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April 30, 2005

KMT Chairman Lien Chan's Historical Visit

KuoMingTang (KMT, Nationalist Party) Chairman Lien Chan's speech at Beijing University followed by Q&A with the audience. The CCP's allowing direct public broadcast of a speech by the KMT chair. It's a historic moment. Very cool.

- Pictures
- Transcript of Beijing University speech and Q&A (audio recording, WMA format)
- China Radio report, with speech transcript

Several reports from China Times (follow links for pinyin-annotated full articles)

2005.04.30　 中國時報
本報最新民調 連表現 56%民眾滿意

國民黨主席連戰訪問大陸，行前波折不斷，但是登陸之後的表現，國人多給予肯定的掌聲。依據本報最新民調發現，七成八的受訪者知道連戰訪問大陸，其中五成六滿意他的總體表現，五成四認為此行並未出賣台灣利益，五成的人表示連戰和中共領導人胡錦濤的會面，對兩岸關係有正面影響。

國民黨主席連戰訪問大陸，並於二十九日會見中共國家主席胡錦濤，引起國人高度關注。依據本報於當天完成針對台灣地區七百餘位成人的電話訪問顯示，受訪民眾當中，已經有七成八知道連戰訪中這件事，二成二的人則表示並不知情。

Words Lien Chan presented in Nanjing at the Sun Yat-sen mausoleum and the former seat of the Republic of China government:

2005.04.28　 中國時報
連戰祭國父文

連戰今天代表國民黨前往中山陵致祭，宣讀祭文並獻花。祭文內容如下：

「維民國九十四年四月二十七日，總理孫中山先生逝世八十週年紀念，中國國民黨主席連戰，代表全體黨員，謹以鮮花致祭於總理之靈曰：清季末世，內政失修，外患迭乘，屢訂條約，喪權辱國，生民塗炭，其誰能救？惟我總理，獨抱遠識，洞燭潮流，倡導革命，發明主義，昭蘇民智，呼號奔走，拯民救國。四方賢豪，共矢丹誠，同心同德，一致奮鬥。辛亥雙十，義起武昌，專制覆亡，民國肇建，五色旗揚，開啟共和。偉哉總理，彪炳勳績，謙讓大位，發展實業，建設國家。民國以後，綱常不備，禍亂相尋。帝制復辟，軍閥亂政，列強為倀，內戰不休，民無寧日。總理明鑒，繼續革命，捍衛民國，維護法統，保存正義。北伐統一，和平建設，未竟志業，積勞盡瘁，遽逝北京。緬我總理，大功至德，千古一人，一人千古。凡我黨員，恪遵遺命，共勉振興，再造中華。　伏維　靈鑒」

2005.04.28　 中國時報
謁中山陵 連戰說出中華民國
羅如蘭、王銘義/南京廿七日專電

國民黨主席連戰昨天率領訪問團到南京中山陵，向國民黨的創黨人─國父孫中山致敬。連戰在中山陵博愛廣場向群眾發表演說時，第一次在大陸的土地上高聲說出：「中華民國是亞洲第一個民主共和國。」稍後在參觀仍保留青天白日滿地紅國旗的國民政府時期「總統府」舊址時，連戰親書孫中山先生遺囑「和平、奮鬥、救中國」相贈，落款則寫著「民國九十四年、二○○五、四月廿七日」。

連戰是兩岸分隔近六十年來，第一位到中山陵謁陵的國民黨主席。訪問團成員昨天身著深色西裝，形成一支肅穆的隊伍，沿著中山陵三百九十二級石階而上，先後經過巨大的牌坊分別題著「博愛」、「天下為公」、「民族、民權、民生」等字。

熱情的南京市民夾道歡迎，中共武警的安全戒備也控制不了，他們形成一波又一波包圍訪問團和媒體的超級人牆，人牆不斷湧動在遼闊的中山陵廣場，場面相當壯觀。

連戰在中山陵前的博愛廣場對群眾發表公開談話。「各位市民同胞」，連戰這樣起頭說，今年是國父逝世八十周年，也是對日抗戰勝利六十周年，在此時刻，他代表國民黨率團前來向創建國民黨的總理致上最高敬意，心情非常嚴肅及虔敬。當連戰說到「抗戰勝利」的時侯，在場的大陸群眾也響起了熱烈掌聲。

連戰稱呼孫中山為「兩岸共同尊崇的國族前輩」，並引用大陸的說法也稱孫中山為「革命先行者」，以孫中山聯結兩岸的歷史時空。他說，孫中山領導國民革命、推翻滿清，建立亞洲第一個民主國家「中華民國」，他不只是革命家、更是政治家，以民主、自由、均富的理念追求中華民族的復興與強盛，犧牲奉獻死而後已，「他的生命奮鬥史也是我們民族的生命奮鬥史」。

連戰指出，面對兩岸局勢嚴峻僵持，我們不能忘記孫中山的「和平、奮鬥、救中國」，中華民族要有前途、有自信，更期盼大家本著和平奮鬥的精神，抓住這個時代，讓台灣持續發展均富，也讓大陸快速成長為小康社會，「這是我們念茲在茲的總體目標」。

連戰的談話獲得在場群眾的熱烈掌聲，許多人甚至激動的流下淚來。連戰在中山陵當場揮毫，留下「中山美陵」的墨寶，將來要掛在中山陵的紀念館。中山陵並為連戰的到來特別打開了寫有「天下為公」四個字的陵門，這是六十年來的第一次。

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April 24, 2005

HIV and Condoms in Uganda

Volume 52, Number 7 · April 28, 2005
God and the Fight Against AIDS
By Helen Epstein, New York Review of Books

Mrs. Museveni's claim that abstinence had triumphed over AIDS in Uganda is incorrect. Between 1988 and 2001, the average age at which young Ugandan women started sexual activity rose by less than a year, even though the national HIV rate fell by some 70 percent.[4] Most Ugandan girls begin having sex at around age seventeen, a year or so younger than in Zimbabwe, where HIV rates are about five times higher. More than half of all Ugandan women have been pregnant by age nineteen. HIV rates in pregnant teenage Ugandan girls fell rapidly during the first half of the 1990s, but during this time, the rate and ages at which these girls became pregnant—a marker of their sexual activity—barely changed at all.[5] Moreover, a study carried out in a rural area of Uganda found that young women who abstain from sex until they are twenty are just as likely to become infected with HIV by age twenty-four as young women who first had sex in their teens.

HIV infection rates fell most rapidly dur-ing the early 1990s, mainly because people had fewer casual partners.[9] However, since 1995, the proportion of men with multiple partners has increased sharply. Condom use increased at the same time, and this must be why HIV infection rates have remained low.

But condom programs in Uganda are now threatened. Under pressure from both the Ugandan and US governments, billboards advertising condoms, for years a common sight throughout the country, were taken down in December 2004. Radio ads with such slogans as "LifeGuard condoms! Ribbed for extra pleasure!" were to be replaced with messages from the cardinal of Uganda and the archbishop about the importance of abstinence and faithfulness within marriage. In November 2004, Engabu, a highly popular Ugandan condom brand, was pulled from the shelves because of alleged problems with its manufacture. At the same time, the government now insists that all condoms entering the country be subjected to additional quality control tests. However, Uganda does not have the equipment to carry out such tests, and this has resulted in a shortage of condoms.

Condoms have a controversial history in Uganda, and official attitudes toward them tend to shift with the ebb and flow of US government funds. During the 1980s and early 1990s, condoms were not widely available in Uganda, and many people did not believe they really worked. The government did not promote their use and religious leaders denounced them as immoral and "un-African."[11] Health experts at USAID and other international agencies were concerned about this because they were skeptical that Uganda's existing AIDS programs would work. In 1986, the Ugandan Ministry of Health had launched a campaign known as "Zero Grazing"— Ugandan slang meaning "don't have casual sexual relationships," but did not promote condoms.

Then, in the early 1990s, the World Bank, USAID, and other donor agencies set out to make condoms more appealing, not only to citizens, but also to policymakers and religious leaders. By then, population experts had had considerable success encouraging the use of a variety of contraceptives—all initially unpopular—in other developing countries, with an approach known as "social marketing," which uses advertising and marketing techniques to encourage people to adopt healthful practices. They had found that when condoms and other contraceptives were distributed free of charge in bland medical packaging, people found them unappealing. But when packaged in bright, colorful sleeves, and advertised on billboards and radio spots as sexy and fun, they were much more popular.

Selling condoms in shops, even at very low prices, rather then distributing them free, also added to their cachet. In Uganda, USAID began funding condom social marketing programs in the early 1990s. At the same time, the agency increased funding for the Ministry of Health, the Uganda AIDS Commission, and various church-affiliated organizations run by some of the leaders who most vocally denounced condoms. This new funding had the effect of toning down public criticism of condoms. Meanwhile, the Zero Grazing campaign was gradually phased out.

By the late 1990s, international contractors that specialize in social marketing, such as Population Services International, authors of the comic book that Ssempa complained about, were selling hundreds of millions of condoms each year in Africa. Organizations like PSI don't make money on the condoms they sell, but they do obtain lucrative government contracts to carry out social marketing programs. Uganda's social marketing campaigns were especially dynamic, and, as the Makerere student informed me, condoms had become part of Ugandan culture.

Then, shortly after Mrs. Museveni returned from Washington in 2003, where she had helped Republicans lobby for the $1 billion appropriated for abstinence programs, Ugandan officials resumed denouncing condoms after a ten-year hiatus. In a speech at an international meeting of AIDS experts in 2004, President Museveni said AIDS was "a moral problem," caused by "undisciplined sex," and that condoms should be reserved for prostitutes. Mrs. Museveni has accused those who promote condoms of racism. "They think Africans cannot control their sexual drives," she said in a speech last year. "We will prove them wrong!" She has warned young people that organizations that promote condoms are only after their money. On a similar note, Information Minister James Butoro, like Mrs. Museveni a born-again Christian, accused condom social marketing organizations of "profiteering."

In 1986, Ugandan health officials had not heard of "long-term concurrency" and Professor Morris had not constructed the computer models that traced the transmission of HIV. Nevertheless, the Ugandans knew that HIV was spreading rapidly through networks of sexual relationships, and it was killing people. They also knew it would be unrealistic to insist that all men abandon their extra wives and mistresses, many of whom depend on the men for the opportunity to work on the land and for money and consumer goods for themselves and their children. Zero Grazing was a compromise. It recognized that sexual arrangements in Africa are often different from the Western nuclear ideal and serial monogamy. Zero Grazing was mainly addressed to men, and its real message was:

Try to stick to one partner, but if you have to keep your long-term mistresses and concubines and extra wives, at least avoid short-term casual encounters with bar girls and prostitutes. Also, you mustn't casually seduce and exploit young women, who may be susceptible to your charms and wealth.

During the Zero Grazing campaign, the proportion of Ugandan men and women with casual partners fell by 60 percent. On surveys and in focus groups conducted throughout the country, most people said that they were protecting themselves from HIV by reducing their partners or "sticking to one."[15] By the time the Zero Grazing campaign was replaced by condom promotion and other programs in the early 1990s, the decline in the HIV infection rate was well underway. After 1995, when condom social marketing programs took off, the proportion of men with "non-regular" partners rose again. But HIV rates continued to fall, albeit far more slowly. Then, after 2000, HIV rates rose slightly. The reason HIV rates have not soared, even though more men have multiple partners, is almost certainly that the men are using condoms. The reason HIV rates are no longer falling is probably that these men are not using condoms consistently, especially in the longer-term, concurrent relationships where HIV transmission is most like to occur.

