We have spoken to your mother. We know everything.
Monday, June 30, 2008
FengShui In The Land Of Fatwas, Waterphiles, 8 Year Old Nazis And Salt
It should be obvious that self help isn’t helping…
When Hassan Bakhtiar couldn’t find a job last year, his mother told him to pray and read the Quran.
Instead, the 25-year-old aerospace engineer dropped in on a packed appearance by Alireza Azmandian, Iran’s most famous motivational speaker and self-help guru. Now, he meditates by staring at a flickering candle and chants Mr. Azmandian’s inspirational catch phrases…
In other Middle East countries with similar demographics, like Egypt and Turkey, young people are increasingly turning back to their Muslim identity for solace. But Iran’s mostly well-educated youth are more likely to seek other remedies — such as self-help seminars, New Age theories, meditation and yoga.
“The regime presumed it could mold the society into whatever shape and form it wanted, but we are seeing the opposite take place,” says sociologist Hamid Reza Jalalipour. The younger generation is “turning away from conventional religion and tradition…”
Can water critics be far behind?
In Tokyo and Paris, you can now spend $5 a glass on special beverages selected by a professional sommelier.
Nothing surprising there, except the beverages being served are different brands of bottled water — with various “flavors” supposedly matched to different foods.
Desalinated seawater from Hawaii, meanwhile, is being sold as “concentrated water” — at $33.50 for a two-ounce bottle. Like any concentrated beverage, it is supposed to be diluted before drinking, except that in this case, that means adding water to . . . water.
And from Tennessee, a company named BlingH2O — whose marketing imagery features a mostly nude model improbably balancing a bottle of water between her heel and her hip — is retailing its water at $40 for 750 milliliters, with special-edition bottles going for $480 — more than a million times the price of the liquid that comes from your tap.
The push to turn water into the new wine is a marketing phenomenon: The bottled-water industry is engaged in an intense effort to convince Americans that the stuff in bottles is substantially different from the stuff out of the tap.
In Tokyo and Paris, you can now spend $5 a glass on special beverages selected by a professional sommelier.
Nothing surprising there, except the beverages being served are different brands of bottled water — with various “flavors” supposedly matched to different foods.
Desalinated seawater from Hawaii, meanwhile, is being sold as “concentrated water” — at $33.50 for a two-ounce bottle. Like any concentrated beverage, it is supposed to be diluted before drinking, except that in this case, that means adding water to . . . water.
And from Tennessee, a company named BlingH2O — whose marketing imagery features a mostly nude model improbably balancing a bottle of water between her heel and her hip — is retailing its water at $40 for 750 milliliters, with special-edition bottles going for $480 — more than a million times the price of the liquid that comes from your tap.
The push to turn water into the new wine is a marketing phenomenon: The bottled-water industry is engaged in an intense effort to convince Americans that the stuff in bottles is substantially different from the stuff out of the tap.
Happy Birthday, you 8 year old Nazi:
A school has confiscated an 8-year-old boy’s birthday party invitations after they were handed out during class because it said it had a duty to ensure against discrimination.
The boy handed out invitations to classmates at his school in Lund, southern Sweden, but did not invite two boys because they were not his friends, the Sydsvenskan newspaper reported earlier this week.
The school, 360 miles south of Stockholm, confiscated all the invitations, saying it objected because it had a duty to ensure against discrimination.
The report on Friday did not name the boy or his family. It said the boy’s father has filed a complaint with the parliamentary ombudsman.
The father told the newspaper that the two classmates were not invited because one had bullied his son and the other had not invited his son to the classmate’s birthday party.
“My son has taken it very hard,” the father told Sydsvenskan of the school’s decision. “It’s like taking someone’s mail.”
The parliamentary ombudsman has asked the school board to decide on the issue before Sept. 8.
Pot-holed roads, crumbling schools, litter-strewn streets – there’s no shortage of problem areas crying out for their attention.
But councils believe they have found a better use for their money: reducing the number of holes in chip shop salt shakers.
Research has suggested that slashing the holes from the traditional 17 to five could cut the amount people sprinkle on their food by more than half.
And so at least six councils have ordered five-hole shakers – at taxpayers’ expense – and begun giving them away to chip shops and takeaways in their areas.
Leading the way has been Gateshead Council, which spent 15 days researching the subject of salty takeaways before declaring the new five-hole cellars the solution.
Officers collected information from businesses, obtained samples of fish and chips, measured salt content and ‘carried out experiments to determine how the problem of excessive salt being dispensed could be overcome by design’.
They decided that the five-hole pots would reduce the amount of salt being used by more than 60 per cent yet give a ‘visually acceptable sprinkling’ that would satisfy the customer.
The Revenge Of The Shia
"...there would be no “total victory” over the Jews and Christians without a “total annihilation” of the Shia, whom he called the secret agents of Islam’s enemies. “If you can’t find any Christians or Jews to kill, vent your wrath against the next available Shia..."
Read it all.In December 2004, as the United Nations Security Council began to grapple with the challenge of Iran’s nuclear ambitions and as Iraq started its slow topple into civil war, one of the closest and most trusted American allies in the Middle East began to warn publicly of the emergence of a “Shia crescent” in the region. Jordan’s King Abdullah, a Sunni who claims direct descent from the Prophet Muhammad, sounded the alarm that a vast swath of the region, stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean and from the oil-rich Caspian Sea to the even richer Persian Gulf, was coming under the sway of the Shia branch of Islam. More ominously, he implied that this looming Shia empire would take its direction from Tehran. President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt echoed this warning last year when he said, during an interview on al-Arabiya television, “Most of the Shias are loyal to Iran, and not to the countries they are living in.”
Abdullah and Mubarak, two of the most prominent Sunni leaders, have, along with senior Saudi officials, evoked the specter of a new Middle East divided along sectarian lines. It would set the long-downtrodden Shia against their traditional Sunni masters, rulers, and landlords. If the first battlefield was Iraq, the two leaders suggested, the next would be the oil-endowed regions of the Persian Gulf, southern Iraq, and Azerbaijan, where Shia happen to live. In this scenario, the ayatollahs of Shiite Iran could then secure control of the Iraqi, Saudi, and Caspian oil and gas fields by placing them under the protection of their own nuclear arsenal, thus establishing the first Islamic state to achieve great-power status since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918.
A glance at the map suggests that this scenario is at least plausible. Although they are a minority of some 150 million in a region of almost 400 million and the larger Islamic community of 1.3 billion, the Shia dominate the region to the east of the Suez Canal. They are a strong majority in Iran, Iraq, Azerbaijan, Yemen, and Bahrain. The Shia now form the largest single Islamic community in Lebanon and cluster along the Persian Gulf coast of Saudi Arabia. There are substantial Shia minorities in Kuwait (35 percent), Qatar (15–20 percent), the United Arab Emirates (six percent), Pakistan (15 percent), and Afghanistan (15 percent). Since the Alawites, who provide the current ruling dynasty of Syria, are an offshoot of the Shia sect, Jordan’s King Abdullah is only slightly stretching the truth to talk of a Shia crescent running from Tehran through Baghdad to Beirut. From his vantage point in Amman, Abdullah’s little kingdom appears encircled, and as he looks eastward, he sees Shia majorities all the way to Pakistan. Watching from Riyadh, the Saudi monarchy may feel secure in the numerical dominance of Sunnis in the kingdom, but its restive Shia subjects are concentrated in the parts of the country where the oil fields lie.
For the first time in centuries, the Shia of the Arab world can taste the prospect of power, while the Sunni are experiencing the bitterness of being overthrown. The Shia of Iraq, long suppressed by the Sunni elite, who cooperated with the Ottoman and British empires, are now in a position to use their numerical majority to dominate the country’s politics. The Shia triumph in Iraq is constrained only by the Sunni resistance, which is fast approaching the dimensions of a full-scale civil war. At the same time, the fierce response of the predominantly Shia Hezbollah of Lebanon to the Israeli attacks of July 2006 has combined with the Shia’s numbers (slightly over 40 percent of Lebanon’s population of four million) and their presence in the government to give them a dominant voice in that Mediterranean state and frontline status in the Arab confrontation with Israel...
