text
stringlengths 2.57k
160k
| hyperpartisan
bool 2
classes | bias
int64 0
4
| cleaned_text
stringlengths 1.79k
91.8k
| word_count
int64 512
12.5k
|
|---|---|---|---|---|
<p>WASHINGTON — The law enforcement investigation into possible coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign has identified a current White House official as a significant person of interest, showing that the probe is reaching into the highest levels of government, according to people familiar with the matter.</p>
<p>The senior White House adviser under scrutiny by investigators is someone close to the president, according to these people, who would not further identify the official.</p>
<p>The revelation comes as the investigation also appears to be entering a more overtly active phase, with investigators shifting from work that has remained largely hidden from the public to conducting interviews and using a grand jury to issue subpoenas. The intensity of the probe is expected to accelerate in the coming weeks, the people said.</p>
<p>The sources emphasized that investigators remain keenly interested in people who previously wielded influence in the Trump campaign and administration but are no longer part of it, including former national security adviser Michael Flynn and former campaign chairman Paul Manafort.</p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">Flynn resigned in February</a> after disclosures that he had lied to administration officials about his contacts with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Current administration officials who have acknowledged contacts with Russian officials include Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, as well as Cabinet members Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.</p>
<p>People familiar with the investigation said the intensifying effort does not mean criminal charges are near, or that any such charges will result. Earlier this week, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed former FBI Director Robert Mueller to serve as special counsel and lead the investigation into Russian meddling.</p>
<p>It is unclear exactly how Mueller’s leadership will affect the direction of the probe, and he is already bringing in new people to work on the team. Those familiar with the case said its significance had increased before Mueller’s appointment.</p>
<p>While the case began quietly last July as an effort to determine whether any Trump associates coordinated with Russian operatives to meddle in the presidential election campaign, the investigative work now being done by the FBI also includes determining whether any financial crimes were committed by people close to the president. The people familiar with the matter said the probe has sharpened into something more fraught for the White House, the FBI and the Justice Department — particularly because of the public steps investigators know they now need to take, the people said.</p>
<p>When subpoenas are issued or interviews are requested, it is possible the people being asked to talk or provide documents will reveal publicly what they were asked about.</p>
<p>A small group of lawmakers known as the Gang of Eight were notified of the change in tempo and focus in the investigation at a classified briefing on Wednesday evening, the people familiar with the matter said. FBI Director James Comey had publicly confirmed the existence of the investigation in March.</p>
<p>Justice Department spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores said, “I can’t confirm or deny the existence or non-existence of investigations or targets of investigations.”</p>
<p>An FBI spokesman declined to comment.</p>
<p>White House spokesman Sean Spicer said, “as the president has stated before, a thorough investigation will confirm that there was no collusion between the campaign and any foreign entity.”</p>
<p>While there has been a loud public debate in recent days over the question of whether the president might have attempted to obstruct justice in his private dealings with FBI Director James Comey, who Trump fired last week, people familiar with the matter said investigators on the case are more focused on Russian influence operations and possible financial crimes.</p>
<p>The FBI’s investigation seeks to determine whether and to what extent Trump associates were in contact with Kremlin operatives, what business dealings they might have had in Russia, and whether they in any way facilitated the hacking and publishing of Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails during the presidential campaign. Several congressional committees are also investigating, though their probes could not produce criminal charges.</p>
<p>A grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia, recently issued a subpoena for records related to Flynn’s business, The Flynn Intel Group, which had been paid more than $500,000 by a company owned by a Turkish American businessman close to top Turkish officials, according to people familiar with the matter.</p>
<p>The Flynn Intel Group was paid for research on Fethullah Gulen, a cleric who Turkey’s current president believes was responsible for a coup attempt last summer. Flynn retroactively registered with the Justice Department in March as a paid foreign agent for Turkish interests.</p>
<p>Separately from the probe now run by Mueller, Flynn is being investigated by the Pentagon’s top watchdog for his foreign payments. Flynn also received $45,000 to appear in 2015 with Russian President Vladimir Putin at a dinner for RT, a Kremlin-controlled media organization.</p>
<p>Flynn discussed U.S. sanctions against Russia with Russia’s ambassador to the United States during the month before President Donald Trump took office, and he withheld that fact from even Vice President Mike Pence. That prompted then Acting Attorney General Sally Yates to warn the White House’s top lawyer he might be susceptible to blackmail. Flynn stepped down after The Washington Post reported on the contents of the call.</p>
<p>The president has nonetheless seemed to defend his former adviser. <a href="" type="internal">A memo by fired FBI Director Comey</a> alleged Trump even asked that the probe into Flynn be shut down.</p>
<p>The White House also has acknowledged that Kushner met with Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the U.S., in late November. Kushner also has acknowledged that he met with the head of a Russian development bank, Vnesheconombank, which has been under U.S. sanctions since July 2014. The president’s son in law initially omitted contacts with foreign leaders from a national security questionnaire, though his lawyer has said publicly he submitted the form prematurely and informed the FBI soon after he would provide an update.</p>
<p>Vnesheconombank handles development for the state, and in early 2015, a man purporting to be one of its New York-based employees was arrested and accused of being an unregistered spy.</p>
<p>That man — Evgeny Buryakov — ultimately pleaded guilty and was eventually deported. He had been in contact with former Trump adviser Carter Page, though Page has said he shared only “basic immaterial information and publicly available research documents” with the Russian. Page was the subject of a secret warrant last year issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, based on suspicions he might have been acting as an agent of the Russian government, according to people familiar with the matter. Page has denied any wrongdoing, and accused the government of violating his civil rights.</p> | false | 1 | washington law enforcement investigation possible coordination russia trump campaign identified current white house official significant person interest showing probe reaching highest levels government according people familiar matter senior white house adviser scrutiny investigators someone close president according people would identify official revelation comes investigation also appears entering overtly active phase investigators shifting work remained largely hidden public conducting interviews using grand jury issue subpoenas intensity probe expected accelerate coming weeks people said sources emphasized investigators remain keenly interested people previously wielded influence trump campaign administration longer part including former national security adviser michael flynn former campaign chairman paul manafort flynn resigned february disclosures lied administration officials contacts russian ambassador sergey kislyak current administration officials acknowledged contacts russian officials include trump soninlaw jared kushner well cabinet members attorney general jeff sessions secretary state rex tillerson people familiar investigation said intensifying effort mean criminal charges near charges result earlier week deputy attorney general rod rosenstein appointed former fbi director robert mueller serve special counsel lead investigation russian meddling unclear exactly muellers leadership affect direction probe already bringing new people work team familiar case said significance increased muellers appointment case began quietly last july effort determine whether trump associates coordinated russian operatives meddle presidential election campaign investigative work done fbi also includes determining whether financial crimes committed people close president people familiar matter said probe sharpened something fraught white house fbi justice department particularly public steps investigators know need take people said subpoenas issued interviews requested possible people asked talk provide documents reveal publicly asked small group lawmakers known gang eight notified change tempo focus investigation classified briefing wednesday evening people familiar matter said fbi director james comey publicly confirmed existence investigation march justice department spokeswoman sarah isgur flores said cant confirm deny existence nonexistence investigations targets investigations fbi spokesman declined comment white house spokesman sean spicer said president stated thorough investigation confirm collusion campaign foreign entity loud public debate recent days question whether president might attempted obstruct justice private dealings fbi director james comey trump fired last week people familiar matter said investigators case focused russian influence operations possible financial crimes fbis investigation seeks determine whether extent trump associates contact kremlin operatives business dealings might russia whether way facilitated hacking publishing democratic national committee hillary clinton campaign chairman john podestas emails presidential campaign several congressional committees also investigating though probes could produce criminal charges grand jury alexandria virginia recently issued subpoena records related flynns business flynn intel group paid 500000 company owned turkish american businessman close top turkish officials according people familiar matter flynn intel group paid research fethullah gulen cleric turkeys current president believes responsible coup attempt last summer flynn retroactively registered justice department march paid foreign agent turkish interests separately probe run mueller flynn investigated pentagons top watchdog foreign payments flynn also received 45000 appear 2015 russian president vladimir putin dinner rt kremlincontrolled media organization flynn discussed us sanctions russia russias ambassador united states month president donald trump took office withheld fact even vice president mike pence prompted acting attorney general sally yates warn white houses top lawyer might susceptible blackmail flynn stepped washington post reported contents call president nonetheless seemed defend former adviser memo fired fbi director comey alleged trump even asked probe flynn shut white house also acknowledged kushner met kislyak russian ambassador us late november kushner also acknowledged met head russian development bank vnesheconombank us sanctions since july 2014 presidents son law initially omitted contacts foreign leaders national security questionnaire though lawyer said publicly submitted form prematurely informed fbi soon would provide update vnesheconombank handles development state early 2015 man purporting one new yorkbased employees arrested accused unregistered spy man evgeny buryakov ultimately pleaded guilty eventually deported contact former trump adviser carter page though page said shared basic immaterial information publicly available research documents russian page subject secret warrant last year issued foreign intelligence surveillance court based suspicions might acting agent russian government according people familiar matter page denied wrongdoing accused government violating civil rights | 658 |
<p>Bustling shopping malls, ugly sweaters, and awkward family photos can only signify the beginning of one thing: the holiday season.</p>
<p>Whether you celebrate Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanzaa, or none of the above, you're probably feeling a bit crazed right now preparing the all-important ingredient list for the holiday dinner, coordinating the travel plans of all the relatives, and fulfilling everyone's <a href="" type="internal">gift list</a>.</p>
<p>It may escape your mind, but all these errands add up when it comes to waste. According to Stanford University, Americans throw out 25 percent more during the holiday season. That amounts to 25 million tons of garbage, or about 1 million extra tons per week.</p>
<p>Simple but effective measures can go a long way, such as recycling gift wrap or skipping out on those holiday cards. But other steps can make a big difference, as well. If you're looking for other ways to increase your sustainability during the holidays, try to stay away from these not-so environmentally friendly gifts.</p>
<p>Glitter giftsUnless you're under the age of eight, you may attract some eye rolls if you're adult wearing glitter. The exception to that rule, however, is during the holiday season--a brief period of time when you're able to flaunt that shiny lipstick to those sparkly New Years Eye pumps without judgment.</p>
<p>But as eye-catching as glitter may be, try to steer clear of gifting any clothing and hygiene products that contain glitter. All those sparkles are made up of microplastics--pieces of plastic that are less than five millimeters. According to scientists, the fibers had the ability to absorb toxic chemicals.</p>
<p>Plastic isn't biodegradable, but it does slowly break down over time, which form the microplastics. When the plastic becomes smaller and smaller, it releases the absorbed toxins. When they're released, the chemicals have the ability to disrupt hormones in animals and humans.</p>
<p>According to UN News, microplastics are nearly unavoidable, with as many as 51 trillion particles littering the seas and threatening wildlife. For some perspective, that's 500 times more than the number of stars in the galaxy.</p>
<p>WATCH: A 23-year-old college dropout has big plans to rid the oceans of plastic waste</p>
<p>All those floating particles, as a result, are able to make their way into our drinking water. A recent study published by Orb Media found that 83 percent of the 159 tap water samples surveyed from 14 countries were contaminated with plastic fibers.</p>
<p>Self-serve coffee machines They're easy, convenient, but also wasteful: single-serve coffee machines.</p>
<p>Best estimates say the number of Keurig pods buried in 2014 would circulate the Earth more than 12 times.</p>
<p>Keurig supporters are quick to defend the company, saying that the pods are actually recyclable. That is true, but there is a catch.</p>
<p>WATCH: The biggest threat to this Guatemalan coffee farm isn't Starbucks. It's climate change.</p>
<p>The customer must disassemble the pod before recycling it.</p>
<p>“So that’s a challenge for convenience-oriented consumer who’s presumably using these products because they don’t want to use a lot of time making coffee-- to expect them to separate all these little components for recycling, is challenging," said Darby Hoover, the senior resource specialist at the Natural Resources Defense Council.</p>
<p>The blame isn't entirely on Keurig, though. Other companies like Nespresso use aluminum pods that also generate a lot of waste. The company has developed a recycling program to give its pods a second chance at life, but it's difficult to know how many people take advantage of it.</p>
<p>Regardless of whether the pods are recyclable, Hoover said the production of the pods themselves requires a lot of energy.</p>
<p>Microbead products</p>
<p>As much as we all enjoy a good exfoliation, especially as a method to escape the hustle and bustle of the holiday season, those tiny beads found in many hygiene and personal products aren't so good for the environment. Like glitter, microbeads don't break down once they're rinsed down the sink.</p>
<p>Because they're so small, microbeads cause problems for the wastewater treatment process. The mesh-size filters are just too big to capture the microbeads, allowing them to float through the system. Eventually, they end up in lakes, rivers, streams and other bodies of water.</p>
<p>Once they end up in the ocean, marine organisms mistake the plastic for food. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, microplastic ingestion causes reproductive and digestive problems for everything from zoo plankton to shellfish to whales.</p>
<p>If shellfish and other foundational species consume plastic, that means you probably are too. Because plastic never biodegrades, it's able to make its way up to the food chain--ending up in shrimp, crab and clams.</p>
<p>Fortunately, most companies have already started phasing out microbeads from their products thanks to legislation passed by Congress in 2015. "Microbead-Free Waters Act of 2015" banned rinse-off cosmetics that contain artificially added plastic microbeads, with a deadline of January 1, 2018.</p>
<p>Gift cardsThough some companies like REI and Target have already transitioned to sustainable gift cards, others still use cards made of PVC. That means most gift cards cannot be recycled in your traditional curbside bin.</p>
<p>According to the non-profit Earthworks, there are three billion new gift cards placed in circulation each year--potentially adding 75 to 100 million pounds of PVC material to the waste stream.</p>
<p>If you do end up receiving a gift card this holiday season, know that you can recycle the PVC through Earthworks' mail-in program.</p>
<p>Unwanted giftsNo matter how hard you try, or know somebody, sometimes you just end up gifting something that someone doesn't want.</p>
<p>"The absolute worst gift you could give in terms of sustainability is a gift that someone doesn't want," Kathryn Kellogg of the <a href="https://www.goingzerowaste.com/page-me/" type="external">Going Zero Waste</a> blog said.</p>
<p>She added that those gifts essentially go to waste--gathering dust in the attic corner.</p>
<p>“Especially because we have a lot of guilt around gifts that are given to use, we’re much more likely to hold on something we don’t want or we don’t need, simply because it was given to us by a relative, some relative , and you feel guilty because it was a gift and you don’t want to give it away."</p>
<p>A little preparation goes a long way, Kellogg added. The awkward debacle of gifting something someone doesn't want can be entirely avoided by creating a gift list or focusing more on experiences, like a trip to the spa, tickets to a concert, or a dinner date.</p>
<p>"Experiences are great because it's a memory that you can form with someone, and it's not something that's going to sit on a shelf and collect dust."</p>
<p>Check these other holiday stories: <a href="" type="internal">This village was designed by architects but built with gingerbread</a> <a href="" type="internal">Christmas markets across the globe continue to thrive despite ISIS terror threats</a> <a href="" type="internal">You may be bringing bugs home in your Christmas tree. Here's how to prevent it.</a></p> | false | 1 | bustling shopping malls ugly sweaters awkward family photos signify beginning one thing holiday season whether celebrate christmas hannukah kwanzaa none youre probably feeling bit crazed right preparing allimportant ingredient list holiday dinner coordinating travel plans relatives fulfilling everyones gift list may escape mind errands add comes waste according stanford university americans throw 25 percent holiday season amounts 25 million tons garbage 1 million extra tons per week simple effective measures go long way recycling gift wrap skipping holiday cards steps make big difference well youre looking ways increase sustainability holidays try stay away notso environmentally friendly gifts glitter giftsunless youre age eight may attract eye rolls youre adult wearing glitter exception rule however holiday seasona brief period time youre able flaunt shiny lipstick sparkly new years eye pumps without judgment eyecatching glitter may try steer clear gifting clothing hygiene products contain glitter sparkles made microplasticspieces plastic less five millimeters according scientists fibers ability absorb toxic chemicals plastic isnt biodegradable slowly break time form microplastics plastic becomes smaller smaller releases absorbed toxins theyre released chemicals ability disrupt hormones animals humans according un news microplastics nearly unavoidable many 51 trillion particles littering seas threatening wildlife perspective thats 500 times number stars galaxy watch 23yearold college dropout big plans rid oceans plastic waste floating particles result able make way drinking water recent study published orb media found 83 percent 159 tap water samples surveyed 14 countries contaminated plastic fibers selfserve coffee machines theyre easy convenient also wasteful singleserve coffee machines best estimates say number keurig pods buried 2014 would circulate earth 12 times keurig supporters quick defend company saying pods actually recyclable true catch watch biggest threat guatemalan coffee farm isnt starbucks climate change customer must disassemble pod recycling thats challenge convenienceoriented consumer whos presumably using products dont want use lot time making coffee expect separate little components recycling challenging said darby hoover senior resource specialist natural resources defense council blame isnt entirely keurig though companies like nespresso use aluminum pods also generate lot waste company developed recycling program give pods second chance life difficult know many people take advantage regardless whether pods recyclable hoover said production pods requires lot energy microbead products much enjoy good exfoliation especially method escape hustle bustle holiday season tiny beads found many hygiene personal products arent good environment like glitter microbeads dont break theyre rinsed sink theyre small microbeads cause problems wastewater treatment process meshsize filters big capture microbeads allowing float system eventually end lakes rivers streams bodies water end ocean marine organisms mistake plastic food according national oceanic atmospheric administration microplastic ingestion causes reproductive digestive problems everything zoo plankton shellfish whales shellfish foundational species consume plastic means probably plastic never biodegrades able make way food chainending shrimp crab clams fortunately companies already started phasing microbeads products thanks legislation passed congress 2015 microbeadfree waters act 2015 banned rinseoff cosmetics contain artificially added plastic microbeads deadline january 1 2018 gift cardsthough companies like rei target already transitioned sustainable gift cards others still use cards made pvc means gift cards recycled traditional curbside bin according nonprofit earthworks three billion new gift cards placed circulation yearpotentially adding 75 100 million pounds pvc material waste stream end receiving gift card holiday season know recycle pvc earthworks mailin program unwanted giftsno matter hard try know somebody sometimes end gifting something someone doesnt want absolute worst gift could give terms sustainability gift someone doesnt want kathryn kellogg going zero waste blog said added gifts essentially go wastegathering dust attic corner especially lot guilt around gifts given use much likely hold something dont want dont need simply given us relative relative feel guilty gift dont want give away little preparation goes long way kellogg added awkward debacle gifting something someone doesnt want entirely avoided creating gift list focusing experiences like trip spa tickets concert dinner date experiences great memory form someone something thats going sit shelf collect dust check holiday stories village designed architects built gingerbread christmas markets across globe continue thrive despite isis terror threats may bringing bugs home christmas tree heres prevent | 670 |
<p />
<p>During this summer’s Gaza assault, we the ever-flexible American audience pitched a little more sonorously than usual about Israel’s 66 years: they’re a little too aggressive, sometimes; they’re a vital Jewish presence in the Middle East; we the overt progressives of the two coasts see that Israel is small island of democracy surrounded by rolling boulders of Muslim (ne’er Muslim and Arab shall separate cognitively) menace, and we just know this is an inherent, well-lettered fact; we shall always follow the endorsed and the endorsed is Israel, lily-colored in a land of red and black.</p>
<p>But then there were camps like the virtually apolitical American everyday people who flinched markedly, because journalists were let into Gaza to behold Israel’s decimation of children and their beach balls, to attest that the pulverized schools and relief centers and civilians indeed should have not been pulverized. This recoiling happened too during the First Intifada, when synaptic connectivity made Donna pause at the turkey carving while primetime news showed men riding in tanks into villages, snapping arms of 10-year-old stone throwers. &#160;Reactionary flashes to broken or exploded children akin to wincing from a hot stovetop are met with the furnace of Israeli hasbara telling the flinched: reach back towards the glow where at least your reputation is safe, where narratives you’ve heard about rightfulness and deservedness are warmer than the cold Siberia of alternative opinions.</p>
<p>“Are you okay in Palestine?” From farm land Illinois, mere high school-era acquaintances who are mothers now, fumbling towards me on Facebook. “But please tell me Mark, what is Hamas…?” “Isn’t Hamas…?” “Aren’t Jewish people supposed…?” &#160;They saw a punishing fist pounding down, and they know punishment is always in the inherent and linear business of thwarting harmful behavior.</p>
<p>The malleability of the terms ‘Jewish’ and ‘Jewish state’ and ‘security’ has been artfully employed by Israel and has influenced a reckless practice of its supporters, fervent or armchair, &#160;leaping headlong into the middle of a narrative and chugging the occupation steadily along. We are disciples of clean city streets and thumping nightclubs, so when they are ripped apart by a suicide bomber there comes sweeping in the tide of vehemence against jihad (struggle), more comfortably unifying and comprehensible than railing with scholar against the milieus where these resolute and terrifying people were created through their cultural starvation and life revocation. And “scholar” could be as trenchant as realizing why we don’t walk into Star Wars three-fourths of the way &#160;wondering why Luke Skywalker and his band of rebels are oppressing those poor stormtroopers; how we read books from beginning to end; the pragmatism of leaving the driveway and arriving at the supermarket, not starting the car at a stoplight. Why does Hamas fire rockets at Tel Aviv and why did buses explode in Jerusalem? History is sprawling and formidable, and this is why there are academics who hone in. But 1921 to 1948, 1967 to 2002—the story&#160; of the creation, the putting into practice, the hammering down of the Jewish state is lumbering, seething, inexorable, and antithetical to sitting in a chilly basement sorting through archives. It pulses with readability, with captivating hell and injustice, black-masked men growling Qu’ranic verses, kipas with shiny faces and bright white banners and blue stars, and after the images which have shocked us on ABC have been anatomized with non-revisionism the heroes are surprising, “terrorism” is suddenly a different word, negotiable, re-attributable.</p>
<p>We believe America is likely guiding us in the right direction. Jim Crow, Vietnam, Iraq — these were not us coming into our own to this point of balance, we are always coming into our own, and we are now a generation of vibrant liberals not unscholarly, but decisively apathetic and selectively empathetic, so many in toleration of the status quo occupation because perhaps we are gay or Jewish or friends of gay Jews, perhaps we voted Obama, perhaps Tel Aviv is a gas. Life is less frightful without a forced injection of shame (you are anti-Semitic, you are not patriotic) than with the biological trait of thinking everything well enough should be left well enough.</p>
<p>Every day, all day, I swim alongside Palestinians in Palestine, through the current which torrents against only them. I know little about them except the certainty of a book on their liberation—maybe a Kadir Nelson-esque “Nelson Mandela” or “I Have a Dream” by Martin Luther King Jr.—on the shelves of children’s libraries, translated in 20 languages by the year 2060, making fools out of a by-gone regime and its patrons. I don’t know if the book will be about a leader: Marwan Bargouthi? The soot-faced little boy standing in rubble at Qalandia checkpoint trying to sell me shekel pinwheels? Perhaps his granddaughter? I prophesize this book henceforth, heralding the end of a towering oppression of an entire people. &#160;Its release will be preceded by this roll down the mountain of colonial support, so slow to pick up speed so that Palestinians might be unscathed. Should over 2,100 civilians have been killed by a powerful military? This is the simple question behind the Gaza shark feed which frenzied America this summer. It illuminated our impulse towards this foreign struggle, whether we invaded city streets or dipped our pontificating finger into an argument. But after that and during these—Protective Edge, Holot, the murder of Mohammed Abu Khdeir, a woman dead at a checkpoint, 1948, 2005, September, Tuesday—after those there remains the pummeling, snowbound winter of the occupation.</p>
<p>We all have corners of our bank accounts designated for Israel.&#160; We also have a tiny room in the attic of our ethics, and on its door is printed “The Palestinians.” We have our families and degrees and lawns to tend to and the right to dodge assailing judgment, but when we open the attic and look inside we realize that this room has been annexed into our American house, which means that we are ourselves all colonizers.</p> | false | 1 | summers gaza assault everflexible american audience pitched little sonorously usual israels 66 years theyre little aggressive sometimes theyre vital jewish presence middle east overt progressives two coasts see israel small island democracy surrounded rolling boulders muslim neer muslim arab shall separate cognitively menace know inherent welllettered fact shall always follow endorsed endorsed israel lilycolored land red black camps like virtually apolitical american everyday people flinched markedly journalists let gaza behold israels decimation children beach balls attest pulverized schools relief centers civilians indeed pulverized recoiling happened first intifada synaptic connectivity made donna pause turkey carving primetime news showed men riding tanks villages snapping arms 10yearold stone throwers 160reactionary flashes broken exploded children akin wincing hot stovetop met furnace israeli hasbara telling flinched reach back towards glow least reputation safe narratives youve heard rightfulness deservedness warmer cold siberia alternative opinions okay palestine farm land illinois mere high schoolera acquaintances mothers fumbling towards facebook please tell mark hamas isnt hamas arent jewish people supposed 160they saw punishing fist pounding know punishment always inherent linear business thwarting harmful behavior malleability terms jewish jewish state security artfully employed israel influenced reckless practice supporters fervent armchair 160leaping headlong middle narrative chugging occupation steadily along disciples clean city streets thumping nightclubs ripped apart suicide bomber comes sweeping tide vehemence jihad struggle comfortably unifying comprehensible railing scholar milieus resolute terrifying people created cultural starvation life revocation scholar could trenchant realizing dont walk star wars threefourths way 160wondering luke skywalker band rebels oppressing poor stormtroopers read books beginning end pragmatism leaving driveway arriving supermarket starting car stoplight hamas fire rockets tel aviv buses explode jerusalem history sprawling formidable academics hone 1921 1948 1967 2002the story160 creation putting practice hammering jewish state lumbering seething inexorable antithetical sitting chilly basement sorting archives pulses readability captivating hell injustice blackmasked men growling quranic verses kipas shiny faces bright white banners blue stars images shocked us abc anatomized nonrevisionism heroes surprising terrorism suddenly different word negotiable reattributable believe america likely guiding us right direction jim crow vietnam iraq us coming point balance always coming generation vibrant liberals unscholarly decisively apathetic selectively empathetic many toleration status quo occupation perhaps gay jewish friends gay jews perhaps voted obama perhaps tel aviv gas life less frightful without forced injection shame antisemitic patriotic biological trait thinking everything well enough left well enough every day day swim alongside palestinians palestine current torrents know little except certainty book liberationmaybe kadir nelsonesque nelson mandela dream martin luther king jron shelves childrens libraries translated 20 languages year 2060 making fools bygone regime patrons dont know book leader marwan bargouthi sootfaced little boy standing rubble qalandia checkpoint trying sell shekel pinwheels perhaps granddaughter prophesize book henceforth heralding end towering oppression entire people 160its release preceded roll mountain colonial support slow pick speed palestinians might unscathed 2100 civilians killed powerful military simple question behind gaza shark feed frenzied america summer illuminated impulse towards foreign struggle whether invaded city streets dipped pontificating finger argument theseprotective edge holot murder mohammed abu khdeir woman dead checkpoint 1948 2005 september tuesdayafter remains pummeling snowbound winter occupation corners bank accounts designated israel160 also tiny room attic ethics door printed palestinians families degrees lawns tend right dodge assailing judgment open attic look inside realize room annexed american house means colonizers | 540 |
<p>It didn’t take long for the inaugural scientific <a href="http://uspath2017.conferencespot.org/" type="external">conference</a> of the U.S. Professional Association for Transgender Health (USPATH) to descend into an ugly display of intolerance and identity politics, with gender-confused kids as ideological pawns.</p>
<p>When the dust finally settled, trans bullies and their medical allies had colluded to kick a dissenting expert (Kenneth Zucker) off the program, justified their censorship by indirectly <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/WPATH/permalink/1457951394249282/" type="external">blaming</a> President Trump (the “ <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/WPATH/permalink/1457951394249282/" type="external">direct threat</a>” to trans people from the “new political climate”), and declared victory.</p>
<p>It was the latest piece in a mounting pile of evidence that the debate over how best to treat gender-confused children is not really about what’s good for children, but about the transgender obsession with being “ <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfgG5TaCzsk" type="external">de-pathologized</a>” and validated as “normal.”</p>
<p>It also points to an even more troubling possibility, that the transgender phenomenon has given rise to what one lesbian critic <a href="https://purplesagefem.wordpress.com/2015/05/10/on-leaving-the-trans-cult/" type="external">calls</a> a “ <a href="https://purplesagefem.wordpress.com/2015/05/10/on-leaving-the-trans-cult/" type="external">trans cult</a>,” characterized by “inventing false facts that don’t stand up to scrutiny, claiming that science is hateful toward your beliefs, claiming to be persecuted when you can’t force your beliefs on other people, and attempts to silence and destroy non-believers. Transgenderism is a religious cult.”</p>
<p>Cult or not, it’s clear that the alliance of trans activists, blind believers, wounded followers, and willing dupes in the medical community controls the airwaves, so to speak, of modern medicine. They have arrogated to themselves the right to rewrite history, silence critics, brand their own ideologically driven opinions as “fact,” and deny a hearing to researchers, clinicians, victims, and families whose evidence and experience run counter to their mandated cultish beliefs.</p>
<p>Consider the events at the USPATH conference. The conference, held February 2-5, 2017 in Los Angeles, drew more than 600 medical clinicians and scientific researchers active in caring for gender non-conforming, gender-confused, and transgender adults, adolescents, and children. They met to “ <a href="http://uspath2017.conferencespot.org/" type="external">affirm</a> our dedication to transgender health” in light of “uncertainty due to the change of leadership in Washington, and concern over what the consequences may be for trans health and trans rights.”</p>
<p>Sponsored by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, the conference debuted the newly formed “USPATH,” ostensibly to serve WPATH’s U.S. members, who account for 75 percent of WPATH’s membership. However, according to USPATH Conference Chair Dan Karasic and Co-Chair Jamison Green, the <a href="http://uspath2017.conferencespot.org/" type="external">conference</a> served a political purpose as well: “USPATH LA 2017 will stand as a strong statement of support for continuing the rapid developments in trans health in America, and for the community of health providers, researchers, and advocates who are advancing that care.”</p>
<p>But not all health care experts are welcome. Kenneth Zucker, a psychologist with years of experience treating gender confusion, was slated to speak on several panels at the conference. He was a token, actually, a voice representing politically disfavored but scientifically weighty research that cautions against labeling gender-confused children as “transgender,” in part because the majority of these children later “desist” from cross-gender identification.</p>
<p>(To deal with the inconvenient data on desistance, some WPATH members <a href="https://gidreform.wordpress.com/2017/02/10/revisiting-flawed-research-behind-the-80-childhood-gender-dysphoria-desistance-myth/" type="external">advocate</a> for changing WPATH’s upcoming Standards of Care 8 to “remove unsubstantiated and harmful statements on the statistical likelyhood [sic]” of transgender persistence or desistance among children. That’s one way to blunt the impact of data you don’t like—erase it.)</p>
<p>In a <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/WPATH/permalink/1457951394249282/" type="external">Facebook</a> post after the uproar, Karasic admitted that USPATH had stacked the conference schedule with practitioners of the “trans affirmative” approach favored by the trans alliance. Karasic said Zucker was invited merely as a gesture of tolerance. Conference organizers had fully expected his views to be “ <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/WPATH/permalink/1457951394249282/" type="external">contextualized</a>” (marginalized) by the “now dominant perspective of trans affirmative care.”</p>
<p>The trans community, however, absolutely loathes Dr. Zucker.</p>
<p><a href="" type="internal" /></p>
<p>To them, his common-sense <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00918369.2012.653309" type="external">approach</a> that, all things being equal, it’s preferable for a child to accept his or her body than pursue a “trans” identity (which requires lifelong medical intervention and is associated with a variety of poor outcomes) inflicts a narcissistic wound. His mere presence draws venom, which is why trans activists disrupted Zucker’s first talk and, after being ejected, demanded and got a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfgG5TaCzsk" type="external">meeting</a> with the Board of WPATH, the conference sponsors.</p>
<p><a href="" type="internal" /></p>
<p>During the meeting, trans activists denounced the invitation to Zucker, whom they described as a champion of “reparative therapy,” and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfgG5TaCzsk" type="external">accused</a> WPATH of being “grounded in cis-normativity and trans-exclusion” and prioritizing “white and cis-gendered clinicians and researchers” without input from the trans community (especially trans women of color).</p>
<p>They also charged WPATH with inflicting “violence and inaccessibility” on the trans community because hotel security was called to keep protesters from disrupting the talk. Activists also complained that WPATH “continues to pathologize our experiences” by supporting the DSM–5 classification of gender dysphoria as a mental health issue. To get a sense of how unhinged all this is, realize that trans activists are leveling these charges against their friends—the professional organization that has done its best to legitimize trans identities.</p>
<p>After the denunciations came the demands. The trans leaders demanded that Zucker be tossed off the program and that WPATH apologize to the trans community for inviting him—and for giving power to cis-gendered, white researchers instead of consulting transgender patients about the selection of conference speakers. Finally, they demanded that WPATH hire trans people as paid consultants, give local trans communities input into planned conferences, and promise that transgender persons will be given seats on WPATH committees, including the scientific committees that decide which academic papers are accepted for conferences.</p>
<p><a href="" type="internal" /></p>
<p>Now imagine if a person suffering from body dysmorphic disorder (also a DSM-5 <a href="https://bdd.iocdf.org/professionals/diagnosis/" type="external">diagnosis</a>) demanded to pass judgment on proposed medical presentations on that topic before a professional conference could invite the speakers. It would never happen.</p>
<p>But trans issues are different. The docs have drunk the Kool-Aid—or are too intimidated to speak truth to power. And it’s clear who has the power. As one trans activist <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfgG5TaCzsk" type="external">proclaimed</a> during the meeting, “We are so amazing and we want to be acknowledged for who we are, as a community…we want our power to be acknowledged.”</p>
<p>So the gender professionals at WPATH and USPATH listened meekly and bowed to power. Zucker’s second panel was cancelled, and Karasic and the WPATH board posted apologies.</p>
<p>It gets worse. A <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfgG5TaCzsk" type="external">video</a> of the meeting between trans activists and WPATH and USPATH leaders reveals a medical community not only pathetically cowed by trans activists, but also apparently colluding with them about how to exclude Zucker without risking a lawsuit. (The video is a treasure trove worth mining if Zucker sues over the incident.)</p>
<p />
<p>Karasic admitted that WPATH “made a mistake” in allowing Zucker to speak. In fact, Karasic volunteered, in hindsight he should have overridden the competitive process by which WPATH’s scientific committee selected papers to ensure that Zucker was rejected. Ironically, according to Karasic, the scientific committee that approved Zucker’s presentations included several professionals who are also transgender.</p>
<p>In a blatant admission of his willingness to censor scientific research in the future, Karasic apologized to the trans activists, saying, “even if it [Zucker’s proposal] was getting a high enough score, I don’t think we should have let him present,” and WPATH/USPATH would not make that mistake in the future.</p>
<p>Karasic <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfgG5TaCzsk" type="external">admitted</a> that he’d intervened on another occasion with the American Psychological Association to prevent Johns Hopkins researcher Paul McHugh, an outspoken opponent of transgender reassignment surgery and medical interventions for gender-confused children, from presenting: “When Paul McHugh had an accepted proposal at the APA,” Karasic <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfgG5TaCzsk" type="external">said</a>, he (Karasic) had “intervened with the scientific committee” and “got them to revoke their acceptance” of McHugh’s paper. (Apparently the test of whether a paper “advances” transgender care is ideological, not evidence-based.)</p>
<p>As trans activists pressed the WPATH officials for a commitment to remove Zucker, the executives hemmed and hawed about alternatives, such as “ask[ing] the other people on this panel to not go,” so that Zucker would “present to an empty room” or trying to “persuade him” not to speak. The WPATH board members were clearly worried that Zucker might sue them if he were disinvited. One USPATH leader <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfgG5TaCzsk&amp;t=1903s" type="external">described</a> Zucker as “very litigious,” and admitted that, while “I’d love to” cancel Zucker’s presentation and eject him from the conference, “we will open ourselves up to legal liability and we will bankrupt ourselves.”</p>
<p>Unsympathetic, the trans activists pressed the point. They wanted Zucker gone: “We are <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfgG5TaCzsk" type="external">demanding</a> that this asshole gets away from this conference…we want him to be excluded from this conference.” Another trans activist declared “this is really crucial. This is how you stand with us… whether you cancel it or not, it’s not going to happen.”</p>
<p>The impasse was resolved when a trans person, apparently an attorney, reassured the conference organizers that, generally speaking, conference organizers “have authority to make changes if there’s a threat or to prevent violence or harm,” for example, if a talk is “likely to create violence” or “alienate certain people.” The trans chorus voiced approval, with one exclaiming, “We are already traumatized” by his presence.</p>
<p>So the same trans community that started the meeting insisting that WPATH agree that “there was no violence” in their protest against Zucker’s first talk, and that they needed their “safe space” because they felt traumatized by the mere presence of security officers, now concocted their own threat of violence as a pretense to shut down Zucker’s second scheduled talk. Seeing daylight, the board embraced the narrative and reassured the trans group that, “Based on what happened yesterday” (the protest}, the board would go ahead and cancel Zucker. It was now “a done deal.”</p>
<p>At the conference’s evening gala, trans persons gathered on stage to celebrate their win but also to repeat their demands that WPATH “stop pathologizing us” and change the WPATH standards of care to affirm transgender identities as completely normal. The activists ended with a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxbsOX4hX0M" type="external">chant</a> led by a trans woman of color: “When I say trans, you say power. Trans…power, trans… power… power to the people.”</p>
<p>The conference moved ahead, minus its lone cautionary voice, leaving the medical zealots free, at the urgings of transgender adults, to embrace ever-earlier medical and surgical intervention for confused and gender non-conforming adolescents.</p>
<p>So they did, giving presentations on a variety of topics ranging from social transition for young children (“what do we know?”), puberty suppression (“lessons learned and unanswered questions”), puberty suppression and loss of fertility (“puberty suppression…effects on fertility…and the associated ethical and legal ramifications”), to double mastectomies for teen girls (“impact of male chest reconstruction on chest dysphoria in transmasculine adolescents…a preliminary study”).</p>
<p>The titles give witness to how experimental these medical interventions really are, but with little acknowledgement that in every experimental trial, some lab rats do poorly or don’t survive. But these docs are experimenting on children, not lab rats. One <a href="https://4thwavenow.com/" type="external">group</a> of concerned parents, many of whom have children who formerly identified as trans, likens the trans experimentation to the <a href="https://4thwavenow.com/" type="external">lobotomy</a> craze of years ago. The results were not good. So they ask:</p>
<p><a href="" type="internal" /></p>
<p>The drama at the USPATH conference, and within its sponsoring organization, WPATH, reveals a disturbing picture of a medical community unable or unwilling to exercise independent judgment in the face of trans rage. It also thoroughly discredits WPATH/USPATH and their members as trustworthy “scientific” or “medical” professionals. Whatever credibility they might have had is now in shreds.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, that won’t stop them. Perhaps “trans cult” is indeed apt. You decide.</p>
<p>Mary Rice Hasson is an attorney and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington DC.</p> | false | 1 | didnt take long inaugural scientific conference us professional association transgender health uspath descend ugly display intolerance identity politics genderconfused kids ideological pawns dust finally settled trans bullies medical allies colluded kick dissenting expert kenneth zucker program justified censorship indirectly blaming president trump direct threat trans people new political climate declared victory latest piece mounting pile evidence debate best treat genderconfused children really whats good children transgender obsession depathologized validated normal also points even troubling possibility transgender phenomenon given rise one lesbian critic calls trans cult characterized inventing false facts dont stand scrutiny claiming science hateful toward beliefs claiming persecuted cant force beliefs people attempts silence destroy nonbelievers transgenderism religious cult cult clear alliance trans activists blind believers wounded followers willing dupes medical community controls airwaves speak modern medicine arrogated right rewrite history silence critics brand ideologically driven opinions fact deny hearing researchers clinicians victims families whose evidence experience run counter mandated cultish beliefs consider events uspath conference conference held february 25 2017 los angeles drew 600 medical clinicians scientific researchers active caring gender nonconforming genderconfused transgender adults adolescents children met affirm dedication transgender health light uncertainty due change leadership washington concern consequences may trans health trans rights sponsored world professional association transgender health conference debuted newly formed uspath ostensibly serve wpaths us members account 75 percent wpaths membership however according uspath conference chair dan karasic cochair jamison green conference served political purpose well uspath la 2017 stand strong statement support continuing rapid developments trans health america community health providers researchers advocates advancing care health care experts welcome kenneth zucker psychologist years experience treating gender confusion slated speak several panels conference token actually voice representing politically disfavored scientifically weighty research cautions labeling genderconfused children transgender part majority children later desist crossgender identification deal inconvenient data desistance wpath members advocate changing wpaths upcoming standards care 8 remove unsubstantiated harmful statements statistical likelyhood sic transgender persistence desistance among children thats one way blunt impact data dont likeerase facebook post uproar karasic admitted uspath stacked conference schedule practitioners trans affirmative approach favored trans alliance karasic said zucker invited merely gesture tolerance conference organizers fully expected views contextualized marginalized dominant perspective trans affirmative care trans community however absolutely loathes dr zucker commonsense approach things equal preferable child accept body pursue trans identity requires lifelong medical intervention associated variety poor outcomes inflicts narcissistic wound mere presence draws venom trans activists disrupted zuckers first talk ejected demanded got meeting board wpath conference sponsors meeting trans activists denounced invitation zucker described champion reparative therapy accused wpath grounded cisnormativity transexclusion prioritizing white cisgendered clinicians researchers without input trans community especially trans women color also charged wpath inflicting violence inaccessibility trans community hotel security called keep protesters disrupting talk activists also complained wpath continues pathologize experiences supporting dsm5 classification gender dysphoria mental health issue get sense unhinged realize trans activists leveling charges friendsthe professional organization done best legitimize trans identities denunciations came demands trans leaders demanded zucker tossed program wpath apologize trans community inviting himand giving power cisgendered white researchers instead consulting transgender patients selection conference speakers finally demanded wpath hire trans people paid consultants give local trans communities input planned conferences promise transgender persons given seats wpath committees including scientific committees decide academic papers accepted conferences imagine person suffering body dysmorphic disorder also dsm5 diagnosis demanded pass judgment proposed medical presentations topic professional conference could invite speakers would never happen trans issues different docs drunk koolaidor intimidated speak truth power clear power one trans activist proclaimed meeting amazing want acknowledged communitywe want power acknowledged gender professionals wpath uspath listened meekly bowed power zuckers second panel cancelled karasic wpath board posted apologies gets worse video meeting trans activists wpath uspath leaders reveals medical community pathetically cowed trans activists also apparently colluding exclude zucker without risking lawsuit video treasure trove worth mining zucker sues incident karasic admitted wpath made mistake allowing zucker speak fact karasic volunteered hindsight overridden competitive process wpaths scientific committee selected papers ensure zucker rejected ironically according karasic scientific committee approved zuckers presentations included several professionals also transgender blatant admission willingness censor scientific research future karasic apologized trans activists saying even zuckers proposal getting high enough score dont think let present wpathuspath would make mistake future karasic admitted hed intervened another occasion american psychological association prevent johns hopkins researcher paul mchugh outspoken opponent transgender reassignment surgery medical interventions genderconfused children presenting paul mchugh accepted proposal apa karasic said karasic intervened scientific committee got revoke acceptance mchughs paper apparently test whether paper advances transgender care ideological evidencebased trans activists pressed wpath officials commitment remove zucker executives hemmed hawed alternatives asking people panel go zucker would present empty room trying persuade speak wpath board members clearly worried zucker might sue disinvited one uspath leader described zucker litigious admitted id love cancel zuckers presentation eject conference open legal liability bankrupt unsympathetic trans activists pressed point wanted zucker gone demanding asshole gets away conferencewe want excluded conference another trans activist declared really crucial stand us whether cancel going happen impasse resolved trans person apparently attorney reassured conference organizers generally speaking conference organizers authority make changes theres threat prevent violence harm example talk likely create violence alienate certain people trans chorus voiced approval one exclaiming already traumatized presence trans community started meeting insisting wpath agree violence protest zuckers first talk needed safe space felt traumatized mere presence security officers concocted threat violence pretense shut zuckers second scheduled talk seeing daylight board embraced narrative reassured trans group based happened yesterday protest board would go ahead cancel zucker done deal conferences evening gala trans persons gathered stage celebrate win also repeat demands wpath stop pathologizing us change wpath standards care affirm transgender identities completely normal activists ended chant led trans woman color say trans say power transpower trans power power people conference moved ahead minus lone cautionary voice leaving medical zealots free urgings transgender adults embrace everearlier medical surgical intervention confused gender nonconforming adolescents giving presentations variety topics ranging social transition young children know puberty suppression lessons learned unanswered questions puberty suppression loss fertility puberty suppressioneffects fertilityand associated ethical legal ramifications double mastectomies teen girls impact male chest reconstruction chest dysphoria transmasculine adolescentsa preliminary study titles give witness experimental medical interventions really little acknowledgement every experimental trial lab rats poorly dont survive docs experimenting children lab rats one group concerned parents many children formerly identified trans likens trans experimentation lobotomy craze years ago results good ask drama uspath conference within sponsoring organization wpath reveals disturbing picture medical community unable unwilling exercise independent judgment face trans rage also thoroughly discredits wpathuspath members trustworthy scientific medical professionals whatever credibility might shreds unfortunately wont stop perhaps trans cult indeed apt decide mary rice hasson attorney fellow ethics public policy center washington dc | 1,114 |
<p>Explosives dropped from the air are among the most terrifying by-products of modern warfare. The destruction that they cause comes from nowhere and unpredictably. And it is compounded by the falling buildings and the fires. People subjected to aerial bombardment will therefore quickly lose heart and sue for peace. So Hitler thought, when he sent the Luftwaffe night after night over London, in order to break the morale of the British people. The result, however, was a determination to sit out the ordeal, a remarkable ingenuity in adapting to it, and a fierce desire for revenge. When that revenge took place a few years later, the German cities were destroyed and thousands killed, many horribly incinerated as at Dresden. But this did little or nothing to hasten the end of the war.</p>
<p>Of course troops who can summon air strikes from the ground have a decided advantage in combat. But they have this advantage only if they are there, on the ground, able to confront the enemy and force him into the open. In the absence of an effective opponent troops can adapt to bombardment from the air, and regroup after every assault, all the more determined to triumph. This is what we are seeing in the battle for Kobane.</p>
<p>Throughout the crisis caused by the rise of the Islamic State President Obama has stuck to his policy of not sending in American troops. And if the Americans don’t go in, probably no one else will go in either, although the feeling in Britain, following the recent despicable murder of civilian hostages, is now leaning towards a fight. In any case there is no other way of winning the war, which means that Obama has decided that, on balance, it is a war that America can afford to lose. Is this true? I don’t think so. The Islamic State will not become a peaceful member of the community of nations. Having established itself by violence and genocide it will continue in the same way, for fear of reprisals and from the natural suspicion of its neighbours.</p>
<p>The Islamic State is a collection of god-intoxicated enthusiasts, enjoying stolen assets and ruling over a subdued and frightened population whose loyalty they cannot guarantee. Like the original Islamic empire, the Islamic State has been established by conquest, and will always need further conquests in order to confirm its legitimacy. Syria and Iraq will be in no position to resist IS, once it has repaired its infrastructure and organized itself as a police state. For it can be resisted only by forces with a rival loyalty, and animated by a national idea. Unlike the Kurds, who fight for their nation and from an ancient claim to territory, the Iraqis and Syrians have little or no national attachment. Faced with invasion they will always be tempted, as they have been tempted at every stage in the present conflict, to lay down their arms and flee to their villages.</p>
<p>If the IS is not defeated in the present conflict, therefore, we will have to accept the presence of an inflamed and paranoid police state in the heart of the Middle East, one whose leaders are hardened by warfare, indifferent to the sufferings of minorities and full of a visceral hatred towards the West and its jahilliya.</p>
<p>The new state will almost certainly begin to take an interest in Turkey, encouraging Islamic extremism there, and reaching out to those young people who are captivated by the jihadist idea. President Erdogan of Turkey has played a double game so far, claiming to be part of the coalition against IS, while watching the destruction of Kobane and resolutely preventing weapons and reinforcements from reaching the Kurds who are fighting there. His own Sunnite religion, and his desire to restore what he can of the Turkish Caliphate, naturally leads to a certain sympathy towards IS, even if he would never tolerate the new state as a partner in an eventual bid for imperial power. One way or another, Erdogan is looking for a result from which Turkey can emerge with real gains and an enhanced Islamic identity. The defeat of IS would not be not such a result – on the contrary, it would leave him with a renewed Kurdish nationalism both inside and outside his borders.</p>
<p>The Islamic State, once it has asserted control within defined borders, will not be a democracy. It will be a police state in the hands of hardened warriors. It will not be accepted by the international community and will have only one thing on which to call in order to establish its legitimacy, and that is the Sunni faith. Once the infidels within the state have been converted or killed, the jihad against the infidel will have to continue. IS will actively foment terrorism abroad, and will almost certainly seek to obtain nuclear and biological weapons. In a worst-case scenario, in which the Taliban regain power in Afghanistan, and a network of sympathy in Pakistan, those weapons will be not so difficult to obtain.</p>
<p>Can America afford this scenario? Surely not. Of course, we can sympathize with the President’s reluctance to get involved. The problem is of far greater importance to Europe than to the United States, and the Europeans seem determined to do nothing, in the absurd belief that nice people have nothing to fear from nasty ones. (See my previous post on Soft Power.) And it is undeniable that the rise of the European Union as a soft bureaucracy, disarming and debilitating the will of the European nations, has undermined the Western alliance, with the result that America is reluctant to be seen to take a leading role.</p>
<p>Still, America will be as much threatened by a victorious IS as the Middle East and Europe will be. The impact will not be confined to the economic sphere. America will have to confront continuous threats to its security and a steady loss of influence across the Islamic world. Whether Muslim countries accept the Islamic State as a legitimate partner, or whether Turkey takes advantage of the situation once again to spread its power to the East, the entire status of the West, and of America as its moral and political representative, will suffer a seismic blow. The future of Israel will again be in doubt, and young people all across the Middle East will be looking for a new order of solutions, one that might promise an end to conflicts that have continued to spread from country to country and have so far never arrived at a destination.</p>
<p>* * *</p>
<p>A YOUTUBE link showing a song and message entitled ‘ <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GO52i0xui8" type="external">To Our Countries</a>‘ from two young women, to fighters in the Middle East, that may be of interest to anyone who read my previous post on ‘ <a href="" type="internal">Too many young men and no women</a>.’</p>
<p>—&#160;Roger Scruton is a Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center.</p> | false | 1 | explosives dropped air among terrifying byproducts modern warfare destruction cause comes nowhere unpredictably compounded falling buildings fires people subjected aerial bombardment therefore quickly lose heart sue peace hitler thought sent luftwaffe night night london order break morale british people result however determination sit ordeal remarkable ingenuity adapting fierce desire revenge revenge took place years later german cities destroyed thousands killed many horribly incinerated dresden little nothing hasten end war course troops summon air strikes ground decided advantage combat advantage ground able confront enemy force open absence effective opponent troops adapt bombardment air regroup every assault determined triumph seeing battle kobane throughout crisis caused rise islamic state president obama stuck policy sending american troops americans dont go probably one else go either although feeling britain following recent despicable murder civilian hostages leaning towards fight case way winning war means obama decided balance war america afford lose true dont think islamic state become peaceful member community nations established violence genocide continue way fear reprisals natural suspicion neighbours islamic state collection godintoxicated enthusiasts enjoying stolen assets ruling subdued frightened population whose loyalty guarantee like original islamic empire islamic state established conquest always need conquests order confirm legitimacy syria iraq position resist repaired infrastructure organized police state resisted forces rival loyalty animated national idea unlike kurds fight nation ancient claim territory iraqis syrians little national attachment faced invasion always tempted tempted every stage present conflict lay arms flee villages defeated present conflict therefore accept presence inflamed paranoid police state heart middle east one whose leaders hardened warfare indifferent sufferings minorities full visceral hatred towards west jahilliya new state almost certainly begin take interest turkey encouraging islamic extremism reaching young people captivated jihadist idea president erdogan turkey played double game far claiming part coalition watching destruction kobane resolutely preventing weapons reinforcements reaching kurds fighting sunnite religion desire restore turkish caliphate naturally leads certain sympathy towards even would never tolerate new state partner eventual bid imperial power one way another erdogan looking result turkey emerge real gains enhanced islamic identity defeat would result contrary would leave renewed kurdish nationalism inside outside borders islamic state asserted control within defined borders democracy police state hands hardened warriors accepted international community one thing call order establish legitimacy sunni faith infidels within state converted killed jihad infidel continue actively foment terrorism abroad almost certainly seek obtain nuclear biological weapons worstcase scenario taliban regain power afghanistan network sympathy pakistan weapons difficult obtain america afford scenario surely course sympathize presidents reluctance get involved problem far greater importance europe united states europeans seem determined nothing absurd belief nice people nothing fear nasty ones see previous post soft power undeniable rise european union soft bureaucracy disarming debilitating european nations undermined western alliance result america reluctant seen take leading role still america much threatened victorious middle east europe impact confined economic sphere america confront continuous threats security steady loss influence across islamic world whether muslim countries accept islamic state legitimate partner whether turkey takes advantage situation spread power east entire status west america moral political representative suffer seismic blow future israel doubt young people across middle east looking new order solutions one might promise end conflicts continued spread country country far never arrived destination youtube link showing song message entitled countries two young women fighters middle east may interest anyone read previous post many young men women 160roger scruton senior fellow ethics public policy center | 560 |
<p>Your Eminences, Your Excellencies, Distinguished Colleagues, Ladies and Gentlemen:</p>
<p>[I’d like to thank the chairman for advertising my book and encourage all of you to do your Christmas shopping early (laughter). There is, of course, an ironic quality to an American being asked to address this Congress on “politics” after the past three weeks…(laughter). But my old and dear friend Cardinal Stafford assures me that he’s not going to take all of you to Florida after the Congress to count ballots (laughter and applause).]</p>
<p>Five years ago, in his address to the United Nations General Assembly, Pope John Paul II described the quest for freedom as “one of the great dynamics of human history.” That quest, the Holy Father insisted, is “not limited to any one part of the world,” nor is it “the expression of any single culture.” Rather, the Pope reminded the General Assembly, “men and women throughout the world, even when threatened by violence, have taken the risk of freedom, asking to be given a place in social, political, and economic life which is commensurate with their dignity as free human beings.” Deepening the analysis further, the Holy Father argued that the global character of this quest for freedom is a “key” to understanding its significance, for the worldwide reach of this movement confirms “that there are indeed universal human rights, rooted in the nature of the person, rights which reflect the objective and inviolable demands of a universal moral law.” <a href="" type="internal">[1]</a></p>
<p>How stands the cause of freedom, five years after the Holy Father identified and lifted up freedom’s moral core before the leaders of the world of politics? And what does the current situation suggest about the discipleship and mission of the baptized in the world of domestic politics and in the international community?</p>
<p>The twentieth century proved beyond dispute that ideas have consequences, for good and for ill. My suggestion this morning is that the idea of freedom in a society and in the international community has everything to do with whether freedom is lived in such a way that the result is genuine human flourishing. If the idea of freedom in a society or in the international community is defective, dehumanizing politics will inevitably follow. If the idea of freedom is sound, we may yet, as the Holy Father proposed in 1995, see a century of tears give birth to a “new springtime of the human spirit.” <a href="" type="internal">[2]</a></p>
<p>Therefore, the primary mission of the laity in the world of politics and in the international community is to promote the notion of freedom for excellence — freedom tethered to truth and ordered to goodness — and to resist the concept of freedom as a neutral faculty of choice that can attach itself legitimately to any object.</p>
<p>Put another way, the lay task in the political arena is to insist that freedom means doing things the right way, rather than doing things my way.</p>
<p>Put yet another way, the laity will advance the new evangelization in the world of politics and in the international community by bringing to those worlds the teaching of Centesimus Annus, read “through” the teaching of Veritatis Splendor and Evangelium Vitae. That is, the teaching of Centesimus Annus on the priority of culture in the formation of democratic politics and the free economy must be read “through” the teaching of Veritatis Splendor on the public meaning of exceptionless moral norms, and through Evangelium Vitae’s analysis of the linkage between the life issues and the basic social and political conditions for living freedom justly and nobly.</p>
<p>Democracy and the free economy are not machines that will run by themselves. The free society will only remain free if the virtues necessary for freedom are alive and well, in and among political communities. It takes a certain kind of people to make political freedom serve the ends of justice; it takes a certain kind of people to discipline and direct the remarkable energies set loose by the free economy. Absent the habits of mind and heart that link freedom to truth and goodness, the free economy will produce what Zbigniew Brzezinski has called the “permissive cornucopia,” and democracy will decay into new forms of manipulation and oppression. That is why the primary mission of the laity in the world of politics and in the international community is to teach, witness to, and embody the truth that freedom is not a matter of doing what we like, but rather of having the right to do what we ought.</p>
<p>Ten years ago, in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse, it seemed as if the cause of freedom, often identified with the democratic project, was irresistible. As I look out into the first quarter of the twenty-first century, it seems to me that the democratic project itself is under internal assault, politically, philosophically, and technologically. A brief outline of each of these threats may help us identify more precisely some of the most pressing issues to be addressed by the distinctive lay mission of the baptized in the world of politics and in the international community.</p>
<p>The political threat to the democratic future involves the increasing role of unelected judges in settling basic issues of public policy. This practice diminishes and demeans democracy, and weakens a people’s democratic instincts. The judicial usurpation of politics on the life issues of abortion and euthanasia, and in the definition of marriage, is taking place on both the national and international planes, often in response to activist non-governmental organizations who cannot achieve their goals through legislation. Through this process, wrongs are being proclaimed as “rights,” and the tools of law are being deployed to do evil, to justify evil, and to compel cooperation with evil. Here is the clearest example to date of what John Paul II warned against in Centesimus Annus: democracies deteriorating into “thinly-disguised” totalitarian systems in which the external forms of democratic government are maintained even as those forms are turned into instrumens of coercion. <a href="" type="internal">[3]</a></p>
<p>This political threat is closely linked to the philosophical threat to the democratic project, which is the prevalence in the public life of western societies of a soft utilitarianism married to a concept of freedom as radical personal autonomy. Here is the “freedom of indifference” of which I spoke earlier in its most dangerous form. For freedom-as-personal-willfulness, coupled with radical skepticism about the possibility of our knowing the moral truth of things, is ultimately incompatible with democratic self-government. If there is only “my truth” and “your truth,” and neither of us recognizes a transcendent horizon of truth by which we agree to settle our differences when our “truths” are in conflict, then one of two things will happen: either I will impose my will on you, or you will impose your will on me. Press that method of settling differences far enough, and we find ourselves, rather abruptly, at the end of democracy. A careful survey of public life in the developed democracies suggests that we are already dangerously far down this path to democratic self-destruction.</p>
<p>The political threat to the democratic future and the philosophical threat often intersect in the many urgent questions posed for politics and the international community by the new biotechnologies. Within a very few years, the completion of the Human Genome Project will hold out the prospect of extending and enriching lives by early-detection techniques and precisely-designed vaccines, and ultimately correcting the genetic defects that lead to sickle-cell anemia, Huntington’s Disease, and various cancers. These are entirely welcome prospects. Yet the new genetic knowledge and the power of the new biotechnologies also carry within them the temptation to re-manufacture the human condition by re-manufacturing human beings. Unless that temptation is resisted — unless the lay mission in the world succeeds in teaching the world the truth about our freedom — the world will suffer the kind of dehumanization that was once imagined only by novelists. Crossing the threshold of the 21st century, it begins to appear that Aldous Huxley was right and George Orwell wrong. The most profoundly threatening dystopia of the future is not the brutal totalitarianism sketched in Orwell’s novel 1984, but the mindless, soulless authoritarianism depicted in Huxley’s Brave New World: a world of stunted humanity; a world of souls without longing, without passion, without striving, without suffering, without surprises or desire — in a word, a world without love.</p>
<p>In confronting the challenge that this brave new world poses for human freedom, the laity have a powerful model in St. Thomas More, recently proclaimed the patron of statesmen and politicians — and, by extension, the patron of all those engaged in public life. Contrary to the image created by the play and film, “A Man for All Seasons,” Thomas More was not a martyr for the primacy of conscience, if by conscience is meant freedom as radical personal autonomy. Thomas More was a martyr for Christian truth, the truth that “man cannot be sundered from God, [or] politics from morality.” <a href="" type="internal">[4]</a> Not all Christians are called to be “martyrs” in the strict sense of being called to suffer death for Christ and the Gospel. But all Christians are called by their baptism to be “martyrs” in the original Greek sense of µ , “witness.” Thus Catholic politicians, statesmen, and citizens engaged in the public debates that are the lifeblood of democracy are called to be witnesses to the truth about the human person.</p>
<p>For Catholics, that truth has been definitively revealed in humanity’s encounter with Jesus Christ. As the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council put it, “Christ the Lord, Christ the new Adam, in the very revelation of the mystery of the Father and of his love, fully reveals man to himself and brings to light his most high calling.” <a href="" type="internal">[5]</a> To enter more fully into our baptismal mission in the world is to take upon ourselves more completely the three-fold mission of the Christ into whom we were baptized: the Christ who is priest, prophet, and king. Thus we are to worship in truth, speak the truth, and serve in the truth.</p>
<p>Like every other aspect of the creation, freedom is “groaning as in the pains of childbirth” as freedom awaits the fullness of its redemption (cf. Romans 8.22). In this particular moment of the “in-between” time that is the Church’s life between Easter and the Lord’s coming in glory, the baptismal mission of the laity in the world of politics is to witness to the truth of the human person, human community, human origins, and human destiny revealed in the incarnate Son of God, who shows us both the face of the Father and the dignity of our human condition. In witnessing to that truth, in charity, we may hope to rebuild the moral foundations of the house of freedom — to persuade the political world of the 21st century that the future of freedom requires reclaiming and renewing the idea of freedom as a matter of having the right to do what we ought.</p>
<p>George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. and holds EPPC’s William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.</p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">[1]</a> Pope John Paul II, Address to the Fiftieth General Assembly of the United Nations Organization, 5 October 1995, 2-3 (emphases in original).</p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">[2]</a> Ibid., 18.</p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">[3]</a> Centesimus Annus, 46.</p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">[4]</a> John Paul II, Apostolic Letter Proclaiming Saint Thomas More Patron of Statesmen and Politicians [L’Osservatore Romano, English Weekly Edition, 8 November 2000, p. 3].</p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">[5]</a> Gaudium et Spes, 22.</p> | false | 1 | eminences excellencies distinguished colleagues ladies gentlemen id like thank chairman advertising book encourage christmas shopping early laughter course ironic quality american asked address congress politics past three weekslaughter old dear friend cardinal stafford assures hes going take florida congress count ballots laughter applause five years ago address united nations general assembly pope john paul ii described quest freedom one great dynamics human history quest holy father insisted limited one part world expression single culture rather pope reminded general assembly men women throughout world even threatened violence taken risk freedom asking given place social political economic life commensurate dignity free human beings deepening analysis holy father argued global character quest freedom key understanding significance worldwide reach movement confirms indeed universal human rights rooted nature person rights reflect objective inviolable demands universal moral law 1 stands cause freedom five years holy father identified lifted freedoms moral core leaders world politics current situation suggest discipleship mission baptized world domestic politics international community twentieth century proved beyond dispute ideas consequences good ill suggestion morning idea freedom society international community everything whether freedom lived way result genuine human flourishing idea freedom society international community defective dehumanizing politics inevitably follow idea freedom sound may yet holy father proposed 1995 see century tears give birth new springtime human spirit 2 therefore primary mission laity world politics international community promote notion freedom excellence freedom tethered truth ordered goodness resist concept freedom neutral faculty choice attach legitimately object put another way lay task political arena insist freedom means things right way rather things way put yet another way laity advance new evangelization world politics international community bringing worlds teaching centesimus annus read teaching veritatis splendor evangelium vitae teaching centesimus annus priority culture formation democratic politics free economy must read teaching veritatis splendor public meaning exceptionless moral norms evangelium vitaes analysis linkage life issues basic social political conditions living freedom justly nobly democracy free economy machines run free society remain free virtues necessary freedom alive well among political communities takes certain kind people make political freedom serve ends justice takes certain kind people discipline direct remarkable energies set loose free economy absent habits mind heart link freedom truth goodness free economy produce zbigniew brzezinski called permissive cornucopia democracy decay new forms manipulation oppression primary mission laity world politics international community teach witness embody truth freedom matter like rather right ought ten years ago aftermath soviet collapse seemed cause freedom often identified democratic project irresistible look first quarter twentyfirst century seems democratic project internal assault politically philosophically technologically brief outline threats may help us identify precisely pressing issues addressed distinctive lay mission baptized world politics international community political threat democratic future involves increasing role unelected judges settling basic issues public policy practice diminishes demeans democracy weakens peoples democratic instincts judicial usurpation politics life issues abortion euthanasia definition marriage taking place national international planes often response activist nongovernmental organizations achieve goals legislation process wrongs proclaimed rights tools law deployed evil justify evil compel cooperation evil clearest example date john paul ii warned centesimus annus democracies deteriorating thinlydisguised totalitarian systems external forms democratic government maintained even forms turned instrumens coercion 3 political threat closely linked philosophical threat democratic project prevalence public life western societies soft utilitarianism married concept freedom radical personal autonomy freedom indifference spoke earlier dangerous form freedomaspersonalwillfulness coupled radical skepticism possibility knowing moral truth things ultimately incompatible democratic selfgovernment truth truth neither us recognizes transcendent horizon truth agree settle differences truths conflict one two things happen either impose impose press method settling differences far enough find rather abruptly end democracy careful survey public life developed democracies suggests already dangerously far path democratic selfdestruction political threat democratic future philosophical threat often intersect many urgent questions posed politics international community new biotechnologies within years completion human genome project hold prospect extending enriching lives earlydetection techniques preciselydesigned vaccines ultimately correcting genetic defects lead sicklecell anemia huntingtons disease various cancers entirely welcome prospects yet new genetic knowledge power new biotechnologies also carry within temptation remanufacture human condition remanufacturing human beings unless temptation resisted unless lay mission world succeeds teaching world truth freedom world suffer kind dehumanization imagined novelists crossing threshold 21st century begins appear aldous huxley right george orwell wrong profoundly threatening dystopia future brutal totalitarianism sketched orwells novel 1984 mindless soulless authoritarianism depicted huxleys brave new world world stunted humanity world souls without longing without passion without striving without suffering without surprises desire word world without love confronting challenge brave new world poses human freedom laity powerful model st thomas recently proclaimed patron statesmen politicians extension patron engaged public life contrary image created play film man seasons thomas martyr primacy conscience conscience meant freedom radical personal autonomy thomas martyr christian truth truth man sundered god politics morality 4 christians called martyrs strict sense called suffer death christ gospel christians called baptism martyrs original greek sense µ witness thus catholic politicians statesmen citizens engaged public debates lifeblood democracy called witnesses truth human person catholics truth definitively revealed humanitys encounter jesus christ fathers second vatican council put christ lord christ new adam revelation mystery father love fully reveals man brings light high calling 5 enter fully baptismal mission world take upon completely threefold mission christ baptized christ priest prophet king thus worship truth speak truth serve truth like every aspect creation freedom groaning pains childbirth freedom awaits fullness redemption cf romans 822 particular moment inbetween time churchs life easter lords coming glory baptismal mission laity world politics witness truth human person human community human origins human destiny revealed incarnate son god shows us face father dignity human condition witnessing truth charity may hope rebuild moral foundations house freedom persuade political world 21st century future freedom requires reclaiming renewing idea freedom matter right ought george weigel distinguished senior fellow ethics public policy center washington dc holds eppcs william e simon chair catholic studies 1 pope john paul ii address fiftieth general assembly united nations organization 5 october 1995 23 emphases original 2 ibid 18 3 centesimus annus 46 4 john paul ii apostolic letter proclaiming saint thomas patron statesmen politicians losservatore romano english weekly edition 8 november 2000 p 3 5 gaudium et spes 22 | 1,018 |
<p>ORCHARD PARK, N.Y. — In what has been an almost weekly question surrounding the <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Buffalo-Bills/" type="external">Buffalo Bills</a> since head coach <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Sean-McDermott/" type="external">Sean McDermott</a> made the ill-fated decision to start Nathan Peterman for a game a month ago in Los Angeles, McDermott did not have a definitive answer on who would start Sunday’s home finale against Miami.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Tyrod_Taylor/" type="external">Tyrod Taylor</a>, who regained his starting job following Peterman’s five-interception implosion in the first half of the Week 9 game against the Chargers but played average at best in the next two games, missed last week’s victory over Indianapolis due to a contusion on his knee.</p>
<p>However, Peterman was knocked out of the game in the third quarter by a concussion and Joe Webb had to finish the game.</p>
<p>Peterman remains in concussion protocol as of Wednesday, so all signs are pointing toward Taylor getting the start against the Dolphins, but McDermott was not ready to commit one way or the other.</p>
<p>“When healthy, Tyrod will be our starter,” McDermott said.</p>
<p>Interestingly, it really hasn’t mattered who has played quarterback for the Bills this season. Taylor has done very little to sway his critics — not to mention the coaching staff — away from the belief that he’s nothing more than a game manager who has reached his ceiling, a ceiling that simply isn’t high enough.</p>
<p>It appears that his time in Buffalo is coming to a close as the 2017 season nears conclusion.</p>
<p>Taylor has presided over a passing game that remains stuck in the mud, ranked 31st in the NFL, and much of the trouble is due to Taylor’s inconsistency and unwillingness to throw the ball downfield.</p>
<p>Peterman has shown some brief flashes that he’s capable of executing a more productive passing game — the five-interception nightmare aside — but he’s a fifth-round rookie and probably isn’t equipped for a three-week AFC East gauntlet (two games with Miami sandwiched around one at New England) that will determine Buffalo’s playoff fate.</p>
<p>And if Peterman doesn’t get meaningful practice time, there is no way he will play this week.</p>
<p>“As part of the concussion protocol process, he’ll be out at practice, but he’s not out of that protocol,” McDermott said. “He’ll be limited through practice because of that.”</p>
<p>Taylor was able to practice on a scaled back basis leading up to the Colts game, and he was holding out hope that he could play, but McDermott shut him down after a Sunday morning workout.</p>
<p>“We got close, we got close,” McDermott said. “It just got to the point where he wasn’t able to function and then execute, based on a lot of things. But we’re moving in the right direction.”</p>
<p>Taylor beat Miami twice in his first year as Buffalo’s starter in 2015, but lost twice last season including a 34-31 overtime home game in Week 16 that ended Buffalo’s slim playoff hopes.</p>
<p>In that last game, Taylor enjoyed the only 300-yard passing performance of his career, but he also had wide receivers <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Sammy-Watkins/" type="external">Sammy Watkins</a> and <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Robert-Woods/" type="external">Robert Woods</a> to throw to.</p>
<p>This time, he might be throwing to the likes of Zay Jones, Deonte Thompson and <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Andre-Holmes/" type="external">Andre Holmes</a> if Kelvin Benjamin — who was held out of practice Wednesday – is unable to play.</p>
<p>And, he will be facing a Miami defense that, in back-to-back victories over Denver and New England, has permitted just one third-down conversion in 24 attempts. This means the Bills are going to have to rely on running back <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/LeSean_McCoy/" type="external">LeSean McCoy</a> to spark the offense, and one of the biggest aspects of the game will be Buffalo’s ability to stay out of difficult third-down distances. After last week’s 227-yard rushing effort, the Bills have jumped back to sixth in the league averaging 130 yards per game.</p>
<p>SERIES HISTORY: 103rd regular-season meeting. Dolphins lead series, 59-42-1. Last season, the Dolphins swept the Bills including a December game in the second-to-last week of the season, a 34-31 overtime decision, that eliminated the Bills from the playoff hunt and helped solidify Miami’s spot in the postseason.</p>
<p>–Tyrod Taylor said Wednesday that he enjoyed a good day at practice and he thinks he will be fine to play Sunday against the Dolphins.</p>
<p>“Feeling healthy, leg is progressing,” he said. “Today was a good day, first step in preparation for this weekend.”</p>
<p>Taylor said there is a chance he could do more damage to the knee by playing, and right now it’s more about pain tolerance than anything, but if Wednesday’s practice was an indication, the knee will continue to improve.</p>
<p>Taylor said, “It feels good today and I expect it to keep getting better. I haven’t had any setbacks, fortunately.”</p>
<p>Taylor confirmed he was close to playing against the Colts last week, but ultimately, he agreed with the team’s decision to sit him out.</p>
<p>“At game time it was more about (being) healthy,” he said. “I wasn’t quite there where I wanted to be and where the trainers wanted me to be to go out here and fully trust my knee was ready to play a full game. Of course, the competitor in me, it’s tough to say that because I want to be out there playing. As a team, we were able to go out there and accomplish a big win under tough conditions. Hats off to the guys, they worked hard throughout the week and Joe (Webb) and Nate (Peterman) handled everything like professionals and went out there and got the job done.”</p>
<p>–The Bills selected safety Jordan Poyer as their Ed Block Courage Award winner. Poyer joined the Bills as a free agent in March after four years in Cleveland. He missed two-thirds of the 2016 season when he suffered a lacerated kidney, but he bounced back to become one of the Bills’ top defensive players this season.</p>
<p>The recipient of the award is someone who symbolizes professionalism, strength, dedication and serves as a community role model for others. Every team in the NFL picks one winner, and they will be honored at a banquet in March in Baltimore. The award was first presented in 1985, and among the past winners in Buffalo are <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Bruce_Smith/" type="external">Bruce Smith</a>, <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Jim_Kelly/" type="external">Jim Kelly</a>, Kent Hull, <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Takeo_Spikes/" type="external">Takeo Spikes</a>, Kevin Everett, Chris Kelsay, Jairus Byrd, <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Kyle_Williams/" type="external">Kyle Williams</a>, <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Cordy-Glenn/" type="external">Cordy Glenn</a> and <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Stephon-Gilmore/" type="external">Stephon Gilmore</a>.</p>
<p>NOTES: QB Tyrod Taylor took the bulk of the practice snaps Wednesday and it appears pretty certain that his knee is feeling better and he will get the start against the Dolphins Sunday. Head coach Sean McDermott said when Taylor is healthy, he is the starter. … QB Nathan Peterman remained in concussion protocol Wednesday and was limited in practice. Given his situation, it seems unlikely that he will play Sunday even as the backup. … WR Kelvin Benjamin sat out practice after reinjuring his knee last week, and it looks as if his game status will be in question all week. … TE Charles Clay had his typical Wednesday maintenance day to rest his knee injury, but he’s expected to be fine for the game. … DT Kyle Williams continues to battle through a sore groin and took Wednesday off, but like last week, he will almost certainly play. … LT Cordy Glenn has missed the last five games with ongoing foot and ankle injuries, and Wednesday he also was suffering through an illness and did not practice. … WR Andre Holmes was suffering from neck stiffness and sat out practice Wednesday.</p> | false | 1 | orchard park ny almost weekly question surrounding buffalo bills since head coach sean mcdermott made illfated decision start nathan peterman game month ago los angeles mcdermott definitive answer would start sundays home finale miami tyrod taylor regained starting job following petermans fiveinterception implosion first half week 9 game chargers played average best next two games missed last weeks victory indianapolis due contusion knee however peterman knocked game third quarter concussion joe webb finish game peterman remains concussion protocol wednesday signs pointing toward taylor getting start dolphins mcdermott ready commit one way healthy tyrod starter mcdermott said interestingly really hasnt mattered played quarterback bills season taylor done little sway critics mention coaching staff away belief hes nothing game manager reached ceiling ceiling simply isnt high enough appears time buffalo coming close 2017 season nears conclusion taylor presided passing game remains stuck mud ranked 31st nfl much trouble due taylors inconsistency unwillingness throw ball downfield peterman shown brief flashes hes capable executing productive passing game fiveinterception nightmare aside hes fifthround rookie probably isnt equipped threeweek afc east gauntlet two games miami sandwiched around one new england determine buffalos playoff fate peterman doesnt get meaningful practice time way play week part concussion protocol process hell practice hes protocol mcdermott said hell limited practice taylor able practice scaled back basis leading colts game holding hope could play mcdermott shut sunday morning workout got close got close mcdermott said got point wasnt able function execute based lot things moving right direction taylor beat miami twice first year buffalos starter 2015 lost twice last season including 3431 overtime home game week 16 ended buffalos slim playoff hopes last game taylor enjoyed 300yard passing performance career also wide receivers sammy watkins robert woods throw time might throwing likes zay jones deonte thompson andre holmes kelvin benjamin held practice wednesday unable play facing miami defense backtoback victories denver new england permitted one thirddown conversion 24 attempts means bills going rely running back lesean mccoy spark offense one biggest aspects game buffalos ability stay difficult thirddown distances last weeks 227yard rushing effort bills jumped back sixth league averaging 130 yards per game series history 103rd regularseason meeting dolphins lead series 59421 last season dolphins swept bills including december game secondtolast week season 3431 overtime decision eliminated bills playoff hunt helped solidify miamis spot postseason tyrod taylor said wednesday enjoyed good day practice thinks fine play sunday dolphins feeling healthy leg progressing said today good day first step preparation weekend taylor said chance could damage knee playing right pain tolerance anything wednesdays practice indication knee continue improve taylor said feels good today expect keep getting better havent setbacks fortunately taylor confirmed close playing colts last week ultimately agreed teams decision sit game time healthy said wasnt quite wanted trainers wanted go fully trust knee ready play full game course competitor tough say want playing team able go accomplish big win tough conditions hats guys worked hard throughout week joe webb nate peterman handled everything like professionals went got job done bills selected safety jordan poyer ed block courage award winner poyer joined bills free agent march four years cleveland missed twothirds 2016 season suffered lacerated kidney bounced back become one bills top defensive players season recipient award someone symbolizes professionalism strength dedication serves community role model others every team nfl picks one winner honored banquet march baltimore award first presented 1985 among past winners buffalo bruce smith jim kelly kent hull takeo spikes kevin everett chris kelsay jairus byrd kyle williams cordy glenn stephon gilmore notes qb tyrod taylor took bulk practice snaps wednesday appears pretty certain knee feeling better get start dolphins sunday head coach sean mcdermott said taylor healthy starter qb nathan peterman remained concussion protocol wednesday limited practice given situation seems unlikely play sunday even backup wr kelvin benjamin sat practice reinjuring knee last week looks game status question week te charles clay typical wednesday maintenance day rest knee injury hes expected fine game dt kyle williams continues battle sore groin took wednesday like last week almost certainly play lt cordy glenn missed last five games ongoing foot ankle injuries wednesday also suffering illness practice wr andre holmes suffering neck stiffness sat practice wednesday | 697 |
<p>The high cost of caring for individuals with chronic diseases is one of the most pressing issues in health care in the U.S. today. The baby boom generation is aging, and advanced age is accompanied by costly chronic illnesses. As a result, Medicare and other health-related governmental programs will face demographic and epidemiological forces that will challenge their financial viability.</p>
<p>In light of the sheer magnitude of costs associated with diabetes, policymakers and the public need to understand how these costs will change over the next decades and how new policies may alter these trends in costs. Policymakers already are keenly interested in developing and pursuing policies that can prevent the expected rise in disease burden and head off expensive public commitments to care for the chronically ill.</p>
<p>The forecasting effort presented in this article speaks directly to this concern by improving the rigor of the estimates of health outcomes and health care spending associated with future trends in the incidence, prevalence, and progression toward complications. We constructed a model of diabetes costs that accounts for the trends in risk factors for diabetes, the natural history of disease, and the effects of treatments-factors currently not used by government budget analysts. Inclusion of these factors in forecasting models can improve estimates under current trends and policies, and more importantly, forecast the impact of alternative policy scenarios.</p>
<p>Overall costs related to type 2 diabetes will be influenced by the demographic shifts in the population, population-level trends in obesity, the development and dissemination of new diabetes-related treatments, and diagnostic tests. Recent trends in obesity rates and major advances in the understanding of the natural history of diabetes have not been formally incorporated into prior forecasts of the burden of diabetes (2- 4). We set out to integrate recent prediction models and epidemiological data for obesity, diabetes incidence, and diabetes complications to forecast the future size of the diabetic population and their related health care costs.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS</p>
<p>Estimates of future total health care costs for diabetes must take into account two dynamic processes. First, the diabetes population is constantly changing over time. New people are diagnosed and added to the population; contemporaneously, other individuals with existing diabetes die and leave this subpopulation. With the balance of these two processes, the prevalence of diabetes in the total population changes on an annual basis. The pace of change differs over time depending on factors such as the rate of obesity and age of those at risk. For instance, the aging of the large baby boom generation will bring large numbers of new people into age categories that are at higher risk of developing the disease.</p>
<p>Second, costs associated with diabetes tend to follow a natural progression over time. Complications take time to develop and inflict damage to the eyes, kidneys, and circulatory and nervous systems. Therefore, robust projection models must include estimates of the expected natural history of the disease based on alternative levels of disease management.</p>
<p>In developing our forecasting model, we account for two types of cohorts-a prevalent and an incident cohort. The prevalent cohort is the population of individuals with diabetes in 2008. It reflects the distribution of different ages and different years with diabetes of the subpopulation in 2008. The second type of cohort is the incident cohort. This group represents the new people with diabetes entering the diagnosed population each year after the base year of 2008. The number of people with diabetes in any year is the sum of the population in the previous year (in 2008, it is the prevalent cohort) and the incident cohort, minus deaths from all causes in the previous year’s population with diabetes.</p>
<p>To account for the costs of both cohorts, we tracked costs using two timelines: 1) the chronological timeline during which we will report our total cost estimates and 2) the age timeline for various heterogeneous subgroups within the prevalent and incident cohorts. For example, different patients may start with diabetes at different ages in the same calendar year. Other patients may start at the same age but in different calendar years.</p>
<p>We developed explicit models to address this dynamic nature of cost accumulation. Figure 1 presents the conceptual accounting of costs over time. This involves accounting for all health care costs incurred for the prevalent groups of people with diabetes, after the annual incident cohort for that year joins the prevalent cohort (illustrated by a dotted box in Fig. 1). Empirically, we account for costs horizontally (as represented by arrows in Fig. 1). That is, we take the prevalent cohort of patients in 2008 and lay out their lifetime cost profiles throughout the calendar time starting from 2008. Similarly, we take the incident cohort of patients in 2009 and lay out their lifetime cost profiles throughout the calendar time starting from 2009. We repeat this pattern for future incident cohorts of patients. We also account for heterogeneity in terms of patient characteristics for all cohorts.</p>
<p>There are three components that are central to estimating this accumulation of costs: 1) defining the prevalent cohort and its heterogeneity, 2) the diabetes incidence model, and 3) the lifetime simulation model for diabetes progression.</p>
<p>Defining the prevalent cohort and its heterogeneity</p>
<p>We assume that the prevalent cohort of adult patients living with diabetes has the demographic and clinical characteristics of adult individuals reporting that they have diabetes in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) (2005-2006).</p>
<p>To create the prevalent cohort, we used self-reported disease to identify individuals with diabetes. We then estimated the U.S. population with diagnosed diabetes, undiagnosed diabetes, and no diabetes, categorized by sex, race/ethnicity, and age from 24 to 85 years. Because few clinical trial results include populations under 24 or over 85 years, this age range allows the model to estimate the effects of clinical trial results on the entire study population. Lifetime diabetes-related costs for the prevalent cohort are estimated using the lifetime simulation model for diabetes progression described below.</p>
<p>The diabetes incidence model</p>
<p>The main purpose of the incidence model is to account for new cases of undiagnosed and diagnosed diabetes in the population over time. Once new subjects are diagnosed, their lifetime costs are calculated using the cost estimates arising out of the lifetime model of diabetes progression.</p>
<p>Appendix Fig. S1A (available in an online appendix at http://care.diabetesjournals.org/cgi/content/full/dc09-0459/DC1) displays the basic structure of the Markov model that traces the transition of the U.S. population across BMI categories over the age of the subjects. These transition probabilities determine the distribution of BMI categories at any point in time, which in turn affects the transition to diabetes. Online appendix Fig. S1B displays the basic structure of the Markov model that tracks the movement of the population between four main states: 1) no diabetes, 2) undiagnosed diabetes, 3) diagnosed diabetes, and 4) death. It also displays the key transition probabilities driving the results of the model.</p>
<p>A fraction of the population without diabetes, conditional on their survival (death rate is denoted by d) to the next period, may progress to have diabetes. Annual progression rates are denoted by the parameter r. These people transition to become diagnosed or to remain undiagnosed with diabetes depending on whether they are screened. Annual screening rates are denoted by the p arameter s. Similarly, depending on whether they are screened, those with currently undiagnosed diabetes transition to become diagnosed or remain undiagnosed. (Here we assume that the screening test is 100% sensitive and specific). As mentioned above, the group with diagnosed diabetes then is removed from this model and fed into the lifetime simulation model described below. The others continue.</p>
<p>Initial distribution of BMI categories are obtained from NHANES data (2005-2006). Yearly transitions across BMI categories are estimated using the 2004-2005 longitudinal data on the Panel 9 cohort from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey. Estimates of d are obtained from published U.S. Life Tables (2004). Estimates of s are obtained from NHANES data (2005-2006). Finally, estimates of r are obtained by fitting the Markov model to published incidence rates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (using the National Health Interview Survey) (5). All parameters are allowed to vary by sex, race, and ethnicity and smoothed over ages 24-85 years. Estimates of r are separately smoothed for age-groups &lt;45, 45-64, and &gt;64 years due to substantial heterogeneity across these age ranges.</p>
<p>Age-specific annual hazard of progression to diabetes for people without diabetes for different sexes and BMI categories are calculated based on observed incidence of people with diagnosed diabetes and current screening rates. The progression hazards increase monotonically with age in all categories and are highest for the obese category followed by overweight and normal at all ages.</p>
<p>Lifetime simulation model of diabetes complications Within a 1-year cycle, patients move from one disease state to another or stay in the current disease state until death or age 95 years.</p>
<p>Online appendix Fig. S2 displays the design of the model of diabetes complications. This figure presents the structure of the decision analytic model. Hypothetical patients move through the model from left to right for each cycle length (1 year). Based on initial patient clinical characteristics, patients are subject to the risk of various complications related to diabetes as well as mortality. Patients who survive a given year repeat the cycle until death.</p>
<p>Data on demographic characteristics (sex and race/ethnicity) as well as relevant clinical characteristics (blood pressure levels, cholesterol levels, GHb levels, and duration of diabetes) are obtained from NHANES and used as data inputs for the simulation models. For each clinical risk factor, we use age-, sex-, and race/ethnicity-specific distributions of these factors within the models.</p>
<p>The diabetes complication models in this analysis are derived from U.K. Prospective Diabetes Study (UKPDS) results (6). Prediction models for all major diabetes-related complications have been developed by the UKPDS study group (7,8). These models have been internally and externally validated with cardiovascular trial data (9). The UKPDS model does not include glucose control as a predictor, making it unsuitable for evaluating the impact of improved diabetes care on end-stage renal disease. Instead, we modeled the development of microalbuminuria and proteinuria, which are linked to the intensity of glucose control (10). We used prediction models for these intermediate complications using optimization procedures to fit observations from the UKPDS control arm to a functional form used in the original National Institutes of Health model (11). For the transition between proteinuria to end-stage renal disease, we used probabilities from an observational study (12).</p>
<p>For background mortality rates, we used race/ethnicity- and sex-specific background mortality rates reported in U.S. life table statistics from 1999 (13). To calculate background mortality rates for individuals with diabetes, we subtracted cardiovascular mortality rates for the general population from the overall mortality rates found in life tables. We multiplied these rates by 2.75 as previously done to reflect higher background mortality rates for patients with diabetes (11). When patients developed specific complications, such as coronary heart disease, stroke, end-stage renal disease, and amputation, we assumed that patients had higher mortality rates attributable to these complications (14,15).</p>
<p>Within the model, we accounted for the effect of individual medications. The benefits of ACE inhibitors were based on the findings from the Heart Outcomes Prevention Evaluation (HOPE) Study (16). Aspirin was assumed to reduce the probability of coronary heart disease but to increase the probability of gastrointestinal bleed (17). We assumed that the joint effect of aspirin and an ACE inhibitor on cardiovascular effects was multiplicative. We did not assume that simply the processes of care such as foot examination or routine laboratory tests independently produced clinical benefits (18).</p>
<p>Health service utilization and cost inputs</p>
<p>We assumed that the use of medications reflects the current distribution of use of insulin, oral agents, insulin plus oral agents, and diet therapy as observed in national studies of diabetes care (19). Distribution of use of different oral glucose lowering agents was assumed to be the observed distribution in national studies (20). Use of ACE inhibitors and aspirin therapy was based on recent national reports of diabetes care (21). Frequency of office visits and laboratory tests was assumed to be that observed in a recent national study (22).</p>
<p>We estimated drug costs based on the average type and frequency of drug prescriptions, dosage of medications, and wholesale drug prices. Annual costs of microvascular and cardiovascular complications were obtained from recent studies in the literature (please see the online appendix Table for details).</p>
<p>For this analysis, we used the complication model to predict the average annual costs of living with diabetes by different ages, sexes, racial groups, and major durations of diabetes. A total of 10,000 Monte-Carlo iterations (each iteration representing a patient life) were used to generate average estimates. All costs are expressed in 2007 USD. In estimating costs for future years, we applied the cost growth assumptions used by the Congressional Budget Office.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>RESULTS</p>
<p>The results of our model regarding overall population changes in obesity, future population size, and health care spending have been briefly described in a related publication (23). We expand on those results and describe forecasts for the Medicare population.</p>
<p>Changes in obesity</p>
<p>Because our model predicts the progression from non-diabetes to diabetes, we estimate changes in percentage of obese, overweight, and normal-weight individuals in the population living without diabetes. Overall obesity distribution in the non-diabetes population remains fairly stable over time, with ~65% of the population being overweight or obese. The percentage categorized as overweight in the non-diabetes population is expected to remain steady at 35% over the time period. The percent categorized as obese is expected to drop slightly from 30% in 2009 to 27% in 2033. This same leveling of the obesity trend is found in projections produced by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for the U.S. population (24).</p>
<p>Future population size for the U.S.</p>
<p>We found that in 2009, there will be 19.5 million diagnosed and 4.25 million undiagnosed diabetes cases in the population ages 24-85 years. Over the next 12 years, the overall population with diabetes is expected to rise (Fig. 2). Among this population, the distribution of diagnosed and undiagnosed individuals will be shaped by the rate of arrival of new cases and continued screening for diabetes by the medical system. The combined effect is that the cohort of established diagnosed diabetes will grow, while the cohort of undiagnosed diabetes steadily declines and stabilizes at around 3.7 million by 2020. After 2020, the size of the cohort of people with undiagnosed diabetes is estimated to decline. The annual incident cohort size follows the same pattern.</p>
<p>The growth of the Medicare population follows many of the same trends for the overall population with diabetes. For 2009, the model projects 6.5 million Medicare-eligible beneficiaries with prevalent diagnosed diabetes. During 2009, 0.9 million will be newly diagnosed with diabetes, while another 0.9 million will remain undiagnosed. By 2034, the number of individuals with diagnosed diabetes eligible for Medicare will rise to 14.1 million, while the size of the annual cohort with undiagnosed diabetes will decrease to 440,000.</p>
<p>Spending associated with the direct care of diabetes and its complications</p>
<p>For this analysis, we projected direct spending on diabetes and its complications for the next 25 years (Fig. 3). The sum of spending for the cohort that currently has diabetes (the prevalent cohort) and the spending for the populations expected to be diagnosed during the next 25 years (the incident cohorts) determines the total costs of diabetes in future years. In the next 25 years, annual spending is expected to increase steeply to approximately $336 billion (in constant 2007 USD), mainly because of the increasing size of the incident cohorts. The annual costs should stabilize from that point on as the size of the incident cohort plateaus. Similarly, Medicare spending on diabetes care is estimated to rise from $45 billion in 2009 to $171 billion in 2034. Based on these estimates, Medicare spending alone will represent just over 50% of direct spending on diabetes in 2034.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>CONCLUSIONS</p>
<p>We project that over the next 25 years, the number of Americans with diagnosed and undiagnosed diabetes will increase from 23.7 million to 44.1 million. During the same time period, annual spending related to diabetes is expected to increase from $113 billion to $336 billion (in constant 2007 USD). These changes are driven more by the size of incoming age cohorts than by changes in obesity and overweight rates. For Medicare, the project growth in diabetes care spending exceeds current projections of spending by Medicare and for the growth domestic product.</p>
<p>Our analysis is distinct from prior efforts to forecast the future size of the diabetes population. Prior studies have accounted for the changing size and age composition of the overall population and assumed fixed age-specific and sex specific prevalence rates (2,3).</p>
<p>More recently, Boyle et al. (4) demonstrated the important impact of changes in the ethnic composition of the population on the projected burden of diabetes. Our study is distinct in its accounting for the evolving nature of the distribution of body weight categories in the population. Our analysis is also unique in its accounting for the natural history of diabetes complications. Both innovations enhance our ability to forecast the future costs attributable to diabetes.</p>
<p>We built this model to improve the budgetary and health outcome information available to federal policymakers. The model provides a rigorous assessment of the future burden of diabetes that accounts for the natural history of the disease and recent advances in treatment. More importantly, the model can also be used to provide estimates of the impact of alternative policy scenarios. Current practices by federal scorekeeping agencies do not approach cost estimating in this manner, nor do they generally provide estimates beyond 10 years. This diabetes model is also meant to serve as an example of the type of forecasting model that can be used by policymakers when considering policies for other chronic diseases. Such models are appropriate when abundant epidemiological data are available to forecast the natural history of disease incidence and progression, as is the case with type 2 diabetes.</p>
<p>The study has several limitations. First, attempts to forecast future costs and utilizations are conditional on current rates of utilization. For example, we have used the most current estimates of screening rates for diabetes from NHANES. However, rates change over time, and future changes may influence our results. Our model also does not account for individuals under 24 years of age who enter the population. This limitation may be particularly relevant for accurately incorporating diabetes prevalence and incidence in the immigrant population, who may experience heterogeneous rates of developing the disease (25). Lastly, during our analysis of transitions across BMI categories, we grouped all individuals who had BMIs ≥30 kg/m2.We did this because of a lack of available Medical Expenditure Panel Survey data to model transitions across finer BMI categories. Many of these limitations may lead to more conservative estimates of the future size of the diabetes populations and their costs.</p>
<p>Despite these limitations, our study strongly suggests that diabetes will grow in the coming decades, both in population size and costs, and will have significant impacts on the lives of Americans and the financial viability of programs like Medicare. Forecasting models like this can help policymakers anticipate future burdens of chronic diseases and design targeted policies that fight these diseases in the most effective ways possible, both in terms of clinical effectiveness and cost-effectiveness.</p> | false | 1 | high cost caring individuals chronic diseases one pressing issues health care us today baby boom generation aging advanced age accompanied costly chronic illnesses result medicare healthrelated governmental programs face demographic epidemiological forces challenge financial viability light sheer magnitude costs associated diabetes policymakers public need understand costs change next decades new policies may alter trends costs policymakers already keenly interested developing pursuing policies prevent expected rise disease burden head expensive public commitments care chronically ill forecasting effort presented article speaks directly concern improving rigor estimates health outcomes health care spending associated future trends incidence prevalence progression toward complications constructed model diabetes costs accounts trends risk factors diabetes natural history disease effects treatmentsfactors currently used government budget analysts inclusion factors forecasting models improve estimates current trends policies importantly forecast impact alternative policy scenarios overall costs related type 2 diabetes influenced demographic shifts population populationlevel trends obesity development dissemination new diabetesrelated treatments diagnostic tests recent trends obesity rates major advances understanding natural history diabetes formally incorporated prior forecasts burden diabetes 2 4 set integrate recent prediction models epidemiological data obesity diabetes incidence diabetes complications forecast future size diabetic population related health care costs 160 research design methods estimates future total health care costs diabetes must take account two dynamic processes first diabetes population constantly changing time new people diagnosed added population contemporaneously individuals existing diabetes die leave subpopulation balance two processes prevalence diabetes total population changes annual basis pace change differs time depending factors rate obesity age risk instance aging large baby boom generation bring large numbers new people age categories higher risk developing disease second costs associated diabetes tend follow natural progression time complications take time develop inflict damage eyes kidneys circulatory nervous systems therefore robust projection models must include estimates expected natural history disease based alternative levels disease management developing forecasting model account two types cohortsa prevalent incident cohort prevalent cohort population individuals diabetes 2008 reflects distribution different ages different years diabetes subpopulation 2008 second type cohort incident cohort group represents new people diabetes entering diagnosed population year base year 2008 number people diabetes year sum population previous year 2008 prevalent cohort incident cohort minus deaths causes previous years population diabetes account costs cohorts tracked costs using two timelines 1 chronological timeline report total cost estimates 2 age timeline various heterogeneous subgroups within prevalent incident cohorts example different patients may start diabetes different ages calendar year patients may start age different calendar years developed explicit models address dynamic nature cost accumulation figure 1 presents conceptual accounting costs time involves accounting health care costs incurred prevalent groups people diabetes annual incident cohort year joins prevalent cohort illustrated dotted box fig 1 empirically account costs horizontally represented arrows fig 1 take prevalent cohort patients 2008 lay lifetime cost profiles throughout calendar time starting 2008 similarly take incident cohort patients 2009 lay lifetime cost profiles throughout calendar time starting 2009 repeat pattern future incident cohorts patients also account heterogeneity terms patient characteristics cohorts three components central estimating accumulation costs 1 defining prevalent cohort heterogeneity 2 diabetes incidence model 3 lifetime simulation model diabetes progression defining prevalent cohort heterogeneity assume prevalent cohort adult patients living diabetes demographic clinical characteristics adult individuals reporting diabetes national health nutrition examination survey nhanes 20052006 create prevalent cohort used selfreported disease identify individuals diabetes estimated us population diagnosed diabetes undiagnosed diabetes diabetes categorized sex raceethnicity age 24 85 years clinical trial results include populations 24 85 years age range allows model estimate effects clinical trial results entire study population lifetime diabetesrelated costs prevalent cohort estimated using lifetime simulation model diabetes progression described diabetes incidence model main purpose incidence model account new cases undiagnosed diagnosed diabetes population time new subjects diagnosed lifetime costs calculated using cost estimates arising lifetime model diabetes progression appendix fig s1a available online appendix httpcarediabetesjournalsorgcgicontentfulldc090459dc1 displays basic structure markov model traces transition us population across bmi categories age subjects transition probabilities determine distribution bmi categories point time turn affects transition diabetes online appendix fig s1b displays basic structure markov model tracks movement population four main states 1 diabetes 2 undiagnosed diabetes 3 diagnosed diabetes 4 death also displays key transition probabilities driving results model fraction population without diabetes conditional survival death rate denoted next period may progress diabetes annual progression rates denoted parameter r people transition become diagnosed remain undiagnosed diabetes depending whether screened annual screening rates denoted p arameter similarly depending whether screened currently undiagnosed diabetes transition become diagnosed remain undiagnosed assume screening test 100 sensitive specific mentioned group diagnosed diabetes removed model fed lifetime simulation model described others continue initial distribution bmi categories obtained nhanes data 20052006 yearly transitions across bmi categories estimated using 20042005 longitudinal data panel 9 cohort medical expenditure panel survey estimates obtained published us life tables 2004 estimates obtained nhanes data 20052006 finally estimates r obtained fitting markov model published incidence rates centers disease control prevention using national health interview survey 5 parameters allowed vary sex race ethnicity smoothed ages 2485 years estimates r separately smoothed agegroups lt45 4564 gt64 years due substantial heterogeneity across age ranges agespecific annual hazard progression diabetes people without diabetes different sexes bmi categories calculated based observed incidence people diagnosed diabetes current screening rates progression hazards increase monotonically age categories highest obese category followed overweight normal ages lifetime simulation model diabetes complications within 1year cycle patients move one disease state another stay current disease state death age 95 years online appendix fig s2 displays design model diabetes complications figure presents structure decision analytic model hypothetical patients move model left right cycle length 1 year based initial patient clinical characteristics patients subject risk various complications related diabetes well mortality patients survive given year repeat cycle death data demographic characteristics sex raceethnicity well relevant clinical characteristics blood pressure levels cholesterol levels ghb levels duration diabetes obtained nhanes used data inputs simulation models clinical risk factor use age sex raceethnicityspecific distributions factors within models diabetes complication models analysis derived uk prospective diabetes study ukpds results 6 prediction models major diabetesrelated complications developed ukpds study group 78 models internally externally validated cardiovascular trial data 9 ukpds model include glucose control predictor making unsuitable evaluating impact improved diabetes care endstage renal disease instead modeled development microalbuminuria proteinuria linked intensity glucose control 10 used prediction models intermediate complications using optimization procedures fit observations ukpds control arm functional form used original national institutes health model 11 transition proteinuria endstage renal disease used probabilities observational study 12 background mortality rates used raceethnicity sexspecific background mortality rates reported us life table statistics 1999 13 calculate background mortality rates individuals diabetes subtracted cardiovascular mortality rates general population overall mortality rates found life tables multiplied rates 275 previously done reflect higher background mortality rates patients diabetes 11 patients developed specific complications coronary heart disease stroke endstage renal disease amputation assumed patients higher mortality rates attributable complications 1415 within model accounted effect individual medications benefits ace inhibitors based findings heart outcomes prevention evaluation hope study 16 aspirin assumed reduce probability coronary heart disease increase probability gastrointestinal bleed 17 assumed joint effect aspirin ace inhibitor cardiovascular effects multiplicative assume simply processes care foot examination routine laboratory tests independently produced clinical benefits 18 health service utilization cost inputs assumed use medications reflects current distribution use insulin oral agents insulin plus oral agents diet therapy observed national studies diabetes care 19 distribution use different oral glucose lowering agents assumed observed distribution national studies 20 use ace inhibitors aspirin therapy based recent national reports diabetes care 21 frequency office visits laboratory tests assumed observed recent national study 22 estimated drug costs based average type frequency drug prescriptions dosage medications wholesale drug prices annual costs microvascular cardiovascular complications obtained recent studies literature please see online appendix table details analysis used complication model predict average annual costs living diabetes different ages sexes racial groups major durations diabetes total 10000 montecarlo iterations iteration representing patient life used generate average estimates costs expressed 2007 usd estimating costs future years applied cost growth assumptions used congressional budget office 160 results results model regarding overall population changes obesity future population size health care spending briefly described related publication 23 expand results describe forecasts medicare population changes obesity model predicts progression nondiabetes diabetes estimate changes percentage obese overweight normalweight individuals population living without diabetes overall obesity distribution nondiabetes population remains fairly stable time 65 population overweight obese percentage categorized overweight nondiabetes population expected remain steady 35 time period percent categorized obese expected drop slightly 30 2009 27 2033 leveling obesity trend found projections produced centers disease control prevention us population 24 future population size us found 2009 195 million diagnosed 425 million undiagnosed diabetes cases population ages 2485 years next 12 years overall population diabetes expected rise fig 2 among population distribution diagnosed undiagnosed individuals shaped rate arrival new cases continued screening diabetes medical system combined effect cohort established diagnosed diabetes grow cohort undiagnosed diabetes steadily declines stabilizes around 37 million 2020 2020 size cohort people undiagnosed diabetes estimated decline annual incident cohort size follows pattern growth medicare population follows many trends overall population diabetes 2009 model projects 65 million medicareeligible beneficiaries prevalent diagnosed diabetes 2009 09 million newly diagnosed diabetes another 09 million remain undiagnosed 2034 number individuals diagnosed diabetes eligible medicare rise 141 million size annual cohort undiagnosed diabetes decrease 440000 spending associated direct care diabetes complications analysis projected direct spending diabetes complications next 25 years fig 3 sum spending cohort currently diabetes prevalent cohort spending populations expected diagnosed next 25 years incident cohorts determines total costs diabetes future years next 25 years annual spending expected increase steeply approximately 336 billion constant 2007 usd mainly increasing size incident cohorts annual costs stabilize point size incident cohort plateaus similarly medicare spending diabetes care estimated rise 45 billion 2009 171 billion 2034 based estimates medicare spending alone represent 50 direct spending diabetes 2034 160 conclusions project next 25 years number americans diagnosed undiagnosed diabetes increase 237 million 441 million time period annual spending related diabetes expected increase 113 billion 336 billion constant 2007 usd changes driven size incoming age cohorts changes obesity overweight rates medicare project growth diabetes care spending exceeds current projections spending medicare growth domestic product analysis distinct prior efforts forecast future size diabetes population prior studies accounted changing size age composition overall population assumed fixed agespecific sex specific prevalence rates 23 recently boyle et al 4 demonstrated important impact changes ethnic composition population projected burden diabetes study distinct accounting evolving nature distribution body weight categories population analysis also unique accounting natural history diabetes complications innovations enhance ability forecast future costs attributable diabetes built model improve budgetary health outcome information available federal policymakers model provides rigorous assessment future burden diabetes accounts natural history disease recent advances treatment importantly model also used provide estimates impact alternative policy scenarios current practices federal scorekeeping agencies approach cost estimating manner generally provide estimates beyond 10 years diabetes model also meant serve example type forecasting model used policymakers considering policies chronic diseases models appropriate abundant epidemiological data available forecast natural history disease incidence progression case type 2 diabetes study several limitations first attempts forecast future costs utilizations conditional current rates utilization example used current estimates screening rates diabetes nhanes however rates change time future changes may influence results model also account individuals 24 years age enter population limitation may particularly relevant accurately incorporating diabetes prevalence incidence immigrant population may experience heterogeneous rates developing disease 25 lastly analysis transitions across bmi categories grouped individuals bmis 30 kgm2we lack available medical expenditure panel survey data model transitions across finer bmi categories many limitations may lead conservative estimates future size diabetes populations costs despite limitations study strongly suggests diabetes grow coming decades population size costs significant impacts lives americans financial viability programs like medicare forecasting models like help policymakers anticipate future burdens chronic diseases design targeted policies fight diseases effective ways possible terms clinical effectiveness costeffectiveness | 1,961 |
<p>“Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” led the field as the London Film Critics’ Circle announced the nominees for their annual awards this morning. Martin McDonagh’s debate-stoking dark comedy scored seven nominations, including bids for Film, Director and Actress of the Year, and repeated its recent SAG double-dip in the supporting actor category. Close behind, with six nods apiece, were Paul Thomas Anderson’s late-breaking “ <a href="http://variety.com/t/phantom-thread/" type="external">Phantom Thread</a>” and home-grown arthouse hit “ <a href="http://variety.com/t/lady-macbeth/" type="external">Lady Macbeth</a>.”</p>
<p>The latter’s nominations came primarily in the Circle’s British/Irish categories, though breakout star Florence Pugh did snag an Actress of the Year nod, alongside Frances McDormand, Sally Hawkins, Isabelle Huppert and Annette Bening. “Three Billboards,” “Dunkirk” and recent BIFA champ “God’s Own Country” all scored in both the Film of the Year and British/Irish Film of the Year category, with delightful wild card “ <a href="http://variety.com/t/paddington-2/" type="external">Paddington 2</a>” rounding out the latter field.</p>
<p>The Brits couldn’t be counted on to give “Darkest Hour” a renewed head of steam, however: As has been the case with U.S. awards groups, Joe Wright’s film received attention only for Gary Oldman — nominated for Actor of the Year with Timothée Chalamet, Daniel Day-Lewis, Daniel Kaluuya and James Franco.</p>
<p>The London critics tend to go their own way in certain respects: Bening gets her first mention of the season here for “Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool,” for example, while Hugh Grant in “ <a href="http://variety.com/2017/film/asia/china-box-office-coco-top-ahead-of-paddington-2-1202635485/" type="external">Paddington 2</a>” is an inspired pick for supporting actor. But for the most part, the films that have been dominating the awards conversation Stateside made strong showings across the pond too. Along with “Three Billboards,” “ <a href="http://variety.com/2017/scene/vpage/daniel-day-lewis-retirement-phantom-thread-premiere-1202637445/" type="external">Phantom Thread</a>” and “Dunkirk,” the Film of the Year field found room for “Call Me By Your Name,” “The Shape of Water,” “Lady Bird,” “Get Out” and “The Florida Project,” with nods for “God’s Own Country” and Russian sensation “Loveless” keeping things fresh.</p>
<p>The winners will be announced at the Circle’s awards ceremony in London on January 28, 2018, where <a href="http://variety.com/t/kate-winslet/" type="external">Kate Winslet</a> — not awards-eligible in the U.K. this year for “Wonder Wheel” — will also be presented with the group’s highest career-achievement honor, the Dilys Powell Award.</p>
<p>The full list of nominees:</p>
<p>Film of the Year“Call Me By Your Name”“Dunkirk”“The Florida Project”“Get Out”“God’s Own Country”“Lady Bird”“Loveless”“Phantom Thread”“The Shape of Water”“Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”</p>
<p>Foreign Language Film of the Year“Aquarius”“Elle”“The Handmaiden”“Loveless”“Raw”</p>
<p>British/Irish Film of the Year“Dunkirk”“God’s Own Country”“ <a href="http://variety.com/2017/film/news/gods-own-country-bifa-1202635435/" type="external">Lady Macbeth</a>”“Paddington 2”“Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”</p>
<p>Documentary of the Year“Human Flow”“I Am Not Your Negro”“Jane”“78/52”“The Work”</p>
<p>Director of the YearLuca Guadagnino, “Call Me By Your Name”Christopher Nolan, “Dunkirk”Sean Baker, “The Florida Project”Guillermo del Toro, “The Shape of Water”Martin McDonagh, “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”</p>
<p>Screenwriter of the YearJames Ivory, “Call Me By Your Name”Jordan Peele, “Get Out”Greta Gerwig, “Lady Bird”Paul Thomas Anderson, “Phantom Thread”Martin McDonagh, “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”</p>
<p>Actress of the YearAnnette Bening, “Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool”Sally Hawkins, “The Shape of Water”Isabelle Huppert, “Elle”Frances McDormand, “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”Florence Pugh, “Lady Macbeth”</p>
<p>Actor of the YearTimothée Chalamet, “Call Me By Your Name”Daniel Day-Lewis, “Phantom Thread”Daniel Kaluuya, “Get Out”James Franco, “The Disaster Artist”Gary Oldman, “Darkest Hour”</p>
<p>Supporting Actress of the YearLily Gladstone, “Certain Women”Holly Hunter, “The Big Sick”Allison Janney, “I, Tonya”Lesley Manville, “Phantom Thread”Laurie Metcalf, “Lady Bird”</p>
<p>Supporting Actor of the YearWillem Dafoe, “The Florida Project”Hugh Grant, “Paddington 2”Woody Harrelson, “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”Sam Rockwell, “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”Michael Stuhlbarg, “Call Me By Your Name”</p>
<p>British/Irish Actress of the YearEmily Beecham, “Daphne”Judi Dench, “Victoria &amp; Abdul”/”Murder on the Orient Express”Sally Hawkins, “The Shape of Water”/”Maudie”/”Paddington 2”Florence Pugh, “Lady Macbeth”Saoirse Ronan, “Lady Bird”/”Loving Vincent”</p>
<p>British/Irish Actor of the YearDaniel Day-Lewis, “Phantom Thread”Colin Farrell, “The Killing of a Sacred Deer”/”The Beguiled”Daniel Kaluuya, “Get Out”Josh O’Connor, “God’s Own Country”Gary Oldman, “Darkest Hour”/”The Space Between Us”</p>
<p>Young British/Irish Performer of the YearHarris Dickinson, “Beach Rats”Tom Holland, “The Lost City of Z”/”Spiderman: Homecoming”Noah Jupe, “Wonder”/”Suburbicon”/”The Man With the Iron Heart”Dafne Keen, “Logan”Fionn Whitehead, “Dunkirk”</p>
<p>Breakthrough British/Irish Filmmaker of the YearAlice Birch, screenwriter, “Lady Macbeth”Simon Farnaby, screenwriter, “Paddington 2″/”Mindhorn”Francis Lee, writer-director, “God’s Own Country”Rungano Nyoni, writer-director, “I Am Not a Witch”William Oldroyd, director, “Lady Macbeth”</p>
<p>Technical Achievement of the Year“Baby Driver,” Darrin Prescott and Jeremy Fry, stunts“Blade Runner 2049,” Dennis Gassner, production design“Dunkirk,” Hans Zimmer, music“God’s Own Country,” Joshua James Richards, cinematography“Lady Macbeth,” Holly Waddington, costume design“The Lost City of Z,” Darius Khondji, cinematography“The Love Witch,” Emma Willis, makeup and hairstyling“Paddington 2,” Pablo Grillo, visual effects“Phantom Thread,” Mark Bridges, costume design“Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” Ben Morris, visual effects</p> | false | 1 | three billboards outside ebbing missouri led field london film critics circle announced nominees annual awards morning martin mcdonaghs debatestoking dark comedy scored seven nominations including bids film director actress year repeated recent sag doubledip supporting actor category close behind six nods apiece paul thomas andersons latebreaking phantom thread homegrown arthouse hit lady macbeth latters nominations came primarily circles britishirish categories though breakout star florence pugh snag actress year nod alongside frances mcdormand sally hawkins isabelle huppert annette bening three billboards dunkirk recent bifa champ gods country scored film year britishirish film year category delightful wild card paddington 2 rounding latter field brits couldnt counted give darkest hour renewed head steam however case us awards groups joe wrights film received attention gary oldman nominated actor year timothée chalamet daniel daylewis daniel kaluuya james franco london critics tend go way certain respects bening gets first mention season film stars dont die liverpool example hugh grant paddington 2 inspired pick supporting actor part films dominating awards conversation stateside made strong showings across pond along three billboards phantom thread dunkirk film year field found room call name shape water lady bird get florida project nods gods country russian sensation loveless keeping things fresh winners announced circles awards ceremony london january 28 2018 kate winslet awardseligible uk year wonder wheel also presented groups highest careerachievement honor dilys powell award full list nominees film yearcall namedunkirkthe florida projectget outgods countrylady birdlovelessphantom threadthe shape waterthree billboards outside ebbing missouri foreign language film yearaquariusellethe handmaidenlovelessraw britishirish film yeardunkirkgods country lady macbethpaddington 2three billboards outside ebbing missouri documentary yearhuman flowi negrojane7852the work director yearluca guadagnino call namechristopher nolan dunkirksean baker florida projectguillermo del toro shape watermartin mcdonagh three billboards outside ebbing missouri screenwriter yearjames ivory call namejordan peele get outgreta gerwig lady birdpaul thomas anderson phantom threadmartin mcdonagh three billboards outside ebbing missouri actress yearannette bening film stars dont die liverpoolsally hawkins shape waterisabelle huppert ellefrances mcdormand three billboards outside ebbing missouriflorence pugh lady macbeth actor yeartimothée chalamet call namedaniel daylewis phantom threaddaniel kaluuya get outjames franco disaster artistgary oldman darkest hour supporting actress yearlily gladstone certain womenholly hunter big sickallison janney tonyalesley manville phantom threadlaurie metcalf lady bird supporting actor yearwillem dafoe florida projecthugh grant paddington 2woody harrelson three billboards outside ebbing missourisam rockwell three billboards outside ebbing missourimichael stuhlbarg call name britishirish actress yearemily beecham daphnejudi dench victoria amp abdulmurder orient expresssally hawkins shape watermaudiepaddington 2florence pugh lady macbethsaoirse ronan lady birdloving vincent britishirish actor yeardaniel daylewis phantom threadcolin farrell killing sacred deerthe beguileddaniel kaluuya get outjosh oconnor gods countrygary oldman darkest hourthe space us young britishirish performer yearharris dickinson beach ratstom holland lost city zspiderman homecomingnoah jupe wondersuburbiconthe man iron heartdafne keen loganfionn whitehead dunkirk breakthrough britishirish filmmaker yearalice birch screenwriter lady macbethsimon farnaby screenwriter paddington 2mindhornfrancis lee writerdirector gods countryrungano nyoni writerdirector witchwilliam oldroyd director lady macbeth technical achievement yearbaby driver darrin prescott jeremy fry stuntsblade runner 2049 dennis gassner production designdunkirk hans zimmer musicgods country joshua james richards cinematographylady macbeth holly waddington costume designthe lost city z darius khondji cinematographythe love witch emma willis makeup hairstylingpaddington 2 pablo grillo visual effectsphantom thread mark bridges costume designstar wars last jedi ben morris visual effects | 529 |
<p>The Democrat from El Paso and the Republican from San Antonio began their 1,600-mile road trip to Washington before dawn Tuesday.</p>
<p>By lunch they had stopped at SXSW in Austin, learned the uniting power of coffee from a barista in San Marcos, shared a granola bar they’d split down the middle and, yes, starred in their own version of “Carpool Karaoke.”</p>
<p>“On the road again,” Willie Nelson sang from the speakers of their 1999 Chevy Impala rental. “Like a band of gypsies, we go down the highway.”</p>
<p>For the next line, Reps. Beto O’Rourke, D, and Will Hurd, R, joined in, belting, “We’re the best of friends.”</p>
<p />
<p />
<p />
<p>But just hours earlier, the men weren’t much more than colleagues, brought together on this day, in this car, because they shared a common predicament and destination. A blizzard in the northeast had canceled Hurd’s flight back to Washington and delayed O’Rourke’s. They were due in the House for floor votes by 6 p.m. Wednesday.</p>
<p>So O’Rourke, who had spent Monday in San Antonio talking to veterans with Hurd, proposed a radical idea: a cross-country road trip, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/HurdOnTheHill/" type="external">broadcast live via Periscope and Facebook for all of</a> <a href="https://www.facebook.com/HurdOnTheHill/" type="external">America</a>.</p>
<p />
<p />
<p />
<p>Hurd, at first reluctant because of their differing styles of travel and politics, eventually agreed.</p>
<p>They decided to call it a town hall meeting on wheels, their “road to work” adventure, an impromptu experiment in democracy free of the aides and entourages of Washington.</p>
<p>At 5 a.m., they rented the Impala and crawled inside, O’Rourke behind the wheel and Hurd riding shotgun. Their only passengers were their cellphones, which, affixed to the dashboard, welcomed thousands of viewers to tune in for the ride.</p>
<p>They welcomed questions from their audience, personal and political in nature, and solicited playlist suggestions, must-see attractions and food pit stops to hit along the way.</p>
<p>At first, the men seemed stiff, exchanging pleasantries and biographies.</p>
<p>But by nightfall, they felt like old friends, the kind that belt Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” off tune, criticize each other’s driving, mock Whataburger drive-through orders and indulge on doughnuts at midnight in Memphis.</p>
<p>All day, they pondered tough questions — who would play them in the movie version of their trip, cake vs. pie, salsa verde or salsa roja — but they also fielded inquiries about the serious political issues facing Americans, including the Republican health-care bill, the border wall, criminal justice reform, foreign policy and Kellyanne Conway’s theory that microwaves can spy on you.</p>
<p>Inevitably, they faced occasionally hostile questions about President Trump.</p>
<p>One viewer offered a simple suggestion to fix the political divide: force all members of Congress to drive around in a car on Facebook Live until they resolve their differences.</p>
<p>“This gives me faith for our country,” one woman commented on Facebook.</p>
<p>“This is America,” wrote another. “United we stand!”</p>
<p>The adventure engaged other elected officials from the across the country, who phoned the congressmen to weigh in on policy issues and offer the weary travelers support.</p>
<p />
<p />
<p />
<p />
<p>At a gas station somewhere between Little Rock and the Tennessee state line, Hurd — at this point comfortable enough with O’Rourke to have nicknamed him “B” — thought his new friend had been kidnapped.</p>
<p>“Where the hell is Beto?” Hurd asked the live stream.</p>
<p>“I hope he didn’t get taken,” he continued, referencing the thriller movie starring Liam Neeson. “I have a certain set of skills, America.”</p>
<p>Although their original intent was to make the trip in a straight, 24-hour shot, it was not to be. Traffic delays, loquaciousness and a detour to Elvis’s Graceland slowed them down. At just after 3 a.m. Eastern time, with “Carry on Wayward Son” blaring, they finally reached their hotel in Nashville, where they planned to crash for a few hours before finishing the final 10-hours of their cross-country trip — ideally in time for their floor vote Wednesday night.</p>
<p>But before they turned in for the night, the congressmen made time for one last stop en route to Nashville.</p>
<p>From the road they could see the fluorescent sign for Gibson’s Donuts, a treasured pastry shop outside Memphis whose loyal customers, including a woman named Molly, had been courting the approaching congressmen for hours on the live feed.</p>
<p>They pulled the Impala into the parking lot and ventured inside, where they found a long line of patrons waiting on doughnuts and Molly calling out to them from a corner booth.</p>
<p>“Molly,” Hurd said. “You da best.”</p>
<p>“Welcome to Memphis!” she said.</p>
<p>They shook hands with a self-proclaimed “yellow-dog Democrat” who recommended the apple-filled doughnuts and told O’Rourke he was the one who looked like a Republican. The staff at Gibson’s gave the congressmen a kitchen tour and complimentary T-shirts.</p>
<p>O’Rourke listened to a woman worried that she may never be able to pay off her student loans, and Hurd told those gathered in the shop that he and his district neighbor don’t always see eye to eye on policy, but that their road trip was about being able to “disagree without being disagreeable.”</p>
<p>“You’re buddies?” an older man asked the congressmen, to which O’Rourke responded: “We’re becoming buddies.”</p>
<p>And after a brief Facebook Live of their Facebook Live by a local reporter (“meta,” O’Rourke commented), the congressmen walked out of Gibson’s with a box full of warm, fresh cake doughnuts.</p>
<p>Back in the car, they showed their viewers the loot.</p>
<p>O’Rourke reached for a doughnut doused in chocolate; Hurd’s was frosting-free. Then the Republican turned to the Democrat and the two tapped their treats together.</p>
<p>“Cheers, buddy.”</p>
<p /> | false | 1 | democrat el paso republican san antonio began 1600mile road trip washington dawn tuesday lunch stopped sxsw austin learned uniting power coffee barista san marcos shared granola bar theyd split middle yes starred version carpool karaoke road willie nelson sang speakers 1999 chevy impala rental like band gypsies go highway next line reps beto orourke hurd r joined belting best friends hours earlier men werent much colleagues brought together day car shared common predicament destination blizzard northeast canceled hurds flight back washington delayed orourkes due house floor votes 6 pm wednesday orourke spent monday san antonio talking veterans hurd proposed radical idea crosscountry road trip broadcast live via periscope facebook america hurd first reluctant differing styles travel politics eventually agreed decided call town hall meeting wheels road work adventure impromptu experiment democracy free aides entourages washington 5 rented impala crawled inside orourke behind wheel hurd riding shotgun passengers cellphones affixed dashboard welcomed thousands viewers tune ride welcomed questions audience personal political nature solicited playlist suggestions mustsee attractions food pit stops hit along way first men seemed stiff exchanging pleasantries biographies nightfall felt like old friends kind belt johnny cashs ring fire tune criticize others driving mock whataburger drivethrough orders indulge doughnuts midnight memphis day pondered tough questions would play movie version trip cake vs pie salsa verde salsa roja also fielded inquiries serious political issues facing americans including republican healthcare bill border wall criminal justice reform foreign policy kellyanne conways theory microwaves spy inevitably faced occasionally hostile questions president trump one viewer offered simple suggestion fix political divide force members congress drive around car facebook live resolve differences gives faith country one woman commented facebook america wrote another united stand adventure engaged elected officials across country phoned congressmen weigh policy issues offer weary travelers support gas station somewhere little rock tennessee state line hurd point comfortable enough orourke nicknamed b thought new friend kidnapped hell beto hurd asked live stream hope didnt get taken continued referencing thriller movie starring liam neeson certain set skills america although original intent make trip straight 24hour shot traffic delays loquaciousness detour elviss graceland slowed 3 eastern time carry wayward son blaring finally reached hotel nashville planned crash hours finishing final 10hours crosscountry trip ideally time floor vote wednesday night turned night congressmen made time one last stop en route nashville road could see fluorescent sign gibsons donuts treasured pastry shop outside memphis whose loyal customers including woman named molly courting approaching congressmen hours live feed pulled impala parking lot ventured inside found long line patrons waiting doughnuts molly calling corner booth molly hurd said da best welcome memphis said shook hands selfproclaimed yellowdog democrat recommended applefilled doughnuts told orourke one looked like republican staff gibsons gave congressmen kitchen tour complimentary tshirts orourke listened woman worried may never able pay student loans hurd told gathered shop district neighbor dont always see eye eye policy road trip able disagree without disagreeable youre buddies older man asked congressmen orourke responded becoming buddies brief facebook live facebook live local reporter meta orourke commented congressmen walked gibsons box full warm fresh cake doughnuts back car showed viewers loot orourke reached doughnut doused chocolate hurds frostingfree republican turned democrat two tapped treats together cheers buddy | 534 |
<p>By Hyonhee Shin and Soyoung Kim</p>
<p>SEOUL (Reuters) – The promotion of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s 28-year-old sister to the country’s top decision-making body is a sign he is strengthening his position by drawing his most important people closer to the center of power, experts and officials say.</p>
<p>Kim Yo Jong was named as an alternate member of the politburo within the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea – the opaque, all-powerful party organ where top state affairs are decided, the North’s official media said on Sunday.</p>
<p>It makes her only the second woman in patriarchal North Korea to join the exclusive club after Kim Kyong Hui, who held powerful roles when her brother Kim Jong Il ruled the country.</p>
<p>“Since she is a female, Kim Jong Un likely does not see her as a threat and a challenge to his leadership,” said Moon Hong-sik, research fellow at the Institute for National Security Strategy. “As the saying goes ‘blood is thicker than water,’ Kim Jong Un thinks Kim Yo Jong can be trusted.”</p>
<p>Unlike her aunt, who was promoted to the politburo in 2012 after serving more than three decades in the party, Kim Yo Jong has risen to power at an unprecedented pace.</p>
<p>Kim Kyong Hui has not been seen since her husband, Jang Song Thaek, once regarded as the No.2 leader in Pyongyang, was executed in 2013. South Korea’s spy agency believes she is now in a secluded place near Pyongyang undergoing a treatment for an unidentified disease, according to an August briefing to parliament.</p>
<p>Jang and his wife are not the only relatives to fall from Kim Jong Un’s favor.</p>
<p>Kim Jong Un’s estranged half-brother, Kim Jong Nam, was killed with a toxic nerve agent at a Malaysian airport in February. Two women are on trial for the murder, which South Korean and U.S. officials believe Kim Jong Un’s regime was behind.</p>
<p>Kim Jong Nam, who lived in exile in Macau, had criticized his family’s dynastic rule and his brother had issued a standing order for his execution, according to some South Korean lawmakers.</p>
<p>IN A PONYTAIL AND BLACK SUITS</p>
<p>The smartly dressed Kim Yo Jong, her hair usually pulled back in a ponytail and mostly seen in black suits and black-heeled shoes, made her first debut on state media in December 2011, seen standing tearfully next to Kim Jong Un at the funeral of their father.</p>
<p>Since then, Kim has made several appearances with her brother, giggling at concerts, riding a white horse, smiling as she receives flowers on his behalf at state functions.</p>
<p>Her youth and bubbly personality seen in state media are in stark contrast to the usually glum generals and aging party cadres who follow Kim Jong Un on official duties.</p>
<p>Having previously only occasionally appeared in the background, the young heiress has moved to the front and center of media photos more recently, assisting her brother at numerous high-profile state events.</p>
<p>At a massive military parade in April to mark the 105th birth anniversary of founding father Kim Il Sung, she was seen rushing out from behind pillars to bring paperwork to her brother as he prepared to give an address.</p>
<p>The same month, she stood alongside him during the unveiling ceremony of a construction project in Pyongyang.</p>
<p>In March 2016, she&#160;accompanied Kim Jong Un to a field guidance for nuclear scientists, where he claimed successful miniaturisation of nuclear warheads.</p>
<p>“Kim Yo Jong’s official inclusion in the 30-strong exclusive club of North Korea’s chief policy makers means her role within the regime will be expanded further,” Cheong Seong-chang, senior fellow at the Sejong Institute south of Seoul.</p>
<p>BEHIND THE VEIL</p>
<p>Apart from her age, little is&#160;known about Kim Yo Jong. She was publicly identified for the first time in February 2011 when a South Korean TV station caught her at a Eric Clapton concert in Singapore with her other brother, Kim Jong Chol.</p>
<p>The three, who all reportedly went to school in Switzerland, are full blood siblings, born&#160;to Kim Jong Il’s fourth partner, Ko Yong Hui.&#160;</p>
<p>Kim Jong Chol, the oldest of Kim Jong Il’s sons, does not involve himself in politics, leading a quiet life in Pyongyang where he plays guitar in a band, according to Thae Yong Ho, North Korea’s former deputy ambassador in London who defected to the South.</p>
<p>In 2014, Kim Yo Jong was made vice director of the Workers’ Party’s Propaganda and Agitation Department, which handles ideological messaging through the media, arts and culture.&#160;</p>
<p>The position led the U.S. Treasury Department to blacklist her along with six other North Korean officials in January for “severe human rights abuses” and censorship that concealed the regime’s “inhumane and oppressive behavior”.</p>
<p>Last year, South Korea’s former spy chief said Kim Yo Jong was seen “abusing power”, punishing propaganda department executives for “minor mistakes”.</p>
<p>In a North Korean state media photo in January 2015, she was spotted wearing a ring on her fourth finger during a visit to a child care center.</p>
<p>South Korean intelligence officials say Kim might have wed a schoolmate from the prestigious Kim Il Sung University, but there has been no confirmation of whether she is indeed married or to whom.</p> | false | 1 | hyonhee shin soyoung kim seoul reuters promotion north korean leader kim jong uns 28yearold sister countrys top decisionmaking body sign strengthening position drawing important people closer center power experts officials say kim yo jong named alternate member politburo within ruling workers party korea opaque allpowerful party organ top state affairs decided norths official media said sunday makes second woman patriarchal north korea join exclusive club kim kyong hui held powerful roles brother kim jong il ruled country since female kim jong un likely see threat challenge leadership said moon hongsik research fellow institute national security strategy saying goes blood thicker water kim jong un thinks kim yo jong trusted unlike aunt promoted politburo 2012 serving three decades party kim yo jong risen power unprecedented pace kim kyong hui seen since husband jang song thaek regarded no2 leader pyongyang executed 2013 south koreas spy agency believes secluded place near pyongyang undergoing treatment unidentified disease according august briefing parliament jang wife relatives fall kim jong uns favor kim jong uns estranged halfbrother kim jong nam killed toxic nerve agent malaysian airport february two women trial murder south korean us officials believe kim jong uns regime behind kim jong nam lived exile macau criticized familys dynastic rule brother issued standing order execution according south korean lawmakers ponytail black suits smartly dressed kim yo jong hair usually pulled back ponytail mostly seen black suits blackheeled shoes made first debut state media december 2011 seen standing tearfully next kim jong un funeral father since kim made several appearances brother giggling concerts riding white horse smiling receives flowers behalf state functions youth bubbly personality seen state media stark contrast usually glum generals aging party cadres follow kim jong un official duties previously occasionally appeared background young heiress moved front center media photos recently assisting brother numerous highprofile state events massive military parade april mark 105th birth anniversary founding father kim il sung seen rushing behind pillars bring paperwork brother prepared give address month stood alongside unveiling ceremony construction project pyongyang march 2016 she160accompanied kim jong un field guidance nuclear scientists claimed successful miniaturisation nuclear warheads kim yo jongs official inclusion 30strong exclusive club north koreas chief policy makers means role within regime expanded cheong seongchang senior fellow sejong institute south seoul behind veil apart age little is160known kim yo jong publicly identified first time february 2011 south korean tv station caught eric clapton concert singapore brother kim jong chol three reportedly went school switzerland full blood siblings born160to kim jong ils fourth partner ko yong hui160 kim jong chol oldest kim jong ils sons involve politics leading quiet life pyongyang plays guitar band according thae yong ho north koreas former deputy ambassador london defected south 2014 kim yo jong made vice director workers partys propaganda agitation department handles ideological messaging media arts culture160 position led us treasury department blacklist along six north korean officials january severe human rights abuses censorship concealed regimes inhumane oppressive behavior last year south koreas former spy chief said kim yo jong seen abusing power punishing propaganda department executives minor mistakes north korean state media photo january 2015 spotted wearing ring fourth finger visit child care center south korean intelligence officials say kim might wed schoolmate prestigious kim il sung university confirmation whether indeed married | 543 |
<p>I did not vote for President-Elect Donald Trump and continue to question his fitness to serve. Thus I am unsurprised that hundreds of thousands of women would want to protest his election this coming Saturday, the day after the inauguration. I am surprised, however, that the leaders of the Women’s March on Washington—and most feminists today—are so <a href="http://nymag.com/thecut/2017/01/womens-march-2017-drops-anti-choice-partner-after-backlash.html?mid=fb-share-thecut" type="external">unwilling</a> to listen to an alternative feminist perspective, one with deep roots in feminist history and a good deal to offer to women today.</p>
<p>As a pro-choice activist who helped lead my college’s Women’s Center in the 1990s, and now, decades later, as a pro-life feminist, I too have looked forward to the day when a strong and accomplished woman would lead our nation. But however strong and accomplished, Secretary Clinton was not the woman for me. To me she represents all the contradictions of abortion rights feminism, contradictions also conspicuous in the <a href="https://www.womensmarch.com/mission/" type="external">guiding principles</a> of the Women’s March. In my view, an authentic women’s movement—one that properly extols human dignity, care, and non-violence—must be unabashedly pro-life.</p>
<p>With both Trump’s inauguration and the 44th anniversary of Roe v Wade decision fast approaching, I have been concerned that Donald Trump the man—as president of the United States—would actually strengthen in the American imagination the popular feminist fallacy that abortion is necessary to <a href="http://www.harvard-jlpp.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/34_3_889_Bachiochi.pdf" type="external">women’s equality</a>. After all, Donald Trump as “pro-life candidate” fit perfectly the pro-choice caricature of an abortion opponent: degrading to and disrespectful of women. If I could say just one thing to those at the Women’s March, it would be this: the constitutional right to abortion has only made men like Trump worse.</p>
<p>Contraception fails. It just does. But constitutionalizing the right to abortion as Roe did in January 1973 hasn’t relieved women of the consequences of sex or the vulnerabilities of pregnancy. Rather it has detached men even further from sex’s procreative potential and, for the poor in particular, increased the vulnerability of both women and children. That is, easy abortion empowers the male illusion that sex can finally be completely consequence-free. For men, anyway.</p>
<p>The ascendancy of abortion rights feminism over the last fifty years has failed to remedy the sort of objectification of women on particular display by our president-elect in the unearthed Access Hollywood&#160; <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/10/08/trump-lewd-attack-on-women---the-full-transcript/" type="external">video</a> and <a href="http://digitalcommons.uri.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1033&amp;context=dignity" type="external">beyond</a>. As pro-life feminists have long <a href="http://www.angelfire.com/ego/staples009/images/15.htm" type="external">argued</a>, the undisciplined testosterone-driven male libido, interested in no-strings-attached sex, benefits most from an abortion-permissive culture. And when male sexuality goes undisciplined, bereft of the deep emotional bonds once demanded by self-respecting women, sex is sought for pleasure alone. For the most callous of men, women become mere pleasure-providers, the objects of the male libido’s aggressive demands.</p>
<p>Indeed, worry over the tendencies of dissolute men was a key reason women’s <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/1566477?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents" type="external">suffragists</a> of the late 19th century did not see abortion as the panacea their successors have. Unlike today’s abortion-rights-feminists, the suffragists feared that sex unmoored from its procreative potential would increase male sexual immorality and infidelity. The suffragists were seeking just the reverse: “Votes for women, chastity for men” was actually a <a href="http://www.ampltd.co.uk/digital_guides/women_suffrage_and_politics_sylvia_pankhurst/Introduction-to-Sylvia-Pankhurst.aspx" type="external">suffragist</a> slogan.</p>
<p>And yet, in a bitter irony (with encouragement from some <a href="http://www.feministsforlife.org/men-launched-the-movement-to-legalize-abortion/" type="external">men</a>), those carrying the feminist mantel in the 1970s abandoned this vision of sexual integrity for both sexes and legalized abortion became the sine qua non of sexual freedom. Transforming male-oriented institutions—and the men that governed them—was just too difficult: <a href="http://www.americamagazine.org/issue/feminist-case-against-abortion" type="external">conforming</a> women’s bodies seemed a far easier path. If men could reduce sex to sport, denying the intimate connection created with the women they bedded and the children they fathered, well, women ought to be able to do the same.</p>
<p>Only we can’t. Sex-induced hormones connect us more than “casual” sex would seem to allow. And women must worry about pregnancy, about how carrying a child would impact our bodies, and how caring for a child would shape our futures. And so, women also tend to see more clearly the vulnerability inherent in the human condition, the human goods brought about in giving care, and how our politics affect those at the margins.</p>
<p>So why would women ever think it “better” to treat sex, the act that creates new dependent human life, so casually, as if it lacked profound consequences for connection and caregiving? Why would any feminist think it is a moral advance for women to imitate male abandonment of the vulnerable through abortion?</p>
<p>Influential women such as Anne-Marie Slaughter thankfully have begun to <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Unfinished-Business-Women-Work-Family/dp/0812984978" type="external">highlight</a> a more authentic feminist logic: if society better valued caregiving, then perhaps men would do more of it, and we’d see greater collaboration in the home, more equity in the workplace, and more family-friendly policies. But as pro-choice law professor Robin West has <a href="https://www.routledge.com/In-Search-of-Common-Ground-on-Abortion-From-Culture-War-to-Reproductive/West-Murray-Esser/p/book/9781472420466" type="external">noticed</a>, the constitutionalizing of abortion rights in Roe stands in dramatic tension with a political agenda that better values caregiving.</p>
<p>Were it not for the wedding of modern feminism with the sexual revolution, many more men, I think, would more readily value the culturally essential work of caregiving. Both <a href="http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo3623927.html" type="external">research</a>and my personal experience suggests that men who aren’t beholden to the fleeting attractions of sexual pleasure do value caregiving, and consider the nurture and education of their children their most essential work. I dare say that these men are the very picture of the emotionally available, responsible, and engaged husbands and fathers my feminist sisters and I once dreamed of. Abortion rights will not produce more such men; but a greater appreciation that sex is a serious enterprise just might.</p>
<p>Erika Bachiochi is a visiting fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and author of “Embodied Equality: Debunking Equal Protection Arguments for Abortion Rights.” The views expressed in this commentary are solely hers.</p> | false | 1 | vote presidentelect donald trump continue question fitness serve thus unsurprised hundreds thousands women would want protest election coming saturday day inauguration surprised however leaders womens march washingtonand feminists todayare unwilling listen alternative feminist perspective one deep roots feminist history good deal offer women today prochoice activist helped lead colleges womens center 1990s decades later prolife feminist looked forward day strong accomplished woman would lead nation however strong accomplished secretary clinton woman represents contradictions abortion rights feminism contradictions also conspicuous guiding principles womens march view authentic womens movementone properly extols human dignity care nonviolencemust unabashedly prolife trumps inauguration 44th anniversary roe v wade decision fast approaching concerned donald trump manas president united stateswould actually strengthen american imagination popular feminist fallacy abortion necessary womens equality donald trump prolife candidate fit perfectly prochoice caricature abortion opponent degrading disrespectful women could say one thing womens march would constitutional right abortion made men like trump worse contraception fails constitutionalizing right abortion roe january 1973 hasnt relieved women consequences sex vulnerabilities pregnancy rather detached men even sexs procreative potential poor particular increased vulnerability women children easy abortion empowers male illusion sex finally completely consequencefree men anyway ascendancy abortion rights feminism last fifty years failed remedy sort objectification women particular display presidentelect unearthed access hollywood160 video beyond prolife feminists long argued undisciplined testosteronedriven male libido interested nostringsattached sex benefits abortionpermissive culture male sexuality goes undisciplined bereft deep emotional bonds demanded selfrespecting women sex sought pleasure alone callous men women become mere pleasureproviders objects male libidos aggressive demands indeed worry tendencies dissolute men key reason womens suffragists late 19th century see abortion panacea successors unlike todays abortionrightsfeminists suffragists feared sex unmoored procreative potential would increase male sexual immorality infidelity suffragists seeking reverse votes women chastity men actually suffragist slogan yet bitter irony encouragement men carrying feminist mantel 1970s abandoned vision sexual integrity sexes legalized abortion became sine qua non sexual freedom transforming maleoriented institutionsand men governed themwas difficult conforming womens bodies seemed far easier path men could reduce sex sport denying intimate connection created women bedded children fathered well women ought able cant sexinduced hormones connect us casual sex would seem allow women must worry pregnancy carrying child would impact bodies caring child would shape futures women also tend see clearly vulnerability inherent human condition human goods brought giving care politics affect margins would women ever think better treat sex act creates new dependent human life casually lacked profound consequences connection caregiving would feminist think moral advance women imitate male abandonment vulnerable abortion influential women annemarie slaughter thankfully begun highlight authentic feminist logic society better valued caregiving perhaps men would wed see greater collaboration home equity workplace familyfriendly policies prochoice law professor robin west noticed constitutionalizing abortion rights roe stands dramatic tension political agenda better values caregiving wedding modern feminism sexual revolution many men think would readily value culturally essential work caregiving researchand personal experience suggests men arent beholden fleeting attractions sexual pleasure value caregiving consider nurture education children essential work dare say men picture emotionally available responsible engaged husbands fathers feminist sisters dreamed abortion rights produce men greater appreciation sex serious enterprise might erika bachiochi visiting fellow ethics public policy center author embodied equality debunking equal protection arguments abortion rights views expressed commentary solely | 537 |
<p>The Super Bowl is over. March Madness is fast approaching, with NBA and Stanley Cup playoffs close behind. Spring training for the new baseball season has begun. Year after year, season by season, sports fans across the country shift their attentions, polish their loyalties, and renew their hopes: maybe this year, just this once, it won’t again be “wait ’til next year.”</p>
<p>For many decades, America’s most significant athletic contests have been our most popular civic rituals, temporarily removing us from the normal rhythms of everyday life. Medieval Europeans built cathedrals; our ancestors built civic monuments and memorials; we build sports palaces. There we gather, not only vicariously to taste the sweetness of victory but also to celebrate together all that is perennially great in human sport–excellence, grace, and the intense moments that separate triumph from tragedy. It is easy to dismiss sport as a triviality, and some highbrows will always do so. Yet these games that youngsters play somehow seem to capture both the lowest and the loftiest possibilities of embodied human life, eliciting in participant spectators and spectating participants the full range of human passions, from rapturous joy to paralyzing despair.</p>
<p>But all is not well in the world of sports. The football season began with a superstar banished for killing dogs and ended with a United States senator charging espionage; former Olympic winners are forced to return their medals; and the baseball season will open under a cloud of steroids and finger-wagging congressional hearings, which put one of baseball’s greatest pitchers in the stocks. More generally, many contemporary fans believe that the golden age of sport has long since passed–that modern athletics has become both corrupt and corrupting. Athletes are mercenaries, goes the lament, driven by the love of money. The pursuit of excellence has been sacrificed to spectacle, shaped more by the demands of television profits than the dignity of the game. Our heroes are often villains, with no regard for the law of the land or the rules of the game. Sport has morphed into entertainment, and sportsmen into unsportsmanlike trash-talking punks. It was not always thus, the old man sighs, longing for the days of Ruth and Gehrig, Williams and DiMaggio.</p>
<p>Our nostalgia, of course, is something of a distortion, if a noble one. Our ignorance of the sporting past–the vanity of the original Greek Olympians, the base passions of the original Roman fans, the tawdry character of many early twentieth-century baseball stars, the point-shaving and other gambling-related scandals–allows us to forget that much of what we lament about the present is not at all novel. And when it comes to the recent past–the era that today’s graying elders remember longingly from their now lost youth–it is far more pleasant and ennobling to remember the best and to forget the worst; to judge today’s athletes against an idealization of those who came before. No doubt, a generation hence, tomorrow’s elders will do the same, longing for the days of Tiger Woods and Derek Jeter and Peyton Manning.</p>
<p>Yet if nostalgia is a danger, so is failing to reckon squarely with an adulteration of sports that is, in fact, unique to our age. For the nature of athletics has indeed changed greatly from the naked runners and wrestlers of Athens and Sparta to the would-be champions of the Beijing Olympics. In the modern era we have seen a series of dramatic changes in what it means to be both an athlete and a spectator. The first great transformation was captured powerfully in 1981 in the film Chariots of Fire, which dealt with the Olympics of 1924: it portrayed the cultural shift, then just emerging, from the amateur to the professional. Exercise became training; practice became drills; the pursuit of victory became a science (and a business). The new professionals quickly accomplished feats unheard of in the days of the amateur–with more power, greater speed, and unprecedentedly complex strategies of execution. The original men of the gridiron would find much about modern football unimaginable: the size and the skill of the players; the management of the game with overhead photos, helmet headphones, and aging masterminds calling every play from upstairs; the serial loyalties of players who move from one team to the next, abandoning their followers to follow the money.</p>
<p>Combined with the new age of radio and especially big-market television, the professionalization of sport changed the ethic of the players and the outlook of the fans. With team owners raking in billions, players came to expect, and to demand, financial rewards commensurate with their value in the marketplace. They came to see their own achievements, measured quantitatively and enshrined in record books, as assets that may be “monetized” into endorsements. And fans became ambivalent about the games that they followed with such intensity. We still marvel at the games’ great players, but we question their motivations. We hunger for greater thrills and broken records, but we mourn a lost purity of play that the new professionalism has crowded out. We are devoted unto death to our local teams, but we watch our hometown heroes sign contracts with our arch-rivals within minutes (or so it seems) of the city’s victory parade. We expect to be entertained, but we still want sport to be something more than a circus or a rock concert. We love taking our children to the ball field, but we fear that today’s superstars are bad role models for the young.</p>
<p>Into this culture of ambivalence comes the Mitchell Report and the congressional hearings that it has prompted. The report, issued last December, is a 409-page indictment of the widespread use of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball. Commissioned by Bud Selig, the commissioner of baseball, and provoked by numerous allegations of illicit drug use by recently active and current players, the report was written by former Senator George Mitchell after months of thorough investigation, extensive interviews, and private testimony. We now live, the report declares to no one’s surprise, in the “era of steroids. ” Although it does little to explain how or why we entered this tawdry era, the report expresses the hope that its findings will help bring the era to an end, through stricter oversight, tougher penalties, and better education about the dangerous side effects of performance-enhancing drugs.</p>
<p>Such reforms, however welcome, seem unlikely to halt the glory- or wealth-seeking athlete’s turn to biotechnology in the pursuit of superior performance. Indeed, in a few years the age of steroids may look quaint by comparison with future doping technologies, such as genetic muscle enhancements that could be both impossible to trace and more effective than steroids or growth hormone. If professionalization was the last century’s great transformation of sport, biotechnical enhancement looks to be this century’s great degradation of sport. And while the Mitchell Report gives voice to a widespread concern about the disturbing effects of performance-enhancing drugs on modern athletics, it also demonstrates our inability (or unwillingness) to confront the deeper sources of the trouble. We seem to know that biotechnological enhancement is a threat to the “integrity of the game,” but we cannot really articulate why. The reason is that we have lost an understanding of what makes sports truly admirable, and hence worthy of our attention and our devotion.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>II.</p>
<p>By spending nearly all of its hundreds of pages documenting who used which drugs and when, the Mitchell Report takes for granted that using steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs is a moral and legal offense that should be opposed. It offers a brief list of reasons for the current ban: steroid use unfairly disadvantages honest athletes, undermines the validity of baseball records, harms the human body, sets a bad example for young a thletes, and threatens the integrity of the game. These concerns are all genuine, but they are never subjected to rigorous analysis. Only by examining them carefully can we see their inadequacy.</p>
<p>The fact that steroids are illegal is, of course, a good reason not to use them–but not a reason why they should remain illegal, or why they were proscribed in the first place. Declaring that steroids unfairly advantage those who use them, while true, is not a sufficient reason for continuing to prohibit their use. Why not, in the name of fairness, allow those individuals with more limited natural gifts to use steroids and other chemical agents to level the playing field, so that victory will come not to the most talented but rather to those who make the best use of their talents? Or why not allow all athletes to use performance-enhancing drugs openly and legally, thus giving everyone free and fair access to whatever enhancements they choose? Indeed, the Mitchell Report itself suggests that one of the solutions to the steroid problem is to promote other kinds of nutritional supplements that would allow players to “achieve the same results.” But this begs the question: why are some body-altering or performance-boosting supplements to be applauded and others to be decried?</p>
<p>In its claim that steroid use “victimizes” non-users by giving them three undesirable choices–lose out to the biologically enhanced, quit the game, or imperil their bodies by becoming users themselves–the Mitchell Report pushes the argument a little deeper. In an age of biotechnical enhancements, many athletes feel constrained by the fact–or by the belief–that it is impossible to compete, or to compete on an equal playing field, without them. The choice to forgo performance-enhancing drugs amounts to unilateral disarmament, virtually guaranteeing that only those taking every biological advantage will succeed. In the steroid era, the pressure to use drugs has certainly been widespread, felt especially by the many marginal players–or by minor leaguers trying to move up–for whom any edge is the difference between staying in the game and losing the big salaries that all major leaguers now earn.</p>
<p>But if the majority of the players, as the report suggests, would truly prefer to stay chemically clean and avoid the need for this unwelcome choice, they could easily and successfully remove such pressures by agreeing collectively to expose the violators and to shame them–something the Players’ Union (which urged players not to cooperate with Mitchell) is light-years away from even considering. Moreover, the concern about coercion fails to get to the heart of the matter: competition is always demanding, often coercively so, and competitive athletes are always forced to measure up to their peers in training and practice or else be left behind. And many of the sports we find most thrilling–football, hockey, boxing, downhill skiing–require putting one’s body in peril. One of the athletic virtues we most admire is “playing hurt,” which often means placing excellence in action above bodily well-being. Beginning with Achilles, our most celebrated heroes–in sport as well as in war–have willingly put their bodies at risk on the field of glory, accepting bodily harm and even a shortened life as a price worth paying for being remembered. Why then should we decry, rather than admire, the athlete who sacrifices his body to the game he loves, or risks life and limb in the drive to bring his team to victory, or puts short-term glory above long-term health?</p>
<p>Even in sports that entail much less physical risk, such as baseball, concerns about adverse health effects, while appropriate, hardly seem to capture what really troubles us about steroids. The booing of Barry Bonds and the refusal to elect Mark McGwire to the Hall of Fame had nothing to do with their risking bodily harm. Even if the drugs were legal and safe, one imagines that the record-seeking batter would not like to be seen shooting up before heading to the plate, thus revealing his chemical dependence at the very moment when he is supposed to be demonstrating his personal excellence. He may use such drugs in private, without hesitation or apology, in his quest for fame, fortune, victory, or greatness; but he would be embarrassed to be seen in the act by the very public whose adulation he craves. Why, exactly, is he ashamed? And would such shame persist for long in a culture that gradually normalized doping because it lacked any better arguments than the risk of bodily harm for maintaining the taboo against it?</p>
<p>The Mitchell Report is surely right to highlight concern for the health effects on youthful athletes who would imitate their steroid-using heroes. The bodies and brains of still-growing young people are especially susceptible to drug-induced harms; a shocking number of teenage and collegiate superstarwannabes are already placing themselves needlessly at risk, and many more would be endangered should the taboo on these drugs be relaxed. Yet high schools, colleges, and even national Olympic committees, all bent on victory and the money and prestige that it brings, enthusiastically expose young athletes to enormous dangers to life and limb, not to speak of deforming their very lives, all in the service of glory for school and country. Sequestering women’s volleyball teams or pubescent gymnasts in drug-free but monomaniacal 24/ 7/365 training camps for the Olympics arguably deforms the bodies and minds of young people even more than steroid use, cheating, or flouting the law.</p>
<p>In the end, the Mitchell Report leaves us with a circular argument: we deride record-breakers such as Bonds as cheaters, yet we fail to articulate the deep ethical and human grounds for preserving the rules that they flouted in their pursuit of athletic glory. In its concern about the “integrity of the game,” the report invites us to think about the meaning of performance-enhancing drugs for the game itself; but the various hazards it lists–cheaters win unfairly, baseball records become illegitimate, drug suppliers can influence the outcome of games by threatening to expose their clients–are limited if genuine. All three points stress concerns about honesty and authenticity affecting only the outcome of the game–no cheating to win, no distorted records of personal accomplishment, no pressure to throw games–not the authenticity of the game itself.</p>
<p>What is missing is any exploration of why athletic activity and athletic excellence are diminished and dehumanized by the turn to biotechnological enhancements; why the steroid-using athlete cheats not simply his competitor, but first and foremost himself and those who cheer for him. The report leaves unexplored and undescribed what makes doping shameful and degrading, both for the athletes who engage in it and the culture that fails to oppose it. And it never probes or captures, by image or argument, what makes human sport at its best a realm of excellence and grace, ennobling for participants and spectators alike.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>III.</p>
<p>Like the Mitchell Report, most discussions of biotechnical enhancement are preoccupied with the novel biotechnologies themselves. Commonplace in such discussions are quasi-Talmudic (and inconclusive) arguments about whether and how, for example, steroid use differs from special diets as a means for increasing the mass of muscles, or how an erythropoietin injection (“blood doping”) differs from taking vitamins as a means for increasing the oxygen-carrying capacity of blood. But a deeper analysis of enhancement should begin not from assessments of the technical means, but from explorations of the desirable ends. Only if we have a clear idea of the nature and dignity of human activity, in sport and beyond, can we see how that dignity is threatened by the age of biotechnological enhancement. (This was the approach adopted in Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness, the 2003 report of the President’s Council on Bioethics, which we helped to draft and from which, i n this section of our essay and the next, we freely draw.) We begin by examining athletic activity itself, seeking to illuminate the integrity of the athlete; and move then to consider the activity of the spectators, so as to illuminate the integrity of sport and its value for all of us.</p>
<p>In athletics, as in other human activities, excellence has until now been achievable only by disciplined effort. For this reason, attaining those achievements by means of drugs, genetic engineering, or implanted devices looks to many people to be a form of “cheating”–not just their opponents but also the game, themselves, and their would-be admirers. Many of us believe that each person should work hard for his achievements, and we look down on those who try to fly high on the cheap. Even if we prefer the grace of the “natural athlete,” whose performance deceptively appears to be effortless, we admire also those who overcome obstacles and struggle to achieve their excellence.</p>
<p>This matter of character–the merit of disciplined and dedicated striving–though not the deepest basis of one’s objection to biotechnological shortcuts, is surely pertinent. Moreover, character is not only the source of our deeds, but also their product. Rowdy children or unruly athletes whose disruptive behavior is “remedied” by pacifying drugs rather than by their own efforts are not learning self-control; if anything, they are learning to think self-control unnecessary. A drug to induce fearlessness does not produce courage. An injection to induce aggressiveness does not cultivate the genuine desire to excel.</p>
<p>The reason that cheating should bother us is not simply our love of fairness but, more fundamentally, our admiration for human achievement. We esteem the human doer at his best, especially when he is engaged in those activities, like sport, that invite all human beings to admire the excellence of the few. How did he–a human being just like me–do that? If the answer is steroids, then we come to feel as if the body we admire is less like ours, and we come to believe that the deeds we admire are mere simulations of the human rather than the human at his best. The concern about cheating and bad character thus points to the deeper concern about the nature and dignity of human activity, in sport and beyond. In short: what makes human activity truly human, and what makes excellent human activity truly excellent?</p>
<p>In athletics, as in so many other human activities, superior performance is generally attained through training and practice. One gets to run faster by running; one builds up endurance by enduring; one increases one’s strength by using it on ever-increasing burdens. Likewise with the complex specific skills of the game–hitting, fielding, and throwing the baseball. The capacity to be improved is improved by using it; the deed to be perfected is perfected by doing it. In many cases, of course, no amount of practice can overcome one’s limited natural endowments: nature dispenses her unequal gifts with little regard for any abstract principle of “fairness.” Yet however mysterious the source and the distribution of each person’s natural potential, the individual’s cultivation of his natural endowments is intelligible. As agents and as spectators, we can understand the connection between effort and improvement, between activity and experience, between work and result. We appreciate self-achieved excellence because it flows from and manifests the presence of an active, excellence-seeking self.</p>
<p>By contrast, when we use performanceenhancing drugs to alter our native biology–whether to make the best even better or the below-average more equal–we paradoxically make improvements to our performance less intelligible, in the sense of being less connected to our own self-conscious activity and exertion. The improvements that we once might have made through training alone we now make only with the assistance of stimulants or steroids. Though we might be using rational and scientific means to remedy the mysterious inequality or unchosen limits of our native gifts, we would in fact make the individual’s agency less humanly or experientially intelligible to himself.</p>
<p>The steroid-using athlete certainly gains new physical powers, and the scientist who produced the biological agents of such improvement can certainly understand in scientific terms the genetic workings or physiochemical processes that make it possible. But from the athlete’s perspective, he improves as if by “magic.” True, steroids (or, someday, genetic muscle enhancement) will enable him to perform at a higher level only if he continues to train. True, as he trains, he still tires, perspires, and feels his (altered) body at work. But as the athlete himself can surely attest, the changes in his body are decisively (albeit not solely) owed to the pills he popped or the shots he took, interventions whose relation to the changes he undergoes are utterly opaque to his direct human experience. He has the advantage of the mastery of modern biology, but he risks a partial alienation from his own efforts. Precisely because he has chosen to be chemically made into a better athlete, his resulting superior performances are not great athletic achievements. A patient to his druggist, less doer and more done-to, he is dependent on outside agents for “his” performance. His doings become, in a crucial sense, less “his own.”</p>
<p>Why would an aspiring athlete subject himself to such magical transformations? Why would he adulterate his body and dilute his agency in pursuit of a personal achievement, which, once achieved, ironically mocks itself by being less personally his own? The pursuit of an answer will soon lead us to the heart of athletic activity and why we esteem it. In the process, we shall discover that the use of steroids or other biological enhancers is in fact a symptom of a much deeper adulteration.</p>
<p>In competitive athletics, the goal is victory–the defeat of the opponent, the display of one’s own superiority–usually not only in a single contest but over an entire season. Team success is measured by making the playoffs and then winning it all; individual success is measured by batting over .300, driving in more than 100 runs, or winning more than twenty games in a season. And beyond the contests of this season, the star players also compete against those who excelled in seasons past. Athletes who strive for glory often want to be known as the best ever; and since Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds cannot compete directly against Babe Ruth or Hank Aaron, they do so by compiling higher numbers in the book of records. Over time, athletic excellence becomes defined solely in terms of outcomes: winning rather than losing, breaking previous records, and compiling a stellar statisticum vitae. Some old-fashioned connoisseurs may still watch sports for the love of a game well played; but most fans, encouraged by sports media’s mania for keeping score, pay and watch largely to learn and celebrate the result.</p>
<p>Once athletic excellence is equated largely with successful outcomes, admired and compensated only for its contributions to the bottom line, it is surely tempting for athletes to seek an extra edge that will increase the chance of victory, boost their individual statistics, and enable them not only to stay in the game but to rise to the top of the ladder. If their native powers do not suffice or begin to decline, they will be only too happy to seek magical means of getting a better or a different body, all in the service of the longed-for final results.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>IV.</p>
<p>Yet the dignity and the worth of athletic activity are not defined only by winners and losers, faster and slower times, old records and new. It is not simply the separable, measurable, and comparative result that makes a performance excellent. It is also the humanity of the human performer. Excellent athletic activity seems to have a meaning–the human body in action, the grace and rhythm of the moving human form, the striving and exertion of the aspiring human athlete–that is separable from competition, even when the athlete is competitively engaged. What matters more than the measurable outcome is the lived experience, for doer and spectator alike, of a humanly cultivated gift, excellently at work, striving for superiority and with the outcome in doubt.</p>
<p>Animals, after all, also run, often quickly and gracefully, doer and deed seamlessly united. The average cheetah runs much faster than the fastest human being. But we do not honor the cheetah in the same way we honor the Olympic runner, because the Olympian runs in a human way as a human being. We admire the cheetah’s grace and beauty, but we do not esteem its performance. The cheetah cannot help but run fast, and should he catch his quarry he will not have run in vain. The human runner, by contrast, must cultivate his gifts in order to perfect them, and although the race is to the swift, his distinctive humanity is on display throughout, win or lose. Racing itself is a human achievement, for each runner alone and for all runners together. For this reason, in assessing athletic performance, we do not in fact separate what is done from how it is done and who is doing it–from the fact that it is being done by a human doer. And we should not separate the score from the purpose of keeping score in the first place: to honor and to promote a given type of human accomplishment whose meaning is in the doing, not simply in the scored result. Tomorrow’s box score is at most a ghostly shadow of today’s ball game. The record book’s statistics are anything but vital.</p>
<p>Athletic contests are live human dramas, compressed versions of the overall human drama, in which desire and drive are of the essence. A game comprises more than competing moves calculated for, or justified solely, by the result. Consider the best human chess player playing against a chess-playing computer–an outstanding human being facing off against an outstanding human artifact. Are man and machine really “playing chess”? On one level, they are indeed playing the same game, making intelligible moves according to the same rules. Yet the computer “plays” the game rather differently–with no uncertainty, no nervousness, no sweaty palms, no active mind, and, most crucially, with no desires or hopes regarding future success. The computer’s way of “playing” is really a kind of simulation–the product of genuine human achievement, to be sure, but not the real thing: playing chess. By building computers that “play” perfect chess, we change the meaning of the activity itself, reorienting the very character of our aspiration from becoming great chess players to producing the best-executed game of chess.</p>
<p>Why, if chess is no more than the sum of opposing moves that are in principle calculable by a machine, would human beings wish to play chess at all, especially if the machines can do it better? Why would no one watch a “match” between two chess-playing computers, or, to come back to sports, a baseball game that pitted robot pitchers against automatic batting machines? The answer is at once simple and complex. We still play chess because only we can play chess, that is, as human beings, as genuine chess players. (The computer programmer is not a chess player.)</p>
<p>In baseball, similarly, we still run and pitch because running and pitching, while not as fast as roller-skating or using pitching machines, possess a dignity unique to themselves and unique to those who engage in these activities. The runner or pitcher on steroids is still a human being who runs or pitches; but the doer of the deed is, arguably, less obviously himself and less obviously human than his unaltered counterpart. He may be faster, but he may also be on the way to becoming more like an efficient machine or a horse bred for the racetrack than a self-willing and self-directing human agent.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>To determine the specific difference of a human act or performance, and to identify the qualities that make us admire the performance as a human activity and as the performer’s own, comparison with the doings of other animals again proves helpful. In the activity of other animals, there is necessarily a unity between doer and deed; acting impulsively and without reflection, an animal–unlike a human being–cannot deliberately feign activity or separate its acts from itself as their immediate source. But although a cheetah runs, it does not run a race. Though it senses and pursues its prey, it does not harbor ambitions to surpass previous performances. Though its motion is not externally compelled, it does not run by choice. Though it moves in ordered sequence, it has not planned the course. It owes its beauty and its excellence–and these are not to be disparaged–to nature and to instinct alone.</p>
<p>In contrast, the human runner chooses to run a race and sets before himself his goal. He measures the course and prepares himself for it. He surveys his rivals and plots his strategy. He disciplines his body and cultivates his natural gifts to pursue his goal. The end, the means, and the manner are all matters of conscious awareness and deliberate choice. The racer’s running is a human act humanly done, because it is done freely and knowingly.</p>
<p>But the humanity of athletic performance resides not only in the chosenness and the intelligibility of the deed. It depends decisively also on the activity of a well-tuned and well-working body. The body in question is a living body, not a mere machine; not just any animal body but a human one; not someone else’s body but one’s own. Each of us is personally embodied. Each of us lives with, and because of, certain bodily gifts that owe nothing to our rational will. Each of us not only has a body; each of us also is a body.</p>
<p>The truth and the beauty of integrated and embodied human activity are displayed and celebrated in human sport (and also in dance and musical performance). When we see an outstanding athlete in action, we do not see–as we do in horse racing–a rational agent riding or whipping a separate animal body. We see instead a body gracefully and harmoniously at work, but at work with discipline and focus, pushing its limits and displaying its powers, all the while tacitly obeying the rules and requirements of the game. We know immediately that the human athlete is engaged in deliberate and goal-directed activity, that he is not running in flight moved by fear or in pursuit moved by hunger. Yet while the human character of his bodily movements is at once obvious, the “mindedness” of the bodily activity is tacit and unobtrusive. So attuned is the body, and so harmonious is it with heart and mind, that–in the best instance–the whole activity of the athlete appears effortlessly to flow from a unified and undivided being. At such moments the athlete experiences and displays something like the unity of doer and deed one observes in other animals, but with this difference: for humans, such a unity is an achievement. A great sprinter may run like a gazelle and a great boxer may fight like a tiger, but one would never mistake their harmony of body and soul for the brute instinct that spurs an animal toward flight or fight.</p>
<p>In the most complex sports–baseball, football, basketball, soccer–many of our most sophisticated psychic and physical powers come into play, visibly and elegantly united. The athlete goes beyond what is animal in man to ascend from acts of the body to acts of mind-body coordination. Man and cheetah both run, but man alone executes a hit-and-run, or dives to catch a sinking liner, or gallops to run down a towering fly ball whose trajectory he has subconsciously calculated correctly after hearing it leave the bat. The expert base-stealer knows how to time the pitcher’s delivery to gain an undefeatable head start, and the sharp-eyed base runner knows when to extend a double into a triple and how to complete his feat with an artful slide.</p>
<p>Beyond these individual anatomized acts of mind and body, there is the great feat of playing the game itself, both from moment to moment and from beginning to end, in light of the larger whole. Players survey the entire scene as they perform in concert with others, attending to where their teammates are heading and how their opponents are defending. They embody the rules, manage the clock, execute their game plans, and make innumerable strategic adjustments when things go badly. At their peak, the great player and the great team reveal the human difference in its glory.</p>
<p>At the root of athletic activity, as of all worthy human activity, is desire or drive or aspiration–every bit as important as talent or training or strategic planning. Our aspiration for excellence, our drive to perform, our desire to do and be something memorable and great, is not finally the product of pure reason or pure will. Neither is it the product merely of our animality. It stems rather from that distinct blending of mind and desire, perhaps peculiar to human beings, called by the Greeks eros, which drives us to make of ourselves something less imperfect, something more noble, something beautiful and fine–something that would be fulfilling, as much as is humanly possible. At his heights, the great athlete longs for more than the spirited conquest of his opponents; he longs for “the perfect game,” for perfection itself, for the performance that transcends victory alone. And he pursues this aspiration as himself and (at least to begin with) for himself. No admirable human being would seek excellence on condition that, in order to attain it, he would gladly have to become someone or something else. No sane person would choose to be the fastest thing on two legs if it required becoming an ostrich. Not the excellence of beast or god, or even the excellence of a magically transformed human being, but the excellence of our own embodied share of mankind’s vast potential is the goal we should admire.</p>
<p>In trying to achieve better bodies through biotechnology, we do not in fact honor our given bodies or cultivate our given individual gifts. Instead we are, whether we realize it or not, voting with our syringes to have a different body, with different native capacities and powers. We are giving ourselves new and foreign gifts, not nature’s and not our own. Those who retort that nature’s original gifts deserve no special claim on our loyalty–why not become someone else, or even something better-than-human?–would diminish the possibility of personal human excellence in the very effort they make to enhance it.</p>
<p>We come here to the great paradox of all human aspiration, which is that it always embraces both the acceptance of the given and the desire for its perfection. In striving to excel in whatever activity, we must seek to make ourselves better than we now are, but we must also continue to affirm our enduring identity, lest we cease being who and what we are trying to perfect. Every athlete’s pursuit of excellence implicitly requires accepting, with grace and gratitude, his own body and its natural endowments, which he cannot escape or change without ceasing to be himself.</p>
<p>The ironies of the biotechnological enhancement of athletic performance should now be painfully clear. By turning to biological agents to transform ourselves in the image that we choose and will, we compromise our choosing and willing identity itself, electing to become less than normally the source or the shapers of our own identity. We take a pill or insert a gene that makes us into something we desire, but only by compromising the self-directed path toward its attainment. By using these agents to transform our bodies for the sake of better bodily performance, we mock the very excellence of our own individual embodiment that superior performance is meant to display. By using these technological means to transcend the limits of our natures, we deform the character of human desire and aspiration, settling for externally gauged achievements that are less and less the fruits of our own individual striving and cultivated finite gifts.</p>
<p>By submitting to the chemists, we become mere placeholders for the tainted records that might one day attach to our name. For what could be more in conflict with athletic excellence, with the body gracefully at work fulfilling its full potential, than the image of the passive patient, chemically dependent on the technological cleverness of others, coveting feats that he can never truly claim as his own and adulation that he does not really deserve? Even should the enhancements of tomorrow prove safe and legal, the shame that now attaches to steroid use would still remain–at least in any honorable society and before any worthy fans.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>V.</p>
<p>Yet our own worthiness as fans remains an open and largely neglected question, as does the relation of spectator to sport. Athletic activity does not necessarily require spectators. Millions of young and not-so-young people play sports in gyms and on playgrounds, sometimes in organized leagues, often in pick-up games, largely unobserved save by their fellow participants and perhaps a few family members. But spectator sports, both collegiate and professional, are our shared national obsession; they define our perception of sports, and, in turn, they shape the meaning of sport in modern culture. And in those realms, the world of the athlete is inseparable from the world of the spectator; the stage on which athletes perform is inseparable from the audience. For the players, the fans provide encouragement, recognition, and the acclaim that confirms their own superiority. For the fans, the players show how the enormously difficult games we try to play can be played by the best, enabling us vicariously to participate in their attainments. As taste is to genius, so appreciative beholding is to superior athletic activity, mirroring and completing it by allowing it to be properly known and properly valued.</p>
<p>Yet there are inherent difficulties in spectator sports, both for the athletes and for the beholders. The fan who comes to see genuine excellence in honorable competition is at the mercy of the integrity–or the lack of integrity–of the athletes and the game. For the athlete who seeks recognition, the honor that he receives is notoriously no better than the judgment and the taste of those who bestow it. The greatest athletes, who know the difference between honor and celebrity, between glory and vainglory, care much more for recognition from a few worthy opponents and connoisseurs than for cheers from an ill-informed mob. Although most professional players take inspiration from the fans as “our extra man,” playing to the crowd and satisfying its tastes is at bottom a deformation of athletics, an adulteration imported from the theater. Showing off while playing the part of someone else is the essence of theater; shining forth being oneself at one’s best is the heart of sports, worthy of being seen.</p>
<p>Many of us fans can vividly remember the greatest performances of Roger Clemens on the mound and Marion Jones on the racetrack–the two 20-strikeout games (against the Seattle Mariners in 1986 and against the Detroit Tigers ten years later), the 100-meter final in Sydney in 2000. We remember Mark McGwire’s besting Sammy Sosa in the home-run derby of 1998 to reach a new season record of 70, and we recall seeing it broken only three years later when Barry Bonds hit numbers 71 and 72 in one game, just two days before the end of the season. As spectators, we witnessed human excellence in the flesh–the striving body at work, beautiful to behold, and the spirited competitor at play, dominating opposing batters or rising above his rivals. These performances filled the most devoted fans with euphoric pleasure, and even elicited the admiration of those who cheered for the defeated. Greatness is greatness, even when it is not our own. And some of the spectators whose lives were elevated by these great performances never lived to see the fall of their heroes. T hey beheld them in ignorance, memories forever sweet. The curtain was never lifted to reveal the hidden syringe that gave the steroid-dependent victors their “edge.”</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>In a marvelous recent book titled In Praise of Athletic Beauty, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht pays moving tribute to the aesthetic excellence of great athletes and describes the deep human satisfactions that great athletic performances give to those who watch them, whether as partisans or as connoisseurs. Yet like the fan who never lives to see the curtain lifted, we are left to wonder: might the use of performance-enhancing drugs enhance the experience of the spectator, even as it compromises the integrity of the athlete?</p>
<p>For the beauty-loving fan who watches in ignorance, the performance of athletes on steroids is no less beautiful or impressive. For the victory-loving fan who watches in ignorance, the victory is no less sweet. And for the entertainment-loving fan who watches in ignorance, the pleasure-giving spectacle of sport is not diminished. And yet, when we see Marion Jones heading off to prison and Roger Clemens facing his inquisitors in Congress, we, as spectators, feel wronged. Our heroes turn out to be villains; the retired numbers on the backs of their jerseys get replaced with a scarlet “HGH” on their foreheads; they have soured the pleasure we once took in remembering their feats, and cheated us out of our unadulterated admiration for their excellence. But right as we are to feel wronged, we spectators may well bear some responsibility for the degradation of our heroes. Right as we are to feel cheated, we have also created a culture that demands new records and greater spectacles and that worships victory at (almost) any cost. To restore the “integrity of the game,” we need to recover why sport matters to us as a society–why the games men play are a serious business, capable of shaping our characters and our souls, for better and for worse.</p>
<p>The adulteration of sport today is owed, of course, partly to the fact that spectator sports are, quite literally, a serious business–a multibillion-dollar serious business–not only for the professional athletes but even more for the agents, the team owners, and the television networks. The tastes of the fans are, to say the least, not entirely of their own making. The huge salaries and bonuses, the marketing of the players and the paraphernalia, the pre-game slam-dunk or home-run-hitting contests, the reduction of the game to the highlight reel replayed endlessly on round-the-clock sports channels (the major channel is aptly called “EntertainmentSPN‘), the hyping of homer derbies and record chasings, the exploding scoreboards and raucous entertainment between innings or at half-time, the compulsory celebrity appearances before and after the game: all these profit-driven activities help to shape the tastes and judgments of the fans, whose tastes and judgments in turn transform the shape of the game and the way it is played and appreciated.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>Fandom may have become a marketable commodity, but in its essence it remains something noble, and it has deeper roots and significances. Most fans become sports enthusiasts when they are young. And the young are “fan-atics” in the primordial sense: patriots for their team, worshippers of their heroes, amateurs who seek to imitate the pros. The young learn to play the games they watch, and they love to watch the games they play. For many, this loyalty to their team persists for the rest of their lives: as adults they may settle down in New York City, but they remember taking the bus to see Carl Yastrzemski play at Fenway, and they will remain devotees of “Red Sox nation” unto death. Fandom is a kind of patriotism–a devotion to one’s own, for better and for worse, combined with a thirst for victory, especially against one’s greatest rivals. A few years ago, in a discussion in Washington on “making patriots,” Irving Kristol remarked that “if you want to make patriots, make your kids join a sports team.”</p>
<p>The fans want to participate in the thrill of victory, even if it means accepting, year after year, the likelihood of defeat. One of the authors of this essay is this year entering his seventh decade of rooting for the White Sox–and rooting against the Cubs and Yankees–with only one World Series victory to show for it, a victory that he cherishes especially because it proved that not all hope is foolishness. Fans feel, emotionally and even physically, part of the game. They jump from their seats; they scream at the television; they threaten the referees; they dance in the streets.</p>
<p>Yet the modern culture of sport complicates the fan’s experience of loyalty. Not only do players jump from nation to nation in search of the best salary, so that today’s Red Sox god is tomorrow’s Yankee devil. Today’s hunger for victory easily degenerates into a belief that all is fair in sport and war. Those who might feel cheated to learn that Clemens was on steroids may well, in the final inning of the final game, have willfully looked the other way so that they could have their victory parade. In sports today, we face the challenge of preserving the virtue of loyalty in a culture of infidelity; and we face the challenge of moderating the love of victory by the love of honor.</p>
<p>In a culture that rewards or tolerates victory without honor, the fans wrong the players as much as the players wrong the fans. The players do what they have to do to deliver us the victories that we demand, and we look the other way, trying not to see the infractions and debasements–not only illegal steroids and corked bats, but “taking out” the quarterback or pirating your opponent’s game plan–that may have helped to gain the victories that give us so much pleasure. Only when the evidence comes out do we vilify the athletes who did what they did in their quest for our admiration, knowing full well what gaining that admiration often requires. We may condemn our athletic heroes for using performanceenhancing drugs, but we are in fact complicit in their corruption, for we have created a culture that encourages the use of cosmetic surgery, Botox, Viagra, and other tools in our growing arsenal of bio-magic to remake our bodies in the image of our fantasies.</p>
<p>If all we seek from our athletes is entertainment alone–a good show–we will eventually snicker at the means they use to satisfy us. If what most delights us is seeing the ball fly out into San Francisco Bay or the pitching radar gun recording more than 100 miles per hour, we will be indifferent to how such results are attained. Human sport will become a strange hybrid of dog racing, fantasy wrestling, and the circus freak show, with men and women programmed to perform at the highest levels that science makes possible, and a society of mere spectators who do the wave and roar their approval at feats that defeat the reason anyone plays and honors sports in the first place.</p>
<p>Sport is a species of play, but it is not a frivolous activity. Our games serve no utilitarian purpose. They do not feed the hungry, or cure the sick, or shelter the cold. In part for that very reason, however, sport belongs to a superior domain of human activity: activity done not for the sake of something else, but for its own sake. Like all play, sport is essentially valuable as an end in itself, not just for some result or consequence, whether victory or profit. It belongs not to the realm of necessity, but to the realm of leisure, of freedom, of cultivation.</p>
<p>Sport is gratuitous, one of the domains (like music and the arts) that sets human beings apart from the other animals, as free and perfectible beings who can and do live for more than physical survival and genetic self-perpetuation. Among human societies, those in which play and sport are encouraged have risen above humankind’s sober preoccupations with safety, comfort, and gain. Leisure, as Josef Pieper argued in a beautiful book with this title, is the ba sis of culture, and the cultivation of our embodied excellences–for their own perfection’s sake–is one of the marks of a cultured society, one whose citizens celebrate being alive and fit, with coordinated and “mindful” bodies capable of complex and often beautiful movements, improved by the need to test them against worthy rivals.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>Play is different from mere amusement or entertainment, other activities that are also “ends in themselves.” A game, though a pastime, does more than pass the time; and though sport entertains us, its meaning is independent of the pleasure we derive from it. A structured activity, governed by rules and filled with risk and uncertainty, sport invites and rewards not only game-specific skills, but also the indispensable virtues of determination, discipline, courage, endurance, enterprise, perspicacity, and mental toughness. For those who play the game seriously, virtues such as these, once acquired, can be transferred to other realms of life: many a well-coached college athlete in later years praises his coach most for helping him to become a man–responsible, honorable, devoted to making something of himself. For those who watch the game seriously and over the long haul, virtues such as these, once witnessed, can be ratified and admired more generally. Because sport is gratuitous, it is a field of grace: the gracious display of beautiful form, the gracious appreciation of worthy opponents, gratitude for native gifts and efforts rewarded.</p>
<p>Yet sport is not simply artful play. Its essence lies somewhere between dance and war, embracing aspects of both. For in sport, men meet on the field of play, a field where only the best men win and where many of the best players are driven primarily by the thirst for victory. The deepest appeal of sport is often the drama of the game–the miracle drive to win as the clock expires, the near-perfect season that ends in tragic defeat, the return of the fallen champion to glory. The fascination of sport lies in the moment of truth, when some rise and some fall, some perform and some choke. Here in microcosm, the human drama is on display, with all its pathos and possibility.</p>
<p>Liberated from the cares of everyday life, spectators are given privileged access to some of life’s deepest truths. For three periods or four quarters or nine innings, we behold the human story without the pathos of our own lives bearing down upon us. We watch athletes accomplish seemingly superhuman things–things we could never do–which we therefore hold in awe. And yet even our best athletes embody the possibilities and the limitations of a finite and vulnerable human body, whose possibilities they are striving to perfect, whose limitations they are struggling to surmount. Our spirit soars with the few who succeed–and the kid in us will always love a winner. But as we mature, we come also to respect the many more who try and fail, who rise and fall, as human beings just like us. Even the immortals one day retire, and the best do so with grace, standing aside for the next generation of would-be heroes.</p>
<p>Because sport is not war, the fight to the finish is marked not by death or surrender, but, when played in the right spirit, by gracious celebration and good sportsmanship, displayed by winners and losers alike. This crowning touch of the sporting event Gumbrecht captures nicely in a story about a Japanese baseball superstar named Koji Akiyama, who struck out looking with runners on base at a critical moment of the Japanese championship series. While the fans sighed in disappointment, “Akiyama stayed at the batter’s box a second longer than he needed to–and gave a really beautiful smile to the pitcher.” Gumbrecht comments:</p>
<p>Akiyama’s smile, I believe, must have come from the feeling that, for a brief moment at least, the opposing pitcher had taken the game of baseball to its highest level, making him, the man at bat who lost the competition, part of this achievement. It was like the smile of the angels that we see sculpted into the stone of medieval cathedrals–art historians believe these smiles signify the angels’ happiness at being able to play a role in God’s perfect creation.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>At their best, our greatest athletic events become even more than civic rituals; our stadiums do indeed become cathedrals, and our fandom a kind of worship. And if this is correct, then learning to praise athletic beauty is inadequate to the full human and social meaning of sport. For sport is capable of leading us beyond the aesthetic to the moral and even to the transcendent. The great athlete embodies that perfect unity of gratitude for the given possibilities of his being and pride in the achievements that he alone made possible. If all that matters is athletic beauty, then we should care little about the syringe behind the curtain, so long as what we are allowed to see is still beautiful. But if what matters is the elevation of man through sport, on the field and off, then steroids degrade that which is capable of elevating.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>VI.</p>
<p>With all the problems facing America today, there is perhaps something silly, even trivializing, about Congress devoting its time to performance-enhancing drugs in sports. The gotcha game on Capitol Hill certainly has done little to help us to see the deeper issues involved, or to understand what gives athletes and games the integrity that we all presumably seek to defend. But perhaps the occasion of the Mitchell Report will at least invite us to imagine what kind of society we might become if biotechnical interventions were to become more powerful and more widespread.</p>
<p>We might come to see Olympic races and dog races, human runners and running horses, as little different from one another. Well-bred athletes, increasingly here mostly for our entertainment and amusement, might become little more than expendable props. We might lose sight of the difference between real and false excellence, and eventually no longer care about the distinction. Worst of all, we would be in danger of turning our would-be heroes into slaves–persons who exist only to entertain us and meet our standards, and whose freedom to pursue human excellence has been shackled by the need to perform, and to conform, for our amusement and applause. For a while–perhaps indefinitely–we might relish the superior results that only our biotechnical ingenuity could make possible: faster times, better scores, broken records. But we would have gone very far in losing sight of why excellence is worth seeking at all, and how we pursue it as human beings, not artifacts; as aspiring beings, not objects; as proud beings, not shameful ones.</p>
<p>For the young fans who grow up in the age of biotechnical enhancement, the danger is greatest. The problem is not only that they will come to imitate their steroid-dependent role models, at great harm to their bodies and futures. The deeper danger is that the young will come to assume that everything fine is really fake; that human excellence is always compromised; that the greatest performances are always an illusion; that the curtain will inevitably be lifted to reveal the chemist lurking in the shadows. A culture that degrades its heroes, especially the heroes of the young, will destroy the very idea of heroism. A society that gets used to steroids in sport will become even more cynical than it already is. A civilization shaped by the possibilities of biotechnical enhancement will erode the twin possibilities of gratitude and excellence. All that will remain are cartoon heroes and high-tech magic acts, and a life devoted to their soul-deforming amusements.</p>
<p>The cure for the adulteration of sports, a cultural disease that is already far along, will require much more than the banishment of steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs. It will require a revival–for contemporary Americans, difficult to achieve–of the athletic ideal, seen as a manifestation of the mysterious powers that mak e us human. It is useful to recall that the athletic contests of the ancient Greeks, conducted at Olympia, had elements of religious festivals, in which the games were celebrated alongside theatrical productions of great tragedies as well as animal sacrifices offered to the gods. Apollonian beauty was in the stadium, Dionysian ecstasy was on the stage and in the crowds, and catharsis and edification were all around. But today, in our sports palaces, without our knowing it–and even without the beer and bratwurst–Dionysus holds court among the fans, while Apollo still manages to shine between commercial television timeouts and the endless reciting of statistics. In our adulterated age, the amateur spirit–the love of the game–is not quite dead. Neither is the disposition to gratitude, as many a winning athlete after a great play points heavenward or after a thrilling victory gives verbal credit and thanks to God, usually to the embarrassment of his television interviewer. Yet in these little gestures, however routine and so often thoughtless, we sports fans are reminded of perhaps the deepest reason why we should honor athletics.</p>
<p>In Chariots of Fire, the Scottish runner Eric Liddell, urged by his sister to give up running and return to his work as a Christian missionary in China, explains movingly why he cannot do so. “I believe that God made me for a purpose, but He also made me fast, and when I run I feel His pleasure…. To give up running would be to hold Him in contempt.” Skeptics may scoff, but the true fans of sports, first listening to Liddell and then watching him perform, nod approvingly, regardless of their theological commitments, or even their lack thereof. They know, the believers and the unbelievers, just what he means. And absent such gratitude for our gifts and the correlative desire to cultivate them honorably to the fullest extent possible, the adulteration of sport will not be overcome, even if the steroid era were to come to an end.</p>
<p>—Leon R. Kass is Hertog Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Eric Cohen, EPPC adjunct fellow&#160;and editor-at-large of The New Atlantis, is&#160;author of the forthcoming In the Shadow of Progress: Being Human in the Age of Technology (Encounter Books).</p> | false | 1 | super bowl march madness fast approaching nba stanley cup playoffs close behind spring training new baseball season begun year year season season sports fans across country shift attentions polish loyalties renew hopes maybe year wont wait til next year many decades americas significant athletic contests popular civic rituals temporarily removing us normal rhythms everyday life medieval europeans built cathedrals ancestors built civic monuments memorials build sports palaces gather vicariously taste sweetness victory also celebrate together perennially great human sportexcellence grace intense moments separate triumph tragedy easy dismiss sport triviality highbrows always yet games youngsters play somehow seem capture lowest loftiest possibilities embodied human life eliciting participant spectators spectating participants full range human passions rapturous joy paralyzing despair well world sports football season began superstar banished killing dogs ended united states senator charging espionage former olympic winners forced return medals baseball season open cloud steroids fingerwagging congressional hearings put one baseballs greatest pitchers stocks generally many contemporary fans believe golden age sport long since passedthat modern athletics become corrupt corrupting athletes mercenaries goes lament driven love money pursuit excellence sacrificed spectacle shaped demands television profits dignity game heroes often villains regard law land rules game sport morphed entertainment sportsmen unsportsmanlike trashtalking punks always thus old man sighs longing days ruth gehrig williams dimaggio nostalgia course something distortion noble one ignorance sporting pastthe vanity original greek olympians base passions original roman fans tawdry character many early twentiethcentury baseball stars pointshaving gamblingrelated scandalsallows us forget much lament present novel comes recent pastthe era todays graying elders remember longingly lost youthit far pleasant ennobling remember best forget worst judge todays athletes idealization came doubt generation hence tomorrows elders longing days tiger woods derek jeter peyton manning yet nostalgia danger failing reckon squarely adulteration sports fact unique age nature athletics indeed changed greatly naked runners wrestlers athens sparta wouldbe champions beijing olympics modern era seen series dramatic changes means athlete spectator first great transformation captured powerfully 1981 film chariots fire dealt olympics 1924 portrayed cultural shift emerging amateur professional exercise became training practice became drills pursuit victory became science business new professionals quickly accomplished feats unheard days amateurwith power greater speed unprecedentedly complex strategies execution original men gridiron would find much modern football unimaginable size skill players management game overhead photos helmet headphones aging masterminds calling every play upstairs serial loyalties players move one team next abandoning followers follow money combined new age radio especially bigmarket television professionalization sport changed ethic players outlook fans team owners raking billions players came expect demand financial rewards commensurate value marketplace came see achievements measured quantitatively enshrined record books assets may monetized endorsements fans became ambivalent games followed intensity still marvel games great players question motivations hunger greater thrills broken records mourn lost purity play new professionalism crowded devoted unto death local teams watch hometown heroes sign contracts archrivals within minutes seems citys victory parade expect entertained still want sport something circus rock concert love taking children ball field fear todays superstars bad role models young culture ambivalence comes mitchell report congressional hearings prompted report issued last december 409page indictment widespread use performanceenhancing drugs baseball commissioned bud selig commissioner baseball provoked numerous allegations illicit drug use recently active current players report written former senator george mitchell months thorough investigation extensive interviews private testimony live report declares ones surprise era steroids although little explain entered tawdry era report expresses hope findings help bring era end stricter oversight tougher penalties better education dangerous side effects performanceenhancing drugs reforms however welcome seem unlikely halt glory wealthseeking athletes turn biotechnology pursuit superior performance indeed years age steroids may look quaint comparison future doping technologies genetic muscle enhancements could impossible trace effective steroids growth hormone professionalization last centurys great transformation sport biotechnical enhancement looks centurys great degradation sport mitchell report gives voice widespread concern disturbing effects performanceenhancing drugs modern athletics also demonstrates inability unwillingness confront deeper sources trouble seem know biotechnological enhancement threat integrity game really articulate reason lost understanding makes sports truly admirable hence worthy attention devotion 160 160 ii spending nearly hundreds pages documenting used drugs mitchell report takes granted using steroids performanceenhancing drugs moral legal offense opposed offers brief list reasons current ban steroid use unfairly disadvantages honest athletes undermines validity baseball records harms human body sets bad example young thletes threatens integrity game concerns genuine never subjected rigorous analysis examining carefully see inadequacy fact steroids illegal course good reason use thembut reason remain illegal proscribed first place declaring steroids unfairly advantage use true sufficient reason continuing prohibit use name fairness allow individuals limited natural gifts use steroids chemical agents level playing field victory come talented rather make best use talents allow athletes use performanceenhancing drugs openly legally thus giving everyone free fair access whatever enhancements choose indeed mitchell report suggests one solutions steroid problem promote kinds nutritional supplements would allow players achieve results begs question bodyaltering performanceboosting supplements applauded others decried claim steroid use victimizes nonusers giving three undesirable choiceslose biologically enhanced quit game imperil bodies becoming users themselvesthe mitchell report pushes argument little deeper age biotechnical enhancements many athletes feel constrained factor beliefthat impossible compete compete equal playing field without choice forgo performanceenhancing drugs amounts unilateral disarmament virtually guaranteeing taking every biological advantage succeed steroid era pressure use drugs certainly widespread felt especially many marginal playersor minor leaguers trying move upfor edge difference staying game losing big salaries major leaguers earn majority players report suggests would truly prefer stay chemically clean avoid need unwelcome choice could easily successfully remove pressures agreeing collectively expose violators shame themsomething players union urged players cooperate mitchell lightyears away even considering moreover concern coercion fails get heart matter competition always demanding often coercively competitive athletes always forced measure peers training practice else left behind many sports find thrillingfootball hockey boxing downhill skiingrequire putting ones body peril one athletic virtues admire playing hurt often means placing excellence action bodily wellbeing beginning achilles celebrated heroesin sport well warhave willingly put bodies risk field glory accepting bodily harm even shortened life price worth paying remembered decry rather admire athlete sacrifices body game loves risks life limb drive bring team victory puts shortterm glory longterm health even sports entail much less physical risk baseball concerns adverse health effects appropriate hardly seem capture really troubles us steroids booing barry bonds refusal elect mark mcgwire hall fame nothing risking bodily harm even drugs legal safe one imagines recordseeking batter would like seen shooting heading plate thus revealing chemical dependence moment supposed demonstrating personal excellence may use drugs private without hesitation apology quest fame fortune victory greatness would embarrassed seen act public whose adulation craves exactly ashamed would shame persist long culture gradually normalized doping lacked better arguments risk bodily harm maintaining taboo mitchell report surely right highlight concern health effects youthful athletes would imitate steroidusing heroes bodies brains stillgrowing young people especially susceptible druginduced harms shocking number teenage collegiate superstarwannabes already placing needlessly risk many would endangered taboo drugs relaxed yet high schools colleges even national olympic committees bent victory money prestige brings enthusiastically expose young athletes enormous dangers life limb speak deforming lives service glory school country sequestering womens volleyball teams pubescent gymnasts drugfree monomaniacal 24 7365 training camps olympics arguably deforms bodies minds young people even steroid use cheating flouting law end mitchell report leaves us circular argument deride recordbreakers bonds cheaters yet fail articulate deep ethical human grounds preserving rules flouted pursuit athletic glory concern integrity game report invites us think meaning performanceenhancing drugs game various hazards listscheaters win unfairly baseball records become illegitimate drug suppliers influence outcome games threatening expose clientsare limited genuine three points stress concerns honesty authenticity affecting outcome gameno cheating win distorted records personal accomplishment pressure throw gamesnot authenticity game missing exploration athletic activity athletic excellence diminished dehumanized turn biotechnological enhancements steroidusing athlete cheats simply competitor first foremost cheer report leaves unexplored undescribed makes doping shameful degrading athletes engage culture fails oppose never probes captures image argument makes human sport best realm excellence grace ennobling participants spectators alike 160 160 iii like mitchell report discussions biotechnical enhancement preoccupied novel biotechnologies commonplace discussions quasitalmudic inconclusive arguments whether example steroid use differs special diets means increasing mass muscles erythropoietin injection blood doping differs taking vitamins means increasing oxygencarrying capacity blood deeper analysis enhancement begin assessments technical means explorations desirable ends clear idea nature dignity human activity sport beyond see dignity threatened age biotechnological enhancement approach adopted beyond therapy biotechnology pursuit happiness 2003 report presidents council bioethics helped draft n section essay next freely draw begin examining athletic activity seeking illuminate integrity athlete move consider activity spectators illuminate integrity sport value us athletics human activities excellence achievable disciplined effort reason attaining achievements means drugs genetic engineering implanted devices looks many people form cheatingnot opponents also game wouldbe admirers many us believe person work hard achievements look try fly high cheap even prefer grace natural athlete whose performance deceptively appears effortless admire also overcome obstacles struggle achieve excellence matter characterthe merit disciplined dedicated strivingthough deepest basis ones objection biotechnological shortcuts surely pertinent moreover character source deeds also product rowdy children unruly athletes whose disruptive behavior remedied pacifying drugs rather efforts learning selfcontrol anything learning think selfcontrol unnecessary drug induce fearlessness produce courage injection induce aggressiveness cultivate genuine desire excel reason cheating bother us simply love fairness fundamentally admiration human achievement esteem human doer best especially engaged activities like sport invite human beings admire excellence hea human like medo answer steroids come feel body admire less like come believe deeds admire mere simulations human rather human best concern cheating bad character thus points deeper concern nature dignity human activity sport beyond short makes human activity truly human makes excellent human activity truly excellent athletics many human activities superior performance generally attained training practice one gets run faster running one builds endurance enduring one increases ones strength using everincreasing burdens likewise complex specific skills gamehitting fielding throwing baseball capacity improved improved using deed perfected perfected many cases course amount practice overcome ones limited natural endowments nature dispenses unequal gifts little regard abstract principle fairness yet however mysterious source distribution persons natural potential individuals cultivation natural endowments intelligible agents spectators understand connection effort improvement activity experience work result appreciate selfachieved excellence flows manifests presence active excellenceseeking self contrast use performanceenhancing drugs alter native biologywhether make best even better belowaverage equalwe paradoxically make improvements performance less intelligible sense less connected selfconscious activity exertion improvements might made training alone make assistance stimulants steroids though might using rational scientific means remedy mysterious inequality unchosen limits native gifts would fact make individuals agency less humanly experientially intelligible steroidusing athlete certainly gains new physical powers scientist produced biological agents improvement certainly understand scientific terms genetic workings physiochemical processes make possible athletes perspective improves magic true steroids someday genetic muscle enhancement enable perform higher level continues train true trains still tires perspires feels altered body work athlete surely attest changes body decisively albeit solely owed pills popped shots took interventions whose relation changes undergoes utterly opaque direct human experience advantage mastery modern biology risks partial alienation efforts precisely chosen chemically made better athlete resulting superior performances great athletic achievements patient druggist less doer doneto dependent outside agents performance doings become crucial sense less would aspiring athlete subject magical transformations would adulterate body dilute agency pursuit personal achievement achieved ironically mocks less personally pursuit answer soon lead us heart athletic activity esteem process shall discover use steroids biological enhancers fact symptom much deeper adulteration competitive athletics goal victorythe defeat opponent display ones superiorityusually single contest entire season team success measured making playoffs winning individual success measured batting 300 driving 100 runs winning twenty games season beyond contests season star players also compete excelled seasons past athletes strive glory often want known best ever since mark mcgwire barry bonds compete directly babe ruth hank aaron compiling higher numbers book records time athletic excellence becomes defined solely terms outcomes winning rather losing breaking previous records compiling stellar statisticum vitae oldfashioned connoisseurs may still watch sports love game well played fans encouraged sports medias mania keeping score pay watch largely learn celebrate result athletic excellence equated largely successful outcomes admired compensated contributions bottom line surely tempting athletes seek extra edge increase chance victory boost individual statistics enable stay game rise top ladder native powers suffice begin decline happy seek magical means getting better different body service longedfor final results 160 160 iv yet dignity worth athletic activity defined winners losers faster slower times old records new simply separable measurable comparative result makes performance excellent also humanity human performer excellent athletic activity seems meaningthe human body action grace rhythm moving human form striving exertion aspiring human athletethat separable competition even athlete competitively engaged matters measurable outcome lived experience doer spectator alike humanly cultivated gift excellently work striving superiority outcome doubt animals also run often quickly gracefully doer deed seamlessly united average cheetah runs much faster fastest human honor cheetah way honor olympic runner olympian runs human way human admire cheetahs grace beauty esteem performance cheetah help run fast catch quarry run vain human runner contrast must cultivate gifts order perfect although race swift distinctive humanity display throughout win lose racing human achievement runner alone runners together reason assessing athletic performance fact separate done done itfrom fact done human doer separate score purpose keeping score first place honor promote given type human accomplishment whose meaning simply scored result tomorrows box score ghostly shadow todays ball game record books statistics anything vital athletic contests live human dramas compressed versions overall human drama desire drive essence game comprises competing moves calculated justified solely result consider best human chess player playing chessplaying computeran outstanding human facing outstanding human artifact man machine really playing chess one level indeed playing game making intelligible moves according rules yet computer plays game rather differentlywith uncertainty nervousness sweaty palms active mind crucially desires hopes regarding future success computers way playing really kind simulationthe product genuine human achievement sure real thing playing chess building computers play perfect chess change meaning activity reorienting character aspiration becoming great chess players producing bestexecuted game chess chess sum opposing moves principle calculable machine would human beings wish play chess especially machines better would one watch match two chessplaying computers come back sports baseball game pitted robot pitchers automatic batting machines answer simple complex still play chess play chess human beings genuine chess players computer programmer chess player baseball similarly still run pitch running pitching fast rollerskating using pitching machines possess dignity unique unique engage activities runner pitcher steroids still human runs pitches doer deed arguably less obviously less obviously human unaltered counterpart may faster may also way becoming like efficient machine horse bred racetrack selfwilling selfdirecting human agent 160 160 determine specific difference human act performance identify qualities make us admire performance human activity performers comparison doings animals proves helpful activity animals necessarily unity doer deed acting impulsively without reflection animalunlike human beingcannot deliberately feign activity separate acts immediate source although cheetah runs run race though senses pursues prey harbor ambitions surpass previous performances though motion externally compelled run choice though moves ordered sequence planned course owes beauty excellenceand disparagedto nature instinct alone contrast human runner chooses run race sets goal measures course prepares surveys rivals plots strategy disciplines body cultivates natural gifts pursue goal end means manner matters conscious awareness deliberate choice racers running human act humanly done done freely knowingly humanity athletic performance resides chosenness intelligibility deed depends decisively also activity welltuned wellworking body body question living body mere machine animal body human one someone elses body ones us personally embodied us lives certain bodily gifts owe nothing rational us body us also body truth beauty integrated embodied human activity displayed celebrated human sport also dance musical performance see outstanding athlete action seeas horse racinga rational agent riding whipping separate animal body see instead body gracefully harmoniously work work discipline focus pushing limits displaying powers tacitly obeying rules requirements game know immediately human athlete engaged deliberate goaldirected activity running flight moved fear pursuit moved hunger yet human character bodily movements obvious mindedness bodily activity tacit unobtrusive attuned body harmonious heart mind thatin best instancethe whole activity athlete appears effortlessly flow unified undivided moments athlete experiences displays something like unity doer deed one observes animals difference humans unity achievement great sprinter may run like gazelle great boxer may fight like tiger one would never mistake harmony body soul brute instinct spurs animal toward flight fight complex sportsbaseball football basketball soccermany sophisticated psychic physical powers come play visibly elegantly united athlete goes beyond animal man ascend acts body acts mindbody coordination man cheetah run man alone executes hitandrun dives catch sinking liner gallops run towering fly ball whose trajectory subconsciously calculated correctly hearing leave bat expert basestealer knows time pitchers delivery gain undefeatable head start sharpeyed base runner knows extend double triple complete feat artful slide beyond individual anatomized acts mind body great feat playing game moment moment beginning end light larger whole players survey entire scene perform concert others attending teammates heading opponents defending embody rules manage clock execute game plans make innumerable strategic adjustments things go badly peak great player great team reveal human difference glory root athletic activity worthy human activity desire drive aspirationevery bit important talent training strategic planning aspiration excellence drive perform desire something memorable great finally product pure reason pure neither product merely animality stems rather distinct blending mind desire perhaps peculiar human beings called greeks eros drives us make something less imperfect something noble something beautiful finesomething would fulfilling much humanly possible heights great athlete longs spirited conquest opponents longs perfect game perfection performance transcends victory alone pursues aspiration least begin admirable human would seek excellence condition order attain would gladly become someone something else sane person would choose fastest thing two legs required becoming ostrich excellence beast god even excellence magically transformed human excellence embodied share mankinds vast potential goal admire trying achieve better bodies biotechnology fact honor given bodies cultivate given individual gifts instead whether realize voting syringes different body different native capacities powers giving new foreign gifts natures retort natures original gifts deserve special claim loyaltywhy become someone else even something betterthanhumanwould diminish possibility personal human excellence effort make enhance come great paradox human aspiration always embraces acceptance given desire perfection striving excel whatever activity must seek make better must also continue affirm enduring identity lest cease trying perfect every athletes pursuit excellence implicitly requires accepting grace gratitude body natural endowments escape change without ceasing ironies biotechnological enhancement athletic performance painfully clear turning biological agents transform image choose compromise choosing willing identity electing become less normally source shapers identity take pill insert gene makes us something desire compromising selfdirected path toward attainment using agents transform bodies sake better bodily performance mock excellence individual embodiment superior performance meant display using technological means transcend limits natures deform character human desire aspiration settling externally gauged achievements less less fruits individual striving cultivated finite gifts submitting chemists become mere placeholders tainted records might one day attach name could conflict athletic excellence body gracefully work fulfilling full potential image passive patient chemically dependent technological cleverness others coveting feats never truly claim adulation really deserve even enhancements tomorrow prove safe legal shame attaches steroid use would still remainat least honorable society worthy fans 160 160 v yet worthiness fans remains open largely neglected question relation spectator sport athletic activity necessarily require spectators millions young notsoyoung people play sports gyms playgrounds sometimes organized leagues often pickup games largely unobserved save fellow participants perhaps family members spectator sports collegiate professional shared national obsession define perception sports turn shape meaning sport modern culture realms world athlete inseparable world spectator stage athletes perform inseparable audience players fans provide encouragement recognition acclaim confirms superiority fans players show enormously difficult games try play played best enabling us vicariously participate attainments taste genius appreciative beholding superior athletic activity mirroring completing allowing properly known properly valued yet inherent difficulties spectator sports athletes beholders fan comes see genuine excellence honorable competition mercy integrityor lack integrityof athletes game athlete seeks recognition honor receives notoriously better judgment taste bestow greatest athletes know difference honor celebrity glory vainglory care much recognition worthy opponents connoisseurs cheers illinformed mob although professional players take inspiration fans extra man playing crowd satisfying tastes bottom deformation athletics adulteration imported theater showing playing part someone else essence theater shining forth oneself ones best heart sports worthy seen many us fans vividly remember greatest performances roger clemens mound marion jones racetrackthe two 20strikeout games seattle mariners 1986 detroit tigers ten years later 100meter final sydney 2000 remember mark mcgwires besting sammy sosa homerun derby 1998 reach new season record 70 recall seeing broken three years later barry bonds hit numbers 71 72 one game two days end season spectators witnessed human excellence fleshthe striving body work beautiful behold spirited competitor play dominating opposing batters rising rivals performances filled devoted fans euphoric pleasure even elicited admiration cheered defeated greatness greatness even spectators whose lives elevated great performances never lived see fall heroes hey beheld ignorance memories forever sweet curtain never lifted reveal hidden syringe gave steroiddependent victors edge 160 160 marvelous recent book titled praise athletic beauty hans ulrich gumbrecht pays moving tribute aesthetic excellence great athletes describes deep human satisfactions great athletic performances give watch whether partisans connoisseurs yet like fan never lives see curtain lifted left wonder might use performanceenhancing drugs enhance experience spectator even compromises integrity athlete beautyloving fan watches ignorance performance athletes steroids less beautiful impressive victoryloving fan watches ignorance victory less sweet entertainmentloving fan watches ignorance pleasuregiving spectacle sport diminished yet see marion jones heading prison roger clemens facing inquisitors congress spectators feel wronged heroes turn villains retired numbers backs jerseys get replaced scarlet hgh foreheads soured pleasure took remembering feats cheated us unadulterated admiration excellence right feel wronged spectators may well bear responsibility degradation heroes right feel cheated also created culture demands new records greater spectacles worships victory almost cost restore integrity game need recover sport matters us societywhy games men play serious business capable shaping characters souls better worse adulteration sport today owed course partly fact spectator sports quite literally serious businessa multibilliondollar serious businessnot professional athletes even agents team owners television networks tastes fans say least entirely making huge salaries bonuses marketing players paraphernalia pregame slamdunk homerunhitting contests reduction game highlight reel replayed endlessly roundtheclock sports channels major channel aptly called entertainmentspn hyping homer derbies record chasings exploding scoreboards raucous entertainment innings halftime compulsory celebrity appearances game profitdriven activities help shape tastes judgments fans whose tastes judgments turn transform shape game way played appreciated 160 160 fandom may become marketable commodity essence remains something noble deeper roots significances fans become sports enthusiasts young young fanatics primordial sense patriots team worshippers heroes amateurs seek imitate pros young learn play games watch love watch games play many loyalty team persists rest lives adults may settle new york city remember taking bus see carl yastrzemski play fenway remain devotees red sox nation unto death fandom kind patriotisma devotion ones better worse combined thirst victory especially ones greatest rivals years ago discussion washington making patriots irving kristol remarked want make patriots make kids join sports team fans want participate thrill victory even means accepting year year likelihood defeat one authors essay year entering seventh decade rooting white soxand rooting cubs yankeeswith one world series victory show victory cherishes especially proved hope foolishness fans feel emotionally even physically part game jump seats scream television threaten referees dance streets yet modern culture sport complicates fans experience loyalty players jump nation nation search best salary todays red sox god tomorrows yankee devil todays hunger victory easily degenerates belief fair sport war might feel cheated learn clemens steroids may well final inning final game willfully looked way could victory parade sports today face challenge preserving virtue loyalty culture infidelity face challenge moderating love victory love honor culture rewards tolerates victory without honor fans wrong players much players wrong fans players deliver us victories demand look way trying see infractions debasementsnot illegal steroids corked bats taking quarterback pirating opponents game planthat may helped gain victories give us much pleasure evidence comes vilify athletes quest admiration knowing full well gaining admiration often requires may condemn athletic heroes using performanceenhancing drugs fact complicit corruption created culture encourages use cosmetic surgery botox viagra tools growing arsenal biomagic remake bodies image fantasies seek athletes entertainment alonea good showwe eventually snicker means use satisfy us delights us seeing ball fly san francisco bay pitching radar gun recording 100 miles per hour indifferent results attained human sport become strange hybrid dog racing fantasy wrestling circus freak show men women programmed perform highest levels science makes possible society mere spectators wave roar approval feats defeat reason anyone plays honors sports first place sport species play frivolous activity games serve utilitarian purpose feed hungry cure sick shelter cold part reason however sport belongs superior domain human activity activity done sake something else sake like play sport essentially valuable end result consequence whether victory profit belongs realm necessity realm leisure freedom cultivation sport gratuitous one domains like music arts sets human beings apart animals free perfectible beings live physical survival genetic selfperpetuation among human societies play sport encouraged risen humankinds sober preoccupations safety comfort gain leisure josef pieper argued beautiful book title ba sis culture cultivation embodied excellencesfor perfections sakeis one marks cultured society one whose citizens celebrate alive fit coordinated mindful bodies capable complex often beautiful movements improved need test worthy rivals 160 160 play different mere amusement entertainment activities also ends game though pastime pass time though sport entertains us meaning independent pleasure derive structured activity governed rules filled risk uncertainty sport invites rewards gamespecific skills also indispensable virtues determination discipline courage endurance enterprise perspicacity mental toughness play game seriously virtues acquired transferred realms life many wellcoached college athlete later years praises coach helping become manresponsible honorable devoted making something watch game seriously long haul virtues witnessed ratified admired generally sport gratuitous field grace gracious display beautiful form gracious appreciation worthy opponents gratitude native gifts efforts rewarded yet sport simply artful play essence lies somewhere dance war embracing aspects sport men meet field play field best men win many best players driven primarily thirst victory deepest appeal sport often drama gamethe miracle drive win clock expires nearperfect season ends tragic defeat return fallen champion glory fascination sport lies moment truth rise fall perform choke microcosm human drama display pathos possibility liberated cares everyday life spectators given privileged access lifes deepest truths three periods four quarters nine innings behold human story without pathos lives bearing upon us watch athletes accomplish seemingly superhuman thingsthings could never dowhich therefore hold awe yet even best athletes embody possibilities limitations finite vulnerable human body whose possibilities striving perfect whose limitations struggling surmount spirit soars succeedand kid us always love winner mature come also respect many try fail rise fall human beings like us even immortals one day retire best grace standing aside next generation wouldbe heroes sport war fight finish marked death surrender played right spirit gracious celebration good sportsmanship displayed winners losers alike crowning touch sporting event gumbrecht captures nicely story japanese baseball superstar named koji akiyama struck looking runners base critical moment japanese championship series fans sighed disappointment akiyama stayed batters box second longer needed toand gave really beautiful smile pitcher gumbrecht comments akiyamas smile believe must come feeling brief moment least opposing pitcher taken game baseball highest level making man bat lost competition part achievement like smile angels see sculpted stone medieval cathedralsart historians believe smiles signify angels happiness able play role gods perfect creation 160 best greatest athletic events become even civic rituals stadiums indeed become cathedrals fandom kind worship correct learning praise athletic beauty inadequate full human social meaning sport sport capable leading us beyond aesthetic moral even transcendent great athlete embodies perfect unity gratitude given possibilities pride achievements alone made possible matters athletic beauty care little syringe behind curtain long allowed see still beautiful matters elevation man sport field steroids degrade capable elevating 160 160 vi problems facing america today perhaps something silly even trivializing congress devoting time performanceenhancing drugs sports gotcha game capitol hill certainly done little help us see deeper issues involved understand gives athletes games integrity presumably seek defend perhaps occasion mitchell report least invite us imagine kind society might become biotechnical interventions become powerful widespread might come see olympic races dog races human runners running horses little different one another wellbred athletes increasingly mostly entertainment amusement might become little expendable props might lose sight difference real false excellence eventually longer care distinction worst would danger turning wouldbe heroes slavespersons exist entertain us meet standards whose freedom pursue human excellence shackled need perform conform amusement applause whileperhaps indefinitelywe might relish superior results biotechnical ingenuity could make possible faster times better scores broken records would gone far losing sight excellence worth seeking pursue human beings artifacts aspiring beings objects proud beings shameful ones young fans grow age biotechnical enhancement danger greatest problem come imitate steroiddependent role models great harm bodies futures deeper danger young come assume everything fine really fake human excellence always compromised greatest performances always illusion curtain inevitably lifted reveal chemist lurking shadows culture degrades heroes especially heroes young destroy idea heroism society gets used steroids sport become even cynical already civilization shaped possibilities biotechnical enhancement erode twin possibilities gratitude excellence remain cartoon heroes hightech magic acts life devoted souldeforming amusements cure adulteration sports cultural disease already far along require much banishment steroids performanceenhancing drugs require revivalfor contemporary americans difficult achieveof athletic ideal seen manifestation mysterious powers mak e us human useful recall athletic contests ancient greeks conducted olympia elements religious festivals games celebrated alongside theatrical productions great tragedies well animal sacrifices offered gods apollonian beauty stadium dionysian ecstasy stage crowds catharsis edification around today sports palaces without knowing itand even without beer bratwurstdionysus holds court among fans apollo still manages shine commercial television timeouts endless reciting statistics adulterated age amateur spiritthe love gameis quite dead neither disposition gratitude many winning athlete great play points heavenward thrilling victory gives verbal credit thanks god usually embarrassment television interviewer yet little gestures however routine often thoughtless sports fans reminded perhaps deepest reason honor athletics chariots fire scottish runner eric liddell urged sister give running return work christian missionary china explains movingly believe god made purpose also made fast run feel pleasure give running would hold contempt skeptics may scoff true fans sports first listening liddell watching perform nod approvingly regardless theological commitments even lack thereof know believers unbelievers means absent gratitude gifts correlative desire cultivate honorably fullest extent possible adulteration sport overcome even steroid era come end leon r kass hertog fellow american enterprise institute professor committee social thought university chicago eric cohen eppc adjunct fellow160and editoratlarge new atlantis is160author forthcoming shadow progress human age technology encounter books | 5,112 |