I asked David Apuuli, the affable head of the Uganda AIDS Commission, why the government did not revive the Zero Grazing campaign, which seemed to have been so effective. He giggled, poked me with his elbow, and winked theatrically. "You know what that was all about, don't you?" What Dr. Apuuli meant was this:

What kind of an idiot are you? What do you think the Christians are going to say if we start talking about Zero Grazing? Zero Grazing recognized that polygamy, both formal and informal, was normative and legitimate. That would not fly in the current political and religious climate. Mrs. Museveni would have a fit, and the Bush administration, which pours billions of dollars a year into Uganda, would be very dismayed if the country they hold up as a triumph of abstinence education started promoting Zero Grazing.

But there may be other reasons why Zero Grazing is unlikely to be revived. For one thing, there is no multimillion-dollar bureaucracy to support it. For condoms, there are the large contractors like PSI with headquarters in Washington and thousands of employees in plush offices all over the world. Abstinence-only education is supported by a similarly well-endowed network of faith-based and abstinence-only education organizations, mainly in the US. Zero Grazing was devised by Ugandans in the 1980s, when they were facing a terrible problem, and had to deal with it largely on their own. Now that AIDS is a multibillion-dollar enterprise, donors with vast budgets and highly articulate consultants offer health departments in impoverished developing countries a set menu of HIV prevention programs, which consists mainly of abstinence and condoms. Beleaguered health officials have no time, money, or will to devise programs that might better suit their cultures.

Another reason why abstinence programs are favored over Zero Grazing may have to do with the sexual hypocrisy common to all known societies. The revival of interest in virginity in Africa is not always driven by American money. In southern Africa, many communities have revived the custom of virginity testing—in which older women examine unmarried younger women to ensure their hymens are unbroken. Virginity testing has become so popular among the Zulus that it is sometimes carried out en masse, at football stadiums. Meanwhile, Swaziland's King Mswati III decreed in 2001 that all young, unmarried Swazi women should abstain from sex for five years and wear special tassels in their hair, as a signal to men to leave them alone. Fines were imposed on subjects who broke the rule.

Like other abstinence programs, Swaziland's was not a success. Today, four years after the decree, 40 percent of all Swazi adults are HIV-positive— the highest HIV infection rate in the world. While the King frowns on premarital sex, he tolerates polygamy, and indeed has thirteen wives of his own, at last count. He chooses a new bride each August at the annual Reed Dance Festival, where thousands of topless girls in traditional grass skirts dance and sing his praises. In 2003, when the King chose a seventeen-year-old, he fined himself one cow.

The South African anthropologist Suzanne Leclerc-Madlala attributes the revival of interest in virginity to an increasing sense among elders, especially men, that they are losing control of young people and women. All around they see worsening economic and social conditions and the horror of AIDS, and because they are only human, they blame this state of affairs on the loosening morals of increasingly educated, urbanized women and young people, rather than examining how their own behavior also contributes to these problems.[16]

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April 21, 2005

Politics and the Abortion Debate

David Brooks has some provocative thoughts for the Democrats.

Roe's Birth, and Death
By DAVID BROOKS, New York Times
Published: April 21, 2005

Justice Harry Blackmun did more inadvertent damage to our democracy than any other 20th-century American. When he and his Supreme Court colleagues issued the Roe v. Wade decision, they set off a cycle of political viciousness and counter-viciousness that has poisoned public life ever since, and now threatens to destroy the Senate as we know it.

When Blackmun wrote the Roe decision, it took the abortion issue out of the legislatures and put it into the courts. If it had remained in the legislatures, we would have seen a series of state-by-state compromises reflecting the views of the centrist majority that's always existed on this issue. These legislative compromises wouldn't have pleased everyone, but would have been regarded as legitimate.

Instead, Blackmun and his concurring colleagues invented a right to abortion, and imposed a solution more extreme than the policies of just about any other comparable nation.

Religious conservatives became alienated from their own government, feeling that their democratic rights had been usurped by robed elitists. Liberals lost touch with working-class Americans because they never had to have a conversation about values with those voters; they could just rely on the courts to impose their views. The parties polarized as they each became dominated by absolutist activists.

Unable to lobby for their pro-life or pro-choice views in normal ways, abortion activists focused their attention on judicial nominations. Dozens of groups on the right and left have been created to destroy nominees who might oppose their side of the fight. But abortion is never the explicit subject of these confirmation battles. Instead, the groups try to find some other pretext to destroy their foes....

The fact is, the entire country is trapped. Harry Blackmun and his colleagues suppressed that democratic abortion debate the nation needs to have. The poisons have been building ever since. You can complain about the incivility of politics, but you can't stop the escalation of conflict in the middle. You have to kill it at the root. Unless Roe v. Wade is overturned, politics will never get better.

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The Anarchical Society by Hedley Bull

Quotes from Hedley Bull's classic work on international relations:

Hedly Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (1977).

Chapter 4, "Order versus Justice in World Politics"

Consider, again, international law. It is not merely that international law sanctifies the status quo without providing for a legislative process whereby the law can be altered by consent and thus causes the pressures for change to consolidate behind demands that the law should be violated in the name of justice. It is also that when the law is violated, and a new situation is brought about by the triumph not necessarily of justice but of force, international law accepts this new situation as legitimate, and concurs in the means whereby it has been brought about. As Mazrui writes, international law condemns aggression, but once aggression has been successful it ceases to be condemned. The conflict between interational law and international justice is endemic because the situations from which the law takes it point of departure are a series of faits accomplis brought about by force and the threat of force, legitimised by the principle that treaties concluded under duress are valid.

Moreover, contrary to much superficial thinking on this subject, it is not as if this tendency of international law to accomodate itself to power politics were some unfortunate but remediable defect that is fit to be removed by the good work of some high-minded professor of international law or by some ingenious report of the International Law commission. There is every reason to think that this feature of international law, which sets it at loggerheads with elementary justice, is vital to its working; and that if international law ceased to have this feature, it would so lose contact with international reality as to be unable to play any role at all....

There is no general incompatibility as between order in the abstract, in the sense in which it has been defined, and justice in any of the meanings that have been reviewed. We may imagine, in other words, a society in which there is pattern of activity that sustains elementary or primary goals of social life, and also provides for advanced or secondary goals of justice or equality, for states, for individuals and in terms of the world common good. There is no a priori reason for holding that such a society is unattainable, or that there is any inconsistency in pursuing both world order and world justice. There is, however, incompatibility as between the rules and institutions that now sustain order within the society of states, and demands for world justice, which imply the destruction of this society, demands for human justice, which it can accomodate only in a selective and partial way, and demands for interstate and international justice, to which it is not basically hostile, but to which also it can provide only limited satisfaction.

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Marriage Therapy

Married With Problems? Therapy May Not Help
By SUSAN GILBERT, New York Times
Published: April 19, 2005

In the last few years, efforts to find ways to save more marriages and other long-term relationships have increased.

With an experimental approach called integrative behavioral couples therapy, for example, 67 percent of couples significantly improved their relationships for two years, according to a study reported in November to the Association for the Advancement of Behavior Therapy.

Instead of teaching couples how to avoid or solve arguments, as traditional counseling techniques do, the integrative therapy aims to make arguments less hurtful by helping partners accept their differences. It is based on a recent finding that it is not whether a couple fights but how they fight that can destroy a relationship.

Especially encouraging, all of the couples in the study were at high risk of divorce. "Many had been couples therapy failures," said Dr. Andrew Christensen, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles and the lead author of the study.

Some studies indicate that couples who take marriage education classes have a lower divorce rate than couples who do not take the classes.

But Dr. Gottman, who uses marriage education workshops and couples therapy, has found that workshops alone are insufficient for 20 percent to 30 percent of couples in his research. These couples have problems - like a history of infidelity or depression - that can be addressed only in therapy, he said.

Couples therapy, also called marriage counseling and marriage therapy, refers to a number of psychotherapy techniques that aim to help couples understand and overcome conflicts in their relationship.

A relatively new approach that studies have found highly effective is called emotionally focused therapy, with 70 to 73 percent of couples reaching recovery - the point where their satisfaction with their relationship is within normal limits - for up to two years, the length of the studies.

Dr. Johnson, who helped develop emotionally focused therapy in the 1990's, said that it enabled couples to identify and break free of the destructive emotional cycles that they fell into.

"A classic one is that one person criticizes, the other withdraws," she said. "The more I push, the more you withdraw. We talk about how both partners are victims of these cycles."

As the partners reveal their feelings during these cycles, they build trust and strengthen their connection to each other, she said.

Surprisingly, Dr. Johnson said, until emotionally focused therapy came along, therapists were so intent on getting couples to make contracts to change their behavior that they did not delve into the emotional underpinnings of a relationship.

"It was like leaving chicken out of chicken soup," she said.

Dr. Johnson's latest research, completed in January, included 24 of the most at-risk couples, people who were unable to reconcile because their trust in each other had been shattered by extramarital affairs and other serious injuries to their relationship.

"These injuries are like a torpedo," she said. "They take a marriage down."

The study found that after 8 to 12 sessions, a majority of the couples had healed their injuries and rebuilt their trust.

Most important, these gains lasted for three years. "It's very satisfying to know that we can make a difference with these couples and that it sticks," Dr. Johnson said.

Alice, a library program coordinator in Honesdale, Pa., credits her couples therapy, which focused on emotional issues, with getting her and her husband to reunite after a yearlong separation.

"The marriage counselor brought us back together," she said.

Alice, who did not want her last name used out of privacy concerns, said an important catalyst for their reunion was the therapist's asking each to think about the ways that the other person wanted to feel appreciated and loved. Gradually, she said, she has come to see that her husband's needs were different from her own.

"Going back to this exercise is one thing that has gotten us through hard times," she said.

But not all marriages are salvageable, therapists say. "Some people are fundamentally mismatched, and they can't benefit from therapy," Dr. Gottman said.

Others - beyond the scope of couples therapy or marriage education programs - are people with personality disorders and relationships marred by violence and intimidation.

"We have nothing to offer them," he said.

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April 20, 2005

Planned Japanese War Shrine Visit Fuels China Feud

Planned shrine visit in Japan fuels China feud
ChinaPost.com.tw
2005/4/20
By Natalie Obiko Pearson TOKYO, AP

Nationalist lawmakers, headed by a former defense minister, announced plans to visit the Yasukuni Shrine, which honors Japan's 2.5 million war dead, on Friday, an aide to lawmaker Yasu Kano said on condition of anonymity.

He said the visit was planned well in advance and had nothing to do with the anti-Japanese riots rocking China.

But Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang noted that the dead honored at the Tokyo shrine include executed war criminals, whom he called the "planners and conspirators" of World War II.

"We hope the Japanese leaders could fully respect the people in the victimized countries in Asia, including the Chinese people," Qin said in Beijing. He called on Japanese leaders to "refrain from doing anything that might harm the feelings of Asian people."

Also Tuesday, the Tokyo High Court rejected demands to compensate Chinese victims of atrocities committed by Japan's military in the 1930s and '40s, including the use of biological weapons, which historians estimate killed as many as 250,000 people.

The ruling upheld a 1999 lower court ruling that international law barred foreign citizens from seeking compensation from the Japanese government for wartime actions.

Beijing, meanwhile, said Tuesday it wanted U.N. heritage protection for a germ warfare laboratory in northeastern China, to serve as a reminder of "horrible atrocities" committed by Japanese troops.

