Monday, April 21, 2008
Saturday, April 19, 2008
The Divorce Generation Grows Up
Grant High School's class of '82 were raised on 'The Brady Bunch'—while their own families were falling apart. These are their stories—in their words.
Trigger Happy
Nor are they "bitter." In 2006, 36% of gun owners said they were "very happy," while 9% were "not too happy." Meanwhile, only 30% of people without guns were very happy, and 16% were not too happy.
In 1996, gun owners spent about 15% less of their time than nonowners feeling "outraged at something somebody had done." It's easy enough in certain precincts to caricature armed Americans as an angry and miserable fringe group. But it just isn't true. The data say that the people in the approximately 40 million American households with guns are generally happier than those people in households that don't have guns.
The gun-owning happiness gap exists on both sides of the political aisle. Gun-owning Republicans are more likely than nonowning Republicans to be very happy (46% to 37%). Democrats with guns are slightly likelier than Democrats without guns to be very happy as well (32% to 29%). Similarly, holding income constant, one still finds that gun owners are happiest.
...A bit of evidence that self-reliance is at work among gun owners comes from the General Social Survey. It asked whether one agrees with the statement, "Those in need have to take care of themselves." In 2004, gun owners were 10 percentage points more likely than nonowners to agree (60% to 50%).
That response is not evidence that gun owners only care about themselves, however. In 2002, they were more likely to give money to charity than people without guns (83% to 75%). This charity gap doesn't reflect their somewhat higher incomes. Gun owners were also more likely to give in other ways, such as donating blood. Are gun owners unsentimental? In 2004, they were more likely than those without guns to strongly agree that they would "endure all things" for the one they loved (45% to 37%).
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Friday, April 18, 2008
The New E-spionage Threat
- China's Response to BusinessWeek
- Interactive Graphic: Anatomy of a Spear-Phish
- Podcast: Behind the Cover
- An Evolving Crisis
- BusinessWeek TV: New Cyber Threat
- Video: Defending the Homeland
- Warning About Certain Internet Addresses
- CERT: Online Attacks Threaten U.S. Financial Institutions (.pdf)
- CERT: U.S. Defense Contractors and Government Employee Targets (.pdf)
The Fiscal Consequences of Divorce
Families that stay together, save together. That's the conclusion of a new study indicating that U.S. taxpayers are forking out at least $112 billion annually, and over $1 trillion dollars per decade, on divorces and unwed childbearing. This estimate is based on federal, state, and local government programs and lost tax revenue.
Says the study's principal author, Ben Scafidi of Georgia State University: "These costs are due to increased taxpayer expenditures for anti-poverty, criminal justice and education programs, and through lower levels of taxes paid by individuals whose adult productivity has been negatively affected by increased childhood poverty caused by family fragmentation." Similar work by Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation has found that children who grow up in fatherless homes are far more likely to have behavior problems, drug abuse, high school drop out rates, and to be in poverty as adults.
What can government do? The Institute for American Values, which underwrote the Scafidi research, recommends modest taxpayer funds to support efforts to decrease divorce rates and unwed childbearing. That may be a waste of money, as these are the types of activities best undertaken by churches and private support networks. The best hope is that the lesson will be taken to heart by the media, politicians and educators, reversing some of the casualness with which divorces are sought and granted. In the 1970s and '80s, a school of thought maintained that breaking up troubled marriages was a win-win. Feminists argued it was a form of women's liberation, the children were better off, etc. But a steady drumbeat of research has shown that in most cases almost everyone is rendered worse off by divorce and separation. That includes taxpayers.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Not just Bono's wife
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| CREDIT: Mike Hutchings, Reuters |
| Ali Hewson and Bono visit a rural clinic in Lesotho, one of several African countries that produce a line of fair trade organic clothing. Africans would much rather work than accept charity, says Ms. Hewson, wife of the Irish rock star. |
"I don't want to end my life feeling I've only looked after myself, that everything I did was to protect myself. I want, when I die, to believe that I've achieved what I was supposed to achieve, that is, to help other people in whatever way I could."
