Sunday 2/7/16

In the Gospel today, Luke recounts Christ's miracle of the fishing boat where countless fish are retrieved after a day a failed fishing by several fishermen. The fishermen are so impressed they give up their work and follow Christ. Mark emphasizes the call, not the miracle, but their is something wonderful about Christ's interfering with the mundane. Fishing, no raising from the dead or sight to the blind here. There is an element of life itself as miraculous. And people. People, after all, are the eventual mediators of Christ's New Testament.
In Seamus Heaney’s long, meditative poem Lightenings, there is a section (number VIII) which relates a strange occurrence at the Irish monastery of Clonmacnoise. The monastery, founded in 544 by Saint Ciaran,  fell into decline during the twelfth century. It was one of the greatest in medieval Ireland, visited by scholars from far abroad because of its reputation for piety and the promotion of learning (the annals – which we only have a 17^th Century copy of now – mentioned by Heaney in the poem recorded Ireland’s history from its earliest times right up to 1408).

The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise

Were all at prayer inside the oratory

A ship appeared above them in the air.

The anchor dragged along behind so deep

It hooked itself into the altar rails

And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill,

A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope

And struggled to release it. But in vain.

“This man can’t bear our life here and will drown,”

The abbot said, “unless we help him.” So

They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed

back

Out of the marvellous as he had known it.

Cab Thoughts 2/6/16

A man's admiration for absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him.--deTocqueville


The Washington Times reported: A former CIA director said the U.S.-led coalition fighting the Islamic State has been reluctant to attack oil wells controlled by the extremist group partly because of environmental concerns. "We did not want to go after oils wells--actually hitting oil wells that ISIS controls because we didn't want to do environmental damage and we didn't want to destroy that infrastructure, " said former spy chief Michael Morell. I wonder if such thinking has ever existed before. More important, I wonder if the community of citizens ever existed before where such a public statement would be accepted as at all reasonable.

I saw "Riders of the Purple Sage" this weekend, a movie with Ed Harris. I read the book as a child and remember the astonishment I experienced realizing the hero was a calculating killer who despised Mormons and hunted them. The movie removed some of the extra plot and the Mormons went unnamed. Even in the modern age it is still arresting. (The heroine is roundly criticized for not marrying as it is unnatural.) It is said the story formed the template for many modern westerns. It must have been gripping as I still remember much of it, even the names.

This year, the elementary attendance rate in the Baltimore city public schools is 93 percent. But, look more closely and you find that nearly 20 percent of students in grades one through five have missed more than 20 days of school. That's a whole month and that's more than 6,000 children.

 

The Spanish reintroduced the horse to the Ameri­cas in the early sixteenth century (equines had roamed the Ameri­cas before the last Ice Age). The horse was introduced slowly into American Indian life. A current thesis is that this was culturally disruptive, requiring more mobility, more grazing land and this resulted in more conflict. It can be argued that change is not inherently good but the horse became a fact in American life. Anyone who has read about the Comanche will know that some adapted very well--to the dismay of their neighbors.

 

Antediluvian: Adj: 1. Of or relating to the period before the Biblical flood. 2. very old, old-fashioned, or out of date; antiquated; primitive: antediluvian ideas. Antediluvian is related to the Latin term dīluvium meaning "a flood." The prefix ante- means "before" and is used in the formation of compound words.

Brazil is in the midst of a dramatic economic downturn that's left the country to suffer through the worst inflation-growth outcome (i.e. stagflation) in more than a decade. Unemployment and inflation are soaring (annual headline IPCA inflation at 10.28%, unemployment at 7.9% in August, up from just 4.7% a year earlier) while output is plunging (IBC-Br monthly real GDP indicator down 6.1% Y/Y in September) and the market is losing confidence in the government's ability to end a political stalemate on the way to shoring up the fiscal books and hitting primary surplus targets. WSJ: "Brazil's service sector, including beauty salons, banks and realtors, employs more than any other sector in the country by a wide margin, and represents about 60% of GDP."

Who is....Samuel Huntington?

 

On Dec. 14, in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln announces a grant of amnesty for Emilie Todd Helm, his wife Mary Lincoln's half sister and the widow of a Confederate general. The pardon was one of the first under Lincoln's Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction, which he had announced less than a week before. The plan was the president's blueprint for the reintegration of the South into the Union. Part of the plan allowed for former Confederates to be granted amnesty if they took an oath to the United States. The option was open to all but the highest officials of the Confederacy.

