A class act
With a sinister turn as a schoolmarm on the edge, Judi Dench is stepping out of her comfort zone. That might just deserve an Oscar

By Matt Wolf

Sunday Times
Even on market day, which is Thursday, Stratford-upon-Avon seems quintessentially sleepy, and it is doubly so on a misty Thursday morning just before Christmas. A chill in the air seems to be keeping most people indoors. This isn’t quite the setting in which you’d expect to find one of our national treasures, Judi Dench, in the run-up to what will almost certainly be her sixth Oscar nomination in nine years. If Dench were American, she would doubtless be out on the awards campaign trail, like it or not. But then, if Dench were American, she probably wouldn’t have had the acting career she has had. So here she is, tucked away in her long-standing home, the Royal Shakespeare Company, performing in a musical, chatting away over coffee and croissants at a high-street chain cafe.
Dench is so thoroughbred a stage creature that the film part of her CV seems like a cumulative surprise. But surprising it definitely is. One has to go back to the early days of the Academy Awards, and Bette Davis, to find another performer given a comparable number of nods in quite so compressed a time. (Dench won her prize at the second hurdle, for 1998’s Shakespeare in Love.) And neither Davis nor another multiple nominee, Katharine Hepburn, were in their sixties before international renown came to call. But nothing Dench has done on screen has been more unexpected than her latest role, as the embittered teacher Barbara Covett in Notes on a Scandal, based on Zoë Heller’s 2003 novel. An actress who has been pretty well domesticated by her public — that’s the power of television sitcom for you — plays someone mean and not a little bit mad. And human, too.
When Dench and I first met, backstage at the Aldwych Theatre in 1990, during Sam Mendes’s revival of The Cherry Orchard, she spoke then of her desire, “if at all possible, to choose the most unlikely role — that’s all I’ve ever wanted to do”. The theme pops up again as we munch our croissants, with showgoers for that day’s matinée performance of Merry Wives — The Musical doing a polite double take as they clock that the very person who has brought them into town to begin with is there in the window, looking right back at them. Up close, Dench transmits warmth, if forgivable impatience at the time that is being eaten out of her schedule, even in Stratford. American film journalists and television crews are already finding their way here. But for the moment, a bright scarf swathing her cream top, she settles in like someone primed for a good morning gossip.
“I know several people like Barbara, as I’m sure you do — people who, as far as you can see, never have any kind of relationship with anybody, or are just desperately needy.” She laughs, keen not to get too gloomy on what will be a two-performance day at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, around the corner. “Those sorts of people usually resort to having animals, of course, and that’s why animals are such comforts to us all.”
It makes sense for Dench to have seized this role with both hands, not to mention a cunning fury. Behind it are the screenwriter Patrick Marber and the director Richard Eyre — as with Dench, theatre animals. Playing a stern-faced school stalwart whose apparent sympathy and brisk efficiency are tilting toward psychosis, Dench illuminates for keeps the part of a lonely north London teacher who takes a comely new recruit, Cate Blanchett’s Sheba Hart, into her care — only to crack when it is made apparent that the adulterous Sheba may in fact care more for her family, husband Bill Nighy included, as well as a certain pupil.
Dench has long confessed to not being a good reader of material. That gift is just one of many that prompts a mention of Michael Williams, her husband of 30 years, who died in 2001 of lung cancer and is buried in nearby Charlecote. (So, too, are his parents and Dench’s mother.) But Dench’s co-star in As Time Goes By, Geoffrey Palmer, had already given her Heller’s novel when the producer Scott Rudin approached her to do a film version. “Yes, that’s rather unlike me,” she laughs, about a scenario where she knew exactly what was being proposed. And, as with so much in her career, it was the talent involved that prompted her to accept. “I knew the story, but it was working with Richard, who I seem to have known all my life” — this is their fifth collaboration — “and also working with Cate, for whom my admiration is completely undimmed.”
What about the appeal of at last playing a baddie? “Barbara’s not a villain. She’s just a victim of her own circumstance,” Dench says, in quite reasonable defence of a role that finds her narrowing her face in near-mutinous intensity as she discovers that her cherished Sheba has been having it off with a male student who, even worse, is under-age. That part is played by the striking Irish newcomer Andrew Simpson, whose amorous cavorting with Blanchett must have made him the envy of his schoolmates. Dench speaks of him most fondly: “He used to bless himself before each scene, since he’s from a good Catholic family. He was a good sport.”
So one assumes.
“People always say, ‘Do you like the character or not?’, but I don’t think you make that kind of judgment. You never make that judgment. There are things you like and dislike, as in everything. It’s what makes everybody so interesting. There are traits to somebody you may not like, but you still love them, as in a relationship. But you don’t actually categorically come down on one thing and think, ‘Oh, I like this, and I don’t like that.’ You just try to grade all the colours of the person so that it adds up to a believ- able whole.”
Still, there’s a brilliant logic to casting Dench that it isn’t up to her to explain, and her colleagues are happy to do it for her. “It helps that Judi is very loved,” Heller tells me, “because one thing I wouldn’t want is for Barbara to be a stage villain. There’s a kind of residue of everything Judi means, particularly to a British audience, that helps make her a more human, sympathetic person, so that she’s not just a glinty-eyed old bag bringing death and destruction to all around her.”
Rudin, in turn, anatomises the appeal of putting Dench in a part 180 degrees from the role of Iris Murdoch, or the financially reckless, emotionally impulsive actress in David Hare’s Amy’s View, on both of which he worked with Dench. “I wrote Judi a letter,” Rudin recalls, “at the moment when she was thinking whether to do the movie or not, and said, ‘Basically, everybody you’ve played has been one version or another of a star in the world that they’re in — but you’ve never played anybody like the audience. This is your chance to play somebody who the audience feels is them.’” Which probably isn’t the case with queens Victoria or Elizabeth I, or even Mrs Henderson in 2005.
Yet that empathy with and for the audience is part of Dench’s stock in trade, as I’ve discovered in various public interviews with her. The force field of affection is palpable. But in Notes on a Scandal, it extends to Dench’s ability, as Rudin says, “to play Barbara as someone who’s in the world, engaged, and isn’t some sort of recluse or shut-in. Judi’s in that world alone, playing the gigantic deficit of her loneliness, but she hasn’t made Barbara a victim at all. You feel she’s a spiky character who has sort of made her bed and ended up in a place of her own making”. Dench, in turn, invokes by way of comparison Lady Macbeth, whom she famously played for the RSC opposite Ian McKellen: “She’s not a grim person when she comes on. She’s a person you can relate to, and suddenly she says, ‘For goodness’ sake, give me the strength to go through with this.’ And it’s the same with Barbara: it’s all to do with human failings and human strengths.”
It is the humanity communicated time and again from Dench, whether in full command as James Bond’s M (“When I make those films, I’m 6ft tall”) or, that very afternoon, prompting cheers from a full house as Mistress Quickly, in the same week that this musical version of Merry Wives has been roundly, if not altogether fairly, dismissed in the press. That’s not to say that she can’t and won’t speak her mind. Regarding the reviews, Dench talks of “not wanting anyone coming and fracturing things and saying, ‘Well, this and this and this and this.’ We know pretty well, and our job is either to preserve what we’ve got or work on getting it better. It’s no good just a lot of people throwing the shit at us — there’s no point”.
The point for Dench, you feel, is in continuing the work that, more than ever, is her life, especially with Williams no longer by her side. There’s talk of her finally filming, later this year, the television adaptation of the Elizabeth Gaskell novel Cranford that went south a season or two ago, while her recent revival of Noël Coward’s Hay Fever, for Peter Hall, may re-emerge on Broadway. Before anything else, though, will come surgery on a long-problematic knee and yet another go at an Oscar. She smiles when the subject comes up: “You’ve got to have a nomination to go to the Oscars; I don’t have a nomination, and you do have to have one.” What she doesn’t add is the unspoken word “yet”. When it comes to modesty, as with talent, Judi Dench is worth taking note of.
Notes on a Scandal opens on February 2; Merry Wives — The Musical runs until February 10 at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

