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Judgement
Day in Dallas (06/22/02) new
In The Tablet by Richard Major
“Greater than any constitutional shift is a change in the way the
American Catholic Church and society see each other. They are not mutually
comprehending; they do not now trust each other. In Dallas justice required
the Church to humble itself before society and accept the demands of public
opinion. But the shattering effect of its humiliation will make the Church
think more freshly of its role. Cardinal George, cool and sad, declared
that this scandal would be ‘providential’ if it made the Church
look beyond the particular and attend to the wider context of American
society. He said: ‘The Church was weakened even before this crisis
began; for a generation we have experienced profound loss. How are we
to be the Catholic Church within this kind of culture?’ Then the
cardinal spelled out his view of American civilisation, and the journalists
began squirming, stirring in their seats, laughing nervously and snorting
— which is the effect truth sometimes has on journalists. ‘Our
culture is secularised protestantism, self-righteous and decadent at the
same time’, Cardinal George said baldly. In such a culture, how can
the Church understand itself? How can it, ‘smaller perhaps but faithful’
as it is likely to be, he said, understand anew celibacy, or homosexuality,
which society does not pretend to understand either? ‘To whom do
we really listen?’ he asked.”
Trying
to Restore a Faith (06/15/02) new
By Frank Keating in The New York Times
“Yesterday I accepted a request by the United States Conference of
Catholic Bishops to become chairman of a special lay commission that will
address the crisis of confidence — and in too many cases, a crisis of
faith — in my church. I undertook this task after much thought and prayer,
and only after specific criteria were established defining the powers
and goals of the commission. Those goals can be easily summarized: to
protect the innocent from abuse and exploitation, and to restore faith
in the church and its leadership.”
God
Save Us From Democracy (06/20/02) new
By J. P. Zmirak at FrontPage Magazine
“The Vatican, for all its reputation as an international power broker,
is little more than a (very tall) bully pulpit; the pope has a staff of
a few hundred overworked men and women, a budget smaller than most Fortune
500 corporations, and no legal leverage. Under these constraints, it labors
around the world, nudging bishops, persuading statesmen, sending missionaries,
mediating wars, caring for the poor, trying to keep the Moslems from slaughtering
nuns and the West from eating its young. It’s an inhuman task; that the
Church succeeds at all, and has not already collapsed, ought to impress
any skeptic that there’s something mysterious about this organization....
Would that happen, if ordinary Catholics — not just trouble-making, orthodox
intellectuals like me — got involved in choosing bishops? In changing
Church policy? You bet it would. Andrew Greeley, erotic novelist and weathervane,
is probably right when he says that the average American Catholic wants
both condoms and altar rails, easy divorce and ‘Ave Maria,’
sung at his daughter’s third church wedding. Subject Church teachings
to plebiscite — remembering that a majority of American Catholics voted
for Clinton and Gore — and what will you get? God only knows. And that’s
why he’s protecting the Church from democracy.”
Throw
Away the Key: Well, not really — but hold Padilla for as long as
necessary. (06/20/02) new
By Rich Lowry at National Review Online
“Embedded in all this heated rhetoric is the idea that there is no
check on the executive’s authority in the Padilla case. But habeas
corpus has not been repealed (if it had been, that would indeed be news,
and actually endanger our rights). Which means that if the heavy-breathers
are correct and Padilla’s rights are so obviously being trampled,
his lawyer can challenge the constitutionality of his detention in court.
Which is exactly what she — with plenty of help from the ACLU —
is going to do.”
Powell’s
Trial Balloon (06/17/02) new
By William Safire in The New York Times
“1. Statehood, even if qualified as provisional or interim, confers
a degree of sovereignty. That means control of borders, the ability to
make treaties, and to import arms from Iraq and by sea from Iran. 2. Partial
statehood would give Arafat control of an airport. A plane loaded with
fuel or explosives could hit a major Tel Aviv building within three minutes,
too quickly for Israeli jets to scramble. Ritual condemnation would follow.
3. Any form of statehood would limit Israel’s ability to search out
bomb factories and arrest terrorist leaders. What is now a tolerable sweep
into disputed territory would be denounced in the U.N. as invasion pure
and simple. That would trigger European economic boycotts and draw Arab
allies into a wider war.”
