In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, a Yale University student asked one of her instructors, "Would it be OK now for us to be patriotic?" The professor, John Lewis Gaddis, widely regarded as the dean of American Cold War historians, replied: "Yes, I think it would."
In a way, I don’t live in America. My world is the minority one of NPR and kalamata olives. This week, however, I’m writing from a cruise ship, and America this is. This is the America of USA Today, sausage links and “Rumor Has It.”
These are also the people who Blue Americans are given to thinking of as “scary” hordes, ever on the brink of returning America to the heartless Social Darwinism of the Gilded Age.
The idea is that because of this, we enlightened folk are to craft our public statements so as to hold off this eternal threat. When I put an American flag sticker on my windshield after September 11, a friend of mine of this type actually ripped it off, an action she meant as something between a joke and a protest. In her eyes, there were so many people “out there” who might take the sticker as a call for ignorant jingoism that it was irresponsible for a college professor to have the sticker on his car. About every fourth letter in my mailbag is from someone who says that they agree with my often right-of-center comments on race, but “worry” that people “out there” might misinterpret me as suggesting a return to Jim Crow, or leaving ghettos to fester unattended.
MANHATTAN, Kan. -- Thousands of students from Saudi Arabia are enrolling on college campuses across the United States this semester under a new educational exchange program brokered by President Bush and Saudi King Abdullah.
The program will quintuple the number of Saudi students and scholars in the United States by the academic year's end. And big, public universities from Florida to Oregon are in a fierce competition for their tuition dollars.
The kingdom's royal family -- which is paying full scholarships for most of the 15,000 students -- says the program will help stem unrest at home by schooling the country's brightest in the American tradition. The State Department sees the exchange as a way to build ties with future Saudi leaders and young scholars at a time of unsteady relations with the Muslim world...
The case can be read here.PORTLAND — The Oregon Supreme Court today rejected the discrimination claim of an atheist whose son was required to attend a Boy Scout recruiting session in a Portland public school.
The Scout oath requires members "to do my duty to God and my country" but simply providing information to pupils in public schools isn't discrimination under Oregon Law, the court said.
Reversing a lower court, the justices denied the claim of Nancy Powell, whose son, Remington, was in elementary school when the dispute began in 1996.
The justices said the recruiting process on school grounds treats all students the same.
"It is in the later enrollment in the organization that the Boy Scouts differentiate among those who do not profess a belief in the deity and those who do," the court said. "That enrollment, however, is not done by the school district, nor is it done in any public elementary school activity."
Dissenting, Justice Rives Kistler said the Scouts' offer "appeared to be open to all the elementary school children without limitation," but that wasn't the case.
"That offer, both in fact and in operation, divided the elementary school children into two groups: those whose religious views agreed with the Scouts' views and those whose views did not," he wrote.
My wonderful wife is Heather. Our fun-loving kids are Jay (93), Ben (96) and Rachel (01). We serve with Caleb Project and are based in Nairobi, Kenya, lent to Wycliffe Bible Translators. Nairobi is the largest city in east Africa.
Who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970? You may be forgiven for not remembering, given some of the prize's dubious recipients over the years (e.g., Yasser Arafat). Well, then: Who has saved perhaps more lives than anyone else in history? The answer to both questions is, of course, Norman Borlaug.
Who? Norman Borlaug, 92, is the father of the "Green Revolution," the dramatic improvement in agricultural productivity that swept the globe in the 1960s. He is now the subject of an admiring biography by Leon Hesser, a former State Department official who first met Mr. Borlaug 40 years ago in Pakistan, where they worked together to boost that country's grain production. "The Man Who Fed the World" describes, in a workmanlike way, how a poor Iowa farm boy trained in forestry and plant pathology came to be one of humanity's greatest benefactors...