Art Buchwald, Columnist and humorist dies at 81

By Bryan Marquard, Globe Staff
With wit that never lost its edge, Art Buchwald used his newspaper column to skewer politicians in the nation's capital and over the decades millions of Americans began their morning by reading his unfolding chronicle of history, writ small and satirical. At the end of his life ill health gave him a new subject, his own death, and he wrote his own epitaph in a series of poignant dispatches from a hospice center that he left after outliving his stay.
Mr. Buchwald, who had entered hospice care a year ago when his kidneys failed, died in his Washington, D.C., home Wednesday evening, according to his son, Joel. He was 81 and had published a book last year, "Too Soon to Say Goodbye," that celebrated the unexpected coda in his long life of achievement.
"The purpose of the hospice is to help you pass away gently when all else fails," he wrote. "You are supposed to do it with as little pain as possible and with dignity. It didn't work out that way for me."
After a year-long respite that his son described as "a hell of a victory lap," Mr. Buchwald began receiving hospice care at home 12 days ago. "He died comfortably with his family at his bedside," the family said in a statement.
Mr. Buchwald, who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1982, had lived in Washington nearly 45 years, dividing his time between the capital and a second home on Martha's Vineyard for the past 35 years.
"There was no better way to start the day than to open the morning paper to Art's column, laugh out loud and learn all over again to take the issues seriously in the world of politics, but not take yourself too seriously," US Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat, said in a statement.
In columns written after entering hospice care, Mr. Buchwald confronted the topic of dying, though with a hint of the puckish observations readers have come to expect when reading a column accompanied by a photo of Mr. Buchwald with his lopsided grin and horn-rimmed glasses.
"By the way, people always talk about heaven as the place where we are all going," he wrote last March. "The problem with thinking about heaven is that you then have to think about hell. The irony of our culture is people are constantly telling other people to go to hell, but no one tells them to go to heaven."
During the weeks after Mr. Buchwald entered the hospice, his room became a place where laughter -- usually his own -- often rang out as his bedside became a mandatory stop-over for the bold-faced name set. A headline for a New York Times report on his hospice room declared, "Washington's Hottest Salon Is a Deathbed."
Instead of dying, his health improved and he left the hospice on July 1.
"The whole point is I didn't expect to be here," he told the Globe in an interview last July at his gray-shingled house on Main Street in Vineyard Haven. "My plan was to leave the earth. And then I thought, to hell with it, I'll go to the Vineyard."
Though he was known for the humor he culled from politics, many younger fans might be surprised to learn that Mr. Buchwald cut his teeth in his 20s writing about restaurants and nightlife for the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune. He expanded into writing about celebrities, and the column was first syndicated as "Art Buchwald in Paris."
Against the advice of friends who thought it would be difficult to repeat his Paris success, Mr. Buchwald relinquished his status as arguably the most famous American in the City of Lights and relocated to Washington in the early 1960s. The move made him even more successful. At its height, his column was syndicated to hundreds of newspapers and many of the more than two dozen collections he published were bestsellers.
As a political humorist, he employed a style and an approach that were deceptive in their simplicity. He would tear an article from a newspaper, tuck it in a pocket, and mull the topic -- sometimes for days -- before quickly pounding out a column in unadorned prose that, often as not, turned the topic of the day on its head.
"I can now reliably report that Vice President Spiro Agnew has no intention of dumping Richard Nixon," he wrote in 1971 as Nixon prepared for his re-election campaign. "A spokesman for the Vice President told me that Agnew was very satisfied with the job his President was doing and that he even intended to give him more responsibilities than any Vice President has ever given his President before."
Mr. Buchwald and his wife and children first started going to Martha's Vineyard in 1971, to escape the summer heat in Washington. A few years later a friend, the playwright Lillian Hellman, tipped off the Buchwalds that a 1888 house on Main Street in Vineyard Haven was for sale and they bought it.
Along with using the island as a vacation retreat, Mr. Buchwald served for many years as master of ceremonies and auctioneer at an annual fund-raiser to benefit a consortium of social service agencies.
"I don't know how it happened, but I've become the Jerry Lewis of Martha's Vineyard," he told the Globe in 1996.
In hospice care, Mr. Buchwald retained his sense of humor and took pleasure in being able to eat whatever he wanted after deciding to forego dialysis treatment, which would have prolonged his life, often having McDonald's meals brought in.
"What's beautiful about death is you can say anything you want to, as long as you don't lord it over others that you know something they don't," he wrote in his March 14 column. "The thing that is very important, and why I'm writing this, is that whether they like it or not, everyone is going to go. The big question we still have to ask is not where we're going, but what were we doing here in the first place?"
In addition to his son, who lives in Washington, Mr. Buchwald leaves two daughters Jennifer of Roxbury and Connie Buchwald Marks of Culpeper, Va.; two sisters Edith Jaffe of Bellevue, Wash., and Doris Kahme of Delray Beach, Fla., and Monroe Township, N.J.; and five grandchildren.
A family spokeswoman said Mr. Buchwald will be buried in the Vineyard Haven Cemetery in Martha's Vineyard, Mass., where his wife Ann is buried.
Posted by the Boston Globe City & Region Desk at 10:38 AM

Absolute PowerThe real reason the Bush administration won't back down on Guantanamo.

By Dahlia Lithwick

From The Washington Post/Slate Magazine
Why is the United States poised to try Jose Padilla as a dangerous terrorist, long after it has become perfectly clear that he was just the wrong Muslim in the wrong airport on the wrong day?Why is the United States still holding hundreds of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, long after years of interrogation and abuse have established that few, if any, of them are the deadly terrorists they have been held out to be?And why is President Bush still issuing grandiose and provocative signing statements, the latest of which claims that the executive branch holds the power to open mail as it sees fit?Willing to give the benefit of the doubt, I once believed the common thread here was presidential blindness—an extreme executive-branch myopia that leads the president to believe that these futile little measures are somehow integral to combating terrorism. That this is some piece of self-delusion that precludes Bush and his advisers from recognizing that Padilla is just a chump and Guantanamo merely a holding pen for a jumble of innocent and half-guilty wretches.But it has finally become clear that the goal of these foolish efforts isn't really to win the war against terrorism; indeed, nothing about Padilla, Guantanamo, or signing statements moves the country an inch closer to eradicating terror. The object is a larger one, and the original overarching goal of this administration: expanding executive power, for its own sake.Two scrupulously reported pieces on the Padilla case are illuminating. On Jan. 3, Nina Totenberg of National Public Radio interviewed Mark Corallo, spokesman for then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, about the behind-the-scenes decision-making in the Padilla case—a case that's lolled through the federal courts for years. According to Totenberg, when the Supreme Court sent Padilla's case back to the lower federal courts on technical grounds in 2004, the Bush administration's sole concern was preserving its constitutional claim that it could hold citizens as enemy combatants. "Justice Department officials warned that if the case went back to the Supreme Court, the administration would almost certainly lose," she reports, which is why Padilla was hauled back to the lower courts. Her sources further confirmed that "key players in the Defense Department and Vice President Cheney's office insisted that the power to detain Americans as enemy combatants had to be preserved."Deborah Sontag's excellent New York Times story on Padilla on Jan. 4 makes the same point: He was moved from military custody to criminal court only as "a legal maneuver that kept the issue of his detention without charges out of the Supreme Court." So this is why the White House yanked Padilla from the brig to the high court to the federal courts and back to a Florida trial court: They were only forum shopping for the best place to enshrine the right to detain him indefinitely. Their claims about Padilla's dirty bomb, known to be false, were a means of advancing their larger claims about executive power. And when confronted with the possibility of losing on those claims, they yanked him back to the criminal courts as a way to avoid losing powers they'd already won.This need to preserve newly won legal ground also explains the continued operation of the detention center at Guantanamo Bay. Last week marked the fifth anniversary of the camp that—according to Donald Rumsfeld in 2002—houses only "the worst of the worst." Now that over half of them have been released (apparently, the best of the worst) and even though only about 80 of the rest will ever see trials, the camp remains open. Why? Civil-rights groups worldwide and even close U.S. allies like Germany, Denmark, and England clamor for its closure. And as the ever-vigilant Nat Hentoff points out, new studies reveal that only a small fraction of the detainees there are even connected to al-Qaida—according to the Defense Department's own best data.But Guantanamo stays open for the same reason Padilla stays on trial. Having claimed the right to label enemy combatants and detain them indefinitely without charges, the Bush administration is unable to retreat from that position without ceding ground. In some sense, the president is now as much a prisoner of Guantanamo as the detainees. And having gone nose-to-nose with the Congress over his authority to craft stripped-down courts for these "enemies," courts guaranteed to produce guilty verdicts, Bush cannot just call off the trials.The endgame in the war on terror isn't holding the line against terrorists. It's holding the line on hard-fought claims to absolutely limitless presidential authority.Enter these signing statements. The most recent of the all-but-meaningless postscripts Bush tacks onto legislation gives him the power to "authorize a search of mail in an emergency" to ''protect human life and safety" and "for foreign intelligence collection." There is some debate about whether the president has that power already, but it misses the point. The purpose of these signing statements is simply to plant a flag on the moon—one more way for the president to stake out the furthest corners in his field of constitutional dreams.Last spring, The New Yorker's Jane Mayer profiled David Addington, Vice President Richard Cheney's chief of staff and legal adviser. Addington's worldview in brief: A single-minded devotion to something called the New Paradigm, a constitutional theory of virtually limitless executive power, wherein "the President, as Commander-in-Chief, has the authority to disregard virtually all previously known legal boundaries, if national security demands it," Mayer describes.Insiders in the Bush administration told Mayer that Addington and Cheney had been "laying the groundwork" for a vast expansion of presidential power long before 9/11. In 2002, the vice president told ABC News that the presidency was "weaker today as an institution because of the unwise compromises that have been made over the last 30 to 35 years." Rebuilding that presidency has been their sole goal for decades.The image of Addington scrutinizing "every bill before President Bush signs it, searching for any language that might impinge on Presidential power," as Mayer puts it, can be amusing—like the mother of the bride obsessing over a tricky seating chart. But this zeal to restore an all-powerful presidency traps the Bush administration in its own worst legal sinkholes. This newfound authority—to maintain a disastrous Guantanamo, to stage rights-free tribunals and hold detainees forever—is the kind of power Nixon only dreamed about. It cannot be let go.In a heartbreaking letter from Guantanamo this week, published in the Los Angeles Times, prisoner Jumah Al Dossari writes: "The purpose of Guantanamo is to destroy people, and I have been destroyed." I fear he is wrong. The destruction of Al Dossari, Jose Padilla, Zacarias Moussaoui, and some of our most basic civil liberties was never a purpose or a goal—it was a mere byproduct. The true purpose is more abstract and more tragic: To establish a clunky post-Watergate dream of an imperial presidency, whatever the human cost may be.A version of this piece appeared in the Washington Post Outlook section.