In a four-hour anti-Shia sermon, released on the Internet a week before his death in a U.S. bombing raid in June but apparently recorded two months earlier, Zarqawi ran through a list of Shia “betrayals” and cited a number of venomously anti-Shia tracts written by scholars in the fundamentalist Wahhabi branch of Sunni Islam. He declared that there would be no “total victory” over the Jews and Christians without a “total annihilation” of the Shia, whom he called the secret agents of Islam’s enemies. “If you can’t find any Christians or Jews to kill, vent your wrath against the next available Shia,” Zarqawi said. He claimed that his fellow terrorists, the Hezbollah in Lebanon, were only pretending to oppose Israel, while in reality their mission was to protect Israel’s northern border. Zarqawi concluded with a formal declaration of war on the Iraqi Shia leader Moqtada al-Sadr and his “bastards.” (Large parts of this bizarre and possibly unhinged outburst focused on defending the chastity of the Prophet’s wife Ayesha against Shia slurs, on discussing whether the Ayatollah Khomeini was a pedophile, and on assailing “wicked” Shia clerics who purportedly defended unusual sexual positions.)...
The grisly scenario that lay behind the concerns of the Egyptian, Jordanian, and Saudi leaders is that a Sunni-Shia civil war in Iraq could erupt into a wider Sunni-Shia war across the Arab world, a larger and later version of the Iran-Iraq War that lasted for most of the 1980s and bled, exhausted, and impoverished both countries. The most callous practitioner of realpolitik might see this as preferable to a war between Islam and the West in some lethal rendition of Samuel Huntington’s famous “clash of civilizations.” Such a conflict certainly cannot be ruled out, but the consequences for the region and the world’s oil supply, and even the potential for global suicide if Iran obtains nuclear weapons (or if Pakistan joins the fray), are almost too hideous to contemplate.
... Bush invited to the White House one of the best-known Arab academics and intellectuals, Fouad Ajami, a professor at the School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University. Ajami tried to counsel the president that the Shia resurgence was a historical process that would prove difficult and probably could not be stopped. In a subsequent meeting at the Council on Foreign Relations, Ajami said, “The idea that the Shia will make their claim on political power in the affairs of the Arab world and that it will be peaceful is not really tenable. It will be a very, very contested political game. And we have to be willing to accept this. And we must not be scared off by what the Jordanians and the Egyptians and others are telling us. . . . We should not be frightened of radical Shiism; we should understand these things on their own terms. We should not jump when someone says to us ‘radical Shiism,’ for one interesting reason—right?—9/11. The 19 who came our way were not Shia. They were good Sunni boys, and we should remind the Arab regimes when they try to frighten us out of our skins that in fact we also have another menace, which is radical Sunnism.”
Ajami made a further point about the kind of social and political change the Shia resurgence could bring to the Arab and Islamic worlds, citing a Kuwaiti Shia friend who had suggested, “If you take Egypt out of the Arab world—and it’s a kind of outlier country, historically, culturally, in every way—there is no Sunni majority in the Arab world. . . . The region becomes a group—a multiplicity of communities and sects, and the place of the Shia in that landscape truly changes. So the region is being redrawn.”
King Abdullah of Jordan, Egypt’s Mubarak, and the Saudi monarchy all have their own very good reasons to protect their current positions in the Arab world and to be alarmed at the changes the new Shia role could bring. The question is whether their anxiety is shared by their own people or simply reflects concern that the empowerment of the Shia implies the empowerment of Iran to the detriment of the Sunni Arab establishment. There is no clear answer. The history of Sunni-Shia and Arab-Persian tensions points one way; but the rallying of Sunni public opinion behind the Shia resistance of southern Lebanon this past summer and the hailing of the Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah as the new Saladin, the new pan-Arab hero, point to a different future, in which Arab and Islamic solidarity against Israel will trump the traditional Sunni-Shia enmities. The only safe conclusion is that the political situation is too dynamic and the ethnic and sectarian politics of the region are moving too fast for any easy prediction.
But look at the issue from a perspective that considers the catalytic role that has been played by the two American interventions in Iraq, in the wars of President Bush the elder in 1991 and of his son 12 years later. From the point of view of the Kurds, the 1991 war became—after Saddam Hussein’s postwar repression and the mass flight of refugees into Turkey—a kind of liberation, under the protection of the Anglo-American no-fly zone. The Kurds of northern Iraq enjoyed a regional autonomy that has been consolidated by the war of 2003. And for the Shia, despite the dreadful losses of Saddam Hussein’s repression after 1991 and the deaths by sectarian strife in the last three years, the American interventions have brought about an unprecedented era of empowerment and liberation. This is unlikely to produce the kind of gratitude that would see statues of the two Bushes erected in Kurdish Suleimaniya or in the Shia city of Basra, but the effect of this double liberation on the politics of Iraq and of the region has been revolutionary. The balance of power between Sunni and Shia, and (because of the empowerment of Iran through the departure of its old enemy Saddam Hussein and of the Sunni-dominated Iraq that he represented) between Arab and Persian, has been fundamentally shifted.
In a sense, the Islamic world is undergoing almost simultaneously its Renaissance, its Reformation, and its Enlightenment, and the Shia are living their version of the civil rights movement, all while reeling from the impact of economic and media revolutions. Considered in this light, the emergence of Al Qaeda might be seen as a particularly virulent symptom of this tumultuous Arab transformation and as a response not just to the perceived sins of the West, but also, in the case of Zarqawi, as an extreme Sunni reaction to the Shia resurgence. Of all the tectonic shifts now jarring the Middle East, the rise of the long-subdued Shia promises to be the most potent, and potentially the most destructive.
Shopping for God - Dwelling in a Land of Converts
Every conversion is a betrayal, even as we depict it as an act of higher loyalty. When we turn toward God, taking what we believe is the right path, we rationalize the switch as turning toward truth and submitting to the unassailable claims that eternal principlesmust, of necessity, make on our conscience. Here I stand; I can do no other, as Martin Luther put it to Johann von Eck and the Diet of Worms. And that was before he realized what he was getting himself, and Christendom, into.
Yet even as we embrace what we see as the greater good, we are, by definition, turning away from something we held dear from the tradition we were raised in, from ideas we once believed in, from friends, from family, from the tribe. And that rejection often brings conflict and pain, and ought to bring a desire to redeem, if not explain, the unsettling tensions that can accompany one of the most profound decisions in a person's life. Well, I won't see you in paradise, a lifelong friend said when I announced that I had converted to Catholicism. My friend is a faithful evangelical whose judgments are not to be dismissed lightly, even though a natural reflex against my disloyalty to what was once our shared tradition surely weighed heavily in her verdict. She has since come to an uneasy peace with my choice, and I suspect the evolution of her beloved Billy Graham on issues of denominational competition he was one of the great eulogizers of Pope John Paul II no doubt eased the way.
Still, more than fifteen years later, that naked confrontation of creeds and emotions continues to disturb my conscience, and to prompt considerations not only of my own religious choice but of our growing national penchant for conversion for continual religious reinvention that seems to mirror our national fascination with makeovers and our almost manic need for constant movement. A pilgrimage is one thing, having the goal of deepening faith through a long and rigorous journey of sanctification. But we are rapidly becoming a society of religious boulevardiers, always on the move, not as itinerant monks who bring our faith with us, but as God-shoppers on the lookout for the best deal. The reality is that conversion does not seem to trouble our nights nearly as much as it should, and to my mind this calls into question the depth of our newfound commitments; it also points to the common societal tendency to gloss over real differences, or, at the other extreme, to exalt combat as the only means to ideological clarity.
In the first scenario, religious conversion amounts to little more than psychotherapy chicken soup that could be served up any number of ways depending on one's mood. In the second scenario, conversion is just another weapon wielded on the battlefield that is America's public square today a way to prove that I am right and you are wrong, and wrong about everything, not just religion. Our conversion is affirmed only by demonstrating that our personal choice of what to believe is superior to all other beliefs, including those we ourselves once espoused. Neither rationale the therapeutic or the self-justifying addresses the claims of the religious community we leave or the one we join. The real disloyalty in these cases is to faith itself.
Historically, the ardor for conversion in America is understandable, though its contemporary expression is nothing short of revolutionary. We are a God-loving nation, defined spiritually by our revivalism, as we are politically by our republicanism. We do not want inherited truth any more than we want a hereditary monarchy. Yet sometime in the last few decades the quest for authenticity we were founded, after all, by Puritan pilgrims seeking the true faith got mixed up with our market-based love of reinvention, and thus the conversion industry was born.
In his classic work from 1955, Protestant-Catholic-Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology, Will Herberg argued that some 96 percent of Americans continued to identify with the religious traditions they were raised in by and large one of the three religions examined in the book. If there was any significant shifting, it was within these groupings. Stasis characterized the American religious character. Three decades later, one of Herberg's leading successors in the field, sociologist Robert Wuthnow, showed how much the landscape had changed: By 1985, Wuthnow reported, one-third of Americans had converted to another religion, and most likely the numbers have continued to rise since then. Not only that, but many Americans, in what sociologist Wade Clark Roof has called this generation of seekers, have converted several times.