Ali Hewson
It was the first morning of the rest of her life. Dark-haired, dark-eyed 12-year-old Alison Stewart no sooner arrived at Mount Temple Comprehensive School in Dublin than Paul Hewson, a grade above her, spotted the new girl.
"He worked very hard at being the heartthrob," she recently told an English journalist.
"He came up to me within the first day and asked did I know where his class should be going? It was just an excuse to talk to me, and I thought, 'What an eejit.'
"I remember that on the fourth day of school, I saw him walking across the courtyard and it was, bing! That is the guy for me."
For a year, he pursued while Ali, determined not to be just another of his girls, was cool. But the next year, Paul's mother died suddenly of an aneurism. That year, Ali, 13, helped Paul -- from washing his clothes and cooking his food to keeping track of his house keys and walking with him to school.
They began dating in November 1976, when Ali was 15. Paul is now world-famous as the Irish rock group U2's lead man and humanitarian-at-large, Bono.
He told talk-show host Larry King years later: "I joined U2 and I started going out with Ali, so it was a good month."
When Ali was 21, and Bono was 22, they married. They have four children, aged six to 18, whose names reflect religious values and the strong Christian theme in U2's music: daughters Jordan and Memphis Eve, and sons Elijah Bob Patricius Guggi Q (partly named for friends) and John Abraham.
"It is hard, sometimes. I hate being called 'Bono's wife,' and being identified just as that," she said in 1993. She has avoided public attention "I'm very protective of my kids, and of my life with Bono. It has worked well up to now, the sort of life (in which) I can go out and do the normal sort of stuff, and he can take all the heat. I'd rather work behind the scenes."
Over the years, she has left obscurity and 'Mrs. Bono' behind. Her work started after U2 joined rocker Bob Geldof in his first Live Aid concert to raise money for starving Ethiopians.
"The children out there had nothing, nothing, yet they seemed to be really alive spiritually. For me, the culture shock was in coming home, back to supermarkets full of food and children who seemed spoiled, who had everything, and yet were so starved of spirituality and any understanding of what life was about."
She gave up her dream of a four-year nursing degree to keep the relationship strong as Bono and U2 topped charts worldwide.
In 1989, at age 28, she graduated with a degree in social and political science, giving birth to their first child, daughter, Jordan, two weeks after her final exams.
Though the Hewsons have homes around the world, they strive to raise normal, unspoiled children in their large Killiney home in south County Dublin where they overlook the Irish Sea.
Being a single mother while U2 toured for months, even years, "is as hard as it is for any single parent," she said. "But then, the difference is that if something goes completely wrong, I can just phone Bono. He's probably one of the best psychologists I know. He always comes through for me."
Being a mother, Ms. Hewson said, started her involvement with Greenpeace's campaign against contamination by England's Sellafield facility, which lies 200 kilometres across the Irish Sea. To protest building THORP, a nuclear reprocessing centre at Sellafield, she organized a 1992 stunt in which U2 and Greenpeace donned radiation suits and transported drums of "contaminated mud" from the Irish Sea to the nuclear site perimeter.
In 1993, seven years after the Soviet nuclear power plant, Chernobyl, exploded in Ukraine, she made her first trip to Belarus, where 70 per cent of the contamination fell.
There, she said, four million children suffer from leukemia and other cancers and genetic deformities. It was her first of many gruelling 5,600-kilometre trips -- sometimes driving one of many ambulances filled with medical supplies.
She was working for Chernobyl Children's Project, which provides care for children, many of them abandoned, deformed and dying from "Chernobyl AIDS."
Project founder and former Irish presidential candidate Adi Roche has been the driving force for dozens of medical convoys, for thousands of children who recuperate in Ireland, for surgeries and transport of hundreds of dying children from Belarus to actor Paul Newman's camp at Barretstown Castle in County Kildare.
The Hewson-Roche team, and others, spent three weeks in Belarus in 1993 where they filmed in high-radiation exclusion zones to make the award-winning documentary Black Wind, White Land -- Living with Chernobyl.
