No one blamed Mae West for Pearl Harbor. Run it through the search engines and nothing comes up about sexy American bombshells causing God to look the other way as Japanese dive bombers turned Pearl Harbor into a junk yard. The answer at AOL: “Your search for ‘mae west pearl harbor’ returned no results. We recommend that you check your spelling.”

There was, in short, no Jerry Falwell around to blame America for Pearl Harbor, no one wagging his finger at the sinners before the smoke had even cleared, proclaiming that God had pulled away America’s protective shield and let an explosion and fireball kill 1,177 crewmen on the USS Arizona because the nation had become too lewd and crude, too secular, too full of dirty movies, too full of people who got a kick out of Mae West when she said “So many men, so little time.”

All told, the only thing that pops up in the search for “mae west pearl harbor” are references to inflatable life-jackets, mainly in oral history accounts like the one by Pharmacist’s Mate Second Class Lee Soucy, crewman aboard the USS Utah on December 7, 1941.

“After a minute or two below the armored deck, we heard another bugle call, then the whistle followed by the boatswain’s chant, ‘Abandon ship, abandon ship,’” explains Soucy. “We scampered up the ladder. As I raced toward the open side of the deck, an officer stood by a stack of life preservers and tossed the jackets at us as we ran by. When I reached the open deck, the ship was listing precipitously. I thought about the huge amount of ammunition we had on board and that it would surely blow up soon. I wanted to get away from the ship fast, so I discarded my life jacket. I didn’t want a Mae West slowing me down.”

Or this oral history from Arthur Goodfriend about a briefing from his captain: “There’s nothing to worry about, he said, as he told us about the life raft, Mae West, radio, etc. Mae West is the thing you put around your body, a life preserver. It’s called a Mae West after the woman who has big breasts and so anything that bulges is a Mae West.”

In any case, it didn’t take long on that Dec. 7 morning. The first attack wave of 183 planes, composed of dive bombers, torpedo bombers, horizontal bombers and fighters, took off from Japanese carriers around 6:00 a.m. and headed for the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, located just 230 miles to the south. A little more than an hour later, at 7:15 a.m., a second attack wave of 167 Japanese planes lifted off the carriers.

The first group of planes hit Pearl Harbor at 7:53 a.m., the second wave at 8:55. By 9:55 a.m., it was all over. Two hours and 2,403 dead – 2,335 servicemen and 68 civilians, with most of the latter killed by improperly fused American anti-aircraft shells landing in Honolulu. In addition to the dead, 1,178 wounded, plus 188 planes destroyed, mostly on the ground, five battleships sunk, another three heavily damaged, plus the loss of three destroyers, three cruisers and three smaller vessels.

American anti-aircraft guns were unmanned, ammunition boxes were locked, and Billy Graham, 23, was fresh out of the Florida Bible Institute with a Bachelor of Theology degree. There’s no record of Rev. Graham saying anything about 3,581 Americans being killed and wounded during those two hours because “My Little Chickadee” was playing in America’s movie houses, a film that paired bad-girl Mae “I used to be Snow White but I drifted” West with W.C. “More people are driven insane through religious hysteria than by drinking alcohol” Fields.

It’s that quote from Fields that best describes some of the more wacky e-mail that’s been filling my mailbox since I economically summarized Jerry Falwell’s buttinski theology this way in a recent column: “God got in bed with an international gang of Islamic terrorists because Ellen DeGeneres got in bed with Anne Heche.”

Robert L. sends a typical response: “Mr. Reiland, theology is not your strong suit. God is giving us a wake up call, telling us ‘WAKE UP AMERICA! NEXT TIME IT MIGHT BE A NUCLEAR ATTACK.’” Nice! God’s the perfect and all-knowing father who’ll nuke his own kids for being less than picture-perfect? That’s the kind of person we lock up.

From Dave, much the same, all in caps: “YOU OWE IT TO YOURSELF TO SEE HOW MAD GOD REALLY CAN BE. READ ISAIAH. PLEASE! WHAT ON THIS EARTH GIVES YOU THE IMPRESSION THAT GOD CAN BE ANYTHING BUT MAD?” Why so vindictive and mad, perpetually? I always thought He had it pretty nice.

And from Mark: “Abortion is more morally depraved than bin Laden’s terrorism. He’s trying to kill Jews and there are more of them in New York City than in Israel, and they’re easier to kill there.” And this nice summing up of sacred history, from Marlene: “Hosea said Israel was a whore.” Mark, Marlene, guess what? Whores are way more fun than terrorists! Who’d you rather have drop by when you’re up on the 80th floor?

Bottom line: Is anyone getting the idea that religion – both here and in the Afghan caves – is driving people nuts?

The smoke was still coming from the ruins of the World Trade Center when Jerry Falwell made a stop at Pat Robertson’s “700 Club” to explain why American passenger jets had been turned into missiles, why over 5,000 people were still buried in the smoldering and twisted ruins in Manhattan, why hundreds more had been killed in the crashes in Pennsylvania and at the Pentagon.

The death and devastation was caused by folks like Ellen DeGeneres, explained the good and portly preacher, caused by liberal judges and pagan television and ACLU lawyers and dirty dancing. God was mad at America, proclaimed Falwell, mad enough about abortion and gender-bending and everything else to get up there in the sky that morning with Satam Al Suqami, Abdulaziz Alomari, Waleed Alshehri, Wall Alshehri and Mohamed Atta and slam American Airlines flight 11 straight into the World Trade Center.

God, Falwell told Robertson, had protected America “wonderfully these 225 years,” and this was the first time since 1812 that we’d been attacked on our soil. The reason? Divine protection was withdrawn because we’re too bad … worse even, I guess, than the rats and psychos who live in the caves of Afghanistan.

The four plane crashes? “The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked,” said Falwell. “When we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. Throwing God out successfully with the help of the federal court system, throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools. The pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way – all of them who have tried to secularize America – I point the finger in their face and say ‘you helped this happen.’”

