Fire Hydrant of Freedom

Alex states:

"You obviously felt some connection with this article or you wouldn't have posted it. If you didn't want to discuss the issues raised why post it in the first place [?]"

As mentioned before, posting something doesn't mean I'm obligated to defend it, agree with it in total, deconstruct it to your liking, or involve myself in unproductive arguments. You have latched on to an element of an article and now want to play a game of "gotcha." Well hey, go nuts, have at it, and pat yourself on the back when you?re done.

If I had any desire to further this conversation I'd posit Ayoob's criteria contain implicitly contextual elements, but what's the point? I think you're interested in heat instead of illumination and hence derive nothing of value from our exchanges. As such snipe away. I've got better things to do.

In closing I'll mention that, though I'm not much of a martial artist, sometimes I train with people less skilled than me. I don't use the occasion to lord my superiority, preferring instead to do what I can to maximize the training value for both my partner and me.

In a similar vein, I post to this list for reasons of growth I feel no obligation to explain to you. I derive nothing of value from tit for tat exchanges with the rhetorically challenged and so choose, for the most part, not to participate in them. There are folks on this list whose opinions I respect; I trust they?ll understand that my unwillingness to engage does not connote an inability to do so.

Alex asks:

?Why is the former 'obviously unacceptable' while the latter is 'logical and reasonable'??

Hmm, sounds like you?re holding me answerable for another person?s beliefs. Had stated in an earlier exchange that I don?t necessarily agree in total with everything I post. ?Spose I?d best also mention I?m not particularly inclined to deconstruct or otherwise ferret out an author?s deeper meanings. Seems I left my Ouija board at home today, and besides Crafty doesn?t pay me enough to apply the tools of biblical scholarship to every wan post.

Perhaps a better way to phrase the question would be: ?Why do you think the author believes the former is ?obviously acceptable? while the latter is ?logical and reasonable??? Phrased in that manner speculation is implicit, I won?t feel that I?m being backed into some authoritative corner, and perhaps we can avoid the rhetorical vortices we often find ourselves in.

Several of my interests overlap and coalesce in the following article from Reason online. The concept of "gun control," and its disparate effect on those on the lowest rungs of the socio-economic ladder, is certainly nothing new.


The Klan's Favorite Law


Gun control in the postwar South


Dave Kopel

If you believe everything that Michael Moore says in Bowling for Columbine and his books, then you would think that "pro-gun" people are white racists, and that "gun control" would be a wonderful way to help minorities. But a look at America's past reveals what historian Clayton Cramer has accurately called "The Racist Roots of Gun Control."

After the Civil War, the defeated Southern states aimed to preserve slavery in fact if not in law. The states enacted Black Codes which barred the black freedmen from exercising basic civil rights, including the right to bear arms. Mississippi's provision was typical: No freedman "shall keep or carry fire-arms of any kind, or any ammunition."

Under the Mississippi law, a person informing the government about illegal arms possession by a freedman was entitled to receive the forfeited firearm. Whites were forbidden to give or lend freedman firearms or knives.

The Special Report of the Anti-Slavery Conference of 1867 complained that freedmen were "forbidden to own or bear firearms and thus.rendered defenseless against assaults" by whites. Or as a letter printed in the Jan. 13, 1866 edition of Harper's Weekly observed: "The militia of this county have seized every gun found in the hands of so-called freedmen in this section of the county. They claim that the Statute Laws of Mississippi do not recognize the Negro as having any right to carry arms."

Congress' "Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction" set forth the factual case for the need for a 14th Amendment to protect the liberties enumerated in the federal Bill of Rights. At the Committee's hearings, General Rufus Saxon testified that all over the South, whites were "seizing all fire-arms found in the hands of the freedmen. Such conduct is in clear and direct violation of their personal rights as guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States, which declares that 'the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.'"

Despite the statutes, and at the suggestion of Reconstruction governors and other leaders, blacks often formed militias to resist white terrorism. For example, in June 1867 in Greensboro, Alabama, the police let the murderer of a black voting registrar escape; in response, a freedman who would later serve in the Alabama State Legislature urged his fellow freedmen to create a permanent militia. "Union League" militias were formed all over central Alabama.

The freedmen slipped from white control. One planter protested that his workers were "turbulent and disorderly," coming and going when they wished, as if they had a choice whether or not to work. The Union League, protested another ex-master, was advising freedmen "to ignore the Southern white man as much as possible...to set up for themselves."

The next spring, the Ku Klux Klan came to central Alabama. The Klansmen, unlike the freedmen, had horses, and thus the tactical advantages of mobility. In a few months, the Klan triumph was complete. One freedman recalled that the night riders, after reasserting white control, "took the weapons from might near all the colored people in the neighborhood."

The same dynamic existed throughout the South. Sometimes militias consisting of freedmen or Unionists were able to resist the Klan or other white forces. In places like the South Carolina back-country, where the blacks were a numerical majority, the black militias kept white terrorists at bay for long periods.

While many blacks participated in informal, local militias, most of the reconstruction governors set up official state militias that were racially integrated. Like many other facets of the reconstruction governments (and the racist governments which followed them), the integrated "black" state militias were corrupt. The state militias, which sought to protect the state governments and the election process, were frequently in conflict with informal white militias. Arms shipments from the federal government to arm the militias were often intercepted and seized by white militias.

Official or unofficial, the black militias were the primary target of the white racist resistance. "Pitchfork" Ben Tillman, the U.S. Senate advocate of racism for many decades, joined a "Sweetwater Sabre Club" whose members seized control of South Carolina's Edgefield Country from a black militia in 1874-75, and attacked a black militia at Hamburg, South Carolina in 1876.

In areas where the black militias lost and the Klan or other white groups took control, "almost universally the first thing done was to disarm the negroes and leave them defenseless," wrote Albion Tourge? in his 1880 book The Invisible Empire. (An attorney and civil rights worker from the north, Tourge? would later represent the civil rights plaintiff in Plessy v. Ferguson.)

The Klan's objective in disarming the blacks was to leave them unable to defend their rights, a Congressional hearing found. Afraid of race war and retribution, whites were terrified at the mere sight of a black with a gun. As legal historian Kermit Hall notes, "From the southern white's point of view, a well-armed Negro militia was precisely what John Brown had sought to achieve at Harpers Ferry in 1859."

The Vicksburg white riot of 1874 typified the problem. According to a Congressional investigation, the whites conducted, "Unauthorized searches by self-constituted authority into private homes, searches for arms converted, as is unusual, into robbery and thieving...." The Congressional Report detailed one arms roundup:

One poor old man, half crazed, but harmless, sitting quietly in a neighbor's house, is brutally shot to death in the presence of terrified women and shrieking children. He gained his wretched living by hunting and fishing, and had a shot-gun. No one pretended that Tom Bidderman had anything to do with the fight, but he was black, and had a gun in his house, and so they murdered him for amusement as they were going from the city to restore order in the country.

The Radical Republican Congress observed the South with dismay. The Republicans intended to use federal power to force freedom on the South. One of the Radical Republicans' most important tools was the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which required states to respect basic human rights. While the vague language of the amendment has produced disagreement about exactly what is covered, the Congressional backers of the amendment seem to have intended, at the least, protecting the core freedoms listed in the national Bill of Rights. Announced Representative Clarke of Kansas: "I find in the Constitution an article which declared 'the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.' For myself, I shall insist that the reconstructed rebels of Mississippi respect the Constitution in their local laws."

The earlier Freedman's Bureau Bill had also been squarely aimed at protecting the right to bear arms. The bill guaranteed federal protection of "the full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and estate, including the constitutional right of bearing arms."

The Amendment was quickly emasculated by the United States Supreme Court in The Slaughter-House Cases and United States v. Cruikshank, The Supreme Court understood the social realities of the South. The Cruikshank decision gave the green light to the Klan, unofficial white militias, and other racist groups to forcibly disarm the freedmen and impose white supremacy.

One state at a time, white racists took control of government by using armed violence and the threat of violence to control balloting on election day. Freedmen and their white allies also resorted to arms. But white Republican governors were usually afraid that employing the black militias fully would set off an even broader race war.

The white South, while defeated on the battlefield in 1865, had continued armed resistance to Northern control for over a decade. When the North, an occupying power, grew weary of the struggle and abandoned its black and Republican allies in the South, the white South was again the master of its destiny.

In deference to the Fourteenth Amendment, some states did cloak their laws in neutral, non-racial terms. For example, the Tennessee legislature barred the sale of any handguns except the "Army and Navy model." The ex-Confederate soldiers already had their high quality "Army and Navy" guns. But cash-poor freedmen could barely afford lower-cost, simpler firearms not of the "Army and Navy" quality. Arkansas enacted a nearly identical law in 1881, and other Southern states followed suit, including Alabama (1893), Texas (1907), and Virginia (1925).

As Jim Crow intensified, other Southern states enacted gun registration and handgun permit laws. Registration came to Mississippi (1906), Georgia (1913), and North Carolina (1917). Handgun permits were passed in North Carolina (1917), Missouri (1919), and Arkansas (1923).

As one Florida judge explained, the licensing laws were "passed for the purpose of disarming the negro laborers... [and] never intended to be applied to the white population."

That gun control has a very unsavory past does not, in itself, prove that all modern gun control proposals are a bad idea. But it does offer reasons to be especially cautious about the dangers of disarming people who cannot necessarily count on their local government to protect them.

Dave Kopel is Research Director of the Independence Institute. This article is based on his book The Samurai, the Mountie, and the Cowboy: Should America Adopt the Gun Controls of Other Democracies? The book contains citations to numerous secondary sources discussing the issues in this article.

http://www.reason.com/hod/dk021505.shtml

An effective use of the old compare and contrast essay:

Masters of the Game
The Left on Churchill and Summers.

If you're a liberal who's still moping like a dog whose food bowl has been moved, thanks to all the conservative victories of late, I have some words of encouragement for you: You guys are still way, way smarter than we are about some things.

Consider the current flap about Ward Churchill and the recent one about Harvard President Larry Summers.

Ward Churchill, as you've probably heard, is a tenured professor of "ethnic studies" at the University of Colorado. Until recently he was the chairman of the department. When invited to another school to give a talk, it came out that he had written an essay comparing the civilian victims of 9/11 to "little Eichmanns." This was a reference to Adolf Eichmann, the chief architect of the Holocaust.

Known for making factually unencumbered statements about the evils of America, Churchill recently gave an interview in which he said he wanted the "U.S. off the planet. Out of existence altogether." He thinks "more 9/11s" are necessary. He holds no Ph.D., and his scholarship ? for want of a better word ? is under relentless attack. Before the current kerfuffle, he'd attained whatever prominence he had by pretending he was an American Indian radical. He likes to pose with assault rifles. The Rocky Mountain News did a genealogical search of Churchill's past and found that he's basically a vanilla white guy playing Indian and enriching himself in the process. The American Indian Movement called Churchill a fraud years ago.

OK, flash back to the hysteria over Larry Summers. By now his auto-da-f? is old news. But let's recap. One of the most respected economists in America, president of Harvard University, and the former secretary of the Treasury, Summers was invited to a closed-door, off-the-record academic conference at which everyone was encouraged to think unconventionally. Warning his audience several times that he was going to be deliberately "provocative," he suggested that there might be some innate cognitive differences between men and women.

This is not a controversial hypothesis in macroeconomics, and it is losing its taboo status in psychology, genetics, and neuroscience. Thousands of peer-reviewed academic papers have been written on the differences between men and women when it comes to various cognitive functions. Note that I said "differences." Superiority and inferiority don't play into it, and Summers never said otherwise. Indeed, he ventured this hypothesis, after showing his obeisance to the more politically correct explanations: discrimination, not enough effort to recruit women, etc., etc.

So what was the reaction?

An MIT feminist biologist ? who moonlights as a feminist activist ? quickly got the vapors and stormed out of the room for fear of fainting. If she stayed any longer, she explained, she'd vomit. Derrick Jackson of the Boston Globe compared Summers to people who cavalierly bandy about the N-word or who thoughtlessly wear swastikas. One hundred members of the Harvard faculty drafted a letter demanding that he apologize. The National Organization for Women demanded that he resign.

The dean of engineering at the University of Washington called his comments "an intellectual tsunami." Since the Asian catastrophe had only just transpired, the tastelessness of the metaphor may not be as apparent now as it was then. Regardless, if his comments were a tsunami, Summers's critics have certainly cashed in on the disaster-relief effort.

Forced to apologize over and over, Summers was then bullied into appointing not one but two new "task forces" on gender equity. Staffed with 22 women and five men, the task forces will no doubt discover that much more work needs to be done and that Summers should apologize more.

In the Summers affair, free speech and academic freedom barely came up, except among a few conservative commentators and one or two academics who were already known for their political incorrectness. Instead, Summers was a pinata to be bashed for material rewards and to send the message that some subjects ? no matter what the evidence ? are simply taboo even for serious scholars to discuss in closed-door, off-the-record meetings.

Meanwhile, Ward Churchill, whose scholarship is a joke, whose evidence is tendentious at best, and who called the victims of 9/11 the moral equivalent of a man who sent babies to the gas chambers, is a hero of free speech. He has refused to apologize. Many conservatives are forced to defend free speech and "diversity" in academia while liberals let the NOWers feed on Summers's flesh.

Liberals may despise what Churchill said, but it's a matter of principle now. The normally insightful and fair Mort Kondracke declared on Fox News, "I really think it's useful for universities to have people like this around, to show students and the rest of us just how odious some of the ideas of the far Left are." Would Kondracke punt on a professor who'd endorsed slavery? I somehow doubt it.

Hopefully ? and, I think, probably ? someone will find enough academic fraud to fire Churchill for cause. No doubt, we'll hear from many on the left about the "chilling effect" such a move would have on "academic freedom," and many conservatives will clear their throats in embarrassment. You really have to marvel at how the other side has mastered this game.

http://nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldberg200502111210.asp

That's also an interesting twisting of the facts to attack the Euros. FYI WWII started in 1939 when France and Britain declared war on Germany in support of their ally, Poland. The US entered the war in 1941 only after being attacked by both Germany and Japan and with a formal declaration of war from both.

Maybe the US should feel guilty for having "hesitated too long".

Oh my goodness. There is no reason to believe that anything fruitful will spring from further discussion, but there are a couple of comments here that I'm afraid I can't abide

WWII started when France and Britain declared war? That measure utterly ignores causality; many better lines of demarcation exist. Perhaps it began when the treaty of Versailles was utterly abrogated by Germany; maybe it began when Hitler staged fake attacks from Poland he then used as pretext; then again maybe when the Fascists in Germany usurped power by extra-constitutional means best marks the date; or perhaps the onset of the Nazi's eugenic madness can be considered the start.

After trying long and hard to ignore Hitler's imperial ends, France and Britain finally and formally acknowledged that a madman's brinkmanship left them no other choice but to fight. Claiming WWII started when the obvious was acknowledged is like saying the AIDs epidemic began when HIV was named. In both instances a lot of death and destruction occurred long before the talking heads made formal noise.

As for any guilt the US should feel . . . the US was in the midst of an economic depression, a strong strain of isolationism had swept the land, a significant portion of the population traced its roots back to Germany, nations most proximate to the threat were embracing appeasement, and indeed the threat was on the other side of the freaking Atlantic ocean. The surprise is not that the US stayed out of the war for so long, the surprise is that despite all sorts of very compelling reasons to let the Euros settle their own affairs many US politicians took very large political risks that almost certainly lead the US into another war far removed from its shores.

Was Lend Lease a sign of US hesitance? How about the massive rearmament program undertaken in the midst of a depression? Perhaps supplying Chenault and allowing our fighter pilots to resign their commissions and fight in China shows how we sought to duck and cover? Maybe the massive intelligence effort started up from near scratch demarks our hesitance? Or perhaps American meddling merely demonstrates we are parochial dunces before the feces hits the fan, and hesitant fools if we wait for the sh*t storm to reach our shores.

Sheesh. . . .

Perhaps this would be better posted under "Geo-cultural Matters." As that may be, as someone who grew up amid zero population growth doomsayers, this piece demonstrates once again that terminal chest thumping is usually wrong.

Think the most interesting point arising from the following lengthy article is the posited swing in political power toward the aging demographic and how this will impact younger adults. Specifically, the thought that overly taxed producers won't have the income to raise children has some interesting implications.


Demographics and the Culture War


By Stanley Kurtz
Stanley Kurtz is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

We moderns have gotten used to the slow, seemingly inexorable dissolution of traditional social forms, the family prominent among them. Yet the ever-decreasing size of the family may soon expose a fundamental contradiction in modernity itself. Fertility rates have been falling throughout the industrialized world for more than 30?years, with implications that are only just now coming into view. Growing population has driven the economy, sustained the welfare state, and shaped modern culture. A declining population could conceivably put the dynamic of modernization into doubt.

The question of the cultural and economic consequences of declining birthrates has been squarely placed on the table by four new books: The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity and What to Do About It, by Phillip Longman; Fewer: How the New Demography of Depopulation Will Shape Our Future, by Ben Wattenberg; The Coming Generational Storm: What You Need to Know About America?s Economic Future, by Laurence J. Kotlikoff and Scott Burns; and Running On Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It, by Peter G. Peterson. Longman and Wattenberg concentrate on the across-the-board implications of demographic change. Kotlikoff and Burns, along with Peterson, limn the economic crisis that could come in the absence of swift and sweeping entitlement reform.

Taken together, these four books suggest that we are moving toward a period of substantial social change whose tantalizing ideological implications run the gamut from heightened cultural radicalism to the emergence of a new, more conservative cultural era.

New demographics

Drawing on these books, let us first get a sense of the new demography. The essential facts of demographic decline discussed in all four are not in doubt. Global fertility rates have fallen by half since 1972. For a modern nation to replace its population, experts explain, the average woman needs to have 2.1 children over the course of her lifetime. Not a single industrialized nation today has a fertility rate of 2.1, and most are well below replacement level.

In Ben Franklin?s day, by contrast, America averaged eight births per woman. American birth rates today are the highest in the industrialized world ? yet even those are nonetheless just below the replacement level of 2.1. Moreover, that figure is relatively high only because of America?s substantial immigrant population. Fertility rates among native born American women are now far below what they were even in the 1930s, when the Great Depression forced a sharp reduction in family size.

Population decline is by no means restricted to the industrial world. Remarkably, the sharp rise in American fertility rates at the height of the baby boom ? 3.8 children per woman ? was substantially above Third World fertility rates today. From East Asia to the Middle East to Mexico, countries once fabled for their high fertility rates are now falling swiftly toward or below replacement levels. In 1970, a typical woman in the developing world bore six children. Today, that figure is about 2.7. In scale and rapidity, that sort of fertility decline is historically unprecedented. By 2002, fertility rates in 20 developing countries had fallen below replacement levels. 2002?also witnessed a dramatic reversal by demographic experts at the United Nations, who for the first time said that world population was ultimately headed down, not up. These decreases in human fertility cover nearly every region of the world, crossing all cultures, religions, and forms of government.

Declining birth rates mean that societies everywhere will soon be aging to an unprecedented degree. Increasing life expectancy is also contributing to the aging of the world?s population. In 1900, American life expectancy at birth was 47 years. Today it is 76. By 2050, one out of five Americans will be over age 65, making the U.S. population as a whole markedly older than Florida?s population today. Striking as that demographic graying may be, it pales before projections for countries like Italy and Japan. The United Nations estimates that by 2050, 42 percent of all people in Italy and Japan will be aged 60 or older.

