lloydtown 

Travels in Southern Ontario

We'll be driving to Waterloo Region today to visit our daughter. We drive west across the Holland Marsh (drained in the 1930s, now flat land with black soil, famous for fruit and vegetable farming), the Oak Ridges Moraine, and the
Niagara Escarpment. We completely by-pass Orangeville, and go south and west across the headwaters of the Credit River, then through Guelph (the Speed and Eramosa Rivers). We cut briefly through Cambridge (the Speed and Grand Rivers).

It's close to 2 hours, each way (the freeway would usually cut some time off--400 south to either 407 or 401, then west) but we like to do a little sight-seeing.

The scenery is not really spectacular in the way of the Rocky Mountains, but there are some really impressive and varied land forms--hills, valleys, variations in the river beds--much of it still covered with a gorgeous forest. The farms, hamlets and towns add human interest. The forest here is much more varied than in my native Alberta, and of course it is at its best in the fall. There is a kind of obsession around here with the red maple (the national flag, and all that), but that is only one of many species that put on their finery.

We basically drive along the north of both King township and Caledon. These are amazing areas, quite close to Toronto, where rural folk, some of them with real money, are trying to preserve things roughly as they are, and keep the subdivisions out. There are stories that land owners will buy from their neighbours, at subdivision prices, to keep the land as farm and forest.

The old highway goes right through the main street of a village called Erin. (The website says in order not to sound like a tourist, say "Ear-in"). It's not really a great well-preserved 19th century Main Street, like maybe in Brockville, but it has a lot of charm. It has obviously begun to appeal to Toronto day-trippers, but it doesn't yet have that heavy "tourists-only" feel. Traffic does get heavy, and I feel sorry for the locals doing their shopping.

Erin is on one fork of the Credit River, which now flows down through big, often congested Mississauga to Lake Ontario. In the 19th century, Erin became a mill town before there was much of anything further south--and the mills on the headwaters of the Credit River stopped the Atlantic salmon from running there. There is now a huge arterial road further south called Erin Mills.

Update: When my in-laws were in town, and wanted to visit our daughter, we stopped in Erin for a change instead of just driving on through. We ate at the Rob Roy Inn, and strolled the main street a bit. The Rob Roy is a nicely renovated old house, and the menu was basically pleasant pub fare.

For one of our trips, I decided to see if I could by-pass Erin. I ended up on Forks of the Credit road, and we went right through Belfountain. Not a short cut at all--the speed limit is very low, on winding, hilly roads--but spectacularly beautiful. This small area is in fact a bit like the Rocky Mountain parks in Alberta. The road criss-crosses both the Credit River and an old railway track. There are some businesses that definitely do cater to the Toronto trade.


Here is a picture from the web. (Holy smokes! I've managed to load the actual picture! It comes from a site with pictures from many places, including China, but this one says it is from Belfountain).

Here is a site with more fall colours in Southern Ontario. Fall is my favourite time of the year. I have tried to find some poetry that reflects that, but so far I can only find things that suggest summer is much better.

Ontario Election update

The Liberals won a landslide: 72 seats, to 24 for the PCs (Tories), and 7 for the NDP. The Liberal platform was an amalgam of left and right: more spending on health care and education, revoking new tax cuts to pay for new spending, bizarre touches like subsidies for auto insurance and day care, rent control, more police officers (with violent crime trending downward), converting coal-fired electricity generators to natural gas on a tight time frame, all wrapped up with a promise of fiscal responsibility/balanced budgets.

The numbers obviously don't add up, but in fairness, the numbers in the Tory promises didn't add up either. No one seems to know what's next. Are voters determined to have more government services, even at the expense of deficits or new taxes? (Liberal leader Dalton McGuinty has promised not to raise taxes). Or are they more determined to have "fiscal responsibility" and "tax restraint," so that they will gladly give up some of the pie-in-the-sky they have been promised?