They filmed children, among them nine-month-old Anna. "Both her legs are short. Both her ears are closed," said Ms. Hewson.
"I just picked her up and it's just one of those things where we bonded." She has been adopted by an Irish family and is Ms. Hewson's goddaughter.
In 1996, Ms. Hewson was part of an Irish aid convoy to Belarus and Western Russia to mark the 10th anniversary of the (April 26, 1986) Chernobyl explosion. Chernobyl's estimated toll ranges from 50 direct deaths and 4,000 eventual deaths to more than 500,000 deaths and nine million people affected.
In 2003, she narrated Chernobyl Heart, a film about the suffering left by Chernobyl, which won an Oscar in 2004 for best documentary.
In 2002, she headed a 1.2 million-postcard protest directed at then-prime minister Tony Blair, Prince Charles and the head of British Nuclear Fuels demanding that Britain close Sellafield because of its failed safety record and periodic nuclear contamination of air and water over decades.
"Sellafield has the potential to be 80 times the size of the Chernobyl accident," she said.
(Britain had to shut down THORP in 2005 after a massive internal leak went undetected for nine months. It plans to reopen this year for another three years, over objections from Ireland, Iceland, Norway and Austria.)
"There are people being born with Down syndrome and higher numbers of leukemia cases on Ireland's east coast," said Ms. Hewson, "but research is not being done into this." Since 9/11, she has noted: "The 75 tonnes of plutonium sitting on its site can't but be at the top of any terrorist's list."
In 2005, she, Bono and New York designers Rogan Gregory and Scott Hahn started a Fair Trade organic clothing label EDUN -- nude spelled backwards to suggest natural and Eden. (The Hewsons are shareholders in an organic food chain called Nude.)
"Bono's biggest impression of the Africans is that they don't want charity. They want trade," says Ms. Hewson. "If you have it made in Africa, you create trade there, you can create jobs there."
"Rich countries subsidize their own agricultural sectors by about $1 billion per day," said Ms. Hewson at EDUN's launch. She cited the $4-billion annual subsidy the U.S. hands its cotton farmers. "Then they flood the market with (cheap) cotton. It's unfair. It's a false economy and just crushes African farmers."
DONNA JACOBS is an Ottawa writer; her e-mail is nnabjacobs@hotmail.com
Saturday, April 12, 2008
Friday, April 11, 2008
Wednesday, April 09, 2008
The Trouble With Brand Hillary
...Hillary Clinton has waged a campaign based, in large measure, on her national security experience. Her so-called "Day One" readiness. Indeed, she says plainly on the campaign trail that "We need a candidate that can go toe-to-toe with John McCain on national security." (Frankly, I think if Democrats join the issue in that way they are fighting on Mr. McCain's home field and going uphill, but that is a discussion for another day.)
Recently the Clinton campaign released a portion Sen. Clinton's White House daily activity logs. These logs provide the first independent means to evaluate her claim that her White House years provided her the relevant national security/commander-in-chief experience to be president.
A preliminary analysis of these logs has begun to reveal Mrs. Clinton's claims of experience to be overstated. If these logs continue to bear out that she is less experienced than she has claimed, she will, at best, be branded as an exaggerator. She then will face an onslaught that will make the Gore and Kerry attacks look like a walk in the park.
On a related point, Mrs. Clinton has been arguing to primary voters that she is more electable than Barack Obama because "she has been vetted fully so there will be no general election surprises." Well, the recently released tax returns appear to undermine this argument as well.
Specifically, these returns demonstrate the former President Clinton made tens of millions of dollars on the speaking circuit and by helping to broker business deals or make introductions around the world. This is his prerogative as a private citizen. What the returns do not tell us, however, is who paid for these speeches; who his clients were/are; whether he can unwind his business relationships (he is being sued by one of his clients for fraud in state court in California); what conflicts of interest or appearances of conflict reside in his seven-year, private-sector career. (Remember the difficulty Geraldine Ferraro's husband created for her candidacy?). A lot more openness and transparency will be required by Bill Clinton before it is known just how vulnerable Hillary Clinton is as a general election candidate.
