New Year madness

A bit of a cold shower from the party poopers at The Wall Street Journal:

New Year madness is a thing of quite modern making, and hardly an improvement on the tradition that long preceded it, which called for a somewhat sober, respectful and reflective morning celebration. I blame the Scots for the worldwide embrace of midnight debauchery. And, of course, whoever it was that, some little while beforehand, went and invented public clocks.

Clocks are the real key. The whole notion of bidding formal and raucous farewell to the Old and offering optimistic greeting to the New was something that could really only occur once we in the public square knew when the exact moment of midnight was. Until the manufacture of proper clock escapements, and until Galileo exhibited the marvels of the pendulum, the slow appearance of dawn just had to do. First light was the only clue anyone had as to the start of a new year.

But then came clocks, at first great clanking iron engines equipped with enormous hanging bells that could inform us of the passing of time. Clocks that could perform this magic were first placed on top of specially-built church towers—initially to wake the villagers from slumber, to bring the harvest-workers home from the fields, or to sound the Angelus and bring in the pious to pray.

Reuters

New Year's fireworks in Berlin.

These devices first began to peal their chimes in the 15th century, and they had become popular and quite widely dispersed by the 17th. All towns had them by then, as did most villages—and it was about this time that the Scots, armed with timepieces of their own, enthusiastically got into the act.

They adopted in short order their peculiar twin customs of Hogmanay and First Footing, designed to mark the sliding of one year into another, and by the 1680s they started organizing celebrations around them that eventually had us all getting off on this whole present-day New-Year-begins-at-midnight malarkey. Then a century later Robert Burns wrote the words to "Auld Lang Syne" and set it to a jaunty Scottish dance tune—and with that, and the provision on the last evening of December of copious draughts of whisky, so these normally dour and repressed northern peoples oversaw the beginning of the long decline of the old habit of marking New Year with ceremonies of dignified moderation and temporal respect.

Stevie Wonder

Gene Krupa

Jason Mraz-- I'm Yours

Ever Since I Can Remember

Year-End Spread

The concluding excerpt to my year-end column this week in The Jewish Journal: 

Of course, Judaism has plenty to offer — it’s one long buffet full of wonderful delights: morality, prayer and Torah, yes, but also centuries of history, philosophy, poetry, music, literature, theater, mysticism and humor, among other things.

The problem is that individual groups or movements have attached themselves to one section of the buffet, ignored the others, and said, “Here! This is Judaism!” Torah-observant Jews might ignore history and literature. Cultural Jews might ignore Torah and prayer. Spiritual Jews and tikkun olam Jews might ignore both, and so on. Yet each one will claim, “This is Judaism!”

Rarely will any group present the whole buffet or cross outside of their comfort zones (Limmud being a notable exception). I’ve spent twenty years in Orthodox shuls, for example, and I think I can count on one hand the classes or sermons that have dealt with Jewish poetry or literature.

By the same token, many of my friends who are “cultural Jews” have written off Torah study as being outdated and irrelevant.

My point is this: Jews would be a lot more interested in exploring their Judaism if they saw it as a buffet full of different delights, rather than a restaurant with one or two items on the menu — especially if those items are predictable servings of morality.

We focus so much on the obvious virtues — honesty, faith, compassion, integrity, humility, generosity, etc. — that we seem to forget the one virtue that makes us feel the most alive: curiosity.

Yet curiosity is the virtue that not only can entice disconnected Jews to explore their Judaism, it’s also the virtue that can bring Jews closer together. What is real love if not the desire or curiosity to get to know — rather than judge — the Other?

Unfortunately, there’s no money in curiosity. It’s not easy to control your flock when you encourage them to spread their wings and sample the many delights of their faith. Who knows where they might end up? Falling for Jewish literature or history? Becoming more Torah-observant? Joining another Jewish community?

Ironically, for Judaism to thrive in the next century, we will need to violate the first rule of marketing: finding your niche and promoting the hell out of it. We’re niching ourselves to death. Whichever niche you’re in, whichever section of the buffet you’re promoting, it would behoove all movements of Judaism to mix it up and add a few more items to their menus.

Think about it. If you see a beautiful spread with an array of choices, you might criticize one of the choices, but chances are you won’t criticize the whole buffet. Judaism deserves nothing less.

Happy New Year.

Demographic time bomb?

One of the most compelling arguments for Israel giving up land has been the so-called demographic "time bomb", which assumes that if Israel does not give up the West Bank, the country would soon end up with a Jewish minority. Here, in today's Jerusalem Post, Yoram Ettinger takes on that assumption: 

DEMOGRAPHIC ASSUMPTIONS have played an increasing role in shaping national security policy since 1992. But what if these assumptions are dramatically wrong? For example, since the beginning of annual aliya in 1882 - and in contradiction to demographic projections - the Jewish population between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean has grown 238-fold, while the Arab population increased only sixfold. Since 1948, the Jewish population has increased almost tenfold, and the Arab population has expanded threefold.

Israel's demographers did not believe that a massive aliya would take place in the aftermath of the 1948/9 war. One million Jews arrived. They projected no substantial aliya from the communist bloc during the 1970s. Almost 300,000 Jews arrived. They dismissed the possibility of a massive aliya from the USSR, even if the gates were opened. One million olim relocated from the Soviet Union to the Jewish homeland during the 1990s.

Contrary to demographic assumptions, a rapid and drastic decline in Muslim fertility has been documented by the UN Population Division: Iran - 1.7 births per woman; Algeria - 1.8 births; Egypt - 2.5 births; Jordan - three births; and so on. The Arab fertility rate in pre-1967 Israel declined 20 years faster than projected, and Judea and Samaria Arab fertility has dropped below 4.5 births per woman, tending toward three births.

Precedents suggest that low fertility rates can rarely be reversed following a sustained period of significant reduction.

At the same time, the annual number of Jewish births increased by 45 percent between 1995 (80,400) and 2008 (117,000), mostly impacted by the demographic surge within the secular sector. The total annual Arab births in pre-1967 Israel stabilized around 39,000 during the same period, reflecting the successful Arab integration into the infrastructure of education, employment, health, trade, politics and sports.

AN AUDIT of the documentation of Palestinian births, deaths and migration, which is conducted by the Palestinian Authority ministries of Health and Education and Election Commission, as well as by Israel's Border Police and Central Bureau of Statistics and by the World Bank, reveals huge misrepresentations by the Palestine Central Bureau of Statistics.

