Thursday, June 30, 2005

Economics: Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, Russia, UK, USA - plus, yes, China! G8 will work on freer trade. oil price

Canada's Prime Minister, minority Lib govt leader, Paul Martin, will be present at the G8 Summit of advanced industrial nations in Scotland on July 6-8. Gleneagles, Scotland. As three Lib commentators said on a presigious news panel last nite, he will bring to the table "not much." The only thing he's distinguished himself for on the pressing economic policy issues of international implication are his definite No to Bono (who supported PM PM's re-election) and Geldof, regarding the request for Canada's commitment to the .7% of GNP revenues for international aid to impoverished nations thru-out the world. He's the only government leader to have done so, yet. Before the discussions even begin. Before the Live Aid Concert even has a chance to perform its grand lobbying effort to that end. So, that's about it re PM PM this Post Meridian.

France, famously in recent days, dissented again in its snotty way fromt the generally open reception that European govt leaders have given to US Prez Bush's address on the War on Terrorism in Iraq. On directly economic matters after the write-down la République has had to undergo on previously estimated profits in Iraq, it should be noted in reference to G8 issues that France, like several other G8s, subsidizes its own agricultural industries, thus making food cheaper and rendering poor countries which produce largely foodstuffs unable to compete on an open world market. Oil is also a continuing problem.

Germany, the other refuser of military help toward the democratic development of oil-rich Iraq. But wannabe Mr Clean, Helmut Schröder has just been wacked by the industrial proletariat in the country's manufacturing region where unemployment has reached near-catastrophic dimensions, and belt-titening is being resisted tooth-and-nail. Germany has to make some real structural readjustments, as its corporations move their manufacturing operations to Hungary, Bulgaria, and other East European states, while East Germany itself, is not having much of a redevelopment under capitalsim. Oil must be a continuing problem.

Italy has had mixed results in recent years under Berlusconi, Japan tuffed its way thru the worst of its sink and is slowly recovering toward, but very far to go, its former industrial strength, as its companies learn to create manufacturing facilities in the the countries where its autos are sold, for instance. The Ontario government just paid out $70 million to Honda to locate in our fair cawf cawf province. Canadians are buying Hondas. And will be even more so.

Russia's an add-on member of G8, for international political reasons. However, its take-over of the major oil company/ies on the basis of their previous capitalist corruption, means that the state oil biz in Russia and the rest of the Soviet empire, is a serious economic factor in world ecnomics today. Indeed, another guest to the G8 table this time around is the galloping golloximy of China - now a major consumer of Russian/formerSov oil - with many new pipelines and an armada of ocean/sea oil-bearing ships and ports in the works. China is the world's hottest economy, constantly in danger of overheating and heading the corruption-swamped system into collapse. It artificially keeps its currency, the yuan, at an artificially lower level of value (thus, subsidized by the Chinese govt), to the distress of other South East Asian countries which could compete with the monstroid were there a level playing field. China has once again to let its currency float freely on the international market, so there's a need for legislation against it, restricting trade, and opening trade to the competitors which need the business for their hardworking industrial-working populations. China is deeply subsidized by its slave labour, and its suppression of spontaneous movements to create free labour unions. Russia can be expected to back almost anything China wants, because the oil sales are important to Russia.

The UK has two main goals at the G8 Summit, July 6-8, not so much due to Tony Blair, but to his Finance man (I'll get back to you on this name) who has his eyes on the the next general election after Tony's retired (and we'll all be sad to see this stalwart man go). Anyway, whathisname wants an end to agricultural subsidies (which pressures also the US regarding its subsidy of its cotton home-growers, as this undercuts African cotton growers on the international market - but China has an interest in African cotton for its textile industries, in exchange for Chinese o-i-l, even tho China is a net importer of oil for all those new autos, trucks, buses, etc.). And the UK's treasury politico with a lust on for the Prime Ministry next round, also wants a whitewash of his liberal credentials, so is emphasizing throwing gobs and gobs and gobs of money at Africa. Which desperqtely needs it, but is in such said condition on the corruption that little of the money is likely to reach the people who could use it to create prosperity rather ruin in Africa, where drout doesn't bring everything agricultural to a halt. Africa's extractions industries are owned externally, mostly by what seem to be bandit corporations, like the former operations of Canada's Talisman in the Sudan.