The Sunday Times
January 14, 2007
Civil war in Iraq might suit the West's interests

Andrew Sullivan
In war and in politics unexamined axioms are always dangerous. That much we learnt from 2003. The axiom driving policy then was that Saddam Hussein had WMDs. On that unquestioned assumption, all the debate rested. And yet the axiom was false.
Today a similar unquestioned axiom is driving the debate about whether to stay in Iraq or leave. The axiom is that leaving Iraq would be a disaster for the security of the West. Here’s how President George Bush put it last Wednesday night: “To step back now would force a collapse of the Iraqi government, tear the country apart and result in mass killings on an unimaginable scale. Such a scenario would result in our troops being forced to stay in Iraq even longer and confront an enemy that is even more lethal.”
The fundamental question we have to ask right now is: how true is this? On the face of it the president has a very strong point. Withdrawal would indeed be likely to prompt a massive blood-letting in Iraq. It would give the Sunni-Shi’ite civil war far more oxygen and almost certainly provoke the Sunni powers, particularly Egypt and Saudi Arabia, to intervene financially or militarily in defence of Iraq’s outnumbered Sunni minority.
It would mean Iran emerging as a Shi’ite superpower in the region, with a strong presence in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon further intensifying the sense of Sunni beleaguerment and anger. We could see violence along the ancient Sunni-Shi’ite fault line sucking in much of the region, with its many fragile regimes. The consequences could be soaring oil prices, and any number of unforeseen disasters. After all, ask yourself: how many pleasant surprises come out of the Middle East? And yet the alternative — an indefinite entanglement with the pathologies of Iraq — prompts the question of whether there’s anything in this nightmare scenario that could be advantageous for the West. Is there a constructive argument for leaving? That’s the alternative scenario worth pondering.
Here’s how the counterintuitive argument would run. From 9/11 onwards the West’s war on terror has essentially followed the ideological narrative of Al-Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden: this is a war between Islam and the West. President Bush’s dismal war strategy has only intensified that narrative, and that storyline is easily the most powerful recruitment device for Islamist terrorists in the West.
But if America withdrew from Iraq and a Sunni-Shi’ite war took off, the narrative of the long war would inevitably change. It would go from Islam versus the West to Islam versus itself. Escalating conflict in the Arab Muslim world would only be fully explicable in terms of the Sunni-Shi’ite split.
Instantly, Sunni Al-Qaeda would have a serious enemy close at hand: Shi’ite Iran. Think of this not as a “divide and conquer” strategy so much as a “divide and get out of the way” strategy. And with deft handling it could conceivably reap dividends in the long run.
Wars, after all, are not just about guns and military action. They are also about ideas and ideology. Long wars, especially, are won by those who gain control of the narrative. The West won the cold war when it became understood globally as a battle between totalitarianism and freedom. Defining the conflict that way helped a great deal towards winning it, and in retrospect the Helsinki accords which publicly endorsed that narrative were the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union.
Similarly, redefining the war on terror as essentially the product of ancient feuds within Islam immediately shifts the argument onto terrain favourable to the West. For the first time in five years, it takes the narrative out of Bin Laden’s hands.
It also has the added benefit of being true. Al-Qaeda’s primary foes have always been Arab regimes not in accordance with extreme fundamentalist Wahhabist theology. But that theology is also full of contempt for those regarded by Al-Qaeda and most Sunnis as heretics: the Shi’ites of Iran.
We are learning in Iraq not to underestimate the power of this mutual hatred. The loathing of Muslims for other Muslims in the Middle East today is as deep as the loathing of Christians for other Christians once was in Europe. For Sunni versus Shi’ite, think Protestant versus Catholic. For 2007, think 1557.
Freud’s term for the passionate hating of people very like oneself — but different in some minor degree — was the “narcissism of small differences”. The West has a chance to exploit that Muslim narcissism for our own purposes — and for the sake of moderate Muslims across the world.
Or look at this another way: what is the greatest weakness of our enemy? The answer is fanaticism. It was fanaticism that prompted Bin Laden to attack on 9/11 before he had access to WMDs. He struck too soon because he couldn’t help himself. His rage forces him to make mistakes. The same went for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who alienated all of Jordan by bombing a wedding and who even prompted Bin Laden to worry about killing too many Muslims in Iraq.
Al-Qaeda hates the West but its main beef is with fellow Muslims who are heretics and traitors. The fanatics have certainly killed far more Muslims than non-Muslims over the years.
So why not let them hang themselves by this rope? By leaving Iraq, America could create a dangerous civil war that nonetheless has huge propaganda potential for changing the entire game of this larger war. It takes the West much further out of the picture and focuses the mind where it truly belongs: on current Muslim pathologies, paranoia and self-hatred. We can still prove our pro-reform bona fides by concentrating on Afghanistan, where we still have a chance to turn things around. And we also give Iran a big headache in grappling with the chaos on its border.
The other likely result of a Sunni-Shi’ite war is serious damage to the world’s oil supply. But isn’t that just what the West needs? Don’t we desperately need to wean ourselves off oil — and wouldn’t $100 a barrel be the best way to accelerate that? I’m not saying that leaving a civil war in Iraq is not dangerous. But so is staying. And the upsides of leaving haven’t been fully thought through yet, so let’s think them through, shall we? My fear is that Bush has not thought this through. There is no plan B because his rigid, incurious mind doesn’t have the dexterity to entertain it. The fundamentalist psyche doesn’t like paradox or nuance. But in dealing with this complex and metastasising problem, paradox and nuance and ruthless self-interest are indispensable.
This surely is the real conservative insight: that ideology must never trump reality, that new scenarios need new thinking, that in every crisis there is an opportunity. Currently the axiom that withdrawal is unthinkable is impeding our ability to think of new directions and new strategies. But we desperately need to think outside our comfort zone. Flexibility is not an enemy in wartime. In fact in this war our very survival may even depend on it.

