|
Conservative
Churches Grew Fastest in 1990's, Report Says (09/18/02) new
In The New York Times by Laurie Goodstein
“Socially conservative churches that demand high commitment from
their members grew faster than other religious denominations in the last
decade, according to a study released yesterday by statisticians who count
American religious affiliations every 10 years.... ‘I was astounded
to see that by and large the growing churches are those that we ordinarily
call conservative,’ said Ken Sanchagrin, director of the Glenmary
Research Center and a professor and chairman of the department of sociology
at Mars Hill College in Mars Hill, N.C. ‘And when I looked at those
that were declining, most were moderate or liberal churches. And the more
liberal the denomination, by most people’s definition, the more they
were losing.’”
Christianity’s
New Center (09/12/02) new
Interview of Philip Jenkins by Katie Bacon at
Atlantic Unbound
“In the global South you have almost a pre-Vatican II, old-world
kind of Catholicism. Catholics there are more concerned with the traditional,
more willing to accept authority and leadership, more prepared to insist
on orthodoxy. Whereas in America and Europe we tend to have cafeteria
Catholicism, as in, I'll take a little bit of this, a little bit of that,
throw in a bit of Wicca, and see what we come up with.”
Prior
Knowledge of Sept. 11 Not Just Urban Legend (09/10/02) new
At Insight on the News by Jeffrey Scott Shapiro
“‘What are you looking at?’ asked the schoolteacher as
she approached one of her freshman students. The boy, a young Palestinian,
seemed captivated as he stared out the window across Brooklyn toward the
lower downtown area of Manhattan. ‘Do you see those two buildings?’
he asked while pointing toward the World Trade Center. ‘They won’t
be standing there next week.’ It was noon, Sept. 6, 2001.”
Hippocratic
Oafs: Muslims demand sensitivity. They ought to show some too.
(09/20/02) new
By Peggy Noonan at OpinionJournal
“So the Southerners are eyeballing the young Muslim males. Maybe
these guys are bad guys. They allow themselves to think this in part
because one of the things Americans regret most since Sept. 11 2001 is
their lack of suspicion. We’re all very live-and-let-live. Before
Sept. 11, young Muslim males could tell someone in passing that soon those
towers in New York will go boom. And fearing to offend, fearing to hurt
the feelings of another person, we’d let it pass. We’d mind
our business, give them the benefit of the doubt.”
Iraqi
Interrogatories: The usual questions about Iraq. (09/20/02)
new
By Victor Davis Hanson at The National Review Online
“Since September 11 there has no longer been a margin of safety —
or error — allowing us a measure of absolute certainty before action.
Long gone is the notion that American soil is inviolable or that enemies
will not butcher thousands of civilians unexpectedly and in time of peace.
All we need to know is that [Saddam Hussein] broke the armistice agreements
of the first war, violated the weapons-inspections accords, likes to attack
other countries, dallies with terrorists, has nightmarish weapons, and
has already fought us once. That he is a dictator, killed thousands of
his own people, sought to assassinate a president of the United States,
tried to destroy the ecology of Kuwait, and sent missiles into Israel
and Saudi Arabia are not misdemeanors.”
Behind
the Hate: The enemy’s problem. (09/11/02) new
By David Pryce-Jones at The National Review Online
“For centuries now, the West and its social order has challenged
other civilizations. In the face of that challenge, China, Japan, India,
adopted the science and the arts, even the music, which were both the
cause and the effect of Western creativity. Leaders and thinkers in Muslim
countries also tried to match the West. With the possible exception of
Turkey, they proved unable to do so. The reasons for this are unclear.
Nobody and nothing effectively stands in the way of education, reform,
experiment in building a modern social order with its own special characteristics
like other peoples.”
Is
This the Way to Decide on Iraq? (09/20/02) new
By Charles Krauthammer in The Washington Post
“When the case for war is made purely in terms of American national
interest — in terms of the safety, security and very lives of American
citizens — chins are pulled as the Democrats think it over. But when
the case is the abstraction of being the good international citizen and
strengthening the House of Kofi, the Democrats are ready to parachute
into Baghdad.”
U.S.
Was Aware of bin Laden Threat Before Sept. 11 Attacks (09/19/02)
new
In The New York Times by James Risen
“The Congressional panels’ staff director said on Wednesday
that the American intelligence community was told in 1998 that Arab terrorists
were planning to fly a bomb-laden aircraft into the World Trade Center,
but the F.B.I. and the Federal Aviation Administration did not take the
threat seriously. The August 1998 intelligence report from the Central
Intelligence Agency was just one of several warnings the United States
received, but did not seriously analyze, in the years leading up to the
Sept. 11 attacks that were detailed at the Congressional hearings.”