<p>When “ <a href="http://variety.com/t/kid-nation/" type="external">Kid Nation</a>” premiered on CBS 10 years ago, it was amidst a firestorm of controversy. Ever since the reality series was first picked up, critics and viewers alike were raising questions about the wisdom of putting 40 children — between the ages of 8 and 15 — in a makeshift town and having them fend for themselves without adult supervision.</p>
<p>Addressing the Television Critics Assn. a few months before the premiere, then-CBS entertainment president Nina Tassler took the controversy in stride, saying that in order for a reality show to “change the landscape of television, you have to stir public debate.”&#160;CBS’ goal, said Tassler, was to “do something different, and try and reach out and have people talk about the show.” And in that, they certainly succeeded. Here, executive producer Tom&#160;Forman talks with Variety about the genesis of the show, his take on the controversy, and whether he’d ever revisit the idea.</p>
<p>Forman, who had won the reality program Emmy two years in a row for “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” on rival broadcaster ABC, had an overall deal with CBS, and worried the reality genre was growing stale, wanted to make a big splash with his next show. Forman sat down with then-head of alternative Ghen Maynard to brainstorm ideas. “Is there a fresh casting pool out there?” Forman recalls thinking. “The people we were putting on these shows had watched too many of these shows and were saying what was expected of them. We quickly realized, yes, there was, but they may just be ages eight to 15.”</p>
<p>It was from that conversation that “Kid Nation” was born. Forman, who was a father himself, became fascinated by the idea of what kids would be capable of if allowed freedom of thought. Developing the show during George W. Bush’s presidency also lent itself to the themes he wanted the show to explore. “If you took extraordinary kids and gave them the chance to rethink government or religion or education –&#160;these issues that plagued us then and today –&#160;what would they come up with if unencumbered by our legacy issues as adults?” Forman says.</p>
<p>A self-professed “history buff” and “fan of social experiments,” Forman says he initially saw the show as a straight documentary series with a large cast. “‘Lost’ was a big hit on TV at the time, and that was sort of how I envisioned this working, too, in that there were hundreds of people stranded on the island, and there were a few key characters front and center of every episode, but at any time someone else could do something interesting and become an episodic or multi-episode arc,” Forman says. “I hadn’t seen that in non-scripted before.”</p>
<p>As Forman began to flesh out details of the show, it became clear “Kid Nation” would have to include game metrics, as well. “Those elements were what you needed to power up broadcast reality series in the development process at the time,” he says.</p>
<p>The show grew into a hybrid that saw the kids moving into bare bones quarters in Bonanza, New Mexico — it was such a ghost town there were no bathrooms, just outhouses. It was in this makeshift town that they lived — eating and sleeping and doing chores –&#160;as well as worked, earning money they could spend recreationally. They were guided by a “Pioneer Journal” production left behind, learning to churn butter and even butcher chickens. The town was also where they took part in competitions designed to encourage teamwork, push forward leaders, earn individuals gold stars which could be turned into more practical rewards.</p>
<p>Though the show was not entirely how he initially envisioned it, Forman was not deterred. “Some audience members might not pay much attention to the competitions,” he says. “The part that was amazing and controversial and groundbreaking was the social element and the documentary element as the kids figured it out.”</p>
<p>In order to succeed at the social experiment portion of the show, he knew casting would be key. Finding “remarkable” kids meant&#160;outreach with “gifted and talented programs” at schools, rather than casting calls that would net aspiring actors. “It was almost a year of talking to those kids to make sure they were right for the show and talking to their parents to make sure they felt comfortable with what we were about to do,” Forman says.</p>
<p>The parents had to sign a 22-page liability waiver&#160;– a document that ended up getting as much press as the show itself because of the legalese that signed away their rights to sue the production company or network if their children were exposed to “unmarked and uncontrollable hazards and conditions that may cause the Minor serious bodily injury, illness, or death” as well as the possibilities of encountering wild animals or extreme weather.</p>
<p>But Forman says the kids were never truly at risk. “They had to be safe and cared for at every turn,” Forman says of the young cast. “It was the only&#160;show I’ve ever run and possibly the only show in the history of television that had a full-time pediatrics department. It had counselors&#160;– both life and psychological counselors but also our equivalent of camp counselors who were living among the kids at all times but taking a step back when it came to leadership.”</p>
<p>During the show’s short run — it premiered on Sept. 19 and wrapped in early December — the kids were assigned to “districts” and given jobs and spending money according to that class structure. They were encouraged to find ways to hone the rules of their society, and they participated in challenges that often saw them facing a choice of reward or prize&#160;– usually pitting a practical option against a luxury. They held town hall meetings where voting was encouraged, and they ended up discussing quite a few of the important topics Forman had hoped they would consider.</p>
<p>“They were taking the mission really seriously. These 40 kids really wanted to reach a consensus about religion and government and the environment, and watching them try to get there was so inspiring,” Forman remembers. “When they were kind, they were just so genuinely kind and good to each other, and that was beautiful to watch.”</p>
<p>However, they were still cliquey, and “when they were mean, they were meaner than any adults could ever be,” Forman acknowledges.</p>
<p>In addition to the controversy that arose from the liability waiver, the performers union AFTRA also took issue with the show and questioned how much autonomy the kids had to say and do what they wanted, versus being directed by the production staff. There were questions about fair compensation and whether the show was adhering to child labor laws. Comparisons to “Lord of the Flies,” which Forman himself didn’t deny at the time, also added to public concerns. Moments of bullying and tyranny dominated screen time, and some of the audience was disturbed by specific adult behaviors some of the kids exhibited (slamming soda like alcohol, wolf-whistling at girls who were walking by, speaking in broken dialects or affected accents to mimic other ethnicities).</p>
<p>“Kids are pathologically honest,” Forman says of watching their personalities play out in an extreme environment. “They were multi-faceted, and candidly, so much of that hit the cutting room floor because we had so much but also given the nature of reality television, we had to service the whole game construct.”</p>
<p>“Kid Nation” was never intended to be a show&#160;for kids, although it starred kids, though Forman does say that the idea of parents watching it with their children in order to continue the conversation about real world issues was a big driving factor for why he wanted the show to be on a broadcast network.</p>
<p>Ten years later, Forman isn’t sure if there is room on broadcast for the kind of documentary storytelling where “we’d put the kids together, see what happened, and then find our stories in post” like he initially wanted. “We talk about ‘Kid Nation’ all the time as we develop new shows,” Forman says of his team at his independent global content studio, Critical Content. “We talk about lessons learned about casting and group dynamics and how to run a big show. That was about the toughest show anyone will ever produce!”</p>
<p>Despite all of the backlash, Forman still looks back on “Kid Nation” as a highlight — and says he still has dreams of someday, somehow revisiting it. “Every couple of years I pick up the phone and lob in a call to CBS and see if we should do it again,” Forman says, noting that he still keeps in touch with some of the kids and follows many of them on social media.</p>
<p>But if he were to do it again, he says he’d want to have a bit more of a firm stance on the execution. “I’m talking less about season two or three with a new cast than a ‘Where Are They Now?’ with the kids we had originally,” Forman says. “I think it’s so interesting to see footage of them at eight or nine with snapshots of who they’ve grown into. They were really the best cast I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with.”</p> | false | 1 | kid nation premiered cbs 10 years ago amidst firestorm controversy ever since reality series first picked critics viewers alike raising questions wisdom putting 40 children ages 8 15 makeshift town fend without adult supervision addressing television critics assn months premiere thencbs entertainment president nina tassler took controversy stride saying order reality show change landscape television stir public debate160cbs goal said tassler something different try reach people talk show certainly succeeded executive producer tom160forman talks variety genesis show take controversy whether hed ever revisit idea forman reality program emmy two years row extreme makeover home edition rival broadcaster abc overall deal cbs worried reality genre growing stale wanted make big splash next show forman sat thenhead alternative ghen maynard brainstorm ideas fresh casting pool forman recalls thinking people putting shows watched many shows saying expected quickly realized yes may ages eight 15 conversation kid nation born forman father became fascinated idea kids would capable allowed freedom thought developing show george w bushs presidency also lent themes wanted show explore took extraordinary kids gave chance rethink government religion education 160these issues plagued us today 160what would come unencumbered legacy issues adults forman says selfprofessed history buff fan social experiments forman says initially saw show straight documentary series large cast lost big hit tv time sort envisioned working hundreds people stranded island key characters front center every episode time someone else could something interesting become episodic multiepisode arc forman says hadnt seen nonscripted forman began flesh details show became clear kid nation would include game metrics well elements needed power broadcast reality series development process time says show grew hybrid saw kids moving bare bones quarters bonanza new mexico ghost town bathrooms outhouses makeshift town lived eating sleeping chores 160as well worked earning money could spend recreationally guided pioneer journal production left behind learning churn butter even butcher chickens town also took part competitions designed encourage teamwork push forward leaders earn individuals gold stars could turned practical rewards though show entirely initially envisioned forman deterred audience members might pay much attention competitions says part amazing controversial groundbreaking social element documentary element kids figured order succeed social experiment portion show knew casting would key finding remarkable kids meant160outreach gifted talented programs schools rather casting calls would net aspiring actors almost year talking kids make sure right show talking parents make sure felt comfortable forman says parents sign 22page liability waiver160 document ended getting much press show legalese signed away rights sue production company network children exposed unmarked uncontrollable hazards conditions may cause minor serious bodily injury illness death well possibilities encountering wild animals extreme weather forman says kids never truly risk safe cared every turn forman says young cast only160show ive ever run possibly show history television fulltime pediatrics department counselors160 life psychological counselors also equivalent camp counselors living among kids times taking step back came leadership shows short run premiered sept 19 wrapped early december kids assigned districts given jobs spending money according class structure encouraged find ways hone rules society participated challenges often saw facing choice reward prize160 usually pitting practical option luxury held town hall meetings voting encouraged ended discussing quite important topics forman hoped would consider taking mission really seriously 40 kids really wanted reach consensus religion government environment watching try get inspiring forman remembers kind genuinely kind good beautiful watch however still cliquey mean meaner adults could ever forman acknowledges addition controversy arose liability waiver performers union aftra also took issue show questioned much autonomy kids say wanted versus directed production staff questions fair compensation whether show adhering child labor laws comparisons lord flies forman didnt deny time also added public concerns moments bullying tyranny dominated screen time audience disturbed specific adult behaviors kids exhibited slamming soda like alcohol wolfwhistling girls walking speaking broken dialects affected accents mimic ethnicities kids pathologically honest forman says watching personalities play extreme environment multifaceted candidly much hit cutting room floor much also given nature reality television service whole game construct kid nation never intended show160for kids although starred kids though forman say idea parents watching children order continue conversation real world issues big driving factor wanted show broadcast network ten years later forman isnt sure room broadcast kind documentary storytelling wed put kids together see happened find stories post like initially wanted talk kid nation time develop new shows forman says team independent global content studio critical content talk lessons learned casting group dynamics run big show toughest show anyone ever produce despite backlash forman still looks back kid nation highlight says still dreams someday somehow revisiting every couple years pick phone lob call cbs see forman says noting still keeps touch kids follows many social media says hed want bit firm stance execution im talking less season two three new cast kids originally forman says think interesting see footage eight nine snapshots theyve grown really best cast ive ever pleasure working | 809 |
<p>WASHINGTON — The White House and congressional Republicans are finalizing a tax plan that would slash the corporate rate while likely reducing the levy for the wealthiest Americans, with President Donald Trump ready to roll out the policy proposal at midweek.</p>
<p>The grand plan to rewrite the nation’s tax code would be the first major overhaul in three decades, delivering on a Trump campaign pledge and providing a sorely needed legislative achievement. It also is expected to eliminate or reduce some tax breaks and deductions.</p>
<p>The plan would likely cut the tax rate for the wealthiest Americans, now at 39.6 percent, to 35 percent, people familiar with the plan said Monday. They spoke on the condition of anonymity ahead of a formal announcement.</p>
<p>In addition, the top tax for corporations would be reduced to around 20 percent from the current 35 percent, they said. It will seek to simply the tax system by reducing the number of income tax brackets from seven to three.</p>
<p>The White House and congressional leaders planned an all-out blitz later this week to build support for the plan, which is now Trump’s top legislative priority as the GOP has struggled to repeal and replace former President Barack Obama’s health care law. The political stakes are high for Trump, who has promised to bring 3 percent economic growth and expanded jobs through tax cuts.</p>
<p>Vice President Mike Pence was expected to hold events in Michigan and Wisconsin on Thursday to promote the tax plan with business leaders.</p>
<p>Debate over deductions</p>
<p>The plan being assembled lays out “pro-growth tax reform,” Rep. Kevin Brady, R-Texas, chairman of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, told reporters on Capitol Hill. It will fix a tax code that is “so complex, so costly and so unfair,” he said.</p>
<p>Details will be filled in later by the committee, and legislation will be put forward after the House and Senate enact their budget frameworks, Brady said.</p>
<p>Republicans are divided over the potential elimination of some of the deductions, underscoring the difficulty of overhauling the tax code even with GOP control of the House and Senate.</p>
<p>House Republicans planned to hold a Wednesday retreat at Fort McNair, Maryland, a few miles from the White House, to discuss the proposal, with briefings led by Brady and Rep. Peter Roskam, R-Ill.</p>
<p>Trump planned to address the plan in a speech the same day at the Indiana State Fairgrounds in Indianapolis. Cabinet members and other top administration officials were fanning out on Thursday to talk about the benefits of overhauling the tax system.</p>
<p>“The tax reform, I think, is very critical, and he knows that,” said Christopher Ruddy, CEO of NewsMax and a longtime Trump friend. “And that’s why he’ll push really hard for it. But he’s got something big going for him here. The Republicans need to run on something next year, and it’s tax cuts. So even if they don’t want to be particularly helpful to him, I think they’re going to give him this. If he has the tax cuts signed, I think it’s going to be very helpful for him.”</p>
<p>Touching with his conservative base, Trump planned to discuss the tax plan at dinner Monday night with representatives of several conservative, religious and anti-abortion groups.</p>
<p>Major push</p>
<p>Outside Republican groups and business interests are also planning a major push to advocate for the tax framework.</p>
<p>Corry Bliss, the executive director of the American Action Network, a conservative advocacy group, said it planned to spend $12 million — atop the $8 million it spent laying the groundwork for the tax overhaul — to help win passage of the plan.</p>
<p>“There’s an understanding among outside groups, among members, among Republicans across the country that there is a desperate need to cut middle-class taxes,” Bliss said, noting “excitement and relief” among outside groups that it was “finally time” to push the tax package in Congress.</p>
<p>Republicans control Congress but are split on some core tax issues. They’re in agreement on wanting to cut tax rates and simplify the byzantine tax system, but they’re divided over whether to add to the government’s ballooning debt with tax cuts. The GOP also is at odds over eliminating the federal deduction for state and local taxes.</p>
<p>That deduction is prominently in the sights of the plan’s architects. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin says the administration wants to eliminate or reduce it because the federal government shouldn’t be subsidizing states and wealthy households. Nearly 44 million people claimed the deduction for state and local taxes in 2014, according to the most recent IRS tally, especially in the high-tax, high-income states of California, New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.</p>
<p>Politics figure heavily. There are a host of GOP lawmakers in those four Democratic-controlled “blue” states — including prominent members like House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California. A number of them are pushing back.</p>
<p>Regardless of what the administration and the House GOP come up with on taxes, Sen. Orrin Hatch, the Utah Republican who heads the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee, has warned that his panel won’t be “a rubber stamp” for the plan.</p>
<p>Republican senators on opposing sides of the deficit debate have tentatively agreed on a plan for $1.5 trillion in tax cuts. That would add substantially to the debt and would enable deeper cuts to tax rates than would be allowed if Republicans followed through on earlier promises that their tax overhaul wouldn’t add to the budget deficit. That would mark an about-face for top congressional Republicans like Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who had for months promised it wouldn’t add to the deficit.</p> | false | 1 | washington white house congressional republicans finalizing tax plan would slash corporate rate likely reducing levy wealthiest americans president donald trump ready roll policy proposal midweek grand plan rewrite nations tax code would first major overhaul three decades delivering trump campaign pledge providing sorely needed legislative achievement also expected eliminate reduce tax breaks deductions plan would likely cut tax rate wealthiest americans 396 percent 35 percent people familiar plan said monday spoke condition anonymity ahead formal announcement addition top tax corporations would reduced around 20 percent current 35 percent said seek simply tax system reducing number income tax brackets seven three white house congressional leaders planned allout blitz later week build support plan trumps top legislative priority gop struggled repeal replace former president barack obamas health care law political stakes high trump promised bring 3 percent economic growth expanded jobs tax cuts vice president mike pence expected hold events michigan wisconsin thursday promote tax plan business leaders debate deductions plan assembled lays progrowth tax reform rep kevin brady rtexas chairman taxwriting house ways means committee told reporters capitol hill fix tax code complex costly unfair said details filled later committee legislation put forward house senate enact budget frameworks brady said republicans divided potential elimination deductions underscoring difficulty overhauling tax code even gop control house senate house republicans planned hold wednesday retreat fort mcnair maryland miles white house discuss proposal briefings led brady rep peter roskam rill trump planned address plan speech day indiana state fairgrounds indianapolis cabinet members top administration officials fanning thursday talk benefits overhauling tax system tax reform think critical knows said christopher ruddy ceo newsmax longtime trump friend thats hell push really hard hes got something big going republicans need run something next year tax cuts even dont want particularly helpful think theyre going give tax cuts signed think going helpful touching conservative base trump planned discuss tax plan dinner monday night representatives several conservative religious antiabortion groups major push outside republican groups business interests also planning major push advocate tax framework corry bliss executive director american action network conservative advocacy group said planned spend 12 million atop 8 million spent laying groundwork tax overhaul help win passage plan theres understanding among outside groups among members among republicans across country desperate need cut middleclass taxes bliss said noting excitement relief among outside groups finally time push tax package congress republicans control congress split core tax issues theyre agreement wanting cut tax rates simplify byzantine tax system theyre divided whether add governments ballooning debt tax cuts gop also odds eliminating federal deduction state local taxes deduction prominently sights plans architects treasury secretary steven mnuchin says administration wants eliminate reduce federal government shouldnt subsidizing states wealthy households nearly 44 million people claimed deduction state local taxes 2014 according recent irs tally especially hightax highincome states california new york new jersey connecticut politics figure heavily host gop lawmakers four democraticcontrolled blue states including prominent members like house majority leader kevin mccarthy california number pushing back regardless administration house gop come taxes sen orrin hatch utah republican heads taxwriting senate finance committee warned panel wont rubber stamp plan republican senators opposing sides deficit debate tentatively agreed plan 15 trillion tax cuts would add substantially debt would enable deeper cuts tax rates would allowed republicans followed earlier promises tax overhaul wouldnt add budget deficit would mark aboutface top congressional republicans like ryan senate majority leader mitch mcconnell months promised wouldnt add deficit | 569 |
<p>How Ukraine could help re-democratizing Russia</p>
<p>Recent political developments in the three Eastern Slavic states, like the repression of opposition figures in Moscow, Minsk, and Kyiv, have been frustrating. They illustrate once more that the EU’s and, not the least, Germany’s policies towards Eastern Europe during the last two decades were a failure, in a number of ways. In spite of considerable efforts of the Western political elite with regard to Moscow’s leadership, Russia has, as the key Northern Eurasian state, become an advocate of anti-democratic tendencies. After consolidating an authoritarian regime inside, the Kremlin is now engaged in anchoring the Putinist model, around the Russian Federation. This concerns both the support or promotion of similar regimes in the post-Soviet space, as well as various attempts to come to a durable modus vivendi with the West.</p>
<p>The many interactions that the West had with Russia since 1991 resulted, to be sure, in a number of agreements on disarmament, cultural exchange, investment, and trade. And some of them, like START III, have been rather important. However, most of these deals would have also come about had Brussels, Washington, and Berlin been less intensively engaged with the Kremlin. The basic divide between the democratic West and authoritarian Russia has been hardly diminished by them.</p>
<p>Moscow’s elite discourse and Russian domestic politics, notwithstanding, do not operate in international isolation. The leaders and population of Russia interact most intensively with the citizens of the former Soviet republics. This concerns especially the other two Orthodox Eastern Slavic countries – Ukraine and Belarus. This circumstance entails a specific opportunity to readjust the West’s policies towards Eastern Europe, in general, and those of Germany towards Ukraine, in particular.</p>
<p>Belarus and Russia have, by now, been ruled by more or less autocratic regimes, for several years. They would have a long way to go to return to the democratic beginnings of the early 1990s. Things are different in post-Orange Ukraine. One can, to be sure, now observe authoritarian tendencies in Kyiv that remind of the regressions in Belarus since 1994 and Russia since 1999. However, the centralization attempts of the new Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich encounter multifarious resistance. TV channels defend the independence of their news reporting and political discussions. Rectors of universities take openly or covered positions against the controversial Education Minister Dmytro Tabachnik. A plethora of different social groups – nationalist parties, human rights organizations, entrepreneurs associations, feminist activists etc. – make their disagreement with Yanukovich’s policies heard every week.</p>
<p>Moreover, the new leadership, for all its pro-Russian orientation, is still markedly distinct from Russian and Belarusian political elites concerning its foreign policy orientation. The new power holders in Kyiv do not any longer aim at NATO membership. But they tirelessly emphasize that they – in continuity with their “Orange” predecessors – want Ukraine to become a full member of the European Union. These and some other specifics make Ukraine today a country that remains distinct from its North-Eastern neighbours. These Ukrainian specifics also have larger implications for European politics and Eurasian security.</p>
<p>Ukraine plays the role of both, the most important “brotherly people” and the largest imperial temptation of post-Soviet Russia. The future self-perception of Russia as either a saturated nation state or re-emerging empire will, above all, be determined by the development of Ukraine. If Ukraine returns into the Russian orbit, Moscow will see itself again as the pivot of a huge territory, and an imperial center that, in one way or another, controls much of Northern Eurasia. If Ukraine, on the other hand, will not only rhetorically, but also substantively converge with the Western community of states, the Kremlin rulers will, to be sure, still control the largest state in the world. However, the Russians would then be left on to themselves.</p>
<p>Such a constellation entails an important policy option for the West concerning the framing of the future triangular relationship between the EU, Ukraine, and Russia. Not only would a consolidation of Ukraine as an independent state have fundamental repercussions for Russia’s self-perception, and thus for Moscow’s relations with the outer world in general. The political development of Ukraine has also implications for the Russian domestic discourse. Because of the close relations and multifarious contacts between Ukrainians and Russians, a successful Ukrainian re-democratization and sustainable integration of Kyiv into the international community of democratic states would be significant beyond Ukraine’s borders. Such an evolution would leave a deeper impression in Russia than the various models, advices, and demands that the West has presented to the Kremlin during the last 20 years.</p>
<p>If the Ukrainians could demonstrate that a large Eastern Slavic and Orthodox post-Soviet nation is able to build and sustain a real democracy – this would be of all-European importance. It would constitute a more weighty argument for a renewed democratization of the Russian Federation too than the many respective appeals of the EU and US, of the past. References to a Ukrainian model would be something that the Russian leadership would not any longer – as in its current reactions to the liberal-democratic paradigm – be able to dismiss easily as Western ethno-centrism or an American subversion strategy.</p>
<p>A refocusing of Western – not the least German – foreign policies should, of course, not entail a break with Moscow. The successful START III negotiations have illustrated that one can also achieve important progress in the development of the Russian-Western relationship with an authoritarian Russia. In any way, Russia will, in view of its territorial size and geopolitical relevance, surely remain on the radar screen of Western diplomacy. What, however, is overdue is a readjustment of the foreign policy foci of the relevant decision makers in Washington, Brussels, and Berlin. Russian issues should not any longer absorb the bulk of attention of Western actors engaged with Eastern Europe. This would, against the background of the continuing idiosyncrasies of the political discourse and seclusion of the decision making processes in Russia, be a waste of energy and time.</p>
<p>Instead, the EU and Germany, in particular, should in their future Eastern policies concentrate on the country that is geopolitically relevant too, still open towards Western advice, and manifestly pro-European – Ukraine. Sooner or later, heightened attention from the EU concerning the economic potential, internal affairs, and foreign policies of Ukraine would result in substantive domestic change in Kyiv. Progress in the political development and European integration of Ukraine would, in its turn, have feedback effects within Russian domestic politics and thus indirectly also for Moscow’s relations to Brussels, Washington and Berlin.</p>
<p>In spite of the various setbacks of the last year, in Ukraine, there still exist important preconditions for a new turn towards Europeanization. What, so far, has been missing is targeted support, from the West, of such germs within society as well as political and intellectual elite of Ukraine. The main reason for this omission is the generally low interest of both national- and European-level Western political actors for Ukraine. Their engagement with the Ukrainian government and civil society is often casual or limited to diplomatic niceties. This is a result of the peripheral status of Ukraine within the Eastern policies of the EU and its member states, as well as within the international thinking of their political and intellectual leaders. Among them, one often still finds the idea that negotiations with Moscow and initiatives regarding Russia are the crucial or even only keys to the creation of a stable post-communist security structure. Against this background, Kyiv is considered of, at best, secondary importance to the emergence of a durable pan-European political architecture. Worse, Ukraine is frequently seen as a mere object or even blank spot within the new institutional configuration of the European continent in the 21st century.</p>
<p>In fact, Ukraine plays a decisive role for the future of Europe. Her fate will not only determine whether the All-European Common Home, once proposed by Mikhail Gorbachev, will become reality or not. The EU will not be able to meet its elementary needs for sustainable security and confidence-building cooperation in the Euro-Asiatic space without taking Ukraine under its wings. A democratization of Ukraine would represent a chance to demonstrate to the Russian elite and society a relevant model for development for their own country. Should such a strategy be successful, this could also lay the foundation for a durable partnership and, perhaps, even for a values community between Russia and the EU in the 21st century.</p>
<p>______</p>
<p>A more extensive version of this article is forthcoming, in May 2011, in IP Global: The Journal of the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP), vol. 12, no. 3.</p> | false | 1 | ukraine could help redemocratizing russia recent political developments three eastern slavic states like repression opposition figures moscow minsk kyiv frustrating illustrate eus least germanys policies towards eastern europe last two decades failure number ways spite considerable efforts western political elite regard moscows leadership russia key northern eurasian state become advocate antidemocratic tendencies consolidating authoritarian regime inside kremlin engaged anchoring putinist model around russian federation concerns support promotion similar regimes postsoviet space well various attempts come durable modus vivendi west many interactions west russia since 1991 resulted sure number agreements disarmament cultural exchange investment trade like start iii rather important however deals would also come brussels washington berlin less intensively engaged kremlin basic divide democratic west authoritarian russia hardly diminished moscows elite discourse russian domestic politics notwithstanding operate international isolation leaders population russia interact intensively citizens former soviet republics concerns especially two orthodox eastern slavic countries ukraine belarus circumstance entails specific opportunity readjust wests policies towards eastern europe general germany towards ukraine particular belarus russia ruled less autocratic regimes several years would long way go return democratic beginnings early 1990s things different postorange ukraine one sure observe authoritarian tendencies kyiv remind regressions belarus since 1994 russia since 1999 however centralization attempts new ukrainian president viktor yanukovich encounter multifarious resistance tv channels defend independence news reporting political discussions rectors universities take openly covered positions controversial education minister dmytro tabachnik plethora different social groups nationalist parties human rights organizations entrepreneurs associations feminist activists etc make disagreement yanukovichs policies heard every week moreover new leadership prorussian orientation still markedly distinct russian belarusian political elites concerning foreign policy orientation new power holders kyiv longer aim nato membership tirelessly emphasize continuity orange predecessors want ukraine become full member european union specifics make ukraine today country remains distinct northeastern neighbours ukrainian specifics also larger implications european politics eurasian security ukraine plays role important brotherly people largest imperial temptation postsoviet russia future selfperception russia either saturated nation state reemerging empire determined development ukraine ukraine returns russian orbit moscow see pivot huge territory imperial center one way another controls much northern eurasia ukraine hand rhetorically also substantively converge western community states kremlin rulers sure still control largest state world however russians would left constellation entails important policy option west concerning framing future triangular relationship eu ukraine russia would consolidation ukraine independent state fundamental repercussions russias selfperception thus moscows relations outer world general political development ukraine also implications russian domestic discourse close relations multifarious contacts ukrainians russians successful ukrainian redemocratization sustainable integration kyiv international community democratic states would significant beyond ukraines borders evolution would leave deeper impression russia various models advices demands west presented kremlin last 20 years ukrainians could demonstrate large eastern slavic orthodox postsoviet nation able build sustain real democracy would alleuropean importance would constitute weighty argument renewed democratization russian federation many respective appeals eu us past references ukrainian model would something russian leadership would longer current reactions liberaldemocratic paradigm able dismiss easily western ethnocentrism american subversion strategy refocusing western least german foreign policies course entail break moscow successful start iii negotiations illustrated one also achieve important progress development russianwestern relationship authoritarian russia way russia view territorial size geopolitical relevance surely remain radar screen western diplomacy however overdue readjustment foreign policy foci relevant decision makers washington brussels berlin russian issues longer absorb bulk attention western actors engaged eastern europe would background continuing idiosyncrasies political discourse seclusion decision making processes russia waste energy time instead eu germany particular future eastern policies concentrate country geopolitically relevant still open towards western advice manifestly proeuropean ukraine sooner later heightened attention eu concerning economic potential internal affairs foreign policies ukraine would result substantive domestic change kyiv progress political development european integration ukraine would turn feedback effects within russian domestic politics thus indirectly also moscows relations brussels washington berlin spite various setbacks last year ukraine still exist important preconditions new turn towards europeanization far missing targeted support west germs within society well political intellectual elite ukraine main reason omission generally low interest national europeanlevel western political actors ukraine engagement ukrainian government civil society often casual limited diplomatic niceties result peripheral status ukraine within eastern policies eu member states well within international thinking political intellectual leaders among one often still finds idea negotiations moscow initiatives regarding russia crucial even keys creation stable postcommunist security structure background kyiv considered best secondary importance emergence durable paneuropean political architecture worse ukraine frequently seen mere object even blank spot within new institutional configuration european continent 21st century fact ukraine plays decisive role future europe fate determine whether alleuropean common home proposed mikhail gorbachev become reality eu able meet elementary needs sustainable security confidencebuilding cooperation euroasiatic space without taking ukraine wings democratization ukraine would represent chance demonstrate russian elite society relevant model development country strategy successful could also lay foundation durable partnership perhaps even values community russia eu 21st century ______ extensive version article forthcoming may 2011 ip global journal german council foreign relations dgap vol 12 3 | 818 |
<p>Clint Eastwood’s Flags of our Fathers is the bigger and more expensive side of a cinematic diptych, the other half of which is a movie in Japanese, to be released next year, called Letters from Iwo Jima. It tells the story of General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, the Japanese defender of Iwo Jima who knew his cause was doomed but who fought on bravely, tenaciously, skilfully and almost to the last man. Apparently, heroism of this classic type is OK for the Japanese, but it won’t do for us Americans. We only want the victim-hero who has lately become the stock-in-trade of the Hollywood war movie, and it is that familiar figure which makes Flags of our Fathers a bore. True, the scenes of combat are often gripping, but there are far too few of them. And they are impossible to make any sense of&#160;— even as much sense as the men themselves must have been able to make of their situation. Most of the film consists of scenes set in stateside America in the spring of 1945 as three victim-heroes of the flag-raising on Iwo Jima go on a war bond tour.</p>
<p>The number of things wrong with this concept are too many to count. The three men&#160;— two Marines, Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) and Ira Hayes (Adam Beach) and a Navy corpsman, John “Doc” Bradley (Ryan Phillippe)&#160;— are engaging enough characters, but we see too little of them that’s not involved with the emotional after-effects of combat. In effect, they become their neuroses. Their disillusionment with being fêted as heroes naturally goes hand in hand with what we learned well after 1945 to call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, as both produce picturesque, pity-inducing suffering. The trouble is that we’ve seen it so often before. Traumatized soldiers who shed their boyish illusions of honor and glory and heroism are now even more routine in the movies than those illusions themselves were in the patriotic pictures of the 1940s. We get it, all right? The American movie audience lost its innocence so long ago it doesn’t even remember what innocence was like anymore. You might almost start to wonder if it ever existed in the first place.</p>
<p>Even in its set-up, the war-bond tour is bogus. We are asked to believe that the country is on the brink of bankruptcy and in danger of being unable to go on with the war unless the bond tour raises enough money, which is ridiculous. But Mr. Eastwood and his screenwriters,William Broyles Jr. and Paul Haggis (adapting the book by James Bradley and Ron Powers), have to hype the tour because they are also hyping one of the movie’s central pseudo-profundities: that the fate of nations depends on a single photograph. The comparison that somebody makes in the movie is with the photograph during the Vietnam war of the South Vietnamese officer executing a Viet Cong prisoner. This was supposed to have turned the American public against the war and led to America’s eventual pull-out. Doubtless the media, of which the movie business may be considered to be an offshoot, would like to believe in their own importance to this extent, but neither this photograph nor the one of the flag-raising on Iwo Jima had anything like the importance that Flags of Our Fathers attributes to them.</p>
<p>Even more disastrous is the ponderous and heavy-handed moralizing Clint Eastwood has gone in for in his late directorial career, at least since Unforgiven (1992). In fact, the moralism of Flags is substantially the same as that of Unforgiven and boils down to the sort of “message” that Sam Goldwyn used to say ought to be left to Western Union: killing people, and watching people die, leaves a man permanently scarred. Yet Clint doesn’t mention that it’s not all down-side, since these scars also bring status. In particular, they admit the man to a freemasonry of grief and bitter experience that allows him to look down with a sort of pitying contempt on everyone who stands outside it. Of the civilians or stateside military men our three heroes encounter on their tour, only the parents of dead comrades are at all sympathetic. The rest are giggly or glad-handing ninnies. They Just Don’t Understand! Sob! And so our victim-heroes are further victimized by being isolated from society by their experiences. Politicians, of course, come in for a particular slating. Even President Harry S. Truman (David Patrick Kelly), a man who in real-life saw some pretty serious combat himself in World War I, is made to look like an idiot.</p>
<p>The summit of idiocy comes as the three men are made to climb a Mt. Suribachi made of papier maché erected in the middle of Soldier Field, Chicago, and plant a flag on the top as a brass band plays patriotic marches, fireworks go off and thousands cheer. “That’s show-business,” says their handler, Bud Gerber (John Slattery), cheerfully. In the unlikely event you need to have it pointed out to you, this is supposed to be a very bad thing. Though he has been a director for 35 years and an actor for more than half a century, Mr. Eastwood apparently believes that putting on a show is a shameful thing&#160;— at least if it is a show about heroism. Heroism, for him, means suffering, not triumph or glory. “Maybe there’s no such thing as heroes,” goes the other of the film’s two principal pseudo-profundities. Pishposh! There’s an idea nobody in Hollywood has ever thought of before!</p>
<p>No one would mind it too much if we had been allowed to take the moral or leave it alone. But Mr. Eastwood apparently thinks we’re as dumb as Mr. and Miss American Everyman of 1945 and need to be hit over the head with it again and again. Most clumsily, as the three heroes stand on top of their fake mountain in Chicago and watch the fireworks go off, the film fades to an Iwo Jima flashback: the mountain becomes the real mountain, the fireworks become real bombs and rocketry and the men become their former selves, terrified in the middle of a nightmare landscape. This happens not once but twice, and there are literally dozens of other cuts back and forth between fat and fatuous civvy street and the allegedly real world of death and destruction that the men have come from but have been unable to leave behind. Do you think these switchbacks are meant to tell us something?</p>
<p>If you’re anything like me, you will become dizzy and disoriented from so much needless shuttling between the two contrasting worlds. The effect is also hopelessly to compromise the narrative line that might otherwise have given context and meaning to the emotions of terror and grief on the battlefield and disgust and disillusionment back in the States. Just as you start to be engaged by the scenes of battle, you will find yourself back in the unfeeling civilian world, on a train speeding through the night with the supposititious heroes feeling sorry for themselves. Just as you’re getting interested&#160;— as interested as you can&#160;— get in their post-combat and post-war lives, you are whisked away again to witness some fresh battlefield horror which (count on it) is going to come back to haunt them in after-years. The representation of emotion may be what the movies are all about, but when it is emotion this detached from its non-emotional context it becomes merely wearying.</p>
<p>Lord knows, I don’t want to give the impression that I am ridiculing a movie that goes to such extraordinary lengths to show respect for those who have so bravely suffered and died. But I felt about it rather as I did about Saving Private Ryan, that perhaps there’s such a thing as being too respectful; perhaps showing too much respect for the suffering is not to show enough respect for the man. For if we suppose, as some of us still do, that these men suffered for something&#160;— to wit, their duty, their honor, their country&#160;— don’t these thing deserve just a little bit of respect as well? Duty and honor are never mentioned in Flags of our Fathers, and the country it shows us doesn’t deserve the sufferers’ sacrifices. If their suffering is all they’ve got to show for it, I call that demeaning, not respectful.</p> | false | 1 | clint eastwoods flags fathers bigger expensive side cinematic diptych half movie japanese released next year called letters iwo jima tells story general tadamichi kuribayashi japanese defender iwo jima knew cause doomed fought bravely tenaciously skilfully almost last man apparently heroism classic type ok japanese wont us americans want victimhero lately become stockintrade hollywood war movie familiar figure makes flags fathers bore true scenes combat often gripping far impossible make sense of160 even much sense men must able make situation film consists scenes set stateside america spring 1945 three victimheroes flagraising iwo jima go war bond tour number things wrong concept many count three men160 two marines rene gagnon jesse bradford ira hayes adam beach navy corpsman john doc bradley ryan phillippe160 engaging enough characters see little thats involved emotional aftereffects combat effect become neuroses disillusionment fêted heroes naturally goes hand hand learned well 1945 call posttraumatic stress disorder produce picturesque pityinducing suffering trouble weve seen often traumatized soldiers shed boyish illusions honor glory heroism even routine movies illusions patriotic pictures 1940s get right american movie audience lost innocence long ago doesnt even remember innocence like anymore might almost start wonder ever existed first place even setup warbond tour bogus asked believe country brink bankruptcy danger unable go war unless bond tour raises enough money ridiculous mr eastwood screenwriterswilliam broyles jr paul haggis adapting book james bradley ron powers hype tour also hyping one movies central pseudoprofundities fate nations depends single photograph comparison somebody makes movie photograph vietnam war south vietnamese officer executing viet cong prisoner supposed turned american public war led americas eventual pullout doubtless media movie business may considered offshoot would like believe importance extent neither photograph one flagraising iwo jima anything like importance flags fathers attributes even disastrous ponderous heavyhanded moralizing clint eastwood gone late directorial career least since unforgiven 1992 fact moralism flags substantially unforgiven boils sort message sam goldwyn used say ought left western union killing people watching people die leaves man permanently scarred yet clint doesnt mention downside since scars also bring status particular admit man freemasonry grief bitter experience allows look sort pitying contempt everyone stands outside civilians stateside military men three heroes encounter tour parents dead comrades sympathetic rest giggly gladhanding ninnies dont understand sob victimheroes victimized isolated society experiences politicians course come particular slating even president harry truman david patrick kelly man reallife saw pretty serious combat world war made look like idiot summit idiocy comes three men made climb mt suribachi made papier maché erected middle soldier field chicago plant flag top brass band plays patriotic marches fireworks go thousands cheer thats showbusiness says handler bud gerber john slattery cheerfully unlikely event need pointed supposed bad thing though director 35 years actor half century mr eastwood apparently believes putting show shameful thing160 least show heroism heroism means suffering triumph glory maybe theres thing heroes goes films two principal pseudoprofundities pishposh theres idea nobody hollywood ever thought one would mind much allowed take moral leave alone mr eastwood apparently thinks dumb mr miss american everyman 1945 need hit head clumsily three heroes stand top fake mountain chicago watch fireworks go film fades iwo jima flashback mountain becomes real mountain fireworks become real bombs rocketry men become former selves terrified middle nightmare landscape happens twice literally dozens cuts back forth fat fatuous civvy street allegedly real world death destruction men come unable leave behind think switchbacks meant tell us something youre anything like become dizzy disoriented much needless shuttling two contrasting worlds effect also hopelessly compromise narrative line might otherwise given context meaning emotions terror grief battlefield disgust disillusionment back states start engaged scenes battle find back unfeeling civilian world train speeding night supposititious heroes feeling sorry youre getting interested160 interested can160 get postcombat postwar lives whisked away witness fresh battlefield horror count going come back haunt afteryears representation emotion may movies emotion detached nonemotional context becomes merely wearying lord knows dont want give impression ridiculing movie goes extraordinary lengths show respect bravely suffered died felt rather saving private ryan perhaps theres thing respectful perhaps showing much respect suffering show enough respect man suppose us still men suffered something160 wit duty honor country160 dont thing deserve little bit respect well duty honor never mentioned flags fathers country shows us doesnt deserve sufferers sacrifices suffering theyve got show call demeaning respectful | 717 |
<p>The waiters at <a href="http://www.restaurantbror.dk/en/" type="external">BROR</a> in Copenhagen have to be careful not to freak out their customers.</p>
<p>That's easier said than done when the menu includes selections like cod head, mackerel sperm, and cow uterus. "We'll send out the crispy puffed ox penis for free," said Victor Wågman, one of the restaurant's co-founders. "And we'll describe a dish simply as 'lamb,' instead of calling it 'lamb's brain.'" Both methods, he explained, lead to people being more willing to give these unconventional ingredients a try.</p>
<p>Wågman opened BROR with Samuel Nutter in 2013. The pair met while working at Noma, one of the most influential and renowned restaurants in culinary history. Both chefs credited their time at Noma as an influence for BROR's approach to food, but they also strove to bring something different to the Copenhagen restaurant scene. So while still embodying Noma's philosophies, Wågman and Nutter placed their focus on meat in a very distinct way.</p>
<p>BROR's set menu immediately stands out for its inclusion of out-of-the-ordinary items like bull testicles and chicken butt. These are the parts of animals that most people have never considered eating, and BROR offers guests the chance to taste them all in a single sitting. And the menu at the Copenhagen restaurant serves several other purposes beyond the initial shock value that it provides.</p>
<p>Wågman described Noma as "a fairy tale world where money was no issue." But in starting his own restaurant, spending was something that absolutely had to be considered, especially as the restaurant opened without any investors. While the mismatched, secondhand plates are aesthetically interesting, they're also evidence of the effort to cut back on the costs associated with opening a restaurant. And likewise, the concept of BROR's unusual menu was inspired by frugal motives. By using commonly discarded parts of animals in their dishes, Wågman and Nutter were able to serve their guests high-quality products in a more cost-effective manner.</p>
<p>In addition, the menu highlights the importance of sustainability. Consumers today are used to being served a version of meat that seems far removed from the actual living, breathing animal it once was. While most people have no problem eating an attractive fish fillet or a sushi roll slathered with mayo, they're turned off by the sight of an entire fish head on the plate in front of them. This attitude often results in the "grosser" parts of an animal going to waste.</p>
<p>But since many of the neglected animal parts are no less edible than those that are more pleasing to the eye, the movement to eat the entire animal presents a more ethical and sustainable way of consuming meat.</p>
<p>And at BROR, their offerings actually do end up being pleasing to the eye, further dismantling the misconception that certain components of an animal are undesirable or disgusting.</p>
<p>With each plate that Wågman brought to the table, I found myself impressed by the careful consideration that went into the dish. While the baked cod head was unapologetic about its origins, it was beautifully garnished, and the bright colors of the mackerel sperm flatbread were incredibly inviting. BROR is the Danish word for "brother," and according to the restaurant's website, it symbolizes care, respect, and honesty. All three values were apparent in the dishes.</p>
<p>Just as the tasting menu challenges diners to step out of their comfort zones, it also serves as a challenge to the chefs who prepare it. Within BROR's kitchen, a high level of experimentation is encouraged. Creativity is a necessary ingredient to their "use it all" mentality. And given the restaurant's success since its 2013 opening, Wågman and Nutter can afford to play around with their menu and the techniques behind it.</p>
<p>When the chefs first had the idea to utilize cow uterus in a dish, finding a source proved to be difficult. But eventually, a butcher in Sweden was able to provide it. "Any tips? How do [you] use yours at home?" the restaurant joked to its followers on <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BHmhzh9DYr4/?taken-by=restaurantbror" type="external">Instagram</a>.</p>
<p>Cow uterus made it onto the menu in the form of an open-faced sandwich known as "smørrebrød." Smørrebrød, traditionally made up of a thick piece of bread and an abundance of toppings, has a lengthy history as a lunch item in Denmark. But chefs in the country have since turned it into a more fashionable menu item, and the trend has started to catch on around the world.</p>
<p>Copenhagen has been widely regarded as a top culinary destination in recent years, especially when it comes to New Nordic cuisine. Since the 2000s, New Nordic cuisine has aimed to introduce local ingredients to menus, updating traditional Scandinavian recipes and emphasizing seasonable ingredients.</p>
<p>The culinary movement was largely inspired by René Redzepi and Claus Meyer, the co-founders of Noma. In November 2004, the two chefs organized a meeting in Copenhagen to develop the region's cuisine. The New Nordic Food programme launched in 2005 with the goal of raising awareness of Nordic cuisine across the globe.</p>
<p>"I think that Noma paved the way for adventurous eating in Copenhagen," Wågman told me. "People here are more willing to try unique dishes. Without Noma coming before us, BROR could have seemed too extreme. But after Noma, we're able to push things a little further."</p>
<p>As time goes on, more and more of Wågman's nightly customers come in with an awareness of the offbeat ingredients that make up the tasting menu. "By now, most people know what BROR is about," he said. The popularity of the restaurant demonstrates the continued growth of both New Nordic cuisine and the whole animal initiative and the potential for the two movements to work together.</p>
<p>BROR's set menu includes a selection of snacks followed by five courses, with the opportunity to add a wine pairing. They also offer a smaller four course option. The menu changes daily, so guests will never be quite sure what to expect upon sitting down (Wågman and Nutter see the element of surprise as an important aspect of the meal). However, the kitchen can accommodate food allergies and dietary restrictions with advanced notice, so vegetarians are able to experience the cuisine as well.</p>
<p>The restaurant is open for dinner Wednesday through Sunday, starting at 5:30 p.m.</p>
<p>See more related Circa stories: <a href="" type="internal">Sheep's head is an Icelandic specialty, and this bus station is the place to try it</a> <a href="" type="internal">You can drink with taxidermied animals and decapitated dolls at this bizarre bar</a> <a href="" type="internal">A huge collection of fetuses is on display at a medical museum in Copenhagen</a></p> | false | 1 | waiters bror copenhagen careful freak customers thats easier said done menu includes selections like cod head mackerel sperm cow uterus well send crispy puffed ox penis free said victor wågman one restaurants cofounders well describe dish simply lamb instead calling lambs brain methods explained lead people willing give unconventional ingredients try wågman opened bror samuel nutter 2013 pair met working noma one influential renowned restaurants culinary history chefs credited time noma influence brors approach food also strove bring something different copenhagen restaurant scene still embodying nomas philosophies wågman nutter placed focus meat distinct way brors set menu immediately stands inclusion outoftheordinary items like bull testicles chicken butt parts animals people never considered eating bror offers guests chance taste single sitting menu copenhagen restaurant serves several purposes beyond initial shock value provides wågman described noma fairy tale world money issue starting restaurant spending something absolutely considered especially restaurant opened without investors mismatched secondhand plates aesthetically interesting theyre also evidence effort cut back costs associated opening restaurant likewise concept brors unusual menu inspired frugal motives using commonly discarded parts animals dishes wågman nutter able serve guests highquality products costeffective manner addition menu highlights importance sustainability consumers today used served version meat seems far removed actual living breathing animal people problem eating attractive fish fillet sushi roll slathered mayo theyre turned sight entire fish head plate front attitude often results grosser parts animal going waste since many neglected animal parts less edible pleasing eye movement eat entire animal presents ethical sustainable way consuming meat bror offerings actually end pleasing eye dismantling misconception certain components animal undesirable disgusting plate wågman brought table found impressed careful consideration went dish baked cod head unapologetic origins beautifully garnished bright colors mackerel sperm flatbread incredibly inviting bror danish word brother according restaurants website symbolizes care respect honesty three values apparent dishes tasting menu challenges diners step comfort zones also serves challenge chefs prepare within brors kitchen high level experimentation encouraged creativity necessary ingredient use mentality given restaurants success since 2013 opening wågman nutter afford play around menu techniques behind chefs first idea utilize cow uterus dish finding source proved difficult eventually butcher sweden able provide tips use home restaurant joked followers instagram cow uterus made onto menu form openfaced sandwich known smørrebrød smørrebrød traditionally made thick piece bread abundance toppings lengthy history lunch item denmark chefs country since turned fashionable menu item trend started catch around world copenhagen widely regarded top culinary destination recent years especially comes new nordic cuisine since 2000s new nordic cuisine aimed introduce local ingredients menus updating traditional scandinavian recipes emphasizing seasonable ingredients culinary movement largely inspired rené redzepi claus meyer cofounders noma november 2004 two chefs organized meeting copenhagen develop regions cuisine new nordic food programme launched 2005 goal raising awareness nordic cuisine across globe think noma paved way adventurous eating copenhagen wågman told people willing try unique dishes without noma coming us bror could seemed extreme noma able push things little time goes wågmans nightly customers come awareness offbeat ingredients make tasting menu people know bror said popularity restaurant demonstrates continued growth new nordic cuisine whole animal initiative potential two movements work together brors set menu includes selection snacks followed five courses opportunity add wine pairing also offer smaller four course option menu changes daily guests never quite sure expect upon sitting wågman nutter see element surprise important aspect meal however kitchen accommodate food allergies dietary restrictions advanced notice vegetarians able experience cuisine well restaurant open dinner wednesday sunday starting 530 pm see related circa stories sheeps head icelandic specialty bus station place try drink taxidermied animals decapitated dolls bizarre bar huge collection fetuses display medical museum copenhagen | 606 |
<p>COWARDICE:&#160;A Brief History</p>
<p>By Chris Walsh</p>
<p>Illustrated. 292 pp. Princeton University Press. $27.95.</p>
<p>“Cowardice” is not quite one of those words, like “honor,” whose meaning was once understood by everyone but is now understood by almost no one. Yet its meaning has lately become more elusive. Are suicide bombers “cowardly,” as we are so often assured they are, or insanely courageous? Is it more cowardly to refuse to fight or to fight for fear of being called a coward for not fighting? Some people claim to have the answers to such questions about this once familiar and unproblematic subject, but they tend to disagree. There is no consensus as to who is a coward and who is not — or even about whether the question is one of any importance. Cowardice, whatever it means, must seem a matter of individual choice, like everything else, and the implied judgment made by the term probably requires that we decline to use it at all.</p>
<p>Chris Walsh, an associate director of the College of Arts and Sciences Writing Program at Boston University, purports to offer a historical investigation of the subject in “Cowardice: A Brief History,” but his book is much more of a social and cultural survey of attitudes toward cowardice during various periods of American history. The limitation, by and large, to American examples is presumably for the sake of keeping the book to a manageable size and the brief history briefer rather than longer, but the lack of foreign comparisons obscures what distinguishes the American attitude from that of the old European honor culture.</p>
<p>The book can be seen as a kind of extended footnote to William Ian Miller’s “The Mystery of Courage” (2000), and it has some of the same problems, not least a tendency to mystification. Miller’s book is one of Walsh’s central texts — along with Stephen Crane’s “The Red Badge of Courage,” James Jones’s “The Thin Red Line” and a sermon titled “The Curse of Cowardice,” delivered in Hanover, Va., by Samuel Davies in 1758 to recruit soldiers for the French and Indian War. These Walsh keeps coming back to after ranging further afield among an impressive array of primary sources.</p>
<p>But then, for a subject like cowardice, nearly all the sources are primary. Perhaps the most important thing we learn from this book comes from its very existence. Ours could be the first time and place in which cowardice has been thought a subject worthy of academic study. Near the beginning, we find a Google graph showing that the word is much less used today than it was 200 or even 100 years ago. The decline is a steady one until shortly after the beginning of the present century, when there is a small but unmistakable uptick. The author is surely right to say that this is owing to popular debate about terrorism since 9/11, but I wonder if the graph for “honor,” “courage,” “virtue” or any other words that now sound “judgmental” would not describe a similar pattern.</p>
<p>The book’s “working definition” of a coward, naturally hedged with numerous qualifications, is “someone who, because of excessive fear, fails to do what he is supposed to do.” “Excessive” begs the question. What makes this fear excessive? The fact that it provokes cowardice — which is then defined by the excessive fear. But it bespeaks a definitional need to probe within, to find the coward’s true feelings in order to authenticate his cowardice. Does he have “excessive” fear? Yes? Then he’s a proper coward instead of, presumably, only pretending to be one. But surely it is one definition of a coward, and perhaps a better one to be working with, that it is something no one ever pretends to be.</p>
<p>By contrast, courage is often pretended — perhaps so often as to approach always — which is what makes it so much more rewarding as a subject for study. If the mask is fascinating because of what it hides, what it hides is mere fear, which is rather lacking in nuance. What is there to say about it once it has been named? A quick survey of books with “fear” in their titles suggests that all are written for the purpose of dismissing or getting rid of it. Giving way to fear, which is what the coward does, is more interesting, however, because of its public dimension, since it is the rare act of cowardice that entirely escapes public observation. The coward emulates the writer or analyst (or vice versa), by bringing into the light of day that which belongs to the shadowiest realm of the psyche.</p>
<p>About Henry Fleming, the problematic hero of “The Red Badge of Courage,” Walsh has this to say: “When he thinks that having made his ‘mistakes in the dark’ meant that he was still a man, the implication is that any sin so thoroughly a matter of social perception is no sin at all.” It is not really as sin that Henry sees his own act of cowardice; rather it is as a potential cause for (public) shame. If it is also a sin, that does not concern him: only the prospect of being known as cowardly. This is in the nature of the thing. We all care more about being publicly acknowledged as sinners than about committing sins in the first place, but cowardice is itself nearly always a public acknowledgment.</p>
<p>Or at least that is the traditional way to look at it. Part of Walsh’s purpose is to tease us with the idea that maybe there is more to it than that. Maybe bravery itself conceals a kind of cowardice. Of the scene in which Henry runs from battle so desperately that, if you didn’t know the direction of his flight, you wouldn’t know if he was charging or fleeing, Walsh writes: “Cowardice and courage become merely arbitrary names we give to physiological reactions to environmental conditions.” At least that’s what the coward tells himself!</p>
<p>There is a similar definitional problem with “duty,” to which the book devotes a chapter. “Examining specific mentions of ‘duty’ in relation to cowardice,” we read, “suggests an increasingly common understanding that duty is trivial, absurd or downright pernicious.” This is no doubt true, but of course such things could only be said in a context of denial that the duty in question is a duty at all. What seems dubious, logically, is retaining the idea of duty while disparaging it in such terms. Or is it? Maybe, just as there could be said to be a cowardly shadow to someone who acts courageously because he is afraid to be a coward, so there is also a kind of ghostly dutifulness in someone who takes on the duty of defying the very idea of duty.</p>
<p>This kind of thinking seems to me oversubtle, a backhanded way of justifying bad behavior. But insofar as there is a demand for a book on cowardice from a reputable university press, it must be because a sizable contingent of people will not think of it in this way. For whatever reason, we want to be told that the standards by which people used to be judged have to be re-examined — as cowardice has been in the last century, mainly on therapeutic grounds — if not abolished altogether. Those who are interested in such standards, whether pro or con, will find this book an indispensable addition to their libraries.</p>
<p>James Bowman, a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, is the author of “Honor: A History” and “Media Madness.”</p> | false | 1 | cowardice160a brief history chris walsh illustrated 292 pp princeton university press 2795 cowardice quite one words like honor whose meaning understood everyone understood almost one yet meaning lately become elusive suicide bombers cowardly often assured insanely courageous cowardly refuse fight fight fear called coward fighting people claim answers questions familiar unproblematic subject tend disagree consensus coward even whether question one importance cowardice whatever means must seem matter individual choice like everything else implied judgment made term probably requires decline use chris walsh associate director college arts sciences writing program boston university purports offer historical investigation subject cowardice brief history book much social cultural survey attitudes toward cowardice various periods american history limitation large american examples presumably sake keeping book manageable size brief history briefer rather longer lack foreign comparisons obscures distinguishes american attitude old european honor culture book seen kind extended footnote william ian millers mystery courage 2000 problems least tendency mystification millers book one walshs central texts along stephen cranes red badge courage james joness thin red line sermon titled curse cowardice delivered hanover va samuel davies 1758 recruit soldiers french indian war walsh keeps coming back ranging afield among impressive array primary sources subject like cowardice nearly sources primary perhaps important thing learn book comes existence could first time place cowardice thought subject worthy academic study near beginning find google graph showing word much less used today 200 even 100 years ago decline steady one shortly beginning present century small unmistakable uptick author surely right say owing popular debate terrorism since 911 wonder graph honor courage virtue words sound judgmental would describe similar pattern books working definition coward naturally hedged numerous qualifications someone excessive fear fails supposed excessive begs question makes fear excessive fact provokes cowardice defined excessive fear bespeaks definitional need probe within find cowards true feelings order authenticate cowardice excessive fear yes hes proper coward instead presumably pretending one surely one definition coward perhaps better one working something one ever pretends contrast courage often pretended perhaps often approach always makes much rewarding subject study mask fascinating hides hides mere fear rather lacking nuance say named quick survey books fear titles suggests written purpose dismissing getting rid giving way fear coward interesting however public dimension since rare act cowardice entirely escapes public observation coward emulates writer analyst vice versa bringing light day belongs shadowiest realm psyche henry fleming problematic hero red badge courage walsh say thinks made mistakes dark meant still man implication sin thoroughly matter social perception sin really sin henry sees act cowardice rather potential cause public shame also sin concern prospect known cowardly nature thing care publicly acknowledged sinners committing sins first place cowardice nearly always public acknowledgment least traditional way look part walshs purpose tease us idea maybe maybe bravery conceals kind cowardice scene henry runs battle desperately didnt know direction flight wouldnt know charging fleeing walsh writes cowardice courage become merely arbitrary names give physiological reactions environmental conditions least thats coward tells similar definitional problem duty book devotes chapter examining specific mentions duty relation cowardice read suggests increasingly common understanding duty trivial absurd downright pernicious doubt true course things could said context denial duty question duty seems dubious logically retaining idea duty disparaging terms maybe could said cowardly shadow someone acts courageously afraid coward also kind ghostly dutifulness someone takes duty defying idea duty kind thinking seems oversubtle backhanded way justifying bad behavior insofar demand book cowardice reputable university press must sizable contingent people think way whatever reason want told standards people used judged reexamined cowardice last century mainly therapeutic grounds abolished altogether interested standards whether pro con find book indispensable addition libraries james bowman resident scholar ethics public policy center washington author honor history media madness | 615 |
<p>Attacks on Donald Trump have been fast and furious, but some appeared to be so cheap, ridiculous or hurtful that even the man himself was too embarrassed to list them in his “Fake News Awards.” Are they credible? You be the judge.</p>
<p>While previously thrown around as a vague insult, this accusation has been recently used&#160;more literally, with such impartial president-watchers as <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/can-you-read/2018/01/04/46d967a2-f18c-11e7-b3bf-ab90a706e175_story.html?utm_term=.669ea699b763" type="external">Joe Scarborough and Michael Wolff</a>&#160;listing incidents of Trump’s reluctance to talk about reading and claims by unnamed White House insiders that the president is “no more than semi-literate.”</p>
<p>#Resistance&#160; <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXGuJlTVXfw" type="external">Youtubers</a>&#160;seized on the idea, and started meticulously picking apart “evidence” in Trump’s body language and behavior to reinforce the idea that his reading skills are rudimentary.</p>
<p>There is a basic implausibility of a silver-spoon heir going from an elite military school; to Wharton; to concluding billion-dollar-deals; to signing acts as the president; without knowing what is written, but perhaps that would fit in with an image of Trump as a maverick savant.</p>
<p>Just thinking more day-to-day… Could Trump send his uncensored and eccentrically-spelt tweets without knowing how to read? Would an illiterate person even know how Twitter works? Would he bother to attack the “failing” New York Times?</p>
<p>Trump often has to deliver lengthy speeches, whose contents are known in advance. To assume that he can memorize them perfectly without notes&#160;in hours would really make him a “stable genius” of the oral tradition.</p>
<p>[embedded content]</p>
<p>Now, whether Trump is a lazy reader or dyslexic are more relevant – if presumptuous – concerns, but less interesting for a five-minute TV slot.</p>
<p>Trying to nail the thrice-married serial cheater, who was elected despite epic prior coverage of his ‘locker-room talk’ audio, on grounds of morality, is harder than it looks.</p>
<p>Here, the media has either overshot or undershot the public revulsion target.</p>
<p>The Christopher Steele dossier image of Trump marshaling compliant Russian prostitutes to defile the bed Barack Obama had slept on was too lurid, cartoonish and cheaply satirical.</p>
<p>[embedded content]</p>
<p>Meanwhile, the much-touted Stormy Daniels revelations of Trump as a “one-position” superannuated gallant, “obsessively” watching Shark Week in his hotel room and complimenting the porn star with awkward comparisons to his daughter, came off more tame and pathetic than explosive. The fact, that in the context of the #MeToo campaign, professing that women had to be believed, Daniels’ denials of the story – whether or not paid for with hush money – were batted away for the sake of attacking a political opponent, also flavored the affair with an aftertaste of hypocrisy.</p>
<p>[embedded content]</p>
<p>She wouldn’t move from New York, she doesn’t want to hold his hand, she keeps a separate bedroom from the president in the White House – speculation about marital strife has provided air support for every accusation of Trump’s infidelity and overall insufferability.</p>
<p>All this may well be true, but there is one problem – Melania remains mum. In the absence of personal disclosure, the media has made a skin-flaying pivot from portraying the First Lady as an Eastern European Robo-Ice Queen on the make, to Bluebeard’s wife. But after years of snooty jibes and unfavorable comparisons, the new-found concern for Melania, who has never been coy about her attraction to Trump’s status and wealth, seems a touch insincere. Why didn’t anyone warn her before?</p>
<p>[embedded content]</p>
<p>The occupant of the White House disintegrating in full public view would create unprecedented upheaval and embarrassment, and it is imperative that such a scenario must be stopped, or at least prevented, if it appears likely in 2020 and beyond.</p>
<p>There is valid, if likely inconsequential research to be done from afar for example, comparing the deterioration of Trump’s vocabulary over the past several decades, and whether it is likely to prevent him from performing his job well over dozens of other counter-indications for presidency.</p>
<p>But the way the anti-Trump media brigade has gone about this has been petty, scientifically illiterate and stigmatizing. Opponents have repeatedly jumped on isolated incidents – holding a glass with two hands, the “slurring” during that Jerusalem speech – and mixed up psychiatric and neurological diagnoses, making the whole enterprise seem more like 25th Amendment-targeting political point-scoring than ethics-guided&#160;insight into&#160;a man allegedly in the grasp of devastating conditions.</p>
<p>For someone with a supposedly loosening grip on reality, Trump managed to astutely neutralize the narrative, when he reportedly volunteered to take the Montreal Cognitive Assessment and achieved a perfect score, which of course, then led to the next line of attack.</p>
<p>[embedded content]</p>
<p>Rear Admiral Ronny Jackson tended to George W. Bush, and was the personal physician of Barack Obama, before continuing in the same post for Donald Trump. Which is the exact background for a man that would then subtract several pounds from the current president’s weight so that he would be classified as <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/is-trumps-doctor-okay/2018/01/17/0d887f50-fbce-11e7-ad8c-ecbb62019393_story.html?utm_term=.506c760d5a63" type="external">“overweight” and not “obese.”</a></p>
<p>Whatever the cathartic properties of such diatribes, Trump’s critics are their least appealing when they mock the color of his skin, give a blow-by-blow description of his scalp surgery, or repeat innuendo about the size of his hands – behaviors they would condemn in almost every other context.</p>
<p>Also, if you let the hate flow through you, do not also pretend that you are humbly serving the cause of truth, as the <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/rabbit-holes/the-rise-of-the-anti-trump-girthers" type="external">New Yorker</a> did earlier this month claiming that “the allure of girtherism isn’t simply the prospect of an easy joke… But the idea that, in seizing upon the plain facts about his body, we might somehow force the President an inch or two closer to the truth.”</p>
<p>If you can successfully accuse Trump of this, you can accuse him of anything.</p>
<p>There are several hundred separate videos and photos of the US president both ascending and descending staircases of various widths, inclines, and materials, unsupported, holding on to the railings, holding on to Theresa May. Not a single named source has ever alleged this fear, yet now there are numerous articles containing the words “Trump” and “bathmophobia” (don’t worry they had to look it up too, before writing them).</p>
<p>[embedded content]</p>
<p>In any case, what is that story even trying to say? Why would Trump be afraid of stairs? A psychological condition? Poor balance? Vanity? Wooden leg? Just fill in the blanks, it doesn’t matter, because it’s made up anyway.</p>
<p>Even in the above catalog of inanity, it is hard to imagine a more textbook example of Donald Trump’s detractors providing endless distraction from substantive issues, and perfect ammunition to be shot down as irrelevant purveyors of falsehoods.</p>
<p>Igor Ogorodnev for RT</p> | false | 1 | attacks donald trump fast furious appeared cheap ridiculous hurtful even man embarrassed list fake news awards credible judge previously thrown around vague insult accusation recently used160more literally impartial presidentwatchers joe scarborough michael wolff160listing incidents trumps reluctance talk reading claims unnamed white house insiders president semiliterate resistance160 youtubers160seized idea started meticulously picking apart evidence trumps body language behavior reinforce idea reading skills rudimentary basic implausibility silverspoon heir going elite military school wharton concluding billiondollardeals signing acts president without knowing written perhaps would fit image trump maverick savant thinking daytoday could trump send uncensored eccentricallyspelt tweets without knowing read would illiterate person even know twitter works would bother attack failing new york times trump often deliver lengthy speeches whose contents known advance assume memorize perfectly without notes160in hours would really make stable genius oral tradition embedded content whether trump lazy reader dyslexic relevant presumptuous concerns less interesting fiveminute tv slot trying nail thricemarried serial cheater elected despite epic prior coverage lockerroom talk audio grounds morality harder looks media either overshot undershot public revulsion target christopher steele dossier image trump marshaling compliant russian prostitutes defile bed barack obama slept lurid cartoonish cheaply satirical embedded content meanwhile muchtouted stormy daniels revelations trump oneposition superannuated gallant obsessively watching shark week hotel room complimenting porn star awkward comparisons daughter came tame pathetic explosive fact context metoo campaign professing women believed daniels denials story whether paid hush money batted away sake attacking political opponent also flavored affair aftertaste hypocrisy embedded content wouldnt move new york doesnt want hold hand keeps separate bedroom president white house speculation marital strife provided air support every accusation trumps infidelity overall insufferability may well true one problem melania remains mum absence personal disclosure media made skinflaying pivot portraying first lady eastern european roboice queen make bluebeards wife years snooty jibes unfavorable comparisons newfound concern melania never coy attraction trumps status wealth seems touch insincere didnt anyone warn embedded content occupant white house disintegrating full public view would create unprecedented upheaval embarrassment imperative scenario must stopped least prevented appears likely 2020 beyond valid likely inconsequential research done afar example comparing deterioration trumps vocabulary past several decades whether likely prevent performing job well dozens counterindications presidency way antitrump media brigade gone petty scientifically illiterate stigmatizing opponents repeatedly jumped isolated incidents holding glass two hands slurring jerusalem speech mixed psychiatric neurological diagnoses making whole enterprise seem like 25th amendmenttargeting political pointscoring ethicsguided160insight into160a man allegedly grasp devastating conditions someone supposedly loosening grip reality trump managed astutely neutralize narrative reportedly volunteered take montreal cognitive assessment achieved perfect score course led next line attack embedded content rear admiral ronny jackson tended george w bush personal physician barack obama continuing post donald trump exact background man would subtract several pounds current presidents weight would classified overweight obese whatever cathartic properties diatribes trumps critics least appealing mock color skin give blowbyblow description scalp surgery repeat innuendo size hands behaviors would condemn almost every context also let hate flow also pretend humbly serving cause truth new yorker earlier month claiming allure girtherism isnt simply prospect easy joke idea seizing upon plain facts body might somehow force president inch two closer truth successfully accuse trump accuse anything several hundred separate videos photos us president ascending descending staircases various widths inclines materials unsupported holding railings holding theresa may single named source ever alleged fear yet numerous articles containing words trump bathmophobia dont worry look writing embedded content case story even trying say would trump afraid stairs psychological condition poor balance vanity wooden leg fill blanks doesnt matter made anyway even catalog inanity hard imagine textbook example donald trumps detractors providing endless distraction substantive issues perfect ammunition shot irrelevant purveyors falsehoods igor ogorodnev rt | 611 |
<p>By Bozorgmehr Sharafedin</p>
<p>LONDON (Reuters) – Iran’s Revolutionary Guards have arrested at least 30 dual nationals during the past two years, mostly on spying charges, according to lawyers, diplomats and relatives, twice as many as earlier reported by local or international media.</p>
<p>The number marks a sharp rise since 2015, when an international nuclear deal raised hopes of detente with the West. In the years before that the number of dual nationals detained at any given time was in single figures.</p>
<p>It also points up a new trend as a majority of those arrested since then, 19 out of the 30, have citizenship in Europe. Previously most of the detainees were Iranian Americans.</p>
<p>Detainees’ relatives and lawyers said the Guards were using them as bargaining chips in international relations and to put off European firms that sought business in Iran after the government agreed the deal with world powers to lift sanctions.</p>
<p>The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has vast business interests as well as being Iran’s most powerful security force and has criticized the government for handing contracts to foreigners.</p>
<p>The Guards did not respond to several requests for comment. The Iranian government referred Reuters to the judiciary, which also did not respond to repeated approaches.</p>
<p>Iranian authorities have previously denied holding detainees for ransom and accuse Western governments of holding Iranians on trumped-up charges.</p>
<p>Relatives of dual nationals detained in Iran, their lawyers and Western diplomats shared information such as name, date of arrest and any charges, on condition neither they nor the detainees were identified, citing fear of repercussions.</p>
<p>Iran does not routinely announce arrests or charges and does not recognize dual nationals, whose rights to consular assistance are enshrined in the U.N. Vienna Convention.</p>
<p>In all cases, the sources said the detainees had not carried out any espionage and were arrested only because of their second citizenship. They explained their willingness to share details be saying they had been kept in the dark by both the Iranian authorities and Western governments.</p>
<p>Several governments argue that maintaining a low profile is in the best interests of the detainees. “This is very much what guides our approach,” a UK government source said. Dutch Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Daphne Kerremans said identifying detainees “could get the prisoners into trouble”.</p>
<p>BREAKING SILENCE</p>
<p>Some relatives only break their silence once their initial hopes have been dashed.</p>
<p>The wife of Ahmadreza Djalali, a Swedish-based Iranian scientist arrested in 2016 after attending a conference in Tehran, decided to speak out in February.</p>
<p>“We were all hopeful that he would be released soon. He was calling us from jail, saying he had not been officially charged. They had told him that he would be released after answering a few questions,” Vida Mehrannia said by telephone from Stockholm.</p>
<p>“I made the case public to media after nine months when he was threatened with a death sentence by a prosecutor and went on a hunger strike,” she added.</p>
<p>Djalali was sentenced to death in October on espionage charges.</p>
<p>Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom said at the time: “We will point out that this will affect the relationship with the EU, and this in a time when Iran and the EU need to cooperate, not least with the nuclear deal we have with Iran.”</p>
<p>The deal to lift sanctions in return for curbs on Iran’s nuclear program was international, but significant U.S. restrictions remained in place.</p>
<p>Official confirmation of new arrests sometimes emerges indirectly. Records of a session of the European Parliament in June 2017 showed three Dutch-Iranian nationals were in jail in Iran. Only one case has been reported.</p>
<p>Asked about the two unknown cases, Dutch Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Kerremans told Reuters the individuals were arrested in November 2012 and January 2016 and said government actions were mostly “aimed at ensuring an honest trial, not demanding release”.</p>
<p>“It is very difficult for the Dutch government to lend support since Iran does not recognize the Dutch nationality of the prisoners, and gives little to no information about them,” she said.</p>
<p>In January 2016, then-British Prime Minister David Cameron raised the issue of three dual UK-Iran nationals held in Iranian prisons in a phone call with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, according to a transcript posted on the Downing Street website. Only two of those cases were known to the public at the time.</p>
<p>Contacted for comment, a UK foreign ministry spokesman declined to specify how many British-Iranian dual nationals had been arrested. London raised all cases with Iran at every available opportunity, he said.</p>
<p>Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, an Iranian-British aid worker employed by the Thomson Reuters Foundation, was arrested in April 2016 while on holiday in Iran and later charged with plotting to overthrow Iran’s clerical establishment.</p>
<p>The foundation and her family have repeatedly denied the accusations.</p>
<p>“The only thing that as a family we can do is to point out the injustice of this,” said her husband Richard Ratcliffe.</p>
<p>He and others said this week that Foreign Minister Boris Johnson had made inaccurate comments about her to members of parliament that had been seized on by the Iranian judiciary and used to frame her.</p>
<p>Johnson had said, “she was simply teaching people journalism.” He subsequently said “the UK government has no doubt that she was on holiday in Iran” and that his comments “could have been clearer”.</p>
<p>“My point was that I disagreed with the Iranian view that training journalists was a crime, not that I wanted to lend any credence to Iranian allegations that Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe had been engaged in such activity,” he said.</p>
<p>PRISONER EXCHANGE</p>
<p>In 2016, Iran released five U.S. citizens in a prisoner exchange as the nuclear deal was implemented.</p>
<p>One remained behind and six American citizens or permanent residents have been arrested since, their lawyers or relatives have told media, of whom one has been freed on bail.</p>
<p>A U.S. State Department official confirmed three cases, did not comment on two others and mentioned another detainee, Nizar Zakka, saying he was unjustly held and calling for his release without clarifying his U.S. status.</p>
<p>Asked for more details about Zakka and other detained US citizens and legal residents, the official said the safety and security of U.S. citizens abroad was a top priority, adding: “Due to privacy considerations, we have no further comment.”</p>
<p>In an October 25 letter to the U.N. Secretary General seen by Reuters, Zakka’s lawyer Jason Poblete said his client was a U.S. permanent resident and “is being held as a hostage, as are other innocent persons, to exact political concessions from the United States and other governments”, including on sanctions.</p>
<p>For its part, Iran says its nationals are detained unjustly in the West. Kazem Gharibabadi, deputy head of Iran’s Council for Human Rights, part of the judiciary, has said more than 56 Iranians are imprisoned in the United States and an unspecified number in other countries.</p>
<p>“Some of those are detained under baseless charges, including bypassing sanctions,” he was quoted as saying by state media on Sunday.</p>
<p>U.S. Department of Justice spokesman Wyn Hornbuckle declined to comment on Gharibabadi’s figure, saying the Justice Department does not track prosecutions by nationality and the U.S. government’s Bureau of Prisons does not track how many inmates have Iranian nationality.</p>
<p>He said inmates in U.S. federal prison “are serving sentences handed down by federal judges after thorough due process of law”.</p> | false | 1 | bozorgmehr sharafedin london reuters irans revolutionary guards arrested least 30 dual nationals past two years mostly spying charges according lawyers diplomats relatives twice many earlier reported local international media number marks sharp rise since 2015 international nuclear deal raised hopes detente west years number dual nationals detained given time single figures also points new trend majority arrested since 19 30 citizenship europe previously detainees iranian americans detainees relatives lawyers said guards using bargaining chips international relations put european firms sought business iran government agreed deal world powers lift sanctions islamic revolutionary guard corps vast business interests well irans powerful security force criticized government handing contracts foreigners guards respond several requests comment iranian government referred reuters judiciary also respond repeated approaches iranian authorities previously denied holding detainees ransom accuse western governments holding iranians trumpedup charges relatives dual nationals detained iran lawyers western diplomats shared information name date arrest charges condition neither detainees identified citing fear repercussions iran routinely announce arrests charges recognize dual nationals whose rights consular assistance enshrined un vienna convention cases sources said detainees carried espionage arrested second citizenship explained willingness share details saying kept dark iranian authorities western governments several governments argue maintaining low profile best interests detainees much guides approach uk government source said dutch foreign ministry spokeswoman daphne kerremans said identifying detainees could get prisoners trouble breaking silence relatives break silence initial hopes dashed wife ahmadreza djalali swedishbased iranian scientist arrested 2016 attending conference tehran decided speak february hopeful would released soon calling us jail saying officially charged told would released answering questions vida mehrannia said telephone stockholm made case public media nine months threatened death sentence prosecutor went hunger strike added djalali sentenced death october espionage charges swedish foreign minister margot wallstrom said time point affect relationship eu time iran eu need cooperate least nuclear deal iran deal lift sanctions return curbs irans nuclear program international significant us restrictions remained place official confirmation new arrests sometimes emerges indirectly records session european parliament june 2017 showed three dutchiranian nationals jail iran one case reported asked two unknown cases dutch foreign ministry spokeswoman kerremans told reuters individuals arrested november 2012 january 2016 said government actions mostly aimed ensuring honest trial demanding release difficult dutch government lend support since iran recognize dutch nationality prisoners gives little information said january 2016 thenbritish prime minister david cameron raised issue three dual ukiran nationals held iranian prisons phone call iranian president hassan rouhani according transcript posted downing street website two cases known public time contacted comment uk foreign ministry spokesman declined specify many britishiranian dual nationals arrested london raised cases iran every available opportunity said nazanin zaghariratcliffe iranianbritish aid worker employed thomson reuters foundation arrested april 2016 holiday iran later charged plotting overthrow irans clerical establishment foundation family repeatedly denied accusations thing family point injustice said husband richard ratcliffe others said week foreign minister boris johnson made inaccurate comments members parliament seized iranian judiciary used frame johnson said simply teaching people journalism subsequently said uk government doubt holiday iran comments could clearer point disagreed iranian view training journalists crime wanted lend credence iranian allegations mrs zaghariratcliffe engaged activity said prisoner exchange 2016 iran released five us citizens prisoner exchange nuclear deal implemented one remained behind six american citizens permanent residents arrested since lawyers relatives told media one freed bail us state department official confirmed three cases comment two others mentioned another detainee nizar zakka saying unjustly held calling release without clarifying us status asked details zakka detained us citizens legal residents official said safety security us citizens abroad top priority adding due privacy considerations comment october 25 letter un secretary general seen reuters zakkas lawyer jason poblete said client us permanent resident held hostage innocent persons exact political concessions united states governments including sanctions part iran says nationals detained unjustly west kazem gharibabadi deputy head irans council human rights part judiciary said 56 iranians imprisoned united states unspecified number countries detained baseless charges including bypassing sanctions quoted saying state media sunday us department justice spokesman wyn hornbuckle declined comment gharibabadis figure saying justice department track prosecutions nationality us governments bureau prisons track many inmates iranian nationality said inmates us federal prison serving sentences handed federal judges thorough due process law | 699 |
<p />
<p>&lt;img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-2080" title="albert-einstein" src="https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/albert-einstein.jpg" alt="albert-einstein" width="350" height="197" srcset="https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/albert-einstein.jpg 500w, https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/albert-einstein-150x85.jpg 150w, https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/albert-einstein-300x169.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 350px) 100vw, 350px" /&gt;</p>
<p>Online reports of a study by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency cast doubt over the survival of Israel beyond the next two decades. Regardless of the validity of the report, with what is now known about the costs in blood and treasure that the U.S.-Israeli relationship has imposed on the U.S., its key ally, Israel could fall within five years.</p>
<p>For more than six decades, American support for Israel has relied on the ability of pro-Israelis to dominate U.S. media, enabling Tel Aviv to put a positive spin on even its most extreme behavior, including its recent massacre in Gaza. With access to online news coverage, that Zionist bias is becoming apparent and the real facts transparent.</p>
<p>Though Americans seldom show a strong interest in foreign affairs, that, too, is changing. While few of them grasp the subtleties of one-state versus two-state proposals, many have seen online the impact of a murderous Israeli assault on Palestinian civilians that was timed between Christmas and the inauguration of Barack Obama.</p>
<p>The leaders of the 9/11 Commission acknowledged that its members would not allow testimony on the impetus for that attack. Yet the report confirmed that the key motivation was the U.S.-Israeli relationship. With access to online news, more Americans are asking why they are forced to support a colonial Apartheid government.</p>
<p>With the election of yet another extremist Israeli government led by yet another right-wing Likud Party stalwart, it’s clear that Tel Aviv intends to preclude peace by continuing to build more settlements. With that stance, Israel not only pushed Barack Obama into a corner, it also forced U.S. national security to make a key strategic decision: Is Israel a credible partner for peace? By any criteria, the answer must be a resounding “No.”</p>
<p>That inescapable conclusion leaves Americans with few options. After all, the U.S. is largely responsible for the legitimacy granted this extremist enclave in May 1948 when Harry Truman, a Christian-Zionist president, extended nation-state recognition. He did so over the strenuous objections of Secretary of State George Marshall, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the fledgling CIA and the bulk of the U.S. diplomatic corps.</p>
<p>By December 1948, a distinguished contingent of Jewish scientists and intellectuals warned in The New York Times that those leading the effort to establish a Jewish state bear “the unmistakable stamp of a Fascist party.” Albert Einstein joined concerned Jews who cautioned Americans “not to support this latest manifestation of fascism.”</p>
<p>Only in the past few weeks has the momentum emerged to subject Israel to the same external pressures that were brought to bear against Apartheid South Africa. After more than six decades of consistent behavior—and clear evidence of no intent to change—activists coalesced around the need to boycott Israeli exports, divest from Israeli firms and impose sanctions against Israel akin to those it seeks against others.</p>
<p>The focal point for peace in the Middle East should not be those nations that do not have nuclear weapons but the one nation that does. Absent external pressure, Israeli behavior will not change. Absent pressure—and likely force—applied by the U.S. as the nation that has long enabled this behavior, Colonial Zionism will continue to pose a threat to peace. Occupying powers are not known to voluntarily relinquish lands they occupy. Likewise for their readiness to surrender nuclear arms.</p>
<p>An End to Jewish Fascism?</p>
<p>The key issue need no longer be a subject of endless debate. There must be a one-state solution consistent with democratic principles of full equality. Informed Americans are no longer willing to support a theocratic state in which full citizenship is limited to those deemed “Jewish” (whatever that means). If local birth rates suggest an eventual end to the “Jewish state,” then so be it. Why wait two decades when this nightmare can be drawn to a close in less than five years?</p>
<p>Forget about a return to pre-1967 borders, instead return to pre-1948 borders. Designate Jerusalem an international city under U.N. protection and dispatch multi-national forces to maintain peace. Palestinians should have a right of return, including the ability to recover properties from which they fled under an assault by Jewish terrorists. If Colonial Zionists (aka settlers) want compensation for “their” property, let them seek restitution from the Diaspora that encouraged their unlawful occupation.</p>
<p>Those who consider themselves “Jewish” can remain as part of an inclusive democracy. Or they can depart. Americans must consider how many of these extremists it wants to welcome to a nation already straining under an immigration burden. A reported 500,000 Israelis hold U.S. passports. With more than 300,000 dual-citizens residing in California alone, that state may require a referendum on just how many Zionists it wishes to receive. Likewise for Russia from which many “Jews” fled, including some 300,000 Russian émigrés who support the Likud Party but have yet to be certified as Jewish.</p>
<p>Zionists originally saw Argentina and Uganda as desirable venues to establish their enterprise. They may wish to apply there for resettlement. The question of why Palestinians (or Californians) should bear the cost of a problem created by Europeans six decades ago is one that Tel Aviv has yet to answer except by citing ancient claims that it insists should take precedence over two millennia of Palestinian residence.</p>
<p>By withdrawing Israel’s status as a legitimate “state,” those Jews long appalled by the behavior of this extremist enclave can no longer be portrayed as guilty by association. That long overdue shift in status is certain to benefit the broader Jewish community. By shutting down Israel’s nuclear arms program and destroying its nuclear arsenal, the world can be spared the key impetus now driving a nuclear arms race in the region.</p>
<p>Unless pro-Israelis can create another crisis by inducing an invasion of Iran (or a race war), Americans will soon realize that only one “state” had the means, motivation, opportunity and stable nation-state intelligence required to fix the intelligence that led the U.S. to invade Iraq consistent with the expansionist goals of Colonial Zionism.</p>
<p>Intelligence now working its way to transparency will soon confirm that, but for Zionists within the U.S. government, 9/11 could have been prevented and war in Iraq avoided. To date, this extremism has been enabled by a series of weak U.S. presidents. For the U.S. to restore its credibility requires that it not only lead the effort to shut down the Zionist enterprise but that it also share responsibility for its behavior to date.</p> | false | 1 | ltimg classaligncenter sizefull wpimage2080 titlealberteinstein srchttpswwwforeignpolicyjournalcomwpcontentuploads200909alberteinsteinjpg altalberteinstein width350 height197 srcsethttpswwwforeignpolicyjournalcomwpcontentuploads200909alberteinsteinjpg 500w httpswwwforeignpolicyjournalcomwpcontentuploads200909alberteinstein150x85jpg 150w httpswwwforeignpolicyjournalcomwpcontentuploads200909alberteinstein300x169jpg 300w sizesmaxwidth 350px 100vw 350px gt online reports study us central intelligence agency cast doubt survival israel beyond next two decades regardless validity report known costs blood treasure usisraeli relationship imposed us key ally israel could fall within five years six decades american support israel relied ability proisraelis dominate us media enabling tel aviv put positive spin even extreme behavior including recent massacre gaza access online news coverage zionist bias becoming apparent real facts transparent though americans seldom show strong interest foreign affairs changing grasp subtleties onestate versus twostate proposals many seen online impact murderous israeli assault palestinian civilians timed christmas inauguration barack obama leaders 911 commission acknowledged members would allow testimony impetus attack yet report confirmed key motivation usisraeli relationship access online news americans asking forced support colonial apartheid government election yet another extremist israeli government led yet another rightwing likud party stalwart clear tel aviv intends preclude peace continuing build settlements stance israel pushed barack obama corner also forced us national security make key strategic decision israel credible partner peace criteria answer must resounding inescapable conclusion leaves americans options us largely responsible legitimacy granted extremist enclave may 1948 harry truman christianzionist president extended nationstate recognition strenuous objections secretary state george marshall joint chiefs staff fledgling cia bulk us diplomatic corps december 1948 distinguished contingent jewish scientists intellectuals warned new york times leading effort establish jewish state bear unmistakable stamp fascist party albert einstein joined concerned jews cautioned americans support latest manifestation fascism past weeks momentum emerged subject israel external pressures brought bear apartheid south africa six decades consistent behaviorand clear evidence intent changeactivists coalesced around need boycott israeli exports divest israeli firms impose sanctions israel akin seeks others focal point peace middle east nations nuclear weapons one nation absent external pressure israeli behavior change absent pressureand likely forceapplied us nation long enabled behavior colonial zionism continue pose threat peace occupying powers known voluntarily relinquish lands occupy likewise readiness surrender nuclear arms end jewish fascism key issue need longer subject endless debate must onestate solution consistent democratic principles full equality informed americans longer willing support theocratic state full citizenship limited deemed jewish whatever means local birth rates suggest eventual end jewish state wait two decades nightmare drawn close less five years forget return pre1967 borders instead return pre1948 borders designate jerusalem international city un protection dispatch multinational forces maintain peace palestinians right return including ability recover properties fled assault jewish terrorists colonial zionists aka settlers want compensation property let seek restitution diaspora encouraged unlawful occupation consider jewish remain part inclusive democracy depart americans must consider many extremists wants welcome nation already straining immigration burden reported 500000 israelis hold us passports 300000 dualcitizens residing california alone state may require referendum many zionists wishes receive likewise russia many jews fled including 300000 russian émigrés support likud party yet certified jewish zionists originally saw argentina uganda desirable venues establish enterprise may wish apply resettlement question palestinians californians bear cost problem created europeans six decades ago one tel aviv yet answer except citing ancient claims insists take precedence two millennia palestinian residence withdrawing israels status legitimate state jews long appalled behavior extremist enclave longer portrayed guilty association long overdue shift status certain benefit broader jewish community shutting israels nuclear arms program destroying nuclear arsenal world spared key impetus driving nuclear arms race region unless proisraelis create another crisis inducing invasion iran race war americans soon realize one state means motivation opportunity stable nationstate intelligence required fix intelligence led us invade iraq consistent expansionist goals colonial zionism intelligence working way transparency soon confirm zionists within us government 911 could prevented war iraq avoided date extremism enabled series weak us presidents us restore credibility requires lead effort shut zionist enterprise also share responsibility behavior date | 634 |
<p>By John Davison</p>
<p>HAZIMA, Syria (Reuters) – The few bullet-marked schools Islamic State did not flatten or booby trap around its former Syrian stronghold of Raqqa are buzzing for the first time in years with the sound of children learning.</p>
<p>In the village of Hazima, north of Raqqa, teachers gave ad-hoc alphabet lessons to crammed classrooms on a recent summer’s day before the start of term.</p>
<p>“Right now, the most important thing is to get children into class,” said teacher Ahmed al-Ahmed, standing next to a hole in the school stairwell left by a mine blast that wounded a colleague.</p>
<p>The ultra-hardline Islamic State closed this school and many others in northern Syria after it seized control of the region in 2014, three years into the country’s civil war. Instead it taught children extremist thought in mosques.</p>
<p>But now that the group has been ousted from most territory it held in and around Raqqa by a U.S.-backed military alliance, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a growing debate over education points to the ethnic tensions expected to follow.</p>
<p>What is taught in areas under the control of the SDF, which includes Arab militias but is dominated by the Kurdish YPG, is one of many questions over how predominantly Arab parts of northern Syria will be run as they come into the Kurdish fold.</p>
<p>Schools around Raqqa will this year teach a new curriculum that is based on old textbooks but erases the Baathist ideology of President Bashar al-Assad, a decision agreed on by Arab and Kurdish teachers alike.</p>
<p>But an official in the SDF has floated the immediate introduction of Kurdish lessons in Raqqa schools, an idea that makes local officials bristle.</p>
<p>In contrast with other areas under SDF control that have for years taught Kurdish, there are no plans yet to teach the language in mostly Arab Raqqa.</p>
<p>Officials say it would need broad consensus, hinting at concerns that its introduction too quickly would cause unrest.</p>
<p>“We wouldn’t object to Kurdish teaching. But if it’s imposed on schools then there will be problems,” Ahmed said.</p>
<p>RESENTMENT OVER KURDISH POWER</p>
<p>The YPG has held areas of northeast Syria since early in the six-year-old war which are now under a self-run administration opposed by Assad, who holds the main population centers in the west and is also advancing against Islamic State, and Turkey, a YPG foe which borders Syria. Raqqa is likely to join the administration, officials say.</p>
<p>All ethnic groups are represented in the local bodies that run majority Arab regions captured by the SDF as it ousted IS fighters but critics say Kurds dominate decision-making.</p>
<p>Reuters interviews with SDF officials and local authorities suggest resentment over Kurdish power is brewing over education plans.</p>
<p>A senior SDF adviser and coordinator with the U.S. coalition said he believed Kurdish would be taught to Kurdish pupils around Raqqa this year, following the model for other schools in SDF territory.</p>
<p>“No one has opposed this … every (ethnic) group has the right to study in its own language,” Amed Sido said via the internet.</p>
<p>Officials in the Raqqa Civil Council, the newly-formed local governing body, were taken aback.</p>
<p>“No, that won’t happen without consultations with us and agreement in the council,” Ammar Hussein, an education committee official, said at its office in the town of Ain Issa. “For now it’s in Arabic, with English and French lessons.”</p>
<p>Echoing several council members, he said Kurdish would be taught only if families requested it, there were enough qualified teachers and the Arab-Kurdish council approved it.</p>
<p>“If the people here agree … there won’t be any objection,” said Ali Shanna, another education committee official. “But the Kurd knows the Kurdish language, why does he need to learn it?”</p>
<p>A former Kurdish teacher privately derided Shanna’s comments.</p>
<p>“I hate that attitude. It’s ignorance, it’s the same thinking as Daesh (Islamic State),” said the teacher, who had been jailed under Assad for writing a Kurdish-language journal.</p>
<p>FEAR OF UNREST</p>
<p>The sensitivity over language has already caused unrest in Hasaka to the northeast, an area controlled for years by the YPG where a new curriculum is taught in Arabic and Kurdish, both now official languages. In demonstrations reported by a monitoring group, protesters called for Arab children not to have to learn Kurdish.</p>
<p>Mostafa Bali, an SDF official, said there was no intention to force Kurdish on Arabs, or to suppress Arabic.</p>
<p>“We don’t support racism over language. But there are many Kurds who would like to see Arabic teaching banned in Kurdish areas as revenge for the Baath (teaching),” he said.</p>
<p>The Baathist curriculum championed Arab nationalism over ethnic identity. Kurdish pupils were punished for speaking their mother tongue in school playgrounds. Now, even in some Arab-majority towns, Kurds are taught Kurdish.</p>
<p>Officials in Raqqa are determined to do things their way, regardless of what they say are potential military threats from Assad or neighboring Turkey.</p>
<p>“We won’t let Turkey or anyone else interfere in our internal affairs. We decide what we’ll teach or not teach,” Leila Mostafa, the Kurdish co-president of the Raqqa Civil Council said.</p>
<p>At Hazima school, teachers worry about both the legacy left by Islamic State and Assad, and future political upheaval.</p>
<p>“One kid turned up singing Islamic State chants,” teacher Ahmed Saoud said.</p>
<p>The teachers say “racist” Baathist modules help fuel Syria’s conflict and are anxious to begin the new curriculum.</p>
<p>“It’s urgent we start teaching. The next phase will be difficult – there’ll be a reckoning between factions,” Ahmed al-Ahmed said, without specifying which groups he was referring to. “A reckoning, in general.”</p> | false | 1 | john davison hazima syria reuters bulletmarked schools islamic state flatten booby trap around former syrian stronghold raqqa buzzing first time years sound children learning village hazima north raqqa teachers gave adhoc alphabet lessons crammed classrooms recent summers day start term right important thing get children class said teacher ahmed alahmed standing next hole school stairwell left mine blast wounded colleague ultrahardline islamic state closed school many others northern syria seized control region 2014 three years countrys civil war instead taught children extremist thought mosques group ousted territory held around raqqa usbacked military alliance syrian democratic forces sdf growing debate education points ethnic tensions expected follow taught areas control sdf includes arab militias dominated kurdish ypg one many questions predominantly arab parts northern syria run come kurdish fold schools around raqqa year teach new curriculum based old textbooks erases baathist ideology president bashar alassad decision agreed arab kurdish teachers alike official sdf floated immediate introduction kurdish lessons raqqa schools idea makes local officials bristle contrast areas sdf control years taught kurdish plans yet teach language mostly arab raqqa officials say would need broad consensus hinting concerns introduction quickly would cause unrest wouldnt object kurdish teaching imposed schools problems ahmed said resentment kurdish power ypg held areas northeast syria since early sixyearold war selfrun administration opposed assad holds main population centers west also advancing islamic state turkey ypg foe borders syria raqqa likely join administration officials say ethnic groups represented local bodies run majority arab regions captured sdf ousted fighters critics say kurds dominate decisionmaking reuters interviews sdf officials local authorities suggest resentment kurdish power brewing education plans senior sdf adviser coordinator us coalition said believed kurdish would taught kurdish pupils around raqqa year following model schools sdf territory one opposed every ethnic group right study language amed sido said via internet officials raqqa civil council newlyformed local governing body taken aback wont happen without consultations us agreement council ammar hussein education committee official said office town issa arabic english french lessons echoing several council members said kurdish would taught families requested enough qualified teachers arabkurdish council approved people agree wont objection said ali shanna another education committee official kurd knows kurdish language need learn former kurdish teacher privately derided shannas comments hate attitude ignorance thinking daesh islamic state said teacher jailed assad writing kurdishlanguage journal fear unrest sensitivity language already caused unrest hasaka northeast area controlled years ypg new curriculum taught arabic kurdish official languages demonstrations reported monitoring group protesters called arab children learn kurdish mostafa bali sdf official said intention force kurdish arabs suppress arabic dont support racism language many kurds would like see arabic teaching banned kurdish areas revenge baath teaching said baathist curriculum championed arab nationalism ethnic identity kurdish pupils punished speaking mother tongue school playgrounds even arabmajority towns kurds taught kurdish officials raqqa determined things way regardless say potential military threats assad neighboring turkey wont let turkey anyone else interfere internal affairs decide well teach teach leila mostafa kurdish copresident raqqa civil council said hazima school teachers worry legacy left islamic state assad future political upheaval one kid turned singing islamic state chants teacher ahmed saoud said teachers say racist baathist modules help fuel syrias conflict anxious begin new curriculum urgent start teaching next phase difficult therell reckoning factions ahmed alahmed said without specifying groups referring reckoning general | 551 |
<p>I’m occasionally asked why I, a dues-paying member of the Guild of “Public Intellectuals,” never pursued doctoral studies. The short answer is that I met Robert&#160;Pickus, who was my personal doctoral program: a volcano of ideas who taught me more than I could possibly have absorbed from any number of courses, seminars, and dissertations, and who introduced me to a host of thinkers, including Midge Decter, Irving Kristol, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Norman Podhoretz, who, along with Richard John Neuhaus and Michael Novak, completed whatever in my education Pickus had left unfinished​. When he died on January 22, at the age of 92, I lost a friend and mentor who left an indelible imprint on my life, and the United States lost one of its most passionately patriotic citizens, a genuine American original.</p>
<p>The son of immigrants and a veteran of OSS operations in Sweden during World War II, Pick, as he was universally known, spent the immediate post-war years studying political theory at the University of Chicago during that institution’s glory days. Leaving Chicago with his doctoral coursework completed but “ABD” (all-but-dissertation, as the academic argot had it), he plunged into work for the American Friends Service Committee; there, he co-authored&#160;Speak Truth to Power, a proposal for a peace-oriented U.S. foreign policy that drew the respect, if not the agreement, of George F.&#160;Kennan&#160;and Reinhold&#160;Niebuhr. But as the&#160;AFSC, like the rest of the peace movement, took a hard left turn in the early1960s, Pick became a sign of contradiction within –&#160;indeed, a target of seriously nasty obloquy from –&#160;the movement to which he had dedicated his professional life. For in&#160;Pickus’s&#160;view, what called itself a “peace movement” became, in the early Vietnam years, an&#160;anti–American-power-in-the-world&#160;movement.</p>
<p>Part of that judgment was based on Pick’s profound intellectual, moral, and political disdain for Communism, which he knew as a god that failed long before others figured that&#160;out. But the deeper root of his critique of the peace movement of his day was his love for the United States, which, for this scion of the great central-European Jewish migration to America, was the model of the kind of pluralistic, tolerant, democratic political community to which the world should aspire. The peace-movement people who spelled their country’s name&#160;“Amerika”&#160;struck Robert&#160;Pickus, who proudly called himself a peace activist for more than a half-century, as moral idiots and dangerous fools. If the&#160;“Amerika”&#160;people (and the fellow-travelers who declined to criticize them, on the principle of&#160;pas d’ennemis à gauche) couldn’t understand, and appreciate, how democratic politics and the rule of law made pluralist political community possible in the United States, how were those people going to contribute in any useful way to building a world in which law and politics replaced mass violence as the means of adjudicating conflict?</p>
<p>They weren’t. And&#160;Pickus&#160;did not hesitate to tell them so, perhaps most memorably on May 21, 1965, “Vietnam Day” in Berkeley, Calif. For hours, the usual suspects, including&#160;Staughton&#160;Lynd&#160;and Jerry Rubin, had been saying the things the usual suspects said in those days; then it was Pick’s turn to speak. He spoke as the Western-area director of an organization called Turn Toward Peace and an opponent of American policy in Vietnam. But he also spoke as a man who knew that Vietnamese Communists, be they North Vietnamese or Viet Cong, were not agrarian reformers, but totalitarians with blood on their hands. And he proceeded to tell the Berkeley crowd that their tacit, or in some cases explicit, support for the Communist cause in Vietnam was a disgrace to anything that styled itself a “peace” movement.</p>
<p>Five minutes into his speech, he said that much of what he had heard thus far had been “Cold War&#160;clichés&#160;–&#160;only they’re not American Cold Warclichés, they’re the&#160;clichés&#160;of the Communist world.” Then he switched his attention, from the faculty who had already spoken to the students they’d harangued: What he could not understand, he said, was “why so many bright people have accepted so much pure crap (that was worn out 30 years ago) as though it was really a way to stand for what you really want: resistance to the whole idea of hatred, resistance to the idea of violence, resistance to hatred. And yet what takes place here?&#160;Staughton&#160;Lynd&#160;stands up and talks about how annihilation in a Brooks Brothers suit is still murder, and I don’t hear anyone&#160;.&#160;.&#160;.&#160;talking about the fact that murder at the point of a Viet Cong knife is also ‘still murder.’” It was impossible, he continued, to talk sensibly about a peace process in Vietnam that resulted in governments based on a “belief in the dignity of the individual man” if you “are caught in what&#160;.&#160;.&#160;.&#160;I will now accurately describe: hatred.” Hatred, that is, of America and its role in the world.</p>
<p>It was about time, he said, that America “got rid of all the&#160;McCarthyite&#160;crap.” But he was also “sick and tired of a reverse&#160;McCarthyism masquerading as an argument for freedom” by “applying the term ‘red-baiting’ to anyone who wants to talk about Communist politics and what’s wrong with them.” And he then challenged students and faculty alike to think beyond the tired over-simplifications of “withdraw from Vietnam now” in order to face some serious questions: “Why are you withdrawing, to what end? Are you withdrawing to aid in achieving a stable settlement there? Do you want to see an international presence there that will guarantee that the opposition [to North Vietnam and the Viet Cong] is not murdered?” The children of American privilege, studying at a great public institution of higher learning like Berkeley, ought to be able to manage something beyond “this idiotic isolationist line” of a “simple ‘get out of Vietnam.’” What Berkeley needed, he concluded, was “a lot more realistic pacifists and a lot fewer patsies” who took the bait and thought that “withdraw now” was the gutsy call. Let the leftists he was criticizing “have your guts; I want your brains.”</p>
<p>That final challenge bespoke the essence of Robert&#160;Pickus, who, for all that he devoted his life to peace activism in his singular (and noble) definition of it, was at bottom a teacher. The gang that organized “Vietnam Day” in Berkeley in May 1965 may have been drawn from the tenured-faculty subdivision of the invincibly ignorant; that much, at least, is suggested by their refusal to print his speech along with the many others delivered that day. But over 50 years of leading organizations variously known as Acts for Peace, Turn Toward Peace, the World Without War Council, and the James Madison Foundation, Pick’s tutelage left a deep imprint on many minds and souls, including mine.</p>
<p>It was Pick, a son of Judaism, who reminded me, a Catholic, that, since the days of Augustine, Catholicism had thought of peace as the product of law and politics: In Augustine’s fine phrase, peace is&#160;tranquillitas ordinis, the “tranquility of order.”</p>
<p>It was Pick, a pacifist, who showed me, a Catholic theologian committed to the just-war tradition, how these two moral commitments could work together when “work for peace” was not traduced to agitation against alleged American “militarism,” but focused on finding legal and political alternatives to war in resolving international conflict.</p>
<p>It was Pick who, by insisting that peace and freedom were inseparable, helped me to think about “human rights” in a disciplined, precise way, and who first showed me what John Paul II and&#160;Václav&#160;Havel&#160;later confirmed: that the robust defense of human rights behind the Iron Curtain was one crucial key to bringing down the Berlin Wall and liberating what&#160;Pickus&#160;understood full well were “captive nations.”</p>
<p>(And, oh yes: It was Pick who taught me to read&#160;National Review&#160;and who cajoled what must have been a startled but amused Bill Buckley into providing complimentary NR subscriptions to World Without War Council offices.)</p>
<p>But the deeper lesson Pick taught was about the difference between “career” and “vocation.” There was nothing wrong with a career. But to live vocationally, in service of a great cause, was something noble and soul-strengthening. In his case, that meant the vocation to advance the prospects of a world in which, as Albert Camus (one of his heroes) put it, we were “neither victims nor executioners.” I joined him in pursuing that vocation for nine years; but he understood that, when a parallel vocational call came to me in 1989 in the offer of the presidency of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, it was a call I ought to answer.</p>
<p>To the end, he believed in building what he often called an “American peace effort worthy of the name”: one that firmly rejected all forms of tyranny, especially the Communist variety; one that cherished American democracy and saw American political, economic, and, yes, military power as essential in moving the world toward a greater measure of political community; one that understood that this is an imperfect world, in which utopian politics too often turns into a tacit acquiescence in evil –&#160;or evil itself; one that honored the rule of law and wasn’t seduced by leftist revolutionary violence; one that acknowledged the present competencies and&#160;corruptions&#160;of international organizations while working to reform them.</p>
<p>He was an American original, this pacifist who admired Ronald Reagan. And if he was all too frequently defeated in the great battle of his life –&#160;the battle to prevent what styled itself the American peace movement from becoming captive to what he regarded as infantile leftism and anti-Americanism –&#160;he never stopped trying. For in the trying, he was living vocationally, in response to what he understood to be the deep moral truths embodied in the Jewish scriptures and the great Western tradition of political philosophy.</p>
<p>– George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.</p> | false | 1 | im occasionally asked duespaying member guild public intellectuals never pursued doctoral studies short answer met robert160pickus personal doctoral program volcano ideas taught could possibly absorbed number courses seminars dissertations introduced host thinkers including midge decter irving kristol seymour martin lipset norman podhoretz along richard john neuhaus michael novak completed whatever education pickus left unfinished died january 22 age 92 lost friend mentor left indelible imprint life united states lost one passionately patriotic citizens genuine american original son immigrants veteran oss operations sweden world war ii pick universally known spent immediate postwar years studying political theory university chicago institutions glory days leaving chicago doctoral coursework completed abd allbutdissertation academic argot plunged work american friends service committee coauthored160speak truth power proposal peaceoriented us foreign policy drew respect agreement george f160kennan160and reinhold160niebuhr the160afsc like rest peace movement took hard left turn early1960s pick became sign contradiction within 160indeed target seriously nasty obloquy 160the movement dedicated professional life in160pickuss160view called peace movement became early vietnam years an160antiamericanpowerintheworld160movement part judgment based picks profound intellectual moral political disdain communism knew god failed long others figured that160out deeper root critique peace movement day love united states scion great centraleuropean jewish migration america model kind pluralistic tolerant democratic political community world aspire peacemovement people spelled countrys name160amerika160struck robert160pickus proudly called peace activist halfcentury moral idiots dangerous fools the160amerika160people fellowtravelers declined criticize principle of160pas dennemis à gauche couldnt understand appreciate democratic politics rule law made pluralist political community possible united states people going contribute useful way building world law politics replaced mass violence means adjudicating conflict werent and160pickus160did hesitate tell perhaps memorably may 21 1965 vietnam day berkeley calif hours usual suspects including160staughton160lynd160and jerry rubin saying things usual suspects said days picks turn speak spoke westernarea director organization called turn toward peace opponent american policy vietnam also spoke man knew vietnamese communists north vietnamese viet cong agrarian reformers totalitarians blood hands proceeded tell berkeley crowd tacit cases explicit support communist cause vietnam disgrace anything styled peace movement five minutes speech said much heard thus far cold war160clichés160160only theyre american cold warclichés theyre the160clichés160of communist world switched attention faculty already spoken students theyd harangued could understand said many bright people accepted much pure crap worn 30 years ago though really way stand really want resistance whole idea hatred resistance idea violence resistance hatred yet takes place here160staughton160lynd160stands talks annihilation brooks brothers suit still murder dont hear anyone160160160160talking fact murder point viet cong knife also still murder impossible continued talk sensibly peace process vietnam resulted governments based belief dignity individual man caught what160160160160i accurately describe hatred hatred america role world time said america got rid the160mccarthyite160crap also sick tired reverse160mccarthyism masquerading argument freedom applying term redbaiting anyone wants talk communist politics whats wrong challenged students faculty alike think beyond tired oversimplifications withdraw vietnam order face serious questions withdrawing end withdrawing aid achieving stable settlement want see international presence guarantee opposition north vietnam viet cong murdered children american privilege studying great public institution higher learning like berkeley ought able manage something beyond idiotic isolationist line simple get vietnam berkeley needed concluded lot realistic pacifists lot fewer patsies took bait thought withdraw gutsy call let leftists criticizing guts want brains final challenge bespoke essence robert160pickus devoted life peace activism singular noble definition bottom teacher gang organized vietnam day berkeley may 1965 may drawn tenuredfaculty subdivision invincibly ignorant much least suggested refusal print speech along many others delivered day 50 years leading organizations variously known acts peace turn toward peace world without war council james madison foundation picks tutelage left deep imprint many minds souls including mine pick son judaism reminded catholic since days augustine catholicism thought peace product law politics augustines fine phrase peace is160tranquillitas ordinis tranquility order pick pacifist showed catholic theologian committed justwar tradition two moral commitments could work together work peace traduced agitation alleged american militarism focused finding legal political alternatives war resolving international conflict pick insisting peace freedom inseparable helped think human rights disciplined precise way first showed john paul ii and160václav160havel160later confirmed robust defense human rights behind iron curtain one crucial key bringing berlin wall liberating what160pickus160understood full well captive nations oh yes pick taught read160national review160and cajoled must startled amused bill buckley providing complimentary nr subscriptions world without war council offices deeper lesson pick taught difference career vocation nothing wrong career live vocationally service great cause something noble soulstrengthening case meant vocation advance prospects world albert camus one heroes put neither victims executioners joined pursuing vocation nine years understood parallel vocational call came 1989 offer presidency ethics public policy center call ought answer end believed building often called american peace effort worthy name one firmly rejected forms tyranny especially communist variety one cherished american democracy saw american political economic yes military power essential moving world toward greater measure political community one understood imperfect world utopian politics often turns tacit acquiescence evil 160or evil one honored rule law wasnt seduced leftist revolutionary violence one acknowledged present competencies and160corruptions160of international organizations working reform american original pacifist admired ronald reagan frequently defeated great battle life 160the battle prevent styled american peace movement becoming captive regarded infantile leftism antiamericanism 160he never stopped trying trying living vocationally response understood deep moral truths embodied jewish scriptures great western tradition political philosophy george weigel distinguished senior fellow washingtons ethics public policy center holds william e simon chair catholic studies | 885 |
<p>Arguments about whether or not Pope Francis “gets the science right” in his new encyclical <a href="http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html#_ftnref95" type="external">Laudato Si’</a>&#160;tend to miss the point rather badly. This is because the Pope’s forceful, and in many ways radical, critique of our modern world is not built upon a particular reading of the scientific literature (about which the Pope has no special authority to speak), but upon the Church’s understanding of the gift of creation and the place of man within creation—a subject about which the Pope and the Church do speak with authority.</p>
<p>Put another way, the Pope’s deepest critique of our contemporary world retains its full weight and significance regardless of whether one agrees with the Pope’s reading of the extent and causes of global climate change or not.</p>
<p>So while many have focused on the Pope’s rather grim reading of the present ecological crisis—global climate change, acidification of the oceans, loss of biodiversity, desertification, lack of access to clean water, etc.—as Matthew Schmitz points out in <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2015/06/18/pope-francis-wants-to-roll-back-progress-is-the-world-ready/" type="external">a thoughtful piece for the Washington Post</a>, the encyclical hinges, not on a reading of the science, but on a diagnosis of an underlying spiritual crisis.</p>
<p>As evidence of the coming disaster, Francis adduces environmental calamities—climate change, pollution, deforestation, monoculture, extinction—and yet he leaves no doubt that the crisis is fundamentally a spiritual one. Its source is our desire to master and manipulate nature, which leads us to use technology that ends up mastering us.</p>
<p>The ecological and economic concerns addressed by the encyclical are symptoms of a fundamental breakdown in how we understand creation and, crucially, ourselves. “If the present ecological crisis is one small sign of the ethical, cultural and spiritual crisis of modernity,” Pope Francis insists, “we cannot presume to heal our relationship with nature and the environment without healing all fundamental human relationships.” (119)</p>
<p>So what is the deeper crisis? What is the root cause of the present ecological crisis Pope Francis sees as threatening our “common home”? It is a crisis of the human person. “There can be no ecology,” writes the Holy Father, “without an adequate anthropology.” (118) How can we understand the rest of creation unless we understand our own selves, who are part of that creation? And how can we understand ourselves, if we ignore, dismiss, or abuse creation of which we are part and to which our vocation as stewards obliges us?</p>
<p>If we take a fragmented view of the human person and human life—a view often encouraged by our politics, in which various issues are cobbled together to form this or that platform, which stands in opposition to and competition with other policy platforms—we can easily miss the integrity of the Church’s view of the whole human person, which includes our social nature, our place in the world, and our ultimate end, which is communion with God.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.catholicvote.org/three-popes-one-gospel-of-life/" type="external">Earlier this year</a>, I suggested that the “culture of death” described by Pope John Paul II and the “dictatorship of relativism” warned about by Pope Benedict XVI both describe facets of the same crisis Pope Francis has described as the “throwaway culture” and the “culture of waste.” This new encyclical makes this connection even clearer. For example, Pope Francis explicitly ties the defense of creation to the defense of human life and the family. Citing Pope John Paul II in Centesimus Annus, Francis writes:</p>
<p>I would stress the great importance of the family, which is “the place in which life – the gift of God – can be properly welcomed and protected against the many attacks to which it is exposed, and can develop in accordance with what constitutes authentic human growth. In the face of the so-called culture of death, the family is the heart of the culture of life”. In the family we first learn how to show love and respect for life; we are taught the proper use of things, order and cleanliness, respect for the local ecosystem and care for all creatures. In the family we receive an integral education, which enables us to grow harmoniously in personal maturity. (213)</p>
<p>The culture of life, of course, is incompatible with a view of the human person that places individual freedom and autonomy above our relationships and obligations to others and to the marvelous gift of creation God has entrusted to our care. The Holy Father makes this point directly and forcefully:</p>
<p>[C]oncern for the protection of nature is also incompatible with the justification of abortion. How can we genuinely teach the importance of concern for other vulnerable beings, however troublesome or inconvenient they may be, if we fail to protect a human embryo, even when its presence is uncomfortable and creates difficulties? (120)</p>
<p>As for the connection between relativism and the throwaway culture (and the ecological crisis), Pope Francis drives the point home hard:</p>
<p>The culture of relativism is the same disorder which drives one person to take advantage of another, to treat others as mere objects, imposing forced labor on them or enslaving them to pay their debts. The same kind of thinking leads to the sexual exploitation of children and abandonment of the elderly who no longer serve our interests. It is also the mindset of those who say: Let us allow the invisible forces of the market to regulate the economy, and consider their impact on society and nature as collateral damage. In the absence of objective truths or sound principles other than the satisfaction of our own desires and immediate needs, what limits can be placed on human trafficking, organized crime, the drug trade, commerce in blood diamonds and the fur of endangered species? Is it not the same relativistic logic which justifies buying the organs of the poor for resale or use in experimentation, or eliminating children because they are not what their parents wanted? This same “use and throw away” logic generates so much waste, because of the disordered desire to consume more than what is really necessary.</p>
<p>This encyclical is strong medicine; it challenges deep cultural assumptions held, often uncritically, by many on both the right and left of our politics. Above all it is a call to conversion, a call to discover (or rediscover) an understanding of creation in which we are not the center, but rather privileged witnesses to the glory and splendor of God made manifest in all his works—most especially in us.</p>
<p>One last thought: In reading Laudato Si, this deeply “Franciscan” encyclical of our Jesuit pope, I was reminded of the words written by St. Ignatius of Loyola at the outset of his <a href="http://www.jesuit.org/jesuits/wp-content/uploads/the-spiritual-exercises-.pdf" type="external">Spiritual Exercises</a>. The “Principle and Foundation” is a succinct statement of our origins, our end, and the proper ordering of all we encounter along the way. I leave his words&#160;here for your consideration and edification.</p>
<p>Principle and Foundation</p>
<p>Man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save his soul.</p>
<p>And the other things on the face of the earth are created for man and that they may help him in prosecuting the end for which he is created.</p>
<p>From this it follows that man is to use them as much as they help him on to his end, and ought to rid himself of them so far as they hinder him as to it.</p>
<p>For this it is necessary to make ourselves indifferent to all created things in all that is allowed to the choice of our free will and is not prohibited to it; so that, on our part, we want not health rather than sickness, riches rather than poverty, honor rather than dishonor, long rather than short life, and so in all the rest; desiring and choosing only what is most conducive for us to the end for which we are created.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>Stephen P. White is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.</p> | false | 1 | arguments whether pope francis gets science right new encyclical laudato si160tend miss point rather badly popes forceful many ways radical critique modern world built upon particular reading scientific literature pope special authority speak upon churchs understanding gift creation place man within creationa subject pope church speak authority put another way popes deepest critique contemporary world retains full weight significance regardless whether one agrees popes reading extent causes global climate change many focused popes rather grim reading present ecological crisisglobal climate change acidification oceans loss biodiversity desertification lack access clean water etcas matthew schmitz points thoughtful piece washington post encyclical hinges reading science diagnosis underlying spiritual crisis evidence coming disaster francis adduces environmental calamitiesclimate change pollution deforestation monoculture extinctionand yet leaves doubt crisis fundamentally spiritual one source desire master manipulate nature leads us use technology ends mastering us ecological economic concerns addressed encyclical symptoms fundamental breakdown understand creation crucially present ecological crisis one small sign ethical cultural spiritual crisis modernity pope francis insists presume heal relationship nature environment without healing fundamental human relationships 119 deeper crisis root cause present ecological crisis pope francis sees threatening common home crisis human person ecology writes holy father without adequate anthropology 118 understand rest creation unless understand selves part creation understand ignore dismiss abuse creation part vocation stewards obliges us take fragmented view human person human lifea view often encouraged politics various issues cobbled together form platform stands opposition competition policy platformswe easily miss integrity churchs view whole human person includes social nature place world ultimate end communion god earlier year suggested culture death described pope john paul ii dictatorship relativism warned pope benedict xvi describe facets crisis pope francis described throwaway culture culture waste new encyclical makes connection even clearer example pope francis explicitly ties defense creation defense human life family citing pope john paul ii centesimus annus francis writes would stress great importance family place life gift god properly welcomed protected many attacks exposed develop accordance constitutes authentic human growth face socalled culture death family heart culture life family first learn show love respect life taught proper use things order cleanliness respect local ecosystem care creatures family receive integral education enables us grow harmoniously personal maturity 213 culture life course incompatible view human person places individual freedom autonomy relationships obligations others marvelous gift creation god entrusted care holy father makes point directly forcefully concern protection nature also incompatible justification abortion genuinely teach importance concern vulnerable beings however troublesome inconvenient may fail protect human embryo even presence uncomfortable creates difficulties 120 connection relativism throwaway culture ecological crisis pope francis drives point home hard culture relativism disorder drives one person take advantage another treat others mere objects imposing forced labor enslaving pay debts kind thinking leads sexual exploitation children abandonment elderly longer serve interests also mindset say let us allow invisible forces market regulate economy consider impact society nature collateral damage absence objective truths sound principles satisfaction desires immediate needs limits placed human trafficking organized crime drug trade commerce blood diamonds fur endangered species relativistic logic justifies buying organs poor resale use experimentation eliminating children parents wanted use throw away logic generates much waste disordered desire consume really necessary encyclical strong medicine challenges deep cultural assumptions held often uncritically many right left politics call conversion call discover rediscover understanding creation center rather privileged witnesses glory splendor god made manifest worksmost especially us one last thought reading laudato si deeply franciscan encyclical jesuit pope reminded words written st ignatius loyola outset spiritual exercises principle foundation succinct statement origins end proper ordering encounter along way leave words160here consideration edification principle foundation man created praise reverence serve god lord means save soul things face earth created man may help prosecuting end created follows man use much help end ought rid far hinder necessary make indifferent created things allowed choice free prohibited part want health rather sickness riches rather poverty honor rather dishonor long rather short life rest desiring choosing conducive us end created 160 stephen p white fellow ethics public policy center | 664 |
<p><a href="http://variety.com/t/stephen-king/" type="external">Stephen King</a>’s “ <a href="http://variety.com/t/it/" type="external">It</a>” has always been a tough nut to crack. Though the mammoth novel has been reduced to a few indelible images and quotes over the decades — a killer clown, a balloon, “you’ll float too” — King’s story of seven youngsters who come of age while confronting a shape-shifting demonic presence in small-town Maine, then come home as adults to deal with its return, is quite a lot of things. It’s a messy, druggy attempt to distill decades of horror tropes into a chaotic fever dream; a portrait of a fictional town as obsessively mapped as Joyce’s Dublin; a meditation on childhood, trauma, and forgetting; “In Search of Lost Time” bloodied up for the grindhouse.</p>
<p>The second attempt to adapt King’s 1,100-page doorstop for the screen, director <a href="http://variety.com/t/andy-muschietti/" type="external">Andy Muschietti</a>’s “It” is also a lot of different things. Focusing entirely on the childhood-set portions of King’s book, it’s a collection of alternately terrifying, hallucinatory, and ludicrous nightmare imagery; a sometimes jarring pileup of moods, ranging from haunted house horror to nostalgic hangout humor; a popcorn movie about gruesome child murders; a series of well-crafted yet decreasingly effective suspense setpieces; and a series of well-acted coming-of-age sequences that don’t quite fully mature. “It” looks poised to make a killing at the box office, but there’s a fundamental hollowness that haunts the film just as surely as the titular monster haunts this small town.</p>
<p>Perhaps that’s inevitable, as the film is incomplete by design, punting one half of its source material to a potential sequel — and considering the film’s pre-release tracking numbers, that sequel looks fairly inevitable. Much like Quentin Tarantino’s first volume of “Kill Bill” offered a delirious yet morally unmoored mixtape of kung-fu spectacle, only for the second installment to provide the context that retroactively made it all meaningful, “It” very much feels like the flashier half of a longer story. As it stands, Muschietti (along with screenwriters Chase Palmer, Gary Dauberman and previously attached director Cary Fukunaga) has remained faithful to the book’s overall mood while diverging from its particulars, and King fans will surely appreciate the clear effort and affection that went into this adaptation, even as it struggles to become more than the sum of its parts.</p>
<p>Advancing the setting from the 1950s to the late 1980s, the film spans roughly nine months in the roughneck township of Derry, Maine, beginning with the brutal murder of six-year-old Georgie (Jackson Robert Scott). The novel’s famous opening sequence is largely adapted beat-for-beat, lingering with sickening unhurriedness on this sweet kid frolicking in the rain as he follows a paper boat into a storm drain, where he’s met by a sinister figure calling itself Pennywise the Dancing Clown (Bill Skarsgard), who sweet-talks him inch by inch toward his doom. It’s an upsettingly effective scene, and the rest of the film struggles to craft another with similar impact.</p>
<p>A few months later, Georgie’s older brother Bill (Jaeden Lieberher), wracked with guilt over sending Georgie out alone, is the last one still holding out futile hopes of finding him alive. Several other kids have since gone missing, and as school breaks for the summer, Bill enlists his clique of dorky buddies to help scout out the nearby streams for clues. His friends try their best to remain supportive, even as they’re more interested in talking about girls and avoiding the torments of the town’s psychotic bully, Henry Bowers (Nicholas Hamilton). The clan includes Richie (Finn Wolfhard), a crass, Coke-bottle-spectacled know-it-all; Eddie (Jack Dylan Grazer), an inhaler-wielding hypochondriac; and Stanley (Wyatt Oleff), a sclerotic skeptic heading unprepared into his bar mitzvah.</p>
<p>Their group, self-named “the Losers Club,” gradually grows to include Ben (Jeremy Ray Taylor), a shy new kid who spends his time in the library, and Mike (Chosen Jacobs), a home-schooled loner who also appears to be the only black kid in town. The biggest disruption, however, comes with the addition of Beverly (Sophia Lillis), a supremely confident, chain-smoking tomboy eager to escape her abusive home life. Both Bill and Ben are quick to fall in love with her, and the film is sensitive to the sometimes tender, sometimes unbearable awkwardness that ensues when puberty tosses a wrench into the already delicate machinery of male-female friendships.</p>
<p>Following the novel’s example, Muschietti has constructed a film that’s just as much “Stand by Me” as creature feature, and casting director Rich Delia goes above the call of duty assembling a group of youngsters who are every bit as funny, irritating and empathetic as the script requires. Lieberher and Lillis are particularly revelatory, their flirtations warm and believable, and Lillis bears more than just a superficial resemblance to a young Amy Adams. But Wolfhard all but steals the show as the gang’s cheerful antagonist Richie. Best known for his turn last year in “Stranger Things” — which itself shamelessly pilfered elements from “It” to more cohesive effect — the 14-year-old unleashes torrents of profanity and stupid-clever teenage quips with infectious panache.</p>
<p>Of course, there’s also the matter of the child-killing chthonian creature haunting their steps. One by one, It (a pronoun that gradually becomes a proper noun) appears to each of the Losers in a variety of guises, toying with them just long enough to scare them witless before reverting to its default form of Pennywise. Eventually, the kids all admit to one another that they’ve been having the same experiences, and bookish Ben connects the sinister goings-on to similar eruptions of violence throughout the history of Derry, a town where mysterious tragedy appears to strike every 27 years. Led by the increasingly committed Bill, the group resolves to fight back against It themselves, even if that means venturing into the town’s labyrinthine sewer system.</p>
<p>No matter how many awful fates befall “It’s” characters, the filmmaking itself is never sadistic. The action is generally clean and comprehensibly staged, with the long fun-house scene inside 29 Neibolt Street offering a particularly inventive set of scares, and composer Benjamin Wallfisch’s arsenal of spare piano pieces, breathy woodwinds and vortices of sampled children’s voices works wonders. Muschietti shares King’s love of period-appropriate rock music, though he doesn’t always use it appropriately: One potentially blood-curdling scene is bizarrely neutered by its use of the Cure’s “Six Different Ways.”</p>
<p>But as spine-tingling as a number of individual scenes are, the film struggles to find a proper rhythm. Scene-to-scene transitions are static and disjointed, settling into a cycle of “…and then this happened” without deepening the overall dread or steadily uncovering pieces of a central mystery. Curiously, “It” grows less intense as it goes, handicapped by an inability to take in the scope of Derry as a town defined by its buried traumas and secrets, let alone really plumbing the primal depths of fear that It itself represents. As Pennywise, Skarsgard is largely tasked with providing a canvas for the film’s visual effects, and he never manages to cast as long a shadow as Tim Curry did with the character in the 1990 TV miniseries.</p>
<p>The film does, however, pick up on one key element of the novel, and King’s writing in general, that often goes missing in films based on his work: the notion that young people are uniquely burdened with atoning for the inequities of the adult world. Much of “It” takes place with no parents in sight, and when adults do break into the narrative, they’re invariably drunk, cruel, manipulative and indifferent if not hostile toward the fears and worries of those they ought to be protecting. As King puts it in the novel, “adults are the real monsters,” and Muschietti has plenty of ground left to cover when we see what kinds of adults these characters become.</p>
<p>Reviewed at Warner Bros. studios, Burbank, Aug. 29, 2017. MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 135 MIN.</p>
<p>A Warner Bros. release of a New Line Cinema presentation of a Vertigo Entertainment, Lin Pictures, Katzsmith production in association with Ratpac-Dune Entertainment. Producers: Roy Lee, Dan Lin, Seth Grahame-Smith, David Katzenberg, Barbara Muschietti. Executive producers: Dave Neustadter, Walter Hamada, Richard Brener, Toby Emmerich, Marty P. Ewing, Doug Davison, Jon Silk, Niija Kuykendall.</p>
<p>Director: Andy Muschietti. Screenplay: Chase Palmer, Cary Fukunaga, Gary Dauberman, based on the novel by Stephen King. Camera (color): Chung-Hoon Chung. Editor: Jason Ballantine. Music: Benjamin Wallfisch.</p>
<p>Jaeden Lieberher, Sophia Lillis, Jeremy Ray Taylor, Finn Wolfhard, Chosen Jacobs, Jack Dylan Grazer, Wyatt Oleff, Bill Skarsgard, Nicholas Hamilton, Jackson Robert Scott</p> | false | 1 | stephen kings always tough nut crack though mammoth novel reduced indelible images quotes decades killer clown balloon youll float kings story seven youngsters come age confronting shapeshifting demonic presence smalltown maine come home adults deal return quite lot things messy druggy attempt distill decades horror tropes chaotic fever dream portrait fictional town obsessively mapped joyces dublin meditation childhood trauma forgetting search lost time bloodied grindhouse second attempt adapt kings 1100page doorstop screen director andy muschiettis also lot different things focusing entirely childhoodset portions kings book collection alternately terrifying hallucinatory ludicrous nightmare imagery sometimes jarring pileup moods ranging haunted house horror nostalgic hangout humor popcorn movie gruesome child murders series wellcrafted yet decreasingly effective suspense setpieces series wellacted comingofage sequences dont quite fully mature looks poised make killing box office theres fundamental hollowness haunts film surely titular monster haunts small town perhaps thats inevitable film incomplete design punting one half source material potential sequel considering films prerelease tracking numbers sequel looks fairly inevitable much like quentin tarantinos first volume kill bill offered delirious yet morally unmoored mixtape kungfu spectacle second installment provide context retroactively made meaningful much feels like flashier half longer story stands muschietti along screenwriters chase palmer gary dauberman previously attached director cary fukunaga remained faithful books overall mood diverging particulars king fans surely appreciate clear effort affection went adaptation even struggles become sum parts advancing setting 1950s late 1980s film spans roughly nine months roughneck township derry maine beginning brutal murder sixyearold georgie jackson robert scott novels famous opening sequence largely adapted beatforbeat lingering sickening unhurriedness sweet kid frolicking rain follows paper boat storm drain hes met sinister figure calling pennywise dancing clown bill skarsgard sweettalks inch inch toward doom upsettingly effective scene rest film struggles craft another similar impact months later georgies older brother bill jaeden lieberher wracked guilt sending georgie alone last one still holding futile hopes finding alive several kids since gone missing school breaks summer bill enlists clique dorky buddies help scout nearby streams clues friends try best remain supportive even theyre interested talking girls avoiding torments towns psychotic bully henry bowers nicholas hamilton clan includes richie finn wolfhard crass cokebottlespectacled knowitall eddie jack dylan grazer inhalerwielding hypochondriac stanley wyatt oleff sclerotic skeptic heading unprepared bar mitzvah group selfnamed losers club gradually grows include ben jeremy ray taylor shy new kid spends time library mike chosen jacobs homeschooled loner also appears black kid town biggest disruption however comes addition beverly sophia lillis supremely confident chainsmoking tomboy eager escape abusive home life bill ben quick fall love film sensitive sometimes tender sometimes unbearable awkwardness ensues puberty tosses wrench already delicate machinery malefemale friendships following novels example muschietti constructed film thats much stand creature feature casting director rich delia goes call duty assembling group youngsters every bit funny irritating empathetic script requires lieberher lillis particularly revelatory flirtations warm believable lillis bears superficial resemblance young amy adams wolfhard steals show gangs cheerful antagonist richie best known turn last year stranger things shamelessly pilfered elements cohesive effect 14yearold unleashes torrents profanity stupidclever teenage quips infectious panache course theres also matter childkilling chthonian creature haunting steps one one pronoun gradually becomes proper noun appears losers variety guises toying long enough scare witless reverting default form pennywise eventually kids admit one another theyve experiences bookish ben connects sinister goingson similar eruptions violence throughout history derry town mysterious tragedy appears strike every 27 years led increasingly committed bill group resolves fight back even means venturing towns labyrinthine sewer system matter many awful fates befall characters filmmaking never sadistic action generally clean comprehensibly staged long funhouse scene inside 29 neibolt street offering particularly inventive set scares composer benjamin wallfischs arsenal spare piano pieces breathy woodwinds vortices sampled childrens voices works wonders muschietti shares kings love periodappropriate rock music though doesnt always use appropriately one potentially bloodcurdling scene bizarrely neutered use cures six different ways spinetingling number individual scenes film struggles find proper rhythm scenetoscene transitions static disjointed settling cycle happened without deepening overall dread steadily uncovering pieces central mystery curiously grows less intense goes handicapped inability take scope derry town defined buried traumas secrets let alone really plumbing primal depths fear represents pennywise skarsgard largely tasked providing canvas films visual effects never manages cast long shadow tim curry character 1990 tv miniseries film however pick one key element novel kings writing general often goes missing films based work notion young people uniquely burdened atoning inequities adult world much takes place parents sight adults break narrative theyre invariably drunk cruel manipulative indifferent hostile toward fears worries ought protecting king puts novel adults real monsters muschietti plenty ground left cover see kinds adults characters become reviewed warner bros studios burbank aug 29 2017 mpaa rating r running time 135 min warner bros release new line cinema presentation vertigo entertainment lin pictures katzsmith production association ratpacdune entertainment producers roy lee dan lin seth grahamesmith david katzenberg barbara muschietti executive producers dave neustadter walter hamada richard brener toby emmerich marty p ewing doug davison jon silk niija kuykendall director andy muschietti screenplay chase palmer cary fukunaga gary dauberman based novel stephen king camera color chunghoon chung editor jason ballantine music benjamin wallfisch jaeden lieberher sophia lillis jeremy ray taylor finn wolfhard chosen jacobs jack dylan grazer wyatt oleff bill skarsgard nicholas hamilton jackson robert scott | 879 |
<p>Since the credits rolled on “The Force Awakens,” fans have taken to the Internet to theorize the answers to the dangling mysteries left unsolved. Who or what is Snoke? Who are Rey’s parents? What’s the deal with the reclusive Luke Skywalker? In the two years since “Episode VII,” theories have ranged from possible, unlikely, to straight up baffling.&#160; With “The Last Jedi” right around the corner we’re looking at some of the best — and craziest — theories from around the web.</p>
<p />
<p>The Knights of Ren were Luke’s Students</p>
<p>Of all the theories out there, this one rings seems pretty plausible. Around the halfway point of “The Force Awakens,” Rey is given Luke’s old lightsaber — the one he lost in his fight with Darth Vader in “The Empire Strikes Back.” When she touches it she sees a number of visions, one of them being of Kylo Ren and a group of equally hooded baddies called The Knights of Ren.</p>
<p>It seems unlikely that Kylo Ren could amass such a strong following so quickly after betraying Luke…unless he talked all of Luke’s other jedi students into siding with him. This could also explain why Luke exiled himself to Ahch-To (the island we find him on at the end of “Force Awakens.” He’s not mourning the death of all his students, but that he couldn’t save them from the Dark Side.</p>
<p>Rey is Obi-Wan’s Granddaughter</p>
<p>Rey’s origin is subject to countless Internet theories. She’s Darth Vader reincarnated, she was the result of a virgin birth just like Anakin, she hatched from an egg (more on that later). It seems highly unlikely that the new “ <a href="http://variety.com/t/star-wars/" type="external">Star Wars</a>” flicks would retread the much maligned immaculate conception plot from the prequels, but the theory that Rey is a Kenobi… that’s not that crazy.</p>
<p>The main argument for this theory is that the episodic “ <a href="http://variety.com/2017/film/news/star-wars-branded-the-last-jedi-1202630593/" type="external">Star Wars</a>” tales have always revolved around one theme: family. And more specifically, it has (for better or worse) always centered around the Skywalker and Kenobi dynamic. Obi-Wan raises Anakin, trains Anakin, is betrayed by Anakin and ultimately is killed by Anakin all while becoming a sort of father figure to Luke. That theme would be easy to continue if Rey and Kylo Ren continue to clash, as Kenobis and Skywalkers seem destined to do.</p>
<p>And yes, we are implying that Old Ben took up with a lover in the sand dunes of Tatooine, Jedi code or not he’s only human.</p>
<p />
<p>Luke is a Villain in “The Last Jedi”</p>
<p>From what we heard about him in “The Force Awakens,” and what we’ve seen of him in “The Last Jedi” trailers, it seems like there’s something wrong with Luke. Some fans believe that his failure with Kylo Ren has forced him to slip to the Dark Side himself.</p>
<p>People are backing up the theory that Luke is now a villain with “The Last Jedi” poster. Throughout the series, every poster for every film has always featured the villain looming as the largest image in the background. In the upcoming film, that’s Luke. It doesn’t help that on special IMAX posters — one for Light Side characters and one for Dark Side characters — Luke is featured on both.</p>
<p>Snoke is Darth Plagueis</p>
<p>The idea that Supreme Leader Snoke is actually Darth Plagueis was one of the earliest theories about the villain’s identity. For a quick refresher, Plagueis was an incredibly powerful Sith Lord who taught the Emperor Palpatine. This is the Sith that found a way to cheat death, and the story that ultimately tempts Anakin to the Dark Side.</p>
<p>The strongest evidence for this theory comes from “The Force Awakens” novelization, where Snoke is described as tall, gaunt, and humanoid. Plagueis was a Muun which is a species that’s also tall, thin and humanoid. Sharp-eared fans have also pointed out that the music played when Plagueis was previously mentioned in “Revenge of the Sith” is eerily similar to Snoke’s theme in “The Force Awakens.”</p>
<p>However, “Episode VII” director J.J. Abrams has denied this theory. And this would carry a bit of weight had he not also constantly denied that Benedict Cumberbatch’s character in “Star Trek Into Darkness” was Khan…which turned out to be 100% true.</p>
<p />
<p>Benicio del Toro’s DJ Is An Older Ezra Bridger</p>
<p>If you don’t know the name Ezra Bridger, we strongly suggest checking out the spinoff series “Star Wars: Rebels.” Set five years before “A New Hope” the animated shows follows a group of ragtag rebels as they run covert operations against the Empire. One of those rebels is Ezra,&#160; a Jedi Padawan who spent time tracking down Obi-Wan.</p>
<p>This theory originated when fans realized that del Toro’s DJ has similar face scars to Ezra. Plus the young character would be about the same age as del Toro (early 50s) at the time of “The Last Jedi.” Is it possible Disney decided to integrate an aged-up character from one of their animated series into the live-action films?</p>
<p>Kylo Ren is a Double Agent</p>
<p>This idea attempts to explain why Kylo Ren complains so much about feeling weird and conflicted throughout “The Force Awakens.” It’s gives Han’s death more weight.</p>
<p>What if Kylo Ren was never seduced by the Dark Side? What if Ren willingly crossed over to the First Order in order to get close to Snoke? His semi-constant complaining about being drawn to the Light Side makes sense because that’s where he’s supposed to be. It could also explain why he asked Han to help him right before he ran his father through with his lightsaber. Killing Han would prove his loyalty to the Dark Side and allow him to get closer to Snoke. Plus, scenes from “The Last Jedi” trailer seem to hint that he gets in the same room as the Supreme Leader at some point in the film.</p>
<p>Rey is Luke’s Clone</p>
<p>“Star Wars” loses it’s mind for clones. Having Rey be a clone of Luke isn’t as much of stretch as possible. Most theories suppose that the First Order is behind said cloning while trying to create a Force User to take down Luke. There are even a couple different ways they could have acquired his DNA.</p>
<p>The obvious way would be from Luke’s severed hand. We already know his lightsaber was recovered — Maz Kanata was keeping it in her cantina — so if that was found it stands to reason Luke’s gross hand could have been found somewhere too. The other way would be from Darth Vader’s helmet. The First Order already has the helmet — how they got it is a mystery — and Luke took the helmet off Vader as he was dying at the end of “Return of the Jedi.”</p>
<p />
<p>Snoke Was One of the Jedi Younglings</p>
<p>We’re getting into ridiculous territory with this one. Remember in “Revenge of the Sith” when Anakin went full Dark Side and murdered a bunch of defenseless kids? Well, some people on the Internet have suggested that one of those kids survived the attack and grew up to become Supreme Leader Snoke. Yep.</p>
<p>Boba Fett is Snoke</p>
<p>The “Star Wars” fandom is filled with Boba Fett acolytes — people who continue to carry a torch for a character that, while looking bada**, has almost no screen time and is killed by a blind Han Solo. Fett fans have theorized that not only did the bounty hunter survive falling into the Sarlacc Pit, but also somehow developed a powerful connection to the Force — a trait he does not possess — to become Supreme Leader Snoke.</p>
<p>Because “Star Wars” fans will never quit trying to make Boba Fett happen.</p>
<p>Rey Hatched from an Egg</p>
<p>There is actually a theory that posits Rey doesn’t have parents, but rather was hatched from an egg. Oddly, this theory has more backing it up than some of the wilder ones (looking at you Snoke is a dead youngling fans).</p>
<p>The idea comes from a story in Marvel’s “Poe Dameron” comic series. In the story, the people of the planet Ovanis protect a sacred blue egg called a Creche Egg, which they believe houses the galaxy’s savior. The odds that Rey hatched from said egg are next to zero, but weirder things have happened in “Star Wars.”</p>
<p />
<p>Supreme Leader Snoke is Jar Jar Binks</p>
<p>This is the granddaddy of Snoke headcannon. The theory suggests that Jar Jar Binks — the bumbling and reviled Gungan from the prequel series — is not only Snoke, but also has been pulling the strings behind the creation of the Empire and the First Order from the very beginning. Fans have pointed to Palpatine and Jar Jar being from the same planet and the Gungans convincing the Senate to grant Palpatine emergency powers in “Revenge of the Sith” as for this theory. Some have also suggested that Jar Jar is so powerful he can use the force to manipulate his appearance, which would explain why Snoke looks so different in “The Force Awakens.”</p>
<p>[embedded content]</p> | false | 1 | since credits rolled force awakens fans taken internet theorize answers dangling mysteries left unsolved snoke reys parents whats deal reclusive luke skywalker two years since episode vii theories ranged possible unlikely straight baffling160 last jedi right around corner looking best craziest theories around web knights ren lukes students theories one rings seems pretty plausible around halfway point force awakens rey given lukes old lightsaber one lost fight darth vader empire strikes back touches sees number visions one kylo ren group equally hooded baddies called knights ren seems unlikely kylo ren could amass strong following quickly betraying lukeunless talked lukes jedi students siding could also explain luke exiled ahchto island find end force awakens hes mourning death students couldnt save dark side rey obiwans granddaughter reys origin subject countless internet theories shes darth vader reincarnated result virgin birth like anakin hatched egg later seems highly unlikely new star wars flicks would retread much maligned immaculate conception plot prequels theory rey kenobi thats crazy main argument theory episodic star wars tales always revolved around one theme family specifically better worse always centered around skywalker kenobi dynamic obiwan raises anakin trains anakin betrayed anakin ultimately killed anakin becoming sort father figure luke theme would easy continue rey kylo ren continue clash kenobis skywalkers seem destined yes implying old ben took lover sand dunes tatooine jedi code hes human luke villain last jedi heard force awakens weve seen last jedi trailers seems like theres something wrong luke fans believe failure kylo ren forced slip dark side people backing theory luke villain last jedi poster throughout series every poster every film always featured villain looming largest image background upcoming film thats luke doesnt help special imax posters one light side characters one dark side characters luke featured snoke darth plagueis idea supreme leader snoke actually darth plagueis one earliest theories villains identity quick refresher plagueis incredibly powerful sith lord taught emperor palpatine sith found way cheat death story ultimately tempts anakin dark side strongest evidence theory comes force awakens novelization snoke described tall gaunt humanoid plagueis muun species thats also tall thin humanoid sharpeared fans also pointed music played plagueis previously mentioned revenge sith eerily similar snokes theme force awakens however episode vii director jj abrams denied theory would carry bit weight also constantly denied benedict cumberbatchs character star trek darkness khanwhich turned 100 true benicio del toros dj older ezra bridger dont know name ezra bridger strongly suggest checking spinoff series star wars rebels set five years new hope animated shows follows group ragtag rebels run covert operations empire one rebels ezra160 jedi padawan spent time tracking obiwan theory originated fans realized del toros dj similar face scars ezra plus young character would age del toro early 50s time last jedi possible disney decided integrate agedup character one animated series liveaction films kylo ren double agent idea attempts explain kylo ren complains much feeling weird conflicted throughout force awakens gives hans death weight kylo ren never seduced dark side ren willingly crossed first order order get close snoke semiconstant complaining drawn light side makes sense thats hes supposed could also explain asked han help right ran father lightsaber killing han would prove loyalty dark side allow get closer snoke plus scenes last jedi trailer seem hint gets room supreme leader point film rey lukes clone star wars loses mind clones rey clone luke isnt much stretch possible theories suppose first order behind said cloning trying create force user take luke even couple different ways could acquired dna obvious way would lukes severed hand already know lightsaber recovered maz kanata keeping cantina found stands reason lukes gross hand could found somewhere way would darth vaders helmet first order already helmet got mystery luke took helmet vader dying end return jedi snoke one jedi younglings getting ridiculous territory one remember revenge sith anakin went full dark side murdered bunch defenseless kids well people internet suggested one kids survived attack grew become supreme leader snoke yep boba fett snoke star wars fandom filled boba fett acolytes people continue carry torch character looking bada almost screen time killed blind han solo fett fans theorized bounty hunter survive falling sarlacc pit also somehow developed powerful connection force trait possess become supreme leader snoke star wars fans never quit trying make boba fett happen rey hatched egg actually theory posits rey doesnt parents rather hatched egg oddly theory backing wilder ones looking snoke dead youngling fans idea comes story marvels poe dameron comic series story people planet ovanis protect sacred blue egg called creche egg believe houses galaxys savior odds rey hatched said egg next zero weirder things happened star wars supreme leader snoke jar jar binks granddaddy snoke headcannon theory suggests jar jar binks bumbling reviled gungan prequel series snoke also pulling strings behind creation empire first order beginning fans pointed palpatine jar jar planet gungans convincing senate grant palpatine emergency powers revenge sith theory also suggested jar jar powerful use force manipulate appearance would explain snoke looks different force awakens embedded content | 834 |
<p>The <a href="http://variety.com/t/marvel/" type="external">Marvel</a> <a href="http://variety.com/t/netflix/" type="external">Netflix</a> shows, at their most successful, follow a cookie-cutter format: An individual, a representative of a marginalized group, is both burdened and blessed with extraordinary ability. The 13-episode season becomes a bildungsroman for the superhero: Flashbacks, context, and of course, the inescapable threads tying Matt Murdock, a blind man. Jessica Jones, a rape survivor. Luke Cage, a black man. The times where this sub-genre of <a href="http://variety.com/2017/film/news/thor-ragnarok-box-office-ticket-sales-1202604435/" type="external">Marvel</a> shows have faltered is straying from that format — whether that’s Season 2 of “Daredevil,” the ill-conceived “Iron Fist,” or the ensemble series “The Defenders.”</p>
<p>At first, “Marvel’s <a href="http://variety.com/t/the-punisher/" type="external">The Punisher</a>” seems like another misstep. In the television landscape at large, another overwhelmingly gray and <a href="http://variety.com/2017/tv/columns/marvel-the-punisher-violence-guns-las-vegas-1202583168/" type="external">brutally violent</a> show centered on a dysfunctional antihero is superfluous. Within the superhero genre, it’s even more so. But “ <a href="http://variety.com/2017/scene/vpage/jon-bernthal-marvel-the-punisher-netflix-premiere-1202608872/" type="external">The Punisher</a>” transcends what it appears to be. Not completely, and not always; this is still a very violent show, saturated in tortured masculinity. (In just the opening credits, an array of semiautomatic weapons float in the air to arrange themselves in the skull-shaped logo of the Punisher.) But thanks to Jon Berthal’s seamless performance as the non-superpowered vigilante Frank Castle and showrunner Steve Lightfoot’s sharp, conscious storytelling, “The Punisher” approaches the high points of “Marvel’s Jessica Jones” by introducing a damaged, deadly character and telling his story as one piece of an unjust whole. Despite first impressions, Frank Castle is in fact&#160;a marginalized figure — because he is a veteran.</p>
<p>It’s difficult to imagine better casting than Bernthal, who communicates so fluently with impassive silences, and is convincing both when he is being terribly violent and especially gentle. But it still takes the show a few minutes of throat-clearing to find its sweet spot. In the first episode, “The Punisher” might as well be ticking off a checklist of antihero tropes. He handles his emotions by slamming a sledgehammer into a wall over and over again, for hours. He is so frequently haunted by memories of his wife and children that they become irritating presences — if only because his wife, especially, has no discernible character traits beyond being warm, soft, and probably clean. He broods, constantly, with near-operatic range — over the pages of a book, behind a steering wheel, on the Staten Island ferry. Frank Castle broods so much, so single-mindedly, you want to offer him some eggs to incubate.</p>
<p>But outside of Frank, the show starts offering the audience storylines that don’t feel of a piece with his vigilante narrative. There’s Dinah Madani (Amber Rose Revah), a suit at Homeland Security who is hyper-conscious of the fact that as a Persian-American woman, she’s both an asset and a liability. There’s a veterans’ support group, led by Frank’s friend Curtis (Jason R. Moore), in which veterans from very different backgrounds struggle to make sense of the world they are reintegrating into. (Early on, in a sign of welcome complications to come, Curtis says to Castle: “Do me a favor, Frank. Don’t be a wallowing asshole.”) And there’s cocky hacker Micro (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), who starts hunting Frank after spotting him on one of the many surveillance cameras posted around the city. Without fully realizing it, Frank’s unitmates, Micro, Dinah, and Frank himself are all trying to understand what happened during one tour of duty — a series of missions where, it is revealed, Frank’s unit was pushed to commit war crimes. As other veterans become better bigger characters — and Dinah makes more connections in Homeland Security — the network of guilt and corruption behind the senseless violence is slowly brought to light.</p>
<p>Both Dinah and Micro are intriguing characters — Dinah, in premise, and Micro, in execution. Dinah was created for the TV show, and Micro is based on the comics, but as far as supporting characters in Marvel shows go, both exceed expectations. Moss-Bachrach, in particular — who “Girls” viewers will remember as Marnie’s tiresome husband Desi — brings astonishing life to a character who is otherwise so classically a comic-book villain. Like Frank, Micro faked his death; unlike Frank, though, his family is still alive. Micro watches them, obsessively, through cameras and microphones he’s placed all through the house. Frank figures this out, and starts to use Micro’s perpetual watching to manipulate him: He shows up at the Lieberman house one day, seemingly by accident, to insinuate himself into Micro’s former life. That Frank is missing a wife and kids, just as Micro’s wife and kids are missing a husband and father, does not go unnoticed. One of the strangely compelling things about “The Punisher” is how deeply messed up it is — as if it is observing, in the transition from comic-book page to live-action, how twisted some of these character dynamics are.</p>
<p>This carries through in the show’s relationship to its violence. Every episode is punctuated with a set piece of stunning violence — not just visually striking, as is often the case with action sequences, but viscerally affecting, too. Action scenes that we have all grown accustomed to — like a car accident where a sedan flips into the air and then lands heavily, or weapons drawn menacingly at a high stakes card game — take on new brutality in “The Punisher,” which pays uncomfortably close attention to the sound of bones snapping, the smear of blood on a sledgehammer, the intimacy of getting close enough to someone to kill them. This is a brand of violence that is especially, well, punishing — brutal, scrappy, painful set pieces that offer nothing balletic or glorious about the act of beating the crap out of someone. It’s cynical, and at times pretty despairing, too.</p>
<p>But above all what “The Punisher” is cynical about is the use of force: This is a series where a man who was asked to senselessly kill by his government goes rogue and ends up hunting down members of that same government — because they made him kill people. The show is wary of guns, wary of blind patriotism, wary of unquestioned service; it sides only and always with veterans. (The affection that military veterans have for the character of the Punisher is a <a href="http://taskandpurpose.com/bone-deep-relationship-punisher-military/" type="external">long-documented one</a>. The character was originally a veteran of the Vietnam War when introduced in 1974; in the <a href="http://variety.com/2017/tv/global/netflix-australia-1202612682/" type="external">Netflix</a> series, he’s a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.) Bernthal’s Frank Castle seems to have wrapped himself in these forces because he doesn’t trust anyone else to have the power to wield them — and at the same time, because he is so broken by his own tragedy, he is a protagonist who commits violence while understanding how that violence creates trauma. It makes for a charged, destabilizing dynamic, and one that Bernthal inhabits with skillful aplomb.</p>
<p>It comes through in the way a few of these scenes are directed, too. In one episode, a dark room is literally lit up with gunfire. In a midseason episode, an entire action sequence is portrayed as if it is a first-person shooter video game — an unnervingly brilliant construction for anyone familiar with that medium. It implicates the audience almost against our will, putting us in the position of the soldier in the field from the comfort of our Netflix-watching couch. The thread of Micro watching the other characters draws the viewer into the story, too; we are watching for clues just as he is. With the emphasis on surveillance, domestic terrorism, and homeland security, “The Punisher” is strikingly relevant — quite possibly the most relevant Marvel show, at least from a national security standpoint.</p>
<p>In all, “The Punisher” is not just satisfying but surprising — an interpretation of Netflix and Marvel’s tried-and-true partnership that offers more depth and challenges to the audience than even the gritty world of “Marvel’s Jessica Jones.” Free from superpowers and superheroes, the Marvel universe is more forgiving — and more interesting. Of course, the slightly cartoony Marvel Cinematic Universe is still a world where people named Carson Wolf show up and act as if they are not obviously villains. But “The Punisher’s” place in it is a welcome morass of thorny questions and unresolvable answers. At least in this part of the television landscape, there is room for another antihero.</p> | false | 1 | marvel netflix shows successful follow cookiecutter format individual representative marginalized group burdened blessed extraordinary ability 13episode season becomes bildungsroman superhero flashbacks context course inescapable threads tying matt murdock blind man jessica jones rape survivor luke cage black man times subgenre marvel shows faltered straying format whether thats season 2 daredevil illconceived iron fist ensemble series defenders first marvels punisher seems like another misstep television landscape large another overwhelmingly gray brutally violent show centered dysfunctional antihero superfluous within superhero genre even punisher transcends appears completely always still violent show saturated tortured masculinity opening credits array semiautomatic weapons float air arrange skullshaped logo punisher thanks jon berthals seamless performance nonsuperpowered vigilante frank castle showrunner steve lightfoots sharp conscious storytelling punisher approaches high points marvels jessica jones introducing damaged deadly character telling story one piece unjust whole despite first impressions frank castle fact160a marginalized figure veteran difficult imagine better casting bernthal communicates fluently impassive silences convincing terribly violent especially gentle still takes show minutes throatclearing find sweet spot first episode punisher might well ticking checklist antihero tropes handles emotions slamming sledgehammer wall hours frequently haunted memories wife children become irritating presences wife especially discernible character traits beyond warm soft probably clean broods constantly nearoperatic range pages book behind steering wheel staten island ferry frank castle broods much singlemindedly want offer eggs incubate outside frank show starts offering audience storylines dont feel piece vigilante narrative theres dinah madani amber rose revah suit homeland security hyperconscious fact persianamerican woman shes asset liability theres veterans support group led franks friend curtis jason r moore veterans different backgrounds struggle make sense world reintegrating early sign welcome complications come curtis says castle favor frank dont wallowing asshole theres cocky hacker micro ebon mossbachrach starts hunting frank spotting one many surveillance cameras posted around city without fully realizing franks unitmates micro dinah frank trying understand happened one tour duty series missions revealed franks unit pushed commit war crimes veterans become better bigger characters dinah makes connections homeland security network guilt corruption behind senseless violence slowly brought light dinah micro intriguing characters dinah premise micro execution dinah created tv show micro based comics far supporting characters marvel shows go exceed expectations mossbachrach particular girls viewers remember marnies tiresome husband desi brings astonishing life character otherwise classically comicbook villain like frank micro faked death unlike frank though family still alive micro watches obsessively cameras microphones hes placed house frank figures starts use micros perpetual watching manipulate shows lieberman house one day seemingly accident insinuate micros former life frank missing wife kids micros wife kids missing husband father go unnoticed one strangely compelling things punisher deeply messed observing transition comicbook page liveaction twisted character dynamics carries shows relationship violence every episode punctuated set piece stunning violence visually striking often case action sequences viscerally affecting action scenes grown accustomed like car accident sedan flips air lands heavily weapons drawn menacingly high stakes card game take new brutality punisher pays uncomfortably close attention sound bones snapping smear blood sledgehammer intimacy getting close enough someone kill brand violence especially well punishing brutal scrappy painful set pieces offer nothing balletic glorious act beating crap someone cynical times pretty despairing punisher cynical use force series man asked senselessly kill government goes rogue ends hunting members government made kill people show wary guns wary blind patriotism wary unquestioned service sides always veterans affection military veterans character punisher longdocumented one character originally veteran vietnam war introduced 1974 netflix series hes veteran wars iraq afghanistan bernthals frank castle seems wrapped forces doesnt trust anyone else power wield time broken tragedy protagonist commits violence understanding violence creates trauma makes charged destabilizing dynamic one bernthal inhabits skillful aplomb comes way scenes directed one episode dark room literally lit gunfire midseason episode entire action sequence portrayed firstperson shooter video game unnervingly brilliant construction anyone familiar medium implicates audience almost putting us position soldier field comfort netflixwatching couch thread micro watching characters draws viewer story watching clues emphasis surveillance domestic terrorism homeland security punisher strikingly relevant quite possibly relevant marvel show least national security standpoint punisher satisfying surprising interpretation netflix marvels triedandtrue partnership offers depth challenges audience even gritty world marvels jessica jones free superpowers superheroes marvel universe forgiving interesting course slightly cartoony marvel cinematic universe still world people named carson wolf show act obviously villains punishers place welcome morass thorny questions unresolvable answers least part television landscape room another antihero | 727 |
<p>No small part of the extraordinary success of the pro–“gay marriage” movement has been its ability to sell the idea that this really is No Big Deal. Same-sex-attracted men and women, the claim goes, simply want what other people want — stable, loving relationships, in which responsibility is assumed for those for whom we care. When the state recognizes that, all will be well, calm will prevail, and we can all get on with our lives.</p>
<p>It’s a culturally powerful argument, especially when wrapped in the mantle of the classic civil-rights movement, and the polling numbers suggest that a lot of people who couldn’t have imagined “same-sex marriage” even five years ago have been persuaded. Yet the notion that agitations would stop when “gay marriage” was legalized from sea to shining sea never made a lot of sense, not least because that assurance abstracted the “gay marriage” argument from its deeper context, which was, is, and always will be the sexual revolution and its fierce, Jacobin determination to bend, break, and then grind into the dust the proponents of a biblically based sexual ethics, a natural-law-based sexual ethics, or both.</p>
<p>In the realm of the law, this means that the proponents of “gay marriage” (and the proponents of the sexual revolution more broadly construed) are like sharks: They have to keep moving forward (as they understand forward progress) to survive. Thus the shrewder advocates of “same-sex marriage” are already looking for another case to bring into the federal judicial shooting gallery, a case that will put “gay marriage” on a firmer constitutional footing than the conceptual and jurisprudential Jell-O of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges — a stronger foundation that will give LGBT advocates a chance to get “sexual orientation” explicitly identified as the equivalent of race, and thus subject to “strict scrutiny,” for purposes of civil-rights law. Meanwhile, the more advanced skirmishers in this war against traditional moral norms are already exploring the possibilities of gaining legal sanction for polygamy. A campaign to defend adult incest (and “consensual” sex with children) cannot be far over the horizon.</p>
<p>And then there’s the culture-war side of post-Obergefell America. The more measured proponents of “same-sex marriage” assured the rest of us that, once their just cause was vindicated, the culture wars would abate. Here the civil-rights analogy was abused again. Just as Americans had built the most racially tolerant and inclusive society in history after Brown v. Board of Education and the 1964 Civil Rights Act, so would we, post–“gay marriage,” proceed without much further ado to the enjoyment of a non-judgmental society in which difference was celebrated and sexual “bigotry” was tossed into the same trashcan of history as the nonsensical racial theory that shaped the&#160;Dred Scott decision. Everyone would get along with everyone else, and harsh rhetoric (like the oceans, in the imagination of presidential candidate Barack Obama) would begin to recede.</p>
<p>Tell that to Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap., the archbishop of Philadelphia.</p>
<p>In early July, a private Catholic school located in the archdiocese, Waldron Mercy Academy, decided not to renew a teacher’s contract: a not-abnormal occurrence. The teacher was the school’s director of religious education and had been living in a “same-sex marriage” for some time, a fact that was, it seems, widely known. After one family complained about this manifestly incongruous situation, the school’s principal and board of directors decided not to renew the teacher’s contract; they were supported in that judgment by the religious community that sponsors the school. The Archdiocese of Philadelphia was not involved in the decision, but Archbishop Chaput, as chief custodian of Catholic orthodoxy in the diocese given to his care, offered a brief statement of support for the school’s decision.</p>
<p>Then came the deluge.</p>
<p>It consisted in part of vile e-mail. One “correspondent” advised the mild-mannered Capuchin archbishop (whom he described as a “CHILD MOLESTING SACK OF SH*T”) to “GO F**K YOURSELF,” adding the eschatological note that he hoped Chaput would “ROT IN HELL.”</p>
<p>This is the peace that was supposed to follow a live-and-let-live adjudication of the “same-sex marriage” question?</p>
<p>Michael Newall, a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, was less vulgar but no less angry and equally mindless. Waving the bloody shirt of sexual abuse, as if this had anything to do with what had happened at Waldron Mercy Academy, he accused the archbishop of “hypocrisy” (a term he evidently understands in an Alice in Wonderland sort of way) before dismissing Chaput as a “relic” who stands in poor contrast to the embracing, affirming Pope Francis — although, Newall went on to write, the pope is “far from perfect on the subject” of “LGBT acceptance” because even he “still opposes gay marriage itself.”</p>
<p>Mr. Newall buttressed his calumnies of both the archbishop and the pope by adverting to his “12 years in Catholic schools and another four at a Catholic college,” although he declined to identify his almae matres — which may be a relief to the schools in question.</p>
<p>Some may consider me a suspect witness in the case of Archbishop Chaput, who has been a close friend for decades. But I fear no conviction on the charge of special pleading when I say that Chaput has been a stalwart, courageous, and unflinching reformer of the Church in the three dioceses he has served, where he has made clear that, as John Paul II said to the U.S. cardinals in 2002, “there is no room” in the clergy “for those who would abuse the young”; that he is widely respected by his peers in the American hierarchy as one of the best bishops of his generation; and that he has saved the Archdiocese of Philadelphia from utter financial — and thus evangelical — catastrophe by dint of performing wonders since his arrival in Philadelphia in 2011. No other bishop envies him the job he took on then; more than one American bishop believes that he is the only one of their number who could have pulled it off in Philadelphia, in terms of both the Church’s public credibility and the stabilization of its finances.</p>
<p>But now this good, decent, compassionate, and holy man — a bishop who truly knows “the smell of the sheep,” in Pope Francis’s formula — is the target of vicious attacks privately and wicked canards publicly. Why? Because he believes that the Catholic Church has a better answer to the human longing for happiness than the false promises of the sexual revolution in a society-without-aberrant-behavior — the New Normal. Because he thinks that Catholic institutions and those who work in them should embody the truths about life and love that the Catholic Church professes on the basis of both revelation and reason. Because he understands that, when the state demands that we believe something that we know is not true, all sorts of bad consequences for democracy follow.</p>
<p>The recent assault on Archbishop Chaput is a taste of what awaits many others. The useful idiots who insist that, if the bishops of the United States would just retreat from the culture wars, all would be well, are manifesting their ignorance of the requirements of pastoral leadership while unwittingly confessing to a degree of political stupidity that is staggering. Obergefell has let loose demons, and their name is Legion. Those demons should be fought with compassion, critical intelligence, and blunt honesty about the Church’s own failings. They should be fought with hearts open to the possibility of conversion on the part of even the most besotted Church-bashers. And they should be fought in full recognition that we all live by the Divine Mercy.</p>
<p>But they must be fought. Both the Church’s evangelical witness and the future of the American democratic experiment depend on it.</p>
<p>— George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.</p> | false | 1 | small part extraordinary success progay marriage movement ability sell idea really big deal samesexattracted men women claim goes simply want people want stable loving relationships responsibility assumed care state recognizes well calm prevail get lives culturally powerful argument especially wrapped mantle classic civilrights movement polling numbers suggest lot people couldnt imagined samesex marriage even five years ago persuaded yet notion agitations would stop gay marriage legalized sea shining sea never made lot sense least assurance abstracted gay marriage argument deeper context always sexual revolution fierce jacobin determination bend break grind dust proponents biblically based sexual ethics naturallawbased sexual ethics realm law means proponents gay marriage proponents sexual revolution broadly construed like sharks keep moving forward understand forward progress survive thus shrewder advocates samesex marriage already looking another case bring federal judicial shooting gallery case put gay marriage firmer constitutional footing conceptual jurisprudential jello justice anthony kennedys majority opinion obergefell v hodges stronger foundation give lgbt advocates chance get sexual orientation explicitly identified equivalent race thus subject strict scrutiny purposes civilrights law meanwhile advanced skirmishers war traditional moral norms already exploring possibilities gaining legal sanction polygamy campaign defend adult incest consensual sex children far horizon theres culturewar side postobergefell america measured proponents samesex marriage assured rest us cause vindicated culture wars would abate civilrights analogy abused americans built racially tolerant inclusive society history brown v board education 1964 civil rights act would postgay marriage proceed without much ado enjoyment nonjudgmental society difference celebrated sexual bigotry tossed trashcan history nonsensical racial theory shaped the160dred scott decision everyone would get along everyone else harsh rhetoric like oceans imagination presidential candidate barack obama would begin recede tell archbishop charles j chaput ofm cap archbishop philadelphia early july private catholic school located archdiocese waldron mercy academy decided renew teachers contract notabnormal occurrence teacher schools director religious education living samesex marriage time fact seems widely known one family complained manifestly incongruous situation schools principal board directors decided renew teachers contract supported judgment religious community sponsors school archdiocese philadelphia involved decision archbishop chaput chief custodian catholic orthodoxy diocese given care offered brief statement support schools decision came deluge consisted part vile email one correspondent advised mildmannered capuchin archbishop described child molesting sack sht go fk adding eschatological note hoped chaput would rot hell peace supposed follow liveandletlive adjudication samesex marriage question michael newall columnist philadelphia inquirer less vulgar less angry equally mindless waving bloody shirt sexual abuse anything happened waldron mercy academy accused archbishop hypocrisy term evidently understands alice wonderland sort way dismissing chaput relic stands poor contrast embracing affirming pope francis although newall went write pope far perfect subject lgbt acceptance even still opposes gay marriage mr newall buttressed calumnies archbishop pope adverting 12 years catholic schools another four catholic college although declined identify almae matres may relief schools question may consider suspect witness case archbishop chaput close friend decades fear conviction charge special pleading say chaput stalwart courageous unflinching reformer church three dioceses served made clear john paul ii said us cardinals 2002 room clergy would abuse young widely respected peers american hierarchy one best bishops generation saved archdiocese philadelphia utter financial thus evangelical catastrophe dint performing wonders since arrival philadelphia 2011 bishop envies job took one american bishop believes one number could pulled philadelphia terms churchs public credibility stabilization finances good decent compassionate holy man bishop truly knows smell sheep pope franciss formula target vicious attacks privately wicked canards publicly believes catholic church better answer human longing happiness false promises sexual revolution societywithoutaberrantbehavior new normal thinks catholic institutions work embody truths life love catholic church professes basis revelation reason understands state demands believe something know true sorts bad consequences democracy follow recent assault archbishop chaput taste awaits many others useful idiots insist bishops united states would retreat culture wars would well manifesting ignorance requirements pastoral leadership unwittingly confessing degree political stupidity staggering obergefell let loose demons name legion demons fought compassion critical intelligence blunt honesty churchs failings fought hearts open possibility conversion part even besotted churchbashers fought full recognition live divine mercy must fought churchs evangelical witness future american democratic experiment depend george weigel distinguished senior fellow washingtons ethics public policy center holds william e simon chair catholic studies | 695 |
<p />
<p>"Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few." Bernard Shaw's concerns aside, some claim that participation in elections is the epitome of democratic practice. The latest parliamentary elections in Egypt is an exception where "election by the incompetent many is substituted by an appointment-like election." In Egypt, elections are typically a foregone conclusion and the ballot boxes do not yield surprises. Previous elections were rife with reported fraud. The votes were marred with rampant irregularities, and tainted with violations. In order to finagle with the results, the regime resort to rigging and meddling through: the disqualification of opposition candidates, carousel balloting, shutting polling stations, vote buying, and thugs intimidating voters. These practices invariably usher in a house with an unshakable majority for the ruling party. Despite the great length of creativity that the regime goes to, in order to sideline its opponents, a veneer of pluralism was usually preserved. Some opposition was always tolerated, as long as it did not impede the ruling party from having a comfortable control of the parliament.</p>
<p>In a country hitherto bereft of a true democratic transition, the outcome of the latest elections is shocking even by Egypt's dismal standards. The ruling party will dominate exclusively without any semblance of competition. The sweeping victory of the party, and the withdrawal of the others before the runoffs, is a blatant indication that Egypt is regressing to a one-party-rule. This comes at a time where the regime's commitment to monopolize power far outweighs any one else's commitment to promote democracy. As the favorable international environment has faded, there was no attempt to keep appearances, before the international community, with a facade of competition.</p>
<p>Even if some are taken aback by surprise, the tactics, adopted by the regime before the elections, were a clear indication of what was about to transpire. To tighten state control, the regime attempted to censor any communication of controversial content. For instance, the telecommunications regulator imposed restrictions on mobile text messages. The regulations stipulated that cell phone providers get a clearance before sending mass SMS messages to their users. This step stifled the opposition's ability to mobilize supporters. It also stripped them of a tool that enabled them to sidestep the restrictions they are exposed to while communicating with their constituency.</p>
<p>To further tighten its grip on the media, the regime extended censorship to broadcasters. The Minister of Information cancelled licenses of firms providing television satellite uplinks. Thus, satellite television channels were required to get official clearance before reporting live from anywhere in Egypt. The government also authorized a shut down of several private television channels on grounds of violation of broadcast license. A famous talk show that probe into sensitive corners of political and social life was discontinued. This was complemented by intimidation of journalists. A famous dissident editor, Ibrahim Eissa who is known for his satirical columns, was sacked from his position. Eissa was a biting critic of the president, and refused to toe the government line. This was meant to make an example of him for transgressing unwritten rules and crossing red lines. The regime also restricted the ability of political parties to advertise their campaigns. All these measures were meant to mute vocal anti government criticism.</p>
<p>To create the image of real competition, the calls for boycott had to be circumvented. Despite emphatic official assertions that the elections will proceed according to well established laws and constitutional precepts, the opposition has been mulling a boycott of the elections. With the lack of guarantees for integrity, participation ultimately supplied the regime with the trappings of a legitimate democracy and gave credence to the myth of political reforms. Therefore, some pondered staying away in order to unmask sham elections. The opposition, however, was divided on the merits of taking part in elections. The critics argued that boycotting would deprive the opposition of the opportunity for interaction with voters and allows the ruling party a full rein over political life. While, by participating, the opposition can expose electoral transgressions.</p>
<p>As some of the opposition entertained participation, the regime tried to tame the participants. The ruling party tapped its allies within opposition parties. These parties decided to ingratiate themselves with the regime to secure some seats in the parliament. A tacit deal with the regime would allow these parties a comeback that they would not otherwise be able to achieve, on their own, in the campaign trail. Thus, the regime can replace the Muslim Brotherhood members, a thorn in their side, with other malleable members from these parties. The regime also brought in a constitutional ban on religion based parties, and put obstacles in the registration of their candidates. Moreover, they imposed a ban on brandishing the political slogans of the Muslim Brotherhood, with the warning that any infringements would warrant immediate action.</p>
<p>The regime also tinkered with the constitution to obviate judicial oversight. Instead, a feebly staffed appointed electoral commission was to run the poll. There were petitions to allow international monitors to observe the parliamentary elections. Egypt rebuffed these calls as an affront to sovereignty that would enable foreigners to interfere in internal affairs. This stance, however, precluded any type of monitoring even by domestic civil society. The commission gave credentials to a small percentage of civil society groups. The proxies of the candidates were denied entry to the polling stations as well.</p>
<p>All these practices lead observers to foresee circumscribed elections. The aftermath of the elections confirmed these speculations. For what it portends for the country, the outcome of the elections sounds like an obituary for any aspirations for democratic transformation. This is a serious setback to democracy, and will lead to a couple of dire consequences:</p>
<p>First, this outcome allows the ruling party to promote its candidate for presidential elections without obstacles. Egypt is on the cusp of a profound change at the twilight of the Mubarak era. The country is swirling with the debate on whether Mubarak is laying the ground work for his son. Mubarak's delicate state of health catapulted these questions to the headlines. The question seems apt on who wields power after Mubarak. This parliamentary elections was the first episode in a series that would lead to answer that question. It is considered a prelude to the presidential elections expected to take place in the coming year. The parliament plays an essential part in vetting presidential candidates. A candidate is required to secure at least 250 signatures from the lower and upper houses and municipal councils. Thus, solid control of the parliament will make it easier to block independent challengers.</p>
<p>Second, the credibility of any future elections is irreparably impaired. Elections in Egypt usually witness meager turnout. Citizens usually watch from the sidelines and accept the preordained outcome. The majority has grown inured to having no say in the course of events, and they are left to follow attentively as the predetermined outcome unfolds. The outcome of this elections reconfirms that the regime has no desire to take the national will into consideration.</p> | false | 1 | democracy substitutes election incompetent many appointment corrupt bernard shaws concerns aside claim participation elections epitome democratic practice latest parliamentary elections egypt exception election incompetent many substituted appointmentlike election egypt elections typically foregone conclusion ballot boxes yield surprises previous elections rife reported fraud votes marred rampant irregularities tainted violations order finagle results regime resort rigging meddling disqualification opposition candidates carousel balloting shutting polling stations vote buying thugs intimidating voters practices invariably usher house unshakable majority ruling party despite great length creativity regime goes order sideline opponents veneer pluralism usually preserved opposition always tolerated long impede ruling party comfortable control parliament country hitherto bereft true democratic transition outcome latest elections shocking even egypts dismal standards ruling party dominate exclusively without semblance competition sweeping victory party withdrawal others runoffs blatant indication egypt regressing onepartyrule comes time regimes commitment monopolize power far outweighs one elses commitment promote democracy favorable international environment faded attempt keep appearances international community facade competition even taken aback surprise tactics adopted regime elections clear indication transpire tighten state control regime attempted censor communication controversial content instance telecommunications regulator imposed restrictions mobile text messages regulations stipulated cell phone providers get clearance sending mass sms messages users step stifled oppositions ability mobilize supporters also stripped tool enabled sidestep restrictions exposed communicating constituency tighten grip media regime extended censorship broadcasters minister information cancelled licenses firms providing television satellite uplinks thus satellite television channels required get official clearance reporting live anywhere egypt government also authorized shut several private television channels grounds violation broadcast license famous talk show probe sensitive corners political social life discontinued complemented intimidation journalists famous dissident editor ibrahim eissa known satirical columns sacked position eissa biting critic president refused toe government line meant make example transgressing unwritten rules crossing red lines regime also restricted ability political parties advertise campaigns measures meant mute vocal anti government criticism create image real competition calls boycott circumvented despite emphatic official assertions elections proceed according well established laws constitutional precepts opposition mulling boycott elections lack guarantees integrity participation ultimately supplied regime trappings legitimate democracy gave credence myth political reforms therefore pondered staying away order unmask sham elections opposition however divided merits taking part elections critics argued boycotting would deprive opposition opportunity interaction voters allows ruling party full rein political life participating opposition expose electoral transgressions opposition entertained participation regime tried tame participants ruling party tapped allies within opposition parties parties decided ingratiate regime secure seats parliament tacit deal regime would allow parties comeback would otherwise able achieve campaign trail thus regime replace muslim brotherhood members thorn side malleable members parties regime also brought constitutional ban religion based parties put obstacles registration candidates moreover imposed ban brandishing political slogans muslim brotherhood warning infringements would warrant immediate action regime also tinkered constitution obviate judicial oversight instead feebly staffed appointed electoral commission run poll petitions allow international monitors observe parliamentary elections egypt rebuffed calls affront sovereignty would enable foreigners interfere internal affairs stance however precluded type monitoring even domestic civil society commission gave credentials small percentage civil society groups proxies candidates denied entry polling stations well practices lead observers foresee circumscribed elections aftermath elections confirmed speculations portends country outcome elections sounds like obituary aspirations democratic transformation serious setback democracy lead couple dire consequences first outcome allows ruling party promote candidate presidential elections without obstacles egypt cusp profound change twilight mubarak era country swirling debate whether mubarak laying ground work son mubaraks delicate state health catapulted questions headlines question seems apt wields power mubarak parliamentary elections first episode series would lead answer question considered prelude presidential elections expected take place coming year parliament plays essential part vetting presidential candidates candidate required secure least 250 signatures lower upper houses municipal councils thus solid control parliament make easier block independent challengers second credibility future elections irreparably impaired elections egypt usually witness meager turnout citizens usually watch sidelines accept preordained outcome majority grown inured say course events left follow attentively predetermined outcome unfolds outcome elections reconfirms regime desire take national consideration | 658 |
<p><a href="" type="internal">The Faith Angle Forum</a>&#160;is a semi-annual conference which brings together a select group of 20 nationally respected journalists with 3-5 distinguished scholars on areas of religion, politics &amp; public life.</p>
<p>“Re-Imagining Religion in a Secular Age”</p>
<p>South Beach Miami, Florida</p>
<p>Speaker:</p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">Dr. James K.A. Smith</a>, Professor of Philosophy, Calvin College</p>
<p><a href="http://eppc.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/01064050/1-Monday-14-2016-Re-imagining-Religion-in-a-Secular-Age-Dr.-James-K.A.-Smith.mp3" type="external">Presentation audio</a>&#160;|&#160; <a href="http://eppc.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/01064050/1-Monday-14-2016-Re-imagining-Religion-in-a-Secular-Age-Q-and-A.mp3" type="external">Q &amp; A audio part 1</a> | <a href="http://eppc.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/01064050/1-Monday-14-2016-Re-imagining-Religion-in-a-Secular-Age-Q-and-A-part-2.mp3" type="external">Q &amp; A audio part 2</a></p>
<p>List of participants found <a href="#unique-identifier" type="external">here</a>.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>Michael Cromartie, Moderator</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE: In introducing our speaker, I would simply say that Jamie Smith is one of the most important philosophers you may never have heard of, but after this morning you will.</p>
<p>He is the author of numerous theological and philosophical books.&#160; His most recent book, for those of you who know the work of Charles Taylor, the Canadian philosopher, Jamie’s written a book called “How Not to Be Secular,” and the subtitle is “Reading Charles Taylor.”</p>
<p>Charles Taylor has a book, it’s like 900 pages, called “The Secular Age,” and Jamie, for the rest of us who didn’t have the time to get to the 800 or 900-page book by Taylor, has written a 100-page summary of what you need to know about Charles Taylor, and taught a course at Calvin College on Taylor, and it became this book.</p>
<p>He has a new book coming out in April, called “You Are What You Love:&#160; The Spiritual Power of Habit.”</p>
<p>Jamie is a Professor of Philosophy at Calvin College, and as I said, the author of many books, which are listed in the bio.&#160; He did his Ph.D. in Philosophy at Villanova University, and we are delighted to have Jamie Smith to begin our conversation on “Re-imagining Religion in a Secular Age.”</p>
<p>Jamie, thank you, for joining us.</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Thank you.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; I’ve never had anyone applaud after my introduction.&#160; That must have been have been a really great introduction.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Dr. James K.A. “Jamie” Smith, Calvin College</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH: I’m trying to think of having something so interesting to say that I have to say “this is off the record.”&#160; I can’t imagine what that would be.&#160; I sort of started my adult life as a preacher, so I’m struggling to sit and talk.&#160; I usually stand, and roam, and talk.&#160; So we’ll see how this goes.&#160;I brought an outline with me, just to help.&#160; This is very, sort of didactic, but just to give us a framework for a conversation, and something for you to doodle on.</p>
<p>The question I want to think about with you this morning — thank you again for having me, this is just a fantastic pleasure and opportunity and honor — and I want to think with you about what it means to say that “we live in a secular society.”&#160; And I think that is a much more amorphous term than we sometimes realize.&#160;Is it a description?&#160; Is it a prescription?&#160; What exactly is being claimed?&#160; What are the implications of that for a shared common life in the public square?&#160;And also, what are the implications of that for understanding religion and spirituality?&#160; So I think my goal this morning, is in a way, to kind of unpack some of the ambiguity that I think is folded into the terms “secularism, secularity, and the secular,” with two goals in mind.&#160; I would like to spend a few moments thinking about how that might change the way we think about religion in public life, and politics.</p>
<p>So part of it is, I want to think about the sort of social, political, public square implications, of how we think about the secular.&#160; And one of the things I want to try to tease out there is why I think not all critiques of secularism are equal.&#160; That is, I think sometimes people get nervous when people are critical of secularism, as if that’s sort of a stalking horse for theocracy.&#160; And I just want to introduce some nuance where I think, no, there could be other things going on in that.</p>
<p>I want to introduce why we might want to distinguish “secularism” from “secularity.” That’ll be part of the project.&#160; Then the second half, I want to try to unpack why I think this changes how we think about religion and spirituality.&#160; And why, in particular, I think Charles Taylor gives us a frame to do that.&#160;And I might even hazard some prognostications about the future of religion in light of this.&#160; So let me start with, what I’m going to call, “taxonomy of the secular.”&#160; And here, again, I’m very much sort of leaning, floating in the wake of Charles Taylor’s really groundbreaking work.</p>
<p>Let’s distinguish three different ways of understanding the term “secular.”&#160; The first, we’ll just call “secular one,” is in a way, the most ancient use of the word, in which the secular simply refers to the temporal, the earthly, the worldly; this sort of the mundane material existence of creaturely temporal life.&#160; So for someone like St. Augustine, the 5th-Century North African Bishop, the “saeculum” is actually an era.&#160;It’s a time; it’s not a space.&#160; The “saeculum” is this time in which we find ourselves between the Fall and the Second Coming for Augustine.&#160; And that means it’s a contested place, you sort of expect difference, but it also just refers to kind of mundane earthly life.&#160; So priests and nuns are sacred; butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers are secular; it’s that sort of earthly level of existence.</p>
<p>That meaning, however, shifts significantly, and is changed, starting in the late Middle Ages, and then into the Protestant Reformation and afterwards.&#160; And that’s partly because as Taylor points out, what happened, is you got a little bit of a kind of two-tiered version of Christianity that came out of that in the West.&#160; So if you have the sacred secular distinction and then there are sort of sacred vocations, and then there are secular things.&#160; Somebody’s got to have kids, right?&#160;So those, sort of secular endeavors it’s like okay somebody’s got to do that, but it’s a bit of a second-class citizenship within the spiritual realm.&#160; And so that creates this two-tiered picture that actually creates all kinds of problems and tensions.&#160; And what happens in the reform movements of the Late Middle Ages and early Protestant Reformation is actually the obliteration and leveling of that distinction.</p>
<p>So that for someone like John Calvin — one of the real upshots of the Reformation is this sanctification of ordinary life. So someone like John Calvin comes along and says, “Wait, wait, wait, the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker also have sacred vocations;” that their work, their mundane, temporal ‘secular work’ is also carried out in the face of God.&#160;So you level this distinction.&#160; And now, actually everything is sacred in some sense.&#160; You lose the two-tiered picture of the universe and picture of the spiritual.&#160; So what does that do to the word “secular”?&#160; This is the second piece that I think becomes significant.</p>
<p>In modernity, the “secular” now is going to — and this is the way I think we usually use the term “secular” now — is going to refer to a sort of nonsectarian, neutral, unbiased, areligious space or standpoint. So the secular is this perspective or space that is neutral, unbiased, ‘objective,’ and usually likes to congratulate itself on being “capital R” Rational.</p>
<p>So if we want spaces and perspectives that are secular, what you’re going to have to rule out is all the contingencies of traditions, authorities, beliefs, and perhaps, above all, religion.&#160; You carve out this space.&#160; Now, it’s that notion of the secular that is then assumed by the secularization thesis, which we’ll talk about for a moment, and secularism, as a kind of, what would you say, a prescriptive dogmatic project for the public square.</p>
<p>So in the secularization thesis, secularization theory was a very sort of confident expectation that as Western societies, to start, experienced modernization and technological advancement, all of the supposedly divisive forces of religious belief and participation would wither away, and modernity’s disenchantment would gradually sort of gobble up the rest of society.&#160;And you expect the end of religion on the basis of the secularization thesis, because everybody is going to become objective, rational, scientific, and so on.&#160; So secularization theory is always “secular two” theory.&#160; Does that make sense in this taxonomy?</p>
<p>Furthermore, the kind of prescriptive program for the public square that also lays out an agenda, an expectation that our political spaces, our public spaces, our university spaces will be purified of contingency, particularity, and the irrationality of religious belief, that also is a “secular two” meaning of the word secular.&#160; So secularism, if we could call that agenda secularism, that also is a “secular two” understanding of the secular.&#160;So what’s interesting I think, the time in which we find ourselves, now, is the secularization thesis has fallen on hard times.&#160; It is not an account that has survived well, mostly because it has not accounted for the phenomena that we keep bumping into, both in the West and globally.&#160; So the secularization thesis, which was informed by this pre-theoretical commitment to this dogmatic secularism, has not been illuminating in a way you could challenge it, just because it doesn’t work very well as an explanatory account.</p>
<p>And I was saying to someone last night — I was at NYU last week, and they have, just as a little taste of how the world did not go the way 1970 sociologists expected, is at New York University, at the heart of Washington Square, is a university-built and funded center called “The Center for Global Spirituality.” The New York University realizes that there needed to be room for robust, particular expressions and discussion of religion at the heart of the University.&#160; That is not something you ever would have guessed if you were an ardent devotee of the secularization thesis 30 years ago.</p>
<p>So there’s interesting phenomena that are exceptions that sort of push back on the secularization paradigm.&#160; I would also say that this notion of the neutral, unbiased, objective, ‘purely rational’ actor/perceiver has also come under ardent philosophical critique over the last generation, from a number of different places, and not even from just religiously motivated criticisms.&#160; In this sense actually, it’s very interesting to note the overlap between feminist critiques of philosophy and what we call epistemology, philosophies of knowledge, and religious interests in that respect.&#160;So feminist critiques of that ideal of rationality come along and they say, “You know it’s striking.&#160; It seems like this allegedly neutral, unbiased, objective, rational actor in the so-called ‘naked public square,’ looks a lot like a German white guy.</p>
<p>So there’s this suspicion that “wait a second, you’re kind of, you’re selling us a line on this neutrality.”&#160; And so they undercut the myth of neutrality that really underwrote the secularist project.&#160;And so this is where you get interesting alliances between — surprisingly, you can see interesting alliances between, say, religious critics of secularism and feminists and even queer theory criticisms of the same, and George Marsden’s work, “The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship,” actually draws out that parallel.&#160; So I have undoubtedly bitten off way more than we can chew in 40 minutes.&#160; So I’m going to mush on here a little bit.</p>
<p>Dr. Jamie Smith</p>
<p>This leads to the introduction by Charles Taylor of a third way of understanding the secular.&#160; And this is what we want to sort of hone in on this morning.&#160; For Taylor, a society is secular not because it is unreligious or areligious or antireligious.&#160; A society is secular insofar as religious belief or belief in God is understood to be one option among others.</p>
<p>So the society is secular insofar as religious belief and, actually any belief, is contestable.&#160;&#160; That’s what has changed.&#160; Is that nobody can take their belief system to be axiomatic or the default for a society.&#160; So everyone has the sense of the contestability of belief.</p>
<p>Taylor often formulates the question this way.&#160; He says — and Taylor is very careful to say that he’s telling a story about the West.&#160; He thinks there’s a lot more work to be done, to think about how this works outside of ‘the West.’</p>
<p>But his question is something like this:&#160; “Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God, in say 1500; and yet in the year 2000, in some sectors of Western society, it is virtually impossible to believe in God?”&#160; So how is it that in 1500, something like atheism is pretty much intellectually unimaginable; whereas, if you live in probably most of the sorts of spheres that we run in this room, it’s virtually impossible to imagine believing in God in the year 2000.</p>
<p>Now, 500 years is a fairly long time.&#160; And there’s a long story to be told about how that shift — it’s a story of what Taylor calls the “disenchantment of the world.”&#160; This sense that the world becomes this sort of “encased imannent frame” as he calls it.</p>
<p>We could talk about the history because I do think it’s interesting and important, but what I’m interested in then, is the way he defines this “third sense of the secular” as a “move from a society where a belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, pretty unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others.”</p>
<p>In this sense we live in a secular age, by the way, even if religious participation remains very high because one of the things that is one of the challenges for the secularization thesis — and it was sort of trotted out in the ’60s-’70s — is it seemed to work fantastically for England, but it didn’t make much sense of the United States.&#160; Where you had a lot of the same galloping forces of technological advancement, consumer capitalism, and so on, and you could still have this really high religious participation.</p>
<p>For Taylor, the United States is still a deeply secular society, but not because it is unreligious, but because it is still a society in which everybody realizes that their beliefs are contested and contestable.&#160; That’s what it would mean to live in a “secular” age.&#160; It’s not a prediction about the withering of religion. It’s less a matter of whether people are going to believe and it’s more, how they are going to believe and that’s the change.&#160; He’ll draw on Peter Berger’s notion of plausibility conditions:&#160; “What, has changed here” he would say “is not necessarily beliefs, but the conditions of belief.”&#160; This sort of the water that people swim in while they believe.</p>
<p>So let’s then, with that taxonomy in mind, and if you just keep in mind that this third sense of the secular is mostly what we’re interested in, let me try to unpack in five simple thesis, what really amounts to a non-secularist account of the secular.&#160;&#160; I should say Taylor himself is Roman Catholic, is actually fairly forthright, especially in follow-up work about his own religious motivations, but it’s not in a sort of agenda axe-to-grind sense, but in the sense that he’s being honest about the commitments that he brings to this perspective. And in a way, I sometimes read Taylor as the most sophisticated of Christian apologists’ working today, only in the sense that he’s being very honest about that and he’s floating this thesis, which says “Try this on, as an account, as a theory, to make sense of the world that we live in, and my bet” Taylor would say “is that this works better to account for the complexity of our secular age.”&#160; So we’ll see if that works.</p>
<p>Here’s the five themes that I want to try to summarize.&#160; So first of all, I do think it’s important that secularity here is not synonymous with unbelief.&#160; So a secular age is not an unbelieving age, it’s certainly not an atheistic age.&#160; It is an age in which you experience the contestability of belief, for both believers and “unbelievers” would be part of the implication of that.&#160;Secondly, and this one’s a little trickier. &#160;&#160;“The secular” as Taylor puts it “is an accomplishment.&#160; It’s not what’s merely left over when we subtract transcendence.”</p>
<p>So let me try to make sense of this.&#160; Most secularization theorists tell, what Taylor calls a “subtraction story.”&#160; It’s a kind of whiggish, confident, progressivist story, which goes something like this:&#160; In times past, many, many years ago, human beings had these fantastical beliefs in gods and God.&#160; They believed in an enchanted universe, they believed that there were spirits active, they believed that there was more than the natural and that even the natural in a sense was suspended in and sort of nourished by the supernatural.</p>
<p>So they lived in this fantastical world.&#160;&#160; But along came Immanuel Kant, or pick Isaac Newton, or some sort of turning point of enlightenment.&#160; And what happens at this turning point of enlightenment is humanity wakes up to the disenchantment of the world that the natural is all that there is.&#160; And eventually what happens, is we realize that this supernatural addendum that we kept adding to our account of the cosmos, is extraneous and unnecessary and we sort of settle for the natural.&#160; We sort of wake up and settle for a naturalized world without any reference to God, or the gods, or eternity, or transcendence.</p>
<p>And what’s left over after you subtract all of those fantastical religious beliefs, is cold hard rationality, the sort of courage to look in the face of how hard things are.&#160; There’s often a rational maturation story that goes with this.&#160; We sort of grow up and we see that this is the way things really are.</p>
<p>And now what’s left after you subtract all that, is ‘the secular.’&#160; Taylor says that’s not the way it happened and that wouldn’t even be possible.&#160; That’s not sufficient, because actually what humanity had to come up with is this third piece.</p>
<p>It wasn’t enough to just subtract the religious for lack of a better term, and be left with the natural, the secular.&#160; What also had to happen for this to become plausible, for something like non-theism to be a live option, a belief, is you had to come up with alternative accounts of significance and meaning.&#160; And this to me, is the most interesting; although, in some ways the most intricate part of the account.</p>
<p>That when we are left in this immanent frame, this kind of enclosed universe in which we find ourselves, the only way that will really be a viable space to inhabit meaningfully is, if we can generate an alternative account of significance.&#160; And Taylor calls this alternative account, “exclusive humanism.”&#160; What he means is that in modernity we found ways to generate projects, meaning, pursuits, even longings that could plausibly be satisfied without reference to transcendence, and without reference to eternity.</p>
<p>And Taylor, the Christian, stands back and looks at this accomplishment and says, “Bravo that was unthinkable in the West for millennia.”&#160; He doesn’t believe it, but he stands back and he says, “This is an incredible cultural accomplishment to have actually managed to come up with a vision of human significance that didn’t appeal to transcendence or eternity” that’s what he means by “exclusive humanism.”</p>
<p>I don’t know how far into the philosophical weeds we want to go, but I’ll just plant this little flag.&#160; There is a long story to be told here, about how much that vision of exclusive humanism in the long march of history — Taylor is kind of a Hegelian — actually depends on having come through the religions of the West and sort of formalizing them or secularizing them, so that you couldn’t have the modern moral order, if people hadn’t first learned that they were supposed to love their neighbors. And now, what you do is you get an alternative account of what it is to love your neighbor.&#160; I think there’s an interesting conversation to be had there.&#160; Maybe we’ll have it.</p>
<p>The fourth theme:&#160; This immanent frame in which we find ourselves in a secular age, is not cross-pressured.&#160; Everybody who believes anything, which by the way is everybody, finds themselves in this immanent frame, but not happily confident and oblivious to the challenges, right?&#160; In other words, the immanent frame, no matter what you believe, is a cross-pressured space.&#160; I’ve tried to give you this little lame diagram.&#160; This is what I can do in MS Word’s “Draw” function.</p>
<p>Because for Taylor, what happens is — this is really significant for everybody, so let me give you an example:&#160; If I’m a “believer” in some sort of traditional religious perspective, in a secular age, in this immanent frame, I’m going to experience the cross-pressures, as the cross-pressures of disenchantment, and I’m going to have to even if I believe, I’m going to have to realize that I believe in the face of neighbors, and colleagues, and friends who believe something radically different, which means that doubt is the natural accompaniment of faith, in a secular age.</p>
<p>Now, one could argue that in fact, has always been the case, which is why we have Psalms of Lament, for example, as people struggling to say “How could this be?”&#160; But it’s intensified in modernity.&#160;And I do think this is one of the things, when I’m out speaking to religious communities, Christian communities in particular, one of the things I’m emphasizing is: Folks, you need to give, especially young people, permission to name and articulate these doubts because it is just the water in which they swim.&#160; They live in this cross-pressured space. And unfortunately too many religious communities still feel like doubt is the enemy of faith, rather than a companion.&#160; And I think there’s just a different way to think about that, but notice the cross-pressure works on everyone.&#160; So if the believer is tempted to doubt, the unbeliever can also be tempted to believe. There remains a kind of haunting and pressure that is the sort of pull and lure, and haunting of that eternity and transcendence.&#160; So nobody gets to encase themselves or ensconce themselves, or insulate themselves from cross-pressure.&#160; I think I’m going to come back to that in a moment.</p>
<p>So finally, fifth:&#160; What that means then is secularity does not end belief.&#160; Instead, the cross-pressures generate a nova effect, that’s what I’m going for with the exploding sort of arrow lines, here.&#160; Taylor calls this “nova effect of many modes of believing otherwise.”&#160; So a secular age is not an age of unbelief, it’s actually this really messy, complicated, crazy world in which we find ourselves, in which because people are experiencing all of these multiple cross-pressures it’s almost like the pressure builds up and it explodes, and what you get are all kinds of ways of believing. And you get sort of “Eat, Pray, Love” ways of believing.&#160; You get in many ways, a sort of Oprah-significance. There are all kinds of different ways of people pursuing now, a spiritual life.&#160; This is where I think something like Taylor’s account is the great alternative to the sort of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris’ of the world.&#160; It’s just a much more nuanced account of what we’ll see.</p>
<p>Dr. Jamie Smith</p>
<p>So what will be some of the implications of this?&#160; Let me, first of all say just a little bit about the public square, and then religion.&#160;I do think one of the important public or political upshots of Taylor’s analysis, is that the problem with doctrinaire secularism that is secular two-ism as a kind of agenda for the public square, is that it is not sufficiently secular three.&#160; In other words, secularism as a doctrinaire agenda, I would say does not own up to the contestability of its own beliefs.&#160; So it’s insufficiently secular three.&#160;In that sense, what this analysis does is it levels the playing field.&#160; To deploy one of Taylor’s distinctions, what you could say is “Dogmatic secularism offers a spin on the world rather than a take on the world.”&#160; He has this interesting sort of — I like this — he says “Spin is sort of closed off.&#160; Spin are the stories we tell, in which we try to protect ourselves and stick our heads in the sand about the cross-pressure.”</p>
<p>So you can have — I’ve given you a little quadrant here — you can have religious versions of spin that basically try to protect themselves, and insulate themselves from the cross pressure of the alternatives and that gets you various fundamentalisms.&#160; But you can also have secularist two versions of spin, which equally ensconce themselves and insulate themselves from the cross pressure of haunting.</p>
<p>In contrast, what interested Taylor, and what interests me, is this space of people not offering spins, but takes on the world. A religious take on the world that is open and honest enough to realize — when I talk to my students — I teach at a Christian liberal arts college.&#160; And I think part of teaching them well, is getting them to actually feel the power of an ultimately reductionistic, evolutionary, psychological account of being human.</p>
<p>Do you know what I mean?&#160; Like it’s an unbelievably powerful story that gives you all kinds of insights into human nature.&#160; And if you don’t take that seriously, you will never understand why people find that persuasive, not just as a kind of penultimate account, but as an ultimate account.</p>
<p>So offering takes on the world, is preferable to these kinds of spin doctors of either the religious or secularist version.&#160; So what that means, and this is where I wonder if it would change how we hear some of what’s said in the public sphere.&#160; One could be a trenchant critic of secular two-ism, if that makes sense.&#160; I need these little tricks here.&#160; And yet have a deeper appreciation for secularity, than the secularist.&#160; In other words, you could offer a trenchant critique of secularism, as a dogmatic agenda and actually have a better appreciation for secularity, as the contestability of belief in the contemporary world.&#160; That’s part of what I’m trying to work on.</p>
<p>So how would we feel this difference?&#160; What would change?&#160; Now, I do think this is where our societal sequestration you could say, is evident. In other words, you know Charles Murray’s book Coming Apart which is diagnosing the sort of almost, like the postal codes of inequality right, the zip code&#160; localization of two totally different populations, which I think we’re feeling this year.&#160; I think that there is a religious version of that as well, which is, people who basically sequester themselves in a kind of secularist zip code, so to speak, who literally don’t know what to do with people who believe.&#160; They’re like “What?”&#160; Not from any of you, but some religion reporting is a little bit like, “We went to Mars and we found these people in Colorado Springs and you won’t believe what they think.” It has a little bit of that sort of dynamic to it.&#160; And it’s partly because they inhabit, they’re coming from this tight plausibility structure in which they don’t bump into people who think otherwise.</p>
<p>Now, there is totally a religious version on the other side of that right?&#160; The similar sequestration into these insulated enclaves.&#160; And I think that’s part of what we need to work through.&#160; And I don’t know exactly how that maps onto the presidential campaign this year, but I’m sure it has something to do with it.</p>
<p>One other theme, to just highlight here before I move on, is it’s important that this account of secularity three — there’s no turning back the clock. Do you know what I mean?&#160; You can’t un-know what you know now right?&#160; And it’s as simple as this:&#160; Once you’ve lived on a street where people don’t believe what you believe, you can’t go back into the world, in which everybody was homogenous and monolithic again, right?</p>
<p>So this is another reason why some critiques of secularism are not at all tainted with some nostalgia for a world, in which we were all “Christians in America” or something like that right?&#160; The mythology of that, the best accounts appreciate that there’s no turning back the clock.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; Some are trying.</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Some are trying, indeed.&#160; Absolutely.&#160; And that’s why someone like me, who — I would be a critic of “secular two”-ism — would be equally a critic of some of this nostalgic just resentment of secularity.&#160; So there’s a lot of nuance that we need in this account.</p>
<p>Finally, let me say a bit about why I think this might change how we see religion in our secular age.&#160; The first is, it should make us newly interested in all the enduring phenomena of spiritual longing.&#160; That if you just bought a secularization thesis, probably mostly what you’re going to do is look for things that confirm that thesis, which ultimately, I think are a pretty small sample of say U.S. society.</p>
<p>And in fact, if you zoom out to this wider sense of the secular, what becomes interesting is how many enduring expressions of longing for something ultimate, something divine, something other, some sense of fullness that can’t be reduced to the natural, are all over the place.&#160; That’s this nova effect, this explosion of ways of believing.</p>
<p>I won’t bore you with too much of this, but you can see this in popular culture, in all kinds of different ways.&#160; For me, one of the places to hear this is in music.&#160; By the way, there’s a great British novelist, Julian Barnes, who I still think does not get enough attention over here.</p>
<p>So he wrote “Sense of an Ending.”&#160; It was probably his most recent book that got some awards over on this side of the pond.&#160; A really interesting character, in that, he’s kind of like the quintessential person, of a generation who grew up in England with no religious formation whatsoever.&#160; He’s very honest about that. But in 2008, he wrote a memoir called “Nothing to Be Frightened Of,” which is a very, very powerful — and in many ways I think, was a kind of oblique response to Richard Dawkins.&#160; And at one point in “Nothing to Be Frightened Of,” Julian Barnes says this:&#160; “I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him.”</p>
<p>It’s fascinating, right?&#160; That, to me, encapsulates so much of our age: “I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him.”</p>
<p>He’s a great devotee of the arts, both music and painting.&#160; And what’s interesting is, when you follow him, to say Venice or Northern Italy, and he’s going to see all the paintings that he loves, and he’s haunted because at one point he pauses and he has to ask the question: “What must it be like if you think this is true?” And he realizes that in fact, the world view that generated all of these works of art, that he so treasures is one that is almost completely implausible to his contemporaries.&#160; So it’s an interesting dynamic.&#160; “I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him.”</p>
<p>And I think if you start looking for those sorts of phenomenon in our culture — one that came to mind, is a song by The Postal Service.&#160; I’m dating myself by this.&#160; Listen to these lyrics from a song called “Clark Gable”</p>
<p>“I want so badly to believe that</p>
<p>There is truth and love is real</p>
<p>And I want life in every word</p>
<p>To the extent that it’s absurd</p>
<p>And I’m looking through the glass</p>
<p>Where the light bends at the cracks</p>
<p>And I’m screaming at the top of my lungs</p>
<p>Pretending the echoes belong to someone</p>
<p>Someone I used to know”</p>
<p>We become interested in the sort of hauntings of a longing for something lost, right?&#160; That’s all over the culture.&#160; Steve Jobs.&#160; Steve Jobs to me, is a fascinating icon of someone who does not fit the secularization thesis, right?&#160; Because you’ve got somebody at the heart of Silicon Valley, the heart of innovation culture, the heart of tech, the heart of design.&#160; And what’s interesting, is he’s cross-pressured.&#160; In Isaacson’s biography, there’s this fantastic episode right near the end of his life, such a tragic early death, and the hubris that in a way led to that.&#160; And yet, listen to this one encounter.</p>
<p>“One sunny afternoon when he wasn’t feeling very well, Jobs sat in the garden behind his house and reflected on death.&#160; He talked about his experiences in India almost four decades earlier, his study of Buddhism and his views on reincarnation and spiritual transcendence.”</p>
<p>“‘About 50/50, I’m believing in God,’ he said.”</p>
<p>So here’s the thing.&#160; If you’re in that sort of resentment mode, you’re like, “Oh see?”&#160; What it used to be, everybody believed in God.&#160; Whereas, I’m thinking you’re in the middle of the Bay Area, and somebody tells you they’re 50/50 on believing in God?&#160; I’m like, I’ll take that bet.&#160; That’s a pretty interesting phenomenon.&#160; You know he’s in the shadow of Stanford.&#160; He’s 50/50 in believing in God.&#160; I’ll take it.</p>
<p>“He said, ‘For most of my life, I felt that there must be more to our existence than meets the eye.'”</p>
<p>“He admitted that as he faced death, he might be over estimating the odds out of a desire to believe in an afterlife.”</p>
<p>“‘I’d like to think that something survives after you die,’ he said, ‘it’s strange to think that you accumulate all this experience, and maybe a little wisdom and it just goes away.&#160; So I really want to believe that something survives, that maybe your consciousness endures.'”</p>
<p>“He fell silent for a very long time.”</p>
<p>“‘But on the other hand, perhaps it’s like an on/off switch:&#160; click, and you’re gone.'”</p>
<p>“Then he paused again, and he smiled slightly.”</p>
<p>“‘Maybe that’s why I never liked to put on/off switches on Apple devices.'”</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>To me that’s a great story of this kind of cross-pressured person, who is haunted and pulled by sort of competing longings and worries.</p>
<p>Dr. Jamie Smith</p>
<p>The last example I’ll give, because we don’t have time to talk about Terrence Malick, but I’m so excited about “Knight of Cups,” I have to tell you.&#160; But there’s an HBO documentary called “God is the Bigger Elvis.”&#160; Has anybody seen this?&#160; It’s like 30 minutes long.&#160; It’s available free on YouTube now.</p>
<p>It follows the story of a Hollywood starlet from the ’50s and early ’60s named Dolores Hart.&#160; Dolores Hart is kind of living the Hollywood dream, she’s starring alongside leading men, like well, Elvis, Warren Beatty.&#160; So you have some sense of the world that she was living in, right?</p>
<p>And she was engaged to be married.&#160; But she went home to New York one weekend, and she ended up on a retreat at a convent, at an abbey in Connecticut.&#160; And it sort of like lodged this burr in her side that she couldn’t quite shake. She went back to Hollywood and pursuing her career, but what she couldn’t shake was the sense of this call back to Regina Laudis Abbey in Connecticut.&#160; And in fact, eventually she left her career, she broke her engagement, and if I recall correctly, she wears her wedding dress into her induction into the Abbey, where she is now Mother Prioress and has lived since, I think, 1963.</p>
<p>And by the way, the man that she was engaged to comes to see her every single week.&#160; And they hold hands, and kiss on the cheek, and love each other dearly.&#160; I mean it’s a very, very powerful story.</p>
<p>Aside from the story itself, here’s what interests me.&#160; This was on HBO.&#160; Why would this be on HBO?&#160; This is, like Game of Thrones channel, right?</p>
<p>And by the way the story, the portrayal is I would say, a mix of respectful awe and puzzled mesmerization.&#160; Why would somebody give up freedom, to literally cloister themselves by celibacy and poverty?&#160; And yet this is broadcast on HBO, which to me, again, is an interesting phenomenon, of I wonder if people are already feeling the cracks in libertinism. I’m starting to think, is there already a kind of openness to imagining the world otherwise?</p>
<p>Terrence Malick did “Tree of Life.”&#160; He’s got a new film coming out with Christian Bale, called “Knight of Cups.”&#160; He’s actually a philosopher by training.&#160; He translated some of the work of Martin Heidegger, but has gone on to be this really remarkable filmmaker who, Tree of Life people have said, is a kind of replay of Augustine’s Confessions. And his latest work, Knight of Cups is just suffused with very oblique and yet pretty overpowering religious themes.</p>
<p>And he’s well respected by critics and audiences alike.&#160; To me it’s just another example that the secular age is much more like the films of Terrence Malick than the stories told by Sam Harris.&#160; There’s an alternative way to deal with where we find ourselves.</p>
<p>So what might this mean for religion, going forward?&#160; Let me hazard a few hypotheses.</p>
<p>First, I do think that Taylor helps us make sense of the spiritual, but not religious, phenomenon in new ways.&#160; It’s intriguing. You hardly ever run into somebody who says, “I’m an ardent naturalist. I’m completely devoted to calculating rationality and I have no interest in transcendence, whatsoever.”</p>
<p>No.&#160; You meet people who say “I’m spiritual, but I’m not religious,” which means they can’t quite shake this something more-ness that is calling, though admittedly, they probably kind of want in on their own terms.&#160; Often the religion that has been rejected by the “spiritual, but not religious” — well, it’s sometimes a religion well-lost you know?&#160; It was some sort of civic deism or whatever it might be. And in some ways, I actually think the “spiritual, but not religious” could be a better portal to people coming into more authentic, thick religious communities, than the sort of vague, civil religion that we had for so many years.</p>
<p>What I’m interested in is thinking about the future of religion. In a way Protestantism has to grapple with the fact that it kind of generated the “spiritual, but not religious” phenomenon.&#160; I say this as a Protestant for this reason:&#160; One of the things that happens in Protestantism is a kind of desacramentalization, a disenchantment of a sort of enchanted world and worship.</p>
<p>And so what happens in Protestantism, is in some ways Christianity gets reduced to a message that is preached and absorbed by intellectual receptacles.&#160; And that’s not entirely fair, but it’s sort of how the snowball gets going.&#160; And so the version of religion that comes out of that is a very sort of intellectualist’s — I know it’ll sound odd to say that Evangelicals are intellectuals for some of you, but it is.&#160; There’s a rendition of Christianity here that is primarily a set of beliefs that you affirm.&#160; And what you get is what Taylor calls a “dynamic of ex-carnation.”&#160; So incarnation is a dynamic of things becoming embodied.&#160; “Ex-carnation” is Christianity becomes increasingly abstracted and disembodied.&#160; That sort of has a Frankensteinish effect in the sense that it kind of unleashes consequences that were never, ever intended, but are nevertheless unwillingly realized.&#160; So I think that’s part of what we need to realize, which however now creates — and by the way, the spirituality of the “spiritual, but not religious” also tends to be kind of “message-ish.”</p>
<p>For me, part of, the Ted talks are part of the secular spirituality.&#160; Do you know what I mean?&#160; Clearly, they are the sermons of a secular age right?&#160; They’re the place we go looking for the “message” to sort of improve ourselves, or whatever it might be. The “sermon-ization” of Christianity and Protestantism, kind of set us up for that.&#160; And again, I’m going to say I’m a Protestant.&#160; This is internal critique all right?</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; It’s okay.</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Okay, good.&#160; I don’t want Michael mad at me.</p>
<p>MICAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; We do internal critiques at the Faith Angle Forum.</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Good. Now, that said, here’s the other pieces I’m interested in:</p>
<p>At the end of “A Secular Age,” this humongous book, of which 3 pages, are kind of a contemporary analysis.&#160; Taylor says this:&#160; He closes, this is page 770, “This heavy concentration of the atmosphere of imamnence” this kind of claustrophobia, of living in the immanent frame “will intensify a sense of living in a wasteland for subsequent generations, and many young people will begin to explore beyond the boundaries.”</p>
<p>So his one little bit of prognostication is that yes, we find ourselves in the immanent frame.&#160; People inhabit the world as if that were the case, but what’s going to happen, is that world is going to start sort of closing in, and it’s going to be experienced as a kind of arid wasteland.</p>
<p>The allusion to T.S. Eliot is not accidental here.</p>
<p>And so he says, “What you’re going to see happen” — his hypothesis — “is that you’re actually going to see people who find the paucity of that, is so thin, that in fact, they start actually looking beyond the boundaries of the immanent frame again.”&#160; There becomes a new openness.</p>
<p>The pressures of transcendence that can’t be explained away are going to generate new, sort of third ways of spiritual expression and longing.&#160; They’ll be more open to “takes” on the world, and in fact, they might, like God is the Bigger Elvis start to wonder if renunciation isn’t actually the way to freedom.&#160; So there’s a sort of mutual haunting of the secular.</p>
<p>I’ve also been thinking over the last couple of months, for reasons that will be obvious, I wonder if another possibility, however on the other side of that arid wasteland, is a desire for the strong man, so that if in that world, the state is all that’s left , if everybody shifts and in a way foists so many expectations on the state, which I do think is part of a feature of a certain kind of modern moral order, then what happens, is there will be people who are not experiencing the benefits of that, who are experiencing the wasteland in very tangible ways, who will also be looking for a savior who pulls the levers of the state for them.</p>
<p>I don’t know.&#160; This is my armchair quarterbacking of Republican Presidential —</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; You can leave that alone.</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Yes.&#160; It’s just I wonder, because part of what we could talk about too, is how is secularization felt differently in different classes?&#160; How is secularization felt in the working class, as opposed to elite educated classes?</p>
<p>Finally then, I do think you can imagine two futures for — and here, I’ll just speak to Christianity, since that’s the tradition that I know — but I would love to learn more, and hear how other traditions think about this.&#160; As I look at Protestant/Evangelicalism for example, you can see two possibilities:&#160; One is a trajectory where you see Evangelical’s basically racing to become mainline liberal Protestants.&#160; Not that there’s anything wrong with that.&#160; Well, I do think there’s something wrong with that, but in other words what happens, is they basically — what they’ll say, is “We want to kind of tack to what we think is plausible within the modern moral order.”</p>
<p>So you get a certain new rendition of Protestant/Evangelicalism that looks to me, like a very predictable trajectory.&#160; And we are also seeing, is actually what you might almost call a “Catholic retrieval of incarnational sacramental spirituality.” In other words, what you’ll also see, is Christian communities and Evangelical communities who are reacting to that disenchantment and desacramentalization of the world.&#160; The ex-carnation.&#160; And are therefore drawn to more incarnate-embodied, communal, sacramental expressions of the faith.</p>
<p>I’m seeing that amongst young people in the college I teach at.&#160; By the way, that doesn’t all mean that they swim the Tiber, cross the Bosphorus, and go to the Orthodox Church, the Roman Catholic Church, though that’s also happening.&#160; Some just sort of make their way to Canterbury. What I would say as somebody who is out and about, what’s most fascinating to me, is how much nondenominational Evangelical congregations are waking up to this dynamic and retrieving very ancient ways of being Christian, that in a way aren’t indigenous to their piety, but in fact they realize they need some sort of anchor like that.&#160; I think that’s part of the story, to look at.</p>
<p>And my hunch, is also, that on the other side of that wasteland, as Taylor puts it, the sort of do-it-yourself spirituality of the “spiritual, but religious,” — when it fails, if it fails, it often fails in the face of crisis.&#160; And it seems to me, that only if religious communities actually have a truly robust alternative, not just the kind of “Jesusified version of spiritual but not religious” would it really be seen as a welcome alternative to that. And so part of what I’m watching for, is how much these kind of robust, almost kind of ancient retrievals of faith become live options again, even though we’re within a “secular society.”&#160; I’ll stop there.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; Thank you, JAMIE SMITH.&#160; Thank you very much.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; Well, I’ve already got eight people on the list.&#160; Thank you.&#160; Will Saletan.</p>
<p>Will Saletan, Slate</p>
<p>WILL SALETAN, Slate:&#160; Okay.&#160; Jamie, that was wonderful.&#160; This critical theory from the right, we need more of it.&#160; I love the Charles Taylor.&#160; I love what you’ve added to it.</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Thank you.</p>
<p>WILL SALETAN:&#160; We need more of it in the public square.&#160; I have a couple of questions for you, and you can answer whichever one you like.&#160; So one is about our past:</p>
<p>At one point, you said, that getting to the point we are at in this modern secular morality or secularism, the morality that we have in the secular age, depended on having come through the religions of the West. &#160;And your example was the Golden Rule, I think.</p>
<p>Now, my question to you is:&#160; Do you think that was contingent?&#160; That if we hadn’t, that there was something about this particular religion that we came through that allowed us to develop these foundations of our secular morality, or is there something in the nature of things, and the nature of society, people, for example, that we couldn’t have achieved what we’ve achieved if we hadn’t had a religion that happens to promote that idea or be based on that idea, so that the religion of the time is just another product, as is our time, of that foundation?</p>
<p>Another way of asking it or this is possibly related:&#160; You said at one point, “In 1500, atheism was intellectually unimaginable.”&#160; And I wonder, whether that’s actually true.&#160; I wonder, whether there’s a little bit of the German white guy problem with that.&#160; That perhaps there was more atheism than we can see, through the historical records that we tend to look at, and maybe what was there, was more of a golden rule inside, or outside of religion.</p>
<p>The other question I have for you is about, whether where we are, is progress.&#160; You said at one point that “You can’t turn back secularity-three.&#160; That once you’ve lived on a street where other people don’t believe what you believe, you can’t go back to a world where everybody was homogenous and monolithic.”</p>
<p>Isn’t that a good empirical way to test, to verify, and therefore, to define growing up?&#160; That inability to go back intellectually means that where we are is wiser than where we were.</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160;&#160; Great questions — so, on the first one:</p>
<p>One of the things, that I think I’ve so appreciated about Taylor’s account is that he actually takes contingency really seriously.&#160; So it’s not just a straight progress narrative. And he does.&#160; He thinks.&#160; He talks about what he calls a “zigzag approach to history.”&#160; It’s like things could have gone differently.</p>
<p>And on this particular point, all he means to show is that if you trace the particular contingent genealogy of how you get to this sort of modern, moral order of universal concern, it comes through a remarkable detribalization of concern that happens in the universalism of Christianity: that every other is my neighbor.&#160; And that unleashes a moral imagination that couldn’t have been thought before, and therefore we become indebted to that in some way.</p>