Can societies that old sustain themselves? That is the question inviting speculation. With fertility falling swiftly in the developing nations, immigration will not be able to ameliorate certain implications of a rapidly aging West. Even in the short or medium term, the aging imbalance cannot be rectified except through a level of immigration far above what Western countries would find politically acceptable. Alarmed by the problems of immigration and assimilation, even famously tolerant Holland has begun to turn away immigrants en masse ? and this before the recent murder of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, which has subsequently forced the questions of immigration and demography to the center of the Dutch political stage.

In short, the West is beginning to experience significant demographic changes, with substantial cultural consequences. Historically, the aged have made up only a small portion of society, and the rearing of children has been the chief concern. Now children will become a small minority, and society?s central problem will be caring for the elderly. Yet even this assumes that societies consisting of elderly citizens at levels of 20, 30, even 40?or more percent can sustain themselves at all. That is not obvious.

Population decline is also set to ramify geometrically. As population falls, the pool of potential mothers in each succeeding generation shrinks. So even if, well into the process, there comes a generation of women with a higher fertility rate than their mothers?, the momentum of population decline could still be locked in. Population decline may also be cemented into place by economics. To support the ever-growing numbers of elderly, governments may raise taxes on younger workers. That would make children even less affordable than they are today, decreasing the size of future generations still further.

If worldwide fertility rates reach levels now common in the developing world (and that is where they seem headed), within a few centuries, the world?s population could shrink below the level of America?s today. Of course, it?s unlikely that mankind will simply cease to exist for failure to reproduce. But the critical point is that we cannot reverse that course unless something happens to substantially increase fertility rates. And whatever might raise fertility rates above replacement level will almost certainly require fundamental cultural change.

Why does modern social life translate into the lower birth rates that spark all those wider implications? Urbanization is one major factor. In a traditional agricultural society, children are put to work early. They also inherit family land, using its fruits to care for aging parents. In a modern urban economy, on the other hand, children represent a tremendous expense, and one increasingly unlikely to be returned to parents in the form of wealth or care. With the growth of a consumer economy, potential parents are increasingly presented with a zero-sum choice between children and more consumer goods and services for themselves.

Along with urbanization, the other important factor depressing world fertility is the movement of women into the workforce ? and the technological changes that have made that movement possible. By the time many professional women have completed their educations, their prime childbearing years have passed. Thus, a woman?s educational level is the best predictor of how many children she will have. As Wattenberg shows, worldwide, the correlation between falling female illiteracy and falling female fertility is nearly exact. And as work increasingly becomes an option for women, having a child ?means not only heavy new expenses, but also the loss of income that a mother might otherwise have gained through work.

Technological change also stands behind the movement of women into the workforce. In a modern, knowledge-based economy, women suffer no physical disadvantage. The ability of women to work in turn depends upon the capacity of modern contraception, along with abortion, to control fertility efficiently. The sheer breadth and rapidity of world fertility decline implies that contraceptive technology has been a necessary condition of the change. Before fertility could be reliably controlled through medical technology, marriage and accompanying strictures against out-of-wedlock births were the key check on a society?s birth rate. Economic decline meant delayed marriage, and thus lower fertility. But contraceptive technology now makes it possible to efficiently control fertility within marriage. This turns motherhood into a choice. And what demographic decline truly shows is that when childbearing has become a matter of sheer choice, it has become less frequent.

The movement of population from tightly knit rural communities into cities, along with contraception, abortion, and the related entry of women into the workforce, explain many of the core cultural changes of the postmodern world. Secularism, individualism, and feminism are tied to a social system that discourages fertility. If a low-fertility world is unsustainable, then these cultural trends may be unsustainable as well. Alternatively, if these cultural trends cannot be modified or counterbalanced, human population appears on course to shrink ever more swiftly.

New economics?

Yet there are?signs that the current balance of social forces is not sustainable and may well give way sooner rather than later. That, at any rate, is the view of Longman, Peterson, Kotlikoff and Burns. (Wattenberg is somewhat more sanguine about our ability to weather the coming challenge, although he does not directly address the more dystopic scenarios Peterson, Kotlikoff, and Burns float.) Broadly speaking, both the free market and the welfare state assume continual population growth. ?Pay as you go? entitlements require ever-larger new generations to finance the retirement of previous generations. Longman argues that economic growth itself depends upon ever-increasing numbers of consumers and workers.

Population growth, he argues, drove the Industrial Revolution, and there has never been economic growth under conditions of population decline. Thus, for example, he ascribes Japan?s current economic troubles to its declining fertility. And though Longman doesn?t point to Germany, it us interesting to note that this particular low-fertility country is also struggling economically to the point of revisiting the famously shorter European work week ? a phenomenon obviously related to the struggle to reduce the pensions promised to an aging population and premissed on more younger workers than actually came to exist.

Both Longman and Wattenberg raise the question of whether markets need population growth in order to thrive. As Wattenberg puts the point, it hardly makes sense to invest in a business whose pool of potential customers is shrinking. That much might be true, even if entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare were fully funded. But Social Security and Medicare are not fully funded. On the contrary, America?s massive unfunded entitlement programs have the potential to spark a serious social and economic crisis in the not too distant future. And the welfare state in the rest of the developed world is on even shakier economic ground.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the combined cost of Medicare and Medicaid alone will consume a larger share of the nation?s income in 2050 than the entire federal budget does today. By 2050, the combined cost of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and interest on the national debt will rise to 47?percent of gross domestic product ? more than double the level of expected federal revenues at the time. Without reform, all federal spending would eventually go to seniors. Obviously, the system will correct before we reach that point. But how?

Already, senior citizens vote at very high rates ? reacting sharply to any potential cuts in benefits. As the baby boomers retire, the political weight of senior citizens will be vastly greater than it already is. Proposed pension reforms brought down French and Italian governments in the 1990s. Even China has been forced by large-scale protests and riots to back off from attempts to reduce retirement benefits.

In the absence of serious reform, we may be in for an economic ?hard landing.? Peterson, Kotlikoff, and Burns warn of a spiraling financial crisis that could even lead to worldwide depression. Former Federal Reserve Board chairman Paul Volcker sees a 75?percent chance of an economic crisis of some sort within the next five years.

What might such a ?meltdown? look like? Peterson, Kotlikoff, and Burns spin out essentially the same scenario. The danger is that investors might at some point decide that the United States will never rein in its deficit. Once investors see America?s deficits as out of control, they will assume their dollar-based securities will be eroded by inflation, higher interest rates, and a serious decline in the stock market. Should a loss of confidence cause leading investors to pull their money out of U.S. securities, it could set off a run on the dollar. That would create the very inflation, interest rate increases, and market decline that investors feared in the first place. Such has already happened in Argentina, which Kotlikoff and Burns use as a paradigm in which loss of investor confidence brought down the economy in a kind of self-fulfilling prophesy. The danger is that the United States and the rest of the industrialized world may already have entered the sort of debt trap common among Third World nations. A rapidly aging Japan is even more vulnerable than America, say Kotlikoff and Burns. They add that, should investors looking at teetering modern welfare states and the long-term demographic crisis bring down any of the advanced economies, the contagion could spread to others.

Are we really headed for a worldwide economic meltdown that will leave tens of millions of aging seniors languishing in substandard nursing homes while the rest of us suffer from long years of overtaxation, rising crime, and political instability? Kotlikoff and Burns say the prospect is all too real, and Peterson implies as much.

Yet there are also critics of such disaster scenarios. They argue that growth rates in the new information-based economy will likely be somewhat higher than in the past. Higher rates of economic growth will bring in enough revenue to offset the rising costs of entitlements. Medical advances are keeping older workers healthy and productive. Raise the retirement age by a couple of years, say many, and the expanded workforce would boost government revenues enough to offset shrinkage in the number of younger workers.

Peterson, Kotlikoff, and Burns say these fixes won?t work. Despite increased life expectancy, older workers have generally been retiring earlier. It would be politically difficult to force them in the other direction. And according to Kotlikoff and Burns, delayed retirement produces negligible gains for the economy. When people work longer, they save less because they have fewer years of retirement to finance. The effects cancel out. Overall investment in the economy is reduced, as is the real wage base available for government taxation.

Kotlikoff and Burns also argue that the apparent productivity gains of the late nineties were illusory. Peterson argues that, even if productivity gains prove real, the benefit for the deficit will be canceled out by increases in discretionary spending.

The truth is, no one knows what future productivity will be. There?s a chance rates will turn higher on into the future, yet it seems imprudent to rely on luck with the stakes so high. And as Peterson, Kotlikoff, and Burns point out, so long as Social Security is indexed to wages, revenue gains from higher productivity will be canceled out by increased benefits. Even an ideal growth scenario cannot solve the entitlement crisis unless Social Security is indexed to prices rather than wages. It would seem that politically difficult reform and significant de facto benefit cuts are inevitable even on the most optimistic of reckonings. And the optimistic scenarios themselves seem strained.

What about the pessimistic scenarios? It would be foolish to predict with certainty an economic ?hard landing,? much less world-wide depression. Still, the case that these are at least real possibilities seems strong. Even without a ?meltdown,? long-term prospects for the economy and the welfare state in rapidly aging societies seem uncertain at best. How exactly will nations like Japan or Italy be able to function when more than 40 percent of their citizens are over 60? Hard landing or not, and the political power of the elderly notwithstanding, there seems a very real chance that America?s entitlement programs will someday be substantially scaled back. But what sort of struggle between the old and the young will emerge in the meantime, and how will a massive and relatively impoverished older generation cope with the change?

The Coming Generational Storm and Running On Empty?are important books. Whether or not the reader is ultimately persuaded by these premonitions of economic peril, it?s time the United States had a serious debate over entitlement reform. Nonetheless, there is also something problematic in the way that Peterson, Kotlikoff, and Burns place the lion?s share of blame for our problems on our political leadership. True, both parties deserve to be chastised for running from the entitlement crisis. Yet even if Peterson, Burns, and Kotlikoff are right about that, they put too much blame on politicians for what broader cultural and demographic forces have wrought. Peterson nods to demography as the background condition for the deficit dilemma yet barely explores the link. Kotlikoff and Burns have much more to say about the demographic details yet treat our changed fertility patterns as irreversible and therefore irrelevant to policy.

That is a questionable assumption. The growing expense of child-rearing, for example, plays a key role in holding birth rates down. Peterson, Kotlikoff, and Burns are quick to criticize the push for lower taxes, yet rising taxes arguably helped to deepen the population decline at the root of our economic dilemma. In 1955, at the height of the baby boom, a typical one-earner family paid 17.3 percent of its income in taxes. Today, a median family with one paycheck pays 37.6 percent of its income in taxes ? 39?percent if it?s a two-earner couple. So the new demography has put us into an economic trap. High taxes depress birth rates, but low taxes expand demographically driven deficits still further.

Precisely because we are at an unprecedented demographic watershed, politicians have no model for taking these factors into account. Political leaders in an earlier era could take it for granted that ever-growing populations would keep the welfare state solvent and the economy humming. It?s not surprising that neither the public nor politicians have been able to adjust to the immense, unintended, and only gradually emerging social consequences of postmodern family life. With their eyes firmly fixed on the underlying demographic changes, Wattenberg and Longman are less disposed to browbeat politicians than are Peterson, Kotlikoff, and Burns.

A new conservatism?

On the matter of the new demography and its social consequences, the work of Ben Wattenberg holds a place of special honor. In 1987, 17 years before the publication of Fewer, Wattenberg wrote The Birth Dearth. That book was the first prominent public warning of a crisis of population decline. Yet many rejected its message. In an era when a ?population explosion? was taken for granted, the message of The Birth Dearth flew squarely in the face of received wisdom. Subsequent events, however, have proved Wattenberg right.

Despite that vindication, Wattenberg?s own views have changed somewhat. Whereas The Birth Dearth advocated aggressive pro-natalist policies, today Wattenberg seems to have all but given up hope that fertility rates can be substantially increased. On the one hand, he thinks it unlikely that worldwide population can maintain a course of shrinkage without end. On the other hand, he sees no viable scenario by which this presumably unsustainable trend might be reversed.

In The Empty Cradle, Philip Longman takes a different view. Longman believes that runaway population decline may be halted, yet he understands that this can be accomplished only by way of fundamental cultural change. The emerging demographic crisis will call a wide range of postmodern ideologies into question. Longman writes as a secular liberal looking for ways to stabilize the population short of the traditionalist, religious renewal he fears the new demography will bring in its wake.

Given the roots of population decline in the core characteristics of postmodern life, Longman understands that the endless downward spiral cannot be reversed without a major social transformation. As he puts it, ?If human population does not wither away in the future, it will be because of a mutation in human culture.? Longman draws parallels to the Victorian era and other periods when fears of population decline, cultural decadence, and fraying social safety nets intensified family solidarity and stigmatized abortion and birth control. Longman also notes that movements of the 1960s, such as feminism, environmentalism, and the sexual revolution, were buttressed by fears of a population explosion. Once it becomes evident that our real problem is the failure to reproduce, these movements and attitudes could weaken.

Longman?s greatest fear is a revival of fundamentalism, which he defines broadly as any movement that relies on ancient myth and legend, whether religious or not, ?to oppose modern, liberal, and commercial values.? Religious traditionalists tend to have large families (relatively speaking). Secular modernists do not. Longman?s fear is that, over time, Western secular liberals will shrink as a portion of world population while, at home and abroad, traditionalists will flourish. To counter this, and to solve the larger demographic-economic crisis, Longman offers some very thoughtful proposals for encouraging Americans to have more children. Substantial tax relief for parents is the foundation of his plan.

Longman has thought this problem through very deeply. Yet, in some respects, his concerns seem odd and exaggerated. He lumps American evangelicals together with Nazis, racists, and Islamicists in the same supposed opposition to all things modern. This is more interesting as a specimen of liberal prejudice than as a balanced assessment of the relationship between Christianity and modernity. Moreover, the mere fact that religious conservatives have more children than secular liberals is no guarantee that those children will remain untouched by secular culture.
Still, Longman rightly sees that population decline cannot be reversed in the absence of major cultural change, and the prospects of a significant religious revival must not be dismissed. In a future shadowed by vastly disproportionate numbers of poor elderly citizens, and younger workers struggling with impossible tax burdens, the fundamental tenets of postmodern life might be called into question. Some will surely argue from a religious perspective that mankind, having discarded God?s injunctions to be fruitful and multiply, is suffering the consequences.

Yet we needn?t resort to disaster scenarios to see that our current demographic dilemma portends fundamental cultural change. Let us say that in the wake of the coming economic and demographic stresses, a serious secular, pronatalist program of the type proposed by Longman were to take hold and succeed. The result might not be ?fundamentalism,? yet it would almost certainly involve greater cultural conservatism. Married parents tend to be more conservative, politically and culturally. Predictions of future dominance for the Democratic Party are based on the increasing demographic prominence of single women. Delayed marriage lowers fertility rates and moves the culture leftward. Reverse that trend by stimulating married parenthood, and the country grows more conservative ? whether in a religious mode or not.

But can the cultural engines of postmodernity really be thrown into reverse? After all, people don?t decide to have children because they think it will help society. They act on their personal desires and interests. Will women stop wanting to be professionals? Is it conceivable that birth control might become significantly less available than it is today? It certainly seems unlikely that any free Western society would substantially restrict contraception, no matter how badly its population was dwindling.

Yet it is important to keep in mind that decisions about whether and when to have children may someday take place in a markedly different social environment. As mentioned, children are valued in traditional societies because of the care they provide in old age. In the developed world, by contrast, old age is substantially provisioned by personal savings and the welfare state. But what will happen if the economy and the welfare state shrink significantly? Quite possibly, people will once again begin to look to family for security in old age ? and childbearing might commensurately appear more personally necessary.

If a massive cohort of elderly citizens find themselves in a chronic state of crisis, the lesson for the young will be clear. Wattenberg notes that pro-natalist policies have failed wherever they?ve been tried. Yet in conditions of serious economic stress and demographic imbalance, sweeping pro-natalist plans like those offered by Longman may in fact become workable. That would usher in a series of deeper cultural changes, most of them pointing society in a more conservative direction.

Then again, we may finesse the challenge of a rapidly aging society by some combination of increased productivity, entitlement reform, and delayed retirement. In that case, fertility will continue to fall, and world population will shrink at compounding speed. The end result could be crisis or change further down the road, or simply substantial and ongoing reductions in world population, with geostrategic consequences difficult to predict. One way or the other, it would seem that our social order is in motion.

New eugenics?

The emerging population implosion, then, may be taken in part as a challenge to Francis Fukuyama?s ?end of history? thesis. As Fukuyama himself came to recognize in his 2002 book, Our Posthuman Future, the greatest challenge to the ?end of history? idea is the prospect that biotechnology might work a fundamental change in human nature and society. In the form of modern contraception, it may already have done so. And contraception could be only the beginning.

Like others who warn of the dangers of biotechnology, Fukuyama is most concerned about the prospect that genetic engineering could undermine the principles of liberty and equality. If children are genetically engineered for greater health, strength, or intellectual capacity, erstwhile liberal society could be plunged into a brave new world of genetically-based class hierarchy.

That is a grave concern, yet there may still be others. The disruptive effects of biotechnology will play out in a depopulating world ? perhaps a world shadowed by economic and cultural crisis. So the immediate challenge of biotechnology to human history is the prospect that the family might be replaced by a bioengineered breeding system. Artificial wombs, not the production of supermen, may soon be the foremost social challenge posed by advancing science. Certainly, there is a danger that genetic engineering may someday lead to class distinctions. But the pressure on the bioengineers of the future will be to generate population. If and when the prospect of building ?better? human beings becomes real, it will play out in the context of a world under radical population pressure. That population crunch will likely shape the new genetics at every turn.

With talk of artificial wombs and the end of the family, we are a long way from the idea of a conservative religious revival. The truth is, the possibility of a population crisis simultaneously raises the prospect of conservative revival and eugenic nightmare. In his landmark book on Western family decline, Disturbing the Nest, sociologist David Popenoe traces out contrasting ideal-typical scenarios by which the Western family might be either strengthened or further eroded. Looking at these scenarios, it?s evident that a population crisis could trigger either one.

What could reverse the decline of the Western nuclear family? Anything that might counter the affluence, secularism, and individualism that led to family decline in the first place, says Popenoe. Economic decline could force people to depend on families instead of the state. A religious revival could restore traditional mores. And a revised calculation of rational interest in light of social chaos could call the benefits of extreme individualism into question. We?ve already seen that a demographic-economic crisis could invoke all three of these mechanisms.

But what about the reverse scenario, in which the nuclear family would entirely disappear? According to Popenoe, the end of the nuclear family would come through a further development of our growing tendency to separate pair-bonding from sex and procreation. Especially in Europe, marriage is morphing into parental cohabitation. And in societies where parents commonly cohabit, the practice of ?living alone together? is emerging. There unmarried parents remain ?together? yet live in separate households, only one of them with a child. And of course, intentional single motherhood by older unmarried women ? Murphy Brown-style ? is another dramatic repudiation of the nuclear family. The next logical step in all this would be for single mothers to turn their children over to some other individual or group for rearing. That would spell the definitive end of the nuclear family.