Still, the Clinton Library has yet to provide the list of its largest donors, or explain how their donations were solicited; as well it is not yet known whether Hillary Clinton played a role in President Clinton's pardon decisions including the 11th-hour pardon of Marc Rich. The Republican National Committee and related advocacy groups will surely allege a coverup if all this is not disclosed before the general election.
Unless all this material is released and vetted fully before the primaries come to an end, Mrs. Clinton is asking Democrats to make a leap of faith that nothing will be revealed in the general election campaign that could prove fatal. From what is available presently, Mrs. Clinton may prove to be the most vulnerable Democratic candidate in the last three election cycles.
Monday, April 07, 2008
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Why Bono is the 'master manipulator'
"It is absurd, if not obscene, that celebrity is a door that such serious issues need to pass through before politicians take note."
-- Bono
Bono, lead man for the famous Irish U2 rock band, took his name from a street sign -- the Dublin hearing aid company "Bono Vox of O'Connell Street."
He shortened it first to "Bono Vox" and then to just "Bono."
Since then, he's gone beyond a "good voice" to pro bono -- Latin for "in the public good."
In 2003, he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and in 2005, he shared the cover of Time magazine with Bill and Melinda Gates as Persons of the Year .
Bono (Paul Hewson), at 47, has become the billion-dollar charity man. The singer/songwriter's trademark leather jacket and vividly-tinted wraparound sunglasses (for his light-sensitive eyes and a bit for his vanity) give him a distinctive presence as he twists the arms of the mighty to fight poverty.
Many celebrities, for example Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, give their own money; the Jolie Pitt Foundation donated $8 million in 2006, including $1 million to Doctors Without Borders. Brad Pitt's Make It Right Foundation aims to rebuild New Orleans' Lower 9th Ward from Hurricane Katrina's devastation.
Bono doesn't give his own money, says University of Waterloo political science professor Andrew F. Cooper. What the musician gives is time and work, his fame and, he says, his "stubbornness" -- digging money out of other people's pockets and out of national treasuries to help Africa and to forgive Third World debt.
Mr. Cooper, in his recently-published anecdote-and quote-rich book Celebrity Diplomacy, has made an excellent study of Bono, the world's No. 1 example of celebrities-turned-diplomat or, in the author's phrase "the Bonoization of diplomacy."
While announcing a $5-billion foreign aid package in 2002, U.S. President George W. Bush said of Bono, who was sitting behind him: "Bono, I appreciate your heart, and to tell you what an influence you've had -- Dick Cheney walked in the Oval Office, he said, '(ultra-conservative Republican Senator) Jesse Helms wants us to listen to Bono's ideas'."
Former president Bill Clinton tells a similar story: "I'll never forget one day during my administration. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers arrives in the Oval Office to announce: 'You know, some guy just came in to see me in jeans and a T-shirt and he just had one name, but he sure was smart. Do you know anything about him'?"
Mr. Cooper, professor and distinguished fellow of the Waterloo-based Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), has studied celebrity diplomats from the early pacesetting Audrey Hepburn and Danny Kaye to dozens of stars and public figures, who include George Clooney, Leonardo DiCaprio, Oprah Winfrey and, of course, Diana, Princess of Wales.
For Bono, it all started in 1984 when U2 played during rocker Bob Geldof's 1984 Band Aid concert for Ethiopian famine relief efforts.
Bono, then 24, and his wife, Ali, went further than those concerts. They went all the way to Wello, Ethiopia, and worked for six weeks at an orphanage.
"You'd wake up in the morning and as the mist would be lifting, you'd see thousands and thousands of people who'd been walking all night to our food station," Bono recounted.
"You'd walk out of your tent and you'd count bodies of dead and abandoned children. Or worse, the father of a child would walk up to you and try to give you his living child and say, 'You take it, because if this is your child, it won't die.'
"My experience there was very hard to forget, but ... I did.
"We went back to our daily life in Ireland and me being in a band, but we'd always hoped we might be able to look at the structure of the problem. There's a certain kind of poverty that is structural, not just misfortune, and so when I heard about this plan to use the millennium as an opportunity to give the poorest countries a chance to start again (with their international debt forgiven), I thought, 'This is major, and it's the right thing to do'."