Qaeda’s
New Links Increase Threats From Global Sites (06/16/02) new
In The New York Times by David Johnston, Don Van Natta
Jr. and Judith Miller
“A group of midlevel operatives has assumed a more prominent role
in Al Qaeda and is working in tandem with Middle Eastern extremists across
the Islamic world, senior government officials say. They say the alliance,
which extends from North Africa to Southeast Asia, now poses the most
serious terrorist threat to the United States. This new alliance of terrorists,
though loosely knit, is as fully capable of planning and carrying out
potent attacks on American targets as the more centralized network once
led by Osama bin Laden, the officials said.”
Arrests
Reveal Al Qaeda Plans: Three Saudis Seized by Morocco Outline Post-Afghanistan
Strategy (06/16/02) new
In The Washington Post by Peter Finn
“Besieged by U.S. and allied forces in December in the mountains
of eastern Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden commanded his fighters to disperse
across the globe to attack ‘American and Jewish interests,’
according to accounts officials here say they have obtained from three
al Qaeda operatives who were captured in Morocco. The three men, citizens
of Saudi Arabia, have told interrogators that they escaped Afghanistan
and came to Morocco on a mission to use bomb-laden speedboats for suicide
attacks on U.S. and British warships in the Strait of Gibraltar, senior
Moroccan officials said. The men were captured in May in a joint Moroccan-CIA
operation.”
Scholar
warns West of Muslim goals (06/18/02) new
At United Press International by Uwe Siemon-Netto
“A leader of the small worldwide Muslim reform movement warned the
West Tuesday against wishful thinking as the U.S. government promotes
an intensive dialogue with Islam. ‘The dialogue is not proceeding
well because of the two-facedness of most Muslim interlocutors on the
one hand and the gullibility of well-meaning Western idealists on the
other,’ said Bassam Tibi.”
Iraq’s
tortured children (06/22/02) new
By John Sweeney of BBC News
“Ali talked about the paranoid frenzy that rules Baghdad — the
tortures, the killings, the corruption, the crazy gangster violence of
Saddam and his two sons. And the faking of the mass baby funerals. You
may have seen them on TV. Small white coffins parading through the streets
of Baghdad on the roofs of taxis, an angry crowd of mourners, condemning
Western sanctions for killing the children of Iraq. Usefully, the ages
of the dead babies — ‘three days old’, ‘four days
old’ — are written in English on the coffins. I wonder who did
that.”
2
FBI Whistle-Blowers Allege Lax Security, Possible Espionage
(06/19/02) new
In The Washington Post by James V. Grimaldi
“In separate cases, two new FBI whistle-blowers are alleging mismanagement
and lax security — and in one case possible espionage — among
those who translate and oversee some of the FBI’s most sensitive,
top-secret wiretaps in counterintelligence and counterterrorist investigations.
The allegations of one of the whistle-blowers have prompted two key senators
— Judiciary Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) and Charles E. Grassley
(R-Iowa) — to pose critical questions about the FBI division working
on the front line of gathering and analyzing wiretaps.”
Stop
— in the Name of Hate! (06/19/02) new
By Chris Weinkopf at FrontPage Magazine
“To the champions of hate-crime legislation, not all victims —
and not all criminals — are the same. Race, sex, religion, or sexual
preferences are crucial. They distinguish truly ghastly crimes from the
mundane. Which groups are entitled to special protection (or extra prosecution)
depends entirely on which biases the self-proclaimed enemies of bias enshrine
that day.”
Web
Thinkers Warn of Culture Clash (06/21/02) new
In The Washington Post by Anick Jesdanun of Associated
Press
“The Internet’s potential for promoting expression and empowering
citizens is under threat from corporate and government policies that clash
with the medium’s long-standing culture of openness, some leading
Internet thinkers warned. At the annual Internet Society conference this
week in Arlington, the engineers who built the Internet and many of the
policymakers who follow its development urged caution as governments try
to exert control and businesses look to maximize profits.”