A prolonged economic crisis accompanied by widespread concern over depopulation would undoubtedly place feminism under pressure. Yet it?s unlikely that postmodern attitudes toward women, work and family could be swept aside ? or even significantly modified ? without a major cultural struggle. A eugenic regime would be the logical way to safeguard feminist goals in a depopulating world, and there is ample precedent for an alliance between eugenics and feminism.

After all, birth control pioneers like Margaret Sanger in the United States and Marie Stopes in England blended feminism and eugenics at the outset of the twentieth century. As birth control came into wide use, fertility sharply declined ? particularly among the upper classes, which had access to the technology. Alarmed by the relative decline of the elites, Teddy Roosevelt urged upper-class women to have more children. Even progressives began to question their commitment to women?s rights. Margaret Sanger?s response was to promote a eugenic regime of forced sterilization and birth control among the unfit. Instead of urging ?the intelligent? to have more children, Sanger advocated the suppression of births among ?the insane and the blemished.?

The women?s movement of the 1960s forged still more links between feminism and eugenics. Shulamith Firestone?s 1970 classic, The Dialectic of Sex, argued that women would truly be free only when released from the burden of reproduction. Today, as scientists work to engineer embryos in the laboratory, while others devise technology to save premature babies at ever earlier stages of development, the possibility that a viable artificial womb will someday be created has emerged. While feminists are divided on the issue, many look forward to the prospect.

Thus, if faced with an ultimate choice between feminist hopes of workplace equality with men and society?s simultaneous need for more children, it is not hard to imagine that some on the cultural left would opt for technological outsourcing ? surrogacy in various forms ? as a way out. To some extent, this phenomenon has already begun: Consider the small but growing numbers of older, usually career women who choose and pay younger women to carry babies for them. As with Sanger and Firestone, eugenics may be seen by some as the ?logical? alternative to pressure to restore the traditional family.

Christine Rosen, who has usefully thought through the prospects and implications of ?ectogenesis,? suggests that objections to the human exploitation inherent in surrogacy could actually propel a shift toward artificial?wombs. Of course, that would only complete the commodification of childbirth itself ? weakening if not eliminating the parent-child bond. And if artificial wombs one day become ?safer? than human gestation, insurers might begin to insist on our not giving birth the old-fashioned way.

Such dark possibilities demand serious intellectual attention. Neither principled objections to tampering with human nature nor instinctive horror at the thought of it suffice to meet the challenge of the new eugenics. Philosophy and instinct must be welded to a compelling social vision. The course and consequences of world population decline offer just such a vision. In the end, philosophical principles and reflexive horror are guardians of the social order, yet without a lively vision of the social order they are protecting, these guardians cannot properly do their work.

New choices

Even in the?celebrated image of the conservative who stands athwart history yelling ?Stop!? there is a subtle admission of modernization?s inevitability. Tocqueville saw history?s trend toward ever greater individualism as an irresistible force. The most we could do, he thought, was to balance individualism with modern forms of religious, family, and civic association. Today, even Tocqueville?s cherished counterweights to radical individualism are disappearing ? particularly in the sphere of the family.

It is indeed tempting to believe that the fundamental social changes initiated in the 1960s have by now become irreversible. Widespread contraception, abortion, women in the workforce, marital decline, growing secularism and individualism ? all seem here to stay. Looked at from a longer view, however, the results are not really in. We haven?t yet seen the passing of even the great demographic wave of the ?baby boom.? The latter half of the twentieth century may someday be seen not as ushering in the end of history, but as a transition out of modernity and into a new, prolonged, and culturally novel era of population shrinkage.

The most interesting and unanticipated prospect of all would be a conservatism. Of our authors, only Longman has explored the potential ideological consequences of the new demography. In effect, Longman wrote his book to forestall a religiously-based conservatism precipitated by demographic and economic decline. Yet even Longman may underestimate the potential for conservative resurgence.

It wouldn?t take a full-scale economic meltdown, or even a relative disparity in births between fundamentalists and secularists, to change modernity?s course. Chronic low-level economic stress in a rapidly aging world may be enough. There is good reason to worry about the fate of elderly boomers with fragile families, limited savings, and relatively few children to care for them. A younger generation of workers will soon feel the burden of paying for the care of this massive older generation. The nursing shortage, already acute, will undoubtedly worsen, possibly foreshadowing shortages in many other categories of workers. Real estate values could be threatened by population decline. And all these demographically tinged issues, and more, will likely become the media?s daily fare.

In such an atmosphere, a new set of social values could emerge along with a fundamentally new calculation of personal interest. Modernity itself may come in for criticism even as a new appreciation for the benefits of marriage and parenting might emerge. A successful pronatalist policy (if achieved by means of the conventional family rather than through surrogacy or artificial wombs) would only reinforce the conservative trend. In that case we will surely find that it is cultural radicals standing athwart history?s new trend yelling ?Stop!?

Humankind faces three fundamental choices in the years ahead: at least a partial restoration of traditional social values, a radical new eugenics, or endless and compounding population decline. For a long time, this choice may not be an either/or. Divisions will likely emerge both within and between societies on how to proceed. Some regions may grow more traditional, others may experiment with radical new social forms, while still others may continue to shrink. And a great deal will depend upon an economic future that no one can predict with certainty. In any case, the social innovations of the modern world are still being tested, and the outcome is unresolved.

http://www.policyreview.org/feb05/kurtz.html

As the saying goes "God created man, Mr. Colt made them equal."


Gamage gets his guns back
By Stacey Creasy/Editor

MACOMB - Nearly two months after 87-year-old Leonard Gamage fought off an intruder, McDonough County Sheriff Mike Johnson gladly returned the gun that saved Gamage's life.

On Dec. 4, Gamage used his .22 caliber rifle to shoot 20-year-old James Vanderveen of Geneva, in the foot after Vanderveen allegedly attempted to force his way into Gamage's residence.

Gamage said the ordeal began just after 9 p.m. while he was sitting in his home, watching television. He does not know why Vanderveen was trying to break into the house, but he wasn't going to take any chances. After Gamage and the suspect struggled twice, Gamage spotted an opportunity to grab the gun.

"I seized the moment," Gamage said in a previous interview. "I didn't know if the gun was loaded or not, but I was sure it would change his (Vanderveen) mind about getting into the house."

Even though Gamage had Vanderveen in his gun sights, Gamage said the young man continued to threaten to harm Gamage. That is when Gamage fired a warning shot. When Vanderveen refused to back off, Gamage said he shot him in the foot.

While Gamage called a neighbor, Vanderveen fled. Gamage went after him and located Vanderveen next to the garage, near the barn.

"I snuck up on him and told him, 'move an inch and I'll kill you,'" Gamage told the Journal. Gamage said Vanderveen then begged him not to shoot him. Gamage held Vanderveen in that spot until his neighbor, Tom Friday arrived.

Gamage was shaken up, but not injured. Gamage said he was surprised at the amount of strength and energy he had during the ordeal.

Officers from the McDonough County Sheriff's Department arrived at Gamage's residence and sent Vanderveen to the hospital. He was charged a few days later with felony trespassing, and was released from jail after posting a $25,000 cash bond.

During the investigation, the police officers learned Gamage did not have a current Firearms Identification Card, so they confiscated the rifle and second gun in the home. Gamage said the guns have been in the family for years.

Johnson told Gamage once he received a new FOI card, he would return his guns. Johnson kept his word.

The ordeal evolved into Gamage's proverbial 15 minutes of fame. Gamage was invited to talk about the ordeal on a number of radio talk shows. During the talk shows people gave Gamage nicknames like "lock and load Leonard."

The story the Journal broke was also picked up by newspapers and magazines coast to coast.

"You would not believe how many people have called me about this," Gamage said. "I've talked to people in New York and Texas and about every place in between."

A number of people were outraged the police took Gamage's guns, but they were simply abiding by Illinois law.

Gamage said he hopes the story deters would-be burglars from breaking into homes.

"You never know, someone might be there," he added.

http://www.macombjournal.com/articles/2005/02/01/news/news2.txt

All the murder rate comparisons in that article are with more or less 3rd World countries, so it's not really surprising they have high murder rates.

Finland, Switzerland, Israel, Russia, and the US are all cited; they're hardly third world, though I 'spose you could argue the point where Russia is concerned. My guess is that the citizens of Brazil would also object to the third world label.

The thesis of this piece is that strict gun regulation does not assure a low crime rate, nor does limited gun regulation assure a high crime rate. I'm not sure how you would explore this thesis without examining nations with strict and limited regulations. What would you have had the author do?

As mentioned before, the equation is a multivariable one, and if the imputation is that factors other than access to firearms need to be considered, I'd certainly agree. If, however, the claim is that disparate murder rates in three Western democracies are primarily driven by the rate of gun ownership in the US, then I'd strongly disagree. As also mentioned before, the areas of the US with the highest murder rate are those that most restrict private firearm ownership.

Most murder, and crime in general, occur in areas of the US with the most draconian gun laws. Subtract those areas and my strong suspicion is the remaining sections of the US would compare well to the other countries you cite. I note, moreover, that crime, murder included, is falling in the US, most quickly in those areas with the least amount of gun regulation. I'm not sure about Canada, but crime in general, murder included, is rising in the UK.

There is a lot of room to debate the cause of these disparate, nuanced, and changing crime rates, and there is certainly plenty of fodder here for further discussion. I remain convinced, however, that criminal enterprise is first and foremost an enterprise: perceived risk figures prominently in all criminal cost benefit analysis. First world or third, allowing law abiding citizens to provide for there own defense is the simplest, surest way to moderate criminal behavior?one of many benefits conferred by an armed citizenry.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. . . .
From today's Asian Times

US sees a spy in China's Lenovo

WASHINGTON - In a potentially damaging move for Sino-US business relations, American regulators are reportedly blocking IBM's proposed $1.25 billion sale of its personal computer business to the Lenovo Group of China, on national security concerns.

Citing unnamed sources "familiar with the matter", Bloomberg reported on Sunday that members of the Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States (CFIUS) are concerned that Lenovo employees might be used to conduct industrial espionage. According to the report, these members are worried that Chinese operatives may use an IBM facility in North Carolina to launch industrial espionage to further China's military technology. The Chinese government has a majority share in Lenovo, formerly known as Legend. Incidentally, the US recently sanctioned eight Chinese companies for exporting technology to Iran for use in a missile program, according to a recent New York Times report.

CFIUS comprises 11 US agencies, including the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security, and is chaired by the Treasury Department. The influential committee has the ability to veto the deal and could also launch an investigation into the implications of such a deal. IBM had earlier this month said that it had filed for CFIUS approval as part of the necessary regulatory approvals it was seeking to formalize the deal. The Lenovo sale got a US anti-trust clearance earlier this month.

Lenovo and IBM formally filed a notice seeking CFIUS clearance on December 29, according to the unnamed sources. US law stipulates that if the committee doesn't approve a foreign takeover in 30 days, it must open a formal investigation and finally take the matter the US president for a decision. "Because of national security concerns, we do not comment on matters that may be under review by the Committee on Foreign Investment," Treasury spokesman Tony Fratto was quoted as saying. The committee never reveals whether it's studying a certain transaction or the decisions it takes on them.

IBM and the government are negotiating the matter, the sources told Bloomberg. "IBM has filed a required notice with the Committee on Foreign Investments," Edward Barbini, a spokesman for IBM Corp of Armonk, New York, was quoted as saying. "IBM is fully cooperating with all government agencies in their review of this transaction." In a statement, Lenovo spokeswoman Alice Li said: "Lenovo continues to fully cooperate with relevant authorities." Treasury Department spokesman Rob Nichols declined to comment, so did Chinese government officials in Beijing.

CFIUS, which reviews takeovers of US firms by foreign entities to ensure that the deals do not endanger US national security, has previously blocked similar acquisitions by companies with links to China. In 2003, it scrapped the sale of Global Crossing to Hutchison Whampoa Ltd, the Hong Kong conglomerate controlled by billionaire Li Ka-shing, because of national security concerns raised by Chinese control of the company's global undersea cable communications network.

According to the terms of the IBM-Lenovo contract, touted as the most ambitious attempt by a Chinese company to penetrate the American market, IBM will would get $650 million in cash and $600 million in Lenovo stocks to hold a 18.9% stake in the Chinese state-controlled computer major. Lenovo would move its PC business headquarters to New York from Beijing, combining the 9,500 IBM personal-computing division employees with its own 10,000 workers. Lenovo's operations were to be jointly run from Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, where the design and marketing of IBM PCs is centered, and from Beijing, where Lenovo is headquartered.

IBM's PC division hasn't made money in over three years now. It posted a net loss of $139 million in the six months ended June 30 and its shares have fallen 3.9% since. During the past four years, IBM's PC operation has lost about $1 billion, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission regulatory filing. IBM has not been manufacturing its own PCs for many years now, getting most of its products made by partners largely in China. But despite operating at a loss, IBM was supposedly the third-largest vendor worldwide for PCs in 2004, with 5.5% market share. The combined Lenovo/IBM was expected to command a market share of about 8%, making it the third-largest PC supplier worldwide. Lenovo is 57% controlled by Legend Group, which was established in 1984 by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a government institution.

Lenovo is now raising $1.2 billion to help it complete the deal. Lenovo, along with China Eastern Airlines Corp that's seeking $225 million to purchase planes, epitomizes the growing transnational ambition of Chinese companies. Chinese companies spent $4.1 billion buying overseas companies last year, up from $2 billion in 2003.

Reports of the US hurdle, surprisingly, pushed up shares of Hong Kong-traded Lenovo by 5%. Lenovo's shares have shed around 20% since it announced the deal last month as the market has generally viewed the deal negatively because of IBM's recent history of losses in its PC venture.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/GA25Ad03.html

Mr. Moore, Ms. O'Donnell, and various other Hollywood luminaries would keep their bodyguards and disarm everyone else. Charlton Heston had some pretty amusing stories about Hollywood types calling him up during the riots occurring in the wake of the Rodney King verdict. These left liberal folks, upon discovering that gun stores couldn't sell them firearms until after the three day waiting period they had all lobbied for, called Heston to see if he'd lend 'em a gun in the interim. Nothing like a little raw reality to test the strength of one's convictions.

Encountered the following article today and confess it inspires a degree of cognitive dissonance. Posing naked with farm animals I could see causing this result. Posing with guns? Perhaps someone can explain the outcome to me.


Gun photo' candidate dismissed

A Conservative parliamentary candidate has been dismissed after he was pictured on the internet with a range of guns, rifles and a hunting knife.

Robert Oulds, the prospective MP for Slough in Berkshire, appeared with the weapons in the camera phone images.

Tory deputy chairman Andrew Mackay said the party had faced no choice but to remove him from its candidates' list.

"This was a serious error of judgement which was unacceptable in a parliamentary candidate," he added.

'All licensed'

A national newspaper reported there were 11 images of Mr Oulds, 28, a councillor in Chiswick, west London, with the weaponry.

The weapons included an AK 47 assault rifle and a shotgun.

Mr Oulds told The Sun: "Those photos were taken at the home of a member of the Conservative association.

"I went round to this friend's house and he is a member of a licensed gun club and he showed me his firearms and that is it.

"They are all licensed and all legal. They are not mine."

'Nothing illegal'

After being removed from the candidates list, Mr Oulds said in a statement: "I have not tendered my resignation as PPC (prospective parliamentary candidate) for Slough.

"I have apologised to the deputy chairman of the Conservative Party for any embarrassment caused.

"However, contrary to various reports I have not done anything illegal and will continue to represent my constituents as a councillor.

"I am taking legal advice on various issues."

Labour campaign spokesman Fraser Kemp tried to capitalise on the news.

"Robert Oulds is just the tip of the iceberg," he said.

Mr Kemp said the councillor was also director of the Bruges Group, whose speakers had included Tory leader Michael Howard and Iain Duncan Smith.

"There is no evidence to suggest that any of these people knew about Robert Oulds' behaviour, but clearly they were happy, as senior Tories, to associate themselves with someone with Mr Oulds' well-known hard right outlook," added the MP.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/england/berkshire/4186841.stm

Published: 2005/01/20 08:35:53 GMT

by NICHOLAS CHRISTIAN

THE CIA has predicted that the European Union will break-up within 15 years unless it radically reforms its ailing welfare systems.

The report by the intelligence agency, which forecasts how the world will look in 2020, warns that Europe could be dragged into economic decline by its ageing population. It also predicts the end of Nato and post-1945 military alliances.

In a devastating indictment of EU economic prospects, the report warns: "The current EU welfare state is unsustainable and the lack of any economic revitalisation could lead to the splintering or, at worst, disintegration of the EU, undermining its ambitions to play a heavyweight international role."

It adds that the EU?s economic growth rate is dragged down by Germany and its restrictive labour laws. Reforms there - and in France and Italy to lesser extents - remain key to whether the EU as a whole can break out of its "slow-growth pattern".

Reflecting growing fears in the US that the pain of any proper reform would be too much to bear, the report adds that the experts it consulted "are dubious that the present political leadership is prepared to make even this partial break, believing a looming budgetary crisis in the next five years would be the more likely trigger for reform".

The EU is also set for a looming demographic crisis because of a drop in birth rates and increased longevity, with devastating economic consequences.

The report says: "Either European countries adapt their workforces, reform their social welfare, education and tax systems, and accommodate growing immigrant populations [chiefly from Muslim countries] or they face a period of protracted economic stasis."

As a result of the increased immigration needed, the report predicts that Europe?s Muslim population is set to increase from around 13% today to between 22% and 37% of the population by 2025, potentially triggering tensions.

The report predicts that America?s relationships with Europe will be "dramatically altered" over the next 15 years, in a move away from post-Second World War institutions. Nato could disappear and be replaced by increased EU action.

"The EU, rather than Nato, will increasingly become the primary institution for Europe, and the role Europeans shape for themselves on the world stage is most likely to be projected through it," the report adds. "Whether the EU will develop an army is an open question."

Defence spending by individual European countries, including the UK, France, and Germany, is likely to fall further behind China and other countries over the next 15 years. Collectively these countries will outspend all others except the US and possibly China.

The expected next technological revolution will involve the convergence of nano, bio, information and materials technology and will further bolster China and India?s prospects, the study predicts. Both countries are investing in basic research in these fields and are well placed to be leaders. But whereas the US will retain its overall lead, the report warns "Europe risks slipping behind Asia in some of these technologies".

For Europe, an increasing preference for natural gas may reinforce regional relationships, such as those with Russia or North Africa, given the inter-dependence of pipeline delivery, the report argues. But this means the EU will have to deal with Russia, which the report also warns "faces a severe demographic crisis resulting from low birth rates, poor medical care and a potentially explosive Aids situation".

Russia also borders an "unstable region" in the Caucasus and Central Asia, "the effects of which - Muslim extremism, terrorism and endemic conflict - are likely to continue spilling over into Russia".

The report also largely en dorses forecasts that by 2020 China?s gross domestic product will exceed that of individual western economic powers except for the US. India?s GDP will have overtaken or be overtaking European economies.

Because of the sheer size of China?s and India?s populations their standard of living need not approach European and western levels to become important economic powers.

The economies of other developing countries, such as Brazil, could surpass all but the largest European countries by 2020.

http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=56762005

You probably don't know Rafael Peralta's name. If we lived in a country that more fully celebrated the heroics of its men in uniform, you would. He was a sergeant in Company A, 1st Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment for Operation Dawn, the November offensive to retake the Iraqi city of Fallujah, which had become a haven for terrorists. What he did on the day of Nov. 15 was an awe-inspiring act of selfless sacrifice and faithfulness to his fellow Marines.

