James Gandolfini Is Dead at 51; Tough-Talking Mob Boss in ‘Sopranos’

By DAVE ITZKOFF

http://www.nytimes.com

June 19, 2013

James Gandolfini, the Emmy Award-winning actor who shot to fame on the HBO drama “The Sopranos” as Tony Soprano, a tough-talking, hard-living crime boss with a stolid exterior but a rich interior life, died on Wednesday. He was 51.

Mr. Gandolfini’s death was confirmed by HBO. He was traveling in Rome, where he was on vacation and was scheduled to attend the Taormina Film Fest. The cause was not immediately announced; an HBO press representative said that Mr. Gandolfini may have had a heart attack.

Mr. Gandolfini, who grew up in Park Ridge, in Bergen County, N.J., came to embody the resilience of the Garden State on “The Sopranos,” which made its debut in 1999 and ran for six seasons on HBO.

In its pilot episode viewers were introduced to the complicated life of Tony Soprano, a New Jersey mob kingpin who suffers panic attacks and begins seeing a psychiatrist. Over 86 episodes, audiences followed Mr. Gandolfini in the role as he was tormented by his mother (played by Nancy Marchand), his wife (Edie Falco), rival mobsters, the occasional surreal dream sequence and, in 2007, an ambiguous series finale that left millions of viewers wondering whether Tony Soprano had met his fate at a restaurant table.

The success of “The Sopranos” helped make HBO a dominant player in the competitive field of scripted television programming and transformed Mr. Gandolfini from a character actor into a star. The series, created by David Chase, won two Emmys for outstanding drama series, and Mr. Gandolfini won three Emmys for outstanding lead actor in a drama. He was nominated six times for the award.

HBO said of Mr. Gandolfini in a statement on Wednesday, “He was special man, a great talent, but more importantly, a gentle and loving person who treated everyone no matter their title or position with equal respect.”

Mr. Chase, in a statement, called Mr. Gandolfini “one of the greatest actors of this or any time,” and said, “A great deal of that genius resided in those sad eyes.” He added: “I remember telling him many times: ‘You don’t get it. You’re like Mozart.’ There would be silence at the other end of the phone.”

James Joseph Gandolfini Jr. was born in Westwood, N.J., on Sept. 18, 1961. His father was an Italian immigrant who held a number of jobs, including janitor, bricklayer and mason. His mother, Santa, was a high school cafeteria chef.

He attended Park Ridge High School and Rutgers University, graduating in 1983 with a degree in communications. He drove a delivery truck, managed nightclubs and tended bar in Manhattan before becoming interested in acting at age 25, when a friend brought him to an acting class.

He began his movie career in 1987 in the low-budget horror comedy “Shock! Shock! Shock!” In 1992 he had a small part in the Broadway revival of “A Streetcar Named Desire,” starring Alec Baldwin and Jessica Lange.

By the mid-1990s Mr. Gandolfini had made gangster roles a specialty, playing burly but strangely charming tough guys in films like “True Romance” (1993) and “The Juror” (1996). He had an impressive list of character-acting credits, but was largely unknown when Mr. Chase cast him in “The Sopranos” in 1999.

“I thought it was a wonderful script,” Mr. Gandolfini told Newsweek in 2001, recalling his audition. “I thought, ‘I can do this.’ But I thought they would hire someone a little more debonair, shall we say. A little more appealing to the eye.”

“The Sopranos,” which also became a springboard for television writers like Matthew Weiner (who would later create the AMC drama “Mad Men”) and Terence Winter (who later created the HBO series “Boardwalk Empire”), drew widespread acclaim for its detailed studies of the lives of its characters, and, at its center, Mr. Gandolfini’s portrayal of Tony Soprano, who was tightly wound and prone to acts of furious violence. (He beat and choked another mobster to death for insulting the memory of his beloved deceased racehorse, to name but one example.)

Mr. Gandolfini, who had studied the Meisner technique of acting for two years, said that he used it to focus his anger and incorporate it into his performances. In an interview for the television series “Inside the Actors Studio,” Mr. Gandolfini said he would deliberately hit himself on the head or stay up all night to evoke the desired reaction.

If you’re tired, every single thing that somebody does makes you mad, Mr. Gandolfini said in the interview. “Drink six cups of coffee. Or just walk around with a rock in your shoe. It’s silly, but it works.”

Tony Soprano — and the 2007 finale of “The Sopranos,” which cut to black before viewers could learn what plans a mysterious restaurant patron had for Tony as he enjoyed a relaxing meal with his wife and children — would continue to follow Mr. Gandolfini throughout his career.

He went on to play a series of tough guys and heavies, including an angry Brooklyn parent in the Broadway drama “God of Carnage,” for which he was nominated for a Tony Award in 2009; the director of the C.I.A. in “Zero Dark Thirty,” Kathryn Bigelow’s dramatization of the hunt for Osama bin Laden; and a hit man in the 2012 crime thriller “Killing Them Softly.”

Mr. Gandolfini also produced the documentaries “Alive Day Memories: Home From Iraq” and “Wartorn: 1861-2010,” about the history of post-traumatic stress in the military.

Survivors include his wife, Deborah Lin Gandolfini; a daughter, Liliana, born last year; a teenage son, Michael, from his marriage to Marcella Wudarski, which ended in divorce; and his sisters Leta Gandolfini and Johanna Antonacci.

In a 2010 interview with The New York Times, Mr. Gandolfini said that he was not worried about being typecast as Tony Soprano and that he was being offered different kinds of roles as he aged.

“Mostly it’s not a lot of that stuff anymore with shooting and killing and dying and blood,” he said. “I’m getting a little older, you know. The running and the jumping and killing, it’s a little past me.”

Asked why he didn’t appear in more comedies, he answered, “Nobody’s asked.”

Peter Keepnews contributed reporting.

Espionage writer Vince Flynn dies; books beloved from O'Gara's to Baghdad

By Mary Ann Grossmann
mgrossmann@pioneerpress.com

http://www.twincities.com

June 19, 2013

Surrounded by dozens of friends and family, bestselling author and St. Paul favorite Vince Flynn died early Wednesday. He was 47.

