Much of modern culture is controlled by fear. One of the greatest contemporary fears – as any visit to Amazon.com will confirm – is that Muslims are in the process of overwhelming Europe by a combination of immigration and high fertility rates; that Europe by 2050 will be a Muslim region; and that  ‘Christian’ Europe will be no more. Far-right evangelicals join secular authors in generating this alarm. As part of their crusade, they argue fiercely that Turkey ought not to be admitted to the European Union.         
          But the alarm they sound is false, in my opinion. The European Union (E.U.) has a population of 500 million. Muslims constitute approximately 10 million, or just two percent. [My thanks to Steve Slater for the correct percentage.] If Turkey, with its Muslim population of 70 million, were to join the E.U., the E.U.'s population would become 570 million and the percentage of Muslims in the European Union would rise to 14 percent. That’s a lot, but it's about the same percentage as Hispanics in the United States. (And sure enough, we have alarmists here who predict that the U.S.A. will soon become a Hispanic nation.)  
          Muslims are not going to take over Europe in any near future. In fact, Muslim immigration into Europe is declining. More importantly, throughout Europe Muslim birth rates are declining as well. This is true even for Turkey. What this means is that Muslims constitute a challenge to the 'Christian' culture of Europe, but not a dire threat. And if it is a challenge, then traditional Europeans must meet it.
          The challenge will be met only if traditional Europeans can adjust to the presence of Muslims in their midst, and if European culture is made so attractive to Muslims that the latter will assimilate to a significant degree. The attraction must consist not only of material living standards, which is the main reason Muslims migrate to Europe, but also of such values as security, freedom, equality, opportunity, justice, tolerance and democracy.         
          This is not unlike the relationship between present day Americans of European heritage and Americans of African and Hispanic heritage.           

          Peter Singer, professor of bioethics at Princeton University, retells the ancient joke about a man who asks a woman if she would have sex with him for one million dollars. She thinks long and hard and finally replies in the affirmative. He then asks her if she would have sex with him for $50. “What kind of woman do you think I am?” she demands indignantly. He calmly responds, “We’ve already established that; now we are just haggling about the price.”         
          An ethical issue parallel to this arises when we contemplate rationing health care. Rationing health care is something that is part of the hidden agenda of bills being considered by the U. S. House and Senate now, and opinions vary wildly. At bottom is this question: If a $50,000 drug or a $100,000 surgery would enable an 80-year-old such as me to live another six months, should we – meaning the government (if I am poor) or my insurance company (if I can afford insurance) or my (hypothetically) wealthy family –- guarantee me this service?         
          As for the latter, few would say no. Rich people usually get whatever they want. But the first two possibilities are less clear cut. How should an insurance company, or the government (if we end up with a universal health care system) estimate the monetary value of one more month – or six more months – of life? Age clearly makes a difference. $50,000 spent on a 25-year-old with many years ahead of her seems more rational than the same sum spend on someone my age. Another factor is the shared cost to all of us, for any large sum spent on me or a youth is going to raise everyone’s insurance premiums, or taxes. Is it right to do this? Should we agree to do it for the youth, and deny the senior citizen? Or should a bona fide health care plan guarantee whatever it takes to keep like going?         
          I know what I think. What do you think?           

          Trachoma is the leading infectious cause of blindness worldwide. In Western countries, few people know about the disease, but in the poorest countries in Africa, prevalence among children can reach 40 percent. The World Health Organization estimates that 8 million people worldwide have been visually impaired by trachoma. But medical writer Donald McNeil reports that within the past three years, six nations – Iran, Moroco, Oman, Ghana, Mexico, and Saudi Arabia – have eliminated the disease as a public health threat. Good news indeed.
           Trachoma is an eye infection, the bacteria being carried to the victim most commonly by flies. Left unchecked, the infections puff up the eyelids and cause them to roll inward. After years of scratching, the victims go permanently blind. Eliminating the disease involves teaching parents to wash children’s faces frequently, digging covered latrines, giving single does of antibiotics, and surgery to roll back the inverted eyelids.
          The trachoma bacteria will never be eradicated but, as things stand now, no child need grow to adulthood blinded by trachoma. Nevertheless, about 40 million people in hot, dry developing countries are still at risk. Former president Jimmy Carter has been a leader in the fight against trachoma.

