BREVITAS

WORD

Some people are happy inside the church, some are happier outside. Those who prefer to stay outside should write Nature with a capital N. They should bless and venerate the Nature that composed mankind. That would leave a thin wall between them and those who are inside and write God with a capital G. If you knock, it can be heard on both sides. The disagreement is about the spelling of a word - Thor Heyerdahl

The journalist Bernard Fall noted that the French, after Dien Bien Phu, had no choice but to leave Southeast Asia. America, with its vast military, financial, and technological resources, was able to stay because it had the capacity to keep making the same mistakes over and over. Our war against "terrorism" has been in many ways a domestic version of our Vietnam strategy. We keep making the same mistakes over and over because, until now, we could afford to. One of these has been to define the problem by its manifestations rather than its causes. This turns a resolvable political problem into a irresolvable technical problem, because while, for example, there are clearly solutions to the Middle East crisis, there are no other solutions to the guerilla violence that grows from the failure to end it.

In other words, if you define the problem as "a struggle against terrorism" you have already admitted defeat because the guerilla will always have the upper hand against a centralized, technology-dependent society such as ours. There is one way to deal with guerilla warfare and that is to resolve the problems that allow it to thrive. The trick is to undermine the violence of the most bitter by dealing honestly with the complaints of the most rational. - Sam Smith

ECO NOTES FROM THE FUTURE

CTR FOR AMERICAN PROGRESS - The Aldabra banded snail is officially extinct. Existing only on an atoll 426 kilometers northwest of the northern tip of Madagascar, the snail died out after warmer weather cut the rainfall in its habitat.

GREAT MOMENTS IN THE LAW

In 1964, the Exchequer Court of Canada was asked to decide whether the expenses of running a "call girl" business in Vancouver were deductible from gross income for the purposes of income tax. The madam and seven call girls were all convicted and imprisoned. And then taxed. Claims for tax deductions in respect of the ordinary parts of the business, such as phone bills, were allowed. Other types of expenses were disallowed because the business couldn't prove them with receipts, including $2000 for liquor for local officials and $1000 paid to "certain men possessed of physical strength and some guile, which they exercised when set to extricate a girl from difficulties".- Gary Slapper's Case Notes, Times, UK

MID EAST

LA TIMES - The LAPD on Wednesday abruptly scrapped a program to map the city's Muslim population, a major retreat for a department that said the system was needed to identify potential hotbeds of extremism. The reversal comes after a week of protests from Muslim groups and civil libertarians, who equated the mapping with religious profiling. Others questioned whether it was possible for the LAPD to accurately map the city's far-flung Muslim community.

ANGRY ARAB - I was walking to the library in Berkeley yesterday, and I passed by a rally against US torture in Iraq. I counted the people in attendance. There were 12 students.

OUTLYING PRECINCTS

RACHEL ZOLL, AP - Roman Catholics voting in the 2008 elections must heed church teaching when deciding which candidates and policies to support, U.S. bishops said Wednesday. And while the church recognizes the importance of a wide range of issues - from war to immigration to poverty - fighting abortion should be a priority, the bishops said. "The direct and intentional destruction of innocent human life is always wrong and is not just one issue among many," the bishops said.

AP - Barack Obama, who's been scolding Hillary Rodham Clinton for not hastening the release of records from her time as first lady, says he can't step up and produce his own records from his days in the Illinois state Senate. He says he hasn't got any. "I don't have - I don't maintain - a file of eight years of work in the state Senate because I didn't have the resources available to maintain those kinds of records," he said at a recent campaign stop in Iowa. He said he wasn't sure where any cache of records might have gone, adding, "It could have been thrown out. I haven't been in the state Senate now for quite some time."

INSIDE POLITICS, WASH TIMES - "Heading into yet another TV debate, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton faces a potent enemy - not onstage, but in her own mind," Howard Fineman writes at Newsweek.com. "She has a lifelong obsession with seeking out, and trying to control, unruly events and people. She often fails, and harms herself trying. If she doesn't ease up, she risks losing the race. Brainy women don't frighten voters; control freaks do," Mr. Fineman said of the New York Democrat. "Hillary hates surprises, yet chooses to live in the most chaotic situations imaginable - from her eyes-wide-shut marriage to an undomesticated Arkansan, to a race for president in today's impossible-to-tame Wild West of bile-filled blogs and YouTube videos. "I've seen this disaster flick before. In her husband's 1992 campaign, she turned a family real-estate deal into a horror show by refusing to show documents about the transaction to the New York Times. She played the reporter along; then she stiffed him. The maneuver was too clever by half. 'Whitewater' dogged the Clintons for years. The latest example of the Control Freak Syndrome arose in Newton, Iowa, where her campaign planted in the audience at least one (and maybe several) questions to be asked of her. What on earth did she have to fear? By now she has answered thousands of questions and is smarter and better-briefed than any candidate in the field. Why plant an innocuous question about global warming? The answer: because she could."

RASMUSSEN - The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found Hillary Clinton leading Rudy Giuliani by three percentage points in a four-way race that includes Ron Paul running as a Libertarian candidate and Ralph Nader representing the Green Party. The poll shows Clinton earning 42% of the vote while Giuliani attracts 39%. Ron Paul is the choice for 8%, Ralph Nader is preferred by 4% and 7% are not sure. The inclusion of two minor-party candidates has little impact on the gap between Clinton and Giuliani. Recent Rasmussen Reports polling shows Clinton leading Giuliani by an average of four percentage points in a two-way race. The gender gap is huge - Clinton leads by nineteen points among women while Giuliani leads by seventeen among men.

CNN - During an afternoon tea party at the elegant governor's mansion in the capital of South Carolina, former Arkansas first lady Janet Huckabee told CNN she is pretty handy with a grenade launcher. Huckabee, the wife of Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, said in an interview that she once shot a grenade launcher at a National Guard training camp in Arkansas. "I have fired a grenade launcher and hit the target two out of three times, so I think that's pretty good odds for me," she said, noting that she had a special interest in military matters and has also jumped out of an airplane, flown in an F-16 and shot an MP5 submachine gun. . .

HEALTH & SCIENCE

INDEPENDENT, UK - Scientists have found a way of producing a potent cancer vaccine which could be manufactured from a patient's own cancer cells and used to treat their tumor. The technique involves the use of ultra-violet light to trigger the vaccine in a process known as photo-dynamic therapy. Tests on mice have shown that the technique produced a personalized vaccine with the same power as one grown in the laboratory, but in much less time. . .

WAR DEPARTMENT

RAW STORY - Across the total US veteran population of 25 million, CBS found that suicide rates were more than twice as high as for non-veterans

IMMIGRATION

AP - The executive director of the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism says Oklahoma's new immigration law does little to make the state or country safer from terrorism. "We should remember that the 9/11 terrorists ... all had visas and entered this country legally," Don Hamilton said Wednesday in an interview after speaking to members of the Council of State Governments. . . About half the illegal immigrants in the United States entered legally but overstayed their visas, he said. "If you put death rays on the border with Mexico that were 100 percent effective, you would only have solved less than half of the illegal immigration problem," he said.

WAR DEPARTMENT

TELEGRAPH, UK - Train passengers face routine airline-style bag checks and body searches as part of a new counter-terror crackdown announced by Gordon Brown. He conjured up visions of ''Fortress Britain" as he unveiled a succession of security measures at airports, railway stations, sports venues and other public places. Tanks at Heathrow Airport In 2003 tanks were deployed to Heathrow Airport because of a suspected plot to shoot down an airliner

FURTHERMORE. . .

GALLERY: URINALS AROUND THE WORLD