Is China Really the Bad Guy?

This article in the NY Times about China cutting back on deals with developing countries in Africa sparked a question. The point of the article seems to be that countries with poor human rights records found they could ignore Western demands by working with China - trading their natural resources for development assistance. With commodity prices falling and economies crashing, these countries are no longer getting aid from China.

What is interesting is how the article draws a distinction between China's decision to work with countries with poor human rights records without conditions while the US sets conditions. Before we feel good about ourselves, I ask this question: Is there any difference between aid that comes with conditions that are never enforced and therefore never met, or aid that comes without conditions?

I guess it is clear that William Easterly is influencing me. But can we really act righteous when all our loan conditions do nothing to change the countries with poor human rights records?

Democracy - It Ain't Easy

I remember some of the arguments I had with some more liberal friends (you know who you are) back during the early parts of the Iraq War. At the time, I was supporting the continuation of the Iraq War and they were opposing it. (I am not sure whether I supported the invasion - I think at times I did and other times did not. My knowledge of world issues was very limited then.)

I believed, influenced by Thomas Friedman, that we could easily create a democracy in Iraq. If I remember my friends' arguments, they believed that Iraqis were not ready for democracy and that it would not work if it was forced on them instead of them fighting for it themselves. (If I have misrepresented your arguments, please correct me.) I completely rejected that, believing everyone can become democratic.

Looking back, not just after six years in Iraq, but looking at other democracies around the world, I realize that I still believe everyone can have a democracy. What I realize though was that my expectations were extremely naive. Democracies cannot sprout overnight. Democracies need time to grow, to learn from mistakes, and to evolve. They also need stability and a strong middle class.

When we look around the world, we see democracies that have had far more time than Iraq to settle. In these countries, we still see significant growing pains. Pakistan continues to deal with threatened autocratic rule, disrespect for the rule of law and corruption. None of their leaders are free of one or all of these charges. We saw what can happen with contested elections in a relatively stable country like Kenya. South Africa right now seems to face a choice between an ineffective leader and AIDS denier (Thabo Mbeki) and a corrupt leader who is also facing serious rape charges (Jacob Zuma).

If you look at American history, you see similar growing pains. It took us two tries to chose the right form of government (see Articles of Confederation). We fought a bloody civil war. And we have had our own long fight with corruption, which is a fight we will never fully win, as Rod Blagojevich proves.

So I look back at my support then of the war, and I am embarrassed about my naivete. However, I can partly excuse myself since I was just starting to learn about the international world and form my own theories. What is scary is that we had a president who knew so little about the world that he believed creating a democracy was easy. Worse, he still believes it.

While I no longer think democracy is easy, this does not mean I will give up hope. It does mean that we need to change our expectations and our policies. We need to help foster the growth of democracies without the expectation that they will form overnight. This can mean helping increase stability and growth of a middle class. We also need to avoid grand plans like Iraq in the future. And in a place like Afghanistan, we need to be prepared for the long haul.

Bonus: Must be Nice

I appreciated the Opinion piece in today's NY Times, written by an executive at AIG. In it, the author announces his resignation and his disappointment with AIG CEO's refusal to defend those who received bonuses. The opinion piece was well written and made me think a little deeper about the issue. However, it did not change my mind. I still think the bonuses were outrageous.

Basically, the author of the Opinion piece says that his unit was not responsible for the meltdown at AIG, so therefore the public scorn should not be directed at him. This is true if the only reason people are upset about the bonuses is because they thought the bonuses were going only to people who caused the problem. But the bonuses were outrageous even knowing that they also went to people at the firm who were not involved in mortgage-backed securities.

The company was so close to bankruptcy, and close to bringing the whole economy down with it, that it required a government (taxpayer) bailout. Since the firm is in such a precarious situation, all planned expenses need to be reconsidered to determine whether they are integral to save the firm (or at least mitigate the damage it has caused). Bonuses cannot be considered a necessary expense in light of these circumstances.

Now, some people are arguing that the bonuses were necessary to retain the talent at the firm. This does not make sense; with the number of layoffs at financial firms there is a surplus of labor. This surplus gives the firms bargaining advantage and will drive wages down. So bonuses should not be necessary to keep employees, and if they choose to leave, the firm can find newly unemployed workers to fill those positions.