<p>Now, he’s not saying it reduces to it, but he does take that seriously.&#160; Now, I don’t know, is there evidence that there were more atheists before, because Taylor’s account is, it’s actually a deeply communitarian account.&#160; So what he says is “Look in this enchanted world.&#160; The self was also characterized by porosity.” Like you had the sense that the self is porous and is open to forces, and the community is a community of these porous selves, who all hang together in a very communitarian collective way, and therefore, the unbeliever is in a way a threat to the whole, but also the individual unbeliever, because she or he inhabits this enchanted world, doesn’t think, they just have the safe re-doubt to say, “Well, I don’t think this thing out there exists.”</p>
<p>To refuse this thing, would have been to open your-self up and expose your-self to these other things; the demonic or whatever it might be.&#160; And so that’s why there’s this kind of package that makes atheistic belief rather implausible.</p>
<p>What do you think?&#160; Does that help? I don’t know.&#160; That’s his account at least.&#160; I know that he’s been pushed back on some.&#160; It would be very hard to find data, right, given — well, first of all, history is told by winners, but it’s very hard.</p>
<p>It’s at least a plausible account, because then, what he thinks happens in modernity, is now once you sort of disenchant the world, the self is what he calls “buffered.”&#160;&#160; So the self, you get this kind of Cartesian self, this you know Cartesian ego, the Kantian ego, who’s this sort of self-sufficient entity, who in a way, now, has the option of whether or not to believe x, y, or z, but is really sort of insulated and buffered from any threats that come with that.</p>
<p>I find it a plausible way to make sense of some dynamics, but I’m not a historian, so I don’t want to over claim that.&#160; On the last, the growing up dynamic, is that — so what you’re saying, is could we see the arrival at secular-three as a maturation?&#160; Is that the idea?</p>
<p>WILL SALETAN:&#160; Yeah, but it’s because we can’t go back.</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Yes.</p>
<p>WILL SALETAN:&#160; That’s an empirical statement.</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Yes.</p>
<p>WILL SALETAN:&#160; Okay.</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; And I think, I just want to be careful about this because secular-two, also has a growing up narrative.&#160; Secular-two-ism says “I grew up when I stopped believing.”&#160; Now, I just you know sort of see the way things are rationally.</p>
<p>Secular-three would have a grown up narrative, which is “We’ve grown up and realized that actually belief is contestable, and others believe differently than I do.” I think what’s interesting is, for someone working internal to a religious tradition like Christianity, I would also say that is kind of waking up to a reality that Christianity should affirm, which is what Augustine says, “We find ourselves in the saeculum.&#160; So don’t pretend otherwise.” Don’t immunize the eschaton, as Voegelin would put it.&#160; Don’t confuse where you are. Realize where you are, and expect that kind of thing.</p>
<p>WILL SALETAN:&#160; But if I hear you correctly, so the story that we’ve grown up, doesn’t distinguish secular-two from secular-three, but the phenomenon of “can’t go back” does.&#160; Is that right?</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; And what you think that entails; right?&#160; So in secular-three, you can’t go back to a world in which one belief system is going to be taken to be axiomatic, and the default for a society.&#160; In secular-two, you’ve grown up because you’ve learned to not believe.</p>
<p>First of all, I just don’t believe that.&#160; What that means is you’ve believed something that you get to call rational, objective, neutral, and unbiased; right?&#160; It’s like there’s an Emperor’s Clothes story to be told here about secular-two, whereas secular-three is, we all find ourselves in this space where we are owning up to the fact that we believe something.&#160; We believe something ultimate, but we also realize that we can’t expect that to just be the default axiomatic belief for a shared territory, or something like that.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE Carl Cannon.</p>
<p>Carl Cannon, RealClearPolitics.com</p>
<p>CARL CANNON, RealClearPolitics.com:&#160; Professor, you quoted someone I didn’t get who said, “I don’t believe in God, but I miss him.”</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Julian Barnes.</p>
<p>CARL CANNON:&#160; Julian Barnes?&#160; That reminded me of a similar quote, and I don’t want to be like one of these Washington people, who says, “As I said, on Meet the Press,” quoting myself, but I actually don’t —</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>CARL CANNON:&#160; I don’t know who said this.&#160; Cromartie and I have had a debate over it for several years.&#160; Maybe someone in this room said it.&#160; If you did, please raise your hand, but it was in Key West after a long several hours of drinking, and one of the participants in the drinking and the conversation was Christopher Hitchens, and when he left, someone said, maybe me, we don’t know, that Hitchens philosophy seemed to be “God doesn’t exist and I’m really pissed off at him.”</p>
<p>But in the more serious thing, if you take this period of time from 1500 to 2000, it seems that one explanation, the obvious explanation for it, the secular explanation, if you will, is that there’s been this inextricable discovery of scientific phenomena, mostly, but other truths.&#160; That the source was unknown before, and they were thought to be un-knowable and they were attributed to God.&#160; And what a person, a nonbeliever would say, is “This is sort of a steady — it’s progress, and it’s a steady and inextricable march of history, and that these polls we’re seeing about these millennials, a lot of them are spiritual, but not religious, but that is a trend that we’re never going back.&#160; That this is the march of western progress, or I don’t know if it’s progress, but that’s the way things are going.”</p>
<p>You seem to, without directly taking issue with that, maybe challenge that view.&#160; And I would ask you to explain a little more on that.&#160; This marketplace of ideas thing is kind of fun — you know “We are journalists that’s cool” — but is that just a temporary thing?&#160; And it’s the road to, you know, Europe?</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; So I’m a great fan of air conditioning and indoor plumbing, and without question, there is a certain kind of progress story to be told in modernity, and I don’t think any of this has to discount that.&#160; What’s interesting is if you start asking questions of what counts as progress for humanity, now you’re burying down into what Taylor calls the “basement levels of commitments” about what you think counts as flourishing, for example, and so on.</p>
<p>And I think that’s where things get a little bit more contestable.&#160; I actually — I’ve loved Christopher Hitchens for years, right up until the point that he started talking about religion.&#160; He’s so much better about literature and politics than he is about religion, because then I would say he devolves into spin rather than a take for some reason.</p>
<p>What you can’t tell, is just some sort of simplistic, dichotomous, binary option here, between the religious and scientific progress, since in many ways we know that what unleashed the scientific endeavor itself, were religious communities that were invested in that; both Muslim and Christian, I would say.&#160; And so I don’t think we have to feel tension between those two things.&#160; What I’m contesting is a maturation story that equates maturity with unbelief, disbelief.&#160; “Wake up and smell the disenchantment” kinds of stories, right, and again, this is where I feel like there are just a lot of interesting exceptions to the rule.&#160; I didn’t build it in here, but there’s a fantastic short story by David Foster Wallace that was published posthumously in The New Yorker simply called “All That” in which there is this older adult narrator talking about a younger self, who believes in magic.&#160; And what’s interesting, is he doesn’t look back at his younger self, and discount it.&#160; He says, “I look back and see birthed there, a religious reverence that characterized my whole life,” and that “even atheism is its own form of worship.”</p>
<p>He has this really interesting analysis, where he refuses the maturation story.&#160; And again, what intrigues me is, and it gets published in The New Yorker, right?&#160; Interesting little exception to the rule that you would expect of kind of, trenchant secularization.&#160; Does that help?</p>
<p>CARL CANNON:&#160; Yes.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; Naomi Schaefer Riley.</p>
<p>Naomi Schaefer Riley, New York Post</p>
<p>NAOMI SCHAEFER RILEY, New York Post:&#160; I wanted to ask, I wanted to dig a little deeper into this sequestration question that I’m sure a lot of people are interested in for political reasons.&#160; I guess if we were having this conversation about 10 or 15 years ago, the sequestration would have been a matter of the elites not believing and the people on the ground in fly-over country believing.</p>
<p>I think a lot of the work that has come out in the last decade or so, has suggested that is an incomplete and maybe inaccurate picture of what’s going on in America today.&#160; That is that a lot of the religious belief in the country is now among the middle and upper classes, and it’s the working class and people who are living in poverty who have the least amount of religion in their lives. So I guess what I’m curious about, is how are we to think about the sequestration now?</p>
<p>And the second kind of part to that I’ve been thinking more about is the Peter Berger question.&#160; So if, as he suggested, we are, or we were at some point, a nation of Indians run by the Swedes, if we’re now a nation of Swedes run by the Indians, maybe, does that mean that the elite belief in religion is going to start to trickle back down?</p>
<p>I guess one question is, whether the elites have a sway, whether their churchgoing or more frequent churchgoing habits are going to be able to trickle back down.&#160; And I don’t know whether there is a political answer to all this, but I’m sort of curious about the overall picture here, how we should think about our zip codes these days.</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Yes.&#160; And I would be fascinated just to hear others work on this.&#160; This is very much sort of off the cuff reflections on my part.&#160; I guess I’m not convinced we do know that sort of religious participation seems to be more highly represented in sort of educated elites than we might have expected, and that there has been a kind of secularization of poor and working classes in ways that we might not have guessed.</p>
<p>I don’t know that at all translates into a confidence that those elites who are religiously active, now constitute a majority of the elite, though, right?&#160; That’s not true. So I think you can still safely say — I mean in many ways, it confirms James Hunter’s work — but in this sense that I think people inhabit intellectual milieus and environments that are significantly dominated by one sort of set of beliefs and expectations that make it increasingly difficult for people to imagine the alternative.</p>
<p>I guess maybe, probably I would say one of the most intense examples of that today, is the university; right? So if you think of it, the last bastion of the most confident modernity and secularism-two is, in many ways, still a university.&#160; Now, even though there’s all kinds of exceptions to the rule on the margins of that. There’s still the default unwritten, scripted orthodoxy of the university, is confidently expecting the secularization story.</p>
<p>And insofar as those are still the incubators of then cultural influencers, I guess I don’t see the sample representation of those elites who are practicing religious folk, being significant enough yet, to have sort of cascaded and shaped, what’s happening in Hollywood studios, or newsrooms.&#160; I’ll let you guys tell me about that, but there’s something.</p>
<p>Now, are you asking a demographic question, too, about whether you could imagine us getting to that point?</p>
<p>NAOMI SCHAEFER RILEY:&#160; Well, I guess if religious belief is increasingly being concentrated in these upper classes, even if it’s not yet concentrating in the majority, I mean isn’t that kind of belief then going to have more of an affect that’s going to be characterizing more of the way we practice religion than I think what have in mind?</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH: Yes.&#160; And I would say, too, my hunch though is that let’s say those religious folk, who find themselves in those sectors are also probably well aware of the realities of secular three, and therefore the way they will engage those public conversations and seek to persuade is going to be very different than the kind of slash and burn apologetics that usually happens in other sectors, which have no chance of having any sort of success in shaping cultural or changing the cultural conversation I think.</p>
<p>The one piece I think that I also just don’t know enough about is the real shifts that have taken place in sort of working class and poor religiosity. &#160;And it strikes me that one of the things that has gone away is what we might call, for the lack of a better term, “catechesis.” There’s just a certain failure of catechesis in the churches, and therefore people don’t even feel the tensions that they ought to feel sometimes about that. But again, I admittedly am, as a complete amateur, trying to understand the Trump phenomenon a little bit.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; Paul Edwards, you are next.&#160; One of the reasons we’re doing this session with JAMIE SMITH, by the way, is I have lunch twice a year with eight of your colleagues and we talk about what are the topics that we want to talk about at the next Faith Angle.&#160; And Carl Cannon, after the killings in San Bernardino, wanted to do a session on that, which we’ll do tomorrow morning. But also, Carl reminded us, soon after that I think Naomi — was it The New York Post’s, big headline “Keep God out of It.”&#160; Do you remember that?&#160; Was it yours, or the Daily News?</p>
<p>NAOMI SCHAEFER RILEY:&#160; It was the Daily News.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; It was the Daily News, and Carl made the point, this is a little unusual. I remember, Carl, you said, you knew this newsroom is secular but the idea that you would just do a headline, “Please Don’t Bring God into the Discussion,” was something new, and that’s why we actually came up with this topic.&#160;Paul Edwards.</p>
<p>Paul Edwards, Deseret News</p>
<p>PAUL EDWARDS, Desert News:&#160; Jamie, I’m guessing you’re familiar with the “Benedict Option.”&#160; Does this mean something to you?</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Yes.</p>
<p>PAUL EDWARDS:&#160; And I was wondering how that fits into what you’re thinking about here.&#160; So if you might?&#160; I can talk about it, but maybe you could explain a little bit about the “Benedict Option” that’s being discussed, and how it fits into a particular retreat from secularization.</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Yeah.&#160; So at least we found something I can say off the record.&#160; Only because —</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; You want this off the record?</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; — Rod Dreher is a friend.&#160; Yeah, I think so.&#160; Can we just talk about it, out loud for a sec?</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; Yes.</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; So the “Benedict Option,” how many have heard this phrase?&#160; I’d just be curious.&#160; Oh, wow.&#160; Good, all right.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; Do you want this off the record? He can handle it.</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; All right, fine.&#160; Okay.&#160; On the record I think.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; I want to quote you.</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Yes.&#160; So the “Benedict Option” is a certain response of religious conservatives who are sort of, I would say waking up to the fact that American culture, generally is not going to form them in faith.&#160; Apparently this is a revelation.&#160; And therefore, and by the way, it seems so clearly catalyzed by the Supreme Court gay marriage decision, which to me is one of the reasons why I feel like it’s suspect.</p>
<p>I’m not deciding either way on that.&#160; I’m just saying that there is a, certain reactionariness about it that I find narrow and uninteresting.&#160; And so what they advocate is — it comes of course from the Benedictine tradition of monastic life.&#160; It really is an illusion to the final sentence of Alasdair MacIntyre’s famous work “After Virtue,” in which he says, “We are waiting now for another Benedict to come along and give us a society that actually forms virtue and character,” and so on and so forth.</p>
<p>And so the “Benedict Option,” as I understand it—I do think it’s misunderstood often—is about prioritizing an intentionality within Christian communities, in this case, to be much more intentional about formation and so on, and less confident that they will be able to steer, shape, and probably dominate wider cultural conversation — so it’s actually a refusal of the culture wars as well.&#160; What I just find a bit frustrating about it, is again, the particular reactionary point about marriage that I do think is the live option.&#160; It also comes off as alarmist and despairing in ways that I find completely unhelpful.</p>
<p>After the break, I’m going to give you a copy of the Fall 2013 issue of Comment magazine. I got to interview Charles Taylor a couple years ago, and one of the things that just struck me is that hope is his dominant posture.&#160; And I think that’s really important.&#160; I think if you actually have the long game in perspective here, if you have the long history in perspective — I spend most of my time reading St. Augustine in the 5th Century, and nothing surprises me, like nothing surprises me today, and so I don’t feel, like oh, “my goodness, the sky is falling because the Supreme Court decision,” or something like that.&#160; There’s a different set of expectations about that.</p>
<p>Finally, I would say what Rod is advocating as this new thing that we should be doing, just sounds like what the Church was always supposed to be doing.&#160; It comes off as a little bit like here’s the next great thing, and it turns out it’s only because we’ve failed to do what we were supposed to be doing. Again, Rod’s a friend, and what’s odd for me, is how much he sort of draws on my own work, to sort of articulate this, and yet, I, myself feel a certain distance from it because it comes with a grumpy alarmist despair that I don’t really want to be associated with.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; I’m so delighted that was on the record.&#160; There was nothing controversial.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Well, that will be one book blurb I’m not writing.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; That was very helpful, because I’m giving a talk next month, and I discuss the Benedict Option.&#160; I will now quote you.</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Oh, great.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; To affirm my own point.</p>
<p>Miranda Kennedy, and then to James Hunter.</p>
<p>Miranda Kennedy, NPR</p>
<p>MIRANDA KENNEDY, NPR:&#160; So I was fascinated by your description of having to convince your students of how seductive the, like rationalist Darwinistic version of history is. Did I get that right?</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; So notice, I’m working with a certain student population, so you know I teach at Calvin College.&#160; In many ways, the windows are wide open, you know, we’re sort of engaged, but many of these students, you know a significant percentage of students are coming out of K to 12 Christian education as well, and without being at all reactionary — so in Grand Rapids, Michigan, we sometimes call G-R-usalem, because there’s still pretty thick plausibility structures in the region, where you could get away with it.</p>
<p>So for me, it’s like some days I wish Calvin College was a college at the University of Michigan, so that we could inhabit both of those spaces and feel the cross-pressure a little more intensely.&#160; So in that context, I’m trying to foster an intellectual honesty, where they realize (a) this is saying a lot of true things about beings and human origins, but to also just feel the compelling-ness of this; right, like it’s a very adequate story to explain a lot. And so I want them to feel that precisely so they’re not then sent out living in some sort of oblivious bubble–</p>
<p>MIRANDA KENNEDY:&#160; Right. &#160;Because they haven’t like chosen the Benedict Option themselves, yet; they’re just —</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Exactly.</p>
<p>MIRANDA KENNEDY:&#160; I’m so interested because having grown up with that particular narrative — the one that you have to convince them is seductive — you know, now seeing inside a Christian world, how totally opposite the world views are, I can understand why perhaps we are where we are. You know politically, and all kinds of other divisions, and I wonder if you think about ways that we could break down some of those divisions better in our lives, I mean just inside American culture.</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; So in some ways, it does come down to the how, rather than just the —</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; You discuss that in your book.</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Yeah, right, which is also why it’s kind of called, “How (Not) to be Secular,” with the parenthesis, because I mean I actually think there’s ways in which all of us need to learn how to be secular.&#160; Right?&#160; But then I’m saying, as for Christian communities, religious communities, there are also ways that you want to learn to not be that.&#160; To me, breaking that down is exactly the space I want to live in.</p>
<p>I had a fantastic experience a week ago, tonight.&#160; I was in a conversation in New York, with Kwame Anthony Appiah, is that a name that some of you know? A Ghanaian English philosopher at NYU, an ethicist in the law school, advocate of what he calls, “Cosmopolitanism,” a really significant book that the people were talking about a few years ago, identifies as an atheist. And we had a public conversation about — well, so here’s the thing.&#160; They frame it as a debate about pluralism toleration and the common good between the Christian and the atheist.&#160; I’m not interested in a debate.&#160; I’m much more interested in first of all, showing how much we have in common, and in many ways, trying to deconstruct the caricatures that I think a lot of those folks would have had about Christianity, to say, no, absolutely, here’s why I affirm the goods of toleration, here’s why I affirm pluralism, here’s why I affirm the common good, here’s all the ways that we overlap and share concerns.</p>
<p>And then getting to a point where I could push him, and it was actually, it was a blast.&#160; I loved it, because on the one hand he articulates this vision of this cosmopolitanism, which is a perfect expression of the modern moral order.&#160; And then if you start asking him about the moral sources that would really fund that basically, what he starts talking about is being raised as a Methodist in Ghana.</p>
<p>And the sort of, the intuitions and sort of spiritual inclinations that he absorbed, which by the way is the replaying of the kind of Western story in some ways.&#160; So it was co-sponsored by Christian groups on campus, the secularist group on campus, the humanist society, a Muslim student society, and I think some of the kind of atheist secularists and Christian groups were looking for these fireworks, right, that’s why you bill it as a debate.</p>
<p>We completely disappointed them because we absolutely had a blast, I actually just was completely in awe that I was on the stage with him, and modeled, I hope, a mode of ad hoc collaboration without pretending we didn’t have ultimate differences, and I just feel like there’s a lot of room and hunger for that.&#160; I have for all the stories you might tell about the University, I’ve actually only had mostly great experiences of that kind of thing.&#160; And I do feel like you all steward spaces that could do the same, and are doing the same in some ways.&#160; Does that speak to your –?</p>
<p>MIRANDA KENNEDY:&#160; I guess.&#160; I’m not sure I entirely agree that we are consistently doing it –</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Sure.</p>
<p>MIRANDA KENNEDY:&#160; –but I’m interested that you think that there’s a hunger, because I do think there’s a very strong hunger for debate, like he said.&#160; The people want the clashes. And it’s boring when you hear people who are supposed to be on opposite sides, kind of coming together.</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Yeah.</p>
<p>MIRANDA KENNEDY:&#160; And it’s not necessarily about agreeing.&#160; It’s also just about — I was asking more about hearing one another’s viewpoints, because that I feel —</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Oh.&#160; So you’re not sequestered?&#160; So you actually bump into it.</p>
<p>MIRANDA KENNEDY:&#160; Yeah.&#160; The sequestration happens in so many levels of society —</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH: &#160;Yes.</p>
<p>MIRANDA KENNEDY:&#160; I just for so long did not know what, for instance, like Christian Evangelicals actually believed — in you know, in their hearts, in their minds, at home.&#160; I just had a politicized version of that, that got you know transmuted into the public square.</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Yeah.&#160; Do you remember that Molly Worthen piece a few weeks ago, in the Times on Sunday? About The Veritas Forum and the Augustine Collective, these movements on Ivy League campuses, which I think their goal is to just make sure that the intellectual tradition of Christianity is heard in those elite university spaces. But I agree.&#160; Who was the sociologist who wrote “The Big Sort,” right?&#160; That we keep sifting ourselves out, and to overcome that I think is a huge challenge, yeah.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; Bill Bishop.</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Bill Bishop, yes.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; Quickly, on this point, Paul Edwards?</p>
<p>PAUL EDWARDS:&#160; Just on the Appiah.&#160; I’ve heard him talk about Paul as a cosmopolitan.</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Oh, yeah absolutely.</p>
<p>PAUL EDWARDS:&#160; You know, and so he’s —</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Absolutely, the apostle, Paul.</p>
<p>PAUL EDWARDS:&#160; The apostle Paul, very strong in his thinking, so —</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Yeah.&#160; Galatians 2:&#160; “There is neither Jew nor Greek; neither slave nor free; neither male nor woman,” yeah.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; James Hunter you’re up next.</p>
<p>James Hunter, University of Virginia</p>
<p>JAMES HUNTER, University of Virginia:&#160; Thank you.&#160; Jamie, thank you for a terrific lecture; I want to push back, though, on Taylor.</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Yeah, great.</p>
<p>JAMES HUNTER:&#160; I mean, who is anyone to take on Charles Taylor?&#160; But I think that at certain important points, he needs to be pushed back against.&#160; His strength is as a phenomenologist.</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Yes.</p>
<p>JAMES HUNTER:&#160; In talking about religious experience and religious belief, and the super nova he describes, I think is a fair description of what happens in the late modern world, in the private sphere. In personal experience.&#160; But culture and this is really important here, culture is not reducible to individual belief.</p>
<p>Culture is not the sum total of individual belief.&#160; Culture is a powerful symbolic order, independent of what people believe or don’t believe, and to always imbed it in the powerful institution, and this speaks to Will’s question earlier, about atheists in the 1500s.&#160; Are there more, were there more atheists back in the 1500s than we think?</p>
<p>Well, it’s an interesting empirical question, but at some level, it doesn’t matter because the symbolic order and the dominant institutions back then, were infused with a religious imagery, with religious signifiers, powerful symbols.&#160; There may have been more atheists, but they probably wouldn’t have gathered much, and they weren’t politicized.&#160; And again, there may have been, but probably not much of that.</p>
<p>So in the public sphere, however, the world of finance, say, or medical research, or of political campaigning, whatever, this is not a sphere or a culture of contested — well, certainly it’s contested — but in terms of the mechanics, the logic of running a campaign or of doing medical research, whatever someone’s personal beliefs may be, the frameworks of understanding, the frameworks of action, the rules by which people operate are defined by a technical rationality that is disenchanted, that is secular, and it’s not really, as I say, contested. An airline pilot, who is a Pentecostal snake handler, can hold his or her beliefs, as long as they don’t bring them into the cockpit.</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Yeah, and his snakes.</p>
<p>JAMES HUNTER:&#160; Okay.&#160; There’s a movie about this.</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Snakes on the Plane.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>JAMES HUNTER:&#160; There is a movie about that.</p>
<p>And so the culture of the public sphere, which again, disenchanted, oriented toward a kind of technical, functional rationality, it is totalizing.&#160; It operates within a latent epistemology that is positivist, an ethics that is utilitarian, a teleology that is problem-oriented, but with no serious hyper goods that anyone could agree upon.&#160; And this provides a plausibility structure for a kind of exclusive secularism.</p>
<p>So the question is, given this — I mean again, I think what Taylor describes is accurate insofar as it bears on private life, personal experience, individual belief, and so on.&#160; I don’t think it extends into the symbolic order and institutional realities of the public sphere.&#160; And part of the political dilemma of our global politics and our, even national politics is the pushback against that totalizing secular ethos.&#160; Is that a fair critique of Taylor?&#160; You seem to be an enthusiast of his, and I don’t want to make you a proxy for him, but I would love to hear your views of that.</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; No.&#160; I think you’re on to something.&#160; A couple things come to mind.&#160; One is I mean you want your pilot to work that way, right?&#160; So it seems like there is a certain kind of, I hate the term, but there’s a certain kind of compartmentalization that would be welcome it seems to me, right?&#160; Because I don’t know if I want the dynamics that get the plane up and going, I kind of, I want us to stay within that logic when we’re doing that.</p>
<p>On the other hand, I guess I’ve always thought that Taylor feels the extent to which the wider symbolic universe has been dominated by the disenchantment.&#160; At least I can feel that.&#160; But again, I think he thinks that’s more localized.&#160; I mean you’re interested in the particularly influential sort of elite culture shaping centers, in which this would be much more true to, right?</p>
<p>And I think it’s interesting, when I interviewed Taylor, he says, he started thinking about a secular age in the ’60s when he was at Oxford.&#160; He knew he was already going to write a secular age in the ’60s at Oxford, because it was his experience of the University, in which he found himself in this university, and he says, “Why is what I believe so unbelievable to everybody else that’s around me?”</p>
<p>So I think you could actually grant a lot of the account — and by the way, this would also become a way to assess the degree of assimilation of religious communities to that technical rationality, utilitarianism, right?&#160; That in a way, because we simply play along with the logic of the market, or whatever it might be, we unwittingly get sucked into seeing that as the overall logic that society is a market, or something like that.</p>
<p>And I think that’s right.&#160; We’ve underestimated the extent to which disenchantment — but we all are disenchanted now, in that sense.&#160; It is true.&#160; I think, probably Taylor is best when he’s trying to — sometimes he says what he’s trying to do, is describe what it feels like, right.&#160; And that’s a very individual sort of subjective experience. What does it feel like to believe in this age?&#160; What does it feel like to not believe in this age?&#160; But yeah, no, I welcome the conversation.&#160; I need to think more about that.&#160; That’s great.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; And before we go on the break, Andrew Miller, you’ll take us into the break.</p>
<p>Andrew Miller, The Economist</p>
<p>ANDREW MILLER, The Economist: &#160;Yeah, I just, I enjoyed your talk very much.&#160; And I just thought it was important, I wanted to offer, I guess a defense of secularism.</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Yeah, yeah.</p>
<p>ANDREW MILLER:&#160; And briefly, and or at least a critique of your critique of secularism, because I think although you hurried through it, you kind of lighted things a little bit.&#160; Of course and for the reasons you say, as an account of history, or the end of history, you know, it hasn’t turned out to be very prophetic.&#160; And as an aggressive sort of you know program, you’ll do it, at least possibly as advisory right now, but as a sort of pope, or as a, you know a long term agenda.&#160; I guess a lot of could-have-been secularists would say that on the contrary, the events of the last 20 years have made it all the more urgent as a creed.</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Yeah, no, and this is the conversation we need to have, because what I would say in reply, is I think one of the things we are feeling in this country right now, is actually the effects of a secularization, which has eroded the sorts of institutions that used to actually foster civic camaraderie and life, in ways that we’ve lost.</p>
<p>So for all the sort of you know “religion is a source of evil” kinds of arguments, I just want to meet them with an account of how much religious institutions were responsible for the formation of — well, character habits, dispositions and inclinations that actually also made us better citizens.&#160; And so if secularization entails the erosion of those kinds of institutions, what we will get is the paucity of our civic life, as we’re currently experiencing it.</p>
<p>Now, I would say remember though, even as someone coming from a religious tradition, I can actually be a pretty ardent advocate of secularity three as a healthy realization.&#160; In fact, I’ve been spending a lot of time with British theologian and ethicist, Oliver O’Donovan.&#160; Fascinating work on this history, but at one point he says, “The society which is most Christian, will be most secular because it will actually be the one that is most attentive to how penultimate our reality is, and so it will be least inclined to sort of invest the penultimate with ultimate sort of significance.”</p>
<p>I feel like one of the things that’s happening — Jody Bottum’s work has, I think, diagnosed this, is precisely when you lose the transcendent and eternal, now what has to happen, is everybody has to turn the penultimate into the ultimate. &#160;And so now our political identities, our political allegiances are characterized by a kind of religious fervor, that almost makes it impossible for us to do collaboration in that space.</p>
<p>ANDREW MILLER:&#160; I guess if you’re a secularist, you’d say about this question, it was sort of post-religious morality, you know in the absence of the, you know ghosts of religion and God.&#160; That like the French Revolutionist it’s too early to say, and it’s much too early to say.&#160; You know this moment has only, really existed for a very short space in human history.</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Sure. One last thing though.&#160; This is totally the conversation I want to have for the next five years, because I think what has struck me is in secularistic accounts of morality, they also still tend to imagine morality as primarily a set of beliefs and expectations.&#160; And what’s missing, this is actually the perfect segue to this afternoon.&#160; What I think is missing in secular accounts of morality, is precisely an account of habit.&#160; And in order to talk about habits of disposition, you need communities of character.&#160; This is James Hunter’s book.&#160; Now, maybe the secularist has an account of where those communities are, and what they’re doing, but I feel like we haven’t had that conversation yet. Yeah it’s a great point.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; Okay.&#160; When we come back from the break, Tom, you’re first.</p>
<p>BREAK</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; While we’re waiting for the others to come, I would mention that Jamie’s new book is out next month.&#160; It’s called “You are What You Love.”</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; You’re a good agent.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; We like to promote books here.&#160; And his book on Charles Taylor, again, is called “How (Not) to be Secular.”&#160; But this is coming out next month.</p>
<p>But Tom, you’re up first.</p>
<p>Tom Gjelten, NPR</p>
<p>TOM GJELTEN, NPR: Okay.&#160; So right before the break, Jamie, you categorized yourself as a healthy advocate of “secularization three.”&#160; So when you say you’re an advocate for a certain type of secularity that kind of obligates you to pronounce on issues of public and even political debate, right?</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; I hereby retract that.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>TOM GJELTEN:&#160; So a huge issue is the meaning of religious liberty, and how to interpret the First Amendment, you know, mandating that Congress not establish a religion or limit the exercise thereof.&#160; I was just reading this interview with Charles Taylor, in which he talks about open secularism versus closed secularism, and he says that closed secularism, “instead of being the regime that defends everyone’s freedom of conscience, whether religious or nonreligious, it becomes secularism wary of religion and always ready to set limits to it.&#160; Non-religion becomes the common principle, although you tolerate religion if it stays in its place.”</p>
<p>That sounds very much like what Potter Stewart argued in 1960, saying that if the government takes too strict a view of the separation of Church and State, it actually elevates secularism to the level of a rival religion, and therefore you know neutrality, as far as the role of the government in this issue, is you know more complicated than it might at first appear.&#160; So what implication’s does the fact that we live in this era of contested belief, mean for the neutrality of the State, when it comes to expressions of religion?</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Yeah.&#160; So I’m trying to think of another court decision, but I’m not going to be able to retrieve that on the top of my head.&#160; Taylor, in that same interview, advocates then what he calls an open secularism, right.&#160; So it is a form of disestablishment, but it’s not one that asks people to leave their religious identities at the door of this proverbal naked public square.</p>
<p>You make room for people to bring who they are, in their fullness, into the public square.&#160; And that’s what I’m envisioning.&#160; And the State then, the State’s responsibility is to be fair, not neutral.</p>
<p>Now, that can be a weasel word, obviously, and we’ll fight a lot about what fairness looks like.&#160; But I think it’s the difference between — Jerry and I were talking about Laïcité in France, which is a very, very live option in Quebec, as well, where Taylor’s working from.&#160; What’s interesting is it’s precisely in societies in which religion had such a totalizing institutional expression in the Church, sort of, running things that you also then get the alternative of laicity, which is this ardent secularism endorsed by the State, basically.</p>
<p>And I think religious liberty that’s imagined in the kind of secular three middle, is one that obviously does not establish a church.&#160; It does not establish a particular religion, but is making space for people to come with the thickness of their religious commitments.&#160; It does then have to be a truly pluralist space.</p>
<p>So I think another way to frame the tension here, is between secularism, as actually a very homogenizing agenda versus a secularity three that makes room for a genuine pluralism.&#160; The other piece that comes to mind is the limits of the freedom of conscience model, is that it entirely envisions religious belief as this individual phenomenon, right, of what I believe.</p>
<p>What I think we are wrestling through right now, over the last few years, is what we might call “institutional” religious freedom, right.&#160; Do bodies have a kind of freedom?&#160; Do you know Stanley Carlson-Thies?</p>
<p>TOM GJELTEN:&#160; Sure.</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; The institutional religious freedom alliance is saying, we can’t just think about religious freedom as your permission in private, to believe what you want on weekends.&#160; If religion is a way of life that is shared by communal bodies, we also have to find healthy ways to make room for those bodies to live out that.&#160; And that’s what I’m imagining as a good thing.</p>
<p>I feel like I’m not answering your question though.</p>
<p>TOM GJELTEN:&#160; No.&#160; You’re beginning to answer it.&#160; You’re just not taking it to the degree that I wanted you to take it.</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Okay.&#160; Yeah.</p>
<p>TOM GJELTEN:&#160; Which is to pronounce on the, you know the religious liberty.&#160; I mean Ted Cruz has said that this is a religious liberty election.&#160; He’s the one that has made this argument most forcefully that the State has to allow people to pray in school, you know, and to know interfere with religious beliefs in the public square, as well as in the private square.&#160; And I’m wondering if you know does that jive with –?</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Yeah.&#160; That’s messy isn’t it, because there, I feel like what I’m trying to think through is, if that’s what they mean by religious liberty, what they actually mean, there’s still quite allied to the State craft as the expression of this.&#160; Whereas, I think if you had, I’m not pronouncing on this, but if you take, say, a Catholic social teaching about subsidiarity, which means that there are all kinds of layers and levels and spheres of culture beyond the State that are significant for society as a whole, then I would say that what’s crucial is to secure the religious liberty for those institutional expressions to be who they are.</p>
<p>I guess I’m less inclined to imagine that religious liberty means repristinating the public schools to do what they used to do when we thought everybody was a Christian.&#160; I hope this is not getting me in trouble somewhere, but yeah, it just doesn’t seem… Again, this is why O’Donovan, when he says, “The most Christian state is the most secular,” is actually, it recognizes the contested nature of the saeculum.&#160; On the other hand, his wife Joan Lockwood O’Donovan, who is also a Christian legal scholar, has written a fascinating paper on why the establishment of the Church of England was actually — has been the best thing for religious minorities.</p>
<p>So it’s very messy, in how we want to think of it.&#160; If the good is making room for communities to pursue their faith in ways that are meaningful, but also allow them to contribute to the public sphere that’s what I’m sort of looking for.&#160; I feel, I guess I do think there is a, certain legitimacy.</p>
<p>People could feel like some decisions and policies over the last few years have impinged on the religious liberty of institutions in particular.&#160; But that’s different than sort of prayer in schools kind of dynamic.&#160; I should tell you, I’m Canadian.&#160; So you have to take all of this with a grain of salt, and your fights are a little bit different than my fights in a way.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; Okay.&#160; Mort Kondracke.</p>
<p>Mort Kondracke, Roll Call</p>
<p>MORT KONDRACKE, Roll Call:&#160; So you tossed off this reference to the strong man as something that was in our future, and I fear that it is in our immediate future, and I wanted you to expand on that a little bit, but my theory about this is the big sort.&#160; That what’s happened in America, is that religious people have gone off into their sphere.&#160; They go to their churches, they go to their — they watch FOX News or they vote Republican.</p>
<p>They avoid the elites, they oppose same sex marriage strongly, they shout about it.&#160; Whereas the seculars inhabit the city, and the university for sure, and say things like “Well, those poor people.&#160; All they do is they cling to their guns and their religion.”&#160; President Obama, he would be you know one of the elites, although he claimed — never mind.</p>
<p>So what I see is not this, what you call “no turning back.”&#160; I see an attempt to turn back, a division in the society, a polarization politically and religiously.&#160; And in this confusion, and in the sort of expressions of rage, which are constantly being drummed along by activist groups and radio talk show hosts, and cable channels and stuff like that a war going on.</p>
<p>And into this war steps somebody saying, “Follow me.&#160; I can solve it all.&#160; I’ll fix it.&#160; I’ll make America great again.”&#160; And I think that there’s actually a kind of a strange religious component to this, of I’ll make it all the way it was back in the ’50s.</p>
<p>And we’re going to call it “Merry Christmas again,” right?</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Yeah.</p>
<p>MORT KONDRACKE:&#160; That’s a message that I think differs from what you’re hopefully saying about the sort of the acceptance of secularity.</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Yes.&#160; And I don’t want to pretend.&#160; I’m not a political commentator.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; Oh, go ahead.</p>
<p>(Laughter.)</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; So I guess part of what, and even the conversations with you today, I mean this is such a learning experience for me.&#160; Part of what I now wish I knew more about, were the dynamics of what we could call the secularization of the working class. Because now all of a sudden I’m really really interested in that.</p>
<p>My hunch is that actually the engine of secularization here is more Walmart than NYU.&#160; And by that I mean that the sort of force of cultural liturgies of consumerism and consumption and finding meaning in a kind of economic expression, which has been powerfully I think formative over the last generation or two.&#160; Not because the mall convinced us of anything, but because it subtly co-opted us by its liturgies.</p>
<p>If then people effectively are secularized insofar as they’ve given themselves to the realities of the market and consumption is the way that they’re going to be happy, then you are going to experience the failures of the market to deliver in ways that have almost a kind of religious crisis about them.&#160; Right.&#160; And so now, what you’re looking for is somebody to pull the levers to make that system generate what it promised for you.&#160; Now, I think there are all kinds of just sheer straight up xenophobia that’s at work here.</p>
<p>The other thing that struck me, and this is totally now me, as an amateur pundit.&#160; I wonder to what extent this dynamic is the reality of people, who find themselves just a million miles from political power and the machinations of political power.&#160; So government has always just been some sort of distant magic.</p>
<p>And so now, you’re just looking for your magician.&#160; Do you know what I mean?&#160; You’re just looking for the guy who promises to make that magic work for you.&#160; I think that itself, is a sign of a disenfranchisement and disenchantment.</p>
<p>I don’t have any answers.&#160; I’m just totally thinking alongside with you.&#160; I could see how clearly some are capitalizing on this campaign on an attempt to rollback secularity three.</p>
<p>To me, that is just unconstructive resentment, but apparently it works, so that’s disturbing — and that’s why I’m trying to think through, is there almost, is the way to understand this, to tap into it as a kind of religious dynamic, right?&#160; A kind of religious response.&#160; I’m not sure, you know.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; Quickly on this point, Naomi, and then, David Brooks, is next.</p>
<p>NAOMI SCHAFER RILEY:&#160; No, I just, I wonder whether there is a connection here, I mean the economic horses didn’t pop up suddenly, but what we have seen is the moving away of these institutions.&#160; I mean that used to connect people to those centers of power, whether it was political parties, or churches</p>
<p>and all of that —</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Yes.</p>
<p>NAOMI SCHAFER RILEY:&#160; — just connection is working at the same time and forcing maybe people — making people feel like their hands have been forced into this.</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Yes.&#160; So a sort of Robert Putnam analysis, alongside this, right?&#160; Yeah, very good.&#160; Very helpful.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; David Brooks, and then Napp.</p>
<p>David Brooks,&#160;New York Times</p>
<p>DAVID BROOKS, New York Times:&#160; So you mentioned that Taylor’s praises secularism last 500 years for creating, its great achievement is to create a purely humanistic account of what a meaningful life looks like.&#160; And then you went on to describe the super nova, the cross-pressured individual.&#160; And then you described some beautiful examples of this person.</p>
<p>And whether Julian Barnes, or David Foster Wallace, or Terrence Malick, or Steve Jobs, or even Trump supporters, I guess.&#160; They don’t seem complete.&#160; They don’t seem to have an example of a purely humanistic account of a meaningful life.&#160; And so do you have any good examples of people who have achieved this?</p>
<p>(Laughter.)</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Well, they would be saints, right?</p>
<p>DAVID BROOKS:&#160; But they’re haunted by God-ism in almost every case, whether it’s Jobs’s 50/50, or Barnes, or Wallace.</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; How about Dorothy Day?&#160; I’m just going through chapters in your book now, right?</p>
<p>(Laughter.)</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; But wouldn’t Dorothy Day be just a fantastic illustration of somebody who clearly inhabited the cross-pressured space?&#160; So it’s not like she was living in some naïve la-la land where she was protected from that.&#160; I mean I think of actually Elie’s book of the four of them, right, O’Connor, Percy, Day, and Merton, right?</p>
<p>DAVID BROOKS:&#160; Yes.</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; To me, all four of those are just such compelling stories of —</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; What’s the title of that book again?</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Paul Elie, The Life You Save May be Your Own.&#160; And it’s sort of like these four biographies of catholic artists, novelists, and so on, and to me, yeah, I guess I keep looking at examples like that of people who have felt the cross pressure, walked through it.&#160; Taylor actually thinks Gerard Manley Hopkins is another example.&#160; Ivan Illich, you know these folks who have felt honestly, and traumatically, even, the failures of sort of modern promises, but haven’t then just retreated in repristinating ways, but have sort of forged new paths.</p>
<p>That’s why he ends A Secular Age by saying, look it’s the poets that are sort of — it’s working at the level of the imagination that helps us see a future.</p>
<p>DAVID BROOKS:&#160; I was going to say if we’ve moved from 500 years of secularism&#160;&#160; and if we wound up at Dorothy Day, we haven’t moved very far.</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; In the sense that it’s a recovery, you mean, or –?</p>
<p>DAVID BROOKS:&#160; I mean most secular people would not say Dorothy Day is a secular person.</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Ah.&#160; Well, but she’s secular in the third sense, right?</p>
<p>DAVID BROOKS:&#160; I get what you’re thinking.</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; It’s interesting.&#160; Nancey Murphy, who taught for a long time at Fuller Seminary, she used to talk about what she called the “omega shape” of history, which was you had this sort of ancient medieval kind of world view plausibility structures.&#160; You have some of the revolutions of modernity that set us out on this detour.</p>
<p>And then what it turns out, is in post-modernity, you come back to a place that actually has a remarkable amount of continuity with what had gone before.&#160; And this turns out to be this sort of detour that we went through.&#160; You can’t forget it, but you’re in a different space.</p>
<p>I think that’s — there’s always going to be something strange, right.&#160; It’s not — there’s always going to be an element of memory, I guess, to this.&#160; And sometimes I like it when Taylor says, “Tell me what you think about Saint Francis, and I will tell you what you’re sort of basement assumptions are.”</p>
<p>“If you think Saint Francis basically chose to live a deformed life, I already know what you believe, but if you think Saint Francis is an icon of flourishing, then you’ve got a totally different account of what it is to flourish.”&#160; I think it’s always going to be that competition between the two.</p>
<p>MICHAELMICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; Excellent.&#160; Napp Nazworth?</p>
<p>Napp Nazworth, The Christian Post</p>
<p>NAPP NAZWORTH, The Christian Post:&#160; I want to talk about Evangelicals.&#160; So you were talking about the two trajectories, and for the second trajectory, the non-mainline Protestant one, you said “nondenominational congregations are retrieving ancient ways of being Christian.”&#160; So I have three questions about that.</p>
<p>Can you give us some specific examples of how they’re doing that?&#160; And how does that tie into secular three?&#160; And then also, is there — are these congregations that you’re talking about, is it related to any other things like urban versus rural, small church, big church, mega church; multiracial, multiethnic churches versus mostly white churches, what are you seeing?</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Yeah.&#160; Great questions.&#160; So I should probably flag this by saying, I’m probably seeing a self-selecting sample, because this is people who are inviting me places.&#160; In some ways I would say, I’m a Protestant Evangelical who sees his mission as to remind Evangelicals that they’re Catholic.</p>
<p>In the sense that I think the only small “c” catholic.&#160; I want to say big “C” Catholic, but not necessarily Roman.&#160; Okay?&#160; I believe in the Holy Catholic Church.&#160; And what I mean by that, is helping — it seems to me, the viability of faith communities in a secular three age, are directly indexed to their ability to draw on wells that are older than modernity.&#160; Right?</p>
<p>So that in fact, it’s not just a nostalgic retrieval, but it is basically finding ways of being faithful in the present that draw on and are tied to ancient and medieval ways that the Spirit has led throughout the ages.&#160; That’s kind of what I mean by “catholicity.”&#160; And I just see a remarkable and surprising openness to this in places that you would never expect.</p>
<p>I have another book called “Desiring the Kingdom,” which is a kind of the academic version of “You are What You Love,” which is kind of making this case.&#160; And I get calls from places like Dallas Theological Seminary.&#160; Do any of you know Dallas Seminary?&#160; It’s kind of like the heart of dispensationalist Evangelicalism, and they’re reading this stuff, which is talking about ancient liturgies and Saint Augustine, and all these kinds of things. &#160;So two congregations come to mind.&#160; One is Christ Community Church in De Moines, Iowa, which started as a plant of a massive Baptist megachurch in the city, and sort of went out into this very intentional, liturgical, sacramental, catholic, almost monastic expression.</p>
<p>Ironically, when they then looked around and realized, if we were really consistent with this, we shouldn’t be independent, right.&#160; We should be woven into the web of some sort of body and community.&#160; They actually ended up joining the Mennonite Church.&#160; So they’re kind of sacramental Mennonites, which is basically a Stanley Hauerwas congregation.</p>
<p>And so that’s in Des Moines.&#160; How do you want to characterize that?&#160; It’s urban, but it also has a kind of — you know, it’s definitely a Midwestern sort of thing.&#160; We could talk about a bunch of congregations in Brooklyn that are associated with the Presbyterian Church in America, the Resurrection Network of Churches that also are sort of tapping into this liturgical, ancient, sacramental heritage.</p>
<p>In a way, you could say it’s a re-enchanted Christianity.&#160; And then a place, like Sojourn, which is a nondenominational church in Louisville, Kentucky.&#160; What’s going on here, is everybody, I would say, is waking up to the dynamics that David and James are going to talk about, which is the dynamics of formation and character.&#160; And they’re realizing that worship is sort of the incubator for the formation of Christian character.</p>
<p>And so they have to become more intentional about what worship looks like and that looks like retrieving ancient forms.&#160; So there’s an interesting — I think it’s consistent with this secular three reality.&#160; Maybe it actually comes back to Benedict Option, kind of stuff, because it’s saying well, you know what, we sort of — we have underestimated the power of formation of cultural liturgies, and we need — we’ve left the treasures of cultural formation in our religious tradition off the table.</p>
<p>In fact, what we did was we took the cultural liturgies and we thought we could make church cool, because we would make it like the mall or the rock concert, or the coffee shop, and then that turns out to be the dynamics of assimilation.&#160; The ethnic piece of that, I’m not sure I would have any confident assessment of that.</p>
<p>I would say, like a place like Sojourn, I know it is not just an elite educated class kind of dynamic that’s quite a working class congregation.&#160; I’d have to do more digging around to know that.</p>
<p>UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: How are they changing their worship service?</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH: &#160;How are they changing their worship service?&#160; Basically, they’re going from what I call the sort of “talking head brain on a stick model,” where you walk in, sing 30 minutes of very emotive songs, and then sit down for a 45-minute lecture; to what I think most people would feel, like is a kind of catholic rhythm, right, they see worship as this narrative performance from beginning to end, and they’re sort of walking through the dynamics of you know, confession, absolution.</p>
<p>Here’s an untold story, I think. &#160;I don’t know what counts for journalists, but to me, it’s fascinating how many Presbyterian Churches now observe weekly Eucharist or Communion.&#160; So to me that’s always just a little signal.&#160; Whenever you run into evangelical churches that are practicing weekly communion or Lord’s Supper, what’s happened is they have effectively appropriated a catholic cadence, right.</p>
<p>And they’re often, they have to be very intentional about it because everybody’s like, “Oh, we’re not supposed to do it every week.&#160; It won’t be special anymore,” or whatever.&#160; And there’s just a lot of — and that’s both kind of evangelical denominational realities, like these Presbyterian Churches, I mentioned, but also a bunch of these nondenominational churches.</p>
<p>So does that feel like something interesting?&#160; I don’t know.&#160; I just think it’s an interesting bellwether of actually, kind of contemporary congregations looking for the resources of ancient formative practices that’s the way I would narrate it.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; Okay.&#160; Abdullah, and then Jessica Stern.</p>
<p>Imam Abdullah Antepli, Duke University</p>
<p>ABDULLAH ANTEPLI, Duke University:&#160; Thank you, James.&#160; A fascinating compilation.&#160; Two questions:&#160; If one can simplistically talk, there are two schools of thought in secularism, and I feel you are — two Anglo-Saxon schools of secularism centric, and there’s a French secularism, which I grew up in Turkey with.</p>
<p>It’s not disbelief, but it’s grudgingly accepting religion it’s not going to disappear, but we have to control it.&#160; We have to, almost treating religion like herpes.&#160; It’s not going to go away.</p>
<p>(Laughter.)</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Prophylactic.</p>
<p>ABDULLAH ANTEPLI:&#160; Yes, exactly.&#160; To me, most people are in different proportions, both.&#160; There’s a hybrid secularism that some people are Anglo-Saxon-type seculars unto their own faith tradition towards, but towards other faith traditions, they become immediately French type of secularism.</p>
<p>Ted Cruz, when he’s advocating for people to pray, and when people ask, “Can Muslims pray?&#160; Can Jews pray?&#160; Can Hindus pray?”&#160; He becomes incredibly French secularist says that’s absolutely not the case.</p>
<p>So there is so much hybrid people are not one kind.&#160; Even like many Christians who are secular Anglo-Saxon types, they are comfortable with it, if their religion is remaining within the four walls of the Church.&#160; Especially Episcopalians, they don’t know what to do if that goes beyond the four walls of Church, etc.&#160; So I feel your conversations are too Anglo-Saxon type centric.</p>
<p>The second.&#160; Also, as you beautifully discussed, the social manifestation of these intellectual and religious, sort of shifts and patterns in our society, it’s again, too liberal Protestant centric.&#160; What do those conversations and patterns that you discuss means in the face of this major demographic changes happening in American society?&#160; What do those conversations mean for practicing Catholics, Muslims; Jews who are not really like that?</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; That’s great.&#160; The first analysis is brilliant.&#160; So in what way my account is too Anglo-Saxon in the sense that I’m too comfortable with — can you just say a little bit more about that so I know how to engage?&#160; You defined the French very, very well.</p>
<p>ABDULLAH ANTEPLI:&#160; In the four —</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; I’m never going to forget “religion as herpes.”</p>
<p>(Laughter.)</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; What characterizes the Anglo-Saxon as you’re describing it?</p>
<p>ABDULLAH ANTEPLI:&#160; Anglo-Saxon secularism, it divides the religion as a separation of Church and State, but it respects religion.&#160; There is no innate hostility towards religion.&#160; It respects religion, which I believe is, like John Adams type secularism. &#160;It’s what America mainly built upon, but in their personal life, but French secularism is innate and hostile towards religion.</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Yes, yes.</p>
<p>ABDULLAH ANTEPLI:&#160; You get sort of — considers religion, again, something to be afraid of and to be limited.</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; And do you, would you say, I just think that’s very helpful.&#160; Would you say, is there a legitimate worry that certain kind of elite sectors in the United States tend towards the French?</p>
<p>ABDULLAH ANTEPLI:&#160; Yes.</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Yes.&#160; And which then also breeds its own resentment —</p>
<p>ABDULLAH ANTEPLI:&#160; Absolutely.</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; — from those religious communities?</p>
<p>ABDULLAH ANTEPLI:&#160; Absolutely, yeah.</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; That’s a great point.&#160; I mean I don’t have anything to really add to that than others saying, I guess the way I would push back on the French sort of Revolutionary model, is to point out something like Tom was saying, that actually then what happens is you actually make secularism its own kind of religion — it’s religion-like at least, right?</p>
<p>That’s where then I want to sort of unleash the epistemological dogs and call into question what underwrites that kind of confidence.&#160; It’s really helpful.&#160; The liberal Protestant concern—well, that’s really that’s me trying to stick to what I know, right?</p>
<p>So I would want to hear more about how other religious traditions see themselves navigating, like, for example:&#160; Could Muslim communities accept something like this secularity three analysis?&#160; In other words, is something like the analysis available more broadly, but then we would have to think differently about the resources.&#160; I would love to hear more.</p>
<p>ABDULLAH ANTEPLI:&#160; The Anglo-Saxon type of secularism is the ideal model.&#160; Most Muslims coming to United States, they come with incredible attraction and appeal to Anglo-Saxon secularism because many of them are suffering with French type secularism.&#160; Many countries like Tunis, Turkey, they learned from the French teachers and they even mastered further in the understanding.</p>
<p>Despite post-911 realities, many American Muslims feel they practice their religion more comfortably in America than anywhere else.&#160; But those parameters have not been developed yet.</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Yeah, no, that’s very helpful.&#160; I mean it does strike me that then there’s probably an interesting conversation to be had about U.S. history in that regard, given early commerce between France and the United States in some of the ideology of this, as opposed to again, this work by Joan Lockwood O’Donovan on England and the way in which actually the establishment of the Church was good for religious minorities, and actually religious minorities, non-Christian minorities have been some of the strongest opponents of the disestablishment of the Church.&#160; That would be an illustration of this Anglo-Saxon model.&#160; Yeah that’s really helpful.&#160; That’s great.&#160; Thank you.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; Okay.&#160; Jessica Stern is up next.</p>
<p>Jessica Stern, Boston University</p>
<p>JESSICA STERN:&#160; Thank you so much.&#160; As I said to you, I think this is both educational and incredibly moving, and I’m really grateful to you.</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Thank you.</p>
<p>JESSICA STERN, Boston University:&#160; I am wondering whether the pressure for secularity three results in part from the declining percentage of Christians in the United States and Canada.&#160; And I was looking at the Pew polls — you know we keep talking about what’s happening in the United States, who’s less religious, who’s more.&#160; The latest Pew poll shows that between 2007 and 2014, religiously affiliated persons went down somewhat, from 83 percent to 77 percent so there’s a slight decline.&#160; Not that it’s secularism, but there is nonetheless a slight decline.</p>
<p>And the group most responsible for the decline, at least according to this poll, is millennials.&#160; It’s not working class, although I’ve seen that some sociologists claim that working class people are leaving the Church.&#160; And that brings me to a question that of course is related to my own obsessions, but it just kept coming up for me, while I heard you speaking.</p>
<p>The universalist impulse in religion versus the particularist.&#160; How do you encourage a thick version of secularity three while perhaps discouraging that particularist impulse, such that it doesn’t become a majoritarian rule, such that only Christians feel at home?</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Yes.&#160; That was a great — I’ve been learning so much.&#160; This is so helpful.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; While you think of your answer, let me — I heard the other day a wonderful comment.&#160; Somebody said, “The problem with theocracy is everybody wants to be Theo.”</p>
<p>(Laughter.)</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Yes.&#160; I mean on the first point, I think what’s interesting is the sort of Pew demographic snapshot, I would say, is not a sign that we are arriving at secularity three.&#160; It is a set of shifts taking place within secularity three that has been a reality for a long time, right.</p>
<p>Now, you could grant that the speed with which secularity three seeps into the social imaginary of a society, as Taylor puts it, has been slower in the United States than in Continental Europe or the United Kingdom, or something like that.&#160; I think that’s probably true.&#160; But what’s interesting is the demographic story is, it’s hard to know cause or affect, right, or whether it’s — I think it’s more symptomatic of things that have already taken place.</p>
<p>I do think the reality of immigration is precisely what is ramping up the learning curve for U.S. society, in appreciating this, right, and in Canada, too, because — and it’s interesting.&#160; Taylor talks about one of the features of belief in a secular age, when you feel this cross pressure, is he talks about it as the fragilization of belief, right.&#160; And that’s this sense in which, in a way, you can’t just naively and confidently assume your way of seeing the world is the only way of seeing the world.</p>
<p>And I think the realities of immigration bring the world’s religions and beliefs home, or here, and so people are obviously — it’s just like their education ramps up exponentially in appreciating that dynamic, which is then also, I think you get some of the resentment kind of movements, and you can get steam behind the kind of repristination dynamics.</p>
<p>The universalist particularist that’s really interesting.&#160; Do you think, I’ve been wondering lately, so generally I’m suspicious of talking about religion.&#160; Do you know what I mean?&#160; I’m not sure that there’s — I understand it works as a, certain shorthand to get at some phenomena, but I think usually all we ever have are religions.</p>
<p>And it seems to me, some religions — oh, gosh, I’m just going to say, it seems to me, some expressions of religions have internal to them, an account of, why believers ought to be universalist that is not universal across all of those religions, right?&#160; So I don’t want to have to pick between universalism versus particularism, right.&#160; I think you could make a case that in some ways fostering — again, this might be a kind of Benedict Option logic, but fostering a deep catechesis in a particular religion is precisely how you foster people, who make room for a pluralistic public sphere.&#160; I don’t know.</p>
<p>Does that make sense?&#160; I don’t know.&#160; It’s a great thing to think about.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; Okay.&#160; Kathleen Parker, and then Daniel.</p>
<p>Kathleen Parker,&#160;&#160;Washington Post</p>
<p>KATHLEEN PARKER,Washington Post:&#160; First of all, I apologize for dragging the conversation from the sublime to the mundane, but and this question may have come up.&#160; You may have discussed this in my absence, so please just stop me if that’s the case.</p>
<p>I was just wondering if, I would just be interested in your thoughts about the Evangelical support for Donald Trump.</p>
<p>You know I’m sure there are other issues, you know, Evangelicals aren’t only Evangelicals, but there — and other issues may be more important than their religious beliefs.&#160; But you know when Donald Trump says he’s a Christian, who doesn’t need forgiveness, and he’s otherwise, as unchristian-like as anyone we’ve ever seen.</p>
<p>Do you have any theories on what they are attracted to, or some other explanation for this odd support?</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Yeah.&#160; So I have two.&#160; And again, I’m not a sociologist; I’m a philosopher.&#160; I’m just a poor country philosopher.</p>
<p>Two things.&#160; One is a spectacular failure of catechesis.&#160; Do you know what I mean? Because either way — I will say on Super Tuesday, as I was watching some data come in, it turned out that there was also, I think 35 percent of Catholics also voted for Trump.&#160; So I felt at least a little bit of relief.&#160; This guy is not only our problem.</p>
<p>But it strikes me that what we’re dealing with here, and this is something Tom’s story on NPR covered, is the extent to which Evangelical has just been an identifier, like a descriptor that people put on themselves.&#160; A label that they wear.&#160; And insofar as that’s coupled with a spectacular failure of catechesis, by that I mean, like actual instruction in the faith, people can almost fill that descriptor with whatever they think is a certain badge.</p>
<p>And so when you ask them, “Are you X?”&#160; Yes, I’m an Evangelical.&#160; Do you support Donald Trump?&#160; Yes, I do.&#160; There’s not much experienced tension between those —</p>
<p>KATHLEEN PARKER:&#160; Well, then we’ll just make it Christians across the board, rather than Evangelical, as some special —</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; And would that change the data, though?</p>
<p>KATHLEEN PARKER:&#160; No.</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; I wonder.&#160; See because I feel like the other piece that I’m interested in, is it relates to this theme of ex-carnation that I was talking about.&#160; And this is a more volatile hypothesis, but my sense is, my hunch is that Evangelicalism, as a form of Protestantism, is susceptible to turning Christianity into a web of beliefs to which you assent.</p>
<p>Which then, doesn’t necessarily have to come with a ton of connection to a way of life that you practice, so you get this — really, this was never supposed to happen, but you get nominal Evangelicals.</p>
<p>Whereas, most people became Evangelicals because they were nominal Lutherans or whatever.&#160; Do you know what I mean?&#160; But this is something weird.&#160; And particularly in regions like the South and so on, this works.</p>
<p>This is why I think if our polling, or our social science could be much more fine-grained, and not just ask the self-descriptor question, but if as again, Tom’s story, if you dig down to the level of practice and participation, I think you see very different numbers about Trump, for example.&#160; I think that probably also explains that Massachusetts number, because if you’re Irish in South Boston, you’re Catholic, of course you are, even though you’ve never been to church in years, right?</p>
<p>So there’s affiliation as opposed to practice, I think is really crucial.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; And there is data on that, Jamie.</p>
<p>When you hold for people who go to church at least once a week.&#160; Maybe twice, but once, the numbers for Trump go way down.&#160; And I always thought, and I’ve said this to John Green, who’s been here before, who’s a political scientist and demographer that I thought that was a description of Evangelical, a person who actually goes to church a lot —</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Right.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; — and says that to be an Evangelical means to be a faithful participant in, not only church, but Wednesday night Bible studies.&#160; And so then, therefore when I’ve had calls on this question, the word “Evangelical” has become so flimsily described that in South Carolina, if somebody says, “Well, you must be an Evangelical.”&#160; “Yeah, I think so.&#160; I go to church once a year during Easter.”</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Yeah.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; Well that’s not an Evangelical.</p>
<p>KATHLEEN PARKER:&#160; In South Carolina, they say there are more Evangelicals than people.</p>
<p>(Laughter.)</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; I would also add one, related to something we were talking about earlier, in response to Napp.&#160; So one of the other things that intrigues me, is when Evangelical Protestants start kind of embracing this catholicity account.&#160; I would say baked into the DNA of that expression and formation of Christianity, is something that weds you to a people, that’s transnational and ancient.</p>
<p>So it undercuts nationalism, whereas the other is sort of intellectualized Christianity for brains on a stick, I think is also the most susceptible to being just co-opted by nationalisms.&#160; And so that might also explain some of the Trump phenomena, and maybe a little bit of the Ted Cruz phenomena, too.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; Just on this point, Jessica, and then Daniel, you’re up next.</p>
<p>JESSICA STERN:&#160; I wonder, whether your concept of the “liturgy of the mall” helps to explain that and maybe if there’s time, I think you are brilliant on that topic.&#160; I hope you’ll get to it.</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Oh.&#160; Yeah.&#160; I don’t know if we will.&#160; I do this in “You are What You Love.”&#160; In other words, one of the things that I’ve been trying to push — in a way, this is a different way of thinking about religion, not as a constellation of beliefs, doctrines, and ideas, but actually as a formative way of life.&#160; It’s something that’s practiced.&#160; The primacy of practice.</p>
<p>But once you start looking at religion in that way, what you’ll also realize is that the competing religions aren’t just the things that call themselves religions.&#160; It’s actually the liturgies of consumerism and the cathedrals of consumerism, the mall or whatever it might be, are as powerfully co-optive as rival gospels or messages, or religions.</p>
<p>And I think, to me, a lot of the explanatory dynamic for say Protestant Evangelical assimilation to wider cultural dynamics is not that somebody changed their mind.&#160; It’s that somebody trained their hearts.&#160; And they were co-opted by these rival liturgies, which then is what catalyzes new intentionality about Christian liturgical formation as a counter measure to that.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; Okay.&#160; Daniel, and then Wajahat.</p>
<p>Daniel Lippman, Politico</p>
<p>DANIEL LIPPMAN, Politico:&#160; Thank you so much.&#160; I had a two-part question.&#160; How would you address the, responsibility of Evangelicals or just you know Christians in general, Protestants or Catholics, for I guess secularists have — kind of split themselves away from people who are religious in America, where they think Oh, those people are crazy.&#160; We don’t associate.&#160; You know it’s the big sort theory.</p>
<p>What’s the responsibility of Evangelicals for doing their own splitting, where they feel like those city slickers they don’t feel an attachment — it’s like two different countries, and how do you think that’s going to continue?</p>
<p>And the second part of my question is, you’ve talked about how secularism has hurt the country a little bit in that it, you know just in all the ways you talked about that.&#160; What can be done to keep America a democracy, but dial back some of the secularism so that people have — you know, what’s the practical thing that can be done to address this, but still keep — not return back to where religion is everything?</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Yes, that’s great.&#160; Thank you.&#160; On the first point, I mean to be perfectly honest, I think it is way harder, and almost impossible for religious people to insulate themselves from secularism in this society, than it is for “secular elites” to ensconce themselves without ever having to bump into religious people, because for reasons like James was mentioning.</p>
<p>In a way, the symbolic universes, the cultural systems are kind of hooked up to — so I mean as soon as you have cable, fundamentalism is dead.&#160; Do you know what I mean?&#160; Like there’s just — there’s not — where went our resistance, and I think the story —</p>
<p>DANIEL LIPPMAN:&#160; They don’t look down on —</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; No, you’re right.&#160; Absolutely, and, but in some ways — I’m not condoning it, I’m just saying you can also understand some of the feelings of stuff kind of being crammed down throats.&#160; Do you know what I mean?&#160; For us, raising four kids, you’re working on all of these kinds of intentional measures, not to cocoon them, but to be intentional about their formation, and there’s just all this kind of competition.</p>
<p>So you can see how they feel, like it’s not a fair game.&#160; That Goliath gets to pull the strings of society.&#160; The second question I think is really interesting.&#160; Academics are the worst, because I keep thinking of these books that are not popular, but Jeffrey Stout at Princeton is somebody — actually, he’d be a fascinating figure to bring here.&#160; He’s in the Religion Department at Princeton University.&#160; He wrote a book called “Democracy and Tradition.”</p>
<p>So Stout takes himself to be an Emersonian.&#160; He has no kind of, traditional religious affiliation at all, but is an ardent critic of secularism in the way that I’ve been describing it.&#160; And I think at the end of it, and yet he’s also critical of people like Stanly Hauerwas and Benedict Option people because he thinks it sounds like he’s giving them license to no longer participate in the public sphere and the common good.</p>
<p>He says, “No, we need religious folks to participate in our democracy for the good of our democracy.”&#160; I would say the one move that I find interesting here, is to stop focusing on federal politics.&#160; And so what’s interesting, is he frames this as, what does it look like for religious folk, let’s say, to get involved and engaged in municipal politics, neighborhood politics, state politics?”</p>
<p>Like taking seriously, in some ways, the layers of the republic, because by the time you get to federal politics, it’s just a train wreck, a gridlock.&#160; Whereas, there’s meaningful — you know, what a mayor and city council can do, can be pretty powerful in shaping the way people live lives in a city.&#160; And so encouraging that lower level of democratic participation.</p>
<p>This is another reason why, though, I’m really interested in the work of Oliver O’Donovan, because he basically shows how and why Christians, for example, should be invested in democracy, because in some ways it owes its legacy to these religious traditions.&#160; So there’s a genealogy story to tell, where we shouldn’t have to choose between the two, I think.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; Okay.&#160; Wajahat?</p>
<p>Wajahat Ali, Al Jazeera America</p>
<p>WAJAHAT ALI, Al Jazeera America:&#160; Good morning everyone.&#160; I was unable to meet most of you last night.&#160; I’m here as the unofficial ambassador of moderate Muslims everywhere.&#160; Myself, and Abdullah, are the last moderate Muslims on earth.</p>
<p>(Laughter.)</p>
<p>WAJAHAT ALI:&#160; So we’re unicorns.&#160; That’s on the record, by the way.</p>
<p>(Laughter.)</p>
<p>WAJAHAT ALI:&#160; Thank you for understanding that joke.&#160; Hip crowd.</p>
<p>Speaking about religious minorities, I know we touched upon it, and using the definitions we’ve discussed about secularities, secularism, and to even, a type of fundamentalism, either religious fundamentalism, or even the type of personality.&#160; I think (inaudible) was describing.&#160; I think he’d say the “Trump voter” that has emerged that wants things to go back to the way they were: black and white television, where things were simple, and people like me didn’t exist, with these difficult names. &#160;These multi-hyphenated names.&#160; You know, two skin colors; not caramel mocha.</p>
<p>You know, I’m sitting here thinking about this modern America.&#160; The existence of religious minorities.&#160; Now, we can talk about Muslims because they seem to animating most of this discussion.&#160; We could talk about Jews, Hindus.</p>
<p>Is the existence of religious minorities in America, not just the existence, but if you will, the swagger, the prominence, the emergence of religious minorities in America, ironically, fueling not only secularism, as manifested by the New Atheists, but also secularity.&#160; And also religious fundamentalism.</p>
<p>And if it is, then what does that say about the role and place of religious minorities for the future of America?&#160; And I want to hear thoughts on that.</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; So I’m immediately going to Abdullah’s frame in that it would fuel secularism if the secularism was of this kind of French model, and it first of all, probably doesn’t have any grain of nuance in what it thinks its seeing in religious communities.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; Repeat again what the French model is.</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Religion as herpes.&#160; How can you forget that?</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; I just wanted to hear it again.</p>
<p>(Laughter.)</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; So yeah, I could see that.&#160; It would absolutely contribute to secularity three, as well.&#160; Although, what I would say, is contribute to an awareness of it, like it’s sort of like wake up and smell secularity three, because obviously we live in a more contested and diverse space.</p>
<p>Now, for somebody who sees secularity three as actually a healthy environment for religious communities to be who they are called to be, I welcome that.&#160; Like that seems like a good.&#160; But I can clearly see why it also then becomes this catalyst for resentment.</p>
<p>And by resentment, I also mean kind of a retrenchment back to this myth.&#160; And that’s the turning back the clock thing, which I just think is characterized by a kind of, I was going to say, ignorance, but do you see?</p>
<p>UNIDENTIFIED PERSON:&#160; Naïveté.</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Naïveté.&#160; Yes, yes, it’s naïveté, but —</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; It’s a nice way of saying ignorance.</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Yeah.&#160; I guess what’s worrisome though, is how much energy that seems to be able to generate.&#160; Like there’s still — that’s still tapping into something here.&#160; Go ahead.</p>
<p>WAJAHAT ALI:&#160; And specifically, the one community then that I don’t think we discussed, is when you look at religious communities, like Evangelical communities, for example, whether or not they’re real Evangelicals who go to church, or the ones who are just by virtue of checking on the box, like the Trump voter.&#160; I’m being simplistic now.&#160; I’m really curious because if you see the communities themselves, the traditions, the values are very similar, oftentimes, which might be seen as an (inaudible) to some people.</p>
<p>What?&#160; Muslims have similar values to Evangelicals?</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Yeah, yeah.</p>
<p>WAJAHAT ALI:&#160; I went to an, all-boys Jesuit Catholic High School, where I dominated every semester when it came to religious studies, by the way.</p>
<p>(Laughter.)</p>
<p>WAJAHAT ALI:&#160; Which made my priest weep every day.</p>
<p>(Laughter.)</p>
<p>WAJAHAT ALI:&#160; — but the stories were very same.</p>
<p>It was like, you know, we studied the Bible’s literature, traditional values, and what’s interesting to me, is I agree with you, then the secularism aspect of it and the secularity aspect of it.&#160; But the position, then of the religious minority with the swagger, let’s say Muslims or Jews with Catholics, when it comes to the Evangelical Christians who feel like the emergence of this religious minority &#160;in America, is forcing them to retrench&#160; instead of embrace secularity three. Can you talk about that?</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH: &#160;Yes.&#160; It’s interesting because we’ve also had Muslim students come to Calvin College, which is a Christian liberal arts college, precisely because they see it as an ethos that is more hospitable to how they would want to live out their faith than Michigan State, or something like that.</p>
<p>So the analysis I want to give, is of those Evangelicals who are responding the way you do, the way you’re noting, there is something going on there, in which something other than their Evangelical identity is trumping their political interests at that point.&#160; Do you know what I mean?&#160; I want to say their religious identity is a stalking horse or code for something else, which again to me, is why we need a diagnosis of how and why Protestant Evangelicalism seems to susceptible to being co-opted by forces other than it.</p>
<p>And yet, you could still wear it, like so to what extent can Evangelicalism be something you wear to really cover your American nationalism, or something like that.&#160; It seems very susceptible to that in the United States, in the ways that it’s not in other places.&#160; And so this is where you almost need, now — we almost have to get down to the level of theological correction within the Christian community.</p>
<p>This is why I keep bringing up catechesis, like do people really understand what they should be doing?&#160; Actually, Tom and I had a fascinating conversation last night, where we were saying, what was the stat?&#160; Seventy percent of Muslims voted for George W. Bush in the 2000 Election, precisely because of social values, right?</p>
<p>Obviously that radically changes after 9-11, and yet, if I’m a Christian who’s interested in public life and the common good, I see, as some of my significant compatriots in that endeavor, Muslim and Jews, who actually share a lot of these concerns.&#160; And I feel like I have resources internal to the Christian tradition, to narrate exactly why I ought to do that.&#160; I feel like I’m not answering your question though.&#160; Does that help?</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; You know, we’re about to break for lunch.&#160; Okay.&#160; Clare Duffy, you’re going to take us into lunch with a clear and concise question.</p>
<p>Clare Duffy, NBC Nightly News</p>
<p>CLARE DUFFY, NBC Nightly News:&#160; With a really short question, I promise.&#160; This is sort of random.&#160; When did the impression of libertinism attach to secularity?</p>
<p>You said, at one point cracks appeared in the libertinism of —</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Yes.</p>
<p>CLARE DUFFY:&#160; When did that impression attach, and why?</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; We need dates.</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; So okay.&#160; So I may have spoken too hastily.&#160; I guess it depends on the story you want to tell about the 1960s.&#160; And I wasn’t here, but allegedly.</p>
<p>So insofar as — maybe what we could say, is at the heart of a secularist outlook and therefore even [sic] a lot of secular spiritualties, is this valorization of autonomy as the ultimate good.</p>
<p>CLARE DUFFY:&#160; Hm.</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; I would say it’s also woven into the American Declaration of Independence, but anyway that’s a different theme.&#160; So that then gets realized in different ways, and it seems to me that one of those, is it’s realization in the sexual revolution of the ’60s which I just think we’re already at an interesting phase in which —</p>
<p>I don’t know.&#160; I’m a total square.&#160; I don’t know how these things go.</p>
<p>But I do feel like there’s a certain reassessment of that going on.&#160; At least, I’m of the generation, of sort of kids whose parents were divorced multiple times over.&#160; And so we’re asking ourselves questions about certain sexual mores that were taken for granted in John Updike novels, that don’t get replayed in the novels of David Foster Wallace.</p>
<p>It’s a fascinating — you know, it’s just two totally different worlds, so that association of libertinism, I am just tying to, this trenchant fixation on autonomy, as really the only good that could be affirmed, and wondering whether people are already feeling the effects of that.&#160; That said, I was married at 19, so who am I to say?</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; I’d like to give another commercial.&#160; If you want to get a less-than 3-minute summary of the life and thought of Saint Augustine, Google “Jamie Smith and Augustine” on YouTube.&#160; And Jamie, I guess it’s in anticipation of this book, isn’t it?</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Yeah, and another big book I’m working on.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; Well what’s that book called?</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; “On the Road with Augustine,” which is why I think Augustine is our great — this is somewhat ripping off David, but I think Augustine is the great postmodern saint, because he actually lived a certain kind of cross pressure himself.</p>
<p>You know, we have “The Wolf of Wall Street,” Augustine was the Lupin de Milan, he was the “Wolf of Milan.”&#160; He lived Leo’s life.</p>
<p>But then sort of realized and found fullness and wholeness in a different story.&#160; So I’m playing on Kerouac’s “On the Road,” and that’s the next project.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; And so the title again, is?</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; “On the Road with Augustine.”</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; And when is that coming out?</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; But “You are What you Love” is also very much Augustinian in its (inaudible) —</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; But when is that one coming?</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Well, it still needs to be written, so 2018.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; Oh, I see.&#160; It hasn’t been written yet.</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; No, no, no.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; Okay.&#160; But if you do a YouTube of Jamie and Augustine and Laity Lodge, that little two-and-a-half, two minutes and forty seconds overview he gives of why Augustine’s important today, it’s really really valuable.&#160; So we aim to promote our speakers, their books, and now their YouTube, and their CD’s, and their music, whatever.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; You’re taking me back to my preacher days, when the preacher brought tapes in the back, and —</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; Yes, exactly.&#160; Join me in thanking our speaker this morning.</p>
<p>JAMIE SMITH:&#160; Thank you very much. &#160;Thanks for a great conversation.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>PARTICIPANTS</p>
<p>Wajahat Ali,&#160;Al Jazeera America</p>
<p>Fred Barnes,&#160;The Weekly Standard</p>
<p>Mindy Belz,&#160;WORLD Magazine</p>
<p>Shannon Bream,&#160;Fox News</p>
<p>Carl Cannon,&#160;RealClearPolitics.com</p>
<p>Clare Duffy,&#160;NBC Nightly News</p>
<p>Paul Edwards,&#160;Deseret News</p>
<p>Tom Gjelten,&#160;NPR</p>
<p>Erica Grieder,&#160;Texas Monthly</p>
<p>Miranda Kennedy,&#160;NPR</p>
<p>Morton Kondracke,&#160;Roll Call &amp; Congressional Quarterly</p>
<p>Daniel Lippman,&#160;Politico</p>
<p>Andrew Miller,&#160;The Economist</p>
<p>Napp Nazworth,&#160;The Christian Post</p>
<p>Kathleen Parker,&#160;Washington Post</p>
<p>Kirsten Powers,&#160;The Daily Beast</p>
<p>Naomi Schaefer Riley,&#160;New York Post</p>
<p>Sarah Jane Rothenfluch,&#160;Oregon Public Broadcasting</p>
<p>Will Saletan,&#160;Slate</p>
<p>Graeme Wood,&#160;The Atlantic</p>
<p>&#160;</p> | false | 1 | faith angle forum160is semiannual conference brings together select group 20 nationally respected journalists 35 distinguished scholars areas religion politics amp public life reimagining religion secular age south beach miami florida speaker dr james ka smith professor philosophy calvin college presentation audio160160 q amp audio part 1 q amp audio part 2 list participants found 160 michael cromartie moderator michael cromartie introducing speaker would simply say jamie smith one important philosophers may never heard morning author numerous theological philosophical books160 recent book know work charles taylor canadian philosopher jamies written book called secular subtitle reading charles taylor charles taylor book like 900 pages called secular age jamie rest us didnt time get 800 900page book taylor written 100page summary need know charles taylor taught course calvin college taylor became book new book coming april called love160 spiritual power habit jamie professor philosophy calvin college said author many books listed bio160 phd philosophy villanova university delighted jamie smith begin conversation reimagining religion secular age jamie thank joining us jamie smith160 thank applause michael cromartie160 ive never anyone applaud introduction160 must really great introduction laughter dr james ka jamie smith calvin college jamie smith im trying think something interesting say say record160 cant imagine would be160 sort started adult life preacher im struggling sit talk160 usually stand roam talk160 well see goes160i brought outline help160 sort didactic give us framework conversation something doodle question want think morning thank fantastic pleasure opportunity honor want think means say live secular society160 think much amorphous term sometimes realize160is description160 prescription160 exactly claimed160 implications shared common life public square160and also implications understanding religion spirituality160 think goal morning way kind unpack ambiguity think folded terms secularism secularity secular two goals mind160 would like spend moments thinking might change way think religion public life politics part want think sort social political public square implications think secular160 one things want try tease think critiques secularism equal160 think sometimes people get nervous people critical secularism thats sort stalking horse theocracy160 want introduce nuance think could things going want introduce might want distinguish secularism secularity thatll part project160 second half want try unpack think changes think religion spirituality160 particular think charles taylor gives us frame that160and might even hazard prognostications future religion light this160 let start im going call taxonomy secular160 im much sort leaning floating wake charles taylors really groundbreaking work lets distinguish three different ways understanding term secular160 first well call secular one way ancient use word secular simply refers temporal earthly worldly sort mundane material existence creaturely temporal life160 someone like st augustine 5thcentury north african bishop saeculum actually era160its time space160 saeculum time find fall second coming augustine160 means contested place sort expect difference also refers kind mundane earthly life160 priests nuns sacred butchers bakers candlestick makers secular sort earthly level existence meaning however shifts significantly changed starting late middle ages protestant reformation afterwards160 thats partly taylor points happened got little bit kind twotiered version christianity came west160 sacred secular distinction sort sacred vocations secular things160 somebodys got kids right160so sort secular endeavors like okay somebodys got bit secondclass citizenship within spiritual realm160 creates twotiered picture actually creates kinds problems tensions160 happens reform movements late middle ages early protestant reformation actually obliteration leveling distinction someone like john calvin one real upshots reformation sanctification ordinary life someone like john calvin comes along says wait wait wait butcher baker candlestick maker also sacred vocations work mundane temporal secular work also carried face god160so level distinction160 actually everything sacred sense160 lose twotiered picture universe picture spiritual160 word secular160 second piece think becomes significant modernity secular going way think usually use term secular going refer sort nonsectarian neutral unbiased areligious space standpoint secular perspective space neutral unbiased objective usually likes congratulate capital r rational want spaces perspectives secular youre going rule contingencies traditions authorities beliefs perhaps religion160 carve space160 notion secular assumed secularization thesis well talk moment secularism kind would say prescriptive dogmatic project public square secularization thesis secularization theory sort confident expectation western societies start experienced modernization technological advancement supposedly divisive forces religious belief participation would wither away modernitys disenchantment would gradually sort gobble rest society160and expect end religion basis secularization thesis everybody going become objective rational scientific on160 secularization theory always secular two theory160 make sense taxonomy furthermore kind prescriptive program public square also lays agenda expectation political spaces public spaces university spaces purified contingency particularity irrationality religious belief also secular two meaning word secular160 secularism could call agenda secularism also secular two understanding secular160so whats interesting think time find secularization thesis fallen hard times160 account survived well mostly accounted phenomena keep bumping west globally160 secularization thesis informed pretheoretical commitment dogmatic secularism illuminating way could challenge doesnt work well explanatory account saying someone last night nyu last week little taste world go way 1970 sociologists expected new york university heart washington square universitybuilt funded center called center global spirituality new york university realizes needed room robust particular expressions discussion religion heart university160 something ever would guessed ardent devotee secularization thesis 30 years ago theres interesting phenomena exceptions sort push back secularization paradigm160 would also say notion neutral unbiased objective purely rational actorperceiver also come ardent philosophical critique last generation number different places even religiously motivated criticisms160 sense actually interesting note overlap feminist critiques philosophy call epistemology philosophies knowledge religious interests respect160so feminist critiques ideal rationality come along say know striking160 seems like allegedly neutral unbiased objective rational actor socalled naked public square looks lot like german white guy theres suspicion wait second youre kind youre selling us line neutrality160 undercut myth neutrality really underwrote secularist project160and get interesting alliances surprisingly see interesting alliances say religious critics secularism feminists even queer theory criticisms george marsdens work outrageous idea christian scholarship actually draws parallel160 undoubtedly bitten way chew 40 minutes160 im going mush little bit dr jamie smith leads introduction charles taylor third way understanding secular160 want sort hone morning160 taylor society secular unreligious areligious antireligious160 society secular insofar religious belief belief god understood one option among others society secular insofar religious belief actually belief contestable160160 thats changed160 nobody take belief system axiomatic default society160 everyone sense contestability belief taylor often formulates question way160 says taylor careful say hes telling story west160 thinks theres lot work done think works outside west question something like this160 virtually impossible believe god say 1500 yet year 2000 sectors western society virtually impossible believe god160 1500 something like atheism pretty much intellectually unimaginable whereas live probably sorts spheres run room virtually impossible imagine believing god year 2000 500 years fairly long time160 theres long story told shift story taylor calls disenchantment world160 sense world becomes sort encased imannent frame calls could talk history think interesting important im interested way defines third sense secular move society belief god unchallenged indeed pretty unproblematic one understood one option among others sense live secular age way even religious participation remains high one things one challenges secularization thesis sort trotted 60s70s seemed work fantastically england didnt make much sense united states160 lot galloping forces technological advancement consumer capitalism could still really high religious participation taylor united states still deeply secular society unreligious still society everybody realizes beliefs contested contestable160 thats would mean live secular age160 prediction withering religion less matter whether people going believe going believe thats change160 hell draw peter bergers notion plausibility conditions160 changed would say necessarily beliefs conditions belief160 sort water people swim believe lets taxonomy mind keep mind third sense secular mostly interested let try unpack five simple thesis really amounts nonsecularist account secular160160 say taylor roman catholic actually fairly forthright especially followup work religious motivations sort agenda axetogrind sense sense hes honest commitments brings perspective way sometimes read taylor sophisticated christian apologists working today sense hes honest hes floating thesis says try account theory make sense world live bet taylor would say works better account complexity secular age160 well see works heres five themes want try summarize160 first think important secularity synonymous unbelief160 secular age unbelieving age certainly atheistic age160 age experience contestability belief believers unbelievers would part implication that160secondly ones little trickier 160160the secular taylor puts accomplishment160 whats merely left subtract transcendence let try make sense this160 secularization theorists tell taylor calls subtraction story160 kind whiggish confident progressivist story goes something like this160 times past many many years ago human beings fantastical beliefs gods god160 believed enchanted universe believed spirits active believed natural even natural sense suspended sort nourished supernatural lived fantastical world160160 along came immanuel kant pick isaac newton sort turning point enlightenment160 happens turning point enlightenment humanity wakes disenchantment world natural is160 eventually happens realize supernatural addendum kept adding account cosmos extraneous unnecessary sort settle natural160 sort wake settle naturalized world without reference god gods eternity transcendence whats left subtract fantastical religious beliefs cold hard rationality sort courage look face hard things are160 theres often rational maturation story goes this160 sort grow see way things really whats left subtract secular160 taylor says thats way happened wouldnt even possible160 thats sufficient actually humanity come third piece wasnt enough subtract religious lack better term left natural secular160 also happen become plausible something like nontheism live option belief come alternative accounts significance meaning160 interesting although ways intricate part account left immanent frame kind enclosed universe find way really viable space inhabit meaningfully generate alternative account significance160 taylor calls alternative account exclusive humanism160 means modernity found ways generate projects meaning pursuits even longings could plausibly satisfied without reference transcendence without reference eternity taylor christian stands back looks accomplishment says bravo unthinkable west millennia160 doesnt believe stands back says incredible cultural accomplishment actually managed come vision human significance didnt appeal transcendence eternity thats means exclusive humanism dont know far philosophical weeds want go ill plant little flag160 long story told much vision exclusive humanism long march history taylor kind hegelian actually depends come religions west sort formalizing secularizing couldnt modern moral order people hadnt first learned supposed love neighbors get alternative account love neighbor160 think theres interesting conversation there160 maybe well fourth theme160 immanent frame find secular age crosspressured160 everybody believes anything way everybody finds immanent frame happily confident oblivious challenges right160 words immanent frame matter believe crosspressured space160 ive tried give little lame diagram160 ms words draw function taylor happens really significant everybody let give example160 im believer sort traditional religious perspective secular age immanent frame im going experience crosspressures crosspressures disenchantment im going even believe im going realize believe face neighbors colleagues friends believe something radically different means doubt natural accompaniment faith secular age one could argue fact always case psalms lament example people struggling say could be160 intensified modernity160and think one things im speaking religious communities christian communities particular one things im emphasizing folks need give especially young people permission name articulate doubts water swim160 live crosspressured space unfortunately many religious communities still feel like doubt enemy faith rather companion160 think theres different way think notice crosspressure works everyone160 believer tempted doubt unbeliever also tempted believe remains kind haunting pressure sort pull lure haunting eternity transcendence160 nobody gets encase ensconce insulate crosspressure160 think im going come back moment finally fifth160 means secularity end belief160 instead crosspressures generate nova effect thats im going exploding sort arrow lines here160 taylor calls nova effect many modes believing otherwise160 secular age age unbelief actually really messy complicated crazy world find people experiencing multiple crosspressures almost like pressure builds explodes get kinds ways believing get sort eat pray love ways believing160 get many ways sort oprahsignificance kinds different ways people pursuing spiritual life160 think something like taylors account great alternative sort richard dawkins sam harris world160 much nuanced account well see dr jamie smith implications this160 let first say little bit public square religion160i think one important public political upshots taylors analysis problem doctrinaire secularism secular twoism kind agenda public square sufficiently secular three160 words secularism doctrinaire agenda would say contestability beliefs160 insufficiently secular three160in sense analysis levels playing field160 deploy one taylors distinctions could say dogmatic secularism offers spin world rather take world160 interesting sort like says spin sort closed off160 spin stories tell try protect stick heads sand crosspressure ive given little quadrant religious versions spin basically try protect insulate cross pressure alternatives gets various fundamentalisms160 also secularist two versions spin equally ensconce insulate cross pressure haunting contrast interested taylor interests space people offering spins takes world religious take world open honest enough realize talk students teach christian liberal arts college160 think part teaching well getting actually feel power ultimately reductionistic evolutionary psychological account human know mean160 like unbelievably powerful story gives kinds insights human nature160 dont take seriously never understand people find persuasive kind penultimate account ultimate account offering takes world preferable kinds spin doctors either religious secularist version160 means wonder would change hear whats said public sphere160 one could trenchant critic secular twoism makes sense160 need little tricks here160 yet deeper appreciation secularity secularist160 words could offer trenchant critique secularism dogmatic agenda actually better appreciation secularity contestability belief contemporary world160 thats part im trying work would feel difference160 would change160 think societal sequestration could say evident words know charles murrays book coming apart diagnosing sort almost like postal codes inequality right zip code160 localization two totally different populations think feeling year160 think religious version well people basically sequester kind secularist zip code speak literally dont know people believe160 theyre like what160 religion reporting little bit like went mars found people colorado springs wont believe think little bit sort dynamic it160 partly inhabit theyre coming tight plausibility structure dont bump people think otherwise totally religious version side right160 similar sequestration insulated enclaves160 think thats part need work through160 dont know exactly maps onto presidential campaign year im sure something one theme highlight move important account secularity three theres turning back clock know mean160 cant unknow know right160 simple this160 youve lived street people dont believe believe cant go back world everybody homogenous monolithic right another reason critiques secularism tainted nostalgia world christians america something like right160 mythology best accounts appreciate theres turning back clock michael cromartie160 trying jamie smith160 trying indeed160 absolutely160 thats someone like would critic secular twoism would equally critic nostalgic resentment secularity160 theres lot nuance need account finally let say bit think might change see religion secular age160 first make us newly interested enduring phenomena spiritual longing160 bought secularization thesis probably mostly youre going look things confirm thesis ultimately think pretty small sample say us society fact zoom wider sense secular becomes interesting many enduring expressions longing something ultimate something divine something sense fullness cant reduced natural place160 thats nova effect explosion ways believing wont bore much see popular culture kinds different ways160 one places hear music160 way theres great british novelist julian barnes still think get enough attention wrote sense ending160 probably recent book got awards side pond160 really interesting character hes kind like quintessential person generation grew england religious formation whatsoever160 hes honest 2008 wrote memoir called nothing frightened powerful many ways think kind oblique response richard dawkins160 one point nothing frightened julian barnes says this160 dont believe god miss fascinating right160 encapsulates much age dont believe god miss hes great devotee arts music painting160 whats interesting follow say venice northern italy hes going see paintings loves hes haunted one point pauses ask question must like think true realizes fact world view generated works art treasures one almost completely implausible contemporaries160 interesting dynamic160 dont believe god miss think start looking sorts phenomenon culture one came mind song postal service160 im dating this160 listen lyrics song called clark gable want badly believe truth love real want life every word extent absurd im looking glass light bends cracks im screaming top lungs pretending echoes belong someone someone used know become interested sort hauntings longing something lost right160 thats culture160 steve jobs160 steve jobs fascinating icon someone fit secularization thesis right160 youve got somebody heart silicon valley heart innovation culture heart tech heart design160 whats interesting hes crosspressured160 isaacsons biography theres fantastic episode right near end life tragic early death hubris way led that160 yet listen one encounter one sunny afternoon wasnt feeling well jobs sat garden behind house reflected death160 talked experiences india almost four decades earlier study buddhism views reincarnation spiritual transcendence 5050 im believing god said heres thing160 youre sort resentment mode youre like oh see160 used everybody believed god160 whereas im thinking youre middle bay area somebody tells theyre 5050 believing god160 im like ill take bet160 thats pretty interesting phenomenon160 know hes shadow stanford160 hes 5050 believing god160 ill take said life felt must existence meets eye admitted faced death might estimating odds desire believe afterlife id like think something survives die said strange think accumulate experience maybe little wisdom goes away160 really want believe something survives maybe consciousness endures fell silent long time hand perhaps like onoff switch160 click youre gone paused smiled slightly maybe thats never liked put onoff switches apple devices laughter thats great story kind crosspressured person haunted pulled sort competing longings worries dr jamie smith last example ill give dont time talk terrence malick im excited knight cups tell you160 theres hbo documentary called god bigger elvis160 anybody seen this160 like 30 minutes long160 available free youtube follows story hollywood starlet 50s early 60s named dolores hart160 dolores hart kind living hollywood dream shes starring alongside leading men like well elvis warren beatty160 sense world living right engaged married160 went home new york one weekend ended retreat convent abbey connecticut160 sort like lodged burr side couldnt quite shake went back hollywood pursuing career couldnt shake sense call back regina laudis abbey connecticut160 fact eventually left career broke engagement recall correctly wears wedding dress induction abbey mother prioress lived since think 1963 way man engaged comes see every single week160 hold hands kiss cheek love dearly160 mean powerful story aside story heres interests me160 hbo160 would hbo160 like game thrones channel right way story portrayal would say mix respectful awe puzzled mesmerization160 would somebody give freedom literally cloister celibacy poverty160 yet broadcast hbo interesting phenomenon wonder people already feeling cracks libertinism im starting think already kind openness imagining world otherwise terrence malick tree life160 hes got new film coming christian bale called knight cups160 hes actually philosopher training160 translated work martin heidegger gone really remarkable filmmaker tree life people said kind replay augustines confessions latest work knight cups suffused oblique yet pretty overpowering religious themes hes well respected critics audiences alike160 another example secular age much like films terrence malick stories told sam harris160 theres alternative way deal find might mean religion going forward160 let hazard hypotheses first think taylor helps us make sense spiritual religious phenomenon new ways160 intriguing hardly ever run somebody says im ardent naturalist im completely devoted calculating rationality interest transcendence whatsoever no160 meet people say im spiritual im religious means cant quite shake something moreness calling though admittedly probably kind want terms160 often religion rejected spiritual religious well sometimes religion welllost know160 sort civic deism whatever might ways actually think spiritual religious could better portal people coming authentic thick religious communities sort vague civil religion many years im interested thinking future religion way protestantism grapple fact kind generated spiritual religious phenomenon160 say protestant reason160 one things happens protestantism kind desacramentalization disenchantment sort enchanted world worship happens protestantism ways christianity gets reduced message preached absorbed intellectual receptacles160 thats entirely fair sort snowball gets going160 version religion comes sort intellectualists know itll sound odd say evangelicals intellectuals is160 theres rendition christianity primarily set beliefs affirm160 get taylor calls dynamic excarnation160 incarnation dynamic things becoming embodied160 excarnation christianity becomes increasingly abstracted disembodied160 sort frankensteinish effect sense kind unleashes consequences never ever intended nevertheless unwillingly realized160 think thats part need realize however creates way spirituality spiritual religious also tends kind messageish part ted talks part secular spirituality160 know mean160 clearly sermons secular age right160 theyre place go looking message sort improve whatever might sermonization christianity protestantism kind set us that160 im going say im protestant160 internal critique right michael cromartie160 okay jamie smith160 okay good160 dont want michael mad micael cromartie160 internal critiques faith angle forum jamie smith160 good said heres pieces im interested end secular age humongous book 3 pages kind contemporary analysis160 taylor says this160 closes page 770 heavy concentration atmosphere imamnence kind claustrophobia living immanent frame intensify sense living wasteland subsequent generations many young people begin explore beyond boundaries one little bit prognostication yes find immanent frame160 people inhabit world case whats going happen world going start sort closing going experienced kind arid wasteland allusion ts eliot accidental says youre going see happen hypothesis youre actually going see people find paucity thin fact start actually looking beyond boundaries immanent frame again160 becomes new openness pressures transcendence cant explained away going generate new sort third ways spiritual expression longing160 theyll open takes world fact might like god bigger elvis start wonder renunciation isnt actually way freedom160 theres sort mutual haunting secular ive also thinking last couple months reasons obvious wonder another possibility however side arid wasteland desire strong man world state thats left everybody shifts way foists many expectations state think part feature certain kind modern moral order happens people experiencing benefits experiencing wasteland tangible ways also looking savior pulls levers state dont know160 armchair quarterbacking republican presidential michael cromartie160 leave alone jamie smith160 yeah yeah yeah know laughter jamie smith160 yes160 wonder part could talk secularization felt differently different classes160 secularization felt working class opposed elite educated classes finally think imagine two futures ill speak christianity since thats tradition know would love learn hear traditions think this160 look protestantevangelicalism example see two possibilities160 one trajectory see evangelicals basically racing become mainline liberal protestants160 theres anything wrong that160 well think theres something wrong words happens basically theyll say want kind tack think plausible within modern moral order get certain new rendition protestantevangelicalism looks like predictable trajectory160 also seeing actually might almost call catholic retrieval incarnational sacramental spirituality words youll also see christian communities evangelical communities reacting disenchantment desacramentalization world160 excarnation160 therefore drawn incarnateembodied communal sacramental expressions faith im seeing amongst young people college teach at160 way doesnt mean swim tiber cross bosphorus go orthodox church roman catholic church though thats also happening160 sort make way canterbury would say somebody whats fascinating much nondenominational evangelical congregations waking dynamic retrieving ancient ways christian way arent indigenous piety fact realize need sort anchor like that160 think thats part story look hunch also side wasteland taylor puts sort doityourself spirituality spiritual religious fails fails often fails face crisis160 seems religious communities actually truly robust alternative kind jesusified version spiritual religious would really seen welcome alternative part im watching much kind robust almost kind ancient retrievals faith become live options even though within secular society160 ill stop michael cromartie160 thank jamie smith160 thank much applause michael cromartie160 well ive already got eight people list160 thank you160 saletan saletan slate saletan slate160 okay160 jamie wonderful160 critical theory right need it160 love charles taylor160 love youve added jamie smith160 thank saletan160 need public square160 couple questions answer whichever one like160 one past one point said getting point modern secular morality secularism morality secular age depended come religions west 160and example golden rule think question is160 think contingent160 hadnt something particular religion came allowed us develop foundations secular morality something nature things nature society people example couldnt achieved weve achieved hadnt religion happens promote idea based idea religion time another product time foundation another way asking possibly related160 said one point 1500 atheism intellectually unimaginable160 wonder whether thats actually true160 wonder whether theres little bit german white guy problem that160 perhaps atheism see historical records tend look maybe golden rule inside outside religion question whether progress160 said one point cant turn back secularitythree160 youve lived street people dont believe believe cant go back world everybody homogenous monolithic isnt good empirical way test verify therefore define growing up160 inability go back intellectually means wiser jamie smith160160 great questions first one one things think ive appreciated taylors account actually takes contingency really seriously160 straight progress narrative does160 thinks160 talks calls zigzag approach history160 like things could gone differently particular point means show trace particular contingent genealogy get sort modern moral order universal concern comes remarkable detribalization concern happens universalism christianity every neighbor160 unleashes moral imagination couldnt thought therefore become indebted way hes saying reduces take seriously160 dont know evidence atheists taylors account actually deeply communitarian account160 says look enchanted world160 self also characterized porosity like sense self porous open forces community community porous selves hang together communitarian collective way therefore unbeliever way threat whole also individual unbeliever inhabits enchanted world doesnt think safe redoubt say well dont think thing exists refuse thing would open expose things demonic whatever might be160 thats theres kind package makes atheistic belief rather implausible think160 help dont know160 thats account least160 know hes pushed back some160 would hard find data right given well first history told winners hard least plausible account thinks happens modernity sort disenchant world self calls buffered160160 self get kind cartesian self know cartesian ego kantian ego whos sort selfsufficient entity way option whether believe x z really sort insulated buffered threats come find plausible way make sense dynamics im historian dont want claim that160 last growing dynamic youre saying could see arrival secularthree maturation160 idea saletan160 yeah cant go back jamie smith160 yes saletan160 thats empirical statement jamie smith160 yes saletan160 okay jamie smith160 think want careful seculartwo also growing narrative160 seculartwoism says grew stopped believing160 know sort see way things rationally secularthree would grown narrative weve grown realized actually belief contestable others believe differently think whats interesting someone working internal religious tradition like christianity would also say kind waking reality christianity affirm augustine says find saeculum160 dont pretend otherwise dont immunize eschaton voegelin would put it160 dont confuse realize expect kind thing saletan160 hear correctly story weve grown doesnt distinguish seculartwo secularthree phenomenon cant go back does160 right jamie smith160 think entails right160 secularthree cant go back world one belief system going taken axiomatic default society160 seculartwo youve grown youve learned believe first dont believe that160 means youve believed something get call rational objective neutral unbiased right160 like theres emperors clothes story told seculartwo whereas secularthree find space owning fact believe something160 believe something ultimate also realize cant expect default axiomatic belief shared territory something like michael cromartie carl cannon carl cannon realclearpoliticscom carl cannon realclearpoliticscom160 professor quoted someone didnt get said dont believe god miss jamie smith160 julian barnes carl cannon160 julian barnes160 reminded similar quote dont want like one washington people says said meet press quoting actually dont laughter carl cannon160 dont know said this160 cromartie debate several years160 maybe someone room said it160 please raise hand key west long several hours drinking one participants drinking conversation christopher hitchens left someone said maybe dont know hitchens philosophy seemed god doesnt exist im really pissed serious thing take period time 1500 2000 seems one explanation obvious explanation secular explanation theres inextricable discovery scientific phenomena mostly truths160 source unknown thought unknowable attributed god160 person nonbeliever would say sort steady progress steady inextricable march history polls seeing millennials lot spiritual religious trend never going back160 march western progress dont know progress thats way things going seem without directly taking issue maybe challenge view160 would ask explain little that160 marketplace ideas thing kind fun know journalists thats cool temporary thing160 road know europe jamie smith160 im great fan air conditioning indoor plumbing without question certain kind progress story told modernity dont think discount that160 whats interesting start asking questions counts progress humanity youre burying taylor calls basement levels commitments think counts flourishing example think thats things get little bit contestable160 actually ive loved christopher hitchens years right point started talking religion160 hes much better literature politics religion would say devolves spin rather take reason cant tell sort simplistic dichotomous binary option religious scientific progress since many ways know unleashed scientific endeavor religious communities invested muslim christian would say160 dont think feel tension two things160 im contesting maturation story equates maturity unbelief disbelief160 wake smell disenchantment kinds stories right feel like lot interesting exceptions rule160 didnt build theres fantastic short story david foster wallace published posthumously new yorker simply called older adult narrator talking younger self believes magic160 whats interesting doesnt look back younger self discount it160 says look back see birthed religious reverence characterized whole life even atheism form worship really interesting analysis refuses maturation story160 intrigues gets published new yorker right160 interesting little exception rule would expect kind trenchant secularization160 help carl cannon160 yes michael cromartie160 naomi schaefer riley naomi schaefer riley new york post naomi schaefer riley new york post160 wanted ask wanted dig little deeper sequestration question im sure lot people interested political reasons160 guess conversation 10 15 years ago sequestration would matter elites believing people ground flyover country believing think lot work come last decade suggested incomplete maybe inaccurate picture whats going america today160 lot religious belief country among middle upper classes working class people living poverty least amount religion lives guess im curious think sequestration second kind part ive thinking peter berger question160 suggested point nation indians run swedes nation swedes run indians maybe mean elite belief religion going start trickle back guess one question whether elites sway whether churchgoing frequent churchgoing habits going able trickle back down160 dont know whether political answer im sort curious overall picture think zip codes days jamie smith160 yes160 would fascinated hear others work this160 much sort cuff reflections part160 guess im convinced know sort religious participation seems highly represented sort educated elites might expected kind secularization poor working classes ways might guessed dont know translates confidence elites religiously active constitute majority elite though right160 thats true think still safely say mean many ways confirms james hunters work sense think people inhabit intellectual milieus environments significantly dominated one sort set beliefs expectations make increasingly difficult people imagine alternative guess maybe probably would say one intense examples today university right think last bastion confident modernity secularismtwo many ways still university160 even though theres kinds exceptions rule margins theres still default unwritten scripted orthodoxy university confidently expecting secularization story insofar still incubators cultural influencers guess dont see sample representation elites practicing religious folk significant enough yet sort cascaded shaped whats happening hollywood studios newsrooms160 ill let guys tell theres something asking demographic question whether could imagine us getting point naomi schaefer riley160 well guess religious belief increasingly concentrated upper classes even yet concentrating majority mean isnt kind belief going affect thats going characterizing way practice religion think mind jamie smith yes160 would say hunch though lets say religious folk find sectors also probably well aware realities secular three therefore way engage public conversations seek persuade going different kind slash burn apologetics usually happens sectors chance sort success shaping cultural changing cultural conversation think one piece think also dont know enough real shifts taken place sort working class poor religiosity 160and strikes one things gone away might call lack better term catechesis theres certain failure catechesis churches therefore people dont even feel tensions ought feel sometimes admittedly complete amateur trying understand trump phenomenon little bit michael cromartie160 paul edwards next160 one reasons session jamie smith way lunch twice year eight colleagues talk topics want talk next faith angle160 carl cannon killings san bernardino wanted session well tomorrow morning also carl reminded us soon think naomi new york posts big headline keep god it160 remember that160 daily news naomi schaefer riley160 daily news michael cromartie160 daily news carl made point little unusual remember carl said knew newsroom secular idea would headline please dont bring god discussion something new thats actually came topic160paul edwards paul edwards deseret news paul edwards desert news160 jamie im guessing youre familiar benedict option160 mean something jamie smith160 yes paul edwards160 wondering fits youre thinking here160 might160 talk maybe could explain little bit benedict option thats discussed fits particular retreat secularization jamie smith160 yeah160 least found something say record160 michael cromartie160 want record jamie smith160 rod dreher friend160 yeah think so160 talk loud sec michael cromartie160 yes jamie smith160 benedict option many heard phrase160 id curious160 oh wow160 good right michael cromartie160 want record handle jamie smith160 right fine160 okay160 record think michael cromartie160 want quote jamie smith160 yes160 benedict option certain response religious conservatives sort would say waking fact american culture generally going form faith160 apparently revelation160 therefore way seems clearly catalyzed supreme court gay marriage decision one reasons feel like suspect im deciding either way that160 im saying certain reactionariness find narrow uninteresting160 advocate comes course benedictine tradition monastic life160 really illusion final sentence alasdair macintyres famous work virtue says waiting another benedict come along give us society actually forms virtue character forth benedict option understand iti think misunderstood oftenis prioritizing intentionality within christian communities case much intentional formation less confident able steer shape probably dominate wider cultural conversation actually refusal culture wars well160 find bit frustrating particular reactionary point marriage think live option160 also comes alarmist despairing ways find completely unhelpful break im going give copy fall 2013 issue comment magazine got interview charles taylor couple years ago one things struck hope dominant posture160 think thats really important160 think actually long game perspective long history perspective spend time reading st augustine 5th century nothing surprises like nothing surprises today dont feel like oh goodness sky falling supreme court decision something like that160 theres different set expectations finally would say rod advocating new thing sounds like church always supposed doing160 comes little bit like heres next great thing turns weve failed supposed rods friend whats odd much sort draws work sort articulate yet feel certain distance comes grumpy alarmist despair dont really want associated michael cromartie160 im delighted record160 nothing controversial laughter jamie smith160 well one book blurb im writing laughter michael cromartie160 helpful im giving talk next month discuss benedict option160 quote jamie smith160 oh great michael cromartie160 affirm point miranda kennedy james hunter miranda kennedy npr miranda kennedy npr160 fascinated description convince students seductive like rationalist darwinistic version history get right jamie smith160 notice im working certain student population know teach calvin college160 many ways windows wide open know sort engaged many students know significant percentage students coming k 12 christian education well without reactionary grand rapids michigan sometimes call grusalem theres still pretty thick plausibility structures region could get away like days wish calvin college college university michigan could inhabit spaces feel crosspressure little intensely160 context im trying foster intellectual honesty realize saying lot true things beings human origins also feel compellingness right like adequate story explain lot want feel precisely theyre sent living sort oblivious bubble miranda kennedy160 right 160because havent like chosen benedict option yet theyre jamie smith160 exactly miranda kennedy160 im interested grown particular narrative one convince seductive know seeing inside christian world totally opposite world views understand perhaps know politically kinds divisions wonder think ways could break divisions better lives mean inside american culture jamie smith160 ways come rather michael cromartie160 discuss book jamie smith160 yeah right also kind called secular parenthesis mean actually think theres ways us need learn secular160 right160 im saying christian communities religious communities also ways want learn that160 breaking exactly space want live fantastic experience week ago tonight160 conversation new york kwame anthony appiah name know ghanaian english philosopher nyu ethicist law school advocate calls cosmopolitanism really significant book people talking years ago identifies atheist public conversation well heres thing160 frame debate pluralism toleration common good christian atheist160 im interested debate160 im much interested first showing much common many ways trying deconstruct caricatures think lot folks would christianity say absolutely heres affirm goods toleration heres affirm pluralism heres affirm common good heres ways overlap share concerns getting point could push actually blast160 loved one hand articulates vision cosmopolitanism perfect expression modern moral order160 start asking moral sources would really fund basically starts talking raised methodist ghana sort intuitions sort spiritual inclinations absorbed way replaying kind western story ways160 cosponsored christian groups campus secularist group campus humanist society muslim student society think kind atheist secularists christian groups looking fireworks right thats bill debate completely disappointed absolutely blast actually completely awe stage modeled hope mode ad hoc collaboration without pretending didnt ultimate differences feel like theres lot room hunger that160 stories might tell university ive actually mostly great experiences kind thing160 feel like steward spaces could ways160 speak miranda kennedy160 guess160 im sure entirely agree consistently jamie smith160 sure miranda kennedy160 im interested think theres hunger think theres strong hunger debate like said160 people want clashes boring hear people supposed opposite sides kind coming together jamie smith160 yeah miranda kennedy160 necessarily agreeing160 also asking hearing one anothers viewpoints feel jamie smith160 oh160 youre sequestered160 actually bump miranda kennedy160 yeah160 sequestration happens many levels society jamie smith 160yes miranda kennedy160 long know instance like christian evangelicals actually believed know hearts minds home160 politicized version got know transmuted public square jamie smith160 yeah160 remember molly worthen piece weeks ago times sunday veritas forum augustine collective movements ivy league campuses think goal make sure intellectual tradition christianity heard elite university spaces agree160 sociologist wrote big sort right160 keep sifting overcome think huge challenge yeah michael cromartie160 bill bishop jamie smith160 bill bishop yes michael cromartie160 quickly point paul edwards paul edwards160 appiah160 ive heard talk paul cosmopolitan jamie smith160 oh yeah absolutely paul edwards160 know hes jamie smith160 absolutely apostle paul paul edwards160 apostle paul strong thinking jamie smith160 yeah160 galatians 2160 neither jew greek neither slave free neither male woman yeah michael cromartie160 james hunter youre next james hunter university virginia james hunter university virginia160 thank you160 jamie thank terrific lecture want push back though taylor jamie smith160 yeah great james hunter160 mean anyone take charles taylor160 think certain important points needs pushed back against160 strength phenomenologist jamie smith160 yes james hunter160 talking religious experience religious belief super nova describes think fair description happens late modern world private sphere personal experience160 culture really important culture reducible individual belief culture sum total individual belief160 culture powerful symbolic order independent people believe dont believe always imbed powerful institution speaks wills question earlier atheists 1500s160 atheists back 1500s think well interesting empirical question level doesnt matter symbolic order dominant institutions back infused religious imagery religious signifiers powerful symbols160 may atheists probably wouldnt gathered much werent politicized160 may probably much public sphere however world finance say medical research political campaigning whatever sphere culture contested well certainly contested terms mechanics logic running campaign medical research whatever someones personal beliefs may frameworks understanding frameworks action rules people operate defined technical rationality disenchanted secular really say contested airline pilot pentecostal snake handler hold beliefs long dont bring cockpit jamie smith160 yeah snakes james hunter160 okay160 theres movie jamie smith160 snakes plane laughter james hunter160 movie culture public sphere disenchanted oriented toward kind technical functional rationality totalizing160 operates within latent epistemology positivist ethics utilitarian teleology problemoriented serious hyper goods anyone could agree upon160 provides plausibility structure kind exclusive secularism question given mean think taylor describes accurate insofar bears private life personal experience individual belief on160 dont think extends symbolic order institutional realities public sphere160 part political dilemma global politics even national politics pushback totalizing secular ethos160 fair critique taylor160 seem enthusiast dont want make proxy would love hear views jamie smith160 no160 think youre something160 couple things come mind160 one mean want pilot work way right160 seems like certain kind hate term theres certain kind compartmentalization would welcome seems right160 dont know want dynamics get plane going kind want us stay within logic hand guess ive always thought taylor feels extent wider symbolic universe dominated disenchantment160 least feel that160 think thinks thats localized160 mean youre interested particularly influential sort elite culture shaping centers would much true right think interesting interviewed taylor says started thinking secular age 60s oxford160 knew already going write secular age 60s oxford experience university found university says believe unbelievable everybody else thats around think could actually grant lot account way would also become way assess degree assimilation religious communities technical rationality utilitarianism right160 way simply play along logic market whatever might unwittingly get sucked seeing overall logic society market something like think thats right160 weve underestimated extent disenchantment disenchanted sense160 true160 think probably taylor best hes trying sometimes says hes trying describe feels like right160 thats individual sort subjective experience feel like believe age160 feel like believe age160 yeah welcome conversation160 need think that160 thats great michael cromartie160 go break andrew miller youll take us break andrew miller economist andrew miller economist 160yeah enjoyed talk much160 thought important wanted offer guess defense secularism jamie smith160 yeah yeah andrew miller160 briefly least critique critique secularism think although hurried kind lighted things little bit160 course reasons say account history end history know hasnt turned prophetic160 aggressive sort know program youll least possibly advisory right sort pope know long term agenda160 guess lot couldhavebeen secularists would say contrary events last 20 years made urgent creed jamie smith160 yeah conversation need would say reply think one things feeling country right actually effects secularization eroded sorts institutions used actually foster civic camaraderie life ways weve lost sort know religion source evil kinds arguments want meet account much religious institutions responsible formation well character habits dispositions inclinations actually also made us better citizens160 secularization entails erosion kinds institutions get paucity civic life currently experiencing would say remember though even someone coming religious tradition actually pretty ardent advocate secularity three healthy realization160 fact ive spending lot time british theologian ethicist oliver odonovan160 fascinating work history one point says society christian secular actually one attentive penultimate reality least inclined sort invest penultimate ultimate sort significance feel like one things thats happening jody bottums work think diagnosed precisely lose transcendent eternal happen everybody turn penultimate ultimate 160and political identities political allegiances characterized kind religious fervor almost makes impossible us collaboration space andrew miller160 guess youre secularist youd say question sort postreligious morality know absence know ghosts religion god160 like french revolutionist early say much early say160 know moment really existed short space human history jamie smith160 sure one last thing though160 totally conversation want next five years think struck secularistic accounts morality also still tend imagine morality primarily set beliefs expectations160 whats missing actually perfect segue afternoon160 think missing secular accounts morality precisely account habit160 order talk habits disposition need communities character160 james hunters book160 maybe secularist account communities theyre feel like havent conversation yet yeah great point michael cromartie160 okay160 come back break tom youre first break michael cromartie160 waiting others come would mention jamies new book next month160 called love jamie smith160 youre good agent michael cromartie160 like promote books here160 book charles taylor called secular160 coming next month tom youre first tom gjelten npr tom gjelten npr okay160 right break jamie categorized healthy advocate secularization three160 say youre advocate certain type secularity kind obligates pronounce issues public even political debate right jamie smith160 hereby retract laughter tom gjelten160 huge issue meaning religious liberty interpret first amendment know mandating congress establish religion limit exercise thereof160 reading interview charles taylor talks open secularism versus closed secularism says closed secularism instead regime defends everyones freedom conscience whether religious nonreligious becomes secularism wary religion always ready set limits it160 nonreligion becomes common principle although tolerate religion stays place sounds much like potter stewart argued 1960 saying government takes strict view separation church state actually elevates secularism level rival religion therefore know neutrality far role government issue know complicated might first appear160 implications fact live era contested belief mean neutrality state comes expressions religion jamie smith160 yeah160 im trying think another court decision im going able retrieve top head160 taylor interview advocates calls open secularism right160 form disestablishment one asks people leave religious identities door proverbal naked public square make room people bring fullness public square160 thats im envisioning160 state states responsibility fair neutral weasel word obviously well fight lot fairness looks like160 think difference jerry talking laïcité france live option quebec well taylors working from160 whats interesting precisely societies religion totalizing institutional expression church sort running things also get alternative laicity ardent secularism endorsed state basically think religious liberty thats imagined kind secular three middle one obviously establish church160 establish particular religion making space people come thickness religious commitments160 truly pluralist space think another way frame tension secularism actually homogenizing agenda versus secularity three makes room genuine pluralism160 piece comes mind limits freedom conscience model entirely envisions religious belief individual phenomenon right believe think wrestling right last years might call institutional religious freedom right160 bodies kind freedom160 know stanley carlsonthies tom gjelten160 sure jamie smith160 institutional religious freedom alliance saying cant think religious freedom permission private believe want weekends160 religion way life shared communal bodies also find healthy ways make room bodies live that160 thats im imagining good thing feel like im answering question though tom gjelten160 no160 youre beginning answer it160 youre taking degree wanted take jamie smith160 okay160 yeah tom gjelten160 pronounce know religious liberty160 mean ted cruz said religious liberty election160 hes one made argument forcefully state allow people pray school know know interfere religious beliefs public square well private square160 im wondering know jive jamie smith160 yeah160 thats messy isnt feel like im trying think thats mean religious liberty actually mean theres still quite allied state craft expression this160 whereas think im pronouncing take say catholic social teaching subsidiarity means kinds layers levels spheres culture beyond state significant society whole would say whats crucial secure religious liberty institutional expressions guess im less inclined imagine religious liberty means repristinating public schools used thought everybody christian160 hope getting trouble somewhere yeah doesnt seem odonovan says christian state secular actually recognizes contested nature saeculum160 hand wife joan lockwood odonovan also christian legal scholar written fascinating paper establishment church england actually best thing religious minorities messy want think it160 good making room communities pursue faith ways meaningful also allow contribute public sphere thats im sort looking for160 feel guess think certain legitimacy people could feel like decisions policies last years impinged religious liberty institutions particular160 thats different sort prayer schools kind dynamic160 tell im canadian160 take grain salt fights little bit different fights way michael cromartie160 okay160 mort kondracke mort kondracke roll call mort kondracke roll call160 tossed reference strong man something future fear immediate future wanted expand little bit theory big sort160 whats happened america religious people gone sphere160 go churches go watch fox news vote republican avoid elites oppose sex marriage strongly shout it160 whereas seculars inhabit city university sure say things like well poor people160 cling guns religion160 president obama would know one elites although claimed never mind see call turning back160 see attempt turn back division society polarization politically religiously160 confusion sort expressions rage constantly drummed along activist groups radio talk show hosts cable channels stuff like war going war steps somebody saying follow me160 solve all160 ill fix it160 ill make america great again160 think theres actually kind strange religious component ill make way back 50s going call merry christmas right jamie smith160 yeah mort kondracke160 thats message think differs youre hopefully saying sort acceptance secularity jamie smith160 yes160 dont want pretend160 im political commentator michael cromartie160 oh go ahead laughter jamie smith160 guess part even conversations today mean learning experience me160 part wish knew dynamics could call secularization working class sudden im really really interested hunch actually engine secularization walmart nyu160 mean sort force cultural liturgies consumerism consumption finding meaning kind economic expression powerfully think formative last generation two160 mall convinced us anything subtly coopted us liturgies people effectively secularized insofar theyve given realities market consumption way theyre going happy going experience failures market deliver ways almost kind religious crisis them160 right160 youre looking somebody pull levers make system generate promised you160 think kinds sheer straight xenophobia thats work thing struck totally amateur pundit160 wonder extent dynamic reality people find million miles political power machinations political power160 government always sort distant magic youre looking magician160 know mean160 youre looking guy promises make magic work you160 think sign disenfranchisement disenchantment dont answers160 im totally thinking alongside you160 could see clearly capitalizing campaign attempt rollback secularity three unconstructive resentment apparently works thats disturbing thats im trying think almost way understand tap kind religious dynamic right160 kind religious response160 im sure know michael cromartie160 quickly point naomi david brooks next naomi schafer riley160 wonder whether connection mean economic horses didnt pop suddenly seen moving away institutions160 mean used connect people centers power whether political parties churches jamie smith160 yes naomi schafer riley160 connection working time forcing maybe people making people feel like hands forced jamie smith160 yes160 sort robert putnam analysis alongside right160 yeah good160 helpful michael cromartie160 david brooks napp david brooks160new york times david brooks new york times160 mentioned taylors praises secularism last 500 years creating great achievement create purely humanistic account meaningful life looks like160 went describe super nova crosspressured individual160 described beautiful examples person whether julian barnes david foster wallace terrence malick steve jobs even trump supporters guess160 dont seem complete160 dont seem example purely humanistic account meaningful life160 good examples people achieved laughter jamie smith160 well would saints right david brooks160 theyre haunted godism almost every case whether jobss 5050 barnes wallace jamie smith160 dorothy day160 im going chapters book right laughter jamie smith160 wouldnt dorothy day fantastic illustration somebody clearly inhabited crosspressured space160 like living naïve lala land protected that160 mean think actually elies book four right oconnor percy day merton right david brooks160 yes jamie smith160 four compelling stories michael cromartie160 whats title book jamie smith160 paul elie life save may own160 sort like four biographies catholic artists novelists yeah guess keep looking examples like people felt cross pressure walked it160 taylor actually thinks gerard manley hopkins another example160 ivan illich know folks felt honestly traumatically even failures sort modern promises havent retreated repristinating ways sort forged new paths thats ends secular age saying look poets sort working level imagination helps us see future david brooks160 going say weve moved 500 years secularism160160 wound dorothy day havent moved far jamie smith160 sense recovery mean david brooks160 mean secular people would say dorothy day secular person jamie smith160 ah160 well shes secular third sense right david brooks160 get youre thinking jamie smith160 interesting160 nancey murphy taught long time fuller seminary used talk called omega shape history sort ancient medieval kind world view plausibility structures160 revolutions modernity set us detour turns postmodernity come back place actually remarkable amount continuity gone before160 turns sort detour went through160 cant forget youre different space think thats theres always going something strange right160 theres always going element memory guess this160 sometimes like taylor says tell think saint francis tell youre sort basement assumptions think saint francis basically chose live deformed life already know believe think saint francis icon flourishing youve got totally different account flourish160 think always going competition two michaelmichael cromartie160 excellent160 napp nazworth napp nazworth christian post napp nazworth christian post160 want talk evangelicals160 talking two trajectories second trajectory nonmainline protestant one said nondenominational congregations retrieving ancient ways christian160 three questions give us specific examples theyre that160 tie secular three160 also congregations youre talking related things like urban versus rural small church big church mega church multiracial multiethnic churches versus mostly white churches seeing jamie smith160 yeah160 great questions160 probably flag saying im probably seeing selfselecting sample people inviting places160 ways would say im protestant evangelical sees mission remind evangelicals theyre catholic sense think small c catholic160 want say big c catholic necessarily roman160 okay160 believe holy catholic church160 mean helping seems viability faith communities secular three age directly indexed ability draw wells older modernity160 right fact nostalgic retrieval basically finding ways faithful present draw tied ancient medieval ways spirit led throughout ages160 thats kind mean catholicity160 see remarkable surprising openness places would never expect another book called desiring kingdom kind academic version love kind making case160 get calls places like dallas theological seminary160 know dallas seminary160 kind like heart dispensationalist evangelicalism theyre reading stuff talking ancient liturgies saint augustine kinds things 160so two congregations come mind160 one christ community church de moines iowa started plant massive baptist megachurch city sort went intentional liturgical sacramental catholic almost monastic expression ironically looked around realized really consistent shouldnt independent right160 woven web sort body community160 actually ended joining mennonite church160 theyre kind sacramental mennonites basically stanley hauerwas congregation thats des moines160 want characterize that160 urban also kind know definitely midwestern sort thing160 could talk bunch congregations brooklyn associated presbyterian church america resurrection network churches also sort tapping liturgical ancient sacramental heritage way could say reenchanted christianity160 place like sojourn nondenominational church louisville kentucky160 whats going everybody would say waking dynamics david james going talk dynamics formation character160 theyre realizing worship sort incubator formation christian character become intentional worship looks like looks like retrieving ancient forms160 theres interesting think consistent secular three reality160 maybe actually comes back benedict option kind stuff saying well know sort underestimated power formation cultural liturgies need weve left treasures cultural formation religious tradition table fact took cultural liturgies thought could make church cool would make like mall rock concert coffee shop turns dynamics assimilation160 ethnic piece im sure would confident assessment would say like place like sojourn know elite educated class kind dynamic thats quite working class congregation160 id digging around know unidentified person changing worship service jamie smith 160how changing worship service160 basically theyre going call sort talking head brain stick model walk sing 30 minutes emotive songs sit 45minute lecture think people would feel like kind catholic rhythm right see worship narrative performance beginning end theyre sort walking dynamics know confession absolution heres untold story think 160i dont know counts journalists fascinating many presbyterian churches observe weekly eucharist communion160 thats always little signal160 whenever run evangelical churches practicing weekly communion lords supper whats happened effectively appropriated catholic cadence right theyre often intentional everybodys like oh supposed every week160 wont special anymore whatever160 theres lot thats kind evangelical denominational realities like presbyterian churches mentioned also bunch nondenominational churches feel like something interesting160 dont know160 think interesting bellwether actually kind contemporary congregations looking resources ancient formative practices thats way would narrate michael cromartie160 okay160 abdullah jessica stern imam abdullah antepli duke university abdullah antepli duke university160 thank james160 fascinating compilation160 two questions160 one simplistically talk two schools thought secularism feel two anglosaxon schools secularism centric theres french secularism grew turkey disbelief grudgingly accepting religion going disappear control it160 almost treating religion like herpes160 going go away laughter jamie smith160 prophylactic abdullah antepli160 yes exactly160 people different proportions both160 theres hybrid secularism people anglosaxontype seculars unto faith tradition towards towards faith traditions become immediately french type secularism ted cruz hes advocating people pray people ask muslims pray160 jews pray160 hindus pray160 becomes incredibly french secularist says thats absolutely case much hybrid people one kind160 even like many christians secular anglosaxon types comfortable religion remaining within four walls church160 especially episcopalians dont know goes beyond four walls church etc160 feel conversations anglosaxon type centric second160 also beautifully discussed social manifestation intellectual religious sort shifts patterns society liberal protestant centric160 conversations patterns discuss means face major demographic changes happening american society160 conversations mean practicing catholics muslims jews really like jamie smith160 thats great160 first analysis brilliant160 way account anglosaxon sense im comfortable say little bit know engage160 defined french well abdullah antepli160 four jamie smith160 im never going forget religion herpes laughter jamie smith160 characterizes anglosaxon youre describing abdullah antepli160 anglosaxon secularism divides religion separation church state respects religion160 innate hostility towards religion160 respects religion believe like john adams type secularism 160its america mainly built upon personal life french secularism innate hostile towards religion jamie smith160 yes yes abdullah antepli160 get sort considers religion something afraid limited jamie smith160 would say think thats helpful160 would say legitimate worry certain kind elite sectors united states tend towards french abdullah antepli160 yes jamie smith160 yes160 also breeds resentment abdullah antepli160 absolutely jamie smith160 religious communities abdullah antepli160 absolutely yeah jamie smith160 thats great point160 mean dont anything really add others saying guess way would push back french sort revolutionary model point something like tom saying actually happens actually make secularism kind religion religionlike least right thats want sort unleash epistemological dogs call question underwrites kind confidence160 really helpful160 liberal protestant concernwell thats really thats trying stick know right would want hear religious traditions see navigating like example160 could muslim communities accept something like secularity three analysis160 words something like analysis available broadly would think differently resources160 would love hear abdullah antepli160 anglosaxon type secularism ideal model160 muslims coming united states come incredible attraction appeal anglosaxon secularism many suffering french type secularism160 many countries like tunis turkey learned french teachers even mastered understanding despite post911 realities many american muslims feel practice religion comfortably america anywhere else160 parameters developed yet jamie smith160 yeah thats helpful160 mean strike theres probably interesting conversation us history regard given early commerce france united states ideology opposed work joan lockwood odonovan england way actually establishment church good religious minorities actually religious minorities nonchristian minorities strongest opponents disestablishment church160 would illustration anglosaxon model160 yeah thats really helpful160 thats great160 thank michael cromartie160 okay160 jessica stern next jessica stern boston university jessica stern160 thank much160 said think educational incredibly moving im really grateful jamie smith160 thank jessica stern boston university160 wondering whether pressure secularity three results part declining percentage christians united states canada160 looking pew polls know keep talking whats happening united states whos less religious whos more160 latest pew poll shows 2007 2014 religiously affiliated persons went somewhat 83 percent 77 percent theres slight decline160 secularism nonetheless slight decline group responsible decline least according poll millennials160 working class although ive seen sociologists claim working class people leaving church160 brings question course related obsessions kept coming heard speaking universalist impulse religion versus particularist160 encourage thick version secularity three perhaps discouraging particularist impulse doesnt become majoritarian rule christians feel home jamie smith160 yes160 great ive learning much160 helpful michael cromartie160 think answer let heard day wonderful comment160 somebody said problem theocracy everybody wants theo laughter jamie smith160 yes160 mean first point think whats interesting sort pew demographic snapshot would say sign arriving secularity three160 set shifts taking place within secularity three reality long time right could grant speed secularity three seeps social imaginary society taylor puts slower united states continental europe united kingdom something like that160 think thats probably true160 whats interesting demographic story hard know cause affect right whether think symptomatic things already taken place think reality immigration precisely ramping learning curve us society appreciating right canada interesting160 taylor talks one features belief secular age feel cross pressure talks fragilization belief right160 thats sense way cant naively confidently assume way seeing world way seeing world think realities immigration bring worlds religions beliefs home people obviously like education ramps exponentially appreciating dynamic also think get resentment kind movements get steam behind kind repristination dynamics universalist particularist thats really interesting160 think ive wondering lately generally im suspicious talking religion160 know mean160 im sure theres understand works certain shorthand get phenomena think usually ever religions seems religions oh gosh im going say seems expressions religions internal account believers ought universalist universal across religions right160 dont want pick universalism versus particularism right160 think could make case ways fostering might kind benedict option logic fostering deep catechesis particular religion precisely foster people make room pluralistic public sphere160 dont know make sense160 dont know160 great thing think michael cromartie160 okay160 kathleen parker daniel kathleen parker160160washington post kathleen parkerwashington post160 first apologize dragging conversation sublime mundane question may come up160 may discussed absence please stop thats case wondering would interested thoughts evangelical support donald trump know im sure issues know evangelicals arent evangelicals issues may important religious beliefs160 know donald trump says hes christian doesnt need forgiveness hes otherwise unchristianlike anyone weve ever seen theories attracted explanation odd support jamie smith160 yeah160 two160 im sociologist im philosopher160 im poor country philosopher two things160 one spectacular failure catechesis160 know mean either way say super tuesday watching data come turned also think 35 percent catholics also voted trump160 felt least little bit relief160 guy problem strikes dealing something toms story npr covered extent evangelical identifier like descriptor people put themselves160 label wear160 insofar thats coupled spectacular failure catechesis mean like actual instruction faith people almost fill descriptor whatever think certain badge ask x160 yes im evangelical160 support donald trump160 yes do160 theres much experienced tension kathleen parker160 well well make christians across board rather evangelical special jamie smith160 would change data though kathleen parker160 jamie smith160 wonder160 see feel like piece im interested relates theme excarnation talking about160 volatile hypothesis sense hunch evangelicalism form protestantism susceptible turning christianity web beliefs assent doesnt necessarily come ton connection way life practice get really never supposed happen get nominal evangelicals whereas people became evangelicals nominal lutherans whatever160 know mean160 something weird160 particularly regions like south works think polling social science could much finegrained ask selfdescriptor question toms story dig level practice participation think see different numbers trump example160 think probably also explains massachusetts number youre irish south boston youre catholic course even though youve never church years right theres affiliation opposed practice think really crucial michael cromartie160 data jamie hold people go church least week160 maybe twice numbers trump go way down160 always thought ive said john green whos whos political scientist demographer thought description evangelical person actually goes church lot jamie smith160 right michael cromartie160 says evangelical means faithful participant church wednesday night bible studies160 therefore ive calls question word evangelical become flimsily described south carolina somebody says well must evangelical160 yeah think so160 go church year easter jamie smith160 yeah michael cromartie160 well thats evangelical kathleen parker160 south carolina say evangelicals people laughter jamie smith160 would also add one related something talking earlier response napp160 one things intrigues evangelical protestants start kind embracing catholicity account160 would say baked dna expression formation christianity something weds people thats transnational ancient undercuts nationalism whereas sort intellectualized christianity brains stick think also susceptible coopted nationalisms160 might also explain trump phenomena maybe little bit ted cruz phenomena michael cromartie160 point jessica daniel youre next jessica stern160 wonder whether concept liturgy mall helps explain maybe theres time think brilliant topic160 hope youll get jamie smith160 oh160 yeah160 dont know will160 love160 words one things ive trying push way different way thinking religion constellation beliefs doctrines ideas actually formative way life160 something thats practiced160 primacy practice start looking religion way youll also realize competing religions arent things call religions160 actually liturgies consumerism cathedrals consumerism mall whatever might powerfully cooptive rival gospels messages religions think lot explanatory dynamic say protestant evangelical assimilation wider cultural dynamics somebody changed mind160 somebody trained hearts160 coopted rival liturgies catalyzes new intentionality christian liturgical formation counter measure michael cromartie160 okay160 daniel wajahat daniel lippman politico daniel lippman politico160 thank much160 twopart question160 would address responsibility evangelicals know christians general protestants catholics guess secularists kind split away people religious america think oh people crazy160 dont associate160 know big sort theory whats responsibility evangelicals splitting feel like city slickers dont feel attachment like two different countries think thats going continue second part question youve talked secularism hurt country little bit know ways talked that160 done keep america democracy dial back secularism people know whats practical thing done address still keep return back religion everything jamie smith160 yes thats great160 thank you160 first point mean perfectly honest think way harder almost impossible religious people insulate secularism society secular elites ensconce without ever bump religious people reasons like james mentioning way symbolic universes cultural systems kind hooked mean soon cable fundamentalism dead160 know mean160 like theres theres went resistance think story daniel lippman160 dont look jamie smith160 youre right160 absolutely ways im condoning im saying also understand feelings stuff kind crammed throats160 know mean160 us raising four kids youre working kinds intentional measures cocoon intentional formation theres kind competition see feel like fair game160 goliath gets pull strings society160 second question think really interesting160 academics worst keep thinking books popular jeffrey stout princeton somebody actually hed fascinating figure bring here160 hes religion department princeton university160 wrote book called democracy tradition stout takes emersonian160 kind traditional religious affiliation ardent critic secularism way ive describing it160 think end yet hes also critical people like stanly hauerwas benedict option people thinks sounds like hes giving license longer participate public sphere common good says need religious folks participate democracy good democracy160 would say one move find interesting stop focusing federal politics160 whats interesting frames look like religious folk lets say get involved engaged municipal politics neighborhood politics state politics like taking seriously ways layers republic time get federal politics train wreck gridlock160 whereas theres meaningful know mayor city council pretty powerful shaping way people live lives city160 encouraging lower level democratic participation another reason though im really interested work oliver odonovan basically shows christians example invested democracy ways owes legacy religious traditions160 theres genealogy story tell shouldnt choose two think michael cromartie160 okay160 wajahat wajahat ali al jazeera america wajahat ali al jazeera america160 good morning everyone160 unable meet last night160 im unofficial ambassador moderate muslims everywhere160 abdullah last moderate muslims earth laughter wajahat ali160 unicorns160 thats record way laughter wajahat ali160 thank understanding joke160 hip crowd speaking religious minorities know touched upon using definitions weve discussed secularities secularism even type fundamentalism either religious fundamentalism even type personality160 think inaudible describing160 think hed say trump voter emerged wants things go back way black white television things simple people like didnt exist difficult names 160these multihyphenated names160 know two skin colors caramel mocha know im sitting thinking modern america160 existence religious minorities160 talk muslims seem animating discussion160 could talk jews hindus existence religious minorities america existence swagger prominence emergence religious minorities america ironically fueling secularism manifested new atheists also secularity160 also religious fundamentalism say role place religious minorities future america160 want hear thoughts jamie smith160 im immediately going abdullahs frame would fuel secularism secularism kind french model first probably doesnt grain nuance thinks seeing religious communities michael cromartie160 repeat french model jamie smith160 religion herpes160 forget laughter michael cromartie160 wanted hear laughter jamie smith160 yeah could see that160 would absolutely contribute secularity three well160 although would say contribute awareness like sort like wake smell secularity three obviously live contested diverse space somebody sees secularity three actually healthy environment religious communities called welcome that160 like seems like good160 clearly see also becomes catalyst resentment resentment also mean kind retrenchment back myth160 thats turning back clock thing think characterized kind going say ignorance see unidentified person160 naïveté jamie smith160 naïveté160 yes yes naïveté michael cromartie160 nice way saying ignorance jamie smith160 yeah160 guess whats worrisome though much energy seems able generate160 like theres still thats still tapping something here160 go ahead wajahat ali160 specifically one community dont think discussed look religious communities like evangelical communities example whether theyre real evangelicals go church ones virtue checking box like trump voter160 im simplistic now160 im really curious see communities traditions values similar oftentimes might seen inaudible people what160 muslims similar values evangelicals jamie smith160 yeah yeah wajahat ali160 went allboys jesuit catholic high school dominated every semester came religious studies way laughter wajahat ali160 made priest weep every day laughter wajahat ali160 stories like know studied bibles literature traditional values whats interesting agree secularism aspect secularity aspect it160 position religious minority swagger lets say muslims jews catholics comes evangelical christians feel like emergence religious minority 160in america forcing retrench160 instead embrace secularity three talk jamie smith 160yes160 interesting weve also muslim students come calvin college christian liberal arts college precisely see ethos hospitable would want live faith michigan state something like analysis want give evangelicals responding way way youre noting something going something evangelical identity trumping political interests point160 know mean160 want say religious identity stalking horse code something else need diagnosis protestant evangelicalism seems susceptible coopted forces yet could still wear like extent evangelicalism something wear really cover american nationalism something like that160 seems susceptible united states ways places160 almost need almost get level theological correction within christian community keep bringing catechesis like people really understand doing160 actually tom fascinating conversation last night saying stat160 seventy percent muslims voted george w bush 2000 election precisely social values right obviously radically changes 911 yet im christian whos interested public life common good see significant compatriots endeavor muslim jews actually share lot concerns160 feel like resources internal christian tradition narrate exactly ought that160 feel like im answering question though160 help michael cromartie160 know break lunch160 okay160 clare duffy youre going take us lunch clear concise question clare duffy nbc nightly news clare duffy nbc nightly news160 really short question promise160 sort random160 impression libertinism attach secularity said one point cracks appeared libertinism jamie smith160 yes clare duffy160 impression attach michael cromartie160 need dates jamie smith160 okay160 may spoken hastily160 guess depends story want tell 1960s160 wasnt allegedly insofar maybe could say heart secularist outlook therefore even sic lot secular spiritualties valorization autonomy ultimate good clare duffy160 hm jamie smith160 would say also woven american declaration independence anyway thats different theme160 gets realized different ways seems one realization sexual revolution 60s think already interesting phase dont know160 im total square160 dont know things go feel like theres certain reassessment going on160 least im generation sort kids whose parents divorced multiple times over160 asking questions certain sexual mores taken granted john updike novels dont get replayed novels david foster wallace fascinating know two totally different worlds association libertinism tying trenchant fixation autonomy really good could affirmed wondering whether people already feeling effects that160 said married 19 say michael cromartie160 id like give another commercial160 want get lessthan 3minute summary life thought saint augustine google jamie smith augustine youtube160 jamie guess anticipation book isnt jamie smith160 yeah another big book im working michael cromartie160 well whats book called jamie smith160 road augustine think augustine great somewhat ripping david think augustine great postmodern saint actually lived certain kind cross pressure know wolf wall street augustine lupin de milan wolf milan160 lived leos life sort realized found fullness wholeness different story160 im playing kerouacs road thats next project michael cromartie160 title jamie smith160 road augustine michael cromartie160 coming jamie smith160 love also much augustinian inaudible michael cromartie160 one coming jamie smith160 well still needs written 2018 michael cromartie160 oh see160 hasnt written yet jamie smith160 michael cromartie160 okay160 youtube jamie augustine laity lodge little twoandahalf two minutes forty seconds overview gives augustines important today really really valuable160 aim promote speakers books youtube cds music whatever laughter jamie smith160 youre taking back preacher days preacher brought tapes back michael cromartie160 yes exactly160 join thanking speaker morning jamie smith160 thank much 160thanks great conversation 160 160 160 participants wajahat ali160al jazeera america fred barnes160the weekly standard mindy belz160world magazine shannon bream160fox news carl cannon160realclearpoliticscom clare duffy160nbc nightly news paul edwards160deseret news tom gjelten160npr erica grieder160texas monthly miranda kennedy160npr morton kondracke160roll call amp congressional quarterly daniel lippman160politico andrew miller160the economist napp nazworth160the christian post kathleen parker160washington post kirsten powers160the daily beast naomi schaefer riley160new york post sarah jane rothenfluch160oregon public broadcasting saletan160slate graeme wood160the atlantic 160 | 11,777 |
<p>WASHINGTON — Republican leaders were stung by another defeat Wednesday when the Senate rejected a repeal of the Obamacare law and its mandates on coverage, taxes and Medicaid expansion.</p>
<p>The Senate voted 55-45 against the repeal bill.</p>
<p>Seven Republicans, including Sen. Dean Heller, R-Nev., voted against repeal of the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare, leaving in doubt what GOP leaders will be able to cobble together in a final bill this week.</p>
<p>“Today’s vote to fully repeal Obamacare without an immediate replacement plan would create more uncertainty in Nevada’s already fragile market and is not in the best interest of my state,” Heller said.</p>
<p>In addition to Heller, GOP senators from other Medicaid expansion states voted against the repeal, including Sens. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.V., Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, John McCain, R-Ariz., Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn.</p>
<p>The repeal bill was the same one passed by Senate Republicans in 2015, when President Barack Obama was in the White House and vetoed the legislation. Heller and other Republicans voted for repeal in 2015.</p>
<p>A vote on the legislation Wednesday was delayed over a provision on abortion. The vote was taken later, along with one on a Democratic amendment to write a health care bill in committee. That measure died on a straight party-line vote.</p>
<p>A recent analysis by the Congressional Budget Office found that the repeal-only bill would have resulted in 32 million additional people without insurance over a 10-year period.</p>
<p>But Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said the Affordable Care Act, has failed to live up to its promises and instead expanded an entitlement program, Medicaid, and increased the debt.</p>
<p>“The question isn’t ‘Do you want to help people?’ It’s ‘How are you going to pay for it?’” Paul said.</p>
<p>Broad measure also fails</p>
<p>A more broad measure to repeal portions of Obamacare failed in the Senate on Tuesday, just hours after debate began.</p>
<p>That bill, the Republican repeal and replace legislation that was written behind closed doors, would have left some Obamacare mandates and taxes in place, but would have ended Medicaid expansion in several years and cut the Medicaid program by $756 billion.</p>
<p>Heller also voted against that amendment, saying it would jeopardize “too many Nevadans’ health care coverage.”</p>
<p>But Heller said he remained open to Republican legislation overhauling Obamacare if states “are given the flexibility to build on their successes and ensure protection for those who are currently covered.”</p>
<p>Nevada was one of 31 states and the District of Columbia that expanded the Medicaid program under the ACA, resulting in coverage for 11 million people nationwide, including more than 200,000 in Nevada, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.</p>
<p>A symbolic, non-binding Senate resolution offerred by Heller to affirm Medicaid expansion died on a 10-90 vote, drawing support from only those GOP lawmakers from whose states took federal funding to broaden the program, including Portman, Collins, McCain and Capito.</p>
<p>Senators will now continue debate on a health care bill that could leave most of the Obamacare provisions intact.</p>
<p>The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association warned Wednesday that repealing, or eliminating the Obamacare mandate that everyone purchase insurance would have dire consequences.</p>
<p>“A system that allows people to purchase coverage only when they need it drives up costs for everyone,” the association said.</p>
<p>Blue Cross Blue Shield also called for final legislation to include dedicated funds to be made available to people with significant medical conditions.</p>
<p>Bipartisan approach urged</p>
<p>Democrats have balked at Republican efforts to repeal Obamacare, and have instead urged a bipartisan approach that would shore up public insurance exchanges that provide coverage to those without government- or employee-sponsored plans.</p>
<p>Several Republicans, including Alexander and Collins, also favor a more broad, bipartisan approach to address the problems with the nation’s health care law, most notably rising premiums and costs shouldered by small businesses to provide plans.</p>
<p>The Senate voted 51-50 on Tuesday, with Vice President Mike Pence casting the tiebreaking vote, to begin debate on a health care plan.</p>
<p>The Senate took up a bill passed earlier by the House, legislation that President Donald Trump praised in a Rose Garden ceremony before calling the bill “mean.”</p>
<p>Trump has warned Senate Republicans of political consequences if GOP lawmakers fail to repeal a law that they have campaigned against for seven years.</p>
<p>Heller, considered the most vulnerable Republican up for reelection in 2018, is being attacked on the right and the left.</p>
<p>A pro-Trump PAC aired TV ads attacking Heller for his opposition to the first Senate Republican health care bill, before the effort was criticized by Republican leaders and the ads discontinued.</p>
<p>Heller is also being targeted by national Democrats in a state that Hillary Clinton won in the 2016 presidential election.</p>
<p>One prominent Democrat, Rep. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., is seeking the Democratic nomination to challenge Heller.</p>
<p>Rep. Dina Titus, D-Nev., also is exploring a bid for the Senate, but has not announced her intentions.</p>
<p>Contact Gary Martin at 202-662-7390 or [email protected]. Follow @garymartindc on Twitter.</p> | false | 1 | washington republican leaders stung another defeat wednesday senate rejected repeal obamacare law mandates coverage taxes medicaid expansion senate voted 5545 repeal bill seven republicans including sen dean heller rnev voted repeal affordable care act known obamacare leaving doubt gop leaders able cobble together final bill week todays vote fully repeal obamacare without immediate replacement plan would create uncertainty nevadas already fragile market best interest state heller said addition heller gop senators medicaid expansion states voted repeal including sens rob portman rohio shelley moore capito rwv lisa murkowski ralaska john mccain rariz susan collins rmaine lamar alexander rtenn repeal bill one passed senate republicans 2015 president barack obama white house vetoed legislation heller republicans voted repeal 2015 vote legislation wednesday delayed provision abortion vote taken later along one democratic amendment write health care bill committee measure died straight partyline vote recent analysis congressional budget office found repealonly bill would resulted 32 million additional people without insurance 10year period sen rand paul rky said affordable care act failed live promises instead expanded entitlement program medicaid increased debt question isnt want help people going pay paul said broad measure also fails broad measure repeal portions obamacare failed senate tuesday hours debate began bill republican repeal replace legislation written behind closed doors would left obamacare mandates taxes place would ended medicaid expansion several years cut medicaid program 756 billion heller also voted amendment saying would jeopardize many nevadans health care coverage heller said remained open republican legislation overhauling obamacare states given flexibility build successes ensure protection currently covered nevada one 31 states district columbia expanded medicaid program aca resulting coverage 11 million people nationwide including 200000 nevada according kaiser family foundation symbolic nonbinding senate resolution offerred heller affirm medicaid expansion died 1090 vote drawing support gop lawmakers whose states took federal funding broaden program including portman collins mccain capito senators continue debate health care bill could leave obamacare provisions intact blue cross blue shield association warned wednesday repealing eliminating obamacare mandate everyone purchase insurance would dire consequences system allows people purchase coverage need drives costs everyone association said blue cross blue shield also called final legislation include dedicated funds made available people significant medical conditions bipartisan approach urged democrats balked republican efforts repeal obamacare instead urged bipartisan approach would shore public insurance exchanges provide coverage without government employeesponsored plans several republicans including alexander collins also favor broad bipartisan approach address problems nations health care law notably rising premiums costs shouldered small businesses provide plans senate voted 5150 tuesday vice president mike pence casting tiebreaking vote begin debate health care plan senate took bill passed earlier house legislation president donald trump praised rose garden ceremony calling bill mean trump warned senate republicans political consequences gop lawmakers fail repeal law campaigned seven years heller considered vulnerable republican reelection 2018 attacked right left protrump pac aired tv ads attacking heller opposition first senate republican health care bill effort criticized republican leaders ads discontinued heller also targeted national democrats state hillary clinton 2016 presidential election one prominent democrat rep jacky rosen dnev seeking democratic nomination challenge heller rep dina titus dnev also exploring bid senate announced intentions contact gary martin 2026627390 gmartinreviewjournalcom follow garymartindc twitter | 527 |
<p>When U-boat U-612 sets sail from La Rochelle in France, it will be a major TV moment, the sequel to the iconic 1981 German war film and 1985 TV series “ <a href="http://variety.com/t/das-boot/" type="external">Das Boot</a>.” With a budget topping $30 million over eight episodes, it is one of the priciest series ever out of Germany, and marks the freshly re-named <a href="http://variety.com/t/bavaria-fiction/" type="external">Bavaria Fiction</a>’s biggest-ever push into the waters of international TV.</p>
<p>The German producer is in the elite ranks domestically, making almost 300 hours a year and in the same bracket as UFA and Constantin. As it turns 10, it has gotten a new name and one it wants to resonate in global markets as well as on home turf.</p>
<p>Bavaria Fiction sits within the vast Bavaria Film holding group, a conglomerate that spans film and TV production, distribution and licensing in Germany, Austria and Italy. The wider Bavaria Film is approaching its centenary, while Bavaria Fiction has just hit double figures. It was created as Bavaria Fernsehproduktion in 2007, taking over the TV production business of Bavaria Film, and run as a joint venture with ZDF Enterprises, the commercial arm of German pubcaster ZDF. Based in the Bavarian capital, Munich, the company also has outposts in Cologne, Stuttgart and Berlin.</p>
<p>Colonia Media has been part of Bavaria Fiction since 2014 and worked on the Cologne-produced editions of “Tatort,” the long-running ARD drama, which sees various broadcasters contribute installments to the franchise. The company also has “Tatort: Munster,” which drew 14.6 million viewers in April, making it the fifth most popular edition of the show since ratings started in Germany. Cop show “Soko Stuttgart” and medical series “Dr. Klein” are among the Stuttgart-produced series, and other signature shows include “Storm of Love,” the ARD soap following relationships as they unfold in a five-star Rosenheim hotel, and police procedural “The Rosenheim Cops.”</p>
<p>The Bavaria Fiction rebrand, overseen by marketing supremo Isabelle Fedyk who joined from Tandem this year, goes deeper than applying lick of paint. It underlines the company’s evolution from a producer working Germany’s pubcasters, to a fully-fledged content company, developing and producing for different platforms at home and abroad. Bavaria Fernsehproduktion was also a handle that didn’t trip off the tongue for non-German speakers.</p>
<p>“As you get into the international market, it’s good when people can spell your name,” says Jan S. Kaiser, Bavaria Fiction managing director, alongside Manfred Haus-Pflüger.</p>
<p>The international push has two imperatives: new found opportunities in both domestic pay-TV and the global scripted business, and a challenging free-TV market at home.</p>
<p>“The pay-TV channels in Germany have started commissioning and we are happy that we can do ‘ <a href="http://variety.com/2017/tv/global/rick-okon-lizzie-caplan-sky-das-boot-sequel-1202479418/" type="external">Das Boot</a>’ with them, and we are looking forward to working with Netflix and the other platforms that started in recent years,” Kaiser says from his office at Bavaria Studios, overlooking the original “Das Boot” U-boat. “We do a lot for the broadcasters but their budgets are limited, and while some have said they want to do more, for others, what they want to do in terms of new content is limited.”</p>
<p>“Storm of Love” is Bavaria’s most successful show outside Germany, selling in 25 territories, but the “Das Boot” sequel opens another international chapter.</p>
<p>“We are a company that has a lot of experience across different genres and different formats and this is why we are prepared for the international market,” Kaiser says.</p>
<p>Knowing Bavaria Fiction can handle anything from a daily soap to an event miniseries and has the use of a studio, makes it easier to attract partners as it expands into multi-broadcaster projects. Chief creative officer Oliver Vogel says the international story can include and go beyond the edgier co-productions it is now getting, and include its German series and procedurals. He cites “Dr. Klein,” a medical drama about a female paediatrician with dwarfism that Netflix has in a second window in Germany.</p>
<p>“Think about it, in the United States is there a series like that?” he asks. “Even our long-running series could be interesting for the international market.”</p>
<p>If “Dr. Klein” addresses inclusion, another show touching on social issues is “Bella Germania.” The upcoming ZDF series looks at the wave of Italian migrant workers who came to Germany in the 1960s. Meanwhile, at the cultural end of the Bavaria Fiction line-up there is Heinrich Breloer’s docudrama “Brecht” with original archive footage of the poet and playwright. “Freud,” about the Austrian psychoanalyst, is also in development with Austria’s ORF and will be a co-production running to eight parts, coming in at about $2 million per episode.</p>
<p>“We are a company that has a lot of experience across different genres and different formats and this is why we are prepared for the international market.”Jan S. Kaiser</p>
<p>Kaiser and Vogel are both Bavaria veterans: the former was general production manager of Bavaria Film, and managing director of film producer Bavaria Pictures, the latter is one of Germany’s best-known TV producers and has been working within the Bavaria team for over two decades. Moritz Polter is a newbie by comparison. He joined Bavaria Fiction in 2016 from “Crossing Lines” production company Tandem to spearhead co-production and drive the international business. By that point “Das Boot” was under way, and he closed the financing, bringing in U.S. partner Sonar Entertainment, and has been closely involved as it heads into production. “Arctic Circle” and “Germanized” have since been added to the roster of international projects, delivering the high-end, edgy, serialized pieces for which the international market thirsts.</p>
<p>“I love living in Munich and the challenge of taking one of the oldest, most established companies into a different time zone and into the international arena was a one I couldn’t refuse,” Polter says.</p>
<p>His plan is to start with Europe-led projects. “Setting up a show for the American market right away is too high risk for us as a new international player,” he says. “Taking established European writers — English, German, French — and creating content that sells internationally is more feasible.”</p>
<p>Culture-clash comedy “Germanized” is set in a French village on the verge of bankruptcy that welcomes a German company and hundreds of German workers. It is Deutsche Telekom’s first original for its EntertainTV service, and Amazon is expected to board it internationally. The French- and German-language show will star Christoph Maria Herbst from “The Office”-inspired ProSieben comedy “Stromberg.”</p>
<p>“Telekom was interesting for us, it’s a new player and ‘Germanized’ will get a lot of attention,” Polter says. “They need a strong brand and Christoph Maria Herbst is that, and it will get a lot of buzz.”</p>
<p>“Arctic Circle” is the first German-Finnish co-production, with Bavaria teaming with Yellow Film &amp; TV to make the series for the Finnish streaming service Elisa, which will launch the show, and pubcaster YLE. A serial-killer drama, the €6.5 million ($7.7 million), 10-part series will move beyond the usual Nordic noir tropes, with a wide, bright and open aesthetic replacing the usual darker tones.</p>
<p>Internationally, momentum is building. “We’re heading in the right direction,” Polter says. “By the May [L.A.] Screenings or MIPTV we’ll be further along and people will be coming to us a lot more when we prove we can sustain what we’re talking about.”</p>
<p>As Bavaria Fiction heads into its second decade, Oliver adds the plan is to expand, but in a measured way. “It’s more important to make good movies and series, not try to be number one or two across all production,” he says. “We want to work with the best people and make the best stories, but we don’t need to be the biggest company.”</p> | false | 1 | uboat u612 sets sail la rochelle france major tv moment sequel iconic 1981 german war film 1985 tv series das boot budget topping 30 million eight episodes one priciest series ever germany marks freshly renamed bavaria fictions biggestever push waters international tv german producer elite ranks domestically making almost 300 hours year bracket ufa constantin turns 10 gotten new name one wants resonate global markets well home turf bavaria fiction sits within vast bavaria film holding group conglomerate spans film tv production distribution licensing germany austria italy wider bavaria film approaching centenary bavaria fiction hit double figures created bavaria fernsehproduktion 2007 taking tv production business bavaria film run joint venture zdf enterprises commercial arm german pubcaster zdf based bavarian capital munich company also outposts cologne stuttgart berlin colonia media part bavaria fiction since 2014 worked cologneproduced editions tatort longrunning ard drama sees various broadcasters contribute installments franchise company also tatort munster drew 146 million viewers april making fifth popular edition show since ratings started germany cop show soko stuttgart medical series dr klein among stuttgartproduced series signature shows include storm love ard soap following relationships unfold fivestar rosenheim hotel police procedural rosenheim cops bavaria fiction rebrand overseen marketing supremo isabelle fedyk joined tandem year goes deeper applying lick paint underlines companys evolution producer working germanys pubcasters fullyfledged content company developing producing different platforms home abroad bavaria fernsehproduktion also handle didnt trip tongue nongerman speakers get international market good people spell name says jan kaiser bavaria fiction managing director alongside manfred hauspflüger international push two imperatives new found opportunities domestic paytv global scripted business challenging freetv market home paytv channels germany started commissioning happy das boot looking forward working netflix platforms started recent years kaiser says office bavaria studios overlooking original das boot uboat lot broadcasters budgets limited said want others want terms new content limited storm love bavarias successful show outside germany selling 25 territories das boot sequel opens another international chapter company lot experience across different genres different formats prepared international market kaiser says knowing bavaria fiction handle anything daily soap event miniseries use studio makes easier attract partners expands multibroadcaster projects chief creative officer oliver vogel says international story include go beyond edgier coproductions getting include german series procedurals cites dr klein medical drama female paediatrician dwarfism netflix second window germany think united states series like asks even longrunning series could interesting international market dr klein addresses inclusion another show touching social issues bella germania upcoming zdf series looks wave italian migrant workers came germany 1960s meanwhile cultural end bavaria fiction lineup heinrich breloers docudrama brecht original archive footage poet playwright freud austrian psychoanalyst also development austrias orf coproduction running eight parts coming 2 million per episode company lot experience across different genres different formats prepared international marketjan kaiser kaiser vogel bavaria veterans former general production manager bavaria film managing director film producer bavaria pictures latter one germanys bestknown tv producers working within bavaria team two decades moritz polter newbie comparison joined bavaria fiction 2016 crossing lines production company tandem spearhead coproduction drive international business point das boot way closed financing bringing us partner sonar entertainment closely involved heads production arctic circle germanized since added roster international projects delivering highend edgy serialized pieces international market thirsts love living munich challenge taking one oldest established companies different time zone international arena one couldnt refuse polter says plan start europeled projects setting show american market right away high risk us new international player says taking established european writers english german french creating content sells internationally feasible cultureclash comedy germanized set french village verge bankruptcy welcomes german company hundreds german workers deutsche telekoms first original entertaintv service amazon expected board internationally french germanlanguage show star christoph maria herbst officeinspired prosieben comedy stromberg telekom interesting us new player germanized get lot attention polter says need strong brand christoph maria herbst get lot buzz arctic circle first germanfinnish coproduction bavaria teaming yellow film amp tv make series finnish streaming service elisa launch show pubcaster yle serialkiller drama 65 million 77 million 10part series move beyond usual nordic noir tropes wide bright open aesthetic replacing usual darker tones internationally momentum building heading right direction polter says may la screenings miptv well along people coming us lot prove sustain talking bavaria fiction heads second decade oliver adds plan expand measured way important make good movies series try number one two across production says want work best people make best stories dont need biggest company | 739 |
<p>By Tom Allard</p>
<p>MARAWI CITY, Philippines (Reuters) – With a grimace, Brigadier General Melquiades Ordiales of the Philippines 1st Marine Brigade recounted the painful gains made against Islamist militants in Marawi City.</p>
<p>“It took us one week from this point to that point, to cross that street,” he said, casting his eyes to the other side of a two-lane road in the heart of the southern Philippines city, lined by three-storey buildings shattered by air strikes and the remaining walls riddled with bullet holes.</p>
<p>“It was really very, very tough.”</p>
<p>The grinding urban warfare that has destroyed much of the grandly named Sultan Omar Dianalan Boulevard shows just how much of a threat Islamic State is to the Philippines and potentially other countries in the Southeast Asian region.</p>
<p>But when the fighting started, Philippine authorities were unfazed.</p>
<p>After the Islamic State-backed militants took over large parts of picturesque, lakeside Marawi in May, the country’s defense minister, Delfin Lorenzana, predicted the entire conflict would be over in one week.</p>
<p>Now, after four months of intense aerial bombardment and house-by-house battles, Philippine commanders believe they are in the final stages of the operation to oust the rebels from the city.</p>
<p>In the past two weeks, military officials say they have conquered three militant bastions, including a mosque, and restricted about 60 remaining guerrillas to about 10 devastated city blocks in the business district. Patrols have been increased on the lake to prevent the supply of armaments and recruits to the holed-up militants.</p>
<p>HIGH-POWERED WEAPONS</p>
<p>Military officers who have skirmished for years with Islamic insurgents in the southern Philippines say the battle in Marawi has been more intense and difficult than earlier encounters.</p>
<p>The Islamic State militants are better armed, with high-powered weapons, night vision goggles, the latest sniper scopes and surveillance drones, said Captain Arnel Carandang, of the Philippines Army First Scout Ranger Battalion.</p>
<p>He said he has served for almost a decade in the remote jungles and mountains of Mindanao, the southern Philippines region that has long been wracked by insurgencies. Now, Carandang says, the military is in unfamiliar urban terrain.</p>
<p>The militants have exploited the battlefield to their advantage and held off Philippines forces despite a 10-to-1 numerical advantage for the government troops.</p>
<p>Borrowing heavily from Islamic State tactics in the Iraqi city of Mosul, they have surrounded themselves with hostages and used snipers and a network of tunnels.</p>
<p>Marawi’s underground drainage system and “rat holes” – crevices in the walls of high floors allowing access to adjacent buildings – have enabled the rebels to evade bombs and remain undetected, soldiers at the battlefront said.</p>
<p>“We believe there have been some foreign terrorists that have been directing their operations that’s why they are,&#160;how do I define this, really good,” said Carandang.</p>
<p>“We have seen some cadavers of foreigners. Some are white, some are black and some tall people we guess are Asians (from outside the Philippines). We have been hearing in their transmissions some English speaking terrorists.”</p>
<p>SCAVENGE FOR FOOD</p>
<p>Hostages – many of them Christians – have been deployed to build improvised explosive devices, scavenge for food and weapons in the heat of battle and fight for the Islamist rebels, according to those who escaped.</p>
<p>“When we were first moved to the mosque, there were more than 200 of us,” an escaped hostage, who asked not to be identified for safety reasons, told Reuters last week.</p>
<p>“We gradually became fewer. People would go on errands but they wouldn’t come back. They either escaped or died. By the time I left, there were only about 100 of us.”</p>
<p>The account could not be verified, but military officials confirmed the man escaped from Marawi in early August.</p>
<p>The hostage said the militants were excited by their successes in Marawi, speaking often of the advantages of urban warfare and talking about some of their next possible targets, including other cities in Mindanao and the Philippines capital Manila.</p>
<p>“They said they could hide well in the cities. They can get civilians to become hostages and it’s more difficult in the mountains with only the soldiers,” he said.</p>
<p>Many of the fighters are young recruits, who are fanatical and accomplished fighters, the soldiers said.</p>
<p>“By the way they move and their tactics, you can see they’ve been trained,” said Colonel Jose Maria Cuerpo, deputy commander of the 103rd Brigade fighting in Marawi.</p>
<p>For a description of how Mindanao youngsters are recruited by militants, click on [nL3N1KB1Z5]</p>
<p>PROPOSAL REBUFFED</p>
<p>Much of this bloodshed could have been avoided, local political leaders told Reuters.</p>
<p>Naguib Sinarimbo, a Muslim leader who has negotiated between the military and Islamic separatists for years, said he and other elders had urged the armed forces to allow militias and rival Islamist groups to take the lead in ousting the Islamic State militants.</p>
<p>The groups were familiar with Marawi’s terrain and, through family and clan links, could influence many of the fighters to lay down their weapons, they told the armed forces.</p>
<p>The proposal was rebuffed, Sinarimbo said. Air power, the military assured them, was the path to a quick win.</p>
<p>Zia Alonto Adiong, a provincial politician, said the military also had doubts about the loyalty of some of the “political personalities” offering to provide their militias to push out the fighters.</p>
<p>The result was a city in ruins, hundreds of thousands of residents displaced and “emboldened” Islamists, Sinarimbo said.</p>
<p>“They proceeded with the aerial bombing but they didn’t take the city,” Sinarimbo said. “The military lost&#160;authority.”</p>
<p>In addition, the devastation of the city will play into militants’ hands, creating resentment and further radicalising many youngsters, he said.</p>
<p>Marawi residents in evacuation centers or staying with relatives elsewhere are becoming increasingly frustrated, said Adiong, who is a spokesman for the local government’s crisis management authority. Some residents were disappointed and angry that requests for a moratorium on bank loan repayments had not been met, he told Reuters.</p>
<p>Philippines central bank governor Nestor Espenilla told Reuters legislation would be needed for a debt moratorium and was being studied.</p>
<p>Mindanao has long been marred by the decades of Muslim hostility to rule from Manila. After years fighting insurgent groups and then long negotiations, the government signed an agreement in 2014 to give Muslim majority areas in Mindanao autonomy. But the deal has been long delayed.</p>
<p>“This part of the Philippines is fertile ground to plant violent extremism,” Adiong said. “There is a narrative of social injustice that is strong. Young people are fed up with the peace process and nothing concrete or sustainable has developed.”</p>
<p>“[The militants] use this as the basis to entice people, to get support of the local people.”</p>
<p>LAST STAND?</p>
<p>In Marawi, some in the armed forces are hopeful that at least some militants will surrender and hand over between 45 to 50 civilian captives. Carandang, the Scout Rangers captain, however said indications were the rebels are preparing for a bloody final stand.</p>
<p>“We are monitoring the enemy’s transmissions and it’s like during these final days they are being more fanatical,” he said. “Transmissions indicate they are preparing for suicide bombings.”</p>
<p>An unused suicide vest was discovered this month in Marawi’s Grand Mosque, a former stronghold of the militants, government sources told Reuters.</p>
<p>Suicide attacks are rare in the Philippines despite decades of Islamist insurgency.</p>
<p>“That’s the difference between here and Syria and Iraq,” said Ordiales, the marine general. “It’s almost the same war tactics and fighting tactics, the one thing that’s not the same is the human bomb or the suicide bombing.</p>
<p>“It hasn’t happened, not yet.”</p> | false | 1 | tom allard marawi city philippines reuters grimace brigadier general melquiades ordiales philippines 1st marine brigade recounted painful gains made islamist militants marawi city took us one week point point cross street said casting eyes side twolane road heart southern philippines city lined threestorey buildings shattered air strikes remaining walls riddled bullet holes really tough grinding urban warfare destroyed much grandly named sultan omar dianalan boulevard shows much threat islamic state philippines potentially countries southeast asian region fighting started philippine authorities unfazed islamic statebacked militants took large parts picturesque lakeside marawi may countrys defense minister delfin lorenzana predicted entire conflict would one week four months intense aerial bombardment housebyhouse battles philippine commanders believe final stages operation oust rebels city past two weeks military officials say conquered three militant bastions including mosque restricted 60 remaining guerrillas 10 devastated city blocks business district patrols increased lake prevent supply armaments recruits holedup militants highpowered weapons military officers skirmished years islamic insurgents southern philippines say battle marawi intense difficult earlier encounters islamic state militants better armed highpowered weapons night vision goggles latest sniper scopes surveillance drones said captain arnel carandang philippines army first scout ranger battalion said served almost decade remote jungles mountains mindanao southern philippines region long wracked insurgencies carandang says military unfamiliar urban terrain militants exploited battlefield advantage held philippines forces despite 10to1 numerical advantage government troops borrowing heavily islamic state tactics iraqi city mosul surrounded hostages used snipers network tunnels marawis underground drainage system rat holes crevices walls high floors allowing access adjacent buildings enabled rebels evade bombs remain undetected soldiers battlefront said believe foreign terrorists directing operations thats are160how define really good said carandang seen cadavers foreigners white black tall people guess asians outside philippines hearing transmissions english speaking terrorists scavenge food hostages many christians deployed build improvised explosive devices scavenge food weapons heat battle fight islamist rebels according escaped first moved mosque 200 us escaped hostage asked identified safety reasons told reuters last week gradually became fewer people would go errands wouldnt come back either escaped died time left 100 us account could verified military officials confirmed man escaped marawi early august hostage said militants excited successes marawi speaking often advantages urban warfare talking next possible targets including cities mindanao philippines capital manila said could hide well cities get civilians become hostages difficult mountains soldiers said many fighters young recruits fanatical accomplished fighters soldiers said way move tactics see theyve trained said colonel jose maria cuerpo deputy commander 103rd brigade fighting marawi description mindanao youngsters recruited militants click nl3n1kb1z5 proposal rebuffed much bloodshed could avoided local political leaders told reuters naguib sinarimbo muslim leader negotiated military islamic separatists years said elders urged armed forces allow militias rival islamist groups take lead ousting islamic state militants groups familiar marawis terrain family clan links could influence many fighters lay weapons told armed forces proposal rebuffed sinarimbo said air power military assured path quick win zia alonto adiong provincial politician said military also doubts loyalty political personalities offering provide militias push fighters result city ruins hundreds thousands residents displaced emboldened islamists sinarimbo said proceeded aerial bombing didnt take city sinarimbo said military lost160authority addition devastation city play militants hands creating resentment radicalising many youngsters said marawi residents evacuation centers staying relatives elsewhere becoming increasingly frustrated said adiong spokesman local governments crisis management authority residents disappointed angry requests moratorium bank loan repayments met told reuters philippines central bank governor nestor espenilla told reuters legislation would needed debt moratorium studied mindanao long marred decades muslim hostility rule manila years fighting insurgent groups long negotiations government signed agreement 2014 give muslim majority areas mindanao autonomy deal long delayed part philippines fertile ground plant violent extremism adiong said narrative social injustice strong young people fed peace process nothing concrete sustainable developed militants use basis entice people get support local people last stand marawi armed forces hopeful least militants surrender hand 45 50 civilian captives carandang scout rangers captain however said indications rebels preparing bloody final stand monitoring enemys transmissions like final days fanatical said transmissions indicate preparing suicide bombings unused suicide vest discovered month marawis grand mosque former stronghold militants government sources told reuters suicide attacks rare philippines despite decades islamist insurgency thats difference syria iraq said ordiales marine general almost war tactics fighting tactics one thing thats human bomb suicide bombing hasnt happened yet | 718 |
<p>We are living in complicated and confusing times. And although we are short on persuasive comprehensive analyses of our circumstances, we are definitely not lacking in insightful attempts to get at various bits of the whole. Many smart observers are writing about populism and elitism, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, the weakness of our political institutions, the roots and implications of economic insecurity and social and cultural breakdown, and lots more.</p>
<p>Many of these analyses are well worth your while, but I’ve been struck in particular by two books in recent months that have tried to think explicitly about how our attitudes toward change contribute to the mood of the moment. These two excellent books— <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Complacent-Class-Self-Defeating-Quest-American/dp/1250108691" type="external">The Complacent Class</a> by Tyler Cowen and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Art-Being-Free-Tocqueville-Ourselves/dp/1250077184" type="external">The Art of Being Free</a> by James Poulos—seem at first to make almost opposite arguments, but I think their insights might be combined to point to one particularly important facet of the trouble we confront.</p>
<p>Cowen’s basic premise is that things aren’t changing enough, and that this threatens America’s prosperity and happiness. “What I find striking about contemporary America,” he writes, “is how much we are slowing things down, how much we are digging ourselves in, and how much we are investing in stability.”</p>
<p>He offers many examples of this inclination to stagnate, and proposes many possible causes. Cowen’s book is rich in thought-provoking insights and is a testament to his own voracious curiosity and open-minded intelligence. There is more to it than any summary could hope to capture. But ultimately the book seems to suggest that the great slowdown we are living through is above all a function of an excess of satisfaction. Americans are fat and happy, even those who are at the socio-economic bottom in our society. “You might think the group at the bottom cannot possibly be complacent about their situation,” Cowen writes. “But by the standards of recent history, indeed they have been when it comes to their actual behavior.”</p>
<p>Cowen certainly acknowledges, toward the end, that people aren’t likely to just put up with being left behind. And he notes that many Americans nearer to the top aren’t simply&#160;happy either. Indeed, he writes, “one of the great ironies of the situation is that those most likely to complain about the complacent class are the prime and often most influential members of that class themselves, namely what I call the privileged class.” But neither they nor those less privileged seem inclined to do anything about their complaints. People may be frustrated, but they are inclined to leave things as they are.</p>
<p>Poulos offers what at first seems like a very different kind of argument. In fact, it’s very different not only from Cowen’s book but from pretty much anything you’re likely to read about our contemporary predicament. He opens the book with a warning about that, telling his readers “This is a weird book for people who feel like they might be a little crazy.” And after spending hours as a reader in Poulos’s company you will surely walk away thinking at least one of you might be a little crazy.</p>
<p>This is partly because Poulos has knack for seeing certain deep and important things all at once rather than thinking his way to them by arduous steps, and this makes it hard for him to help his readers come along with him and glimpse them too. There is no trail of bread crumbs to follow, only a series of impossibly enticing invitations to leap across vast canyons, which is no small challenge for those of us who aren’t gifted daredevils. But it is very much worth the effort to try.</p>
<p>Poulos suggests that the craziness of contemporary American life is a function of the craziness of human life in general—that it’s one manifestation of a deeper truth about ourselves that is always a little beyond our reach, but also that some of the means at our disposal now to express our frustration with that fact can be particularly bad for us. As a result we tend to live our lives “crazily, selfishly, and melodramatically.” He takes his reader on a tour of the many facets of contemporary American craziness. But near the core of his case is the suggestion that our craziness has to do with an inarticulate fear of stagnation.</p>
<p>“It is a characteristic predicament of modern American life that we cannot articulate the experience of living in our world except as an experience of change,” Poulos writes. This is a crucial insight, drawn from Alexis de Tocqueville, who serves as the muse of Poulos’s book. And it suggests that worries about stagnation (that is, worries like Cowen’s) point to something deeper. But these worries, Poulos argues, don’t only manifest in a sense that life is too stagnant but also at the same time in a sense that life is crazy—that nothing is stable, that things change too much, that we are living at breakneck speed.</p>
<p>“Change is the perfect summation of our fascination with the possibility of everything and our fear of the certainty of nothing,” Poulos writes. And his exploration of the place of change in our thinking helps to highlight something Cowen downplays: Sometimes we resist change because we are satisfied or complacent, but often we resist change because we are fearful and insecure.</p>
<p>Stagnation moved by insecurity seems a little more like the predicament we are in than stagnation moved by complacency (which Cowen defines as “a growing sense of satisfaction with the status quo”). The former, more negative, kind of stagnation is what both books are really about, it seems to me. Poulos focuses on the underlying sense of insecurity, which runs much deeper than our economistic ways of thinking about politics usually suggest. Cowen focuses on the resulting paralysis, which is a huge problem for a society that is barely capable of understanding itself in any terms other than the terms of change. And both argue that the way forward is to recognize that insecurity is our natural condition and that this is by no means all bad. In this sense, the two books help to clarify each other.</p>
<p>Our society exhibits high risk aversion and dissatisfaction with the status quo at the same time—a desire for security in a time of diminishing dynamism. This points to a dangerous feedback loop in which our distaste for an insecure status quo leaves us wanting change but the very insecurity that makes us so unhappy leaves us fearful of change. And this can only lead to more and more frustration. That diagnosis, combining elements of Cowen and Poulos, might get a little closer to the mark than either of them on his own. And I suspect they might both agree, up to a point.</p>
<p>But it also hints at one more step we might take toward understanding our circumstances. It suggests that what we lack is a secure foundation for risk taking. Such a foundation would be something like the way out of the feedback loop. Sometimes we take risks out of necessity and in the absence of any other choice, of course. These are desperate risks. But in a rich, free society we usually do have other options. We are more likely now to take risks when we feel reasonably secure—that is, to take risks out of ambition and aspiration more than fear and desperation. And the risks that tend to drive innovation of the sort Cowen wants to see more of are most frequently risks taken from a reasonably secure base.</p>
<p>The need for a secure foundation for risk taking is one of the justifications frequently offered for the social safety net. And it is certainly among the strongest arguments (though hardly the only strong argument) for a minimum set of protections and a modicum base of provisions. That case also points to the need to design such protections and provisions with an eye to minimizing disincentives to dynamism, work, ambition, and risk-taking, which is a need our social safety net often ignores, and which should guide the ways we reform some key public policies.</p>
<p>But the need for a secure base for risk taking is also a case for a revived institutionalism in American social and political thought. A secure base for taking risks is one of the things that healthy familial, communal, social, cultural, economic, and political institutions can help to provide us. We talk a lot about contemporary America’s “loss of faith in institutions” in pretty abstract terms. But among the concrete implications of that loss is a sense of flux and insecurity that makes us feel like everything is constantly changing yet also makes us afraid to change much of anything. “Faith in institutions” translates to confidence in the availability of some minimal stability.</p>
<p>A society that has lost that confidence can easily become a society dissatisfied with an insecure status quo but too risk averse to do anything about it beyond complaining. As Cowen suggests, this may be the biggest of all the risks we face. And as Poulos suggests, addressing this problem will require a revival of some means of democratic forbearance that may in turn depend on a revival of democratic institutions, broadly conceived.</p>
<p>A reflection on two great new books worth reading, in any case.</p>
<p>Yuval Levin is the Hertog Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.</p> | false | 1 | living complicated confusing times although short persuasive comprehensive analyses circumstances definitely lacking insightful attempts get various bits whole many smart observers writing populism elitism nationalism cosmopolitanism weakness political institutions roots implications economic insecurity social cultural breakdown lots many analyses well worth ive struck particular two books recent months tried think explicitly attitudes toward change contribute mood moment two excellent books complacent class tyler cowen art free james poulosseem first make almost opposite arguments think insights might combined point one particularly important facet trouble confront cowens basic premise things arent changing enough threatens americas prosperity happiness find striking contemporary america writes much slowing things much digging much investing stability offers many examples inclination stagnate proposes many possible causes cowens book rich thoughtprovoking insights testament voracious curiosity openminded intelligence summary could hope capture ultimately book seems suggest great slowdown living function excess satisfaction americans fat happy even socioeconomic bottom society might think group bottom possibly complacent situation cowen writes standards recent history indeed comes actual behavior cowen certainly acknowledges toward end people arent likely put left behind notes many americans nearer top arent simply160happy either indeed writes one great ironies situation likely complain complacent class prime often influential members class namely call privileged class neither less privileged seem inclined anything complaints people may frustrated inclined leave things poulos offers first seems like different kind argument fact different cowens book pretty much anything youre likely read contemporary predicament opens book warning telling readers weird book people feel like might little crazy spending hours reader pouloss company surely walk away thinking least one might little crazy partly poulos knack seeing certain deep important things rather thinking way arduous steps makes hard help readers come along glimpse trail bread crumbs follow series impossibly enticing invitations leap across vast canyons small challenge us arent gifted daredevils much worth effort try poulos suggests craziness contemporary american life function craziness human life generalthat one manifestation deeper truth always little beyond reach also means disposal express frustration fact particularly bad us result tend live lives crazily selfishly melodramatically takes reader tour many facets contemporary american craziness near core case suggestion craziness inarticulate fear stagnation characteristic predicament modern american life articulate experience living world except experience change poulos writes crucial insight drawn alexis de tocqueville serves muse pouloss book suggests worries stagnation worries like cowens point something deeper worries poulos argues dont manifest sense life stagnant also time sense life crazythat nothing stable things change much living breakneck speed change perfect summation fascination possibility everything fear certainty nothing poulos writes exploration place change thinking helps highlight something cowen downplays sometimes resist change satisfied complacent often resist change fearful insecure stagnation moved insecurity seems little like predicament stagnation moved complacency cowen defines growing sense satisfaction status quo former negative kind stagnation books really seems poulos focuses underlying sense insecurity runs much deeper economistic ways thinking politics usually suggest cowen focuses resulting paralysis huge problem society barely capable understanding terms terms change argue way forward recognize insecurity natural condition means bad sense two books help clarify society exhibits high risk aversion dissatisfaction status quo timea desire security time diminishing dynamism points dangerous feedback loop distaste insecure status quo leaves us wanting change insecurity makes us unhappy leaves us fearful change lead frustration diagnosis combining elements cowen poulos might get little closer mark either suspect might agree point also hints one step might take toward understanding circumstances suggests lack secure foundation risk taking foundation would something like way feedback loop sometimes take risks necessity absence choice course desperate risks rich free society usually options likely take risks feel reasonably securethat take risks ambition aspiration fear desperation risks tend drive innovation sort cowen wants see frequently risks taken reasonably secure base need secure foundation risk taking one justifications frequently offered social safety net certainly among strongest arguments though hardly strong argument minimum set protections modicum base provisions case also points need design protections provisions eye minimizing disincentives dynamism work ambition risktaking need social safety net often ignores guide ways reform key public policies need secure base risk taking also case revived institutionalism american social political thought secure base taking risks one things healthy familial communal social cultural economic political institutions help provide us talk lot contemporary americas loss faith institutions pretty abstract terms among concrete implications loss sense flux insecurity makes us feel like everything constantly changing yet also makes us afraid change much anything faith institutions translates confidence availability minimal stability society lost confidence easily become society dissatisfied insecure status quo risk averse anything beyond complaining cowen suggests may biggest risks face poulos suggests addressing problem require revival means democratic forbearance may turn depend revival democratic institutions broadly conceived reflection two great new books worth reading case yuval levin hertog fellow ethics public policy center | 792 |
<p><a href="http://variety.com/t/steven-spielberg/" type="external">Steven Spielberg</a>’s “ <a href="http://variety.com/t/the-post/" type="external">The Post</a>” throttles along in a pleasurably bustling, down-to-the-timely-minute way. It’s a heady, jam-packed docudrama that, with confidence and great filmmaking verve (though not what you’d call an excess of nuance), tells a vital American story of history, journalism, politics, and the way those things came together over a couple of fateful weeks in the summer of 1971. That’s when The New York Times, followed by The Washington Post, published extensive excerpts from the Pentagon Papers: the top-secret government history of the Vietnam War that revealed, for the first time, the lies told&#160;to the American people about U.S. involvement in Indochina dating back to 1945. (Most destructive lie: the hiding of the fact that U.S. leaders knew the war was a losing battle.)</p>
<p>The heart of the movie is set at <a href="http://variety.com/2017/artisans/awards/blade-runner-2049-contenders-cinematographers-gravitate-toward-large-formats-and-sumptuous-images-1202626463/" type="external">the Post</a>, where the paper’s executive editor, Ben Bradlee ( <a href="http://variety.com/t/tom-hanks/" type="external">Tom Hanks</a>), with his urbane rasp, aristocrat-in-shirt-sleeves mystique, and a bite more forceful than his bark, and Katharine Graham ( <a href="http://variety.com/t/meryl-streep/" type="external">Meryl Streep</a>), the paper’s wily socialite patrician publisher, square off like a couple of sparring partners who won’t let the fact that they’re on the same side stop them from taking a punch. Both of them want a great newspaper, one that will shake off its image as a “local paper” and do more than make headlines; they want it to make history. But they disagree on how to get there. The rascally Bradlee is like the prim and proper Graham’s id: She hired him, but can’t decide whether to encourage or repress him. Their contentious camaraderie is highly entertaining, and so is the whole movie, which pulses ahead like a detective yarn for news junkies, one that crackles with present-day parallels.</p>
<p>In 1971, following the public revelation of the Pentagon Papers, both the Times and the Post stood tall against an injunction, filed by the Nixon White House, to cease publication of the classified documents — an attempt at legal clampdown that could well have snuffed the Fourth Estate as we know it. “The Post” offers not so much a message as a warning: that freedom of the press is a fight that never stops, and that the force that keeps it going is the absolute die-hard belief in that freedom. When the press begins to accept restrictions, however grudgingly, it’s all but inviting itself to be muzzled.</p>
<p>That’s a lesson that has rarely needed to be heard as much as it does today. “The Post” is a movie of galvanizing relevance, one that’s all but certain to connect with an inspiringly wide audience (I predict a $100 million gross) and with the currents of awards season. That said, it’s a potently watchable movie that isn’t quite a work of art. Two of Spielberg’s recent history films were also made in a messianic spirit of topical fervor: “Munich,” a dread-inflected thriller that addressed the post-9/11 world, and “Lincoln,” a kind of dramatized time machine that commented on our own increasingly fractious and divided political arena. Yet both those films had a depth and mystery and power that transcended the moment; you could watch them 20 years from now and they would still echo. “The Post,” written by Liz Hannah and Josh Singer in a mode that’s boundingly busy and a little too expository, is a more functional, less imaginative movie — it’s high-carb docudrama prose rather than poetry. You can be stirred by what it’s saying and still feel that when it’s over, the film declares more than it reverberates.</p>
<p>The gold standard for this sort of true-life journalistic muckraker is, of course, “All the President’s Men,” a movie that took place in the ’70s, was made in the ’70s, and tapped the alternating current of corruption and idealism that helped define the ’70s. “The Post,” by contrast, seems to be set in some fetishistic museum-piece re-creation of the ’70s, with every drag on a cigarette calling too much attention to itself (yes, a lot of people smoked — but where’s the smoky air hanging in the rooms?), too many “casually” signposted references to dinner-party mainstays like “Scotty” Reston and Lawrence Durrell, and too many actors wearing wigs that are visibly wigs (prime culprit: Michael Stuhlbarg, in a way too shiny mop, as the New York Times executive editor Abe Rosenthal). And why does Bruce Greenwood, generally an actor of supreme subtlety, blare his lines and pop his eyes as Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, the secretly doubting hawk who commissioned the Pentagon study and then made the strategic mistake of letting someone like Daniel Ellsberg read it?</p>
<p>The film opens with Ellsberg, played by Matthew Rhys with a fine, forlorn rabbinical iciness, typing notes in the Vietnam combat field, then listening to McNamara on the plane ride back explain that the war is going terribly — only to watch him turn around and play the war’s booster at an airport press conference. Ellsberg is disgusted by the two faces of American policy. A research associate at the Rand Corporation, he has access to all 7,000 pages of the study, which he has spent months smuggling out, photocopying, and slipping to reporter Neil Sheehan of the Times.</p>
<p>Ben Bradlee can smell something is up — he’s noticed that Sheehan hasn’t had a by-line in three months — and the film hooks you with Bradlee’s cussed old-school fervor, which takes the form of his brazen desire to compete with the Times. When he and two of his reporters first see the Pentagon Papers story on a newsstand, learning about it along with everyone else, Bradlee knows how historically vital it is — but he also knows that he’s been scooped. Hanks doesn’t quite have the bone-dry gin-martini brittleness that Jason Robards summoned so memorably in “All the President’s Men,” and Hanks’ regional inflections come and go (the actor lends a Boston vowel to every 10th line or so). But he nails Bradlee’s wry and jaded WASP-renegade charisma — the star editor’s nose for truth that emerges from his acceptance of how scuzzy the world is, and how badly it needs to have the light shined on it. Despite a White House ban, Bradlee refuses to take the acerbic Judith Martin (Jessie Mueller) off the Tricia Nixon wedding, and that minor decision reflects his core values. He’s a player who’s not going to play ball.</p>
<p>“The Post” has some good tense scenes set in the analog era of reporting, notably when Ben Bagdikian (Bob Odenkirk), the harried Post reporter with a long-time connection to Ellsberg, hunts him down using multiple pay phones, then flies to Washington with the boxed papers in their own special seat. The shoe-leather dimension of reporting has always been more dramatic than contemporary scenes of investigators staring into their computer terminals.</p>
<p>At the same time, part of what rescues the movie from any vestige of preachiness is that it’s framed as a business drama. Streep’s Graham, who inherited the publisher’s mantle after her husband’s suicide, is about to take the family newspaper public, and much is made of the share price: Will it will be $24.50 or $27? That could make a difference of $3 million, which would pay for 25 reporters’ jobs. In its wonky way, “The Post” touches the first moment when people realized that American newspapers were not necessarily a growth industry. Graham’s belief — idealistic but also prophetic — is that it will be the quality of newspapers, their influence, that allows them to flourish. Streep, speaking in an imperious nasal singsong, makes Graham irresistibly knowing yet, beneath the tea-party bluster, secretly unsure of herself: the only woman in a boardroom of men, and therefore an executive who has to fly solo to find her own way.</p>
<p>Complicating matters is the fact that she’s close friends with Robert McNamara. Once the Pentagon Papers story breaks, will the Post go easy on him? Or will Graham follow through on Bradlee’s request and exploit the friendship to get their own copy of the papers? The answers are: No and no. But these conversations are riveting, because they transport us back to an exotic age when editors and politicians didn’t regard themselves as adversaries; they were all on the side of America. “The Post” is about how and why that era had to end. Bradlee, a former pal of JFK’s, also played the game of rubbing elbows with power. But now, disgusted by the lies revealed in the Pentagon Papers, he enunciates the new credo. “We have to be a check on their power,” he says. “If we don’t, who will?”</p>
<p>The movie becomes a multi-stranded tale of journalistic triumph, with Graham movingly arriving at the realization that she’s not just the caretaker of her late husband’s company; it’s her company. The decision to publish the Papers becomes nothing less than an assertion of democracy, made all the more potent when newspapers across the land publish in solidarity. The press — the media — becomes greater than the sum of its parts. But that’s because it always was. The Pentagon Papers marked an iconic moment in American history: the press claiming its own freedom to call out the excesses of power. “The Post” celebrates what that means, tapping into an enlightened nostalgia for the glory days of newspapers, but the film also takes you back to a time when the outcome was precarious, and the freedoms we thought we took for granted hung in the balance. Just as they do today.</p> | false | 1 | steven spielbergs post throttles along pleasurably bustling downtothetimelyminute way heady jampacked docudrama confidence great filmmaking verve though youd call excess nuance tells vital american story history journalism politics way things came together couple fateful weeks summer 1971 thats new york times followed washington post published extensive excerpts pentagon papers topsecret government history vietnam war revealed first time lies told160to american people us involvement indochina dating back 1945 destructive lie hiding fact us leaders knew war losing battle heart movie set post papers executive editor ben bradlee tom hanks urbane rasp aristocratinshirtsleeves mystique bite forceful bark katharine graham meryl streep papers wily socialite patrician publisher square like couple sparring partners wont let fact theyre side stop taking punch want great newspaper one shake image local paper make headlines want make history disagree get rascally bradlee like prim proper grahams id hired cant decide whether encourage repress contentious camaraderie highly entertaining whole movie pulses ahead like detective yarn news junkies one crackles presentday parallels 1971 following public revelation pentagon papers times post stood tall injunction filed nixon white house cease publication classified documents attempt legal clampdown could well snuffed fourth estate know post offers much message warning freedom press fight never stops force keeps going absolute diehard belief freedom press begins accept restrictions however grudgingly inviting muzzled thats lesson rarely needed heard much today post movie galvanizing relevance one thats certain connect inspiringly wide audience predict 100 million gross currents awards season said potently watchable movie isnt quite work art two spielbergs recent history films also made messianic spirit topical fervor munich dreadinflected thriller addressed post911 world lincoln kind dramatized time machine commented increasingly fractious divided political arena yet films depth mystery power transcended moment could watch 20 years would still echo post written liz hannah josh singer mode thats boundingly busy little expository functional less imaginative movie highcarb docudrama prose rather poetry stirred saying still feel film declares reverberates gold standard sort truelife journalistic muckraker course presidents men movie took place 70s made 70s tapped alternating current corruption idealism helped define 70s post contrast seems set fetishistic museumpiece recreation 70s every drag cigarette calling much attention yes lot people smoked wheres smoky air hanging rooms many casually signposted references dinnerparty mainstays like scotty reston lawrence durrell many actors wearing wigs visibly wigs prime culprit michael stuhlbarg way shiny mop new york times executive editor abe rosenthal bruce greenwood generally actor supreme subtlety blare lines pop eyes secretary defense robert mcnamara secretly doubting hawk commissioned pentagon study made strategic mistake letting someone like daniel ellsberg read film opens ellsberg played matthew rhys fine forlorn rabbinical iciness typing notes vietnam combat field listening mcnamara plane ride back explain war going terribly watch turn around play wars booster airport press conference ellsberg disgusted two faces american policy research associate rand corporation access 7000 pages study spent months smuggling photocopying slipping reporter neil sheehan times ben bradlee smell something hes noticed sheehan hasnt byline three months film hooks bradlees cussed oldschool fervor takes form brazen desire compete times two reporters first see pentagon papers story newsstand learning along everyone else bradlee knows historically vital also knows hes scooped hanks doesnt quite bonedry ginmartini brittleness jason robards summoned memorably presidents men hanks regional inflections come go actor lends boston vowel every 10th line nails bradlees wry jaded wasprenegade charisma star editors nose truth emerges acceptance scuzzy world badly needs light shined despite white house ban bradlee refuses take acerbic judith martin jessie mueller tricia nixon wedding minor decision reflects core values hes player whos going play ball post good tense scenes set analog era reporting notably ben bagdikian bob odenkirk harried post reporter longtime connection ellsberg hunts using multiple pay phones flies washington boxed papers special seat shoeleather dimension reporting always dramatic contemporary scenes investigators staring computer terminals time part rescues movie vestige preachiness framed business drama streeps graham inherited publishers mantle husbands suicide take family newspaper public much made share price 2450 27 could make difference 3 million would pay 25 reporters jobs wonky way post touches first moment people realized american newspapers necessarily growth industry grahams belief idealistic also prophetic quality newspapers influence allows flourish streep speaking imperious nasal singsong makes graham irresistibly knowing yet beneath teaparty bluster secretly unsure woman boardroom men therefore executive fly solo find way complicating matters fact shes close friends robert mcnamara pentagon papers story breaks post go easy graham follow bradlees request exploit friendship get copy papers answers conversations riveting transport us back exotic age editors politicians didnt regard adversaries side america post era end bradlee former pal jfks also played game rubbing elbows power disgusted lies revealed pentagon papers enunciates new credo check power says dont movie becomes multistranded tale journalistic triumph graham movingly arriving realization shes caretaker late husbands company company decision publish papers becomes nothing less assertion democracy made potent newspapers across land publish solidarity press media becomes greater sum parts thats always pentagon papers marked iconic moment american history press claiming freedom call excesses power post celebrates means tapping enlightened nostalgia glory days newspapers film also takes back time outcome precarious freedoms thought took granted hung balance today | 854 |
<p>Merkel’s decision to open the borders to refugees in 2015 proved to be her most controversial move as chancellor. With an election looming, critics say it has caused discontent in Germany, a split in the EU… and Merkel’s own change of heart.</p>
<p>Just two weeks before the parliamentary election, German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s CDU party is comfortably ahead of all contenders. Her approval rating, however, has not yet fully recovered after going into a tailspin following her handling of the 2015 migrant crisis.</p>
<p>Despite receiving thousands of asylum-seekers annually, Germany has been safeguarded by its geographic location and the Dublin agreement (which regulates asylum procedures in the EU), which left most refugees stranded in the EU’s coastal states, such as Greece and Italy. Berlin, however, began facing a new reality two years ago. As the migrant influx into Europe from the Middle East and North Africa gained momentum, the German chancellor announced a “humanitarian move,” opening Germany’s borders to migrants in August 2015.</p>
<p>Her decision may have been guided by other motives, Professor William Mallinson, a former British diplomat, told RT.&#160;“Germany’s attitude appears to be hypocritical: on the one hand, in October 2010, Angela Merkel announced that multiculturalism has ‘utterly failed.’ Yet, pandering to the electorate – or so she thought – she let in over one million immigrants only six years later,”&#160;Mallinson said.&#160;</p>
<p>The change in Merkel’s rhetoric in the months to follow was merely an attempt&#160;“to jump onto the anti-immigration bandwagon because of the impending elections.”</p>
<p>Read more</p>
<p><a href="https://www.rt.com/news/402257-merkel-hit-tomato-campaign/" type="external" /></p>
<p>And there is more to it, according to Doris Von Sayn-Wittgenstein, a German AfD politician. The decision to open the borders was ultimately not an attempt to deal with the crisis, but rather to give it a ‘let it happen’ option, she told RT, adding that the “the government is going by ‘Yes we can’ and is simply denying the problem.”</p>
<p>Angela Merkel herself, “for historical reasons,” most feared the media images of armed police and Bundeswehr soldiers confronting migrants at the border, Robin Alexander, a German political journalist and author of a best-seller on how the German government has dealt with refugees, claimed in his book. While not challenging the ‘open borders’ policy, Boris Palmer, mayor of Tuebingen, Germany, <a href="http://www.faz.net/aktuell/wirtschaft/afrika-im-umbruch/boris-palmer-veroeffentlicht-buch-er-kann-nicht-allen-helfen-15128326.html?printPagedArticle=true#pageIndex_2" type="external">believes</a>&#160;that Merkel was wrong to turn a decision “which was born from a necessity” into a “moral litmus test” for the nation.</p>
<p>The situation became so chaotic that at some point, authorities managed to “lose” 130,000 asylum-seekers who never turned up at the refugee centers to properly file asylum requests, German media <a href="http://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/fluechtlingspolitik-mehr-als-jeder-zehnte-asylsuchende-ist-verschwunden-1.2881071" type="external">reported</a>, citing interior ministry figures.&#160;“Until now we have hundreds of thousands of people, where we don’t know the names. It is a breakdown of the state as a system,”&#160;former German Parliamentary State Secretary on Defense and ex-VP of the OSCE Assembly Willy Wimmer told RT.</p>
<p>The general public initially gave broad support for asylum-seekers, with the popular slogan ‘Refugees Welcome.’ However, the mood of the population began to change following allegations of mass sexual harassment during 2015 New Year’s Eve celebrations in Cologne. With 1,200 complaints filed, police were able to <a href="http://www.bpb.de/apuz/239696/die-silvesternacht-und-ihre-folgen?p=all" type="external">identify</a>&#160;over 300 suspects, 109 of whom were asylum-seekers. Although German citizens were also among the suspects, the case triggered mass outrage, as it did not receive widespread coverage and proper reactions from the authorities until days afterward. This resulted in a wide-ranging national debate on refugees in Germany, as well as numerous protests, with the slogan ‘Merkel muss weg’ (Merkel must go) commonly heard.</p>
<p>The mass influx of refugees also had a major impact on Germany’s national security situation. Back in August 2016, the head of the Bavarian department of the domestic intelligence agency (BfV), Manfred Hauser, warned that “hit squads” linked to Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) might have infiltrated Germany posing as refugees.</p>
<p>Read more</p>
<p><a href="https://www.rt.com/news/402535-germans-top-concern-terrorism/" type="external" /></p>
<p>His agency looked into “hundreds” of such cases, he <a href="https://www.rt.com/news/355587-refugees-isis-sleepers-germany/" type="external">said</a>. In 2016, jihadists carried out five attacks, while the security services managed to prevent seven others, according to the BfV.</p>
<p>The deadliest incident occurred on December 19, 2016, when a 27-year-old rejected asylum-seeker – a Tunisian man named Anis Amri who had pledged allegiance to IS – plowed a truck into a Berlin Christmas market, leaving 12 people dead and dozens injured. The assailant, who had previously been on the radar of the police, managed to flee the scene and reach Italy, where he was gunned down by police.</p>
<p>Just months earlier, in July, a 27-year-old Syrian refugee detonated an explosive device outside a music festival in the town of Ansbach, killing himself and injuring 12 others. That same month, a 17-year-old Afghan refugee with an axe assaulted train passengers near Wurzburg in central Germany, leaving five people injured. IS claimed responsibility for all of the attacks. The terrorist threat remains high, and the country “must expect further attacks by individuals or terror groups” which “may occur any time,” the head of the BfV, Hans-Georg Maassen, <a href="https://www.rt.com/news/379875-germany-terrorist-attacks-possible/" type="external">warned</a>&#160;this March.</p>
<p>Germany failed to make a necessary assessment of the security situation following the New Year’s Eve incidents in Cologne, political analyst John Bosnitch told RT. He added that the authorities did little to effectively accelerate integration. As “long as the migrants with a different cultural background continue to maintain their own bloc within the German society… the possibility of integrating this group is going to decline, and it is going to become a much worse problem in Germany than it is today,” he said.</p>
<p>It was only after the first terrorist attacks on German soil committed by asylum-seekers and mass anti-immigrant demonstrations with the ‘Merkel must go!’ slogan that the chancellor admitted her political course might be somewhat “flawed.” In September 2016, Merkel publicly acknowledged that her infamous “We can do it!” had become “an empty formula.”&#160;</p>
<p>That came way too late, according to Mallinson. “She is now admitting that she was mistaken,”&#160;he&#160;old RT.&#160;“The damage has, however, already been done.”</p>
<p>Merkel then toughened her rhetoric on issues perceived as related to refugees. In December of the same year, Merkel announced that “the full-face [Muslim] veil must be banned wherever it is legally possible” and stressed that “all Germans that always lived here as well as those who just arrived” should obey the law, apparently referring to the surge in migrant crime. She added that German law “takes precedence” over Sharia law (Islamic law).</p>
<p>[embedded content]</p>
<p>Following the deadly 2016 Berlin Christmas Market attack, Merkel <a href="https://www.rt.com/news/371529-germany-repatriate-tunisians-attack/" type="external">promised</a>&#160;to speed up deportations of failed Tunisian asylum-seekers, as Anis Amri, who plowed a truck into the market crowd, had come to Germany from Tunisia. The Chancellor also reiterated her promise to speed up deportations of all failed asylum-seekers.</p>
<p>The change in rhetoric appears less surprising if one looks at the polls following Merkel’s ‘open borders’ policy. According to <a href="http://www.bild.de/politik/inland/angela-merkel/wie-sind-merkels-chancen-48849788.bild.html" type="external">Bild</a>, in late 2014, Merkel enjoyed 75-percent support among Germans, while by late 2015, it fell by 26 percent and stood at 49 percent. Support continued to fall, reaching one of its lowest points in 2016. Other data provided by German <a href="https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article156891529/Merkels-Beliebtheit-steigt-auf-Zehn-Monats-Hoch.html" type="external">Die Welt</a>&#160;daily in 2016 showed that Merkel’s policy during the refugee crisis resulted in her gradually losing 12 percent of public support.</p>
<p>Angela Merkel is, in fact, now no longer pursuing “a policy of open borders, and that fits perfectly with the mood in the country,” Robin Alexander said. Despite saying that she would “make all the important decisions of 2015 the same way again,” the closer the election approaches, the more it seems that this is no longer the case. In fact, Merkel has been repeating the line: “What happened in 2015 cannot, should not and must not happen again.”</p>
<p>Merkel’s controversial open-border policy also gave a boost to right-wing elements within the country, including the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, and a popular movement called Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the Occident (PEGIDA).</p>
<p>[embedded content]</p>
<p>The AfD has benefitted greatly from the migrant crisis, and may win as much as 10 percent of the seats in the upcoming Bundestag election, according to opinion <a href="http://www.wahlrecht.de/umfragen/" type="external">polls</a>. The party, despite its brief four-year history, is already represented in many regional parliaments in Germany. The party has on numerous occasions drawn accusations of xenophobia, and even being “Nazi.” This, however, simply indicates that people’s real problems are ignored, Doris von Sayn-Wittgenstein told RT. Essentially, people who complain about migrants nowadays are “called racist and liars,” Sayn-Wittgenstein said, adding that “our system can’t take these people [migrants] anymore.”</p>
<p>“The Germans don’t have the courage to choose another leader,” Iben Thranholm believes, adding that it remains a “mystery” to her.</p>
<p>To somehow fix the situation and “equally” distribute migrants among the EU, Merkel’s government has been pushing (along with Brussels) for specific quotas. The goal of resettling 160,000 migrants was approved by the EU in September 2015.</p>
<p>[embedded content]</p>
<p>Hungarian PM Viktor Orban has become one of the most vocal critics of the quota system, warning that its implementation might result in&#160;“tens of millions”&#160;of migrants coming to Europe. His concerns were strongly echoed by Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Denmark.</p>
<p>Resistance is not only due to quota systems themselves, Wimmer believes, but due to the lack of proper negotiations and the inability of Merkel to consult with anyone before announcing her open-border policy.&#160;“Everything in Europe happened because of the decision of one person – Mrs. Merkel,”&#160;Wimmer told RT.&#160;“That is the reason why the Poles, Hungarians, and others refuse to take Merkel’s migrants.”</p>
<p>Read more</p>
<p><a href="https://www.rt.com/news/402246-politics-raped-european-values/" type="external" /></p>
<p>The European Court of Justice (ECJ) on Wednesday dismissed a challenge by Slovakia and Hungary against the EU’s relocation policy for asylum-seekers, reiterating the EU’s right to force its members to accept the migrant quotas. Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto slammed the decision, <a href="https://www.rt.com/news/402246-politics-raped-european-values/" type="external">saying</a>&#160;“Politics has raped European law.”&#160;</p>
<p>Another measure aimed at “fixing” the migrant crisis was signing the EU-Turkey deal in March of last year. Under the agreement, all “irregular” migrants arriving in Greece – if they do not apply for asylum or get their application rejected – will be returned to Turkey. For each Syrian returned to Turkey, one must be resettled in the EU.</p>
<p>This agreement, however, offers no solution to the problem by merely “outsourcing” it, according to <a href="https://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/file_attachments/mb-migrants-libya-europe-090817-en.pdf" type="external">Oxfam</a> and other humanitarian groups. This criticism focuses in particular on the fears of human rights abuses of people in Turkish refugee camps. Prior to the deal, Merkel hailed the progress made with Turkey on the refugee issue, also envisioning a boost to Ankara’s EU membership process. Since then, relations between Turkey on one side, and the EU and Berlin on the other, have deteriorated, raising serious fears that the deal is falling apart.</p>
<p>With all the twists and turns in recent years, Chancellor Merkel has shown herself to be a political chameleon, political analyst John Bosnitch told RT.&#160;“If she manages to be re-elected, then she will have to find a new shape to take, a new political form, in other words, to be a chameleon once again,” Bosnitch said.</p> | false | 1 | merkels decision open borders refugees 2015 proved controversial move chancellor election looming critics say caused discontent germany split eu merkels change heart two weeks parliamentary election german chancellor angela merkels cdu party comfortably ahead contenders approval rating however yet fully recovered going tailspin following handling 2015 migrant crisis despite receiving thousands asylumseekers annually germany safeguarded geographic location dublin agreement regulates asylum procedures eu left refugees stranded eus coastal states greece italy berlin however began facing new reality two years ago migrant influx europe middle east north africa gained momentum german chancellor announced humanitarian move opening germanys borders migrants august 2015 decision may guided motives professor william mallinson former british diplomat told rt160germanys attitude appears hypocritical one hand october 2010 angela merkel announced multiculturalism utterly failed yet pandering electorate thought let one million immigrants six years later160mallinson said160 change merkels rhetoric months follow merely attempt160to jump onto antiimmigration bandwagon impending elections read according doris von saynwittgenstein german afd politician decision open borders ultimately attempt deal crisis rather give let happen option told rt adding government going yes simply denying problem angela merkel historical reasons feared media images armed police bundeswehr soldiers confronting migrants border robin alexander german political journalist author bestseller german government dealt refugees claimed book challenging open borders policy boris palmer mayor tuebingen germany believes160that merkel wrong turn decision born necessity moral litmus test nation situation became chaotic point authorities managed lose 130000 asylumseekers never turned refugee centers properly file asylum requests german media reported citing interior ministry figures160until hundreds thousands people dont know names breakdown state system160former german parliamentary state secretary defense exvp osce assembly willy wimmer told rt general public initially gave broad support asylumseekers popular slogan refugees welcome however mood population began change following allegations mass sexual harassment 2015 new years eve celebrations cologne 1200 complaints filed police able identify160over 300 suspects 109 asylumseekers although german citizens also among suspects case triggered mass outrage receive widespread coverage proper reactions authorities days afterward resulted wideranging national debate refugees germany well numerous protests slogan merkel muss weg merkel must go commonly heard mass influx refugees also major impact germanys national security situation back august 2016 head bavarian department domestic intelligence agency bfv manfred hauser warned hit squads linked islamic state formerly isisisil might infiltrated germany posing refugees read agency looked hundreds cases said 2016 jihadists carried five attacks security services managed prevent seven others according bfv deadliest incident occurred december 19 2016 27yearold rejected asylumseeker tunisian man named anis amri pledged allegiance plowed truck berlin christmas market leaving 12 people dead dozens injured assailant previously radar police managed flee scene reach italy gunned police months earlier july 27yearold syrian refugee detonated explosive device outside music festival town ansbach killing injuring 12 others month 17yearold afghan refugee axe assaulted train passengers near wurzburg central germany leaving five people injured claimed responsibility attacks terrorist threat remains high country must expect attacks individuals terror groups may occur time head bfv hansgeorg maassen warned160this march germany failed make necessary assessment security situation following new years eve incidents cologne political analyst john bosnitch told rt added authorities little effectively accelerate integration long migrants different cultural background continue maintain bloc within german society possibility integrating group going decline going become much worse problem germany today said first terrorist attacks german soil committed asylumseekers mass antiimmigrant demonstrations merkel must go slogan chancellor admitted political course might somewhat flawed september 2016 merkel publicly acknowledged infamous become empty formula160 came way late according mallinson admitting mistaken160he160old rt160the damage however already done merkel toughened rhetoric issues perceived related refugees december year merkel announced fullface muslim veil must banned wherever legally possible stressed germans always lived well arrived obey law apparently referring surge migrant crime added german law takes precedence sharia law islamic law embedded content following deadly 2016 berlin christmas market attack merkel promised160to speed deportations failed tunisian asylumseekers anis amri plowed truck market crowd come germany tunisia chancellor also reiterated promise speed deportations failed asylumseekers change rhetoric appears less surprising one looks polls following merkels open borders policy according bild late 2014 merkel enjoyed 75percent support among germans late 2015 fell 26 percent stood 49 percent support continued fall reaching one lowest points 2016 data provided german die welt160daily 2016 showed merkels policy refugee crisis resulted gradually losing 12 percent public support angela merkel fact longer pursuing policy open borders fits perfectly mood country robin alexander said despite saying would make important decisions 2015 way closer election approaches seems longer case fact merkel repeating line happened 2015 must happen merkels controversial openborder policy also gave boost rightwing elements within country including alternative germany afd party popular movement called patriotic europeans islamization occident pegida embedded content afd benefitted greatly migrant crisis may win much 10 percent seats upcoming bundestag election according opinion polls party despite brief fouryear history already represented many regional parliaments germany party numerous occasions drawn accusations xenophobia even nazi however simply indicates peoples real problems ignored doris von saynwittgenstein told rt essentially people complain migrants nowadays called racist liars saynwittgenstein said adding system cant take people migrants anymore germans dont courage choose another leader iben thranholm believes adding remains mystery somehow fix situation equally distribute migrants among eu merkels government pushing along brussels specific quotas goal resettling 160000 migrants approved eu september 2015 embedded content hungarian pm viktor orban become one vocal critics quota system warning implementation might result in160tens millions160of migrants coming europe concerns strongly echoed poland czech republic slovakia denmark resistance due quota systems wimmer believes due lack proper negotiations inability merkel consult anyone announcing openborder policy160everything europe happened decision one person mrs merkel160wimmer told rt160that reason poles hungarians others refuse take merkels migrants read european court justice ecj wednesday dismissed challenge slovakia hungary eus relocation policy asylumseekers reiterating eus right force members accept migrant quotas hungarian foreign minister peter szijjarto slammed decision saying160politics raped european law160 another measure aimed fixing migrant crisis signing euturkey deal march last year agreement irregular migrants arriving greece apply asylum get application rejected returned turkey syrian returned turkey one must resettled eu agreement however offers solution problem merely outsourcing according oxfam humanitarian groups criticism focuses particular fears human rights abuses people turkish refugee camps prior deal merkel hailed progress made turkey refugee issue also envisioning boost ankaras eu membership process since relations turkey one side eu berlin deteriorated raising serious fears deal falling apart twists turns recent years chancellor merkel shown political chameleon political analyst john bosnitch told rt160if manages reelected find new shape take new political form words chameleon bosnitch said | 1,085 |
<p />
<p>A pervading sense of awe seems to be engulfing Arab societies everywhere. What is underway in the Arab world is greater than simply revolution in a political or economic sense – it is, in fact, shifting the very self-definition of what it means to be Arab, both individually and collectively.</p>
<p>Hollywood has long caricatured and humiliated Arabs. American foreign policy in the Middle East has been aided by simplistic, degrading, and at times racist depictions of Arabs in the mass media. A whole generation of pseudo-intellectuals have built their careers on the notion that they have a key understanding of Arabs and the seemingly predictable pattern of their behavior.</p>
<p>Now we see Libya – a society that had nothing by way of a civil society and which was under a protracted stage of siege – literally making history. The collective strength displayed by Libyan society is awe-inspiring to say the least. Equally praiseworthy is the way in which Libyans have responded to growing dangers and challenges. But most important is the spontaneous nature of their actions. Diplomatic efforts, political organization, structured revolutionary efforts and media outreach simply followed the path and demands of the people. Libyans led the fight, and everyone else either obliged or played the role of spectator.</p>
<p>There is something new and fascinating underway here – a phenomena of popular action that renders any historical comparisons inadequate. Western stereotypes have long served an important (and often violent) purpose: reducing the Arab, while propping up Israeli, British and American invasions in the name of ‘democracy’, ‘freedom’ and ‘liberation’. Those who held the ‘torch of civilization’ and allegedly commanded uncontested moral superiority gave themselves unhindered access to the lands of the Arabs, their resources, their history, and, most of all, their very dignity.</p>
<p>Yet those who chartered the prejudiced discourses, defining the Arabs to suit their colonial objectives – from Napoleon Bonaparte to George W. Bush – only showed themselves to be bad students of history. They tailored historical narratives to meet their own designs, always casting themselves as the liberators and saviors of all good things, civilization and democracy notwithstanding. In actual fact, they practiced the very opposite of what they preached, wreaking havoc, delaying reforms, co-opting democracy, and consistently leaving behind a trail of blood and destruction.</p>
