http://www.davidwarrenonline.com NEWSPAPER COLUMNS - A Collection of Essays on Contemporary Events by David Warren (c)2005 davidwarrenonline.com, David Warren, The Ottawa Citizen. All rights reserved. Yesterday was Candlemas, and therefore also Groundhog Day. Punxsutawney Phil, the weather-prognosticating groundhog of Gobbler's Knob, predicted six more weeks of "global cooling." I use that term with the same abandon as might the IPCC, of course: technically, the animal only predicts six more weeks "of winter." I'm not sure how far away from his location in Pennsylvania the prediction is meant to apply. In fact, I've never been able to get a clear answer to this, just as my reader will never get a clear answer from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- which, together with Al Gore, an immense groundhog-like creature who crawls frequently out of a hole in Tennessee, constitutes our chief media source of climatological "settled science." (A contradiction of terms.) We've been given some clear answers that weren't serious, ranging from the famed "hockey stick" diagram, that entirely misrepresented planetary temperature trends; to smaller assertions such as, "all the glaciers in the Himalayas will have melted by the year 2035." This latter we now know was made up from whole cloth, like the polar bear die-off, and a great deal of nonsense about Arctic and Antarctic ice cover. To my survey, there is not a single aspect of the "anthropogenic global warming" hypothesis that has been left standing by recent revelations, and more shoes drop every day. It's better than that: Sir David King, the British government's former "chief scientist," has even had to abandon his arguably paranoid claim that "highly sophisticated" foreign intelligence services and/or wealthy rightwing Americans were behind the e-mail leak from the University of East Anglia, that touched off the bottomless "Climategate" scandal in November. For as he admitted to the Guardian on Monday (hardly a rightwing newspaper), he had simply failed to follow the story. All the e-mails were hacked through a single server. They included e-mails saved from as far back as 1996, and various data sets that fatally undermined the credibility of the whole international "anthropogenic global warming" research effort -- by illustrating conscious selection of statistics, and direct manipulation of reporting in scientific publications, by major players. From what I can see, I doubt Sir David was dishonest. He had simply averted his eyes from inconvenient truths. This is a very common human foible, and scientists are, I insist, human beings. Had he been following the story he would have grasped that everything came through one server, that the information had not been cherry-picked by some nefarious spy agency over 14 years. I might almost say the same for the disgraced Dr. Phil Jones, the former boss of the East Anglia operation, now implicated in various cover-ups, attempts to intimidate and silence skeptics, and purposeful breaches of Britain's freedom of information act. I'm sure he "believed" in what he was doing. Like communist apparatchiks in the good old days, a global warm-alarmist may "honestly" think he is serving a higher purpose, that he is on "the right side of history," that he must cut a few corners for the greater good, that the end will eventually justify the means. Read Dostoevsky on this. The book is Crime and Punishment, and the character is Raskolnikov. By subtle increments a failure of candour degenerates into major-league crime. Not only all the numbers, but all the assumptions behind "AGW" -- not "most," but all -- have depended on the manipulation of facts by persons who had an interest in manipulating them. Often the specific incident is small, but the falsehood is cumulative. Investment in the illusion grows, the stakes become too large to forfeit. Yet the reality remains: that we still don't know any more about long-term human influence on climate than Punxsutawney Phil can know by observing his own shadow. This should have been obvious to climatologists from the beginning. At the simplest level, they could observe that global temperature estimates depended on a slur of constantly changing thermometer locations and time sequences. NASA's recent admissions are the more pathetic for that reason: from the top down, these were men who should have known better than to think they could fly beyond the end of such a limb. I have argued previously for chastity: not limited to the sexual sense, of keeping one's pants on. The virtue of chastity requires us to look at the world without immediately engaging our desires. Those desires are often not sexual at all; some of the most powerful involve justifying one's livelihood. A scientist with an interest in getting a result is under huge temptation, compounded by the huge public funding on which his research depends. Our mysterious capacity for chastity can put us above the animal level: for if we try, we can actually remove the blinkers of, "What's in it for me?" -- and discover truths larger than ourselves. The highest arts and sciences require alike the highest conditions of chastity. It is what lifts us above the groundhogs. http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=1106 http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=1106 Hardly anyone likes banks. I have a sneaking contrarian regard for them, because I think of bankers as droll people, and enjoy bankerly dark humour, which looks at any human enterprise as a wild dance atop the cliff of bankruptcy. At least, this used to be the case, though I must admit the bankers I've known have been mostly French, Dutch, or British. I think of one blue-shirted gentleman named John, who presided over a little Barclay's branch in Covent Garden, London, a generation ago. He didn't even have to say anything to errant shopkeepers seeking short-term loans. They'd just look at him and change their minds. He was as generous as the day was long, but never with the bank's money. He told riches-to-rags stories, with the relish of a country vicar reciting the misfortunes of his parishioners: a rich, internalized, cello duet between sincere compassion and slapstick farce. Insurance underwriters I have also loved. One in particular, a gentleman I shall call Neville, for that was his name, I used to take walks with en route to some bar in a certain Asian city. He was a delight to walk with. As we would pass down a street, he would point to all the physical hazards. He could spot which roof tiles were likeliest to blow off; which walls might collapse from cumulative traffic vibrations; bolts on fire escapes waiting to rust through. He could explain the kind of ankle injury a pedestrian could sustain from an irregular sidewalk, that would leave him a lifelong cripple. How the cab driver idling between fares might die unaware of carbon monoxide, and the legal fallout on the ownership of his taxi licence. And then, at the bar, how a miscalculation by the brewmaster could by-produce formaldehyde enough to fill a hospital ward with customers suffering esophageal burning and cardiac arrhythmia. Neville made the world a brighter place. Doctors can also make fine companions, and I like neurologists the best. There's one named Jeremy who once put me in view, in a church basement, of the ways in which a slight bump to the head, of no apparent immediate consequence, could turn one into a human vegetable. Conversely, of shrapnel injuries that had been survived. How I wished to introduce him to Neville. There is some form of dark humour appropriate to persons of every rank and class. Among journalists it used to be de rigueur to joke about perfectly unreliable sources; about the stupidest lie one ever fell for. Not that malice has ever been required, for one might also recall how he was led, innocently and plausibly, from one misunderstanding to another, into writing a piece of reportage that would go down in the annals of journalism as the most embarrassingly mistaken scoop ever to appear on a front page. One might even embellish such stories, for the sake of warning one's younger colleagues. Nor can I pretend no such thing ever happened to me. I