Alvaro Vargas Llosa: The Infidel

http://www.tcsdaily.com

16 Mar 2007

She is, together with Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese leader who has spent decades confronting military thugs, the most fascinating female public figure to come out of the underdeveloped world in a long time. I already knew this before I picked up Ayaan Hirsi Ali's autobiography, "Infidel,'' but I don't remember being more emotionally affected -- or more persuaded -- by a memoir since college. The moral challenge Hirsi Ali poses to the Islamic world she comes from, and to the Western world she has adopted, is nothing short of Voltairean. In the manner of the French philosopher, she turns upside down beliefs and institutions that millions take for granted.

Hirsi Ali became world famous in 2004, when Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered by an Islamic fundamentalist for making a documentary critical of Islam. The killer pinned a note to his victim's body with a death threat against Hirsi Ali, who had collaborated with him. She had taken refuge in Holland after a life of oppression under her Islamic family, made worse by her native Somalia's clan-based structures and forced relocations to Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia and Kenya. Not only was she a devout Muslim, but she had been a close sympathizer of the Muslim Brotherhood, the fundamentalist movement that was sweeping the region. After escaping to Holland to avoid an arranged marriage, she became a Dutch citizen and began to speak out against the culture of oppression affecting women in the Islamic world. She denounced "multiculturalism," in which Western countries tolerate and encourage -- often at taxpayers' expense -- cultural practices among immigrant groups even when they violate individual rights.



Theo van Gogh


Several factors make Hirsi Ali's argument devastating. Personal experience is one. The description of her and her sister's genital mutilation, one of many episodes rendered in harrowing detail but with a tone that is elegantly contained, is the fate of young Muslim girls in many countries, including in the "multicultural'' West, today. Another factor is her compassion. This is not the enemy of Muslims speaking, but a conscience that came to value individual freedom above loyalty to clan and obedience to the Koran, precisely because she saw the suffering of those among whom she was raised.

And then there is her autonomy of thinking. She was not converted by anyone nor did she succumb to any party from the "other side." She absorbed the Western canon by herself, often against the advice of Westerners, learning, little by little, the secret of the West's rise: the separation of church and state, individual sovereignty, freedom of trade, the rule of law.



Aayan Hirsi Ali

Hirsi Ali does not deny that courageous efforts are made by some Muslims to bring enlightenment to that part of the world. She is aware that, centuries ago, Muslims practiced trade and science, and were instrumental in helping the West rediscover Aristotle and the classics. But she thinks that this history is no justification for Muslims to practice barbaric acts today. The more liberal manifestations of Islam, she maintains, are personal deviations from the Koran and the prophet. "I could no longer," she says, "avoid seeing the totalitarianism, the pure moral framework that is Islam. ... True Islam, as a rigid belief system ... leads to cruelty."

Hirsi Ali renounced her own faith, but that is not a prerequisite for reforming the Muslim world. After all, Christianity, once a very oppressive religion, eventually became part of a liberal culture. But reforming Islam will involve, yes, a reinterpretation -- a reinvention -- of the Koran.

Hirsi Ali has been called many things, among them a right-wing fanatic. To suggest that making the defense of women's rights one's life cause and refusing to apply double standards when judging cultures makes one a right-wing fanatic can only mean that her critics have lost their moral compass. The fact that Western guilt has made it fashionable to support cultural groups that oppress their members in the name of "multiculturalism" is one powerful reason we all need to be reminded that free societies did not come about by luck, but through the painstaking trial-and-error process that selected those values and institutions that best protected freedom.

Hirsi Ali almost lost her Dutch citizenship, even though she was a member of parliament, when the Dutch government, under pressure from her critics, used a technical pretext to question the validity of her status. In the end, the government backtracked, but she nevertheless decided it was time to leave the country and settle in the United States.

I feel safer knowing she is among those of us lucky enough to live in free societies, where I hope she will continue to cause lots of trouble.

'Extras' calls it quits

Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant

Gervais, Merchant decline third season

By STEVE CLARKE
http://www.variety.com
20 March 2007

Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant's Brit comedy ``Extras'' will end with a one-off special.

Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant have ruled out a third season of cult British comedy hit "Extras."

The writer-performers, who also created "The Office," will end "Extras" with a one-off special as they did with "The Office."

"We don't have a date or any details about the cast yet," a spokeswoman for Gervais told the BBC, adding that the idea was in its "very, very early" stages.

However, the pair "will, at some point, sit down together and write it," she said.



Kate Winslet and Ricky Gervais from an episode of "Extras" from the show's first season.

"Extras," which has featured guest appearances by Kate Winslet, David Bowie and Robert De Niro, to name a few, follows the exploits of comic actor Andy Millman and his haphazard agent, Darren Lamb. HBO airs it in the U.S.

Merchant won the comedy performance prize for his role as Lamb at the Royal Television Society's program awards last week.

George Weigel: The End of the Anglican Communion

John Henry Newman (1801-1890)

From the Denver Catholic Register
Week of March 7, 2007

There's an Anglican church, St. Luke's, a few blocks up Old Georgetown Road from my parish in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. St. Luke's recently posted a large sign on the church lawn: "No matter who you are, no matter what you believe, you are welcome at our table."

Which is, in one sense, a noble sentiment: if it's meant to convey that, look, we're all sinners, and no matter how awful you may think you are, you're welcome in the communion of Christ's Church if you're truly repentant. Judging from recent events in the Anglican Communion, however, St. Luke's sign isn't a synopsis of the parable of the prodigal son and his merciful father; it's a succinct, if unwitting, statement of why the Anglican Communion is coming apart at the seams.

No Catholic serious about the Catholic commitment to the unity of Christ's Church can take any satisfaction from today's Anglican meltdown. It now looks as if John Henry Newman was right when he concluded that Anglicanism was not a "third branch" on the tree of historic Christian orthodoxy, of which the other branches were Catholicism and the Orthodox churches of the Christian east; rather, Newman decided, Anglicanism was Protestantism in English guise. In the wake of the Second Vatican Council, as hopes for ecclesial reconciliation between Rome and Canterbury ran high, it seemed, briefly, as if Cardinal Newman might have been wrong. With the Anglican Communion now fracturing into a gaggle of quarreling communities no longer in communion with each other, it looks as if Newman had the deeper insight into what King Henry VIII wrought.

But neither the late cardinal nor the multi-uxorious king could have imagined that Anglicanism's breakup would result from some Anglicans' insistence that sodomy can be sacramental.



King Henry XIII (1491-1547)

Yet that is precisely what is happening. As Canada's finest Catholic commentator, Father Raymond de Souza, wrote last year (reflecting on the attempts of Dr. Rowan Williams, archbishop of Canterbury, to hold the Anglican Communion together), "Some [Anglicans] argue that [homosexual acts] are sinful; others that they are sacramental. This is an unbridgeable gap and it appears impossible for Canterbury to straddle it, try as he might." Dr. Williams has tried mightily; he seems to have failed. There are indeed unbridgeable gaps, and it turns out that it does matter what you believe, if you wish to be seated at "our table" -- at least in the minds of the majority of the world's Anglicans, who disagree with the Episcopal Church USA's determination to bless same-sex unions and ordain practicing homosexuals to priestly and episcopal ministry.

An American Anglican clergyperson, debating all this on PBS's "NewsHour," said that, if schism were the only answer, she and her Pasadena congregation would choose "the Gospel" over "the institutional Church." From a theological point of view, no more thoroughly Protestant posing of the issue could be imagined. And what does standing up for "the Gospel" have to do with embracing the Zeigeist of the more delirious suburbs of the People's Republic of California?

Shortly after Rowan Williams was named to Becket's chair, we spent a cordial ninety minutes together at Lambeth Palace, Canterbury's London headquarters. I gave him a copy of Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II; we spoke of John Paul's theology of the body, and then fell to discussing the difference between "sacramental" and "gnostic" understandings of the human condition. The former insists that the stuff of the world -- including maleness, femaleness, and their complementarity -- has truths built into it; gnostics say it's all plastic, all malleable, all changeable. The sacramentalists believe that the extraordinary reveals itself through the ordinary: bread, wine, water, salt, marital love and fidelity; the gnostics say it's a matter of superior wisdom, available to the enlightened (which can mean, the politically correct). Dr. Williams seemed convinced that the gnosticism of a lot of western high culture posed a great danger to historic Christianity and the truths it must proclaim.