Robertson’s instant response: “Well, I totally concur.” The response from the White House: “The president does not share those views.” And the response from columnist Rip Rense: “God’s mad? I don’t know about you, folks, but whenever somebody tells me he claims to know God’s mind, I get kind of nervous. Makes me think about all those primitive tribes jumping for joy in the Middle East because they believe God has smitten the Great Satan. They think they know God’s mind too.”

Let’s follow Falwell’s theology. God got in bed with an international gang of Islamic terrorists because Ellen DeGeneres got in bed with Anne Heche. Or from another angle, the loving God of Christianity helped plow United Airlines Flight 175 into the World Trade Center because He’s mad that Gloria Steinem fought for equal pay for equal work.

And what, we should ground all passenger jets because God hates feminists, or because Madonna’s on tour? And what, God blew up the Pentagon because Dick Cheney’s daughter isn’t straight enough, and every large building in England should be evacuated because Elton John doesn’t put Tab A in Slot B?

“To follow this logic, one can only conclude that God is a terrorist,” says Rense. “Isn’t this what the Rev is saying? To follow the Falwellian logic, God hired those wacko hit-men and put them up to their fiendish work. And it’s just a short leap from there to think that maybe, gasp, God is on their side! After all, all those Muslim extremists just hate abortion, feminism and homosexuality, right? I mean, they don’t even let women show their faces in public. Osama bin Laden owns three wives (at last count), and young women who have sex before marriage are often decapitated by their own families.” Family values, via the God squad.

“Ol’ Jer’s way of thinking reminds me of primitive tribes who sacrifice monkeys to calm God down when he gets all riled up and dumps a big storm on their heads,” says Rense. “His thinking reminds me of Muslim extremist murderers who think that only they know the mind of a righteous God.”

All told, Falwell’s way of thinking isn’t all that different from what Saeed Alghamdi was probably thinking when he boarded United flight 93 in Newark, or what Fayez Ahmed was thinking as he got on United flight 175 in Boston, or what Hani Hanjour was thinking as American Airlines flight 77 left Dulles. All were blind to America as a civilized and free nation, unable to see a country of hard-working, successful and good people. Instead, they saw only infidels, impure people that their God wanted to kill.

As I’m writing this, Falwell is making the TV rounds, saying he was quoted out of context and apologizing if any impression was left that he thought God had allowed terrorists to attack us because of civil liberties groups, abortion, gays, lesbians and feminists.

“In the midst of the shock and mourning of a dark week for America, I made a statement that I should not have made and which I sincerely regret,” he said. “I want to apologize to every American, including those I named.” At a time of national mourning, he agreed, his comments were “insensitive, divisive and ill-timed.”

Ill-timed? Wrong again. There’s no time when his comments will make sense, except maybe to some primeval witch doctor.

What comes next? On August 18, 1998, Israeli military intelligence sources reported that Osama bin Laden had paid over 2 million pounds sterling to a middle-man in Kazakhstan who promised to deliver a “suitcase” bomb to bin Laden within two years. The following month in Munich, Germany, on September 25, 1998, Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, a top bin Laden aide, was arrested and charged with acting on behalf of bin Laden to obtain nuclear materials.

Less than two months later, a November 13, 1998, article in the Arabic news magazine Al-Watan Al-Arabi reported that bin Laden gave organized crime figures in the former Soviet republics in Central Asia and the Caucasus $30 million in cash and two tons of opium in exchange for an estimated 20 nuclear warheads. Citing inside information from top Russian intelligence sources, Al-Watan Al-Arabi maintained that bin Laden planned to have the warheads dismantled by his own team of scientists, who would then convert the weapons into “instant nukes” or “suitcase nukes.”

In 1996, Jamal Ahmad al-Fadl, a Sudanese national, turned himself in at an American embassy, claiming to have information vital to U.S. national security. On February 7, 2001, during the third day of the trial for the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Al-Fadl testified before a federal jury in New York City that he was directly involved in late 1993 or early 1994 in arranging a $1.5 million purchase of uranium for bin Laden in Khartoum, Sudan, allegedly for the development of nuclear weapons for a jihad – a holy war – against the West.

On the afternoon of the attacks on New York and the Pentagon, the Abu Dhabi television’s bureau chief in Islamabad, Jamal Ismail, reported that bin Laden, while claiming to have had no knowledge of the attacks ahead of time, praised the people who carried out the terrorist strikes in Washington and New York. From a hide-out in Afghanistan, a close aide of bin Laden gave Abu Dhabi TV the reaction from inside terrorist headquarters to the initial reports of American passenger planes being crashed into the World Trade Center and Pentagon: “Osama bin Laden thanked All Mighty Allah and bowed before him when he heard this news.”

On the following day, a London-based Arab journalist revealed that bin Laden’s followers had warned his newspaper by telephone three weeks earlier of an upcoming major attack against the United States. “They said it would be a huge and unprecedented attack, but they did not specify details,” said Abdel-Bari Atwan, editor of the Al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper.

It was, of course, unprecedented. And we were warned. “I’m fighting so I can die a martyr and go to heaven to meet God,” bin Laden told the Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper more than a year ago. It’s all about All Mighty Allah, in short, and heavenly deeds, like mass murder, and the Great Satan – about them and us, about nuking infidels for Allah. “Our fight now,” explains bin Laden, “is against the Americans.”

Here’s how ABC News put it last February, interviewing bin Laden: “The U.S. has said, in formal charges, that you are in a position to develop chemical weapons and try to purchase nuclear material for weapons. How would such weapons be used?”

