Brit's Eye View

George Bush whines about oil

2008-05-17T14:31:00.000-07:00

So the Saudi's wouldn't play ball and increase the oil supply, huh?

Mr President, if you had not screwed up the post-invasion of Iraq you would have had all the oil you needed - from Iraq, and at a price that would stopped the cost of gas from skyrocketing. The war would be paid for and Iraq would be well on the way to reconstruction.

We would not be discussing drilling in Alaska.

Neither would the United States be so hugely in debt; we would not have suffered the death of over 4000 soldiers; we would be viewed more favorably by the rest of the world and YOU, Mr President, would be popular. You would have a legacy to be proud of.

Is homosexuality immoral?

2007-03-14T21:11:00.000-07:00

Is homosexuality immoral?

Peter Pace - Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff - believes so, which underscores his reasons for allowing gays into the military on the Don't Ask, Don't Tell basis.

Hillary Rodham Clinton dodged giving her opinion when first asked, and then clarified her position. She disagrees with Pace.

Look, if you get the thought categories wrong, you make Pace's mistake and get stuck in Clinton's (temporary) cleft stick.

Homosexuality is not a choice. It is just how some people are. You may debate the genetic predisposition, the hormonal imbalances, etc., all you like, but unless you are a head-in-the-sand Born Again dead-beat, the matter is settled. And, please note, heterosexuality is the same. It's just how some (okay, most) people are.

So what is the real thought category? Simply this - heteosexuality is neither inherently moral nor immoral; but heterosexual people are capable of behaving immorally. It follows that homosexuality is not inherently moral or immoral. But homosexuals are equally capable of behaving immorally.

Morality is normally a matter of behavior not essence.

Of course, you are now free to make your case for what is or is not immoral behavior. That's up to you and your personal criteria.

But if Peter Pace had understood this crucial distinction he would not have laid himelf open to such criticism; nor would Hillary have had to dodge her questioner.

Collecting US telephone numbers

2006-05-14T08:15:00.000-07:00

So the NSA is collecting telephone numbers! But why is the press so coy about pressing for the purpose?

Bush says the database of phone calls is not being used for [data] mining or trolling. But we have no reason to believe what he says.

1. You can look for patterns of activity. For instance, suppose the NSA suspects terrorist cells are active in, say, Chicago. Then you look for numbers of calls from Chicago to Pakistan, or Palestine, or Iran, etc. Compare the proportion of those calls with calls from other cities. As soon as you find statistically significant uplift of calls in one location you lift out those calls and apply closer inspection and analysis. You are now a small step away from actual phone tapping (avoiding the FISA courts, of course!) .

2. The database also contains a staggering web of connected calls. Suppose a particular location in Chicago makes many calls to the Middle East, you can follow up on all his other phone calls (shall we say to other US locations), and then see if any of these make calls to the Middle East. And so forth. The pattern and networks could be very complex and the implications might be quite benign. But as soon as there is good reason to suspect unusual activity you jump straight to phone tapping.

Quite neat, really. But is it ethical or constitutional? That's the debate.

Three years in Iraq

2006-03-18T23:45:00.000-08:00

The very fact of a three year anniversary of the war in Iraq is an indictment of the appalling misjudgments of the Bush administration.

It was with gung-ho optimism that Bush, Cheyney and Rumsfelt sent the troops in to remove Saddam confident that the job could be done quickly with a small, efficient fighting force; that the people would come out into the streets greeting the Americans as their liberators hailing the dawn of freedom and democracy; that the commercial opportunities for wealth creation would be enormous; that a new stability would come to the Middle East as friendly Iraq became an alternative base for troops rather than the increasingly uncertain Saudi Arabia; and that abundant oil supplies would be ensured.

After the initial conquest of Baghdad President Bush declared Mission Accomplished. All that remained was to find the WMD and destroy them.

The judgments that formed the invasion policy were so hideously wrong that both Iraq and the USA are paying for it dearly with bombing, death, near civil war and the worst ever national debt. It is a nightmare scenario that the stupid, shortsighted neo-con naivete of Washington could not conceive.

Whatever rousing talk spews forth from the mouths of Bush and Runsfelt (Cheyney is almost silent) that the job must be completed and we must not cede the day to the enemy by running home - we must never cease to hold the White House responsible for their ghastly failure to understand the true nature of terrorism and the longstanding mistrust of American foreign policy and hatred of American cultural imperialism by most of the Islamic world.

Intellectual realists knew this to start with.

Hatred towards a perceived oppressor does not easily die. It took over 30 years in small Northern Ireland to get the IRA to abandon guns and bombs (and we're not sure they've done it yet). The Israel/Palestine question is no nearer to resolution than it has ever been. The Tamil Tigers never were defeated; the Mujahadeen drove the Soviets out of Afghanistan and the Viet Cong saw the US Army out of View Nam.

Terrorism survives because the seed bed in which it grows consists of ordinary people; families with women and children, who feel aggrieved by a cause that strikes at the very core of their beliefs and way of life. No propaganda changes their minds or hearts. Children learn to hate the enemies their fathers kill as soon as they are old enough to speak. There is no question that their cause is righteous and their tactics morally justifiable. Women tend the wounded and bury their sons because love for their men is a strong as the gunman's hatred of the oppressor.

You cannot eliminate these profound convictions - so different from ours, by rounding up suspects and incarcerating them in interrogation camps carefully positioned beyond the reach of law and inspection. Bombing does not change hearts, it hardens opposition; and that works both ways, from both sides. Only killing on such a scale that approximates to genocide or ethnic cleansing can eliminate this kind of opposition. This was been the solution of the Nazis, and miscellaneous African states including the Sudan. It was the policy of Saddam Hussein - although he was restrained from completing his ambitions. It is the philosophy of Hamas towards Israel.