For instance, the PCBS's census includes about 400,000 overseas residents who have been away for more than one year, ignores high net-emigration (28,000 in 2008, 25,000 in 2007, etc.) and double-counts some 250,000 Jerusalem Arabs, who are also counted by Israel. Furthermore, a 40,000-60,000 annual birth gap is confirmed between PCBS numbers and the documentation conducted by the PA Health and Education ministries.

The audit of Palestinian and Israeli documentation exposes a 66% bend in the current number of Judea and Samaria Arabs - 1.55 million and not 2.5 million, as claimed by the PA. It certifies a solid 67% Jewish majority over 98.5% of the land west of the Jordan River (without Gaza), compared with a 33% and an 8% Jewish minority in 1947 and 1900, respectively, west of the Jordan River. An 80% majority is attainable by 2035 with the proper demographic policy, highlighting aliya, returning expatriates, etc.

In conclusion, demographic optimism is well-documented, while demographic fatalism is resoundingly refuted. There is a demographic problem, but it is not lethal, and the tailwind is Jewish. Therefore, anyone suggesting that there is a demographic machete at the throat of the Jewish state and that Jewish geography must be conceded to secure Jewish demography, is either grossly mistaken or outrageously misleading.

John Lennon-- Love

Why your boss is incompetent

Newscientist magazine revisits a provocative finding:

The idea that high-level incompetence is inevitable was formulated in the 1969 best-selling book The Peter Principle: Why things always go wrong. Its authors, psychologist Laurence Peter and playwright Raymond Hull, started from the observation that while jobs generally get more difficult the higher up any ladder you climb, most people only come equipped with a more or less fixed level of talent that corresponds to their intelligence, knowledge and energy. At some point, then, they will be promoted into a job they can't quite handle. They will, as Peter and Hull put it, "reach the level of their own incompetence". And there they will stay, fouling up operations until they either retire or some egregiously inept act gets them fired.
The problem is what they get up to in the meantime. "They end up distracting us from their crummy work with giant desks," says Robert Sutton of the Stanford Graduate School of Business in California. "They replace action with incomprehensible acronyms, blame others for failure, and cheat to create the illusion of progress." Meanwhile, Peter and Hull concluded, the actual work gets done by those who have not yet scaled the summit of their own incompetence. That would be you and me, then.

Sly and The Family Stone

Learning from terror

As usual, historian Victor Davis Hanson nails it in National Review Online: 

Coming on the heels of the killing spree by Maj. Nidal Hasan at Fort Hood, the latest terrorist "incident," involving Abdul Mutallab on Northwest Flight 253, is yet another isolated but tell-tale sign that we must learn from:

1) If solidly middle-class Westernized Muslims mouth the al-Qaeda line of radical Islamic, anti-American boilerplate, please take them seriously — i.e., worry less about their feelings and more about the lives of innocents they may in the future seek to annihilate. The more upscale and the more the Western exposure, the more there is to worry about.

2) For the last eight years, many have patiently tried to suggest that the answer to "Why do they hate us?" does not entail poverty, Western imperialism or colonialism, support for Israel, past provocations, etc. Rather, radical Islam encourages in an Hasan or Mutallab age-old passions like pride, envy, and a sense of inferiority — all accelerated by instantaneous communications and abetted by continual Western apologetics that on a global level blame Westerners for self-induced misery in many Islamic countries. "They did it" is far easier than looking inward to address tribalism, gender apartheid, statism, autocracy, religious intolerance, and fundamentalism, which in perfect-storm fashion ensure an impoverished — and resentful and angry — radical Islamic community while the rest of the world moves merrily on.

3) I think the year-long mantra of "Bush destroyed the Constitution" is now almost over, and we will begin again worrying about our collective safety rather than scoring partisan points by citing supposed excesses in our anti-terrorism efforts. With the delay in closing Guantanamo (from the promised shuttering on Jan. 20, 2010 to . . . sometime in 2011?), Obama's quiet copy-catting of Bush security protocols (such as wiretaps, intercepts, tribunals, and renditions), and the popular outcry against the upcoming show trial of KSM in New York, a public consensus is growing that radical Muslims like Hasan and Mutallab will continue to attempt to kill Americans. Citizens increasingly understand that the last eight years of relative safety following 9/11 were due only to heightened security at home and proactive use of force abroad, that we should cease trying to appease radical Islam by dreaming up new euphemisms ("overseas contingency operations," "man made disasters," etc.), and that it is time to stop the apologetics and kowtowing, and grudgingly accept that thousands of radical Islamic fundamentalists worldwide want to kill Americans — and dozens of governments, at least on the sly, hope that they do. Such venom has nothing to do with past American behavior or George Bush's strut, nor can it be ameliorated on the cheap by Barack Obama's Nobel Prize, middle name, or reset-button diplomacy.

4) As we learned on 9/11, it is often the unsung heroes among us that come out of the shadows to aid us, and not necessarily large bureaucracies entrusted with our safety. Individuals acting on their own so often make the difference between salvation and mass murder.

5) After the embarrassing debate about Hasan (e.g., "Was he a terrorist?"; second-hand post-traumatic stress syndrome, etc.), I don't think the public will put up with similar contextualization about Mutallab.

6) The politics of anti-terrorism in this administration will insidiously begin to change, given that there was no repeat of 9/11 between 2001 and 2009  — and that thereafter, signs began to emerge that radical Muslims were reenergized and eager to trump their feat of eight years ago. In such a climate, one must worry more about the passengers on Flight 253 and less about whether self-confessed mass murderer and beheader KSM is given a public venue to explain his hatred of the United States, and is granted rights usually not accorded to such out-of-uniform and self-proclaimed terrorist enemies. So a little more "Beware of radical Muslim terrorists who want to murder us — and won't!" and a little less chest-thumping about dropping the supposedly retrograde "War on Terror."

Why we're losing the war

Our system just can't seem to deal with holy wars, that hazy place between real war and ordinary crime. Once again, Christopher Hitchens in Slate tells it like it is:

For some years after 9/11, passengers were forbidden to get up and use the lavatory on the Washington-New York shuttle. Zero tolerance! I suppose it must eventually have occurred to somebody that this ban would not deter a person who was willing to die, so the rule was scrapped. But now the principle has been revisited for international flights. For many years after the explosion of the TWA plane over Long Island (a disaster that was later found to have nothing at all to do with international religious nihilism), you could not board an aircraft without being asked whether you had packed your own bags and had them under your control at all times. These two questions are the very ones to which a would-be hijacker or bomber would honestly and logically have to answer "yes." But answering "yes" to both was a condition of being allowed on the plane! Eventually, that heroic piece of stupidity was dropped as well. But now fresh idiocies are in store. Nothing in your lap during final approach. Do you feel safer? If you were a suicide-killer, would you feel thwarted or deterred?

