Roger wrote:
Why would anyone bet on the dollar versus the Euro?! With our deficit
spending the dollar will continue to decline!

Craig

Our deficits are now declining and are paid for by the Chinese. Our
unemployment rate is so low that we need to import millions of
"uneducated, illiterate foreigners to do the jobs that Americans don't
want to do", and build a fence to keep them out; and our gasoline
prices are back below $2.00 per gallon. In France gas prices are low
enough that their cars can once again be easily burned by THEIR
uneducated, illiterate foreigners; which is what, $5.00 a gallon? If
they don't get their gas prices back up to six they'll run out of cars.
Why would anyone bet on the Euro versus the dollar?

October 30, 2006
The Dark Ages
Live from the Middle East
by Victor Davis Hanson
Tribune Media Services

The most frightening aspect of the present war is how easily our
pre-modern enemies from the Middle East have brought a stunned
postmodern world back into the Dark Ages.

Students of history are sickened when they read of the long-ago,
gruesome practice of beheading. How brutal were those societies that
chopped off the heads of Cicero, Sir Thomas More and Marie Antoinette.
And how lucky we thought we were to have evolved from such elemental
barbarity.

Twenty-four hundred years ago, Socrates was executed for unpopular
speech. The 18th-century European Enlightenment gave people freedom to
express views formerly censored by clerics and the state. Just imagine
what life was like once upon a time when no one could write music,
compose fiction or paint without court or church approval?

Over 400 years before the birth of Christ, ancient Greek literary
characters, from Lysistrata to Antigone, reflected the struggle for
sexual equality. The subsequent notion that women could vote, divorce,
dress or marry as they pleased was a millennia-long struggle.

It is almost surreal now to read about the elemental hatred of Jews in
the Spanish Inquisition, 19th-century Russian pogroms or the Holocaust.
Yet here we are revisiting the old horrors of the savage past.

Beheading? As we saw with Nick Berg and Daniel Pearl, our Neanderthal
enemies in the Middle East have resurrected that ancient barbarity -
and married it with 21st-century technology to beam the resulting gore
instantaneously onto our computer screens. Xerxes and Attila, who stuck
their victims' heads on poles for public display, would've been
thrilled by such a gruesome show.

Who would have thought centuries after the Enlightenment that
sophisticated Europeans - in fear of radical Islamists - would be
afraid to write a novel, put on an opera, draw a cartoon, film a
documentary or have their pope discuss comparative theology?

The astonishing fact is not just that millions of women worldwide in
2006 are still veiled from head-to-toe, trapped in arranged marriages,
subject to polygamy, honor killings and forced circumcision, or are
without the right to vote or appear alone in public. What is more
baffling is that in the West, liberal Europeans are often wary of
protecting female citizens from the excesses of Sharia law -
sometimes even fearful of asking women to unveil their faces for
purposes of simple identification and official conversation.

Who these days is shocked that Israel is hated by Arab nations and
threatened with annihilation by radical Iran? Instead, the surprise is
that even in places like Paris or Seattle, Jews are singled out and
killed for the apparent crime of being Jewish.

Since Sept. 11, the West has fought enemies who are determined to bring
back the nightmarish world that we thought was long past. And there are
lessons Westerners can learn from radical Islamists' ghastly efforts.

First, the Western liberal tradition is fragile and can still
disappear. Just because we have sophisticated cell phones, CAT scanners
and jets does not ensure that we are permanently civilized or safe.
Technology used by the civilized for positive purposes can easily be
manipulated by barbarians for destruction.

Second, the Enlightenment is not always lost on the battlefield. It can
be surrendered through either fear or indifference as well. Westerners
fearful of terrorist reprisals themselves shut down a production of a
Mozart opera in Berlin deemed offensive to Muslims. Few came to the aid
of a Salman Rushdie or Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh when their
unpopular expression earned death threats from Islamists. Van Gogh, of
course, was ultimately killed.

The Goths and Vandals did not sack Rome solely through the power of
their hordes; they also relied on the paralysis of Roman elites who no
longer knew what it was to be Roman - much less whether it was any
better than the alternative.

Third, civilization is forfeited with a whimper, not a bang.
Insidiously, we have allowed radical Islamists to redefine the
primordial into the not-so-bad. Perhaps women in head-to-toe burkas in
Europe prefer them? Maybe that crass German opera was just too over the
top after all? Aren't both parties equally to blame in the Palestinian,
Iraqi and Afghan wars?

To grasp the flavor of our own Civil War, impersonators now don period
dress and reconstruct the battles of Shiloh or Gettysburg. But we need
not show such historical reenactment of the Dark Ages. You see, they
are back with us - live almost daily from the Middle East.

©2006 Tribune Media Services