Prepare
for the big chill (06/22/02) new
By Andrew Kenny in The Spectator
“When the global warmers tell us that the stakes are very high, they
are quite right. Global warming has become an immense international gravy
train worth billions of dollars. It is now one of the largest recipients
of government research money in the world. It finances jobs, grants, conferences,
international travel and journals. It not only keeps a huge army of people
in comfortable employment but also fills them with self-righteousness
and moral superiority, and satisfies those deep instincts in the Green
movement for meddling, hectoring, controlling and censuring.”
Silent Spring
at 40: Rachel Carson’s classic is not aging well. (06/12/02)
By Ronald Bailey at Reason Online
“So 40 years after the publication of Silent Spring, the legacy
of Rachel Carson is more troubling than her admirers will acknowledge.
The book did point to problems that had not been adequately addressed,
such as the effects of DDT on some wildlife. And given the state of the
science at the time she wrote, one might even make the case that Carson’s
concerns about the effects of synthetic chemicals on human health were
not completely unwarranted. Along with other researchers, she was simply
ignorant of the facts. But after four decades in which tens of billions
of dollars have been wasted chasing imaginary risks without measurably
improving American health, her intellectual descendants don’t have the
same excuse.”
Federal
Judge Throws Out Charge in Shoe Bomb Case (06/11/02)
By The Associated Press at FOXNews
“A judge threw out one of nine charges Tuesday against a man accused
of trying to blow up a jetliner with explosives in his shoes, ruling that
an airplane is not a vehicle under a new anti-terrorism law. The charge
— attempting to wreck a mass transportation vehicle — was filed
under the USA Patriot Act, which was passed by Congress after the Sept.
11 terrorist attacks. U.S. District Judge William Young said that although
an airplane was engaged in mass transportation it is not a vehicle as
defined by the new law.”
Dispatcher
Says She Was Told Not to Report Shoe-Bomb Incident (06/13/02)
In The New York Times by Matthew L. Wald
“The American Airlines dispatcher who was monitoring a trans-Atlantic
flight when the captain reported that a passenger had a shoe bomb said
today that her supervisor tried to prevent her from notifying the authorities.
The supervisor worried that law enforcement officials would delay the
plane on the ground, the dispatcher said. In a complaint filed with the
Federal Aviation Administration, the dispatcher said her supervisor ‘instructed
me to hold off informing the authorities because the flight would be remotely
parked, and “it would be forever before we could get the plane out
of there.”’”
Shoe-bomb
flight conduct criticized (06/13/02)
In The Dallas Morning News by Jim Morris
“The American Airlines dispatcher who helped guide the flight carrying
a suspected shoe-bomber to a safe landing in December alleged in a whistle-blower
complaint Wednesday that airline supervisors interfered with her during
the incident and threatened her afterward. In a complaint filed with the
director of the Federal Aviation Administration’s Whistleblower Protection
Program, Julie Robichaux, a 12-year American employee, said she was subjected
to ‘intimidation, threats and disciplinary action’ after criticizing
the airline’s handling of Flight 63 on Dec. 22.”
Post-Sept.
11 “Backlash” Proves Difficult to Quantify (06/12/02)
In The New Jersey Law Journal by Jim Edwards
“With five lawsuits filed in three states last week by the American
Civil Liberties Union, all alleging racial profiling of Arabs and Asians
on airplanes, Americans could be forgiven for thinking that the attacks
on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had turned the country into
a nation of vigilantes and bigots. But 10 months after the events, the
official numbers tell a less alarming story. While there certainly was
a hike in such bias claims since September, it’s hard to say that
the increase was serious or even statistically significant.”
Much
of Sept. 11 Charity Remains to Be Disbursed (06/11/02)
In The Washington Post by Lena H. Sun, Sarah Cohen and
Jacqueline L. Salmon
“Of the $2.3 billion raised by the largest charities in the nine
months since the terrorist attacks, 29 cents of each dollar has gone to
the survivors of those killed. A survey by The Washington Post of the
major charities, which raised virtually all of the funds that flowed in
after Sept. 11, found that roughly 20 cents of each dollar has gone to
displaced workers and others affected by the attacks and an additional
40 cents has yet to be distributed. Several charities reported that money
continues to come in — in one case an average of $21,500 a day —
even though the organizations have long since ended their appeals for
donations.”