U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan urged Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and Chinese President Hu Jintao to meet this weekend in Jakarta, Indonesia, where all three will be attending the Asia-Africa summit.

"They have lots of relationship on all fronts -- political, economic and social -- and I hope those important aspects of their relationship will encourage them to resolve their differences," Annan said Monday.

From Wikipedia's entry on the Yakusuni Shrine

About 1,000 POWs executed for war crimes during World War II are enshrined here. This was not a political issue back then as Yasukuni was supposed to enshrine all Japanese War casualties. However, on October 17, 1978, 13 Class A war criminals (according to the judgement of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East), including Hideki Tojo, were quietly enshrined as "Martyrs of Showa" (昭和殉難者 Shōwa junnansha). They are among the gods that rest peacefully in the shrine, with other heros who fought for Japan. When revealed to the media on April 19, 1979, this started a controversy which rages to this day. The shrine has further angered many with its defiant defense of the war criminals; the same pamphlet mentioned above also claims: "Some 1,068 people, who were wrongly accused as war criminals by the Allied court, were enshrined here." The shrine's English-language website refers to those 1,068 as those "who were cruelly and unjustly tried as war criminals by a sham-like tribunal of the Allied forces." After the revelation of 1979, the Emperor of Japan stopped paying visits to the shrine and this has remained the case ever since. However there are also strong voices amongst the people of Japan in support of the visits [1] (http://www.asahi.com/special/shijiritsu/TKY200404190343.html), including Governor of Tokyo Shintaro Ishihara, who on August 15, 2004, indicated his strong hope for the Emperor to once again start paying visits to the shrine.

The controversial nature of the shrine has figured largely in both domestic Japanese politics and the country's relations with other countries in the region in the years since 1978. Three Japanese prime ministers have caused an uproar by visiting the shrine since then: Yasuhiro Nakasone in 1985, Ryutaro Hashimoto in 1996, and especially Junichiro Koizumi, who visited four times, in August 13, 2001, April 23, 2002, January 15, 2003 and January 1, 2004. Visits by prime ministers to the shrine generally provoke official condemnation by nations in the region, especially the People's Republic of China and South Korea, as they see such action as the the attempt to legitimise Japanese militarism.

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China's wooing of Taiwan opposition unpredictable

target=_blank>China's wooing of opposition unpredictable
ChinaPost.com.tw
2005/4/20

Associate Professor of Political Science at the private Soochow University Emile Sheng also said Taiwan had gone through an "enormous upheaval" in the past few months.

He ruled out the possibility that China fever would inflame the Taiwan independence movement in turn."In past years, the situation has changed quite a bit," Sheng said.

Developing economic ties with China has become more important and public perceptions were influenced by business tycoon Shi Wen-long renouncing his belief in Taiwan independence on the eve of a mass demonstration against China's anti-secession law, Sheng said.

"For the short term, mainstream public opinion does not want to see forced reunification but it does not want to see a war either," Sheng said."If China does something outrageous it will give the (pro-independence) fundamentalists ammunition, but so far, aside from the anti-secession law, everything China is showing is goodwill," he said.

"I sense that the new leadership in Beijing is more and more flexible, not only terms of approaches, but also in terms of political initiatives," he said. After the passage of China's anti-secession law, [Chinese Council of Advanced Policy Studies analyst Andrew Yang] said, China was trying to alienate the government with what Yang termed a "peace offensive".

He said China was placing less importance on its cherished "one China" principle and the "one country two systems" model for reunification than it had in the past.

Yang said President Chen could not turn his back on Beijing and needed to take the initiative with the Communist power rather than just react to new developments.

He said Soong could sound out Beijing's bottom line on Taiwan if the two sides were to negotiate a peace settlement, adding it most suited Soong's political interests to cooperate with Chen.

"Beijings' objective is to prevent independence and Taiwan's objective is a peace settlement."It's a win-win situation," Yang said.The analyst said the two sides could then create their own status quo which was not supported by the U.S. He said the U.S. would welcome this and not intervene.

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Chinese Boycott of Japanese Goods

Protests may hit Japan sales but impact limited
2005/4/20
By Max Sato TOKYO, AFP

Tensions have soared between the two Asian countries since Japan approved a nationalist history textbook this month, leading to sometimes violent anti Japanese demonstrations in China.

Activists have called on the Chinese to stop buying select Japanese brands with alleged links to the textbook campaign and other nationalist causes.

Japan is China's third largest trading partner after the European Union and the United States.

But for Japan, China has replaced the United States as its largest trading partner, with bilateral trade hitting a record US$168 billion in 2004 and seen on the uptrend.

Satoyuki Imai, dean of the Faculty of Modern Chinese Studies at Aichi University in central Japan, said Japanese exports to China would be unaffected as most of them are machinery and parts that both Chinese and non-Chinese firms need for their manufacturing.

"If Japanese factories shut down in China, it's going to hurt the employment of local people," he said.

Ma also pointed to the negative impact of prolonged anti-Japanese protests on securing employees with higher skills, who might choose to work instead for European and North American companies.

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April 15, 2005

Paul Krugman on Health Care Economics

Krugman is writing a series of op-eds on health care economics. This
is the second, I believe. It's been good so far.

The Medical Money Pit
By PAUL KRUGMAN, New York Times
Published: April 15, 2005

In fact, Britain's system isn't as bad as its reputation - especially for lower-paid workers, whose counterparts in the United States often have no health insurance at all. And the waiting lists have gotten shorter.

But in any case, Britain isn't the country we want to look at, because its health care system is run on the cheap, with total spending per person only 40 percent as high as ours.

The countries that have something to teach us are the nations that don't pinch pennies to the same extent - like France, Germany or Canada - but still spend far less than we do. (Yes, Canada also has waiting lists, but they're much shorter than Britain's - and Canadians overwhelmingly prefer their system to ours. France and Germany don't have a waiting list problem.)

In 2002, the latest year for which comparable data are available, the United States spent $5,267 on health care for each man, woman and child in the population. Of this, $2,364, or 45 percent, was government spending, mainly on Medicare and Medicaid. Canada spent $2,931 per person, of which $2,048 came from the government. France spent $2,736 per person, of which $2,080 was government spending.

Amazing, isn't it? U.S. health care is so expensive that our government spends more on health care than the governments of other advanced countries, even though the private sector pays a far higher share of the bills than anywhere else.

Most Americans probably don't know that we have substantially lower life-expectancy and higher infant-mortality figures than other advanced countries. It would be wrong to jump to the conclusion that this poor performance is entirely the result of a defective health care system; social factors, notably America's high poverty rate, surely play a role. Still, it seems puzzling that we spend so much, with so little return.

A 2003 study published in Health Affairs (one of whose authors is my Princeton colleague Uwe Reinhardt) tried to resolve that puzzle by comparing a number of measures of health services across the advanced world. What the authors found was that the United States scores high on high-tech services - we have lots of M.R.I.'s - but on more prosaic measures, like the number of doctors' visits and number of days spent in hospitals, America is only average, or even below average. There's also direct evidence that identical procedures cost far more in the U.S. than in other advanced countries.

The authors concluded that Americans spend far more on health care than their counterparts abroad - but they don't actually receive more care. The title of their article? "It's the Prices, Stupid."

Why is the price of U.S. health care so high? One answer is doctors' salaries: although average wages in France and the United States are similar, American doctors are paid much more than their French counterparts. Another answer is that America's health care system drives a poor bargain with the pharmaceutical industry.

Above all, a large part of America's health care spending goes into paperwork. A 2003 study in The New England Journal of Medicine estimated that administrative costs took 31 cents out of every dollar the United States spent on health care, compared with only 17 cents in Canada.

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April 14, 2005

United Nations and Global Democracy

David Brooks, arguably the most prominent neo-conservative in America, has an op-ed in the Times today about John Bolton's nomination to the U.N. He provides a good summary of the reasons why global democracy is just a dream. It's a good starting point for a real debate.

Loudly, With a Big Stick
By DAVID BROOKS, New York Times
Published: April 14, 2005

I don't like John Bolton's management style. Nor am I a big fan of his foreign policy views. He doesn't really believe in using U.S. power to end genocide or promote democracy.

But it is ridiculous to say he doesn't believe in the United Nations. This is a canard spread by journalists who haven't bothered to read his stuff and by crafty politicians who aren't willing to say what the Bolton debate is really about.

The Bolton controversy isn't about whether we believe in the U.N. mission. It's about which U.N. mission we believe in.

John Bolton is just the guy to explain why this vaporous global-governance notion is a dangerous illusion, and that we Americans, like most other peoples, will never accept it.

We'll never accept it, first, because it is undemocratic. It is impossible to set up legitimate global authorities because there is no global democracy, no sense of common peoplehood and trust. So multilateral organizations can never look like legislatures, with open debate, up or down votes and the losers accepting majority decisions.

Instead, they look like meetings of unelected elites, of technocrats who make decisions in secret and who rely upon intentionally impenetrable language, who settle differences through arcane fudges. Americans, like most peoples, will never surrender even a bit of their national democracy for the sake of multilateral technocracy.

Second, we will never accept global governance because it inevitably devolves into corruption. The panoply of U.N. scandals flows from a single source: the lack of democratic accountability. These supranational organizations exist in their own insular, self-indulgent aerie.

We will never accept global governance, third, because we love our Constitution and will never grant any other law supremacy over it. Like most peoples (Europeans are the exception), we will never allow transnational organizations to overrule our own laws, regulations and precedents. We think our Constitution is superior to the sloppy authority granted to, say, the International Criminal Court.

Fourth, we understand that these mushy international organizations liberate the barbaric and handcuff the civilized. Bodies like the U.N. can toss hapless resolutions at the Milosevics, the Saddams or the butchers of Darfur, but they can do nothing to restrain them. Meanwhile, the forces of decency can be paralyzed as they wait for "the international community."

Fifth, we know that when push comes to shove, all the grand talk about international norms is often just a cover for opposing the global elite's bêtes noires of the moment - usually the U.S. or Israel. We will never grant legitimacy to forums that are so often manipulated for partisan ends.

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Television and Advertising

Ken Auletta has a fascinating article about the advertising industry in the New Yorker. It's amazing that advertisers are actually being allowed to join in the script-writing process. It shows that television is really a medium designed to deliver advertising rather than information or even entertainment. If advertising is what pays the bills, satisfying advertisers will be priority one.

THE NEW PITCH
by KEN AULETTA, New Yorker
Do ads still work?
Issue of 2005-03-28

Broadcasters continue to take steps to accommodate advertisers. ESPN has been experimenting with using a split screen for commercial breaks: ads play on one side while sports action continues, silently, on the other. Network dramas and situation comedies have more sex, more action, more urban appeal. Susan Lyne, the former president of ABC Entertainment, says, “Anything that is complex narrative storytelling—one-hour dramas, narrative miniseries, character-driven movies for television—advertisers don’t believe there is an audience under fifty for these kinds of shows.”

Today, there are product-placement specialists, such as Frank Zazza, the C.E.O. of iTVX, a Westchester-based firm. The studios and television networks employ people to negotiate placement deals. There are no set fees, but the size and demographics of the audience matter; a quick shot of a company’s logo in a movie can fetch from ten thousand to ninety thousand dollars. Placements are negotiated individually, with payment going not only to a network or a studio but to the producers who integrate a product into their script. A thirty-second commercial on “Desperate Housewives” would cost up to four hundred thousand dollars, Zazza says, while a product placement on the same show—if it lasted about twenty seconds and was part of a script—could cost advertisers the same amount. Product placement may also consist of giving away cars on “Oprah.” Last year, General Motors’ Pontiac division gave away two hundred and seventy-six cars on the show. A single thirty-second ad on “Oprah” costs about seventy thousand dollars; Zazza estimates that the publicity value to Pontiac was worth at least seventy million dollars.

