Reader Mail: 9 January 2006

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Subject: attacking Mead debunker Freeman

An Australian historian puts Margaret Mead's biggest detractor on the psychoanalytic sofa

By PETER MONAGHAN

Just how far should scholars go in debunking intellectual opponents? Is persistence, to the point of ignoring one's own pursuits, a sign of mental instability?

The case of Derek Freeman, the contentious Australian anthropologist who died in 2001 at the age of 84, raises both questions. For decades he relentlessly dissected and attacked the work of the noted anthropologist Margaret Mead, who died in 1978.

Freeman sought to persuade his colleagues that Mead's pathbreaking work on Samoa was fundamentally misbegotten. In particular he criticized her first book, the one that made her reputation: Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation (1928). In it, Mead depicted casual sex among Samoan teenage girls to argue that adolescence is not a stressful time in all cultures.

Along the way, Freeman also wanted to raise fundamental questions about the roles of nature and nurture in human behavior. But his attacks on Mead produced one of the bitterest disputes in the history of anthropology, dividing supporters of her cultural-determinist reading of human development and scholars who hold that biology, too, plays a significant role in human behavior.

Freeman was convinced that Mead had been duped into believing that Samoa was a sexual Shangri-La. He laid out his argument in two books: Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth (Harvard University Press, 1983) and The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research (Westview Press, 1999).

Freeman also participated in the making of a 1988 documentary, Margaret Mead and Samoa, which included an interview with one of Mead's original informants, Fa'apua'a, who said, in the film's dramatic final moments, that indeed, she and her friends had fooled Mead.

Here.

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Subject: quagga

The quagga was a horselike animal native to southern Africa that went extinct in 1883. Its head, neck and shoulders and sometimes the forward part of its flank were covered with stripes; the back part of its torso, its rump and legs were unstriped. An old joke among the Dutch, the first Europeans to settle in South Africa, was that the quagga was a zebra that had forgotten its pajama pants. [Reinhold] Rau's goal, which he has been working toward for three decades, is to breed the quagga back into existence. His approach is to take zebras that look more quaggalike than the norm and mate them with one another, generation after generation, progressively erasing the stripes from the back part of their bodies.

This may sound preposterous. How likely is it that deliberate breeding can retrace the path of natural selection by which the quagga split off from the plains zebra more than a hundred thousand years ago? But over the years Rau's project has gained some establishment support. Several scientific studies of the zebra family, for instance, have suggested that plains zebras and quaggas were closely enough related to make Rau's project feasible from a genetic point of view. This is important to Rau, because he doesn't seem to want just to create a quagga look-alike but to recreate - or at least closely approximate - the genetic original. And beginning in the late 80's, the Namibian and South African park systems supplied Rau with promising animals so that he could put his ideas into practice. (The South African park system, as well as the natural history museum, also absorbs some of the small, ongoing cost of the project.)

Over years of breeding, Rau has made great progress creating zebras that look like quaggas.

Here.

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Subject: not everyone's for sale, just Congress

For Watterson's syndicate, it just made sense to capitalize on the enormous popularity of the comic strip. Licensing Calvin and Hobbes would expand the audience by offering more ways to mediate and consume the characters. For Watterson, however, this logic was both shortsighted and offensive, because it failed to take into consideration what would be lost in the process. In the introduction to The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book (1995), he wrote, "I don't want some animation studio giving Hobbes an actor's voice, and I don't want some greeting card company using Calvin to wish people a happy anniversary, and I don't want the issue of Hobbes's reality settled by a doll manufacturer. When everything fun and magical is turned into something for sale, the strip's world is diminished."

Watterson, who retired his still-popular strip on January 1, 1996, believes that forms matter. He argued that the content of Calvin and Hobbes would be cheapened if it took on a commercial form beyond the multi-dimensional strip. The daily form of comic strips offers a distinct view of the boy and tiger that would be undermined if their images suddenly appeared on key chains and bumper stickers. Watterson explained, "My strip is about private realities, the magic of imagination, and the specialness of certain friendships. Who would believe in the innocence of a little kid and his tiger if they cashed in on their popularity to sell overpriced knickknacks that nobody needs? Who would trust the honesty of the strip's observations when the characters are hired out as advertising hucksters?"

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Subject: riot photos

Aftermath of French Riots

01.2.2006 | Sara White Wilson | Partisan Art, Photography | 1 Comment

Perhaps the most disturbing paradox about the recent riots in France is that neighborhoods were self-destructing in order to gain a political voice. Much of the fervor of the past week recalls France’s tumultuous and bloody history of riot and revolt. The difference is that the disaffected rioters were not burning down government headquarters, they were burning their neighbor's car and their local grocery.

http://www.newpartisan.com/home/aftermath-of-french-riots.html

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Subject: tourism and New Orleans

Lose tourism

I mentioned in an earlier blog that New Orleans wouldn't be rebuilt because tourism is a losing business.

So many people have demanded proof that I dug up the data. The pure case is Maui, an island.

Maui is more than a pure case, it is a "best case" because the average tourist stays a whole week, rents a car and has no relatives in Maui. This compares with Disneyland or Disney World where people only stay for one day. There is virtually no other business in Maui, the farms produce sugar and pineapple worth less than 10% of the island's total revenue.

Here are the facts:

Here are the facts: 2.3 million tourists spend $2.5 billion dollars which supports 115,000 people permanently living on the island of Maui. Of the 115,000 residents, 55,000 work. The rest don't work; 1223threetouristsl_227,000 are under 18 years old, 12,000 are over 65 years old. Of the $2.5 billion that the tourists spend, $1.0 billion is spent on hotel and condo lodging, which directly supports 10,000 workers. Local transportation expenditures are half a billion dollars and support 5,000 transit drivers and other related workers. Another three-quarters of a billion dollars is spent on food, one third in restaurants, creating jobs for 3-4,000 cooks, waiters and other food service staff.

When thinking about tourism in New Orleans, it is better to modify data to more closely resemble San Francisco where four times as many out-of-the-area visitors spend half as much money as visitors to1223oldcitytourists Maui do. San Francisco and New Orleans have roughly the same number of tourists who spend the same amount of money.

That means that tourism could support a population in New Orleans and the surrounding area of less than 230,000 people. That is less than half of the pre-Katrina New Orleans City population of 480,000 and, considering the low wages in tourism, less than 100,000 could be expected to live in the City. So the City would shrink to less than one quarter of its size living on tourism.

I'll make the statement more emphatic: tourism, the only viable business, could barely support New Orleans at one quarter of its pre-Katrina population.

http://phillips.blogs.com/goc/2005/12/lose_tourism.html#more

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Subject: sitcoms

Four Generations Of Americans Demand Sitcom Reparations

July 25, 2001 | Issue 37•25

WASHINGTON, DC–Pressure is building for the nation's TV networks to offer a formal apology and reparations to the four generations of Americans who lost millions of hours to inane sitcoms.

Four Generations

Hello, Larry survivors demonstrate in front of NBC Studios in Burbank, CA.

"We, on behalf of this nation's 215 million Telecaust victims, demand extensive reparations from the perpetrators of these heartless and falsely heartfelt programs," said Meredith Bishop, 47, president of Americans For Sitcom Reparations (AFSR). "For hours wasted staring at mind-numbing swill, for idiotic pap promoted as outrageous romps, for an unending parade of very special episodes, season-ending cliffhangers, and celebrity walk-on appearances, we demand justice be served at long last."

AFSR leaders are calling for each Telecaust survivor to receive a minimum of $8,900 for his or her suffering. Under the AFSR plan, an additional $350 million would go toward the creation of a memorial to time killed during the Sitcom Era and toward educational programs designed to raise awareness and help prevent future sitcom crimes.

"The big TV networks can never erase the pain they have caused," said attorney Ben Feuerstein, who is representing the American public in what is believed to be the largest class-action lawsuit ever filed. "But at the very least, they can demonstrate an ounce of regret and repentance for their crimes by compensating those who, for decades, have suffered through everything from Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. to Herman's Head."

Said Tampa, FL, resident Helen Neimaier, who lost more than 20,000 hours to sitcoms from 1951 to 1998: "Every night, it was something different, yet completely the same: Mrs. Roper would mistakenly think Jack was giving Chrissie love lessons when he was actually giving her cooking lessons. Or Webster would learn an important lesson about playing with fire. But we were given nothing of substance to watch. And we would go to bed, only to begin again the next night at 8 p.m., 7 Central and Mountain."

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28354

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Subject: "New World"

The Indians, so far as we see them, never work. They take their ease and play all day, apparently, while living in peace, harmony and plenty. Meanwhile the settlers work and slave constantly and yet are reduced to eating shoe leather and each other. The latter seem to have no idea of hunting, fishing or agriculture and to be utterly dependent on getting game and corn from the Indians -- or supplies from England. They are only interested in searching for gold, even if they starve in the attempt, and in fighting each other. Similarly, the Indians are all attractive graceful, well-proportioned and handsomely decorated with tattoos, like Allen Iverson. The English are all dirty, ugly, toothless and bedraggled, or all of them except the obviously Irish Captain Smith, and their gold-lust -- or is it God-lust? -- makes them hate-filled, vicious, and constantly at one another's throats.

This easy schematization of complicated events only increases the basic incoherence at the heart of the movie. When Smith is saved from death by Pocahontas -- who, by the way, is never named in the film until she is re-named Rebecca -- he is presented with a stark choice: live the hippie life in peace, plenty, and sexual freedom among the Indians or go back to the English settlers and return to a life of nothing but hardship, treachery, bitterness, and celibacy. Which would you choose? Why Captain Smith goes back remains a mystery, as is his subsequent jilting of Pocahontas when it looks as if he could have her without going native. But Mr. Malick has little time for linear narrative and questions of motivation and plausibility. His film is organized as a series of tableaux vivants to which we must supply our own context. Even the rescue of Captain Smith by Pocahontas's throwing herself upon his body is not portrayed except in its aftermath, as the bodies are all tastefully arranged. Mr. Malick seems to have a positive distaste for action.