The
State of the Special Relationship (June 2002)
By Robin Harris in Policy Review
“If America’s European allies only France and Britain possessed a
significant capacity to assist in the war on terrorism, and only Britain
had the will. A British task force was accordingly deployed in the Gulf;
British submarines fired Tomahawks against Taliban targets on two occasions.
Within Afghanistan, members of Britain’s SAS regiment — without doubt
the most skilled special service forces in the world — performed
taxing and dangerous tasks with great success, notably in attacking the
al Qaeda training camp outside Kandahar and in hand-to-hand fighting in
the Tora Bora region. British forces are still involved in mopping-up
operations against the enemy. The pity is that from first to last these
exploits have mattered little in the overall outcome. This has been America’s
war, and the U.S. has fought it according to its own battle plan and almost
entirely with its own resources.”
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Advice
to Graduates About Advice (06/06/1971)
By Edward C. Banfield at Claremont McKenna College
“Figures of speech, especially metaphors, are peculiarly serviceable
to people who give advice about social problems. The use of them tends
to create an emotional response in the listener that enhances the urgency
of the ‘problem’ thus raising the value of the putative ‘solution’
that the advice-giver offers. I sometimes wonder if we could have an ‘urban
crisis’ without a good supply of metaphors. Suppose that a writer
could not speak of ‘decaying neighborhoods’ but instead had
to say what he meant straight out — say that the well-off have moved
away from aging unfashionable neighborhoods, that this has given the less
well-off opportunities to move into housing better than they formerly
had, and that they, for obvious reasons, are in most instances disposed
to spend less on the repair and maintenance of houses than the former
occupiers were. Or suppose that a United States Senator instead of saying,
as one recently did, that ‘the cities are mortally sick and getting
sicker’ and that the ‘states are in a state of chronic crisis’
had to speak plainly — in this instance, perhaps, to say that although
in the last decade the cities and states have increased their revenues
by a factor of three, there are nevertheless many voters who would like
to have more spent, provided of course that the taxes are paid mainly
by others.”
The
End of History? (Summer 1989)
By Francis Fukuyama in The National Interest
“The triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident first of
all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western
liberalism. In the past decade, there have been unmistakable changes in
the intellectual climate of the world’s two largest communist countries,
and the beginnings of significant reform movements in both. But this phenomenon
extends beyond high politics and it can be seen also in the ineluctable
spread of consumerist Western culture in such diverse contexts as the
peasants’ markets and color television sets now omnipresent throughout
China, the cooperative restaurants and clothing stores opened in the past
year in Moscow, the Beethoven piped into Japanese department stores, and
the rock music enjoyed alike in Prague, Rangoon, and Tehran. What we may
be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a
particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such:
that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the
universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human
government. This is not to say that there will no longer be events to
fill the pages of Foreign Affairs’s yearly summaries
of international relations, for the victory of liberalism has occurred
primarily in the realm of ideas or consciousness and is as yet incomplete
in the real or material world. But there are powerful reasons for believing
that it is the ideal that will govern the material world in the long run.”
An
Explosion of Green (Apr. 1995)
By Bill McKibben in The Atlantic
“In the early nineteenth century the cleric Timothy Dwight reported
that the 240-mile journey from Boston to New York City passed through
no more than twenty miles of forest. Surveying the changes wrought by
farmers and loggers in New Hampshire, he wrote, ‘The forests are
not only cut down, but there appears little reason to hope that they will
ever grow again.’ Less than two centuries later, despite great increases
in the state’s population, 90 percent of New Hampshire is covered
by forest. Vermont was 35 percent woods in 1850 and is 80 percent today,
and even Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island have seen woodlands
rebound to the point where they cover nearly three fifths of southern
New England. This process, which began as farmers abandoned the cold and
rocky pastures of the East for the fertile fields of the Midwest, has
not yet run its course.... This unintentional and mostly unnoticed renewal
of the rural and mountainous East — not the spotted owl, not the
salvation of Alaska’s pristine ranges — represents the great
environmental story of the United States, and in some ways of the whole
world. Here, where ‘suburb’ and ‘megalopolis’ were
added to the world’s vocabulary, an explosion of green is under way,
one that could offer hope to much of the rest of the planet.”
