Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 505

Behold the Mosquito of the Future

A company that’s pioneered the genetic modification of pests like fruit flies and mosquitoes to help control their populations is expanding its operations in Brazil, opening a new factory that it says could protect 300,000 people from mosquitoes, a dangerous disease vector. The BBC reports:

Small-scale studies in parts of Brazil, Panama and the Cayman Islands suggest engineered sterile mosquitoes can reduce wild insect populations by more than 90% when released into the wild.

The studies were carried out by the only company currently trialling GM insects, Oxitec, based in Abingdon, Oxfordshire. Oxitec, which was spun out from the University of Oxford, was bought by US company Intrexon for $160m (£106m) in August last year.

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard of Oxitec—the company has been making headlines for its development of a self-limiting gene for mosquitoes for some time, and in 2014 we heard about Oxitec’s progress in engineering a male fruit fly capable of only fathering sons, thereby leading to the collapse of the population of the pest.

Oxitec’s field trials introducing GM mosquitoes in Brazil have been highly successful, “killing 96% of the dengue-spreading mosquitoes,” according to the BBC. The fact that its parent company is now building on that success is highly encouraging news: these sterilization techniques can not only be a boon to public health, but also boost crop yields by targeting pests without using pesticides, and in so doing cut down on the collateral damage to other insect populations that those pesticides might cause.Environmentalists tend to have a knee-jerk reaction against this sort of solution, but it’s exactly the sort of technology that could allow humanity to thrive while lessening our impact on our surrounding environment. Killing pests and saving lives with GM mosquitoes? We live in interesting times.

U.S. Companies Complain About Chinese Regulations

An American Chamber of Commerce survey reports that companies doing business in China are more concerned about the regulatory and legal environment than they are about the economic slowdown. LA Times:

Despite the slowing economy and rising labor costs, a significant amount of confidence in the Chinese market remains. More than 50% of respondents still rank China as one of the top three investment destinations, and most indicated they are still optimistic about China’s domestic growth potential.

“Business will continue to invest in China,” said James Zimmerman, chairman of the chamber, “but with more calculation and caution.”The report cited regulatory challenges as the top concern of American businesses in China, with labor costs a close second.

As the Financial Times reports, participants complained about “inconsistent regulatory interpretation and unclear laws” which they said make it difficult to conduct business in China, and they expressed concerns about national security laws and perceived restrictions on civil society.

International organizations have been sounding the alarm after a Swedish activist confessed to various political crimes on Chinese television in a statement many observers believe he was pressured to make. The incident has raised concerns that China is becoming tougher on foreigns who criticize the regime. Apparently, according to the Chamber of Commerce study, those fears are raising hairs in corporate boardrooms as well.This is only one study, of course, but it is telling that, even amidst a Chinese economic crisis, many businesses are more concerned about regulations and political uncertainty than they are about economic volatility. It’s a reminder of the tough road ahead for President Xi Jinping, who has been trying to strengthen the economy while simultaneously consolidating power both in and for the Communist Party. In many ways, tightening political control is at odds with boosting the economy.

The Chickens Come Home to Roost

Some grim news about the U.S. deficit, via Fix the Debt:

New projections from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) show the national debt and deficits rising rapidly, with debt rising by over $10 trillion over the next decade and deficits growing from $439 billion last year to $544 billion this year, and to $1.37 trillion by 2026. This represents a significant deterioration from previous projections.

“This report makes it abundantly clear that the era of declining deficits is over,” said Maya MacGuineas, head of the Campaign to Fix the Deb [. . .]According to CBO, the national debt will rise from $13.1 trillion, or 74 percent of GDP last year, to $23.8 trillion, or 86 percent by 2026. This is significantly worse than CBO’s projections in August, which showed debt rising to 77 percent of GDP by 2025. In total, debt in 2025 will be $1.4 trillion higher than had been previously projected.

Interest rates were already raised in December, and if they continue rising, this is going to be an even bigger issue.

But, either way, the reality at play here—that we are facing rising deficits after a long period of sustained, if tepid, economic growth—points to just how irresponsibly the federal budget has been managed. Both President Bush and President Obama added enormously and unwisely to the country’s deficit and debt, and the consequences of these errors will haunt us for years to come.

