Fire Hydrant of Freedom

The dilemma of a deadly disease: patients may be forcibly detained
Doctors fear TB strain could cause a global pandemic if it is not controlled

Chris McGreal in Johannesburg and Sarah Boseley, health editor
Tuesday January 23, 2007

Guardian

South Africa is considering forcibly detaining people who carry a deadly
strain of tuberculosis that has already claimed hundreds of lives. The
strain threatens to cause a global pandemic, but the planned move pits
public protection against human rights.
The country's health department says it has discussed with the World Health
Organisation and South Africa's leading medical organisations the
possibility of placing carriers of extreme drug resistant TB or XDR-TB under
guard in isolation wards until they die, but has yet to reach a decision.

Pressure to take action has been growing since a woman diagnosed with the
disease discharged herself from a hospital last September and probably
spread the infection before she was finally coaxed back when she was
threatened with a court order.

More than 300 cases of the highly infectious disease, which is spread by
airborne droplets and kills 98% of those infected within about two weeks,
have been identified in South Africa.

But doctors believe there have been hundreds, possibly thousands, more and
the numbers are growing among the millions of people with HIV, who are
particularly vulnerable to the disease. Their fear is that patients with
XDR-TB, told that there is little that can be done for them, will leave the
isolation wards and go home to die. But while they are still walking around
they risk spreading the infection.

Now a group of doctors has warned in a medical journal that if enforced
isolation is not introduced XDR-TB could swamp South Africa and spread far
beyond its borders. Regular TB is already the single largest killer of
people with Aids in South Africa.

Pandemic

Jerome Amir Singh of the Centre for Aids Programme of Research in South
Africa and two colleagues wrote in the peer-reviewed journal Public Library
of Science Medicine that the government must overcome its understandable
qualms over human rights in the interests of the majority. Without
exceptional control measures, including enforced isolation, XDR-TB "could
become a lethal global pandemic", they say.

"The containment of infectious patients with XDR-TB may arguably take
precedence over any other patients not infected with highly infectious and
deadly airborne diseases, including those with full-blown Aids. This is an
issue requiring urgent attention from the global community," they wrote.

"The South African government's initial lethargic response to the crisis and
uncertainty amongst South African health professionals concerning the
ethical, social and human rights implications of effectively tackling this
outbreak highlight the urgent need to address these issues lest doubt and
inaction spawn a full-blown XDR-TB epidemic in South Africa and beyond."

Mary Edginton of the Witwatersrand university's medical school endorses
enforced quarantining.

"You can look at it from two points of view. From the patient's point of
view, you are expected to stay in some awful place, you can't work and you
can't see your family. You will probably die there. From the community's
point of view such a person is infectious. If they go to the shops or wander
around their friends they can spread it, potentially to a large group of
people," she said.

Karin Weyer of the Medical Research Council has called for enforced
hospitalisation of high-risk TB patients on the grounds that the risks to
society outweigh individual rights. But she opposes forcible treatment
because of the dangers associated with the drugs.

Professor Edginton said that medical authorities in the US and other
countries can obtain a court order to detain a person with infectious TB or
someone who is non-infectious but has failed to adhere to treatment. "The
Americans are much better at enforcing their laws on this," she said.

South African law also permits enforced isolation but some lawyers say it
comes into conflict with the constitutional guarantees on individual rights.
However, the constitution also guarantees communal rights, including
protection from infection and the right to a safe environment.

South Africa's health department yesterday said it has discussed the
possibility of enforced isolation with the country's Medical Research
Council and the World Health Organisation but has not reached a conclusion.

Poor housing

Ronnie Green-Thompson, a special adviser to the health department, said the
issue at stake is the human rights of the individual weighed against the
rights of the wider public. "The issue of holding the patient against their
will is not ideal but may have to be considered in the interest of the
public. Legal opinion and comment as well as sourcing the opinion of human
rights groups is important," he said.

"Also of importance is preventing those factors that lead to infectious TB
and these are poverty, poor housing, overcrowding and poor nutrition and any
other factors that weakens patients' resistance to acquiring infections."

Umesh Lalloo, of Durban's Nelson Mandela School of Medicine and head of the
research team into the first XDR-TB outbreak, said he is not persuaded that
detention is necessary.

"It's a very difficult call. Given our recent past with human rights
violations we need to be careful. I'm not dismissing such a move but it's a
very radical step. What we should be pushing for is a reinforcement of the
TB control programme which would contain the spread," he said. Professor
Lalloo said one consideration is that almost all infections appear to have
spread to patients in hospital.

The doctors and co-authors said that it is essential that patients were
detained in "humane and decent living conditions" and they urged the
government to change the rules so that those in hospital with TB continue to
receive welfare payments which are cut off if they are treated at the
state's expense.

Although cases of XDR-TB were discovered in South Africa a decade ago, the
disease started claiming dozens of lives at the small Tugela Ferry hospital
in rural KwaZulu-Natal two years ago. XDR-TB's origins are uncertain but the
WHO says the misuse of anti-tuberculosis drugs is the most likely cause.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007

From the Early Bird:

Washington Post
January 16, 2007
Pg. 15

Interrogation Research Is Lacking, Report Says

Few Studies Have Examined U.S. Methods

By Josh White, Washington Post Staff Writer

There is almost no scientific evidence to back up the U.S. intelligence community's use of controversial interrogation techniques in the fight against terrorism, and experts believe some painful and coercive approaches could hinder the ability to get good information, according to a new report from an intelligence advisory group.

The 374-page report from the Intelligence Science Board examines several aspects of broad interrogation methods and approaches, and it finds that no significant scientific research has been conducted in more than four decades about the effectiveness of many techniques the U.S. military and intelligence groups use regularly. Intelligence experts wrote that a lack of research could explain why abuse has been alleged at U.S. facilities in Afghanistan, Cuba and Iraq.

"Since there had been little or no development of sustained capacity for interrogation practice, training, or research within intelligence or military communities in the post-Soviet period, many interrogators were forced to 'make it up' on the fly," wrote Robert A. Fein, chairman of the study, published by the National Defense Intelligence College. "This shortfall in advanced, research-based interrogation methods at a time of intense pressure from operational commanders to produce actionable intelligence from high-value targets may have contributed significantly to the unfortunate cases of abuse that have recently come to light."

The report explores scientific knowledge on interrogation in the wake of reported abuse around the globe. The study, sponsored by the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon's Counterintelligence Field Activity, was posted yesterday on the Federation of American Scientists' Web site, at http:www.fas.org/irp/dni/educing.pdf.

In it, experts find that popular culture and ad hoc experimentation have fueled the use of aggressive and sometimes physical interrogation techniques to get those captured on the battlefields to talk, even if there is no evidence to support the tactics' effectiveness. The board, which advises the director of national intelligence, recommends studying the matter.

"There is little systematic knowledge available to tell us 'what works' in interrogation," wrote Robert Coulam, a research professor at the Simmons School for Health Studies in Boston. Coulam also wrote that interrogation practices that offend ethical concerns and "skirt the rule of law" may be narrowly useful, if at all, because such practices could undermine the legitimacy of government action and support for the fight against terrorism.

The Bush administration has long advocated the ability to use aggressive interrogation tactics on terrorism suspects. After abuse came to light at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and the Navy's prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Congress forced the government to limit its approaches to long-standing military doctrine but allowed a loophole that lets the CIA continue such techniques.

The Army's new field manual on intelligence, approved in September, specifically bans some of the most aggressive techniques -- such as "waterboarding," beatings, sensory deprivation and depriving a detainee of food -- and draws clear boundaries for all military personnel who participate in interrogations. Army officials abandoned more coercive techniques because of the abuse scandals and evidence that Army and contract interrogators had developed approaches in the field based on vague guidance.

The new study finds that there may be no value to coercive techniques.

"The scientific community has never established that coercive interrogation methods are an effective means of obtaining reliable intelligence information," wrote Col. Steven M. Kleinman, who has served as the Pentagon's senior intelligence officer for special survival training.

Kleinman wrote that intelligence gathered with coercion is sometimes inaccurate or false, noting that isolation, a tactic U.S. officials have used regularly, causes "profound emotional, psychological, and physical discomfort" and can "significantly and negatively impact the ability of the source to recall information accurately."

 





Sunday January 7, 2007

 

New China. New crisis

In the last decade China has emerged as a powerful, resurgent economic force with the muscle to challenge America as the global superpower. But, in his controversial new book, Will Hutton argues that China's explosive economic reforms will create seismic tensions within the one-party authoritarian state and asks: can the centre hold?

For more than 2,000 years, China's conceit was that it was the celestial kingdom, the country whose standing was endowed by heaven itself and whose emperors tried to reproduce heavenly harmony on Earth. All China basked in the reflected glow; foreigners were barbarians beyond the gilded pale who should not be allowed even to learn the art of speaking and writing Chinese.

 

When I first visited China in the autumn of 2003, such articles of Confucian faith seemed very far away, submerged by the lost wars and the 26 humiliating treaties of the 19th century, subsequent communist revolution and now the economic growth to which Beijing's motorway rings and Shanghai's skyline are tribute. This was a new China that had plainly left behind obeisance to the canons of Confucianism and the later cruelties of Mao. More than three years and a book later, I am less convinced.

 

All societies are linked to their past by umbilical cords - some apparent, some hidden. China is no different. Imperial Confucian China and communist China alike depended - and depend - upon the notion of a vastly powerful, infallible centre: either because it was interpreting the will of heaven or, now, of the proletariat. In neither system have human rights, constitutional checks and balances or even forms of democracy figured very much. As a result, China has poor foundations on which to build the subtle network of institutions of accountability necessary to manage the complexities of a modern economy and society. Sooner or later, it is a failing that will have to be addressed.

 

China is both very confident about its recent success and very insecure about its past, a potent mix that breeds a deep-seated xenophobia and shallow arrogance. China's economy in 2007 will be nearly nine times larger than it was in 1978 when Deng Xiaoping won the power struggle with the Maoists and began his extraordinarily sinuous, gradualist but successful programme of market-based economic reforms, groping for stones to cross the river, as he called it. China is now the fourth largest economy in the world - after the United States, Japan, and Germany - and is set to become the second largest within a decade. More than 150 million workers have moved to China's booming cities and 400 million people have been removed from poverty. It is a head-spinning achievement.

 

China is the new factor in global politics and economics, and its rulers and people know it. It now has more than $1 trillion of foreign exchange reserves, the world's largest. It is the single most important financier of the United States' enormous trade deficit. It is the world's second largest importer of oil. Before 2010, it will be the world's largest exporter of goods. It is, comfortably, the world's second largest military power. Last year, the Pentagon's four-yearly defence review stated that China is the power most likely to 'field disruptive military technologies that could over time offset traditional US military advantages'. A new great power is in the making, but one whose pursuit of its self-interest takes the amorality of power to a new plane. It is not just the Chinese who should be concerned about its institutional and moral failings; all of us should be.

 

In China, you can almost smell the new self-confidence: it is in the skyscrapers built in months; it is in the brash and unashamed willingness to rip off and copy Western brands; it is in the well-groomed and inscrutable demeanour of the rich entrepreneurs, self-confident officials and assured academics.

 

I sat in a Beijing bar just over a year ago with a typical member of China's new class of rich businessmen who double up as members of the party, a combination of commercial and political power that China knew well as the old Confucian mandarinate, now strangely reproducing itself in a new guise after Mao tried to eliminate it forever in the Cultural Revolution.

 

In surprisingly fluent English and with his Mercedes waiting outside, he praised China's communist regime and its curious mix of capitalism and communism with all the enthusiasm of a Tory businessmen praising Thatcher. Chinese corruption? Think of Enron and party-funding scandals in London, he declaimed. Double standards between communist rhetoric and practice? What about the US and Britain's invasion of Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay? What I failed to realise, he insisted, betraying both assurance and insecurity, is that China will not surrender again the natural rank that it should never have lost. Western values, institutions and attitudes were being revealed for being straw men, blown away by resurgent China and the pragmatism of its communist leaders.

 

Yet Western values and institutions are not being blown away. The country has made progress to the extent that communism has given up ground and moved towards Western practices, but there are limits to how far the reformers can go without giving up the basis for the party's political control. Conservatives insist that much further and the capacity to control the country will become irretrievably damaged; that the limit, for example, is being reached in giving both trade unions more autonomy and shareholders more rights. It is the most urgent political debate in China.

 

The tension between reform and conservatism is all around. For example, the party's commitment now is no longer to building a planned communist economy but a 'socialist market' economy. The 26,000 communes in rural China, which were once the vanguard of communism, were swept away by the peasants themselves in just three years between 1979 and 1982, the largest bottom-up act of decollectivisation the world has ever witnessed. Hundreds of millions of peasants are, via long leases, again farming plots held by their ancestors for millenniums. China's state-owned enterprises no longer provide life-long employment and welfare for their workers as centrepieces of a new communist order; they are autonomous companies largely free to set prices as they choose in an open economy and progressively shedding their social obligations.

 

Equally amazing, China's communists have declared that the class war is over. The party now claims to represent not just the worker and peasant masses but entrepreneurs and business leaders, whom it welcomes into its ranks. The party refers to this metamorphosis as the 'three represents': meaning that the party today represents 'advanced productive forces' (capitalists); 'the overwhelming majority' of the Chinese (not just workers and peasants); and 'the orientation ... of China's advanced culture' (religious, political and philosophical traditions other than communism).

 

Party representatives say that the country is no longer pledged to fight capitalism to the death internationally, but, instead, wants to rise peacefully. China has joined the World Trade Organisation and is a judicious member of the United Nations Security Council, using its veto largely in matters that immediately concern it, such as Taiwan.

 

But for all that, it remains communist. The maxims of Marxist-Leninst-Maoist thought have to stand, however much the party tries to stretch the boundaries, because they are the basis for one-party rule. Yet the system so spawned is reaching its limits. For example, China's state-owned and directed banks cannot carry on channelling hundreds of billions of pounds of peasant savings into the financing of a frenzy of infrastructure and heavy industrial investment. The borrowers habitually pay interest only fitfully, and rarely repay the debt, even as the debt mountain explodes. The financial system is vulnerable to any economic setback.

 

Equally, China is reaching the limits of the capacity to increase its exports, which, in 2007, will surpass $1 trillion, by 25 per cent a year. At this rate of growth, they will reach $5 trillion by 2020 or sooner, representing more than half of today's world trade. Is that likely? Are there ships and ports on sufficient scale to move such volumes - and will Western markets stay uncomplainingly open? Every year, it is also acquiring $200bn of foreign exchange reserves as it rigs its currency to keep its exports competitive. Can even China insulate its domestic financial system from such fantastic growth in its reserves and stop inflation rising? Already, there are ominous signs that inflationary pressures are increasing.

 

These ills have communist roots. It is the lack of independent scrutiny and accountability that lie behind the massive waste of investment and China's destruction of its environment alike. The pace of desertification has doubled over 20 years, in a country where 25 per cent of the land area is already desert. Air pollution kills 400,000 people a year prematurely. A hacking cough in the Beijing smog or the stench when the wind comes from the north in Shanghai are reminders of just how far China still has to go.

 

Energy is wasted on an epic scale. But the worst problem is water. One-fifth of China's 660 cities face extreme water shortages and as many as 90 per cent have problems of water pollution; 500 million rural Chinese still do not have access to safe drinking water. Illegal and rampant polluting, a severe shortage of sewage treatment facilities, and chemical pollutants together continue to degrade China's waterways. In autumn 2005, two major cities - Harbin and Guangzhou - had their water supplies cut off for days because their river sources had suffered acute chemical spills from state-owned factories.

 

Enterprises are accountable to no one but the Communist party for their actions; there is no network of civil society, plural public institutions and independent media to create pressure for enterprises to become more environmentally efficient. Watchdogs, whistleblowers, independent judges and accountable government are not just good in themselves as custodians of justice; they also keep capitalism honest and efficient and would curb environmental costs that reach an amazing 12 per cent of GDP. As importantly, they are part of the institutional network that constitutes an independent public realm that includes free intellectual inquiry, free trade unions and independent audit. It is this 'enlightenment infrastructure' that I regard in both the West and East as the essential underpinning of a healthy society. The individual detained for years without a fair trial is part of the same malign system that prevents a company from expecting to be able to correct a commercial wrong in a court, or have a judgment in its favour implemented, if it were against the party interest.

Let There Be 'Blight'
Welcome to the post-Kelo world.

BY WILLIAM R. MAURER
Thursday, January 11, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST

SEATTLE--The city of Burien, Wash., recently decided that a piece of property owned by the seven Strobel sisters that had long housed a popular diner-style restaurant was not upscale enough for the city's ambitious "Town Square" development, which will feature condos, shops, restaurants and offices. Rather than condemn the property for a private developer and risk a lawsuit, Burien came up with a plan--it would put a road through the property, and the city manager told his staff to "make damn sure" it did. When a subsequent survey revealed that the road would not affect the building itself, but only sideswipe a small corner of the property, the staff developed yet another site plan that put the road directly through the building. A trial court concluded that the city's actions might be "oppressive" and "an abuse of power"--but allowed the condemnation anyway. The Washington Court of Appeals affirmed, and the Washington Supreme Court refused to hear the case.