was once asked to fill in for an ulcerous movie reviewer, by an editor who could not be convinced that I knew nothing about the cinema. The plot summary I then provided for a rather complicated Italian movie began to go wrong about the beginning when I did not grasp the opening scene was a "flashback." My reader may perhaps be aware, from his own line of work, of immense fields of tragicomedic potentiality. God in his wisdom gave us dreams to cope with our secret forebodings; with the many slips between cups and lips. Even the sleeping birds seem to dream; and to compensate for our comparatively greater endowment of foresight, we have humour, including the very darkest kind, to get us through the daylight stretches. Indeed, I have long observed a disposition towards "black humour" is a reasonably accurate predictor of orthodoxy in religious belief, and soundness of political judgment. Add an indubitable propensity to self-deprecation, and you might even be able to trust the fellow. (Or the girl, as case may be.) Returning to bankers, who are now under the gun from legislators in both America and Europe -- for having crawled out on limbs of different sorts -- my sense is that they need more than merely adequate reserve requirements. They are made the scapegoats for a whole society that has been going out on limbs of credit, without sufficient reserves. They also have a better excuse, for American bankers in particular were put under legislative requirements to provide mortgages and other credit to customers they did not traditionally fancy, and they invented some of the wilder postmodern risk-management schemes directly in response to such political pressure. It is a cold, cruel world for politicians' scapegoats. It is made colder not only by the societal tendency towards rank irresponsible consumerism. For the visitation of grim, atheist "political correctness" on every aspect of human life has been taking its toll. It acts, for instance, as a poison to kill dark humour. The effect is bankers and others less and less able to see risk, because they less and less dare to joke about it. http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=1105 http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=1105 It really wouldn't do, in light of his death this week at age 91, for me to share what I truly think about J.D. Salinger; especially after mentioning in this column only five years ago that his most famous work, Catcher in the Rye, was "a book I believe to have been written ... under direct demonic possession." So let me go about this as gently as I can. We are instructed, at least by the Christian authorities, to pray for the repose of all souls, and look for virtues even in the lives of the least saintly. It is among the most difficult instructions. "The good is oft interrèd with their bones," as Shakespeare assures us, in the third act of Julius Caesar. Whereas, "the evil that men do" went on to become the title of innumerable heavy metal hits, paranoid thriller films, comic books, and vampire novels. Fortunately, Christian instructions to search forensically for good are balanced by others, and I was delighted to be apprised recently of this clarification, in the encyclical Pope Pius XI wrote against the Nazis: "Charity by no means implies a renunciation of the right of proclaiming, vindicating and defending the truth and its implications. The priest's first loving gift to his neighbours is to serve truth and refute error in any of its forms. Failure on this score would be not only a betrayal of God and your vocation, but also an offence against the real welfare of your people and country." Suffice to say I read Catcher in the Rye when I was in high school -- as everyone did, in my Grade 10 class, for the reading was assigned by our countercultural English teacher, who, in her evening role as supervisor of the film club, forced us to watch Barbarella. Perhaps "forced" is too strong a term -- membership in that club was voluntary -- but what I recall over the temporal distance was an almost conscious campaign to corrupt us. Even at the time, I remember thinking that the book, especially, was a threat to public morals. Barbarella much less so: it was merely an opportunity for progressive young men to watch the once-estimable Jane Fonda take off her clothes. My own taste ran more to another film club outing in that 1968 season, Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet, in which the question was whether the female lead, played by the more shyly attractive Olivia Hussey, had taken her clothes off or not. My younger readers, raised on movies in which the female lead always takes her clothes off, may snicker at the innocence of my baby-boom generation, just as we snicker today at the absence of any subtlety at all, but "such, such were the joys." No, as I say, "soft pornography" never quite struck me as so powerful a corrupting force, as a novel which exalts the worst kind of self-pitying adolescent narcissism, and holds it up as an ideal, through adulthood to a senile old age. The book has had a remarkable and, to my mind, infernal influence on society, owing in part to its author's literary skill in the manipulation of colloquial language, in part to the emotional and even hormonal power in that peculiar explosion of sex and ego that is adolescent narcissism itself. The proof is in the pudding, and the fact that Catcher in the Rye went on to inspire at least three celebrity assassins (Mark David Chapman, John Hinckley Jr., and Robert John Bardo), along with who knows how many "little league" psychos and suicides, speaks to its real power. The great German poet, J.W. von Goethe, achieved something similar with his own original contribution to the genre of the "coming of age novel" -- The Sufferings of Young Werther, in 1774. It not only triggered the suicides of innumerable overwrought young dandies across the Europe of his day, but launched the German Romantic movement. Still, what for Goethe had been the over-talented expression of a passing phase in youth -- ironically disavowed even within the novel -- was for Salinger the embodiment of a permanent worldview. The latter's paranoid demonization of "the Phonies" is echoed in the 1950s Jimmy-Dean cults of rebellion, in every hippie tract against "the Squares," and to this day in delusionary ideas about how the world works, among our leftwing "intellectuals." Indeed, one cannot look through the list of President Obama's strange and demented policy czars without spotting so many Holden Caulfields, nor escape their ever-presence among the talking heads of MSNBC. And in watching the president's State of the Union address this week, I had the distinct impression of a man whose big-government vision rests less in Marxism than in the faux-naïf of "a catcher in the rye." http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=1104 http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=1104 We take it for granted up here in Canada that our political class should tell us how to spend our own money in election campaigns. Perhaps not everywhere in Canada: they still don't think that way in Alberta, where all the sane people seem to have congregated for a last stand. But in discussing the matter with friends here in Ontario -- a province now subsidized by the taxpayers of Alberta -- the idea that persons, whether human or corporate, should be allowed to spend their own money exactly as they see fit, to support causes they truly care about, is a non-starter. Years of just such regulation have helped us to accept the proposition that Big Nanny knows better than we can ever know, what is good for us. For an election in which real issues were discussed might be "ugly." Political discourse should be limited to questions of style, not substance, lest horrible, politically incorrect things get put on the table, and politicians have to explain exactly why they should be taken off. So, Nanny audits political spending through an immense bureaucracy, which has the effect of reversing power relations between the "wise" political parties and those crazy voters. Is this the argument for campaign spending controls? I think it is the real argument, but it