This year, Zazza told me, a billion dollars will be spent on product placement in the United States, up from half a billion last year. Next year, he guessed, the figure will double again, coming to represent a fifth of what is spent on all network television advertising. The challenge for agencies is to figure out how to replace the fees they once earned on thirty-second spots. One method is for advertisers to invest aggressively in programs where they have some control over the scripts. On behalf of Sears and Unilever, for instance, MindShare, WPP’s media-buying arm, has joined with ABC to develop comedies and dramas and share in the profits.

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April 12, 2005

Ending World Poverty

There's a good review of Jeffrey Sachs' new book in the New Yorker. Sachs was involved in designing the economic reform programs in Poland and Russia in the early 1990s and today is heading the UN's Millenial development program.

ALWAYS WITH US
by JOHN CASSIDY
Jeffrey Sachs's plan to eradicate world poverty.
Issue of 2005-04-11
Jeffrey Sachs "The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time" (Penguin Press; $27.95).

Under the U.N. plan, financial assistance would be extended until 2015, as long as the recipients met certain performance targets. Health care, primary schooling, and other services for the poor would be provided free of charge, reversing the recent trend toward user fees, which the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have encouraged in a misguided effort to improve efficiency. "The extreme poor don't have enough to eat, much less to pay for electricity or water or bed nets or contraceptives," Sachs observes.

He's surely right to emphasize spending on health care, direct poverty relief, and education. For one thing, rates of infection, malnutrition, and enrollment in schools are a lot easier to monitor than over-all economic progress. In Tanzania in 2001, for example, the government more than doubled the education budget and abolished user fees, using aid money to help meet the cost. Since then, the enrollment rate in primary schools has risen from sixty per cent to ninety per cent.

Yet, as the history of development policy suggests, there can be political dangers to overpromising, and Sachs, by placing so much emphasis on geography, underplays other reasons for Africa's stalled development. Most African countries, bequeathed arbitrary borders by their colonial heritages, are ethnically heterogeneous, and that has led to political problems, as groups compete for the spoils of government. Kenya, which contains about forty different ethnic communities, has been plagued by corruption and ethnic conflict, as have many African nations. Congo, Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, and several other countries have been riven by what the development economist Paul Collier refers to as resource wars, in which rival ethnic groups compete for control of valuable natural resources.

Sachs, as he did in Poland and Russia, refuses to acknowledge that institutional failures could hobble his ambitious plans. "Africa shows absolutely no tendency to be more or less corrupt than any other countries at the same income level," he writes. Then he presents the results of a study that he and some colleagues carried out recently, using various indicators of quality of governance. Countries they judge to have "average" standards of governance include Chad, Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone—all places that have recently experienced devastating civil conflicts.

Many African scholars, such as the Ghanaian economist George B. N. Ayittey, are far more willing to criticize their kleptocratic governments than Sachs is. Ayittey points out that aid money sometimes helps corrupt and incompetent regimes to remain in power. The World Bank and the I.M.F. extended nine loans to the tyrannical administration of Mobutu Sese Seko, who looted Zaire for decades, at one point taking personal control of an entire gold-mining region. Sweden and other Scandinavian countries supported Julius Nyerere's socialist regime in Tanzania, which almost destroyed the agricultural sector by dragooning scattered bushmen into collective farms.

Sachs also downplays the problem of misappropriated aid. Many African nations are so poor that under the U.N. plan they would probably receive annual aid payments equivalent to fifteen to twenty per cent of their gross domestic product. Without adequate safeguards, one has to wonder how much of this money would end up helping the people it was supposed to reach. Sachs's plan calls for recipient governments to commit to good governance, it's true, but, once the money started flowing, these assurances would need to be supplemented with stringent external supervision.

Here's the Paul Collier article mentioned in the review:

Natural Resources and Conflict in Africa

By Paul Collier
October 2004
[...]

Two contrasting examples help to bring the issues into focus. Thirty years ago Botswana and Sierra Leone had the same level of per capita income. Then they both received enormous diamond income. The government of Botswana succeeded brilliantly in harnessing these revenues for economic growth: for many years Botswana was not just the fastest growing economy in Africa, it was the fastest growing economy in the world. As a landlocked desert, it is easy to imagine Botswana’s fate in the absence of diamonds. Sierra Leone had a dramatically different experience. The diamond revenues fomented violent political contests which destroyed the society. The economy collapsed, and now the country is at the bottom of the Human Development Index. The differential between the two countries in terms of per capita income is now an astonishing ten-to-one. The economic and political governance of natural resource revenues was evidently absolutely vital in producing this massive divergence in outcome. In short, although policies and governance always matter, they matter much more where there are large natural resource rents. Africa needs more Botswanas and fewer Sierra Leones: which of them will Equatorial Guinea, Sao Tome and Principe, Mauritania, and Gambia resemble two decades hence?

If I was a citizen of an African natural resource economy I would want to know how to become Botswana and to avoid the fate of Sierra Leone. I think that the magic ingredient that makes the difference is scrutiny of government by the country’s citizens. Unfortunately, scrutiny is a ‘public good’ – that is, if it is provided, the whole society benefits. The incentives for individual action are thus all wrong – basically, the smart thing to do is to sit back and hope that someone else goes to the trouble of providing public goods such as scrutiny. Societies need ‘collective action’ to overcome the public goods problem and because Africa’s societies are so highly diverse –more ethnically diverse than anywhere else in the world - they find it unusually difficult to supply public goods at the national level.

Of course, people and groups lobby the government, but overwhelmingly this lobbying is not for the national interest but for individual or group advantage. But there are ways around this problem. In an ethnically diverse society it is probably much easier to organize scrutiny at the local or regional level than at the national level – at the local level ethnicity is likely to unite people in collective action, just as at the national level it is likely to divide them and frustrate collective action. If the rents from natural resources could be transparently and fairly distributed to sub-national levels of government there is some hope that such governments would come to face serious citizen scrutiny. The challenge is to get to this stage where rents accruing at the national level are seen to be fairly distributed to the regions.

The Right Agenda for Outsiders

This is where the rest of us come in – those of us who are not African citizens and so have little basis to tell African governments what they should and shouldn’t be doing. What we can legitimately do is to make it easier for African citizens to get to the stage at which they can overcome their collective action problem and scrutinize how resource rents are used at the local level. Specifically, we can help to make natural resource rents transparent at the national level. This has been the agenda of NGOs such as Global Witness – now picked up by the British government’s Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative – and I think that it is the right agenda. At least, it is the right agenda for us. Transparency in reporting revenues is itself only an input into scrutiny – it makes domestic scrutiny easier. It doesn’t make it happen automatically, but without transparency in revenues there can be no scrutiny of how they are used.

Another key area for international action is that banks should be required to cooperate in tracking down misappropriated natural resource rents. For example, the Nigerian government has recently abandoned the attempt to repatriate the vast Abacha wealth from London banks because the process was proving to be an unending legal nightmare. What is the incentive for African societies to scrutinize their leaders if corrupt wealth is so well-defended by Western legal systems?

A further area for international action is the acquisition of natural resource contracts. Too often Western corporations have connived with African political leaders to reach deals that were mutually profitable at the expense of the country. Transparent competitive tendering must become the norm. When North Sea oil concessions were awarded we would not have tolerated an oil company concluding a secret private deal with a minister; we should not tolerate such a practice in Africa.

This, to my mind, is the agenda for corporate social responsibility in Africa: transparency in bidding for resource concessions; transparency in revenue payments to governments; and cooperation by banks in tracking misappropriation of rents. Sadly, it is far from the currently dominant agenda. International resource extraction companies live in terror of two powerful forces – Western consumers who may boycott their products; and the local people living around their installations, who may kidnap employees and damage equipment. They have responded to Western consumer pressure – itself based on a lazy, teenage misdiagnosis of Africa’s ills – by trying to look like good employers and good environmentalists. They have responded to local extortion rackets by providing health and education facilities in the neighborhood of their installations. Frankly, both of these are at best irrelevant. High wages mess up the labour market and so cost jobs; it is governments, not companies, that should be supplying basic social services. What has got lost is the legitimate, indeed essential role that companies can play in helping African societies to scrutinize their governments. Corporate social responsibility in Africa must be radically redefined.

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April 11, 2005

United States and South Korea

Interesting news that the US is pulling out a major weapon stockpile from South Korea. The article below says that they 600,000 tons of ammunition. Only Korea and Israel have this weapons reserve program with the U.S. These are mostly likely older weapons intended for a conventional war in case of an invasion from the North and not best-suited for what's likely to flare up there now.

The pullout, I think, is meant to warn Korea against getting too cozy with China. The Korea government has recently spoken of acting as a "balancer" between China and Japan. That's diplomatic language for joining China to restrain Japan. It doesn't have the military or diplomatic clout to literally be a "balancer." South Korea and Japan both have been under the United States' defense umbrella since the end of World War II and have been considered military allies. The U.S. is upset that it's now tilting towards China and pulling some of its troops and weapons out to show the Koreans who's the boss, hoping to get enough of them uneasy to change the government's policy.

So how will this affect what happens with North Korea?

Korea-US Military Alliance Turns Sour
By Jung Sung-ki, Korea Times

The military alliance between South Korea and the United States has shown signs of friction in recent months, affected by a series of developments between the two allies.

The Defense Ministry last Friday revealed a document from Washington a year ago that notified Seoul of its decision to end its war reserve stocks program, called the War Reserve Stocks Allies (WRSA), until 2006.

Under the WRSA program, Washington has maintained about 600,000 tons of ammunition worth 5 trillion won ($4.9 billion) here in preparation for a possible war on the peninsula since 1982, ministry officials said. This accounts for about 60 percent of the ammunition needed for 60 days in an emergency.

The U.S. finances the program, while South Korea has contributed about 70 billion won annually to manage the stockpile. With the termination of the program, Seoul is likely to have to spend some 1 trillion won to get what it needs, the officials said. A bill over the program's termination is now pending in the U.S. Congress.

In a letter to former Defense Minister Cho Young-gil dated May 21, 2004, former U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz said the U.S. government will terminate the war reserve stocks program by 2006. The Critical Requirements Deficiency List program, including bombs and equipment needed within the first 30 days after the outbreak of a war, already suspended last year, according to the letter.

The government, however, denied speculation that the U.S.' plan to dump its preposition supplies here might be an expression of Washington's discontent at Seoul, regarding the negotiations of defense costs to cut the country's share and the ``balancer" policy.

``The termination of the WRSA program has been going on at global level,'' ministry spokesman Shin Hyun-don said in a press briefing. ``The U.S. first notified us of the issue in 2000, long before the so-called balancer policy emerged.''

The WRSA programs with the Philippines, Taiwan and Thailand ended before 2002, he said. South Korea and Israel only maintain the programs.

In a move toward building an independent defense system, the ministry said Monday that it is considering procuring 1,000 Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) bombs. The plan aims to enhance independent deterrent capabilities against some 3,000 long-range artilleries deployed near the Demilitarized Zone by the North.

The JDAM, dubbed ``smart bombs,'' are cutting-edge missiles guided by global positioning satellite technology. With the JDAM kits, South Korea's military force would be able to carry out a surgical strike, accurately destroying North Korea's artillery capabilities, the officials said.