He was right. The gnosticism that infects the Episcopal Church USA has just about driven the Anglican Communion over the cliff.

George Weigel is a senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

Patrick Goldstein: '300': It's just a movie -- or is it?

THE BIG PICTURE/ PATRICK GOLDSTEIN

Call it a grand, vivid spectacle -- nothing more, nothing less.

The Los Angeles Times
March 20, 2007


Don't tell the critics, but "300" is a new kind of action movie, a clever synthesis of the stylized epic storytelling practiced by Peter Jackson in "Lord of the Rings" and the stop 'n' start fast-motion cutting of the Wachowski brothers' "Matrix" series. Let's call it Hyper Cinema. "300's" entire visual environment — its billowy wheat fields, its stormy gray skies, even blood that miraculously evaporates before it hits the ground — is a fabricated universe, created by 1,300 effects shots generated in a computer after the actors have gone home.

It's a gamer's view of the world that film critics don't relate to because they seem to have forgotten the kick they got from reading comics as kids. When I went to see "300" last week, the theater was full of scruffy guys who looked like they spent a lot more hours playing Final Fantasy X11 or God of War II than working out at the gym. In an era when it's increasingly difficult to reach young males, "300" offered a vivid spectacle of glistening pecs — as one admirer put it, "Ray Harryhausen crossed with Leni Riefenstahl" — that couldn't be replicated at home.

"We took a singular idea and went all the way with it, which I think resonates with audiences," director Zack Snyder, whose only other feature was a remake of "Dawn of the Dead," said on the phone from London. "It gives you that feeling that made you go to movies in the first place, as in 'Holy [smoke], that was awesome!' "

Populated with unknown actors, the retelling of the gory battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC was airily dismissed as hokum by America's leading critics.

Where the fanboys saw an easily identifiable theme — "me and my buddies are gonna band together and kick some butt" — critics spied pandering trash. The Boston Globe's Wesley Morris called "300" "action porn." The New York Times' A.O. Scott said " '300' is about as violent as ' Apocalypto' and twice as stupid." And the Washington Post's Stephen Hunter, dripping with disdain, exclaimed, "Go tell the Spartans that their sacrifice was not in vain; their long day's fight under the cooling shade of a million falling arrows safeguarded the West and guaranteed, all these years later, the right of idiots to make rotten movies about them."

Those idiots grossed $129.2 million in just 10 days. And Snyder says he wasn't perturbed by the nasty reviews. "Nah, I love 'em, they were funny," he says. "The reviews were so neo-con, so homophobic. They couldn't just go see the movie without trying to over-intellectualize it."

The critics were disturbed by a host of issues, not the least being the film's macho belligerence, cartoonish lack of interest in history and racial stereotyping of Xerxes' Persian hordes as dark-skinned, decadent club queens. But a key reason critics reacted so harshly is because they have been trained to value realism over fantasy, whether it is the stoic drama of Clint Eastwood's "Letters From Iwo Jima" or the cool psychological precision of David Fincher's "Zodiac," which has flopped at the box office, despite critical raves.

"Zodiac" had everything a critic could love. It was smart, full of context and armed with a compelling narrative about an obsessive search for an enigmatic killer. Unfortunately, Fincher is a filmmaker who has little interest in what audiences — or studio executives — think about his movies. He makes them for himself.

In contrast, Snyder's "300," with its Xbox ethos, is a movie made for a generation of visual sensation seekers. Critics are largely shaped by the aesthetic of the cinematic past, which is why you often get the feeling they've been dragged, kicking and screaming, into a new world they describe as coarser, more superficial and less intellectually stimulating than the golden age of their moviegoing youth.

The complaints are almost always the same. "It's an epic without a dream," said one critic. "The loudness, the smash-and-grab editing, and the relentless pacing drive every idea from your head, and even if you've been entertained, you may feel cheated of some dimension — a sense of wonder, perhaps." Those words were written 30 years ago by Pauline Kael, reviewing "Star Wars."

If anyone knows how late critics come to the party, it is Fincher, whose breakthrough 1995 thriller "Se7en" was roundly dismissed by many of the same top critics who were "Zodiac's" biggest admirers. The Wall Street Journal's Joe Morgenstern called it "ponderous," Time's Richard Schickel dubbed it "twaddle" and Newsweek's David Ansen described its style as being a cross between "a Nike commercial and a bad Polish art film."




Now that his work is more familiar, Fincher is considered an old master, at least compared with a nervy upstart like Snyder. As it turns out, the two men's backgrounds are surprisingly similar. Fincher, who is only four years older than the 40-year-old Snyder, began his career at ILM doing optical effects on George Lucas films before directing a series of commercials and music videos for everyone from Aerosmith to Paula Abdul. Snyder had a similar career path.

"I'm part of the 'Star Wars' generation — it's what made me want to become a director," Snyder says. "Blade Runner," "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and "Excalibur" — films he saw in his mid-teens — are the ones he cites as big influences.

It's obvious that Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" series has served as an influence as well. "300's" deformed hunchback, Ephialtes, who betrays the Spartans, is uncannily reminiscent, both in physical form and in moral ambiguity, to "LOTR's" Gollum.

Snyder has learned that film is a subliminal art, in the sense that he uses his visuals to supply the film's emotional underpinning. In "300," the sky is always dark and unsettled, as if to signal the bitter bloodshed to come. "We tried to make the sky reflect the emotion in the movie, which you can't do in a regular movie," he says. "That's what is great about this kind of green-screen filmmaking. It's not just the actors who matter. Every element in the frame supports the emotion of the moment."

Sadly, our critics, who seemed content with hooting at "300," have lost touch with what makes movies different from other art forms. Hollywood's mass-audience films are not a literary or an intellectual genre. Never have been, never will be. They are built around visuals and emotion, the two elements that "300" used to capture the public imagination.

No one understands this better than 13-year-old Tristan Rodman, who saw "300" (with his dad, since the film is R-rated). "I guess the critics have not liked the movie for the same reason that the majority of people in America did like it," he told me. "Most people just went to see it. Not for the acting or the story, which was just OK, but for the spectacle."

Tristan got a great thrill from seeing "300." And whether you're a critic or just a fanboy, isn't that what people have always gone to the movies for?


"The Big Picture" appears Tuesdays in Calendar. Questions or criticism can be e-mailed to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.

Steve Van Zandt: A Hit Man In More Ways Than One

Steve Van Zandt as Silvio Dante in HBO's "The Sopranos"

From CBS Sunday Morning

NEW YORK, March 18, 2007

(CBS) Steve Van Zandt is one of the stars of "The Sopranos," but he started as Bruce Springsteen's consigliore. Sunday Morning correspondent Anthony Mason spoke to the the secondhand man for mobs and rockers.

The infamous Bada Bing club is set in a real-life strip joint just off a hustling New Jersey highway. There, on the set of "The Sopranos," Steve Van Zandt has just been given his script for the next scene.

As Silvio Dante, in his pompadour toupee, Van Zandt plays hit man and top lieutenant to mob boss Tony Soprano. But before he was Tony Soprano's consigliore, he was Bruce Springsteen's sidekick as a guitarist in the E Street Band.

Van Zandt is creatively restless, says his wife Maureen, who also plays his TV wife in "The Sopranos."

"That's what's interesting about him," she told Mason. "That he's a real renaissance man. I know that sounds very cliché, but he is."

His latest incarnation: music impresario and self-proclaimed savior of rock 'n' roll. It started with his syndicated radio show, "Little Steven's Underground Garage," which is now heard on 200 stations. From his New York production office, Van Zandt also books "Underground Garage" concerts that feature new and classic rock bands, as well as the underground garage go-go girls choreographed by Maureen.

Little Steven's radio show now has two million listeners. But in the beginning he had to beg syndicators to get it on the air.