 Back in 1969, while leading The Navigators ministries in Asia, I read a book by Laurence J. Peters entitled The Peter Principle. The book was written in a humorous, tongue-in-cheek style and was easy reading. Yet it’s thesis was serious and time has confirmed the principle Peters explicated. Briefly stated, it is that people in bureaucracies and other walks of life are usually promoted to their “level of incompetency.” That is to say, the final position they hold is one for what they are underqualified. As a result, many – perhaps most – of the highest positions in government, the military, education, business, etc. are held by incompetents.         
          If you think about it, you can easily understand why this is so. A person enters business or government at an entry-level position. She does well and is promoted. In the new position she again does well and is again promoted. But sooner or later the person gets promoted – after all, she has an great record – to a position to which, for whatever reason, she is not really up to. That should not surprise us. No one is capable of every possible responsibility.         
          All this I recalled when Governor Sarah Palin announced her resignation. As a relatively young person she had risen to become leader of the great state of Alaska, and by all accounts was doing a good job of it. Then she was promoted to being the chosen candidate for vice president of the United States. It became readily apparent that she was out of her league. And when she and her running mate were defeated she returned to the governorship. 
          There she discovered that life had become much tougher. She and her family were subject to intense and unwelcome public scrutiny. All kinds of ethics complaints – most of them unwarranted – were leveled at her. She had to spend much time fighting them and accumulated heavy legal debts in doing so. Finally, it just didn’t seem to be worth the effort, so she bailed out.         
          Now it appears that her supporters, and very likely she herself, contemplate her running for President in 2012. That would be a big mistake. Her best chance for success and happiness lies in getting back to her level of competency -- perhaps as a highly paid and popular talk show host. As St. Paul wisely counseled: Let no one thing of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment.

          When Barack Obama assumed presidential power and announced that he was shifting America’s “war on terror” from Iraq to Afghanistan, I thought this was the right move. I assumed he meant that he had decided to go after Al-Qa’eda’s leader, Osama bin Ladin, surgically -- something that his predecessor should have done instead of getting mired down in Iraq. I initially figured Obama’s new strategy would prove more efficient and vastly less expensive than the failed Iraqi strategy.
          Six months into the new administration, however, I have second thoughts. Instead of going after Al-Qa’eda and bin Ladin, Obama’s advisors convinced him to initiate a fresh round of “nation-building” in Afghanistan, not all that different than what President Bush tried to do in Iraq. The idea is that by developing a stable democracy and economy in Afghanistan, the Taliban (who have been providing safe haven for bin Ladin) will eventually be co-opted into supporting President Karzai and the new Afghanistan. But this is not likely to happen, for reasons that are rooted in the long history of Afghanistan.         
          The Taliban are Pushtunis, that is, from the Pushtun tribe long dominant in the region. Pushtuns comprise the present ruling class in Afghanistan. The Afghan Taliban is Pushtun as well. But – and this does not seem to be given the weight it merits -- there are millions of Pushtuns in the mountainous regions of west Pakistan, twice as many, in fact, as in Afghanistan itself. And borders, a modern colonial invention, are irrelevant to the Pushtuns.
          Although Pushtuns quarrel with each other, they have historically united against any foreign state that threatens control of Afghanistan, and usually they have managed to bring in the other major tribes with them. In the past they bested the British; they bested the Russians; and they expect to best the Americans (who have already been in Afghanistan for eight years). If the current U.S. effort against them in southern Afghanistan is any way successful, the Taliban will merely disappear into western Pakistan, tripling their armed forces in the process, before resuming the battle.         
          Pakistan is ostensibly an American ally. But the Pakistan government does not want more Pushtuni Taliban pushed into Pakistan. Pakistan already has its hands full with Taliban-like forces in places like the Swat Valley and Waziristan. If Pakistan is forced to engage in an all-out war with America against the Taliban, it fears defeat. So Pakistan policy and U.S. policy are on a collision course. If Obama’s strategy is successful, and the Afghan Taliban are won over, agreeing to renounce violence and join the present Afghan government, nothing is really settled – for there are still 25 million Pushtuns, most of them Taliban sympathizers – remaining in Pakistan and sheltering Al-Qa’eda.         
          In short, I fear that President Obama has committed the U.S. to an indefinite stay in Afghanistan, at exorbitant cost in men and money. This is something that all the Afghans will sooner or later rebel against. That is their history, and our conundrum.         

          I'm not really an avid conservationist. I get the big stuff -- preserving the Amazon rain forest, for instance -- but I don't get too wrought up over some of the smaller stuff. The saddleback tamarin monkey, shown here, was discovered this year in the Amazon rain forest. It is about the size of baby squirrel but has a foot-long tail. And here's my point: it is only one of approximately 20,000 new species discovered annually. In the latest year for which we have a tally, newly discovered species numbered 18,516. Of these, half were insects. New insect species are coming in by the boatload, one scientist reports.
          Science journalist Natalie Angier notes that "as a result of habitat destruction, climate volatility, pesticide runoff, ocean dumpting, jet-setting invasive species and other 'anthropogenic' effects on the environment," the extinction rate today is many times above nature's chronic winnowing. That may be true with respect to the short span of history since Homo sapiens took control of Planet Earth. But it's certainly not true in the context of evolutionary history. Comets plunging into the earth from our solar system, massive volcanic eruptions and tsunamis, tectonic plate movements, etc. have resulted in massive extinctions in the past (think of the dinosaurs). Yet there are more species on earth today than ever before -- countless numbers, in fact, for scientists have only identified about 15 percent of all living species.
          In theological terms, God has entrusted the stewardship of our planet to the human race, so it is incumbent on us to do what we can. But we ought not to get in over our heads -- and trying to preserve every existing species on earth is clearly not within our means. Or so it seems to me.