Why do we fail to detect or defeat the guilty, and why do we do so well at collective punishment of the innocent? The answer to the first question is: Because we can't—or won't. The answer to the second question is: Because we can. The fault here is not just with our endlessly incompetent security services, who give the benefit of the doubt to people who should have been arrested long ago or at least had their visas and travel rights revoked. It is also with a public opinion that sheepishly bleats to be made to "feel safe." The demand to satisfy that sad illusion can be met with relative ease if you pay enough people to stand around and stare significantly at the citizens' toothpaste. My impression as a frequent traveler is that intelligent Americans fail to protest at this inanity in case it is they who attract attention and end up on a no-fly list instead. Perfect.

It was reported over the weekend that in the aftermath of the Detroit fiasco, no official decision was made about whether to raise the designated "threat level" from orange. Orange! Could this possibly be because it would be panicky and ridiculous to change it to red and really, really absurd to lower it to yellow? But isn't it just as preposterous (and revealing), immediately after a known Muslim extremist has waltzed through every flimsy barrier, to leave it just where it was the day before?

What nobody in authority thinks us grown-up enough to be told is this: We had better get used to being the civilians who are under a relentless and planned assault from the pledged supporters of a wicked theocratic ideology. These people will kill themselves to attack hotels, weddings, buses, subways, cinemas, and trains. They consider Jews, Christians, Hindus, women, homosexuals, and dissident Muslims (to give only the main instances) to be divinely mandated slaughter victims. Our civil aviation is only the most psychologically frightening symbol of a plethora of potential targets. The future murderers will generally not be from refugee camps or slums (though they are being indoctrinated every day in our prisons); they will frequently be from educated backgrounds, and they will often not be from overseas at all. They are already in our suburbs and even in our military. We can expect to take casualties. The battle will go on for the rest of our lives. Those who plan our destruction know what they want, and they are prepared to kill and die for it. Those who don't get the point prefer to whine about "endless war," accidentally speaking the truth about something of which the attempted Christmas bombing over Michigan was only a foretaste. While we fumble with bureaucracy and euphemism, they are flying high.

Cat Stevens

New TSA regulations in action

They screw up, we pay

Who gets punished for the U.S. Homeland Security's boneheaded decision not to put an advertised would-be terrorist on the no-fly list? Why, millions of airport travelers like you and I, as you can read in The Huffington Post:

Tougher airline security measures were imposed Friday after a man flying from Nigeria to Amsterdam then to the U.S. on a Northwest Airlines flight tried to ignite an explosive as the plane prepared to land in Detroit.

Government officials didn't detail the restrictions, saying they don't want terrorists to know about potential security measures. They also declined to say how long the measures would be in effect and said the limits could vary from airport to airport.

Authorities introduced a second layer of security at Pearson International Airport in Toronto. On Monday morning, every U.S.-bound passenger was subjected to a pat down and their luggage was inspected by hand. It took about three hours for travelers to get through the checks.

On one Air Canada flight from Toronto to New York's La Guardia Airport the crew told passengers before departure that in addition to remaining in their seats for the duration of one-hour flight, they were not allowed to use any electronic devices – even iPods – or their own headphones. The crew also told passengers that they would not be able to access their personal belongings because of the "enhanced security procedures."

Over the weekend, travelers on incoming international flights said that during the final hour, attendants removed blankets, banned opening overhead bins, and told passengers to stay in their seats with their hands in plain sight.

Do they think we're stupid?

Eight years and billions of dollars of airport security after 9/11, a bomb is smuggled on a U.S. airplane by a would-be terrorist who had been exposed to U.S. authorities as a would-be terrorist by his own father. The response of our fearless protectors to this extraordinary level of negligence and incompetence? The system worked!
Check out their comments at the end of this excerpt from today's New York Times:

When a prominent Nigerian banker and former government official phoned the American Embassy in Abuja in October with a warning that his son had developed radical views, had disappeared and might have traveled to Yemen, embassy officials did not revoke the young man’s visa to enter the United States, which was good until June 2010.

Instead, officials said Sunday, they marked the file of the son, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, for a full investigation should he ever reapply for a visa. And when they passed the information on to Washington, Mr. Abdulmutallab’s name was added to 550,000 others with some alleged terrorist connections — but not to the no-fly list. That meant no flags were raised when he used cash to buy a ticket to the United States and boarded a plane, checking no bags.

Now that Mr. Abdulmutallab is charged with trying to blow up a transcontinental airliner over Detroit on Christmas Day, some members of Congress are urgently questioning why, eight years after the Sept. 11 attacks, security measures still cannot keep makeshift bombs off airliners.

On Sunday, as criticism mounted that security lapses had led to a brush with disaster, President Obama ordered a review of the two major planks of the aviation security system — the creation of watch lists and the use of detection equipment at airport checkpoints.

At the same time, a jittery air travel system coped with a new scare. On the same flight that Mr. Abdulmutallab took on Friday — Northwest 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit — an ailing Nigerian man who spent a long time in the restroom inadvertently set off a security alert. It turned out to be a false alarm.

Officials in several countries, meanwhile, worked to retrace Mr. Abdulmutallab’s path and to look for security holes. In Nigeria, officials said he arrived in Lagos on Christmas Eve, just hours before departing for Amsterdam. American officials were tracking his travels to Yemen, and Scotland Yard investigators were checking on his connections in London, where he studied from 2005 to 2008 at University College London and was president of the Islamic Society.

Obama administration officials scrambled to portray the episode, in which passengers and flight attendants subdued Mr. Abdulmutallab and doused the fire he had started, as a test that the air safety system passed.

“The system has worked really very, very smoothly over the course of the past several days,” Janet Napolitano, the Homeland Security secretary said, in an interview on “This Week” on ABC. Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman, used nearly the same language on “Face the Nation” on CBS, saying that “in many ways, this system has worked.”

Ad of the year

Dave Matthews Band

Saying no to a rock star

Shmuel Rosner in Slate has an interesting take on the value of saying no to the rock star president: 

It isn't just that no one has cut Obama any slack. World leaders seem to be taking pleasure in rebuffing him, disappointing him, even, in some cases, mocking him. French President Nicolas Sarkozy famously called Obama an "inexperienced, ill-prepared" leader.

Praising and admiring Obama are still common, but raising doubts about him, even scoffing at him, is now becoming fashionable. Although he is still popular among Europeans and more popular with Muslims than his despised predecessor, Obama is being tagged with the unflattering label John Quincy Adams earned before he lost the 1828 election: "Adams can write, Jackson can fight."