I haven't had a chance to read this, but it got traded in at our bookstore the other day and it looks interesting. From the publisher (courtesy Barnes & Noble):
When Violeta Chamorro defeated Daniel Ortega in 1990 to become president of Nicaragua, despite a knee injury that put her on crutches for the entire campaign, most observers were shocked. Ortega's party, the Sandinistas, controlled the country, except for the Catholic Church and Mrs. Chamorro's newspaper, La Prensa, which, virtually alone, predicted the outcome accurately. After the election, many doubted that the Sandinistas would permit Mrs. Chamorro to take office, but she did, thanks in no small part to her own canny political instincts in reaching out to the Sandinistas rather than retaliating against them for causing a decade of oppression and poverty. After six years in office she has brought her country back from ruin, ending a civil war and revitalizing an economy that had become the second worst in the Western Hemisphere. Perhaps most remarkable of all, Mrs. Chamorro had never held office before, and from childhood had had no other aspiration than to raise a family. Although written by a sitting president, this is a memoir like no other - intensely personal and deeply moving. President Chamorro explains that her lack of political experience left her to govern by the model she knew best, raising a family. Her own children were politically divided, like her country, and she tried to keep communication open among them. She did the same for what she calls her family of Nicaragua, reconciling left and right whenever possible, trying to put past political turmoil behind her. Devoted to the memory of her martyred husband, committed to her religious faith and her faith in democracy, Violeta Chamorro has ruled from the heart and led her country from disaster to recovery.
In a nutshell, author Michael Pollan looks around at food, wonders exactly where it comes from before it gets to his table, and tries to find out. Of course, if you're like me, you'd just as soon not think too minutely about how beef and chicken and breakfast cereal, etc., get to your table, but, well, it's not a bad thing for grown-ups to face up to now and then, is it? Especially if there are some things about the system that might be changed for the better? Pollan takes on all comers, I must say. (PETA included.) If he doesn't understand something, he's willing to get close enough to try to understand it. (Example. He's never shot a gun, but decides to find out what it's like to go hunting, so devotes months to the project. What he finds out surprises him. And me, for that matter.)
Fair warning: There are some bits I wish had been bowdlerized, but they are few and far between. I wouldn't hand this to the kids and it doesn't quite pass my "Grandma" test - if my grandmother were still alive, I wouldn't hand her this, mostly because of a few body-part references.
The author and I have our differences, here and there. For instance, he says that he can't see why humans would have abandoned the relatively healthy hunter-gatherer lifestyle for agriculture unless they'd killed off what they'd been hunting/gathering. I disagree. While I'm sure some bands did overhunt or overharvest, and while I'll grant that farming launched some public health issues right from the beginning (epidemics from crowding together and accumulated waste, new diseases incubated in domestic animals), I can think of lots of reasons people who were hunter-gatherers might settle down in one place instead. People tend to be territorial, for one thing; even hunters protect their hunting grounds. That somebody figured that a home base might be more easily defended than a whole region seems a possibility. That somebody got tired of carrying Grandpa around on his back might have been a factor here or there, now and then. Plus, people like to build things. (Including forts, I think.) Also, some people just naturally like to have stockpiles. For that matter, I suspect many a farm was started by a fellow who got tired of hearing, "Must we move already? I just got the camp set up the way I like it." ;)
But I quibble. It's an interesting, if sometimes stomach-churning, book, and I think it addresses some issues that probably ought to be addressed. Our food supply is a vital interest. If we're not smart about it, we court disaster. It's also, at times, an unexpectedly funny book, written by a middle-aged guy out to explore both the world and his inner self. And there are some sometimes-priceless descriptions of different subcultures in today's America. A unique offering. I can't recommend it without reservations, but I can recommend it.
A footnote: Pollan will carefully build up a case sometimes so he can then illustrate why it doesn't hold together as well as its advocates like to think it does. If you jump to conclusions, you're likely to find yourself mistaken. I found that whenever I was getting ready to gnash my teeth, the cure usually was to simply keep reading.
...The decision by the IAU, the official arbiter of heavenly objects, restricts membership in the elite cosmic club to the eight classical planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
Pluto and objects like it will be known as "dwarf planets," which raised some thorny questions about semantics: If a raincoat is still a coat, and a cell phone is still a phone, why isn't a dwarf planet still a planet?
NASA said Pluto's downgrade would not affect its $700 million New Horizons spacecraft mission, which this year began a 9 1/2-year journey to the oddball object to unearth more of its secrets.