          New Jersey, where we live, long has had a reputation as the most politically corrupt state in the union -- a reputation enhanced by the popularity of the TV program, The Sopranos, which is set in New Jersey. Our reputation was confirmed once again yesterday with the arrest of 44 people including three of our mayors, two state assemblymen, and a host of cronies engaged in "pay to play" politics, including a member of the governor's cabinet.  Our  governor, Jon Corzine, appears to be an honest man, but his election to a second term has become problematical now. He is trailing his opponent, Christopher Christie, the main figure in the photo above, who has been a successful prosecutor of crooked politicians these past few years -- though he himself has some dubious associations. 
          Georgia and I are sensitive to the nature of New Jersey politics. For six years Georgia served as a Freeholder (the label New Jersey gives its county commissioners). She was the first African American to hold the position in Passaic County, our county. During those six years she staunchly opposed the questionable practises of her own party, and ultimately she was dropped by the party and replaced by someone more amenable.
         

         As a white man living in an African-American neighborhood for the past quarter-century, I am following the story about the arrest of Professor Gates, and the subsequent comment by President Obama about it, with concern. Anyone who thinks that race relations in the United States is not a continuing problem has another think coming. 
          Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is a distinguished professor at Harvard University. James Crowley is a police sergent with a commendable career to date. Barack Obama is someone who up to this point has positioned himself as a racial mediator. So it was surprising -- and offensive to many -- to hear the President characterize the actions of the Cambridge, Massachusetts police department as stupid. On the other hand, it was also refreshing to see the President get personally involved in the incident, given his previous aloofness.
         My own "take" on the matter is that all three men were simply tired. Gates had just returned from an overseas trip and was understandably travel-weary. I can't really speak for Crowley about this particular incident, but I do know that police work is not an easy task. And Obama was answering the final question of a press conference and was visibly tired. Under ideal circumstances all three would -- and should -- have responded differently.
         But we must realize the realities of life. African-Americans, even men of high rank, have experienced inexcusable racial profiling by police. Professor Gates and President Obama are both hypersensitive to this injustice. Policemen also, for different reasons, take a lot of abuse as they carry out their duties, and feel underappreciated. Since the police are the ones with authority, it is, in my opinion, incumbent upon them to exercise the greatest restraint. And in the case of the Cambridge police, perhaps more training in race relations is called for -- and this in spite of the fact that Crowley himself has been selected in the past to lecture on racial profiling.

          The U.S. criminal justice system is seriously flawed. It needs to be reformed, and Christians, along with other people of good will, ought to be taking the lead in this. I am thinking now particularly about the matter of imprisonment for life, highlighted in a recent New York Times report by Solomon Moore.
          It is appalling to realize that nearly ten percent of all prisoners in the U. S. are serving life sentences. A full half of these -- almost 150,000 -- have no possibility of parole. This is up from 34,000 twenty-five years ago. Two-thirds of these are Black and Hispanic. Only one in six are White. Amazingly -- you may not believe this, but it's true -- nearly 7,000 juveniles are serving life terms, 1,755 of them without possibility of parole.
          One result is gross overcrowding. As I write, the California prison system is in federal receivership for overcrowding and for failing to provide adequate medical care for prisoners, many of whom are elderly because they are serving life terms. And the financial cost is staggering. It costs society $36,000 a year to maintain a younger person in prison; the cost rises to more than $100,000 annually for older inmates.
          No question about it: there are some criminals who need to be kept out of society permanently. But they are, in my opinion, a small minority. The majority of prisoners are valid candidates for rehabilitation. Certainly this is true of those juveniles I referred to. Many adults who are serving life sentences are doing so for essentially non-violent crimes such as three convictions for drug possession. 
          Our goal in criminal justice should be restoration and rehabilitation, not pure retribution. Not all criminals can be rehabilitated; but the majority can, and should be. The federal penitentiary system, plus six other states (Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, Maine, Pennsylvania and South Dakota) do not offer the possibility of parole to prisoners serving life sentences. This is something we might expect in a dictatorial regime like China or Zimbabwe, but surely not in the United States.

