Man Accused of Lobbing Urine Into Yards
CLIVE, Iowa - A Nebraska man has been arrested in central Iowa for allegedly delivering some unwanted Christmas gifts. Reno Tobler, 54, was arrested Thursday in Clive after police caught him lobbing urine bottles into backyards.
"We've got a Grinch that has been lobbing urine," said Clive Police Chief Robert Cox. "Since this fall, we've had eight to 10 incidents reported where people have found containers full of urine thrown into their backyards."
Tobler is a truck driver whose route regularly takes him to the Clive area. He was charged with littering and harassment for allegedly tossing detergent-sized bottles of his urine over fences.
Tobler told police that it was a longtime hobby of his to deliver the bottles. Police searched his vehicle and found several other urine-filled bottles ready for delivery.
Tobler was taken to the Polk County Jail and was released on a $500 bond.
Wednesday, December 28, 2005
For the Cause
Sinclair Letter Turns Out to Be Another Exposé
Note found by an O.C. man says 'The Jungle' author got the lowdown on Sacco and Vanzetti.By Jean O. Pasco, Times Staff Writer
Ordinarily, Paul Hegness wouldn't have looked twice at Lot 217 as he strolled through an Irvine auction warehouse, preferring first-edition books and artwork to the box stuffed with old papers and holiday cards.But then, he wouldn't have stumbled upon a confession from one of America's great authors. Inside the box, an envelope postmarked Sept. 12, 1929, caught his eye. It was addressed to John Beardsley, Esq., of Los Angeles. The return address read, "Upton Sinclair, Long Beach."
"I stood there for 15 minutes reading it over and over again," Hegness said of the letter by the author of "The Jungle," the groundbreaking 1906 book that exposed unsanitary conditions at slaughterhouses.The last paragraph got the Newport Beach attorney's attention. "This letter is for yourself alone," it read. "Stick it away in your safe, and some time in the far distant future the world may know the real truth about the matter. I am here trying to make plain my own part in the story."The story was "Boston," Sinclair's 1920s novelized condemnation of the trial and execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian immigrants accused of killing two men in the robbery of a Massachusetts shoe factory.Prosecutors characterized the anarchists as ruthless killers who had used the money to bankroll antigovernment bombings and deserved to die. Sinclair thought the pair were innocent and being railroaded because of their political views.Soon Sinclair would learn something that filled him with doubt. During his research for "Boston," Sinclair met with Fred Moore, the men's attorney, in a Denver motel room. Moore "sent me into a panic," Sinclair wrote in the typed letter that Hegness found at the auction a decade ago."Alone in a hotel room with Fred, I begged him to tell me the full truth," Sinclair wrote. " … He then told me that the men were guilty, and he told me in every detail how he had framed a set of alibis for them. Hegness paid $100 for the box containing Sinclair's confessional letter and tucked it away in a closet — where it gathered dust. Now, after stumbling upon it again, he plans to donate it to Sinclair's archives at Indiana University, where it will join a trove of correspondence that reveals the ethical quandary that confronted Sinclair — papers that even some scholars of the author weren't aware of."This is a stunning revelation," said Anthony Arthur of Los Angeles, a retired literature professor and author of the recently released biography, "Upton Sinclair: Radical Innocent." "I've never heard of this," added Lauren Coodley, a professor of history and psychology at Napa Valley College who edited a recent Sinclair anthology. "It's one of those amazing things. That's why history is so fascinating, because we keep revising it."Upton Beall Sinclair was a giant of the nation's Progressive Era, a crusading writer and socialist who championed the downtrodden and persecuted. President Theodore Roosevelt, who pushed through the nation's first food-purity laws in response to "The Jungle," coined the name for Sinclair's craft: muckraker.Sinclair wasn't alone in believing Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent when he began researching the book that fictionalized their case. On Aug. 23, 1927, the day they were executed, 25,000 protested in Boston.The men have been viewed as martyrs by the American left ever since. Historians agree that prosecutors in the case were biased and shoddy, and that the two men failed to receive a fair trial.On the 50th anniversary of their execution, Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis all but pardoned the pair, urging that "any disgrace should be forever removed from their names." But the fearless Sinclair was left a conflicted man by what Sacco and Vanzetti's lawyer — and later others in the anarchist movement — told him. "I faced the most difficult ethical problem of my life at that point," he wrote to his attorney. "I had come to Boston with the announcement that I was going to write the truth about the case."Other letters tucked away in the Indiana archive illuminate why one of America's most strident truth tellers kept his reservations to himself."My wife is absolutely certain that if I tell what I believe, I will be called a traitor to the movement and may not live to finish the book," Sinclair wrote Robert Minor, a confidant at the Socialist Daily Worker in New York, in 1927. "Of course," he added, "the next big case may be a frame-up, and my telling the truth about the Sacco-Vanzetti case will make things harder for the victims."He also worried that revealing what he had been told would cost him readers. "It is much better copy as a naïve defense of Sacco and Vanzetti because this is what all my foreign readers expect, and they are 90% of my public," he wrote to Minor.Sinclair was born in 1878, and his upbringing in New York City was framed by his parents' poverty and his grandparents' wealth. He entered college at 14 and paid for school by writing stories for newspapers and magazines. His first novel was published in 1901.He moved to Southern California in 1915. In 1926, he ran as a Socialist for California governor, getting 60,000 votes. He took another stab in 1934, during the Great Depression, this time winning the Democratic primary with a platform of ending poverty. He got nearly 900,000 votes.In 1943, Sinclair won a Pulitzer Prize for "Dragon Teeth," a novel that dealt with Hitler's rise to power. He died in a small town in New Jersey in 1968 at the age of 90, having never publicly disclosed his doubts about the innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti.Ideale Gambera, whose father was a Boston anarchist in the 1920s, said he could empathize with Sinclair's angst about revealing his doubts.Gambera, 80, said there was a strict code of silence to protect the group and hide the nature of their activities. He said his father, Giovanni Gambera, a member of the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee, told him before he died in 1982 that Sacco was one of the killers."They all lied," said Gambera, a retired English professor living in San Rafael. "They did it for the cause."
Note found by an O.C. man says 'The Jungle' author got the lowdown on Sacco and Vanzetti.By Jean O. Pasco, Times Staff Writer
Ordinarily, Paul Hegness wouldn't have looked twice at Lot 217 as he strolled through an Irvine auction warehouse, preferring first-edition books and artwork to the box stuffed with old papers and holiday cards.But then, he wouldn't have stumbled upon a confession from one of America's great authors. Inside the box, an envelope postmarked Sept. 12, 1929, caught his eye. It was addressed to John Beardsley, Esq., of Los Angeles. The return address read, "Upton Sinclair, Long Beach."
"I stood there for 15 minutes reading it over and over again," Hegness said of the letter by the author of "The Jungle," the groundbreaking 1906 book that exposed unsanitary conditions at slaughterhouses.The last paragraph got the Newport Beach attorney's attention. "This letter is for yourself alone," it read. "Stick it away in your safe, and some time in the far distant future the world may know the real truth about the matter. I am here trying to make plain my own part in the story."The story was "Boston," Sinclair's 1920s novelized condemnation of the trial and execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian immigrants accused of killing two men in the robbery of a Massachusetts shoe factory.Prosecutors characterized the anarchists as ruthless killers who had used the money to bankroll antigovernment bombings and deserved to die. Sinclair thought the pair were innocent and being railroaded because of their political views.Soon Sinclair would learn something that filled him with doubt. During his research for "Boston," Sinclair met with Fred Moore, the men's attorney, in a Denver motel room. Moore "sent me into a panic," Sinclair wrote in the typed letter that Hegness found at the auction a decade ago."Alone in a hotel room with Fred, I begged him to tell me the full truth," Sinclair wrote. " … He then told me that the men were guilty, and he told me in every detail how he had framed a set of alibis for them. Hegness paid $100 for the box containing Sinclair's confessional letter and tucked it away in a closet — where it gathered dust. Now, after stumbling upon it again, he plans to donate it to Sinclair's archives at Indiana University, where it will join a trove of correspondence that reveals the ethical quandary that confronted Sinclair — papers that even some scholars of the author weren't aware of."This is a stunning revelation," said Anthony Arthur of Los Angeles, a retired literature professor and author of the recently released biography, "Upton Sinclair: Radical Innocent." "I've never heard of this," added Lauren Coodley, a professor of history and psychology at Napa Valley College who edited a recent Sinclair anthology. "It's one of those amazing things. That's why history is so fascinating, because we keep revising it."Upton Beall Sinclair was a giant of the nation's Progressive Era, a crusading writer and socialist who championed the downtrodden and persecuted. President Theodore Roosevelt, who pushed through the nation's first food-purity laws in response to "The Jungle," coined the name for Sinclair's craft: muckraker.Sinclair wasn't alone in believing Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent when he began researching the book that fictionalized their case. On Aug. 23, 1927, the day they were executed, 25,000 protested in Boston.The men have been viewed as martyrs by the American left ever since. Historians agree that prosecutors in the case were biased and shoddy, and that the two men failed to receive a fair trial.On the 50th anniversary of their execution, Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis all but pardoned the pair, urging that "any disgrace should be forever removed from their names." But the fearless Sinclair was left a conflicted man by what Sacco and Vanzetti's lawyer — and later others in the anarchist movement — told him. "I faced the most difficult ethical problem of my life at that point," he wrote to his attorney. "I had come to Boston with the announcement that I was going to write the truth about the case."Other letters tucked away in the Indiana archive illuminate why one of America's most strident truth tellers kept his reservations to himself."My wife is absolutely certain that if I tell what I believe, I will be called a traitor to the movement and may not live to finish the book," Sinclair wrote Robert Minor, a confidant at the Socialist Daily Worker in New York, in 1927. "Of course," he added, "the next big case may be a frame-up, and my telling the truth about the Sacco-Vanzetti case will make things harder for the victims."He also worried that revealing what he had been told would cost him readers. "It is much better copy as a naïve defense of Sacco and Vanzetti because this is what all my foreign readers expect, and they are 90% of my public," he wrote to Minor.Sinclair was born in 1878, and his upbringing in New York City was framed by his parents' poverty and his grandparents' wealth. He entered college at 14 and paid for school by writing stories for newspapers and magazines. His first novel was published in 1901.He moved to Southern California in 1915. In 1926, he ran as a Socialist for California governor, getting 60,000 votes. He took another stab in 1934, during the Great Depression, this time winning the Democratic primary with a platform of ending poverty. He got nearly 900,000 votes.In 1943, Sinclair won a Pulitzer Prize for "Dragon Teeth," a novel that dealt with Hitler's rise to power. He died in a small town in New Jersey in 1968 at the age of 90, having never publicly disclosed his doubts about the innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti.Ideale Gambera, whose father was a Boston anarchist in the 1920s, said he could empathize with Sinclair's angst about revealing his doubts.Gambera, 80, said there was a strict code of silence to protect the group and hide the nature of their activities. He said his father, Giovanni Gambera, a member of the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee, told him before he died in 1982 that Sacco was one of the killers."They all lied," said Gambera, a retired English professor living in San Rafael. "They did it for the cause."
What about Vitamin T?
Revealed: the pill that prevents cancer
By Jeremy Laurance, Health Editor
Published: 28 December 2005
A daily dose of vitamin D could cut the risk of cancers of the breast, colon and ovary by up to a half, a 40-year review of research has found. The evidence for the protective effect of the "sunshine vitamin" is so overwhelming that urgent action must be taken by public health authorities to boost blood levels, say cancer specialists.
A growing body of evidence in recent years has shown that lack of vitamin D may have lethal effects. Heart disease, lung disease, cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, schizophrenia and multiple sclerosis are among the conditions in which it is believed to play a vital role. The vitamin is also essential for bone health and protects against rickets in children and osteoporosis in the elderly.
Vitamin D is made by the action of sunlight on the skin, which accounts for 90 per cent of the body's supply. But the increasing use of sunscreens and the reduced time spent outdoors, especially by children, has contributed to what many scientists believe is an increasing problem of vitamin D deficiency.
After assessing almost every scientific paper published on the link between vitamin D and cancer since the 1960s, US scientists say that a daily dose of 1,000 international units (25 micrograms) is needed to maintain health. " The high prevalence of vitamin D deficiency combined with the discovery of increased risks of certain types of cancer in those who are deficient, suggest that vitamin D deficiency may account for several thousand premature deaths from colon, breast, ovarian and other cancers annually," they say in the online version of the American Journal of Public Health.
The dose they propose of 1,000IU a day is two-and-a-half times the current recommended level in the US. In the UK, there is no official recommended dose but grey skies and short days from October to March mean 60 per cent of the population has inadequate blood levels by the end of winter.
The UK Food Standards Agency maintains that most people should be able to get all the vitamin D they need from their diet and "by getting a little sun". But the vitamin can only be stored in the body for 60 days.
High rates of heart disease in Scotland have been blamed on the weak sunlight and short summers in the north, leading to low levels of vitamin D. Differences in sunlight may also explain the higher rates of heart disease in England compared with southern Europe. Some experts believe the health benefits of the Mediterranean diet may have as much to do with the sun there as with the regional food.
Countries around the world have begun to modify their warnings about the dangers of sunbathing, as a result of the growing research on vitamin D. The Association of Cancer Councils of Australia acknowledged this year for the first time that some exposure to the sun was healthy.
Australia is one of the world's sunniest countries and has among the highest rates of skin cancer. For three decades it has preached sun avoidance with its "slip, slap, slop" campaign to cover up and use sunscreen. But in a statement in March, the association said: "A balance is required between avoiding an increase in the risk of skin cancer and achieving enough ultraviolet radiation exposure to achieve adequate vitamin D levels." Bruce Armstrong, the professor of public health at Sydney University, said: " It is a revolution."
In the latest study, cancer specialists from the University of San Diego, California, led by Professor Cedric Garland, reviewed 63 scientific papers on the link between vitamin D and cancer published between 1966 and 2004. People living in the north-eastern US, where it is less sunny, and African Americans with darker skins were more likely to be deficient, researchers found. They also had higher cancer rates.
The researchers say their finding could explain why black Americans die sooner from cancer than whites, even after allowing for differences in income and access to care.
Professor Garland said: "A preponderance of evidence from the best observational studies... has led to the conclusion that public health action is needed. Primary prevention of these cancers has been largely neglected, but we now have proof that the incidence of colon, breast and ovarian cancer can be reduced dramatically by increasing the public's intake of vitamin D." Obtaining the necessary level of vitamin D from diet alone would be difficult and sun exposure carries a risk of triggering skin cancer. "The easiest and most reliable way of getting the appropriate amount is from food and a daily supplement," they say.
The cost of a vitamin D supplement is about 4p a day. The UK Food Standards Agency said that taking Vitamin D supplements of up to 1,000IU was " unlikely to cause harm".
What it can do
Heart disease
Vitamin D works by lowering insulin resistance, which is one of the major factors leading to heart disease.
Lung disease
Lung tissue undergoes repair and "remodelling" in life and, since vitamin D influences the growth of a variety of cell types, it may play a role in this lung repair process.
Cancers (breast, colon, ovary, prostate)
Vitamin D is believed to play an important role in regulating the production of cells, a control that is missing in cancer. It has a protective effect against certain cancers by preventing overproduction of cells.
Diabetes
In type 1 diabetes the immune system destroys its own cells. Vitamin D is believed to act as an immunosuppressant. Researchers believe it may prevent an overly aggressive response from the immune system.
High blood pressure
Vitamin D is used by the parathyroid glands that sit on the thyroid gland in the neck. These secrete a hormone that regulates the body's calcium levels. Calcium, in turn, helps to regulate blood pressure, although the mechanism is not yet completely understood.
Schizophrenia
The chance of developing schizophrenia could be linked to how sunny it was in the months before birth. A lack of sunlight can lead to vitamin D deficiency, which scientists believe could alter the growth of a child's brain in the womb.
Multiple sclerosis
Lack of vitamin D leads to limited production of 1.25-dihydroxyvitamin D3, the hormonal form of vitamin D3 which regulates the immune system, creating a risk for MS.
Rickets and osteoporosis
The vitamin strengthens bones, protecting against childhood rickets and osteoporosis in the elderly.
A daily dose of vitamin D could cut the risk of cancers of the breast, colon and ovary by up to a half, a 40-year review of research has found. The evidence for the protective effect of the "sunshine vitamin" is so overwhelming that urgent action must be taken by public health authorities to boost blood levels, say cancer specialists.