The US's chief concerns may well be similar to those of PM PM (Canada's pm): no movement to the .7% GNP international standard. But I think Bush may evidence some movement in that respect. Also I think he realizes the utter unreality of maintaining especially the cotton subsidy in the face the need of other countries to get a decent return for theirs, on the global market. Other agricultural subsidies may be recalcitrant as well. Right now, on the other hand, Bush seems interested in pushing methan or ethanol or something I don't quite grasp yet, as an alternative fuel. The Prez has been consulting with these people annually. But elsewhere instead of corn as the source, I've seen straw mentioned. G8 may clarify some of these options, because they impinge on alternative sources for auto, truck, and bus energy. What you can't leave out of Bush's picture, however, is his drive to link freer trade and world prosperity to stepped-up democratization - not just in the Middle East, but in the African tyranniates and in China. - Owlb

G8 Gleneagles Official Website

Wednesday, June 29, 2005

North America: US&Canada: Canada Parliament junks marriage in favour of generic business-contract

One continent, two countries I love, and yesterday

Yesterday, the Canadian Parliament finally tottered over the brink into the mindless mediocrity of a Liberal minority government and allies (New Democratic Party casting aside democracy to force support of a bad piece of legislation; and Bloc Québecois, the separatist party normal for Canada but so rapidly casting aside the stifling heritage of its peculiar Roman Catholicism that it supported the same creepy irrationality as the Libs it hates and the Socialist totalitarians on the issue). What a legal majority in the 150s to the minority in 130s of voting Members of Parliament (MPs) decided as now the law of the land is a complete demotion of trad idea of iwoman1man marriage. Marriage is no longer recognized in Canada, not as a distinct form of intimate union, not as a unique life-journey of 1woman1man together across the differences. Neither other form of intimate union, that emerging between 2women vowed to each other, and that between 2men vowed together with the same intention of permanence and to the exclusion of all others, manages the great task of the 1woman1man journey to create daily a common journey across these differences. What Parliament did was reduce the state's recognition of intimate unions to its one slim same: two persons only. Ostensibly, I would imagine, the feature of vows as to the intention of permanence and exclusivity remain at least implicit - but the new Pitt Doctrine suggests that the Parliamentary majority and the courts regard those features as pale ghosts from the past. They are merely arguing points in the divorce proceedings when they come, in the division of property, including any children. Marriage does not exist now in Canada; a pale substitute of business contract generically applying to any two persons above a certain age is all Parliament and the courts have left to us. Also, we shouldn't lose site of the fact that 2women intimate unions are not recognized and provided for, as such. They are merely one of the optional products one may find in the can(ada). You know, like the label that says "May contain beef, pork, chicken, turkey or llama meat. May contain peanuts." The heroes of the vote are on the losers' side - some 30 Liberals voted against their party, and one Liberal cabinet minister resigned his post in order to break ranks to help bring up the number of joining the 100 Conservatives (numbers correct within a margin of error). "A damned defeat was made," if I may here quote the Bard.