Unless the United States is prepared (with its Iraqi friends) to kill all the family support systems that nurture the men we call terrorists, terrorism will remain alive and vicious. Since this is an impossible moral position for the United States to take it follows that the USA cannot defeat terrorism by engaging in armed struggle. Only dialogue and diplomacy stretched out over decades can bring a change.

The conservative mentality of the voters of the United States did not see this three years ago. They marched to the tune of "We must support the Commander in Chief in the hour of peril" and "We must never undermine our troops who are in harm's way." This veneer of loyalty only glossed over the widespread political immaturity of American voters. But three years on the veneer is wearing very thin. The President is widely unpopular (Hello - we tried to tell you he was not up to the job, but you didn't listen!). The war is now perceived as a mistake (Hello - we told you to start with, but you wouldn't listen!). The oil and other revenues that would have flowed from a clean take-over of Iraq have turned into bottomless pits of financial loss.

The President is now stomping the country again on a sort of one man crusade to turn the tide in favor of his mistakes. But he is no orator. Others write his speeches and lend some respectability to his arguments. But get him off his prepared rhetoric and he is incompetent and inarticulate; probably an embarrassment to his colleagues back in the White House. His Social Security reform program foundered as soon as his words died from his mouth. His Medicare reform has run into huge problems. His fine words of support for the post-Katrina recovery program have left millions of voters cynical that he exercises any moral leadership at all. Scandal and sleaze dogs his staff including the office of the Vice President. Let's face it - the hubbub over a semen stained dress was a picnic in the park compared with the dreadful mess this inept President has led us into.

Sure, there is no easy way out of Iraq. But talk about certain victory is a tactical and rhetorical mistake. There can be no victory. We can only look for the best possible solution; and an expensive and bloody one at that.

The Democrats need to come clean about their own political idiocy when the war began. They were trounced into supporting the President because it would have seemed fundamentally disloyal to America, at the time, not to have done so. They were in a bind. Based on the intelligence they had they gave reluctant support. It was very hard to crystallize a policy to oppose the invasion. Yet the warnings of a flawed basis for the invasion were all there.

Remember, Hans Blix and his team spent months following up on intelligence passed to them from the US on likely weapons locations or nuclear facilities. They consistently found none. Did nobody piece this together - US intelligence was consistently WRONG?! Iraqi scientists were being flown out of the country and questioned about Saddam's programs, and the UN team could not gather sufficient evidence to build a case for WMD.

But so convinced was Bush - egged on by Cheyney and his backdoor non-intelligence from Chalabi - that they were right that he brushed Blix aside like some irritating fly and plunged in to sort the matter out himself.

Democrats - that was all open to you at the time. But you lacked the political insight to make a stand on this. You therefore got dragged into the Bush invasion folly. There were other methods that could and should have been pursued. Unfortunately such methods as those proposed by the French were simply held up to ridicule and as a mark of American intellectual power we renamed French fries Freedom fries. Democrats should have been quicker off the mark to denounce Bush's freedom lies.

In time, the propaganda to the American people changed. So there were no WMD. No matter - the freedom of the Iraqi people is what mattered. Saddam needed to go anyway. The USA was now embarking on a great drive to deliver democracy to the world as the philosophical cure to terrorism. Well now - that is another story.

For now, we are marking the third anniversary of a war of such growing unpopularity that much as we feel for our troops fulfilling their Mission Impossible, we must take the opportunity to say again that the whole bloody mess is a direct consequence of the stupid and foolish judgments of an inept neo-con administration, and the sooner the people can vote next November to correct the folly they put in power by the last popular election, the better. Democracy at home might begin to win.

George's Library - decision expected soon

2005-11-19T10:08:00.000-08:00

So George Bush will build a presidential library? What, for three books?

Here's a tribute from Jimmy Durante:

I’ll never forget the day I read a book
It was contagious
Seventy pages
There were pictures here and there
So it wasn’t hard to bear
The day I read a book

It’s a shame I don’t recall the name of the book
It wasn’t a history
I know because it had no plot
It wasn’t a mystery
Because nobody there got shot
The day I read a book
I can’t remember when
But one of these days I’m gonna do it again.

The environmental debate

2005-09-25T20:06:00.000-07:00

My open letter to Mr. Bush sparked off some very lively responses, some of which were posted as comments on this blog.

There is certainly no unananimity as to whether the warming climate of this planet is a part of a natural cycle, or caused by carbon emissions, or something in between - i.e. it's getting warmer anyway, but man made emissions are making it hotter quicker.

Prof Sir John Lawton, chairman of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, said the intensity of the recent hurricanes was caused by water in the Gulf of Mexico being warmer than usual and was consistent with the latest scientific predictions of how the climate will behave as a result of man-made warming (which is what I said) counteracting the US 'climate loonies'.

Prof Sir David King, UK Government chief scientific advisor, has recently said that climate change is a far greater threat to the United States than International terrorism (with which I concur). This, from the BBC

The National Review Online has slammed Professor King for his petulant invasion of a climate conference in Moscow - get the story here.

Yet Tony Blair is now changing his pro-Kyoto stance and falling in line with George Bush (as usual) - see The Independent, Sept 25th

Popular TV botanist David Bellamy has weighed in on the subject calling all the talk of global warming "poppycock."

Can we have some honesty here? Please. With such a wide divergence of views, even amongt the scientific community, we have to look for the subtext - the real reason people make decisions.