From Rod Dreher NPR

As President Bush marched the country to war with Iraq, even some voices on the Right warned that this was a fool's errand. I dismissed them angrily. I thought them unpatriotic.
But almost four years later, I see that I was the fool. In Iraq, this Republican President for whom I voted twice has shamed our country with weakness and incompetence, and the consequences of his failure will be far, far worse than anything Carter did.
The fraud, the mendacity, the utter haplessness of our government's conduct of the Iraq war have been shattering to me. It wasn't supposed to turn out like this. Not under a Republican President.
I turn 40 next month - middle aged at last - a time of discovering limits, finitude. I expected that. But what I did not expect was to see the limits of finitude of American power revealed so painfully. I did not expect Vietnam. As I sat in my office last night watching President Bush deliver his big speech, I seethed over the waste, the folly, the stupidity of this war.
I had a heretical thought for a conservative - that I have got to teach my kids that they must never, ever take Presidents and Generals at their word - that their government will send them to kill and die for noble-sounding rot - that they have to question authority.
On the walk to the parking garage, it hit me. Hadn't the hippies tried to tell my generation that? Why had we scorned them so blithely?
Will my children, too small now to understand Iraq, take me seriously when I tell them one day what powerful men, whom their father once believed in, did to this country? Heavy thoughts for someone who is still a conservative despite it all. It was a long drive home.