Likewise, in the battles between the English and the Indians, the latter always appear to be getting the better of the former, but all is chaotic and aimless and impossible to make any sense of militarily. There is just a series of pictures. Watching them you feel as if you are trying to make sense of a book in a language you don't understand from looking at the illustrations. Drama is also purged from the dialogue. There is more voiceover, meant to be seen as interior monologue and even prayer, God help us, than there is verbal interchange between the characters. Moreover, long passages of Indian speech are not subtitled, though shorter ones sometimes are. Pocahontas is soon speaking English like a native, but none of the English, even Captain Smith, appears to speak the Indian language. And Pocahontas's English is more often employed in voiceovers -- you mean she's already thinking in English? -- and solitary prayers to the Great Spirit, or "father" or "mother" or sun or moon -- than in communicating with the English. When Rolfe comes on the scene, blow me down if he doesn't start in on the voiceovers.

http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=9223

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Subject: today's hooligan

Times change, blowing full-time on English hooligans

Rick Broadbent

January 10, 2006

TONY O'NEILL once basked in the twisted glory of the tabloid title "Britain's most notorious soccer thug", travelled to fights in a converted minibus called the "War Wagon" and threatened to knock out David Beckham at Budapest airport. He has been shot in the stomach, banned from all grounds for seven years and is next in court this week. Some might argue that he does not deserve a voice, but it is surely worth listening to him when he says: "The day of the old-fashioned football hooligan is dead. It's over."

In the build-up to the World Cup in Germany, there will be a deluge of horror stories about English hooligans and the carnage that they are planning, but an almost trouble-free Euro 2004, improved policing and fans' initiatives - including a towel-and-sunbed race - have provided cause for optimism. The English disease is not cured. The most recent edition of Searchlight, the anti-fascist magazine, highlights the problem and tells the story of Darren Wells, a former member of Combat 18, the neo-Nazi group, insulting tourists and destroying artefacts at a Polish concentration camp while supporting England abroad. "We did it because it was a laugh," Wells said. "It was all just about being provocative. It was sticking two fingers up at a society we didn't like."

That attitude endures and, while the previous World Cup, in Japan and South Korea, was peaceful, England's draw against Sweden there was marked by hooligans attacking Asian taxi drivers in Burnley.

But if the English disease is not cured, it may well be in remission and a far cry from the 1980s, when the Union Jack was misappropriated and a snarling misanthropy ruled Britannia. On the night of the World Cup draw, about 150 England fans celebrated in London's Offside bar with a glass of riesling and a talk from Sven Goldmann, a German football writer. Mark Perryman, the organiser, said: "Anyone who goes looking for trouble or who is filled with hate should stay at home." The 3200 banning orders should help. So will the spotters at domestic ports and the British police officers who will travel to Germany. But according to former hooligans, there has been a change in attitudes.

"The firms will never be what they used to be," O'Neill said. "You don't see fans rampaging abroad any more and the reason is other countries have started taking it to the English. "Other countries are now far worse. When (Manchester) United played the Champions League semi-final in Leverkusen, Germans travelled 400 miles (650km) in white vans just to have a go." O'Neill also believes that the novelty factor has dwindled. The plethora of European games our top clubs now play means that England matches are no longer the rare chances "to take it to the foreigners". He added: "United fans have not been away with England since 1990. In the '70s, going abroad was all about thieving, in the '80s the violence came in, now England is just the likes of Stoke City and Shrewsbury Town bigging it up and posing for the cameras."

Cass Pennant, a former ringleader with West Ham United's ICF, agreed. "The top boys won't be going to Germany; it will be 18-year-old lager louts, the sort that get pissed and smash up pubs on a Saturday night," he said. "People say it's organised, but it's headless chickens. The trouble will come because the Eastern Europeans will be up for it. They will see England as a massive scalp." Applying sporting phrases to thuggery is all part of the romanticising of hooliganism, but Pennant did cut through realms of academic research to explain its attraction. "The stars used to be on the terraces," he said.

Put it down to Heysel, the drug-fuelled rave culture or CCTV, but England, once the scourge of football, is now far from the worst. The trouble that does occur is usually associated with lower-league clubs.

Elsewhere, Searchlight's Nick Lowles points out that Brazilian-born player Hernani was abused by fans of his own Polish team this season, sparking the anti-fascist movement, Never Again, to launch a campaign. In Romania, the mayor of Craiova blamed black players for the local club's poor form, saying: "If I put them in a zoo and showed them to kids saying look at the monkeys, they wouldn't see any difference." From racism in Spain to fascism in Rome, the deep-seated issues abroad can make England's binge-drink culture look almost small beer.

At Euro 2000, more than 900 English hooligans were expelled after rioting in Brussels and Charleroi. Four years later there were only 53 arrests in Portugal. With another 500 banning orders in place since then, hopes are high that the true England fans will enjoy their holidays in peace. The German authorities are certainly confident, encouraging a party atmosphere by erecting giant screens in leading cities and actively encouraging fans to travel without tickets.

Here.

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Subject: media affect people

Violent games make users more aggressive

VIOLENT computer games can trigger a mechanism in the brain that makes people more likely to behave aggressively. A study of the effects of popular games such as Doom, Mortal Kombat and Grand Theft Auto, which involve brutal killings, high-powered weaponry and street crime, indicates that avid users become desensitised to shocking acts of aggression. Psychologists found that this brain alteration, in turn, appeared to prime regular users of such games to act more violently. Many studies have concluded that people who play violent games are more aggressive, more likely to commit violent crimes and less likely to help others. Critics say these correlations prove only that violent people like violent games, not that games can change behaviour.

However, the new research, carried out by scientists at theUniversity of Missouri-Columbia, goes some way towards demonstrating a causal link between computer games and violence, rather than a simple association. When shown images of real-life violence, people who played violent video games were found to have a diminished brain response. The same group had more natural reactions to other emotionally disturbing images such as those of dead animals or ill children.

The team, led by Missouri-Columbia psychologist Bruce Bartholow, measured a type of brain activity called the P300 response, which reflects the emotional impact of an image on the viewer. The participants were shown real-life images interspersed with violent scenes and non-violent negative images. In subjects with the most experience of violent games, the P300 response to the violent images was smaller, and delayed. "People who play a lot of violent video games didn't see them as much different from neutral (images)," Dr Bartholow said. An early report of the study is published on newscientist.com.

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Subject: kwallege

Women's group calls for Paterno's job

Published January 9, 2006

The president of the National Organization for Women in Pennsylvania says Penn State coach Joe Paterno made outrageous remarks about an alleged sexual assault and wants him to resign. Joanne Tosti-Vasey said Paterno's comments represent an institutional insensitivity to women. Talking about Florida State linebacker A.J. Nicholson, who had been accused of sexual assault and sent home before the Orange Bowl, Paterno said: "There's so many people gravitating to these kids. He may not have even known what he was getting into, Nicholson. They knock on the door, a cute girl knocks on the door. What do you do? Geez. . . . He's a heck of a football player, by the way." Penn State spokesman Guido D'Elia said Paterno made his remarks in the context of bowl-game distractions. "If you were present, you understood he meant no malice," D'Elia said.

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Subject: agents nabbed

Report: Mossad agent caught in Iran

By YAAKOV KATZ AND JPOST STAFF

An Iranian newspaper in Teheran claimed Monday that an Israeli agent was detained by Iranian security forces, saying that the arrest "significantly hindered the Mossad's attempts to operate in Iran." According to Israel Radio, the Iranian paper did not say what sources had confirmed that an Israeli agent was indeed arrested. Israeli security officials have yet to respond to the Iranian paper's report.

In related news, Jaris Jaris, the former head of the Fasuta Local Council in the Upper Galilee suspected of spying on Israel for Iranian Intelligence, was indicted by a Haifa District Court on Monday on charges of having contact with foreign agents and for conspiring to give information to the enemy. His remand was extended by two days. In addition, some 10 days ago, one of his lawyers was caught trying to smuggle cellular calling cards into his prison cell.

The arrest of Jaris, 58, by Israel Police's Serious and International Crimes Unit together with the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) was released for publication last Friday. He was arrested on December 12, after police discovered that he had been recruited by Iran and was asked to use his political contacts to infiltrate the government and the Israeli political system by becoming a member of Knesset.

"Jaris' interrogation reveals a web of Iranian espionage activity against Israel," defense officials said. "The efforts included attempts to infiltrate an Iranian agent into the Knesset with the primary goal of obtaining classified information and influencing the government decisions." Jaris, police said, fled Israel in 1970 and moved to Lebanon after he was caught operating a Fatah terror cell. Once in Lebanon, Jaris continued working for the Fatah and was responsible for sending terrorists across the border into Israel. In 1996, Jaris returned to Israel together with additional officials from the Palestinian Authority and from May 2001 until November 2003 he served as the head of the Fasuta Local Council.

In September 2004, police said, Jaris traveled to Cyprus to meet with Hani Abdullah - a friend he made in Lebanon - to promote the establishment of a joint research center. Abdullah told Jaris that the center, if he wanted, could be funded by the Hizbullah and Iran. Jaris agreed. Two months later, police said, Abdullah called Jaris and told him to come to Cyprus to meet an Iranian donor for the center. During his police interrogation, Jaris admitted that the man he met was from Iranian Intelligence. The agent asked Jaris to "infiltrate the Israeli political system, to create political contacts and to join an existing Israeli political party," police said.