Welcome to the post-Kelo world. The U.S. Supreme Court's 2005 decision made clear that the federal courts would not stop local governments across the country from condemning private property for economic development. While the court noted that states were free to provide greater protections for homes and small businesses if they chose, Washington state stands as evidence that a strong state constitution means little if the courts do not enforce it and local governments disregard it.

When Kelo came out, local governments and their lobbyists eagerly explained that ours was not a "Kelo state," and that the legislative efforts to restrict eminent-domain abuse in other states were unnecessary here. The Washington Constitution explicitly provides that "private property shall not be taken for private use" (except in very limited circumstances). "It can't happen here" became the oft-repeated message used to placate home and small business owners seeking legislative protections for their property.





When it comes to governmental abuse, "it can't happen here" really means "it is happening right now." Local governments are busily using mechanisms in state law to threaten neighborhoods and abuse property owners, and the state Supreme Court has repeatedly let them get away with it.
Shortly after Kelo, the Washington Supreme Court allowed the Seattle Monorail to permanently condemn a piece of property it needed only temporarily for a construction staging area. Once the monorail had completed that legitimate public use, it intended to sell the property at a premium to raise revenue. In this way, Washington courts now allow local governments to condemn more land than is necessary, for longer than is necessary, in the hopes that the government can play real-estate speculator with whatever is left.

The court also ruled that the meetings at which a local government determines which property to condemn could take place essentially in secret, with the only notice for property owners being a posting on an obscure government Web site. The court ignored the fact that computer usage among minorities, the elderly and the poor is significantly lower than in other segments of the population, and that it is these communities that traditionally have been the target of eminent-domain abuse.

Washington courts now defer to even the most extreme examples of governmental exploitation, exemplified by Burien's treatment of the Strobel sisters. So long as the government can manufacture a fig leaf of public use or possible public use for constitutional cover, local governments can take private property to transfer to other private entities or deliberately target properties not upscale enough for the bureaucrats' "vision."

The tools available for trampling constitutional rights are already there. Since the Kelo decision, municipalities have rediscovered Washington's Community Renewal Act, the local incarnation of statutes used to destroy working-class (and often minority) neighborhoods across the country in the 1950s and '60s. The government, under the act, can condemn an entire neighborhood and transfer the property to a private developer so long as the government finds that at least some property in the neighborhood is "blighted." Unfortunately, this statute is so broadly worded that practically every neighborhood in Washington meets the definition of "blight"--things like "obsolete platting" and "diversity of ownership" constitute "blight." The statute provides all the devices a mildly clever planner needs to pull off a Kelo-style taking.

Working-class neighborhoods are already feeling the pressure. Auburn recently declared much of its beautiful downtown "blighted," and adopted a Community Renewal Plan. One city manager explained that blight "means anything that impairs or arrests sound growth"--a hugely elastic definition. Similarly, Seattle is considering using the Community Renewal Act in the city's Rainier Valley, one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the nation.





Regardless of strong constitutional protections for private property, governments and courts now view eminent domain as an area where few if any restrictions exist. And not just in Washington. In probably the most appalling example, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit let stand a condemnation in which a developer in the Port Chester, N.Y., demanded that Bart Didden give him either $800,000 or a 50% share in Mr. Didden's property, which was slated to be a CVS pharmacy--or the developer would have the village condemn it. Mr. Didden refused; the next day, the village condemned his property to hand it over to the developer to construct a Walgreens. Tomorrow, the U.S. Supreme Court will consider whether to take the case.
Meanwhile, state and federal courts are turning redevelopment areas into Constitution-free zones, where the government can do what it wants with few or no restrictions. It doesn't have to be this way. Courts could force the government to comply with the state and federal constitutions. Local governments could limit their takings only to legitimate public uses. But until all three branches of government begin taking their constitutional obligations seriously, property owners across the country face the continued threat of eminent-domain abuse, regardless of what the state or federal constitution says.

Ask the Strobel sisters, who are now fighting for just compensation for a property that was never for sale in the first place.

Mr. Maurer is executive director of the Institute for Justice, Washington chapter, and the author of "A False Sense of Security: The Potential for Eminent-Domain Abuse in Washington," recently published by the Washington Policy Center. The Institute litigated the Kelo case and represents Bart Didden in his appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

We kick off a new thread with this piece:
============================

 January 2, 2007
 
  Free Will: Now You Have It, Now You Don’t   By DENNIS OVERBYE
    Correction Appended
  I was a free man until they brought the dessert menu around. There was one of
those molten chocolate cakes, and I was suddenly being dragged into a vortex,
swirling helplessly toward caloric doom, sucked toward the edge of a black
(chocolate) hole. Visions of my father’s heart attack danced before my glazed
eyes. My wife, Nancy, had a resigned look on her face.
  The outcome, endlessly replayed whenever we go out, is never in doubt, though I
often cover my tracks by offering to split my dessert with the table. O.K., I can
imagine what you’re thinking. There but for the grace of God.
  Having just lived through another New Year’s Eve, many of you have just resolved
to be better, wiser, stronger and richer in the coming months and years. After
all, we’re free humans, not slaves, robots or animals doomed to repeat the same
boring mistakes over and over again. As William James wrote in 1890, the whole
“sting and excitement” of life comes from “our sense that in it things are really
being decided from one moment to another, and that it is not the dull rattling off
of a chain that was forged innumerable ages ago.” Get over it, Dr. James. Go get
yourself fitted for a new chain-mail vest. A bevy of experiments in recent years
suggest that the conscious mind is like a monkey riding a tiger of subconscious
decisions and actions in progress, frantically making up stories about being in
control.
  As a result, physicists, neuroscientists and computer scientists have joined the
heirs of Plato and Aristotle in arguing about what free will is, whether we have
it, and if not, why we ever thought we did in the first place.
  “Is it an illusion? That’s the question,” said Michael Silberstein, a science
philosopher at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. Another question, he added,
is whether talking about this in public will fan the culture wars.
  “If people freak at evolution, etc.,” he wrote in an e-mail message, “how much
more will they freak if scientists and philosophers tell them they are nothing
more than sophisticated meat machines, and is that conclusion now clearly
warranted or is it premature?”
  Daniel C. Dennett, a philosopher and cognitive scientist at Tufts University who
has written extensively about free will, said that “when we consider whether free
will is an illusion or reality, we are looking into an abyss. What seems to
confront us is a plunge into nihilism and despair.”
  Mark Hallett, a researcher with the National Institute of Neurological Disorders
and Stroke, said, “Free will does exist, but it’s a perception, not a power or a
driving force. People experience free will. They have the sense they are free.
  “The more you scrutinize it, the more you realize you don’t have it,” he said.
  That is hardly a new thought. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said, as
Einstein paraphrased it, that “a human can very well do what he wants, but cannot
will what he wants.”
  Einstein, among others, found that a comforting idea. “This knowledge of the
non-freedom of the will protects me from losing my good humor and taking much too
seriously myself and my fellow humans as acting and judging individuals,” he said.
  How comforted or depressed this makes you might depend on what you mean by free
will. The traditional definition is called “libertarian” or “deep” free will. It
holds that humans are free moral agents whose actions are not predetermined. This
school of thought says in effect that the whole chain of cause and effect in the
history of the universe stops dead in its tracks as you ponder the dessert menu.
  At that point, anything is possible. Whatever choice you make is unforced and
could have been otherwise, but it is not random. You are responsible for any
damage to your pocketbook and your arteries.
  “That strikes many people as incoherent,” said Dr. Silberstein, who noted that
every physical system that has been investigated has turned out to be either
deterministic or random. “Both are bad news for free will,” he said. So if human
actions can’t be caused and aren’t random, he said, “It must be — what — some
weird magical power?”
  People who believe already that humans are magic will have no problem with that.
  But whatever that power is — call it soul or the spirit — those people have to
explain how it could stand independent of the physical universe and yet reach from
the immaterial world and meddle in our own, jiggling brain cells that lead us to
say the words “molten chocolate.”
  A vote in favor of free will comes from some physicists, who say it is a
prerequisite for inventing theories and planning experiments.
  That is especially true when it comes to quantum mechanics, the strange
paradoxical theory that ascribes a microscopic randomness to the foundation of
reality. Anton Zeilinger, a quantum physicist at the University of Vienna, said
recently that quantum randomness was “not a proof, just a hint, telling us we have
free will.”
  Is there any evidence beyond our own intuitions and introspections that humans
work that way?
  Two Tips of the Iceberg
  In the 1970s, Benjamin Libet, a physiologist at the University of California, San
Francisco, wired up the brains of volunteers to an electroencephalogram and told
the volunteers to make random motions, like pressing a button or flicking a
finger, while he noted the time on a clock.
  Dr. Libet found that brain signals associated with these actions occurred half a
second before the subject was conscious of deciding to make them.
  The order of brain activities seemed to be perception of motion, and then
decision, rather than the other way around.
  In short, the conscious brain was only playing catch-up to what the unconscious
brain was already doing. The decision to act was an illusion, the monkey making up
a story about what the tiger had already done.
  Dr. Libet’s results have been reproduced again and again over the years, along
with other experiments that suggest that people can be easily fooled when it comes
to assuming ownership of their actions. Patients with tics or certain diseases,
like chorea, cannot say whether their movements are voluntary or involuntary, Dr.
Hallett said.
  In some experiments, subjects have been tricked into believing they are responding
to stimuli they couldn’t have seen in time to respond to, or into taking credit or
blame for things they couldn’t have done. Take, for example, the “voodoo
experiment” by Dan Wegner, a psychologist at Harvard, and Emily Pronin of
Princeton. In the experiment, two people are invited to play witch doctor.
  One person, the subject, puts a curse on the other by sticking pins into a doll.
The second person, however, is in on the experiment, and by prior arrangement with
the doctors, acts either obnoxious, so that the pin-sticker dislikes him, or nice.
  After a while, the ostensible victim complains of a headache. In cases in which he
or she was unlikable, the subject tended to claim responsibility for causing the
headache, an example of the “magical thinking” that makes baseball fans put on
their rally caps.
  “We made it happen in a lab,” Dr. Wegner said.
  Is a similar sort of magical thinking responsible for the experience of free will?
  “We see two tips of the iceberg, the thought and the action,” Dr. Wegner said,
“and we draw a connection.”
  But most of the action is going on beneath the surface. Indeed, the conscious mind
is often a drag on many activities. Too much thinking can give a golfer the yips.
Drivers perform better on automatic pilot. Fiction writers report writing in a
kind of trance in which they simply take dictation from the voices and characters
in their head, a grace that is, alas, rarely if ever granted nonfiction writers.
  Naturally, almost everyone has a slant on such experiments and whether or not the
word “illusion” should be used in describing free will. Dr. Libet said his results
left room for a limited version of free will in the form of a veto power over what
we sense ourselves doing. In effect, the unconscious brain proposes and the mind
disposes.
  In a 1999 essay, he wrote that although this might not seem like much, it was
enough to satisfy ethical standards. “Most of the Ten Commandments are ‘do not’
orders,” he wrote.
  But that might seem a pinched and diminished form of free will.
  Good Intentions
  Dr. Dennett, the Tufts professor, is one of many who have tried to redefine free
will in a way that involves no escape from the materialist world while still
offering enough autonomy for moral responsibility, which seems to be what everyone
cares about.
  The belief that the traditional intuitive notion of a free will divorced from
causality is inflated, metaphysical nonsense, Dr. Dennett says reflecting an
outdated dualistic view of the world.
  Rather, Dr. Dennett argues, it is precisely our immersion in causality and the
material world that frees us. Evolution, history and culture, he explains, have
endowed us with feedback systems that give us the unique ability to reflect and
think things over and to imagine the future. Free will and determinism can
co-exist.
  “All the varieties of free will worth having, we have,” Dr. Dennett said.
  “We have the power to veto our urges and then to veto our vetoes,” he said. “We
have the power of imagination, to see and imagine futures.”
  In this regard, causality is not our enemy but our friend, giving us the ability
to look ahead and plan. “That’s what makes us moral agents,” Dr. Dennett said.
“You don’t need a miracle to have responsibility.”
  Other philosophers disagree on the degree and nature of such “freedom.” Their
arguments partly turn on the extent to which collections of things, whether
electrons or people, can transcend their origins and produce novel phenomena.
  These so-called emergent phenomena, like brains and stock markets, or the idea of
democracy, grow naturally in accordance with the laws of physics, so the story
goes. But once they are here, they play by new rules, and can even act on their
constituents, as when an artist envisions a teapot and then sculpts it — a concept
sometimes known as “downward causation.” A knowledge of quarks is no help in
predicting hurricanes — it’s physics all the way down. But does the same apply to
the stock market or to the brain? Are the rules elusive just because we can’t
solve the equations or because something fundamentally new happens when we
increase numbers and levels of complexity?
  Opinions vary about whether it will ultimately prove to be physics all the way
down, total independence from physics, or some shade in between, and thus how free
we are. Dr. Silberstein, the Elizabethtown College professor, said, “There’s
nothing in fundamental physics by itself that tells us we can’t have such emergent
properties when we get to different levels of complexities.”
  He waxed poetically as he imagined how the universe would evolve, with more and
more complicated forms emerging from primordial quantum muck as from an elaborate
computer game, in accordance with a few simple rules: “If you understand, you
ought to be awestruck, you ought to be bowled over.”
  George R. F. Ellis, a cosmologist at the University of Cape Town, said that
freedom could emerge from this framework as well. “A nuclear bomb, for example,
proceeds to detonate according to the laws of nuclear physics,” he explained in an
e-mail message. “Whether it does indeed detonate is determined by political and
ethical considerations, which are of a completely different order.”
  I have to admit that I find these kind of ideas inspiring, if not liberating. But
I worry that I am being sold a sort of psychic perpetual motion machine. Free
wills, ideas, phenomena created by physics but not accountable to it. Do they
offer a release from the chains of determinism or just a prescription for a very
intricate weave of the links?And so I sought clarity from mathematicians and
computer scientists. According to deep mathematical principles, they say, even
machines can become too complicated to predict their own behavior and would labor
under the delusion of free will.
  If by free will we mean the ability to choose, even a simple laptop computer has
some kind of free will, said Seth Lloyd, an expert on quantum computing and
professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
  Every time you click on an icon, he explained, the computer’s operating system
decides how to allocate memory space, based on some deterministic instructions.
But, Dr. Lloyd said, “If I ask how long will it take to boot up five minutes from
now, the operating system will say ‘I don’t know, wait and see, and I’ll make
decisions and let you know.’ ”
  Why can’t computers say what they’re going to do? In 1930, the Austrian
philosopher Kurt Gödel proved that in any formal system of logic, which includes
mathematics and a kind of idealized computer called a Turing machine, there are
statements that cannot be proven either true or false. Among them are
self-referential statements like the famous paradox stated by the Cretan
philosopher Epimenides, who said that all Cretans are liars: if he is telling the
truth, then, as a Cretan, he is lying.
  One implication is that no system can contain a complete representation of itself,
or as Janna Levin, a cosmologist at Barnard College of Columbia University and
author of the 2006 novel about Gödel, “A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines,” said:
“Gödel says you can’t program intelligence as complex as yourself. But you can let
it evolve. A complex machine would still suffer from the illusion of free will.”
  Another implication is there is no algorithm, or recipe for computation, to
determine when or if any given computer program will finish some calculation. The
only way to find out is to set it computing and see what happens. Any way to find
out would be tantamount to doing the calculation itself.
  “There are no shortcuts in computation,” Dr. Lloyd said.
  That means that the more reasonably you try to act, the more unpredictable you
are, at least to yourself, Dr. Lloyd said. Even if your wife knows you will order
the chile rellenos, you have to live your life to find out.
  To him that sounds like free will of a sort, for machines as well as for us. Our
actions are determined, but so what? We still don’t know what they will be until
the waiter brings the tray.
  That works for me, because I am comfortable with so-called physicalist reasoning,
and I’m always happy to leverage concepts of higher mathematics to cut through
philosophical knots.
  The Magician’s Spell
  So what about Hitler?
  The death of free will, or its exposure as a convenient illusion, some worry,
could wreak havoc on our sense of moral and legal responsibility. According to
those who believe that free will and determinism are incompatible, Dr. Silberstein
said in an e-mail message, it would mean that “people are no more responsible for
their actions than asteroids or planets.” Anything would go.
  Dr. Wegner of Harvard said: “We worry that explaining evil condones it. We have to
maintain our outrage at Hitler. But wouldn’t it be nice to have a theory of evil
in advance that could keep him from coming to power?”
  He added, “A system a bit more focused on helping people change rather than paying
them back for what they’ve done might be a good thing.”
  Dr. Wegner said he thought that exposing free will as an illusion would have
little effect on people’s lives or on their feelings of self-worth. Most of them
would remain in denial.
  “It’s an illusion, but it’s a very persistent illusion; it keeps coming back,” he
said, comparing it to a magician’s trick that has been seen again and again. “Even
though you know it’s a trick, you get fooled every time. The feelings just don’t
go away.”
  In an essay about free will in 1999, Dr. Libet wound up quoting the writer Isaac
Bashevis Singer, who once said in an interview with the Paris Review, “The
greatest gift which humanity has received is free choice. It is true that we are
limited in our use of free choice. But the little free choice we have is such a
great gift and is potentially worth so much that for this itself, life is
worthwhile living.”
  I could skip the chocolate cake, I really could, but why bother? Waiter!
  Correction: January 4, 2007
    An article in Science Times on Tuesday about the debate over free will misstated
the location of Elizabethtown College, where Michael Silberstein, who commented
on free will and popular culture, is a science philosopher. It is in
Pennsylvania, not Maryland.
 