Bin Laden’s reply: “This is a multi-dimensional question. It presupposes that I do possess such weapons, and goes on to ask about the way in which we will use them. In answer, I would say that acquiring weapons for the defense of Muslims is a religious duty. To seek to possess the weapons that could counter those of the infidels is a religious duty. If I have indeed acquired these weapons, then this is an obligation I carried out and I thank God for enabling us to do that. And if I seek to acquire these weapons I am carrying out a duty. It would be a sin for Muslims not to try to possess the weapons that would prevent the infidels from inflicting harm on Muslims. But how we could use these weapons if we possess them is up to us.”

And, similarly, it’s up to us how we use our weapons. And, said the Washington Post last week, Americans are now in “a determined and warlike mood, ready to strike swift and hard.” Some 94 percent of the U.S. public in last Tuesday’s Washington Post-ABC News poll, for instance, supports military action against those responsible for the attacks in New York and Washington. In his speech to the nation on the night of the attacks, President Bush said the United States “will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.” In the Post-ABC poll, 84 percent of respondents were of the same mind, agreeing that the U.S. should launch military action against any countries that assist or harbor terrorists – action, for example, against places like Afghanistan, the nation that plays host to bin Laden, or the countries that the State Department names in its 2000 report as sponsoring terrorism: Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan and Libya.

The irony in all this is that bin Laden, a millionaire Saudi engineer, came to prominence fighting alongside the U.S.-backed Afghan mujahedeen, the “holy warriors” who fought Soviet troops in the 1980s with CIA training and an estimated $6 billion in American weapons. It was an Afghan jihad, backed with American dollars and blessed by the governments of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

Fighting against a Soviet creed that held religion in contempt, thousands of Islamic fighters – Turks, Egyptians, Lebanese and others – joined bin Laden to aid the Afghan Muslim resistance against the Soviet army. Bin Laden, according to Middle Eastern analyst Hazhir Teimourian, received top-level security instruction from the CIA itself.

When the war ended, bin Laden, transformed into a radical Muslim, surfaced as the head of a group of battle-hardened religious fundamentalists, veterans who were ready to purge any and all non-Islamic influences from the Middle East. Bin Laden’s intense anti-Americanism emerged when U.S. troops were stationed in Saudi Arabia during the 1991 Gulf War.

Issuing a public proclamation in 1992, bin Laden ordered strikes on U.S. military installations in both Saudi Arabia and Somalia. Within months, bin Laden-trained forces ambushed American troops in Somalia, killing 18 Army Rangers and dragging their naked mud-covered bodies through the streets. At around the same time, the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center occurred when a car-bomb exploded in an underground garage, killing six people and causing more than $300 million in damages.

What followed was an attack against a U.S. Air Force high-rise in Saudi Arabia, a call to arms against Americans published in the London Arabic newspaper Al-Quds al-Arabi, an Islamic Fatwa, or holy order, calling for Muslims to “kill Americans and their allies, civilians and military” wherever they’re found, the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and a strike against the Navy warship USS Cole in a Yemeni port. “If someone can kill an American soldier,” explained bin Laden, “it is better than wasting time on other matters.”

All U.S. citizens, in other words, soldier and civilian, became “legitimate targets.” It was, proclaimed bin Laden, time to “get ready for the holy war,” time for the Palestinian group Islamic Jihad and the Egyptian al-Gamma al-Islamiya “to put in place a common strategy against the United States,” time for a full-blown jihad that was the “obligation of all Muslims,” time for hijacked passenger planes to replace smaller scale boat-bomb attacks and suicide trucks.

The message was one of faith-based hatred, a message of alleged American fright and powerlessness. “The American army is going down hill in its morale,” declared bin Laden. “Its members are too cowardly and too fearful to meet the young people of Islam face to face.”

And so, now comes the toll in Manhattan. Not six people this time, but thousands, with Iraqi television playing a patriotic song that begins “Down with America!” as it shows the World Trade Center’s towers falling, and with young Palestinians cheering in the West Bank for the cameras, happy that Manhattan looked like Dante’s Inferno for a few days.

And the toll next time, unless we hit back, of a chemical or biological attack in the Holland and Lincoln tunnels? Or the toll next time, unless we assist bin Laden in reaching his dream of martyrdom, of a suitcase nuke detonation at the Empire State Building?

All told, September 11 was a wake-up call. We only lose if we roll over and go back to sleep again.

Interviewing Osama bin Laden last February, ABC News asked this question:
“You have been charged with masterminding the bombings of the two U.S.
embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Are these charges true?”

Bin Laden’s answer:

Praise be to God, the Cherisher and Sustainer of the
Worlds. Peace and blessings be upon Prophet Muhammad, his companions and his
kin. Let me begin by stating that we, in the World Islamic Front for jihad
against Jews and Crusaders, have, by the grace of God Almighty, issued a
crystal clear fatwa calling on the Nation to carry on jihad aimed at
liberating Islamic holy sites, and the Ancient House, The Holy Ka’aba, and
Al-Aksa Mosque and all Islamic lands. By the grace of God, praise and glory
be to him, this Nation, the Nation of Muhammad, God’s peace and blessings be
upon him, has responded to this appeal and this instigation. We will continue
this course because it is a part of our religion, and because God, praise and
glory be to him, ordered us to carry out jihad so that the word of God may
remain exalted to the heights. If the instigation for jihad against the Jews
and the Americans, in order to liberate Al-Aksa Mosque and the Holy Ka’aba,
is considered a crime, let history be a witness that I am a criminal.

Strip away the bovine excrement and here’s the answer: Yes.

The bombs went off at the U.S. embassies, in other words, because the Grand
Pooh-Bah in the Sky has ordered a holy war, has ordered his most ardent fans
to blow themselves up in pizza shops and smash passenger jets into the sides
of skyscrapers.

And “we will continue this course,” explains bin Laden, because it’s “a part
of our religion.” And if that’s “considered a crime,” i.e., considered a
crime to kill 10 or 20 thousand people in one morning at the World Trade
Center, so be it.

And here’s the second question from ABC News: “You warned that Americans
would die. Then, two months later, the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar As
Salaam were bombed. Were these bombings because of your fatwa, your decree,
against America?”

Bin Laden’s reply: “By the grace of God, praise and glory be to him, we have
repeatedly issued warnings, over a number of years. Following these warnings
and these calls, anti-American explosions took place in a number of Islamic
countries. Most probably, these acts came about as a result of such calls and
warnings. But only God knows the truth.”

Again, get past the heifer dust and here’s the answer: Yes. Yes, I ordered
the hits and “most probably, these acts came about as a result,” but, hey,
only the Grand Pooh-Bah knows for sure.

There’s nothing new in any of this, except that the destruction has
escalated. It’s the same demonization of the West, the same painting of the
United States as the Great Satan, the same faith-based blather, the same envy
of our prosperity from the boondocks of the world, the same hatred of our
freedom by those who’ve sacrificed their individual distinctiveness to a
collective psychosis.

If Ronald Reagan was still in the White House, he might well be saying the
same thing now about bin Laden that he said in his Jan. 7, 1986, press conference
about Libyan leader Col. Gaddafi: “I find he’s not only a barbarian but he’s flaky.”

Unfortunately, it looks like we ain’t seen nothing yet. “They’re looking to
acquire chemical, biological and nuclear weapons,” says former U.S. Defense
Secretary William Cohen. Benjamin Netanyahu, former Prime Minister of Israel,
issued much the same warning six years ago in his book “Fighting Terrorism”:
“The very real possibility that terrorists may soon acquire horrific weapons
of mass destruction and use them to escalate terrorism beyond our wildest
dreams has not been addressed properly by Western governments. Today’s
tragedies can either be the harbingers of much greater calamities yet to come
or the turning point in which free societies once again mobilize their
resources, their ingenuity, and their will to wipe out this evil from our
midst. Fighting terrorism is not a ‘policy option’; it is a necessity for our
survival.”

The problem, says Leonard Peikoff, founder of the Ayn Rand Institute, is that
we’ve been too soft: “Fifty years of increasing American appeasement in the
Mideast” have led to “fifty years of increasing contempt in the Muslim world
for the U.S.” – and Sept. 11 was the “inevitable climax.”

At its root, Peikoff argues, our capitulation was philosophical. We were
denounced as too wealthy, too unholy, too egoistic and we refused to answer
back that we are motivated, and rightfully so, by the desire to pursue
personal happiness here on earth in a rich, free, secular and individualist
society.

And now? “We must wipe out the terrorist training camps and eliminate any
retaliatory military capability – and thereby terrorize and paralyze all
the tyrannies watching, who will now know what is in store for them if they
choose in any form to attack the U.S.,” states Peikoff. “The choice today is
mass death in the U.S. or mass death in the terrorist nations. To those who
oppose war, I ask: If not now, when? How many more corpses are necessary
before this country should take action?”

SEA ISLE, N.J. – As one season folds into another at the beach, the news is good and bad. On the upside, the renters and kids are gone, the dogs are more free to run in the surf without getting ticketed, the Lima Bean Festival is coming, no one in town was swallowed by a shark and there was no line this week for lunch at the Crab Trap.

“I’m so glad they’re gone,” said the bartender at lunch yesterday, referring to the grand exodus of the summer crowd on Labor Day. “I especially won’t miss the kids. All summer, adults would go to their tables and leave their kids, 7- and 10-year-olds, at the bar to play, to toss stirrers around and play in the bar mix, like I don’t need these seats for dinner customers.” That’s end-of-season frustration talking, fatigue and aggravation, after what amounts to 100 Saturday nights in a row.

It was the same with the all-night cashier at the 7-11 on the night before Labor Day. “I can’t wait ’til tomorrow,” she said, looking pale and exhausted and dragging on a cigarette as she rang up my caf? mocha. “They all get out of here tomorrow. Starting Tuesday, this town’s nothing, zilch.”

Among a group of beach house owners in town for the weekend, the talk was more about money and the economy, about their record losses in the stock market and the record gains in the value of their beach properties, and about Alan Greenspan’s comments on stocks and houses at the Fed’s annual retreat in Jackson Hole, Wyo., over the Labor Day weekend.

Bottom line, Greenspan said it was tough to understand how the changing values of stocks and homes affect consumer spending and the overall economy: “To answer these questions, we need far more information than we currently possess about the nature and the sources of capital gains and the interaction of these gains with credit markets and consumer behavior.”

In fact, the linkages aren’t difficult to comprehend. We don’t, for instance, need “far more information” to see how increases in the value of stock and homes produce higher levels of consumer confidence, elevated levels of consumer spending and accelerated growth in the overall economy. Simply stated, the relationship between the value of stocks and homes and the level of consumer spending and total economic activity is direct and positive.

Looking back, it’s too bad that Greenspan wasn’t as cautious in the recent past as he seems today, too bad he didn’t seek “far more information,” for instance, about the links between stock values and the overall health of the economy before he made his famed “irrational exuberance” speech on Dec. 6, 1996, and too bad he didn’t dig for “far more information” before he tried to prick the bubble of the rising U.S. stock market by jacking up interest rates in 1999 and 2000 while the economy was heading straight into a recession.

All told, by fighting an inflation that didn’t exist, Greenspan enacted an ill-timed policy of raising interest rates after the economy had begun to fall. The effect was to turn an investment boom into a bust and cut consumer purchases of big-ticket items like homes and automobiles. The price of the error? Very expensive – a stalled economy, a collapsing stock market, and an overall drop of some $7 trillion in wealth over the past 12 months.

The way out of the woods? It’s not enough, clearly, that the Fed has been working energetically to undo the damage it produced, cutting interest rates seven times since January. Compared to last year, total economic activity in this year’s second quarter expanded by only 1.2 percent, the weakest performance since the first quarter of 1993.