Jaris joined Meretz towards the end of 2004 and in conversations with political activists expressed interest in becoming a member of Knesset. Three months later, Jaris visited Cyprus for a third time. There he met with two Iranian agents who asked him about his past and his connections with politicians in Israel. Following the meeting, Jaris was asked to try and establish contacts with the top political echelon. Police said over the course of 2005 the Shin Bet noticed a significant rise in the number of Iranian attempts to recruit Israeli citizens as spies. The defense establishment has dealt with a number of cases in recent years of Israeli-Arabs who were suspected of maintaining contacts with Iran intelligence. Some of the Israelis worked in jobs, police said, that gained them access to sensitive information. Meretz rejected having any association with Jaris and released a statement claiming: "Jaris is one of 22,000 listed members of the party but is not at all involved in the party or in any of its institutions."

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Subject: idea

Edmund Burke: Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.

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Subject: bog man details

Prehistoric bog man used hair 'gel'

LONDON - The preserved remains of two prehistoric men discovered in an Irish bog have revealed a couple of surprises - one used hair gel and the other stood 6 foot 6 inches high, the tallest Iron Age body discovered. "He would have been a giant...the other man was quite short, about 5 foot 2 inches," said Ned Kelly, head of antiquities at the National Museum of Ireland. "The shorter man appeared to attempt to give himself greater stature by a rather curious headdress which was a bit like a Mohican-style with the hair gel, which was a resin imported from France," Kelly told BBC radio. Bacterial conditions found in the peat bogs preserved the remains so that even fingerprints were clearly visible.

The fashion-conscious gel wearer has been named Clonycavan Man and Kelly said the fact he was able to buy imported cosmetics suggests he was a wealthy member of Irish society about 2,300 years ago. The other was dubbed Oldcroghan Man.

Kelly said both men had murdered. "Oldcroghan Man was stabbed through the chest. He saw that attack coming because there is a defensive injury on his arm." He was then decapitated and his body cut in half while Clonycaven Man had his head split open with an axe before he was disembowelled.

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Subject: Daily Nigger

Two Niggers Charged In Slayings of 7 in Richmond Homes

Police Suspect Robbery Was Motive In Attacks on Two Families Last Week

By Jay Mathews

Washington Post Staff Writer

Monday, January 9, 2006; Page B03

Two 28-year-old men [sic - NIGGERS] have been charged with the killings of seven WHITE people in Richmond. The victims, including two children, were members of two Richmond families who were slain this month in their homes, police said. Ricky Gray, who grew up in Arlington, and Ray J. Dandridge, whose address was listed by police as unknown, remained in custody yesterday in Philadelphia, where officers aided by a SWAT team captured them Saturday at a house. Gray and Dandridge could be extradited to Virginia as early as today, authorities said.

Richmond Police Chief Rodney D. Monroe said police found members of one of the families -- Percyell Tucker, 55, his wife, Mary Baskerville, 47, and her daughter Ashley Baskerville, 21 -- dead Friday night at their home in the 3400 block of Broad Rock Road. The house had been ransacked, and several items were taken, including the family's car, a police report said.

Police said they quickly tied those killings to the New Year's Day slayings of Bryan Harvey, 49, his wife, Kathryn, 39, and their daughters, Stella, 9, and Ruby, 4, in their home in the 800 block of West 31st Street. All seven victims had been bound, police said. They said the Harveys' throats were cut and their home set on fire. Police have not said how Tucker and the Baskervilles were killed.

Here.

Ed. Note: When this story first hit the wires, the jewed media used all three names for both men, I believe to mislead the reader to infer they were rednecks rather than niggers. Now that at least one is revealed a nigger, the middle names are dropped.

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Subject: summarizing Sharon

Ariel Sharon, agent of perpetual war

By Rami G. Khouri

With the apparent end of his political life, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon deserves to be treated more fairly and completely than he treated the Palestinian, Lebanese and other neighboring Arab people whom he spent most of his life fighting, occupying, tormenting or killing. Global, especially American, media and political circles are widely hailing Sharon as an innovative, daring "man of peace." There are elements of truth in all these attributes, and some of Sharon's recent political acts may prove to have historic and positive consequences.

It is too early to judge - and in any case we should not judge Sharon on his style or goals, but rather on his actions and their consequences. On that basis, a much less flattering picture emerges from a more complete assessment of his life's work to date. In his petulant political life - unlike his bold military escapades - Sharon often deployed flashy tactics when he could not forge successful strategies and policies. He was a political illusionist who took the stage at a time when his people needed his kind of emotional force and comforting power - but he leaves behind a confused, fractured, uncertain landscape, in both Israel and Palestine.

He ends his public service having patently failed to achieve the one thing he says he strived most passionately for his entire life: to ensure the security and acceptance of Israel in the Middle East. His reliance on military force and tactical boldness proved, in the end, to be high drama but poor strategy. His one significant political action that must be acknowledged was his recent intriguing attempt to define and lead a new political "center" in Israeli politics that combined forces from his former Likud Party with others from the center and left.

Sharon's motives remained unclear. We can be generous and assume that he finally realized that Israel, and the Jewish people he saw himself as leading and defending, could not realistically or morally keep dealing with the Palestinians through long -term occupation, permanent annexation, military retribution, routine collective punishment, economic strangulation, and daily, institutionalized humiliation and dehumanization.

The sum of his life's actions, though, suggests that he is less a man of peace than a chronic creator of chaos and conflict, as his successors in power will learn soon enough. He entered hospital during an Israeli foreign policy episode that is one of the most ironically shocking testaments to the deadly combination of Sharon's political amateurism and reliance on force. He was frantically, almost hysterically, recreating in the northern Gaza Strip the same sort of "security zone" that Israeli created in South Lebanon after 1982, and that proved a colossal failure. Sharon seems not to have learned the lesson there: that only a truly free, sovereign Arab neighbor can be a peaceful neighbor to Israel.

Here.

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Subject: Gulf -Arab stock boom

Gulf stock markets make historic gains in 2005

Capitalization up by 118 percent

By Agence France Presse (AFP)

KUWAIT: Stock markets in Gulf Arab states made historic gains in 2005, more than doubling their total capitalization to well over one trillion dollars, driven by high liquidity and strong oil prices. Market capitalization in the six -nation Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) surged to $1.146 trillion at the end of last year, up by a massive 118 percent from $526.3 billion at the end of 2004, Kuwait's Bayan Investment Co said in a report.

Total market value of the seven stock markets of the energy -rich GCC states stood at just $119 billion in 2000, making almost a nine -fold gain during the past five years.

Here.

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Subject: Burke and the revolution in France

It is ironical that Jeff should appeal to Burke and to Russell Kirk, Burke's great twentieth -century apologist, to bolster his case. Following Matthew Arnold, Jeff offers Burke's 1791 "Thoughts on French Affairs" as a model for how an adult should approach political -social realities. Everyone knows that Burke eloquently warned against the cultural and moral devastations to be expected from the French Revolution in his Reflections. That was in 1790, well before the Terror, which didn't get underway until 1792. But did Burke change his mind? Jeff thinks so:

He recognized now that the complex forces bringing about the French Revolution had accumulated to the point, had acquired such irresistible power, that the ancien r?gime was doomed.

This is partly right. Burke wasn't trying to restore the ancien regime - -that was never part of his program. He was trying to stop the cancer of the French Revolution. In "Thoughts on French Affairs," a private memorandum that Burke wrote as part of his campaign to motivate England to go to war against France, he noted that the French Revolution, unlike this or that local revolution whose effects did not resonate much beyond one country's borders, was of "quite another character and description." The French Revolution, like the Reformation, was "a revolution of doctrine and theoretic dogma," which, "by its essence, could not be local or confined to the country in which it had its origin." What was at stake was nothing less than the future of European civilization and its moral, religious, social, and political institutions. "The message Burke sought to convey to Pitt" in that memorandum, Conor Cruise O'Brien notes in The Great Melody, his thematic biography of Burke, "was that the French Revolution was potentially as explosive an event, in social and political and military terms, as the Reformation had been."

Jeff quotes from the famous concluding paragraph of "Thoughts on French Affairs," "What is to be done?" Here is the whole thing.

It would be presumption in me to do more than to make a case. Many things occur. But as they, like all political measures, depend on dispositions, tempers, means, and external circumstances, for all their effect, not being well assured of these, I do not know how to let loose any speculations of mine on the subject. The evil is stated, in my opinion, as it exists. The remedy must be where power, wisdom, and information, I hope, are more united with good intentions than they can be with me. I have done with this subject, I believe, for ever. It has given me many anxious moments for the two last years. If a great change is to be made in human affairs, the minds of men will be fitted to it; the general opinions and feelings will draw that way. Every fear, every hope, will forward it; and then they, who persist in opposing this mighty current in human affairs, will appear rather to resist the decrees of Providence itself, than the mere designs of men. They will not be resolute and firm, but perverse and obstinate.

Like Matthew Arnold, Jeff presents this as, if not an about -face, at least a sort of resignation on the part of Burke: the accumulated realities of the situation, Jeff argues, suggest that we make our peace with the new order lest we appear "perverse and obstinate." Arnold (in "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time") puts it thus:

That return of Burke upon himself has always seemed to me one of the finest things in English literature, or indeed in any literature. That is what I call living by ideas: . . . still to be able to think, still to be irresistibly carried, if so be it, by the current of thought to the opposite side of the question. . .