Bush hates being tied down by international agreements. He always wants the US to be the superpower doing its own righteous thing. Kyoto was not his call and he had other priorities, like the economy. He and his advisors were too shortsighted to realize that, awful though the possibility of further mainland terrorism will be, it will never cost as much as the hurricanes, tornados, floods and fires that impact the United States every year. Thus Homeland Security was looking the wrong way when Katrina arrived.

Inasmuch as the cyclical arguments for global warming are undeniably valid the Administration had ample scientific cover for it's rejection of Kyoto. This provides rationale for all others who prefer not to face the implications of man's interference with his environment. It's a prejudice thing - sorry. Suck it up.

(See also this very good presentation of the North Atlantic Oscillation - NAO . It adds to the complexity of the debate.)

It is endemic in careful science that experts avoid going out on a limb by undue extrapolation of results into areas of statistical uncertainty. So of course many scientist are cautious about saying global warming is anything more than a natural cycle. But we cannot classify TV naturalist David Bellamy as a careful scientist. He is a typical, over-the-top, pompous commentator full of humbug. His words are wild and extreme.

Tony Blair has changed his tune, but not because of his own scientific advisors. No - GW got to him.

Time for yet more honesty.

First - I really believe that Bush (and now Blair) have a point. International accords, like Kyoto, tend not to work very well. But the recognition of the problem and a joint endeavour to engage in some sort of solution is not a complete waste of time. Even if "Kyoto" is only a buzzword to allude to a massive problem, as least we all know what it is.

Second - few people (even Americans) know just how advanced is American technology in attacking the problem of carbon emissions. The new wave of power generation plants now being developed will be able to process fossil fuels of all kinds with almost zero sum carbon emissions, at the same time harnessing all the chemical by-products for other industrial uses. This is not so technical you will not understand it. Notice, some of it is President Bush's initiative. I can give credit where credit is due!

Thus Blair is also now saying that market forces and private industry will do a better job of reducing emissions than impossible international obligations that would cripple emerging economies if they tried to implement them. Geez, you had better be right.

Lastly, I still believe the environment is a way bigger problem than terrorism. Katrina has just delivered that wake-up call. And hurricane Rita had Bush hopping all over the place trying to look as though he really is on the ball. It was kinda obvious!

Kyoto: As Rita follows Katrina

2005-09-21T19:35:00.000-07:00

Dear President Bush,

A few years ago you refused to endorse the Kyoto agreement whereby nations of the world would co-operate in reducing carbon emissions to help counteract global warming. One of your major reasons, as I recall, was that the Kyoto requirements were too stringent for the United States - they would damage the American economy.

Now we have been ripped apart by Hurricane Katrina, and Rita is closing in. These huge hurricanes derive their massive power from oceans that are getting warmer and warmer and too many earth scientists are saying there IS a connection with global warming.

Already we have no idea how you will pay for the recovery from Katrina when your miscalculations from your war in Iraq are already plunging the nation into unprecedented deficit.

This is the thing: signing on to Kyoto would hurt the economy? Well the impact of global warming will hurt it even more! If the left fist don't get you then the right one will.

Your decisions, Mr. President, are the most damaging to the American economy.

Of course, "strong leadership" means there is no way you will ever change your mind. (Sigh!)

Michael Buss

Shaivo: A tale of selfishness and bigotry

2005-04-01T08:26:00.000-08:00

There are some things the press will not say, though millions of people think, because they would consider those things too delicate. But I'm going to say what needs to be said.

The parents of Terri Schaivo have obtruded themselves into the news frame of the United States for reasons that are both selfish and ignorant. They have been wrong from day one. The various judges who got hauled into the fight for the 'cause' knew it, but were in too delicate a position to say so bluntly. And they also had extremely clear legal grounds for repeatedly refusing to authorize the re-connection of the feeding tube. See this excellent article from attorney Jacob Hornberger -
The Schiavo Case is NOT Judicial Murder

Terry Schaivo 'died' a long time ago. A raft of medical diagnosis and opinion pronounced her to be in a persistent vegetative condition. This means that although her body could function with minimal support, all consciousness and perception had gone. Terri's apparent signs of recognition and response came from automatic reflexes controlled by a part of the brain unrelated to true consciousness. Her brain was so damaged by past events and the ongoing state of bare existence that there was NEVER any hope of any kind of recovery whatsoever. It was not as though one day she might 'wake up' from a long coma; it was not as though she was conscious inside her head, trapped, but unable to communicate with the outside world except through occasional smiles and eyelid movement. Poor girl! But at least she was not 'there' to suffer, to 'fight', to make decisions, or 'want' anything. She was, very sadly, brain dead. Dead. On several occasions, before the onset of her medical episode 15 years ago, Terri clearly indicated to a variety of people that if she ever got into this state she would not want her life prolonged.

A family may hope for a while. But in the end reality has to set in. For what good reason would anyone keep a person like Terri artificially alive except for sheer selfishness and ignorance?

Forget love. Piffle! This had nothing to do with love, whatever the Schindlers might say. Love always knows when to let go; ignorance doesn't. Most families, at some point, eventually gather round the death bed of a dying relative. The time remaining may be short, or uncertain, but the reality of impending death is a factor they struggle with as best they may. Sometimes the judgement is that everything possible must be done to save the dying person. At other times, the reality is simple; we must all die at some time, and when that time comes love recognises it and prepares to let go. At that point love may lament and grieve with intense and unbearable emotion, but it still knows deep inside that it is time to let go. Love lets go. Only selfishness clings on.

As I write the Pope is dying. He rests in his room with a variety of ailments all of which are treatable at some point. But do we see cardinals petitioning the Rome judiciary to hear a case to have him rushed to the hospital to make more attempts to save his life? Is pressure being applied to the medical care teams to do more to preserve his life? Will they be sued if they don't? NO! For although millions of people love this Pope, they know it is time to let him go. Love does not selfishly insist on its own agenda against the best interests of the patient.