The Ideological Animal

We think our political stance is the product of reason, but we're easily manipulated and surprisingly malleable. Our essential political self is more a stew of childhood temperament, education, and fear of death. Call it the 9/11 effect. By:Jay Dixit Psychology Today
Cinnamon Stillwell never thought she'd be the founder of a political organization. She certainly never expected to start a group for conservatives, most of whom became conservatives on the same day—September 11, 2001. She organized the group, the 911 Neocons, as a haven for people like her—"former lefties" who did political 180s after 9/11.
Stillwell, now a conservative columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, had been a liberal her whole life, writing off all Republicans as "ignorant, intolerant yahoos." Yet on 9/11, everything changed for her, as it did for so many. In the days after the attacks, the world seemed "topsy-turvy." On the political left, she wrote, "There was little sympathy for the victims," and it seemed to her that progressives were "consumed with hatred for this country" and had "extended their misguided sympathies to tyrants and terrorists."
Disgusted, she looked elsewhere. She found solace among conservative talk-show hosts and columnists. At first, she felt resonance with the right about the war on terror. But soon she found herself concurring about "smaller government, traditional societal structures, respect and reverence for life, the importance of family, personal responsibility, national unity over identity politics." She embraced gun rights for the first time, drawn to "the idea of self-preservation in perilous times." Her marriage broke up due in part to political differences. In the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, she began going to pro-war rallies.
In 2005, she wrote a column called "The Making of a 9/11 Republican." Over the year that followed, she received thousands of e-mails from people who'd had similar experiences. There were so many of them that she decided to form a group. And so the 911 Neocons were born.
We tend to believe our political views have evolved by a process of rational thought, as we consider arguments, weigh evidence, and draw conclusions. But the truth is more complicated. Our political preferences are equally the result of factors we're not aware of—such as how educated we are, how scary the world seems at a given moment, and personality traits that are first apparent in early childhood. Among the most potent motivators, it turns out, is fear. How the United States should confront the threat of terrorism remains a subject of endless political debate. But Americans' response to threats of attack is now more clear-cut than ever. The fear of death alone is surprisingly effective in shaping our political decisions—more powerful, often, than thought itself.
Abstract Art vs. Talk Radio: The Political Personality Standoff
Most people are surprised to learn that there are real, stable differences in personality between conservatives and liberals—not just different views or values, but underlying differences in temperament. Psychologists John Jost of New York University, Dana Carney of Harvard, and Sam Gosling of the University of Texas have demonstrated that conservatives and liberals boast markedly different home and office decor. Liberals are messier than conservatives, their rooms have more clutter and more color, and they tend to have more travel documents, maps of other countries, and flags from around the world. Conservatives are neater, and their rooms are cleaner, better organized, more brightly lit, and more conventional. Liberals have more books, and their books cover a greater variety of topics. And that's just a start. Multiple studies find that liberals are more optimistic. Conservatives are more likely to be religious. Liberals are more likely to like classical music and jazz, conservatives, country music. Liberals are more likely to enjoy abstract art. Conservative men are more likely than liberal men to prefer conventional forms of entertainment like TV and talk radio. Liberal men like romantic comedies more than conservative men. Liberal women are more likely than conservative women to enjoy books, poetry, writing in a diary, acting, and playing musical instruments.
"All people are born alike—except Republicans and Democrats," quipped Groucho Marx, and in fact it turns out that personality differences between liberals and conservatives are evident in early childhood. In 1969, Berkeley professors Jack and Jeanne Block embarked on a study of childhood personality, asking nursery school teachers to rate children's temperaments. They weren't even thinking about political orientation.
Twenty years later, they decided to compare the subjects' childhood personalities with their political preferences as adults. They found arresting patterns. As kids, liberals had developed close relationships with peers and were rated by their teachers as self-reliant, energetic, impulsive, and resilient. People who were conservative at age 23 had been described by their teachers as easily victimized, easily offended, indecisive, fearful, rigid, inhibited, and vulnerable at age 3. The reason for the difference, the Blocks hypothesized, was that insecure kids most needed the reassurance of tradition and authority, and they found it in conservative politics.
The most comprehensive review of personality and political orientation to date is a 2003 meta-analysis of 88 prior studies involving 22,000 participants. The researchers—John Jost of NYU, Arie Kruglanski of the University of Maryland, and Jack Glaser and Frank Sulloway of Berkeley—found that conservatives have a greater desire to reach a decision quickly and stick to it, and are higher on conscientiousness, which includes neatness, orderliness, duty, and rule-following. Liberals are higher on openness, which includes intellectual curiosity, excitement-seeking, novelty, creativity for its own sake, and a craving for stimulation like travel, color, art, music, and literature.
The study's authors also concluded that conservatives have less tolerance for ambiguity, a trait they say is exemplified when George Bush says things like, "Look, my job isn't to try to nuance. My job is to tell people what I think," and "I'm the decider." Those who think the world is highly dangerous and those with the greatest fear of death are the most likely to be conservative.
Liberals, on the other hand, are "more likely to see gray areas and reconcile seemingly conflicting information," says Jost. As a result, liberals like John Kerry, who see many sides to every issue, are portrayed as flip-floppers. "Whatever the cause, Bush and Kerry exemplify the cognitive styles we see in the research," says Jack Glaser, one of the study's authors, "Bush in appearing more rigid in his thinking and intolerant of uncertainty and ambiguity, and Kerry in appearing more open to ambiguity and to considering alternative positions."
Jost's meta-analysis sparked furious controversy. The House Republican Study Committee complained that the study's authors had received federal funds. George Will satirized it in his Washington Post column, and The National Review called it the "Conservatives Are Crazy" study. Jost and his colleagues point to the study's rigorous methodology. The study used political orientation as a dependent variable, meaning that where subjects fall on the political scale is computed from their own answers about whether they're liberal or conservative. Psychologists then compare factors such as fear of death and openness to new experiences, and seek statistically significant correlations. The findings are quintessentially empirical and difficult to dismiss as false.
Yet critics retort that the research draws negative conclusions about conservatives while the researchers themselves are liberal. And it's true that over the decades, a disproportionate amount of the research has focused on figuring out what's behind conservative behavior. Right shift is likewise more studied than left shift, largely because most of that research has been since 9/11, and aimed at trying to explain the conservative conversions of people like Cinnamon Stillwell.
Even with impeccable methodology, bias may creep into the choice of which phenomena to study. "There is a bias among social scientists," admits Glaser. "They look for the variables that are unflattering. There probably are other nice personality traits associated with conservatism, but they haven't shown up in the research because it's not as well studied."
"There are differences between liberals and conservatives, and people can value them however they like," Jost points out. "There is nothing inherently good or bad about being high or low on the need for closure or structure. Some may see religiosity as a positive, whereas others may see it more neutrally, and so on."
Red Shift
By 2004, as the presidential election drew near, researchers saw a chance to study the Jost results against the backdrop of unfolding events. Psychologists Mark Landau of the University of Arizona and Sheldon Solomon of Skidmore sought to explain how President Bush's approval rating went from around 51 percent before 9/11 to 90 percent immediately afterward. In one study, they exposed some participants to the letters WTC or the numbers 9/11 in an image flashed too quickly to register at the conscious level. They exposed other participants to familiar but random combinations of letters and numbers, such as area codes. Then they gave them words like coff__, sk_ll, and gr_ve, and asked them to fill in the blanks. People who'd seen random combinations were more likely to fill in coffee, skill, and grove. But people exposed to subliminal terrorism primes more often filled in coffin, skull, and grave. "The mere mention of September 11 or WTC is the same as reminding Americans of death," explains Solomon.
As a follow-up, Solomon primed one group of subjects to think about death, a state of mind called "mortality salience." A second group was primed to think about 9/11. And a third was induced to think about pain—something unpleasant but non-deadly. When people were in a benign state of mind, they tended to oppose Bush and his policies in Iraq. But after thinking about either death or 9/11, they tended to favor him. Such findings were further corroborated by Cornell sociologist Robert Willer, who found that whenever the color-coded terror alert level was raised, support for Bush increased significantly, not only on domestic security but also in unrelated domains, such as the economy.
University of Arizona psychologist Jeff Greenberg argues that some ideological shifts can be explained by terror management theory (TMT), which holds that heightened fear of death motivates people to defend their world views. TMT predicts that images like the destruction of the World Trade Center should make liberals more liberal and conservatives more conservative. "In the United States, political conservatism does seem to be the preferred ideology when people are feeling insecure," concedes Greenberg. "But in China or another communist country, reminding people of their own mortality would lead them to cling more tightly to communism."
Jost believes it's more complex. After all, Cinnamon Stillwell and others in the 911 Neocons didn't become more liberal. Like so many other Democrats after 9/11, they made a hard right turn. The reason thoughts of death make people more conservative, Jost says, is that they awaken a deep desire to see the world as fair and just, to believe that people get what they deserve, and to accept the existing social order as valid, rather than in need of change. When these natural desires are primed by thoughts of death and a barrage of mortal fear, people gravitate toward conservatism because it's more certain about the answers it provides—right vs. wrong, good vs. evil, us vs. them—and because conservative leaders are more likely to advocate a return to traditional values, allowing people to stick with what's familiar and known. "Conservatism is a more black and white ideology than liberalism," explains Jost. "It emphasizes tradition and authority, which are reassuring during periods of threat."
To test the theory, Jost prompted people to think about either pain—by looking at things like an ambulance, a dentist's chair, and a bee sting—or death, by looking at things like a funeral hearse, the grim reaper, and a dead-end sign. Across the political spectrum, people who had been primed to think about death were more conservative on issues like immigration, affirmative action, and same-sex marriage than those who had merely thought about pain, although the effect size was relatively small. The implication is clear: For liberals, conservatives, and independents alike, thinking about death actually makes people more conservative—at least temporarily.
Fear and Voting In America
Campaign strategists in both parties have never hesitated to use scare tactics. In 1964, a Lyndon Johnson commercial called "Daisy" juxtaposed footage of a little girl plucking a flower with footage of an atomic blast. In 1984, Ronald Reagan ran a spot that played on Cold War panic, in which the Soviet threat was symbolized by a grizzly lumbering across a stark landscape as a human heart pounds faster and faster and an off-screen voice warns, "There is a bear in the woods!" In 2004, Bush sparked furor for running a fear-mongering ad that used wolves gathering in the woods as symbols for terrorists plotting against America. And last fall, Congressional Republicans drew fire with an ad that featured bin Laden and other terrorists threatening Americans; over the sound of a ticking clock, a voice warned, "These are the stakes."
"At least some of the President's support is the result of constant and relentless reminders of death, some of which is just what's happening in the world, but much of which is carefully cultivated and calculated as an electoral strategy," says Solomon. "In politics these days, there's a dose of reason, and there's a dose of irrationality driven by psychological terror that may very well be swinging elections."
Solomon demonstrated that thinking about 9/11 made people go from preferring Kerry to preferring Bush. "Very subtle manipulations of psychological conditions profoundly affect political preferences," Solomon concludes. "In difficult moments, people don't want complex, nuanced, John Kerry-like waffling or sophisticated cogitation. They want somebody charismatic to step up and say, 'I know where our problem is and God has given me the clout to kick those people's asses.'"
Into The Blue
Studies show that people who study abroad become more liberal than those who stay home.
People who venture from the strictures of their limited social class are less likely to stereotype and more likely to embrace other cultures. Education goes hand-in-hand with tolerance, and often, the more the better:
Professors at major universities are more liberal than their counterparts at less acclaimed institutions. What travel and education have in common is that they make the differences between people seem less threatening. "You become less bothered by the idea that there is uncertainty in the world," explains Jost.
That's why the more educated people are, the more liberal they become—but only to a point. Once people begin pursuing certain types of graduate degrees, the curve flattens. Business students, for instance, become more conservative in their views toward minorities. As they become more established, doctors and lawyers tend to protect their economic interests by moving to the right. The findings demonstrate that conservative conversions are fueled not only by fear, but by other factors as well. And if the November election was any indicator, the pendulum that swung so forcefully to the right after 9/11 may be swinging back.
Tipping The Balance
Political conversions that are emotionally induced can be very subtle: A shift in support for a given issue or politician is not the same as a radical conversion or deep philosophical change. While views may be manipulated, the impact may or may not translate in the voting booth. Following 9/11, most lifelong liberals did not go through outright conversion or shift their preferred candidate. Yet many liberals who didn't become all-out conservatives found themselves nonetheless sympathizing more with conservative positions, craving the comfort of a strong leader, or feeling the need to punish or avenge. Many in the political center moved to the right, too. In aggregate, over an electorate of millions—a large proportion of whom were swing voters waiting to be swayed one way or the other—even a subtle shift was enough to tip the balance of the Presidential election, and the direction the country took for years. "Without 9/11 we would have a different president," says Solomon. "I would even say that the Osama bin Laden tape that was released the Thursday before the election was sufficient to swing the election. It was basically a giant mortality salience induction."
If we are so suggestible that thoughts of death make us uncomfortable defaming the American flag and cause us to sit farther away from foreigners, is there any way we can overcome our easily manipulated fears and become the informed and rational thinkers democracy demands?
To test this, Solomon and his colleagues prompted two groups to think about death and then give opinions about a pro-American author and an anti-American one. As expected, the group that thought about death was more pro-American than the other. But the second time, one group was asked to make gut-level decisions about the two authors, while the other group was asked to consider carefully and be as rational as possible. The results were astonishing. In the rational group, the effects of mortality salience were entirely eliminated. Asking people to be rational was enough to neutralize the effects of reminders of death. Preliminary research shows that reminding people that as human beings, the things we have in common eclipse our differences—what psychologists call a "common humanity prime"—has the same effect.
"People have two modes of thought," concludes Solomon. "There's the intuitive gut-level mode, which is what most of us are in most of the time. And then there's a rational analytic mode, which takes effort and attention."
The solution, then, is remarkably simple. The effects of psychological terror on political decision making can be eliminated just by asking people to think rationally. Simply reminding us to use our heads, it turns out, can be enough to make us do it.