But Arnold was wrong about Burke's being "carried . . . to the opposite side of the question," just as he was wrong that "Thoughts on French Affairs" "were some of the last pages he ever wrote." Burke wrote "Thoughts" in 1791; he lived on until 1797, and the disaster of the French Revolution was never far from his thoughts - -or his activities as a politician and rhetorician. "Burke never desisted," O'Brien noted, "from February 1790 on, from his attack on the French Revolution and its English sympathisers. But he was careful how he chose the ground of his attack. During the second half of 1791 and the first quarter of 1792 he fought the battle through correspondence, through conversation with powerful individuals, and above all through his great series of political tracts."

Russell Kirk makes a similar point in Edmund Burke: A Genius Reconsidered. Burke had advocated peace with the American colonies, concessions to Ireland, more generous relations with India. "But from 1790 onward, he demanded war to the knife against the European revolutionaries, going beyond Pitt and his cabinet in his sternness." Again, Jeff is right that Burke did not advocate restoration of the old regime in "Thoughts." Nor did he in any of his later writings on the subject. As he said in a letter to Marie Antoinette, should the King accept the new constitution, they were sure to be "undone" forever.

And so it was. But that did not diminish by a whit Burke's ferocity against the Revolution. Kirk has it exactly right, I believe, when he observes that Burke concluded "Thoughts" with a passage (quoted above) "which some scholars, very curiously, have interpreted as a mark of feebleness in Burke." To be sure, Burke was discouraged when he wrote "Thoughts." Like Churchill in the late 1930s, he was a near solitary voice crying in the wilderness. That concluding paragraph was not an instrument of surrender or capitulation; it was a calculated, if weary and (strange for Burke) rhetorically ambiguous, admission of the difficulties that lay ahead. As Kirk put it, what Burke was asking for in "Thoughts" was "an assault `with guns blazing' on revolutionary France." This was his consistent policy, expressed in numerous speeches, letters, and manifestos. In "Remarks on the Policy of the Allies with Respect to France" (1793), for example, he admonishes his readers to bear constantly in mind "the nature and character of the enemy we have to contend with. The Jacobin Revolution is carried on by men of no rank, of no consideration, of wild, savage minds, full of levity, arrogance, and presumption, without morals, without probity, without prudence." England must, he says, "meet a vicious and distempered energy with a manly and rational vigor. As virtue is limited in its resources, we are doubly bound to use all that in the circle drawn about us by our morals we are able to command."

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Subject: the jewing of art

An evening with Michael Fried

[Posted 1:38 PM by Roger Kimball]

Arm yourselves, friends: get a cup of coffee or a glass of wine. This is a long post.

This past Wednesday, I went to the Studio School on East 8th Street in New York to discuss the work of Gustave Courbet, the 19th -century French Realist painter. The other speaker was Michael Fried, a celebrated art historian who presides over the humanities center at the Johns Hopkins University. Professor Fried is the star of the first chapter of my book The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art, though in the interests of truth -in -advertising I should say that by "star" I mean "object of criticism and ridicule." Indeed, Professor Fried, though one of the most illustrious academic art historians in the contemporary firmament, is also one of the most preposterous. He is also one of the most intelligent - -and, as I discovered, most boorish - -which only adds to the drama.

The evening did not begin auspiciously. When I was asked to participate in the program a few months ago, I agreed with the proviso that Mr. Fried speak first. He occupied such a prominent place in The Rape of the Masters that I felt he should be given a chance to respond to the criticisms I made, after which I would in turn reply to his comments. But when I got to my office that afternoon, I found a faxed list of ground rules stipulating that the order of the speakers would be decided by coin toss and that neither speaker would mention the work of the other during his presentation - -a stricture that was doubly ridiculous: logistically, since it came the very day of the event and I had already written my talk; and substantively, since the whole reason for asking us to speak together was on account of my criticisms of Professor Fried's work.

I called the organizers to say that I could not agree to those rules, especially as they had been sprung at the last moment. They said fine, we'll work it out, come along at 6:00 p.m. Mr. Fried was not amused. "I'm out," he said, much to the chagrin of the dean of the school who was preparing to face the couple of hundred people who had toddled along to witness the festivities. He just couldn't abide "philistine" exchanges in which he might actually be called to account for his ideas. More mollifying talk from the dean. I agreed to go first. Grudgingly, Mr. Fried accepted. It was clearly painful for him to contemplate appearing alongside so declasse a figure as I.

Well, it all went as I expected. I spoke first, nattering on for about 30 minutes, 10 minutes over budget, a figure Professor Fried complainingly inflated to 40 minutes when he got up and proceeded to talk for just over an hour. I would estimate that audience reaction ran about 4 or 5 to 1 in Professor Fried's favor, a ratio I am used to when speaking at universities, but which surprised me at the Studio School. One new prejudice on display that I hadn't seen before was the contemptuous deprecation of PowerPoint presentations in favor of slides. Mr. Fried several times indulged in sarcasm about my use of PowerPoint, though not, I noticed, during the 3 or 4 minutes when one of his slide carousels broke down and the audience sat in the darkened hall watching squares of bright white light flash on and off on the wall in front of them. Both technologies, I think, are grossly inadequate for displaying works of art. There is really no substitute for the original. But if you want to provide people with visual memoranda of art works, are slides really preferable? Some say the colors are more accurate. Maybe. It probably depends on the care with which you select the digital image. I did not exercise particular care because the point of my talk did not depend on such discriminations (I regret, though, that one of the images I used was reversed - -a mistake that Professor Fried commented on early and often).

At the center of the The Rape of the Masters are seven case studies of how contemporary academic art history has gone wrong. Professor Fried occupies an honored place in my rogue's gallery, for with him, as I show, art history has gone horribly wrong. This is not to say that Professor Fried is not learned in his subject: indeed, he knows an immense amount about Courbet, Adolf Menzel, and the other artists on whose work he has lavished his attention. He is also capable of sensitive aesthetic discrimination, as he showed on at least one occasion in the course of his talk when discussing Courbet's great painting "The Artist's Studio."

But in the end, whatever artist he discusses, Professor Fried is really much more interested in himself: in his pet, vaguely psychoanalytic theories about artists and their relationship to their art.

[...]



But ask yourself this: what would Courbet have to say if someone told him his painting strove to "eliminate the distinction" between the sexes? Or that it was concerned with "the metaphorics of phallicism, menstrual bleeding," etc.? The scattering of grain in The Wheat Sifters (1853 -1854), Professor Fried tells us, "can also be seen as a downpour of menstrual blood - -not red but warm -hued and sticky -seeming, flooding outward from the sifter's rose -draped thighs."

Unfortunately for this interpretation, Courbet clearly, indeed cleverly, painted grain, not blood. It is one of the triumphs of that painting that he is able to make his pigment seem so light and airy; pace Professor Fried, it impresses the viewer not as something that floods outward from the sifter's thighs but that floats down from the sifting pan she holds out before her. Look and see.

http://www.newcriterion.com/weblog/armavirumque.html

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Subject: licensing parents?

DAVID LYKKEN
Behavioral geneticist and Emeritus Professor of Psychology, University of Minnesota; Author, Happiness

Laws requiring parental licensure

I believe that, during my grandchildren's lifetimes, the U.S. Supreme Court will find a way to approve laws requiring parental licensure.

Traditional societies in which children are socialized collectively, the method to which our species is evolutionarily adapted, have very little crime. In the modern U.S., the proportion of fatherless children, living with unmarried mothers, currently some 10 million in all, has increased more than 400% since 1960 while the violent crime rate rose 500% by 1994, before dipping slightly due to a delayed but equal increase in the number of prison inmates (from 240,000 to 1.4 million.) In 1990, across the 50 States, the correlation between the violent crime rate and the proportion of illegitimate births was 0.70.

About 70% of incarcerated delinquents, of teen-age pregnancies, of adolescent runaways, involve (I think result from) fatherless rearing. Because these frightening curves continue to accelerate, I believe we must eventually confront the need for parental licensure -- you can't keep that newborn unless you are 21, married and self-supporting -- not just for society's safety but so those babies will have a chance for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

[no mention of race. nigger crime used as pretext for government expansion. the government loves niggers, they are its 'customers' and its pretext.]

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Subject: school's out

ROGER C. SCHANK
Psychologist & Computer Scientist; Chief Learning Officer, Trump University; Author, Making Minds Less Well Educated than Our Own

No More Teacher's Dirty Looks

After a natural disaster, the newscasters eventually excitedly announce that school is finally open so no matter what else is terrible where they live, the kids are going to school. I always feel sorry for the poor kids.

My dangerous idea is one that most people immediately reject without giving it serious thought: school is bad for kids - - it makes them unhappy and as tests show - - they don't learn much.

When you listen to children talk about school you easily discover what they are thinking about in school: who likes them, who is being mean to them, how to improve their social ranking, how to get the teacher to treat them well and give them good grades.

Schools are structured today in much the same way as they have been for hundreds of years. And for hundreds of years philosophers and others have pointed out that school is really a bad idea:

We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a belly full of words and do not know a thing. - - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught. - - Oscar Wilde

Schools should simply cease to exist as we know them. The Government needs to get out of the education business and stop thinking it knows what children should know and then testing them constantly to see if they regurgitate whatever they have just been spoon fed.

The Government is and always has been the problem in education:

If the government would make up its mind to require for every child a good education, it might save itself the trouble of providing one. It might leave to parents to obtain the education where and how they pleased, and content itself with helping to pay the school fees of the poorer classes of children, and defraying the entire school expenses of those who have no one else to pay for them. - - JS Mill

First, God created idiots. That was just for practice. Then He created school boards. - - Mark Twain

Schools need to be replaced by safe places where children can go to learn how to do things that they are interested in learning how to do. Their interests should guide their learning. The government's role should be to create places that are attractive to children and would cause them to want to go there.