Obama can write—and he can speak—but if he can't fight, he'll find it hard to achieve his goals. If he can't fight, he isn't scary. And evidently, being popular didn't help him much. In fact, you might even say that being popular made it more difficult for Obama to succeed. He was too popular for his own good, annoyingly popular, distractingly popular. When a TV interviewer asked Sarkozy whether there was "competition for leadership" between him and Obama, the Frenchman responded, "there's no competition," but he was demonstrably annoyed.

Obama's popularity with the people of the world is something local leaders feel an instinctive urge to resist. No one is pleased when a foreign politician is more loved and respected than he is. And in many cases, opposition is the trouble. For Netanyahu and Abbas, resisting Obama was politically beneficial. Their "people" appreciated the leaders' newly discovered chutzpah. Unhinged by Obama's conciliatory tone, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez suggested that the president is the devil without worrying much about possible consequences. Iranians have more confidence in Obama than they had in Bush—only more reason for supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to point out that he can't tell the difference.

In fact, no world leader has paid a price for disappointing Obama. With Obama so nice and so conciliatory, risking retaliation by the White House doesn't seem all that dangerous. If resisting Bush's policies was a political necessity, encouraged and driven by the anger of the masses (ask Britain's Tony Blair about that), resisting Obama has become trendy, almost cool, because it gives world leaders the chance to stand taller, to be an equal member of the club of the clashing rock stars. Imagine the most popular boy in class asking a girl out. Imagine that after much consideration the girl says no. Not even you are good enough for me.

Pops

A review in City Journal of Terry Teachout's new biography of Louis Armstrong:

In the spring of 1998, Time commissioned Al Hirschfeld, the doyen of American caricaturists, to draw an unusual cover. It would celebrate five outstanding “Artists and Entertainers of the Century”—Pablo Picasso, Lucille Ball, Charlie Chaplin, Steven Spielberg, and Louis Armstrong. Much fanfare accompanied the announcement. That illustration was never published.

A handful of staffers condemned the portrait of Armstrong as racist and made their feelings known to the managing editor. He capitulated without a backward glance. “We thought,” recalled Walter Isaacson, “it’s controversial, so why go there?” Hirschfeld redrew the cover (for a substantial fee), with Bob Dylan sitting in for the black trumpeter.

The decision was an egregious blunder. In the first place, it distorted history in the name of political correctness. Dylan is a pop and folk superstar, but he is in no sense a great musician. His compositions are elemental, his guitar work no more than adequate. As for his voice, only Woody Allen could sound so adenoidal. In contrast, Armstrong’s horn is the most authoritative instrument in the annals of jazz (“You can’t play nothing on trumpet that doesn’t come from him,” remarked Miles Davis). And Armstrong’s vocal phrasing has influenced just about every cabaret and band singer from the 1920s to the present.

Second, Hirschfeld, once an editorial cartoonist for the radical New Masses and perhaps the least biased artist in America, had no intention of giving offense. He was simply rendering Armstrong’s toothy, incandescent smile and exophthalmic eyes, markedly white against his dark brown skin. Hirschfeld didn’t create that caricature; Armstrong did. As Terry Teachout explains in his luminous biography, exaggeration and over-the-top bonhomie were the way Armstrong survived, then prevailed, and finally triumphed in life and in show business, an arena with even fewer scruples than journalism.

JJ Cale

Regina Spektor-- Hallelujah

Damien Rice-- Hallelujah

Music that makes you want to live

Algis Valiunas in The Weekly Standard on music that makes you want to live:

But it is of course Messiah that remains Handel's nonpareil work. Here the secular and the sacred are joined, as Handel constructs a monument to everlasting truth on a pedestal of familiar, worldly beauty. In Handel's sound-world, biblical grandeur requires an admixture of joyous levity to portray fully the surpassing love of the God who suffered and died for human salvation. Some of the music is unmistakably churchly, based on the hymn rather than the dance or operatic aria: The bass recitatives and airs have all the majesty of prophetic utterance whose solemnity is amplified as only music can do. But the melody of the alto air He was despised could almost be set to a lament for lost love from Alcina or Rodelinda. Similarly, a chorus such as For unto us a child is born has the ebullient lightness of a pastoral dance from an Italian opera, though it will swell into hieratic magnificence. It is fitting that this oratorio has become the consummate Christmas musical staple: It exemplifies the community at glad-hearted worship, in a world that fulfills its spiritual needs.

And this community of souls extends well beyond the Christian flock. In Henderson the Rain King, Saul Bellow's hero, an American millionaire trying to heal his spiritual desolation with a journey into the African wild, is greeted warmly by the isolated Arnewi tribe. Anticipating revelation and renewal, Henderson is moved to sing to the Arnewi from Messiah: He was despised and But who may abide the day of His coming. Taking in the music, Willatale, the old queen of the tribe, the woman of Bittahness, says to him, "Grun-tu-molani." Henderson cannot wait to understand what she is saying, and the translator explains, "Say, you want to live. Grun-tu-molani. Man want to live."

That is what Handel's music does: It makes you want to live. There is no greater gift an artist can give his audience.

Why beauty matters

Roger Scruton, in The Journal of The American Enterprise Institute, meditates on why beauty in architecture matters-- and the high cost of ignoring it:

In Britain, the state, in the form either of local or central government, will tell you whether you can or cannot build on land that you own. And if it permits you to build, it will stipulate not only the purposes for which you may use the building, but also how it should look, and what materials should be used to construct it. Americans are used to building regulations that enforce utilitarian standards: insulation, smoke alarms, electrical safety, the size and situation of bathrooms, and so on. But they are not used to being told what aesthetic principles to follow, or what the neighborhood requires of materials and architectural details. I suspect that many Americans would regard such stipulations as a radical violation of property rights, and further evidence of the state’s illegitimate expansion.

This American attitude has something healthy about it, but it tends to go with two quite erroneous assumptions about beauty and the aesthetic. The first assumption is that beauty is an entirely subjective matter, about which there can be no reasoned argument and concerning which it is futile to search for a consensus. The second assumption, congenial to those who adopt the first, is that beauty doesn’t matter, that it is a value without economic reality, which cannot be allowed to place any independent constraint on the workings of the market.