The government got involved because there were legitimate financial obligations that AIG was likely to have trouble meeting. Bonuses were not one of those obligations.

While I took the opinion piece at face value, there is an obvious contradiction in it. The author mentions that he accepted a $1 salary to stay at AIG in a sense of public duty. However, he still accepted, and felt he needed, a $700,000 bonus, and is now quitting over the outrage it drew. If he recognized the need to accept a $1 salary, then he should have also realized the need to refuse / renegotiate the bonus.

Not Sure What to Think

I cannot decide whether to be a little optimistic about the new Israeli government, or depressed and terrified. And my feelings change depending on the article I read. The fact that this is a right wing government (with Avigdor Lieberman as foreign minister) that does not believe in a two state solution depresses me - especially since I thought Obama's even hand might actually be able to guide the region forward.

But then it seems that the right wing government wants to govern from the middle and does not want to anger the Obama administration (and thereby recognizing that Obama will be more willing to actually criticize). And although they do not believe in a two state solution, they want to see economic growth in the Palestinian territories before talk of a two-state solution.

So I guess I am in the middle - neither optimistic nor depressed. I am glad there is talk of fostering economic growth in the territories. However, I am skeptical since I do not know what kind of growth can be expected given the large scale destruction in Gaza (maybe they only mean the West Bank). We'll just have to wait and see.

A Raisin in the Sun

I was raised in the Methodist Church - in a Northeast Methodist Church to be exact. My family went every Sunday and I was required to go to Sunday school even after my Confirmation. I did manage to learn a lot about Christianity - mostly through osmosis probably - and I respect the faith and the teachings (mostly). So you might ask why I do not practice.

In all honesty, I don't have a problem with the more mystical elements like the Virgin Birth, Christ's Resurrection, or the Old Testament teachings (well, there are some stories that I just don't get). My problem is with God. There, I said it. The fact is, that even if He does exist, I can't bring myself to worship Him.

There is a quote from Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun that I loved as soon as I read it and haven't been able to forget about since.

Beneatha: Mama, you don't understand. It's all a matter of ideas, and God is just one idea I don't accept. It's not important. I am not going out and be immoral or commit crimes because I don't believe in God. I don't even think about it. It's just that I get tired of Him getting credit for all the things the human race achieves through its own stubborn effort. There simply is no blasted God - there is only man and it is he who achieves miracles!

Beneatha gets slapped by Mama right after this, but that is beside the point. What bothers me is that God asks us to be humble but requires that we spend some significant portion of our lives worshiping Him. And on top of that, I don't even know what we are worshiping. Am I worshiping a God that allows 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus to be killed in 100 days; a God that allows millions of Jews to die under Hitler; a God that watches as famine, disease, and war (with child soldiers no less) wipe out the most vulnerable among us?

The crux of Christianity seems to be that we created sin, so therefore we are to blame for all of the world's evils. Yet the credit for all miracles go to Him. It has to be one way or the other. Either the human race is responsible for wars and miracles, or God is. I tend towards the former, but if it is the later, then I don't see why God is worth worshiping.

I Still Hate Him

Former VP Dick Cheney has been making press lately by saying that Obama's attempts to roll back some of his administration's worst abuses will make us less safe. This enrages me for a couple reasons.

First, he exaggerates the benefits of using torture and unlimited detentions while ignoring the costs. As we know, torture only creates the incentive for the victim to say what his interrogators want to hear. Sometimes this produces good intelligence, but sometimes not. In fact, it can lead the prisoner to overstate or lie about existing threats (which then further creates the false impression that the torture is working).

More importantly, it completely ignores the effect that our policies of torture have on recruitment of new terrorists. In fact, any security gains policies of torture can achieve are only short-term, while the costs are long term. This works for politicians like Bush and Cheney, who can claim short-term victory, and deny the long term affects that surface after they have left office.

But second, Cheney's statements and the Bush administration policies suggest that security is both attainable and our primary concern; holding to our values and protecting liberties is secondary. The idea that security, that protection from all terrorist attacks, is attainable is false. Once we admit that, that we can never achieve total security, than we must also decide not to sacrifice our values, for there is no payoff.