Whence it comes to pass, that for not having chosen the right course, we often take very great pains, and consume a good part of our time in training up children to things, for which, by their natural constitution, they are totally unfit. - - Montaigne

We had a President many years ago who understood what education is really for. Nowadays we have ones that make speeches about the Pythagorean Theorem when we are quite sure they don't know anything about any theorem.

There are two types of education. . . One should teach us how to make a living, And the other how to live. - - John Adams

Over a million students have opted out of the existing school system and are now being home schooled. The problem is that the states regulate home schooling and home schooling still looks an awful lot like school.

We need to stop producing a nation of stressed out students who learn how to please the teacher instead of pleasing themselves. We need to produce adults who love learning, not adults who avoid all learning because it reminds them of the horrors of school. We need to stop thinking that all children need to learn the same stuff. We need to create adults who can think for themselves and are not convinced about how to understand complex situations in simplistic terms that can be rendered in a sound bite.

Just call school off. Turn them all into apartment houses.

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Subject: liberal arts these days

DENIS DUTTON
Professor of the philosophy of art, University of Canterbury, New Zealand, editor of Philosophy and Literature and Arts & Letters Daily

A "grand narrative"

The humanities have gone through the rise of Theory in the 1960s, its firm hold on English and literature departments through the 1970s and 80s, followed most recently by its much -touted decline and death.

Of course, Theory (capitalization is an English department affectation) never operated as a proper research program in any scientific sense -- with hypotheses validated (or falsified) by experiment or accrued evidence. Theory was a series of intellectual fashion statements, clever slogans and postures, imported from France in the 60s, then developed out of Yale and other Theory hot spots. The academic work Theory spawned was noted more for its chosen jargons, which functioned like secret codes, than for any concern to establish truth or advance knowledge. It was all about careers and prestige.

Truth and knowledge, in fact, were ruled out as quaint illusions. This cleared the way, naturally, for an "anything-goes" atmosphere of academic criticism. In reality, it was anything but anything goes, since the political demands of the period included a long list of stereotyped villains (the West, the Enlightenment, dead whites males, even clear writing) to be pitted against mandatory heroines and heroes (indigenous peoples, the working class, the oppressed, and so forth).

Though the politics remains as strong as ever in academe, Theory has atrophied not because it was refuted, but because everyone got bored with it. Add to that the absurdly bad writing of academic humanists of the period and episodes like the Sokal Hoax, and the decline was inevitable. Theory academics could with high seriousness ignore rational counter -arguments, but for them ridicule and laughter were like water thrown at the Wicked Witch. Theory withered and died.

But wait. Here is exactly where my most dangerous idea comes in. What if it turned out that the academic humanities -- art criticism, music and literary history, aesthetic theory, and the philosophy of art -- actually had available to them a true, and therefore permanently valuable, theory to organize their speculations and interpretations? What if there really existed a hitherto unrecognized "grand narrative" that could explain the entire history of creation and experience of the arts worldwide?

Aesthetic experience, as well as the context of artistic creation, is a phenomenon both social and psychological. From the standpoint of inner experience, it can be addressed by evolutionary psychology: the idea that our thinking and values are conditioned by the 2.6 million years of natural and sexual selection in the Pleistocene.

This Darwinian theory has much to say about the abiding, cross-culturally ascertainable values human beings find in art. The fascination, for example, that people worldwide find in the exercise of artistic virtuosity, from Praxiteles to Hokusai to Renee Fleming, is not a social construct, but a Pleistocene adaptation (which outside of the arts shows itself in sporting interests everywhere). That calendar landscapes worldwide feature alternating copses of trees and open spaces, often hilly land, water, and paths or river banks that wind into an inviting distance is a Pleistocene landscape preference (which shows up in both art history and in the design of public parks everywhere). That soap operas and Greek tragedy all present themes of family breakdown ("She killed him because she loved him") is a reflection of ancient, innate content interests in story-telling.

Darwinian theory offers substantial answers to perennial aesthetic questions. It has much to say about the origins of art. It's unlikely that the arts came about at one time or for one purpose; they evolved from overlapping interests based in survival and mate selection in the 80,000 generations of the Pleistocene. How we scan visually, how we hear, our sense of rhythm, the pleasures of artistic expression and in joining with others as an audience, and, not least, how the arts excite us using a repertoire of universal human emotions: all of this and more will be illuminated and explained by a Darwinian aesthetics.

I've encountered stiff academic resistance to the notion that Darwinian theory might greatly improve the understanding of our aesthetic and imaginative lives. There's no reason to worry. The most complete, evolutionarily-based explanation of a great work of art, classic or recent, will address its form, its narrative content, its ideology, how it is taken in by the eye or mind, and indeed, how it can produce a deep, even life-transforming pleasure. But nothing in a valid aesthetic psychology will rob art of its appeal, any more than knowing how we evolved to enjoy fat and sweet makes a piece of cheesecake any less delicious. Nor will a Darwinian aesthetics reduce the complexity of art to simple formulae. It will only give us a better understanding of the greatest human achievements and their effects on us.

In the sense that it would show innumerable careers in the humanities over the last forty years to have been wasted on banal politics and execrable criticism, Darwinian aesthetics is a very dangerous idea indeed. For people who really care about understanding art, it would be a combination of fresh air and strong coffee.

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Subject: applied history

A dangerous thought: What if public policy makers have an obligation to engage historians, and historians have an obligation to try to help?

And instead of just retailing advice, go generic. Historians could set about developing a rigorous sub-discipline called "Applied History."

There is only one significant book on the subject, published in 1988. Thinking In Time: The Uses of Hustory for Decision Makers was written by the late Richard Neustadt and Ernest May, who long taught a course on the subject at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. (A course called "Reasoning from History" is currently taught there by Alexander Keyssar.)

Done wrong, Applied History could paralyze public decision making and corrupt the practice of history - - that's the danger. But done right, Applied History could make decision making and policy far more sophisticated and adaptive, and it could invest the study of history with the level of consequence it deserves.

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Subject: 'dangerous' ideas

The dangerous idea is that all of us contain within our large brains adaptations whose functions are to commit despicable atrocities against our fellow humans -- atrocities most would label evil.

The unfortunate fact is that killing has proved to be an effective solution to an array of adaptive problems in the ruthless evolutionary games of survival and reproductive competition: Preventing injury, rape, or death; protecting one's children; eliminating a crucial antagonist; acquiring a rival's resources; securing sexual access to a competitor's mate; preventing an interloper from appropriating one's own mate; and protecting vital resources needed for reproduction. ...

The danger comes from people who refuse to recognize that there are dark sides of human nature that cannot be wished away by attributing them to the modern ills of culture, poverty, pathology, or exposure to media violence.

***

MARCO IACOBONI
Neuroscientist; Director, Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Lab, UCLA

Media Violence Induces Imitative Violence: The Problem With Super Mirrors

Media violence induces imitative violence. If true, this idea is dangerous for at least two main reasons. First, because its implications are highly relevant to the issue of freedom of speech. Second, because it suggests that our rational autonomy is much more limited than we like to think. This idea is especially dangerous now, because we have discovered a plausible neural mechanism that can explain why observing violence induces imitative violence. Moreover, the properties of this neural mechanism - - the human mirror neuron system - - suggest that imitative violence may not always be a consciously mediated process. The argument for protecting even harmful speech (intended in a broad sense, including movies and videogames) has typically been that the effects of speech are always under the mental intermediation of the listener/viewer. If there is a plausible neurobiological mechanism that suggests that such intermediate step can be by -passed, this argument is no longer valid.

For more than 50 years behavioral data have suggested that media violence induces violent behavior in the observers. Meta -data show that the effect size of media violence is much larger than the effect size of calcium intake on bone mass, or of asbestos exposure to cancer. Still, the behavioral data have been criticized. How is that possible? Two main types of data have been invoked. Controlled laboratory experiments and correlational studies assessing types of media consumed and violent behavior. The lab data have been criticized on the account of not having enough ecological validity, whereas the correlational data have been criticized on the account that they have no explanatory power. Here, as a neuroscientist who is studying the human mirror neuron system and its relations to imitation, I want to focus on a recent neuroscience discovery that may explain why the strong imitative tendencies that humans have may lead them to imitative violence when exposed to media violence.

Mirror neurons are cells located in the premotor cortex, the part of the brain relevant to the planning, selection and execution of actions. In the ventral sector of the premotor cortex there are cells that fire in relation to specific goal-related motor acts, such as grasping, holding, tearing, and bringing to the mouth. Surprisingly, a subset of these cells -- what we call mirror neurons -- also fire when we observe somebody else performing the same action. The behavior of these cells seems to suggest that the observer is looking at her/his own actions reflected by a mirror, while watching somebody else's actions. My group has also shown in several studies that human mirror neuron areas are critical to imitation. There is also evidence that the activation of this neural system is fairly automatic, thus suggesting that it may by-pass conscious mediation. Moreover, mirror neurons also code the intention associated with observed actions, even though there is not a one-to-one mapping between actions and intentions (I can grasp a cup because I want to drink or because I want to put it in the dishwasher). This suggests that this system can indeed code sequences of action (i.e., what happens after I grasp the cup), even though only one action in the sequence has been observed.