          One summer Tom Crompton and I were traveling in Easst Africa -- Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Malawi and Zimbabwe -- encouraging various national evangelical fellowships. Both of us were struck by the presence of Chinese business men and developers. That was thirty-some years ago, just after China had completed the building of the Tan-Zam (Tanzania-Zambia) railway. Since then bilateral trade has grown to $100 billion, with Chinese investment ranging from oil and agriculture to banking and dam construction. Harry Hurt reports that about 750,000 Chinese now live and work in sub-saharan Africa. In Africa the Chinese are not propagating communism; on the contrary, since East Africa is largely Christian, many Chinese are being exposed to the Gospel.
          On an entirely different subject, I am happy to report that the U.S. Senate has pulled the plug on funding seven more outrageously expensive F-22 fighter jets. This is something I advocated in one of my blogs last week.

          One of my pet peeves is the stupid and dangerous practise of talking on a phone while driving. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has been conducting research since 2002. Their findings have been systematically suppressed by Congress, whose members fear the wrath of voters. Here are the facts: persons speaking on a cell phone while driving are four times more likely to have accidents than other drivers. In fact, their rate is the same as drivers whose alcohol intake measures .08 percent -- the level most states accept as indicating drunk driving.
          In 2002 cellphone use by drivers caused 240,000 accidents, including 955 fatalities. That was 2002 and the estimates are that the figure has at least doubled since then. Significantly, the NHTSA research shows that using hands-free headsets makes no difference in the rate of accidents or fatalities. This is an important finding, for New Jersey, where I live, bans hands-on cellphone use by drivers (my wife got a traffic ticket the other day for this offense) but permits hands-free headsets.

          Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison for his anti-apartheid activities. He is getting up in years now and no longer travels outside South Africa. But yesterday there was a hugh benefit concert -- Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, and a dozen other pop music greats -- celebrating his 91st birthday at the Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan. 46664 was his prison number. It is also the name of the organization he founded to promote AIDS prevention. Mandela hopes his birthday, July 18th, will become an internationally recognized "day dedicated to service."
          We often think of AIDS as having originated in the area around Uganda in East Africa. And that may be so. But the fact is that the overwhelming majority of HIV-infected persons live in South Africa and nearby states such as Swaziland, Botswana, and Lesotho. More than one-quarter of the population of the states just mentioned carry the virus. In Uganda, by contrast, only one out of twenty do. One intriguing finding over the past three or four decades is that the infection rate is lowest in those countries where at least 80 percent of men are circumcised, and highest where they are not.

          During July and August my pastor is preaching a series of sermons on the suffering of the Old Testament character, Job. Some years back, aboard a long Pan Am flight on my way home from a conference in Australia, I recall reading the story and scribbling a few thoughts about it. They follow, somewhat abbreviated:
         
          Here was a man "blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil." He ordered his life by the simple propostion that God rewarded good and punished evil. Within that worldview he prospered beyond measure. In the process he became self-righteous, unaware that the deepest desire of his life remained unmet. He was a man misled by success.
          Midway through the story his heart's need is uncovered. Through personal disaster and suffering he discerns that, more than anything, what he really wants is a personal relationship with God. He want to see God. He wants what later saints would call the Beatific Vision. "And after my flesh has been thus destroyed...I shall see God, whom I shall see for myself, and my eyes shall behold."
          In the end (actually, a new beginning) Job was granted his soul's desire. "I had heard of You by the hearing of the ear," he testified, "but now my eyes see You." We too can be as easily midled as Job. Give us a little success in our career, a secure relationship with our families, financial security, good health (or even the prospect of these) and we quickly relax our quest for the ultimate.
          Nothing less than a deep and growing personal relationship with God will do. Position, spiritual production, reputation -- these are nothing. Family and friends are second best. Only God can satisfy fully. Only he is worth of our steady pursuit.
          God is faithful. Discerning our deepest longing, he will do whatever is necessary -- even allowing disaster to befall us -- to detach our hearts from "things" and return us to himself. This may require a conversion on our part, perhaps even a series of conversions. But in the end we truly know God.
          And for those of you who have heard me lecture on the theme of spiritual reproduction, the closing lines of the Book of Job are slyly suggestive: "And after this Job lived 140 years and saw his sons, and his sons' sons -- four generations."