People like Dick Cheney will always be there, describing our deepest fears and fooling us into thinking that we can be safe. His solution will be through short term policies and sacrificing of our values and freedoms. We can defeat people like that by deciding that our values are more important, and accepting that by living free, we live with risk.

Holy Shit

Holy Shit. This article in the New York Review of Books is infuriating. The article describes a report by the International Committee of the Red Cross regarding the treatment of the 14 "high value detainees" that were until recently kept in secret detention sites outside the US. The description of their interrogations is appalling and very clearly torture. Through all of this, it seems that senior officials were aware of and sometimes directing the torture.

Bush has said that his administration did not torture. But the only way that statement is true is through the cruel and ugly logic of his torture memo, where torture is defined only as causing death, organ failure, or the loss of functioning of a body part. Rejecting that narrow definition of torture, we can accept that Bush did in fact torture prisoners.

Read the article for yourself. And get angry.

Book Report: Chasing the Flame (1)

I am not ready yet to give my thoughts on Samantha Powers' book Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World. I finished reading it a while ago, but I have not been able to organize all my thoughts on it yet. So while I do that, here is a post with some golden quotes from the book (the Kindle is amazing!).

Here is the quote of the book:

To nonexperts, humanitarian action and human rights sounded like synonyms or, at the very least, complements. But he knew that, in the real world, feeding people was often incompatible with speaking out. "How do we reconcile the need for humanitarian access and thus discretion, with the need, sometimes the obligation, for human rights?" he asked a gathering of diplomats from donor countries in Geneva, undoubtedly with the events of Zaire and Tanzania on his mind. "In the face of overwhelming human rights abuses, when do humanitarian agencies withdraw?"

And now some others to get you thinking:

Released from the cold war stalemate, the Security Council of the 1990s had been liberated to enforce international peace and security. But the back-to-back calamities had made it clear that, if civilians were not pawns in a larger ideological struggle, as they had been in the cold war, their welfare would command hardly any attention at all. Instead of using the Security Council to establish and enforce a new global order, the major powers sent lightly armed peacekeepers into harm’s way simply to monitor the carnage. The results were devastating in two regards. First, civilians were murdered en masse. And second, the UN peacekeepers took far more of the blame than the politicians who had handed them an assignment that was, Vieira de Mello liked to say, "mission impossible."

in the 1980s Western governments had spent millions aiding the Cambodian refugees as a way of destabilizing the Vietnam-installed regime in Phnom Penh. But in the Great Lakes area, a region of marginal strategic value, Western governments were not using aid as a tool for promoting their national interests. Rather, they were using aid as a substitute for meaningful foreign policy engagement of any kind. [Something Western governments do way too often.]

He urged UN officials to accept "that humanitarian crises are almost always political crises, that humanitarian action always has political consequences, both perceived and real." Since everybody else was playing politics with humanitarian aid, he wrote, "we can hardly afford to be apolitical."

In 1999 scholar Edward Luttwak published an influential article in Foreign Affairs entitled "Give War a Chance," in which he suggested that aid workers and peace-brokers were prolonging wars that would only end permanently if they were "allowed to run their natural course." "Policy elites," Luttwak wrote, "should actively resist the emotional impulse to intervene in other peoples’ wars—not because they are indifferent to human suffering but precisely because they care about it."

Vieira de Mello wrote a steaming letter to the editor slamming Luttwak’s "simplistic compilation of old arguments and wrong conclusions." He faulted Luttwak for his "uniform picture of war." Since few conflicts tidily confined themselves within national borders, Vieira de Mello argued, turning one’s back on violence would often result in wider, messier regional conflicts. In addition, since so many governments and rebel movements benefited from war, they had an incentive to prolong war on their own. They didn’t need any help from aid workers.

While he acknowledged that humanitarian action could sometimes have perverse consequences, he wrote that "to deny aid altogether is not only unhelpful, it is unthinkable." He noted that he generally valued critical commentary, but he found unhelpful such "oversimplified accounts far removed from the complexities of actual war and blanket statements that lead to quietism." [I have heard this same argument before, and de Mello's response is perfect.]

But he thought the flawed tendency of aid workers to give aid uncritically and indefinitely was a lesser danger than the tendency of rich countries to turn their backs on humanitarian crises altogether.

Only when Western powers stood together unequivocally, flexing their collective diplomatic and financial muscles, did Russia and China come around, as in the Persian Gulf War or in the belated decision to act militarily in Bosnia. But Vieira de Mello knew that occasions would arise when all the Western unity and diplomacy in the world would not change their views. In those circumstances, he was prepared to admit, exceptional emergencies might require a "coalition of the willing" to bypass the paralyzed Council. Ever so rarely, the urgency and legitimacy of the cause could excuse the illegality of the procedures. [Notice how this echoes the US justification for Iraq - without the legitimacy of the cause.]

He adopted a formulation common among those who supported NATO’s action but were nervous about its implications: The war was illegal (under the procedural rules of the UN Charter) but legitimate (according to the substantive ideals the UN was trying to advance).

he also did not understand why disarmament was a key item on the Security Council checklist while human rights were not. "A regime that can grossly violate the rights of its own people is ipso facto a threat to its neighbors and to regional and international peace and security," he insisted.

He knew that the organization he cherished was at once an actor in its own right and simply a building, no better or worse than the collective will of the countries that constituted it.

but he never imagined that U.S. planners would think so little about the peace [in Iraq]. Surely, he thought, they had watched as UN peacekeepers foundered in their "morning after" efforts to maintain order in the 1990s. Surely the Coalition would take precautions to stave off the kind of chaos that could be far deadlier than anything a regular army could unleash. Surely they would understand that establishing human security was a prerequisite to achieving other aims.

In 2000 he had embraced a new norm first put forth by an independent commission: the "responsibility to protect." The first responsibility to protect individuals from violence fell to those individuals’ government, but when that government proved unable (in a failing state) or unwilling (in a repressive state) to offer such protection, then the responsibility vested upward to the international community, which had a duty to mobilize the means to stop mass murder.

This last quote is amazing.

Book Report: Shia Revival

I finished reading The Shia Revival by Vali Nasr. The book mostly focuses on the conflict between Shia and Sunni faiths, with an emphasis on Shiaism, and includes a brief history of Islam (again, with a focus on Shiaism). The book is well written and so it was a quick read.

I learned two main things from this book. First, our understanding of the Middle East and their politics, as covered in the press, is highly skewed. Who we see as the villains and heroes depends on who likes us and who does not. In the past we have seen Iran as a villain and Saudi Arabia as a hero. In fact, as 9/11 taught us, it should be the other way around. We even judge Iran's democracy more harshly because of our relationship with them and yet don't judge Saudi Arabia's repressive government.

The author sees all developments in the Middle East through the lens of Shia and Sunni interactions (conflicts) and that other issues are often pawns in that interaction. An Iraq with closer ties to Iran can counter strength of Sunni governments, whose oppression and intolerance have a negative impact on the region (which is not at all how the US press sees it). Also, the Israel / Palestine issue is manipulated to garner popular support and strength in the region.

The book manages to provide a much more nuanced, and less negative, view of Shias and Iran specifically. Unfortunately, I do not think Americans are ready to accept that view.

The second thing I learned was of course how similar Islam and Christianity are when you contrast their histories. Both religions have had to respond to oppression against their faithful. Early Christians choose martyrdom (a really good analysis of the Gnostic Book of Judas suggests the author believed that martyrdom was against God's will - leading sheep to the slaughter) as a way to promote the faith. In the face of oppression, Shias have at times chosen martyrdom (as the celebration of Ashora remembers) at times modified their faith, and at times simply withstood the oppression.

Both faiths have had to deal with modernization as well, although it seems Islam has had the greater challenge since the modern world has seemed to leave Muslims behind. This debate largely revolves around traditionalism versus change. The faiths also face(d) conflicts over who should lead the faith and who should lead the government - and whether those two should be the same.

The issue that really struck me though was how the religions debate internally whether individual piety or social justice is more important - essentially whether the faith should be inward looking or outward looking. Around the 1950s, Shia clerics argued that the faith was too focused on piety and did not do enough to fight for changes to make people's lives better. Through these teachings, these Shias were arguing for revolution and social change - some argued in support of communism.