"They said, 'Well, we can't get that on the radio anymore," Van Zandt said. "We sent out 350 pilot shows to every radio station in the country. And every one turned us down. Every one. It became, 'Uh-oh, I've got a war here.'"

At a convention of radio programmers he went on the attack, leading a revolution to put rock back on the radio. For Van Zandt that revolution began on February 9th, 1964 when the Beatles played "The Ed Sullivan Show."

"I saw hope for myself," he said. "It was like, here is something I've never seen before, I didn't even imagine existed. And suddenly, maybe there's hope for my life. Because I didn't fit in anywhere. And I was starting to get concerned, you know?"

So little Steven joined a band, the first of many. In 1970 he signed on as bass guitarist for a group called "Steel Mill." The lead singer was a kid named Springsteen. The two teenagers from New Jersey found they were kindred spirits.

"I mean in the end everyone who had a choice to do something else did it, you know," Van Zandt said. "And in the end, me and him were the only ones left standing. You know what I mean? We were the true freaks! The true misfits and the true outcasts."

He later joined Springsteen's "E Street Band" and co-produced the album "The River." Then, amicably, Van Zandt decided to go his own way — missing out on the success of the next Springsteen album, "Born in the U.S.A.," which sold 20 million copies.

"Oh yeah, it was brilliant," Van Zandt said. "When I joined the band we were making $200 a week. And we finally are about to cash in. And I leave."

As Little Steven, wearing the signature bandana that he says hides a scar from a car accident, Van Zandt recorded 5 albums and produced many more for other acts, but commercially nothing really clicked.

"You can't look back with too much regret," he said. "What little I know I've learned since I left the band. And one of the things you learn as you leave is - you shouldn't have left!"

Even his best-known song of the period, "Sun City," an anthem of protest against apartheid in South Africa, was no help to his career. By the early '90s he felt like he was cast out into the wilderness.

"Oh, I was done," Van Zandt said. "Because I was pretty much blackballed from the industry for being so political. It was not a cool thing to do. And I was a little too successful at it."

Then in 1997, while appearing on the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame ceremonies, his fortunes took an unexpected turn. Producer David Chase was dreaming up a new series for HBO.

"My wife and I happened to watch, happened to light on that induction ceremony with the Rascals and there he was," Chase said. "He just had so much presence, was interesting and funny, and I thought, 'Oh, I gotta bring that guy in.' He looked penetrating, suspicious, you know, ready for anything."

He asked Van Zandt to audition for "The Sopranos," but Van Zandt had never acted before. He ended up moving into character quite easily.

"I spent my whole life trying to learn about who I am. Being somebody else is a vacation," he said.

Just as "The Sopranos" began filming, Bruce Springsteen called. He was putting the E Street Band back together and wanted Van Zandt to tour with him again.

"You know, we grew up together and so I was his kind of righthand man for a long time and the guy he could trust," Van Zandt said. "The guy who didn't really have any ambition to be him, to be the Boss. I like being second in command. I like being behind the scenes. I like being an advisor, you know. I like being consigliore. I was born to do that. I don't know why."

But in his own production company, Van Zandt is the boss, promoting the music he loves. In a new animated series he's developing, the government has outlawed rock. The hero is a familiar looking guy in a bandana.

"I actually lead the revolution below ground," he said. "But above ground I'm a respectable businessman."

Obituary: Stuart Rosenberg

Stuart Rosenberg, Director of TV and Films, Dies at 79

By DAVE KEHR

The New York Times
Published: March 19, 2007

Stuart Rosenberg, a hard-working director of series television and theatrical films who captured the simmering anti-authoritarianism of the late 1960s in the widely popular Paul Newman prison drama “Cool Hand Luke,” died on Thursday at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 79.

Born in Brooklyn in 1927, Mr. Rosenberg studied Irish literature at New York University, where he met his future wife, Margot Pohoryles. While trying to make ends meet as a graduate student and part-time teacher, he found a job as an apprentice film editor in the new television industry, which was rapidly developing in Manhattan in the early 1950s.

Mr. Rosenberg became a full-fledged editor and then, in 1957, a director on the television series “Decoy,” starring Beverly Garland as a New York City policewoman. In 1958 and 1959 he directed 15 episodes of the crime show “Naked City” before landing his first job on a Hollywood film, “Murder, Inc.” But a 1960 strike by the actors’ and screenwriters’ unions forced him to leave the film, and he was replaced by its producer, Burt Balaban. Mr. Rosenberg returned to television, directing episodes of “The Untouchables,” “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” “The Twilight Zone” and other shows.

Although he directed “Question 7,” a Lutheran-financed film about religious persecution in East Germany, he didn’t make a major studio picture until 1967. He discovered Donn Pearce’s novel “Cool Hand Luke” in a Hollywood Boulevard bookstore and took it to Jack Lemmon’s production company, Jalem.

Paul Newman projected a grinning indomitability as the instinctive and irrepressible rebel Lucas Jackson, an inmate of a Southern prison who locks horns with a sadistic overseer played by Strother Martin. Mr. Martin pronounced the film’s most famous line: “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.”

After “Cool Hand Luke,” Mr. Rosenberg directed Mr. Lemmon and the French actress Catherine Deneuve, making her American debut, in “The April Fools.” He worked with Mr. Newman again on “WUSA” (1970), “Pocket Money” (1972) and “The Drowning Pool” (1975).

Two of Mr. Rosenberg’s best films were urban crime stories characterized by a sharp use of locations and visceral acting: “The Laughing Policeman” (1973) and “The Pope of Greenwich Village” (1984). In 1980 he replaced Bob Rafelson on another prison picture, “Brubaker,” with Robert Redford as a reform-minded warden. His most financially successful film was probably “The Amityville Horror” (1979), which has inspired seven sequels to date.

Mr. Rosenberg made his last theatrical film, “My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys,” for an independent studio, the Samuel Goldwyn Company, in 1991. He later taught directing at the American Film Institute, where his students included the filmmakers Darren Aronofsky, Todd Field, Scott Silver and Mark Waters.

He is survived by his wife, of Beverly Hills; his son, a first assistant director whose credits include four of his father’s films, and daughter-in-law, Vivianne Rosenberg, of Burbank, Calif.; and four grandchildren.

Saul Singer: Is Green Good?

Inconvenient realities.

March 19, 2007 7:00 AM

http://www.nationalreview.com/

I just saw a very inconvenient movie. Not An Inconvenient Truth, starring Al Gore, but a new documentary that aired last week on BBC 4 called The Great Global Warming Swindle.

The film is not inconvenient because it predicts environmental disaster, but because it forced me to think heretical thoughts. As Patrick Moore, a founder of Greenpeace, said in the film, questioning the global-warming orthodoxy has become tantamount to denying the Holocaust. So it is no fun for me to risk being labeled a “global-warming denier.”

Actually, I’m not, since there is no dispute that global temperatures have risen roughly half a degree Celsius over the past century. Yet what I cannot deny is the strong likelihood that this warming was not primarily caused by greenhouse gases — let alone by carbon dioxide (CO2), let alone by man-made CO2.

Here are the facts as presented by the prominent scientists interviewed in the film:

* Climate change is natural. Global temperatures have been generally rising since the end of the Little Ice Age about 150 years ago, when the River Thames would regularly freeze over. Most of this rise preceded global industrial activity, which only kicked in about 1940. And from 1940 to 1975, global temperatures dropped slightly.

A thousand years ago, during the Medieval Warm Period, the climate was warmer than today, and vineyards grew even in northern England. And 8,000 years ago, during the Holocene Maximum, it was considerably warmer than today. Yet polar bears, which are supposedly threatened by current warming, survived through both of these periods.

The Greenland icecap, ice-core sampling shows, goes back at least 11,000 years, meaning it too existed even through these warmer periods.

* Rising CO2 is caused by rising temperatures, not the other way around. The dramatic graph that Gore displays in his movie, showing the correlation between CO2 and temperatures over hundreds of thousands of years based on ice core samples, is accurate. What Gore doesn’t say is that the same graph shows that peaks in CO2 lag behind the temperature peaks by hundreds of years.