is not the argument commonly offered. The "official" argument is that, sans Big Nanny, those big corporate interests on Bay Street or wherever would "buy" the elections. This premise, in turn, is even more insulting to the electorate. It holds that we can be bought, as easily as politicians. The insult is also quite unfair. Canadians, as all other electors, have a human tendency to resent obvious attempts to buy them, and to express that resentment through the secret ballot. (It might be different if we, like the politicians, had the opportunity to benefit from the pay-offs directly.) There was an especially good example of this phenomenon stateside last week in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. A certain Martha Coakley, Democrat candidate for the U.S. Senate, started the campaign with vastly more cash than her Republican opponent, a certain Scott Brown. He, for his part, famously began by delivering lawn signs in his own pickup truck. As he began to catch on in the polls, for sure, he attracted money from across the country. But so did Ms Coakley, from desperate party efforts to save their seat. One is reminded of the remark by perhaps Canada's most laughable prime minister, Kim Campbell, that election campaigns are no time to discuss public policy. (That was the election in which her party held precisely two seats, neither of them hers.) Sometimes "the people" decide that they would like to discuss things anyway. The current Tea Party phenomenon in the U.S. is an example of this. People who have matters of substance to discuss feel they have been blocked out of the political process, by big government and big media alike; that the current American legislative agenda is decidedly not in their interest. And they've been organizing themselves to great effect, with their own money. In the last U.S. election, it could be argued that a great weight of cash helped candidate Obama crush candidate McCain. Obama himself "opted out" of public funding, from the moment it appeared more money could be raised outside that (unconstitutional) system. In fact, the money followed the charisma, and not vice versa. In a split but efficacious decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last week that the First Amendment, which guarantees free speech, trumps the McCain-Feingold campaign finance act of 2002, and any other attempt to restrict election spending by "corporate persons" (in the broad sense that includes unions and any other formal organization). As Justice Anthony Kennedy explained in the majority decision, "The government may regulate corporate speech through disclaimer and disclosure requirements, but it may not suppress that speech altogether." The majority also homed in on this crucial point: that bureaucratic regulation of speech constitutes a de facto prior restraint, due to the time and expense involved in administrative proceedings. This is a point we have made up here, against "human rights" commissions and the like: that their very existence is antipathetic to an open society. There are many and huge ramifications, but the chief one is that the decision attacks the contemporary lobbying system. In effect, those advancing special interests are condemned to lobbying the entire electorate, instead of just lobbying the politicians behind closed doors. This directly undermines the political class. It goes to the heart of their ability to broker deals not in the public interest, and pass them into law without public debate. And that in turn is why the response to the decision from the political class has been unfriendly to the edge of berserk. They correctly understand that "politics as usual" is now under review, actually and not rhetorically. Pray blow that wind north. http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=1103 http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=1103 Perhaps I am stupid -- a number of my correspondents think this is the explanation -- but I am frequently unable to make any sense at all of media reporting on religion. This puts me at a disadvantage in responding -- as I am sometimes asked to do -- to the latest reports. Almost any public statement made by the pope or a Vatican official would serve as an example, and I sometimes wonder why they bother to say anything at all, given what will be reported. But for a specific recent example, let us take Pope Benedict's annual remarks to the assembled diplomatic corps in the Vatican, two weeks ago. According to almost every headline I saw or could search, he used the occasion to denounce world leaders for failing to make sufficient progress at Copenhagen. Knowing what I do about both the office and its present incumbent, I found this odd: for neither the Roman Church nor the former Joseph Ratzinger has a history of embracing statist solutions to -- anything, really. Yet my inbox immediately filled with messages, from persons themselves of no known Catholic background, telling me the Pope had signed on to the whole "global warming" bill of goods. In their defence, they could reasonably take that impression from the news headlines. And one could hardly expect that, before citing a Vatican "policy" with uncharacteristic approval, they would actually consult the Pope's own words in their context. The whole premise of the liberal media is, after all, "You don't have to do that because we do it for you." Imagine my own surprise, on consulting the original text, to find that the Pope had actually mentioned the Copenhagen climate conference. (Something in it!) He had referred to the "economic and political resistance" to fighting environmental degradation exhibited there. This was a direct observation that almost anyone could have made, and I myself noticed the spectacle of politicians from countries with the worst environmental records making self-righteous and self-serving attacks on those from countries with the best. But this is a far cry from signing on to anything. Two things stand out, when actually reading the Pope's text. The first is the unambiguous way in which he condemned socialist materialism. He referred expressly to the environmental fallout of the old Soviet regime, not only at home but in his native Germany. That would be the first hint that he was not advocating the sort of planetary "green socialism" on offer at the conference. But more signally, see his leading example of political man versus God's creation. It was the writing of new laws, all over the world, that undermine "the differences between the sexes." Here is the full "money line," lest we add to the confusion: "Creatures differ from one another and can be protected, or endangered, in different ways, as we know from daily experience. One such attack comes from laws or proposals, which, in the name of fighting discrimination, strike at the biological basis of the difference between the sexes. I am thinking, for example, of certain countries in Europe or North and South America." Now, as a Catholic myself I should perhaps be grateful that the news headlines were not, "Pope links global warming to gay marriage." Yet as a media person, I could see that this headline was as plausible as the one almost universally chosen. And, not much more absurd. The difficulty, for reporters and editors who are not only not Christian, but have no practical knowledge of Christian teachings and traditions -- is that, even when trying their honest best, they translate what they hear into what they do understand. Those removed from religious life tend inevitably to assume that political questions are the only public ones, and that private and public life belong in different dimensions. They are not being malicious when they do this. They are instead being ignorant, which is often more dangerous. The Pope was himself preaching -- as popes commonly do -- from an understanding of man in relation to "the creation" that is different in kind from the political view; and which is in fact more comprehensive. And he was making a statement that is not restricted to Catholic beliefs, nor even to those shared by all faithful Christians. Faithful Jews, incidentally, believe exactly the same thing, and to some degree so do exponents of other religious