Bono's charity work is inspired partly from his own story. He grew up in Ireland during "The Troubles" with a Roman Catholic father and a Protestant mother. She died of a brain hemorrhage at her father's funeral when Bono was 14.
Religion drives and sustains him along with a healthy dose of "Catholic guilt." (He, guitarist David Evans "The Edge," and drummer Larry Mullen belonged to a charismatic Christian group called Shalom in their early years.)
He has added skills. "Bono stands out as a master manipulator, unlike his counterpart, Bob Geldof," says Mr. Cooper. The two have often teamed up on world leaders using Bono's smooth-talking good-cop approach to Geldof's rough-edged, scruffy and irreverent bad-cop style. Mr. Cooper calls Mr. Geldof "the antidiplomat."
Brilliantly successful in raising money, Mr. Geldof commandeered a global audience of 1.5 billion who tuned 93 per cent of the world's TVs to one of his benefit concerts. The 15-hour concert and recording raised $100 million.
Mr. Cooper analyses Bono's success.
One, Bono is a wordsmith -- from his musical lyrics to the media sound bites that are music to the journalist's ears.
For example: "It is absurd, if not obscene, that celebrity is a door that such serious issues need to pass through before politicians take note," Bono said. "But there it is. The idea has a force of its own. We're making it louder. Making noise is a job description, really, for a rock star."
(It took Diana, Princess of Wales, to catalyze interest on a treaty to ban landmines. Canada's then-foreign affairs minister Lloyd Axworthy had championed the cause with U.S. activist Jody Williams. She and the International Campaign to Ban Landmines shared the Nobel Peace Prize.)
Two, Bono does his homework -- seeking out, for one, Jeffrey Sachs, Columbia University economy professor and one-man NGO, who gave him a crash course in international debt.
Mr. Sachs was "amply repaid," says Mr. Cooper, when Bono wrote the forward to Mr. Sach's bestselling book The End of Poverty. Mr. Sachs also travelled to Kenya with Angelina Jolie -- another fact-getter in her job as UN High Commissioner for Refugees, which helps 20 million refugees in 120 countries.
Bono joined the London-based group Jubilee 2000 to support "the idea of the poorest countries having their debs to the richest ones cancelled out" and then launched his own foundation, DATA (Debt, AIDS, Trade, Africa.).
Three, he targets pivotal people and (judiciously) throws their words back at them. He also speaks their language. With Jesse Helms, he quoted scripture, describing AIDS as "the leprosy of our age." With U.S. legislators, he talks security and terrorism: "Africa is not the frontline on the war -- but it could be soon."
Four, he mentors other celebrities.
Five, he praises and criticizes. In 2003, he showed up to celebrate Paul Martin's win at the Liberal leadership convention. Two years later, he washed his hands of prime minister Martin for backing down on his promise to raise Canada's foreign aid to 0.7 per cent of GDP.
Where would Mr. Cooper -- if he were a celebrity -- direct his star power?
"Clean water," he answers instantly. "I'm always amazed celebrities don't choose it." One exception is actor Matt Damon, main champion and co-founder of the H2O Africa Foundation (www.h2oafrica.org) whose network of NGOs and corporations builds clean water projects across Africa. Despite Mr. Damon's star status and water's crucial tie-in to poverty, disease and degraded environment, the Damon campaign has had only small-scale accomplishments, says Mr. Cooper. The foundation has found it "hard to translate its work into big clout." Clean water needs "new and more celebrity advocates," he says "diligent and committed personalities to act as its champions." Thus Ottawa-based WaterCan (www.watercan.com), whose honorary president is Margaret Trudeau, "does seem to be filling a gap." Each day, dirty water and lack of sanitation kill 5,000 children in the Third World. Globally, pathogen-infested water infects one in every three people with diseases. The diseases kill 2.2 million of them.
Donna Jacobs is an Ottawa writer; her e-mail address is donnabjacobs@hotmail.com