The explanation: The main source and sink for CO2 is the oceans, which emit this gas as they warm, and absorb it as they cool. Oceans take centuries to change temperature, so atmospheric concentrations of CO2 also take time to catch up with temperature changes.

* Solar activity seems to be the main driver of climate change. The new film shows compelling graphs demonstrating the tight correlation between sun spots and cosmic rays — both measures of solar activity — and earth temperatures. CO2 is a side show compared to the sun.

* Greenhouse gases are a very minor part of the atmosphere, but of these, water vapor comprises 95 percent. The atmosphere contains only 0.054 percent CO2 from all sources, human and natural.

* The IPCC, the United Nations body of scientists examining climate change, has become politicized. Former National Academy of Sciences president Frederick Seitz has charged that inconvenient statements by scientists were simply deleted by the IPCC staff, such as: “None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed climate changes to the specific cause of greenhouse gases.”

* All the global-warming models predict that if the warming is caused by the greenhouse effect, it should be more pronounced at the top of the greenhouse, namely in the troposphere, about 10 km. above the equator, where the heat is being trapped. Instead, the evidence shows either no additional warming there, or even slower warming than on the surface.

* IPCC reports have claimed that “mosquito species that transmit malaria do not usually survive where the mean winter temperature drops below 16 to 18 degrees centigrade.” The Pasteur Institute’s Paul Reiter resigned from the IPCC over this lie, pointing out that mosquitoes are “extremely abundant” in the Arctic, and that a major malaria epidemic occurred in the 1920s Soviet Union, infecting 13 million and killing 60,000 people.

* As late as 1974, a BBC documentary, The Weather Machine, warned of the coming global ice age, since at that time the globe had indeed been cooling for the previous 35 years.

Ironically, one scientist in that film suggested that manmade CO2 emissions might reverse this and stave off disaster.

All this should lead thinking people to at least keep an open mind. But there is more. Global-warming activists have been urging poor countries not to use their coal and oil, but to turn to wind and solar energy instead. This effectively condemns the two billion people now living without electricity to their misery.

According to the World Health Organization, four million children under the age of five die each year from the smoke produced by the indoor fires used in homes without electricity. There is nothing wrong with people in rich countries volunteering to cut their carbon emissions, but demanding this of the extreme poor is inhuman.

Global warming has become a religion not only in the sense of intolerance toward dissent, but also as the animating moral crusade of our age. Here too, it is not harmless, if environmentalism is allowed to trump ethics. Our children should not be taught that the height and essence of being good is to be green.

I’m all for preserving the environment. I would even pay a premium for a hybrid car — not to stop global warming, but simply to cut down on unhealthy and unpleasant smog. But all this should be at the level of good hygiene, not religion. To do good, one must first do no harm. Global-warming extremism, by harming the poorest of the poor and by substituting for real moral causes, fails this test.

Saul Singer heads the Project on U.S.-Israel Relations at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, and is editorials editor and columnist at The Jerusalem Post. He previously served as a foreign policy advisor to U.S. Senator Connie Mack and on the staffs of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the Senate Banking Committee.

Scott P. Richert: Taking Muslims at Their Word

http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org

March 16, 2007

Scott P. Richert

The following article first appeared in the Rockford Register Star on Sunday, January 28, 2007. It is posted here in response to some of the comments in the writebacks to “Jihad in Rockford: The Plot Thickens.”

On September 12, 2006, Pope Benedict XVI delivered his now-infamous Regensburg Address. The reaction in the Muslim world included protests, violence, and the murder of a nun—all over the Pope’s citation of a late-14th-century Byzantine emperor’s rhetorical claim that all that Muhammad brought that was new were “things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”

Lost in the uproar was the main point of the Pope’s speech: that “not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature” as Christians understand it. In Islam, however, Allah’s “will is not bound up with any of our [Western] categories, even that of rationality.”

Benedict’s speech was a call for dialogue between Christianity and Islam. For a dialogue to take place, however, three conditions are necessary: Both sides must be interested in pursuing the truth, which means embracing reason; both sides must represent their own positions truthfully, without any intent to deceive; and each side must take the other’s claims at face value, as truly representing the other’s position.

In the wake of Derrick Shareef’s arrest for planning to detonate grenades at CherryVale Mall during Advent, a daylong dialogue that Aaron Wolf, the associate editor of Chronicles, and I held with leaders from the Iqra School and Muslim Association of Greater Rockford (MAGR) in February 2002 is perhaps more relevant today than it was when I published an account of it in the April 2002 issue of Chronicles. (The text of the article is available at “Through a Glass, Darkly.”) MAGR estimates that there are now 300 Muslim families in the Rockford area; the school continues to grow, and may expand to include all 12 grades; and local Muslims are becoming more prominent, as doctors, lawyers, and engineers, among other occupations.

What made the dialogue interesting was the candor with which both sides addressed questions about the role of Islam raised by the September 11 attacks. When Aaron raised the question of the media’s use of the term “radical Islam,” Atteya Elnoory, the principal at that time, stated that “We don’t even deal with radical Islam, because we do not know what it is.” Dr. Khalid Siddiqui, then assistant director of the neonatal intensive-care unit at Swedish-American Hospital, the chairman of the board of the school, and now president of MAGR, elaborated on Elnoory’s remark, describing Islam as a pendulum, which can “swing to the extremes and come back to the middle, but you are still within the boundaries” of Islam. Any discussion of radical Islam, he claimed, also depends on your perspective: “You can believe someone is a terrorist, and I don’t.” To prove his point, he cited the example of Osama bin Laden, who recognized the dangers of atheistic communism and “went [to Afghanistan] and used his whole wealth to fight.” When, as Dr. Siddiqui put it, bin Laden was able to do what the United States could not and the Russians were forced to withdraw from Afghanistan, “the CIA interfered and created a very unstable government.” Finding themselves “still oppressed by Israel . . . the only way to get out is to fight. Experience says that.”

As for the future of Islam in America, Dr. Siddiqui argued that non-Muslim Americans should not fear the coming of sharia (Islamic law). “Who is superior to us? Only God. If He made the laws, then He can be unbiased.” Moreover, he claimed, “If you look at the Constitution, it is a pure Islamic constitution,” restricting the power of men and leaving room for the imposition of sharia.

Shpendim Nadzaku, the current imam at the Rockford mosque (who hadn’t yet moved to Rockford when Aaron and I visited), was called upon by the local media to condemn Shareef, and he held an open house at the mosque in the days following the arrest. The local media have presented him—correctly—as a representative of mainstream Islam. What they have not done, however, is attempt to understand what mainstream Islam means in an American context. As Dr. Siddiqui’s remarks indicate, the views of mainstream Muslims are far from the views of most non-Muslim Americans. How many non-Muslims in Rockford believe that the Constitution is a pure Islamic document, and that America would benefit from adopting sharia as the law of the land? How many non-Muslims believe that the definition of terrorism should be different for Muslims than for non-Muslims?

In her December 20 article on Sheik Nadzaku’s open house, Geri Nikolai quoted Nadzaku as saying, “As long as justice is prevalent throughout society, at the end of the day, nothing should cause us to want to slaughter each other.” On the surface, that seems a sentiment with which we can all agree. In Islam, as in the American constitutional system, justice means equal treatment before the law. For Muslims, however, the law in question is not the Constitution but sharia.
In his 1996 book Salt of the Earth, Pope Benedict XVI (then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger) wrote that:

the Koran is a total religious law, which regulates the whole of political and social life and insists that the whole order of life be Islamic. Sharia shapes society from beginning to end. In this sense, it can exploit such freedoms as our constitutions give, but it cannot be its final goal to say: Yes, now we too are a body with rights, now we are present [in society] just like the Catholics and the Protestants. In such a situation, [Islam] would not achieve a status consistent with its inner nature; it would be in alienation from itself.