A mere 4% of students embarking on language courses in schools achieve a basic level of fluency after three years. 96% fail to achieve fluency and/or abandon courses completely.

 

In 1640 Aphra Behn was baptized. The precise date and circumstances of her birth are unclear, as is much else about Behn's life, but her distinguished place in English literature is assured: Love Letters Between a Nobleman and his Sister (1684-7) is seen as the first epistolary novel; Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave (1688) is studied as the first anti-colonial novel and the first philosophical novel, one of its ideas being that of the 'noble savage'; her popular, fifteen-play career on the Restoration stage made her the first woman to earn a living as a writer. This last accomplishment is most famously toasted in Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own: All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, which is, most scandalously but rather appropriately, in Westminster Abbey, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds. It is she -- shady and amorous as she was -- who makes it not quite fantastic for me to say to you tonight: Earn five hundred a year by your wits.

            (Steve King)

A danger of collectivism of any sort is that it clouds thinking.  Collectivism not only masks differences that distinguish individuals who comprise whatever group is constructed, in whatever fashion, into some collective, it also causes people too easily to attribute thought and action to the group rather than to the individuals who make-up the group. So when a middle-aged white male violently attacks an institution, such as Planned Parenthood, people often lump all limited- and anti-government people together into some fictional group that is feared to be especially prone to commit violence of the sort that occurred in Colorado. Collecting individuals into general group behavior is the definition of bigotry. Since special interests are assumed to come in groups, this separation is made all the more difficult.

Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/10/popular-and-unpopular-science.html

 

Using a groundbreaking gene editing technique, University of California scientists have created a strain of mosquitoes capable of rapidly introducing malaria-blocking genes into a mosquito population through its progeny, ultimately eliminating the insects' ability to transmit the disease to humans. This is a huge step, the creation of an inherited change in DNA. And the implications of man-induced inheritable change are overwhelming.

 

The telegraph linked New York to the markets of Europe just as the war was ending. Samuel Morse's invention had spread across the eastern half of the United States during the 1840s and to California in the early 1860s. The telegraph further consolidated American financial markets in New York.  So, for the first time, serious communication efforts were separated from transportation.

If competition serves a social purpose, it must produce something that we could not have in its absence. To the degree that competition does what we could have done equally cheaply in its absence, it is wasteful. Competition in fact leads to the discovery of opportunities that would otherwise go unnoticed.  It thus generates a spontaneous discovery process, the exact course of which is unpredictable.  This process includes, inter alia, both the discovery of hitherto unsatisfied wants and the products to satisfy those wants, and the invention of lower-cost methods of satisfying preferences.  It also encompasses the creation of new economic forms, customs, and structures.--Gerald P. O'Driscoll's and Mario J. Rizzo's 1985 book, The Economics of Time & Ignorance.

Competition is a painful creator. Our lives would be ordered by politicians, bureaucrats and do-gooders who either find the process too painful or would substitute their own brilliance for the competitive creative process.


The Clash of Civilizations (COC) is a theory that people's cultural and religious identities will be the primary source of conflict in the post-Cold War world. It was proposed by political scientist Samuel P. Huntington in a 1992 lecture at the American Enterprise Institute, which was then developed in a 1993 Foreign Affairs article titled "The Clash of Civilizations?", in response to his former student Francis Fukuyama's 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man. Huntington later expanded his thesis in a 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.
The phrase itself was earlier used by Albert Camus in 1946, and by Bernard Lewis in an article in the September 1990 issue of The Atlantic Monthly titled "The Roots of Muslim Rage". Even earlier, the phrase appears in a 1926 book regarding the Middle East by Basil Mathews: Young Islam on Trek: A Study in the Clash of Civilizations (p. 196). This expression derives from clash of cultures, already used during the colonial period. (Wiki)
"It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future." Huntington, 1993 Foreign Affairs

 

However, politicians' success does not depend on their learning the lessons of history or of economics.  It depends far more on their going along with what is widely believed by the public and the media, which may include conspiracy theories or belief that higher prices are due to "greed" or "gouging."--Sowell

 

Robert Pershing Wadlow (1918-1940) was the tallest person in recorded history for whom there is irrefutable evidence. Wadlow reached 8 ft 11.1 in (2.72 m) in height and weighed 439 lb (199 kg) at his death at age 22. His great size and his continued growth in adulthood were due to hyperplasia of his pituitary gland, which results in an abnormally high level of human growth hormone. Robert Wadlow showed no indication of an end to his growth even at the time of his death. 