<p>In the 1920s, Britain sliced up, then recomposed Iraq territorially and demographically to suit specific political and economic agenda. Oil wells were drilled in Kirkuk and Baghdad, then Mosul and Basra. Iraq’s cultural uniqueness was merely an opportunity to divide and conquer. Britain played out the ethno-religious-tribal mix to the point of mastery. But Arabs in Iraq rebelled repeatedly and Britain reacted the way it would to an army in a battle field. The Iraqi blood ran deep until the revolution of 1958, when the people obtained freedom from puppet kings and British colonizers. In 2003, British battalions returned carrying even deadlier arms and more dehumanizing discourses, imposing themselves as the new rulers of Iraq, with the US leading the way.</p>
<p>Palestinians – as Arabs from other societies – were not far behind in terms of their ability to mobilize around a decided and highly progressive political platform. Indeed, Palestine experienced its first open rebellion against the Zionist colonial drive in the country, and the complacent British role in espousing it and laboring to ensure its success decades ago (well before Facebook and Twitter made it to the revolutionary Arab scene). In April 1936, all five Palestinian political parties joined under the umbrella of the Arab Higher Committee (AHC), led by Haj Amin al-Husseini. One of the AHC’s first decisions was to assemble National Committees throughout Palestine. In May, al-Husseini summoned the first conference of the National Committees in Jerusalem, which collectively declared a general strike on May 8, 1936. The first joint Palestinian action to protest the Zionist-British designs in Palestine was non-violent. Employing means of civil disobedience, the 1936 uprising aimed to send a stern message to the British government that Palestinians were nationally unified and capable of acting as an assertive, self-assured society. The British administration in Palestine had thus far discounted the Palestinian demand for independence and paid little attention to their incessant complaints about the rising menace of Zionism and its colonial project.</p>
<p>Palestinian fury turned violent when the British government resorted to mass repression. It had wanted to send a message to Palestinians that her Majesty’s Government would not be intimidated by what it saw as insignificant fellahin, or peasants. The first six months of the uprising, which lasted under different manifestations and phases for three years, was characterized at the outset by a widely observed general strike which lasted from May to October 1936. Palestine was simply shut down in response to the call of the National Committees and al-Husseini. This irked the British, who saw the “non-Jewish residents of Palestine” as deplorable, troublesome peasants with untamed leadership. Within a few years, Palestinians managed to challenge the conventional wisdom of the British, whose narrow Orientalist grasp on the Arabs as lesser beings with fewer or no rights – a model to be borrowed later on by the Zionists and Israeli officials – left them unqualified to ponder any other response to a legitimate uprising than coercive measures.</p>
<p>The price of revolution is always very high. Then, thousands of Palestinians were killed. Today, Libyans are falling in intolerable numbers. But freedom is sweet and several generations of Arabs have demonstrated willingness to pay the high price it demands.</p>
<p>Arab society – whether the strikers of Palestine in 1936, the rebels of Baghdad of 1958, or the revolutionaries of Libya, Tunisia and Egypt of 2011 – remain, in a sense, unchanged, as determined as ever win freedom, equality and democracy. And their tormenters also remain unhinged, using the same language of political manipulation and brutal military tactics.</p>
<p>The studious neoconservatives at the Foreign Policy Initiative and elsewhere must be experiencing an intellectual ‘shock and awe’, even as they continue in their quest to control the wealth and destiny of Arabs. Arab societies, however, have risen with a unified call for freedom. And the call is now too strong to be muted.</p> | false | 1 | pervading sense awe seems engulfing arab societies everywhere underway arab world greater simply revolution political economic sense fact shifting selfdefinition means arab individually collectively hollywood long caricatured humiliated arabs american foreign policy middle east aided simplistic degrading times racist depictions arabs mass media whole generation pseudointellectuals built careers notion key understanding arabs seemingly predictable pattern behavior see libya society nothing way civil society protracted stage siege literally making history collective strength displayed libyan society aweinspiring say least equally praiseworthy way libyans responded growing dangers challenges important spontaneous nature actions diplomatic efforts political organization structured revolutionary efforts media outreach simply followed path demands people libyans led fight everyone else either obliged played role spectator something new fascinating underway phenomena popular action renders historical comparisons inadequate western stereotypes long served important often violent purpose reducing arab propping israeli british american invasions name democracy freedom liberation held torch civilization allegedly commanded uncontested moral superiority gave unhindered access lands arabs resources history dignity yet chartered prejudiced discourses defining arabs suit colonial objectives napoleon bonaparte george w bush showed bad students history tailored historical narratives meet designs always casting liberators saviors good things civilization democracy notwithstanding actual fact practiced opposite preached wreaking havoc delaying reforms coopting democracy consistently leaving behind trail blood destruction 1920s britain sliced recomposed iraq territorially demographically suit specific political economic agenda oil wells drilled kirkuk baghdad mosul basra iraqs cultural uniqueness merely opportunity divide conquer britain played ethnoreligioustribal mix point mastery arabs iraq rebelled repeatedly britain reacted way would army battle field iraqi blood ran deep revolution 1958 people obtained freedom puppet kings british colonizers 2003 british battalions returned carrying even deadlier arms dehumanizing discourses imposing new rulers iraq us leading way palestinians arabs societies far behind terms ability mobilize around decided highly progressive political platform indeed palestine experienced first open rebellion zionist colonial drive country complacent british role espousing laboring ensure success decades ago well facebook twitter made revolutionary arab scene april 1936 five palestinian political parties joined umbrella arab higher committee ahc led haj amin alhusseini one ahcs first decisions assemble national committees throughout palestine may alhusseini summoned first conference national committees jerusalem collectively declared general strike may 8 1936 first joint palestinian action protest zionistbritish designs palestine nonviolent employing means civil disobedience 1936 uprising aimed send stern message british government palestinians nationally unified capable acting assertive selfassured society british administration palestine thus far discounted palestinian demand independence paid little attention incessant complaints rising menace zionism colonial project palestinian fury turned violent british government resorted mass repression wanted send message palestinians majestys government would intimidated saw insignificant fellahin peasants first six months uprising lasted different manifestations phases three years characterized outset widely observed general strike lasted may october 1936 palestine simply shut response call national committees alhusseini irked british saw nonjewish residents palestine deplorable troublesome peasants untamed leadership within years palestinians managed challenge conventional wisdom british whose narrow orientalist grasp arabs lesser beings fewer rights model borrowed later zionists israeli officials left unqualified ponder response legitimate uprising coercive measures price revolution always high thousands palestinians killed today libyans falling intolerable numbers freedom sweet several generations arabs demonstrated willingness pay high price demands arab society whether strikers palestine 1936 rebels baghdad 1958 revolutionaries libya tunisia egypt 2011 remain sense unchanged determined ever win freedom equality democracy tormenters also remain unhinged using language political manipulation brutal military tactics studious neoconservatives foreign policy initiative elsewhere must experiencing intellectual shock awe even continue quest control wealth destiny arabs arab societies however risen unified call freedom call strong muted | 585 |
<p />
<p>I find the discourse surrounding the Snowden Affair bewildering. The latest reports suggest that the United States is using maximum political leverage, including coercive diplomacy, to discourage small Latin American countries from granting asylum to Edward Snowden. It is also complaining that Russia is giving Snowden ‘a propaganda platform’ and expressing its ‘disappointment’ with China/Hong Kong for its earlier refusal to expel Snowden back to the United States to face charges once his passport was cancelled.</p>
<p>This anger is misdirected.&#160; Taking the overall situation into account, whatever anger has been generated by the Snowden Affair should be directed at the United States for expecting other governments under the circumstances to transfer custody over Snowden. From almost every angle of relevant law, morality, and politics, the human rights case for protecting Snowden against the long arm of American criminal law is overwhelming. Anyone who commits nonviolent ‘political crimes’ should almost always be entitled to be protected, and should certainly not be compelled to hole up in an airport transit lounge for weeks of anguishing suspense while governments sort out the interplay between dealing justly with Snowden and not upsetting the diplomatic applecart.</p>
<p>The persisting official U.S. approach was concisely conveyed by an American embassy official in Moscow to a Human Rights Watch representative, who then was apparently asked to relay it to Snowden at his airport press conference held a few days ago: “U.S. authorities do not consider him to be a human rights defender or a whistleblower. He broke the law and he has to be held accountable.” Yes, Snowden broke American law, but he did it to reveal improprieties in the American surveillance programs that raised serious questions of the Constitutional rights of citizens, as well as the overseas legitimate concerns of foreign governments. &#160;President Obama made an enigmatic statement to the press about the pursuit of Snowden: “We’re following all the appropriate legal channels and working with various other countries to make sure the rule of law is observed.” If read as I would interpret the applicable rule of law, the United States should abandon its efforts to gain custody as Snowden’s alleged crimes are ‘political offenses.’ Obviously, Obama has a different understanding.</p>
<p>Russia did its part to create legal confusion when the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, told the world media that Moscow was refusing to comply with the American request to turn Snowden over because Russia had no extradition treaty with the United States, but such an assertion overlooks the political offense exception to extradition, which should certainly be applied here.</p>
<p>It has become increasingly evident even to American public opinion that a twisted logic has gripped Washington in this case. What is more, the underlying U.S. assumptions have been partially accepted by many governments throughout the world who should know better, namely that Snowden should not be the benefit of sanctuary in the face of this all-out effort by the United States to prosecute him criminally. There are no applicable extradition treaties that bind the governments to turn Snowden over for prosecution to the United States in the countries where he has so far been present, and even if such a treaty did bind China or Russia, it should not be of help to Washington. Remember the elaborate inquiry into whether the Spanish extradition request in 1998 so as to prosecute the Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet, should be honored led to an elaborate set of legal inquiries in Britain where he was detained; he was finally sent home from London to Chile on the grounds that his medical condition made him unfit to stand trial in Spain.</p>
<p>It is standard practice for international law to allow governments to refuse a request for extradition in the event that the accusation involves a political crime.&#160; It is true that the definition of a political crime is unsettled. It is widely understood that violent and heinous behavior involved in genocide, crimes against humanity, terrorism, and maybe hate speech, are not considered to be ‘political crimes.’ The rationale for this exception to transnational criminal law enforceable is humane and in keeping with a pluralist world of sovereign states. As with any protective policy, there may be a cost, but the democratic ethos is in favor of incurring such costs in the interest of curtailing abuses of state power. Such costs seem worth bearing, especially in the United States, considering several recent trends: projection of global power in a unique manner; imposing a regime of homeland security on the American people that has been shown vulnerable to abuse; a decline in the checks and balance mechanisms that offer the citizenry protection against autocratic tendencies of government, especially under wartime conditions; privatization of the security and paramilitary functions of the state. Snowden’s acts should be seen as swimming against this authoritarian tide.</p>
<p>It is a matter of upholding the quality of world order, as well as supporting an international legal order that makes the world safe for political diversity and dissent. It is the latter norm that is raised by the Snowden disclosures, the global public interest in strengthening the options of individuals who challenge what they believe to be an overreaching of state power. In the world of the 21st century, ideological diversity is less significant than whistleblowing dissent that is a fantastic public service on behalf of democratic openness, countering tendencies to rely on excessive secrecy in the name of post-9/11 security in which literally everyone, everywhere is a hypothetical threat. Of course, the balance of values and interests is not so clear except to conspiracy-minded dogmatists. The state is responsible for protecting its people against threats, and these can be mounted from within and without. It is said that ‘two wrongs don’t make a right,’ but here it is possible that ‘two rights should not be treated as a wrong.’ It may be that Snowden deserves some credit even here as reportedly he has not disclosed some material that would expose the way in which the National Security Agency (NSA) operates, which could jeopardize reasonable data collection procedures.</p>
<p>Should revealing a secret government surveillance system of global proportions be treated as revealing an international &#160;wrong? It should be a ‘no brainer’ that Snowden’s alleged crimes are quintessentially ‘political’ in nature, which would make a grant of extradition an unlawful and regressive violation, as well as an encroachment on Snowden’s human rights. Not only this, but by far the most serious ‘crimes’ exposed by Snowden documented the seeming wrongdoing of the U.S. Government and its private contractors, including Snowden’s employer, Booz, Allen, &amp; Hamilton. As the world now knows thanks to Snowden, the controversial surveillance targets were not only the totality of Americans, but, as well, included foreign governments and many of their most confidential activities. Under these circumstances, it seems surprising that Washington has been so vigorous in the pursuit of Snowden under conditions that made it inappropriate to prosecute him for crimes under U.S. law so long as he remained outside the country.</p>
<p>To date, the mainstream media has been dutifully tagging along with the crime chase narrative. The American strategy has managed to keep public attention focused on Snowden rather than on what his disclosures to date have revealed and what further bombshells may be present in the material that is in the hands of the media, but not yet disclosed. It is one more negative example of ‘American exceptionalism.’ It is hard to imagine that the political leadership in Moscow or Beijing, or even London or Paris, would be lecturing Washington in a similar fashion if the shoe were on the other foot. Such a government would probably and sensibly shut up, and hope that the whole mess would quietly slip from view. Why the United States decides to act differently is worth a separate investigation.</p>
<p>We need to realize that extradition is a technique to foster maximum international collaboration designed to encourage the enhanced enforcement of national criminal law. If extradition is unavailable, as here, or even if it had been available, it would be inapplicable, there exists no respectable legal basis for the American international pursuit of Snowden? The approach adopted by Washington is quite absurd if examined objectively, and rests exclusively on its presumed geopolitical clout. What the United States has been arguing is that since it claims the authority to cancel summarily Snowden’s passport (which itself may not be ‘legal’ since the right to travel is constitutionally protected unless there has been a prior formal judicial proceeding), he has no legal right to be present in a foreign country, and hence the politically appropriate act by a foreign government is to expel him forthwith to his country of nationality. In effect, such an approach if generally adopted would make extradition completely superfluous, and in fact, because of its limitations, far less effective than the passport cancellation/expulsion ‘remedy’ that would circumvent the political crimes exception where it is most needed and appropriate.</p>
<p>Lawyers, of course, earn their living by finding ingenious ways to produce counter-arguments that sometimes override not only common sense, but public reason. In this vein, can it be plausibly argued that the crimes charged against Snowden involve espionage laws and theft of government property, and as such, extradition could be granted because such behavior does not deserve to be treated as a political crime? Some commentators have reinforced this assert by pointing to the volunteer Israeli spy, Jonathan Pollard, who has languished in American jails for years to show that the U.S. is entitled to gain control over Snowden to punish those who violate its espionage laws. Even the slightest reflection would reject the relevance of such an analogy. Pollard was unlawfully giving highly classified information to a foreign government and apprehended in the territory where the crime was committed, which makes the political nature of the crime irrelevant. If Snowden remained in the United States his political motivations could be argued in a court, but would not exempt him from criminal indictment and prosecution. His crimes could then be explained as politically motivated extra-legal instances of civil disobedience in the Thoreau/Martin Luther King tradition. Snowden’s conduct might also be defended legally by stressing his non-criminal intentions and the ‘necessity’ he reasonably believed provided a basis to reveal the realities about the truly frightening scope and depth of surveillance, and thus avoid the greater harm to public interests by its undisclosed continuation. These were more or less the arguments that Daniel Ellsberg so persuasively relied upon in the Pentagon Papers case 40 years ago to support his contention that the American people were entitled to know how their leaders manipulated facts and law to justify Vietnam War policies.</p>
<p />
<p /> | false | 1 | find discourse surrounding snowden affair bewildering latest reports suggest united states using maximum political leverage including coercive diplomacy discourage small latin american countries granting asylum edward snowden also complaining russia giving snowden propaganda platform expressing disappointment chinahong kong earlier refusal expel snowden back united states face charges passport cancelled anger misdirected160 taking overall situation account whatever anger generated snowden affair directed united states expecting governments circumstances transfer custody snowden almost every angle relevant law morality politics human rights case protecting snowden long arm american criminal law overwhelming anyone commits nonviolent political crimes almost always entitled protected certainly compelled hole airport transit lounge weeks anguishing suspense governments sort interplay dealing justly snowden upsetting diplomatic applecart persisting official us approach concisely conveyed american embassy official moscow human rights watch representative apparently asked relay snowden airport press conference held days ago us authorities consider human rights defender whistleblower broke law held accountable yes snowden broke american law reveal improprieties american surveillance programs raised serious questions constitutional rights citizens well overseas legitimate concerns foreign governments 160president obama made enigmatic statement press pursuit snowden following appropriate legal channels working various countries make sure rule law observed read would interpret applicable rule law united states abandon efforts gain custody snowdens alleged crimes political offenses obviously obama different understanding russia part create legal confusion russian president vladimir putin told world media moscow refusing comply american request turn snowden russia extradition treaty united states assertion overlooks political offense exception extradition certainly applied become increasingly evident even american public opinion twisted logic gripped washington case underlying us assumptions partially accepted many governments throughout world know better namely snowden benefit sanctuary face allout effort united states prosecute criminally applicable extradition treaties bind governments turn snowden prosecution united states countries far present even treaty bind china russia help washington remember elaborate inquiry whether spanish extradition request 1998 prosecute chilean dictator augusto pinochet honored led elaborate set legal inquiries britain detained finally sent home london chile grounds medical condition made unfit stand trial spain standard practice international law allow governments refuse request extradition event accusation involves political crime160 true definition political crime unsettled widely understood violent heinous behavior involved genocide crimes humanity terrorism maybe hate speech considered political crimes rationale exception transnational criminal law enforceable humane keeping pluralist world sovereign states protective policy may cost democratic ethos favor incurring costs interest curtailing abuses state power costs seem worth bearing especially united states considering several recent trends projection global power unique manner imposing regime homeland security american people shown vulnerable abuse decline checks balance mechanisms offer citizenry protection autocratic tendencies government especially wartime conditions privatization security paramilitary functions state snowdens acts seen swimming authoritarian tide matter upholding quality world order well supporting international legal order makes world safe political diversity dissent latter norm raised snowden disclosures global public interest strengthening options individuals challenge believe overreaching state power world 21st century ideological diversity less significant whistleblowing dissent fantastic public service behalf democratic openness countering tendencies rely excessive secrecy name post911 security literally everyone everywhere hypothetical threat course balance values interests clear except conspiracyminded dogmatists state responsible protecting people threats mounted within without said two wrongs dont make right possible two rights treated wrong may snowden deserves credit even reportedly disclosed material would expose way national security agency nsa operates could jeopardize reasonable data collection procedures revealing secret government surveillance system global proportions treated revealing international 160wrong brainer snowdens alleged crimes quintessentially political nature would make grant extradition unlawful regressive violation well encroachment snowdens human rights far serious crimes exposed snowden documented seeming wrongdoing us government private contractors including snowdens employer booz allen amp hamilton world knows thanks snowden controversial surveillance targets totality americans well included foreign governments many confidential activities circumstances seems surprising washington vigorous pursuit snowden conditions made inappropriate prosecute crimes us law long remained outside country date mainstream media dutifully tagging along crime chase narrative american strategy managed keep public attention focused snowden rather disclosures date revealed bombshells may present material hands media yet disclosed one negative example american exceptionalism hard imagine political leadership moscow beijing even london paris would lecturing washington similar fashion shoe foot government would probably sensibly shut hope whole mess would quietly slip view united states decides act differently worth separate investigation need realize extradition technique foster maximum international collaboration designed encourage enhanced enforcement national criminal law extradition unavailable even available would inapplicable exists respectable legal basis american international pursuit snowden approach adopted washington quite absurd examined objectively rests exclusively presumed geopolitical clout united states arguing since claims authority cancel summarily snowdens passport may legal since right travel constitutionally protected unless prior formal judicial proceeding legal right present foreign country hence politically appropriate act foreign government expel forthwith country nationality effect approach generally adopted would make extradition completely superfluous fact limitations far less effective passport cancellationexpulsion remedy would circumvent political crimes exception needed appropriate lawyers course earn living finding ingenious ways produce counterarguments sometimes override common sense public reason vein plausibly argued crimes charged snowden involve espionage laws theft government property extradition could granted behavior deserve treated political crime commentators reinforced assert pointing volunteer israeli spy jonathan pollard languished american jails years show us entitled gain control snowden punish violate espionage laws even slightest reflection would reject relevance analogy pollard unlawfully giving highly classified information foreign government apprehended territory crime committed makes political nature crime irrelevant snowden remained united states political motivations could argued court would exempt criminal indictment prosecution crimes could explained politically motivated extralegal instances civil disobedience thoreaumartin luther king tradition snowdens conduct might also defended legally stressing noncriminal intentions necessity reasonably believed provided basis reveal realities truly frightening scope depth surveillance thus avoid greater harm public interests undisclosed continuation less arguments daniel ellsberg persuasively relied upon pentagon papers case 40 years ago support contention american people entitled know leaders manipulated facts law justify vietnam war policies | 971 |
<p>‘Lukewarm Catholicism has no future; submitting to the transforming fire of the Holy Spirit is no longer optional,” George Weigel writes in his new book, <a href="" type="internal">Evangelical Catholicism</a>. We live in a time when “religious faith, commitment to a religious community, and a religiously informed morality can no longer be taken for granted….Evangelical Catholicism calls the entire Church to holiness for the sake of mission.” That mission involves the building up “of the community of the faithful not for the sake of the community but for the sake of a common reception of the mysteries of the faith, which in turn become the fonts of grace from which the community sets about the conversion of the world. The tongues of fire from which the Church is formed thus become the fire of mission by which the world is set ablaze.” This “certainly asks a lot,” but so does Christianity. And, Weigel, in a book that is part history, part analysis, part call-to-action, and all nourishment points out that “it is precisely by calls to Christian greatness based on the grace of God lifting up our hearts, and the fire of the Holy Spirit infusing our efforts, that the Catholic faith has always grown.” Weigel talks about Evangelical Catholicism, the current cultural moment, and more in an interview with National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez.</p>
<p>KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” [Luke 18.8] The question comes straight from the gospels, and the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus argued that this was the question “that anyone, pope or layperson, would understand to be the most urgent” question facing the Church, at any moment in history. What would the Son of Man find right about now? And what must we do about it? Is it our responsibility — yours and mine and everyone who calls himself Christian — to make sure he finds faith?</p>
<p>GEORGE WEIGEL: The Son of Man, coming as the Risen Lord returning in glory, would find the usual human confusion, in the midst of which he’d also find a lot of faith: some of it remarkably compelling and attractive, like the faith of a John Paul II; some of it full of sheer heroism, like the faith of persecuted Christians in Islamic lands and in China; much of it a bit catechetically unformed, despite various expressions of piety; all of it struggling against the usual enemies — the world, the flesh, and the devil. And he would find a Catholic Church leaving one phase of its history — the Church of the Counter-Reformation, in which the faith could be absorbed by osmosis from the ambient public culture and then sustained by simple, question-and-answer catechesis and devotional piety — and entering another: the Church of the New Evangelization, “Evangelical Catholicism,” in which Biblically literate and sacramentally formed Catholics, who have a clear understanding of their missionary vocation as baptized persons, are offering their families, neighbors, colleagues, and fellow citizens the Gospel: friendship with Jesus Christ as the answer to the question that is every human life.</p>
<p>LOPEZ: There was a recent book called <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Catholicism-A-Journey-Heart-Faith/dp/0307720519/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1360037350&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=Catholicism" type="external">Catholicism</a>&#160;published by Image Catholic and now here you are with your latest book called Evangelical Catholicism. Are these about the same Church?</p>
<p>WEIGEL: Father Robert Barron, author of Catholicism, and I have a very similar view of the Catholicism of the 21st century and the third millennium — a Catholicism that has met the Risen Lord and received from him the Great Commission; a Church that has rediscovered how to introduce men and women to the true and the good through the beautiful; a Church that understands that the truth it proposes is liberating, not confining; a Church that’s a culture-forming counterculture, challenging the culture of the imperial autonomous self to a nobler view of human possibilities under grace; a Church that’s moved beyond the who’s-in-charge-here cat-and-dog fights of the past 40 years; a Church that affirms that everyone has a unique vocation, and that challenges everyone to live his or her unique vocation in an evangelical, mission-driven way.</p>
<p>LOPEZ: Why is Leo XIII, who died more than a hundred years ago, so relevant today?</p>
<p>WEIGEL: We have to widen the historical lens to grasp the nature of this “Catholic moment” in the Church’s 2,000-year history. The evangelical Catholicism being born today is the result of a process of deep reform in the Church that begins, in my view, with the election of Leo XIII in 1878. After the 32-year pontificate of Pius IX ended with the pope battened down behind the Leonine Wall and describing himself as the “prisoner of the Vatican,” his successor, Leo XIII, had two choices: continue to withdraw into bunkers in defiance of an aggressively hostile secular modernity, or figure out some way to engage secular modernity and challenge it to a serious conversation about the human future. If you look at Leo’s tomb in the Lateran Basilica in Rome, you’ll see that he chose the second option: The pope is standing tall, right foot thrust forward and right hand extended, as if to say, “Look, world, we’ve got some things to talk about and we’ve got some proposals to make; are you willing to listen?”</p>
<p>That forward-thrusting stance set in motion certain dynamics that led to the great Catholic reform movements of the mid-20th century: the liturgical movement, the movements of philosophical and theological reform, the reform of Catholic Biblical studies, the development of Catholic social doctrine, new and more scientifically rigorous approaches to the study of Church history. These movements, in turn, set the intellectual framework for the Second Vatican Council, which has now been given an authoritative interpretation by John Paul II and Benedict XVI – both of whom have focused that interpretation through the prism of the “New Evangelization.” So, through that wider “Leonine” lens, we can see that the past hundred-plus years of Catholic reform, including Vatican II, have been intended to prepare the Church for a renewed and revitalized missionary vocation in the 21st century and the third millennium. If John XXIII (who summoned it) was the father of Vatican II and Pius XII was its grandfather (because his teaching is the second-most-cited source in the documents of Vatican II), then Leo XIII (in whose pontificate John XXIII was born) is the Council’s great-grandfather — the man who set in motion the end of Counter-Reformation Catholicism and the eventual emergence of evangelical Catholicism.</p>
<p>LOPEZ: Is there any elements evangelical Catholicism has learned from American evangelical Protestants?</p>
<p>WEIGEL: I think there are some important things that evangelical Catholicism can learn from evangelical Protestantism throughout the world: the importance of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ (“friendship with Jesus” being perhaps the key theme in the preaching of Pope Benedict XVI); the absolute centrality of Baptism in each of our lives; the determination to see every place we go as “mission territory.” From the evangelical Protestant encounter with Scripture, Catholics can also learn to read the New Testament again with the eyes of faith: not as an ancient text to be dissected, but as a living book that describes God’s ways in the world with remarkable salience for our own times and lives.</p>
<p>LOPEZ: Is an evangelical Catholicism realistic when “the Catholic vote” and so much of what we see from Catholics today has very little to do with the surrender to revealed faith you suggest the world needs?</p>
<p>WEIGEL: Well, let’s begin by noting for the umpteenth time that there isn’t any such thing as “the Catholic vote.” There are voters who self-identify as Catholics, but their degree of Catholic commitment and practice varies widely, and their voting patterns tend to mirror their commitments. Regular, weekly-Mass-attending Catholics skew heavily Republican; once-a-year Catholics skew heavily Democratic; and the scale slides in between – the once-a-month Catholic is more likely to vote Republican than the once-a-quarter Catholic. So it really makes no sense to talk about a “Catholic vote,” any more than it makes sense to talk about a “gender-gap” in our electoral politics. The “gap” in the latter is between married women and single women; the “gap” among Catholics is between practicing Catholics and occasional Catholics.</p>
<p>As for “realism,” I’m not suggesting that evangelical Catholicism is one possible way of being Catholic among a dozen other options; I’m saying, quite frankly, that this is the Church of the future. Cultural Catholicism – Catholicism based on the fact that your grandmother was born in County Cork or Guadalajara or Palermo or Kracow – is not going to make it when the ambient public culture is toxic, anti-Biblical, Christophobic. The only Catholicism with a future is a robustly evangelical Catholicism in which deeply converted disciples are formed for mission and empowered to meet the challenge of that hostile culture. As for its being hard, well, it’s always been hard. But the experience of dynamic, evangelically Catholic parishes, dioceses, campus ministries, seminaries, renewal movements, and religious orders is that, if you preach it and live it, they will come – because it’s true, because it’s compelling, because it’s exhilarating, and because we learn to live the truth of our humanity there by living it in conformity to Christ.</p>
<p>LOPEZ: You call people “baptized pagans” in this book. Who are they, and isn’t that a wee bit harsh?</p>
<p>WEIGEL: Well, to get down to specific cases, I can think of several members of Congress and senior administration officials who fit the bill. These people self-identify as Catholics, and they may even go to Mass with some regularity. But they are leading lives of such theological and moral incoherence (by, for example, supporting Roev.Wade or agitating for “gay marriage” or defending the HHS mandate while ignoring its threat to religious freedom) that their communion with the Church is seriously damaged.</p>
<p>The politicos aren’t the only problem here, of course. There are aging, tenured members of theology departments at prestigious Catholic universities whose teaching and writing make clear that they are in a defective state of communion with the Church, because they deny what the Catholic Church teaches to be true. The entire fracas with the Leadership Conference of Women Religious is, in fact, about precisely this: Is the LCWR living in communion with the Church, or is it living (and propounding) what amounts to another faith – indeed, another religion? We know that there are schismatics in the 21st-century Church: people who are, in a formal, canonical sense, living outside the legal boundaries of the Church because they have broken communion with the Church by breaking its canon law (think of the Lefebvrists). What I’m suggesting with the, admittedly provocative, term “baptized pagans” is that the Church has a much bigger problem than the tiny and marginal Lefebvrist sect, because there are a lot of people who are still inside the canonical boundaries of the Church but who aren’t in communion with the Church in any other meaningful sense. And it’s the job of all Catholics — but especially the Church’s pastors – to call those “baptized pagans” back to living in the fullness and integrity of Catholic faith.</p>
<p>LOPEZ: “When Catholic public witness fails to persuade on…fundamental questions, evangelical Catholics must understand that those failures are not compensated for by modest victories on other fronts.” What do you have in mind here?</p>
<p>WEIGEL: What I have in mind is when a Catholic conference director, having gotten his clock cleaned on a “gay marriage” vote in his legislature or a vote to regulate the abortion industry in his state, announces that, while that’s too bad, he looks forward to working on some social-service project with the people who just cleaned his clock. That kind of, oh-well, what-the-heck, we’ll-try-again-tomorrow attitude is badly mistaken. It assumes that all issues are equal, and they’re not. The right to life, the nature of marriage, and religious freedom are first-principles issues. When we lose on those issues, we risk losing the constitutional order (which is, after all, rooted in the way things are, as that pint-sized political realist James Madison understood), and we should make our unhappiness with those legislators who vote the wrong way very, very clear.</p>
<p>I have been a longtime supporter of tuition tax credits, vouchers, or some other device to make Catholic schools more available to at-risk kids. Catholic bishops and lobbyists should be able to work across the aisle on issues like this, where there may even be support among people who are otherwise wrong-headed on core Catholic issues. But we can’t do the wink-and-nod routine on the core issues, for doing so suggests that we’re not really serious about them. Moreover, if we really believe that a legislator is putting his or her soul in peril by supporting the culture of death rather than the culture of life, we ought to make that clear to him or her. Finally, tuition tax credits or other devices to make it possible for more at-risk kids to attend Catholic schools aren’t going to be worth much, over the long haul, if the Leviathan state decides that, for state accreditation purposes, Catholic schools have to teach, let’s say, that “gay marriage” is just the same as any other form of marriage.</p>
<p>LOPEZ: “In a cultural environment where all authority is suspect and the notion of divine authority is thought to be a psychological hangover from the postmodern world,” you write, “the claim that the divine authority is transmitted in an unbroken chain of apostolic succession through the bishops of the Church in communion with the Bishop of Rome seems literally incredible.” And yet, you continue “that is what the Catholic Church believes, and that is what Evangelical Catholicism must proclaim, explain, and live.” You’re a serious person; serious people listen to you. They even let you on NBC. How can you claim such a thing? How can you believe that? What makes you so sure the Catholic Church is true?</p>
<p>WEIGEL: The key question is, as always, “Who do you say that I am?” as Jesus put it to the disciples when they were strolling through Caesarea Philippi. If I embrace Jesus as what he says he is — the way, the truth, and the life — then it seems reasonable to think that Jesus would have wished his followers, the Church, to be preserved in that truth. Catholics have always believed that that truth is preserved by the work of the Holy Spirit in the Church through the “apostolic succession”: the bishops in union with the Bishop of Rome, who “succeed” the apostles, the original witnesses to Jesus, the Risen Lord, as Christ’s witnesses in the world, and as the authoritative teachers of the Church.</p>
<p>Americans accept that nine unelected lawyers wearing strange black costumes and sitting on a dais in a faux-temple make authoritative judgments about the meaning of the U.S. Constitution. Some people think that tenured Ivy League faculty members and Hollywood starlets make authoritative judgments. Is it any stranger for me to believe that the Church’s bishops, heirs of a tradition that is 2,000 years old, can and do make authoritative judgments?</p>
<p>I’m also a student of history and theology, and my work in those disciplines has demonstrated to my satisfaction that, while the process by which the Church, through its authoritative teachers, makes up its mind as to what’s “in” and what’s “out” — what’s truly Catholic and what isn’t — is often complicated and messy, it has proven itself over time. And that, I think, is an indicator that the Holy Spirit is at work in the process.</p>
<p>Finally, I see what has happened to Christian communities that have lost any sense of a teaching authority anchored in, and responsible to, Scripture and the Church’s settled tradition: They crumble in the face of a hostile culture, or they simply become expressions of the culture rather than the Gospel. That’s a cautionary tale, and, at least along the via negativa, it’s another argument for the Catholic Church’s understanding of itself as guided by authoritative teachers in the apostolic succession.</p>
<p>LOPEZ: Why would any rational faithful person accept a priest as a middleman? Why can’t I go to God directly? Why are the sacraments so important?</p>
<p>WEIGEL: In the Catholic understanding of these things, a priest isn’t a middleman in the way a car salesman is the middle man between you and the vehicle you want to acquire. The Catholic priest is an icon of the eternal priesthood of Jesus Christ: a flawed icon, often, but an icon nonetheless. As icons, in eastern Christian theology, are not merely representational, but “make present” the reality they display, Catholic priests “make present” the priesthood of Jesus Christ. It’s Christ who baptizes, Christ who hears confessions and forgives sins, Christ who makes himself really present under the forms of bread and wine so that his people can feed on him and be more closely bound to him — Christ, working through the Church’s ordained priests.</p>
<p>You can, of course, go to God direct, any time, all the time. “Practicing the presence” is an old spiritual discipline. You can also “go to God” daily — as evangelical Catholics should do — in the Bible. But if you are “going to God” in the fellowship of the Catholic Church, you also do that through the sacraments that Christ himself left the Church as a privileged means to “go to” him, and through him to the Holy Trinity of Father, Son, and Spirit. The sacraments are the contact point, the border, between the Church in this world and the Church that already lives in glory, in the light and love of the Trinity. In fact, “border” isn’t quite the right word, for it’s more like a membrane than a border: It’s permeable. In the sacraments of the Church, we live “in the Kingdom” in a special way; we live in anticipation of what will be when God finally gets what God intended all along, which is the salvation of the world and of history, described by the visionary St. John as the wedding feast of the lamb in the new Jerusalem.</p>
<p>LOPEZ: How are “renewal movements and new forms of Catholic community” the hope for a “renaissance of faith”? Why can’t people just be Catholic? What’s with all these modifiers?</p>
<p>WEIGEL: There are many evangelically vibrant parishes and campus ministries in the Catholic Church in the United States. But in Western Europe, for example, where the ordinary expressions of Catholic life (such as parishes and campus ministries) are moribund, the juice, the energy, is often found in Catholic renewal movements and new forms of Catholic community. John Paul II thought of these movements as the “charismatic” fruits of the Second Vatican Council. Of course, these movements and communities eventually have to be integrated into the normal patterns of Catholic life (parishes, dioceses, etc.). But at this particular moment in Catholic history, and throughout the world, the new movements and communities are where a lot of people are rediscovering, or just plain discovering, the whole truth of Catholic faith.</p>
<p>LOPEZ: How is wanting to be tolerant and make sure those men and women who identify as homosexual have the same rights as everyone else “an attempt to remake human nature by means of law and to endorse that remanufacture by coercive state power”?</p>
<p>WEIGEL: Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, who is quite probably the most intellectually accomplished bishop in the history of Catholicism in the United States, put this brilliantly in a January column in his archdiocesan newspaper: “Sexual relations between a man and a woman are naturally and necessarily different from sexual relations between same-sex partners. This truth is part of the common sense of the human race. It was true before the existence of either Church or State, and it will continue to be true when there is no State of Illinois and no United States of America. A proposal to change this truth about marriage in civil law is less a threat to religion than it is an affront to human reason and the common good of society. It means we are all to pretend to accept something we know is physically impossible. The Legislature might just as well repeal the law of gravity.” Now, in a culture where the idea that some things just are has become severely attenuated, this is, as the disciples once remarked of something Jesus said, a “hard saying.” But it happens to be true. And if the state successfully asserts its capacity to redefine reality in the matter of men, women, and marriage, where does its capacity to redefine reality stop? Why not redefine the parent-child relationship, or the doctor-patient relationship, or the priest-penitent relationship, or the counselor-counselee relationship? Why not redefine citizenship as adherence to the state’s redefinition of reality?</p>
<p>LOPEZ: How can it be true that all Christians are called to holiness? Isn’t that just for saints?</p>
<p>WEIGEL: Sanctity is every Christian’s human and Christian destiny. It’s our Christian destiny, because that’s the vocation into which we were baptized: the vocation to be holy as he, the Lord, is holy, for we are his by being baptized into him — into his body, the Church. It’s our human destiny because it is by being conformed to the pattern of Christ’s life of self-giving love that we embrace the truth about ourselves, which is that we are to make our lives into a gift for others, as life itself is a gift to each of us. That is the “moral structure” of the human condition. And this truth, which John Paul II believed we can discern from reason, is both powerfully displayed and radically confirmed by the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.</p>
<p>Saints, C. S. Lewis reminds us, are simply people who can live comfortably, not nervously, with God. So, if you want a seat at the wedding feast of the lamb in the new Jerusalem, you’ve got to become the kind of person who’s comfortable there, in that company.</p>
<p>LOPEZ: How does the sexual revolution have anything to do with the Incarnation of Christ? Does this assertion just feed the conventional notion that Catholics are obsessed with sex — specifically with saying no to it and taking all the fun out of it?</p>
<p>WEIGEL: In a culture of Abercrombie &amp; Fitch ads, MTV, and HBO soft-porn channels, it’s rather a hoot to suggest that it’s the Catholic Church that’s obsessed with sex. The culture is obsessed with sex. But it’s a very weird kind of sex, a kind of disembodied sex, in which there is neither commitment nor fruitfulness. In that culture, the ancient Christian conviction that, as the Lutheran theologian Gilbert Meilaender once put it, Christians only make love with people to whom they’ve made promises can sound dreadfully old-hat. But is a life of one-night-standing really all there is?</p>
<p>The Incarnation teaches us that God takes our enfleshment very, very seriously because human flesh and blood became the material by which the Son of God entered history. Our embodiedness is not a toy we “own” and “use” and “play with,” and when we treat it like that we do a lot of damage to ourselves. If you doubt that, ask any college counselor — even one who’s thoroughly irreligious — who’s trying to help young people caught in the trap of addiction to online pornography.</p>
<p>LOPEZ: You write that “the best of Christian art, architecture, sculpture, literature, and music has always been theologically informed.” Do we really produce such things anymore? You seem to be hopeful.</p>
<p>WEIGEL: There’s been an awful lot of aesthetic garbage produced in post-conciliar Catholicism, but the silly season is largely over and the tide is turning, if slowly. So, yes, I think the Church still inspires artists of various disciplines to make beautiful things. My friend James MacMillan’s music is one example. Duncan Stroik’s Chapel of Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity at Thomas Aquinas College in California is another. Things are a little slow on the literary side these days, but after a century that produced Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Walker Percy, Flannery O’Connor, Paul Horgan, J. D. Powers, and many other literary luminaries, perhaps Anglophone Catholic letters is just taking a bit of a breather.</p>
<p>The point in Evangelical Catholicism is that, in a world that can’t believe that anything is true and that’s deeply conflicted about what is good, the beautiful may be a privileged window into the true and the good. Something is either beautiful or it isn’t. Pondering why that’s the case opens up a lot of other questions. That’s one reason why the Church’s liturgy should be beautiful, not tacky: The beauty of the liturgy opens up our senses and the pores of our minds so that we can ponder the true and the good as God gives them to us in Word and Sacrament.</p>
<p>LOPEZ: How can Catholicism be both culture-forming and countercultural?</p>
<p>WEIGEL: Catholicism has always formed its own micro-culture. Catholics use a different language, tell a unique set of stories, live in a different time-zone (in which, for example, Sunday is not just a day on which the malls close earlier), perceive life and death according to a distinctive horizon. Once upon a time — say, when I was a boy — that Catholic micro-culture fit rather comfortably within the ambient public culture. That’s no longer the case. There’s real chafing, to put it mildly, between the way we’re taught to live in the Catholic micro-culture and the way “the world” invites us to live.</p>
<p>“The world” sings “I did it my way” and imagines this to be the apex of human aspiration and maturity; the Catholic micro-culture teaches a different ethos, in which conformity to the truths built by God into creation and into us is the royal road to human flourishing. My suggestion, in Evangelical Catholicism, is that the Church best challenges the dominant public culture today, not so much by argument as by demonstrating the human decency of the lives formed in that Catholic micro-culture. Lives lived nobly, charitably, and compassionately can open up the closed windows of a secular world choking on its own exhaust fumes. Let in some fresh air, and open some new conversations, and make possible encounters with God in Christ. Preaching the Gospel “in the world” begins with living the Gospel.</p>
<p>LOPEZ: What does the state of our culture today have to do with the Cold War?</p>
<p>WEIGEL: Well, we’re not being sent to prison camps — yet. But the structure of the situation is not dissimilar. Catholicism played a crucial role in the collapse of European Communism because a vibrant Catholic micro-culture maintained its integrity and its tensile strength, and eventually proved more supple and enduring than the ambient public anti-culture of Communism. That’s why a lot of the younger and more evangelically assertive bishops of the United States have looked to the example of the Polish bishops under Communism for their inspiration in challenging the soft totalitarianism of the HHS mandate.</p>
<p>LOPEZ: Why do “twenty-first century Christophobes” fear Christ?</p>
<p>WEIGEL: The secular Christophobes of the West fear Christ because they imagine him to be an enemy of autonomy, which they define as the highest of human values. But this rather misses the point: autonomyfor what? The sandbox of solipsism, the playpen of self-absorption, can get rather lonely after awhile. When honest secularists recognize that loneliness in themselves, the hand of Christ will be there to lift them out of the sandbox or playpen and into a maturity and happiness built, not from “autonomy,” but from living a commitment to truth and with compassion for others. And that hand of Christ will be extended by the people of the Church, who are, in Pius XII’s wonderful image, Christ’s “mystical body” in the world.</p>
<p>LOPEZ: What are the Emmaus roads to be walked?</p>
<p>WEIGEL: They’re everywhere, as the Risen One is everywhere, waiting to meet us along those roads, to surprise us with his exposition of the Scriptures, and to join us in the breaking of the bread.</p>
<p>LOPEZ: Why does the modern world need “divine mercy” so much?</p>
<p>WEIGEL: Because of its guilt, often unconscious, but there nonetheless. The 20th century was the bloodiest in human history, by orders of magnitude. Add the new slaughter of the innocents in abortion to the slaughters of the World Wars, the death camps, the Gulag, and all the rest of the politically induced horrors, and you have a world awash in guilt over the cruelty and inhumanity it has visited upon itself. To whom can the sin that produced that guilt be confessed? By whom can it be expiated? By what authority can it be forgiven? The answers to those three questions cannot be Dr. Freud, Amnesty International, or the United Nations. The answer, I believe and the Church proclaims, is the God of the Bible, who comes into the world and into history — first in the people of Israel, and then in his Son — to offer humanity the embrace of the divine love, which alone can heal the brokenness of our lives, our societies, and our cultures.</p>
<p>LOPEZ: How is this “wedding feast of the lamb” business relevant to the daily lives of Catholics and the institutional Church</p>
<p>WEIGEL: Because belief in the wedding feast of the lamb lets us relax a bit. God has already won: That’s the message of Easter. The story is going to end the way God intended from the beginning. If you really believe that, you’re not insouciant about daily life or public life. But you can approach daily life and public life without clenched fists and gritted teeth.</p>
<p>LOPEZ: You write of the need for a pope to have “a deep spiritual capacity to bear the wounds of the entire Church without being bled to death by them.” Does evangelical Catholicism open doors to a Christian mysticism that is foreign to us in contemporary America? One where unity, freedom, love, sacrifice, suffering, and joy have deeper meanings, which we may not feel comfortable feeling or acknowledging, never mind discussing or testifying to?</p>
<p>WEIGEL: Christianity without the Cross is a nice story, but not a true story — it’s certainly not the truth of the world, which is what Christianity understands itself to be. It’s ultimately a mystery, a divine mystery, this cruciform “structure” of redemption and sanctification. And the inability to grasp it, at first, is an old story: that God didn’t provide the kind of redeemer we would have invented is a story as old as the gospels. As Christ’s own townsmen said in scornful disbelief, “Isn’t this the son of Joseph?” They had another kind of redeemer in mind, and often we do, too.</p>
<p>Moreover, the Cross only makes sense from the far side of Easter: The experience of the Risen Lord is the experience by which the Church, from the beginning, begins to comprehend the cruciform character of the life of the spirit. That’s why the Cross doesn’t overwhelm us; that’s why we embrace it — because we have met the Risen Lord, and can thus embrace the whole of his life, including the radical and complete self-giving and obedience of his death.</p>
<p>LOPEZ: Your book is clearly a challenge to Catholics. Is it also an explanation for everyone? And an open door?</p>
<p>WEIGEL: I certainly intend it that way. I’ve tried to do three things in Evangelical Catholicism, which is, in a sense, the summing up of everything I’ve learned over the past 30 years of my work within the Church. I’ve tried to propose a new, more capacious view of modern Catholic history, so that we can see this evangelical Catholic moment more clearly and understand its character. I’ve tried to suggest criteria for measuring true and false reform in the Church, so that reform doesn’t get confused with deconstruction. And I’ve tried to lay out a program of specific reforms — of the episcopate, the priesthood, the liturgy, consecrated life, lay vocational life, Catholic intellectual life, the Church’s public witness, and the papacy and the Roman Curia — that would help deepen the radical reform that is evangelical Catholicism and bring it to a first maturation.</p>
<p>Evelyn Waugh once said that the Church looks ever so much bigger from inside than from outside. Evangelical Catholicism is an invitation to take a look from inside — and a look at the future.</p>
<p>– Kathryn Jean Lopez is editor-at-large of National Review Online.&#160;George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. and holds EPPC’s William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.</p> | false | 1 | lukewarm catholicism future submitting transforming fire holy spirit longer optional george weigel writes new book evangelical catholicism live time religious faith commitment religious community religiously informed morality longer taken grantedevangelical catholicism calls entire church holiness sake mission mission involves building community faithful sake community sake common reception mysteries faith turn become fonts grace community sets conversion world tongues fire church formed thus become fire mission world set ablaze certainly asks lot christianity weigel book part history part analysis part calltoaction nourishment points precisely calls christian greatness based grace god lifting hearts fire holy spirit infusing efforts catholic faith always grown weigel talks evangelical catholicism current cultural moment interview national review onlines kathryn jean lopez kathryn jean lopez son man comes find faith earth luke 188 question comes straight gospels late fr richard john neuhaus argued question anyone pope layperson would understand urgent question facing church moment history would son man find right must responsibility mine everyone calls christian make sure finds faith george weigel son man coming risen lord returning glory would find usual human confusion midst hed also find lot faith remarkably compelling attractive like faith john paul ii full sheer heroism like faith persecuted christians islamic lands china much bit catechetically unformed despite various expressions piety struggling usual enemies world flesh devil would find catholic church leaving one phase history church counterreformation faith could absorbed osmosis ambient public culture sustained simple questionandanswer catechesis devotional piety entering another church new evangelization evangelical catholicism biblically literate sacramentally formed catholics clear understanding missionary vocation baptized persons offering families neighbors colleagues fellow citizens gospel friendship jesus christ answer question every human life lopez recent book called catholicism160published image catholic latest book called evangelical catholicism church weigel father robert barron author catholicism similar view catholicism 21st century third millennium catholicism met risen lord received great commission church rediscovered introduce men women true good beautiful church understands truth proposes liberating confining church thats cultureforming counterculture challenging culture imperial autonomous self nobler view human possibilities grace church thats moved beyond whosinchargehere catanddog fights past 40 years church affirms everyone unique vocation challenges everyone live unique vocation evangelical missiondriven way lopez leo xiii died hundred years ago relevant today weigel widen historical lens grasp nature catholic moment churchs 2000year history evangelical catholicism born today result process deep reform church begins view election leo xiii 1878 32year pontificate pius ix ended pope battened behind leonine wall describing prisoner vatican successor leo xiii two choices continue withdraw bunkers defiance aggressively hostile secular modernity figure way engage secular modernity challenge serious conversation human future look leos tomb lateran basilica rome youll see chose second option pope standing tall right foot thrust forward right hand extended say look world weve got things talk weve got proposals make willing listen forwardthrusting stance set motion certain dynamics led great catholic reform movements mid20th century liturgical movement movements philosophical theological reform reform catholic biblical studies development catholic social doctrine new scientifically rigorous approaches study church history movements turn set intellectual framework second vatican council given authoritative interpretation john paul ii benedict xvi focused interpretation prism new evangelization wider leonine lens see past hundredplus years catholic reform including vatican ii intended prepare church renewed revitalized missionary vocation 21st century third millennium john xxiii summoned father vatican ii pius xii grandfather teaching secondmostcited source documents vatican ii leo xiii whose pontificate john xxiii born councils greatgrandfather man set motion end counterreformation catholicism eventual emergence evangelical catholicism lopez elements evangelical catholicism learned american evangelical protestants weigel think important things evangelical catholicism learn evangelical protestantism throughout world importance personal relationship jesus christ friendship jesus perhaps key theme preaching pope benedict xvi absolute centrality baptism lives determination see every place go mission territory evangelical protestant encounter scripture catholics also learn read new testament eyes faith ancient text dissected living book describes gods ways world remarkable salience times lives lopez evangelical catholicism realistic catholic vote much see catholics today little surrender revealed faith suggest world needs weigel well lets begin noting umpteenth time isnt thing catholic vote voters selfidentify catholics degree catholic commitment practice varies widely voting patterns tend mirror commitments regular weeklymassattending catholics skew heavily republican onceayear catholics skew heavily democratic scale slides onceamonth catholic likely vote republican onceaquarter catholic really makes sense talk catholic vote makes sense talk gendergap electoral politics gap latter married women single women gap among catholics practicing catholics occasional catholics realism im suggesting evangelical catholicism one possible way catholic among dozen options im saying quite frankly church future cultural catholicism catholicism based fact grandmother born county cork guadalajara palermo kracow going make ambient public culture toxic antibiblical christophobic catholicism future robustly evangelical catholicism deeply converted disciples formed mission empowered meet challenge hostile culture hard well always hard experience dynamic evangelically catholic parishes dioceses campus ministries seminaries renewal movements religious orders preach live come true compelling exhilarating learn live truth humanity living conformity christ lopez call people baptized pagans book isnt wee bit harsh weigel well get specific cases think several members congress senior administration officials fit bill people selfidentify catholics may even go mass regularity leading lives theological moral incoherence example supporting roevwade agitating gay marriage defending hhs mandate ignoring threat religious freedom communion church seriously damaged politicos arent problem course aging tenured members theology departments prestigious catholic universities whose teaching writing make clear defective state communion church deny catholic church teaches true entire fracas leadership conference women religious fact precisely lcwr living communion church living propounding amounts another faith indeed another religion know schismatics 21stcentury church people formal canonical sense living outside legal boundaries church broken communion church breaking canon law think lefebvrists im suggesting admittedly provocative term baptized pagans church much bigger problem tiny marginal lefebvrist sect lot people still inside canonical boundaries church arent communion church meaningful sense job catholics especially churchs pastors call baptized pagans back living fullness integrity catholic faith lopez catholic public witness fails persuade onfundamental questions evangelical catholics must understand failures compensated modest victories fronts mind weigel mind catholic conference director gotten clock cleaned gay marriage vote legislature vote regulate abortion industry state announces thats bad looks forward working socialservice project people cleaned clock kind ohwell whattheheck welltryagaintomorrow attitude badly mistaken assumes issues equal theyre right life nature marriage religious freedom firstprinciples issues lose issues risk losing constitutional order rooted way things pintsized political realist james madison understood make unhappiness legislators vote wrong way clear longtime supporter tuition tax credits vouchers device make catholic schools available atrisk kids catholic bishops lobbyists able work across aisle issues like may even support among people otherwise wrongheaded core catholic issues cant winkandnod routine core issues suggests really serious moreover really believe legislator putting soul peril supporting culture death rather culture life ought make clear finally tuition tax credits devices make possible atrisk kids attend catholic schools arent going worth much long haul leviathan state decides state accreditation purposes catholic schools teach lets say gay marriage form marriage lopez cultural environment authority suspect notion divine authority thought psychological hangover postmodern world write claim divine authority transmitted unbroken chain apostolic succession bishops church communion bishop rome seems literally incredible yet continue catholic church believes evangelical catholicism must proclaim explain live youre serious person serious people listen even let nbc claim thing believe makes sure catholic church true weigel key question always say jesus put disciples strolling caesarea philippi embrace jesus says way truth life seems reasonable think jesus would wished followers church preserved truth catholics always believed truth preserved work holy spirit church apostolic succession bishops union bishop rome succeed apostles original witnesses jesus risen lord christs witnesses world authoritative teachers church americans accept nine unelected lawyers wearing strange black costumes sitting dais fauxtemple make authoritative judgments meaning us constitution people think tenured ivy league faculty members hollywood starlets make authoritative judgments stranger believe churchs bishops heirs tradition 2000 years old make authoritative judgments im also student history theology work disciplines demonstrated satisfaction process church authoritative teachers makes mind whats whats whats truly catholic isnt often complicated messy proven time think indicator holy spirit work process finally see happened christian communities lost sense teaching authority anchored responsible scripture churchs settled tradition crumble face hostile culture simply become expressions culture rather gospel thats cautionary tale least along via negativa another argument catholic churchs understanding guided authoritative teachers apostolic succession lopez would rational faithful person accept priest middleman cant go god directly sacraments important weigel catholic understanding things priest isnt middleman way car salesman middle man vehicle want acquire catholic priest icon eternal priesthood jesus christ flawed icon often icon nonetheless icons eastern christian theology merely representational make present reality display catholic priests make present priesthood jesus christ christ baptizes christ hears confessions forgives sins christ makes really present forms bread wine people feed closely bound christ working churchs ordained priests course go god direct time time practicing presence old spiritual discipline also go god daily evangelical catholics bible going god fellowship catholic church also sacraments christ left church privileged means go holy trinity father son spirit sacraments contact point border church world church already lives glory light love trinity fact border isnt quite right word like membrane border permeable sacraments church live kingdom special way live anticipation god finally gets god intended along salvation world history described visionary st john wedding feast lamb new jerusalem lopez renewal movements new forms catholic community hope renaissance faith cant people catholic whats modifiers weigel many evangelically vibrant parishes campus ministries catholic church united states western europe example ordinary expressions catholic life parishes campus ministries moribund juice energy often found catholic renewal movements new forms catholic community john paul ii thought movements charismatic fruits second vatican council course movements communities eventually integrated normal patterns catholic life parishes dioceses etc particular moment catholic history throughout world new movements communities lot people rediscovering plain discovering whole truth catholic faith lopez wanting tolerant make sure men women identify homosexual rights everyone else attempt remake human nature means law endorse remanufacture coercive state power weigel cardinal francis george chicago quite probably intellectually accomplished bishop history catholicism united states put brilliantly january column archdiocesan newspaper sexual relations man woman naturally necessarily different sexual relations samesex partners truth part common sense human race true existence either church state continue true state illinois united states america proposal change truth marriage civil law less threat religion affront human reason common good society means pretend accept something know physically impossible legislature might well repeal law gravity culture idea things become severely attenuated disciples remarked something jesus said hard saying happens true state successfully asserts capacity redefine reality matter men women marriage capacity redefine reality stop redefine parentchild relationship doctorpatient relationship priestpenitent relationship counselorcounselee relationship redefine citizenship adherence states redefinition reality lopez true christians called holiness isnt saints weigel sanctity every christians human christian destiny christian destiny thats vocation baptized vocation holy lord holy baptized body church human destiny conformed pattern christs life selfgiving love embrace truth make lives gift others life gift us moral structure human condition truth john paul ii believed discern reason powerfully displayed radically confirmed passion death resurrection jesus christ saints c lewis reminds us simply people live comfortably nervously god want seat wedding feast lamb new jerusalem youve got become kind person whos comfortable company lopez sexual revolution anything incarnation christ assertion feed conventional notion catholics obsessed sex specifically saying taking fun weigel culture abercrombie amp fitch ads mtv hbo softporn channels rather hoot suggest catholic church thats obsessed sex culture obsessed sex weird kind sex kind disembodied sex neither commitment fruitfulness culture ancient christian conviction lutheran theologian gilbert meilaender put christians make love people theyve made promises sound dreadfully oldhat life onenightstanding really incarnation teaches us god takes enfleshment seriously human flesh blood became material son god entered history embodiedness toy use play treat like lot damage doubt ask college counselor even one whos thoroughly irreligious whos trying help young people caught trap addiction online pornography lopez write best christian art architecture sculpture literature music always theologically informed really produce things anymore seem hopeful weigel theres awful lot aesthetic garbage produced postconciliar catholicism silly season largely tide turning slowly yes think church still inspires artists various disciplines make beautiful things friend james macmillans music one example duncan stroiks chapel lady holy trinity thomas aquinas college california another things little slow literary side days century produced graham greene evelyn waugh walker percy flannery oconnor paul horgan j powers many literary luminaries perhaps anglophone catholic letters taking bit breather point evangelical catholicism world cant believe anything true thats deeply conflicted good beautiful may privileged window true good something either beautiful isnt pondering thats case opens lot questions thats one reason churchs liturgy beautiful tacky beauty liturgy opens senses pores minds ponder true good god gives us word sacrament lopez catholicism cultureforming countercultural weigel catholicism always formed microculture catholics use different language tell unique set stories live different timezone example sunday day malls close earlier perceive life death according distinctive horizon upon time say boy catholic microculture fit rather comfortably within ambient public culture thats longer case theres real chafing put mildly way taught live catholic microculture way world invites us live world sings way imagines apex human aspiration maturity catholic microculture teaches different ethos conformity truths built god creation us royal road human flourishing suggestion evangelical catholicism church best challenges dominant public culture today much argument demonstrating human decency lives formed catholic microculture lives lived nobly charitably compassionately open closed windows secular world choking exhaust fumes let fresh air open new conversations make possible encounters god christ preaching gospel world begins living gospel lopez state culture today cold war weigel well sent prison camps yet structure situation dissimilar catholicism played crucial role collapse european communism vibrant catholic microculture maintained integrity tensile strength eventually proved supple enduring ambient public anticulture communism thats lot younger evangelically assertive bishops united states looked example polish bishops communism inspiration challenging soft totalitarianism hhs mandate lopez twentyfirst century christophobes fear christ weigel secular christophobes west fear christ imagine enemy autonomy define highest human values rather misses point autonomyfor sandbox solipsism playpen selfabsorption get rather lonely awhile honest secularists recognize loneliness hand christ lift sandbox playpen maturity happiness built autonomy living commitment truth compassion others hand christ extended people church pius xiis wonderful image christs mystical body world lopez emmaus roads walked weigel theyre everywhere risen one everywhere waiting meet us along roads surprise us exposition scriptures join us breaking bread lopez modern world need divine mercy much weigel guilt often unconscious nonetheless 20th century bloodiest human history orders magnitude add new slaughter innocents abortion slaughters world wars death camps gulag rest politically induced horrors world awash guilt cruelty inhumanity visited upon sin produced guilt confessed expiated authority forgiven answers three questions dr freud amnesty international united nations answer believe church proclaims god bible comes world history first people israel son offer humanity embrace divine love alone heal brokenness lives societies cultures lopez wedding feast lamb business relevant daily lives catholics institutional church weigel belief wedding feast lamb lets us relax bit god already thats message easter story going end way god intended beginning really believe youre insouciant daily life public life approach daily life public life without clenched fists gritted teeth lopez write need pope deep spiritual capacity bear wounds entire church without bled death evangelical catholicism open doors christian mysticism foreign us contemporary america one unity freedom love sacrifice suffering joy deeper meanings may feel comfortable feeling acknowledging never mind discussing testifying weigel christianity without cross nice story true story certainly truth world christianity understands ultimately mystery divine mystery cruciform structure redemption sanctification inability grasp first old story god didnt provide kind redeemer would invented story old gospels christs townsmen said scornful disbelief isnt son joseph another kind redeemer mind often moreover cross makes sense far side easter experience risen lord experience church beginning begins comprehend cruciform character life spirit thats cross doesnt overwhelm us thats embrace met risen lord thus embrace whole life including radical complete selfgiving obedience death lopez book clearly challenge catholics also explanation everyone open door weigel certainly intend way ive tried three things evangelical catholicism sense summing everything ive learned past 30 years work within church ive tried propose new capacious view modern catholic history see evangelical catholic moment clearly understand character ive tried suggest criteria measuring true false reform church reform doesnt get confused deconstruction ive tried lay program specific reforms episcopate priesthood liturgy consecrated life lay vocational life catholic intellectual life churchs public witness papacy roman curia would help deepen radical reform evangelical catholicism bring first maturation evelyn waugh said church looks ever much bigger inside outside evangelical catholicism invitation take look inside look future kathryn jean lopez editoratlarge national review online160george weigel distinguished senior fellow ethics public policy center washington dc holds eppcs william e simon chair catholic studies | 2,790 |
<p>ON OBAMACARE REPEAL</p>
<p>“Medical costs are the tapeworm of American economic competitiveness.</p>
<p>“Our health costs have gone up (incredibly) and will go up a lot more … that is a problem this society is having trouble with and is going to have more trouble with. It almost transcends (political party).</p>
<p>“If you talk about the world competitiveness of American industry, (health costs are) the biggest single variable where we keep getting more and more out of whack with the rest of the world.</p>
<p>“(The Obamacare repeal) is a huge tax cut for guys like me … either the deficit goes up or they get the taxes from someone else.”</p>
<p>ON BERKSHIRE’S DURABILITY</p>
<p>“I can’t think of anything that can harm Berkshire in a material, permanent way except weapons of mass destruction.</p>
<p>“If that ever happens, there’ll be more to worry about than the price of Berkshire.”</p>
<p>CHARLIE MUNGER ON PUERTO RICO</p>
<p>“Who would have guessed a U.S. territory would wind up in bankruptcy? I would because they behaved like idiots.”</p>
<p>ON NOT BUYING AMAZON</p>
<p>“I was too dumb to realize what was going to happen.</p>
<p>“I did not think (Jeff Bezos) could succeed on the scale that he has … I underestimated the brilliance of the execution. It takes a lot of ability.</p>
<p>“It always looked expensive … and I never thought he would be where he is today.</p>
<p>“We miss a lot of things.”</p>
<p>ON BERKSHIRE’S BREAK-UP VALUE</p>
<p>“If I die tonight, the stock would go up tomorrow. There’d be speculation about breakups. Some of the parts might (temporarily) sell for more than the whole.”</p>
<p>ON INTERNATIONAL TRADE</p>
<p>“Trade is beneficial to society but the people who see the benefits … are getting small benefits, invisible benefits. The guy who’s getting hurt by it … is feeling it very specifically.”</p>
<p>ON STOCK BUYBACKS</p>
<p>“When the time comes, and it could come reasonably soon … we have to re-examine what to do with funds that (can’t) be deployed well. It could be repurchases, it could be dividends.</p>
<p>“At the moment, we’re still optimistic enough about deploying the capital … There will be markets where we can do (interesting) things on a big scale.”</p>
<p>ON JOBS</p>
<p>“Our kids will live better than we do because America does get more productive … It’s essential to America that we become more productive.”</p>
<p>ON HIS LONGEVITY</p>
<p>“We’ve been very, very lucky in life and so far our luck seems to be holding.”</p>
<p>ON HIS LEGACY</p>
<p>“I really like teaching. If somebody thought I’d done a decent job of teaching, I’d feel pretty good about that.”</p>
<p>ON UNDERSTANDING TECH INVESTMENTS</p>
<p>“I make no pretense whatsoever of being on the same level as some 15-year-old (who has) an interest in tech.</p>
<p>“I’ve gained no real knowledge on tech, well, since I was born, actually.”</p>
<p>ON FUTURE ACQUISITIONS</p>
<p>“We could do a very large deal if we thought it was sufficiently attractive … We spent $16 billion back when we were much smaller … in the fall of 2008. It never (created) a problem for me sleeping at night.</p>
<p>“Charlie and I really do not discuss sectors much … we’re really opportunistic. We’re looking at all kinds of businesses all of the time. We’re hoping, we get a call … and we know in the first five minutes whether (a deal) has a reasonable chance of happening.</p>
<p>“We (like) companies where consumer behavior can be (predicted) further off.</p>
<p>“We don’t really say we’ll go after companies in this field or that field.</p>
<p>“If you’re (primarily) interested in getting the highest price for your business, we’re not a good call (to make).”</p>
<p>ON BOARDS’ STOCK HOLDINGS</p>
<p>“I looked at a company the other day and seven of the directors had never bought a share of stock … They’ve been given a lot of stock.</p>
<p>“What you want is a system that works well in spite of human nature.</p>
<p>“American business overall has done very well for Americans.”</p>
<p>ON A BERKSHIRE CEO’S SKILLS</p>
<p>“You need a sensible capital allocator in the job of being CEO of Berkshire. And we will have one.</p>
<p>“Capital allocation probably should be close to their main talent.</p>
<p>“Berkshire would not do well if someone was put in with skills in other areas but didn’t have the ability for capital allocation.</p>
<p>“We certainly don’t want somebody if they lack a ‘money mind.'”</p>
<p>ON PAY CONSULTANTS</p>
<p>“If the board hires a compensation consultant after I go, I will come back.”</p>
<p>ON HOW HIS SUCCESSOR MIGHT BE COMPENSATED</p>
<p>“I would actually hope that we would have somebody A) That’s already very rich, which they should be. Working a long time and really not motivated by whether they have 10 times as much money … and they might even wish to set an example by engaging for something far lower.”</p>
<p>ON HEDGE FUNDS</p>
<p>“We’ve got two guys in the office managing ($20 billion) … we pay them $1 million a year plus (more based on) the amount by which they beat the S&amp;P. … How many hedge funds managers say, I only want to get paid if I do something for you? … It just doesn’t happen.”</p>
<p>ON COAL</p>
<p>“Over time, coal is essentially certain to decline as a percentage of the revenue of the (BNSF) railroad. We are looking for other sources of growth (besides) coal.</p>
<p>“In my mind, we’re going to be shipping less coal 10 or 20 years from now. The coal aspect (of the business) is going to diminish.”</p>
<p>ON EATING JUNK FOOD</p>
<p>“I don’t mind having 500-600 calories for dessert. I’ll let someone else have the broccoli.”</p>
<p>ON RUNNING A HANDS-OFF CONGLOMERATE</p>
<p>“I think our hands-off style actually can add significant value to many companies. We free up at least 20 percent of the time for a CEO (compared to running) a public company.</p>
<p>“I think we bring something to the party.”</p>
<p>ON TECHNOLOGY HOLDINGS IBM AND APPLE</p>
<p>“When I bought IBM six years ago, I thought it would do better in the six years … than it has. Apple is much more of a consumer products business. In terms of analyzing moats around it, consumer behavior … they are two different types of decisions. I was wrong on the first one, and we’ll find out whether I was right on the second.</p>
<p>“I could be making two mistakes on IBM. It’s harder to predict in my view … how much price competition will enter in something like cloud services.”</p>
<p>“We missed (Amazon.com) entirely. We’ve never owned a share.”</p>
<p>ON AIRLINES</p>
<p>“It’s a fiercely competitive industry. The question is if it’s a suicidally competitive industry. It has been operating at 80 percent or better of capacity for some time. … It’s fair to say they will operate at higher degrees of capacity over the next five or 10 years than at historical rates. They actually at present are earning quite high returns on invested capital, I think higher than FedEx or UPS.</p>
<p>“It is no cinch that the industry will have more pricing sensibility in the next 10 years, but the conditions have improved for that.”</p>
<p>ON INTEREST RATES</p>
<p>“I do not think it’s easy to predict the (course) of interest rates at all.”</p>
<p>ON VOLATILITY</p>
<p>“It is the nature of market systems to occasionally go haywire in one direction or another.</p>
<p>“When the rest of the world is fearful, we know America is going to come out fine.”</p>
<p>ON MARKET SPECULATION</p>
<p>“(Keynes said) there’s always some speculation. … People can get very excited about speculating in markets. There’s nothing more agonizing than to see your neighbor (getting richer). Early on in the development of markets there’s probably some tendency to be more speculative than markets that have been around for a couple hundred years. Markets have a casino characteristic that has a lot of appeal.</p>
<p>“China being a newer market … is likely to have some pretty extreme experiences.</p>
<p>“Fear spreads like you cannot believe. The way the public can react is really extreme … and that offers opportunities for investors.</p>
<p>“Markets are there to be taken advantage of.”</p>
<p>CHARLIE MUNGER ON BERKSHIRE’S ADVANTAGE</p>
<p>“I think we have one big advantage. A lot of other people are trying to be brilliant, and we’re just trying to stay rational.”</p>
<p>MUNGER ON BUFFETT</p>
<p>“You’re a fatter version of Mahatma Gandhi.”</p>
<p>ON WELLS FARGO, IN WHICH BERKSHIRE OWNS $27.8 BLN STAKE</p>
<p>“At Wells Fargo, there were three significant mistakes, but one dwarfs all of the others. … You have to be careful what you incentivize. There was an incentive system built around cross-selling. … That was incentivizing the wrong kind of behavior.</p>
<p>“The main problem was they didn’t act when they learned about it.”</p>
<p>ON BERKSHIRE’S EARNINGS REPORT</p>
<p>“The realized investment gains or losses in any period really mean nothing … We don’t really think about the timing of what we do. We do not make earnings forecasts.</p>
<p>“I feel very good about the first quarter even though our operating earnings were down a little bit.”</p>
<p>ON VANGUARD FOUNDER JACK BOGLE</p>
<p>“It was not in the interests of Wall Street to have the development of index funds, because it brought down fees dramatically. When Jack started, very few people, certainly Wall Street did not applaud him. He was the subject of some derision. And now we’re talking trillions when we get into index funds.</p>
<p>“Jack at a minimum has saved, in the pockets of investors, he’s put tens and tens and tens of billions into their pockets. It’s Jack’s 88th birthday on Monday. Happy birthday, Jack and thank you on behalf of (investors).”</p>
<p>ON AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES</p>
<p>“Driverless trucks are a lot more of a threat than an opportunity to Burlington Northern.</p>
<p>“Autonomous vehicles, widespread, would hurt us if they spread to trucks, and they would hurt our auto insurance business. They may be a long way off. That will depend on experience in the first early months of the introduction. If they make the world safer, it will be a very good thing but it won’t be a good thing for auto insurers.”</p> | false | 1 | obamacare repeal medical costs tapeworm american economic competitiveness health costs gone incredibly go lot problem society trouble going trouble almost transcends political party talk world competitiveness american industry health costs biggest single variable keep getting whack rest world obamacare repeal huge tax cut guys like either deficit goes get taxes someone else berkshires durability cant think anything harm berkshire material permanent way except weapons mass destruction ever happens therell worry price berkshire charlie munger puerto rico would guessed us territory would wind bankruptcy would behaved like idiots buying amazon dumb realize going happen think jeff bezos could succeed scale underestimated brilliance execution takes lot ability always looked expensive never thought would today miss lot things berkshires breakup value die tonight stock would go tomorrow thered speculation breakups parts might temporarily sell whole international trade trade beneficial society people see benefits getting small benefits invisible benefits guy whos getting hurt feeling specifically stock buybacks time comes could come reasonably soon reexamine funds cant deployed well could repurchases could dividends moment still optimistic enough deploying capital markets interesting things big scale jobs kids live better america get productive essential america become productive longevity weve lucky life far luck seems holding legacy really like teaching somebody thought id done decent job teaching id feel pretty good understanding tech investments make pretense whatsoever level 15yearold interest tech ive gained real knowledge tech well since born actually future acquisitions could large deal thought sufficiently attractive spent 16 billion back much smaller fall 2008 never created problem sleeping night charlie really discuss sectors much really opportunistic looking kinds businesses time hoping get call know first five minutes whether deal reasonable chance happening like companies consumer behavior predicted dont really say well go companies field field youre primarily interested getting highest price business good call make boards stock holdings looked company day seven directors never bought share stock theyve given lot stock want system works well spite human nature american business overall done well americans berkshire ceos skills need sensible capital allocator job ceo berkshire one capital allocation probably close main talent berkshire would well someone put skills areas didnt ability capital allocation certainly dont want somebody lack money mind pay consultants board hires compensation consultant go come back successor might compensated would actually hope would somebody thats already rich working long time really motivated whether 10 times much money might even wish set example engaging something far lower hedge funds weve got two guys office managing 20 billion pay 1 million year plus based amount beat sampp many hedge funds managers say want get paid something doesnt happen coal time coal essentially certain decline percentage revenue bnsf railroad looking sources growth besides coal mind going shipping less coal 10 20 years coal aspect business going diminish eating junk food dont mind 500600 calories dessert ill let someone else broccoli running handsoff conglomerate think handsoff style actually add significant value many companies free least 20 percent time ceo compared running public company think bring something party technology holdings ibm apple bought ibm six years ago thought would better six years apple much consumer products business terms analyzing moats around consumer behavior two different types decisions wrong first one well find whether right second could making two mistakes ibm harder predict view much price competition enter something like cloud services missed amazoncom entirely weve never owned share airlines fiercely competitive industry question suicidally competitive industry operating 80 percent better capacity time fair say operate higher degrees capacity next five 10 years historical rates actually present earning quite high returns invested capital think higher fedex ups cinch industry pricing sensibility next 10 years conditions improved interest rates think easy predict course interest rates volatility nature market systems occasionally go haywire one direction another rest world fearful know america going come fine market speculation keynes said theres always speculation people get excited speculating markets theres nothing agonizing see neighbor getting richer early development markets theres probably tendency speculative markets around couple hundred years markets casino characteristic lot appeal china newer market likely pretty extreme experiences fear spreads like believe way public react really extreme offers opportunities investors markets taken advantage charlie munger berkshires advantage think one big advantage lot people trying brilliant trying stay rational munger buffett youre fatter version mahatma gandhi wells fargo berkshire owns 278 bln stake wells fargo three significant mistakes one dwarfs others careful incentivize incentive system built around crossselling incentivizing wrong kind behavior main problem didnt act learned berkshires earnings report realized investment gains losses period really mean nothing dont really think timing make earnings forecasts feel good first quarter even though operating earnings little bit vanguard founder jack bogle interests wall street development index funds brought fees dramatically jack started people certainly wall street applaud subject derision talking trillions get index funds jack minimum saved pockets investors hes put tens tens tens billions pockets jacks 88th birthday monday happy birthday jack thank behalf investors autonomous vehicles driverless trucks lot threat opportunity burlington northern autonomous vehicles widespread would hurt us spread trucks would hurt auto insurance business may long way depend experience first early months introduction make world safer good thing wont good thing auto insurers | 861 |
<p>By Laila Kearney</p>
<p>NEW YORK (Reuters) – Texas communities flooded by Hurricane Harvey could see their property tax revenues sink, a financial blow that would leave many cities and counties struggling for years.</p>
<p>Property taxes are the top source of revenue for local governments in Texas, which depend on it to fund schools, roads and other public services.</p>
<p>With tens of thousands of homes and businesses damaged, officials foresee tumbling values when those structures are reassessed.</p>
<p>“This is something that is going to depress revenues, the only major revenues our counties have, immediately and for years,” said Donald Lee, executive director of the Texas Conference of Urban Counties, a non-profit organization of 37 member counties.</p>
<p>Texas is one of seven states nationwide that has no state income tax, leaving it with an outsized dependence on property taxes. The Lone Star state has the third highest average property tax rate in the United States, at&#160;2.06 percent, according to a study by real-estate tracker ATTOM Data Solutions.</p>
<p>Neighboring Florida, which likewise has no state income tax, could face a similar challenge. The state is bracing for a direct hit from Hurricane Irma, one of the strongest storms ever recorded in the Atlantic. Florida counties like Miami-Dade, which is in Irma’s immediate path, also count property taxes as their biggest revenue source.</p>
<p>Wind and flooding damaged at least&#160;$65 billion worth of property since Hurricane Harvey made landfall on Aug. 25 and tore across dozens of Texas counties in the following days, according to a preliminary report by AIR Worldwide, which evaluates the impact of catastrophes.</p>
<p>Assessors in Harris County, home to Houston, began visiting neighborhoods struck by Harvey this week, according to Harris County Appraisal District spokesman Jack Barnett.</p>
<p>But with roughly 1.8 million parcels of property in the county, where property taxes poured more than $1.4 billion into county coffers last year, the impact to property values was largely unknown.</p>
<p>Harris County Treasurer Orlando Sanchez echoed the sentiment. “There will be a hit, there’s no question about it, but we’ll have to see what that is,” Sanchez said.</p>
<p>&#160;&#160;&#160; Still, analysts and local officials suspect Harvey could wallop property tax revenues to a degree few storms have in the United States.</p>
<p>“The flooding that we’re seeing reminds me a lot of (Hurricane) Katrina,” which devastated New Orleans in 2005, said Kate Boatright, a Dallas-based analyst with S&amp;P Global Ratings.</p>
<p>&#160;&#160;&#160; Property tax collections in New Orleans dropped 17 percent after the storm, and did not recover to pre-Katrina levels until five years later, according to the city’s financial reports.</p>
<p>Thousands of New Orleans workers and teachers were laid off while major streets lay broken for years. S&amp;P downgraded the city’s credit.</p>
<p>In Texas, certain Harvey-struck counties, like Harris, are starting from a stronger financial position than that of New Orleans and Louisiana when Katrina bore down, which could help with recovery, Boatright said.</p>
<p>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Harvey, which brought a record 51.88 inches of rain to southeast Texas, also flooded large swaths of residential and commercial property.</p>
<p>By Friday, Texas counties and cities had reported at least 68,981 homes and businesses were destroyed or severely damaged in the storm, with another 145,944 properties affected in some way, the Texas Department of Public Safety said. Many were outside of designated flood plains.</p>
<p>Properties beyond mapped flooding areas typically are not required to have flood insurance, and the cost of rebuilding or repairing can fall on property owners.</p>
<p>“A lot of property owners do not have the money sitting around to rebuild,” said Lee of the Texas counties organization.</p>
<p>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;As a way to mitigate the costs, owners will look for emergency reassessments of their homes to reduce their upcoming tax bills, he said.</p>
<p>Each county in Texas has an appraisal and collection system. Values are usually set in January and bills go out in October and November.</p>
<p>Even if property owners don’t get reappraisals, revenues will still likely sink if the homes are not restored to pre-storm conditions by the next annual appraisals, Lee said.</p>
<p>The potential drop in revenue comes amid a state legislative fight over property taxes, which many Texas residents say have become unaffordable. Republican Governor Greg Abbott has supported an effort to make it harder for large counties and cities to raise property taxes. But that measure stalled in a special legislative session last month.</p>
<p>&#160;&#160;&#160; Texas-based Fitch Ratings analyst Steve Murray said he was concerned about the impact on smaller Texas localities, which typically have lower financial reserves to sustain them than do larger cities and counties.</p>
<p>The speed at which communities recover and grow back their tax bases will also depend on the timeliness and amount of federal aid, Murray said.</p>
<p>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;But that money can take months, and often years, to reach damaged communities after disasters.</p>
<p>&#160;&#160;&#160; “In the meantime, revenue is going to take a hit,” Lee said.</p> | false | 1 | laila kearney new york reuters texas communities flooded hurricane harvey could see property tax revenues sink financial blow would leave many cities counties struggling years property taxes top source revenue local governments texas depend fund schools roads public services tens thousands homes businesses damaged officials foresee tumbling values structures reassessed something going depress revenues major revenues counties immediately years said donald lee executive director texas conference urban counties nonprofit organization 37 member counties texas one seven states nationwide state income tax leaving outsized dependence property taxes lone star state third highest average property tax rate united states at160206 percent according study realestate tracker attom data solutions neighboring florida likewise state income tax could face similar challenge state bracing direct hit hurricane irma one strongest storms ever recorded atlantic florida counties like miamidade irmas immediate path also count property taxes biggest revenue source wind flooding damaged least16065 billion worth property since hurricane harvey made landfall aug 25 tore across dozens texas counties following days according preliminary report air worldwide evaluates impact catastrophes assessors harris county home houston began visiting neighborhoods struck harvey week according harris county appraisal district spokesman jack barnett roughly 18 million parcels property county property taxes poured 14 billion county coffers last year impact property values largely unknown harris county treasurer orlando sanchez echoed sentiment hit theres question well see sanchez said 160160160 still analysts local officials suspect harvey could wallop property tax revenues degree storms united states flooding seeing reminds lot hurricane katrina devastated new orleans 2005 said kate boatright dallasbased analyst sampp global ratings 160160160 property tax collections new orleans dropped 17 percent storm recover prekatrina levels five years later according citys financial reports thousands new orleans workers teachers laid major streets lay broken years sampp downgraded citys credit texas certain harveystruck counties like harris starting stronger financial position new orleans louisiana katrina bore could help recovery boatright said 160160160160harvey brought record 5188 inches rain southeast texas also flooded large swaths residential commercial property friday texas counties cities reported least 68981 homes businesses destroyed severely damaged storm another 145944 properties affected way texas department public safety said many outside designated flood plains properties beyond mapped flooding areas typically required flood insurance cost rebuilding repairing fall property owners lot property owners money sitting around rebuild said lee texas counties organization 160160160160as way mitigate costs owners look emergency reassessments homes reduce upcoming tax bills said county texas appraisal collection system values usually set january bills go october november even property owners dont get reappraisals revenues still likely sink homes restored prestorm conditions next annual appraisals lee said potential drop revenue comes amid state legislative fight property taxes many texas residents say become unaffordable republican governor greg abbott supported effort make harder large counties cities raise property taxes measure stalled special legislative session last month 160160160 texasbased fitch ratings analyst steve murray said concerned impact smaller texas localities typically lower financial reserves sustain larger cities counties speed communities recover grow back tax bases also depend timeliness amount federal aid murray said 160160160160but money take months often years reach damaged communities disasters 160160160 meantime revenue going take hit lee said | 520 |
<p>Let me take you back in your mind’s eye to the fall of 1940, the fateful period that Winston Churchill called Britain’s “finest hour.”</p>
<p>Having subdued the Low Countries and France, Adolf Hitler now turned his attention to the last remaining democratic power in Europe. Hermann Goering convinced Hitler that Britain could be bludgeoned into submission on the cheap, so the Luftwaffe unleashed a fierce aerial blitz intended to break the British will to resist. Night after night, London was in flames. You may remember one of the most famous photographs from those desperate days: a nocturnal silhouette of St. Paul’s Cathedral, its great dome standing strong and unshaken against the smoke and fire swirling through the City of London. That photograph stirs the emotions to this day, because it captures in one brilliant image the struggle of Western civilization against the barbarism that seemed on the verge of overwhelming it.</p>
<p>Now, turn your mind’s eye two generations forward.</p>
<p>About forty-five years after the Blitz, Mikhail Gorbachev, then the newly-chosen general secretary of the Soviet communist party, visited London on one of his first trips abroad. As part of the hospitality extended to Mr. Gorbachev and his party, they were taken to visit St. Paul’s Cathedral. As I recall the story, after touring Sir Christopher Wren’s masterpiece Gorbachev turned to the Verger, one of the cathedral officials, and said, “A most interesting building. What is it used for today?” To which the Verger replied, “In order, sir, to worship God.”</p>
<p>A decade later, I was in London to lecture and looked up a young Czech seminarian, then studying at Heythrop College, who had been helpful to me when I was doing research in Prague on the Catholic Church’s role in the collapse of European communism. I asked my young friend what he wanted to see, and he mentioned that he hadn’t visited St. Paul’s yet. So we took the Tube to the City and went to the cathedral. To my surprise, I discovered that one could no longer enter St. Paul’s without paying an entrance fee. Yes, Christian worship continued at the cathedral church of the Diocese of London. But, at least on a Saturday afternoon in January 1995, it had been turned into a museum.</p>
<p>These three vignettes — St. Paul’s in defiance of the Nazi blitz, St. Paul’s confounding the leader of Soviet communism, and St. Paul’s become an architectural museum — come to mind when I try to understand what has happened in western Europe, and what has happened to western Europe in recent decades — and when I try to understand why Europe’s approach to democracy and to the responsibilities of the democracies in world politics seems so different from many Americans’ understanding of these issues. In the aftermath of 9/11, and particularly in the debate that preceded the Iraq War of 2003, Americans have become acutely aware that there is a “European problem.” Interestingly enough, so do at least some Europeans, including some European intellectuals, among them at least two prominent French political philosophers.</p>
<p>My proposal in this lecture is that, at its most fundamental level, this “European problem” is best understood in moral and cultural terms. My further suggestion is that the “problem” is our problem, too, as well as one besetting our European friends and allies.</p>
<p>In recent months, the most widely-discussed American analysis of America’s European problem and Europe’s America problem has been that advanced by my friend Robert Kagan in his book, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order. In a line from his book that he may have subsequently come to view with a measure of chagrin, Kagan argues that “on major strategic and international questions today, Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus.” However fetching such a characterization may be in a sound-bite world, it does scant justice to the seriousness of Bob Kagan’s argument.</p>
<p>To begin with, Kagan understands that not all Europeans are “from Venus” — Tony Blair comes to mind — nor are all Americans “from Mars” (witness the editorial page of the New York Times and the early phase of the contest for the Democratic Party’s 2004 presidential nomination). Yet Kagan insists that these conventional images — “Americans are from Mars, Europeans from Venus” — bespeak important truths. The United States and western Europe have different strategic visions: different understandings of how the world works, different understandings of the nature of power, different understandings of the causes of conflict in the world, different views of the role of international legal and political organizations in managing conflict, and different perceptions of the utility of military power in securing peace, freedom, and order in world affairs — and that’s before we get to the policy differences that now separate the United States and Europe on issues such as the path to peace in the Middle East, the International Criminal Court, the rebuilding of Iraq, and so forth.</p>
<p>Kagan suggests that these dramatically different strategic visions are not the by-products of national character, reminding us of Europe’s bellicose past and America’s traditional nervousness about international power politics and entangling alliances. Rather, on Kagan’s view, these different strategic visions are the product of a vast disparity of military power between the United States and Europe. That power-gap did not just happen, though; the disparity in military power between the U.S. and Europe is itself the product of an ideological gap between Old Europe and the United States — what Kagan terms “a different set of ideals and principles regarding the utility and morality of power.” The ideological gap, in turn, is based on a different set of experiences in the 20th century.</p>
<p>The devastation of their continent by two world wars; the continent’s division during a Cold War that, had it broken out into hot war, would likely have destroyed Europe; the longer European experience of vulnerability to terrorism — all of this, Kagan suggests, has led Europeans to a different set of perceptions about the threats to peace and freedom at work in the 21st century world. Moreover, these experiences have led Europeans to the convictions that security threats can and should be met, in the main, not by traditional applications of “hard power” but by the further refinement of international legal and political instruments of conflict-resolution. The most enthusiastic European “Venusians,” like European Commission president and former Italian prime minister Romano Prodi, see the present European Union as the model, indeed the prefigurement, of a world run by “soft power.” As Prodi put it in a May 2001 speech in Paris, in Europe, “the rule of law has replaced the crude interplay of power…power politics have lost their influence; [therefore, by] making a success of [European] integration we are demonstrating to the world that it is possible to create a method for peace.” This, Kagan suggests, has become Europe’s new mission civilisatrice, its “civilizing mission:” Europe is to bring to the world the fulfillment of Immanuel Kant’s vision of “perpetual peace.”</p>
<p>Kagan understands that Europe’s passion for this new mission is in part a function of the fear-that-dare-not-speak-its-name: namely, that if the experience of an integrated, peaceful post-Cold War Europe isn’t universalizable, then it might not be a settled accomplishment for Europe, either. And that is to think the unthinkable in a circumstances in which, as Kagan nicely puts it, “the French are still not confident they can trust the Germans, and the Germans are still not sure they can trust themselves.” That, in turn, helps explain why Europe’s integration — originally intended to create a European superpower and an independent European foreign and defense policy — has gone hand-in-hand with a drastic decline, absolutely and relatively, in Europe’s “hard power” capabilities.</p>
<p>There are many ironies in the fire here, and Kagan neatly sums them up:</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>“Europe’s rejection of power politics, its devaluing of military force as a tool of international relations, have depended on the presence of American military forces on European soil. Europe’s new Kantian order could flourish only under the umbrella of American power exercised according to the rules of the old Hobbesian order. American power made it possible for Europeans to believe that power was no longer important. And now, in the final irony, the fact that United States military power has solved the European problem, especially the &gt;German question,’ allows Europeans today to believe that American military power, and the &gt;strategic culture’ that has created and sustained it, are outmoded and dangerous.”</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>And that, in Kagan’s view, leads to the “great paradox,” namely, that Europe’s emergence into post-history has been made possible by the fact that the United States still lives in history: “Because Europe has neither the will nor the ability to guard its own paradise and keep it from being overrun, spiritually as well as physically, by a world that has yet to accept the rule of &gt;moral consciousness,’ it has become dependent on America’s willingness to use its military might to deter or defeat those around the world who still believe in power politics.”</p>
<p>Which brief summary of his position will, I hope, drive home the point that Dr. Kagan does his argument insufficient justice when he reduces it to a matter of Martians vs. Venusians.</p>
<p>Yet I would also suggest that my friend Bob Kagan doesn’t drive the analysis deeply enough. Yes, western Europeans see the world differently, and thus have ordered their institutions, their politics, and their national budgets differently. Yes, that different vision of the world and its possibilities is the product of experiences unlike those Americans underwent in the 20th century. Yes, Europeans can find some historical warrant for believing a world of perpetual peace is possible in Kant’s idealism (and I mean “idealism” in both its philosophical and psychological senses).</p>
<p>But why did Europe turn out this way? Why did Europeans learn these things from their experience? And why have these learnings taken the political and ideological forms they have?</p>
<p>Why, in the aftermath of 1989, did Europeans fail to condemn communism as a moral and political monstrosity? Why was the only politically acceptable judgment on communism the anodyne observation that it “didn’t work”?</p>
<p>Why, to come to the present, do European statesmen insist on defending certain fictions in world politics: like the fiction that Yassir Arafat is interested in peace with Israel; or the fiction that the Kyoto protocols would be rigorously observed by the nations that signed the Kyoto agreement; or the fiction that there is something meaningfully describable in political terms as an “international community,” the highest expression of which is the U.N. Security Council as presently configured?</p>
<p>Why do Europeans defend the trial of Slobodan Milosevic in the Hague as a great triumph for world order, when its most measurable consequence to date has been to burnish Milosevic’s image in Serbia and revive the fortunes of his political party?</p>
<p>Why is Europe retreating from democracy and binding itself ever tighter in the cords of bureaucracy, with Brussels now concerning itself about the appropriate circumference of tomatoes and the proper care and feeding of Sardinian hogs?</p>
<p>Why do European states find it virtually impossible to take hard domestic political decisions — as on the length of the work-week or the funding of pensions?</p>
<p>Why do European courts seek an expanded international jurisdiction that, as in the Pinochet case, defies the democratically agreed-to arrangements made by free people in other countries?</p>
<p>Why is Europe on the way to what the French political philosopher Pierre Manent calls “depoliticization?” Why, as Manent puts it, does Europe “[drug] itself with humanitarianism in order to forget that it exists less and less politically”? Why does Manent have “the impression today that the greatest ambition of Europeans is to become the inspectors of American prisons”?</p>
<p>Why have most of Europe’s political leaders insisted that the new Constitution for Europe include a deliberate act of historical amnesia, in which a millennium and a half of Christianity’s contributions to European understandings of human rights and democracy are air-brushed from the continent’s political memory?</p>
<p>Why are so many European public intellectuals “Christophobic,” as international legal scholar Joseph Weiler (himself an observant Jew) puts it? Why is European high culture so enamored of the present and so contemptuous of both religious and secular tradition, as French philosopher Rémi Brague has pointed out? How can European intellectuals and lumpen-intellectuals still celebrate a man like Jacques Derrida, who, a month after the event, could say this of 9/11: “We do not in fact know what we are saying or naming in this way: September 11, le 11 septembre, September 11. The brevity of the appellation (September 11, 9/11) stems not from an economic or rhetorical necessity. The telegram of this metonymy — a name, a number — points out the unqualifiable by recognizing that we do not recognize or even cognize that we do not yet know how to qualify, that we do not know what we are talking about.”</p>
<p>Why did so many of the French prefer to continue their vacations rather than bury their parents when thousands of elderly Frenchmen and women died alone during the heat wave this past August — and were then left in overflowing refrigerated warehouses?</p>
<p>Above all, and most urgently of all, why is Europe systematically depopulating itself? Why is Europe committing demographic suicide? Why does no western European country have a replacement-level birth-rate? What is happening when an entire continent, wealthier and healthier than ever before, declines to create the human future in the most elemental sense, by creating a next generation? The evidence of this extraordinary default can be found everywhere in Europe; Europeans regularly complain about it when they fret about immigrants “taking over.” Why, then, do they not reverse the trend? Why will they not admit that these demographics — which are without parallel in human history, absent wars, plagues, or natural catastrophes — are the defining reality of their 21st century?</p>
<p>These questions cannot be answered satisfactorily by reference only to Europe’s distinct experience of the 20th century and what Europe learned from that. A deeper question has to be raised: Why did Europe have the 20th century it did? Why did a century that began with confident predictions about a maturing humanity reaching new heights of civilizational accomplishment produce in Europe, within four decades, two world wars, three totalitarian systems, a Cold War threatening global catastrophe, oceans of blood, mountains of corpses, Auschwitz and the Gulag? What happened? Why?</p>
<p>Over the course of twelve years of research and teaching in east central Europe, I’ve been impressed by what might be called the Slavic view of history. You can find it in a great thinker who lived in the borderland between Orthodoxy and Catholicism, Vladimir Soloviev, with his religious and moral challenge to the fashionable nihilism and materialism of the late 19th century. You can find it in the novelists, poets, and playwrights of Polish Romanticism — Henryk Sienkiewicz, Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz S»owacki, Cyprian Kamil Norwid — who broke decisively with the Jacobin conviction that “revolution” meant a complete rupture with the past, insisting by contrast that genuine “revolution” meant the recovery of lost spiritual and moral values. You can find it in Karol Wojty»a, later Pope John Paul II, and in such intellectual leaders of the anti-communist resistance in east central Europe as Václav Havel and Václav Benda, who all believed that “living in the truth” could change what seemed unchangeable in history.</p>
<p>The common thread running through these disparate thinkers is the conviction that the deepest currents of “history” are spiritual and cultural, rather than political and economic. In this way of thinking, “history” is not simply the by-product of the contest for power in the world — although power plays an important role in history. And “history” is certainly not the exhaust fumes produced by the means of production. Rather, “history” is driven, over the long haul, by culture — by what men and women honor, cherish, and worship; by what societies deem to be true and good, and by the expressions they give to that in language, literature, and the arts; by what individuals and societies are willing to stake their lives on.</p>
<p>Poland is one embodiment of this way of thinking, which Poles believe has been vindicated empirically by their own modern history. In 1795, with the Third Polish Partition, the great powers of the region — Russia, Prussia, Austria-Hungary — completed the vivisection of a political community whose origins went back to the last years of the first millennium of Christian history; thus for one hundred twenty-three years, from 1795 to 1918, the Polish state was erased from Europe. Yet during that century and a quarter in which you could not find “Poland” on any map of Europe — a time in which the Russians and Prussians, in particular, made strenuous efforts to eradicate the idea of “Poland” — the Polish nation survived. Indeed, the Polish nation survived with such vigor that it could give birth to a new Polish state in 1918. And despite the fact that the Polish state was beset for fifty years by the plagues of Nazism and communism, the Polish nation proved strong enough to give a new birth to freedom in east central Europe in the Revolution of 1989.</p>
<p>How did this happen? How did Poland survive? Poland survived — better, Poland prevailed — because of culture: a culture formed by a distinctive language (Slavic, yet written in a Latin alphabet and thus oriented to the West as well as the East); by a unique literature, which helped keep alive the memory and idea of “Poland;” and by the intensity of its Catholic faith. Poles know in their bones that culture is what drives history over the long haul.</p>
<p>To call this a “Slavic view of history” reflects the principal location of this body of thought over the past two hundred years or so. In fact, though, it is really a classically Christian way of thinking about history, whose roots can be traced back at least as far as St. Augustine and The City of God. In the English-speaking world of the 20th century, the most distinguished exponent of this culture-driven view of history was Christopher Dawson. As Dawson once put it in one of the most cited passages from his voluminous body of work, St. Paul’s passage from Troy in Asia Minor to Philippi on the European mainland did more to shape the future of European culture and European history than anything recorded by the great historians of his day — because it took place “underneath the surface” of history, such that those who even noticed that an itinerant rabbi from Tarsus had come to Europe and was preaching another king than Caesar couldn’t grasp the significance of what was being said.</p>
<p>In any case, it is the Slavs who have been the most powerful exponents of this “culture-first” understanding of the dynamics of the world’s story in our time. One such Slavic reader of the signs of the times, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, brought this optic on history to bear on the questions that concern us in his 1983 Templeton Prize Lecture. Parsing the horrors of the 20th century, Solzhenitsyn found a historical pivot — perhaps better, a historical trapgate — in the First World War:</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>“The failings of human consciousness, deprived of its divine dimension, have been a determining factor in all the major crimes of this century. The first of these was World War I , and much of our present predicament can be traced back to it. That war…took place when Europe, bursting with health and abundance, fell into a rage of self-mutilation that could not but sap its strength for a century or more, and perhaps forever. The only possible explanation for this is a mental eclipse among the leaders of Europe due to their lost awareness of a Supreme Power above them…Only the loss of that higher intuition which comes from God could have allowed the West to accept calmly, after World War I, the protracted agony of Russia as she was being torn apart by a band of cannibals…The West did not perceive that this was in fact the beginning of a lengthy process that spells disaster for the whole world.”</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>As the 20th century gave way to the 21st , the “disaster” Solzhenitsyn foresaw had been avoided, at least in the form of nuclear holocaust. But that does not diminish the salience of Solzhenitsyn’s chief point — that 1914-1918 marked the beginning of a civilizational crisis in Europe, and perhaps especially in western Europe, whose effects are much with us today. Indeed, in trying to get a satisfactory answer to several of the questions I raised above, including the meta-question of Europe’s demographic self-destruction, I can think of no better answer than the one suggested by Solzhenitsyn’s analysis: these phenomena are the expression of a profound and longstanding crisis of civilizational morale.</p>
<p>It should not be surprising that this crisis of civilizational morale has only become visible since the end of the Cold War. Its effects were first masked by the illusory peace that marked the inter-war period; then by the rise of totalitarianism and the Great Depression; then by World War II; and then by the Cold War. It was only after 1991, when the political and military crises that began in 1914 had ended, that the long-term effects of Europe’s “rage of self-mutilation” could come to the surface of history and be seen for what they were — and for what they are.</p>
<p>Solzhenitsyn’s insight suggests that a theologically informed analysis of history may in fact shed more light on what imagines itself to be the “real world” than most political realists manage to do. Another Christian analyst of the dynamics of modern European history fills out Solzhenitsyn’s indictment and helps us get answers to the “European problem” that cut more deeply than the political.</p>
<p>Writing during the Occupation of a France that had fallen supinely before the Wehrmacht just months before, Jesuit theologian Henri de Lubac (who would later become one of the intellectual architects of the Second Vatican Council) proposed that the civilizational crisis in which Europe found itself during World War II was the product of what he called “atheistic humanism” — the deliberate rejection of the God of the Bible, the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus, in the name of authentic human liberation. What biblical man had perceived as a liberation from the whims of the gods or Fate — the self-revelation in history of the one God who was neither a willful tyrant nor a remote abstraction — atheistic humanism perceived as bondage. Human greatness required rejecting the biblical God, according to atheistic humanism.</p>
<p>This, de Lubac suggested, was something new. This was not the atheism of skeptical individuals looking to discomfort the neighbors or to impress the faculty tenure committee. This was atheistic humanism, atheism with a developed ideology and a program for re-making the world. Ideas have consequences, and bad ideas can have lethal consequences. At the heart of the darkness inside the great mid-20th century tyrannies, Father de Lubac discerned the lethal effects of the marriage between atheistic humanism and modern technology. He summed up the results of this misbegotten union in these terms: “It is not true, as is sometimes said, that man cannot organize the world without God. What is true is that, without God, he can only organize it against man.” That is what the tyrannies of the 20th century had proven — that ultramundane humanism is inevitably inhuman humanism.</p>
<p>I wonder, though, if we cannot push Father de Lubac’s analysis backwards and forwards, historically. De Lubac makes a powerful case that the mid-20th century tyrannies, communism and Nazism, were expressions of an atheistic humanism that took its cues from the positivism of Comte, the subjectivism of Feuerbach, the materialism of Marx, and the radical willfulness of Nietszche. But hadn’t the worm gotten into the European civilizational apple earlier than Lenin and Hitler? Perhaps the most complete expression of the material effects of atheistic humanism had to wait until Treblinka and Perm Camp 36. But don’t we come to a deeper reading of the civilizational trapgate that was 1914-1918 by applying a similar analytic lens? Can we explain why Europe fell into Solzhenitsyn’s “rage of self-mutilation” without recognizing, as the great Russian writer put it, that men had forgotten God? Doesn’t de Lubac’s suggestion that that forgetting was in the name of a false concept of human liberation help us understand why the forgetting was so powerful and so complete?</p>
<p>If we read “history” from beneath the surface of history, de Lubac’s analysis of the drama of atheistic humanism helps flesh out Solzhenitsyn’s identification of 1914-1918 as the moment when European civilization went into crisis. I would also suggest that de Lubac’s analysis sheds light on post-Cold War Europe. Here, too, beneath the surface of post-Cold War history, we can find residues of the drama of atheistic humanism. Yes, the most grotesque institutional expressions of atheistic humanism were defeated in World War II and the Cold War. But certain intellectual, spiritual, and moral residues remained, again “underneath the surface” of history. Can we explain European post-modernism without atheistic humanism — without, to repeat, Comte’s positivism, Feuerbach’s subjectivism, Marx’s materialism, and Nietzsche’s will-to-power? I doubt it. The incoherent ramblings of a Jacques Derrida on 9/11 are not the product of Jacques Derrida alone. The depoliticization of Europe lamented by Pierre Manent is not the product of the Brussels bureaucracy alone — and neither are the “presentism” and contempt for tradition decried by Remí Brague.</p>
<p>The “European problem” is not, in other words, a product of the 20th century alone — although the crisis of European civilizational morale accelerated exponentially during the Great War when, as Pierre Manent writes, “self-sacrifice gave way to self-mutilation and the frenzied love of death.” No, the roots of the “European problem” that thoughtful Europeans and many Americans experience today go back to the 19th century, to the drama of atheistic humanism and the related triumph of secularization in western Europe. For that process of secularization had profound public consequences: it meant the collapse of a transcendent horizon of moral judgment in European public life and the triumph of what Manent call the “self-adoration” and “fateful hubris” that led to the Great War and its progeny.</p>
<p>As New School sociologist José Casanova has put it, secularization became “a self-fulfilling prophecy in Europe…a taken-for-granted belief shared not only by sociologists but by a majority of the population.” Why European Christianity was particularly vulnerable to the siren-song of atheistic humanism raises another, deeper set of questions that are beyond the scope of this lecture and that deserves extensive and serious study. But even absent definitive answers to those questions, the proximate cultural roots of today’s “European problem” can be identified with some clarity.</p>
<p>European man has convinced himself that in order to be modern and free, he must be radically secular. That conviction has had crucial, indeed lethal, consequences for European public life and European culture; indeed, that conviction and its public consequences are at the root of Europe’s contemporary crisis of civilizational morale. That crisis of civilizational morale, in turn, helps explain why European man is deliberately forgetting his history. That crisis of civilizational morale helps us understand why European man is abandoning the hard work and high adventure of democratic politics, seeming to prefer the false domestic security of bureaucracy and the false international security of the U.N. system. That crisis of civilizational morale is why European man is failing to create the human future of Europe.</p>
<p>Writing in the aftermath of World War II, Christopher Dawson took exception to the suggestion that modern European civilization was “pagan.” Paganism was rife with religious sentiment, Dawson recalled; what was going on in mid-20th century Europe was something different. True, many men and women had ceased to belong to the Church; but rather than belonging to something else, rather than adhering to another community of transcendent allegiance, they now belonged nowhere. This “spiritual no man’s land,” as Dawson characterized it, was inherently unstable and ultimately self-destructive. Or, as the usually gentle Dawson put it in an especially fierce passage, “…a secular society that has no end beyond its own satisfaction is a monstrosity — a cancerous growth which will ultimately destroy itself.” One wonders what Christopher Dawson would say today.</p>
<p>The next question for Americans, however, is — so what? Or, to phrase it differently, why should we care? If Europe is in civilizational crisis, what effect does that have on us, beyond occasional aggravations at the Security Council? Let Europe continue to slide into a condition of powerlessness, eating its seed corn as it goes. What has any of that to do with us?</p>
<p>A lot, I suggest. Which means that their “European problem” is also ours.</p>
<p>Why?</p>
<p>Aside from the enormous economic and other practical complications that an exhausted and imploding Europe will cause for the United States, and leaving aside for the moment those aggravations at the Security Council, let me suggest three reasons why Americans should care. The first reason involves pietas, an ancient European, which is to say Roman, virtue that teaches us both reverence and gratitude for those on whose shoulders we stand.</p>
<p>I am prepared to argue that very little that has crossed the Atlantic in the past several centuries hasn’t been improved in the process: from the English language itself to the forms of constitutional democracy to “rounders” (transformed by Americans into God’s game, baseball). By the same token, pietas demands that I remember where all those good things came from in their original forms. A United States indifferent to the fate of Europe is a United States indifferent to its roots. Yes, Americans have developed a new form of European civilization. But that American civilization has long understood itself to be in continuity with the civilization of the West that we associate, in its origins, with Europe — with the unique civilizational accomplishment that emerged from the interaction of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome. Americans learned about the dignity of the human person, about limited and constitutional government, about the principle of consent, and about the transcendent standards of justice to which the state is accountable in the school of political culture that we call “Europe.” We should remember that, with pietas. We have seen what historical amnesia about cultural and civilizational roots has done to Europe. We do not want that to happen here.</p>
<p>The second reason we can and must care has to do with the medium- and long-term threat to American security posed by Europe’s demographic meltdown. Demographic vacuums do not remain unfilled — especially when the demographic vacuum in question is a continent possessed of immense economic resources. One can see the effects of Europe’s self-inflicted de-population in the tensions experienced in France, Germany, and elsewhere by rising tides of immigration from North Africa, Turkey, and other parts of the Islamic world. And while it may be the case, in the most optimistic of scenarios, that these immigrants will become good European democrats, practicing civility and tolerance and defending the religious freedom of others, there is another and far grimmer alternative. Europe’s current demographic trend-lines could eventually produce a Europe in which Sobieski’s victory at Vienna in 1683 is reversed, such that the Europe of the 22nd century, or even the late 21st, is a Europe increasingly influenced, and perhaps even dominated, by radicalized Islamic populations, convinced that their long-delayed triumph in the European heartland is at hand.</p>
<p>We have already seen what the emergence of significant Islamic populations has done to the politics of France and Germany. Is there no connection between the problems posed domestically in France and Germany by their new immigrant populations, on the one hand, and the strategy of appeasement toward radicalized Islam adopted by French and German political leaders, on the other? It seems very unlikely. Is a European future dominated by an appeasement mentality toward radical Islam in the best interests of the United States? That seems even more unlikely.</p>
<p>The third reason why the “European problem” is ours as well as theirs has to do with the future of the democratic project, here in the United States and indeed throughout the world. What Pierre Manent laments as Europe’s “depoliticization” already has its parallels in our own public life. What is most disturbing, for example, about the bizarre debate over the mere mention of Christianity’s contributions to European civilization in the proposed European Constitution is that the amnesiacs who wish to rewrite European history by eliminating Christianity from the historical equation are doing so in service to a thin, indeed anorexic, idea of procedural democracy. To deny that Christianity had anything to do with the evolution of free, law-governed, and prosperous European societies is more than a question of falsifying the past; it is also a matter of creating a future in which moral truth has no role in governance, in the determination of public policy, in understandings of justice, and in the definition of that freedom which democracy is intended to embody.</p>
<p>Were these ideas to triumph in Europe, that would be bad for Europe; but it would also be bad for the United States, for that triumph would inevitably reinforce similar tendencies in our own high culture, and ultimately in our law. The judicial redefinition of freedom as personal willfulness manifest in the recent Supreme Court decision, Lawrence v. Texas, was buttressed by citations from European courts. And what would it mean for the democratic project in global terms if the notion that democracy has nothing to do with moral truth is exported from western Europe to central and eastern Europe via the expanding European Union, and thence to other new democracies around the world? If Christopher Dawson was right that a thoroughly secularized democracy, constitutionally and politically disabled from bringing transcendent moral truths to bear on its public life, is self-destructive, then the entire democratic project — in Latin America, in south and east Asia, in Oceania and Canada — is being imperiled by the prospect that the “European problem” will metastasize beyond the current membership of the E.U.</p>
<p>So there are many reasons why we should, and must care. We sever ourselves from our civilizational roots if we ignore Europe in a fit of aggravation or pique. Our security will be further imperiled in a post-9/11 world if Europe’s demographics continue to change in ways that give new advantage to the dynamism of radical Islamism in world politics. The American democratic experiment will be weakened if Europe’s “depoliticization” reinforces similar tendencies here in the United States, and so will the democratic project in the world.</p>
<p>Is there anything to be done about all this, at the level of public policy?</p>
<p>Let me return one last time to Christopher Dawson who, in an earlier phase of the “European problem,” wrote that “the modern dilemma is essentially a spiritual one, and every one of its main aspects, moral, political, and scientific, beings us back to the need of a spiritual solution.” If Dawson was right, and I think he was, then the long-term answer to the demise of Europe will only be found in a revitalization of Europe’s Christian roots and the rebirth of Christian conviction in Christianity’s historic heartland. Europe, in other words, needs something like a Great Awakening — by which I mean, not necessarily a fourth wave of the Wesleyan revolution, but a rebirth of life-transforming and culture-forming Christian conviction, especially Catholic conviction. And that, by definition, is something that cannot be produced by public policy — either European domestic policy, or American foreign policy.</p>
<p>U.S. foreign policy can help at the margins by supporting the new democracies of east central Europe if, as M. Chirac evidently fears, they continue to show bad manners and resist an E.U. in which the practice of democracy is attenuated by judicial activism, and the democratic idea is further eroded by institutionalizing the notion of democracy as a matter of political and legal procedures alone.</p>
<p>American public diplomacy could also be far more helpful. The failure of American embassies in Europe over the past two years to systematically engage the European media, European universities and research institutes, European voluntary organizations — all those places where European opinion is molded — has had serious and damaging results. Most Europeans, including such vigorously pro-American Europeans as the Poles, now have a thoroughly distorted view of American civil society, American domestic politics, American intentions in the world, and American actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. I am not suggesting that a vigorous public diplomacy would have solved, to our complete satisfaction, that part of the “European problem” that manifested itself at the U.N. Security Council in late 2002 and early 2003. But it would have created the conditions for the possibility of an internal European debate on the war against terrorism that might have made for a different result in the 2002 German elections, that might have blunted the more egregious behavior of the French government, and that might have created more popular support for the governments of Spain, Italy, and Poland, which did support the U.S. position on Iraq.</p>
<p>Just as the U.S. government must take far more seriously the war of ideas in Europe, so must American philanthropy, which should imagine the present situation as roughly analogous to the contest with Marxist ideas for the soul of Europe in the years immediately following World War II. Generously funded trans-Atlantic initiatives that seek to challenge the hegemony of post-modernism in European intellectual life and the deleterious consequences of that abandonment of reason on public policy are as imperative today as initiatives like the Congress for Cultural Freedom and Encounter were fifty years ago.</p>
<p>At the end of the day, however, I am less interested in specific policy options — which souls more clever than I can devise — than with understanding the “European problem” at its roots, which are cultural and spiritual rather than political. That is the beginning of wise policy. But it is also the beginning of understanding why “their” European problem is also ours — a cautionary tale that, unless understood in its depth, can and likely will be replayed on this side of the Atlantic, with unhappy consequences for American democracy and for the future of freedom in the world.</p>
<p>These difficult first years of the twenty-first century have taught us the importance of reading world politics in new ways. Europe’s crisis of civilizational morale teaches us that, while there are many lenses through which history can be read, theological lenses help us to see deeper, farther, and more truly.</p>
<p>George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. and holds EPPC’s William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.</p> | false | 1 | let take back minds eye fall 1940 fateful period winston churchill called britains finest hour subdued low countries france adolf hitler turned attention last remaining democratic power europe hermann goering convinced hitler britain could bludgeoned submission cheap luftwaffe unleashed fierce aerial blitz intended break british resist night night london flames may remember one famous photographs desperate days nocturnal silhouette st pauls cathedral great dome standing strong unshaken smoke fire swirling city london photograph stirs emotions day captures one brilliant image struggle western civilization barbarism seemed verge overwhelming turn minds eye two generations forward fortyfive years blitz mikhail gorbachev newlychosen general secretary soviet communist party visited london one first trips abroad part hospitality extended mr gorbachev party taken visit st pauls cathedral recall story touring sir christopher wrens masterpiece gorbachev turned verger one cathedral officials said interesting building used today verger replied order sir worship god decade later london lecture looked young czech seminarian studying heythrop college helpful research prague catholic churchs role collapse european communism asked young friend wanted see mentioned hadnt visited st pauls yet took tube city went cathedral surprise discovered one could longer enter st pauls without paying entrance fee yes christian worship continued cathedral church diocese london least saturday afternoon january 1995 turned museum three vignettes st pauls defiance nazi blitz st pauls confounding leader soviet communism st pauls become architectural museum come mind try understand happened western europe happened western europe recent decades try understand europes approach democracy responsibilities democracies world politics seems different many americans understanding issues aftermath 911 particularly debate preceded iraq war 2003 americans become acutely aware european problem interestingly enough least europeans including european intellectuals among least two prominent french political philosophers proposal lecture fundamental level european problem best understood moral cultural terms suggestion problem problem well one besetting european friends allies recent months widelydiscussed american analysis americas european problem europes america problem advanced friend robert kagan book paradise power america europe new world order line book may subsequently come view measure chagrin kagan argues major strategic international questions today americans mars europeans venus however fetching characterization may soundbite world scant justice seriousness bob kagans argument begin kagan understands europeans venus tony blair comes mind americans mars witness editorial page new york times early phase contest democratic partys 2004 presidential nomination yet kagan insists conventional images americans mars europeans venus bespeak important truths united states western europe different strategic visions different understandings world works different understandings nature power different understandings causes conflict world different views role international legal political organizations managing conflict different perceptions utility military power securing peace freedom order world affairs thats get policy differences separate united states europe issues path peace middle east international criminal court rebuilding iraq forth kagan suggests dramatically different strategic visions byproducts national character reminding us europes bellicose past americas traditional nervousness international power politics entangling alliances rather kagans view different strategic visions product vast disparity military power united states europe powergap happen though disparity military power us europe product ideological gap old europe united states kagan terms different set ideals principles regarding utility morality power ideological gap turn based different set experiences 20th century devastation continent two world wars continents division cold war broken hot war would likely destroyed europe longer european experience vulnerability terrorism kagan suggests led europeans different set perceptions threats peace freedom work 21st century world moreover experiences led europeans convictions security threats met main traditional applications hard power refinement international legal political instruments conflictresolution enthusiastic european venusians like european commission president former italian prime minister romano prodi see present european union model indeed prefigurement world run soft power prodi put may 2001 speech paris europe rule law replaced crude interplay powerpower politics lost influence therefore making success european integration demonstrating world possible create method peace kagan suggests become europes new mission civilisatrice civilizing mission europe bring world fulfillment immanuel kants vision perpetual peace kagan understands europes passion new mission part function fearthatdarenotspeakitsname namely experience integrated peaceful postcold war europe isnt universalizable might settled accomplishment europe either think unthinkable circumstances kagan nicely puts french still confident trust germans germans still sure trust turn helps explain europes integration originally intended create european superpower independent european foreign defense policy gone handinhand drastic decline absolutely relatively europes hard power capabilities many ironies fire kagan neatly sums 160 160 160 160 europes rejection power politics devaluing military force tool international relations depended presence american military forces european soil europes new kantian order could flourish umbrella american power exercised according rules old hobbesian order american power made possible europeans believe power longer important final irony fact united states military power solved european problem especially gtgerman question allows europeans today believe american military power gtstrategic culture created sustained outmoded dangerous 160 kagans view leads great paradox namely europes emergence posthistory made possible fact united states still lives history europe neither ability guard paradise keep overrun spiritually well physically world yet accept rule gtmoral consciousness become dependent americas willingness use military might deter defeat around world still believe power politics brief summary position hope drive home point dr kagan argument insufficient justice reduces matter martians vs venusians yet would also suggest friend bob kagan doesnt drive analysis deeply enough yes western europeans see world differently thus ordered institutions politics national budgets differently yes different vision world possibilities product experiences unlike americans underwent 20th century yes europeans find historical warrant believing world perpetual peace possible kants idealism mean idealism philosophical psychological senses europe turn way europeans learn things experience learnings taken political ideological forms aftermath 1989 europeans fail condemn communism moral political monstrosity politically acceptable judgment communism anodyne observation didnt work come present european statesmen insist defending certain fictions world politics like fiction yassir arafat interested peace israel fiction kyoto protocols would rigorously observed nations signed kyoto agreement fiction something meaningfully describable political terms international community highest expression un security council presently configured europeans defend trial slobodan milosevic hague great triumph world order measurable consequence date burnish milosevics image serbia revive fortunes political party europe retreating democracy binding ever tighter cords bureaucracy brussels concerning appropriate circumference tomatoes proper care feeding sardinian hogs european states find virtually impossible take hard domestic political decisions length workweek funding pensions european courts seek expanded international jurisdiction pinochet case defies democratically agreedto arrangements made free people countries europe way french political philosopher pierre manent calls depoliticization manent puts europe drug humanitarianism order forget exists less less politically manent impression today greatest ambition europeans become inspectors american prisons europes political leaders insisted new constitution europe include deliberate act historical amnesia millennium half christianitys contributions european understandings human rights democracy airbrushed continents political memory many european public intellectuals christophobic international legal scholar joseph weiler observant jew puts european high culture enamored present contemptuous religious secular tradition french philosopher rémi brague pointed european intellectuals lumpenintellectuals still celebrate man like jacques derrida month event could say 911 fact know saying naming way september 11 le 11 septembre september 11 brevity appellation september 11 911 stems economic rhetorical necessity telegram metonymy name number points unqualifiable recognizing recognize even cognize yet know qualify know talking many french prefer continue vacations rather bury parents thousands elderly frenchmen women died alone heat wave past august left overflowing refrigerated warehouses urgently europe systematically depopulating europe committing demographic suicide western european country replacementlevel birthrate happening entire continent wealthier healthier ever declines create human future elemental sense creating next generation evidence extraordinary default found everywhere europe europeans regularly complain fret immigrants taking reverse trend admit demographics without parallel human history absent wars plagues natural catastrophes defining reality 21st century questions answered satisfactorily reference europes distinct experience 20th century europe learned deeper question raised europe 20th century century began confident predictions maturing humanity reaching new heights civilizational accomplishment produce europe within four decades two world wars three totalitarian systems cold war threatening global catastrophe oceans blood mountains corpses auschwitz gulag happened course twelve years research teaching east central europe ive impressed might called slavic view history find great thinker lived borderland orthodoxy catholicism vladimir soloviev religious moral challenge fashionable nihilism materialism late 19th century find novelists poets playwrights polish romanticism henryk sienkiewicz adam mickiewicz juliusz sowacki cyprian kamil norwid broke decisively jacobin conviction revolution meant complete rupture past insisting contrast genuine revolution meant recovery lost spiritual moral values find karol wojtya later pope john paul ii intellectual leaders anticommunist resistance east central europe václav havel václav benda believed living truth could change seemed unchangeable history common thread running disparate thinkers conviction deepest currents history spiritual cultural rather political economic way thinking history simply byproduct contest power world although power plays important role history history certainly exhaust fumes produced means production rather history driven long haul culture men women honor cherish worship societies deem true good expressions give language literature arts individuals societies willing stake lives poland one embodiment way thinking poles believe vindicated empirically modern history 1795 third polish partition great powers region russia prussia austriahungary completed vivisection political community whose origins went back last years first millennium christian history thus one hundred twentythree years 1795 1918 polish state erased europe yet century quarter could find poland map europe time russians prussians particular made strenuous efforts eradicate idea poland polish nation survived indeed polish nation survived vigor could give birth new polish state 1918 despite fact polish state beset fifty years plagues nazism communism polish nation proved strong enough give new birth freedom east central europe revolution 1989 happen poland survive poland survived better poland prevailed culture culture formed distinctive language slavic yet written latin alphabet thus oriented west well east unique literature helped keep alive memory idea poland intensity catholic faith poles know bones culture drives history long haul call slavic view history reflects principal location body thought past two hundred years fact though really classically christian way thinking history whose roots traced back least far st augustine city god englishspeaking world 20th century distinguished exponent culturedriven view history christopher dawson dawson put one cited passages voluminous body work st pauls passage troy asia minor philippi european mainland shape future european culture european history anything recorded great historians day took place underneath surface history even noticed itinerant rabbi tarsus come europe preaching another king caesar couldnt grasp significance said case slavs powerful exponents culturefirst understanding dynamics worlds story time one slavic reader signs times aleksandr solzhenitsyn brought optic history bear questions concern us 1983 templeton prize lecture parsing horrors 20th century solzhenitsyn found historical pivot perhaps better historical trapgate first world war 160 160 160 160 failings human consciousness deprived divine dimension determining factor major crimes century first world war much present predicament traced back wartook place europe bursting health abundance fell rage selfmutilation could sap strength century perhaps forever possible explanation mental eclipse among leaders europe due lost awareness supreme power themonly loss higher intuition comes god could allowed west accept calmly world war protracted agony russia torn apart band cannibalsthe west perceive fact beginning lengthy process spells disaster whole world 160 20th century gave way 21st disaster solzhenitsyn foresaw avoided least form nuclear holocaust diminish salience solzhenitsyns chief point 19141918 marked beginning civilizational crisis europe perhaps especially western europe whose effects much us today indeed trying get satisfactory answer several questions raised including metaquestion europes demographic selfdestruction think better answer one suggested solzhenitsyns analysis phenomena expression profound longstanding crisis civilizational morale surprising crisis civilizational morale become visible since end cold war effects first masked illusory peace marked interwar period rise totalitarianism great depression world war ii cold war 1991 political military crises began 1914 ended longterm effects europes rage selfmutilation could come surface history seen solzhenitsyns insight suggests theologically informed analysis history may fact shed light imagines real world political realists manage another christian analyst dynamics modern european history fills solzhenitsyns indictment helps us get answers european problem cut deeply political writing occupation france fallen supinely wehrmacht months jesuit theologian henri de lubac would later become one intellectual architects second vatican council proposed civilizational crisis europe found world war ii product called atheistic humanism deliberate rejection god bible god abraham isaac jacob jesus name authentic human liberation biblical man perceived liberation whims gods fate selfrevelation history one god neither willful tyrant remote abstraction atheistic humanism perceived bondage human greatness required rejecting biblical god according atheistic humanism de lubac suggested something new atheism skeptical individuals looking discomfort neighbors impress faculty tenure committee atheistic humanism atheism developed ideology program remaking world ideas consequences bad ideas lethal consequences heart darkness inside great mid20th century tyrannies father de lubac discerned lethal effects marriage atheistic humanism modern technology summed results misbegotten union terms true sometimes said man organize world without god true without god organize man tyrannies 20th century proven ultramundane humanism inevitably inhuman humanism wonder though push father de lubacs analysis backwards forwards historically de lubac makes powerful case mid20th century tyrannies communism nazism expressions atheistic humanism took cues positivism comte subjectivism feuerbach materialism marx radical willfulness nietszche hadnt worm gotten european civilizational apple earlier lenin hitler perhaps complete expression material effects atheistic humanism wait treblinka perm camp 36 dont come deeper reading civilizational trapgate 19141918 applying similar analytic lens explain europe fell solzhenitsyns rage selfmutilation without recognizing great russian writer put men forgotten god doesnt de lubacs suggestion forgetting name false concept human liberation help us understand forgetting powerful complete read history beneath surface history de lubacs analysis drama atheistic humanism helps flesh solzhenitsyns identification 19141918 moment european civilization went crisis would also suggest de lubacs analysis sheds light postcold war europe beneath surface postcold war history find residues drama atheistic humanism yes grotesque institutional expressions atheistic humanism defeated world war ii cold war certain intellectual spiritual moral residues remained underneath surface history explain european postmodernism without atheistic humanism without repeat comtes positivism feuerbachs subjectivism marxs materialism nietzsches willtopower doubt incoherent ramblings jacques derrida 911 product jacques derrida alone depoliticization europe lamented pierre manent product brussels bureaucracy alone neither presentism contempt tradition decried remí brague european problem words product 20th century alone although crisis european civilizational morale accelerated exponentially great war pierre manent writes selfsacrifice gave way selfmutilation frenzied love death roots european problem thoughtful europeans many americans experience today go back 19th century drama atheistic humanism related triumph secularization western europe process secularization profound public consequences meant collapse transcendent horizon moral judgment european public life triumph manent call selfadoration fateful hubris led great war progeny new school sociologist josé casanova put secularization became selffulfilling prophecy europea takenforgranted belief shared sociologists majority population european christianity particularly vulnerable sirensong atheistic humanism raises another deeper set questions beyond scope lecture deserves extensive serious study even absent definitive answers questions proximate cultural roots todays european problem identified clarity european man convinced order modern free must radically secular conviction crucial indeed lethal consequences european public life european culture indeed conviction public consequences root europes contemporary crisis civilizational morale crisis civilizational morale turn helps explain european man deliberately forgetting history crisis civilizational morale helps us understand european man abandoning hard work high adventure democratic politics seeming prefer false domestic security bureaucracy false international security un system crisis civilizational morale european man failing create human future europe writing aftermath world war ii christopher dawson took exception suggestion modern european civilization pagan paganism rife religious sentiment dawson recalled going mid20th century europe something different true many men women ceased belong church rather belonging something else rather adhering another community transcendent allegiance belonged nowhere spiritual mans land dawson characterized inherently unstable ultimately selfdestructive usually gentle dawson put especially fierce passage secular society end beyond satisfaction monstrosity cancerous growth ultimately destroy one wonders christopher dawson would say today next question americans however phrase differently care europe civilizational crisis effect us beyond occasional aggravations security council let europe continue slide condition powerlessness eating seed corn goes us lot suggest means european problem also aside enormous economic practical complications exhausted imploding europe cause united states leaving aside moment aggravations security council let suggest three reasons americans care first reason involves pietas ancient european say roman virtue teaches us reverence gratitude whose shoulders stand prepared argue little crossed atlantic past several centuries hasnt improved process english language forms constitutional democracy rounders transformed americans gods game baseball token pietas demands remember good things came original forms united states indifferent fate europe united states indifferent roots yes americans developed new form european civilization american civilization long understood continuity civilization west associate origins europe unique civilizational accomplishment emerged interaction jerusalem athens rome americans learned dignity human person limited constitutional government principle consent transcendent standards justice state accountable school political culture call europe remember pietas seen historical amnesia cultural civilizational roots done europe want happen second reason must care medium longterm threat american security posed europes demographic meltdown demographic vacuums remain unfilled especially demographic vacuum question continent possessed immense economic resources one see effects europes selfinflicted depopulation tensions experienced france germany elsewhere rising tides immigration north africa turkey parts islamic world may case optimistic scenarios immigrants become good european democrats practicing civility tolerance defending religious freedom others another far grimmer alternative europes current demographic trendlines could eventually produce europe sobieskis victory vienna 1683 reversed europe 22nd century even late 21st europe increasingly influenced perhaps even dominated radicalized islamic populations convinced longdelayed triumph european heartland hand already seen emergence significant islamic populations done politics france germany connection problems posed domestically france germany new immigrant populations one hand strategy appeasement toward radicalized islam adopted french german political leaders seems unlikely european future dominated appeasement mentality toward radical islam best interests united states seems even unlikely third reason european problem well future democratic project united states indeed throughout world pierre manent laments europes depoliticization already parallels public life disturbing example bizarre debate mere mention christianitys contributions european civilization proposed european constitution amnesiacs wish rewrite european history eliminating christianity historical equation service thin indeed anorexic idea procedural democracy deny christianity anything evolution free lawgoverned prosperous european societies question falsifying past also matter creating future moral truth role governance determination public policy understandings justice definition freedom democracy intended embody ideas triumph europe would bad europe would also bad united states triumph would inevitably reinforce similar tendencies high culture ultimately law judicial redefinition freedom personal willfulness manifest recent supreme court decision lawrence v texas buttressed citations european courts would mean democratic project global terms notion democracy nothing moral truth exported western europe central eastern europe via expanding european union thence new democracies around world christopher dawson right thoroughly secularized democracy constitutionally politically disabled bringing transcendent moral truths bear public life selfdestructive entire democratic project latin america south east asia oceania canada imperiled prospect european problem metastasize beyond current membership eu many reasons must care sever civilizational roots ignore europe fit aggravation pique security imperiled post911 world europes demographics continue change ways give new advantage dynamism radical islamism world politics american democratic experiment weakened europes depoliticization reinforces similar tendencies united states democratic project world anything done level public policy let return one last time christopher dawson earlier phase european problem wrote modern dilemma essentially spiritual one every one main aspects moral political scientific beings us back need spiritual solution dawson right think longterm answer demise europe found revitalization europes christian roots rebirth christian conviction christianitys historic heartland europe words needs something like great awakening mean necessarily fourth wave wesleyan revolution rebirth lifetransforming cultureforming christian conviction especially catholic conviction definition something produced public policy either european domestic policy american foreign policy us foreign policy help margins supporting new democracies east central europe chirac evidently fears continue show bad manners resist eu practice democracy attenuated judicial activism democratic idea eroded institutionalizing notion democracy matter political legal procedures alone american public diplomacy could also far helpful failure american embassies europe past two years systematically engage european media european universities research institutes european voluntary organizations places european opinion molded serious damaging results europeans including vigorously proamerican europeans poles thoroughly distorted view american civil society american domestic politics american intentions world american actions iraq afghanistan suggesting vigorous public diplomacy would solved complete satisfaction part european problem manifested un security council late 2002 early 2003 would created conditions possibility internal european debate war terrorism might made different result 2002 german elections might blunted egregious behavior french government might created popular support governments spain italy poland support us position iraq us government must take far seriously war ideas europe must american philanthropy imagine present situation roughly analogous contest marxist ideas soul europe years immediately following world war ii generously funded transatlantic initiatives seek challenge hegemony postmodernism european intellectual life deleterious consequences abandonment reason public policy imperative today initiatives like congress cultural freedom encounter fifty years ago end day however less interested specific policy options souls clever devise understanding european problem roots cultural spiritual rather political beginning wise policy also beginning understanding european problem also cautionary tale unless understood depth likely replayed side atlantic unhappy consequences american democracy future freedom world difficult first years twentyfirst century taught us importance reading world politics new ways europes crisis civilizational morale teaches us many lenses history read theological lenses help us see deeper farther truly george weigel distinguished senior fellow ethics public policy center washington dc holds eppcs william e simon chair catholic studies | 3,505 |
<p>In Book Three of Tolstoy’s epic, War and Peace, the hero, Pierre Bezukhov, arrives at the battlefield of Borodino to find that the fog of war has descended, obscuring everything he had expected to be clear. There is no order, there are no familiar patterns of action, all is contingency. He could not, Count Bezukhov admits, “even distinguish our troops from the enemy’s.” (1) &#160;And the worst is yet to come, for once the real fighting begins, chaos takes over in full.</p>
<p>From the Iliad to Tolstoy and beyond, that familiar trope, “the fog of war,” has been used to evoke the millennia-old experience of the radical uncertainty of combat. The gut-wrenching opening scenes of “Saving Private Ryan” brought this ancient truth home to a new generation of Americans: in even the most brilliantly planned military campaign, such as the Allied invasion of Normandy, contingency is soon king, and overcoming the radical contingency of combat draws on a man’s deepest reserves of courage and wit.</p>
<p>Some analysts, however, take the trope of “the fog of war” a philosophical step farther and suggest that warfare takes place beyond the reach of moral reason, in a realm of interest and necessity where moral argument is a pious diversion at best and, at worst, a lethal distraction from the deadly serious business at hand.</p>
<p>To which men and women formed by biblical religion, by the great tradition of Western moral philosophy, or by the encounter between biblical religion and moral philosophy that we call moral theology must say – “No, that is a serious mistake.” Nothing human takes place outside the realm or beyond the reach of moral reason. Every human action takes place within the purview of moral judgment.</p>
<p>Thus moral muteness in a time of war is a moral stance: it can be a stance born of fear; it can be a stance born of indifference; it can be a stance born of cynicism about the human capacity to promote justice, freedom, and order, all of which are moral goods. But whatever its psychological, spiritual, or intellectual origins, moral muteness in wartime is a form of moral judgment – a deficient and dangerous form of moral judgment.</p>
<p>That is why the venerable just war tradition – a form of moral reasoning that traces its origins to St. Augustine in fifth century North Africa – is such an important public resource. For fifteen hundred years, as it has been developed amidst the historical white water of political, technological, and military change, the just war tradition and the just war way of thinking have allowed men and women to avoid the trap of moral muteness, to think through the tangle of problems involved in the decision to go to war and in the conduct of war itself – and to do all that in a way that recognizes the distinctive realities of war. Indeed, in the national debate launched by the war against terrorism and the threat of outlaw states armed with weapons of mass destruction, we can hear echoes of the moral reasoning of Augustine and his successors:</p>
<p>What is the just cause that would justify putting our armed forces, and the American homeland, in harm’s way?</p>
<p>Who has the authority to wage war – the President? The President and Congress? The United States acting alone? The United States with a sufficient number of allies? The United Nations?</p>
<p>Is it ever right to use armed force first? Can going first ever be, not just morally permissible, but morally imperative?</p>
<p>How can the use of armed force contribute to the pursuit of justice, freedom, and order in world affairs?</p>
<p>That these are the questions that instinctively emerge in the American national debate suggests that the just war tradition remains alive in our national cultural memory. And that, for the reasons suggested just a moment ago, is a very good thing. But it is also a somewhat surprising thing. For the past thirty years have witnessed a great forgetting of the classic just war tradition among those who had long been assumed to be its primary intellectual custodians: the nation’s religious leaders, moral philosophers, and moral theologians. That forgetting has been painfully evident in much of the recent commentary from religious leaders in the matter of U.S. policy toward Iraq: commentary that is often far more dependent on political and strategic intuitions of dubious merit than on solid moral reasoning. The fact of the matter today is that the just war tradition, as a historically informed method of rigorous moral reasoning, is far more alive in our service academies than in our divinity schools and faculties of theology; the just war tradition “lives” more vigorously in the officer corps, in the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and at the higher levels of the Pentagon than it does at the National Council of Churches, in certain offices at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, or on the Princeton faculty. (2)</p>
<p>This “forgetting” in the places where the just war tradition has been nurtured for centuries has led to confusions about the tradition itself. Those confusions have, in turn, led to distorted and, in some cases, irresponsible analyses from the quarters to which Americans usually look for moral guidance. That is why it is imperative that the just war tradition be retrieved and developed in these first perilous years of the twenty-first century. At issue is the public moral hygiene of the Republic – and our national capacity to think with moral rigor about some very threatening realities of today’s world.</p>
<p>That process of retrieval and development must begin at the beginning: by recalling precisely what the just war tradition is.</p>
<p>A Theory of Statecraft</p>
<p>In one of last year’s most celebrated books, Warrior Politics, veteran foreign correspondent&#160; Robert Kaplan suggested that only a “pagan ethos” can provide us with the kind of leadership capable of safely traversing the global disorder of the 21st century. (3) &#160; Kaplan’s “pagan ethos” has several interlocking parts. It is shaped by a tragic sense of life, one which recognizes the ubiquity, indeed inevitability, of conflict. It teaches a heroic concept of history: fate is not all, and wise statecraft can lead to better futures. It promotes a realistic appreciation of the boundaries of the possible. It celebrates patriotism as a virtue. And it is shaped by a grim determination to avoid “moralism,” which Kaplan (following Machiavelli, the Chinese sage Sun-Tzu, and Max Weber) identifies with a morality of intentions, oblivious to the peril of unintended or unanticipated consequences. (4)&#160; For Robert Kaplan, exemplars of this “pagan ethos” in the past century include Theodore Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Franklin Roosevelt.</p>
<p>Reading Warrior Politics, and reflecting on the concept of morality that informs it, reminded me of a story that I hadn’t thought of for years.&#160; During the Korean War, the proudly Protestant Henry Luce, son of China missionaries, found himself confused by the debate over “morality and foreign policy” that Harry Truman’s “police action” had stirred up. What, Luce asked his friend, Father John Courtney Murray, S.J., did foreign policy have to do with the Sermon on the Mount? “What,” Father Murray replied, “makes you think that morality is identical with the Sermon on the Mount”? (5)</p>
<p>Robert Kaplan, a contemporary exponent of foreign policy realism, seems to share Henry Luce’s mis-impression that the moral life is reducible to the ethics of personal probity and interpersonal relationships. The implication is that issues of statecraft exist somewhere “outside” the moral universe. The classic just war tradition takes a very different view.</p>
<p>As I indicated a moment ago, the classic tradition insists that no aspect of the human condition falls outside the purview of moral reasoning and judgment — including politics. Politics is a human enterprise. Because human beings are creatures of intelligence and free will — because human beings are inescapably moral actors — every human activity, including politics, is subject to moral scrutiny. (6)&#160; There is no Archimedean point outside the moral universe from which even the wisest “pagan” statesman can leverage world politics.</p>
<p>Indeed, what Robert Kaplan proposes as a “pagan ethos” is a form of moral reasoning that would be enriched by a serious encounter with the classic just war tradition. One need not be a “pagan,” as Kaplan proposes, to understand the enduring impact of original sin on the world and its affairs; Genesis 1-3 and a good dose of Augustine’s City of God will do the job just as well, and arguably better. One need not be a “pagan” to be persuaded that moral conviction, human ingenuity, and wise statecraft can bend history’s course in a more humane direction; one need only reflect on the achievement of Pope John Paul II and the Church-based human rights resistance in central and eastern Europe in helping rid the world of the plague of Communism. (7)&#160; A realistic sense of the boundaries of the humanly possible in given situations is not foreign to the classic moral tradition of the West; prudence, after all, is one of the cardinal virtues. Nor is patriotism necessarily “pagan;” indeed, in a country culturally configured like the United States, patriotism is far more likely to be sustained by biblical rather than “pagan” moral warrants. As for “moralism” and its emphasis on good intentions, I hope I shall not be thought unecumenical if I observe that that is a Protestant problem, and that Catholic moral theology in the Thomistic stream is very dubious about voluntaristic theories of the moral life and their reduction of morality to a contest of wills between the divine will and my will – a theme I took up in last year’s inaugural Simon Lecture.&#160;(8)</p>
<p>Robert Kaplan notwithstanding, we can get to an ethic appropriate for leadership in world politics without declaring ourselves “pagans.” And, as Brian Anderson argued in a thoughtful review of Kaplan’s book, we can get there while retaining “a crucial place for a transcendent ought that limits the evil governments can do.” (9)&#160; An ethic for world politics can be built against an ampler moral horizon than Robert Kaplan suggests.</p>
<p>As a tradition of statecraft, the just war tradition recognizes that there are circumstances in which the first and most urgent obligation in the face of evil is to stop it. Which means that there are times when waging war is morally necessary, to defend the innocent and to promote the minimum conditions of international order. This, I suggest, is one of those times. Grasping that does not require us to be “pagans.” It only requires us to be morally serious and politically responsible. Moral seriousness and political responsibility require us to make the effort to “connect the dots” between means and ends.</p>
<p>Thus the just war tradition is best understood as a sustained and disciplined intellectual attempt to relate the morally legitimate use of proportionate and discriminate military force to morally worthy political ends. In this sense, the just war tradition shares Clausewitz’s view of the relationship between war and politics : unless war is an extension of politics, it is simply wickedness. For Robert Kaplan, Clausewitz may be an archetypal “pagan.” But on this crucial point, at least, Clausewitz was articulating a thoroughly classic just war view of the matter. Good ends do not justify any means. But as Father Murray liked to say, in his gently provocative way, “If the end doesn’t justify the means, what does?” In the classic just war tradition of statecraft, what “justifies” the resort to proportionate and discriminate armed force — what makes war&#160; make moral sense —&#160; is precisely the morally worthy political ends being defended and/or advanced.</p>
<p>That is why the just war tradition is a theory of statecraft, not simply a method of casuistry. And that intellectual fact is the first thing about the just war tradition that must be retrieved today, if we seek a public moral culture capable of informing the national and international debate about war, peace, and international order.</p>
<p>Identifying the Starting Point</p>
<p>The second crucial idea to be retrieved in the contemporary renewal of the just war tradition is the distinction between bellum and duellum, between warring and “duelling,” so to&#160; speak. As intellectual historian and just war theorist James Turner Johnson has demonstrated in a number of seminal works, this distinction is the crux of the matter in moral analysis. (10)&#160; Bellum is the use of armed force for public ends by public authorities who have an obligation to defend the security of those for whom they have assumed responsibility. Duellum, on the other hand, is the use of armed force for private ends by private individuals. To grasp this essential distinction is to understand that, in the just war tradition, “war” is a moral category. Moreover, in the classic just war tradition, armed force is not inherently suspect morally. Rather, as Johnson insists, the classic tradition views armed force as something that can be used for good or evil, depending on who is using it, why, to what ends, and how. (11)</p>
<p>Thus those scholars, activists, and religious leaders who claim that the just war tradition “begins” with a “presumption against war” or a “presumption against violence” are quite simply mistaken. It does not begin there, and it never did begin there. To suggest otherwise is not merely a matter of misreading intellectual history (although it is surely that). To suggest that the just war tradition begins with a “presumption against violence” inverts the structure of moral analysis in ways that inevitably lead to dubious moral judgments and distorted perceptions of political reality.</p>
<p>The classic tradition, as I have indicated, begins with the presumption — better, the moral judgment — that rightly-constituted publicly authority is under a strict moral obligation to defend the security of those for whom it has assumed responsibility, even if this puts the magistrate’s own life in jeopardy. That is why Thomas Aquinas locates his discussion of bellum iustum within the treatise on charity in the Summa Theologiae. (12)&#160; That is why the late Paul Ramsey, who revivified Protestant just war thinking in America after World War II, described the just war tradition as an explication of the public implications of the Great Commandment of love-of-neighbor (even as he argued that the commandment sets limits to the use of armed force). (13)</p>
<p>If the just war tradition is a theory of statecraft, to reduce it to a casuistry of means-tests that begins with a “presumption against violence” is to begin at the wrong place. The just war tradition begins somewhere else. It begins by defining the moral responsibilities of governments, continues with the definition of morally appropriate political ends, and then takes up the question of means. By reversing the analysis of means and ends, the “presumption against violence” starting-point collapses bellum into duellum and ends up conflating the ideas of “violence”and “war.” The net result is that warfare is stripped of its distinctive moral texture. Indeed, among many American religious leaders today, the very notion of warfare as having a “moral texture” seems to have been forgotten.</p>
<p>The “presumption against violence” starting-point is not only fraught with historical and methodological difficulties. It is also theologically dubious. Its effect in moral analysis is to turn the tradition inside-out, such that war-conduct [in bello] questions of proportionality and discrimination take theological precedence over what were traditionally assumed to be the prior war-decision [ad bellum] questions: just cause, right intention, competent authority, reasonable chance of success, proportionality of ends, and last resort. This inversion explains why, in much of the religious commentary after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, considerable attention was paid to the necessity of avoiding indiscriminate non-combatant casualties in the war against terrorism, while little attention was paid to the prior question of the moral obligation of government to pursue national security and world order, both of which were directly threatened by the terrorist networks.</p>
<p>This inversion is also theologically problematic because it places the heaviest burden of moral analysis on what are inevitably contingent judgments. There is nothing wrong, per se, with contingent judgments; but they are contingent. In the nature of the case, we can have less surety about in bello proportion and discrimination than we can about the ad bellum questions. (14) &#160; As I hope I have shown above, the tradition logically starts with ad bellum questions because the just war tradition is a tradition of statecraft: a tradition that attempts to define morally worthy political ends. But there is also a theo-logic – a theological logic – that gives priority to the ad bellum questions, for these are the questions on which we can have some measure of moral clarity.</p>
<p>The “presumption against violence” and its distortion of the just war way of thinking can also lead to serious misreadings of world politics. One such misreading, precisely from this intellectual source, may be found in the 1983&#160; U.S. bishops’ pastoral letter, “The Challenge of Peace” [TCOP]. TCOP was deeply influenced by the emphasis laid on questions of in bello proportionality and discrimination because of the threat of nuclear war. No doubt these were important issues. But when that emphasis drove the moral analysis, as it did in TCOP, the result was a distorted picture of reality and a set of moral judgments that contributed little to wise statecraft. Rather than recognizing that nuclear weapons were one (extremely dangerous) manifestation of a prior conflict with profound moral roots, the bishops’ letter seemed to suggest that nuclear weapons could, somehow, be factored out of the conflict between the West and the Soviet Union by arms control. And in order to achieve arms control agreements with a nervous, even paranoid, foe like the Soviet Union, it might be necessary to downplay the moral and ideological (i.e., human rights) dimensions of the Cold War. That, at least, was the policy implication of the claim that the greatest threat to peace (identified as such because in bello considerations and the “presumption against violence” trumped everything else) was the mere possession of nuclear weapons.</p>
<p>The opposite, of course, turned out to be true. Nuclear weapons were not the primary threat to peace; communism was. When communism went, so did the threat posed by the weapons. As the human rights resistance in central and eastern Europe brought massive regime change inside the Warsaw Pact, creating dynamics that eventually led to the demise of the USSR itself, the risks of nuclear war were greatly diminished and real disarmament (not “arms control”) began. The “presumption against violence” starting point, as manifest in TCOP, produced a serious misreading of the political realities and possibilities.</p>
<p>The claim that a “presumption against violence” is at the root of the just war tradition cannot be sustained historically, methodologically, or theologically. If the just war tradition is a tradition of statecraft, and if the crucial distinction that undergirds it is the distinction between bellum and duellum, then the just war tradition cannot be reduced, as too many religious leaders reduce it today, to a series of means tests that begins with a “presumption against violence.” To begin here – to imagine that the role of moral reason is to set a series of hurdles (primarily having to do with in bello questions of proportionality and discrimination) that statesmen must overcome before the resort to armed force is given moral sanction – is to begin at the wrong place. And beginning at the wrong place almost always means arriving at the wrong destination. The retrieval and development of classic just war thinking must include a recovery of the classic structure of the just war argument. That means getting the starting-point right.</p>
<p>Just War and Achievable Peace</p>
<p>Fifteen years ago, before I had learned something about literary marketing, I published a book entitled Tranquillitas Ordinis: The Present Failure and Future Promise of American Catholic Thought on War and Peace. (15)&#160; There I argued that, as a theory of statecraft,&#160; the just war tradition contained within itself a ius ad pacem, in addition to the classic ius ad bellum (the moral rules governing the decision to go to war) and ius in bello (the rules governing the use of armed force in combat). By coining the phrase ius ad pacem, I was trying to prise out of the just war way of thinking a concept of the peace that could and should be sought through the instruments of politics – including, if necessary, the use of armed force. Like the just war tradition itself, this concept of peace finds its roots in Augustine: in The City of God, peace is tranquillitas ordinis, the “tranquillity of order,” or as I preferred to render it in more contemporary terms, the peace of “dynamic and rightly-ordered political community.” (16)</p>
<p>In Augustine’s discussion of peace as a public or political issue, “peace” is not a matter of the individual’s right-relationship with God, nor is it a matter of seeking a world without conflict. The former is a question of interior conversion (which by definition has nothing to do with politics), and the latter is impossible in a world forever marked, even after its redemption, by the mysterium iniquitatis. In the appropriate political sense of the term, peace is, rather, tranquillitas ordinis: the order created by just political community and mediated through law.</p>
<p>This is, admittedly, a humbler sort of peace. It coexists with broken hearts and wounded souls. It is to be built in a world in which swords have not been beaten into plowshares, but remain: sheathed, but ready to be unsheathed in the defense of innocents. Its advantage, as Augustine understood, is that it is the form of peace that can be built through the instruments of politics.</p>
<p>This peace of tranquillitas ordinis, this peace of order, is composed of justice and freedom. The peace of order is not the eerily quiet and sullen “peace” of a well-run authoritarian regime; it is a peace built on foundations of constitutional, commutative, and social justice. It is a peace in which freedom, especially religious freedom, flourishes. The defense of basic human rights is thus an integral component of “work for peace.” (17)</p>
<p>This is the peace that has been achieved in and among the developed democracies. It is the peace that has been built in recent decades between such ancient antagonists as France and Germany. It is the peace that we defend within the richly diverse political community of the United States, and between ourselves and our neighbors and allies. It is the peace that we are now defending in the war against global terrorism and against aggressor states seeking weapons of mass destruction.</p>
<p>International terrorism of the sort we have seen since the late 1960s, and of which we had a direct national experience on 9/11, is a deliberate assault, through the murder of innocents, on the very possibility of order in world affairs. That is why the terror networks must be dismantled or destroyed. The peace of order is also under grave threat when vicious, aggressive regimes acquire weapons of mass destruction – weapons that we must assume, on the basis of their treatment of their own citizens, these regimes will not hesitate to use against others. That is why there is a moral obligation to ensure that this lethal combination of irrational and aggressive regimes + weapons of mass destruction + credible delivery systems does not go unchallenged. That is why there is a moral obligation to rid the world of this threat to the peace and security of all. Peace, rightly understood, demands it.</p>
<p>This concept of peace-as-order can also enrich our understanding of that much-bruited term, the “national interest.”</p>
<p>The irreducible core of the “national interest” is composed of those basic security concerns to which any responsible democratic statesman must attend. But those security concerns are related to a larger sense of national purpose and international responsibility: we defend America because America is worth defending, on its own terms and because of what it means for the world. Thus the security concerns that make up the core of the “national interest” should be understood as the necessary inner dynamic of the exercise of America’s international responsibilities. And those responsibilities include the obligation to contribute, as best we can, to the long, hard, never-to-be-finally-accomplished “domestication” of international public life: to the quest for ordered liberty in an evolving structure of international public life capable of advancing the classic goals of politics — justice, freedom, order, the general welfare, and peace. Empirically and morally, the United States cannot adequately defend its “national interest” without concurrently seeking to advance those goals in the world. Empirically and morally, those goals will not be advanced if they are pursued in ways that gravely threaten the basic security of the United States.</p>
<p>In eradicating global terrorism and denying aggressive regimes weapons of mass destruction, the United States and those who walk this road with us are addressing the most threatening problems of global dis-order that must be resolved if the peace of order, the peace of tranquillitas ordinis, is to be secured in as wide a part of the world as possible in the 21st century.</p>
<p>Here, national interest and international responsibility coincide.</p>
<p>Issues for Intellectual Development</p>
<p>Moral clarity in a time of war requires us to retrieve the idea of the just war tradition as a tradition of statecraft, the classic structure of just war analysis, and the concept of peace as tranquillitas ordinis. Moral clarity in this time of war also requires us to develop and extend the just war tradition to meet the political exigencies of a new century, and to address the international security issues posed by new weapons technologies. Permit me to sketch briefly three areas in which the ad bellum (“war-decision”) criteria of the just war tradition require development, even as I suggest what the policy implications of these developments might be in today’s circumstances.</p>
<p>Just Cause</p>
<p>In the classic just war tradition, “just cause” was understood as defense against aggression, the recovery of something wrongfully taken, or the punishment of evil. As the tradition has developed since World War II, the latter two notions have been largely displaced, and “defense against aggression” has become the primary, even sole, meaning of “just cause.” (18) &#160;This theological evolution has parallels in international law: the “defense against aggression” concept of “just cause” shapes Articles 2 and 51 of the Charter of the United Nations. In light of 21st century international security realities, it is imperative to re-open this discussion and to develop the concept of “just cause.” (19)</p>
<p>As recently as the Korean War (and, some would argue, the Vietnam War), “defense against aggression” could reasonably be taken to mean a defensive military response to a cross-border military aggression already underway. New weapons capabilities and outlaw or “rogue” states require a development of the concept of “defense against aggression.” To take an obvious, current example: it makes little moral sense to suggest that the United States must wait until a North Korea or Iraq or Iran actually launches a ballistic missile tipped with a nuclear, biological, or chemical weapon of mass destruction before we can legitimately do something about it. Can we not say that, in the hands of certain kinds of states, the mere possession of weapons of mass destruction constitutes an aggression — or, at the very least, an aggression-waiting-to-happen?</p>
<p>This “regime factor” is crucial in the moral analysis, for weapons of mass destruction are clearly not aggressions-waiting-to-happen when they are possessed by stable, law-abiding states. No Frenchman goes to bed nervous about Great Britain’s nuclear weapons, and no sane Mexican or Canadian worries about a pre-emptive nuclear attack from the United States. Every sane Israeli, Turk, or Bahraini, on the other hand, is deeply concerned about the possibility of an Iraq or Iran with nuclear weapons and medium-range ballistic missiles. If the “regime factor” is crucial in the moral analysis, then pre-emptive military action to deny the rogue state that kind of destructive capacity would not, in my judgment, contravene the “defense against aggression” concept of “just cause.” Indeed, it would do precisely the opposite, by giving the concept of&#160; “defense against aggression” real traction in the world we must live in, and transform.</p>
<p>Some will argue that this violates the principle of sovereignty and risks a global descent into chaos. To that, I would reply that the post-Westphalian notions of state equality and sovereign immunity assume at least a minimum of acquiescence to minimal international norms of order. Today’s rogue states cannot, on the basis of their behavior, be granted that assumption. Therefore, they have forfeited that immunity. The “regime factor” is determinative, in these extreme instances. (20)</p>
<p>To deny rogue states the capacity to create lethal dis-order, precisely because their possession of weapons of mass destruction threatens the minimum conditions of order in international public life, strengthens the cause of world order; it does not undermine it. Surely the lessons of the 1930s are pertinent here.</p>
<p>On the matter of&#160; “just cause,” the tradition also needs development in terms of its concept of the relevant actors in world politics. Since 9/11, some analysts have objected to describing our response to the international terrorist networks as “war” because, they argue, al-Qaeda and similar networks are not states, and only states can, or should, wage “war,” properly understood. There is an important point at stake here, but the critics misapply it.</p>
<p>Limiting the legitimate use of armed force to those international actors who are recognized in international law and custom as exercising “sovereignty” has been one of the principle accomplishments of just war thinking as it has shaped world political culture and law; over a period of centuries, the classic distinction between bellum and duellum has been concretized in international law. At the same time, however, it does not fudge or blur this crucial distinction to recognize that al-Qaeda and similar networks function like states, even if they lack certain of the attributes and trappings of sovereignty traditionally understood. Indeed, terrorist organizations provide a less ambiguous example of a legitimate military target, because, unlike conventional states (which are always admixtures of good and evil, against whom military action sometimes threatens the good as well as the evil), the “parasite states” that are international terrorist organizations are unmitigated evils whose only purpose is wickedness — the slaughter of innocents for ignoble political ends. (21)&#160; Thus the exigencies of the current situation require us to think outside the Westphalian box, so to speak, but to do so in such a way as to avoid dismantling de facto the distinction between bellum and duellum.</p>
<p>Competent Authority</p>
<p>Two questions involving the ad bellum criterion of “competent authority” have been raised since 9/11: the question of the relationship between a government’s domestic and foreign policy and its legitimacy as a belligerent, and the question of whether “competent authority” now resides in the United Nations only.</p>
<p>One of the more distasteful forms of post-9/11 commentary can be found in suggestions that there were “root causes” to terrorism – “root causes” that not only explained the resort to mass violence against innocents, but made the use of such violence humanly plausible, if not morally justifiable. The corollary to this was the suggestion that the United States had somehow brought 9/11 on itself, by reasons of its dominant economic and cultural position in the world, its Middle East policy, or some combination thereof. The moral-political implication was that such a misguided government lacked the moral authority to respond to terrorism through the use of armed force.</p>
<p>The “root causes” school blithely ignores the extant literature on the phenomenon of contemporary terrorism, which is emphatically not a case of the “wretched of the earth” rising up to throw off their chains. (22)&#160; But it is the moral-political implication the “root causes” school draws that I want to address. Here, Lutheran scholar David Yeago has been a wise guide. Writing in the ecumenical journal Pro Ecclesia, Yeago clarified an essential point:</p>
<p>“The authority of the government to protect the law-abiding and impose penalties on evil-doers is not a reward for the government’s virtue or good conduct…The protection of citizens and the execution of penalty on peace-breakers is the commission which constitutes government, not a contingent right which it must somehow earn. In the mystery of God’s providence, many or indeed most of the institutional bearers of governmental authority are unworthy of it, often flagrantly so, themselves stained with crime. But this does not make it any less the vocation of government to protect the innocent and punish evil-doers. A government which refused to safeguard citizens and exercise judgment on wrong out of a sense of the guilt of past crime would only add the further crime of dereliction of duty to its catalog of offenses.” (23)</p>
<p>The question of alliances and international organizations must also be addressed in the development of just war thinking about competent authority. Must any legitimate military action be sanctioned by the U.N. Security Council? Or, if not that, then is the United States obliged, not simply as a matter of political prudence but as a matter of moral principle, to gain the agreement of allies (or, more broadly, “coalition partners”) to any use of armed force in response to terrorism, or any military action against aggressive regimes with weapons of mass destruction?</p>
<p>That the U.N. Charter itself recognizes an inalienable national right to self-defense suggests that the Charter does not claim sole authority to legitimate the use of armed force for the Security Council; if you are under attack, according to the Charter, you don’t have to wait for the permission of China, France, Russia, or others of the veto-wielding powers to defend yourself. Moreover, the manifest inability of the U.N. to handle large-scale international security questions suggests that assigning a moral veto over U.S. military action on these fronts to the Security Council would be a mistake. Then there is the question of what we might call “the neighborhood” on the Security Council: what kind of moral logic is it to claim that the U.S. government must assuage the interests of the French foreign ministry and the strategic aims of the repressive Chinese government – both of which are in full play in the Security Council – in order to gain international moral authority for the war against terrorism and the defense of world order against outlaw states with weapons of mass destruction? A very peculiar moral logic, indeed, I should think.</p>
<p>Building coalitions of support for dismantling the international terror networks and denying rogue states lethal weapons capacities is politically desirable (and in some instances militarily essential). But I very much doubt that it is morally imperative from a classic just war point of view. The United States has a unique responsibility for leadership in the war against terrorism and the struggle for world order; that is not a statement of hubris but of empirical fact. That responsibility may have to be exercised unilaterally on occasion. Defining the boundaries of unilateral action while defending its legitimacy under certain circumstances is one crucial task for a developing just war tradition.</p>
<p>Last Resort</p>
<p>Among those who have “forgotten” the just war tradition while retaining its language, the classic ad bellum criterion of “last resort” is usually understood in simplistically mathematical terms: the use of proportionate and discriminate armed force is the last point in a series of options, and prior, non-military options (legal, diplomatic, economic, etc.) must be serially exhausted before the criterion of “last resort” is satisfied. This is both an excessively mechanistic understanding of “last resort” and a prescription for danger.</p>
<p>The case of international terrorism again compels a development of this ad bellum criterion. For what does it mean to say that all non-military options have been tried and found wanting when we are confronted with a new and lethal type of international actor, one which recognizes no other form of power except the use of violence and which is largely immune (unlike a conventional state) to international legal, diplomatic, and/or economic pressures? The charge that U.S. military action after 9/11 was morally dubious because all other possible means of redress had not been tried and found wanting misreads the nature of terrorist organizations and networks. The “last” in “last resort” can mean “only,” in circumstances where there is plausible reason to believe that non-military actions are unavailable or unavailing.</p>
<p>As for rogue states developing or deploying weapons of mass destruction, a developed just war tradition would recognize that here, too, “last resort” cannot be understood mathematically, as the terminal point of a lengthy series of non-military alternatives. Can we not say that “last resort” has been satisfied in those cases when a rogue state has made plain, by its conduct, that it holds international law in contempt and that no diplomatic solution to the threat it poses is likely, and when it can be demonstrated that the threat the rogue state poses is intensifying? I think we can. Indeed, I think we must.</p>
<p>Some states, because of the regime’s aggressive intent and the lack of effective internal political controls on giving lethal effect to that intent, cannot be permitted to acquire weapons of mass destruction. Denying them those weapons through proportionate and discriminate armed force — even displacing those regimes — can be an exercise in the defense of the peace of order, within the boundaries of a developed just war tradition. Until such point as the international political community has evolved to the degree that international organizations can effectively disarm such regimes, the responsibility for the defense of order in these extreme circumstances will lie elsewhere.</p>
<p>The Charism of Responsibility &#160;</p>
<p>Finally, moral clarity in this time of war requires a developed understanding of the “location” of the just war tradition in our public discourse and in responsible governance. If the just war tradition is indeed a tradition of statecraft, then the proper role of religious leaders and public intellectuals is to do everything possible to clarify the moral issues at stake in a time of war, while recognizing that what we might call the “charism of responsibility” lies elsewhere – with duly constituted public authorities, who are more fully informed about the relevant facts and who must bear the weight of responsible decision-making and governance. It is simply clericalism to suggest that religious leaders and public intellectuals “own” the just war tradition in a singular way.</p>
<p>As I have argued above, many of today’s religious leaders and public intellectuals have suffered severe amnesia about core components of the tradition, and can hardly be said to “own” it in any serious intellectual sense of ownership. But even if today’s religious leaders and public intellectuals were fully in possession of the tradition, the burden of decision-making would still lie elsewhere.&#160;Religious leaders and public intellectuals are called to nurture and develop the moral-philosophical riches of the just war tradition. The tradition itself, however, exists to serve statesmen.</p>
<p>There is a charism of political discernment that is unique to the vocation of public service. That charism is not shared by bishops, stated clerks, rabbis, imams, or ecumenical and interreligious agencies. Moral clarity in a time of war demands moral seriousness from public officials. It also demands a`measure of political modesty from religious leaders and public intellectuals, in the give-and-take of democratic deliberation.</p>
<p>Some have suggested, in recent months, that the just war tradition is obsolete. To which I would reply: to suggest that the just war tradition is obsolete is to suggest that politics — the organization of human life into purposeful political communities — is obsolete. To reduce the just war tradition to an algebraic casuistry is to deny the tradition its capacity to shed light on the irreducible moral component of all political action. What we must do, in this generation, is to retrieve and develop the just war tradition to take account of the new political and technological realities of the twenty-first century. September 11, what has followed, and what lies ahead, have demonstrated just how urgent that task is.</p>
<p>George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. and holds EPPC’s William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.</p>
<p>____</p>
<p>1 Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude, III.2.21 (New York: Knopf, 1992), p. 460.</p>
<p>2 There are different degrees of forgetfulness here, of course, and the recent letter by the U.S. Catholic bishops to President Bush on the question of Iraq was of a higher degree of intellectual seriousness than the effusions of other national religious bodies. But the bishops’ letter did, I would argue, continue a pattern of just war forgetfulness whose origins I shall discuss below.</p>
<p>3 Robert D. Kaplan, Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos (New York: Random House, 2002).</p>
<p>4 See Brian C. Anderson, “Men o’ War,” National Review, February 25, 2002, p. 46.</p>
<p>5 This story is recounted in a slightly more generic form in John Courtney Murray, S.J., We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition (Garden City; Doubleday Image Books, 1964), p. 262.</p>
<p>6 One publicly prominent exponent of this view is, of course, Pope John Paul II. Prior to his pontificate, he analyzed the capacity for moral action as the distinguishing characteristic of the human being in Osoba y czyn, oraz inne studia antropologiczne, edited by Tadeusz Stycze , Jerzy W. Ga kowski, Adam Rodzi ski, and Andrzej Szostek (Lublin: KUL Press, 1994). This is the revised Polish edition of Karol Wojty a’s principal philosophical work; the presently available English translation is inadequate. Osoba y czyn is intelligently discussed in Kenneth L. Schmitz, At the Center of the Human Drama: The Philosophical Anthropology of Karol Wojty a/Pope John Paul II (Washington: CUA Press, 1993), and Jaros aw Kupczak, O.P., Destined for Liberty: The Human Person in the Philosophy of Karol Wojty a/John Paul II (Washington: CUA Press, 2000).</p>
<p>7 See my study, The Final Revolution: The Resistance Church and the Collapse of Communism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).</p>
<p>8 For a Catholic critique of voluntaristic (i.e., will-centered) conceptions of the moral life, see Servais Pinckaers, O.P., The Sources of Christian Ethics (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1995) and Morality: The Catholic View (South Bend: St. Augustine Press, 2001).</p>
<p>9 Anderson, art.cit., p. 48.</p>
<p>10&#160;Johnson’s major works include the following: Can Modern War Be Just? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); The Quest for Peace: Three Moral Traditions in Western Cultural History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); and Morality and Contemporary Warfare (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).</p>
<p>11 See&#160; Johnson, Morality and Contemporary Warfare, pp. 35-36.</p>
<p>12 Summa Theologiae II-II, 40.1.</p>
<p>13 Ramsey’s principal works in this field were War and the Christian Conscience (1961) and The Just War (1968). James Turner Johnson describes Ramsey’s specifically Christian understanding of the just war tradition in these terms: “Ramsey argued that Christian just war theory is based on the moral duty of love of neighbor. The obligation to protect the neighbor who is being unjustly attacked provided justification for Christians to resort to force; at the same time, love also imposes limits on such force, requiring that no more be done to the unjust assailant than is necessary to prevent the evil he would do, and that no justified use of force can ever itself directly and intentionally target the innocent.” [James Turner Johnson, “The Just War Tradition and the American Military,” in Johnson and George Weigel, Just War and the Gulf&#160; War (Washington: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1991), pp. 8-9]</p>
<p>14 On this point, see James Turner Johnson, “Just Cause Revisited,” in Close Calls: Intervention, Terrorism, Missile Defense, and ‘Just War’ Today, Elliott Abrams, ed. (Washington: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1998, p. 27.</p>
<p>15 New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.</p>
<p>16 Augustine, De Civitate Dei, XIX, 13.</p>
<p>17 Pope John Paul II has made important contributions to this idea, especially in his World Day of Peace message in 1981 [see Ways of Peace: Papal Messages for the World Day of Peace 1968-1986 (Vatican City: Pontifical Commission “Iustitia et Pax,” 1987), pp. 147-161]. The Pope’s most recent World Day of Peace statements refines the discussion of the components of tranquillitas ordinis further by teaching that there is no peace without justice and no justice without forgivenesss. Forgiveness helps create the conditions of civil society in which the peace of order, composed of justice and freedom, can flourish. In a comment on the message, Richard John Neuhaus notes, “The title of the message has it right: there is no peace without justice, and temporal justice is secured by the acknowledgment of a transcendent judgment that reveals our need to be forgiven and to forgive. This is said [by the Pope] without any blurring of the line between good and evil, or any obscuring of the duty to defend the innocent. Rather, it anticipates the day when, beyond the present battles, there may be a new order based on a shared recognition of God’s justice and mercy. Some call that idealistic. The right word is prophetic.” [See John Paul II, “No Peace without Justice, No Justice without Forgiveness,” in Origins 31:28 (December 20, 2001), pp. 461-66; Richard John Neuhaus, “The Public Square,” First Things 120 (February 2002), p. 88]</p>
<p>18 See Johnson, “Just Cause Revisited,” for a historical survey and contemporary arguments.</p>
<p>19 The debate over “humanitarian intervention” launched in the 1990s by the Somali famine and the genocidal violence of an imploding Yugoslavia also remains to be completed, and bears on the development of the just cause criterion. Addressing the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization on 5 December 1992, Pope John Paul II spoke of&#160; humanitarian intervention as a “duty of justice” in cases of impending or actual genocide, or mass starvation caused by political upheaval or ethnic conflict. But the Pope did not specify precisely why this is a moral duty, on whom that duty falls, or how it is to be fulfilled. Development is, again, required.</p>
<p>Can we argue that the mass murder of innocents (or the starvation of entire peoples) constitutes an unacceptable affront to world order and a challenge to international security that must be met? That might have arguably been true in Yugoslavia, but it seems a stretch in regions more marginal to mainstream world politics — no matter how much we deplore (as we should) situations like the Somali famine or the genocide in Rwanda. If, as the Pope proposes, there is a “duty” of humanitarian intervention in these cases, then perhaps it is time to revisit the old notion of “punishment for evil” as satisfying the criterion of “just cause” for the resort to armed force in the vindication of justice and the peace of order. That would not resolve other questions posed by the assertion of a “duty” of humanitarian intervention, but it would get the just cause debate tethered to what are likely to be an increasing number of “real-world” situations in the 21st century.</p>
<p>In any event, this is an argument for another occasion.</p>
<p>20 Denying rogue states weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them, and effecting regime change if necessary to accomplish this, could also have a salutary effect on changing the state-of-the-question in Islamic societies. Political modernization in the Arab Islamic world has not, typically, meant liberation. Rather, the importation of western revolutionary ideologies has generally led to repression. In his recent study, What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response, Bernard Lewis argues that Arab Islamic states “looked for the secret of Western success in those features of the West that were most distinctive, most different from anything in their own experience — and not tainted with Christianity.” This, as Christopher Caldwell notes in a review of Lewis’s work, led Arab Islamic states to modern western political ideologies. “The French Revolution was a major influence,” Caldwell writes, “but also, eventually, nationalism, socialism, and National Socialism, whose baleful influence Lewis still sees at work in the Baathist regimes of Iraq and Syria. The move to political modernization in Islam did not enhance freedom and autonomy, but strengthened states through modern approaches to enforcement, surveillance, propaganda, and the consequent depredations against civil society.” This, in turn, has led to a blame-the-West phenomenon throughout the Arab Islamic world, with the United States currently replacing European colonialism, which replaced the Turks, who replaced the Mongols, as the source of Islamic decline. It is crucial, Bernard Lewis argues, to change the question, so that the Islamic world stops asking “Who did this to us” and starts asking the question, “What did we do wrong?” Regime change in places like Iraq could well contribute to changing the question, as well as to clearing the ground on which the seeds of a new Islamic civil society could be planted. [See Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Christopher Caldwell, “The Closing of the Muslim Mind,” The Weekly Standard, January 21, 2002, p.39; Joshua Muravchik, “Freedom and the Arab World,” The Weekly Standard, December 31, 2001, pp. 15-16.]</p>
<p>21 On this point see the editorial “In a Time of War,” First Things 118 (December 2001), pp. 11-17.</p>
<p>22 On the intellectual origins and class “location” of modern terrorism, see Walter Laqueur, Terrorism, (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977).</p>
<p>23 David S. Yeago, “Just War: Reflections from the Lutheran Tradition in a Time of Crisis,” Pro Ecclesia X:4, pp. 414-15.</p> | false | 1 | book three tolstoys epic war peace hero pierre bezukhov arrives battlefield borodino find fog war descended obscuring everything expected clear order familiar patterns action contingency could count bezukhov admits even distinguish troops enemys 1 160and worst yet come real fighting begins chaos takes full iliad tolstoy beyond familiar trope fog war used evoke millenniaold experience radical uncertainty combat gutwrenching opening scenes saving private ryan brought ancient truth home new generation americans even brilliantly planned military campaign allied invasion normandy contingency soon king overcoming radical contingency combat draws mans deepest reserves courage wit analysts however take trope fog war philosophical step farther suggest warfare takes place beyond reach moral reason realm interest necessity moral argument pious diversion best worst lethal distraction deadly serious business hand men women formed biblical religion great tradition western moral philosophy encounter biblical religion moral philosophy call moral theology must say serious mistake nothing human takes place outside realm beyond reach moral reason every human action takes place within purview moral judgment thus moral muteness time war moral stance stance born fear stance born indifference stance born cynicism human capacity promote justice freedom order moral goods whatever psychological spiritual intellectual origins moral muteness wartime form moral judgment deficient dangerous form moral judgment venerable war tradition form moral reasoning traces origins st augustine fifth century north africa important public resource fifteen hundred years developed amidst historical white water political technological military change war tradition war way thinking allowed men women avoid trap moral muteness think tangle problems involved decision go war conduct war way recognizes distinctive realities war indeed national debate launched war terrorism threat outlaw states armed weapons mass destruction hear echoes moral reasoning augustine successors cause would justify putting armed forces american homeland harms way authority wage war president president congress united states acting alone united states sufficient number allies united nations ever right use armed force first going first ever morally permissible morally imperative use armed force contribute pursuit justice freedom order world affairs questions instinctively emerge american national debate suggests war tradition remains alive national cultural memory reasons suggested moment ago good thing also somewhat surprising thing past thirty years witnessed great forgetting classic war tradition among long assumed primary intellectual custodians nations religious leaders moral philosophers moral theologians forgetting painfully evident much recent commentary religious leaders matter us policy toward iraq commentary often far dependent political strategic intuitions dubious merit solid moral reasoning fact matter today war tradition historically informed method rigorous moral reasoning far alive service academies divinity schools faculties theology war tradition lives vigorously officer corps uniform code military justice higher levels pentagon national council churches certain offices united states conference catholic bishops princeton faculty 2 forgetting places war tradition nurtured centuries led confusions tradition confusions turn led distorted cases irresponsible analyses quarters americans usually look moral guidance imperative war tradition retrieved developed first perilous years twentyfirst century issue public moral hygiene republic national capacity think moral rigor threatening realities todays world process retrieval development must begin beginning recalling precisely war tradition theory statecraft one last years celebrated books warrior politics veteran foreign correspondent160 robert kaplan suggested pagan ethos provide us kind leadership capable safely traversing global disorder 21st century 3 160 kaplans pagan ethos several interlocking parts shaped tragic sense life one recognizes ubiquity indeed inevitability conflict teaches heroic concept history fate wise statecraft lead better futures promotes realistic appreciation boundaries possible celebrates patriotism virtue shaped grim determination avoid moralism kaplan following machiavelli chinese sage suntzu max weber identifies morality intentions oblivious peril unintended unanticipated consequences 4160 robert kaplan exemplars pagan ethos past century include theodore roosevelt winston churchill franklin roosevelt reading warrior politics reflecting concept morality informs reminded story hadnt thought years160 korean war proudly protestant henry luce son china missionaries found confused debate morality foreign policy harry trumans police action stirred luce asked friend father john courtney murray sj foreign policy sermon mount father murray replied makes think morality identical sermon mount 5 robert kaplan contemporary exponent foreign policy realism seems share henry luces misimpression moral life reducible ethics personal probity interpersonal relationships implication issues statecraft exist somewhere outside moral universe classic war tradition takes different view indicated moment ago classic tradition insists aspect human condition falls outside purview moral reasoning judgment including politics politics human enterprise human beings creatures intelligence free human beings inescapably moral actors every human activity including politics subject moral scrutiny 6160 archimedean point outside moral universe even wisest pagan statesman leverage world politics indeed robert kaplan proposes pagan ethos form moral reasoning would enriched serious encounter classic war tradition one need pagan kaplan proposes understand enduring impact original sin world affairs genesis 13 good dose augustines city god job well arguably better one need pagan persuaded moral conviction human ingenuity wise statecraft bend historys course humane direction one need reflect achievement pope john paul ii churchbased human rights resistance central eastern europe helping rid world plague communism 7160 realistic sense boundaries humanly possible given situations foreign classic moral tradition west prudence one cardinal virtues patriotism necessarily pagan indeed country culturally configured like united states patriotism far likely sustained biblical rather pagan moral warrants moralism emphasis good intentions hope shall thought unecumenical observe protestant problem catholic moral theology thomistic stream dubious voluntaristic theories moral life reduction morality contest wills divine theme took last years inaugural simon lecture1608 robert kaplan notwithstanding get ethic appropriate leadership world politics without declaring pagans brian anderson argued thoughtful review kaplans book get retaining crucial place transcendent ought limits evil governments 9160 ethic world politics built ampler moral horizon robert kaplan suggests tradition statecraft war tradition recognizes circumstances first urgent obligation face evil stop means times waging war morally necessary defend innocent promote minimum conditions international order suggest one times grasping require us pagans requires us morally serious politically responsible moral seriousness political responsibility require us make effort connect dots means ends thus war tradition best understood sustained disciplined intellectual attempt relate morally legitimate use proportionate discriminate military force morally worthy political ends sense war tradition shares clausewitzs view relationship war politics unless war extension politics simply wickedness robert kaplan clausewitz may archetypal pagan crucial point least clausewitz articulating thoroughly classic war view matter good ends justify means father murray liked say gently provocative way end doesnt justify means classic war tradition statecraft justifies resort proportionate discriminate armed force makes war160 make moral sense 160 precisely morally worthy political ends defended andor advanced war tradition theory statecraft simply method casuistry intellectual fact first thing war tradition must retrieved today seek public moral culture capable informing national international debate war peace international order identifying starting point second crucial idea retrieved contemporary renewal war tradition distinction bellum duellum warring duelling to160 speak intellectual historian war theorist james turner johnson demonstrated number seminal works distinction crux matter moral analysis 10160 bellum use armed force public ends public authorities obligation defend security assumed responsibility duellum hand use armed force private ends private individuals grasp essential distinction understand war tradition war moral category moreover classic war tradition armed force inherently suspect morally rather johnson insists classic tradition views armed force something used good evil depending using ends 11 thus scholars activists religious leaders claim war tradition begins presumption war presumption violence quite simply mistaken begin never begin suggest otherwise merely matter misreading intellectual history although surely suggest war tradition begins presumption violence inverts structure moral analysis ways inevitably lead dubious moral judgments distorted perceptions political reality classic tradition indicated begins presumption better moral judgment rightlyconstituted publicly authority strict moral obligation defend security assumed responsibility even puts magistrates life jeopardy thomas aquinas locates discussion bellum iustum within treatise charity summa theologiae 12160 late paul ramsey revivified protestant war thinking america world war ii described war tradition explication public implications great commandment loveofneighbor even argued commandment sets limits use armed force 13 war tradition theory statecraft reduce casuistry meanstests begins presumption violence begin wrong place war tradition begins somewhere else begins defining moral responsibilities governments continues definition morally appropriate political ends takes question means reversing analysis means ends presumption violence startingpoint collapses bellum duellum ends conflating ideas violenceand war net result warfare stripped distinctive moral texture indeed among many american religious leaders today notion warfare moral texture seems forgotten presumption violence startingpoint fraught historical methodological difficulties also theologically dubious effect moral analysis turn tradition insideout warconduct bello questions proportionality discrimination take theological precedence traditionally assumed prior wardecision ad bellum questions cause right intention competent authority reasonable chance success proportionality ends last resort inversion explains much religious commentary terrorist attacks 911 considerable attention paid necessity avoiding indiscriminate noncombatant casualties war terrorism little attention paid prior question moral obligation government pursue national security world order directly threatened terrorist networks inversion also theologically problematic places heaviest burden moral analysis inevitably contingent judgments nothing wrong per se contingent judgments contingent nature case less surety bello proportion discrimination ad bellum questions 14 160 hope shown tradition logically starts ad bellum questions war tradition tradition statecraft tradition attempts define morally worthy political ends also theologic theological logic gives priority ad bellum questions questions measure moral clarity presumption violence distortion war way thinking also lead serious misreadings world politics one misreading precisely intellectual source may found 1983160 us bishops pastoral letter challenge peace tcop tcop deeply influenced emphasis laid questions bello proportionality discrimination threat nuclear war doubt important issues emphasis drove moral analysis tcop result distorted picture reality set moral judgments contributed little wise statecraft rather recognizing nuclear weapons one extremely dangerous manifestation prior conflict profound moral roots bishops letter seemed suggest nuclear weapons could somehow factored conflict west soviet union arms control order achieve arms control agreements nervous even paranoid foe like soviet union might necessary downplay moral ideological ie human rights dimensions cold war least policy implication claim greatest threat peace identified bello considerations presumption violence trumped everything else mere possession nuclear weapons opposite course turned true nuclear weapons primary threat peace communism communism went threat posed weapons human rights resistance central eastern europe brought massive regime change inside warsaw pact creating dynamics eventually led demise ussr risks nuclear war greatly diminished real disarmament arms control began presumption violence starting point manifest tcop produced serious misreading political realities possibilities claim presumption violence root war tradition sustained historically methodologically theologically war tradition tradition statecraft crucial distinction undergirds distinction bellum duellum war tradition reduced many religious leaders reduce today series means tests begins presumption violence begin imagine role moral reason set series hurdles primarily bello questions proportionality discrimination statesmen must overcome resort armed force given moral sanction begin wrong place beginning wrong place almost always means arriving wrong destination retrieval development classic war thinking must include recovery classic structure war argument means getting startingpoint right war achievable peace fifteen years ago learned something literary marketing published book entitled tranquillitas ordinis present failure future promise american catholic thought war peace 15160 argued theory statecraft160 war tradition contained within ius ad pacem addition classic ius ad bellum moral rules governing decision go war ius bello rules governing use armed force combat coining phrase ius ad pacem trying prise war way thinking concept peace could sought instruments politics including necessary use armed force like war tradition concept peace finds roots augustine city god peace tranquillitas ordinis tranquillity order preferred render contemporary terms peace dynamic rightlyordered political community 16 augustines discussion peace public political issue peace matter individuals rightrelationship god matter seeking world without conflict former question interior conversion definition nothing politics latter impossible world forever marked even redemption mysterium iniquitatis appropriate political sense term peace rather tranquillitas ordinis order created political community mediated law admittedly humbler sort peace coexists broken hearts wounded souls built world swords beaten plowshares remain sheathed ready unsheathed defense innocents advantage augustine understood form peace built instruments politics peace tranquillitas ordinis peace order composed justice freedom peace order eerily quiet sullen peace wellrun authoritarian regime peace built foundations constitutional commutative social justice peace freedom especially religious freedom flourishes defense basic human rights thus integral component work peace 17 peace achieved among developed democracies peace built recent decades ancient antagonists france germany peace defend within richly diverse political community united states neighbors allies peace defending war global terrorism aggressor states seeking weapons mass destruction international terrorism sort seen since late 1960s direct national experience 911 deliberate assault murder innocents possibility order world affairs terror networks must dismantled destroyed peace order also grave threat vicious aggressive regimes acquire weapons mass destruction weapons must assume basis treatment citizens regimes hesitate use others moral obligation ensure lethal combination irrational aggressive regimes weapons mass destruction credible delivery systems go unchallenged moral obligation rid world threat peace security peace rightly understood demands concept peaceasorder also enrich understanding muchbruited term national interest irreducible core national interest composed basic security concerns responsible democratic statesman must attend security concerns related larger sense national purpose international responsibility defend america america worth defending terms means world thus security concerns make core national interest understood necessary inner dynamic exercise americas international responsibilities responsibilities include obligation contribute best long hard nevertobefinallyaccomplished domestication international public life quest ordered liberty evolving structure international public life capable advancing classic goals politics justice freedom order general welfare peace empirically morally united states adequately defend national interest without concurrently seeking advance goals world empirically morally goals advanced pursued ways gravely threaten basic security united states eradicating global terrorism denying aggressive regimes weapons mass destruction united states walk road us addressing threatening problems global disorder must resolved peace order peace tranquillitas ordinis secured wide part world possible 21st century national interest international responsibility coincide issues intellectual development moral clarity time war requires us retrieve idea war tradition tradition statecraft classic structure war analysis concept peace tranquillitas ordinis moral clarity time war also requires us develop extend war tradition meet political exigencies new century address international security issues posed new weapons technologies permit sketch briefly three areas ad bellum wardecision criteria war tradition require development even suggest policy implications developments might todays circumstances cause classic war tradition cause understood defense aggression recovery something wrongfully taken punishment evil tradition developed since world war ii latter two notions largely displaced defense aggression become primary even sole meaning cause 18 160this theological evolution parallels international law defense aggression concept cause shapes articles 2 51 charter united nations light 21st century international security realities imperative reopen discussion develop concept cause 19 recently korean war would argue vietnam war defense aggression could reasonably taken mean defensive military response crossborder military aggression already underway new weapons capabilities outlaw rogue states require development concept defense aggression take obvious current example makes little moral sense suggest united states must wait north korea iraq iran actually launches ballistic missile tipped nuclear biological chemical weapon mass destruction legitimately something say hands certain kinds states mere possession weapons mass destruction constitutes aggression least aggressionwaitingtohappen regime factor crucial moral analysis weapons mass destruction clearly aggressionswaitingtohappen possessed stable lawabiding states frenchman goes bed nervous great britains nuclear weapons sane mexican canadian worries preemptive nuclear attack united states every sane israeli turk bahraini hand deeply concerned possibility iraq iran nuclear weapons mediumrange ballistic missiles regime factor crucial moral analysis preemptive military action deny rogue state kind destructive capacity would judgment contravene defense aggression concept cause indeed would precisely opposite giving concept of160 defense aggression real traction world must live transform argue violates principle sovereignty risks global descent chaos would reply postwestphalian notions state equality sovereign immunity assume least minimum acquiescence minimal international norms order todays rogue states basis behavior granted assumption therefore forfeited immunity regime factor determinative extreme instances 20 deny rogue states capacity create lethal disorder precisely possession weapons mass destruction threatens minimum conditions order international public life strengthens cause world order undermine surely lessons 1930s pertinent matter of160 cause tradition also needs development terms concept relevant actors world politics since 911 analysts objected describing response international terrorist networks war argue alqaeda similar networks states states wage war properly understood important point stake critics misapply limiting legitimate use armed force international actors recognized international law custom exercising sovereignty one principle accomplishments war thinking shaped world political culture law period centuries classic distinction bellum duellum concretized international law time however fudge blur crucial distinction recognize alqaeda similar networks function like states even lack certain attributes trappings sovereignty traditionally understood indeed terrorist organizations provide less ambiguous example legitimate military target unlike conventional states always admixtures good evil military action sometimes threatens good well evil parasite states international terrorist organizations unmitigated evils whose purpose wickedness slaughter innocents ignoble political ends 21160 thus exigencies current situation require us think outside westphalian box speak way avoid dismantling de facto distinction bellum duellum competent authority two questions involving ad bellum criterion competent authority raised since 911 question relationship governments domestic foreign policy legitimacy belligerent question whether competent authority resides united nations one distasteful forms post911 commentary found suggestions root causes terrorism root causes explained resort mass violence innocents made use violence humanly plausible morally justifiable corollary suggestion united states somehow brought 911 reasons dominant economic cultural position world middle east policy combination thereof moralpolitical implication misguided government lacked moral authority respond terrorism use armed force root causes school blithely ignores extant literature phenomenon contemporary terrorism emphatically case wretched earth rising throw chains 22160 moralpolitical implication root causes school draws want address lutheran scholar david yeago wise guide writing ecumenical journal pro ecclesia yeago clarified essential point authority government protect lawabiding impose penalties evildoers reward governments virtue good conductthe protection citizens execution penalty peacebreakers commission constitutes government contingent right must somehow earn mystery gods providence many indeed institutional bearers governmental authority unworthy often flagrantly stained crime make less vocation government protect innocent punish evildoers government refused safeguard citizens exercise judgment wrong sense guilt past crime would add crime dereliction duty catalog offenses 23 question alliances international organizations must also addressed development war thinking competent authority must legitimate military action sanctioned un security council united states obliged simply matter political prudence matter moral principle gain agreement allies broadly coalition partners use armed force response terrorism military action aggressive regimes weapons mass destruction un charter recognizes inalienable national right selfdefense suggests charter claim sole authority legitimate use armed force security council attack according charter dont wait permission china france russia others vetowielding powers defend moreover manifest inability un handle largescale international security questions suggests assigning moral veto us military action fronts security council would mistake question might call neighborhood security council kind moral logic claim us government must assuage interests french foreign ministry strategic aims repressive chinese government full play security council order gain international moral authority war terrorism defense world order outlaw states weapons mass destruction peculiar moral logic indeed think building coalitions support dismantling international terror networks denying rogue states lethal weapons capacities politically desirable instances militarily essential much doubt morally imperative classic war point view united states unique responsibility leadership war terrorism struggle world order statement hubris empirical fact responsibility may exercised unilaterally occasion defining boundaries unilateral action defending legitimacy certain circumstances one crucial task developing war tradition last resort among forgotten war tradition retaining language classic ad bellum criterion last resort usually understood simplistically mathematical terms use proportionate discriminate armed force last point series options prior nonmilitary options legal diplomatic economic etc must serially exhausted criterion last resort satisfied excessively mechanistic understanding last resort prescription danger case international terrorism compels development ad bellum criterion mean say nonmilitary options tried found wanting confronted new lethal type international actor one recognizes form power except use violence largely immune unlike conventional state international legal diplomatic andor economic pressures charge us military action 911 morally dubious possible means redress tried found wanting misreads nature terrorist organizations networks last last resort mean circumstances plausible reason believe nonmilitary actions unavailable unavailing rogue states developing deploying weapons mass destruction developed war tradition would recognize last resort understood mathematically terminal point lengthy series nonmilitary alternatives say last resort satisfied cases rogue state made plain conduct holds international law contempt diplomatic solution threat poses likely demonstrated threat rogue state poses intensifying think indeed think must states regimes aggressive intent lack effective internal political controls giving lethal effect intent permitted acquire weapons mass destruction denying weapons proportionate discriminate armed force even displacing regimes exercise defense peace order within boundaries developed war tradition point international political community evolved degree international organizations effectively disarm regimes responsibility defense order extreme circumstances lie elsewhere charism responsibility 160 finally moral clarity time war requires developed understanding location war tradition public discourse responsible governance war tradition indeed tradition statecraft proper role religious leaders public intellectuals everything possible clarify moral issues stake time war recognizing might call charism responsibility lies elsewhere duly constituted public authorities fully informed relevant facts must bear weight responsible decisionmaking governance simply clericalism suggest religious leaders public intellectuals war tradition singular way argued many todays religious leaders public intellectuals suffered severe amnesia core components tradition hardly said serious intellectual sense ownership even todays religious leaders public intellectuals fully possession tradition burden decisionmaking would still lie elsewhere160religious leaders public intellectuals called nurture develop moralphilosophical riches war tradition tradition however exists serve statesmen charism political discernment unique vocation public service charism shared bishops stated clerks rabbis imams ecumenical interreligious agencies moral clarity time war demands moral seriousness public officials also demands ameasure political modesty religious leaders public intellectuals giveandtake democratic deliberation suggested recent months war tradition obsolete would reply suggest war tradition obsolete suggest politics organization human life purposeful political communities obsolete reduce war tradition algebraic casuistry deny tradition capacity shed light irreducible moral component political action must generation retrieve develop war tradition take account new political technological realities twentyfirst century september 11 followed lies ahead demonstrated urgent task george weigel distinguished senior fellow ethics public policy center washington dc holds eppcs william e simon chair catholic studies ____ 1 leo tolstoy war peace translated louise aylmer maude iii221 new york knopf 1992 p 460 2 different degrees forgetfulness course recent letter us catholic bishops president bush question iraq higher degree intellectual seriousness effusions national religious bodies bishops letter would argue continue pattern war forgetfulness whose origins shall discuss 3 robert kaplan warrior politics leadership demands pagan ethos new york random house 2002 4 see brian c anderson men war national review february 25 2002 p 46 5 story recounted slightly generic form john courtney murray sj hold truths catholic reflections american proposition garden city doubleday image books 1964 p 262 6 one publicly prominent exponent view course pope john paul ii prior pontificate analyzed capacity moral action distinguishing characteristic human osoba czyn oraz inne studia antropologiczne edited tadeusz stycze jerzy w ga kowski adam rodzi ski andrzej szostek lublin kul press 1994 revised polish edition karol wojty principal philosophical work presently available english translation inadequate osoba czyn intelligently discussed kenneth l schmitz center human drama philosophical anthropology karol wojty apope john paul ii washington cua press 1993 jaros aw kupczak op destined liberty human person philosophy karol wojty ajohn paul ii washington cua press 2000 7 see study final revolution resistance church collapse communism new york oxford university press 1992 8 catholic critique voluntaristic ie willcentered conceptions moral life see servais pinckaers op sources christian ethics washington catholic university america press 1995 morality catholic view south bend st augustine press 2001 9 anderson artcit p 48 10160johnsons major works include following modern war new yale university press 1984 quest peace three moral traditions western cultural history princeton princeton university press 1987 morality contemporary warfare new yale university press 1999 11 see160 johnson morality contemporary warfare pp 3536 12 summa theologiae iiii 401 13 ramseys principal works field war christian conscience 1961 war 1968 james turner johnson describes ramseys specifically christian understanding war tradition terms ramsey argued christian war theory based moral duty love neighbor obligation protect neighbor unjustly attacked provided justification christians resort force time love also imposes limits force requiring done unjust assailant necessary prevent evil would justified use force ever directly intentionally target innocent james turner johnson war tradition american military johnson george weigel war gulf160 war washington ethics public policy center 1991 pp 89 14 point see james turner johnson cause revisited close calls intervention terrorism missile defense war today elliott abrams ed washington ethics public policy center 1998 p 27 15 new york oxford university press 1987 16 augustine de civitate dei xix 13 17 pope john paul ii made important contributions idea especially world day peace message 1981 see ways peace papal messages world day peace 19681986 vatican city pontifical commission iustitia et pax 1987 pp 147161 popes recent world day peace statements refines discussion components tranquillitas ordinis teaching peace without justice justice without forgivenesss forgiveness helps create conditions civil society peace order composed justice freedom flourish comment message richard john neuhaus notes title message right peace without justice temporal justice secured acknowledgment transcendent judgment reveals need forgiven forgive said pope without blurring line good evil obscuring duty defend innocent rather anticipates day beyond present battles may new order based shared recognition gods justice mercy call idealistic right word prophetic see john paul ii peace without justice justice without forgiveness origins 3128 december 20 2001 pp 46166 richard john neuhaus public square first things 120 february 2002 p 88 18 see johnson cause revisited historical survey contemporary arguments 19 debate humanitarian intervention launched 1990s somali famine genocidal violence imploding yugoslavia also remains completed bears development cause criterion addressing un food agricultural organization 5 december 1992 pope john paul ii spoke of160 humanitarian intervention duty justice cases impending actual genocide mass starvation caused political upheaval ethnic conflict pope specify precisely moral duty duty falls fulfilled development required argue mass murder innocents starvation entire peoples constitutes unacceptable affront world order challenge international security must met might arguably true yugoslavia seems stretch regions marginal mainstream world politics matter much deplore situations like somali famine genocide rwanda pope proposes duty humanitarian intervention cases perhaps time revisit old notion punishment evil satisfying criterion cause resort armed force vindication justice peace order would resolve questions posed assertion duty humanitarian intervention would get cause debate tethered likely increasing number realworld situations 21st century event argument another occasion 20 denying rogue states weapons mass destruction means deliver effecting regime change necessary accomplish could also salutary effect changing stateofthequestion islamic societies political modernization arab islamic world typically meant liberation rather importation western revolutionary ideologies generally led repression recent study went wrong western impact middle eastern response bernard lewis argues arab islamic states looked secret western success features west distinctive different anything experience tainted christianity christopher caldwell notes review lewiss work led arab islamic states modern western political ideologies french revolution major influence caldwell writes also eventually nationalism socialism national socialism whose baleful influence lewis still sees work baathist regimes iraq syria move political modernization islam enhance freedom autonomy strengthened states modern approaches enforcement surveillance propaganda consequent depredations civil society turn led blamethewest phenomenon throughout arab islamic world united states currently replacing european colonialism replaced turks replaced mongols source islamic decline crucial bernard lewis argues change question islamic world stops asking us starts asking question wrong regime change places like iraq could well contribute changing question well clearing ground seeds new islamic civil society could planted see bernard lewis went wrong western impact middle eastern response new york oxford university press 2001 christopher caldwell closing muslim mind weekly standard january 21 2002 p39 joshua muravchik freedom arab world weekly standard december 31 2001 pp 1516 21 point see editorial time war first things 118 december 2001 pp 1117 22 intellectual origins class location modern terrorism see walter laqueur terrorism boston little brown 1977 23 david yeago war reflections lutheran tradition time crisis pro ecclesia x4 pp 41415 | 4,577 |
<p>The best way to view President Obama's <a href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/06/04/a_new_beginning_with_muslims_96831.html" type="external">speech in Cairo</a> is to understand the way Obama views himself and the rhetorical devices he employs. In this case, the key to unlocking Obama's speech may be Aristotle's golden mean, the search for a mid-point between extremes. Obama's rhetorical template is an increasingly familiar one: he gives voice to one side of a dispute and then the other. And Obama — our philosopher-king, the Voice of Reason in an unreasonable world — interprets and arbitrates these disputes, putting them in just the right context and arriving at just the right solution. Or so we are led to believe. The trouble is that Obama's approach at times distorts history and mistreats our closest allies.</p>
<p>The President's Cairo speech begins with a discussion of tension between the United States and Muslims around the world — “tension rooted in historical forces that go beyond any current policy debate.” Each side holds responsibility for those tensions. But if you read Obama's text carefully, you will come away with the impression that one side in particular — the United States and the West — is much more at fault than the other. Tensions have been fed, according to Obama, by Western colonialism, the mistreatment of Muslim-majority countries during the Cold War, and by” the sweeping change brought by modernity and globalization [which] led many Muslims to view the West as hostile to the traditions of Islam.” Those missteps and injustices, Obama implies, all tilt the scales against America and the West.</p>
<p>On the other side of the scale there are mistakes for which the Muslim world is responsible. And here the blame lies with “violent extremists” who have exploited those (Western-created) tensions in “a small but potent minority of Muslims.” This led to the attacks on September 11, 2001 and the continued efforts of these extremists to engage in violence against civilians. But even that eventually counts against America, at least in this respect: militant Islamic attacks “led some in my country to view Islam as inevitably hostile not only to America and Western countries, but also to human rights. This has bred more fear and mistrust.”</p>
<p>Obama's second “golden mean” section of the speech had to do with the United States and Iran. Obama presents the two nations as equally at fault for the current pass. In the middle of the Cold War, Obama tells us, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically-elected Iranian government. And since the Islamic Revolution, Iran has played a role in acts of hostage-taking and violence against U.S. troops and civilians. “Rather than remain trapped in the past,” he says, “I have made it clear to Iran's leaders and people that my country is prepared to move forward… without preconditions on the basis of mutual respect.”</p>
<p>Obama's speech's third “golden mean” section has to do with Afghanistan and Iraq. Afghanistan is the good war. It deserves our support, and it will have it. Iraq, on the other hand, was the “war of choice” — one that Obama opposed, one that caused friction within America and between America and the world, and one that symbolizes a failure of diplomacy. The Iraqi people may be better off without the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, Obama admits, and we do have a responsibility to help Iraq forge a better future — but the clear message of the speech is that Obama found the war unnecessary and distasteful and he is eager to wash his, and America's, hands of it, as much and as soon as possible.</p>
<p>Obama's fourth “golden mean” deals with Israel and the Palestinians. In this section, Israel is portrayed as home to a historically persecuted people. Threatening Israel with destruction is “deeply wrong” and only serves to “evoke in the minds of Israelis this most painful of memories while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve.” At the same time, “it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people — Muslims and Christians — have suffered in pursuit of a homeland.” The situation for the Palestinian people is “intolerable.” America “will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own.” The result is a “stalemate”; both sides have “legitimate aspirations” but also suffer from “a painful history that makes compromise elusive.” We cannot see this conflict “only from one side or the other” because that will “be blind to the truth.” And it is time to act on what everyone knows to be true: Israel will not go away and the Palestinians need a state. To that end, Palestinians must abandon violence. “Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed,” Obama said. “It is a sign of neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus,” he went on.</p>
<p>Israelis, on the other hand,</p>
<p>must acknowledge that just as Israel 's right to exist cannot be denied, neither can Palestine 's. The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop. Israel must also live up to its obligations to ensure that Palestinians can live, and work, and develop their society. And just as it devastates Palestinian families, the continuing humanitarian crisis in Gaza does not serve Israel 's security; neither does the continuing lack of opportunity in the West Bank . Progress in the daily lives of the Palestinian people must be part of a road to peace, and Israel must take concrete steps to enable such progress.</p>
<p>Among the problems with Obama's speech is that in order to make his narrative fit, he must manipulate history, sometimes subtly and sometimes not, sometimes by what he omits and sometimes by what he states. Let's take things in order.</p>
<p>In his discussion of the West and the Muslim world, President Obama fails to mention how, in the past two decades, the United States has shed blood and treasure in Kuwait, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq — all Muslim-dominated countries — in an effort to aid tens of millions of people who were threatened by or living under ruthless dictatorships. The impulse to help these countries was not in every instance simply humanitarian; but in every instance humanitarianism was a factor, and in some instances it was the dominant one. Today, more than 50 million Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq are liberated from two of the most sadistic regimes we have ever witnessed. It might be nice for President Obama — and frankly those in the Arab world — to say that, even just once.</p>
<p>Nor does Obama mention other efforts to help Muslims — for example, the extraordinary humanitarian efforts by Americans to aid Indonesia in the aftermath of the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.</p>
<p>In addition, Obama's account of the resentment that exists, and in some instances dominates, the Islamic world today is shallow and misleading. For example, he does not connect the political and economic repression in the Arab world to the rise of jihadism. Arab intellectuals themselves have recognized these failures, calling on Arab governments to address the “freedom gap” and push for internal reform, greater politics participation, and economic openness. And to imply that the West has been a key accelerator when it comes to radical Islam is simply wrong. I realize Obama has no obligation to devote a speech to problems plaguing the Arab and Islamic worlds; but he does have an obligation to provide a fair account of things if he chooses to raise the topic.</p>
<p>As for his discussion of America and Iran, Max Boot <a href="http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/boot/68462" type="external">puts it well</a>. Obama's account</p>
<p />
<p>is accepting the (false) narrative of the Iranian Revolution, which holds that America's role in overthrowing Mossadeq more than half a century ago — a development that would not have been possible had the leftist prime minister not lost support in the Iranian street — is just as bad as the campaign of mass murder and kidnapping that Iran continues to support at this very moment.</p>
<p>On Afghanistan and Iraq: while I appreciate what Obama says about the former, his portrayal of Iraq is distorted. Of all the countries in the Arab/Persian world, Iraq is among the closest to fulfilling the principles Obama praises in his speech, including democracy and human rights, religious freedom, freedom for women, progress and modernity. Iraq certainly isn't perfect, and in some respects it has many miles to travel. But its government is, as even Obama had to concede, democratically elected. And it is certainly on a more enlightened path than, say, Iran or even Egypt, for whom Obama had nothing but praise. Yet instead of celebrating the achievements in Iraq — which have been extraordinary, even as it remains an imperfect and fragile nation — Obama focused mostly on the negative. It is clear that long ago Obama settled on a (negative) view of Iraq. While events have thankfully forced him to back away from his previously (irresponsible) position, he still cannot see it for what it is.</p>
<p>Then there is the issue of Israel and the Palestinians. What is troubling about Obama's account is the moral equivalence he asserts between Israel and the Palestinians is false. It also ignores what Israel is: democratic and lawful, willing to grant rights to its Arab citizens, willing to hold itself accountable for its mistakes, a country of bustling energy, entrepreneurial spirit, and a thriving civil society. Israel is among the most admirable and impressive nations in the world, and that we have ever seen. And all of this despite living in a region that for the most part despises her and in some instances wants to destroy her.</p>
<p>Beyond that, Obama perpetuates falsehoods, including the one that Israelis deny the Palestinian right to exist just as Palestinians deny Israel's right to exist. That is true only in rare cases, and in any event it fails to take into account Israel's many good-faith efforts to give the Palestinians a homeland, including in 2000, when Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered almost all of the territories the Palestinians had asked for. Yasir Arafat rejected the offer and began a second intifada. And in Gaza in 2005 Israel did what no other nation — not the Jordanians, not the British, not anyone — has ever done before: provide the Palestinians with the opportunity for self-rule. In response, Israel was shelled by thousands of rockets and mortar attacks. Hamas used Gaza as its launching point. Yet it is Israel , according to Obama, that must make yet more concessions and give up yet more land, as if stopping settlements will fundamentally transform Palestinian attitudes. It will not. The sine qua non for progress is for the Palestinian leadership to make its own inner peace with the Jewish state. If it did, as Jordan has, a Palestinian homeland would surely follow; and if it does not, peace is impossible. Israel has already shown it can make peace with Arab countries and give up huge swaths of land (like the Sinai Desert) if only those nations reconcile themselves to the existence of Israel and cast aside their violent animus toward her.</p>
<p>The suffering of the Palestinian people is real and tragic and needs to end. But the source of that suffering lies with a corrupt leadership and the complicity of other Arab nations. To cast all the blame on Israel is deeply unfair.</p>
<p>President Obama, in his speech to the Muslim world, said he would “speak the truth as best I can.” Some of what he said about democracy, religious freedom, women's rights, and economic development and opportunity was sound and appropriate. And I will concede, as others have, that it could have been worse — though that's a fairly low bar to clear. But a good deal of what Obama presented, particularly in the first half of the speech, was a cartoon version of history. In the process, Obama downplayed the achievements of the Arab country we have very strong relations with and placed the most intense pressure on the nation that counts among our closest allies and best friends. I have little doubt that Obama's speech will be hailed by the Muslim world and by the chattering class. But it was, in some important respects, a misleading address, and therefore a regrettable one. The things Obama will win from the speech will be, I think, ephemeral; the distortions of history and reality more enduring. It is not, I think it's fair to say, the balance Aristotle had in mind.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p />