Pope Benedict’s understanding of this question is supported by prominent mainstream Muslims. The Rockford mosque has hosted a speaker from the Midwest chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the chief mainstream Muslim political activist group in the United States. A former chairman of CAIR, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Omar H. Ahmad, told the San Ramon Valley Herald in 1998 that:

Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faiths, but to become dominant. The Koran, the Muslim book of scripture, should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth.

CAIR, on its website, declares that jihad, in addition to meaning “struggle against evil inclinations within oneself,” includes “struggle in the battlefield for self-defense (e.g., having a standing army for national defense), or fighting against tyranny or oppression.” And Muslim scholars, such as Syed Abul Hasan Ali Nadwi, in Muslims in the West: The Message and Mission, declare that oppression and injustice prevail whenever a society prevents Muslims (and all men) from living under Islam.

After Chronicles published my account of our visit to the Iqra School, I went on Wisconsin Public Radio to discuss the article. An angry caller accused me of misrepresenting Islam. “You said that they want to impose sharia in the United States. That’s not true.” When I pointed out that the remark that upset her was not mine but a quotation from Dr. Siddiqui, the caller indignantly replied, “He may have said that, but he doesn’t mean it.”

Pope Benedict is right: The West must engage Islam. The Muslim belief that Allah is beyond all reason is indeed a stumbling block to dialogue, but an even greater one is the condescending refusal of non-Muslims to acknowledge that faithful Muslims in America really do believe what Islam teaches.

Scott P. Richert is the executive editor of Chronicles: A Magazineof American Culture

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Memorial sculpture for slain filmmaker Theo van Gogh unveiled in Amsterdam

A blind man examines a newly unveiled sculpture in memory of slain film maker Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam, Netherlands, Sunday March 18, 2007. The sculpture was unveiled near the spot where the controversial film maker was murdered in 2004 by an Islamic extremist. Amsterdam mayor Job Cohen and a Dutch comedian praised Van Gogh and his work as the metal sculpture was revealed at a park in eastern Amsterdam.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

10:42 a.m. March 18, 2007

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands – Friends and fans of the Dutch filmmaker found dead with a note pinned to his chest with a knife unveiled a memorial sculpture Sunday that depicts him screaming near the spot where he was murdered by an Islamic extremist.
Mayor Job Cohen and a Dutch comedian praised the controversial Theo Van Gogh and his work as the sculpture by Jeroen Henneman was revealed to hundreds of people gathered at a park in eastern Amsterdam.

Titled “The Scream,” the memorial took the form of a series of profiles of Van Gogh in stainless steel-coated ceramics, showing the film maker gradually opening his mouth into a scream.
Cohen said Van Gogh, whose work often offended sections of society, was not a loudmouth – as he was sometimes labeled by critics – but an artist with a clear message about freedom of speech.

Police patrolled the entrance to the park Sunday, but there were no protests and the atmosphere was festive.

Mohammed Bouyeri repeatedly shot Van Gogh in 2004 on an Amsterdam street, slit his throat and thrust into his chest a letter threatening the life of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an outspoken critic of radical Islam. The brutal murder sparked a backlash that included the torching of several mosques.



Bouyeri – who is serving a life sentence for the killing – had been enraged by a film called “Submission” that Van Gogh made with Hirsi Ali, a member of parliament.

“Submission” was a fictional study of abused Muslim women, with scenes of near-naked women with Quranic texts engraved on their flesh.

Muslims called it blasphemous, but Hirsi Ali, who wrote the script, said the film gave voice to her dream of an Islamic Age of Enlightenment.

John Fund: Whose Ox Is Gored?

The media discover the former vice president's environmental exaggerations and hypocrisy.

The Wall Street Journal
Monday, March 19, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
http://online.wsj.com/home-page

Former Vice President Al Gore in Tokyo, January 15, 2007.


The media are finally catching up with Al Gore. Criticism of his anti-global-warming franchise and his personal environmental record has gone beyond ankle-biting bloggers. It's now coming from the New York Times and the Nashville Tennessean, his hometown paper that put his birth, as a senator's son, on its front page back in 1948, and where a young Al Gore Jr. worked for five years as a journalist.

Last Tuesday, the Times reported that several eminent scientists "argue that some of Mr. Gore's central points [on global warming] are exaggerated and erroneous." The Tenessean reported yesterday that Mr. Gore received $570,000 in royalties from the owners of zinc mines who held mineral leases on his farm. The mines, which closed in 2003 but are scheduled to reopen under a new operator later this year, "emitted thousands of pounds of toxic substances and several times, the water discharged from the mines into nearby rivers had levels of toxins above what was legal."

All of this comes in the wake of the enormous publicity Mr. Gore received after his documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" won an Oscar. The film features Mr. Gore reprising his famous sighing and lamenting how the average American's energy use is greedily off the charts. At the film's end viewers are asked, "Are you ready to change the way you live?"

The Nashville-based Tennessee Center for Policy Research was skeptical that Mr. Gore had been "walking the walk" on the environment. It obtained public records showing that for years Mr. Gore has burned through more electricity at his Nashville home each month than the average American family uses in a year--and his consumption was increasing. The heated Gore pool house alone ran up more than $500 in natural-gas bills every month.

Mr. Gore's office responded by claiming that the Gores "purchase offsets for their carbon emissions to bring their carbon footprint down to zero." But CNSNews.com reports that Mr. Gore doesn't purchase carbon offsets with his own resources, and that they are meaningless in terms of global warming.

The offset purchases are actually made for him by Generation Investment Management, a London-based investment firm that Mr. Gore co-founded, and which provides carbon offsets as a fringe benefit to all 23 of its employees, ensuring that they require no real sacrifice on the part of Mr. Gore or his family. Indeed, their impact is also highly limited. The Carbon Neutral Co.--one of the two vendors that sell offsets to Mr. Gore's company, says that offset purchases "will be unable to reduce greenhouse gas emissions . . . in the short term."


**********


The New York Times last week interviewed many scientists who say they are alarmed "at what they call [Mr. Gore's] alarmism on global warming." In a front-page piece in its science section, the Times headline read "From a Rapt Audience, a Call to Cool the Hype."

The Times quoted Don Easterbrook, an emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington University, as telling hundreds of experts at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America that "I don't want to pick on Al Gore. But there are a lot of inaccuracies in the statements we are seeing, and we have to temper that with real data." Mr. Easterbrook made clear he has never been paid by any energy corporations and isn't a Republican.

Even James Hansen, a scientist who began issuing warning cries about global warming in the 1980s and is a top adviser to Mr. Gore, concedes that his work may hold "imperfections" and "technical flaws." Other flaws are more serious, such as Mr. Gore's depiction of sea level rises of up to 20 feet, which would cause Florida and New York City to sink below the surface.

Sober scientists privately say such claims are exaggerated. They point to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body that released its fourth report on global warming last month. While it found humans were the main cause of recent global warming, the report also indicated it was a very slow-moving process. On sea levels, the U.N. panel reported its s best high-end estimate of the rise in sea levels by 2100 was three feet. The new high-end best estimate is less than half the previous prediction, which was still far below Mr. Gore's 20 feet. Similarly, the new report shows that the panel's 2001 report overestimated the human influence on climate change since the Industrial Revolution by at least one-third.

In an email message to the Times, Mr. Gore defended his work as fundamentally accurate. But it's increasingly clear that far from the "consensus" on global warming we are told exists, scientists are having a broad and rich debate on many aspects of it. Nearly two decades after Mr. Gore first claimed that "we face an ecological crisis without any precedent in historic times," we don't know if that is really true.


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Then there is the Gore zinc mine. Mr. Gore has personally earned $570,000 in zinc royalties from a mine his father bought in 1973 from Armand Hammer, the business executive famous for his close friendship with the Soviet Union and for pleading guilty to making illegal campaign contributions during Watergate. One the same day Al Gore Sr. bought the 88-acre parcel from Hammer for $160,000, he sold the land and subsurface mining rights to his then 25-year-old son for $140,000. The mineral rights were then leased back to Hammer's Occidental Petroleum and the royalty payments put in the names of Al Gore Jr. and his wife, Tipper.