traditions. We hold that man has not only a place, but a role in nature, that our material acts are resonant with both material and spiritual consequences. We hold that nature herself is not merely some clockwork, or supermarket. All agriculture, all husbanding, all human culture must adapt to truths more enduring than what is immediately on our plate. In declaring that the roots of peace, of human prosperity, and of ecological well-being are integrated, the pope was perhaps saying something that went over the heads of many of the diplomats, too. But he has a hard sell, to people who think they are friends of nature, who begin by denying their own nature. http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=1102 http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=1102 We cannot know, when the news hits us, whether it is for good or bad. Superficially, the answer is often obvious enough. An earthquake, for instance, cannot be a good thing. Not in itself. But who can guess what redemption may be worked through it? This thought may outrage some atheist readers: but it needs saying, if we are even to begin to "vindicate the ways of God to Man." Likewise it is hard to see what good can come of pumping Qassam rockets into Israeli schoolyards, or dispatching suicide bombers to Jerusalem pizzerias. Palestinian incendiaries may see some good in it; I certainly cannot. But what I see in Haiti is the benefit of that experience. For it was thanks to the skills and capabilities of rescue workers, honed in response to such terror hits, that Israel was able to put a 500-bed field hospital on the ground in Port-au-Prince, in little more than the flying time from Tel Aviv. Fully equipped and staffed by private volunteers, it is a miracle of human ingenuity. That hospital came with search expertise, to recruit patients from under the rubble; with specialists in pediatrics and obstetrics, etc. (The mother of the first born in that hospital called her child, "Baby Israel.") Compare the easy squalour of Michael J. Fox urging Canadians not to get frustrated by the slow pace of other Haitian relief efforts, but to continue sending money. As a former colleague from this newspaper, reporting this remark from the radio, commented: "The Haitians are dying and WE have to be patient?" Yes, our narcissism has reached those levels. Bad can come of bad, good from good, bad from good, but also, good can come of evil. Our task is to make the best of any fate. Sometimes the disaster comes from nature. Far more often, it comes from human cause. Sometimes that cause is far from dramatic. There is no evil plot, no grand conspiracy; the very people doing harm are full of "good intentions." (Hitler himself thought he was doing the Germans a favour.) There may be an upwelling of foolishness, as broad as a national electorate. Long months before the election of Barack Obama, as readers of this column may recall, I could see exactly what a disaster he would be as president of the United States. Indeed, any person of sound conservative conviction could predict what now even Paul Krugman begins to grasp, in New York Times blog posts under titles like, "He Wasn't The One We've Been Waiting For." Krugman and company may never know why he was a disaster, but the idea that Obama was not God's gift to the Democratic Party strikes more Democrats every morning. That a man who, for all his charm of rhetoric and imposture, can be so out of touch with the "core beliefs and values" of his own countrymen -- yet still become their leader -- is something on which to marvel. Yet it has happened again and again in history. In retrospect, the election result of 2008 could have been worse. John McCain might have won; and had he done so, the U.S. would now be in a less tractable mess. The liberal media, which made George W. Bush the most reviled U.S. president since Abraham Lincoln, would have turned on McCain (and his school-marm vice president) with even greater savagery. The Republicans would be wearing all the consequences of public policies not that much different from Obama's, so far -- bailouts and buy-offs and bafflegab -- yet giving the false impression these were "conservative" schemes. The victory of Scott Brown, in the Massachusetts byelection, has brought the Left agenda -- Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid in White House and Congress -- to an abrupt halt. And it has done so before that much damage could be done. In the bluest of all American blue states -- the one which already had a taste of progressive "Obamacare" at state level -- people realized they'd made a horrible mistake. A vote swing of more than 30 per cent changed the complexion of a Senate seat that had belonged to the Kennedy family since 1952. Debt is not the answer to economic problems, there or here; more bureaucracy is not the answer; nor is the further empowerment of public sector unions to hold taxpayers to ransom. And as to terrorism and foreign threats, Mr. Brown was able to play, before the most politically correct constituency in the U.S., variations on the theme: "American taxpayer dollars should go to buying weapons to kill terrorists, not pay for lawyers to defend them." Hallelujah! ... And don't thank Martha Coakley for throwing that election; the polls show indisputably it is Obama we must thank. By "pushing his envelope" an inch too far, he has accomplished what took George III far more effort. http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=1101 http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=1101 The media and political response to Haiti's disaster was as predictable as the effect of a 7.0-magnitude earthquake on Port-au-Prince. The pictures and emotions are still running high, and people are giving generously to more than 10,000 charitable agencies. The scale of that is bewildering; the opportunities for corruption are proportionally large. A natural disaster is the prime fundraising opportunity for any NGO, and the posters go up on their websites right away. Yet very few will have means of immediate delivery to the stricken location. It does not follow that they will immediately forward all receipts to agencies that do have feet on the ground. Haiti is an especially difficult case, because its government and infrastructure were entirely dysfunctional even before the earthquake, and its social conditions such that military force is necessary to distribute goods. The country has no match in the Western Hemisphere: it is more comparable to the 20 or more failed states in Africa, which endure natural disasters with much less international attention because they are not tourist destinations. That the various aid agencies on the ground in Haiti are doing their best under the circumstances, to sort out who is delivering what to where and how, goes almost without saying. Proximity to real human suffering can bring out the best in people, even lifelong bureaucrats. This is not the issue in Haiti, or anywhere else that immediate disaster relief is being delivered. Nor need we worry, at first, about waste, when the priority is to save lives. Yet if our intention is to help, both short term and longer, our emphasis should not be on doing things that make us feel good about ourselves, but instead on what works. A number of reviews were conducted of aid after the Asian tsunami, five years ago. I was struck by one that Laura Freschi cited on the Forbes magazine website. It answered the question, "How can you go wrong by sending drugs?" This study showed that most of the drugs donated to Aceh province in Indonesia -- the region which sustained most damage -- were of kinds not needed by the survivors. Compounding this, more than two-thirds were labelled in languages which local aid workers could not read. "These drugs wasted health workers' time, took up limited storage space in hospitals, and cost millions of dollars to destroy safely." My impression has long been that donations in kind are almost always counter-productive, and donations in money can be useful only if people with direct knowledge of needs at the location are dictating the urgent spending decisions. The rest of the effort is getting in the way. This problem is