Flynn, author of the Mitch Rapp espionage series, died of prostate cancer at United Hospital. According to friend Kathy Schneeman, writing on the catholichotdish.com website, about 35 friends and family, including Flynn's wife, Lysa, were at the hospital when he died about 2 a.m.

Everyone who knew Flynn describes him as an engaging man who was loyal to his friends and to St. Paul -- even after he was famous enough to be interviewed by media across the country.

At Once Upon a Crime mystery bookstore in Minneapolis, co-owner Gary Schulze honored Flynn by painting a small teardrop on the chalk outline of a body at the front of the store where Flynn always signed books.

Rush Limbaugh remembered Flynn on his Wednesday radio show, saying it was "a day of really profound heartbreak."

14 THRILLERS

Born into an Irish-Catholic family in St. Paul, Flynn began his writing career in 1997 with "Term Limits," which he self-published after learning he couldn't fulfill his dream of flying for the Marines because of childhood concussions.

Flynn announced in February 2011 he had stage III metastatic prostate cancer but was optimistic about his chances for survival. Because pain made it nearly impossible for him to sit and concentrate, he delayed publication of "Kill Shot" because he didn't want to "hand in a substandard book."

"Kill Shot" came out in February of 2012 and the 14th Rapp thriller, "The Survivor," will be published in fall.

The series features CIA counterterrorism operative Rapp, who will do whatever it takes to keep the nation safe, including shooting a few guys when necessary or breaking some kneecaps.

"With Vince's death we've lost a writer who has as good a handle on this nation's security interests as any current writer," said Joe Soucheray, Pioneer Press columnist on whose ESPN-1500 radio show Flynn introduced each of his new books.

"Vince got better with every book. He captured an angst in this country in a way a lot of big-time New York Times bestselling writers don't. He cut to the chase -- bad guys and good guys. His good guys are taking out bad guys. He was also a hail-fellow-well-met who never let his tremendous success influence him. He could drop more names with more charm than anyone I've ever met, and you never resented it."

IN HUMVEES IN BAGHDAD

Flynn finished the manuscript for "Term Limits" in 1996 and, after several unhappy experiences with New York agents and publishers, self-published with money from five investors who put up $15,000 to print 2,100 copies and cover marketing. Flynn was working as a bartender when he sold copies out of the trunk of his car. The book sold so well locally that he signed a $500,000 contract with Pocket Books to publish the hardcover edition. The mass-market paperback spent several weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

He introduced Mitch Rapp in "Transfer of Power" (1999).

Readers and critics praised Flynn's accurate depictions of weapons and espionage, based on extensive research trips to Washington, D.C., where he fostered relationships with people in high places.

Flynn's Rapp series was sometimes criticized for leaning to the right politically, with Rapp described in one book as "a modern-day assassin who lived in a civilized country where such a term could never be used openly."

But Flynn made no apologies for Rapp's commitment to national security.

"Prior to 9/11 reviewers said that my plots were implausible, over the top," he said in 2004. "A fair amount of people doubted a menace was out there. Since then, people figured out that it's a war. My viewpoint is that you have to go on the offensive and take these guys out. A lot of people cringe hearing that, but the people we are up against are not meek."

Flynn's publisher said his novels "have been praised for their extensive research and prescient warnings about the rise of Islamic radical fundamentalism and terrorism. His books have been read by current and former presidents, foreign heads of state and intelligence professionals around the world and are admired for their versimilitude and imagination."

His tough books also resonated with troops serving in the Middle East.

When "Memorial Day" was published in 2004, Flynn told the Pioneer Press how elated he was when a CIA chief of operations said "you can't get into a Humvee in Baghdad without kicking a Vince Flynn paperback."

"That director is a former Marine responsible for operations in all the bad spots, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran," Flynn recalled. "When he jumped up, starts pumping my hand and tells me he's a huge fan of my books, I almost fainted. He'd just gotten back from Baghdad, where the guys sat around a bonfire, drinking beer, arguing about who should play Mitch Rapp in a movie."

TWO PASSIONS

Flynn was the fifth of seven children born to Terry and Kathleen Flynn. Terry taught English and coached basketball, football and baseball at St. Thomas Academy. Kathleen Flynn was one of the first female wildlife artists in the state.

The only cloud in Flynn's childhood in Apple Valley was his dyslexia, discovered when he was in fourth grade.

"You end up developing great verbal skills to make up for not being able to read," he told the Pioneer Press. "I didn't test well because I had a hard time forming sentences on essay questions. Even through college I was a horrible writer. Today it's not an issue unless I have to read aloud."

After graduating from St. Thomas Academy and the University of St. Thomas, Flynn worked for Kraft General Foods products, selling Jell-O and Stove Top Stuffing, and was in real-estate sales.

Flynn had a jolt when he was turned down by the Marines at 27: "That was the most sobering day of my life," he recalled. "Besides flying, my other passion was writing an espionage novel."

Flynn took a lot of heat during his bartending years at O'Gara's in the early 1990s when he was an aspiring novelist, according to owner Dan O'Gara.

"If you knew the guy, he could sell anything, and he sold himself," said O'Gara, who recalled that Flynn visited the Snelling Avenue institution even after his books were bestsellers.

"Vince never let his fame and fortune get the best of him," O'Gara recalled, adding that Flynn still let his friends give him a hard time at the bar: "He ended up getting the last laugh, though, because he was the one who made it big."

'MASSIVE CROWDS'

Booksellers were enthusiastic about Flynn's books and enjoyed his personality.

Janet Waller, community relations manager at the Barnes & Noble in Roseville, said Flynn always held his first reading from a new book at the store.

"We supported him back when he was self-published," Waller said, adding that Flynn always drew "massive crowds" that included Flynn's sisters, who teased him about his success.

Waller described Flynn's visits as "having your next door neighbor come, except he was handsome and famous. He deserved every ounce of success he got, and more."

The second store Flynn visited to introduce new books was Once Upon a Crime.

"Vince stayed loyal to us no matter what his publicist wanted him to do," co-owner Schulze recalled. "Even when he was unable to tour because of his health he came in to sign books."

HOLDING TODDLERS

Flynn, who was sometimes teased for attracting so many beautiful women during his bartending days, met his wife Lysa when they were "sort of set up" at a preseason Minnesota Vikings game by local TV anchor Frank Vascellaro.