German President: We Must Consider Migrant Quotas

German President Joachim Gauck declared at Davos Wednesday that enacting quotas on refugee intakes may be “morally and politically necessary.” As the Financial Times reports:

“Even today, we are also discussing limits in terms of the number of people we can absorb,” said Mr Gauck in a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos. “If democrats do not want to talk about limitations then populists and xenophobes will [. . .]

The president, a non-party figure who rarely intervenes in current political debates, said: “That could mean that policymakers have to develop and implement strategies to limit the number of people coming to our country — not as a knee-jerk defensive reaction but as an element of responsible governance. A limitation strategy may even be both morally and politically necessary in order to preserve the state’s ability to function.”[…]Mr Gauck’s words carry weight because, as a former Lutheran pastor in communist East Germany, he is seen as a moral authority.

As is Angela Merkel’s father, something that has been key to her political biography and that is often linked in media accounts to her thinking on the refugee crisis. So while Gauck came out against imposing quotas right now (he said only that “For capacity there is no magic or mathematical formula. Instead, the measure is subject to a permanent process of negotiation in society and politics”) nevertheless his acknowledgement of the moral case for them is in many ways bigger news.

It’s fair at this point to ask if German (and more broadly, Western European) elite opinion is shifting on the refugee issue. Recently, Merkel has faced a significant push by Parliamentary members of her CDU party, and its Barvarian affiliate the CSU, for Germany to reinstate border controls. And other major party figures, such as Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, are known to be more hawkish on immigration than Mrs. Merkel. German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel also took a more skeptical line on refugees at Davos, saying that 80 percent have no qualifications.Meanwhile, Austria announced that it will impose “upward limits”—the politically-loaded term the CSU has been pushing for—on migrants for 2016. And Dutch PM Mark Rutte called for stricter enforcement of external borders and swifter implementation of the Turkey deal, saying that “We cannot cope with the numbers any longer.” It is, in short, much more acceptable for bien pensant Germans and Europeans to discuss immigration controls than it was a year ago. Will that help change Mrs. Merkel’s mind?If she does move, she’s likely to find popular as well as elite support for the move: elite opinion has long been to the left of popular support on this issue. Mrs. Merkel is a very canny politician, and unless she is fully in bunker mode, she can also likely do the math: Germany cannot take everyone who would like to come. We would not, then, rule out a shift at some point.However, timing does matter. The sooner Merkel acts, the greater her flexibility, and the more she’ll likely be able both to modulate the immigrant flow and to moderate the far-right reaction. But spring is coming, and so far, nobody expects it to bring anything other than an increase again in refugees: Rutte cited an expected fourfold increase in arrivals when the weather gets warmer, and warned of a six-to-eight week window for action. Come spring, Mrs. Merkel’s options may grow more limited.

North Sea Oil off the Boil

Crude prices have rebounded 5 percent in trading today, but that will come as cold comfort for producers struggling to find ways to stay profitable in a market seemingly on course to hold under $30 per barrel for the foreseeable future. Sluggish Chinese demand and a swelling global supply have created a massive global oil glut, and the resultant bearish market is making life very difficult for North Sea oil production, which was already facing its twilight years. The FT reports:

More than a dozen offshore oil rigs, each weighing thousands of tonnes, have been quietly parked in [Scotland’s Cromarty Firth], the highest number in more than a decade, after a plunge in crude prices that has nearly killed North Sea exploration[. . .]

“In previous oil crashes there has been a sense that it will come good again — maybe in 18 months the price will bounce back,” says Bob Buskie, chief executive of the Cromarty Firth Port Authority. “But people have lost sight of the dynamic between Saudi [Arabia] not adjusting output and America still throwing money at the fracking game. We have ended up awash with oil.”

Though North Sea production helped make the UK a net oil exporter in the 1980s and eventually a net natural gas exporter as well, today the UK is once again a net importer of fossil fuels as that offshore output has waned. North Sea oil was already among the world’s most expensive to produce, and as those fields have matured companies operating them have faced an unenviable choice: decommission offshore platforms (itself a costly endeavor) or continue to pump increasingly meager amounts of oil at lower and lower prices.

Rigs are crowding one another cheek to jowl in the Cromarty Firth, and their inactivity is a poor portent for the fate of one of the UK’s most important domestic energy resources.