And it’s not enough to blame Bush. CNBC economics commentator Lawrence Kudlow explains how we got here: “What Bush inherited from Clinton was a big economic turkey: the worst bear-market decline in 2.5 decades and the first synchronous global slump since the mid-1970s. Before Bush was even sworn into office, the Nasdaq technology index had already plunged 70 percent. By the time Bush had submitted his tax-cutting budget, the U.S. economy had rolled over to less than 1 percent growth from 8 percent in late 1999. And before the tax cuts were even passed into law, the domestic private-sector economy (excluding government spending and trade) had shrunk two consecutive quarters.”

The right medicine? “The economy,” says Investor’s Business Daily, “can’t perform at its peak when spending, saving and investing are shackled – by law.” The unshackling will require growth oriented tax cuts to encourage investment and boost productivity, especially a capital-gains reduction, genuine death-tax repeal, accelerated depreciation allowances and overall lower business taxes. Longer run, it also means regulatory improvements and tort reform in order to reduce the flow of capital and human resources from productive to nonproductive sectors.

And to boost consumer spending, the largest component of the economy, what’s called for is a speed up in the tax cuts (most are back-ended at the end of the 10-year deal), plus further interest rate cuts to stimulate large-ticket purchases.

Overall, what’ll work is more individual freedom, more incentives, lower taxes and less central control.

“Were we directed from Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we should soon want bread.” That was Thomas Jefferson’s warning about the downside of centralized planning.

Updated, Jefferson might put it this way today: “Were we directed from Washington when to fish, and when to cut bait, we should soon want for more seafood and safer beaches.”

On July 6, a 7-foot bull shark ripped the arm off an 8-year-old boy while he was playing in knee-deep water near Pensacola, Florida. After grabbing the shark and wrestling it to shore, the boy’s uncle extracted the arm from the shark’s mouth. A few weeks later off Grand Bahama Island, a shark mangled the leg of a New York man so severely that surgeons were forced to amputate above the knee. That was followed by two fatal attacks within a few days of each other, one on a 10-year-old boy in Virginia and another on a man in North Carolina. Last August, a 69-year-old man was found floating near his dock on the Intracoastal Waterway in St. Petersburg Beach, dead from a huge bite through the torso.

All told, compared to 1993, the year the federal government launched its shark-protection program, shark attacks are up over 100 percent in U.S. coastal waters, up 325 percent in Florida. “As a result of the federal ban on shark fishing, 236,900 fewer sharks were caught in 1999 than in 1993,” reports Hans Nichols in Insight magazine, “leaving more in the water to gnaw off a limb from an occasional swimmer.”

Worldwide, a record-breaking 79 shark attacks took place last year, 51 of them in U.S. coastal waters, 34 of those in Florida, according to the International Shark Attack File at the University of Florida. In North Carolina and Alabama, shark attacks last year broke all previous records. The federal response, with swimmers, divers and surfers more endangered? Three new candidates were chosen for the endangered species list: gray nurse sharks, dusky sharks and night sharks.

The federal government’s operating assumption is that sharks are becoming extinct, particularly the large ones, and especially where we swim. In the waters off the eastern United States, for instance, the federal government’s Final Fishery Management Plan estimates that the total number of sandbar sharks, black-tips, great hammerheads, tiger sharks and other large coastal sharks has dropped from 8.9 million to 1.4 million from 1974 to 1998.

To counteract this alleged decline, the federal government began its first shark-management plan in 1993, setting catch quotas and banning finning, i.e., the practice of cutting off the fins and tossing the sharks back into the water to die, something that’s still standard procedure in much of the rest of the world.

At the state level, Florida chimed in with a strict, one-shark-per-person and two-sharks-per-boat maximum limit in state waters. Extending 3 miles into the ocean, this curb on catches creates a place of relative safety for sharks exactly where interaction with humans is most likely to occur.

Tightening the rules in 1997, the federal government cut the annual catch quota for large sharks in half, established the first fishing quota for small sharks, and banned entirely the catch of whale sharks, white sharks, basking sharks, sand tigers and bigeye tiger sharks.

Along with bull sharks, it’s these now-protected tiger sharks that are the most frequent attackers of humans in shallow waters. In deeper waters, it’s mako and hammerheads that are most likely to attack, along with the great whites of “Jaws” fame, who seem to mistake surfers for their favorite meal, seals.

“In the open sea, it’s the oceanic white-tip shark that’s most likely to prey on humans,” writes James Swan in North American Hunter magazine. “They hunt in packs and have been responsible for devouring many shipwreck survivors as they struggle to stay afloat.”

Bottom line, the combination of government-mandated shorter fishing seasons, a tenfold cut in shark-fishing permits, an increase in the types of sharks declared off-limits and lowered “trip limits” on catches has produced a 49 percent drop in the number of sharks caught in U.S. coastal waters, from 17.2 million pounds in 1989 to 8.5 million pounds in 1999, and a drop of 86 percent in Florida over the same period, from 7.4 million to just over 1 million pounds.

For the guys who catch sharks for a living, those drops translate into unemployment. Reports the South Florida Sun-Sentinel: “They say the government has grossly underestimated the number of sharks, using politically driven data designed to wipe out the shark-fishing industry. They say lower quotas will drive them out of business. They say the U.S. catches are a small fraction of the huge hauls taken by fishermen in countries that lack any shark restrictions at all. And they point to evidence that the shark population is rebounding: shredded shrimp nets, an increase in nuisance sharks that steal fish off lines, and more attacks on swimmers.”

For the rest of us, the problem is that sharks eat only meat and have evolved over millions of years into A-1 killing machines. In order of descending jeopardy, bathers are the most frequent human targets, followed by surfers, then divers, then shipwreck survivors. Says Merry Camhi at the Audubon Society, “They have a right to live in our oceans.” Fine, and we should have the right to eat them before they eat us.

For Democrats to win back the White House, the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) says the party will have to appeal more to white males, churchgoers and married voters.