Lysa, who grew up on a farm near Detroit Lakes, was a model who worked for the local Eleanor Moore Agency. She and Vince have three children. They lived for years in Edina and more recently in Sunfish Lake.

Flynn loved his family and his Catholic faith, according to longtime friend Schneeman.

"One of my favorite memories of Vince occured when I'd spot him in Murray Hall (at then-St. Thomas College) wearing his football jacket," she wrote at catholichotdish.com. "An entourage surrounded him -- always. Especially a harem of co-eds. But because he was such a people person, Vince always had time for the other folks walking by ..."

She recalls that after Mass at St. Joseph's Church in West St. Paul, Flynn "would help us chase our toddling twins or just hold them in order to give us a break. That's the kind of guy he was."

That sentiment was echoed by Carolyn Reidy, president/CEO of Simon & Schuster.

"As good as Vince was on the page ... he was even more engaging in person," she wrote Wednesday in a press release. "He had a unique ability to make everyone -- from those of us at Simon & Schuster ... to booksellers and retailers around the nation and, most of all, his readers, feel as if we were on his team and sharing in his life and his success.

"We will miss the Mitch Rapp stories that are classic modern thrillers, but we will miss Vince even more."

Mary Ann Grossmann can be reached at 651-228-5574.

Pioneer Press reporter John Brewer contributed to this story.

Today's Tune: The Swimming Pool Q's - Now I'm Talking About Now

Celebrating Our Lady of Paris

Notre Dame has been the city’s grand epicenter for 850 years.


By JOSEPH A. HARRISS from the JUNE 2013 issue of The American Spectator
http://spectator.org

France is the land of great medieval cathedrals par excellence, and over the years they have awed me with their grandeur, both spiritual and temporal. Would-be progressives today would have us believe that the Middle Ages were a Hobbesian hell of wretched poverty and exploitation, when life was inexorably solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. It is true that life then was not as physically comfortable as today. But neither, as far as we can divine, were its intense inhabitants bored, blasé, or dependent on uppers, downers, and Prozac to get through the day. Medieval spirituality dwarfs anything the Western world has since known, thanks to every object, every deed being infused with rich symbolic meaning relating to Christ and eternal life.

The cathedrals, expressions in stone and stained glass of Christian doctrine that could be read like an open book, summed this up for peasant and noble alike. As the British medievalist Philip Ball has noted, “There are few buildings in the world that exude such a sense of meaning, intention, signification—that tell you so clearly and so forcefully that these stones were put in place according to a philosophy of awesome proportions.” In an extraordinary burst of faith-driven fervor from about 1050 to 1350, an astonishing 80 cathedrals, 500 large churches, and several thousand smaller ones were built in cities and towns across the land. As French schoolchildren learn, it was then that “France was covered with a white mantle of churches.”

There was Chartres, with two soaring spires, one Norman, the other Flamboyant Gothic, visible to marching pilgrims for miles across the Beauce plain southwest of Paris. Its unique stained glass flooded it with a mystical, reddish-blue light that even Napoleon admitted would make a militant atheist feel uneasy. Reims, in the Champagne country, had no fewer than 2,300 sacred statues, including a charming angel with a beguiling smile; it was here in 1429 that a victorious Joan of Arc led Charles VII to be anointed king. Vast Amiens, the archetype of classical Gothic architecture, had a nave nearly 500 feet long and a vaulted ceiling 140 feet high, the maximum possible with the building techniques of the day.

But inevitably it has been the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris that has been central to French Christendom for 850 years. (Geographically central as well: It is from a bronze plaque planted in the parvis in front that official distances to everywhere in the country are measured.) Built on the ruins of a Gallo-Roman temple dedicated to Jupiter on the Ile de la Cité, where the city first began, Our Lady of Paris has been the setting for many of the nation’s triumphs and tragedies: glittering royal celebrations and bloody revolutionary madness, papal visits and funerals of chiefs of state. It was here that a barefoot Louis IX carried the Crown of Thorns relic to his coronation in 1239; here that Napoleon impetuously grabbed his crown from the hands of Pope Pius VII and set it on his own head; and here that bells tolled wildly on August 26, 1944, as General Charles de Gaulle attended the Mass celebrating the liberation of Paris.

Like most French cathedrals, Notre Dame de Paris was a long time abuilding. After Pope Alexander III laid the first stone in the presence of King Louis VII in 1163, it took nearly 10 generations of architects, artisans, and laborers to finish the job 182 years later. (Exceptionally, Chartres was built in only 26 years.) Along the way, they had to innovate when the ever higher and thinner load-bearing walls dictated by the new Gothic style, together with larger openings for stained-glass windows, began to fissure. Their solution: the flying buttress. Those dramatic, graceful exterior braces were one of the signatures of the High Gothic style and were used centuries later at Washington’s National Cathedral.

Conceived on a grand scale to accommodate at least 6,000 worshippers, Notre Dame had a nave 427 feet long and 160 feet wide. Once all the light-gray cut stone was in place, finishing touches were added: vivid colors, now worn away, painted on the façade; grotesque gargoyles set on outside ledges; a 7,800-pipe organ installed in the choir; three stunning, 30-foot rose windows placed in the western façade and north and south transepts; and 20 massive, finely tuned bells hung in two towers. Today the edifice looks harmonious and complete, but it is actually missing what was to have been one of its most striking features; the tall spires, intended to top off its towers, were never built.

For 450 years, Notre Dame served its purpose as the seat of the archbishop of Paris, both a place of worship and a convenient glorification of the monarchy. Then came the revolution. Rampaging regicides tore through the cathedral, plundering, pillaging, and desecrating its treasures in an attempt to eradicate religion in France. The rabble removed crosses and crucifixes and replaced statues of the Virgin Mary with Lady Liberty. They beheaded statues of the kings of Judah, whom they mistook for French kings, on the façade. They replaced the Mass with political rallies, dedicating the shrine to the Cult of Reason and Cult of the Supreme Being. They stole all the great bells except one (which was kept as an alarm), and melted them down to make cannons. They turned the House of God into a food warehouse. Ultimately they intended to tear it down and sell it off piecemeal as building materials, but Napoleon acted in time to block that. Ever aware of the importance of symbols, he decreed that it be salvaged and redecorated for his coronation.

