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We
shall not fear (David Warren) new
“We hang not on the Cross, but on Christ’s Resurrection.
At the centre of all Christian doctrine — and according to
Christians, at the centre of everything — is this one moment.
It is not understood as a miracle, but as the miracle at the heart,
explaining all miracles before and after. It was, or rather it is,
the grand intersection between the eternal and our own transitory
world of space and time. Everything in nature and in ourselves was
— is — transformed by it. It casts backwards through history
as well as forwards, it gathers together every strand of meaning,
into one knot, into one flame, and is of the moment with the Creation.
And in prayer, and contemplation, the Christian apprehends, through
the fact of the Cross, and shining through the Cross, the Resurrection.
It is the lifting of the burden, the weight — of sin, of mortality,
of fate. Christ, according to the Gospels, came into the world to
abolish death. To abolish the tyranny over us, to free us from our
greatest fear. In the moment of contemplating Christ’s Resurrection,
we know the truth, and the truth has set us free.”
Bogus
bias at MIT (John Leo) new
“The sad truth is that MIT, one of the world's great centers
of scientific education, has now produced and accepted two astonishingly
unscientific studies of its own administrative behavior. In response
to these studies, nobody on campus has spoken out. ‘The people
on the gender committees control the airwaves on this story, and
nobody will speak up,’ Steiger says. ‘And with good reason.
If they speak, they will be branded as misogynists, and their careers
will be in jeopardy.’ Worse, the culture of MIT is being changed.
Gender equity has replaced scientific merit as the value administrators
will be judged by. And as always in preference schemes, women on
the faculty will now come under suspicion as people who wouldn’t
be there except for politics. And all without any real discussion
or open debate. Amazing.”
Listening
for the Voices of Women (NYT) new
“In the two decades since she wrote In a Different Voice
and went on to identify a crisis of confidence in adolescent girls
— a phenomenon Ms. Gilligan famously dubbed ‘losing voice’
— her work has attained the status of public gospel, inspiring
pop psychology books, feminist lobbies and op-ed columnists, and
galvanizing policy makers. Ms. Gilligan is often cited as an impetus
behind the 1994 Gender Equity in Education Act, which, with an eye
toward improving girls’ test scores, banned sex-role stereotyping
and gender discrimination in the classroom.... Meanwhile, social
scientists were busy challenging her research. In a Different
Voice was attacked almost as soon as it appeared. Some researchers
rejected Ms. Gilligan’s claim that women were more likely to
consider their obligations to others (what she called an ethics
of ‘care’) in making moral decisions, while men were more
likely to rely on abstract principles of fairness (what she called
an ethics of ‘justice’). Ms. Gilligan was accused of using
unorthodox interview methods, of lacking control groups and of failing
to publish her data in peer-reviewed journals. In a 1983 article
in the journal Social Research, Debra Nails, now a philosophy professor
at Michigan State University, dismissed In a Different Voice
as ‘social science at sea without anchor.’ Since then,
trying to replicate Ms. Gilligan’s findings has become a virtual
social-science subfield, employing a small army of researchers —
with little success.”
What
You Say Reveals How You Think (David Stolinsky) new
“The same paper, like most papers, takes great care to refer
to anyone who has not yet been convicted of a crime as an ‘alleged’
or ‘accused’ murderer or rapist. This wording avoids lawsuits,
and more importantly, it follows the American tradition that one
is presumed innocent until proven guilty. So why is it that this
paper began a story about child abuse in the Catholic Church with
the front-page headline ‘Mahony Won’t Name Abusers.’
Not one of these priests had been charged with a crime, much less
convicted, or their names would already be a matter of public record.
But those Cardinal Mahony didn’t name were not referred to
as ‘alleged’ abusers. Somehow the fear of lawsuits, and
the devotion to civil liberties, were forgotten in the rush to condemn
the Catholic Church — and, by extension, Christianity in general.
Accused murderers and rapists in jail awaiting trial are ‘alleged,’
but priests not formally charged with anything are ‘abusers.’
How inconsistent. But how revealing.”
The
slyer virus: The West’s anti-westernism (Mark Steyn) new
“The Arabs say America is to blame for the Middle East. And
Britain and America don’t disagree, not really. The Durban
Syndrome — the vague sense that the West’s success must
somehow be responsible for the rest’s failure — is a far
slyer virus than the toxic effusions of the Chomsky-Sontag set,
and it has seeped far deeper into the cultural bloodstream. At its
most benign, Durban Syndrome manifests itself in a desire not to
offend others if one can offend one’s own instead. We saw this
after September 11 in the incessant exhortations from government,
public service announcements, the nation’s pastors and vicars,
etc., that the American people should resist their natural appetite
for pogroms and refrain from brutalizing Muslims. Ninety-nine-point-nine-nine-nine
percent of Americans had no intention of brutalizing Muslims but
they were sporting enough to put up with being characterized as
a bunch of knuckledragging swamp-dwellers, understanding that diversity
means not just being sensitive to other peoples but also not being
too sensitive about yourself. Similarly, at airports across the
continent, eighty-seven-year-old grannies waited patiently as their
hairpins were confiscated and their bloomers emptied out on the
conveyor belt, implicitly accepting this as a ritual of the multicultural
society: to demonstrate that we eschew ‘racial profiling,’
we go out of our way to look for people who don’t look anything
like the people we’re looking for.... I am woman, hear me roar!