          Famed broadcaster Walter Cronkite -- shown here reporting on the moon landing 40 years ago -- died yesterday. He covered the D-Day landings in Normandy in 1945. Reminiscing about that, he expressed his opinion that the big lesson from World War II was that war is the worst possible method of conflict resolution. This lesson he carried over into his reporting, twenty years later, of the Viet Nam war. His opposition to that war was a major factor in turning the American public against it. 
          The main reason Cronkite was so opposed to war was its cost in human lives. But he also cited exhorbitant financial waste, and attributed it largely to modern reliance on expensive technology. This, of course, is the point I have been making recently with regard to the current war in Afghanistan. But the same point also applies to other areas of modern life. Medical costs here in the U. S. are totally out of control. And this in turn is due to reliance on the latest high tech equipment, which costs a fortune. As I age and face ill health and death as inevitable, I am giving thought to how much expense I should expend on delaying it. Even with the assistance of Medicare insurance, final medical and hospital costs can be exhorbitant. I'm question seriously whether it is morally right to burden my family with such expense.

          Where were you when Neil Armstrong first stepped down on the Moon forty years ago? Of course, if you are under 30, you wouldn't remember. But all of us older types certainly recall where we were and what we were doing when that historic event occured. Me? I was in Auckland, New Zealand, visiting the Navigators staff there, and staying in a hotel down by the waterfront. In those days even the better hotels did not have TVs in their rooms, but Marv Smith rented one for me. Then he and his wife, Georgette, and Allan and Maureen Goulstone joined me to follow the adventure. Today Marv has moved into eternity, Georgette has retired to Arkansas, and the Goulstones live and minister in Christchurch, New Zealand. My wife, Georgia, and I are "trying" to retire, but not having much luck doing so.

          A New York Times reporter tracks down lawyer Ramon J. Jimenez as he sits in his nondescript office above a bar in the poorest Congressional district in the U.S. He is watching the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Sonia Sotomayor on the office TV. He does so with nostalgia and, at times, a few regrets. For he graduated from Harvard Law School -- one of the first Hispanics to do so -- a few years before Sotomayor graduated from Yale Law School. While she pursued a high-prestige, high-paying and very successful career, Jimenez has for over 30 years devoted himself to serving low-income families, injured workers, and various community groups in the South Bronx. Much of his activity has been pro bono, without charge, and his income has rarely exceeded $40,000 a year. I ask myself: Which of the two has had the better career? Which has contributed most to society? But I cannot answer my own questions,for only God knows. It is clear that both Sotomayor and Jimenez have made notable and permanent contributions. Yet society rewards them quite differently. Why must this be so?         

          Sir Edward and Lady Joan Downs -- he the famous British symphony orchestra conductor, she a talented ballet dancer -- chose my birthday to commit suicide, assisted by members of the Swiss clinic Dignitas. He was 85, virtually blind and deaf; she was a decade younger and in the terminal stages of cancer. Years ago I probably would have condemn their decision. God creates life and only God can end life, I would have said. Today, as I enter my ninth decade, I no longer feel the same. They chose to die side by side, hand in hand, and I think that was not only dignified but beautiful.
          Of course, there are many ethical issues to be resolved. Assisted suicide is illegal in Britain, but Sir Edward and his wife had the financial means to fly to Switzerland; most of us do not have that kind of money. Are only rich people allowed this dignity? Here in the U.S. assisted suicide is illegal in most states, but is permitted in Oregon; but again, it is an expensive proposition even apart from the cost of travel. Is it moral to take one's own life? Socrates did it; but so did Hitler and Judas. I think context matters a great deal. In the case of Sir Edward and Joan, everyone agrees that they enjoyed more than 50 years of happy marriage together. I don't blame them for wanting to die together.

          If you don't mind, I want to revert to a blog I wrote a couple of days ago. In it, I deplored the high cost of war, not only in lives but in money, largely because of our civilization's preoccupation with technology. I suggested we would do well to emulate the warfare style of olden days, when "champions" selected from each side (their respective armies standing behind them) fought each other and winner took all. David vs. Goliath is an apt example. Only one life was lost in this battle, and the financial cost was minimal. David used stones and a slingshot. He disdained the technology available, namely, a suit of armor.
          Well, now it turns out that the former vice president of the U. S., Dick Cheney (above) was thinking along the same lines. He suggested to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that it develop small teams to kill select Al Qa'eda leaders, including of course Osama bin Laden. Apparently the idea was never carried out because of logistical, political and diplomatic problems. Instead, the U.S. increasingly relies of bombs and missiles dropped by pilotless drones, a very expensive proposition that to date has achieved only minimal results.  The "small teams" idea still seems reasonable to me. 
          I am no fan of Dick Cheney, and I do not believe in killing, period. I am opposed to capital punishment. And I think that wartime slaughter is both stupid and disgraceful. Nevertheless, we live in an imperfect world where human beings have, for untold generations, opted for violence as the solution to tribal and national conflicts. Given that reality, I favor the lesser of two evils and would like to see our leaders explore methods that result in fewer lives lost and less money wasted. The CIA cites logistical, legal and diplomatic reasons for not doing so. I can't agree. Both diplomacy and legality ought to favor this approach. As for logistics, surely we have enough money to equip well-trained special operation teams to hunt down individuals even when they are hiding in the caves of Waziristan. Maybe very little money is needed. When King Saul and David were contesting the leadership of Israel, both hid out in caves -- and both found each other.
          Reverting to the "champion" style of warfare is an instance of going backward in order to allow civilization to move forward, freeing up men and money to pursue the really worthwhile goals of reducing poverty and disease throughout the world. For this reason I applaud President Obama who has vowed to veto a military spending bill unless a provision of $1.75 billion for buying seven (just seven!) new F-22 fighter jets is eliminated.