The only way we can honor Sgt. Peralta's heroism is to tell his story and remember his name. What follows is mostly drawn from the reporting of Marine combat correspondent Lance Cpl. T.J. Kaemmerer, who witnessed the events on that day.

Sgt. Peralta, 25, was a Mexican American. He joined the Marines the day after he got his green card and earned his citizenship while in uniform. He was fiercely loyal to the ethos of the Corps. While in Kuwait, waiting to go into Iraq, he had his camouflage uniform sent out to be pressed. He constantly looked for opportunities to help his Marine brothers, which is why he ended up where he was on Nov. 15. A week into the battle for Fallujah, the Marines were still doing the deadly work of clearing the city, house by house. As a platoon scout, Peralta didn't have to go out with the assault team that day. He volunteered to go.

According to Kaemmerer, the Marines entered a house and kicked in the doors of two rooms that proved empty. But there was another closed door to an adjoining room. It was unlocked, and Peralta, in the lead, opened it. He was immediately hit with AK-47 fire in his face and upper torso by three insurgents. He fell out of the way into one of the cleared rooms to give his fellow Marines a clear shot at the enemy. During the firefight, a yellow fragmentation grenade flew out of the room, landing near Peralta and several fellow Marines. The uninjured Marines tried to scatter out of the way, two of them trying to escape the room, but were blocked by a locked door. At that point, barely alive, Peralta grabbed the grenade and cradled it to his body.

His body took most of the blast. One Marine was seriously injured, but the rest sustained only minor shrapnel wounds. Cpl. Brannon Dyer told a reporter from the Army Times, "He saved half my fire team."

Kaemmerer compares Peralta's sacrifice to that of past Marine Medal of Honor winners Pfc. James LaBelle and Lance Cpl. Richard Anderson. LaBelle dove on a Japanese grenade to save two fellow Marines during the battle of Iwo Jima. Although he had just been wounded twice, Anderson rolled over an enemy grenade to save a fellow Marine during a 1969 battle in Vietnam.

Peralta's sacrifice should be a legend in the making. But somehow heroism doesn't get the same traction in our media environment as being a victim or villain, categories that encompass the truly famous Jessica Lynch and Lynndie England respectively. Peralta's story has been covered in military publications, a smattering of papers including the Seattle Times and the San Diego Union-Tribune, ABC News, and some military blogs. But the Washington Post and the New York Times only mentioned Peralta's name in their lists of the dead. Scandalously, the "heroism" of Spc. Thomas Wilson ? the national guardsman who asked a tough question of Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld that had been planted with him by a reporter ? has been more celebrated in the press than that of Peralta.

Kaemmerer recounts how later on the night of Nov. 15, a friend approached him and said: "You're still here; don't forget that. Tell your kids, your grandkids, what Sgt. Peralta did for you and the other Marines today." Don't forget. Good advice for all of us.

http://nationalreview.com/lowry/lowry200501110730.asp

A Lengthy piece out of ReasonOnline. Is DBMA represented in New Hampshire?


Revolt of the Porcupines!
The Free State Project wants libertarians to take over New Hampshire. Is this a revolutionary plan or a pipe dream?
Brian Doherty


It?s not often that libertarians are enough of a threat to anyone else?s interests that they generate protests. But that is what has been happening in New Hampshire lately. In June, 200 residents showed up at a heated town meeting in tiny Grafton township to challenge a trio of libertarian activists they feared were trying to conquer their community. Less than a week later, a squad of protesters picketed a fund-raising dinner in Plymouth, featuring Republican Governor Craig Benson, sponsored by the New Hampshire Liberty Alliance.

Both protests were triggered by the Free State Project, or FSP, a recently hatched plan for libertarians to roll back the government of New Hampshire and thus create a flagship for a freer America.

The FSP is the brainchild of a 27-year-old political science instructor named Jason Sorens. The Yale lecturer?s idea is both simple and grandiose: Given libertarians? eternal lack of political traction as a thinly spread minority, their most realistic chance to wield political power is to congregate in one state. Sorens figured it would be best if the state had a population below 1.5 million and a political culture already sympathetic to libertarian thinking.

Sorens introduced the idea in a 2001 essay in the webzine Libertarian Enterprise. He then sired an organization dedicated to executing it. FSP leaders and spokesmen proselytize for a freedom lovers? exodus wherever sympathetic listeners are likely to gather, encouraging their fellow libertarians to take the FSP Pledge. The pledge commits you to the proposition that, once 20,000 like-minded libertarians have also made the pledge?thereby solving what might be called the ?you go first? problem?you will within five years move to New Hampshire and be an activist for increased liberty in that state.

Sorens, a married man with no children, had studied small separatist and decentralist movements such as the Mormons and the Parti Quebecois. He became fascinated by recent successes in devolved local control in Wales, Scotland, and Spain, and decided that, when it comes to effecting radical political change, smaller localities, not huge federal states, are where the action is.

Sorens identified 10 American states where he thought 20,000 libertarians could make significant strides toward such goals as lowering taxes, achieving school choice, and creating more vibrant and decentralized local authorities. In September 2003, after 5,000 people had signed up, the FSP pledgers voted on their favorite. New Hampshire, whose slogan is ?Live Free or Die,? won by a 10 percentage-point margin over second-place Wyoming.

That?s why I spent the last weekend in February, the mellow end of a fierce Granite State winter, hanging around with a group of FSP ?Porcupines? and interested parties. (FSPers have adopted the porcupine as their totem?a creature that's peaceful when left alone but capable of causing great harm in self-defense.) We lounged around talking politics in the sitting room of the Inn at Danbury, a cozy family-run bed and breakfast, checked out nearby towns such as Grafton, and enjoyed winter sports such as snowmobiling.

 

The people I met didn?t seem to be libertarian versions of the Unabomber, desperate to live separated from the ideologically uncongenial like a modern-day Thoreau. They just think contemporary government is too expensive, too intrusive, and too active, and are eager to embrace the most effective way to change that.

As peculiar and radical as it might seem when you first hear about it, the FSP has received widespread, serious attention in the media. The New York Times ran a respectful 1,500-word piece about it last October. Playboy has given the Porcupines props, as has Reader?s Digest, which seems to indicate an impressively wide appeal.

To be sure, it's a lot easier to garner favorable press reports than it is to get people to actually schlep to an often brutally cold, sparsely populated state. But whether or not the FSP ever hits its target membership goal, much less turns New Hampshire into a libertarian paradise, it retains real significance as a thought experiment. It forces people to confront the reality of how much they are willing to sacrifice for their notions about political liberty?and how much people with different grievances against government might have in common.

?My Best Friends Are Nonlibertarians?

The Free State Project is the most recent and successful face of libertarian separatism?or, as some call it, libertarian Zionism. To be sure, many involved in the search for new libertarian communities reject such terms. Roderick Long, a philosophy professor at Auburn University and the brains behind the Libertarian Nation Foundation, a group dedicated to theorizing about the possibilities for libertarian polities, tells me he doesn?t like the term separatist because ?the attraction is not that I don?t want to live near or interact with nonlibertarians. Most of my best friends are nonlibertarians. We don?t want to live by ourselves but simply want a chance to demonstrate to the world that libertarian principles actually work. We want to escape from government, not escape from ordinary decent people? who happen not to share their political philosophy.

Ever since Ayn Rand presented the self-sufficient, regulator-free paradise of Galt?s Gulch in her 1957 epic Atlas Shrugged, people have periodically popped up to sell the idea that the only sure path to liberty is for libertarians to gather together in close proximity. Then no one would mooch or rob or force paper fiat money on their fellows. Freely minted gold coins would clink on the counter of brothels and, if you please, opium dens. And the weasels who in a statist world would be telling brave producers what they had to make or what they had to pay their employees would need to find new work?perhaps as toll booth operators on private roads, or tort lawyers, since lawsuits for proven harms would replace the regulatory state.

Sorens? originality lies in his common sense, seemingly feasible suggestion about how to act on this impulse. His predecessors never quite managed that.

One of the earliest postwar proposals to actualize the Galt?s Gulch fantasy was one of the most outr?: the idea that libertarians, driven to the edges of the continental shelf by an ever-expanding Leviathan state, should retreat to the high seas. Libertarian uberfreak Kerry Thornley was the early apostle of this idea, in a series of articles in the seminal ?60s libertarian zine Innovator. (This was before he decided he had been a CIA mind-control patsy possibly involved in the JFK assassination as a ?second Oswald.? See ?Historia Discordia,? August/September.)

A wealthy pharmaceutical company owner named Werner Stiefel was the first to try to create an ocean-based libertarian society, not just write about it. In 1968, under the name Operation Atlantis, Stiefel began recruiting eager young libertarians to move into an old motel in Saugerties, New York. From that humble base they were, according to the plan, eventually to obtain sovereignty over some island?the Prickly Pear Cays in the British West Indies were an initial target?and turn it into a fresh, uncorrupted country. Under that new nation?s flag, Stiefel and his freebooters could sail ships that would build artificial platforms in the ocean, which would become the real new nation.

The Stiefelers coined their own silver money, the deca, and earned a brief mention in Esquire in September 1970. ?Operation Atlantis is a real mind-blower,? Esquire said. ?They?re not just interested in a floating community, but an honest-to-God independent country.?How are they going to do it? They?re going to build an island, baby, in the middle of the ocean.? In 1971 the group changed the price of its newsletter from 24 U.S. cents to 32 ?deca-cents.?

In the early ?70s Stiefel and his crew built from scratch a rebar-and-mortar boat inside a geodesic dome. They managed, with many difficulties along the way, to sail the homemade vessel from Saugerties down to the Silver Shoals area, near the Bahamas. There, according to Erwin Strauss? book How to Start Your Own Country, they eventually ran afoul of Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier, who had designs of his own for the area where Stiefel tried to build a nation. (Sunken Spanish galleons with unclaimed treasure were thought to be in the area.) Stiefel and his crew were driven away, and no new Atlantis rose above the waves.

But the dream of an aquatic Galt?s Gulch was too sweet to die. Around the same time that Stiefel ran afoul of Baby Doc, Mike Oliver, a concentration camp survivor, coin dealer, and land developer from Nevada, was inflaming libertarian minds with his 1968 book called A New Constitution for a New Country. In it he presented a model constitution for a nation whose extremely limited government could be financed voluntarily. Oliver did more than just write constitutions for sand castles in the sky and imagine ocean-bound libertarian strongholds; he actually gathered teams and money to build them. (Who would actually inhabit them always seemed a bit of an afterthought.)

In 1972, Oliver supervised the sea kingdom of Minerva, built on a South Pacific reef that was dry only at low tide. Minerva was quickly conquered, in one assault with one gunboat, by the king of Tonga. Oliver and his circle?which eventually included John Hospers, a philosopher at the University of Southern California and the Libertarian Party?s first presidential candidate?a couple of years later tried to make common cause with a separatist movement on the Bahamian island of Abaco, but that effort fizzled out.

Oliver?s most serious reach for libertopia came on the South Pacific island of Vanuatu, part of the New Hebrides. In 1980 representatives of Oliver?s Phoenix Foundation?which for a while had former Reason editor and Reason Foundation founder Robert Poole on its board of directors ?supplied advice and some technical skill to Jimmy Moly Stevens, leader of a Vanuatu separatist movement. The French and British, who had a peculiar dual protectorate over the islands, were pulling out. While some questioned Stevens? libertarian bona fides, we never got a chance to find out how sincere he was.

This nascent nation also was strangled in its crib. At least this time it took more than one Tongan gunboat. Troops from both Papua New Guinea and Australia, in service of the socialist government that inherited the New Hebrides after the French and British left, suppressed Stevens? rebellion. He spent a decade in jail, and the Phoenix Foundation caught the eye of the feds, who briefly considered prosecution of the parties involved for violations of the Arms Export Control Act and the Logan Act, which prohibits private citizens from interfering in U.S. relations with foreign powers.

?Grab Them by the Scruff of Their Necks?

 Jason Sorens? dream is off to a better start than the soggy failures of the past. Choosing dry land was probably a wise move. Another vital ingredient has been the Internet, the most useful tool for the seeding, crafting, and guiding of intentional communities ever invented.

The FSP has made effective use of the Internet?s potential: At freestateproject.org, you can take the pledge, communicate on public message boards, and register your personal information, which, if you like, eventually will be available to other Free Staters. So all the Porcupines will be able to talk among themselves about moving plans and job and housing prospects, or just hash out libertarian ideas and how to actualize them. At press time, 6,103 people were pledged, and about 100 already had moved, although the pledge does not require them to do so until the target of 20,000 participants has been reached.

The Free Staters I visited in New Hampshire assure me that if and when the exodus begins, the traveling Porcupines will find many great things already awaiting them. For starters, there?s Article 10 of the state constitution?s Bill of Rights, which reads:

 ?Whenever the ends of government are perverted, and public liberty manifestly endangered, and all other means of redress are ineffectual, the people may, and of right ought to reform the old, or establish a new government. The doctrine of nonresistance against arbitrary power, and oppression, is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.?

As Sorens has written, New Hampshire has a history based on ?settlement patterns centered around small towns occupying rills, dales, and valleys? that gave rise to a ?town meeting system [that] allowed citizens to keep their government officials close enough to ?grab them by the scruff of their necks? if they overstepped their power. Essentially what developed was a kind of ?communal libertarianism? different from the individualism of the West, where one could simply escape the company of others.?

That system, argues Sorens, is still largely intact, which increases the Porcupines? confidence that they can make a difference in New Hampshire. Still, it is treacherous to make assumptions about how human beings today are influenced, bound by, or carrying on attitudes prevalent among their ancestors hundreds, or even dozens, of years ago.

Beyond matters of inchoate political culture, New Hampshire has a good head start on many specific issues important to libertarians. It lacks both sales and personal income taxes?though many complain the property taxes are too high, and there is an 8.5 percent business profits tax. About two-thirds of the property taxes go to public schools, so a successful school privatization would have a huge impact on the tax burden.

The state?s gun policies are relatively libertarian: Open carry is legal without a permit, and concealed carry requires a permit that is easy to get, with localities forbidden to impose tougher rules. There is no legal requirement for automotive liability insurance, though New Hampshire does have government-enforced ?community rating? for health insurance. The state lacks annoying bits of nanny statism such as seat belt and helmet laws for adults.

Free Stater Keith Murphy, an urban studies graduate student at the University of Maryland, tells me that on his visit to New Hampshire to scout it out, he did something every day that would have been against the law in his home state. These exercises of freedom included driving without a seat belt, buying fireworks and shooting them, and even the humble but profound act of buying beer at a grocery store.

New Hampshire boasts a median household income of $53,910, more than 20 percent above the national median, making it fourth-ranked of all states by that measure. It also has the lowest percentage of population below the poverty line of any state. It has a healthy high-tech economy, which is important for the types of jobs that attract people who will be able to easily move to the Free State. One Porcupine, Robert Gibson, is already moving his computerized process-serving corporation, Corbadex, up to Manchester and offering jobs to fellow Free Staters.

For libertarians who crave genuine political influence, perhaps the most encouraging thing about New Hampshire is that it has the largest state legislature in the country: 400 representatives, most with constituencies smaller than 3,000. (The downside of this is that each legislator is commensurately rather powerless to get things done.) You could realistically shake hands with every single voter in your district, and probably have a cup of coffee with every voter you?d need to win. House members are paid a pittance of $100 a year, making government in New Hampshire a game for enthusiastic amateurs and the retired. And ballot fusion is legal there, so Libertarian Party types could conceivably also win major-party nominations and gain straight party votes.

At the Free State gathering in Danbury I met Henry McElroy, a charming and dedicatedly anti-state Republican state representative whose libertarianism is so radical that it?s difficult to imagine him holding office anywhere else. McElroy thinks he?s making some headway with a bill that would return New Hampshire to the gold standard. Other bills introduced in the New Hampshire legislature (all unlikely to become law) would nullify the 16th amendment, reduce the business profits tax by half over five years, and make jury nullification an established legal right.

Another advantage of New Hampshire?which has some sea coast, lots of mountains, lots of small rural towns, and a few sizable metropolises?is how well suited it seems to philosopher Robert Nozick?s vision of a libertarian utopia as a framework for lots of different mini-utopias. There are many different ways for Free Staters to build their dreams in New Hampshire. They could live in the snowy mountains or in a big city within an hour?s drive of Boston; run for state legislature or join the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws; fight to loosen homeschooling requirements or to lower property taxes; live in an anarchist commune in the woods or in a downtown apartment.

New Hampshire?s libertarian-leaning governor, Craig Benson, even signed on as a friend of the FSP. ?Come on up,? he has told the Porcupines. ?We?d love to have you. You?re active, you want to make the state or the towns and cities you hope to live in a better place.? The chairwoman of the state Democratic Party predictably complained (even as she ticked off three good reasons to join the movement), ?Why is Governor Benson supporting a group that wants to legalize prostitution, legalize drugs, and eliminate public schools??

In mid-April, the Concord Monitor reported that ?a panel authorized by the governor to find inefficiencies in the state health and transportation departments is composed almost entirely of members of the Free State Project.? Gov. Benson had befriended Libertarian Party state chair John Babiarz while running against him for governor in 2002; they discovered they had some common attitudes toward the size and inefficiency of state government. Benson appointed Babiarz to a state commission seeking out government inefficiencies, and Babiarz brought on a bunch of Free Staters to assist him in that role. Babiarz tells me he has his eye on cutting state spending on transportation and child services, and has already advised the state to cut or curtail its role in running plant nurseries and prisons. Unusual as this might be on the national level, the head of the state Libertarian Party is a serious political player in New Hampshire.

Despite any head start they might have, Sorens recommends that Porcupines take things slowly upon moving to New Hampshire. He writes that ?we will have to do our best to blend in, lay down roots in the community?If we come in trumpeting an ?abolish everything? platform, we will make enemies out of people who might otherwise be sympathetic to us.? Some heated opposition to the FSP is already evident, provoked by a splinter group called the Free Town Project.

The Free Town Project advocates that Porcupines concentrate themselves in Babiarz?s home of Grafton, which already lacks most local regulations. Radical talk on Web sites and listservs associated with the Free Town Project got some locals riled enough that one mailed an anti-FSP flier to everyone in Grafton. This was followed by the June town meeting, at which FSP representatives were asked to explain themselves. FSP organizer Tim Condon tells me he got a lynch mob feeling from many of the Graftonites. Condon came up from his Florida home to defend the project?s honor against what he considered the ?libertarian exhibitionism? of a few outliers who were talking up Grafton as a home for freewheeling dueling, bums fighting in the streets as low-paid entertainers, and bestiality.

Sorens? expressed wishes are less extreme but still radical. He speculates about ordering federal law enforcement agents out of localities, for example. But unlike in Grafton, which has a population of only 1,000 or so, there is little risk that the FSP will ?flood? the whole state. It plans an influx of 20,000 over several years; lately, New Hampshire has been gaining about that many newcomers every year.

"I Can?t Sit by and Watch It Happen Without Me"

The Free Staters earned a major bit of local media attention the weekend I was with them in February. We all gathered in a friendly Irish pub to watch the Massachusetts-based TV newsmagazine Chronicle dedicate a half-hour to the FSP. Prominently featured was FSP?s current president, Amanda Phillips. Phillips is a single mother in her early 30s, a former Air Force special investigator turned accounting supervisor, currently living in Massachusetts. She is an anarchist, a matter of some controversy among Free Staters, though it didn?t seem to faze the TV reporters.