A growing body of evidence in recent years has shown that lack of vitamin D may have lethal effects. Heart disease, lung disease, cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, schizophrenia and multiple sclerosis are among the conditions in which it is believed to play a vital role. The vitamin is also essential for bone health and protects against rickets in children and osteoporosis in the elderly.
Vitamin D is made by the action of sunlight on the skin, which accounts for 90 per cent of the body's supply. But the increasing use of sunscreens and the reduced time spent outdoors, especially by children, has contributed to what many scientists believe is an increasing problem of vitamin D deficiency.
After assessing almost every scientific paper published on the link between vitamin D and cancer since the 1960s, US scientists say that a daily dose of 1,000 international units (25 micrograms) is needed to maintain health. " The high prevalence of vitamin D deficiency combined with the discovery of increased risks of certain types of cancer in those who are deficient, suggest that vitamin D deficiency may account for several thousand premature deaths from colon, breast, ovarian and other cancers annually," they say in the online version of the American Journal of Public Health.
The dose they propose of 1,000IU a day is two-and-a-half times the current recommended level in the US. In the UK, there is no official recommended dose but grey skies and short days from October to March mean 60 per cent of the population has inadequate blood levels by the end of winter.
The UK Food Standards Agency maintains that most people should be able to get all the vitamin D they need from their diet and "by getting a little sun". But the vitamin can only be stored in the body for 60 days.
High rates of heart disease in Scotland have been blamed on the weak sunlight and short summers in the north, leading to low levels of vitamin D. Differences in sunlight may also explain the higher rates of heart disease in England compared with southern Europe. Some experts believe the health benefits of the Mediterranean diet may have as much to do with the sun there as with the regional food.
Countries around the world have begun to modify their warnings about the dangers of sunbathing, as a result of the growing research on vitamin D. The Association of Cancer Councils of Australia acknowledged this year for the first time that some exposure to the sun was healthy.
Australia is one of the world's sunniest countries and has among the highest rates of skin cancer. For three decades it has preached sun avoidance with its "slip, slap, slop" campaign to cover up and use sunscreen. But in a statement in March, the association said: "A balance is required between avoiding an increase in the risk of skin cancer and achieving enough ultraviolet radiation exposure to achieve adequate vitamin D levels." Bruce Armstrong, the professor of public health at Sydney University, said: " It is a revolution."
By Jeremy Laurance, Health Editor
Published: 28 December 2005
A daily dose of vitamin D could cut the risk of cancers of the breast, colon and ovary by up to a half, a 40-year review of research has found. The evidence for the protective effect of the "sunshine vitamin" is so overwhelming that urgent action must be taken by public health authorities to boost blood levels, say cancer specialists.
A growing body of evidence in recent years has shown that lack of vitamin D may have lethal effects. Heart disease, lung disease, cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, schizophrenia and multiple sclerosis are among the conditions in which it is believed to play a vital role. The vitamin is also essential for bone health and protects against rickets in children and osteoporosis in the elderly.
Vitamin D is made by the action of sunlight on the skin, which accounts for 90 per cent of the body's supply. But the increasing use of sunscreens and the reduced time spent outdoors, especially by children, has contributed to what many scientists believe is an increasing problem of vitamin D deficiency.
After assessing almost every scientific paper published on the link between vitamin D and cancer since the 1960s, US scientists say that a daily dose of 1,000 international units (25 micrograms) is needed to maintain health. " The high prevalence of vitamin D deficiency combined with the discovery of increased risks of certain types of cancer in those who are deficient, suggest that vitamin D deficiency may account for several thousand premature deaths from colon, breast, ovarian and other cancers annually," they say in the online version of the American Journal of Public Health.
The dose they propose of 1,000IU a day is two-and-a-half times the current recommended level in the US. In the UK, there is no official recommended dose but grey skies and short days from October to March mean 60 per cent of the population has inadequate blood levels by the end of winter.
The UK Food Standards Agency maintains that most people should be able to get all the vitamin D they need from their diet and "by getting a little sun". But the vitamin can only be stored in the body for 60 days.
High rates of heart disease in Scotland have been blamed on the weak sunlight and short summers in the north, leading to low levels of vitamin D. Differences in sunlight may also explain the higher rates of heart disease in England compared with southern Europe. Some experts believe the health benefits of the Mediterranean diet may have as much to do with the sun there as with the regional food.
Countries around the world have begun to modify their warnings about the dangers of sunbathing, as a result of the growing research on vitamin D. The Association of Cancer Councils of Australia acknowledged this year for the first time that some exposure to the sun was healthy.
Australia is one of the world's sunniest countries and has among the highest rates of skin cancer. For three decades it has preached sun avoidance with its "slip, slap, slop" campaign to cover up and use sunscreen. But in a statement in March, the association said: "A balance is required between avoiding an increase in the risk of skin cancer and achieving enough ultraviolet radiation exposure to achieve adequate vitamin D levels." Bruce Armstrong, the professor of public health at Sydney University, said: " It is a revolution."
In the latest study, cancer specialists from the University of San Diego, California, led by Professor Cedric Garland, reviewed 63 scientific papers on the link between vitamin D and cancer published between 1966 and 2004. People living in the north-eastern US, where it is less sunny, and African Americans with darker skins were more likely to be deficient, researchers found. They also had higher cancer rates.
The researchers say their finding could explain why black Americans die sooner from cancer than whites, even after allowing for differences in income and access to care.
Professor Garland said: "A preponderance of evidence from the best observational studies... has led to the conclusion that public health action is needed. Primary prevention of these cancers has been largely neglected, but we now have proof that the incidence of colon, breast and ovarian cancer can be reduced dramatically by increasing the public's intake of vitamin D." Obtaining the necessary level of vitamin D from diet alone would be difficult and sun exposure carries a risk of triggering skin cancer. "The easiest and most reliable way of getting the appropriate amount is from food and a daily supplement," they say.
The cost of a vitamin D supplement is about 4p a day. The UK Food Standards Agency said that taking Vitamin D supplements of up to 1,000IU was " unlikely to cause harm".
What it can do
Heart disease
Vitamin D works by lowering insulin resistance, which is one of the major factors leading to heart disease.
Lung disease
Lung tissue undergoes repair and "remodelling" in life and, since vitamin D influences the growth of a variety of cell types, it may play a role in this lung repair process.
Cancers (breast, colon, ovary, prostate)
Vitamin D is believed to play an important role in regulating the production of cells, a control that is missing in cancer. It has a protective effect against certain cancers by preventing overproduction of cells.
Diabetes
In type 1 diabetes the immune system destroys its own cells. Vitamin D is believed to act as an immunosuppressant. Researchers believe it may prevent an overly aggressive response from the immune system.
High blood pressure
Vitamin D is used by the parathyroid glands that sit on the thyroid gland in the neck. These secrete a hormone that regulates the body's calcium levels. Calcium, in turn, helps to regulate blood pressure, although the mechanism is not yet completely understood.
Schizophrenia
The chance of developing schizophrenia could be linked to how sunny it was in the months before birth. A lack of sunlight can lead to vitamin D deficiency, which scientists believe could alter the growth of a child's brain in the womb.
Multiple sclerosis
Lack of vitamin D leads to limited production of 1.25-dihydroxyvitamin D3, the hormonal form of vitamin D3 which regulates the immune system, creating a risk for MS.
Rickets and osteoporosis
The vitamin strengthens bones, protecting against childhood rickets and osteoporosis in the elderly.
A daily dose of vitamin D could cut the risk of cancers of the breast, colon and ovary by up to a half, a 40-year review of research has found. The evidence for the protective effect of the "sunshine vitamin" is so overwhelming that urgent action must be taken by public health authorities to boost blood levels, say cancer specialists.
A growing body of evidence in recent years has shown that lack of vitamin D may have lethal effects. Heart disease, lung disease, cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, schizophrenia and multiple sclerosis are among the conditions in which it is believed to play a vital role. The vitamin is also essential for bone health and protects against rickets in children and osteoporosis in the elderly.
Vitamin D is made by the action of sunlight on the skin, which accounts for 90 per cent of the body's supply. But the increasing use of sunscreens and the reduced time spent outdoors, especially by children, has contributed to what many scientists believe is an increasing problem of vitamin D deficiency.
After assessing almost every scientific paper published on the link between vitamin D and cancer since the 1960s, US scientists say that a daily dose of 1,000 international units (25 micrograms) is needed to maintain health. " The high prevalence of vitamin D deficiency combined with the discovery of increased risks of certain types of cancer in those who are deficient, suggest that vitamin D deficiency may account for several thousand premature deaths from colon, breast, ovarian and other cancers annually," they say in the online version of the American Journal of Public Health.
The dose they propose of 1,000IU a day is two-and-a-half times the current recommended level in the US. In the UK, there is no official recommended dose but grey skies and short days from October to March mean 60 per cent of the population has inadequate blood levels by the end of winter.
The UK Food Standards Agency maintains that most people should be able to get all the vitamin D they need from their diet and "by getting a little sun". But the vitamin can only be stored in the body for 60 days.
High rates of heart disease in Scotland have been blamed on the weak sunlight and short summers in the north, leading to low levels of vitamin D. Differences in sunlight may also explain the higher rates of heart disease in England compared with southern Europe. Some experts believe the health benefits of the Mediterranean diet may have as much to do with the sun there as with the regional food.
Countries around the world have begun to modify their warnings about the dangers of sunbathing, as a result of the growing research on vitamin D. The Association of Cancer Councils of Australia acknowledged this year for the first time that some exposure to the sun was healthy.
Australia is one of the world's sunniest countries and has among the highest rates of skin cancer. For three decades it has preached sun avoidance with its "slip, slap, slop" campaign to cover up and use sunscreen. But in a statement in March, the association said: "A balance is required between avoiding an increase in the risk of skin cancer and achieving enough ultraviolet radiation exposure to achieve adequate vitamin D levels." Bruce Armstrong, the professor of public health at Sydney University, said: " It is a revolution."
Tuesday, December 27, 2005
Prof Honored for Solving Old Math Problem
I don't even understand what the question was.
KANSAS CITY, Mo. - A professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia is being recognized for solving a math problem that had stumped his peers for more than 40 years.
The achievement has landed Steven Hofmann an invitation to speak next spring at the 2006 International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid, Spain. (bet they party)
"It is like a baseball player being picked for the all-star team," Hofmann said of the invitation to the event, which is held every four years.
Hofmann became curious about the problem as an undergraduate when a professor introduced him to it.
The professor was unable to solve the problem. Hofmann, 47, would have more success when the problem began to take over his life in 1996. Until he solved it in 2000, it was the last thing he thought about before he went to bed and the first thing he thought about when he woke. He spent two to eight hours each day on the problem, working periodically with several colleagues.
"I could be out for a bike ride, and I would be thinking about it," Hofmann told The Kansas City Star. "Sometimes I would be doing something, get an idea and have to stop ... and write it down."
The problem, known as Kato's Conjecture, applies to the theory of waves moving through different media, such as seismic waves traveling through different types of rock. It bears the name of Tosio Kato, a now-deceased mathematician at the University of California-Berkeley, who posed the problem in research papers first written in 1953 and again in 1961.
Part of the problem, called the one-dimensional version, was solved about 20 years ago. Though it was a breakthrough, work remained. Hofmann solved the problem in all its dimensions in a 120-word paper that he wrote with several colleagues _ Pascal Auscher, Michael Lacey, John Lewis, Alan McIntosh and Philippe Tchamitchian.
"Philosophically, the reason research in math matters is that by pursuing math ideas that are deep and interesting for their own sake, you will get real-world applications in the future," Hofmann said.
"It is like making investments."
Theodore Slaman, chairman of the Department of Mathematics at the University of California-Berkeley, said solving a problem as old as Kato's Conjecture "is like finding the Holy Grail."
"Once you have solved it, people believe you have an understanding of an entirely new area. The longer a problem has been around, the more cachet associated with solving it."
KANSAS CITY, Mo. - A professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia is being recognized for solving a math problem that had stumped his peers for more than 40 years.
The achievement has landed Steven Hofmann an invitation to speak next spring at the 2006 International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid, Spain. (bet they party)
"It is like a baseball player being picked for the all-star team," Hofmann said of the invitation to the event, which is held every four years.
Hofmann became curious about the problem as an undergraduate when a professor introduced him to it.
The professor was unable to solve the problem. Hofmann, 47, would have more success when the problem began to take over his life in 1996. Until he solved it in 2000, it was the last thing he thought about before he went to bed and the first thing he thought about when he woke. He spent two to eight hours each day on the problem, working periodically with several colleagues.
"I could be out for a bike ride, and I would be thinking about it," Hofmann told The Kansas City Star. "Sometimes I would be doing something, get an idea and have to stop ... and write it down."
The problem, known as Kato's Conjecture, applies to the theory of waves moving through different media, such as seismic waves traveling through different types of rock. It bears the name of Tosio Kato, a now-deceased mathematician at the University of California-Berkeley, who posed the problem in research papers first written in 1953 and again in 1961.
Part of the problem, called the one-dimensional version, was solved about 20 years ago. Though it was a breakthrough, work remained. Hofmann solved the problem in all its dimensions in a 120-word paper that he wrote with several colleagues _ Pascal Auscher, Michael Lacey, John Lewis, Alan McIntosh and Philippe Tchamitchian.
"Philosophically, the reason research in math matters is that by pursuing math ideas that are deep and interesting for their own sake, you will get real-world applications in the future," Hofmann said.
"It is like making investments."
Theodore Slaman, chairman of the Department of Mathematics at the University of California-Berkeley, said solving a problem as old as Kato's Conjecture "is like finding the Holy Grail."
"Once you have solved it, people believe you have an understanding of an entirely new area. The longer a problem has been around, the more cachet associated with solving it."
Joe Epstein on Tocqueville
"One of the reasons that people in a democracy do not become enthusiastic about wars is that they do not feel truly implicated in them. Especially is this so when the wars are not strictly defensive and when they are fought exclusively by a professional army. The last war that commanded full national allegiance was World War II, and my guess--not having the perspicuity of Tocqueville--is that, owing to the draft, most people in the country had relatives and friends fighting in that war. Small flags with gold stars hung in the windows of families who lost husbands and sons, and the sight of them brought a national resolution not to make those deaths pointless. The country was united because the responsibility for fighting was spread throughout the population.
Nice though it would be to think that the people of the U.S. were behind World War II because they wanted to save the Jews, or loathed Hitler's doctrines, my guess (again) is that this wasn't the central reason for being ready to accept sacrifices because of this war. Without Pearl Harbor--without, that is, America's having been invaded, however peripherally, by a government--American entry into the war would most likely never have come about. Wars are most easily sold--as the Bush administration is attempting to do in Iraq--as defensive: We must get them before they get us. Wars of ideas, of clashing ideals, do not go down well in democracies, which may well be a criticism of democratic citizens.
The thought of the U.S. fighting a Thirty Years War or engaging in something akin to the Peloponnesian War (which lasted 27 years) is unthinkable. These were wars fought by aristocrats, not democrats, who want chiefly to get on with their pleasurable lives. A miserably difficult war against a fanatical enemy with no conclusion in obvious sight has nothing to do with pleasure. A hard sell, this war, and Tocqueville would have bet the chateau against the American people finally buying it. For once it would be nice to see him proved hopelessly wrong."
Nice though it would be to think that the people of the U.S. were behind World War II because they wanted to save the Jews, or loathed Hitler's doctrines, my guess (again) is that this wasn't the central reason for being ready to accept sacrifices because of this war. Without Pearl Harbor--without, that is, America's having been invaded, however peripherally, by a government--American entry into the war would most likely never have come about. Wars are most easily sold--as the Bush administration is attempting to do in Iraq--as defensive: We must get them before they get us. Wars of ideas, of clashing ideals, do not go down well in democracies, which may well be a criticism of democratic citizens.
The thought of the U.S. fighting a Thirty Years War or engaging in something akin to the Peloponnesian War (which lasted 27 years) is unthinkable. These were wars fought by aristocrats, not democrats, who want chiefly to get on with their pleasurable lives. A miserably difficult war against a fanatical enemy with no conclusion in obvious sight has nothing to do with pleasure. A hard sell, this war, and Tocqueville would have bet the chateau against the American people finally buying it. For once it would be nice to see him proved hopelessly wrong."
