Camels and gnats: The malthusian fundamentalism insurgency

His research has included the use of census microdata to profile important but relatively unstudied sectors of the older population. He has served as a reviewer of research proposals funded by the National Institute on Aging; and he is on the editorial boards of the Journal of Gerontology, Research on Aging, Comprehensive Gerontology,and the Journal of Applied Gerontology.     

Review essay

Lauren Weiner has written on Latin American affairs for the American Spectator,the Washington Times,and many other publications.     

The Minos and the Socratic Examination of Law

The Minos is said to initiate the natural law tradition because it claims that an unjust law is not truly a law. But the dialogue also shows that reason cannot recognize that a given statute, as such, is a law. Along with this criticism of law, the Minos shows why the Socratic inquiry into law must consider whether divine law is based on a kind of knowledge through which law can be recognized as authoritative. Thanks to the Minos, we see that Plato's Laws begins by examining the kind of knowledge that underlies divine law and that throughout the dialogue the Athenian Stranger is testing whether human reason can know and establish divine law. In the end, the Minos and Laws establish a once influential but now neglected Socratic tradition of inquiry into law.     

National memory: The duty to remember,the need to forget

Ronald Koven has served as a correspondent in France for twenty-four of the past thirty-two years, successively as the de Gaulle watcher of the International Herald Tribuneand as the Paris correspondent of the Washington Post(for which he was the diplomatic editor and the foreign editor) and the Boston Globe.He concentrates on surveying and coordinating aid for independent news media in Eastern Europe.     

US labor party

The High Court in Australia agrees with the Mandla definition of ‘race’.     

Licensing,Accreditation and Quality Improvement

This article provides an explanation of why consideration is needed of historical practice issues when designing new regulatory regimes. It also suggests some practice techniques that can be applied both to existing and new regulatory regimes to enhance the effectiveness of the regulation. It does so by exploring the problems faced by existing service providers and regulators following the introduction of a new regulatory regime intended to raise the standard of out‐of‐home care services in NSW. This involved agencies making the transition from a licensing regime based on minimum standards under the Children (Care and Protection) Act 1987 to accreditation, employing optimum practice standards, under the Children and Young Persons (Care and Protection) Act 1998.     

A Latin last hurrah

He has written on the region for the Miami Herald, Newsday, The Wall Street Journal, Strategic Review, Freedom At Issue,and is the author of The Democratic Mask: The Consolidation of the Sandinista Revolutionand A Question for El Salvador: What Does the FMLN Really Want?This article is based on a Freedom House Fact Finding Mission, May 1989.     

When children want children

Leon Dash works with the Investigative Desk of the Washington Post.He recently completed When Children Want Children: The Urban Crisis in Teenage Childbearing,for which he received a 1990 PEN/Martha Albrand special citation. He is also the co-author (with Ben Bagdikian) of The Shame of the Prisons.     

A pragmatic inquiry

His research on political conflict among planning practitioners has appeared in the Journal of Planning Education and Research.His forthcoming book, New Homeless and Old,coauthored with Robert Slayton, traces the emergence of the new homeless to the destruction of skid row housing and community.     

From Uniformity to Diversity? Reinventing Public Sector Industrial Relations in New Zealand

Since 1988 industrial relations in New Zealand's public sector have changed significantly. This paper discusses the changing roles of the State Services Commission and chief executives in bargaining with public sector employees, and how these changing roles have affected union representation and wage rates. While the Employment Contracts Act, 1991 resulted in changes to bargaining, generally its effect was minimal in the public sector with respect to bargaining outcomes. However, one of the more significant changes as a result of the Employment Contracts Act has been a move to direct employer — employee negotiations. Bargaining in New Zealand's public sector has moved, in the last nine years, from uniformity to diversity, but to what extent?     

Left High and Dry? Climate Change,Common‐Pool Resource Theory,and the Adaptability of Western Water Compacts

Efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are falling far short of what a consensus of scientists argues is necessary to avoid potentially catastrophic increases in the mean global temperature. Increasingly, attention is devoted to understanding the vulnerability and adaptability of social and ecological systems to climate change in particular areas of the world. In the Western United States and other semi‐arid regions of the world, possibly the most immediate, direct impacts of climate change involve the availability of water resources. Scientific evidence suggests that the West is likely to become hotter and drier and will experience greater variability in precipitation. These changes will affect tens of millions of residents in Western states, and nearly every sector of the economy, especially agriculture. The logic of common‐pool resource theory is applied in this Theory to Practice essay to assess the vulnerability and adaptability to climate change of interstate river compacts and to offer recommendations for coping with climate change. Future areas of research on this critical topic are also outlined. Expert e‐commentaries by Richard Kashmanian and Roger Gorke of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and by Elisabeth Graffy of the U.S. Geological Survey, can be found on the PAR website (go to aspanet.org , click on the link to PAR, and then on the Theory to Practice link).     