All:

Yes, I know there is a thread of the same name on the Political forum, but I'm beginning to think it belongs here.  So for the moment we will have a thread on each of the forums and see where people tend to post.

I begin with a post of another Nature Conservancy project.  (I am a basic level member of NC btw).  I like NC because of its market, win-win orientation.

Marc
==========

Farmers and Conservationists Form a Rare Alliance
 Kevin P. Casey for The New York Times
Shorebirds on flooded land in Skagit County, Wash., a sight that could become more common as a result of a “Farming for Wildlife” program.
 
By JESSICA KOWAL
Published: December 27, 2006
MOUNT VERNON, Wash. — The standoff here between farmers and environmentalists was familiar in the modern West.


Lisa Bellefond of the Nature Conservancy and David Hedlin, a farmer, on farmland set to become wetlands.
With salmon and wildlife dwindling in the Skagit River Delta, some environmentalists had argued since the 1980s that local farms should be turned back into wetlands. Farmers here feared that preachy outsiders would strip them of their land and heritage.

This year, though, the standoff ended — at least for three longtime farmers in this fertile valley, who began collaborating with their former enemies to preserve wildlife and their livelihoods.

The Nature Conservancy, which usually buys land to shield it from development, is renting land from the three farmers on behalf of migrating Western sandpipers, black-bellied plovers, dunlins, marbled godwits and other shorebirds.

From private and public funds, including a grant from the federal Environmental Protection Agency, the farmers, David Hedlin, Gail Thulen and Alan Mesman, will together receive up to $350,000 for three years of labor, expenses and the use of 210 acres, said Kevin Morse, the Skagit Delta project manager for the conservancy.

Each man has committed about 70 acres to this project, which is called Farming for Wildlife. A third of that land will be flooded with a few inches of fresh water in the spring, fall and winter. This will create shallow ponds to entice thousands of birds, some of them on their way to and from the Arctic, to stop and snack on tiny invertebrates and worms as they travel along the Pacific flyway.

More than a dozen shorebird species have declined primarily because of the loss of local wetlands, said Gary Slater, research director at the Ecostudies Institute here and a consultant for the Nature Conservancy.

The farmers see the Nature Conservancy’s willingness to pay them as an acknowledgment that they should not be expected to sacrifice their land or their living for wildlife. This approach effectively turns shorebirds into another crop to manage, instead of grounds for a lawsuit.

“The stewardship ethic in this valley is incredibly strong, but it doesn’t trump the bank,” said Mr. Hedlin, 56, who, with his wife, Serena Campbell, grows farmer’s market produce, vegetable seeds, pumpkins, winter wheat and pickling cucumbers on their 400-acre farm.

Mr. Hedlin’s 70-acre Farming for Wildlife parcel has been under water since a heavy November rain breached a dike and flooded the field, in a preview of what environmentalists hope will happen. Edged with wild roses and blackberry bushes, this accidental lake quickly attracted wintering waterfowl like trumpeter swans, coots, and mallard, teal and wigeon ducks.

An hour north of Seattle and an hour south of Vancouver, British Columbia, this region’s glorious tulip farms attract hundreds of thousands of tourists each April. Skagit farmers also produce about 80 crops of commercial significance, including seeds used to grow beets, spinach and cabbage around the world, many of the red potatoes eaten in the United States, and vegetables and dairy products sent to farmer’s markets and restaurants in the Pacific Northwest.

Thousands of years of flooding on the Skagit River deposited a rich layer of topsoil in the “magic Skagit,” as Mr. Hedlin calls the valley. European immigrants flocked here starting in the 1860s and built Victorian houses for their families on the board-flat green fields.

They also constructed an elaborate network of earthen dikes to capture land from the saltwater delta and prevent the rivers from flooding their farms. On this managed agricultural landscape, tens of thousand of acres of farmland were once tidal wetlands, Mr. Hedlin said.

Since the mid-1990s, residents have tried to slow development as strip malls and housing subdivisions marched northward from Seattle. Skagit County residents pay extra taxes to buy development rights from farmers, and a charitable group, Skagitonians to Preserve Farmland, warns that “Pavement is forever.”

Many conservationists have also decided that farms are better than pavement, and say they are willing to balance preservation with profitable land use.

Mr. Morse lives here and even volunteered to spend two days last spring selling Mr. Hedlin’s produce at a farmer’s market.

“We don’t know anything about farming,” Mr. Morse told the farmers recently over coffee and sandwiches at the Rexville Grocery. “You guys are the stewards of the land. You tell me what to do.”

For this experiment, each farmer’s 70-acre parcel has been planted with a mixture of clover and grass to enrich the soil. While a third of the land will be periodically flooded for birds, a third will be fenced as pasture for dairy cows, and the rest will be mowed and otherwise left alone.

Farms here are gradually shifting toward organic production because consumers willingly pay much more for organic food. As another incentive to join Farming for Wildlife, the 210 acres will be available for organic use after three years.

Mr. Mesman will start producing organic milk with his 225 Holstein cows next spring. Mr. Thulen sees a big market for organic potatoes.

“In my time, I can see our little valley was farmed very hard,” said Mr. Thulen, whose 2,000-acre farm was begun by his grandfather in 1867. “That pendulum has swung to get the ground healthy again.”

In an ideal world, the Nature Conservancy would love to persuade farmers to add wetlands to their regular crop rotation. To that end, the group’s scientists will analyze soil samples to assess whether shallow flooding might improve soil fertility as much as cow manure and mowed grass do.

In a similar project on the Tule Lake National Wildlife Refuge in Northern California, farmers reported better potato yields and fewer nematodes, a harmful worm, on land that had been purposefully flooded. But scientists say this may not apply in the Skagit Valley, where the soil has a higher clay content.

Whether or not they end up with more productive land, the three farmers seem pleased to try something new without financial risk.

“If 100 years from now,” Mr. Hedlin said, “there are healthy viable family farms in this valley and waterfowl and wildlife and salmon in the river, then everyone wins.”

The exchange rate of the US dollar is a powerful indicator of many fundamental forces.

===========================

http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,453906,00.html
How Dangerous is the Dollar Drop?
By Christian Reiermann

Is an end of an era looming in the foreign exchange markets? The dollar has been depreciating against the euro for weeks. Currency experts and the German government don't yet see this as cause for alarm. The US currency's role as a lead currency isn't as important as it used to be, they say.


 AP
Christmas on Wall Street: Credit-based prosperity.
Like most central bankers, Jean-Claude Trichet, the president of the European Central Bank (ECB), has a penchant for cryptic comments. Injecting a certain degree of incomprehensibility is a signal to the professionals that he's competent. And when it comes to laymen, industry jargon has the desired effect of generating the necessary respect.

Last Thursday the public was treated to yet another example of Trichet's convoluted speaking style. A number of risks, the ECB president said, could jeopardize a generally favorable economic outlook in the euro zone. They included, according to Trichet, "concerns regarding possible uncontrolled developments triggered by global economic imbalances."

What Europe's most powerful protector of the currency was actually saying was this: The gradual decline of the dollar in the foreign currency markets in recent weeks could pose a threat to the economy. What Trichet was also trying to broadcast is that the ECB has recognized and is aware of the threat.

Nevertheless, the European Central Bank in Frankfurt again increased its key interest rate on Thursday by a quarter percentage point to 3.5 percent, which makes the euro more attractive to international investors. The central bankers had no choice but to take the step, having already announced their intentions weeks ago.

Experts have been predicting for some time that the dollar would eventually go into a nosedive, and now that time seems to have come. The US currency has lost five percent of its value against the euro since late October, and 13 percent since the beginning of the year. The euro is currently fluctuating around a value of $1.33, which is only 3 cents away from its all-time high in 2004. And yet Trichet's counterpart Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the US Federal Reserve, has done nothing but look on as the dollar plunges.

A sea change appears to be taking place on the international financial markets. For years, global capital flowed in only one direction, with $2 billion going into the United States every day. Investors viewed the world's largest economy not only as a bastion of stability, but also as a place that promised the best deals, the most lucrative returns and the highest growth rates.


 DER SPIEGEL
Caption: SPIEGEL0650 Seite Bollen Datum: 11. Dezember 2006
The Americans, for their part, welcomed foreign investment. For them, it was almost a tradition to save very little and spend more than they earned -- essentially achieving affluence on credit. Foreigners financed the Americans' almost obsessive consumer spending, which spurred worldwide economic growth for years.

Because the US government was unable to fall back on the savings of its citizens, it too was forced to finance its budget deficit with foreign capital. Both consumer spending and the federal deficit kept the dollar high, because the rest of the world was practically scrambling to invest in the United States.

This phase seems to have come to an end, at least for the time being. "There are fundamental weaknesses in the American economy. This could not continue in the long term," says Alfred Steinherr, chief economist at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW).

Investors pulling out

Investors worldwide are becoming sceptical and starting to pull their money out of the United States. They have realized that a people and a country cannot live beyond their means in the long term. The US dollar's exchange rate is starting to crumble as a result of this withdrawal.

The depreciation is causing growing concern about what will happen to the global economy if the United States loses its role as an engine of growth. If German cars, machinery and services become more expensive, will the German economic recovery end before it has really started?

The German government isn't worried yet, at least not officially. Nevertheless, experts in the finance and economics ministries have been keeping a close eye on developments. Although they continue to believe that the changes still fall within the scope of long-term averages, they don't rule out that the situation could worsen.

They believe that a first critical threshold for the competitiveness of the German economy will be reached at an exchange rate of about $1.36 per euro, and that Germany could see major difficulties at rates in the neighborhood of $1.50. If there is turbulence in the foreign currency markets, the government in Berlin will find itself in an especially challenging position. In early 2007, Germany will assume the chairmanship of the so-called G8 group of seven major industrialized nations plus Russia.


 DPA
Worried about the dollar: The guardian of the euro, European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet.
The G8 has repeatedly engaged in crisis management to deal with problems in the international financial system. It did so in the 1980s, when the combined forces of the G8 were needed to put a stop to the soaring dollar. It stepped in with equal verve a few years to forestall a decline in the American currency with the so-called Louvre Accord.

There are two principal causes behind the most recent development. Both have to do with the fact that Europe is becoming more attractive for international investors compared to the United States. On the one hand, interest rates in Europe and the United States are moving in opposite directions. "The ECB will continue to raise its key rates next year, whereas interest rates appear to have peaked in the USA," says Joachim Scheide, an expert on the economy at the Global Economic Institute (IFW) in the northern German city of Kiel. This means that financial investments denominated in euros are yielding higher interest and are in greater demand internationally, which in turn leads to a rise in the euro.

The prospects for growth are also shifting. The US economy is cooling off. The government recently lowered its 3.3 percent growth forecast for 2007. If Americans consume less as a result of a decline in foreign capital investment, the United States could even face a prolonged period of more modest growth.

Germany has shed 'sick man' image

By contrast the euro zone economy is robust. Germany, in particular, has surprised many with a stream of good economic news. Unemployment dropped below the psychologically critical threshold of four million in November. The Ifo business climate index, which measures the expectations of businesses, is at its highest point in 15 years, while consumer confidence has reached a five-year high.

In the last quarter of this year Germany, long considered the sick man of Europe, will have transformed itself into an engine of economic growth. According to analysts at Postbank, Germany's annual growth, projected at 3.4 percent, will even exceed that of the United States this year.

This is the kind of news that fuels the expectations of investors who now prefer to invest their money in the euro zone. The result is an increase in the exchange rate for the European Union's common currency. But how will the decline in the dollar's value affect future economic development? Could it cause a major imbalance in the global economy, or will the global economy, and Germany, get off lightly?


NEWSLETTER
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 Pessimists are quick to come out of the woodwork whenever a major shift in the financial markets approaches. Many economists and bank analysts, especially in the United States, believe that the correction will happen very suddenly, with the dollar depreciating by 10 to 30 percent within a short period of time.

This would inevitably cause an adjustment crisis. Growth rates would plunge worldwide and a global recession, coupled with a drastic jump in unemployment, could follow.

This doomsday scenario is by no means the majority view. Some experts, especially in Germany, are more optimistic. "The US trade deficit has grown in the course of a few years," says IFW expert Scheide. "It will also gradually decline over a period of several years."

Scheide expects the dollar to lose another 10 percent in value against the euro in the next five years, a scenario that would be much easier to handle for the German and European economies. Companies would have sufficient time to adjust to changes in exchange rates. "In that case even an exchange rate of 1.40 wouldn't be disastrous," said DIW analyst Steinherr.

Germany is a good example of how effectively this can work. Despite the fact that the dollar has lost half of its value against the euro since 2002, exports have not been adversely affected. Indeed, they even increased from €651 billion ($861 billion) to €786 billion ($1.04 triilion). The Germany economy exported more than ever before in October.

Another reason is that the dollar zone is no longer as important for German exports as it was only a few decades ago. Leaving aside exceptions such as the auto industry, other regions of the world have long since become more important to the German economy than the United States, where Germany now sells less than one-tenth of its exports. Germany exports more than 40 percent of its goods and services to other countries within the euro zone, 13 percent to eastern Europe and nine percent to Asia. The turbulence surrounding the dollar has had virtually no effect on German exports to neighboring European countries. Most of the EU's new members have tied their currencies to the euro, and exchange rate risks evaporated for western Europe with the introduction of the euro.

The euro even prevents the kinds of major upheavals in Europe that occurred in the past whenever the dollar fell. When that happened, German businesses and consumers were routinely forced to bear a greater burden of adjustment than the economies of neighboring countries. In the past, if the German mark gained 10 percent in value against the dollar, the French franc or the Italian lira would only gain six or seven percent. As a result, the German mark was overvalued relative to other European currencies, which translated into economic disadvantages for the German economy.

This mechanism was eliminated when the euro was introduced. Now all member states carry the same burden.

The consequences of a declining dollar for the German and European economy will be determined in large part by the way other currencies develop relative to the dollar. "It would be fatal if only the euro were to rise," says DIW analyst Steinherr. "Then it would only be the euro zone that would have to bear the burden of adjustment." But the foreign currency markets suggest a different development, as the dollar is also losing value in relation to other important currencies.


 DDP
Trade boom: containers in Hamburg port.
The British pound, for example, rose to new highs last week. Even more importantly, the currencies of east Asian growth regions are also appreciating against the dollar. The Thai Baht, for example, gained about 15 percent against the dollar in 2006, while the South Korean Won gained 10 percent. Even the Chinese Yuan, which slavishly followed the dollar in the past, gained more than three percent. Virtually every economy is bearing part of the burden of adjustment.

The decline in the dollar also has its advantages. For Germany, the greatest advantage is that Germans pay less for oil. The oil price is mainly set in dollars worldwide. If the dollar declines, the same amount of oil costs Europe fewer euros, and the money the Europeans save can be spent on other goods.

A similar dynamic applies to exports from the dollar zone. If the decline in the dollar continues, computers, software licenses and machinery from the United States will become less expensive. Both developments would represent a windfall for companies and people in the euro zone, because the same amount of money would buy more goods.

The perils of a currency crash are not nearly as great as they were in the days of the dollar's absolute dominance 30 or 40 years ago. Globalization has led to the development of a number of growth centers in the world economy which share the burden of turbulence. Gone are the days when an American finance minister could boast: "The dollar is our currency, but it's your problem."

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

Perhaps Sun Helmet, who was an artist for the Conan comics from Marvel (I proudly have an autographed cover he did in my office) can share some additional insight , , ,
=================================
WSJ 12/13/06

From Pen to Sword
Conan the Barbarian was first a literary figure.

BY JOHN J. MILLER
Wednesday, December 13, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST

Actor-turned-politician Arnold Schwarzenegger recently won an easy re-election as California's governor. His movie-screen alter ego, Conan the Barbarian, never had to bother with yawping masses of voters--but he seems no less popular these days, judging from a revival movement that's winning a new generation of fans for one of the best-known characters that American literature has produced.

If Conan isn't first remembered as a literary figure, it's because the culture has embraced him so completely on film, in comic books, and as an icon of thick-muscled, sword-wielding manhood. Yet he got his start on the printed page as the invention of Robert E. Howard, a rural Texas pulp writer who lived from 1906 to 1936.