China Gets Aggressive in the Senkakus

“Recently, the Chinese government sent bigger, stronger patrol ships — almost equivalent with naval combatant ships — into the waters around the Senkakus,” Hideaki Kaneda, a retired Japanese vice-admiral, tells The Financial Times. China, which calls the Senkakus the Diaoyus, has competing territorial claims to the islands, and ever since Japan bought them from a private Japanese owner in 2012, Beijing has been more vocal and active in the region. In December, China sent its first armed vessel close to the island chain. According to Tokyo, Beijing is taking advantage of the world’s focus on the South China Sea to be more aggressive in the north.

Earlier this month, Tokyo announced it would send patrols to meet any Chinese ship that sailed too close to the Senkakus. It isn’t clear if they have followed through on this promise or not. Nonetheless, the situation is clearly escalating and Japan lodged several official complaints with Beijing over the recent activity. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has been hoping that by not shying away from confrontation with Beijing over its maritime activity, he can keep the Chinese at bay. But if he’s unlikely to back down, so too is his counterpart, President Xi Jinping. This is one game of chicken you can be sure defense officials around the world are watching closely.

Under the Long Shadow of the Holocaust

Two significant statements about the relations between Jews and Christians were published toward the end of 2015; both were widely reported by both religious and general media. On December 3, 2015, the Center for Jewish-Christian Understanding, an Orthodox institution located in Efrat, Israel, published a statement on the relation between the two faiths signed by a number of prominent Orthodox rabbis from Israel, America and Europe. On December 10, 2015, the Vatican’s Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews published a statement with a much sharper focus: It announced that the Roman Catholic Church would stop all missionary activities specifically targeting Jews for conversion. While these statements were motivated by contemporary developments (such as the turbulence in the Middle East and the related resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe), I think that one must see these recent events in the context of decades of Jewish and Christian efforts to understand the religious significance of the Holocaust, that monstrous crime that continues to throw its long shadow over any serious conversations between representatives of the two communities.