Robert Heinlein, 1953
"I found in traveling around the world that a great many people . . ., apparently well educated and sophisticated, were convinced that the people of the United States were in the grip of terror and that free speech and free press no longer existed here. They believed that the United States was fomenting a third world war and would presently start it, with Armageddon consequences for everyone else, and that the government of the United States smashed without mercy anyone who dared to oppose even by oral protests this headlong rush toward disaster.
These people could "prove" their opinions by quoting any number of Americans and American newspapers and magazines. That they were able to quote such American sources proved just the opposite, namely that we do continue to enjoy free speech even to express arrant nonsense and unpopular opinion, escaped them completely."
"I found in traveling around the world that a great many people . . ., apparently well educated and sophisticated, were convinced that the people of the United States were in the grip of terror and that free speech and free press no longer existed here. They believed that the United States was fomenting a third world war and would presently start it, with Armageddon consequences for everyone else, and that the government of the United States smashed without mercy anyone who dared to oppose even by oral protests this headlong rush toward disaster.
These people could "prove" their opinions by quoting any number of Americans and American newspapers and magazines. That they were able to quote such American sources proved just the opposite, namely that we do continue to enjoy free speech even to express arrant nonsense and unpopular opinion, escaped them completely."
Thursday, December 22, 2005
www.opinionjournal.com
John Schmidt, who served as an assistant attorney general during the Clinton administration, weighs in with a Chicago Tribune op-ed on the wiretapping kerfuffle:
"President Bush's post- Sept. 11, 2001, authorization to the National Security Agency to carry out electronic surveillance into private phone calls and e-mails is consistent with court decisions and with the positions of the Justice Department under prior presidents. . . .
In the Supreme Court's 1972 Keith decision holding that the president does not have inherent authority to order wiretapping without warrants to combat domestic threats, the court said explicitly that it was not questioning the president's authority to take such action in response to threats from abroad.
Four federal courts of appeal subsequently faced the issue squarely and held that the president has inherent authority to authorize wiretapping for foreign intelligence purposes without judicial warrant.
In the most recent judicial statement on the issue, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, composed of three federal appellate court judges, said in 2002 that "All the . . . courts to have decided the issue held that the president did have inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence . . . We take for granted that the president does have that authority."
The New York Times http://newsbusters.org/node/3298 reports on one of those cases:
"A Federal appeals court has ruled that the National Security Agency may lawfully intercept messages between United States citizens and people overseas, even if there is no cause to believe the Americans are foreign agents, and then provide summaries of these messages to the Federal Bureau of Investigation."
This article appeared Nov. 7, 1982, and is reprinted by Newsbusters.org. -But last week the Times was shocked, shocked to learn that the NSA was spying on al Qaeda. The Drudge Report http://drudgereport.com/flash8.htm notes that both President Carter http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/eo12139.htm and President Clinton http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/eo/eo-12949.htm signed executive orders providing for warrantless searches. This is looking increasingly like another effort by hostile journalists to gin up a fake scandal and discredit the administration. And once again, Democrats are falling for it. From the Associated Press:
"Domestic spying authorized by the White House "doesn't uphold our Constitution" and President Bush offered a "lame" defense in recent public appearances, Sen. John Kerry[*] said Tuesday.
The [haughty, French-looking] Massachusetts Democrat, who [by the way served in Vietnam and] lost to Bush in the 2004 presidential election, also said the alleged White House leak of a CIA agent's identity was more serious than the media's disclosure of the spying program.:
This is proof, as if any were needed, that Kerry is not serious. Remember that in January 2004 http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110004628 , Kerry described the war against terror as "primarily an intelligence and law-enforcement operation" rather than a military one. If he is to be believed--admittedly, a big "if"--a President Kerry would have been more concerned with terrorists' "rights" than with gathering intelligence to prevent terror attacks.
"President Bush's post- Sept. 11, 2001, authorization to the National Security Agency to carry out electronic surveillance into private phone calls and e-mails is consistent with court decisions and with the positions of the Justice Department under prior presidents. . . .
In the Supreme Court's 1972 Keith decision holding that the president does not have inherent authority to order wiretapping without warrants to combat domestic threats, the court said explicitly that it was not questioning the president's authority to take such action in response to threats from abroad.
Four federal courts of appeal subsequently faced the issue squarely and held that the president has inherent authority to authorize wiretapping for foreign intelligence purposes without judicial warrant.
In the most recent judicial statement on the issue, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, composed of three federal appellate court judges, said in 2002 that "All the . . . courts to have decided the issue held that the president did have inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence . . . We take for granted that the president does have that authority."
The New York Times http://newsbusters.org/node/3298 reports on one of those cases:
"A Federal appeals court has ruled that the National Security Agency may lawfully intercept messages between United States citizens and people overseas, even if there is no cause to believe the Americans are foreign agents, and then provide summaries of these messages to the Federal Bureau of Investigation."
This article appeared Nov. 7, 1982, and is reprinted by Newsbusters.org. -But last week the Times was shocked, shocked to learn that the NSA was spying on al Qaeda. The Drudge Report http://drudgereport.com/flash8.htm notes that both President Carter http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/eo12139.htm and President Clinton http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/eo/eo-12949.htm signed executive orders providing for warrantless searches. This is looking increasingly like another effort by hostile journalists to gin up a fake scandal and discredit the administration. And once again, Democrats are falling for it. From the Associated Press:
"Domestic spying authorized by the White House "doesn't uphold our Constitution" and President Bush offered a "lame" defense in recent public appearances, Sen. John Kerry[*] said Tuesday.
The [haughty, French-looking] Massachusetts Democrat, who [by the way served in Vietnam and] lost to Bush in the 2004 presidential election, also said the alleged White House leak of a CIA agent's identity was more serious than the media's disclosure of the spying program.:
This is proof, as if any were needed, that Kerry is not serious. Remember that in January 2004 http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110004628 , Kerry described the war against terror as "primarily an intelligence and law-enforcement operation" rather than a military one. If he is to be believed--admittedly, a big "if"--a President Kerry would have been more concerned with terrorists' "rights" than with gathering intelligence to prevent terror attacks.
Katrina
-Democrats consider President Bush "racially insensitive," if not downright racist.
According to a Time poll conducted shortly after Katrina, 54 percent of Democrats believe race and income level played a part in the hurricane response, compared to 17 percent of Republicans. The government's sluggish response to Katrina hurt Bush's standing with blacks. Now only 2 percent of blacks approve of the president's performance.
"George Bush doesn't care about black people," said rapper Kanye West during a nationally televised Hurricane Katrina relief effort.
CNN's Jack Cafferty also whipped out the race card, "Despite the many angles of this tragedy, and Lord knows there've been a lot of 'em in New Orleans, there is a great big elephant in the living room that the media seems content to ignore -- that would be, until now. . . . [W]e in the media are ignoring the fact that almost all of the victims in New Orleans are black and poor." CNN's Wolf Blitzer concurred," . . . [S]o many of these people, almost all of them that we see, are so poor and they are so black . . . "
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, whose befuddled response to Katrina likely cost lives, said, "The more I think about it, definitely race played into this." Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan went even further. He speculated that someone intentionally blew up the levee to flood the black area: "I heard from a reliable source who saw a 25-foot-deep crater under the levee breach. It may have been blown up to destroy the black part of town and keep the white part dry."
But what about the facts? A just-released report by the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals found whites in New Orleans died at a higher rate than minorities. According to the 2000 census, whites make up 28 percent of the city's population, but the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals indicates that whites constitute 36.6 percent of the storm's fatalities in the city. Yet blacks make up 67.25 percent of the population and 59.1 percent of the deceased. Again, whites in New Orleans died at a higher rate than minorities.
Orleans Parish, which sustained substantial damage, was 28 percent white and 67 percent black. But the devastation included neighboring parishes and Mississippi counties that were overwhelmingly white. Those hardest hit -- besides Orleans Parish -- were St. Bernard Parish (88 percent white, 8 percent black), Jefferson Parish (70 percent white, 23 percent black), Plaquemines Parish (70 percent white, 23 percent black), St. Tammany Parish (87 percent white, 10 percent black), Hancock County (90 percent white, 7 percent black), Harrison County (73 percent white, 21 percent black), and Jackson County (75 percent white, 21 percent black).
Larry Elder is a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist and publishes a monthly newsletter entitled "The Elder Statement."
According to a Time poll conducted shortly after Katrina, 54 percent of Democrats believe race and income level played a part in the hurricane response, compared to 17 percent of Republicans. The government's sluggish response to Katrina hurt Bush's standing with blacks. Now only 2 percent of blacks approve of the president's performance.
"George Bush doesn't care about black people," said rapper Kanye West during a nationally televised Hurricane Katrina relief effort.
CNN's Jack Cafferty also whipped out the race card, "Despite the many angles of this tragedy, and Lord knows there've been a lot of 'em in New Orleans, there is a great big elephant in the living room that the media seems content to ignore -- that would be, until now. . . . [W]e in the media are ignoring the fact that almost all of the victims in New Orleans are black and poor." CNN's Wolf Blitzer concurred," . . . [S]o many of these people, almost all of them that we see, are so poor and they are so black . . . "
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, whose befuddled response to Katrina likely cost lives, said, "The more I think about it, definitely race played into this." Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan went even further. He speculated that someone intentionally blew up the levee to flood the black area: "I heard from a reliable source who saw a 25-foot-deep crater under the levee breach. It may have been blown up to destroy the black part of town and keep the white part dry."
But what about the facts? A just-released report by the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals found whites in New Orleans died at a higher rate than minorities. According to the 2000 census, whites make up 28 percent of the city's population, but the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals indicates that whites constitute 36.6 percent of the storm's fatalities in the city. Yet blacks make up 67.25 percent of the population and 59.1 percent of the deceased. Again, whites in New Orleans died at a higher rate than minorities.
Orleans Parish, which sustained substantial damage, was 28 percent white and 67 percent black. But the devastation included neighboring parishes and Mississippi counties that were overwhelmingly white. Those hardest hit -- besides Orleans Parish -- were St. Bernard Parish (88 percent white, 8 percent black), Jefferson Parish (70 percent white, 23 percent black), Plaquemines Parish (70 percent white, 23 percent black), St. Tammany Parish (87 percent white, 10 percent black), Hancock County (90 percent white, 7 percent black), Harrison County (73 percent white, 21 percent black), and Jackson County (75 percent white, 21 percent black).
Larry Elder is a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist and publishes a monthly newsletter entitled "The Elder Statement."
Pouting Pundits of Pessimism
Every bit of good economic news gives them reason for despair.
BY BRIAN S. WESBURY
Friday, December 2, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST
During a quarter century of analyzing and forecasting the economy, I have never seen anything like this. No matter what happens, no matter what data are released, no matter which way markets move, a pall of pessimism hangs over the economy.
It is amazing. Everything is negative. When bond yields rise, it is considered bad for the housing market and the consumer. But if bond yields fall and the yield curve narrows toward inversion, that is bad too, because an inverted yield curve could signal a recession.
If housing data weaken, as they did on Monday when existing home sales fell, well that is a sign of a bursting housing bubble. If housing data strengthen, as they did on Tuesday when new home sales rose, that is negative because the Fed may raise rates further. If foreigners buy our bonds, we are not saving for ourselves. If foreigners do not buy our bonds, interest rates could rise. If wages go up, inflation is coming. If wages go down, the economy is in trouble.
This onslaught of negative thinking is clearly having an impact. During the 2004 presidential campaign, when attacks on the economy were in full force, 36% of Americans thought we were in recession. One year later, even though unemployment has fallen from 5.5% to 5%, and real GDP has expanded by 3.7%, the number who think a recession is underway has climbed to 43%.
This is a real conundrum. It is true, bad things have happened. Katrina wiped out a major city and many people are still displaced. GM has announced massive layoffs. Underfunded pension plans are being handed off to the government. Oil, gasoline and natural gas prices have soared. Despite it all, the U.S. economy continues to flourish.
One would think that this would give pouting pundits reason to question their pessimism. After all, politicians who bounce back from scandal get monikers such as "the comeback kid." Athletes who overcome personal tragedy or sickness to achieve greatness are called "heroes." This is a quintessential American tradition, and the economy is following the script perfectly. The more hardship it faces, the more resilient it appears. The list of pessimistic forecasts that have been proved wrong grows by the day.
The trade deficit was supposed to cause a collapse in the dollar; but the dollar is up 10% versus the euro in the past eight months. The budget deficit was supposed to push up interest rates; yet the 10-year Treasury yield, at 4.5%, is well below its 2000 average yield of 6% when the U.S. faced surpluses as far as the eye could see.
Sharp declines in consumer confidence and rising oil prices were supposed to hurt retail sales; but holiday shopping is strong. Many fear that China is stealing our jobs, but new reports suggest that U.S. manufacturers are so strong that a shortage of skilled production workers has developed. And since the Fed started hiking interest rates 16 months ago, 3.5 million new jobs and $750 billion in additional personal income have been created. Stocks are also up, which according to pundits was unlikely as long as the Fed was hiking rates.
So, where is all of the pessimism coming from? Some say that the anxiety is warranted. The theory goes like this: Globalization and technology are a massive force that levels the playing field. Because capital and ideas can move freely around the world, foreign wages will move up, while U.S. wages fall, until some sort of equilibrium is found. It's a compelling story. After all, real average hourly earnings in the U.S. fell 1.6% during the 12 months ending in October.
However, there are numerous reasons to believe that this statistic is not giving an accurate picture of the economy's health. First, history shows that when oil prices rise sharply, real earnings take a temporary hit. As a result, a snapshot of inflation-adjusted earnings data in the wake of Katrina is misleading.
Moreover, for the past 30 years, real average hourly earnings have declined by an annual average of 0.1%. But this can't possibly reflect reality. In the past 30 years, cell phones and computers have become ubiquitous. Home and auto ownership have climbed. More people dine out; travel; attend sporting events, movies and rock concerts; and join health clubs. Over those same 30 years, real per capita consumption has increased at an average annual rate of 2.3%. Hourly earnings data do not include tips, bonuses, commissions or benefits, and therefore will always lag actual increases in living standards.
Some observers of the current economy, such as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and former Clinton economic adviser Gene Sperling, argue correctly that globalization is inevitable and, in fact, good. Nonetheless, they focus on those who are hurt by the transitional impact and suggest that government intervene to offset any damage from plant closures or job losses.
But this has never worked. The history of economic progress is one of innovation and change. This "creative destruction" can never be a pain-free experience for every individual involved. The new must replace the old. Attempting to alter this fact of life, and create a utopia where no one experiences pain, has always led to more unhappiness than before. Germany's near 11% unemployment rate and the recent riots in France are the latest evidence of government's inability to successfully fight market forces.
One key reason the U.S. economy has outperformed other industrialized nations, and exceeded its long-run average growth rate during the past two years, is the tax cut of 2003. By reducing taxes on investment, the U.S. boosted growth, which in turn created new jobs that replace those that are lost as the old economy dies. Ireland is also a beautiful example of the power of tax cuts to boost growth and lift living standards.
Economic growth is the only true shock absorber for an economy in transition. To minimize the pain of technological globalization and address the anxiety that these forces are creating, free-market policies must be followed. While tremendous pressures are building to increase government involvement in the economy, it is important that the U.S. stay the course that brought it out of recession.
To meet the challenges that lie ahead, a vibrant, flexible and expanding economy is absolutely necessary. While it is tempting to think that government programs are necessary to address anxiety, in reality only the free market can successfully navigate today's rough waters. In the end, it will be the private sector, not the public sector, that quells all this anxiety and creates the opportunities so many desire.
Mr. Wesbury is chief investment strategist with Claymore Advisors LLC.
Every bit of good economic news gives them reason for despair.
BY BRIAN S. WESBURY
Friday, December 2, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST
During a quarter century of analyzing and forecasting the economy, I have never seen anything like this. No matter what happens, no matter what data are released, no matter which way markets move, a pall of pessimism hangs over the economy.
It is amazing. Everything is negative. When bond yields rise, it is considered bad for the housing market and the consumer. But if bond yields fall and the yield curve narrows toward inversion, that is bad too, because an inverted yield curve could signal a recession.
If housing data weaken, as they did on Monday when existing home sales fell, well that is a sign of a bursting housing bubble. If housing data strengthen, as they did on Tuesday when new home sales rose, that is negative because the Fed may raise rates further. If foreigners buy our bonds, we are not saving for ourselves. If foreigners do not buy our bonds, interest rates could rise. If wages go up, inflation is coming. If wages go down, the economy is in trouble.