Gore spokeswoman Kalee Kreider claims the terms of the 30-year Occidental lease agreement gave the Gores "no legal recourse" to get out of it. She said the Gores never thought about selling the land and would not comment on whether they ever tried to void the lease. "There is a certain zone of privacy once people go into private life," Ms. Kreidler said. She said critics of the arrangement should realize it should be viewed in a "1973 context, not a 2007 context. . . . There was a different environmental sensibility about all sorts of things."

But what about a 1992 context? That is the year Mr. Gore published "Earth in the Balance," in which he wrote: "The lakes and rivers sustain us; they flow through the veins of the earth and into our own. But we must take care to let them flow back out as pure as they came, not poison and waste them without thought for the future." Mr. Gore wrote that at a time when he would be collecting zinc royalties for another 11 years.

The mines had a generally good environmental record, but they wouldn't pass muster either with the standard Mr. Gore set in "Earth in the Balance" or with most of his environmentalist friends. In May 2000 the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation issued a "Notice of Violation" notifying the Pasminco mine its zinc levels in a nearby river exceeded standards established by the state and the federal Environmental Protection Agency. In 1996 the mine twice failed biomonitoring tests designed to protect water quality in the river for fish and wildlife. "The discharge of industrial wastewater from Outfall #001 [the Caney Fork effluent] contains toxic metals (copper and zinc)," the analysis stated. "The combined effect of these pollutants may be detrimental to fish and aquatic life."

The Gore mines were no small operations. In 2002, the year before they shut down, they ranked 22nd among all metal-mining operations in the U.S., with total toxic releases of 4.1 million pounds. A new mine operator, Strategic Resource Acquisition, is planning to reopen the mines later this year. The Tennessean reports that just last week, Mr. Gore wrote SRA asking it to work with a national environmental group as it makes its plans. He noted that under the previous operator, the mines had, according to the environmental website Scorecard, "pollution releases from the mine in 2002 [that] placed it among the 'dirtiest/worst facilities' in the U.S." Mr. Gore requested that SRA "engage with us in a process to ensure that the mine becomes a global example of environmental best practices." The Tennessean dryly notes that Mr. Gore wrote the letter the week after the paper posed a series of questions to him about his involvement with the zinc mines.


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Columnist Steven Milloy recalls talking with Mr. Gore in 2006 about the 1997 Kyoto Protocol he helped negotiate as vice president. "Did we think Kyoto would [reduce global warming] when we signed it? . . . Hell no!" said Mr. Gore, according to Mr. Milloy. The former vice president then explained that the real purpose of Kyoto was to demonstrate that international support could be mustered for action on environmental issues. Mr. Gore clearly believes that the world hasn't acted with enough vigor in the decade since Kyoto, which may explain his growing use of the global-warming hype that concerns many mainstream scientists.

Mr. Gore has called the campaign to combat global warming a "moral imperative." But Mr. Gore faces another imperative: to square his sales pitches with the facts and his personal lifestyle to more align with what he advocates that others practice. "Are you ready to change the way you live?" asks Mr. Gore's film. It's time people ask Mr. Gore "Are you ready to change the way you live, as well as the way you lecture the rest of us?"

Mark Steyn: Victor Victorians. A lesson in real morality

Ioan Gruffudd as William Wilberforce in Samuel Goldwyn Films' Amazing Grace - 2007

March 18, 2007

Chicago Sun-Times

'William Wilberforce,'' writes Eric Metaxas in Amazing Grace, "was the happy victim of his own success. He was like someone who against all odds finds the cure for a horrible disease that's ravaging the world, and the cure is so overwhelmingly successful that it vanquishes the disease completely. No one suffers from it again -- and within a generation or two no one remembers it ever existed.''

What did Wilberforce ''cure''? Two centuries ago, on March 25, 1807, one very persistent British backbencher secured the passage by parliament of an Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade throughout His Majesty's realms and territories. It's not that no one remembers the disease ever existed, but that we recall it as a kind of freak pandemic -- a SARS or bird flu that flares up and whirs round the world and is then eradicated. The American education system teaches it as such -- as a kind of wicked perversion the Atlantic settlers had conjured out of their own ambition. In reality, it was more like the common cold: a fact of life. The institution predates the word's etymology, from the Slavs brought from eastern Europe to the glittering metropolis of Rome. It predates by some millennia the earliest laws, such as the Code of Hammurabi in Mesopotamia. The first slave owners on the North American continent were hunter-gatherers.

As Metaxas puts it, ''Slavery was as accepted as birth and marriage and death, was so woven into the tapestry of human history that you could barely see its threads, much less pull them out. Everywhere on the globe, for 5,000 years, the idea of human civilization without slavery was unimaginable. . . . What Wilberforce vanquished was something even worse than slavery,'' says Metaxas, "something that was much more fundamental and can hardly be seen from where we stand today: He vanquished the very mind-set that made slavery acceptable and allowed it to survive and thrive for millennia. He destroyed an entire way of seeing the world, one that had held sway from the beginning of history, and he replaced it with another way of seeing the world.'' Ownership of existing slaves continued in the British West Indies for another quarter-century and in the United States for another 60 years, and slave trading continued in Turkey until Ataturk abolished it in the '20s and in Saudi Arabia until it was (officially) banned in the '60s, and it persists in Africa and other pockets of the world to this day. But not as a broadly accepted "human good.''

There was some hard-muscle enforcement that accompanied the new law: The Royal Navy announced that it would regard all slave ships as pirates, and thus they were liable to sinking and their crews to execution. But what was decisive was the way Wilberforce ''murdered'' (in Metaxas' word) the old acceptance of slavery by the wider society. As he wrote in 1787, ''God almighty has set before me two great objects: the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners.''

The latter goal we would now formulate as ''changing the culture'' -- which is what he did. The film of ''Amazing Grace'' shows the Duke of Clarence and other effete toffs reeling under a lot of lame bromides hurled by Wilberforce on behalf of ''the people.''

But, in fact, ''the people'' were a large part of the problem. Then as now, citizens of advanced societies are easily distracted. The 18th century Church of England preached "a tepid kind of moralism" disconnected both from any serious faith and from the great questions facing the nation. It was a sensualist culture amusing itself to death: Wilberforce goes to a performance of Don Juan, is shocked by a provocative dance, and is then further shocked to discover the rest of the audience is too blase even to be shocked. The Paris Hilton of the age, the Prince of Wales, was celebrated for having bedded 7,000 women and snipped from each a keepsake hair. Twenty-five percent of all unmarried females in London were whores; the average age of a prostitute was 16, and many brothels prided themselves on offering only girls under the age of 14.



William Wilberforce (1759-1833)

Many of these features -- weedy fainthearted mainstream churches, skanky celebs, weary provocations for jaded debauchees -- will strike a chord in our own time. "There is a deal of ruin in a nation," remarked Adam Smith. England survived the 18th century, and maybe we will survive the 21st. But the life of William Wilberforce and the bicentennial of his extraordinary achievement remind us that great men don't shirk things because the focus-group numbers look unpromising. What we think of as "the Victorian era" was, in large part, an invention of Wilberforce that he succeeded in selling to his compatriots. We children of the 20th century mock our 19th century forebears as uptight prudes, moralists and do-gooders. If they were, it's because of Wilberforce. His legacy includes the very notion of a "social conscience": In the 1790s a good man could stroll past an 11-year-old prostitute on a London street without feeling a twinge of disgust or outrage; he accepted her as merely a feature of the landscape, like an ugly hill. By the 1890s, there were still child prostitutes, but there were also charities and improvement societies and orphanages. It is amazing to read a letter from Wilberforce and realize that he is, in fact, articulating precisely 220 years ago what New Yorkers came to know in the '90s as the "broken windows" theory: ''The most effectual way to prevent greater crimes is by punishing the smaller.''