Congress
was Warned Two Months Before 9/11 Attacks (09/19/02) new
At Cybercast News Service by Jeff Johnson
“Based on information gathered by the committee, there were a total
of 28 pieces of intelligence information gathered after June 1998 that
hinted bin Laden wanted to strike the U.S., including 11 indicating an
imminent attack after March 2001. Additionally, 12 so-called ‘intelligence
indicators’ lead analysts to believe that al Qaeda would use airplanes
to strike targets in Washington, D.C., and New York.”
A
Visit to Shanksville (09/11/02) new
By Joan Marie Nagy at NewsMax
“I hope the permanent memorial maintains the evidence of that violent
impact and preserves that hallowed ground forever. Americans need to remember
the price paid in that Pennsylvania field. When I remember September 11,
I will feel grief, then anger, then pride. The overwhelming thought or
feeling I will forever associate with September 11 will be that, when
given a chance, most every ordinary American will still fight to the death
to preserve the lives of other Americans.”
A
Bell Tolls In Shanksville (09/11/02)
At CBSNews by Jim Krasula (?)
“Flight 93 took off from Newark, N.J., bound for San Francisco. It
crashed in a grass field next to a line of trees about 70 miles southeast
of Pittsburgh — far from the devastation in New York and at the Pentagon.
The reason, say investigators, is that people on board confronted their
four hijackers and brought down the flight far from some intended target
in Washington, D.C. — The Capitol, according to al Qaeda members interviewed
by Arab television recently.”
“Citizen-soldiers”
of Flight 93 honored (09/12/02)
In The Modesto Bee by Lawrence M. O’Rourke
“Charles Carpenter, a farmer just over the ridge from the crash site,
said the terrorists failed to splinter America. ‘The terrible thing
that happened here has brought us closer together as a people,’ he
said. ‘If those terrorists had in mind splitting us up, it sure did
backfire.’ Sandy Dahl, widow of pilot Jason Dahl, said that the memory
of Sept. 11 constantly reminds her that ‘lives are short and there
is no time for hate.’ ‘Here we remember ordinary people who
did heroic things,’ said Albert Youngblood, an accountant whose half
sister, Wanda Green, a flight attendant, died in the crash. Alice Hoglan,
the mother of passenger Mark Bingham of San Francisco, said the terrorist
attack showed the need for the United States to take an active role in
solving the world’s problems. ‘Today was beautiful,’ she
said. ‘It was a fitting tribute in honor of the actions the people
aboard Flight 93 took.’”
The
Heroes Of Flight 93: The last full measure of devotion (09/12/02)
In Newsday by Hugo Kugiya
“A sharp change in the weather marked the service for the 33 passengers
(not including the four hijackers) and the crew of seven aboard the Boeing
757 that crashed onto a reclaimed strip mine about an hour after it departed
Newark Airport. Low, dark clouds, propelled by a furious wind, arrived
with the dawn, turning frigid what had been a string of balmy, humid days.
Schools in Somerset County were canceled for the day, as all the district’s
school buses were deployed to shuttle people to the memorial site. Attendees
were searched and prohibited from freely entering and leaving the service.
State police patrolled the grounds on horseback. A covered stage was set
up about 500 yards from the crash site, where the Johnstown Symphony Orchestra
and a Marine Corps band played to open the service at 9:30 a.m. Relatives
sat in white folding chairs on a gravel clearing in front of the stage.
Separated by a plastic fence behind the relatives were the 4,000 others
who attended.”
Flight
93 Victims Praised as Patriots (09/11/02)
At KDKA by The Associated Press
“Family members clutched flowers and flags - some wore pins with
photographs of their lost loved ones - under overcast skies as wind whipped
across the pastoral setting. Military aircraft, first large cargo ships
and then four fighter jets, flew over the ceremony in formation.... Some
of the family members of the victims also spoke. Murial Borza, an 11-year-old
who lost her half-sister, Deora Bodley, asked for a minute of silence
for world peace. Sandy Dahl, the wife of Flight 93 pilot Jason Dahl said,
‘If we learn nothing else from this tragedy, we learn that life is
short and there is no time for hate.’”
Courage
of Flight 93 heroes celebrated in Pa. (09/12/02)
In The (Penn State) Collegian by Adam Fabian
“‘We are all grateful,’ Director of Homeland Security and
former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge told the listeners. ‘Your loved
ones did not expect to serve the cause of freedom that Tuesday morning,
but serve freedom they did.’ Ridge also took a moment during his
statement to thank the citizens of Shanksville for their help and support.