Utahns break from Bush on Iraq
Reddest state no longer behind war's handling, split on 'surge'
By Matthew D. LaPlante The Salt Lake Tribune
President Bush has lost majority support on Iraq from residents of the reddest state in the nation. A Salt Lake Tribune poll conducted last week shows Utah's support for Bush's handling of the war in Iraq has taken a substantial plunge in the past few months. Just 41 percent of Utahns say they support Bush on Iraq - marking the first time a Tribune poll has found fewer than half of Utahns in the president's war camp. Meanwhile, the poll shows Utahns about evenly split on whether to send more troops to Iraq. About 44 percent of Utahns back a "surge" - an option Bush reportedly is considering, and which has much lower nationwide support. Less than six months ago, with Bush and two senior members of his Cabinet in town to shore up support in the state that gave him his largest margin of victory in two elections, 54 percent of Utahns supported him on Iraq, according to a Tribune poll conducted in August. That rate exceeded national numbers collected at the same time by about 20 percent. Since then, the president has publicly acknowledged increased violence in Iraq - a war even he will no longer say the U.S. is winning. A high-profile panel has roundly criticized his approach to the war, as have a number of retired generals. His defense secretary - the architect of much of America's policy in Iraq - stepped down under heavy criticism. And the tally of U.S. troop deaths has continued to grow. All of that appears to have affected Republican performance in midterm elections in which Democrats won majority control in both chambers of Congress. And those Republican losses, said pollster J. Brad Coker, may have had the greatest influence on Utahns' support for Bush at war. "I suspect a lot of the drop is post-election voters who were sticking with Bush through the election out of party loyalty," said Corker, of Mason-Dixon Polling & Research Inc., which conducted The Tribune poll. "Now, they're looking back and thinking if he had handled Iraq better maybe Republicans would have fared better." So, long pariahs in a nation where support for the president's handling of the war has been flagging for several years, more Utahns now appear to be lining up with their neighbors on the subject. The Tribune survey results are similar to findings of pollster SurveyUSA, which in a poll sponsored by KSL-TV last month, found 42 percent of Utahns supportive of the president's handling of the war. But with national support for Bush at war also having plummeted in recent months, support in Utah remains about 20 points higher than the nation at large. According to a CBS News poll, conducted in the first three days of 2007, just 23 percent of Americans support Bush on Iraq. Although Utah still appears to lead the nation in its support for Bush's war management, the drop below 50 percent should be a warning to the Bush administration, said Kirk Jowers, director of the University of Utah's Hinckley Institute of Politics. "I think Utah is like the canary in the coal mine for Bush," Jowers said. "If he loses Utah, the state that has been most steadfast in supporting him, he has to know it can't get much lower." And Bush doesn't appear to have gotten a bump in approval for his war management in the wake of the killing of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. The execution was marred by the public release of a video in which gallows witnesses were heard chanting praises for a cleric whose relatives now hold significant power in Iraq - and who are wielding it, some say, in ways not unlike the manner in which Saddam kept power during his reign. In Utah, Kim Spangrude, a member of Military Families for Peace, said she believes The Tribune poll results reflect a burgeoning reality in the Beehive State, one in which criticism of the president and his military policies is not immediately denounced as not supportive of U.S. troops. "The rhetoric up until now has been framed in terms of patriotism - that we all must continue the support of the war in order to continue upholding our troops," said Spangrude, whose son served in Iraq. "Now people know it's important to speak up. People are finally coming to terms with the fact that they have the right and obligation to speak up when they believe we are going in the wrong direction." Louis Freeman, a retired pharmacist from Sandy, was among the 625 registered Utah voters to participate in The Tribune poll. He supported Bush when the war began. "It was the correct thing to do," Freeman said of the overthrow of the Iraqi government. "That's a given in my mind." Since the invasion, though, Freeman said Bush hasn't exhibited the flexibility in leadership to respond to the ever-changing situation on the ground in Iraq. Freeman is among those Utahns who say they would support a short-term increase in the number of troops in Iraq. Polls have consistently shown national support for such an option at less than 20 percent over the past year. The rate of support for a surge in Iraq among voters in Utah - which though vastly conservative has sent fewer service members to fight in the nation's current wars than most other states - is twice as high, according to the poll. Utahns continue to support Bush personally, with 56 percent rating the president's performance in the White House as "excellent" or "good" in the Tribune poll, which has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points, according to Mason-Dixon Polling & Research Inc. Nationwide approval for Bush has fluctuated between 30 percent and 40 percent in various polls over the past month. But a White House spokesman noted that Bush "doesn't govern by polls," directing The Tribune to the president's comments to reporters on Dec. 20. "I'm often asked about public opinion," Bush said. "Of course, I want public opinion to support the efforts. I understand that. But I also understand the consequences of failure." But Bill King, a Salt Lake City resident who also participated in The Tribune survey, said Bush is the failure. King said he had "skeptical support" for the president's decision to go to war in Iraq. Now, King believes, Bush is responsible for mismanaging a war that has cost more than 3,000 American lives. "He's a crook," King said. And that, he said, is an opinion he's hearing more often among friends, acquaintances and co-workers these days. mlaplante@sltrib.com

Revealed: Israel plans nuclear strike on IranUzi Mahnaimi, New York and Sarah Baxter, Washington
Sunday Times (Of London)

ISRAEL has drawn up secret plans to destroy Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities with tactical nuclear weapons.
Two Israeli air force squadrons are training to blow up an Iranian facility using low-yield nuclear “bunker-busters”, according to several Israeli military sources.
The attack would be the first with nuclear weapons since 1945, when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Israeli weapons would each have a force equivalent to one-fifteenth of the Hiroshima bomb.
Under the plans, conventional laser-guided bombs would open “tunnels” into the targets. “Mini-nukes” would then immediately be fired into a plant at Natanz, exploding deep underground to reduce the risk of radioactive fallout.
“As soon as the green light is given, it will be one mission, one strike and the Iranian nuclear project will be demolished,” said one of the sources.
The plans, disclosed to The Sunday Times last week, have been prompted in part by the Israeli intelligence service Mossad’s assessment that Iran is on the verge of producing enough enriched uranium to make nuclear weapons within two years.
Israeli military commanders believe conventional strikes may no longer be enough to annihilate increasingly well-defended enrichment facilities. Several have been built beneath at least 70ft of concrete and rock. However, the nuclear-tipped bunker-busters would be used only if a conventional attack was ruled out and if the United States declined to intervene, senior sources said.
Israeli and American officials have met several times to consider military action. Military analysts said the disclosure of the plans could be intended to put pressure on Tehran to halt enrichment, cajole America into action or soften up world opinion in advance of an Israeli attack.
Some analysts warned that Iranian retaliation for such a strike could range from disruption of oil supplies to the West to terrorist attacks against Jewish targets around the world.
Israel has identified three prime targets south of Tehran which are believed to be involved in Iran’s nuclear programme:
Natanz, where thousands of centrifuges are being installed for uranium enrichment
A uranium conversion facility near Isfahan where, according to a statement by an Iranian vice-president last week, 250 tons of gas for the enrichment process have been stored in tunnels
A heavy water reactor at Arak, which may in future produce enough plutonium for a bomb
Israeli officials believe that destroying all three sites would delay Iran’s nuclear programme indefinitely and prevent them from having to live in fear of a “second Holocaust”.
The Israeli government has warned repeatedly that it will never allow nuclear weapons to be made in Iran, whose president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has declared that “Israel must be wiped off the map”.
Robert Gates, the new US defence secretary, has described military action against Iran as a “last resort”, leading Israeli officials to conclude that it will be left to them to strike.
Israeli pilots have flown to Gibraltar in recent weeks to train for the 2,000-mile round trip to the Iranian targets. Three possible routes have been mapped out, including one over Turkey.
Air force squadrons based at Hatzerim in the Negev desert and Tel Nof, south of Tel Aviv, have trained to use Israel’s tactical nuclear weapons on the mission. The preparations have been overseen by Major General Eliezer Shkedi, commander of the Israeli air force.
Sources close to the Pentagon said the United States was highly unlikely to give approval for tactical nuclear weapons to be used. One source said Israel would have to seek approval “after the event”, as it did when it crippled Iraq’s nuclear reactor at Osirak with airstrikes in 1981.
Scientists have calculated that although contamination from the bunker-busters could be limited, tons of radioactive uranium compounds would be released.
The Israelis believe that Iran’s retaliation would be constrained by fear of a second strike if it were to launch its Shehab-3 ballistic missiles at Israel.
However, American experts warned of repercussions, including widespread protests that could destabilise parts of the Islamic world friendly to the West.
Colonel Sam Gardiner, a Pentagon adviser, said Iran could try to close the Strait of Hormuz, the route for 20% of the world’s oil.
Some sources in Washington said they doubted if Israel would have the nerve to attack Iran. However, Dr Ephraim Sneh, the deputy Israeli defence minister, said last month: “The time is approaching when Israel and the international community will have to decide whether to take military action against Iran.”