exacerbated by our "culture of narcissism," which focuses on the happyface of good intentions. Good intentions are never enough, prudence is required to convert them into useful action, yet prudence is the last thing on the minds of people jostled by headlines into a need to "do something now." The impulse to "write a cheque" to assuage conscience becomes more and more deeply engrained in our psyches, as we abandon the moral and spiritual underpinnings of our civilization, and indulge the habit of quantifying each issue by the amount of money we throw at it. My advice to the people who have asked me what they can most usefully do to help is, start thinking ahead to the next disaster. For Port-au-Prince is already bottlenecked with supplies. Love is not a declaration, but instead an action, and those who are troubled by the hideous conditions in which so many on our planet live and die had better devote more time than is required by PayPal. A hard and unwelcome truth (to those who want the charitable equivalent of instant gratification) is the limit on the amount of money that can be usefully spent on a disaster, before counter-productive efforts begin to dominate all spending. By counter-productive I mean, especially, in a case like Haiti, restoring the circumstances that keep its people in desperation, including the power of a kleptocracy to create political obstacles to any direct human enterprise -- whether profitable or charitable. The first part of disaster relief is uncontroversial: food, water, medicine, shelter. Surprisingly, that doesn't cost a whole lot, nor take very long. It's the "peace and development" programs that follow which absorb the big money -- the growing of permanent new branches of bureaucracy to mind the population thus saved. Haiti is not a basket case from the absence of foreign aid. Quite the contrary. I lived many years in Asia, and much of my journalistic work was focused on "development issues." I've seen the consequences of aid dependency with my own eyes. It is the same story everywhere, where people are desperately poor: they have no freedom, they are landless, everything belongs to an exploiting class. And that exploiting class is, almost invariably, "leftist," and the nearly-exclusive beneficiary of foreign aid. http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=1100 http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=1100 The "just-so" story was defined by Rudyard Kipling, in his magisterial and exemplary work, Just So Stories for Little Children, published in 1902. I remember it well as a formative masterpiece of my own early childhood -- after the Pookie books, and before the all-but-scriptural Kim. It is the work in which Kipling explains e.g. How the Whale got his Throat, How the Camel got his Hump, How the Leopard got his Spots, How the First Letter was Written -- the sort of basic briefing any child needs, to confront a world that might otherwise appear senseless. The account of the Beginning of the Armadilloes, in the High and Far-Off Times -- and on the banks of the turbid Amazon -- is especially instructive. It supplies a theory of the convergent evolution of the clever armadillo, from the Stickly-Prickly Hedgehog and/or his friend the Slow-Solid Tortoise, under the ministrations of the Painted Jaguar. Consulting it today, I realize that my skepticism toward the dogmas of neo-Darwinism might well originate from that story. It is not that I prefer Kipling's account of the origin of species, which was a quite intentional (and very amusing) farce. Rather, that it spared me from developing a taste for quite unintentional farces. In logic, a "just-so story" is known as the "ad hoc fallacy." The Latin means "for this," and it applies to any "pourquoi" explanation of things, given for the express purpose of supporting an otherwise unprovable hypothesis. The perfect example would be the whole pseudo-science of "evolutionary psychology," which seeks to explain why man is the way he is, by means of evolutionary plausibilities. We start from the hypothesis that everything in nature, as Darwin says, adapts exclusively to the end of survival. And then we return to the same place, by a logical circle. This hypothesis necessarily excludes the good, the beautiful, and the true from consideration. Those are "illusory," survival is "real." Religion, art, and science themselves are "explained" by means of sociobiological just-so stories. Today we have any number of these standard entertainments, flashed at us through the covers of all popular science magazines, in which authors of cruelly limited imagination, but with advanced college degrees, declare this or that human trait or ability originated in the environmental requirements of our cave-dwelling ancestors. At the moment this topic is very much alive as academic banter. A recent book by psychologists David P. Barash and Judith Eve Lipton may have got it started. In an article they wrote for the Chronicle of Higher Education two weeks ago, they were defending the proposition that "just-so stories" are the beginning of all science and human reasoning, and ought to be paid some respect on that account. This, I must say, gets everything backward; and on Rudyard Kipling's behalf, I should like to decline their condescending flattery. For unlike an evolutionary psychologist, Kipling would never afflict his readers with concepts as intrinsically absurd as "reciprocal altruism" (which, if it is reciprocal, cannot be altruism, and if it is altruism, cannot be reciprocal.) That is just one example. Kipling -- perhaps our greatest 20th-century prose author in English -- was a satirist of the deepest kind. I say "deepest" because on the surface he is hardly a satirist at all, except in some rather overtly political verses; and even those are subtly loaded with paradox, under the surface. In the Just So Stories he was not merely trying to enchant young children, as adults think he was doing. He had a mind too knowing for that kind of play. He was instead arming his young readers to defend themselves against the faithless simplicities of their adult keepers. No modern writer is quite so subversive as Kipling. And at the heart of him you find, in Just So Stories, the Jungle Books, and everywhere, this shining truth: that faith, good faith, good loyal faith, transcends all "explanations" of the unexplainable. * My Wednesday column, on "unmanning the barricades," seems to have stirred considerable controversy among my hockey correspondents. My assertion that the game remains, relatively at least to the world outside the arena, a little frozen oasis of common sense, objective law, rewarded merit, and manliness, free of political correction, has been challenged. Several who follow the game more closely, noted increasingly "girlish" or soccer-like behaviour on the rink, and all were agreed about the trend in that direction of new hockey regulations. One of my Catholic correspondents writes, in summary: "While I agree with the point you're making in the article, I should warn you that recent changes to the hockey rulebook are all aimed at penalizing physical play, thus rewarding the growing number of soft, visor-wearing European players, or Chicken Swedes as Harold Ballard so rightly identified them. My brother calls it post-Vatican II hockey." No columnist likes to make corrections, but on inquiring into the facts of this matter, I fear that I may have given my readers too rosy a view. Yes, even hockey is going the way of other once-proud national institutions, and becoming answerable to Big Nanny. http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=1099 http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=1099 The epicentre of the earthquake that levelled Port-au-Prince this week was at a known distance west-south-west of the city, and at a known shallow depth. Although the date of the earthquake could not be predicted, it was known to be fairly inevitable. The amplitude of the first "temblor" and each of more than a dozen powerful aftershocks could all be measured and possibly predicted. Given all this information, it would also have been possible to predict with fair accuracy how much overall damage would be done -- that most large masonry buildings would likely come down. A knowledge of Haiti itself already provides intending rescuers with some idea of the difficulties they face in delivering food, water, medicine, and shelter. Looting, gang violence (with machetes, when guns are unavailable), and such spontaneous acts of public despair as piling corpses across a street to protest the lack of aid (thus creating a roadblock against its delivery), must all have been predictable, from past experience of delivering aid after hurricane disasters. The collapse even of surviving infrastructure, and of all government services, went without saying. But while all this could be expected, no one can reasonably be blamed. The Red Cross and other international relief agencies, the U.S. military and all national agencies in the developed countries are primed for disaster response anywhere. They can hardly be maintained in readiness for sudden events in specific locations. All this should go without saying, but needs to be said to understand what is involved in Haitian relief efforts. There is no shortage of supplies and equipment at the ready -- the "donors' conferences" will find little resistance to committing them -- and people from all over the world will send heartfelt money. National agencies will even be a little competitive in their eagerness to prove their own preparedness and usefulness. For such reasons as I've sketched above, they are already tripping over each other. According to reports, the airport at Port-au-Prince is blocked with the accumulation of planes that cannot be refuelled; the city's hospitals collapsed; inmates of the main prison escaped. Rescuers are not to be blamed when making their best efforts. It is in human nature to look for scapegoats, however: to find someone with a public identity to blame, since there is no satisfaction in blaming everyone. Sometimes, the accused are guilty as charged, but as often they were the very men and women with the clearest understanding of the evils, who did most to contain them. Their ill-luck is simply to become "the face associated with it." One thinks of the great medical researchers, whose reward is to have the most hideous diseases named in their honour. The rain falls on the just and unjust, and curses fall in the same way. Pat Robertson, the American evangelical, has brought down contumely on himself for his curious assertion that Haiti is suffering divine retribution, for some pact made with the devil, a very long time ago. Before we begin cursing him for this, let us at least observe that he appears to be raising more money for relief efforts than any of his self-appointed moral superiors. His remarks were extremely tasteless, but then, what should we think of contemporary tastes? Nor would I dismiss the Biblical idea of divine retribution, except to note, it is Biblical. We humans are in no position to read the mind of God, and those of "catholic" or "orthodox" faith should know better than to claim this ability. The reader who wants to contemplate this mystery would better puzzle on the Bible, than on the prophecies of Pat Robertson. I have never been to Haiti, but have met people quite familiar with the place. Each has depicted a "broken society," getting "broker" continuously over the last generation or two; a country unable to rise to the task of governing itself without tyranny. There are many such countries in our world; and in every case there are plausible historical explanations for how they got that way. Mr. Robertson's own off-the-cuff comparison of Haiti to the Dominican Republic -- a far more successful country that shares the same island -- did not lack acuity. But the same informants who described to me the worst of Haiti, often also described the best: exhilarating encounters with warm, kindly, often very creative and thoughtful people, who were no less "typically Haitian" than members of machete gangs. An earthquake makes no distinctions between them. The moral theatre is not in the earthquake, but in the response to it. We pray inwardly for the relief of suffering, out of empathy, as we should. But then we should pray the poor people of this smashed city and nation will themselves rise from the ruins, and make the best that can be made of their terrible suffering. http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=1098 http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=1098 The best defence is a good offence, according to ancestral lore; and as Canadians we understand the principle in hockey. Play the game in the other team's zone and they won't be scoring many goals on you. Not that you can do without a couple of defencemen (or a goalie for that matter); but even there, the point holds. You want defencemen who can move the play forward, who can get the puck out of your own zone. Just dumping it out is ineffective: you want to pass the thing forward. Indeed, it is a relief to watch hockey, a game of limited consequence except that it remains a little frozen oasis of common sense. The big professional teams are all-male. The inability to skate is seen as a liability. Puck-handling skills aren't negotiable, either. Merit continues to be rewarded in hockey, and there is no nonsense about this. Mere "credentials" will get you nowhere. Coaches who prove useless are fired, and even overpaid players who consistently fail to contribute to overall team performance are sent, unsentimentally, down to the minors. Refereeing is still done, so far as I can see, without any recourse to post-modern "rights language," and an offside remains an objective thing. We have yet to see even the theatre of whining that adds a sheen of disgrace to international soccer. Not that we should cease to be vigilant. Recent campaigns to eliminate the good old-fashioned hockey brawl -- on the grounds that people might get hurt -- are a cause for concern. We need to appreciate the greater evil presented by the intrusion of effeminacy into what is essentially a man's game. "A man's game." I do not doubt the power of that phrase alone to provoke people. That is why it must be allowed to stand. Among the most urgent requirements of our moment in the "evolution of western society" is to halt the progress of emasculation. An effeminate society will never withstand the challenge of psychopathic masculine aggression -- in the form of, exempli gratia, contemporary "Islamism." We need men who are men, to defend us; men who are not merely shrill, from the pain of their gelding. Hockey is itself a surrogate for warfare, and if you doubt it for a moment, listen to the crowd. (Including the women. Especially the women.) And while I might think professional sports in general a circus for the masses, and a lure into couch potatodom -- real men don't watch, they play -- hockey in particular has become valuable as a museum exhibit of many forgotten virtues. I was writing last week about airport security, making the point that the very fatuity of the latest "politically correct" security regulations -- the refusal to profile likely terrorists, the insistence on punishing everybody equally, the abject dependence on fallible and hideously expensive technology, the mindless willingness to be held hostage -- may be contributing to the demise of political correction itself. Even people in the mainstream media are beginning to ask questions like, "How do the Israelis handle these threats?" But I have learned not to count on public outrage. The polls are now in, and the willingness of air travellers to submit to "full body scanners" -- that render them nude to security personnel -- proves we continue to be "a nation of sheep." Imagine this! Look at the denudations of Auschwitz; see the hell-paintings of Hieronymus Bosch; read the Book of Genesis again; think carefully about what is wrong with pornography. Now consider the crowds going willingly in nakedness into their airplanes. The tyrant has reduced us to a shivering, humiliated mass. I, for one, have resolved not to board an airplane through a full-body scanner, and I do not believe anyone with a lively sense of his own human dignity should submit to that farce, short of physical compulsion. Yet there is worse. The "knicker