This onslaught of negative thinking is clearly having an impact. During the 2004 presidential campaign, when attacks on the economy were in full force, 36% of Americans thought we were in recession. One year later, even though unemployment has fallen from 5.5% to 5%, and real GDP has expanded by 3.7%, the number who think a recession is underway has climbed to 43%.
This is a real conundrum. It is true, bad things have happened. Katrina wiped out a major city and many people are still displaced. GM has announced massive layoffs. Underfunded pension plans are being handed off to the government. Oil, gasoline and natural gas prices have soared. Despite it all, the U.S. economy continues to flourish.
One would think that this would give pouting pundits reason to question their pessimism. After all, politicians who bounce back from scandal get monikers such as "the comeback kid." Athletes who overcome personal tragedy or sickness to achieve greatness are called "heroes." This is a quintessential American tradition, and the economy is following the script perfectly. The more hardship it faces, the more resilient it appears. The list of pessimistic forecasts that have been proved wrong grows by the day.
The trade deficit was supposed to cause a collapse in the dollar; but the dollar is up 10% versus the euro in the past eight months. The budget deficit was supposed to push up interest rates; yet the 10-year Treasury yield, at 4.5%, is well below its 2000 average yield of 6% when the U.S. faced surpluses as far as the eye could see.
Sharp declines in consumer confidence and rising oil prices were supposed to hurt retail sales; but holiday shopping is strong. Many fear that China is stealing our jobs, but new reports suggest that U.S. manufacturers are so strong that a shortage of skilled production workers has developed. And since the Fed started hiking interest rates 16 months ago, 3.5 million new jobs and $750 billion in additional personal income have been created. Stocks are also up, which according to pundits was unlikely as long as the Fed was hiking rates.
So, where is all of the pessimism coming from? Some say that the anxiety is warranted. The theory goes like this: Globalization and technology are a massive force that levels the playing field. Because capital and ideas can move freely around the world, foreign wages will move up, while U.S. wages fall, until some sort of equilibrium is found. It's a compelling story. After all, real average hourly earnings in the U.S. fell 1.6% during the 12 months ending in October.
However, there are numerous reasons to believe that this statistic is not giving an accurate picture of the economy's health. First, history shows that when oil prices rise sharply, real earnings take a temporary hit. As a result, a snapshot of inflation-adjusted earnings data in the wake of Katrina is misleading.
Moreover, for the past 30 years, real average hourly earnings have declined by an annual average of 0.1%. But this can't possibly reflect reality. In the past 30 years, cell phones and computers have become ubiquitous. Home and auto ownership have climbed. More people dine out; travel; attend sporting events, movies and rock concerts; and join health clubs. Over those same 30 years, real per capita consumption has increased at an average annual rate of 2.3%. Hourly earnings data do not include tips, bonuses, commissions or benefits, and therefore will always lag actual increases in living standards.
Some observers of the current economy, such as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and former Clinton economic adviser Gene Sperling, argue correctly that globalization is inevitable and, in fact, good. Nonetheless, they focus on those who are hurt by the transitional impact and suggest that government intervene to offset any damage from plant closures or job losses.
But this has never worked. The history of economic progress is one of innovation and change. This "creative destruction" can never be a pain-free experience for every individual involved. The new must replace the old. Attempting to alter this fact of life, and create a utopia where no one experiences pain, has always led to more unhappiness than before. Germany's near 11% unemployment rate and the recent riots in France are the latest evidence of government's inability to successfully fight market forces.
One key reason the U.S. economy has outperformed other industrialized nations, and exceeded its long-run average growth rate during the past two years, is the tax cut of 2003. By reducing taxes on investment, the U.S. boosted growth, which in turn created new jobs that replace those that are lost as the old economy dies. Ireland is also a beautiful example of the power of tax cuts to boost growth and lift living standards.
Economic growth is the only true shock absorber for an economy in transition. To minimize the pain of technological globalization and address the anxiety that these forces are creating, free-market policies must be followed. While tremendous pressures are building to increase government involvement in the economy, it is important that the U.S. stay the course that brought it out of recession.
To meet the challenges that lie ahead, a vibrant, flexible and expanding economy is absolutely necessary. While it is tempting to think that government programs are necessary to address anxiety, in reality only the free market can successfully navigate today's rough waters. In the end, it will be the private sector, not the public sector, that quells all this anxiety and creates the opportunities so many desire.
Mr. Wesbury is chief investment strategist with Claymore Advisors LLC.
Wednesday, December 21, 2005
The only thing surprising is that the study’s authors seem to think their conclusions are surprising: Media Bias Is Real, Finds UCLA Political Scientist.
"While the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal is conservative, the newspaper’s news pages are liberal, even more liberal than The New York Times. The Drudge Report may have a right-wing reputation, but it leans left. Coverage by public television and radio is conservative compared to the rest of the mainstream media. Meanwhile, almost all major media outlets tilt to the left.
These are just a few of the surprising findings from a UCLA-led study, which is believed to be the first successful attempt at objectively quantifying bias in a range of media outlets and ranking them accordingly.
“I suspected that many media outlets would tilt to the left because surveys have shown that reporters tend to vote more Democrat than Republican,” said Tim Groseclose, a UCLA political scientist and the study’s lead author. “But I was surprised at just how pronounced the distinctions are.”
“Overall, the major media outlets are quite moderate compared to members of Congress, but even so, there is a quantifiable and significant bias in that nearly all of them lean to the left,” said co?author Jeffrey Milyo, University of Missouri economist and public policy scholar.
The results appear in the latest issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, which will become available in mid-December.
Groseclose and Milyo based their research on a standard gauge of a lawmaker’s support for liberal causes. Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) tracks the percentage of times that each lawmaker votes on the liberal side of an issue. Based on these votes, the ADA assigns a numerical score to each lawmaker, where “100” is the most liberal and “0” is the most conservative. After adjustments to compensate for disproportionate representation that the Senate gives to low?population states and the lack of representation for the District of Columbia, the average ADA score in Congress (50.1) was assumed to represent the political position of the average U.S. voter.
Groseclose and Milyo then directed 21 research assistants — most of them college students — to scour U.S. media coverage of the past 10 years. They tallied the number of times each media outlet referred to think tanks and policy groups, such as the left-leaning NAACP or the right-leaning Heritage Foundation.
Next, they did the same exercise with speeches of U.S. lawmakers. If a media outlet displayed a citation pattern similar to that of a lawmaker, then Groseclose and Milyo’s method assigned both a similar ADA score.
“A media person would have never done this study,” said Groseclose, a UCLA political science professor, whose research and teaching focuses on the U.S. Congress. “It takes a Congress scholar even to think of using ADA scores as a measure. And I don’t think many media scholars would have considered comparing news stories to congressional speeches.”
Of the 20 major media outlets studied, 18 scored left of center, with CBS’ “Evening News,” The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times ranking second, third and fourth most liberal behind the news pages of The Wall Street Journal.
Only Fox News’ “Special Report With Brit Hume” and The Washington Times scored right of the average U.S. voter.
The most centrist outlet proved to be the “NewsHour With Jim Lehrer.” CNN’s “NewsNight With Aaron Brown” and ABC’s “Good Morning America” were a close second and third."
"While the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal is conservative, the newspaper’s news pages are liberal, even more liberal than The New York Times. The Drudge Report may have a right-wing reputation, but it leans left. Coverage by public television and radio is conservative compared to the rest of the mainstream media. Meanwhile, almost all major media outlets tilt to the left.
These are just a few of the surprising findings from a UCLA-led study, which is believed to be the first successful attempt at objectively quantifying bias in a range of media outlets and ranking them accordingly.
“I suspected that many media outlets would tilt to the left because surveys have shown that reporters tend to vote more Democrat than Republican,” said Tim Groseclose, a UCLA political scientist and the study’s lead author. “But I was surprised at just how pronounced the distinctions are.”
“Overall, the major media outlets are quite moderate compared to members of Congress, but even so, there is a quantifiable and significant bias in that nearly all of them lean to the left,” said co?author Jeffrey Milyo, University of Missouri economist and public policy scholar.
The results appear in the latest issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, which will become available in mid-December.
Groseclose and Milyo based their research on a standard gauge of a lawmaker’s support for liberal causes. Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) tracks the percentage of times that each lawmaker votes on the liberal side of an issue. Based on these votes, the ADA assigns a numerical score to each lawmaker, where “100” is the most liberal and “0” is the most conservative. After adjustments to compensate for disproportionate representation that the Senate gives to low?population states and the lack of representation for the District of Columbia, the average ADA score in Congress (50.1) was assumed to represent the political position of the average U.S. voter.
Groseclose and Milyo then directed 21 research assistants — most of them college students — to scour U.S. media coverage of the past 10 years. They tallied the number of times each media outlet referred to think tanks and policy groups, such as the left-leaning NAACP or the right-leaning Heritage Foundation.
Next, they did the same exercise with speeches of U.S. lawmakers. If a media outlet displayed a citation pattern similar to that of a lawmaker, then Groseclose and Milyo’s method assigned both a similar ADA score.
“A media person would have never done this study,” said Groseclose, a UCLA political science professor, whose research and teaching focuses on the U.S. Congress. “It takes a Congress scholar even to think of using ADA scores as a measure. And I don’t think many media scholars would have considered comparing news stories to congressional speeches.”
Of the 20 major media outlets studied, 18 scored left of center, with CBS’ “Evening News,” The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times ranking second, third and fourth most liberal behind the news pages of The Wall Street Journal.
Only Fox News’ “Special Report With Brit Hume” and The Washington Times scored right of the average U.S. voter.
The most centrist outlet proved to be the “NewsHour With Jim Lehrer.” CNN’s “NewsNight With Aaron Brown” and ABC’s “Good Morning America” were a close second and third."
Future tech noir, cyberspace, androids, and more!So you want to prowl the gloomy, wet asphault streets of dystopia? Come face to face with killer androids. Fly home in a gravity defying car. Create the perfect child. Rummage through the ruins of a fallen city. Or watch prisoners play in a deadly game show where no one comes out alive? If so, check out the list of movies below!01. 'Blade Runner (The Director's Cut)'02. 'Dark City (New Line Platinum Series)'03. 'Metropolis (Restored Authorized Edition)'04. 'Cybercity'05. 'Mind Warp / Movie'06. 'Brazil'07. 'The Fifth Element'08. 'Future Kill'09. '1984'10. 'Minority Report (Widescreen Edition)'11. 'Impostor (Director's Cut)'12. 'The 6th Day (Special Edition)'13. 'Gattaca'14. 'A.I. Artificial Intelligence (Widescreen Special Edition)'15. 'The Matrix'16. 'Hardware / Movie'17. 'Soldier'18. 'Robocop'19. 'The Terminator'20. 'The Running Man (Special Edition)'21. 'Escape from New York (Special Edition)'22. 'Escape From L.A.'23. 'Total Recall'24. 'Battle Queen 2020'
Post Apocalypse, wastelands, savage gangs, and more!Do you dream of wandering through the wastelands of a post nuclear world? To fight for the leadership of a ruthless biker gang. Sail the seas of a world where the polar ice caps have melted. Or survive the attacks of nuclear mutated zombies? If so, check out the list of movies below!01. 'Planet of the Apes'02. 'Mad Max (Special Edition)'03. 'Neon City'04. 'Exterminators in the Year 3000'05. 'Steel Dawn'06. 'New Eden'07. 'Knights / Movie'08. 'Six-String Samurai'09. 'A Boy & His Dog'10. 'Warriors of the Wasteland'11. 'Tank Girl'12. 'Cherry 2000'13. 'Screamers'14. 'The Postman'15. 'Waterworld'16. 'Def-Con 4: Defense Condition'17. 'Battlefield Earth'18. '28 Days Later (Widescreen Edition)'19. 'The Omega Man'20. 'Doom Runners'21. 'Heavy Metal (Special Edition)'
Population overflow, piles of burning books, time travel, and everything else!Want to live in an over populated world of chaos? Help a mad scientist kidnap children and steal their dreams. Or live in fear in world where it's illegal to live over a certain age? If so, check out the list of movies below!01. 'Fahrenheit 451'02. 'Logan's Run'03. 'Soylent Green'04. '12 Monkeys'05. 'The City of Lost Children'
Post Apocalypse, wastelands, savage gangs, and more!Do you dream of wandering through the wastelands of a post nuclear world? To fight for the leadership of a ruthless biker gang. Sail the seas of a world where the polar ice caps have melted. Or survive the attacks of nuclear mutated zombies? If so, check out the list of movies below!01. 'Planet of the Apes'02. 'Mad Max (Special Edition)'03. 'Neon City'04. 'Exterminators in the Year 3000'05. 'Steel Dawn'06. 'New Eden'07. 'Knights / Movie'08. 'Six-String Samurai'09. 'A Boy & His Dog'10. 'Warriors of the Wasteland'11. 'Tank Girl'12. 'Cherry 2000'13. 'Screamers'14. 'The Postman'15. 'Waterworld'16. 'Def-Con 4: Defense Condition'17. 'Battlefield Earth'18. '28 Days Later (Widescreen Edition)'19. 'The Omega Man'20. 'Doom Runners'21. 'Heavy Metal (Special Edition)'
Population overflow, piles of burning books, time travel, and everything else!Want to live in an over populated world of chaos? Help a mad scientist kidnap children and steal their dreams. Or live in fear in world where it's illegal to live over a certain age? If so, check out the list of movies below!01. 'Fahrenheit 451'02. 'Logan's Run'03. 'Soylent Green'04. '12 Monkeys'05. 'The City of Lost Children'
Monday, December 19, 2005
ANWR
Our fake drilling debate
Dec 15, 2005by George Will ( bio archive contact )
...In 1980, a Democratic-controlled Congress at the behest of President Carter set area 1002 aside for possible energy exploration. Since then, although there are active oil and gas wells in at least 36 U.S. wildlife refuges, stopping drilling in ANWR has become sacramental for environmentalists who speak about it the way Wordsworth wrote about the Lake Country.
Few opponents of energy development in what they call ``pristine'' ANWR have visited it. Those who have and think it is ``pristine'' must have visited during the 56 days a year when it is without sunlight. They missed the roads, stores, houses, military installations, airstrip and school. They did not miss seeing the trees in area 1002. There are no trees.
Opponents worry that the caribou will be disconsolate about, and their reproduction disrupted by, this intrusion by man. The same was said 30 years ago by opponents of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline that brings heated oil south from Prudhoe Bay. Since the oil began flowing, the caribou have increased from 5,000 to 31,000. Perhaps the pipeline's heat makes them amorous.
Ice roads and helicopter pads, which will melt each spring, will minimize man's footprint, which will be on a 2,000-acre plot about one-fifth the size of Washington's Dulles Airport. Nevertheless, opponents say the environmental cost is too high for what the ineffable John Kerry calls ``a few drops of oil.'' Some drops. The estimated 10.4 billion barrels of recoverable oil -- such estimates frequently underestimate actual yields -- could supply all the oil needs of Kerry's Massachusetts for 75 years.
Flowing at 1 million barrels a day -- equal to 20 percent of today's domestic oil production -- ANWR oil would almost equal America's daily imports from Saudi Arabia...But for many opponents of drilling in ANWR, the debate is only secondarily about energy and the environment. Rather, it is a disguised debate about elemental political matters.
For some people, environmentalism is collectivism in drag. Such people use environmental causes and rhetoric not to change the political climate for the purpose of environmental improvement. Rather, for them, changing the society's politics is the end, and environmental policies are mere means to that end.
The unending argument in political philosophy concerns constantly adjusting society's balance between freedom and equality. The primary goal of collectivism -- of socialism in Europe and contemporary liberalism in America -- is to enlarge governmental supervision of individuals' lives. This is done in the name of equality.
People are to be conscripted into one large cohort, everyone equal (although not equal in status or power to the governing class) in their status as wards of a self-aggrandizing government. Government says the constant enlargement of its supervising power is necessary for the equitable or efficient allocation of scarce resources.
Therefore, one of the collectivists' tactics is to produce scarcities, particularly of what makes modern society modern -- the energy requisite for social dynamism and individual autonomy. Hence collectivists use environmentalism to advance a collectivizing energy policy. Focusing on one energy source at a time, they stress the environmental hazards of finding, developing, transporting, manufacturing or using oil, natural gas, coal or nuclear power.