So determined are Americans to choose their religious destiny that any opinion to the contrary is seen as, well, heresy. I once attended a seminar on Native American religion in which one of the panelists an American Indian was complaining about the appropriation of his traditions by white shamans, a lament that received nods of assent from the largely white crowd. But he elicited an audible gasp when he pointed out that people simply couldn't choose to become a practitioner of Indian religion. The religion is so bound up with the tribe you are born into and the geographical area where that tribe lives, he explained, that plucked from this context the religion makes no sense. And conversely, it makes no sense for someone to pretend to be part of a world they cannot enter. Needless to say, his listeners were aghast.
What accounts for the shift? There are a number of factors, prominent among them the decline of institutions, the fraying of communal and ethnic bonds, and the rise in religious intermarriage. Once you marry someone from outside your faith or denomination, it becomes increasingly untenable to consign them to even the comfier upper rings of hell. (Mel Gibson, a traditionalist Catholic who has suggested that his Episcopalian wife is destined for perdition, may be exceptional in this regard.)
The increase in immigration has not diluted the predominantly Christian makeup of the nation as much as some contend, but it did significantly expand the menu of choices. Loosed from their bonds of familial and denominational loyalty, Americans have happily availed themselves of these choices the heretical imperative, as Peter Berger has called it. We remain a deeply spiritual, if not especially religious nation; most people feel they have to be something. (A man's got to believe in something, W.C. Fields said. His punch line was, I believe I'll have another drink, but the original sentiment still holds true.) In the abstract, this sort of religious freelancing should be a good thing. Sociologists like to differentiate between achieved and ascribed identities, the latter being the religious loyalty that one takes in with mother's milk, together with the rites and traditions of old-world faiths. Achieved identities are those we discover for ourselves, often as we grow into adulthood.
In his book Paul the Convert, author Alan F. Segal reports that two-thirds of religious conversions are gradual, the result of intellectual and emotional quests, and only one-third are sudden. That kind of slow fermentation should I would think produce a deeper and richer religious faith. Yet the opposite seems typically to be the case, as religious conversion so often looks like spiritual faddism, with questing Americans snapping up all manner of spiritual snake oil and trading it in as soon as they realize they've bought just another placebo.
For many who discover a new spiritual home within a long-standing tradition, on the other hand, there seems to be a tendency to proclaim their newfound allegiance, but without acquiring a corresponding grounding in the history and beliefs of their faith. That results in what both liberals and conservatives decry as an endemic religious illiteracy in America, or, perhaps worse, a simple lack of religious seriousness.
The opposite tendency, of course, is the more widely noted phenomenon of converts becoming the greatest zealots. Diving into the deep end of the religious pool can be as problematic as skimming the surface, however. William James famously described conversion as the process, gradual or sudden, by which a self hitherto divided or consciously wrong, inferior, and unhappy becomes unified and consciously right, superior, and happy. It is a short step from there to triumphalism, and too many converts seem ready to take that step, perhaps in part out of a desire to compensate for their delayed enlightenment by trying to prove that they are purer in their beliefs, more Catholic, one might say, than the pope. This can produce all manner of tragic results, as each day's news bears witness to.
The more common problem with the zealousness of the converted, I think, is that it is often rooted in a narcissistic desire to be right, which is then camouflaged as a proprietary monopoly on universal truth. One can believe in something that is true without being correct about everything else in one's life. The humility required by the great religious traditions would never sanction the egotism of identifying one's personal wishes with the universal truths of the faith. Separating the two is perhaps the greatest spiritual challenge for the deepest religious believers. It is a quest for what Richard Gaillardetz, a Catholic studies professor at the University of Toledo, has called eschatological humility. Eschatological humility, he wrote in Commonweal magazine, treasures divine truth as it is mediated through the received faith of the church but also recognizes that we do not so much possess divine truth as it possesses us.
Along with the penchant for zealotry, the newly converted are often strongly attracted by the idea of a historically grounded religious authenticity. One could argue that this has always been an incentive to, and a justification for, religious conversion. Go to the source for the real thing, we are told, so it's no surprise that we follow this advice in our thinking about religion.
Several years ago I was invited by a rabbi friend to give a talk at Sabbath services. Naturally, I was a bit daunted by the prospect, especially when the rabbi encouraged me to talk about my experience of swimming the Tiber a story that I figured might be of interest to the audience, but not one pointing to common ground between us. When I had finished my tale of conversion and opened the floor for questions, an elderly woman in the front row shot up her hand and asked, So, you went from being a Protestant to a Catholic. Why didn't you go all the way and become a Jew?
The line induced laughs, and my somewhat embarrassed rabbi quickly shifted the discussion to other areas. I actually thought it was a good question, perhaps because I recognize in my own psyche the lure of historical verisimilitude, which was certainly one of the factors in my own leap backward, beyond 1517. The motivation to make a clean break is understandable, and an integral part of the appeal of conversion. Islam, in fact, teaches that its newcomers do not convert per se but actually undergo a reversion, that is, a return to the place where we all started, Islam being the default set point of the soul in the Muslim view. By discovering one's true self somewhere in the distant past, we needn't contend with the hurt feelings of those living with us in the present, or with the idea that we ourselves have changed or betrayed anything. We were always right. We just didn't know it.
Unfortunately, in America today this approach too often becomes an exercise in chronological, rather than theological, justification. It becomes what I call vintage religion, like shopping for retro furnishings that can recreate a world we were never part of and that we can then idealize through some soft-focus lens of nostalgia. The resuscitation of Celtic and Norse religions, along with resurgent neopagan faiths like Wicca and Heathenism, are manifestations of this trend. These modern versions of ancient traditions are often created out of whole cloth, but they offer the pleasure of enjoying an old-time religion without engaging one's own past. It is the luxury of wearing a beautiful fur coat that was bought by someone else's grandmother long before it was a sin to kill animals for fashion.
Underlying the entire conversion question is the loss of the fear of eternal damnation. In the old days, if you made the wrong choice you were doomed. Not anymore. Today, religious belief is pretty much, I'm OK, You're OK. See you in heaven. In his 2003 book The Transformation of American Religion: How We Actually Practice Our Faith, Alan Wolfe aptly calls this phenomenon salvation inflation, and the numbers bear him out. One Gallup poll has shown that 75 percent of Americans say that there is a religion other than their own that offers a true path to God, and of that number a substantial majority believe that this other path to God is equally as good as their own. Additionally, although the vast majority of Americans say that there will come a day when God judges people and decides whether they will go to heaven or hell, the poll finds that 44 percent believe that a good person will go to heaven whether or not he or she believes in God.
This is seven centuries and an even longer distance theologically from Pope Boniface VIII declaring that there is no salvation outside the Catholic Church extra ecclesiam nulla salus.
The progress from a conversion of fear to one of mature choice would not seem to be such a bad thing. Converting out of the fear that we are dangling over a fiery pit with one foot on a banana peel, as Jonathan Edwards had it, is not exactly the most profound motivation for worshiping God. The problem, of course, is that if one religion or no religion is as good as another, why switch? In fact, why be anything at all? Many Americans seem to be asking the same thing, and the lack of any need to formally affiliate with a brand-name faith has contributed to the steep decline in membership in many denominations. It has also prompted the expenditure of millions of dollars in advertising by those denominations, in an effort to better market themselves.
Improving public relations, however, does not strike me as the best way to attract believers. In the end, meaningful beliefs attract the best believers, and the enduring appeal of conversion can be seen as evidence that many Americans do take their religious quests seriously. This can be salutary not only for them, but also for the faiths they embrace. I once heard the church historian Martin Marty recount his experience of acquiring three daughters-in-law, and his surprise at their fascination with the various Marty family rituals whose roots and significance the Martys themselves had begun to take for granted through decades of habit. It was thanks to these newcomers to the family, he said, that he began to rediscover the meaning and memories of the family traditions. In the same way, converts can hold up a mirror to the communities they join, perhaps reminding us of things we don't like about ourselves, but also about the good things that attracted us in the first place, and above all about the why of who we are.
In American Catholicism adult converts 150,000 every year have been called the new immigrants, an apt label given the impact they are having on the church. Purdue University sociologist James Davidson has shown that the 10 percent or so of American Catholics who are converts are often more faithful in their observances than so-called cradle Catholics. Converts are more likely to believe there is something special about being Catholic; they are more likely to be registered in a parish (87 versus 67 percent); to read about the church (47 versus 34 percent); to share their faith (41 versus 29 percent); and to believe that their faith helps them with daily decisions (35 versus 21 percent).
Certainly much of this can be chalked up to the often short-lived zeal of the convert. It is the process of deepening the faith after conversion what the church calls mystagogy that is the true test of a conversion. The pilgrimage of sanctification after the moment of justification is an avenue by which bonds frayed by rejection of one tradition in favor of another can be healed.