The first assumption, that beauty is subjective, owes much of its appeal to the fact that it is functional in a democratic culture. By making this assumption you avoid giving offense to the one whose taste differs from yours. He likes garden gnomes, illuminated Christmas displays, Bing Crosby singing “White Christmas,” and a thousand other things that send shudders down the educated spine. But that’s his taste, and he is entitled to it. Leave him to enjoy it and he will leave you to get on with listening to Beethoven quartets, collecting antiques, and designing your house in the style of Palladio. But sometimes the assumption becomes dysfunctional. Each year his illuminated Christmas display increases in size, gets more bright and obtrusive, and lasts longer. Eventually his house has an all-year round Christmas tree, with Santa protruding from the chimney and brightly shining reindeer on the lawn. To be honest, the sight is insufferable, and entirely spoils the view from your window. You retaliate by playing Wagner late at night, only to receive blasts of Bing Crosby in the early hours. Here is the democratic culture at work—on its way to mutual destruction.

This kind of thing has been felt strongly in Europe, and it is one of the reasons for the reaction against McDonalds. While everyone has a right to advertise his wares, the advertisement must not spoil the place on which it shines. And American advertisements seem invariably designed to do just that. Maybe they don’t have that effect in America: after all, it is hard to see how the average American main street can be spoiled by an illuminated sign or by anything else. But the main streets of European cities are the result of meticulous aesthetic decisions over centuries. Do we really want the double yellow arches competing with the arches of St. Mark’s?

Teddy Pendergrass

Hail to the Star

Daniel Henniger of The Wall Street Journal analyzes Obama's star factor and how it connects-- and interferes-- with the needs of the presidency: 

The American presidency isn't like anything else in life. What was magic at Harvard or wowed independents in 2008 isn't necessarily what works in the Oval Office or in a room with Vladimir Putin or Wen Jiabao, who are quite beyond the experience of political awe.

The aspect of the "Obama" phenomenon that disconcerts me most is the sense that Barack Obama himself is at times oblivious of where it has taken him. The first time was his acceptance speech last year in Denver, in which he promised to solve, well, pretty much everything. Grandiosity is de rigueur on that occasion, but this was its antic cousin, grandiloquence.

This week brought a more troubling incident. Harry Reid's Senate had just secured its 60th vote for Mr. Obama's health-care reform. Whatever one's view, its trillion-dollar-plus cost is an agreed given. Days earlier the public saw Congress vote to raise the debt ceiling by almost $290 billion to make room for the needs of the $800 billion stimulus bill, the unprecedented $3.5 trillion budget, and the House's approval Dec. 16 of a new $154 billion jobs bill. Amid this President Obama said Monday: "We can't continue to spend . . . as if the hard-earned tax dollars of the American people can be treated like Monopoly money."

From the Wizard of Oz to Tiger Woods, the greatest danger to grand men is feet of clay. There are varieties of clay. For the politician known as Obama it is that if he is shown to be a cynic, he is finished. "Monopoly money" was an everyone-agrees-with-me remark. But to everyone, it was simply fantastic.

The American people took a flyer on Barack Obama. If they conclude Obama is just the name of another lesser god, his fall could come as fast as his rise.

Is science boring?

Absolutely, according to Stephen Battersby of NewScientist:

ASTONISHING discoveries in space, revelations about human nature, frightening news on the environment, medical advances that will banish life-threatening diseases: an inexhaustible stream of wonders runs through the pages of New Scientist. All tell the same tale. Science is exciting. Science is cutting-edge. Science is fun.

It is now time to come clean. This glittering depiction of the quest for knowledge is... well, perhaps not an outright lie, but certainly a highly edited version of the truth. Science is not a whirlwind dance of excitement, illuminated by the brilliant strobe light of insight. It is a long, plodding journey through a dim maze of dead ends. It is painstaking data collection followed by repetitious calculation. It is revision, confusion, frustration, bureaucracy and bad coffee. In a word, science can be boring.

My own brief and undistinguished research career included its share of mind-numbing tasks, notably the months of data processing which revealed that a large and expensive orbiting gamma-ray telescope had fixed its eye on the exploding heart of a distant galaxy and seen... nothing. I tip my hat, though, to New Scientist's San Francisco bureau chief, who spent nearly three years watching mice sniff each other in a room dimly lit by a red bulb. "It achieved little," he confesses, "apart from making my clothes smell of mouse urine." And the office prize for research ennui has to go to the editor of NewScientist.com. "I once spent four weeks essentially turning one screw backwards and forwards," he says. "It was about that time that I decided I didn't want to be a working scientist."

Eric Clapton-- Knocking on Heaven's Door

Votes for sale

Michael Gerson of The Washington Post gives us more evidence of a dysfunctional political system that only feeds the cynicism people feel towards politicians: 

Sometimes there is a fine ethical line between legislative maneuvering and bribery. At other times, that line is crossed by a speeding, honking tractor-trailer, with outlines of shapely women on mud flaps bouncing as it rumbles past.

Such was the case in the final hours of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's successful attempt to get cloture on health care reform. Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska, the last Democratic holdout, was offered and accepted a permanent exemption from his state's share of Medicaid expansion, amounting to $100 million over 10 years.

Afterward, Reid was unapologetic. "You'll find," he said, "a number of states that are treated differently than other states. That's what legislating is all about."

But legislating, presumably, is also about giving public reasons for the expenditure of public funds. Are Cornhuskers particularly sickly and fragile? Is there a malaria outbreak in Grand Island? Ebola detected in Lincoln?

Reid didn't even attempt to offer a reason why Medicaid in Nebraska should be treated differently from, say, Medicaid across the Missouri River in Iowa. The majority leader bought a vote with someone else's money. Does this conclusion sound harsh? Listen to Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who accused the Senate leadership and the administration of "backroom deals that amount to bribes," and "seedy Chicago politics" that "personifies the worst of Washington."

i-Phone jam with robot

Elton John-- Sixty Years On

Remembering the women

In all the noise we make about the victims of terror and holy wars, the one victim we can always count on are the women. This problem dates from time immemorial, and is unlikely to be "fixed" by our war against terrorism, explains Francine Prose of Lapham's Quarterly:

Hardly anyone noticed this summer when former president Jimmy Carter explained why he had decided to leave the Baptist Church. However “painful and difficult,” wrote Carter in an essay that appeared in the Guardian, his break with the denomination to which he had belonged for sixty years had begun to seem like the only possible response to past opinions expressed and codified by the Southern Baptist Convention. “It was an unavoidable decision when the convention’s leaders, quoting a few carefully selected Bible verses and claiming that Eve was created second to Adam and responsible for original sin, ordained that women must be ‘subservient’ to their husbands and prohibited from serving as deacons, pastors, or chaplains in the military service. This was in conflict with my belief—confirmed in the holy scriptures—that we are all equal in the eyes of God.”