In the immediate period after the Holocaust, with its horrors still close at hand, any religious reflection was overshadowed by the anguished question of theodicy: How could a God worshipped by both Jews and Christian as both perfectly just and also omnipotent allow these horrors to occur? The question is asked in an unbearable scene in Elie Wiesel’s autobiographical memoir Night (the English translation, from the original French and Yiddish versions, was published in 1966). Wiesel and his family were deported to the death camps from the part of Romania that had been annexed by Hungary; Wiesel spent two years in Auschwitz. The aforementioned scene was one in which a thirteen-year old boy was hanged for having stolen some food. The boy was too light for his neck to be broken in the fall from the gallows; he slowly and painfully died of strangulation; it took him half an hour to die. Other prisoners were forced to watch. A prisoner standing next to Wiesel asked “Where is God?” Then Wiesel thought that a voice within him replied, “He is hanging here from the gallows”. If one can even bear to reflect about this scene, one must realize that this reply is ambiguous. It can mean quite simply that after this scene one can no longer believe in God, one can only be an atheist. A more complicated meaning could be that, in some mysterious and somehow redemptive way, God participates in the extreme suffering of his creation. There are strands in Jewish mysticism that suggest the latter theodicy (most directly in the myth of the broken vessels taught by Isaac Luria (1534-1572)).As far as I know, Wiesel never clarified what he thought the meaning should be. It is possible that he wasn’t sure. He once avowed to be a sort of agnostic. Yet he was preoccupied with the Kabbalah in his later years. He also once remarked that if he ever ceased to be a Jew, he would cease to be. Ever after the liberation, Wiesel took on two personal vocations—to bear witness to the Holocaust (the duty to remember) and to help ensure that such a genocide could never happen again (the duty to intervene). For the latter vocation he involved himself in humanitarian actions in far-away places (such as Bosnia or Cambodia), for which he rightly received the Nobel Prize for Peace. Perhaps one may recall here that an important idea in the Lurianic mystical system is that of the “repair of the universe”, tikkun olam, in which human actions can assist God in gathering the broken vessels and restoring them to their God-given redemptive task.The most strident Jewish voice giving (at least initially) an atheist answer to the question of theodicy raised by the Holocaust was that of Richard Rubenstein, an American Reform rabbi. In his book After Auschwitz (1966) he forcefully stated that after the Holocaust it was no longer possible to believe in the Biblical God. He was close for a while to the Protestant academics who made a lot of noise at the time with the so-called “death of God theology” (a man-bites-dog story that landed them on the cover of Time magazine). Prominent among them was Thomas Altizer (who taught for many years at Emory University) used the Christian idea of kenosis, the self-inflicted humiliation of God reaching its climax in the crucifixion of Jesus. As to Rubenstein, at one point in his career he said what was needed was “some form of paganism”. His intellectual credibility was not enhanced when he drew close to the Unification Church of the Reverend Sun Mying Moon.It is impossible to avoid thinking about the Holocaust in the ongoing dialogue between Jews and Christians. But that dialogue has veered into other issues. A persistent issue has been the question of Christian guilt for the Nazi crimes, and going back in history for the roots of European anti-Semitism. The guns of World War II had been silenced only a few months when the EKID (the Protestant Church in Germany, which then as now contains both Lutheran and Reformed provincial churches) assembled in Stuttgart on October 19, 1945 and issued a solemn Declaration of Guilt for the Nazi atrocities. The moving force at that meeting were the leaders of the so-called Confessing Church, which was the movement within the EKID to resist, not the regime politically but the attempt to impose Nazi ideology onto church life. Best known among these leaders was Martin Niemoeller (1892-1984), who was imprisoned for years in a concentration camp. One might think that these individuals had no guilt to confess, unlike many other Protestants who actively supported the regime. (With this in mind, later statements substituted “responsibility” for “guilt”: Guilt is always individual, but a political community bears responsibility for crimes committed in its name.) Thus the Declaration simply said that “we” (Germans) had brought great suffering “over many peoples and countries” (the Holocaust was never explicitly mentioned, but everyone in that assembly knew which “people” was specially intended); “we” in the Confession Church did not speak out more loudly or act more resolutely.)Not much later Niemoeller came to America on a lecture tour and was much more explicit about the Holocaust. The Stuttgart Declaration was the opening salvo in the development of a penitential culture which has been established in the Federal Republic and is a potent reality even now. (The DDR, the Communist state in East Germany, disclaimed responsibility for the crimes of “the fascists”; the Holocaust was not part of the political narrative). Berlin, once again the capital of a re-unified Germany, is full of memorial signs commemorating Jewish victims of Nazi actions; the prime example is the huge (and, I think, deliberately repellent) Holocaust monument a few steps from the Reichstag dome, the symbol of the new German democracy. (It is no accident that Berlin has the largest colony in the EU of Israeli residents, that Germany has been Israel’s best friend in the EU, and that Chancellor Merkel, the daughter of a Lutheran pastor in the DDR, risked her political career in ordering the opening of the border to admit over a million refugees in 2015.)Within Protestant theology in Germany a key figure has been Friedrich-Wilhelm Marquandt (1928-2002), who taught at the Free University in Berlin. He strongly emphasized, not only that Christianity has its roots in the Hebrew Bible, but that the Christian Church does not supersede God’s covenant with Israel, which remains in full force. Needless to say, this pervasive deference to Judaism has been welcomed in some Jewish circles, criticized by some conservative Lutherans (one of whom said that the role Marquandt envisaged for Christians in the Jewish community is that of dhimmis, tolerated “People of the Book”, in the community of Islam). The biographical background of Marquandt’s theology is full of pathos: His father was in the SS and was seen in Berlin in his uniform during Kristallnacht, the violent anti-Jewish pogrom in November 1938, often interpreted as a prelude to the Holocaust. [I must confess that I haven’t read Marquandt’s writings nor ever met him. But I had some conversations with devoted students of his and was