Yesterday, in the USA, there was no stooping to such irrational and cruel nonsense in the name of a misbegotten abuse of the word "equality," a concept of equality that ignores the differences between the three forms of intimate union. Where in Canada, the Tories (Consersatives) did come up with a flawed alternative draft for a law, using the specious terms "same-sex," which is a generic that doesn't exist except as an abstraction to refer to very diffferent specificities in one breath. What is lost in this abstractive rhetoric is the specificty of either 2women or 2men - that is, the specificity of both - specificities not reducible to one another and which constitute two different orders of societal sphere, among the three different forms of intimate unions that do exist de facto within the societal fabric. Where the Tories in Canada did propose a law that would recognize these in a badly-worded way under "same-sex," as said, and under the obsequious and devious term "civil union," there were other possibilities that the stodgy Tories were not creative enuff to think up. Not creative enuff because the blinders of the Roman Catholic Church kept them from thinking outside the Magestrium wornout thawtforms and public strategies which left the broad Christian, Judaic and Muslim populations bereft of good secular leadership. The problem with the Tories is the problem of its Roman Catholic element which is in mental rigor mortis due to its dependent on the RC doctrine of subsidiarity instead of sphere specificity. The Protestant fundamentalist ranters were perhaps even worse in making it possible - I mean, between the brain-dead RCs and ProtFunds, the Tory party was condemned to a stale alternative that never got to the heart of the matter as far as stating in terms understandable to the whole population what is at stake in the state's recognition of marriage as the priority form, and the validity of the two other forms with other names and conceivably other provisions. There was reason to have said there was no such thing "civil union," but now there is good reason to say there is, since after yesterday that's all there is: the state's recognition of a generic business-contract arrangement, without acknowledgement of something preceding its action, a something made by the couple (in one form or another of the three forms of intimate unions). This distinction regarding the uniqueness of marriage has now been obsolesced and we live in NewSpeakland, where words themselves are products of ideologies and not of deference to pre-existent structural norms for different kinds of societal entities made, in the case of intimate unions, by the specific couple themselves together. In the USA, this reality in regard to marriage has not yet been destroyed in the mental microwave oven that some are trying to get into radiation mode. But, in the USA, the opposite malady persists, where the dividers are trying to piggyback their cruel desire to fry homos in a good old-fashioned oven of hatred where no state of the union can recognize either of the additional two forms of intimate unions that do exist and will exist de facto no matter how blind the law pretends to be, as in Canada. There's a huge union of organized yahoos now at work to capture Bush's support for a plain and simple and veritable support for the trad legal definition of marriage to be enshrined in an amendment to the US Federal Constitution, while allowing the states to decide each in turn what is in its interests and those of its citizens in regard to legal recognition of the two additional forms of intimate unions - none of which, when authentic, is a business contract first and foremost.

Yesterday, the President of the USA, stood firm for the spread of democracy against the tyrants and terrorists. I saw a brilliant TV news show this evening on TVO (TV Ontario) where three panelists said Bush's stand was basically correct (while they thawt his argumentation was flawed), but they gave statistics Bush didn't cite regarding how things in many respects have improved in Iraq. Were Bush was praised for acknowledging there can't be much of a deadline set to pull US forces out of Iraq and our time horizon is better thawt in a 10-year framework. That candour and realism from critics of Bush, is much appreciated. Of course, Canada will be no real help with those realities, as the Liberal government and the people of Canada generally have no problem saying Let the Americans do it. Let the Americans defend us. And: Damn the Americans! It's a disease up here, an disease of epidemic proportions.

I love my two countries, but I saw more of the undesirability of Canadian knuckle-brained politics yesterday than I care to contemplate.

Canada terminates the distinctiveness of marriage for a generic business deal

Sunday, June 26, 2005

Labour Unions: Gay Marriage: Alliance opposes AFL-CIO use of workers dues re "Gmarriage," while itself deceiving workers