Enthusiasts have celebrated Howard's centenary all year long with pilgrimages to the tiny town of Cross Plains, where a family home has been turned into a shrine-like museum, plus the release of several anthologies of stories and a new biography, "Blood & Thunder," by Mark Finn. These festivities culminated at the World Fantasy Convention in Austin, Texas, last month when a group of devotees announced the establishment of the Robert E. Howard Foundation, which hopes to arrange for the publication of everything its namesake ever wrote--an estimated 3.5 million words of prose and poetry.





The Conan stories make up only a small fraction of this huge output: There are 21 of them, including a novel, and they were written at breakneck speed between 1932 and 1935. As with everything by Howard, their quality varies dramatically: A fantasy classic such as "Beyond the Black River" remains a riveting tale that undermines popular notions of frontier progress and manifest destiny; "The Vale of Lost Women," however, is a clunky piece of hackwork that would be instantly forgotten were it not for the fame of its star character.
Yet the stories share a fundamental power because Howard was a skilled action-adventure storyteller. So were a lot of other pulp writers, of course. What ultimately set Howard apart was a dazzling imagination that dreamed up the sword-and-sorcery subgenre of fantasy literature before anybody had heard about J.R.R. Tolkien and his hobbits.

With Conan, Howard created a protagonist whose name is almost as familiar as Tarzan's. In his influential essay on Howard, Don Herron credits the Texan with begetting the "hard-boiled" epic hero, and doing for fantasy what Dashiell Hammett did for detective fiction. Suddenly, the world--even a make-believe one such as Conan's Hyboria--was rendered seamier and more violent, and Howard described it in spare rather than lush prose.

Conan has a knack for locating damsels in distress, but he is no knight in shining armor who piously obeys a code of chivalry. Instead, he is a black-haired berserker from a wild and wintry land called Cimmeria. He has little patience for social conventions he doesn't understand. "The warm intimacies of small, kindly things, the sentiments and delicious trivialities that make up so much of civilized men's lives were meaningless to him," wrote Howard in "Beyond the Black River." Conan occasionally thinks his way out of a problem, but more often he reaches for a weapon and slashes his way out. "There's nothing in the universe cold steel won't cut," he boasts.

The Conan stories don't unfold in a straight, sequential narrative. Each one is a stand-alone episode from an action-packed life. Howard once claimed that he wasn't creating "these yarns" as much as "simply chronicling [Conan's] adventures as he told them to me."

In the tales, Conan takes his turn as a thief, pirate, mercenary, tribal chieftain and, finally, king. He is never comfortable in any of these roles. You can take the boy out of Cimmeria, but you can't take Cimmeria out of the boy: Just about everywhere Conan goes and no matter what he does, he is an outsider who follows only a rough sense of personal honor. He has been called an existential hero because he feels no responsibility to be anything other than his authentic, barbaric self. "I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content," he says in "Queen of the Black Coast."

Conan's view of life is predictably bleak and brutal: "In this world men struggle and suffer vainly, finding pleasure only in the bright madness of battle; dying, their souls enter a gray, misty realm of clouds and icy winds, to wander cheerlessly throughout eternity," he says. "I seek not beyond death."

Neither did Howard. When he learned that his mother had slipped into a fatal coma, he typed a four-line couplet: "All fled, all done/So lift me on the pyre/The feast is over/And the lamps expire." Then he went to his car and shot himself in the head. He was 30 years old.

Fans sometimes speculate about what would have happened if Howard hadn't committed suicide--and kept on writing into, say, the years of the Reagan presidency. Would he have gone on to write westerns, a genre in which he dabbled and displayed a growing interest? Would he have matured as an author?

Whatever the case, Howard did leave behind a big pile of material--much more than many writers who live twice as long. In addition to Conan, there are stories about Solomon Kane, a Puritan swashbuckler; Kull, a warrior from Atlantis; and Bran Mak Morn, the king of an ancient race. Many aficionados consider "Worms of the Earth" and "The Dark Man," a pair of Bran Mak Morn stories, to be his finest.





Since 2003, Del Rey has issued definitive texts on each of these heroes, based on Howard's own manuscripts rather than the edited and bowdlerized versions that have appeared elsewhere. Three of these collections contain everything Howard ever wrote on Conan, including previously unpublished story fragments. With October's release of "Kull: Exile of Atlantis," the sixth in the series, Del Rey says it has put out more than 200,000 of these books.
A small industry of armchair scholars has made it possible. "We've gone pro," says Leo Grin, the editor of a journal and blog called "The Cimmerian." Yet they've also had to battle for respectability. "The comics and the movies have brought in fans, but they've also been an albatross," says Rusty Burke, an editor of the Del Rey books. "We're maybe 10 or 20 years behind H.P. Lovecraft."

Last year, Lovecraft, another 1930s pulp writer, slithered his way into the literary canon when the Library of America issued a definitive book of his influential horror fiction. Howard is not nearly as cerebral as Lovecraft, but Lovecraft never seized the Zeitgeist with a character like Conan.

The albatross may grow heavier before it grows lighter: Dark Horse Comics calls Conan one of its best-selling titles, Funcom will launch a highly anticipated online game next year, and Warner Bros. reportedly wants to make a new flick. All of this will expand Howard's growing fan base.

One thing seems certain: After Arnold Schwarzenegger and the rest of us are long gone, Conan will still be wandering, sword in hand and ready to excite ever more readers.

Mr. Miller writes for National Review and is the author of "A Gift of Freedom."

 

ALDEN, N.Y. -- An elderly couple's dog helped save them from freezing to death during a surprise storm by digging a 20-foot tunnel through the snow.

The snowstorm fell in the Buffalo, N.Y., area in October. Eve Fertig, 81, and her husband, Norman, were taking care of injured birds in a wildlife sanctuary on their Alden property when it hit.

The storm intensified and the couple became trapped by falling trees and heavy snow.

"It just started piling up," Eve Fertig said. "I said, 'Norman, we can't stay here, we'll die.'"

The couple's 160-pound German shepherd-timber wolf mix, Shana, started digging under the trees and through the snow. She dug a 1-foot-wide tunnel 20 feet back to their home.

Shana then came back to Eve and Norman and barked. When the couple hesitated, Shana wouldn't give up. She grabbed Eve Fertig's jacket with her mouth. They all went through the tunnel.

"It was quite a distance," Eve Fertig said. "We get out and she pulls us out. We got on the back deck, got the back door open and we fell inside. And we laid there all night."

Shana, rescued as a neglected puppy from an apparent puppy mill operation, now has a hero's plaque and an honorary fire helmet from firefighters who later checked on the Fertigs.

Shana's hero award for bravery came from the group Citizens for Humane Animal Treatment.

New oil production technology is tested
WASHINGTON, Dec. 6 (UPI) -- A technology developed with U.S. Department of Energy funding has revived oil production in two abandoned oilfields on Osage Indian tribal land in Oklahoma.

Officials say the technology can potentially add billions of barrels of additional domestic oil production in declining fields.

The Department of Energy said production has jumped from zero to more than 100 barrels of oil daily in the two Osage County, Okla., fields, one of which is more than 100 years old.

That success suggests the method might be able to revitalize thousands of other seemingly depleted U.S. oilfields.

The new technology, initially proposed by Grand Resources Inc., an independent oil producer based in Tulsa, Okla., involves the use of horizontal well waterflooding.

Government officials said the United States has more than 218 billion barrels of by-passed conventional oil lying at shallow depths in tens of thousands of declining or depleted reservoirs. If the new technology could tap even 1-10th of that by-passed oil, officials say it would roughly double the nation's proved crude oil reserves.

Copyright 2006 by United Press International. All Rights Reserved

All:

It seems to me that the Pope is on to something quite important with his discussion of God and Reason and his discussion of the principal of reciprocity.

Marc
=============

Western Civ 101
Pope Benedict's seminar on fundamentals.

BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Friday, December 1, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST

It is somehow appropriate that amid the confusions of the U.S. involvement with the sectarians of Iraq, Pope Benedict XVI, fresh from his own "engagement" with contemporary Islam at Regensburg, should come to Turkey, which has sought membership in the European Union for 20 years. The theologian Michael Novak said recently of Benedict, "His role is to represent Western civilization." I'd say Benedict is more than up to the task. What remains to discover is whether Western civilization is still up to it.

We have been in this spot before, and won.

When Stalin famously asked how many divisions the pope had, he assumed that the brute force of military power would be everywhere decisive. That belief led to a four-decade standoff between the Soviets' tank armies and NATO. Finally in the 1980s, John Paul II, the Polish pope, gave intellectual hope and heft to anticommunist dissidents. Ronald Reagan and his allies prevailed over Europe's marching pacifists and installed Pershing missile batteries in Europe. By decade's end, the long Cold War with communism was dissipating. The pope's engagement mattered.

One may assume that in some Himalayan redoubt, history's latest homicidal utopians, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, believe that coupling their ideology to Islamic suicide bombers--in New York, London or Baghdad--is more than a match for the will of a morally diminished West. Are they wrong?





Benedict XVI has written with force about a morally diminished Europe. So like his predecessor, this pope decided to engage in the greatest military and intellectual battle of our age.
We all know how a few months ago at the University of Regensburg, Benedict made himself a central player in the post-9/11 era by quoting the 14th-century Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus. Not much noted at the time was Benedict's second quotation from Manuel II: "God is not pleased by blood, and not acting reasonably [emphasis added] is contrary to God's nature." Benedict's lecture at Regensburg mentioned "reason" and "rationality" repeatedly. He went so far as to claim that the "rapprochement" between Biblical faith and Greek philosophical inquiry (reason) was "of decisive importance" for world history. "This convergence," said Benedict, "created Europe and remains the foundation of what can rightly be called Europe."

Very simply, he is talking about and defending what we call "the West"--both the place and the classically liberal idea, which radical Islam wants to blow up. Just as John Paul championed the jailed or hiding dissidents behind the Iron Curtain, Benedict is seeking similar protections for persecuted Christian minorities--indeed all minorities--across the Islamic world. Starting in Turkey.

Arriving in Ankara, the pope immediately raised two ideas from the wellsprings of the West. He said on his first day that a just society requires freedom of religion and on behalf of Turkey's tiny Catholic community, he raised the issue of property rights.





One might say the pope's counteroffensive--in the Islamic world and in the West--is overdue. One might also say his chances of winning are a long shot. Benedict's appeals to Europe to rediscover strength inside its religious tradition comes at a difficult moment. He admitted as much in a book-length interview 10 years ago ("Salt of the Earth: The Church at the End of the Millennium"). It is Islamic belief, Cardinal Ratzinger said, that "the Western countries are no longer capable of preaching a message of morality, but have only know-how to offer the world. The Christian religion has abdicated."
Militant Islam is on the march, literally, with enormous moral self-confidence. By contrast the West, as Wilfred M. McClay, an historian at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga, aptly described it recently, is in "an era of post-modern moral insouciance." With others, Benedict argues that this moral insouciance is the West's greatest vulnerability. This, too, ought to be part of "homeland security."

Every nation in Europe has a birth rate below replacement, opting for material well-being over the (relative) sacrifice of raising two or more children. (Of all industrialized nations, only the U.S. birth rate exceeds replacement.) Against this trend, Benedict has thrown what he's got: the traditional Western notion of finding strength in the union of reason and religious faith.

It has become a hard sell. If the Vatican opposes abortion or stem-cell research, the West's intellectual elites deem it unfit to participate in any imaginable public forum. In the U.S., Christian evangelicals are feared by many as a threat equal to Islamic extremists, and unfit to participate in our politics. The hottest "religion" subject in the West now is atheism in the person of Richard Dawkins, author of "The God Delusion," who, Time magazine wrote this month, is "riding the crest of an atheist literary wave." Our obsessions seem to be off-subject.





I think the pope is right that the West is engaged in a decisive intellectual competition with the ideas of radical Islam. This won't end with the battle for Baghdad. Will scientific agnosticism defend the West against militant Islam? With what? In Europe, its intellectuals can barely mount an argued defense against internal threats. Externally, as in Afghanistan, they won't even fight.
Benedict XVI's evident intention is to engage the Islamic world, particularly its religious and political leaders, in an intense and long discussion of the religious, political and legal rights of their resident minorities, in other words, the Western tradition. The implications of this effort are obvious for achieving an acceptable modus vivendi with global Islam.

How many divisions does this pope have? Good question. At the moment, I'd say, not as many as the last time.

Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.

http://www.ideachannel.tv/

Milton Friedman's "Free to Choose"!

Dennis Gartman  11-28-2006

?In Bahrain? ?Google Earth? has played a huge role in deciding how the election plays out. Knowing, almost intuitively, that the Sunni royal family?s fortunes were enormous and that the Royals lived a life quite egregiously beyond the most wild dreams of the Shi?ia general populace, with the introduction of Google Earth on the net, the public finally could see just how utterly fantastic were the Royals? lives. They ?googled? the royal compounds hidden beyond huge walls, and were stunned by what they saw.

?The Khalifa family then tried to outlaw ?Google Earth? only to find that the uproar was so severe, and the political ramifications equally as severe, that they had no choice but to rescind that decision. The end result is resounding defeat for the parties loyal to the Khalifa royal family and victory for the radical Shi?ia Islamist parties.?

 

What It Takes to Make a Student
Today's NY Times
By PAUL TOUGH
Published: November 26, 2006
On the morning of Oct. 5, President Bush and his education secretary, Margaret Spellings, paid a visit, along with camera crews from CNN and Fox News, to Friendship-Woodridge Elementary and Middle Campus, a charter public school in Washington. The president dropped in on two classrooms, where he asked the students, almost all of whom were African-American and poor, if they were planning to go to college. Every hand went up. ?See, that?s a good sign,? the president told the students when they assembled later in the gym. ?Going to college is an important goal for the future of the United States of America.? He singled out one student, a black eighth grader named Asia Goode, who came to Woodridge four years earlier reading ?well below grade level.? But things had changed for Asia, according to the president. ?Her teachers stayed after school to tutor her, and she caught up,? he said. ?Asia is now an honors student. She loves reading, and she sings in the school choir.?


KIPP's mission is to give students like these fifth to eighth graders in the South Bronx an even better education than their white middle-class counterparts.


MOTTOS MATTER But coherent goals, clear lesson plans and teachers willing to put in 15-hour days matter even more at KIPP schools.

Bush?s Woodridge trip came in the middle of a tough midterm election campaign, and there was certainly some short-term political calculation in being photographed among smiling black faces. But this was more than a photo opportunity. The president had come to Woodridge to talk about the most ambitious piece of domestic legislation his administration had enacted after almost six years in office: No Child Left Behind. The controversial education law, which established a series of standards for schools and states to meet and a variety of penalties for falling short, is up for reauthorization next year in front of a potentially hostile Congress, and for the law to win approval again, the White House will have to convince Americans that it is working ? and also convince them of exactly what, in this case, ?working? really means.

When the law took effect, at the beginning of 2002, official Washington was preoccupied with foreign affairs, and many people in government, and many outside it too, including the educators most affected by the legislation, seemed slow to take notice of its most revolutionary provision: a pledge to eliminate, in just 12 years, the achievement gap between black and white students, and the one between poor and middle-class students. By 2014, the president vowed, African-American, Hispanic and poor children, all of whom were at the time scoring well below their white counterparts and those in the middle class on standardized tests, would not only catch up with the rest of the nation; they would also reach 100 percent proficiency in both math and reading. It was a startling commitment, and it made the promise in the law?s title a literal one: the federal government would not allow a single American child to be educated to less than that high standard.

It was this element of the law that the president had come to Woodridge to talk about. ?There?s an achievement gap in America that?s not good for the future of this country,? he told the crowd. ?Some kids can read at grade level, and some can?t. And that?s unsatisfactory.?

But there was good news, the president concluded: ?I?m proud to report the achievement gap between white kids and minority students is closing, for the good of the United States.?

This contention ? that the achievement gap is on its way to the dustbin of history ? is one that Bush and Spellings have expressed frequently in the past year. And the gap better be closing: the law is coming up on its fifth anniversary. In just seven more years, if the promise of No Child Left Behind is going to be kept, the performances of white and black students have to be indistinguishable.

But despite the glowing reports from the White House and the Education Department, the most recent iteration of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the test of fourth- and eighth-grade students commonly referred to as the nation?s report card, is not reassuring. In 2002, when No Child Left Behind went into effect, 13 percent of the nation?s black eighth-grade students were ?proficient? in reading, the assessment?s standard measure of grade-level competence. By 2005 (the latest data), that number had dropped to 12 percent. (Reading proficiency among white eighth-grade students dropped to 39 percent, from 41 percent.) The gap between economic classes isn?t disappearing, either: in 2002, 17 percent of poor eighth-grade students (measured by eligibility for free or reduced-price school lunches) were proficient in reading; in 2005, that number fell to 15 percent.

The most promising indications in the national test could be found in the fourth-grade math results, in which the percentage of poor students at the proficient level jumped to 19 percent in 2005, from 8 percent in 2000; for black students, the number jumped to 13 percent, from 5 percent. This was a significant increase, but it was still far short of the proficiency figure for white students, which rose to 47 percent in 2005, and it was a long way from 100 percent.

