that you burn more calories over all” than at the extremely leisurely lower end.

Perhaps just as important, bear in mind that exercise has benefits beyond weight reduction. In the study of obese people who took up exercise, most became notably healthier, increasing their aerobic capacity, decreasing their blood pressure and resting heart rates, and, the authors write, achieving “an acute exercise-induced increase in positive mood,” leading the authors to conclude that, “significant and meaningful health benefits can be achieved even in the presence of lower than expected exercise-induced weight loss.”

Finally and thankfully, exercise seems to aid, physiologically, in the battle to keep off body fat once it has been, through resolute calorie reduction, chiseled away. In other work by Melanson’s group, published in September, laboratory rats that had been overfed and then slimmed through calorie reduction were able to “defend” their lower weight more effectively if they ran on a treadmill and ate at will than if they had no access to a treadmill. The exercise seemed to reset certain metabolic pathways within the rats, Melanson says, that blunted their body’s drive to replace the lost fat. Similar mechanisms, he adds, probably operate within the bodies of humans, providing scientific justification for signing up for that Thanksgiving Day 5K.

Gretchen Reynolds, New York Times

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Full article: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/04/phys-ed-why-doesnt-exercise-lead-to-weight-loss/

Today in History – November 7

Today is Saturday, Nov. 7, the 311th day of 2009. There are 54 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight in History

On Nov. 7, 1917, Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution took place as forces led by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin overthrew the provisional government of Alexander Kerensky.

On this date

In 1837, Elijah Parish Lovejoy was killed by a pro-slavery mob while defending the site of his anti-slavery newspaper The Saint Louis Observer. His death both deeply affected many individuals who opposed slavery and greatly strengthened the cause of abolition.

In 1867, Marie Curie, the Polish-born French physicist twice awarded the Nobel Prize for her work on radioactivity, was born.

In 1874, the Republican Party was symbolized as an elephant in a cartoon drawn by Thomas Nast in Harper’s Weekly.

In 1893, passage of a referendum made Colorado the first state to grant women the right to vote.

In 1916, Republican Jeannette Rankin of Montana became the first woman elected to Congress.

In 1929, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City opened.

In 1940, in Washington state, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, nicknamed “Galloping Gertie,” collapsed during a windstorm.

In 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt won an unprecedented fourth term in office, defeating Thomas E. Dewey.

In 1962, Richard Nixon, having lost California’s gubernatorial race, held what he called his “last press conference,” telling reporters, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.”

In 1962, former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt died at age 78.

In 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed a bill establishing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

In 1972, President Richard Nixon was re-elected in a landslide over Democrat George McGovern.

In 1973, Congress overrode President Richard Nixon’s veto of the War Powers Act, which limits a chief executive’s power to wage war without congressional approval.

In 1989, L. Douglas Wilder won the governor’s race in Virginia, becoming the first elected black governor in U.S. history; David N. Dinkins was elected New York City’s first black mayor.

In 1991, Basketball star Magic Johnson announced that he had tested positive for the AIDS virus and was retiring.

In 1998, House Speaker Newt Gingrich resigned following an election in which the Republican House majority shrunk from 22 to 12.

In 1999, ten years ago, relatives of the victims of EgyptAir Flight 990 gathered in Newport, R.I., to bid them a wrenching farewell, a week after the plane crashed into the Atlantic Ocean.

In 1999, Tiger Woods became the first golfer since Ben Hogan in 1953 to win four straight tournaments.

In 1999, Kenya’s Joseph Chebet won the New York City Marathon; Adriana Fernandez won the women’s division.

In 2000, Republican George W. Bush was elected president over incumbent Democratic Vice President Al Gore, though Gore won the popular vote by a narrow margin. The winner was not known for more than a month because of a dispute over the results in Florida.

In 2000, Hillary Rodham Clinton was elected to the U.S. Senate from New York, becoming the first first lady to win public office.

In 2004, five years ago, France rolled out overwhelming military force to put down an explosion of anti-French violence in Ivory Coast, its former West African colony.

In 2004, in the New York City Marathon, Britain’s Paula Radcliffe won the women’s race, edging Kenya’s Susan Chepkemei by only four seconds; South Africa’s Hendrik Ramaala won the men’s race.

In 2004, actor and musical star Howard Keel died at age 85.

In 2006,Keith Ellison, a Democrat from Minnesota, became the first Muslim elected to Congress.

In 2008, one year ago, in his first news conference since being elected president, Barack Obama called on Congress to extend unemployment benefits and pass a stimulus bill. The government reported the unemployment rate had soared to 6.5 percent in Oct. 2008, up from 6.1 percent just a month earlier.

In 2008, General Motors Corp. reported a $2.5 billion loss in the third quarter while Ford Motor Co. said it had lost $129 million.

In 2008, Aaschool in Haiti collapsed, killing some 90 people.

In 2008, Mieczyslaw Rakowski, Poland’s last communist-era party chairman and prime minister, died in Warsaw at age 81.

Today’s Birthdays

Evangelist Billy Graham is 91. Opera singer Dame Joan Sutherland is 83. Actor Barry Newman is 71. Singer Johnny Rivers is 67. Singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell is 66. Singer Nick Gilder is 58. The head of the U.S. Central Command, Gen. David Petraeus, is 57. Actor Christopher Knight (“The Brady Bunch”) is 52. Rock musician Tommy Thayer (KISS) is 49. Actress Julie Pinson is 42. Rock musician Greg Tribbett (Mudvayne) is 41. Actor Christopher Daniel Barnes is 37. Actors Jason and Jeremy London are 37. Actress Yunjin Kim is 36. Rock musician Zach Myers (Shinedown) is 26.

Today’s Historic Birthdays

Andrew White
11/7/1832 – 11/4/1918
American educator and diplomat; founder and first president of Cornell University

Marie Curie
11/7/1867 – 7/4/1934
Polish-born French physicist

Lise Meitner
11/7/1878 – 10/27/1968
Austrian physicist

Leon Trotsky
11/7/1879 – 8/21/1940
Russian revolutionary

Eleanor Medill Patterson
11/7/1884 – 7/24/1948
American publisher

Sir Chandrasekhara Raman
11/7/1888 – 11/21/1970
Indian physicist

Herman Mankiewicz
11/7/1897 – 3/5/1953
American screenwriter

Konrad Lorenz
11/7/1903 – 2/27/1989
Austrian zoologist

Albert Camus
11/7/1913 – 1/4/1960
French novelist

Thought for Today

“History is simply a piece of paper covered with print; the main thing is still to make history, not to write it.” – Otto von Bismarck, German statesman (1815-1898).

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Full article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/07/AR2009110700003.html

http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/20091107.html

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/today/today.html