The cathedral, now the property of the state, then began a long, gradual period of stabilization and restoration. When Louis Philippe became king in 1830, he saw popular sentiment in favor of the restoration of medieval buildings. That received a boost in 1831 with the publication of Victor Hugo’s monumental novel, Notre Dame de Paris. (Translated into English, oddly, as The Hunchback of Notre Dame, it had some puzzled 20th-century football fans searching for a hump on Fighting Irish quarterbacks.) Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, a major Gothic Revival architect, was commissioned to bring Notre Dame back to life. He took a controversially creative approach, attempting to capture a medieval ideal rather than simply restore things as they were. The kings of Judah were put back on their ledge, even more garish gargoyles were added, and a spire was erected atop the nave.

Today some 14 million annual visitors come to see the Crown of Thorns, a fragment of the True Cross, and other unique relics in the treasury, and be dazzled by the bright blues, greens, reds, and yellows of the 13th-century rose windows. They can also contemplate my personal favorite: a medieval stone statue of the Virgin, shown as a frivolous young Parisienne carelessly holding the Christ Child on her hip, her large crown as Queen of Heaven heavy on her girlish brow, her eyes half-closed in a sophisticated glance, her mouth set in a pouting little moue. Many also climb the 387 steps for a close look at those gargoyles and a panoramic view of the city that the writer Jean Giraudoux once called “the thousand acres of the world where most has been thought, spoken and written. The planet’s hub, the most free, the most elegant, the least hypocritical.”

This year they will also be attending the celebration of Notre Dame’s 850th anniversary. The government has budgeted $8.5 million to clean the great organ’s thousands of pipes, as well as to sponsor lectures, concerts, and evening son et lumière shows. On May 6, the cathedral and its organ were commemorated by World Organ Day, with 850 organ recitals in concert halls and places of worship around the world. But the most ambitious project has been replacing the cathedral’s old, discordant bells with nine new ones. Financed with $2.6 million in private donations, the resplendent bronze bells, totaling six tons, were on display for a month in the nave before being hoisted into the north and south towers. They rang out melodiously for the first time to mark Palm Sunday.  

I suspect that Victor Hugo, the old romantic, would have been pleased by all the hoopla over his beloved church. As he wrote of it, “Assuredly, the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris is, to this day, a majestic and sublime edifice.” 

The Regulated States of America

Tocqueville saw a nation of individuals who were defiant of authority. Today? Welcome to Planet Government

By NIALL FERGUSON

  The Wall Street Journal

  http://online.wsj.com

  June 18, 2013

In "Democracy in America," published in 1833, Alexis de Tocqueville marveled at the way Americans preferred voluntary association to government regulation. "The inhabitant of the United States," he wrote, "has only a defiant and restive regard for social authority and he appeals to it . . . only when he cannot do without it."

Unlike Frenchmen, he continued, who instinctively looked to the state to provide economic and social order, Americans relied on their own efforts. "In the United States, they associate for the goals of public security, of commerce and industry, of morality and religion. There is nothing the human will despairs of attaining by the free action of the collective power of individuals."

What especially amazed Tocqueville was the sheer range of nongovernmental organizations Americans formed: "Not only do they have commercial and industrial associations . . . but they also have a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small; Americans use associations to give fetes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they create hospitals, prisons, schools."

Tocqueville would not recognize America today. Indeed, so completely has associational life collapsed, and so enormously has the state grown, that he would be forced to conclude that, at some point between 1833 and 2013, France must have conquered the United States.

Enlarge Image

Barbara Kelley

The decline of American associational life was memorably documented in Robert Puttnam's seminal 1995 essay "Bowling Alone," which documented the exodus of Americans from bowling leagues, Rotary clubs and the like. Since then, the downward trend in "social capital" has only continued. According to the 2006 World Values Survey, active membership even of religious associations has declined from just over half the population to little more than a third (37%). The proportion of Americans who are active members of cultural associations is down to 14% from 24%; for professional associations the figure is now just 12%, compared with more than a fifth in 1995. And, no, Facebook FB +0.78% is not a substitute.

Instead of joining together to get things done, Americans have increasingly become dependent on Washington. On foreign policy, it may still be true that Americans are from Mars and Europeans from Venus. But when it comes to domestic policy, we all now come from the same place: Planet Government.

As the Competitive Enterprise Institute's Clyde Wayne Crews shows in his invaluable annual survey of the federal regulatory state, we have become the regulation nation almost imperceptibly. Excluding blank pages, the 2012 Federal Register—the official directory of regulation—today runs to 78,961 pages. Back in 1986 it was 44,812 pages. In 1936 it was just 2,620.

True, our economy today is much larger than it was in 1936—around 12 times larger, allowing for inflation. But the Federal Register has grown by a factor of 30 in the same period.

The last time regulation was cut was under Ronald Reagan, when the number of pages in the Federal Register fell by 31%. Surprise: Real GDP grew by 30% in that same period. But Leviathan's diet lasted just eight years. Since 1993, 81,883 new rules have been issued. In the past 10 years, the "final rules" issued by our 63 federal departments, agencies and commissions have outnumbered laws passed by Congress 223 to 1.

Right now there are 4,062 new regulations at various stages of implementation, of which 224 are deemed "economically significant," i.e., their economic impact will exceed $100 million.

The cost of all this, Mr. Crews estimates, is $1.8 trillion annually—that's on top of the federal government's $3.5 trillion in outlays, so it is equivalent to an invisible 65% surcharge on your federal taxes, or nearly 12% of GDP. Especially invidious is the fact that the costs of regulation for small businesses (those with fewer than 20 employees) are 36% higher per employee than they are for bigger firms.

Next year's big treat will be the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, something every small business in the country must be looking forward to with eager anticipation. Then, as Sen. Rob Portman (R., Ohio) warned readers on this page 10 months ago, there's also the Labor Department's new fiduciary rule, which will increase the cost of retirement planning for middle-class workers; the EPA's new Ozone Rule, which will impose up to $90 billion in yearly costs on American manufacturers; and the Department of Transportation's Rear-View Camera Rule. That's so you never have to turn your head around when backing up.