South Korea's 'balancer' policy attacked
By Choe Sang-Hun, International Herald Tribune
Saturday, April 9, 2005

SEOUL South Korea's main opposition leader on Friday berated a government's policy of seeking a balancing role in Northeast Asia, saying it would damage the country's alliance with the United States.

President Roh Moo Hyun of South Korea recently stressed that his government would play a "balancer's role" in the region. Speaking at a military academy in mid-March, he said: "The map of power in Northeast Asia could shift, depending on what choice we make."

Government officials said Roh's comments reflected South Korea's desire to help control the increasing friction between China and Japan, both suspected of aspiring to regional dominance amid rising nationalism in both countries.

A high-ranking government official rejected the charge, saying Roh's policy was primarily designed to help stop a possible arms race between China and Japan. But he said South Korea also does not want Washington to create military tension with China.

"The alliance between South Korea and the United State is a healthy one," said the official, who refused to be named.

The official acknowledged that "One possible scenario we can imagine in which our policy of playing a balancing role gets in conflict with our alliance with the United States is when Washington considers China a threat and engages in a confrontation with China by helping Japan build up its arms."

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April 10, 2005

Water in Iraq

$10 billions to get the water system running? Why do I feel that these people are taking the Americans for a ride? Iraq has a population of 25 million to Afghanistan's 28 million. Afghanistan's entire government budget for 2005 is only $4.75 billion.

Millions Said Going to Waste in Iraq Utilities
A coalition memo says water, sewage and power facilities rebuilt with U.S. funds are falling into disrepair. Iraqis say they need more money.
By T. Christian Miller, Los Angeles Times
April 10, 2005

The Ministry of Public Works estimates that it would cost as much as $10 billion to provide clean water to most Iraqis. Facing rising security costs, the U.S. has slashed the budget for water projects from $4.3 billion to less than $2.3 billion — with further cuts planned.

The ministries say they simply do not have enough money to maintain their current dilapidated systems, much less operate new ones.

"The main problem we suffer is our budget. There's simply not enough for our needs," said Mahmoud Ali Ahmed, the head of Iraq's water distribution system. "The money does not exist for the maintenance and rehabilitation of existing projects."

Afghans Get No Guarantees on Reconstruction Budget
Friday April 08, 2005 (1741 PST)

About 93 percent of Afghanistan's recently adopted $4.75 billion budget for the coming year will come from foreign donors, and less than a quarter of that will be controlled by the government.

The arrangement dates to early 2002, when Afghanistan's fledgling interim authority lacked the capacity to administer large-scale aid projects. In his opening speech to the forum Monday, Karzai, who became Afghanistan's first democratically elected president in October, said circumstances had changed.

"The Afghan government, as the ultimate body accountable to the Afghan people, must also be better informed about, and play its due role in, steering the development process," he said. "The government must become the anchor for a more integrated, transparent and accountable development effort."

Karzai and other government leaders have also expressed concern that many of the 2,400 nongovernmental organizations registered in Afghanistan might be wasting international funds by providing their Western staffs with unnecessarily large salaries and perks, and that other nongovernmental organizations are simply private, for-profit companies claiming nonprofit status to get tax exemptions that allow them to win government contracts at the expense of Afghan firms.

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Liberation Theology

What is it?

"Christian Revolution in Latin America:
The Changing Face of Liberation Theology"
by Ron Rhodes

Gustavo Gutierrez, author of A Theology of Liberation, provides us with a representative methodology. Like other liberationists, Gutierrez rejects the idea that theology is a systematic collection of timeless and culture-transcending truths that remains static for all generations. Rather, theology is in flux; it is a dynamic and ongoing exercise involving contemporary insights into knowledge, humanity, and history.

Sin. Using methodologies such as Gutierrez's, liberationists interpret sin not primarily from an individual, private perspective, but from a social and economic perspective. Gutierrez explains that "sin is not considered as an individual, private, or merely interior reality.

Liberationists view capitalist nations as sinful specifically because they have oppressed and exploited poorer nations. Capitalist nations have become prosperous, they say, at the expense of impoverished nations. This is often spoken of in terms of "dependency theory" - that is, the development of rich countries depends on the underdevelopment of poor countries.

There is another side to sin in liberation theology. Those who are oppressed can and do sin by acquiescing to their bondage. To go along passively with oppression rather than resisting and attempting to overthrow it - by violent means if necessary - is sin.[5]

The use of violence has been one of the most controversial aspects of liberation theology. Such violence is not considered sinful if it is used for resisting oppression. Indeed, certain liberation theologians "will in some cases regard a particular action (e.g., killing) as sin if it is committed by an oppressor, but not if it is committed by the oppressed in the struggle to remove inequities. The removal of inequities is believed to result in the removal of the occasion of sin [i.e., the oppressor] as well."[6]

Pope John Paul II has for years devoted himself to establishing a balanced policy on political activism for Roman Catholic clergy. He has staunchly advocated social justice, but has also consistently warned the clergy about becoming too involved in secular affairs and about the dangers of Marxism.

The Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith - the Vatican's watchdog for doctrinal orthodoxy - issued two important statements on liberation theology. The Instruction on Certain Aspects of the "Theology of Liberation" (1984) warned that it is impossible to invoke Marxist principles and terminology without ultimately embracing Marxist methods and goals. Marxism should therefore be avoided altogether.

Two years later (1986), the Instruction on Christian Freedom and Liberation affirmed the legitimacy of the oppressed taking action "through morally licit means, in order to secure structures and institutions in which their rights will be truly respected."[19] However, "while the church seeks the political, social and economic liberation of the downtrodden, its primary goal is the spiritual one of liberation from evil."[20] The statement accepted armed struggle "as a last resort to put an end to an obvious and prolonged tyranny which is gravely damaging the common good."[21]

This relative openness of the Roman Catholic church was largely responsible for liberation theology's rapid expansion. As we shall see shortly, however, the church's concerns over Marxism have proven justified in view of recent world events. Vatican leadership has breathed a collective sigh of relief that Marxist elements in liberation theology now seem to be waning. SHIFTING SANDS: 1990

Since the emergence of liberation theology in the 1960s, some aspects of the movement have remained constant. In his recent book, Liberation Theology at the Crossroads (1990), Paul E. Sigmund observes that liberation theology stills sees the world as more characterized "by conflict than compromise, inequality than equality, oppression rather than liberation. It also still retains its belief in the special religious character of the poor both as the object of God's particular love and the source of religious insights."[22] Despite these constants, however, liberation theology has also seen significant changes in recent years.

We begin with the observation that 1989 saw almost the whole of Eastern Europe rise up in revolt against Marxist ideology. The major reforms occurring in the Soviet Union and East Bloc nations represent an admission that Marxism has failed.

Michael Novak, who holds the George Frederick Jewett Chair at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., raised a penetrating question in view of recent European events: "What will become of the liberation theologians of Latin America and elsewhere who have so long praised the ideals of Marxist-Leninism, but now must see how hollow they are?"[23]

Novak argues that a close reading of the Latin American theologians suggests that they "have begun to worry that they earlier invested too much credence in the social science they picked up from the universities."[24] For this reason, he says, "liberation theologians in the last few years have become much less hopeful about social structures, and increasingly concerned with issues of spirituality. They seem to be turning less to politics, and more to faith."[25] Sigmund agrees, noting that now "the greater emphasis [is] on the spiritual sources and implications of the concept of liberation."[26] (We shall address this "new spirituality" shortly.)

The shift in perspectives on socialism is one of the most important developments in liberation theology. In the recent writings of many liberation theologians, we find the concession that "the once-favored approach of substituting socialism for dependency or capitalism simply doesn't work, as has been seen in Eastern Europe."[27] Without necessarily deserting socialism, liberationists have shown an increasing ambiguity about what socialism really means, as well as an increasing tolerance of competing systems and an acceptance of Western-style democracy as a legitimate weapon against oppression.[28] Arthur F. McGovern, a Jesuit, comments that "the new political context in many parts of Latin America has led liberation theologians to talk about building a 'participatory democracy' from within civil society. Socialism no longer remains an unqualified paradigm for liberation aspirations."[29]

Another significant development in liberation theology is that its theologians are speaking much less of dependency theory - the idea that the development of rich countries depends on the underdevelopment of poor countries. To be sure, liberation theologians are still predominantly anticapitalist, but many have recognized that dependency theory has rightfully been criticized for some of its fundamental assertions.

The fallacy of dependency theory has been demonstrated by sociologist Peter Berger of Boston University. Berger has pointed out that "the development experience of Japan and the 'four little dragons' of East Asia - Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore - represent 'empirical falsification' of the socioeconomic assumptions of dependency theory and liberation theology." On the other hand, Berger stressed, "there is simply no evidence of successful development by socialist third world nations anywhere or at anytime."[30]

Moreover, the liberationist's solution to the dependency problem - a socialist break with the capitalist world - has looked less attractive to liberation theologians because "the models of socialism either seemed to be bankrupt, or were resorting to market incentives and private enterprise, even inviting multinational investment."[31]

Besides shifts in thinking on socialism and dependency theory, many have had second thoughts about liberation theology because of the bloodshed it has provoked. A Los Angeles Times article focusing on liberation theology in El Salvador notes that "the deaths of some of those who have challenged the establishment have brought sober second thoughts about both the basis and the practice of liberation theology."[32] The article also observes that "such a violent counterrevolution here and in other Latin American nations - along with the failure of Eastern European Marxism and the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua to bring social, political and economic justice - have led to calls for a new look at liberation theology."[33] Indeed, "some of the basic analytical assumptions and practical applications of liberation theology are being questioned, not just by the conservative elements of the [Catholic] church but also by some of those thinkers who first conceived the philosophy."[34]

Sigmund has observed that in view of the bloodshed associated with the movement in recent years, liberation theologians are no longer offering the easy justifications of the necessity of "counterviolence" against the "institutionalized violence" of the political establishment.[35] He also notes that the most obvious change in liberation theology "is from an infatuation with socialist revolution to a recognition that the poor are not going to be liberated by cataclysmic political transformations, but by organizational and personal activities in Base Communities."[36]

We have already noted that liberation theologians are focusing more on issues of spirituality. First and foremost, this means that liberation theologians are deriving more of their liberationist concepts from the Bible as opposed to social theory. Early books by liberation theologians focused primarily on social analysis and had very few biblical references. Now the situation is practically reversed: recent books by liberation theologians contain many biblical references and very little social analysis. There is much more "theology" in liberation theology these days. But their methodological approach is still one of a preferential treatment to the poor.

Besides greater rootedness in the Bible, there also seems to be more interest in spiritual disciplines - such as prayer, devotions, exercising faith, and fellowshiping with other believers. Much of this takes place at a grassroots level in ecclesial base communities. Bible studies on "liberation passages" (such as Mary's Magnificat, Luke 1:46-55) are common. The goal is to discover how Scripture applies to specific problems in the lives of the oppressed.

We have noted that liberation theology is predominantly a Roman Catholic movement. An important factor now impacting the movement in Latin America is the explosion of evangelical Protestantism there. "Latin America is no longer the Roman Catholic monolith it once was. Since the late 1960s, the number of Protestants has surged from 15 million to an estimated 40 million, about 10 percent of the population of Latin America."[37] Brazilian bishop Monsignor Boaventura Kloppenburg says that "Latin America is turning Protestant even faster than Central Europe did in the sixteenth century."[38] The overwhelming majority of these Protestants are Pentecostal.

