Christopher Hitchens...

...has a fascinating article over at Slate discussing whether the Vatican should be considered a sovereign state, and the significance of that decision to the child sex abuse cases.

Catholic News Service:

The Bible may well be the best proof that God works in mysterious ways. Rather than one writer being divinely inspired to pen a clear outline of the duties men and women have to God, to each other and to the world around them, he commissioned numerous writers. Many are anonymous and never even wrote anything down, passing the wisdom along verbally.

This process produced a book more than 1,000 years in the making. Instead of a blueprint for humanity, the Bible is a mix of essays, poetry, short stories, moral tracts, numerologies, do's and don'ts, and genealogies. Adding to the confusion today is that the Bible was written in several ancient languages, meaning that practically all contemporary readers are seeing it in translation. And while the Bible is divinely inspired, there is no evidence that translations are.

For all of its insistence that the Bible is inspired, the article from which I took the above quote contains a number of remarkable admissions.

I generally find that Catholics have a much more accurate and healthy understanding of the history of the Bible and its role in Christianity. Relying as they do on the Pope (rather than the Bible) to discern God's perfect will, Catholics are freer to discuss the Bible's obvious limitations. By contrast, Protestants, who deny the Pope's authority, invest the Bible with the undeserved patina of infallibility that once belonged solely to the Pope.

China Running Low on Labor?

WSJ.com:

That labor supply is running dry might seem strange in a country of 1.3 billion people. But the trend's been discernible for a while, as the effects of an aging population and China's one-child policy kick in. In the past 10 years, the population of 20-to-39-year-olds -- from which most manufacturing labor is drawn -- has fallen 22%, Merrill Lynch says.

The UK is Starting to Get It

TimesOnline:

Plans to link retirement age to life expectancy are being studied by the man in charge of welfare reform.

Iain Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary, signalled that he thought longer retirement periods were bad for the economy.

The Government has already begun an inquiry into raising the retirement age to 66 not sooner than 2016 for men, and 2020 for women.

“It is an absolute imperative to start moving that retirement age up,” said Mr Duncan Smith, seeing it as attractive to link the state retirement age to rising life expectancy.

I like the idea, though I do have concerns about politicizing the calculation of life expectancy.

Great Wall of China Held Together by Sticky Rice

Who knew?