bomber" who tried to bring down an airliner approaching Detroit -- intentionally choosing Christmas Day -- was, immediately after capture, singing like a bird about his connections with Yemen, and the imminent threat of further attacks. This vital conduit of life-and-death information was then intentionally plugged, when President Obama made his decision to have him charged as a conventional criminal, read his "Miranda rights," and lawyered up. This is of a piece with the closing of Guantanamo, moving the 9/11 trials to New York, the feints at prosecuting senior Bush administration officials, the persistent White House attempts to undermine Gen. McChrystal and Gen. Petraeus in the field with second-guessing and press leaks, and -- so on. And this isn't hockey, this is war -- with thousands upon thousands of lives on the line in America itself and around the world, and the integrity of our society under siege. http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=1097 http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=1097 First, let's kill all the lawyers. I hasten to specify, this is a quote. And to add that some of my best friends are lawyers. And moreover, even after exempting them individually, and despite my very personal experiences with such monstrous stuff as Ontario family law, I do not recommend killing all the lawyers. Such are my religious convictions that I will insist: not even one lawyer should be harmed. In any physical way. The quote is from Shakespeare. Take him to the hate crimes tribunal! Indeed: I'd love to have that docket. I think we could have this Shakespeare up before all the Canadian "human rights" commissions from here to eternity, on the basis of on-the-record quotes, and thus without the usual need for hearsay. His plays are crawling with remarks, the political incorrectitude of which would be the more apparent to Canada's "human rights" commissioners, were they not, as a class, such drooling, humourless, subliterate twits. But fortunately for old Will, he never entered a Canadian jurisdiction. The fact he has been dead for 394 years may also prove helpful to his defence. Not that he needs help, for even when he wrote, he showed a remarkable skill for skating around his contemporary censors. With age, I have come to admire more and more the number of starkly recusant hints he was able to fly in his Histories, like paper airplanes, over everyone's head. Definitely one of my heroes. For the benefit of readers with only a university education, however, I should explain. Even though the quote with which we began is a line in Shakespeare, it did not represent his views. It was put in the mouth of Dick the Butcher, who is responding to a harangue by Jack Cade, the socialist revolutionary in Henry VI, Part Two. (See act 4, scene 2, and passim, for Shakespeare's medieval, catholic and intensely unfavourable views on socialist revolutionaries.) Therefore, some irony was intended. So no, we should not kill all the lawyers. But that doesn't mean they should get off easy. While I support capital punishment in principle, and while a new criminological study has shown, by statistical means, that on average more than two innocent lives are saved for every convicted killer executed in Texas (search: "Raymond Teske"), I favour more subtle punishments for lesser crimes. And this includes, in the case of any political party that becomes dominated by lawyers, defeating them at the polls. This is a point brought home to me by an amusing item a friend forwarded this week, comparing Democrat to Republican party in the United States. The Democrat leadership is all lawyers, and has been for some time. Barack Obama, lawyer; Michelle Obama, lawyer; Hillary Clinton, lawyer; Bill Clinton, lawyer; Harry Reid, lawyer; Nancy Pelosi, lawyer; and so forth. All Democrat presidential candidates since 1984, lawyers -- except Al Gore, who somehow failed to graduate from law school. Compare, if you will, the Republican leadership over the last while, in White House and Congress. The last Republican lawyer to make president was Gerald Ford. Instead: movie actor, spy chief, businessman, successively. Last election: an old soldier, and a PTA lady. Look back at the leaders of the so-called "Republican revolution" in Congress: Newt Gingrich, history professor; Tom Delay, pest exterminator; Dick Armey, economist; Bill Frist, heart surgeon. (And note what the Democrat lawyers did to get rid of them.) Alas, when I turn to Canada, I see all-party government by lawyers; and the interminable legacy of the extremely lawyerly Liberal Party under that lawyer Pierre Trudeau. Moreover, beyond legislative politics (both here and in the U.S.), I review a continuous social revolution achieved by such lawyerly "reforms" as the Omnibus Bill of 1970; or Santa's 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Our lawyers never nationalized banks. In every case, it seems to me, they changed the laws in order to change the people. (The precise opposite of democracy.) People foolishly voted in Trudeau the same way they voted in Obama: "Hope and Change." From lawyers. And this is the wisdom of all the policy czars that President Obama has appointed -- his commando team of lawyers, many with highly controversial, radical left pasts. Superficially, they could be removed from office tomorrow. But if they can rewrite enough laws and regulations, in the smoke and confusion of brief moments in power, they will, in a deeper sense, remain in office for generations to come. I was writing last Sunday in general opposition to the concept of "reform." It is a lawyerly concept, which has narrowed in our time to the tactics of "legislation by litigation," and should be profoundly anathematic to a free society. By increments, the need for lawyers has been extended to every aspect of human life, and the law schools themselves have metastatically expanded. In a sense, our entire society has been criminalized, by lawyers adding to myriad laws that impinge not only on criminals, but on everybody. And by increments, we must find some way to reverse that parasitical growth, which threatens to choke even our humanity. http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=1096 http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=1096 Islamism -- a totalitarian political manifestation of Islam, which holds among other tenets the gratuitous slaughter of infidels -- is not yet fully discredited. Only a small minority of Muslims subscribe to it, and only the more radical Leftists tend to ally with it. Yet it does command an enthusiastic constituency; and given the willingness of members to act on their beliefs, it will, for the foreseeable future, enjoy an influence beyond their mere number. A single "Islamist" on a commercial airliner, for instance, may have a greater influence on its flight plan than all the other passengers combined. To say that Islam is a religion of peace is fair enough, according to many credible spokesman for mainstream Islam. Sheikh Tantawi of Al-Azhar in Egypt -- the most authoritative Sunni Muslim I could find -- went so far as to tell me Islam is "the religion of love," and who am I to challenge such a scholar? I am no more qualified than President Bush was to make authoritative pronouncements about the nature of Islam, so I will let this pass with the more Clintonesque observation that, "it depends what you mean by 'is'." Notwithstanding, when Sheikh Tantawi assured me (even before 9/11) that "Islamism is not Islam," he was speaking with evident sincerity, while volubly expressing his distaste for the terrorists of the day. I have certainly met Muslims who seemed as spiritual and otherworldly in the practice of their faith as many Christians in the practice of theirs. That the religion is living, and can be a force for good, I am prepared to maintain; though of course, it is up to Muslims to make that argument effectively. Yet I'm also aware that contemporary Islamism carries doctrinal and behavioural echoes from past Islamic "heresies," such as the cult of the "Hashishiyyins" or "Assassins" whom the Crusaders encountered in the 11th and 12th centuries. "Islamism" is thus to be taken not as religion, but as