In reflecting on his own faith journey on the eve of his retirement in 2004, Bill Moyers cited T.S. Eliot's claim that no man has ever climbed to the higher stages of the spiritual life who has not been a believer in a particular religion, or at least a particular philosophy. Moyers then inverted the image of mountaintop enlightenment to one that is perhaps better suited to the nitty-gritty of real faith at work: As we dig deeper into our own religion, if we are lucky we break through to someone else digging deeper toward us from the core of their tradition, and on some transcendent level we converge....
This does not avoid the differences, or gloss over the difficulties, inherent in our religious choices. Rather, it is a call to plumb the depths of our faith to be truer to ourselves, and in doing so to discover connections with eternal truths and with other believers that may not have been visible under the aspect of a privatized or superficial life of faith. Conversion is popularly depicted as a sudden burst of inspiration enjoyed by a blessed individual. But the most firmly grounded conversion is one that transports an individual deeply into a community. In the end, true conversion is an ongoing process, and above all a challenge to ourselves as much as it is to those around us.
The Baby Drain
“Europe is infected by a strange lack of desire for the future...”
...The town has housing enough to support a population of 3,000, but fewer than 1,600 live here, and every year the number drops. Rocco Falivena, Laviano’s 56-year-old mayor, strolled down the middle of the street, outlining for me the town’s demographics and explaining why, although the place is more than a thousand years old, its buildings all look so new. In 1980 an earthquake struck, taking out nearly every structure and killing 300 people, including Falivena’s own parents. Then from tragedy arose the scent of possibility, of a future. Money came from the national government in Rome, and from former residents who had emigrated to the U.S. and elsewhere. The locals found jobs rebuilding their town. But when the construction ended, so did the work, and the exodus of residents continued as before.
When Falivena took office in 2002 for his second stint as mayor, two numbers caught his attention. Four: that was how many babies were born in the town the year before. And five: the number of children enrolled in first grade at the school, never mind that the school served two additional communities as well. “I knew what was my first job, to try to save the school,” Falivena told me. “Because a village that does not have a school is a dead village.” He racked his brain and came up with a desperate idea: pay women to have babies. And not just a token amount, either; in 2003 Falivena let it be known he would pay 10,000 euros (about $15,000) for every woman — local or immigrant, married or single — who would give birth to and rear a child in the village. The “baby bonus,” as he calls it, is structured to root new citizens in the town: a mother gets 1,500 euros when her baby is born, then a 1,500-euro payment on each of the child’s first four birthdays and a final 2,500 euros the day the child enrolls in first grade. Falivena has a publicist’s instincts, and he said he hoped the plan would attract media attention. It did, generating news across Italy and as far away as Australia...
There are some indications that Falivena’s baby bonus is succeeding — the first-grade class has 17 students this year — but that figure may be misleading. As it turns out, many of the new parents who have taken advantage of the bonus are locals who planned to have a child anyway. (Ida Robertiello, another of the baby-bonus mothers who sang Falivena’s praises for me, admitted that she was already pregnant with her son Matteo when Falivena announced his scheme.) The main effect of the bonus money may be on the timing of births. Last year Falivena was out of office, and the temporary replacement canceled the payments. “I know several women in Laviano who are pregnant now,” Daniela told me, and her husband added, with a rakish grin, that couples got busy because they knew Falivena was coming back as mayor, with a promise to restart the payments.
But with close to 50 mothers now eligible, Falivena doesn’t know how long he can keep the baby bonus going. And Laviano is still losing population...
Demographically speaking, Laviano is not unique in Italy, or in Europe. In fact, it may be a harbinger. In the 1990s, European demographers began noticing a downward trend in population across the Continent and behind it a sharply falling birthrate. Non-number-crunchers largely ignored the information until a 2002 study by Italian, German and Spanish social scientists focused the data and gave policy makers across the European Union something to ponder. The figure of 2.1 is widely considered to be the “replacement rate” — the average number of births per woman that will maintain a country’s current population level. At various times in modern history — during war or famine — birthrates have fallen below the replacement rate, to “low” or “very low” levels. But Hans-Peter Kohler, José Antonio Ortega and Francesco Billari — the authors of the 2002 report — saw something new in the data. For the first time on record, birthrates in southern and Eastern Europe had dropped below 1.3. For the demographers, this number had a special mathematical portent. At that rate, a country’s population would be cut in half in 45 years, creating a falling-off-a-cliff effect from which it would be nearly impossible to recover. Kohler and his colleagues invented an ominous new term for the phenomenon: “lowest-low fertility.”
To the uninitiated, “lowest low” seems a strange thing to worry about. A few decades ago we were getting “the population explosion” drilled into us. The invader species homo sapiens, we learned, was eating through the planet’s resources and irretrievably fouling and wrecking its fragile systems. Has the situation changed for the better since Paul Ehrlich set off the alarm in 1968 with his best seller “The Population Bomb”? Do current headlines — global food shortages, climate change — not indicate continuing signs of calamity?
They do, as far as some are concerned, but things have changed somewhat. For one thing, around the world, even in developing countries, birthrates have plummeted — from 6.0 globally in 1972 to 2.9 today — as populations have shifted from rural areas to cities and people have adopted urban lifestyles, and the drop has perhaps lessened the urgency of the overpopulation cry. Meanwhile, in recent years another chorus of voices has sounded. Yes, we’re straining resources, they say, and it’s undeniable that some parts of the globe are overrun with humanity. But other regions now confront a very different fate. In Europe, “lowest low” isn’t just a phenomenon of rural areas like Laviano. Cities like Milan and Bologna have recorded some of the lowest birthrates anywhere, in part because the high cost of living forces couples either to move or to have fewer children. After the term was invented, “lowest-low fertility” got the attention of leaders in Brussels and national capitals across the Continent — and by now everyone from Seville to Helsinki seems to be aware of it. In Greece, the problem is so well situated in the national psyche that it is conversationally compacted: people refer simply to “the demographic.” Putting the numbers in a broader world-historical context stirred a debate about Europe’s future. Around the time that President Kennedy went to Germany and gave his “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech, Europe represented 12.5 percent of the world’s population. Today it is 7.2 percent, and if current trends continue, by 2050 only 5 percent of the world will be European.
“Demographers and economists foresee that 30 million Europeans of working age will ‘disappear’ by 2050. At the same time, retirement will be lasting decades as the number of people in their 80s and 90s increases dramatically.” The crisis, they argue, will come from a “triple whammy of increasing demand on the welfare state and health-care systems, with a decline in tax contributions from an ever-smaller work force.” That is to say, there won’t be enough workers to pay for the pensions of all those long-living retirees. What’s more, there will be a smaller working-age population compared with other parts of the world; the U.S. Census Bureau’s International Database projects that in 2025, 42 percent of the people living in India will be 24 or younger, while only 22 percent of Spain’s population will be in that age group. This, in the wording of a Demographic Fitness Survey by the Adecco Institute, a London-based research group, will result in a “war for talent.” And the troubles for Europe are magnified by other factors in the existing welfare states of many of its countries. Europeans are used to early retirement — according to the Adecco survey, only 60 percent of men in France between the ages of 50 and 64 are still working.
Then there is the matter of what kind of society “lowest low” will bring. How will the predominance of one- and two-child families affect family cohesion, sibling relationships, care for elderly parents? Imagine a society in which family reunions consist of three people, in which nearly all of a child’s relatives are in their 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s. Laviano’s empty streets echo with something strange and seemingly new. As the social scientists Billari, Kohler and Ortega put it, Europe is entering “an uncharted territory in demographic history.”
...“Maybe tinkering with the retirement age and making other economic adjustments is good,” he said. “But you can’t go on forever with a total fertility rate of 1.2. If you compare the size of the 0-to-4 and 29-to-34 age groups in Spain and Italy right now, you see the younger is almost half the size of the older. You can’t keep going with a completely upside-down age distribution, with the pyramid standing on its point. You can’t have a country where everybody lives in a nursing home.”
Sunday, June 29, 2008
Kiss My Ass, Oh Yeah
MHNN (Ann Arbor, MI)- Pat M Santy author of Carnival Of The Insanities (COTI) met with Bill Clinton after his remarks regarding Barack Obama were widely disseminated.When asked if the former president would actively support the Democrat nominee, he replied that Obama would have to 'Kiss my ass' before he would extend any help to the campiagn.
Friends and colleagues of the former president contacted Dr Santy and specifically asked her to head up an intervention team that might calm Mr Clinton and defuse the situation.
After speaking with Barack and Michele Obama and securing their commitment to be in attendance, Dr Sanity agreed to meet with the former president. What follows is a transcript of session.