impressed by their seriousness. They participated in an annual ceremony, which ran over two days, in which every name of Berlin Jews deported to the death camps was read aloud in a public place. This ceremony was actually started by a group of Catholic nuns.]As with so many issues, the Second Vatican Council was a watershed in Catholic-Jewish relations. On October 19, 1965, the Council, under the authority of Pope Paul VI, issued a “Declaration of the Church to Non-Christian Religions”. Several paragraphs dealt specifically with Jews, though the emphasis throughout the document on the rights of other religions, and on Catholic respect for them, applies to Judaism as well. However, as was correctly pointed out, the relation between Christianity and Judaism is a special one, different from that with any other religion (if only because the Hebrew Bible is an integral part of Christian Scripture). This difference was bureaucratically recognized when after the Council the Vatican organized a series of agencies to deal with interfaith dialogues; there were separate agencies set up for dialogue with Jews and with other religions.There was no specific mention of the Holocaust in the passage dealt with Jews, but a number of important statements were made: There must be a stop to the Catholic “tradition of contempt for Jews and Judaism”. Catholics must reject hatred, persecution, displays of anti-Semitism directed against Jews at any time and by anyone. The old charge of “deicide” against the Jews must be abandoned: “The crucifixion of Jesus cannot be charged against the Jews, without distinction, then alive nor against the Jews of today”. (This condemnation was particularly significant because the charge of “deicide” (murder of God) was repeatedly made in the history of Christian anti-Semitism, most recently by Catholic-oriented pro-Nazi movements in Slovakia, Croatia, Hungary and Ukraine.) These passages have become normative for any Catholic dealings with Jews or with Judaism. But in the decades since Vatican II the Catholic-Jewish dialogue has dealt with another set of issues: The relationship between God’s covenant with Israel and with the Christian Church, that is between the Old Testament and the New (“testament” being a synonym for “covenant”). The Christian roots of anti-Semitism. The relation between Christian and Nazi anti-Semitism. The role of Pope Pius XII during the Holocaust. The status of the Holy Land in traditional Jewish and Christian understanding, and in Zionist ideology. All of these issues involve complicated historical questions that cannot possibly be dealt with here, though toward the end of this paper I will briefly return to the issue of the “two covenants”.There was a major predecessor of the statement about Christianity by a group of Orthodox rabbis in December 2015: The document Dabru Emet/”Speak the Truth”, published on September 10, 2000; this one, unlike the more recent one, was mainly signed by Reform and Conservative rabbis. These were the main points of this statement: Jews and Christians indeed worship the same God, and derive authority from the same book (though obviously, in the Jewish case, only from the first part, the Hebrew Bible). Christians have come to respect the Jewish claim to the Land of Israel (this more an expectation than a statement of fact). Nazism was not a Christian phenomenon. Clearly this was a gesture of friendship from liberal Jews to liberal Christians.As was to be expected, the document was sharply criticized by Orthodox Jews: The first point, about worshiping the same God, was the main points of criticism. The bestowal of Messiah status on Jesus of Nazareth and, worse, his elevation to divine status in the Trinity, constitute idolatry from the viewpoint of Jewish Orthodoxy, and were so considered by rabbis for many centuries. Probably the sharpest rebuke came in an article by Jon Levenson, an Orthodox Biblical scholar teaching, of all places, at the Harvard Divinity School: “How not to conduct Jewish-Christian dialogue”, in Commentary, December 2001. [It must have dawned on dialogue-minded Christians who were pleased with Dabru Emet, that maybe they should talk to more Orthodox Jews if the dialogue is to go much further—just as liberal Christians interested in dialogue with Islam should talk with, say, scholars from Al-Azhar rather than liberal Muslims with whom they already have large areas of agreement.]Thus the statement by the group of Orthodox rabbis mentioned at the beginning of this post must have been music to the ears of dialogue-minded Christians waiting for more Orthodox partners than the signatories of Dabru Emet. It seems to me that they got this—the signatories are without exception Orthodox rabbis. And there are no aggressive statements about Christianity, such as the changes of “idolatry” because of Christian doctrines about Jesus and the Trinity. The most positive pro-Christian statement opens paragraph 3 of the document: “We acknowledge that Christianity is neither an accident nor an error, but the willed divine outcome and gift to the nations”. But in giving credit to Christians the statement exaggerates: “The Catholic Church has acknowledged the eternal Covenant between God and Israel”—some Catholic theologians may have done this, not Nostra Aetate. Further on it says “Jews and Christians have a common covenantal mission to perfect the world under the sovereignty of the Almighty”—that sounds more like Friedrich-Wilhelm Marquandt than a general Christian consensus (and I note that “covenantal” is here put in lower case, unlike “Covenant” in paragraph 3—a lesser covenant?—for Gentile dhimmis?) Objectively speaking, does this document further the theological dialogue between Jews and Christians, going beyond common moral (condemnation of anti-Semitism) and political (seeking a just peace in the Middle East) collaboration? I think yes. It opens a door for some Orthodox participation in the sought-after interfaith dialogue; many Orthodox, even this side of Haredim, will not want to walk through this door. It will all depend on who on either side will make which interpretations; as always, non-theological interests will be involved (as happens, for sure, in the centuries-long Christian struggle about the nature of Jesus Christ).And now to the Vatican document published on December 10, 2015: The Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews took another significant step in its area of concern. It said that “Catholics should always witness to their faith but not undertake organized efforts to convert Jews”. This step does not come easily. Evangelical Protestants continue to follow the so-called Great Commission very seriously—the statement of Jesus, reported in the Gospel of Matthew (28:19): “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and of the Holy Spirit”. The Catholic Church, along with most mainline Protestantism, has been reluctant about intrusive “proselytism” (which has lately become a pejorative term). In Catholic circles the “witness” approved in the document has been described as “Christian presence”. As far as I know, the phrase was first used by Catholic missionaries in North Africa to refer to their dealings with Muslims—not standing on street-corners urging them to be baptized, but quietly saying Mass while doing good works of charity (hospitals, schools and the like), all in an attitude of respect for Islam. But, in explicitly applying this idea of witness to the Jews, the document comes closer to the idea of the continuing covenant with Israel as a rationale for a distinctive approach to Judaism: The key paragraph is titled “The Gifts and Calling of God are irrevocable” (my italics). (It is at least conceivable that the Orthodox drafters of their document, published only a few days before the Vatican’s, saw a preview of the latter.)  