Last time around, Al Gore carried only 36 percent of the white male vote. And that was in every category, across all income levels. “Non-college-educated white men, who ought to be a bedrock Democratic constituency based on economics,” says columnist Morton Kondracke, “went for George Bush 63 percent to 34 percent.”

Gore struck out with similar numbers among churchgoers, carrying only 36 percent of those who attend church on a regular basis, to Bush’s 63 percent. In contrast, among those who never set foot in church – except for weddings and funerals – Gore hammered Bush, 61 percent to 30 percent.

And Gore won only 44 percent of all married voters – all races, all incomes. For the Democrats to win the majority of that mainstream vote, argues the DLC, it’s going to take some “values centrism” – things like support for bigger tax credits for children, more television V-chips and a political posture that’s more favorable to business.

Overall, the DLC – the home base of well-positioned guys like Bill Clinton, Joe Lieberman, John Breaux, and Dick Gephardt – says its mission is to “define and galvanize popular support for a new public philosophy built on progressive ideals, mainstream values, and innovative, non-bureaucratic, market-based solutions.” That means “promoting opportunity for all” while “demanding responsibility from everyone,” a philosophy where welfare isn’t seen as a never-ending entitlement, criminals aren’t portrayed as victims of society, the federal bureaucracy isn’t called out to solve every problem and the private sector isn’t painted as the enemy.

The DLC is asserting, in short, that it’s the Party that needs an overhaul, not just Al Gore. White male voters, for example – in total, all incomes, urban, rural – supported Republicans in House races last year by 59 percent to 38 percent, and voted for Republicans in Senate races by 60 percent to 38 percent.

The left, unsurprisingly, will come to blows with any attempt to move the party to the center. From super-liberal Mother Jones magazine: “The Clinton years have completed and locked in the Reagan revolution.” Completed and locked in what’s called a “Republicrat duopoly,” a coalition of politicians in both parties, bought by the rich, who wink at the morals and greed of the “overclass” while attacking of the morals of the “underclass” … a state that “ends welfare, not poverty.”

The “legacy,” continues the analysis in Mother Jones, is that “history will record with some astonishment that this remorseless progress towards a corporate state was accompanied by a chorus of support from the politically correct. African American leaders, for instance, described as ‘our first black president’ a character who as a candidate had made a point of executing the mentally-deficient Rickey Ray Rector, who ditched Lani Guinier, humiliated Betty Currie and vetoed a United Nations resolution calling for international action to forestall the genocide in Rwanda. Feminists, during the impeachment battle, rallied around a man who hit on the help and then trashed his conquests if they complained. Liberal academics and intellectuals flocked to a president who had bombed Sudan in dog-wagging style, deceived his Cabinet, taken wagonloads of off-the-record money from Indonesian and Chinese special interests and rented Mr. Lincoln’s bedroom to the fat cats.”

The result? “A price has to be paid for all this, and the immediate as well as longer lasting cost: American Democratic liberalism has lost its honor and prestige and has proved itself as adept in making excuses for power as any Babbitt in the Nixon era.”

On the Republican side, Zogby says his polling data shows that George Bush got only 8 percent of the African-American vote, and 32 percent of Hispanic votes. In a recent Washington Post interview, Bush pollster Matthew Dowd stated the goal for 2004: “We have to get somewhere between 38 to 40 percent of the Hispanic vote.” In just the past few weeks, that’s meant a steady stream of policy initiatives from the White House: a call for the opening of the United States to Mexican trucks, weekly radio addresses in English and Spanish, the promotion of Cinco de Mayo, the celebration of the Mexican victory over the French army and a White House amnesty plan that grants legal residency to three million illegal aliens from Mexico.

And with drugs and votes? Here’s how Washington Post columnist William Raspberry describes it: “Most of the experts say drug use rates are roughly equal for blacks and whites. But according to Ethan Nadelmann of the Lindesmith Center, blacks are arrested for drug offenses at six times the rate for whites.” The D.C.-based Justice Policy Institute, for instance, points to the different jumps in the number of people behind bars in New York state since 1980 for drug offenses – imprisonment increases of 1,600 percent, 1,300 percent and 100 percent, respectively, for Hispanics, blacks and whites.

Says Bush, “I think a lot of people are coming to the realization that maybe long minimum sentences for first-time users may not be the best way to occupy jail space or heal people from disease.”

With parents now physically attacking and threatening an estimated 150 umpires and referees each year, syndicated columnist Georgie Anne Geyer reports that 15 state legislatures have passed laws levying stiff fines against this type of family fun.

Geyer describes the behavior of a parent at a school event: “At one game, in Bethesda, Md., a father threatened the referee at his 14-year-old daughter’s soccer game, dropped his pants and ‘mooned’ the official – and was applauded by many in the crowd.”

All told, an estimated three-fourths of referees quit within three years and one-half of all new teachers are gone within five years. It’s slightly reminiscent of 1966 in China when Mao launched his Red August anti-teacher campaign, telling Red Guard students that their teachers were “class enemies,” overly fortunate and excessively literate foes that they should spit upon, badger, beat and finally kill.

In a major article, “Schools Awash in Bad Behavior,” the Washington Post paints a picture of a wide-ranging danger to society from “out of control” students: “Children across the country spit on teachers, trip them, threaten to burn down the school, pelt their teachers with obscenities and expose themselves.” Such events, increasingly “shocking” and “self-indulgent,” reports the Post, have now shifted from “rare” to “regular” events in many elementary schools, nationwide.

Al Gore’s solution during the presidential election was “alternative educational settings,” or “special second-chance schools,” for students expelled for disciplinary reasons. In short, stick all the bad apples in one barrel. Bush, in contrast, pushed for more school choice – more competition, more accountability, less monopoly, more vouchers for poor children stuck in failing schools.