President Obama occasionally pays lip service to the idea of tax reform. But nothing actually gets done and the Internal Revenue Service code (plus associated regulations) just keeps growing—it passed the nine-million-word mark back in 2005, according to the Tax Foundation, meaning nearly 19% more verbiage than 10 years before. While some taxes may have been cut in the intervening years, the tax code just kept growing.

I wonder if all this could have anything to do with the fact that we still have nearly 12 million people out of work, plus eight million working part-time jobs, five long years after the financial crisis began.

Genius that he was, Tocqueville saw this transformation of America coming. Toward the end of "Democracy in America" he warned against the government becoming "an immense tutelary power . . . absolute, detailed, regular . . . cover[ing] [society's] surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way."

Tocqueville also foresaw exactly how this regulatory state would suffocate the spirit of free enterprise: "It rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one's acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces [the] nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd."

If that makes you bleat with frustration, there's still hope.

Mr. Ferguson's new book "The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die" has just been published by Penguin Press.

A version of this article appeared June 19, 2013, on page A15 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Regulated States of America.

Then What in Syria?

By Cal Thomas

http://townhall.com

June 18, 2013

Two recent newspaper editorials illustrate the double-mindedness some feel about President Obama's decision to provide small arms and ammunition to Syrian rebels.

The Washington Post headlined an editorial: "No time for half-measures: Syria's rebels need a robust intervention from the Obama administration." The New York Times took a more realistic approach: "After Arming the Rebels, Then What? President Obama should be careful about being dragged into the brutal Syrian war."

I'm on the side of the Times.

Some promote U.S. involvement in Syria for humanitarian reasons. That might be sufficient if the outcome advanced humanitarian concerns, but exchanging one tyrant for another is not a long-term solution. One Syrian rebel group has reportedly pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden's replacement, al-Qaida leader Sheik Ayman al-Zawahri. Deposing a mass murderer in favor of jihadists committed to "holy war" against America and the West is like choosing a firing squad over the guillotine.

The Washington Post reported the murder of a 14-year-old boy by Syrian rebels. The boy's crime? When he "was asked to bring one of his customers some coffee," the Post writes, "he reportedly refused, saying, 'Even if (Prophet) Mohammed comes back to life, I won't.'" A group of Islamist rebels took this as an insult to Islam. Are these the rebels President Obama's backing?

The United States has a bad track record in the Middle East. President Jimmy Carter helped topple the shah of Iran. Now the shah's replacements, in concert with Hezbollah, writes ABC News, "have been helping the Syrian regime of President Bashar Assad..." Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei recently called Israel a "cancerous tumor" and vowed Iran's support to any nation or group that attacks it. Iran is intent on acquiring nuclear weapons. The Independent newspaper in Britain reports that Iran has pledged to send 4,000 Iranian Revolutionary Guards to Syria to support President Assad.

In Egypt, Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood candidate, won the last election after the U.S. supported the ouster of Hosni Mubarak. The outcome in Libya, following U.S. support of rebels opposed to Moammar Gadhafi, is unlikely to be pleasant should that nation's draft constitution based on Sharia law be adopted.

The Obama administration reportedly is ready to consider a U.N. request to resettle some Syrian refugees in the United States. "...part of an international effort that could bring thousands of Syrians to American cities and towns," writes the Los Angeles Times. Can we be sure a number of them won't be jihadists?

For too long, American involvement in the Middle East has employed the wrong formula in the mistaken belief that we can change the thinking of radical Islamists. Many administrations have pressured Israel in the misguided and unjustified hope that this would produce a change in outlook and a reset in religious fanaticism. It hasn't. In fact, our "reach-out" efforts are seen as weakness in much of the Islamic world.

Arab and Muslim peoples have been at war with other nations and each other for centuries. The two major factions of Islam -- Sunni and Shia -- are in constant conflict over which one is Prophet Mohammed's legitimate heir. The "infidel" West can't help settle any of this and is more likely to unite the warring factions against us, as it has in the past.

Add to this a scenario that resembles the Cold War. Russia is "all-in," supplying anti-ship cruise missiles to President Assad's regime. Moscow, according to the Wall Street Journal, has deployed at least a dozen warships to patrol waters near the Russian naval base in the Syrian city of Tartus. President Obama's token gesture of small arms and ammunition is the equivalent of dipping one's toe in the Mediterranean Sea and calling it swimming.

As in so many other instances, President Obama is, according to the Daily Telegraph, "leading from behind in Syria -- and can't see where he is going."

The president wants credit for withdrawing American forces from Iraq and Afghanistan, but with Syria he is involving the U.S. in another war that can't be "won," at least not in a way that will advance American interests.

Christendom’s Greatest Cathedral to Become a Mosque

Turkey is reclaiming its jihadi past, while Europe is simultaneously erasing its own Christian heritage.

By Raymond Ibrahim On June 18, 2013 @ 12:00 am In Culture Bytes,Europe,Middle East,Religion,Turkey | 3 Comments
http://pjmedia.com




While unrest in Turkey continues to capture attention, more subtle and more telling events concerning the Islamification of Turkey — and not just at the hands of Prime Minister Erdogan but majorities of Turks — are quietly transpiring. These include the fact that Turkey’s Hagia Sophia museum is on its way to becoming a mosque.

Why does the fate of an old building matter?

Because Hagia Sophia — Greek for “Holy Wisdom” — was for some thousand years Christianity’s greatest cathedral. Built in 537 A.D. in Constantinople, the heart of the Christian empire, it was also a stalwart symbol of defiance against an ever encroaching Islam from the east.

After parrying centuries of jihadi thrusts, Constantinople was finally sacked by Ottoman Turks in 1453. Its crosses desecrated and icons defaced, Hagia Sophia — as well as thousands of other churches — was immediately converted into a mosque, the tall minarets of Islam surrounding it in triumph.

Then, after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, as part of several reforms, secularist Ataturk ^[1] transformed Hagia Sophia into a “neutral” museum in 1934 — a gesture of goodwill to a then-triumphant West from a then-crestfallen Turkey.