Considerably more attention was generated some months earlier by another story about how religion conceives and enforces its view of a woman’s place. The horrific attack on two Afghan girls en route to school—the young women were severely disfigured by acid allegedly thrown by Taliban fighters—was widely reported and discussed. Obviously, the assault was more brutal, shocking, and newsworthy than an elderly white guy’s regretful decision to separate himself from the misguided pronouncements of some other elderly white guys. And just as clearly, the Taliban’s plans for women far exceed the darkest imaginings of the Southern Baptists, whose tenets—“a wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband”—seem genial and reassuringly vague when compared to the restrictions that the Taliban impose, and seek to impose, on women, regulations that narrow the parameters of daily life down to a space in which anyone, male or female, would suffocate. Under Taliban rule Afghan women cannot work, attend school, leave home without a male chaperone, or ride in a taxi. Minor infractions, such as showing an ankle, are punished by public whippings. More serious violations, such as adultery, are capital crimes for which the sentence is death by hanging or stoning.

The acid attack on the schoolgirls offered graphic and persuasive confirmation of one reason why we have gone to war, or in any case one reason we’ve been given: according to some, once we defeat the Taliban, every Afghan girl can go to school. That’s the outcome everyone wants, though it is less often mentioned that literacy rates among Afghan women were appallingly low long before the Taliban, back in the 1980s when we were still arming the mujahideen—including many future Taliban warriors—to fight against the Russians. The Taliban’s demonic and demonizing attitude toward women represents merely the most current extreme manifestation of the grotesque misogyny fostered throughout history by religion and patriarchal tribal culture. Both the Taliban and the Southern Baptists employ the “lessons” of biology and scripture to “prove” women’s inferiority, a view of our gender unlikely to be eliminated by another air strike or drone-missile deployment, or by the polite demurrals of a former president.

What are we making?

David Brooks of The New York Times meditates on the New Economy:

In the 19th and 20th centuries we made stuff: corn and steel and trucks. Now, we make protocols: sets of instructions. A software program is a protocol for organizing information. A new drug is a protocol for organizing chemicals. Wal-Mart produces protocols for moving and marketing consumer goods. Even when you are buying a car, you are mostly paying for the knowledge embedded in its design, not the metal and glass.

A protocol economy has very different properties than a physical stuff economy. For example, you and I can’t use the same piece of metal at the same time. But you and I can use the same software program at the same time. Physical stuff is subject to the laws of scarcity: you can use up your timber. But it’s hard to use up a good idea. Prices for material goods tend toward equilibrium, depending on supply and demand. Equilibrium doesn’t really apply to the market for new ideas.

Over the past decades, many economists have sought to define the differences between the physical goods economy and the modern protocol economy. In 2000, Larry Summers, then the Treasury secretary, gave a speech called “The New Wealth of Nations,” laying out some principles. Leading work has been done by Douglass North of Washington University, Robert Fogel of the University of Chicago, Joel Mokyr of Northwestern and Paul Romer of Stanford.

Their research is the subject of an important new book called “From Poverty to Prosperity,” by Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz.

Kling and Schulz start off entertainingly by describing a food court. There are protocols everywhere, not only for how to make the food, but how to greet the customers, how to share common equipment like trays and tables, how to settle disputes between the stalls and enforce contracts with the management.

"I Would Live in Your Love" by Sara Teasdale

I would live in your love as the sea-grasses live in the sea,
Borne up by each wave as it passes, drawn down by each wave that
recedes;
I would empty my soul of the dreams that have gathered in me,
I would beat with your heart as it beats, I would follow your soul
as it leads.

Andrew Bird-- "Imitosis"

Parody of leadership?

Robert Samuelson of Newsweek doesn't mince words about his feelings for Obamacare and other things presidential:

Barack Obama's quest for historic health care legislation has turned into a parody of leadership. We usually associate presidential leadership with the pursuit of goals that, though initially unpopular, serve America's long-term interests. Obama has reversed this. He's championing increasingly unpopular legislation that threatens the country's long-term interests. "This isn't about me," he likes to say, "I have great health insurance." But of course, it is about him: about the legacy he covets as the president who achieved "universal" health insurance. He'll be disappointed.

Even if Congress passes legislation -- a good bet -- the finished product will fall far short of Obama's extravagant promises. It will not cover everyone. It will not control costs. It will worsen the budget outlook. It will lead to higher taxes. It will disrupt how, or whether, companies provide insurance for their workers. As the real-life (as opposed to rhetorical) consequences unfold, they will rebut Obama's claim that he has "solved" the health care problem. His reputation will suffer.

It already has. Despite Obama's eloquence and command of the airwaves, public suspicions are rising. In April, 57 percent of Americans approved of his "handling of health care" and 29 percent disapproved, reports The Washington Post-ABC News poll; in the latest survey, 44 percent approved and 53 percent disapproved. About half worried that their care would deteriorate and that health costs would rise.

These fears are well-grounded. The various health care proposals represent atrocious legislation. To be sure, they would provide insurance to 30 million or more Americans by 2019. People would enjoy more security. But even these gains must be qualified. Some of the newly insured will get healthier, but how many and by how much is unclear. The uninsured now receive 50 percent to 70 percent as much care as the insured. The administration argues that today's system has massive waste. If so, greater participation in the waste by the newly insured may not make them much better off.

A change in human nature?

There's plenty to criticize about last week's global climate summit in Copenhagen-- including the uncertain science and the absence of any real agreements. But Colin Blakemore at The Guardian sees something higher and deeper in the very idea of the summit: a possible evolution in human nature.

However things turn out, Copenhagen deserves a different sort of credit, perhaps even more significant than a step towards saving the planet. Copenhagen may mark a turning point in human nature, when the global village acquired a global mind.

What we have just witnessed is delegates from 192 countries talking about making sacrifices, slowing their development, constraining their industry, taxing their citizens, in a collective bid to stifle climate change. Those nations included virtually every race, every religion, every style of government – from monarchy to dictatorship, from constitutional democracy to communism.

For the past 5,000 years, agreements between nations have been determined by military or economic power, by political ideology or religious dogma. What Copenhagen has established, even if the final agreement fudges and procrastinates, is that a new force is at work in international diplomacy. A force that does not speak in terms of faith and conviction, that is not even absolutely certain about what it has to say. That force is science.

"I Don't Know if History Repeats Itself" by Yehuda Amichai

I don't Know if history repeats itself
But I do know that you don't.

I remember that city was divided
Not only between Jews and Arabs,
But Between me and you,
When we were there together.

We made ourselves a womb of dangers
We built ourselves a house of deadening wars
Like men of far north
Who build themselves a safe warm house of deadening ice.