A quarter of a century of this tactic applied to ANWR is about 24 years too many. If geologists were to decide that there were only three thimbles of oil beneath area 1002, there would still be something to be said for going down to get them, just to prove that this nation cannot be forever paralyzed by people wielding environmentalism as a cover for collectivism.
Dec 15, 2005by George Will ( bio archive contact )
...In 1980, a Democratic-controlled Congress at the behest of President Carter set area 1002 aside for possible energy exploration. Since then, although there are active oil and gas wells in at least 36 U.S. wildlife refuges, stopping drilling in ANWR has become sacramental for environmentalists who speak about it the way Wordsworth wrote about the Lake Country.
Few opponents of energy development in what they call ``pristine'' ANWR have visited it. Those who have and think it is ``pristine'' must have visited during the 56 days a year when it is without sunlight. They missed the roads, stores, houses, military installations, airstrip and school. They did not miss seeing the trees in area 1002. There are no trees.
Opponents worry that the caribou will be disconsolate about, and their reproduction disrupted by, this intrusion by man. The same was said 30 years ago by opponents of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline that brings heated oil south from Prudhoe Bay. Since the oil began flowing, the caribou have increased from 5,000 to 31,000. Perhaps the pipeline's heat makes them amorous.
Ice roads and helicopter pads, which will melt each spring, will minimize man's footprint, which will be on a 2,000-acre plot about one-fifth the size of Washington's Dulles Airport. Nevertheless, opponents say the environmental cost is too high for what the ineffable John Kerry calls ``a few drops of oil.'' Some drops. The estimated 10.4 billion barrels of recoverable oil -- such estimates frequently underestimate actual yields -- could supply all the oil needs of Kerry's Massachusetts for 75 years.
Flowing at 1 million barrels a day -- equal to 20 percent of today's domestic oil production -- ANWR oil would almost equal America's daily imports from Saudi Arabia...But for many opponents of drilling in ANWR, the debate is only secondarily about energy and the environment. Rather, it is a disguised debate about elemental political matters.
For some people, environmentalism is collectivism in drag. Such people use environmental causes and rhetoric not to change the political climate for the purpose of environmental improvement. Rather, for them, changing the society's politics is the end, and environmental policies are mere means to that end.
The unending argument in political philosophy concerns constantly adjusting society's balance between freedom and equality. The primary goal of collectivism -- of socialism in Europe and contemporary liberalism in America -- is to enlarge governmental supervision of individuals' lives. This is done in the name of equality.
People are to be conscripted into one large cohort, everyone equal (although not equal in status or power to the governing class) in their status as wards of a self-aggrandizing government. Government says the constant enlargement of its supervising power is necessary for the equitable or efficient allocation of scarce resources.
Therefore, one of the collectivists' tactics is to produce scarcities, particularly of what makes modern society modern -- the energy requisite for social dynamism and individual autonomy. Hence collectivists use environmentalism to advance a collectivizing energy policy. Focusing on one energy source at a time, they stress the environmental hazards of finding, developing, transporting, manufacturing or using oil, natural gas, coal or nuclear power.
A quarter of a century of this tactic applied to ANWR is about 24 years too many. If geologists were to decide that there were only three thimbles of oil beneath area 1002, there would still be something to be said for going down to get them, just to prove that this nation cannot be forever paralyzed by people wielding environmentalism as a cover for collectivism.
Friday, December 16, 2005
Drunk Finn Sets Norwegian Fine Record
Hey Package, maybe it is not a problem with drinking, maybe it is because of our genealogy?
OSLO, Norway - A Finnish citizen arrested on a public bus while drunk and nearly naked has set an apparent record for unpaid fines in Norway, with an estimated 99 of them, police said Friday.
The man, whose name was not released, is known by police for his tendency to discard pieces of clothing as his level of intoxication increases, the Bergens Tidende newspaper reported.
"He has gotten up to 99 fines," police attorney Rudolf Christophersen told the newspaper. "In the (Bergen area's) Hordaland Police District alone he has $14,260 worth of fines. That must be a record."
The man, whom police said offered up five different identities, has repeatedly been expelled from Norway, but keeps returning.
In the latest incident, on Wednesday, police received a telephone call from the bus driver in Bergen, the main city on Norway's west coast, who said: "There is a naked, drunk, difficult Finn causing trouble on board."
Police found the man dressed only his underpants, and extremely drunk, and are seeking to have him jailed on charges that include indecent exposure, vagrancy, public drunkenness and failing to pay his outstanding fines.
OSLO, Norway - A Finnish citizen arrested on a public bus while drunk and nearly naked has set an apparent record for unpaid fines in Norway, with an estimated 99 of them, police said Friday.
The man, whose name was not released, is known by police for his tendency to discard pieces of clothing as his level of intoxication increases, the Bergens Tidende newspaper reported.
"He has gotten up to 99 fines," police attorney Rudolf Christophersen told the newspaper. "In the (Bergen area's) Hordaland Police District alone he has $14,260 worth of fines. That must be a record."
The man, whom police said offered up five different identities, has repeatedly been expelled from Norway, but keeps returning.
In the latest incident, on Wednesday, police received a telephone call from the bus driver in Bergen, the main city on Norway's west coast, who said: "There is a naked, drunk, difficult Finn causing trouble on board."
Police found the man dressed only his underpants, and extremely drunk, and are seeking to have him jailed on charges that include indecent exposure, vagrancy, public drunkenness and failing to pay his outstanding fines.
Thursday, December 15, 2005
Hardly noticeable...
These photos provided by the International Kids Fund Tuesday, Dec. 13, 2005, shows Marlie Cassueus, 14, right, as she looks now with a 16-pound tumor-like growth on her face Tuesday, Dec. 13, 2005 in Miami and as she looked at left in this undated family photo. Marlie will undergo surgery to remove the growth Wednesday, Dec. 14 at Holtz Children's Hospital, part of the University of Miami/Jackson Memorial Medical Center. (AP Photo/International Kids Fund)
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
Mooj: Life is about people. It's about connections.
Andy Stitzer: It's all about connections.
Mooj: It's not about cocks, and ass, and tits.
Andy Stitzer: Yeah.
Mooj: And butthole pleasures.
Andy Stitzer: It's not about butthole pleasures at all.
Mooj: It's not about these rusty trombones, and these dirty sanchez.
Andy Stitzer: Please stop.
Mooj: And these cincinatti bowties, and these pussy juice cocktail, and these shit stained balls. Andy Stitzer: Mooj, just please stop.
Andy Stitzer: It's all about connections.
Mooj: It's not about cocks, and ass, and tits.
Andy Stitzer: Yeah.
Mooj: And butthole pleasures.
Andy Stitzer: It's not about butthole pleasures at all.
Mooj: It's not about these rusty trombones, and these dirty sanchez.
Andy Stitzer: Please stop.
Mooj: And these cincinatti bowties, and these pussy juice cocktail, and these shit stained balls. Andy Stitzer: Mooj, just please stop.
Tuesday, December 13, 2005
Allah Dammit!
$40M to Spread Islam in US Colleges
Four years after September 11, the Saudi prince whose poisoned gift was turned down by Rudy Giuliani is handing over $40M to Harvard and Georgetown Universities.
BOSTON - A Saudi prince believed to be the wealthiest businessman in the Muslim world has donated $40 million for Harvard and Georgetown to expand their Islamic studies programs, the schools announced Monday.
Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Alsaud, who gave $20 million to each university, is a nephew of the late King Fahd and worth upward of $20 billion, according to Forbes magazine, which ranked him fifth on its 2005 list of the world’s billionaires.
Harvard and Georgetown officials said they will use the gifts to add faculty and scholarships and expand their Islamic studies curricula.
“Bridging the understanding between East and West is important for peace and tolerance,” Prince Alwaleed said in a statement issued by both schools.
Harvard, which is naming its newly created program after Alwaleed, already has more than two dozen faculty researching or teaching in the field of Islamic studies.
“This program will enable us to recruit additional faculty of the highest caliber, adding to our strong team of professors who are focusing on this important area of scholarship,” Harvard President Lawrence Summers said in a statement.
Georgetown will use the gift, the second-largest in its history, to expand its Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. The center, which was founded in 1993, also will be renamed after Alwaleed.
Four years after September 11, the Saudi prince whose poisoned gift was turned down by Rudy Giuliani is handing over $40M to Harvard and Georgetown Universities.
BOSTON - A Saudi prince believed to be the wealthiest businessman in the Muslim world has donated $40 million for Harvard and Georgetown to expand their Islamic studies programs, the schools announced Monday.
Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Alsaud, who gave $20 million to each university, is a nephew of the late King Fahd and worth upward of $20 billion, according to Forbes magazine, which ranked him fifth on its 2005 list of the world’s billionaires.
Harvard and Georgetown officials said they will use the gifts to add faculty and scholarships and expand their Islamic studies curricula.
“Bridging the understanding between East and West is important for peace and tolerance,” Prince Alwaleed said in a statement issued by both schools.
Harvard, which is naming its newly created program after Alwaleed, already has more than two dozen faculty researching or teaching in the field of Islamic studies.
“This program will enable us to recruit additional faculty of the highest caliber, adding to our strong team of professors who are focusing on this important area of scholarship,” Harvard President Lawrence Summers said in a statement.
Georgetown will use the gift, the second-largest in its history, to expand its Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. The center, which was founded in 1993, also will be renamed after Alwaleed.
At Least Arnold Learned From History
Jack Henry Abbott spent the nine years before his eighteenth birthday in Utah reformatories. He was free for six months, then he was sent to the Utah penitentiary to do time for writing bad checks. He got more felony time three years later when he stabbed one inmate to death and injured another in a prison brawl. He robbed a bank during a brief escape in 1971; that earned him a nineteen-year federal sentence on top of the state time. He was then twenty-five years old.
In 1978 Abbott began a lengthy correspondence with Norman Mailer, who was at the time writing The Executioner's Song (1979), a fictionalized biography of executed murderer Gary Gilmore. Mailer got some of Abbott's letters published in the prestigious New York Review of Books, which led to publication of Abbott's first book, In the Belly of the Beast (1982).
When Abbott came up for parole Mailer wrote a strong letter on his behalf, not only saying he was fit for release but that Mailer could guarantee him gainful employment in New York. Abbott was transferred to a New York halfway house in early in June 1981.
Diane Christian and I had done some research on Death Row in Texas not long before that and we were exchanging regular letters with several men on the Row. One of them read In the Belly of the Beast and wrote us that "they're the kind of letters somebody on the inside writes somebody on the outside who doesn't know jack-shit about the penitentiary and never will." He and several other men on the Row found the book's success in New York proof of how easily conned people in the free world were.
While Abbott was at the halfway house he was the darling of New York literary society. He was on "Good Morning, America," and went to fancy parties. I heard Mailer talk about him several times on tv and remember thinking, "You've found your own Gary Gilmore." Mailer had never gotten to meet Gary Gilmore and I'd always thought that rankled him: he was hired to work on Executioner's Song by Lawrence Schiller after Gilmore's execution and he based his Gilmore dialog on Schiller's extensive interview tapes.
With Abbott, he had his own his pet convict. It was like those people who get a big animal you're not supposed to have and show it to you on a leash with a jewel-encrusted collar. You don't know if you're supposed to admire the animal or them for having it on the leash with the jewel-encrusted collar. Well, yes, you do know.
If Abbott had stayed out of trouble for eight weeks, he would have gone on parole. He didn't make it. Six weeks after he got to New York, he stabbed to death a waiter named Richard Adan. Because of his previous record, Abbott received the maximum sentence: 15 years to life. After he went back to prison Abbott wrote a second book, My Return (1987).
Jack Henry Abbott hanged himself with a bedsheet and shoelace in Wende Correctional Faculty on Sunday, February 10, 2002.
In 1978 Abbott began a lengthy correspondence with Norman Mailer, who was at the time writing The Executioner's Song (1979), a fictionalized biography of executed murderer Gary Gilmore. Mailer got some of Abbott's letters published in the prestigious New York Review of Books, which led to publication of Abbott's first book, In the Belly of the Beast (1982).
When Abbott came up for parole Mailer wrote a strong letter on his behalf, not only saying he was fit for release but that Mailer could guarantee him gainful employment in New York. Abbott was transferred to a New York halfway house in early in June 1981.
Diane Christian and I had done some research on Death Row in Texas not long before that and we were exchanging regular letters with several men on the Row. One of them read In the Belly of the Beast and wrote us that "they're the kind of letters somebody on the inside writes somebody on the outside who doesn't know jack-shit about the penitentiary and never will." He and several other men on the Row found the book's success in New York proof of how easily conned people in the free world were.
While Abbott was at the halfway house he was the darling of New York literary society. He was on "Good Morning, America," and went to fancy parties. I heard Mailer talk about him several times on tv and remember thinking, "You've found your own Gary Gilmore." Mailer had never gotten to meet Gary Gilmore and I'd always thought that rankled him: he was hired to work on Executioner's Song by Lawrence Schiller after Gilmore's execution and he based his Gilmore dialog on Schiller's extensive interview tapes.
With Abbott, he had his own his pet convict. It was like those people who get a big animal you're not supposed to have and show it to you on a leash with a jewel-encrusted collar. You don't know if you're supposed to admire the animal or them for having it on the leash with the jewel-encrusted collar. Well, yes, you do know.
If Abbott had stayed out of trouble for eight weeks, he would have gone on parole. He didn't make it. Six weeks after he got to New York, he stabbed to death a waiter named Richard Adan. Because of his previous record, Abbott received the maximum sentence: 15 years to life. After he went back to prison Abbott wrote a second book, My Return (1987).
Jack Henry Abbott hanged himself with a bedsheet and shoelace in Wende Correctional Faculty on Sunday, February 10, 2002.
Since when do they prescribe coke?
LOS ANGELES - Colin Farrell is being treated for exhaustion and dependency on prescription medication, his publicist said. The medication was prescribed to the Irish actor after a back injury, publicist Danica Smith said in a written statement Monday.
The statement said Farrell had checked himself into a treatment center, which wasn't identified. "No other comments (are) to be made at this time," the statement said.
Farrell, 29, stars in the upcoming adventure-drama "The New World."
The statement said Farrell had checked himself into a treatment center, which wasn't identified. "No other comments (are) to be made at this time," the statement said.
Farrell, 29, stars in the upcoming adventure-drama "The New World."
Monday, December 12, 2005
www.powerlineblog.com
Cost-benefit analysis Washington Post style
This Washington Post article recounts the debate within the administration over whether to proceed with last January's Iraqi elections on schedule. According to the Post, the president's top advisers were split, with no clear consensus. However, President Bush didn't wait for consensus. Rather, he insisted that the elections go forward as scheduled.
Post reporters Peter Baker and Robin Wright are not inclined to give Bush credit for making what surely was the correct decision. Eventually, they concede that what they choose to describe as "deadline democracy" managed to "propel the process forward and appears on the verge of creating a new government with legitimacy earned at the ballot box [while resulting] in a constitution often described as more democratic than any in the Arab world." But they nonetheless characterize Bush's decision as "one with distinct costs and benefits," suggesting that by proceeding on schedule the administration "failed to produce the national accord it sought among Iraq's three main groups, producing a schism that could loom beyond Thursday's elections." ...Baker and Wright do not even attempt to explain how delaying the January elections would have produced a "national accord." The only clear consequence of delay would have been to alienate Shiite leaders like the Ayatollah Sistani upon whose support we depend. Beyond that, delay simply would have kept the three factions frozen where they were.
Indeed, late in their piece Baker and Wright admit that holding the elections in January broke the stalemate and caused the Sunnis to begin earnest participation in the democratic process. "In a dramatic shift after the January elections," they write, "Sunni groups that had boycotted the election and therefore won only 16 of 275 seats in parliament declared they wanted to help write the constitution." Baker and Wright make this concession only by way of attacking subsequent decisions by the administration. But it fully vindicates Bush's decision to proceed with the January election. Don't expect the Washington Post to acknowledge this, though.
This Washington Post article recounts the debate within the administration over whether to proceed with last January's Iraqi elections on schedule. According to the Post, the president's top advisers were split, with no clear consensus. However, President Bush didn't wait for consensus. Rather, he insisted that the elections go forward as scheduled.