Here comes the terabyte hard drive
By Michael Kanellos:

From CNet
Last year, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies predicted hard-drive companies would announce 1 terabyte drives by the end of 2006. Hitachi was only off by a few days.
The company said on Thursday that it will come out with a 3.5-inch-diameter 1 terabyte drive for desktops in the first quarter, then follow up in the second quarter with 3.5-inch terabyte drives for digital video recorders, bundled with software called Audio-Visual Storage Manager for easier retrieval of data, and corporate storage systems.
The Deskstar 7K1000 will cost $399 when it comes out. That comes to about 40 cents a gigabyte. Hitachi will also come out with a similar 750GB drive. Rival Seagate Technology will come out with a 1 terabyte drive in the first half of 2007. The two companies, along with others, will tout their new drives at the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and will show off hybrid hard drives, as well.
A terabyte is a trillion bytes, or a million megabytes, or 1,000 gigabytes, as measured by the hard-drive industry. (There are actually two conventions for calculating megabytes, but this is how the drive industry counts it.) As a reference, the print collection in the Library of Congress comes to about 10 terabytes of information, according to the How Much Information study from U.C. Berkeley. The report also found that 400,000 terabytes of e-mail get produced per year. About 50,000 trees would be necessary to create enough paper to hold a terabyte of information, according to the report.
Who needs this sort of storage capacity? You will, eventually, said Doug Pickford, director of market and product strategy at Hitachi. Demand for data storage capacity at corporations continues to grow, and it shows no sign of abating. A single terabyte drive takes up less space than four 250GB drives, which lets IT managers conserve on computing room real estate. The drive can hold about 330,000 3MB photos or 250,000 MP3s, according to Hitachi's math.
Consumers, meanwhile, are gobbling up more drive capacity because of content like video. An hour of standard video takes up about 1GB, while an hour of high-definition video sucks up 4GB, Pickford said.
Consumers, though, tend to be skeptical of ever needing more storage capacity.
"We heard that when we brought out 1 gigabyte drives," Pickford said.
The boost in capacity for desktop drives comes in part through the introduction of perpendicular recording technology to 3.5-inch-diameter drives. In perpendicular drives, data can be stored in vertical columns, rather than on a single plane. Drive makers have already released notebook drives, which sport smaller 2.5-inch-diameter drives, with perpendicular recording. The 1 terabyte drives will be Hitachi's first 3.5-inch drives with perpendicular recording.

Currently, Hitachi sells 3.5-inch drives that hold 500GB of data, while Seagate has come out with a 750GB data drive.
Drive makers convert to perpendicular recording when the need for areal density, the measure of how much data can be crammed into a square inch, passes 125 gigabits. The terabyte drive (and the 750GB drive) can hold 148 gigabits per square inch, or 148 billion bits. Hitachi's previous 3.5-inch drives maxed out at 115 gigabits per square inch.
The hard drive turned 50 last year, and over the past five decades data capacity has increased at a fairly regular and rapid pace. The first drive, which came with the RAMAC computer, weighed about a ton and held 5MB of data.
Hard-drive scientists say that increases in capacity will continue because of technologies like heat-assisted recording and patterned media.
Copyright ©1995-2007 CNET Networks, Inc. All rights reserved.

The Choice

Andrew Sullivan

I cannot have been the only one to have spent the Christmas break wrestling with the central question we have to answer in 2007: what to do in Iraq. The more you ponder it, the harder a call it is. It seems to me we have to leave behind recriminations against the Bush administration. History will damn this president sufficiently. There is no need for us to pile on now. The question is simply: what is in the best interests, first, of the United States and second, of Iraq? And yes: the American priority is clear. A serious foreign policy places national interest first and foremost in its judgment.
One option is to plow forward with this president, a new defense secretary and a "surge". By a surge, I mean a serious commitment of 50,000 combat troops to try and pacify a raging civil war - in Baghdad for starters. The point of such an operation is to do what should have been done almost four years ago: maintain the order necessary for any halfway peaceful transition to normalcy in Iraq. The drawback here is twofold. The first is that it really is too late. The civil war has gone well past the point of no return. Pacification of the entire country may well not render any of the parties more eager to sacrifice for a national democracy. American casualties could surge along with troop numbers, with domestic opinion already sharply hostile to continuing the war. The American political system could itself buckle under the strain - along with the military.
The second and graver problem is that any such surge would, at any moment, require the U.S. to side with one of the factions in Iraq and so embroil us in the Shia-Sunni civil war that is spreading throughout the region. That strikes me as a terrible risk. We are already targeted by terrorists simply for our freedom. To be targeted for being pro-Shi'a or pro-Sunni would add another layer of risk to the American public.
The alternative is withdrawal. Many will call this a defeat. In many ways, it is. The attempt to remake the Middle East on our terms and on our own schedule has been revealed in retrospect as pure folly. The core goals of the Iraq war - to disarm Saddam and remove him from power - have been accomplished. Iraq is no longer a potential source of WMDs - just of suicide bombers and terrorists. Saddam is dead. It seems clear to me that the deep trauma of the Saddam years - an unimaginable hell to those of us who have experienced nothing like it - needs time to resolve itself. It may even need a civil war to resolve itself.
The risks of withdrawal are also obvious: it would doubtless lead to genocide and ethnic cleansing on a hideously cruel scale. It may unleash a regional sectarian war with unknowable consequences. It is very difficult for any president to unleash such disorder on a global scale. Except, of course, this president has already unleashed such disorder as deliberate policy, and stood by as chaos spread.
I'll wait to hear what the president has to offer in detail before making a clear decision in my own mind. But my view right now is that we should withdraw most combat troops by the middle of this year; and leave a remaining force in the Kurdish region and along the Iraq-Turkey border. Protecting the fledgling democracy in Kurdistan and reassuring Turkey should be our top priorities. This will force Iraqi indigenous forces to come up with their own leader, a man who has real power and a capacity to restore order, however brutally. We may get another dictator. In fact, we may have witnessed his unofficial swearing-in at Saddam's execution: "Moktada! Moktada! Moktada!" So be it. The current chaos ties the U.S. down in a hideously tightening vise. We have to change the dynamic and actually do something we can accomplish. We cannot win this civil war for any side, and we shouldn't. We can, however, withdraw.
My own view is that withdrawal might even have some beneficial consequences. It will force Iran and the Sunni powers to intervene either to foment war or to stymie it. It could well unleash turmoil in Iran, and give Tehran a huge headache that will give it an incentive to deal with the world at large. I do not believe that Ahmadinejad will regard al-Sadr as a stable partner. Crucially, withdrawal could change the narrative of this war. So far, the narrative has been the one scripted by bin Laden: Islam versus the West. Thanks to Zarqawi, the narrative could soon become: Islam against itself. That is the real struggle here, masked by Western enmeshment. By getting out of Iraq now - decisively, swiftly, and candidly - we could actually gain in the long war. At some point, the chaos could force Iran to the negotiating table for fear of the massive instability on its doorstep. So Iraq could become the key to Iran after all.
The moral cost of withdrawal is huge. We should do all we can to provide amnesty for any Iraqis who have been loyal to us. (It does not surprise me that we shamefully haven't. This is the Bush administration.) But the moral cost of plowing on is also exponential. It may merely delay the day of reckoning. It risks sending young Americans to die in order for a president to save face, not in order to win. The truth is: we have lost this battle, if not the war. I am still inclined to believe such a loss was avoidable. The amazing restraint of the Shia for so long, and the enthusiasm for elections, revealed the potential in Iraq for a breakthrough. But this president threw it away. There is no getting around this, I'm afraid. It is reality. And if we do not get out by June, I fear an even worse one.