In any case, with the starting bell about to ring for another school year and nearly 70 percent of fourth graders, urban and rural, unable to read at a basic level, Al Gore has come back with an ugly beard, Bush II has compromised away any real shot at reform and the National Education Association (NEA) is saying the answer is more money and less work, i.e., automatic raises and smaller classes.

All in all, it looked like another year of more of the same, another round of the annual autumn debate about why we’re behind Uzbekistan in math and science and scoring somewhere between Tonga and Bhutan in reading.

Speaking recently to delegates at the NEA’s convention, Bush’s secretary of education, Rod Paige, pointed to the numbers: education spending straight up over the past eight years and zero to tiny improvements in student performance. The finger-pointing puts the blame in all the usual places – TV, drugs, indifferent parents, red tape, tenured burn-outs, politicians, teachers’ unions, the fact that public schools are a monopoly and, most of all, disinterested kids.

Then came the good news: The kids do better – just like California oranges – when they’re sun-kissed! It turns out that a new study of 21,000 California school kids indicates that students suffer when there isn’t enough light, becoming off-balance just like the folks who suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), a depression brought on by a lack of sunlight.

“Researchers found that students in classrooms with the most light showed a 20 percent faster rate of improvement on math tests, and a 26 percent faster rate of improvement on reading tests, than students toiling in classrooms with the least light,” reports the New York Observer. “In a Seattle school district, the amount of daylight in a classroom was a better predictor of academic performance than gender, class size, or whether the student came from a single parent family. Students in classrooms with ample natural light scored as much as 18 percent higher on tests than those whose classrooms had no windows.”

And screens matter! “Not only did windows make a difference; if they opened, there were further benefits,” reports the Observer. “In the California study, students in classrooms with windows that could open advanced 8 percent faster over one year than those in classrooms without open windows, which researchers attributed to the flow of natural air.”

Maybe that’s why those smart-alecky homeschoolers win all the spelling bees. Perhaps it’s not their self-starting work ethic after all, or their faithful and dedicated parents, or their top-notch mail-order cassettes. Maybe it’s just the patio, the sun, the porch and the windows that open, the flow of fresh air that’s boosting performance by 20 to 26 percent. Same with those Catholic schools in Brooklyn from the 1930s with their big old floor-to-ceiling double-hung windows that regularly outperform the city’s more updated public schools with their airtight rooms and windows that don’t open.

I asked the Significant Other what she thought about it. For her, it was simple – just common sense – even without the California study: “Look at the plants in the winter. You think we’re immune to that? It’s why people head for Florida when that gray cloud comes over Pittsburgh every winter.”

The lesson? First, call the remodeling crews to get the windows open and install some screens. Second, see how that works, see if we beat Tonga and Bhutan, before there’s any more talk about extending the school year. And third, invite some good architects and environmental psychologists to the table the next time a school’s being designed.

“Slayings tie 2000 total” is the morning headline in the Pittsburgh
Tribune-Review as I’m writing this. This time it’s a black woman, Katrenia
Rae Seymore, 29, dumped naked in a wooded area with an electrical cord around
her neck. She was the mother of seven girls, ages 11, 10, 9, 8, 7 and twins,
5.

“She had a drug problem,” explained her mother. Her death brought the
total number of homicides this year in the city to 43, the same number of
homicides all last year and we still have the better part of five months to
go.

Before Seymore, it was two young black men, 24- and 32-years-old, gunned down
at 2 a.m. as they were approaching a traffic light. Both died from gunshot
wounds to the chest. At around the same time, another black man died in the
hospital from wounds he suffered in a shooting seven weeks earlier. All told,
27 of the city’s latest 28 murder victims were black.

“It’s heroin,” says a Pittsburgh cop. “A turf fight.” Word on the street is
that demand is up, a good supply is getting through the airport and the
killings, in large part, are the work of guys fresh out of prison and
fighting to get back their old territories.

Unhappily, the whole bloody mess is little more than a replay of what was
once called the “noble experiment,” the national prohibition of alcohol, 1920
to 1933. Back then, the idea was to take something that most people do,
something that most people can handle, and make it suddenly illegal as of
midnight on January 16, 1920.

Pour the Demon Rum down the sewers, proclaimed the hallelujah chorus, and
it’ll be heaven on earth. “The reign of tears is over,” proclaimed Reverend
Billy Sunday when Prohibition was enacted. “The slums will soon be a memory.
We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and
corncribs. Men will walk upright now, women will smile and children will
laugh. Hell will be forever for rent.”

On top of corncribs and smiling women, the prohibitionists envisaged less
crime, less corruption, improved marriages, fewer prisons, empty poorhouses,
and lower taxes. Instead, Prohibition became a classic illustration of the
Law of Unintended Consequences. What the federal ban on liquor delivered was
an increase in alcohol consumption, more murders, more bribes, more
government, more jail and a large increase in Al Capone’s net worth.

Mark Thornton, assistant professor of economics at Auburn University,
summarizes the results: “Alcohol became more dangerous to consume; crime
increased and became ‘organized’; the court and prison systems were stretched
to the breaking point; corruption of public officials was rampant; tax
revenues declined; and government spending greatly increased.”

More specifically, the homicide rate jumped from 6 per 100,000 population in
the pre-Prohibition period to nearly 10 per 100,000 by 1933, a rise that was
reversed by the repeal of Prohibition; the reported death toll from poisoned
liquor hit 4,154 in 1925, up from 1,064 in 1920; the annual budget of the
Bureau of Prohibition went from $4.4 million to $13.4 million during the
1920s; and the jail business boomed, with the number of federal convicts
increasing by over 500 percent from 1920 to 1933, primarily due to
convictions for drugs and alcohol.

Bottom line, annual per capita spending on alcohol during Prohibition was
greater than it had been before Prohibition, after falling steadily before
Prohibition, and crime grew into an empire. With sales and earnings
escalating on products made illicit by government decree, it was only
criminals, by definition, who could run the increasingly profitable show. In
Chicago, gang related murders topped 400 in a single year. Said Will Rogers,
“Governments used to murder by the bullet only. Now it’s by the quart.”