Some years ago, when we still were a very small group of neuroscientists studying mirror neurons and we were just starting investigating the role of mirror neurons in intention understanding, we discussed the possibility of super mirror neurons. After all, if you have such a powerful neural system in your brain, you also want to have some control or modulatory neural mechanisms. We have now preliminary evidence suggesting that some prefrontal areas have super mirrors. I think super mirrors come in at least two flavors. One is inhibition of overt mirroring, and the other one -- the one that might explain why we imitate violent behavior, which require a fairly complex sequence of motor acts -- is mirroring of sequences of motor actions. Super mirror mechanisms may provide a fairly detailed explanation of imitative violence after being exposed to media violence.

***

DAVID BODANIS
Writer, Consultant; Author: The Electric Universe

The hyper-Islamicist critique of the West as a decadent force that is already on a downhill course might be true

I wonder sometimes if the hyper-Islamicist critique of the West as a decadent force that is already on a downhill course might be true. At first it seems impossible: no one's richer than the US, and no one has as powerful an Army; western Europe has vast wealth and university skills as well.

But what got me reflecting was the fact that in just four years after Pearl Harbor, the US had defeated two of the greatest military forces the world had ever seen. Everyone naturally accepted there had to be restrictions on gasoline sales, to preserve limited source of gasoline and rubber; profiteers were hated. But the first four years after 9/11? Detroit automakers find it easy to continue paying off congressmen to ensure that gasoline-wasting SUV's aren't restricted in any way.

There are deep trends behind this. Technology is supposed to be speeding up, but if you think about it, airplanes have a similar feel and speed to ones of 30 years ago; cars and oil rigs and credit cards and the operations of the NYSE might be a bit more efficient than a few decades ago, but also don't feel fundamentally different. Aside from the telephones, almost all the objects and and daily habits in Spielberg's 20 year old film E.T. are about the same as today.

What has transformed is the possibility of quick change. It's a lot, lot harder than it was before. Patents for vague, general ideas are much easier to get than they were before, which slows down the introduction of new technology; academics in biotech and other fields are wary about sharing their latest research with potentially competing colleagues (which slows down the creation of new technology as well).

Even more, there's a tension, a fear of falling from the increasingly fragile higher tiers of society, which means that social barriers are higher as well. I went to adequate but not extraordinary public (state) schools in Chicago, but my children go to private schools. I suspect that many contributors to this site, unless they live in academic towns where state schools are especially strong, are in a similar position. This is fine for our children, but not for those of the same theoretical potential, yet who lack parents who can afford it.

Sheer inertia can mask such flaws for quite a while. The National Academy of Sciences has shown that, once again, the percentage of American-born university students studying the hard physical sciences has gone down. At one time that didn't matter, for life in America -- and at the top American universities -- was an overwhelming lure for ambitious youngsters from Seoul and Bangalore. But already there are signs of that slipping, and who knows what it'll be like in another decade or two.

There's another sort of inertia that's coming to an end as well. The first generation of immigrants from farm to city bring with them the attitudes of their farm world; the first generation of 'migrants' from blue collar city neighborhoods to upper middle class professional life bring similar attitudes of responsibility as well. We ignore what the media pours out about how we're supposed to live. We're responsible for parents, even when it's not to our economic advantage; we vote against our short-term economic interests, because it's the 'right' thing to do; we engage in philanthropy towards individuals of very different backgrounds from ourselves. But why? In many parts of America or Europe, the rules and habits creating those attitudes no longer exist at all.

When that finally gets cut away, will what replaces it be strong enough for us to survive?

***

GEOFFREY MILLER
Evolutionary Psychologist, University of New Mexico; Author, The Mating Mind

Runaway consumerism explains the Fermi Paradox

The story goes like this: Sometime in the 1940s, Enrico Fermi was talking about the possibility of extra-terrestrial intelligence with some other physicists. They were impressed that our galaxy holds 100 billion stars, that life evolved quickly and progressively on earth, and that an intelligent, exponentially-reproducing species could colonize the galaxy in just a few million years. They reasoned that extra-terrestrial intelligence should be common by now. Fermi listened patiently, then asked simply, "So, where is everybody?". That is, if extra-terrestrial intelligence is common, why haven't we met any bright aliens yet? This conundrum became known as Fermi's Paradox.

The paradox has become more ever more baffling. Over 150 extrasolar planets have been identified in the last few years, suggesting that life-hospitable planets orbit most stars. Paleontology shows that organic life evolved very quickly after earth's surface cooled and became life-hospitable. Given simple life, evolution shows progressive trends towards larger bodies, brains, and social complexity. Evolutionary psychology reveals several credible paths from simpler social minds to human-level creative intelligence. Yet 40 years of intensive searching for extra-terrestrial intelligence have yielded nothing. No radio signals, no credible spacecraft sightings, no close encounters of any kind.

So, it looks as if there are two possibilities. Perhaps our science over-estimates the likelihood of extra-terrestrial intelligence evolving. Or, perhaps evolved technical intelligence has some deep tendency to be self-limiting, even self-exterminating. After Hiroshima, some suggested that any aliens bright enough to make colonizing space-ships would be bright enough to make thermonuclear bombs, and would use them on each other sooner or later. Perhaps extra-terrestrial intelligence always blows itself up. Fermi's Paradox became, for a while, a cautionary tale about Cold War geopolitics.

I suggest a different, even darker solution to Fermi's Paradox. Basically, I think the aliens don't blow themselves up; they just get addicted to computer games. They forget to send radio signals or colonize space because they're too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissism. They don't need Sentinels to enslave them in a Matrix; they do it to themselves, just as we are doing today.

The fundamental problem is that any evolved mind must pay attention to indirect cues of biological fitness, rather than tracking fitness itself. We don't seek reproductive success directly; we seek tasty foods that tended to promote survival and luscious mates who tended to produce bright, healthy babies. Modern results: fast food and pornography. Technology is fairly good at controlling external reality to promote our real biological fitness, but it's even better at delivering fake fitness -- subjective cues of survival and reproduction, without the real-world effects. Fresh organic fruit juice costs so much more than nutrition-free soda. Having real friends is so much more effort than watching Friends on TV. Actually colonizing the galaxy would be so much harder than pretending to have done it when filming Star Wars or Serenity.

Fitness-faking technology tends to evolve much faster than our psychological resistance to it. The printing press is invented; people read more novels and have fewer kids; only a few curmudgeons lament this. The Xbox 360 is invented; people would rather play a high-resolution virtual ape in Peter Jackson's King Kong than be a perfect-resolution real human. Teens today must find their way through a carnival of addictively fitness-faking entertainment products: MP3, DVD, TiVo, XM radio, Verizon cellphones, Spice cable, EverQuest online, instant messaging, Ecstasy, BC Bud. The traditional staples of physical, mental, and social development (athletics, homework, dating) are neglected. The few young people with the self-control to pursue the meritocratic path often get distracted at the last minute -- the MIT graduates apply to do computer game design for Electronics Arts, rather than rocket science for NASA.

Around 1900, most inventions concerned physical reality: cars, airplanes, zeppelins, electric lights, vacuum cleaners, air conditioners, bras, zippers. In 2005, most inventions concern virtual entertainment -- the top 10 patent-recipients are usually IBM, Matsushita, Canon, Hewlett-Packard, Micron Technology, Samsung, Intel, Hitachi, Toshiba, and Sony -- not Boeing, Toyota, or Wonderbra. We have already shifted from a reality economy to a virtual economy, from physics to psychology as the value-driver and resource-allocator. We are already disappearing up our own brainstems. Freud's pleasure principle triumphs over the reality principle. We narrow-cast human-interest stories to each other, rather than broad-casting messages of universal peace and progress to other star systems.

Maybe the bright aliens did the same. I suspect that a certain period of fitness-faking narcissism is inevitable after any intelligent life evolves. This is the Great Temptation for any technological species -- to shape their subjective reality to provide the cues of survival and reproductive success without the substance. Most bright alien species probably go extinct gradually, allocating more time and resources to their pleasures, and less to their children.

Heritable variation in personality might allow some lineages to resist the Great Temptation and last longer. Those who persist will evolve more self-control, conscientiousness, and pragmatism. They will evolve a horror of virtual entertainment, psychoactive drugs, and contraception. They will stress the values of hard work, delayed gratification, child-rearing, and environmental stewardship. They will combine the family values of the Religious Right with the sustainability values of the Greenpeace Left.

My dangerous idea-within-an-idea is that this, too, is already happening. Christian and Muslim fundamentalists, and anti-consumerism activists, already understand exactly what the Great Temptation is, and how to avoid it. They insulate themselves from our Creative-Class dream-worlds and our EverQuest economics. They wait patiently for our fitness-faking narcissism to go extinct. Those practical-minded breeders will inherit the earth, as like-minded aliens may have inherited a few other planets. When they finally achieve Contact, it will not be a meeting of novel-readers and game-players. It will be a meeting of dead-serious super-parents who congratulate each other on surviving not just the Bomb, but the Xbox. They will toast each other not in a soft-porn Holodeck, but in a sacred nursery.

***

KAI KRAUSE
Researcher, philosopher, software developer, Author: 3DScience: new Scanning Electron Microscope imagery

Anty Gravity: Chaos Theory in an all too practical sense

Dangerous Ideas? It is dangerous ideas you want? From this group of people ? That in itself ought to be nominated as one of the more dangerous ideas...

Danger is ubiquitous. If recent years have shown us anything, it should be that "very simple small events can cause real havoc in our society". A few hooded youths play cat and mouse with the police: bang, thousands of burned cars put all of Paris into a complete state of paralysis, mandatory curfew and the entire system in shock and horror.

My first thought was: what if any really smart set of people really set their mind to it...how utterly and scarily trivial it would be, to disrupt the very fabric of life, to bring society to a dead stop?