<p>— Peter Wehner is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in&#160; Washington, D.C. He served in the Bush White House as director of the office of strategic initiatives.</p> | false | 1 | best way view president obamas speech cairo understand way obama views rhetorical devices employs case key unlocking obamas speech may aristotles golden mean search midpoint extremes obamas rhetorical template increasingly familiar one gives voice one side dispute obama philosopherking voice reason unreasonable world interprets arbitrates disputes putting right context arriving right solution led believe trouble obamas approach times distorts history mistreats closest allies presidents cairo speech begins discussion tension united states muslims around world tension rooted historical forces go beyond current policy debate side holds responsibility tensions read obamas text carefully come away impression one side particular united states west much fault tensions fed according obama western colonialism mistreatment muslimmajority countries cold war sweeping change brought modernity globalization led many muslims view west hostile traditions islam missteps injustices obama implies tilt scales america west side scale mistakes muslim world responsible blame lies violent extremists exploited westerncreated tensions small potent minority muslims led attacks september 11 2001 continued efforts extremists engage violence civilians even eventually counts america least respect militant islamic attacks led country view islam inevitably hostile america western countries also human rights bred fear mistrust obamas second golden mean section speech united states iran obama presents two nations equally fault current pass middle cold war obama tells us united states played role overthrow democraticallyelected iranian government since islamic revolution iran played role acts hostagetaking violence us troops civilians rather remain trapped past says made clear irans leaders people country prepared move forward without preconditions basis mutual respect obamas speechs third golden mean section afghanistan iraq afghanistan good war deserves support iraq hand war choice one obama opposed one caused friction within america america world one symbolizes failure diplomacy iraqi people may better without tyranny saddam hussein obama admits responsibility help iraq forge better future clear message speech obama found war unnecessary distasteful eager wash americas hands much soon possible obamas fourth golden mean deals israel palestinians section israel portrayed home historically persecuted people threatening israel destruction deeply wrong serves evoke minds israelis painful memories preventing peace people region deserve time also undeniable palestinian people muslims christians suffered pursuit homeland situation palestinian people intolerable america turn backs legitimate palestinian aspiration dignity opportunity state result stalemate sides legitimate aspirations also suffer painful history makes compromise elusive see conflict one side blind truth time act everyone knows true israel go away palestinians need state end palestinians must abandon violence resistance violence killing wrong succeed obama said sign neither courage power shoot rockets sleeping children blow old women bus went israelis hand must acknowledge israel right exist denied neither palestine united states accept legitimacy continued israeli settlements construction violates previous agreements undermines efforts achieve peace time settlements stop israel must also live obligations ensure palestinians live work develop society devastates palestinian families continuing humanitarian crisis gaza serve israel security neither continuing lack opportunity west bank progress daily lives palestinian people must part road peace israel must take concrete steps enable progress among problems obamas speech order make narrative fit must manipulate history sometimes subtly sometimes sometimes omits sometimes states lets take things order discussion west muslim world president obama fails mention past two decades united states shed blood treasure kuwait somalia bosnia kosovo afghanistan iraq muslimdominated countries effort aid tens millions people threatened living ruthless dictatorships impulse help countries every instance simply humanitarian every instance humanitarianism factor instances dominant one today 50 million muslims afghanistan iraq liberated two sadistic regimes ever witnessed might nice president obama frankly arab world say even obama mention efforts help muslims example extraordinary humanitarian efforts americans aid indonesia aftermath devastating 2004 indian ocean tsunami addition obamas account resentment exists instances dominates islamic world today shallow misleading example connect political economic repression arab world rise jihadism arab intellectuals recognized failures calling arab governments address freedom gap push internal reform greater politics participation economic openness imply west key accelerator comes radical islam simply wrong realize obama obligation devote speech problems plaguing arab islamic worlds obligation provide fair account things chooses raise topic discussion america iran max boot puts well obamas account accepting false narrative iranian revolution holds americas role overthrowing mossadeq half century ago development would possible leftist prime minister lost support iranian street bad campaign mass murder kidnapping iran continues support moment afghanistan iraq appreciate obama says former portrayal iraq distorted countries arabpersian world iraq among closest fulfilling principles obama praises speech including democracy human rights religious freedom freedom women progress modernity iraq certainly isnt perfect respects many miles travel government even obama concede democratically elected certainly enlightened path say iran even egypt obama nothing praise yet instead celebrating achievements iraq extraordinary even remains imperfect fragile nation obama focused mostly negative clear long ago obama settled negative view iraq events thankfully forced back away previously irresponsible position still see issue israel palestinians troubling obamas account moral equivalence asserts israel palestinians false also ignores israel democratic lawful willing grant rights arab citizens willing hold accountable mistakes country bustling energy entrepreneurial spirit thriving civil society israel among admirable impressive nations world ever seen despite living region part despises instances wants destroy beyond obama perpetuates falsehoods including one israelis deny palestinian right exist palestinians deny israels right exist true rare cases event fails take account israels many goodfaith efforts give palestinians homeland including 2000 prime minister ehud barak offered almost territories palestinians asked yasir arafat rejected offer began second intifada gaza 2005 israel nation jordanians british anyone ever done provide palestinians opportunity selfrule response israel shelled thousands rockets mortar attacks hamas used gaza launching point yet israel according obama must make yet concessions give yet land stopping settlements fundamentally transform palestinian attitudes sine qua non progress palestinian leadership make inner peace jewish state jordan palestinian homeland would surely follow peace impossible israel already shown make peace arab countries give huge swaths land like sinai desert nations reconcile existence israel cast aside violent animus toward suffering palestinian people real tragic needs end source suffering lies corrupt leadership complicity arab nations cast blame israel deeply unfair president obama speech muslim world said would speak truth best said democracy religious freedom womens rights economic development opportunity sound appropriate concede others could worse though thats fairly low bar clear good deal obama presented particularly first half speech cartoon version history process obama downplayed achievements arab country strong relations placed intense pressure nation counts among closest allies best friends little doubt obamas speech hailed muslim world chattering class important respects misleading address therefore regrettable one things obama win speech think ephemeral distortions history reality enduring think fair say balance aristotle mind 160 peter wehner senior fellow ethics public policy center in160 washington dc served bush white house director office strategic initiatives | 1,104 |
<p>Many aspects of your daily life, the sorts of activities and purchases you take for granted, are regulated by a single federal agency.</p>
<p>From the toothpaste you use to the lipstick you apply, the medicines you take&#160;to the food you eat, the Food and Drug Administration is supposed to stand between consumers and faulty products that could do them harm.&#160;It oversees&#160;$2.4 trillion&#160;of the U.S. economy—some 20 cents of every dollar Americans spend.</p>
<p>But in&#160;the first months of&#160;Donald Trump’s presidency, the FDA has shown signs it may be&#160;retreating&#160;from its mission.</p>
<p>From January to July, the agency sent 265 warning letters to companies, notifying them of what it alleged to be serious violations of federal rules. That’s the lowest tally for the first seven months of any year since 2008, according to a review of letters posted on the FDA’s website. Compared with the first seven months of the Obama administration, that’s an 8 percent decline. On average, it’s a 30 percent drop from the&#160;number of letters sent during the same period of all eight years Barack Obama was president.</p>
<p>In March, Trump&#160;nominated&#160;45-year-old Scott Gottlieb to run the FDA. Confirmed&#160;by the Senate in May, he’s&#160;embraced some muscular regulation over the past few months: The agency recently&#160;asked drugmaker Endo International Plc to take an opioid painkiller off the market&#160;and proposed ratcheting down the amount of nicotine in cigarettes to non-addictive levels.&#160;</p>
<p>But Gottlieb, who also worked for the agency under President George W. Bush, has been critical of FDA practices in the past. In late 2011, when he was a resident fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, he wrote an op-ed&#160;for the&#160;Wall Street Journal suggesting that the regulator’s enforcement approach contributed to generic drug shortages by driving up costs for pharmaceutical companies.&#160;</p>
<p>While concerns with&#160;product safety are valid, he wrote, “the FDA and the manufacturers often don’t understand the drug-production processes well enough to detect the root cause of problems. Instead of calling for targeted fixes of troubled plants, the agency has often taken a very costly shotgun approach that requires upgrades virtually everywhere.” He echoed those remarks in&#160;Congressional testimony&#160;(PDF) later that month.</p>
<p>The FDA, in response to questions about the drop in warning letters under Trump, says there’s been no order to slow down enforcement and that Gottlieb doesn’t plan to soften the regulator’s approach.</p>
<p>“Commissioner Gottlieb and the FDA support and will vigorously enforce the agency’s current laws and regulations,” FDA spokeswoman Lyndsay Meyer said in an email.&#160;“Any honest analysis of the agency’s overall enforcement statistics will reflect results that are comparable to annual statistics from previous years. Enforcement statistics reflect actions initiated many months and sometimes more than a year prior to the reporting of the final action.”</p>
<p>Besides warning letters, the FDA has a variety of other tools&#160;to get companies to comply with food, drug, and safety laws. For the most serious violations, it can order recalls, seize products, and seek court-ordered injunctions. The agency obtained&#160;17 injunctions in the 2016 fiscal year&#160;(PDF), which ended Sept. 30. It also has a criminal investigation office that can help initiate prosecutions.&#160;The&#160;FDA declined to provide additional data on its enforcement activities in 2017, including the total number of inspections, citing ongoing investigations.&#160;Agency representatives also contend&#160;it’s too early to fairly assess FDA enforcement under Trump by looking at the data it makes public.&#160;</p>
<p>Nevertheless, warning letters remain one&#160;indicator of the agency’s enforcement intensity. Any slowdown&#160;would be consistent with reports of diminished activity by other federal agencies since Trump, who campaigned on the promise of&#160;cutting regulations, took office.</p>
<p>The Environmental Protection Agency has brought fewer actions and collected smaller fines compared with previous administrations during the same period, according to an Aug. 10 report by the&#160;Environmental Integrity Project, a non-partisan&#160;watchdog group.&#160;Penalties levied by financial regulators against Wall Street firms are down significantly as well, the Wall Street Journal reported Aug. 6.</p>
<p>The slowdown isn’t across the board, however: During the first six months of the new&#160;administration, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration conducted workplace inspections at a pace similar to the first six months of 2016, Bloomberg reported Aug. 3. (However, OSHA’s reporting of workplace fatalities is falling, the Wall Street Journal&#160;said Aug. 27.)</p>
<p>The FDA conducts thousands of inspections each year in the U.S. and globally, sending companies detailed observations of possible violations. If manufacturers don’t address serious problems,&#160;a warning letter may follow, sometimes months&#160;or more than a year after inspectors first find something wrong.&#160;</p>
<p>The letters are a potent tool to alert both&#160;companies and the public to trouble&#160;at manufacturing plants or other sites. The agency’s policy&#160;(PDF) is to post all warning letters publicly, with most published within a few weeks of having been sent to the target company.</p>
<p>For example, an August 2015 letter to snack-making giant Frito-Lay Inc. cited “insanitary conditions” at a plant in Pulaski, Tennesee, that could lead food products to “become contaminated with filth or rendered injurious to health.” The FDA pointed out leaks in the roof and peeling paint directly above exposed food production lines, cookie dough and cheese filling leaking from machinery&#160;and large areas of the plant “soiled with apparent food debris and dust.” In an inspection the following July, the FDA determined that Frito-Lay had fixed the problems.&#160;(Frito-Lay didn’t respond to a request&#160;for comment.)</p>
<p>An October 2016 letter to a Chinese dental implant-maker stated that&#160;tanks of water at its plant had “unidentified green/brown particulate accumulation.”&#160;The water was used to steam-clean implants throughout the manufacturing process.&#160;As a result, the FDA said it would stop the products from entering the U.S. until the concerns were addressed.</p>
<p>One FDA official whom the agency allowed Bloomberg to interview on the condition he wouldn’t be identified said&#160;there’s natural variation in the pace of enforcement activities, and that the FDA prefers to evaluate its performance with a full year of data.</p>
<p>Warning letters&#160;represent “one of their&#160;more forceful instruments to use in trying to assure high-quality manufacturing processes,” said Eric&#160;Sacks, director of health-care product alerts at the ECRI Institute, which monitors the safety of medical products. He said the number could decline for many reasons and didn’t necessarily reflect a drawback in enforcement. Voluntary product recalls initiated by companies have not declined,&#160;Sacks said.</p>
<p>Another potential contributor to a&#160;dip in regulatory activity may be tied to the administration’s slow pace in filling federal posts, a former FDA official said. Pending matters from a previous administration are also sometimes delayed, said Joshua Sharfstein, the first FDA political appointee under&#160;Obama. “There were definitely some enforcement actions that were held up for me to review” in 2009, said Sharfstein, now an associate dean at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.</p>
<p>The change in warning-letter activity this year hasn’t been uniform across the FDA. The regulator operates through a network of district offices and several national centers focused on specific industries such as drugs, medical devices, food, and tobacco. Activity varies across these units, according to FDA data.</p>
<p>The sharpest drop has been at the group that regulates medical devices, which has all but stopped publishing warning&#160;letters. Since mid-November 2016, the Center for Devices and Radiological Health posted a single warning letter, regarding St. Jude heart implants that had previously been recalled for battery problems.&#160;(A spokesman for St. Jude parent company Abbott Laboratories said in an email that the company is making progress toward resolving the FDA’s concerns.)</p>
<p>In 2016, the device center had sent 18 warning letters by the end of July. On average, from 2009 to 2016, the device center sent 48 letters to manufacturers during the first seven months of a year. Meyer, the FDA spokeswoman, said in an email that the device center has issued additional warning letters—11 in total—but didn’t specify when they were sent&#160;or why they weren’t posted publicly. She said&#160;the center is working to “improve the issuance and posting process.”</p>
<p>A slowdown in enforcement would be worrisome, said&#160;Michael Carome, director of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, a watchdog organization. He reviewed the data analyzed by Bloomberg.</p>
<p>The dramatic dropoff in warning letters to medical device makers&#160;appears particularly problematic, Carome said. “This is a huge market,” with hundreds of thousands of products, he explained. FDA oversight “is critically important to make sure that there aren’t defects” and that malfunctions are properly reported.</p>
<p>The FDA’s food regulator, the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, ensures the safety of America’s food supply, polices dietary supplements, and oversees cosmetics. That office is in the process of implementing new rules related to the Food Safety Modernization Act, which was signed into law in 2011. Its warning letter rate dropped significantly this year&#160;compared with&#160;2016.</p>
<p>The FDA official said the new rules focus on preventing contaminated food from entering&#160;the market, rather than reacting&#160;after the fact. The agency wants to help companies understand the new regulations before enforcing them, he said.&#160;The agency&#160;has issued blanket restrictions on certain food imports from regions with a record of problems, he&#160;noted, including cilantro from Mexico&#160;and shrimp from Malaysia—actions he noted wouldn’t show up in the food safety center’s warning letter tallies.</p>
<p>The food center has sent nine letters from January to July of this year, compared with 36 sent during the same period last year. The FDA official said the effort to put the new rules into place may have affected agency&#160;activity.</p>
<p>The FDA is a sprawling agency. Beyond its White Oak, Maryland, headquarters, it operates 19 district offices across the U.S. and Puerto Rico. These outposts are empowered to issue warning letters regarding food, drugs, devices, and other&#160;products regulated by the agency. So far, they have issued more than half of all agency warning letters in 2017. But their numbers have&#160;dropped as well.</p>
<p>In the first seven months of this year, district offices were responsible for 168 letters, compared with 228 over the same period in 2016. That’s a 30 percent decline—the same percentage drop for the agency overall—from the average January to July pace in all eight&#160;years of the Obama administration.</p>
<p>Michael Jacobson, co-founder and president of the health-advocacy group&#160;Center for Science in the Public Interest, called the drop in FDA warning letters “an ominous sign” that Trump’s anti-regulation&#160;rhetoric&#160;has become official policy. “More Americans will get sick—or not get well—if laws ensuring the safety of our food and drugs are not enforced,” he said in an email.</p>
<p>The pace of warning letters &#160;this year seems to match the pace set during the administration of George W. Bush. On average, the agency overall issued 251 warning letters in the January to July period of each year between 2005 and 2009, close to the 265 issued overall this year. (Warning letters prior to 2005 are not archived on the FDA’s website.)</p>
<p>After Bush left office, the scope of FDA authority expanded to include tobacco. Enforcement activity by the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products, created as a result of additional powers conferred by Congress, has picked up in 2017. The 49 warning letters it has sent through July exceeds the 42 it sent in&#160;the same period in 2016. (Bloomberg’s analysis excludes warning letters sent to tobacco retailers, which the FDA issues by the hundreds to stores that sell tobacco to minors. The agency reports those letters separately.)</p>
<p>Likewise,&#160;the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, which regulates pharmaceuticals and such over-the-counter products as toothpaste, issued slightly more warning letters this year than over&#160;the same period in 2016.</p>
<p>Beyond warning letters, there are other ways in which to view FDA performance. One data set the agency publishes tracks the number of citations issued by&#160;inspectors. Citations are observations recorded&#160;to alert companies about possible problems in manufacturing, food safety, or other areas. They don’t necessarily constitute violations&#160;and usually come before warning letters.&#160;</p>
<p>Citations reported in the first quarter of 2017, the latest period available, appear to be down significantly compared with&#160;recent years—but there are important caveats. Citations made during inspections that could lead to further&#160;enforcement actions are withheld from published data until cases are resolved, the agency says. Data for recent months, therefore, may undercount the number of citations actually issued in that period. The agency declined requests for additional data to gauge the number of inspections performed and citations issued in 2017.</p>
<p>In written testimony&#160;(PDF) for his confirmation hearing, Gottlieb pledged to run the FDA “as an impartial and passionate advocate for public health” guided by science. He said the “FDA’s enforcement tools are a bedrock of its mission.”</p>
<p>These initial numbers, however, have watchdogs such as Public Citizen’s Carome worried that Trump’s pledge to roll back red tape&#160;has reached the FDA—potentially endangering Americans who rely on the 17,000-employee agency to protect them. &#160;</p>
<p>“I think there’s little reason to believe that, overall, the industry is doing dramatically better,” he said, reflecting on&#160;the decline in warning letters. “That’s unlikely to be the explanation for the drop in these numbers.”</p> | false | 1 | many aspects daily life sorts activities purchases take granted regulated single federal agency toothpaste use lipstick apply medicines take160to food eat food drug administration supposed stand consumers faulty products could harm160it oversees16024 trillion160of us economysome 20 cents every dollar americans spend in160the first months of160donald trumps presidency fda shown signs may be160retreating160from mission january july agency sent 265 warning letters companies notifying alleged serious violations federal rules thats lowest tally first seven months year since 2008 according review letters posted fdas website compared first seven months obama administration thats 8 percent decline average 30 percent drop the160number letters sent period eight years barack obama president march trump160nominated16045yearold scott gottlieb run fda confirmed160by senate may hes160embraced muscular regulation past months agency recently160asked drugmaker endo international plc take opioid painkiller market160and proposed ratcheting amount nicotine cigarettes nonaddictive levels160 gottlieb also worked agency president george w bush critical fda practices past late 2011 resident fellow conservative american enterprise institute wrote oped160for the160wall street journal suggesting regulators enforcement approach contributed generic drug shortages driving costs pharmaceutical companies160 concerns with160product safety valid wrote fda manufacturers often dont understand drugproduction processes well enough detect root cause problems instead calling targeted fixes troubled plants agency often taken costly shotgun approach requires upgrades virtually everywhere echoed remarks in160congressional testimony160pdf later month fda response questions drop warning letters trump says theres order slow enforcement gottlieb doesnt plan soften regulators approach commissioner gottlieb fda support vigorously enforce agencys current laws regulations fda spokeswoman lyndsay meyer said email160any honest analysis agencys overall enforcement statistics reflect results comparable annual statistics previous years enforcement statistics reflect actions initiated many months sometimes year prior reporting final action besides warning letters fda variety tools160to get companies comply food drug safety laws serious violations order recalls seize products seek courtordered injunctions agency obtained16017 injunctions 2016 fiscal year160pdf ended sept 30 also criminal investigation office help initiate prosecutions160the160fda declined provide additional data enforcement activities 2017 including total number inspections citing ongoing investigations160agency representatives also contend160its early fairly assess fda enforcement trump looking data makes public160 nevertheless warning letters remain one160indicator agencys enforcement intensity slowdown160would consistent reports diminished activity federal agencies since trump campaigned promise of160cutting regulations took office environmental protection agency brought fewer actions collected smaller fines compared previous administrations period according aug 10 report the160environmental integrity project nonpartisan160watchdog group160penalties levied financial regulators wall street firms significantly well wall street journal reported aug 6 slowdown isnt across board however first six months new160administration occupational safety health administration conducted workplace inspections pace similar first six months 2016 bloomberg reported aug 3 however oshas reporting workplace fatalities falling wall street journal160said aug 27 fda conducts thousands inspections year us globally sending companies detailed observations possible violations manufacturers dont address serious problems160a warning letter may follow sometimes months160or year inspectors first find something wrong160 letters potent tool alert both160companies public trouble160at manufacturing plants sites agencys policy160pdf post warning letters publicly published within weeks sent target company example august 2015 letter snackmaking giant fritolay inc cited insanitary conditions plant pulaski tennesee could lead food products become contaminated filth rendered injurious health fda pointed leaks roof peeling paint directly exposed food production lines cookie dough cheese filling leaking machinery160and large areas plant soiled apparent food debris dust inspection following july fda determined fritolay fixed problems160fritolay didnt respond request160for comment october 2016 letter chinese dental implantmaker stated that160tanks water plant unidentified greenbrown particulate accumulation160the water used steamclean implants throughout manufacturing process160as result fda said would stop products entering us concerns addressed one fda official agency allowed bloomberg interview condition wouldnt identified said160theres natural variation pace enforcement activities fda prefers evaluate performance full year data warning letters160represent one their160more forceful instruments use trying assure highquality manufacturing processes said eric160sacks director healthcare product alerts ecri institute monitors safety medical products said number could decline many reasons didnt necessarily reflect drawback enforcement voluntary product recalls initiated companies declined160sacks said another potential contributor a160dip regulatory activity may tied administrations slow pace filling federal posts former fda official said pending matters previous administration also sometimes delayed said joshua sharfstein first fda political appointee under160obama definitely enforcement actions held review 2009 said sharfstein associate dean johns hopkins bloomberg school public health change warningletter activity year hasnt uniform across fda regulator operates network district offices several national centers focused specific industries drugs medical devices food tobacco activity varies across units according fda data sharpest drop group regulates medical devices stopped publishing warning160letters since midnovember 2016 center devices radiological health posted single warning letter regarding st jude heart implants previously recalled battery problems160a spokesman st jude parent company abbott laboratories said email company making progress toward resolving fdas concerns 2016 device center sent 18 warning letters end july average 2009 2016 device center sent 48 letters manufacturers first seven months year meyer fda spokeswoman said email device center issued additional warning letters11 totalbut didnt specify sent160or werent posted publicly said160the center working improve issuance posting process slowdown enforcement would worrisome said160michael carome director public citizens health research group watchdog organization reviewed data analyzed bloomberg dramatic dropoff warning letters medical device makers160appears particularly problematic carome said huge market hundreds thousands products explained fda oversight critically important make sure arent defects malfunctions properly reported fdas food regulator center food safety applied nutrition ensures safety americas food supply polices dietary supplements oversees cosmetics office process implementing new rules related food safety modernization act signed law 2011 warning letter rate dropped significantly year160compared with1602016 fda official said new rules focus preventing contaminated food entering160the market rather reacting160after fact agency wants help companies understand new regulations enforcing said160the agency160has issued blanket restrictions certain food imports regions record problems he160noted including cilantro mexico160and shrimp malaysiaactions noted wouldnt show food safety centers warning letter tallies food center sent nine letters january july year compared 36 sent period last year fda official said effort put new rules place may affected agency160activity fda sprawling agency beyond white oak maryland headquarters operates 19 district offices across us puerto rico outposts empowered issue warning letters regarding food drugs devices other160products regulated agency far issued half agency warning letters 2017 numbers have160dropped well first seven months year district offices responsible 168 letters compared 228 period 2016 thats 30 percent declinethe percentage drop agency overallfrom average january july pace eight160years obama administration michael jacobson cofounder president healthadvocacy group160center science public interest called drop fda warning letters ominous sign trumps antiregulation160rhetoric160has become official policy americans get sickor get wellif laws ensuring safety food drugs enforced said email pace warning letters 160this year seems match pace set administration george w bush average agency overall issued 251 warning letters january july period year 2005 2009 close 265 issued overall year warning letters prior 2005 archived fdas website bush left office scope fda authority expanded include tobacco enforcement activity fdas center tobacco products created result additional powers conferred congress picked 2017 49 warning letters sent july exceeds 42 sent in160the period 2016 bloombergs analysis excludes warning letters sent tobacco retailers fda issues hundreds stores sell tobacco minors agency reports letters separately likewise160the center drug evaluation research regulates pharmaceuticals overthecounter products toothpaste issued slightly warning letters year over160the period 2016 beyond warning letters ways view fda performance one data set agency publishes tracks number citations issued by160inspectors citations observations recorded160to alert companies possible problems manufacturing food safety areas dont necessarily constitute violations160and usually come warning letters160 citations reported first quarter 2017 latest period available appear significantly compared with160recent yearsbut important caveats citations made inspections could lead further160enforcement actions withheld published data cases resolved agency says data recent months therefore may undercount number citations actually issued period agency declined requests additional data gauge number inspections performed citations issued 2017 written testimony160pdf confirmation hearing gottlieb pledged run fda impartial passionate advocate public health guided science said fdas enforcement tools bedrock mission initial numbers however watchdogs public citizens carome worried trumps pledge roll back red tape160has reached fdapotentially endangering americans rely 17000employee agency protect 160 think theres little reason believe overall industry dramatically better said reflecting on160the decline warning letters thats unlikely explanation drop numbers | 1,333 |
<p />
<p>Some years ago, when I was Business Week's columnist, an up-and-coming academic economist published his conclusions that raising the minimum wage did not cause unemployment.&#160; An implication was that labor unions did not cause unemployment by forcing up wages. &#160;</p>
<p>&lt;img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-14896" style="margin: 5px;" src="https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Paul-Craig-Roberts.jpg" alt="Paul Craig Roberts" width="256" height="180" srcset="https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Paul-Craig-Roberts.jpg 256w, https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Paul-Craig-Roberts-150x105.jpg 150w" sizes="(max-width: 256px) 100vw, 256px" /&gt;</p>
<p>These conclusions flew in the face of economic theory.&#160; Theory held that employees were paid the value of their marginal product. The value of the marginal product of labor is a measure of labor's contribution to the firm's revenues. As a factory, for example, increases its work force, after initially rising, the contribution of each additional employee to output falls. Think of it in this way: as the work force expands, the fixed size of the factory means that additional workers have less technology and capital per capita with which to work.&#160;</p>
<p>Thus, after some point, the marginal product of additional workers falls. The value of the worker's marginal product is his output times the price of the product.</p>
<p>Translated, that means that employers expand the work force to the point that the last person hired adds as much value to the firm's output as the cost of his wage.</p>
<p>Therefore, arbitrarily raising wages beyond this point by legislation or strikes would mean that the last employees hired cost more than they contribute to the value of the company's output. (The wage rises, but not the marginal product of labor). In other words, the work force would be downsized to the point that the value of the marginal product of the last unit of labor hired equaled the higher wage. Think of it this way: as the number of employees shrink, the capital and technology of the firm is spread among fewer workers, making them more productive.</p>
<p>I pounded the up-and-coming economist pretty hard for his conclusions.&#160; Having grown with age more skeptical of all explanations, today I probably would report his views, commend him for his courage in taking on established wisdom, and say that his findings should be examined for their correctness.</p>
<p>Like physics, or chemistry, or law, or history, or literature, or whatever, there are far too many areas of economics for one economist to be informed about and to keep up with. I don't know whether the economist I took to the woodshed prevailed and changed the theory of wage determination or whether some fault was found in his work.</p>
<p>California entrepreneur Ron Unz has reopened the case for raising the minimum wage. Unz advocates for a $12 per hour minimum wage. Allowing for an eight-hour five-day work week with two weeks' vacation, this would produce an annual income of $24,000, the poverty level income for a family.</p>
<p>Unz has received more favorable attention than I gave the academic economist back in the 1980s or 1990s.</p>
<p>Unz <a href="http://www.unz.com/article/the-conservative-case-for-a-higher-minimum-wage/" type="external">makes a good case</a>. If Americans were paid a living wage for the jobs that Mexicans manage to do by living 10 to a trailer, illegal immigration would decline. Unz can convincingly argue that a higher minimum wage would actually increase the employment of American citizens as they would be able to scrape by on the wages from the higher minimum wage.</p>
<p>I endorse Unz's proposal with reservations. My doubts about a healthy rise in the minimum wage are not based on the economic theory that the value of the marginal product curve of labor is the firm's demand curve for labor. Nor am I opposed to a reduction of illegal immigration or to paying people a living wage. If the working poor made enough to live on, the social welfare budget could be cut.</p>
<p>From my standpoint, the problem with raising the minimum wage to a survivable level is that it pacifies the millions of Americans who are being oppressed by the greed of the one percent and the public officials who serve them. Making the survival of the oppressed easier keeps them from being in the streets protesting the rising inequality of income and wealth that jobs offshoring, financial deregulation, and cuts in social welfare programs such as food stamps have produced in America.</p>
<p>The ladders of upward mobility that made America an opportunity society have been dismantled by the movement abroad of America's high value-added, high productivity jobs, leaving displaced Americans with only lowly paid domestic service jobs, such as retail clerks, waitresses, bartenders, and hospital orderlies. Making low pay jobs more livable makes the dismantling of the opportunity society more acceptable.</p>
<p>I think that Unz is correct that a significant rise in the minimum wage would both reduce illegal immigration by making it possible for Americans to survive on minimum wage jobs and provide a poverty level income for millions of Americans who currently live below the poverty line. But this amelioration of hardship suppresses protests and rebellion.</p>
<p>To recover justice, a reasonable distribution of income, the accountability of government, corporations, and banksters to the rule of law, and to revive the growth of consumer demand on which the success of the US economy depends, the existing order that serves the one percent needs to be altered. The ladders of upward mobility must be restored.</p>
<p>What is more imperative, a rise in the minimum wage that pacifies the work force and the downtrodden by making their survival easier, or a rising swell of disaffection that ultimately reforms or overthrows a government that is unaccountable both to law and to the people?</p>
<p>What I learned as a Washington insider for a quarter of a century is that Washington buys compliance. By purchasing compliance Washington can continue to masquerade the US as "the indispensable people, a light unto the world," while Washington murders people in half a dozen countries and destroys the infrastructure, housing, and environment of those countries, simultaneously dispossessing the American middle class, destroying civil liberty, and locking the poor into an underclass.</p>
<p>Until the government is brought back into compliance with the rule of law and the will of the people, ameliorating hardships sustains the evil empire.</p>
<p>Unz is a genuine reformer.&#160; But reforms can have unintended consequences, and that is what worries me about raising the minimum wage.</p> | false | 1 | years ago business weeks columnist upandcoming academic economist published conclusions raising minimum wage cause unemployment160 implication labor unions cause unemployment forcing wages 160 ltimg classalignleft sizefull wpimage14896 stylemargin 5px srchttpswwwforeignpolicyjournalcomwpcontentuploads201204paulcraigrobertsjpg altpaul craig roberts width256 height180 srcsethttpswwwforeignpolicyjournalcomwpcontentuploads201204paulcraigrobertsjpg 256w httpswwwforeignpolicyjournalcomwpcontentuploads201204paulcraigroberts150x105jpg 150w sizesmaxwidth 256px 100vw 256px gt conclusions flew face economic theory160 theory held employees paid value marginal product value marginal product labor measure labors contribution firms revenues factory example increases work force initially rising contribution additional employee output falls think way work force expands fixed size factory means additional workers less technology capital per capita work160 thus point marginal product additional workers falls value workers marginal product output times price product translated means employers expand work force point last person hired adds much value firms output cost wage therefore arbitrarily raising wages beyond point legislation strikes would mean last employees hired cost contribute value companys output wage rises marginal product labor words work force would downsized point value marginal product last unit labor hired equaled higher wage think way number employees shrink capital technology firm spread among fewer workers making productive pounded upandcoming economist pretty hard conclusions160 grown age skeptical explanations today probably would report views commend courage taking established wisdom say findings examined correctness like physics chemistry law history literature whatever far many areas economics one economist informed keep dont know whether economist took woodshed prevailed changed theory wage determination whether fault found work california entrepreneur ron unz reopened case raising minimum wage unz advocates 12 per hour minimum wage allowing eighthour fiveday work week two weeks vacation would produce annual income 24000 poverty level income family unz received favorable attention gave academic economist back 1980s 1990s unz makes good case americans paid living wage jobs mexicans manage living 10 trailer illegal immigration would decline unz convincingly argue higher minimum wage would actually increase employment american citizens would able scrape wages higher minimum wage endorse unzs proposal reservations doubts healthy rise minimum wage based economic theory value marginal product curve labor firms demand curve labor opposed reduction illegal immigration paying people living wage working poor made enough live social welfare budget could cut standpoint problem raising minimum wage survivable level pacifies millions americans oppressed greed one percent public officials serve making survival oppressed easier keeps streets protesting rising inequality income wealth jobs offshoring financial deregulation cuts social welfare programs food stamps produced america ladders upward mobility made america opportunity society dismantled movement abroad americas high valueadded high productivity jobs leaving displaced americans lowly paid domestic service jobs retail clerks waitresses bartenders hospital orderlies making low pay jobs livable makes dismantling opportunity society acceptable think unz correct significant rise minimum wage would reduce illegal immigration making possible americans survive minimum wage jobs provide poverty level income millions americans currently live poverty line amelioration hardship suppresses protests rebellion recover justice reasonable distribution income accountability government corporations banksters rule law revive growth consumer demand success us economy depends existing order serves one percent needs altered ladders upward mobility must restored imperative rise minimum wage pacifies work force downtrodden making survival easier rising swell disaffection ultimately reforms overthrows government unaccountable law people learned washington insider quarter century washington buys compliance purchasing compliance washington continue masquerade us indispensable people light unto world washington murders people half dozen countries destroys infrastructure housing environment countries simultaneously dispossessing american middle class destroying civil liberty locking poor underclass government brought back compliance rule law people ameliorating hardships sustains evil empire unz genuine reformer160 reforms unintended consequences worries raising minimum wage | 580 |
<p>Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon directed by the excellent Mr. Ang Lee is a sort of Charlie’s Angels for sophisticates. Good as Mr Lee is, one sometimes finds oneself observing of his films that they are very well done while asking oneself if, after all, they were unquestionably worth doing. So it is with this film, which mixes together a 19th century redaction of ancient Chinese legends, the movies’ long love affair with Oriental-style kick-fighting, some cinematic “magic realism” and a large dollop of Hollywood feminism in a brew which never, to my taste, takes on a flavor of its own. Or rather, insofar as it is flavored at all, it has the familiar, rotten taste of the feminist parable to which it is forever making a tentative approach before drawing back again in the direction of a more traditional love story.</p>
<p>We begin with the arrival of a legendary martial arts master of the even more legendary Wudan, one Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun-Fat), at the home of his old friend and adviser Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh), who is the widow of a comrade-in-arms killed in battle. Having defeated all opponents, Li decides to retire and present his famous sword, the Green Destiny, to an old and much-revered friend, Sir Te (Lung Sihung). Shu Lien assists in the transfer. But almost immediately after its arrival at the house of Sir Te, the Green Destiny is stolen by a lithe cat-burglar who is able to perform acrobatic prodigies in escaping the pursuit of Shu Lien—herself an accomplished leaper and kicker.</p>
<p>It is at this point that we realize that, like the major actors, we have left the earth and will only touch down again when it is convenient for the author. The burglar and the pursuing Shu Lien leap from rooftop to rooftop in such a way as to suggest that Mr Lee and his screenwriters, Wang Hui Ling, James Schamus and Tsai Kuo Jung, are trying to bend our disbelief without quite breaking it. Never in nature have there been such leaps, but neither do the pursued nor the pursuer take to the air in full Superman style. It looks more as if they had suddenly been transported to a planet where the gravity was about a tenth of what it is on earth so that they can simply bound like kangaroos for great distances without the inconvenience of having to come down until they have attained the neighboring rooftop. When they do come down, and come face to face, they engage in a kicking, chopping sort of combat, both with and without weapons, which while remarkably graceful and athletic is itself not (at this stage anyway) redolent of the supernatural.</p>
<p>The fight is inconclusive, but the thief gets away. We soon learn that the cat-burglar disguise has masked a demure young aristocratic girl called Jen (Zhang Ziyi), daughter of the provincial governor, who is about to be married. She has already confided in Shu Lien, whom she professes to regard as a sister, that she is not happy. “I’m getting married soon, but I haven’t lived the life I want”—a life, she goes on to explain, characterized by freedom, especially the freedom to choose her own mate, but also adventure, “like one of the heroes I read about in books.” Now it emerges, however, that while mom and dad thought she was in school, or at least being tutored by her governess, she has already lived a life nearly as adventurous as that of Li Mu Bai, whose past is only vaguely alluded to. For the governess is in fact the notorious woman warrior, Jade Fox (Cheng Pei Pei), who has stolen the secrets of the Wudan and taught herself, and subsequently Jen, the arts of combat with which she means to avenge her sex for their exclusion by the knights of Wudan.</p>
<p>The suggestion of a distinctively modern parable of the relation between the sexes is carried as far as the hint of a lesbian interest by Jade Fox in her young protégé and thus, perhaps, of a budding proto-feminist cabal. At one level, the movie’s feminism could be construed as amounting to little more than some Brandy Chastain-style shirt-waving. Jade Fox and Jen, if they stand for anything, stand for Title IX funding for girls’ martial arts. But there is an underlying seriousness implied by the imagery of war. Jade Fox certainly, and maybe Jen too, not only want to compete with the boys, they want to kill them. The Green Destiny’s phallic implications—stolen by a girl!—suggest a castration anxiety for which these predatory females are only too happy to give some foundation.</p>
<p>But all such meanings in the story are raised only to be abandoned. Or rather, perhaps, we are invited to adopt the view of Jen herself, a beautiful and highly talented young woman who finds herself torn (as so many talented and beautiful young women do) between the feminist imperative to her left and, on the right, the comforting patronage that the masculine is always ready to extend to her. When Li Mu Bai sees her fight, he immediately recognizes her potential and asks her to consent to be his pupil. Moreover, we are also shown in long flashback Jen’s capture by desert bandits and her subsequent life among them, during which she becomes the lover of the bandit chieftain, Lo (Chang Chen). If one cannot quite imagine her barefoot and pregnant in some Mongolian mountain cave, neither is she altogether immune to the charms of a more traditionally feminine domesticity.</p>
<p>The problem is that the movie offers us no real option for the latter. Jen’s own mom and dad are presumably busy professionals, since they remain extremely shadowy figures on the periphery of the action and are apparently so uninvolved in her life that they don’t even notice when she has been kidnapped by bandits. And how, we wonder, did Jade Fox manage to teach her all those secrets of the Wudan right under her parents’ noses? Didn’t they ever wonder about all that kicking and leaping going on down in the rumpus room? For Jen, the established sexual order only exists in the form of Lo, who offers her a gang rather than a family, and Li’s ambiguously sexual pursuit of her. He could be another lover, or he and Shu Lien together could offer her an alternative family, though these remain only speculative alternatives.</p>
<p>At any rate, no decision can be made until she is prepared to break off with the wicked Jade Fox, and by the time she does this it is too late. There is a climactic battle between Li and Jade Fox, and Jen, as usual without a thought for her parents, retreats to a sort of dream-world with Lo. None of it makes any sense to me, nor have I seen any critic prepared to explain it. Rather, the movie garners kudos on the basis of its style and visual inventiveness, especially of the fight sequences which were choreographed by the guy who did them for The Matrix. The martial arts movie, we are told, will never be the same. Perhaps this is true. Those of us who had no great love for the martial arts movie in the first place (except in the witty hands—and feet—of Jackie Chan) may reflect that it is only fitting that its already tenuous connection to reality should have vanished into the clouds with Ang Lee.</p> | false | 1 | crouching tiger hidden dragon directed excellent mr ang lee sort charlies angels sophisticates good mr lee one sometimes finds oneself observing films well done asking oneself unquestionably worth film mixes together 19th century redaction ancient chinese legends movies long love affair orientalstyle kickfighting cinematic magic realism large dollop hollywood feminism brew never taste takes flavor rather insofar flavored familiar rotten taste feminist parable forever making tentative approach drawing back direction traditional love story begin arrival legendary martial arts master even legendary wudan one li mu bai chow yunfat home old friend adviser shu lien michelle yeoh widow comradeinarms killed battle defeated opponents li decides retire present famous sword green destiny old muchrevered friend sir te lung sihung shu lien assists transfer almost immediately arrival house sir te green destiny stolen lithe catburglar able perform acrobatic prodigies escaping pursuit shu lienherself accomplished leaper kicker point realize like major actors left earth touch convenient author burglar pursuing shu lien leap rooftop rooftop way suggest mr lee screenwriters wang hui ling james schamus tsai kuo jung trying bend disbelief without quite breaking never nature leaps neither pursued pursuer take air full superman style looks suddenly transported planet gravity tenth earth simply bound like kangaroos great distances without inconvenience come attained neighboring rooftop come come face face engage kicking chopping sort combat without weapons remarkably graceful athletic stage anyway redolent supernatural fight inconclusive thief gets away soon learn catburglar disguise masked demure young aristocratic girl called jen zhang ziyi daughter provincial governor married already confided shu lien professes regard sister happy im getting married soon havent lived life wanta life goes explain characterized freedom especially freedom choose mate also adventure like one heroes read books emerges however mom dad thought school least tutored governess already lived life nearly adventurous li mu bai whose past vaguely alluded governess fact notorious woman warrior jade fox cheng pei pei stolen secrets wudan taught subsequently jen arts combat means avenge sex exclusion knights wudan suggestion distinctively modern parable relation sexes carried far hint lesbian interest jade fox young protégé thus perhaps budding protofeminist cabal one level movies feminism could construed amounting little brandy chastainstyle shirtwaving jade fox jen stand anything stand title ix funding girls martial arts underlying seriousness implied imagery war jade fox certainly maybe jen want compete boys want kill green destinys phallic implicationsstolen girlsuggest castration anxiety predatory females happy give foundation meanings story raised abandoned rather perhaps invited adopt view jen beautiful highly talented young woman finds torn many talented beautiful young women feminist imperative left right comforting patronage masculine always ready extend li mu bai sees fight immediately recognizes potential asks consent pupil moreover also shown long flashback jens capture desert bandits subsequent life among becomes lover bandit chieftain lo chang chen one quite imagine barefoot pregnant mongolian mountain cave neither altogether immune charms traditionally feminine domesticity problem movie offers us real option latter jens mom dad presumably busy professionals since remain extremely shadowy figures periphery action apparently uninvolved life dont even notice kidnapped bandits wonder jade fox manage teach secrets wudan right parents noses didnt ever wonder kicking leaping going rumpus room jen established sexual order exists form lo offers gang rather family lis ambiguously sexual pursuit could another lover shu lien together could offer alternative family though remain speculative alternatives rate decision made prepared break wicked jade fox time late climactic battle li jade fox jen usual without thought parents retreats sort dreamworld lo none makes sense seen critic prepared explain rather movie garners kudos basis style visual inventiveness especially fight sequences choreographed guy matrix martial arts movie told never perhaps true us great love martial arts movie first place except witty handsand feetof jackie chan may reflect fitting already tenuous connection reality vanished clouds ang lee | 625 |
<p>By Wa Lone and Antoni Slodkowski</p>
<p>YANGON (Reuters) – When the former U.N. chief Kofi Annan wrapped up his year-long probe into Myanmar’s troubled northwest on Aug. 24, he publicly warned that an excessive army response to violence would only make a simmering conflict between Rohingya insurgents and Myanmar security forces worse.</p>
<p>Just three hours later, shortly after 8 p.m., Rohingya insurgent leader Ata Ullah sent a message to his supporters urging them to head to the foot of the remote Mayu mountain range with metal objects to use as weapons.</p>
<p>A little after midnight, 600 km northwest of the country’s largest city Yangon, a rag-tag army of Rohingya militants, wielding knives, sticks, small weapons and crude bombs, attacked 30 police posts and an army base.</p>
<p>“If 200 or 300 people come out, 50 will die. God willing, the remaining 150 can kill them with knives,” said Ata Ullah in a separate voice message to his supporters. It was circulated around the time of the offensive on mobile messaging apps and a recording was subsequently reviewed by Reuters.</p>
<p>The assault by Ata Ullah’s group, the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), was its biggest yet. Last October, when the group first surfaced, it attacked just three police border posts using about 400 fighters, according to Myanmar government estimates. The Myanmar army is now estimating up to 6,500 people took part in the August offensive.</p>
<p>Its ability to mount a much more ambitious assault indicates that many young Rohingya men have been galvanized into supporting ARSA following the army crackdown after the October attacks, according to interviews with more than a dozen Rohingya and Rakhine villagers, members of the security forces and local administrators. The brutal October response led to allegations that troops burned down villages and killed and raped civilians.</p>
<p>The crisis in ethnically-riven Rakhine state is the biggest to face Myanmar’s leader Aung San Suu Kyi, and her handling of it has been a source of disillusionment among the democracy champion’s former supporters in the West. United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres appealed to Myanmar authorities on Tuesday to end violence against Rohingya Muslims, warning of the risk of ethnic cleansing, a possible humanitarian catastrophe, and regional destabilization.</p>
<p>Rohingya leaders and some policy analysts say Suu Kyi’s failure to tackle the grievances of the Muslim minority, who have lived under apartheid-like conditions for generations, has bolstered support for the militants.</p>
<p>MAJOR COUNTEROFFENSIVE</p>
<p>The fledgling militia has been transformed into a network of cells in dozens of villages, capable of staging a widespread offensive.</p>
<p>Myanmar’s government has declared ARSA a terrorist organization. It has also accused it of killing Muslim civilians to prevent them from cooperating with the authorities, and of torching Rohingya villages, allegations the group denies.</p>
<p>The latest assault has provoked a major counteroffensive in which the military says it killed almost 400 insurgents and in which 13 members of the security forces have died.</p>
<p>Rohingya villagers and human rights groups say the military has also attacked villages indiscriminately and torched homes. Myanmar government says it is carrying out a lawful counter-terrorism operation and that the troops have been instructed not to harm civilians.</p>
<p>Nearly 150,000 Rohingya have fled to Bangladesh since Aug. 25, leading to fears of a humanitarian crisis. Some 26,750 non-Muslim villagers have also been displaced inside Myanmar.</p>
<p>Suu Kyi has said she would adopt recommendations of Kofi Annan’s panel that encouraged more integration. She has also previously appealed for understanding of her nation’s ethnic complexities.</p>
<p>In a statement on Wednesday, she blamed “terrorists” for “a huge iceberg of misinformation” on the strife in Rakhine. She made no mention of the Rohingya who have fled.</p>
<p>Suu Kyi’s spokesman, Zaw Htay, could not be immediately reached for comment.</p>
<p>On Monday, however, he told Reuters Myanmar was carrying out a counterterrorism operation and taking care of “the safety of civilians, including Muslims and non-Muslims.”</p>
<p>“NOT HOW HUMANS LIVE”</p>
<p>In an interview with Reuters in March, Ata Ullah linked the creation of the group to communal violence between Buddhists and Muslims in Rakhine in 2012, when nearly 200 people were killed and 140,000, mostly Rohingya, displaced.</p>
<p>“We can’t turn the lights on at night. We can’t move from one place to another during the day,” he told Reuters in previously unpublished remarks, referring to restrictions placed on the Rohingya population’s behavior and movements.</p>
<p>“Everywhere checkpoints: every entry and every exit. That’s not how humans live.”</p>
<p>A Rohingya community leader who has stayed in northern Rakhine said that, while the rest of Myanmar enjoyed new freedoms under Suu Kyi after decades of&#160;military rule, the Muslim minority have been increasingly marginalized.</p>
<p>Support for the insurgents grew after the military operation last year, he said.</p>
<p>“When the security forces came to our village, all of the villagers apologized and asked them not to set the houses on fire – but they shot the people who made that request,” he said.</p>
<p>“People suffered because their sons got killed in front of them even though they begged for mercy, their daughters, sisters were raped – how could they live without constantly thinking about it, that they want to fight against it, whether they die or not.”</p>
<p>Reuters couldn’t independently confirm the villagers’ accounts.</p>
<p>Last month, a Myanmar government probe – led by former head of military intelligence and now Vice President, Myint Swe – rejected allegations of crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing during the crackdown last year.</p>
<p>CELL NETWORK</p>
<p>Villagers and police officers in the area say that ARSA had since last October established cells in dozens of villages, where local activists then recruited others.</p>
<p>“People shared their feelings with others from the community, they talked to each other, they told their friends or acquaintances from different regions – and then they exploded,” said the Rohingya community leader.</p>
<p>Rohi Mullarah, a village elder from the Kyee Hnoke Thee village in northern Buthidaung, said the leaders sent their followers regular and frequent messages via apps like WhatsApp and WeChat, encouraging them to fight for freedom and human rights and enabling them to mobilize many people without the risk of being caught going into the heavily militarized areas to recruit.</p>
<p>“They mainly sent phone messages to the villagers, they didn’t … move people from place to place,” he said. He said his village was not involved in the insurgency and even posted a signboard in front of it that said any militants would be attacked by the villagers if they attempt to recruit people.</p>
<p>Many Rohingya elders have for decades rejected violence and sought dialogue with the government. While ARSA has now gained some influence, especially among young, disaffected men, many Rohingya elders have condemned the group’s violent tactics.</p>
<p>CAMPAIGN OF TERROR</p>
<p>In recent months there had been reports of killings of local administrators, government informers and village chiefs in the Rakhine region, leading to speculation the insurgents were adopting brutal tactics to stop information on their activities from leaking to the security forces.</p>
<p>“They cut out the government communication by instigating a campaign of fear and took charge in the region,” said Sein Lwin, police chief in Rakhine. .</p>
<p>An army source directly involved in operations in northern Rakhine also said it was now much more difficult to get information on ARSA’s plans.</p>
<p>The strategy resulted in the “shut down of government mechanisms” in some places “because no government servants dared to stay there”, the army source said.</p>
<p>A village head from northern Buthidaung township, who asked not to be named, said the insurgents called him several times pressing him to&#160;allow some young villagers to take part in their training – an offer he refused.</p>
<p>“I tried to stay safe and sometimes I had to sleep at the police station and local administrator’s house,” he said.</p>
<p>INTERCEPTED MESSAGES</p>
<p>Despite the largely successful clamp down on information by the insurgents, it was a tip off by an informer that stopped the Aug. 25 attacks from being much worse for the Myanmar security services, the army source said.&#160;</p>
<p>About an hour after Ata Ullah’s men headed for the jungle in the evening of Aug. 25,&#160;the army received a signal from the Rohingya informer saying the attack was coming.</p>
<p>The 9 p.m. message mentioned imminent multiple attacks, but it did not say where they would occur. The warning was enough for the security forces to withdraw some troops to larger stations and to reinforce strategic locations, saving many lives on the government side, the military source said.</p>
<p>The raids by the insurgents came in waves from around 1 a.m. until sunrise, and took place mostly in Maungdaw township where Ata Ullah staged his three attacks in October. This time, though, the distance between the northern- and southern-most points was as long as 100 km (60 miles). The Rohingya also struck in the north of the neighboring Buthidaung township, including an audacious bid to storm an army base.</p>
<p>“We were surprised they attacked across such a wide geographical area – it shook the whole region,” said the army source.</p> | false | 1 | wa lone antoni slodkowski yangon reuters former un chief kofi annan wrapped yearlong probe myanmars troubled northwest aug 24 publicly warned excessive army response violence would make simmering conflict rohingya insurgents myanmar security forces worse three hours later shortly 8 pm rohingya insurgent leader ata ullah sent message supporters urging head foot remote mayu mountain range metal objects use weapons little midnight 600 km northwest countrys largest city yangon ragtag army rohingya militants wielding knives sticks small weapons crude bombs attacked 30 police posts army base 200 300 people come 50 die god willing remaining 150 kill knives said ata ullah separate voice message supporters circulated around time offensive mobile messaging apps recording subsequently reviewed reuters assault ata ullahs group arakan rohingya salvation army arsa biggest yet last october group first surfaced attacked three police border posts using 400 fighters according myanmar government estimates myanmar army estimating 6500 people took part august offensive ability mount much ambitious assault indicates many young rohingya men galvanized supporting arsa following army crackdown october attacks according interviews dozen rohingya rakhine villagers members security forces local administrators brutal october response led allegations troops burned villages killed raped civilians crisis ethnicallyriven rakhine state biggest face myanmars leader aung san suu kyi handling source disillusionment among democracy champions former supporters west united nations secretarygeneral antonio guterres appealed myanmar authorities tuesday end violence rohingya muslims warning risk ethnic cleansing possible humanitarian catastrophe regional destabilization rohingya leaders policy analysts say suu kyis failure tackle grievances muslim minority lived apartheidlike conditions generations bolstered support militants major counteroffensive fledgling militia transformed network cells dozens villages capable staging widespread offensive myanmars government declared arsa terrorist organization also accused killing muslim civilians prevent cooperating authorities torching rohingya villages allegations group denies latest assault provoked major counteroffensive military says killed almost 400 insurgents 13 members security forces died rohingya villagers human rights groups say military also attacked villages indiscriminately torched homes myanmar government says carrying lawful counterterrorism operation troops instructed harm civilians nearly 150000 rohingya fled bangladesh since aug 25 leading fears humanitarian crisis 26750 nonmuslim villagers also displaced inside myanmar suu kyi said would adopt recommendations kofi annans panel encouraged integration also previously appealed understanding nations ethnic complexities statement wednesday blamed terrorists huge iceberg misinformation strife rakhine made mention rohingya fled suu kyis spokesman zaw htay could immediately reached comment monday however told reuters myanmar carrying counterterrorism operation taking care safety civilians including muslims nonmuslims humans live interview reuters march ata ullah linked creation group communal violence buddhists muslims rakhine 2012 nearly 200 people killed 140000 mostly rohingya displaced cant turn lights night cant move one place another day told reuters previously unpublished remarks referring restrictions placed rohingya populations behavior movements everywhere checkpoints every entry every exit thats humans live rohingya community leader stayed northern rakhine said rest myanmar enjoyed new freedoms suu kyi decades of160military rule muslim minority increasingly marginalized support insurgents grew military operation last year said security forces came village villagers apologized asked set houses fire shot people made request said people suffered sons got killed front even though begged mercy daughters sisters raped could live without constantly thinking want fight whether die reuters couldnt independently confirm villagers accounts last month myanmar government probe led former head military intelligence vice president myint swe rejected allegations crimes humanity ethnic cleansing crackdown last year cell network villagers police officers area say arsa since last october established cells dozens villages local activists recruited others people shared feelings others community talked told friends acquaintances different regions exploded said rohingya community leader rohi mullarah village elder kyee hnoke thee village northern buthidaung said leaders sent followers regular frequent messages via apps like whatsapp wechat encouraging fight freedom human rights enabling mobilize many people without risk caught going heavily militarized areas recruit mainly sent phone messages villagers didnt move people place place said said village involved insurgency even posted signboard front said militants would attacked villagers attempt recruit people many rohingya elders decades rejected violence sought dialogue government arsa gained influence especially among young disaffected men many rohingya elders condemned groups violent tactics campaign terror recent months reports killings local administrators government informers village chiefs rakhine region leading speculation insurgents adopting brutal tactics stop information activities leaking security forces cut government communication instigating campaign fear took charge region said sein lwin police chief rakhine army source directly involved operations northern rakhine also said much difficult get information arsas plans strategy resulted shut government mechanisms places government servants dared stay army source said village head northern buthidaung township asked named said insurgents called several times pressing to160allow young villagers take part training offer refused tried stay safe sometimes sleep police station local administrators house said intercepted messages despite largely successful clamp information insurgents tip informer stopped aug 25 attacks much worse myanmar security services army source said160 hour ata ullahs men headed jungle evening aug 25160the army received signal rohingya informer saying attack coming 9 pm message mentioned imminent multiple attacks say would occur warning enough security forces withdraw troops larger stations reinforce strategic locations saving many lives government side military source said raids insurgents came waves around 1 sunrise took place mostly maungdaw township ata ullah staged three attacks october time though distance northern southernmost points long 100 km 60 miles rohingya also struck north neighboring buthidaung township including audacious bid storm army base surprised attacked across wide geographical area shook whole region said army source | 900 |
<p>WASHINGTON — Nevada’s Republican Sen. Dean Heller placed himself in the wobbly space between two tectonic plates set to collide <a href="" type="internal">when he announced Friday that he would not support President Donald Trump’s American Health Care plan “in this form.”</a></p>
<p>The beltway newsletter Axios dubbed the move a “public waffling.”</p>
<p>Before the announcement, Nevada Democrats had blasted out emails that applied pressure on Heller to oppose the Senate version of the Trump bill as by 2024 it would end the Affordable Care Act’s “federal funding for Medicaid Expansion, which covers 200,000 Nevadans.” Nevada is one of 31 states that expanded Medicaid enrollment under the 2010 measure also known as Obamacare.</p>
<p>Before the Senate bill’s release, the AARP had begun a national TV campaign — with ads in Nevada — that hit the bill for its inclusion of an “age tax” that would allow health care providers to charge older consumers higher premiums than permissible under the Affordable Care Act.</p>
<p>Flanked by GOP Gov. Brian Sandoval, who also opposes the bill, Heller agreed that Medicaid cuts were a major problem with the bill.</p>
<p>“This bill will mean a loss of coverage for millions of Americans and many Nevadans,” Heller said. “It doesn’t protect Nevadans on Medicaid and the most vulnerable Nevadans.”</p>
<p>Math problem</p>
<p>Then came the counter jolt when America’s First Priorities, a super PAC run by former Trump advisers, let it be known it was preparing to hit Heller with a $1 million ad purchase in an effort to move him into the yes column.</p>
<p>Heller’s announcement complicated the GOP’s math appreciably.</p>
<p>On Thursday, as Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell released a working draft of the measure, four conservative Republicans — Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas, Mike Lee of Utah, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Rand Paul of Kentucky — announced they could not support the “draft as written” because it cannot “accomplish the most important promise that we made to Americans: to repeal Obamacare and lower their health care costs.”</p>
<p>The Senate is comprised of 52 Republicans and 48 Democrats and Independents who caucus with Democrats. If there is a 50-50 split, Vice President Mike Pence can break a tie. McConnell needs 50 senators to pass a bill, so the four-senator announcement put the White House in a position of having to draw at least two senators from the party’s right flank to reach the 50-vote mark.</p>
<p>In announcing he was the possible fifth Republican no vote, Heller put Trump and McConnell in a position where they may have to offer to add or drop provisions in order mollify not only Heller, but also moderate GOP Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. That conceivably could force the Trump administration to reach out to Democrats.</p>
<p>But at Friday’s press briefing, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer confirmed that Trump does not believe he will win a single Democratic vote.</p>
<p>On Thursday, Rep. Jacky Rosen, D-Nevada, the likely Democratic challenger to Heller, said in a statement, “People in my district will be personally devastated by this disastrous legislation. Senate Republicans should reject this partisan repeal effort and focus on working across the aisle to lower your costs and expand access to affordable health care for all Americans.”</p>
<p>Some handicappers list Heller as perhaps the most endangered Senate Republican in the 2018 elections, as the Silver State has turned increasingly purple. After backing George W. Bush for president in 2000 and 2004, Nevadans supported President Barack Obama twice by healthy margins in 2008 and 2012. In 2016, Nevadans gave Hillary Clinton a narrow victory with a slim lead of fewer than 30,000 votes. In the race to replace retiring Democratic Minority Leader Harry Reid last year, Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto beat Republican Joe Heck by a similar margin.</p>
<p>In 2011 Sandoval appointed Heller, then a Republican House member, to the seat vacated when GOP John Ensign resigned. When Heller ran for the seat in 2012, he narrowly defeated Democratic Congresswoman Shelley Berkley with 46 percent of the vote to her 45 percent.</p>
<p>Risky business</p>
<p>In such tight circumstances, Heller risks alienating base GOP voters if he helps torpedo the signature Trump health bill. While Trump lost Nevada in the general election, Nevada Republicans favored Trump overwhelmingly in the 2016 caucus.</p>
<p>In a Thursday statement Heller told voters he had “serious concerns about the bill’s impact on the Nevadans who depend on Medicaid.” He posted the measure on his website “so that any Nevadans who wish to review it can do so. As I have consistently stated, if the bill is good for Nevada, I’ll vote for it and if it’s not ­— I won’t.”</p>
<p>No one from Heller’s office could be reached for comment Saturday.</p>
<p>“There is no excuse for any Republican or Democrat to oppose the Senate health care bill outright,” America First Priorities president Brian O. Walsh said in a statement Saturday.</p>
<p>“Senator Heller, who once claimed he would focus on repealing and replacing Obamacare with a willing partner in the White House, appears to be heading down a path with Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and the radical left,” the statement read.“We sure hope he changes his mind as he learns more about the bill. We at America First Policies will make certain that citizens know who stood in the way of repealing and replacing Obamacare, and we will ensure the people’s voices are heard.”</p>
<p>Debra J. Saunders is the White House correspondent for the Las Vegas Review Journal. Contact her at [email protected] or at 202-662-7391. Follow <a href="http://www.twitter.com/DebraJSaunders" type="external">@DebraJSaunders</a> on Twitter.</p> | false | 1 | washington nevadas republican sen dean heller placed wobbly space two tectonic plates set collide announced friday would support president donald trumps american health care plan form beltway newsletter axios dubbed move public waffling announcement nevada democrats blasted emails applied pressure heller oppose senate version trump bill 2024 would end affordable care acts federal funding medicaid expansion covers 200000 nevadans nevada one 31 states expanded medicaid enrollment 2010 measure also known obamacare senate bills release aarp begun national tv campaign ads nevada hit bill inclusion age tax would allow health care providers charge older consumers higher premiums permissible affordable care act flanked gop gov brian sandoval also opposes bill heller agreed medicaid cuts major problem bill bill mean loss coverage millions americans many nevadans heller said doesnt protect nevadans medicaid vulnerable nevadans math problem came counter jolt americas first priorities super pac run former trump advisers let known preparing hit heller 1 million ad purchase effort move yes column hellers announcement complicated gops math appreciably thursday sen majority leader mitch mcconnell released working draft measure four conservative republicans sens ted cruz texas mike lee utah ron johnson wisconsin rand paul kentucky announced could support draft written accomplish important promise made americans repeal obamacare lower health care costs senate comprised 52 republicans 48 democrats independents caucus democrats 5050 split vice president mike pence break tie mcconnell needs 50 senators pass bill foursenator announcement put white house position draw least two senators partys right flank reach 50vote mark announcing possible fifth republican vote heller put trump mcconnell position may offer add drop provisions order mollify heller also moderate gop sens susan collins maine lisa murkowski alaska conceivably could force trump administration reach democrats fridays press briefing white house press secretary sean spicer confirmed trump believe win single democratic vote thursday rep jacky rosen dnevada likely democratic challenger heller said statement people district personally devastated disastrous legislation senate republicans reject partisan repeal effort focus working across aisle lower costs expand access affordable health care americans handicappers list heller perhaps endangered senate republican 2018 elections silver state turned increasingly purple backing george w bush president 2000 2004 nevadans supported president barack obama twice healthy margins 2008 2012 2016 nevadans gave hillary clinton narrow victory slim lead fewer 30000 votes race replace retiring democratic minority leader harry reid last year democrat catherine cortez masto beat republican joe heck similar margin 2011 sandoval appointed heller republican house member seat vacated gop john ensign resigned heller ran seat 2012 narrowly defeated democratic congresswoman shelley berkley 46 percent vote 45 percent risky business tight circumstances heller risks alienating base gop voters helps torpedo signature trump health bill trump lost nevada general election nevada republicans favored trump overwhelmingly 2016 caucus thursday statement heller told voters serious concerns bills impact nevadans depend medicaid posted measure website nevadans wish review consistently stated bill good nevada ill vote wont one hellers office could reached comment saturday excuse republican democrat oppose senate health care bill outright america first priorities president brian walsh said statement saturday senator heller claimed would focus repealing replacing obamacare willing partner white house appears heading path nancy pelosi chuck schumer radical left statement readwe sure hope changes mind learns bill america first policies make certain citizens know stood way repealing replacing obamacare ensure peoples voices heard debra j saunders white house correspondent las vegas review journal contact dsaundersreviewjournalcom 2026627391 follow debrajsaunders twitter | 562 |
<p>WASHINGTON — Where immigrants are concerned, James Wright is OK with people who are here legally, as well as illegally — if they haven’t committed crimes. But turn the talk specifically to the risks and benefits of admitting refugees to the U.S., and the New Jersey resident gives a fraught sigh.</p>
<p>“It’s hard not to be conflicted,” said Wright, 26, an independent who supports President Donald Trump’s proposed travel ban on certain foreigners. “By no means do I want to be cruel and keep people out who need a safe place. But we have to have a better system of thoroughly finding out who they are.”</p>
<p>Wright is part of a group of Americans a new survey suggests are making distinctions between legal immigrants who choose to be here and refugees — who are legal immigrants, too — fleeing persecution in their home countries. A new poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research reflects that divide, with two-thirds of the respondents saying the benefits of legal immigration generally outweigh the risks. But just over half — 52 percent — say refugees pose a great enough risk to further limit their entry into the United States.</p>
<p>Interviews with some of the poll’s participants suggest the distinction may be one of perception in an age of religious and politically inspired violence and 4.8 million refugees fleeing war-scarred Syria.</p>
<p>“Sometimes the vetting might not be quality,” said Randall Bagwell, 33, a Republican from of San Antonio, Texas, the state second to California in settling refugees between Oct. 1 and Jan. 31, according to the State Department. “Nobody can do quality control when they’re just reacting immediately.”</p>
<p />
<p>President Donald Trump has long linked tougher immigration limits to a safer country, and on Monday signed a new travel ban that, in part, will suspend refugee travel to the U.S. for four months except for those already on their way to the United States. The new order, which takes effect on March 16, will impose a 90-day ban on entry to the United States for people from Sudan, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia and Yemen — all Muslim-majority nations — who are seeking new visas. It was Trump’s second effort at a travel ban. The first was blocked by the courts.</p>
<p>Also reflecting his hard line, Trump last week announced to Congress a new office to aid Americans and their families who are victims of immigrant violence. That’s despite years of studies that have shown that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than U.S.-born people.</p>
<p>Much of Trump’s candidacy and young presidency have been powered by the idea that he will protect Americans from “bad dudes” who want to come here, issuing a mix of tough, if vague, policy — from “extreme vetting” to the travel ban, a border wall with Mexico and more.</p>
<p>Americans report conflicting feelings about immigrants just over six weeks into his presidency, the poll suggests. On the one hand, Americans see refugees as a risk apart from other legal immigrants, with a third of Democrats and 8 in 10 Republicans saying the risks are great enough to place more limits on refugees admitted to the U.S. Despite those fears, Americans still see legal immigration generally as a boon, the poll shows. More than 6 in 10 say a major benefit of legal immigration is that it enhances the reputation of the United States as a land of opportunity.</p>
<p>The good and bad of immigration has long been a painful and intensifying national debate. Trump has shown some flexibility — or inconsistency, depending on one’s viewpoint — on his approach. For example, Iraq is no longer on the list of countries whose people are banned. Officials from the Pentagon and State Department had urged the White House to reconsider given Iraq’s key role in fighting the Islamic State group. Also, the new order does not subject Syrians to an indefinite travel ban, as did the original.</p>
<p>Trump also has minimized talk of deporting all of the estimated 11 million people in the U.S. illegally and suggested that he could be open to comprehensive immigration reform. That sparked both interest and skepticism on Capitol Hill, where a solution has stymied Congress for years.</p>
<p>But Trump’s warnings about refugees in particular apparently have stuck in the American consciousness, according to the poll.</p>
<p>Refugees entering the U.S. undergo rigorous background checks, including a search of government databases that list people suspected of having ties to terrorist groups. Processing of refugees can take up to two years — and usually longer for those coming from Syria. After a year in the U.S., refugees are required to check in and obtain green cards. But U.S. officials have acknowledged that information on people coming from Syria, in particular, may be limited.</p>
<p>Mandy Gibson, 37, sees the benefits of admitting legal immigrants — but isn’t so sure about refugees.</p>
<p>“Maybe it’s the media. They are making refugees sound like they aren’t legal immigrants and I don’t necessarily understand, but they are different to me,” said Gibson, who works in a Greensboro, North Carolina, grocery store. Either way, she said, “anybody who is coming from countries that have ISIS really should have a very thorough background check.”</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>The AP-NORC poll of 1,004 adults was conducted Feb. 16-20, using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 3.9 percentage points.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Online:</p>
<p>AP-NORC: http://www.apnorc.org/</p> | false | 1 | washington immigrants concerned james wright ok people legally well illegally havent committed crimes turn talk specifically risks benefits admitting refugees us new jersey resident gives fraught sigh hard conflicted said wright 26 independent supports president donald trumps proposed travel ban certain foreigners means want cruel keep people need safe place better system thoroughly finding wright part group americans new survey suggests making distinctions legal immigrants choose refugees legal immigrants fleeing persecution home countries new poll associated pressnorc center public affairs research reflects divide twothirds respondents saying benefits legal immigration generally outweigh risks half 52 percent say refugees pose great enough risk limit entry united states interviews polls participants suggest distinction may one perception age religious politically inspired violence 48 million refugees fleeing warscarred syria sometimes vetting might quality said randall bagwell 33 republican san antonio texas state second california settling refugees oct 1 jan 31 according state department nobody quality control theyre reacting immediately president donald trump long linked tougher immigration limits safer country monday signed new travel ban part suspend refugee travel us four months except already way united states new order takes effect march 16 impose 90day ban entry united states people sudan syria iran libya somalia yemen muslimmajority nations seeking new visas trumps second effort travel ban first blocked courts also reflecting hard line trump last week announced congress new office aid americans families victims immigrant violence thats despite years studies shown immigrants less likely commit crimes usborn people much trumps candidacy young presidency powered idea protect americans bad dudes want come issuing mix tough vague policy extreme vetting travel ban border wall mexico americans report conflicting feelings immigrants six weeks presidency poll suggests one hand americans see refugees risk apart legal immigrants third democrats 8 10 republicans saying risks great enough place limits refugees admitted us despite fears americans still see legal immigration generally boon poll shows 6 10 say major benefit legal immigration enhances reputation united states land opportunity good bad immigration long painful intensifying national debate trump shown flexibility inconsistency depending ones viewpoint approach example iraq longer list countries whose people banned officials pentagon state department urged white house reconsider given iraqs key role fighting islamic state group also new order subject syrians indefinite travel ban original trump also minimized talk deporting estimated 11 million people us illegally suggested could open comprehensive immigration reform sparked interest skepticism capitol hill solution stymied congress years trumps warnings refugees particular apparently stuck american consciousness according poll refugees entering us undergo rigorous background checks including search government databases list people suspected ties terrorist groups processing refugees take two years usually longer coming syria year us refugees required check obtain green cards us officials acknowledged information people coming syria particular may limited mandy gibson 37 sees benefits admitting legal immigrants isnt sure refugees maybe media making refugees sound like arent legal immigrants dont necessarily understand different said gibson works greensboro north carolina grocery store either way said anybody coming countries isis really thorough background check ___ apnorc poll 1004 adults conducted feb 1620 using sample drawn norcs probabilitybased amerispeak panel designed representative us population margin sampling error respondents plus minus 39 percentage points ___ online apnorc httpwwwapnorcorg | 528 |
<p>By Daina Beth Solomon</p>
<p>MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ:) is preparing to open a 1 million square-foot warehouse near Mexico City, sources familiar with the project said, part of an effort to boost its presence in Mexico’s nascent e-commerce industry.</p>
<p>The new warehouse is slated to be built in the Tepotzotlan municipality about 25 miles (40 km) north of the Mexican capital, according to four Mexico City real estate professionals familiar with the plans. Expected to be completed next year, the facility would triple Amazon’s distribution space in Mexico, home to around 120 million potential customers.</p>
<p>Amazon’s Mexico push comes amid talks to revamp the North American Free Trade Agreement, which could benefit the Seattle-based retailer if the United States persuades Mexico to raise a $50 limit on the value of online purchases that can be imported duty-free.</p>
<p>Amazon is a relative newcomer to Mexico; it opened its Kindle e-books site to Mexican customers in 2013 and expanded into sales of physical goods just two years ago. But it is growing much faster than rivals such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc (NYSE:), and is already the nation’s third-largest online retailer. Amazon posted $253 million in sales in Mexico last year, more than double the year before, according to market research firm Euromonitor International.</p>
<p>Sharing a nearly 2,000-mile long border with the United States, Mexico would seem a logical place for Amazon to expand. But duplicating the company’s U.S.-style success could prove tougher.</p>
<p>Online shopping comprises nearly 3 percent of all retail sales in Mexico compared with over 10 percent in the United States. Some Mexican shoppers are wary of online fraud and many do not have credit cards.</p>
<p>Some analysts believe Amazon is willing to take the risk as it races to bulk up in foreign markets to compete with fast-moving global competitors such as China’s Alibaba (NYSE:) Group Holding Ltd.</p>
<p>“Amazon is not afraid to plow into a new market in a very big way, take a big hit, but say, 10 years down the line, this is going to be big and profitable,” said Neil Saunders, managing director at the GlobalData Retail research firm.</p>
<p>Amazon spokesman Julio Gil declined to comment on plans for a new warehouse in Mexico. He said the company’s Mexican unit is aiming to expand its product offerings, offer faster deliveries and make the purchasing process as smooth and secure as possible to inspire consumer confidence.</p>
<p>“We’re trying to eliminate any friction,” Gil said.</p>
<p>FLUID LOGISTICS</p>
<p>Amazon currently operates two distribution centers in Mexico totaling more than 500,000 square feet (46,452 sq m), Gil said. Both are in Cuautitlan Izcalli in the state of Mexico, adjacent to the autonomous district of Mexico City, whose metro area is home to more than 20 million people.</p>
<p>The new warehouse will be constructed about 7 miles (11 km) from the existing facilities. All are located along the so-called “NAFTA” highway, an industrial belt that runs through Mexico’s factory regions to the U.S. border.</p>
<p>The new facility is being built by industrial developer Fibra Prologis, according to sources familiar with the plans. The Mexico-based real estate investment trust owns 34.2 million square feet (3.2 million sq m) of manufacturing and logistics space across Mexico. Prologis declined interview requests.</p>
<p>At 1 million square feet, the new facility would be able to distribute bulky products such as furniture, as well as small items like books and microwaves, a set-up Amazon uses in other foreign countries, said Marc Wulfraat, president of the logistics consultancy firm MWPVL International.</p>
<p>If about 85 percent of the space is used for small products – typical of a U.S. warehouse set-up – Amazon would be able to store 15 million products and make up to 1 million deliveries a day nationwide. It would likely employ 2,000 to 3,000 people to handle the shipments, Wulfraat said.</p>
<p>The location could also serve as a distribution point for products going north to the United States, added Saunders from GlobalData.</p>
<p>“Amazon is very fluid with its logistics,” he said. “As long as that border is reasonably open, Amazon is very agnostic.”</p>
<p>MEXICAN RETICENCE ONLINE</p>
<p>Amazon’s global operations stretch across 14 countries including Latin America’s most populous nations, Brazil and Mexico. That footprint fueled $11.5 million in net international sales in the second quarter, just over half the size of Amazon’s North American sales.</p>
<p>Amazon’s 2016 Mexico sales fell well behind the market leader, Argentina’s MercadoLibre Inc, with $435 million in sales, according to Euromonitor. Still Amazon edged out No. 4 Wal-Mart and was neck-and-neck with third-place Linio, a division of Berlin-based Rocket Internet .</p>
<p>All are fighting for loyalty from consumers largely unaccustomed to clickable shopping and wary of credit card and mail fraud.</p>
<p>“Much of the reticence of Mexican shoppers to make purchases online is uncertainty,” said Carlos Hermosillo Bernal, an analyst at Actinver. “Will I get the product? Is it what was being offered? What guarantee do I have?”</p>
<p>That reluctance may fade as Mexico’s middle- and upper-class millennials gain purchasing power.</p>
<p>Mexico City-based college student Daniel Arturo Munoz Castro, 20, said he has purchased board games, smartphone accessories and t-shirts on Amazon’s app. He appreciates the variety of products and ease of use, even though his father first thought it might be a scam.</p>
<p>“It’s not like other web pages when you order things, and perhaps they don’t arrive. It’s very safe,” he said.</p>
<p>Still, Mexico’s vast wealth disparity and cultural differences lead some analysts to doubt whether Amazon can replicate a U.S. shopping concept. Amazon backed off from its investments in China, for example, after struggling to understand the local markets, said Gene Munster, managing partner at Loup Ventures.</p>
<p>“If they largely failed in China, why try in Mexico, Brazil or India? The answer is they haven’t failed yet in those areas, and they may be able to right the ship,” he said.</p>
<p>TWEAKING TRADE RULES</p>
<p>If the United States, Mexico and Canada raise the value of online purchases that can be imported duty-free as part of a modernized North American Free Trade Agreement, Amazon may be poised to reap rewards in Mexico.</p>
<p>The proposal, which is backed by U.S. trade representatives, would push the duty-free limit on imports to about $800 from thresholds of $50 in Mexico and C$20 ($16.5) in Canada. That would give consumers in those countries an incentive to buy big-ticket products online from the United States, an idea that President Donald Trump has championed in his “Buy American” agenda.</p>
<p>Mexican negotiators, however, are treading cautiously amid push-back from Mexican industries such as textiles and footwear. [nL2N1LM1C8]</p>
<p>“We have to find a middle point that does not damage our economies with extreme liberalization,” Mexico Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo said at the conclusion of NAFTA talks in Mexico City early this month. The next round is scheduled for Ottawa in late September.</p>
<p>International trade analyst Claude Barfield of the American Enterprise Institute anticipates that even a compromise is unlikely to dash Amazon’s plans for Mexico.</p>
<p>“I can’t imagine this would be a deal-breaker,” he said.</p>
<p>Graphic on Amazon’s two years of growth in Mexico: http://tmsnrt.rs/2x16eaG</p> | false | 1 | daina beth solomon mexico city reuters amazoncom inc nasdaq preparing open 1 million squarefoot warehouse near mexico city sources familiar project said part effort boost presence mexicos nascent ecommerce industry new warehouse slated built tepotzotlan municipality 25 miles 40 km north mexican capital according four mexico city real estate professionals familiar plans expected completed next year facility would triple amazons distribution space mexico home around 120 million potential customers amazons mexico push comes amid talks revamp north american free trade agreement could benefit seattlebased retailer united states persuades mexico raise 50 limit value online purchases imported dutyfree amazon relative newcomer mexico opened kindle ebooks site mexican customers 2013 expanded sales physical goods two years ago growing much faster rivals walmart stores inc nyse already nations thirdlargest online retailer amazon posted 253 million sales mexico last year double year according market research firm euromonitor international sharing nearly 2000mile long border united states mexico would seem logical place amazon expand duplicating companys usstyle success could prove tougher online shopping comprises nearly 3 percent retail sales mexico compared 10 percent united states mexican shoppers wary online fraud many credit cards analysts believe amazon willing take risk races bulk foreign markets compete fastmoving global competitors chinas alibaba nyse group holding ltd amazon afraid plow new market big way take big hit say 10 years line going big profitable said neil saunders managing director globaldata retail research firm amazon spokesman julio gil declined comment plans new warehouse mexico said companys mexican unit aiming expand product offerings offer faster deliveries make purchasing process smooth secure possible inspire consumer confidence trying eliminate friction gil said fluid logistics amazon currently operates two distribution centers mexico totaling 500000 square feet 46452 sq gil said cuautitlan izcalli state mexico adjacent autonomous district mexico city whose metro area home 20 million people new warehouse constructed 7 miles 11 km existing facilities located along socalled nafta highway industrial belt runs mexicos factory regions us border new facility built industrial developer fibra prologis according sources familiar plans mexicobased real estate investment trust owns 342 million square feet 32 million sq manufacturing logistics space across mexico prologis declined interview requests 1 million square feet new facility would able distribute bulky products furniture well small items like books microwaves setup amazon uses foreign countries said marc wulfraat president logistics consultancy firm mwpvl international 85 percent space used small products typical us warehouse setup amazon would able store 15 million products make 1 million deliveries day nationwide would likely employ 2000 3000 people handle shipments wulfraat said location could also serve distribution point products going north united states added saunders globaldata amazon fluid logistics said long border reasonably open amazon agnostic mexican reticence online amazons global operations stretch across 14 countries including latin americas populous nations brazil mexico footprint fueled 115 million net international sales second quarter half size amazons north american sales amazons 2016 mexico sales fell well behind market leader argentinas mercadolibre inc 435 million sales according euromonitor still amazon edged 4 walmart neckandneck thirdplace linio division berlinbased rocket internet fighting loyalty consumers largely unaccustomed clickable shopping wary credit card mail fraud much reticence mexican shoppers make purchases online uncertainty said carlos hermosillo bernal analyst actinver get product offered guarantee reluctance may fade mexicos middle upperclass millennials gain purchasing power mexico citybased college student daniel arturo munoz castro 20 said purchased board games smartphone accessories tshirts amazons app appreciates variety products ease use even though father first thought might scam like web pages order things perhaps dont arrive safe said still mexicos vast wealth disparity cultural differences lead analysts doubt whether amazon replicate us shopping concept amazon backed investments china example struggling understand local markets said gene munster managing partner loup ventures largely failed china try mexico brazil india answer havent failed yet areas may able right ship said tweaking trade rules united states mexico canada raise value online purchases imported dutyfree part modernized north american free trade agreement amazon may poised reap rewards mexico proposal backed us trade representatives would push dutyfree limit imports 800 thresholds 50 mexico c20 165 canada would give consumers countries incentive buy bigticket products online united states idea president donald trump championed buy american agenda mexican negotiators however treading cautiously amid pushback mexican industries textiles footwear nl2n1lm1c8 find middle point damage economies extreme liberalization mexico economy minister ildefonso guajardo said conclusion nafta talks mexico city early month next round scheduled ottawa late september international trade analyst claude barfield american enterprise institute anticipates even compromise unlikely dash amazons plans mexico cant imagine would dealbreaker said graphic amazons two years growth mexico httptmsnrtrs2x16eag | 763 |
<p>ENGLEWOOD, Colo. – As the <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Denver_Broncos/" type="external">Denver Broncos</a> convened at the UCHealth Training Center here beginning July 26, the same story that dominated the offseason will remain the top headliner.</p>
<p>There is a new head coach ( <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Vance-Joseph/" type="external">Vance Joseph</a>), a new offensive coordinator ( <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Mike-McCoy/" type="external">Mike McCoy</a>) and a new defensive coordinator (Joe Woods). But the focus will be on quarterbacks <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Trevor-Siemian/" type="external">Trevor Siemian</a> and <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Paxton-Lynch/" type="external">Paxton Lynch</a> to see which one will open the season when the Broncos host the division-rival Chargers in the second game of a Monday night doubleheader.</p>
<p>Siemian has the advantage in terms of experience, having started 14 games in 2016, but the offense has been tweaked to play more toward Lynch’s strengths, and he appeared to gain confidence during offseason work, particularly in his timing with starting wide receivers <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Demaryius_Thomas/" type="external">Demaryius Thomas</a> and <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Emmanuel-Sanders/" type="external">Emmanuel Sanders</a>.</p>
<p>Joseph has said that he wants consistency from his starting quarterback, and with a veteran team, that is a priority. However, upside has to come into consideration, and if Siemian can’t break free from Lynch, he could find himself as the No. 2 quarterback by Week 1 behind Lynch, whose first-round pedigree and raw arm strength could give him an advantage despite his scattershot moments.</p>
<p>For the time being at least, Joseph announced Wednesday that Siemian will be the first unit for the opening practice of camp.</p>
<p>On the defensive side, Woods, the defensive backs coach last season, takes over for the departed <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Wade_Phillips/" type="external">Wade Phillips</a> and promised only minor changes from the way Phillips ran the defense.</p>
<p>“I don’t want to come in and change the fingerprints or the foundation of our defense,” Woods said in the offseason. “All I said is, I want to sprinkle a little sugar on it. It’s something that will give us a little change-up, make offenses work at the line of scrimmage. That’s all we’re doing.”</p>
<p>Said cornerback <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Chris_Harris/" type="external">Chris Harris</a> Jr., “Our defense, we made little tweaks. We’re not as simple as we have been in the past. In the past, we played so much man and just making it so easy for the quarterbacks. So now we’re going to sprinkle in (some) different little things and make them think.”</p>
<p>TRAINING CAMP: UCHealth Training Center; Englewood, Colo.</p>
<p>COACH: Vance Joseph</p>
<p>1st season as Broncos/NFL head coach</p>
<p>THE BREAKDOWN</p>
<p>2016 finish: 3rd AFC West (9-7-0)</p>
<p>STATISTICS</p>
<p>TOTAL OFFENSE: 323.1 (27th)</p>
<p>RUSHING: 92.8 (27th)</p>
<p>PASSING: 230.3 (T21st)</p>
<p>TOTAL DEFENSE: 316.1 (4th)</p>
<p>RUSHING: 130.3 (28th)</p>
<p>PASSING: 185.8(1st)</p>
<p>2017 PRESEASON SCHEDULE</p>
<p>All times Mountain</p>
<p>Aug. 10, at Chicago (Thu), 6:00</p>
<p>Aug. 19, at San Francisco (Sat), 8:00</p>
<p>Aug. 26, GREEN BAY (Sat), 7:00</p>
<p>Aug. 31, ARIZONA (Thu), 7:00</p>
<p>UNIT-BY-UNIT ANALYSIS</p>
<p>QUARTERBACKS: Starter – Trevor Siemian. Backups – Paxton Lynch, Chad Kelly, Kyle Sloter.</p>
<p>Siemian and Lynch are expected to split first-team repetitions until there is enough separation for head coach Vance Joseph to name one of them the starting quarterback. Kelly is expected to begin throwing at some point during training camp, but this is likely to be a redshirt year for the seventh-round pick as he learns the system. Sloter was signed to handle third-team repetitions while Kelly heals; if Kelly is up to speed by the end of the summer, there might not even be a practice-squad place for him.</p>
<p>RUNNING BACKS: Starters – <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/C.J._Anderson/" type="external">C.J. Anderson</a>, FB Andy Janovich. Backups – Devontae Booker, <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Jamaal_Charles/" type="external">Jamaal Charles</a>, Juwan Thompson, De’Angelo Henderson, Bernard Pierce.</p>
<p>Anderson was in shape during OTAs and looked stronger than he did in previous offseasons, even though he spent the early part of the year rehabilitating from a torn meniscus. Janovich is the only fullback on the roster and he might find himself in a utility role, even seeing some tight-end-type work. There is a significant crunch on the depth chart. Henderson, a sixth-round pick, seems a good bet to make the team as a potential third-down back of the future. Booker could push Anderson for a starting role. The wild card is Charles. If he’s healthy and can put his recent injuries behind him, he could start; if he struggles to overcome his issues, he might not make it out of camp. If Charles’ knee responds, he could create a crunch that leads to a trade of one of the veteran runners.</p>
<p>TIGHT ENDS: Starter — A.J. Derby. Backups – Virgil Green, Jeff Heuerman, Jake Butt, Henry Krieger-Coble, <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Steven/" type="external">Steven</a> Scheu, Austin Traylor.</p>
<p>Butt will begin training camp on the non- <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/John_Walker/" type="external">football</a> injury list, but when he completes recovery from a torn ACL, he could represent the future of the position, as he can line up in an in-line or stand-up alignment. Derby provides an interior target who should help the quarterbacks get the football out quickly. Heuerman is finally healthy and could provide a down-the-seam presence. Green is a solid blocker, but could be on the bubble in the new scheme. Krieger-Coble, Scheu and Traylor will have their chances to impress.</p>
<p>WIDE RECEIVERS: Starters – Demaryius Thomas, Emmanuel Sanders. Backups – Bennie Fowler, <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Jordan_Taylor/" type="external">Jordan Taylor</a>, Cody Latimer, Marlon Brown, Carlos Henderson, Isaiah McKenzie, Kalif Raymond, Hunter Sharp, Anthony Nash.</p>
<p>Thomas and Sanders should see the football plenty of times in what is expected to be a “pass-happy” offense, and Henderson and McKenzie will help provide depth and could be good change-of-pace options. McKenzie, in particular, could provide some explosive plays in limited use, and could be utilized on jet and fly sweeps. From there, it gets interesting, because a roster crunch looms. Fowler, Taylor, Latimer, Brown and Raymond are all returning veterans from last year’s roster, but if the Broncos avoid injuries, no more than two of those five are likely to make the 53-man roster out of the preseason. Fowler and Latimer could stick because of their roles on special teams, but Taylor had the most receptions of that group last season, and his flair for spectacular catches and outstanding body control in mid-air could allow him to steal a roster spot once again.</p>
<p>OFFENSIVE LINEMEN: Starters – LT Ty Sambrailo, LG Max Garcia, C Matt Paradis, RG Ron Leary, RT <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Menelik-Watson/" type="external">Menelik Watson</a>. Backups – LT <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Garett-Bolles/" type="external">Garett Bolles</a>, C/G Connor McGovern, G/T Michael Schofield, RT <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Donald-Stephenson/" type="external">Donald Stephenson</a>, G/T <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Allen-Barbre/" type="external">Allen Barbre</a>, G Billy Turner, C Dillon Day, G Chris Muller, T Justin Murray, T Cedrick Lang, T Elijah Wilkinson.</p>
<p>Once again, the Broncos are starting over on the offensive line, and if Bolles can earn the starting job, they will likely start Week 1 with 60 percent of the line comprised of players who were not on last year’s roster. They have already moved Leary from left guard, which he played in Dallas, to the right side; this allows Garcia to return to left guard, where he started last year. Leary has said he doesn’t care which side he plays on. Paradis did not take part in OTAs, but is expected to return from a pair of hip surgeries. With so much change up front, his health is crucial to the unit’s success. If his hips don’t hold up, it’s hard to imagine the Broncos getting any kind of improvement unless McGovern makes a big leap in his second season. As camp opened, the Broncos acquired versatile backup Barbre from the Eagles.</p>
<p>DEFENSIVE LINEMEN: Starters – DE <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Derek-Wolfe/" type="external">Derek Wolfe</a>, NT Domata Peko, DE Jared Crick. Backups – DE Zach Kerr, DE Billy Winn, NT Kyle Peko, DE Adam Gotsis, DE DeMarcus Walker, NT Tyrique Jarrett, DE Shakir Soto, DE Shelby Harris.</p>
<p>Wolfe is the proven commodity and enters training camp poised for a big year after an outstanding spring. Domata Peko, a team captain with the Bengals, brings leadership, even though he will probably be limited to base-package work only at this point in his career. The question revolves around who will help generate a pass rush along with Wolfe. Crick and Gotsis both added weight, but Gotsis suffered a knee injury late in OTAs and underwent a knee procedure; he is expected back early in camp. Walker was a prolific pass rusher at Florida State, but at 280 pounds, is he strong enough for an interior role at the next level? Kerr should also be a part of the rotation.</p>
<p>LINEBACKERS: Starters – OLB <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Von-Miller/" type="external">Von Miller</a>, OLB Shane Ray, ILB <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Brandon_Marshall/" type="external">Brandon Marshall</a>, ILB Todd Davis. Backups – OLB Shaquil Barrett, OLB Vontarrius Dora, OLB Kasib Edebali, ILB Zaire Anderson, ILB Corey Nelson, OLB Ken Ekanem, ILB Josh Banderas, ILB Jerrol Garcia-Williams, ILB Kevin Snyder, ILB Quentin Gause, ILB Deon Hollins.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/DeMarcus_Ware/" type="external">DeMarcus Ware</a>‘s retirement pushes Ray into the starting lineup; he had eight sacks last year and should be ready for an expanded role opposite Miller, a perennial All-Pro who is the unquestioned ringleader of the defense. Marshall is effective when healthy, but has dealt with injuries in each of the last two years; he and Davis are an effective tandem. Anderson and Nelson provide experienced depth. The questions are with depth on the outside. Barrett is injured and out until the regular season, and with Ware retired and Dekoda Watson having departed for San Francisco in free agency, either Dora or Edebali will have to step up.</p>
<p>DEFENSIVE BACKS: Starters – CB Chris Harris Jr., CB Aqib Talib, FS Darian Stewart, SS T.J. Ward. Backups – CB Bradley Roby, CB Lorenzo Doss, FS Justin Simmons, SS Will Parks, CB <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Chris_Lewis/" type="external">Chris Lewis</a>-Harris, CB Brendan Langley, FS Orion Stewart, SS Jamal Carter, CB Dontrell Nelson, CB Marcus Rios, FS Dante Barnett, SS Dymonte Thomas.</p>
<p>The starters have all been Pro Bowlers at some point in the last three seasons, and represent the best secondary in the AFC, if not the NFL. But Harris, Talib, Stewart and Ward are all in their seventh season or later, and Talib in particular is in his 10th year and coming off a season in which he battled back issues. Roby had his fifth-year option picked up and will continue to work at least 50 percent of the snaps as the No. 3 cornerback. Simmons is an emerging center-field-type safety who intercepted a pass in each of the final two games last season; he and Parks provide solid young depth. Doss, Lewis-Harris and Langley will battle for the No. 4 role; Lewis-Harris’ experience gives him an edge. Langley should see plenty of special-teams work right away. The Broncos signed four undrafted safeties — Stewart, Carter, Barnett and Thomas — and at least one of them should stick on the practice squad.</p>
<p>SPECIAL TEAMS: K <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Brandon-McManus/" type="external">Brandon McManus</a>, P Riley Dixon, LS Casey Kreiter, KOR Carlos Henderson, PR Isaiah McKenzie.</p>
<p>Kalif Raymond, Cody Latimer and Hunter Sharp could all factor into the competition on returns, but general manager <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/John_Elway/" type="external">John Elway</a> drafted Henderson and McKenzie with the intention of using them on returns right away. Henderson’s straight-line speed, long stride and running-back build make him a good fit for kickoff returns, while McKenzie’s quickness made him one of the best punt returners in college football last year. McManus and Dixon are one of the best young kicker-punter combinations in the league.</p> | false | 1 | englewood colo denver broncos convened uchealth training center beginning july 26 story dominated offseason remain top headliner new head coach vance joseph new offensive coordinator mike mccoy new defensive coordinator joe woods focus quarterbacks trevor siemian paxton lynch see one open season broncos host divisionrival chargers second game monday night doubleheader siemian advantage terms experience started 14 games 2016 offense tweaked play toward lynchs strengths appeared gain confidence offseason work particularly timing starting wide receivers demaryius thomas emmanuel sanders joseph said wants consistency starting quarterback veteran team priority however upside come consideration siemian cant break free lynch could find 2 quarterback week 1 behind lynch whose firstround pedigree raw arm strength could give advantage despite scattershot moments time least joseph announced wednesday siemian first unit opening practice camp defensive side woods defensive backs coach last season takes departed wade phillips promised minor changes way phillips ran defense dont want come change fingerprints foundation defense woods said offseason said want sprinkle little sugar something give us little changeup make offenses work line scrimmage thats said cornerback chris harris jr defense made little tweaks simple past past played much man making easy quarterbacks going sprinkle different little things make think training camp uchealth training center englewood colo coach vance joseph 1st season broncosnfl head coach breakdown 2016 finish 3rd afc west 970 statistics total offense 3231 27th rushing 928 27th passing 2303 t21st total defense 3161 4th rushing 1303 28th passing 18581st 2017 preseason schedule times mountain aug 10 chicago thu 600 aug 19 san francisco sat 800 aug 26 green bay sat 700 aug 31 arizona thu 700 unitbyunit analysis quarterbacks starter trevor siemian backups paxton lynch chad kelly kyle sloter siemian lynch expected split firstteam repetitions enough separation head coach vance joseph name one starting quarterback kelly expected begin throwing point training camp likely redshirt year seventhround pick learns system sloter signed handle thirdteam repetitions kelly heals kelly speed end summer might even practicesquad place running backs starters cj anderson fb andy janovich backups devontae booker jamaal charles juwan thompson deangelo henderson bernard pierce anderson shape otas looked stronger previous offseasons even though spent early part year rehabilitating torn meniscus janovich fullback roster might find utility role even seeing tightendtype work significant crunch depth chart henderson sixthround pick seems good bet make team potential thirddown back future booker could push anderson starting role wild card charles hes healthy put recent injuries behind could start struggles overcome issues might make camp charles knee responds could create crunch leads trade one veteran runners tight ends starter aj derby backups virgil green jeff heuerman jake butt henry kriegercoble steven scheu austin traylor butt begin training camp non football injury list completes recovery torn acl could represent future position line inline standup alignment derby provides interior target help quarterbacks get football quickly heuerman finally healthy could provide downtheseam presence green solid blocker could bubble new scheme kriegercoble scheu traylor chances impress wide receivers starters demaryius thomas emmanuel sanders backups bennie fowler jordan taylor cody latimer marlon brown carlos henderson isaiah mckenzie kalif raymond hunter sharp anthony nash thomas sanders see football plenty times expected passhappy offense henderson mckenzie help provide depth could good changeofpace options mckenzie particular could provide explosive plays limited use could utilized jet fly sweeps gets interesting roster crunch looms fowler taylor latimer brown raymond returning veterans last years roster broncos avoid injuries two five likely make 53man roster preseason fowler latimer could stick roles special teams taylor receptions group last season flair spectacular catches outstanding body control midair could allow steal roster spot offensive linemen starters lt ty sambrailo lg max garcia c matt paradis rg ron leary rt menelik watson backups lt garett bolles cg connor mcgovern gt michael schofield rt donald stephenson gt allen barbre g billy turner c dillon day g chris muller justin murray cedrick lang elijah wilkinson broncos starting offensive line bolles earn starting job likely start week 1 60 percent line comprised players last years roster already moved leary left guard played dallas right side allows garcia return left guard started last year leary said doesnt care side plays paradis take part otas expected return pair hip surgeries much change front health crucial units success hips dont hold hard imagine broncos getting kind improvement unless mcgovern makes big leap second season camp opened broncos acquired versatile backup barbre eagles defensive linemen starters de derek wolfe nt domata peko de jared crick backups de zach kerr de billy winn nt kyle peko de adam gotsis de demarcus walker nt tyrique jarrett de shakir soto de shelby harris wolfe proven commodity enters training camp poised big year outstanding spring domata peko team captain bengals brings leadership even though probably limited basepackage work point career question revolves around help generate pass rush along wolfe crick gotsis added weight gotsis suffered knee injury late otas underwent knee procedure expected back early camp walker prolific pass rusher florida state 280 pounds strong enough interior role next level kerr also part rotation linebackers starters olb von miller olb shane ray ilb brandon marshall ilb todd davis backups olb shaquil barrett olb vontarrius dora olb kasib edebali ilb zaire anderson ilb corey nelson olb ken ekanem ilb josh banderas ilb jerrol garciawilliams ilb kevin snyder ilb quentin gause ilb deon hollins demarcus wares retirement pushes ray starting lineup eight sacks last year ready expanded role opposite miller perennial allpro unquestioned ringleader defense marshall effective healthy dealt injuries last two years davis effective tandem anderson nelson provide experienced depth questions depth outside barrett injured regular season ware retired dekoda watson departed san francisco free agency either dora edebali step defensive backs starters cb chris harris jr cb aqib talib fs darian stewart ss tj ward backups cb bradley roby cb lorenzo doss fs justin simmons ss parks cb chris lewisharris cb brendan langley fs orion stewart ss jamal carter cb dontrell nelson cb marcus rios fs dante barnett ss dymonte thomas starters pro bowlers point last three seasons represent best secondary afc nfl harris talib stewart ward seventh season later talib particular 10th year coming season battled back issues roby fifthyear option picked continue work least 50 percent snaps 3 cornerback simmons emerging centerfieldtype safety intercepted pass final two games last season parks provide solid young depth doss lewisharris langley battle 4 role lewisharris experience gives edge langley see plenty specialteams work right away broncos signed four undrafted safeties stewart carter barnett thomas least one stick practice squad special teams k brandon mcmanus p riley dixon ls casey kreiter kor carlos henderson pr isaiah mckenzie kalif raymond cody latimer hunter sharp could factor competition returns general manager john elway drafted henderson mckenzie intention using returns right away hendersons straightline speed long stride runningback build make good fit kickoff returns mckenzies quickness made one best punt returners college football last year mcmanus dixon one best young kickerpunter combinations league | 1,146 |
<p>The most inane insta-pundit commentary had it that the 2012 election “hadn’t really changed anything,” what with President Obama still in the White House, the House still in Republican hands, and the Senate still controlled by Democrats. The truth of the matter, of course, is that a great deal changed, somewhere around 11p.m.EST on Tuesday, November 7, when Ohio was declared for the president and the race was effectively over. To wit:</p>
<p>Obamacare, the governmental takeover of one-sixth of the U.S. economy, is now set in legislative concrete, and the progressive campaign to turn ever-larger numbers of citizens into wards of the state has been given a tremendous boost–with electoral consequences as far as the eye can see.</p>
<p>A war in the Middle East is now almost certain, and sooner rather than later; as if the previous three and a half years of fecklessness were not enough, the cast of mind manifest in the administration’s abdication of responsibility in Benghazi will have likely convinced a critical mass of the Israeli leadership that they have no choice but to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities in self-defense. The economic chaos resulting from military conflict in the Persian Gulf (and beyond) will further deepen the European fiscal crisis while making an already weak American economic recovery even more anemic.</p>
<p>The children and grandchildren of November 7’s voters have been condemned to bear the burden of what is certainly an unpayable mountain of debt, and may be an unserviceable amount of debt, which in either case will be an enormous drag on the economy, even as it mortgages America’s strategic options in Asia to the holders of U.S. government bonds in Beijing.</p>
<p>The American culture war has been markedly intensified, as those who booed God, celebrated an unfettered abortion license, canonized Sandra Fluke, and sacramentalized sodomy at the Democratic National Convention will have been emboldened to advance the cause of lifestyle libertinism through coercive state power, thus deepening the danger of what a noted Bavarian theologian calls the “dictatorship of relativism.”</p>
<p>Religious freedom and civil society are now in greater jeopardy than ever, as what was already the most secularist and statist administration in history will, unfettered by reelection concerns, accelerate its efforts to bring free voluntary associations to heel as de facto extensions of the state.</p>
<p>Nothing changed? In a pig’s eye.</p>
<p>Europeans understood this, immediately, even if large swaths of the American punditocracy didn’t. One e-mail from Poland, the morning after the election, expressed real fear for the future (as well my correspondent might, given President Obama’s craven whisperings to Dimitry Medvedev that a reelected administration would pull the final plug on missile defense in Europe, as Vladimir Putin has long sought). Another, from London, suggested that Obama’s reelection was a cataclysm for America similar to Henry VIII’s break with Rome: a politico-cultural-economic game-changer the effects of which would be felt for centuries. A Scottish friend (correctly) foresaw serious trouble for the Catholic Church in the United States, to which he had long looked for models of leadership in handling aggressive secularism.</p>
<p>None of this was surprising, however. Five weeks before Election Day, I had lunch with the head of state of one of America’s closest European allies. When I asked him how our politics looked to him from a distance of some 3,500 miles, he replied, more in sorrow than in anger, “America is missing greatness.” Americans dubious of what they style “foreign entanglements,” who would otherwise shrug off such an observation, might think twice about it in light of a second Obama administration. For my luncheon host was not simply referring to a lack of American leadership abroad; he was, in a single, poignant phrase, speaking of a national will to diminishment that seemed to him evident in both the astonishing possibility that a failed president would be reelected and the equally surprising inability of that president’s opponents to make a compelling case for change.</p>
<p>And here, too, is something for Republican strategists to ponder while sifting through the wreckage. Mitt Romney made himself a better candidate throughout 2012, and for one brief, electric moment at the first debate, he seemed like a leader with vision, passion, and wit. But a recovery of American greatness–cultural, political, economic, diplomatic, and military greatness–was not the driving theme of the Romney campaign. Not knowing Mitt Romney personally, I can’t say whether this obviously decent and successful man simply lacked the understanding necessary to make the case for true American renewal, as distinct from the faux hope-and-change mantra that had seduced so many in 2008. But whatever Romney’s personal inclinations, many Republican campaign managers and consultants always seemed afraid of scaring the horses. Obama would be beaten, they insisted, on grounds of competence, not by a campaign that called the country to recognize that it need not settle for mediocrity, a campaign that summoned America to new heights of achievement.</p>
<p>The themes for such a campaign were not difficult to imagine; they could have been built around a recasting of FDR’s four freedoms. Freedom of religion: No government bureaucrat in Washington is going to tell your religious community how to conduct its affairs. Freedom from fear: A Romney administration will not tolerate the burning of American embassies and the torture and murder of our diplomats by the thugs of al-Qaeda and their jihadist allies. Freedom for excellence and accomplishment: Unshackling American ingenuity from the restraints of government interference will unleash new wealth-creating and wealth-distributing energies, even as that liberation empowers the poor to lead lives of self-responsibility through honest and dignified work. And freedom from unpayable debt: Your children and grandchildren must not be buried beneath a sludge pile of extravagance sluicing out of a national capital (and an administration) addicted to throwing oceans of money at problems.</p>
<p>Would it have worked? Who knows? But the issues would have been sharpened; the fake issues (“war on women,” “tax breaks for the rich,” etc.) might have been marginalized; and a lot more energy–real political energy, not just energies bent on denying Obama a second term–might have been unleashed.</p>
<p>The countercase, it must be admitted, has something to be said for it. Not the countercase of the culture-wars-averse campaign consultants, but a countercase that would run something like this (and that illustrates another great change, not initiated on election day but confirmed by the results):</p>
<p>Whatever the clumsiness of Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” remark, the hard fact of the matter is that a critical mass of Americans are now so dependent on government (either directly or through public-sector unions) that any appeal to a larger national vision, much less a vision of personal responsibility, is impossible. So try to make the case that a Romney alternative to Obama will fix things without fundamentally altering the relationship between individual citizens (and families) and the post-New Deal, post-Great Society American welfare state.</p>
<p>There is, in hard truth, something here. That half the country was prepared to reelect a manifestly failed president whose personal incapacities, like the incapacities of the bloated governmental bureaucracies over which he presided, were on full display in the weeks before the election, and in venues ranging from North Africa to Staten Island, is a very disturbing “indicator,” as the pollsters like to say. That a goodly proportion of that half of America seemed susceptible to the Obama campaign’s class warfare is also disturbing. But perhaps most disturbing of all is the exit-poll data showing that a healthy majority of the electorate believed Obama more ca pable than Romney of handling foreign crises: and this, after the lethal fiasco of Benghazi, itself the embodiment of an ideologically driven pusillanimity in foreign policy that has been on display since the president’s apologize-for-America tour at the beginning of his first term. “Missing greatness,” it turns out, is not just a function of who’s in charge. It’s a result of democratic citizens’ not paying attention. Or worse, it’s the result of citizens’ suffering such severe ideological glaucoma that they cannot see what is in front of them.</p>
<p>What has obviously changed, in other words, is American political culture: and it is hard to make a case that that change has been for the better. Shortly after Ohio sealed the deal on Election Night, a friend (who earlier in the evening had said that she was having a hard time recognizing the country she grew up in) sent me an e-mail with a salient Tocqueville quote:</p>
<p>In the United States, the majority rules in the name of the people. This majority is chiefly composed of peaceful citizens who by taste or interest sincerely desire the good of the country….If republican principles are to perish in America, they will succumb only after a long social travail, frequently interrupted, often resumed; they will seem to be reborn several times, and they will disappear without return only when an entirely new people has taken the place of the one that exists in our day.</p>
<p>So let’s spare ourselves the Bertolt Brecht bromide about a displeased government getting itself a new people, which is precisely the opposite of the point here, and ponder the serious question raised by Tocqueville, and put in more contemporary terms by another of my day-after-the-election e-mail correspondents, a former senior White House official:</p>
<p>Is it time 1) to conclude that what began in 1992 has provided 26 years of confirmatory evidence that the American experiment in ordered liberty has given way, decisively and irrevocably, to a crass and stupid commercial (and sexualized) culture, under a technical-administrative state, guided by the view that man is the measure of all things, and 2) to consider a refocusing of political efforts to the local level, which has its own problems of corruption, stupidity, and loss of tradition and virtue, but in some cases may permit of a politics in some measure noble and worthy?</p>
<p>Unwilling to go quite that far into the Slough of Despond, I nonetheless recognize (and commend) the seriousness of the questions posed by these two friends. For while the surface manifestations of national politics (the presidency, control of the houses of Congress) may look “the same” to the less lucid elements of the punditocracy, the question of whether we have become, if not “an entirely new people” (paceTocqueville’s warning), then a deeply divided people, one large part of which is now wedded to government in ways that gravely erode civic virtue, surely must be part of the post-2012 conversation.</p>
<p>And even if our cultural slide into a cheerful Gomorrah is not, as my second correspondent suggested, “irrevocable,” the effects of the culture of the imperial autonomous (and government-subsidized) Self on our politics must be reckoned with, as Republicans, conservatives, and all those who felt a real emptiness settling upon them at 11p.m.EST on Tuesday night think through the economic reconstruction, the restoration of fiscal sanity, and the exercise of global responsibility that must be part of a post-Obama America, now unhappily deferred until at least January 2017.</p>
<p>It takes a certain kind of people, living certain indispensable virtues, to make the market and democracy work so that justice, prosperity, and human flourishing are the net results of freedom. That elementary truth–recognized by the Founders, ignored by the newly reelected administration, and avoided by libertarians and Republican campaign consultants–has to be at the center of the conversation about the American future, and about playing good defense during the next four challenging years.</p>
<p>George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.</p> | false | 1 | inane instapundit commentary 2012 election hadnt really changed anything president obama still white house house still republican hands senate still controlled democrats truth matter course great deal changed somewhere around 11pmest tuesday november 7 ohio declared president race effectively wit obamacare governmental takeover onesixth us economy set legislative concrete progressive campaign turn everlarger numbers citizens wards state given tremendous boostwith electoral consequences far eye see war middle east almost certain sooner rather later previous three half years fecklessness enough cast mind manifest administrations abdication responsibility benghazi likely convinced critical mass israeli leadership choice strike irans nuclear facilities selfdefense economic chaos resulting military conflict persian gulf beyond deepen european fiscal crisis making already weak american economic recovery even anemic children grandchildren november 7s voters condemned bear burden certainly unpayable mountain debt may unserviceable amount debt either case enormous drag economy even mortgages americas strategic options asia holders us government bonds beijing american culture war markedly intensified booed god celebrated unfettered abortion license canonized sandra fluke sacramentalized sodomy democratic national convention emboldened advance cause lifestyle libertinism coercive state power thus deepening danger noted bavarian theologian calls dictatorship relativism religious freedom civil society greater jeopardy ever already secularist statist administration history unfettered reelection concerns accelerate efforts bring free voluntary associations heel de facto extensions state nothing changed pigs eye europeans understood immediately even large swaths american punditocracy didnt one email poland morning election expressed real fear future well correspondent might given president obamas craven whisperings dimitry medvedev reelected administration would pull final plug missile defense europe vladimir putin long sought another london suggested obamas reelection cataclysm america similar henry viiis break rome politicoculturaleconomic gamechanger effects would felt centuries scottish friend correctly foresaw serious trouble catholic church united states long looked models leadership handling aggressive secularism none surprising however five weeks election day lunch head state one americas closest european allies asked politics looked distance 3500 miles replied sorrow anger america missing greatness americans dubious style foreign entanglements would otherwise shrug observation might think twice light second obama administration luncheon host simply referring lack american leadership abroad single poignant phrase speaking national diminishment seemed evident astonishing possibility failed president would reelected equally surprising inability presidents opponents make compelling case change something republican strategists ponder sifting wreckage mitt romney made better candidate throughout 2012 one brief electric moment first debate seemed like leader vision passion wit recovery american greatnesscultural political economic diplomatic military greatnesswas driving theme romney campaign knowing mitt romney personally cant say whether obviously decent successful man simply lacked understanding necessary make case true american renewal distinct faux hopeandchange mantra seduced many 2008 whatever romneys personal inclinations many republican campaign managers consultants always seemed afraid scaring horses obama would beaten insisted grounds competence campaign called country recognize need settle mediocrity campaign summoned america new heights achievement themes campaign difficult imagine could built around recasting fdrs four freedoms freedom religion government bureaucrat washington going tell religious community conduct affairs freedom fear romney administration tolerate burning american embassies torture murder diplomats thugs alqaeda jihadist allies freedom excellence accomplishment unshackling american ingenuity restraints government interference unleash new wealthcreating wealthdistributing energies even liberation empowers poor lead lives selfresponsibility honest dignified work freedom unpayable debt children grandchildren must buried beneath sludge pile extravagance sluicing national capital administration addicted throwing oceans money problems would worked knows issues would sharpened fake issues war women tax breaks rich etc might marginalized lot energyreal political energy energies bent denying obama second termmight unleashed countercase must admitted something said countercase culturewarsaverse campaign consultants countercase would run something like illustrates another great change initiated election day confirmed results whatever clumsiness mitt romneys 47 percent remark hard fact matter critical mass americans dependent government either directly publicsector unions appeal larger national vision much less vision personal responsibility impossible try make case romney alternative obama fix things without fundamentally altering relationship individual citizens families postnew deal postgreat society american welfare state hard truth something half country prepared reelect manifestly failed president whose personal incapacities like incapacities bloated governmental bureaucracies presided full display weeks election venues ranging north africa staten island disturbing indicator pollsters like say goodly proportion half america seemed susceptible obama campaigns class warfare also disturbing perhaps disturbing exitpoll data showing healthy majority electorate believed obama ca pable romney handling foreign crises lethal fiasco benghazi embodiment ideologically driven pusillanimity foreign policy display since presidents apologizeforamerica tour beginning first term missing greatness turns function whos charge result democratic citizens paying attention worse result citizens suffering severe ideological glaucoma see front obviously changed words american political culture hard make case change better shortly ohio sealed deal election night friend earlier evening said hard time recognizing country grew sent email salient tocqueville quote united states majority rules name people majority chiefly composed peaceful citizens taste interest sincerely desire good countryif republican principles perish america succumb long social travail frequently interrupted often resumed seem reborn several times disappear without return entirely new people taken place one exists day lets spare bertolt brecht bromide displeased government getting new people precisely opposite point ponder serious question raised tocqueville put contemporary terms another dayaftertheelection email correspondents former senior white house official time 1 conclude began 1992 provided 26 years confirmatory evidence american experiment ordered liberty given way decisively irrevocably crass stupid commercial sexualized culture technicaladministrative state guided view man measure things 2 consider refocusing political efforts local level problems corruption stupidity loss tradition virtue cases may permit politics measure noble worthy unwilling go quite far slough despond nonetheless recognize commend seriousness questions posed two friends surface manifestations national politics presidency control houses congress may look less lucid elements punditocracy question whether become entirely new people pacetocquevilles warning deeply divided people one large part wedded government ways gravely erode civic virtue surely must part post2012 conversation even cultural slide cheerful gomorrah second correspondent suggested irrevocable effects culture imperial autonomous governmentsubsidized self politics must reckoned republicans conservatives felt real emptiness settling upon 11pmest tuesday night think economic reconstruction restoration fiscal sanity exercise global responsibility must part postobama america unhappily deferred least january 2017 takes certain kind people living certain indispensable virtues make market democracy work justice prosperity human flourishing net results freedom elementary truthrecognized founders ignored newly reelected administration avoided libertarians republican campaign consultantshas center conversation american future playing good defense next four challenging years george weigel distinguished senior fellow washingtons ethics public policy center holds william e simon chair catholic studies | 1,058 |
<p>Supporters of&#160;Obamacare&#160;frequently contend that the health-care law, now being implemented nationwide, is really just a version of a Republican reform plan. As they describe it, the law is built on consumer choice and competition among private insurers. What could be more Republican than that?</p>
<p>Of course, this superficial description of Obamacare skates past the law’s massive shift of power and authority to the federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the sidelining of individual, employer, and state decision-making roles in the process. HHS now has the power to decide every important question regarding what kind of insurance Americans must purchase, where they must get it, and how much it will cost. The law also imposes costly and job-destroying mandates on individuals and businesses, raises taxes by at least a half-trillion dollars, and piles a massive new entitlement obligation on top of the unaffordable ones already on the federal books. If you are willing to ignore all of these elements that push U.S. health care toward centralized, and costly, government control, then sure, maybe a Republican or two could support it.</p>
<p>When it was being considered, no Republicans in Congress were willing to look past&#160;Obamacare’s&#160;clear aim, which was to move U.S. health care as much as politically possible toward a fully government-run system. If&#160;Obamacare&#160;retains a surface resemblance to a private-sector-driven, market-based system, it is only because those who wrote it and pushed it through Congress believed they could go no farther in 2010 without fragmenting the coalition in support of the legislation. There should be no doubt about the overall direction, though:&#160;Obamacare&#160;is a massive step toward centralized government control, and that was its purpose.</p>
<p>This explains why the same administration that claims to be implementing a market-based reform for working-age Americans is simultaneously trying to undermine the only market-driven elements now operating in Medicare — namely, the Medicare Advantage program and the prescription-drug benefit. The apparent contradiction is actually an indication of consistency. The administration and its supporters distrust markets, consumer choice, and competition in health care, so they devised an approach for working Americans that minimizes these elements as much as possible, while handing over to HHS the power to impose ever more stringent regulations in the future. At the same time, in Medicare, which is already dominated by a government-run insurance option, the administration’s objective is to strangle and eventually eliminate those aspects of the program that are outside full government control.</p>
<p>The consequences of an effort to squelch competition in Medicare would be significant. Although Medicare has only about 49 million enrollees (out of a population of 316 million), the program has an outsized influence on the structure and direction of American health care. In particular, Medicare heavily influences how the nation’s network of hospitals and physician groups is organized. This is why the Medicare-reform vision of Representative Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) — based on what is called premium support — is so important. If the program were to move toward genuine consumer choice, with the government-run Medicare option competing on a level playing field with private plans, and with the consumers having an incentive to pick high-value, low-cost coverage to keep their premiums down, pressure would build for both the government option and the private plans to hold down their costs. This, in turn, would put pressure on hospitals and physicians to hold down their own costs and provide more convenient and higher-quality services to their patients. It is a vision that could transform Medicare, and begin to transform all of U.S. health care. Which is exactly why the Obama administration views it, along with the market-based elements of the current Medicare program, as the primary threat to its statist vision of health care.</p>
<p>Medicare Advantage (MA) has been targeted by the administration for deep cuts since early in 2009. MA plans are private-insurance options in Medicare. Seniors can elect to receive their benefits through an MA plan instead of the traditional, government-run insurance option. For seniors electing to enroll in MA, the government pays a fixed monthly amount to the plans, and the plans then must provide the entire Medicare package of services. These plans have proven very popular, especially in recent years. Enrollment in them now exceeds 14 million people, or more than one in four Medicare participants.</p>
<p>The administration and its allies complain that MA growth has been fueled by overpayments to health-care providers, and that was their justification for including large MA cuts in Obamacare. Of course, these cuts were also useful in transferring resources out of Medicare to pay for Obamacare’s large subsidies to expand health-insurance coverage for those under age 65. According to the Congressional Budget Office, Obamacare’s MA cuts will total more than $150 billion over ten years, including $14 billion in 2015 alone.</p>
<p>It is certainly true that MA plans are paid rates that exceed the costs of the traditional Medicare program in many parts of the country. But this is due to the anti-competitive structure of Medicare. The default option in Medicare is enrollment in the government-run fee-for-service insurance program. Enrollees pay the same national premium, regardless of the cost structure of the local program or the alternative private options. The government also imposes regulated payment rates on doctors and hospitals, whereas MA plans must negotiate contracts with their networks of providers. In addition, many Medicare enrollees have an employer plan that ensures they will pay no cost at the point of service for their care.</p>
<p>All of these features distort competition between the traditional program and MA plans. So far, instead of removing the distortions and leveling the playing field, Congress has decided to set payment rates for MA plans that make them attractive to enrollees.</p>
<p>But the fact that Medicare pays MA plans above the costs of the traditional program does not imply that MA plans are less efficient. In fact, they are not. According to the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, or MedPAC, MA plans are able to deliver the Medicare package of benefits for about 96 percent of the traditional program’s costs. And MA HMOs are even more efficient, providing Medicare benefits at just 92 percent of the traditional program’s costs. MA plans use the higher payments from the government to provide additional benefits to their enrollees, including lower deductibles and cost-sharing requirements than those of the traditional program.</p>
<p>The Obama administration is well aware of these facts, and it is adamantly opposed to true competition in Medicare — that is, providing beneficiaries the same fixed level of support regardless of what coverage option they select. Under such an arrangement — known as premium support — if the traditional program costs more than an MA plan, beneficiaries would have to pay the added premium themselves. Several studies have confirmed that a truly level playing field would lead to large-scale migration out of the government-run fee-for-service option and into the privately administered MA plans.</p>
<p>But in order to create a Ryan-like level playing field, it is critical first to have a vibrant private option in Medicare that will lay the foundation for genuine competition. This is why the current skirmishing over MA payment rates is so consequential. The Obama administration is determined to proceed with the planned cuts in Obamacare, and to add to them with administrative decisions that would cut MA rates still further. Oliver Wyman, a consulting firm, has estimated that the MA cuts the administration is seeking for 2015 (more on that below) would reduce MA rates by 5.9 percent, on top of the 4 to 6 percent cut already implemented in 2014. The MA plans would have no choice but to adjust to these cuts by scaling back coverage and raising premiums and cost-sharing requirements for their enrollees. The cumulative effects would raise annual costs for MA enrollees by as much as $1,700.</p>
<p>To their credit, Republicans in Congress have seized on these cuts as a political issue and plan to make them a central theme in the 2014 midterm elections. The Obama administration would like to characterize the reductions as cuts for the insurers offering the plans, but the seniors enrolled in the plans know better, because they have experienced changes in their costs when the government has cut payments to MA plans in the past. There are indications that political pressure is already building. Nineteen Senate Democrats recently signed a letter complaining to the Obama administration about the cuts. If put to a vote in Congress, the cuts almost certainly would get canceled or significantly scaled back.</p>
<p>The other competitive component of Medicare is the drug benefit — which is actually a prototype of a full-fledged premium-support plan. The government’s contribution toward drug coverage is determined entirely by competitive bids from plans offering prescription-drug insurance. The government calculates the enrollment-weighted average of those bids and provides a percentage of that amount to the beneficiaries as their entitlement to drug coverage. The beneficiaries then apply this payment to the plan of their choice, and pay any additional premium themselves. This design, which is exactly what Paul Ryan envisions for the rest of Medicare, ensures that the beneficiaries are cost-conscious and eager to enroll in low-premium, high-value plans.</p>
<p>By every measure, and especially by the standard of restraining cost growth, the drug benefit has been a success. In 2014, for the fourth year in a row, premiums owed by enrollees in prescription-drug plans have remained flat, at about $31 per month, on average. This is four dollars below the premium that the Congressional Budget Office predicted at enactment (in 2003) would be required in 2006. Total costs for the program are more than 40 percent below the original estimates. And the CBO has also concluded that the drug benefit has improved the health of seniors, thus lowering costs in the rest of Medicare. It is very rare indeed to find a new federal program that comes in under budget and yet surpasses expectations for customer satisfaction and quality.</p>
<p>The Obama administration regularly sends out officials to downplay these achievements. It has also dreamt up supposed problems in the program — such as too many plan offerings, and the use of preferred pharmacies — in an attempt to justify a massive and costly 700-page regulation, issued as a proposed rule in January. If adopted, the regulation would severely limit the cost-cutting strategies of the drug plans, require them to contract with essentially all pharmacies in a community, and give the government the authority to stick its nose into drug-pricing negotiations. The effect would be a massive increase in the program’s costs in 2015 — as much as $1.6 billion more than what they would be under current rules. The result would&#160;be higher premiums for seniors, and reduced choice. This is the quintessential bloated, bureaucratic solution in search of an actual real-world problem.</p>
<p>As with the proposed Medicare Advantage cuts, Republicans in Congress have pounced on this clumsy overreach of the administration — and they will have a lot of allies in the coming fight. Patient advocates have recognized that heavy regulation of a benefit that is working will only impede access to care for those with difficult and costly medical conditions. The GOP would be wise to highlight the problems these higher costs would cause for very vulnerable and frail seniors.</p>
<p>President Obama long ago signaled his disdain for the belief that competition and market forces could work to improve the nation’s health-care system. Unfortunately for him, private plans and a prototype for true competition already had a foothold in Medicare before he took office. They were working well, and seniors liked what these arrangements provided for them. The administration’s efforts to roll back these popular features of Medicare are thus setting in motion a major political backlash among elderly voters. The GOP need only channel it to good use in November.</p>
<p>James C. Capretta is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.</p> | false | 1 | supporters of160obamacare160frequently contend healthcare law implemented nationwide really version republican reform plan describe law built consumer choice competition among private insurers could republican course superficial description obamacare skates past laws massive shift power authority federal department health human services hhs sidelining individual employer state decisionmaking roles process hhs power decide every important question regarding kind insurance americans must purchase must get much cost law also imposes costly jobdestroying mandates individuals businesses raises taxes least halftrillion dollars piles massive new entitlement obligation top unaffordable ones already federal books willing ignore elements push us health care toward centralized costly government control sure maybe republican two could support considered republicans congress willing look past160obamacares160clear aim move us health care much politically possible toward fully governmentrun system if160obamacare160retains surface resemblance privatesectordriven marketbased system wrote pushed congress believed could go farther 2010 without fragmenting coalition support legislation doubt overall direction though160obamacare160is massive step toward centralized government control purpose explains administration claims implementing marketbased reform workingage americans simultaneously trying undermine marketdriven elements operating medicare namely medicare advantage program prescriptiondrug benefit apparent contradiction actually indication consistency administration supporters distrust markets consumer choice competition health care devised approach working americans minimizes elements much possible handing hhs power impose ever stringent regulations future time medicare already dominated governmentrun insurance option administrations objective strangle eventually eliminate aspects program outside full government control consequences effort squelch competition medicare would significant although medicare 49 million enrollees population 316 million program outsized influence structure direction american health care particular medicare heavily influences nations network hospitals physician groups organized medicarereform vision representative paul ryan r wis based called premium support important program move toward genuine consumer choice governmentrun medicare option competing level playing field private plans consumers incentive pick highvalue lowcost coverage keep premiums pressure would build government option private plans hold costs turn would put pressure hospitals physicians hold costs provide convenient higherquality services patients vision could transform medicare begin transform us health care exactly obama administration views along marketbased elements current medicare program primary threat statist vision health care medicare advantage targeted administration deep cuts since early 2009 plans privateinsurance options medicare seniors elect receive benefits plan instead traditional governmentrun insurance option seniors electing enroll government pays fixed monthly amount plans plans must provide entire medicare package services plans proven popular especially recent years enrollment exceeds 14 million people one four medicare participants administration allies complain growth fueled overpayments healthcare providers justification including large cuts obamacare course cuts also useful transferring resources medicare pay obamacares large subsidies expand healthinsurance coverage age 65 according congressional budget office obamacares cuts total 150 billion ten years including 14 billion 2015 alone certainly true plans paid rates exceed costs traditional medicare program many parts country due anticompetitive structure medicare default option medicare enrollment governmentrun feeforservice insurance program enrollees pay national premium regardless cost structure local program alternative private options government also imposes regulated payment rates doctors hospitals whereas plans must negotiate contracts networks providers addition many medicare enrollees employer plan ensures pay cost point service care features distort competition traditional program plans far instead removing distortions leveling playing field congress decided set payment rates plans make attractive enrollees fact medicare pays plans costs traditional program imply plans less efficient fact according medicare payment advisory commission medpac plans able deliver medicare package benefits 96 percent traditional programs costs hmos even efficient providing medicare benefits 92 percent traditional programs costs plans use higher payments government provide additional benefits enrollees including lower deductibles costsharing requirements traditional program obama administration well aware facts adamantly opposed true competition medicare providing beneficiaries fixed level support regardless coverage option select arrangement known premium support traditional program costs plan beneficiaries would pay added premium several studies confirmed truly level playing field would lead largescale migration governmentrun feeforservice option privately administered plans order create ryanlike level playing field critical first vibrant private option medicare lay foundation genuine competition current skirmishing payment rates consequential obama administration determined proceed planned cuts obamacare add administrative decisions would cut rates still oliver wyman consulting firm estimated cuts administration seeking 2015 would reduce rates 59 percent top 4 6 percent cut already implemented 2014 plans would choice adjust cuts scaling back coverage raising premiums costsharing requirements enrollees cumulative effects would raise annual costs enrollees much 1700 credit republicans congress seized cuts political issue plan make central theme 2014 midterm elections obama administration would like characterize reductions cuts insurers offering plans seniors enrolled plans know better experienced changes costs government cut payments plans past indications political pressure already building nineteen senate democrats recently signed letter complaining obama administration cuts put vote congress cuts almost certainly would get canceled significantly scaled back competitive component medicare drug benefit actually prototype fullfledged premiumsupport plan governments contribution toward drug coverage determined entirely competitive bids plans offering prescriptiondrug insurance government calculates enrollmentweighted average bids provides percentage amount beneficiaries entitlement drug coverage beneficiaries apply payment plan choice pay additional premium design exactly paul ryan envisions rest medicare ensures beneficiaries costconscious eager enroll lowpremium highvalue plans every measure especially standard restraining cost growth drug benefit success 2014 fourth year row premiums owed enrollees prescriptiondrug plans remained flat 31 per month average four dollars premium congressional budget office predicted enactment 2003 would required 2006 total costs program 40 percent original estimates cbo also concluded drug benefit improved health seniors thus lowering costs rest medicare rare indeed find new federal program comes budget yet surpasses expectations customer satisfaction quality obama administration regularly sends officials downplay achievements also dreamt supposed problems program many plan offerings use preferred pharmacies attempt justify massive costly 700page regulation issued proposed rule january adopted regulation would severely limit costcutting strategies drug plans require contract essentially pharmacies community give government authority stick nose drugpricing negotiations effect would massive increase programs costs 2015 much 16 billion would current rules result would160be higher premiums seniors reduced choice quintessential bloated bureaucratic solution search actual realworld problem proposed medicare advantage cuts republicans congress pounced clumsy overreach administration lot allies coming fight patient advocates recognized heavy regulation benefit working impede access care difficult costly medical conditions gop would wise highlight problems higher costs would cause vulnerable frail seniors president obama long ago signaled disdain belief competition market forces could work improve nations healthcare system unfortunately private plans prototype true competition already foothold medicare took office working well seniors liked arrangements provided administrations efforts roll back popular features medicare thus setting motion major political backlash among elderly voters gop need channel good use november james c capretta senior fellow ethics public policy center visiting fellow american enterprise institute | 1,085 |
<p />
<p>Although the House Democrats have added a couple toothless <a href="http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=110_cong_bills&amp;docid=f:s1642es.txt.pdf" type="external">reforms</a> to Title VI to disguise their capitulation to the radical professors, you can tell these changes are window-dressing by looking at what the Dems have left out. Not only does the House bill omit the Senate’s stronger and more contested reform proposals, it also leaves out a series of reforms that no one (to my knowledge) has ever publicly opposed. Amazingly, some of the omitted reforms have even been recommended by a prestigious non-partisan study that the Democrats themselves originally called for. In other words, the House Democrats are now so beholden to radical professors and the higher education lobby that they are ignoring their own blue ribbon commission. I’ll get to Saudi manipulation of Title VI in a bit, but first let’s look at the heretofore non-controversial reforms the House Democrats have just gutted.</p>
<p>Opposing Apple Pie Most people know that intercepted transmissions from the 9/11 hijackers went unrecognized for want of government translators. Six years later, the shortage of accomplished speakers of Middle Eastern languages remains acute. The core purpose of Title VI (originally called the National Defense Education Act) is to get speakers of strategic languages into government service. Clearly the program isn’t working, and sad to say, some of this is intentional. Many radical professors actually <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/kurtz/kurtz200404010914.asp" type="external">boycott</a> national security related scholarship programs. Thus, some of the very same academics who benefit from Title VI subsidies are actively trying to undermine the core purpose of the program.</p>
<p>There are other reasons why Title VI subsidies have consistently failed to bring speakers of strategic languages into government service. For one thing, the government doesn’t even have a coordinated way of obtaining basic information about which languages are most needed in which agency, and which subsidized university programs have the best record of sending students into government service. One of the key findings of the <a href="http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NTlkYmJlNTk5MDYyZDdkYmU2YWM4YWI2NTRlYjM1OWE=" type="external">report</a> on Title VI by the National Research Council (a study called for by the Democrats themselves), is that we lack data on the actual “impacts” and “outcomes” of Title VI subsidies.</p>
<p>The Senate’s bipartisan reform package addresses these problems with provisions for consulting a broad spectrum of government agencies on areas of linguistic need, and insuring that subsidized academic programs encourage government service on the part of their students. There is also a requirement that subsidized programs conduct post-graduation job-placement surveys, as well as a provision calling on the Dept. of Education to take past job-placement performance into account when deciding on renewing a given university’s subsidies.</p>
<p>It’s tough to see how a reasonable person could object to these proposals. I’ve never heard a public argument against any of them. Even Senator Kennedy and the Senate Democrats have adopted them. Only a radical professor who wanted to receive government largesse without any accountability — perhaps even with the intention of undermining the very purpose of the subsidy itself — could object. Yet the House has omitted even these utterly reasonable proposals. The non-partisan National Research Council report also recommends that the Dept. of Education draw up a biennial report on the functioning of Title VI, and make its findings public. This perfectly harmless recommendation is included in the Senate version of Title VI, yet omitted from the House’s gutted bill.</p>
<p>Dems’ Sharp Turn Something quite new and different is happening with the post-2006 House Democrats. Title VI reform has been a bone of contention for years, and yet up until now neither party allowed the battle to turn partisan. When I testified before the House on this issue in 2003, the hearings were staffed on a bipartisan basis. Republicans made a point of consulting with the Democrats and coming up with a compromise bill, which passed without opposition on the floor of the House. From the start, Title VI reform has seen an intense pull and tug between scholarly associations (like MESA) and the higher education lobby, on the one hand, and critics of higher education, like <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=0944029493" type="external">Martin Kramer</a> and me, on the other. Yet both political parties acknowledged problems with the program, and the need for substantial reform. That’s still the case in the Senate, but in the House, the Democrats have gutted even the most non-controversial proposals for reform–and against the advice of their own commission’s report.</p>
<p>Saudi Money So what about Saudi money? I won’t repeat the extraordinary story of how the Saudi’s have managed to capture and use the “public outreach” programs mandated under Title VI to shape America’s K-12 education on the Middle East. You can read about that in “Saudi in the Classroom” (linked above). The only good news out of the House Democrats’ version of Title VI is that they have at least implicitly acknowledged the problem. The House bill includes a new provision requiring programs supported by Title VI subsidies to report foreign gifts.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, the Democrats’ foreign gift reporting provision can’t be taken seriously. In the first place, to the best of my understanding, there already is a foreign gift reporting provision in effect for institutions of higher education. (I welcome comments, corrections, or additional information from readers on the current status and actual operation of this provision.) I’m <a href="http://vlex.com/vid/19196063" type="external">referring</a> to Section 1011f. “Disclosure of foreign gifts” of Title 20 of the U.S. Code.</p>
<p>As I read it, existing law seems already to require institutions of higher education to disclose large foreign gifts to the Secretary of Education. (It would be very interesting to see whether colleges and universities are actually complying with this law.) But even if the Democrats’ foreign gift reporting provision is not entirely red undant, the million dollar threshold for reporting in the Democrats’ bill is obviously way too high. Section 1011f already requires colleges and universities to report gifts over $250,000. So by Congress’s own existing standard, the proposed foreign gift reporting provision is four times higher than it ought to be.</p>
<p>Although the Saudis have occasionally given gifts in the tens of millions of dollars to various universities, these tend to fund special centers, and are therefore made public in any case. With a one million dollar threshold, it should be relatively easy for the Saudis, if necessary, to slightly reduce any covert gifts, and disburse them to a few more Title VI institutions. And much of the Saudi influence is indirect, as when federally subsidized public outreach centers adopt Saudi developed teacher training curricula. So disclosing direct financial gifts only begins to get at the mechanisms of foreign control over this program.</p>
<p>No Fix Unfortunately, the House Democrats have killed off every reform that might actually expose and correct foreign influence over Title VI. For one thing, House Democrats have now rejected the idea of an advisory board for this program. Yet, like nearly every other government scholarship program, Title VI originally had an advisory board. The board was eliminated in the early nineties, and program oversight has suffered ever since. The proposed advisory board would have no power other than the power to cast sunlight — for example, by determining the nature and extent to which foreign governments might be influencing the program.</p>
<p>In place of an advisory board, the Senate came up with the compromise of a grievance procedure. Note that grievances would have applied not to college course-work (the college curriculum is explicitly protected from federal interference, and in any case, with the exception of some language classes, Title VI does not directly fund college course work). The Senate’s proposed grievance procedure applies instead to the “public outreach programs” that run K-12 teacher-training workshops and other public seminars. These public outreach activities are not part of the college curriculum, but are creatures of Congress. Without either an advisory board or a grievance procedure, the public outreach programs are totally without oversight, and this is precisely how the Saudis have been able to turn Title VI into a Trojan horse for their own educational goals.</p>
<p>The troubled Title VI program cannot be fixed by a foreign gift reporting provision, which may well be redundant, and in any case has a reporting threshold four times higher than previous congressional requirements. The problem of foreign influence on Title VI can only be solved with some form of systematic oversight — be it an advisory board able to hold public hearings, or a grievance procedure. The fig-leaf of a near-meaningless foreign gift reporting provision is an admission by the Democrats that there is a serious problem of foreign influence over Title VI, but it is not a solution.</p>
<p>Turning Partisan Although Title VI reform has never before been a partisan issue, it may well become one. If the House Democrats manage to gut the Senate compromise, reform will be dead for the moment, but very legitimately available to Republicans as an issue from now on. Do the Democrats in Congress really want to tie their fortunes to the radicals who dominate academic programs of Middle East Studies? By bowing to the professors and cutting out even the most non-controversial reforms of Title VI (including ideas suggested by their own commission’s report) the Dems are effectively playing into every “soft on defense” stereotype. In the past, Democrats and Republicans in both the House and Senate have been able to piece together a compromise on this issue. It’s a measure of how extreme House Democrats have become that they have dumped even the most non-controversial compromises from the bill.</p>
<p>The good news is that House Education and Labor Committee Chairman, George Miller, has left a slight opening for compromise. At committee markup, under pressure from Michigan Republican <a href="http://hoekstra.house.gov/" type="external">Pete Hoekstra</a> (the original sponsor of Title VI reform), Miller held out the prospect of agreeing to further changes when the bill reaches the floor.</p>
<p>Is there anything you can do to help? There certainly is. You can contact your congressional representatives and ask them to support a strong program of reform for Title VI of the Higher Education Act. You might tell them that you favor the provisions of the Senate bill, and that you are disappointed with the near elimination of any Title VI reform in the House’s version of the Higher Education Act. Ask congressmen to adopt the provisions of the Senate bill in the House, and ask Senators (especially on the Senate Committee on Health Education Labor &amp; Pensions) to <a href="http://help.senate.gov/favicon.ico" type="external">fight hard</a> for the Senate version of Title VI reform in conference. The Title VI controversy will likely be resolved one way or the other over the next few months. But that’s only for now. We may be witnessing the beginning, not the end, of Title VI’s life as a fully partisan issue.</p>
<p>— Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the <a href="" type="internal">Ethics and Public Policy Center.</a></p> | false | 1 | although house democrats added couple toothless reforms title vi disguise capitulation radical professors tell changes windowdressing looking dems left house bill omit senates stronger contested reform proposals also leaves series reforms one knowledge ever publicly opposed amazingly omitted reforms even recommended prestigious nonpartisan study democrats originally called words house democrats beholden radical professors higher education lobby ignoring blue ribbon commission ill get saudi manipulation title vi bit first lets look heretofore noncontroversial reforms house democrats gutted opposing apple pie people know intercepted transmissions 911 hijackers went unrecognized want government translators six years later shortage accomplished speakers middle eastern languages remains acute core purpose title vi originally called national defense education act get speakers strategic languages government service clearly program isnt working sad say intentional many radical professors actually boycott national security related scholarship programs thus academics benefit title vi subsidies actively trying undermine core purpose program reasons title vi subsidies consistently failed bring speakers strategic languages government service one thing government doesnt even coordinated way obtaining basic information languages needed agency subsidized university programs best record sending students government service one key findings report title vi national research council study called democrats lack data actual impacts outcomes title vi subsidies senates bipartisan reform package addresses problems provisions consulting broad spectrum government agencies areas linguistic need insuring subsidized academic programs encourage government service part students also requirement subsidized programs conduct postgraduation jobplacement surveys well provision calling dept education take past jobplacement performance account deciding renewing given universitys subsidies tough see reasonable person could object proposals ive never heard public argument even senator kennedy senate democrats adopted radical professor wanted receive government largesse without accountability perhaps even intention undermining purpose subsidy could object yet house omitted even utterly reasonable proposals nonpartisan national research council report also recommends dept education draw biennial report functioning title vi make findings public perfectly harmless recommendation included senate version title vi yet omitted houses gutted bill dems sharp turn something quite new different happening post2006 house democrats title vi reform bone contention years yet neither party allowed battle turn partisan testified house issue 2003 hearings staffed bipartisan basis republicans made point consulting democrats coming compromise bill passed without opposition floor house start title vi reform seen intense pull tug scholarly associations like mesa higher education lobby one hand critics higher education like martin kramer yet political parties acknowledged problems program need substantial reform thats still case senate house democrats gutted even noncontroversial proposals reformand advice commissions report saudi money saudi money wont repeat extraordinary story saudis managed capture use public outreach programs mandated title vi shape americas k12 education middle east read saudi classroom linked good news house democrats version title vi least implicitly acknowledged problem house bill includes new provision requiring programs supported title vi subsidies report foreign gifts unfortunately variety reasons democrats foreign gift reporting provision cant taken seriously first place best understanding already foreign gift reporting provision effect institutions higher education welcome comments corrections additional information readers current status actual operation provision im referring section 1011f disclosure foreign gifts title 20 us code read existing law seems already require institutions higher education disclose large foreign gifts secretary education would interesting see whether colleges universities actually complying law even democrats foreign gift reporting provision entirely red undant million dollar threshold reporting democrats bill obviously way high section 1011f already requires colleges universities report gifts 250000 congresss existing standard proposed foreign gift reporting provision four times higher ought although saudis occasionally given gifts tens millions dollars various universities tend fund special centers therefore made public case one million dollar threshold relatively easy saudis necessary slightly reduce covert gifts disburse title vi institutions much saudi influence indirect federally subsidized public outreach centers adopt saudi developed teacher training curricula disclosing direct financial gifts begins get mechanisms foreign control program fix unfortunately house democrats killed every reform might actually expose correct foreign influence title vi one thing house democrats rejected idea advisory board program yet like nearly every government scholarship program title vi originally advisory board board eliminated early nineties program oversight suffered ever since proposed advisory board would power power cast sunlight example determining nature extent foreign governments might influencing program place advisory board senate came compromise grievance procedure note grievances would applied college coursework college curriculum explicitly protected federal interference case exception language classes title vi directly fund college course work senates proposed grievance procedure applies instead public outreach programs run k12 teachertraining workshops public seminars public outreach activities part college curriculum creatures congress without either advisory board grievance procedure public outreach programs totally without oversight precisely saudis able turn title vi trojan horse educational goals troubled title vi program fixed foreign gift reporting provision may well redundant case reporting threshold four times higher previous congressional requirements problem foreign influence title vi solved form systematic oversight advisory board able hold public hearings grievance procedure figleaf nearmeaningless foreign gift reporting provision admission democrats serious problem foreign influence title vi solution turning partisan although title vi reform never partisan issue may well become one house democrats manage gut senate compromise reform dead moment legitimately available republicans issue democrats congress really want tie fortunes radicals dominate academic programs middle east studies bowing professors cutting even noncontroversial reforms title vi including ideas suggested commissions report dems effectively playing every soft defense stereotype past democrats republicans house senate able piece together compromise issue measure extreme house democrats become dumped even noncontroversial compromises bill good news house education labor committee chairman george miller left slight opening compromise committee markup pressure michigan republican pete hoekstra original sponsor title vi reform miller held prospect agreeing changes bill reaches floor anything help certainly contact congressional representatives ask support strong program reform title vi higher education act might tell favor provisions senate bill disappointed near elimination title vi reform houses version higher education act ask congressmen adopt provisions senate bill house ask senators especially senate committee health education labor amp pensions fight hard senate version title vi reform conference title vi controversy likely resolved one way next months thats may witnessing beginning end title vis life fully partisan issue stanley kurtz senior fellow ethics public policy center | 1,020 |
<p>When a rogue nation considers other possible crimes as alternatives to war and settles on sanctions, the result is less violent but not always less deadly.</p>
<p>The U.S. Senate has <a href="http://click.actionnetwork.org/mpss/c/5AA/ni0YAA/t.28i/E4B4WtEgQEWGOPoZ7EoQxw/h1/Xa8u3BsTSv1IGC5Rcd7xzLv0pYbCVkmHqIOuyxtIAUy0GIzPQP-2BA5DwMQJDnAhF3KorfGARPxQkFIxIZgZpqhEEk7GZX8p5pYq1WZWicjYAi3-2FWt-2BSp4QMnsQGs70R0CIC-2FTZ07TJC4plUAnxPQE6AaEXnpw6jBbUuaZZMvWoVKcFzHQjVQxHumcM0BS-2Fv2NeRBEZ-2Fazn-2BZ00ZCdQ69AVRgMRbDPXCKapcF-2F4fwBUNoRV7LKJcPMm8kCE6suh0KnxpRgitxRTz0QZm13jdc7k-2BOrVf-2FSxhgRlV5CC-2FF-2BylyQHqZREpifozY3oFPR3BAbVJ59DU-2FERZMIP0NOEhCw7exBMjus6EsjRAH581yOuhhREA72IxDO9Z-2FTrEo8pIVzQlACbPNhhHhnFc35iFFx59RXEPo9Nh51vIajTFEk3qg-3D" type="external">increased</a> sanctions on the people of Iran and Russia, if the House and President go along. The Senate vote was <a href="http://click.actionnetwork.org/mpss/c/5AA/ni0YAA/t.28i/E4B4WtEgQEWGOPoZ7EoQxw/h2/a8Z5LRyAEBMqydP-2FL-2F5LEsP3LhNdl-2FfaX-2FPrlCdNvzKHtZ1ZAGEFjQtbz-2BXwhMFOc7C2BPem5eY-2BcDDIW6cWBlz-2F2rp0lgT-2FAFHT4I8XLRx-2B97yQQFwy953aQTXVaH6GOOiucTduwnjzCBTn166SBL6pqn5uBNuZzGK0qkIjAkKvV0baXjNeC6-2BH4gNDmrHVIQuHAlz2db3-2BP6m-2Bsroma5q50-2FsV5f9Vzl0L1CUVXWC-2BxqJEz0xXNtPETLbROat8Gv939MwzOPCZ3YJ5q-2FwcnuN6AB04gZQFgwWlJyR7ga9I8Y8HCtGn4jnzEveJSEDR7CSk7du5vP3gZTdkfACdtGtHAbDjVqk5FXEx33vslw9DL8QG4mtVr2LNfkgxyH1-2F" type="external">98-2</a>, with Senators Rand Paul and Bernie Sanders voting no, the latter despite his support for the Russian half of the bill.</p>
<p>The bill is called “An act to provide congressional review and to counter Iranian and Russian governments’ aggression.”</p>
<p>“Aggression” is a term of art here meant to convey something like what it means for the U.S. military to accuse a Syrian airplane in Syria of aggression against U.S. forces before shooting it down. Legally, the aggressor is the United States in both situations (in the Syrian war and in the context of these sanctions), but practically speaking resistance to U.S. aggression is perceived in Washington, D.C., as unacceptable hostility.</p>
<p />
<p />
<p>“Military action,” we should note, is a criminal activity under the U.N. Charter and under the Kellogg-Briand Pact. It is not just “politics by other means,” but rather the quintessentially rogue action. When a rogue nation considers other possible crimes as alternatives to war and settles on sanctions, the result is less violent but not always less deadly. U.S. sanctions on Iraq prior to 2003 <a href="http://click.actionnetwork.org/mpss/c/5AA/ni0YAA/t.28i/E4B4WtEgQEWGOPoZ7EoQxw/h4/Jb9ZUZ-2BHBLFAkQw-2FQ1kTOm-2BrKdkzMJV7pUQ1MXG8kQ7a4OAGrWeE-2FcyR07QbzFDmcepP754j-2Fl-2BPloKZlcswVp6gpklTajKFuNnWSLIwLjcxKblnjz-2BxvMGd1VlINTZAAIR9RA-2BJ0j3-2FX8A2V74D861wsTyjaT2O5T9o3RVzHTtYPnqxZQCUMW73iyQB79rrgCVilggkPkAQdG5irMN0GqwT9WxuV-2F071tfGusCv9cKMb3d0mjlbWOiVzU2X50ytch5ZpKeqCxHSEk9dZ6lhpq0TPcY0VddIB1aDhyYqKQTF1kal5m6MQmTNUpY7hOsyRxYQks5zbybKr5LyljctfoJppqUfwdkSzFMpYfDzcFGTuwQhxOFQCWEYaqw4lM8u-2FzI7t-2BrojiZNGu6ApxjXALbj6RWr9SEx9696VoSOpxA-3D" type="external">killed</a> at least 1.7 million people, including at least 0.5 million children, according to the U.N. (something then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said was “worth it”). So, sanctions do “put lives on the line,” but they are the tools of a rogue, not of global justice “cracking down” on rogues.</p>
<p />
<p />
<p>Of course, if the goal is not domestic overthrow but promotion of a nationalist or militarist who will make a good enemy easy to provoke into a war, then arguably there have been dangerous signs of success in North Korea, while the Iranians’ reelection of a moderate, and Putin’s extremely cool restraint must be infinitely frustrating.</p>
<p>The U.S. does not present sanctions as tools of murder and cruelty, but that’s what they are. The Russian and Iranian people are already suffering under U.S. sanctions, the Iranians most severely. But both take pride in and find resolve in the struggle, just as do people under military attack. In Russia, the sanctions are actually benefitting agriculture, just as they have done in Cuba. Necessity is the mother of food production. Still, the suffering is widespread and real. Reinforcing the blockade on Cuba is a criminal action that will lead to deaths (including the deaths of U.S. citizens denied access to Cuban medicines).</p>
<p>The U.S. presents its sanctions as law enforcement rather than law violation. The senate’s legislation blames Iran for building missiles and for supporting terrorists and insurgents. The United States, of course, far outdoes Iran in both regards, and building missiles is (sadly) not a violation of any law. Large-scale terrorism, also known as war, is, however, where U.S. criminality really dwarfs Iran and Russia.</p>
<p>The same bill cites the U.S. “intelligence community” with “assessing” in January that “Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the United States presidential election.” Thus Russia stands accused (without a shred of proof) of undermining cyber security and elections, things the United States leads the world in. In addition, Russia is accused of “aggression” in Ukraine, something that facilitating a violent coup in Kiev does not apparently add up to. Then there are “human rights abuses” and “corruption within Russia.”</p>
<p>If there is any role for a global system of justice to address such matters, there is no role for the U.S. government, the greatest purveyor of violence on earth, the greatest incarcerator of humans on earth, the greatest consumer of petroleum on earth, and a government that has legalized bribery, to do so.</p>
<p>The array of sanctions in this new bill, as in the existing sanctions programs on numerous nations, makes an odd mix. Some sanctions supposedly target human rights, while others are clearly aimed at economic competition — and communications competition. Various industries are targeted for damage. The production of a report on Russian media is ordered — as if the United States is not also the leader in promoting its own media abroad.</p>
<p>The silver lining here, as well as — coincidentally — the part of the legislation least likely to please the White House is the effort to block Russian fossil fuels pipelines. The Secretary of Exxon Mobil cannot be pleased. If Russophobia were to save the climate from huge amounts of carbon, as well as making it acceptable to demand verifiable vote counting in U.S. elections, there would at least be something to smile about as humanity approaches the brink.</p>
<p>Needless to say, we’d be better off abolishing sanctions along with war as counterproductive, cruel, barbaric forms of hostility in a world that needs cooperation, forgiveness, and generosity as it never has before. When the Soviet Union dismantled itself, abandoned communism, and petitioned to join the E.U. and NATO, and to mutually disarm, the U.S. government made very clear that it values something far higher than eliminating enemies. And that is this: maintaining enemies. Sanctions serve that purpose with Russia and Iran: they maintain enemies, they sell weapons.</p>
<p>They also prepare the ground, as in Iraq, for war. Russia’s nuclear weapons, the incredible success of Islamophobia, traditional U.S. racism, and the positioning of the U.S. military in the area all make this very bad news for Iran as the likely next victim. And if a U.S. war is launched against Iran, we are likely to hear from Washington’s halls of power as a justification for war the following pathetic confession: “Well, we tried sanctions and that didn’t work.”</p>
<p>This article was originally published in the <a href="http://click.actionnetwork.org/mpss/c/5AA/ni0YAA/t.28i/E4B4WtEgQEWGOPoZ7EoQxw/h0/TsOKxdbUeHLDsaduuFG-2FUyBsP9qxCvTUqWurbzRyeLPXwsmLCQCyZ8Kq3bK2D49m9GqQwpEYwNhE4Gp-2B2NwWO04ShZeGJxTV7NnvDxnGr0ufL1dTAqYyS1u6vs5pVJ8FbWFCpbFegj5XqEKGQo9v7oyBRaRJBbfc7214-2F2TvOUYroJhOi-2BQQWMUsze27QAUahmvJ3rkMizjFCnKkSqv6nX5W38Py3AH47NVF8AmQlMbsA-2F-2Bd-2BCgQgDA8PEwgIW3Qutr0wQBjWLmpXb-2Bs4I3Zf5dAr5Mk2x5Hzsma-2FE099LBBfKqAuVk3JDt2VGIBsWQepb1V47esxqh0LHWp6ctgRijKkKaivJTVFcGDYYmK2nGLs90SXF0-2F7R-2BExLdSGBJR" type="external">American Herald Tribune</a>.</p> | false | 1 | rogue nation considers possible crimes alternatives war settles sanctions result less violent always less deadly us senate increased sanctions people iran russia house president go along senate vote 982 senators rand paul bernie sanders voting latter despite support russian half bill bill called act provide congressional review counter iranian russian governments aggression aggression term art meant convey something like means us military accuse syrian airplane syria aggression us forces shooting legally aggressor united states situations syrian war context sanctions practically speaking resistance us aggression perceived washington dc unacceptable hostility military action note criminal activity un charter kelloggbriand pact politics means rather quintessentially rogue action rogue nation considers possible crimes alternatives war settles sanctions result less violent always less deadly us sanctions iraq prior 2003 killed least 17 million people including least 05 million children according un something thensecretary state madeleine albright said worth sanctions put lives line tools rogue global justice cracking rogues course goal domestic overthrow promotion nationalist militarist make good enemy easy provoke war arguably dangerous signs success north korea iranians reelection moderate putins extremely cool restraint must infinitely frustrating us present sanctions tools murder cruelty thats russian iranian people already suffering us sanctions iranians severely take pride find resolve struggle people military attack russia sanctions actually benefitting agriculture done cuba necessity mother food production still suffering widespread real reinforcing blockade cuba criminal action lead deaths including deaths us citizens denied access cuban medicines us presents sanctions law enforcement rather law violation senates legislation blames iran building missiles supporting terrorists insurgents united states course far outdoes iran regards building missiles sadly violation law largescale terrorism also known war however us criminality really dwarfs iran russia bill cites us intelligence community assessing january russian president vladimir putin ordered influence campaign 2016 aimed united states presidential election thus russia stands accused without shred proof undermining cyber security elections things united states leads world addition russia accused aggression ukraine something facilitating violent coup kiev apparently add human rights abuses corruption within russia role global system justice address matters role us government greatest purveyor violence earth greatest incarcerator humans earth greatest consumer petroleum earth government legalized bribery array sanctions new bill existing sanctions programs numerous nations makes odd mix sanctions supposedly target human rights others clearly aimed economic competition communications competition various industries targeted damage production report russian media ordered united states also leader promoting media abroad silver lining well coincidentally part legislation least likely please white house effort block russian fossil fuels pipelines secretary exxon mobil pleased russophobia save climate huge amounts carbon well making acceptable demand verifiable vote counting us elections would least something smile humanity approaches brink needless say wed better abolishing sanctions along war counterproductive cruel barbaric forms hostility world needs cooperation forgiveness generosity never soviet union dismantled abandoned communism petitioned join eu nato mutually disarm us government made clear values something far higher eliminating enemies maintaining enemies sanctions serve purpose russia iran maintain enemies sell weapons also prepare ground iraq war russias nuclear weapons incredible success islamophobia traditional us racism positioning us military area make bad news iran likely next victim us war launched iran likely hear washingtons halls power justification war following pathetic confession well tried sanctions didnt work article originally published american herald tribune | 539 |
<p>Note: On September 5, 2013, President Obama <a href="" type="internal">appointed</a>&#160;Bruce Cole to the Eisenhower Memorial Commission.</p>
<p>Only in Washington: After 12 years of study and millions of dollars spent, a congressionally appointed commission has yet to break ground on the National Mall for a memorial to President Dwight David Eisenhower. The memorial, which could cost American taxpayers up to $142 million—yes, you read that correctly—is now embroiled in controversy over the appropriateness of starchitect Frank Gehry’s ambitious design.</p>
<p />
<p>DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER MEMORIAL COMMISSION</p>
<p>Most presidential memorials are modest, limited to life-sized statues, columns, friezes, and tombs; many presidents are memorialized only by their headstones. This type of unostentatious memorialization mirrors the nature of the office. American presidents are elected chief executives with powers lent only temporarily by their peers: “the first among equals.” They are remembered as citizens, and their memorials are strikingly different from those built for European monarchs, which glorify hereditary aristocracy, privilege, and absolute power.</p>
<p>The presidential memorials in Washington, befitting their location in the nation’s capital, are of a different order. They are national commemorations designed for mass visitation by tourists and so more capacious and theatrical than their counterparts outside the Beltway.</p>
<p>The Lincoln and Jefferson memorials on the Mall are civic shrines which engender emotion through architectural form and space; each marshals these elements to create awe and gravitas, and each revolves around a monumental statue of the president, seen in full only after visitors ascend a series of stairs and pass through a screen of columns.</p>
<p>Both memorials employ the vocabulary of classical architecture also used for federal buildings, including the Capitol, the White House, and the Treasury, to produce a permanence, stability, and confidence evoked by the style’s origin in ancient Greece and Rome.</p>
<p>But these are not hallmarks of Frank Gehry, who made his reputation, and fortune, on unstable, disorienting, and unfocused architecture. His architectural philosophy is summed up in his claim, “Life is chaotic, dangerous, and surprising. Buildings should reflect that.”</p>
<p>As Gehry tells it, he was in Washington, “walking around looking at the memorials and thinking there has got to be a better way to do this.” Really? One wonders how many Americans agree that Gehry’s way is better.</p>
<p>While his plan borrows superficially from the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials—it includes columns, statues, and texts of speeches—it is unintelligible. Spread over four acres, the monument by its very size produces confusion, architectural preening, and pomposity. It consists of a lot of elements of different shapes, proportions, materials, and sizes, including eight-story-high pillars (purposely misnamed columns in an attempt to forge a connection with the other memorials), trees, engraved words, plinths, multiple statues, and three gargantuan 80-foot-tall aluminum mesh “tapestries” resembling chain link fences.</p>
<p>The Gehry design includes a statue of Eisenhower, shape and size to be determined; the latest version depicts him not as a soldier or as president, but as a cadet, which is perhaps marginally better than the original idea to infantilize him as a barefoot farm boy. It’s alarming that this late in the conceptual design stage, on the eve of final approval and the authorization of millions of dollars ($60 million has already been allocated by Congress, and the Eisenhower Memorial Commission requested an additional $60 million this year and possibly another $20 million next year), so many components of the monument remain vague, including the identity of many of the nine-foot statues.</p>
<p>Unlike the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials, the Gehry plan is so incoherent that the job of elucidating it to visitors must be subcontracted to a profusion of digital interactive displays and recorded “sound wells,” which will be costly, fragile, and of little educational value.</p>
<p>In sum, Gehry’s design is more about his ego than about Ike. It purposely subverts long-held traditions of civic celebration by trivializing Eisenhower’s accomplishments.</p>
<p>For millions, these are still living memory: Ike’s role as supreme commander of the Allied forces that liberated Europe, his stewardship of NATO, and his two terms as president of the United States are part of these people’s own history. But they will not always be with us.</p>
<p>Rising generations will lack this firsthand historical memory. Surveys and tests prove that such young people, like many of their parents, will know next to nothing about this great American when they visit Washington.</p>
<p>Not only to teach them about Ike, but also to tell them why he is important and worth remembering, is the task of any memorial worthy of his name. In the execution of these tasks, the Gehry proposal fails utterly.</p>
<p>So, instead of spending millions more on the Gehry plan in these days of enormous government debt and expenditures, why not swap pomposity and self-promotion for modesty and restraint, befitting a memorial to Dwight Eisenhower?</p>
<p>The whole project could start over with a truly open and democratic competition with input from the American public as to what design would most suitably honor Eisenhower. It doesn’t matter if a traditionalist architect or one working in a modern style wins. What’s important is to build something worthy of our 34th president.</p>
<p>Or how about the reasonable suggestion of the Eisenhower family for a statue in front of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House? An image of Ike adjacent to the World War II memorial would also make sense. Either could be done for just a fraction of Gehry’s multimillion-dollar fee, let alone the total cost of the memorial.</p>
<p>Until recently, congressional approval for the memorial seemed a sure thing, but after a salvo of national condemnation (Roll Call said it had reached “fever pitch”), including criticism from Ike’s granddaughters Susan and Anne—their brother David resigned from the memorial commission—that’s no longer certain.</p>
<p>Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar has now weighed in by asking for more time and study. According to his press office, “The Secretary believes it is important to build a national memorial that appropriately honors the legacy of President Eisenhower and reflects the shared vision of his family, the Commission, and the American people.” “Appropriately” is the key word here.</p>
<p>Several congressional heavy hitters have also expressed serious reservations, including Jim Moran, ranking member of the House Interior and Environment Committee, who has asked his colleagues on the Eisenhower Memorial Commission “to rethink their support and allow a new public competition on an alternative design.” Representative Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, has demanded documents from the scandal-ridden General Services Administration—it ran the architectural competition that critics claim was rigged—and from the Eisenhower Memorial Commission. Representatives Dan Lungren, Aaron Schock, and Frank Wolf have also publicly stated their concern about the proposed design and asked for a delay. And last week the House Appropriations subcommittee responsible for funding the Eisenhower Memorial released a draft budget that included no funds for the project for fiscal year 2013, a move that could put the whole thing on hold.</p>
<p>Until recently, the Gehry behemoth seemed a sure thing, but no longer. If outraged citizens can persuade their elected officials not to squander their tax dollars on an inappropriate monument to a great American, it will be a victory for Ike and the American people.</p>
<p>Bruce Cole, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, was a senior scholar at the Hudson Institute at the time this article was published. He is now a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.</p> | false | 1 | note september 5 2013 president obama appointed160bruce cole eisenhower memorial commission washington 12 years study millions dollars spent congressionally appointed commission yet break ground national mall memorial president dwight david eisenhower memorial could cost american taxpayers 142 millionyes read correctlyis embroiled controversy appropriateness starchitect frank gehrys ambitious design dwight eisenhower memorial commission presidential memorials modest limited lifesized statues columns friezes tombs many presidents memorialized headstones type unostentatious memorialization mirrors nature office american presidents elected chief executives powers lent temporarily peers first among equals remembered citizens memorials strikingly different built european monarchs glorify hereditary aristocracy privilege absolute power presidential memorials washington befitting location nations capital different order national commemorations designed mass visitation tourists capacious theatrical counterparts outside beltway lincoln jefferson memorials mall civic shrines engender emotion architectural form space marshals elements create awe gravitas revolves around monumental statue president seen full visitors ascend series stairs pass screen columns memorials employ vocabulary classical architecture also used federal buildings including capitol white house treasury produce permanence stability confidence evoked styles origin ancient greece rome hallmarks frank gehry made reputation fortune unstable disorienting unfocused architecture architectural philosophy summed claim life chaotic dangerous surprising buildings reflect gehry tells washington walking around looking memorials thinking got better way really one wonders many americans agree gehrys way better plan borrows superficially jefferson lincoln memorialsit includes columns statues texts speechesit unintelligible spread four acres monument size produces confusion architectural preening pomposity consists lot elements different shapes proportions materials sizes including eightstoryhigh pillars purposely misnamed columns attempt forge connection memorials trees engraved words plinths multiple statues three gargantuan 80foottall aluminum mesh tapestries resembling chain link fences gehry design includes statue eisenhower shape size determined latest version depicts soldier president cadet perhaps marginally better original idea infantilize barefoot farm boy alarming late conceptual design stage eve final approval authorization millions dollars 60 million already allocated congress eisenhower memorial commission requested additional 60 million year possibly another 20 million next year many components monument remain vague including identity many ninefoot statues unlike jefferson lincoln memorials gehry plan incoherent job elucidating visitors must subcontracted profusion digital interactive displays recorded sound wells costly fragile little educational value sum gehrys design ego ike purposely subverts longheld traditions civic celebration trivializing eisenhowers accomplishments millions still living memory ikes role supreme commander allied forces liberated europe stewardship nato two terms president united states part peoples history always us rising generations lack firsthand historical memory surveys tests prove young people like many parents know next nothing great american visit washington teach ike also tell important worth remembering task memorial worthy name execution tasks gehry proposal fails utterly instead spending millions gehry plan days enormous government debt expenditures swap pomposity selfpromotion modesty restraint befitting memorial dwight eisenhower whole project could start truly open democratic competition input american public design would suitably honor eisenhower doesnt matter traditionalist architect one working modern style wins whats important build something worthy 34th president reasonable suggestion eisenhower family statue front eisenhower executive office building next white house image ike adjacent world war ii memorial would also make sense either could done fraction gehrys multimilliondollar fee let alone total cost memorial recently congressional approval memorial seemed sure thing salvo national condemnation roll call said reached fever pitch including criticism ikes granddaughters susan annetheir brother david resigned memorial commissionthats longer certain secretary interior ken salazar weighed asking time study according press office secretary believes important build national memorial appropriately honors legacy president eisenhower reflects shared vision family commission american people appropriately key word several congressional heavy hitters also expressed serious reservations including jim moran ranking member house interior environment committee asked colleagues eisenhower memorial commission rethink support allow new public competition alternative design representative darrell issa chairman house committee oversight government reform demanded documents scandalridden general services administrationit ran architectural competition critics claim riggedand eisenhower memorial commission representatives dan lungren aaron schock frank wolf also publicly stated concern proposed design asked delay last week house appropriations subcommittee responsible funding eisenhower memorial released draft budget included funds project fiscal year 2013 move could put whole thing hold recently gehry behemoth seemed sure thing longer outraged citizens persuade elected officials squander tax dollars inappropriate monument great american victory ike american people bruce cole former chairman national endowment humanities senior scholar hudson institute time article published senior fellow ethics public policy center | 714 |
<p>On February 19, 2009, business journalist Rick Santelli inadvertently helped launch a populist movement. Appearing on the cable network CNBC from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Santelli spoke of rising public anger about the expensive taxpayer-funded bailouts of failed banks, bankrupt corporations, and home owners who had defaulted on their mortgages. These policies were breeding deep concern about the growth of government, Santelli argued, and people were looking for ways to express their opposition. “We’re thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party,” he said, suggesting that participants might throw stock certificates into Lake Michigan.</p>
<p>The tone and substance of Santelli’s complaints struck a nerve. Video of his remarks spread rapidly across the internet, and his reference to the Boston Tea Party seemed to give many the inspiration they were seeking. Just two months later, on April 15, an estimated 500,000 people marked tax day with roughly 800 “Tea Party” protests across the country. There have since been hundreds more such gatherings, including several large demonstrations in Washington and other major cities. Directed especially against the Obama administration’s economic policies and the recently enacted health-care legislation, these events represent a large (if loosely organized) grassroots protest movement. Indeed, this past April, a&#160;New York Times&#160;poll found that 18% of Americans identify themselves as Tea Party supporters.</p>
<p>Yet as this new populism has spread, it has also generated a great deal of worry and disdain. One might expect a negative response from observers on the left: Tea Party anger is, after all, directed at their favored policies and politicians. But the Tea Partiers have also engendered concern and scorn among many on the right and in the center.&#160;New York Times&#160;columnist David Brooks, for example, has defined the activists as “a large, fractious confederation of Americans who are defined by what they are against,” and who are characterized by the “zero-sum mentality that is at the heart of populism.”&#160;Washington Post&#160;columnist George Will, who opposes many of the same policies the Tea Parties reject, has his doubts, too: Populism’s “constant ingredient has been resentment,” he wrote recently. “It always wanes because it never seems serious as a solution.”</p>
<p>This dim view of populists has a long pedigree in political thought. Observers since Plato and Aristotle have warned that democracy’s peculiar failing is its tendency to produce demagogues: popular leaders who can excite the masses through fiery oratory, and then exploit the resulting political fervor to rise to power and destroy the state.</p>
<p>The American founders had the same fears, and so built our republic to contain such outbursts whenever they might arise. By and large, they have succeeded: American populism, as it has taken shape again and again throughout our history, has not yielded the demagogic figures that so worried the classical philosophers. Our exceptional nation has an exceptional political culture, and among its foremost features has always been a distinctive form of populism that, far from threatening to destroy the republic, has at crucial moments helped to balance and rejuvenate it.</p>
<p>This is not to say that we know for sure what our own populist moment will bring. To understand both its significance and its potential, however, we should look not at the classical portrait of populism but rather at its unique manifestation in the United States — a history that is, by turns, both consoling and cautionary.</p>
<p>THE SPECTER OF DEMAGOGUES</p>
<p>Our view of classical populism is shaped by both the warnings of philosophers and the experiences of some democracies, ancient and modern. In the&#160;Politics, Aristotle defines a demagogic democracy as one in which “the decrees of the assembly override the law” and a popular faction “takes the superior share in the government as a prize of victory.” The people’s leader, the demagogue, incites them to pursue such despotism through extravagant rhetoric, playing on the people’s basest desires and fears. The result is laid out ominously in Plato’s&#160;Republic: The people — “an obedient mob” — “set up one man as their special leader…and make him grow great.” The masses take the property of the wealthy to redistribute it among themselves; the people’s enemies, meanwhile, are charged with crimes and banished from the city (or worse). The Athenian philosophers were not merely theorizing such scenarios: Their city had lived through them, during the reigns of the 5thcentury&#160;B.C. demagogues Alcibiades and Cleon.</p>
<p>Though classic populism has varied according to time and place, it has generally taken the form of a morality play in four acts. In the first act, the masses come to feel like powerless victims, left helpless against the onslaught of an oppressive “other.” In the second act, often following a crisis, that “other” is defined by a popular leader as an implacable enemy — one who has no concern for the welfare of the people, and whose actions are motivated by selfishness and greed. In the third, the leader proposes a solution: The people must use their numerical advantage to seize control of the state. In the final act, that power is used to take back from the enemy that which rightfully belongs to the people, without regard for the enemy’s consent or rights.</p>
<p>This basic outline has been followed by regimes throughout history — from the demagogueries of the ancient Greek democrats, to the modern forms of communism, fascism, and socialism. The enemy can be economic (like capitalists or aristocrats), racial (as the Jews were for the Nazis), religious (as with sects in Lebanon or Iraq), or foreign (think Hugo Chávez’s denunciations of America). The circumstances of each case differ greatly, of course, but the pattern remains the same: The “victim” seeks to vanquish the “victor,” to take what is rightfully his, and to do unto the other what has allegedly been done unto him. When the drama is finally over, the rule of the people has given way to the rule of a despot.</p>
<p>Such a pattern was among the evils James Madison sought to contain through the Constitution. His great fear, as he put it in Federalist No. 49, was that “the&#160;passions,…not the&#160;reason, of the public would sit in judgment.” If this were permitted, Madison wrote in Federalist No. 10, “the influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame”; the American republic, he believed, should be designed to keep such conflagrations in check.</p>
<p>Madison assumed that Americans would be tempted to&#160;demand&#160;classical populism; the challenge was to reduce the ability of the government to&#160;supply&#160;it. In this sense, his creation has clearly worked: America has never had a classically populist regime. More interesting, however, is the fact that — contrary to Madison’s assumption — the demand for such populism has always been fairly low in America. As it turns out, Americans have tended not to launch large-scale quasi-democratic movements in the classical-populist mold. And when such movements have arisen, they have generally not done well at election time — and so have never come close to enacting their agendas.</p>
<p>The relative absence of these movements has always puzzled European and Marxist social scientists, who have struggled to explain why America — in this respect virtually unique in the Western world — never formed a significant socialist or communist party. After all, economic mobility isn’t that different in the United States than in Europe. Inequality is worse. Why, then, haven’t Americans clamored to overthrow the powerful? What&#160;is&#160;the matter with Kansas?</p>
<p>The answer is to be found in the American soul, shaped as it has surely been by Madison’s system. Americans are a self-governing people through and through, and American populism reflects the American passion for self-determination. That passion certainly leads some Americans to respond powerfully against overbearing elites, and so causes some populist movements to form. But it has also often allowed these responses to be channeled in constructive directions — keeping our politics in balance, and over time giving rise to enduring political coalitions.</p>
<p>In looking at some key populist episodes in our history, then, one finds a pattern that should ease the worries of those now concerned about a politics of resentment. It is also a pattern that offers some crucial guidance for the instigators and cheerleaders of today’s populist movement.</p>
<p>AMERICAN POPULISM</p>
<p>American populism shares with its classical cousin the use of heated rhetoric against an unjust “other,” and the idea that popular control of the state is essential to the restoration of justice. But it breaks from the classical model in three significant respects.</p>
<p>First, successful populist movements tend to characterize the American people not as helpless victims, but as honest folk dispossessed of their right to achieve prosperity and happiness through self-improvement and hard work. As such, American populists seek not a charismatic leader who will bring them order and justice, but rather a re-opening of the avenues to self-advancement and self-reliance.</p>
<p>Second, the “other” in American populism tends not to be vilified as an implacable enemy without rights. Instead, he is an adversary: one who might be corrupt or acting unjustly at the moment, but still a fellow citizen who retains his basic American goodness, is capable of redemption, and is secure in his rights. Despite some reckless accusations to the contrary, today’s populist movement seems no different on this front.</p>
<p>Third and most important, effective American populists generally do not seek to take the enemy’s property to redistribute it to the people. Instead, they argue that if the government is once again made responsive to the electorate — by placing the populists in power — the people will again be able to help themselves. Sooner or later, the populists usually develop a policy agenda — and it is typically a case for using government to advance self-reliance or enable prosperity and growth.</p>
<p>These distinctive elements of American populism recur throughout our political history. There are, of course, exceptions; but the movements that have led to lasting political coalitions are generally the ones that have followed this pattern.</p>
<p>Indeed, America’s first enduring political coalition was built on the back of a populist movement: a revolt by farmers against what they perceived as an elitist political leadership devoted to urban trading and banking interests. Many rural farmers in the republic’s early years were upset by such acts of the new federal government as the tax on whiskey (which precipitated the Whiskey Rebellion of the 1790s); the creation of the First Bank of the United States, which made loans for the benefit of commercial interests; and new taxes levied to finance the Quasi-War with France in de facto support of America’s trading partner and former colonial overlord, Great Britain. When the Federalists passed the Sedition Act in 1798 (which criminalized criticism of the government), and started arresting opposition newspaper publishers, many Americans saw that the very future of their self-governing democracy was at stake.</p>
<p>Appealing to these worries in the election of 1800, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison patched together Southerners and rural voters in the Mid-Atlantic states in an effort to defeat the reigning Federalists, headed by John Adams and Alexander Hamilton. While Jefferson, Madison, Adams, and Hamilton are today held in high esteem as intellectuals — and perhaps as America’s most contemplative politicians — one would never know it from the rhetoric they employed in their efforts to win power. The Jeffersonians accused their Federalist opponents of being monarchists bent on overthrowing republican government and replacing it with a regime based on the British model (and run in the interests of the rich). Jefferson called his opponents “Anglomen and monocrats.” The Federalists in turn described Republicans as a wild and angry mob, akin to the French revolutionaries, who would murder their opponents and burn churches.</p>
<p>Amid the passion and the anger, Jefferson and Madison’s Republican Party — the forerunner of today’s Democrats — won the day; the coalition they built then proceeded to win every national election until 1824. The Republicans also provided the first example of a uniquely American populist movement. They cast the American people as honest, hardworking, and determined to reclaim America from the elitists trying to rob them of their liberties; the people’s adversaries, meanwhile, were identified as aristocratically inclined public officials (especially Adams and Hamilton) whose support came from the powerful and wealthy New England merchant class. Justice and republican government, the narrative went, would be restored only when the people seized the government in their own name by winning elections. As Jefferson put it in a March 1799 letter to Thomas Lomax, “The spirit of 1776 is not dead. It has only been slumbering.” Once the people “recover from the temporary frenzy into which they [have] been decoyed,” Jefferson wrote the following year, &#160;they will “rally round the constitution, &amp;…rescue it from the destruction with which it had been threatened.”</p>
<p>But even in the populists’ harsh depictions, the Federalist adversary never rose to the level of an enemy. Unlike American Tories who supported Britain during the Revolution — and who saw their property seized and were driven to emigrate to the West Indies or Canada by the thousands — Federalists were treated like fellow Americans who, with some persuasion, might return to republican principles. “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists,” President Jefferson intoned in his first inaugural address — hardly a recitation of the classical-populist creed.</p>
<p>Just as important, the Republican notion of justice was based on an appeal to self-determination and self-reliance. Jefferson did not seek to take the property of the Federalists and distribute it to farmers and mechanics; rather, he sought to repeal policies that he believed prevented people from making their own way in life. The hated whiskey tax, for example, was repealed by the Republican Congress, as were many of the other taxes Adams had imposed — but no punitive economic or political measures were imposed on the defeated. The element of retributory vengeance, so crucial to old-fashioned populism, was entirely absent from Republican doctrine (and governing practice).</p>
<p>Much the same was true of the next great populist episode in our history: the rise of Jacksonian democracy. The elections of 1828 and 1832 saw the ruling Republicans break into two factions: The minority faction — headed by incumbent president John Quincy Adams — became the National Republicans (and then the Whigs); it drew its support from the mercantile regions of the country, mainly New England and the large cities of the South. Members of the majority faction, meanwhile, renamed themselves the Democrats under the leadership of Andrew Jackson. This new group re-established the character and core of the Jeffersonian coalition, extending it to the new states of the South and Midwest.</p>
<p>Of the public figures who emerged in America’s early decades, Jackson is often considered the closest to a classical populist. He certainly made a great deal of his humble frontier roots, engaged in heated rhetoric, and drew class distinctions. Upon his election as president in 1828, Jackson threw open the doors of the White House — welcoming thousands of supporters, regardless of social class, to an unrefined and boisterous inaugural celebration filled with muddy boots and heavy drinking. In 1832, he campaigned against the Second Bank of the United States — a forerunner of the Federal Reserve — arguing that it was a scheme of the elite and the rich to despoil the people. In a message explaining his veto of a measure that would have re-chartered the bank, Jackson noted that giving the bank an effective “monopoly of the foreign and domestic exchange” would cause its stock price to rise by 30% or more. The people holding this stock, and others who would benefit from the bank’s continued existence, were foreigners and “a few hundred of our own citizens, chiefly of the richest class.” This and other measures being proposed in Washington — such as using federal money to support road and canal construction that would have benefited industrialists — showed, in Jackson’s view, that “many of our rich men have not been content with equal protection and equal benefits, but have besought us to make them richer by act of Congress.” Jackson’s campaign motto that re-election year was hardly subtle: “Let the People Rule.”</p>
<p>Yet Jackson’s tactics offer another example of a fundamentally constructive American populism. He accused his adversaries of oppressing the poor for the sake of the rich — but he did not seek to take away their rights or their property. He eliminated the Second Bank and opposed federally financed internal improvements, but his aim was to end the purported depredation of the people by the wealthy, not to enrich his own supporters. In Jackson’s morality play, he restored the American heritage to a dispossessed, but fundamentally self-reliant, people — not by taking from the rich, but by ennobling the ordinary.</p>
<p>Jackson was an American populist, but not a demagogue. And his rise to power, like Jefferson’s, ushered in an enduring coalition — one with a concrete agenda intended to counteract the power of established economic interests, and so to enable greater upward mobility and self-reliance.</p>
<p>A HOUSE DIVIDED</p>
<p>Because he led the Union through the Civil War, saved the American experiment, and ended slavery, Abraham Lincoln is generally thought of today as a unifying statesman — not a populist. (Indeed, he staunchly opposed the populist “Know Nothing” movement that sought to curb immigration in his day.) But Lincoln’s career nonetheless illustrates the character and strengths of some peculiarly American-populist ideas — ideas that he absorbed during his 20 years’ war with the Democratic populists who dominated Illinois politics, and which he later applied as a candidate and as president.</p>
<p>Lincoln ran his 1858 and 1860 campaigns using well-honed populist techniques. He championed the free white people of the North — honest citizens seeking to reclaim America and preserve its ideals for future generations. The people’s adversaries, meanwhile, were identified as Southern slaveholders and their Northern co-conspirators. (Lincoln even alleged that his great rival, Stephen Douglas, was engaged in a blatant conspiracy with Supreme Court chief justice Roger Taney, President James Buchanan, and former president Franklin Pierce to bring slavery to the North and to revoke each state’s power to abolish the practice in its jurisdiction.) In Lincoln’s campaign narrative, justice could be achieved only by removing these adversaries from power; failure to do so would place the American republic in jeopardy.</p>
<p>Classical populism would have rounded out this litany by offering some obvious remedies — chief among them the repossession of the Southern elites’ property, and the curtailment of their rights. This, indeed, was the platform of the abolitionists, and many (including William Lloyd Garrison) denounced Lincoln for his failure to adopt it.</p>
<p>But Lincoln rejected the classical-populist temptation, and held to a different course — one that enabled his Republican Party to sweep to victory a mere six years after its founding. Lincoln argued that as wrong as slavery was, Southerners should not be deprived of their human property without compensation. While abolitionists argued that the Constitution was a pact with the devil because it implicitly tolerated slavery, Lincoln argued that respect for the Constitution was essential to American liberty. His approach, therefore, was to limit the spread of slavery — not to launch an extraconstitutional crusade to abolish slavery everywhere in an attempt to assuage Northerners’ sense of justice.</p>
<p>Beyond the slavery question, Lincoln’s Republicans also advanced economic policies designed to let the average American better himself. The first GOP Congress created land-grant colleges in the states to research agricultural productivity, passed a Homestead Act that gave federal land to settlers who improved it, and provided public assistance for building a transcontinental railroad. Each program enlarged the reach of the federal government, but each was designed to give the individual the means — access to knowledge, land, and transportation — by which to advance himself.</p>
<p>Lincoln showed that the threads of American populism could be woven into a different political coat than those worn by Jefferson and Jackson, but that these populist threads were nonetheless the key to political success in our democracy. And the coalition Lincoln built would dominate American politics for the next 30 years, until an economic depression — combined with widespread immigration and industrialization in the early 1890s — left the public again ill at ease. These changes eventually gave rise to the American political movements that have come closest to real classical populism: the People’s Party, and the William Jennings Bryan Democrats.</p>
<p>A CROSS OF GOLD</p>
<p>The People’s Party, often referred to simply as “the Populists,” marked a break from the American model of populism — though, ultimately, an unsuccessful one. Emerging from the West and the South in the late 1880s in response to falling agricultural prices and the pressures of industrialization, the Populists claimed to represent a particular class of victim: the small farmer whose economic difficulties were purportedly caused by a conspiracy of big-business owners and Eastern bankers. Like their American-populist forerunners, the People’s Party argued that the government had to be wrested from the control of these moneyed elites. Their grievances and preferred remedies were elaborately stated in the preamble to their 1892 platform: “The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind….From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two great classes, tramps and millionaires….We seek to restore the government of the Republic to the hands of the ‘plain people.’ ”</p>
<p>Where the People’s Party departed from past movements, however, was in advocating the most nakedly redistributionist philosophy yet seen in America. The Populists called for free coinage of silver to produce inflation, which would severely reduce the value of the elites’ savings and investments. They demanded a graduated income tax and government ownership of the railroads, telephones, and telegraphs — the equivalent of demanding government ownership of airlines, television, and the internet today. Their version of the populist morality play called not for restoring a traditional sense of American justice, or for re-opening the paths to self-improvement, but for taking from the undeserving rich in order to give to helpless, more deserving victims.</p>
<p>The Populists’ early forays into electoral politics did meet with some success. Their candidate for president in 1892, James Weaver, carried four states — Kansas, Colorado, Nevada, and Idaho — and ran well in many others. In that same decade, Populists also forged alliances in the South with Republicans and African-Americans, winning the governorship of North Carolina and coming close in other states.</p>
<p>Seeing both a threat and an opportunity, the Democratic Party responded in the form of a 36-year-old congressman from Nebraska named William Jennings Bryan. Like Barack Obama and Sarah Palin, Bryan catapulted to national prominence off of one outstanding speech before his party’s national convention. Unlike Obama and Palin — who stressed themes of, respectively, unity (one America, red and blue) and ordinariness (the hockey mom from Wasilla) — Bryan spoke about class warfare. Decrying bankers and industrialists, Bryan embraced free silver, an income tax, and government relief for farmers. Placing himself at the vanguard of the “struggling masses” battling against “the idle holders of idle capital” — and claiming to represent the “avenging wrath of an indignant people” engaged in a “crusade” against advocates of the gold standard — Bryan concluded his fiery oration with the famous edict, “you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”</p>
<p>Some Democrats who supported the gold standard were so alarmed by Bryan that they rejected their party’s nominee in favor of their own candidate, John Palmer. Bankers and industrialists, too, were (obviously) frightened by Bryan’s rhetoric, and fought back with all their might. Indeed, Bryan’s Republican opponent, William McKinley, raked in record-setting campaign contributions. And McKinley, for his part, campaigned on the theme that Bryan was a madman, a religious fanatic, and determined to wreck the economy. Tariffs and the gold standard had produced the industrialization that was spreading wealth to millions and providing working men with a “full dinner pail,” he argued. In response to populist calls for redistribution and appeals to victimhood, McKinley offered self-reliance and economic dynamism.</p>
<p>McKinley won the election, setting the foundation for a generation of Republican Party dominance. Classical populism, it seems, did not play well in America, even among voters pressed by hard times. And while McKinley’s successes in the industrial states were only logical, far more revealing was what happened in America’s burgeoning cities and resource-rich hills, home to the very laborers and miners Bryan claimed to represent. The mining counties of northern Wisconsin and Michigan, and the anthracite coal region of northeastern Pennsylvania, had all voted for Democrat Grover Cleveland in 1892, but went for McKinley in 1896. The great interior cities of Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Milwaukee followed suit. Even New York City, a Democratic bastion since the 1850s, voted for McKinley. Bryan’s classical-populist emphasis on retributory vengeance frightened the largely immigrant industrial working class, while McKinley’s classic American emphasis on helping people help themselves resonated with their own hopes and dreams.</p>
<p>There was not to be another major populist episode in American politics until the Great Depression. And even in the midst of that enormous crisis, it was a distinctly American populism — not the vengeful demagoguery of the People’s Party — that carried the day.</p>
<p>Franklin Roosevelt certainly spoke in populist tones, casting the American people as vulnerable to “unscrupulous money changers” and his opponents as distant elites whose “industrial dictatorship” had ushered in an “economic tyranny” that meant “men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness.” But Roosevelt’s “second American Revolution,” as legal scholar Cass Sunstein has described it, would not consist fundamentally of taking from the rich to give to the poor. That approach was advocated at the time by more classical populists, like Louisiana governor Huey Long, who explicitly called for the nation to “share the wealth.” Instead, the New Deal was meant to rebuild, in Roosevelt’s words, “an American way of life” — giving each person “equal opportunity in the marketplace,” just as the first American Revolution “guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place.” &#160;In Roosevelt’s view, his “generation of Americans ha[d] a rendezvous with destiny,” a calling to establish an economic system that “helps men to help themselves.”</p>
<p>Of course, F. D. R.’s programs vastly expanded the power of the government, but they did so mostly in ways that preserved a great deal of economic freedom. The Social Security Act provided government assistance that would save the widowed, the unemployed, and the aged from material poverty, but (at least as originally conceived) did not create a massive welfare state. The Wagner Act guaranteed the right of labor unions to organize and to bargain, but without making government the final arbiter of wages. The Federal Housing Administration helped to revive the housing market after the Depression and to finance America’s rapid suburbanization after the war. And the G.I. Bill gave soldiers from working-class families the financial support they needed to attend college — starting a rapid rise in educational attainment that not only answered many Americans’ yearning for self-advancement, but also helped fuel the nation’s post-war boom. In short, Roosevelt’s American-populist rhetoric and policies did legitimize a vast expansion of government in the name of serving “the people” — but, critically, did so in ways that preserved essential American freedoms.</p>
<p>CONSERVATIVE POPULISM</p>
<p>In the wake of the Depression, the New Deal, and the enduring political coalition established by Franklin Roosevelt, American conservatives were left reeling for decades. Conservative intellectuals seemed to alternate between the despair of Albert Jay Nock and the doll houses of Southern agrarianism and Ayn Rand libertarianism. Conservative politicians like Robert Taft proved unable to build a national majority, as even the Republican Party seemed to turn to more liberal standard-bearers like Earl Warren and Nelson Rockefeller. With the launch of&#160;National Review&#160;in 1955, William F. Buckley, Jr., sought to fuse conservative intellectual tendencies into an alloy stronger than each component; this intellectual conservatism was, however, to remain disconnected from mainstream politics until the mid-1960s.</p>
<p>In the ’60s, many Americans grew uneasy with the course the country seemed to be taking, both politically and socially. The America of farms and small towns was giving way to a nation of suburbs; the growth of large corporations, the rise of television, and the sharp increase in internal mobility were eroding the cohesiveness of local communities. Accompanying these changes was the growth of the national government, which had continued apace even under Republican president Dwight Eisenhower. Despite increasing affluence and relative peace abroad, an ever-larger number of Americans felt their country was becoming unrecognizable — and they wanted to take it back.</p>
<p>So it was that intellectual conservatism and popular anxiety joined forces in Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign to create a crude populism of the right. But despite what would appear to have been a favorable political climate, this amalgam proved dismally unpopular. While the rhetoric of Goldwater’s campaign was generally fairly measured, that of his backers was too often not. Much like the Populist farmers in the late 1890s, Goldwater’s supporters felt themselves to be oppressed. Many railed against elites, sometimes crossing the line from battling an adversary to assaulting an enemy; they argued, for instance, that there was a conscious conspiracy between business, government, and intellectuals to end American freedom and to yield to communist ambitions at home and abroad. Perhaps the most extreme example was the founder of the John Birch Society, Robert Welch, who claimed that an international cabal bent on undermining U.S. sovereignty and power had its tentacles deep in the American government — on the right and left alike — and that even “Dwight Eisenhower [had been] a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.”</p>
<p>Ronald Reagan, then an increasingly political Hollywood actor, entered the fray near the end of the campaign with a nationally televised speech on Goldwater’s behalf. Casting the election as a choice between “up or down — up to man’s age-old dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order — or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism,” Reagan accused incumbent president Lyndon Johnson of spreading socialism. Johnson’s administration, Reagan said, was seeking to “trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state” and engaging in “appeasement” with our enemies. Noting that he was a former Democrat, Reagan closed with a conscious invocation of Franklin Roosevelt: “You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on Earth, or we will sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.” The movie star’s message roused the faithful, but fell flat among the voting masses.</p>
<p>Goldwater’s crushing defeat seemed to all but the most die-hard conservatives to be the death knell of this nascent movement. Viewed against the backdrop of American political history, it is not hard to see why Goldwater lost: The tone and ideas of some of his extreme backers were viewed as odd and frightening by most voters, and the candidate’s inability (or unwillingness) to disavow their words allowed Johnson to paint Goldwater himself as odd and frightening. Instead of seeking to help honest folk restore the rights denied them by an adversary, too often Goldwater came across as wanting to lead victims in a violent battle against an implacable enemy.</p>
<p>The campaign suffered from another, fatal flaw. To succeed at the voting booth, American-populist movements have generally needed to present a positive alternative — to make an affirmative case for how their victory would set things right, and show how their particular policies would let the individual help himself. Goldwater’s backers assumed that the people would simply understand that a return to classic constitutional government would achieve their desired ends. But after 30 years under the New Deal, the constitutional connection was no longer intuitive. Americans had been convinced that the New Deal’s balance of government intervention and private enterprise was the best way, in Roosevelt’s words, to “follow the pursuit of happiness.”</p>
<p>Conservatives therefore faced a new challenge: how to plant the tree of liberty in the garden of Roosevelt. It was a challenge that would occupy Ronald Reagan for the next 16 years — first as governor of California, and then as a candidate for president. Ultimately, Reagan came up with an answer very much in the American-populist tradition: championing the cause of honest, simple people who felt powerless in American politics, and attracting them with the promise of self-reliance and upward mobility. Echoing Roosevelt’s appeal to the “forgotten man,” Reagan said conservatives “represent the forgotten American — that simple soul who goes to work, bucks for a raise…and knows there just ‘ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.’ ”</p>
<p>But Reagan made a point of avoiding personal or conspiratorial insinuations; he also presented his policies as gradual and safe reforms. Conservatives had lost, he said, because liberals had painted them as advocating “radical departure from the status quo.” Instead, Reagan believed, conservatives should adopt “the soft sell to prove our radicalism was an optical illusion.” This meant convincing those who had supported the New Deal that their own creation was the cause of their dissatisfaction.</p>
<p>The desire to avoid being tarred as an extremist did not mean, however, that Reagan would avoid blunt language. Throughout his career, he minced no words when describing the threats to freedom and prosperity posed by unlimited, centralized government. He clearly defined his adversary: big government run by faceless bureaucrats who cared more for their schemes than the people’s welfare. Nor could the man who called the Soviet Union “the evil empire” and defined the ending of the Cold War as “we win, they lose” be said to have dissembled on foreign policy. But when it came to his domestic opponents, Reagan avoided the classical-populist trap of vilifying his political adversaries as outright enemies.</p>
<p>Reagan’s approach also departed from Goldwater’s in his frequent praise for individual accomplishment. He constantly drove home the idea that the individual could better himself with only minimal government support (“the safety net”). As president, Reagan began the tradition of placing “average Americans” in the gallery at State of the Union addresses; he held up these ordinary people — most of whom had performed extraordinary actions — as living examples of the idea that the “forgotten American” was capable of great things. Throughout his political career, Reagan constantly drew the connection between individual action and economic growth — and between limited government and human self-improvement — through example, imagery, and explanation. It was in no small part responsible for his political success.</p>
<p>Some Republican triumphs of the post-Reagan era — especially the 1994 takeover of Congress, which built on the anxieties revealed by the strength of Ross Perot’s populist presidential campaign two years earlier — employed many of the same elements. Conservatives railed against liberal elites, offered reforms of a welfare system that had been crushing individual initiative, and sought to set private enterprise free. George W. Bush’s two successful presidential campaigns were waged in less populist times, and therefore in a less populist spirit — but they, too, incorporated some of these populist themes.</p>
<p>A TIME FOR CHOOSING</p>
<p>The populist spirit is back with a vengeance today. An economic crisis provoked partly by bankers who showed little regard for the people’s money, a response from Washington that lost sight of the proper limits of American government, and looming debt and fiscal crises have produced a deep unease that has yielded, among other things, the much-discussed Tea Party movement.</p>
<p>We do not yet know whether that movement will join the ranks of successful populist uprisings that appealed to American values and so led to enduring political coalitions, or whether it will come to be listed among failed populist efforts that couldn’t translate public disquiet into electoral success. But the history of American populism can at least give us a sense of this movement’s direction, and should help today’s populists figure out their next steps.</p>
<p>Those who believe that the aggressive, angry pitch of the Tea Partiers’ rhetoric will automatically alienate independent voters should think again. As we have seen, successful populist movements define adversaries in stark and often abrasive terms. Skilled political leaders in a democracy — figures like Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Reagan — know what pundits and academics often overlook: that they must move the heart before they can persuade the mind. In our modern mass democracy especially, this often requires a simple narrative: an easily identifiable “good” hero, a “bad” villain, and an unambiguous moral arc — one that shows how society can be redeemed from its current, fallen state, and how average Americans can flourish under the reformed regime. Such an appeal obviously requires sharp rhetoric and clear divisions.</p>
<p>Critics of the Tea Partiers and other conservative populists are right, however, in their concerns that aggressive rhetoric&#160;cango too far. William Jennings Bryan lost because he painted a portrait of his time that voters didn’t recognize, and because he made a majority afraid. Some libertarian populists, with their rejection of every facet of the modern welfare state, are likely to do the same — because even this center-right nation does not want to see the welfare state dismantled. And just as some of Barry Goldwater’s supporters tainted his campaign with their accusations of communist conspiracies reaching even to the presidency, the conspiracy theorists who insist that President Obama was not born in America risk damaging conservative populism today.</p>
<p>When Goldwater told the Republican convention of 1964 that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, [and] moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue,” he signaled to all that the extremists were welcome in his cause. But in his effort to make no enemies on the right, Goldwater ensured that he would make few friends in the center. Buckley knew better, and made sure that his developing conservative movement would not emerge stillborn because of its association with the fringes. He backed many populist conservative causes, but made clear in&#160;National Review&#160;that neither Ayn Rand radicals nor conspiracy theorists would find a home in conservatism. Those who seek to define modern conservative populism must do likewise with today’s extreme elements.</p>
<p>What is clear about our populist moment is that neither cerebral gentility nor unbridled passion alone can successfully channel today’s public sentiments into a meaningful political coalition. Neither can an agenda of pure opposition. Polls do show that overwhelming majorities of Americans now think the country is going in the wrong direction, are unhappy with Congress and its leaders, and want to elect new representatives; when Tea Partiers echo this discontent, they offer hope to millions of voters who want their worries taken seriously. But today’s populists should not imagine that an echo is all these voters want.</p>
<p>The fact is that the Tea Partiers themselves are disproportionately conservative Republicans. And while the troubles of the moment give those on the right a chance to be heard by other Americans, conservatives must think carefully about what they want to say once they have these voters’ ears. Polls clearly show that while most independent voters who are open to the Tea Party’s tone and concerns are unhappy with government, and think our political leaders have the wrong priorities, they do not want to tear down the welfare state or dramatically roll back the federal government. They want alternatives to President Obama’s approach. The challenge for conservatives, then, is to propose alternatives that offer a real change of direction without seeming too radical.</p>
<p>The history of American populism suggests that the key to meeting this challenge is to offer clear, positive proposals that can be easily identified as efforts to help people help themselves. Failing to grasp this insight is what sank Bryan and Goldwater; understanding how to express it in word and deed is what made Reagan and his coalition.</p>
<p>Those who hope to lead today’s conservative populism toward a new governing coalition must therefore take care to spend as much time building up as they do tearing down. Defining the adversary and his failings is essential; appealing to the anxiety of those who feel powerless against what is emerging from Washington is crucial; emotional rhetoric with an obvious moral arc is a must. But today’s populists must also point people toward a positive vision — one that clearly shows how retaking government will allow them to improve their own lives. Failure to do this will force Americans in the political middle to decide between those who oppose and those who create. And our innate American optimism will lead us to support those who create every time.</p>
<p>Today’s conservative populists therefore face a choice. They can learn from America’s populist past, and turn an intense but transient public sentiment into an enduring political force. Or they can yield to the twin temptations of intellectualism and exuberance and miss an opportunity. Given the lasting consequences of past populist movements, both failed and successful, it hardly seems an exaggeration to say that which option today’s populists choose will help determine the future contours of the conservative coalition, and of America’s political landscape. For this reason alone, they are a force to take seriously — this fall, and in the years ahead.</p>
<p>Henry Olsen is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.</p> | false | 1 | february 19 2009 business journalist rick santelli inadvertently helped launch populist movement appearing cable network cnbc floor chicago mercantile exchange santelli spoke rising public anger expensive taxpayerfunded bailouts failed banks bankrupt corporations home owners defaulted mortgages policies breeding deep concern growth government santelli argued people looking ways express opposition thinking chicago tea party said suggesting participants might throw stock certificates lake michigan tone substance santellis complaints struck nerve video remarks spread rapidly across internet reference boston tea party seemed give many inspiration seeking two months later april 15 estimated 500000 people marked tax day roughly 800 tea party protests across country since hundreds gatherings including several large demonstrations washington major cities directed especially obama administrations economic policies recently enacted healthcare legislation events represent large loosely organized grassroots protest movement indeed past april a160new york times160poll found 18 americans identify tea party supporters yet new populism spread also generated great deal worry disdain one might expect negative response observers left tea party anger directed favored policies politicians tea partiers also engendered concern scorn among many right center160new york times160columnist david brooks example defined activists large fractious confederation americans defined characterized zerosum mentality heart populism160washington post160columnist george opposes many policies tea parties reject doubts populisms constant ingredient resentment wrote recently always wanes never seems serious solution dim view populists long pedigree political thought observers since plato aristotle warned democracys peculiar failing tendency produce demagogues popular leaders excite masses fiery oratory exploit resulting political fervor rise power destroy state american founders fears built republic contain outbursts whenever might arise large succeeded american populism taken shape throughout history yielded demagogic figures worried classical philosophers exceptional nation exceptional political culture among foremost features always distinctive form populism far threatening destroy republic crucial moments helped balance rejuvenate say know sure populist moment bring understand significance potential however look classical portrait populism rather unique manifestation united states history turns consoling cautionary specter demagogues view classical populism shaped warnings philosophers experiences democracies ancient modern the160politics aristotle defines demagogic democracy one decrees assembly override law popular faction takes superior share government prize victory peoples leader demagogue incites pursue despotism extravagant rhetoric playing peoples basest desires fears result laid ominously platos160republic people obedient mob set one man special leaderand make grow great masses take property wealthy redistribute among peoples enemies meanwhile charged crimes banished city worse athenian philosophers merely theorizing scenarios city lived reigns 5thcentury160bc demagogues alcibiades cleon though classic populism varied according time place generally taken form morality play four acts first act masses come feel like powerless victims left helpless onslaught oppressive second act often following crisis defined popular leader implacable enemy one concern welfare people whose actions motivated selfishness greed third leader proposes solution people must use numerical advantage seize control state final act power used take back enemy rightfully belongs people without regard enemys consent rights basic outline followed regimes throughout history demagogueries ancient greek democrats modern forms communism fascism socialism enemy economic like capitalists aristocrats racial jews nazis religious sects lebanon iraq foreign think hugo chávezs denunciations america circumstances case differ greatly course pattern remains victim seeks vanquish victor take rightfully unto allegedly done unto drama finally rule people given way rule despot pattern among evils james madison sought contain constitution great fear put federalist 49 the160passionsnot the160reason public would sit judgment permitted madison wrote federalist 10 influence factious leaders may kindle flame american republic believed designed keep conflagrations check madison assumed americans would tempted to160demand160classical populism challenge reduce ability government to160supply160it sense creation clearly worked america never classically populist regime interesting however fact contrary madisons assumption demand populism always fairly low america turns americans tended launch largescale quasidemocratic movements classicalpopulist mold movements arisen generally done well election time never come close enacting agendas relative absence movements always puzzled european marxist social scientists struggled explain america respect virtually unique western world never formed significant socialist communist party economic mobility isnt different united states europe inequality worse havent americans clamored overthrow powerful what160is160the matter kansas answer found american soul shaped surely madisons system americans selfgoverning people american populism reflects american passion selfdetermination passion certainly leads americans respond powerfully overbearing elites causes populist movements form also often allowed responses channeled constructive directions keeping politics balance time giving rise enduring political coalitions looking key populist episodes history one finds pattern ease worries concerned politics resentment also pattern offers crucial guidance instigators cheerleaders todays populist movement american populism american populism shares classical cousin use heated rhetoric unjust idea popular control state essential restoration justice breaks classical model three significant respects first successful populist movements tend characterize american people helpless victims honest folk dispossessed right achieve prosperity happiness selfimprovement hard work american populists seek charismatic leader bring order justice rather reopening avenues selfadvancement selfreliance second american populism tends vilified implacable enemy without rights instead adversary one might corrupt acting unjustly moment still fellow citizen retains basic american goodness capable redemption secure rights despite reckless accusations contrary todays populist movement seems different front third important effective american populists generally seek take enemys property redistribute people instead argue government made responsive electorate placing populists power people able help sooner later populists usually develop policy agenda typically case using government advance selfreliance enable prosperity growth distinctive elements american populism recur throughout political history course exceptions movements led lasting political coalitions generally ones followed pattern indeed americas first enduring political coalition built back populist movement revolt farmers perceived elitist political leadership devoted urban trading banking interests many rural farmers republics early years upset acts new federal government tax whiskey precipitated whiskey rebellion 1790s creation first bank united states made loans benefit commercial interests new taxes levied finance quasiwar france de facto support americas trading partner former colonial overlord great britain federalists passed sedition act 1798 criminalized criticism government started arresting opposition newspaper publishers many americans saw future selfgoverning democracy stake appealing worries election 1800 thomas jefferson james madison patched together southerners rural voters midatlantic states effort defeat reigning federalists headed john adams alexander hamilton jefferson madison adams hamilton today held high esteem intellectuals perhaps americas contemplative politicians one would never know rhetoric employed efforts win power jeffersonians accused federalist opponents monarchists bent overthrowing republican government replacing regime based british model run interests rich jefferson called opponents anglomen monocrats federalists turn described republicans wild angry mob akin french revolutionaries would murder opponents burn churches amid passion anger jefferson madisons republican party forerunner todays democrats day coalition built proceeded win every national election 1824 republicans also provided first example uniquely american populist movement cast american people honest hardworking determined reclaim america elitists trying rob liberties peoples adversaries meanwhile identified aristocratically inclined public officials especially adams hamilton whose support came powerful wealthy new england merchant class justice republican government narrative went would restored people seized government name winning elections jefferson put march 1799 letter thomas lomax spirit 1776 dead slumbering people recover temporary frenzy decoyed jefferson wrote following year 160they rally round constitution amprescue destruction threatened even populists harsh depictions federalist adversary never rose level enemy unlike american tories supported britain revolution saw property seized driven emigrate west indies canada thousands federalists treated like fellow americans persuasion might return republican principles republicans federalists president jefferson intoned first inaugural address hardly recitation classicalpopulist creed important republican notion justice based appeal selfdetermination selfreliance jefferson seek take property federalists distribute farmers mechanics rather sought repeal policies believed prevented people making way life hated whiskey tax example repealed republican congress many taxes adams imposed punitive economic political measures imposed defeated element retributory vengeance crucial oldfashioned populism entirely absent republican doctrine governing practice much true next great populist episode history rise jacksonian democracy elections 1828 1832 saw ruling republicans break two factions minority faction headed incumbent president john quincy adams became national republicans whigs drew support mercantile regions country mainly new england large cities south members majority faction meanwhile renamed democrats leadership andrew jackson new group reestablished character core jeffersonian coalition extending new states south midwest public figures emerged americas early decades jackson often considered closest classical populist certainly made great deal humble frontier roots engaged heated rhetoric drew class distinctions upon election president 1828 jackson threw open doors white house welcoming thousands supporters regardless social class unrefined boisterous inaugural celebration filled muddy boots heavy drinking 1832 campaigned second bank united states forerunner federal reserve arguing scheme elite rich despoil people message explaining veto measure would rechartered bank jackson noted giving bank effective monopoly foreign domestic exchange would cause stock price rise 30 people holding stock others would benefit banks continued existence foreigners hundred citizens chiefly richest class measures proposed washington using federal money support road canal construction would benefited industrialists showed jacksons view many rich men content equal protection equal benefits besought us make richer act congress jacksons campaign motto reelection year hardly subtle let people rule yet jacksons tactics offer another example fundamentally constructive american populism accused adversaries oppressing poor sake rich seek take away rights property eliminated second bank opposed federally financed internal improvements aim end purported depredation people wealthy enrich supporters jacksons morality play restored american heritage dispossessed fundamentally selfreliant people taking rich ennobling ordinary jackson american populist demagogue rise power like jeffersons ushered enduring coalition one concrete agenda intended counteract power established economic interests enable greater upward mobility selfreliance house divided led union civil war saved american experiment ended slavery abraham lincoln generally thought today unifying statesman populist indeed staunchly opposed populist know nothing movement sought curb immigration day lincolns career nonetheless illustrates character strengths peculiarly americanpopulist ideas ideas absorbed 20 years war democratic populists dominated illinois politics later applied candidate president lincoln ran 1858 1860 campaigns using wellhoned populist techniques championed free white people north honest citizens seeking reclaim america preserve ideals future generations peoples adversaries meanwhile identified southern slaveholders northern coconspirators lincoln even alleged great rival stephen douglas engaged blatant conspiracy supreme court chief justice roger taney president james buchanan former president franklin pierce bring slavery north revoke states power abolish practice jurisdiction lincolns campaign narrative justice could achieved removing adversaries power failure would place american republic jeopardy classical populism would rounded litany offering obvious remedies chief among repossession southern elites property curtailment rights indeed platform abolitionists many including william lloyd garrison denounced lincoln failure adopt lincoln rejected classicalpopulist temptation held different course one enabled republican party sweep victory mere six years founding lincoln argued wrong slavery southerners deprived human property without compensation abolitionists argued constitution pact devil implicitly tolerated slavery lincoln argued respect constitution essential american liberty approach therefore limit spread slavery launch extraconstitutional crusade abolish slavery everywhere attempt assuage northerners sense justice beyond slavery question lincolns republicans also advanced economic policies designed let average american better first gop congress created landgrant colleges states research agricultural productivity passed homestead act gave federal land settlers improved provided public assistance building transcontinental railroad program enlarged reach federal government designed give individual means access knowledge land transportation advance lincoln showed threads american populism could woven different political coat worn jefferson jackson populist threads nonetheless key political success democracy coalition lincoln built would dominate american politics next 30 years economic depression combined widespread immigration industrialization early 1890s left public ill ease changes eventually gave rise american political movements come closest real classical populism peoples party william jennings bryan democrats cross gold peoples party often referred simply populists marked break american model populism though ultimately unsuccessful one emerging west south late 1880s response falling agricultural prices pressures industrialization populists claimed represent particular class victim small farmer whose economic difficulties purportedly caused conspiracy bigbusiness owners eastern bankers like americanpopulist forerunners peoples party argued government wrested control moneyed elites grievances preferred remedies elaborately stated preamble 1892 platform fruits toil millions boldly stolen build colossal fortunes unprecedented history mankindfrom prolific womb governmental injustice breed two great classes tramps millionaireswe seek restore government republic hands plain people peoples party departed past movements however advocating nakedly redistributionist philosophy yet seen america populists called free coinage silver produce inflation would severely reduce value elites savings investments demanded graduated income tax government ownership railroads telephones telegraphs equivalent demanding government ownership airlines television internet today version populist morality play called restoring traditional sense american justice reopening paths selfimprovement taking undeserving rich order give helpless deserving victims populists early forays electoral politics meet success candidate president 1892 james weaver carried four states kansas colorado nevada idaho ran well many others decade populists also forged alliances south republicans africanamericans winning governorship north carolina coming close states seeing threat opportunity democratic party responded form 36yearold congressman nebraska named william jennings bryan like barack obama sarah palin bryan catapulted national prominence one outstanding speech partys national convention unlike obama palin stressed themes respectively unity one america red blue ordinariness hockey mom wasilla bryan spoke class warfare decrying bankers industrialists bryan embraced free silver income tax government relief farmers placing vanguard struggling masses battling idle holders idle capital claiming represent avenging wrath indignant people engaged crusade advocates gold standard bryan concluded fiery oration famous edict shall crucify mankind upon cross gold democrats supported gold standard alarmed bryan rejected partys nominee favor candidate john palmer bankers industrialists obviously frightened bryans rhetoric fought back might indeed bryans republican opponent william mckinley raked recordsetting campaign contributions mckinley part campaigned theme bryan madman religious fanatic determined wreck economy tariffs gold standard produced industrialization spreading wealth millions providing working men full dinner pail argued response populist calls redistribution appeals victimhood mckinley offered selfreliance economic dynamism mckinley election setting foundation generation republican party dominance classical populism seems play well america even among voters pressed hard times mckinleys successes industrial states logical far revealing happened americas burgeoning cities resourcerich hills home laborers miners bryan claimed represent mining counties northern wisconsin michigan anthracite coal region northeastern pennsylvania voted democrat grover cleveland 1892 went mckinley 1896 great interior cities chicago detroit cleveland milwaukee followed suit even new york city democratic bastion since 1850s voted mckinley bryans classicalpopulist emphasis retributory vengeance frightened largely immigrant industrial working class mckinleys classic american emphasis helping people help resonated hopes dreams another major populist episode american politics great depression even midst enormous crisis distinctly american populism vengeful demagoguery peoples party carried day franklin roosevelt certainly spoke populist tones casting american people vulnerable unscrupulous money changers opponents distant elites whose industrial dictatorship ushered economic tyranny meant men could longer follow pursuit happiness roosevelts second american revolution legal scholar cass sunstein described would consist fundamentally taking rich give poor approach advocated time classical populists like louisiana governor huey long explicitly called nation share wealth instead new deal meant rebuild roosevelts words american way life giving person equal opportunity marketplace first american revolution guaranteed equal opportunity polling place 160in roosevelts view generation americans rendezvous destiny calling establish economic system helps men help course f rs programs vastly expanded power government mostly ways preserved great deal economic freedom social security act provided government assistance would save widowed unemployed aged material poverty least originally conceived create massive welfare state wagner act guaranteed right labor unions organize bargain without making government final arbiter wages federal housing administration helped revive housing market depression finance americas rapid suburbanization war gi bill gave soldiers workingclass families financial support needed attend college starting rapid rise educational attainment answered many americans yearning selfadvancement also helped fuel nations postwar boom short roosevelts americanpopulist rhetoric policies legitimize vast expansion government name serving people critically ways preserved essential american freedoms conservative populism wake depression new deal enduring political coalition established franklin roosevelt american conservatives left reeling decades conservative intellectuals seemed alternate despair albert jay nock doll houses southern agrarianism ayn rand libertarianism conservative politicians like robert taft proved unable build national majority even republican party seemed turn liberal standardbearers like earl warren nelson rockefeller launch of160national review160in 1955 william f buckley jr sought fuse conservative intellectual tendencies alloy stronger component intellectual conservatism however remain disconnected mainstream politics mid1960s 60s many americans grew uneasy course country seemed taking politically socially america farms small towns giving way nation suburbs growth large corporations rise television sharp increase internal mobility eroding cohesiveness local communities accompanying changes growth national government continued apace even republican president dwight eisenhower despite increasing affluence relative peace abroad everlarger number americans felt country becoming unrecognizable wanted take back intellectual conservatism popular anxiety joined forces barry goldwaters 1964 presidential campaign create crude populism right despite would appear favorable political climate amalgam proved dismally unpopular rhetoric goldwaters campaign generally fairly measured backers often much like populist farmers late 1890s goldwaters supporters felt oppressed many railed elites sometimes crossing line battling adversary assaulting enemy argued instance conscious conspiracy business government intellectuals end american freedom yield communist ambitions home abroad perhaps extreme example founder john birch society robert welch claimed international cabal bent undermining us sovereignty power tentacles deep american government right left alike even dwight eisenhower dedicated conscious agent communist conspiracy ronald reagan increasingly political hollywood actor entered fray near end campaign nationally televised speech goldwaters behalf casting election choice mans ageold dream ultimate individual freedom consistent law order ant heap totalitarianism reagan accused incumbent president lyndon johnson spreading socialism johnsons administration reagan said seeking trade freedom soup kitchen welfare state engaging appeasement enemies noting former democrat reagan closed conscious invocation franklin roosevelt rendezvous destiny preserve children last best hope man earth sentence take last step thousand years darkness movie stars message roused faithful fell flat among voting masses goldwaters crushing defeat seemed diehard conservatives death knell nascent movement viewed backdrop american political history hard see goldwater lost tone ideas extreme backers viewed odd frightening voters candidates inability unwillingness disavow words allowed johnson paint goldwater odd frightening instead seeking help honest folk restore rights denied adversary often goldwater came across wanting lead victims violent battle implacable enemy campaign suffered another fatal flaw succeed voting booth americanpopulist movements generally needed present positive alternative make affirmative case victory would set things right show particular policies would let individual help goldwaters backers assumed people would simply understand return classic constitutional government would achieve desired ends 30 years new deal constitutional connection longer intuitive americans convinced new deals balance government intervention private enterprise best way roosevelts words follow pursuit happiness conservatives therefore faced new challenge plant tree liberty garden roosevelt challenge would occupy ronald reagan next 16 years first governor california candidate president ultimately reagan came answer much americanpopulist tradition championing cause honest simple people felt powerless american politics attracting promise selfreliance upward mobility echoing roosevelts appeal forgotten man reagan said conservatives represent forgotten american simple soul goes work bucks raiseand knows aint thing free lunch reagan made point avoiding personal conspiratorial insinuations also presented policies gradual safe reforms conservatives lost said liberals painted advocating radical departure status quo instead reagan believed conservatives adopt soft sell prove radicalism optical illusion meant convincing supported new deal creation cause dissatisfaction desire avoid tarred extremist mean however reagan would avoid blunt language throughout career minced words describing threats freedom prosperity posed unlimited centralized government clearly defined adversary big government run faceless bureaucrats cared schemes peoples welfare could man called soviet union evil empire defined ending cold war win lose said dissembled foreign policy came domestic opponents reagan avoided classicalpopulist trap vilifying political adversaries outright enemies reagans approach also departed goldwaters frequent praise individual accomplishment constantly drove home idea individual could better minimal government support safety net president reagan began tradition placing average americans gallery state union addresses held ordinary people performed extraordinary actions living examples idea forgotten american capable great things throughout political career reagan constantly drew connection individual action economic growth limited government human selfimprovement example imagery explanation small part responsible political success republican triumphs postreagan era especially 1994 takeover congress built anxieties revealed strength ross perots populist presidential campaign two years earlier employed many elements conservatives railed liberal elites offered reforms welfare system crushing individual initiative sought set private enterprise free george w bushs two successful presidential campaigns waged less populist times therefore less populist spirit incorporated populist themes time choosing populist spirit back vengeance today economic crisis provoked partly bankers showed little regard peoples money response washington lost sight proper limits american government looming debt fiscal crises produced deep unease yielded among things muchdiscussed tea party movement yet know whether movement join ranks successful populist uprisings appealed american values led enduring political coalitions whether come listed among failed populist efforts couldnt translate public disquiet electoral success history american populism least give us sense movements direction help todays populists figure next steps believe aggressive angry pitch tea partiers rhetoric automatically alienate independent voters think seen successful populist movements define adversaries stark often abrasive terms skilled political leaders democracy figures like jefferson jackson lincoln roosevelt reagan know pundits academics often overlook must move heart persuade mind modern mass democracy especially often requires simple narrative easily identifiable good hero bad villain unambiguous moral arc one shows society redeemed current fallen state average americans flourish reformed regime appeal obviously requires sharp rhetoric clear divisions critics tea partiers conservative populists right however concerns aggressive rhetoric160cango far william jennings bryan lost painted portrait time voters didnt recognize made majority afraid libertarian populists rejection every facet modern welfare state likely even centerright nation want see welfare state dismantled barry goldwaters supporters tainted campaign accusations communist conspiracies reaching even presidency conspiracy theorists insist president obama born america risk damaging conservative populism today goldwater told republican convention 1964 extremism defense liberty vice moderation pursuit justice virtue signaled extremists welcome cause effort make enemies right goldwater ensured would make friends center buckley knew better made sure developing conservative movement would emerge stillborn association fringes backed many populist conservative causes made clear in160national review160that neither ayn rand radicals conspiracy theorists would find home conservatism seek define modern conservative populism must likewise todays extreme elements clear populist moment neither cerebral gentility unbridled passion alone successfully channel todays public sentiments meaningful political coalition neither agenda pure opposition polls show overwhelming majorities americans think country going wrong direction unhappy congress leaders want elect new representatives tea partiers echo discontent offer hope millions voters want worries taken seriously todays populists imagine echo voters want fact tea partiers disproportionately conservative republicans troubles moment give right chance heard americans conservatives must think carefully want say voters ears polls clearly show independent voters open tea partys tone concerns unhappy government think political leaders wrong priorities want tear welfare state dramatically roll back federal government want alternatives president obamas approach challenge conservatives propose alternatives offer real change direction without seeming radical history american populism suggests key meeting challenge offer clear positive proposals easily identified efforts help people help failing grasp insight sank bryan goldwater understanding express word deed made reagan coalition hope lead todays conservative populism toward new governing coalition must therefore take care spend much time building tearing defining adversary failings essential appealing anxiety feel powerless emerging washington crucial emotional rhetoric obvious moral arc must todays populists must also point people toward positive vision one clearly shows retaking government allow improve lives failure force americans political middle decide oppose create innate american optimism lead us support create every time todays conservative populists therefore face choice learn americas populist past turn intense transient public sentiment enduring political force yield twin temptations intellectualism exuberance miss opportunity given lasting consequences past populist movements failed successful hardly seems exaggeration say option todays populists choose help determine future contours conservative coalition americas political landscape reason alone force take seriously fall years ahead henry olsen senior fellow ethics public policy center | 3,870 |