And so, here we go again, back to the drive-bys in the inner city, back to
the overdoses from products with adulterated potencies, with J. Orlin Grabbe,
author of “The Function of the Drug War” and other essays that “inspect the
global underbelly,” asking the right questions: “When was the last time our
murder rate soared suddenly and innocent bystanders were killed during
drive-by shootings between rival criminal gangs? When was the last time a
significant number of people died from adulterated alcoholic beverages? When
was the last time large numbers of Americans had dealings on a daily basis
with vicious thugs and sociopathic underworld characters? When was the last
time corruption so pervaded our police forces and judicial system that
ordinary citizens in many cities and towns lost all respect for their own
government authorities?”

The answer’s the same to all those questions, says Grabbe: “During alcohol
prohibition, 70 years ago.”

Simply stated, Prohibition didn’t work in the 1920s and ’30s and it’s not
working in 2001. As Thornton says it, “Sound economic theory predicts that
prohibition of mutually beneficial exchanges is doomed to failure.” Last time
around, for instance, by 1925, some five years into Prohibition, the number
of speak-easies in the U.S. outnumbered the number of saloons that had been
closed. Over 100,000 operated in New York City alone. Demand, in short,
created the supply.

And today, it’s no different. With the highest rate of incarceration in the
world and after all the drive-bys and all the prisons overflowing with
nonviolent drug offenders, it’s still easier in Pittsburgh to find some smack
at midnight than a good reuben, still easier to get an 8-ball than a good
hamburger.

Just look at the numbers and it’s obvious that Social Security is a “lousy investment” for anyone under 50, says Pete Dupont, the former governor of Delaware and current policy chairman of the National Center for Policy Analysis. “Social Security made sense in 1935,” he says. “In 2001, it’s dangerously outdated.”

Outdated in several ways – most importantly in terms of demographics. Start with 1940, the first year Social Security checks were mailed out. There were 42 workers supporting each retiree. By 1950, that ratio had dropped to 16-1. By 1960, there were only five workers paying into the system for every retiree. Today, we’re down to three workers per retiree, and it’s expected to be 2-1 by 2030.

What that means is more money going out and fewer people to pick up the tab. And it means the end of the system’s surpluses. Every year since 1983, Social Security has taken in more in taxes than was needed to pay benefits. That changes in 2016, according to the latest forecast from the Social Security trustees, when the incoming revenue from the 12.4 percent payroll tax won’t be enough to cover the price of benefits.

The system then begins to eat up the accumulated Social Security surpluses. By 2038, say the official projections, the entire surplus will be gone. In fact, the surpluses were gone on the day they came in, with the money spent on other government programs and replaced with the non-marketable Treasury bonds that make up the Social Security trust fund.

The Social Security trust fund, in short, bears little likeness to a private sector trust fund. There are no real “reserves” or “surpluses.” The “assets” are nothing more than paper IOUs, essentially promises by the D.C. politicians that they’ll do whatever it takes to come up with the money to redeem the bonds. They’ll raise taxes, in other words, or borrow the money from somewhere else, to generate the “surplus” that they’ve already spent.

Altogether, running on a pay-as-you-go basis with zero real resources, Social Security has an unfunded liability of nearly $22 trillion, an amount 7 times larger than the national debt. Bottom line, minus reform, it’s a system with too few workers, too many liabilities and tax hikes and benefit cuts on the horizon.

In the face of all this, Gov. Dupont points to a pair of tables in the recently released interim report of President Bush’s Commission to Strengthen Social Security to underscore his point about the system being a bad deal. The tables show the rate of return on Social Security taxes and how long taxpayers have to live in order to get their money back, in order to break even.

For men retiring this year and in all subsequent years, a table shows that the number of years an average earner must collect Social Security benefits just to get back what he paid into the system exceeds his life expectancy. More specifically, the commission’s report shows the deal that today’s 35-year-olds are receiving: “Workers paying the maximum tax into Social Security and retiring in 2030 would have to live past age 110 simply to get back what they paid in.”

It’s the same story for women retiring in 2010 and thereafter. In order to break even, they have to collect Social Security checks for longer than their life expectancy. “And for black Americans the news is even worse,” says Dupont. “Because of shorter life expectancies, they’ll on average receive $21,000 less in benefits over their lifetimes than their white counterparts.”

On top of that, Michael Tanner at the Cato Institute contends that Social Security directly contributes to the growing wealth gap between blacks and whites: “Because Social Security taxes squeeze out other forms of saving and investment, especially for low-income workers, many African Americans are unable to accumulate real wealth.”

Either way, black or white, we’re simply not accumulating enough assets for retirement. “The median U.S. household owned only $17,400 worth of financial assets in 1998, including retirement accounts,” states the commission’s report. “For African-American and Hispanic households the numbers were only $3,060 and $1,200 respectively.” Overall, the personal savings rate as a percentage of after-tax income was a negative 0.1 percent last year, down from 9.3 percent in 1974.

The way out? Says former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., the commission’s co-chairman: “Unless we move boldly and quickly, the promise of Social Security to future retirees cannot be met without eventual resort to benefit cuts, tax increases or massive borrowing.”

“Boldly and quickly” probably means the commission is set to give a green light to the idea of workers investing a portion of their Social Security taxes in personal investment accounts. As it now stands, says the commission’s interim report, the Social Security system “does nothing to promote individual savings or investment” and is “utterly devoid of options for building a net worth.”

The risk? Add it all up – the Great Depression, World War II, every downturn – and the inflation-adjusted annual returns on stocks in the Standard & Poor’s composite index have averaged nearly 8 percent per year, or about 8 times the rate of return that today’s Boomers and Gen-Xers can expect to get from Social Security.