Thus the fate of this ancient building is full of portents. And according to Hurriyet Daily News ^[2], “A parliamentary commission is considering an application by citizens to turn the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul into a mosque…. A survey conducted with 401 people was attached to the application, in which more than 97 percent of interviewees requested the transformation of the ancient building into a mosque and afterwards for it to be reopened for Muslim worship.”

Even lesser known is the fact that other historic churches are currently being transformed into mosques, such as a 13^th century church building — portentously also named Hagia Sophia — in Trabzon. After the Islamic conquest, it was turned into a mosque. But because of its “great historical and cultural significance” ^[3] for Christians, it too, during Turkey’s secular age, was turned into a museum and its frescoes restored. Yet local authorities recently decreed that its Christian frescoes would again be covered and the church/museum turned into a mosque.

Similarly, the 5^th century Studios Monastery ^[4], dedicated to St. John the Baptist, is set to become an active mosque. And the existence of the oldest functioning Christian monastery in the world ^[5], 5^th century Mor Gabriel Monastery, is at risk. Inhabited today by only a few dozen Christians dedicated to learning the monastery’s teachings, the ancient Aramaic language spoken by Jesus, and the Orthodox Syriac tradition, neighboring Muslims filed a lawsuit accusing the monks of practicing “anti-Turkish activities” and of illegally occupying land which belongs to Muslim villagers. The highest appeals court in Ankara ruled in favor of the Muslim villagers, saying the land that had been part of the monastery for 1,600 years is not its property, absurdly claiming that the monastery was built over the ruins of a mosque — even though Muhammad was born 170 years after the monastery was built.

Turkey’s Christian minority, including the Orthodox Patriarch ^[6], are naturally protesting this renewed Islamic onslaught against what remains of their cultural heritage — to deaf ears.
The Muslim populace’s role in transforming once Christian sites into mosques is a reminder of all those other Turks not protesting the Islamization of Turkey, and who if anything consider Erdogan’s government too “secular.”

Their numbers are telling. In May 2012, Reuters ^[7] reported that:

Thousands of devout Muslims prayed outside Turkey’s historic Hagia Sophia museum on Saturday [May 23] to protest a 1934 law that bars religious services at the former church and mosque. Worshippers shouted, “Break the chains, let Hagia Sophia Mosque open,” and “God is great” [the notorious “Allahu Akbar”] before kneeling in prayer as tourists looked on. Turkey’s secular laws prevent Muslims and Christians from formal worship within the 6th-century monument, the world’s greatest cathedral for almost a millennium before invading Ottomans converted it into a mosque in the 15th century.

The desire to turn Hagia Sophia into a mosque is not about Muslims wanting a place to pray — as of 2010, there were 3,000 active mosques in Istanbul alone ^[8]. Rather, it’s about their reveling, and trying to revivify, the glory days of Islamic jihad and conquest: Reuters added that Muslims “staged the prayers ahead of celebrations next week marking the 559th anniversary of the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet’s conquest of Byzantine Constantinople.”

According to Salih Turhan, a spokesman quoted by Reuters, “As the grandchildren of Mehmet the Conqueror, seeking the re-opening Hagia Sophia as a mosque is our legitimate right.”
Sultan Mehmet was the scourge of European Christendom, whose Islamic hordes seized and ravished Constantinople, forcibly turning it Islamic. Openly idolizing him, as many Turks do, is tantamount to their saying, “We are proud of our ancestors who killed and stole the lands of European Christians.” And yet, despite such militant overtones, Turhan, whose position is echoed by many Turks, still manages to blame the West: “Keeping Hagia Sophia Mosque closed is an insult to our mostly Muslim population of 75 million. It symbolizes our ill-treatment by the West.”

So keeping a historically Christian/Western building — that was stolen by Islamic jihad — as a neutral museum is seen as “ill-treatment by the West,” even as Turks continue destroying the nation’s original Christian heritage.

And the historical revisions continue. Last May 29^th, when Turks celebrate the Fall of Constantinople, Erdogan himself declared that the jihadi invasion — which saw countless Christians enslaved, raped, or slaughtered — was the true “time of enlightenment.”  After showing how Erdogan got it upside down, Ralph Sidway ^[9], an Orthodox Christian author, wrote ^[10]:

Erdogan and Turkey celebrate the Fall of Constantinople, and the West congratulates them. “We are continuing to write history today,” says Erdogan, and write it  –  or re-write it  –  they do, under the somnambulant gaze of craven Western leaders too ignorant, or too fearful, to challenge Islam’s claim to moral superiority, historical righteousness and eventual world domination. By their policies, posture and pronouncements, Western European nations, and the United States, are conceding the future to a rapidly re-Islamicizing Turkey, and are aiding in Islam’s stated goal of a new, global caliphate^[11] determined to conquer us, just as it conquered Constantinople 560 years ago. Every Turkish celebration of 29 May 1453 is a gauntlet flung down in challenge to the West. Each such event which goes unanswered and unchallenged by the West is another nail in the coffin of Christian culture, human rights, and free people everywhere.

Indeed, at a time when Turkey is openly reclaiming its jihadi heritage, Europeans are actively erasing their Christian heritage which for centuries kept the Islamic jihad at bay. Among other capitulations, Europeans are currently betraying church buildings to Muslims to convert to mosques ^[12] and scrubbing references of the historic Turkish jihads against Europe ^[13] from classroom textbooks, lest Muslim students be offended.

Meanwhile, here are neighboring Turkey’s Muslims openly praising the same jihadi warlords who brutally conquered a portion of Europe centuries ago, converting thousands of churches into mosques, even as they openly prepare to finish the job — which may not even require force, as Europe actively sells its own soul.