The TV cameras showed Phillips curled up with David Friedman?s anarcho-capitalist classic The Machinery of Freedom and spotlighted her sneakers emblazoned with the circle-A anarchy symbol. Most Porcupines were delighted with the piece, but certain touches clearly were intended to make Free Staters seem a little silly, if not bordering on lunatic and dangerous. A fair amount of screen time was given to the Dalton Gang, a group of cowboy-emulating vintage weapon enthusiasts exercising their liberty to openly carry their guns. Also featured was a Porcupine tooling down the street in his smoke-belching Unimog, a bizarre, hulking German military vehicle. Ultimately, the anchors of the show concluded that the FSP is an ?interesting? development, as opposed to an alarming one.

Which is good, Phillips thinks. While she knows people like the Daltons probably seemed like comic-relief freaks to most viewers, right now her audience is not a standard TV audience. It is fellow libertarians, the ones she is trying to convince to move. And they will be aware that if people want to carry their old guns or drive German military vehicles, that?s just fine.

To Condon, an ex-Marine and Florida attorney, that sort of colorful eccentricity is more than just fine. He is nostalgic about his old college days in Gainesville, Florida, remembering ?all these junky trailers from the ?50s and ?60s, people building sheds, old junky cars?it was terrific! Pimps, whores, poets, law students, geneticists, all mixed up?great, but very poor-looking.? He?s hoping to find a similar dynamic mix in a Free State, unburdened by the officious ?little Hitlers? who insist that other people paint their houses or maintain their yards or behave the way they want them to behave.

But Condon can?t move right away. He?s taking care of his elderly mother down in Florida. This sort of personal-life conflict no doubt will keep even many excited liber-tarian activists out of New Hampshire. Indeed, given all the advantages New Hampshire already has to the libertarian-minded, one wonders why the market hasn?t already taken care of this problem, so to speak. Why were entrepreneurs like Sorens and Phillips needed to sell the idea of migrating to New Hampshire, if lower taxes and less government dominate libertarians? decisions about where to live?

Despite rhetoric from Porcupines about how their move is easy compared to the difficulties that early migrants to America faced crossing the oceans in search of liberty, most Americans, even most libertarians?assuming they manage not to run afoul of drug laws, eminent domain, or IRS prosecutions?just don?t feel so tyrannized on a day-to-day basis that they feel an urgent need to uproot themselves.

So who are these people ready to move to New Hampshire for political reasons? The people I met and talked to in the Free State movement are varied, but not all that varied. They are overwhelmingly white and white-collar, though not very wealthy. They include chiropractors, programmers, college students in both social and medical sciences, business supervisors, financial planners, and hair stylists.

What they do not have in common is horror stories about state persecution that ruined their lives. I heard no stories of drug arrests, land grabs, regulation-driven business failures, or children snatched away by government agencies. A zoology student with a Green Party background hopes the Free State will be a more genuinely communitarian world, one where people have to cooperate to meet the social needs government now tries to meet. Tim Condon speculates New Hampshire will become not just a freewheeling social scene but also an American Hong Kong, a low-regulation mecca that will snatch away businesses and wealth from the rest of the country, shoring up the Porcupines? enclave.

While most rebel at the notion when I float it, the Free Staters? disgust with the state seems more theoretical and philosophical than experiential?though the desire to more conveniently homeschool their children and have less of their income snatched are motivations for many. Amanda Phillips sums up the FSP spirit that motivates even people who might not, to the normal American?s view, seem particularly oppressed: ?My gosh, I could actually have a society where I could walk around carrying a concealed weapon without having to ask permission, and keep the money I earn, and send my daughter to a private school that?s reasonably priced, and live in a world where what women do with their own bodies is their own business? When I see this vision of what could be, now that there is a real chance it could happen, I can?t sit by and watch it happen without me.?

?Migrating for Freedom?

The major problem with the notion that the FSP will bring liberty in our times to New Hampshire is that many of America?s tyrannical impositions, from the most evil to the most petty, come from the federal level. And the FSP is very vocally not a secessionist movement.

Thus, what the FSP can achieve even in a best-case scenario is limited. We have seen what the feds think of states that try to relax their drug laws. How would the No Child Left Behind president deal with an attempt to end mandatory public schooling? Or to avoid or evade the enforcement of regulations from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Food and Drug Administration, the Federal Trade Commission, or the Federal Communications Commission?or to dodge a new military draft?

In response to the question of whether the FSP idea really can work, Sorens says that in effect it already has?just not with libertarians. Vermont has, since the 1960s, evolved from the home of rock-ribbed Yankee conservatism to the home of Ben & Jerry?s, self-described socialist U.S. Congressman Bernie Sanders, and Howard Dean. This transformation has even inspired a Take Back Vermont counterrevolutionary back-lash. The hippies and the crunchies and the liberals targeted Vermont, Sorens claims, using as evidence an April 1972 Playboy article. That article, written by Richard Pollak, was based on a proposal floated in the Yale Journal of Law and Social Policy by two firebrand law school students named James F. Blumstein and James Phelan.

Blumstein and Phelan wrote, ?What we advocate is the migration of large numbers of people to a single state for the express purpose of effecting the peaceful political take-over of that state through the elective process.? Sound familiar? Like Sorens? original essay, their piece didn?t even name a state. But in the Playboy article, Pollak fingered Vermont as the most appropriate state for ?the nation?s alienated young.?

Blumstein, today a law professor at Vanderbilt University, is loath to credit his idea or Pollak?s expansion of it with Vermont?s change. He rightly notes that he has no evidence the piece was a direct influence on anyone, much less tens of thousands. By contrast, Sorens, with the FSP?s database, will have a better idea of whether any change in New Hampshire?s future can be attributed to his proposal.

?The whole American experience is based on migrating for freedom,? Sorens rightly notes. While the corpses of many attempts at intentional communities dot the American landscape, the FSP idea is more ecumenical and less insistent on a specific central location (New Hampshire is a state, not a commune) and way of life. The example of the Mormons could cheer the Porcupines: They migrated en masse to a state and succeeded in dominating its political culture for the long haul. But when they rubbed up too hard against the feds, they abandoned one of their key practices, polygamy.

A similar fate for the Free Staters seems likely?perhaps some significant moves in tax and service cutting in New Hampshire, but a fully libertarian society stillborn under the watchful eye of federal tyranny. And this is assuming the Free Staters actually summon the 20,000.

A Porcupine get-together in the kinder month of June, one I was not able to attend, attracted 300 people, 10 times as many as showed up in February in Danbury. Yet there?s been little growth in the number of FSP pledgers since New Hampshire was chosen last year. Sorens blames a downturn in press coverage; he hopes that with more funding for advertising and outreach the Free Staters can break out of the slump. But it may well be that libertarian separatism is still too eccentric to win over tens of thousands.

Still, history is not always predictable, and funny things can happen when people have something specific to rally round. The FSP experiment is opening up paths of communication to, and between, people who have not normally been likely to embrace the libertarian political message. Ryan Lazarotta, a gay man and a personal stylist, is the FSP coordinator for the Las Vegas area. He and his partner already have their New Hampshire move mapped out. Lazarotta, who had never had anything to do with libertarianism, stumbled upon the FSP on the Web and found it made sense of a lot of things.

Lazarotta had been on his own since age 14, his unpleasant experience in public schools ?100 percent? responsible for his leaving home so young. Now he wants to tell his fellow gays that they don?t need to be slaves on a Democratic plantation. ?I want to spread the idea of freedom among my peers,? he says. ?As far as FSP is concerned, [gay men] should be a great target. They are mobile, often self-generate their income, don?t necessarily want to have to pay to educate other people?s children,? and when it comes to the legal status of their intimate relationships, are faced daily with insults based on unequal legal treatment.

?I?m new to this whole frame of thought,? Lazarotta says, ?and through personal meetings I?m building comfort levels and trust between groups that don?t necessarily encounter each other on a regular basis. As Democratic-leaning as I?d been, I wasn?t comfortable, say, with gun rights people. But when we all meet at a table we realize we all can get along great and have a common denominator in what we are trying to achieve. Our special interests might be related to our personal lives, but our greater ambitions and fates have us wrapped up together.?

That sort of common understanding might not be as romantic as life on a liberated oil platform, free as the sea breezes that blow. But it?s a vital step toward making the many sorts of people who are disenchanted with statism realize that they already live together on an island, one that will be liberated only if they fight together.

Senior Editor Brian Doherty is the author of This Is Burning Man (Little, Brown).

http://www.reason.com/0412/fe.bd.revolt.shtml

America's counterproductive war on drugs is one of my biggest gripes with the government. Christopher Hitchens writes here about our efforts to export this failed policy, shooting ourselves in the foot in Afghanistan in the process.



Let the Afghan Poppies Bloom
How the drug war is undermining the war on terrorism.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, Dec. 13, 2004, at 11:47 AM PT


Why should it be that the intervention in Afghanistan has apparently gone so much better than anyone would have predicted, while the intervention in Iraq has proved to be so much more arduous? There are a number of thinkable answers to this question. Afghanistan had already had the experience of theocracy and civil war, to the point where its citizenry was sickened and inured. The Taliban had only been in power for a fairly short time, while the Iraqi Baath Party had had more than three decades in which to debauch the country's treasury and accustom its citizens to fearful obedience. Most of Afghanistan's neighbors generally want the Karzai government to succeed, or at least to see some version of stability, while some of Iraq's neighbors short-sightedly believe that they might benefit from a discrediting of the Allawi government in Baghdad.

To these contrasting hypotheses one might add another variable, this time on the other side of the ledger. Coalition forces in Iraq do not come roaring into towns and villages to tell the local people to stop producing or consuming oil products. Nor do they roam the country blowing up oil-wells or drills. Picture how the situation in Iraq might be different if they did. Now picture something that you do not have to imagine?a determined effort by the liberators of Afghanistan to force the country back into warlordism and anarchy. Every day, soldiers acting in our name are burning or spraying Afghanistan's only viable crop.

Like many stories in the mainstream media, this dramatic piece of news can appear on the front page only if it is printed upside down. Thus we learned from the New York Times of Dec. 11, in a front-page article bylined by Eric Schmitt, that a secret "assessment" by Lt. Gen. David Barno, the senior American officer in the country, has concluded that poppy cultivation is the main threat to the creation of a decent society, and the main avenue by which former Taliban and al-Qaida forces can hope to return from their crushing defeat.

Any attentive reading of the report, however, shows that it is the campaign against poppy cultivation that constitutes the threat. This point was underlined, perhaps coincidentally, by an op-ed essay in the same edition of the Times, written by Afghanistan's tireless and talented finance minister, Ashraf Ghani. "Today," he wrote, "many Afghans believe that it is not drugs, but an ill-conceived war on drugs that threatens their economy and nascent democracy" (my italics). Ghani went on to point out that a third of Afghanistan's GDP depends on the crop and that "destroying that trade without offering our farmers a genuine alternative livelihood has the potential to undo the embryonic economic gains of the past three years." As he further emphasized, these highly undesirable consequences arise from the control of the trade by a "mafia" with links to Islamic nihilism.

Ghani's meticulous analysis promptly broke down with a non-sequitur: a call for more money and force to be spent in combating a "mafia" that, as he has already admitted, commands a decisive part of the rural economy. Nowhere is it even asked what would happen if the trade was legalized and taxed: a measure that would immediately remove it from mafia control and immediately enrich a vast number of Afghan cultivators who currently exist on the margin of survival.

Reporting from Afghanistan a few months ago (Vanity Fair, November 2004) I pointed out a few obvious facts. Twenty and more years ago, the country's main export was grapes and raisins. It was a vineyard culture. But many if not most of those vines have been dried up or cut down, or even uprooted and burned for firewood, in the course of the hideous depredations of the past decades. An Afghan who was optimistic enough to plant a vine today could expect to wait five years before seeing any return for it, whereas a quick planting of poppies will see pods flourishing in six months. What would you do, if your family or your village were on a knife-edge? The American officers I met, tasked with repressing this cultivation, were to a man convinced that they were wasting their time and abusing the welcome they had at first received in the countryside. It doesn't take much intelligence to understand the history of Prohibition, or to know that American consumer demand is strong enough to overcome any attempt to inhibit supply. In any case, we know this already from dire experience in Bolivia, Colombia, and Mexico.

There is the further point that opium is good for us. Painkillers and anesthetics have to come from somewhere, and we have an arrangement with Turkey to grow and refine the stuff that we need. Why Turkey, an already over-indulged client state? Isn't it time to give the struggling Afghans a share of the business? We could simultaneously ensure a boost for Afghan agriculture, remove an essential commodity from terrorist and warlord control, and guarantee a steady supply of analgesics that would be free of impurities or additives.

In order to comprehend this point, there is no need to know much about Afghanistan. Do you know anyone who really believes in the "war on drugs" as it is supposedly waged in the United States? It is widely understood to be the main index of pointless and costly and unjust incarceration, a huge source of corruption in police departments, and a cause of crime in its own right as well as a source of tainted and "cut" narcotics. And that is before you even consider absurdities and cruelties like the denial of medical marijuana, or the diversion of personnel and resources from the war against more threatening gangsters. Our entire state policy, at home and abroad, is devoted not to stopping a trade that actually grows every year, but rather to ensuring that all its profitable means of production, distribution, and exchange remain the fiefdom of criminal elements. We consciously deny ourselves access to properly refined and labeled products and to the vast revenue that could accrue to the Treasury instead of to the mobsters here and overseas.

This demented legacy of the Nixon administration will have to be abandoned sooner or later, and I believe that the threatened sacrifice of Afghanistan to the dogma may be the "tipping point." There are numerous policy planners, prison officials, policemen, elected politicians, and scientific specialists, on the intelligent Right as well as the intelligent Left, who have concluded that decriminalization is an urgent necessity. It's hard to think of any other single reform that could make more difference in more areas. The idea offers a way out of the current sterile red state/blue state dichotomy. It ought to be the next big thing.

http://slate.msn.com/id/2110987/

Watching Russia deal in fits and starts with the creation of a free market infrastructure has been fairly interesting. It appears Russia is trying to catch up with India and China in the arena of jobs outsourced by American hi tech companies, but is lagging due to a lack of high speed data connectivity and English speakers.

I think it's worth noting that one of the Russian clients cited in the article is the US Department of Energy, which handles, among other things, US nuclear materials. I wonder what sort of information Russia, India, and China are mining in the course of their outsourcing efforts.


By Erin E. Arvedlund The New York Times
Thursday, December 16, 2004


It trails India but could compete on costs
?
MOSCOW  Off a snowy path winding through the campus of Moscow State University, Alexis Sukharev is packing his boxes and moving to bigger offices in the city, hoping to help create Russia's version of India's Bangalore: a prime destination for other countries' offshoring of technology jobs.

Sukharev, 58, is well known to American information technology executives. He was the first to create a commercially successful Russian outsourcing company, on the eve of the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

His original client was Hewlett-Packard. His latest client is International Business Machines.

Sukharev said he had little fear of the U.S. backlash against offshoring.

Moreover, Sukharev says some Western companies he has visited - like Bechtel, which has 200 different proprietary programs - "are not cutting people because of outsourcing." Instead, he said, companies are farming out new business to companies like his or to Indian or Chinese companies.

Sukharev said he was encouraged by Russia's recent initiatives to support software programming centers, beginning with one in Dubna, about 120 kilometers, or 75 miles, north of Moscow.

But Russia still lags far behind India, according to Luxoft, an outsourcing company here, which said that India's $11 billion outsourcing industry last year dwarfed Russia's, at $500 million.

Still, the Russian ministry in charge of communications and information technology estimates that figure could grow to $2 billion in the next two years.

"Indian companies are considerably more mature," Sukharev said. And the Indian government was quick to offer home-grown companies tax breaks and near-zero customs taxes in some cases. "They're about 12 years ahead of us," Sukharev said. "But the gap is closing."

And there are day-to-day obstacles. Always a powerhouse in cybernetics, Russia still boasts a talented pool of scientists - but many are jolted by the realities of commercial business as opposed to research.

"The biggest problem," Sukharev said, "is finding skilled workers who not only specialize in theory but in practice. Many still need English-language training."

Still, that figure for programmers is growing. In 2004 the number of Russian graduates with master's degrees in computer science or majors in software engineering was 68,126, up 6.9 percent from 2003, according to the Russian State Statistics Committee.

"We're seeing our growth in all outsourcing companies here," said Julia Rovinskaya, a spokeswoman for Luxoft in Moscow, but she echoed many of the problems that Sukharev identified, especially English-language training.

Russia also needs new infrastructure, something on which India has made more headway. Russia lacks the wealth of basic Internet "backbone" infrastructure already in place in the United States and India; that has kept inexpensive, high-bandwidth Internet capacity out of reach for many here, Sukharev says. A T-1 line, or fast, dedicated phone and data line, with high capacity might cost $500 a month in the United States. In Russia, it costs $50,000 a month. "That is something only the Russian government can build," he said.

President Vladimir Putin recently led a delegation to India with Leonid Reiman, Russia's minister of communications; Russian business executives, including Sukharev; and computer scientists to visit the technology giant Infosys and learn how India's government helped along its outsourcing boom.

Putin has now also agreed in principle to a government-sponsored concept to help develop Russia's computer programming industry - though few details have been put in motion.

Russian outsourcing companies want to compete with India's giants, like Infosys, Satyam and Wipro. But size does matter, and Sukharev says that Russia has only one or two outsourcing companies with at least 1,000 employees.

"We just don't have big companies," Sukharev said, "but we can compete on price." Russian programmers work for $15 to $25 an hour, about the same as their Indian competitors, he estimates. IBS is one of Russia's bigger companies, with more than 3,000 employees, and clients include Shell, BP, J.P. Morgan, Ford and the U.S. Department of Energy.

Sukharev's outsourcing company, which is called Auriga, and other similar Russian companies desperately need the country's famously thick red tape to dissolve if they are to grow.

Customs clearance is a continuing nightmare, Sukharev said. Just five years ago, Auriga imported a color laser printer that authorities confused with advanced hardware for research and development. It was confiscated.

So why is Putin interested in outsourcing now?

"He understands Russia's IT industry has potential," Sukharev said. "But we have to learn from and partner with Indian companies."

http://www.iht.com/articles/2004/12/15/business/outsource.html

It appears the British Attorney General is at odds with the Prime Minister and head of Scotland Yards. Out of the Telegraph:


Burglars have rights too, says Attorney General
By Melissa Kite and Andrew Alderson
(Filed: 12/12/2004)

A fresh row broke out last night about the rights of householders to fight back against intruders after the Government's most senior lawyer defended the rights of burglars.

Lord Goldsmith, the attorney-general, flew in the face of the Prime Minister's pledge to look again at the law with a view to giving homeowners more rights when he said that existing legislation was adequate.

He said that criminals must also have the right to protection from violence, prompting David Davis, the shadow home secretary, to accuse the government of being dangerously split on the issue.

Lord Goldsmith's intervention came as Sir John Stevens, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, dismissed fears that giving homeowners greater freedom when tackling burglars would lead to an "arms race" that would put them in greater danger.

He denied that a change in the law, which currently gives homeowners the right to use "reasonable force" when tackling intruders, would encourage burglars to become more aggressive.

In an interview with The Telegraph, Sir John - who last weekend came out in favour of the Right to Fight Back campaign, launched by this newspaper two months ago - said: "I am convinced that enabling householders to use whatever force is necessary will discourage burglars.