BOOK NOTES

Book reviewed in this article: Loren P. Beth . The Development of Judicial Review in Ireland, 1937–1966. “Tasks and Priorities in Administrative Reforms”. The Indian Journal of Public Administration Ralph Braibanti , Research on the Bureaucracy of Pakistan International Institute of Administrative Sciences, Education for Development Administration. Royal Institute of Public Administration, Training in Local Authorities.     

The fragmented French executive: Ministerial cabinets in the Fifth Republic

Ministerial cabinets are small informal groups of personal advisers attached to each Minister. Originally a political body they have in the Fifth Republic become a pivot in the politico‐administrative system. To a large extent the role of cabinets can be understood by analysing their environment—that is the needs of the Minister to whom they are responsible, the central administration and the nature of the cabinet itself. These three variables form a useful framework within which the activities of cabinets can be assessed. ¹     

House organ

Red green theory and practice in the world today take a wide variety of forms that eschew leftist dogmatism and “time‐honored, time‐worn” slogans, on the one hand, and “mere utopianism,” on the other. The Alternative Rouge et Verte (AREV) movement in France is one of these, as a reading of this statement of their general political views, written for CNS, will reveal. The publication of the AREV movement is: Alternative Rouge et Verte, 40 rue de Malti, 75011 Paris, France.     

Deleuze,cinema, Bergson

In the Cinema books, Deleuze integrated his ‘counter‐history’ of philosophy and arrived at a philosophy of art. For him, the artist is a ‘creator of truth’ because truth is not to be achieved, formed, or reproduced; it has to be created’ (Cinema 2 1985: 146). Stressing the pre‐eminent importance of the ‘creation of the New’, Deleuze calls on us to reread and rethink with him the works of Bergson, whom he views as indispensable to the ‘pure semiotics’ of cinema.     

Taking adoption seriously

He is the former Assistant Executive Director of both the Child Welfare League of America and the Day Care and Child Development Council of America. He has published widely on the issue of adoption. Among other works, he served as the chief editor of the Adoption Fact Bookand co-authored the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Adoption.     

How rumors are born

Jean-No?l Kapferer is an internationally recognized expert on rumors. He is professor of communication at l’école des Hautes études Commercialesand at l’Institut Supérieur des Affairesin Paris, and president of the Foundation pour l’étude et l’Information sur les Rumeurs.He is author of numerous books on communication and persuasion. This article has been adapted from his book Rumors, Uses, Interpretation, and Images,published by Transaction.     

Europe’s Jewish problem

He is affiliated with the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria. He is author of Applied Mathematical Demography; Population Change and Social Policy;and co-author (with Wilhelm Flieger) of World Populations: An Analysis of Vital Data.     

"There Was No Plan": An Interview with Rajiv Chandrasekaran

The George W. Bush administration’s doctrines of preemption and democratization through military action have been much debated. Discussants have included former members of the military, students of international relations and diplomacy, philosophers, and legal theorists, to name a few. Not surprisingly, the focus of these expostulations has been on the utility of hard and soft power, the international ripple effects of military action and state toppling, and the legal and moral propriety of preemption. For the most part, public administrators have little participated in these debates. This is regrettable, for the central question nestled within any debate over public policy is the question of plausibility. Can this policy be executed successfully? The governance challenges in postconflict states are profound. Who should rule? How should the state be reconstructed? What administrative structures should be erected? Who should staff government offices and bureaucracies, and what principles should guide them? If preemption and democratization are to succeed, then these questions must be answered. Rajiv Chandrasekaran is an assistant managing editor of the Washington Post. His book Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006) is an examination of the Coalition Provisional Authority that governed Iraq from April 2003 through June 2004. Mr. Chandrasekaran has served as the journalist in residence for the International Reporting Project at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies and as a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington, D.C. In March 2007, Mr. Chandrasekaran was interviewed by Kevin Kosar on behalf of the Public Administration Review.     

The 2001 “spy” plane incident revisited: the Chinese perspective

The 2001 “spy” plane incident was probably the most serious military incident in Sino-American relations since the 1970s, and it generated a crisis in the already brittle relationship since the new Bush administration came into office. This article attempts to revisit this incident from the Chinese perspective and provides some insight into the understanding of the Chinese foreign policy behavior and position on Sino-American relations. It presents the respective arguments concerning the responsibilities of the incident, explores the Chinese historical memory of US hegemonic behavior, and examines the Chinese perspective and attitude towards the incident and their causes through a study of the reactions of the Chinese government and the Chinese people to the incident.¹ He is the founding editor of theHong Kong Journal of Social Sciences and theJournal of Comparative Asian Development. He is also Guest Lecturer at the School of Government, Zhongshan University in Guangzhou, China. The author wishes to thank anonymous reveiwers for their helpful comments made on earlier drafts of this paper.