This book is a must read because it can both humanize Shias and help people to think about our role in the Middle East differently. We should be supporting states based not on their rhetoric towards us, but how their actions affect us and their own people. Also, by better understanding the power plays between Sunnis and Shias, we can better manage issues and conflicts in the region.

Economy, Interest Rates, and Cycles

As I have been thinking about the economic crisis, one thing keeps nagging at me. I have thought for a long time that interest rates were too low, and yet they kept getting lower. The constant lowering of interest rates during high growth seemed to have been an attempt to maintain growth and prevent a recession. And that decision was made on the assumption that we could actually prevent recessions.

This article in the Atlantic however suggests that the normal business cycle (boom and bust) still exists and maybe always will - that we have not conquered it. So maybe we should have raised interest rates during high growth instead of lowering them to maintain the high growth. By lowering them further while we were growing, we not only created a bubble, but removed one major mechanism we have for getting ourselves out of the recession. Interest rates cannot be lowered further, so the Fed is left with creative but risky mechanisms to get the economy going again.

There has been a lot of talk about lax regulation under Greenspan, and rightly so. But I think the Fed's policy on interest rates needs to be considered as well.

Gay Marriage: What Does the Bible Say?

Newsweek recently had an interesting article focusing on gay marriage. The article tried to engage with Christian arguments against gay marriage, instead of simply dismissing the Bible as an invaluable place to derive policy. Overall, the author made some good points, but oversimplified others. At the same time, I don't know how you can really engage in a discussion on textual teachings of the Bible and be thorough while also meeting space constraints of a Newsweek article.

Her first point, and what I have come to believe, is that most people who oppose gay marriage cannot do it using Biblical textual literalism, since almost no one actually follows all things taught in the Bible. Modern Christians regularly disregard teachings from the Old Testament, especially Leviticus, one of the few places male homosexuality is mentioned.

So if textual literalism is not driving Christians to oppose gay marriage, what is? The common response is support for a traditional family. It is this part of the argument where the author oversimplifies. She looks back to the Old Testament families (especially Abraham and Jacob) and suggests that since they had multiple wives, than the Bible cannot be the source of a focus on the one male - one female family unit. This argument does not make sense if we see that the teachings of Jesus often conflict with, and probably were meant to change, teachings in the Old Testament. The loving and peaceful Jesus was very different from what appears to be a vengeful Old Testament God. So if Jesus did preach about family units, than Jacob's multiple wives doesn't matter as much.

Unfortunately, I don't know as much about all of the teachings of Jesus, so I don't know what focus he put on families. But from what I understand, his (and Paul's) opposition to divorce is far stronger than opposition to gay relationships (the author rightly mentions this as well). So this begs the question - why does modern Christianity put far more focus on gay marriage than on actually dealing with the bigger problems facing what the Bible upholds as the traditional family unit? Through this lens, it seems like bigotry masking itself as righteousness.

If Christians really want to focus on strengthening families, then they need to focus on things that are actually affecting families. If high divorce rates and single family households are contrary to what the Bible upholds as the correct family unit, then Christians should deal with these issues, which are not related to homosexuality at all.

The bottom line is that opposition to gay marriage makes little sense even if you accept that the Bible can be a reasonable place to draw moral lessons. Almost no one can claim they are Biblical literalists and looking at the spirit of the text gives no clues to understand why opposing gay marriage should be a major focus of Christians hoping to protect families.

Book Report: The Bottom Billion

I read Paul Collier's The Bottom Billion a while ago, but never published this post. I did however publish a joint book report on this book and The End of Poverty over at the short-lived human rights blog. I have been reading (slowly) all of the popular books on development, and this was the one I started with.

To summarize quickly, Collier takes a very pro-growth position on how to improve the countries in the bottom billion - the worst performing countries. He uses statistical modeling to look at what factors affect growth, and he finds that being landlocked, resource rich (oil or diamonds for example), recent conflict or coups, and poor democracy - especially lack of an open press all have negative correlations with growth.