Say it loud, I’m black and proud! We’re here, we’re
queer, get used to it! The one identity we’re not encouraged
to trumpet is the one that enables us to trumpet all the others:
our identity as citizens of a very particular kind of society, built
on the rule of law, property rights, freedom of expression, and
the universal franchise. I am Western, hear me apologize!”
A
Turn from Tolerance (WP) new
“Long before Sept. 11, many white Europeans had deep-running
concerns that their countries were involuntarily becoming multicultural
as guest workers and refugees, mostly Muslim, established themselves
in residence. There are about 15 million Muslims in Europe, making
Islam the the continent’s largest non-Christian religion. The
post-Sept. 11 concerns underscored a paradox that has cycled through
European politics for years: The continent needs foreign workers
to gird an aging workforce but is queasy about accepting them, especially
if they are Muslim. ‘There is this fear for national identity
combined with a fear of Muslims that has fueled this debate on immigration,’
said Jan Niessen, director of the Migration Policy Group, a research
organization in Brussels.”
As
the Web Matures, Fun Is Hard to Find (NYT) new
“Just 11 years after it was born and about 6 years after it
became popular, the Web has lost its luster. Many who once raved
about surfing from address to address on the Web now lump site-seeing
with other online chores, like checking the In box. What attracted
many people to the Web in the mid-1990’s were the bizarre and
idiosyncratic sites that began as private obsessions and swiftly
grew into popular attractions: the Coffee Cam, a live image of a
coffee maker at the University of Cambridge; the Fish Tank Cam from
an engineer at Netscape; The Spot, the first online soap opera;
the Jennicam, the first popular Internet peephole; the Telegarden,
which allowed viewers to have remote control of a robot gardener;
and the World Wide Ouija, where viewers could question the Fates
with the computer mouse. The Web was like a chest of toys, and each
day brought a new treasure.... The problem facing the Web is not
that some of these particular sites have come and gone — there
are, after all, only so many times anyone can look at a coffeepot,
even online — but that no new sites have come along to captivate
the casual surfer.”
What’s
news for the experts is common knowledge to most (Kay Hymowitz) new
“Not so long ago, everyone knew that children — boys and
girls — were cruel, aggressive, Darwinian creatures who needed
adults around to teach them self-restraint. William Golding’s
classic 1954 novel Lord of the Flies, a disturbing
story of English private school students deserted on an island after
an airplane crash, illustrated the point most dramatically. It was
common knowledge that, while girls didn’t often resort to fisticuffs,
they were prone to back-stabbing, manipulation and scheming, a fact
known to everyone from William Thackeray, who created the infamous
Becky Sharpe in the novel Vanity Fair to Charles Schultz,
inventor of Charlie Brown’s nemesis, Lucy. But in the late
1960s, development experts began revising the commensense view of
children’s natural ethical state. This was partly because of
the influence of the liberation movements of the time, partly to
address changes in the family such as divorce and working mothers
that made autonomous children a necessity.... But after a dramatic
rise in juvenile crime and bullying, a slew of suburban school shootings,
and just the daily grind of adult-child warfare, this theory was
bound to disappoint.”
U.S.
maintains the upper hand (David Warren) new
“As I reported in this newspaper on Friday, the ‘jailing,’
or rather probationing of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat has been
taken over from Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, by U.S. Vice-President
Dick Cheney. It is an extremely significant step, not because it
‘disempowers’ the Israelis, but because it puts the United
States forward directly in the role of Israel's protector, negotiating
on Israel’s behalf. While lost on the western media, the point
has been taken in several capitals of the Arab world: Mr. Arafat
and his terrorist groups are no longer simply confronting Israel.
They are now confronting a United States that is increasingly aware
of their international connections. Mr. Cheney set the conditions
for a meeting between himself and Mr. Arafat in Cairo yesterday,
which did not take place because Mr. Arafat did not meet them. The
essential, verifiable condition was that Mr. Arafat would deliver
a public address, to his people, in unambiguous Arabic, demanding
an immediate end to all terrorist strikes against Israel, and be
seen delivering like orders to all the Palestinian militias under
his ultimate command. Instead, he appeared on Palestinian TV looking
as if he were a hostage reading a prepared statement by his kidnapper.