The city has been reunited
But we haven't been there together.
By now I know
That History doesn't repeat itself,
As I always knew that you wouldn't.

Papa John Creach--Over the Rainbow

Arabian nights

Fighting the PR War

My column this week in The Jewish Journal on Israel's PR challenge and one idea that might help. Here is the last part:

What should that message be? One thing Wexler impressed on me is that we shouldn’t fool ourselves into believing that if we go “beyond the conflict,” as many people are advocating, that somehow the world will be distracted from the Palestinian issue. They won’t.

But still, what can you possibly say in 10 or 30 seconds that can cut through the complexities of the conflict and generate more sympathy for Israel’s position?

In a word, hate.

Specifically, we ought to focus on the hatred and glorifying of violence taught in Palestinian schools, summer camps, media and mosques that many of us believe is the real obstacle to peace.

Even Dennis Ross, a top advisor to the White House on Middle East affairs, once told me that his biggest regret in the Oslo process was the failure to enforce the clauses against incitement in Palestinian society.

In truth, how can we expect Palestinians to want to make peace with those they have been taught to hate and reject? And how can we expect Israelis to take enormous risks for peace with those who have been taught to hate and reject them?

Settlement freezes are nice, but they don’t deal with the core problem: a Palestinian society that worships total victory against the hated Zionist enemy rather than reconciliation and peaceful co-existence.

Israel advocates around the world should begin immediately a concerted campaign around this one single-minded message: “You can’t reach peace while you teach hate.” Factual and visual examples of this teaching of hatred can easily be accessed on Web sites for MEMRI or Palestinian Media Watch.

That’s some of what Wexler and I came up with after a couple of hours of brainstorming. Like I said, not very subtle or pretty, but then again, neither is war.

Fictitious letter from Obama to Kim Jong-II by Anthony Sacramone

Dear Supreme Leader,

How are you? I am fine. Mrs. Obama is also fine. Our two children are also fine. The Vice President and his wife, too, are fine. Many members of the Cabinet are fine. We’re all fine here. Thank you for asking. Even if it wasn’t out loud but just in your mind.

It’s been some time since we last chatted, although I’m informed that was never. Nevertheless, I can’t help but think I know you somehow, although it may just be that I watched that puppet movie by the South Park guys one too many times.

Word on the street is that your country is different from ours. You have universal health care, for example (but if I’m not mistaken, no one is allowed to take ill in your nation without express written permission). Here, people can get sick whenever they want. For example, a lot of people are getting sick of me. (Just kidding.)

Anyhoo, I hear you guys don’t have a lot in the way of strip malls and basic human rights. I’d like to address that strip-mall business. Wouldn’t a nice Office Depot/Dunkin Donuts/Staples combo look just great in downtown Pyongyang? (Pyongyang does have a downtown, doesn’t it? Or did you have it shot? Kidding again. We laugh a lot in Washington. Sometimes for no apparent reason. Then we take our pills and we’re fine.)

I’m looking at your country right now, in that picture the CIA World FactBook supplies. Did you know you’re right next to China? (I don’t know how much information gets to you guys from the outside. Do you Twitter? In the United States, most schoolchildren are taught that we’re next to Canada so an escape route can be drawn early in the event of a draft.)

The United States is on very friendly terms with China. In fact, we owe China lots and lots of money. Wouldn’t you like us to owe you money, too? Isn’t it better when people owe people money than when people threaten people? How does that Barbra Streisand song go? “People-e-e-e-e … people who owe people-e-e-e-e … are the luckiest people-e-e-e-e in the world-d-d-d-d.” Then there’s that one with Donna Summer: “If you’ve had enough, don’t put up with his stuff, don’t you do it-t-t-t. Now, if you’ve had your fill, get the check, pay the bill, you can do it-t-t-t!” Great stuff.

I see that your climate is “temperate with rainfall concentrated in summer.” Temperate. Let’s think about that word for a minute. Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines it as “existing as a prophage in infected cells and rarely causing lysis <temperate bacteriophages>.” Not very helpful, I must admit. Perhaps it means something else in North Korean. I do know what intemperate means, as when you threatened to wipe us off the map. If this were an Instant Message, I would insert a frowny-face emoticon right here. (Do you IM? Do you have emoticons? Are you allowed to express emotion in your land? Please write back soon and let me know.)

I guess I should get to my point. In November, when meeting with Mr. Lee, I urged you to just please stop doing whatever it is you’re doing. Have you gotten around to that yet? Have you stopped? Why don’t you stop? Please stop. Did you stop? Should I stop asking you to stop? Will you stop then? Please don’t stop stopping. OK, I’m going to stop now. See, I stopped. Did you? Did you stop? Please stop.

Well I have to go now. I have six TV interviews, two cover shoots, a single I’m cutting with Lady GaGa and Cornel West, and a supermarket opening to get to today. As I’m sure you understand, being a messianic figure to your people is a grind and a half. Work work work.

I know you’re an atheist Marxist dictatorship and all and don’t celebrate Christmas. We’re trying to cut back here, too. I wish there were just one generic holiday we could all enjoy and that didn’t mean anything so no one would get offended. Because when you mean things, then that only means that things are meaningful. And where does that get you? Someone has to interpret what the meaning means — and then someone disagrees with that interpretation. And then you’re offering graduate degrees in the meaning of meaning and racking up huge student-loan bills that you can only pay off by acting as a drug mule for a South American drug kingpin. And all you wanted was for someone to get you Season Two of The Big Bang Theory and leave it under the tree. Life is strange.

In any event, may the new year (do you have new years in North Korea? Or does the same year just go on and on until you just want to kill yourself?) bring our two great nations closer together, even though China keeps getting in the way.

Very best regards,

Supreme Leader Barack Obama

P.S. Under separate cover, I’m sending you a little gift. It’s a collection of great American movies on DVD. (Do you have movies over there? I believe you do, and that you’re a big fan. I read somewhere that you have 20,000 in your collection. No food but plenty of movies. Sounds like college!) I hope you don’t have these films. Meet Me in St. Louis is a wowser — tell me that isn’t a brilliant use of Technicolor. Did you know that Judy Garland almost didn’t do the film because she thought Margaret O’Brien would steal the picture? I’m also including Midway. That damn Joe Lieberman made me throw it in. What a nudge!

JJ Cale-- Cajun Moon

"Bluebird" by Charles Bukowski

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I'm not going
to let anybody see
you.