The relative innocence and stable period of the last 50 years may spiral into a nearly inevitable exposure to real chaos. What if it isn't haphazard testosterone driven riots, where they cannibalize their own neighborhood, much like in L.A. in the 80s, but someone with real insight behind that criminal energy ? What if Slashdotters start musing aloud about "Gee, the L.A. water supply is rather simplistic, isn't it?" An Open Source crime web, a Wiki for real WTO opposition ? Hacking L.A. may be a lot easier than hacking IE.

That is basic banter over a beer in a bar, I don't even want to actually speculate what a serious set of brainiacs could conjure up. And I refuse to even give it any more print space here. However, the danger of such sad memes is what requires our attention!

In fact, I will broaden the specter still: its not violent crime and global terrorism I worry about, as much as the basic underpinning of our entire civilization coming apart, as such. No acts of malevolence, no horrible plans by evil dark forces, neither the singular "Bond Nemesis" kind, nor masses of religious fanatics. None of that needed... It is the glue that is coming apart to topple this tower. And no, I am not referring to "spiraling trillions of debt".

No, what I am referring to is a slow process I observed over the last 30 years, ever since in my teens I wondered "How would this world work, if everyone were like me ?" and realized: it wouldn't !

It was amazing to me that there were just enough people to make just enough shoes so that everyone can avoid walking barefoot. That there are people volunteering to spend day-in, day-out, being dentists, and lawyers and salesmen. Almost any "jobjob" I look at, I have the most sincere admiration for the tenacity of the people...how do they do it? It would drive me nuts after hours, let alone years...Who makes those shoes ?

That was the wondrous introspection in adolescent phases, searching for a place in the jigsaw puzzle.

But in recent years, the haunting question has come back to me: "How the hell does this world function at all? And does it, really ? I feel an alienation zapping through the channels, I can't find myself connecting with those groups of humanoids trouncing around MTV. Especially the glimpses of "real life": on daytime-courtroom-dramas or just looking at faces in the street. On every scale, the closer I observe it, the more the creeping realization haunts me: individuals, families, groups, neighborhoods, cities, states, countries... they all just barely hang in there, between debt and dysfunction. The whole planet looks like Any town with mini malls cutting up the landscape and just down the road it's all white trash with rusty car wrecks in the back yard. A huge Groucho Club I don't want to be a member of.

But it does go further: what is particularly disturbing to see is this desperate search for Individualism that has rampantly increased in the last decade or so.

Everyone suddenly needs to be so special, be utterly unique. So unique that they race off like lemmings to get 'even more individual' tattoos, branded cattle, with branded chains in every mall, converging on a blanded sameness world wide, but every rap singer with ever more gold chains in ever longer stretched limos is singing the tune: Don't be a loser! Don't be normal! The desperation with which millions of youngsters try to be that one-in-a-million professional ball player may have been just a "sad but silly factoid" for a long time.

But now the tables are turning: the anthill is relying on the behaviour of the ants to function properly. And that implies: the social behaviour, the role playing, taking defined tasks and follow them through.

What if each ant suddenly wants to be the queen? What if soldiering and nest building and cleaning chores is just not cool enough any more?

If AntTV shows them every day nothing but un-Ant behaviour...?

In my youth we were whining about what to do and how to do it, but in the end,all of my friends did become "normal" humans, orthopedics and lawyers, social workers, teachers... There were always a few that lived on the edges of normality, like ending up as television celebrities, but on the whole: they were perfectly reasonable ants. 1.8 children, 2.7 cars, 3.3 TVs...

Now: I am no longer confident that line will continue. If every honeymoon is now booked in Bali on a Visa card, and every kid in Borneo wants to play ball in NYC... can the network of society be pliable enough to accommodate total upheaval? And what if 2 billion Chinese and Indians raise a generation of kids staring 6+ hours a day into All American values they can never attain... being taunted with Hollywood movies of heroic acts and pathetic dysfunctionality, coupled with ever increasing violence and disdain for ethics or morals.

Seeing scenes of desperate youths in South American slums watching "Kill Bill" makes me think: this is just oxygen thrown into the fire... The ants will not play along much longer. The anthill will not survive if even a small fraction of the system is falling apart.

Couple that inane drive for "Super Individualism" (and the Quest for Coolness by an ever increasing group destined to fail miserably) with the scarily simple realization of how effective even a small set of desperate people can become, then add the obvious penchant for religious fanaticism and you have an ugly picture of the long term future.

So many curves that grow upwards towards limits, so many statistics that show increases and no way to turn around.

Many in this forum may speculate about infinite life spans, changing the speed of light, finding ways to decode consciousness, wormholes to other dimensions and finding grand unified theories.

To make it clear: I applaud that! "It does take all kinds". Diversity is indeed one of the definitions of the meaning of life. Edge IS Applied Diversity.

Those are viable and necessary questions for mankind as a whole, however: I believe we need to clean house, re-evaluate, redefine the priorities.

While we look at the horizon here in these pages, it is the very ground beneath us, that may be crumbling. The ant hill could really go to ant hell! Next year, let's ask for good ideas. Really practical, serious, good ideas. "The most immediate positive global impact of any kind that can be achieved within one year?". How to envision Internet3 and Web3 as a real platform for a global brainstorming with 6+ billion potential participants.

This was not meant to sound like doom and gloom naysaying. I see myself as a sincere optimist, but one who believes in realistic pessimism as a useful tool to initiate change.

***

JUDITH RICH HARRIS
Independent Investigator and Theoretician; Author, The Nurture Assumption

The idea of zero parental influence

Is it dangerous to claim that parents have no power at all (other than genetic) to shape their child's personality, intelligence, or the way he or she behaves outside the family home? More to the point, is this claim false? Was I wrong when I proposed that parents' power to do these things by environmental means is zero, nada, zilch?

A confession: When I first made this proposal ten years ago, I didn't fully believe it myself. I took an extreme position, the null hypothesis of zero parental influence, for the sake of scientific clarity. Making myself an easy target, I invited the establishment -- research psychologists in the academic world -- to shoot me down. I didn't think it would be all that difficult for them to do so. It was clear by then that there weren't any big effects of parenting, but I thought there must be modest effects that I would ultimately have to acknowledge.

The establishment's failure to shoot me down has been nothing short of astonishing. One developmental psychologist even admitted, one year ago on this very website, that researchers hadn't yet found proof that "parents do shape their children," but she was still convinced that they will eventually find it, if they just keep searching long enough.

Her comrades in arms have been less forthright. "There are dozens of studies that show the influence of parents on children!" they kept saying, but then they'd somehow forget to name them -- perhaps because these studies were among the ones I had already demolished (by showing that they lacked the necessary controls or the proper statistical analyses). Or they'd claim to have newer research that provided an airtight case for parental influence, but again there was a catch: the work had never been published in a peer-reviewed journal. When I investigated, I could find no evidence that the research in question had actually been done or, if done, that it had produced the results that were claimed for it. At most, it appeared to consist of preliminary work, with too little data to be meaningful (or publishable).

Vaporware, I call it. Some of the vaporware has achieved mythic status. You may have heard of Stephen Suomi's experiment with nervous baby monkeys, supposedly showing that those reared by "nurturant" adoptive monkey mothers turn into calm, socially confident adults. Or of Jerome Kagan's research with nervous baby humans, supposedly showing that those reared by "overprotective" (that is, nurturant) human mothers are more likely to remain fearful.

Researchers like these might well see my ideas as dangerous. But is the notion of zero parental influence dangerous in any other sense? So it is alleged. Here's what Frank Farley, former president of the American Psychological Association, told a journalist in 1998:

[Harris's] thesis is absurd on its face, but consider what might happen if parents believe this stuff! Will it free some to mistreat their kids, since "it doesn't matter"? Will it tell parents who are tired after a long day that they needn't bother even paying any attention to their kid since "it doesn't matter"?

Farley seems to be saying that the only reason parents are nice to their children is because they think it will make the children turn out better! And that if parents believed that they had no influence at all on how their kids turn out, they are likely to abuse or neglect them.

Which, it seems to me, is absurd on its face. Most chimpanzee mothers are nice to their babies and take good care of them. Do chimpanzees think they're going to influence how their offspring turn out? Doesn't Frank Farley know anything at all about evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology?

My idea is viewed as dangerous by the powers that be, but I don't think it's dangerous at all. On the contrary: if people accepted it, it would be a breath of fresh air. Family life, for parents and children alike, would improve. Look what's happening now as a result of the faith, obligatory in our culture, in the power of parents to mold their children's fragile psyches. Parents are exhausting themselves in their efforts to meet their children's every demand, not realizing that evolution designed offspring -- nonhuman animals as well as humans -- to demand more than they really need. Family life has become phony, because parents are convinced that children need constant reassurances of their love, so if they don't happen to feel very loving at a particular time or towards a particular child, they fake it. Praise is delivered by the bushel, which devalues its worth. Children have become the masters of the home.

And what has all this sacrifice and effort on the part of parents bought them? Zilch. There are no indications that children today are happier, more self-confident, less aggressive, or in better mental health than they were sixty years ago, when I was a child -- when homes were run by and for adults, when physical punishment was used routinely, when fathers were generally unavailable, when praise was a rare and precious commodity, and when explicit expressions of parental love were reserved for the deathbed.

Is my idea dangerous? I've never condoned child abuse or neglect; I've never believed that parents don't matter. The relationship between a parent and a child is an important one, but it's important in the same way as the relationship between married partners. A good relationship is one in which each party cares about the other and derives happiness from making the other happy. A good relationship is not one in which one party's central goal is to modify the other's personality.