PMS- Mr President, you seem highly agitated. I'm concerned about you.
BC- I'm a man. Of course I'm agitated.
PMS- Excuse me?
BC- I'm sitting next to Michelle Obama. She's hot.
PMS- Let's stay focused.
MO- That's his problem. He stays focused on what's in his pants.
BC- You are such a kidder, Michelle! Women with a sense of humor and big backside really turn me own.
PMS- Why are you so mad at Obama, Bill?
BC- Why am I so mad at Obama? Why am I so mad at Obama? I'm not mad at Obama- I'm outraged!
PMS- Why?
MC- Cause he's been bested by a black man, that's why. Bill Clinton is still a Lily white racist pig when you get right down to it.
BO- Michelle, shut up. I want to hear what he has to say.
MO-Push me around half breed and the only thing you'll get tonight is the TV remote.
BC- I'm outraged because I was feeding at the public trough for decades before I got to the White House. I had to pretend I gave a damn about people for years before I got my shot. I had to work my way up to the front of the line. Now, all of sudden the White House and the presidency have become an affirmative action destination.
MO- What did you say?
PMS- Maybe we ought to take a break-
BC- I don't need no stinkin' break. Here's the deal, fat butt. You haven't paid your dues. It's that simple. You guys latched the onto public assistance trough right off the bat. The Chicago Democrat machine took care of your every need. When you headed off to Washington, they helped you make sure the hospital where Michelle 'worked' got some big money- and her salary almost tripled overnight. We didn't have a machine like that in Arkansas. We took the big risks ourselves-
BO- You mean like Whitewater? How is it you lost money but never actually lost money?
MO- It always amazes me how dumb some white folks can be.
BC- Screw you.
BO- No, screw you! You are just upset because I've shut the door to the Clinton's taking what they can when they can from whom they can. Your wife is a Senator- just like me and 98 others. She's nothing special and consequently, you're nothing special anymore. That has to bug the hell outta you. I know all about psychology and dysfunction. I read that 3 dead shrink guy everyday.
PMS- Good for you, Barack!
MO- He's white.
PMS- Who is white?
MO- That shrink guy. Only a white guy has the stones to pretend he's not one but three dead guys.
PMS- Yes Michelle. Must be a white privilege thing.
BO- Here's where you can kiss my ass, Bill. Why should I help you retire your wife's campaign debt? How come when you spend your own money you don't have to actually spend that money? Why is your money sacred, Bill? Romney spent his own money and and didn't ask for it back.
MO- Even that honkey dumbass Kerry spent his wife's ketchup money and didn't demand it back. What makes you so special? Come on white boy, tell us?
BC- I WAS THE PRESIDENT! I WAS THE LEADER OF THE FREE WORLD! HOW DARE YOU TALK TO ME LIKE THAT!
MO- You were the dumbass who got caught with his pants down and you were the dumbass that lied to the nation and you were the dumass that got his law license revoked for a while. We know exactly who you are.
PMS- I don't think this is helpful-
BC- Whatever problems you have with me have nothing to with Hillary-
BO- She's a lying bitch, too. Remember the 941 FBI files of Clinton enemies found in her office? Remember the Rose Law firm billing records that proved she lied? She and you have lots in common.
BC- Big talk from the guy who got into bed with Rezko and Auchi. Big talk from the guy who took Cook County handouts and patronage. Wanna play that game? The only change you can deliver is more corruption. You talk about race in America and all the while you are empowering the Chicago Democrats. Ralph was right. You just talk white. You don't give a damn about anybody but yourself and what's in it for you.
MO- You got that right- and wait till you see what we have in store for you. We know what Sandy Berger shoved down his pants. How about a black man tell the world-
PMS- I think we need a break Relax, read Carnival Of The Insanities and we'll pick this up later.
Saturday, June 28, 2008
'Ranting About Feminism: Not That I'm Bitter'
(The comments at the end of the piece are fascinating)
I worry about the next generation of young women.
A few years ago I was telling a story about growing up and listening to such high-self-esteem songs on the radio as “Love Has No Pride” or “I Will Follow Him.” At one point, a young woman in the back of the room raised her hand and pointed out that “two full generations have passed since you were growing up.” (I thanked her for sharing and then told her, gently, that she failed the class.) But I decided to go and listen to some new music.
That week it so happened that on the cover of Time magazine there was a singer-songwriter named Jewel. Her hit song was called “You Were Meant for Me.” I don’t know whether it’s actually been identified as the theme song for clinical depression, but I think it should be. It goes something like, “I get up in the morning and you’re not here, even though you were meant for me. I make one egg but I don’t clean the pan. I go to the movies but I leave early because you were meant for me. I go home, I cook the other egg in the dirty pan because you were meant for me,” etc. This is what’s happened after 40 years of the women’s movement.
At least with “I Will Follow Him,” we got off our asses. Not that I’m bitter.
Yet these are women who pay their own bills, write their own papers, and fight their own ideological battles. They bring home the bacon, fry it up in the pan, etc., just as the song has it. They are busy revising the rules, not bending to them.
Speaking of the rules: In 1996, I appeared on Oprah debating with two “girls” who had written a book titled The Rules (I call them “girls” because that’s what they called themselves. They are exactly my age. We all graduated from high school in 1975 and even if women are still, at least according to the ex-president of Harvard, deficient in math skills, every woman can still figure out how old another woman is. We can also figure out each other’s weight as if we were running a booth at a state fair.)
On Oprah’s stage I faced a blonde and a brunette; the brunette did not speak. And I don’t want to sound nasty, but the blonde was as blond as I am. We argued on television like a bunch of women from the Bronx yelling at each other through tenement windows and over clotheslines. They wanted to know, as the blond put it, “why you have such a problem with our book, Dr. Barreca.” (She made the word “doctor” sound like “vampire.”) I replied, “I have a problem with your book because it assumes that men are morons and that women are capable of infinite manipulation; you tell women that the only way to get a man to marry them is to withhold sex as long as possible. You say, and I quote, ‘Never laugh out loud in front of a man. Save the laughter for your girlfriends.’ And ‘No matter how hot the sex gets, you must remain cool.’ What I want to know is, if you can’t laugh out loud, and you can’t have hot sex, why on earth would you want a husband?”
Why, in other words, should any of us do battle with these stereotypes? The victory is insignificant, we wouldn’t have to get our hands dirty, and we’d never be late for work. Oh, right, we probably wouldn’t be going out to work, either.
Hmmm….
Oh, right: because when you cave, you are buying, however subtly, into the idea that it is easier to please the master than to learn mastery — that you are getting what you need by the privilege of your sex rather than by the right of your humanity. You have to be nice to the guy who pumps your gas, checks your oil, or buys you a house and pays your bills. You literally can’t afford not to be. He’s “providing” for you because he’s happy with your company. If he becomes unhappy with you, he has every right to kick you out of his house and refuse to pay your bills. You are there, not by right, but by privilege.
Not that feminism has everything neatly sorted, as the Brits would say; there’s still a lot of work to be done.
The Onion had maybe the best response to the crisis of feminism: A 2003 headline blared “Women Now Empowered By Everything A Woman Does.” “Acts of empowerment include gossiping about the sexual proclivities of male acquaintances, lunching with other women in small groups, taking calcium-rich antacid tablets, and reading The Nanny Diaries.” The Onion purports to quote a women’s-studies professor as saying, “From midnight cheesecake noshers to Moms who don’t fool around with pain, feminist achievement covers a broad spectrum. … It is great to be a female athlete, senator, or physician. But we must not overlook the homemaker who uses a mop equipped with convenient, throwaway towellettes, the college co-ed who chooses to abstain from sex, and the college co-ed who chooses to have a lot of sex. Only by lauding every single thing a woman does, no matter how ordinary, can you truly go, girls.”
Okay, I’ll stop now. I know I’m ranting. Any thoughts on the subjects raised, my dears?
Friday, June 27, 2008
The Good, The Bad And The Ugly
The Good, The Bad And The Ugly
As many recent readers’ comments indicate, a lot of reasonable, smart people —including some artists — have nothing but contempt for contemporary art. A few even suspect contemporary artists — in particular, the famous ones whose moves from one mega-dealer to another are always in the art news, and whose exhibitions greedily gobble up whole museum interiors with gosh-and-golly “installations” — of pulling a fast one on the public.
Even people with broad taste in art, who like everything in modernism from Cubism to Abstract Expressionism, become enraged when they see so much contemporary art that to them looks deliberately ugly, or calculatedly offensive, or outrageously oversized or overproduced, or ridiculously expensive, or deliberately slack. The chorus of protest veritably shouts, “Why can’t contemporary artists just make beautiful art — like artists used to do?”