The Schindlers did not get this. Nor did Jeb Bush; nor his brother George Bush. Nor thousands of religious do-gooders possessed of a totally phoney concept of the sanctity of life. That's what makes them bigots.

But there were more reasons for the Schindlers (egged on by the coffin chasing lawyers) to sustain their fight. They felt they were locked into a no-holds barred fight with Terri's husband, Michael Schaivo. They had the bone between their teeth and they were not going to let go, for to have done so would be to let the much hated and villified husband WIN. And that would never do. They painted themselves, psychologically, into a corner from which they could not escape until Terri's body finally died. For them to give up was not to give up hope for Terri; it was rather to give up a fight against Michael Schaivo, against lawyers, politicians and judges. In this struggle Terri's vegetative body became merely a pawn, a symbol of a 'bigger struggle' for what the Schindlers and their ilk wish to call the 'right to life.' That made their struggle contemptible and their so-called concern for Terri, bogus.

Think about it Mr. and Mrs. Schindler. Think about it.

Does the law need to be changed? Does the consitution need to be amended? In both cases, probably not. Families and doctors have always figured out how to find a way. They do so every day and we do not hear about it because this is the private preserve of families, pastors and doctors.

The law gave the right to decide to the husband; and no matter what others may think of the cruel dilemma in which Michael Schaivo found himself, with dreadful moral choices to make at every turn, he at least had the clarity to make the right decision.

Think about it Mr. and Mrs. Schindler. Think about it. And if you are wise and humble enough, you may go away to do your grieving and healing. Then you may begin - if you can - a new life FREE of the hideous chains which have bound you to a lost cause for years.

Blair accused over 'Sinn Fein deals'

2005-03-15T22:48:00.000-08:00

Telegraph | News | Blair accused over 'Sinn Fein deals'

Well, Hello! So it seems the White house might try to prevent fund-raising for the IRA!! God Almighty! Why in heaven's name did they not stop the flow of funds to terrorists in Ireland years ago?? Have they nopt been paranoid about stopping funds to Muslim terrorists? Still, I suppose it's better late than never.

New Social Security Plan smacks of scam

2005-02-02T22:29:00.000-08:00

When I heard the President's State of the Union address I thought that his domestic program was beginning to look quite good. Then I read this article in the Washington Post on exactly how the new Social Security Plan will work. Geez! What's the point? Here was spin even worse than the thin after-the-event justification for the invasion of Iraq.

PLEASE - read the details.
Participants Would Forfeit Part of Accounts' Profits

The man in the arena

2005-01-21T22:34:00.000-08:00

Without doubt one of the greatest presidents of the United States was Theodore Roosevelt. He stood as a Colossus over his age leaving his imprints for generations to come. No stranger to energetic action he wrote the oft quoted passage that rebuts the ease with which onlookers criticize and gives credit to "the man who is actually in the arena" - even if in his effort he fails.

By some accounts George W. Bush is now the man in the arena, and by Roosevelt's dictum we should not criticize him. Tcha!

Half of America roundly rebuts him; the educated press finds his record tarred with inadequacies of varying colors, most of the rest of the world is highly critical of him.

Until the current President it is doubtful is any of them were the creation of a committee. They were men of education and reading, men of stong opinions - well able to handle themselves under pressure. I doubt Teddy Roosevelt ever imagined a President who would not read the newpapers but leave it to his staff to filter the news and tell him what they thought he should know.

Bush's book reading habits are poor to the point of utter embarrasment. Read this CNN article, or this Slate commentary.

President George Bush is the product of Carl Rove's amazing determination to make him President. He is still nursed along by his neo-con nannies - Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld and Co., and carefully kept from facing the press most of the time because they know their 'boss' cannot be trusted not to put his foot in his mouth. He deliberately surrounds himself with people who tell him what he wants to hear. With Powell gone, George Bush is now in soft cocoon with little sense of the real weight of debate and opinion in the outside world. That is very scary, and very dangerous.

To change the metaphor from the second term lame duck presidency; Bush may be "the man in the arena" but it's increasingly apparent he's been thrown from his horse and is limping for the rails.

Landing on Titan

2005-01-15T10:29:00.000-08:00

Cool pictures of the descent of the Huygens probe onto the surface of Titan!

You can see the ocean, a coast line, smog, etc: Much the same as flying in to LA.

Now wait a minute ...!

Knickers in a twist about prayer

2005-01-13T17:40:00.000-08:00

President Bush's inaugration on January 20th contains the usual extraordinary anomaly of public prayer. And we are not surprised that a small group of citizens is going to the courts to challenge its constitutionality.

An opening invocation will be delivered by The Reverend Dr. Luis León. The closing benediction prayer will be by offered up by Pastor Kirbyjon H. Caldwell.

Americans are all over the map on church and state. As we say in Britain - they have their knickers in a twist - where knickers means underpants!

They (and I generalize grossly) do not understand what is meant by the words "an establishment" in the First Amendment, and many of them think that the words "building a wall of separation between Church and State," are actually in the Constitution (No!). In truth, Thomas Jefferson coined these words in a communication to the Danbury Baptist Association.

I'm not going to deal with the technicalities here - but I will later. Here is the extraordinary inconsistency:

The President is allowed to have a pastor lead in public prayer at his inauguration, but schools and sporting events may not have public prayer.
The state can pay for the House and Senate to have a chaplain but no such religious person would be employed in a public school.
The President will take an oath of office with his hand on a Bible, but a court house may not have a small extract from the Bible (the Ten Commandments) on the wall.

As I say - these guys have their knickers in a twist!

Spin, spin, spin if you will, you legal whizz-kids, you constitutional jurists. But you dig the hole deeper.

The loophole for torture

2005-01-12T20:41:00.000-08:00

ANYONE who reads widely has long known that Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheyney and George Bush have always wanted to be able to torture their enemies to extract from them maximum possible information about potential terrorist threats to the United States.

To do that they needed to have an appearance of high moral conduct towards their enemies while keeping quiet the fact that unknown men in unknown places are being subjected to treatment so brutal that it is indistinguishable from Saddam Hussein's torture chambers or the Spanish Inquisition. Here the prying eyes of the Red Cross never pierce the darkness and the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war is but a joke.

Since the revelations of abuse at Abu Ghraib the Administration has to tried to clean up its act sufficiently to calm public fears. That, as we might say in England, is a load of bollocks.

Our new Attorney General elect crafted the clever sidestepping legal advice that made the case for the President to do whatever he likes to captive terrorists in a time of 'war'. And Rummy had no difficulty in making sure it filtered down to the right level while trying to cover its origin in the Oval Office. The show trials of Lynndie England, Jeremy Sivits and now Charles Graner are a neat whitewash to make believe the abuse came only from low level and irresponsible military personnel. Attempts to prove the culture of abuse was spawned from the top only peter out in official obfusfaction.

And even though Mr Alberto Gonzales has gone on record that he abhors torture, his words in the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings were carefully measured so that he never actually totally denied his complicity in the Administration's torture policies.

Today's New York Times reveals that whereas the restrictions on prisoner abuse cover the Defense Department they do NOT extend to the CIA. So the military may not torture prisoners but the intelligence community may!

At the end of last year the House and Senate thought they had sufficiently fenced up the White House, to prevent further abuse. It turns out, however, that under Adminstration pressure just four men removed the ultimate safeguards AFTER the bill had been approved on a 96-2 vote. It was sneaky and underhand. Condi Rice, under questioning, used her usual weasel words to wiggle out of the implications of what had been done. (Click the title of this blog to read the NY Time article, or see my previous blog.)

Be sure of this, the United States government has secured for itself locations which are so far outside the law that they can do almost whatever they want with the inmates. But Guantanmo and Abu Ghraib have come under such scrutiny that these places - run by the miltary - are now obliged to restrict the extent of tough treatment to prisoners. This rule does not reach to the CIA's secret locations in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

What's the issue? Do we really care if very evil men are treated very badly to make them cough up information? These terrorists are not prisoners of war - they are international criminals; at least, they might be if we applied our usual rules of law and brought them to trial and proved the evidence. But the US could not even build a case against the alleged 20th highjacker of the 9/11 attacks, so it certainly does not want to go public with the three dozen our so men it now holds and tortures in secret.

But do we really care? Yes, because the US should be held to the very highest values of humane and ethical treatment. Yes, because Mr. Right-Wing-Family-Values-Born-Again-Bush, who reads his Bible and prays every day so that God can give him 'gut feelings, should know that the Apostle Paul taught us we should treat overcome evil with good (Romans 12:17-21). Yes, because our extreme treatment of high value prisoners makes a nonsense of our 'shock' when Muslim extremists cut off the heads of our people before the gaze of the video camera. Yes, because the foreign policy of the present US Government is the main cause of the whole appalling debacle in Iraq and our treatment of prisoners only adds to the contempt that our enemies have for us. Yes, because we expect our leaders not to be two-faced.

Sure, we need to take major steps to defend the United States homeland against further terrorists hits. But we can NEVER beat terrorism at its own game by returning violence with violence. Mr Bush is incapable of getting that. Rummy knows he has screwed up big time, but will not admit it. Doctor Condi Rice knows she advised Mr Bush badly but her only safe haven is inside the White House where she must sing the same tune as her boss. The discredited Cheyney, the gullible believer of the spurious nonsense that Chalabi channeled to him to build a case for war with Iraq can never bring himself to admit he was so wrong about the reasons for war. We have an adminstration locked into being unable to admit its ghastly miscalculations; painted into a corner - while yet pretending to be the paragon of international leadership and freedom.

Rather than taking the big bold steps necessary to be truly great and magnanimous on the world stage, they use artifice, legal evasions and weasel words to obscure the moral baseness of the their treatment of their enemies.

There's nothing original in what I've said. I can do no more than deliver another pin-prick in the hide of an elephant.

White House weasels out of torture restrictions

2005-01-12T20:38:00.000-08:00

The New York Times > Washington > White House Fought New Curbs on Interrogations, Officials Say

With the news focus on tsumani relief and storm damage at home this important news item may not get sufficient recognition. You need to spend 10 minutes reading it in the New York Times. Please also see my next blog.

Mr. Bush's values!

2005-01-07T23:44:00.000-08:00

CNN.com - Feds paid pundit to push Bush policy - Jan 7, 2005

Mr. Bush went to the country in the 2004 Election leaning heavily on values. Well here is one of his values - bribery! Read the story.

I suppose it was his administration. Maybe he know nothing about it? But we'll be watching.

Way to go George!

AIDS - and the Survival of the Fittest

2005-01-06T18:21:00.000-08:00

Nelson Mandela, one of the great fighters for justice of our age, today announced the tragic news that his only surviving son has died of AIDS. In fact, every day in South Africa 600 people die of AIDS.

This courageous announcement will help to bring discussion into the open about this 'unspeakable' disease. The continent of Africa is being decimated by HIV/AIDS and only slowly, very slowly are attitudes changing and governments responding to the need to make medical care available at reasonable costs to stem the tide of human destruction. It may still be too late, for already whole communities have been so ravaged by the anti-immune disease that they may never recover.