The
Doomslayer (Feb. 1997)
By Ed Regis in Wired
“The world is getting progressively poorer, and it’s all because
of population, or more precisely, overpopulation. There’s
a finite store of resources on our pale blue dot, spaceship Earth, our
small and fragile tiny planet, and we’re fast approaching its ultimate
carrying capacity. The limits to growth are finally upon us, and we’re
living on borrowed time. The laws of population growth are inexorable.
Unless we act decisively, the final result is written in stone: mass poverty,
famine, starvation, and death. Time is short, and we have to act now.
That’s the standard and canonical litany.... There’s just one
problem with The Litany, just one slight little wee imperfection: every
item in that dim and dreary recitation, each and every last claim, is
false.... Thus saith The Doomslayer, one Julian
L. Simon, a neither shy nor retiring nor particularly mild-mannered
professor of business administration at a middling eastern-seaboard state
university. Simon paints a somewhat different picture of the human condition
circa 1997. ‘Our species is better off in just about every measurable
material way,’ he says. ‘Just about every important long-run
measure of human material welfare shows improvement over the decades and
centuries, in the United States and the rest of the world. Raw materials
— all of them — have become less scarce rather than more. The
air in the US and in other rich countries is irrefutably safer to breathe.
Water cleanliness has improved. The environment is increasingly healthy,
with every prospect that this trend will continue.’”
A brilliant parody:
Transgressing
the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity
(Spring/Summer 1996)
By Alan Sokal in Social Text
“There are many natural scientists, and especially physicists, who
continue to reject the notion that the disciplines concerned with social
and cultural criticism can have anything to contribute, except perhaps
peripherally, to their research. Still less are they receptive to the
idea that the very foundations of their worldview must be revised or rebuilt
in the light of such criticism. Rather, they cling to the dogma imposed
by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual
outlook, which can be summarized briefly as follows: that there exists
an external world, whose properties are independent of any individual
human being and indeed of humanity as a whole; that these properties are
encoded in ‘eternal’ physical laws; and that human beings can
obtain reliable, albeit imperfect and tentative, knowledge of these laws
by hewing to the ‘objective’ procedures and epistemological
strictures prescribed by the (so-called) scientific method.”
... and, in explanation, ...
A
Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies (May/June 1996)
By Alan Sokal in Lingua Franca
“For some years I’ve been troubled by an apparent decline in
the standards of rigor in certain precincts of the academic humanities.
But I’m a mere physicist: If I find myself unable to make heads or
tails of jouissance and differance, perhaps that just reflects
my own inadequacy. So, to test the prevailing intellectual standards,
I decided to try a modest (though admittedly uncontrolled) experiment:
Would a leading North American journal of cultural studies — whose
editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew
Ross — publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it
sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions?
The answer, unfortunately, is yes.... What’s going on here? Could
the editors really not have realized that my article was written as a
parody?”
Networks
Need a Reality Check: A firsthand account of liberal bias at CBS News.
(02/13/1996)
By Bernard Goldbert in The Wall Street Journal
“There are lots of reasons fewer people are watching network news,
and one of them, I’m more convinced than ever, is that our viewers
simply don’t trust us. And for good reason. The old argument that
the networks and other ‘media elites’ have a liberal bias is
so blatantly true that it’s hardly worth discussing anymore. No,
we don’t sit around in dark corners and plan strategies on how we’re
going to slant the news. We don’t have to. It comes naturally to
most reporters.”
There
is No Time, There Will Be Time (11/18/1998)
By Peggy Noonan in Forbes ASAP
“When you consider who is gifted and crazed with rage... when you
think of the terrorist places and the terrorist countries... who do they
hate most? The Great Satan, the United States. What is its most important
place? Some would say Washington. I would say the great city of the United
States is the great city of the world, the dense 10-mile-long island called
Manhattan, where the economic and media power of the nation resides, the
city that is the psychological center of our modernity, our hedonism,
our creativity, our hard-shouldered hipness, our unthinking arrogance.”
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