<p>NFL injury report for Sunday games</p>
<p>ARIZONA CARDINALS at PHILADELPHIA EAGLES</p>
<p>ARIZONA CARDINALS</p>
<p>–Out: T D.J. Humphries (knee), DT Robert Nkemdiche (calf)</p>
<p>–Questionable: G <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Alex-Boone/" type="external">Alex Boone</a> (chest), WR <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/John_Brown/" type="external">John Brown</a> (quadricep), WR <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/JJ-Nelson/" type="external">J.J. Nelson</a> (hamstring, tooth)</p>
<p>PHILADELPHIA EAGLES</p>
<p>–Out: DT Fletcher Cox (calf), CB <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Ronald-Darby/" type="external">Ronald Darby</a> (ankle)</p>
<p>–Questionable: S Corey Graham (hamstring), RB <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Wendell-Smallwood/" type="external">Wendell Smallwood</a> (knee), DT Destiny Vaeao (wrist), S Jaylen Watkins (hamstring)</p>
<p>BALTIMORE RAVENS at OAKLAND RAIDERS</p>
<p>BALTIMORE RAVENS</p>
<p>–Out: DT <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Brandon-Williams/" type="external">Brandon Williams</a> (foot), TE Maxx Williams (ankle)</p>
<p>–Doubtful: CB Jaylen Hill (thigh)</p>
<p>–Questionable: S Anthony Levine (thigh), WR <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Jeremy_Maclin/" type="external">Jeremy Maclin</a> (hand), CB <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Jimmy_Smith/" type="external">Jimmy Smith</a> (achilles), TE <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Benjamin_Watson/" type="external">Benjamin Watson</a> (calf), S Lardarius Webb (thigh)</p>
<p>OAKLAND RAIDERS</p>
<p>–Questionable: CB <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/David-Amerson/" type="external">David Amerson</a> (concussion), QB <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Derek-Carr/" type="external">Derek Carr</a> (back), CB Gareon Conley (shin), G Gabe Jackson (foot), RB <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/DeAndre-Washington/" type="external">DeAndre Washington</a> (hamstring)</p>
<p>BUFFALO BILLS at CINCINNATI BENGALS</p>
<p>BUFFALO BILLS</p>
<p>–Out: LB Ramon Humber (thumb), WR <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Jordan-Matthews/" type="external">Jordan Matthews</a> (thumb)</p>
<p>–Questionable: CB E.J. Gaines (groin), T <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Cordy-Glenn/" type="external">Cordy Glenn</a> (foot, ankle), S <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Micah-Hyde/" type="external">Micah Hyde</a> (knee), CB <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Shareece-Wright/" type="external">Shareece Wright</a> (back)</p>
<p>CINCINNATI BENGALS</p>
<p>–Out: TE <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Tyler-Eifert/" type="external">Tyler Eifert</a> (back), TE Ryan Hewitt (knee), WR <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/John_Ross/" type="external">John Ross</a> (knee), S Derron Smith (ankle)</p>
<p>–Questionable: LB Jordan Evans (hamstring)</p>
<p>CAROLINA PANTHERS at DETROIT LIONS</p>
<p>CAROLINA PANTHERS</p>
<p>–Out: S <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Kurt-Coleman/" type="external">Kurt Coleman</a> (knee), S Demetrious Cox (ankle), C <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Ryan-Kalil/" type="external">Ryan Kalil</a> (neck)</p>
<p>–Questionable: DE <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Mario-Addison/" type="external">Mario Addison</a> (knee), T <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Matt-Kalil/" type="external">Matt Kalil</a> (groin), DE <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Julius_Peppers/" type="external">Julius Peppers</a> (shoulder)</p>
<p>DETROIT LIONS</p>
<p>–Out: WR Kenny Golladay (hamstring), RB <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Dwayne-Washington/" type="external">Dwayne Washington</a> (quadricep), LB Paul Worrilow (knee)</p>
<p>–Questionable: DE <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Ezekiel-Ansah/" type="external">Ezekiel Ansah</a> (knee), S Don Carey (knee), LB <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Jarrad-Davis/" type="external">Jarrad Davis</a> (neck), G <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/TJ-Lang/" type="external">T.J. Lang</a> (back), DT Haloti Ngata (shoulder), C Travis Swanson (ankle), T Rick Wagner (ankle, shoulder), LB Tahir Whitehead (pectoral)</p>
<p>GREEN BAY PACKERS at DALLAS COWBOYS</p>
<p>GREEN BAY PACKERS</p>
<p>–Out: LB <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Joe_Thomas/" type="external">Joe Thomas</a> (ankle)</p>
<p>–Doubtful: RB <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Ty-Montgomery/" type="external">Ty Montgomery</a> (ribs)</p>
<p>–Questionable: WR <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Davante-Adams/" type="external">Davante Adams</a> (concussion), T David Bakhtiari (hamstring), LB Ahmad Brooks (back), T Bryan Bulaga (ankle), DT Mike Daniels (hip), CB Davon House (quadricep), CB <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Quinten-Rollins/" type="external">Quinten Rollins</a> (ankle)</p>
<p>DALLAS COWBOYS</p>
<p>–Out: DE Charles Tapper (foot)</p>
<p>–Questionable: CB <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Anthony_Brown/" type="external">Anthony Brown</a> (ankle), CB <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Nolan-Carroll/" type="external">Nolan Carroll</a> (concussion), T La’el Collins (ankle), LB Sean Lee (hamstring), DT Stephen Paea (knee), T <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Tyron-Smith/" type="external">Tyron Smith</a> (back)</p>
<p>JACKSONVILLE JAGUARS at PITTSBURGH STEELERS</p>
<p>JACKSONVILLE JAGUARS</p>
<p>–Out: LB Lerentee McCray (knee)</p>
<p>–Questionable: WR Marqise Lee (ribs), C Brandon Linder (illness), WR Jaelen Strong (hamstring), S Jarrod Wilson (shoulder)</p>
<p>PITTSBURGH STEELERS</p>
<p>–Doubtful: T Marcus Gilbert (hamstring)</p>
<p>LOS ANGELES CHARGERS at NEW YORK GIANTS</p>
<p>LOS ANGELES CHARGERS</p>
<p>–Out: RB Branden Oliver (hamstring), WR <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Mike_Williams/" type="external">Mike Williams</a> (back)</p>
<p>–Questionable: T Joe Barksdale (foot), LB Jatavis Brown (ankle), TE Sean McGrath (foot), WR <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Tyrell-Williams/" type="external">Tyrell Williams</a> (neck)</p>
<p>NEW YORK GIANTS</p>
<p>–Out: RB <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Paul-Perkins/" type="external">Paul Perkins</a> (ribs), C Weston Richburg (concussion)</p>
<p>–Questionable: G John Jerry (hamstring), DE Avery Moss (shoulder), DE <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Jason-Pierre-Paul/" type="external">Jason Pierre-Paul</a> (shoulder, knee), DE <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Olivier-Vernon/" type="external">Olivier Vernon</a> (ankle)</p>
<p>NEW YORK JETS at CLEVELAND BROWNS</p>
<p>NEW YORK JETS</p>
<p>–Out: DE <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Kony-Ealy/" type="external">Kony Ealy</a> (shoulder), RB <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Matt_Forte/" type="external">Matt Forte</a> (knee, toe), LB Josh Martin (ankle), CB <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Darryl_Roberts/" type="external">Darryl Roberts</a> (hamstring)</p>
<p>–Questionable: CB Juston Burris (foot), DE <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Muhammad-Wilkerson/" type="external">Muhammad Wilkerson</a> (shoulder)</p>
<p>CLEVELAND BROWNS</p>
<p>–Doubtful: WR <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Kenny_Britt/" type="external">Kenny Britt</a> (knee, groin), LB <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Jamie-Collins/" type="external">Jamie Collins</a> (concussion)</p>
<p>SAN FRANCISCO 49ERS at INDIANAPOLIS COLTS</p>
<p>SAN FRANCISCO 49ERS</p>
<p>–Out: S Adrian Colbert (hamstring), LB <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Reuben-Foster/" type="external">Reuben Foster</a> (ankle), S Eric Reid (knee), LB Dekoda Watson (groin)</p>
<p>–Questionable: WR <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Marquise-Goodwin/" type="external">Marquise Goodwin</a> (concussion)</p>
<p>INDIANAPOLIS COLTS</p>
<p>–Out: TE <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Jack-Doyle/" type="external">Jack Doyle</a> (concussion, neck), CB Nate Hairston (quadricep), QB <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Andrew-Luck/" type="external">Andrew Luck</a> (right shoulder)</p>
<p>–Doubtful: RB <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Matt_Jones/" type="external">Matt Jones</a> (knee)</p>
<p>–Questionable: CB Rashaan Melvin (hamstring, ankle), WR Chester Rogers (hamstring)</p>
<p>SEATTLE SEAHAWKS at LOS ANGELES RAMS</p>
<p>SEATTLE SEAHAWKS</p>
<p>–Out: DE <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Cliff-Avril/" type="external">Cliff Avril</a> (neck), DT Quinton Jefferson (hand)</p>
<p>–Doubtful: CB Jeremy Lane (groin), RB <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/CJ-Prosise/" type="external">C.J. Prosise</a> (ankle)</p>
<p>–Questionable: LB Michael Wilhoite (hamstring)</p>
<p>LOS ANGELES RAMS</p>
<p>–Doubtful: S Lamarcus Joyner (hamstring)</p>
<p>–Questionable: G Jamon Brown (groin)</p>
<p>TENNESSEE TITANS at MIAMI DOLPHINS</p>
<p>TENNESSEE TITANS</p>
<p>–Out: S Johnathan Cyprien (hamstring), WR <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Corey-Davis/" type="external">Corey Davis</a> (hamstring)</p>
<p>–Questionable: QB <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Marcus-Mariota/" type="external">Marcus Mariota</a> (hamstring)</p>
<p>MIAMI DOLPHINS</p>
<p>–Questionable: DE Terrence Fede (shoulder), CB Xavien Howard (shoulder), LB Mike Hull (shoulder), CB <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Byron-Maxwell/" type="external">Byron Maxwell</a> (hamstring, foot), DT Jordan Phillips (ankle)</p>
<p>KANSAS CITY CHIEFS at HOUSTON TEXANS on Sunday night</p>
<p>KANSAS CITY CHIEFS</p>
<p>–Out: G Laurent Duvernay-Tardif (knee), LB Dee Ford (back), C Mitch Morse (foot)</p>
<p>HOUSTON TEXANS</p>
<p>–Out: G Kyle Fuller (hamstring), LB Ben Heeney (knee), CB <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Kevin_Johnson/" type="external">Kevin Johnson</a> (knee)</p>
<p>–Questionable: C Greg Mancz (knee)</p> | false | 1 | nfl injury report sunday games arizona cardinals philadelphia eagles arizona cardinals dj humphries knee dt robert nkemdiche calf questionable g alex boone chest wr john brown quadricep wr jj nelson hamstring tooth philadelphia eagles dt fletcher cox calf cb ronald darby ankle questionable corey graham hamstring rb wendell smallwood knee dt destiny vaeao wrist jaylen watkins hamstring baltimore ravens oakland raiders baltimore ravens dt brandon williams foot te maxx williams ankle doubtful cb jaylen hill thigh questionable anthony levine thigh wr jeremy maclin hand cb jimmy smith achilles te benjamin watson calf lardarius webb thigh oakland raiders questionable cb david amerson concussion qb derek carr back cb gareon conley shin g gabe jackson foot rb deandre washington hamstring buffalo bills cincinnati bengals buffalo bills lb ramon humber thumb wr jordan matthews thumb questionable cb ej gaines groin cordy glenn foot ankle micah hyde knee cb shareece wright back cincinnati bengals te tyler eifert back te ryan hewitt knee wr john ross knee derron smith ankle questionable lb jordan evans hamstring carolina panthers detroit lions carolina panthers kurt coleman knee demetrious cox ankle c ryan kalil neck questionable de mario addison knee matt kalil groin de julius peppers shoulder detroit lions wr kenny golladay hamstring rb dwayne washington quadricep lb paul worrilow knee questionable de ezekiel ansah knee carey knee lb jarrad davis neck g tj lang back dt haloti ngata shoulder c travis swanson ankle rick wagner ankle shoulder lb tahir whitehead pectoral green bay packers dallas cowboys green bay packers lb joe thomas ankle doubtful rb ty montgomery ribs questionable wr davante adams concussion david bakhtiari hamstring lb ahmad brooks back bryan bulaga ankle dt mike daniels hip cb davon house quadricep cb quinten rollins ankle dallas cowboys de charles tapper foot questionable cb anthony brown ankle cb nolan carroll concussion lael collins ankle lb sean lee hamstring dt stephen paea knee tyron smith back jacksonville jaguars pittsburgh steelers jacksonville jaguars lb lerentee mccray knee questionable wr marqise lee ribs c brandon linder illness wr jaelen strong hamstring jarrod wilson shoulder pittsburgh steelers doubtful marcus gilbert hamstring los angeles chargers new york giants los angeles chargers rb branden oliver hamstring wr mike williams back questionable joe barksdale foot lb jatavis brown ankle te sean mcgrath foot wr tyrell williams neck new york giants rb paul perkins ribs c weston richburg concussion questionable g john jerry hamstring de avery moss shoulder de jason pierrepaul shoulder knee de olivier vernon ankle new york jets cleveland browns new york jets de kony ealy shoulder rb matt forte knee toe lb josh martin ankle cb darryl roberts hamstring questionable cb juston burris foot de muhammad wilkerson shoulder cleveland browns doubtful wr kenny britt knee groin lb jamie collins concussion san francisco 49ers indianapolis colts san francisco 49ers adrian colbert hamstring lb reuben foster ankle eric reid knee lb dekoda watson groin questionable wr marquise goodwin concussion indianapolis colts te jack doyle concussion neck cb nate hairston quadricep qb andrew luck right shoulder doubtful rb matt jones knee questionable cb rashaan melvin hamstring ankle wr chester rogers hamstring seattle seahawks los angeles rams seattle seahawks de cliff avril neck dt quinton jefferson hand doubtful cb jeremy lane groin rb cj prosise ankle questionable lb michael wilhoite hamstring los angeles rams doubtful lamarcus joyner hamstring questionable g jamon brown groin tennessee titans miami dolphins tennessee titans johnathan cyprien hamstring wr corey davis hamstring questionable qb marcus mariota hamstring miami dolphins questionable de terrence fede shoulder cb xavien howard shoulder lb mike hull shoulder cb byron maxwell hamstring foot dt jordan phillips ankle kansas city chiefs houston texans sunday night kansas city chiefs g laurent duvernaytardif knee lb dee ford back c mitch morse foot houston texans g kyle fuller hamstring lb ben heeney knee cb kevin johnson knee questionable c greg mancz knee | 638 |
<p>On January 22, 1899, Pope Leo XIII addressed an encyclical letter to Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore and, through him, to the entire Catholic hierarchy of the United States. Entitled Testem Benevolentiae (A Witness of Good Will), the letter raised cautions about attitudes and theories that some churchmen feared were corrupting the integrity of Catholic faith and weakening Catholic witness in the United States. The fretting churchmen in question were largely Europeans who bundled their concerns under the rubric “Americanism.”</p>
<p>Leo’s warnings came amidst a period of squabbling within the American hierarchy, and reactions to the papal letter fell along predictable party lines. Cardinal Gibbons and his party — which included the larger-than-life figure of John Ireland, archbishop of St. Paul, Minn. (and a former Union chaplain in the Civil War), and Bishop John J. Keane, first rector of the recently founded Catholic University of America — denied that any responsible churchman was teaching the dubious ideas of the “Americanism” against which Pope Leo warned. The opposition to Gibbons and his friends — led by Archbishop Michael Corrigan of New York and the ever-contentious Bishop Bernard McQuaid of Rochester — thanked the pope for saving the faith in America from a real and present danger. That bifurcated response to Testem Benevolentiae has been replicated in the subsequent writing of U.S. Catholic history, although the ideological positions of the debaters have reversed.</p>
<p>That Leo’s alleged “Americanism” was a “phantom heresy” — a reflection of squalid Church politics in Europe rather than an indictment of any views actually held by Catholics in the United States — was the line long maintained by classic historians of American Catholicism, including the modern dean of that guild, Father John Tracy Ellis (himself the principal biographer of Gibbons). Then came the Sixties and Seventies, and a revisionist school of U.S. Catholic historians began to argue that there were, in fact, adventurous currents at work in American Catholic intellectual and pastoral life in the late 19th century, advocating a rather different idea of the Church from that which prevailed in Roman circles at the time.</p>
<p>As the revisionists understood the controversy, American Catholic leaders like Isaac Hecker (a former Brook Farm resident who converted to Catholicism and founded the Paulist Fathers) were exploring a more open, progressive Catholicism, better fitted to life in a robust democracy like the United States. That exploration, the revisionists continued, was cut short by Testem Benevolentiae and by what the revisionists regarded as the pusillanimous response to the encyclical by Gibbons, Ireland, and other leaders of the forward-looking wing of the Church in the United States. The revisionists didn’t believe that Hecker and his fellow Americanists were heretics, of course; rather, they saw in them the precursors of the kind of Catholicism the revisionists hoped would triumph after Vatican II. But in the revisionist view, the “phantom heresy” moniker that began with Gibbons’s response to Testem Benevolentiae and that was defended by John Tracy Ellis and his school, was a clever piece of ecclesiastical bobbing and weaving that did scant justice to the Rome-challenging originality of Hecker and the Americanists.</p>
<p>It’s a fascinating argument, in which both sides have scored important and telling points. But what makes the 19th-century Americanist controversy intriguing today is its remarkable contemporaneity. Indeed, one can read the past half-year of debate among American Catholics initiated by the Obama administration’s HHS mandate as a new Americanist controversy — one in which dubious views are no longer phantoms but are quite real, and are at the very center of the internal Catholic dispute over the appropriate response to the mandate.</p>
<p>What did Leo XIII warn against in Testem Benevolentiae? Sifting through his baroque Latin (and the equally baroque English into which it is usually translated), one finds Pope Leo addressing several important theological questions:</p>
<p>He warned against the claim that the Holy Spirit was more active in the modern democratic age than in the past, such that the center of authority in the Church was shifting from the Church’s apostolic leaders — the bishops — to the consciences of individual Catholics.</p>
<p>He cautioned against stressing natural virtues over supernatural virtues, so that the Church’s active life in the world was taken to be of more consequence than its sacramental life. And he deplored what Hecker’s critics charged was an Americanist deprecation of such virtues as humility and obedience (the latter being considered somehow undemocratic and immature).</p>
<p>He was concerned that doctrine — what John Paul II a century later would call the Catholic “symphony of truth” — might be regarded in some quarters as an impediment to evangelization and witness. And he took aim at what he called the confusion of liberty with license, as if willfulness were at the center of human freedom.</p>
<p>He was, in other words, warning against confusions and distortions that are manifestly in play in certain Catholic quarters today, whether or not they were widespread in Catholic circles in late-19th-century America.</p>
<p>Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has displayed many of these tendencies throughout her years in the national spotlight. Most recently, the House minority leader said that her Catholic faith “compels” her to “be against discrimination of any kind,” which is why she, as a Catholic, supports so-called “gay marriage.” That the teaching authority of the Church has made unmistakably clear on numerous occasions that there is and can be no such thing as “gay marriage” evidently makes not the slightest difference to Mrs. Pelosi, whose personal judgments are the magisterium she obeys.</p>
<p>HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is another whose approach to faith, judgment, and public policy would seem to vindicate Leo XIII’s concerns. Despite the efforts of the archbishop of Kansas City, Kansas, Joseph Naumann, to convince her otherwise, Sebelius, first as governor of the Sunflower State and now as chief health-care official in the Obama administration, has insisted on the most libertine possible abortion policy. She vetoed a bill prohibiting late-term abortions shortly before leaving the governor’s office in Topeka, and she has defended the HHS mandate’s diktat that religious institutions must provide coverage including abortifacient drugs as part of “preventive health services.” That several popes and the entire Catholic hierarchy of the United States have, on numerous occasions, declared such actions beyond the bounds of moral reason — not just the bounds of Catholic doctrine, but the bounds of moral reason itself — makes no discernible difference to Secretary Sebelius. Like Representative Pelosi, she is her own magisterium.</p>
<p>Leo’s concerns about confusions over the natural and supernatural virtues seem prescient when one looks around the U.S. Catholic scene today. E. J. Dionne Jr. regularly praises the Church for its social-service networks (as well he should). But amidst his many attempts to bolster the fading cause of Catholic progressivism, has Dionne ever written about the absolute centrality of the sacraments to Catholic identity and mission, linking the Church’s liturgical life to its work for justice, as the leaders of the mid-20th-century Liturgical Movement always did? I don’t doubt that Dionne believes that the celebration of the Eucharist is a stronger expression of the essence of Catholicism than what any bishop says about the Ryan budget; still, no one would learn that from any of his columns since January. And in this, of course, Dionne maintains his role as chief cheerleader for the Obama administration. For it was President Obama who, at Notre Dame’s 2009 commencement, defined social-service Catholicism of a certain ideological hue as the real Catholicism — a theme to which Obama has returned in recent weeks, reminiscing about the halcyon days of his community organizing in Chicago.</p>
<p>Then there is the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, an organization of sisters the Vatican is attempting to reform. That Vatican intervention took place not because many of these sisters supported Obamacare (pace E. J. Dionne), but because their approach to religious life embodies many of the difficulties against which Leo XIII cautioned: conscience understood as personal willfulness and set against ecclesial authority; religious obedience juxtaposed to human maturity; humility discarded for the sake of pride (in this case feminist pride). Many of the LCWR’s leaders seem to agree with Dionne that what really counts in the life of American sisters is their social service, not the vowed witness of poverty, chastity, and obedience in the midst of a culture dominated by the imperial autonomous Self. Leo XIII would have disagreed, and his prediction that any such secularist reduction of consecrated religious life would lead to its implosion has been borne out by the sad fact that the LCWR orders are dying from lack of new members.</p>
<p>Then there is Mario Cuomo, who in 1984 gave a distinctively Americanist speech, in Leo XIII’s sense of the term, at Notre Dame: a speech that paved the way for the national careers of Nancy Pelosi, Kathleen Sebelius, and Joe Biden, and that would have defined the curious Catholicism of the John Kerry administration, had things gone the other way in 2004. Cuomo recently told Maureen Dowd that “if the Church were my religion, I’d have given it up a long time ago. . . . All the terrible things the Church has done. Christ is my religion, the Church is not.” Yet the Church and its teachings, as Leo XIII wrote to Cardinal Gibbons in his ornate style, come to us “from the same Author and Master, ‘the Only Begotten Son, Who is in the bosom of the Father’ [John 1:18].”</p>
<p>Maureen Dowd’s anti-Church rants on the New York Times op-ed page would have brought an embarrassed blush to the face of a great man (and a devoted churchman) like Isaac Hecker. But in this instance, Dowd’s invitation gave Cuomo the opportunity to articulate with precision one facet of the down-market theology that shapes the new Americanism: the theology that sets Jesus (heavily edited down to a few verses from the Sermon on the Mount) against the Church. And when Jesus is juxtaposed to the Church rather them embraced as the Lord of the Church that is His Body in the world, the rest readily follows: Private judgment trumps authoritative Catholic teaching; the Church of social service is severed from, and then trumps, the Church of the sacraments; freedom is purely a matter of following conscience (no matter how ill-formed or erroneous that conscience may be); doctrine is an obstacle to witness; and Kathleen Sebelius, a Catholic cabinet officer who has declared her administration at “war” with the Catholic Church, addresses a commencement ceremony at Georgetown University, a hub of the new Americanism and its distortion of Catholic identity and Catholic social doctrine.</p>
<p>This new form of Catholicism Lite, a not-so-phantom hash of ideas that poses real problems for the integrity of the Church and its evangelical mission, breathes deeply of two winds that have long blown through American Christianity: the ancient Pelagian wind, with its emphasis on the righteousness of our works and how they will win our salvation; and the Congregationalist wind, with its deep suspicion that Catholic authority is incompatible with American democracy. As for the older Americanist controversy, I think the classic historiographers of U.S. Catholicism were largely right: The “Americanism” of which Leo XIII warned in Testem Benevolentiae was far more a phantom concocted by fevered, ancien-régime European minds than a heresy that threatened Catholic faith in the United States. But the problems that Leo flagged are very much with us over a century later. They are at the root of the internal Catholic culture war that has intensified as religious freedom has come under concerted assault, and as the new Americanists, who form a coherent party in a way that Isaac Hecker and his friends never did, have either denied that assault — or abetted it.</p>
<p>– George Weigel is distinguished senior fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.</p> | false | 1 | january 22 1899 pope leo xiii addressed encyclical letter cardinal james gibbons baltimore entire catholic hierarchy united states entitled testem benevolentiae witness good letter raised cautions attitudes theories churchmen feared corrupting integrity catholic faith weakening catholic witness united states fretting churchmen question largely europeans bundled concerns rubric americanism leos warnings came amidst period squabbling within american hierarchy reactions papal letter fell along predictable party lines cardinal gibbons party included largerthanlife figure john ireland archbishop st paul minn former union chaplain civil war bishop john j keane first rector recently founded catholic university america denied responsible churchman teaching dubious ideas americanism pope leo warned opposition gibbons friends led archbishop michael corrigan new york evercontentious bishop bernard mcquaid rochester thanked pope saving faith america real present danger bifurcated response testem benevolentiae replicated subsequent writing us catholic history although ideological positions debaters reversed leos alleged americanism phantom heresy reflection squalid church politics europe rather indictment views actually held catholics united states line long maintained classic historians american catholicism including modern dean guild father john tracy ellis principal biographer gibbons came sixties seventies revisionist school us catholic historians began argue fact adventurous currents work american catholic intellectual pastoral life late 19th century advocating rather different idea church prevailed roman circles time revisionists understood controversy american catholic leaders like isaac hecker former brook farm resident converted catholicism founded paulist fathers exploring open progressive catholicism better fitted life robust democracy like united states exploration revisionists continued cut short testem benevolentiae revisionists regarded pusillanimous response encyclical gibbons ireland leaders forwardlooking wing church united states revisionists didnt believe hecker fellow americanists heretics course rather saw precursors kind catholicism revisionists hoped would triumph vatican ii revisionist view phantom heresy moniker began gibbonss response testem benevolentiae defended john tracy ellis school clever piece ecclesiastical bobbing weaving scant justice romechallenging originality hecker americanists fascinating argument sides scored important telling points makes 19thcentury americanist controversy intriguing today remarkable contemporaneity indeed one read past halfyear debate among american catholics initiated obama administrations hhs mandate new americanist controversy one dubious views longer phantoms quite real center internal catholic dispute appropriate response mandate leo xiii warn testem benevolentiae sifting baroque latin equally baroque english usually translated one finds pope leo addressing several important theological questions warned claim holy spirit active modern democratic age past center authority church shifting churchs apostolic leaders bishops consciences individual catholics cautioned stressing natural virtues supernatural virtues churchs active life world taken consequence sacramental life deplored heckers critics charged americanist deprecation virtues humility obedience latter considered somehow undemocratic immature concerned doctrine john paul ii century later would call catholic symphony truth might regarded quarters impediment evangelization witness took aim called confusion liberty license willfulness center human freedom words warning confusions distortions manifestly play certain catholic quarters today whether widespread catholic circles late19thcentury america former house speaker nancy pelosi displayed many tendencies throughout years national spotlight recently house minority leader said catholic faith compels discrimination kind catholic supports socalled gay marriage teaching authority church made unmistakably clear numerous occasions thing gay marriage evidently makes slightest difference mrs pelosi whose personal judgments magisterium obeys hhs secretary kathleen sebelius another whose approach faith judgment public policy would seem vindicate leo xiiis concerns despite efforts archbishop kansas city kansas joseph naumann convince otherwise sebelius first governor sunflower state chief healthcare official obama administration insisted libertine possible abortion policy vetoed bill prohibiting lateterm abortions shortly leaving governors office topeka defended hhs mandates diktat religious institutions must provide coverage including abortifacient drugs part preventive health services several popes entire catholic hierarchy united states numerous occasions declared actions beyond bounds moral reason bounds catholic doctrine bounds moral reason makes discernible difference secretary sebelius like representative pelosi magisterium leos concerns confusions natural supernatural virtues seem prescient one looks around us catholic scene today e j dionne jr regularly praises church socialservice networks well amidst many attempts bolster fading cause catholic progressivism dionne ever written absolute centrality sacraments catholic identity mission linking churchs liturgical life work justice leaders mid20thcentury liturgical movement always dont doubt dionne believes celebration eucharist stronger expression essence catholicism bishop says ryan budget still one would learn columns since january course dionne maintains role chief cheerleader obama administration president obama notre dames 2009 commencement defined socialservice catholicism certain ideological hue real catholicism theme obama returned recent weeks reminiscing halcyon days community organizing chicago leadership conference women religious organization sisters vatican attempting reform vatican intervention took place many sisters supported obamacare pace e j dionne approach religious life embodies many difficulties leo xiii cautioned conscience understood personal willfulness set ecclesial authority religious obedience juxtaposed human maturity humility discarded sake pride case feminist pride many lcwrs leaders seem agree dionne really counts life american sisters social service vowed witness poverty chastity obedience midst culture dominated imperial autonomous self leo xiii would disagreed prediction secularist reduction consecrated religious life would lead implosion borne sad fact lcwr orders dying lack new members mario cuomo 1984 gave distinctively americanist speech leo xiiis sense term notre dame speech paved way national careers nancy pelosi kathleen sebelius joe biden would defined curious catholicism john kerry administration things gone way 2004 cuomo recently told maureen dowd church religion id given long time ago terrible things church done christ religion church yet church teachings leo xiii wrote cardinal gibbons ornate style come us author master begotten son bosom father john 118 maureen dowds antichurch rants new york times oped page would brought embarrassed blush face great man devoted churchman like isaac hecker instance dowds invitation gave cuomo opportunity articulate precision one facet downmarket theology shapes new americanism theology sets jesus heavily edited verses sermon mount church jesus juxtaposed church rather embraced lord church body world rest readily follows private judgment trumps authoritative catholic teaching church social service severed trumps church sacraments freedom purely matter following conscience matter illformed erroneous conscience may doctrine obstacle witness kathleen sebelius catholic cabinet officer declared administration war catholic church addresses commencement ceremony georgetown university hub new americanism distortion catholic identity catholic social doctrine new form catholicism lite notsophantom hash ideas poses real problems integrity church evangelical mission breathes deeply two winds long blown american christianity ancient pelagian wind emphasis righteousness works win salvation congregationalist wind deep suspicion catholic authority incompatible american democracy older americanist controversy think classic historiographers us catholicism largely right americanism leo xiii warned testem benevolentiae far phantom concocted fevered ancienrégime european minds heresy threatened catholic faith united states problems leo flagged much us century later root internal catholic culture war intensified religious freedom come concerted assault new americanists form coherent party way isaac hecker friends never either denied assault abetted george weigel distinguished senior fellow washingtons ethics public policy center holds william e simon chair catholic studies | 1,109 |
<p />
<p>When Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) disintegrated over eastern Ukraine on July 17 this year, the global media narrative was seized by a politically-charged West. Hardly any Asian press establishment had the capability to dispatch a world-class media investigative team to the crash site. For all the praises heaped on Asia’s stunning growth, the tragedy exposed the region’s lingering incapacity to generate an immediate, independent and in situ media narrative.</p>
<p>China had long recognized the vulnerabilities posed by this strategic lacuna. An external arm of the state broadcaster CCTV now complements the spigots of internal media control. CCTV’s ability to challenge global behemoths such as the BBC and CNN remain uncertain, as questions linger over its long-term appeal and credibility.</p>
<p>MH17 poses a stark reminder to Asia on its continued susceptibility to external informational deluges, backed by specious <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQRvINebeok" type="external">social media evidences</a>, <a href="http://www.independent.ie/world-news/europe/obama-accuses-putin-over-deaths-of-298-on-flight-mh17-30443797.html" type="external">insensate accusations</a>, <a href="https://www.thejournal.ie/hans-de-borst-daughter-mh17-1582106-Jul2014/" type="external">maudlin bereavement</a> and affected gravitas. Hard evidences – belatedly released in <a href="http://www.onderzoeksraad.nl/uploads/phase-docs/701/b3923acad0ceprem-rapport-mh-17-en-interactief.pdf" type="external">tranche from Sept 9</a> – were buried under an avalanche of hysteria.</p>
<p>The Malaysian activist media, ever ready to publicize instances of judicial irregularities within the country, was remiss in playing by its own rulebook. Every emotive debris on the post-crash horizon was scavenged for political mileage, before public outrage began to wane.</p>
<p>The eerily-named opposition newsletter <a href="http://www.therocket.com.my/en/in-the-wake-of-mh17-malaysia-must-consider-sanctions-against-russia/" type="external">The Rocket,</a> echoing the fusillades of the Western media,&#160; concluded as early as July 23 that there was “strong evidence to suggest that pro-Russian rebels had downed the aircraft using arms from Russia, hence&#160;Malaysia should&#160;pressure the Russian government via sanctions and the cancellation of ongoing business deals with them.”</p>
<p>One wonders how that “strong evidence” was adduced. Was evidence mistaken for the contrived suggestibility of Western propaganda?</p>
<p>In keeping with the overall tempo, unfamiliar bylines briefly appeared in the Malaysian online media to reinforce notions of Russian guilt. These receded under the tide of potent counter-narratives from the US alternative media and Russian mainstays such as <a href="http://en.ria.ru/" type="external">Novosti</a>, <a href="http://rt.com/" type="external">Russia Today</a>, <a href="http://en.itar-tass.com/" type="external">TASS</a> and <a href="http://english.pravda.ru/" type="external">Pravda</a>.</p>
<p>Interest in the MH17 tragedy as well as the mysterious disappearance of MH370 earlier on March 8 has predictably ebbed in Malaysia, even as both tragedies are subjected to daily scrutiny in the global media.</p>
<p>Asia may continue to pay a heavy price for this strategic media handicap.</p>
<p>Asia needs to ask itself whether it wants its own tragedies to be scripted abroad. Can it seize the propaganda narrative before external parties shape public opinion?&#160; Or will it continue to rely on authoritarian media strictures to control public discourse?</p>
<p>The Internet has not emerged as the great equalizer to media restrictions in the non-Western world as was once envisaged. It is not simply a matter of growing online censorship. The “free media” is often a blowback to the vagaries of institutionalized patronage. Funding is not a problem for the discontented who can peddle “freedom and democracy” across the political divide. The strategic narrative, in the end, gets choked between official media control and the anarchic agendas of the Open Society, USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).</p>
<p>Activism is sometimes a well-paid career choice of a few who can impress a “free will” conviction upon the many. Murderous fallouts from the Arab Spring should have reset our bearings on the ugly realities of cyclical amnesia and horde-like delusions, wrought upon by the chimera of “hope and change.” Yet, the mob is prone to repeating its past mistakes, right after applauding the famously familiar caution of <a href="https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/g/georgesant101521.html" type="external">George Santayana</a>.</p>
<p>The MH17 tragedy did reveal a curious paradox in the Malaysian online media: Ad hoc remarks posted on online comment boxes were sometimes superior to the main commentaries themselves. &#160;No surprises here as mediocrity is inexorably replicated at the local level before being routinely winnowed out in the “glocality” of the borderless media.</p>
<p>Developing a literary flair and style are an absolute no-no. Control is overbearing, sensitivity is prioritized and language is watered down. Using terms like “poodle” or “lapdog” to describe EU subservience to US policies would be most unbecoming or unprofessional of the native commentariat. It is however touché when <a href="http://en.itar-tass.com/world/756360" type="external">Marie Le Pen</a> uses the canine analogy in an identical context. What was the difference? The savoir-faire, panache and je ne sais quois of a blonde, white nationalist? Local metier in the end goes unnoticed, unrecognized, and unrewarded.</p>
<p>The insipidity of Asian reportage is often matched by the pusillanimity of its content. The lack of talent and originality here is reflective of the wider media malaise worldwide. The good cop-bad cop meme is used formulaically to create bipartisan-like divides, win permanent audiences and grab future sources of revenue. Corporations, lobbies and public relations giants, inherently averse to any form of critical thinking, are well-disposed towards cultivated mediocrity in politics and the media.</p>
<p>The media circus becomes as depressingly predictable as the maverick actions of a John McCain or the visionary principles of a Barack Obama. These stalwarts yet prevail and get re-elected, much to the detriment of the global media quotient.</p>
<p>Entrenched mediocrity in the Asian media may be partly attributable to the pseudosciences creeping into the wider field of humanities. News is not only history’s first draft; it informs our social sciences that, in turn, defines the field of communications and media.</p>
<p>Therein lies the problem. The profusion of catchy, marketable and politically-correct neologisms is recycled within the social sciences-media loop. It is no longer sufficient to call a spade a “bloody shovel” because, as <a href="http://www.openculture.com/2013/07/noam-chomsky-calls-postmodern-critiques-of-science-over-inflated-polysyllabic-truisms.html" type="external">Noam Chomsky</a> observes, “you don’t get to be a respected intellectual by presenting truisms in monosyllables.”</p>
<p>Post-modernist erudition is contemptuous of the mundane, especially when reality is so prosaic. Ontological fractionation accompanies hermeneutical wizardry, adding ever an expanding corpus of knowledge to the science of tauroscatology. Academic publications and its Op-ed derivatives thrive on novelties, as do sales, marketing and advertising upon which journalism is underwritten.</p>
<p>Chomsky pans these pseudosciences as “ <a href="http://www.openculture.com/2013/07/noam-chomsky-calls-postmodern-critiques-of-science-over-inflated-polysyllabic-truisms.html" type="external">Polysyllabic Truisms</a>” that continue to have “a terrible effect on the third world.” It is a world where nanotechnology competes with the sub-atomic <a href="http://www.microvita.com/" type="external">microvita</a> of Indian mystic P.R. Sarkar in the next big quantum leap of human development.</p>
<p>The East Asian mind is however averse to heavy abstractions in the social sciences realm. Contrary to popular perception, Sun-Tzu just does not do metaphysics. His pithy wisdom is geared on harnessing the physical realm; not the kundalini. Abstracts do not fill the stomach.&#160;</p>
<p>Social sciences and the media are therefore overlooked in favor of science, technology and innovation (STI). Asian STI outputs perennially outpace “developments” – if one could call it – in the social sciences realm. The pursuit of science, itself often reducible to binary 0s and 1s, triumphs the need to master growing complexities in humanities.</p>
<p>The democratic West, after all, is more obsessed with neo-Marxist critical theorizing than Communist China, reflecting a larger East-West divide over the purpose and applicability of the social sciences and media.&#160; The philosophical meanderings get richer, along roads that get poorer, as one travels from Tokyo to Ahmedabad. &#160;Religious fundamentalism predominate lands further west, in a Middle East that can be intolerant of both sciences and human beings. Beyond that precipice is the West itself where the post-modernist raison d’être appears as clueless as its media.</p>
<p>This divide is reflected in the hemispherically opposite approaches to geopolitics. The ideologically-predicated <a href="https://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/files/chathamhouse/public/Research/Americas/0813pp_pivottoasia.pdf" type="external">Asian Pivot</a> is countervailed by a <a href="http://russia-insider.com/en/china_business/2014/11/11/07-12-54am/china_pledges_40_billion_new_silk_road" type="external">Silk Road</a> alternative based on organic trade and development. &#160;The upshot to the latter however is a regulated media that can be hostile to colorful sparks of journalistic creativity. &#160;Asian nations may find it desirable to temper each other’s media, and to keep matters comfortably parochial, vernacular and nationalist. Prevailing disincentives to aggressive transborder journalism will likely grow in tandem with trade.</p>
<p>The question however remains: For how much longer can Asia concede the strategic media narrative to the West? Should the basic 5Ws and H – the Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How – of its tragedies continue to be scripted abroad? &#160;Its mobile middle-classes are more likely to source local news from the global media due to domestic insouciance and shortcomings. This reality rarely bothers policy-makers. An event like the MH17 tragedy may result in a brief scramble to douse public ire before status quo is duly restored.</p>
<p>One day, however, inbuilt controls may prove insufficient, the floodgates may be breached, and the barbarians may enter. This may be the Asian Spring. It is therefore high time for Asia to develop its own pan-global media capability.</p> | false | 1 | malaysia airlines flight 17 mh17 disintegrated eastern ukraine july 17 year global media narrative seized politicallycharged west hardly asian press establishment capability dispatch worldclass media investigative team crash site praises heaped asias stunning growth tragedy exposed regions lingering incapacity generate immediate independent situ media narrative china long recognized vulnerabilities posed strategic lacuna external arm state broadcaster cctv complements spigots internal media control cctvs ability challenge global behemoths bbc cnn remain uncertain questions linger longterm appeal credibility mh17 poses stark reminder asia continued susceptibility external informational deluges backed specious social media evidences insensate accusations maudlin bereavement affected gravitas hard evidences belatedly released tranche sept 9 buried avalanche hysteria malaysian activist media ever ready publicize instances judicial irregularities within country remiss playing rulebook every emotive debris postcrash horizon scavenged political mileage public outrage began wane eerilynamed opposition newsletter rocket echoing fusillades western media160 concluded early july 23 strong evidence suggest prorussian rebels downed aircraft using arms russia hence160malaysia should160pressure russian government via sanctions cancellation ongoing business deals one wonders strong evidence adduced evidence mistaken contrived suggestibility western propaganda keeping overall tempo unfamiliar bylines briefly appeared malaysian online media reinforce notions russian guilt receded tide potent counternarratives us alternative media russian mainstays novosti russia today tass pravda interest mh17 tragedy well mysterious disappearance mh370 earlier march 8 predictably ebbed malaysia even tragedies subjected daily scrutiny global media asia may continue pay heavy price strategic media handicap asia needs ask whether wants tragedies scripted abroad seize propaganda narrative external parties shape public opinion160 continue rely authoritarian media strictures control public discourse internet emerged great equalizer media restrictions nonwestern world envisaged simply matter growing online censorship free media often blowback vagaries institutionalized patronage funding problem discontented peddle freedom democracy across political divide strategic narrative end gets choked official media control anarchic agendas open society usaid national endowment democracy ned activism sometimes wellpaid career choice impress free conviction upon many murderous fallouts arab spring reset bearings ugly realities cyclical amnesia hordelike delusions wrought upon chimera hope change yet mob prone repeating past mistakes right applauding famously familiar caution george santayana mh17 tragedy reveal curious paradox malaysian online media ad hoc remarks posted online comment boxes sometimes superior main commentaries 160no surprises mediocrity inexorably replicated local level routinely winnowed glocality borderless media developing literary flair style absolute nono control overbearing sensitivity prioritized language watered using terms like poodle lapdog describe eu subservience us policies would unbecoming unprofessional native commentariat however touché marie le pen uses canine analogy identical context difference savoirfaire panache je ne sais quois blonde white nationalist local metier end goes unnoticed unrecognized unrewarded insipidity asian reportage often matched pusillanimity content lack talent originality reflective wider media malaise worldwide good copbad cop meme used formulaically create bipartisanlike divides win permanent audiences grab future sources revenue corporations lobbies public relations giants inherently averse form critical thinking welldisposed towards cultivated mediocrity politics media media circus becomes depressingly predictable maverick actions john mccain visionary principles barack obama stalwarts yet prevail get reelected much detriment global media quotient entrenched mediocrity asian media may partly attributable pseudosciences creeping wider field humanities news historys first draft informs social sciences turn defines field communications media therein lies problem profusion catchy marketable politicallycorrect neologisms recycled within social sciencesmedia loop longer sufficient call spade bloody shovel noam chomsky observes dont get respected intellectual presenting truisms monosyllables postmodernist erudition contemptuous mundane especially reality prosaic ontological fractionation accompanies hermeneutical wizardry adding ever expanding corpus knowledge science tauroscatology academic publications oped derivatives thrive novelties sales marketing advertising upon journalism underwritten chomsky pans pseudosciences polysyllabic truisms continue terrible effect third world world nanotechnology competes subatomic microvita indian mystic pr sarkar next big quantum leap human development east asian mind however averse heavy abstractions social sciences realm contrary popular perception suntzu metaphysics pithy wisdom geared harnessing physical realm kundalini abstracts fill stomach160 social sciences media therefore overlooked favor science technology innovation sti asian sti outputs perennially outpace developments one could call social sciences realm pursuit science often reducible binary 0s 1s triumphs need master growing complexities humanities democratic west obsessed neomarxist critical theorizing communist china reflecting larger eastwest divide purpose applicability social sciences media160 philosophical meanderings get richer along roads get poorer one travels tokyo ahmedabad 160religious fundamentalism predominate lands west middle east intolerant sciences human beings beyond precipice west postmodernist raison dêtre appears clueless media divide reflected hemispherically opposite approaches geopolitics ideologicallypredicated asian pivot countervailed silk road alternative based organic trade development 160the upshot latter however regulated media hostile colorful sparks journalistic creativity 160asian nations may find desirable temper others media keep matters comfortably parochial vernacular nationalist prevailing disincentives aggressive transborder journalism likely grow tandem trade question however remains much longer asia concede strategic media narrative west basic 5ws h tragedies continue scripted abroad 160its mobile middleclasses likely source local news global media due domestic insouciance shortcomings reality rarely bothers policymakers event like mh17 tragedy may result brief scramble douse public ire status quo duly restored one day however inbuilt controls may prove insufficient floodgates may breached barbarians may enter may asian spring therefore high time asia develop panglobal media capability | 843 |
<p>In the 1960s, infamous cult leader Charles Manson had established such a hold over his drug-fueled followers that he commanded them to start a race war. After Manson’s death, RT.com looks at where his most ardent followers are now.</p>
<p>Living at an old movie set, Spahn ranch, members of the so-called ‘Manson Family’ came to know Charles Manson as a kind of Jesus and a devil-like figure. Outlining his plans for ‘Helter Skelter,’ named after The Beatles song, Manson hoped a spate of attacks on white people could be blamed on African Americans.</p>
<p>Manson’s warped teachings led members of his family to carry out murders that shocked America. On August 9, 1969, the family broke into the Hollywood home of director Roman Polanski and actor Sharon Tate, slaying the occupants. Polanski was away on business at the time, but his pregnant wife and five other occupants were killed.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.rt.com/usa/410257-jonestown-peoples-temple-massacre/" type="external">READ MORE:&#160;Horror in Jonestown: Cult survivor recalls brainwashing, blackmail &amp; mass suicide (AUDIO)</a></p>
<p>The following evening, Manson and members of his cult group drove out to Waverly Drive, Los Angeles. There he ordered the murder of couple Leno and Rosemary LaBianca.</p>
<p>On November 19, 2017, Manson passed away in prison at the age of 83. But where are the most infamous members of his family? RT.com explores what happened to the most prominent worshippers of the deadly cult leader.</p>
<p>Leslie Van Houten</p>
<p>In interviews over the years, Leslie Van Houten has spoken about how Manson styled himself as a messiah-like figure. During her time taking drugs with the family, Van Houten said she came to believe that Manson was Jesus. She was convicted for the killings of Leno and Rosemary Bianca, and has admitted knowing the Tate murders would happen.</p>
<p>On September 6, 2017, Van Houten was granted parole for a second time in two years. In 2016 her release was blocked by California Governor Jerry Brown and a decision on her future is yet to be decided. In her latest parole <a href="http://www.cielodrive.com/leslie-van-houten-parole-hearing-2016.php" type="external">hearing</a>, Van Houten described the LaBianca murders. “We took Mrs LaBianca into the bedroom and put a pillowcase over her head… I went to hold her down, we could hear Mr LaBianca dying,” she said.</p>
<p>Mary Brunner</p>
<p>Charles Manson’s former lover, Mary Brunner was convicted of armed robbery in 1971. She is thought to have witnessed a murder carried out by fellow Manson group member Bobby Beausoleil.</p>
<p>Brunner initially gave evidence against members of the Manson family in a trial over the murder of teacher Gary Hinman but eventually withdrew her testimony. She was freed from prison in 1977.</p>
<p>Bobby Beausoleil</p>
<p>According to an <a href="http://www.cielodrive.com/bobby-beausoleil-parole-hearing-2016.php" type="external">archived</a> parole hearing, Beausoleil killed Hinman in order to prove himself to the Manson family. The gruesome stabbing came prior to the Tate and LaBianca murders. Jailed in 1969, Beausoleil has been denied parole 16 times since 1982. His next bid for freedom will not come until 2019. He is currently being held at the a medical facility in Vacaville, California.</p>
<p>Susan Atkins</p>
<p>Atkins was initially sentenced to death for her role in the murders at Polanski and Tate’s mansion in Beverly Hills. Just 21 at the time of the killings, Atkins is said to have held Tate as she was stabbed 16 times. Having been spared the death penalty due to a change in law, Atkins died in 2009 of a brain tumor at a women’s prison in <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/09/25/california.manson.atkins/index.html" type="external">Chowcilla</a>. She was 61.</p>
<p>Linda Kasabian</p>
<p>A former resident of Spahn Ranch, Kasabian was at the scene of both the Tate and LaBianca murders. She was offered immunity for prosecution in the case against Manson and other family members, and her testimony was regarded as key in convicting Manson.</p>
<p>[embedded content]</p>
<p>Bruce Davis</p>
<p>Now aged 75, Bruce Davis is still behind bars. He was convicted of being involved in the deaths of Gary Hinman and Spahn ranch helper Donald Shea.</p>
<p>Incarcerated in 1972, Davis is currently being held at a male-only state prison near San Luis Obispo. Like Van Houten, the former Manson apostle has previously been approved parole only for the decision to be reversed by the governor. Prior to 2010, Davis had 24 parole bids rejected.</p>
<p>Patricia Krenwinkel</p>
<p>Patricia Krenwinkel is being held at the California Institution for Women, and is the longest prison-serving female member of the family.</p>
<p>Krenwinkel was one of the group to break into the Sharon Tate’s home on August 9, 1969. Amid the mayhem of that night, Krenwinkel cornered victim Abigail Folger and stabbed her 28 times. On June 22, 2017, she was denied any prospect of release for at least five years.</p>
<p>Steve ‘Clem’ Grogan</p>
<p>Grogan remained in the car during the murderous rampage at the Tate home, but was later convicted for his involvement in the death of Donald Shea. He was released from prison in the 1980s and is the only member of the Manson family who was convicted of murder to be released.</p>
<p>Charles ‘Tex’ Watson</p>
<p>One of the main figures of Manson’s cabal, Watson murdered Sharon Tate on August 9, 1969. During the murder, Watson told the victims that he was “the devil.” He admitted helping co-conspirators to stab Wojciech Frykowski and Abigail Folger before attacking Tate. Watson also broke into the LaBianca household the following night and took part in that double slaying. Now aged 71, he is not due for parole until 2021.</p> | false | 1 | 1960s infamous cult leader charles manson established hold drugfueled followers commanded start race war mansons death rtcom looks ardent followers living old movie set spahn ranch members socalled manson family came know charles manson kind jesus devillike figure outlining plans helter skelter named beatles song manson hoped spate attacks white people could blamed african americans mansons warped teachings led members family carry murders shocked america august 9 1969 family broke hollywood home director roman polanski actor sharon tate slaying occupants polanski away business time pregnant wife five occupants killed read more160horror jonestown cult survivor recalls brainwashing blackmail amp mass suicide audio following evening manson members cult group drove waverly drive los angeles ordered murder couple leno rosemary labianca november 19 2017 manson passed away prison age 83 infamous members family rtcom explores happened prominent worshippers deadly cult leader leslie van houten interviews years leslie van houten spoken manson styled messiahlike figure time taking drugs family van houten said came believe manson jesus convicted killings leno rosemary bianca admitted knowing tate murders would happen september 6 2017 van houten granted parole second time two years 2016 release blocked california governor jerry brown decision future yet decided latest parole hearing van houten described labianca murders took mrs labianca bedroom put pillowcase head went hold could hear mr labianca dying said mary brunner charles mansons former lover mary brunner convicted armed robbery 1971 thought witnessed murder carried fellow manson group member bobby beausoleil brunner initially gave evidence members manson family trial murder teacher gary hinman eventually withdrew testimony freed prison 1977 bobby beausoleil according archived parole hearing beausoleil killed hinman order prove manson family gruesome stabbing came prior tate labianca murders jailed 1969 beausoleil denied parole 16 times since 1982 next bid freedom come 2019 currently held medical facility vacaville california susan atkins atkins initially sentenced death role murders polanski tates mansion beverly hills 21 time killings atkins said held tate stabbed 16 times spared death penalty due change law atkins died 2009 brain tumor womens prison chowcilla 61 linda kasabian former resident spahn ranch kasabian scene tate labianca murders offered immunity prosecution case manson family members testimony regarded key convicting manson embedded content bruce davis aged 75 bruce davis still behind bars convicted involved deaths gary hinman spahn ranch helper donald shea incarcerated 1972 davis currently held maleonly state prison near san luis obispo like van houten former manson apostle previously approved parole decision reversed governor prior 2010 davis 24 parole bids rejected patricia krenwinkel patricia krenwinkel held california institution women longest prisonserving female member family krenwinkel one group break sharon tates home august 9 1969 amid mayhem night krenwinkel cornered victim abigail folger stabbed 28 times june 22 2017 denied prospect release least five years steve clem grogan grogan remained car murderous rampage tate home later convicted involvement death donald shea released prison 1980s member manson family convicted murder released charles tex watson one main figures mansons cabal watson murdered sharon tate august 9 1969 murder watson told victims devil admitted helping coconspirators stab wojciech frykowski abigail folger attacking tate watson also broke labianca household following night took part double slaying aged 71 due parole 2021 | 525 |
<p>Amidst the media buzz, the recent announcement by Washington to fly P-8 maritime surveillance flights out of Singapore needs to be viewed in perspective.</p>
<p>There has been quite a bit of media buzz over the Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement (DCA) inked just recently between Singapore and the United States. Even though the <a href="http://www.defense.gov/News/News-Releases/News-Release-View/Article/633200/joint-statement-by-us-secretary-of-defense-ash-carter-and-singapore-minister-fo" type="external">joint statement</a> promulgated by both countries' defense chiefs contains numerous provisions for enhanced defense linkages, the spotlight seems to be focused on the inaugural deployment of U.S. Navy P-8 Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft to Singapore on December 7-14.</p>
<p>In fact, American military planes have made rotational deployments to Singapore since the early 1990s, for instance from the latter's Paya Lebar Airbase. I once lived in a high-rise apartment - typical of those that characterize this small, heavily-urbanized island city-state - that gave quite a good view of the airstrip. The distinctive shapes and livery of U.S. military transport and tanker planes parked on the apron, at times partially concealed or taxiing on the flight line in full view, were hard to miss.</p>
<p>The reason why this new deployment garnered so much attention is because the platform in question is none other than a P-8 Poseidon. This is the case even though the P-8 is actually not a newcomer to Singaporean skies; it was <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-08-03/u-s-continues-testing-surveillance-plane-in-singapore-exercise" type="external">tested back in August 2014</a> during joint training drills with the Singapore Armed Forces. The crux of the issue is that, just like the ubiquitous UH-1 "Huey" helicopter being the symbol of the Vietnam War, the P-8 has gained analogous status over the South China Sea following a number of aerial incidents with Chinese forces. Therefore, one almost instinctively links the plane to the South China Sea rationale.</p>
<p>However, as one indulges in the recent tensions arising in those waters, it becomes easy to overlook the fact that the P-8 is designed as a multi-mission aircraft designed for a wide variety of tasks: surface surveillance, over-the-horizon missile targeting for friendly combat units, search-and-rescue, electronic intelligence-gathering, anti-submarine warfare, and so forth. In other words, this plane can be employed for a whole of spectrum of peacetime and wartime missions.</p>
<p>The P-8's role in hunting for Chinese submarines stationed on Hainan Island and in challenging Beijing's South China Sea claims has been often talked about. Less discussed about is the aircraft's value in promoting regional maritime domain awareness against non-state threats such as pirates. Despite the spate of military modernization efforts undertaken by many Southeast Asian governments, the one capability area which still suffers from relative neglect is aerial platforms, equivalent to the P-8 or a less capable type, for maritime surveillance. This category of capability has for long been relegated to lower priority in favor of high-powered, "big ticket" purchases such as combat vessels and multi-role fighter jets. Southeast Asia is plagued by an uneven spread, in terms of quantity and quality, of maritime patrol aircraft.</p>
<p>Only in the more recent years, Indonesia began to induct newer maritime patrol aircraft. Malaysia and Singapore maintain small fleets of such planes since the 1990s, without concrete new replacements plans at present. Vietnam is a newcomer, but its Canadian-built amphibian planes are handicapped by short range and limited payload. As such, the P-8 flights ought to be a welcome addition to help fill regional shortfalls, since data gathered by the plane can be shared with Southeast Asian authorities.</p>
<p>And it is not just data pertaining to the South China Sea disputes, but those useful in deterring and mitigating piratical and armed robbery attacks against ships in Southeast Asian waters where a number of ship hijacks had been reported. The navies of Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and the U.S. held an <a href="http://www.navy.mil/submit/display.asp?story_id=86971" type="external">inaugural Roundtable Staff Talks back in May 2015</a> to discuss about, amongst other things, information-sharing to promote maritime domain awareness in part targeted at this development. This P-8 deployment can be deemed one of the natural outcomes of the talks and notably the following <a href="http://www.defensenews.com/story/defense/2015/05/30/carter-announces-425m-in-pacific-partnership-funding/28206541/" type="external">Southeast Asia Maritime Security Initiative</a>.</p>
<p>Of course, it will be entirely misleading to claim that this P-8 deployment is totally unrelated to the South China Sea tensions. Staging such sorties out of Singapore does provide an operational advantage for U.S. Navy surveillance efforts over the disputed waters. Singapore, as a non-claimant, is also a politically less-sensitive partner of choice compared to those who are parties to the disputes; for example, Malaysia.</p>
<p>Furthermore, it is apparent that Singapore seeks to manage external perceptions of this deployment, amongst other initiatives covered in the new agreement. In this connection, the joint statement specifically mentioned that the deployment as falling "under the ambit" of the two previous pacts - the 1990 Memorandum of Understanding and 2005 Strategic Framework Agreement. This is plausibly a deliberate wording aimed at mollifying any misinterpretation of this deployment as signifying a radical change in the nature of existing bilateral defense relations. To be sure, the Enhanced DCA is not, and never will be, an instrument of formal military alliance.</p>
<p>This essentially reflects Singapore's longstanding foreign policy stance; on the one hand promoting its enduring security partnership with Washington in a bid to further entrench the latter's security commitments to this region; while taking care not to unnecessarily "rock the boat" by provoking a vigorous Chinese response on the other. The multi-functional nature of the P-8 enables an inherently ambiguous strategic intent, thereby providing greater flexibility of options for both the U.S. and Singapore governments. Allowing B-52 strategic bomber flights, however, will be a Rubicon Singapore does not wish to cross because of their inherently offensive functions. By comparison, P-8 sorties may lend to better "escalation-control".</p>
<p>But what can be said of China's response? This is a question that ought to be of interest given recent South China Sea tensions. Beijing did <a href="http://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/xwfw_665399/s2510_665401/2511_665403/t1322524.shtml" type="external">criticize</a> this latest move by Washington, as it almost usually did whenever Pentagon announced or conducted new deployments to the region. Nonetheless, it will still exercise caution. Having already inked the <a href="http://www.defense.gov/Portals/1/Documents/pubs/141112_MemorandumOfUnderstandingRegardingRules.pdf" type="external">Memorandum of Understanding</a> in November 2014 and its <a href="http://www.defense.gov/Portals/1/Documents/pubs/US-CHINA_AIR_ENCOUNTERS_ANNEX_SEP_2015.pdf" type="external">Supplement</a> in September this year with the U.S. to govern rules of behavior for safety of aerial and maritime encounters, conducting aggressive military counter-surveillance against the P-8 flights will be to China's detriment.</p>
<p>It can be seen that in February, Beijing did not particularly react to Washington's decision on <a href="http://www.defensenews.com/story/defense/naval/navy/2015/02/18/us-navy-lcs-operate-singapore/23619799/" type="external">rotational deployment of four Littoral Combat Ships to Singapore</a>. In May, Chinese forces garrisoned in the disputed waters <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2015/05/20/politics/south-china-sea-navy-flight/" type="external">issued repeated warnings</a> to a P-8 monitoring Beijing's land reclamation activities but did not engage. The same month, Chinese warships maintained a safe distance to USS Fort Worth conducting its <a href="http://www.cpf.navy.mil/news.aspx/010400" type="external">maiden South China Sea patrol</a>. This was repeated during the passage of USS Lassen in October. Beijing will likely exhibit the same behavioral pattern.</p>
<p>What this means is that besides making diplomatic representations and intensifying military counter-surveillance efforts, Beijing could only watch the sorties being flown out of Singapore and fume, yet desisting from drastic countermeasures involving use of force. Singapore will not suffer from retribution for this latest move. Neither will Beijing attempt to manipulate, overtly or behind the scenes, Singapore's longstanding security ties with Washington since that may potentially backfire on itself. After all, Beijing counts on Singapore's present capacity as coordinator of ASEAN-China relations to improve its image in Southeast Asia following the recent South China Sea spats.</p>
<p>However, there is a potential "wild card" one still needs to recognize. Given the envisaged increase in P-8 flights, a Chinese air defense identification zone over the South China Sea, similar to the one established in November 2013 over the East China Sea, now inches closer - even if slightly - towards the reality. Once all new airstrips Beijing is currently building in the disputed waters turn operational, it may just be a matter of time and its political will.</p> | false | 1 | amidst media buzz recent announcement washington fly p8 maritime surveillance flights singapore needs viewed perspective quite bit media buzz enhanced defence cooperation agreement dca inked recently singapore united states even though joint statement promulgated countries defense chiefs contains numerous provisions enhanced defense linkages spotlight seems focused inaugural deployment us navy p8 poseidon maritime patrol aircraft singapore december 714 fact american military planes made rotational deployments singapore since early 1990s instance latters paya lebar airbase lived highrise apartment typical characterize small heavilyurbanized island citystate gave quite good view airstrip distinctive shapes livery us military transport tanker planes parked apron times partially concealed taxiing flight line full view hard miss reason new deployment garnered much attention platform question none p8 poseidon case even though p8 actually newcomer singaporean skies tested back august 2014 joint training drills singapore armed forces crux issue like ubiquitous uh1 huey helicopter symbol vietnam war p8 gained analogous status south china sea following number aerial incidents chinese forces therefore one almost instinctively links plane south china sea rationale however one indulges recent tensions arising waters becomes easy overlook fact p8 designed multimission aircraft designed wide variety tasks surface surveillance overthehorizon missile targeting friendly combat units searchandrescue electronic intelligencegathering antisubmarine warfare forth words plane employed whole spectrum peacetime wartime missions p8s role hunting chinese submarines stationed hainan island challenging beijings south china sea claims often talked less discussed aircrafts value promoting regional maritime domain awareness nonstate threats pirates despite spate military modernization efforts undertaken many southeast asian governments one capability area still suffers relative neglect aerial platforms equivalent p8 less capable type maritime surveillance category capability long relegated lower priority favor highpowered big ticket purchases combat vessels multirole fighter jets southeast asia plagued uneven spread terms quantity quality maritime patrol aircraft recent years indonesia began induct newer maritime patrol aircraft malaysia singapore maintain small fleets planes since 1990s without concrete new replacements plans present vietnam newcomer canadianbuilt amphibian planes handicapped short range limited payload p8 flights ought welcome addition help fill regional shortfalls since data gathered plane shared southeast asian authorities data pertaining south china sea disputes useful deterring mitigating piratical armed robbery attacks ships southeast asian waters number ship hijacks reported navies indonesia malaysia singapore us held inaugural roundtable staff talks back may 2015 discuss amongst things informationsharing promote maritime domain awareness part targeted development p8 deployment deemed one natural outcomes talks notably following southeast asia maritime security initiative course entirely misleading claim p8 deployment totally unrelated south china sea tensions staging sorties singapore provide operational advantage us navy surveillance efforts disputed waters singapore nonclaimant also politically lesssensitive partner choice compared parties disputes example malaysia furthermore apparent singapore seeks manage external perceptions deployment amongst initiatives covered new agreement connection joint statement specifically mentioned deployment falling ambit two previous pacts 1990 memorandum understanding 2005 strategic framework agreement plausibly deliberate wording aimed mollifying misinterpretation deployment signifying radical change nature existing bilateral defense relations sure enhanced dca never instrument formal military alliance essentially reflects singapores longstanding foreign policy stance one hand promoting enduring security partnership washington bid entrench latters security commitments region taking care unnecessarily rock boat provoking vigorous chinese response multifunctional nature p8 enables inherently ambiguous strategic intent thereby providing greater flexibility options us singapore governments allowing b52 strategic bomber flights however rubicon singapore wish cross inherently offensive functions comparison p8 sorties may lend better escalationcontrol said chinas response question ought interest given recent south china sea tensions beijing criticize latest move washington almost usually whenever pentagon announced conducted new deployments region nonetheless still exercise caution already inked memorandum understanding november 2014 supplement september year us govern rules behavior safety aerial maritime encounters conducting aggressive military countersurveillance p8 flights chinas detriment seen february beijing particularly react washingtons decision rotational deployment four littoral combat ships singapore may chinese forces garrisoned disputed waters issued repeated warnings p8 monitoring beijings land reclamation activities engage month chinese warships maintained safe distance uss fort worth conducting maiden south china sea patrol repeated passage uss lassen october beijing likely exhibit behavioral pattern means besides making diplomatic representations intensifying military countersurveillance efforts beijing could watch sorties flown singapore fume yet desisting drastic countermeasures involving use force singapore suffer retribution latest move neither beijing attempt manipulate overtly behind scenes singapores longstanding security ties washington since may potentially backfire beijing counts singapores present capacity coordinator aseanchina relations improve image southeast asia following recent south china sea spats however potential wild card one still needs recognize given envisaged increase p8 flights chinese air defense identification zone south china sea similar one established november 2013 east china sea inches closer even slightly towards reality new airstrips beijing currently building disputed waters turn operational may matter time political | 776 |
<p>On Wednesday, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan convened a hearing on “The Fiscal Consequences of the New Health Care Law.” CMS Chief Actuary Richard Foster was the lead witness for the hearing, following by a panel on which EPPC Fellow James Capretta was asked to participate along with Dennis Smith, Wisconsin’s Secretary for Health Services, and Paul van de Water, Senior Fellow at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.</p>
<p>All of the written testimony is available <a href="" type="external">here</a>. Mr. Capretta’s testimony appears below, and it is attached as a pdf file. In addition, the committee has posted video clips of various parts of the hearing, available <a href="http://budget.house.gov/healthcare/hearing1262011.htm" type="external">here</a>.</p>
<p>Watch complete video of the hearing <a href="http://www.c-spanvideo.org/videoLibrary/event.php?id=190425" type="external">here</a>.</p>
<p>Mr. Chairman, Mr. Van Hollen, and members of the Committee, thank you for the opportunity to participate in this very important hearing on the fiscal consequences of the health care law.</p>
<p>The most serious threat to the nation’s long-term prosperity is projected large fiscal deficits over the years and decades ahead. And the main reason the nation’s budget deficits are expected to remain at dangerously high levels for the foreseeable future is because of the rapid growth of entitlement spending.</p>
<p>Importantly, entitlement spending was a problem even before the enactment of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). In 1975, the combined cost of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid was 5.4 percent of GDP. In 2009, these entitlement programs cost 10.1 percent of GDP.</p>
<p>That jump in spending — 4.7 percent of GDP — is the main reason it is so difficult to bring the nation’s budget closer to sustainable fiscal balance. Every year, we are spending more and more to fulfill entitlement promises made years and decades ago, leaving less and less to finance other priorities, even as the growing levels of entitlement spending puts enormous pressure on taxpayers.</p>
<p>And we haven’t even hit the really rough patch yet. Over the coming two decades, the United States will undergo an unprecedented demographic transformation, as the baby boom generation moves from its working years into retirement. The number of Americans age 65 and older will rise from 41 million in 2010 to 71 million in 2030. As these baby boomers enroll in Social Security and Medicare, costs will soar.</p>
<p>We were therefore already racing toward a budget and entitlement crisis before the health care law was considered and passed. Indeed, for the proponents of the legislation, that became a primary argument for its enactment. The president argued that his health care plan would begin to address the entitlement problem, at least from the perspective of the health programs. “Health reform is entitlement reform” was the catch-phrase.</p>
<p>But is that really the case? Did the new health care law ease the entitlement and budget crisis, or did it make matters even worse? That is the crucial question, and this Committee should be commended for taking it up as one of the first items for discussion in this new Congress. I believe the evidence is overwhelming that the new law will make matters not better, but far worse.</p>
<p>The most noteworthy characteristic of the new law is that it is the largest entitlement expansion since the 1960s. So, at a time when the federal budget is already buckling under the weight of existing entitlement programs, the new law stands up three new ones which will enroll tens of millions of Americans into taxpayer-financed programs promising permanent access to uncapped benefits. Moreover, spending on these new entitlements is expected to grow at rates that are above the level of growth of the economy or general inflation.</p>
<p>How then does a new law which increases spending by nearly $1 trillion over the period 2010 to 2019 reduce the federal deficit (by about $130 billion over ten years according to the Congressional Budget Office and by a modest amount in the decade after that)? The only way is by raising taxes and cutting spending by amounts in excess of the new spending commitments. According CBO’s estimate of the final legislation, spending reductions will bring the net increase in spending down to about $430 billion over the next decade. The tax hike to pay for this spending will total about $560 billion over the same period.</p>
<p>Thus, although the legislation has often been described by proponents as a deficit reduction measure, it might be more accurate to say that it is a very large spending bill, offset, at least on paper, by even larger tax increases.</p>
<p>But even these numbers do not tell the whole story. It is also important to look carefully at the assumptions underlying these estimates to determine if the promised deficit reduction will occur in reality, or just on paper. There are a number of reasons to be very skeptical in this regard.</p>
<p>The CLASS Act</p>
<p>The argument that the new law reduces the federal budget deficit over the coming decade rests in large part on the supposed deficit reduction from the creation of the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports Act, or CLASS Act, which is a new long-term care insurance entitlement program. CBO’s estimate assumes that $70 billion in supposed deficit reduction through 2019 is to come from the CLASS Act.</p>
<p>But, in truth, the CLASS Act is another budgetary time-bomb waiting to explode, not a solution that produces deficit reduction. In the short term, because the program is brand new and no one is eligible for benefits until they have paid in for five years, premiums are collected and no benefits are paid — producing what appears to be a temporary surplus. But beyond the visible ten-year window, those premiums are needed to pay long-term care insurance claims.</p>
<p>Moreover, every actuarial analysis done on the program indicates it will suffer from severe adverse selection. That is, it will attract mainly enrollees who expect to need the benefit. The result is that individual premiums are likely to be quite high because too few healthy workers will enroll. Overall premiums will fall well short of what is needed to cover the implicit benefit promises. Pressure will then build for a future taxpayer bailout to avoid imposing cuts on the vulnerable citizens who elected to enroll and pay premiums. In short, this program is not going to solve our entitlement crisis. Indeed, it is a perfect illustration of why federal entitlement spending is our central budgetary problem.</p>
<p>Disequilibrium in Federal Insurance Subsidies</p>
<p>The new law promises members of households with incomes between 135 and 400 percent of the federal poverty line new premium subsidies if they get their coverage through the new state-run “exchanges.” Census data show that today there are about 111 million Americans under the age of 65 who are living in households with incomes in that range. But CBO estimates that only 19 million people will be getting the new premium assistance in 2019. They assume the other 90 million Americans will stay in job-based plans.</p>
<p>If that were really to happen, it would be terribly unfair. As Stephanie Rennane and Eugene Steuerle of the Urban Institute have documented, the new premium subsidies in the exchanges are worth far more to low- and moderate-wage workers than today’s federal tax preference for employer-paid premiums (see Chart 1). For instance, a household of four with compensation of $60,000 in 2016 would get $3,500 more in government assistance if they moved from employer coverage to an exchange. The extra subsidies would be even more for lower wage workers.</p>
<p />
<p>The new law thus sets up a situation where two families with identical compensation totals from their employers can get very different levels of federal support depending on where they get their insurance.</p>
<p>In my judgment, that’s not likely to be a politically stable situation. Pressure will build on elected leaders to treat every American equally. That is likely to lead to regulatory and legislative decisions making it easier for workers now in job-based plans to migrate to the exchanges.</p>
<p>Over time, what is likely to happen is that those who would be better off in the exchanges will end up there, one way or another, even as higher wage workers retain the tax advantage for job-based coverage. As the labor market segregates, costs will soar well above the $1 trillion in new spending over ten years currently projected for the law.</p>
<p>AMT-Like Bracket Creep</p>
<p>The new law relies heavily on tax increases to cover the new entitlement spending. According to CBO’s latest long-term budget projections, by 2035, the tax increases in the new law will collect revenue equal to 1.2 percent of GDP, which is very substantial. In today’s terms, that’s a $180 billion tax increase, every year.</p>
<p>How can that be, given that the tax hikes do not go nearly that high in the first decade? The answer is AMT-like bracket creep. The new tax on high-cost insurance plans, sometimes called the “Cadillac” tax, applies to policies with premiums for families above $27,500 in 2018. That threshold will only grow with general consumer inflation in 2020 and beyond, not growth of health costs. Thus, by 2030, the tax will be binding on many millions of Americans’ insurance plans.</p>
<p>Similarly, the new Medicare taxes on wages and other sources of income apply only to individuals with incomes above $200,000 per year beginning in 2013 ($250,000 for couples). But those income thresholds are fixed; they won’t rise with inflation at all. In very short order, that means these taxes will begin hitting middle-class Americans with massive tax hikes. By 2030, inflation will have eroded the $200,000 threshold so that it is the equivalent of $130,000 today (assuming 2.5 percent annual inflation).</p>
<p>The Medicare Payment Rate Reductions</p>
<p>The largest spending reduction in Medicare comes from automatic reductions in the inflation updates for hospitals and other institutional providers of care. The notional rationale is that these cuts represent productivity improvement in the various institutions getting Medicare payments. The reductions, amounting to a 0.4-0.5 percentage point reduction off the normal inflation update for Medicare payments, will occur every year, in perpetuity. The compounding effect of doing this on a permanent basis would be massive savings in Medicare — if they really were implemented. CBO says the cuts will generate $156 billion over the first decade alone.</p>
<p>But there are strong reasons to suspect these cuts will not be sustained. Medicare’s actuarial team, led by Richard Foster, has warned repeatedly that these cuts are not viable over the medium and long-term because they would jeopardize access to care for seniors. The cuts would push average Medicare payments to levels that are below what Medicaid is expected to pay, and the network of providers willing to take care of Medicaid patients is notoriously constrained. It is hard to imagine political leaders allowing Medicare to become less attractive to those providing services than Medicaid is today.</p>
<p>It’s worth noting here that these cuts in payment rates do not constitute “delivery system reform,” which the administration has often stated is what it is trying to achieve with the Medicare changes in the new law. These cuts in inflation updates will hit every institution equally, without regard to whether or not the institution is treating its patients well or badly. The savings that are expected from other reforms, such as Accountable Care Organizations, are minor by comparison.</p>
<p>The Budgetary Effect of Tax Hikes and Medicare Cuts in a Second Decade</p>
<p>The administration and others have noted frequently that CBO’s cost estimate indicates the possibility of modest deficit reduction in the second decade after 2019 (although CBO notes that such an estimate carries more uncertainty than its ten-year projections). But the expectation of long-term deficit reduction is entirely dependent on huge spending reductions from the Medicare inflation cuts and from more and more middle-class Americans paying higher taxes under the new law’s tax provisions.</p>
<p>As shown in Chart 2, the tax hikes from the new law plus the savings from the “productivity adjustment” in Medicare would generate about $180 billion in “offsets” in 2020. By 2030, the spending cuts and tax hikes from these provisions will have more than tripled, to over $600 billion. If these taxes and spending cuts do not materialize, the new law will be a budget-buster of significant proportions.</p>
<p />
<p>Debt Subject to Limit</p>
<p>Both CBO and the Medicare actuaries have both noted that the Medicare cuts and payroll tax hikes which are supposed to improve the solvency of the Medicare hospital trust fund in the new law can only be counted once, not twice. Here is how CBO put it in a Director’s blog post from December 2009:</p>
<p>To describe the full amount of HI trust fund savings as both improving the government’s ability to pay future Medicare benefits and financing new spending outside of Medicare would essentially double-count a large share of those savings and thus overstate the improvement in the government’s fiscal position.</p>
<p>In other words, these taxes and cuts in Medicare either improve the government’s ability to pay future Medicare claims, or they pay for a new entitlement program — but not both.</p>
<p>One way to see that clearly is by looking at the impact of the health care law on debt subject to limit. According to CBO, the new law will increase that debt, by about $230 billion over the coming decade, because the Medicare tax hikes and spending cuts are double-counted instead of devoted to deficit reduction.</p>
<p>Conclusion</p>
<p>Mr. Chairman, you and your colleagues on this committee face a daunting challenge. The nation is rushing rapidly toward a fiscal crisis, driven by excessive borrowing and debt. Even before the health law was enacted, it was necessary to reform the nation’s entitlement programs to bring spending commitments more in line with what the country can afford. Now, with enactment of the health law, the climb to a balanced budget got much steeper.</p>
<p>The solution is to start by unwinding what was just passed and replacing it with a program that constitutes genuine entitlement reform.</p>
<p>James Capretta is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.</p> | false | 1 | wednesday house budget committee chairman paul ryan convened hearing fiscal consequences new health care law cms chief actuary richard foster lead witness hearing following panel eppc fellow james capretta asked participate along dennis smith wisconsins secretary health services paul van de water senior fellow center budget policy priorities written testimony available mr caprettas testimony appears attached pdf file addition committee posted video clips various parts hearing available watch complete video hearing mr chairman mr van hollen members committee thank opportunity participate important hearing fiscal consequences health care law serious threat nations longterm prosperity projected large fiscal deficits years decades ahead main reason nations budget deficits expected remain dangerously high levels foreseeable future rapid growth entitlement spending importantly entitlement spending problem even enactment patient protection affordable care act ppaca 1975 combined cost social security medicare medicaid 54 percent gdp 2009 entitlement programs cost 101 percent gdp jump spending 47 percent gdp main reason difficult bring nations budget closer sustainable fiscal balance every year spending fulfill entitlement promises made years decades ago leaving less less finance priorities even growing levels entitlement spending puts enormous pressure taxpayers havent even hit really rough patch yet coming two decades united states undergo unprecedented demographic transformation baby boom generation moves working years retirement number americans age 65 older rise 41 million 2010 71 million 2030 baby boomers enroll social security medicare costs soar therefore already racing toward budget entitlement crisis health care law considered passed indeed proponents legislation became primary argument enactment president argued health care plan would begin address entitlement problem least perspective health programs health reform entitlement reform catchphrase really case new health care law ease entitlement budget crisis make matters even worse crucial question committee commended taking one first items discussion new congress believe evidence overwhelming new law make matters better far worse noteworthy characteristic new law largest entitlement expansion since 1960s time federal budget already buckling weight existing entitlement programs new law stands three new ones enroll tens millions americans taxpayerfinanced programs promising permanent access uncapped benefits moreover spending new entitlements expected grow rates level growth economy general inflation new law increases spending nearly 1 trillion period 2010 2019 reduce federal deficit 130 billion ten years according congressional budget office modest amount decade way raising taxes cutting spending amounts excess new spending commitments according cbos estimate final legislation spending reductions bring net increase spending 430 billion next decade tax hike pay spending total 560 billion period thus although legislation often described proponents deficit reduction measure might accurate say large spending bill offset least paper even larger tax increases even numbers tell whole story also important look carefully assumptions underlying estimates determine promised deficit reduction occur reality paper number reasons skeptical regard class act argument new law reduces federal budget deficit coming decade rests large part supposed deficit reduction creation community living assistance services supports act class act new longterm care insurance entitlement program cbos estimate assumes 70 billion supposed deficit reduction 2019 come class act truth class act another budgetary timebomb waiting explode solution produces deficit reduction short term program brand new one eligible benefits paid five years premiums collected benefits paid producing appears temporary surplus beyond visible tenyear window premiums needed pay longterm care insurance claims moreover every actuarial analysis done program indicates suffer severe adverse selection attract mainly enrollees expect need benefit result individual premiums likely quite high healthy workers enroll overall premiums fall well short needed cover implicit benefit promises pressure build future taxpayer bailout avoid imposing cuts vulnerable citizens elected enroll pay premiums short program going solve entitlement crisis indeed perfect illustration federal entitlement spending central budgetary problem disequilibrium federal insurance subsidies new law promises members households incomes 135 400 percent federal poverty line new premium subsidies get coverage new staterun exchanges census data show today 111 million americans age 65 living households incomes range cbo estimates 19 million people getting new premium assistance 2019 assume 90 million americans stay jobbased plans really happen would terribly unfair stephanie rennane eugene steuerle urban institute documented new premium subsidies exchanges worth far low moderatewage workers todays federal tax preference employerpaid premiums see chart 1 instance household four compensation 60000 2016 would get 3500 government assistance moved employer coverage exchange extra subsidies would even lower wage workers new law thus sets situation two families identical compensation totals employers get different levels federal support depending get insurance judgment thats likely politically stable situation pressure build elected leaders treat every american equally likely lead regulatory legislative decisions making easier workers jobbased plans migrate exchanges time likely happen would better exchanges end one way another even higher wage workers retain tax advantage jobbased coverage labor market segregates costs soar well 1 trillion new spending ten years currently projected law amtlike bracket creep new law relies heavily tax increases cover new entitlement spending according cbos latest longterm budget projections 2035 tax increases new law collect revenue equal 12 percent gdp substantial todays terms thats 180 billion tax increase every year given tax hikes go nearly high first decade answer amtlike bracket creep new tax highcost insurance plans sometimes called cadillac tax applies policies premiums families 27500 2018 threshold grow general consumer inflation 2020 beyond growth health costs thus 2030 tax binding many millions americans insurance plans similarly new medicare taxes wages sources income apply individuals incomes 200000 per year beginning 2013 250000 couples income thresholds fixed wont rise inflation short order means taxes begin hitting middleclass americans massive tax hikes 2030 inflation eroded 200000 threshold equivalent 130000 today assuming 25 percent annual inflation medicare payment rate reductions largest spending reduction medicare comes automatic reductions inflation updates hospitals institutional providers care notional rationale cuts represent productivity improvement various institutions getting medicare payments reductions amounting 0405 percentage point reduction normal inflation update medicare payments occur every year perpetuity compounding effect permanent basis would massive savings medicare really implemented cbo says cuts generate 156 billion first decade alone strong reasons suspect cuts sustained medicares actuarial team led richard foster warned repeatedly cuts viable medium longterm would jeopardize access care seniors cuts would push average medicare payments levels medicaid expected pay network providers willing take care medicaid patients notoriously constrained hard imagine political leaders allowing medicare become less attractive providing services medicaid today worth noting cuts payment rates constitute delivery system reform administration often stated trying achieve medicare changes new law cuts inflation updates hit every institution equally without regard whether institution treating patients well badly savings expected reforms accountable care organizations minor comparison budgetary effect tax hikes medicare cuts second decade administration others noted frequently cbos cost estimate indicates possibility modest deficit reduction second decade 2019 although cbo notes estimate carries uncertainty tenyear projections expectation longterm deficit reduction entirely dependent huge spending reductions medicare inflation cuts middleclass americans paying higher taxes new laws tax provisions shown chart 2 tax hikes new law plus savings productivity adjustment medicare would generate 180 billion offsets 2020 2030 spending cuts tax hikes provisions tripled 600 billion taxes spending cuts materialize new law budgetbuster significant proportions debt subject limit cbo medicare actuaries noted medicare cuts payroll tax hikes supposed improve solvency medicare hospital trust fund new law counted twice cbo put directors blog post december 2009 describe full amount hi trust fund savings improving governments ability pay future medicare benefits financing new spending outside medicare would essentially doublecount large share savings thus overstate improvement governments fiscal position words taxes cuts medicare either improve governments ability pay future medicare claims pay new entitlement program one way see clearly looking impact health care law debt subject limit according cbo new law increase debt 230 billion coming decade medicare tax hikes spending cuts doublecounted instead devoted deficit reduction conclusion mr chairman colleagues committee face daunting challenge nation rushing rapidly toward fiscal crisis driven excessive borrowing debt even health law enacted necessary reform nations entitlement programs bring spending commitments line country afford enactment health law climb balanced budget got much steeper solution start unwinding passed replacing program constitutes genuine entitlement reform james capretta fellow ethics public policy center | 1,331 |
<p>SHENYANG, China — Family members of Liu Xiaobo scattered the Nobel Peace Prize laureate’s ashes into the sea on Saturday in funeral proceedings closely orchestrated by the Chinese government following his death from cancer while in custody.</p>
<p>Liu’s supporters said the move was intended by the authoritarian government to permanently erase any traces of China’s best-known political prisoner, who died Thursday at the age of 61.</p>
<p>The sea burial took place Saturday at noon, just hours after his cremation, a spokesman for the northeastern city of Shenyang, where Liu died, told reporters.</p>
<p>Liu’s elder brother, also addressing reporters at the briefing, thanked the ruling Communist Party and the government for its handling of his brother’s funeral. The brother, Liu Xiaoguang, is regarded by Liu’s friends as having long been unsupportive of Liu’s political advocacy.</p>
<p>Liu died from multiple organ failure following a battle with liver cancer while serving an 11-year sentence for incitement to subvert state power. In the run-up to his death, Beijing faced mounting international criticism for not letting him and his wife travel for treatment abroad as he had wished.</p>
<p>The government held two briefings Saturday and provided photos of the funeral and the sea burial, the latest moves in a propaganda campaign seemingly aimed at countering criticism that Beijing has failed to handle Liu’s deterioration and dying wishes in a humanitarian way. A video about Liu’s hospital treatment released on the website of Shenyang’s judicial bureau Friday appeared aimed at the same objective.</p>
<p>Activists and friends of the family said the sea burial appeared to be Beijing’s way of removing every last physical trace of Liu. It also removes the need for a land-based grave at which his supporters would have been able to pay their respects.</p>
<p>“The government’s thinking is that in this way, they can destroy the body and remove all traces of him,” dissident and family friend Hu Jia said by phone.</p>
<p>“After all, he’s a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and he died after being suppressed by the authorities,” Hu said. “The authorities are very worried that a grave would be the focal point of the public’s actions to memorialize him, which could easily turn into protests.”</p>
<p>Activist filmmaker and friend Zeng Jinyan said the sea burial would not deter supporters from commemorating Liu’s life.</p>
<p>“Now, Liu Xiaobo is everywhere,” Zeng said. “Two-thirds of the earth’s surface is covered by the sea and I can foresee that in the future, activists and ordinary people will go to the sea and memorialize Liu Xiaobo.”</p>
<p>In Hong Kong, thousands of Liu’s supporters and activists attended a candlelight vigil Saturday to mourn his death.</p>
<p>Supporters paid their respects by observing a minute of silence and marching through the streets of Hong Kong holding lit candles.</p>
<p>Liu’s wife and other family members have been closely guarded by authorities and remain largely out of contact with the outside world even after his death. Governments around the world have urged China to free his wife, Liu Xia, from the strict house arrest she has lived under for years even though she has not been convicted of any crime.</p>
<p>The government handout photos showed Liu Xia, who wore dark sunglasses, being comforted by her brother in a funeral parlor as they stood in a row with Liu’s older and younger siblings and their wives. Liu’s body lay in an open casket in the center of the room, surrounded by an arrangement of potted white flowers.</p>
<p>A black banner strung on the wall read “Mr. Liu Xiaobo’s funeral” in white Chinese characters. It was positioned above a framed picture of Liu. A press release issued by the government said that the ceremony was held at 6:30 a.m. to the music of Mozart’s Requiem, and that the body was cremated shortly afterward.</p>
<p>The government also said some of Liu’s friends attended the ceremony, a claim that was disputed by people who have long been close to Liu. In the handout images, none among a group of people standing by the casket were identifiable as any of Liu’s friends, Zeng said.</p>
<p>Zeng said she was among the Liu family’s friends who had traveled to Shenyang only to be prevented by the authorities from seeing Liu in his final moments.</p>
<p>“I just want to be closer to him and to see him, touch him even, if it’s possible, and to give Liu Xia a hug, that’s all,” she said in English.</p>
<p>Zeng said it was “shameful” that the government said Liu’s friends had attended the funeral. “How disgusting,” she said.</p>
<p>Another of Liu’s friends, dissident writer Mo Zhixu, said he thought the well-built young men with buzz cuts in the handout photos resembled security agents who kept track of Liu’s wife. “This is just a big performance,” he said.</p>
<p>“This regime has long been acting without humanity — that’s why they denied him even a minute of freedom even until his death,” Mo said.</p>
<p>At the briefing in Shenyang, a spokesman for the city’s information office said the authorities were looking out for Liu Xia’s interests and insisted that she is free.</p>
<p>“As far as I know, Liu Xia has freedom. But she just lost her relative and is in deep sorrow,” spokesman Zhang Qingyang said. “After Liu Xiaobo’s death, let Liu Xia tend to his affairs and try to keep her away from external interference.”</p>
<p>Liu was only the second Nobel Peace Prize winner to die in police custody, a fact pointed to by human rights groups as an indication of the Chinese Communist Party’s increasingly hard line against its critics. The first, Carl von Ossietzky, died from tuberculosis in Germany in 1938 while serving a sentence for opposing Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime.</p>
<p>Liu rose to prominence during the 1989 pro-democracy protests centered in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. He was sentenced to 11 years in prison in 2009 for co-authoring “Charter 08,” a document that called for an end to one-party rule in China.</p>
<p>He was in prison when he was awarded the Nobel in 2010, which Beijing condemned as an affront to its political and legal systems.</p>
<p>There is little mention of Liu in China’s heavily censored state media and social networking platforms. One notable exception is a newspaper published by the Communist Party that said in an editorial that the West was “deifying” Liu, a man the paper described as a criminal who was “paranoid, naive and arrogant.”</p>
<p>“Liu’s memorial tablet cannot find a place in China’s cultural temple,” the Global Times said in the editorial Saturday. “Deification of Liu by the West will be eventually overshadowed by China’s denial of him.”</p> | false | 1 | shenyang china family members liu xiaobo scattered nobel peace prize laureates ashes sea saturday funeral proceedings closely orchestrated chinese government following death cancer custody lius supporters said move intended authoritarian government permanently erase traces chinas bestknown political prisoner died thursday age 61 sea burial took place saturday noon hours cremation spokesman northeastern city shenyang liu died told reporters lius elder brother also addressing reporters briefing thanked ruling communist party government handling brothers funeral brother liu xiaoguang regarded lius friends long unsupportive lius political advocacy liu died multiple organ failure following battle liver cancer serving 11year sentence incitement subvert state power runup death beijing faced mounting international criticism letting wife travel treatment abroad wished government held two briefings saturday provided photos funeral sea burial latest moves propaganda campaign seemingly aimed countering criticism beijing failed handle lius deterioration dying wishes humanitarian way video lius hospital treatment released website shenyangs judicial bureau friday appeared aimed objective activists friends family said sea burial appeared beijings way removing every last physical trace liu also removes need landbased grave supporters would able pay respects governments thinking way destroy body remove traces dissident family friend hu jia said phone hes nobel peace prize laureate died suppressed authorities hu said authorities worried grave would focal point publics actions memorialize could easily turn protests activist filmmaker friend zeng jinyan said sea burial would deter supporters commemorating lius life liu xiaobo everywhere zeng said twothirds earths surface covered sea foresee future activists ordinary people go sea memorialize liu xiaobo hong kong thousands lius supporters activists attended candlelight vigil saturday mourn death supporters paid respects observing minute silence marching streets hong kong holding lit candles lius wife family members closely guarded authorities remain largely contact outside world even death governments around world urged china free wife liu xia strict house arrest lived years even though convicted crime government handout photos showed liu xia wore dark sunglasses comforted brother funeral parlor stood row lius older younger siblings wives lius body lay open casket center room surrounded arrangement potted white flowers black banner strung wall read mr liu xiaobos funeral white chinese characters positioned framed picture liu press release issued government said ceremony held 630 music mozarts requiem body cremated shortly afterward government also said lius friends attended ceremony claim disputed people long close liu handout images none among group people standing casket identifiable lius friends zeng said zeng said among liu familys friends traveled shenyang prevented authorities seeing liu final moments want closer see touch even possible give liu xia hug thats said english zeng said shameful government said lius friends attended funeral disgusting said another lius friends dissident writer mo zhixu said thought wellbuilt young men buzz cuts handout photos resembled security agents kept track lius wife big performance said regime long acting without humanity thats denied even minute freedom even death mo said briefing shenyang spokesman citys information office said authorities looking liu xias interests insisted free far know liu xia freedom lost relative deep sorrow spokesman zhang qingyang said liu xiaobos death let liu xia tend affairs try keep away external interference liu second nobel peace prize winner die police custody fact pointed human rights groups indication chinese communist partys increasingly hard line critics first carl von ossietzky died tuberculosis germany 1938 serving sentence opposing adolf hitlers nazi regime liu rose prominence 1989 prodemocracy protests centered beijings tiananmen square sentenced 11 years prison 2009 coauthoring charter 08 document called end oneparty rule china prison awarded nobel 2010 beijing condemned affront political legal systems little mention liu chinas heavily censored state media social networking platforms one notable exception newspaper published communist party said editorial west deifying liu man paper described criminal paranoid naive arrogant lius memorial tablet find place chinas cultural temple global times said editorial saturday deification liu west eventually overshadowed chinas denial | 634 |
<p><a href="" type="internal">The Faith Angle Forum</a>&#160;is a semi-annual conference which brings together a select group of 20 nationally respected journalists with 3-5 distinguished scholars on areas of religion, politics &amp; public life.</p>
<p>&#160;“Religious Liberty and the American Culture Wars”&#160;</p>
<p>South Beach, Florida</p>
<p>Speaker:</p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">Dr. John Inazu</a>,&#160;Associate Professor of Law and Political Science, Washington University School of Law in St. Louis</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>Michael Cromartie</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; Well, ladies and gentlemen, in keeping with our tradition of making sure that our topics are topical and up to date, here&#160;we are on “Religious Liberty and the American Culture Wars.”</p>
<p>Professor John Inazu, as you know from the bio, is Associate Professor of Law and Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis.&#160; His law degree is from Duke University, his undergrad degree is from Duke University, and his Ph.D. in Political Science is from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.&#160; And I asked him when Carolina and Duke play in basketball, who does he pull for?&#160; He’s a former Cameron Crazy.&#160; Actually painted his body I think when he was an undergrad there and stood on the sidelines with the other Duke fans.</p>
<p>John Inazu</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU:&#160; Off the record.</p>
<p>Laughter</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; Yes, off the record.&#160; It might be too late.</p>
<p>Laughter</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; Professor Inazu’s first book is called Liberty’s Refuge:&#160; The Forgotten Freedom of Assembly, published by Yale University Press.&#160; He has a new book coming out called Confident Pluralism:&#160; Surviving and Thriving Through Deep Difference.&#160; Confident Pluralism.</p>
<p>So when will that be out, John?</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU:&#160; It’s not formally approved, but it would be the Spring ’16 list if it happens, so it would be early ’16 or late ’15.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; Okay.&#160; Confident Pluralism, ladies and gentlemen.</p>
<p>John, thank you so much for joining us on this very timely topic.</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU:&#160; Thanks so much.&#160; It’s great to be with you all.&#160; The assigned topic, “Religious Liberty and the American Culture Wars,” I would say since Michael gave the topic to me, has taken on some increased significance.&#160; I usually spend March checking out of work and watching Duke play, but since Duke went to Indiana this year right around the time of the RFRA, it was hard to avoid work, and so here we are a couple of weeks later.</p>
<p>I want to actually begin by narrowing this topic in two ways, and I hope both of these reflect fidelity to the original wording.&#160; The first is to note that “the American Culture Wars” largely means gay rights and abortion, at least in the current moment, and particularly with respect to this topic of religious liberty. I want to suggest two important qualifiers to that recasting.&#160; First, I think we’re likely to see transgender issues added to the mix in the coming years, and this is going to bring conceptual challenges in both directions.&#160; It will put pressure on progressive appeals to more abstract notions of equality, and we can see these kinds of challenges illustrated in Ruth Padawer’s fascinating article last fall about transgender students at Wellesley College.&#160; In the other direction, we’re going to see increased pressure on conservative religious ethics insofar as transgender issues raise questions distinct from sexual practices.&#160; But transgender issues I don’t think have yet migrated to the center of these culture wars conflicts.</p>
<p>The second qualifier about recasting or narrowing this focus is that the culture wars I don’t think really are confined to sex.&#160; Sex gives us the headlines, but there are questions lurking nearby about transcendence, autonomy, technology, class, education, and race, which are connected to and in some ways broaden these conflicts.&#160; These issues deserve a lot more attention, but today, given the time constraints and also the particular focus on religious liberty, I’m going to focus on gay rights and abortion, and mostly gay rights.</p>
<p>The other way to narrow the topic today is to note that in the context of “the American Culture Wars,” the category of “religious liberty” really means mostly the legal and policy concerns of conservative Catholics and Evangelicals.&#160; That is to say religious liberty challenges are largely, though not entirely, affecting conservative Christians, and they are largely, though not entirely, affecting white conservative Christians, at least for the moment.</p>
<p>Now, I don’t mean for this observation to suggest that religious liberty is only for white conservative Christians.&#160; The Supreme Court’s most recent religious liberty decision earlier this year upheld the statutory right of a Muslim man to grow a religious beard in prison.&#160; And the history of religious free exercise doctrine owes much of its content to religious minorities like Mormons, Christian Scientists, Native American spiritualists, and, of course, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, which give us most of our free exercise case law.&#160; But the faces of today’s most prominent religious liberty cases are all white Christians:&#160; Hosanna-Tabor, Hobby Lobby, the New Mexico photographer, the Washington florist, and the Indiana pizza makers, to name just a few of them.</p>
<p>I have tried hard to brainstorm a clever shorthand description for this group, but I came up empty, so I’m just going to adopt the label that others have used, which is “the traditionalists.”&#160; I think that’s a bit clunky, but it won’t be as bad or verbally ambiguous as “the nones.”</p>
<p>Laughter</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU:&#160; A few things about the traditionalists.&#160; First, they’re not really only white.&#160; I’m going to generalize here for expediency in calling them white traditionalists, but there are some important multiethnic traditionalist institutions.&#160; And, second, the traditionalists aren’t just old men; they include substantial numbers of women and young people as well.</p>
<p>Now, this twofold revision to the title of “Religious Liberty and the American Culture Wars” gives us something like “Traditionalists and the Ongoing Conflict over Gay Rights and Abortion.”&#160; Having perhaps hijacked, Michael, the topic in my reframing of it, I would like to focus on three challenges confronting traditionalists and hope that these will also shed light on the broader topic at hand.</p>
<p>The first challenge is cultural, the inability of traditionalists to connect with other people of faith who share similar views on contested cultural issues.&#160; I will talk here, too, about the related challenge of insular discourse, the inability of traditionalists to see that some of their discourse lacks traction in a wider culture, including legal, political, and media circles.</p>
<p>The second challenge is legal, the problem with free exercise doctrine and the current weaknesses of alternative legal doctrines, like the right of association.</p>
<p>And the third challenge is institutional, the practical concerns of how to sustain traditionalist institutions in the current cultural climate.</p>
<p>Now, lurking in the background of all of these challenges, and soon to be foregrounded, is the Jim Crow analogy:&#160; whether today’s traditionalists are equivalent to segregationists, and particularly, whether traditionalist views about sexuality and the boundaries, the membership boundaries, that follow from those are analogous to race-based discrimination in the Jim Crow South.&#160; That comparison also foregrounds the question of remedy, whether the extraordinary legislative and judicial responses to Jim Crow should be deployed today.&#160; I’m going to call this the Bob Jones question, and I will return to it throughout our discussion.</p>
<p>So let me start with the cultural challenge for traditionalists, and that’s insularity.&#160; Traditionalists are not the only religious believers at odds with progressive politics on gay rights and abortion.&#160; Many conservative Jews and Muslims share their social views, but conservative Jews and Muslims have mostly stayed out of the culture wars, and traditionalists, somewhat oddly, don’t always see them as allies.&#160; One of the many ironies playing out today is the tone-deafness of some, though not all, traditionalists to the civil liberties challenges that American Muslims confront because of their faith.</p>
<p>The challenge of insularity is even more striking within Christianity.&#160; Black Evangelicals, Latino Pentecostals, and other socially conservative Christian minority groups share many traditionalist views, but they have not engaged the culture wars battles, in part because Republican positions on race, poverty, and immigration always prevented those groups from climbing onto the bandwagon of the Religious Right.</p>
<p>The inability of traditionalists to form alliances with other socially conservative believers, both fellow Christians and believers of other faiths, has left a lot of Americans without a side, but also without a voice, in the current cultural conflicts, not wanting to join the front lines of the culture wars with the traditionalists, but not either substantively aligned with progressive sexual ethics.</p>
<p>Black Evangelicals exemplify the traditionalist failure to forge partnerships, particularly in light of the Bob Jones question.&#160; Efforts to distinguish Jim Crow from the present day will almost certainly need to be made at the level of culture and law.&#160; And white traditionalists are unlikely to make those arguments by themselves.&#160; Sure there were traditionalists supporting the efforts for the abolition of slavery and later helping to lead the civil rights era, but plenty of traditionalists were on the other side of those issues.&#160; Some of the very buildings that house today’s traditionalist schools once housed segregationist academies.&#160; That’s part of the reason the Bob Jones question carries so much weight against traditionalists.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, black Evangelicals are usually absent from the current public debates over religious liberty and the culture wars.&#160; They are ignored by some progressives who don’t want them to articulate differences between Jim Crow and the present day, and they are ignored by traditionalists who have failed to establish meaningful relationships with them.</p>
<p>My sense is even that some traditionalists are waiting for black Evangelicals to figure out the current cultural moment and draw near to them in a spirit of solidarity.&#160; My guess is that black Evangelicals have a pretty good handle on the current moment, and I think they’re also less anxious about it than traditionalists.&#160; At least some of the traditionalist anxiety is a worry about a loss of cultural and political significance.</p>
<p>Nor is there much incentive for black Evangelicals to butt heads with progressives, religious or otherwise.&#160; It’s not that most progressives care what black Evangelicals have to say about sexuality, but progressives can at least credibly claim that black lives matter some of the time.&#160; We’ve seen this play out most recently in the journey from Ferguson to Baltimore.&#160; Progressives, religious and otherwise, have recognized the deaths of young black men point to something far greater than individual actions and isolated grand jury decisions.&#160; Traditionalists have largely been silent on the issue, or worse, deny the significance of the underlying issues altogether.&#160; The traditionalist response and non-response to the Ferguson moment has not gone unnoticed, and it will heighten the insularity challenge for traditionalists.</p>
<p>Now, while I’m on the topic of insularity, it’s worth mentioning a contrasting phenomenon on the other side of the culture wars.&#160; There has been an uptick I think in the coordination between LGBT advocates and abortion advocates.&#160; Those alliances are informing and underwriting legislative</p>
<p>John Inazu</p>
<p>initiatives, academic conferences, amicus briefs, and a host of other efforts.&#160; The partnerships are striking in their depth as well as their efficiency.&#160; It may be that they’re driven by demographic trends on different issues with perhaps abortion advocates looking to align more strongly with gay rights against a common traditionalist foe, but whatever the reason, the alliance seems to be having success in a number of areas.</p>
<p>One other progressive alliance that’s worth mentioning is the recent warming of some, but not all, LGBT groups to big business.&#160; It wasn’t that long ago we saw progressive outrage over the ideas of the expressive corporation in Citizens United and Hobby Lobby. But the role of Angie’s List, Salesforce, and Apple in Indiana seems to have laid aside some of those tensions in at least some circles.</p>
<p>So enough on insularity of relationships for the traditionalists and the forging of relationships in the other direction.&#160; I also want to talk about the additional problem of traditionalist insularity in discourse and their seeming inability to recognize that some discourse will not effectively translate into broader cultural debates.</p>
<p>Let me be precise about what I mean here and then give a couple of examples.&#160; I don’t mean to suggest that traditionalists should mute the content or mode of their expression.&#160; To the contrary, I think discourse constraints based on notions of public reason or political correctness are deeply misguided.&#160; Traditionalists, like everyone else, should be able to make arguments on their own terms.&#160; But my sense is that a good deal of traditionalist discourse is self-consciously a strategy of cultural engagement, and some of that engagement will have little traction on broader culture.&#160; Let me mention three examples of this observation.</p>
<p>First, in the gay rights context, the argument that traditionalist institutions impose membership boundaries based on sexual conduct, not sexual orientation.&#160; Most traditionalists today focus on these conduct restrictions:&#160; they would welcome anyone to their groups, but ask gays and lesbians to abstain from acting on their orientation, and they would say just as they ask unmarried heterosexuals to abstain.</p>
<p>The basic distinction between conduct and orientation is theologically significant and makes sense to many traditionalists, but it’s largely a cultural and legal loser.&#160; Some celibate gay and lesbian Christians retain the distinction in their own lives, but far more gays and lesbians reject it.&#160; And in 2010, a majority of the Supreme Court concluded that the conduct versus orientation distinction was legally irrelevant in the context of the membership requirements of a private group.&#160; Now, I think that actually the Court’s conclusion there is flawed in that particular context, as opposed to a state-centered law and definition that we saw in something like Lawrence v. Texas — and that it’s different when we’re talking about a private group. But the justices haven’t yet asked me for my opinion on that point.</p>
<p>A second example of insular discourse is an implicit and sometimes explicit desire of some traditionalists to return to “the good old days.”&#160; Some traditionalists argue that America, as we now find it, is in a “less coherent” age and that things were more understandable in an earlier era.&#160; I think there is some truth to this argument in some dimensions, and we do have important questions to ask about what fills the content of something like the category of “morality” in a secular society. But when traditionalists argue for a return to coherence, they encounter a serious problem of when and to what they would like to return.&#160; It turns out that earlier times were not so coherent for African Americans, for Japanese Americans, for religious minorities, for women, for gays and lesbians.&#160; A greater awareness of the pluralism that actually exists in our country puts pressure on coherence, but it also does a lot of good, and traditionalists who focus only on coherence miss some of the good.</p>
<p>This brings me to my third example of insular discourse.&#160; While some traditionalists reject or resist pluralism as a threat to coherence, others seem to be drawn to particular theological visions of pluralism that are unlikely to translate into broader discourse.</p>
<p>And so, for example, George Marsden, at the end of a book on the 1950s, argues that Americans should adopt a version of Abraham Kuyper’s pluralism.&#160; Kuyper’s theory, according to Marsden, sees different structures of society as “reflecting a God-ordained ordering of social reality that people of all faiths could recognize as beneficial,” and he includes various institutions “with their own authority, each in its own sphere.”</p>
<p>That kind of argument has had a lot of traction in some traditionalist circles, and it goes back for several decades.&#160; It’s a nice vision as far as it goes, but it hinges on these explicitly theological premises.&#160; Marsden suggests that this kind of pluralism, although developed in a theological framework, would, in his words, “be compatible with many other outlooks and would help provide an alternative to the culture-wars mentality that has plagued American life for the past generation.”&#160; I’m not so sure.&#160; If we’re going to have an alternative to the culture wars, I think we at least need a language that both sides can understand.&#160; There are some arguments for pluralism that could do that, but I don’t see it in Kuyper.</p>
<p>That’s all for the cultural insularity of the traditionalists.&#160; The second challenge I want to highlight is that of legal doctrine, and here I would like to suggest that the current doctrine protecting the free exercise of religion is largely a patchwork doctrine.&#160; The ministerial exception case, Hosanna-Tabor, from 2012, and the recent Hobby Lobby decision, are both seen as wins for religious liberty and wins for traditionalists. But the overall trajectory of religious liberty seems to me to be on the decline, at least doctrinally.&#160; The main culprit is Employment Division v. Smith, the 1990 peyote case that led to the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act.&#160; I think one way to think about the history of religious liberty since 1990 is as a patchwork response to Smith through various statutory and legal disputes.</p>
<p>Now, I don’t want to suggest that the importance of religious liberty as an abstract ideal has lost its cultural or political significance.&#160; We have polling data that suggests that most Americans value religious liberty generally, and our government continues to advocate for religious freedom around the globe. But the popular and rhetorical support along these lines I think belies the likely fact that fewer people today recognize the immediate need of legal protections on free exercise doctrine.&#160; One reason for this case may be that religious liberty has been a victim of its own success.&#160; Many past challenges to religious freedom are no longer active threats.&#160; We don’t impose blasphemy laws, we don’t force people to make compelled statements of belief, we don’t impose taxes to support the training of ministers.&#160; These changes mean that as a practical matter, many Americans no longer depend upon the free exercise right for their religious liberty.&#160; They are free to practice religion without governmental constraints.</p>
<p>I think the clearest example of this ‑‑ the least threatened religious believer in America ‑‑ is the progressively oriented Christian, who at once remains a part of the dominant historical and cultural faith in the United States but whose views are largely aligned with contemporary liberal values.&#160; It’s hard to think of many aspects of progressive Christian belief and practice that confront government regulation in a way that implicates religious liberty.&#160; Now, I want to be careful here.&#160; I don’t mean to suggest that progressive Christians hold no views antithetical to government interests.&#160; For example, many elements of the so-called “religious left” challenge American policy on war, criminal law, immigration, and the environment.&#160; But most of these arguments pose few questions about the boundaries of free exercise; they are religiously informed policy arguments, not religious free exercise claims.</p>
<p>There are also a growing number of Americans, a subset of the “nones,” who are either actually or functionally “non-religious” and may therefore feel no need for free exercise protections.&#160; This group is still relatively small, but it is not insignificant, and it is growing.&#160; And more importantly, this group has moved from being almost imperceptible in the late 18th century to sociologically significant today.&#160; It is no longer possible to ignore nonbelievers in framing normative and legal religious liberty arguments, particularly in cases implicating the Establishment Clause.&#160; That reality, for example, is evident in the growing recognition that even so-called “nonsectarian” prayers are incapable of accommodating atheists.</p>
<p>Today, both the non-religious and mainstream religious progressives may be less inclined to worry about the contested boundaries of free exercise, at least in some cases, and especially when they might be antithetical to other interests.</p>
<p>The Indiana RFRA controversy may be a good indicator.&#160; Consider, for example, how some commentators began adding scare quotes to the phrase “religious liberty.”&#160; It’s one thing to conclude that the constitutional value of religious liberty should be outweighed by another constitutional value like equality, but something different is happening when we put religious liberty in scare quotes.</p>
<p>To be sure, the rhetoric on both sides of the Indiana controversy bordered on the absurd.&#160; Conservative radio host Mark Levin contended that opponents of the bill “hated America.”&#160; And Family Research Council President Tony Perkins argued that revising the law would “gut religious freedom.”&#160; And in the other direction, Tim Cook called the Indiana law “an effort to enshrine discrimination.”&#160; And Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in Time suggested that the Indiana RFRA was “a step toward establishing an American version of Sharia law.”</p>
<p>Meanwhile, the crux of the actual legal debate seemed to be whether a few Christian florists and cake bakers and apparently one hapless pizza joint should be permitted to refuse to provide their services for a same-sex wedding.&#160; That question is not unimportant, and it’s importance weighed in both directions. But regardless of one’s view on the merits, the policy implications do not come close to the surrounding rhetoric.&#160; I think that Doug Laycock was right to assert that the Indiana RFRA “has been misunderstood by some people and deliberately distorted and lied about by others.”&#160; It’s a bad sign of the debates that are still to come, and it might indicate continued or even growing pressures on claims for religious liberty.</p>
<p>On the other hand, even if I am right about the decline in cultural support for the free exercise of religion, or religious liberty more generally, there are two important reasons that I think this is overstated and does not mean by any means the functional end of religious liberty protections.&#160; The first is that the Supreme Court has continued to recognize constitutional protections for religious groups, at least insofar as those groups look something like churches or other bodies of worship.&#160; The key case is Hosanna-Tabor from 2012 in which a unanimous Court recognized a ministerial exception to employment discrimination laws.&#160; The Court located that exception in the First Amendment’s free exercise and establishment clauses.</p>
<p>The justices made clear that the ministerial exception provides an absolute protection for churches to hire and fire ministers on any basis.&#160; They were far less clear about what qualifies as a church and who qualifies as a minister.&#160; Importantly, too, the opinion in Hosanna-Tabor never really squares the circle with the peyote case, Employment Division v. Smith.&#160; The Court never convincingly explains why Smith’s rule about neutral laws or general applicability did not apply to the neutral law of general applicability at issue in Hosanna-Tabor.&#160; So in other words, the protections that Hosanna-Tabor gives to religious groups are neither precisely defined nor entirely coherent, but they are real protections, and they mitigate some of the cultural pressures on the free exercise rights.</p>
<p>The second reason to see continued protections for religious free exercise is that our shared constitutional heritage properly acknowledges that religious belief and practice fall squarely within other civil liberties that we protect under the First Amendment.&#160; Indeed, religious individuals and groups have long been paradigmatic of the dissent that frames the need for these other rights, or what the Supreme Court called “the right to differ.”&#160; Much of our history has been shaped by dissenting religious groups, and that continues to be the case today. So even if the category of religious liberty is losing some of its cultural and constitutional traction, there are protections available for religious groups at the core of these other rights.</p>
<p>My sense is that traditionalists will be better off engaging with these issues of dissent, non-conformity, and pluralism, although not Kuyper’s version of pluralism.&#160; Part of that focus will require greater attention to First Amendment rights of speech and association, or, as I argued in my first book, the right of assembly.</p>
<p>These other rights focus more essentially on the importance of dissent and difference without appealing to a kind of religious exceptionalism.&#160; To put</p>
<p>John Inazu</p>
<p>it slightly differently, it may be that the values that undergird speech, assembly, and association draw from a history with greater current cultural appeal than the values underlying the free exercise right.&#160; In fact, these other rights have historically protected many non-religious progressive groups, and of particular relevance here are protections extended to gay social clubs and gay student groups during the early gay rights movement.</p>
<p>But there is also a doctrinal problem in the move to these other rights, and it lies in the right of association.&#160; Some of you may recall in Hosanna-Tabor that the Obama administration proposed the right of association as a sufficient protection for the church in that case.&#160; All nine justices rejected that argument.&#160; And I think part of the reason for the lack of appeal was a lack of coherence in the doctrine around the right of association.</p>
<p>To my mind, the problems with this doctrinal incoherence began in a 1984 decision called Roberts v. United States Jaycees, when the Supreme Court recognized two distinct flavors of association:&#160; intimate association and expressive association.&#160; According to the Court, intimate association is an “intrinsic” feature of the right of association that focuses on “highly personal relationships” and “deep attachments and commitments.”&#160; That sounds promising, but courts have drawn its limits quite narrowly.&#160; In practice, the right of intimate association only extends to close family relationships.&#160; Courts have refused to extend its protections even to small social groups or tightly knit religious groups.&#160; And interestingly, the close family relationships that do qualify as intimate associations are already well protected under other Supreme Court doctrines; for example, special protections for spouses and parent-child relationships.&#160; For this reason, we have a right of intimate association that actually turns out to be almost meaningless, that doesn’t offer any protections to any real groups not otherwise protected.&#160; In other words, it offers very little to the balance of civil liberties.</p>
<p>The other flavor of association is expressive association, and this does more constitutional work.&#160; The basic idea here is that a group is expressive and eligible for constitutional protection if it is pursuing some other First Amendment interest, like speech or press or religion.&#160; The group, in other words, must facilitate one of these interests in order to qualify for greater constitutional protection.</p>
<p>But this category of expressive association comes with a corollary, and that is that some groups are “non-expressive.”&#160; Non-expressive association obscures the fact that any act of associating has expressive potential.&#160; Joining, gathering, speaking, or not speaking can all be expressive, and many groups that might seem from the outside to be non-expressive could in fact articulate an expressive intent if asked.</p>
<p>And the legal consequences of this distinction between expressive and non-expressive are striking.&#160; If you have a law that affects a non-expressive association, it need only pass “rational basis” scrutiny, which means that almost any law will survive that threshold.&#160; That means a non-expressive group can be regulated for almost any reason.</p>
<p>And there are other problems with expressive association.&#160; Even groups that do qualify under that category are not always protected constitutionally.&#160; In the Jaycees case, the Court concluded that the all-male Jaycees was an expressive association. But turning to Minnesota’s interest in “eradicating gender discrimination,” the Court decided that the expressive association claim failed.&#160; There wasn’t in the case much analysis about why the Jaycees was practically impeding that interest or the precise policy implications of what eradicating gender discrimination would look like in Minnesota. And the consequences were significant for the Jaycees:&#160; it meant that they could no longer exist in the current form.&#160; I think some of this reasoning underlied part of the Court’s reticence to rely upon the doctrine in Hosanna-Tabor.</p>
<p>So now I have suggested that not only the free exercise right is in trouble but also that association might also be.&#160; My hunch ‑‑ and it’s really only a hunch ‑‑ is that association has a greater likelihood of being rehabilitated today, and that’s largely because the protections that it could offer could benefit not only religious groups, but also non-religious groups. And it’s plausible, perhaps even likely, that at some point down the road non-religious groups that appear to be culturally ascendant today will one day need these same protections against majoritarian norms.</p>
<p>So let me turn finally to the third challenge, which is the challenge of traditionalist institutions.&#160; Here I want to suggest that traditionalists are now experiencing a new level of vulnerability at their own doorsteps.&#160; To be sure, there are some traditionalists that have felt embattled for some time, and I suppose that we could plausibly view the loss of public religious displays and public prayers as a kind of challenge to religion, particularly for people who had grown accustomed to those displays and those prayers.</p>
<p>But to return to the culture wars metaphor, the past few years have seen a rapid change in the front lines of that war.&#160; Notwithstanding some cases like the recent Town of Greece decision involving public prayer before a local government meeting, most high-profile religious liberty cases today focus on free exercise, not establishment.&#160; Traditionalists have spent the past decades fighting about monuments and prayer only to discover that they have been outflanked and now find their fallback positions under attack.</p>
<p>Setting aside the overblown rhetoric in all directions, there does seem to be a real difference in framing “religious liberty and American culture wars” when the battle lines have moved from issues like school prayer and vouchers — or even cake bakers and florists — to questions of whether religious student groups can be on public university campuses, whether religious colleges should be accredited, and whether local school systems should accept volunteer support from churches and ministries.&#160; These challenges pose significant challenges for traditionalist institutions, especially because traditionalists will soon be alone in imposing membership and leadership restrictions that affect gays and lesbians.&#160; Unlike gender-based distinctions, which continue to persist in lots of non-religious institutional contexts, there will be no secular institutional analogue to traditional views about sexuality and marriage.</p>
<p>It seems to me then that a great deal hinges on the Bob Jones question.&#160; If Jim Crow really is the proper analogy and the proper baseline, then most of the questions raised by Ross Douthat and others are going to arise:&#160; loss of tax exemption for traditionalist ministries, the closing down of schools and social service organizations, and the professional purging of doctors, lawyers, and counselors who are traditionalists.</p>
<p>And here on this particular topic I want to be a bit more normative.&#160; Perhaps you’ve thought I’ve been normative all along, but I’ll be even more normative here and a bit more personal.&#160; My friend Andy Koppelman, who has long supported gay rights and same-sex marriage, has called the current stage of the culture wars battle over sexuality a “cleanup operation.”&#160; The rhetoric is often so strong that I feel at times that I’ll end up being like Hiroo Onoda, the Japanese soldier assigned to the Philippines during World War II who refused to surrender for almost 30 years after the war had ended.</p>
<p>And I suppose I share some affinities with Onoda — I’m half Japanese and I used to be a military officer. But I’m not sure that I’ll be the lone holdout at the end of this war.&#160; For one thing, I’m not sure that I’ve ever been fighting this war, even though my beliefs and values largely align with one side.&#160; Instead of being like Onoda, maybe I’m more akin to a civilian bystander that the putative victors need to do something about.&#160; But another reason that I don’t think I’m like Onoda is that I don’t really feel all that alone.&#160; I look around and see a lot of other people and a lot of other institutions that don’t seem to be going away. And those institutions are doing a lot of good for society:&#160; in education, social services, hospitals, mercy ministries, and other areas.</p>
<p>So a few quick examples here.&#160; One is Focus on the Family, which I had always thought of as being on the front lines of the culture wars. But if you’re like me and you haven’t paid attention to Focus in past few years or past decade, or the work of their new president, Jim Daly, you might be surprised at what you find.&#160; I’m not suggesting their substantive views have changed.&#160; Focus on the Family is not in danger of being mistaken as the Protestant mainline. But the differences in modes of engagement are significant.&#160; Focus has gone from the days of Dobson pushing Colorado’s infamous Amendment 2 to the days of Daly partnering with the Gill Foundation, a gay rights group, to help enact Colorado’s anti-human trafficking legislation.</p>
<p>Here’s another example.&#160; I sit on the board of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, which has been on the front lines of the campus access issues and has been expelled from a handful of college and university campuses around the country.&#160; InterVarsity, as it turns out, is one of the more multiethnic traditionalist institutions.&#160; In California, over 70 percent of its students are students of color.&#160; And InterVarsity hasn’t really been fighting the culture wars. Its focus has been elsewhere, on ministry and missions. &#160;Since 1946, it’s hosted a conference called Urbana that has drawn 300,000 participants and sent tens of thousands of students around the globe for work that includes sharing the Christian faith but also includes serving the poor, building infrastructure, and helping the sick and dying.&#160; In 2012, half of the 15,000 Urbana participants were people of color.&#160; The next upcoming conference is in St. Louis at the end of December.&#160; And if you’ve never heard of Urbana, then let me make a serious invitation to you.&#160; Come join me and see it.&#160; Come see what a big group of traditionalists do when we get together.&#160; And I mean this invitation seriously on the record today.&#160; You can stay at my house if you want to put up with three small children, too.</p>
<p>Laughter</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU:&#160; So why do I highlight these examples now?&#160; We’re a couple of months away from a Supreme Court decision that will likely constitutionalize state-recognized same-sex marriage.&#160; And as Doug Laycock has argued in a brief filed in those cases, filed in support of the same-sex petitioners, religious liberty challenges for traditionalists will intensify.&#160; We saw a preview of Doug’s prediction in the exchange between Justice Alito and the solicitor general that Sarah highlighted in an article last week.&#160; Justice Alito raised the Bob Jones question, and General Verrilli said, “It’s going to be an issue.”</p>
<p>Now I think is a good time to be thinking about the implications of the Bob Jones question:&#160; whether we really think that Gordon College in 2015 is like Bob Jones in 1983, that InterVarsity is like a neo-Nazi group, and that Tim Keller is like the Grand Wizard of the Klan.&#160; I, with his permission, share that analogy.</p>
<p>Laughter</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU:&#160; If we think there are meaningful differences, then now is a good time to think harder about the rhetoric fueling some of these debates.&#160; And I think one reason to think through these questions is that regardless of where the culture wars end up or what particular front we are fighting on at any given moment, we are going to have to at some point draw lines and set limiting principles.</p>
<p>And I want to illustrate this with a vignette or a story that I think is going to lead my book, although I’m not totally set on it yet, and this is out of a class that I teach at Wash U. on the constitutional law around law and religion.&#160; And in this particular case, I was teaching the Establishment Clause cases around school funding, which are always really interesting and a pretty convoluted topic. At one point, I asked how much funding can the government give to private religious schools?&#160; The key case is a 1947 decision involving buses and whether taxpayer dollars can reimburse Catholic parents for busing their kids to Catholic schools.&#160; And the intellectual puzzle is this:&#160; if you say that tax dollars can pay for buses, then what about textbooks and prayer books and Bibles and ministers?&#160; And if you say they can’t, then what about public roads and crossing guards?&#160; In other words, the funding from the state is everywhere, and at what point do we draw the line about these particular institutions?</p>
<p>So since I make a business of posing hypotheticals to students, I threw one out and I said, well, let’s take the Catholic Church, which has gender norms that are out of step with some contemporary norms on gender. And so let’s assume that this Catholic school finds itself in a city with more progressive gender norms, but it also decides that it wants to provide crossing guards to all private and public schools because there is evidence that fewer kids would die in the crosswalk.&#160; Can it refuse to withhold the dollars from a Catholic school?</p>
<p>And so I had expected some back-and-forth, that’s the reason to throw out the hypothetical, but I was actually surprised when one student dug in pretty firmly: &#160;“Yes, absolutely.&#160; The school has chosen to place itself outside the bounds of acceptable society and it’s not entitled to the services of the state.”&#160; And so I said, “Well, what if the school catches on fire?&#160; Can the fire department refuse to answer the call?”&#160; “Yes, absolutely.&#160; The school can try to put out the fire on its own, but it’s outside the boundaries of the state.”&#160; And I said, “Well, what if there is an active shooter in the school?&#160; Should the SWAT team show up and stand down and wait for the shooter to finish?” and the student said, “I don’t see why not.”</p>
<p>Now, this was, to be sure, a classroom hypothetical. But I want to point out that there is an internal logic to the student’s answers and there are ways in which if one starts from the premise that government cannot support unpopular or dissenting or unorthodox positions, then there might be a desire normatively or legally to go all the way even to this extreme.&#160; I’m not suggesting that this is practically on the table, it’s meant rhetorically and illustratively, but it does suggest that we need to think about what limiting principles are to come and how we frame the normative, the cultural, and the legal debate around those.</p>
<p>So with that, I look forward to your questions and discussion.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; Thank you.&#160; Thank you, John.</p>
<p>Well, I’ve already got a long list here.&#160; And EJ, you’re up first, so pull the mike up, and then Emma and Napp and everyone else.</p>
<p>Over here.&#160; Yeah.</p>
<p><a href="http://eppc.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/0159.jpg" type="external" />EJ DIONNE, Washington Post:&#160; Thank you very, very much.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; Just turn it on.</p>
<p>EJ DIONNE:&#160; I thought I was on.&#160; Can you hear me?</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; Yeah.</p>
<p>EJ DIONNE:&#160; Yeah.&#160; I just thank you for your presentation.&#160; I was reminded when you made your comment again about the fuzziness of the law here that at one point it was legal for parochial school students to get state-funded textbooks but not maps, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously asked, “Well, what about atlases?”</p>
<p>Laughter</p>
<p>EJ DIONNE:&#160; It’s a great question.</p>
<p>I want to sort of pose a series of, if you will, challenging hypotheticals, and that as a general proposition, I am sympathetic particularly on the gay marriage issue to clear exemptions for churches and religious institutions.&#160; You obviously can’t force a church to perform a gay wedding or a priest or an Orthodox rabbi, you can’t force them to give their basements or halls for that.&#160; I don’t think that is problematic, I think it’s very clear on the First Amendment they have a right to those exemptions, but I worry about several things.</p>
<p>One is confusing religious liberty arguments under the Constitution with exemptions or accommodations that the state makes in the interest of pluralism that are not necessarily required by law, and that’s just one question I want to put on the table.</p>
<p>The second is what bothered me about the Hobby Lobby case is that the religious rights of employers were recognized but not the religious liberty rights of the people who work for those employers, for the workers or the employees.&#160; As you know, Ginsburg’s dissent, religious organizations exist to foster the interests of persons subscribing to the same religious faith, not so of for-profit corporations.&#160; Workers who sustain the operations of those corporations commonly are not drawn from one religious community.</p>
<p>And so it seems to me there are two issues raised by the Hobby Lobby case.&#160; One is that one, which is it privileges the owners’ rights and doesn’t really get into the rights of employees, presumably they can quit, but that doesn’t seem at all plausible to me.&#160; And the second is there are many people who push for or sponsored RFRA who never anticipated it would be read as a corporate or a business right, and I wonder if you could talk about that.</p>
<p>The second kind of question I wanted to raise is about our bakers and florists in the gay marriage cases.&#160; And here is the instance that bothered me about, well, what if you give them a religious exemption?&#160; So what if a baker reads scripture in an anti-Semitic way or what if a florist sees the Pope as the antichrist?&#160; If you extend the religious exemption to the florist and the baker from participating in a same-sex marriage ceremony, why wouldn’t that religious exemption then extend to his right to discriminate against a Catholic wedding or a Jewish wedding or God knows how many other kinds of wedding?&#160; Where can you ‑‑ once you open this religious exemption door, where does it stop?</p>
<p>And then just a last point in the scare quotes around “religious liberty,” I’m not sure they are scare quotes, maybe they are, but I’m sure you saw David Cole’s piece in the New York Review a while back, and he sort of made a point, which I’ll just read here.&#160; “One of the problems for opponents of same-sex marriage was that they could not credibly point to anyone who was harmed by it.&#160; Proponents, by contrast, could point to many sympathetic victims,” and then there is more, and he goes on to say, “Focusing on religious-based objections puts a human face on the opposition to same-sex marriage.”</p>
<p>I think those quotation marks you sometimes saw reflected a view that having lost the battle possibly legally, depending on what the Court does, and increasingly losing the battle of public opinion, this is kind of a backup operation to say, what grounds do we have to oppose this in the culture?&#160; And so critics of it would see it more as a tactical move than as a principled move.&#160; I suspect on that last one you’ll have a strong dissent, which I want to hear, but I would love you to address these other questions, sort of the Hobby ‑‑ what I see as the problems of Hobby Lobby and the problem once you extend religious exemptions to the providers of public services, like flowers or cakes, once you open that door, I don’t know where you close it without really going all the way back to Bob Jones and having problems with what the Court did in Bob Jones.</p>
<p>Thank you.</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU:&#160; Yeah.&#160; Thanks.&#160; That’s a lot of questions.&#160; I’m going to try to cover most of it.&#160; Just one brief comment about the first premise you made about the churches’ halls and spaces.&#160; I’m not sure those are completely protected, and one of the reasons is because of the public accommodations laws and the nature of public accommodations, and so there are I think not implausible situations in which some church property could be designated as a public accommodation.</p>
<p>EJ DIONNE:&#160; I said that because I, as somebody who worries about what the Indiana law does, I would stipulate that I am willing to grant significant room, accommodation, to explicitly religious organizations.&#160; It gets more complicated when you get to universities, I grant you.</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU:&#160; And, in fact, that’s something I think the revised version of the Indiana RFRA gets closer to that point, so I think you’re right there.</p>
<p>You know, exemptions versus accommodations, it’s a baselines question, and we would have to go back to sort of first principles of constitutional theory to decide or argue whether something is properly an accommodation or a constitutionally required right, and, I mean, those are I think really important questions, but I’m not sure they’re resolvable.</p>
<p>The Hobby Lobby question is a really interesting one on the employer versus employee.&#160; I would just point out that we have the same conundrum whether we’re talking the for-profit context or not, so religious non-profit versus an employee of the nonprofit, or a church versus the church employee.</p>
<p>EJ DIONNE:&#160; Yeah.</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU:&#160; And so we have to ‑‑ it’s kind of a binary decision.&#160; You’ve got to pick a rights holder to protect, and I think under ‑‑ maybe this is sort of a Tocquevillian inclination, but under some Democratic theory arguments, you would want to strengthen the boundaries of the private group in civil society against the state. And if you pick the individual over the group, you end up collapsing that boundary vis-a-vis the state.</p>
<p>Now, the for-profit question introduces all kinds of other really interesting normative and values questions.&#160; I’m not sure there’s a clean doctrinal hook that severs the for-profit from the nonprofit.&#160; I mean, one of the interesting things around Hobby Lobby is — when people started to critique the corporate claims of religion — that religious corporations have always claimed free exercise rights.&#160; Churches are religious corporations, and so the corporate structure is not new, the for-profit context is, and you see a lot of both cultural and legal backlash to those kinds of claims, and those are ‑‑ I think those are newer claims.</p>
<p>Now, you also mentioned ‑‑ I read you as sort of registering a version of Justice Scalia’s argument in the Smith case, which is the road to anarchy, right?&#160; If you allow some of these exemptions, where does it stop and where does it go?&#160; And here I think again theoretically you open yourself up to a lot, particularly because free exercise law is highly deferential to the sincerity of the claimant, and so as long as we have a sincere claim, there is often a lot of deference in that case. But empirically, we don’t have a lot of cases suggesting that that’s the road that is going to happen.&#160; We don’t actually have ‑‑ you know, I don’t know any of these cake bakers or florists, I don’t know what their motivations are. But there aren’t many of them, and they’re not ‑‑ they’re absolutely being used for political purposes in lots of directions ‑‑ right? ‑‑ and they’re framing rhetorical debates. But as for those people in particular, there aren’t many of them, and I think I would be surprised if their own motives were actually some sort of sour grapes in the same-sex marriage policy debates.&#160; Again, I’m not sure because I don’t&#160;‑‑</p>
<p>EJ Dionne</p>
<p>EJ DIONNE:&#160; Well, no, but the sour grapes is sort of part of a larger movement as opposed to the individual baker or florist who might have that</p>
<p>exemption, but if I could come back on you in two ways.&#160; One is&#160; in the peyote case, what you were opening up there was government action, whereas if you extend this to all kinds of private actors, that is like a multiple of 100 or 1,000 in terms of allowable discrimination, and I just don’t know once you open that door to providers of public accommodation where you close it and where people can ‑‑ where we can rationally decide, well, it’s okay for the baker and the florist in the case of the gay wedding, but not in these other cases.&#160; It just seems to me that in terms of allowing new forms of discrimination, you really could open a very wide door with this.</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU:&#160; I mean, theoretically, but, I mean, again, we don’t have those cases, and they would ‑‑ the bakers and the florists have all lost, and if you go from the baker ‑‑ I mean, whatever you think about the baker or the florist, if you move from the baker to IBM or some massive corporation that wants to discriminate, I think the government has a pretty easy way to say there is a compelling interest in antidiscrimination norms that’s going to trump the religious liberty claim.&#160; And so, I mean, you’re right to raise a theoretical tension, I’m just not sure practically or empirically we have evidence that that would follow or is following.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; Okay.&#160; Emma Green, and then I have others.</p>
<p>Emma Green</p>
<p>EMMA GREEN, TheAtlantic.com:&#160; So I won’t go as long as EJ, I’ll limit myself to just two questions, but I understand the impulse.</p>
<p>Laughter</p>
<p>EJ DIONNE:&#160;&#160;I’m the sinner.</p>
<p>Laughter</p>
<p>EMMA GREEN:&#160; Well, I understand the impulse.&#160; This is all very interesting.&#160; So I have two questions that are rather distinct.&#160; The first is you mentioned at the beginning of your comments that the transgender issue is going to be one that enters the culture war debates, and this is interesting to me for two reasons.&#160; First, that there are very few transgender Americans, it’s just a very small percentage of society, and in certain ways it’s a symbolic battlefield, it’s not actually about a large class of people, it’s a very narrow class of people.&#160; And the second is that, for example, when Bruce Jenner did his interview about being a transgender woman, you see Russell Moore’s reaction to that is to undermine the language of transgender identity and basically say this is not how we understand sexual identity and gender to work.</p>
<p>So I guess my question is if that becomes a part of the culture war, how will that play out especially for such a minority group of people and how will that rhetoric translate across ideological boundaries?</p>
<p>And then the second distinct question is sort of related to what EJ was referring to, which is taking it almost out of the legal sphere and more about cultural norms and pluralistic belonging and the ability of society to get together or to cooperate.&#160; The cake bakers and florists and t-shirt makers are interesting because it’s all in the sphere of commerce.</p>
<p>It’s people having a certain point of view and unwillingness, having an unwillingness, to do commerce with people who they disagree with in some sort of ideological or deeply held religious way, and that also plays out on the other side of the question.&#160; We saw that in Chick-fil-A two years ago.&#160; It comes out that Chick-fil-A had donated to Prop 8.&#160; There was a widespread backlash against going to Chick-fil-A, this is by people who support gay marriage rather than people who oppose gay marriage.</p>
<p>So what do you think the cultural implications are for this issue being played out in a sphere of commerce in particular and an unwillingness to literally do business, exchange goods and services, with people who are on an opposite side of the ideological debate than you?</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU:&#160; Great.&#160; Yeah, so transgender, I think the demographics are small.&#160; I think the way that this issue is addressed is going to make a big difference, and I think a lot of traditionalists just don’t have a grasp on the complexities of the issue. And so you see I think careless and thoughtless comments a lot, and, I mean, this is where I think traditionalists often shoot themselves in the foot, speaking before thinking sometimes, or reading. And there is ‑‑ I mean, I think the questions around transgender are ‑‑ there are so many fascinating practical policy implications that follow. And so even when you have a very small subset of the population, this plays out in institutional policies that are down to how many and where the bathroom is going to be and who plays on the sports teams.&#160; And these are all binary decisions, and they’re zero sum in some sense, and they have to be ‑‑ whatever decision is reached I think has to be sort of carefully and thoughtfully reached.&#160; And my worry is that as this particular issue enters into the mainstream of the culture wars that some of that thoughtfulness won’t happen, and there are real casualties to real people when whatever the policy is isn’t thoughtful and careful on that point.</p>
<p>And on the commerce point, it’s interesting because you mentioned ‑‑ I mean, in some ways, the cake bakers and Chick-fil-A are a little different because one is the question of whether there is going to be a legal fine imposed, so one is a legal question, and the other, in the boycott sense, is more of a cultural question.</p>
<p>The boycott, I have a chapter in my book coming up on boycotts and protests, and boycotts are just fascinating to think about especially in the area where I write because they both epitomize the kind of private collective action that we really need to see, people coming together for stronger force, and yet they can also impose a sort of coercive force in doing so.&#160; So I’ve been puzzled on boycotts for a long time.</p>
<p>I will say that in the Chick-fil-A example, and traditionalists, at least especially Evangelicals, have been sort of leading the boycott wars for a long time with Disney and Starbucks and all of that, and now you have Chick-fil-A, and Mozilla in the other direction.&#160; And I think it was Megan McArdle who had a piece suggesting that culture wars, boycotts in particular, just aren’t very effective because most people, most consumers of those products, are driven by other interests.&#160; So “boycott Hobby Lobby” doesn’t really pan out because there aren’t a lot of scrapbooking liberals.</p>
<p>And so you have like these sort of built-in consumer preferences that really render ineffective most kinds of culture wars boycotts. But you do see at least threats of boycotts in Indiana in particular where that could be much more significant. And there I think ‑‑ I mean, my own sense on this, which I’m still sort of forming in the book that I’m writing is, I mean, let them play out with some perhaps counsel and guidance as to how we go about them.</p>
<p>And there are situations when a majoritarian presence of a boycott can become particularly oppressive, and there are some really fascinating examples out of the civil rights era where that was happening, and so we have to account for the social realities, but it’s largely a non-legal question.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; And the name of that book again is Confident Pluralism?</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU:&#160; Confident Pluralism.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; Yeah, we like to promote books here.</p>
<p>Michael Gerson is up next.&#160; Right here.</p>
<p>Michael Gerson</p>
<p>MICHAEL GERSON, Washington Post:&#160; Yeah.&#160; I just wanted to get a little more information on why Kuyper is a dead end.&#160; So this idea of kind of principled</p>
<p>pluralism.&#160; EJ mentioned David Coleman, at the College Board, who spent some time at Wheaton College at the C.S. Lewis collection there and did&#160;‑‑</p>
<p>EJ DIONNE:&#160; It’s a different guy.</p>
<p>MICHAEL GERSON:&#160; Oh, okay.&#160; All right.&#160; All right.&#160; I appreciate the reference.&#160; Okay.&#160; I’m talking about David Coleman, head of the College Board, but he did a piece essentially arguing that religious institutions contribute something to the educational process, the diversity in that process, actually is an important value, social value.&#160; And I just wanted to throw out, you know, I wanted you to give the reasons why that is hopeless or maybe even why it’s late. Because I can understand the argument that if 20 years ago from a position of cultural influence Christians had talked about a principled pluralism, it might be more effective than an argument that looks like a defensive operation to defend certain rights, and so maybe it’s just a matter of whether it’s the timing.&#160; But I’m just curious.</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU:&#160; The timing is certainly a question, and I think some traditionalists will rightly face criticism and critiques for being opportunists about, you know, “oh, suddenly we’re all interested in pluralism” and “let’s just get along” now that things have turned the corner.&#160; So, no, I think those critiques in many cases are going to be rightly made, but, you know, the Kuyperian stuff, I mean, most of this, as you know, comes into the American context through Jim Skillen writing in the ’80s and ’90s&#160;‑‑</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; Let’s stop for a moment right here and give a quick one paragraph summary of who Abraham Kuyper is, not a common word in Washington, D.C., discourse, but among some of us it is.&#160; Would you like to give that summary or would you want me to give it or Mike Gerson to give it?</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU:&#160; Please.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; Abraham Kuyper was a Dutch member of Parliament, President of the Netherlands, also a theologian and philosopher who has had great influence on some areas of Christian political theory, and Kuyper emphasized the point that Michael just made about the need for what he called principled pluralism.&#160; Anyway, he was a very important figure and a giant intellect plus a politician.</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU: &#160;Yeah, right.&#160; And I think ‑‑ I mean, so I guess I have a number of different concerns on Kuyper, but one of them is the theological premises seem to be necessary for the argument to work.&#160; So when you start with something like “God has ordained different spheres of society and given government a sphere and church a sphere and so forth,” well, that’s going to sound intuitive to some people. But if you don’t accept the first premise, I think you’re just going to be scratching your head and say, “Why?&#160; I mean, the state has more power.&#160; What do you mean God has ordained?”</p>
<p>And so maybe there was a time when that kind of argument would have more traction.&#160; I don’t see it today, particularly when it’s going to be invoked by traditionalists turning to God language and theological arguments in the current cultural moment.&#160; So I guess that’s part of it.</p>
<p>And I guess the other thing is when I’ve seen efforts to translate Kuyper ‑‑ this has been happening in legal scholarship and legal debates for a few years now, including some non-religious people who have tried to use a Kuyperian framework ‑‑ it just doesn’t seem to work.&#160; I mean, it sort of sets up a theological argument that frames everything, and then in almost a non sequitur says “here is how we can apply it to American society.”&#160; I mean, you know, what do I know?&#160; Maybe there will be some sort of massive cultural receptivity to it, but I don’t see it.</p>
<p>The other challenge is the modifier “principled.”&#160; I mean, if Jonathan Haidt is right about the way words work with different constituencies, “principled” has a lot of appeal to I think conservatives and traditionalists.&#160; I think others might wonder, “What do you mean by ‘principled’?&#160; That language doesn’t have much traction.”&#160; Not to say that other people are unprincipled, but just kind of a ‑‑ I don’t know if it’s the alliteration of the word, but there seems to be something about “principled pluralism” that has all kinds of traction in a lot of these circles you’re mentioning, but I haven’t seen it gain traction elsewhere.&#160; The one, as you know, the one instance where it really did come more to the forefront was the Aspen Institute study a few years ago. But the entire report doesn’t give you any content about what principled pluralism is, it just uses it as a label and a title, which then suggests to me that we need to look more to the source.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; Okay.&#160; Okay.&#160; Napp Nazworth and then Will.</p>
<p>Napp Nazworth</p>
<p>NAPP NAZWORTH, The Christian Post:&#160; All right.&#160; More about wedding vendors.&#160; So I agreed with what you said about the irony with regard to the traditionalists and</p>
<p>Muslims, and they haven’t really been building bridges and so forth.&#160; There is an irony on the flipside of that as well, and that is that we haven’t seen the liberals go after Muslim wedding vendors like they’ve gone after Christian wedding vendors, and I wonder if you think that might be for pragmatic reasons or for ideological reasons.&#160; We know there are some because here in this debate people found them and so forth.</p>
<p>Also, would RFRA protect wedding vendors?&#160; Because we haven’t really had a case yet, so I’m wondering what you think on the merits of RFRA whether they would be protected from having to serve a same-sex wedding, whether you think it would and whether you think it should.</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU:&#160; Yeah, so I don’t know.&#160; I don’t know any Christian cake bakers, I don’t know any Muslim cake bakers either.&#160; I just don’t know cake bakers, I guess, so I don’t know what the specifics of that.</p>
<p>The RFRA question I think is an important one, and it plays into the rhetoric about Indiana.&#160; I think the answer is we don’t know how that would come out.&#160; We do know that state RFRAs that have been used in those contexts have not succeeded in protecting the vendors, and so there is an unanswered question about that for the RFRA context.&#160; That said ‑‑ and this is what was important in Indiana ‑‑ Indiana made clear that the state RFRA would apply to both the for-profits and the private parties that would cover these vendors, and so this is where on the Right some of the rhetoric about, you know, “this has nothing to do with potential LGBT discrimination” was also just false. So I mean everybody behind that law knew that these cases were part of the issue there.&#160; And so that’s an important part about it.</p>
<p>Now, you ask me, do I think it should protect the cake baker, the wedding vendor, not to put me on the spot, right?&#160; I think ‑‑ you know, I don’t know, I mean, I actually think it’s a tough call.&#160; I think there are really important values on both sides of the question.&#160; I think that assuming we take the sincerity of the religious claim, and in most of these cases, I don’t think the sincerity has been questioned.&#160; You do have very important interests from both parties, but I also think we’re talking about a very small number of cases, and so if I were in the political space, which I’m not, I would say let’s not worry about the cake bakers and the wedding photographers.&#160; Right?</p>
<p>So if I were in the legislature, I would probably have come out about how the compromised or revised Indiana legislation came out.</p>
<p>NAPP NAZWORTH:&#160; (Off microphone) compromise it?</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU:&#160; The revised legislation, which added the nondiscrimination protections and excluded, essentially excluded, for-profit businesses from its coverage.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; Okay.&#160; Will Saletan and then Paul Edwards and Ana.</p>
<p>Will Saletan</p>
<p>WILLIAM SALETAN, Slate:&#160; I wanted to come back to something you said about ‑‑ you were giving examples of tone-deafness or arguments that are used</p>
<p>by traditionalists that don’t resonate broadly.&#160; I think the first one was this distinction between ‑‑ in the gay context between identity and conduct, and I think you said that argument,&#160;that distinction, was a political loser or a judicial loser.&#160; What is the alternative, in the sense that if you’re a traditionalist group, you can’t reject the identity because that puts you in that Bob Jones category ‑‑ right? ‑‑ now you’re in with all of the race analogy and you’re going to lose all of the religious liberties or expressive liberties you would claim.</p>
<p>If you don’t draw the distinction and you accept the conduct, where are you and what are you still claiming to stand for, what are you still standing for?&#160; What’s left of the rationale for opposing any kind of same-sex role in society including same-sex marriage?</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU:&#160; Right.&#160; So I think what I was trying to say is that internally to these traditionalist groups, the distinction is not going to go away.&#160; I mean, it’s sort of theologically central to the identity claim.&#160; I was mostly suggesting that under the current law, that distinction doesn’t work, and culturally it doesn’t work that much.&#160; Now, I do think actually, I don’t think ‑‑ I mean, a lot ‑‑ a number of people would say Bob Jones is different because race is different, and I actually don’t think that’s a good argument.&#160; I think if Bob Jones is different, it’s different because of the cultural and historical context of Jim Crow and the years subsequent to it.&#160; If the argument ends up being race is different, I can see a lot of reasons why many people would come back and say, “Well, why is race different from excluding me based on my gender or sexuality or anything else?”&#160; I mean, in 2015, I’m pretty hurt by that exclusion just as someone is hurt by racial exclusion.&#160; So I think if there is a difference that is going to have legal and cultural traction, it has to be around the specifics of what Bob Jones was and what Jim Crow was, and that’s really how the case itself is written and how a lot of people have commented on it. But it becomes a ‑‑ I mean, it’s an important question to address and an important distinction to be made.</p>
<p>Was that responsive, or do you want to follow up?</p>
<p>WILLIAM SALETAN:&#160; I wasn’t entirely persuaded, but I can ‑‑ I’m not sure.&#160; I would have to read more about it.&#160; I didn’t really feel like ‑‑ I don’t really understand from your answer why ‑‑ it seems to me like if I were advising those groups, I would say it’s a no-brainer not to fight.&#160; They certainly shouldn’t oppose the identity per se because you’re heading down a road where you’re essentially going to have to acknowledge that orientation is like color, I mean, it’s just there, and the way that they’ve come to deal with it is to say ‑‑ you know, they have the term “same-sex attracted,” you are “same-sex attracted.”&#160; This happens in families in our congregation and we just have to deal with it, but we draw distinction against the conduct because once you concede the conduct, you’ve conceded pretty much everything.</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU:&#160; Right.&#160; And I think that distinction that you just articulated is what most traditionalist groups today would say, and I think my point is that the Supreme Court disagrees.&#160; So even in the context of a private membership determination ‑‑ this is the Christian Legal Society case from 2010 ‑‑ the Court said ‑‑ the Christian Legal Society drew that exact distinction ‑‑ right? ‑‑ and they said same-sex attracted, or however they want to describe it, are welcome here, we have this conduct restriction, and the Supreme Court said, no, they’re equated under the law in this context.&#160; So that’s all I mean to say by the constitutional loser, at least under the current law.</p>
<p>Does that make sense?</p>
<p>WILLIAM SALETAN:&#160; Yeah, but it makes it sound like they’ve essentially lost legally, that it’s over, it was over then according to that interpretation.</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU:&#160; Well, it’s a 5-4 decision, and I think it’s ‑‑ you know, this comes from initially Justice O’Connor’s concurrence in Lawrence v. Texas, which was the sodomy law in Texas, and in that case, when you’re talking about a governmental law that ostensibly says it’s only going after conduct but disproportionately affects gay men far more than anyone else, I think the Court is right to push back and say this distinction looks like it’s artificial and should be collapsed and we should hold the state to a higher account here and this distinction doesn’t work.&#160; But when that moves from what the state is doing into the context of a private membership group and five justices on the Court buy that, I think that actually does a lot more work in ways that haven’t completely been thought through yet.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; Okay.&#160; Paul Edwards, over here.&#160; And, Paul, in your question, I don’t want to give you your question, but in your question can you wrap around something about the Utah law?</p>
<p>Laughter</p>
<p>Paul Edwards</p>
<p>PAUL EDWARDS, Deseret News:&#160; So as many of you are aware, Utah began its legislative session with a rather impressive press conference from the leadership of</p>
<p>the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Mormon Church, where they had three apostles and a senior woman leader from the leading council of the church invite the opportunity to move forward with legislation that both protected LGBT rights in employment and housing with the idea that there would also be opportunities for specific carve-outs for religious protections, religious liberty protections, and that framed a very significant development at the state legislature this year.</p>
<p>And I wanted to, John, really thank you for the discussion and just provide an observation on this about the issue about insularity of discourse.&#160; So that move by the Church grew out of its experience with Proposition 8, and that may seem to be ironic in some way because the LDS Church was seen as a major leader fighting for Proposition 8 in California, but in the process of being engaged that way, church leadership recognized that ‑‑ I think they found themselves surprised by the opposition against Prop 8.&#160; They probably shouldn’t have in some sense, but they didn’t expect how strongly they would be attacked directly as an institution, and quietly they started discussion with LGBT groups, both in California, but primarily in Utah.&#160; And so this year’s events didn’t just happen because of concerns about same-sex marriage as the backdrop, as they saw that coming forward.</p>
<p>This has really been seven years of discussion with the LGBT community in the state, and I think it shows actually an interesting development in thinking on a lot of levels, and I’ll note one here, that by opening up that dialogue and creating better understanding about what was most important to each group, going into the legislative session, I think what a lot of people anticipated ‑‑ and, by the way, there had been talk of this same compromise about a year and a half earlier, and it was put on hold because of the decision within the state, the First U.S. District Court in the United States in the State of Utah, to declare same-sex marriage as a constitutional right within the State of Utah.</p>
<p>So when that came forward, some of this negotiation on a compromise between LGBT rights and religious liberty was put on hold in the legislative session.&#160; But as this came forward, there was a lot of talk about ideal exemptions for religious groups in the way that this was done, and interestingly enough, as these groups worked together, instead of coming up with carve-outs on kind of an exemption basis, although there are a few of these within the legislation that are important, and they’re very important for different interests, but probably the most innovative piece of the legislation is actually an equal protection kind of thing around speech in the workplace.&#160; And so in all these employment discrimination questions that came forward about how this would play out by adding sexual orientation and gender identity into the civil rights statute in the state, they also created a portion there that protects individuals’ ability to in a ‑‑ I won’t read the specific legislation, but in a non-obstructive way express themselves about fundamental issues, both religious issues, but express themselves about issues related to marriage and sexuality in the workforce and participating groups outside of the workforce that may have different views on marriage and sexuality, and not be retaliated against for that within the workplace.</p>
<p>So it cuts both directions; right?&#160; It’s not just a protection for those that have been arguing against same-sex marriage, or those that have been arguing for, but it’s an equal protection clause within the legislation that we don’t quite know how it will play out.&#160; I mean, this is rather new.&#160; But that was more a result of the dialogue between the two organizations, the leading organizations on this being at the table, Equality Utah and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints being involved in the negotiations over how this would ultimately come forward.&#160; So&#160;‑‑</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; You need to turn that into a question.</p>
<p>PAUL EDWARDS:&#160; So I guess the question I have then, John, for you is, do you think that that kind of opening up of dialogue is possible in other states?&#160; Utah is a bit unique because it does have a dominant religious tradition from which to ‑‑ you know, you have a player that can sit down and talk with another community, as it were.&#160; So you have these two different communities.&#160; But do you think that that kind of opening up can be part of how things move forward in other states?</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU:&#160; I mean, my own view is sort of maybe “too little too late,” to Mike’s point earlier, that in other states especially this might have been a nice idea 5 years ago or 10 years ago, but it seems less politically feasible today, and it does seem that Utah is unique in that case.&#160; I think one test case here is the proposed federal ENDA legislation, which recently the ACLU and other groups pulled out their support of.&#160; And so, you know, I think the strategy there is just wait a few years and pass it without religious exemptions, which makes sense to me.&#160; I mean, it “makes sense” in terms of political sense — not that I have any — but that that’s likely what will happen in a few years.&#160; And so there could be a couple deep red states that currently lack any non-discrimination protections for sexual orientation or sexual identity that could be open to this sort of compromise. But it doesn’t seem politically that there is much on the table left to compromise especially after June when we have a decision from the Supreme Court and the policy moves that will follow.</p>
<p>PAUL EDWARDS:&#160; Can I?&#160; But I do think that what we ‑‑ so we have a lot of states without any civil rights protections.&#160; Marriage is one civil right, but there are a lot of other kinds of protections that you may want.&#160; So I don’t think marriage answers it.&#160; I mean, a judicial decision on marriage does provide a significant backdrop on this, but it doesn’t ‑‑ I don’t know that it opens up the whole other array of civil rights protections within employment, housing, public&#160;‑‑</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU:&#160; It might not.&#160; It depends on how the decision is written, I think, which is what I think people are waiting to see.&#160; But I’m just ‑‑ I mean, I’m not optimistic about the possibility of legislative compromise in other states particularly because of the uniqueness of Utah.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; And as you know, there are traditionalists who are not happy with the Utah decision.</p>
<p>PAUL EDWARDS:&#160; Oh, yeah.</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU:&#160; Yeah, you know, this was ‑‑ when you were talking&#160;‑‑</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; Some of them have been speakers at this conference.</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU:&#160; Michael, when you were talking earlier about how The Atlantic should sort of map out the different flavors of Islam and all of the internal fights, it would be nice to ‑‑ maybe you all can do that, too, for traditionalists.&#160; I mean, the number of sort of discord in voices and&#160;‑‑</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; I’ll get working on that map during the break time in the afternoon, and I’ll have a map for you by tonight.&#160; No&#160;‑‑</p>
<p>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE SPEAKER:&#160; Do you want a break now?</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; We’re going to take a break ‑‑ well, here’s what I want to say, if we could take a short break, but make it only like 5 minutes or so because we are going to just go to 3:30, and then we give you 3 hours of free time.&#160; Or would people like to take breaks on their own and just keep going or take a short break?&#160; Can I hurdle you back in here in 5 minutes?</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU:&#160; Yeah.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; Okay, but we before we do that, though, we’re not going to take a break right now, we’re going to take it in 5 minutes.</p>
<p>Laughter</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; I want to get David Rennie in, and then you’ll start us up after the break, Ana.</p>
<p>David Rennie</p>
<p>DAVID RENNIE, Economist: &#160;I have two questions.&#160; One is a very general one.&#160; So this is a very stupid general question.&#160; You said something interesting, and I don’t think I heard you explain what you meant.&#160; You said that you would like to see as a way through this in the future kind of an appeal to the principles of dissent and non-religious rights of expression, moving away from claims of religious exceptionism. But that sounded very interesting, and it sounded as though it ties into the title of your book at least about confident pluralism.&#160; I don’t think I know what you mean by that exactly.</p>
<p>And then shut me down and don’t answer this if this doesn’t suit you, but you mentioned at the beginning the culture wars were about predominantly things like gay marriage, but also abortion.&#160; How does this tie into things like the states where they’ve passed laws ‑‑ I think I have this right ‑‑ but in some states pharmacists, for example, can refuse to fill prescriptions for things like the morning-after pill if that offends their conscience, and that is certainly seen by some in the religious liberty movement as very much&#160;a religious liberty kind of issue.&#160; Does that differ?&#160; I mean, is that going better for traditionalists, that kind of claim, than some of the stuff that’s happening on gay marriage?</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU:&#160; Yeah.&#160; So let me start with the second question.&#160; On the pharmacist exemptions, some of those cases have prevailed.&#160; I believe there is one in Oregon I think that did prevail, but I think, to your point, those are wrapped up in the state RFRA legislation. So whether a state Religious Freedom Act is going to protect for-profit contexts is going to reach both the cake baker but also the pharmacist unless there’s a specific carve-out — either protecting pharmacists, which is one way you could write a statute, or expressly not protecting the cake baker context, which is another way.&#160; So a lot of it is going to be in the statutory writing, which is to say that they are both in play but distinguishable depending on how one writes the specific law.</p>
<p>And then on the question of dissent and what confident pluralism means, you’ll need to read the book.&#160; What I mean by that is what I’m doing is trying to offer an alternative account.&#160; This is actually a different approach than the Kuyperian pluralism stuff that’s rooted not in some sort of theological argument but rooted in secular liberal democratic theory, that we have ideas and theories of pluralism built into our constitutional tradition, and these are all around dissent, and a kind of dissent that recognizes the kinds of groups we protect as countercultural, as odd, as offensive. And then we’re always ‑‑ I mean, the practical political question is always, “where do you draw the line”?&#160; When is too far?&#160; We’re not going to protect Al Qaeda operatives and we’re not going to protect cannibals.</p>
<p>And so we’re going to have to figure out where those outer lines are, but we do protect all kinds of groups that society has seen as weird, bad, irrational, out of step, backwards, and I think at least what attracts me to this argument ‑‑ and I’ve been in this space for quite some time now ‑‑ is that this does have ideological implications across the board.</p>
<p>So this is an argument ‑‑ the last paper I wrote is on how labor unions can use these same kinds of principles and arguments, and there are ‑‑ historically most of the examples actually cut in a far more — what we would say today is “progressive” — direction for the kinds of groups protected for being dissenting and countercultural and out of step.</p>
<p>And so that’s the intuition that I’m trying to tap into with this idea of confident pluralism, that it’s rooted not in some theological argument, but it’s rooted in a shared American constitutional tradition.&#160; And then we have to have some serious questions about where the lines are drawn around those boundaries.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; Okay.&#160; Did he get them both in?</p>
<p>DAVID RENNIE:&#160; (Off microphone) follow-up.&#160; That would be (off microphone) framing of race as kind of the predecessor to this.&#160; You ultimately only got the ‑‑ you would be looking to protect kind of unpopular expressions of kind of speech, but the problem is going to be actually ‑‑ and I don’t see how your ‑‑ you know, I can see how it makes sense politically to say there are people on the left who are also going to need these protections at some point or not, and therefore they’re available as allies if you’re smart about how you kind of frame this stuff as a traditionalist.&#160; What I don’t quite understand is how practically a dissent defense could help, say, a florist.&#160; Or are you saying forget the florist, the florist is done, that’s not going to happen, it’s going to end up like, you know, say, the Nation of Islam saying things that are very offensive to, you know, Jews or something, and it’s protected?&#160; Is that the sort of analogy&#160;‑‑</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU:&#160; Well, I mean, my own view here ‑‑ this is perhaps idiosyncratic, but I just think that we can draw a pragmatic distinction between a commercial and a non-commercial context, and then we can argue about tough cases.&#160; I think hospitals are really tough cases.&#160; They’re under the law, nonprofit, noncommercial entities, but they exercise tremendous power in some local communities, and at the same time, many of them have deeply religious commitments, so hospitals are tough cases. But we can draw a line that’s between commercial and non-commercial and focus on the non-commercial.&#160; Now, that’s not a philosophically or theoretically neat distinction, but it seems to me preferable to the kind of Richard Epstein libertarian argument that says, you know ‑‑ he doesn’t go quite this far, but “let’s dial back Title VII protections,” or the kind of argument from the other direction that says there is no sort of space left of civil society for private groups and for voluntary organizations.&#160; And so that’s the kind of space that I’m focused on there.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; Okay.&#160; Let’s take a 5- or 6‑minute break.&#160; Thank you.</p>
<p>Break</p>
<p>Ana Marie Cox</p>
<p>ANA MARIE COX,&#160;The Daily Beast&#160;&amp;&#160;Bloomberg View:&#160; You know when you are talking—you say, “No one questioned the sincerity of these claimants.” I want to question the sincerity. Which is to say, something that has bothered me as an individual of personal faith myself and watching some of the Indiana arguments unfold, a lot of people seem to take that at face value, including those who are opposed to the Indiana law, took at face value the idea that this was a legitimate religious objection, that it — it may be wrong — it may be something that we should curb, but it was somehow an expression of religion.</p>
<p>And I guess maybe this is a theological question. I just don’t understand how baking a cake is going to infringe on someone’s religious liberty.&#160; Like it just doesn’t – I don’t get it, even though I may disagree, I get, you know, questions about abortion, like Hobby Lobby.&#160; If you believe that abortion is murder, well then clearly to be involved in that at all is going to be a moral affront, right?&#160; That is like just a clear-cut line.&#160; I do not want to be a part of it, like a conscientious objector of war.</p>
<p>But baking a cake, providing flowers, taking pictures, to me I, I just don’t get why that is a moral affront, how does that make you less of a Christian?&#160; Is that a sin if you provided a cake?&#160; What would be the thing that happened?&#160; What would be the thing that went against your religion?</p>
<p>And then I actually want to point out just as a follow-up-related question, when you introduced your talk, you talked about these things, that gay marriage and abortion are the two things in the culture war right now.&#160; I think it’s interesting that they’ve become so linked because there’s not an obvious link, except in the minds of people that assume that, that’s the culture war, right?&#160; One of the most interesting conversations I’ve had in a while I had at CPAC, with a young women, who is very active in College Students for Life.&#160; And I asked her about gay marriage issues.&#160; And she said, “I see them as another cause for myself.” She was pro-gay marriage.</p>
<p>She said that “I am for the liberties of all human begins from womb to tomb,” right? And she said that on her campus and among her friends, that’s not an uncommon view.&#160; So that’s just for like — I think that’s for a framing question.&#160; That’s your culture, your ancillary issue in some ways.</p>
<p>One last thing.&#160; So I asked a couple questions about marriage vendors, but you, yourself, a couple times said this isn’t really about the marriage vendors.&#160; This is not something that you’re particularly paying attention to, right?&#160; That’s a small subset.&#160; So what is it that you’re concerned about?&#160; Because your talk, you did say several times you were concerned about, you know, religious liberty being on the decline, right?&#160; So, what is that?&#160; What does that mean?&#160; Because is that the same as just the expression of religion?&#160; Is it freedom to practice verses the freedom to express?&#160; Are those two different things or am I conflating them?</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU:&#160; Okay, great.&#160; So first on gay rights and abortion. I mean part of this is we are trying to frame the issues for the purposes of the conversation.&#160; I don’t think it’s really an issue of traditionalist insularity in that there are divergent views on these issues within traditionalists as well.&#160; Right?&#160; Some of those demographic trends reflect broader cultural trends. I do think that the interesting alignment’s happening politically or otherwise around these issues from progressives so there are lots of them in legal briefs and funding sources for Congress and these sort of things, abortion and gay rights, which might not be intuitively linked but they are in terms of what’s happening.&#160; The other two points, I think both go to the issues I want to clarify.</p>
<p>One, when I say religious liberty is on the decline, I’m trying to make doctrinal and cultural observations.&#160; I actually don’t even mean a normative point there.&#160; I think descriptively that’s happening doctrinally and culturally that may be happening, if I’m right about just sort of perceptions about immediate threats to religious liberty and I don’t mean for that to be, to cash out any particular implications.</p>
<p>But the kinds of cases that I’m most interested in thinking about are cases like access of campus student groups and public colleges and universities for funding, and grants for private schools as well. Those sorts of things.&#160; So that’s where I focus most of my time in thinking on this.</p>
<p>Now on the sincerity point. What I want to clarify here is when I said that nobody was questioning the sincerity, I mean that as a –- I mean people are saying all kinds of things, on twitter and elsewhere.&#160; So I mean legally there was very little that I’ve seen to suggest that there is a legal claim that questions sincerity.&#160; This has to do with doctrinal distinctions. There is substantial deference to a religious claim that assumes sincerity unless there’s lots of evidence to the contrary.&#160; So what would that evidence be?&#160; Well, if a religious claimant says, “I have a religious objection to paying taxes,” then people might say, “wait a minute, you benefit quite a bit.”&#160; You get a windfall if you don’t pay taxes, right?&#160; So the sincerity of that claim is and has been questioned.&#160; In the wedding baker case, it’s hard to see what the windfall is to the –- I mean, the cake baker’s going to lose some business probably.</p>
<p>ANA MARIE COX:&#160; But part of the sincerity that I think is interesting is that they apparently have a sincere belief that their religious liberty will be impacted by providing a service.&#160; And that’s what I don’t get.</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU: Right.</p>
<p>ANA MARIE COX:&#160; How is their liberty impacted by providing a service?&#160; You’re not gay.&#160; You haven’t officiated it.&#160; You haven’t given your blessing to the wedding.</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU:&#160; Right.&#160; So I would say, I mean– I don’t know cake bakers, and I’m not a cake baker, but if I were a cake baker, I would bake the cake. I mean, I can’t see any reason that I wouldn’t.&#160; But the cake baker I think views that as a form of compelled support or expression.&#160; And whether I can relate to or identify with that claim, that falls into the category of religious claims and this is where the sincerity question comes into play.&#160; One of the reasons we defer heavily to sincerity is because lots of religious claims are impenetrable from the outside.&#160; We just don’t understand. “Why would you believe that?&#160; I don’t get it.&#160; It doesn’t -– It’s not consistent with my understanding of my faith or your faith, or anything else.”</p>
<p>But part of what the law does, is it says if we’re going to protect religious liberty, we protect idiosyncratic religious liberty. We protect religious liberty that is internally inconsistent. We protect religious liberty that is out of step with other religious claims from the same faith tradition.&#160; And that’s consistently what happens absent these sort of self-interested claims.&#160; Where courts start to look very skeptically is if there’s going to be a windfall from the claim.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; Quickly on this point, Tom.</p>
<p>Tom Gjelten</p>
<p>TOM GJELTEN, NPR: Just very quick.&#160; I posed that very question to Albert Mohler, the president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and he pointed to a verse in the first chapter of Romans.&#160; In the first chapter of Romans, Paul lays out a lot of arguments against men doing unnatural acts with other men and women doing unnatural acts with other women.&#160; And in the last verse, he says, it’s not only sinful to engage in these acts, but sinful to approve of these acts.&#160; So that was the verse that he cited.&#160; If you believe literally in every verse in the Bible, then that seems to be a reasonable foundation for a religious belief.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; Yes. Robert Draper, you’re next and then Rabbi Sacks.</p>
<p>Robert Draper</p>
<p>ROBERT DRAPER,&#160;New York Times Magazine:&#160; Okay, sure. John, I want to get you to expand a little more on something you had alluded to regarding how the longstanding alliance between traditionalists and white evangelicals have begun to fray.&#160; And particularly as regards gay marriage, that it had in fact been axiomatic that black evangelical ministers were on the front lines in preserving or promoting traditional marriage. &#160;And, and something has clearly happened and you outlined a few possibilities, having to do with, among other things, the black evangelical community being alienated by, for example, the traditionalist silence on subjects related to Ferguson.</p>
<p>But it seems to me like it’s more affirmative than that. That there has actually been a kind of evolution towards acceptance of same sex marriage in the black evangelical community, much as has taken place throughout the rest of America.&#160; And I wonder if you believe that’s so or if you simply think that for whatever reason they are, as you suggested white traditionalists were thinking, that the black evangelical community is simply sorting all of this out.</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU:&#160; Yes.&#160; So one, one thing on the premise. I don’t think there’s been a fraying relationship.&#160; I don’t think this relationship’s ever existed.&#160; I think white evangelicals, white traditionalists have done a terrible job of caring for black evangelicals.&#160; And that’s nothing new.&#160; So there’s, it’s not that there’s been a recent fraying.&#160; Now I don’t actually -– I have no insight into what is happening within black churches. I did use the phrase “black evangelicals” to attempt a small distinction within black church communities that there’s an evangelical component that is probably more traditionalist than some more black mainline churches.&#160; But now we’re getting into an area that I don’t know anything about in terms of the internal workings.&#160; But, but it’s important that there’s -– I don’t think that there’s been any kind of a fraying.&#160; I just think we’re seeing yet another iteration of a failure to establish relationships.</p>
<p>ROBERT DRAPER:&#160; But it’s manifested itself, among other things, on the black evangelical community not being as, not being as forward, not being as frontal, not being as active, in fighting against, on same sex marriage in 2015 and 2014 as has been in 2009, 2010, 2011.&#160; Does that seem to be the case with you?</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU:&#160; Yeah, that, probably could be right.&#160; I don’t know what the reasons for that are, okay.&#160; Yeah, but I do think it’s important that the broader context there is that black evangelicals by and large were never onboard with the “religious right” kind of efforts from the ’80s and ’90s.</p>
<p>ROBERT DRAPER:&#160; No, but on this particular issue, they happen to be working in concert with each other.&#160; Right, on gay marriage?</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU:&#160; Yeah, I don’t know about that. I mean the thing I’d want to know more about is what working in concert looks like.&#160; I mean aligned in the same position, yes, working on similar policy goals probably, but I don’t know just how– I don’t know what the relationships undergirding the alignment look like, I haven’t seen them.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; I would like to say this off the record.</p>
<p>Off the record</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; Okay. Rabbi Sacks and then Andy Ferguson.</p>
<p>Rabbi Jonathan Sacks</p>
<p>RABBI JONATHAN SACKS,&#160;New York University and Yeshiva University:&#160; I did have a serious question.&#160; I just want to prep my remarks with an observation.&#160; It’s terrific listening to this.&#160; I haven’t understood a single word because, this conversation is so American, it is just incredibly fascinating to me as a Brit.&#160; I’m certainly impressed by David, who is following all of this perfectly. But it just plays out so differently, in England, because number one, it’s not constructive in terms of Constitutional Amendments.&#160; We don’t have a Constitution. Our leading constitutionalist said the British Constitution is whatever the Cabinet secretary and the queen secretary write on the back of an envelope.&#160; So, you know, it’s a kind of mystical thing.</p>
<p>Secondly, it’s not fought out in the Supreme Court.&#160; We have the House of Lords, so it plays out really, really differently in Great Britain and it just, it’s fascinating to see our different cultures.</p>
<p>But the third, I think a pretty common origin back in 1620 (I know we had bad moment back in 1776).&#160; But we have all forgiven each other for that. How two cultures work their way towards the principle of tolerance in very, very different ways.&#160; So in that context, there’s just two questions I’d like to ask.</p>
<p>Number one, in Britain every morning, it’s a weird thing.&#160; In the middle of the key news program in the morning in Britain the main news program.&#160; It’s on radio not television and there’s this wacky thing that in the middle of the news, I give or somebody else gives a 2 minute 45 second religious reflection, on something happening in the news. It is the most gloriously eccentric thing you can possibly imagine. It used to take 3 minutes but, 10 years ago the British, BBC decided nobody could concentrate anymore for 3 minutes. So it’s down to 2 minutes 45 seconds. And the BBC is constantly trying to get rid of it.&#160; It’s so unusual, I call it the “olds” as opposed to the news.</p>
<p>But the audience keep writing in and saying, you know, “Don’t get rid of it- It’s our favorite bit.”&#160; I suppose it’s their favorite bit because they can all go off and do something useful for 2 minutes 45 seconds.&#160; But what this meant was, the way I starting doing this 25 to 30 years ago, I found myself having to develop a language, which I could speak as a Jew to an audience 99.5 percent of which was not Jewish. &#160;And I had to communicate with them.</p>
<p>So I developed a language of public reasoning that was a religious language.&#160; As a result I found it very difficult to see how John Rawls for instance, develops this concept of (inaudible) and having to be intelligible to everyone.</p>
<p>But that doesn’t mean to say I’m a religious, spiritual, moralist like the rest of them.&#160; And I just wondered what you have in American culture as supposed to the law, the Constitution, the amendments and the courts?&#160; What do you do to create that feeling that we’re all part of the public conversation?&#160; Because that little device on the BBC you see integrated the Sheikh and Hindu and the Muslim communities in Britain, because they had to provide a speaker who had to speak to a public that didn’t share their views.</p>
<p>And so just by creating this little slot, they created a public language and public reason and that includes very different religious voices.&#160; I just wondered if you had any in American culture to mitigate these sharp angles of the law of and of the contention and conflict.&#160; That’s number one.</p>
<p>Number two is, you know, the thing I love so much is that the picture of America Tocqueville draws, that when he comes here from a country, from France, seeing that religion has no power and therefore no influence.&#160; He comes to America and discovers it has no power and a great deal of influence.</p>
<p>So I began to understand religion has a vital role in creating that cohesion of civil society within which democracy can flourish.&#160; Now as I see American politics over the last “cultural war” decades, it seems to me that that Tocqueville vision is being masked from American minds and things are becoming very much the, children of the light against the children of darkness dualism.</p>
<p>And I’m just wondering whether there’s movement in American life.&#160; Go back to that Tocquevillian vision, and develop a much more embracing language that softens the contours of some of these zero sum conflicts.</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU:&#160; I mean that’s lovely.&#160; I think what you are gesturing toward is a need for civic practices. For me, working on writing this book, it’s become just increasingly clear that that’s part of the message that has to be out there.&#160; How do we–even if we can’t agree on the common good–how do we find common ground?&#160; And there are places that we can do that.&#160; I mean we need exemplars and we need to tell each other stories and start just kind of basic things like, speaking more nicely to each other.</p>
<p>And then part of that, and this goes back to what I was saying earlier about the insularity challenge.&#160; I think recognizing in all directions the human dimension and the human cost to all of this.&#160; And, you know, just one example that comes to mind, in some traditionalist circles, there is just an inability to see the reality of LGBT bullying or just being dismissive of this completely.</p>
<p>And what frames that dismissal?&#160; I mean how could you assent to certain beliefs about what Christianity is and then not be standing up for people who are being bullied and abused?&#160; So it’s just one easy example. There’s a lot of room to go in terms of finding that common ground, in civic practices.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE: I have a list here.&#160; Andy Ferguson and then Michelle.</p>
<p>Andy Ferguson</p>
<p>ANDREW FERGUSON, The Weekly Standard:&#160; First just on that last question. I think the problem is that a lot of traditionalists now feel like they’re being bullied.&#160; That’s the point these legal cases make.&#160; You know, it’s not that cake bakers are going after the people who want to get married– it’s the people who want to get married and the institutions behind them that are going after the cake bakers.&#160; But anyway, that’s not the point.</p>
<p>This is just a point of information, I guess.&#160; If everybody seems to say –EJ, you mentioned this– that ministers and priests wouldn’t be able to be forced to do gay marriages because of free expression, I guess, is the cause.&#160; If a minister or a priest is giving and making a marriage, how does it work the other way around? Can the State take away the power of the minister or the priest to do a State-sanctioned marriage?</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU: Yeah, I mean I think so.&#160; That’s a licensing question. I mean the State–and not just government entities, but quasi-governmental accreditation agencies with licensing power–in that context or others.</p>
<p>ANDREW FERGUSON:&#160; So do you think that’s the next step?</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU: I guess it’s an option on the table. It would be state-by-state basis.</p>
<p>ANDREW FERGUSON:&#160; In the Supreme Court arguments, they were saying the magistrates could if a law office could refuse to do gay marriage and the same with clerks at the counties– if they refuse to enforce this constitutional right, which I assume it’s what it is going to become, in a couple months, then they can be barred from that office because they are not performing their Constitutional obligations.</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU:&#160; Yeah.&#160; I think those are scenarios that are definitely on the table.&#160; In California right now, I think by virtue of their judicial ethics code–although it could be a statute–that says that judges in California may not belong to organizations like the Boy Scouts or other discriminatory organizations.&#160; Now there are, I think the current version has a religious exemption but that’s, you know, up for grabs. So that’s another example where these things could be cashed out.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; Okay, Michelle Boorstein.</p>
<p>Michelle Boorstein</p>
<p>MICHELLE BOORSTEIN, Washington Post:&#160; Could you –- could you explain what concretely you see people doing to prepare for things that they, the traditional types, that they think is actually coming down the road?&#160; You mentioned in the beginning people concerned about loss of tax exemptions and attorneys and maybe doctors and counselors, that kind of thing.&#160; Because from my point of view, at least at the beginning– there’s only these few cases.&#160; Everybody kept citing these three cases.</p>
<p>So from my point as a reporter, saying okay, well what are people actually, not just saying might happen, what are people actually preparing for?&#160; What’s the most concrete stuff that you’ve seen and that people think something is going to happen and that they’re actually preparing for beyond just talking about it?&#160; Is there evidence for it?</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU:&#160; Yeah.&#160; So I think, I think the example of Gordon College is a good sort of a case study and a lot of people are paying a lot of attention to that. So Gordon, do people know the background of the story?</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; No, go ahead.</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU:&#160; Gordon’s president, Michael Lindsay, signs a letter to the Obama Administration–signed by a bunch of other folks too, Rick Warren and Michael Wear and others– asking that when the Administration adds sexual orientation and sexual identity to its executive order for contracting that it includes a religious exemption.&#160; And as a result of signing that letter, Gordon hits the news big time and there’s lot of media attention to Gordon that maintains.&#160; This goes back to Will’s conversation earlier.&#160; It maintains a conduct restriction against gay and lesbian sexual conduct.&#160; And so there are consequences.&#160; And then most of -–</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; And heterosexual conduct?</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU:&#160; Right.&#160; Right.&#160; They looked at — yeah.&#160; Sexual conduct of all kinds, but the key issue here is as it affects gays and lesbians.&#160; So there are local consequences.&#160; There are a couple of school districts that severed ties with Gordon student teachers –</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; Gordon’s north of Boston.&#160; It’s an evangelical college.</p>
<p>MICHELLE BOORSTEIN:&#160; I thought the -– I thought in the case of Gordon they re-established it. There was talk about losing accreditation, but they didn’t actually lose any accreditation.</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU:&#160; There are a bunch issues going on.&#160; So one is accreditation from the regional accreditor and that was just resolved.&#160; But separate from that there’s a local public school district that’s K-12, right, that says Gordon student-teachers are no longer welcome in the school district.&#160; And there’s reporting that the Congressional representative to that district told Gordon’s president that he was going to try to put him out of business.&#160; So there’s pressure on Gordon, political pressure and a cultural pressure onboard.&#160; So that’s one example.</p>
<p>Another, and I’m familiar with this, through some of my own work, but the question of religious student groups on public colleges and university campuses and whether they’re welcome there or not.&#160; So this is -– the way this has come up with the courts is around this question of what’s called “an all-comers policy.”&#160; If you as an organization are unwilling to admit any student as a member or leader of your group, you can’t be eligible as recognized student organization.&#160; So there’s, there’s some legal maneuvering here, but the end result is that there are a number of these traditionalist groups that have in both public and private contexts moved off campus.</p>
<p>And so those are, I think, some of the questions.&#160; But there are –- I mean when the Solicitor General of the United States raises that, and says in oral argument that Bob Jones is going to be an issue, then I think a lot of traditionalist institutions start to take notice.</p>
<p>MICHELLE BOORSTEIN:&#160; Was that in which case?</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU: This was this past week in the same sex marriage case.</p>
<p>MICHELLE BOORSTEIN:&#160; Oh, I see—maybe tied to that.</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU:&#160; Right.</p>
<p>MICHELLE BOORSTEIN:&#160; What about the tax exemptions?&#160; When you talked about tax exemptions, is there –-</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU:&#160; Well, that’s the Bob Jones’s question.</p>
<p>MICHELLE BOORSTEIN:&#160; Oh, I see.&#160; When I tried to look into this a few months ago, I assumed that there would be – I forget the name of the organization that prepares a lot of, like financial accountability for Christian organizations. It’s a large organization. But it really, there wasn’t –- I, I was curious what they were doing to prepare their clients or members for these problems.</p>
<p>And it turned out that it’s still hypothetical as far as I could understand it.&#160; There wasn’t really, you know… Is that your sense of it?&#160; I’m just trying to gauge what is, what is the concern about the future and serious concern about that future and things that people who are really in the know are saying, look, you better prepare for this and that because you’re going to lose –-</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU:&#160; Right. Yeah, I think a lot of it is trying to look for or to see what possible downstream policy consequences are.&#160; And this is why a lot of people are really interested in how it will likely be Justice Kennedy writing this opinion and what he says.&#160; I mean the wording of this opinion will matter a great deal to a lot of groups.&#160; And we saw in the Windsor case when Justice Kennedy uses the word “animus” to describe the motives of Congress in enacting DOMA, that that word then has a lot of traction.</p>
<p>So there’s immediate legal traction from Supreme Court cases. Then there’s also related cultural and discourse traction from the words and the language and phrases that are used.&#160; And I think a lot of people from all sides of these issues are looking carefully at what Justice Kennedy has to say and has said in the past.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; Ok, Sarah Pulliam Bailey on this point.</p>
<p>Sarah Pulliam Bailey</p>
<p>SARAH PULLIAM BAILEY, Washington Post:&#160; So, as you mentioned, it was raised this weekend in the Supreme Court case, how likely do you think it will be that if this case does, go in the favor of gay rights, what does that mean?&#160; And how would it impact religious institutions like Gordon, or World Vision or these non-profits compared to churches?&#160; Will there be a distinction even?</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU: Yeah.&#160; So, let me start by saying there was an argument made to the court in the same sex marriage cases that the Court should not recognize same sex marriage because of the religious liberty issues that will follow.&#160; I disagree with that argument.&#160; I mean I don’t think that that’s a plausible argument against same sex marriage–that there’s some possible downstream threat to religious liberty does not strike me as a compelling reason to oppose same sex marriage.</p>
<p>I do think that practically speaking, and this is again where a certain culture comes into play, but those consequences are far more likely to follow.&#160; So those of you who want sort of a road map to this, the brief that Doug Laycock filed at the Supreme Court in these cases, maps out sort of a pretty wide array of potential conflicts and consequences. And the reason I think Doug wrote that brief is that a number of the lower courts since Windsor haven’t really paid attention to the full range of consequences that might follow.</p>
<p>So again, we’re talking future and speculative, but it important I think. Can you remind me of part two of that question?</p>
<p>SARAH PULLIAM BAILEY: What institutions or is this churches?</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU: Right. So this goes to the question of a ministerial exception.&#160; And I mentioned that the Supreme Court has given particular–actually very striking and strong–protections to churches and ministers, but left entirely unclear what those categories are.</p>
<p>So now we’re seeing in the lower courts, cases that are stretching this doctrine and applying the concept of church to non-church entities or religious non-profits and applying the category of “minister” to people who aren’t essentially ministers but have some sort of ministerial component.&#160; And that’s going to be -– I think it’s hard to know how that plays out because of the way the laws, the law around this, what categories, are not precisely defined.&#160; Just sort of wait and see what each case says about that concept.&#160; But it’s a -– you know, it can be stretched pretty far.&#160; I think it already has been stretched pretty far.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE: Ana Marie Cox and then David Hawkings.</p>
<p>ANA MARIE COX:&#160; Actually, I first kind of want to offer a data point to the discussion we’re having about black evangelicals and gay marriage.&#160; I just looked up the polls and it’s true black Americans are still sort of like Americans as a whole in the accepting of gay marriage, but there’s a really interesting poll that came up in the wave of Indiana asking about providing services to gay couples.&#160; And on that, so white non-Hispanic, when asked should businesses be allowed to refuse: 52 percent to 45 percent.&#160; Black, non-Hispanic, should businesses be allowed to refuse: 36 percent.&#160; Required to provide: 61 percent.&#160; Hispanics allowed to refuse: 35 percent.&#160; Required to provide it: 56 percent.</p>
<p>NAPP NAZWORTH: Did the question say support gays or gay weddings?</p>
<p>ANA MARIE COX: Gay weddings.&#160; We should be required to provide services to same sex weddings, is the question.&#160; And we get into religion, particular white evangelicals allowed to refuse: 71 percent versus 25%.&#160; White mainline: 49.7, black Protestant allowed to refuse: 37 percent versus required to provide: 59 percent.&#160; So that’s just -– when you start framing it in terms of should a business be allowed to discriminate, I think the minorities perk up.</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU:&#160; I think that’s a good point and I also think it’s important to disentangle the current question of “should the Supreme Court constitutionalize same sex marriage?” with a question of–like the Bob Jones question–“should a private group be able to retain its views?”&#160; And there I haven’t seen polling on minority voters and citizens.</p>
<p>But I think you might see, to distinguish from sort of an essentially internal theological belief from an external question of “what is civil marriage?” or what the State says about what marriage is.&#160; And I would imagine on the latter question, you’d see a lot of divergence because it’s what I described as the white traditionalist view.&#160; Some of them are trying to hold on to sort of a Christian notion of America that a lot of the minorities really never saw, because it didn’t seem very Christian to them.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE: Okay.&#160; David Hawkings.</p>
<p>David Hawkings</p>
<p>DAVID HAWKINGS, Roll Call: So one of the interesting story lines from the arguments was the hints from the Chief Justice that he might want to get on the winning, potentially winning side, by saying this is just a straightforward, garden variety sex discrimination case.&#160; I guess I’m wondering how you react to that in context of this discussion. Because does that open up a whole different can of worms?&#160; Is that just a sideline?&#160; Is that not what anybody’s going to be talking about in two years?</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU: Yeah, so that’s a really interesting argument and I think it’s Andy Koppelman that’s principally behind that argument before the Court. I think the Chief Justice sees it as a way to write a more narrow decision, which might be in his interest. I think if he joins the majority, then he gets to write the opinion, which also matters.&#160; So those are two parts there.</p>
<p>An interesting thing about sex discrimination is that we – this is sort of the point that I made earlier. It’s going to be, for the foreseeable future, we will have all kinds of secular analogs to religious sex discrimination, right? Sororities, fraternities, strip clubs, athletic teams.&#160; I mean we have a lot of instances of sex discrimination in society. And so just is as a cultural matter, there’s not going to be this sort of outlier of religious groups on the question, but there will be on the question of sexual orientation, sexuality.</p>
<p>WILL SALETAN: How, if the decision comes down on the grounds that Justice Roberts was asking about sex discrimination?&#160; How does that affect the religious liberty question as opposed to if they come down?</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU: No, I think, I think that the religious liberty implications are, I think are going to be driven more largely by the language and the words the Court uses regardless of the legal agreement that it reaches. I mean there are also arguments that one should find an equal protection argument versus a substantive due process kind of argument there.&#160; The amount of legal arguments before the court in these cases is pretty overwhelming.&#160; But I think, my sense is, more than the precise legal grounds it’s going to be words like “animus” and “bigotry.”&#160; Whether those words are included or not in the opinion is going to drive the downstream religious liberty challenges.</p>
<p>And it’s going to be cultural as well as legal.&#160; That’s my sense.&#160; So you look skeptical.</p>
<p>WILL SALETAN: Yeah.&#160; I mean legally it doesn’t make any sense to me, what you just said.&#160; But politically it makes a lot of sense.&#160; It’s just weird to me that we have an institution that’s supposed to be the judicial branch, not the political branch, and that, what sort of words, adjectives, sentimental words that get thrown into a decision or not, be the driving factor in the decisions downstream.&#160; That just surprises me.</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU: That surprises me too.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE: Why does that surprise you again, Will?</p>
<p>WILL SALETAN:&#160; I thought the whole point of the court system was that the grounds, the rational part, we get away from the Jonathan Haidt view of the world and get back to sort of the, you know, notion of rationality in an argument that’s filled with logic. That the grounds on which the Court makes, bases its opinion would be what is then what drives to the cases downstream.&#160; Otherwise, you know, it just seems odd, that we should all be paying more attention to the … I think the way you explained the cases, the term, I think you mentioned the term animus being included in Justice Kennedy’s opinion. [inaudible] Is there a paper trail there where we can see how that drove the decision subsequently?</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU: It’s in Windsor where Kennedy uses the term animus.&#160; When you see lower courts post-Windsor picking up on that term and using in their own. So I mean, I’m not -– I think all I’m trying to suggest with this particular illustration is that the Supreme Court has when it writes decisions there are legal consequences and there are cultural signals that follow.&#160; I mean I think the complexities of the constitutional argument before the Court right now are really complicated.&#160; This is actually not an area of the law that I specialize in, but I’m pretty confounded about some of the legal intricacies behind some of the arguments.&#160; And that’s not to say that I view it one way or the other.&#160; I mean I’m legitimately confounded about how this should come out under the legal doctrine.&#160; So I imagine when I read the doctrinal analysis, I may or may not understand it.&#160; I may or may not agree with it.&#160; But the rhetorical framing of the analysis will make a big difference, I think, downstream.&#160; But that’s –- I mean wherever you fall on not just these issues, but any issues, it seems descriptively true that we collectively have ceded a lot of authority and moral authority to the Supreme Court on this and lots of other issues.&#160; And that cuts in ways that affect, you know, people differently, depending on the issues.&#160; But it seems that over and over again, the Supreme Court has a lot of moral authority and moral authority that plays out in the words as well as doctrinal arguments.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE: Emma, you get to ask the last question from our session. Emma Green.</p>
<p>EMMA GREEN:&#160;My question is, given what we’ve seen about the massive shifts in public opinion towards same sex marriage, especially that’s brought on by peoples’ personal acquaintances, you know, knowing a family member or friend changes peoples’ viewpoints.&#160; The fact that, as you said, these cases of cake bakers and t-shirt makers and florists are actually quite limited.&#160; How much is the rhetoric of persecution actually something that’s pushed by the last remaining cultural beliefs of the remnants of the culture warriors?&#160; Is there really actually a feeling within the American public writ large of being persecuted?</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU: Yeah.&#160; I think there’s anxiety.&#160; I hear the persecution language a lot and I–I’m thinking about back to Ana’s comment, I mean how one could understand–the fact that in our first session we heard about people being beheaded–that’s persecution.&#160; And so when people talk about persecution in any context that we talked about today, I really bristle at that and I think, it’s rhetorically problematic, but I also think it’s just theologically wrong to wave the persecution flag.</p>
<p>Now is it possible that persecution could come some day?&#160; I mean I don’t think beheading is out there, but is it possible that there could be targeted and uncompromising challenges to people?&#160; I think, you know, the Memories Pizza example, you come pretty close to people just kind of beating up on these poor pizza owners–I think kind of ambushed into making a statement.&#160; And, but then interestingly, there’s some sort of counter backlash and there’s the GoFundMe site that gives them a bunch of money.</p>
<p>It’s just, especially after our first session today, it’s really hard to put persecution words around the types of stuff we’re talking about.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160; The word anxiety might be a better word.</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU: Yeah, there’s a lot of anxiety and some of it may be warranted and some of it’s, I think, unwarranted.&#160; But yeah, I’d much rather talk about the anxiety over persecution.</p>
<p>EMMA GREEN: Well, it’s an interesting phenomenon and maybe you can comment on this. But particularly within a Christian context, there are legitimately Christians all over the world who are being persecuted and killed, not just the consequences of ISIS, but Africa and other places. And so it seems difficult, or I guess just strange for Christian leaders to at once be advocates for that —you know, Christian Evangelical community, is enormously influential in trafficking around the world, trying to fight against actual genuine Christian persecution around the world, but then have that language in the United States political context and talk about things like being forced to bake a cake.&#160; It seems like those -– it’s very difficult to hold those ideas in your head at the same time.&#160; But Christian leaders and [inaudible] thinkers can seem to do that.</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU: Yeah.&#160; I think that’s right.&#160; I mean I agree with you.&#160; It’s another example of maybe, I mean maybe tone deafness.&#160; And just to throw another example too, there is some talk in some traditionalist’s circles about being, “the new minority.”&#160; And I think that is also just tone deaf and wrong. &#160;I mean there are circumstances and there will more circumstances, which some traditionalist views will be minority views and perhaps marginalized, but this is not –- I mean when you look at sort of what minority populations in the United States have been through and have confronted, it’s a long way before Christians are the minority.&#160; So that’s another example where I think the language is just pretty tone deaf.&#160; But again, this is hard because the rhetoric on both sides ratchets up this kind of argument.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE: Nadine?</p>
<p>Nadine Epstein</p>
<p>NADINE EPSTEIN, Moment Magazine:&#160; Did it really start with religious leaders or did it start with lawyers who were looking at these cases as a way to incrementally build, you know, a larger campaign, a larger legal and political campaign?</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU: Yeah.&#160; I mean I, I have not seen the persecution language in legal briefs.&#160; I mean it’s possible –-</p>
<p>NADINE EPSTEIN:&#160; I mean the cake bakers, isn’t that all sort of legal or legal cases that were being built to make a bigger argument?&#160; Those didn’t come from — like did they come from clergy who were upset about this?&#160; You know, have you heard this from people in their community or their congregation?&#160; Or did it literally come from lawyers coming from outside going, hey, this is something that we can use?</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU: Yeah, I don’t know.&#160; So it’s interesting when it comes to interest group lawyering, there’s all kinds of–it’s in all directions–to find the right plaintiffs.&#160; So I actually don’t know all these cases, and how all of them started -– some of them might have started from interest group lawyers from religious liberty firms or some of them might have started from a lawsuit.&#160; I mean, because cases get started in lots of different ways.&#160; So I mean if I’m a cake baker and I get sued under an anti-discrimination law, then I don’t think – if that’s the first move, it’d be hard to tie that to the some strategic political effort.&#160; If on the other hand, it’s a religious interest group, advocacy firm, then there is that argument. &#160;But I just don’t know how it started.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE: One thing I want to do after this session is to come up with a word that’s not persecution, but maybe a little stronger than anxiety.&#160; I mean Gordon College almost lost its accreditation and it would have lost its entire history as a school and would have been decimated, but this week it was saved.&#160; So that’s not persecution, but it’s a little more than anxiety too.</p>
<p>ANDREW FERGUSON: It’s also, they didn’t invent this language of persecution.&#160; People who defend traditional marriage are consistently called haters.&#160; They didn’t invent the language of discrimination and persecution, but it’s from other places where it’s been used and is now being used against them.&#160; It seems sort of rich to think otherwise.&#160; It’s not their fault in that sense.&#160; And as you point out, there is Gordon College.&#160; If your livelihood is on the line, you have a right to worry a little about this stuff.</p>