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In the first few years of this decade, two parallel debates about the achievement gap have emerged. The first is about causes; the second is about cures. The first has been taking place in academia, among economists and anthropologists and sociologists who are trying to figure out exactly where the gap comes from, why it exists and why it persists. The second is happening among and around a loose coalition of schools, all of them quite new, all established with the goal of wiping out the achievement gap altogether.


MODEL BEHAVIOR Kids like Niya Henry, a second grader at an Achievement First charter school in Brooklyn, learn a system for conduct -- to nod while listening to the teacher, for example -- along with reading and math.



The two debates seem barely to overlap ? the principals don?t pay much attention to the research papers being published in scholarly journals, and the academics have yet to study closely what is going on in these schools. Examined together, though, they provide a complete and nuanced picture, sometimes disheartening, sometimes hopeful, of what the president and his education officials are up against as they strive to keep the promise they have made. The academics have demonstrated just how deeply pervasive and ingrained are the intellectual and academic disadvantages that poor and minority students must overcome to compete with their white and middle-class peers. The divisions between black and white and rich and poor begin almost at birth, and they are reinforced every day of a child?s life. And yet the schools provide evidence that the president is, in his most basic understanding of the problem, entirely right: the achievement gap can be overcome, in a convincing way, for large numbers of poor and minority students, not in generations but in years. What he and others seem not to have apprehended quite yet is the magnitude of the effort that will be required for that change to take place.

But the evidence is becoming difficult to ignore: when educators do succeed at educating poor minority students up to national standards of proficiency, they invariably use methods that are radically different and more intensive than those employed in most American public schools. So as the No Child Left Behind law comes up for reauthorization next year, Americans are facing an increasingly stark choice: is the nation really committed to guaranteeing that all of the country?s students will succeed to the same high level? And if so, how hard are we willing to work, and what resources are we willing to commit, to achieve that goal?


In the years after World War II, and especially after the civil rights reforms of the 1960s, black Americans? standardized-test scores improved steadily and significantly, compared with those of whites. But at some point in the late 1980s, after decades of progress, the narrowing of the gap stalled, and between 1988 and 1994 black reading scores actually fell by a sizable amount on the national assessment. What had appeared to be an inexorable advance toward equality had run out of steam, and African-American schoolchildren seemed to be stuck well behind their white peers.

The issue was complicated by the fact that there are really two overlapping test-score gaps: the one between black children and white children, and the one between poor children and better-off children. Given that those categories tend to overlap ? black children are three times as likely to grow up in poverty as white children ? many people wondered whether focusing on race was in fact a useful approach. Why not just concentrate on correcting the academic disadvantages of poor people? Solve those, and the black-white gap will solve itself.

There had, in fact, been evidence for a long time that poor children fell behind rich and middle-class children early, and stayed behind. But researchers had been unable to isolate the reasons for the divergence. Did rich parents have better genes? Did they value education more? Was it that rich parents bought more books and educational toys for their children? Was it because they were more likely to stay married than poor parents? Or was it that rich children ate more nutritious food? Moved less often? Watched less TV? Got more sleep? Without being able to identify the important factors and eliminate the irrelevant ones, there was no way even to begin to find a strategy to shrink the gap.

Researchers began peering deep into American homes, studying up close the interactions between parents and children. The first scholars to emerge with a specific culprit in hand were Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley, child psychologists at the University of Kansas, who in 1995 published the results of an intensive research project on language acquisition. Ten years earlier, they recruited 42 families with newborn children in Kansas City, and for the following three years they visited each family once a month, recording absolutely everything that occurred between the child and the parent or parents. The researchers then transcribed each encounter and analyzed each child?s language development and each parent?s communication style. They found, first, that vocabulary growth differed sharply by class and that the gap between the classes opened early. By age 3, children whose parents were professionals had vocabularies of about 1,100 words, and children whose parents were on welfare had vocabularies of about 525 words. The children?s I.Q.?s correlated closely to their vocabularies. The average I.Q. among the professional children was 117, and the welfare children had an average I.Q. of 79.



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When Hart and Risley then addressed the question of just what caused those variations, the answer they arrived at was startling. By comparing the vocabulary scores with their observations of each child?s home life, they were able to conclude that the size of each child?s vocabulary correlated most closely to one simple factor: the number of words the parents spoke to the child. That varied greatly across the homes they visited, and again, it varied by class. In the professional homes, parents directed an average of 487 ?utterances? ? anything from a one-word command to a full soliloquy ? to their children each hour. In welfare homes, the children heard 178 utterances per hour.



What should the government be doing to ensure a quality education for all children?
What?s more, the kinds of words and statements that children heard varied by class. The most basic difference was in the number of ?discouragements? a child heard ? prohibitions and words of disapproval ? compared with the number of encouragements, or words of praise and approval. By age 3, the average child of a professional heard about 500,000 encouragements and 80,000 discouragements. For the welfare children, the situation was reversed: they heard, on average, about 75,000 encouragements and 200,000 discouragements. Hart and Risley found that as the number of words a child heard increased, the complexity of that language increased as well. As conversation moved beyond simple instructions, it blossomed into discussions of the past and future, of feelings, of abstractions, of the way one thing causes another ? all of which stimulated intellectual development.

Hart and Risley showed that language exposure in early childhood correlated strongly with I.Q. and academic success later on in a child?s life. Hearing fewer words, and a lot of prohibitions and discouragements, had a negative effect on I.Q.; hearing lots of words, and more affirmations and complex sentences, had a positive effect on I.Q. The professional parents were giving their children an advantage with every word they spoke, and the advantage just kept building up.

In the years since Hart and Risley published their findings, social scientists have examined other elements of the parent-child relationship, and while their methods have varied, their conclusions all point to big class differences in children?s intellectual growth. Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, a professor at Teachers College, has overseen hundreds of interviews of parents and collected thousands of hours of videotape of parents and children, and she and her research team have graded each one on a variety of scales. Their conclusion: Children from more well-off homes tend to experience parental attitudes that are more sensitive, more encouraging, less intrusive and less detached ? all of which, they found, serves to increase I.Q. and school-readiness. They analyzed the data to see if there was something else going on in middle-class homes that could account for the advantage but found that while wealth does matter, child-rearing style matters more.

Martha Farah, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, has built on Brooks-Gunn?s work, using the tools of neuroscience to calculate exactly which skills poorer children lack and which parental behaviors affect the development of those skills. She has found, for instance, that the ?parental nurturance? that middle-class parents, on average, are more likely to provide stimulates the brain?s medial temporal lobe, which in turn aids the development of memory skills.

Another researcher, an anthropologist named Annette Lareau, has investigated the same question from a cultural perspective. Over the course of several years, Lareau and her research assistants observed a variety of families from different class backgrounds, basically moving in to each home for three weeks of intensive scrutiny. Lareau found that the middle-class families she studied all followed a similar strategy, which she labeled concerted cultivation. The parents in these families engaged their children in conversations as equals, treating them like apprentice adults and encouraging them to ask questions, challenge assumptions and negotiate rules. They planned and scheduled countless activities to enhance their children?s development ? piano lessons, soccer games, trips to the museum.

The working-class and poor families Lareau studied did things differently. In fact, they raised their children the way most parents, even middle-class parents, did a generation or two ago. They allowed their children much more freedom to fill in their afternoons and weekends as they chose ? playing outside with cousins, inventing games, riding bikes with friends ? but much less freedom to talk back, question authority or haggle over rules and consequences. Children were instructed to defer to adults and treat them with respect. This strategy Lareau named accomplishment of natural growth.

Peggy Noonan, as usual, in fine form:
===============================

What Grandma Would Say
We don't need to solve the immigration problem forever. We need to solve it now.

Friday, November 24, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST

It is July 10, 1858, a Saturday evening, and Lincoln is speaking in Chicago. The night before his opponent in their race for the U.S. Senate, Stephen Douglas, had referred to him graciously in his big speech, and invited him to take a good seat. Lincoln seized the opportunity and invited Douglas's audience to hear him the next night.

And so here he was, speaking, as usual, text and subtext, on slavery. But near the end, he turned to who populates America. Half or more of his audience, he suggested, could trace their personal ancestry back to the founding generation, "those iron men" who were "our fathers and grandfathers." Remembering their creation of the United States, thinking of "how it was done and who did it," has civic benefits. It leaves Americans feeling "more attached to one another, and more firmly bound to the country we inhabit."

What of those who could not trace their bloodlines back to the Revolution? The immigrants of Europe are "not descendents at all," Lincoln said, and "cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us."

"But" he then said.

"But when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.' " And that "moral sentiment" connects groups and generations and tells America's immigrants "that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration. And so they are."

"And so they are." With those four words he told the anti-immigrant Know Nothings that new Americans have an equal place. He was saying: Take That, haters of the Catholic Church, spoofers of foreign ways, nonsympathizers with the beset, bedraggled and be-brogued.





I love those words by Lincoln, and believe them. But it continues to amaze that 148 years after he said them, who populates America is still a matter of urgent argument.
Much of course has changed. Immigration in Lincoln's day was open and legal. Now it is open in effect because overwhelmingly illegal in practice. If you want to come across the border, you can, essentially, come. You make the decision about what is best for you; America does not make the decision as to what is best for it. Both Congress and the White House, our official deciders, will likely do in the next session what they did in the last: spend a lot of time trying to confuse people into thinking they're closing the borders without actually closing them. There will be talk again of fences, partial fences, fencelike entities and virtual fences. While they dither and mislead, towns and cities will continue to attempt to make their own immigration policy.

You know the facts. Immigrants are here in huge numbers, unlawfully, in the age of terror. They swell the cost of local life--emergency rooms, schools--which has an impact on local taxes. There are towns and cities that feel, and are, overwhelmed. And no one will help them.

The essential reason, I think, is that America's elites don't want America's borders closed. Businesses want low-wage workers; intellectuals are wed to global visions of cross-border prosperity; politicians want Hispanic loyalty and the Hispanic vote. It's not convenient for any of them to close the borders. If Americans on the ground are enduring difficulties over this, it's . . . too bad. This is further eroding America's already eroding faith in its institutions.

I think there are two unremarked elements of the debate that are now contributing to the government's inability or refusal to come up with a solution.

The problem is not partisanship. It is not polarization, not really. Sentiments on this of all issues in the nation of immigrants are and would be complicated, nuanced. The problem is doctrinaire-ness. Even as both parties have become less philosophical, less tied to their animating philosophies, they have become more doctrinaire. The people who should be solving the immigration problem are holding fiercely to abstractions--to big-think economic theory, to emanations of penumbras in the law--instead of facing a crucial, concrete and immediate challenge.

The second element is definitiveness. Our political figures say they have to concentrate on an overall, long-term, comprehensive answer to the immigration problem. So they huff and puff about the long-term implications of this move or that, and in the end they do nothing.

They are like people in a burning house who sit around discussing the long-term efficacy of various kinds of water hoses while the house burns down around them.

More and more our leaders forget the common sense of grandma. In most everyone's family there was a grandma who used to sit quietly in the corner and say nothing. Then someone would ask her opinion just to be polite, and she'd say something so wise, so commonsensical, it stopped everyone in their tracks. And you realized that she was smart, that she'd lived a life and seen things.
In the case of illegal immigration in America I think grandma would say, "Stop it. Build a wall. But put doors in the wall so when the problem is over, you can open the doors."

America has, since 1980, experienced the biggest wave of immigrants since the great wave of 1880-1920. And we have never stopped to absorb it. We have never stopped to digest what we've eaten. Is it any wonder we have indigestion?

We don't really have to solve the problem forever. We just have to solve it now. One wonders why we don't stop illegal immigration, now. Absorb, settle down, ease pressures--for now. Why not be empirical, and find out what's true? Some say stopping illegal immigration will lead to an increase in wages for low-income workers. This is to be desired. Let's find out if it happens.

And why not give the latest waves of immigrants time to become Americans? Time to absorb our meaning and history and traditions. Isn't that the way to help them feel "more attached" and "more firmly bound to the country we inhabit"?

I'm not sure we need more globalism, but I feel certain we need more grandmaism. A happy Thanksgiving to all, old and new.

Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of "John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father" (Penguin, 2005), which you can order from the OpinionJournal bookstore. Her column appears Fridays on OpinionJournal.com.

A Free-for-All on Science and Religion
By GEORGE JOHNSON
Maybe the pivotal moment came when Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate in physics, warned that ?the world needs to wake up from its long nightmare of religious belief,? or when a Nobelist in chemistry, Sir Harold Kroto, called for the John Templeton Foundation to give its next $1.5 million prize for ?progress in spiritual discoveries? to an atheist ? Richard Dawkins, the Oxford evolutionary biologist whose book ?The God Delusion? is a national best-seller.
Or perhaps the turning point occurred at a more solemn moment, when Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City and an adviser to the Bush administration on space exploration, hushed the audience with heartbreaking photographs of newborns misshapen by birth defects ? testimony, he suggested, that blind nature, not an intelligent overseer, is in control.
Somewhere along the way, a forum this month at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., which might have been one more polite dialogue between science and religion, began to resemble the founding convention for a political party built on a single plank: in a world dangerously charged with ideology, science needs to take on an evangelical role, vying with religion as teller of the greatest story ever told.
Carolyn Porco, a senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., called, half in jest, for the establishment of an alternative church, with Dr. Tyson, whose powerful celebration of scientific discovery had the force and cadence of a good sermon, as its first minister.
She was not entirely kidding. ?We should let the success of the religious formula guide us,? Dr. Porco said. ?Let?s teach our children from a very young age about the story of the universe and its incredible richness and beauty. It is already so much more glorious and awesome ? and even comforting ? than anything offered by any scripture or God concept I know.?
She displayed a picture taken by the Cassini spacecraft of Saturn and its glowing rings eclipsing the Sun, revealing in the shadow a barely noticeable speck called Earth.
There has been no shortage of conferences in recent years, commonly organized by the Templeton Foundation, seeking to smooth over the differences between science and religion and ending in a metaphysical draw. Sponsored instead by the Science Network, an educational organization based in California, and underwritten by a San Diego investor, Robert Zeps (who acknowledged his role as a kind of ?anti-Templeton?), the La Jolla meeting, ?Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason and Survival,? rapidly escalated into an invigorating intellectual free-for-all. (Unedited video of the proceedings will be posted on the Web at tsntv.org.)
A presentation by Joan Roughgarden, a Stanford University biologist, on using biblical metaphor to ease her fellow Christians into accepting evolution (a mutation is ?a mustard seed of DNA?) was dismissed by Dr. Dawkins as ?bad poetry,? while his own take-no-prisoners approach (religious education is ?brainwashing? and ?child abuse?) was condemned by the anthropologist Melvin J. Konner, who said he had ?not a flicker? of religious faith, as simplistic and uninformed.
After enduring two days of talks in which the Templeton Foundation came under the gun as smudging the line between science and faith, Charles L. Harper Jr., its senior vice president, lashed back, denouncing what he called ?pop conflict books? like Dr. Dawkins?s ?God Delusion,? as ?commercialized ideological scientism? ? promoting for profit the philosophy that science has a monopoly on truth.
That brought an angry rejoinder from Richard P. Sloan, a professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, who said his own book, ?Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine,? was written to counter ?garbage research? financed by Templeton on, for example, the healing effects of prayer.
With atheists and agnostics outnumbering the faithful (a few believing scientists, like Francis S. Collins, author of ?The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief,? were invited but could not attend), one speaker after another called on their colleagues to be less timid in challenging teachings about nature based only on scripture and belief. ?The core of science is not a mathematical model; it is intellectual honesty,? said Sam Harris, a doctoral student in neuroscience and the author of ?The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason? and ?Letter to a Christian Nation.?
?Every religion is making claims about the way the world is,? he said. ?These are claims about the divine origin of certain books, about the virgin birth of certain people, about the survival of the human personality after death. These claims purport to be about reality.?
By shying away from questioning people?s deeply felt beliefs, even the skeptics, Mr. Harris said, are providing safe harbor for ideas that are at best mistaken and at worst dangerous. ?I don?t know how many more engineers and architects need to fly planes into our buildings before we realize that this is not merely a matter of lack of education or economic despair,? he said.
Dr. Weinberg, who famously wrote toward the end of his 1977 book on cosmology, ?The First Three Minutes,? that ?the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless,? went a step further: ?Anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done and may in the end be our greatest contribution to civilization.?
With a rough consensus that the grand stories of evolution by natural selection and the blossoming of the universe from the Big Bang are losing out in the intellectual marketplace, most of the discussion came down to strategy. How can science fight back without appearing to be just one more ideology?
?There are six billion people in the world,? said Francisco J. Ayala, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Irvine, and a former Roman Catholic priest. ?If we think that we are going to persuade them to live a rational life based on scientific knowledge, we are not only dreaming ? it is like believing in the fairy godmother.?
?People need to find meaning and purpose in life,? he said. ?I don?t think we want to take that away from them.?
Lawrence M. Krauss, a physicist at Case Western Reserve University known for his staunch opposition to teaching creationism, found himself in the unfamiliar role of playing the moderate. ?I think we need to respect people?s philosophical notions unless those notions are wrong,? he said.
?The Earth isn?t 6,000 years old,? he said. ?The Kennewick man was not a Umatilla Indian.? But whether there really is some kind of supernatural being ? Dr. Krauss said he was a nonbeliever ? is a question unanswerable by theology, philosophy or even science. ?Science does not make it impossible to believe in God,? Dr. Krauss insisted. ?We should recognize that fact and live with it and stop being so pompous about it.?
That was just the kind of accommodating attitude that drove Dr. Dawkins up the wall. ?I am utterly fed up with the respect that we ? all of us, including the secular among us ? are brainwashed into bestowing on religion,? he said. ?Children are systematically taught that there is a higher kind of knowledge which comes from faith, which comes from revelation, which comes from scripture, which comes from tradition, and that it is the equal if not the superior of knowledge that comes from real evidence.?
By the third day, the arguments had become so heated that Dr. Konner was reminded of ?a den of vipers.?
?With a few notable exceptions,? he said, ?the viewpoints have run the gamut from A to B. Should we bash religion with a crowbar or only with a baseball bat??
His response to Mr. Harris and Dr. Dawkins was scathing. ?I think that you and Richard are remarkably apt mirror images of the extremists on the other side,? he said, ?and that you generate more fear and hatred of science.?
Dr. Tyson put it more gently. ?Persuasion isn?t always ?Here are the facts ? you?re an idiot or you are not,? ? he said. ?I worry that your methods? ? he turned toward Dr. Dawkins ? ?how articulately barbed you can be, end up simply being ineffective, when you have much more power of influence.?
Chastened for a millisecond, Dr. Dawkins replied, ?I gratefully accept the rebuke.?
In the end it was Dr. Tyson?s celebration of discovery that stole the show. Scientists may scoff at people who fall back on explanations involving an intelligent designer, he said, but history shows that ?the most brilliant people who ever walked this earth were doing the same thing.? When Isaac Newton?s ?Principia Mathematica? failed to account for the stability of the solar system ? why the planets tugging at one another?s orbits have not collapsed into the Sun ? Newton proposed that propping up the mathematical mobile was ?an intelligent and powerful being.?
It was left to Pierre Simon Laplace, a century later, to take the next step. Hautily telling Napoleon that he had no need for the God hypothesis, Laplace extended Newton?s mathematics and opened the way to a purely physical theory.
?What concerns me now is that even if you?re as brilliant as Newton, you reach a point where you start basking in the majesty of God and then your discovery stops ? it just stops,? Dr. Tyson said. ?You?re no good anymore for advancing that frontier, waiting for somebody else to come behind you who doesn?t have God on the brain and who says: ?That?s a really cool problem. I want to solve it.? ?
?Science is a philosophy of discovery; intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance,? he said. ?Something fundamental is going on in people?s minds when they confront things they don?t understand.?
He told of a time, more than a millennium ago, when Baghdad reigned as the intellectual center of the world, a history fossilized in the night sky. The names of the constellations are Greek and Roman, Dr. Tyson said, but two-thirds of the stars have Arabic names. The words ?algebra? and ?algorithm? are Arabic.
But sometime around 1100, a dark age descended. Mathematics became seen as the work of the devil, as Dr. Tyson put it. ?Revelation replaced investigation,? he said, and the intellectual foundation collapsed.
He did not have to say so, but the implication was that maybe a century, maybe a millennium from now, the names of new planets, stars and galaxies might be Chinese. Or there may be no one to name them at all.
Before he left to fly back home to Austin, Dr. Weinberg seemed to soften for a moment, describing religion a bit fondly as a crazy old aunt.
?She tells lies, and she stirs up all sorts of mischief and she?s getting on, and she may not have that much life left in her, but she was beautiful once,? he lamented. ?When she?s gone, we may miss her.?
Dr. Dawkins wasn?t buying it. ?I won't miss her at all,? he said. ?Not a scrap. Not a smidgen.?