His solutions therefore are to promote democracy, export diversity, and international intervention during / following conflicts. I can agree with all of these, especially intervention. I firmly believe that more peacekeeping missions are both good for stability (obviously) but also a moral necessity to protect the victims of conflict. Sound democracy is hard to argue against also, since it can lead to pressure on the government to make good decisions. And countries with one major commodity can see their revenue misused and their exchange rates harmed (international aid can have the same impact).

I fear that I am oversimplifying, as well as leaving things out. I don't have the energy right now to really get into the details of his economic proposals. The point though is that he analysis made sense, but it seemed both too broad and quick, as well as somewhat cold in its tone. His arguments were all about economics, to the point that his main concern was to see positive growth that might get these countries out of their horrible situation over 20 years or so. What he didn't focus enough on was what to do right now to improve their situation. Their conditions are so horrible that we need equal focus to long term solutions and short-term fixes and I felt that his book was mostly focused on the long term.

The Only Cure for Steroids

I have been despondent about the ability of steroids testing to ever keep up with the cheaters. I believed that the cheaters would always have more resources than, and therefore be multiple steps ahead of, the testing agencies. I still think this is the case. But I recently came across a testing policy that would actually combat this and could be a real deterrent for steroids use. Here is the most important part of the proposal, via Freakonomics:

An independent laboratory stores urine and blood samples for all players, and tests these blood samples 10 years, 20 years, and 30 years later using the most up-to-date technology available.

He has other suggestions, but this is the best one. Cheaters know they can beat the system now, but they also must know testing will eventually catch up to their methods years from now. The next step would be to incorporate clauses in contracts that impose penalties years later if positive results come back years later.

This is the only method that would actually be effective. And the fact that we don't see it, and won't ever see it, shows me that baseball is not actually committed to ending steroid use. The unions would never allow it, and Major League Baseball will never push hard for it. What a shame.

The Bible, Again

In a previous post I mentioned how I was interested in reading the Bible primarily because I wanted to know where it actually talked about homosexuality. In looking back, I realize I did not make it clear why I would be interested in that. In case you do not know me as well, my interest is in how a loving God could ban something that, when done between two consenting adults can be just as beautiful as any heterosexual relationship.

My interest therefore is where in the Bible gay relationships are mentioned, what the context is, and how it compares to other proscriptions of the Bible. I assume that many people who argue against recognizing gay marriage do so with little real knowledge of the Bible and so my goal is to know the Bible better than they do.

In truth, I think I also oversimplified. I also want to read the Bible to understand myself better, to understand my family (ancestry) better, and to understand other conservative thought better.

Big Mac - Hitting Coach

I will always have a soft spot for Mark McGwire. Granted, I am disappointed in how he conducted himself (allegedly) in his chase for the homerun record. But heroes from your youth are hard to topple, and when they do fall, they rarely fall all the way.

So this article in the Times, about his foray back into baseball as a hitting instructor, makes me smile. I am happy that he is finding joy in baseball again. At the same time, I can still admit that he will need to come clean about his use of performance enhancing drugs at some point. He cannot keep avoiding the issue. He owes it to his fans. But more than that, he owes it to those who might come next and follow his example.

Child Soldiers

The problem with a book like A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Child Soilder and a movie like Blood Diamond, is they mostly raise awareness of situations that are long since over. You are left enraged that these conditions existed, but you are left without an outlet. The inevitable question that arises is where the current crises are. Unfortunately, that information is not as readily available, as these incidents are not covered widely. I should have posted about this a long time ago, but here is a brief word about where current child soldier incidents are:

The 13 countries where groups that recruit child soldiers operate are Afghanistan, Burundi, Central African Republic, Congo, Myanmar, Nepal, Somalia, Sudan, Chad, Colombia, Philippines, Sri Lanka and Uganda, according to the report.

Some of these should be no surprise. Congo, Somalia, and Sudan are homes to some of the worst conflicts right now and I imagine that many years from now, the next books and movies will be set in these countries. Sri Lanka continues to battle the Tamil Tiger terrorist group. I have heard about Myanmar's use of child soldiers. It is surprising though that Afghanistan is of course on our radar in the US, but allegations of using child soldiers is not discussed.

Well, knowing is half the battle, right? The other half is action...