He condemned, after the fact, only one particular suicide bombing
in Jerusalem. This was 11 eggs short of a dozen.”
Stranglehold
on Speech (Robert Samuelson) new
“Free speech is not selective speech, respectable speech or
popular speech. Free speech does not exist unless it can include
speech that you — and perhaps most people — despise. People
must have, as individuals and as groups, the routine right to express
themselves, even if their expressions offend. Somehow these truths
escape the supporters of ‘campaign finance reform,’ whose
crusade threatens free speech.... In the final 60 days before the
2000 election, more than 135,000 political advertisements were run
by sponsors who weren’t candidates or the political committees
of candidates, reports the Brennan Center for Justice at New York
University. The new campaign finance legislation — known variously
as McCain-Feingold and Shays-Meehan after its main Senate and House
sponsors — aims to remove many (if not most) of these ads by
non-candidates from the air. Unless political advertisements aren’t
‘speech,’ this represents a massive suppression of free
speech.... Free speech must be a concept that ordinary people can
grasp in most ordinary circumstances. It must not become a lawyerly
collection of qualifications, footnotes and regulations, and that
is where the campaign finance crusade is leading.”
Bleak
future looms if you don’t take a stand (Dan Gillmor) new
“This is a quiz about your future. It’s about how you
view some basic elements of the emerging Digital Age. 1. Do you
care if a few giant companies control virtually all entertainment
and information? 2. Do you care if they decide what kinds of technological
innovations will reach the marketplace? 3. Would you be concerned
if they used their power to compile detailed dossiers on everything
you read, listen to, view and buy? 4. Would you find it acceptable
if they could decide whether what you write and say could be seen
and heard by others? Those are no longer theoretical questions.
They are the direction in which America is hurtling. Media conglomerates
are in a merger frenzy. Telecommunications monopolies are creating
a cozy cartel, dividing up access to the online world. The entertainment
industry is pushing for Draconian controls on the use and dissemination
of digital information.”
The
Great Terror (Jeffrey Goldberg) new
“Gosden believes it is quite possible that the countries of
the West will soon experience chemical- and biological-weapons attacks
far more serious and of greater lasting effect than the anthrax
incidents of last autumn and the nerve-agent attack on the Tokyo
subway system several years ago — that what happened in Kurdistan
was only the beginning. ‘For Saddam’s scientists, the
Kurds were a test population,’ she said. ‘They were the
human guinea pigs. It was a way of identifying the most effective
chemical agents for use on civilian populations, and the most effective
means of delivery.’ The charge is supported by others. An Iraqi
defector, Khidhir Hamza, who is the former director of Saddam’s
nuclear-weapons program, told me earlier this year that before the
attack on Halabja military doctors had mapped the city, and that
afterward they entered it wearing protective clothing, in order
to study the dispersal of the dead. ‘These were field tests,
an experiment on a town,’ Hamza told me. He said that he had
direct knowledge of the Army’s procedures that day in Halabja.
‘The doctors were given sheets with grids on them, and they
had to answer questions such as “How far are the dead from
the cannisters?”’ Gosden said that she cannot understand
why the West has not been more eager to investigate the chemical
attacks in Kurdistan. ‘It seems a matter of enlightened self-interest
that the West would want to study the long-term effects of chemical
weapons on civilians, on the DNA,’ she told me. ‘I’ve
seen Europe’s worst cancers, but, believe me, I have never
seen cancers like the ones I saw in Kurdistan.’”
The
good, the bad and the Gallic shrug (Mark Steyn) new
“Countries A and B may be at war, but there is no good side
and no bad side, just two parties ‘trapped’ in a ‘mindless’
‘cycle of violence’ that ‘threatens the peace process.’
The ‘peace process’ tends to be no peace and lotsa process,
in which Western panjandrums have invested considerable amounts
of their prestige. That’s why in Paris this weekend most of
my dining companions were outraged not by the deaths of Palestinians
or Israelis but by the shelling of Palestinian Authority buildings.
‘These buildings,’ one indignant Frenchman told me, ‘were
built with money direct from the Union!’ — i.e., the European
Union. ‘We have given billions, and now it is rubble.’
‘Oh, your money's perfectly safe,’ I said. ‘Its sitting
in the Hamas bigshots’ numbered bank accounts in Zurich.’
.... Forget the ‘cycle of violence’ and the ‘peace
process.’ History teaches us that the most lasting peace is
achieved when one side — preferably the worst side — is
decisively defeated and the regime’s diseased organs are comprehensively
cleansed. That’s why National Socialism, Fascism and Japanese
militarism have not troubled us of late.”
