Told ya

says Victor Davis Hanson to Scowcroft, Brzezinski, and Albright.

Protest in Shanghai

Ian Hamet thinks the leadership is scapegoating Japan: "I think someone in Beijing, someone who is all too familiar with both The Prince and The Art of War, has been working to divert frustration to a more acceptable target."

The evangelical pope?

Evangelical historian Mark Noll assesses the ways in which John Paul II did and did not bring evangelicals and Catholics closer.

Number Two?

Peter Drucker gives his take on the direction of the world economy in The National Interest. The U.S. will be strong for a long time, but is not the single dominant economy any more.

Drucker sees four world economies emergin: a world economy of information; of money; of multinationals (one no longer dominated by American enterprises); and a mercantilist world economy of goods, services and trade.

Information:

In the long run, the most important implication is probably the impact of information on mentality and awareness. It creates new affinities and new communities. The woman student in Shanghai who taps into the Internet remains Chinese, but she sees herself at the same time as a member of a worldwide, non-national "information society." ....

Money

The next major economic crisis will most probably be a crisis of the U.S. dollar in the world economy....

The government deficit is therefore being financed almost in its entirety by foreign investments in the United States, mostly in government securities like short-term treasury notes and medium-term bonds. The Japanese are converting most, if not all, of their trade surplus with the United States into dollar-denominated U.S. government securities and have thus become the largest U.S. creditor....

This, needless to say, is an unstable and volatile system. It would collapse if the foreign holders of U.S. government securities (above all, the Japanese) were for whatever reason (such as a crash in their own economy) to dump their holdings of U.S. government securities....

Multinationals:

There were 7,258 multinational companies worldwide in 1969. Thirty-one years later, in 2000, the number had increased ninefold to more than 63,000. By that year, multinationals accounted for 80 percent of the world's industrial production....

American-based multinationals are only a fraction--and a diminishing one--of all multinationals. Only 185 of the world's 500 largest multinationals--fewer than 40 percent--are headquartered in the United States (the European Union has 126, Japan 108). And multinationals are growing much faster outside the United States, especially in Japan, Mexico, and lately, Brazil....

The New Mercantilism

The modern state was invented by the French political philosopher Jean Bodin in his 1576 book Six Livres de la Republique. He invented the state for one purpose only: to generate the cash needed to pay the soldiers defending France against a Spanish army financed by silver from the New World--the first standing army since the Romans' more than a thousand years earlier....

However discredited as economic theory, mercantilism, not Adam Smith's free trade, thus became the policy and practice of governments virtually everywhere....

But mercantilism is increasingly becoming the policy of "blocs" rather than of individual nation-states. These blocs--with the European Union the most structured one, and the U.S.-dominated NAFTA trying to embrace the entire Western Hemisphere (or at least North and Central America)--are becoming the integrating units of the new world economy. Each bloc is trying to establish free trade internally and to abolish within the bloc all hurdles, restrictions and impediments, first to the movement of goods and money and ultimately to the movement of people. The United States, for instance, has proposed extending NAFTA to embrace all of Central America.

At the same time, each bloc is becoming more protectionist against the outside....

For thirty years after World War II, the U.S. economy dominated practically without serious competition. For another twenty years it was clearly the world's foremost economy and especially the undisputed leader in technology and innovation.

.... it is facing rivals that, either singly or in combination, could conceivably make America Number Two.

This has important repercussions for all sorts of American organizations paying American workers in U.S. dollars.

A more exciting, animated you

Real-time virtual animation now allows a "second-life" in a virtual world. As if I need a whole new dimension in which to deal with my pathologies.

The next Pope matters to all of us

as George Wiegel, official biographer of John Paul II points out, to Catholics, friends of Catholics, enemies of Christianity, and the politically involved for any other reason.

Voltaire would be spinning in his grave at the thought of the papacy as a defender of the "rights of man;" and I rather doubt that Huxley imagined the papacy as a counterweight to the evolution of the brave new world. Yet precisely such hopes-- and fears--may be found throughout the world today, in this twenty-seventh year of the pontificate of John Paul II.

He sees three big issues the next pope will face, as indicated by present discussions among the College of Cardinals:

The first of these is the virtual collapse of Christianity in its historic heartland--western Europe. The second great issue is the Church's response to the multi-faceted challenge posed by the rise of militant Islam. And the third involves the questions posed by the biotech revolution.

Read the whole thing to see how he develops these.

God and Caesar in China

China now has the world�s second-largest evangelical Christian population, second only to the United States. A new book, God and Caesar in China examines China's religion policy, the history and growth of Catholic and Protestant churches in China, and the implications of church-state friction for relations between the United States and China, concluding with recommendations for U.S. policy. Contributors include Daniel H. Bays (Calvin College), Mickey Spiegel (Human Rights Watch), Chan Kim-kwong (Hong Kong Christian Council), Jean-Paul Wiest (Chinese University of Hong Kong), Richard Madsen (University of California, San Diego), Xu Yihua (Fudan University), and Liu Peng (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences).

Generation Y embraces choice, redefines religion

A recent study summarized in the Washington Times finds "that 23 percent of Generation Y, like Generation X, do not identify with a religious denomination or don't believe in God. This is more than twice the number of nonbelievers among baby boomers...."

The good news is that the survey paints a composite picture of a generation who are seekers far more than they are drifters – a world away from their portrayal as stereotypical automatons we so often imagine as receiving their values directly from Paris Hilton or Justin Timberlake’s PR spokesperson. They are actively considering questions of identity, community, and meaning – negotiating how important their religious identities will ultimately be – but doing so with their own friends, in their own homes, and in their own ways.

Well, sorta good news, maybe.