America Full Filled

Paul Theroux

NY Times

AMERICAN crowing is harmless enough, but the announcement this year that the United States population had reached 300 million, had (to my ear) the unmistakable growl of a boast. It was as though the colossal agglomeration of people amounted to another great score in our love affair with bigness.
The news gave me no pleasure. I just felt sad, while at the same time hating my wistful mood. Fogeydom is the last bastion of the bore and reminiscence is its anthem. As William Burroughs noted, in the 1950s, What I want for dinner is a bass fished in Lake Huron in 1920.
It is futile to want the old days back, but that doesn’t mean one should ignore the lessons of the visitable past — say, when there were half that number of people in the country. In some important ways life really was better then because of it. The overcrowded, much noisier, more hectic, intensely urbanized and vertical world of the present can seem hostile and hallucinatory to anyone who knew America in a simpler form.
In my lifetime the population has doubled. I’m glad I grew up when the number of Americans was so much smaller. How does one explain to anyone under 50, or to the grateful unfazed immigrant from an overpopulated nation, that this was once a country of enormous silence and ordinariness — empty spaces not just in the Midwest and the rural South but in the outer suburbs of New England, like the one I grew up in, citified on one margin and thinning to woods on the other. That roomier and simpler America shaped me by giving me and others of my generation a love for space and a taste for solitude.
Talking fondly, and sadly, of the past, it is impossible to avoid the elegiac tone of Edmund Gosse in “Father and Son.” In this, one of my favorite books, Gosse recalls the richness and beauty of the English shores of his youth, and the rock pools he had delved into with his father, who was a naturalist (and a crank). Gosse writes of “the soft and radiant forms, sea anemones, seaweeds, shells, fishes, which had inhabited them, undisturbed since the creation of the world,” and then speaks of their violation by collectors: “There is nothing, now, where in our days there was so much.” Fifty years before, “on the coast of Devonshire and Cornwall, where the limestone at the water’s edge is wrought into crevices and hollows, the tide line was, like Keats’s Grecian vase, ‘a still unravished bride of quietness.’ ”
Even in its heyday, Medford, Mass., was never compared to a Grecian urn. But it is impossible for me not to feel a sense of grief when I reflect on how my part of Webster Street — the house footprint, indeed the whole block where I was born — is now buried under Interstate 93. Before that road was put through and Medford Square was still important, the Mystic River linked us to the world, and High Street rejoiced in the same sinuous contours it had in April 1775, when Paul Revere rode down it at midnight, warning of the British attack.
I grew up in a country of sudden and consoling lulls, which gave life a kind of pattern and punctuation, unknown now. It was typified by the somnolence of Sundays, when no stores were open. There were empty parts of the day, of the week, of the year; times when there were no people on the sidewalks, no traffic in the streets, no audible human voices, now and then no sound at all. In this hushed world, a bumblebee was a physical presence, the sound of a cicada could dominate an August afternoon.
Nowhere was solitude more available than on a long drive, especially at night; and it seems to me that my generation was defined by the open road, and the accompanying hope that a promise lay at the end of it. The almost trance-like experience of driving down the soft tunnel of a dark highway at night was something I relished. At most, there would be the distant red lights of a car far ahead, and always the murmur of the glowing radio, the hiss of the tires and, at a certain speed on narrower roads, the fizzing past of telephone poles with their rhythmic whiplash.
Late at night, in most places I knew, there was almost no traffic and driving, a meditative activity, could cast a spell. Behind the wheel, gliding along, I was keenly aware of being an American in America, on a road that was also metaphorical, making my way through life, unhindered, developing ideas, making decisions, liberated by the flight through this darkness and silence. With less light pollution, the night sky was different, too — starrier, more daunting, more beautiful.
I have not seen roads or night skies like that for many years. As Gosse said about the ring of living beauty of the English shore, “All this is long over and done with.”
A longing for a simpler world, for a glimpse of the past, is one of the motives in travel. But the rest of the world has fared no better in terms of population pressure, and in many places it is much worse, even catastrophic. The population of Malawi 40 years ago was small and sustainable. None of us Peace Corps volunteers there at that time thought in terms of rescuing the country but only of helping to improve it. Now Malawi can’t feed itself; it’s one of the many countries that people wish to flee, renowned for being hopeless, unjustly publicized as an enormous orphanage of desperate tots, needing to be saved, devoid of pride, lost without us. The notion that a pop singer (back then it would have been Elvis) would breeze through and scoop up a child in a condescending gesture of rescue was unthinkable then.
In India a few months ago, as I was leaving my hotel in Chennai, I noticed a hotel employee shadowing me. He warned me that the sidewalks were so packed with people I would be swallowed up and stifled. He was right. And I was unable to cross the main street in Bangalore, a leafy city of under a million people in 1973 and now a hectically improvised sprawl of seven million. Mumbai’s population of nearly 20 million rivals that of São Paulo, Brazil, and Lagos, Nigeria — nightmare cities.
Travel, except in almost inaccessible places, is no longer the answer to finding solitude. And this contraction of space on a shrinking planet suggests a time, not far off, when there will be no remoteness: nowhere to become lost, nothing to be discovered, no escape, no palpable concept of distance, no peculiarity of dress — frightening thoughts for a traveler.
Yet some of the most populous countries manage to be habitable because they are societies with strict, and civilized, codes of conduct. India, China and Japan are convenient examples, but I would include many African and Middle Eastern countries, too. The vindictive stereotype of the Muslim as a xenophobe does not tally with my experience of wandering in the Muslim world, where I have been treated hospitably, welcomed by strangers as “dayf al Rahman,” a guest of the Merciful One.
We are passing through a confused period of aggression and fear, characterized by our confrontational government, the decline of diplomacy, a pugnacious foreign policy and a settled belief that the surest way to get people to tell the truth is to torture them. (And by the way, “water boarding” was a torture technique at the worst of the Khmer Rouge prisons.) It is no wonder we have begun to squint at strangers. This is a corrosive situation in a country where more and more people, most of them strangers, are a feature of daily life. Americans as a people I believe to be easygoing, compassionate, not looking for a fight. But surely I am not the only one who has noticed that we are ruder, more offhand, readier to take offense, a nation of shouters and blamers.
Yes, it is just silly and fogeyish to yearn for that simpler and smaller world of the past. But one could ask for the past’s better manners, the instinctive decorum that has served to mitigate conflict. One of the lessons of travel is that, though half the world is wearing T-shirts and sneakers, they manage to live in overpopulated cities because they have not abandoned their traditional modes of politeness. These grace notes, which make traveling in crowded countries bearable, are a lesson to us in a mobbed and jostling world.
Paul Theroux is the author of the forthcoming novel “The Elephanta Suite.”

Huge Arctic ice break discovered

Scientists have discovered that an enormous ice shelf broke off an island in the Canadian Arctic last year, in what could be sign of global warming.
It is said to be the largest break in 25 years, casting an ice floe with an area of 66 sq km (25 square miles).
It occurred in August 2005 but was only recently detected on satellite images.
The chunk of ice bigger than Manhattan could wreak havoc if it moves into oil drilling regions and shipping lanes next summer, scientists warned.
For something that large to move that quickly is quite amazing Luke Copland, University of Ottawa
"The Arctic is all frozen up for the winter and it's stuck in the sea ice about 50km (30 miles) off the coast," said Luke Copland, an assistant professor at the University of Ottawa.
"The risk is that next summer, as that sea ice melts, this large ice island can then move itself around off the coast and one potential path for it is to make its way westward toward the Beaufort Sea where there is lots of oil and gas exploration, oil rigs and shipping."
'Quite amazing'
The ice break was initially undetected due to the remoteness of the northern coast of Ellesmere island, which is about 800km (500 miles) from the North Pole.
Satellite images showed the 15km (9mile) crack, then the ice floating about 1km (0.6 miles) from the coast within about an hour, said Mr Copland, a specialist in glaciers and ice masses.
"You could stand at one edge and not see the other side, and for something that large to move that quickly is quite amazing," he said.
Mr Copland said a combination of low accumulations of sea ice around the edges of the ice mass, as well as the Arctic's warmest temperatures on record, contributed to the break.
The region was 3C (5.4F) above average in the summer of 2005, he said.
Ice shelves in Canada's far north have shrunk by as much as 90% since 1906.
"It's hard to tie one event to climate change, but when you look at the longer-term trend, the bigger picture, we've lost a lot of ice shelves on northern Ellesmere in the past century.
"This is that continuing and this is the biggest one in the last 25 years," he said.
Story from BBC NEWS: