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Pope Benedict's Timely Prayer Intentions

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As the U.S. looks to swear in the most radically pro-choice president in history, and as India mourns over 170 victims of a terrorist killing spree, the Pope, in this month of December, asks us to pray:

that, faced by the growing expansion of the culture of violence and death, the Church may courageously promote the culture of life through all her apostolic and missionary activities.

Lest you think this is reactive, the Pope sends these intentions to the Apostleship of Prayer before the start of the calendar year. The 2009 intentions can be found here.

This month's missionary intention is:

that especially in mission countries, Christians may show through gestures of brotherliness that the Child born in the grotto in Bethlehem is the luminous Hope of the world.
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Terror in Mumbai

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The WSJ reconstructs the terror attacks in Mumbai based on eyewitness accounts.

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Two reviews

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Pankaj Mishra:

As the spiritual leader of six million people, the Dalai Lama can be credited with a significant renunciation of the authority of tradition—of the conventional politics of national self-interest as well as of religion. Such is his influence that a curt decree from him in the past weeks could have triggered a massive, probably uncontrollable, uprising in Tibet. Yet he continued to reject violence as unethical and counterproductive, even threatening to resign from his position as head of the government-in-exile, in Dharamsala, if Tibetan violence against the Chinese persisted. Increasingly, he has been forced to walk a difficult rhetorical line, accusing China of “cultural genocide” while still supporting its stewardship of the Olympic Games. He has consistently disapproved of even relatively modest attempts to influence the Chinese government, including hunger strikes and economic boycotts. In his view, Tibet needs good neighborly relations with China: “One nation’s problems can no longer be satisfactorily solved by itself alone,” he has said. He bravely promotes “universal responsibility” to people who want to be citizens of their own country before they start thinking about the universe.

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“The more he gave himself to the world,” Iyer writes, the more Tibetans have come to feel “like natural children bewildered by the fact that their father has adopted three others.” The Tibetan novelist Jamyang Norbu complains that Tibetan support groups and the government-in-exile have become “directionless” in trying to “reorient their objectives around such other issues as the environment, world peace, religious freedom, cultural preservation, human rights—everything but the previous goal of Tibetan independence.”

Avidly embracing the liberating ideas of the secular metropolis, the Dalai Lama resembles the two emblematic types who have shaped the modern age, for better and for worse—the provincial fleeing ossified custom and the refugee fleeing totalitarianism. Even so, his critics may have a point: the Dalai Lama’s citizenship in the global cosmopolis seems to come at a cost to his dispossessed people.

As China grows unassailable, it is easy to become pessimistic about Tibet, and to imagine its spiritual leader becoming increasingly prey to fatalism. The Dalai Lama’s retreat from the exclusivist claims of ancestral religion and the nation-state can seem the reflex of someone who, since he first copied out his predecessor’s prophecy, has helplessly watched his country’s landmarks disappear. The bracing virtue of Iyer’s thoughtful essay, however, is that it allows us to imagine the Dalai Lama as something of an intellectual and spiritual adventurer, exploring fresh sources of individual identity and belonging in the newly united world.

Louis Bayard:

In the warmth of the Dalai Lama's bespectacled gaze, we can more easily forget the less attractive aspects of his thinking -- his endorsement of nuclear weapons in India, his acceptance of contributions from Japanese terrorists. We can also, if we're really drunk on him, give him credit for changing the world.

But politics is not simply an extension of personality, and the fact remains that, under the Dalai Lama's watch, one of the world's great centers of Buddhism has been, in Iyer's words, "all but wiped off the map."...

Not all this failure can be laid at one man's door. You could even argue that the Tibetan cause was doomed from the moment Nixon pressed flesh with Mao. Or still earlier, if we are to take seriously Buddhist principles of karmic retribution. But when Iyer asks the Dalai Lama if Tibet's sufferings are a result of its "collective karma," he is greeted with gnomic fragments: "It's complicated ... mysterious." Which the bedazzled Iyer takes to mean that the answer "belonged to worlds I wasn't in a position to enter or understand." I take it to mean that the Dalai Lama lacks a good answer. (How many mountebanks have plied the same line: I could explain, but you wouldn't understand.) And perhaps it doesn't matter if he has the right answers anymore. The more vaguely he speaks, the more we fawn on him.

After all, he asks so little of us. For Western audiences, at least, the message boils down to the equivalent of a Benetton ad: Be nice, live happy. No profession of creed. No radical redistribution of income. (Richard Gere did pay for the bathrooms outside the Dalai Lama's main temple.) Not much self-sacrifice. (Feel free to wave your "Free Tibet" banner at the Chinese Embassy.) Not even much in the way of guilt for the 6 million or so Tibetans under China's yoke.

Hell, the Dalai Lama has forgiven China, so why shouldn't we? To hear him tell it: "Our real enemies are our own habitual tendencies toward thinking in terms of enemies ... Our terrors are of our own creation. The world itself is not so frightening, if only we can see it correctly."

With all due respect to His Holiness -- and with all due apologies for my Western bias -- this is horseshit. And something very close to an insult to those who have lived and died in terror, the Dalai Lama's compatriots in particular. Would he have dared offer this counsel to the 1 million Tibetans who were directly or indirectly killed by invading Chinese? To the countless others who were raped, sterilized, electroshocked? What about those Tibetan parents who were forced to applaud while their children were executed? Would they be expected to believe their sufferings were merely illusory and passing?

Game, set, match Bayard.

P.S. Read the last sentence I quoted from Mishra in light of the last paragraph I quoted from Bayard.

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Progress: from Malaria to Diabetes

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If you doubt that history has a strong affinity for irony, behold:

The forgotten diseases of the poor world are finally getting some attention. Warren Buffett’s $31 billion donation to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is just the latest and most spectacular milestone in an increasingly aggressive campaign against infectious diseases, including tuberculosis, malaria, and HIV/AIDS. But even as the rich world finally grapples with this challenge, a new and more menacing threat to the developing world’s health is gathering.

Chronic ailments such as diabetes, cancer, and heart and respiratory disease are hitting poor countries faster and harder than expected. Perversely, economic growth and development is hastening the arrival of rich-world diseases before poor countries’ health systems can prepare.

Revolutionary changes in transportation, advertising, and food production have conspired to alter lifestyles abruptly in many parts of the developing world. Popular Western junk food, cheap cigarettes, and a flood of new automobiles mean that many citizens of poor countries eat worse and exercise less than they did only a decade ago. The movement of people from the countryside to more lucrative jobs in the cities has exacerbated the trend. Public health awareness in most poor countries hasn’t caught up. This new affluence means that the poorest countries are now fighting a two-front war on disease.

Diabetes—a disease usually associated with affluent societies—is particularly dangerous. In countries with weak health infrastructures, it is anything but the manageable condition it can be in the rich world. A person in Mozambique who requires insulin injections, for example, will probably live no more than a year. In Mali, the average life span after onset is 30 months. According to the International Diabetes Federation, the number of people around the world suffering from the disease has jumped in the past two decades from 30 million to 230 million. Almost 40 million Chinese over the age of 20 have diabetes. Neighboring India ranks second with an estimated 30 million, or 6 percent of its population. In some countries in the Caribbean and the Middle East, 12 to 20 percent of the population is diabetic. Seven of the 10 countries with the most diabetics are in the developing world.

From the same article comes a staggering nugget:

In China, 300 million men smoke cigarettes and 160 million adults are hypertensive. Many of them will contract chronic diseases at young ages, and the economic consequences will be profound. China alone lost an estimated $18 billion in national income in 2005 to heart disease, stroke, and diabetes. The cumulative loss between 2005 and 2015 will likely be $556 billion, a staggering sum for an economy that is still modernizing.

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One of the awesomest stories of the year

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Montana mom hunts down al-Qaeda on the Internet.

For four years, she has alternated her day jobs of mother and magistrate in the mountain state of Montana with a night-time role as a hunter of terrorists. Mrs Rossmiller first turned freelance spy after September 11.

Donning a range of virtual disguises, she uses her functional, self-taught Arabic, and customised software that masks her true identity and whereabouts, to navigate into radical internet chat rooms frequented by real terrorists or any fanatic with a computer and a grudge.
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In her best known case, she secured a life sentence for a treacherous soldier, Pte Ryan Anderson, who was trying to transmit the weaknesses of the M1 Abrams tank to al-Qa'eda. It was when she was called to give evidence in that case that her cover was blown. "I didn't have the choice of remaining anonymous," she said, despite earlier pledges from the authorities that her name would never be made public.

On many occasions she has encountered terrorists overseas. Three times she has lured young British Islamists into unmasking themselves, including one group in Liverpool. The FBI passed the material to British intelligence, after which she heard nothing more.

She brushes off the possible threat to her and her family from terrorist reprisal. She pointed out that in Montana's little towns, strangers stick out and the locals are armed. "There have to be risks taken, otherwise you can't get anything done."

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Iran

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Mark Steyn, from this Sunday's Sun-Times:

You know what's great fun to do if you're on, say, a flight from Chicago to New York and you're getting a little bored? Why not play being President Ahmadinejad? Stand up and yell in a loud voice, "I've got a bomb!" Next thing you know the air marshal will be telling people, "It's OK, folks. Nothing to worry about. He hasn't got a bomb." And then the second marshal would say, "And even if he did have a bomb it's highly unlikely he'd ever use it." And then you threaten to kill the two Jews in row 12 and the stewardess says, "Relax, everyone. That's just a harmless rhetorical flourish." And then a group of passengers in rows 4 to 7 point out, "Yes, but it's entirely reasonable of him to have a bomb given the threatening behavior of the marshals and the cabin crew."
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