A really good book still has to be written on the debate about the welfare state over the past few decades. The "right" has had some success in slowing the growth of the welfare state, and even changing its priorities a bit, mostly with a combination of tax cuts and spending cuts. Of course the left, which thought the welfare paradise would just keep on growing, denounces this as an expression of "resentment," mean, short-sighted (since the economy benefits if we keep "bringing the poor along"), etc. Both sides "buy the voters with their own money," both actively corrupt voters in comparison to some ideal of "self-reliance." Active politicians keep on discovering the wisdom of Aristophanes' Knights: the demos really longs for a comfortable pair of shoes, but this is somehow a shameful secret.

Update: PC leader Ernie Eves has taken criticism for not showing what he actually believes in. He ran for party leadership by saying it was time to move to a more accomodating position--not singling out groups such as the teachers' unions that seem to oppose reform. He cancelled a move to market rates for electricity, subsidized the rates for many consumers, and postponed one round of tax cuts for a year.

In the election campaign he sounded more "right wing" again, even adopting policies from his "right wing" opponent for the leadership, Jim Flaherty, such as a tax cut for parents sending kids to any private school, and a ban on teacher strikes during the school year. He did a media event on "law and order," waving a roll of barbed wire, and referring back to the recent murder of a child, which the parole authorities have supposedly not taken seriously enough. Another big tax break was on the interest component of home mortgage payments--an echo of a national U.S. program.

So people wondered "who the real Ernie was." Also, even in his switch to the right, he seemed to have no confidence in across-the-board tax cuts, such as Mike Harris had been known for. Instead there were targeted cuts--reminiscent of Clinton more than of Bush Jr. Have conservatives lost their taste for broader tax cuts, which in principle always mean reducing government spending by a significant amount? (Leaving aside "tax cuts create jobs, and thus pay for programs.")

McGuinty is bland, and his jokes are corny, but he has remained quite consistent since he became leader in 1996. His tendency to make Santa Claus-like promises really kicked in during the last weeks of the campaign--when polls showed he already had it in the bag. He may live to regret some of these promises (six months leave for family members of someone who is ill, if I remember correctly?), and they certainly seem to confirm the Tory charge that these people are out-of-control tax-and-spenders at heart.

It is to McGuinty's credit that stories now come out (carefully leaked?) saying that members of his caucus and campaign team wanted to match Tory promises of targetted tax cuts. Dalton said no: these policies are gimmicks, and they will make it harder to balance the budget. You may not like this message, but it was unquestionably his message, and he won with in. No tricks, unless you count the shopping list of promises.

There was obviously real anger at some apparent "breakdowns" in the public sector, to which Tory budget cuts may have contributed. "Walkerton," an example of tainted municipal water that actually killed a few people, kept coming up. There was damning testimony about the SARS crisis during the campaign. Somewhat to my surprise, there was anger at the very idea of letting the private sector build a hospital, which the government will then lease. This is I believe the Tony Blair model for private-public partnerships, or 3Ps. The total cost to taxpayers may be more in the end, but facilities get built quickly, leaving money free today for other things. One proposed 3P hospital would be in Brampton, and every Tory iin Brampton lost his seat--including Tony Clement, a real rising star.

Update: I should have mentioned another "targetted" tax cut that the Tories had just begun to implement: a reduction in the education share of property tax paid by seniors. This apparently struck many people as blatantly unfair, if not stupid. Eves tried to re-announce it at a seniors event during the campaign, and many of the seniors were apparently heckling him: we don't want a tax cut, we want more long-term care beds. Surely a gifted writer could show what that event can teach us about our times.

I have worked on "the political side" for the Tories, and somehow my heart always goes out to them. Even if it's true that they always give in to what they "conservatively" object to, sooner or later, and even if it is sometimes remarkably soon, I sympathize with people who say "hold it a minute." This always holds out the promise of actually thinking about alternatives; of course, this promise is seldom realized by flesh and blood Tories.

Tories vaguely like elites, maybe even winners. But which ones? Not poets or philosophers--too airy-fairy. The Church? Well, one has a drink with the Bishop when one absolutely must--perhaps after a funeral. Academics? They've all gone a bit crazy, haven't they? Well, perhaps except for a few, here and there--I'll think of a name in a minute.