cult, or an assemblage of cults. There are other cults in Islam, as in Christianity, as in Hinduism and all major religions -- each bearing some relation to the religion itself. "By their fruits ye will know them," as the Founder of my own Church explained. All such cults have living force, so long as they reside within living people. But I would maintain, further, that they survive, as legacy, long after the last true believer has died. Habits of mind, forged in religious experience -- whether orthodox or heretical is not the issue here -- pass down to subsequent generations. For instance, oriental cults that flourished in the first Christian centuries, but had long since died to outward appearance, continued to sound echoes into the Middle Ages. And some of the great mediaeval outbursts of popular madness, such as the Albigensian heresy, or "Cathars," carried clear marks of Gnostic and Manichaean historical antecedents. Likewise, the Puritan cults implanted in America by some of her earliest colonists, which disappeared as active agents not long after, continue nevertheless to exert subtle influence upon our cultural behaviour today. One cannot look candidly at "political correctness" without being reminded of the witchcraft trials at Salem. Our post-modern "zero tolerances" have an American flavour, that makes them different from, say, those of the show trials in Stalin's Russia, at least to connoisseurs. Yet one cannot look back on the ascetic aspects of Puritanism -- with its implicit conflict between body and soul -- without thinking back to the Cathars. Indeed, the various religious heresies and fanaticisms of this world depend on a surprisingly limited repertory of core bad ideas, and that alone assures family resemblances between them. Today, such superstitious, though outwardly secular beliefs as those in "progress" or the "Zeitgeist"; in redemption through technology or law or "experts"; in hygienic practices and dieting as a substitute for spiritual purification -- persist even though the Enlightenment atheist cults which engendered them no longer command adherents. And yet that "mystical materialism" persists as a habit of mind, and is now mixing again with new forms of more overtly "spiritual" fervour to produce new heresies from the old raw materials. Al Gore's visions of environmental apocalypse, spooky beliefs in redemption through "reducing our carbon footprint," and the various other crackpot environmentalist ideas, have force because they draw on the same old schizophrenia: apprehension of a grand cosmic conflict between "dross matter" and "refined spirit." Militant Islam postulates some paradise in which the perpetrators of psychopathic violence will be rewarded with their 72 virgins, or whatever. In some respects this is closer to sanity than the Green postulate, in which the Earth becomes an Eden after the human presence has been, as much as possible, removed. For at least under the Islamist system, someone stands to benefit. http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=1095 http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=1095 According to an item that appeared yesterday on the BBC website, giving up smoking may sharply increase the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes. The connection between this and airport security -- my topic du jour -- might not be readily apparent. So let me explain. The BBC story is politically incorrect. Smoking is supposed to be always bad for you; giving it up always good. That is what political correctness demands, and therefore studies which show the contrary must be suppressed or ignored. (It's the same thing with "anthropogenic global warming," and a few hundred other topics.) I personally doubt smoking is always good for you, and I generally recommend against taking it up. But whether it has benefits or not, there has in fact been an accumulation of evidence that suddenly giving up smoking, after decades through which your metabolism has been adapting to tar and nicotine, might be rather more dangerous than continuing to smoke. An open mind will examine evidence, whether the risk is health or security. It will not allow itself to be blindsided by the requirements of anybody's propaganda. It will certainly work from hunches and expectations, but it will also subject its own assumptions to skeptical review. "Western Civ" became rich and powerful, but also remarkably free and humane, out of this very habit of playing "devil's advocate" with itself. This has been, for 20 centuries now, innate even to the theological reasoning of the Church to which I belong (the Roman one). Let's put this in the plainest language. The first thing the Devil tries to do, when invading an intellectual organism, is get rid of the "devil's advocate." He needs people who are afraid to think. The first thing political correctness attempts is to suppress any genuine inquiry or debate. Instead, by the threat of personal contumely and ostracism, it instills a neurotic compulsion to avoid contradicting the "correct" political line. This must necessarily be a powerful neurosis: for the ideas which animate "progressive" or "left-wing" people tend to disintegrate on contact with common sense. Here's a little exercise I learned from a friend. Repeat after me: "The problem with stereotypes is that they're all true!" (It's just a breathing exercise.) That smoking item on the BBC -- itself an intensely "PC" institution -- can thus be taken as a sign of the times. It is one of many glinting indications I have seen in "mainstream" media, lately, that freedom of thought may be returning. I mention this at an angle to the most spectacular indication. It was triggered by some Nigerian Islamist, who ("allegedly") tried to take down an airliner on its approach to Detroit, Christmas day. So far, ho hum -- that's the sort of thing Islamists are always trying to do. So why is it news? After all, President Obama's homeland security chief, the unbelievably incompetent but assiduously PC Janet Napolitano, twice announced, "the system worked." What she could only mean by this is, that after the total failure of massive bureaucratic measures to prevent the boarding of a man they'd been directly warned to look out for, passengers aboard the flight tackled him. The terrorist was thus prevented from detonating his binary "knicker bomb." Better yet, he was left with painful burns. Don't laugh. His mission was a complete success. By pulling that one little stunt, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, from Lagos, Nigeria, by way of Yemen, was able to snarl Christmas and New Year's traffic through airports all over the world, and especially across North America. He was able to induce the unbelievably incompetent Janet Napolitano to immediately introduce several new layers of utterly useless air security regulations, which in turn backed up vast crowds of air travellers, thus making them ripe targets for any suicide bomber. But there is hope. Conditions have now got so bad, from the 99 per cent of damage that is inflicted not by terrorists but by the cumbersome bureaucracies responding to them (100 per cent in this case), that we are now reading "mainstream" articles about how the Israelis handle airport security -- with total success, against much greater threats, at lower cost, with no flight delays. This is encouraging: people are actually discussing what works. I did notice several of the articles, though well-researched in other respects, carefully avoided mentioning the key element in the Israeli security strategy, which is: open ethnic, religious, demographic, and behavioural profiling. It is not something anyone wants to do. It is just something that has to be done if we are going to avoid being slaughtered by terrorists. And though we may not yet be talking about the issue directly, the cracks are appearing in the wall of political correctitude, which means it might eventually come down. Later, we might want to return to the actual risks of smoking. But for now, we should deal with our mass apocalyptic death problem. http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=1094 http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=1094