All:

My default bias on nuclear power tends to be strongly negative.  I worry about what to do with by-products both for concern over accidents and for concern over the risks of theft; it being a source of unsound countries building nuclear bombs; catastrophes such as Chernoble; and nuclear reactors being targets to terrorist attack-- e.g. what if Flight 93 had its target the reactor at Three Mile Island.  One screw-up could screw up a lot of mother earth for a very long time. 

I distrust the experts.  Here in California, the Diablo Canyon reactor was built on an earthquake fault line.   Something like that does not inspire confidence to say the least.

That said, with the strong pressures to move beyond petroleum, the nuclear question is being presented again and of course advocates are proffering what they believe to be solutions to concerns.

Marc
================

Monday, November 20, 2006 
 
Barron's
EDITORIAL COMMENTARY   
Needed for Nuclear Power
Fuel recycling mitigates waste worries and is key to new plant construction
By WILLIAM R. STRATTON and DONALD F. PETERSON
 
BETWEEN 1965 AND 1985, the U.S. constructed 110 nuclear electric-power reactors and is now operating 103 atomic plants that provide 20% of the nation's electric-power demand. Their operating record in recent years has been little short of phenomenal. Because of their safety and operating records, their permits or licenses are being extended from 40 to 60 years.

A number of electric utilities are on the verge of submitting applications to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a combined construction and operating license. The proposed reactors will be of an improved and simplified design, pre-approved, more amenable to maintenance and operation than the first-generation reactors designed before 1980. All will be of a size to provide 1,000 to 1,500 megawatts, day and night, wind or no wind, rain or snow. Some studies estimate that more than 1,000 additional power stations of this size will be needed in the next half-century. After reviewing seven comprehensive studies, the World Nuclear Association stated flatly in December 2005 that nuclear power is competitive now.

This is good news. But there is still a problem created 30 years ago when President Jimmy Carter forbade the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel, establishing the once-through fuel cycle and effectively killing active development of commercial nuclear power. This wrong-headed decision was prompted by concern about the spread of nuclear weapons. Carter expected that the rest of the world would follow our lead, but no other countries have so limited their application of nuclear technology.

Supply and Storage

Carter's decision did create two other problems, neither foreseen by his administration nor fully solved, even after 30 years. The first is the problem of supply. It may be that insufficient uranium ore exists to fuel the nuclear-power industry for an extended period. The thermal neutron light-water reactor industry is sustained by the uranium-235 isotope -- only 0.7% of naturally occurring uranium. This must be enriched to about 3% U-235 to be suitable for power-plant fuel. Some studies suggest that there are limited quantities of uranium ore, others are more optimistic. The availability of adequate uranium to sustain the once-through cycle is still an open question.

The second and more significant issue is that of storing or disposing of spent fuel. This may be a red herring, but it has a very powerful odor. Many people believe that disposing of spent fuel is a show-stopper.

At the present rate of production, there will be enough spent fuel waiting in 2010 to fill the Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada, which has a capacity of 70,000 metric tons. Of course, the squabbling over regulations for storage at Yucca Mountain continues with no license in sight. The previous requirement for 10,000 years of safe storage recently has escalated to millions of years.

If a new surge of power-plant construction is about to begin, the spent-fuel problem must be solved. The rising demand for electricity suggests that the rate of plant construction will surpass that of the 1970s by a large margin -- depending in part on the congressional perception of global warming. New Yucca Mountain-type storage sites will be required, and we will see intense bureaucratic infighting over safety and security needs.

It's not often understood that the protracted times for the safe storage of spent fuel result from the presence of "transuranics" in it, not from the direct products of uranium fission. Transuranics are the isotopes that build up in the fuel when a uranium atom captures one or more neutrons without fission. Some of these decay into different elements: For example, plutonium-241 decays to americium-241, which then, too, can capture neutrons. Several of these isotopes have lifetimes in the thousands and tens of thousands of years. Some generate enough heat to be a problem.

Beyond the not-in-my-back-yard syndrome, transuranics are the reasons for the difficulties with storage in a repository like Yucca Mountain.

Fortunately, solutions to the waste problem are under development in the U.S., France, Great Britain, Russia and Japan. It's overdue, since recycling of fuel and waste was the intent of the pioneering engineers of nuclear power plants back in the 1950s.

A recycling process in use abroad comprises about three chemical steps and permits some separation of uranium, plutonium, other transuranics and fission products. The volumes of contaminated liquid waste is drastically reduced. The plutonium from this process can be used in thermal neutron reactors, but for only another two cycles because the higher isotopes of plutonium stop the fission process.

Another method still being developed is called pyrometallurgical recycling or electro-refining. This removes the fission products from the uranium, plutonium and other transuranics. Waste volume would be small, consisting almost entirely of fission products with much shorter half-lives than transuranics, so the necessary storage times would be reduced from thousands to hundreds of years. The remainder, consisting of plutonium mixed with other transuranics, is an unattractive target for theft but perfectly acceptable as fuel for fast-neutron breeder reactors. Early estimates suggest it is a much less expensive process to separate the several parts of spent fuel.

U.S. nuclear engineers have extensive experience with breeder reactors, which are the necessary final step in this development of modern nuclear-reactor technology using a closed fuel cycle. Among the initial reactors developed after World War II, Experimental Breeder Reactor No. 1 was the first in the world to generate electricity from nuclear energy; the event took place in Idaho in December 1951. Its successor, called EBR-2, operated successfully for 30 years from the early 1960s, generating more than 60 megawatts of electricity and serving as a test bed for experiments at the same time.

Fast-neutron breeder reactors can use all the transuranics and fission them to generate electricity. These reactors can be designed to produce excess plutonium from U-238 for additional fuel, or burn plutonium to generate electricity. They burn or transmute the troublesome part of the spent fuel, while producing electric power and more plutonium for other fast reactors, or thermal neutron reactors using mixed-oxide fuel.

Prototype Time

Various designs of this reactor concept have been constructed and operated successfully in the U.S. and other countries. Prototype plants have existed in France since 1974, in Russia since 1981, and Japan plans to incorporate the closed fuel cycle with breeder reactors systematically in this century. Both India and China have plans for constructing breeder reactors.

The technology now exists for recycling spent reactor fuel, and fast neutron sodium-cooled reactors have been operated for many years. The critical components of the closed fuel cycle are ready for prototype operations, preferably an integrated demonstration financed by a consortium of electric utilities or the Department of Energy.

This is an expensive but necessary investment for the future. Yucca Mountain storage expense could be reduced to a small fraction of present costs, and mandatory storage time reduced to a few hundred years.

The closed cycle, using enriched uranium for fuel in light-water reactors, recycling of spent fuel through an electrochemical process, and using the recovered plutonium and other transuranics as fuel in a breeder reactor, is complete. It's not a simple process, but it's essential to assure ample energy for the indefinite future. It will be expensive to start, but there are no viable alternatives. The time to expand nuclear-power generation is now.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

WILLIAM R. STRATTON and DONALD F. PETERSON are nuclear scientists, retired from Los Alamos National Laboratory. They are members of the Los Alamos Education Group, a non-profit organization advocating increased use and development of nuclear energy.

 

On various occasions I have mentioned NG as someone to keep an eye on for the presidency in  2008.  Here is his latest:

Which Bipartisanship Will Bush Choose?
By NEWT GINGRICH
November 16, 2006; Page A18

The election results pose two enormous strategic choices for America. First, the obvious outcome of a Democratic-controlled Congress and a Republican White House is the need for bipartisan cooperation in order to get anything done. The key question is: Which kind of bipartisanship will emerge? Will there be a Ronald Reagan approach to bipartisanship which appeals to the conservative majority of the House? Or will there be an establishment bipartisanship which cuts deals between liberals and the White House? Second: Will the departure of Donald Rumsfeld and his replacement by Robert Gates lead to a tactical effort to minimize the difficulties of Iraq, or to a fundamental rethinking of the larger threats to American safety?

These two choices are strikingly interrelated. An establishment bipartisanship between the White House and liberal congressional leaders will almost certainly make it necessary to focus narrowly on how to minimize difficulties in Iraq and postpone consideration of the larger threats to America for the remainder of this and into the next presidency. By contrast, a conservative bipartisanship that knits together the House Republicans and the Blue Dog Democrats into a floor majority, working with a White House that emphasizes popular issues at the grassroots, would make it much easier to focus on the larger threats to American safety. (Such a bipartisanship could stress making the cap gains tax cut permanent; controlling set-asides and discretionary spending; oversight on failing bureaucracies and waste; English as the language of government; and biofuels as part of an energy policy.)

How these bipartisanship choices are made will do a great deal to define our government and politics for the next few years. Each strategy cross-pressures a different part of the House and Senate. Each requires some members to choose between their loyalty to their values and those held by their districts on the one hand and their party leadership on the other.

A liberal establishment strategy will almost certainly split the GOP and lead to a grassroots rebellion against the kind of policies which a Pelosi-Reid alliance would force on the White House. House Republicans would find themselves split again and again as their leadership cooperated with Nancy Pelosi to bring forward liberal legislation. Conservative senators would find themselves blocking and filibustering liberal legislation brought forward by the Senate establishment Republican leadership and Harry Reid. Their supporters at home would be angrily insistent on active opposition to a liberal establishment legislative agenda.

On the other hand, a conservative populist grassroots strategy would almost certainly make daily interactions with liberal leaders more confrontational as they found themselves nominally chairing committees but losing votes on the floor and having their initiatives rejected by a conservative grassroots coalition. With a conservative populist grassroots strategy it is the 44 Blue Dog Democrats who would find themselves cross-pressured. In the House, some 54 Democrats won by claiming they were much more conservative than Nancy Pelosi, and much more conservative than the San Francisco values she represents. Here, they would be forced to choose between their voters back home and the promises made to them during the campaign, and their leadership.

Ironically, the very nature of the Democratic victory makes it possible to re-establish the conservative Democrat and House Republican coalition which made the Reagan legislative victories of 1981-82 possible. Tip O'Neill was the liberal Democratic speaker when Reagan became president, but he did not have a liberal majority in the House. Yet despite a seemingly liberal Democrat lock in a 242-192 majority, they lost control of the floor on the most important bill of Reagan's first term. His tax cuts were initially passed 238-195 with 48 Democrats splitting from the leadership and siding with Reagan and the GOP. The final passage of the conference report passed 282-95, with a 113-vote Democratic majority siding with Reagan and only 95 liberal democrats voting "no."

I was a sophomore during this exciting Reagan first term and I learned from him the art of appealing to the American people to win votes in Washington. When we passed welfare reform in 1996, the Democrats split 98 "yes" and 98 "no." When we passed the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, the Democrats split 153 "yes" and only 52 diehard liberals voted "no."

If President Bush decides to govern as President Reagan did, he will work to unify the Blue Dog Democrats with the Republicans to win a handful of very large victories while accepting a constant barrage of unhappiness from the liberal leadership. That is what conservative bipartisanship is like. If on the other hand, President Bush decides on an establishment strategy of cooperating with the liberal leadership, he will guarantee splitting his own party and will see his legacy drift further and further to the left as the Pelosi-Reid wing of their party demands more and more concessions.

This choice of which strategy to follow domestically has an enormous implication for national security. A liberal coalition will focus narrowly on Iraq and seek to avoid thinking about the scale of threat we face internationally. A conservative bipartisan coalition will look first to the larger threat to American security and will then seek to find solutions in Iraq to strengthen American security. It is hard to see how a liberal coalition will be able to look at the larger threats to our safety, even when the threat, articulated in this warning by Vice Admiral Patrick Walsh, is clear: "What we are talking about today is an ideology that thrives on murder, intimidation and fear. It puts innocent people at risk, particularly those in open societies. What we are talking about are people who worship death itself."

Thus the decision about which bipartisanship to pursue with regard to a legislative agenda and the Iraq war becomes for the Bush administration a decision about how safe and how prosperous America will be under divided government.

Mr. Gingrich is a former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Those of you old enough, know who promoter Bill Graham (Fillmore, Fillmore East) was and his pivotal role in pyschedelic music and much more. Recently it has come out that his massive vaults of concert tapes was sold by his estate and has been put up on the web!  See the major piece ono the front page of the business section of the LA Times on Sunday Nov. 12, 2006 for more ( LATimes.com )

http://concerts.wolfgangsvault.com

I am totally blissed out at the moment listening to old Jefferson Airplane concerts!

=========

All:

There's a thread of the same name in the other forum, but at the moment I'm too durn lazy to bring it over.  That said, the following makes the need for this thread quite clear.

TAC,
Marc
==============================

http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyid=2006-11-10T021338Z_01_N09494500_RTRUKOC_0_US-LIFE-PLEDGE.xml&src=rss&rpc=22
By Dan Whitcomb

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Student leaders at a California college have touched off a furor by banning the Pledge of Allegiance at their meetings, saying they see no reason to publicly swear loyalty to God and the U.S. government.

The move by Orange Coast College student trustees, the latest clash over patriotism and religion in American schools, has infuriated some of their classmates -- prompting one young woman to loudly recite the pledge in front of the board on Wednesday night in defiance of the rule.

"America is the one thing I'm passionate about and I can't let them take that away from me," 18-year-old political science major Christine Zoldos told Reuters.



"The fact that they have enough power to ban one of the most valued traditions in America is just horrible," Zoldos said, adding she would attend every board meeting to salute the flag.

