zqzq56's blog

Conrad Black's Victory<1>

WASHINGTON -- "If you have nothing else you have your principles," Lady Thatcher told me when things were pretty tough at The American

Spectator in the late 1990s. Sharks were circling the ship and there was blood in the water and I was getting anxious. She was serene, having

just flown back from Beijing, but she was adamant. "You have your principles." They endure, and fortify you when things are dire.

Doubtless, Conrad Black has had his principles too, and they are not much different from mine, though he is Canadian. For that matter, if you

are reading this, they are not much different from yours: the sanctity of the individual, individual liberty, limited government, the rule of

law. Now, because he has resisted being put away in a dark place for six and a half years, the rule of law is more secure. On June 24 all

nine Supreme Court justices sided with him. The "honest services" statute of a 1988 law that has been used ever since to prosecute white

collar crime is too vague and unconstitutional. The Court has remanded Black's conviction back to a lower court for reconsideration. I hope

it is just a matter of time before his long ordeal is over.

He has lost his company, which provided an alternative to the mainstream media around the English-speaking world. He lost his fortune, and

many friends. To the friends I would say, au revoir. They were not much anyway, and besides he has Seth Lipsky, Ira Stoll, Roger Hertog, and

thousands of others who have proved their mettle by sticking with him. And most emphatically he has his principles.

Through the years he has fought for his freedom and the 27 months he has spent in prison I have never seen him waver in his confidence in

eventual vindication. Nor have I seen him lose faith in the American rule of law or the Constitution. He got a bad break, but he recognized

that in the American system of justice he still had a chance. Nine justices have spoken. He has his chance. Now let us hope that the lower

court does the decent thing and lets him go. He has had one of the most brilliant constitutional lawyers of his generation, Miguel Estrada,

who himself might have been on the Supreme Court were it not for the partisan poisons out there. Estrada will be hustling to get him out on

bail while he awaits reconsideration.

p>Thanks to Mr. Craughwell for a fine piece, even if I disagreed with part of it. br> -- Bob French br> Alexandria, Virginia /p>

The last quarter of the 20 century witnessed a decline in the Catholic Church that is, in every aspect, unprecedented. Thomas Craughwell is not writing anything new, undocumented, or inaccurate when he illustrates just how precipitous that decline has been: dwindling numbers of religious vocations and Mass attendance, as well as a widespread indifference or hostility toward Catholic doctrine, including condemnation of abortion. Craughwell is also quite correct to state that the baleful effects of Vatican II, plus wrenching societal changes, led to the Church's current malaise. To apply John Maynard Keynes's comment about the Versailles Treaty to Vatican II, "It was written in the Devil's own hand."

For many, like me, who consider themselves part of the "Traditional" Church, Benedict XVI's recent papal "motu propio" (by the pope's own initiative) in allowing the restoration of the Mass of St. Pius V, often referred to as "the Tridentine Mass," was a step in the right direction. As Craughwell pointed out, however, twice in the 1980's, Pope John Paul II asked (an indult) that bishops throughout the world allow the Traditional Mass to be offered. With few exceptions, the request was disregarded. In this we also agree: effective papal action is necessary to re-establish Vatican supremacy in such matters, something that has been absent for more than three decades.

Vatican II did not occur within a vacuum. The unprecedented rise of unbridled hedonism, and the corrosive role of feminism within Western societies came to pass simultaneously. Within a very short period, all of the institutions that had previously provided stability and constancy were under attack: the traditional family was being replaced, the universities restructured, and that pillar of conservatism and our link to the past, the Church, had now begun its accommodation with modernism. It was a recipe for disaster. The modern Church became modern by losing its contact with its past; hence, the "old" liturgy and Mass were no longer acceptable. Formerly, priests participated in the "sacrifice" of the Mass by facing the cross; now, Mass was "celebrated," often with outlandish music, communion was a "meal," and the priest turned his back to the altar and crucifix. Will any of these novelties, which turned the Church inside out, be replaced? Like the man from Missouri, I'll believe it when I see it.

If the pope wishes to restore the Mass that has been the core of traditional Catholic liturgy, it will take his unwavering effort to see that his "motu propio" is carried out. Will he do what is necessary? That is the real question, for as sure as night follows day, there is, and will be, strong resistance amongst the majority of U.S. and Western bishops. The highly influential French bishops may have conceded for the moment, but time will tell if they, as well as their Western colleagues, can be "persuaded" by papal telephone calls to allow the Mass for all time to once again gain its rightful place amongst Catholics.