But mission head Alan Stern said he was "embarrassed" by Pluto's undoing and predicted that Thursday's vote would not end the debate. Although 2,500 astronomers from 75 nations attended the conference, only about 300 showed up to vote.
"It's a sloppy definition. It's bad science," he said. "It ain't over."
Under the new rules, two of the three objects that came tantalizingly close to planethood will join Pluto as dwarfs: the asteroid Ceres, which was a planet in the 1800s before it got demoted, and 2003 UB313, an icy object slightly larger than Pluto whose discoverer, Michael Brown of the California Institute of Technology, has nicknamed "Xena." The third object, Pluto's largest moon, Charon, isn't in line for any special designation...
OMAHA, Neb. A troop of Boy Scouts on a camping trip to earn merit badges ended up saving an 18-month-old girl's life.
About five members of the Omaha St. Cecilia's Troop 100 were swimming in the Platte River at Two Rivers State Recreation Area on Saturday.
Eleven-year-old Christian Nanson spotted the girl floating face-down in the water and yelled to nine-year-old John Fitzgerald to help. The boys grabbed the girl out of the water while other Scouts found a cell phone to call for help and directed rescuers.
Douglas County Sheriff's Deputy David Brock said the girl was treated for hypothermia and released from the hospital today. She had been with her family before she slipped away from her mother, chasing after some dogs.
In a small room at Michigan State Prison hangs the picture of an attractive woman with an overhead banner bearing this message: "Remember, Gentlemen, there is a lady present." The picture is of Dorothy Carnegie, and the room is where Dale Carnegie classes are held for inmates of the prison. Prison classrooms are the only places Carnegie classes are held where iron bars on the windows and guards at the door make it impossible for fear-stricken students to take to their heels.
Of all the special classes given by Dale Carnegie & Associates and their sponsors, none have been more successful and more eagerly received than those given to prisoners. In 1960 some fifteen hundred inmates of thirty-one penal institutions in the United States and Canada completed work in forty-eight classes. More than seven thousand prisoners have participated since the prison program was initiated in Hawaii in 1950 by J. Edwin Whitlow, the Carnegie sponsor there...
...Well underneath the cracking Devin body was Ferrari chassis #0202 belonging to a 1952 Ferrari 340 America with a Vignale Spider body. It’s one of the most valuable Ferraris in existence.
Once fully restored, which [Tom] Shaughnessy plans to do himself, the Ferrari could bring nearly $2.8-million...
Although I have tried mightily, I cannot find much merit in the idea that there is a “party of death” at work in American politics. It seems to me that this formulation states the problem wrongly...
One question, though. Does anyone know if that book is the same as the following? Or does it cover much the same ground in a different fashion? The former was published by HarperSanFrancisco earlier this year, and my copy says it's a first edition. I don't see any notice that it was previously published elsewhere. But the following, published a few years ago by Zondervan, certainly sounds like the same book?
C. S. Lewis at the BBC: Messages of Hope in the Darkness of War
Clicking on a book cover will take you to Barnes & Noble.
...A friend just told me about a doctor in her town who had advised many women to abort their Down's children (including her, and her child ended up not having it) and then he had a grandchild with Down's. He wrote a public apology to all the women he'd counselled to have abortions!
While looking for that book to link to, I chanced across this one. Have you read it? It sounds good in the write-ups. It's aimed at ages 12 and up. The author is Peg Kehret.
Small Steps: The Year I Got Polio
...Oh, sure. Just my luck. One of my favorites, Lament for a Maker, seems to be, at present, out of print again. (Or maybe it is just temporarily out of stock at Barnes & Noble?) I'm not the only one who likes this one. I've seen it held up as one of the best-written mystery novels of all time. I'm not sure I'd go that far, but if you only read one book by this author, this would likely be a good one to pick.
Lament for a Maker: A Sir John Appleby Mystery
P.S. J.I.M. Stewart wrote a memoir, Myself and Michael Innes, but I can't say I'd recommend it, if for no other reason than I liked the author less after I read it. He comes across better in his fiction, I'd say.