Over 40 million people worldwide live with HIV/AIDS, and we do not know how many others have it without their knowing. The epidemic is not waning - so before it ends it will wipe out vast numbers of the global population. But of this we can be sure - it WILL burn itself out. It will hit a limit beyond which it cannot travel, a margin not fenced in by medicine but by behavioral change.

Did you ever think to apply the theory of evolution to the spread of disease? To be precise I mean that element of the theory we call the survival of the fittest. Whether plants or animals - including human beings - those who are best able to cope with stress from the environment, disease, war or famine will survive. It is usually thought that this is entirely a biological tug-of-war in which physical considerations alone determine who will survive. But when we come to homo sapiens we have to factor in man's intelligence. Smart decisions, wise courses of actions can lead to the survival of families, towns or nations. Intellectual fitness also makes for survival.

Many things inform the intellect: science, education, fear, necessity, morality, religion, and more. Apply this to AIDS. Tragically, vast numbers have this awful disease through no fault of their own: babies born with it, adults infected from compromised blood transfusions, accidental infection in hospital - even rape of an innocent victim by an AIDS infected man. An informed intellect will not help these.

But even more have contracted the syndrome because of risky behavior. Some knew they were taking risks while many - especially in Africa - did not know that having multiple sexual partners (for whatever reason) was potentially dangerous.

The law of the survival of the fittest will inexorably have its way. The high risk takers will be eliminated in time until their number is so reduced that the remaining members of these groups will change their behavior or die the same way. Treat them with all the drugs they can afford to prolong life, they will still die of AIDS related diseases. Sexual hedonism will be hit so hard that eventually there will grow a wisdom - a morality if you like - that reverts to the old traditional sexuality of both Muslim and Christian traditions. Education, openess and a new morality in Africa will eventually be the salvation of a young and orphaned population.

Now it becomes evident that those best fitted to survive are those who, for intellectual or moral reasons, do not share needles, do not engage in prolific anal sex, do not make it a lifestyle to develop long lists of sexual partners. In the end, those who choose risky behavior will all die out - maybe hundreds of millions of them. But the spreading epidemic will hit a wall where a revised global morality or common sense eventually learns when to say No. We cannot count on medicine to secure that boundary.

These, the fittest, will survive.

In the meantime, compassion, education and medical research are still engaged in battle against a forest fire which they can, at best, only hope to contain. The fire will go out when there is no more tinder to burn.

Tsumanis and God

2005-01-05T09:59:00.000-08:00

A long time ago I gave up believing that God controlled every little bit of the universe. Had I not, the biblical view that God manipulates the environment to trigger earthquakes, blast off volcanoes, send plagues, and withold rain or overwhelm with floods would now be intolerable. I would now be trying to understand the purposes of God in sending (as though he did it on purpose, or at least allowed it to happen) the appalling tsunamis that followed the Sumatra earthquake.

Did he have it in for Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists? Was he trying to cull part of the globe's over-population? Was this a sign of the Last Times! Was he shaking a fist at man's sinful defiance? To be honest, I would be having a very hard time with God if I really believed what I used to believe.

The Archbishop of Canterbury - head of the worldwide communion of Anglican churches - went on record to say that there would be something wrong with Christians if this event did not make them question the very existence of God. See The Electronic Telegraph, Jan 2nd.

This is how the world IS. Sometimes it is a pleasant, harmonious place where the sun shines, fruit ripens on the bough, we are happy and content and all is well with the world - in our little corner. Equally so, we abuse this Earth's resources polluting the oceans and the very air we breathe, killing off thousands of species of plants and animals in the process, stripping the sea of fish stocks, hacking down the rain forests - (those great engines for soaking carbon dioxide out of the air and replacing it with oxygen).

We are the exploiters and plunderers of a world whose abundance we have failed to respect. We proliferate our race until mankind is obliged to live in the fragile margins where floods assail the land, mountains rain down mud and fire and storms rip our houses from their roots.

Sometimes the natural harshness of this untameable world snaps back through its own inexorable nature and we are found in the way. That's just how it is.

In the midst of the appalling human tragedy we are also seeing man at his noblest and best rising to respond to an impact so severe that conventional boundaries and differences become (for a short while) irrelevant and we reassess our priorities to be those of giving and caring rather than grabbing and keeping.

OC Catholic church pays up. Issues still unresolved.

2005-01-04T08:04:00.000-08:00

The $100 million settlement by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange to victims sexually abused by some of its priests only goes part way to resolve the real issues at stake. The running scandal of the Roman Catholic Church's complicity in this vile corruption by denial, cover-up, obstruction, evasion and finally monetary compensation is an ongoing spectacle of horrific proportions. That much is clear to most people.

But it seems to me that neither the people nor the press are yet getting to the real point. For the moral and spiritual decadence of this church strikes at the very heart if its historic claim to be the one true church of Jesus Christ.

The only true church?
These are ecumenical days - days when many Christian churches appear to be getting along better and being more accommodating of each other. Since Vatican II even the Roman Church has appeared to open its arms to other churches including the Greek and Russian Orthodox communions. But be not deceived, it has never yet abandoned its claim to have the only truly legitimate and apostolic ministry, to be the only means of receiving true grace, to be the only vehicle of salvation for the peoples of the world. This means that outside of the Roman Catholic communion nobody can be sure of being right with God or attaining the bliss of heaven.

Admittedly, there will be many practicing Catholics who are neither aware of this or who give it scant recognition, but that is irrelevant. The general views of the catholic churchgoer do not define the nature of the church. That is the preserve of the church itself.