It’s important not to blame artists for changes in social and cultural values. Yes, they play a role in cultural changes, but they are not the single or even most important cause of those changes. Artists necessarily make art that mirrors their own times. (Otherwise, they’d be ignored — something artists emphatically do not like.) In modern times, some artists have been notoriously ahead of their times — but these artists are exceptions to the general rule, operative even in modernism, that artists who want to be significant in the history of art must, for starters, be recognized in their own times.
We can’t predict how people in the future will interpret art that’s made in any given era, or the new contexts in which it will be seen. The Greeks, for example, would have found our delectation over the armless Venus de Milo incomprehensible. People in the Renaissance would have thought it absurd to find beauty in Gothic ruins, and a museum-going bourgeois in Paris in the 1870s regarded Impressionism as hideously ugly.
If modern art has taught us one thing, it is to be appreciative of many different kinds of art. Picasso thought African sculpture was truly beautiful when most people thought it only exotic. The art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler thought Picasso’s African-influenced Cubist paintings beautiful when most people thought them ugly. Many current historians of modern art find Andy Warhol’s “Marilyn” paintings truly beautiful, where their predecessors found them merely crassly attention-getting. And so on.
Today’s most visible contemporary art reflects and compresses our society’s main beliefs into visual forms. Like it or not, the odds are that the art from today that’s thought to be great (or even just very good) a hundred years from now, is right now among the art that’s being shown in galleries. To invoke the old saw about fiction, “There are no Great American Novels lying in bureau drawers.” With the exception of “outsider artists” — the rare exception, since there are hardly any possibilities left for anyone to truly be “outside” society — visual artists aren’t like Emily Dickinson, quietly stowing their art away in a private place.
Whether we’re talking about Michelangelo with his celestial nudes, Monet with his “impression” of a sunrise, or the contemporary Japanese artist Takashi Murakami with his bug-eyed, flower wallpaper, the first aim of an artist is to express some kind of meaning. For many artists, meaning comes through beauty. But not for all. Just about any expressionist artist — from Matthias Grünewald in the 16th century to Emile Nolde in the early 20th — aims first and foremost to express deep agony, and he (or, these days, she) uses deep distortion, rather than beauty, to achieve that aim. Seeing the paintings of Chaim Soutine or Francis Bacon or Alice Neel as “beautiful” is a retrospective, culturally acquired, taste.
Then there’s the vast and varied category of “conceptual art,” ranging from Marcel Duchamp and Dada from 90 years ago, through Sol LeWitt and Joseph Kosuth a generation ago, to every third show in the Chelsea galleries today. It all goes for ironic meaning — a punch line, if you will — at the expense of not only beauty, but even any design considerations other than basic legibility.
But, one suspects, even if Duchamp had never been born and Dada had never occurred, our egalitarian age would still devalue beauty. We who live in this speedy, diverse, more or less democratic society are, down deep, fairly suspicious of beauty. Beauty is based on a hierarchy that labels some things undeniably “beautiful” and others irretrievably ugly. Most serious, inventive and “alive” contemporary artists don’t want merely to reiterate elements of an established hierarchy. Even if they are interested in “beauty,” they want to test its boundaries, to make it new, to make it a beauty that speaks to their times. This is the task for artists of our times. Blaming contemporary artists for the situation caused by the democratic age in which we live is, in the end, a little silly.
When the next generation of artists looks back at the art being made today, it will probably dismiss most of it not as ugly, or too ironic, but as merely old-fashioned, i.e. not “beautiful” in a meaningful way to them or, with our current “conceptual” art, not ironic enough. Sometime in the future, however, some overlooked aspect of some of today’s art will inevitably stimulate new and unexpected beauties. “Beautiful,” that is, to people energetic enough to get out there and look at contemporary art, open-minded enough really to wrestle with it, and savvy enough to try to sort things out for themselves.
This, folks, is the way the art ball bounces.
Short Changed Kiwis, Comedian On Trial And Chocolate Security
Rules and regulations, EU style
A market trader has been banned from selling a batch of kiwi fruits because they are 1mm smaller than EU rules allow.
Inspectors told 53-year- old Tim Down he is forbidden even to give away the fruits, which are perfectly healthy.
The father of three will now have to bin the 5,000 kiwis, costing him £1,000 in lost sales.
Speaking yesterday from the stall in Bristol he has owned for 20 years, Mr Down said: 'It's total nonsense. I work hard enough to make a living without all these bureaucrats telling us what we can and can't sell.
'They're saying I'm a criminal for selling this fruit, but the real crime is that all this fruit will go to waste - all because it's 1mm too small.
'It's a terrible waste, particularly when we're all feeling the pinch from rising food prices and I've got to throw away this perfectly good fruit.'
There are thousands of children starving in Africa...
A Canadian stand-up comedian will face a human rights tribunal hearing after a woman complained she and her friends faced a "tirade of homophobic and sexist comments" while attending one of his shows.
"They were drunk, they were being jerks and I was very rude and visceral to them because, like I said, if you have a heckler what you want to do is put them in their place by offending them, so I tried to hit them where it hurts and the only thing I had to key on was the fact that they were lesbians.
"I don't care if they're lesbians, heterosexuals, homosexuals or giraffes."
Mr. Earle said the complaint is an attack on comedians' right to perform. "I would never have expected it would get escalated to a philosophical battle."
George Carlin would have died a poor man if had been a Canadian.
No smoking allowed- unless you are lighting up a joint or some hash
Starting next week, you'll still be able to legally smoke a joint in the famously relaxed coffee shops of Amsterdam — but for a cigarette, you'll have to step outside.
A tobacco ban that goes into effect Tuesday in the Netherlands has both tourists and shop owners, like, totally confused, man.
"It's crazy," says Jon Foster, 36, an American who owns the popular Grey Area coffee shop in the gentrified Jordaan area of central Amsterdam. "It seems totally illogical to have a business that specializes in smoking and you ban tobacco."
The new law prohibits smoking in bars, cafes, restaurants and clubs to protect people from secondhand tobacco smoke. It is similar to bans that have swept across Europe since Ireland made pubs smoke-free in 2004, as well as restrictions across the USA.
The contradiction here is that the ban extends to coffee shops in the Netherlands that are renowned since 1976 for letting people buy and smoke marijuana or hashish without being arrested.
IBM is working with candy maker Mars Inc. and the U.S. government to study the genetic code of cocoa trees to safeguard the world's chocolate supply.
Closely held Mars, the maker of M&M candies and Snickers bars, and the U.S. Agriculture Department will sequence the entire cocoa genome, deciphering the plant's biological map. IBM will analyze the results using Blue Gene, the world's second- fastest supercomputer, the company said today in a statement.
Political unrest and plant diseases in Africa, home to two- thirds of cocoa production, have driven up prices more than 50 percent in the past year. Cocoa trees in Africa and Asia have become increasingly stunted from fungus, insects and drought, triggering supply shortfalls.
In a bid to appease the 'militants,' look for keffiya'd and hijab'd M&M's in a store near you.
Who Gets Palestinian Aid? The EU Isn't Telling
Relations between the EU and Israel received an upgrade last week. In Luxembourg, a decision was taken by the EU’s 27-member states to “elevate our [EU] relations to a new level of more intense, more fruitful, more influential cooperation,” according to Slovenian foreign minister Dimitrij Rupe whose country holds the EU presidency.
Despite these positive developments, there is an aspect of this relationship that if not properly dealt with, could strain EU-Israeli ties. And the reasons for this should be of serious concern for Bulgarians worried about the transparency and accountability of EU institutions.
The issue is over EU-funding of Non-Governmental organisations (NGOs) operating in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Every year, the EU provides tens of millions of Euros to various NGOs ostensibly to promote “peace”, “democracy”, and “reconciliation”. However, according to NGO Monitor, many of these NGOs use EU funds to promote Palestinian rejectionism, deny Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state and for other campaigns of deligitimisation.
Most notable is the campaign of “Boycotts Divestment and Sanctions”, which receives support from Christian Aid, the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network (EMHRN) and the Applied Research Institute-Jerusalem (ARIJ)- all EU-funded NGOs. In this regard, the EU actually funds groups, which undermine their official policies.
But what upsets Israelis the most is the opaque nature of the funding process. Despite a Ђ23 million budget for 2007, the Directorate-General for Humanitarian Aid (ECHO) does not identify the names of its Palestinian partner NGOs. Similarly AIDCO, which manages the “Partnership for Peace” programme, does not require its grant-recipients to identify the names of NGOs it provides EU monies to. Evaluations of EU-funded projects are also kept secret.