Post reporters Peter Baker and Robin Wright are not inclined to give Bush credit for making what surely was the correct decision. Eventually, they concede that what they choose to describe as "deadline democracy" managed to "propel the process forward and appears on the verge of creating a new government with legitimacy earned at the ballot box [while resulting] in a constitution often described as more democratic than any in the Arab world." But they nonetheless characterize Bush's decision as "one with distinct costs and benefits," suggesting that by proceeding on schedule the administration "failed to produce the national accord it sought among Iraq's three main groups, producing a schism that could loom beyond Thursday's elections." ...Baker and Wright do not even attempt to explain how delaying the January elections would have produced a "national accord." The only clear consequence of delay would have been to alienate Shiite leaders like the Ayatollah Sistani upon whose support we depend. Beyond that, delay simply would have kept the three factions frozen where they were.
Indeed, late in their piece Baker and Wright admit that holding the elections in January broke the stalemate and caused the Sunnis to begin earnest participation in the democratic process. "In a dramatic shift after the January elections," they write, "Sunni groups that had boycotted the election and therefore won only 16 of 275 seats in parliament declared they wanted to help write the constitution." Baker and Wright make this concession only by way of attacking subsequent decisions by the administration. But it fully vindicates Bush's decision to proceed with the January election. Don't expect the Washington Post to acknowledge this, though.
Loan article- depressing!
"These trends have intersected before -- paying off college loans has never been easy, and earlier generations have had to contend with weak job markets. But they are felt more keenly today. Almost two-thirds of students have to borrow money to get through school; as many as one-quarter may be accumulating credit-card debt to help pay for tuition. The median debt for college graduates in 2004 was $15,162, an increase of 66.5% since 1993.That may not seem like a crippling sum, but plenty of individuals owe much more. Back in 1993, only 4.2% of graduates had loans exceeding $25,000. A decade later, 17% did.Today's 30-year-olds are also the first generation for whom having a credit card was a rite of passage. Most of their parents couldn't get a credit card until well after graduation. But beginning in the early 1990s, students have been bombarded by tempting offers at a time when they were just scraping by. For those whose financial education had scarcely begun, it seemed like free money: Spend a couple of hundred dollars and only pay the minimum balance of $10 a month. So students used their cards to buy computers, clothes, gas, textbooks and sometimes even to pay for tuition.Living with debt has become perfectly acceptable: Last year 76% of college students had credit cards and their average debt was $2,169. "We wink at the magical thinking that credit-card companies encourage us to engage in," says Darryl Dahlheimer, a program manager at Lutheran Social Service Financial Counseling in Minneapolis. "The bitter 30-year-olds are the ones who are still paying off the pizza they ate when they were 20."
http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/CollegeandFamily/Moneyinyour20s/P137030.asp
http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/CollegeandFamily/Moneyinyour20s/P137030.asp
Man Had 100 Bags of Cocaine in Stomach
OSLO, Norway - A Liberian man was arrested with about one kilogram (2.2 pounds) of cocaine concealed in 100 condoms in his stomach on the Norwegian-Swedish border, customs officials said Monday.
The 41-year-old, whose name was withheld, was a passenger on bus from Sweden to southeastern Norway, and needed medical attention shortly after he was detained late Saturday, said Wenche Fredriksen, of the Norwegian Customs Region Eastern Norway.
She said the man swallowed the illegal drugs in Germany, and became ill during the customs interrogation.
I'm usually full after 15 cocaine filled condoms.
The 41-year-old, whose name was withheld, was a passenger on bus from Sweden to southeastern Norway, and needed medical attention shortly after he was detained late Saturday, said Wenche Fredriksen, of the Norwegian Customs Region Eastern Norway.
She said the man swallowed the illegal drugs in Germany, and became ill during the customs interrogation.
I'm usually full after 15 cocaine filled condoms.
A snippet from the best article I have read in months relating to the WOT-
"Of course, to anyone who relies entirely or largely on the mainstream media for information, it will come as a great surprise to hear that we are winning in Iraq. Winning? Militarily? How can we be winning militarily when, day after day, the only thing of any importance going on in that country is suicide bombings and car bombings? When neither our own troops nor the Iraqi forces we have been training are able to stop the "insurgents" from scoring higher and higher body counts? When every serious military move we make against the strongholds of these dedicated and ruthless adversaries is met with "fierce resistance"? When, for every one of them we manage to kill, two more seem to pop up?
Winning? Politically? How can we be winning politically when the very purpose for which we allegedly invaded Iraq has been unmasked as a chimera? When every step we force the Iraqis to take toward democratization is accompanied by angry sectarian strife between Shiites and Sunnis and between Arabs and Kurds? When our clumsy efforts to bring the Sunnis into the political process have hardly made a dent in their support for the insurgency? When the end result is less likely to be the stable democratic regime we supposedly went there to establish than a civil war followed by the breakup of Iraq into three separate countries?
There has been one great exception to this relentless drumbeat of bad news. It occurred in January 2005, in the coverage of the first election in liberated Iraq. To the astonishment of practically everyone in the world, more than eight million Iraqis came out to vote on election day even though the Islamofascist terrorists had threatened to slaughter them if they did. This very astonishment was a measure of how false an impression had been created of the state of affairs in Iraq. No one fed by the mainstream media could have had the slightest inkling that these eight million people were actually there, so invisible had they been to reporters who spent all their time interviewing the discontented Iraqi man-in-the-street and to cameras seemingly incapable of focusing on anything but carnage and rubble.
But the mainstream media soon recovered from the shock. By October, on the morning after a second ballot in which the new Iraqi constitution was ratified by fully 79% of the electorate, the Washington Post ran its announcement of these inspiring results on page 13. As for the paper's front page, the columnist Jeff Jacoby would note that it
was dominated by a photograph, stretched across four columns, of three daughters at the funeral of their father, . . . who had died from injuries suffered during a Sept. 26 bombing in Baghdad. Two accompanying stories, both above the fold, were headlined "Military Has Lost 2,000 in Iraq" and "Bigger, Stronger, Homemade Bombs Now to Blame for Half of U.S. Deaths." A nearby graphic--"The Toll"--divided the 2,000 deaths by type of military service.In sum, in the words of the Australian blogger Arthur Chrenkoff:
Death, violence, terrorism, precarious political situation, problems with reconstruction, and public frustration (both in Iraq and America) dominate, if not overwhelm, the mainstream media coverage and commentary on Iraq.About a year ago, concerned that he might have been exaggerating when he made this assertion on the basis of his "gut feeling," Mr. Chrenkoff decided to check it out more scientifically. So he did "a little tally" of the stories published or broadcast all over the world on a single average day (which happened to be Jan. 21, 2005). Here are some of the numbers that, with the help of the Google News Index, he was able to report from that one day:
2,642 stories about Condoleezza Rice's confirmation hearings, in the context of grilling she has received over the administration's Iraq policy.
1,992 stories about suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks.
887 stories about prisoner abuse by British soldiers.
216 stories about hostages currently being held in Iraq.
761 stories reporting on activities and public statements of insurgents.
357 stories about the antiwar movement and the dropping public support for involvement in Iraq.
182 stories about American servicemen killed and wounded in operations.
217 stories about concerns for fairness and validity of Iraqi election (low security, low turnout, etc.).
107 stories about civilian deaths in Iraq.
123 stories noting Vice President Cheney's admission that he had underestimated the task of reconstruction.
118 stories about complicated and strained relations between the U.S. and Europe.
121 stories discussing the possibility of an American pullout.
27 stories about sabotage of Iraqi oil infrastructure. As against all this, the good news made a pathetic showing:
16 stories about security successes in the fight against insurgents.
7 stories about positive developments relating to elections.
73 stories about the return to Iraq of stolen antiquities. Obviously, then, the reporters and their editors in the mainstream media have been working overtime to show how badly things have been going for us in Iraq.
Meanwhile, the op-ed pundits, the academic theorists and the armchair generals have chimed in with analyses blaming it all on the incompetence of the president and his appointees. By now, the proposition that the aftermath of the invasion has been marked by one disastrous blunder after another is accepted without question or qualification by just about everyone: open opponents of the Bush Doctrine eager to prove that they were right to denounce the invasion; Democrats whose main objective is to discredit the Bush administration; and erstwhile supporters who have lost heart and are looking for a way to justify their desertion."
Mr. Podhoretz is editor-at-large of Commentary and author of 10 books, most recently "The Norman Podhoretz Reader," edited by Thomas L. Jeffers (Free Press, 2004). This article will appear in Commentary's January issue.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110007661
"Of course, to anyone who relies entirely or largely on the mainstream media for information, it will come as a great surprise to hear that we are winning in Iraq. Winning? Militarily? How can we be winning militarily when, day after day, the only thing of any importance going on in that country is suicide bombings and car bombings? When neither our own troops nor the Iraqi forces we have been training are able to stop the "insurgents" from scoring higher and higher body counts? When every serious military move we make against the strongholds of these dedicated and ruthless adversaries is met with "fierce resistance"? When, for every one of them we manage to kill, two more seem to pop up?
Winning? Politically? How can we be winning politically when the very purpose for which we allegedly invaded Iraq has been unmasked as a chimera? When every step we force the Iraqis to take toward democratization is accompanied by angry sectarian strife between Shiites and Sunnis and between Arabs and Kurds? When our clumsy efforts to bring the Sunnis into the political process have hardly made a dent in their support for the insurgency? When the end result is less likely to be the stable democratic regime we supposedly went there to establish than a civil war followed by the breakup of Iraq into three separate countries?
There has been one great exception to this relentless drumbeat of bad news. It occurred in January 2005, in the coverage of the first election in liberated Iraq. To the astonishment of practically everyone in the world, more than eight million Iraqis came out to vote on election day even though the Islamofascist terrorists had threatened to slaughter them if they did. This very astonishment was a measure of how false an impression had been created of the state of affairs in Iraq. No one fed by the mainstream media could have had the slightest inkling that these eight million people were actually there, so invisible had they been to reporters who spent all their time interviewing the discontented Iraqi man-in-the-street and to cameras seemingly incapable of focusing on anything but carnage and rubble.
But the mainstream media soon recovered from the shock. By October, on the morning after a second ballot in which the new Iraqi constitution was ratified by fully 79% of the electorate, the Washington Post ran its announcement of these inspiring results on page 13. As for the paper's front page, the columnist Jeff Jacoby would note that it
was dominated by a photograph, stretched across four columns, of three daughters at the funeral of their father, . . . who had died from injuries suffered during a Sept. 26 bombing in Baghdad. Two accompanying stories, both above the fold, were headlined "Military Has Lost 2,000 in Iraq" and "Bigger, Stronger, Homemade Bombs Now to Blame for Half of U.S. Deaths." A nearby graphic--"The Toll"--divided the 2,000 deaths by type of military service.In sum, in the words of the Australian blogger Arthur Chrenkoff:
Death, violence, terrorism, precarious political situation, problems with reconstruction, and public frustration (both in Iraq and America) dominate, if not overwhelm, the mainstream media coverage and commentary on Iraq.About a year ago, concerned that he might have been exaggerating when he made this assertion on the basis of his "gut feeling," Mr. Chrenkoff decided to check it out more scientifically. So he did "a little tally" of the stories published or broadcast all over the world on a single average day (which happened to be Jan. 21, 2005). Here are some of the numbers that, with the help of the Google News Index, he was able to report from that one day:
2,642 stories about Condoleezza Rice's confirmation hearings, in the context of grilling she has received over the administration's Iraq policy.
1,992 stories about suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks.
887 stories about prisoner abuse by British soldiers.
216 stories about hostages currently being held in Iraq.
761 stories reporting on activities and public statements of insurgents.
357 stories about the antiwar movement and the dropping public support for involvement in Iraq.
182 stories about American servicemen killed and wounded in operations.
217 stories about concerns for fairness and validity of Iraqi election (low security, low turnout, etc.).
107 stories about civilian deaths in Iraq.
123 stories noting Vice President Cheney's admission that he had underestimated the task of reconstruction.
118 stories about complicated and strained relations between the U.S. and Europe.
121 stories discussing the possibility of an American pullout.
27 stories about sabotage of Iraqi oil infrastructure. As against all this, the good news made a pathetic showing:
16 stories about security successes in the fight against insurgents.
7 stories about positive developments relating to elections.
73 stories about the return to Iraq of stolen antiquities. Obviously, then, the reporters and their editors in the mainstream media have been working overtime to show how badly things have been going for us in Iraq.
Meanwhile, the op-ed pundits, the academic theorists and the armchair generals have chimed in with analyses blaming it all on the incompetence of the president and his appointees. By now, the proposition that the aftermath of the invasion has been marked by one disastrous blunder after another is accepted without question or qualification by just about everyone: open opponents of the Bush Doctrine eager to prove that they were right to denounce the invasion; Democrats whose main objective is to discredit the Bush administration; and erstwhile supporters who have lost heart and are looking for a way to justify their desertion."
Mr. Podhoretz is editor-at-large of Commentary and author of 10 books, most recently "The Norman Podhoretz Reader," edited by Thomas L. Jeffers (Free Press, 2004). This article will appear in Commentary's January issue.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110007661
Wow.
Dyan French, also known as "Mama D," is a New Orleans Citizen and Community Leader. She testified before the House Select Committee on Hurricane Katrina on Tuesday.
"I was on my front porch. I have witnesses that they bombed the walls of the levee, boom, boom!" Mama D said, holding her head. "Mister, I'll never forget it."
"Certainly appears to me to be an act of genocide and of ethnic cleansing," Leah Hodges, another New Orleans citizen, told the committee. . .
"I was on my front porch. I have witnesses that they bombed the walls of the levee, boom, boom!" Mama D said, holding her head. "Mister, I'll never forget it."
"Certainly appears to me to be an act of genocide and of ethnic cleansing," Leah Hodges, another New Orleans citizen, told the committee. . .
Enroachment
"...One thing is clear: where Islam is protected from so-called blasphemy, freedom of conscience and freedom of speech -- let alone women's rights -- are not. This same notion of Islam's "protection" came up when Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini sentenced Salman Rushdie to death in 1989 for his "blasphemous" novel, "The Satanic Verses," pitching the Western world into craven fits of appeasement. As Daniel Pipes has written, the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) not only endorsed Iran's charges of "blasphemy" and Mr. Rushdie's "heresy," it also called for "necessary legislation to insure the protection of the religious beliefs of others." Saliently, the OIC declared that "blasphemy cannot be justified on the basis of freedom of expression and opinion." Some things never change. As we see in Afghanistan -- and, increasingly, elsewhere -- this fundamental tenet of Islamic society is one of them. And it is on this point that the West and Islam are struggling to come to terms. For example, the Islamic furor over a dozen Muhammad cartoons published in a Danish newspaper --and Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen's refusal to meddle with his country's freedom of speech -- continues to rise up the food chain, from death threats and street riots, to ambassadorial protests, to heads-of-state deliberations at the December OIC meeting in Mecca.
Turkish prime minister Recep Erdogan's reaction not only sums up the official Islamic response, but is also highly significant given Turkey's bid to become the European Union bridge between the West and Islam. On a recent trip to Denmark, as recounted in the Internet edition of the Turkish newspaper "Zaman," Mr. Erdogan addressed the Muhammad-cartoon issue, saying, "Freedoms have limits, what is sacred should be respected." As columnist Mustafa Unal put it, Mr. Erdogan "indicated that respect toward what is considered sacred is more important than the freedom of expression." This is a major point of culture clash -- or would be, if the West cared to defend its freedoms. Which is a big "if." Meanwhile, Denmark's "Berlingske Tidende," via the blogger Fjordman (fjordman.blogspot.com), reports that the 56 countries of the OIC have now written the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights to "help contain this encroachment on Islam, so the situation won't get out of control." Let's translate. "Encroachment on Islam" equals criticism of Islam -- aka "blasphemy" in Islamic quarters. "The situation" equals freedom of speech. "Out of control" equals criticism of Islam as an exercise of freedom of speech. In response, the U.N. human rights commissioner, Louise Arbour, emphasized her "regret" over "any statement or act that could express a lack of respect for the religion of others." Which sounds like the Danes are in U.N.-trouble. But what about the statements or acts -- from censorship to death sentences -- of the religion that encroach on the rights of others? That's a question no one dares to ask."
Diana West is a contributing columnist for Townhall.com.