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Article printed from PJ Media: http://pjmedia.com

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/blog/hagia-sophia-to-become-mosque/

URLs in this post:

[1] Ataturk: http://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/2011/10/21/interview-austin-bay-on-ataturk/

[2] Hurriyet Daily News: http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/parliament-to-discuss-return-to-prayers-at-hagia-sophia.aspx?pageID=238&nID=40412&NewsCatID=341

[3] “great historical and cultural significance”: http://www.pravoslavie.ru/english/61735.htm

[4] Studios Monastery: http://www.johnsanidopoulos.com/2013/03/studios-monastery-will-be-turned-into.html

[5] the oldest functioning Christian monastery in the world: http://www.ansamed.info/ansamed/en/news/sections/generalnews/2012/07/12/Turkey-Oldest-Christian-monastery-risk_7176199.html

[6] Orthodox Patriarch: http://www.catholicculture.org/news/headlines/index.cfm?storyid=17116

[7] Reuters: http://uk.reuters.com/article/2012/05/26/uk-turkey-prayer-idUKBRE84P0FV20120526

[8] 3,000 active mosques in Istanbul alone: http://www.ibb.gov.tr/sites/ks/en-US/0-Exploring-The-City/Location/Pages/IstanbulinNumbers.aspx

[9] Ralph Sidway: http://facingislam.blogspot.com/

[10] wrote: http://www.raymondibrahim.com/islam/rapidly-re-islamicizing-turkey-rewrites-history/

[11] new, global caliphate: http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/09/oic_and_the_modern_caliphate.html

[12] betraying church buildings to Muslims to convert to mosques: http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/2761/converting-churches-into-mosques

[13] scrubbing references of the historic Turkish jihads against Europe: http://islamversuseurope.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/vienna-teachers-told-not-to-cover-topic.html

A Nation of Kids on Speed

Six million children in the U.S. have already been diagnosed with ADHD. Plenty more will follow.

By PIETER COHEN AND NICOLAS RASMUSSEN

  The Wall Street Journal

  http://online.wsj.com

  June 16, 2013

Walk into any American high school and nearly one in five boys in the hallways will have a diagnosis of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. According to the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, 11% of all American children ages 4 to 17—over six million—have ADHD, a 16% increase since 2007. When you consider that in Britain roughly 3% of children have been similarly diagnosed, the figure is even more startling. Now comes worse news: In the U.S., being told that you have ADHD—and thus receiving some variety of amphetamine to treat it—has become more likely.

Last month, the American Psychiatric Association released the fifth edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—the bible of mental health—and this latest version, known as DSM-5, outlines a new diagnostic paradigm for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. Symptoms of ADHD remain the same in the new edition: "overlooks details," "has difficulty remaining focused during lengthy reading," "often fidgets with or taps hands" and so on. The difference is that in the previous version of the manual, the first symptoms of ADHD needed to be evident by age 7 for a diagnosis to be made. In DSM-5, if the symptoms turn up anytime before age 12, the ADHD diagnosis can be made.

It's also easier to diagnose adult ADHD. Before, adults needed to exhibit six symptoms. Now, five will do. These changes will undoubtedly fuel increased prescriptions of the drugs that doctors use to treat ADHD: stimulants such as Ritalin and Adderall.

Enlarge Image

Corbis

Even before DSM-5, doctors were already on track to prescribe enough stimulants this year for each American man, woman and child to receive the equivalent of 130 mg of amphetamine (about 40 five-mg pills of Adderall) and an even greater amount of the very similar drug Ritalin. In this era of excessive prescribing, we seem to have forgotten the cautionary history of amphetamines in America—a history that shows how overprescribing stimulants leads to widespread dependence and addiction.

Since their introduction by the pharmaceutical company Smith, Kline & French in 1937, amphetamines have been prescribed for maladies that had more to do with societal expectations than genuine mental illness. American soldiers received stimulants during World War II to boost morale and improve performance in combat.

Meantime, back at home, amphetamine was heralded as the first antidepressant, and shortly thereafter, as an ideal weight-loss pill. One 1955 advertisement for AmPlus amphetamine tablets assured users that they would be "beachable by summer." Decades would pass until research demonstrated the lack of long-term benefit for most cases of depression and weight loss, but the lack of proof didn't hold doctors back from liberally prescribing stimulants to millions of housewives in postwar suburbs.

By 1969, doctors were prescribing the equivalent of 120 mg of amphetamine for each American—a high-water mark of per-capita consumption we are only now about to surpass. By then, the addictive potential of prescription stimulants had attracted intense scientific and public scrutiny as evidence grew that many patients were becoming dependent on the drugs. Thirty percent of patients in one study conducted in New York state admitted to using their medications recreationally. Millions of people without prescriptions easily obtained diverted pills.

In 1968, the National Academy of Sciences organized an authoritative investigation into the stimulants' true benefits and risks. The consensus: These drugs had limited efficacy and real harms. Medical experts discouraged the use of stimulants for both depression and obesity, but the warnings had little effect on doctors' prescribing habits until the Controlled Substances Act of 1971 mandated that stimulants be placed in a tightly controlled category of medications, referred to as Schedule II.

Doctors were free to prescribe the drugs but had to report each prescription. Almost overnight, prescriptions for stimulants to treat depression and obesity plummeted: Medical use dropped 90% between 1969 and 1972.

Just when it seemed that amphetamine's days were numbered, doctors began to embrace the drug for treating Hyperkinetic Reaction of Childhood—what we now call ADHD. (It became the official name in 1987.) Concern about dependence and addiction, along with the watchful eye of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, kept prescriptions for ADHD at low levels during the 1970s.

But by the 1990s, experts and advocacy groups for ADHD, some funded by pharmaceutical companies, began to argue that stimulants did not lead to addiction when treating children for the disorder, and that the stimulants actually decreased the risk of future drug abuse. Their main argument was that ADHD itself is a significant risk factor for future substance abuse, and that stimulants, by treating the underlying illness, also reduced the likelihood of future drug use. Concerned parents were told that starting their children on stimulants when young would decrease the risks of future trouble with alcohol and drugs.

The problem with this reassuring message is that it was based on flimsy evidence. Experts had relied on studies of children treated with stimulants by their personal physicians, compared with children who had ADHD but did not receive stimulants. These community studies were fraught with confounding variables and were only suggestive.

Three months ago, the only randomized trial to study future substance abuse by ADHD kids refuted the notion that stimulants, when taken in childhood, have a protective effect. Investigators found strong evidence that ADHD itself in fact predisposes children to later substance abuse—but no evidence that stimulant medication reduces this rate any better than treating ADHD with behavioral approaches. Further evidence that stimulants do not protect children from addiction was provided in a comprehensive review published last month in JAMA Psychiatry.