Households
Divided (Jean Bethke Elshtain) new
“Wilson argues that the destructive features of a world without
fathers are by now so well documented that they are beyond challenge.
No responsible person wants to see that world expand, given its
clear and present dangers. But how did it come about, and how are
we to bring the second nation closer to the standard of the first
in order to ensure that, in the parlance of the moment, no child
is left behind? Wilson reminds us that when Sen. Daniel Patrick
Moynihan first alerted the country in 1960 to the troubles looming
on the horizon as the world of fatherlessness and rising out-of-wedlock
birth was coming into view, he was denounced, accused of everything
from racism to sexism to cultural imperialism, even as many people
within the black community were saying the same thing — that
a leap in fatherlessness was a ‘pathology.’ But that made
no difference to the mainstream media or scholarship. As a result,
it was easy for the first nation, irresponsibly, to ignore the problem
of the second. Forty years later, facing an epidemic in teenage
motherhood — by 1995, ‘three out of every four births
to all teenagers were to unmarried girls; for black girls, it was
nine out of ten’ — the alarm bells finally went off as
politicians and social analysts converged on the same point: This
trend cannot continue, as too much measurable harm is being done
to children. As the evidence piled up, even those most resistant
to the notion that fatherlessness as an independent factor generated
risk factors for children, whatever the family’s socio-economic
status, were forced to acknowledge the data. ‘Children in one-parent
families, compared to those in two-parent ones, are twice as likely
to drop out of school. Boys in one-parent families are much more
likely than those in two-parent ones to be both out of school and
out of work. Girls in one-parent families are twice as likely as
those in two-parent ones to have an out-of-wedlock birth.’”
How
Oscar Ghettoized Poitier (John Podhoretz) new
“The spin on the evening was that it made history because two
black performers won Best Actor and Best Actress on the same night
that the first black movie star, Sidney Poitier, received an honorary
Oscar. But there was something terribly retrogressive about the
way all this was treated. The Oscar show worked overtime to make
us think of Denzel Washington, Halle Berry and Poitier not as unique
and remarkable talents but rather as tokens. Why were only black
actors and actresses given a chance to speak in the three-minute
film tribute to Sidney Poitier? Did Poitier’s career really
have meaning only to black performers? Of course not. His extraordinary
dignity and power gave the lie to the racist idea that white audiences
could only respond to white performers and white stories. In a magnificent
speech that was the highlight of the otherwise-unspeakable ceremony,
Poitier himself paid a powerful and modest tribute to the directors,
producers and studio heads who made history by casting him in the
films that made him a star. They were all white. So is Poitier’s
wife Joanna. Poitier had two daughters with Joanna, who are therefore
both black and white. He is an integrationist not only professionally,
but personally. For him to be seen as an inspiration only
to black people is to ghettoize an extraordinary man who simply
refused to accept the limits of race.”
Dumbing
Down the SAT: The very existence of intelligence differences in
America is about to become a forbidden truth. (Stanley Kurtz) new
“There was a time when Americans believed that finding and
training the country’s finest minds was in the national interest.
Certainly, all American children ought to have access to quality
education. But, ultimately, it is to our collective advantage as
a nation to have a way of identifying students of high aptitude.
And it is fairer to students themselves — especially those
from lesser schools — to have a way of recognizing intellectual
potential that has not yet come to the surface. The irony is that
support for destruction of the SAT test comes from a liberal elite
that is itself the product of our educational meritocracy. Guilt
about success combines here with a hidden craving for moral superiority
over the benighted middle classes. Those in the middle — and
many minorities as well — still believe in the principles of
liberty and equality that created the meritocracy in the first place.
But once again, the liberal elite, in a conversation amongst itself,
is managing to turn our most basic values and practices inside out
— with nary a peep from a public that would fight these changes
if they were honestly told what is happening.”
Of
conscience & cowardice (Robert Going) new
“I happen to believe in the sanctity of human life from conception
to natural death. While perhaps a minority view, it is generally
not considered an extreme position except by those who take delight
in yanking babies feet first three quarters of the way out of their
mothers’ wombs, sticking a needle in the head and sucking the
brains out. Those people would doubtless find my views radical.
Still, if I had written what I’ve just written, or said it
aloud in a public place at any time from 1985 when I first became
a candidate for judicial office until I left the bench in 2001,
I would have been subject to discipline, even removal, by the Commission
on Judicial Conduct. Some members of that commission and its staff
have even gone so far as to state that accepting the nomination
of the Right to Life Party is judicial misconduct.... After I became
a county-level judge, the death penalty was restored in this state.