As to why so many are presently turning to evangelicalism, one analyst suggests that "there now is a widespread recognition that liberation theology overlooked the emotional, personal message most people seek from religion. At the simplest level, liberation theologians preached salvation through social change - meaning, in effect, socialism in one form or another. The evangelicals preach individual salvation through individual change."[39]

David Martin, author of Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America (1990), suggests that economic advancement is another underlying cause of the Protestant explosion. He argues that "evangelical religion and economic advancement often go together[they] support and reinforce one another."[40] Carmen Galilea, a sociologist in Santiago, said that the typical Pentecostal "is well-regarded. He is responsible. He doesn't drink and is better motivated and better paid. As a result, he rises economically."[41] Pentecostal preaching "puts great emphasis on the demand to develop yourself," thus contributing to the economic rise.[42]

In a recent article in Insight magazine, Daniel Wattenberg suggests that another factor linking Pentecostalism and upward mobility is "the mutual material support available within the Pentecostal faith community (the churches provide a network that often functions as a job or housing referral agency)."[43] Moreover, volunteer work in the church "utilizes peoples' talents and creates opportunities to develop new skills that may give them a sense of usefulness and fulfillment for the first time in their lives."[44] The skills learned in a church context also give an edge to church members in seeking work outside the church.

Part of the Flock Felt Abandoned by the Pope
By Chris Kraul and Henry Chu, Times Staff Writers
April 10, 2005

In its heyday in the 1970s and '80s, liberation theology sought to combine decentralized Catholicism with leftist movements for social change, to bring God into the fight for justice on Earth.

Central to the doctrine were so-called "base communities" — the small communal groups that clerics such as Ventura organized to promote self-awareness and activism.

But soon after his election to the papacy in 1978, John Paul became alarmed by what he said were similarities between some elements of liberation theology and Marxism. He saw links between the groups and the participation of some Latin American clergy in political parties, government, even guerrilla armies.

Defenders of the theology say the vast majority of priests, catechists and lay people who practiced it were apolitical and nonviolent, that John Paul's stance was influenced by his upbringing in Eastern Europe, where communism and its Marxist underpinnings were the overriding demons.

"The pope was listening to those who were portraying liberation theology in caricatures — priests with guns, Marxists — and they just weren't accurate," said Dean Brackley, a theology professor at the Jesuit-run Central American University in San Salvador.

In any case, the new pope soon moved to quash liberation theology's dynamics, without officially declaring it taboo. In Brazil, the pope fired Archbishop Helder Camara, the "red bishop," and replaced him with an archconservative in Brazil's needy northeast region. He curbed the influence of Sao Paulo Cardinal Paulo Evaristo Arns, a strong proponent of base communities, by carving up his archdiocese in 1989.

"We were not understood," said Arns, 83 and now retired, adding that many Catholics became disaffected under the late pope. "A portion of the lay leadership was lost."

Leading Brazilian liberation theologian Leonardo Boff was ordered in 1984 to explain himself before a Vatican tribunal and to observe a year of "obsequious silence" during which the Franciscan monk was forbidden to speak out publicly or publish writings. Facing another such sentence in the early 1990s, Boff later left the order.

On a 1983 visit to Nicaragua, John Paul publicly scolded priest Ernesto Cardenal, a liberation theology proponent who had taken the post of minister of culture under the leftist Sandinista regime.

Maria Lopez Vigil, a former nun who is now a journalist in Nicaragua, accused the pope of taking "the side of the powerful" in the conflicts that convulsed Central America in the 1970s and 1980s.

"He cost the church members," she said, "but even worse, made hundreds of thousands of people uncomfortable with a God they thought was intolerant."

Here in El Salvador, where liberation theology was a driving force in organizing opposition to the right-wing government, John Paul's punitive measures were keenly felt.

After John Paul's ascension in 1978, Vatican commissions visited Romero two times demanding that he explain his outspoken criticism of El Salvador's military rulers and the seeming impunity of death squads that ended up claiming 21 priests and nuns as victims.

For years after his death, the Vatican maintained a pointed distance from Romero, while he became recognized as a martyr. Although John Paul twice visited Romero's tomb during Central American visits, the Vatican only recently announced that it was formally initiating Romero's beatification process.

"The pope didn't understand the meaning of Romero," said former priest Ventura, now 59. "It indicated that Rome doesn't give aspects of the Salvadoran, the Latin American church, the attention it should."

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April 08, 2005

Oakland Couple Fighting for Their Neighborhood

This couple mentioned in the SF Chronicle article below lives around Telegraph Ave. and 59th St, just south of the Oakland/Berkeley border, two miles southwest of the UC Berkeley campus. The article says they've lived there since 1994. They probably have quite a bit of equity in the house. The original deal they had with the city subsidized housing program probably required them to share 1/2 of any appreciation on the house with the city if they were to sell. The city says it's willing to change the terms so that they only have to pay $35,000 if they sell and move. But housing prices being what they are, it'd be hard for them to buy another house in the San Francisco Bay Area.

By the way, the husband works as radio technician and a part-time lawyer, an unusual combination.

Couple to keep fighting for their neighborhood
59th Street residents had considered selling their house
Jim Herron Zamora, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, April 8, 2005

Daphne McCullough looks out her front window, where she put up a sign proclaiming her and her husband's intent to stay put. Chronicle photo by Michael Macor

Against the advice of police, Patrick McCullough has decided to continue his crusade against drug dealers on 59th Street in North Oakland rather than moving to a safer neighborhood.

McCullough, 49, and his wife, Daphne, hung a banner Thursday in their front window -- "I AM NOT MOVING," it said -- after they decided that selling their home did not make economic sense or seem "right or fair."

"My wife and I just don't want to let the drug dealers win," said McCullough, a radio technician who works part time as a lawyer. "That's just a really negative message. I want to stay here and make the neighborhood better."

McCullough, who has routinely chased away drug dealers who congregate near his home, made headlines in February when he shot and wounded a teenager who was among a group of young men McCullough said had assaulted him. Police said McCullough had acted in self-defense after seeing the boy reach for a gun in another youth's waistband, and the district attorney's office decided not to file charges against him or the boy.

McCullough said their decision to stay in the neighborhood was primarily based on "desire to stick it out and succeed" but was also rooted in economic realities. They think it is a bad time to sell their home and move because publicity has scared other buyers away.

The McCulloughs purchased their home through a city program that provides loans to first-time homebuyers. City officials offered them an exemption from a rule that would have required them to pay the city half of their equity if they sold the house.

But the McCulloughs said they would still have to pay the city $35,000 if they moved, making it that much harder to come up with a down payment on another home.

Since they moved into their home in the 500 block of 59th Street in 1994, the McCulloughs have told young men they suspect are selling drugs to go away. They've also frequently called police. Patrick McCullough was assaulted in his yard in 2003, and a 5-pound chunk of concrete was tossed through a window last fall.

On Feb. 18, McCullough shot 16-year-old Melvin McHenry in the arm after, he said, he was surrounded and assaulted in his front yard by several young men who shouted, "Snitch! Snitch!"

McCullough said he fired when he saw Melvin reach into another youth's waistband to pull out what he believed was a gun. But Melvin and his mother, Stacy Hegler, said McCullough had provoked the incident by shouting profanities at a group of young people walking by and then swinging at the teenager.

Melvin's family plans to sue McCullough. Their attorneys, Ivan Golde and Daniel Horowitz, also have asked McCullough's home insurers to pay Hegler $300, 000. Hegler also is seeking a court order to keep McCullough away from her residence and prevent him from keeping a gun in his home.

A judge already has granted McCullough and his family an order requiring Melvin and his mother to stay away from them.

"Patrick McCullough is a danger to this street," Hegler said last week. "We are the victims."

Mayor Jerry Brown visited the McCulloughs, and they have been widely lauded for their efforts to clean up the street. But after February's incident, they contemplated selling their home and moving to another neighborhood.

Real estate agents confirm that potential buyers have backed out of deals to buy nearby homes because of the publicity about 59th Street. Potential renters also have changed their minds about moving in. This comes at a time when two-bedroom homes only a few blocks away list for $500,000 and are receiving multiple offers.

Oakland police Lt. Lawrence Green, who oversees patrols in the area and has posted extra officers on 59th Street, had advised the McCulloughs to move and said he wouldn't consider living there even if it was free.

But Green said Thursday that police supported the McCulloughs and would do "everything we can" to make 59th Street safe.

"I'd rather see the dope dealers move out and not the good citizens," Green said. "It would be a tough loss because it feels like we've made so much progress in those neighborhoods."

Since the banner went up, Daphne McCullough says passing neighbors have flashed "thumbs-up" signals of approval, and police officers have left supportive voice mails.

"Neighbors don't want to see us go," she said. "We're the ones who have been fighting."

Page B - 1

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Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, aka the Inquisition

Didn't know it still exists.

The cardinal was selected then by the pope to lead the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which, in other more dangerous times for people accused of heresy, was called the Inquisition.

In 1997, a Sri Lankan theologian, the Rev. Tissa Balasuriya, was even excommunicated after being accused of challenging fundamental Catholic tenets like original sin and the Immaculate Conception.

Cardinal Ratzinger became the first church leader to rebuke Father Kung publicly for increasingly liberal writings, and Father Kung was eventually banned from teaching at Catholic universities.

German Cardinal Has a Major Voice at the Funeral
By DANIEL J. WAKIN and MARK LANDLER, New York Times
Published: April 8, 2005

ROME, April 7 - Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who will say the funeral Mass for Pope John Paul II in St. Peter's Square on Friday, was one of his closest collaborators and for now has become perhaps the leading force in the Roman Catholic Church.

A small white-haired man, Cardinal Ratzinger moved to John Paul's side as his doctrinal watchdog in 1981 and was said to have regular access to him. The cardinal was selected then by the pope to lead the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which, in other more dangerous times for people accused of heresy, was called the Inquisition.

Cardinal Ratzinger has acted as theological police officer, coming down hard on theologians who deviated from his interpretation of Catholic teaching.

In 1997, a Sri Lankan theologian, the Rev. Tissa Balasuriya, was even excommunicated after being accused of challenging fundamental Catholic tenets like original sin and the Immaculate Conception. The Rev. Charles E. Curran, who taught at Catholic University in Washington, was also disciplined, along with some Latin Americans who subscribed to liberation theology, which blended Marxist thought with religious efforts to help the poor.

Cardinal Ratzinger's first campaign, in the 1980's, was against liberation theology. More recently, he has waged a fight against religious relativism, which holds that no faith can claim to be the sole vessel of truth or to represent the world's only savior.

In the early 1960's, he was a theological adviser at the Second Vatican Council, the conference that transformed the church. He supported many of its efforts to make the church more open - but was later said to have turned against what he saw as excesses. It was part of an ideological transformation.

In 1966, the Rev. Hans Kung, a Swiss theologian, recruited him for the chair in dogmatic theology at Tubingen. He was so highly regarded, Father Kung said in an interview, that he was not asked to compete against other candidates, as is the custom in German universities.

The university was swept up in the protests of the 1960's. Hecklers interrupted his lectures, and the student parish, in which he was active, became radicalized. Repelled by what he saw as a neo-Marxist power grab, he left Tubingen in 1969 for the more conservative university at Regensburg in Bavaria.

"You will never understand him without knowing about his experience with the student revolts," Father Kung said. "He was disgusted by it."