The Victorians, if plunked down before the Anna Nicole updates for an hour or two, would probably conclude we're nearer the 18th century than their own. A "social conscience" obliges the individual to act. Today we call for action all the time, but mostly from government, which is another way of excusing us and allowing us to get on with the distractions of the day. Our schoolhouses revile the Victorian do-gooders as condescending racists and oppressors -- though the single greatest force for ending slavery around the world was the Royal Navy. Isn't societal self-loathing just another justification for lethargy? After all, if the white man is inherently wicked, that pretty much absolves one from having to do anything. And so the same kind of lies we told ourselves about slaves we now tell ourselves about other faraway people, and for the same reason: because big changes are tough and who needs the hassle? The hardest thing in any society is "the reformation of manners.''

One Last Thing | Taking closer look at Al Gore's truth

Posted on Sun, Mar. 18, 2007

By Jonathan Last
for the Philadelphia Inquirer

The post-Oscar attacks on Al Gore for living in a mansion that consumes 20 times as much energy as the average American house were enjoyable, but unfair.

Gore's consumption of fossil fuels has nothing to do with the arguments he has been advancing about climate change. After all, his thesis is empirical, not subjective.

It doesn't matter a lick whether Al Gore is a hypocrite. What matters is whether or not he is right.

Gore proposes essentially four assertions, which build conditionally:

(1) Earth's climate is getting warmer; (2) man is responsible in substantial part for this change;

(3) this change will result in net harm; and (4) this change can be reversed by man.

Let's take them in order.

Here is what we know for certain about climate change: In the last 100 years, the average temperature on Earth has risen 1 degree Fahrenheit.

This is not unprecedented. Throughout history, the planet has gone through temperature cycles. There have been "warm periods" and ice ages.

To take just one example, Swiss climatologists believe that the glaciers in the Alps have melted into near nothingness 10 times in the last 10,000 years.

As recently as the 1970s, global cooling was considered by many scientists to be a major imminent threat, with the book The Weather Conspiracy: The Coming of the New Ice Age doing the work of today's An Inconvenient Truth.

Given the history of fluctuations in temperatures, to what degree is man responsible for the current rise? That depends on whom you ask and when you ask them. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says it believes that human activity has been a primary driver.

But this verdict is not final: The IPCC recently explained that its initial work on climate change overestimated man's impact by as much as 25 percent. Who knows how it will change its estimates in the future.



In "The Day After Tomorrow," with Jake Gyllenhaal, super storms cause a near apocalypse and bring about, in a matter of days, a new ice age. Al Gore was pushing the 2004 doomsaying film.


Meanwhile, other scientists say they believe the sun is responsible.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany note that the sun has seemed to be burning more brightly for the last 60 years, which may account for the increase of 1 degree.

But as British scientist Nigel Calder notes, theories about climate change that don't finger man as the culprit are met with hostility or blank stares in the parts of the scientific community most heavily invested in Gore's theses, such as the IPCC.

Which brings us to the third part: If global warming is real, what would the net effect be? Gore says it would be very bad indeed. Taking his cue from the former vice president, the announcer of the Academy Awards telecast gushed that "Davis Guggenheim and the cast were scheduled to shoot in New Orleans the night before Hurricane Katrina hit, an event that brought home the threat - and the impact - of global warming." If global warming causes more storms like Katrina, that would be trouble.

But as a recent piece in Slate acknowledges, "the hurricane-warming link isn't settled at all. Rather, it's a very contentious debate between two groups of scientists - computer-modeling atmospheric scientists versus meteorologists."

Gore, however, goes further. In promoting the 2004 film The Day After Tomorrow, he told the press, "I hope this movie will provide many opportunities for in-depth conversations about what this issue is really all about."

The movie depicted a series of super storms that cause a near apocalypse and bring about, in a matter of days, a new ice age.

Given this promiscuous doomsaying, it's no surprise that some scientists have begun to quietly complain about Gore. A number of them went on record with their complaints to the New York Times last week.

Kevin Vranes, a University of Colorado climatologist, worried that Gore had been "overselling our certainty about knowing the future."




Gore warns about a 20-foot rise in sea level; the IPCC panel estimates "that the world's seas in this century would rise a maximum of 23 inches - down from earlier estimates."

Ever apocalyptic, Gore says that "our civilization has never experienced any environmental shift remotely similar to this." But Don Easterbrook, a geology professor from Western Washington University, notes that within the last 15,000 years there have been shifts up to "20 times greater than the warming in the past century."

What's more, some broad historical evidence, such as that presented by Thomas Gale Moore in his book Climate of Fear, suggests that Earth's "warming periods" have been accompanied by advances in human civilization. As the saying goes, past performance is not an indication of future gains. But if the climate were to warm gradually, it's not obvious why man wouldn't adapt and flourish again, as we have in the past.

Of course, none of that matters if the final condition of the Gore hypothesis doesn't hold. Can man stop the changing of the climate?

Again, the science is conflicted. Gore certainly believes we can. Others are less certain. Climate-change alarmist Paul Hellyer, a former Canadian minister of defense, recently said he believed advanced technology from extraterrestrial civilizations offered the best hope to "save our planet" from the perils of climate change.

Art Bell and Whitley Strieber take a backseat to no one in their worries about climate change. They wrote the book The Coming Global Superstorm, on which The Day After Tomorrow was based, and they, too, fear it may be too late. Bell is host on a radio show about UFOs and the paranormal. Before hooking up with Bell, Strieber wrote five nonfiction books about having been abducted by aliens.

Nothing wrong with any of that, of course. We all have to believe in something.

But when you compound the probabilities, the claims of environmentalists such as Gore begin to look less and less certain. In fact, in their unwillingness to brook dissent or countervailing theories, they seem less like scientists and more like the fundamentalists they otherwise scorn.


Contact Jonathan V. Last at jlast@phillynews.com.

Bret Stephens: Islamosocialism

PROTEST AGAINST THE HIJAB BAN IN FRANCE
[French Embassy, London, UK. Saturday 17th January 2004]

GLOBAL VIEW

The European left makes common cause with the Muslim right.

The Wall Street Journal

Sunday, March 18, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT

"It is a profound truth," declared the British Socialist Party in a 1911 manifesto, "that Socialism is the natural enemy of religion." Not the least of the oddities in the subsequent history of progressive politics is that today it has become the principal vehicle in the West for Islamist goals and policies.

Caroline Lucas, a member of the Green Party faction in the European Parliament, is a longtime activist in anti-nuclear, animal-rights and environmentalist causes, and not someone likely to describe herself as an anti-feminist. Yet in June 2004, she joined British MPs Fiona Mactaggart of Labor and Sarah Teather of the Liberal Democrats for a press conference in the House of Commons organized by the Assembly for the Protection of Hijab. The Assembly, better known as Pro-Hijab, is a pan-European organization formed "to campaign nationally and internationally for the protection of every Muslim woman's right to wear the Hijab in accordance with her beliefs and for the protection of every woman's right to dress as modestly and as comfortably as she pleases."

Once upon a time, feminists and socialists alike would have translated that as "subservience to the patriarchy." Now they seem to have rediscovered their roots as civil libertarians, at least when it's politically expedient. Consider the issue of the Armenian genocide. In 1998, the French-speaking wing of Belgium's Socialist Party (PS) co-sponsored legislation to criminalize denial of the Ottoman Empire's murder of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians, much as Holocaust denial is also against the law.

Yet for the past several years, the same PS has been blocking the process of criminalization it helped initiate, presumably in the service of free speech. "Additional legal and historical research," says Belgian Deputy Prime Minister Laurette Onkelinx, remains to be done in ascertaining exactly what happened in Anatolia in 1915.

Progressives have also been remarkably mindful of civil liberties in matters of immigration. When the German state of Baden-Wüttemberg last year required applicants for citizenship to answer a series of questions regarding their personal views, the leader of the German Green Party, Renate Künast, denounced it as "immoral." "A country governed by law," she argued, "cannot ask questions about moral values." Among the questions: "Where do you stand on the statement that a wife should obey her husband and that he can hit her if she fails to do so?"


**********


Curiously, however, Europe's progressives have been somewhat less tolerant on other issues concerning moral values and personal belief. Take "Islamophobia," which progressives often consider akin to racism and have, in some instances, sought to ban by legal means. In Britain last year, Tony Blair's government enacted the Racial and Religious Hatred Act, which criminalized "threatening" comments against religious persons or beliefs. Comedian Rowan Atkinson and author Salman Rushdie, among others, warned that the law undermined basic rights of speech. But for London Mayor Ken Livingstone it was not enough: He defined "Islamophobia" as "discrimination, intolerance or hostility towards Islam and Muslims," and regretted that criminal acts were not more broadly defined by the legislation.