Cops? Tories certainly love events commemorating cops, but do they socialize with them? Lawyers? Yes, I think they have become the priests of our age (along with IT people), but they are as likely to be Liberals as Tories.

That pretty much leaves business people, faute de mieux. As a group, somewhat of a bunch of bastards, if not quite as low and greedy as the left keeps suggesting. It's cheerful, in a way, to hang out with entrepreneurs, who are always full of hope at the latest perpetual-motion machine. We can even make common cause with them over low taxes. But still: what the hell do we actually have to talk about?

I guess conservative politics is really a contradiction in terms: true conservatives mostly want to "mind their own business," including friends and family. There's something distasteful about meetings, and something creepy about the welfare state.

One great, hilarious example of how this works is Disraeli becoming leader--not just of the Tories, but of the "die-hard" Tories of his time. He would regularly try to have something like a caucus meeting. The "guys" would absolutely refuse to come to London for such a ridiculous purpose, but they would grudgingly agree to spend a weekend at somebody's palatial country place, where the hunting was good. Of course, once there, all they wanted to do was hunt--an activity in which their leader, Disraeli, took no part. (I guess the equivalent today would be golf).

Update: Or maybe it would be better to say: in a liberal democracy, the business people are the natural conservatives. They have "met a payroll," and they more or less believe in hard work and the virtues that allow one to accumulate wealth.

In a way it should be a hard sell to persuade them to accept the welfare state, but they pretty well have accepted it.

Somehow farmers always have a special place among the "conservatives." They work hard, using their hands and bodies, so they feel strongly that they deserve any benefit they end up with. Their actual fortune still depends heavily on weather--nature or chance. So once again, if some benefit comes in, they have simply won one instead of always losing. The net result is that they preach individualism and self-reliance, but expect subsidies.

In Xenophon's Oeconomicus, which many professors will say is the dullest book by this dull (?) author, the main character, who is identified as a citizen but also a country gentleman, says that his father loves the land. In fact, he loves it so much, he loves to fix it up and then sell it at a profit.

Once more on WMDs

OK, OK: Maybe I was wrong. (See also here.)

Maybe the truth is that Saddam pretended to have WMDs, or exaggerated how many he had--maybe even used agents to spread these lies--because he wanted the U.S. to think an invasion would immediately trigger the use of chemical or biological weapons. (Link from Slate).

It's hard to believe this mega-power, the U.S., with such great intelligence resources, could be so clueless. Now there are suggestions that Saddam was clueless, too--his experts had stopped building or acquiring WMDs, perhaps ten years earlier, and he may not have realized just how defenceless he was. (Link from NY Post refers to a Time magazine article, which I can't find). So this becomes another potential justification for the Bush/Blair group: we were no more clueless about WMDs in Iraq than Saddam himself.

Some critics of the war thought the threat that Saddam might deploy WMDs was a good reason not to go in, and it may have been a reason why the Pentagon was insistent on moving as quickly as possible.

U.S. Allies I: Pakistan

There have been several items of interest in recent days having to do with governments who are the allies of the U.S., and who might become allies. I will try to deal with several of these over the next little while.

Pakistan: Pervez Musharraf

The Toronto Star has a story today on the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan--closest to Afghanistan. A Moslem fundamentalist coalition won elections there a year ago, and now the new provincial government is acting more and more like the Taliban--although leaders insist they will be less violent or extreme.

How did this happen? According to the article:

"Most analysts fault President Musharraf for creating the conditions that allowed the Islamists to make a breakthrough in the parliamentary elections.

"Previously, religious parties were considered a fringe movement, capable of massing extremists for street protests, but never capturing more than 10 or 15 per cent of the vote. That changed when Musharraf sidelined the major secular parties, banning the candidacies of his two main rivals in exile, Pakistan People's Party leader Benazir Bhutto, and Pakistan Muslim League chief Nawaz Sharif (whom he ousted in a military coup four years ago).

"Encouraged by the military, the various religious parties agreed not to run candidates against one another in the same constituencies. By avoiding a split in the vote, and exploiting local resentment against America's war on the Taliban, the new coalition won a two-thirds majority of seats.

"Foreign diplomats and local analysts say Musharraf has opened a Pandora's box in Pakistani politics. The religious parties that the army had expected to be compliant are confronting him with their sharia strategy.
'The president was so hellbent on destroying the two (mainline) parties that he didn't realize the consequences of fragmenting the secular vote,' says Aamer Ahmed Khan, editor of The Herald newsmagazine.

"Now, Musharraf is vowing to block the province's plans for sharia if they impinge on federal jurisdiction. But the mullahs are not intimidated."

So we have a case of Musharraf deliberately weakening his main "secular" opposition--forces that have actually proved themselves capable of taking over the country--and inadvertently strengthening Taliban-like Islamic fundamentalism. How far will this go? Some leaders of the new coalition were known as secular politicians until very recently: they are growing beards, and supporting various crackdowns under sharia, in order to work with more extreme elements. That's where the votes (apparently) are.

More troubling possibilities appear elsewhere. The BBC gives a picture of Musharraf dealing with "extremists" both on the Afghan frontier and in Kashmir. Musharraf's own line is that he is much more secular and moderate than these "other" people, so the West had better deal with him--the alternatives could be a lot worse. The U.S. has bought this, giving him at least a billion dollars. There is a troubling sense, however, that he is not simply pushing back against extremism as best he can: he is using it to get what he wants: aid from the U.S., concessions from India over Kashmir, and possibly the return of the Taliban in Afghanistan. (Pakistan was one of the few countries that recognized the Taliban as the government of Afghanistan).


Christopher Hitchens in Slate comments briefly on Bernard-Henri Levy's new book on the killers of Daniel Pearl in Pakistan. The title of the Slate piece is "Inside the Islamic Mafia," and much of the piece could be interpreted as pro-Bush when it comes to the War on Terror. There is a lawless international threat; 9/11 was an example of its work; and so was the killing of Pearl. Bush is at least generally right in his approach; his critics, by contrast, are probably sentimentally assuming that there is some Arab nationalist movement or Islamic movement that has legitimate grievances and can be appeased by a solution of issues such as "Palestine." These same people, roughly of the left, probably did not care about the Moslems in Bosnia, or else they critized what the U.S. did to help those people.

The more troubling aspect of Hitchens' piece, however, comes when he reports on clear suggestions in Levy's book that Musharraf's secret police were directly implicated in the killing of Pearl; Musharraf may not be entirely innocent of that crime; and even though Musharraf now seems to be collaborating with the U.S. by giving up significant numbers of fairly high-ranking Al Qaeda fighters, it seems possible that he is simply doing what he has to do to assuage U.S. suspicions. Hitchens says of a recent high-profile arrest: "Many words of praise were uttered, in official American circles, for the exemplary cooperation displayed by our gallant Pakistani allies. But what else do these allies have to trade, except al-Qaida and Taliban suspects, in return for the enormous stipend they receive from the U.S. treasury? Could it be that, every now and then, a small trade is made in order to keep the larger trade going?"

Daniel Pearl may have been killed because he was a threat to Musharraf: "His inquiries had at least the potential for exposing the Pakistani collusion and double-dealing with jihad forces, in much the same pattern the Saudi Arabian authorities have been shown to follow--by keeping two sets of books, in other words, and by exhibiting only one set to Americans." The horrible details of Pearl's killing, including the emphasis on the fact that he was a Jew, may have been for the benefit of the gullible.

Musharraf's real plan may be to put the Taliban back in power in Afghanistan, and even to re-build Al Qaeda in some discreet way. Hitchens makes it clear that if any "reputable," more or less pro-U.S. government, is more closely tied to the terrorist form of Islamism than Pakistan, it is Saudi Arabia.