 

Susan Strasburg, daughter of famed acting instructor Lee Strasburg,  originating the Broadway role of Anne Frank in The Diary of Anne Frank. Nominated for a Tony Award at the age of 18, she became the youngest actress to star on Broadway with her name above the marquee title. Here she recounts seeking feedback from award-winning actor Sir Laurence Olivier from her book, Marilyn and Me :
"As much as I loved doing Anne Frank, it now overwhelmed me. After a year and a half the high emotional pitch of the performance had taken a toll on my energy and psyche. I was getting every germ that floated into Manhattan. I was losing weight, unable to eat. The year before, [Lee Strasburg student] Marilyn [Monroe] had brought Laurence Olivier to see the play. Afterward he'd been very complimentary. As we were taking publicity photos, all smiling our best airline stewardess smiles, I'd pleaded, "Please, Sir Laurence ..."
" 'Larry,' he'd insisted.
" 'Please ... Sir ... Larry, tell me what you really thought.' He cleared his throat. 'Well, dear child,' he'd said precisely, 'half the effort would have had twice the effect.'
"I was devastated. My smile evaporated, as did his. The flash popped, and the moment was stamped indelibly on film, and on my ego. Marilyn came to my defense. 'She does that because she cares. She wants the people who came to see her to get their money's worth.' I was grateful to her.
"It was true I'd asked, but he didn't have to tell me. He was supposed to be an English gentleman. I knew how the actress felt who had screamed at my father backstage after her opening night, 'How dare you come back here and tell me the truth?' "

AAAAaaaaaannnnnddddd......a graph on duration of U.S. unemployment:

United States mean duration of unemployment 1948-2010.

The Last of It

I have not been a big fan of Mrs. Clinton. Recently I was asked to defend my position. This is what I wrote. (I must admit, with the primaries and all, all of them, and Clinton in particular, are wearying):

I think there are several problems.
The first is a little unfair. Although Hillary is mainly in the public eye and discussion because of her husband, she is really not responsible for his errors. Still, since her success originates with him, she does get some of his downside. And his downside is big--and generic. No other adult male in the U.S. would have escaped the judicial system for what he did. Abuse of an employee--an intern--and then perjury in front of the grand jury--no guy would have survived that. While that is not her fault, it reeks of elite privilege, the same privilege I expect will protect her in the security violations which she unquestionably has done--violations again no average person would survive. This distinction between her and the rest of us mortals makes people like me very unhappy. The Europeans think this distinction routine but the Americans do not.
Next, her accomplishments are obscure to most observers. That does not necessarily disqualify her but it does not recommend her. Her one main achievement was her health care plan in the 90s when, for no discernible reason, she was made the head of a healthcare restructuring, a plan that would have dropped medical spending 38%. That would have been devastating to the industry and to the health of the country. Perhaps that is necessary--even crucial-- but no one elected her to do it. Why was she put in charge of it? See below.
Next, her errors have been big. As Secretary of State she presided over the Egyptian disaster and the Libyan fiasco and has declared them a success. Now these were not her creation, that we know. She was the agent of the Obama administration. And the policies were only Bush 2 in liberal drag; still they have been seriously bad mistakes. But she has claimed they were successful. Not recognizing that they were not is worse.
Next, she is a self-declared "progressive." What is that? This definition from George Will is not bad, written about free speech on campus: "If you believe, as progressives do, that human nature is not fixed, and hence is not a basis for understanding natural rights. And if you believe, as progressives do, that human beings are soft wax who receive their shape from the society that government shapes. And if you believe, as progressives do, that people receive their rights from the shaping government. And if you believe, as progressives do, that people are the sum of the social promptings they experience. Then it will seem sensible for government, including a university’s administration, to guarantee not freedom of speech but freedom from speech. From, that is, speech that might prompt its hearers to develop ideas inimical to progress, and might violate the universal entitlement to perpetual serenity." This definition may be too confining but it is generally true that the progressive political philosophy favors top-down imposition of policies created by self-appointed elites that are neither tried nor necessarily true and dismisses the idea of basic rights of citizens that limit government action, regardless of intent.  I think a government leader should be considerably more cautious. An American leader should be even more so. The conclusion here is the uncomfortable "Progressivism is a process of thinking inconsistent with America and its history." I think that is true.
Her arrogance is another aspect. There are countless examples of her overbearing dismissive elitism from secret service interviews to her public committee appearances. All leaders are dangerous, arrogant ones are worse.
Next, the money. I begrudge no one financial success. Her's is ludicrous. The amassing of a large fortune while a "public servant" is common corruption; she is uncommonly corrupt. It is not simple inference; her famous cattle futures scam was classic money laundering. Classic. No one with any understanding of it believes otherwise. What is in question is, why do her supporters not dismiss her? How can anyone put up with it?
She is mendacious. Almost always. She says things that are untrue--provably untrue--and does so constantly. This happens so often one wonders if she is not unbalanced. I know all leaders lie but she is beyond the pale. Again, why do people put up with it?
Finally is her ambition. I prefer a leader whose ambition is fed by achievement, shaped by philosophy and tempered by knowledge. Her's is just naked demand for power--not just desire but demand. Her arrogance assumes her ascension. In her mind it is reasonable she decides, unasked, to modify, then design the changes in, a health care system that is 17% of the economy. That is revolutionary Third World--or divine right--thinking, not ours.
She is the basic modern politician, confident without reason, arrogant with little accomplishment, pretentious in her posing--a black hole for money, power and reputation.

Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton began to write poetry in 1957 after watching a half-hour show on educational television entitled "How to Write a Sonnet." Her first encouragements came from her psychiatrist (she was terminally insane) and from Robert Lowell, who taught both her and Sylvia Plath in his Boston University poetry workshop.
Bad company.
She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967

This is her signature poem, My Kind, published in her first book of poems, To Bedlam and Part Way Back, in 1960:

I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.

 

 

Cab thoughts 2/3/16

"We human beings always seek happiness. Now there are two ways. You can make yourself happy by making other people unhappy--I call that the logic of robbery. The other way, you make yourself happy by making other people happy--that's the logic of the market. Which way do you prefer?"-- Zhang Weiying,

 

Mothers who are over 40 at the time of a child's birth are 128% more likely to have a left-handed baby than a woman in her 20s. 

A disturbing notion from  Russ's essay - "Why Software Really Will Eat the World - and Whether We Should Worry:" Government does many stupid and wasteful things, but that doesn't stop creative, driven people from continuing to innovate.  It doesn't stop my kids from getting a decent education.  But it stops other kids who are growing up in more challenging circumstances from participating in the parts of the economy that remain dynamic.  The minimum wage and our lousy public schools don't hurt my kids.  But they hurt millions of others.  I don't know if the digital revolution will weaken the public-school monopoly or force public schools to do a better job.  But if we want a future where all people have a decent chance to flourish, introducing a little more competition into schools and labor markets would go a long way.

 

During the Civil War, the Chicago Tribune counted 1,395 banks in the Union states, each with bills of various denominations -- some 8,370 varieties of notes in all. They had various backing, the notes were often refused and commerce considerably impaired until the standardization of money.

 

Early in football, teams approached the line of scrimmage and the signal caller barked out the plays at the line of scrimmage. Nothing was hidden from the defense. There was no huddle. When Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., a school for the deaf,  played nondeaf clubs or schools, they used hand signals -- American Sign Language -- to call a play at the line of scrimmage. Hand signals against nondeaf schools gave Gallaudet an advantage. But other deaf schools could read quarterback Paul Hubbard's sign language. So, beginning in 1894, Hubbard came up with a plan. He decided to conceal the signals by gathering his offensive players in a huddle prior to the snap of the ball.

Fortnight: n: 1. the space of fourteen nights and days; two weeks. Fortnight is a contraction of the Old English fēowertēne niht.

The Speyer wine bottle (or 'Römerwein') is a sealed vessel - presumed to contain liquid wine - and so named because it was unearthed from a Roman tomb found near Speyer, Germany. It is the world's 'oldest bottle of wine.' The Speyer wine bottle was originally found in 1867, in what is now the Rhineland-Palatinate region of Germany, near the town of Speyer, one of the oldest settlements in the area. The bottle has been dated between 325 and 350 AD, and is the "oldest known unopened bottle of wine" in the world.

 

Who is...Philo T. Farnsworth?

 

The anti-slave, anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant Know-Nothings -- ­members of a secret society whose main goal was to prevent 'foreigners' from gaining political power -- ­demanded a 21-year residency requirement for naturalization in the 1850s.

 

Freedom. According to "Rolling Stone", a growing number of people are experimenting with "microdoses" of psychedelics to help them work. A microdose of LSD is around 10-15 micrograms, approximately a tenth of a "normal" dose. At that dosage, Rolling Stone describes the drug's effects as "subperceptual": " 'Enough, says Rick Doblin, founder and executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, 'to feel a little bit of energy lift, a little bit of insight, but not so much that you are tripping.' 