As a cross-assigned judge I was offered the opportunity to take
special training that would allow me to sit on capital cases. I
declined, and wondered what I would do if such assignments became
mandatory. Most of us don’t give a lot of thought to the death
penalty. I never did, truthfully. But when faced with the real possibility
that you might someday decide who lives and who dies, you’d
sure better start thinking about it. I likely would have ended up
as one of those who should have resigned rather than follow the
law. But would I have? I believe in the sanctity of human life from
birth to natural death. It’s such an easy thing to say. Now.”
But
Seriously, Folks (Larry Miller) new
“But, you see in all of American life there has, for a long
time, been a battle of sorts to define what is serious and what
is not, and all the wrong people are consistently winning. No matter
how stupid, wrongheaded, or immoral some of our leaders and representatives
have been over the years, if they can affect an appearance of troubled
thoughtfulness when they address our problems, if they speak in
a measured way, if they look around and nod with gravity, and if
they use coy, calculated gestures — biting a lower lip, say
— they will always be considered ‘serious’ people,
and there’s no telling how far they can go. And I just don’t
get it. P.J. O’Rourke has created some of the most immensely
funny things in the history of immensely funny things, and I consider
his work to be wise, large, insightful, and practical; in short,
serious. The problem for me, you see, is that I don’t know
what to call the ‘serious’ people of today, because I
don’t think they are. When Mr. Daschle holds forth on our war
effort, everyone thinks he’s serious, he certainly thinks he’s
serious, but all I see behind those unblinking blue eyes is a man
thinking, ‘Boy, I sure would look good stepping off that big,
green helicopter and saluting.’ The ‘support’ Messrs.
Daschle, Leahy, Biden, et al. have given to our war effort has the
same sincerity of the wrestling bad guy who spends two minutes gouging
the face of his opponent with an awl and then, when confronted by
the referee, slips the iron into his shorts and holds up his hands
like a Vegas dealer going on his break.”
The
1930s, Again: A hard rain is going to fall. (Victor Davis Hanson) new
“And so we Americans, like those 70 years ago who so wanted
a perpetual peace, pray for a return of sanity in the Middle East.
We chose to ignore horrific stories of Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia
— the embryo of 9/11. We are more amused than shocked that
madrassas have taught a generation to hate us. When mullahs
in Iran speak of destroying Israel we wince, but also shrug. We
want to see no real connection between madmen blowing themselves
up to kill us in New York and the like-minded doing the same in
Tel-Aviv. We put our trust in peace with a killer like Mr. Arafat,
who packs a gun and whips up volatile crowds in Arabic. All the
while, no American statesman has the guts to tell the Arab leadership
that statism, tribalism, fundamentalism, gender apartheid, and autocracy
— not America, not Israel — make their people poor, angry,
and dangerous.... I don’t listen any more to the apologies
and prevarications of our whiney university Arabists, our equivocators
in the state department, and the really tawdry assortment of oil
men, D.C. insiders, bought and paid for PR suits, and weapons hucksters.
The truth is that a large minority of the Middle Eastern world wishes
a war with America that it cannot win — and much of the rest
is apparently either indifferent or amused. So we should stop apologizing,
prepare for the worst, hope for the best, and accept this animosity
— just as our forefathers once did when faced by similar autocrats
and their captive peoples who threatened us in 1941.”
New
Analysis Says Women’s Studies Prism Emits a Distinctly Feminist
Coloring (FOXNews) new
“The modern woman is plagued by stereotypes imposed by a male-dominated
society, which keeps her relegated to rearing children, keeping
home and working in low-paying, menial jobs. That is the universal
claim found in women’s studies textbooks on college campuses
today, according to a critical analysis by the Independent Women’s
Forum, a women’s group that has often tangled with the traditional
feminist establishment. The treatise, set forth by Christine Stolba,
a senior fellow at IWF, has already drawn fire from scholars who
see Stolba as an ‘ultra-conservative’ with an ax to grind
against traditional feminists.... She said many of the textbooks
ignore the advances women have made in order to push an anti-male,
liberal agenda that is rooted more in the stone age of gender relations
than in 21st-century culture. ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged
in women’s studies textbooks that women have been and continue
to be the victims of oppression,’ wrote Stolba. ‘Women’s
studies textbooks support a large number of factual inaccuracies.
Many of these are deliberately misleading sisterly sophistries.’”
Keyes’
challenge: Return nation to principles (Pensacola News Journal)
“The people of faith in America bear a special burden to return
the nation to its founding principles, Ambassador Alan Keyes told
a crowd Friday in Pensacola. ‘God Bless America? Yes, but I
keep hearing the question,’ Keyes said. ‘Why?’ Afghanistan
terrorist Osama bin Laden did not introduce America to evil on Sept.