A Saudi lawyer is quoted on how Islamism can be manipulated by people who are not particularly pious: because there are true believers in the world, fortunes and careers can be made by manipulating them, threatening to turn them lose on the world, and actually turning them loose on certain enemies.

In short, the most interesting question Hitchens raises is whether the U.S. is demonstrating any skill in distinguishing its friends from its enemies.

Update: see also the Globe and Mail on Friday . Musharraf just visited Canada. He gives a plausible performance as someone who wants the same things the U.S. does: crack down on Al Qaeda, prevent the Taliban from taking over in Afghanistan. He even urges Canada along with other countries to do more in Afghanistan, saying that if Hamid Karzai falls, there will be chaos. This article, however, which generally gives Musharraf's own view, also offers some hints that Pakistan has not done everything possible to secure the border with Afghanistan, or to defeat the Taliban.

Update: Musharraf has made some comment to the effect that Daniel Pearl "got over-involved," or looked too closely at "extremists". Reaction here and here.

Update: it occurred to me after finishing this that I totally neglected the "obvious" things, that everyone mentions: Musharraf did not exactly come to power by democratic means (he led a successful coup); he does not seem in any hurry to restore elections; and he at least tolerates the madrassahs or religious schools, a significant minority of which teach violence and hatred of the West.

Back to the 90s--But not the 80s

It should probably be stressed again that the U.S. did a great job of going after Al Qaeda for the first few months after 9/11--and there is still a lot of intelligent work going on in several different countries. (Link from Instapundit). (Here are some interesting articles (here and here) stressing the importance of Indonesia and the Phillipines in 2002--and indicating that any attack on Iraq may go on the back burner). (There are striking similarities to the Cold War here, including the fact that the U.S. might work closely with some nasty regimes; they may be SOBs, in what I'm pretty sure are LBJ's words, but they will be "our" SOBs.)

The invasion of Iraq remains a great diversion or question mark: will it somehow weaken "international terrorism" by taking away some of its hope of easy victories, or strengthen it by exposing a huge U.S. occupying force to hatred and guerilla attacks?

Insofar as the Adminisration's defenders are willing to admit a certain uncertainty as to what to do next, they are tempted to go back to the past. Couldn't somebody else have taken care of this problem, so that W. wouldn't have had to?

So Republicans find a new reason to attack Clinton. He knew about Al Qaeda, but did virtually nothing. He insisted on the "isolated cells" model of terrorism, and then argued that it was old-fashioned police work that was appropriate, not a massive reaction by the U.S. against "host" countries.

Now, lo and behold: those people we were helping in Bosnia (a mission many Bush defenders have always criticized) included: some of the same terrorists we are fighting now! (Link from the Corner).

I guess this might at least counter-balance the repeated suggestions that Al Qaeda was created practically from nothing, with considerable help from the U.S., during the mujahadeen war in Afghanistan, when...er...Reagan was President.

Somewhere just over the horizon, a strange possibility is starting to appear: a U.S. president springs Milosevic from prison, dusts off his lapels, and says "I hope I wasn't out of line with those 'war criminal' remarks. We're all fighting Islamic terrorists now."

For those who don't know, I'm paraphrasing the classic sitcom, Get Smart.

Rationales for the War

Tim Cavanaugh has another nice piece in Reason Online.

I will attempt a paraphrase. The Administration has offered different and even somewhat contradictory rationales for the invasion of Iraq. As rationalizers always do, they probably hoped the accumulation of several rationales would be much more powerful than one or two on their own, as if each one can only add to the case. In fact, however, the reason that there were so many rationales was no doubt that some of them were quite weak on their own. Once this fact is exposed, the whole pile are threatened with going down together--more or less as a pack of lies or pathetic pretexts for doing what one wants to do.

(Here goes an analogy to Vietnam again).

Perhaps the grandest rationale is one that, according to Cavanaugh, the President himself has not really offered--"a more democratic Iraq, with greater personal freedoms, could inspire democratic trends throughout the Middle East."

Cavanaugh says: "It's a measure of how much contempt President Bush has for the American voters that even now he won't spell out the goal of the Iraq mission in plain terms."