This is both a normative problem for the EU, which has emphasised the importance of transparency in government, and a practical issue that impedes oversight and an informed critical examination of performance indicators. The European Ombudsman seems to agree, and issued a strongly worded statement in June criticising the Commission for withholding documents from public scrutiny.
Ensuring that this issue does not become a thorn in the flowering EU-Israel relationship is critical. Bulgarian citizens and parliamentarians, regardless of their view of the Arab-Israeli conflict, have an important role to play. Demanding information from the European Commission on how public funds are spent, and asking whether they actually contribute to peace will demonstrate to the Israeli public that Europe is serious about using civil society to further strengthen this important strategic relationship.
So You Think You're Special?
From The Social Affairs Unit:
No, we can't all be special- And to think we can is the road to personal unhappiness and social breakdown.
Few would disagree that the need that most of us have to be appreciated by others - by our family, our friends and peers - is natural and healthy. The desire to be well-thought of can act as both a spur to individual achievement as well as a glue for keeping society together. Striving to be top in the field, to hone a particular talent, or to simply make money if that's your chosen path, can be inspiring and attractive.
But the need to be special, to be taken uncritically at one's own self-evaluation, or to draw attention to oneself at every opportunity, is something else entirely. Claiming uniqueness regardless of talent or deed, by making oneself the most seen, by shouting the loudest, or simply by way of brute force, might give the individual satisfaction - although this alone is highly questionable - but the effect on society's morale can be both destructive and divisive. It's this phenomenon which is currently disfiguring the British social landscape, and which I try to explore in Look at Me: Celebrating the Self in Modern Britain.
One need look no further than the language. It's fair to say that the traditional British characteristic of self-effacement is now obselete. Be understated now about your work ("Oh, it keeps the wolf from the door"), or what you have done with your life ("this and that"), and you will be taken at your word. For many modern Britons, raised to cherish self-esteem above all else, such modesty is simply not understood or is tantamount to self-negation, the greatest crime of all. Hyperbole rules the day, regardless of the banality of the circumstances: I'm devastated, you're totally incredible, he's completely bizarre.
Putting yourself at the centre of the universe, childlike as it is, is not in modern Britain a habit restricted to would-be stars, surly youths and hyped-up urban professionals. Educated middle class types do it in more rarefied ways, although the effect is the same in the end. Despite the ever-increasing use in the media of the word "community", and indeed what would appear to be a nostalgia for the simplicities of the past, there is in fact a repudiation amongst some sections of the population of any form of collective identity, whether expressed in nationhood, locality or personal roots. Such concepts are seen as constricting by these single, soaring selves.
Fascinated by other cultures, from which they carefully cherry-pick, and fans on principle of anything which transgresses the "norm", they are self-designated Citizens of the World, flattering themselves with their love for "the other". Totally self-formed (at least in their own eyes), they can shine forth, unsullied by any form of limiting group membership. Even when they do something as collective as a political protest - Not in My Name! - it is still resolutely egotistical.
Not that a group in itself is a bar to being special - so long as it's the right one of course. If you can claim victimhood of one or other variety - and according to one recent report, that's upward of 70% of us - you too can count yourself special. If that fails, then you can always exploit your emotional life for the benefit of the cameras - or perhaps, hook yourself onto somebody else's grief.
But it is in the cult of celebrity - which could arguably be better renamed the cult of visibility - that we can see the most glaring manifestation of what we might call the flight from ordinariness in modern British culture. Witnessing the elevation of the nonentity from mostly well-deserved obscurity to a position in which he or she receives blanket coverage from tabloid and broadsheet alike - as happens most obviously in so-called reality television - is an utterly demoralising and draining experience. Our attention is forced onto people and events which would otherwise barely occupy our thoughts, and in the process our own everyday priorities, concerns and efforts are demeaned and diminished. Jade Goody's effect on us has not, ultimately, been an elevating one.
The current obsession with celebrity is at odds with the broader landscape of British culture, which has traditionally prided itself on being less susceptible to such things. It exists now purely as an end in itself, the flip-side of our own obsession with ourselves. Celebrity is seen by thousands as an utterly attainable state, a tradable commodity. The more level-headed might be amused by the passing circus. Even those with a modicum of self-awareness would be able to put a distance between it and themselves. But for the less well-equipped, brought up to believe that all must have prizes, there really is no hope. And if, like the yob, they feel they've been told they are infinitely capable and then cheated of their place in the game, they might even get violent.
Should any of this matter? If you worry about the gradual disintegration of the public arena, then yes, it matters. If you are one of those people who finds yourself slowly but surely abandoning visits to restaurants, cinemas and theatres, exhausted by the loud exhibitionism and selfishness which passes for "vibrancy", then it matters. If you despair at the debasement of both our culture and its belief in the importance and capacity of the individual, it matters. It you believe that an attachment to something bigger than just our own selves is vital not only for social cohesion but inner balance, then it matters hugely.
A couple of years ago, the Prince of Wales, in his typically plaintive fashion, bemoaned the fashion for out-of-control self-belief. He complained in a leaked memo:
What is wrong with everyone nowadays? Why do they all seem to think they are qualified to do things far beyond their capabilities?Predictably and wilfully misrepresented, the Prince was torn limb from limb by a media which saw only aristocratic de haut en bas. But you didn't have to be remotely privileged to see he'd put his finger on something. His remarks sparked a few days of discussion about the failings of the education system. Vitally important though that is, it's not the whole story. If the Prince feels like venturing into further enquiry, perhaps Look at Me: Celebrating the Self in Modern Britain will give him more food for thought.
And Now, Sniffer Dogs Are Offensive
Muslim ANGER at sniffer dogs at station
Muslims travelling on trains from Brighton have objected to sniffer dogs being used to search them for drugs and bombs.
The trial by the British Transport Police (BTP) on all rail passengers travelling through the station prompted complaints from some Muslims who said their religion did not allow direct contact with dogs.
The findings, outlined in a Government report, showed that in another trial on the Heathrow Express platform at London's Paddington station, body scanners were considered unacceptable on religious grounds by female Muslims.
The report on five rail security trials conducted in 2006 and the public's response to them also revealed that some Asians and black people felt they could be selected for tests because of their ethnicity or because screening staff saw them as potential terrorists.
But the BTP said that despite being conscious of other people's beliefs, no-one would be absolved of the security checks on religious grounds.
A BTP spokesman said: "We are obviously aware of, and sensitive to, cultural sensitivities.
"BTP officers do have the power to stop and search anyone under section 44 of the Terrorism Act.
"This also covers the use of dog handlers and dogs, which are used to indicate any substance they have been trained to detect.
"As a force we obviously look at feedback about how people from all faiths and backgrounds view the use of dogs and how we can incorporate that into how the dogs and their handlers interact with people."
Thursday, June 26, 2008
China's Testosterone Problem
From The New Republic: No Country for Young Men
Over the last decade, they cropped up in cities throughout China, tucked into raucous markets or along forgotten side streets, their interiors smelling of musty canvas and crammed with bounty for aspiring young soldiers: illicit weapons shops with names like ARMY GOODS STORE and GUNCOOL. For a few thousand yuan--a few hundred dollars--assault rifle-like air guns await in dirty back rooms, along with fatigues, bulletproof vests, kneepads, long underwear, camouflage t-shirts, rucksacks, bandoliers, helmets, helmet sleeves, walkie-talkies, and two-liter CamelBaks. Once outfitted, China's militiamen organize into clubs--Guangzhou Fight Men, Shanghai Band of Brothers, Tianjin Seals--and storm remote lots or abandoned warehouses, shooting at each other with pellets, to stage what they call "war games." The term belies the seriousness participants assign the activity: The more established clubs have dedicated battlegrounds whose surrounding trees are nailed with DANGER signs.
In gun-happy America, this hobby might not rise above the level of eccentricity; but, in China, where most weapons are illegal, it requires a special degree of passion. Beijing periodically cracks down, and clubs sometimes disappear overnight. In a round-up last year, Beijing cops seized 3,400 guns and knives used in war games. Still, the government can't seem to quash the urge among Chinese twentysomethings to unleash a few rounds. The headline on a recent Shanghai Weekly article explains the games' appeal in unusually apt Chinglish: URBAN BATTLE: A VERY MAN ACTIVITY.
The macho violence spurting forth through outlets like war games is a growing trend in Chinese society--and China's one-child policy, in effect since 1979, is partly responsible. The country's three decades of iron-fisted population planning coincided with a binge in sex-selective abortions (Chinese traditionally favor sons, who carry on the family line) and a rise, even as the country developed, in female infant mortality. After almost 30 years of the policy, China now has the largest gender imbalance in the world, with 37 million more men than women and almost 20 percent more newborn boys than girls nationwide.