The move was lead by three recently elected student trustees, who ran for office wearing revolutionary-style berets and said they do not believe in publicly swearing an oath to the American flag and government at their school. One student trustee voted against the measure, which does not apply to other student groups or campus meetings.

The ban follows a 2002 ruling by a federal appeals court in San Francisco that said forcing school children to recite the pledge was unconstitutional because of the phrase "under God." The U.S. Supreme Court struck down the ruling on procedural grounds but left the door open for another challenge.

"That ('under God') part is sort of offensive to me," student trustee Jason Bell, who proposed the ban, told Reuters. "I am an atheist and a socialist, and if you know your history, you know that 'under God' was inserted during the McCarthy era and was directly designed to destroy my ideology."

Bell said the ban largely came about because the trustees didn't want to publicly vow loyalty to the American government before their meetings. "Loyalty ought to be something the government earns through performance, not through reciting a pledge," he said.

Martha Parham, a spokeswoman for the Coast Community College District, said her office had no standing on the student board and took no position on the flag salute ban.

"If their personal belief is that they don't want to say the Pledge of Allegiance, the district certainly isn't going to dictate what they do," she said.

More than 28,000 students attend the community college, located in conservative Orange County, California, south of Los Angeles.

An Elephant Crackup?
 ?a..
By CHARLES SIEBERT
Published: October 8, 2006
'We're not going anywhere," my driver, Nelson Okello, whispered to me one
morning this past June, the two of us sitting in the front seat of a jeep
just after dawn in Queen Elizabeth National Park in southwestern Uganda. We'd
originally stopped to observe what appeared to be a lone bull elephant
grazing in a patch of tall savanna grasses off to our left. More than one
"rogue" crossed our path that morning - a young male elephant that has made
an overly strong power play against the dominant male of his herd and been
banished, sometimes permanently. This elephant, however, soon proved to be
not a rogue but part of a cast of at least 30. The ground vibrations
registered just before the emergence of the herd from the surrounding trees
and brush. We sat there watching the elephants cross the road before us,
seeming, for all their heft, so light on their feet, soundlessly plying the
wind-swept savanna grasses like land whales adrift above the floor of an
ancient, waterless sea.



Andres Serrano for The New York Times


Andres Serrano for The New York Times

Then, from behind a thicket of acacia trees directly off our front left
bumper, a huge female emerged - "the matriarch," Okello said softly. There
was a small calf beneath her, freely foraging and knocking about within the
secure cribbing of four massive legs. Acacia leaves are an elephant's
favorite food, and as the calf set to work on some low branches, the
matriarch stood guard, her vast back flank blocking the road, the rest of
the herd milling about in the brush a short distance away.

After 15 minutes or so, Okello started inching the jeep forward, revving the
engine, trying to make us sound as beastly as possible. The matriarch,
however, was having none of it, holding her ground, the fierce white of her
eyes as bright as that of her tusks. Although I pretty much knew the answer,
I asked Okello if he was considering trying to drive around. "No," he said,
raising an index finger for emphasis. "She'll charge. We should stay right
here."

I'd have considered it a wise policy even at a more peaceable juncture in
the course of human-elephant relations. In recent years, however, those
relations have become markedly more bellicose. Just two days before I
arrived, a woman was killed by an elephant in Kazinga, a fishing village
nearby. Two months earlier, a man was fatally gored by a young male elephant
at the northern edge of the park, near the village of Katwe. African
elephants use their long tusks to forage through dense jungle brush. They've
also been known to wield them, however, with the ceremonious flash and
precision of gladiators, pinning down a victim with one knee in order to
deliver the decisive thrust. Okello told me that a young Indian tourist was
killed in this fashion two years ago in Murchison Falls National Park, just
north of where we were.

These were not isolated incidents. All across Africa, India and parts of
Southeast Asia, from within and around whatever patches and corridors of
their natural habitat remain, elephants have been striking out, destroying
villages and crops, attacking and killing human beings. In fact, these
attacks have become so commonplace that a whole new statistical category,
known as Human-Elephant Conflict, or H.E.C., was created by elephant
researchers in the mid-1990's to monitor the problem. In the Indian state
Jharkhand near the western border of Bangladesh, 300 people were killed by
elephants between 2000 and 2004. In the past 12 years, elephants have killed
605 people in Assam, a state in northeastern India, 239 of them since 2001;
265 elephants have died in that same period, the majority of them as a
result of retaliation by angry villagers, who have used everything from
poison-tipped arrows to laced food to exact their revenge. In Africa,
reports of human-elephant conflicts appear almost daily, from Zambia to
Tanzania, from Uganda to Sierra Leone, where 300 villagers evacuated their
homes last year because of unprovoked elephant attacks.

Still, it is not only the increasing number of these incidents that is
causing alarm but also the singular perversity - for want of a less
anthropocentric term - of recent elephant aggression. Since the early 1990's,
for example, young male elephants in Pilanesberg National Park and the
Hluhluwe-Umfolozi Game Reserve in South Africa have been raping and killing
rhinoceroses; this abnormal behavior, according to a 2001 study in the
journal Pachyderm, has been reported in "a number of reserves" in the
region. In July of last year, officials in Pilanesberg shot three young male
elephants who were responsible for the killings of 63 rhinos, as well as
attacks on people in safari vehicles. In Addo Elephant National Park, also
in South Africa, up to 90 percent of male elephant deaths are now
attributable to other male elephants, compared with a rate of 6 percent in
more stable elephant communities.

In a coming book on this phenomenon, Gay Bradshaw, a psychologist at the
environmental-sciences program at Oregon State University, notes that in
India, where the elephant has long been regarded as a deity, a recent
headline in a leading newspaper warned, "To Avoid Confrontation, Don't
Worship Elephants." "Everybody pretty much agrees that the relationship
between elephants and people has dramatically changed," Bradshaw told me
recently. "What we are seeing today is extraordinary. Where for centuries
humans and elephants lived in relative peaceful coexistence, there is now
hostility and violence. Now, I use the term 'violence' because of the
intentionality associated with it, both in the aggression of humans and, at
times, the recently observed behavior of elephants."

For a number of biologists and ethologists who have spent their careers
studying elephant behavior, the attacks have become so abnormal in both
number and kind that they can no longer be attributed entirely to the
customary factors. Typically, elephant researchers have cited, as a cause of
aggression, the high levels of testosterone in newly matured male elephants
or the competition for land and resources between elephants and humans. But
in "Elephant Breakdown," a 2005 essay in the journal Nature, Bradshaw and
several colleagues argued that today's elephant populations are suffering
from a form of chronic stress, a kind of species-wide trauma. Decades of
poaching and culling and habitat loss, they claim, have so disrupted the
intricate web of familial and societal relations by which young elephants
have traditionally been raised in the wild, and by which established
elephant herds are governed, that what we are now witnessing is nothing less
than a precipitous collapse of elephant culture.

It has long been apparent that every large, land-based animal on this planet
is ultimately fighting a losing battle with humankind. And yet entirely
befitting of an animal with such a highly developed sensibility, a
deep-rooted sense of family and, yes, such a good long-term memory, the
elephant is not going out quietly. It is not leaving without making some
kind of statement, one to which scientists from a variety of disciplines,
including human psychology, are now beginning to pay close attention.



Once the matriarch and her calf were a comfortable distance from us that
morning, Okello and I made the 20-minute drive to Kyambura, a village at the
far southeastern edge of the park. Back in 2003, Kyambura was reportedly the
site of the very sort of sudden, unprovoked elephant attack I'd been hearing
about. According to an account of the event in the magazine New Scientist, a
number of huts and fields were trampled, and the townspeople were afraid to
venture out to surrounding villages, either by foot or on their bikes,
because elephants were regularly blocking the road and charging out at those
who tried to pass.


=================



Page 2 of



Park officials from the Uganda Wildlife Authority with whom I tried to
discuss the incident were reluctant to talk about it or any of the recent
killings by elephants in the area. Eco-tourism is one of Uganda's major
sources of income, and the elephant and other wildlife stocks of Queen
Elizabeth National Park are only just now beginning to recover from years of
virtually unchecked poaching and habitat destruction. Tom Okello, the chief
game warden at the park (and no relation to my driver), and Margaret
Driciru, Queen Elizabeth's chief veterinarian, each told me that they weren't
aware of the attack in Kyambura. When I mentioned it to the executive
director of the wildlife authority, Moses Mapesa, upon my initial arrival in
the capital city, Kampala, he eventually admitted that it did happen, but he
claimed that it was not nearly as recent as reported. "That was 14 years
ago," he said. "We have seen aggressive behavior from elephants, but that's
a story of the past."

Kyambura did look, upon our arrival, much like every other small Ugandan
farming community I'd passed through on my visit. Lush fields of banana
trees, millet and maize framed a small town center of pastel-colored
single-story cement buildings with corrugated-tin roofs. People sat on
stoops out front in the available shade. Bicyclers bore preposterously
outsize loads of bananas, firewood and five-gallon water jugs on their
fenders and handlebars. Contrary to what I had read, the bicycle traffic
along the road in and out of Kyambura didn't seem impaired in the slightest.

But when Okello and I asked a shopkeeper named Ibrah Byamukama about
elephant attacks, he immediately nodded and pointed to a patch of maize and
millet fields just up the road, along the edges of the surrounding
Maramagambo Forest. He confirmed that a small group of elephants charged out
one morning two years earlier, trampled the fields and nearby gardens,
knocked down a few huts and then left. He then pointed to a long orange gash
in the earth between the planted fields and the forest: a 15-foot-deep,
25-foot-wide trench that had been dug by the wildlife authority around the
perimeter of Kyambura in an attempt to keep the elephants at bay. On the way
out of town, Okello and I took a closer look at the trench. It was filled
with stacks of thorny shrubs for good measure.

"The people are still worried," Byamukama said, shaking his head. "The
elephants are just becoming more destructive. I don't know why."

Three years ago, Gay Bradshaw, then working on her graduate degree in
psychology at the Pacifica Graduate Institute outside Santa Barbara, Calif.,
began wondering much the same thing: was the extraordinary behavior of
elephants in Africa and Asia signaling a breaking point? With the assistance
of several established African-elephant researchers, including Daphne
Sheldrick and Cynthia Moss, and with the help of Allan Schore, an expert on
human trauma disorders at the department of psychiatry and biobehavioral
sciences at U.C.L.A., Bradshaw sought to combine traditional research into
elephant behavior with insights about trauma drawn from human neuroscience.
Using the few remaining relatively stable elephant herds in places like
Amboseli National Park in Kenya, as control groups, Bradshaw and her
colleagues analyzed the far more fractious populations found in places like
Pilanesberg in South Africa and Queen Elizabeth National Park in Uganda.
What emerged was a portrait of pervasive pachyderm dysfunction.

Elephants, when left to their own devices, are profoundly social creatures.
A herd of them is, in essence, one incomprehensibly massive elephant: a
somewhat loosely bound and yet intricately interconnected, tensile organism.
Young elephants are raised within an extended, multitiered network of doting
female caregivers that includes the birth mother, grandmothers, aunts and
friends. These relations are maintained over a life span as long as 70
years. Studies of established herds have shown that young elephants stay
within 15 feet of their mothers for nearly all of their first eight years of
life, after which young females are socialized into the matriarchal network,
while young males go off for a time into an all-male social group before
coming back into the fold as mature adults.

When an elephant dies, its family members engage in intense mourning and
burial rituals, conducting weeklong vigils over the body, carefully covering
it with earth and brush, revisiting the bones for years afterward, caressing
the bones with their trunks, often taking turns rubbing their trunks along
the teeth of a skull's lower jaw, the way living elephants do in greeting.
If harm comes to a member of an elephant group, all the other elephants are
aware of it. This sense of cohesion is further enforced by the elaborate
communication system that elephants use. In close proximity they employ a
range of vocalizations, from low-frequency rumbles to higher-pitched screams
and trumpets, along with a variety of visual signals, from the waving of
their trunks to subtle anglings of the head, body, feet and tail. When
communicating over long distances - in order to pass along, for example,
news about imminent threats, a sudden change of plans or, of the utmost
importance to elephants, the death of a community member - they use patterns
of subsonic vibrations that are felt as far as several miles away by
exquisitely tuned sensors in the padding of their feet.


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This fabric of elephant society, Bradshaw and her colleagues concluded, had
effectively been frayed by years of habitat loss and poaching, along with
systematic culling by government agencies to control elephant numbers and
translocations of herds to different habitats. The number of older
matriarchs and female caregivers (or "allomothers") had drastically fallen,
as had the number of elder bulls, who play a significant role in keeping
younger males in line. In parts of Zambia and Tanzania, a number of the
elephant groups studied contained no adult females whatsoever. In Uganda,
herds were often found to be "semipermanent aggregations," as a paper
written by Bradshaw describes them, with many females between the ages of 15
and 25 having no familial associations.

As a result of such social upheaval, calves are now being born to and raised
by ever younger and inexperienced mothers. Young orphaned elephants,
meanwhile, that have witnessed the death of a parent at the hands of
poachers are coming of age in the absence of the support system that defines
traditional elephant life. "The loss of elephants elders," Bradshaw told me,
"and the traumatic experience of witnessing the massacres of their family,
impairs normal brain and behavior development in young elephants."

What Bradshaw and her colleagues describe would seem to be an extreme form
of anthropocentric conjecture if the evidence that they've compiled from
various elephant resesarchers, even on the strictly observational level,
wasn't so compelling. The elephants of decimated herds, especially orphans
who've watched the death of their parents and elders from poaching and
culling, exhibit behavior typically associated with post-traumatic stress
disorder and other trauma-related disorders in humans: abnormal startle
response, unpredictable asocial behavior, inattentive mothering and
hyperaggression. Studies of the various assaults on the rhinos in South
Africa, meanwhile, have determined that the perpetrators were in all cases
adolescent males that had witnessed their families being shot down in
cullings. It was common for these elephants to have been tethered to the
bodies of their dead and dying relatives until they could be rounded up for
translocation to, as Bradshaw and Schore describe them, "locales lacking
traditional social hierarchy of older bulls and intact natal family
structures."

In fact, even the relatively few attempts that park officials have made to
restore parts of the social fabric of elephant society have lent substance
to the elephant-breakdown theory. When South African park rangers recently
introduced a number of older bull elephants into several destabilized
elephant herds in Pilanesburg and Addo, the wayward behavior - including
unusually premature hormonal changes among the adolescent elephants -
abated.

But according to Bradshaw and her colleagues, the various pieces of the
elephant-trauma puzzle really come together at the level of neuroscience, or
what might be called the physiology of psychology, by which scientists can
now map the marred neuronal fields, snapped synaptic bridges and crooked
chemical streams of an embattled psyche. Though most scientific knowledge of
trauma is still understood through research on human subjects, neural
studies of elephants are now under way. (The first functional M.R.I. scan of
an elephant brain, taken this year, revealed, perhaps not surprisingly, a
huge hippocampus, a seat of memory in the mammalian brain, as well as a
prominent structure in the limbic system, which processes emotions.) Allan
Schore, the U.C.L.A. psychologist and neuroscientist who for the past 15
years has focused his research on early human brain development and the
negative impact of trauma on it, recently wrote two articles with Bradshaw
on the stress-related neurobiological underpinnings of current abnormal
elephant behavior.

"We know that these mechanisms cut across species," Schore told me. "In the
first years of humans as well as elephants, development of the emotional
brain is impacted by these attachment mechanisms, by the interaction that
the infant has with the primary caregiver, especially the mother. When these
early experiences go in a positive way, it leads to greater resilience in
things like affect regulation, stress regulation, social communication and
empathy. But when these early experiences go awry in cases of abuse and
neglect, there is a literal thinning down of the essential circuits in the
brain, especially in the emotion-processing areas."

Woof All:

We've certainly been willing to explore the good and the bad about Islam, so it seems more than fair that EVERYONE is fair game for fair questions. 

The Catholic Church has been on the forefront of "family values" yet seems to have a lot of people in it who have a hard time living up to its values.  Why is this?

Marc
============

http://www.cruxnews.com/rose/rose-16july04.html

All:

I've noted in local press the renovation of the Griffith Observatory and wondered whether to take my son.  How perfectly timed then to find this piece by the NY Times's (don't hold that against him!) Edward Rothstein, whose columns it is always a pleasure to read.  Indeed, I always forward them to my mother in Peru and she has declared him to be "a mensch".  For those who don't know New Yorkese, which includes many Yiddish words, that's a good thing.

Marc


======
Observatory Review | 'Griffith Observatory'

A Human-Centered Cosmos in Domes to the Stars

By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

Published: November 2, 2006

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 28 ? Walk into the central rotunda of the expanded Griffith Observatory ? the Los Angeles landmark that is to reopen Friday after being closed almost five years and undergoing $93 million of reconstruction ? and gaze up at the domed ceiling. You will see what 70 million visitors have glimpsed since the observatory opened in 1935, high above the city?s ever-expanding grid and sprawl: stern Jupiter grasping his thunderbolt, Atlas bearing the weight of the Zodiac, Mercury soaring, and Venus reclining. These are the heavenly bodies in their original mythological incarnations: gods and goddesses deploying stupendous and mystifying powers.