I think what's really dangerous -- perhaps a better word is tragic -- is the establishment's idea of the all-powerful, and hence all-blamable, parent.

http://www.edge.org/q2006/q06_print.html

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Subject: Republicans these days

Bridge to Nowhere

There is no idealist center to the Republican Party any more - it's been sold for power: for votes, for junkets, for golf, for bribes, for contributions. The GOP is best described these days as its most pathetic pork project, the infamous Bridge to Nowhere in the Alaska of Ted Stephens. These Republicans have not built a bridge to a finer, prosperous, free American future. Their bridge leads nowhere, will transport only the privileged few, and it costs us billions in treasure and hard-won freedom in principle.

Reckless spending is the hallmark of these Republicans in power (and I take pains to note, not all Republicans) - the spending of tax dollars, of opportunity, and of lives. The arrogance is most stunning when it ignores the truth to spin the yarn, to tell the lie, to link Al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein and effective government to Republican-only lobby shops on K Street. Their motto is this: if we think it, it must be right. It is right. And when challenged? 9/11 covers most transgressions nicely.

Here.

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Subject: enter jews, exit integrity

What's in a hat?

To most people, Jack Abramoff's stylish brim says "Godfather." But if you're an observant Jew, it tells a much different story.

By Stephen Hirsch

Jan. 6, 2006 | The picture of Jack Abramoff walking out of a federal courthouse on Tuesday wearing a distinctive fedora is by now iconic. And chances are, like Howard Fineman and Maureen Dowd, you thought he looked like a gangster. But that wasn't my reaction. What struck me was that Abramoff was wearing my hat, a Borsalino, the ne plus ultra of Yeshiva boy caps. Tucked tight on his head, pinched even, perfectly symmetrical (if a little deep for my taste), it was immaculate.

Maybe the contrition Abramoff expressed in his statements was real. Maybe he even recited "Baruch Dayan Emes," the blessing you make when you hear really bad news, after he went to court. Maybe he was wearing a yami (a diminutive yarmulke) underneath his fedora. While it's no secret that he's an Orthodox (if not Torah-observant, or frum) Jew, I've never seen a picture of him with either a Borsalino or yarmulke before. Why now?

As opposed to Abramoff, who I believe was raised frum from birth, I'm what is called a Baal Tshuva, a Jew who used to live a secular lifestyle, but now observes Shabbos (the Sabbath), keeps kosher, davens (prays) three times a day, etc. I wear my Borsalino every Shabbos, every Yom Tov (Jewish holiday), and at weddings and other special Jewish occasions. By wearing the Borsalino to court, I imagine that Abramoff was emotionally retreating into the safety of our insular world. I wonder if he read all the subsequent "gangster look" stories; maybe that's why he switched to the baseball cap yesterday?

When I become friendly with non-Jews, they inevitably ask, "Why do you guys dress like that?" My answer always surprises: At the end of the day, the hat is basically a fashion statement. Religiously speaking, a Borsalino or a black felt yami is equivalent to a baseball cap, but socially, it means everything.

Observant Jews are commanded to set themselves apart from non-Jews. Indeed, the Talmud mentions that one of the reasons we were redeemed from Egypt, despite our falling into the depths of spiritual decay, is that we kept our separate style of dress. Basically, how different we look is a sign of how connected or disconnected we are from the rest of society.

http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2006/01/06/hats/index.html

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Subject: paleoneoJEW Lapin

Let us prey

Jack Abramoff and his deeply religious right-wing cronies express their "biblical worldview" by swindling Indian tribes and bribing legislators. Verily, mysterious are the ways of the Lord.

By Joe Conason

Jan. 6, 2006 | Now that such whited sepulchers as Newt Gingrich have denounced the betrayal of the Republican revolution and the evils of congressional corruption, what more can be said about Jack Abramoff, Ralph Reed, Tom DeLay and all the other politicians, operatives and bagmen implicated in their schemes? Perhaps it is worth expressing a small hope that the good religious people of this country will rise up in outrage against the abuse of their faith by all these pious hypocrites.

Rarely has the contrast between the rhetoric of the religious right and the behavior of its leaders been so starkly exposed as in the Abramoff scandal. The most obvious example was the manipulation of Christian activists in Louisiana and Texas by Reed, former executive director of the Christian Coalition, who said he was helping them fight gambling when he was actually using them to promote Indian casinos (and to make a few million bucks for himself).

That episode alone should have alerted honest Christians to the moral rot within the Republican leadership that professed to represent their interests. But there is of course much more evidence of the religious cynicism of Abramoff and his cronies.

Consider the curious figure of Rabbi Daniel Lapin, a self-styled authority on the relationship between biblical morality and modern political life who is also a great pal of Abramoff's and DeLay's. An outstanding example of the bogus religiosity that has enshrouded this gang, Lapin has scarcely received the notice he deserves in the scandal, although he has provided many of the most darkly comical moments as it unfolded during the past year.

For those who don't know him, Lapin leads conservative organizations that have brought him alliances with Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and Michael Medved, as well as close friendships with DeLay and Abramoff.

This particular man of God, vaunted for his scholarly understanding of the Bible and his apologetics for Christian fundamentalism, turns out to have served as a money launderer and fraudster for Abramoff. He was paid by Abramoff's bogus Washington charity, the Capital Athletic Foundation, which passed money along to the wife of California Rep. John Doolittle, among other dubious "charitable" payments. Lapin's own peculiar "religious charity," Toward Tradition, took in thousands of dollars from an online gambling firm, which it then passed along to the wife of DeLay staffer Tony Rudy.

Abramoff showered money on Lapin and his family, and the right-wing rabbi was not ungrateful. When the ambitious lobbyist needed to embellish his curriculum vitae to impress the overseers of the prestigious Cosmos Club in Washington, Lapin gladly furnished him with fake awards attesting to his religious scholarship.

"I just need to know what needs to be produced ... letters? Plaques? Neither?" he asked in an e-mail to Abramoff.

"Probably just a few clever titles of awards, dates and that's it," the lobbyist replied. "As long as you are the person to verify them [or we can have someone else verify one and you the other], we should be set. Do you have any creative titles, or should I dip into my bag of tricks?"

What Lapin ultimately bestowed on his benefactor was a backdated award from Toward Tradition, the group he founded to restore morality in America. It named Abramoff a "Scholar of Biblical and American History."

[jew Lapin is the jew used by the right, including paleos, to "prove" that jews aren't all hostile; the religious ones are really conservative, really on our side. the truth proves otherwise. a lapin is a kike is a kike is a kike. don't wait up for the sobrans to admit it, though. jews are a race of swindlers, and pretending to be conservative traditionalists is just another scam.]

It would be interesting to hear Lapin -- or Falwell or Robertson, both of whom have defended these crooks until now -- explain how swindling Indian tribes and handing out money and favors to legislators fits into the "biblical worldview" they supposedly espouse. A decade ago, Reed described his mission as "changing the soul of American politics," but he proved perfectly willing to sell the soul of his movement as soon as the opportunity arose. In fact, he pleaded with Abramoff to send him the business.

Not many politicians have been as bold as DeLay in publicly claiming the mandate of heaven. Who can forget his justification for pushing the impeachment of Bill Clinton, whom he accused of having the "wrong worldview"? While the Hammer cavorted on Scottish golf courses and gorged himself on Malaysian banquets, he was assuring the faithful on Capitol Hill that the Almighty had chosen him for leadership and was teaching him how to do his job.

Several years ago, at one of many fundamentalist meetings he has addressed, DeLay explained: "He [God] has been walking me through an incredible journey, and it all comes down to worldview. He is using me, all the time, everywhere, to stand up for biblical worldview in everything that I do and everywhere I am. He is training me, He is working with me."

Well, perhaps not everywhere and perhaps not everything. What did God tell DeLay about those lavish trips and dinners and donations, and about the money funneled to his wife? The actual Bible, which he professes to believe is the word of the Lord, is quite clear on the question. Bribery is strictly prohibited in Exodus 23:8 and Job 36:18, which specifically warns: "Be careful that no one entices you by riches; do not let a large bribe turn you aside."

DeLay once claimed to have been inspired by the writings of Charles Colson, the Watergate felon who found religion in prison. Whatever may become of Abramoff, Reed, DeLay and their luckless co-conspirators, the Colson path will not be open to them. When you've spent a lifetime exploiting religion for profit and power, it's a lot harder to convince anyone that you've undergone a jailhouse conversion.

Here.

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Subject: LTE to WND

Until America starts to put the squeeze on Canada so that she sees how economically and militarily dependent she is on the U.S., the anti-America sentiment will continue to prevail. It will also help when the Canadian government stops funding these sentiments through government-subsidized TV stations.

We laugh at Americans, but we can become criminals by having a private hospital.

We laugh at Americans, but we can't have an exclusively religious TV or radio station – except through liberal Buffalo.

We laugh at Americans, but we have to wait six hours for emergency care.

We laugh at Americans, but our "conservative" news can only come from CNN and CBS.

We laugh at Americans, but 30 percent of students in Ontario don't graduate from high schools.

We laugh at Americans as we are taxed to the ground.

We laugh at Americans, but all our senators are appointed by the prime minister.

We laugh at Americans, but our $2 million gun registry is now approaching $2 billion.

We laugh at Americans and take our convicted murderers to watch whales, go skiing and go to the shopping malls.

We laugh at Americans, and our doctors are recommending that we give free booze to homeless people to keep them from crime.

We laugh at Americans and don't know that marriage can only be between a man and a woman.

Free needles, anyone?

Don't laugh at us. We are a sorry bunch.

Mitchell Persaud
Toronto, Canada

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