‘This sleepy little town puts its arms around you and embraces you,’
he said. After those remarks, the family members of Flight 93 stood and
applauded the crowd that included many residents of Shanksville and surrounding
communities.”
Site
of Crash Is “Hallowed Ground”: In a Pa. Field, Thousands Pay
Homage to Where America First Fought Back (09/11/02)
In The Washington Post by Sue Anne Pressley
“There is nothing much to see at the rural crash site of United Airlines
Flight 93 — just a line of charred trees and a distant disturbance
in the oats field where the giant crater was. Yet people keep coming here,
with the hushed reverence of church-goers, more than a thousand of them
a week. Most say it helps them somehow. They stand quietly near the wall
of tokens brought here by other visitors — the police patches and
firefighters’ caps from around the country, the flags with broken
hearts designed by someone in Ohio, even plain rocks with ‘Thank
you, Heroes of Flight 93’ scrawled over them in big black letters.”
Flight
93 Passengers Honored with Gratitude (09/11/02)
At ABCNews by David Morgan of Reuters
“The tolling of a single bell and release of white doves on a wind-swept
field on Wednesday honored the memory of the 40 passengers and crew on
United Airlines Flight 93, a year after their plane crashed during an
onboard struggle with four hijackers. Near the edge of a reclaimed strip
mine in the Appalachian highlands 70 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, thousands
— including more than 500 relatives of the victims — gathered
for an anniversary service under leaden skies, many tearfully clutching
American flags.”
Site
Of Tragedy Now A Shrine To American Heroes (09/02/02)
At Cox Newspapers by Bob Dart
“Todd Beamer’s final call to action is repeated on hundreds
of signs, rocks and scrawled messages at the temporary memorial that overlooks
the crash site. Congress will soon approve legislation authorizing the
National Park Service to build and maintain a permanent memorial. It will
be designed with input of the families of the 40 victims of Flight 93.
Meanwhile, thousands of tributes have been attached to a billboard-sized
rectangle of chain-link fence. Smaller memorials are added daily by the
visitors who drive down Skyline Drive to reach the site. Visitors write
on every available spot — poster boards attached to the fence, the
guard rails around the parking lot, stones on the ground, even the porta-potties.
”
Life
in small town forever changed by Sept. 11 plane crash (03/09/02)
In The (South Carolina) State by Amy Worden of
Knight Ridder Newspapers
“Twenty miles from the Pennsylvania Turnpike, along narrow roads,
Shanksville is not easy to find. A driver could easily miss the small
sign directing traffic to a temporary memorial along a newly paved mountaintop
road. Visitors stop at a parking area built a quarter-mile from the crash
site, overlooking the area now ringed with chain-link fence and still
under 24-hour guard. A memorial wall - a colorful shrine to the heroes
of Flight 93 - has sprouted on the barren land scarred by years of mining.
Visitors leave familiar tokens behind - flags, flowers, toys and signs
- and they bring intimate mementos such as MIA bracelets, watches, police
badges, and a United Airlines flight attendant’s uniform.”
Occasionally, some links are moved
from this section into the Featured
Webpages Trove.
|
|
The
Role of Government in Education (1955)
By Milton Friedman in Economics and the Public Interest
“This re-examination of the role of government in education suggests
that the growth of governmental responsibility in this area has been unbalanced.
Government has appropriately financed general education for citizenship,
but in the process it has been led also to administer most of the schools
that provide such education. Yet, as we have seen, the administration
of schools is neither required by the financing of education, nor justifiable
in its own right in a predominantly free enterprise society. Government
has appropriately been concerned with widening the opportunity of young
men and women to get professional and technical training, but it has sought
to further this objective by the inappropriate means of subsidizing such
education, largely in the form of making it available free or at a low
price at governmentally operated schools. The lack of balance in governmental
activity reflects primarily the failure to separate sharply the question
what activities it is appropriate for government to finance from
the question what activities it is appropriate for government to administer
— a distinction that is important in other areas of government activity
as well. Because the financing of general education by government is widely
accepted, the provision of general education directly by govern mental
bodies has also been accepted. But institutions that provide general education
are especially well suited also to provide some kinds of vocational and
professional education, so the acceptance of direct government provision
of general education has led to the direct provision of vocational education.
To complete the circle, the provision of vocational education has, in
turn, meant that it too was financed by government, since financing has
been predominantly of educational institutions not of particular kinds
of educational services.”
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.”
|