          I don't know just why this birthday means more to me than past ones, perhaps because I never really expected to live so long. But God has given me good health, unquenchable optimism, a gratifying vocation, and many friends. I thank God for his unfailing love. My favorite Bible verse, in fact, is I John 4:16, "And so we know and rely on the love God has for us." As I now begin my 81st voyage around the sun I want to wish a special Happy Birthday to those friends on the Facebook network who have birthdays this month of July.....         
          Alejandro, my Argentine/Paterson buddy of the past 25 years; Badu, who led the Navigators ministries in Asia for years; Ben, who shared a summer with us in Lebanon back in the 1960s; Canary, my granddaughter who was also born on July 14th; Linda, my daughter, born in Lebanon, raised in Malaysia; David, whose birthday also coincides with Canary's and mine; Joyce, whose husband, Ron, colabored with me in Asia; Nabeel, who led the Nav work in Egypt for many years; and Bob, my oldest friend on this list: we were college freshmen together and he, too, is 80 this month.
          My thanks to all of you who have sent birthday greetings. Those of you in Asia actually sent yours a day early, our time. Georgia and I plan to celebrate the day by having dinner at a Chinese buffet this evening.

          "War is hell," declared civil war General William Tecumseh Sherman, after his "scorched earth" strategy had burned down much of Georgia and the Carolinas.  War may be hell, say others, but it is a necessary evil. No, say I: War is mindless and stupid, not only because of the countless lives, civilian as well as military, that are killed and maimed, but because of its cost in dollars -- dollars that should be spent on fighting disease and relieving poverty throughout the world.
          The two-man F-16 shown here costs two and a half million dollars. That price is misleading, however.  That's the "shelf price." By the time you fully equip it with weapons and other requirements, the price jumps to 50-55 million! Its primary mission is to shoot down and kill the two crew members of an enemy plane. In other words, it costs the American taxpayer 25 million dollars to kill one enemy airman. Recall that glamorous movie, Top Gun.
          That's air. Now consider land. The M-1 tank also has a shelf price of 2.5 million. But when you equip it with weapons and other requirements, the actual price is 65 million. And the price goes up to 120 million when special armor is added. The M-1 tank has a crew of four, and its main task is to destroy other tanks -- we are talking about $30 million dollars per enemy killed. (Typically, few tanks in battle destroy more than one other tank, two at the most.)
          And sea. A guided missle destroyer such as the DDG-1000, fully equipped, costs six billion dollars. Destroyers are among a navy's smaller ships. Their purpose is to safeguard the larger ships, aircraft carriers, for example. The DDG-1000 carries a crew of 142. What does that come to? 42 million dollars per crew member!         
         Centuries ago, the prophet Haggai warned his people, "You earn wages, only to put them in a purse with holes in it." To my mind, that's what is happening in our time, and it has long-range consequences far more significant than the economic depression we are experiencing today. Think of how many villagers across Africa and Asia and Latin America could be empowered toward vibrant, healthy, productive lives for the cost of a single destroyer! And when was the last time you actually heard or read about a destroyer in action?
          Conflicts between nations are inevitable. Sadly, some conflicts cannot be resolved through diplomacy. So we go to war, at horrifying expence. Would it not make more sense to return to the war-style exemplified in the story of David and Goliath, the style of contending "champions"? Let's take Osama bin Laden and put him in front of his band of warriors. Then take the U. S. commander in Afghanistan, General McChrystal, and place him in front of a company of soldiers -- and let jsut the two of them go at it. How many lives and how many dollars would be saved!