Cardinal Ratzinger became the first church leader to rebuke Father Kung publicly for increasingly liberal writings, and Father Kung was eventually banned from teaching at Catholic universities.

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April 07, 2005

Ian McEwan on Saul Bellow's Passing

I loved his Herzog very much. It has almost everything one can ask of a book.

April 7, 2005
Master of the Universe
By IAN MCEWAN, New York Times

London
WHEN a great writer dies - an unusual event, for this is a rare breed - we pay our respects by a visit to our bookshelves, library or bookshop; mourning and celebration merge honorably. It will be some time before we have the full measure of Saul Bellow's achievement, and there is no reason we should not start with a small thing, a phrase or sentence that has become part of our mental furniture, and a part of life's pleasures. After all, good readers, Nabokov advised his students, "should notice and fondle details."

Bellow lovers often evoke a certain dog, barking forlornly in Bucharest during the long night of the Soviet domination of Romania. It is overheard by an American visitor, Dean Corde, the typically dreamy Bellovian hero of "The Dean's December," who imagines these sounds as a protest against the narrowness of canine understanding, and a plea: "For God's sake, open the universe a little more!" We approve of that observation because we are, in a sense, that dog, and Saul Bellow, our master, heard us and obliged.

In fact, the very freedom that Henry James claimed for the novelist in his essay "The Art of Fiction" ("All life belongs to you") was generously embraced by Mr. Bellow; he set himself, and succeeding generations, free of the formal trappings of modernism, which by the mid-20th century had begun to seem a heavy constraint.

He had no time for Virginia Woolf's assertion that in the modern novel character is dead. Mr. Bellow's world is as densely populated as Dickens's, but its citizens are neither caricatures nor grotesques. They sit in memory like people you could convince yourself you have met: the hopeless racketeer Lustgarten ("partly subtle, partly ill") in "Mosby's Memoirs," who brings financial ruin to his family by importing a Cadillac into postwar France; the excitable low-lifer, Cantabile, waving a gun in "Humboldt's Gift" - in his agitation he suddenly needs to defecate, and forces his victim, Charlie Citrine ("a man of culture or intellectual attainments") into the stall with him. Citrine distracts himself with reflections on ape behavior while Cantabile "crouched there with his hardened dagger brows."

And most vivid of all, for me at least, Moses Herzog, Mr. Bellow's most achieved dreamer, the least practical of men in an America of vigorous, material pursuits. In "Herzog," Mr. Bellow brought to perfection the art of fictional digression. When the hero goes to visit his lover, the lovely Ramona, he waits on the bed while she goes off to change into what Martin Amis would call her "brothel wear."

In those moments Herzog reflects on the way the entire world presses in on him, and Mr. Bellow seems to set out a kind of manifesto, a ringing checklist of the challenges the novelist must confront, or the reality he must contain or describe. It also serves as a reader's guide to the raw material of Mr. Bellow's work. I came to know this passage by heart through re-reading, and borrowed it for the epigraph of a novel. It was a risk, because the pulse of this prose was likely to make my own sound puny.

"Well, for instance, what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organized power. Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by mechanization. After the late failure of radical hopes. In a society that was no community and devalued the person. Owing to the multiplied power of numbers which made the self negligible. Which spent military billions against foreign enemies but would not pay for order at home. Which permitted savagery and barbarism in its own great cities. At the same time, the pressure of human millions who have discovered what concerted efforts and thoughts can do. As megatons of water shape organisms on the ocean floor. As tides polish stones. As winds hollow cliffs..."

Mr. Bellow's city, of course, was Chicago, as vital to him, and as beautifully, teemingly evoked, as Joyce's Dublin; the novels are not simply set in the 20th century, they are about that century - its awesome transformations, its savagery, its new machines, the great battles of its thought systems, the resounding failure of totalitarian systems, the mixed blessings of the American way. These elements are not dealt with in abstract, but sifted through the vagaries of character, of an individual trying to figure where he stands in relation to the mass of which he is a part. And always, the past is pressing in, memories of childhood, the crowded streets and tenements, shared rooms, overbearing and eccentric relatives and neighbors - the immigrant poor, attending to the call to American identity.

The American critic Lee Siegel wrote recently that every British writer with an intellectual or emotional connection to America wants to lay claim to Mr. Bellow, saying, "He is their Plymouth Rock, or maybe their Rhodesia." There is some truth to this.

What is it we find in him that we cannot find here, amongst our own? I think what we admire is the generous inclusiveness of the work - not since the 19th century has a writer been able to render a whole society, without condescension, or self-conscious social anthropology. Seamlessly, Mr. Bellow can move between the poor and their mean streets, and the power elites of university and government, the privileged dreamer with the "deep-sea thought." His work is the embodiment of an American vision of plurality. In Britain we no longer seem able to write across the crass and subtle distortions of class - or rather, we can't do it gracefully, without seeming to strain or without caricature. Mr. Bellow appears larger, therefore, than any British writer can hope to be.

Another reason: in a literary culture that has generally favored the whole scheme of a novel against the finely crafted sentence, we honor the musicality, the wit, the lovely beat of a good Bellovian line. An example, rightly favored by the critic James Wood, is the description of Behrens, the florist in the story "Something to Remember Me By": "Amid the flowers, he alone had no color - something like the price he paid for being human." Another example, of special significance to me because I paid tribute to Bellow by making a variation on it: in "Herzog," we read of Gersbach with his wooden leg, "bending and straightening gracefully like a gondolier."

It is not surprising then that some of the best celebrations of Mr. Bellow's writing have originated in Britain. Certain essays may already be on your shelves, and in this time of taking stock, it might be enlivening to reach for them. One of them is Martin Amis's magnificent advocacy of "The Adventures of Augie March" as the definitive Great American Novel in the introduction to the Everyman edition; another is James Wood's introduction to Penguin's "Collected Stories," in which joy is a central element in his response to the work.

Writers we admire and re-read are absorbed into the fine print of our consciousness, into the white noise of our thoughts, and in this sense, they can never die. Saul Bellow started publishing in the 1940's, and his work spreads across the century he helped to define. He also redefined the novel, broadened it, liberated it, made it warm with human sense and wit and grand purpose. Henry James once proposed an obvious but helpful truth: "the deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer." We are saying farewell to a mind of unrivalled quality. He opened our universe a little more. We owe him everything.

Ian McEwan is the author, most recently, of "Saturday."

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Papal Infallibility, Liberalism, and Attendance

Thomas Cahill, the author of "How the Irish Saved Civilization" and "Pope John XXIII" has an op-ed in the New York Times today about papal infallibility. He tells an interest story about how the doctrine came about:

John Paul II has been almost the polar opposite of John XXIII, who dragged Catholicism to confront 20th-century realities after the regressive policies of Pius IX, who imposed the peculiar doctrine of papal infallibility on the First Vatican Council in 1870, and after the reign of terror inflicted by Pius X on Catholic theologians in the opening decades of the 20th century. Unfortunately, this pope was much closer to the traditions of Pius IX and Pius X than to his namesakes. Instead of mitigating the absurdities of Vatican I's novel declaration of papal infallibility, a declaration that stemmed almost wholly from Pius IX's paranoia about the evils ranged against him in the modern world, John Paul II tried to further it. In seeking to impose conformity of thought, he summoned prominent theologians like Hans Kung, Edward Schillebeeckx and Leonardo Boff to star chamber inquiries and had his grand inquisitor, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, issue condemnations of their work.

But John Paul II's most lasting legacy to Catholicism will come from the episcopal appointments he made. In order to have been named a bishop, a priest must have been seen to be absolutely opposed to masturbation, premarital sex, birth control (including condoms used to prevent the spread of AIDS), abortion, divorce, homosexual relations, married priests, female priests and any hint of Marxism. It is nearly impossible to find men who subscribe wholeheartedly to this entire catalogue of certitudes; as a result the ranks of the episcopate are filled with mindless sycophants and intellectual incompetents. The good priests have been passed over; and not a few, in their growing frustration as the pontificate of John Paul II stretched on, left the priesthood to seek fulfillment elsewhere.

The situation is dire. Anyone can walk into a Catholic church on a Sunday and see pews, once filled to bursting, now sparsely populated with gray heads. And there is no other solution for the church but to begin again, as if it were the church of the catacombs, an oddball minority sect in a world of casual cruelty and unbending empire that gathered adherents because it was so unlike the surrounding society.

I think Cahill is too optimistic that a more liberal Catholic Church will draw more young people into the pews. All mainline Christian churches in the United States have had this demographic problem, including the liberal Episcopalian Church which has recently elected Gene Robinson, an openly gay man, as a bishop. It's the evangelical churches with conservative religious doctrines, but with more flamboyant rock 'n roll atmospherics, that have been gaining in youth memberships. Maybe they are going the way of Christian churches in Europe. You see that clearly on the college campuses. Conservatives obviously tend to be more religious than liberals. The fact that conservatives tend have more babies at an earlier age than liberals is probably exacerbating that demographic trend.

See the findings of this survey, for example:
Church Trends, 2000
The broad picture of interdenominational attendance, giving, member involvement and more

Of the 1,000 people surveyed by Barna, four out of every 10 said they attend a church service on a typical Sunday. Though this figure is down from last year, it remains relatively unchanged since 1994. The least likely group to attend services is the Baby Busters (18 to 34) at 28%, compared with 51% of adults 55 or older. And while the attendance among men remains unchanged, female attendance has declined in recent years.

Overall, however, women are still more likely to attend church regularly than men.

Politically, conservatives were almost twice as likely as liberals (53% vs. 28%) to attend service every week. And regionally, the "Bible belt" areas of the South and Midwest still attract higher attendance than in the Northeast and West. Attendance averages proved higher among black churches--at 100 per service--than among white congregations (85), and suburban churches were the largest of all at 120 people per service. The smallest attendance was found in rural churches, with urban churches falling somewhere in between at 100.

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April 06, 2005

Suicide Attackers Strike at Kashmiri Peace Bus

By REUTERS Published: April 6, 2005

SRINAGAR, India (Reuters) - Gun-toting Islamic rebels on Wednesday stormed and torched a complex sheltering passengers due to travel on a path-breaking bus ride between divided Indian and Pakistani Kashmir.

Terrified people, including women and children, hurled themselves through ground floor windows as fire engulfed the heavily fortified complex in Srinagar, flames leaping high into the air and thick black smoke blanketing the city center.

All of the two dozen passengers due to take Thursday's inaugural run to Pakistani Kashmir -- most of whom were living in separate buildings at the rear of the complex because of earlier threats -- escaped unharmed.

Four militant groups who had pledged to turn the first trans-Kashmir bus in half a century -- seen as an emotional symbol of warming ties -- into a coffin, told newspaper offices they had ordered the suicide raid.

Twenty-two Indian passengers, who were housed at the complex, are now under guard at a secret base in Srinagar until their departure. Two other passengers were in Baramulla in northern Kashmir at the time of the attack.

In Muzaffarabad, capital of Pakistani Kashmir, passengers said the violence would not scare them off their first and possibly their only chance to see relatives separated by years of war and hostility between India and Pakistan.

``I am not scared. I will definitely go if the bus goes,'' said Nisar Ahmed Zakir. ``In war-like situations such incidents happen. But I will go.''

Abida Masoodi, a woman in her 50s, echoed his comments. ``It's my firm decision to go provided the bus goes. If such a death is the fate, then it's OK.'' Abida said she wanted to see sisters and brothers in Indian Kashmir she had not seen for 20 years.

India and Pakistan have fought two of their three wars since independence over the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir and came close to another in 2002.