11, he said. ‘Don’t think you can escape responsibility
for your own.’ The moral challenge is simple, he said: ‘Cease
to do evil, and learn to do good.’ .... ‘We do not stand
on the same ground the nation was founded on. We do not stand on
the same principles the country’s strength was built on,’
Keyes said. ‘It reminds me of the old cartoons we used to see
when I was a kid. Roadrunner would get halfway across the abyss,
and he would suddenly realize where he was. I sadly believe that
in one respect, that’s where we are in terms of our freedom.
There’s nothing underneath us anymore.’ .... ‘We
have made the name of God obscene in our public schools. In ancient
Greece, obscene was something you could not show in public. The
name of God has been an obscenity in our government-run schools
for the last 30 or 40 years. Don’t say it, don’t show
it, don’t speak it. That’s all been run out by this auspicious
principle of separation (of church and state) they're always telling
us about.... ’The most terrible departure... is the fact that
we have embraced an understanding of our rights that now encompasses
the lie that the most fundamental right — which is the right
to live at all — is not a matter of God’s will, but of
human choice. ‘In the Roe v. Wade decision, the Supreme Court
told us the right to life for each human being... comes from human
choice. How do we think we can have it both ways? I don’t understand
this contradiction. It can’t be God’s choice and my choice,
too.’”
What
Hollings’ Bill Would Do (Wired News)
“If Hollywood and the music industry get their way, new software
and hardware will sport embedded copy protection technology. A bill
introduced by Senate Commerce Chairman Fritz Hollings would prohibit
the sale or distribution of nearly any technology — unless
it features copy-protection standards to be set by the federal government....
Anyone selling — or creating and distributing — ‘digital
media devices’ may not do so unless they include government-approved
security standards.... It would be unlawful to import software or
hardware without government-approved security standards.... Network-connected
computer systems may not delete markers indicating a file is copy-protected.
Knowingly removing copy-protection markers from digital content
is prohibited.... It would be unlawful to knowingly distribute or
send someone any digital content that has been purged of its this-is-copy-protected
marker.... One part of the bill overrides a landmark lawsuit that
said the Rio MP3 player did not violate copyright law.”
France’s
Bloody Hands (NYP)
“France is hardly in a position to lecture the United States
about justice, the death penalty or civil rights. The last time
that France was involved in a major terrorist campaign, in Algeria
from 1954-62, French security forces routinely tortured rebel suspects
— while murdering uncounted thousands in summary executions.
Only recently, retired French Army Gen. Paul Aussaresses published
a sensational memoir calmy recounting his own role in these atrocities,
which were carried out with the approval of French government figures
— such as future President Francois Mitterand. Even today,
the French criminal justice system is so weighted against defendants
that the accused is practically guilty until proven innocent....
In any case, it’s one thing for France — which has officially
abolished the death penalty at home — to register its unhappiness
at the prospect of Moussaoui’s execution, but it’s quite
another for this ‘ally’ to threaten non-cooperation with
the Sept. 11 investigation. It is early in this war against terror,
but you can be sure the United States will not forget the countries
which stood beside her. And those that let her down.”
Religious
leaders waste their energy (Bill Wineke)
“The question I have this morning is whether Jesus Christ went
to the cross to encourage us to drive Saturns. Because Sunday is
Palm Sunday, the first day of the Christian season of Holy Week,
I don’t think that’s an impertinent question. Yet, I have
on my desk a letter signed by ‘48 Wisconsin Religious leaders’
telling me that God wants sport utility vehicles to get better gas
mileage and I’m asking myself, ‘why does the church keep
doing this?’ .... Among other conservation measures, the letter
calls on the senators to support policies to ‘raise substantially
vehicle fuel economy across the board in the shortest feasible timeframe,
and require SUVs, minivans and passenger cars to meet the same standard.’
But the letter doesn’t stop there. It also calls for more investment
in wind, geothermal and biomass technologies, regulation of carbon
dioxide emissions and greater energy efficiency. It is signed by
leaders from liberal Protestant, Jewish, Roman Catholic and, even,
Zen religious bodies. For whatever it’s worth, I agree with
most of the ideas expressed in the letter. What I don’t understand,
again, is why religious leaders are issuing such exhortations in
the name of God.”
Saudi
newspaper editor “apologizes” for Purim blood libel (Jerusalem
Post)
“A Saudi Arabian newspaper editor yesterday issued a backhanded
apology for a column published last week which resurrected the medieval
blood libel against Jews by claiming they use the blood of Christian
or Muslim ‘mature adolescents’ to prepare special Purim
pastries. Al-Riyadh editor-in-chief Turki al-Sudairi wrote that
the article, written by Umayma Ahmed al-Jalahma of King Faisal University,
was ‘not fit to print.’ The paper had been sharply criticized
by the US government before Al-Riyadh published the apology. On
Monday, the Voice of America aired an editorial praising Saudi Arabia
for its peace initiative, but criticizing it for not doing more
to reduce Israel-Arab tensions. ‘In the meantime,’ said
VOA, ‘there is something that Saudi Arabia and other countries
could do right now to ease tensions in the Middle East. They could
stop newspapers and radio and television stations, especially those
controlled by the state, from inciting hatred and violence against
Jews.’”