Open Letter

to Kendall Boutwell,

Union Workers against Gay Marriage


Mr Kendall Boutwell,
Union Workers against Gay Marriage

I agree with your point about unions. I support the Christian Labour Association of Canada (CLAC) and the smaller Christian
Labour Association in the USA (CLA-USA), despite the load of homophobia they presumably carry and which I have personally experienced several decades back. The situation may have changed; I don't know; but I critically support both CLAC and CLA-USA because, aside from the concern I just registered, they are much more founded on good principles and welcome people of all faiths to unionization based on those principles derived from the Gospel. Yet, I'm still trying to get justice from CLAC on the matter of concern. While I disagree with that homophobic past practice (which had a disastrous effect on my family, including a suicide) by any union, it must also be said in all fairness that CLAC does not use any member's dues for political purposes, either for or against one side or another in the issues you put in the forefront - or others. All unions have to shoulder a strong claim against them in regard to day-to-day homophobia that affects the earning of wages and every outcome of the lack of an equal playing-field for particapation in society, union, and performance of work. That's something other than a union using workers' dues to pay for a campaign against the Federal Marriage Amendent to the US Constitution. Yet you manipulatively make no such distinction.

I definitely agree that the AFL-CIO and its President John Sweeney are being outragously manipulative in using union funds for these partisan purposes. I'd like to add my name to your petition.

But, you and your bosom-buddies in the alliance against Sweeney's AFL-CIO are being equally dishonest and manipulative.

I strongly disagree with the bigotry of your petition. You pretend that you're supporting the Federal Marriage Amendment, but you abuse those of us who would dearly like to join in the petition who cannot support the hate-motivated clauses you piggyback on that one central point, that one valid central point.

In Canada, the Conservative Party on the Federal level has offered alternative legislation to the Government's attempt to demote marriage to some generic designator only. But the Conservatives have been far too late in coming somewhat to their senses in the battle and are up against far too devious an alliance of political opponents, to the net effect that the CPC's improvement on the government's proposed legistlation to demote the traditional legal definition of marriage, seems at the moment a lost cause. The Tory alternative legislation is very unlikely to win the day. It makes provision for legal recognition of "same-sex" "civil unions" - two dubious terms that should not be enshrined in law, especially in law recognizing other kinds of intimate unions than that of marriage. In fact, there is no generic same-sex intimate union; there are Lesbian intimate unions and there are male homo intimate unions, and if the state finds it has an interest in recognizing either or both, it should do so with integrity in recognizing the difference between the three kinds of intimate unions now under consideration - 1woman1man, Lesbian 2women, and male homo 2men. It's very important to keep the element of vows made by any such couple, vows that stipulate the intention of permanence, and to the exclusion of all others. The one-to-one provision should be emphasized regarding all three - that's the chief factor of sameness. But the differences otherwise should more largely determine what the state evaluates as its own interest in regard to these two additional claims to recognition - recognition of what alredy exists in society and is part of the American and Canadian societal fabric.

You're site's rhetoric is reprehensible because it is not based on clarity of petition, is not pinpointed to supporting the Federal Marriage Amendment and intentionally exludes those who cannot support your dishonest piggybacking of additional points, as these raise a question regarding the authenticity of your motives, has presumptuous hate-motivated small-print subtextual clauses - to the net effect that you are manipulative and untrustworthy. I do not trust that the peition is really in support of traditional marriage and allowing other people with other choices to find a distinct separate recognition, should the individual states find it in their interest to do so. Of course, to do so to whatever extent (variously state by state, and under some other more appropriate names than marriage - which should not be redefined and which should remain relatively privileged in the interests of the state), with perhaps limited, if any, further provisions beyond sheer recognition as to their existence and the mere right of these kinds of intimate relations to exist without suppression or persecution in the workplace, and without the political order going into a condition of denial about the sorts and conditions of humanity's different kinds of intimate unions that exist within the various state jurisdications. Your stance is a sin against neighbour and even more important against God, a manipulative use of the political process of petition, and a morally bankrupt move for precisely that reason.