But then Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee kicked off the peace process this month at the same stadium Thursday's bus is due to leave from, offering a ``hand of friendship.''

Many Kashmiri families have been separated since 1947, when Pakistani-backed tribesmen invaded Kashmir in a bid to bring it into Pakistan and prevent it joining India.

The ceasefire line is a random frontier, based purely on where each sides armies were when the 1947/48 fighting stopped.

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Congo, Darfur, and the Media

Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times has another op-ed about Darfur today (The Pope and Hypocrisy). I wonder why he hasn't written an article about the war in Congo that has killed 4 million in five years. I did a search in NYTimes.com's archive and found nothing. Sudan borders Congo, and Darfur is only a few hundred miles from Congo.

Africa's forgotten and ignored war
By Fergal Keane BBC correspondent in DR Congo
Last Updated: Saturday, 18 October, 2003, 11:18 GMT 12:18 UK

For, here at the outset, let us be clear about one matter: that Congo is a tragedy the developed world has done its best to ignore. A Congolese soldier in a war-torn country Four million people have died from massacre, famine, disease.

Four million in just five years.

In that period the armies of no fewer than seven African countries have fought here. They did not fight for the good of the Congolese but as part of a latter day scramble for Africa, a war for the country's rich resources of diamonds, gold and minerals.

The Pope and Hypocrisy
NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF Published: April 6, 2005

President Bush and other world leaders are honoring John Paul II in a way that completely misunderstands his message. We pay him no tribute if we lower our flags to half-staff and send a grand presidential delegation to his funeral, when at the same time we avert our eyes as villagers are slaughtered and mutilated in the genocide unfolding in Darfur.

The message of the pope's ministry was about standing up to evil, not about holding grand funerals.

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The Catholic Church and AIDS

It would nice if the Catholic Church would change its teaching on condom us, but how much blame does it deserve for the spread of STDs such as AIDS. For instance, it's been widely reported that there's a general reluctance among men in these countries to use condoms, whether or not they're Catholics. The Catholic Church teaches both abstinence from sex as well as abstinence from condoms. Why should we suppose one teaching is more effective than the other? (Answer: Well, because it's easier to abstain from condoms than it is to abstain from sex. Does that mean Catholicism, in of itself, prevents more people from using condoms than from having extramarital sex?)

Below is a list of countries in the world ranked by adult HIV infection rate, along with some figures on their religious composition. It seems, at first blush, that countries with non-Catholic majorities are just as likely to be hit by HIV. Do we know if Catholics in these countries are more likely to be infected HIV than non-Catholics?

From the CIA Fact Book and Adherents.com (figures in square brackets; I've listed the highest figure given where there are multiple figures)
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/rankorder/2155rank.html
Rank Country HIV/AIDS

1 Swaziland Zionist (a blend of Christianity and indigenous ancestral worship) 40%, Roman Catholic 20%, Muslim 10%, Anglican, Bahai, Methodist, Mormon, Jewish and other 30%

2 Botswana indigenous beliefs 85%, Christian 15% [9% Catholic]

3 Lesotho Christian 80%, indigenous beliefs 20% [45% Catholic]

4 Zimbabwe syncretic (part Christian, part indigenous beliefs) 50%, Christian 25%, indigenous beliefs 24%, Muslim and other 1% [17% Catholic]

5 South Africa Christian 68% (includes most whites and Coloreds, about 60% of blacks and about 40% of Indians), Muslim 2%, Hindu 1.5% (60% of Indians), indigenous beliefs and animist 28.5% [10.00% Catholic]

6 Namibia Christian 80% to 90% (Lutheran 50% at least), indigenous beliefs 10% to 20% [20% Catholic]

7 Zambia Christian 50%-75%, Muslim and Hindu 24%-49%, indigenous beliefs 1% 10.00% [37.5% Catholic]

8 Malawi Protestant 55%, Roman Catholic 20%, Muslim 20%, indigenous beliefs 3%, other 2%

9 Central African Republic indigenous beliefs 35%, Protestant 25%, Roman Catholic 25%, Muslim 15% note: animistic beliefs and practices strongly influence the Christian majority

10 Mozambique indigenous beliefs 50%, Christian 30%, Muslim 20% [31% Catholic]

11 Guinea-Bissau indigenous beliefs 50%, Muslim 45%, Christian 5% [11% Catholic]

12 Tanzania mainland - Christian 30%, Muslim 35%, indigenous beliefs 35%; Zanzibar - more than 99% Muslim [31% Catholic]

13 Gabon Christian 55%-75%, animist, Muslim less than 1% [75% Catholic]

14 Cote d'Ivoire Christian 20-30%, Muslim 35-40%, indigenous 25-40% (2001) [20.5 Catholic]

15 Sierra Leone Muslim 60%, indigenous beliefs 30%, Christian 10% [3% Catholic]

16 Cameroon indigenous beliefs 40%, Christian 40%, Muslim 20% [35% Catholic]

17 Kenya Protestant 45%, Roman Catholic 33%, indigenous beliefs 10%, Muslim 10%, other 2%

18 Burundi Christian 67% (Roman Catholic 62%, Protestant 5%), indigenous beliefs 23%, Muslim 10%

19 Liberia indigenous beliefs 40%, Christian 40%, Muslim 20% [3.6% Catholic]

20 Haiti Roman Catholic 80%, Protestant 16% (Baptist 10%, Pentecostal 4%, Adventist 1%, other 1%), none 1%, other 3% (1982)

Posted by mrl at 09:11 PM Link to This Post | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Crime and Obesity

This 1999 study below published in the journal Pediatrics confirms my suspicion that crime is a major factor contributing to obesity. The connection? A high crime rate causes people to stay at home, veg in front of the TV, and eat junk food. It's worth noting that a higher crime is more connected to the lack of physical activity in girls than boys.

Maybe this is a bigger factor than the "too many McDonald's in the neighborhood" Fast Food Nation hypothesis.

It reminds me of Malcolm Gladwell's article on the Chicago heatwave of 1995, which resulted in 739 deaths. It's quite likely that the high crime rate in some of the neighborhoods contributed to the high death rate because residents in those neighborhoods were afraid to go outside during the heatwave.

Klinenberg finds that conclusion unacceptably superficial. The disaster may look inevitable, but beneath the surface he sees numerous explanations for why it took the shape it did. One chapter of the book is devoted to a comparison of two adjoining low-income neighborhoods in Chicago, Little Village and North Lawndale. Statistically, the two are almost identical, each with heavy concentrations of poor, elderly people living alone, so it would seem that the heat wave should have taken a similar toll in both neighborhoods. But North Lawndale had ten times the fatality rate of Little Village. Why? Because Little Village is a bustling, relatively safe, close-knit Hispanic community; the elderly had family and friends nearby who could look in on them, and streets and stores where they could go to escape their stifling apartments. North Lawndale, by contrast, is a sprawling, underpopulated, drug-infested neighborhood. The elderly there were afraid to go outside, and had no one close by to visit them. The heat was deadly only in combination with particular social and physical circumstances.

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Determinants of Adolescent Physical Activity and Inactivity Patterns by Penny Gordon-Larsen, PhD*, Robert G. McMurray, PhD, and Barry M. Popkin, PhD*, §
From the * Carolina Population Center, Department of Exercise Physiology, and § Department of Nutrition, School of Public Health, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

"Inactivity" in the tables below is defined as "TV/video viewing and video/computer games" in the study. "SE" is standard error (standard deviation).

Interactions Between Ethnicity and Sex and Determinants Logistic regression models were used to test sex and ethnicity interactions with each set of environmental determinants (PE participation, recreation center use, and neighborhood crime).

Differential effects were seen only for inactivity for neighborhood crime and sex and recreation center and race. Females living in high crime areas were at increased likelihood of falling in the highest category of inactivity (AOR: 1.29; CI: 1.03-1.62; P .027).

Total number of incidents of serious crime in the adolescents' neighborhood was significantly associated with a decrease in physical activity. Crime was also associated with an increase in inactivity, although this relationship was not significant. Crime was very clearly associated with ethnicity, but there were no significant age, sex, and sex-ethnicity interactions. However, logistic regression results showed a differential association between high neighborhood crime and increased inactivity (AOR: 1.29; CI: 1.03-1.62; P .027) for females relative to males.

Posted by mrl at 01:36 PM Link to This Post | Comments (1) | TrackBack

The Vatican as a Country

About.com's geography page has some info on the Holy See, also known as the Vatican. It's amusing to see its stats listed as those of a country:

Holy See (Vatican City)

Location: Southern Europe, an enclave of Rome (Italy)

Area: total: 0.44 sq km land: 0.44 sq km water: 0 sq km

Area - comparative: about 0.7 times the size of The Mall in Washington, DC

Land boundaries: total: 3.2 km border countries: Italy 3.2 km

Natural resources: none

Geography - note: urban; landlocked; enclave of Rome, Italy; world's smallest state; outside the Vatican City, 13 buildings in Rome and Castel Gandolfo (the pope's summer residence) enjoy extraterritorial rights

Population: 880 (July 2000 est.)

Population growth rate: 1.15% (2000 est.)

Ethnic groups: Italians, Swiss, other

Religions: Roman Catholic

Languages: Italian, Latin, various other languages

Literacy: definition: NA total population: 100% male: NA% female: NA%

Country name: conventional long form: The Holy See (State of the Vatican City) conventional short form: Holy See (Vatican City) local long form: Santa Sede (Stato della Citta del Vaticano) local short form: Santa Sede (Citta del Vaticano)

Government type: monarchical-sacerdotal state

Independence: 11 February 1929 (from Italy)

National holiday: Installation Day of the Pope (John Paul II), 22 October (1978)
Constitution: Apostolic Constitution of 1967 (effective 1 March 1968)

Suffrage: limited to cardinals less than 80 years old

Executive branch: chief of state: Pope JOHN PAUL II (since 16 October 1978) head of government: Secretary of State Cardinal Angelo SODANO (since 2 December 1990) cabinet: Pontifical Commission appointed by the pope elections: pope elected for life by the College of Cardinals; election last held 16 October 1978 (next to be held after the death of the current pope); secretary of state appointed by the pope election results: Karol WOJTYLA elected pope

Legislative branch: unicameral Pontifical Commission

Judicial branch: none; normally handled by Italy

Political parties and leaders: none

Political pressure groups and leaders: none (exclusive of influence exercised by church officers)
International organization participation: IAEA, ICFTU, Intelsat, IOM (observer), ITU, NAM (guest), OAS (observer), OPCW, OSCE, UN (observer), UNCTAD, UNHCR, UPU, WIPO, WToO (observer)

Economy - overview: This unique, noncommercial economy is supported financially by contributions (known as Peter's Pence) from Roman Catholics throughout the world, the sale of postage stamps and tourist mementos, fees for admission to museums, and the sale of publications. The incomes and living standards of lay workers are comparable to, or somewhat better than, those of counterparts who work in the city of Rome.

Population below poverty line: NA%

Household income or consumption by percentage share: lowest 10%: NA% highest 10%: NA%

Labor force - by occupation: agriculture NA%, industry NA%, services NA%; note - dignitaries, priests, nuns, guards, and 3,000 lay workers live outside the Vatican

Budget: revenues: $209.6 million expenditures: $198.5 million, including capital expenditures of $NA (1997)

Industries: printing and production of a small amount of mosaics and staff uniforms; worldwide banking and financial activities

Posted by mrl at 01:31 PM Link to This Post | Comments (0) | TrackBack