<p>JOHN INAZU: Yeah, and in the case of Gordon, for example, I wrote and pushed back strongly on some of the efforts against Gordon and the abuse language like — well, I can’t remember.&#160; But they did not use the language of persecution there.&#160; I do think it’s to some extent–there’s just a lot of bullying going on against Gordon to use that language. I mean —The Boston Globe has been bullying Gordon over this issue, and I don’t know why.&#160; This happens, right?&#160; And that’s again, not persecution, but there are, there are some targeted efforts out there.&#160; And they’re worth, pointing out, critiquing.</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE: Okay.&#160; Again, on that happy note.&#160; Ladies and gentleman, let’s thank our speaker.</p> | false | 1 | faith angle forum160is semiannual conference brings together select group 20 nationally respected journalists 35 distinguished scholars areas religion politics amp public life 160religious liberty american culture wars160 south beach florida speaker dr john inazu160associate professor law political science washington university school law st louis 160 michael cromartie michael cromartie160 well ladies gentlemen keeping tradition making sure topics topical date here160we religious liberty american culture wars professor john inazu know bio associate professor law political science washington university st louis160 law degree duke university undergrad degree duke university phd political science university north carolina chapel hill160 asked carolina duke play basketball pull for160 hes former cameron crazy160 actually painted body think undergrad stood sidelines duke fans john inazu john inazu160 record laughter michael cromartie160 yes record160 might late laughter michael cromartie160 professor inazus first book called libertys refuge160 forgotten freedom assembly published yale university press160 new book coming called confident pluralism160 surviving thriving deep difference160 confident pluralism john john inazu160 formally approved would spring 16 list happens would early 16 late 15 michael cromartie160 okay160 confident pluralism ladies gentlemen john thank much joining us timely topic john inazu160 thanks much160 great all160 assigned topic religious liberty american culture wars would say since michael gave topic taken increased significance160 usually spend march checking work watching duke play since duke went indiana year right around time rfra hard avoid work couple weeks later want actually begin narrowing topic two ways hope reflect fidelity original wording160 first note american culture wars largely means gay rights abortion least current moment particularly respect topic religious liberty want suggest two important qualifiers recasting160 first think likely see transgender issues added mix coming years going bring conceptual challenges directions160 put pressure progressive appeals abstract notions equality see kinds challenges illustrated ruth padawers fascinating article last fall transgender students wellesley college160 direction going see increased pressure conservative religious ethics insofar transgender issues raise questions distinct sexual practices160 transgender issues dont think yet migrated center culture wars conflicts second qualifier recasting narrowing focus culture wars dont think really confined sex160 sex gives us headlines questions lurking nearby transcendence autonomy technology class education race connected ways broaden conflicts160 issues deserve lot attention today given time constraints also particular focus religious liberty im going focus gay rights abortion mostly gay rights way narrow topic today note context american culture wars category religious liberty really means mostly legal policy concerns conservative catholics evangelicals160 say religious liberty challenges largely though entirely affecting conservative christians largely though entirely affecting white conservative christians least moment dont mean observation suggest religious liberty white conservative christians160 supreme courts recent religious liberty decision earlier year upheld statutory right muslim man grow religious beard prison160 history religious free exercise doctrine owes much content religious minorities like mormons christian scientists native american spiritualists course jehovahs witnesses give us free exercise case law160 faces todays prominent religious liberty cases white christians160 hosannatabor hobby lobby new mexico photographer washington florist indiana pizza makers name tried hard brainstorm clever shorthand description group came empty im going adopt label others used traditionalists160 think thats bit clunky wont bad verbally ambiguous nones laughter john inazu160 things traditionalists160 first theyre really white160 im going generalize expediency calling white traditionalists important multiethnic traditionalist institutions160 second traditionalists arent old men include substantial numbers women young people well twofold revision title religious liberty american culture wars gives us something like traditionalists ongoing conflict gay rights abortion160 perhaps hijacked michael topic reframing would like focus three challenges confronting traditionalists hope also shed light broader topic hand first challenge cultural inability traditionalists connect people faith share similar views contested cultural issues160 talk related challenge insular discourse inability traditionalists see discourse lacks traction wider culture including legal political media circles second challenge legal problem free exercise doctrine current weaknesses alternative legal doctrines like right association third challenge institutional practical concerns sustain traditionalist institutions current cultural climate lurking background challenges soon foregrounded jim crow analogy160 whether todays traditionalists equivalent segregationists particularly whether traditionalist views sexuality boundaries membership boundaries follow analogous racebased discrimination jim crow south160 comparison also foregrounds question remedy whether extraordinary legislative judicial responses jim crow deployed today160 im going call bob jones question return throughout discussion let start cultural challenge traditionalists thats insularity160 traditionalists religious believers odds progressive politics gay rights abortion160 many conservative jews muslims share social views conservative jews muslims mostly stayed culture wars traditionalists somewhat oddly dont always see allies160 one many ironies playing today tonedeafness though traditionalists civil liberties challenges american muslims confront faith challenge insularity even striking within christianity160 black evangelicals latino pentecostals socially conservative christian minority groups share many traditionalist views engaged culture wars battles part republican positions race poverty immigration always prevented groups climbing onto bandwagon religious right inability traditionalists form alliances socially conservative believers fellow christians believers faiths left lot americans without side also without voice current cultural conflicts wanting join front lines culture wars traditionalists either substantively aligned progressive sexual ethics black evangelicals exemplify traditionalist failure forge partnerships particularly light bob jones question160 efforts distinguish jim crow present day almost certainly need made level culture law160 white traditionalists unlikely make arguments themselves160 sure traditionalists supporting efforts abolition slavery later helping lead civil rights era plenty traditionalists side issues160 buildings house todays traditionalist schools housed segregationist academies160 thats part reason bob jones question carries much weight traditionalists meanwhile black evangelicals usually absent current public debates religious liberty culture wars160 ignored progressives dont want articulate differences jim crow present day ignored traditionalists failed establish meaningful relationships sense even traditionalists waiting black evangelicals figure current cultural moment draw near spirit solidarity160 guess black evangelicals pretty good handle current moment think theyre also less anxious traditionalists160 least traditionalist anxiety worry loss cultural political significance much incentive black evangelicals butt heads progressives religious otherwise160 progressives care black evangelicals say sexuality progressives least credibly claim black lives matter time160 weve seen play recently journey ferguson baltimore160 progressives religious otherwise recognized deaths young black men point something far greater individual actions isolated grand jury decisions160 traditionalists largely silent issue worse deny significance underlying issues altogether160 traditionalist response nonresponse ferguson moment gone unnoticed heighten insularity challenge traditionalists im topic insularity worth mentioning contrasting phenomenon side culture wars160 uptick think coordination lgbt advocates abortion advocates160 alliances informing underwriting legislative john inazu initiatives academic conferences amicus briefs host efforts160 partnerships striking depth well efficiency160 may theyre driven demographic trends different issues perhaps abortion advocates looking align strongly gay rights common traditionalist foe whatever reason alliance seems success number areas one progressive alliance thats worth mentioning recent warming lgbt groups big business160 wasnt long ago saw progressive outrage ideas expressive corporation citizens united hobby lobby role angies list salesforce apple indiana seems laid aside tensions least circles enough insularity relationships traditionalists forging relationships direction160 also want talk additional problem traditionalist insularity discourse seeming inability recognize discourse effectively translate broader cultural debates let precise mean give couple examples160 dont mean suggest traditionalists mute content mode expression160 contrary think discourse constraints based notions public reason political correctness deeply misguided160 traditionalists like everyone else able make arguments terms160 sense good deal traditionalist discourse selfconsciously strategy cultural engagement engagement little traction broader culture160 let mention three examples observation first gay rights context argument traditionalist institutions impose membership boundaries based sexual conduct sexual orientation160 traditionalists today focus conduct restrictions160 would welcome anyone groups ask gays lesbians abstain acting orientation would say ask unmarried heterosexuals abstain basic distinction conduct orientation theologically significant makes sense many traditionalists largely cultural legal loser160 celibate gay lesbian christians retain distinction lives far gays lesbians reject it160 2010 majority supreme court concluded conduct versus orientation distinction legally irrelevant context membership requirements private group160 think actually courts conclusion flawed particular context opposed statecentered law definition saw something like lawrence v texas different talking private group justices havent yet asked opinion point second example insular discourse implicit sometimes explicit desire traditionalists return good old days160 traditionalists argue america find less coherent age things understandable earlier era160 think truth argument dimensions important questions ask fills content something like category morality secular society traditionalists argue return coherence encounter serious problem would like return160 turns earlier times coherent african americans japanese americans religious minorities women gays lesbians160 greater awareness pluralism actually exists country puts pressure coherence also lot good traditionalists focus coherence miss good brings third example insular discourse160 traditionalists reject resist pluralism threat coherence others seem drawn particular theological visions pluralism unlikely translate broader discourse example george marsden end book 1950s argues americans adopt version abraham kuypers pluralism160 kuypers theory according marsden sees different structures society reflecting godordained ordering social reality people faiths could recognize beneficial includes various institutions authority sphere kind argument lot traction traditionalist circles goes back several decades160 nice vision far goes hinges explicitly theological premises160 marsden suggests kind pluralism although developed theological framework would words compatible many outlooks would help provide alternative culturewars mentality plagued american life past generation160 im sure160 going alternative culture wars think least need language sides understand160 arguments pluralism could dont see kuyper thats cultural insularity traditionalists160 second challenge want highlight legal doctrine would like suggest current doctrine protecting free exercise religion largely patchwork doctrine160 ministerial exception case hosannatabor 2012 recent hobby lobby decision seen wins religious liberty wins traditionalists overall trajectory religious liberty seems decline least doctrinally160 main culprit employment division v smith 1990 peyote case led federal religious freedom restoration act160 think one way think history religious liberty since 1990 patchwork response smith various statutory legal disputes dont want suggest importance religious liberty abstract ideal lost cultural political significance160 polling data suggests americans value religious liberty generally government continues advocate religious freedom around globe popular rhetorical support along lines think belies likely fact fewer people today recognize immediate need legal protections free exercise doctrine160 one reason case may religious liberty victim success160 many past challenges religious freedom longer active threats160 dont impose blasphemy laws dont force people make compelled statements belief dont impose taxes support training ministers160 changes mean practical matter many americans longer depend upon free exercise right religious liberty160 free practice religion without governmental constraints think clearest example least threatened religious believer america progressively oriented christian remains part dominant historical cultural faith united states whose views largely aligned contemporary liberal values160 hard think many aspects progressive christian belief practice confront government regulation way implicates religious liberty160 want careful here160 dont mean suggest progressive christians hold views antithetical government interests160 example many elements socalled religious left challenge american policy war criminal law immigration environment160 arguments pose questions boundaries free exercise religiously informed policy arguments religious free exercise claims also growing number americans subset nones either actually functionally nonreligious may therefore feel need free exercise protections160 group still relatively small insignificant growing160 importantly group moved almost imperceptible late 18th century sociologically significant today160 longer possible ignore nonbelievers framing normative legal religious liberty arguments particularly cases implicating establishment clause160 reality example evident growing recognition even socalled nonsectarian prayers incapable accommodating atheists today nonreligious mainstream religious progressives may less inclined worry contested boundaries free exercise least cases especially might antithetical interests indiana rfra controversy may good indicator160 consider example commentators began adding scare quotes phrase religious liberty160 one thing conclude constitutional value religious liberty outweighed another constitutional value like equality something different happening put religious liberty scare quotes sure rhetoric sides indiana controversy bordered absurd160 conservative radio host mark levin contended opponents bill hated america160 family research council president tony perkins argued revising law would gut religious freedom160 direction tim cook called indiana law effort enshrine discrimination160 kareem abduljabbar time suggested indiana rfra step toward establishing american version sharia law meanwhile crux actual legal debate seemed whether christian florists cake bakers apparently one hapless pizza joint permitted refuse provide services samesex wedding160 question unimportant importance weighed directions regardless ones view merits policy implications come close surrounding rhetoric160 think doug laycock right assert indiana rfra misunderstood people deliberately distorted lied others160 bad sign debates still come might indicate continued even growing pressures claims religious liberty hand even right decline cultural support free exercise religion religious liberty generally two important reasons think overstated mean means functional end religious liberty protections160 first supreme court continued recognize constitutional protections religious groups least insofar groups look something like churches bodies worship160 key case hosannatabor 2012 unanimous court recognized ministerial exception employment discrimination laws160 court located exception first amendments free exercise establishment clauses justices made clear ministerial exception provides absolute protection churches hire fire ministers basis160 far less clear qualifies church qualifies minister160 importantly opinion hosannatabor never really squares circle peyote case employment division v smith160 court never convincingly explains smiths rule neutral laws general applicability apply neutral law general applicability issue hosannatabor160 words protections hosannatabor gives religious groups neither precisely defined entirely coherent real protections mitigate cultural pressures free exercise rights second reason see continued protections religious free exercise shared constitutional heritage properly acknowledges religious belief practice fall squarely within civil liberties protect first amendment160 indeed religious individuals groups long paradigmatic dissent frames need rights supreme court called right differ160 much history shaped dissenting religious groups continues case today even category religious liberty losing cultural constitutional traction protections available religious groups core rights sense traditionalists better engaging issues dissent nonconformity pluralism although kuypers version pluralism160 part focus require greater attention first amendment rights speech association argued first book right assembly rights focus essentially importance dissent difference without appealing kind religious exceptionalism160 put john inazu slightly differently may values undergird speech assembly association draw history greater current cultural appeal values underlying free exercise right160 fact rights historically protected many nonreligious progressive groups particular relevance protections extended gay social clubs gay student groups early gay rights movement also doctrinal problem move rights lies right association160 may recall hosannatabor obama administration proposed right association sufficient protection church case160 nine justices rejected argument160 think part reason lack appeal lack coherence doctrine around right association mind problems doctrinal incoherence began 1984 decision called roberts v united states jaycees supreme court recognized two distinct flavors association160 intimate association expressive association160 according court intimate association intrinsic feature right association focuses highly personal relationships deep attachments commitments160 sounds promising courts drawn limits quite narrowly160 practice right intimate association extends close family relationships160 courts refused extend protections even small social groups tightly knit religious groups160 interestingly close family relationships qualify intimate associations already well protected supreme court doctrines example special protections spouses parentchild relationships160 reason right intimate association actually turns almost meaningless doesnt offer protections real groups otherwise protected160 words offers little balance civil liberties flavor association expressive association constitutional work160 basic idea group expressive eligible constitutional protection pursuing first amendment interest like speech press religion160 group words must facilitate one interests order qualify greater constitutional protection category expressive association comes corollary groups nonexpressive160 nonexpressive association obscures fact act associating expressive potential160 joining gathering speaking speaking expressive many groups might seem outside nonexpressive could fact articulate expressive intent asked legal consequences distinction expressive nonexpressive striking160 law affects nonexpressive association need pass rational basis scrutiny means almost law survive threshold160 means nonexpressive group regulated almost reason problems expressive association160 even groups qualify category always protected constitutionally160 jaycees case court concluded allmale jaycees expressive association turning minnesotas interest eradicating gender discrimination court decided expressive association claim failed160 wasnt case much analysis jaycees practically impeding interest precise policy implications eradicating gender discrimination would look like minnesota consequences significant jaycees160 meant could longer exist current form160 think reasoning underlied part courts reticence rely upon doctrine hosannatabor suggested free exercise right trouble also association might also be160 hunch really hunch association greater likelihood rehabilitated today thats largely protections could offer could benefit religious groups also nonreligious groups plausible perhaps even likely point road nonreligious groups appear culturally ascendant today one day need protections majoritarian norms let turn finally third challenge challenge traditionalist institutions160 want suggest traditionalists experiencing new level vulnerability doorsteps160 sure traditionalists felt embattled time suppose could plausibly view loss public religious displays public prayers kind challenge religion particularly people grown accustomed displays prayers return culture wars metaphor past years seen rapid change front lines war160 notwithstanding cases like recent town greece decision involving public prayer local government meeting highprofile religious liberty cases today focus free exercise establishment160 traditionalists spent past decades fighting monuments prayer discover outflanked find fallback positions attack setting aside overblown rhetoric directions seem real difference framing religious liberty american culture wars battle lines moved issues like school prayer vouchers even cake bakers florists questions whether religious student groups public university campuses whether religious colleges accredited whether local school systems accept volunteer support churches ministries160 challenges pose significant challenges traditionalist institutions especially traditionalists soon alone imposing membership leadership restrictions affect gays lesbians160 unlike genderbased distinctions continue persist lots nonreligious institutional contexts secular institutional analogue traditional views sexuality marriage seems great deal hinges bob jones question160 jim crow really proper analogy proper baseline questions raised ross douthat others going arise160 loss tax exemption traditionalist ministries closing schools social service organizations professional purging doctors lawyers counselors traditionalists particular topic want bit normative160 perhaps youve thought ive normative along ill even normative bit personal160 friend andy koppelman long supported gay rights samesex marriage called current stage culture wars battle sexuality cleanup operation160 rhetoric often strong feel times ill end like hiroo onoda japanese soldier assigned philippines world war ii refused surrender almost 30 years war ended suppose share affinities onoda im half japanese used military officer im sure ill lone holdout end war160 one thing im sure ive ever fighting war even though beliefs values largely align one side160 instead like onoda maybe im akin civilian bystander putative victors need something about160 another reason dont think im like onoda dont really feel alone160 look around see lot people lot institutions dont seem going away institutions lot good society160 education social services hospitals mercy ministries areas quick examples here160 one focus family always thought front lines culture wars youre like havent paid attention focus past years past decade work new president jim daly might surprised find160 im suggesting substantive views changed160 focus family danger mistaken protestant mainline differences modes engagement significant160 focus gone days dobson pushing colorados infamous amendment 2 days daly partnering gill foundation gay rights group help enact colorados antihuman trafficking legislation heres another example160 sit board intervarsity christian fellowship front lines campus access issues expelled handful college university campuses around country160 intervarsity turns one multiethnic traditionalist institutions160 california 70 percent students students color160 intervarsity hasnt really fighting culture wars focus elsewhere ministry missions 160since 1946 hosted conference called urbana drawn 300000 participants sent tens thousands students around globe work includes sharing christian faith also includes serving poor building infrastructure helping sick dying160 2012 half 15000 urbana participants people color160 next upcoming conference st louis end december160 youve never heard urbana let make serious invitation you160 come join see it160 come see big group traditionalists get together160 mean invitation seriously record today160 stay house want put three small children laughter john inazu160 highlight examples now160 couple months away supreme court decision likely constitutionalize staterecognized samesex marriage160 doug laycock argued brief filed cases filed support samesex petitioners religious liberty challenges traditionalists intensify160 saw preview dougs prediction exchange justice alito solicitor general sarah highlighted article last week160 justice alito raised bob jones question general verrilli said going issue think good time thinking implications bob jones question160 whether really think gordon college 2015 like bob jones 1983 intervarsity like neonazi group tim keller like grand wizard klan160 permission share analogy laughter john inazu160 think meaningful differences good time think harder rhetoric fueling debates160 think one reason think questions regardless culture wars end particular front fighting given moment going point draw lines set limiting principles want illustrate vignette story think going lead book although im totally set yet class teach wash u constitutional law around law religion160 particular case teaching establishment clause cases around school funding always really interesting pretty convoluted topic one point asked much funding government give private religious schools160 key case 1947 decision involving buses whether taxpayer dollars reimburse catholic parents busing kids catholic schools160 intellectual puzzle this160 say tax dollars pay buses textbooks prayer books bibles ministers160 say cant public roads crossing guards160 words funding state everywhere point draw line particular institutions since make business posing hypotheticals students threw one said well lets take catholic church gender norms step contemporary norms gender lets assume catholic school finds city progressive gender norms also decides wants provide crossing guards private public schools evidence fewer kids would die crosswalk160 refuse withhold dollars catholic school expected backandforth thats reason throw hypothetical actually surprised one student dug pretty firmly 160yes absolutely160 school chosen place outside bounds acceptable society entitled services state160 said well school catches fire160 fire department refuse answer call160 yes absolutely160 school try put fire outside boundaries state160 said well active shooter school160 swat team show stand wait shooter finish student said dont see sure classroom hypothetical want point internal logic students answers ways one starts premise government support unpopular dissenting unorthodox positions might desire normatively legally go way even extreme160 im suggesting practically table meant rhetorically illustratively suggest need think limiting principles come frame normative cultural legal debate around look forward questions discussion michael cromartie160 thank you160 thank john well ive already got long list here160 ej youre first pull mike emma napp everyone else here160 yeah ej dionne washington post160 thank much michael cromartie160 turn ej dionne160 thought on160 hear michael cromartie160 yeah ej dionne160 yeah160 thank presentation160 reminded made comment fuzziness law one point legal parochial school students get statefunded textbooks maps daniel patrick moynihan famously asked well atlases laughter ej dionne160 great question want sort pose series challenging hypotheticals general proposition sympathetic particularly gay marriage issue clear exemptions churches religious institutions160 obviously cant force church perform gay wedding priest orthodox rabbi cant force give basements halls that160 dont think problematic think clear first amendment right exemptions worry several things one confusing religious liberty arguments constitution exemptions accommodations state makes interest pluralism necessarily required law thats one question want put table second bothered hobby lobby case religious rights employers recognized religious liberty rights people work employers workers employees160 know ginsburgs dissent religious organizations exist foster interests persons subscribing religious faith forprofit corporations160 workers sustain operations corporations commonly drawn one religious community seems two issues raised hobby lobby case160 one one privileges owners rights doesnt really get rights employees presumably quit doesnt seem plausible me160 second many people push sponsored rfra never anticipated would read corporate business right wonder could talk second kind question wanted raise bakers florists gay marriage cases160 instance bothered well give religious exemption160 baker reads scripture antisemitic way florist sees pope antichrist160 extend religious exemption florist baker participating samesex marriage ceremony wouldnt religious exemption extend right discriminate catholic wedding jewish wedding god knows many kinds wedding160 open religious exemption door stop last point scare quotes around religious liberty im sure scare quotes maybe im sure saw david coles piece new york review back sort made point ill read here160 one problems opponents samesex marriage could credibly point anyone harmed it160 proponents contrast could point many sympathetic victims goes say focusing religiousbased objections puts human face opposition samesex marriage think quotation marks sometimes saw reflected view lost battle possibly legally depending court increasingly losing battle public opinion kind backup operation say grounds oppose culture160 critics would see tactical move principled move160 suspect last one youll strong dissent want hear would love address questions sort hobby see problems hobby lobby problem extend religious exemptions providers public services like flowers cakes open door dont know close without really going way back bob jones problems court bob jones thank john inazu160 yeah160 thanks160 thats lot questions160 im going try cover it160 one brief comment first premise made churches halls spaces160 im sure completely protected one reasons public accommodations laws nature public accommodations think implausible situations church property could designated public accommodation ej dionne160 said somebody worries indiana law would stipulate willing grant significant room accommodation explicitly religious organizations160 gets complicated get universities grant john inazu160 fact thats something think revised version indiana rfra gets closer point think youre right know exemptions versus accommodations baselines question would go back sort first principles constitutional theory decide argue whether something properly accommodation constitutionally required right mean think really important questions im sure theyre resolvable hobby lobby question really interesting one employer versus employee160 would point conundrum whether talking forprofit context religious nonprofit versus employee nonprofit church versus church employee ej dionne160 yeah john inazu160 kind binary decision160 youve got pick rights holder protect think maybe sort tocquevillian inclination democratic theory arguments would want strengthen boundaries private group civil society state pick individual group end collapsing boundary visavis state forprofit question introduces kinds really interesting normative values questions160 im sure theres clean doctrinal hook severs forprofit nonprofit160 mean one interesting things around hobby lobby people started critique corporate claims religion religious corporations always claimed free exercise rights160 churches religious corporations corporate structure new forprofit context see lot cultural legal backlash kinds claims think newer claims also mentioned read sort registering version justice scalias argument smith case road anarchy right160 allow exemptions stop go160 think theoretically open lot particularly free exercise law highly deferential sincerity claimant long sincere claim often lot deference case empirically dont lot cases suggesting thats road going happen160 dont actually know dont know cake bakers florists dont know motivations arent many theyre theyre absolutely used political purposes lots directions right theyre framing rhetorical debates people particular arent many think would surprised motives actually sort sour grapes samesex marriage policy debates160 im sure dont160 ej dionne ej dionne160 well sour grapes sort part larger movement opposed individual baker florist might exemption could come back two ways160 one is160 peyote case opening government action whereas extend kinds private actors like multiple 100 1000 terms allowable discrimination dont know open door providers public accommodation close people rationally decide well okay baker florist case gay wedding cases160 seems terms allowing new forms discrimination really could open wide door john inazu160 mean theoretically mean dont cases would bakers florists lost go baker mean whatever think baker florist move baker ibm massive corporation wants discriminate think government pretty easy way say compelling interest antidiscrimination norms thats going trump religious liberty claim160 mean youre right raise theoretical tension im sure practically empirically evidence would follow following michael cromartie160 okay160 emma green others emma green emma green theatlanticcom160 wont go long ej ill limit two questions understand impulse laughter ej dionne160160im sinner laughter emma green160 well understand impulse160 interesting160 two questions rather distinct160 first mentioned beginning comments transgender issue going one enters culture war debates interesting two reasons160 first transgender americans small percentage society certain ways symbolic battlefield actually large class people narrow class people160 second example bruce jenner interview transgender woman see russell moores reaction undermine language transgender identity basically say understand sexual identity gender work guess question becomes part culture war play especially minority group people rhetoric translate across ideological boundaries second distinct question sort related ej referring taking almost legal sphere cultural norms pluralistic belonging ability society get together cooperate160 cake bakers florists tshirt makers interesting sphere commerce people certain point view unwillingness unwillingness commerce people disagree sort ideological deeply held religious way also plays side question160 saw chickfila two years ago160 comes chickfila donated prop 8160 widespread backlash going chickfila people support gay marriage rather people oppose gay marriage think cultural implications issue played sphere commerce particular unwillingness literally business exchange goods services people opposite side ideological debate john inazu160 great160 yeah transgender think demographics small160 think way issue addressed going make big difference think lot traditionalists dont grasp complexities issue see think careless thoughtless comments lot mean think traditionalists often shoot foot speaking thinking sometimes reading mean think questions around transgender many fascinating practical policy implications follow even small subset population plays institutional policies many bathroom going plays sports teams160 binary decisions theyre zero sum sense whatever decision reached think sort carefully thoughtfully reached160 worry particular issue enters mainstream culture wars thoughtfulness wont happen real casualties real people whatever policy isnt thoughtful careful point commerce point interesting mentioned mean ways cake bakers chickfila little different one question whether going legal fine imposed one legal question boycott sense cultural question boycott chapter book coming boycotts protests boycotts fascinating think especially area write epitomize kind private collective action really need see people coming together stronger force yet also impose sort coercive force so160 ive puzzled boycotts long time say chickfila example traditionalists least especially evangelicals sort leading boycott wars long time disney starbucks chickfila mozilla direction160 think megan mcardle piece suggesting culture wars boycotts particular arent effective people consumers products driven interests160 boycott hobby lobby doesnt really pan arent lot scrapbooking liberals like sort builtin consumer preferences really render ineffective kinds culture wars boycotts see least threats boycotts indiana particular could much significant think mean sense im still sort forming book im writing mean let play perhaps counsel guidance go situations majoritarian presence boycott become particularly oppressive really fascinating examples civil rights era happening account social realities largely nonlegal question michael cromartie160 name book confident pluralism john inazu160 confident pluralism michael cromartie160 yeah like promote books michael gerson next160 right michael gerson michael gerson washington post160 yeah160 wanted get little information kuyper dead end160 idea kind principled pluralism160 ej mentioned david coleman college board spent time wheaton college cs lewis collection did160 ej dionne160 different guy michael gerson160 oh okay160 right160 right160 appreciate reference160 okay160 im talking david coleman head college board piece essentially arguing religious institutions contribute something educational process diversity process actually important value social value160 wanted throw know wanted give reasons hopeless maybe even late understand argument 20 years ago position cultural influence christians talked principled pluralism might effective argument looks like defensive operation defend certain rights maybe matter whether timing160 im curious john inazu160 timing certainly question think traditionalists rightly face criticism critiques opportunists know oh suddenly interested pluralism lets get along things turned corner160 think critiques many cases going rightly made know kuyperian stuff mean know comes american context jim skillen writing 80s 90s160 michael cromartie160 lets stop moment right give quick one paragraph summary abraham kuyper common word washington dc discourse among us is160 would like give summary would want give mike gerson give john inazu160 please michael cromartie160 abraham kuyper dutch member parliament president netherlands also theologian philosopher great influence areas christian political theory kuyper emphasized point michael made need called principled pluralism160 anyway important figure giant intellect plus politician john inazu 160yeah right160 think mean guess number different concerns kuyper one theological premises seem necessary argument work160 start something like god ordained different spheres society given government sphere church sphere forth well thats going sound intuitive people dont accept first premise think youre going scratching head say why160 mean state power160 mean god ordained maybe time kind argument would traction160 dont see today particularly going invoked traditionalists turning god language theological arguments current cultural moment160 guess thats part guess thing ive seen efforts translate kuyper happening legal scholarship legal debates years including nonreligious people tried use kuyperian framework doesnt seem work160 mean sort sets theological argument frames everything almost non sequitur says apply american society160 mean know know160 maybe sort massive cultural receptivity dont see challenge modifier principled160 mean jonathan haidt right way words work different constituencies principled lot appeal think conservatives traditionalists160 think others might wonder mean principled160 language doesnt much traction160 say people unprincipled kind dont know alliteration word seems something principled pluralism kinds traction lot circles youre mentioning havent seen gain traction elsewhere160 one know one instance really come forefront aspen institute study years ago entire report doesnt give content principled pluralism uses label title suggests need look source michael cromartie160 okay160 okay160 napp nazworth napp nazworth napp nazworth christian post160 right160 wedding vendors160 agreed said irony regard traditionalists muslims havent really building bridges forth160 irony flipside well havent seen liberals go muslim wedding vendors like theyve gone christian wedding vendors wonder think might pragmatic reasons ideological reasons160 know debate people found forth also would rfra protect wedding vendors160 havent really case yet im wondering think merits rfra whether would protected serve samesex wedding whether think would whether think john inazu160 yeah dont know160 dont know christian cake bakers dont know muslim cake bakers either160 dont know cake bakers guess dont know specifics rfra question think important one plays rhetoric indiana160 think answer dont know would come out160 know state rfras used contexts succeeded protecting vendors unanswered question rfra context160 said important indiana indiana made clear state rfra would apply forprofits private parties would cover vendors right rhetoric know nothing potential lgbt discrimination also false mean everybody behind law knew cases part issue there160 thats important part ask think protect cake baker wedding vendor put spot right160 think know dont know mean actually think tough call160 think really important values sides question160 think assuming take sincerity religious claim cases dont think sincerity questioned160 important interests parties also think talking small number cases political space im would say lets worry cake bakers wedding photographers160 right legislature would probably come compromised revised indiana legislation came napp nazworth160 microphone compromise john inazu160 revised legislation added nondiscrimination protections excluded essentially excluded forprofit businesses coverage michael cromartie160 okay160 saletan paul edwards ana saletan william saletan slate160 wanted come back something said giving examples tonedeafness arguments used traditionalists dont resonate broadly160 think first one distinction gay context identity conduct think said argument160that distinction political loser judicial loser160 alternative sense youre traditionalist group cant reject identity puts bob jones category right youre race analogy youre going lose religious liberties expressive liberties would claim dont draw distinction accept conduct still claiming stand still standing for160 whats left rationale opposing kind samesex role society including samesex marriage john inazu160 right160 think trying say internally traditionalist groups distinction going go away160 mean sort theologically central identity claim160 mostly suggesting current law distinction doesnt work culturally doesnt work much160 think actually dont think mean lot number people would say bob jones different race different actually dont think thats good argument160 think bob jones different different cultural historical context jim crow years subsequent it160 argument ends race different see lot reasons many people would come back say well race different excluding based gender sexuality anything else160 mean 2015 im pretty hurt exclusion someone hurt racial exclusion160 think difference going legal cultural traction around specifics bob jones jim crow thats really case written lot people commented becomes mean important question address important distinction made responsive want follow william saletan160 wasnt entirely persuaded im sure160 would read it160 didnt really feel like dont really understand answer seems like advising groups would say nobrainer fight160 certainly shouldnt oppose identity per se youre heading road youre essentially going acknowledge orientation like color mean way theyve come deal say know term samesex attracted samesex attracted160 happens families congregation deal draw distinction conduct concede conduct youve conceded pretty much everything john inazu160 right160 think distinction articulated traditionalist groups today would say think point supreme court disagrees160 even context private membership determination christian legal society case 2010 court said christian legal society drew exact distinction right said samesex attracted however want describe welcome conduct restriction supreme court said theyre equated law context160 thats mean say constitutional loser least current law make sense william saletan160 yeah makes sound like theyve essentially lost legally according interpretation john inazu160 well 54 decision think know comes initially justice oconnors concurrence lawrence v texas sodomy law texas case youre talking governmental law ostensibly says going conduct disproportionately affects gay men far anyone else think court right push back say distinction looks like artificial collapsed hold state higher account distinction doesnt work160 moves state context private membership group five justices court buy think actually lot work ways havent completely thought yet michael cromartie160 okay160 paul edwards here160 paul question dont want give question question wrap around something utah law laughter paul edwards paul edwards deseret news160 many aware utah began legislative session rather impressive press conference leadership church jesus christ latterday saints mormon church three apostles senior woman leader leading council church invite opportunity move forward legislation protected lgbt rights employment housing idea would also opportunities specific carveouts religious protections religious liberty protections framed significant development state legislature year wanted john really thank discussion provide observation issue insularity discourse160 move church grew experience proposition 8 may seem ironic way lds church seen major leader fighting proposition 8 california process engaged way church leadership recognized think found surprised opposition prop 8160 probably shouldnt sense didnt expect strongly would attacked directly institution quietly started discussion lgbt groups california primarily utah160 years events didnt happen concerns samesex marriage backdrop saw coming forward really seven years discussion lgbt community state think shows actually interesting development thinking lot levels ill note one opening dialogue creating better understanding important group going legislative session think lot people anticipated way talk compromise year half earlier put hold decision within state first us district court united states state utah declare samesex marriage constitutional right within state utah came forward negotiation compromise lgbt rights religious liberty put hold legislative session160 came forward lot talk ideal exemptions religious groups way done interestingly enough groups worked together instead coming carveouts kind exemption basis although within legislation important theyre important different interests probably innovative piece legislation actually equal protection kind thing around speech workplace160 employment discrimination questions came forward would play adding sexual orientation gender identity civil rights statute state also created portion protects individuals ability wont read specific legislation nonobstructive way express fundamental issues religious issues express issues related marriage sexuality workforce participating groups outside workforce may different views marriage sexuality retaliated within workplace cuts directions right160 protection arguing samesex marriage arguing equal protection clause within legislation dont quite know play out160 mean rather new160 result dialogue two organizations leading organizations table equality utah church jesus christ latterday saints involved negotiations would ultimately come forward160 so160 michael cromartie160 need turn question paul edwards160 guess question john think kind opening dialogue possible states160 utah bit unique dominant religious tradition know player sit talk another community were160 two different communities160 think kind opening part things move forward states john inazu160 mean view sort maybe little late mikes point earlier states especially might nice idea 5 years ago 10 years ago seems less politically feasible today seem utah unique case160 think one test case proposed federal enda legislation recently aclu groups pulled support of160 know think strategy wait years pass without religious exemptions makes sense me160 mean makes sense terms political sense thats likely happen years160 could couple deep red states currently lack nondiscrimination protections sexual orientation sexual identity could open sort compromise doesnt seem politically much table left compromise especially june decision supreme court policy moves follow paul edwards160 i160 think lot states without civil rights protections160 marriage one civil right lot kinds protections may want160 dont think marriage answers it160 mean judicial decision marriage provide significant backdrop doesnt dont know opens whole array civil rights protections within employment housing public160 john inazu160 might not160 depends decision written think think people waiting see160 im mean im optimistic possibility legislative compromise states particularly uniqueness utah michael cromartie160 know traditionalists happy utah decision paul edwards160 oh yeah john inazu160 yeah know talking160 michael cromartie160 speakers conference john inazu160 michael talking earlier atlantic sort map different flavors islam internal fights would nice maybe traditionalists160 mean number sort discord voices and160 michael cromartie160 ill get working map break time afternoon ill map tonight160 no160 unidentified female speaker160 want break michael cromartie160 going take break well heres want say could take short break make like 5 minutes going go 330 give 3 hours free time160 would people like take breaks keep going take short break160 hurdle back 5 minutes john inazu160 yeah michael cromartie160 okay though going take break right going take 5 minutes laughter michael cromartie160 want get david rennie youll start us break ana david rennie david rennie economist 160i two questions160 one general one160 stupid general question160 said something interesting dont think heard explain meant160 said would like see way future kind appeal principles dissent nonreligious rights expression moving away claims religious exceptionism sounded interesting sounded though ties title book least confident pluralism160 dont think know mean exactly shut dont answer doesnt suit mentioned beginning culture wars predominantly things like gay marriage also abortion160 tie things like states theyve passed laws think right states pharmacists example refuse fill prescriptions things like morningafter pill offends conscience certainly seen religious liberty movement much160a religious liberty kind issue160 differ160 mean going better traditionalists kind claim stuff thats happening gay marriage john inazu160 yeah160 let start second question160 pharmacist exemptions cases prevailed160 believe one oregon think prevail think point wrapped state rfra legislation whether state religious freedom act going protect forprofit contexts going reach cake baker also pharmacist unless theres specific carveout either protecting pharmacists one way could write statute expressly protecting cake baker context another way160 lot going statutory writing say play distinguishable depending one writes specific law question dissent confident pluralism means youll need read book160 mean im trying offer alternative account160 actually different approach kuyperian pluralism stuff thats rooted sort theological argument rooted secular liberal democratic theory ideas theories pluralism built constitutional tradition around dissent kind dissent recognizes kinds groups protect countercultural odd offensive always mean practical political question always draw line160 far160 going protect al qaeda operatives going protect cannibals going figure outer lines protect kinds groups society seen weird bad irrational step backwards think least attracts argument ive space quite time ideological implications across board argument last paper wrote labor unions use kinds principles arguments historically examples actually cut far would say today progressive direction kinds groups protected dissenting countercultural step thats intuition im trying tap idea confident pluralism rooted theological argument rooted shared american constitutional tradition160 serious questions lines drawn around boundaries michael cromartie160 okay160 get david rennie160 microphone followup160 would microphone framing race kind predecessor this160 ultimately got would looking protect kind unpopular expressions kind speech problem going actually dont see know see makes sense politically say people left also going need protections point therefore theyre available allies youre smart kind frame stuff traditionalist160 dont quite understand practically dissent defense could help say florist160 saying forget florist florist done thats going happen going end like know say nation islam saying things offensive know jews something protected160 sort analogy160 john inazu160 well mean view perhaps idiosyncratic think draw pragmatic distinction commercial noncommercial context argue tough cases160 think hospitals really tough cases160 theyre law nonprofit noncommercial entities exercise tremendous power local communities time many deeply religious commitments hospitals tough cases draw line thats commercial noncommercial focus noncommercial160 thats philosophically theoretically neat distinction seems preferable kind richard epstein libertarian argument says know doesnt go quite far lets dial back title vii protections kind argument direction says sort space left civil society private groups voluntary organizations160 thats kind space im focused michael cromartie160 okay160 lets take 5 6minute break160 thank break ana marie cox ana marie cox160the daily beast160amp160bloomberg view160 know talkingyou say one questioned sincerity claimants want question sincerity say something bothered individual personal faith watching indiana arguments unfold lot people seem take face value including opposed indiana law took face value idea legitimate religious objection may wrong may something curb somehow expression religion guess maybe theological question dont understand baking cake going infringe someones religious liberty160 like doesnt dont get even though may disagree get know questions abortion like hobby lobby160 believe abortion murder well clearly involved going moral affront right160 like clearcut line160 want part like conscientious objector war baking cake providing flowers taking pictures dont get moral affront make less christian160 sin provided cake160 would thing happened160 would thing went religion actually want point followuprelated question introduced talk talked things gay marriage abortion two things culture war right now160 think interesting theyve become linked theres obvious link except minds people assume thats culture war right160 one interesting conversations ive cpac young women active college students life160 asked gay marriage issues160 said see another cause progay marriage said liberties human begins womb tomb right said campus among friends thats uncommon view160 thats like think thats framing question160 thats culture ancillary issue ways one last thing160 asked couple questions marriage vendors couple times said isnt really marriage vendors160 something youre particularly paying attention right160 thats small subset160 youre concerned about160 talk say several times concerned know religious liberty decline right160 that160 mean160 expression religion160 freedom practice verses freedom express160 two different things conflating john inazu160 okay great160 first gay rights abortion mean part trying frame issues purposes conversation160 dont think really issue traditionalist insularity divergent views issues within traditionalists well160 right160 demographic trends reflect broader cultural trends think interesting alignments happening politically otherwise around issues progressives lots legal briefs funding sources congress sort things abortion gay rights might intuitively linked terms whats happening160 two points think go issues want clarify one say religious liberty decline im trying make doctrinal cultural observations160 actually dont even mean normative point there160 think descriptively thats happening doctrinally culturally may happening im right sort perceptions immediate threats religious liberty dont mean cash particular implications kinds cases im interested thinking cases like access campus student groups public colleges universities funding grants private schools well sorts things160 thats focus time thinking sincerity point want clarify said nobody questioning sincerity mean mean people saying kinds things twitter elsewhere160 mean legally little ive seen suggest legal claim questions sincerity160 doctrinal distinctions substantial deference religious claim assumes sincerity unless theres lots evidence contrary160 would evidence be160 well religious claimant says religious objection paying taxes people might say wait minute benefit quite bit160 get windfall dont pay taxes right160 sincerity claim questioned160 wedding baker case hard see windfall mean cake bakers going lose business probably ana marie cox160 part sincerity think interesting apparently sincere belief religious liberty impacted providing service160 thats dont get john inazu right ana marie cox160 liberty impacted providing service160 youre gay160 havent officiated it160 havent given blessing wedding john inazu160 right160 would say mean dont know cake bakers im cake baker cake baker would bake cake mean cant see reason wouldnt160 cake baker think views form compelled support expression160 whether relate identify claim falls category religious claims sincerity question comes play160 one reasons defer heavily sincerity lots religious claims impenetrable outside160 dont understand would believe that160 dont get it160 doesnt consistent understanding faith faith anything else part law says going protect religious liberty protect idiosyncratic religious liberty protect religious liberty internally inconsistent protect religious liberty step religious claims faith tradition160 thats consistently happens absent sort selfinterested claims160 courts start look skeptically theres going windfall claim michael cromartie160 quickly point tom tom gjelten tom gjelten npr quick160 posed question albert mohler president southern baptist theological seminary pointed verse first chapter romans160 first chapter romans paul lays lot arguments men unnatural acts men women unnatural acts women160 last verse says sinful engage acts sinful approve acts160 verse cited160 believe literally every verse bible seems reasonable foundation religious belief michael cromartie160 yes robert draper youre next rabbi sacks robert draper robert draper160new york times magazine160 okay sure john want get expand little something alluded regarding longstanding alliance traditionalists white evangelicals begun fray160 particularly regards gay marriage fact axiomatic black evangelical ministers front lines preserving promoting traditional marriage 160and something clearly happened outlined possibilities among things black evangelical community alienated example traditionalist silence subjects related ferguson seems like affirmative actually kind evolution towards acceptance sex marriage black evangelical community much taken place throughout rest america160 wonder believe thats simply think whatever reason suggested white traditionalists thinking black evangelical community simply sorting john inazu160 yes160 one one thing premise dont think theres fraying relationship160 dont think relationships ever existed160 think white evangelicals white traditionalists done terrible job caring black evangelicals160 thats nothing new160 theres theres recent fraying160 dont actually insight happening within black churches use phrase black evangelicals attempt small distinction within black church communities theres evangelical component probably traditionalist black mainline churches160 getting area dont know anything terms internal workings160 important theres dont think theres kind fraying160 think seeing yet another iteration failure establish relationships robert draper160 manifested among things black evangelical community forward frontal active fighting sex marriage 2015 2014 2009 2010 2011160 seem case john inazu160 yeah probably could right160 dont know reasons okay160 yeah think important broader context black evangelicals large never onboard religious right kind efforts 80s 90s robert draper160 particular issue happen working concert other160 right gay marriage john inazu160 yeah dont know mean thing id want know working concert looks like160 mean aligned position yes working similar policy goals probably dont know dont know relationships undergirding alignment look like havent seen michael cromartie160 would like say record record michael cromartie160 okay rabbi sacks andy ferguson rabbi jonathan sacks rabbi jonathan sacks160new york university yeshiva university160 serious question160 want prep remarks observation160 terrific listening this160 havent understood single word conversation american incredibly fascinating brit160 im certainly impressed david following perfectly plays differently england number one constructive terms constitutional amendments160 dont constitution leading constitutionalist said british constitution whatever cabinet secretary queen secretary write back envelope160 know kind mystical thing secondly fought supreme court160 house lords plays really really differently great britain fascinating see different cultures third think pretty common origin back 1620 know bad moment back 1776160 forgiven two cultures work way towards principle tolerance different ways160 context theres two questions id like ask number one britain every morning weird thing160 middle key news program morning britain main news program160 radio television theres wacky thing middle news give somebody else gives 2 minute 45 second religious reflection something happening news gloriously eccentric thing possibly imagine used take 3 minutes 10 years ago british bbc decided nobody could concentrate anymore 3 minutes 2 minutes 45 seconds bbc constantly trying get rid it160 unusual call olds opposed news audience keep writing saying know dont get rid favorite bit160 suppose favorite bit go something useful 2 minutes 45 seconds160 meant way starting 25 30 years ago found develop language could speak jew audience 995 percent jewish 160and communicate developed language public reasoning religious language160 result found difficult see john rawls instance develops concept inaudible intelligible everyone doesnt mean say im religious spiritual moralist like rest them160 wondered american culture supposed law constitution amendments courts160 create feeling part public conversation160 little device bbc see integrated sheikh hindu muslim communities britain provide speaker speak public didnt share views creating little slot created public language public reason includes different religious voices160 wondered american culture mitigate sharp angles law contention conflict160 thats number one number two know thing love much picture america tocqueville draws comes country france seeing religion power therefore influence160 comes america discovers power great deal influence began understand religion vital role creating cohesion civil society within democracy flourish160 see american politics last cultural war decades seems tocqueville vision masked american minds things becoming much children light children darkness dualism im wondering whether theres movement american life160 go back tocquevillian vision develop much embracing language softens contours zero sum conflicts john inazu160 mean thats lovely160 think gesturing toward need civic practices working writing book become increasingly clear thats part message there160 weeven cant agree common goodhow find common ground160 places that160 mean need exemplars need tell stories start kind basic things like speaking nicely part goes back saying earlier insularity challenge160 think recognizing directions human dimension human cost this160 know one example comes mind traditionalist circles inability see reality lgbt bullying dismissive completely frames dismissal160 mean could assent certain beliefs christianity standing people bullied abused160 one easy example theres lot room go terms finding common ground civic practices michael cromartie list here160 andy ferguson michelle andy ferguson andrew ferguson weekly standard160 first last question think problem lot traditionalists feel like theyre bullied160 thats point legal cases make160 know cake bakers going people want get married people want get married institutions behind going cake bakers160 anyway thats point point information guess160 everybody seems say ej mentioned ministers priests wouldnt able forced gay marriages free expression guess cause160 minister priest giving making marriage work way around state take away power minister priest statesanctioned marriage john inazu yeah mean think so160 thats licensing question mean stateand government entities quasigovernmental accreditation agencies licensing powerin context others andrew ferguson160 think thats next step john inazu guess option table would statebystate basis andrew ferguson160 supreme court arguments saying magistrates could law office could refuse gay marriage clerks counties refuse enforce constitutional right assume going become couple months barred office performing constitutional obligations john inazu160 yeah160 think scenarios definitely table160 california right think virtue judicial ethics codealthough could statutethat says judges california may belong organizations like boy scouts discriminatory organizations160 think current version religious exemption thats know grabs thats another example things could cashed michael cromartie160 okay michelle boorstein michelle boorstein michelle boorstein washington post160 could could explain concretely see people prepare things traditional types think actually coming road160 mentioned beginning people concerned loss tax exemptions attorneys maybe doctors counselors kind thing160 point view least beginning theres cases160 everybody kept citing three cases point reporter saying okay well people actually saying might happen people actually preparing for160 whats concrete stuff youve seen people think something going happen theyre actually preparing beyond talking it160 evidence john inazu160 yeah160 think think example gordon college good sort case study lot people paying lot attention gordon people know background story michael cromartie160 go ahead john inazu160 gordons president michael lindsay signs letter obama administrationsigned bunch folks rick warren michael wear others asking administration adds sexual orientation sexual identity executive order contracting includes religious exemption160 result signing letter gordon hits news big time theres lot media attention gordon maintains160 goes back wills conversation earlier160 maintains conduct restriction gay lesbian sexual conduct160 consequences160 michael cromartie160 heterosexual conduct john inazu160 right160 right160 looked yeah160 sexual conduct kinds key issue affects gays lesbians160 local consequences160 couple school districts severed ties gordon student teachers michael cromartie160 gordons north boston160 evangelical college michelle boorstein160 thought thought case gordon reestablished talk losing accreditation didnt actually lose accreditation john inazu160 bunch issues going on160 one accreditation regional accreditor resolved160 separate theres local public school district thats k12 right says gordon studentteachers longer welcome school district160 theres reporting congressional representative district told gordons president going try put business160 theres pressure gordon political pressure cultural pressure onboard160 thats one example another im familiar work question religious student groups public colleges university campuses whether theyre welcome not160 way come courts around question whats called allcomers policy160 organization unwilling admit student member leader group cant eligible recognized student organization160 theres theres legal maneuvering end result number traditionalist groups public private contexts moved campus think questions160 mean solicitor general united states raises says oral argument bob jones going issue think lot traditionalist institutions start take notice michelle boorstein160 case john inazu past week sex marriage case michelle boorstein160 oh seemaybe tied john inazu160 right michelle boorstein160 tax exemptions160 talked tax exemptions john inazu160 well thats bob joness question michelle boorstein160 oh see160 tried look months ago assumed would forget name organization prepares lot like financial accountability christian organizations large organization really wasnt curious prepare clients members problems turned still hypothetical far could understand it160 wasnt really know sense it160 im trying gauge concern future serious concern future things people really know saying look better prepare youre going lose john inazu160 right yeah think lot trying look see possible downstream policy consequences are160 lot people really interested likely justice kennedy writing opinion says160 mean wording opinion matter great deal lot groups160 saw windsor case justice kennedy uses word animus describe motives congress enacting doma word lot traction theres immediate legal traction supreme court cases theres also related cultural discourse traction words language phrases used160 think lot people sides issues looking carefully justice kennedy say said past michael cromartie160 ok sarah pulliam bailey point sarah pulliam bailey sarah pulliam bailey washington post160 mentioned raised weekend supreme court case likely think case go favor gay rights mean160 would impact religious institutions like gordon world vision nonprofits compared churches160 distinction even john inazu yeah160 let start saying argument made court sex marriage cases court recognize sex marriage religious liberty issues follow160 disagree argument160 mean dont think thats plausible argument sex marriagethat theres possible downstream threat religious liberty strike compelling reason oppose sex marriage think practically speaking certain culture comes play consequences far likely follow160 want sort road map brief doug laycock filed supreme court cases maps sort pretty wide array potential conflicts consequences reason think doug wrote brief number lower courts since windsor havent really paid attention full range consequences might follow talking future speculative important think remind part two question sarah pulliam bailey institutions churches john inazu right goes question ministerial exception160 mentioned supreme court given particularactually striking strongprotections churches ministers left entirely unclear categories seeing lower courts cases stretching doctrine applying concept church nonchurch entities religious nonprofits applying category minister people arent essentially ministers sort ministerial component160 thats going think hard know plays way laws law around categories precisely defined160 sort wait see case says concept160 know stretched pretty far160 think already stretched pretty far michael cromartie ana marie cox david hawkings ana marie cox160 actually first kind want offer data point discussion black evangelicals gay marriage160 looked polls true black americans still sort like americans whole accepting gay marriage theres really interesting poll came wave indiana asking providing services gay couples160 white nonhispanic asked businesses allowed refuse 52 percent 45 percent160 black nonhispanic businesses allowed refuse 36 percent160 required provide 61 percent160 hispanics allowed refuse 35 percent160 required provide 56 percent napp nazworth question say support gays gay weddings ana marie cox gay weddings160 required provide services sex weddings question160 get religion particular white evangelicals allowed refuse 71 percent versus 25160 white mainline 497 black protestant allowed refuse 37 percent versus required provide 59 percent160 thats start framing terms business allowed discriminate think minorities perk john inazu160 think thats good point also think important disentangle current question supreme court constitutionalize sex marriage question oflike bob jones questionshould private group able retain views160 havent seen polling minority voters citizens think might see distinguish sort essentially internal theological belief external question civil marriage state says marriage is160 would imagine latter question youd see lot divergence described white traditionalist view160 trying hold sort christian notion america lot minorities really never saw didnt seem christian michael cromartie okay160 david hawkings david hawkings david hawkings roll call one interesting story lines arguments hints chief justice might want get winning potentially winning side saying straightforward garden variety sex discrimination case160 guess im wondering react context discussion open whole different worms160 sideline160 anybodys going talking two years john inazu yeah thats really interesting argument think andy koppelman thats principally behind argument court think chief justice sees way write narrow decision might interest think joins majority gets write opinion also matters160 two parts interesting thing sex discrimination sort point made earlier going foreseeable future kinds secular analogs religious sex discrimination right sororities fraternities strip clubs athletic teams160 mean lot instances sex discrimination society cultural matter theres going sort outlier religious groups question question sexual orientation sexuality saletan decision comes grounds justice roberts asking sex discrimination160 affect religious liberty question opposed come john inazu think think religious liberty implications think going driven largely language words court uses regardless legal agreement reaches mean also arguments one find equal protection argument versus substantive due process kind argument there160 amount legal arguments court cases pretty overwhelming160 think sense precise legal grounds going words like animus bigotry160 whether words included opinion going drive downstream religious liberty challenges going cultural well legal160 thats sense160 look skeptical saletan yeah160 mean legally doesnt make sense said160 politically makes lot sense160 weird institution thats supposed judicial branch political branch sort words adjectives sentimental words get thrown decision driving factor decisions downstream160 surprises john inazu surprises michael cromartie surprise saletan160 thought whole point court system grounds rational part get away jonathan haidt view world get back sort know notion rationality argument thats filled logic grounds court makes bases opinion would drives cases downstream160 otherwise know seems odd paying attention think way explained cases term think mentioned term animus included justice kennedys opinion inaudible paper trail see drove decision subsequently john inazu windsor kennedy uses term animus160 see lower courts postwindsor picking term using mean im think im trying suggest particular illustration supreme court writes decisions legal consequences cultural signals follow160 mean think complexities constitutional argument court right really complicated160 actually area law specialize im pretty confounded legal intricacies behind arguments160 thats say view one way other160 mean im legitimately confounded come legal doctrine160 imagine read doctrinal analysis may may understand it160 may may agree it160 rhetorical framing analysis make big difference think downstream160 thats mean wherever fall issues issues seems descriptively true collectively ceded lot authority moral authority supreme court lots issues160 cuts ways affect know people differently depending issues160 seems supreme court lot moral authority moral authority plays words well doctrinal arguments michael cromartie emma get ask last question session emma green emma green160my question given weve seen massive shifts public opinion towards sex marriage especially thats brought peoples personal acquaintances know knowing family member friend changes peoples viewpoints160 fact said cases cake bakers tshirt makers florists actually quite limited160 much rhetoric persecution actually something thats pushed last remaining cultural beliefs remnants culture warriors160 really actually feeling within american public writ large persecuted john inazu yeah160 think theres anxiety160 hear persecution language lot iim thinking back anas comment mean one could understandthe fact first session heard people beheadedthats persecution160 people talk persecution context talked today really bristle think rhetorically problematic also think theologically wrong wave persecution flag possible persecution could come day160 mean dont think beheading possible could targeted uncompromising challenges people160 think know memories pizza example come pretty close people kind beating poor pizza ownersi think kind ambushed making statement160 interestingly theres sort counter backlash theres gofundme site gives bunch money especially first session today really hard put persecution words around types stuff talking michael cromartie160 word anxiety might better word john inazu yeah theres lot anxiety may warranted think unwarranted160 yeah id much rather talk anxiety persecution emma green well interesting phenomenon maybe comment particularly within christian context legitimately christians world persecuted killed consequences isis africa places seems difficult guess strange christian leaders advocates know christian evangelical community enormously influential trafficking around world trying fight actual genuine christian persecution around world language united states political context talk things like forced bake cake160 seems like difficult hold ideas head time160 christian leaders inaudible thinkers seem john inazu yeah160 think thats right160 mean agree you160 another example maybe mean maybe tone deafness160 throw another example talk traditionalists circles new minority160 think also tone deaf wrong 160i mean circumstances circumstances traditionalist views minority views perhaps marginalized mean look sort minority populations united states confronted long way christians minority160 thats another example think language pretty tone deaf160 hard rhetoric sides ratchets kind argument michael cromartie nadine nadine epstein nadine epstein moment magazine160 really start religious leaders start lawyers looking cases way incrementally build know larger campaign larger legal political campaign john inazu yeah160 mean seen persecution language legal briefs160 mean possible nadine epstein160 mean cake bakers isnt sort legal legal cases built make bigger argument160 didnt come like come clergy upset this160 know heard people community congregation160 literally come lawyers coming outside going hey something use john inazu yeah dont know160 interesting comes interest group lawyering theres kinds ofits directionsto find right plaintiffs160 actually dont know cases started might started interest group lawyers religious liberty firms might started lawsuit160 mean cases get started lots different ways160 mean im cake baker get sued antidiscrimination law dont think thats first move itd hard tie strategic political effort160 hand religious interest group advocacy firm argument 160but dont know started michael cromartie one thing want session come word thats persecution maybe little stronger anxiety160 mean gordon college almost lost accreditation would lost entire history school would decimated week saved160 thats persecution little anxiety andrew ferguson also didnt invent language persecution160 people defend traditional marriage consistently called haters160 didnt invent language discrimination persecution places used used them160 seems sort rich think otherwise160 fault sense160 point gordon college160 livelihood line right worry little stuff john inazu yeah case gordon example wrote pushed back strongly efforts gordon abuse language like well cant remember160 use language persecution there160 think extenttheres lot bullying going gordon use language mean boston globe bullying gordon issue dont know why160 happens right160 thats persecution targeted efforts there160 theyre worth pointing critiquing michael cromartie okay160 happy note160 ladies gentleman lets thank speaker | 10,718 |
<p>WASHINGTON — A Democratic senator held the Senate floor through the night and was still going Wednesday in an attention-grabbing talk-a-thon highlighting his party’s opposition to President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch.</p>
<p>But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell claimed the votes necessary to change Senate rules and thwart the Democratic filibuster in a showdown that could alter the course of the Senate and the court.</p>
<p>Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley started talking Tuesday evening and was still going more than 13 hours later as he accused Gorsuch of siding with corporations over regular people, likening Gorsuch’s approach to that of Antonin Scalia, the justice who died last year. Though Scalia died 14 months ago, Republicans held the seat open so President Donald Trump could fill it, sparking enduring Democratic fury.</p>
<p>Merkley stood in front of a blow-up of the preamble to the Constitution, still talking Wednesday morning.</p>
<p />
<p>He said Gorsuch “is much like his idol and role model Antonin Scalia and other far-right conservatives on the Supreme Court. And while this unbalanced approach might make for interesting reading the courtroom is not an academic paper each case involves real people with real problems.”</p>
<p>Merkley’s lengthy speech made for drama but had no chance to change the outcome. In votes set for Thursday, Democrats will try to block Gorsuch’s confirmation, but McConnell will then change Senate rules to lower the threshold required to advance Supreme Court nominees from 60 votes to a simple majority in the 100-member Senate.</p>
<p>“They seem determined to head into the abyss,” the Kentucky Republican said of Democrats as debate began Tuesday over Judge Neil Gorsuch’s nomination. “They need to reconsider.”</p>
<p>Democrats blamed Republicans for pushing them to attempt a nearly unheard of filibuster of a qualified Supreme Court pick. Forty-four Democrats intend to vote against proceeding to final confirmation on Gorsuch, which would be enough to block him under the Senate’s existing parliamentary rules that require 60 votes to advance a nomination.</p>
<p>But McConnell intends to act unilaterally with the rest of the 51 other members of the GOP Senate conference and change the rules to eliminate the 60-vote threshold so that it would require just a simple majority to install Gorsuch on the high court bench, as well as all future Supreme Court nominees. Asked if he has the votes to do that, given misgivings voiced by many Republicans, McConnell answered simply “yes.”</p>
<p>Democrats tried mightily to keep the focus on Republicans’ plans to change Senate rules, rather than on their own plans to obstruct a nominee who would likely have gotten onto the court easily with no filibuster in earlier, less contentious political times.</p>
<p>Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York said, “Senator McConnell would have the world believe that his hands are tied. That the only option after Judge Gorsuch doesn’t earn 60 votes is to break the rules, to change the rules. That could not be further from the truth.”</p>
<p>In fact, a Senate rules change does appear to be the lone route that Republicans have to put Gorsuch on the court. And despite claims from Schumer and others that Trump and Republicans could go back to the drawing board and come up with a more “mainstream” nominee, it seems unlikely that any nominee produced by Trump would win Democrats’ approval.</p>
<p>On Tuesday evening McConnell officially filed a “cloture” motion, the procedural step designed to end debate on a nomination and bring it to a final vote. That started the clock toward a showdown on Thursday, when Democrats are expected to try to block Gorsuch, at which point Republicans would respond by enacting the rules change. The change is known on Capitol Hill as the “nuclear option” because of the potential repercussions for the Senate and the court.</p>
<p>For the Senate, it would mean that future Supreme Court nominees could get on the court without bipartisan support, potentially leading to a more ideologically polarized court. More immediately, Gorsuch’s confirmation to fill the vacancy on the court created by Scalia’s death would restore the conservative voting majority that existed before Scalia’s death and could persist or grow for years to come.</p>
<p>And for the Senate, lawmakers of both parties bemoaned the further erosion of their traditions of bipartisanship and consensus. Some were already predicting that they would end up eliminating the 60-vote requirement for legislation, as well as nominations. But McConnell pledged Tuesday that this would not happen on his watch.</p>
<p>Gorsuch now counts 55 supporters in the Senate: the 52 Republicans including McConnell, along with three moderate Democrats from states that President Donald Trump won last November — Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota and Joe Donnelly of Indiana. A fourth Senate Democrat, Michael Bennet from Gorsuch’s home state of Colorado, has said he will not join in the filibuster against Gorsuch but has not said how he will vote on final passage.</p>
<p>Gorsuch, 49, is a 10-year veteran of a federal appeals court in Denver where he’s compiled a highly conservative record that’s led Democrats to complain that he too often sides with corporations without regard to the humanity of the plaintiffs before him.</p> | false | 1 | washington democratic senator held senate floor night still going wednesday attentiongrabbing talkathon highlighting partys opposition president donald trumps supreme court nominee neil gorsuch senate majority leader mitch mcconnell claimed votes necessary change senate rules thwart democratic filibuster showdown could alter course senate court oregon sen jeff merkley started talking tuesday evening still going 13 hours later accused gorsuch siding corporations regular people likening gorsuchs approach antonin scalia justice died last year though scalia died 14 months ago republicans held seat open president donald trump could fill sparking enduring democratic fury merkley stood front blowup preamble constitution still talking wednesday morning said gorsuch much like idol role model antonin scalia farright conservatives supreme court unbalanced approach might make interesting reading courtroom academic paper case involves real people real problems merkleys lengthy speech made drama chance change outcome votes set thursday democrats try block gorsuchs confirmation mcconnell change senate rules lower threshold required advance supreme court nominees 60 votes simple majority 100member senate seem determined head abyss kentucky republican said democrats debate began tuesday judge neil gorsuchs nomination need reconsider democrats blamed republicans pushing attempt nearly unheard filibuster qualified supreme court pick fortyfour democrats intend vote proceeding final confirmation gorsuch would enough block senates existing parliamentary rules require 60 votes advance nomination mcconnell intends act unilaterally rest 51 members gop senate conference change rules eliminate 60vote threshold would require simple majority install gorsuch high court bench well future supreme court nominees asked votes given misgivings voiced many republicans mcconnell answered simply yes democrats tried mightily keep focus republicans plans change senate rules rather plans obstruct nominee would likely gotten onto court easily filibuster earlier less contentious political times senate minority leader chuck schumer new york said senator mcconnell would world believe hands tied option judge gorsuch doesnt earn 60 votes break rules change rules could truth fact senate rules change appear lone route republicans put gorsuch court despite claims schumer others trump republicans could go back drawing board come mainstream nominee seems unlikely nominee produced trump would win democrats approval tuesday evening mcconnell officially filed cloture motion procedural step designed end debate nomination bring final vote started clock toward showdown thursday democrats expected try block gorsuch point republicans would respond enacting rules change change known capitol hill nuclear option potential repercussions senate court senate would mean future supreme court nominees could get court without bipartisan support potentially leading ideologically polarized court immediately gorsuchs confirmation fill vacancy court created scalias death would restore conservative voting majority existed scalias death could persist grow years come senate lawmakers parties bemoaned erosion traditions bipartisanship consensus already predicting would end eliminating 60vote requirement legislation well nominations mcconnell pledged tuesday would happen watch gorsuch counts 55 supporters senate 52 republicans including mcconnell along three moderate democrats states president donald trump last november joe manchin west virginia heidi heitkamp north dakota joe donnelly indiana fourth senate democrat michael bennet gorsuchs home state colorado said join filibuster gorsuch said vote final passage gorsuch 49 10year veteran federal appeals court denver hes compiled highly conservative record thats led democrats complain often sides corporations without regard humanity plaintiffs | 516 |
<p>What if you were a grown adult working a seemingly mundane bureaucratic job, caring for your comatose wife, and you learned that there existed not only another version of yourself but of the whole world? Suddenly questions of true self, identity, and nature versus nurture would permeate even the simplest everyday interactions. At least, that is what happens to Howard Silk (J.K. Simmons) in Starz’s new drama, “ <a href="http://variety.com/t/counterpart/" type="external">Counterpart</a>,” a series designed around the “nostalgia of a classic spy novel with a science fiction element sprinkled over it,” per creator and executive producer <a href="http://variety.com/t/justin-marks/" type="external">Justin Marks</a>.</p>
<p>Inspired by his childhood reading of John le Carre and Graham Greene, Marks deconstructed the “tropes, conventions and language” of the thriller genre as the landscape on which to build a character-driven show that explores multiple versions of its characters in its two worlds — worlds that started out similar but whose history diverged, resulting in different advancements in technology and different behaviors in its version of the people from Howard’s world.</p>
<p>“You’ve got a whole different narrative to the other side based on world history that’s different for the last few decades,” Marks explains. “What we realized was rather than servicing a different underlying aesthetic between both worlds, we should let aesthetics come out of the choices we made in the story on the other side. So if there are different rules about public health on the other side, how does that manifest itself in terms of costumes? Same with technology: why do their cell phones look different? Well, it’s because they have a different timeline of smartphone development than we do.”</p>
<p>Noting that he prefers to “build a world and turn off all the lights and hand the audience a flashlight,” Marks says that it is important to him to never try to intentionally confuse the audience as to what world they are in or play the elements of a world as a twist. Instead, he and his production team worked hard to create visual clues to aid with centering the audience in any given scene, even when action moves fast.</p>
<p>“The lighting is cooler over there because it’s all LED bulbs because they are more energy efficient. On our side we use a warmer Tungsten bulb,” he points out. “Also, we try to build, especially in the first three to four episodes, a rhythm of cross-cutting. We’re always going to give you a transition or an understanding of what that is or play out a story before we cut back to some other place. I think that’s important because when you’re dealing with different worlds or different versions of one character, it can take the audience out of it if you don’t find the technical choices that really draw distinction.”</p>
<p>Howard learns about the existence of the other version of himself (called Howard Prime in the show and also played by Simmons) early in the premiere episode, driving the questions of identity and nature versus nurture that executive producer <a href="http://variety.com/t/jordan-horowitz/" type="external">Jordan Horowitz</a> says are at the crux of the show.</p>
<p>“The answer to ‘Why are there two sides?’ is where a hard science fiction show would drive because it is a big concept, but the human element inside of it and the implications of it existing was always more compelling to us. ‘OK so it exists but where do we go next?’” Horowitz says. “Resources were allocated in different places, and we may be genetically identical but because of our circumstance, one aspect of our personality was developed and another was repressed.”</p>
<p>Just as the worlds appear different, so do Howard and Howard Prime — simply by the way in which they carry themselves, which allows Simmons to tap into different tools to embody each individual man. Although Simmons says that he considered “losing or gaining 20 pounds” to physically differentiate the men, the production schedule, which often had him flitting between both characters just hours apart, did not allow for that. Instead, he relied solely on their psychologies and emotions to set them apart. “It just became a question of how life has beaten down or attacked these characters in different ways and how it’s sort of empowered them in different ways,” he says.</p>
<p>Although both versions of Howard were born of the same exact genetics and had the same experiences for the first few decades of their lives, the last several decades, when their worlds’ histories diverged, is where they began to “peel off” from each other.</p>
<p>As time goes on, though, Simmons reveals that the Howards find “how similar they actually are” at their core, despite the different circumstances that have led them to very different behaviors and personality traits. “Every new piece of information Howard gets is elucidating and mind-blowing,” Simmons notes. “There can’t help but be a butterfly effect to his learning new information and being changed by it.”</p>
<p>“The act of observing changes the experiment in some way,” Marks adds. “It’s a chance to stand outside of yourself and see yourself under a different set of circumstances and then use that to say, “If that’s me, here, then do I truly know myself?’”</p>
<p>Howard won’t only be challenged by the realization of his own personal double but also of the fact that his wife Emily (Olivia Williams) should exist in the other world, as well. While he and Howard Prime are tasked to work together, temptation to find out more about the other version of Emily and what their relationship is like complicates things.</p>
<p>“We see this, in a lot of ways, as a love rectangle between two versions of the same marriage,” says Marks. “The regret that comes from different members of each version really drives the whole show. There are questions of ‘Could you fall in love with a version of your significant other that’s not your significant other? What is the best version of the self, and what is the best fit? How well does one know who they’re really married to, and what do you learn about that person by meeting their other?”</p>
<p>Adds Marks, “There are a lot of twists that come down the pike!”</p>
<p>“ <a href="http://variety.com/2017/tv/news/counterpart-starz-stephen-rea-richard-schiff-sarah-bolger-1201963913/" type="external">Counterpart</a>” will get a special premiere Dec. 10 at 9 p.m. on Starz and then air the rest of its nine-episode season starting in January.</p> | false | 1 | grown adult working seemingly mundane bureaucratic job caring comatose wife learned existed another version whole world suddenly questions true self identity nature versus nurture would permeate even simplest everyday interactions least happens howard silk jk simmons starzs new drama counterpart series designed around nostalgia classic spy novel science fiction element sprinkled per creator executive producer justin marks inspired childhood reading john le carre graham greene marks deconstructed tropes conventions language thriller genre landscape build characterdriven show explores multiple versions characters two worlds worlds started similar whose history diverged resulting different advancements technology different behaviors version people howards world youve got whole different narrative side based world history thats different last decades marks explains realized rather servicing different underlying aesthetic worlds let aesthetics come choices made story side different rules public health side manifest terms costumes technology cell phones look different well different timeline smartphone development noting prefers build world turn lights hand audience flashlight marks says important never try intentionally confuse audience world play elements world twist instead production team worked hard create visual clues aid centering audience given scene even action moves fast lighting cooler led bulbs energy efficient side use warmer tungsten bulb points also try build especially first three four episodes rhythm crosscutting always going give transition understanding play story cut back place think thats important youre dealing different worlds different versions one character take audience dont find technical choices really draw distinction howard learns existence version called howard prime show also played simmons early premiere episode driving questions identity nature versus nurture executive producer jordan horowitz says crux show answer two sides hard science fiction show would drive big concept human element inside implications existing always compelling us ok exists go next horowitz says resources allocated different places may genetically identical circumstance one aspect personality developed another repressed worlds appear different howard howard prime simply way carry allows simmons tap different tools embody individual man although simmons says considered losing gaining 20 pounds physically differentiate men production schedule often flitting characters hours apart allow instead relied solely psychologies emotions set apart became question life beaten attacked characters different ways sort empowered different ways says although versions howard born exact genetics experiences first decades lives last several decades worlds histories diverged began peel time goes though simmons reveals howards find similar actually core despite different circumstances led different behaviors personality traits every new piece information howard gets elucidating mindblowing simmons notes cant help butterfly effect learning new information changed act observing changes experiment way marks adds chance stand outside see different set circumstances use say thats truly know howard wont challenged realization personal double also fact wife emily olivia williams exist world well howard prime tasked work together temptation find version emily relationship like complicates things see lot ways love rectangle two versions marriage says marks regret comes different members version really drives whole show questions could fall love version significant thats significant best version self best fit well one know theyre really married learn person meeting adds marks lot twists come pike counterpart get special premiere dec 10 9 pm starz air rest nineepisode season starting january | 521 |
<p>Some time ago, <a href="http://variety.com/t/ai-weiwei/" type="external">Ai Weiwei</a>’s fame eclipsed his art, so what he does with that fame really does matter. In his first feature-length documentary (he’s made video installations in the past), the Chinese dissident stamps the international refugee crisis with his imprimatur, lending his name to the cause in the hope of raising awareness of just how serious the calamity has become. This leads to several problems, not least of which is that if you need a celebrity to tell you there’s a crisis, you really haven’t been paying attention. Perhaps Ai knew that, because “ <a href="http://variety.com/t/human-flow/" type="external">Human Flow</a>” is basically Refugees for Dummies, a primer on global displacement with theatrical releases all lined up and an Amazon deal that’s bound to see significantly more traffic than box office cash registers or, crucially, refugee NGOs.</p>
<p>The numbers are impressive: shot in more than 20 countries, with 25 film crews and featuring a score of experts involved in humanitarian aid, “Human Flow” must have been a logistical nightmare for the fixers on the ground. The documentary spans the globe, from Bangladesh to Iraq, Kenya to Mexico, boasting expansive drone sequences of refugee camps from high in the sky, distressing images of huddled survivors being helped off boats, and lots of shots of Ai, mingling with refugees. Missing however is any sense of the people behind the word “refugee.” As Hanan Ashrawi cogently states, being labeled a refugee robs you of your individuality. You become a number, not a person, just an anonymous digit in the numbing lists constantly scrawled across newscasts or, for that matter, “Human Flow,” which names on screen all the experts yet barely grants the same dignity to the men and women they’re advocating for.</p>
<p>Quotes from the New York Times, Die Zeit, Newsweek, etc. punctuate the flow of information as Ai and his crews shift from refugees coming into Europe by sea to the desperate thousands trapped in camps located in some of the world’s most inhospitable regions. The scandal of Macedonia’s closed borders, which led to similar closures in Hungary, Serbia and beyond, gets a look-in before moving on to the 75,000 refugees trapped along the Jordanian border. A brief mention of the misery within poorly outfitted camps leads to a short discussion of the significantly worse problems of refugees living outside organized shelters.</p>
<p>Maha Yahya, from the Carnegie Middle East Center, makes the connection between loss of dignity and the ease with which young men and women without hope can so easily fall prey to radicalization. From there, the documentary moves to Gaza and then Amir Khalil and the Four Paws organization, helping animals in distressed situations around the world. The problem of internal refugees is touched on in Afghanistan, where people encouraged to return are denied the right to reoccupy their former lands, instead forced into urban poverty. There’s a small bit on Mexico, and a little coverage of Dadaab, the world’s largest refugee camp, located in Kenya. Oddly absent is any mention of the Sahrawi refugee camps in Algeria, though perhaps George Clooney’s admirably under-the-radar involvement there made it less attractive for another celebrity to take a look.</p>
<p>Interspersed with all this is Ai himself, cropping up regularly to play with kids, cook kebabs for refugees, react to forceful statements by Princess Dana Firas, and comfort a veiled woman who breaks down on camera. Yes, Ai stands #withrefugees, which is an admirable Twitter keyword yet by making this a self-described “personal journey,” he distracts from the real issues and turns the documentary into just another famous person’s endorsement of the latest humanitarian bandwagon. His motives are unquestionably genuine (this is a man who’s bravely fought an authoritarian regime and consistently defends the freedom of expression), but by insisting on his presence, the documentary becomes little more than a feature segment on a news program using a celebrity as a hook. Lost among the bulletins and traveling shots is any sense of the individuals whose distinctiveness is eliminated under the crushing word “refugee.”</p>
<p>Cinematically there are moments of true compositional beauty, especially at the start when stately images of a boat at sea (aesthetically attractive and practically devoid of meaning) shift to rougher sequences with a greater sense of urgency. Yet perhaps the large number of cinematographers is the reason why there’s nothing especially distinctive about the package, nothing to tell you this is the work of the most recognizable living artist of the moment. Well, recognizable by his figure at least.</p>
<p>Reviewed at Cinema Adriano, Rome, Aug. 22, 2017. (In Venice film festival – competing.) Running time: 140 MIN.</p>
<p>(Documentary – Germany-Italy) A Participant Media, Rai Cinema production in association with AC Films. (International sales: Lionsgate International, London.) Produced by Ai Weiwei, Chin-chin Yap, Heino Deckert. Executive producers, Andy Cohen, Jeff Skoll, Diane Weyermann.</p>
<p>Director: Ai Weiwei. Camera (color): Ai Weiwei, Murat Bay, Christopher Doyle, Huang Wenhai, Konstantinos Koukoulis, Renaat Lambeets, Li Dongxu, Lv Hengzhong, Ma Yan, Johannes Waltermann, Xie Zhenwei, Zhang Zanbo. Editor: Niels Pagh Andersen. Music: Karsten Fundal.</p>
<p>Ai Weiwei, Muhammad Hassan, Boris Cheshirkov, Ustaz Rafik, Peter Bouckaert, Filippo Grandi, Princess Dana Firas, Hanan Ashrawi, Abdullah Mahmoud, Cem Terzi, Tanya Chapuisat, Maha Yahya, Walid Jumblatt, Hagai El-Ad, Amir Khalil, Wella Kouyou, Marin Din Kajdom, Marin Din Kajdomcaj, Maya Ameratunga, Ahmed Shuja, Pascal C. Thirion, Maria Kipp, Ioannis Mouzalas, Gabriela Soraya Vázquez, Kemal Kirisci, Mohammad Fares. (English, Arabic, Farsi, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Kurdish, Rohingya, Spanish, Turkish, Pashtun dialogue)</p> | false | 1 | time ago ai weiweis fame eclipsed art fame really matter first featurelength documentary hes made video installations past chinese dissident stamps international refugee crisis imprimatur lending name cause hope raising awareness serious calamity become leads several problems least need celebrity tell theres crisis really havent paying attention perhaps ai knew human flow basically refugees dummies primer global displacement theatrical releases lined amazon deal thats bound see significantly traffic box office cash registers crucially refugee ngos numbers impressive shot 20 countries 25 film crews featuring score experts involved humanitarian aid human flow must logistical nightmare fixers ground documentary spans globe bangladesh iraq kenya mexico boasting expansive drone sequences refugee camps high sky distressing images huddled survivors helped boats lots shots ai mingling refugees missing however sense people behind word refugee hanan ashrawi cogently states labeled refugee robs individuality become number person anonymous digit numbing lists constantly scrawled across newscasts matter human flow names screen experts yet barely grants dignity men women theyre advocating quotes new york times die zeit newsweek etc punctuate flow information ai crews shift refugees coming europe sea desperate thousands trapped camps located worlds inhospitable regions scandal macedonias closed borders led similar closures hungary serbia beyond gets lookin moving 75000 refugees trapped along jordanian border brief mention misery within poorly outfitted camps leads short discussion significantly worse problems refugees living outside organized shelters maha yahya carnegie middle east center makes connection loss dignity ease young men women without hope easily fall prey radicalization documentary moves gaza amir khalil four paws organization helping animals distressed situations around world problem internal refugees touched afghanistan people encouraged return denied right reoccupy former lands instead forced urban poverty theres small bit mexico little coverage dadaab worlds largest refugee camp located kenya oddly absent mention sahrawi refugee camps algeria though perhaps george clooneys admirably undertheradar involvement made less attractive another celebrity take look interspersed ai cropping regularly play kids cook kebabs refugees react forceful statements princess dana firas comfort veiled woman breaks camera yes ai stands withrefugees admirable twitter keyword yet making selfdescribed personal journey distracts real issues turns documentary another famous persons endorsement latest humanitarian bandwagon motives unquestionably genuine man whos bravely fought authoritarian regime consistently defends freedom expression insisting presence documentary becomes little feature segment news program using celebrity hook lost among bulletins traveling shots sense individuals whose distinctiveness eliminated crushing word refugee cinematically moments true compositional beauty especially start stately images boat sea aesthetically attractive practically devoid meaning shift rougher sequences greater sense urgency yet perhaps large number cinematographers reason theres nothing especially distinctive package nothing tell work recognizable living artist moment well recognizable figure least reviewed cinema adriano rome aug 22 2017 venice film festival competing running time 140 min documentary germanyitaly participant media rai cinema production association ac films international sales lionsgate international london produced ai weiwei chinchin yap heino deckert executive producers andy cohen jeff skoll diane weyermann director ai weiwei camera color ai weiwei murat bay christopher doyle huang wenhai konstantinos koukoulis renaat lambeets li dongxu lv hengzhong yan johannes waltermann xie zhenwei zhang zanbo editor niels pagh andersen music karsten fundal ai weiwei muhammad hassan boris cheshirkov ustaz rafik peter bouckaert filippo grandi princess dana firas hanan ashrawi abdullah mahmoud cem terzi tanya chapuisat maha yahya walid jumblatt hagai elad amir khalil wella kouyou marin din kajdom marin din kajdomcaj maya ameratunga ahmed shuja pascal c thirion maria kipp ioannis mouzalas gabriela soraya vázquez kemal kirisci mohammad fares english arabic farsi french german greek hungarian kurdish rohingya spanish turkish pashtun dialogue | 586 |
<p>The smoke, the flames, the aching lungs, the evacuations. They’re summertime facts of life in the U.S. West, where every wildfire season competes with memories of previous destruction.</p>
<p>This year was supposed to be mild after an extremely wet winter and spring but has ended up one of the worst in U.S. history in land burned. The foliage that sprouted from previous rain and snow has gone bone-dry in intense heat, feeding flames in places that have not seen downpours in months and strangling cities with smoke.</p>
<p>The biggest fires came a little later than usual in some states, after Labor Day, when the fire season traditionally starts to peter out.</p>
<p>A look at the fires:</p>
<p>OREGON</p>
<p>It’s been weeks since Maryjane Carlson has been able to relax.</p>
<p>The artist lives in Brookings, a small city along the southern Oregon coast that’s threatened by one of the nation’s largest wildfires. Carlson and her neighbors never know when the blaze is going to move closer to the wooded town.</p>
<p>“It’s overwhelming,” she said Wednesday. “It’s kind of like living in a war zone.”</p>
<p>In addition to the fear of the flames, smoke never leaves. An asthmatic, Carlson had to buy an air purifier and sometimes covers her face with a mask.</p>
<p>Thousands of residents have evacuated as firefighters battle blazes statewide, including one devastating hiking trails and waterfalls in the scenic Columbia River Gorge.</p>
<p>Officials expect the fire near Brookings to burn for at least another month. The weather is a wild card in a region accustomed to rain and fog. If it’s hot and dry, it will be a scary September.</p>
<p>“We don’t know what the weather’s going to do, and half the problem is that uncertainty,” Carlson said.</p>
<p>MONTANA</p>
<p>Darinda Yoder wishes she had not waited so long to evacuate her home near Montana’s border with Canada.</p>
<p>If she had left earlier, she would not have the terrifying memory of flames rushing down a mountain toward the state’s oldest Amish community this weekend.</p>
<p>“The fire came down so fast they almost didn’t get us out,” Yoder told the Missoulian newspaper. “I don’t think it would have affected me the way it is now if I’d not seen the fire.”</p>
<p>It has burned 10 homes and 30 other buildings and threatened a community on the western shore of Lake Koocanusa on Wednesday. Some 187 residents have fled West Kootenai, with most staying with families on the lake’s eastern shore or in recreational vehicles.</p>
<p>It’s among dozens of fires that have forced people from their homes, destroyed residences and filled the sky with smoke for months statewide.</p>
<p>WASHINGTON</p>
<p>Local recreationists and tourists mourned damage to popular hiking trails and campsites from a wildfire near Mount Rainier National Park.</p>
<p>It more than doubled in size to 68 square miles (175 square kilometers) and closed all backcountry trails on the east side of the iconic park.</p>
<p>Steffen Rausch told Seattle news station KIRO-TV that he was saddened the fire closed 70 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail, which runs from Canada to Mexico, near Mount Rainier.</p>
<p>“Because if you are going to do PCT, you want to do as much of the PCT as you can,” said Rausch, a German who had hiked from the Mexico border to Washington.</p>
<p>Rangers worked to alert hikers to leave the area. Some campers were told to have their gear packed.</p>
<p>Smoke swathed areas from Seattle to Spokane, where the air Wednesday was rated as hazardous.</p>
<p>IDAHO</p>
<p>Catholic nuns living at the Monastery of St. Gertrude can normally see across an entire prairie to the Bitterroot Mountains.</p>
<p>But they were hard-pressed Wednesday to see the road leading to the monastery in the city of Cottonwood amid heavy smoke.</p>
<p>“Everything is just a big haze,” Sister Placida Wemhoff said. “Our eyes smart and sting.”</p>
<p>Cottonwood had the unwanted distinction of having the worst air quality in the nation for much of Wednesday, the Environmental Protection Agency said.</p>
<p>Wemhoff would normally be putting the flowerbeds to rest for the winter but had to halt the work. Most of the nuns are older and particularly at risk from the hazardous air quality.</p>
<p>“The sisters are trying to avoid heavy work where you puff and pant,” Wemhoff said.</p>
<p>Idaho’s largest wildfire is being allowed to burn in a rugged wilderness area. Authorities say they plan to protect bridges, a ranch, and other high-value sites that could be threatened by the 110-square-mile (285-square-kilometer) blaze.</p>
<p>UTAH</p>
<p>Nearly 200 homes in a high-end neighborhood nestled in the foothills near a northern Utah canyon were evacuated Wednesday as crews battled a blaze that has burned three houses.</p>
<p>Calmer winds allowed firefighters to stop the 1-square-mile (2.5-square-kilometer) fire from spreading toward more homes in the city of Ogden, said Rachelle Handley of the U.S. Forest Service.</p>
<p>Mark Archer said he and his wife received texts about a mandatory evacuation Tuesday and drove home from their jobs in a panic because they had left their 18-year-old son sleeping. They grabbed their pets and important documents. Their son had already left because of the heavy smoke.</p>
<p>They were back to their house that evening, which smelled like a campfire. Warned that high winds could trigger another evacuation, Archer and his family had bags packed.</p>
<p>He set his alarm to look out the window every two hours.</p>
<p>“It’s still scary to go home in case it picks up with high winds,” said Archer, 56, adding his lungs and eyes stung Wednesday. “All I can do is just hope and pray.”</p>
<p>CALIFORNIA</p>
<p>Twenty large blazes burned across the state, including one outside Yosemite National Park that moved through ancient sequoia trees and another that burned five homes in Los Angeles.</p>
<p>A big Labor Day weekend wildfire in the LA suburb of Burbank was reduced to a black scar but remained dangerous. It had burned near 1,400 homes.</p>
<p>“We are not out of the woods yet,” Fire Department spokesman Erik Scott said of the potential for hotspots.</p>
<p>In Northern California, centers with air purifiers have opened and some schools have suspended classes as smoke from several wildfires fills the air. Dr. Donald Baird, health officer of far northern Humboldt County, urged people to stay indoors to give their lungs a break.</p>
<p>In neighboring Trinity County, a fire on both sides of a river was expanding north toward another fire after destroying 72 homes and forcing about 2,000 people to evacuate.</p>
<p>Outside Yosemite, crews gained ground against a blaze that burned halfway through a grove of 2,700-year-old giant sequoias. Officials said it had not killed any trees, which can withstand low-intensity fires.</p> | false | 1 | smoke flames aching lungs evacuations theyre summertime facts life us west every wildfire season competes memories previous destruction year supposed mild extremely wet winter spring ended one worst us history land burned foliage sprouted previous rain snow gone bonedry intense heat feeding flames places seen downpours months strangling cities smoke biggest fires came little later usual states labor day fire season traditionally starts peter look fires oregon weeks since maryjane carlson able relax artist lives brookings small city along southern oregon coast thats threatened one nations largest wildfires carlson neighbors never know blaze going move closer wooded town overwhelming said wednesday kind like living war zone addition fear flames smoke never leaves asthmatic carlson buy air purifier sometimes covers face mask thousands residents evacuated firefighters battle blazes statewide including one devastating hiking trails waterfalls scenic columbia river gorge officials expect fire near brookings burn least another month weather wild card region accustomed rain fog hot dry scary september dont know weathers going half problem uncertainty carlson said montana darinda yoder wishes waited long evacuate home near montanas border canada left earlier would terrifying memory flames rushing mountain toward states oldest amish community weekend fire came fast almost didnt get us yoder told missoulian newspaper dont think would affected way id seen fire burned 10 homes 30 buildings threatened community western shore lake koocanusa wednesday 187 residents fled west kootenai staying families lakes eastern shore recreational vehicles among dozens fires forced people homes destroyed residences filled sky smoke months statewide washington local recreationists tourists mourned damage popular hiking trails campsites wildfire near mount rainier national park doubled size 68 square miles 175 square kilometers closed backcountry trails east side iconic park steffen rausch told seattle news station kirotv saddened fire closed 70 miles pacific crest trail runs canada mexico near mount rainier going pct want much pct said rausch german hiked mexico border washington rangers worked alert hikers leave area campers told gear packed smoke swathed areas seattle spokane air wednesday rated hazardous idaho catholic nuns living monastery st gertrude normally see across entire prairie bitterroot mountains hardpressed wednesday see road leading monastery city cottonwood amid heavy smoke everything big haze sister placida wemhoff said eyes smart sting cottonwood unwanted distinction worst air quality nation much wednesday environmental protection agency said wemhoff would normally putting flowerbeds rest winter halt work nuns older particularly risk hazardous air quality sisters trying avoid heavy work puff pant wemhoff said idahos largest wildfire allowed burn rugged wilderness area authorities say plan protect bridges ranch highvalue sites could threatened 110squaremile 285squarekilometer blaze utah nearly 200 homes highend neighborhood nestled foothills near northern utah canyon evacuated wednesday crews battled blaze burned three houses calmer winds allowed firefighters stop 1squaremile 25squarekilometer fire spreading toward homes city ogden said rachelle handley us forest service mark archer said wife received texts mandatory evacuation tuesday drove home jobs panic left 18yearold son sleeping grabbed pets important documents son already left heavy smoke back house evening smelled like campfire warned high winds could trigger another evacuation archer family bags packed set alarm look window every two hours still scary go home case picks high winds said archer 56 adding lungs eyes stung wednesday hope pray california twenty large blazes burned across state including one outside yosemite national park moved ancient sequoia trees another burned five homes los angeles big labor day weekend wildfire la suburb burbank reduced black scar remained dangerous burned near 1400 homes woods yet fire department spokesman erik scott said potential hotspots northern california centers air purifiers opened schools suspended classes smoke several wildfires fills air dr donald baird health officer far northern humboldt county urged people stay indoors give lungs break neighboring trinity county fire sides river expanding north toward another fire destroying 72 homes forcing 2000 people evacuate outside yosemite crews gained ground blaze burned halfway grove 2700yearold giant sequoias officials said killed trees withstand lowintensity fires | 650 |
<p>The Tampa Bay Lightning secured the last of “The Triplets” by re-signing forward Ondrej Palat to a five-year, $26.5 million contract on Friday.</p>
<p>Palat’s deal is on par annually with that of fellow Triplets <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Tyler-Johnson/" type="external">Tyler Johnson</a> and Nikita Kucherov. Johnson recently signed a seven-year pact with $35 million while Kucherov’s contract goes for an average $4.77 million — although that pact ends after the 2018-19 season.</p>
<p>Palat collected 17 goals, 35 assists and 39 penalty minutes in 75 games last season with the Lightning. The 26-year-old Czech ranked second among the team’s forwards in ice time (19:07) while his five power-play goals were fourth as he finished the final season of a three-year, $10 million contract.</p>
<p>–The Calgary Flames signed restricted free-agent forward Curtis Lazar to a two-year, $1.9 million contract.</p>
<p>Lazar collected one goal, three assists and four penalty minutes over 37 games split between the Ottawa Senators and Flames last season.</p>
<p>The 22-year-old British Columbia native was acquired from the Senators with defenseman Michael Kostka at the trade deadline for blue-liner Jyrki Jokipakka and a 2017 second-round draft pick.</p>
<p>Lazar has recorded 13 goals, 26 assists and 36 penalty minutes in 180 career games with the Senators and Flames since being selected 17th overall by Ottawa in the 2013 draft.</p>
<p>–Los Angeles Kings forward Jonny Brodzinski signed a two-year contract extension.</p>
<p>Forward Michael Mersch, and defensemen Kevin Gravel and Paul LaDue also inked one-year, two-way deals.</p>
<p>For Brodzinski, the first year is a two-way deal while the second is strictly one way. The contract carries an average annual value of $650,000 at the NHL level.</p>
<p>Mersch and Gravel’s pacts involve an average annual value of $650,000 at the NHL level, while LaDue’s deal is worth $874,125 at the NHL level.</p>
<p>–The Chicago Blackhawks agreed to terms with defenseman Erik Gustafsson on a one-year contract that runs through the 2017-18 season.</p>
<p>Gustafsson, 25, registered a team-high 25 assists to go with five goals in 68 games with the American Hockey League’s Rockford IceHogs last season. The Nynashamn, Sweden, native posted eight goals and 33 assists in 95 regular-season games with the IceHogs over the past two seasons.</p>
<p>Originally signed by Chicago as a free agent on April 30, 2015, Gustafsson made his NHL debut during the 2015-16 season, notching 14 assists in 41 regular-season games with the Blackhawks. He also added an assist in five playoff contests.</p>
<p>Gustafsson was originally drafted by the Edmonton Oilers in the fourth round of the 2012 draft.</p>
<p>–The New York Islanders signed goaltender Christopher Gibson to a one-year, two-way deal.</p>
<p>Gibson, 24, made his NHL debut with the Islanders in 2015-16, appearing in four games during his first year with the organization. Last season, Gibson posted a 6-0-0 record with a 2.52 goals-against-average and .912 save percentage in seven games with Bridgeport of the American Hockey League.</p>
<p>Gibson has played 106 AHL games with the Sound Tigers and Toronto Marlies, going 54-34-9 with a 2.54 GAA, .915 save percentage and four shutouts. The Islanders initially acquired him on Sept. 17, 2015 in exchange for <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Michael_Grabner/" type="external">Michael Grabner</a> from the Toronto Maple Leafs.</p>
<p>Gibson was drafted by the Los Angeles Kings in the second round in 2011.</p>
<p>–The Carolina Hurricanes agreed to terms with 2017 first-round selection Martin Necas on a three-year, entry-level contract.</p>
<p>The deal will pay Necas $832,500 on the NHL level or $70,000 on the AHL level per season. He receives a signing bonus of $277,500.</p>
<p>Necas, 18, spent last season with HC Kometa Brno of the Czech Extraliga, the Czech Republic’s top professional league. He notched seven goals and eight assists in 41 regular-season games. He scored four goals in 10 playoff games as Brno won the league championship.</p>
<p>The 6-foot-1, 178-pounder also represented the Czech Republic at the 2017 International Ice Hockey Federation World Junior Championship, notching a goal and two assists in five games.</p>
<p>–The Washington Capitals re-signed left winger Liam O’Brien to a one-year, two-way contract.</p>
<p>The deal is worth $650,000 at the NHL level and $85,000 at the AHL level.</p>
<p>O’Brien, 22, appeared in one game with the Capitals during the 2016-17 season and has a goal and an assist in 14 career NHL games with Washington.</p>
<p>The 6-foot-1, 215-pound left winger had 10 goals and 20 assists in 64 games with the AHL’s Hershey Bears last season. In 168 career AHL games, O’Brien has 21 goals and 33 assists.</p>
<p>–The New York Rangers agreed to terms with forward Filip Chytil on a three-year, entry-level contract.</p>
<p>Chytil, 17, skated in 38 games with PSG Zlin in the Czech Extraliga this past season, registering four goals and four assists for eight points, along with 16 penalty minutes. He was one of 21 players younger than 18 who played in the league last season.</p>
<p>The 6-foot-2, 192-pounder has played in Zlin’s organization since the 2012-13 season. Chytil skated in 30 games with PSG Zlin’s U18 team during the 2015-16 season, registering 28 goals and 22 assists along with a plus-23 rating and eight penalty minutes.</p>
<p>Chytil was selected by the Rangers in the first round of the 2017 draft.</p>
<p>–The San Jose Sharks signed goaltender Josef Korenar to a standard, entry-level contract. Per club policy, the terms of the deal were not disclosed.</p>
<p>Korenar, 19, appeared in 32 games with Lincoln of the USHL last season, posting a 14-11-4 record along with a 2.22 goals-against average and a .925 save percentage with two shutouts.</p>
<p>NHL Central Scouting ranked him 17th amongst all draft-eligible North American goaltenders in their end of season rankings.</p>
<p>The 6-foot-1, 175-pound native of Humpolec, Czech Republic, was also ranked as the fourth-best European goaltending prospect by NHL Central Scouting ahead of the 2016 draft.</p> | false | 1 | tampa bay lightning secured last triplets resigning forward ondrej palat fiveyear 265 million contract friday palats deal par annually fellow triplets tyler johnson nikita kucherov johnson recently signed sevenyear pact 35 million kucherovs contract goes average 477 million although pact ends 201819 season palat collected 17 goals 35 assists 39 penalty minutes 75 games last season lightning 26yearold czech ranked second among teams forwards ice time 1907 five powerplay goals fourth finished final season threeyear 10 million contract calgary flames signed restricted freeagent forward curtis lazar twoyear 19 million contract lazar collected one goal three assists four penalty minutes 37 games split ottawa senators flames last season 22yearold british columbia native acquired senators defenseman michael kostka trade deadline blueliner jyrki jokipakka 2017 secondround draft pick lazar recorded 13 goals 26 assists 36 penalty minutes 180 career games senators flames since selected 17th overall ottawa 2013 draft los angeles kings forward jonny brodzinski signed twoyear contract extension forward michael mersch defensemen kevin gravel paul ladue also inked oneyear twoway deals brodzinski first year twoway deal second strictly one way contract carries average annual value 650000 nhl level mersch gravels pacts involve average annual value 650000 nhl level ladues deal worth 874125 nhl level chicago blackhawks agreed terms defenseman erik gustafsson oneyear contract runs 201718 season gustafsson 25 registered teamhigh 25 assists go five goals 68 games american hockey leagues rockford icehogs last season nynashamn sweden native posted eight goals 33 assists 95 regularseason games icehogs past two seasons originally signed chicago free agent april 30 2015 gustafsson made nhl debut 201516 season notching 14 assists 41 regularseason games blackhawks also added assist five playoff contests gustafsson originally drafted edmonton oilers fourth round 2012 draft new york islanders signed goaltender christopher gibson oneyear twoway deal gibson 24 made nhl debut islanders 201516 appearing four games first year organization last season gibson posted 600 record 252 goalsagainstaverage 912 save percentage seven games bridgeport american hockey league gibson played 106 ahl games sound tigers toronto marlies going 54349 254 gaa 915 save percentage four shutouts islanders initially acquired sept 17 2015 exchange michael grabner toronto maple leafs gibson drafted los angeles kings second round 2011 carolina hurricanes agreed terms 2017 firstround selection martin necas threeyear entrylevel contract deal pay necas 832500 nhl level 70000 ahl level per season receives signing bonus 277500 necas 18 spent last season hc kometa brno czech extraliga czech republics top professional league notched seven goals eight assists 41 regularseason games scored four goals 10 playoff games brno league championship 6foot1 178pounder also represented czech republic 2017 international ice hockey federation world junior championship notching goal two assists five games washington capitals resigned left winger liam obrien oneyear twoway contract deal worth 650000 nhl level 85000 ahl level obrien 22 appeared one game capitals 201617 season goal assist 14 career nhl games washington 6foot1 215pound left winger 10 goals 20 assists 64 games ahls hershey bears last season 168 career ahl games obrien 21 goals 33 assists new york rangers agreed terms forward filip chytil threeyear entrylevel contract chytil 17 skated 38 games psg zlin czech extraliga past season registering four goals four assists eight points along 16 penalty minutes one 21 players younger 18 played league last season 6foot2 192pounder played zlins organization since 201213 season chytil skated 30 games psg zlins u18 team 201516 season registering 28 goals 22 assists along plus23 rating eight penalty minutes chytil selected rangers first round 2017 draft san jose sharks signed goaltender josef korenar standard entrylevel contract per club policy terms deal disclosed korenar 19 appeared 32 games lincoln ushl last season posting 14114 record along 222 goalsagainst average 925 save percentage two shutouts nhl central scouting ranked 17th amongst drafteligible north american goaltenders end season rankings 6foot1 175pound native humpolec czech republic also ranked fourthbest european goaltending prospect nhl central scouting ahead 2016 draft | 643 |
<p>The email arrived in mid-June, seeking to explode any notion that global warming might turn our Arctic expedition into a summer cruise.</p>
<p>“The most important piece of clothing to pack is good, sturdy and warm boots. There is going to be snow and ice on the deck of the icebreaker,” it read. “Quality boots are key.”</p>
<p>The Associated Press was joining international researchers on a month-long, 10,000 kilometer (6,200-mile) journey to document the impact of climate change on the forbidding ice and frigid waters of the Far North. But once the ship entered the fabled Northwest Passage between the Atlantic and the Pacific, there would be nowhere to stop for supplies, no port to shelter in and no help for hundreds of miles if things went wrong. A change in the weather might cause the mercury to drop suddenly or push the polar pack into the Canadian Archipelago, creating a sea of rock-hard ice.</p>
<p>So as we packed our bags, in went the heavy jackets, insulated trousers, hats, mittens, woolen sweaters and the heavy, fur-lined boots.</p>
<p>Global warming or not, it was best to come prepared.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.apnews.com/tag/NewArctic" type="external">Learn more about the Arctic</a> and read dispatches by AP journalists as they traveled through the region’s fabled Northwest Passage last month.</p>
<p>If parts of the planet are becoming like a furnace because of global warming, then the Arctic is best described as the world’s air-conditioning unit. The frozen north plays a crucial role in cooling the rest of the planet while reflecting some of the sun’s heat back into space.</p>
<p>Yet for several decades, satellite pictures have shown a dramatic decline in Arctic sea ice that is already affecting the lives of humans and animals in the region, from Inuit communities to polar bears. Experts predict that the impact of melting sea ice will be felt across the northern hemisphere, altering ocean currents and causing freak weather as far south as Florida or France.</p>
<p>“Things are changing in the Arctic, and that is changing things everywhere else,” said David ‘Duke’ Snider, the seasoned mariner responsible for navigating the Finnish icebreaker MSV Nordica through the Northwest Passage last month.</p>
<p>Researchers on the trip sought a first-hand view of the effects of global warming already seen from space. Even the dates of the journey were a clue: The ship departed Vancouver in early July and arrived in Nuuk, Greenland on July 29th, the earliest transit ever of a region that isn’t usually navigable until later in the year.</p>
<p>As it made its way through the North Pacific — passing Chinese cargo ships, Alaskan fishing boats and the occasional far-off whale — members of the expedition soaked up the sun in anticipation of freezing weeks to come.</p>
<p>Twelve days after the ship had left Vancouver, the ice appeared out of nowhere.</p>
<p>At first, lone floes bobbed on the waves like mangled lumps of Styrofoam. By the time Nordica reached Point Barrow, on Alaska’s northernmost tip, the sea was swarming with ice.</p>
<p>Snider recalled that when he started guiding ships through Arctic waters more than 30 years ago, the ice pack in mid-July would have stretched 50 miles farther southwest. Back then, a ship also would have encountered much thicker, blueish ice that had survived several summer melts, becoming hard as concrete in the process, he said.</p>
<p>He likened this year’s ice to a sea of porridge with a few hard chunks — no match for the nimble 13,000-ton Nordica.</p>
<p>Since the first orbital images were taken in 1979, Arctic sea ice coverage during the summer has dropped by an average of about 34,000 square miles each year — almost the surface area of Maine or the country of Serbia. More recent data show that not only is its surface area shrinking, but the ice that’s left is getting thinner too. Snider said he has seen the ice cover reduced in both concentration and thickness.</p>
<p>The melting ice is one reason why modern ships have an easier time going through the Northwest Passage, 111 years after Norwegian adventurer Roald Amundsen achieved the first transit.&#160;</p>
<p>Modern mariners can get daily satellite snapshots of the ice and precise GPS locations that help them dodge dangerous shallows. But technology can be fickle. After two weeks at sea the ship’s fragile Internet connection went down for six days: no emails, no Google, no new satellite pictures to preview the route ahead.</p>
<p>The outdoor thermometer indicated a temperature of 47 degrees Fahrenheit, but in the never-setting sun of an Arctic summer it felt more like 60 F.&#160;</p>
<p>At one point a row of shacks appeared on a hill. As the ship passed by Cambridge Bay — home to Canada’s High Arctic Research Station— a brief cellphone signal flickered to life, allowing one homesick sailor to make a tearful call to his family.</p>
<p>The Finnish crew, meanwhile, took solace in the creature comforts of home, such as the on-board sauna and reindeer roast on Saturdays.</p>
<p>Even in their bunks, those on board heard the constant churning of ice as the ship plowed through the debris rolling beneath the hull, thundering like hail on a tin roof.</p>
<p>As the icebreaker entered Victoria Strait, deep inside the Northwest Passage, we looked for a shadow moving in the distance or a flash of pale yellow in the expanse of white that would signal the presence of the world’s largest land predator.</p>
<p>At last, a cry went out: “Nanuq, nanuq!”</p>
<p>Maatiusi Manning, an Inuit sailor, had spotted what everyone on board was hoping to see — the first polar bear.</p>
<p>The 1,000-pound predators are at the top of a food chain that’s being pummeled by global warming because of the immediate impact vanishing sea ice has on a range of animals and plants that depend on it.</p>
<p>“If we continue losing ice, we’re going to lose species with it,” said Paula von Weller, a field biologist who was on the trip.</p>
<p>Polar Bears</p>
<p>No Arctic creatures have become more associated with climate change than polar bears. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimated in January that about 26,000 specimens remain in the wild. Population counts of polar bears are notoriously difficult, and researchers are unsure how much their numbers have changed in recent years. But the Fish and Wildlife Service warned that melting sea ice is robbing the bear of its natural hunting ground for seals and other prey.</p>
<p>While some polar bears are expected to follow the retreating ice northward, others will head south, where they will come into greater contact with humans — encounters that are unlikely to end well for the bears.</p>
<p>Still, being the poster child of Arctic wildlife may help the polar bear. Sightings are a highlight for adventure tourists who are flocking to Arctic cruises in increasing numbers.</p>
<p>Last year, the hottest on record in the Arctic, the Crystal Serenity took 1,100 high-paying guests on a cruise of the Northwest Passage, prompting environmentalists to warn of an Arctic tourism rush that could disrupt wildlife habitat. Crystal Cruises says it works closely with local guides, marine biologists and conservationists to ensure wildlife isn’t harmed.</p>
<p>Von Weller said there are benefits to people seeing the region and its animals themselves.</p>
<p>“People are so far removed from the Arctic that they don’t understand it, they don’t know it and they don’t love it,” she said. “I think it’s important for people to see what’s here and to fall in love with it and have a bond and want to protect it.”</p>
<p>That love may need to extend further down the food chain if the fragile ecosystem in the Arctic continues to fall apart. Some of the animals highly associated with the ice are not going to be able to adapt in a reasonable amount of time to keep up with climate change, Weller said.</p>
<p>“The walrus, for example, may spend more time on the mainland. They’re very prone to disturbance so that’s not a good place for walrus to be,” said von Weller.</p>
<p>Research published four years ago rang alarms bells about the future of the red king crab — a big earner for Alaska’s fishing industry — because rising levels of carbon dioxide, a driver of global warming, are making oceans more acidic. Scientists found that juvenile crabs exposed to levels of acidification predicted for the future grew more slowly and were more likely to die.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, new rivals from the south are already arriving in the Arctic as waters warm. Orca have been observed traveling further north in search of food in recent years, and some wildlife experts predict they will become the main seal predator in the coming decades, replacing polar bears.</p>
<p>Humans are increasingly venturing into the Arctic in search of untapped deposits of minerals and fossil fuels — posing a threat to animals. The potential for oil spills from platforms and tankers operating in remote locations has been a major cause for concern among environmentalists since the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster off Alaska killed a quarter of a million seabirds, as well as hundreds of seals and sea otters. Simply getting the necessary emergency response ships to an Arctic spill would be a challenge, while cleaning oil off sea ice would likely take months.</p>
<p>Last month, Canada’s supreme court ruled in favor of the Clyde River community of Baffin Island, which is fighting the proposed seismic blasts used by oil companies to map the sea floor. The Inuit fear that the loud underwater noise caused by the blasts could disorient marine mammals such as whales that depend on sound to communicate, and affect the reproductive cycles of fish and shrimp stocks.</p>
<p>Feeling the impact</p>
<p>The Inuit and other local peoples are already feeling the impact of global warming because they rely on frozen waterways to reach hunting grounds or relatives on other islands. But some say it will not be all bad: Cruise ships offer potential revenue to those Inuit communities willing to engage with tourists.</p>
<p>The absence of sea ice for longer periods each summer, meanwhile, will allow boats to supply villages and mines for longer periods of the year. Where it used to be a hard and fast rule that ships had to be out of the Northwest Passage by Sept. 28, the operating season now stretches beyond October.</p>
<p>Tiina Jaaskelainen, a researcher at the Hanken School of Economics in Finland who was on board the icebreaker, said responding to these changes will require a better understanding of the social impact rather than just the science of climate change.</p>
<p>“Inuit communities need to be involved in planning each use of the passage and the Arctic in general,” she said. “It’s important they can play an active role in the region’s economic development, while good governance may enable local communities to also maintain their traditions.”</p>
<p>Upon entering the Atlantic, the FM radios aboard Nordica began picking up local stations again, including one that played David Bowie’s ‘Ziggy Stardust.’ Nordica reached Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, after 24 days.</p>
<p>“The fact that we were able to plan and execute this transit so efficiently says something about the changes in the ice,” said Scott Joblin, an expert on maritime and polar law from Australian National University in Canberra who studies the legal implications of climate change in the Arctic.</p>
<p>Scientists believe there is no way to reverse the decline in Arctic sea ice in the foreseeable future. Even in the best-case scenario envisaged by the 2015 Paris climate accord, sea ice will largely vanish from the Arctic during the summer within the coming decades.</p>
<p>In the end, the route that foiled countless explorers claimed little more than a camera and a drone.</p>
<p>But we did get a taste of the warming Arctic: Those heavy fur-lined boots never got used.</p> | false | 1 | email arrived midjune seeking explode notion global warming might turn arctic expedition summer cruise important piece clothing pack good sturdy warm boots going snow ice deck icebreaker read quality boots key associated press joining international researchers monthlong 10000 kilometer 6200mile journey document impact climate change forbidding ice frigid waters far north ship entered fabled northwest passage atlantic pacific would nowhere stop supplies port shelter help hundreds miles things went wrong change weather might cause mercury drop suddenly push polar pack canadian archipelago creating sea rockhard ice packed bags went heavy jackets insulated trousers hats mittens woolen sweaters heavy furlined boots global warming best come prepared learn arctic read dispatches ap journalists traveled regions fabled northwest passage last month parts planet becoming like furnace global warming arctic best described worlds airconditioning unit frozen north plays crucial role cooling rest planet reflecting suns heat back space yet several decades satellite pictures shown dramatic decline arctic sea ice already affecting lives humans animals region inuit communities polar bears experts predict impact melting sea ice felt across northern hemisphere altering ocean currents causing freak weather far south florida france things changing arctic changing things everywhere else said david duke snider seasoned mariner responsible navigating finnish icebreaker msv nordica northwest passage last month researchers trip sought firsthand view effects global warming already seen space even dates journey clue ship departed vancouver early july arrived nuuk greenland july 29th earliest transit ever region isnt usually navigable later year made way north pacific passing chinese cargo ships alaskan fishing boats occasional faroff whale members expedition soaked sun anticipation freezing weeks come twelve days ship left vancouver ice appeared nowhere first lone floes bobbed waves like mangled lumps styrofoam time nordica reached point barrow alaskas northernmost tip sea swarming ice snider recalled started guiding ships arctic waters 30 years ago ice pack midjuly would stretched 50 miles farther southwest back ship also would encountered much thicker blueish ice survived several summer melts becoming hard concrete process said likened years ice sea porridge hard chunks match nimble 13000ton nordica since first orbital images taken 1979 arctic sea ice coverage summer dropped average 34000 square miles year almost surface area maine country serbia recent data show surface area shrinking ice thats left getting thinner snider said seen ice cover reduced concentration thickness melting ice one reason modern ships easier time going northwest passage 111 years norwegian adventurer roald amundsen achieved first transit160 modern mariners get daily satellite snapshots ice precise gps locations help dodge dangerous shallows technology fickle two weeks sea ships fragile internet connection went six days emails google new satellite pictures preview route ahead outdoor thermometer indicated temperature 47 degrees fahrenheit neversetting sun arctic summer felt like 60 f160 one point row shacks appeared hill ship passed cambridge bay home canadas high arctic research station brief cellphone signal flickered life allowing one homesick sailor make tearful call family finnish crew meanwhile took solace creature comforts home onboard sauna reindeer roast saturdays even bunks board heard constant churning ice ship plowed debris rolling beneath hull thundering like hail tin roof icebreaker entered victoria strait deep inside northwest passage looked shadow moving distance flash pale yellow expanse white would signal presence worlds largest land predator last cry went nanuq nanuq maatiusi manning inuit sailor spotted everyone board hoping see first polar bear 1000pound predators top food chain thats pummeled global warming immediate impact vanishing sea ice range animals plants depend continue losing ice going lose species said paula von weller field biologist trip polar bears arctic creatures become associated climate change polar bears us fish wildlife service estimated january 26000 specimens remain wild population counts polar bears notoriously difficult researchers unsure much numbers changed recent years fish wildlife service warned melting sea ice robbing bear natural hunting ground seals prey polar bears expected follow retreating ice northward others head south come greater contact humans encounters unlikely end well bears still poster child arctic wildlife may help polar bear sightings highlight adventure tourists flocking arctic cruises increasing numbers last year hottest record arctic crystal serenity took 1100 highpaying guests cruise northwest passage prompting environmentalists warn arctic tourism rush could disrupt wildlife habitat crystal cruises says works closely local guides marine biologists conservationists ensure wildlife isnt harmed von weller said benefits people seeing region animals people far removed arctic dont understand dont know dont love said think important people see whats fall love bond want protect love may need extend food chain fragile ecosystem arctic continues fall apart animals highly associated ice going able adapt reasonable amount time keep climate change weller said walrus example may spend time mainland theyre prone disturbance thats good place walrus said von weller research published four years ago rang alarms bells future red king crab big earner alaskas fishing industry rising levels carbon dioxide driver global warming making oceans acidic scientists found juvenile crabs exposed levels acidification predicted future grew slowly likely die meanwhile new rivals south already arriving arctic waters warm orca observed traveling north search food recent years wildlife experts predict become main seal predator coming decades replacing polar bears humans increasingly venturing arctic search untapped deposits minerals fossil fuels posing threat animals potential oil spills platforms tankers operating remote locations major cause concern among environmentalists since 1989 exxon valdez disaster alaska killed quarter million seabirds well hundreds seals sea otters simply getting necessary emergency response ships arctic spill would challenge cleaning oil sea ice would likely take months last month canadas supreme court ruled favor clyde river community baffin island fighting proposed seismic blasts used oil companies map sea floor inuit fear loud underwater noise caused blasts could disorient marine mammals whales depend sound communicate affect reproductive cycles fish shrimp stocks feeling impact inuit local peoples already feeling impact global warming rely frozen waterways reach hunting grounds relatives islands say bad cruise ships offer potential revenue inuit communities willing engage tourists absence sea ice longer periods summer meanwhile allow boats supply villages mines longer periods year used hard fast rule ships northwest passage sept 28 operating season stretches beyond october tiina jaaskelainen researcher hanken school economics finland board icebreaker said responding changes require better understanding social impact rather science climate change inuit communities need involved planning use passage arctic general said important play active role regions economic development good governance may enable local communities also maintain traditions upon entering atlantic fm radios aboard nordica began picking local stations including one played david bowies ziggy stardust nordica reached nuuk capital greenland 24 days fact able plan execute transit efficiently says something changes ice said scott joblin expert maritime polar law australian national university canberra studies legal implications climate change arctic scientists believe way reverse decline arctic sea ice foreseeable future even bestcase scenario envisaged 2015 paris climate accord sea ice largely vanish arctic summer within coming decades end route foiled countless explorers claimed little camera drone get taste warming arctic heavy furlined boots never got used | 1,152 |
<p>In “ <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2182077/fr/rss/" type="external">Lay Off Linda: Why doesn’t the New York Times stand up for Linda Greenhouse?</a>,” Slate‘s Emily Bazelon and Dahlia Lithwick offer a hilariously defective defense of Linda Greenhouse’s reporting on prominent national-security cases in which her husband Eugene Fidell, an outspoken opponent of Bush-administration policies, has participated. Whereas I have demonstrated (in this series of “Bench Memos” posts: Parts <a href="http://bench.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YzBhZjIxOTA4MjAwYzBjNWEzMDM0Mzk5ZWQwZjc3YTI=" type="external">1</a>, <a href="http://bench.nationalreview.com/post/?q=Y2EwNDVmNmMyODExMGYzZDUyYjAwNTFlMWVmYjYwN2Q=" type="external">2</a>, <a href="http://bench.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ODdhNWEyNWY3NTJlNmU4MGUxMjQ0MTEwNzE5YWVkZDE=" type="external">3</a>, and <a href="http://bench.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZDU0Y2UwM2Q4NGI5YTUyMTBmMTgwMGMyNWVlMDU3Yjg" type="external">4</a>) that New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt has acted as a shill for Greenhouse, they complain that he has “dragg[ed] … her out to the woodshed.” Most remarkably, they call on the New York Times to stop providing (horrors!) “sober explications” of complaints about her reporting.</p>
<p>Bazelon and Lithwick contend that Greenhouse “garners unwarranted attacks” because she’s earned the “status” of “the voice on the court that matters most in the national press.” Well, that’s one theory. Another theory is that in the pre-Internet age Greenhouse was able to get away with a lot of sloppy and biased reporting, and she and her ideological allies don’t like the fact that she now must face up to responsible criticism. The best way to assess the competing theories would be to have careful examination of the complaints made against Greenhouse’s reporting. So it’s telling that Bazelon and Lithwick instead resort to baseless ad hominem attacks and to (literally) catty comments about “right-wing kitty cats” — and it’s especially telling that they urge the New York Times not to take seriously complaints about her reporting.</p>
<p>Bazelon and Lithwick credit Hoyt’s “concession” that I am a “bully who is prone to ‘increasingly intemperate and personal attacks on Greenhouse.'” What Hoyt has made is a charge, not a concession, and as I have shown, that charge is entirely baseless. But Bazelon and Lithwick don’t call their readers’ attention to my thorough refutation, even though they are plainly aware of it, as they link to it in supposed support of their claim that my attacks on Greenhouse are “tireless”. (Ah, yes, 10 or 12 critical posts, apart from the current matter, in nearly three years. That’s “tireless”?)</p>
<p>Bazelon and Lithwick claim that I am “[u]nable to point to any actual bias” in Greenhouse’s reporting on the cases in which her husband has participated. That is not true (see <a href="http://bench.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YzBhZjIxOTA4MjAwYzBjNWEzMDM0Mzk5ZWQwZjc3YTI" type="external">Part 1</a> of my series, where I quote a devastating critique of Greenhouse’s account of the Hamdan decision). Nor is it meaningful: The very point of conflict-of-interest rules is to identify those situations in which partiality should be conclusively presumed, and situations involving spouses are routinely and understandably recognized to be leading instances.</p>
<p>Bazelon and Lithwick contend that “Whelan has slimed both of us, too.” In sole support of their claim that I have “slimed” them, they link to this <a href="" type="internal">essay</a> of mine that exposed a wildly misplaced attack by Bazelon on a 1984 Justice Department memorandum written by then-DOJ attorney Samuel Alito. In the heat of the Alito nomination battle, Bazelon had ample reason to contest my critique — if she could have. So far as I’ve been able to tell, she didn’t do so then, and she hasn’t done so in the more than two years that have passed since. And she and Lithwick don’t do so now. Evidently, the not-so-tiny distinction between a meritorious critique and a meritless one escapes them.</p>
<p>As for Lithwick, that essay of mine merely referred to, and linked to, “what Eugene Volokh charitably described as Dahlia Lithwick’s ‘rather overheated criticism’ of Alito on the day of his nomination.”</p>
<p>In short, Bazelon and Lithwick offer zero evidence that I have “slimed” them.</p>
<p>Bazelon and Lithwick try to confuse the underlying conflict question by conflating it with distinct recusal questions faced by Justice Scalia and Justice Thomas. None of those questions involved participation by a spouse (or by the spouse’s <a href="http://bench.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZjZiNjc5MzM5YzJiYWVhYzk0OGVkNDUwNTBkY2M3OTM" type="external">institutional alter ego</a>) in a proceeding before the Supreme Court, and it’s difficult to imagine that any justice wouldn’t disqualify himself or herself in such a circumstance.</p>
<p>Bazelon and Lithwick also claim that they “defended” Scalia on his decision to take part in the energy policy task force case, but they curiously provide no link to their supposed support.* Here’s what Lithwick had to say on that matter in one <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2094876/" type="external">essay</a>:</p>
<p>Justice Scalia should step aside in Duckgate, regardless of what’s in his heart, because it’s a terrible mistake — especially in a landmark case about cronyism and special influence — to allow the appearance of cronyism and special influence to taint what must be a completely fair decision.</p>
<p>A second Lithwick <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2097350/" type="external">essay</a> is more oblique, but I don’t see how anyone would read her description of Scalia’s “astonishing 21-page memorandum” — “astonishing” because “deeply felt, pained, and virtually unprecedented” — as a defense of his decision not to recuse. Perhaps Lithwick has written such a defense, and perhaps Bazelon has, too. (I couldn’t find anything in a very quick search.) But is it too much — is it bullying? — to expect that Bazelon and Lithwick might provide actual support for their positions?</p>
<p>It’s no wonder that Bazelon and Lithwick object to sobriety.</p>
<p>— Edward Whelan is president of the <a href="" type="internal">Ethics and Public Policy Center</a> and is a regular contributor to NRO’s <a href="http://bench.nationalreview.com/" type="external">“Bench Memos” blog</a>.</p>
<p>*&#160; Following the publication of this essay, Bazelon and Lithwick added a link, but the linked article — an <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2096883/" type="external">essay</a> by Lithwick — doesn’t support their claim to have defended Scalia’s decision not to recuse in the energy policy task force case.&#160; Lithwick’s essay defends Scalia’s non-recusal in Lawrence v. Texas — it was written nearly a year after the Court’s ruling in that case — but states that “he ought to think seriously about staying out of the Cheney appeal, based on his cavortings with the vice president.”&#160; Some defense.</p> | false | 1 | lay linda doesnt new york times stand linda greenhouse slates emily bazelon dahlia lithwick offer hilariously defective defense linda greenhouses reporting prominent nationalsecurity cases husband eugene fidell outspoken opponent bushadministration policies participated whereas demonstrated series bench memos posts parts 1 2 3 4 new york times public editor clark hoyt acted shill greenhouse complain dragged woodshed remarkably call new york times stop providing horrors sober explications complaints reporting bazelon lithwick contend greenhouse garners unwarranted attacks shes earned status voice court matters national press well thats one theory another theory preinternet age greenhouse able get away lot sloppy biased reporting ideological allies dont like fact must face responsible criticism best way assess competing theories would careful examination complaints made greenhouses reporting telling bazelon lithwick instead resort baseless ad hominem attacks literally catty comments rightwing kitty cats especially telling urge new york times take seriously complaints reporting bazelon lithwick credit hoyts concession bully prone increasingly intemperate personal attacks greenhouse hoyt made charge concession shown charge entirely baseless bazelon lithwick dont call readers attention thorough refutation even though plainly aware link supposed support claim attacks greenhouse tireless ah yes 10 12 critical posts apart current matter nearly three years thats tireless bazelon lithwick claim unable point actual bias greenhouses reporting cases husband participated true see part 1 series quote devastating critique greenhouses account hamdan decision meaningful point conflictofinterest rules identify situations partiality conclusively presumed situations involving spouses routinely understandably recognized leading instances bazelon lithwick contend whelan slimed us sole support claim slimed link essay mine exposed wildly misplaced attack bazelon 1984 justice department memorandum written thendoj attorney samuel alito heat alito nomination battle bazelon ample reason contest critique could far ive able tell didnt hasnt done two years passed since lithwick dont evidently notsotiny distinction meritorious critique meritless one escapes lithwick essay mine merely referred linked eugene volokh charitably described dahlia lithwicks rather overheated criticism alito day nomination short bazelon lithwick offer zero evidence slimed bazelon lithwick try confuse underlying conflict question conflating distinct recusal questions faced justice scalia justice thomas none questions involved participation spouse spouses institutional alter ego proceeding supreme court difficult imagine justice wouldnt disqualify circumstance bazelon lithwick also claim defended scalia decision take part energy policy task force case curiously provide link supposed support heres lithwick say matter one essay justice scalia step aside duckgate regardless whats heart terrible mistake especially landmark case cronyism special influence allow appearance cronyism special influence taint must completely fair decision second lithwick essay oblique dont see anyone would read description scalias astonishing 21page memorandum astonishing deeply felt pained virtually unprecedented defense decision recuse perhaps lithwick written defense perhaps bazelon couldnt find anything quick search much bullying expect bazelon lithwick might provide actual support positions wonder bazelon lithwick object sobriety edward whelan president ethics public policy center regular contributor nros bench memos blog 160 following publication essay bazelon lithwick added link linked article essay lithwick doesnt support claim defended scalias decision recuse energy policy task force case160 lithwicks essay defends scalias nonrecusal lawrence v texas written nearly year courts ruling case states ought think seriously staying cheney appeal based cavortings vice president160 defense | 519 |
<p>KANSAS CITY, Mo. — <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Kansas-City-Chiefs/" type="external">Kansas City Chiefs</a> head coach <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Andy_Reid/" type="external">Andy Reid</a> knows his team can be pretty good, and sometimes great. His offense occasionally scores at will and his defense can make big stops.</p>
<p>Getting them to do both at the same time, however, has proven elusive over the past month as the Chiefs dropped three of their last four games.</p>
<p>“I’ve seen it before the last couple of games here where both sides were playing well at the same time,” Reid said. “When we do that we’re a tough team to stop. We’ve got to continue to do that.”</p>
<p>In the team’s 28-17 loss to the <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Dallas-Cowboys/" type="external">Dallas Cowboys</a> on Sunday, the split personality of both squads alternated the stage with one another.</p>
<p>“I thought we were up and down,” Reid said. “The defense I thought started real well, the offense didn’t. Then the second half, the offense picked it up and the defense had a couple of drives there.”</p>
<p>During the first five weeks of the season, the Chiefs could do no wrong. The team raced to a 5-0 start with the offense piling up the points and the defense making timely stops.</p>
<p>But in recent weeks, neither offense nor defense consistently fired on all cylinders.</p>
<p>One curious struggle for the offense comes from the rushing game. Rookie Kareem Hunt, who leads the league with 800 yards rushing, mustered only 37 yards rushing on nine carries.</p>
<p>That continued a four-game streak during which Hunt averaged only 48 yards per game. He averaged 121.8 yards through the team’s first five games.</p>
<p>“Yesterday, we didn’t run nearly as well as we should have, and they were doing some things to try and stop that,” Reid said. “But even with that, you should still be effective.”</p>
<p>Defensively, the Chiefs are struggling finding a balance against the run and pass. The Cowboys found a bit of balance, rushing for 131 yards and passing for 249, close to Kansas City’s averages on the season. But often the Chiefs’ defense cracks down on the run and surrenders a big passing day, or stiles the pass and gets gashed on the ground.</p>
<p>“If you get beat on a play, it doesn’t matter what side of the ball you’re on or special teams, it doesn’t matter,” Reid said. “You step back up and you challenge again. That’s what you do. We’ve got to get back to do that better. Both sides of the ball.”</p>
<p>Reid believes his team has the potential to put everything together, much as it did during the first five games of the season.</p>
<p>“I know what kind of talent we have,” Reid said. “I’m confident in that. I’ve got to make sure offensively, defensively, special teams we’re all doing the right things and were doing the part from a coaching standpoint where we’re giving our players the best opportunity to make plays.”</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>Cornerback <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Steven/" type="external">Steven</a> Nelson played 64 of Kansas City’s 67 defensive snaps in Sunday’s 28-17 loss to the Dallas Cowboys, marking another step since his return from injured reserve with a core muscle injury.</p>
<p>“Nelson’s just kind of getting back into the swing of things,” head coach Andy Reid said. “He’s been playing the nickel position, playing a little bit of corner. We’ll put him back in where he has a bigger role out there.”</p>
<p>In his season debut against Denver in Week 8, Nelson played exclusively as the nickel back. Now the Chiefs are working him back in as their every-day right cornerback. He then moves to the slot when the team moves to a nickel or dime defense.</p>
<p>Nelson received a flag for pass interference in Sunday’s loss to the Cowboys, but Reid faulted the call and not his cornerback. Nelson and Cowboys receiver <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Dez_Bryant/" type="external">Dez Bryant</a> tangled up on the third-and-9 play. The penalty kept the Dallas drive alive, which culminated with a 2-yard touchdown run by <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Ezekiel-Elliott/" type="external">Ezekiel Elliott</a> putting the Cowboys up 21-17.</p>
<p>“I thought Nelson had the right of way on that and was called for pass interference,” Reid said. “I didn’t think that was. It ended up being a big play on that drive. It didn’t allow us to get off the field and get back on when we had a little bit of momentum.”</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>Third down proved a crucial situation for the Chiefs in their loss to Dallas, with the Cowboys converting 7-of-12 third-down attempts, with each one seemingly a crucial blow to Kansas City’s efforts to get their defense off the field.</p>
<p>“Third downs we didn’t get off the field,” Reid said. “From a defensive standpoint we’ve got to be able to do that. We’re better than that.”</p>
<p>Reid faulted both sides of his team for failing on third down Sunday. The offense converted only 4-of-11 third-down tries. He wants his coaches to use the bye week to evaluate the team’s struggles on third down and find solutions.</p>
<p>“Are we putting the guys into the right position to make plays on the ball, then are you making the play?” Reid asked. “We all take responsibility for that. We’ll get that straightened out.”</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>Chiefs head coach Andy Reid holds a 16-2 record following the bye week, yet his philosophy for the time off remains staggeringly simple: vacation time.</p>
<p>“I think it will be good for the players to get away,” Reid. “I gave them this week off, step back, get away, heal up a little bit.”</p>
<p>Rest comes at a critical junction for the Chiefs. The team bolted out of the gates to a 5-0 start but stumbled over the last month, falling to 6-3 heading into the bye.</p>
<p>“We’ve had a pretty good schedule up to this point and really have maximized themselves up to this point,” Reid said. “The effort’s been there and it’s good to step back here to give them the opportunity to do that.”</p>
<p>Another key to Reid’s bye-week success is himself and his coaching staff. Reid carries a strong reputation for developing effective game plans given time to prepare. Now the Chiefs have nearly two weeks preparing for a road trip to visit the <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/New_York_Giants/" type="external">New York Giants</a>.</p>
<p>“The coaches will work and take a couple of days off too and then get back on it and get ready for New York,” Reid said.</p>
<p>NOTES: DE Allen Bailey left Sunday’s game with a sprained MCL in his knee. He briefly tried to return to the game without success. The plans are for Bailey to undergo additional tests to determine the extent of the damage. … LB <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Tamba-Hali/" type="external">Tamba Hali</a> made his season debut Sunday against Dallas, playing 23 of the team’s defensive snaps. The team wants to evaluate how Hali’s knees respond to his playing time and hope the bye week provides a slow immersion back onto the field. … RG Laurent Duvernay-Tardif returned to the starting lineup after missing four games with a sprained knee. Sunday’s game marked the first time the Chiefs returned its opening-week lineup to the field since Week 2 of the season. Duvernay-Tardif received a flag for a false start and head coach Andy Reid said he showed some rust, but was pleased with his overall performance. … LB Dee Ford missed his third game this season with back issues, and the team has yet to indicate a time table for his return. The team hopes the bye week provides additional rest for Ford heading to the season’s stretch drive. … WR Albert Wilson did not play Sunday after aggravating a hamstring injury last week against Denver. It’s not known how long the injury will keep Wilson on the sideline.</p>
<p>MOST VALUABLE ROOKIE: RB Kareem Hunt. The third-round pick from Toledo made a case as the league’s MVP through the first quarter of the season. He leads the league with 800 yards rushing and 1,131 yards from scrimmage. Hunt’s contact balance that allows him extend plays and his proficiency out of the backfield are not surprises. But the ease with which he made the transition to the pro level does raise some eyebrows, especially his ability to provide pass protection. Hunt’s recent struggles on the ground, however, coincide with Kansas City dropping three of its last four games. Hunt averaged just 48 yards rushing in those games. Hunt remains the key to putting the Chiefs’ offense back on track for the second half of the season.</p>
<p>VETERAN SURPRISE: LB Frank Zombo. The Chiefs rely on Zombo as a staunch run defender and sure tackler, but the team needed more from Zombo with a spate of injuries at outside linebacker and the 30-year-old veteran responded. With injuries limiting the playing time of <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Justin-Houston/" type="external">Justin Houston</a>, Dee Ford and Tamba Hali, Zombo stepped in to fill the breach, collecting 1.5 sacks and combining for 22 tackles through nine games. Zombo also serves as a mentor to the team’s young linebackers, especially second-round draft pick Tanoh Kpassagnon.</p>
<p>MIDSEASON REPORT CARD</p>
<p>—PASSING OFFENSE: A-minus – Quarterback <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Alex_Smith/" type="external">Alex Smith</a> posted among the strongest first halves of his career, completing 69.6 percent of his passes for 2,444 yards and 18 touchdowns in the team’s first nine games. All those numbers put him well on pace for career highs. Tight end Travis Kelce and wide receiver <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Tyreek-Hill/" type="external">Tyreek Hill</a> remain on pace for 1,000-yard receiving seasons, and rookie running back Kareem Hunt provides the team with a dual-threat option out of the backfield. The Chiefs lead the league at 6.2 yards per play, and Smith and the passing game are the biggest reason why.</p>
<p>—RUSHING OFFENSE: A-minus – The run game behind rookie Kareem Hunt deserve an A-plus for the first five games of the season, but the last four weeks bring down the average a bit. Hunt leads the league in rushing and yards from scrimmage, piling up 800 yards on the ground and adding 331 more through the air along with six touchdowns in total. Few running backs in recent weeks bolted out of the gates faster than Hunt. But with just 48 yards rushing per game the last four weeks, Hunt must find a way to make adjustments, as the league seems to be solving the riddle he poses.</p>
<p>—PASS DEFENSE: C-minus – The Chiefs rank 28th in passing yards allowed per game. The secondary missed two starters most of the first half of the season. Safety <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Eric-Berry/" type="external">Eric Berry</a> went to injured reserve with an Achilles tendon rupture following Week 1, and starting right cornerback Steven Nelson missed the team’s first eight games with a core muscle injury. Perhaps most distressing, the Chiefs’ pass rushing ranks tied for 16th with just 19 sacks through the first nine games. The team’s defense relies on a strong pass rush to disrupt the passing game. When the Chiefs get to the quarterback, the defense can play lights out. When they cannot, opposing quarterbacks have big days.</p>
<p>—RUSH DEFENSE: D-minus – Even when teams don’t rush the ball particularly well, they still seem to find ways to pile up yards against the Chiefs. The teams ranks 30th in the league with 131.1 rushing yards allowed per game. They also allowed nine rushing touchdowns, showing signs that the bend-but-don’t-break defensive philosophy needs repairs quickly. The Chiefs seem to have the pieces to be better against the run, especially with the addition of defensive tackle Bennie Logan and linebacker Reggie Ragland. The team again misses the expertise of safety Eric Berry against the run.</p>
<p>—SPECIAL TEAMS: B-plus – The kicking game has been close to perfect with rookie kicker Harrison Butker connecting on his last 19 straight field-goal attempts. Punter Dustin Colquitt carries a less than stellar 39.4 net punting average but his ability to put the ball inside the 20 remains among the best in the league. Special teams coordinator Dave Toub normally hangs his hat on the return game, but the Chiefs have struggled in that area. The Chiefs rank eighth in kickoff returns with a 23.3-yard average. Teams normally avoid punt returner Tyreek Hill, leaving the Chiefs 17th in the league with an 8.2-yard return average.</p>
<p>—COACHING: B – Head coach Andy Reid and his staff deserve much of the credit for the team’s 5-0 start, but it also holds significant ownership in the 1-3 slump leading to the bye week. Defensive coordinator Bob Sutton finds himself the target of much of the criticism with the team ranking 28th against the pass, 30th versus the run and 20th with 23.1 points allowed per game. The Chiefs have a Super Bowl offense and a No. 1 overall draft pick defense. Finding a way to improve the defense in the second half stands between the Chiefs and postseason success.</p> | false | 1 | kansas city mo kansas city chiefs head coach andy reid knows team pretty good sometimes great offense occasionally scores defense make big stops getting time however proven elusive past month chiefs dropped three last four games ive seen last couple games sides playing well time reid said tough team stop weve got continue teams 2817 loss dallas cowboys sunday split personality squads alternated stage one another thought reid said defense thought started real well offense didnt second half offense picked defense couple drives first five weeks season chiefs could wrong team raced 50 start offense piling points defense making timely stops recent weeks neither offense defense consistently fired cylinders one curious struggle offense comes rushing game rookie kareem hunt leads league 800 yards rushing mustered 37 yards rushing nine carries continued fourgame streak hunt averaged 48 yards per game averaged 1218 yards teams first five games yesterday didnt run nearly well things try stop reid said even still effective defensively chiefs struggling finding balance run pass cowboys found bit balance rushing 131 yards passing 249 close kansas citys averages season often chiefs defense cracks run surrenders big passing day stiles pass gets gashed ground get beat play doesnt matter side ball youre special teams doesnt matter reid said step back challenge thats weve got get back better sides ball reid believes team potential put everything together much first five games season know kind talent reid said im confident ive got make sure offensively defensively special teams right things part coaching standpoint giving players best opportunity make plays cornerback steven nelson played 64 kansas citys 67 defensive snaps sundays 2817 loss dallas cowboys marking another step since return injured reserve core muscle injury nelsons kind getting back swing things head coach andy reid said hes playing nickel position playing little bit corner well put back bigger role season debut denver week 8 nelson played exclusively nickel back chiefs working back everyday right cornerback moves slot team moves nickel dime defense nelson received flag pass interference sundays loss cowboys reid faulted call cornerback nelson cowboys receiver dez bryant tangled thirdand9 play penalty kept dallas drive alive culminated 2yard touchdown run ezekiel elliott putting cowboys 2117 thought nelson right way called pass interference reid said didnt think ended big play drive didnt allow us get field get back little bit momentum third proved crucial situation chiefs loss dallas cowboys converting 7of12 thirddown attempts one seemingly crucial blow kansas citys efforts get defense field third downs didnt get field reid said defensive standpoint weve got able better reid faulted sides team failing third sunday offense converted 4of11 thirddown tries wants coaches use bye week evaluate teams struggles third find solutions putting guys right position make plays ball making play reid asked take responsibility well get straightened chiefs head coach andy reid holds 162 record following bye week yet philosophy time remains staggeringly simple vacation time think good players get away reid gave week step back get away heal little bit rest comes critical junction chiefs team bolted gates 50 start stumbled last month falling 63 heading bye weve pretty good schedule point really maximized point reid said efforts good step back give opportunity another key reids byeweek success coaching staff reid carries strong reputation developing effective game plans given time prepare chiefs nearly two weeks preparing road trip visit new york giants coaches work take couple days get back get ready new york reid said notes de allen bailey left sundays game sprained mcl knee briefly tried return game without success plans bailey undergo additional tests determine extent damage lb tamba hali made season debut sunday dallas playing 23 teams defensive snaps team wants evaluate halis knees respond playing time hope bye week provides slow immersion back onto field rg laurent duvernaytardif returned starting lineup missing four games sprained knee sundays game marked first time chiefs returned openingweek lineup field since week 2 season duvernaytardif received flag false start head coach andy reid said showed rust pleased overall performance lb dee ford missed third game season back issues team yet indicate time table return team hopes bye week provides additional rest ford heading seasons stretch drive wr albert wilson play sunday aggravating hamstring injury last week denver known long injury keep wilson sideline valuable rookie rb kareem hunt thirdround pick toledo made case leagues mvp first quarter season leads league 800 yards rushing 1131 yards scrimmage hunts contact balance allows extend plays proficiency backfield surprises ease made transition pro level raise eyebrows especially ability provide pass protection hunts recent struggles ground however coincide kansas city dropping three last four games hunt averaged 48 yards rushing games hunt remains key putting chiefs offense back track second half season veteran surprise lb frank zombo chiefs rely zombo staunch run defender sure tackler team needed zombo spate injuries outside linebacker 30yearold veteran responded injuries limiting playing time justin houston dee ford tamba hali zombo stepped fill breach collecting 15 sacks combining 22 tackles nine games zombo also serves mentor teams young linebackers especially secondround draft pick tanoh kpassagnon midseason report card passing offense aminus quarterback alex smith posted among strongest first halves career completing 696 percent passes 2444 yards 18 touchdowns teams first nine games numbers put well pace career highs tight end travis kelce wide receiver tyreek hill remain pace 1000yard receiving seasons rookie running back kareem hunt provides team dualthreat option backfield chiefs lead league 62 yards per play smith passing game biggest reason rushing offense aminus run game behind rookie kareem hunt deserve aplus first five games season last four weeks bring average bit hunt leads league rushing yards scrimmage piling 800 yards ground adding 331 air along six touchdowns total running backs recent weeks bolted gates faster hunt 48 yards rushing per game last four weeks hunt must find way make adjustments league seems solving riddle poses pass defense cminus chiefs rank 28th passing yards allowed per game secondary missed two starters first half season safety eric berry went injured reserve achilles tendon rupture following week 1 starting right cornerback steven nelson missed teams first eight games core muscle injury perhaps distressing chiefs pass rushing ranks tied 16th 19 sacks first nine games teams defense relies strong pass rush disrupt passing game chiefs get quarterback defense play lights opposing quarterbacks big days rush defense dminus even teams dont rush ball particularly well still seem find ways pile yards chiefs teams ranks 30th league 1311 rushing yards allowed per game also allowed nine rushing touchdowns showing signs bendbutdontbreak defensive philosophy needs repairs quickly chiefs seem pieces better run especially addition defensive tackle bennie logan linebacker reggie ragland team misses expertise safety eric berry run special teams bplus kicking game close perfect rookie kicker harrison butker connecting last 19 straight fieldgoal attempts punter dustin colquitt carries less stellar 394 net punting average ability put ball inside 20 remains among best league special teams coordinator dave toub normally hangs hat return game chiefs struggled area chiefs rank eighth kickoff returns 233yard average teams normally avoid punt returner tyreek hill leaving chiefs 17th league 82yard return average coaching b head coach andy reid staff deserve much credit teams 50 start also holds significant ownership 13 slump leading bye week defensive coordinator bob sutton finds target much criticism team ranking 28th pass 30th versus run 20th 231 points allowed per game chiefs super bowl offense 1 overall draft pick defense finding way improve defense second half stands chiefs postseason success | 1,242 |
<p><a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/Overview/" type="external">In the budget President Obama proposed yesterday</a>, he once again chose to placate constituencies and promote an activist government agenda at the expense of getting the nation’s fiscal house in order. The budget forecasts a $1.3 trillion deficit for the current fiscal year—the fourth year in a row of trillion dollar deficits. The president is thus on track to pile up an astonishing $5.3 trillion in deficits during his first term, for fiscal years 2009 to 2012. For those who say he shouldn’t be held accountable for 2009 since he assumed office one-third of the way through it (and then promptly pushed through an $800 billion spending program), the cumulative deficit for the four year period 2010 to 2013 is nearly as bad—$4.8 trillion.</p>
<p>The fundamental problem in the federal budget is the relentless increase in entitlement spending. The administration’s apologists like to say that our fiscal problems stem from tax cuts, the Medicare drug benefit, and unfinanced wars. But this is not so. Over the past four decades, the federal government has collected revenue that has averaged 18 percent of GDP annually. In 1972, when total spending on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid was 4.4 percent of GDP, there was plenty of revenue left over for other priorities of government, like national security. But today, the situation is very different. Spending on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the entitlements created in the health care law are expected to reach 10.2 percent of GDP in 2012, well over half of the normal tax take of the government. That’s the primary reason the government is now experiencing massive fiscal pressure.</p>
<p>The president’s budget does nothing to address this problem and, in fact, makes it much, much worse. According to the administration’s own figures, the president’s plan would increase entitlement spending to about $3.7 trillion in 2022, up from $1.8 trillion in 2008. On average, the president’s budget proposes to increase spending on this segment of the budget by 5.3 percent per year over the coming decade.</p>
<p>Spending on just Medicare and Medicaid in the president’s budget will increase from about $0.6 trillion in 2008 to $1.5 trillion in 2022, and even those figures are optimistic because the budget assumes that the arbitrary cuts in reimbursement rates for those providing services to Medicare patients can be sustained, in direct contradiction to the warnings issued by the administration’s chief actuary for the Medicare program.</p>
<p>According to the president’s numbers, the annual budget deficit would shrink nonetheless, from 8.5 percent of GDP in 2012 to 2.8 percent in 2022. If not from entitlements, where does this supposed deficit reduction come from? Two sources: higher taxes and deep reductions in defense spending.</p>
<p>The president wants to push through another round of massive tax hikes, to pile on top of the nearly $600 billion in tax increases over the coming decade that he already pushed through as part of the health care law. Together, these tax hikes plus the assumption of normal economic growth would push total federal revenues in 2022 to 20.1 percent of GDP, more than 2 percentage points above the average from the last four decades. The U.S. has never maintained tax collection at such a level on a sustained basis.</p>
<p>At the same time, the budget calls for severe cuts in national defense and security spending, from 5.6 percent of GDP this year to 3.4 percent in 2022. Of course, reducing security spending by more than a third over the coming decade would unquestionably improve the nation’s budget outlook. But such a downsizing could only occur if a highly unusual period of tranquility suddenly materialized across the globe. If, on the other hand, the next decade in world history is more like what it has been for millennia, then it would be both financially foolish and utterly irresponsible to claim credit for a fictitious “peace dividend” in outyear budget projections. But, of course, that’s exactly what the Obama budget does to make the deficit forecast look better than it really is.</p>
<p>When the unprecedented tax hikes and the unrealistic defense cuts are set aside, it’s clear that the Obama budget would put the country on a path to fiscal ruin. In 2022, if taxes stay at their historical level and defense spending is held constant with today’s level, then the deficit in the Obama plan would be 7.1 percent of GDP instead of 2.8 percent—well above the level that would be dangerous for the U.S. economy if sustained over several years.</p>
<p>This budget plan fits with the pattern of the Obama presidency. It is aimed more at creating contrasts with the GOP than solving the nation’s budget problem with bipartisan solutions.</p>
<p>It doesn’t have to be this way. Indeed, the steps needed to get our fiscal house in order are well known on both sides of the aisle. The tax law needs an overhaul to broaden the base, lower rates, and promote stronger economic growth. The health entitlement programs need to move away from government command-and-control approaches that have failed and toward a system of defined contribution payments to the programs’ beneficiaries that promotes genuine cost discipline within a functioning marketplace. And Social Security needs to be updated to reflect demographic reality.</p>
<p>For a brief moment, it seemed that the president wanted to take on this challenge and pursue just such an agenda. In 2010, he appointed the Bowles-Simpson commission to come up with a comprehensive budget plan to restore long-term solvency to the government. Not surprisingly, the plan approved by that commission called for serious tax and entitlement reforms as well as deep cuts in every corner of the federal budget.</p>
<p>But instead of embracing the Bowles-Simpson plan, the president changed course and chose to ignore entirely the recommendations of the panel he had initiated to great fanfare. The president then spent all of 2011 attacking the GOP’s version of long-term budget reform instead of offering a serious plan of his own, thus making it all but impossible for a bipartisan consensus to form in Congress. The president’s 2013 budget plan fits this pattern, providing stark contrasts with the GOP at the expense of real progress.</p>
<p>At some point, this approach will catch up with the president. He was elected to lead, regardless of the political consequences. And voters will hold him accountable for results, not empty rhetoric. As matters stand, he is likely to go down in history as the president who hastened the day of the nation’s financial collapse.</p>
<p>James C. Capretta is a fellow at the <a href="" type="internal">Ethics and Public Policy Center</a> and project director of e21’s <a href="http://www.obamacarewatch.org/" type="external">ObamaCare Watch</a>. He was an associate director atthe Officeof Management and Budget from 2001 to 2004.</p> | false | 1 | budget president obama proposed yesterday chose placate constituencies promote activist government agenda expense getting nations fiscal house order budget forecasts 13 trillion deficit current fiscal yearthe fourth year row trillion dollar deficits president thus track pile astonishing 53 trillion deficits first term fiscal years 2009 2012 say shouldnt held accountable 2009 since assumed office onethird way promptly pushed 800 billion spending program cumulative deficit four year period 2010 2013 nearly bad48 trillion fundamental problem federal budget relentless increase entitlement spending administrations apologists like say fiscal problems stem tax cuts medicare drug benefit unfinanced wars past four decades federal government collected revenue averaged 18 percent gdp annually 1972 total spending social security medicare medicaid 44 percent gdp plenty revenue left priorities government like national security today situation different spending social security medicare medicaid entitlements created health care law expected reach 102 percent gdp 2012 well half normal tax take government thats primary reason government experiencing massive fiscal pressure presidents budget nothing address problem fact makes much much worse according administrations figures presidents plan would increase entitlement spending 37 trillion 2022 18 trillion 2008 average presidents budget proposes increase spending segment budget 53 percent per year coming decade spending medicare medicaid presidents budget increase 06 trillion 2008 15 trillion 2022 even figures optimistic budget assumes arbitrary cuts reimbursement rates providing services medicare patients sustained direct contradiction warnings issued administrations chief actuary medicare program according presidents numbers annual budget deficit would shrink nonetheless 85 percent gdp 2012 28 percent 2022 entitlements supposed deficit reduction come two sources higher taxes deep reductions defense spending president wants push another round massive tax hikes pile top nearly 600 billion tax increases coming decade already pushed part health care law together tax hikes plus assumption normal economic growth would push total federal revenues 2022 201 percent gdp 2 percentage points average last four decades us never maintained tax collection level sustained basis time budget calls severe cuts national defense security spending 56 percent gdp year 34 percent 2022 course reducing security spending third coming decade would unquestionably improve nations budget outlook downsizing could occur highly unusual period tranquility suddenly materialized across globe hand next decade world history like millennia would financially foolish utterly irresponsible claim credit fictitious peace dividend outyear budget projections course thats exactly obama budget make deficit forecast look better really unprecedented tax hikes unrealistic defense cuts set aside clear obama budget would put country path fiscal ruin 2022 taxes stay historical level defense spending held constant todays level deficit obama plan would 71 percent gdp instead 28 percentwell level would dangerous us economy sustained several years budget plan fits pattern obama presidency aimed creating contrasts gop solving nations budget problem bipartisan solutions doesnt way indeed steps needed get fiscal house order well known sides aisle tax law needs overhaul broaden base lower rates promote stronger economic growth health entitlement programs need move away government commandandcontrol approaches failed toward system defined contribution payments programs beneficiaries promotes genuine cost discipline within functioning marketplace social security needs updated reflect demographic reality brief moment seemed president wanted take challenge pursue agenda 2010 appointed bowlessimpson commission come comprehensive budget plan restore longterm solvency government surprisingly plan approved commission called serious tax entitlement reforms well deep cuts every corner federal budget instead embracing bowlessimpson plan president changed course chose ignore entirely recommendations panel initiated great fanfare president spent 2011 attacking gops version longterm budget reform instead offering serious plan thus making impossible bipartisan consensus form congress presidents 2013 budget plan fits pattern providing stark contrasts gop expense real progress point approach catch president elected lead regardless political consequences voters hold accountable results empty rhetoric matters stand likely go history president hastened day nations financial collapse james c capretta fellow ethics public policy center project director e21s obamacare watch associate director atthe officeof management budget 2001 2004 | 636 |
<p>By Christian Shepherd</p>
<p>BEIJING (Reuters) – A scooter driver in a bright blue jacket on a food delivery run dashes across a busy intersection slick with rain, hits a turning car and is hurled along the tarmac in a video posted by Chinese police warning that couriers should slow down.</p>
<p>China’s home delivery boom, powered by an estimated three million couriers, most of them riding quiet electric scooters or boxy three-wheelers, has triggered a surge in road accidents, prompting warnings from police and complaints from drivers who say they feel pressure to put speed before safety.</p>
<p>“Accidents happen all the time at rush hour. I have a friend who was hit by a car and could not work for two months,” said a food courier in Beijing surnamed Zhang, declining to give his full name.</p>
<p>The number of users of China’s online food delivery market, dominated by services backed by technology giants Alibaba (NYSE:) Group Holding Ltd and Tencent Holdings Ltd, surged 41.6 percent to 300 million in the first half of 2017, according to a report by the state-controlled China Internet Network Information Center.</p>
<p>After 76 injuries and deaths involving food delivery drivers in Shanghai were recorded in the first half of 2017 alone, police called in China’s largest food delivery companies in late August to warn them to improve safety standards.</p>
<p>Drivers from China’s two largest food delivery companies, Meituan-Dianping and Ele.me, were responsible for about a quarter of all the incidents, the Shanghai police said.</p>
<p>The news sparked a countrywide reaction as city police and state media came out to chastise the industry for accidents.</p>
<p>Police in the eastern city of Nanjing met with food delivery companies on Sept 20 after couriers were involved in more than 3,000 accidents in the first half of 2017, over 90 percent of which were deemed their fault, state media reported.</p>
<p>The official Legal Daily urged authorities to “mobilise the masses” to use phone cameras to catch offenders and punish their employers, identified by distinctively colored uniforms.</p>
<p>A spokesman for Meituan, whose drivers wear a fluorescent yellow, said that the company has safety training for drivers and conducted more than 300 driver training courses in July. He said there was a 13.6 percent drop in traffic incidents in the following month.</p>
<p>A spokeswoman for Ele.me said it tells drivers that “safety is first, speed is second” and that the company recently launched a system to track traffic violations by drivers, as well as offering rewards to onlookers who report incidents.</p>
<p>NEED FOR SPEED</p>
<p>China’s drivers are rarely mugged or shot – a risk facing their counterparts in parts of the United States and some other countries – but they often suffer injuries on the country’s hectic city roads.</p>
<p>While drivers typically take the blame for accidents, labor activists and numerous drivers said incentives make speed a necessity.</p>
<p>The Hong Kong-based China Labour Bulletin, which tracks labor action in China, said couriers are increasingly airing their grievances, staging protests and strikes to demand better wages and accident insurance.</p>
<p>Drivers can face fines for late deliveries or poor customer ratings, the drivers said, adding that companies do not always provide insurance or coverage for accidents. Companies say drivers are covered by public and third party liability insurance.</p>
<p>Food delivery drivers told Reuters that they are expected to do up to 40 deliveries in one 10-to-12-hour shift, usually with a time limit of under half an hour per delivery. Being on time and getting good reviews from customers can mean an extra 5 yuan (0.75 U.S. cents) or so per delivery.</p>
<p>Couriers are also usually not hired directly by the companies that design the ordering software. Instead, they work freelance or for third party companies, leaving them without direct contracts with the platform operators.</p>
<p>In August, dozens of Meituan drivers staged a strike in the southern city of Yixing to complain about pay and injury compensation, showing off their scab-covered legs and using hand-written equations to show how a build up of fines for late deliveries can eat into their salaries.</p>
<p>The vast majority of drivers are migrant workers under the age of 26 who send most of their income home to support their families, according to a 2016 report by Meituan-dianping.</p>
<p>“Food delivery platforms’ management needs to become more humane,” the official People’s Daily newspaper said in a recent commentary. “Switch from an operating model that only seeks speed to one that only seeks stability… don’t let delivery drivers risk their lives delivering meals.”</p>
<p>An Ele.me spokeswoman acknowledged that “balancing delivery speed and traffic safety is indeed very hard”, adding that the company is working to use artificial intelligence to optimize routes and monitor drivers.</p>
<p>Criticism has mostly targeted food delivery companies as their drivers face greater time pressure and have less well-defined routes than those delivering other packages.</p>
<p>But the wider delivery industry also has its problems.</p>
<p>Niu Hongqiang, 23, a driver from Hebei province working for a package delivery company in Beijing said that the safety training he received was “useless.”</p>
<p>“When something goes wrong, it goes wrong in a big way.”</p> | false | 1 | christian shepherd beijing reuters scooter driver bright blue jacket food delivery run dashes across busy intersection slick rain hits turning car hurled along tarmac video posted chinese police warning couriers slow chinas home delivery boom powered estimated three million couriers riding quiet electric scooters boxy threewheelers triggered surge road accidents prompting warnings police complaints drivers say feel pressure put speed safety accidents happen time rush hour friend hit car could work two months said food courier beijing surnamed zhang declining give full name number users chinas online food delivery market dominated services backed technology giants alibaba nyse group holding ltd tencent holdings ltd surged 416 percent 300 million first half 2017 according report statecontrolled china internet network information center 76 injuries deaths involving food delivery drivers shanghai recorded first half 2017 alone police called chinas largest food delivery companies late august warn improve safety standards drivers chinas two largest food delivery companies meituandianping eleme responsible quarter incidents shanghai police said news sparked countrywide reaction city police state media came chastise industry accidents police eastern city nanjing met food delivery companies sept 20 couriers involved 3000 accidents first half 2017 90 percent deemed fault state media reported official legal daily urged authorities mobilise masses use phone cameras catch offenders punish employers identified distinctively colored uniforms spokesman meituan whose drivers wear fluorescent yellow said company safety training drivers conducted 300 driver training courses july said 136 percent drop traffic incidents following month spokeswoman eleme said tells drivers safety first speed second company recently launched system track traffic violations drivers well offering rewards onlookers report incidents need speed chinas drivers rarely mugged shot risk facing counterparts parts united states countries often suffer injuries countrys hectic city roads drivers typically take blame accidents labor activists numerous drivers said incentives make speed necessity hong kongbased china labour bulletin tracks labor action china said couriers increasingly airing grievances staging protests strikes demand better wages accident insurance drivers face fines late deliveries poor customer ratings drivers said adding companies always provide insurance coverage accidents companies say drivers covered public third party liability insurance food delivery drivers told reuters expected 40 deliveries one 10to12hour shift usually time limit half hour per delivery time getting good reviews customers mean extra 5 yuan 075 us cents per delivery couriers also usually hired directly companies design ordering software instead work freelance third party companies leaving without direct contracts platform operators august dozens meituan drivers staged strike southern city yixing complain pay injury compensation showing scabcovered legs using handwritten equations show build fines late deliveries eat salaries vast majority drivers migrant workers age 26 send income home support families according 2016 report meituandianping food delivery platforms management needs become humane official peoples daily newspaper said recent commentary switch operating model seeks speed one seeks stability dont let delivery drivers risk lives delivering meals eleme spokeswoman acknowledged balancing delivery speed traffic safety indeed hard adding company working use artificial intelligence optimize routes monitor drivers criticism mostly targeted food delivery companies drivers face greater time pressure less welldefined routes delivering packages wider delivery industry also problems niu hongqiang 23 driver hebei province working package delivery company beijing said safety training received useless something goes wrong goes wrong big way | 535 |
<p />
<p>This article is adapted from Mr. Weigel’s remarks in the above video, which were delivered at “Religion in the Ukrainian Public Square: An Analysis of the EuroMaidan and Its Aftermath,” a conference sponsored by the Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky Institute of Eastern Christian Studies and held at the University of St. Michael’s College, Toronto, on November 15, 2014.</p>
<p>On May 13, 1982, one year to the day after the assassination attempt in St. Peter’s Square, Pope John Paul II made a pilgrimage to the Marian shrine at Fatima in Portugal in thanksgiving for his life’s being spared. There, he reflected on the seemingly random fact that he had been shot on the feast day of Our Lady of Fatima: “In the designs of Providence,” he said, “there are no mere coincidences.” What seems to us “coincidence,” he was suggesting, is simply a facet of Providence that we’ve not yet grasped.</p>
<p>With that in mind, let me suggest that the Maidan “revolution of dignity” that is still unfolding in Ukraine has a two-fold providential character.</p>
<p>The first aspect of the Maidan’s providential character has been the subject of our reflections all day. The religious communities of Ukraine — Orthodox, Roman and Greek Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim — have cooperated as never before over the past year. And they have done so in the face of severe Russian aggression in various forms: political aggression, military aggression, and even ecclesiastical aggression. In the process, a baseline, a new foundation, has been set for ecumenical and interreligious cooperation in building a vibrant civil society for the free, prosperous, and virtuous Ukraine of the future.</p>
<p>The second providential aspect of the Maidan “revolution of dignity” points outward, toward the West. For this revolution of conscience — which now coincides with the 25th anniversary of the Revolution of 1989 and the collapse of European Communism — teaches five lessons the West badly needs to relearn about its own civic and political project, and the relationship of religious conviction and moral truth to that project.</p>
<p>The first lesson: Freedom is never free.</p>
<p>After the Revolution of 1989 and the subsequent implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, too many in the comfortable and complacent West succumbed to the temptation to imagine that stable, free, and law-governed societies are the norm, that living in freedom under the rule of laws tethered to the moral law is humanity’s natural condition. The truth of which the Maidan “revolution of dignity” has reminded the West is that freedom lived nobly is a cultural and social accomplishment, which must be renewed in every generation on penalty of decadence and decay. And the corollary to that truth is that democratic self-governance is not inevitable, only possible.</p>
<p>The second lesson: Democracy and the free economy are not machines that can run by themselves.</p>
<p>This is the mechanistic fallacy: the notion, fashionable in both political and economic theory in the 21st century West, that the real work of democracy and the free economy lies in getting the machinery of free politics and the market set up properly; then it’s just a matter of inserting the key, firing up the ignition, and letting the machinery run by itself. To be sure, the machinery is important, but the institutions of free politics and free economics are not all there is to the exercise of freedom.</p>
<p>It takes a certain critical mass of people, living certain virtues, to make the machinery of democracy and the market work so that the net result is genuine human flourishing. This is perhaps the central theme that Catholic Social Doctrine teaches 21st century societies, and it has been embodied both by the Maidan “revolution of dignity” and (along the via negativa) by what sparked that revolution. The Ukrainian “Orange Revolution” of 2004–2005 failed because, in its wake, there simply wasn’t that critical mass of citizens living the virtues necessary so that freedom might work for the benefit of all; instead, rampant corruption was the order of the day. By rejecting that culture of corruption, the Maidan “revolution of dignity” reclaimed for Ukraine — and ought to have reminded the West — that only a virtuous people can be free, in the noblest sense of freedom.</p>
<p>The third lesson: Historical and moral clarity count.</p>
<p>As we mark the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and look forward to the silver jubilee of the Czechoslovak “Velvet Revolution” in December, perhaps we in the West can now see more clearly another lesson the Ukrainian experience of the past year should have taught us: that it was a grave error not to undertake, in the aftermath of the Cold War, serious de-Communization efforts on the pattern of the de-Nazification efforts that immediately followed World war II — efforts that were understood then to be an essential component of securing the victory of freedom over tyranny. The results of that error are evident not only in post-Communist states (and especially in Russia); they are evident in the West itself.</p>
<p>How? The vulnerability of the West to Russian propaganda today is a direct result of the post–Cold War failure to culturally delegitimize — to shame and shun until they had acknowledged their errors — those who, for reasons of ideological intoxication or stupidity or both, had misrepresented the realities of Communism in political life, in the universities, in the press, and in the religious communities. Unrepentant and unchastened (indeed, in the case of academics such as Stephen Cohen, boldly defiant), many of the purveyors of falsehood then are the purveyors of falsehood now. Those who made excuses for Soviet aggression then make parallel (and in some instances, identical) excuses for Russian aggression now.</p>
<p>There were certainly complexities to be faced in the first years after the fall of the Wall: No one knew in June 1989 that the Soviet Union would permit a non-Communist prime minister of Poland to take office in September of that year; no one knew during the fall of 1989, as one Communist domino after another fell across the Warsaw Pact, that the USSR would cease to exist in 1991; questions of how to reunite Germany and reunite Europe had to be considered, as did the complex question of individual degrees of complicity in Communist secret-police activity in the Warsaw Pact countries, which is still being sorted out today. All of that can be acknowledged. And still the fact remains: The vulnerability to propaganda and lies that has characterized too much of Western elites’ response to Russian aggression in the face of the Maidan “revolution of dignity” is a direct result of the failure to hold accountable those were wrong — often dead wrong — about Communism during the Cold War. That failure soiled the political culture of the West; a public accounting of the errors of those who were so wrong about Communism would have cleansed Western public life and helped prepare it for the challenges ahead.</p>
<p>Here in Canada, it is an honor to note that Prime Minister Stephen Harper has been a notable exception to the reticence of Western leaders to name things for what they are — to say, without fear of exaggeration, that Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov is an up-market version of Joachim von Ribbentrop, deploying the tactic of the Big Lie (as Ribbentrop did for Hitler) in service to the aggressive strategies of his master, Vladimir Putin. Indeed, the prime minister’s frontal rebuke to President Putin at the G-20 summit in Australia was the most direct and courageous statement by the leader of a Western power since the Maidan revolution of conscience began a year ago. But much more is needed. For until other Western leaders recognize the many untruths about the Cold War they have manifestly failed to confront, the kind of Western policy paralysis and pusillanimity we have seen in response to Russian aggression — which reflect Western vulnerabilities to Russian distortions of history and to blatant Russian propaganda that can be traced back to the Cold War — will continue.</p>
<p>The fourth lesson: Reality-contact is essential for the future of freedom.</p>
<p>The West’s postmodern deracination about the moral truth of things is arguably the greatest threat to international security and world order in these early decades of the 21st century. Of course there are other security threats: Putin’s revanchism throughout the Russian “near abroad”; world dependence on petroleum from some of the most volatile regions of the planet; European dependence on Russian oil and gas, and the corruption of influential Western leaders who make considerable amounts of money from that dependence; the social-welfare spending that has driven most NATO members’ defense budgets below the 2 percent of GNP to which they are formally committed; ISIS; Iranian nuclear ambitions; Chinese muscle-flexing in East and southeast Asia. It’s a long list, in the new world disorder that is a direct by-product of recent Western failures of will and wit.</p>
<p>But the fundamental cause of the West’s seeming incapacity to address any of these issues is a cultural unseriousness, a lack of reality-contact, which is itself rooted in the postmodern denial that there are truths built into the world and into us, truths that we can know by reason. That habit of evading the truth, or pretending that the truth of things is a matter of my subjective impressions or consciousness, has had a great impact on Western public life. How could it not? And it is one cause of the lack of reality-contact we see in Western foreign policies, which cannot even name Russian aggression for what it is much less devise an adequate response to it.</p>
<p>The Maidan “revolution of dignity” has reminded those with eyes to see and ears to hear of truths that form the moral and cultural foundation of the Western experiment in democracy and ordered liberty:</p>
<p>All of this has been on display in the Maidan revolution of dignity&#160;in Ukraine for the past year. And all of this has been — or certainly should have been — a &#160;profound reminder to the West that there is not just “your truth” and “my truth,” that there are truths built into the world and into us, and we ignore them at our personal and civic peril.</p>
<p>The fifth lesson: The ecumenical movement within the Christian churches must be recalibrated for the&#160;21st century.</p>
<p>As one of our primary concerns here is the role of religious communities in Ukraine over the past year, let me point out what the experience of Ukraine’s struggle for civic self-renewal in the face of Russian aggression ought to teach the West, and specifically the Holy See, the Vatican.</p>
<p>To put it as simply and bluntly as possible: Theologically serious ecumenical dialogue is impossible with agents of Russian state power. For a year now, Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church and his “foreign minister,” Metropolitan Hilarion, have engaged in lies and propaganda on behalf of the Russian state — most recently at the World Synod of Bishops in Rome in October, where he blatantly lied about the role of the Greek Catholic Church in the Maidan revolution and even questioned the integrity of that Church as an ecclesial body. This pattern of lies in service to the aggressive agenda of the present Russian political leadership can no longer be accommodated in the name of ecumenical dialogue.</p>
<p>For to continue the accommodation is not only self-demeaning, in the case of the Vatican. It is worse. Maintaining the fiction that ecumenical dialogue is possible with those who are functioning as agents of Russian state power damages the cause of Christian unity and impedes necessary reforms in the Russian Orthodox Church, which some brave Russian Orthodox churchmen have been proposing. Nothing is served by accommodating to falsehood; indeed, accommodating to lies magnifies their impact. If ecumenical dialogue between the eastern and western wings of Christianity is going to advance a common understanding of the Churches’ proper role vis-à-vis state power in the third millennium, it must face the hard truth of what happens to Christian witness when it mortgages itself to state power and serves as its chaplain.</p>
<p>And that brings me, at the end, to a lesson from the West for the future of Christian social action in the new Ukraine: The Church best serves the common good by forming the men and women who form the civil culture — the civil society — that makes democracy possible.</p>
<p>Thus the key relationship here is between the Church and civil society, not between the Church and the state.</p>
<p>The Church asks two things of any just state. The Church asks –&#160;and, if necessary, demands –&#160;the freedom to be itself in its worship, its evangelization, its catechesis, its training of its ministers, and its work of charity and social service. (This, I might add, is the battle we have been fighting in the United States for the past several years against the Obama administration’s abridgements of religious freedom in the implementation of health-care reform.) And the second thing the Church asks the state is to remember that, like all human activities, it is under judgment — the judgment of the moral law. That’s all the Church asks, or should ask, of the state.</p>
<p>But the Church’s public life is much broader, and involves all the ways and means by which the Church helps shape and nurture civil society — the ways in which the Church forms the culture of the free society. That formation is the Church’s principal public task and its chief contribution to democracy.</p>
<p>It took several hundred years for this understanding to crystallize in the Catholic Church, although it involves ideas whose roots reach back to medieval Christendom. But crystallize they finally did, thanks to the Second Vatican Council and John Paul II’s 1991 social encyclical, Centesimus Annus. And that understanding — “Culture first,” or, if you prefer, “Civil society first” — should be a major point of conversation in the Catholic-Orthodox dialogue of the future.</p>
<p>In my recent interview with Major-Archbishop Sviastoslav Shevchuk of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, the archbishop had a message for the West: “This is not only about us; this is about you.” That is exactly right. The Maidan is about us, about the West: It has been a profound reminder of the truths on which Western democracy rests. Ukraine is not a country far away, populated by a people of whom we know very little. Ukraine’s quest for a free society has become a mirror in which the West, looking at the courage embodied in the Maidan revolution of conscience, can measure its own civic, political, and moral and cultural health.</p>
<p>— George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.&#160;</p> | false | 1 | article adapted mr weigels remarks video delivered religion ukrainian public square analysis euromaidan aftermath conference sponsored metropolitan andrey sheptytsky institute eastern christian studies held university st michaels college toronto november 15 2014 may 13 1982 one year day assassination attempt st peters square pope john paul ii made pilgrimage marian shrine fatima portugal thanksgiving lifes spared reflected seemingly random fact shot feast day lady fatima designs providence said mere coincidences seems us coincidence suggesting simply facet providence weve yet grasped mind let suggest maidan revolution dignity still unfolding ukraine twofold providential character first aspect maidans providential character subject reflections day religious communities ukraine orthodox roman greek catholic protestant jewish muslim cooperated never past year done face severe russian aggression various forms political aggression military aggression even ecclesiastical aggression process baseline new foundation set ecumenical interreligious cooperation building vibrant civil society free prosperous virtuous ukraine future second providential aspect maidan revolution dignity points outward toward west revolution conscience coincides 25th anniversary revolution 1989 collapse european communism teaches five lessons west badly needs relearn civic political project relationship religious conviction moral truth project first lesson freedom never free revolution 1989 subsequent implosion soviet union 1991 many comfortable complacent west succumbed temptation imagine stable free lawgoverned societies norm living freedom rule laws tethered moral law humanitys natural condition truth maidan revolution dignity reminded west freedom lived nobly cultural social accomplishment must renewed every generation penalty decadence decay corollary truth democratic selfgovernance inevitable possible second lesson democracy free economy machines run mechanistic fallacy notion fashionable political economic theory 21st century west real work democracy free economy lies getting machinery free politics market set properly matter inserting key firing ignition letting machinery run sure machinery important institutions free politics free economics exercise freedom takes certain critical mass people living certain virtues make machinery democracy market work net result genuine human flourishing perhaps central theme catholic social doctrine teaches 21st century societies embodied maidan revolution dignity along via negativa sparked revolution ukrainian orange revolution 20042005 failed wake simply wasnt critical mass citizens living virtues necessary freedom might work benefit instead rampant corruption order day rejecting culture corruption maidan revolution dignity reclaimed ukraine ought reminded west virtuous people free noblest sense freedom third lesson historical moral clarity count mark 25th anniversary fall berlin wall look forward silver jubilee czechoslovak velvet revolution december perhaps west see clearly another lesson ukrainian experience past year taught us grave error undertake aftermath cold war serious decommunization efforts pattern denazification efforts immediately followed world war ii efforts understood essential component securing victory freedom tyranny results error evident postcommunist states especially russia evident west vulnerability west russian propaganda today direct result postcold war failure culturally delegitimize shame shun acknowledged errors reasons ideological intoxication stupidity misrepresented realities communism political life universities press religious communities unrepentant unchastened indeed case academics stephen cohen boldly defiant many purveyors falsehood purveyors falsehood made excuses soviet aggression make parallel instances identical excuses russian aggression certainly complexities faced first years fall wall one knew june 1989 soviet union would permit noncommunist prime minister poland take office september year one knew fall 1989 one communist domino another fell across warsaw pact ussr would cease exist 1991 questions reunite germany reunite europe considered complex question individual degrees complicity communist secretpolice activity warsaw pact countries still sorted today acknowledged still fact remains vulnerability propaganda lies characterized much western elites response russian aggression face maidan revolution dignity direct result failure hold accountable wrong often dead wrong communism cold war failure soiled political culture west public accounting errors wrong communism would cleansed western public life helped prepare challenges ahead canada honor note prime minister stephen harper notable exception reticence western leaders name things say without fear exaggeration russian foreign minister sergei lavrov upmarket version joachim von ribbentrop deploying tactic big lie ribbentrop hitler service aggressive strategies master vladimir putin indeed prime ministers frontal rebuke president putin g20 summit australia direct courageous statement leader western power since maidan revolution conscience began year ago much needed western leaders recognize many untruths cold war manifestly failed confront kind western policy paralysis pusillanimity seen response russian aggression reflect western vulnerabilities russian distortions history blatant russian propaganda traced back cold war continue fourth lesson realitycontact essential future freedom wests postmodern deracination moral truth things arguably greatest threat international security world order early decades 21st century course security threats putins revanchism throughout russian near abroad world dependence petroleum volatile regions planet european dependence russian oil gas corruption influential western leaders make considerable amounts money dependence socialwelfare spending driven nato members defense budgets 2 percent gnp formally committed isis iranian nuclear ambitions chinese muscleflexing east southeast asia long list new world disorder direct byproduct recent western failures wit fundamental cause wests seeming incapacity address issues cultural unseriousness lack realitycontact rooted postmodern denial truths built world us truths know reason habit evading truth pretending truth things matter subjective impressions consciousness great impact western public life could one cause lack realitycontact see western foreign policies even name russian aggression much less devise adequate response maidan revolution dignity reminded eyes see ears hear truths form moral cultural foundation western experiment democracy ordered liberty display maidan revolution dignity160in ukraine past year certainly 160profound reminder west truth truth truths built world us ignore personal civic peril fifth lesson ecumenical movement within christian churches must recalibrated the16021st century one primary concerns role religious communities ukraine past year let point experience ukraines struggle civic selfrenewal face russian aggression ought teach west specifically holy see vatican put simply bluntly possible theologically serious ecumenical dialogue impossible agents russian state power year patriarch kirill russian orthodox church foreign minister metropolitan hilarion engaged lies propaganda behalf russian state recently world synod bishops rome october blatantly lied role greek catholic church maidan revolution even questioned integrity church ecclesial body pattern lies service aggressive agenda present russian political leadership longer accommodated name ecumenical dialogue continue accommodation selfdemeaning case vatican worse maintaining fiction ecumenical dialogue possible functioning agents russian state power damages cause christian unity impedes necessary reforms russian orthodox church brave russian orthodox churchmen proposing nothing served accommodating falsehood indeed accommodating lies magnifies impact ecumenical dialogue eastern western wings christianity going advance common understanding churches proper role visàvis state power third millennium must face hard truth happens christian witness mortgages state power serves chaplain brings end lesson west future christian social action new ukraine church best serves common good forming men women form civil culture civil society makes democracy possible thus key relationship church civil society church state church asks two things state church asks 160and necessary demands 160the freedom worship evangelization catechesis training ministers work charity social service might add battle fighting united states past several years obama administrations abridgements religious freedom implementation healthcare reform second thing church asks state remember like human activities judgment judgment moral law thats church asks ask state churchs public life much broader involves ways means church helps shape nurture civil society ways church forms culture free society formation churchs principal public task chief contribution democracy took several hundred years understanding crystallize catholic church although involves ideas whose roots reach back medieval christendom crystallize finally thanks second vatican council john paul iis 1991 social encyclical centesimus annus understanding culture first prefer civil society first major point conversation catholicorthodox dialogue future recent interview majorarchbishop sviastoslav shevchuk ukrainian greek catholic church archbishop message west us exactly right maidan us west profound reminder truths western democracy rests ukraine country far away populated people know little ukraines quest free society become mirror west looking courage embodied maidan revolution conscience measure civic political moral cultural health george weigel distinguished senior fellow washingtons ethics public policy center holds william e simon chair catholic studies160 | 1,269 |
<p>As the debate on Obamacare reached a crescendo in late 2009 and 2010, no question was more hotly contested than whether the plan would narrow or widen future federal budget deficits. This issue was particularly sensitive among the handful of wavering Democrats from conservative-leaning districts and states. Their constituents were dubious of the budgetary wisdom of the entire Obama-care exercise, but the bill couldn’t pass without their votes. So, to keep them in the fold, the Obama White House and congressional Democratic leaders manufactured a strategy for legislative success: Without changing the substance of Obamacare’s massive entitlement spending, they would do whatever else could be done to create the perception that the bill was fiscally responsible.</p>
<p>On one level, their plan worked. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) issued a series of cost estimates showing Obamacare would cut the budget deficit modestly over the period from 2010 to 2019. And these estimates, including the final one issued in March 2010, may have been decisive in rounding up the final votes to get the bill through Congress.</p>
<p>But on another level, this strategy failed miserably, because no matter how many times the president repeated the “Obamacare will cut the deficit” talking point, basically no one believed him. And why is that? For starters, it’s simply unbelievable to most Americans that a massive entitlement expansion will lead to less borrowing and pressure on taxpayers. All experience indicates otherwise. It’s also the case that Obamacare’s supposed deficit reduction was based on a series of gimmicks and sham accounting that was exposed well before the final votes were cast. Indeed, one of the most memorable moments in the entire debate was Representative Paul Ryan’s systematic dismantlement of the budgetary arguments being pushed by the president at the White House health care “summit” in February 2010.</p>
<p>Among the canards Ryan exposed that day was the so-called CLASS Act. Now, a year and a half after Obamacare’s passage, the White House has been forced to admit that Ryan and other critics were right all along with regard to CLASS. On October 14, the administration had to kill the program to prevent it from becoming a budgetary disaster in its own right. But that wasn’t what they said about CLASS when Obamacare was under consideration in Congress.</p>
<p>CLASS (for Community Living Assistance Services and Supports) is a voluntary long-term care insurance program that hitched a ride on Obamacare. The program was set up to charge participants premiums for at least five years before they became eligible for benefits​—​meaning that, as the program commenced, there would be several years of premium collection before any meaningful expenditure.</p>
<p>This turned out to be awfully convenient timing for the White House, as it created the perception of a $70 billion, 10-year CLASS surplus that was used to make Obamacare’s overall books look better.</p>
<p>Counting CLASS in the Obamacare totals was an abuse for two reasons. First, as Ryan pointed out, the same dollar can’t be spent twice. But that’s exactly what the White House wanted to do. They said CLASS’s $70 billion surplus could be used both to pay for Obamacare and to liquidate CLASS Act obligations after ten years.</p>
<p>That was bad enough. But the problem was even worse because CLASS itself was a ticking budgetary time bomb, and the administration knew it. Every actuarial analysis done on the program showed it would never last without a massive taxpayer bailout. That’s because it would only attract participants who expected to draw benefits, not those who are generally healthy today. Not only did CLASS create a phony $70billion surplus in the CBO cost estimate, it also put taxpayers on the hook for a massive bailout down the line.</p>
<p>All of this was well known to the administration, even before Ryan pointed it out to the president. But no matter: The White House and its allies in Congress pressed ahead for Obamacare, with CLASS in tow, because the convenience of the budget trick was simply too tempting to resist.</p>
<p>Unfortunately for the White House, reality can only be ignored for so long. The CLASS provisions required the secretary of health and human services to certify that the program could be sustained only with participant premiums​—and not even Obama’s HHS could find a way to do that. The administration thus had to pull the plug on the program and expose it as the budget gambit it always was. And just like that, $70 billion in supposed deficit reduction from Obamacare vanished.</p>
<p>This won’t be the last humiliating admission for the administration thanks to Obamacare. Beyond the CLASS Act surplus, the CBO cost estimate also assumes: Medicare cuts that would force thousands of hospitals to stop admitting senior citizens; cuts to Medicare Advantage that would force millions of enrollees to drop out of the coverage they have and like today; and a decision made by thousands of employers to continue offering coverage to millions of low-wage workers who would be eligible for large subsidies if they were dumped into the Obamacare system. None of these assumptions is plausible, and yet the administration is relying on all of them, just as it relied on CLASS, to back up its contention that Obamacare will cut the deficit.</p>
<p>Sooner or later, these other assumptions will be exposed as flawed too. Most voters won’t be surprised when that happens, though. It will only confirm what they already knew.</p>
<p>James C. Capretta is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He was an associate director at the Office of Management and Budget from 2001 to 2004.</p> | false | 1 | debate obamacare reached crescendo late 2009 2010 question hotly contested whether plan would narrow widen future federal budget deficits issue particularly sensitive among handful wavering democrats conservativeleaning districts states constituents dubious budgetary wisdom entire obamacare exercise bill couldnt pass without votes keep fold obama white house congressional democratic leaders manufactured strategy legislative success without changing substance obamacares massive entitlement spending would whatever else could done create perception bill fiscally responsible one level plan worked congressional budget office cbo issued series cost estimates showing obamacare would cut budget deficit modestly period 2010 2019 estimates including final one issued march 2010 may decisive rounding final votes get bill congress another level strategy failed miserably matter many times president repeated obamacare cut deficit talking point basically one believed starters simply unbelievable americans massive entitlement expansion lead less borrowing pressure taxpayers experience indicates otherwise also case obamacares supposed deficit reduction based series gimmicks sham accounting exposed well final votes cast indeed one memorable moments entire debate representative paul ryans systematic dismantlement budgetary arguments pushed president white house health care summit february 2010 among canards ryan exposed day socalled class act year half obamacares passage white house forced admit ryan critics right along regard class october 14 administration kill program prevent becoming budgetary disaster right wasnt said class obamacare consideration congress class community living assistance services supports voluntary longterm care insurance program hitched ride obamacare program set charge participants premiums least five years became eligible benefitsmeaning program commenced would several years premium collection meaningful expenditure turned awfully convenient timing white house created perception 70 billion 10year class surplus used make obamacares overall books look better counting class obamacare totals abuse two reasons first ryan pointed dollar cant spent twice thats exactly white house wanted said classs 70 billion surplus could used pay obamacare liquidate class act obligations ten years bad enough problem even worse class ticking budgetary time bomb administration knew every actuarial analysis done program showed would never last without massive taxpayer bailout thats would attract participants expected draw benefits generally healthy today class create phony 70billion surplus cbo cost estimate also put taxpayers hook massive bailout line well known administration even ryan pointed president matter white house allies congress pressed ahead obamacare class tow convenience budget trick simply tempting resist unfortunately white house reality ignored long class provisions required secretary health human services certify program could sustained participant premiumsand even obamas hhs could find way administration thus pull plug program expose budget gambit always like 70 billion supposed deficit reduction obamacare vanished wont last humiliating admission administration thanks obamacare beyond class act surplus cbo cost estimate also assumes medicare cuts would force thousands hospitals stop admitting senior citizens cuts medicare advantage would force millions enrollees drop coverage like today decision made thousands employers continue offering coverage millions lowwage workers would eligible large subsidies dumped obamacare system none assumptions plausible yet administration relying relied class back contention obamacare cut deficit sooner later assumptions exposed flawed voters wont surprised happens though confirm already knew james c capretta fellow ethics public policy center associate director office management budget 2001 2004 | 514 |
<p />
<p>In ‘Jaffa: Land of Oranges’, Ghassan Kanafani described his exile from the Palestinian coastal city of Yafa.</p>
<p>As a 12-year-old boy, he struggled to understand, but “on that night, though, certain threads of that story became clearer … a big truck was standing in front of our door. Light things, mainly sleeping items, were being chucked into the truck swiftly and hysterically.”</p>
<p>A few decades after Kanafai wrote about his exile, I, an 8-year-old boy from a Gaza refugee camp, pondered on my own. When I stood at the borders of Yafa, the line of what was real and imagined suddenly became blurred. Once Palestine’s largest city, Yafa turned out not to be a figment of my grandfather’s imagination, or Kanafani’s, but a tangible space of sand, air and sea. The Palestinian-Arab identity of Yafa was evident everywhere.</p>
<p>&lt;img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-17263" src="https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/ramzy-baroud-300x200.jpg" alt="Ramzy Baroud" width="300" height="200" srcset="https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/ramzy-baroud-300x200.jpg 300w, https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/ramzy-baroud-600x400.jpg 600w, https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/ramzy-baroud-73x50.jpg 73w, https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/ramzy-baroud-500x333.jpg 500w, https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/ramzy-baroud-280x186.jpg 280w, https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/ramzy-baroud-60x40.jpg 60w, https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/ramzy-baroud-118x78.jpg 118w, https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/ramzy-baroud-479x319.jpg 479w, https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/ramzy-baroud.jpg 625w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /&gt; I was a third grader on my first school trip. Gazans were still allowed to cross into Israel in those days, mostly as exploited cheap labor. My family was driven out of Palestine during the Nakba, the “Great Catastrophe” that saw the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes. My family was comprised of simple peasants from the village of Beit Daras. The residents of my village were known for their love of couscous, and for their legendary stubbornness, courage and pride. Beit Daras residents saw in Yafa a center of many aspects of their lives. A commercially vibrant port city, known around the world for its oranges, Yafa was home to some of the largest markets in southern Palestine.</p>
<p>Yafa was a center for Arab culture, and a model of co-existence between religions. But British colonization of Palestine starting in 1917 then morphed into a mandate government in 1922, interrupting the natural historic flow that positioned Yafa as the beating heart of Palestine.</p>
<p>[adrotate banner=”55″]Strata of educated elites in Yafa had raised the level of political consciousness of the city to standards that would still be considered high by Middle Eastern criteria today. Politicians, artists, bankers, craftsmen and young and vibrant student communities gave Yafa a middle class that served an essential role in the fight against British colonialism and its Zionist allies many years before the Nakba and the creation of Israel.</p>
<p>Yafawi union members organized around labor rights with steadfast commitment. Arab laborers were being laid off and Jewish laborers coming from Europe were taking their place. That mobilization become part of the 1936 strike and revolution, Palestine’s first collective uprising that inspired generations of Palestinians, and still does today.</p>
<p>Numerous villages and small towns looked to Yafa for guidance, and sometimes survival. My grandfather, who owned a small piece of land in Beit Daras, was a craftsman who weaved baskets. Every few days, he hauled the best of what he made into the Isdud and sometimes al-Majdal markets hoping for a few extra Palestinian dinars to supplement his meagre income. But the best was saved for Yafa because the Yafawis had the best taste. He would put on his poshest outfit for this trip. After feeding his trusty donkey he would pile his baskets on the cart and embark on the long journey.</p>
<p>“’Sido (grandpa) please tell us stories about your adventures in Yafa,”’ we would plead him, as he sat atop an old mattress in his special corner of a small, decaying house in a refugee camp in Gaza. His stories, which he conveyed with much suspense, trod a fine line between truth and fantasy. When I grew up, I realized that the fantasy was not simply his way to amuse us children, but also a way to express how Yafa represented my grandfather’s greatest triumphs and most humiliating defeats.</p>
<p>Fantasy helped him make sense of the world he had left behind. When the Arabs revolted in 1936, Britain hit back pitilessly. Not only did they kill, imprison and exile many Yafawis, they also defaced the city. Large parts of the Old City were erased never to be seen again. History was violently undone.</p>
<p>Grandpa was one of the thousands who defended Palestine to the bitter end. Although he was a peasant, who had taught himself how to weave baskets to survive, later he exchanged everything for an old Turkish rifle to defend Beit Daras, as nearby villages were falling in the hands of Zionist militias, one after the other.</p>
<p>Grandpa said much about how beautiful Yafa was. He would describe the gentle breeze of the sea as it greeted you upon your entrance to the city, and how it would make you feel as if your soul returned to you.</p>
<p>When Beit Daras fell after successive battles between Zionist militias and villagers armed with only a few rifles, grandpa’s soul was trapped forever.</p>
<p>When Plan Dalet, the master plan through which most of Palestine was violently conquered, was implemented following the calculated departure of the British forces, the capture of Yafa became the culmination of a violent campaign.</p>
<p>The highway between Yafa and Jerusalem was a theatre for heroic battles, culminating in the battle of Castal, a few miles away from Jerusalem.</p>
<p>Yafa, known as the “Bride of Sea” was conquered between April and May, 1948. A major exodus was already underway into Transjordan and Syria. Zionist forces belonging to the Haganah and Irgun set aside their supposed differences as they moved in against Yafa.</p>
<p>Three different military campaigns were launched simultaneously—Chametz, Jevussi and Yiftach—through which Yafa, areas around Jerusalem and the whole of eastern Galilee were seized. But when Yafa fell, the pride of Palestine was crushed.</p>
<p>The city was encircled, forcing thousands of people to flee by sea to Gaza or Egypt. Many drowned as small, overcrowded fishing boats gave in and sank. The Arab leadership had hoped the British would not allow the Zionists to conquer Yafa. They were ill-prepared. Civil defenses arrangements were almost non-existent.</p>
<p>The military disparity between Zionist militias (numbering at about 5,000 well trained fighters) and Arab volunteers (numbering around 1,500) was impossible to overcome without backing from the outside. None came. Men and women died in droves. Tens of thousands were on trek over land, but mostly by sea.</p>
<p>At the age of eight, I discovered that Yafa was not a fantasy. Much later in life, I discovered that Yafa, although conquered in battle, still stands through the collective memory of Yafawis everywhere.</p>
<p>While the term Nakba might be a fitting depiction of what befell the Palestinian nation in 1947-48, it is somud—steadfastness—that keeps the millions of refugees holding on tight to their right of return 66 years after the land of orange trees was conquered, and its somud that will keep Yafa alive, forever.</p> | false | 1 | jaffa land oranges ghassan kanafani described exile palestinian coastal city yafa 12yearold boy struggled understand night though certain threads story became clearer big truck standing front door light things mainly sleeping items chucked truck swiftly hysterically decades kanafai wrote exile 8yearold boy gaza refugee camp pondered stood borders yafa line real imagined suddenly became blurred palestines largest city yafa turned figment grandfathers imagination kanafanis tangible space sand air sea palestinianarab identity yafa evident everywhere ltimg classalignleft sizemedium wpimage17263 srchttpswwwforeignpolicyjournalcomwpcontentuploads201302ramzybaroud300x200jpg altramzy baroud width300 height200 srcsethttpswwwforeignpolicyjournalcomwpcontentuploads201302ramzybaroud300x200jpg 300w httpswwwforeignpolicyjournalcomwpcontentuploads201302ramzybaroud600x400jpg 600w httpswwwforeignpolicyjournalcomwpcontentuploads201302ramzybaroud73x50jpg 73w httpswwwforeignpolicyjournalcomwpcontentuploads201302ramzybaroud500x333jpg 500w httpswwwforeignpolicyjournalcomwpcontentuploads201302ramzybaroud280x186jpg 280w httpswwwforeignpolicyjournalcomwpcontentuploads201302ramzybaroud60x40jpg 60w httpswwwforeignpolicyjournalcomwpcontentuploads201302ramzybaroud118x78jpg 118w httpswwwforeignpolicyjournalcomwpcontentuploads201302ramzybaroud479x319jpg 479w httpswwwforeignpolicyjournalcomwpcontentuploads201302ramzybaroudjpg 625w sizesmaxwidth 300px 100vw 300px gt third grader first school trip gazans still allowed cross israel days mostly exploited cheap labor family driven palestine nakba great catastrophe saw expulsion hundreds thousands palestinians homes family comprised simple peasants village beit daras residents village known love couscous legendary stubbornness courage pride beit daras residents saw yafa center many aspects lives commercially vibrant port city known around world oranges yafa home largest markets southern palestine yafa center arab culture model coexistence religions british colonization palestine starting 1917 morphed mandate government 1922 interrupting natural historic flow positioned yafa beating heart palestine adrotate banner55strata educated elites yafa raised level political consciousness city standards would still considered high middle eastern criteria today politicians artists bankers craftsmen young vibrant student communities gave yafa middle class served essential role fight british colonialism zionist allies many years nakba creation israel yafawi union members organized around labor rights steadfast commitment arab laborers laid jewish laborers coming europe taking place mobilization become part 1936 strike revolution palestines first collective uprising inspired generations palestinians still today numerous villages small towns looked yafa guidance sometimes survival grandfather owned small piece land beit daras craftsman weaved baskets every days hauled best made isdud sometimes almajdal markets hoping extra palestinian dinars supplement meagre income best saved yafa yafawis best taste would put poshest outfit trip feeding trusty donkey would pile baskets cart embark long journey sido grandpa please tell us stories adventures yafa would plead sat atop old mattress special corner small decaying house refugee camp gaza stories conveyed much suspense trod fine line truth fantasy grew realized fantasy simply way amuse us children also way express yafa represented grandfathers greatest triumphs humiliating defeats fantasy helped make sense world left behind arabs revolted 1936 britain hit back pitilessly kill imprison exile many yafawis also defaced city large parts old city erased never seen history violently undone grandpa one thousands defended palestine bitter end although peasant taught weave baskets survive later exchanged everything old turkish rifle defend beit daras nearby villages falling hands zionist militias one grandpa said much beautiful yafa would describe gentle breeze sea greeted upon entrance city would make feel soul returned beit daras fell successive battles zionist militias villagers armed rifles grandpas soul trapped forever plan dalet master plan palestine violently conquered implemented following calculated departure british forces capture yafa became culmination violent campaign highway yafa jerusalem theatre heroic battles culminating battle castal miles away jerusalem yafa known bride sea conquered april may 1948 major exodus already underway transjordan syria zionist forces belonging haganah irgun set aside supposed differences moved yafa three different military campaigns launched simultaneouslychametz jevussi yiftachthrough yafa areas around jerusalem whole eastern galilee seized yafa fell pride palestine crushed city encircled forcing thousands people flee sea gaza egypt many drowned small overcrowded fishing boats gave sank arab leadership hoped british would allow zionists conquer yafa illprepared civil defenses arrangements almost nonexistent military disparity zionist militias numbering 5000 well trained fighters arab volunteers numbering around 1500 impossible overcome without backing outside none came men women died droves tens thousands trek land mostly sea age eight discovered yafa fantasy much later life discovered yafa although conquered battle still stands collective memory yafawis everywhere term nakba might fitting depiction befell palestinian nation 194748 somudsteadfastnessthat keeps millions refugees holding tight right return 66 years land orange trees conquered somud keep yafa alive forever | 660 |
<p>Russian cybersecurity company Kaspersky Lab has fallen victim to a witch hunt in the US just because it did its job too well, the company’s CEO, Eugene Kaspersky, said. He added that his firm might have stumbled upon some secret US business.</p>
<p>The whole situation around the US ban on the use of Kaspersky Lab antivirus products by federal agencies “looks very strange,” Kaspersky <a href="http://www.zeit.de/video/2017-11/5648627812001/eugene-kaspersky-sind-sie-ein-russischer-spion" type="external">told</a> Germany’s Die Zeit daily, adding that the whole issue in fact lacks substance. “It was much more hype and noise than real action,” he said.</p>
<p>Kaspersky then explained that the US authorities ordered all governmental agencies to remove all the company’s software from their computers, even though “we had almost zero installations there.” With little real need for such measures, they were apparently aimed at damaging the company’s reputation.</p>
<p>Read more</p>
<p><a href="https://www.rt.com/news/407761-kaspersky-nsa-malware-russia/" type="external" /></p>
<p>“It seems that we just do our job better than others and that made someone very disappointed,” Kaspersky said of the motives behind the US government’s move. “It seems that we detected some unknown or probably very well-known malware that made someone in the US very disappointed.”</p>
<p>At the same time, he stressed that his company does not collect “any sensitive personal data,” not to mention any classified documents, adding that the only data Kaspersky Lab is hunting for is “new types of malware, unknown or suspicious apps.”</p>
<p>The Russian cybersecurity company was indeed accused by the US media of using its software to collect the NSA technology for the Russian government – something that Kaspersky Lab vehemently denied.</p>
<p>According to US media reports in October 2017, an employee from the National Security Agency (NSA) elite hacking unit lost some of the agency’s espionage tools after storing them on his home computer in 2015. The media jumped to blame Kaspersky Lab and the Kremlin.</p>
<p>Read more</p>
<p><a href="https://www.rt.com/usa/409958-kaspersky-russia-us-cyber/" type="external" /></p>
<p>Following the reports, the company conducted an internal investigation and stumbled upon an incident dating back to 2014. At the time, Kaspersky Lab was investigating the activities of the Equation Group – a powerful group of hackers that later was identified as an arm of the NSA.</p>
<p>As part of Kaspersky’s investigation, it analyzed information received from a computer of an unidentified user, who is alleged to be the security service employee in question. It turned out that the user installed pirated software containing Equation malware, then “scanned the computer multiple times,” which resulted in antivirus software detecting suspicious files, including a 7z archive.</p>
<p>“The archive itself was detected as malicious and submitted to Kaspersky Lab for analysis, where it was processed by one of the analysts. Upon processing, the archive was found to contain multiple malware samples and source code for what appeared to be Equation malware,” the company’s October <a href="https://www.kaspersky.ru/about/press-releases/2017_preliminary-results-of-internal-investigation-of-incident-reported-by-the-us-media" type="external">statement</a> explained.</p>
<p>The analyst then reported the matter directly to Eugene Kaspersky, who ordered the company’s copy of the code to be destroyed.</p>
<p>On Thursday, Kaspersky Lab issued <a href="https://www.kaspersky.ru/about/press-releases/2017_kaspersky-lab-full-results-investigation-equation-software" type="external">another statement</a> concerning this incident following a more extensive investigation. The results of the investigation showed that the computer in question was infected with several types of malware in addition to the one created by Equation. Some of this malware provided access to the data on this computer to an “unknown number of third parties.”</p>
<p>Read more</p>
<p><a href="https://www.rt.com/news/409405-kaspersky-lab-spy-agencies-crosshairs/" type="external" /></p>
<p>In particular, the computer was infected with backdoor malware called Mokes, which is also known as Smoke Bot and Smoke Loader. It is operated by an organization called Zhou Lou, based in China.</p>
<p>Kaspersky Lab, a world leader in cybersecurity founded in Moscow in 1997, has been under pressure in the US for years. It repeatedly faced allegations of ties to the Kremlin, though no smoking gun has ever been produced.</p>
<p>In July, Kaspersky offered to hand over source code for his software to the US government, but wasn’t taken up on the offer. In October, the cybersecurity company pledged to reveal its code to independent experts as part of an unprecedented Global Transparency Initiative aimed at staving off US accusations.</p>
<p>Kaspersky has been swept up in the ongoing anti-Russian hysteria in the US, which centers on the unproven allegations of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential elections. In September, the US government banned federal agencies from using Kaspersky Lab antivirus products, citing concerns that it could jeopardize national security and claiming the company might have links to the Kremlin. Eugene Kaspersky denounced the move as “baseless paranoia at best.”</p>
<p>Read more</p>
<p><a href="https://www.rt.com/news/409376-cia-wrote-code-to-impersonate-kaspersky/" type="external" /></p>
<p>Even as Kaspersky Lab is offering its cooperation to US authorities, on Thursday, WikiLeaks published source code for the CIA hacking tool “Hive,” which was used by US intelligence agencies to imitate the Kaspersky Lab code and leave behind false digital fingerprints.</p>
<p>The US might be targeting Kaspersky Lab in its witch hunt because the company might be able to disprove American allegations against Russia, experts told RT. “We have Kaspersky saying, ‘We can do this. We can prove some of these hacks are not Russian, they are American,’ when it comes to the presidential elections. And so they needed to discredit them,” former MI5 analyst Annie Machon said.</p>
<p>The campaign against the Russian cybersecurity firm could go back as early as to 2010, when Kaspersky Lab revealed the origin of the Stuxnet virus that hit Iran’s nuclear centrifuges, she told RT. Back then, Kaspersky Lab stated that “this type of attack could only be conducted with nation-state support and backing.”&#160;Nobody claimed responsibility for the creation of the malware that targeted Iran. However, it is widely believed that the US and Israeli intelligence agencies were behind Stuxnet.</p> | false | 1 | russian cybersecurity company kaspersky lab fallen victim witch hunt us job well companys ceo eugene kaspersky said added firm might stumbled upon secret us business whole situation around us ban use kaspersky lab antivirus products federal agencies looks strange kaspersky told germanys die zeit daily adding whole issue fact lacks substance much hype noise real action said kaspersky explained us authorities ordered governmental agencies remove companys software computers even though almost zero installations little real need measures apparently aimed damaging companys reputation read seems job better others made someone disappointed kaspersky said motives behind us governments move seems detected unknown probably wellknown malware made someone us disappointed time stressed company collect sensitive personal data mention classified documents adding data kaspersky lab hunting new types malware unknown suspicious apps russian cybersecurity company indeed accused us media using software collect nsa technology russian government something kaspersky lab vehemently denied according us media reports october 2017 employee national security agency nsa elite hacking unit lost agencys espionage tools storing home computer 2015 media jumped blame kaspersky lab kremlin read following reports company conducted internal investigation stumbled upon incident dating back 2014 time kaspersky lab investigating activities equation group powerful group hackers later identified arm nsa part kasperskys investigation analyzed information received computer unidentified user alleged security service employee question turned user installed pirated software containing equation malware scanned computer multiple times resulted antivirus software detecting suspicious files including 7z archive archive detected malicious submitted kaspersky lab analysis processed one analysts upon processing archive found contain multiple malware samples source code appeared equation malware companys october statement explained analyst reported matter directly eugene kaspersky ordered companys copy code destroyed thursday kaspersky lab issued another statement concerning incident following extensive investigation results investigation showed computer question infected several types malware addition one created equation malware provided access data computer unknown number third parties read particular computer infected backdoor malware called mokes also known smoke bot smoke loader operated organization called zhou lou based china kaspersky lab world leader cybersecurity founded moscow 1997 pressure us years repeatedly faced allegations ties kremlin though smoking gun ever produced july kaspersky offered hand source code software us government wasnt taken offer october cybersecurity company pledged reveal code independent experts part unprecedented global transparency initiative aimed staving us accusations kaspersky swept ongoing antirussian hysteria us centers unproven allegations russian meddling 2016 presidential elections september us government banned federal agencies using kaspersky lab antivirus products citing concerns could jeopardize national security claiming company might links kremlin eugene kaspersky denounced move baseless paranoia best read even kaspersky lab offering cooperation us authorities thursday wikileaks published source code cia hacking tool hive used us intelligence agencies imitate kaspersky lab code leave behind false digital fingerprints us might targeting kaspersky lab witch hunt company might able disprove american allegations russia experts told rt kaspersky saying prove hacks russian american comes presidential elections needed discredit former mi5 analyst annie machon said campaign russian cybersecurity firm could go back early 2010 kaspersky lab revealed origin stuxnet virus hit irans nuclear centrifuges told rt back kaspersky lab stated type attack could conducted nationstate support backing160nobody claimed responsibility creation malware targeted iran however widely believed us israeli intelligence agencies behind stuxnet | 533 |
<p>[The following is an excerpt from the full transcript of&#160;the CNN show Lou Dobbs Tonight&#160;with EPPC Senior Fellow George Weigel.]</p>
<p>DOBBS: My next guest can hardly be surprised that both France and the Netherlands rejected the European constitution — a constitution, he says, that is sadly bereft of not even a slight nod to 1500 years of Christianity in Europe.</p>
<p>Renowned theologian and biographer of Pope John Paul II, George Weigel, maintains that Europe is in an ominous spiritual and demographic decline.</p>
<p>And he says the United States faces much the same in the way of social and cultural threats. George Weigel is the author of the highly-acclaimed new book <a href="" type="internal">The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America and Politics Without God</a>.</p>
<p>Joining us tonight from Washington.</p>
<p>Good to have you with us.</p>
<p>GEORGE WEIGEL, AUTHOR: Thanks, Lou. Good to be here.</p>
<p>DOBBS: George, let’s — I would like to do something, because the numbers are really very, to me, are stunning. If we could put up, and forgive me for doing this, a chart that shows the number of people in various countries and the way in which they describe religion as important to their lives.</p>
<p>In the United States, 62 percent of us say that religion is important in our lives. And then look at France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Spain and Italy. Italy, surprising, not because it’s twice as much as Spain, but rather because of being the seat of the Vatican and Catholicism, is not even higher.</p>
<p>These trends — obviously you’re focused on — and you’re shocked by the constitution.</p>
<p>Tell us why.</p>
<p />
<p>WEIGEL: The European constitution that was just rejected in France and the Netherlands, commits a deliberate act of historical amnesia by wiping out 1500 years of Christian history from the sources of European civilization.</p>
<p>That’s bad enough historically, but it was done in aid of, I think, a future project. And that is creating a kind of secular, dramatically secular, thoroughly secular, public space in the new European Union.</p>
<p>Why is that bad news? It’s bad news because this kind of vacuous secularism has created, over the past three generations in Europe, an enormous demographic problem.</p>
<p>Europe is depopulating itself in numbers not seen since the Black Death in the 14th century.</p>
<p>DOBBS: And when you say depopulating, George, you’re talking about simply a refusal to reproduce in most of the developed — in most of the western states of Europe?</p>
<p>WEIGEL: Here’s the statistic, Lou, that I think brings this home for a lot us in the United States who haven’t been paying much attention to this. It’s bad enough that Spain will lose approximately 25 percent of its population by 2050; or that Germany, by that time, will lose the equivalent in population of the former East Germany.</p>
<p>What really brings it home is to think that by 2050, 60 percent of Italians will not know, from personal experience, what a brother, a sister, an aunt, an uncle or a cousin is.</p>
<p>This kind of de-population, this willful refusal to create the human future, in the most elemental sense of creating the human future, seems to me to suggest a great cultural crisis, indeed, a great spiritual crisis.</p>
<p>You can’t explain this simply, politically, economically, sociologically. Something is hollow in the European soul, and it’s threatening the great project of a free, secure, peaceful and prosperous Europe.</p>
<p>DOBBS: Peaceful, free, prosperous — almost word-for-word what President Bush said today in his joint press conference with Tony Blair.</p>
<p>But what you’re really describing is a Europe that is imploding demographically. And in terms of its spirituality, absolutely leaving behind its history.</p>
<p>You point to the implications — to this country.</p>
<p>What do you believe is the linkage between what we are witnessing in Europe, which the Europeans may consider themselves to be in denial, and the United States’ future?</p>
<p>WEIGEL: Well, there are two real issues for those of us on this side of the Atlantic, at least in the practical order. Europe, depopulating this way, is going to be in fiscal and social crisis in the next 20 years, because it simply isn’t going to be able to pay for its health care and pension systems.</p>
<p>That kind of social chaos could lead to real economic meltdown, which is not good for anybody and particularly, for the rest of the developed world. There’s also a security issue here, and that is, that the demographic vacuum in Europe is not going to remain unfilled. It’s going to be filled by immigration, and as those immigrants largely come from the Islamic world — the threat of their becoming radicalized in the process, as we’ve seen happen in Germany, France and now in Britain, where for the first time, in the most recent British election, you had block voting by Muslim voters under the instruction of radical imams in east London madrassas.</p>
<p>That’s how George Galloway got reelected to Parliament. This is really bad news from a security point of view. But there’s one other thing that I think we need to recognize: We grew out of Europe. America is Europe transplanted. The death of the roots of our own civilizational achievement can’t be good for us, especially if some of those problems we see — this kind of vacuous secularism and high culture.</p>
<p>An inability to think beyond my own immediate pleasures. If that takes hold in our own country, then we’re going to be in the same sort of trouble 50, 70, 100 years down, that Europe is in today.</p>
<p>DOBBS: George Weigel, obviously, we need far more time. We appreciate the time you’ve given us here this evening.</p>
<p>We hope you’ll come back.</p>
<p>WEIGEL: I’d like that, Lou, thank you.</p>
<p>DOBBS: Thank you, George.</p>
<p>George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. and holds EPPC’s William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.</p> | false | 1 | following excerpt full transcript of160the cnn show lou dobbs tonight160with eppc senior fellow george weigel dobbs next guest hardly surprised france netherlands rejected european constitution constitution says sadly bereft even slight nod 1500 years christianity europe renowned theologian biographer pope john paul ii george weigel maintains europe ominous spiritual demographic decline says united states faces much way social cultural threats george weigel author highlyacclaimed new book cube cathedral europe america politics without god joining us tonight washington good us george weigel author thanks lou good dobbs george lets would like something numbers really stunning could put forgive chart shows number people various countries way describe religion important lives united states 62 percent us say religion important lives look france germany united kingdom spain italy italy surprising twice much spain rather seat vatican catholicism even higher trends obviously youre focused youre shocked constitution tell us weigel european constitution rejected france netherlands commits deliberate act historical amnesia wiping 1500 years christian history sources european civilization thats bad enough historically done aid think future project creating kind secular dramatically secular thoroughly secular public space new european union bad news bad news kind vacuous secularism created past three generations europe enormous demographic problem europe depopulating numbers seen since black death 14th century dobbs say depopulating george youre talking simply refusal reproduce developed western states europe weigel heres statistic lou think brings home lot us united states havent paying much attention bad enough spain lose approximately 25 percent population 2050 germany time lose equivalent population former east germany really brings home think 2050 60 percent italians know personal experience brother sister aunt uncle cousin kind depopulation willful refusal create human future elemental sense creating human future seems suggest great cultural crisis indeed great spiritual crisis cant explain simply politically economically sociologically something hollow european soul threatening great project free secure peaceful prosperous europe dobbs peaceful free prosperous almost wordforword president bush said today joint press conference tony blair youre really describing europe imploding demographically terms spirituality absolutely leaving behind history point implications country believe linkage witnessing europe europeans may consider denial united states future weigel well two real issues us side atlantic least practical order europe depopulating way going fiscal social crisis next 20 years simply isnt going able pay health care pension systems kind social chaos could lead real economic meltdown good anybody particularly rest developed world theres also security issue demographic vacuum europe going remain unfilled going filled immigration immigrants largely come islamic world threat becoming radicalized process weve seen happen germany france britain first time recent british election block voting muslim voters instruction radical imams east london madrassas thats george galloway got reelected parliament really bad news security point view theres one thing think need recognize grew europe america europe transplanted death roots civilizational achievement cant good us especially problems see kind vacuous secularism high culture inability think beyond immediate pleasures takes hold country going sort trouble 50 70 100 years europe today dobbs george weigel obviously need far time appreciate time youve given us evening hope youll come back weigel id like lou thank dobbs thank george george weigel distinguished senior fellow ethics public policy center washington dc holds eppcs william e simon chair catholic studies | 535 |
<p>A coin flip and a pilot’s inexplicable miscalculation combined to snuff out one of Hollywood brightest stars 75 years ago Monday, writing a chapter in local history that continues to attract fans and the curious to the rugged Clark County crash site from all corners of the world.</p>
<p>Carole Lombard, the blond, screwball movie star whose marriage to Clark Gable three years earlier had been front-page news, and 21 others perished when a TWA prop plane crashed on the night of Jan. 16, 1942, shortly after takeoff from McCarran Field in Las Vegas. Gable rushed to the city, first hoping for a miracle and then keeping a grief-stricken vigil until rescue teams recovered his wife’s remains.</p>
<p>“This tremendous drama unfolded over the course of one weekend, and it stole headlines from World War II,” said Robert Matzen, author of the 2013 book “Fireball: Carole Lombard and the Mystery of Flight 3.”</p>
<p>Decades have passed since Lombard’s death, but patrons at the Pioneer Saloon in Goodsprings undoubtedly will raise their glasses to the actress this weekend. They likely will spend a few minutes gazing at the Lombard and Gable memorabilia hanging on the wall and the cigar burn marks on the bar that legend says were left behind by a disconsolate and drunken Gable. And then they’ll listen once more to a tragic tale of fame, love and fate that continues to captivate to this day.</p>
<p>HOLLYWOOD ROYALTY</p>
<p>They were the king and queen of Hollywood. Clark Gable. Carole Lombard.</p>
<p>The highest-paid stars of their era, they rose from silent movies in the 1920s to silver screen romance films of the ’30s, though pairing up just once in the 1932 film “No Man of Her Own.”</p>
<p>Both were divorced when they became an item. After a three-year romance, they eloped to Kingman, Arizona, where they were married March 29, 1939, just before the premier of Gable’s epic Civil War hit “Gone with the Wind,” becoming the pre-split Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie of their day.</p>
<p>The nation already was on edge following the U.S. entry into World War II the previous month when word came that there would be no happily ever after for the celebrity couple: The twin-engine DC-3 airliner carrying Lombard, her mother, Gable’s press agent and 19 other passengers and crew had exploded in a fireball on Potosi Mountain, 20 minutes after taking off from McCarran Field.</p>
<p>The news took on a patriotic tint when it became clear that Lombard was returning from a tour to hawk war bonds to support the war effort.</p>
<p>When she died at 33, the nation lost “a humanitarian who helped the down and out in Hollywood, an advocate who pushed the boundaries for women’s rights and a patriot who died in service of her country,” Matzen said.</p>
<p>FIRE AND LIMESTONE</p>
<p>The crash caused a stir in the still-sleepy town of Las Vegas.</p>
<p>“A thunderous explosion immediately followed, sending wreckage, bodies, cargo and luggage down the cliff,” FAA accident investigator Mike McComb wrote recently, after his passion for “aviation archaelology” inspired him to dig deeper into the pilot-error cause arrived at by his congressional and Civil Aeronautics Board predecessors.</p>
<p>“Patrons of the city’s resorts and casinos rushed out into the crisp air when the sound of the explosion echoed through the Las Vegas Valley. What many described that night were sheets of fire several hundred feet that cast the mountain in a red glow.”</p>
<p>Search-and-rescue teams formed spontaneously and rushed into the pitch-black night, quickly reaching the rugged, snow-topped ledges that jut from the 8,500-foot mountain, 32 air miles southwest of what is now Nellis Air Force Base.</p>
<p>If they were hoping to find survivors, their hopes were quickly dashed. It soon became clear that none of those on board survived the violent crash that occurred when the Transcontinental and Western Air DC-3’s left wing clipped a limestone outcrop.</p>
<p>SUPERSTITIOUS NUMBERS</p>
<p>Lombard, a native of Fort Wayne, Indiana, had just wrapped up a war bond drive that took her by train from Los Angeles to Chicago and Indianapolis. As one of the biggest stars of Hollywood’s golden age, she was a big draw at the patriotic events, where she happily signed autographs and sang the national anthem with gusto. The $2 million raised was well beyond expectations.</p>
<p>Tired and eager to return to the family ranch in Southern California after the last rally in Indianapolis, she challenged her mother, Elizabeth “Bessie” Peters, and Gable’s friend and press agent, Otto Winkler, to flip a coin to determine their mode of transportation. If she won, they would fly out on the next available westbound flight; if her mother, who had never flown, or Winkler, who was prone to air sickness, won, they would climb aboard the next train.</p>
<p>For a while, it appears Lombard’s luck was running hot.</p>
<p>After winning the coin toss, she found that cancellations had opened three seats on TWA Flight 3, so they arrived at Indianapolis Municipal Airport the morning of Jan. 16 to catch a flight that had originated in New York and was ultimately bound for Burbank, California.</p>
<p>Peters, “a numerologist who believed in the science of numbers,” according to Matzen, was distressed to learn the particulars about the flight.</p>
<p>“Three was a hard luck number in her mother’s mind. And it was Flight 3 and Carole was 33 years and three months old and there were three in the party,” the author said Thursday by phone from his home in Pennsylvania.</p>
<p>When they finally boarded the silver DC-3 Sky Club airliner, which was running more than 1½ hours late when it arrived in Indianapolis, they settled in for the marathon that was cross-country air travel in those days: hopscotching across the Plains and Southwest, stopping to get fuel, load mail bags, drop off passengers and take on more with luggage along the way.</p>
<p>When they reached Albuquerque, New Mexico, a new flight crew came aboard — veteran TWA pilot Captain Wayne C. Williams, co-pilot First Officer Morgan Gillette and flight attendant Alice F. Gett. A contingent of 15 soldiers from the Army Air Corps Ferrying Command, who were returning to the West Coast after delivering aircraft to a new bomber base, also got on board there, bumping all civilian passengers except for the Lombard party and Lois Hamilton, an Army wife.</p>
<p>PILOT ERROR MYSTERY</p>
<p>Facing a stiff headwind, Williams received permission from TWA in Burbank to save time by not stopping in Winslow, Arizona, for a scheduled refueling. Instead Flight 3 was to proceed to Boulder City to refuel before the final 90-minute leg to Burbank.</p>
<p>But when the crew realized it would be dark when they arrived in Boulder City, where the airport had no runway lights, the pilot decided to continue another 20 miles to land at what was then called McCarran Field at the north end of the Las Vegas Valley.</p>
<p>Flight plan records show the compass heading and cruise level — a 218-degree compass heading climbing to 8,000 feet above sea level — were never changed to reflect the new departure point at McCarran Field. So when co-pilot Gillette took over the controls following the 7:07 p.m. takeoff, he unknowingly was flying on a collision course with Potosi Mountain, just southwest of what is now Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area.</p>
<p>The collision might have been avoided had a lighted beacon system not been shut off out of concerns that Japanese warplanes could be poised to attack the western U.S. Only a single beacon at Arden, east of Potosi, was shining.</p>
<p>It’s also unclear why the crew wasn’t using another available navigation device, a radio compass which projects signals to follow much like spokes from a bicycle wheel.</p>
<p>“That’s really the main mystery: why the captain with all his experience wasn’t using it, or maybe he was using it and it didn’t work properly,” McComb said.</p>
<p>PRINT THE LEGEND</p>
<p>As soon as they heard the impact, residents of the mining town of Goodsprings, downslope of Double Up Peak and 11 miles southeast of the crash site, organized search parties.</p>
<p>One, led by former high school football star Lyle Van Gordon, was first to reach the site, finding wreckage but no survivors.</p>
<p>Another group that included Review-Journal news editor John F. Cahlan and advertising manager James H. Down, saddled up to ride horses to the site with Paiute rancher Tweed Wilson.</p>
<p>By this time, Gable had been notified by telegram that the plane his wife was on was missing and apparently had crashed.</p>
<p>With no word on the fate of the passengers and crew, Gable chartered a flight to Las Vegas with MGM executive Eddie Mannix and the film company’s publicity head, Howard Strickling. They were met at McCarran Field about 1 a.m. on Jan. 17, 1942 by the Clark County sheriff and taken to the El Rancho, the year-old first hotel on the Strip where Gable stayed sequestered in a bungalow.</p>
<p>As it became clear that the search was a recovery effort, reporters and photographers from Southern California and beyond converged on Las Vegas to wait for Lombard’s body to be brought down the mountain.</p>
<p>Legend has it that Gable spent much of his time waiting at the Pioneer Saloon in Goodsprings.</p>
<p>Bartender Chad Hanson, 32, recounted the oft-told story Thursday:</p>
<p>“To drown his sorrows, so to say, he came to the saloon. He was a big cigar fan, and he sat right here and this is where these cigar burns came from, over the hours he spent here, falling asleep, drowning in his sorrow,” he said, pointing to four worn, pock marks in the century-old cherrywood bar.</p>
<p>According to Matzen, however, Gable, who died in 1960 at age 59, at some point passed the Pioneer but did not spend time there “because it was crawling with reporters.”</p>
<p>“The Pioneer was a very important site in the whole drama, but it really wasn’t Gable’s site,” Matzen said. “He was being protected by Eddie Mannix and Howard Strickling. The heads of MGM were very protective of the Gable brand. He was the most popular actor in the world. Everything he made was a hit, and ‘Gone with the Wind’ pushed him way over the top.”</p>
<p>UNLV history professor Michael Green was noncommittal when asked whether the incident was truth or legend, saying there are some points that back up the tale “and a lot we don’t know.”</p>
<p>“With this kind of story, we end up with something akin to ‘Liberty Valance’: print the legend,” he said by email, referring to a famous Western and role that myth played in forging the legends of the West. “And since the legend (in this case) involves actual Hollywood legends, there’s even more uncertainty.”</p>
<p>WAGING WAR</p>
<p>In addition to doubting the Pioneer Saloon legend, Matzen casts cold water on the storybook romance angle of the Lombard-Gable marriage.</p>
<p>“They had an idyllic realtionship for several months,” he said, before adding, “Their marriage was already in trouble when she died. He had started a relationship with Lana Turner, which was the primary reason why (Lombard) rushed back to Hollywood and died on that mountain.”</p>
<p>Whatever the state of their marriage, Gable took his wife’s death hard.</p>
<p>He joined the Army Air Forces, entering Officer Candidate School in Florida in August 1942.</p>
<p>He later flew five combat missions as an observer-gunner in B-17s as part of a motion-picture unit with the 351st Bomb Group in England. On one mission, he just missed being hit by shrapnel and was the recipient of a Distinguished Flying Cross.</p>
<p>He rose to the rank of major before leaving active duty in 1944.</p>
<p>Matzen sees Gable’s wartime service as a direct reaction to that terrible January night when Carole Lombard and 21 others were killed.</p>
<p>“It was obvious to all his friends that Gable had no more use for living after she died,” he said. “He said he wanted to die in a plane like she did.”</p>
<p>Contact Keith Rogers at [email protected] or 702-383-0308. Follow <a href="https://twitter.com/KeithRogers2" type="external">@KeithRogers2</a> on Twitter.</p>
<p>POTOSI MOUNTAIN PLANE CRASH VICTIMS</p>
<p>Cpl. M.B. Affrine</p>
<p>2nd Lt. James B. Barham</p>
<p>Sgt. A.M. Belejckak</p>
<p>2nd Lt. Hal E. Browne</p>
<p>Sgt. Fredrick P. Cook</p>
<p>1st. Lt. Robert E. Crouch</p>
<p>Fredrick J. Dittman, Army Air Corps</p>
<p>2nd Lt. K.T. Donahue</p>
<p>Alice F. Gett, TWA flight attendant</p>
<p>Morgan A. Gillette, TWA co-pilot</p>
<p>Lois Hamilton, Army wife</p>
<p>Carole Lombard Gable</p>
<p>Sgt. Edgar A. Negren</p>
<p>1st Lt. Robert Negren</p>
<p>2nd Lt. Charles D. Nelson</p>
<p>Elizabeth K. Peters, Lombard’s mother</p>
<p>2nd Lt. Stuart L. Swenson</p>
<p>Pvt. Martin W. Tellrank</p>
<p>Sgt. David C. Tillgman</p>
<p>Pvt. Nicholas Varsamine</p>
<p>Wayne C. Williams, TWA pilot</p>
<p>Otto Winkler, Clark Gable’s agent</p>
<p /> | false | 1 | coin flip pilots inexplicable miscalculation combined snuff one hollywood brightest stars 75 years ago monday writing chapter local history continues attract fans curious rugged clark county crash site corners world carole lombard blond screwball movie star whose marriage clark gable three years earlier frontpage news 21 others perished twa prop plane crashed night jan 16 1942 shortly takeoff mccarran field las vegas gable rushed city first hoping miracle keeping griefstricken vigil rescue teams recovered wifes remains tremendous drama unfolded course one weekend stole headlines world war ii said robert matzen author 2013 book fireball carole lombard mystery flight 3 decades passed since lombards death patrons pioneer saloon goodsprings undoubtedly raise glasses actress weekend likely spend minutes gazing lombard gable memorabilia hanging wall cigar burn marks bar legend says left behind disconsolate drunken gable theyll listen tragic tale fame love fate continues captivate day hollywood royalty king queen hollywood clark gable carole lombard highestpaid stars era rose silent movies 1920s silver screen romance films 30s though pairing 1932 film man divorced became item threeyear romance eloped kingman arizona married march 29 1939 premier gables epic civil war hit gone wind becoming presplit brad pitt angelina jolie day nation already edge following us entry world war ii previous month word came would happily ever celebrity couple twinengine dc3 airliner carrying lombard mother gables press agent 19 passengers crew exploded fireball potosi mountain 20 minutes taking mccarran field news took patriotic tint became clear lombard returning tour hawk war bonds support war effort died 33 nation lost humanitarian helped hollywood advocate pushed boundaries womens rights patriot died service country matzen said fire limestone crash caused stir stillsleepy town las vegas thunderous explosion immediately followed sending wreckage bodies cargo luggage cliff faa accident investigator mike mccomb wrote recently passion aviation archaelology inspired dig deeper piloterror cause arrived congressional civil aeronautics board predecessors patrons citys resorts casinos rushed crisp air sound explosion echoed las vegas valley many described night sheets fire several hundred feet cast mountain red glow searchandrescue teams formed spontaneously rushed pitchblack night quickly reaching rugged snowtopped ledges jut 8500foot mountain 32 air miles southwest nellis air force base hoping find survivors hopes quickly dashed soon became clear none board survived violent crash occurred transcontinental western air dc3s left wing clipped limestone outcrop superstitious numbers lombard native fort wayne indiana wrapped war bond drive took train los angeles chicago indianapolis one biggest stars hollywoods golden age big draw patriotic events happily signed autographs sang national anthem gusto 2 million raised well beyond expectations tired eager return family ranch southern california last rally indianapolis challenged mother elizabeth bessie peters gables friend press agent otto winkler flip coin determine mode transportation would fly next available westbound flight mother never flown winkler prone air sickness would climb aboard next train appears lombards luck running hot winning coin toss found cancellations opened three seats twa flight 3 arrived indianapolis municipal airport morning jan 16 catch flight originated new york ultimately bound burbank california peters numerologist believed science numbers according matzen distressed learn particulars flight three hard luck number mothers mind flight 3 carole 33 years three months old three party author said thursday phone home pennsylvania finally boarded silver dc3 sky club airliner running 1½ hours late arrived indianapolis settled marathon crosscountry air travel days hopscotching across plains southwest stopping get fuel load mail bags drop passengers take luggage along way reached albuquerque new mexico new flight crew came aboard veteran twa pilot captain wayne c williams copilot first officer morgan gillette flight attendant alice f gett contingent 15 soldiers army air corps ferrying command returning west coast delivering aircraft new bomber base also got board bumping civilian passengers except lombard party lois hamilton army wife pilot error mystery facing stiff headwind williams received permission twa burbank save time stopping winslow arizona scheduled refueling instead flight 3 proceed boulder city refuel final 90minute leg burbank crew realized would dark arrived boulder city airport runway lights pilot decided continue another 20 miles land called mccarran field north end las vegas valley flight plan records show compass heading cruise level 218degree compass heading climbing 8000 feet sea level never changed reflect new departure point mccarran field copilot gillette took controls following 707 pm takeoff unknowingly flying collision course potosi mountain southwest red rock canyon national conservation area collision might avoided lighted beacon system shut concerns japanese warplanes could poised attack western us single beacon arden east potosi shining also unclear crew wasnt using another available navigation device radio compass projects signals follow much like spokes bicycle wheel thats really main mystery captain experience wasnt using maybe using didnt work properly mccomb said print legend soon heard impact residents mining town goodsprings downslope double peak 11 miles southeast crash site organized search parties one led former high school football star lyle van gordon first reach site finding wreckage survivors another group included reviewjournal news editor john f cahlan advertising manager james h saddled ride horses site paiute rancher tweed wilson time gable notified telegram plane wife missing apparently crashed word fate passengers crew gable chartered flight las vegas mgm executive eddie mannix film companys publicity head howard strickling met mccarran field 1 jan 17 1942 clark county sheriff taken el rancho yearold first hotel strip gable stayed sequestered bungalow became clear search recovery effort reporters photographers southern california beyond converged las vegas wait lombards body brought mountain legend gable spent much time waiting pioneer saloon goodsprings bartender chad hanson 32 recounted ofttold story thursday drown sorrows say came saloon big cigar fan sat right cigar burns came hours spent falling asleep drowning sorrow said pointing four worn pock marks centuryold cherrywood bar according matzen however gable died 1960 age 59 point passed pioneer spend time crawling reporters pioneer important site whole drama really wasnt gables site matzen said protected eddie mannix howard strickling heads mgm protective gable brand popular actor world everything made hit gone wind pushed way top unlv history professor michael green noncommittal asked whether incident truth legend saying points back tale lot dont know kind story end something akin liberty valance print legend said email referring famous western role myth played forging legends west since legend case involves actual hollywood legends theres even uncertainty waging war addition doubting pioneer saloon legend matzen casts cold water storybook romance angle lombardgable marriage idyllic realtionship several months said adding marriage already trouble died started relationship lana turner primary reason lombard rushed back hollywood died mountain whatever state marriage gable took wifes death hard joined army air forces entering officer candidate school florida august 1942 later flew five combat missions observergunner b17s part motionpicture unit 351st bomb group england one mission missed hit shrapnel recipient distinguished flying cross rose rank major leaving active duty 1944 matzen sees gables wartime service direct reaction terrible january night carole lombard 21 others killed obvious friends gable use living died said said wanted die plane like contact keith rogers krogersreviewjournalcom 7023830308 follow keithrogers2 twitter potosi mountain plane crash victims cpl mb affrine 2nd lt james b barham sgt belejckak 2nd lt hal e browne sgt fredrick p cook 1st lt robert e crouch fredrick j dittman army air corps 2nd lt kt donahue alice f gett twa flight attendant morgan gillette twa copilot lois hamilton army wife carole lombard gable sgt edgar negren 1st lt robert negren 2nd lt charles nelson elizabeth k peters lombards mother 2nd lt stuart l swenson pvt martin w tellrank sgt david c tillgman pvt nicholas varsamine wayne c williams twa pilot otto winkler clark gables agent | 1,257 |
<p>Dec. 5 (UPI) — The land that the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Indians call home is sinking. Without help, the unique cultural traditions of the native people of Southern Louisiana could be washed away.</p>
<p>The Grand Caillou/Dulac Band is one of several tribal groups affected. While another tribal group, the people of Isle de Jean Charles, is being relocated with the help of federal funds, the Grand Caillou/Dulac Band hope to stay.</p>
<p>“We still believe that there’s time, and that we can make it so that we could safely stay,” Shirell Parfait-Dardar, Chief of the Grand Caillou/Dulac Band, told UPI.</p>
<p>Parfait-Dardar and her community live in Dulac, a narrow strip of water-logged land in the Mississippi Delta. Like much of the surrounding land, Dulac faces a troubling combination of environmental threats — chiefly, subsidence, erosion and sea level rise.</p>
<p>While all three factors occur naturally, they’ve been accelerated by human interference.</p>
<p>Subsidence, the sinking of land, can occur naturally as heavier, younger sediment pushes down on older layers. Erosion can also cause land loss. But in the centuries before human settlement, the Mississippi supplied the delta with enough new sediment to offset losses. Over the last century, that supply of sediment has been severely curbed as engineers built dams and levees to control the mighty Mississippi’s flow and protect against flooding.</p>
<p>“When serious levying was initiated in the 1920s, it prevented natural season overbank flooding that would provide fresh water and sediment to the delta,” said Virginia Burkett, chief scientist for climate and land use change with the U.S. Geological Survey.</p>
<p>The oil and gas industry has made matters worse. Removing oil and gas deposits encourages subsidence. The oil and gas industry has dredged a network of canals across much of the delta, making the land that remains more vulnerable to saltwater incursion.</p>
<p>“As saltwater gets farther up into the wetlands from the gulf, it damages the plants,” Burkett said, “and the plants bind the soil together and protect against erosion.”</p>
<p>The combination of erosion, subsidence and a lack of new sediment makes the impact of rising seas all the more damaging, even without considering coastal storms. Over the last 30 years, the storms making landfall in coastal Louisiana have gotten stronger and more damaging.</p>
<p>Hurricanes can turn large swaths of delta land into open water overnight. But even a full moon and some strong gusts can pose a threat to the Grand Caillou/Dulac Band.</p>
<p>“Any high tide with a south wind behind it and they get flooded,” said Rónadh Cox, a geoscientist at Williams College.</p>
<p>Cox connected with Parfait-Dardar after reading about the relocation of the Isle de Jean Charles community. She now takes her students on trips to study the impacts of subsidence on the regions’ native communities. The trips have established a strong connection between the small New England school and the Grand Caillou/Dulac Band.</p>
<p>“Ronadh is a blessing and one our biggest advocates,” Parfait-Dardar said. “She wanted to see first hand what this looked like — what it’s like to be on the front lines of coastal erosion, subsidence and climate change.”</p>
<p>While Parfait-Dardar and her community have a small number of advocates helping them to protect what’s left of their land, they’re still not officially recognized by the federal government.</p>
<p>For several years, the community has been working with legal advocates to petition the government for federal recognition. Parfait-Dardar believes they’re getting close and will be recognized in the new year.</p>
<p>“We don’t just meet the criteria, we exceed it,” she said.</p>
<p>Once recognized, the government will be legally required to consult the Grand Caillou/Dulac Band in regard to any federal action concerning coastal erosion.</p>
<p>“They do acknowledge us, but they’re not required to take any [of our] recommendations and actually utilize those when they make decisions — that will make a big difference,” Parfait-Dardar said.</p>
<p>Parfait-Dardar has plans to petition the government to fill in the bulkhead along a stretch of land known as “shrimpers’ row.”</p>
<p>“It would require maintenance — not a permanent fix, but would definitely help delay the land loss,” she said.</p>
<p>Subsidence, erosion and rising seas have severely limited the ability of community members to live off the land as they have for decades. Saltwater incursion and flooding has made it increasingly difficult to maintain productive gardens. Fishing and shrimping yield smaller hauls than they used to — and with less land, there is less game to hunt and trap.</p>
<p>Poverty is also ever-present in the precarious patches of land in the delta.</p>