In any case, the Orthodox rabbis should be pleased.The two documents just discussed clearly deal with the religious issues in the relations between Jews and Christian, bracketing the more immediate political issues (most of them concerned with the State of Israel and its turbulent neighborhood). It seems clear to me that at the center of these issues is the question of the “irrevocable” quality of God’s covenant with Israel, or alternatively its replacement by the new covenant between God and the Christian Church. The latter position, dominant in Christian theology until recently, has the ponderous name of “supercessionism”—the new covenant (aka the New Testament) supercedes and is seen as superior to the old covenant/Testament. The contrary position, increasingly favored by Catholic and mainline Protestant theologians, gets the even more ponderous name “anti-supercessionism”—that is, the old covenant is still in force.I would think that there is only a problem if one has a very literal understanding of the Bible—the canonical text as written, in either Old or New Testament, is taken as literally the revealed word of God. But if the relevant Biblical passages are looked at through the lens of modern historical scholarship, things get very complicated: Just when did Christianity and Judaism become two divergent religions? There were some pivotal moments; around 59 CE when the Apostles met in Jerusalem and decided, against strong opposition, that the Gentile converts brought in by Paul did not have to be circumcised (the mark of the covenant) or to follow most Torah commandments; after 70 CE when, after the destruction of Jerusalem, the Sanhedrin, the highest rabbinical court, was allowed by the Romans to re-assemble in the little town of Yavneh south of Jaffa, where it finalized the canon of the Hebrew Bible and (according to some doubtful sources) decided that the nascent Jesus movement did not belong; the rebellion of Simon Bar Kochba, around 132 CE, which was brutally suppressed by the Romans and which was not supported by the Nazarenes/Christians. Certainly much after, when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, it was very clear that Judaism did not belong to it.If one goes farther back, things became even murkier if one asks what we really know about what happened in the early history of the Semitic tribes that settled on the mountains of Judea sometime around 2000 BCE. Did Abraham, if he existed at all, pledge allegiance to a rather strange divinity and in exchange received the promise/covenant of a huge stretch of territory stretching from Egypt to Iraq(!)? And what, if anything, happened at Mount Sinai when the God of Abraham renewed the covenant with what, under the leadership of one Moses, was becoming the people of Israel? Orthodox Jews take these events not only as facts but as binding norms. Christians have the even more difficult task to conclude that these alleged facts are binding on them as well.In other worlds, Jews and Christians who cannot understand the Scriptures in such a literal way, don’t really have the problem of how the two covenants relate to each other—both are historically questionable. The question of whether they have a common faith must be addressed  through a much more nuanced assessment of the core of each tradition, rather than through the quasi-juridical decision whether the same covenant covers both traditions. (A hint: It helps to grasp the commonality if, for a moment, one looks at west Asian monotheism through Hindu or Buddhist glasses.) I think that such an assessment will lead to the proposition that yes, Jews and Christians do have a shared faith in the same God. The other questions about common moral and political concerns will also have to be addressed beyond the contretemps of supercessionism or its rejection. These concerns have been strongly expressed in interfaith statements for many years since World War II—that anti-Semitism is a blasphemous offence against God and man; that any persecution of people because of their religion is morally unacceptable; that the State of Israel has a fundamental right to exist in safety (from the Jordan to the Mediterranean, but probably not from the Nile to the Euphrates.) And recalling the Holocaust is a useful help in formulating every one of these concerns.Jews of any denomination are obviously pleased with the Vatican statement of December 2015 discussed above. In addition to being troubled by the move toward sanctification of Pope Pius XII, who has been accused of having been too silent in the face of the of the Holocaust, there have been some Jewish worries about Rome’s carefully calibrated stance on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Evangelicals have no central authority comparable to Rome, but there is a high degree of consensus on many issues. The Evangelical perspective is nicely caught by the American definition of  ambivalence: when you see your mother-in-law go over the cliff in your new Cadillac. Evangelicals have been more pro-Israel than any other category of Christians. (A recent survey found that more American Evangelicals than American Jews believe that God has given the Holy Land to the Jews!) On the other hand, Evangelicals are sturdily on the side of “supersessionism” (pronounce it slowly with a Southern accent). At its meeting in New Orleans in 2009 the meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution affirming the intention of strengthening efforts to convert Jews, as mandated by Jesus’ alleged Great Commission to baptize all nations. [I remember a conversation I had at the time with a rabbi who was outraged and saw this as an expression of anti-Semitism. I told him that I had no sympathy whatever with the SBC resolution, but that I had learned as a sociologist that you cannot understand people’s actions without understanding their basic assumptions. These people assume that you cannot go to heaven unless you accept Jesus Christ as your savior. If you excluded Jews from the prospect of heaven, then you would really be anti-Semitic! He was not convinced.] To my knowledge, most Evangelicals (with varying degrees of fervor) are supercessionists. The Lausanne Movement, an influential international Evangelical organization, met in Jerusalem(!) in 2012, and explicitly endorsed 2009 resolution on Jewish evangelism of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Supreme Leader Backs Purge of Reformists