No Matter the Consequences

Just a little while ago, I was reading Chasing the Flame, a book about Sergio Vierra de Mello, and I watched the American Experience movies on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. Needless to say, these things both made me tremendously sad yet filled me with a desire to live a life fighting against injustice, regardless of the consequences. Unfortunately, that is not what I do right now. But I am working on that. Kind of.

One thing that stood out, was this poem that Robert Kennedy was fond of by Aeschylus (he read it the night Dr. King was assassinated):

Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.

Each time I read these words, they move me.

Kennedy, above the other two I mentioned, was taken before he was able to show any of his real potential. With Kennedy's death, Nixon was elected to the presidency. I cannot even comprehend (but others can) the different world we might have lived in had RFK lived and won instead of Nixon.

Reading the Bible

A writer for Slate recently read the Old Testament of the Bible and wrote an article, (and a book) about the experience. Reading the Bible does not seem like that big of a deal, until you consider how few people actually do. Instead of displaying any stereotypes I have of religious groups in the US, I'll just reference the writer's point that only evangelical protestants really read the Bible.

I recently began reading the Bible, with the hope of at least being able to talk more intelligently about what it does and does not say. My main reason was to learn more about how and when the Bible disapproves of homosexuality. But I also wanted a more general understanding.

This is no small undertaking, and I have made limited progress. But my thoughts so far are similar to David Plotz's.

After reading about the genocides, the plagues, the murders, the mass enslavements, the ruthless vengeance for minor sins (or none at all), and all that smiting—every bit of it directly performed, authorized, or approved by God—I can only conclude that the God of the Hebrew Bible, if He existed, was awful, cruel, and capricious. He gives us moments of beauty—such sublime beauty and grace!—but taken as a whole, He is no God I want to obey and no God I can love.

I have similar feelings about God's role in the world we live in as a whole, and maybe one day I will share a more personal post I have written on the topic.

I also understand Plotz when he says that his heroes in the Bible are those who question God. In fact, one of my favorite parts of Slaughter House Five is when the narrator tells of his love/respect for Lot's wife because she looked back at God's destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah even though it turned her into a pillar of salt.

I plan to continue reading the Bible when I have time, although it will be a very slow process. It is interesting reading, although long passages of boring narration surround the interesting and relevant stories. I'm sure I'll have more to say as I read.

Losing Faith

As much as it pains me to say this, I am losing faith in Governor Paterson. And it seems I am not alone. There is not one thing to point to, but a collection of small decisions that do not make sense. I understand that the state is facing a large budget deficit. In two of his proposed solutions, one borrows from the future to pay a part of next year's deficit and the other cuts funding for a cheap but meaningful service (Governor's Island) for very small budget savings.

In fact, I perceive that his administration is trying to balance the budget through lots of small changes that might affect only small constituencies instead of big but painful changes. This choice makes me question his leadership. I want a governor who is going to stand up and make bold choices in the face of a terrible economy. Instead, I feel like he wants to slide by quietly and hope to not makes waves with his budget decisions. Budget gimmicks and cutting of cheap services do not get a government through a recession. Only tough but smart choices will.

I also feel like we have a different David Paterson than the one who was lieutenant governor and senate minority leader. I was expecting someone who was liberal but collegial. Instead, we seem to have a moderate - one who is easing a Pataki environmental decision and less vocal about reforms to the Rockefeller Drug Laws.

Of course, you can draw a comparison to Obama - another person who seemed to be liberal but collegial and instead is showing to be more moderate - but Obama seems more in charge and willing to make tough decisions and defend them. If Paterson is going to win back trust, he is going to have to be more transparent about, and show strength in, his choices.

Progress in DRC?

The developments in the Democratic Republic of Congo continue to fill me with hope. It really looks like one of the most violent regions in the world may get a break. It is particularly exciting given that the region includes the Virunga National Park, a rich rain forest home to the largest population of mountain gorillas, among others. With peace, tourism might return, bringing some prosperity to the region. At least it might allow protection of the park and the gorillas to return.

Of course, I need to temper my hope with some realism. Congo has seen positive developments in the past, only to see greater and more deadly setbacks. In addition, while one of the insurgent groups has folded, there are other economic factors that impact stability for the residents and protection of the park. As National Geographic pointed out, the charcoal industry is also threatening the park and the gorillas.