     
          The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People kicks off a week of celebration here in the New York metro area, celebrating its 100th anniversary. Of late the association seems to have lost its punch, but that's largely, I think, because the public, including African-Americans, are basking in the aura of the first black president of the United States. But over the past century the NAACP has surely been one of America's seminal organizations, with W. E. B. DuBois, Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King, Jr. and other giants advancing its agenda.
          One of the forgotten heroes of civil rights history in the U.S. is a certain Lloyd Gaines (right). Back in 1938 he triumphed in a case that reached the Supreme Court, a case that affirmed his right to enroll in the segregated Law School of the University of Missouri. This victory ultimately led to Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) which ruled that segregation in public schools is unconstitutional. Both Michelle and Barack Obama are graduates of Harvard Law School.
          As for Lloyd Gaines, his personal story ended in tragedy. Shortly after his 1938 victory, he left his apartment one evening, never to be see again. Did he commit suicide because of the pressure he had been under? His family believes that is improbable, given his history of perseverance. They believe he was abducted on the street and murdered. Out of sight, out of mind, so Gaines disappeared from the public eye. But today, according to David Stout, writing in the New York Times, Lloyd Gaines is revered at the University of Missouri, which awarded him an honorary doctorate of law degree in 2006. In the same year, the Missouri state bar awarded him a law license, posthumously.

          Barack Obama is always calculating, strategizing. One would have thought that in his first official visit to Africa he would have chosen his father's homeland, Kenya. But no, he had a point to promote -- honest politics and economic growth -- and the West African nation of Ghana is one of the few sub-saharan countries to exemplify both. Kenya's economic growth is impressive but, unfortunately, its politics are corrupt. You may remember that last year -- or was it the year before? -- Kenya suffered a virtual civil war because of the perceived dishonesty of its politicians in power. By contrast, this past December Ghana peacefully transfered power from one party to another in free and transparent elections. This being the summer vacation time, President Obama has his family with him. The two girls will surely be moved by their visit to the historic castle outside Accra, the capital, where thousands of slaves were held captive in utterly degrading conditions before being shipped out to North and South America.

          President Obama made one of his better appointments a couple of days ago. Dr. Francis S. Collins is the new head of NIH, the National Institutes of Health. As such he will be overseeing about $40 billion in health research annually. Collins is the world-famous geneticist who successfully led the drive to sequence the human genome in 2003. He has an enviable reputation both as a scientist and a manager. But his appointment will also rile some, for Collins is a devout evangelical Christian and the author of the best-selling The Language of God. He has never been shy about discussing his conversion from atheism to Christ when he was a 27-year-old medical student.

          The mayor of Paterson, New Jersey, where we live, has decided to use stimulus money to pay for summer jobs for teenagers. That sounds like a good idea -- until you read that in order to do that, he has to say "no" to a couple of hundred teenagers who worked for the city last year and had expected to work again this summer. Instead, the mayor has to use the stimulus to hire a whole new set of workers who meet strict poverty guidelines or who are otherwise disadvantaged. As a result, one city camp had to close on opening day because its former staff was not put on payroll. The parents of 60 children were left to scramble to find day care. This whole situation strikes me as a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul. I'm not sure how much real economic stimulus, if any, is involved. In my opinion, the mayor should have allocated the stimulus money for hiring 200 additional teenagers for summer jobs.

          Any document that comes out of the Vatican  -- whether about religion or politics or economics or even Michael Jackson -- is always worth perusing, partly because the Vatican has a large staff of thinkers who draw on 2,000 years of scholarship, and partly because Vatican papers always have a strong moral content based on gospel reflection. Yesterday Pope Benedict XVI, left, on the eve of the Group of 8 economic summit that begins today, issued the encyclical "Charity in Truth," in which he calls for a radical rethinking of the global economy.
          Some parts of "Charity in Truth" are what we might expect. Benedict criticizes the present world economic system, "where the pernicious effects of sin are evident." He urges financiers to "rediscover the genuinely ethical foundation of their activity." But other parts are more controversial, as when he calls for the establishment of "a true world political authority" to oversee the global economy. In some ways, this seems obviously necessary, for globalization has created ways and means by which large banks and huge transnational corporations regularly evade regulation by their home nations. Some international regulation seems necessary. Nevertheless, anything that smacks of a single world government, even if limited to a single field like economics, is likely to frighten most people, including some Christians who believe that a world government is one of the chief goals of the Antichrist.

          Robert McNamara, former secretary of defense and architect of the Vietnam War died yesterday. At one point he wondered aloud, "On what moral basis are the winners of war eulogized while the losers are executed as war criminals?" He was referring specifically to World War II and the dreadful fire bombings in Tokyo and Dresden conducted by the United states, a war in which he served as a relatively low-ranking officer.
          With respect to Viet Nam, however, he was lucky, for America did not so much lose that war (nor did America win it) as merely abandon it. McNamara in later life castigated himself for the hundreds of thousands of civilian casulties that occurred in North and South Viet Nam, to say nothing of 42,000 American soldiers and airmen who were killed in the process. Later on he tried to make up for it by way of his service with the World Bank.
          McNamara was a master at managing large operations, whether Ford Motor Company, the Department of Defense, or the World Bank.  But he was never quite able to make the connection between these large systems and the ordinary folk on the ground the systems were meant to serve. During his tenure at the World Bank, it took him several years to disengage himself from huge development projects such as dams and re-direct the Bank's resources toward seeds and water pumps and other smaller projects that directly impacted the daily lives of poor people.