By the time these newborns reach puberty, war games may seem like a quaint relic. In the 2020s, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences researcher Zheng Zhenzhen, estimates in a People's Daily interview that 10 percent of Chinese men will be unable to find wives, which could have a huge impact on Chinese society. Historian David Courtwright suggests in Violent Land that sexually segregated societies in the United States--frontier towns flush with unmarried men, immigrant ghettos in early twentieth-century cities, mining camps--are behind our propensity toward violence. The immigrants and westward migrants who shaped early America, Courtwright says, were largely young single men, who are-- today as well as then--disproportionately responsible for drug abuse, looting, vandalism, and violent crime. A long-term study of Vietnam veterans in 1998 may explain exactly why: The subjects' testosterone levels, which are linked to aggression and violence, dropped when they married and increased when they divorced. Eternally single men, by extension, maintain high levels of testosterone--a recipe for violent civil unrest.
The one-child policy was instituted in an attempt to hamper the wild growth of the Chinese population. But, in the process of plugging one hole, the government may have left another open. The coming boom in restless young men promises to overhaul Chinese society in some potentially scary ways.
Lianyungang, a booming port city in a Jiangsu province economic belt, is ground zero for some of these changes. According to the China Family Planning Association, it's the city in China with the most extreme gender ratio for children under four--163 boys for every 100 girls. One sunny Saturday morning at verdant Cangwu Park, I count six boys and three girls bouncing on the inflatable castle. Near the ice-cream stand are a dozen sticky-faced kids, seven boys and five girls, feeding pigeons. The children running after kites adorned with Olympics mascots and China's Shenzhou VII spaceship: three and two. The drivers of the cheerful little tanks circling an electric track: three and one.
These numbers work fine on the playground, but, for China's many match- making services, they may prove troublesome. At the Good Luck Marriage Introduction Agency, in a town a few hours' drive west from Liangyungang, two whiteboards mounted on the wall advertise the age, height, and income of available singles. On the day I visit, founder Tao Hui, a fortysomething woman with a bouffant, is watching soap operas in her sweatpants. She hasn't felt the shortage yet, she says. On the whiteboards, a few dozen nameless men line up nicely to a few dozen nameless women. For now, many in the early wave of surplus men are marrying younger women.
"We'll see real problems in eight or ten years," Tao predicts. Her 17-year- old son, she assures me, has good prospects. But she already turns away a lot of single males from outlying villages with no money or education. "If they're ugly and can't find work, there's nothing I can do. No one wants them."
Preliminary returns from the first generation of population-controlled kids suggest how all those unwanted men might fill up their time. Over the past decade, as the boys hit adolescence, the country's youth crime rate more than doubled. In December, Chinese Society of Juvenile Delinquency Research Deputy Secretary General Liu Guiming told a Beijing seminar that today's teens were committing crimes "without specific motives, often without forethought."
The Chinese government--which, policy-making blunders aside, hardly wants a population of hopeless, volatile men under its rule--has been vainly trying to undo the damage. At a symposium on the policy last August, family-planning commission head Zhang Weiqing said the gender ratio harbors a "hidden threat to social stability." In February, officials publicly debated the timeline for phasing out stringent population planning targets, citing the gender ratio along with a rapidly aging population. "In the past, everyone thought we didn't have a problem," says Gu Baochang, a demographer at Renmin University in Beijing. "Now they're starting to pay attention."
In the meantime, the government is adopting a softer tone in its propaganda. The red characters painted on village walls throughout the countryside have evolved from the 1980s slogan YOU BEAT IT OUT! YOU CAN MAKE IT FALL OUT! YOU CAN ABORT IT! BUT YOU CANNOT GIVE BIRTH TO IT! Now they read: IMPLEMENT FAMILY PLANNING FOR THE GOOD OF ALL CITIZENS. And, recently, the government added BOYS AND GIRLS ARE BOTH TREASURES. In 2003, it unveiled the Care For Girls program, which gives stipends to parents of girls in some provinces.
But, as Chinese couples make more money, fertility is naturally declining-- meaning that today's bachelors will form an even larger proportion of China's future population than officials expect. Wang Feng, a sociologist at the University of California-Irvine who's part of a group of scholars advocating phasing out the one-child policy, says the outlook is grim: "Each successive birth cohort is going to be smaller. When younger cohorts get smaller, you have fewer females. It's a double whammy."
Online, many Chinese are worried--about the safety of their daughters, the marriage prospects of their sons. Others--presumably the boys themselves--meet the problem with ominous boasts. As one predicted last year on the portal Tianya: "Our national ability to pick up chicks will reach heights unparalleled in human history."
And still others are coming up with more practical outlets to exploit China's new cadre of unstable young bachelors. Two years ago in Nanjing, Jiangsu's capital, businessman Wu Gang opened the Rising Sun Anger Release Bar in a cheap hotel near the bank of the Yangtze River. The bar featured staples of Chinese entertainment like big-screen karaoke and plates of sunflower seeds but also a central catwalk where, for 100 yuan ($15) per minute, customers paid to assault the waiters, single young migrants from poorer cities to the north. If a customer preferred, his victim would dress in drag. Men "are under too much pressure," Wu explained to me one day, as the waiters high-kicked Pepsi bottles in the storeroom. "They need a way to release it."
Good News, Bad News, A Perry Mason Moment And Casting Leonardo
We've got good news and we've got bad news...:
Upbeat news would have to make up half of all newscasts on all of Romania's radio and television stations, under legislation adopted unanimously Wednesday in the senate.
"News programmes on TV and radio shall contain, in the same proportion, news with positive and negative themes," states the legislation, which is going to President Traian Basescu for adoption.
The measure is the idea of two senators -- one from the governing National Liberal Party, the other from the far-right Great Romania party -- who bemoan the "irreversible effect" of negative news "on the health and life of people".
Following a Tuesday trial when he called for DNA evidence from a urine puddle, a Rochester man was found not guilty of a violation-level charge of urinating in public.
Michael Huppe, 56, of 44 Forest Park Drive, was found not guilty by Judge Sawako Gardner, who offered no explanation for the verdict beyond "not guilty." Her decision was released Wednesday...
Representing himself at trial, Huppe fired a colorful line of questions at the officer including, "Did you see me take my thing out and urinate?" and "Did you test DNA to see if it was my urine?"
The officer testified he did not test DNA from the urine puddle.
"Swear on a Bible and say it was Mr. Huppe’s urine," Huppe shouted at the officer during the June 24 trial, when the judge ordered him to "take a deep breath" and promised the verdict would be forthcoming.
Italian architect Dr. David Fisher announced on Tuesday the launch of a revolutionary skyscraper in Dubai dubbed as the "world's first building in motion," an 80-story tower with revolving floors that give it an ever-shifting shape.
The spinning floors, hung like rings around an immobile cement core, would offer residents a constantly changing view of the Persian Gulf and the Dubai's futuristic skyline...Fisher acknowledges that he is not well known, has never built a skyscraper before and hasn't practiced architecture regularly in decades. But he insisted his lack of experience wouldn't stop him from completing the project, which has attracted top design talent, including Leslie E. Robertson, the structural engineer for the World Trade Center and the Shanghai World Financial Center.
"I did not design skyscrapers, but I feel ready to do so," Fisher said.Skeptics might question Fisher's credentials to pull off the job.
In a biography he had been distributing for months, he said he graduated from the University of Florence in 1976, came to New York in the mid-1980s and later developed hotels and ran a company that specialized in stone and prefabricated construction materials.
The biography also said he received an honorary doctorate from "The Prodeo Institute at Columbia University in New York." No such institution exists, however, and Columbia said it had never awarded Fisher an honorary degree.
Asked to explain the discrepancy, Fisher said, through his New York publicists, that he had been awarded the degree by the Catholic University of Rome during a ceremony in 1994 held at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, which is near Columbia's campus.
The bank just called. 'Build it if you can.'
Sharia Hits The Slopes
Apparently being bundled up head to toe in winter gear isn't enough for some 'militants.'
June 26: Islamist militants burned down a hotel at Pakistan’s only ski resort on Thursday as security in a northwestern tourist valley deteriorated despite a month-old peace pact, the police said.
The Swat valley, several hours drive on mountain roads from Islamabad, was a prime tourist destination until 2007 with ancient Buddhist ruins, a golf course, trout streams and the ski resort. "Half of the hotel has been burned down," said Swat’s police chief, Waqif Khan, referring to the only hotel at the Malam Jabba ski resort. The hotel is owned by the state tourism authority.
Mr Khan said authorities had not been able to get to the resort to tackle the blaze or inspect the damage.
"The area is not under our control, it’s under the militants’ control and no one can go there," he said.
Militants infiltrated the valley from the Afghan border in 2007 to support a radical cleric based there.