Today the lid is blown off the preposterous claim that the Roman Catholic Church is the only ark of salvation. It is exposed as a wretched, conniving, corrupt, self-serving organization of so-called religious men. And to be immediately fair - the church does contain many humble and truly dedicated god-fearing men. But the shared responsibility of the church in recognizing its collective moral failings has besmirched even the holiest.

The heart of the matter
Let's see why this current scandal is so damning - and we will do so in a very down to earth fashion. What aspect of Roman Catholic worship most commonly hits the headlines? It is the Mass. The Pope makes visits to the countries of the world and thousands attend his huge open air Masses. A prominent catholic citizen dies and his funeral Mass is attended by princes and presidents. Every Sunday it is the obligation of the faithful of the church to attend Mass.

What is this Mass? And why do so few people ever ask this question? Most people might understand this to be the commemoration of the death of Jesus by participation in the symbolic elements of bread and wine. As such this is common to all churches. But that is a mistake. For the Roman Catholic Mass claims to be far more than a symbolic commemoration. The very word mass means sacrifice. When the celebrant priest takes the wafer and pronounces the words "This is my Body" a MIRACLE OCCURS! The very substance of the wafer, or bread and wine, becomes totally and utterly transformed into the very body and blood of Jesus Christ. Outwardly, the bread and wine will appear unchanged, but we are to believe that the actual substance is as truly the physical Jesus as if we lived in the days of Christ and held his hand in ours. When the priest lifts up the wafer - which is now a host to the essence of God - he re-offers the sacrifice that Christ made on the cross. And when the communicant eats the wafer or bread, he actually consumes the physical stuff of the body and blood of Jesus. In this way the child of God receives the grace of God to fit him for heaven.

Now I, for one, do not believe that. I never have. But if I were thinking this through for the first time I would now have huge problems in believing it.

A graphic illustration
Look at it like this. It is Saturday night and up in the bedroom of the rectory the parish priest is entertaining a young teenager from his parish.

The priest is a great friend of the family. He has shown love and kindness on innumerable occasions and they all regard his as so close to God that it is a huge privilege merely to have this man enter their house or dine at their table. He has shown especial interest in their son who, the priest tells them, has all the qualities of one day being a priest himself. So the family raises no objection that the boy is often over at the father's home. The young boy himself is then introduced to a very special form of love (the priest tells him); a love that must be a closely guarded secret because most other people do not have the wisdom and maturity to understand it - not even the boy's family!

At first the boy is scared and horrified. But soon he is drawn into the strange intimacy. Priestly hands remove his clothes and explore every part of the young boy's body. The priest's body, normally covered with holy vestments, is exposed and made accessible to the boy as a special gift. Their penises are erect, excited, intrusive, dancing the seminal dance of the most sacred and ancient of priestly celebrations. The wild excitement spins giddily, and slowly subsides.

Those hands, those fatherly, priestly hands, that caressed the young boy's buttocks, that held his throbbing member, now pull on their clothes to resume the outward appearance of social normality. And the next morning these same hands take the bread, hold it aloft in front of a believing congregation and declare "This is my Body" - turning the bread into the very body of Jesus. God is there, physically, in the hands of the priest with the same certainty that he held a young boy's penis the night before.

And you want me to believe the miracle has happened?

The necessary inference
For if the God the priest proclaims bears any resemblance to the Jesus of the New Testament this Mass, this sacrifice, is a travesty, a blasphemy, a monstrous lie. For surely, if I dare to second guess God, he would pronounce in as many words, "The bread remains bread. There is no way my Son will now come at your bidding to inhabit that wafer in your semen stained hands." For a God who is mechanically at the beck and call of a corrupt priest is not a God who commands our belief.

And the grace the priest places in the mouths of the communicants is no grace at all. It is dry bread. Salvation has ebbed from the chalice. This representational act has occurred not once or twice, but tens of thousands of times over the years as child molesting priests have moved from illicit congress to communion.

When some of the bishops learned the truth, many were too ashamed to confront the issue in their priests for they knew at first hand the same experiences. Others knew about it but preferred to keep it quiet with minimum fuss less the scandal demean the Holy Mother Church in the eyes of an unbelieving world or deter the faithful. They became complicit in the felony. It was guilt by association.

Shall we not therefore say that the same righteous God who denied the grace of Christ's presence in the wafer to the offending priest, also denied it to the conspiring bishops? And why stop at the bishops? For the archbishop of Boston, the publicly humiliated Cardinal Bernard Law, was recalled to the Vatican and stripped of his position as archbishop by the Pope. But why did the Pope leave him as a Cardinal - a Prince of the Church? So even this much revered Pope has compromised his judgment by his failure to do that which was right.

Now let us say it. If ever there was a claim by the Roman Catholic church to be the only way of salvation, the true guardians of the sacraments of grace, that claim is once and for all trashed by the behavior and admission of its own priests. Its claims are phony. The mass is a myth - a medieval vestige of religious hocus-pocus. It is therefore sad that the people and the press do not call the church on its fraudulent masses, that they superficially skip over the arrogant claims of an archaic institution and continue to give respect where none is due.

Perhaps because the church is still such a large social institution able to command millions of votes and even more millions of dollars it would be imprudent to press the point.

Bush boosts Asia help to $350 million

2004-12-30T14:30:00.000-08:00

George Bush has already taken heavy criticism for his stingy and belated offer of help to the tsumani-stricken region of south Asia. He deserved it! Colin Powell is now on the stomp trying to whitewash the offer as a flexible one that will rise as demand necessitates. (Three cheers for Mr. Powell. He will be so glad to escape from this administration.)