Every once in a while the democracy does something really stupid experimenting on its own.

Russia has cancelled its free visa program with Turkey. Russians account for a huge portion of Turkey's tourism industry. About 3.3 million Russian tourists visited Turkey in 2014, the second-largest number of tourist arrivals after Germany and around 12% of total visitors, according to Reuters.

 

In Altered States: The United States and Japan since the Occupation, Michael Schaller argues a more expansive reason for the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War was justified to the American public based on the "domino theory," -- the fear that if Vietnam fell, communism would soon reach America's shores. However, that was not the genuine fear of many senior U.S. officials. Instead, with the fall of China to communism in 1949, the more immediate and realistic fear was that Japan would be next and thus all of the Asia-Pacific region would become a communist bloc. Since Japan's economy was still in shambles, and it had been dependent on China for the import of raw materials, most felt it would inevitably come under Soviet and Chinese Communist sway unless alternatives were developed. A key U.S. policy objective thus became to develop Southeast Asia as an alternative, non-communist supplier and trading partner for Japan. It was the only viable alternative of consequence in the region, and therefore, policymakers felt it imperative to keep communism out of Vietnam.If America is so 'exceptional' why is it the world's leader in needing to 'change?'


Just days after the defeat of Argentina's Peronists who have ruled almost non-stop in the three decades since the end of military rule, the Ministry of Finance suffered a mysterious fire in its computer center which destroyed all the previous regime's files. This year there have been destructive fires in the Pink House, the Senate and the Central Bank which destroyed the central bank's records just days after a planned investigation of the banking system. These unfortunate coincidences will probably inspire unwarranted skepticism which will necessitate a government  crackdown.

 

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/10/what-battle-of-tours-really-means.html

 

In 1919, at age thirteen, Phil Farnsworth invented a burglarproof ignition switch for automobiles, earning him an award from Science and Invention magazine. At seventeen, he entered Brigham Young University, spe­cializing in chemistry and electronics. By age twenty, he was running his own business. In 1920, while tilling a potato field in a monotonous back and forth pattern with his horse-drawn plow, Phil imagined that an electron beam might scan an image in exactly the same way, moving across the image line-­by-line. On September 7, 1927, in a makeshift labora­tory in a San Francisco loft, Philo T. Farnsworth transmitted the world's first electronic television image: a straight white line scratched into a piece of black-painted glass. When the glass slide was slowly rotated ninety degrees, so, too, did the image on the screen. 'There you are,' Farnsworth said with typical aplomb, 'electronic televi­sion.' from Jim Henson: The Biography by Brian Jay Jones

East Chicago has re-elected an accused drug dealer and murderer, Mr. Robert "Coop" Battle, as councilman. Bridgeport, Connecticut residents re-elected Mayor Joseph P. Ganim - who during his last term was convicted of 16 felonies including racketeering, extortion, and bribery. Shop on.

In the 1300s, Europe's Black Plague brought death to 25 million people, by some estimates a third to a half of its population, and is one of the most famous episodes in history. But that plague had started in China just a few years earlier and killed more people in Asia -- perhaps as many as 40 million -- than in Europe. The plague was an epidemic of commerce and it followed the trade routs out of China. 60% of Iceland died and it is presumed to have destroyed the Viking Greenland colony.

 

According to Carrie Fisher, Christopher Walken almost got cast as Han Solo.

  

The annual average number of immigrants in the period 1821-1825 was 8,000; in 1826-1830 it was up to 20,587. In the next five years, 1831-1835, it rose to 50,498, then to 69,330 between 1836 and 1840. By 1841-1845, the expansion had grown to an average of 86,067 per year. At that point in history, a series of poor harvests and the failure of the potato crop in northern Europe disrupted European society and produced the first real deluge of immigrants -- 1.4 million between 1845 and 1850, a portent of those to come. During the next seven years, there was an enormous immigration of 22 million from Europe. Ireland and Germany together normally accounted for 65 to 75 percent of total immigration. The ordinary share of just three countries in these years was from 79.4 to more than 90 per­cent. Other northern European nations accounted for most of the remaining immigration.

 

Until the advent of refrigeration, which only came about during the last century or so, mankind was utterly dependent on salt as a food preservative. Therefore, cities and societies hovered around areas that contained salt mines -- e.g., Salzburg in Austria and the many English cities whose name ends in "wich" (salt) -- such as Middlewich, Nantwich, Northwich and Leftwich. Salt shaped civilization -- and was so valuable it served as currency. The word "salary" comes originally from "salt-money, soldier's allowance for the purchase of salt."