We still do not have a single randomized trial to help determine if starting stimulants as an adolescent or adult further increases the risk of future substance abuse, although the long and checkered history of medical stimulants would suggest it does. Certainly, the risks from recreationally using stimulants are already well-documented.

In 2010, Adderall was second only in popularity to the painkiller Vicodin as a prescription drug of abuse among high-school seniors, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Adolescents often perceive prescription drugs as safer than illicit ones, but abusing prescription amphetamines can lead to seizures, psychosis and life-threatening heart disease.

Stimulants can certainly benefit some young children with truly disabling ADHD. However, history has already taught us that overprescribing stimulants to millions of Americans leads to dependence, addiction and overdose. By medicating children for wiggling in their chairs, losing their homework and shouting out answers, we are not teaching them vital coping skills to manage their behavior. Instead, we are teaching them to take a pill. One day, we'll look back and wonder: Why did we do this? Again.

Dr. Cohen is an a assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Rasmussen is a professor of the history of science at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and the author of "On Speed: The Many Lives of Amphetamine" (New York University, 2009).

A version of this article appeared June 17, 2013, on page A17 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: A Nation of Kids on Speed.

Acceptance, Silence, and Submission

By Mark Steyn

http://www.steynonline.com/

National Review's Happy Warrior
June 17, 2013

Four years ago in this space, I was anticipating an increase in Islamic-conversion rates in the likes of Amsterdam and Rotterdam:

Let's say you work in an office in those cities: One day they install a Muslim prayer room, and a few folks head off at the designated time, while the rest of you get on with what passes for work in the EU. A couple of years go by, and it's now a few more folks scooting off to the prayer room. Then it's a majority. And the ones who don't are beginning to feel a bit awkward about being left behind. 

What do you do? The future showed up a lot sooner than you thought. If you were a fundamentalist Christian like those wackjob Yanks, signing on to Islam might cause you some discomfort. But, if you're the average post-Christian Eurosecularist, what's the big deal? Who wants to be the last guy sitting in the office sharpening his pencil during morning prayers? 

Funny how quickly it all happened. There was the woman on reception, but she retired. And the guy in personnel who used to say, sotto voce, that Geert Wilders had a point. But he emigrated the year after Wilders did.

 

Muslim revert Arnoud van Doorn performs Umrah in Saudi Arabia with new friend Sheikh al-Sudais and his local minder

I didn't know the half of it. The other day, Arnoud van Doorn, the producer of Wilders's anti-Islamic film Fitna, announced that he'd converted to Islam — or "accepted Islam," as they say — and made a pilgrimage to Medina to repent and ask for Allah's forgiveness. There's a lot of it about. Tony Blair's sister-in-law has converted. So has Gitmo guard Terry Holdbrooks, who was touched by the way the detainees "wake up each day and smile," and Katherine Russell, the "all-American girl" from Rhode Island who married Tamerlan Tsarnaev and whose parents were "very supportive" of their daughter's decision to "accept Islam" and retreat beneath the veil and stayed "very supportive" right up until their son-in-law blew up the Boston Marathon. The two men who butchered Royal Fusilier Lee Rigby on the streets of London were also converts, British-born sons of Nigerian Christians. Captured by the cameras with, literally, blood on their hands, they reminded me of another convert, the British comedian Omar Brooks. Mr. Brooks's best-known surefire side-splitting showstopping gag is that the attacks on the World Trade Center "changed many people's lives." Comic pause. "Especially those inside." It brought the house down!

A few years back, in a debate at Trinity College in Dublin, he was asked what Mohammed's message to non-believers was and replied, with disarming honesty, "I come to slaughter all of you. . . . We are the Muslims. We drink the blood of the enemy." I thought of Omar Brooks for the first time in years as I watched his two blood-soaked coreligionists stagger about Wellington Street bragging about what they had done in the name of "almighty Allah." I wouldn't have been surprised to see them drinking blood had the constabulary taken any longer and left them with another 20 minutes to show off for the cameras. On the other hand, the Medway Messenger in Kent reported a prompt police response to an outbreak of octogenarian Islamophobia:

"An 85-year-old woman has this afternoon been arrested after abuse was hurled at Muslims outside Gillingham Mosque. The pensioner was handcuffed and taken away in a van by officers attending the Canterbury Street mosque for Friday prayers."

Oh. That's helpful. If you yell at a mosque, the coppers are already inside. If you deface a London war memorial with Islamic slogans, there's none in sight, and even the ubiquitous British CCTV cameras are apparently of no use in identifying the perpetrators. The day after Drummer Rigby's murder, a march in support of the "Help for Heroes" military charity ended in a five-hour standoff between marchers and police, ending with the arrest of Lee Cousins for "mocking the Islamic prayer ritual" by getting down on his hands and knees outside the pub. He was fined 600 pounds — or just shy of a thousand bucks.

"Terrorism's great achievement isn't hijacking jetliners, but hijacking the debate," wrote George Jonas in Canada's National Post. "Successful terrorism persuades the terror-stricken that he's conscience-stricken." Which is why, in the decade after 9/11, Western governments ramped up Islamic immigration instead of slowing it to a trickle; and their citizens were "very supportive" of those who converted in record numbers, instead of mourning the wholesale abandonment of their inheritance; and their community-outreach enforcers dragged those who disrespected the Prophet into court for ever more footling infractions, instead of obliging Islam to adjust to core Western values like freedom of expression. Meanwhile, Islamic self-segregation intensified. The "War on Terror" was always an evasion, for "terror" doesn't easily encompass, say, demands for segregated swimming sessions or even the nightly car burnings in Stockholm. It does, however, accurately capture the response of Sweden's "center-right" government, bleating about doing more to alleviate "social exclusion." We now expect European leaders to sound like battered wives — like Katherine Tsarnaev.

Sweden's foreign-born (i.e., overwhelmingly Muslim) population has increased from 10 percent to 15 in the last decade. Where will it be a decade hence? The Canadian author Doug Saunders, refuting theories of a "Muslim tide," says that Europe's Islamic population will peak at about 10 percent, and more likely stabilize around 7. Right now, 10 percent of Britons under 25 are already Muslim, which means one day Britain will be 10 percent Muslim — at least. And the octogenarians who yell outside the mosque will be gone.

And then there will be silence, and submission.