"The fact that a would-be intruder knows a householder can respond without the fear of being prosecuted will undoubtedly deter criminal acts." Sir John, who will step down next month after five years as commissioner, said fellow police officers were confident that it would act as a deterrent.

"We are on the ground," he said. "We smell it, we see it, we hear it. We know what we are talking about."

Last week, Tony Blair told the House of Commons that he would look at strengthening the law and a Tory MP has introduced a private member's bill to do so.

Lord Goldsmith, however, appeared to take issue with the Prime Minister's pledge to act. "We must protect victims and law abiding citizens," he said.

"But we have to recognise that others have some rights as well. They don't lose all rights because they're engaged in criminal conduct."

Mr Davis said: "They certainly do lose quite a lot of rights. The Government ought to make up its mind. The Prime Minister says one thing and the Attorney General says another.

"Of course all human beings have rights, but when somebody enters your home to commit a crime they give up a large portion of them."

Some critics of a change in the law have voiced concerns that burglars will feel they have to carry guns, knives and other weapons to protect themselves from householders.

Sir John, however, did not see this as a problem. "I have confidence in the good judgement and common sense of the public in knowing how far they should go."

He said that householders should be able to use whatever force is necessary even if - in exceptional circumstances - it involved killing the intruder.

He spoke of his regret about the repercussions over the verdict on Tony Martin, the farmer who shot dead one burglar and seriously injured another during a break-in at his farm in August 1999.

There was a public outcry when Martin was found guilty at Norwich Crown Court and sentenced to life in prison. The charge and sentence were later reduced to five years for manslaughter.

Sir John did not suggest that the jury had reached the wrong verdict, but added: "The Tony Martin case is unfortunate because it has skewed the debate [on the public's right to protect their home]. But it is a fact that burglars have acted with greater confidence since the Tony Martin verdict and that has to be a matter of regret."

Lord Goldsmith, however, warned of the dangers of using the Martin case to make bad law: "There are very few cases that have given rise to this problem. Besides Tony Martin, there's only one I know about.

"It's always possible to extrapolate from one case and think that something is happening across the country when it isn't."

Mr Blair's announcement of a review of the law came three days after the Conservative Party threw its weight behind a new parliamentary attempt to win more rights for householders to protect them from burglars.

The Telegraph revealed last weekend how Patrick Mercer, the Tory MP, would introduce a Private Member's Bill to change the law in favour of homeowners.

In an article in this newspaper today, Mr Mercer described Mr Blair's promise to consult before taking action as a "classic delaying tactic".

Michael Howard, the Tory leader, yesterday praised this newspaper's campaign. "I pay tribute to the highly effective campaign run over so many months by The Sunday Telegraph. It was the first newspaper to highlight this crucial issue and its persistence has been a key factor in winning this change to the law and in forcing Tony Blair's U-turn," he said. "We now need to ensure that Patrick Mercer's bill gets through parliament. The Sunday Telegraph's continued vigilance will be crucial in ensuring this."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;sessionid=0L00PD041E3SFQFIQMFCM5WAVCBQYJVC?xml=/news/2004/12/12/nfight12.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/12/12/ixnewstop.html

A piece that wanders a bit out of Columbia Journalism Review


An Equal-Opportunity Offender Maps the Dark Turn of Intolerance

BY DOUG MARLETTE

Last year, I drew a cartoon that showed a man in Middle Eastern apparel at the wheel of a Ryder truck hauling a nuclear warhead. The caption read, "What Would Mohammed Drive?" Besides referring to the vehicle that Timothy McVeigh rode into Oklahoma City, the drawing was a takeoff on the "What Would Jesus Drive?" campaign created by Christian evangelicals to challenge the morality of owning gas-guzzling SUVs. The cartoon's main target, of course, was the faith-based politics of a different denomination. Predictably, the Shiite hit the fan.

Can you say "fatwa"? My newspaper, The Tallahassee Democrat, and I received more than 20,000 e-mails demanding an apology for misrepresenting the peace-loving religion of the Prophet Mohammed ? or else. Some spelled out the "else": death, mutilation, Internet spam. "I will cut your fingers and put them in your mother's ass." "What you did, Mr. Dog, will cost you your life. Soon you will join the dogs . . . hahaha in hell." "Just wait . . . we will see you in hell with all jews . . . ." The onslaught was orchestrated by an organization called the Council on American-Islamic Relations. CAIR bills itself as an "advocacy group." I was to discover that among the followers of Islam it advocated for were the men convicted of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. At any rate, its campaign against me included flash-floods of e-mail intended to shut down servers at my newspaper and my syndicate, as well as viruses aimed at my home computer. The controversy became a subject of newspaper editorials, columns, Web logs, talk radio, and CNN. I was condemned on the front page of the Saudi publication Arab News by the secretary general of the Muslim World League.

My answer to the criticism was published in the Democrat (and reprinted around the country) under the headline With All Due Respect, an Apology Is Not in Order. I almost felt that I could have written the response in my sleep. In my thirty-year career, I have regularly drawn cartoons that offended religious fundamentalists and true believers of every stripe, a fact that I tend to list in the "Accomplishments" column of my r?sum?. I have outraged Christians by skewering Jerry Falwell, Catholics by needling the pope, and Jews by criticizing Israel. Those who rise up against the expression of ideas are strikingly similar. No one is less tolerant than those demanding tolerance. Despite differences of culture and creed, they all seem to share the notion that there is only one way of looking at things, their way. What I have learned from years of this is one of the great lessons of all the world's religions: we are all one in our humanness.

In my response, I reminded readers that my "What Would Mohammed Drive?" drawing was an assault not upon Islam but on the distortion of the Muslim religion by murderous fanatics - the followers of Mohammed who flew those planes into our buildings, to be sure, but also the Taliban killers of noncompliant women and destroyers of great art, the true believers who decapitated an American reporter, the young Palestinian suicide bombers taking out patrons of pizza parlors in the name of the Prophet Mohammed.

Then I gave my Journalism 101 lecture on the First Amendment, explaining that in this country we do not apologize for our opinions. Free speech is the linchpin of our republic. All other freedoms flow from it. After all, we don't need a First Amendment to allow us to run boring, inoffensive cartoons. We need constitutional protection for our right to express unpopular views. If we can't discuss the great issues of the day on the pages of our newspapers fearlessly, and without apology, where can we discuss them? In the streets with guns? In caf?s with strapped-on bombs?

Although my initial reaction to the "Mohammed" hostilities was that I had been there before, gradually I began to feel that there was something new, something darker afoot. The repressive impulses of that old-time religion were now being fed by the subtler inhibitions of mammon and the marketplace. Ignorance and bigotry were reinventing themselves in the post-Christian age by dressing up as "sensitivity" and masquerading as a public virtue that may be as destructive to our rights as religious zealotry. We seem to be entering a Techno Dark Age, in which the machines that were designed to serve the free flow of information have fallen into the hands of an anti-intellectual mobocracy.

Twenty-five years ago, I began inciting the wrath of the faithful by caricaturing the grotesque disparity between Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker's televangelism scam and the Christian piety they used to justify it. I was then working at The Charlotte Observer, in the hometown of the Bakkers' PTL Club, which instigated a full-bore attack on me. The issues I was cartooning were substantial enough that I won the Pulitzer Prize for my PTL work. But looking back on that fundamentalist religious campaign, even though my hate mail included some death threats, I am struck by the relative innocence of the times and how ominous the world has since become - how high the stakes, even for purveyors of incendiary doodles.

One of the first cartoons I ever drew on PTL was in 1978, when Jim Bakker's financial mismanagement forced him to lay off a significant portion of his staff. The drawing showed the TV preacher sitting at the center of Leonardo Da Vinci's Last Supper informing his disciples, "I'm going to have to let some of you go!" Bakker's aides told reporters that he was so upset by the drawing that he fell to his knees in his office, weeping into the gold shag carpet. Once he staggered to his feet, he and Tammy Faye went on the air and, displaying my cartoons, encouraged viewers to phone in complaints to the Observer and cancel their subscriptions.

Jim Bakker finally resigned in disgrace from his PTL ministry, and I drew a cartoon of the televangelist who replaced him, Jerry Falwell, as a serpent slithering into PTL paradise: "Jim and Tammy were expelled from paradise and left me in charge."

One of the many angry readers who called me at the newspaper said, "You're a tool of Satan."

"Excuse me?"

"You're a tool of Satan for that cartoon you drew."

"That's impossible," I said. "I couldn't be a tool of Satan. The Charlotte Observer's personnel department tests for that sort of thing."

Confused silence on the other end.

"They try to screen for tools of Satan," I explained. "Knight Ridder human resources has a strict policy against hiring tools of Satan."

Click.

Until "What Would Mohammed Drive?" most of the flak I caught was from the other side of the Middle East conflict. Jewish groups complained that my cartoons critical of Israel's invasion of Lebanon were anti-Semitic because I had drawn Prime Minister Menachem Begin with a big nose. My editors took the strategic position that I drew everyone's nose big. At one point, editorial pages were spread out on the floor for editors to measure with a ruler the noses of various Jewish and non-Jewish figures in my cartoons.

After I moved to the Northeast, it was Catholics I offended. At New York Newsday, I drew a close-up of the pope wearing a button that read "No Women Priests." There was an arrow pointing to his forehead and the inscription from Matthew 16:18: "Upon This Rock I Will Build My Church." The Newsday switchboard lit up like a Vegas wedding chapel. Newsday ran an apology for the cartoon, a first in my career, and offered me a chance to respond in a column. The result - though the paper published it in full - got me put on probation for a year by the publisher. That experience inspired the opening scene of my first novel, The Bridge.

The novel's protagonist, a political cartoonist named Pick Cantrell, is fired after beating up his publisher and returns with his wife and son to North Carolina, where he confronts the ghosts of his past in the form of his grandmother, Mama Lucy, the family matriarch and his boyhood nemesis. In an attempt to show how the grandmother became such a formidable ogre, the book flashes back to mill life in the thirties, when Lucy, like my own grandmother, was bayoneted by a National Guardsman during a textile strike. There were obvious autobiographical elements of The Bridge. Like Pick, I would have beaten up my publisher if it had been legal. And The Bridge's fictional setting of Eno, North Carolina, is based loosely on Hillsborough, a former mill village where my ancestors once worked in the cotton mill's weave rooms and where I now live with my family. These days the town features an advanced white-wine-and-Brie-in-bulk community of writers and other bourgeois bohemians. Various members of the community were given highly fictionalized analogs in the novel, from a vegan restaurateur to a sex-toy manufacturer. But most of the book came straight from the imagination.

I'm not sure I expected my foray into what Mark Twain called the "littery" world to be a stroll through a Bloomsbury garden, but I surely did not expect the Taliban, or as some people in my town of Hillsborough called the literary terrorists who went after my book, "HillQaeda."

A neighbor of mine thought he recognized himself in the gay-writer character, Ruffin Strudwick, the author of a Civil War best seller, "told from the point of view of a female Confederate spy," which had "created an uproar among Civil War scholars by suggesting that the relationship between Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson was latently homosexual." It's true, my neighbor made a name for himself by taking on the fictional persona of a Confederate female (not a spy), but the fictional Strudwick was a composite. In fact, his troubled relationship with his father prompted Pat Conroy's sister to write and thank me for basing Strudwick on her brother. Their father, The Great Santini, "would just love how you made Pat gay," she said. The only literal trait my neighbor shared with Strudwick was a weakness for vintage costumes and red high-tops. If I had to defend myself for lifting those details, I would contend that dressing like that around a cartoonist amounts to entrapment.

Sadly, the title of my first chapter - "A Gift for Pissing People Off" - proved to be all too nonfictional. As the galleys of the novel circulated, the offended writer wept like a televangelist to anyone who would listen, claiming he had been viciously caricatured. Another local writer known for her "niceness" called urging me to change my book. Amused as I was to see literary sophisticates behaving like small-town provincials (this is North Carolina; hadn't they read Thomas Wolfe?), the smile was presently wiped off my face. A local publicist I had hired to promote my book called in tears after being told by the nice writer's husband that she would never work in this town again if she continued to represent me. Then the rector of the Episcopal church my family attended complained about the Strudwick character and, lest he be mistaken for the earthy minister in the novel, contacted my publisher and asked to have his name removed from the acknowledgments. This, of course, set off alarms within my publishing house, which brought in lawyers to vet the novel for libel.

Then the weeping writer's close friend who managed the campus bookstore at the University of North Carolina (where I had just become a visiting professor) canceled my book signing there. She tried to get other booksellers around the state to do likewise, on the ground that The Bridge was "homophobic trash." (Her bookstore sells T-shirts that proclaim, "I read banned books.")

Reviews were posted on Amazon.com trashing The Bridge, repeating the homophobia charge, all with similarly worded, weirdly personal talking points. A bit of verse was sent anonymously to my home address: "May maggots munch your belly-bone and rats chew on your ears . . . ." My wife, who had already been shunned on the street and at the local latt? bar, read it as a death threat.

I resisted the impulse to respond. My day job requires enough gladiatorial duty on behalf of free speech. And the attempts to censor my novel weren't really a First Amendment abuse: the government wasn't trying to shut me up (unless you count that state-owned campus bookstore) - only a bunch of unarmed and dangerous writers. Besides, my brothers and sisters in the free press covered my flank nicely. Syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker, for instance, called the attack "a panty-wadding fatwa," adding "I, for one, can't wait for the cartoon."

But how do you cartoon a cartoon? It's a problem of redundancy in this hyperbolic age to caricature an already extravagantly distorted culture. When writers try to censor other writers, we're in Toontown. We are in deep trouble when victimhood becomes a sacrament, personal injury a point of pride, when irreverence is seen as a hate crime, when the true values of art and religion are distorted and debased by fanatics and zealots, whether in the name of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Prophet Mohammed, or a literary Cult of Narcissus.

It was the cynically outrageous charge of homophobia against my book that brought me around to the similarities between the true believers I was used to dealing with and the postmodern secular humanist Church Ladies wagging their fingers at me. The threads that connect the CAIR and the literary fatwas, besides technological sabotage, are entreaties to "sensitivity," appeals to institutional guilt, and faith in a corporate culture of controversy avoidance. Niceness is the new face of censorship in this country.

The censors no longer come to us in jackboots with torches and baying dogs in the middle of the night. They arrive now in broad daylight with marketing surveys and focus-group findings. They come as teams, not armies, trained in effectiveness, certified in sensitivity, and wielding degrees from the Columbia journalism school. They're known not for their bravery but for their efficiency. They show gallantry only when they genuflect to apologize.

The most disturbing thing about the "Mohammed" experience was that a laptop Luftwaffe was able to blitz editors into not running the cartoon in my own newspaper. "WWMD" ran briefly on the Tallahassee Democrat Web site, but once an outcry was raised, the editors pulled it and banned it from the newspaper altogether.

The cyberprotest by CAIR showed a sophisticated understanding of what motivates newsroom managers these days - bottom-line concerns, a wish for the machinery to run smoothly, and the human-resources mandate not to offend. Many of my e-mail detractors appeared to be well-educated, recent ?migr?s. Even if their English sometimes faltered, they were fluent in the language of victimhood. Presumably, victimization was one of their motives for leaving their native countries, yet the subtext of many of their letters was that this country should be more like the ones they emigrated from. They had the American know-how without the know-why. In the name of tolerance, in the name of their peaceful God, they threatened violence against someone they accused of falsely accusing them of violence.

With the rise of the bottom-line culture and the corporatization of newsgathering, tolerance itself has become commodified and denuded of its original purpose. Consequently, the best part of the American character - our generous spirit, our sense of fair play - has been turned against us. Tolerance has become a tool of coercion, of institutional inhibition, of bureaucratic self-preservation. We all should take pride in how this country for the most part curbed the instinct to lash out at Arab-Americans in the wake of 9/11. One of the great strengths of this nation is our sensitivity to the tyranny of the majority, our sense of justice for all. But the First Amendment, the miracle of our system, is not just a passive shield of protection. In order to maintain our true, nationally defining diversity, it obligates journalists to be bold, writers to be full-throated and uninhibited, and those blunt instruments of the free press, cartoonists like me, not to self-censor. We must use it or lose it.

Political cartoonists daily push the limits of free speech. They were once the embodiment of journalism's independent voice. Today they are as endangered a species as bald eagles. The professional troublemaker has become a luxury that offends the bottom-line sensibilities of corporate journalism. Twenty years ago, there were two hundred of us working on daily newspapers. Now there are only ninety. Herblock is dead. Jeff MacNelly is dead. And most of the rest of us might as well be. Just as r?sum? hounds have replaced newshounds in today's newsrooms, ambition has replaced talent at the drawing boards. Passion has yielded to careerism, Thomas Nast to Eddie Haskell. With the retirement of Paul Conrad at the Los Angeles Times, a rolling blackout from California has engulfed the country, dimming the pilot lights on many American editorial pages. Most editorial cartoons now look as bland as B-roll and as impenetrable as a 1040 form.

We know what happens to the bald eagle when it's not allowed to reproduce and its habitat is contaminated. As the species is thinned, the eco-balance is imperiled.

Why should we care about the obsolescence of the editorial cartoonist? Because cartoons can't say "on the other hand," because they strain reason and logic, because they are hard to defend and thus are the acid test of the First Amendment, and that is why they must be preserved.

What would Marlette drive? Forget SUVs and armored cars. It would be an all-terrain vehicle you don't need a license for. Not a foreign import, but American-made. It would be built with the same grit and gumption my grandmother showed when she faced down government soldiers in the struggle for economic justice, and the courage my father displayed as a twenty-year-old when he waded ashore in the predawn darkness of Salerno and Anzio. It would be fueled by the freedom spirit that both grows out of our Constitution and is protected by it - fiercer than any fatwa, tougher than all the tanks in the army, and more powerful than any bunker-buster.

If I drew you a picture it might look like the broken-down jalopy driven by the Joads from Oklahoma to California. Or like the Cadillac that Jack Kerouac took on the road in his search for nirvana. Or the pickup Woody Guthrie hitched a ride in on that ribbon of highway, bound for glory. Or the International Harvester Day-Glo school bus driven cross-country by Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters. Or the Trailways and Greyhound buses the Freedom Riders boarded to face the deadly backroads of Mississippi and Alabama. Or the moonbuggy Neil Armstrong commanded on that first miraculous trip to the final frontier.

What would Marlette drive? The self-evident, unalienable American model of democracy that we as a young nation discovered and road-tested for the entire world: the freedom to be ourselves, to speak the truth as we see it, and to drive it home.

This article from a Scottish publication asks the question "what do you do when your home is burgled?" Roll over and play dead or face legal consequences appears to be the answer. The blithe way this advice is stated strikes me as particularly spooky.


The Scotsman

Wed 1 Dec 2004

So what do you do when your home is burgled?

DR IAN STEPHEN


THE murder of John Monckton and the attack on his wife, Homeyra, during an apparent burglary in their London home has once again highlighted the true dangers and indeed the legal and moral dilemma members of the public face when they are confronted with intruders on their own property.

From a police perspective, the advice to potential victims of burglaries is unequivocal and clear-cut and you should never "have a go", so to speak, but for the victims of crime this is a very difficult thing to put into practice, especially when your natural instincts are to defend yourself, your family and your own property - the very pillars of your life that are being violated and potentially destroyed by criminals.