"the administration that singlehandedly made the war happen should be advancing more inspiring arguments than possible exit strategies, better international burden-sharing, or a relatively low cost."

Of course even a relatively successful outcome for this approach "would keep the United States intimately involved in Middle East politics for a hundred years, and end up transforming America as much as it does the Middle East." Are Americans ready for that? Would candidate Bush have done anything other than laugh at it during the 2000 campaign?

A witty observation from Michael Kinsley in Slate: "While apologizing to the citizenry, Bush could win even more brownie points, at almost no cost, by apologizing specifically to his predecessor. Bush ridiculed Bill Clinton's efforts to follow up military interventions with 'nation building.' Believe it or not, this was a pejorative term, implying unrealistic ambitions. Now Bush talks about turning Iraq into a Jeffersonian democracy."

Teaching in the Modern Age

The American Constitutional Law course is going very well.

The U of T makes available a web site that will check student papers for similarities to an existing data bank of papers. Obviously there is an opportunity to check for plagiarism; just as obviously, the main point is that students know this is being done, in the hope that it is a deterrent.

I have tried to set up my end: identifying myself as an instructor, setting up the course and some individual assignments with deadlines. Now it should be possible for the students to submit their papers electronically.

If this works, it is, as they say, way cool. The site is www. turnitin.com

In a similar vein, the last time I taught, there was really no such thing as the Internet. (I was fortunate to teach at one college in the U.S. that was an early adapter of e-mail).

Now I can refer students to specific websites
(slate, kausfiles), for a discussion of the California recall and recent court decisions.

I had a lot to say, and kind of ran out of time, so I didn't really open things up for discussion very much, but it is obvious there are some bright and well-informed people in the class. Maybe some of them even did the assigned reading!

Saddam/Al Qaeda link? (Updated)

So, Paul Wolfowitz: is there solid evidence of a working relationship between Saddam and Al Qaeda before the recent war in Iraq? Or of such a relationship between Baathists and Al Qaeda today?

Not really.

Update on Al Qaeda connection: Of course, the President himself has now said there is no known connection, and Rumsfeld before him. See Josh Marshall
here, here, and here.

Some spokespeople apparently went on TV last Sunday with the wrong message, like kids who took the wrong lunch to school. (Link from Hit and Run. Scroll to "Coup du Jour.")

WMDs: It is tempting for a cynic like me to say: they got it wrong, so it's the usual dilemma for their defenders: were they lying, or clueless? Obviously there is more to it than that. Bush especially, but even Blair to an extent, gets a full intelligence briefing every day. There are glimpses of "raw data," but it is the job of a lot of staff to distill the data, and present options and recommendations. Obviously on the WMDs issue before March, as on many issues, there were disagreements among senior intelligence people as to how to interpret the data, and what to recommend. Certainly there was a widespread view that Saddam still had WMDs. Clinton thought so, and Blix probably thought so. The view that Saddam had not built anything new since 1991, and indeed had destroyed a lot of things at about that time, which is increasingly emerging as likely to be the truth, probably didn't get a hearing from anyone. Was there spinning, as opposed to lying, at fairly high levels--in other words, telling the staff working on the slides to emphasize bad news, which would justify invasion, and downplay good news? I would think there certainly was. Was this spinning based on at least some evidence, "solid" by the usual standards, in the raw data? I would think so. Did either Bush or Blair know how much spinning or torquing was going on, or that they were on thin ice in some of their specific claims? Who knows?

Clifford Orwin (link will decay) has argued again that Saddam must have had WMDs, since all he had to do to save himself was to provide evidence of the fact that he had none, if it was a fact.

I still agree with Jack Shafer that it makes sense that Saddam wanted to be able to threaten his neighbours, while maintaining some ambiguity as to the extent of his military forces with the UN and the West. Can we say he either had WMDs, or maintained this ambiguity too long, to the point of craziness? Assuming Saddam had no WMDs, why would he keep up this ambiguity, to the point of being suicidal? (Did he bluff when he should have folded? I guess so).