Trouble is - the President is strapped for cash. His disastrously miscalculated war in Iraq has opened a bottomless pit of spending for which the nation will be paying for decades to come. Domestic programs are being nickle and dimed to death for his face-saving nation-building enterprize. Where will he find the $350 million relief money?

Remember when the President sat for 7 silent minutes in a classroom after he heard the news of the WTC attacks? With the same craven inactivity he sat in Crawford, Texas enjoying his family Christmas while the rest of the world was jumping into action to respond to the earthquake tragedy. When he finally awoke from his indecision his talk was of LEADING the rescue and recovery action after a few hasty phone calls to India and Australia and an offer of $15 million. Not surprisingly this has been judged as yet more evidence of his isolationist and arrogant role in the world.

It would be heart-warming and endearing if, for once, the United States forgot about image and posture and simply rolled up its sleeves and buckled down to the task with everyone else, LIKE everyone else. Mercifully, the US agencies and organizations that are now on the job in south Asia are not infected with the same mentality as their President. They will be powerful and effective.

Okay - here I am

2004-09-18T23:07:00.000-07:00

WARNING: Please don't read this blog if you want to think in short sound bites; or can cope with nothing more profound than the latest network TV pop-psyche. But if in order to get you to think I have to stick a metaphorical finger up your nose until you wriggle, at least you will have paid some attention. Even if you don't agree. But do me this favor: do not so barricade yourself into the rightness of your opinions that you could never conceivably change them. Hey, I make you a promise - show me good reason to think otherwise and I will modify my opinions too.

Here I am - a Green-Carded Brit, who is glad to be living in the States because almost anything is preferable to living in Blair's Britain. The state of public affairs in Britain seems to be more petty, more sordid, more over-taxed and more washed-out with excessive, globally warmed-up rain than anything I can find in the U.S. That's probably not quite true - but it feels good to say it!

Now here we go:

The Western World is awash with it - massive, incontrovertible evidence that George Bush totally miscalculated his insane invasion of Iraq and that he now lives in a self-reinforcing world of spin, thinly covered by bluff. According to the polls nearly 50% of Americans are taken in by the argument that if WMD were not actually found, well, What the hell - Saddam was a bad guy, so it was as well to take him out anyway. The people of Iraq are now free. And they might just keep Dubya on for another four years.

This is bolstered by the empty fiction that it is disloyal for us to attack the Commander-in-Chief while his troops are in harm's way fighting under the Stars and Stripes; and even if he did get it wrong it's better to stick by the President than ditch him and install Mr. Flip-Flop Kerry. (More of him later.)

The British have some neat phrases that to dispose of this American anti-intellectualism - What a load of bollocks!! I'm not saying that all Brits would use this phrase to describe the apparent ongoing support of the status quo, but it seems that more of them have opened their eyes to Blair's folly than have Americans to Bush's gung-ho, shoot 'em up strategies.

Dubya's poodle is in deep sh*t - more than most American's know. This week The Daily Telegraph revealed that yet more secret and damning papers have been released that show how profoundly critical were many of Blair's own administration a full year before the invasion of Iraq. Here's the opening paragraph:

"Tony Blair was warned a year before invading Iraq that a stable post-war government would be impossible without keeping large numbers of troops there for 'many years', secret government papers reveal."

You may read the full text at
Electronic Telegraph

The real meaning of Fundamentalism

2004-01-06T11:45:00.000-08:00

Just a quick word on the origin of this much used, much abused and much misunderstood word "fundamentalism".

In 1909 there appeared the first of a series of 12 paperback volumes under the title The Fundamentals (I have a full set). These were mailed free of charge to "every pastor, evangelist, missionary, theological student, Sunday School Superintendent, YMCA and YWCA secretary in the English-speaking world *" Over 3 millions copies were eventually circulated.

The booklets were a protest against what was felt to be a considerable drift in protestant theology in the late 19th century caused by the growing popularity of Darwinism and High Criticism - a scholarly methodology providing new tools for the interpretation of the Bible.
The authors of the papers in The Fundamentals were some of the finest evangelical preachers and theologians of their day; men of great learning and repute.

The Fundamentals were a call back to what the publishers believed to be the core issues, the basics, the FUNDAMENTALS of the historic Christian faith. They rebutted both Higher Criticism and Darwinism and re-affirmed their belief in the full verbal inspiration of the Bible as being the infallible revealed word of God, the nature of man as a sinner, the divinity of Jesus Christ, his atoning death, the necessity of faith in Christ for salvation, and so on.

The Fundamentals proved to be a rallying point for those who were of this persuasion. And just as the early followers of John Wesley were dubbed "Methodists" by others, so the adherents of The Fundamentals became dubbed "fundamentalists". As we know, this theological position came in for some abuse during the famous Scopes Money trial when evolution/creation became the nub of the issue.

But note: These 'fundamentalists' may have become somewhat naive or simplistic as time went on, but they never became political extremists. They did not take up guns and bombs in defense of their religion. That would have been antithetical to all they believed. They were mainstream evangelical protestants. Period. To illustrate, Billy Graham is a good example of a true fundamentalist.

So you can see there could be no such thing as a 'Catholic' fundamentalist. Even less so could you have a 'Muslim' fundamentalist, let alone a 'Hindu' or 'Buddhist' fundamentalist.

Yet somehow the word 'fundamentalist' got detached from it original meaning and misapplied to people who might be better described simply as extremists or religious fanatics. Whatever is the profile of these people it does NOT jibe with the fundamental teachings of conservative evangelical Protestantism - Fundamentalism.

If there is a common thread to be found in the abuse of this word it is an undue, blinkered and lop-sided adherence to whatever the religious adherent believes are his/her infallible scriptures. That can be very satisfying to simple minds which need simple answers.