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Warren Aerial Photography

The Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles reopens tomorrow.

The Griffith Observatory, at 2800 East Observatory Road in Los Angeles, opens tomorrow; (323) 664-1181.

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Forum: Artists and Exhibitions

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Stephanie Diani for The New York Times

The central rotunda, showing the original artwork by Hugo Ballin.

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Stephanie Diani for The New York Times

The Big Picture exhibit at the Griffith Observatory, a Los Angeles landmark that has undergone a $93 million reconstruction and expansion.

As for seeing the stars in more realistic celestial domes, you will have to wait until night to look through the observatory?s 12-inch Zeiss telescope, or enter the new Samuel Oschin Planetarium, just past the rotunda, within which a custom-modified, Zeiss Universarium Mark IX projector will shine its technologically refined images on an aluminum dome above 300 reclining seats.

In the midst of celebrations of the Griffith?s return, such new attractions ? including an expansive lower level of exhibition space carved underneath the original building ? may get much of the attention. But Hugo Ballin?s original ceiling and murals in the rotunda reveal something more important. For this reconstruction is most remarkable not for what has changed, but for what has stayed the same. And that is a radical approach in the world of science exhibitions.

The rotunda?s ceiling holds the key. It shows not what the sky actually is but what humans once made of it, how it was observed and interpreted. Below it are eight murals, newly restored, that portray scientific advances that led to ever more subtle understandings: metallurgists, engineers and mathematicians, in busy colloquy, shape the cosmos through the millenniums. What is being portrayed is the classical human-centered universe. This is the very world that gave birth to the modern planetarium, in which the observer sits ? gazing upward, learning how to interpret what is seen ? as the universe moves around him in a sky dome that could well have been designed by Ptolemy.

When these murals were installed, the Griffith was only the third major planetarium in the United States. (Chicago and Philadelphia came first; the Hayden Planetarium in New York followed a few months later, all using Zeiss equipment.) Built with funds bequeathed to the city by a wealthy Welsh immigrant, Griffith J. Griffith (1850-1919), the observatory is operated by the Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks as a public institution with free admission.

The Griffith?s portrayal of a human-centered universe was shared with other planetariums in the 1930?s, including the Hayden, which also had a lobby with mythological allusions, and a planetarium show, complete with Manhattan?s skyline. These new institutions also linked astronomy to the progressive populism of their era: knowledge about the heavens would inspire another generation of stargazers and explorers, leading to as yet unimagined possibilities.

But this is a very different time, and anything might have happened as the Griffith expanded. (Construction was financed in nearly equal portions by the city, voter-approved bonds and private donations.) In New York the Rose Center for Earth and Space, for example, the reinvention of the Hayden, rejected the perspective of human-centered mythology and looked through the opposite end of the telescope, emphasizing the insignificance of the human, dissolving Hayden?s home into galactic mist.

Something even more unpredictable might have happened here. After all, the Griffith has no affiliation with a university or research institution to provide an anchor. During reconstruction (the architects were Pfeiffer Partners), the building itself was raised by hydraulic lifts so the mountain beneath could be excavated, creating new exhibition areas and a 200-seat hall for shows and lectures, expanding 27,000 square feet of internal space into 67,000.

The only thing that couldn?t change was the observatory?s mission and the classic appearance of this Art Deco building, a landmark that has appeared in science-fiction movies accompanied by figures ranging from Gene Autry to Arnold Schwarzenegger, that had a cameo role in ?Rebel Without a Cause,? and that defines the skyline for parts of Los Angeles.

Many institutions have given in to far lesser temptations by seeking to increase the size of their audience or alter their tone with flashier amusements or pander to lowered expectations with condescension. Yet what happened here? Griffith?s director, Edwin C. Krupp, told The Los Angeles Times earlier this year that the observatory ?won?t be in the mainstream of exhibition design at science centers, astronomy museums or any kind of museums.? And it isn?t. It is retrograde in every sense.

That is one of its virtues.

That doesn?t mean it isn?t flawed, but it does mean that the exhibitions by C&G Partners rather courageously turn their back on contemporary pressures in the museum world. One alcove, the Hall of the Sky, contains simple mechanical models mounted overhead that demonstrate the phases of the moon or how the tilt of the Earth?s axis creates its seasons. In another, live images of the sun?s surface are projected through the observatory?s solar telescope. Another gallery, the Hall of the Eye, displays the evolution of the telescope with panels, dioramas and cases, and shows how California became an ?Alexandria? of astronomical research in the 20th century.

The entire first floor has a quaint clarity. No display tries too much; all will be supplemented by guides offering assistance and information. The most dramatic exhibit is a relic of the original Griffith but bears little relation to the heavens: a Tesla coil housed in a metal cage, whose lightninglike sparks may provide the Griffith?s only spectacle aside from the stars. But all the exhibits remain deliberately human centered; they encourage observation and are about observation.

The new lower level, evoking the expanse of the universe in its cavernous space, is less coherent, but the observer remains central. Traditional panels describe the planets, which are arrayed in proportional size; an interactive computer screen highlights other planetary systems.

The most imposing exhibit, the Big Picture, is an image of what might be hidden behind your finger if held about a foot from your face against the night sky, as demonstrated by a bronze Einstein on a bench, his finger aloft. That strip of eclipsed space becomes a 152-foot-long, 20-foot-high photo of the heavens in porcelain enamel, its 114 panels mounted against the wall, showing the myriad galaxies, quasars and other celestial bodies visible in a finger?s breadth of our perceptible world.

As it turns out, the Big Picture is less interesting visually than conceptually. It does not, in itself, inspire a sense of awe at the heavens. That is reserved for the moment when, in a traditional planetarium, the twilight sky darkens, the overhead dome seems to dissolve, and one gazes upward at a boundless expanse.

But that sensation too is promised. The Griffith?s new planetarium show was still being worked on during my visit, but Mr. Krupp said it would be in keeping with the mythic possibilities of the rotunda, dramatizing a history of our understanding of the universe. Most remarkably, it will have a live narrator, leading the audience on a guided celestial tour. Human centered indeed.

Perhaps the observatory?s only misstep was in giving its bust of James Dean such pride of place on the front lawn, overlooking the famed Hollywood sign on a nearby hill. Why Mr. Dean? Because in ?Rebel Without a Cause? the Griffith plays a crucial role. Mr. Dean?s character comes in contact with the full scope of 1950s teenage brutality and anomie right after a planetarium show in which the cosmic destruction of the Earth is portrayed.

?In all the immensity of our universe and the galaxies beyond,? says the lecturer below the projected dome of stars, ?the Earth will not be missed. Through the infinite reaches of space, the problems of man seem trivial and na?ve indeed. And man, existing alone, seems an episode of little consequence.?

That message might have encouraged the nihilistic violence of the movie?s disaffected characters; or it might have grated against their adolescent convictions about the immensity of their problems when compared with humanity?s ?episode of little consequence.? But why should the Griffith have given Mr. Dean such credit? The observatory?s real message is just the opposite.

An elderly couple was attending church services. About halfway
through she leans over and says, "I just had a silent fart what do you
think I should do?"

He replies "Put a new battery in your hearing aid."

Now for the hard part: Looking stabilization square in the face

 http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/2006/08/1933130

BY ALAN GROPMAN

 

Old vaudevillians say dying is easy but comedy is hard. For American armed forces, conventional warfare is relatively easy, but stabilization and reconstruction operations are hard.

George Packer's "The Assassins' Gate" and Bernard Trainor's and Mike Gordon's "Cobra II" describe the difficulties America is having in Iraq, and although neither book is perfect, these two volumes have been the first to cover the tragedy in Iraq in anything like a comprehensive, professionally accomplished, well-written manner. These books are the very best sort of journalism, truly the first take on history.

 

Packer, Trainor and Gordon resist simplification and look the difficulties square in the face: All three authors argue that the Bush administration, Defense Department and U.S. Central Command used fallacious assumptions, which were based either on poor intelligence or the tendentious selection of information regarding the international political position of potential coalition partners or the political status of the various Iraqi peoples, to map their post-conflict strategy.

 

Finally, and most important, from the outset, all the players above shunned a major U.S. effort in nation building. There was no political will, Packer, Trainor and Gordon contend, to remain in Iraq for any appreciable length of time. There was an exit strategy based on U.S. military forces remaining in Iraq for only months after the expected military victory.

 

Conventional wisdom dictates that success in stabilization and reconstruction of a war-torn society takes five to seven years, but even this traditional understanding can be overly optimistic. The U.S. occupied the former Confederacy for 12 years and did not succeed; Reconstruction in the South lasted from 1865 to 1877, and after the U.S. Army left, the Old Confederacy was ruled by a single party, freedom of the press was often circumscribed (especially on racial matters) and blacks lived in terrorized peonage for almost a century. The U.S. government also occupied and ran Haiti for 19 years from 1915 to 1934 and failed utterly to reform that society. Disappointment in such endeavors is the norm.

 

The postwar planning done for Iraq by CentCom and others (excluding the State Department) allotted weeks and months to the task. We need to examine carefully all of the generalizations one reads about stabilization and reconstruction and all of us ? readers of this journal, war college faculty and students, legislators, bureaucrats in the executive branch ? would profit enormously from reading Packer's and Trainor and Gordon's essential reports on Iraq.

 

Packer is a deeply experienced journalist who led Iraq coverage for The New Yorker magazine. He has traveled all over Iraq, has interviewed most of the decision-makers and is a long-term acquaintance of some of the leading characters in this drama. His sobering account rings with verisimilitude.

 

Packer believed in Operation Iraqi Freedom in March 2003. He considered the war a necessary enterprise because he knew Saddam Hussein was an international menace and a despot dangerous to Iraqis of any religion or ethnic group and whose son and likely successor Uday was a monster. Packer has less trouble, therefore, with the decision to eliminate Saddam (although he believes the case made by the administration was deceptive) than with the planning for the war, its execution and especially with the strategy for the occupation after the fall of Baghdad.

 

Packer argues: "The campaign of persuasion [of the Congress and American people before combat began] proceeded by rhetorical hyperbole, by the deliberate slanting of ambiguous facts in one direction, and by a wink-and-nod suggestion that the administration knew more than it could reveal. Conflicting and inconclusive intelligence about Saddam's weapons programs was selected and highlighted for the worst-case analysis favored by the White House."

 

The deception by key decision-makers, as Packer sees it, was born essentially from the notion that the war would be over quickly and the occupation would be measured in short months ? 90 days, according to Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, the first reconstructor sent to Iraq by the Pentagon. The problem with the planning was the slant the decision-makers put on the tendentious intelligence they emphasized. Missing the fact that there were no weapons of mass destruction was of much less significance than the notion that American forces would be welcomed as liberators.

 

Packer asserts the administration relied much too heavily for intelligence from Iraqi exiles described by the author as: "hundreds of mullahs, monarchists, ex-officers, party bosses, businessmen, intellectuals, and schemers." One of these exiles, a man very close to Packer, was Kanan Makiya, whose story is woven through the narrative from beginning to end. Makiya, author of "Republic of Fear," had not been in Iraq for 35 years, yet the White House relied upon him for its post-invasion picture of Iraq.

 

Packer writes that Makiya told President Bush and Vice President Cheney that the invasion "would transform the image of America in the Arab world, that war could be a force for progress, for democracy. 'People will greet the troops with sweets and flowers.'"

 

Packer cites the numerous organizations that disagreed with the administration's idea of how Iraqis would greet the American military ? the Council of Foreign Relations, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Rand Corp., Army War College, United States Institute of Peace, National Defense University ? but "none of the forecasts penetrated the Pentagon or the Oval Office."

 

Gullibility, according to Packer, caused the administration to send a small force into Iraq to conquer it and then to stabilize it. All pundits writing on this subject argue that security is the first prerequisite for reconstruction and the fewer than 150,000 troops sent to remove Saddam would be enough to provide security only if America were greeted with "sweets and flowers," but not if the reception was rocket-propelled grenades and improvised explosive devices.

 

To secure the country and then build an economy, the occupiers must have an intimate knowledge of the society one is planning to reconstruct and neither Jay Garner nor his replacement, L. Paul Bremer ? nor the generals commanding the nation-building forces ? were qualified in that regard, according to Packer.

 

Packer's final assessment is severe: "I came to believe that those in positions of highest responsibility for Iraq showed a carelessness about human life that amounted to criminal negligence," he writes. "Swaddled in abstract ideas, convinced of their own righteousness, incapable of self-criticism, indifferent to accountability, they turned a difficult undertaking into a needlessly deadly one. When things went wrong, they found other people to blame. The Iraq war was always winnable; it still is. For this very reason, the recklessness of its authors is all the harder to forgive."

 

In "Cobra II," Gordon and Trainor tackle similar issues, but from a different point of view. The authors ? the longtime military correspondent for The New York Times and a retired Marine lieutenant general ? previously collaborated on "The Generals' War," the best book on the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and are authentic experts on military planning and operations. They focus on the operational aspects of the conflict, both planning and execution. They conclude their work with a concise and cogent 10-page "lessons learned" chapter that serves as an effective "executive summary" for the 507-page volume.

 

Gordon and Trainor's work, exhaustively researched and thorough, is much more a traditional campaign history than Packer's work. It includes exceptionally useful maps and a 40-page appendix containing a constructive chronology and key documents. "Cobra II" focuses in on operations, and Trainor and Gordon brilliantly describe the fighting. Gordon was embedded with several combat units, and the narrative is helped by his experiences. The book, however, pays less attention to the contributions of air power in Operation Iraqi Freedom than it deserves, much less than in "The Generals' War," and practically no attention to the British campaign; the U.S. had seven times the British number of combat troops in Iraq, and the British suffered one-quarter of the battle deaths.

 

There are practically no civilian heroes in "Cobra II," although Trainor and Gordon cite President Bush favorably for asking the right questions, and repeatedly. But the authors insist the president did not get the right answers from his civilian advisers or from Gen. Tommy Franks, the CentCom commander. Nobody escapes criticism, including Secretary of State Colin Powell for not fighting the Defense Department and its bureaucracy for control of the nation-building part of the operation, and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, for not ensuring the president got all sides of the story and not balancing battling bureaucracies. The authors are most critical of the Defense Department leadership and Franks for their lackadaisical approach to the stabilization and reconstruction part of the operation.

 

Trainor and Gordon argue that the administration made five fundamental errors in ts approach to the war, beginning with the most grievous of all, misreading of the foe. "Rumsfeld and his generals," assert Trainor and Gordon, "misread their foe by viewing the invasion of Iraq largely as a continuation of the Persian Gulf War." During the 1991 war, Saddam's Republican Guard was his best-equipped and most loyal force, and Franks and "his generals continued to regard the Republican Guard as their principal adversary." Allied ground forces "expected to run roughshod over the [Republican] Guard units ? and drive directly to Baghdad. Bypassed Iraqi units would be left to die on the vine. As it turned out [however] ? the paramilitary Fedayeen ? represented the principal challenge ? [and it] fought tenaciously." Misunderstanding the foe "reflected a failure of intelligence. The CIA in particular was not only wrong on WMD, but failed to identify the importance of the Fedayeen or to uncover the tons of arms that had been cached in the cities and towns of southern Iraq." The defense secretary and CentCom commander, moreover, believed "their victory would be sealed with the seizure of Baghdad ? identified as Iraq's 'center of gravity.'" But the attacks by the Fedayeen "demonstrated that the American-led coalition was contending with a decentralized enemy that was fanatical, not dependent on rigid command and control, and whose base of operations was dispersed throughout the towns and cities of Iraq."

 

Second, the Pentagon leadership relied too much on technology. During the march to Baghdad, high technology combined with a lean and fast force was effective in reaching the city in exceptionally rapid time and with relatively few casualties. "But after the fall of Baghdad ? mass, not speed, was requisite for sealing the victory. Military technology was less decisive against an opponent that faded away into Iraqi cities to fight another day."

 

Third, CentCom failed to adapt to developments on the battlefield. "There were numerous indications in the first days of the war that the United States was involved in a different war than it had anticipated. ? The first Marine to be killed in action died at the hands of an Iraqi dressed in civilian clothes who fired from a pickup truck, not a tank. Moreover, the Americans encountered primitive roadside bombs, suicide car bombs, foreign jihadists, and guerrilla-style ambushes, hallmarks of the insurgency to come. ? But the American war plan was never adjusted on high."

 

Fourth, the American military structure was dysfunctional. In the Iraq war, Rumsfeld and Franks dominated the planning; the Joint Chiefs of Staff were pushed to the margins, and largely accepted their roles.

 

Fifth, the administration had a disdain for nation building. "Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Tommy Franks spent most of their time and energy on the least demanding task ? defeating Saddam's weakened conventional forces, and the least amount on the most demanding rehabilitation of and security for the new Iraq."

 

There are, and there will be, myriad reasons to study both the triumphs and failures of the American military experience in Iraq. The first rough drafts of history produced by Packer, Gordon and Trainor will not only serve the needs of staff and war college students, but today's soldiers and strategists. The story of Iraq, thus far, is that our initial successes are inseparable from our current trials.