Kudos to USA Today, that most mainstream of all major media, for reminding us who "we" are. In an enterprising and courageous story published in August, the paper reported that the average U.S. private-sector worker receives $61,051 in compensation while the average U.S. government worker receives $123,049. I say "enterprising" because that latter figure, The Number we've all been looking for, has been a closely guarded secret for decades, more effectively guarded, manifestly, than most of the nation's military secrets. To tease The Number out of data designed to obscure it was a remarkable piece of journalism, an old-school, First Amendment-justifying "talking story." And I say "courageous" because the paper was predictably attacked by agents of the bureaucracy, who variously alleged error, irresponsibility, base motivation, and bad manners. Even in the media doldrums of late-summer, the constituency for big government recognized a mortal threat and lumbered on to the field to combat it.   

Let's look first at the nature of the threat and then at the campaign to defuse it. For most of our history, the reigning metaphor for government employment has been "public service." Embedded deep in the national imagination is the notion that a government job is the kind of work to which a responsible citizen is occasionally called, usually on a temporary basis, and for which he is expected to sacrifice not only creature comfort but also family time and the disruption of professional development. Although it is sometimes an adventure, that is, government work has traditionally been perceived as more duty than job, with Cincinnatus arrived reluctantly in town but still glancing longingly back at the plow.  (In my own short stints in government, I was told by recruiters to expect sharp cuts in my paycheck and, on this particular commitment at least, the government delivered in full. That was a political generation ago, however, before the Bushes and Clinton managed to rebrand the old liberalism as big-government conservatism.)

Most Americans, despite accumulating evidence to the contrary, have liked to believe that our public servants are high-minded sorts willing to serve the community at some economic cost to themselves; the kind of people who went into government, we liked to think, were in some ways like pastors or nurses or those nice people down at Goodwill Industries, most of whom seemed to be answering to spiritual vocation rather than material incentive. What USA Today did with the publication of The Number was to explode the central myth of democratic governance: namely, that taxpayers are the masters and bureaucrats the servants. What became sunrise-clear as The Number was passed from barber shop to lunch counter to factory floor to yoga class was that our public servants are paying themselves twice as much as we have managed to keep for ourselves… after paying them. Without our notice, it has now been universally noticed, our public servants have been giving themselves quiet raises all these years, tweaking  benefits, fattening pensions. Without our notice, they have been adding hundreds of thousands of new employees to their own ranks even as we taxpayers faced layoffs and cuts and freezes and closings: as we tightened our belts, they loosened theirs. The question has now re-formed itself in the national imagination: who, exactly, is working for whom?

The researchers also found that, among people who had taken ecstasy, those who took it most often were also the most likely to have sleep apnea.

“The results are intriguing,” says Sigrid Veasey, a physician and sleep researcher at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in Philadelphia. “The critical question is whether individuals with pre-existing childhood or young-adulthood sleep apnea are more prone to use ecstasy ... or whether the ecstasy causes or worsens sleep apnea.”

If there is a biological link between ecstasy and sleep apnea, it could be serotonin-making neurons. Writing in the same issue of Neurology, Nancy Chamberlin and Clifford Saper of Harvard Medical School point out that serotonin-making neurons might somehow sense carbon dioxide buildup in the blood or could play a role in a wake-promoting system.

“It would be interesting to see whether former [ecstasy] users have poor arousal responses,” they note, and to assess how these people react to high levels of carbon dioxide, which normally stimulate a person to take a breath.

Veasey cites her group’s research in dogs, which shows that sleep apnea may be worsened when serotonin signaling is blocked. Many young adults who already have some mild sleep apnea could be shifted into a more severe form by such a blockade, she says. But Veasey doubts that the loss of serotonin signaling alone would be enough to cause sleep apnea.

The team’s findings show that similar data-gathering programs in other regions thick with shipping routes, such as the North Pacific, could track year-to-year variability in carbon dioxide uptake in a meaningful way, says Körtzinger.

“I like their methods, making use of existing cargo ships makes data gathering more efficient,” says Pieter Tans, an atmospheric chemist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colo. Although the quality control on data may not be quite as rigorous as it would be on a scientific research vessel, “they seem to be doing an excellent job,” he notes.

“We’re describing a really interesting option which might become very important once the new sets of instrumentation come online,” Jahnke says. “At that point we’ll come