As a law-abiding individual confronted by an intruder in your home you face a catch-22. If you attack the burglar, or react in an "over the top" manner, as was recently illustrated in the case of Tony Martin who shot intruders in his Norfolk farmhouse, you will inevitably end up on the receiving end of a prison sentence that will far outstrip that imposed on the intruder in your own home. This situation has resulted in a lack of belief in the law among the public or rather a belief that the law isn?t exactly on your side when your home is broken into.

To this end it is perhaps important not to dwell on the situation involving Mr Martin because, regardless of the appeal procedure he successfully went through to secure his freedom, in many ways the law still points to his particular attack on the intruders who entered his home as a pre-meditated assault. He had previously been the victim of a number of burglaries within his home and as a result of this he was effectively prepared for further intrusion and reacted as such when his farmhouse was broken into again.

But what the Martin case does reflect is the general fear felt by the public over rising crime rates and the extent to which they will go to protect themselves. As the case involving Mr and Mrs Monckton shows those most at risk from aggravated burglary are the wealthy, individuals identified by criminals as prosperous professionals. However, at the other end of the scale, people living in inner cities and on council estates face a similar level of risk.

When individuals are confronted by intruders there are some actions they should follow. Direct contact should be avoided whenever possible. If unavoidable, the victim should adopt a state of active passivity. In most cases the best form of defence is always avoidance. If this isn?t possible, act passively, be careful what you say or do and give up valuables without a struggle. This allows the victim to take charge of the situation, without the intruder?s awareness, through subtle and non-confrontational means. People can cooperate but initiate nothing. By doing nothing there is no chance of inadvertently initiating violence by saying something such as "Please don?t hurt me".

In a situation involving housebreaking it is also important to remember that many common burglars are adolescents, most likely starting out on the first rung of the criminal ladder, and they are therefore prone to lashing out if confronted and in the worst case scenarios killing out of panic and fear.

Sometimes the perpetrator of a burglary is even more terrified than the victim and in many cases when things go wrong it is the perpetrator of the crime who panics. Although they sometimes go equipped with weapons, in most cases they probably don?t intend to use them but in the heat of the moment, and the fear of either getting caught or attacked themselves, they use them. They don?t expect the person they are trying to hold up to retaliate or react. Mostly the knife is there simply for intimidation rather than intent to use it and they finish up killing somebody by accident rather than design.

This, of course, does not excuse their actions, but it is certainly worth taking on-board when you consider confronting an intruder. While saying this, in my own experience counselling victims of crime in recent years, there has also recently been a marked increase in the use or the threatened use of dangerous weapons in burglaries and common assaults. This, in itself, is a deeply worrying trend and, although not entirely excusing over-retaliation from homeowners, creates an understandable degree of sympathy for members of the public who lash out at intruders in their home. In truth it is an incredibly difficult situation to assess.

What is perhaps most important is dealing with the victims of the crime and helping them through the aftermath. As someone with wide experience of counselling the victims of violent robberies in their homes it is essential to remember the post-traumatic stress associated with such incidents.

The truth is aggravated burglary causes enormous stress as the victim?s home has been violated. This situation is magnified when the victims and their family have been threatened or assaulted and can lead to a whole range of post-traumatic stress disorders. Like the victims of rape and violent assault, members of the public who experience criminal intrusion in their home experience episodes and often show all the classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress like panic attacks, sleep disorders, flashbacks and social withdrawal.

Like other serious crimes the aftermath of a burglary can be the start of a process that continues to destroy the victim?s self-esteem and even relationships with their loved ones and more often than not reinforces their feelings of guilt and self-blame over the situation. The damage to the victim from the original crime can also be magnified by the court experience and, more likely in today?s society, the lack of support from local authorities and the police.

The trauma can be dealt with in a number of ways with professional help, counselling to develop effective coping strategies and taking time off from stressful professional activities. People who fail to seek help often develop further psychological problems. Men especially are not good at accepting support, but some simple counselling immediately after an attack can substantially reduce the risk of long-term psychological problems.

? Dr Ian Stephen is an Honorary Lecturer (Forensic Psychology) at Glasgow Caledonian University and has worked in a number of prisons with long-term prisoners and young offenders. He was a consultant to forensic psychology television series Cracker.


This article:

??http://news.scotsman.com/uk.cfm?id=1377062004

---------------------
Buz:

           

And here's the article about the referenced murder

Crafty
----------------

Financier killed as he confronts burglars

KAREN MCVEIGH


A WEALTHY and highly respected City of London financier was stabbed to death and his wife was left seriously injured after two knife-wielding intruders burst into their multi-million pound townhouse in Chelsea.

John Monckton?s family were "profoundly shocked" by the murder and described him as an "incredibly gentle and thoughtful man".

The couple?s nine-year-old daughter, Isobel, alerted emergency services after finding her parents fighting for their lives after the incident on Monday night. Detectives believe it could have been an attempted burglary, but were keeping an open mind on the motive for the attack.

Yesterday, shocked residents of the exclusive and close-knit area, where actors, rock stars and the aristocracy live next to leading lawyers and businessmen, spoke of a spate of burglaries, robberies and assaults in recent years.

Mr Monckton, 49, died in hospital shortly after the attack. His wife, Homeyra, 45, who was also stabbed, was in a stable condition at St Thomas? Hospital last night after undergoing "significant surgery" for her injuries. She is not expected to be discharged for a week. The couple?s other daughter, Sabrina, 12, was at her boarding school, St Mary?s Ascot, at the time of the murder. She travelled to be with her mother and sister yesterday.

A respected director with financial giant Legal and General and a leading City authority on the corporate bond market, Mr Monckton was also well-known for his deeply held religious beliefs and charitable work. The cousin of Rosa Monckton, a close friend of the late Princess Diana and wife of Dominic Lawson, the Sunday Telegraph editor, Mr Monckton came from a well-established Catholic family and was active in the Knights of Malta charity, which helps the poor.

Police were called to the Moncktons? home, in Upper Cheyne Row, near Albert Bridge, at around 7:35pm on Monday.

Detective Superintendent Mark Jackson said it was too early to establish a motive, but Mr Monckton?s business affairs and the possibility of burglary were "key lines of inquiry".

He added: "The early indications are that two males forced entry into the premises and that is when the offences occurred, and they then decamped from the scene. A murder inquiry has now commenced."

Police are looking at CCTV footage as well as doing forensic tests at the scene and making door-to-door inquiries. Several witnesses have come forward; the suspects were seen fleeing down Glebe Place and on towards the King?s Road.

Yesterday, many residents of Upper Cheyne Row, a tranquil, residential street full of Grade II listed homes, now sealed off by police tape, said they were "saddened and shocked" by the news. The Moncktons? close neighbours include Rolling Stones bass player Bill Wyman, the Marquess of Blandford and several leading financiers.

Canon Michael Brockie, of Our Most Holy Redeemer of Saint Thomas More Church opposite the Moncktons? home, was with Mr Monckton when he died and comforted his wife yesterday. He said she was recovering well.

Canon Brockie described the family as "very close-knit, very dedicated to one another, very private." He said that Mr Monckton, who was on the church?s finance committee, was a "wonderful father and husband" and his death was a "great personal loss, both to me and the parish".

The Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O?Connor, also paid tribute to Mr Monckton, a relative of Lord Monckton, the late owner of Catholic newspaper, the Universe. He said he was horrified by news of the murder of "an exceptional and faithful man".

Canon Brockie, who was in the church at the time of the murder, said he heard a burglar alarm, followed by a banging door, before he went outside to see ambulances. He spoke of a series of recent crimes, including one in the church opposite the Moncktons? house, which left an officer of the church brain-damaged after an attack by an intruder. The priest said he knew of at least three violent burglaries in Chelsea in the past six weeks.

One resident said yesterday that it was the third time in two years that the street had been sealed off with police tape after a major crime. Another spoke of a burglary nearby, where intruders had barged in after a resident opened the door.

A spokesman for Scotland Yard confirmed the attack at the church, in January, and a car hijack, in April, in Cheyne Row, which resulted in two convictions. The Metropolitan Police?s website shows that while Kensington and Chelsea has relatively low crime figures compared for London, it has seen a 66 per cent increase in robberies over the past year, with 87 incidents in 2004. Burglary is also up 16 per cent, from 224 to 240, while violence against the person has seen a 12 per cent increase, from 237 to 266. The borough has also seen the highest percentage rise in knife crime in London in the past two years, with 236 offences in the ten months to March, 35 per cent up on a year earlier.

In 1999, Robert Robinson, former TV presenter for Call My Bluff, and his wife, Josephine, were robbed of ?2,000 of jewellery 100 yards from the Monckton property.

PILLAR OF THE ESTABLISHMENT

AS WELL as being a respected figure in the City, John Monckton came from a family whose achievements straddled politics, finance and the law. He was a cousin of Rosa Monckton, one of the best friends of Diana, Princess of Wales and the wife of Dominic Lawson, the editor of the Sunday Telegraph.

Among his forebears was Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, confidant to Edward VIII during the abdication, who went on to serve in a Tory government as paymaster-general.

Mr Monckton, 49, was a highly respected and senior City fund manager who had been with Legal and General?s investment management division for eight years.

He specialised in the bond markets and was a leading authority on the subject. He headed the bond investment team at L&G.

Born into a distinguished legal family, he was educated at Lincoln College, Oxford, and was called to the Bar as a member of Lincoln?s Inn in 1979. He went to the City in that year, joining the broker Barclays de Zoete Wedd. He later went on to fund managers Foreign & Colonial.

He was also known for his charity work and was a trustee of the Orders of St John which runs St John Ambulance.

It was the 1st Viscount Monckton who achieved the greatest prominence in recent years. The viscount - born Walter Monckton - was the MP for Bristol West from 1951-57 and served in the ministries of defence and labour before becoming paymaster-general.

The following article is from the a Scottish paper, the Evening Times (http://www.eveningtimes.co.uk/hi/news/5032285.html). I think the term "assault knives" is noteworthy.

Article follows:

New laws aim to ban shops from selling knives

NEW laws banning high street shops from selling assault knives, machetes and other weapons could be introduced by the end of next year.


Sales of replica guns will also be banned because they can be converted into useable firearms.


First Minister Jack McConnell has been in talks with chief constables on how to combat the rising level of knife crime, which is at its highest level for 10 years.


There will also be tougher sentencing powers for knife assaults, and a proposal to give police random stop and search powers is being considered.


The age at which young people can buy household knives and axes may also rise from 16 to 18.


A commitment to review the law and enforcement on knife crimes was part of the Executive's Partnership Agreement.


An Executive spokesperson said: "We are looking at existing legislation to determine whether it is sufficiently robust and flexible to respond to the illegal use and carriage of knives.


"Related to that work, we also plan to consult on proposals to increase the powers of our record number of police officers to deal with knife and violent crime."


Details of the new proposals are expected to be revealed in a parliamentary Bill early next year.


Over the past four years the number of incidents involving knives has risen by 350%, and in Glasgow alone 7500 people were victims of knife crime last year.


Under current legislation, councils can ban market traders from selling non-household knives but have no power to prevent their sale in high street shops.


The Evening Times was praised in the Scottish Parliament for campaigning for a crackdown on knife attacks and violence on the streets.


Glasgow's growing problem was highlighted in the Scottish Parliament by Shettleston MSP Frank McAveety after four men were killed in his constituency in a weekend of violence last month.


During First Minister's Questions he produced photographs of makeshift weapons, including scissor blades taped to a broom handle, to demonstrate the extent of the problem.


Mr McConnell said then that ministers were looking at strengthening laws on the sale and carrying of knives, increasing police powers and strengthening sentences as soon as possible.


Among the shops affected by the new law would be Victor Morris whose owner Martin Morris describes his stock as "sporting and collectable" items.


He said the new measures would be pointless and that most knife crime involved kitchen knives.


Mr McAveety said today: "The quicker we strengthen the law the better.


"Many attacks are carried out using domestic knives but a belt and braces approach with rigorous controls over shops which sell dangerous weapons is needed."

Alex asks:

"My question is, what is it about the murders that the arming of the population doesn't prevent them in the same way that the burglaries are prevented?"

The short answer is that there are a lot of variables, far more than I could coherently address. Let me note first, however, that the highest murder rates in the US are in areas with the strictest gun control. Chicago, District of Columbia, New York, Los Angeles, and so on all have higher murder rates than better armed sections of the US.

There are so many variables that it's hard to compare countries--some nations like Switzerland and Israel have a greater percentage of their population armed, but lower murder rate while other countries have draconian gun laws and very high murder rates.

Be that as it may, I think there are some variables that can be isolated, such as:

Geographical. The UK is comprised of islands, while the US shares thousands of miles of borders. Immigration, legal. There is a lot less homogeneity in the US. Immigration, illegal. There are a lot more shady characters entering the US. Economic. There is a lot more economic foment, hence economic conflict, in the US. Police. As I understand it, police have a much greater day-to-day presence in citizen?s lives in the UK than in the US. Drugs. US drug policy creates more drug crime than the corresponding UK policies.

Doubtless I'm missing many things, and I could certainly elaborate on the ones I've listed. Bottom line is it's pretty hard to compare apples and oranges. I think it's more productive to compare regions of the US to others. For instance, the US counties contiguous to the District of Columbia suffer very different murder and crime rates. DC is a murder and crime capitol. Neighboring Virginia counties have a far lower crime rate, while neighboring Maryland counties have crime rates higher than Virginia's, but lower than DC's. Virginia has fairly unrestrictive firearm laws; Maryland's are fairly restrictive; while DC's are the most restrictive in the country.

Sorry I couldn't get more specific, but I think doing so would quickly turn into a doctoral dissertation.

Several years ago all firearms were effectively banned in the UK. Since that time crime in general, and violent crime in particular has risen dramatically. The following BBC article states rates are still rising. My take is that banning law-abiding citizens from owning firearms does nothing but create criminal enterprise zones.

Article follows:


Gun crime figures show fresh rise

The number of firearms offences in England and Wales has risen in the last year, according to Home Office figures released on Thursday.

There has been a 3% climb in gun crime, following a 2% rise the previous year, the figures show.

The statistics also show a 35% rise in crimes involving imitation weapons.

But the figures, which cover the 12 months to June this year, also show a 15% drop in the number of shooting-related deaths.

Home Secretary David Blunkett said police and the government would target particular areas affected by violent crime linked to drugs.

They would tackle the problem in London, the West Midlands, Greater Manchester and Nottinghamshire, Mr Blunkett told a news conference in London.

"We have a situation where crack and guns go together and because crack is a dangerous drug, that stimulates violence," he said.

Training needs

Shadow Home Secretary David Davis said the government had let gun crime get out of hand.

"No amount of government spin will hide the fact that violent crime is out of control," he said. "We now have record levels of gun crime, rocketing sex offences, a further 14% increase in violent crime and overall crime is nearly 750,000 higher than 1998."

Jan Berry, chairman of the Police Federation, called for more and better trained armed police to counter gun crime.

She said: "We urgently need more trained armed police officers throughout England and Wales to tackle the growing menace of gun crime, otherwise lives will increasingly be put at risk."

BBC home affairs correspondent Andy Tighe said the government was interpreting the 3% rise in gun crime as "acceptable and predictable".

But he said the rise came on top of a "quite substantial increase" in firearms offences in recent years.

"Main cities such as Manchester, London, Birmingham and Nottingham do have special units targeting gun crime and the drugs trade, and they are having a significant amount of success."

Reassurance

Separate quarterly crime figures compiled for the Home Office in the British Crime Survey on Thursday showed that general crime was down by 7%, according to householders interviewed for the study. Crime figures recorded by police also showed a 5% fall.

The government was keen to stress that the risk of being a victim of violent crime is at its lowest for nearly 25 years.

The recent murder in Nottingham of 14-year-old Danielle Beccan has stirred fresh concerns about levels of gun crime.

She was killed in a drive-by shooting on her way home from a funfair almost a fortnight ago.

A 20-year-old Nottingham man, Mark Kelly, has been charged with her murder, while a second man aged 23 has also been charged with murder. He was due to appear in court on Thursday.

A gun amnesty is being planned for the city and a campaign to reassure the public is being brought forward.

Earlier in the month, six people were shot in the space of an hour during incidents in London and Bristol. Two people were killed in the London incident.

Smaller rises

But the Home Office figures show firearms-related deaths are comparatively rare.

Last year the number fell to 81 from 97 in the previous 12 months.

The small rises in gun crime for the last two years compare with a 34% increase recorded in 2002.

In 2003, the Home Office introduced a mandatory five-year minimum prison sentence for anyone caught in possession of an illegal firearm.

Government officials claimed there was anecdotal evidence from the police that the move is having a deterrent effect, but that it was too early for this to be reflected in Thursday's figures.

The statistics on imitation weapons come a day after figures emerged from a survey by police in Manchester which showed that more than 70% of callouts from the city's armed response units dealt with fake guns.

The government has previously ruled out a wholesale ban on imitation firearms, saying it was too difficult to find a legal definition for replicas.


GUN CRIME: YEAR TO JUNE 04

Fatalities: 70 (-15%)

Serious injuries: 430 (no change)

Total firearms offences: 10,590 (+3%)

With replica/ imitation gun: 1,350 (+35%)

With handgun: 4,910 (-10%)
Source: Home Office recorded crime figures. Comparisons are with year to June 03


Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/3761626.stm

Published: 2004/10/21 15:10:05 GMT

? BBC MMIV

Several aspects of Alex?s post resist analysis. Let me see if I get this straight:

?1. She is a staunch campaigner against gun control, not an unbiased psychiatrist offering an expert opinion.?

Uhm, okay, she has an opinion and a professional degree. Supporting one with the tools of the other is wrong for what reason? If you have a professional degree the only statements you?re allowed to make are ones deemed unbiased? Who makes that call?

?2. She never practised (sic) psychiatry at all, in fact retired soon after qualifying for unspecified reasons to do with differences with the Psychiatric establishment.?

No foolin?? I hear there was once this Washington lawyer who, for unspecified reasons, abandoned his vocation and started teaching people how to whomp each other better with sticks as an avenue towards higher consciousness. The gall of some people, eh?

?3. Her stance and motivations on several gun control issues are, to me, highly questionable:?

I don?t have access to the source material that inspire the next several charges, and don?t wish to rebut them in a blanket manner, though I do have my quibbles.

?She believes gun deregulation is a prime concern because of a genuine risk of the next Anti-Semitic Holocaust occuring (sic) in America.?

Don?t know about the next holocaust, but there have been an awful lot of unarmed or under-armed people in America and elsewhere who have had to deal with all sorts of awful stuff because of their inability to defend themselves. There have also been many instances of armed communities resisting sundry forms of tyranny. Given the choice I?d just as soon have the ability to cause the bad guys to think twice, and can?t think of any reason to surrender that ability willingly, regardless of faith or circumstance.

?She believes firmly that the 2nd Amendment should protect ALL weapons including fully automatic machine guns, artillery and WMDs.?

WMDs and artillery, eh? Is this reductio ad absurdum or is she really willing to issue battlefield nukes to all Americans? As that may be, ?fully automatic machine guns? is a redundancy, albeit one that may be necessitated by all the ?assault weapon? twaddle currently circulating. BTW, isn?t the position that the Second Amendment protects all weapons about as absurd as the argument that it protects none?

?She boycotted Glock for 'giving in' to gun control by providing free trigger locks with their handguns.?