          Judging by their press conference, which I watched this evening, the meeting between Presidents Medvedev and Obama went well. Of course, it was well prepared for by prior meetings between the two countries' secretaries of state, and by numerous meetings of various working groups. Of special interest to me was their agree-ment to continue dismantling their mutal nuclear arms system. As former secretary of defence, Robert McNarama -- he died today at age 93 -- once said, if there is ever a full-scale nuclear war, it won't matter whether 40,000 weapons are fired, or a mere 10,000. In either case, world civilization will be destroyed altogether. I understand why both America and Russia do not want a few atomic weapons to fall into the hands of terrorists, or be launched by North Korea or Iran or Israel. But the real disaster, as I see it, does not emanate from that direction. The real disaster will come when two countries -- America and Russia, or Iran and Israel, or India and Pakistan -- decide to wage full-scale nuclear war.

          Tomorrow President Obama, show here with a group of former secretaries of state (Kissinger, Schultze, Perry) travels to Russia. High on his agenda will be nuclear arms reduction. He will propose that Russia and the U.S. each reduce their nuclear arsenal to 1,500 weapons by the end of this year. This doesn't sound like much -- and it isn't. But it's a step in the right direction. I hope he succeeds.
          There are numerous reasons why the U. S. should take the lead in reducing the world's nuclear arsenals, and eventually eliminate them altogether. The most obvious reason is that a true nuclear war would likely destroy civilization as we know it. Another reason is that atomic weapons are unnecessary. The U.S., Russia, and other belligerants have more than enough ways of slaughtering each other's solidiers and civilians without having to rely on nuclear arms. Still another reason is cost. Atomic and hydrogen weapons are maddenly expensive, and we have far more important things we should be investing in: eliminating poverty and hunger worldwide, for example. A final, and compelling, reason is moral: America has no moral leverage to exert on would-be nuclear powers such as Pakistan, Iran, and Israel if it insists on maintaining its own reservoir of nuclear weapons for future use. No one has authorized America to be the world's policeman.

         The U.S.A. celebrates its 233rd birthday today. Many Americans will spend the day at the beach, or host cookouts in their back yards. This evening they will watch giant fireworks displays, the biggest being the one on the Hudson River, viewable by both New Jerseyans and New Yorkers. Our own family plans are still vague. One of Georgia's brothers, and his wife, are visiting us from Virginia. So like others, we'll probably have a cookout.
          Having lived much of my life abroad, I have a little different perspective on America than many of our friends and neighbors. For me the most impressive thing about this country is its amazing diversity. No other country in the world has the incredible mixture of races, ethnicities, religions and languages that America has. Of course, this would be an impossible mixture were it not for the freedoms we enjoy, and which we must be diligent to preserve. And of course it will not continue without some serious immigration reforms.
          It dismays me on this 4th of July that despite the highly publicized recent withdrawal of American soldiers from Iraqi cities, we are still mired down in that country, and probably will be for years to come. And it now appears we face a similar future in Afghanistan. President Obama has initiated a new military strategy in Afghanistan, but to my mind it is not focused correctly. It appears to be another likely futile exercise in "nation-building." We should have learned better by now.

          Sarah Palin is resigning her governorship of Alaska in order not to have to serve as a "lame duck" governor. There is an old adage: When the going gets tough, the tough get going. Mrs. Palin has given new meaning to the adage. The going has got tough, so she has got going -- she's abandoning the post to which she was elected. She has announced no immediate plans, but most observers seem to think that she will use to next few years to prepare to run for the presidency of the United States. Mrs. Palin is a "populist," someone who has few policy credentials but who does have the ability to connect to the common man, and woman. Or perhaps I should speak of the common man and woman within a certain segment of the American mosaic. I doubt if her populism is enough to take her to the White House -- unless she uses the next few years to "bone up" on policy and mature politically.  A good example of this comes to mind: the Rev. Al Sharpton who, in his early career, seemed to want only to be at the center of the stage, but who gradually accumulated genuine "heft" and has won the respect of many.

          Dr. Brad Braxton, left, has unexpectedly resigned from his position as senior pastor at Riverside Memorial Church, the best-known church in Manhattan. His resignation came after having been at the church for less than a year. Dr. Braxton said that "pre-existing tensions" in the congregation had overwhelmed his freshman year. The tensions derive from the fact that from the church's founding (by famed pastor Harry Emerson Fosdick) the congregation has been an icon of liberal theology, with heavy emphasis on social involvement. Dr. Braxton, an ordained Baptist minister, by contrast, appeared to many to focus on a more evangelical and invididualistic approach.