The
fundamentalist question (Josie Appleton)
“So why did radical Islam begin to emerge in the West in the
1990s? The emergence cannot be explained by the strength of the
doctrine of radical Islam. Rather, the reasons some young Muslim
men began to be gripped by anti-Western religious dogma should be
sought in changes within Western society. The key factor in the
rise of fundamentalism in the West was the end of the Cold War in
1989. This effectively unfroze politics — dissolving the left-right
axis that had structured political and social identities for much
of the twentieth century. With the collapse of the left, the right
could no longer sustain its coherence — and in Europe and the
USA, right-wing governments tumbled. Society was left increasingly
atomised and directionless. This malaise was compounded by the erosion
of long-standing institutions which had helped tie individuals into
society, including the family, the church, the monarchy and civic
organisations. The ideology of Islamic fundamentalism grew stronger
in this vacuum left by the end of the Cold War. Where post-Cold
War politics seemed uncertain and unconfident, Islamic fundamentalism
promised firm rules, a coherent sense of identity, and a sense of
belonging to a global Islamic community.”
Epidemic
of fear (Frank Furedi)
“Since 11 September, speculating about risk is represented
as sound risk management. The aftermath of 11 September has given
legitimacy to the principle of precaution, with risk increasingly
seen as something you suffer from, rather than something you manage.
Of course, taking sensible precautions makes a lot of sense. But
continually imagining the worst possible outcome is not an effective
way to deal with problems. Allowing speculation to dominate how
we think about risks may even distract us from tackling the everyday
problems and hazards that confront society. We don’t need any
more Hollywood-style brainstorming. We need a grown-up discussion
about our post-11 September world, based on a reasoned evaluation
of all the available evidence rather than on irrational fears for
the future.”
The
Social Psychology of Modern Slavery (SciAm)
“To many people, it comes as a surprise that debt bondage and
other forms of slavery persist into the 21st century. Every country,
after all, has made it illegal to own and exercise total control
over another human being. And yet there are people like Baldev who
remain enslaved — by my estimate, which is based on a compilation
of reports from governments and nongovernmental organizations, perhaps
27 million of them around the world. If slaveholders no longer own
slaves in a legal sense, how can they still exercise so much control
that freed slaves sometimes deliver themselves back into bondage?
This is just one of the puzzles that make slavery the greatest challenge
faced by the social sciences today. Despite being among the oldest
and most persistent forms of human relationships, found in most
societies at one time or another, slavery is little understood.
Although historians have built up a sizable literature on antebellum
American slavery, other types have barely been studied.... Human
trafficking — the involuntary smuggling of people between countries,
often by organized crime — has become a huge concern, especially
in Europe and Southeast Asia. Many people, lured by economic opportunities,
pay smugglers to slip them across borders but then find themselves
sold to sweatshops, brothels or domestic service to pay for their
passage; others are kidnapped and smuggled against their will. In
certain areas, notably Brazil and West Africa, laborers have been
enticed into signing contracts and then taken to remote plantations
and prevented from leaving. In parts of South Asia and North Africa,
slavery is a millennia-old tradition that has never truly ended.”
The
Social Life of Paper (Malcolm Gladwell)
“Computer technology was supposed to replace paper. But that
hasn’t happened. Every country in the Western world uses more
paper today, on a per-capita basis, than it did ten years ago. The
consumption of uncoated free-sheet paper, for instance — the
most common kind of office paper — rose almost fifteen per
cent in the United States between 1995 and 2000. This is generally
taken as evidence of how hard it is to eradicate old, wasteful habits
and of how stubbornly resistant we are to the efficiencies offered
by computerization. A number of cognitive psychologists and ergonomics
experts, however, don’t agree. Paper has persisted, they argue,
for very good reasons: when it comes to performing certain kinds
of cognitive tasks, paper has many advantages over computers. The
dismay people feel at the sight of a messy desk — or the spectacle
of air-traffic controllers tracking flights through notes scribbled
on paper strips — arises from a fundamental confusion about
the role that paper plays in our lives.”
Propaganda
at its best (Cal Thomas)
“Last week, ABC News allowed entertainer Rosie O’Donnell
to take over two hours of airtime for a one-sided infomercial promoting
‘gay adoptions.’ All of the elements required for breaking
down what few social norms remain regarding the family structure
were present on ‘Primetime Thursday.’ First, the celebrity
factor. In our postmodern, post Christian, post objective truth
generation, celebrity equals credibility. Celebrities have replaced
God. When they speak, some people think the rest of us should listen....