Well TANSTAAFL, or perhaps TANSTAASFTL: There Ain?t No Such Thing As A Free Trigger Lock. Someone paid for it. There?s not a lick of evidence trigger locks do any good, regardless of how the costs are shifted, see the Center for Disease Control report. Trigger locks are a feel good measure, one with no demonstrated utility. Perhaps her protest is similarly silly, but I don?t see how you can point out the folly of one without acknowledging the folly of the other.

?4. Bear this in mind: If you don't agree with any of the positions above it is YOU she is applying her 'analysis' to: Whatever reasons you might give for not thinking what she believes is rational, YOU are the one using those defense mechanisms she is talking about, not just anti gun lobbyists. When someone believes a gun manufacturer isn't doing enough to oppose gun control I really have to question their "professional opinion" on a group that opposes them.?

I?m not much inclined to untangle this circumlocution. Suffice to say I think Dr. Thompson?s thesis is fairly straightforward. As both a gun owner and a martial arts practitioner I?ve encountered plenty of people who feel developing martial competencies is an awful thing, preferring to instead surrender their ability to defend themselves and their families. Dr. Thompson seeks to examine the fears these folks profess and provide gun owners the tools to address them. Think her perspective is straight forward, her agenda anything but concealed, and her prose pretty clear.

The following was posted on the Naval Institute Proceedings Magazine web site: http://www.usni.org/proceedings/procurrenttoc.htm

I met Joe Galloway, referenced below, a couple weeks back at a miltary vehicle museum I do volunteer work for. Hadn't thought of him as an embedded reporter until now; Galloway's book We were Soldiers Once, and Young tells the story of a battle in Viet Nam's Ia Drang valley and was later adapted into a movie by Mel Gibson.

Lengthy article follows:


The military laments that its successes in Iraq and Afghanistan have gone unnoticed, while any bad news is immediately set on by a national media intent on painting every U.S. commitment as a quagmire. This might be true, but the military is not without responsibility for this state of affairs.

Military-media relations have improved since General William Sherman announced, ?I hate newspapermen. They come into camp and pick up their camp rumors and print them as facts. I regard them as spies, which, in truth, they are. If I killed them all there would be news from Hell before breakfast.?

Almost a century and a half later, no serving flag or general officers are on record advocating the extermination of journalists. Still, despite the success of the embed process and the tens of millions of dollars spent on public affairs infrastructure, relations continue to be strained. Military officers constantly lament that most of the successes in Iraq and Afghanistan went unnoticed, while every little setback or problem seemingly received national attention. Many believe national policy is set by the media intent on painting every U.S. military commitment as an unwinnable quagmire.

They are right.

But who is responsible for this state of affairs? While it is easy to blame the media for failing to get the true story or to accuse journalists of a liberal bias against military operations, this fails to identify the true culprit. The reason the military is losing the war in the media is because it has almost totally failed to engage, and where it has engaged, it has been with a mind-boggling degree of ineptitude. It is a strange circumstance indeed when virtually every senior officer agrees that the media can make or break national policy, but no more than a handful can name the top military journalist for The Washington Post, The New York Times, or The Wall Street Journal. Thousands of officers who spend countless hours learning every facet of their profession do not spend one iota of their time understanding or learning to engage with a strategic force that can make or break their best efforts.

The military is paying a high and continuing price for its inability to engage the media. There have been 30 years of studies, conferences, and meetings since Vietnam dealing with just this topic, and still the magic formula eludes the military. As the only embedded journalist in Iraq who still was carrying a military ID card (Army Reserve), I feel uniquely placed to comment on the military-media relationship. I served on active duty for more than a dozen years and came to journalism late. However, my stint in journalism focused on military affairs, which allowed me to develop a clear picture of the frustrations most journalists encounter when dealing with the military. Many readers will counter: But what about the frustrations of the military with the media? Who cares? That is like blaming enemy action for the failure of a brilliant plan. The media will always get a story out; it is the military?s responsibility to make sure that story is informed and correct. It is useless for officers to scream in frustration that the media got a story wrong, particularly if they did nothing to help journalists get it right.

As a journalist, when given an assignment, I will not fail. To a journalist, an assignment is the same as a mission order. If the people in the know will not tell me, I will go to their soldiers. If that does not work, I will go to the families of the soldiers and get the versions of the story their sons and daughters have sent them by e-mail. Then I will write the story based on what I was able to get from whatever source was available. All the after-the-fact howling in the world from those who think I got the story all wrong will have no effect. Even if I wanted to go back and fix it, I probably would not bother. The news cycle has moved on, and I have moved on with it.

Anyone who thinks a journalist is ethically bound to go back and fix wrong information or impressions is fooling himself. Even current military stories are competing for space against J-Lo?s latest wedding. Editors are not giving up space to rehash the past?historical record be damned. Besides, too many corrections will begin to make it look like I could not get the right story in the first place, and what compelling reason is there to make myself look incompetent?

Even with knowledge of how the military works, I still found virtually my every attempt to get information from public affairs officers (PAOs) to be akin to getting water from a stone. Many times I sat looking at the phone in disbelief at some answer or non-answer a PAO had given me. Too often, I hung up the phone and thought to myself, if the Secretary of Defense only knew how one of his PAOs was treating a man about to write a column for national distribution. Sometimes, I had to sit back and count off the reasons I should not just start writing mean little articles about the military.

After major combat operations ended, Time magazine took me home. My final article on the war and the military was called ?The Men Who Won the War.? This one article alone should have marked me as a journalist worth being nice to. So, when I called the PAOs at the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) to work out some access for my return to Iraq, I was stupefied by the response. My offer, which was given to half a dozen civilian and military public affairs folks over the course of 20 or 30 calls was pretty extraordinary. At a time when everyone in Iraq was screaming that the media were failing to cover the military?s accomplishments, I said I wanted to tell the country what was going right.

If given the right access, I told them, I probably could get the cover of a major newsweekly several times over the course of a couple of months. In addition, I had several national opinion magazines lined up that would publish all I could send them. I also was in conversations with producers of a network TV news magazine, and they were interested in doing a piece along the same positive lines. Finally, I reminded these public affairs people that Time and CNN were owned by the same company and that I probably would be able to get substantial air time during what I expected to be an extended stay in Iraq.

I was coming to Iraq to look for the news the rest of the media were missing. In short, I had an agenda that correlated exactly with the military?s and the CPA?s, but no one wanted to be bothered. Excuses about it being a hectic period should fall on deaf ears. At one point, I asked for access to Paul Bremer, civil administrator for Iraq, and was told I would have to get in line behind 250 other requests for the same thing. I reminded that PAO what I was bringing to the table and that it was ludicrous I should be placed in line behind a request from the Podunk Gazette. He hung up on me.

Giving up, I asked the 101st Airborne if I could re-embed with them and report on what they were doing. Within an hour of my e-mail request, I had a note from the commanding general telling me to hurry back. He said he had a lot of good news and it had to get out. An hour after his e-mail arrived, the 101st PAO office was on the phone telling me what flight I would be on going back to Iraq. Here was an organization that knew how to treat friendly journalists. It also helped that they have the best PAO of my acquaintance.

I could spout off more about the indignities, incompetence, and rudeness I have been subjected to by PAOs, but the high ground in this discussion is not going to be held by whining. It will be won and held with constructive solutions, and as luck would have it, I have some.

First, a few words about the embed process. What a wonderful idea. Anytime you can get a journalist living in the sand and mud with real soldiers it is a major plus. It is impossible for anyone to be associated with U.S. soldiers in combat and not walk away impressed. As one CBS reporter told me, ?I just had no idea our army was filled with such quality people.? When journalists are sharing the fatigue, deprivations, and danger of the soldiers they are covering, a new respect develops, and it is not long before the Galloway effect (Joe Galloway, a renowned military correspondent, has never written a bad thing about soldiers since he left Vietnam) takes hold.

While the embed process can be improved, such as by ensuring the journalists are mobile and have access to electrical power, I have only one major suggestion for the future. Make sure thought is given to placing embeds at places and levels appropriate for their organizations. My experience will illustrate why this is important. I was embedded at brigade headquarters and saw everything the brigade commander saw. All the other Time and Newsweek embeds were at lower levels. Just after the sandstorm-enforced halt in the assault on Baghdad, Time sent me the copy for that week?s cover story entitled ?Why Are We Losing? and asked me to find comments to feed into the story.

That day I saw Colonel David Perkins of the 3rd Infantry Division and talked to many of his officers. Their reaction to the story was, ?Tomorrow we laager up to refuel and rearm. The next day we move out to hit the Medina Division. It?s beat up, facing the wrong way, and does not know we?re coming. The day after that we ride onto Baghdad International Airport.? After a few calculations, I figured out Time was going to declare the war lost on the same day we entered Baghdad. This was not good.

I sent a note to Time telling them they were about to look very foolish. Unfortunately, I was alone in my estimation of the situation. All of the talking heads on TV were shouting about disaster. However, expert talking-head opinions on the threat Saddam?s paramilitaries were posing to the 3rd?s supply line were not in line with the reality I was witnessing. Battlefield commanders in Iraq, rather then being alarmed at attacks on the supply lines, were thankful, ?Isn?t it nice of them to come out of hiding in the cities and attack across open desert to be slaughtered.? In addition to the talking heads, most of my fellow embeds were echoing the disaster sentiment. When you are living in the dirt with an infantry platoon, it is easy to miss the progress that becomes visible when you get the big picture at a brigade headquarters or higher. After a six-hour meeting, the compromise at Time was to rename the story ?What Will It Take to Win.?

Newsweek went with the cover story ?Quagmire? in big red letters, which allowed  Time to claim a major journalistic coup by not looking as foolish as Newsweek.

The key point here is that it behooves the military to make sure the journalists with the most national impact are placed in locations where they will be able to get a full appreciation of events.

Now, some questions. Did anyone keep track of the embeds after the war was over? Were any of the media invited back to unit homecomings, unit formals, to view unit training, or to follow up on individuals they had covered during the war? Were any of them asked to join unit associations? In fact, there has been virtually no effort whatsoever to try to make the journalists, who shared the misery and danger of war, part of the team. A chance to bond hundreds of journalists to the military is being let slip away.

Each of these journalists should have been cultivated by the units they were with, as well as by the military as a whole. By giving them preferred access, the military would help many of their careers and bind them closer then ever. Some journalists, not given this kind of treatment, will scream that journalists covering the military this way will lose all objectivity. This is a facile argument and hardly worthy of comment. Why do the journalists who have the crime beat in New York City and hang out at One Police Plaza never get accused of being too cozy with the police force? How is it the White House Press Corps, which gets all kinds of privileged access and perks, is never accused of being too cozy with the President?

Neither should anyone in the military assume that just because journalists have been brought into the fold everything will be rosy. Joe Galloway has never said anything bad about the American soldier, but that has not stopped him from pointing his rhetorical weaponry at the Pentagon, the top brass, and the system whenever he has spotted a wrong or injustice. A journalist with a negative story is still going to publish. That is how he gets page one, promotions, and the praise of his peers. However, the military can expect to receive the benefit of the doubt more often than is now the case, and the journalists at least will know what they are talking about, making them more likely to get the story right.

The PAO process needs to be radically rebuilt. Critical to accomplishing this is reversing the passive mind-set of the PAO community such that it ceases being a filter for information and becomes actively engaged in making sure information gets out the door. There is no reason PAOs should be sitting back waiting for journalist inquiries or requests for interviews. Every day they should be out executing an aggressive media plan to get the military story in front of the public. This has to go beyond the sterility of a periodic press release or press briefing. It means spending every day trying to get important stories into the hands of journalists or facilitating stories already in the works.

To do this, military public affairs organizations need to employ some radical new business concepts.

Every businessperson knows that if you want to stay in business you have to anticipate customers? needs and supply them. PAOs have two customers?the organization they serve and the media who come to them for information. They are failing both. Ask your average PAO what information the command wants to get out next week or over the course of a year and the vast majority will give you a blank stare, or worse. Worse would include, ?We want to make sure everyone knows what a magnificent job the soldiers in this organization are doing. On a daily basis they are accomplishing the mission under the most . . .? Thank you, but journalists have all the pabulum they need. PAOs need to get more knowledgeable about the specifics of what their organizations are doing and then be aggressive in getting that story out.

When it comes to getting closer to or understanding the media, the PAO community is failing miserably. Yes, there are some bright lights, but they are few and far between. Programs such as ?Working with Industry? are a step in the right direction, but they are much too small to have any serious practical effect.

One step in the right direction would be to assign a captain/lieutenant to each of the major media organizations. I like to use the term ?reverse embed,? but that could be interpreted as having that officer reporting back to the Pentagon on what the media is doing. What I envision is not a spy, but an informed individual that members of a media group can turn to as a source. Someone who can explain that while a second lieutenant outranks a sergeant major, he gives him an order only at great peril. The manpower costs would be relatively insignificant (three networks, three major news magazines, three cable channels, and maybe a half dozen leading newspapers or syndicates). There is, of course, the chance the media organizations will be wary. This is easily overcome?offer it to only a few groups or on a first come, first served, basis and wait for the rest to clamor for their fair share.

Once in place, this individual could provide context for ongoing stories and facilitate journalist dealings with various commands (local PAOs). At the very least, it would not hurt to have a permanent goodwill ambassador inside organizations that often are viewed as hostile to all things military. It will take a long time before this officer is trusted by the editors, and many of those assigned this duty may feel entitled to combat pay. By its very nature, this will have to be a long-term effort, but I am sure it will not be too many years before the military-media attach? is being given space on the masthead of many media outlets.

A seemingly easy fix would be to give journalists a single point of contact at the higher level depending on what media they work for. For instance, a group of PAOs would be assigned to print magazines and another to news channels. Every journalist at Time or Fox News would know who to call for information. Long-term relationships would be built, and PAOs would gain a thorough understanding of the media with which they are working. Understandably, no PAO team would be able to answer every question that came in, but they would be able to point journalists in the right direction and facilitate contact with local PAOs who might have the information. A side benefit would be that they often would be able to give local PAOs a heads up. And if someone from the national media called a local PAO, that PAO would know who to alert about the inquiry. In an era when even what appears to be local trivia can have a strategic impact, this kind of intelligence would be critical in any attempt to get ahead of a story or at least to get the broad context of an event in journalists? hands.

In fact, failure to provide broader context to events is another major shortcoming of the PAO community. Recently, an article in The Washington Post screamed out about 91 cases of misconduct toward Iraqis being investigated by military authorities. U.S. soldiers and Marines were presented as marauding barbarians in tone if not in words. Some said this was an unfair portrait, but the article was correct in every factual detail. But what if there had been a PAO office somewhere that was responsible for putting this kind of information in context? Alerted by the captain/lieutenant assigned to the Post (who is passing information, not spying) or by the PAOs covering major newspapers, they would have gotten the gist of the article. Then they could have produced something like this:
   ?    .05% of soldiers in Iraq were accused of any misconduct toward Iraqis in the past year.
   ?     15% of New York?s Police Department is accused of some misconduct during the year.
   ?     .003% of military patrols have resulted in investigation.
   ?     .16% of NYPD patrols result in investigation.
   ?     Remove the incidents committed by one terribly led unit of prison guards (800th Military Police), and the military?s performance improves by more than 100%.
   ?     In an environment at least 850 times as deadly as New York City, with a force of tens of thousands of teenagers who have no police training and who are working in communities where they do not even know the language, the U.S. military has done its policing job with 1/300th of the complaints that NYPD receives annually.
   ?     On a per patrol basis, the military is 50 times less likely to receive a complaint than the NYPD.
   ?     In the past year, New York City has lost one officer in the line of duty, or .002% of its force.
   ?     Over the same period, the U.S. military in Iraq lost 842 or .7% of the in-country force (and 5,000 more wounded).

This kind of context could have been given to the article?s author before the story ran or to others after the fact. While even one case of misconduct is a tragedy, the above context puts a new complexion on the problem. The military no longer is a bunch of barbarians pillaging the Iraqi countryside. It is now clear that while there has been some abuse, the vast majority of our men and women in Iraq are doing a great job under very dangerous conditions.

The military would also do well to look into funding various media operations. The reason most embeds came home as soon as major combat operations ended is that it was costing a fortune to keep them in Iraq. News organizations were losing millions covering the war, but they could not decrease their coverage in the face of brutal competition. However, as soon as it was safe to pull the plug, the accountants made them do it. Just when it became critical for the military to have embeds who could tell the full story in Iraq, they vanished. The military needs to come up with a way to foot the bill for extended media operations.

There are several arguments against this. First, the military does not owe the media a stipend to cover their commercial enterprise. Many would claim the military is doing enough by giving journalists access and providing security. That is all well and good, except that it is the military that has a strong vested interest in getting out the entire story. New organizations will get enough copy to cover the news cycle from just a small office in Baghdad. If the military wants journalists to go see what is happening in the rest of the country and how soldiers are coping as they perform their missions, then it has to be ready to pony up the money to finance it. Otherwise, it is useless to complain about the lack of perspective journalists have on events because all they do is sit in offices in Baghdad. Given a choice, the journalists would all be out with the troops because that is where the accolades and Pulitzer Prizes are to be found.

The second objection is that this would give the appearance of a state-controlled media. This might be a long-term problem, but I do not see the media giving in to state control of content anytime soon. However, if we must have a solution, creating an independently administered fund that media outlets could draw on as required would fit the bill. It might be messy as each group fought over its share, but I am confident it would not take long before accommodations were made and some equilibrium achieved.

The military also would be well served by sending some of its more fluent and entertaining PAOs on regular tours of journalism classes throughout the country, possibly even teaching classes at universities. Here is a real chance for the military to catch budding journalists on the ground floor and educate them about the functions and realities of the military. There already are some programs to send fellows to places such as the Shorenstein Center for Press and Public Policy, but once again the numbers are too few to make a significant impact.

In addition, the military needs to expand and formalize programs to get media representatives out to any and all kinds of training and daily events. A lot of this is being done at the local level, but it needs to be expanded to include the national press. This does not mean that marksmanship training will find its way onto national news, but it will begin to establish a new tone and familiarity between the elite press and the military. Once again, I advocate that the military pick up the bill for all of this.

Not all journalists will accept these offers, but some will. Those who do should be brought into the fold. Each media person who shows up for anything should be made an honorary member of the unit, given a unit coin, put on the unit newsletter distribution list, and invited to every social event. This holds doubly true if the visiting journalist writes a negative story. Remember to be nice to the young journalists. You never know which one is going to become a news anchor.

Finally, the military needs to develop programs to get more of its senior officers and civilian officials in front of the press on a regular basis. Too many see the press as their enemy or something to be feared. If the media are the enemy, then the military needs to wade into them as if storming ashore on D-Day. Officers who will run any personal risk in combat to ensure mission accomplishment must learn to be equally fearless when dealing with this new foe. Besides, once they wade in, they might find the enemy is not so bad after all.

Mr. Lacey is a Washington-based writer focusing on defense and international affairs issues. He was embedded with the 101st Airborne during the war in Iraq.

I hear members of most fascist regimes also were breast fed as babies, utilized bipedal locomotion, and had at least one X chromosome.

Cast a net widely enough there's not much you won't catch.

Crafty:

You can do something of an end run in Virginia: most General District and Circuit courts have their case files online at:

http://www.courts.state.va.us/caseinfo/home.html

The info is bare bones, and the system fairly kludgie, but it can get you started.

I live in this neck of the woods. If you need help sorting out districts, circuits, etc. feel free to contact me offline.

Buz