Turkish prime minister Recep Erdogan's reaction not only sums up the official Islamic response, but is also highly significant given Turkey's bid to become the European Union bridge between the West and Islam. On a recent trip to Denmark, as recounted in the Internet edition of the Turkish newspaper "Zaman," Mr. Erdogan addressed the Muhammad-cartoon issue, saying, "Freedoms have limits, what is sacred should be respected." As columnist Mustafa Unal put it, Mr. Erdogan "indicated that respect toward what is considered sacred is more important than the freedom of expression." This is a major point of culture clash -- or would be, if the West cared to defend its freedoms. Which is a big "if." Meanwhile, Denmark's "Berlingske Tidende," via the blogger Fjordman (fjordman.blogspot.com), reports that the 56 countries of the OIC have now written the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights to "help contain this encroachment on Islam, so the situation won't get out of control." Let's translate. "Encroachment on Islam" equals criticism of Islam -- aka "blasphemy" in Islamic quarters. "The situation" equals freedom of speech. "Out of control" equals criticism of Islam as an exercise of freedom of speech. In response, the U.N. human rights commissioner, Louise Arbour, emphasized her "regret" over "any statement or act that could express a lack of respect for the religion of others." Which sounds like the Danes are in U.N.-trouble. But what about the statements or acts -- from censorship to death sentences -- of the religion that encroach on the rights of others? That's a question no one dares to ask."
Diana West is a contributing columnist for Townhall.com.
Friday, December 09, 2005
Thursday, December 08, 2005
The traitor to the left is you my friend...
A Friendly Drink in a Time of War
by Paul Berman
A friend leaned across a bar and said, "You call the war in Iraq an antifascist war. You even call it a left-wing war-a war of liberation. That language of yours! And yet, on the left, not too many people agree with you."
"Not true!" I said. "Apart from X, Y, and Z, whose left-wing names you know very well, what do you think of Adam Michnik in Poland? And doesn't Vaclav Havel count for something in your eyes? These are among the heroes of our time. Anyway, who is fighting in Iraq right now? The coalition is led by a Texas right-winger, which is a pity; but, in the second rank, by the prime minister of Britain, who is a socialist, sort of; and, in the third rank, by the president of Poland-a Communist! An ex-Communist, anyway. One Texas right-winger and two Europeans who are more or less on the left. Anyway, these categories, right and left, are disintegrating by the minute. And who do you regard as the leader of the worldwide left? Jacques Chirac?-a conservative, I hate to tell you."
My friend persisted.
"Still, most people don't seem to agree with you. You do have to see that. And why do you suppose that is?"
That was an aggressive question. And I answered in kind.
"Why don't people on the left see it my way? Except for the ones who do? I'll give you six reasons. People on the left have been unable to see the antifascist nature of the war because . . . "-and my hand hovered over the bar, ready to thump six times, demonstrating the powerful force of my argument.
"The left doesn't see because -" thump!-"George W. Bush is an unusually repulsive politician, except to his own followers, and people are blinded by the revulsion they feel. And, in their blindness, they cannot identify the main contours of reality right now. They peer at Iraq and see the smirking face of George W. Bush. They even feel a kind of schadenfreude or satisfaction at his errors and failures. This is a modern, television-age example of what used to be called 'false consciousness.'"
Thump! "The left doesn't see because a lot of otherwise intelligent people have decided, a priori, that all the big problems around the world stem from America. Even the problems that don't. This is an attitude that, sixty years ago, would have prevented those same people from making sense of the fascists of Europe, too."
Thump! "Another reason: a lot of people suppose that any sort of anticolonial movement must be admirable or, at least, acceptable. Or they think that, at minimum, we shouldn't do more than tut-tut-even in the case of a movement that, like the Baath Party, was founded under a Nazi influence. In 1943, no less!"
Thump! "The left doesn't see because a lot of people, in their good-hearted effort to respect cultural differences, have concluded that Arabs must for inscrutable reasons of their own like to live under grotesque dictatorships and are not really capable of anything else, or won't be ready to do so for another five hundred years, and Arab liberals should be regarded as somehow inauthentic. Which is to say, a lot of people, swept along by their own high-minded principles of cultural tolerance, have ended up clinging to attitudes that can only be regarded as racist against Arabs.
"The old-fashioned left used to be universalist-used to think that everyone, all over the world, would some day want to live according to the same fundamental values, and ought to be helped to do so. They thought this was especially true for people in reasonably modern societies with universities, industries, and a sophisticated bureaucracy-societies like the one in Iraq. But no more! Today, people say, out of a spirit of egalitarian tolerance: Social democracy for Swedes! Tyranny for Arabs! And this is supposed to be a left-wing attitude? By the way, you don't hear much from the left about the non-Arabs in countries like Iraq, do you? The left, the real left, used to be the champion of minority populations-of people like the Kurds. No more! The left, my friend, has abandoned the values of the left-except for a few of us, of course."
Thump! "Another reason: A lot of people honestly believe that Israel's problems with the Palestinians represent something more than a miserable dispute over borders and recognition-that Israel's problems represent something huger, a uniquely diabolical aspect of Zionism, which explains the rage and humiliation felt by Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia. Which is to say, a lot of people have succumbed to anti-Semitic fantasies about the cosmic quality of Jewish crime and cannot get their minds to think about anything else.
"I mean, look at the discussions that go on even among people who call themselves the democratic left, the good left-a relentless harping on the sins of Israel, an obsessive harping, with very little said about the fascist-influenced movements that have caused hundreds of thousands and even millions of deaths in other parts of the Muslim world. The distortions are wild, if you stop to think about them. Look at some of our big, influential liberal magazines-one article after another about Israeli crimes and stupidities, and even a few statements in favor of abolishing Israel, and hardly anything about the sufferings of the Arabs in the rest of the world. And even less is said about the Arab liberals-our own comrades, who have been pretty much abandoned. What do you make of that, my friend? There's a name for that, a systematic distortion-what we Marxists, when we were Marxists, used to call ideology."
Thump! "The left doesn't see because a lot of people are, in any case, willfully blind to anti-Semitism in other cultures. They cannot get themselves to recognize the degree to which Nazi-like doctrines about the supernatural quality of Jewish evil have influenced mass political movements across large swaths of the world. It is 1943 right now in huge portions of the world-and people don't see it. And so, people simply cannot detect the fascist nature of all kinds of mass movements and political parties. In the Muslim world, especially."
Six thumps. I was done. My friend looked incredulous. His incredulity drove me to continue.
"And yet," I insisted, "if good-hearted people like you would only open your left-wing eyes, you would see clearly enough that the Baath Party is very nearly a classic fascist movement, and so is the radical Islamist movement, in a somewhat different fashion-two strands of a single impulse, which happens to be Europe's fascist and totalitarian legacy to the modern Muslim world. If only people like you would wake up, you would see that war against the radical Islamist and Baathist movements, in Afghanistan exactly as in Iraq, is war against fascism."
I grew still more heated.
"What a tragedy that you don't see this! It's a tragedy for the Afghanis and the Iraqis, who need more help than they are receiving. A tragedy for the genuine liberals all over the Muslim world! A tragedy for the American soldiers, the British, the Poles and every one else who has gone to Iraq lately, the nongovernmental organization volunteers and the occupying forces from abroad, who have to struggle on bitterly against the worst kind of nihilists, and have been getting damn little support or even moral solidarity from people who describe themselves as antifascists in the world's richest and fattest neighborhoods.
"What a tragedy for the left-the worldwide left, this left of ours which, in failing to play much of a role in the antifascism of our own era, is right now committing a gigantic historic error. Not for the first time, my friend! And yet, if the left all over the world took up this particular struggle as its own, the whole nature of events in Iraq and throughout the region could be influenced in a very useful way, and Bush's many blunders could be rectified, and the struggle could be advanced."
My friend's eyes widened, maybe in astonishment, maybe in pity.
He said, "And so, the United Nations and international law mean nothing to you, not a thing? You think it's all right for America to go do whatever it wants, and ignore the rest of the world?"
I answered, "The United Nations and international law are fine by me, and more than fine. I am their supporter. Or, rather, would like to support them. It would be better to fight an antifascist war with more than a begrudging UN approval. It would be better to fight with the approving sanction of international law-better in a million ways. Better politically, therefore militarily. Better for the precedents that would be set. Better for the purpose of expressing the liberal principles at stake. If I had my druthers, that is how we would have gone about fighting the war. But my druthers don't count for much. We have had to choose between supporting the war, or opposing it-supporting the war in the name of antifascism, or opposing it in the name of some kind of concept of international law. Antifascism without international law; or international law without antifascism. A miserable choice-but one does have to choose, unfortunately."
My friend said, "I'm for the UN and international law, and I think you've become a traitor to the left. A neocon!"
I said, "I'm for overthrowing tyrants, and since when did overthrowing fascism become treason to the left?"
"But isn't George Bush himself a fascist, more or less? I mean-admit it!"
My own eyes widened. "You haven't the foggiest idea what fascism is," I said. "I always figured that a keen awareness of extreme oppression was the deepest trait of a left-wing heart. Mass graves, three hundred thousand missing Iraqis, a population crushed by thirty-five years of Baathist boots stomping on their faces-that is what fascism means! And you think that a few corrupt insider contracts with Bush's cronies at Halliburton and a bit of retrograde Bible-thumping and Bush's ridiculous tax cuts and his bonanzas for the super-rich are indistinguishable from that?-indistinguishable from fascism? From a politics of slaughter? Leftism is supposed to be a reality principle. Leftism is supposed to embody an ability to take in the big picture. The traitor to the left is you, my friend . . ."
But this made not the slightest sense to him, and there was nothing left to do but to hit each other over the head with our respective drinks.
Paul Berman is the author of Terror and Liberalism. His book The Passion of Joschka Fischer will come out in the spring.
by Paul Berman
A friend leaned across a bar and said, "You call the war in Iraq an antifascist war. You even call it a left-wing war-a war of liberation. That language of yours! And yet, on the left, not too many people agree with you."
"Not true!" I said. "Apart from X, Y, and Z, whose left-wing names you know very well, what do you think of Adam Michnik in Poland? And doesn't Vaclav Havel count for something in your eyes? These are among the heroes of our time. Anyway, who is fighting in Iraq right now? The coalition is led by a Texas right-winger, which is a pity; but, in the second rank, by the prime minister of Britain, who is a socialist, sort of; and, in the third rank, by the president of Poland-a Communist! An ex-Communist, anyway. One Texas right-winger and two Europeans who are more or less on the left. Anyway, these categories, right and left, are disintegrating by the minute. And who do you regard as the leader of the worldwide left? Jacques Chirac?-a conservative, I hate to tell you."
My friend persisted.
"Still, most people don't seem to agree with you. You do have to see that. And why do you suppose that is?"
That was an aggressive question. And I answered in kind.
"Why don't people on the left see it my way? Except for the ones who do? I'll give you six reasons. People on the left have been unable to see the antifascist nature of the war because . . . "-and my hand hovered over the bar, ready to thump six times, demonstrating the powerful force of my argument.
"The left doesn't see because -" thump!-"George W. Bush is an unusually repulsive politician, except to his own followers, and people are blinded by the revulsion they feel. And, in their blindness, they cannot identify the main contours of reality right now. They peer at Iraq and see the smirking face of George W. Bush. They even feel a kind of schadenfreude or satisfaction at his errors and failures. This is a modern, television-age example of what used to be called 'false consciousness.'"
Thump! "The left doesn't see because a lot of otherwise intelligent people have decided, a priori, that all the big problems around the world stem from America. Even the problems that don't. This is an attitude that, sixty years ago, would have prevented those same people from making sense of the fascists of Europe, too."
Thump! "Another reason: a lot of people suppose that any sort of anticolonial movement must be admirable or, at least, acceptable. Or they think that, at minimum, we shouldn't do more than tut-tut-even in the case of a movement that, like the Baath Party, was founded under a Nazi influence. In 1943, no less!"
Thump! "The left doesn't see because a lot of people, in their good-hearted effort to respect cultural differences, have concluded that Arabs must for inscrutable reasons of their own like to live under grotesque dictatorships and are not really capable of anything else, or won't be ready to do so for another five hundred years, and Arab liberals should be regarded as somehow inauthentic. Which is to say, a lot of people, swept along by their own high-minded principles of cultural tolerance, have ended up clinging to attitudes that can only be regarded as racist against Arabs.
"The old-fashioned left used to be universalist-used to think that everyone, all over the world, would some day want to live according to the same fundamental values, and ought to be helped to do so. They thought this was especially true for people in reasonably modern societies with universities, industries, and a sophisticated bureaucracy-societies like the one in Iraq. But no more! Today, people say, out of a spirit of egalitarian tolerance: Social democracy for Swedes! Tyranny for Arabs! And this is supposed to be a left-wing attitude? By the way, you don't hear much from the left about the non-Arabs in countries like Iraq, do you? The left, the real left, used to be the champion of minority populations-of people like the Kurds. No more! The left, my friend, has abandoned the values of the left-except for a few of us, of course."
Thump! "Another reason: A lot of people honestly believe that Israel's problems with the Palestinians represent something more than a miserable dispute over borders and recognition-that Israel's problems represent something huger, a uniquely diabolical aspect of Zionism, which explains the rage and humiliation felt by Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia. Which is to say, a lot of people have succumbed to anti-Semitic fantasies about the cosmic quality of Jewish crime and cannot get their minds to think about anything else.
"I mean, look at the discussions that go on even among people who call themselves the democratic left, the good left-a relentless harping on the sins of Israel, an obsessive harping, with very little said about the fascist-influenced movements that have caused hundreds of thousands and even millions of deaths in other parts of the Muslim world. The distortions are wild, if you stop to think about them. Look at some of our big, influential liberal magazines-one article after another about Israeli crimes and stupidities, and even a few statements in favor of abolishing Israel, and hardly anything about the sufferings of the Arabs in the rest of the world. And even less is said about the Arab liberals-our own comrades, who have been pretty much abandoned. What do you make of that, my friend? There's a name for that, a systematic distortion-what we Marxists, when we were Marxists, used to call ideology."
Thump! "The left doesn't see because a lot of people are, in any case, willfully blind to anti-Semitism in other cultures. They cannot get themselves to recognize the degree to which Nazi-like doctrines about the supernatural quality of Jewish evil have influenced mass political movements across large swaths of the world. It is 1943 right now in huge portions of the world-and people don't see it. And so, people simply cannot detect the fascist nature of all kinds of mass movements and political parties. In the Muslim world, especially."
Six thumps. I was done. My friend looked incredulous. His incredulity drove me to continue.
"And yet," I insisted, "if good-hearted people like you would only open your left-wing eyes, you would see clearly enough that the Baath Party is very nearly a classic fascist movement, and so is the radical Islamist movement, in a somewhat different fashion-two strands of a single impulse, which happens to be Europe's fascist and totalitarian legacy to the modern Muslim world. If only people like you would wake up, you would see that war against the radical Islamist and Baathist movements, in Afghanistan exactly as in Iraq, is war against fascism."
I grew still more heated.
"What a tragedy that you don't see this! It's a tragedy for the Afghanis and the Iraqis, who need more help than they are receiving. A tragedy for the genuine liberals all over the Muslim world! A tragedy for the American soldiers, the British, the Poles and every one else who has gone to Iraq lately, the nongovernmental organization volunteers and the occupying forces from abroad, who have to struggle on bitterly against the worst kind of nihilists, and have been getting damn little support or even moral solidarity from people who describe themselves as antifascists in the world's richest and fattest neighborhoods.
"What a tragedy for the left-the worldwide left, this left of ours which, in failing to play much of a role in the antifascism of our own era, is right now committing a gigantic historic error. Not for the first time, my friend! And yet, if the left all over the world took up this particular struggle as its own, the whole nature of events in Iraq and throughout the region could be influenced in a very useful way, and Bush's many blunders could be rectified, and the struggle could be advanced."
My friend's eyes widened, maybe in astonishment, maybe in pity.
He said, "And so, the United Nations and international law mean nothing to you, not a thing? You think it's all right for America to go do whatever it wants, and ignore the rest of the world?"
I answered, "The United Nations and international law are fine by me, and more than fine. I am their supporter. Or, rather, would like to support them. It would be better to fight an antifascist war with more than a begrudging UN approval. It would be better to fight with the approving sanction of international law-better in a million ways. Better politically, therefore militarily. Better for the precedents that would be set. Better for the purpose of expressing the liberal principles at stake. If I had my druthers, that is how we would have gone about fighting the war. But my druthers don't count for much. We have had to choose between supporting the war, or opposing it-supporting the war in the name of antifascism, or opposing it in the name of some kind of concept of international law. Antifascism without international law; or international law without antifascism. A miserable choice-but one does have to choose, unfortunately."