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei poured cold water on reformist hopes that this weekend’s ruling by Iran’s Guardian Council to disqualify thousands of prospective parliamentary candidates would be overturned. Reformists had complained that as few as 1 percent of their candidates will be allowed to run, a development moderate reformist President Hassan Rouhani had publicly come out against, stating that “I will use all my power to protect the rights of candidates.”

But Khamenei was unequivocal in backing the Guardian Council. As Reuters reports:

[I]n a meeting on Wednesday with officials involved in organizing the elections, Khamenei – who wields the final say on all high matters of state in Iran – made clear he did not agree with Rouhani on who should be able to take seats in parliament.

“I said that even those who oppose the Islamic Republic should take part in the election,” he said, underlining his wish for a high turnout to convey popular support for the system.“(But) this does not mean that opponents of the Islamic Republic should be elected to parliament… Only those who believe in the Islamic Republic and its values should be allowed to enter parliament,” Khamenei said.[..]Ahmad Jannati, the hardline conservative head of the Guardian Council, assured Khamenei at the same meeting that its consideration of candidates’ qualifications would be done “carefully and will not be affected by any pressure”.

The ace trumps the king, and Khamenei, rather than Rouhani, in whom, along with his Foreign Minister Zarif, the Administration has put so much trust, will get his way here. As Mark Dubowitz has put it in another context:

Never has the good-cop, bad-cop routine been more effectively used than by Khamenei & Rouhani/Zarif against Obama & Kerry.

— Mark Dubowitz (@mdubowitz) January 2, 2016

As we wrote yesterday, the situation may yet change: the arc of history may overtake this regime, and a Thermidorian reaction may yet break out. But at least so far, early results indicate that the deal strengthened the hardliners, rather than the moderates.

Colleges Double Down on “Holistic” Admissions

Admissions deans from America’s leading colleges have joined forces with administrators from America’s most exclusive private high schools to offer a set of recommendations for making the college admissions regime place more emphasis on students’ community service and “ethical engagement.” Predictably, the report is being greeted with fawning praise in the media. The Washington Post‘s headline is representative: “To get into college, Harvard report advocates for kindness instead of overachieving.”