Rosie is right because she says so. She says President and Laura
Bush are wrong when they say that the ideal setting for a child
is in a home with a mother and father. End of discussion. The celebrity
goddess has spoken.... There are credible scientific, legal and
religious arguments against ‘gay adoptions.’ ABC didn’t
present them because if they had, Rosie O’Donnell would not
have appeared on ‘Primetime Thursday.’ This was journalism
at its worst but propaganda at its best.”
They
Died for Lack of a Head Scarf (Mona Eltahawy)
“The fire was a tragedy that could have struck anywhere. Fifteen
girls between ages 13 and 17 were trampled to death and 52 others
were hurt when a blaze swept through their school.... Firefighters
told the Saudi press that morality police forced girls to stay inside
the burning building because they were not wearing the head scarves
and black cloaks known as abayas that women must wear in public
in that kingdom. One Saudi paper said the morality police stopped
men who tried to help the girls escape the building, saying, ‘It
is sinful to approach them.’ Girls died because zealots at
the gate would rather see them burn than appear in public dressed
inappropriately.... What kind of virtue is it to allow girls to
die in a fire because of what they were not wearing? Whose Islam
is it that allows these men to dilute the faith I and millions of
others cherish for its teachings of compassion and justice to nothing
more than a dress code and sexual segregation? I grew up learning
God is merciful and that faith was based on choice — you could
not force actions on anyone in the name of religion.”
Zero
tolerance means educators cannot practice what they teach (Dave
Lieber)
“I keep waiting for Rod Serling to pop out in the story of
L.D. Bell High School student Taylor Hess and tell us it is another
episode from his old television show, The Twilight Zone. Hess was
expelled from school because his grandmother’s bread knife
was found in his pickup parked on school property.... ‘What
they’re trying to do is incomprehensible,’ Robert Hess,
Taylor’s father, told me. ‘I just can’t believe it.
Zero tolerance doesn’t mean zero brains. You have to use your
judgment.’ .... This is so sad, what our public education system
has been reduced to, as administrators and teachers try to cope
with the very real threat of student violence. We have taken away
from them the very concepts that we try to teach our children. We
have removed their ability to use their own good judgment, their
reasoning powers and their ability to make decisions on a case-by-case
basis. If justice is not examined on a case-by-case basis, then
it is not true justice.”
You’re
the Doctor: What’s as Easy as ABC? Only a Little Farther Up
the Alphabet? A PhD. (WP)
“These days, PhDs are like opinions and pie holes — pretty
much everybody’s got one. You can earn a PhD: in human nutrition
at Michigan State University; in social work at the University of
Texas; in recreational studies at the University of Florida; in
family studies at the University of New Mexico; and in fashion merchandising
at Texas Women’s University. A candidate for a PhD in creative
writing at the University of Georgia can submit poems instead of
a dissertation. At the University of Michigan you can get a PhD
in literature without reading Shakespeare.... In fact, all kinds
of people are picking up PhDs. This year about 42,000 people will
earn doctorates in the United States, according to the University
of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center, which conducts
research for the National Science Foundation and five other federal
agencies. Most striking is a trend toward more PhDs in the humanities
— up more than 11 percent between 1999 and 2000.... Candidates
in the past were required to possess a breadth of knowledge bearing
on a given subject. Often they had to study additional languages.
And their labor — which usually took years of intense study
in required courses — was subject to review by outside scholars.
In many cases, the requirements have been eased.”
Mein
Kampf for sale, in Arabic (London Telegraph)
“An Arabic translation of Hitler’s Mein Kampf
which has become a bestseller in the Palestinian territories is
now on sale in Britain. The book, Hitler’s account of his life
and anti-Semitic ideology written while he was in prison in the
1920s, is normally found in Britain in academic or political bookshops.
But The Telegraph found it on sale in three newsagents on Edgware
Road, central London, an area with a large Arab population.... Copies
of the translation are understood to have been distributed to London
shops towards the end of last year and have been selling well. In
the preface, Luis al-Haj, the translator, states: ‘National
Socialism did not die with the death of its herald. Rather, its
seeds multiplied under each star.’ The book was on sale alongside
newspapers, magazines, cigarettes and sweets at a newsagent’s
kiosk.”
Web
Critics Take Aim at Old-Style Publishers (FOXNews)
“A small but growing contingent of amateur and semi-professional
media critics are taking aim at newspapers and periodicals, picking
up where those papers’ ombudsmen (if they have them) leave
off. One of the first to appear was SmarterTimes.com, a site that
painstakingly points out flaws in The New York Times. Since then,
similar sights have cropped up that skewer the Los Angeles Times
(LAExaminer.com) and the San Francisco Chronicle (Chronwatch.com).”
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