My friend said, "I'm for the UN and international law, and I think you've become a traitor to the left. A neocon!"
I said, "I'm for overthrowing tyrants, and since when did overthrowing fascism become treason to the left?"
"But isn't George Bush himself a fascist, more or less? I mean-admit it!"
My own eyes widened. "You haven't the foggiest idea what fascism is," I said. "I always figured that a keen awareness of extreme oppression was the deepest trait of a left-wing heart. Mass graves, three hundred thousand missing Iraqis, a population crushed by thirty-five years of Baathist boots stomping on their faces-that is what fascism means! And you think that a few corrupt insider contracts with Bush's cronies at Halliburton and a bit of retrograde Bible-thumping and Bush's ridiculous tax cuts and his bonanzas for the super-rich are indistinguishable from that?-indistinguishable from fascism? From a politics of slaughter? Leftism is supposed to be a reality principle. Leftism is supposed to embody an ability to take in the big picture. The traitor to the left is you, my friend . . ."
But this made not the slightest sense to him, and there was nothing left to do but to hit each other over the head with our respective drinks.
Paul Berman is the author of Terror and Liberalism. His book The Passion of Joschka Fischer will come out in the spring.
Where is the MSM outrage?
China Supplies Arms to Sudan
China becomes top arms supplier of Sudan
Dec. 8, 2005 (UPI) — China has become the top supplier of fighter-bombers to Sudan’s Muslim regime, whose attacks on Christian rebels in the south have made Khartoum notorious.
Sudan’s air force recently bought $100 million worth of Shenyang fighter planes, including a dozen supersonic F-7 jets, and also purchased 34 other fighter-bombers from Beijing, Middle East Newsline reported Thursday.
In exchange, Chinese oil companies have become big stakeholders in Sudan’s oil and natural gas fields.The state-owned China National Petroleum Corp., for example, owns 40 percent of Sudan’s largest oil field.
“China rarely attaches any political strings to its assistance to Africa,” said a report from the Washington-based Jamestown Foundation. “This has opened up space for China to deal quite profitably with some of the more heinous regimes on the continent. It is no coincidence, for example, that Sudan and Zimbabwe now play host to a very large Chinese economic presence.”
China becomes top arms supplier of Sudan
Dec. 8, 2005 (UPI) — China has become the top supplier of fighter-bombers to Sudan’s Muslim regime, whose attacks on Christian rebels in the south have made Khartoum notorious.
Sudan’s air force recently bought $100 million worth of Shenyang fighter planes, including a dozen supersonic F-7 jets, and also purchased 34 other fighter-bombers from Beijing, Middle East Newsline reported Thursday.
In exchange, Chinese oil companies have become big stakeholders in Sudan’s oil and natural gas fields.The state-owned China National Petroleum Corp., for example, owns 40 percent of Sudan’s largest oil field.
“China rarely attaches any political strings to its assistance to Africa,” said a report from the Washington-based Jamestown Foundation. “This has opened up space for China to deal quite profitably with some of the more heinous regimes on the continent. It is no coincidence, for example, that Sudan and Zimbabwe now play host to a very large Chinese economic presence.”
Wednesday, December 07, 2005
Here's a very encouraging report from the Associated Press: Most Americans "say torturing terrorism suspects is justified at least in rare instances, according to AP-Ipsos polling":
"I don't think we should go out and string everybody up by their thumbs until somebody talks. But if there is definitely a good reason to get an answer, we should do whatever it takes," said Billy Adams, a retiree from Tomball, Texas. In America, 61 percent of those surveyed agreed torture is justified at least on rare occasions."
This testifies to the essential moderation and good sense of the American people. We are not pro-torture; rather, we recognize that subjecting terrorists to aggressive interrogation tactics is a wrenching decision that is sometimes necessary in the pursuit of a greater good. Or, as Tom Holsinger says to Glenn Reynolds http://instapundit.com/archives/027305.php , we want torture to be safe, legal and rare.
"I don't think we should go out and string everybody up by their thumbs until somebody talks. But if there is definitely a good reason to get an answer, we should do whatever it takes," said Billy Adams, a retiree from Tomball, Texas. In America, 61 percent of those surveyed agreed torture is justified at least on rare occasions."
This testifies to the essential moderation and good sense of the American people. We are not pro-torture; rather, we recognize that subjecting terrorists to aggressive interrogation tactics is a wrenching decision that is sometimes necessary in the pursuit of a greater good. Or, as Tom Holsinger says to Glenn Reynolds http://instapundit.com/archives/027305.php , we want torture to be safe, legal and rare.
Civil War
Writing in the liberal New Republic, Harvard law prof William Stuntz http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=w051205&s=stuntz120605 draws
an interesting analogy between Iraq and the Civil War:
"Toppling Saddam and seizing his chemical and biological weapons probably wasn't worth the sacrifice of 2,000-plus American lives (as long as nuclear weapons weren't in the picture). Similarly, control over the Mississippi wasn't worth the bloodletting across the length of the Confederacy's border that took place in Lincoln's first term.
Thankfully, Lincoln saw to it that the war's purpose changed. George W. Bush has changed the purpose of his war too, though the change seems more the product of our enemies' choices than of Bush's design. By prolonging the war, Zarqawi and his Baathist allies have drawn thousands of terrorist wannabes into the fight--against both our soldiers and Muslim civilians. When terrorists fight American civilians, as on September 11, they can leverage their own deaths to kill a great many of us. But when terrorists fight American soldiers, the odds tilt towards our side.
Equally important, by bringing the fight to a Muslim land, by making that land the central front of the war on Islamic terrorism, the United States has effectively forced Muslim terrorists to kill Muslim civilians. That is why the so-called Arab street is rising--not against us but against the terrorists, as we saw in Jordan after Zarqawi's disastrous hotel bombing. The population of the Islamic world is choosing sides not between jihadists and Westerners, but between jihadists and people just like themselves. We are, slowly but surely, converting bin Laden's war into a civil war--and that is a war bin Laden and his followers cannot hope to win."
an interesting analogy between Iraq and the Civil War:
"Toppling Saddam and seizing his chemical and biological weapons probably wasn't worth the sacrifice of 2,000-plus American lives (as long as nuclear weapons weren't in the picture). Similarly, control over the Mississippi wasn't worth the bloodletting across the length of the Confederacy's border that took place in Lincoln's first term.
Thankfully, Lincoln saw to it that the war's purpose changed. George W. Bush has changed the purpose of his war too, though the change seems more the product of our enemies' choices than of Bush's design. By prolonging the war, Zarqawi and his Baathist allies have drawn thousands of terrorist wannabes into the fight--against both our soldiers and Muslim civilians. When terrorists fight American civilians, as on September 11, they can leverage their own deaths to kill a great many of us. But when terrorists fight American soldiers, the odds tilt towards our side.
Equally important, by bringing the fight to a Muslim land, by making that land the central front of the war on Islamic terrorism, the United States has effectively forced Muslim terrorists to kill Muslim civilians. That is why the so-called Arab street is rising--not against us but against the terrorists, as we saw in Jordan after Zarqawi's disastrous hotel bombing. The population of the Islamic world is choosing sides not between jihadists and Westerners, but between jihadists and people just like themselves. We are, slowly but surely, converting bin Laden's war into a civil war--and that is a war bin Laden and his followers cannot hope to win."
Tuesday, December 06, 2005
Boss, Genius
Sorrell Booke (b. January 4, 1930 in Buffalo, New York – d. February 11, 1994 in Sherman Oaks, California) was a Jewish-American actor best known for his role as the heavyset, corrupt politician "Jefferson Davis 'Boss' Hogg" in the television show The Dukes of Hazzard.
Fluent in five languages, Sorrell (rhymes with "moral") Booke attended Columbia and Yale Universities and served in the Korean War as a counterintelligence officer. Booke had parts in noteworthy 1960s films such as Black Like Me and A Fine Madness before transitioning to focus primarily on television parts in the 1970s and voice acting in the 1980s and 1990s.
Booke earned himself an Emmy nomination for his appearance in the TV series, Dr. Kildare in the episode entitled, "What's God to Julius?" He also had a recurring role in Norman Lear's groundbreaking sitcom All in the Family as Mr. Sanders, personnel manager at Archie Bunker's workplace, Pendergast Tool and Die.
Most notable to his career was being cast in The Dukes of Hazzard as the humorously-wicked antagonist to Bo and Luke Duke, J.D. 'Boss' Hogg. The series ran from 1979-1985, and spawned an animated series, The Dukes (1983), two reunion TV specials, and a feature film.
He also once conducted the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra.
Fluent in five languages, Sorrell (rhymes with "moral") Booke attended Columbia and Yale Universities and served in the Korean War as a counterintelligence officer. Booke had parts in noteworthy 1960s films such as Black Like Me and A Fine Madness before transitioning to focus primarily on television parts in the 1970s and voice acting in the 1980s and 1990s.
Booke earned himself an Emmy nomination for his appearance in the TV series, Dr. Kildare in the episode entitled, "What's God to Julius?" He also had a recurring role in Norman Lear's groundbreaking sitcom All in the Family as Mr. Sanders, personnel manager at Archie Bunker's workplace, Pendergast Tool and Die.
Most notable to his career was being cast in The Dukes of Hazzard as the humorously-wicked antagonist to Bo and Luke Duke, J.D. 'Boss' Hogg. The series ran from 1979-1985, and spawned an animated series, The Dukes (1983), two reunion TV specials, and a feature film.
He also once conducted the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra.
That's not mine!
Penis Pump Judge Gets Trial Delay
CREEK COUNTY, OKLA-The trial of an Oklahoma judge, charged with three counts of indecent exposure while allegedly using a "penis pump" under his judicial robes while adjudicating two murder trials and a civil trial in 2003, has won yet another delay in his trial when a special judge recused himself.A preliminary hearing in the case against former district judge Donald Thompson, 58, was scheduled to be heard Friday but was postponed after Thompson's lawyers questioned a conversation the trial judge, Craig County associate district judge Gary Maxey, had allegedly had with a potential witness in the Thompson case. Defense attorneys asked for Maxey's recusal because of a conversation he had had with the legal counsel for the Oklahoma Council on Judicial Complaints which investigated Thompson. Maxey said that although he thought he could have been impartial in the case, he was required to recuse himself by the Code of Judicial Conduct. Another judge will have to be appointed before the case can proceed. Earlier this month, Thompson was charged with additional counts of indecent exposure and misuse of a state computer.The case had been postponed in September because a judge who had previously recused himself in the case then participated in the jury selection. Thompson was arrested last year. A judge for over 22 years prior to his resignation last year, Thompson could face up to 10 years in prison and a $20,000 fine on each felony count and would have to register as a sex offender. Thompson has denied the accusations and says that the pump seized was a gag gift from a friend. The sex toy and another one found under the bench will be admitted as evidence at trial and jurors will be allowed to see the sex toy.The trial is expected to be graphic in detail with witnesses testifying that they could hear the noise of the device coming from under the judge's robe while he was conducting the trial and a court stenographer says the sounds were recorded on her tapes of the trial.
CREEK COUNTY, OKLA-The trial of an Oklahoma judge, charged with three counts of indecent exposure while allegedly using a "penis pump" under his judicial robes while adjudicating two murder trials and a civil trial in 2003, has won yet another delay in his trial when a special judge recused himself.A preliminary hearing in the case against former district judge Donald Thompson, 58, was scheduled to be heard Friday but was postponed after Thompson's lawyers questioned a conversation the trial judge, Craig County associate district judge Gary Maxey, had allegedly had with a potential witness in the Thompson case. Defense attorneys asked for Maxey's recusal because of a conversation he had had with the legal counsel for the Oklahoma Council on Judicial Complaints which investigated Thompson. Maxey said that although he thought he could have been impartial in the case, he was required to recuse himself by the Code of Judicial Conduct. Another judge will have to be appointed before the case can proceed. Earlier this month, Thompson was charged with additional counts of indecent exposure and misuse of a state computer.The case had been postponed in September because a judge who had previously recused himself in the case then participated in the jury selection. Thompson was arrested last year. A judge for over 22 years prior to his resignation last year, Thompson could face up to 10 years in prison and a $20,000 fine on each felony count and would have to register as a sex offender. Thompson has denied the accusations and says that the pump seized was a gag gift from a friend. The sex toy and another one found under the bench will be admitted as evidence at trial and jurors will be allowed to see the sex toy.The trial is expected to be graphic in detail with witnesses testifying that they could hear the noise of the device coming from under the judge's robe while he was conducting the trial and a court stenographer says the sounds were recorded on her tapes of the trial.
Monday, December 05, 2005
This is from a great article in the NYT Magazine that addresses European/Muslim issues. I like this quote- sound familiar?
"German immigration policies (and liberal multiculturalism) are only one side of the problem. The other side is the active refusal of many in the Muslim community to integrate. It is an illusion to believe that a German - or French or Dutch - passport and full rights of citizenship are enough to make all Muslims loyal citizens. "The attacks in London," Seyran Ates says, "were in the eyes of many Muslims a successful slap in the face to the Western community. The next perpetrators will be children of the third and fourth immigrant generation, who - under the eyes of well-meaning politicians - will be brought up from birth to hate Western society." It's only a question of time, Ates says, before Berlin experiences attacks like those in London and Madrid. When we spoke, the riots in France had not yet happened."
"German immigration policies (and liberal multiculturalism) are only one side of the problem. The other side is the active refusal of many in the Muslim community to integrate. It is an illusion to believe that a German - or French or Dutch - passport and full rights of citizenship are enough to make all Muslims loyal citizens. "The attacks in London," Seyran Ates says, "were in the eyes of many Muslims a successful slap in the face to the Western community. The next perpetrators will be children of the third and fourth immigrant generation, who - under the eyes of well-meaning politicians - will be brought up from birth to hate Western society." It's only a question of time, Ates says, before Berlin experiences attacks like those in London and Madrid. When we spoke, the riots in France had not yet happened."
Friday, December 02, 2005
Limbo Rock
VATICAN CITY (Reuters)
- Limbo -- the place where the Catholic Church teaches that babies go if they die before being baptized -- may have its days numbered.
According to Italian media reports on Tuesday, an international theological commission will Pope Benedict to eliminate the teaching about limbo from the Catholic catechism.
The Catholic Church teaches that babies who die before they can be baptized go to limbo, whose name comes from the Latin for "border" or "edge," because they deserve neither heaven nor hell. Last October, seven months before he died, Pope John Paul asked the commission to come up with "a more coherent and enlightened way" of describing the fate of such innocents.
It was then headed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who was elected Pope in April. It is now headed by his successor at the Vatican's doctrinal department, Archbishop William Levada, an American from San Francisco. The commission, which has been meeting behind closed doors, may make its recommendation soon.
In his Divine Comedy, Dante passes limbo on his way into hell and writes: "Great grief seized on my own heart when this I heard, because some people of much worthiness I knew, who in limbo were suspended."
- Limbo -- the place where the Catholic Church teaches that babies go if they die before being baptized -- may have its days numbered.
According to Italian media reports on Tuesday, an international theological commission will Pope Benedict to eliminate the teaching about limbo from the Catholic catechism.
The Catholic Church teaches that babies who die before they can be baptized go to limbo, whose name comes from the Latin for "border" or "edge," because they deserve neither heaven nor hell. Last October, seven months before he died, Pope John Paul asked the commission to come up with "a more coherent and enlightened way" of describing the fate of such innocents.
It was then headed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who was elected Pope in April. It is now headed by his successor at the Vatican's doctrinal department, Archbishop William Levada, an American from San Francisco. The commission, which has been meeting behind closed doors, may make its recommendation soon.
In his Divine Comedy, Dante passes limbo on his way into hell and writes: "Great grief seized on my own heart when this I heard, because some people of much worthiness I knew, who in limbo were suspended."
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
On Francisco Franco
On Francisco Franco written by Charles Few Americans know much about Francisco Franco, leader of the winning side in the Spanish C...
-
Starálfur Blá Nótt Yfir HimininnBlá Nótt Yfir MérHorf-Inn Út Um GluggannMinn Með HendurFaldar Undir KinnHugsum Daginn MinnÍ Dag Og Í GærBlá ...
-
"From our perspective this is an issue between Colombia and Ecuador," he said. "I'm not sure what this has to do with Ven...
-
OK, Grandma ... put your hands in the air ... slowly ... step away from the bingo machine ... put down the knitting needles...