<p>“They can survive on $6,000 a year because they extract their food from the delta, they go fishing in the delta, they hunt deer and alligators,” Cox said.</p>
<p>Without such resources, feeding a family becomes more difficult. Many of the band’s young people have left and gotten jobs in the oil and gas industry.</p>
<p>“They’re not going to invest in something that has no future, we can’t fault them for that,” Parfait-Dardar said.</p>
<p>But older community members — who bought property and settled down when there was more land and the seas didn’t seem so threateningly close — can’t leave. Many have limited financial resources and the market for flood-prone houses on shrinking islands is near non-existent.</p>
<p>In addition to fighting to save the physical land that subsidence and climate change threatens, the Grand Caillou/Dulac Band must fight to protect their culture.</p>
<p>Part of that culture includes honoring their ancestors, and many of their ancestors are buried in a graveyard dating to before the Civil War. In the past, hurricanes have washed away burials, but community members are working to secure the grave sites.</p>
<p>“We’re going to do the best we can to honor our deceased,” Parfait-Dardar said. “If they do end up permanently underwater, they’ll be together and we’ll have markings so that we can continue to visit them.”</p>
<p>Parfait-Dardar is confident her community can hold together even if the seas continue to rise. Young people who have left still return to socialize and participate in traditional ceremonies.</p>
<p>“We’re going to keep clinging to all of our traditional practice, even if there is no land left” she said. “We might lose our land but we’re not going to lose our spirit.”</p> | false | 1 | dec 5 upi land biloxichitimachachoctaw indians call home sinking without help unique cultural traditions native people southern louisiana could washed away grand cailloudulac band one several tribal groups affected another tribal group people isle de jean charles relocated help federal funds grand cailloudulac band hope stay still believe theres time make could safely stay shirell parfaitdardar chief grand cailloudulac band told upi parfaitdardar community live dulac narrow strip waterlogged land mississippi delta like much surrounding land dulac faces troubling combination environmental threats chiefly subsidence erosion sea level rise three factors occur naturally theyve accelerated human interference subsidence sinking land occur naturally heavier younger sediment pushes older layers erosion also cause land loss centuries human settlement mississippi supplied delta enough new sediment offset losses last century supply sediment severely curbed engineers built dams levees control mighty mississippis flow protect flooding serious levying initiated 1920s prevented natural season overbank flooding would provide fresh water sediment delta said virginia burkett chief scientist climate land use change us geological survey oil gas industry made matters worse removing oil gas deposits encourages subsidence oil gas industry dredged network canals across much delta making land remains vulnerable saltwater incursion saltwater gets farther wetlands gulf damages plants burkett said plants bind soil together protect erosion combination erosion subsidence lack new sediment makes impact rising seas damaging even without considering coastal storms last 30 years storms making landfall coastal louisiana gotten stronger damaging hurricanes turn large swaths delta land open water overnight even full moon strong gusts pose threat grand cailloudulac band high tide south wind behind get flooded said rónadh cox geoscientist williams college cox connected parfaitdardar reading relocation isle de jean charles community takes students trips study impacts subsidence regions native communities trips established strong connection small new england school grand cailloudulac band ronadh blessing one biggest advocates parfaitdardar said wanted see first hand looked like like front lines coastal erosion subsidence climate change parfaitdardar community small number advocates helping protect whats left land theyre still officially recognized federal government several years community working legal advocates petition government federal recognition parfaitdardar believes theyre getting close recognized new year dont meet criteria exceed said recognized government legally required consult grand cailloudulac band regard federal action concerning coastal erosion acknowledge us theyre required take recommendations actually utilize make decisions make big difference parfaitdardar said parfaitdardar plans petition government fill bulkhead along stretch land known shrimpers row would require maintenance permanent fix would definitely help delay land loss said subsidence erosion rising seas severely limited ability community members live land decades saltwater incursion flooding made increasingly difficult maintain productive gardens fishing shrimping yield smaller hauls used less land less game hunt trap poverty also everpresent precarious patches land delta survive 6000 year extract food delta go fishing delta hunt deer alligators cox said without resources feeding family becomes difficult many bands young people left gotten jobs oil gas industry theyre going invest something future cant fault parfaitdardar said older community members bought property settled land seas didnt seem threateningly close cant leave many limited financial resources market floodprone houses shrinking islands near nonexistent addition fighting save physical land subsidence climate change threatens grand cailloudulac band must fight protect culture part culture includes honoring ancestors many ancestors buried graveyard dating civil war past hurricanes washed away burials community members working secure grave sites going best honor deceased parfaitdardar said end permanently underwater theyll together well markings continue visit parfaitdardar confident community hold together even seas continue rise young people left still return socialize participate traditional ceremonies going keep clinging traditional practice even land left said might lose land going lose spirit | 601 |
<p>A spate of major weekend races around the world fueled hopes for the coming season, even as this year’s championships are still being debated.</p>
<p>In Australia, Redzel silenced any lingering doubts about his sprint dominance with a smashing win in the Darley Classic — and piqued interest that he might accompany Winx to Royal Ascot 2018.</p>
<p>We’ve also got results from South Africa to Japan, where a rising 3-year-old filly won the QE II Cup.</p>
<p>Speaking of the Cup, we’ll step up to the plate with:</p>
<p>Aqueduct</p>
<p>Spring Quality stalked the pace set by a 50-1 long shot in Saturday’s $200,000 Grade III Red Smith Handicap, moved into contention after hitting the stretch and edged clear. Call Provision missed by 1/2 length with a late move with Get Jets another 1/2 length back in third. The favorite, Money Multiplier, was a nose behind that one. Spring Quality, a 5-year-old Quality Road gelding, ran 1 3/8 miles on firm turf in 2:17.72 with <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Edgar_Prado/" type="external">Edgar Prado</a> riding. The gelding scored his first graded stakes win but trainer Graham Motion said more is in the offing. “Probably give him a little break. Freshen him up. I think he can run in the big races next year. This horse is very talented,” Motion said.</p>
<p>Bee Noteworthy seized the advantage in the lane in Sunday’s $125,000 Staten Island Division of the New York Stallion Series and kicked away to a 5 1/4-lengths victory. Frosty Margarita was second in the race, restricted to eligible fillies and mares. Bee Noteworthy, a 5-year-old daughter of Read the Footnotes, ran 7 furlongs on a fast track in 1:25.36 with <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Rajiv_Maragh/" type="external">Rajiv Maragh</a> in the irons.</p>
<p>Churchill Downs</p>
<p>Mr. Misunderstood, under a confident ride by <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Florent-Geroux/" type="external">Florent Geroux</a>, rallied from next-last in the late going to win Saturday’s $100,000 Grade III Commonwealth Turf for 3-year-olds by 1 1/2 lengths over Parlor. Mr Cub made all the early going and held on for third. Mr. Misunderstood, an Archarcharch gelding, got 1 1/16 miles on good turf in 1:46.80. The Brad Cox trainee posted his seventh win from his last eight starts, a skein that started with a claiming race at Fair Grounds last December and includes the Super Derby and the Jefferson Cup. His only loss this year was a seventh-place finish in the Grade III Illinois Derby at Hawthorne in April. He is 7-for-7 on grass. “It’s unbelievable to get our first graded stakes win,” said owner Staton Flurry. “Last year we ran this horse for $30,000 at Fair Grounds and to now turn the corner and become a graded stakes winner is really something special.”</p>
<p>Del Mar</p>
<p><a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Victor_Espinoza/" type="external">Victor Espinoza</a> sent Greyvitos out and winging in Saturday’s $100,000 Grade III <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Bob_Hope/" type="external">Bob Hope</a> Stakes for 2-year-olds and the favorite, Mourinho, couldn’t catch him. At the wire, Greyvitos was drawing away and won by 1 1/2 lengths. Maurinho was second, 7 3/4 lengths ahead of Beautiful Shot. The second choice in the mutuels, Run Away, competed through the first half mile, then faded to finish fifth.</p>
<p>Greyvitos, a Virginia-bred colt by <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Malibu_Moon/" type="external">Malibu Moon</a>, ran 7 furlongs on a fast track in 1:22.20. It was his third start. He failed to fire on the grass in his first outing, then finished third, gaining ground late, in a 5 1/2-furlongs maiden event at Santa Anita Oct. 21. He went to the post Saturday at odds of 19-1.</p>
<p>“With his pedigree, we figured him for a grass horse and definitely for two turns because he’s bred top and bottom for that,” said winning trainer Adam Kitchingman. “And we might run him again on the grass sometime in the future. But he trained so well on the dirt that we wanted to try him on it.” Kitchingman said Greyvitos’ next race will be the Futurity at Los Alamitos.</p>
<p>Majestic Heat, running on just eight days’ rest, took charge in the stretch run in Sunday’s $100,000 <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Betty_Grable/" type="external">Betty Grable</a> Stakes for California-bred fillies and mares and went on to win by 3 1/4 lengths over Barbara Beatrice. Late ‘n Left finished third. Majestic Heat, a 5-year-old mare by Unusual Heat, got 7 furlongs on a fast track in 1:22.56 with Flavien Prat at the controls.</p>
<p>Charles Town</p>
<p>North Atlantic rallied late to catch pacesetting long shot <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Prince/" type="external">Prince</a> of Windsor and win Saturday’s $50,000 A Huevo Stakes for West Virginia-breds by 1 length. Prince of Windsor held second, a neck in front of Charitable Annuity. North Atlantic, a 4-year-old Ghostzapper gelding, ran 9 furlongs on a fast track in 1:53.46 with Arnaldo Bocachica in the irons.</p>
<p>Gulfstream Park West</p>
<p>Saturday’s card contained four juvenile events and four Sunshine Millions previews. Each was worth $75,000. The main track was fast and the turf was firm.</p>
<p>In the Millions Preview events:</p>
<p>Mr. Jordan, the solid favorite, posted a solid win in the Millions Classic Preview, dusting seven rivals in the stretch run en route to an 11 1/2-lengths victory. Richard the Great was good enough to beat the others, 1 1/4 lengths ahead of Zipping. Mr. Jordan, a 5-year-old Kantharos gelding, zipped 1 1/16 miles in 1:45.47 with Edgard Zayas up.</p>
<p>Enterprising, the even-money favorite, rallied from last of seven to win the Millions Turf Preview by 1 1/4 lengths over Galleon Mast. Charlie Mops led early and held on for show money. Enterprising, a 6-year-old Elusive Quality gelding, ran 1 1/16 miles on firm going in 1:47.27 with Emisael Jaramillo in the irons.</p>
<p>Quijote stalked the pace in the Millions Sprint Preview, then prevailed by 1 1/4 lengths from Sweetontheladies. Splash Rules was a nose behind that in third. Quijote, a 4-year-old gelding by Pomeroy, ran 6 furlongs in 1:11.60 with Jose Batista riding.</p>
<p>Lirica led home a three-horse long shot parade in the Millions Distaff, outfinishing April Gaze by 1/2 length. Stormy Embrace led early and finished third, 1 1/2 lengths ahead of the favorite, Mama Joyce. Lirica, a 3-year-old Kantharos filly, ran 7 furlongs in 1:24.63 under Marcos Meneses.</p>
<p>In the juvenile events:</p>
<p>Homemade Salsa heated things up in the stretch run in the Juvenile Turf, drawing off to score by 2 lengths over Anabella Queen. Unstablenthemornin was third. Homemade Salsa, a daughter of Two Step Salsa, got 1 mile on the turf in 1:41.78 with Tyler Gaffalione in the irons.</p>
<p>Wildcat’s Legacy took over late in the Juvenile Sprint and got clear, winning by 3 1/4 lengths over Highborn. Reed Kan was third. Wildcat’s Legacy, a Wildcat Heir colt, got 6 1/2 furlongs in 1:19.94 for jockey Edgard Zayas.</p>
<p>In the Juvenile Turf, Nauti Boy took the lead in the lane and held on gamely to win by 1/2 length over The X. Seattle Treasure checked in third. Nauti Boy, a <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Mizzen_Mast/" type="external">Mizzen Mast</a> gelding, got 1 mile on the grass in 1:41.12 with Zayas up.</p>
<p>Silver Bay led from the start in the Juvenile Fillies Sprint and held off the favorite, Starship Bonita, by a neck under the wire. Lil B Quick was third. Silver Bay, a daughter of Currency Swap, ran 6 1/2 furlongs on a fast track in 1:19.37 with Gaffalione up.</p>
<p>Hawthorne Racecourse</p>
<p>Richie’slilwildcat led comfortably through most of Saturday’s $75,000 Showtime Deb Stakes for Illinois-bred 2-year-old fillies, then had enough left to hold off Speed Devil by 1/2 length and Cowgirl Callie by a neck at the end of the 6 furlongs. Richie’slilwildcat, a daughter of Wildcat Heir, got 6 furlongs on a fast track in 1:10.96 for jockey <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Jose_Valdivia/" type="external">Jose Valdivia</a> Jr. It was her third win, the first two coming at Arlington Park and Churchill Downs.</p>
<p>Laurel Park</p>
<p>Ben’s Cat Day on Saturday included a moving tribute to the honoree as Ben’s Cat’s remains were interred in the paddock. The gelding died from complications after surgery earlier this year. Racing from 2010 until the spring of this year, he won 32 of his 63 starts, 26 of the wins coming in stakes. “Ben’s Cat was an amazing, magnificent animal,” said breeder and trainer <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/King_Leatherbury/" type="external">King Leatherbury</a>. No spring chicken himself, Leatherbury clearly has a way with veteran horses. Less than 30 minutes after the ceremony, his silks were back in the winner’s circle aboard the 11-year-old gelding Classic Wildcat.</p>
<p>On the Laurel track Saturday:</p>
<p>A Different Style showed plenty of style in the $100,000 James F. Lewis III Stakes for 2-year-olds, leading all the way to a 2-lengths victory over the odds-on favorite, Kowboy Karma. Barry Lee was another 3/4 length back in third. With John Bisono up, A Different Style negotiated 6 furlongs in 1:10.16. He’s by The Factor.</p>
<p>Take Charge Paula stalked the pace in the $100,000 Smart Halo Stakes for 2-year-old fillies, then outfinished Caught Dream’n for a head victory.Vertrazzo was third. Take Charge Paula, a daughter of Take Charge Indy, got 6 furlongs in 1:10.59 with Paco Lopez riding.</p>
<p>Prince of Hempt dueled to the lead in the lane in the $100,000 City of Laurel Stakes for 3-year-olds, then held off Tale of Silence to win by 1 length. Sonic Mule led briefly but faded to finish third. Prince of Hempt, a Majestic Warrior gelding, ran 7 furlongs in 1:22.67 under Dana Whitney.</p>
<p>Berned rallied from last of 11 to win the $100,000 Safely Kept Stakes for 3-year-old fillies by 4 1/4 lengths from Your Love. Shimmering Aspen was another 1 1/4 lengths back in third. Berned, a Bernardini filly, got 7 furlongs in 1:22.54 with Feargal Lynch in the irons.</p>
<p>Afleet Willy was off a step slowly in the $100,000 Richard W. Small Stakes but made up all the ground, took the lead in the stretch and prevailed by 3/4 length. Discreet Lover led early, surrendered the lead but was gaining again at the end and salvaged second. Just Call Kenny was another 4 lengths back in third. Afleet Willy, a 4-year-old Wilburn gelding, ran 9 furlongs in 1:49.86 with Jomar Torres up.</p>
<p>My Magician was along late to take the $75,000 Geisha Stakes for fillies and mares by 2 1/4 lengths over Moon Virginia. My Magician, a 5-year-old Street Magician mare, ran 1 mile on a fast track in 1:37.20 with Jomar Torres up.</p>
<p>Mahoning Valley</p>
<p>Southern Princess moved by the early leader in the stretch run in Saturday’s $75,000 First Lady Stakes for Ohio-bred 3-year-old fillies and drew off smartly to win by 4 1/2 lengths. The pacesetter, Blanconia, held second, 5 3/4 lengths better than Classical Music as the placing judges enjoyed an easy one. Southern Mischief, a daughter of Into Mischief, ran 6 furlongs on a fast track in 1:12.73 with Luis Colon in the irons.</p>
<p>Woodbine</p>
<p>Gigantic Breeze got first run to the lead in the stretch in Sunday’s $175,000 (Canadian) Autumn Stakes and made that advantage stand up, beating the odds-on favorite, Melmich, by 1 length. Western Reserve was third. Gigantic Breeze, a 4-year-old Giant’s Causeway gelding, ran 1 1/16 miles on the all-weather track in 1:42.38 with Gary Boulanger in the irons, missing the track record by just 0.22 second. “There’s no doubt in my mind that every race is better than the preceding one, especially now,” said winning trainer Sandy McPherson. “He’s improved, like visually. Every race is better than the one before. I mean, Melmich is a really good horse. He’s a good, good horse.”</p>
<p>Ghostly Presence raced well back early in Saturday’s $125,000 (Canadian) Jammed Lovely Stakes for Ontario-bred 3-year-old fillies, entered the stretch run five-wide and drew off to win by 1 3/4 lengths. Mythical Mission, Crumlin Queen and Dilly Dally Darby finished in a bunch for the minor awards, producing a superfecta payout that hardly was worth the effort ($33.80 for $1). Ghostly Presence, a Ghostzapper filly trained by <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Roger_Attfield/" type="external">Roger Attfield</a> and ridden by Rafael Hernandez, ran 7 furlongs on the all-weather track in 1:23.98.</p>
<p>Golden Gate Fields</p>
<p>Runaway Ghost lived up the first half of his name in Saturday’s $65,000 Golden Nugget Stakes for 2-year-olds. Leading from the early going, the Ghostzapper colt steadily increased his lead all the way to a 7 1/2-lengths win. La Waun finished second but was disqualified all the way to last of six for an early incident. That left Generally Lucky and Go Bobby Go to fill out the trifecta slots. Runaway Ghost, with <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Aaron_Gryder/" type="external">Aaron Gryder</a> up, ran 6 furlongs on the all-weather track in 1:09.71.</p>
<p>Around the world, around the clock:</p>
<p>Australia</p>
<p>Redzel, winner of the last month’s inaugural TAB Everest Stakes, put paid to any lingering doubts about his dominance among Australian sprinters as he posted his sixth straight win in Saturday’s Group 1 Darley Classic at Flemington. The 5-year-old Snitzel gelding took the lead on the stands-side group and powered home convincingly under Kerrin McEvoy, winning by 3/4 lengths.</p>
<p>Terravista added blinkers and ran well to finish second, another 3/4 length ahead of Impending. Chautauqua, once the world’s top-rated sprinter, continued his winless season while duplicating his fourth-place finish in the Everest. Redzel, trained by Peter and Paul Snowden for a large syndicate of “common man” owners, still had doubters after the Everest win. Trainer Peter Snowden said the Darley triumph should end that talk. “His record speaks for itself,” he said.</p>
<p>Snowden said no firm course has been laid for the 5-year-old but indicated international travel is not in the cards for the horse his owners and fans call “Red.” “There’s no need to travel them when there’s so much money here in Australia,” he said, indicating a go at next year’s Everest is more likely than a journey Royal Ascot.</p>
<p>A more optimistic note was sounded by Ascot’s director of racing, <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Nick_Smith/" type="external">Nick Smith</a>, who has been focusing on efforts to geet Aussie supermare Winx, winner of 22 straight races, to Royal Ascot next June. Reporting positively on that effort, Smith also told Racing Post some Redzel’s many connections are “keen too on the Diamond Jubilee” during the Royal meeting.</p>
<p>Also Nov. 10 at Flemington, Tosen Stardom scored his second win in Australia, taking the 2,000-meter Group 1 Emirates Stakes by 1 1/2 lengths over Happy Clapper. The favorite, Folkswood, finished fifth. Tosen Stardom, trained by Darren Weir and ridden by Damian Lane, is a 7-year-old son of Deep Impact. He finished second in the Group 1 Ranvet Stakes during a brief visit to Australia in 2015, then returned to Japan. In eight previous starts during his current tenure down under, his only win was the Group 1 Toorak Handicap at Caulfield Oct. 14.</p>
<p>Japan</p>
<p>Mozu Katchan, facing older rivals for the first time, nailed Crocosmia in the final jumps to win Sunday’s Group 1 <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Elizabeth_II/" type="external">Queen Elizabeth</a> II Cup at Kyoto by a neck in a perfectly timed ride. Mikki Queen just missed with her late run, finishing third, a head back of Crocosmia. The favorite, Vivlos, raced prominently but was outrun in the final 100 meters, finishing fifth. Mozu Katchan, a 3-year-old daughter of Harbinger, saved ground behind the leading quartet through most of the 2,200 meters. Jockey Mirco Demuro asked her as the field straightened out for the run to the line and she found a convenient seam between the tiring rivals. She finished 2,200 meters over good turf in 2:14.3.</p>
<p>“We had a good draw and everything went as planned,” Demuro said. “She was so strong nearing the finish and pinning the leader for the win.”</p>
<p>Mozu Katchan scored her first Group 1 win after some misfortune in the Japanese Filly Triple Crown events. She was second to Soul Stirring in the Group 1 Yushun Himba (G1), the Japanese Oaks. Then, she finished third in the Group 1 Shuka Sho despite losing a shoe.</p>
<p>South Africa</p>
<p>Trainer Brett Crawford saddled four of the eight starters in Saturday’s Pinnacle Stakes at Kenilworth and saw the quartet sweep the placings. Edict of Nantes, under Piere Strydom, got there first by 1/2 length with a late run from the back of a compact field, leading stablemates Sail South, Captain America and Black Cat Back. Although the race was not graded, the field was full of graded stakes runners. Edict of Nantes was the Daily News winner and third in the Vodacom Durban July four months ago.</p>
<p>The quality of the field is further illuminated by the last and second-last — Guineas winner Black Arthur and Horizon, a promising 3-year-old last season looking for better. Many of these will be better going longer than the 1,400 meters of the Pinnacle Plate.</p>
<p>Odds and ends:</p>
<p>Arrogate retained his top position on the Longines World’s Best Racehorse rankings released Thursday with a rating of 134. Australian mare Winx remains No. 2, rated 132. Cracksman, on the strength of his victory in the Qipco Champion Stakes, is rated 130, up from 122, edging Gun Runner, whose Breeders’ Cup Classic victory bumped his rating from 127 to 129. The top five is rounded out by super filly Enable, at 128. Arrogate retains the top spot despite three straight losses because the standings are based on each horse’s top performance during the year. For Arrogate, that was the Dubai World Cup, where he came from last, passed Gun Runner in the stretch with total ease and won going away. After the Longines handicapping panel sorts things out during its December meeting in Hong Kong, the final year-end rankings for 2017 will be revealed during the Longines World’s Best Racehorse Ceremony in January. The top rung is unlikely to feature Arrogate. No question who’s atop the Churchill Downs all-time training list. <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Dale_Romans/" type="external">Dale Romans</a> is the guy, breaking out of a tie with <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Bill_Mott/" type="external">Bill Mott</a> as he sent out Storm Runner to win Sunday’s sixth race. Romans, the quintessential south side Louisvillian, now has 703 wins under the Twin Spires, leaving Mott second with 702. Mott had held the record for more than 31 years and said, “That’s long enough. That’s long enough for anybody to hold a record.” Romans said, “It is truly an honor to stand here as the all-time leading trainer at Churchill Downs. With everything I’ve done in my career at Churchill Downs, and around the country, nothing beats this moment right now.” He heaped praise on his staff and life partner Tammy Fox.</p>
<p>“Everybody knows there’s one goal left out there — one major goal — and that one takes a lot of luck to get to it,” Romans said. “That would be to win a Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs. Every 2-year-old in the barn is a Derby horse until they prove they’re not.” Romans trained Shackleford to a fourth-place finish in the 2011 Run for the Roses.</p> | false | 1 | spate major weekend races around world fueled hopes coming season even years championships still debated australia redzel silenced lingering doubts sprint dominance smashing win darley classic piqued interest might accompany winx royal ascot 2018 weve also got results south africa japan rising 3yearold filly qe ii cup speaking cup well step plate aqueduct spring quality stalked pace set 501 long shot saturdays 200000 grade iii red smith handicap moved contention hitting stretch edged clear call provision missed 12 length late move get jets another 12 length back third favorite money multiplier nose behind one spring quality 5yearold quality road gelding ran 1 38 miles firm turf 21772 edgar prado riding gelding scored first graded stakes win trainer graham motion said offing probably give little break freshen think run big races next year horse talented motion said bee noteworthy seized advantage lane sundays 125000 staten island division new york stallion series kicked away 5 14lengths victory frosty margarita second race restricted eligible fillies mares bee noteworthy 5yearold daughter read footnotes ran 7 furlongs fast track 12536 rajiv maragh irons churchill downs mr misunderstood confident ride florent geroux rallied nextlast late going win saturdays 100000 grade iii commonwealth turf 3yearolds 1 12 lengths parlor mr cub made early going held third mr misunderstood archarcharch gelding got 1 116 miles good turf 14680 brad cox trainee posted seventh win last eight starts skein started claiming race fair grounds last december includes super derby jefferson cup loss year seventhplace finish grade iii illinois derby hawthorne april 7for7 grass unbelievable get first graded stakes win said owner staton flurry last year ran horse 30000 fair grounds turn corner become graded stakes winner really something special del mar victor espinoza sent greyvitos winging saturdays 100000 grade iii bob hope stakes 2yearolds favorite mourinho couldnt catch wire greyvitos drawing away 1 12 lengths maurinho second 7 34 lengths ahead beautiful shot second choice mutuels run away competed first half mile faded finish fifth greyvitos virginiabred colt malibu moon ran 7 furlongs fast track 12220 third start failed fire grass first outing finished third gaining ground late 5 12furlongs maiden event santa anita oct 21 went post saturday odds 191 pedigree figured grass horse definitely two turns hes bred top bottom said winning trainer adam kitchingman might run grass sometime future trained well dirt wanted try kitchingman said greyvitos next race futurity los alamitos majestic heat running eight days rest took charge stretch run sundays 100000 betty grable stakes californiabred fillies mares went win 3 14 lengths barbara beatrice late n left finished third majestic heat 5yearold mare unusual heat got 7 furlongs fast track 12256 flavien prat controls charles town north atlantic rallied late catch pacesetting long shot prince windsor win saturdays 50000 huevo stakes west virginiabreds 1 length prince windsor held second neck front charitable annuity north atlantic 4yearold ghostzapper gelding ran 9 furlongs fast track 15346 arnaldo bocachica irons gulfstream park west saturdays card contained four juvenile events four sunshine millions previews worth 75000 main track fast turf firm millions preview events mr jordan solid favorite posted solid win millions classic preview dusting seven rivals stretch run en route 11 12lengths victory richard great good enough beat others 1 14 lengths ahead zipping mr jordan 5yearold kantharos gelding zipped 1 116 miles 14547 edgard zayas enterprising evenmoney favorite rallied last seven win millions turf preview 1 14 lengths galleon mast charlie mops led early held show money enterprising 6yearold elusive quality gelding ran 1 116 miles firm going 14727 emisael jaramillo irons quijote stalked pace millions sprint preview prevailed 1 14 lengths sweetontheladies splash rules nose behind third quijote 4yearold gelding pomeroy ran 6 furlongs 11160 jose batista riding lirica led home threehorse long shot parade millions distaff outfinishing april gaze 12 length stormy embrace led early finished third 1 12 lengths ahead favorite mama joyce lirica 3yearold kantharos filly ran 7 furlongs 12463 marcos meneses juvenile events homemade salsa heated things stretch run juvenile turf drawing score 2 lengths anabella queen unstablenthemornin third homemade salsa daughter two step salsa got 1 mile turf 14178 tyler gaffalione irons wildcats legacy took late juvenile sprint got clear winning 3 14 lengths highborn reed kan third wildcats legacy wildcat heir colt got 6 12 furlongs 11994 jockey edgard zayas juvenile turf nauti boy took lead lane held gamely win 12 length x seattle treasure checked third nauti boy mizzen mast gelding got 1 mile grass 14112 zayas silver bay led start juvenile fillies sprint held favorite starship bonita neck wire lil b quick third silver bay daughter currency swap ran 6 12 furlongs fast track 11937 gaffalione hawthorne racecourse richieslilwildcat led comfortably saturdays 75000 showtime deb stakes illinoisbred 2yearold fillies enough left hold speed devil 12 length cowgirl callie neck end 6 furlongs richieslilwildcat daughter wildcat heir got 6 furlongs fast track 11096 jockey jose valdivia jr third win first two coming arlington park churchill downs laurel park bens cat day saturday included moving tribute honoree bens cats remains interred paddock gelding died complications surgery earlier year racing 2010 spring year 32 63 starts 26 wins coming stakes bens cat amazing magnificent animal said breeder trainer king leatherbury spring chicken leatherbury clearly way veteran horses less 30 minutes ceremony silks back winners circle aboard 11yearold gelding classic wildcat laurel track saturday different style showed plenty style 100000 james f lewis iii stakes 2yearolds leading way 2lengths victory oddson favorite kowboy karma barry lee another 34 length back third john bisono different style negotiated 6 furlongs 11016 hes factor take charge paula stalked pace 100000 smart halo stakes 2yearold fillies outfinished caught dreamn head victoryvertrazzo third take charge paula daughter take charge indy got 6 furlongs 11059 paco lopez riding prince hempt dueled lead lane 100000 city laurel stakes 3yearolds held tale silence win 1 length sonic mule led briefly faded finish third prince hempt majestic warrior gelding ran 7 furlongs 12267 dana whitney berned rallied last 11 win 100000 safely kept stakes 3yearold fillies 4 14 lengths love shimmering aspen another 1 14 lengths back third berned bernardini filly got 7 furlongs 12254 feargal lynch irons afleet willy step slowly 100000 richard w small stakes made ground took lead stretch prevailed 34 length discreet lover led early surrendered lead gaining end salvaged second call kenny another 4 lengths back third afleet willy 4yearold wilburn gelding ran 9 furlongs 14986 jomar torres magician along late take 75000 geisha stakes fillies mares 2 14 lengths moon virginia magician 5yearold street magician mare ran 1 mile fast track 13720 jomar torres mahoning valley southern princess moved early leader stretch run saturdays 75000 first lady stakes ohiobred 3yearold fillies drew smartly win 4 12 lengths pacesetter blanconia held second 5 34 lengths better classical music placing judges enjoyed easy one southern mischief daughter mischief ran 6 furlongs fast track 11273 luis colon irons woodbine gigantic breeze got first run lead stretch sundays 175000 canadian autumn stakes made advantage stand beating oddson favorite melmich 1 length western reserve third gigantic breeze 4yearold giants causeway gelding ran 1 116 miles allweather track 14238 gary boulanger irons missing track record 022 second theres doubt mind every race better preceding one especially said winning trainer sandy mcpherson hes improved like visually every race better one mean melmich really good horse hes good good horse ghostly presence raced well back early saturdays 125000 canadian jammed lovely stakes ontariobred 3yearold fillies entered stretch run fivewide drew win 1 34 lengths mythical mission crumlin queen dilly dally darby finished bunch minor awards producing superfecta payout hardly worth effort 3380 1 ghostly presence ghostzapper filly trained roger attfield ridden rafael hernandez ran 7 furlongs allweather track 12398 golden gate fields runaway ghost lived first half name saturdays 65000 golden nugget stakes 2yearolds leading early going ghostzapper colt steadily increased lead way 7 12lengths win la waun finished second disqualified way last six early incident left generally lucky go bobby go fill trifecta slots runaway ghost aaron gryder ran 6 furlongs allweather track 10971 around world around clock australia redzel winner last months inaugural tab everest stakes put paid lingering doubts dominance among australian sprinters posted sixth straight win saturdays group 1 darley classic flemington 5yearold snitzel gelding took lead standsside group powered home convincingly kerrin mcevoy winning 34 lengths terravista added blinkers ran well finish second another 34 length ahead impending chautauqua worlds toprated sprinter continued winless season duplicating fourthplace finish everest redzel trained peter paul snowden large syndicate common man owners still doubters everest win trainer peter snowden said darley triumph end talk record speaks said snowden said firm course laid 5yearold indicated international travel cards horse owners fans call red theres need travel theres much money australia said indicating go next years everest likely journey royal ascot optimistic note sounded ascots director racing nick smith focusing efforts geet aussie supermare winx winner 22 straight races royal ascot next june reporting positively effort smith also told racing post redzels many connections keen diamond jubilee royal meeting also nov 10 flemington tosen stardom scored second win australia taking 2000meter group 1 emirates stakes 1 12 lengths happy clapper favorite folkswood finished fifth tosen stardom trained darren weir ridden damian lane 7yearold son deep impact finished second group 1 ranvet stakes brief visit australia 2015 returned japan eight previous starts current tenure win group 1 toorak handicap caulfield oct 14 japan mozu katchan facing older rivals first time nailed crocosmia final jumps win sundays group 1 queen elizabeth ii cup kyoto neck perfectly timed ride mikki queen missed late run finishing third head back crocosmia favorite vivlos raced prominently outrun final 100 meters finishing fifth mozu katchan 3yearold daughter harbinger saved ground behind leading quartet 2200 meters jockey mirco demuro asked field straightened run line found convenient seam tiring rivals finished 2200 meters good turf 2143 good draw everything went planned demuro said strong nearing finish pinning leader win mozu katchan scored first group 1 win misfortune japanese filly triple crown events second soul stirring group 1 yushun himba g1 japanese oaks finished third group 1 shuka sho despite losing shoe south africa trainer brett crawford saddled four eight starters saturdays pinnacle stakes kenilworth saw quartet sweep placings edict nantes piere strydom got first 12 length late run back compact field leading stablemates sail south captain america black cat back although race graded field full graded stakes runners edict nantes daily news winner third vodacom durban july four months ago quality field illuminated last secondlast guineas winner black arthur horizon promising 3yearold last season looking better many better going longer 1400 meters pinnacle plate odds ends arrogate retained top position longines worlds best racehorse rankings released thursday rating 134 australian mare winx remains 2 rated 132 cracksman strength victory qipco champion stakes rated 130 122 edging gun runner whose breeders cup classic victory bumped rating 127 129 top five rounded super filly enable 128 arrogate retains top spot despite three straight losses standings based horses top performance year arrogate dubai world cup came last passed gun runner stretch total ease going away longines handicapping panel sorts things december meeting hong kong final yearend rankings 2017 revealed longines worlds best racehorse ceremony january top rung unlikely feature arrogate question whos atop churchill downs alltime training list dale romans guy breaking tie bill mott sent storm runner win sundays sixth race romans quintessential south side louisvillian 703 wins twin spires leaving mott second 702 mott held record 31 years said thats long enough thats long enough anybody hold record romans said truly honor stand alltime leading trainer churchill downs everything ive done career churchill downs around country nothing beats moment right heaped praise staff life partner tammy fox everybody knows theres one goal left one major goal one takes lot luck get romans said would win kentucky derby churchill downs every 2yearold barn derby horse prove theyre romans trained shackleford fourthplace finish 2011 run roses | 1,983 |
<p>The safety net is full of holes.</p>
<p>The sexual harassment revelations of the past two months have made it clear that procedures for policing misconduct in the workplace are largely ineffective. The more power wielded by the perpetrator, the harder it is for victims to stand up for their rights.</p>
<p>The wave of firings and swift falls from grace by prominent men — from Harvey Weinstein to Charlie Rose, Kevin Spacey to Matt Lauer, Roger Ailes to Brett Ratner — have created a climate of outrage, turmoil and fear. This moment of national reckoning has proven that public shaming is the only way to combat the scourge of workplace harassment.</p>
<p>Employers and major corporations have in many instances been willing to absorb the costs of settlements and blows to morale to protect abusers with clout. The sea change of recent weeks has been the willingness of victims to air sordid details of conduct ranging from sophomoric to criminal. Under the hot light of media coverage, corporate giants and blue-chip brands can’t distance themselves fast enough, even from those once seen as invincible.</p>
<p>But this is not a solution for the millions of women and men in every business sector who face unwanted sexual attention on the job. Legal experts say the outpouring of testimonials about traumatic experiences with misconduct demonstrates the desperate need for tougher laws against perpetrators and penalties for corporate leaders who ignore warnings. The current system that relies heavily on companies to enforce their own policies on harassment and discrimination in the workplace simply isn’t sufficient.</p>
<p>“Civil rights laws do a poor job of clearly defining what constitutes harassing or discriminatory behavior. This allows employers an opportunity to construct what compliance means and argue that they have complied with the law,” says Shauhin Talesh, a professor at UC Irvine School of Law. “Courts often dismiss lawsuits against employers who are able to demonstrate that they have a policy against harassment and a complaint procedure in place.”</p>
<p>So what will it take to drive substantive change? It’s been more than 25 years since Anita Hill bravely forced the nation to confront sexual harassment through her testimony during the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas. Activists and experts see this extraordinary moment as an opening to implement systemic change that could make a difference for the next generation of workers.</p>
<p>Among the areas of focus for publicly held companies:</p>
<p>» Making corporate leaders and boards of directors personally liable if sexual harassment complaints are received and behavior violations continue.» Mandating that human resources departments have a direct reporting structure to the board or a board committee.» Mandating regular and detailed reporting to the board from human resources on employee complaints and working conditions at all levels.» Mandating greater disclosure to the board and to the public on the gender, racial and ethnic breakdown of a company’s workforce as well as the number of full-time, part-time and contract employees.» Mandating diversity goals for the composition of boards of directors.» Tying CEO compensation packages to the achievement of diversity goals at the board and senior management levels.</p>
<p>Increasing the level of diversity in company management is seen as a fundamental step to bring business priorities in line with the multicultural reality of the consumers they serve, in America and beyond. The presence of women in high positions and greater diversity throughout management is seen as the single biggest way to clear the climate of fear and intimidation that so often prevents victims from coming forward with harassment claims.</p>
<p>The deluge of sexual harassment stories comes at a time when many institutional investors already have been stepping up the pressure on companies to be more proactive on diversity goals. That means the infrastructure is in place for activists to use the economic fallout from the harassment-related turmoil as fuel to press for larger diversity goals. Harassment becomes a huge investor concern when it leads to situations like NBC News’ hasty firing of star anchor Lauer from one of TV’s most profitable institutions.</p>
<p>“The patriarchy works through these big, publicly listed companies that we trust to employ millions of people. We need a commitment to sunlight when these [harassment] situations come to light,” says Pat Miguel Tomaino, associate director of socially responsible investing for Boston-based Zevin Asset Management. “The [corporate] impulse is to handle these things internally without public accountability. Comcast could have dealt with [the Lauer situation] years ago without threatening the health of a $500 million franchise.”</p>
<p>The Florida-based 30 Percent Coalition has been pressing public companies to commit to appointing women to 30% of their board of directors seats within the next decade. The Detroit-based Human Capital Management Coalition has petitioned the Securities and Exchange Commission to force broader disclosure of workforce demographics, employee policies and performance statistics. The coalition, led by the UAW Retiree Medical Benefits Trust, encompasses 25 investor groups that manage more than $2.8 trillion in assets.</p>
<p>Some efforts to battle sexual harassment that may have seemed quixotic just a few months ago are gaining steam under the undeniable weight of the anecdotal horror stories of women facing sexual assault behind closed doors. For all the headlines about high-profile personalities in Hollywood, media and politics, experts say sexual harassment also remains rampant in other industries such as retail and hospitality, where low-wage female workers are particularly vulnerable. If there’s ever a moment to capitalize on outrage to fuel social change, it’s now. Social media, of course, is an invaluable megaphone for galvanizing a movement — as demonstrated by the velocity of the conversation in recent weeks among victims of sexual harassment.</p>
<p>“‘They didn’t know’ or ‘They wished they’d known’ is a tired argument. Companies need to make sure gender equity is built into the governing documents.”Pat Miguel Tomaino, Zevin asset management</p>
<p>“We’ve reached a massive turning point with the flood of women and men feeling comfortable coming forward with their stories,” says Neil Wertlieb, an adjunct professor at UCLA School of Law, and whose Wertlieb Law Corp. specializes in corporate governance issues.</p>
<p>“I don’t see this going back to the way it was. This shows management, boards, investors and advertisers that there are some serious problems in corporate America,” Wertlieb says. “People who run businesses have to be ultra- <a href="http://variety.com/t/sensitive/" type="external">sensitive</a> to their fiduciary duty to maintain the integrity of their businesses, otherwise it can subject them to liability if the board or senior management was aware of these things but took no action.”</p>
<p>UC Irvine’s Talesh argues that the accountability trail should run well beyond the C-suite. “We need to make midlevel managers of employers accountable for what happens in their departments,” he says.</p>
<p>The Boston-based Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, a coalition of progressive-minded investors, views diversity concerns and harassment as prime topics to be raised through shareholder resolutions during the spring proxy season.</p>
<p>“As shareholders, we think it’s particularly critical that companies send a strong message through clear, unambiguous corporate policies that sexual harassment will not be tolerated in the workplace,” says Interfaith Center CEO Josh Zinner.</p>
<p>Veteran activists liken the turmoil around sexual harassment to the environment that drove past shareholder activism efforts such as the anti-apartheid push to divest holdings in South Africa in the 1980s. More recently, pressure from investors and consumers via social media spurred numerous Fortune 500 companies to back out of business ventures in North Carolina after the state passed a controversial law limiting the rights of transgender people to use public bathrooms.</p>
<p>At the state legislative level, activists are targeting efforts to toughen Delaware’s laws on workplace harassment because so many public companies are incorporated in that business-friendly state.</p>
<p>Charles Elson, director of the University of Delaware’s Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance, cautions that any such moves need to find a way to “delicately balance the rights of the accuser and the accused.”</p>
<p />
<p>But he concurs that more disclosure of workplace complaints and HR concerns at the board level is crucial. “HR needs to have an ongoing reporting obligation to the board,” he says. “If it isn’t, it ought to be.”</p>
<p>Zevin’s Tomaino says more disclosure coupled with greater diversity and heightened liability for management is the key to combating the ease with which senior leaders can disavow knowledge of troubling behavior. Plausible deniability should no longer be an option, he argues. “‘They didn’t know’ or ‘They wished they’d known’ is a tired argument,” he says. “Companies need to make sure gender equity is built into the governing documents of the bylaws.”</p>
<p>Amid a cultural reckoning with harassment, it’s important for investors to frame the case for change not as contributing to a social movement but rather as a best practice for a business’s bottom line. There’s ample evidence that companies with greater diversity and more worker-friendly policies perform better over the long run.</p>
<p>“From an investor perspective, the ability to attract the best talent has to be a priority,” says Susan Baker, VP of shareholder advocacy at Boston-based Trillium Asset Management, a member of the Interfaith Center coalition.</p>
<p>“If you have issues of sexual harassment and other types of complaints, that’s going to expose you to reputational risks and loss of potential employees. We need an understanding that the company has the proper incentives in place to tackle these abuses,” Baker says. “If companies don’t have strong leadership, they’re exposing themselves to all kinds of risks. Transparency is critical.”</p>
<p>The connectivity of the social media age also ensures that companies have no choice but to respond to outside pressure. Witness the advertiser boycott that helped drive Bill O’Reilly off the air at Fox News after The New York Times revealed his checkered history of sexual harassment settlements.</p>
<p>“In the last 10 years, companies have become very <a href="http://variety.com/2017/biz/news/powerful-men-sexual-misconduct-column-1202638267/" type="external">sensitive</a> about their brands and consumer perceptions of them,” Tomaino says. “They’re more prepared to make a quick change if they decide [a controversy] just isn’t worth it. Investors have to be concerned about any company that will allow people within them to operate with impunity. The health of the organism is always more important than that of any of its limbs.”</p> | false | 1 | safety net full holes sexual harassment revelations past two months made clear procedures policing misconduct workplace largely ineffective power wielded perpetrator harder victims stand rights wave firings swift falls grace prominent men harvey weinstein charlie rose kevin spacey matt lauer roger ailes brett ratner created climate outrage turmoil fear moment national reckoning proven public shaming way combat scourge workplace harassment employers major corporations many instances willing absorb costs settlements blows morale protect abusers clout sea change recent weeks willingness victims air sordid details conduct ranging sophomoric criminal hot light media coverage corporate giants bluechip brands cant distance fast enough even seen invincible solution millions women men every business sector face unwanted sexual attention job legal experts say outpouring testimonials traumatic experiences misconduct demonstrates desperate need tougher laws perpetrators penalties corporate leaders ignore warnings current system relies heavily companies enforce policies harassment discrimination workplace simply isnt sufficient civil rights laws poor job clearly defining constitutes harassing discriminatory behavior allows employers opportunity construct compliance means argue complied law says shauhin talesh professor uc irvine school law courts often dismiss lawsuits employers able demonstrate policy harassment complaint procedure place take drive substantive change 25 years since anita hill bravely forced nation confront sexual harassment testimony supreme court confirmation hearings clarence thomas activists experts see extraordinary moment opening implement systemic change could make difference next generation workers among areas focus publicly held companies making corporate leaders boards directors personally liable sexual harassment complaints received behavior violations continue mandating human resources departments direct reporting structure board board committee mandating regular detailed reporting board human resources employee complaints working conditions levels mandating greater disclosure board public gender racial ethnic breakdown companys workforce well number fulltime parttime contract employees mandating diversity goals composition boards directors tying ceo compensation packages achievement diversity goals board senior management levels increasing level diversity company management seen fundamental step bring business priorities line multicultural reality consumers serve america beyond presence women high positions greater diversity throughout management seen single biggest way clear climate fear intimidation often prevents victims coming forward harassment claims deluge sexual harassment stories comes time many institutional investors already stepping pressure companies proactive diversity goals means infrastructure place activists use economic fallout harassmentrelated turmoil fuel press larger diversity goals harassment becomes huge investor concern leads situations like nbc news hasty firing star anchor lauer one tvs profitable institutions patriarchy works big publicly listed companies trust employ millions people need commitment sunlight harassment situations come light says pat miguel tomaino associate director socially responsible investing bostonbased zevin asset management corporate impulse handle things internally without public accountability comcast could dealt lauer situation years ago without threatening health 500 million franchise floridabased 30 percent coalition pressing public companies commit appointing women 30 board directors seats within next decade detroitbased human capital management coalition petitioned securities exchange commission force broader disclosure workforce demographics employee policies performance statistics coalition led uaw retiree medical benefits trust encompasses 25 investor groups manage 28 trillion assets efforts battle sexual harassment may seemed quixotic months ago gaining steam undeniable weight anecdotal horror stories women facing sexual assault behind closed doors headlines highprofile personalities hollywood media politics experts say sexual harassment also remains rampant industries retail hospitality lowwage female workers particularly vulnerable theres ever moment capitalize outrage fuel social change social media course invaluable megaphone galvanizing movement demonstrated velocity conversation recent weeks among victims sexual harassment didnt know wished theyd known tired argument companies need make sure gender equity built governing documentspat miguel tomaino zevin asset management weve reached massive turning point flood women men feeling comfortable coming forward stories says neil wertlieb adjunct professor ucla school law whose wertlieb law corp specializes corporate governance issues dont see going back way shows management boards investors advertisers serious problems corporate america wertlieb says people run businesses ultra sensitive fiduciary duty maintain integrity businesses otherwise subject liability board senior management aware things took action uc irvines talesh argues accountability trail run well beyond csuite need make midlevel managers employers accountable happens departments says bostonbased interfaith center corporate responsibility coalition progressiveminded investors views diversity concerns harassment prime topics raised shareholder resolutions spring proxy season shareholders think particularly critical companies send strong message clear unambiguous corporate policies sexual harassment tolerated workplace says interfaith center ceo josh zinner veteran activists liken turmoil around sexual harassment environment drove past shareholder activism efforts antiapartheid push divest holdings south africa 1980s recently pressure investors consumers via social media spurred numerous fortune 500 companies back business ventures north carolina state passed controversial law limiting rights transgender people use public bathrooms state legislative level activists targeting efforts toughen delawares laws workplace harassment many public companies incorporated businessfriendly state charles elson director university delawares weinberg center corporate governance cautions moves need find way delicately balance rights accuser accused concurs disclosure workplace complaints hr concerns board level crucial hr needs ongoing reporting obligation board says isnt ought zevins tomaino says disclosure coupled greater diversity heightened liability management key combating ease senior leaders disavow knowledge troubling behavior plausible deniability longer option argues didnt know wished theyd known tired argument says companies need make sure gender equity built governing documents bylaws amid cultural reckoning harassment important investors frame case change contributing social movement rather best practice businesss bottom line theres ample evidence companies greater diversity workerfriendly policies perform better long run investor perspective ability attract best talent priority says susan baker vp shareholder advocacy bostonbased trillium asset management member interfaith center coalition issues sexual harassment types complaints thats going expose reputational risks loss potential employees need understanding company proper incentives place tackle abuses baker says companies dont strong leadership theyre exposing kinds risks transparency critical connectivity social media age also ensures companies choice respond outside pressure witness advertiser boycott helped drive bill oreilly air fox news new york times revealed checkered history sexual harassment settlements last 10 years companies become sensitive brands consumer perceptions tomaino says theyre prepared make quick change decide controversy isnt worth investors concerned company allow people within operate impunity health organism always important limbs | 996 |
<p>In the days since the enactment of their health care plan, Democrats in Washington have been desperately seeking to lodge the new program in the pantheon of American public-policy achievements. House Democratic whip James Clyburn compared the bill to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Vice President Biden argued it vindicates a century of health reform efforts by Democrats and Republicans alike. House speaker Nancy Pelosi said “health insurance reform will stand alongside Social Security and Medicare in the annals of American history.”</p>
<p>Even putting aside the fact that Social Security and Medicare are going broke and taking the rest of the government with them, these frantic forced analogies are preposterous. The new law is a ghastly mess, which began as a badly misguided technocratic pipe dream and was then degraded into ruinous incoherence by the madcap process of its enactment.</p>
<p>The appeals to history are understandable, however, because the Democrats know that the law is also exceedingly vulnerable to a wholesale repeal effort: Its major provisions do not take effect for four years, yet in the interim it is likely to begin wreaking havoc with the health care sector — raising insurance premiums, health care costs, and public anxieties. If those major provisions do take effect, moreover, the true costs of the program will soon become clear, and its unsustainable structure will grow painfully obvious. So, to protect it from an angry public and from Republicans armed with alternatives, the new law must be made to seem thoroughly established and utterly irrevocable — a fact on the ground that must be lived with; tweaked, if necessary, at the edges, but at its core politically untouchable.</p>
<p>But it is no such thing. Obamacare starts life strikingly unpopular and looks likely to grow more so as we get to know it in the coming months and years. The entire House of Representatives, two-thirds of the Senate, and the president will be up for election before the law's most significant provisions become fully active. The American public is concerned about spending, deficits, debt, taxes, and overactive government to an extent seldom seen in American history. The excesses of the plan seem likely to make the case for alternative gradual and incremental reforms only stronger.</p>
<p>And the repeal of Obamacare is essential to any meaningful effort to bring down health care costs, provide greater stability and security of coverage to more Americans, and address our entitlement crisis. Both the program's original design and its contorted final form make repairs at the edges unworkable. The only solution is to repeal it and pursue genuine health care reform in its stead.</p>
<p>From Bad to Worse</p>
<p>To see why nothing short of repeal could suffice, we should begin at the core of our health care dilemma.</p>
<p>Conservative and liberal experts generally agree on the nature of the problem with American health care financing: There is a shortage of incentives for efficiency in our methods of paying for coverage and care, and therefore costs are rising much too quickly, leaving too many people unable to afford insurance. We have neither a fully public nor quite a private system of insurance, and three key federal policies — the fee-for-service structure of Medicare, the disjointed financing of Medicaid, and the open-ended tax exclusion for employer-provided insurance — drive spending and costs ever upward.</p>
<p>The disagreement about just how to fix that problem has tended to break down along a familiar dispute between left and right: whether economic efficiency is best achieved by the rational control of expert management or by the lawful chaos of open competition.</p>
<p>Liberals argue that the efficiency we lack would be achieved by putting as much as possible of the health care sector into one big “system” in which the various irregularities could be evened and managed out of existence by the orderly arrangement of rules and incentives. The problem now, they say, is that health care is too chaotic and answers only to the needs of the insurance companies. If it were made more orderly, and answered to the needs of the public as a whole, costs could be controlled more effectively.</p>
<p>Conservatives argue that the efficiency we lack would be achieved by allowing price signals to shape the behavior of both providers and consumers, creating more savings than we could hope to produce on purpose, and allowing competition and informed consumer choices to exercise a downward pressure on prices. The problem now, they say, is that third-party insurance (in which employers buy coverage or the government provides it, and consumers almost never pay doctors directly) makes health care too opaque, hiding the cost of everything from everyone and so making real pricing and therefore real economic efficiency impossible. If it were made more transparent and answered to the wishes of consumers, prices could be controlled more effectively.</p>
<p>That means that liberals and conservatives want to pursue health care reform in roughly opposite directions. Conservatives propose ways of introducing genuine market forces into the insurance system — to remove obstacles to choice and competition, pool risk more effectively, and reduce the inefficiency in government health care entitlements while helping those for whom entry to the market is too expensive (like Americans with preexisting conditions) gain access to the same high quality care. Such targeted efforts would build on what is best about the system we have in order to address what needs fixing.</p>
<p>Liberals, meanwhile, propose ways of moving Americans to a more fully public system, by arranging conditions in the health care sector (through a mix of mandates, regulations, taxes, and subsidies) to nudge people toward public coverage, which could be more effectively managed. This is the approach the Democrats originally proposed last year. The idea was to end risk-based insurance by making it essentially illegal for insurers to charge people different prices based on their health, age, or other factors; to force everyone to participate in the system so that the healthy do not wait until they're sick to buy insurance; to align various insurance reforms in a way that would raise premium costs in the private market; and then to introduce a government-run insurer that, whether through Medicare's negotiating leverage or through various exemptions from market pressures, could undersell private insurers and so offer an attractive “public option” to people being pushed out of employer plans into an increasingly expensive individual market.</p>
<p>Conservatives opposed this scheme because they believed a public insurer could not introduce efficiencies that would lower prices without brutal rationing of services. Liberals supported it because they thought a public insurer would be fairer and more effective.</p>
<p>But in order to gain 60 votes in the Senate last winter, the Democrats were forced to give up on that public insurer, while leaving the other components of their scheme in place. The result is not even a liberal approach to escalating costs but a ticking time bomb: a scheme that will build up pressure in our private insurance system while offering no escape. Rather than reform a system that everyone agrees is unsustainable, it will subsidize that system and compel participation in it — requiring all Americans to pay ever-growing premiums to insurance companies while doing essentially nothing about the underlying causes of those rising costs.</p>
<p>Liberal health care mavens understand this. When the public option was removed from the health care bill in the Senate, Howard Dean argued in the Washington Post that the bill had become merely a subsidy for insurance companies, and failed completely to control costs. Liberal health care blogger Jon Walker said, “The Senate bill will fail to stop the rapidly approaching meltdown of our health care system, and anyone is a fool for thinking otherwise.” Markos Moulitsas of the Daily Kos called the bill “unconscionable” and said it lacked “any mechanisms to control costs.”</p>
<p>Indeed, many conservatives, for all their justified opposition to a government takeover of health care, have not yet quite seen the full extent to which this bill will exacerbate the cost problem. It is designed to push people into a system that will not exist — a health care bridge to nowhere — and so will cause premiums to rise and encourage significant dislocation and then will initiate a program of subsidies whose only real answer to the mounting costs of coverage will be to pay them with public dollars and so increase them further. It aims to spend a trillion dollars on subsidies to large insurance companies and the expansion of Medicaid, to micromanage the insurance industry in ways likely only to raise premiums further, to cut Medicare benefits without using the money to shore up the program or reduce the deficit, and to raise taxes on employment, investment, and medical research.</p>
<p>The case for averting all of that could hardly be stronger. And the nature of the new law means that it must be undone — not trimmed at the edges. Once implemented fully, it would fairly quickly force a crisis that would require another significant reform. Liberals would seek to use that crisis, or the prospect of it, to move the system toward the approach they wanted in the first place: arguing that the only solution to the rising costs they have created is a public insurer they imagine could outlaw the economics of health care. A look at the fiscal collapse of the Medicare system should rid us of the notion that any such approach would work, but it remains the left's preferred solution, and it is their only plausible next move — indeed, some Democrats led by Iowa senator Tom Harkin have already begun talking about adding a public insurance option to the plan next year.</p>
<p>Because Obamacare embodies a rejection of incrementalism, it cannot be improved in small steps. Fixing our health care system in the wake of the program's enactment will require a big step — repeal of the law before most of it takes hold — followed by incremental reforms addressing the public's real concerns.</p>
<p>The Case for Repeal</p>
<p>That big step will not be easy to take. The Democratic party has invested its identity and its future in the fate of this new program, and Democrats control the White House and both houses of Congress. That is why the conservative health care agenda must now also be an electoral agenda — an effort to refine, inform, and build on public opposition to the new program and to the broader trend toward larger and more intrusive, expensive, and fiscally reckless government in the age of Obama. Obamacare is the most prominent emblem of that larger trend, and its repeal must be at the center of the conservative case to voters in the coming two election cycles.</p>
<p>The design of the new law offers some assistance. In an effort to manipulate the program's Congressional Budget Office score so as to meet President Obama's goal of spending less than $1 trillion in its first decade, the Democrats' plan will roll out along a very peculiar trajectory. No significant entitlement benefits will be made available for four years, but some significant taxes and Medicare cuts — as well as regulatory reforms that may begin to push premium prices up, especially in the individual market — will begin before then. And the jockeying and jostling in the insurance sector in preparation for the more dramatic changes that begin in 2014 will begin to be felt very soon.</p>
<p>To blunt the effects of all this, the Democrats have worked mightily to give the impression that some attractive benefits, especially regarding the rules governing insurance companies, will begin immediately. This year, they say, insurance companies will be prevented from using the preexisting medical condition of a child to exclude that child's parents from insurance coverage, and a risk-pool program will be established to help a small number of adults who are excluded too. Additionally, insurance policies cannot be cancelled retroactively when someone becomes sick, some annual and lifetime limits on coverage are prohibited, and “children” may stay on their parents' insurance until they turn 26. Obamacare's champions hope these reforms might build a constituency for the program.</p>
<p>But these benefits are far too small to have that effect. The preexisting condition exclusion prohibits only the refusal to cover treatment for a specific disease, not the exclusion of a family from coverage altogether, and applies only in the individual market, and so affects almost no one. More than half the states already have laws allowing parents to keep adult children on their policies — through ages varying from 24 to 31. And the other new benefits, too, may touch a small number of people (again, mostly in the individual market, where premiums will be rising all the while), but will do nothing to affect the overall picture of American health care financing. CBO scored these immediate reforms as having no effect on the number of uninsured or on national health expenditures.</p>
<p>The bill will also have the government send a $250 check to seniors who reach the “donut hole” gap in Medicare prescription drug coverage this year — and the checks will go out in September, just in time for the fall elections. But the checks will hardly make up for the significant cuts in Medicare Advantage plans that allow seniors to choose among private insurers for their coverage. Those cuts begin in 2011, but the millions of seniors who use the program will start learning about them this year — again, before the election — as insurance companies start notifying their beneficiaries of higher premiums or cancelled coverage.</p>
<p>We are also likely to see some major players in health insurance, including both large employers and large insurers, begin to take steps to prepare for the new system in ways that employees and beneficiaries will find disconcerting. Verizon, for instance, has already informed its employees that insurance premiums will need to rise in the coming years and retiree benefits may be cut. Caterpillar has said new taxes and rules will cost the company $100 million in just the next year, and tractor maker John Deere has said much the same. Such announcements are likely to be common this year, and many insurers active in the individual market are expected to begin curtailing their offerings as that market looks to grow increasingly unprofitable under new rules.</p>
<p>These early indications will help opponents of the new law make their case. But the case will certainly need to focus most heavily on what is to come in the years after this congressional election: spending, taxes, rising health care costs, cuts in Medicare that don't help save the program or reduce the deficit, and a growing government role in the management of the insurance sector.</p>
<p>The numbers are gargantuan and grim — even as laid out by the Congressional Budget Office, which has to accept as fact all of the legislation's dubious premises and promises. If the law remains in place, a new entitlement will begin in 2014 that will cost more than $2.4 trillion in its first 10 years, and will grow faster than either Medicare or private-sector health care spending has in the past decade.</p>
<p>Rather than reducing costs, Obamacare will increase national health expenditures by more than $200 billion, according to the Obama administration's own HHS actuary. Premiums in the individual market will increase by more than 10 percent very quickly, and middle-class families in the new exchanges (where large numbers of Americans who now receive coverage through their employers will find themselves dumped) will be forced to choose from a very limited menu of government-approved plans, the cheapest of which, CBO estimates, will cost more than $12,000. Some Americans — those earning up to four times the federal poverty level — will get subsidies to help with some of that cost, but these subsidies will gro w more slowly than the premiums, and those above the threshold will not receive them at all. Many middle-class families will quickly find themselves spending a quarter of their net income on health insurance, according to a calculation by Scott Gottlieb of the American Enterprise Institute.</p>
<p>Through the rules governing the exchanges and other mechanisms (including individual and employer insurance mandates, strict regulation of plan benefit packages, rating rules, and the like), the federal government will begin micromanaging the insurance sector in an effort to extend coverage and control costs. But even CBO's assessment does not foresee a reduction in costs and therefore an easing of the fundamental source of our health care woes.</p>
<p>To help pay for the subsidies, and for a massive expansion of Medicaid, taxes will rise by about half a trillion dollars in the program's first 10 years — hitting employers and investors especially hard, but quickly being passed down to consumers and workers. And the law also cuts Medicare, especially by reducing physician and hospital payment rates, by another half a trillion dollars — cuts that will drastically undermine the program's operation as, according to the Medicare actuary, about 20 percent of doctors and other providers who participate in the program “could find it difficult to remain profitable and, absent legislative intervention, might end their participation.” And all of this, CBO says, to increase the portion of Americans who have health insurance from just under 85 percent today to about 95 percent in 10 years.</p>
<p>Of course, this scenario — for all the dark prospects it lays out — assumes things will go more or less as planned. CBO is required to assume as much. But in a program so complex and enormous, which seeks to take control of a sixth of our economy but is profoundly incoherent even in its own terms, things will surely not always go as planned. The Medicare cuts so essential to funding the new entitlement, for instance, are unlikely to occur. Congress has shown itself thoroughly unwilling to impose such cuts in the past, and if it fails to follow through on them in this case, Obamacare will add hundreds of billions of additional dollars to the deficit. By the 2012 election, we will have certainly begun to see whether the program's proposed funding mechanism is a total sham, or is so unpopular as to make Obamacare toxic with seniors. Neither option bodes well for the program's future.</p>
<p>Some of the taxes envisioned in the plan, especially the so-called Cadillac tax on high-cost insurance, are also unlikely to materialize quite as proposed, adding further to the long-term costs of the program. And meanwhile, the bizarre incentive structures created by the law (resulting in part from the elimination of the public insurance plan which was to have been its focus) are likely to cause massive distortions in the insurance market that will further increase costs. The individual market will quickly collapse, since new regulations will put it at an immense disadvantage against the new exchanges. We are likely to see significant consolidation in the insurance sector, as smaller insurers go out of business and the larger ones become the equivalent of subsidized and highly regulated public utilities. And the fact that the exchanges will offer subsidies not available to workers with employer-based coverage will mean either that employers will be strongly inclined to stop offering insurance, or that Congress will be pressured to make subsidies available to employer-based coverage. In either case, the program's costs will quickly balloon.</p>
<p>Perhaps worst of all, the law not only shirks the obligation to be fiscally responsible, it will also make it much more difficult for future policymakers to do something about our entitlement and deficit crisis. Obamacare constructs a new entitlement that will grow more and more expensive even more quickly than Medicare itself. Even if the program were actually deficit neutral, which it surely won't be, that would just mean that it would keep us on the same budget trajectory we are on now — with something approaching trillion-dollar deficits in each of the next 10 years and a national debt of more than $20 trillion by 2020 — but leave us with much less money and far fewer options for doing anything about it.</p>
<p>In other words, Obamacare is an unmitigated disaster — for our health care system, for our fiscal future, and for any notion of limited government. But it is a disaster that will not truly get underway for four years, and therefore a disaster we can avert.</p>
<p>This is the core of the case the program's opponents must make to voters this year and beyond. If opponents succeed in gaining a firmer foothold in Congress in the fall, they should work to begin dismantling and delaying the program where they can: denying funding to key provisions and pushing back implementation at every opportunity. But a true repeal will almost certainly require yet another election cycle, and another president.</p>
<p>The American public is clearly open to the kind of case Obamacare's opponents will need to make. But keeping voters focused on the problems with the program, and with the reckless growth of government beyond it, will require a concerted, informed, impassioned, and empirical case. This is the kind of case opponents of Obamacare have made over the past year, of course, and it persuaded much of the public — but the Democrats acted before the public could have its say at the polls. The case must therefore be sustained until that happens. The health care debate is far from over.</p>
<p>Toward Real Reform</p>
<p>Making and sustaining that case will also require a clear sense of what the alternatives to Obama-care might be — and how repeal could be followed by sensible incremental steps toward controlling health care costs and thereby increasing access and improving care.</p>
<p>Without a doubt, the Democrats' program is worse than doing nothing. But the choice should not be that program or nothing. The problems with our health care system are real, and conservatives must show the public how repealing Obamacare will open the way to a variety of options for more sensible reforms — reforms that will lower costs and help those with preexisting conditions or without affordable coverage options, but in ways that do not bankrupt the country, or undermine the quality of care or the freedom of patients and doctors to make choices for themselves.</p>
<p>Republicans this past year offered a variety of such approaches, which varied in their ambitions, costs, and forms. A group led by representatives Paul Ryan and Devin Nunes and senators Tom Coburn and Richard Burr proposed a broad measure that included reforms of Medicare, Medicaid, the employer-based coverage tax exclusion, and malpractice liability and would cover nearly all of the uninsured. The House Republican caucus backed a more modest first step to make high-risk pools available to those with preexisting conditions, enable insurance purchases across state lines, pursue tort reform, and encourage states to experiment with innovative insurance regulation. Former Bush administration official Jeffrey Anderson has offered an approach somewhere between the two, which pursues incremental reforms through a “small bill.” Other conservatives have offered numerous other proposals, including ways of allowing small businesses to pool together for coverage, the expansion of Health Savings Accounts and consumer-driven health care (which Obama-care would thoroughly gut), and various reforms of our entitlement system.</p>
<p>All share a basic commitment to the proposition that our health care dilemmas should be addressed through a series of discrete, modest, incremental solutions to specific problems that concern the American public, and all agree that the underlying cause of these problems is the cost of health coverage and care, which would be best dealt with by using market forces to improve efficiency and bring down prices.</p>
<p>The approach to healt h care just adopted by President Obama and the Democratic Congress thoroughly fails to deal with efficiency and cost, and stands in the way of any meaningful effort to do so. It is built on a fundamental conceptual error, suffers from a profound incoherence of design, and would make a bad situation far worse. It cannot be improved by tinkering. It must be removed before our health care crisis can be addressed.</p>
<p>If we are going to meet the nation's foremost challenges — ballooning debt, exploding entitlements, out of control health care costs, and the task of keeping America strong and competitive — we must begin by making Obamacare history. We must repeal it, and then pursue real reform.</p>
<p>Yuval Levin is the editor of National Affairs and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.</p> | false | 1 | days since enactment health care plan democrats washington desperately seeking lodge new program pantheon american publicpolicy achievements house democratic whip james clyburn compared bill civil rights act 1964 vice president biden argued vindicates century health reform efforts democrats republicans alike house speaker nancy pelosi said health insurance reform stand alongside social security medicare annals american history even putting aside fact social security medicare going broke taking rest government frantic forced analogies preposterous new law ghastly mess began badly misguided technocratic pipe dream degraded ruinous incoherence madcap process enactment appeals history understandable however democrats know law also exceedingly vulnerable wholesale repeal effort major provisions take effect four years yet interim likely begin wreaking havoc health care sector raising insurance premiums health care costs public anxieties major provisions take effect moreover true costs program soon become clear unsustainable structure grow painfully obvious protect angry public republicans armed alternatives new law must made seem thoroughly established utterly irrevocable fact ground must lived tweaked necessary edges core politically untouchable thing obamacare starts life strikingly unpopular looks likely grow get know coming months years entire house representatives twothirds senate president election laws significant provisions become fully active american public concerned spending deficits debt taxes overactive government extent seldom seen american history excesses plan seem likely make case alternative gradual incremental reforms stronger repeal obamacare essential meaningful effort bring health care costs provide greater stability security coverage americans address entitlement crisis programs original design contorted final form make repairs edges unworkable solution repeal pursue genuine health care reform stead bad worse see nothing short repeal could suffice begin core health care dilemma conservative liberal experts generally agree nature problem american health care financing shortage incentives efficiency methods paying coverage care therefore costs rising much quickly leaving many people unable afford insurance neither fully public quite private system insurance three key federal policies feeforservice structure medicare disjointed financing medicaid openended tax exclusion employerprovided insurance drive spending costs ever upward disagreement fix problem tended break along familiar dispute left right whether economic efficiency best achieved rational control expert management lawful chaos open competition liberals argue efficiency lack would achieved putting much possible health care sector one big system various irregularities could evened managed existence orderly arrangement rules incentives problem say health care chaotic answers needs insurance companies made orderly answered needs public whole costs could controlled effectively conservatives argue efficiency lack would achieved allowing price signals shape behavior providers consumers creating savings could hope produce purpose allowing competition informed consumer choices exercise downward pressure prices problem say thirdparty insurance employers buy coverage government provides consumers almost never pay doctors directly makes health care opaque hiding cost everything everyone making real pricing therefore real economic efficiency impossible made transparent answered wishes consumers prices could controlled effectively means liberals conservatives want pursue health care reform roughly opposite directions conservatives propose ways introducing genuine market forces insurance system remove obstacles choice competition pool risk effectively reduce inefficiency government health care entitlements helping entry market expensive like americans preexisting conditions gain access high quality care targeted efforts would build best system order address needs fixing liberals meanwhile propose ways moving americans fully public system arranging conditions health care sector mix mandates regulations taxes subsidies nudge people toward public coverage could effectively managed approach democrats originally proposed last year idea end riskbased insurance making essentially illegal insurers charge people different prices based health age factors force everyone participate system healthy wait theyre sick buy insurance align various insurance reforms way would raise premium costs private market introduce governmentrun insurer whether medicares negotiating leverage various exemptions market pressures could undersell private insurers offer attractive public option people pushed employer plans increasingly expensive individual market conservatives opposed scheme believed public insurer could introduce efficiencies would lower prices without brutal rationing services liberals supported thought public insurer would fairer effective order gain 60 votes senate last winter democrats forced give public insurer leaving components scheme place result even liberal approach escalating costs ticking time bomb scheme build pressure private insurance system offering escape rather reform system everyone agrees unsustainable subsidize system compel participation requiring americans pay evergrowing premiums insurance companies essentially nothing underlying causes rising costs liberal health care mavens understand public option removed health care bill senate howard dean argued washington post bill become merely subsidy insurance companies failed completely control costs liberal health care blogger jon walker said senate bill fail stop rapidly approaching meltdown health care system anyone fool thinking otherwise markos moulitsas daily kos called bill unconscionable said lacked mechanisms control costs indeed many conservatives justified opposition government takeover health care yet quite seen full extent bill exacerbate cost problem designed push people system exist health care bridge nowhere cause premiums rise encourage significant dislocation initiate program subsidies whose real answer mounting costs coverage pay public dollars increase aims spend trillion dollars subsidies large insurance companies expansion medicaid micromanage insurance industry ways likely raise premiums cut medicare benefits without using money shore program reduce deficit raise taxes employment investment medical research case averting could hardly stronger nature new law means must undone trimmed edges implemented fully would fairly quickly force crisis would require another significant reform liberals would seek use crisis prospect move system toward approach wanted first place arguing solution rising costs created public insurer imagine could outlaw economics health care look fiscal collapse medicare system rid us notion approach would work remains lefts preferred solution plausible next move indeed democrats led iowa senator tom harkin already begun talking adding public insurance option plan next year obamacare embodies rejection incrementalism improved small steps fixing health care system wake programs enactment require big step repeal law takes hold followed incremental reforms addressing publics real concerns case repeal big step easy take democratic party invested identity future fate new program democrats control white house houses congress conservative health care agenda must also electoral agenda effort refine inform build public opposition new program broader trend toward larger intrusive expensive fiscally reckless government age obama obamacare prominent emblem larger trend repeal must center conservative case voters coming two election cycles design new law offers assistance effort manipulate programs congressional budget office score meet president obamas goal spending less 1 trillion first decade democrats plan roll along peculiar trajectory significant entitlement benefits made available four years significant taxes medicare cuts well regulatory reforms may begin push premium prices especially individual market begin jockeying jostling insurance sector preparation dramatic changes begin 2014 begin felt soon blunt effects democrats worked mightily give impression attractive benefits especially regarding rules governing insurance companies begin immediately year say insurance companies prevented using preexisting medical condition child exclude childs parents insurance coverage riskpool program established help small number adults excluded additionally insurance policies cancelled retroactively someone becomes sick annual lifetime limits coverage prohibited children may stay parents insurance turn 26 obamacares champions hope reforms might build constituency program benefits far small effect preexisting condition exclusion prohibits refusal cover treatment specific disease exclusion family coverage altogether applies individual market affects almost one half states already laws allowing parents keep adult children policies ages varying 24 31 new benefits may touch small number people mostly individual market premiums rising nothing affect overall picture american health care financing cbo scored immediate reforms effect number uninsured national health expenditures bill also government send 250 check seniors reach donut hole gap medicare prescription drug coverage year checks go september time fall elections checks hardly make significant cuts medicare advantage plans allow seniors choose among private insurers coverage cuts begin 2011 millions seniors use program start learning year election insurance companies start notifying beneficiaries higher premiums cancelled coverage also likely see major players health insurance including large employers large insurers begin take steps prepare new system ways employees beneficiaries find disconcerting verizon instance already informed employees insurance premiums need rise coming years retiree benefits may cut caterpillar said new taxes rules cost company 100 million next year tractor maker john deere said much announcements likely common year many insurers active individual market expected begin curtailing offerings market looks grow increasingly unprofitable new rules early indications help opponents new law make case case certainly need focus heavily come years congressional election spending taxes rising health care costs cuts medicare dont help save program reduce deficit growing government role management insurance sector numbers gargantuan grim even laid congressional budget office accept fact legislations dubious premises promises law remains place new entitlement begin 2014 cost 24 trillion first 10 years grow faster either medicare privatesector health care spending past decade rather reducing costs obamacare increase national health expenditures 200 billion according obama administrations hhs actuary premiums individual market increase 10 percent quickly middleclass families new exchanges large numbers americans receive coverage employers find dumped forced choose limited menu governmentapproved plans cheapest cbo estimates cost 12000 americans earning four times federal poverty level get subsidies help cost subsidies gro w slowly premiums threshold receive many middleclass families quickly find spending quarter net income health insurance according calculation scott gottlieb american enterprise institute rules governing exchanges mechanisms including individual employer insurance mandates strict regulation plan benefit packages rating rules like federal government begin micromanaging insurance sector effort extend coverage control costs even cbos assessment foresee reduction costs therefore easing fundamental source health care woes help pay subsidies massive expansion medicaid taxes rise half trillion dollars programs first 10 years hitting employers investors especially hard quickly passed consumers workers law also cuts medicare especially reducing physician hospital payment rates another half trillion dollars cuts drastically undermine programs operation according medicare actuary 20 percent doctors providers participate program could find difficult remain profitable absent legislative intervention might end participation cbo says increase portion americans health insurance 85 percent today 95 percent 10 years course scenario dark prospects lays assumes things go less planned cbo required assume much program complex enormous seeks take control sixth economy profoundly incoherent even terms things surely always go planned medicare cuts essential funding new entitlement instance unlikely occur congress shown thoroughly unwilling impose cuts past fails follow case obamacare add hundreds billions additional dollars deficit 2012 election certainly begun see whether programs proposed funding mechanism total sham unpopular make obamacare toxic seniors neither option bodes well programs future taxes envisioned plan especially socalled cadillac tax highcost insurance also unlikely materialize quite proposed adding longterm costs program meanwhile bizarre incentive structures created law resulting part elimination public insurance plan focus likely cause massive distortions insurance market increase costs individual market quickly collapse since new regulations put immense disadvantage new exchanges likely see significant consolidation insurance sector smaller insurers go business larger ones become equivalent subsidized highly regulated public utilities fact exchanges offer subsidies available workers employerbased coverage mean either employers strongly inclined stop offering insurance congress pressured make subsidies available employerbased coverage either case programs costs quickly balloon perhaps worst law shirks obligation fiscally responsible also make much difficult future policymakers something entitlement deficit crisis obamacare constructs new entitlement grow expensive even quickly medicare even program actually deficit neutral surely wont would mean would keep us budget trajectory something approaching trilliondollar deficits next 10 years national debt 20 trillion 2020 leave us much less money far fewer options anything words obamacare unmitigated disaster health care system fiscal future notion limited government disaster truly get underway four years therefore disaster avert core case programs opponents must make voters year beyond opponents succeed gaining firmer foothold congress fall work begin dismantling delaying program denying funding key provisions pushing back implementation every opportunity true repeal almost certainly require yet another election cycle another president american public clearly open kind case obamacares opponents need make keeping voters focused problems program reckless growth government beyond require concerted informed impassioned empirical case kind case opponents obamacare made past year course persuaded much public democrats acted public could say polls case must therefore sustained happens health care debate far toward real reform making sustaining case also require clear sense alternatives obamacare might repeal could followed sensible incremental steps toward controlling health care costs thereby increasing access improving care without doubt democrats program worse nothing choice program nothing problems health care system real conservatives must show public repealing obamacare open way variety options sensible reforms reforms lower costs help preexisting conditions without affordable coverage options ways bankrupt country undermine quality care freedom patients doctors make choices republicans past year offered variety approaches varied ambitions costs forms group led representatives paul ryan devin nunes senators tom coburn richard burr proposed broad measure included reforms medicare medicaid employerbased coverage tax exclusion malpractice liability would cover nearly uninsured house republican caucus backed modest first step make highrisk pools available preexisting conditions enable insurance purchases across state lines pursue tort reform encourage states experiment innovative insurance regulation former bush administration official jeffrey anderson offered approach somewhere two pursues incremental reforms small bill conservatives offered numerous proposals including ways allowing small businesses pool together coverage expansion health savings accounts consumerdriven health care obamacare would thoroughly gut various reforms entitlement system share basic commitment proposition health care dilemmas addressed series discrete modest incremental solutions specific problems concern american public agree underlying cause problems cost health coverage care would best dealt using market forces improve efficiency bring prices approach healt h care adopted president obama democratic congress thoroughly fails deal efficiency cost stands way meaningful effort built fundamental conceptual error suffers profound incoherence design would make bad situation far worse improved tinkering must removed health care crisis addressed going meet nations foremost challenges ballooning debt exploding entitlements control health care costs task keeping america strong competitive must begin making obamacare history must repeal pursue real reform yuval levin editor national affairs fellow ethics public policy center | 2,260 |
<p />
<p>Somewhere in my home I have a set of photo albums I rarely go near. I fear the flood of cruel memories that might be evoked from looking at the countless photos I took during a trip to Iraq. Many of the pictures are of children who developed rare forms of cancer as a result of exposure to Depleted Uranium (DU), which was used in the US-led war against Iraq over two decades ago.</p>
<p>I remember visiting a hospital that was attached to Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad. The odor that filled its corridors was not the stench of medicine, but rather the aroma of death. At a time of oppressive siege, the hospital lacked even basic anesthetic equipment and drugs. Children sat and stared at their visitors. Some wailed in inconceivable pain. Parents teetered between hope and the futility of hope, and at prayer times they duly prayed.</p>
<p>A young doctor gave a sweeping diagnosis: “No child that ever enters this place ever leaves alive.” Being the young reporter I was at the time, I diligently made a note of his words before asking more questions. I didn’t quite grasp the finality of death.</p>
<p>Several years later, Iraq’s desolation continues. On August 16, 90 people were killed and more were wounded in attacks across the country. Media sources reported on the bloodbath (nearly 200 Iraqis were killed this month alone), but without much context. Are we meant to believe that violence in Iraq has transcended any level of reason? That Iraqis get blown up simply because it is their fate to live in perpetual fear and misery?</p>
<p>But the dead, before they were killed, were people with names and faces. They were fascinating individuals in their own right, deserving of life, rights and dignity. Many are children, who knew nothing of Iraq’s political disputes, invited by US wars and occupation and fomented by those who feed on sectarianism.</p>
<p>We often forget this. Those who refuse to fall into the trap of political extremes still tend to process and accept violence in one way or another. We co-exist with tragedy, with the belief that bombs just go off randomly and that surviving victims cannot be helped. We somehow accept the idea that refugees cannot be repatriated and the hungry cannot be fed.</p>
<p>This strange wisdom is most apparent in Sudan. In the Upper Nile state, people are dying from sheer exhaustion before they reach refugee camps in Batil. Some walk for weeks between South Kordofan and the Blue Nile, seeking respite and any chance of survival. Those who endure the journey—compelled by fighting between the Sudanese army and rebels groups—might not survive the harshness of life awaiting them at Batil. The BBC News reported on August 17, citing a warning by Medecins Sans Frontieres, that “[p]eople are dying in large numbers in a refugee camp in South Sudan.”</p>
<p>I almost stumbled on the ‘humanitarian catastrophe’ in Batil (as described by MSF’s medical co-ordinator, Helen Patterson) while reviewing reports of the deteriorating situation in some Darfur refugee camps. Batil now hosts nearly 100,000 of the estimated 170,000 refugees who recently fled their homes. According to the medical charity, 28% of the children are malnourished, and the mortality rate is twice that of the accepted emergency threshold.</p>
<p>Darfur is, of course, a festering wound. Many of the internally displaced refugees often find themselves in a constant state of displacement, as was the case earlier this month. UN officials say that ‘all’ 25,000 people in a single refugee camp, Kassab, went on the run again after armed groups clashed with government forces. They settled in another ‘shelter’ nearby, the town of Kutum. According to the African Union-United Nations Mission in Darfur (UNAMID), the supposed new shelter ‘lacks water, food and sanitation’ (CNN, August 9).</p>
<p>Since then, the story has somewhat subsided. Not because the fleeing refugees are in a good standing, but because this is all the attention that 25,000 refugees can expect from a media awash with news of two-faced politicians and celebrity scandals. It might take a ‘peacemaking’ celebrity to place Batil or Kassab on the media map for another day or two, and surely nothing less than a sizable number of deaths to make the refugees a relevant news item once again.</p>
<p>That said, no attention-seeking VIP is likely to venture out to Mali anytime soon. While the humanitarian crisis in West Africa is reaching frightening levels, the media continues to address the conflict in Mali in terms of the logic of Western interests being threatened by rebels, coups and jihadists. Aside from the fact that few ask of Western complicity in the chaos, 435,000 refugees are flooding neighboring countries. This was the most recent estimate by the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs on August 16, but the fact is ignored by most media.</p>
<p>The World Food Program says that the food crisis is devastating—not only for distraught refugees, but also for millions within the country. Malian children are, of course, outnumbering all other victims. They are helplessly dragged around through endless deserts. When they die, they merely leave a mark as yet another statistic, estimated without much certainty, and, sadly, without value.</p>
<p>However, here may lay the moral to the story. Every Malian, Sudanese, Iraqi, Syrian, Palestinian, Yemeni or Rohingya child matters immensely to those around him. His or her life—or death—might conveniently serve to fortify a political argument, make a good National Geographic reportage, or a Facebook photo with many ‘shares’ and ‘likes’. But for parents, families, friends and neighbors, their children are the center of their universe, however poor and seemingly wretched. Thus, when UNICEF or UNRWA complains about a shortage of funds, it actually means that thousands of innocent people will needlessly suffer, and that centers of many universes will dramatically implode, replacing hope with bottomless despair, and often rage.</p>
<p>It may be convenient to assign conventional political wisdom to explain complex political issues and violent conflicts. But protracted conflicts don’t make life any less precious, or children any less innocent. It is a tragedy when Iraqis seem to be on a constant parade of burying their loved ones, or when the Sudanese seem to be on a constant quest to save their lives. It’s a greater tragedy, however, when we get so used to the unfolding drama of human violence that we can accept as destined the reality of children crossing the Sahara in search of a sip of water.</p> | false | 1 | somewhere home set photo albums rarely go near fear flood cruel memories might evoked looking countless photos took trip iraq many pictures children developed rare forms cancer result exposure depleted uranium du used usled war iraq two decades ago remember visiting hospital attached almustansiriya university baghdad odor filled corridors stench medicine rather aroma death time oppressive siege hospital lacked even basic anesthetic equipment drugs children sat stared visitors wailed inconceivable pain parents teetered hope futility hope prayer times duly prayed young doctor gave sweeping diagnosis child ever enters place ever leaves alive young reporter time diligently made note words asking questions didnt quite grasp finality death several years later iraqs desolation continues august 16 90 people killed wounded attacks across country media sources reported bloodbath nearly 200 iraqis killed month alone without much context meant believe violence iraq transcended level reason iraqis get blown simply fate live perpetual fear misery dead killed people names faces fascinating individuals right deserving life rights dignity many children knew nothing iraqs political disputes invited us wars occupation fomented feed sectarianism often forget refuse fall trap political extremes still tend process accept violence one way another coexist tragedy belief bombs go randomly surviving victims helped somehow accept idea refugees repatriated hungry fed strange wisdom apparent sudan upper nile state people dying sheer exhaustion reach refugee camps batil walk weeks south kordofan blue nile seeking respite chance survival endure journeycompelled fighting sudanese army rebels groupsmight survive harshness life awaiting batil bbc news reported august 17 citing warning medecins sans frontieres people dying large numbers refugee camp south sudan almost stumbled humanitarian catastrophe batil described msfs medical coordinator helen patterson reviewing reports deteriorating situation darfur refugee camps batil hosts nearly 100000 estimated 170000 refugees recently fled homes according medical charity 28 children malnourished mortality rate twice accepted emergency threshold darfur course festering wound many internally displaced refugees often find constant state displacement case earlier month un officials say 25000 people single refugee camp kassab went run armed groups clashed government forces settled another shelter nearby town kutum according african unionunited nations mission darfur unamid supposed new shelter lacks water food sanitation cnn august 9 since story somewhat subsided fleeing refugees good standing attention 25000 refugees expect media awash news twofaced politicians celebrity scandals might take peacemaking celebrity place batil kassab media map another day two surely nothing less sizable number deaths make refugees relevant news item said attentionseeking vip likely venture mali anytime soon humanitarian crisis west africa reaching frightening levels media continues address conflict mali terms logic western interests threatened rebels coups jihadists aside fact ask western complicity chaos 435000 refugees flooding neighboring countries recent estimate un office coordination humanitarian affairs august 16 fact ignored media world food program says food crisis devastatingnot distraught refugees also millions within country malian children course outnumbering victims helplessly dragged around endless deserts die merely leave mark yet another statistic estimated without much certainty sadly without value however may lay moral story every malian sudanese iraqi syrian palestinian yemeni rohingya child matters immensely around lifeor deathmight conveniently serve fortify political argument make good national geographic reportage facebook photo many shares likes parents families friends neighbors children center universe however poor seemingly wretched thus unicef unrwa complains shortage funds actually means thousands innocent people needlessly suffer centers many universes dramatically implode replacing hope bottomless despair often rage may convenient assign conventional political wisdom explain complex political issues violent conflicts protracted conflicts dont make life less precious children less innocent tragedy iraqis seem constant parade burying loved ones sudanese seem constant quest save lives greater tragedy however get used unfolding drama human violence accept destined reality children crossing sahara search sip water | 610 |
<p />
<p>TUESDAY, Sept. 12, 2017 — Excusing the sky-high price tags of many new cancer treatments, pharmaceutical companies often blame high research and development costs.</p>
<p>But a new analysis, focused on 10 new cancer drugs, finds those costs may have been greatly exaggerated — and the return on investment for drug companies is lucrative indeed.</p>
<p>The study found that the typical R&amp;D process for a new cancer medication spans about seven years, with an average per-drug cost of between $648 million and $794 million.</p>
<p>Pricey, yes — but still far below the $2.7 billion-per-drug R&amp;D figure determined by a 2016 Tufts University investigation. It’s that number that drug companies have pointed to as their average R&amp;D cost per drug.</p>
<p>And the payoff, once a new cancer drug reaches the market, can be enormous, the new study found. According to the researchers, after an average of about four years on the U.S. market, the 10 new drugs they studied ended up collectively generating $67 billion in revenue.</p>
<p>That’s seven times the total cost of all the drugs’ combined R&amp;D.</p>
<p>“These results suggest that pharmaceutical drug development is extremely lucrative, and the current drug prices are not necessarily justified by the R&amp;D spending on these drugs,” said study co-author Sham Mailankody. He’s assistant attending physician with the myeloma service at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.</p>
<p>Mailankody co-wrote the study with Dr. Vinay Prasad, of Oregon Health and Science University in Portland. The findings were published online Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine.</p>
<p>At the crux of the issue are skyrocketing U.S. prices for new cancer medications, which often exceed $100,000 a year, sometimes hitting as high as $200,000.</p>
<p>According to Mailankody, there are three common justifications for this “sticker shock”: The drug is a novel approach to treating a cancer; it brings improved effectiveness; and it’s been produced after some very expensive R&amp;D.</p>
<p>Mailankody said that, in prior investigations, he and Prasad already found that “the cost of anticancer drugs is unrelated to the novelty of mechanism of action or the efficacy of these drugs.”</p>
<p>So that leaves the high R&amp;D cost as the sole justification left standing.</p>
<p>To see if that argument held up, the researchers identified 10 drug companies which — for the first time — had each gotten a single new cancer drug to market between 2006 and 2015.</p>
<p>The 10 new medicines included: ponatinib (Iclusig); brentuximab vedotin (Adcetris); cabozantinib (Cometriq); ruxolitinib (Jakafi); eculizumab (Soliris); ibrutinib (Imbruvica); enzalutamide (Xtandi); irinotecan liposome (Onivyde); vincristine liposome (Marqibo); and pralatrexate (Folotyn).</p>
<p>Filings lodged with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission revealed the total amount each company had laid out for all R&amp;D costs related to cancer drugs — even when the company successfully brought just one drug to market.</p>
<p>“Our analysis actually accounts for the cost of [all drug] failures” as well, Mailankody explained, rather than just the R&amp;D costs of a single successful drug.</p>
<p>R&amp;D cost per drug ranged widely between companies, from a low of $320 million to a high of $2.7 billion, the study found.</p>
<p>However, roughly four years after a drug successfully made it to market, nine out of 10 companies saw their revenues greatly exceed such costs. In fact, four of the 10 companies were raking in revenues 10 times their total investment in R&amp;D, the findings showed.</p>
<p>Mailankody noted that drug companies also “enjoy long market exclusivity/patent protections,” averaging about 14 years, so that “in time, it is anticipated that these companies will have substantial profits.”</p>
<p>Merrill Goozner has variously worked as a business professor, journalist, and director of the Integrity in Science Project at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. He wrote a journal commentary reflecting on the new findings. He believes “the study conclusively shows for the first time that the drug industry’s claim that it costs $2.5 billion on average to develop a new drug is completely specious.”</p>
<p>Representatives of the drug industry were quick to take issue with the claims, however.</p>
<p>Speaking to The New York Times, Daniel Seaton, a spokesman for the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, said that because success in drug research is expensive and never guaranteed, “it’s a bit like saying it’s a good business to go out and buy winning lottery tickets.”</p>
<p>And Dr. Joseph DiMasi, the Tufts University researcher who wrote the 2016 study citing the $2.7 billion figure, called the newer study “irredeemably flawed.”</p>
<p>“The sample consists of relatively small companies that have gotten only one drug approved, with few other drugs of any type in development,” he told the Times. This leads to “substantial selection bias,” so that the findings cannot reflect the pharmaceutical industry as a whole.</p>
<p>Dr. J. Leonard Lichtenfeld is deputy chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society. Reading over the study from Mailankody and Prasad, he said that “there are a lot of different facets to this discussion, well beyond the single point of this paper.”</p>
<p>He agreed with DiMasi that the paper’s focus on small start-ups fails to “consider drug companies that are private or very large with many, many, drugs under consideration.”</p>
<p>Lichtenfeld pointed out that “the problem is those kinds of privately held companies don’t provide access to detailed R&amp;D information. And many people, including these researchers, would argue that we need that information in order to make rational interpretations on drug pricing.”</p>
<p>He added, “As a member of the Cancer Society, I don’t have a position on this. But I do think this paper is going to move this discussion along because we need innovation and incentives for innovation. But society ‘writ large’ also needs to reach an understanding as to what is acceptable and desirable. Hopefully, cooler heads will prevail.”</p>
<p>More information</p>
<p>There’s advice on managing the cost of cancer care at the <a href="https://www.cancer.org/treatment/finding-and-paying-for-treatment/understanding-financial-and-legal-matters/the-cost-of-cancer-treatment.html" type="external">American Cancer Society</a>.</p>
<p>Copyright © 2017 HealthDay. All rights reserved.</p> | false | 1 | tuesday sept 12 2017 excusing skyhigh price tags many new cancer treatments pharmaceutical companies often blame high research development costs new analysis focused 10 new cancer drugs finds costs may greatly exaggerated return investment drug companies lucrative indeed study found typical rampd process new cancer medication spans seven years average perdrug cost 648 million 794 million pricey yes still far 27 billionperdrug rampd figure determined 2016 tufts university investigation number drug companies pointed average rampd cost per drug payoff new cancer drug reaches market enormous new study found according researchers average four years us market 10 new drugs studied ended collectively generating 67 billion revenue thats seven times total cost drugs combined rampd results suggest pharmaceutical drug development extremely lucrative current drug prices necessarily justified rampd spending drugs said study coauthor sham mailankody hes assistant attending physician myeloma service memorial sloan kettering cancer center new york city mailankody cowrote study dr vinay prasad oregon health science university portland findings published online monday jama internal medicine crux issue skyrocketing us prices new cancer medications often exceed 100000 year sometimes hitting high 200000 according mailankody three common justifications sticker shock drug novel approach treating cancer brings improved effectiveness produced expensive rampd mailankody said prior investigations prasad already found cost anticancer drugs unrelated novelty mechanism action efficacy drugs leaves high rampd cost sole justification left standing see argument held researchers identified 10 drug companies first time gotten single new cancer drug market 2006 2015 10 new medicines included ponatinib iclusig brentuximab vedotin adcetris cabozantinib cometriq ruxolitinib jakafi eculizumab soliris ibrutinib imbruvica enzalutamide xtandi irinotecan liposome onivyde vincristine liposome marqibo pralatrexate folotyn filings lodged us securities exchange commission revealed total amount company laid rampd costs related cancer drugs even company successfully brought one drug market analysis actually accounts cost drug failures well mailankody explained rather rampd costs single successful drug rampd cost per drug ranged widely companies low 320 million high 27 billion study found however roughly four years drug successfully made market nine 10 companies saw revenues greatly exceed costs fact four 10 companies raking revenues 10 times total investment rampd findings showed mailankody noted drug companies also enjoy long market exclusivitypatent protections averaging 14 years time anticipated companies substantial profits merrill goozner variously worked business professor journalist director integrity science project center science public interest wrote journal commentary reflecting new findings believes study conclusively shows first time drug industrys claim costs 25 billion average develop new drug completely specious representatives drug industry quick take issue claims however speaking new york times daniel seaton spokesman biotechnology innovation organization said success drug research expensive never guaranteed bit like saying good business go buy winning lottery tickets dr joseph dimasi tufts university researcher wrote 2016 study citing 27 billion figure called newer study irredeemably flawed sample consists relatively small companies gotten one drug approved drugs type development told times leads substantial selection bias findings reflect pharmaceutical industry whole dr j leonard lichtenfeld deputy chief medical officer american cancer society reading study mailankody prasad said lot different facets discussion well beyond single point paper agreed dimasi papers focus small startups fails consider drug companies private large many many drugs consideration lichtenfeld pointed problem kinds privately held companies dont provide access detailed rampd information many people including researchers would argue need information order make rational interpretations drug pricing added member cancer society dont position think paper going move discussion along need innovation incentives innovation society writ large also needs reach understanding acceptable desirable hopefully cooler heads prevail information theres advice managing cost cancer care american cancer society copyright 2017 healthday rights reserved | 595 |
<p>The most important truth of our time is that the military/security complex requires an enemy in order to keep profits flowing.</p>
<p>Brzezinski’s death at 89 years of age has generated a load of propaganda and disinformation, all of which serves one interest group or another or the myths that people find satisfying. I am not an expert on Brzezinski, and this is not an apology for him. He was a Cold Warrior, as essentially was everyone in Washington during the Soviet era.</p>
<p>For 12 years Brzezinski was my colleague at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, where I occupied the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy. When I was elected to that chair, CSIS was a part of Georgetown University. However, the president of Georgetown University was one of those liberals who hated Henry Kissinger, who was also our colleague, and the university president also hated Ronald Reagan for his rhetoric, not for his deeds about which the Georgetown president was uninformed. So I also was unwelcome. Whatever I was worth to CSIS, Kissinger was worth more, and CSIS was not going to give up Henry Kissinger.</p>
<p>Therefore the strategic research institute split from Georgetown University. Brzezinski stayed with CSIS.</p>
<p>When my 1971 book, <a href="https://amzn.to/2sqWr9C" type="external">Alienation and the Soviet Economy</a>, which had circulated clandestinely inside the Economic Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in mimeographed form for years, was republished in 1990 with an introduction by University of California, Berkeley, Professor Aaron Wildavsky, Brzezinski, along with Robert Conquest and two members of the USSR Academy of Sciences provided cover endorsements for my book. Brzezinski wrote: “Professor Roberts’ explanation of Soviet economic development is timely, and it fills a noticeable void in the existing literature. The book is beneficial reading for experts and non-experts alike who wish to understand the theoretical Marxian framework within which the Soviet economy grew and declined.”</p>
<p>I quote his endorsement for two reasons. One is to show upfront that I might be biased in my account of Brzezinski. The other is to establish that both Brzezinski and I did not regard the Soviet Union as a long-term threat. I expected the Soviet economy to fail, which it did, and Brzezinski expected the Soviet Union to breakup along nationality lines, which it did under Washington’s supervision. Although we were both Cold Warriors—I was a member of the Committee on the Present Danger—both of us favored a peaceful, not a war or conflict resolution of the Cold War. Brzezinski was most certainly not a Neoconservative determined to remove Russia as a constraint on American unilateralism. Brzezinski, as National Security Advisor to President Carter, did not prevent SALT 2, which the Carter Administration honored despite the refusal of the US Senate to ratify it.</p>
<p>Brzezinski was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1928. His father was a Polish diplomat posted to Germany and the Soviet Union. In 1938 Brzezinski’s father was posted to Montreal, Canada, as Consul General. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the Yalta Conference in which Churchill and FDR assigned Poland to the “Soviet sphere of influence” resulted in Brzezinski growing up in Canada where he was educated. Subsequently he obtained a Ph.D. from Harvard University and became a professor at that university. Brzezinski has all the conspiracy marks against him. He was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Bilderberg Group. Fortunately for me, when I was nominated for membership in the Council on Foreign Relations, I was blackballed.</p>
<p>Brzezinski being Polish and his wife also being Eastern European is enough to explain his animosity toward Russia. However, Brzezinski was not a warmonger. He was an advisor to Hubert Humphrey’s presidential campaign, advocated de-escalation of US involvement in the Vietnam war and resigned from a US State Department position in protest to Washington’s expansion of the Vietnam war.</p>
<p>Simultaneously, he opposed George McGovern’s pacifism.</p>
<p>In my opinion, for what it is worth, Brzezinski wanted to make sure that America held on long enough for the Soviet Union to collapse from its internal contradictions. Brzezinski did not seek to impose American world hegemony. This is a neoconservative goal, not a Cold Warrior’s goal. As President Reagan emphasized, the point of “winning” the Cold War was to end it, not to achieve hegemony over the other party. Brzezinski’s strategy as National Security Advisor toward luring the Soviets into Afghanistan was to weaken the Soviet Union and, thereby, hasten an end to the Cold War.</p>
<p>These are the facts as I experienced them. If I am correct, the truth is different from what we are hearing both from the Russian and Western media, both of which portray Brzezinski as not only evil in wanting to destroy the Soviet Union, but also as the Cold Warrior who created the Cold War, a war that had begun three decades prior to Brzezinski’s rise as National Security Advisor.</p>
<p>It is ironic that Brzezinski’s approach to the Soviet Union is identical to Russia’s approach to the West today. Brzezinski preferred in place of Nixon/Kissinger detente to emphasize international law and human rights. This is Putin’s approach today toward Washington and Washington’s NATO vassals.</p>
<p>As I recall, Brzezinski wanted to use ideas, like V in V for Vendetta, against the Soviets and not military force. This, if memory serves, was the difference between Brzezinski and the military/security complex, which preferred force, and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, who preferred arms control.</p>
<p>I was born into The Matrix. It took many decades, insider experience, and fortuitous experiences for me to escape. Brzezinski might have been one of the fortuitous events. I remember him telling me that as National Security Advisor he was awakened in the middle of the night with the message that a couple hundred Soviet ICBMs were on their way to America. Before he could clear his mind, he was told that it was several thousand ICBMs on their way to destroy America. As the futility of a response hit him, a third message reached him that it was all a mistake from a training exercise somehow being transferred into the early warning network.</p>
<p>In other words, Brzezinski understood how easy it was for mistakes to launch a nuclear holocaust. He wanted to end the Cold War for the same reason that Ronald Reagan wanted to end the Cold War. To make Brzezinski and Reagan the villains, as the left-wing does, when the real villains are the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama regimes that have convinced Russia that Washington is preparing a nuclear first strike on Russia, is a form of ideological idiocy.</p>
<p>But idiocy in the West is what we live with. The question is: how much longer can we survive our idiocy?</p>
<p>I think that the “Soviet Threat,” the basis for the Cold War, was a hoax. It was created by the military/security complex, about which President Eisenhower warned us to no effect. The patriotic war movies, the patriotic Memorial Days and July 4ths with emotional thanks to those who died “saving our freedoms,” which were never in danger from the Japanese and Germans, only from our own government, succeeded in brainwashing even National Security Advisors. Little wonder the insouciance of the American population today.</p>
<p>The Cold War was an orchestration of the military/security complex, and there are many victims. Brzezinski was a victim as the Cold War was his life. JFK was a victim as he lost his life to it. The Vietnamese, who died in the millions, were victims. The photo of the naked young Vietnamese girl fleeing down the road in terror from the American napalm behind her made us aware that the Cold War had many innocent victims. The Soviet troops sent to Afghanistan were victims as were the Afghans themselves.</p>
<p>The Soviet Threat removed itself when hardline communists arrested Soviet President Gorbachev. This ill-conceived intervention collapsed the Soviet Union. With the Soviet Threat removed, the US military/security complex no longer had a justification for its massive budget.</p>
<p>Treading water while looking for a new justification for bleeding the American taxpayer, the military/security complex had President Clinton declare the US to be the World Policeman and to destroy Yugoslavia in the name of “human rights.” With Israeli and neoconservative input, the military/security complex used 9/11 to create the “Muslin Terrorist Threat.” This hoax has now murdered, maimed, dispossessed, and displaced millions of Muslims in seven countries.</p>
<p>Despite 16 years of Washington’s wars against countries ranging from North Africa to Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan, the “Muslim threat” does not suffice to justify the $1.1 trillion US military/security annual budget. Consequently, the Russian Threat has been resurrected.</p>
<p>The Muslim Threat was never a danger to the US. It is only a danger to Washington’s European vassal states, who had to accept millions of Muslim refugees from Washington’s wars. However, the newly created Russian Threat is a threat to every American as well as to every European.</p>
<p>Russia can bite back. For a quarter century Russia has watched Washington prepare for a paralyzing nuclear strike on Russia. Recently, the Russian High Command announced that the Russian military has concluded that Washington does intend a surprise nuclear strike against Russia.</p>
<p>This dire Russian announcement received no western press coverage. No high official of any Western government, Trump included, called Putin to give reassurances that no such attack on Russia was being planned.</p>
<p>So, what happens next time when a false alarm, such as the one Brzezinski received, is received by his counterpart in Moscow or the National Security Council? Will the animosities resurrected by the evil US military/security complex result in the Russians or the US believing the false signal?</p>
<p>The insouciant populations of the West, including the members of the governments, do not appreciate that they are living on the edge of nuclear destruction.</p>
<p>The very few of us who alert you are dismissed as “Russian agents,” “anti-semites,” and “conspiracy theorists.” When you hear a source called a “Russian agent,” an “anti-semite,” or a “conspiracy theorist,” you had better listen to them. These are those in the know who accept arrow slings in order to tell you the truth.</p>
<p>You will never, ever, get the truth from the Western media or from any Western government.</p>
<p>The most important truth of our time is that the world lives on the knife-edge of the American military/security complex’s need for an enemy in order to keep profits flowing. The brutal fact is this: For the sake of its profits, the American military/security complex has subjected the entire world to the risk of nuclear Armageddon.</p>
<p>This article was originally published at&#160; <a href="http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2017/06/02/zbigniew-brzezinski-paul-craig-roberts/" type="external">PaulCraigRoberts.org</a>.</p> | false | 1 | important truth time militarysecurity complex requires enemy order keep profits flowing brzezinskis death 89 years age generated load propaganda disinformation serves one interest group another myths people find satisfying expert brzezinski apology cold warrior essentially everyone washington soviet era 12 years brzezinski colleague center strategic international studies occupied william e simon chair political economy elected chair csis part georgetown university however president georgetown university one liberals hated henry kissinger also colleague university president also hated ronald reagan rhetoric deeds georgetown president uninformed also unwelcome whatever worth csis kissinger worth csis going give henry kissinger therefore strategic research institute split georgetown university brzezinski stayed csis 1971 book alienation soviet economy circulated clandestinely inside economic institute soviet academy sciences mimeographed form years republished 1990 introduction university california berkeley professor aaron wildavsky brzezinski along robert conquest two members ussr academy sciences provided cover endorsements book brzezinski wrote professor roberts explanation soviet economic development timely fills noticeable void existing literature book beneficial reading experts nonexperts alike wish understand theoretical marxian framework within soviet economy grew declined quote endorsement two reasons one show upfront might biased account brzezinski establish brzezinski regard soviet union longterm threat expected soviet economy fail brzezinski expected soviet union breakup along nationality lines washingtons supervision although cold warriorsi member committee present dangerboth us favored peaceful war conflict resolution cold war brzezinski certainly neoconservative determined remove russia constraint american unilateralism brzezinski national security advisor president carter prevent salt 2 carter administration honored despite refusal us senate ratify brzezinski born warsaw poland 1928 father polish diplomat posted germany soviet union 1938 brzezinskis father posted montreal canada consul general molotovribbentrop pact yalta conference churchill fdr assigned poland soviet sphere influence resulted brzezinski growing canada educated subsequently obtained phd harvard university became professor university brzezinski conspiracy marks member council foreign relations bilderberg group fortunately nominated membership council foreign relations blackballed brzezinski polish wife also eastern european enough explain animosity toward russia however brzezinski warmonger advisor hubert humphreys presidential campaign advocated deescalation us involvement vietnam war resigned us state department position protest washingtons expansion vietnam war simultaneously opposed george mcgoverns pacifism opinion worth brzezinski wanted make sure america held long enough soviet union collapse internal contradictions brzezinski seek impose american world hegemony neoconservative goal cold warriors goal president reagan emphasized point winning cold war end achieve hegemony party brzezinskis strategy national security advisor toward luring soviets afghanistan weaken soviet union thereby hasten end cold war facts experienced correct truth different hearing russian western media portray brzezinski evil wanting destroy soviet union also cold warrior created cold war war begun three decades prior brzezinskis rise national security advisor ironic brzezinskis approach soviet union identical russias approach west today brzezinski preferred place nixonkissinger detente emphasize international law human rights putins approach today toward washington washingtons nato vassals recall brzezinski wanted use ideas like v v vendetta soviets military force memory serves difference brzezinski militarysecurity complex preferred force secretary state cyrus vance preferred arms control born matrix took many decades insider experience fortuitous experiences escape brzezinski might one fortuitous events remember telling national security advisor awakened middle night message couple hundred soviet icbms way america could clear mind told several thousand icbms way destroy america futility response hit third message reached mistake training exercise somehow transferred early warning network words brzezinski understood easy mistakes launch nuclear holocaust wanted end cold war reason ronald reagan wanted end cold war make brzezinski reagan villains leftwing real villains clinton george w bush obama regimes convinced russia washington preparing nuclear first strike russia form ideological idiocy idiocy west live question much longer survive idiocy think soviet threat basis cold war hoax created militarysecurity complex president eisenhower warned us effect patriotic war movies patriotic memorial days july 4ths emotional thanks died saving freedoms never danger japanese germans government succeeded brainwashing even national security advisors little wonder insouciance american population today cold war orchestration militarysecurity complex many victims brzezinski victim cold war life jfk victim lost life vietnamese died millions victims photo naked young vietnamese girl fleeing road terror american napalm behind made us aware cold war many innocent victims soviet troops sent afghanistan victims afghans soviet threat removed hardline communists arrested soviet president gorbachev illconceived intervention collapsed soviet union soviet threat removed us militarysecurity complex longer justification massive budget treading water looking new justification bleeding american taxpayer militarysecurity complex president clinton declare us world policeman destroy yugoslavia name human rights israeli neoconservative input militarysecurity complex used 911 create muslin terrorist threat hoax murdered maimed dispossessed displaced millions muslims seven countries despite 16 years washingtons wars countries ranging north africa iraq syria yemen afghanistan muslim threat suffice justify 11 trillion us militarysecurity annual budget consequently russian threat resurrected muslim threat never danger us danger washingtons european vassal states accept millions muslim refugees washingtons wars however newly created russian threat threat every american well every european russia bite back quarter century russia watched washington prepare paralyzing nuclear strike russia recently russian high command announced russian military concluded washington intend surprise nuclear strike russia dire russian announcement received western press coverage high official western government trump included called putin give reassurances attack russia planned happens next time false alarm one brzezinski received received counterpart moscow national security council animosities resurrected evil us militarysecurity complex result russians us believing false signal insouciant populations west including members governments appreciate living edge nuclear destruction us alert dismissed russian agents antisemites conspiracy theorists hear source called russian agent antisemite conspiracy theorist better listen know accept arrow slings order tell truth never ever get truth western media western government important truth time world lives knifeedge american militarysecurity complexs need enemy order keep profits flowing brutal fact sake profits american militarysecurity complex subjected entire world risk nuclear armageddon article originally published at160 paulcraigrobertsorg | 950 |
<p>General readers in search of a reliable and readable single-volume biography of Edmund Burke have had few options in recent decades. Although some significant new material (including especially Burke’s complete personal correspondence) has become available since the middle of the 20th century, no authoritative biography has made his story widely accessible. This is odd, given Burke’s importance to Anglo-American political thought, and especially to English and American conservatives who tend to be fertile in producing books about their heroes.</p>
<p>But precisely Burke’s importance and relevance may have stood in the way of a definitive short biography. Writers telling his story have tended to use it to make points of their own — from Russell Kirk’s effort to make Burke the Christian moralist he needed right through Conor Cruise O’Brien’s mission to prove that Burke, like all good things, was first and foremost Irish. This has yielded some great books, including Kirk’s and O’Brien’s, but no great, straightforward overview of Burke’s life and work. So while some superb academic biographies have appeared, most notably F. P. Lock’s two-volume masterpiece (in 1999 and 2006), there has been nothing of the sort for the non-specialist reader.</p>
<p>Jesse Norman has set out to change that, and he has largely succeeded.&#160;Edmund Burke: The First Conservative&#160;is an engaging, highly readable, and impressively comprehensive overview. It handles the intricacies of English history and politics with great mastery and conveys Burke’s character and personality as few of his biographers have managed to do. Although its treatment of Burke’s life and times is far stronger than its assessment of his ideas, the book powerfully illustrates how the two were connected — how a political actor can be a political thinker too.</p>
<p>Norman is uniquely well suited to the latter task. He is a Conservative member of the British House of Commons with a Ph.D. in philosophy. And in the past few years he has made it his mission to give the Conservative party a coherent governing vision — one that emphasizes the importance of community and culture, in contrast to the more individualistic conservatism of the age of Thatcher (and Reagan).</p>
<p>Norman clearly sees Burke as the patron saint of his more communitarian brand of conservatism, and the portrait of Burke that emerges from his book offers ample support for that view. Burke, he argues, believed that what people want most is “to live together according to shared rules and norms in a moral community.”</p>
<p>By emphasizing this element of Burke’s political thought — which happens to be of particular use to the contemporary Conservative party’s aims — Norman does run the risk of subsuming Burke’s story under his own agenda. But he saves the reader from the worst consequences of that common vice of Burke biographers by dividing his book into two sections: a narrative recounting of Burke’s personal and political life and an analysis of his political ideas.</p>
<p>This makes possible a separation between a superb biography of Burke, very much including his ideas and arguments (in the book’s first section), and a far less impressive employment of Burke in defense of Norman’s priorities (in the second section).</p>
<p>In the biographical first section, which takes up well over half the book, Norman finds just the right balance between fast-paced storytelling and gripping historical detail, and he shines a light both on Burke’s great strengths as a thinker, writer, and orator and on his great weaknesses — especially his tendency to get carried away by his political passions. The essential features of Burke’s political thought — his organic notion of society, his incrementalism, his resistance to both radical change and abuses of power, his love of the emergent order of the British constitution — are interwoven in this tale with grace and subtlety.</p>
<p>The book’s second section, which is nominally devoted to Burke’s ideas, is, however, both less engaging and less useful. Norman pulls out a few prominent themes of particular relevance to contemporary British politics — a case for community, a defense of party politics — but fails to show what makes them central to Burke’s thought or how they are connected to one another.</p>
<p>As a result, Norman sells Burke somewhat short as a political thinker, and therefore also sells short his own argument — the case for a communitarian, non-libertarian conservatism. He fails to bring out the nature of the challenge that Burke posed to the Enlightenment liberalism of his day, and therefore the challenge Burke could still pose to liberal individualism in our day.</p>
<p>Norman insists that Burke’s key arguments are at their core directed against the radicalism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whom the French revolutionaries saw as their intellectual patron. There is no question that Burke thought Rousseau was profoundly in error in some important respects. But to focus on his differences with Rousseau is to ignore his differences with the mainstream of British Enlightenment thought — from Thomas Hobbes and John Locke onward.</p>
<p>In fact, Burke offers a liberal alternative to Enlightenment liberalism. He argues that reasoning about politics from a theory about some pre-political human condition (like the “state of nature” theories employed by Hobbes and Locke and their successors) is absurd, that society is not a product of anyone’s choice and does not exist primarily to protect people’s rights to make choices, and that political liberalism was not an application of ideas discovered in the Enlightenment but the culmination of a process of political development that had been going on in Britain for many centuries. Burke’s vision of politics is an almost point-by-point rebuttal of the radicalism of the age of revolutions — the radicalism that yielded the excessive individualism that (in different forms) is the scourge of both the Left and the Right today. But Norman’s Burke evinces little of this.</p>
<p>The first section of Norman’s book is thus well worth the price, and stands on its own as a superb general biography of Burke. But the second section offers another instance of how easily Burke lends himself to being used as a political prop, and how frequently even the best scholars of his work succumb to this temptation.</p>
<p>A far clearer illustration of this recurring pattern in Burke scholarship is offered by another book published this spring:&#160;Edmund Burke in America, by historian Drew Maciag. Maciag uses Burke as a lens through which to view American political development, and especially the story of conservative thought in our country.</p>
<p>The conceit of the book has real promise: Maciag sets out to learn about the history of American political thought by tracing the different ways that Burke’s name and ideas have been used in our political debates since the Founding. But there is simply not enough material for Maciag to work with, and he never quite overcomes his prejudices.</p>
<p>The story he tells is often well researched, and at some points is insightful and illuminating. But it begins from a weak and partial grasp of Burke’s ideas and a profound hostility to American conservatism, and so is at its best when it recounts little-understood chapters of American political history (especially in the early and mid 19th century) rather than when discussing either of its purported subjects — Burke and the American Right.</p>
<p>The book also suffers from the fact that Burke’s name and work were simply not very prominent in American political debates for most of the nation’s history, so that tracing his appearance in public debates does not reveal as much as Maciag would like — especially given Maciag’s strikingly ideological approach to American political development.</p>
<p>He describes American social and political history in almost Hegelian terms as a “historical process” that moves through stages in which the competition of opposing ideologies ends with a significant step toward greater democratization. He surveys this trajectory by seeking out individuals (usually, but not always, on the losing side of history) who happened to refer to Edmund Burke or draw on his ideas or reputation in some way. The result is a rather random assortment of historical figures whose roles and views are explained not in their own terms but in relation to Maciag’s larger story.</p>
<p>Maciag insists, moreover, that essentially none of these figures — and especially not the more recent among them — understood Burke properly. He points to the fact that Burke was no reactionary but a complex traditionalist reformer and then notes with perplexity that later conservatives (including those of our day) have nonetheless repeatedly reached for his name and writings in advancing their causes. It seems never to occur to him that maybe these later conservatives haven’t been fools or reactionaries either — that perhaps Burke’s deep and complex vision is precisely what appeals to them, and what they are trying to advance.</p>
<p>Maciag would have done well to consider more carefully the real depth of Burke’s vision of politics and to take more seriously the possibility that contemporary Anglo-American conservatism is well aware of the challenge of balancing freedom and order, tradition and progress, and looks to Burke precisely for help in doing so.</p>
<p>He would have done well, in other words, to consult Jesse Norman’s fine new book.</p>
<p>Yuval Levin is Hertog Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and editor of&#160;National Affairs.</p> | false | 1 | general readers search reliable readable singlevolume biography edmund burke options recent decades although significant new material including especially burkes complete personal correspondence become available since middle 20th century authoritative biography made story widely accessible odd given burkes importance angloamerican political thought especially english american conservatives tend fertile producing books heroes precisely burkes importance relevance may stood way definitive short biography writers telling story tended use make points russell kirks effort make burke christian moralist needed right conor cruise obriens mission prove burke like good things first foremost irish yielded great books including kirks obriens great straightforward overview burkes life work superb academic biographies appeared notably f p locks twovolume masterpiece 1999 2006 nothing sort nonspecialist reader jesse norman set change largely succeeded160edmund burke first conservative160is engaging highly readable impressively comprehensive overview handles intricacies english history politics great mastery conveys burkes character personality biographers managed although treatment burkes life times far stronger assessment ideas book powerfully illustrates two connected political actor political thinker norman uniquely well suited latter task conservative member british house commons phd philosophy past years made mission give conservative party coherent governing vision one emphasizes importance community culture contrast individualistic conservatism age thatcher reagan norman clearly sees burke patron saint communitarian brand conservatism portrait burke emerges book offers ample support view burke argues believed people want live together according shared rules norms moral community emphasizing element burkes political thought happens particular use contemporary conservative partys aims norman run risk subsuming burkes story agenda saves reader worst consequences common vice burke biographers dividing book two sections narrative recounting burkes personal political life analysis political ideas makes possible separation superb biography burke much including ideas arguments books first section far less impressive employment burke defense normans priorities second section biographical first section takes well half book norman finds right balance fastpaced storytelling gripping historical detail shines light burkes great strengths thinker writer orator great weaknesses especially tendency get carried away political passions essential features burkes political thought organic notion society incrementalism resistance radical change abuses power love emergent order british constitution interwoven tale grace subtlety books second section nominally devoted burkes ideas however less engaging less useful norman pulls prominent themes particular relevance contemporary british politics case community defense party politics fails show makes central burkes thought connected one another result norman sells burke somewhat short political thinker therefore also sells short argument case communitarian nonlibertarian conservatism fails bring nature challenge burke posed enlightenment liberalism day therefore challenge burke could still pose liberal individualism day norman insists burkes key arguments core directed radicalism jeanjacques rousseau french revolutionaries saw intellectual patron question burke thought rousseau profoundly error important respects focus differences rousseau ignore differences mainstream british enlightenment thought thomas hobbes john locke onward fact burke offers liberal alternative enlightenment liberalism argues reasoning politics theory prepolitical human condition like state nature theories employed hobbes locke successors absurd society product anyones choice exist primarily protect peoples rights make choices political liberalism application ideas discovered enlightenment culmination process political development going britain many centuries burkes vision politics almost pointbypoint rebuttal radicalism age revolutions radicalism yielded excessive individualism different forms scourge left right today normans burke evinces little first section normans book thus well worth price stands superb general biography burke second section offers another instance easily burke lends used political prop frequently even best scholars work succumb temptation far clearer illustration recurring pattern burke scholarship offered another book published spring160edmund burke america historian drew maciag maciag uses burke lens view american political development especially story conservative thought country conceit book real promise maciag sets learn history american political thought tracing different ways burkes name ideas used political debates since founding simply enough material maciag work never quite overcomes prejudices story tells often well researched points insightful illuminating begins weak partial grasp burkes ideas profound hostility american conservatism best recounts littleunderstood chapters american political history especially early mid 19th century rather discussing either purported subjects burke american right book also suffers fact burkes name work simply prominent american political debates nations history tracing appearance public debates reveal much maciag would like especially given maciags strikingly ideological approach american political development describes american social political history almost hegelian terms historical process moves stages competition opposing ideologies ends significant step toward greater democratization surveys trajectory seeking individuals usually always losing side history happened refer edmund burke draw ideas reputation way result rather random assortment historical figures whose roles views explained terms relation maciags larger story maciag insists moreover essentially none figures especially recent among understood burke properly points fact burke reactionary complex traditionalist reformer notes perplexity later conservatives including day nonetheless repeatedly reached name writings advancing causes seems never occur maybe later conservatives havent fools reactionaries either perhaps burkes deep complex vision precisely appeals trying advance maciag would done well consider carefully real depth burkes vision politics take seriously possibility contemporary angloamerican conservatism well aware challenge balancing freedom order tradition progress looks burke precisely help would done well words consult jesse normans fine new book yuval levin hertog fellow ethics public policy center editor of160national affairs | 839 |
<p>By Marc Jones</p>
<p>LONDON (Reuters) – The success of Oxford University’s $1 billion bond, the first in its 1,000-year history, is good news for Britain’s top academic institutions at a time of anxiety over Brexit-related funding shortfalls and calls to scrap student tuition fees.</p>
<p>The 100-year bond, launched on Dec. 1 with a 2.5 percent coupon, has taken the market for deals for UK universities and colleges to a new level on a par with such big U.S. names as Harvard and Yale.</p>
<p>Technically, the bond was the biggest from any university in the world. Buying interest equaled $2 billion or double its face value.</p>
<p>The day after its launch, it was among the top 20 traded issues in the whole of Europe, according to Trax, a subsidiary of debt trading platform MarketAxess.</p>
<p>That is cause for celebration for peers contemplating bond sales, even if their credit scores are less impressive than Oxford’s gold-plated triple-A rating. The oldest university in the English-speaking world, Oxford topped a global ranking by the Times newspaper for the first time last year.</p>
<p>It’s an uncertain time for Britain’s academic institutions.</p>
<p>The cost of student tuition fees, which make up almost half of UK universities’ revenues, has been catapulted to the top of the political agenda by young voters who deserted Britain’s ruling Conservative party in a snap election in June.</p>
<p>Universities expect these fees – currently 9,250 pounds ($12,424) a year – to be reviewed in the new year, meaning they are unlikely to rise further and could even be cut.</p>
<p>“I think the whole higher education sector is worried about the debate around tuition fees,” Oxford’s Pro-Vice-Chancellor for planning and resources David Prout told Reuters after the bond sale earlier this month.</p>
<p>Britain’s plan to leave the European Union in March 2019 is also weighing heavily.</p>
<p>UK universities are already finding it harder to attract and retain EU-born students and staff, with official figures showing undergraduate course applications from EU students fell 7 percent this year.</p>
<p>The other countries in the EU send around 58,000 students, or 8 percent of undergraduates and 15 percent of postgraduate students, to the ‘Russell Group’ comprising 24 top tier universities in the United Kingdom. Around 25,000 of their staff come from other EU countries, too.</p>
<p>Once Britain leaves, these institutions could also lose their places on EU-funded research projects after 2020.</p>
<p>A big worry is how Brexit will affect the UK’s ability to borrow from the European Investment Bank, UK universities’ biggest source of lending.</p>
<p>The bank, the European Union’s main development lender, stopped support in March after London triggered the Article 50 clause to formally start the EU withdrawal process.</p>
<p>LEARNING THE CURVE</p>
<p>Some 36 British universities, including University College London, Edinburgh, Swansea, Bangor, Newcastle and Oxford, have borrowed almost 3 billion euros ($3.52 billion) from the EIB over the last decade to fund campus upgrades.</p>
<p>That’s more than any other country and almost double the 1.7 billion that went to Germany and 1.5 billion to France.</p>
<p>Last year alone, the EIB lent 671 million euros (590.21 million pounds) to UK universities.</p>
<p>But unless EU treaties are amended, Britain will have to leave the EIB after Brexit.</p>
<p>“This (EIB funding) is an area where people (at universities) feel there might be changes, so they are looking at the option of the public and private placement markets,” said Dominic Kerr, manager director of Debt Capital Markets for HSBC.</p>
<p>Kerr has helped launch seven of the eight public bonds that have so far been issued by UK universities, including the first by Cambridge in 2012.</p>
<p>Kerr estimates there have been around 50 market-based funding deals for UK universities and individual colleges in total if ‘private placements’ – bonds offered directly to a just one or a few investors – are included.</p>
<p>Fraser Dixon, JP Morgan’s executive director for UK &amp; Ireland debt Capital Markets, said he had several interested calls after his bank arranged the Oxford bond.</p>
<p>“Having seen what is able to be achieved in the markets and with the EIB possibly disappearing as an option, I think other institutions will be considering their options,” Dixon said.</p>
<p>“The bond markets are offering greater capacity and longer-dated money than the EIB traditionally has.”</p>
<p>Many still hope EIB funding will not vanish altogether.</p>
<p>An EU-UK ‘divorce deal’ outline published last week specifically stated: “The UK considers that there could be mutual benefit from a continuing arrangement between the UK and the EIB,” and that it wanted to “explore” the possibilities.</p>
<p>The EIB does lend to non-EU universities in countries such as Morocco and Tunisia and the group is mulling an offshoot that would include the UK, sources have told Reuters.</p>
<p>“Looking ahead, if there were to be clarity on the future relationship with the UK, let’s see, but from our side we would happily look at supporting higher education in the years ahead,” an EIB source said.</p>
<p>($1 = 0.8517 euros)($1 = 0.7445 pounds)</p>
<p>(1 British pound = 1.1369 euros)</p> | false | 1 | marc jones london reuters success oxford universitys 1 billion bond first 1000year history good news britains top academic institutions time anxiety brexitrelated funding shortfalls calls scrap student tuition fees 100year bond launched dec 1 25 percent coupon taken market deals uk universities colleges new level par big us names harvard yale technically bond biggest university world buying interest equaled 2 billion double face value day launch among top 20 traded issues whole europe according trax subsidiary debt trading platform marketaxess cause celebration peers contemplating bond sales even credit scores less impressive oxfords goldplated triplea rating oldest university englishspeaking world oxford topped global ranking times newspaper first time last year uncertain time britains academic institutions cost student tuition fees make almost half uk universities revenues catapulted top political agenda young voters deserted britains ruling conservative party snap election june universities expect fees currently 9250 pounds 12424 year reviewed new year meaning unlikely rise could even cut think whole higher education sector worried debate around tuition fees oxfords provicechancellor planning resources david prout told reuters bond sale earlier month britains plan leave european union march 2019 also weighing heavily uk universities already finding harder attract retain euborn students staff official figures showing undergraduate course applications eu students fell 7 percent year countries eu send around 58000 students 8 percent undergraduates 15 percent postgraduate students russell group comprising 24 top tier universities united kingdom around 25000 staff come eu countries britain leaves institutions could also lose places eufunded research projects 2020 big worry brexit affect uks ability borrow european investment bank uk universities biggest source lending bank european unions main development lender stopped support march london triggered article 50 clause formally start eu withdrawal process learning curve 36 british universities including university college london edinburgh swansea bangor newcastle oxford borrowed almost 3 billion euros 352 billion eib last decade fund campus upgrades thats country almost double 17 billion went germany 15 billion france last year alone eib lent 671 million euros 59021 million pounds uk universities unless eu treaties amended britain leave eib brexit eib funding area people universities feel might changes looking option public private placement markets said dominic kerr manager director debt capital markets hsbc kerr helped launch seven eight public bonds far issued uk universities including first cambridge 2012 kerr estimates around 50 marketbased funding deals uk universities individual colleges total private placements bonds offered directly one investors included fraser dixon jp morgans executive director uk amp ireland debt capital markets said several interested calls bank arranged oxford bond seen able achieved markets eib possibly disappearing option think institutions considering options dixon said bond markets offering greater capacity longerdated money eib traditionally many still hope eib funding vanish altogether euuk divorce deal outline published last week specifically stated uk considers could mutual benefit continuing arrangement uk eib wanted explore possibilities eib lend noneu universities countries morocco tunisia group mulling offshoot would include uk sources told reuters looking ahead clarity future relationship uk lets see side would happily look supporting higher education years ahead eib source said 1 08517 euros1 07445 pounds 1 british pound 11369 euros | 516 |
<p>Staff Report, NASCAR Wire Service</p>
<p>Distributed by The Sports Xchange</p>
<p>Daytona 500 champion <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Kurt_Busch/" type="external">Kurt Busch</a> got off to a slow start in the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs with a 19th-place finish at Chicagoland — the second-lowest showing among postseason drivers.</p>
<p>Right now, Busch sits 13th on the playoff grid. He’s even with <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Austin-Dillon/" type="external">Austin Dillon</a> in points, but Dillon holds the tiebreaker for the 12th and final advancement spot.</p>
<p>Busch will try to move up the playoff grid as the series heads to New Hampshire Motor Speedway for Sunday’s ISM Connect 300 (2 p.m. ET on NBCSN). The No. 41 Haas Automation/Monster Energy Ford driver is tied for the active series lead with three New Hampshire wins. In 33 career starts at The Magic Mile, he also has three wins, eight top fives, 14 top 10s and a 15.6 average finish.</p>
<p>“It’s a track that has been pretty good to me since I started racing in the top series of this sport,” Busch said. “I raced there for the first time in the (Camping World) Truck Series and won that race. Then, it’s a track where I have three wins in the (Monster Energy Series) cars and, when you’re able to go to a track where you’ve had that kind of success, it just gives you confidence.”</p>
<p>A win by Busch on Sunday would advance him to the second round of the Playoffs and tie him with <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Jeff_Burton/" type="external">Jeff Burton</a> for the all-time wins record at New Hampshire.</p>
<p>Busch explained what he needs his car to do to put him in position to take the checkered flag.</p>
<p>“It depends upon the circumstances but, yes, usually you’re trying to keep your eye on the main prize, which is Victory Lane at the end of the day,” Busch said. “If you have a run-in early in the race, that guy is going to be trying to find you or you’re looking over your shoulder. So if you can sort of hit a reset button and right a mistake, you do that, but not at the expense of taking yourself out of position for the win.”</p>
<p>Sadler attempts to open Playoffs with win for second straight season</p>
<p><a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Elliott_Sadler/" type="external">Elliott Sadler</a> won the NASCAR Xfinity Series regular season championship, but only has one goal on his mind now — capturing the overall series crown.</p>
<p>He starts his quest in Saturday’s VisitMyrtleBeach.com 300 at Kentucky Speedway (8 p.m. ET on NBCSN) where he won the Playoff opener last year.</p>
<p>“Our OneMain Financial team has been gearing up for the playoffs ever since Daytona in February,” Sadler said. “Our strong regular season and Kentucky win last year helps our confidence heading into this weekend.”</p>
<p>In 12 career starts at Kentucky, Sadler claims one win, five top fives, eight top 10s and a 7.8 average finish.</p>
<p>Although Sadler earned the regular season championship, he starts the Playoffs third in the standings. He sits five points behind leader William Byron and trails second-place Justin Allgaier by three points.</p>
<p>Byron and Allgaier are ahead of Sadler because they accumulated more playoff points during the regular season. Byron won three races and two stages to earn 17 playoff points in addition to his eight for finishing third in the standings. Allgaier recorded two victories and three stage wins for 13 playoff points to supplement his 10 for placing second in the standings. Sadler earned 15 playoff points for his regular season championship and logged five for his five stage wins.</p>
<p>“We’re still a long way from Homestead and that’s where we ultimately want to be — racing in the final four for the championship. Kevin (Meendering, crew chief), myself, and the guys are going to take it one race at a time, starting with this weekend’s race. We’re confident in our strategy and we’re ready.”</p>
<p>Bell begins run at NASCAR Camping World Truck Series championship</p>
<p>Christopher Bell has his sights set on greater accomplishments than the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series regular season title he captured at Chicagoland.</p>
<p>“The regular season championship is nice,” said Bell, who leads the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series with four wins, 10 top fives and 14 top 10s. “But now it’s time to get the playoffs started and win another championship for <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Kyle_Busch/" type="external">Kyle Busch</a> Motorsports.”</p>
<p>He’ll begin his run at the series crown when the Camping World Truck Playoffs open with Saturday’s UNOH 175 at New Hampshire Motor Speedway (1 p.m. ET on FS1).</p>
<p>In his one career start at New Hampshire last year, Bell finished third after leading 11 laps.</p>
<p>As a Sunoco Rookie last season, Bell placed runner-up in the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series championship standings.</p>
<p>“New Hampshire is a great place for the Playoffs to get started because Kyle Busch Motorsports has been really successful there — including a one-two finish last year. I’m excited to go there with Rudy (Fugle, crew chief) and have a shot at winning another race. Our tactic as the playoffs start is to go out and win races. Ultimately, if you go out and win races you are going to make it all the way to Homestead and that’s our No. 1 goal.”</p>
<p>Race Weekend Guide</p>
<p>Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series</p>
<p>Race: ISM Connect 300</p>
<p>Place: New Hampshire Motor Speedway</p>
<p>Date and Time: Sunday at 2 p.m. ET</p>
<p>Tune-in: NBCSN, PRN, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio</p>
<p>Distance: 317.4 miles (300 laps); Stage 1 (Ends on lap 75), Stage 2 (Ends on lap 150), Final Stage (Ends on lap 300)</p>
<p>What to Watch for: <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Martin_Truex/" type="external">Martin Truex</a> Jr. opened up the Playoffs with a win at Chicagoland to advance to the Round of 12. … <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Denny_Hamlin/" type="external">Denny Hamlin</a> tries for a second consecutive victory at New Hampshire. … <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Kevin_Harvick/" type="external">Kevin Harvick</a> attempts to win at New Hampshire for the second fall race in a row. … Nine of the 16 Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series Playoff drivers have won at New Hampshire: Kurt Busch, <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Matt_Kenseth/" type="external">Matt Kenseth</a>, <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Ryan_Newman/" type="external">Ryan Newman</a>, <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Jimmie_Johnson/" type="external">Jimmie Johnson</a>, Kyle Busch, Denny Hamlin, Kevin Harvick, <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Kasey_Kahne/" type="external">Kasey Kahne</a> and <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Brad_Keselowski/" type="external">Brad Keselowski</a>.</p>
<p>NASCAR Xfinity Series</p>
<p>Race: VisitMyrtleBeach.com 300</p>
<p>Place: Kentucky Speedway</p>
<p>Date and Time: Saturday at 8 p.m. ET</p>
<p>Tune-in: NBCSN, PRN, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio</p>
<p>Distance: 300 miles (200 laps); Stage 1 (Ends on lap 45), Stage 2 (Ends on lap 90), Final Stage (Ends on lap 200)</p>
<p>What to Watch for: The NASCAR Xfinity Series Playoffs open with a stand-alone race at Kentucky Speedway. … No driver in the NASCAR Xfinity Playoffs field has won a national series championship before. … Ryan Preece returns to the No. 20 Kyle Busch Motorsports Toyota after winning at Iowa and finishing runner-up at New Hampshire. … Angela Ruch will attempt to make a start in the No. 78 Chevrolet. She is one of five female drivers to compete in the NASCAR Xfinity Series at Kentucky.</p>
<p>NASCAR Camping World Truck Series</p>
<p>Race: UNOH 175</p>
<p>Place: New Hampshire Motor Speedway</p>
<p>Date and Time: Saturday at 1 p.m. ET</p>
<p>Tune-In: FS1, MRN, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio</p>
<p>Distance: 225 miles (150 laps); Stage 1 (Ends on lap 55), Stage 2 (Ends on lap 110), Final Stage (Ends on lap 175)</p>
<p>What to Watch for: The NASCAR Camping World Truck Series Playoffs begin at New Hampshire Motor Speedway. … Matt Crafton begins his quest for a third series title. … Johnny Sauter tries to defend his 2016 series championship. … Chase Briscoe leads Grant Enfinger by three points in the Sunoco Rookie of the Year standings.</p> | false | 1 | staff report nascar wire service distributed sports xchange daytona 500 champion kurt busch got slow start monster energy nascar cup series playoffs 19thplace finish chicagoland secondlowest showing among postseason drivers right busch sits 13th playoff grid hes even austin dillon points dillon holds tiebreaker 12th final advancement spot busch try move playoff grid series heads new hampshire motor speedway sundays ism connect 300 2 pm et nbcsn 41 haas automationmonster energy ford driver tied active series lead three new hampshire wins 33 career starts magic mile also three wins eight top fives 14 top 10s 156 average finish track pretty good since started racing top series sport busch said raced first time camping world truck series race track three wins monster energy series cars youre able go track youve kind success gives confidence win busch sunday would advance second round playoffs tie jeff burton alltime wins record new hampshire busch explained needs car put position take checkered flag depends upon circumstances yes usually youre trying keep eye main prize victory lane end day busch said runin early race guy going trying find youre looking shoulder sort hit reset button right mistake expense taking position win sadler attempts open playoffs win second straight season elliott sadler nascar xfinity series regular season championship one goal mind capturing overall series crown starts quest saturdays visitmyrtlebeachcom 300 kentucky speedway 8 pm et nbcsn playoff opener last year onemain financial team gearing playoffs ever since daytona february sadler said strong regular season kentucky win last year helps confidence heading weekend 12 career starts kentucky sadler claims one win five top fives eight top 10s 78 average finish although sadler earned regular season championship starts playoffs third standings sits five points behind leader william byron trails secondplace justin allgaier three points byron allgaier ahead sadler accumulated playoff points regular season byron three races two stages earn 17 playoff points addition eight finishing third standings allgaier recorded two victories three stage wins 13 playoff points supplement 10 placing second standings sadler earned 15 playoff points regular season championship logged five five stage wins still long way homestead thats ultimately want racing final four championship kevin meendering crew chief guys going take one race time starting weekends race confident strategy ready bell begins run nascar camping world truck series championship christopher bell sights set greater accomplishments nascar camping world truck series regular season title captured chicagoland regular season championship nice said bell leads nascar camping world truck series four wins 10 top fives 14 top 10s time get playoffs started win another championship kyle busch motorsports hell begin run series crown camping world truck playoffs open saturdays unoh 175 new hampshire motor speedway 1 pm et fs1 one career start new hampshire last year bell finished third leading 11 laps sunoco rookie last season bell placed runnerup nascar camping world truck series championship standings new hampshire great place playoffs get started kyle busch motorsports really successful including onetwo finish last year im excited go rudy fugle crew chief shot winning another race tactic playoffs start go win races ultimately go win races going make way homestead thats 1 goal race weekend guide monster energy nascar cup series race ism connect 300 place new hampshire motor speedway date time sunday 2 pm et tunein nbcsn prn siriusxm nascar radio distance 3174 miles 300 laps stage 1 ends lap 75 stage 2 ends lap 150 final stage ends lap 300 watch martin truex jr opened playoffs win chicagoland advance round 12 denny hamlin tries second consecutive victory new hampshire kevin harvick attempts win new hampshire second fall race row nine 16 monster energy nascar cup series playoff drivers new hampshire kurt busch matt kenseth ryan newman jimmie johnson kyle busch denny hamlin kevin harvick kasey kahne brad keselowski nascar xfinity series race visitmyrtlebeachcom 300 place kentucky speedway date time saturday 8 pm et tunein nbcsn prn siriusxm nascar radio distance 300 miles 200 laps stage 1 ends lap 45 stage 2 ends lap 90 final stage ends lap 200 watch nascar xfinity series playoffs open standalone race kentucky speedway driver nascar xfinity playoffs field national series championship ryan preece returns 20 kyle busch motorsports toyota winning iowa finishing runnerup new hampshire angela ruch attempt make start 78 chevrolet one five female drivers compete nascar xfinity series kentucky nascar camping world truck series race unoh 175 place new hampshire motor speedway date time saturday 1 pm et tunein fs1 mrn siriusxm nascar radio distance 225 miles 150 laps stage 1 ends lap 55 stage 2 ends lap 110 final stage ends lap 175 watch nascar camping world truck series playoffs begin new hampshire motor speedway matt crafton begins quest third series title johnny sauter tries defend 2016 series championship chase briscoe leads grant enfinger three points sunoco rookie year standings | 799 |
<p>MOSCOW — In a biting attack, Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday accused the outgoing U.S. administration of trying to undermine President-elect Donald Trump by spreading fake allegations and said those who are doing it are “worse than prostitutes.”</p>
<p>The statement reflected the Kremlin’s boiling anger at President Barack Obama’s administration, which declined to comment on Putin’s accusation.</p>
<p>Asked about an <a href="" type="internal">unsubstantiated dossier</a> outlining unverified claims that Trump engaged in sexual activities with prostitutes at a Moscow hotel, Putin dismissed it as “fake” and “nonsense” and said it was part of efforts by Obama’s administration to “undermine the legitimacy of the president-elect” despite his “convincing” victory.</p>
<p>Trump earlier rejected the sexual allegations as “fake news” and “phony stuff.”</p>
<p>Putin’s broadside at the White House reveals a culmination of tensions between Moscow and Washington, which have built up over the Ukrainian crisis, the Syrian war and the allegations of Russian meddling in the U.S. election.</p>
<p>“People who order such fakes against the U.S. president-elect, fabricate them and use them in political struggle are worse than prostitutes,” Putin said. “They have no moral restrictions whatsoever, and it highlights a significant degree of degradation of political elites in the West, including in the United States.”</p>
<p>He spoke in Moscow during a news conference following talks with the president of Moldova.</p>
<p>The Russian leader ridiculed the authors of the Trump dossier for alleging that Russian spy agencies were collecting compromising material on Trump when he visited Moscow in 2013 for the Miss Universe pageant.</p>
<p>“He wasn’t a politician, we didn’t even know about his political ambitions,” Putin said. “Do they think that our special services are hunting for every U.S. billionaire?”</p>
<p>Putin also sarcastically suggested that Trump, who met the world’s most beautiful women at the pageant, had a better choice for female companionship than Moscow prostitutes, even though Putin claimed “they are also the best in the world.”</p>
<p>He said Trump’s foes are ready to go as far as to “stage a Maidan in Washington to prevent Trump from entering office,” in reference to the alleged U.S. role in organizing protests in the main square of the Ukrainian capital, the Maidan, which forced the nation’s Russia-friendly president from power in 2014.</p>
<p>“People who are doing that are inflicting a colossal damage to the interests of the United States,” Putin said.</p>
<p>Putin also charged that those spreading allegations against Trump want to “bind the president-elect hand and foot to prevent him from fulfilling his election promises.”</p>
<p>“How can you do anything to improve U.S.-Russian relations when they launch such canards as hackers’ interference in the election?” he said.</p>
<p>Putin voiced hope that “common sense will prevail” and Russia and the United States will be able to normalize their relations once Trump takes office Friday.</p>
<p>He said he doesn’t know Trump and has no interests in defending him.</p>
<p>“I don’t know Mr. Trump. I have never met him and I don’t know what he will do on the international arena,” Putin said. “I have no reason whatsoever to assail him, criticize him for something, or defend him.”</p>
<p>At a separate news conference Tuesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Moscow hopes for better relations with the United States based on respect for mutual interests once Trump takes office, in contrast with the “messianic” approach of the outgoing U.S. administration that he said has ravaged ties.</p>
<p>Lavrov said Russia and the United States can reach common ground on nuclear arms control and other issues if each country proceeds from its national interests and shows respect for the other side.</p>
<p>He voiced hope that Trump’s team will consist of pragmatic people “who will not engage in moralizing and will try to understand the interests of their partners just as they clearly uphold their own interests.”</p>
<p>Lavrov denounced the foreign policies of the outgoing Obama administration and its allies as “messianic” attempts to enforce Western values on the rest of the world, which has led to instability and conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere.</p>
<p>Lavrov said Moscow is inviting representatives of the incoming U.S. administration to attend talks Monday on Syria in Kazakhstan, discussions brokered by Russia, Turkey and Iran. He voiced hope that Russian and U.S. experts could start discussions on fighting terrorism in Syria during that meeting.</p>
<p>Asked to comment on Trump’s recent comments in which he indicated he could end sanctions imposed on Russia in the aftermath of its 2014 annexation of Crimea in return for a nuclear arms reduction deal, Lavrov said Russia was ready to sit down for nuclear arms talks with the U.S.</p>
<p>Lavrov noted he didn’t see Trump’s words as an offer to cut arms in exchange for canceling the sanctions, rather as an expression of readiness to look at reviewing the sanctions while engaging in negotiations on arms control, among other issues.</p>
<p>Lavrov added that, along with nuclear arsenals, the agenda for such negotiations should include new hypersonic weapons, missile defense, the weaponization of space and other issues.</p>
<p>Like Putin, Lavrov rejected allegations of Russian meddling into the U.S. election as “absurdities” and “fakes” intended to hurt Trump.</p>
<p>He said U.S. intelligence agencies have failed to produce any evidence to back those claims, adding that officials who engaged in the effort “deserve to be fired, as they receive their salaries for nothing.”</p>
<p>Lavrov described the allegations of Russian election meddling in the U.S. vote as the final “spasms of those who realize that their time is coming to an end.”</p>
<p>“The time of foreign policy demagogues is over, and, feeling hurt, they fabricate all kinds of fakes,” he said. “First, officials leak fakes to the media, then media start spinning them and, finally, officials comment on them as facts.”</p>
<p>Lavrov also denounced a dossier on Trump compiled by a former British spy as a “rude provocation,” contemptuously referring to its author as a “runaway swindler from MI6” without citing his name.</p>
<p>In a reflection of the bad blood between Obama’s administration and the Kremlin, Lavrov accused U.S. officials of making repeated attempts to recruit Russian diplomats in the United States as spies, including a deputy chief of mission. He called the attempts “cynical” and “unprecedented.”</p> | false | 1 | moscow biting attack russian president vladimir putin tuesday accused outgoing us administration trying undermine presidentelect donald trump spreading fake allegations said worse prostitutes statement reflected kremlins boiling anger president barack obamas administration declined comment putins accusation asked unsubstantiated dossier outlining unverified claims trump engaged sexual activities prostitutes moscow hotel putin dismissed fake nonsense said part efforts obamas administration undermine legitimacy presidentelect despite convincing victory trump earlier rejected sexual allegations fake news phony stuff putins broadside white house reveals culmination tensions moscow washington built ukrainian crisis syrian war allegations russian meddling us election people order fakes us presidentelect fabricate use political struggle worse prostitutes putin said moral restrictions whatsoever highlights significant degree degradation political elites west including united states spoke moscow news conference following talks president moldova russian leader ridiculed authors trump dossier alleging russian spy agencies collecting compromising material trump visited moscow 2013 miss universe pageant wasnt politician didnt even know political ambitions putin said think special services hunting every us billionaire putin also sarcastically suggested trump met worlds beautiful women pageant better choice female companionship moscow prostitutes even though putin claimed also best world said trumps foes ready go far stage maidan washington prevent trump entering office reference alleged us role organizing protests main square ukrainian capital maidan forced nations russiafriendly president power 2014 people inflicting colossal damage interests united states putin said putin also charged spreading allegations trump want bind presidentelect hand foot prevent fulfilling election promises anything improve usrussian relations launch canards hackers interference election said putin voiced hope common sense prevail russia united states able normalize relations trump takes office friday said doesnt know trump interests defending dont know mr trump never met dont know international arena putin said reason whatsoever assail criticize something defend separate news conference tuesday russian foreign minister sergey lavrov said moscow hopes better relations united states based respect mutual interests trump takes office contrast messianic approach outgoing us administration said ravaged ties lavrov said russia united states reach common ground nuclear arms control issues country proceeds national interests shows respect side voiced hope trumps team consist pragmatic people engage moralizing try understand interests partners clearly uphold interests lavrov denounced foreign policies outgoing obama administration allies messianic attempts enforce western values rest world led instability conflicts middle east elsewhere lavrov said moscow inviting representatives incoming us administration attend talks monday syria kazakhstan discussions brokered russia turkey iran voiced hope russian us experts could start discussions fighting terrorism syria meeting asked comment trumps recent comments indicated could end sanctions imposed russia aftermath 2014 annexation crimea return nuclear arms reduction deal lavrov said russia ready sit nuclear arms talks us lavrov noted didnt see trumps words offer cut arms exchange canceling sanctions rather expression readiness look reviewing sanctions engaging negotiations arms control among issues lavrov added along nuclear arsenals agenda negotiations include new hypersonic weapons missile defense weaponization space issues like putin lavrov rejected allegations russian meddling us election absurdities fakes intended hurt trump said us intelligence agencies failed produce evidence back claims adding officials engaged effort deserve fired receive salaries nothing lavrov described allegations russian election meddling us vote final spasms realize time coming end time foreign policy demagogues feeling hurt fabricate kinds fakes said first officials leak fakes media media start spinning finally officials comment facts lavrov also denounced dossier trump compiled former british spy rude provocation contemptuously referring author runaway swindler mi6 without citing name reflection bad blood obamas administration kremlin lavrov accused us officials making repeated attempts recruit russian diplomats united states spies including deputy chief mission called attempts cynical unprecedented | 591 |
<p />
<p>US Administrations have been blighted since 9/11 by a deadly cocktail of arrogance and ignorance, with a twist of the strong desire for revenge.</p>
<p>But before you take aim and fire, you have to know your enemy, and the scattergun policies of the Bush and now the Obama regimes have served only to create hatred and mistrust against the US in areas where it was never present.</p>
<p>In fact, far from driving the likes of al Qaida into oblivion, this strategy turned the USA into al Qaida’s finest recruiting officer.</p>
<p>Like their intelligence agencies, these US Administrations have chosen only to listen to those who give them information they want to hear even if that information is a long distance from reality.</p>
<p>As a result, a deluded Iraqi man called “Curveball” conned US intelligence and in turn President George W Bush over the existence of WMD. It was all Bush and his neo-cons needed and wanted to hear to justify their illegal invasion of Iraq, assuring the world they would find Weapons of Mass Destruction. It was a blatant lie.</p>
<p>It mattered not that the real experts, like former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter and former U.N. Assistant Secretary General Hans Von Sponek, said WMD simply no longer existed.&#160;It mattered not, it seems, that up to a million paid the blood price for this arrogance and ignorance. It matters not that today Iraq is still in turmoil.</p>
<p>With the same reckless abandon, the USA has been sucked in to a war in Afghanistan from which is cannot retreat or make progress, never mind peace. Bush told us the invasion of Afghanistan was all about getting Osama bin Laden and liberating Afghan women — neither of which has been achieved.</p>
<p>And now, the Middle East is on fire with a Peoples’ Revolution that is busy eliminating all the dictators supported and installed by the USA.</p>
<p>All of this could have been avoided if only the White House had listened … listened to their own people in the growing anti-war movement; listened to ordinary peace activists who mobilized in their tens of millions around the world marching against wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; listened to the tens of millions across the Muslim world about the injustices against the Palestinian people.</p>
<p>Instead, the US Administrations of Bush and Obama chose to listen to a few extremists and fanatics who think they can achieve whatever they want by pointing the barrel of a gun made in America. Might is not right, nor does it guarantee a victory.</p>
<p>And once the chains of fear and oppression break, ordinary people will seize their freedom from those who stole it with their bare hands.</p>
<p>Tahrir Square in Egypt has been turned into the democratic capital of the Arab world, and not one of the leaders of the revolution is armed with anything more than hopes and desires for a better future free from tyranny.</p>
<p>For God’s sake Mr. President, listen to the people before it is too late.</p>
<p>And here’s another friendly piece of advice — there is a cauldron boiling so fiercely in the region, and if you don’t do something about it, the seismic and heroic events unfolding today in Tahrir Square will begin to look more like a convention of Tupperware agents by comparison.</p>
<p>Pakistan is on the brink and so is Afghanistan. Uzbekistan is not far behind, either. Where there is injustice, there can never be peace, and as long as Americans are seen to blindly trample on cultures, customs, and laws in that region with blind arrogance, it will come back to bite them in a big way.</p>
<p>When a young Tunisian man called&#160;Tarek al-Tayyib Muhammad ibn Bouazizi&#160;turned himself in to a human torch in December, he also ignited a flame which has now become the Arab Peoples’ Revolution.</p>
<p>History has shown that it is always seemingly small, insignificant events which trigger revolutions.</p>
<p>So I am asking the White House to pay special attention to the incident involving Raymond Davis, allegedly a US diplomat, who is now residing in Pakistan custody suspected of killing three Pakistanis in Lahore last week.</p>
<p>Already US lawmakers are banging on about the Vienna Conventions only because they now appear to need it so badly.</p>
<p>These are the same Vienna Conventions ignored by America when His Excellency Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeeff, the Ambassador to Pakistan from Afghanistan, was stripped naked, beaten and handed over to US soldiers in January 2002 before being carted off to Guantanamo Bay. These are the same Vienna Conventions which were trampled on when Dr Aafia Siddiqui was shot by US soldiers at point blank range in a police cell in Afghanistan then kidnapped and renditioned to America in July 2008.</p>
<p>It was nearly a full four weeks before she was given any consular access — yet US Ambassador Anne Patterson stood in Islamabad and lied and lied about the case of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui claiming her rights were not violated.</p>
<p>The sad thing is Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton have probably never heard of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui. Why would they bother with minor detail when they’ve got full-scale wars to wage? Their advisers, at the very least, need to read her story — the real one. Her story is vital because she epitomizes all the injustices of the War on Terror and she is now becoming a rallying point for all Pakistani people. Don’t believe the propaganda that she’s the poster girl of the Islamists — please stop falling for these stupid lines.</p>
<p>Dr. Aafia Siddiqui is another&#160;Tarek al-Tayyib Muhammad ibn Bouazizi. I am telling you this in good faith because it is something your best friends, paid informers, stooges and ill-informed intelligence agencies won’t tell you.</p>
<p>Sometimes correcting the smaller issues — though they are by no means small to families and friends involved — will help you with much larger events.</p>
<p>The time has come for America to show humility — return Dr. Siddiqui to her home in Karachi where she can be reunited with her children. And then — and only then — start concerning yourself with Raymond Davis and his activities.</p>
<p>If he is guilty of anything, put faith in Pakistan’s judiciary and let him stand trial in the country where his alleged crime was committed. The US has to start respecting other country’s laws instead of making up their own as they go along to cover up and protect American-made blunders and mistakes.</p>
<p>The US is neither the peoples’ friends nor their master, but the influence it has brought to bear in the Muslim world in recent years has been extremely negative.</p>
<p>This influence has wrecked US foreign policy in the Middle East and will destroy its goals — and we still do not know what they really are — especially in Pakistan and Afghanistan.</p>
<p>Time for humility. Time to listen to the people — and while you’ve been meddling in everyone else’s backyard start looking at your own: there’s a great deal of unrest in the USA with rising unemployment, rising home repossessions, lack of health care and more than 50 million relying on food stamps to survive.</p>
<p>Perhaps it’s time to call a halt to your foreign adventures and attend to more pressing issues at home where the American Dream is turning in to a nightmare for millions.</p> | false | 1 | us administrations blighted since 911 deadly cocktail arrogance ignorance twist strong desire revenge take aim fire know enemy scattergun policies bush obama regimes served create hatred mistrust us areas never present fact far driving likes al qaida oblivion strategy turned usa al qaidas finest recruiting officer like intelligence agencies us administrations chosen listen give information want hear even information long distance reality result deluded iraqi man called curveball conned us intelligence turn president george w bush existence wmd bush neocons needed wanted hear justify illegal invasion iraq assuring world would find weapons mass destruction blatant lie mattered real experts like former un weapons inspector scott ritter former un assistant secretary general hans von sponek said wmd simply longer existed160it mattered seems million paid blood price arrogance ignorance matters today iraq still turmoil reckless abandon usa sucked war afghanistan retreat make progress never mind peace bush told us invasion afghanistan getting osama bin laden liberating afghan women neither achieved middle east fire peoples revolution busy eliminating dictators supported installed usa could avoided white house listened listened people growing antiwar movement listened ordinary peace activists mobilized tens millions around world marching wars afghanistan iraq listened tens millions across muslim world injustices palestinian people instead us administrations bush obama chose listen extremists fanatics think achieve whatever want pointing barrel gun made america might right guarantee victory chains fear oppression break ordinary people seize freedom stole bare hands tahrir square egypt turned democratic capital arab world one leaders revolution armed anything hopes desires better future free tyranny gods sake mr president listen people late heres another friendly piece advice cauldron boiling fiercely region dont something seismic heroic events unfolding today tahrir square begin look like convention tupperware agents comparison pakistan brink afghanistan uzbekistan far behind either injustice never peace long americans seen blindly trample cultures customs laws region blind arrogance come back bite big way young tunisian man called160tarek altayyib muhammad ibn bouazizi160turned human torch december also ignited flame become arab peoples revolution history shown always seemingly small insignificant events trigger revolutions asking white house pay special attention incident involving raymond davis allegedly us diplomat residing pakistan custody suspected killing three pakistanis lahore last week already us lawmakers banging vienna conventions appear need badly vienna conventions ignored america excellency mullah abdul salam zaeeff ambassador pakistan afghanistan stripped naked beaten handed us soldiers january 2002 carted guantanamo bay vienna conventions trampled dr aafia siddiqui shot us soldiers point blank range police cell afghanistan kidnapped renditioned america july 2008 nearly full four weeks given consular access yet us ambassador anne patterson stood islamabad lied lied case dr aafia siddiqui claiming rights violated sad thing barak obama hillary clinton probably never heard dr aafia siddiqui would bother minor detail theyve got fullscale wars wage advisers least need read story real one story vital epitomizes injustices war terror becoming rallying point pakistani people dont believe propaganda shes poster girl islamists please stop falling stupid lines dr aafia siddiqui another160tarek altayyib muhammad ibn bouazizi telling good faith something best friends paid informers stooges illinformed intelligence agencies wont tell sometimes correcting smaller issues though means small families friends involved help much larger events time come america show humility return dr siddiqui home karachi reunited children start concerning raymond davis activities guilty anything put faith pakistans judiciary let stand trial country alleged crime committed us start respecting countrys laws instead making go along cover protect americanmade blunders mistakes us neither peoples friends master influence brought bear muslim world recent years extremely negative influence wrecked us foreign policy middle east destroy goals still know really especially pakistan afghanistan time humility time listen people youve meddling everyone elses backyard start looking theres great deal unrest usa rising unemployment rising home repossessions lack health care 50 million relying food stamps survive perhaps time call halt foreign adventures attend pressing issues home american dream turning nightmare millions | 642 |
<p>Mixing private and public is much the norm for public employees and officials in the Silver State.</p>
<p>Politicians like Hillary Clinton, Vice President Mike Pence and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie faced fiery backlash for their use of private email addresses to handle sensitive information.</p>
<p>Those cases brought to the national spotlight a practice common among public employees: using privately owned email accounts and devices for government business.</p>
<p>Nevada law does not prohibit public employees from using personal cellphones or email accounts for public business. But are those communications considered a public record like those that come from government accounts?</p>
<p>“Wherever government business is conducted, it should be subject to the law,” said Clark County Commissioner Mary Beth Scow.</p>
<p>In a ruling last week, the California Supreme Court said yes, those communications from public employees in that state are public record.</p>
<p>Here in Nevada, a similar case awaits the state’s high court.</p>
<p>PRIVACY VS. PUBLIC RECORD</p>
<p>Most Nevada officials surveyed by the Review-Journal said they use personal email accounts, cellphones or other devices either in tandem with or in place of the publicly funded option.</p>
<p>Many use their own devices and accounts out of convenience and to stay accessible to voters. And the majority of those surveyed said they have no issues with subjecting their personal devices to public records requests.</p>
<p>Emails, text messages and other records sent from and received by government-issued accounts and devices can be requested through public records requests. And outside a handful of restrictions — such as when documents might mention personnel issues — agencies are compelled to produce those records.</p>
<p>Advocates of government transparency say the use of such personal accounts could allow officials to skirt public records laws and hide things they don’t want to be seen.</p>
<p>Clark County Commissioners Scow, Susan Brager and Lawrence Weekly said they use a private email account and personal cellphone for county business, and those should be subject to a public records request if they relate to public business.</p>
<p>Fellow Commissioner Chris Giunchigliani disagrees.</p>
<p>“I do not believe that a personally owned device bought and paid for by myself and not billed to the County should be subject to [Nevada] open records requests,” Giunchigliani said in an email.</p>
<p>Giunchigliani admitted she “occasionally” uses her personal devices to access county email, but she tries to avoid using personal accounts for county business.</p>
<p>While she opposes her personal devices being subject to records requests, Giunchigliani said she does give up communications from those devices if they pertain to a public records request through her county email.</p>
<p>Las Vegas City Councilman Bob Coffin uses his personal account for all government communications.</p>
<p>Coffin uses his personal cellphone and free Hotmail email account for all city communications, he said. That email address is what Coffin puts on letterheads and business cards.</p>
<p>“You could say it’s a private account, but it’s very public,” Coffin said.</p>
<p>Coffin said he prefers to keep his communications with constituents private.</p>
<p>“I just don’t want people snooping in private messages with constituents,” Coffin said.</p>
<p>North Las Vegas Mayor John Lee said he does not use a private email account for city business.</p>
<p>Or even his city-issued email, for that matter.</p>
<p>“I don’t like having to stop, put my glasses on and read, because it becomes a whole thing,” Lee said. “I’m old school.”</p>
<p>Of the 15 Nevada legislators surveyed, 10 said they stick to their official email account for legislative business, and five said they occasionally use personal email and text.</p>
<p>But public or private matters little when it pertains to legislators. Their emails, from either the state or a private account, are not subject to Nevada’s public records laws.</p>
<p>LAW UP FOR DEBATE</p>
<p>If the communications involve public business, they should be public, said Barry Smith, executive director for the Nevada Press Association.</p>
<p>“No matter what device they’re on.”</p>
<p>The law in Nevada falls on the side of those records being public, Smith said.</p>
<p>But the interpretation of Nevada’s public records laws and how they apply to personal accounts is up for debate.</p>
<p>A group of Lyon County residents requested records from members of the Lyon County Commission and Comstock Mining Inc. over a land-use decision in January 2014 that allowed mining to return to the area.</p>
<p>District Court Judge Steven Kosach ruled last year that records on personal devices and accounts are not open to public inspection, because they are outside the control of the public agency.</p>
<p>Kosach said those communications are not considered official actions, but he noted that his ruling “may cause public employees to skirt the provision of the (public records law) by conducting business on their personal devices.”</p>
<p>The residents have appealed to the Nevada Supreme Court. The residents’ attorney, Luke Busby, said in a brief filed in November that the decision “will provide critical guidance to local governments on issues directly affecting Nevada citizens right to access public records.”</p>
<p>The Nevada high court could look to its western neighbor for precedent, with the California Supreme Court’s ruling on a similar case.</p>
<p>In a unanimous decision, the California court ruled that communications sent on personal devices should be disclosed to the public if they deal with public business. To protect some level of privacy, the court said it would be up to the employees to look through their accounts and devices and then sign an affidavit saying exactly what they looked for and what they found.</p>
<p>David Snyder, executive director for the First Amendment Coalition, called the ruling “a big victory for access.”</p>
<p>“It eliminates the possibility that government officials can conceal communications by sending them from the Gmail or Yahoo account, rather than their government account,” Snyder said.</p>
<p>Review-Journal writers Ben Botkin, Natalie Bruzda, Michael Scott Davidson, Meghin Delaney, Sandy Lopez, Art Marroquin and Jamie Munks contributed to this report. Contact Colton Lochhead at [email protected] or 702-383-4638. Follow <a href="http://www.twitter.com/ColtonLochhead" type="external">@ColtonLochhead</a> on Twitter.</p>
<p>RELATED</p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">Nevada legislators not inclined to open their communications to the public</a></p>
<p />
<p>Nevada elected officials on using personal cell phones and emails:</p>
<p>“Because of the nature of the work we do, I don’t see it as big of an issue as it would be on a federal or national level, such as a governor or a presidential candidate.”</p>
<p>– Regent Sam Lieberman, who said he uses his official Nevada System of Higher Education account, as well as his private email.</p>
<p>“Directing people to contact us by city email for official business is a no-brainer. But using a cell phone is a must because I need to be able to get back to my constituents in a timely way.”</p>
<p>– North Las Vegas City Councilman Richard Cherchio. Cherchio said he uses his personal cell phone, but sticks to his city email for official business.</p>
<p>“I have and I like my constituents to have a direct line to me I also don’t like the added [government] expense however small.”</p>
<p>– Clark County Commissioner Susan Brager, who said she uses both a personal cellphone and email account for county business.</p>
<p>“I don’t like having to stop, put my glasses on and read because it becomes a whole thing. I’m old school.”</p>
<p>– North Las Vegas Mayor John Lee, who said he uses neither a private or city email.</p>
<p />
<p /> | false | 1 | mixing private public much norm public employees officials silver state politicians like hillary clinton vice president mike pence new jersey gov chris christie faced fiery backlash use private email addresses handle sensitive information cases brought national spotlight practice common among public employees using privately owned email accounts devices government business nevada law prohibit public employees using personal cellphones email accounts public business communications considered public record like come government accounts wherever government business conducted subject law said clark county commissioner mary beth scow ruling last week california supreme court said yes communications public employees state public record nevada similar case awaits states high court privacy vs public record nevada officials surveyed reviewjournal said use personal email accounts cellphones devices either tandem place publicly funded option many use devices accounts convenience stay accessible voters majority surveyed said issues subjecting personal devices public records requests emails text messages records sent received governmentissued accounts devices requested public records requests outside handful restrictions documents might mention personnel issues agencies compelled produce records advocates government transparency say use personal accounts could allow officials skirt public records laws hide things dont want seen clark county commissioners scow susan brager lawrence weekly said use private email account personal cellphone county business subject public records request relate public business fellow commissioner chris giunchigliani disagrees believe personally owned device bought paid billed county subject nevada open records requests giunchigliani said email giunchigliani admitted occasionally uses personal devices access county email tries avoid using personal accounts county business opposes personal devices subject records requests giunchigliani said give communications devices pertain public records request county email las vegas city councilman bob coffin uses personal account government communications coffin uses personal cellphone free hotmail email account city communications said email address coffin puts letterheads business cards could say private account public coffin said coffin said prefers keep communications constituents private dont want people snooping private messages constituents coffin said north las vegas mayor john lee said use private email account city business even cityissued email matter dont like stop put glasses read becomes whole thing lee said im old school 15 nevada legislators surveyed 10 said stick official email account legislative business five said occasionally use personal email text public private matters little pertains legislators emails either state private account subject nevadas public records laws law debate communications involve public business public said barry smith executive director nevada press association matter device theyre law nevada falls side records public smith said interpretation nevadas public records laws apply personal accounts debate group lyon county residents requested records members lyon county commission comstock mining inc landuse decision january 2014 allowed mining return area district court judge steven kosach ruled last year records personal devices accounts open public inspection outside control public agency kosach said communications considered official actions noted ruling may cause public employees skirt provision public records law conducting business personal devices residents appealed nevada supreme court residents attorney luke busby said brief filed november decision provide critical guidance local governments issues directly affecting nevada citizens right access public records nevada high court could look western neighbor precedent california supreme courts ruling similar case unanimous decision california court ruled communications sent personal devices disclosed public deal public business protect level privacy court said would employees look accounts devices sign affidavit saying exactly looked found david snyder executive director first amendment coalition called ruling big victory access eliminates possibility government officials conceal communications sending gmail yahoo account rather government account snyder said reviewjournal writers ben botkin natalie bruzda michael scott davidson meghin delaney sandy lopez art marroquin jamie munks contributed report contact colton lochhead clochheadreviewjournalcom 7023834638 follow coltonlochhead twitter related nevada legislators inclined open communications public nevada elected officials using personal cell phones emails nature work dont see big issue would federal national level governor presidential candidate regent sam lieberman said uses official nevada system higher education account well private email directing people contact us city email official business nobrainer using cell phone must need able get back constituents timely way north las vegas city councilman richard cherchio cherchio said uses personal cell phone sticks city email official business like constituents direct line also dont like added government expense however small clark county commissioner susan brager said uses personal cellphone email account county business dont like stop put glasses read becomes whole thing im old school north las vegas mayor john lee said uses neither private city email | 734 |
<p>Oh, the weather outside is frightful, but there’s no fire — delightful or otherwise — inside “ <a href="http://variety.com/t/the-snowman/" type="external">The Snowman</a>,” a suitably frosty but flaccid first attempt at Hollywoodizing the oeuvre of popular Norwegian noir&#160;merchant&#160;Jo Nesbø. On paper, this twisty, grisly serial-killer chiller seemed an optimum match of talent to material, with Swedish genre stylist <a href="http://variety.com/t/tomas-alfredson/" type="external">Tomas Alfredson</a> returning to his Scandi roots after a super-smart English-lingo debut in “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” — taking the reins from Martin Scorsese, no less, who still offers his classy imprimatur as an executive producer.</p>
<p>You’d be hard pressed to trace either man’s touch, however, in this choppy, blizzard-brained adaptation of&#160;Nesbø’s 2007 bestseller, for which the best that can be said is that it reworks the text just enough to keep the author’s die-hard fans on their frost-bitten toes. Anyone else, however, is likely to be bewildered by a haphazard structure, a surfeit of dill-pickled red herrings and the blank impenetrability of <a href="http://variety.com/t/michael-fassbender/" type="external">Michael Fassbender</a>’s Harry Hole, a supposedly rule-averse detective who does markedly little detecting over the course of two hours. (Perhaps that’s his maverick USP.) On brand appeal alone, Alfredson’s film may scare up some reasonable early box office internationally; once first snowfall turns to slush, though, it’s unlikely Universal will want to build a “Snowman” franchise.</p>
<p>It might take an investigator more intuitive than Hole to pinpoint precisely where and how things unraveled in a production that seems to have been second-, third- and fourth-guessed at every turn, and bears the manifold scars and stitches of on-the-fly rethinking. The late addition to the credits of Scorsese’s revered editor Thelma Schoonmaker, supplementing the work of the estimable Claire Simpson, hints at a high level of creative uncertainty over just how to fillet and present Nesbø’s dense, misdirection-filled yarn: an introduction to Hole for film franchise purposes, though adapted from the seventh novel in a series. That may partially explain why the character — a taciturn alcoholic whose functionality yo-yos from one scene to the next — never comes into crisp focus.</p>
<p>The logic in beginning with “ <a href="http://variety.com/2017/film/news/the-foreigner-tops-studios-tv-ad-spending-1202584581/" type="external">The Snowman</a>” may be that it’s the most hookily lurid of Nesbø’s narratives, centered as it is on the hunt for what we are told is Norway’s first serial killer: a darkly whimsical maniac who’s kidnapping and carving up a variety of women in Oslo, Bergen and beyond, leaving a stern-faced snowman at the scene of every crime. Before we get to that, however, an oblique prologue takes us to the remote, icy countryside, where a single mother and her adolescent son are routinely terrorized by a local cop until Mom drives her car into and under a frozen lake. What bearing this grim vignette has on the ensuing plot remains unclear for some time, as does its place in the film’s slip-sliding chronology: Blame it on lurching storytelling or unchanging trends in Norwegian knitwear, but transitions between the present, the late 2000s and the mid-1980s are perhaps foggier than they need to be.</p>
<p>Following that introduction, the already sparse essentials of Hole’s character are drawn with minimal strokes. Unattached and seemingly little-liked in the Oslo Crime Squad, prone to spending drunken nights on the street rather than in his barren apartment, he reserves what little warmth he has for his frustrated, on-and-off ex Rakel (a little-challenged Charlotte Gainsbourg) and her teenage son Oleg (Michael Yates), to whom he feels a semi-fatherly duty. In the film’s tangled screenplay (alternately penned by such distinguished hands as “Tinker Tailor’s” Peter Straughan, “Drive’s” Hossein Amini and Søren Sveistrup, creator of Danish TV phenomenon “The Killing”), perceptions of parenthood turn out to be a running concern. When women across the region begin disappearing, later showing up gruesomely dismembered, little seems to connect the victims but motherhood, while their respective vanishings coincide with fresh bouts of snowfall.</p>
<p>While Hole is clued into proceedings via naively scrawled notes sent directly to him by the killer — a device, like the squat little snowmen at every murder site, that plays more comically than creepily — the most resourceful legwork on the case is done by department newcomer Katrine (Rebecca Ferguson), a like-minded loose cannon who nonetheless shares few of her hunches with her scowling partner. However coolly sexy they may be as a duo, the scattered, distracted shaping of the mystery gives Fassbender and Ferguson limited scope to forge much chemistry.</p>
<p>The latter’s arc, in particular, is something of a sacrificial lamb to the film’s heaviest pruning of the novel’s plotting, be it at the scripting or editing stage: Katrine’s more conflicted role in the case has been blandly simplified, her sexually fraught relationship with Hole reduced to some dour, erratic innuendo. It’s all the more to Ferguson’s credit, then, that she still emerges as “The Snowman’s” liveliest, most limber presence. As for Fassbender, affecting a low, near-accentless delivery that aptly matches the character’s general inscrutability — a better approach than most in the film’s Anglo-Nordic vocal smorgasbord — he’s ideally cast as the intense, silently driven Hole, but the script gives him few currents to play beneath those still, iced-over waters.</p>
<p>If “The Snowman” were merely a chilly, streamlined precis of a knottier page-turner, it could stolidly pass muster. The sad surprise here, considering how deftly Alfredson and Straughan previously navigated the far more serpentine plot machinations of a John le Carré classic, is the snowballing incoherence of proceedings. Like a game of narrative Jenga, every excised element appears to have weakened the whodunnit’s overall structure, toward a climax that may well succeed in catching viewers off-guard, but in large part because of how little sense, both practically and emotionally, it makes in immediate retrospect. Also unexpectedly absent is the textured, shadow-marinated atmosphere that Alfredson cultivated so memorably in “Tinker Tailor” and his smashing neo-vampire tale “Let the Right One In”: Heavily accessorized with needless digital detailing, Dion Beebe’s cinematography deals in shades of palest precipitation, but makes oddly little of Norway’s grandly desolate winter landscape.</p>
<p>It’s never exactly dull, though, with its well-populated gallery of supporting players who may or may not have a role in the macabre bigger picture: J.K. Simmons as a sinister mogul steering Oslo’s Winter Olympics bid, James D’Arcy as the hostile husband of the killer’s most recently disappeared victim, to say nothing of a precariously pompadoured Val Kilmer’s bizarro turn as a dissolute detective investigating a potentially related case in ill-fitting flashbacks. By the time the familiar faces of Toby Jones and Chloe Sevigny pop up in mostly negligible roles, however, “The Snowman” begins to feel like a film more dependent on such distractions than it is encumbered by them: There’s a lot happening on the surface of Alfredson’s perplexing winter wonder-why, but considerably less going on inside.</p> | false | 1 | oh weather outside frightful theres fire delightful otherwise inside snowman suitably frosty flaccid first attempt hollywoodizing oeuvre popular norwegian noir160merchant160jo nesbø paper twisty grisly serialkiller chiller seemed optimum match talent material swedish genre stylist tomas alfredson returning scandi roots supersmart englishlingo debut tinker tailor soldier spy taking reins martin scorsese less still offers classy imprimatur executive producer youd hard pressed trace either mans touch however choppy blizzardbrained adaptation of160nesbøs 2007 bestseller best said reworks text enough keep authors diehard fans frostbitten toes anyone else however likely bewildered haphazard structure surfeit dillpickled red herrings blank impenetrability michael fassbenders harry hole supposedly ruleaverse detective markedly little detecting course two hours perhaps thats maverick usp brand appeal alone alfredsons film may scare reasonable early box office internationally first snowfall turns slush though unlikely universal want build snowman franchise might take investigator intuitive hole pinpoint precisely things unraveled production seems second third fourthguessed every turn bears manifold scars stitches onthefly rethinking late addition credits scorseses revered editor thelma schoonmaker supplementing work estimable claire simpson hints high level creative uncertainty fillet present nesbøs dense misdirectionfilled yarn introduction hole film franchise purposes though adapted seventh novel series may partially explain character taciturn alcoholic whose functionality yoyos one scene next never comes crisp focus logic beginning snowman may hookily lurid nesbøs narratives centered hunt told norways first serial killer darkly whimsical maniac whos kidnapping carving variety women oslo bergen beyond leaving sternfaced snowman scene every crime get however oblique prologue takes us remote icy countryside single mother adolescent son routinely terrorized local cop mom drives car frozen lake bearing grim vignette ensuing plot remains unclear time place films slipsliding chronology blame lurching storytelling unchanging trends norwegian knitwear transitions present late 2000s mid1980s perhaps foggier need following introduction already sparse essentials holes character drawn minimal strokes unattached seemingly littleliked oslo crime squad prone spending drunken nights street rather barren apartment reserves little warmth frustrated onandoff ex rakel littlechallenged charlotte gainsbourg teenage son oleg michael yates feels semifatherly duty films tangled screenplay alternately penned distinguished hands tinker tailors peter straughan drives hossein amini søren sveistrup creator danish tv phenomenon killing perceptions parenthood turn running concern women across region begin disappearing later showing gruesomely dismembered little seems connect victims motherhood respective vanishings coincide fresh bouts snowfall hole clued proceedings via naively scrawled notes sent directly killer device like squat little snowmen every murder site plays comically creepily resourceful legwork case done department newcomer katrine rebecca ferguson likeminded loose cannon nonetheless shares hunches scowling partner however coolly sexy may duo scattered distracted shaping mystery gives fassbender ferguson limited scope forge much chemistry latters arc particular something sacrificial lamb films heaviest pruning novels plotting scripting editing stage katrines conflicted role case blandly simplified sexually fraught relationship hole reduced dour erratic innuendo fergusons credit still emerges snowmans liveliest limber presence fassbender affecting low nearaccentless delivery aptly matches characters general inscrutability better approach films anglonordic vocal smorgasbord hes ideally cast intense silently driven hole script gives currents play beneath still icedover waters snowman merely chilly streamlined precis knottier pageturner could stolidly pass muster sad surprise considering deftly alfredson straughan previously navigated far serpentine plot machinations john le carré classic snowballing incoherence proceedings like game narrative jenga every excised element appears weakened whodunnits overall structure toward climax may well succeed catching viewers offguard large part little sense practically emotionally makes immediate retrospect also unexpectedly absent textured shadowmarinated atmosphere alfredson cultivated memorably tinker tailor smashing neovampire tale let right one heavily accessorized needless digital detailing dion beebes cinematography deals shades palest precipitation makes oddly little norways grandly desolate winter landscape never exactly dull though wellpopulated gallery supporting players may may role macabre bigger picture jk simmons sinister mogul steering oslos winter olympics bid james darcy hostile husband killers recently disappeared victim say nothing precariously pompadoured val kilmers bizarro turn dissolute detective investigating potentially related case illfitting flashbacks time familiar faces toby jones chloe sevigny pop mostly negligible roles however snowman begins feel like film dependent distractions encumbered theres lot happening surface alfredsons perplexing winter wonderwhy considerably less going inside | 673 |
<p>Three New Papers On “Privatizing” Social Security, One Conclusion: Bad Idea</p>
<p>by John Mueller Senior Vice President &amp; Chief Economist Lehrman Bell Mueller Cannon, Inc. The United States Capitol Washington, D.C. October 21, 1997</p>
<p>I’m here to describe a series of papers published last week concerning the advisability — or rather, the inadvisability — of ending pay-as-you-go Social Security.</p>
<p>Perhaps I should begin with a word on how I came to write any papers on this subject. For most of the past decade, I have made my living as a principal in a market forecasting firm, which deals not only with U.S. stocks and bonds, but also commodities, currencies, and foreign securities. Our typical clients are Wall Street money managers.</p>
<p>Before that, from 1979 through 1988, I worked for Jack Kemp in the House of Representatives — from 1981 to 1987, as economic counsel to the House Republican Caucus, of which Kemp was chairman. You could accurately describe me as a conservative, Reagan Republican. In the mid-to-late 1980s, I had to do a lot of analysis of proposals to “privatize” Social Security, which were reaching critical political mass in anticipation of the 1988 presidential primaries.</p>
<p>To tell the truth, I never doubted the wisdom of phasing out Social Security, until I had to sift the arguments in favor of doing so. To my great surprise and consternation, they didn’t make any sense. The arguments in favor of ending pay-as-you-go Social Security are, on the whole, a curious mix of horse-and-buggy economic theories with a remarkable ignorance of financial markets. The more you look into the question, the more obvious it becomes that pay-as-you-go Social Security is one of those genuine cases, like national defense, in which the government is necessary to perform a role that the private markets alone cannot — in this case, providing the “foundation layer” of retirement income.</p>
<p>After the stock market crash of October 1987, the issue of “privatizing” Social Security went away for several years. And as a private forecaster I had no opportunity or time to do anything more on the subject. But last year, Martha McSteen, a former Social Security commissioner, asked if I would be willing to do a series of papers for the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare. Today, thanks to the hospitality of Senator Reed, I’d like to summarize the first three papers for you.</p>
<p>An Overview of the Debate About “Privatizing” Social Security.</p>
<p>Since retirees began collecting Social Security benefits in 1941, the average real return on payroll taxes paid has been about 9% — far above the average returns in the stock market, and financial assets in general.</p>
<p>Until the late 1970s, most economists believed that, while future returns could not remain so high, the average return on pay-as-you-go Social Security in the long run would equal the rate of economic growth — and that this rate of return would exceed the average return on financial investments of comparable risk. (“Pay-as-you-go” means that each generation of workers pays the retirement benefits for its parents.)</p>
<p>About 25 years ago, Martin Feldstein and some other economists began to question this conclusion. Feldstein agreed that the long-term return on Social Security would equal the rate of economic growth. But the return on Social Security, according to Feldstein, must be compared, not with a low-risk investment like Treasury bills, but with the total pretax return on business investment in plant and equipment. In fact, Feldstein proposes to abolish all Federal, state and local taxes on business investment financed by retirement saving, while raising taxes on labor compensation. This, he argues, would reduce consumption, increasing saving and economic growth, and pay for the large transition cost of ending pay-as-you-go retirement benefits.</p>
<p>But most “privatizers” do not go so far in their proposals. They argue that, even without such major changes in taxation, simply ending pay-as-you-go Social Security makes sense because the future average return on financial assets like stocks and bonds will exceed the return on pay-as-you-go Social Security.</p>
<p>For example, they point out, the average annual real return on common stocks since 1926 has been about 7% — 4% or 5% on a mix of stocks and bonds — while real economic growth averaged about 3%.</p>
<p>Usually, the “privatizers” push their argument further, comparing past returns on financial assets with projected future economic growth — and projected future returns on Social Security — of 1% to 2%.</p>
<p>All of these arguments depend on three (invalid) assumptions:</p>
<p>1. that investors ignore the difference in risk between Social Security and financial assets; 2. that the future return on Social Security will be reduced, by slower economic growth and changing demographic trends, but the future return on financial assets will not; and 3. that there is no such thing as investing in “human capital” — the costs of child-rearing, education, and so forth, that yield a return in the form of higher future wages.</p>
<p>To deal with one fallacy at a time, I examine different aspects of the “privatizers'” argument in three separate papers.&#160;</p>
<p>1. Can Financial Assets Beat Social Security? Not in the Real World.</p>
<p>In the first paper, I pose the question, “Can financial assets beat Social Security?” And the conclusion is, “Not in the real world.”</p>
<p>We all know that the stock market is a volatile place, even ignoring the Great Depression. The past 25 years have included 12-month periods in which the real value of stocks dropped as much as 40% (1974), and rose as much as 50% (1983).</p>
<p>But the “privatizers” assume that over any longer periods, the return on financial assets dependably approximates its long-term average. This shows a remarkable lack of familiarity with the behavior of the financial markets.</p>
<p>The typical family has an average of about 20 years to save for retirement. (Someone who begins saving at age 25, saves an equal amount each year for 40 years, and retires at age 65, will earn a return on those savings for an average of 20 years. For most families, the saving is bunched between the ages of 45 and 65, which shortens the average; but part of the saving earns a return after age 65, before it is spent.) Now, the 20-year average return on financial assets has been all over the lot.</p>
<p>For example, in the past century the 20-year average real total return on the stock market fell to about zero three times — from 1901 to 1921, from 1928 to 1948, and from 1962 to 1982 (Graph 1). Those returns were substantially negative after paying taxes on interest and dividends. In between the low points were periods in which 20-year average stock market returns peaked at rates ranging from 6% to 10%. This meant that some people earned a negative real return from investing in the stock market, while some received a real return (before taxes) as high as 10%.</p>
<p>It was not possible to avoid below-average performance of the stock market by investing in other financial assets. Since 1945, the 20-year average real total return on long-term government bonds was negative almost exactly two-thirds of the time — in fact, for 33 years straight — including the worst periods for the stock market (Graph 2).</p>
<p>The “privatizers” assume that investors are indifferent to these variations in the returns on investment. In fact, investors as a group are “risk-averse.” Most of us don’t use the term, but we all know exactly what it means. The idea of risk aversion is captured exactly in the adage, “a bird in hand is worth two in the bush.”</p>
<p>You can easily find out whether you are risk-averse. Simply ask yourself: would you risk half your wealth, for an equal payoff, on a coin toss? Someone indifferent to risk would accept the bet, because it is ‘actuarially fair’: the odds of winning and losing are equal, and so are the potential gains and losses.</p>
<p>If you would not accept the bet, you are risk-averse — and so is almost everyone else. Risk aversion is simply the rational response to the human condition: none of us lives long enough, or has enough wealth, to try risky things an infinite number of times.</p>
<p>The decision to invest is a lot like our example of the coin toss. Suppose two investments, over the past hundred years, both yielded an average return of 5% — but one yielded exactly 5% each year, while the other ranged randomly from -5% to +15%. According to the “privatizers,” you should regard both investments as equivalent. But most investors prefer the first investment. It offers a certain return of 5%, while the second investment has two parts: a 5% average return over a hundred years, plus a 50/50 chance of gaining or losing 10% besides — an annual coin toss. The second investment requires a ‘risk premium’: a higher return to compensate for the higher risk (Graph 3). If the average return is the same for both investments, then the “risk-adjusted” return is lower on the second investment than on the first.</p>
<p>In other words, just as people mentally adjust the dollar amount of their paychecks for differences in price inflation, they also adjust different investment returns for differences in risk. Investors do not seek the highest possible average return, but rather the highest risk-adjusted return. When they go shopping in the “financial supermarket,” they compare apples with apples by subtracting the appropriate risk premium from the average return on each investment.</p>
<p>Viewed as an investment, Social Security has some extraordinary characteristics. Its volatility risk is little higher than for Treasury bills — and only one-quarter the risk of common stocks — but its long-term real return is about halfway between Treasury bills and common stocks. As a result, its risk-adjusted return is much higher than on the stock market, or on any other class or mix of financial assets. The difference is still larger when the returns are measured net of management fees, which are roughly 25 times as large for financial portfolios as the administrative costs of Social Security.</p>
<p>All this means that the risk-adjusted return of a portfolio including Social Security systematically exceeds the return of a portfolio limited to financial assets. I illustrate this point by showing that not a single one of the model portfolios recommended by the “privatizers” — who seek to write them into law — can match the risk-adjusted returns on “steady-state” Social Security (Graph 4).</p>
<p>The conclusion of the first paper: the total return on retirement saving is higher with pay-as-you-go Social Security than without it.</p>
<p>2. If Economic Growth Falls to 1.4%,What Happens to the Stock Market?</p>
<p>While the first paper looks at the past, the second paper looks forward, and asks, “If economic growth falls to 1.4%, what happens to the stock market?”</p>
<p>Using past financial asset returns to forecast future returns makes sense if we think the future will resemble the past (apart from random differences). In that case, we would have to conclude that Social Security will outperform financial assets in the future, because it always did so in the past.</p>
<p>But the “privatizers” warn us that the future will be very different from the past. In particular, according to the projections of the Social Security administration, future growth of the economy will be slower, and the number of retirees will rise compared with the number of workers.</p>
<p>However, this means that future financial asset returns will also be lower. Instead, the “privatizers” make two rather extreme assumptions: 1. that Social Security is affected by economic growth, but the stock market is not; and 2. that Social Security is affected by demographic changes, but the stock market is not.</p>
<p>The second paper shows that, apart from random variation, the return on the stock market is systematically determined by three factors: the rate of economic growth, the varying size of generations, and the market’s volatility risk. The paper shows how to construct a projection for financial asset returns consistent with the Social Security actuaries’ economic and demographic projections.</p>
<p>The actuaries’ projections imply that the same economic and demographic factors that drove average annual real stock market returns up to 10% in the past 20 years will drive returns down to about 1.5% in the next 20 years (or about 0.5% after subtracting management fees); almost exactly like the periods from 1901 to 1921, from 1928 to 1948, and from 1962 to 1982. The main factor will be a sharp decline in the ratio of middle-aged savers to young workers setting up households (Graph 5).</p>
<p>The projections also imply an average annual real return on the stock market over the next 75 years of 3.2% — or about 2.2% after subtracting management fees, but before paying taxes.</p>
<p>Conclusion: If the Social Security actuaries’ projections are correct, the United States is about to enter a 75-year economic Ice Age. Financial assets will perform very poorly in such an environment. This will make pay-as-you-go Social Security more, not less attractive than investments in financial assets.</p>
<p>3. The Economics of Pay-as-you-go Social Security&#160;and the Economic Cost of Ending It.</p>
<p>In the third paper, I examine the economics of pay-as-you-go Social Security and the economic cost of ending it.</p>
<p>Economists like Martin Feldstein, who seek to “privatize” Social Security, rely on what’s called the “neoclassical” theory of economic growth. But this theory was challenged by Nobel laureate Theodore W. Schultz nearly 40 years ago, and disproven by the research of John W. Kendrick and others more than 20 years ago.</p>
<p>The third paper recounts the neoclassical theory’s shortcomings as an explanation of economic growth and a guide to policy. The neoclassical theory ignores the existence of “human capital” — those costs of child-rearing and education, training, safety and mobility that increase future income (Graph 6).</p>
<p>Kendrick’s research shows that business investment in plant and equipment has contributed about one-quarter of the growth in national output and income, but investment in human capital has contributed between two-thirds and three-quarters of that growth (Graph 7).</p>
<p>Pay-as-you-go Social Security did have an enormous impact on the saving habits of American households. But far from encouraging more consumption, as Feldstein has argued, pay-as-you-go Social Security financed more investment — especially the massive investment in “human capital” associated with the Baby Boom — and more economic growth than could otherwise have occurred (Graphs 8 and 9). Morover, the real rate of return on this investment in human capital was much higher than the return on nonhuman capital.</p>
<p>Ending pay-as-you-go Social Security — particularly by raising taxes on labor compensation and cutting taxes on property income, as Feldstein proposes — would throw the same process into reverse. The necessary result is lower investment, slower growth, and a smaller economy.</p>
<p>The paper concludes by calculating the economic cost of ending pay-as-you-go Social Security. After 75 years, the U.S. economy would be about 4% smaller — not 8% larger, as Martin Feldstein predicts. The present value of the economic loss is about $3 trillion.</p>
<p>Summary of conclusions.</p>
<p>The evidence presented by all three papers points to the same conclusion: It would be a costly mistake to end pay-as-you-go Social Security. The result would be a lower real return on retirement saving, a tax increase on working families, and a smaller economy.</p>
<p>Replacing Social Security with private savings accounts is one of those issues which are more attractive, the less you know about them. Those who favor “privatizing” Social Security are ignoring the best available economic theory, and the best available economic research. In my own opinion, the political movement to “privatize” Social Security will abruptly collapse as soon as the public begins to learn what’s actually being proposed: a big tax increase and a permanently lower standard of living for most American families.</p>
<p>Instead of “privatizing” Social Security, we should maintain Social Security on a pay-as-you-go basis.</p> | false | 1 | three new papers privatizing social security one conclusion bad idea john mueller senior vice president amp chief economist lehrman bell mueller cannon inc united states capitol washington dc october 21 1997 im describe series papers published last week concerning advisability rather inadvisability ending payasyougo social security perhaps begin word came write papers subject past decade made living principal market forecasting firm deals us stocks bonds also commodities currencies foreign securities typical clients wall street money managers 1979 1988 worked jack kemp house representatives 1981 1987 economic counsel house republican caucus kemp chairman could accurately describe conservative reagan republican midtolate 1980s lot analysis proposals privatize social security reaching critical political mass anticipation 1988 presidential primaries tell truth never doubted wisdom phasing social security sift arguments favor great surprise consternation didnt make sense arguments favor ending payasyougo social security whole curious mix horseandbuggy economic theories remarkable ignorance financial markets look question obvious becomes payasyougo social security one genuine cases like national defense government necessary perform role private markets alone case providing foundation layer retirement income stock market crash october 1987 issue privatizing social security went away several years private forecaster opportunity time anything subject last year martha mcsteen former social security commissioner asked would willing series papers national committee preserve social security medicare today thanks hospitality senator reed id like summarize first three papers overview debate privatizing social security since retirees began collecting social security benefits 1941 average real return payroll taxes paid 9 far average returns stock market financial assets general late 1970s economists believed future returns could remain high average return payasyougo social security long run would equal rate economic growth rate return would exceed average return financial investments comparable risk payasyougo means generation workers pays retirement benefits parents 25 years ago martin feldstein economists began question conclusion feldstein agreed longterm return social security would equal rate economic growth return social security according feldstein must compared lowrisk investment like treasury bills total pretax return business investment plant equipment fact feldstein proposes abolish federal state local taxes business investment financed retirement saving raising taxes labor compensation argues would reduce consumption increasing saving economic growth pay large transition cost ending payasyougo retirement benefits privatizers go far proposals argue even without major changes taxation simply ending payasyougo social security makes sense future average return financial assets like stocks bonds exceed return payasyougo social security example point average annual real return common stocks since 1926 7 4 5 mix stocks bonds real economic growth averaged 3 usually privatizers push argument comparing past returns financial assets projected future economic growth projected future returns social security 1 2 arguments depend three invalid assumptions 1 investors ignore difference risk social security financial assets 2 future return social security reduced slower economic growth changing demographic trends future return financial assets 3 thing investing human capital costs childrearing education forth yield return form higher future wages deal one fallacy time examine different aspects privatizers argument three separate papers160 1 financial assets beat social security real world first paper pose question financial assets beat social security conclusion real world know stock market volatile place even ignoring great depression past 25 years included 12month periods real value stocks dropped much 40 1974 rose much 50 1983 privatizers assume longer periods return financial assets dependably approximates longterm average shows remarkable lack familiarity behavior financial markets typical family average 20 years save retirement someone begins saving age 25 saves equal amount year 40 years retires age 65 earn return savings average 20 years families saving bunched ages 45 65 shortens average part saving earns return age 65 spent 20year average return financial assets lot example past century 20year average real total return stock market fell zero three times 1901 1921 1928 1948 1962 1982 graph 1 returns substantially negative paying taxes interest dividends low points periods 20year average stock market returns peaked rates ranging 6 10 meant people earned negative real return investing stock market received real return taxes high 10 possible avoid belowaverage performance stock market investing financial assets since 1945 20year average real total return longterm government bonds negative almost exactly twothirds time fact 33 years straight including worst periods stock market graph 2 privatizers assume investors indifferent variations returns investment fact investors group riskaverse us dont use term know exactly means idea risk aversion captured exactly adage bird hand worth two bush easily find whether riskaverse simply ask would risk half wealth equal payoff coin toss someone indifferent risk would accept bet actuarially fair odds winning losing equal potential gains losses would accept bet riskaverse almost everyone else risk aversion simply rational response human condition none us lives long enough enough wealth try risky things infinite number times decision invest lot like example coin toss suppose two investments past hundred years yielded average return 5 one yielded exactly 5 year ranged randomly 5 15 according privatizers regard investments equivalent investors prefer first investment offers certain return 5 second investment two parts 5 average return hundred years plus 5050 chance gaining losing 10 besides annual coin toss second investment requires risk premium higher return compensate higher risk graph 3 average return investments riskadjusted return lower second investment first words people mentally adjust dollar amount paychecks differences price inflation also adjust different investment returns differences risk investors seek highest possible average return rather highest riskadjusted return go shopping financial supermarket compare apples apples subtracting appropriate risk premium average return investment viewed investment social security extraordinary characteristics volatility risk little higher treasury bills onequarter risk common stocks longterm real return halfway treasury bills common stocks result riskadjusted return much higher stock market class mix financial assets difference still larger returns measured net management fees roughly 25 times large financial portfolios administrative costs social security means riskadjusted return portfolio including social security systematically exceeds return portfolio limited financial assets illustrate point showing single one model portfolios recommended privatizers seek write law match riskadjusted returns steadystate social security graph 4 conclusion first paper total return retirement saving higher payasyougo social security without 2 economic growth falls 14what happens stock market first paper looks past second paper looks forward asks economic growth falls 14 happens stock market using past financial asset returns forecast future returns makes sense think future resemble past apart random differences case would conclude social security outperform financial assets future always past privatizers warn us future different past particular according projections social security administration future growth economy slower number retirees rise compared number workers however means future financial asset returns also lower instead privatizers make two rather extreme assumptions 1 social security affected economic growth stock market 2 social security affected demographic changes stock market second paper shows apart random variation return stock market systematically determined three factors rate economic growth varying size generations markets volatility risk paper shows construct projection financial asset returns consistent social security actuaries economic demographic projections actuaries projections imply economic demographic factors drove average annual real stock market returns 10 past 20 years drive returns 15 next 20 years 05 subtracting management fees almost exactly like periods 1901 1921 1928 1948 1962 1982 main factor sharp decline ratio middleaged savers young workers setting households graph 5 projections also imply average annual real return stock market next 75 years 32 22 subtracting management fees paying taxes conclusion social security actuaries projections correct united states enter 75year economic ice age financial assets perform poorly environment make payasyougo social security less attractive investments financial assets 3 economics payasyougo social security160and economic cost ending third paper examine economics payasyougo social security economic cost ending economists like martin feldstein seek privatize social security rely whats called neoclassical theory economic growth theory challenged nobel laureate theodore w schultz nearly 40 years ago disproven research john w kendrick others 20 years ago third paper recounts neoclassical theorys shortcomings explanation economic growth guide policy neoclassical theory ignores existence human capital costs childrearing education training safety mobility increase future income graph 6 kendricks research shows business investment plant equipment contributed onequarter growth national output income investment human capital contributed twothirds threequarters growth graph 7 payasyougo social security enormous impact saving habits american households far encouraging consumption feldstein argued payasyougo social security financed investment especially massive investment human capital associated baby boom economic growth could otherwise occurred graphs 8 9 morover real rate return investment human capital much higher return nonhuman capital ending payasyougo social security particularly raising taxes labor compensation cutting taxes property income feldstein proposes would throw process reverse necessary result lower investment slower growth smaller economy paper concludes calculating economic cost ending payasyougo social security 75 years us economy would 4 smaller 8 larger martin feldstein predicts present value economic loss 3 trillion summary conclusions evidence presented three papers points conclusion would costly mistake end payasyougo social security result would lower real return retirement saving tax increase working families smaller economy replacing social security private savings accounts one issues attractive less know favor privatizing social security ignoring best available economic theory best available economic research opinion political movement privatize social security abruptly collapse soon public begins learn whats actually proposed big tax increase permanently lower standard living american families instead privatizing social security maintain social security payasyougo basis | 1,523 |
<p>Hollywood movies have long had an outsize impact on the rest of the world. Now a Hollywood scandal is as well.</p>
<p>What began as an exposé of sexual misconduct by Harvey Weinstein has snowballed into a global cause célèbre, one that’s roiling not just the entertainment industry but also the realms of politics, business and education far beyond American shores. Senior officials in Britain have been forced to quit amid harassment allegations. Members of the European Parliament share their #MeToo stories. The president of France, Emmanuel Macron, says his country is “sick with sexism” and has vowed to fight discrimination and violence against women. “We must act before it’s too late,” Macron declared.</p>
<p>Corporate boardrooms, film festivals, college campuses, talk shows and online forums are abuzz with stories from people, mostly women, who are newly emboldened to speak out about their experiences of intimidation and assault. True, the newfound openness isn’t spread evenly across the globe.&#160;In many regions — parts of Asia, for example — such topics are still taboo or swept under the rug. But even in some socially conservative areas like the Middle East, the Weinstein scandal has triggered awareness and demand for reform with the force and speed of a dam burst.</p>
<p>Nowhere has the atmosphere been more electrified than in Europe — particularly Britain and France. Both countries once garlanded Weinstein with national honors.</p>
<p>“This is about a culture change,” says Kate Kinninmont, head of the London-based advocacy group <a href="http://variety.com/t/women-in-film-and-television/" type="external">Women in Film and Television</a>. “Harvey Weinstein has done us all a favor of being so horrific and repulsive that nobody wants to be in that corner.”</p>
<p>Weinstein has been kicked out of BAFTA, and some British lawmakers are seeking to rescind a title bestowed on him by Queen Elizabeth II for his contribution to the arts. Scotland Yard is investigating a dozen complaints against him by eight women, for alleged assaults dating as far back as the 1980s. The Yard is also investigating sexual assault allegations brought by two men against Kevin Spacey.</p>
<p>After the Weinstein scandal broke, Kinninmont’s organization heard from more than 100 individuals in response to an appeal for people to share tales of mistreatment in the workplace. Complaints of misconduct have also spiked at the BBC, the world’s foremost public broadcaster. The Beeb recently announced that it was yanking a much-anticipated show from its Christmas lineup because of rape allegations against one of the stars. “It’s gone in the bin, and the only way it’s ever going to come out … is if you’ve proven [his] innocence,” says Edel Ryan of JLT Specialty, an insurance brokerage with expertise in media and entertainment.</p>
<p>As in Hollywood, there’s a widespread sense in Britain that the current reckoning is long overdue, as are clear codes of conduct setting out the standards of decent, professional behavior — and the penalty for breaching them. Groups such as the British Film Institute, BAFTA and the British directors’ guild are collaborating on industry-wide guidelines for dealing with harassment and bullying. “It’s not rocket science. Some of it should be quite obvious, but it just needs to be spelled out, and everybody has to take responsibility,” Kinninmont says. “No more gray areas.”</p>
<p>“It’s not rocket science. Some of it should be quite obvious, but it just needs to be spelled out, and everybody has to take responsibility. No more gray areas.”Kate Kinninmont</p>
<p>For all the horror stories, the British entertainment industry in some ways provides a useful counterpoint to Hollywood. No cases of suspected serial abusers of women on the scale of a Weinstein or a James Toback have surfaced in the past few months. While a number of factors might help explain that — and new accusations may yet emerge — it’s worth noting that many of the top executive suites, especially in TV, are occupied by women. “The media industry in the U.K. for sure is very heavily female,” says Ryan. “Perhaps that has made a difference.”</p>
<p>In France, the hope is that the Weinstein scandal has finally tipped the scales in a society where&#160;“Vive la différence”&#160;has long been a smokescreen for chauvinistic, disrespectful behavior. Six years ago, sexual harassment catapulted into the spotlight when Dominique Strauss-Kahn, one of France’s most prominent politicians, was accused of sexually assaulting a hotel employee in New York. But as happened in the U.S. with the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas controversy, an initial outcry eventually died down, and little changed.</p>
<p>Activists are confident that won’t happen this time in an era of social media and instant word of mouth, through campaigns such as #BalanceTonPorc (OutYourPig). Reports of sexual assault and harassment in France shot up by 30% in October compared with the same period last year, leading Macron to proclaim at the presidential palace on Nov. 25: “France can no longer be one of these countries where women are afraid.” Hours later, thousands of women took to the streets of Paris to protest against sexual violence.</p>
<p>Political rhetoric is important. In the entertainment industry, though, money talks loudest — which is why the Swedish Film Institute is making the funds it gives filmmakers contingent on their understanding of gender equality and respect in the workplace. The institute doles out $38 million a year to various projects; starting in 2018, applicants will have to produce a “green card” showing they’ve participated in a daylong seminar on diversity, harassment and proper professional conduct.</p>
<p>The program has been in the works for a couple of years, and was initially criticized by some people as unnecessary. “They said, ‘You shouldn’t do that moralizing thing. We can take care of ourselves,’” says Anna Serner, head of the institute. “But now after #MeToo, we’re getting tremendous support.”</p>
<p>Nearly 600 Swedish actresses, including Oscar winner Alicia Vikander, recently signed an open letter condemning rampant sexual abuse in the entertainment world. As in other countries, the campaign to draw a bead on harassment has extended far beyond show business: Swedish lawyers, doctors and other professionals have their own hashtags for victims wishing to come forward.</p>
<p>For Kinninmont, the urgent national conversation Britain is now having on sexual harassment encourages her to dream of the day that her job at Women in Film and TV becomes obsolete. And that’s thanks to the galvanizing effect of a scandal with its roots in Hollywood, half a world away. “There’s no turning back,” Kinninmont says. “Every single industry organization is willing to clean up what’s going on. It’s truly brilliant.”</p> | false | 1 | hollywood movies long outsize impact rest world hollywood scandal well began exposé sexual misconduct harvey weinstein snowballed global cause célèbre one thats roiling entertainment industry also realms politics business education far beyond american shores senior officials britain forced quit amid harassment allegations members european parliament share metoo stories president france emmanuel macron says country sick sexism vowed fight discrimination violence women must act late macron declared corporate boardrooms film festivals college campuses talk shows online forums abuzz stories people mostly women newly emboldened speak experiences intimidation assault true newfound openness isnt spread evenly across globe160in many regions parts asia example topics still taboo swept rug even socially conservative areas like middle east weinstein scandal triggered awareness demand reform force speed dam burst nowhere atmosphere electrified europe particularly britain france countries garlanded weinstein national honors culture change says kate kinninmont head londonbased advocacy group women film television harvey weinstein done us favor horrific repulsive nobody wants corner weinstein kicked bafta british lawmakers seeking rescind title bestowed queen elizabeth ii contribution arts scotland yard investigating dozen complaints eight women alleged assaults dating far back 1980s yard also investigating sexual assault allegations brought two men kevin spacey weinstein scandal broke kinninmonts organization heard 100 individuals response appeal people share tales mistreatment workplace complaints misconduct also spiked bbc worlds foremost public broadcaster beeb recently announced yanking muchanticipated show christmas lineup rape allegations one stars gone bin way ever going come youve proven innocence says edel ryan jlt specialty insurance brokerage expertise media entertainment hollywood theres widespread sense britain current reckoning long overdue clear codes conduct setting standards decent professional behavior penalty breaching groups british film institute bafta british directors guild collaborating industrywide guidelines dealing harassment bullying rocket science quite obvious needs spelled everybody take responsibility kinninmont says gray areas rocket science quite obvious needs spelled everybody take responsibility gray areaskate kinninmont horror stories british entertainment industry ways provides useful counterpoint hollywood cases suspected serial abusers women scale weinstein james toback surfaced past months number factors might help explain new accusations may yet emerge worth noting many top executive suites especially tv occupied women media industry uk sure heavily female says ryan perhaps made difference france hope weinstein scandal finally tipped scales society where160vive la différence160has long smokescreen chauvinistic disrespectful behavior six years ago sexual harassment catapulted spotlight dominique strausskahn one frances prominent politicians accused sexually assaulting hotel employee new york happened us anita hillclarence thomas controversy initial outcry eventually died little changed activists confident wont happen time era social media instant word mouth campaigns balancetonporc outyourpig reports sexual assault harassment france shot 30 october compared period last year leading macron proclaim presidential palace nov 25 france longer one countries women afraid hours later thousands women took streets paris protest sexual violence political rhetoric important entertainment industry though money talks loudest swedish film institute making funds gives filmmakers contingent understanding gender equality respect workplace institute doles 38 million year various projects starting 2018 applicants produce green card showing theyve participated daylong seminar diversity harassment proper professional conduct program works couple years initially criticized people unnecessary said shouldnt moralizing thing take care says anna serner head institute metoo getting tremendous support nearly 600 swedish actresses including oscar winner alicia vikander recently signed open letter condemning rampant sexual abuse entertainment world countries campaign draw bead harassment extended far beyond show business swedish lawyers doctors professionals hashtags victims wishing come forward kinninmont urgent national conversation britain sexual harassment encourages dream day job women film tv becomes obsolete thats thanks galvanizing effect scandal roots hollywood half world away theres turning back kinninmont says every single industry organization willing clean whats going truly brilliant | 604 |
<p>By Sam Nussey</p>
<p>TOKYO (Reuters) – Companies in Japan’s service industries are struggling to hire and retain staff as the labor market becomes the tightest in decades, and are increasingly taking unorthodox steps to alleviate the shortage.</p>
<p>That can include looking to housewives and the retired to come into or rejoin the labor force. In some cases it means offering better working conditions for some staff, even if this requires raising prices. In others, companies are reducing the services they offer, perhaps by cutting opening hours, or delaying expansion plans.</p>
<p>Japan’s jobless rate stood at a 23-year low of 2.8 percent in August, reflecting a strengthening economy and shrinking working-age population in a rapidly aging society.</p>
<p>And on Monday, the Bank of Japan’s “tankan” quarterly survey showed that the ratio of companies complaining of labor shortages, rather than excess staff, was at its highest level since 1992.</p>
<p>The labor squeeze can reduce the speed of economic development, and even curb some economic activity altogether, hurting Japan’s chances of a period of sustainable growth.</p>
<p>For example, at Sun Mall in Chiba, east of Tokyo, labor shortages have led some tenants to abandon plans to take up space at the site, and others to shut up shop when key workers could not be replaced, according to Seth Sulkin, president and CEO of the mall’s owner Pacifica Capital K.K. He also said a new spa due to open there in a few months has been forced to push back the opening date due to staff shortages.</p>
<p>“The pool of people seeking part-time jobs is shrinking rapidly, particularly outside of central Tokyo,” Sulkin said. “We’ve recommended that the tenants convert some of the positions to full time and raise wages but they tell us they can’t do that and still make money,” he said.</p>
<p>“In Tokyo it’s easier to hire people but it’s not as easy as it used to be,” he said. By contrast, “in our Chiba mall I think the location is the big issue, there’s just not enough people.”</p>
<p>FROM HOUSEWIVES TO RETIREES</p>
<p>With the economy at near full-employment, companies are being forced to try to find new sources of labor.</p>
<p>Fast food chain McDonald’s Holdings Co Japan Ltd (T:), following in the footsteps of convenience store operator FamilyMart UNY Holdings (T:), says it will try to expand its core workforce beyond young people by targeting housewives for part-time positions.</p>
<p>More than half of housewives with children would like to work but are not able to find a suitable job, a survey of more than 4,000 married mothers by the Jobs Research Centre found. They were particularly concerned about long working days that don’t fit with their responsibilities at home.</p>
<p>Signs of companies moving to improve working conditions to retain and attract staff include Doutor Nichires Holdings Co Ltd (T:), which has introduced severance pay for some temporary employees at its Doutor Coffee chain. That is an unusual move in a country where there is a large gap in pay and working conditions between temporary and permanent employees.</p>
<p>Some restaurant operators, including Royal Holdings Co Ltd (T:) and McDonald’s Japan, have begun moving away from 24-hour operations, but that is far from the preferred option for companies in an industry that prides itself on offering convenience and service at all hours of the day.</p>
<p>More than 80% of companies surveyed in a Reuters poll in June reported that they expected labor shortages would force them to restrict the number of services they can offer over the next several years.</p>
<p>Some efforts to expand the labor force are finding corporate thinking has only changed so much.</p>
<p>This March, human resources firm Fullcast Holdings Co Ltd (T:) set up a recruitment agency aimed at Japan’s over 60s and, while almost 2,000 retirees have registered, many companies are not able to accommodate them, says Fullcast Senior Works President Yasuhiro Sumi.</p>
<p>“If there were jobs that met their needs in terms of things like distance from home, job type and working hours there are lots of employable people,” he said.</p>
<p>Many companies remain hesitant to spend their record cash piles on raising wages, in part because they are unable to pass on costs to their customers who are accustomed to nearly two decades of mostly falling prices.</p>
<p>“It seems that deepening labor shortages are not resulting in higher prices that reflect rises in wage and labor costs,” says Hideo Kumano, chief economist at Dai-ichi Life Research Institute.</p>
<p>PRICE HIKES RAISE EYEBROWS</p>
<p>Still, there are some signs of price rises, with even companies famous for their low prices not immune.</p>
<p>One of those firms, yakitori chicken restaurant chain Torikizoku Co Ltd (T:) this month raised its prices 6.4 percent, the first time in 28 years.</p>
<p>And Japan’s largest parcel deliver company, Yamato Holdings Co (T:), this month increased home delivery prices by around 15 percent, the first such rise in almost three decades. Other delivery firms have quickly followed suit.</p>
<p>Yamato become a poster child for Japan’s labor crunch after it booked billions of yen in charges to provide backpay to delivery drivers who had been overworked and underpaid.</p>
<p>“We have confronted the deterioration in working conditions for our front line staff,” Yamato Holdings President Masaki Yamauchi told reporters last week.</p>
<p>The company has promised to hire 10,000 new delivery staff by the end of financial 2019 to ease the strain on the 55,000 full-time drivers, who will have their overtime reduced.</p>
<p>The new staff will be mainly hired from among those who already work for the company as outside contractors, the company says.</p>
<p>On Sunday, billionaire founder of fashion retailer Start Today Co Ltd (T:) Yusaku Maezawa tweeted that shoppers on his Zozotown fashion site will be able to choose how much to pay for delivery.</p>
<p>“If this led to a sharing of feelings between the carrier and the recipient I think it would be lovely,” Maezawa tweeted.</p>
<p>($1 = 112.6000 yen)</p> | false | 1 | sam nussey tokyo reuters companies japans service industries struggling hire retain staff labor market becomes tightest decades increasingly taking unorthodox steps alleviate shortage include looking housewives retired come rejoin labor force cases means offering better working conditions staff even requires raising prices others companies reducing services offer perhaps cutting opening hours delaying expansion plans japans jobless rate stood 23year low 28 percent august reflecting strengthening economy shrinking workingage population rapidly aging society monday bank japans tankan quarterly survey showed ratio companies complaining labor shortages rather excess staff highest level since 1992 labor squeeze reduce speed economic development even curb economic activity altogether hurting japans chances period sustainable growth example sun mall chiba east tokyo labor shortages led tenants abandon plans take space site others shut shop key workers could replaced according seth sulkin president ceo malls owner pacifica capital kk also said new spa due open months forced push back opening date due staff shortages pool people seeking parttime jobs shrinking rapidly particularly outside central tokyo sulkin said weve recommended tenants convert positions full time raise wages tell us cant still make money said tokyo easier hire people easy used said contrast chiba mall think location big issue theres enough people housewives retirees economy near fullemployment companies forced try find new sources labor fast food chain mcdonalds holdings co japan ltd following footsteps convenience store operator familymart uny holdings says try expand core workforce beyond young people targeting housewives parttime positions half housewives children would like work able find suitable job survey 4000 married mothers jobs research centre found particularly concerned long working days dont fit responsibilities home signs companies moving improve working conditions retain attract staff include doutor nichires holdings co ltd introduced severance pay temporary employees doutor coffee chain unusual move country large gap pay working conditions temporary permanent employees restaurant operators including royal holdings co ltd mcdonalds japan begun moving away 24hour operations far preferred option companies industry prides offering convenience service hours day 80 companies surveyed reuters poll june reported expected labor shortages would force restrict number services offer next several years efforts expand labor force finding corporate thinking changed much march human resources firm fullcast holdings co ltd set recruitment agency aimed japans 60s almost 2000 retirees registered many companies able accommodate says fullcast senior works president yasuhiro sumi jobs met needs terms things like distance home job type working hours lots employable people said many companies remain hesitant spend record cash piles raising wages part unable pass costs customers accustomed nearly two decades mostly falling prices seems deepening labor shortages resulting higher prices reflect rises wage labor costs says hideo kumano chief economist daiichi life research institute price hikes raise eyebrows still signs price rises even companies famous low prices immune one firms yakitori chicken restaurant chain torikizoku co ltd month raised prices 64 percent first time 28 years japans largest parcel deliver company yamato holdings co month increased home delivery prices around 15 percent first rise almost three decades delivery firms quickly followed suit yamato become poster child japans labor crunch booked billions yen charges provide backpay delivery drivers overworked underpaid confronted deterioration working conditions front line staff yamato holdings president masaki yamauchi told reporters last week company promised hire 10000 new delivery staff end financial 2019 ease strain 55000 fulltime drivers overtime reduced new staff mainly hired among already work company outside contractors company says sunday billionaire founder fashion retailer start today co ltd yusaku maezawa tweeted shoppers zozotown fashion site able choose much pay delivery led sharing feelings carrier recipient think would lovely maezawa tweeted 1 1126000 yen | 597 |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.