Ken Livingstom speaking at a rally for ending the occupation of Iraq and granting freedon to Palestine. [UK, London, Saturday 27th September 2003]

Since coming to office nearly seven years ago, Mr. Livingstone has become a symbol of the marriage of the European left and the Islamist right. It's a marriage of mutual convenience and, at least on one side, actual belief. In the Netherlands, a recent study by the University of Amsterdam's Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies found that 80% of immigrants--the overwhelming majority of whom are Muslims--voted for the Labor party in recent elections, while the two main center-right parties received a combined 4% of the immigrant vote. In neighboring Belgium, the left-wing sociologist Jan Hertogen credits immigrants for "[saving] democracy" by voting as a bloc against the secessionist and anti-immigrant Vlaams Belang party.

For Muslim voters in Europe, the attractions of the Socialists are several. Socialists have traditionally taken a more accommodating approach to immigrants and asylum-seekers than their conservative rivals. They have championed the welfare state and the benefits it offers poor newcomers. They have promoted a multiculturalist ethos, which in practice has meant respecting Muslim traditions even when they conflict with Western values. In foreign policy, Socialists have often been anti-American and, by extension, hostile to Israel. That hostility has only increased as Muslim candidates have joined the Socialists' electoral slates and as the Muslim vote has become ever more crucial to the Socialists' electoral margin.

More mysterious, however, at least as a matter of ideology, has been the dalliance of the progressive left with the (Islamic) political right. Self-styled progressives, after all, have spent the past four decades championing the very freedoms that Islam most opposes: sexual and reproductive freedoms, gay rights, freedom from religion, pornography and various forms of artistic transgression, pacifism and so on. For those who hold this form of politics dear, any long-term alliance with Islamic politics ultimately becomes an ideological, if not a political, suicide pact. One cannot, after all, champion the cause of universal liberation in alliance with a movement that at its core stands for submission.


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This is not, of course, the first time such a thing has happened in the history of the progressive movement, or in European history. On the contrary, it is the recurring theme. In the early 20th century, the apostles of Fabianism--George Bernard Shaw among them--looked to the Soviet Union for inspiration; in the 1960s the model was Mao; in the late 1970s, the great French philosopher Michel Foucault went to Iran to write a paean to Khomeini's revolution. In nearly every case, the progressives were, by later admission, deceived, but not before they had performed their service as "useful idiots" to a totalitarian cause.

But the stakes today are different. At question for Europeans is not the prevailing view of a distant country. The question is the shaping of their own. Europe's liberal democrats were able, sometimes with outside help, to preserve their values in the face of an outside threat. Whether they can resist the temptations of Islamosocialism remains to be seen.

Mr. Stephens is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. His column appears in the Journal Tuesdays.

Adam Lucas: True Grit

Tyler Hansbrough (50) tries to block the shot of Michigan State's Travis Walton (5) as North Carolina's Ty Lawson, right, looks on during an NCAA second-round East Regional basketball game at the Lawrence Joel Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Winston-Salem, N.C., Saturday, March 17, 2007.

Adam Lucas on the win over Michigan State.

March 18, 2007

http://tarheelblue.cstv.com

WINSTON-SALEM--In the wake of Saturday night's victory over Michigan State, Reyshawn Terry was looking for the right words to describe the Spartans. He pondered for just a second, and then he said this: "That is a tough team. The toughest team we've played all year long."

Tough is one of a basketball player's biggest compliments.

Sometimes, it is a synonym for dirty. Not on Saturday. On Saturday, tough meant tough.

"The big thing I noticed about them is their intensity and how hard they go through their offense," Marcus Ginyard said. "They really run through their sets hard and execute."

"They set great screens," said Wes Miller, who saw plenty of those screens first-hand while he was chasing Drew Neitzel. "You have to really make a commitment to getting through those screens or around those screens. That's the only way to play against them."

In most places, the story of the game will be Tyler Hansbrough's mask-less 33 points. Or maybe it will be Terry's now customary late game heroics. Or perhaps Ty Lawson's sheer domination of the game's tempo and his 20 points.

Not here. Here the story is something different. Here it is something that is not immediately evident on the stat sheet, unless perhaps you locate the 40-29 rebounding advantage against a team that entered the game fifth in the country in rebounding margin.

On the very first possession of the game, Lawson ripped the ball away from 6-foot-8, 235-pound Marquise Gray. With 8 minutes left in the half, Miller hurled himself on top of a loose ball near midcourt. On the sidelines, with the crowd roaring and the game in the balance late in the second half, Roy Williams was down in his fighting stance, pleading for just one stop.

This was a second-round game? That's not how it felt. And it's not how it looked on the court.

Something has happened to these Tar Heels over the last two weeks. And even they're not sure they know exactly what it might be. Watch this group. Really watch them. Not just the player with the ball but all five Tar Heels on the court. For that matter, not just the ones on the court. Watch the bench, too. They've stopped talking about toughness and togetherness and they've started doing it. For the first six months of the season, they were happy to be pretty. Now, all of a sudden, they're gritty.

"It's hard to put your finger on," Ginyard said. "You come in the locker room and there's that feeling in the locker room. There's that excitement coming from everybody for the game. The bench gets into the games even more. You're starting to see those chest bumps again after good plays. At timeouts, the guys on the court are getting met at midcourt with high fives. The heart of this team is really starting to show."



Reyshawn Terry falls onto the scorer's table during an NCAA second-round East Regional basketball game against Michigan State at Lawrence Joel Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Winston-Salem, N.C., Saturday, March 17, 2007.


You think it makes you happy to hear that? Imagine how it makes the coaching staff feel. Maybe that's why Roy Williams punctuated his customary writing of "16" on the white board in the locker room--to signify the teams left in the NCAA field--with a little dance shimmy lifted from Mike Copeland.

They do not award points for midcourt high fives, of course. But it pays off somewhere, somehow. A fragile team--and although this seems like ancient history right now, this team seemed fragile just two weeks ago--would have been ground into dust by Michigan State.

Here is what Michigan State does: they do exactly what they want. Every time. Carolina knew Neitzel was their primary offensive threat, knew he'd carry the bulk of the offensive load. And still he found 27 shots, admitting afterward that he'd never had that many shots in a game at any level. The Spartans ran him around screens. They chipped, they double-stacked, and on one particularly devious first-half play, they ran him around a double screen, took advantage of Carolina's overpursuit, and then sent him backdoor for a layup.

Four different Tar Heels--Ginyard, Miller, Lawson, and Quentin Thomas--took a turn on Neitzel. Finally, worn down by additional ball-handling duties caused by Travis Walton's foul trouble, the fatigue began to show. Neitzel bent over, his hands on his knees. When he stood, he put his hands on his hips, mouth open, trying to suck in a fresh breath of air.

"I wanted to be there every time," Ginyard said. "I wanted him to look for me every time he caught the ball."

Years from now, we'll probably remember Neitzel's 26 points and six 3-pointers. Lost only to history--and to the Carolina coaches--will be the fact that he only shot 33 percent from the field, and he had to hoist 17 trifectas in order to make six.

The Tar Heel offense will get the headlines on Sunday. The defense? It'll stay comfortably in the background.

"When you're on defense, you have to be thinking only about defense," Miller said. "The fact of the matter is, if you play defense, play with five guys moving together and finish it with a box-out and a rebound, you have a chance to beat anybody in any game."

And you have a chance to do something else, something that no one might have expected at the beginning of this month.

You have a chance to be tough.

Adam Lucas's third book on Carolina basketball, The Best Game Ever, chronicles the 1957 national championship season and is available now. His previous books include Going Home Again, focusing on Roy Williams's return to Carolina, and Led By Their Dreams, a collaboration with Steve Kirschner and Matt Bowers on the 2005 championship team.