We are less optimistic about the approach described in the report, which essentially amounts to downplaying test scores and academic performance while supposedly leveling the playing field by giving a boost to students who appear to be honest, generous, and empathetic. First, while the authors contend that this strategy will give a boost to disadvantaged students, and make it more difficult for those who would “game the system,” we think it could well have the opposite effect. Requiring applicants to demonstrate a complex portfolio of personality traits will make the process even more opaque to disadvantaged students who are the first in their families to apply to college, and even more favorable to those who know the ins and outs of the system and can hire consultants to tell them what kind of essays elite admissions officers want to read.Second, the idea that college admissions should be first and foremost a means of assessing the “character” of 17-year olds, rather than their academic promise, has a politically fraught history. It was used to discriminate against Jewish students through the 1950s, and it may be a smokescreen for colleges to penalize Asian applicants today. There are, after all, many different traits and experiences that can demonstrate a strong character, and admissions officers will inevitably emphasize the ones that fit with academia’s cultural and political preferences. That’s not to say admissions officers shouldn’t favor honest, upstanding young people when given the chance—it’s just that they should be wary of allowing perceived personality traits, rather than academic achievements, to become the overriding consideration.We’ve said repeatedly that America’s existing higher education system as currently constituted is an obstacle to mobility for many disadvantaged students. The right way to fix it is for colleges to beef up recruitment in low-income and minority areas, and for our society to create pathways to success that don’t require an expensive four-year degree. But while those approaches would make life more difficult for college administrators, this approach plays conveniently into their interests. Indeed, it’s easy to see why admissions deans at colleges like Princeton and Harvard, and the headmasters at prep schools like Milton Academy and Horace Mann school (all of whom signed the report), think that this is the best path forward. All administrators like to enlarge their authority, and by making admissions a much more subjective exercise, the recommendations outlined in this report would give elite deans and headmasters even more leeway to pick and choose which students get a spot at the top colleges and which students don’t.

Smart Green Spending, for a Change

If you asked your average environmentalist what policymakers ought to be doing to help green the world’s energy supplies, you’d usually get an answer focused on incentivizing renewables like wind and solar power through lavish government subsidies. But those enviro-mental activists won’t tell you about renewables’ intermittency problems—the fact that they can’t provide power when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing—and they’ll surely gloss over the fact that those necessary subsidies will be paid for in the end by higher electricity bills.

But there is a power source out there capable of providing consistent baseload power without greenhouse gas emissions. Nuclear energy remains anathema to the modern environmental movement in large part over concerns of catastrophic meltdowns and difficulties associated with disposing nuclear waste, but a new crop of nuclear power technologies is in the offing that could help address those concerns. As the New York Times reports, the U.S. Department of Energy is helping fund its development:

The Energy Department said it would provide up to $40 million each to two companies, X-energy and Southern Company, over about five years to help develop the alternative reactor designs. As a start, the department, which announced the investments last Friday, is giving each company $6 million this year. […]

X-energy is working on a so-called pebble bed reactor, in which the uranium fuel is contained in ceramic- and graphite-covered balls rather than long, thin rods, and is cooled by gas rather than water. In such a design, the fuel cannot melt down in an accident, so a reactor should be able to be safely located close to population centers.Southern is working with TerraPower and research groups on a design that uses molten chloride, which acts as both coolant and as the medium for the fuel. The material is designed to be self-cooling in an accident, without the need for emergency water cooling systems.

With its well-hyped energiewende, Germany has hoped to set a global green example. But by phasing out its zero-emissions nuclear plants (a decision made in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima disaster, despite the fact that Germany, unlike Japan, doesn’t lie on a major fault line), it has had to increase its consumption of lignite coal, just about the dirtiest fossil fuel around. At the same time, Berlin chose to prop up wind and solar power with feed-in tariffs, guaranteeing producers above-market rates at great cost to households and businesses. In a sense Germany did accomplish its goal, in that it showed the rest of the world exactly how not to craft a green energy mix.

There are plenty of reasons to be excited about nuclear power’s future, and it’s encouraging to see the U.S. is helping to fund the next generation of reactors that we’ll need in short order to replace our current fleet of aging plants. If we want to provide people with consistent power without sky-high power bills and without greenhouse gas emissions, we’re going to need more nuclear power—not less. The U.S. seems to understand that, though green-crazed Germany does not.