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Friday, Jan 18, 2002

babylon and on

"This self-effacing approach, his advisers say, reflects Mr. Bloomberg�s natural reluctance to dominate the stage in the manner of predecessors like Rudolph Giuliani and Ed Koch, as well as the simple calculation that this style will earn him favorable comparisons to Mr. Giuliani, who ran City Hall as if it were an Egyptian temple, with himself in the role of King Tut."

now and then

tonight is the premiere of 'now'. its bill moyers new weekly broadcast of news and opinion on pbs.

unbearable fruits

"The idea that certain fixed laws should apply even amid the violence and anarchy of war isn't new. The saying may have it that all's fair in war, but restrictions on battlefield conduct have always been recognized. The Hebrew Bible forbade soldiers from, among other things, destroying fruit-bearing trees in hostile lands, and chivalric codes existed in the Middle Ages. It was the Dutch philosopher Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), however, who came to be seen as the Solon of today's laws of war. His influential 1625 work On the Laws of War and Peace argued that there exist natural laws, independent of any individual state's legal system, that are apparent to human reason and should prevail even during hostilities."

serious defects

"I became directly involved with Arafat in the late 1960s, in the days when he was being financed and manipulated by the KGB. In the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel humiliated two of the Soviet Union's Arab client states, Egypt and Syria. A couple of months later, the head of Soviet foreign intelligence, Gen. Alexander Sakharovsky, landed in Bucharest. According to him, the Kremlin had charged the KGB to "repair the prestige" of "our Arab friends" by helping them organize terrorist operations that would humiliate Israel. The main KGB asset in this joint venture was a "devoted Marxist-Leninist"--Yasser Arafat, co-founder of Fatah, the Palestinian military force."

yahweh or the highway

"For decades, scholars have tried to penetrate the Bible's story about Israelite monotheism. According to traditional interpretations of the Bible, monotheism was part of Israel's original covenant with Yahweh on Mount Sinai, and the idolatry subsequently criticized by the prophets was due to Israel's backsliding from its own heritage and history with Yahweh. However, scholars have long noted that beneath this presentation lies a number of questions. Why do the Ten Commandments command that there should be no other gods "before Me" (the Lord), if there are no other gods as claimed by other biblical texts? Why should the Israelites sing at the crossing of the Red Sea that "there is no god like You, O Lord?" (Exodus 15:11). Such passages suggest that Israelites knew about other gods and did not simply reject them. It seems that Israelites may have known of other deities and perhaps various passages suggest that behind the Bible's broader picture of monotheism was a spectrum of polytheisms that centered on the worship of Yahweh as the pantheon's greatest figure."

game theory

"This is not necessarily the Great Game, Part 2. The incentives for American cooperation with Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and the other regional powers far outweigh the incentives for confrontation. A great deal of 20th century Mideast conflict can be explained by American-Soviet rivalry � another great game that brought much misery. There is no need to repeat that in Central Asia and every reason not to. To move away from gamesmanship and toward cooperation, Russia might begin by reconsidering its close relations with its regional customers, Saddam Hussein and the Iranian military. And the United States should use great discretion in establishing its bases in Central Asian nations like Kyrgyzstan. Better to build more joint pipelines and fewer military bases."

folkswagon

"Coming at the end of a dismal year for the United States in general and for its largest city in particular, the opening of Tod Williams and Billie Tsien's American Folk Art Museum in New York was a thoroughly uplifting event. The reasons for these good tidings stand quite apart from the timely re-affirmation of American culture at its best. Since the terrorist attacks, the worsening economy and the sharp drop in travel have precipitated a disastrous decline in museum revenues, especially in New York, where several institutions have recently sacked workers and canceled exhibitions. The hardest hit has been the over-reaching Guggenheim, and it is safe to say that Thomas Krens's grandiose scheme for a Frank Gehry building in lower Manhattan, an enterprise dependent on a great deal of municipal funding that now must be allocated elsewhere, is a titanium-armored dinosaur doomed to extinction."

sunshine laws

"Offshore accounts. IBCs. Walking trusts. Financial institutions have plenty of names for the places where the wealthy now hide their money from the IRS. They just don't call it cheating."

Thursday, Jan 17, 2002

name of the rose

finally.

man of the year

"Everyone knows that Rudy Giuliani went out on top, ending his operatic eight-year reign over New York City as the Person of the Year. But hardly anyone noticed that he left behind a parting gift. On his last day in office, Rudy signed an agreement to proceed with the largest corporate subsidy in New York history: up to $1.1 billion in cash and tax breaks for the New York Stock Exchange. Even when the deal was announced three years earlier, it committed money the city didn't really have to a new trading floor the exchange didn't really need in order to generate a new skyscraper no one really wanted in response to a flee-the-city threat no one really believed. And that was before the city began to hemorrhage cash, skyscrapers began to look like targets, and flee-the-city threats began to feel like municipal treason."

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