Maybe he thought ambiguity would keep the Security Council at bay (which turned out to be true), and the U.S. would not, in the end, act without the support of the Security Council (which of course turned out not to be true). One of many bizarre occurrences, after all, has been Bush spending so much time trying to get a specific decision from the Security Council, then proceeding unilaterally anyway. It seems that you either think Security Council support is necessary in a particular case, or (far more likely) you don't. Bush acted as though he did, and perhaps this misled Saddam.

Back on Line

We were without the Internet for almost a week.

It turns out the filter that was installed to make sure we only get basic cable was misapplied. Instead of being installed after the splitter, on the "TV" line only, it was installed before the splitter, so that it affected the Internet as well.

Why it worked for a few weeks with the new modum before it died, I don't know.

Then the installer said he wanted to check that our TV service was OK. I said that as a matter of fact, our reception of Ch. 28 (Fox) had been snowy ever since this new filter was installed. He replaced the filter, and voila! everything works.

Thursday I met my American Constitutional Law class for the first time. Somewhere between 50 and 60 people, and I will have a TA to help with grading. I'm really looking forward to it. I told the students I will submit all their essays to a web-based service that checks for "textual similarities" that might point to plagiarism. This means their work has to be submitted electronically. One student asked: since not all computers have floppy drives, is a CD acceptable? I'm going to have to get up to speed on that by next Thursday.

The course may also have a web site, which may be cool.

Hero the dog is healing nicely. I'm just on pins and needles that he's going to re-injure himself.

In the Ontario election, coming on Oct. 2, I think there is one over-arching question: do you want to re-elect a government that is committed to cutting taxes and reducing the "footprint" of government, or do you think it's time to rebuild government, or get it back to its previous rate of growth: "Re-invest in the services we all depend on."

I'm not sure whether to say much more about the war. Bush probably did what he had to do in his speech last Sunday: confirm that the military occupation of Iraq will continue for some time, and will cost more than had ever been projected previously. Try to make the case that this prolonged campaign, and greatly increased expense, is really the war on terrorism, or the heart of that war.

C.S. Lewis: Finally, a Conclusion

I promise to wrap this up quickly.

When Lewis says "nature makes nothing in vain," he implies that if all sane people long for perfect happiness, there is a good chance that God intends us to take this as a sign that the goal is real, although we may have to struggle for it (achieve heaven, and avoid hell).

In saying "nature makes nothing in vain," Lewis is more or less quoting Aristotle. There is some similarity or overlap between Lewis and Aristotle, and there is even some truth to Lewis's suggestion (in The Abolition of Man) that there is a "tradition" that is with Aristotle, and then there is "modernity" that is against Aristotle.

In both the Ethics and the Politics, Aristotle describes peaks of excellence available to human beings, and strongly suggests that nature supports these peaks--even that it is the peaks that are truly natural, not the messy alternatives that are all too common. Yet somehow Aristotle is firmly "this-worldly," not otherworldly. Leo Strauss says in The City and Man (p. 41) that Aristotle displays "'optimism in the original sense of the term: the world is the best possible world; we have no right to assume that the evils with which it abounds, and especially the evils which do not originate in human folly, could have been absent without bringing about still greater evils; man has no right to complain and to rebel...the nature of man is enslaved in many ways so that only very few, and even these not always, can achieve happiness..."

As far as immortality is concerned, Aristotle says matter-of-factly in the Ethics that "death is the end." More importantly, in Book I he deals with concerns about the "ancestors": does the happiness of dead ancestors depend on their living descendants? This seems to be an indirect way of dealing with concerns about what happens to us after death. Aristotle doesn't simply dismiss such concerns, like the village atheist, but he does strongly imply that people should not be led by fear to trust the priests.

In Plato's Apology of Socrates, Socrates implies that if the afterlife is a place where he can cross-examine famous people, this is about as good as life could get (40e-41d). Such a thought does not seem totally lacking from Dante's description of "limbo." Lewis, by comparison, "moralizes."