AAAaaaannnnnddddd.....a map of the spread of the plague and documented outbreaks:

from Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford

First, We Kill All the Intellectuals

Leadership problems in the West are more than political, they are intellectual. And nowhere is that more glaring than in the Western intellectual academic. Beset by uncertainty, forced into skepticism by the modern tradition, they are always at work building concepts that current dogma demands be foundationless.
 

There is a new book out, Who is Charlie? Xenophobia and the New Middle Class by Emmanuel Todd, translated by Andrew Brown and reviewed in the "London Review of Books" by Jeremy Harding. It is an assessment of the cultural, religious and national feelings that contributed to the anger and outrage over the Hebdo murders. Apparently the reaction was unreasonable, driven by a lot of very complex factors the author is more than happy to create and list. There are two big general factors: Racism and inequality. Inequality is going to be difficult to fix because the French no longer have their own currency to abuse and the racism will go away with interbreeding.

Some nuggets:
-In Todd’s view, France must face up to the reality of a post-Republican era and admit that its leaders have sold its Revolutionary birthright for a mess of EU pottage: budgetary rules in Brussels and monetary policy in Frankfurt have made it impossible to promote equality or intervene when it is under threat. (The Revolutionary birthright has been abridged by the EU? It sounds as if the birthright is a mess of humanist pottage.)
-For two hundred years after the Revolution, egalitarian godlessness and conservative Catholicism lived in mutual suspicion and enmity, but the result was also a useful complicity, especially for the godless, whose humanism might have crumbled into decadent self-regard ‘without the support of its Catholic contradiction’. ‘The image that springs to mind,’ Todd writes, is that of ‘a revolutionary nave stabilized by Catholic flying buttresses.’ (France is dependent upon a shrinking minority that provides the moral guideposts that the majority have purposely rejected?)
-Todd argues France lost sight of the fact that ‘the right to blaspheme against your own religion’ is not the same as blaspheming ‘against someone else’s’...France was in the grip of a ‘religious crisis’, even though it no longer believed in God. ‘We need to take religion seriously,’ he says, ‘especially when it starts to disappear.’ And so to the demography: a virtuoso exposition of France’s past and present as a nation with two traditions – egalitarian unbelievers on the one hand and authoritarian believers on the other – but fully functional and reconciled, for the most part, under the banner of Republican values. (It is quite astonishing that anyone could think this. France is dependent upon religion? We must take religion seriously--especially when it is vanishing? And rejected?)
-In an earlier book Todd and Hervé Le Bras, an INED colleague, came up with the name ‘zombie Catholics’ for this large segment of the French population that still carries the moral and sociological baggage of devout Christianity even though it is no longer practicing. Zombie Catholics prefer authoritarian values to egalitarian ones, and they are in search of a universalizing, transcendent faith to replace the one they have abandoned. They are the new reactionary force shaping the cultural politics of France in the 21st century. (The Catholic power doesn't really believe it? They prefer any spiritual structure, even an immoral one?)
-The two big crises pointed up in Who is Charlie? – racism and inequality – would be solved mechanically by a slow, inexorable sociological change; but this, too, is a long way off, and attitudes will have to change now. Islam, Todd writes, must be ‘legitimated as a component of the nation, just as the Church was … We need to grant to Islam what was granted to Catholicism, in the era of triumphant secularism.’ (This is apparently a one way street. The secularist need have no fear of the evangelical theists.)

There is something almost laughable about this very modern problem. Our freedom from tradition, the skepticism we have substituted for faith, our isolated independence that requires each of us to create man in his own image has undermined  liberty, equality, and fraternity; we have loosed our pre-Enlightenment bonds and now are unmoored.
But the Moors are not. It is whimsical to think that the West, befuddled and indifferent to virtually everything, will meet, as equal partners in the future, people of certainty, passion and ambition.

Nixon: Presidents and Precedents

President Richard Nixon believed that years of aerial bombing in Southeast Asia to pressure North Vietnam achieved “zilch” even as he publicly declared it was effective and ordered more bombing while running for reelection in 1972, according to a handwritten note from Nixon disclosed in a new book by Bob Woodward, this in an article by the WashPo.
So the President of the United States used military action he thought ineffective for completely political purposes and lied about it to get reelected.
So the point really is: Do you think that Nixon was an outlier?