Tupac-- Dear Mama

Bob Marley-- Soul Rebel

Iron and Wine

Saving languages

There are 6,500 languages spoken in the world, and half are expected to die out by the end of the century. Now one man from Cambridge, Dr Mark Turin, is on a mission to record them before they die, as reported in The Independent:

The University of Cambridge academic is leading a project that aims to pull thousands of languages back from the brink of extinction by recording and archiving words, poems, chants – anything that can be committed to tape – in a bid to halt their destruction. Languages the majority of us will never know anything about.

Of the world's 6,500 living languages, around half are expected to die out by the end of this century, according to Unesco. Just 11 are spoken by more than half the earth's population, so it is little wonder that those used by only a few are being left behind as we become a more homogenous, global society. In short, 95 per cent of the world's languages are spoken by only five per cent of its population – a remarkable level of linguistic diversity stored in tiny pockets of speakers around the world.

In a small office room in the back of Cambridge's Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology – a place in which you almost expect Harrison Ford to walk around the corner at any moment, fedora on head, whip in hand – Turin looks over the contents of a box that arrived earlier in the morning from India. "[The receptionists] are quite used to getting these boxes now," says the 36-year-old anthropologist, who is based at the university. Inside the box, which is covered in dozens of rupee postage stamps, are DVDs representing hours of chants, songs, poems and literature from a tiny Indian community that is desperate for its language to have a voice and be included in Turin's venture.

Need money from investors? Learn the elevator pitch

Lou Reed

Valentino's miracle

I loved this story from Nicholas Kristof at The New York Times:

Here’s a story for the holiday season. A 30-year-old former refugee is putting together a most extraordinary Christmas present — the first high school his community has ever had.

Valentino Deng, 30, is the central figure in the masterful 2006 best seller, “What Is the What,” by Dave Eggers. The book records Valentino’s life after the Sudanese civil war strikes his remote town in South Sudan. His friends were shot around him. He lost contact with his family, and he became one of the “lost boys” of Sudan. Fleeing government soldiers, dodging land mines, eating leaves and animal carcasses, Valentino saw boys around him carried off and devoured by lions.

At one point, Valentino and other refugees were attacked by soldiers beside a crocodile-infested river. He swam to safety through water bloodied as some swimmers were shot and others were snatched by crocodiles.

Valentino learned to read and write at makeshift schools in refugee camps by writing letters in the dust with his finger. Improbably, he turned out to be a brilliant student with a cheerful, upbeat personality. And in 2001, the United States accepted him as a refugee.

Valentino had earned the right to take it easy for the next 600 years; instead, he sets an astonishing example of resilience, compassion and charity. He and Eggers channel every penny made from “What Is the What” to a new foundation dedicated to building a high school in his hometown in Sudan.

That’s what I find so inspiring about Valentino. For a quarter-century, world leaders have averted their eyes from horrors in Sudan — first the north-south civil war that killed two million people (more than died in all the wars in America’s history), then the genocide in Darfur and now the growing risk of another civil war. In that vacuum, moral leadership has come instead from university students and refugees like Valentino.

Now Valentino’s school is beginning to operate in the town of Marial Bai — a modern high school serving students from thousands of square miles. It had a soft opening earlier this year with 100 students, and he is hoping to increase to 450 students in the coming months — but that means dizzying challenges.

“I want to enroll more than 50 percent girls,” Valentino said. “But to do that, I have to house them, because families will not allow a girl to go far away to school without a place to stay.

“For now, I’ve enrolled 14 girls,” he added. “But they go home, and then they have to take care of siblings, collect firewood, fetch water. So I’m worried about how much they can learn.” In addition, a high school girl can fetch a huge bride price — about 100 cows — and Valentino thinks the best way to avoid early marriage and give the girls a chance to study is for them to live in a dormitory on the school grounds.

Decades of civil war have left South Sudan one of the poorest places on Earth, where a woman is more likely to die in childbirth than to be literate. In recent years, only about 500 girls have graduated annually from elementary school in South Sudan — out of a total population of eight million.

Valentino’s every step has been Herculean. Building supplies had to be trucked in from Uganda through a jungle where a brutal militia called the Lord’s Resistance Army murders, rapes and loots. There is no electricity or running water in Marial Bai, so the high school’s computers will have to run on solar power. When a microscope arrived the other day, a science teacher was overcome. He had never actually touched one.

The school has a certain American ethos. Valentino is requiring students to engage in service activities, such as building huts for displaced people. “We focus on leadership,” he explained.

Eight high school teachers from the United States, Canada and New Zealand traveled at their own expense to Valentino’s school last summer to train teachers and work with students. They raved to me about how eager the students are to learn; some students burst into tears when the volunteers had to leave.

“What he’s accomplished in his hometown is astounding,” Eggers said. “A 14-structure educational complex built from scratch in one year. It boggles the mind.

“He’s succeeded where countless NGOs stumble, mainly because he knows the local business climate and can negotiate reasonable local prices for materials,” he added, referring to nongovernmental organizations.

Valentino is still fund-raising and looking for volunteer teachers. He needs $15,000 to finish a dormitory for girls, and much more to dig wells and operate the school for the first three years. (More information about the school is at www.valentinoachakdeng.org.) But he’s relentless.

“I’m the lucky one,” Valentino told me. “I must be the one who will make a difference.”

What a perfect sentiment for these holidays.

When the truth gets in the way

What happens when the historical truth is chauvinistic and impolitic and undermines your noble message? In the case of President Obama, you do the ignoble: you distort, ignore, gloss over or dissemble, as historian Victor Davis Hanson explains in National Review Online:

In these minor and major historical distortions, there are two recurrent themes. The most obvious is that George W. Bush has been culpable, and that a far more sensitive and astute Obama is here to set things right. Historical citations will be crafted, in deductive fashion, to support that thesis.

But there is a second sort in which the self-proclaimed global healer Obama marshals history for noble purposes. And in service to his inspirational global ecumenism, the president apparently feels free to twist and fudge the past in order to suggest that our cultures are all roughly equal, with pasts that are likewise both good and bad, and thus we now need to bond and unify with appreciation of one another’s differences.

Obama feels that reverence for both the facts and spirit of history is not as important as that noble aim. If, for example, Muslims can be assured that the West has been just as culpable as they have been, and if they can be praised by unduly exaggerating their past cultural achievements, then perhaps the Islamic world will see that the United States is a broker of good will.

The alternatives to Obama’s constant historical revisionism would be to be quiet about history’s often disturbing truths — or to admit that the present globalization, in terms of economics, politics, culture, and military affairs, is largely an embrace of Westernization and the result of the unique dynamism and morality of Western culture itself.

To articulate the latter truth abroad would be chauvinistic and impolitic. To be quiet about it would be diplomatic. But to distort it for noble intentions has been nevertheless ignoble.