You should also clean up your act in regard to your rhetoric. If you mean "Gay activist" or "GBLT activist" you properly reference an ideology that binds certain activists, and not what is referenced by the word "homosexual" (I never use the term, but only "homo"). A "homosexual activist" could easily mean an activist supporting the police or a change of rules in a baseball league - any activist who is active about anything and is also a homo. I think your very verbiage is a function of your dishonest motive; it is a kind of Newspeak that does not add clarity, There is no homosexual agenda; but there is a Gay agenda, and I oppose it. What's more you don't have to be homo to be a "Gay activist" - and you and your bosom-buddies don't know the actual sexuality of many of the people you try to gather in your net of false words. You should go after the ideology/agenda and not the sexuality of those you oppose. I'm homo; and I'm a vowed celibate with formally solemnized recognition. I stick to my vows and my neo-monastic hermit cell. Where do I fit in your classificatory system? (a rhetorical question only).

In conclusion, you are undermining the wisdom of President George Bush when he tells us that people should not be fired nor their intimate relations used against them. Rules of decorum in the workplace should suffice. And, again following the President's lead, the states should decide what is in any given state's interest in recognizing or otherwise enacting provisions, separately I would hope for all the three kinds of intimate unions, to allow peaceable and just existence for all inhabitants.

Yours, Albert Gedraitis
American living in Canada
Former researcher, Christian Labour Association of Canada
Former shop steward, Service Employees International Union (a truly corrupt union in my day here)

Union Workers against Gay Marriage
Christian Labour Association of Canada
Christian Labor Association (USA)

Saturday, June 25, 2005

Marriage: Polygamy ACLU, while removing Christianity from public square, pushing "Gay marriage," now pushes for polygamy too

In the USA, the same old outfit that brawt us so many reductions in liberties, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), is at it again. These are the guys who try to stop every Christmas manifestation in public spaces, no matter what the composition of the community is in religious preference or the personal self-identifications of its citizens. Any howler or gaggle can stop the installation of a Nativity creche, any public Cross can be brawt, any plague honouring the foundation of American legal roots in the Ten Commandments from the Hebew Bible, any public prayer at a town council can be challenged in court because of the "sensitivities" of some minority no matter how small, according to the practice of ACLU. It has an anti-Christian agenda, but it doesn't target public expression of minority religions with the same zeal and aplomb.

After many battles to redefine the meaning at law of marriage (1woman1man, promised intention of permanence, promised exclusivity to only the one partner), common law and codified law alike in our jurisprudential tradition, now ACLU has joined to its constant attacks upon marriage, its new program in support of polygamy. The president of ACLU, Nadine Strossen claimed polygamy is a "fundamental right." Stop. Note that Strossen is not claiming polygamy is a constitutional right; rather, the alien concept of a right more fundamental than one established in the Bill of Rights in the US Constitution is being appealed - and it is not "natural law" (a concept of certain branches of Catholic philosophy, now adopted by some Protestants). Nor is it an appeal from what's codified to some earlier acknowledged legal source of the Western and Hebrew traditions - namely, Scripture. Nor is it an appeal to the customary law rooted in the tribal practices of Brits before Christianity, or Native American tribes before the British Common Law came to this continent with white settlers. Rather, these "fundamental rights" are rooted elsewhere that rarely explains itself; it is a rhetorical appeal, not an explanation we get for the claims of these revisionists of very meaning of the foundations of Western legal conceptualization.

The Yale Daily News, student run newspaper at Yale University, reported Strossen's remarks, which WorldNetDaily passes on:

The ACLU chief said her organization defends "the freedom of choice for mature, consenting individuals," making it "the guardian of liberty ... defend[ing] the fundamental rights of all people."

Some opponents of same-sex marriage -- including, notably, Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa. -- have argued that its acceptance will create a slipperly slope, leading to the sanctioning of other types of relationships, including polygamy.


Santorum was correct about the American situation. And also in Canada, where the courts have taken away the power of the electorate to determine such matters, falsely reading into the Charter of Rights when the separation of the Canadian legal system from the British occurred (altho in English-speaking Canada, the common law tradition still has some force), falsely reading into the Charter the right to "Gay marriage" on the basis of a specious and false doctrine of equality, the polygamists have now come forward to claim their "fundamental rights" ACLU-style as well. And the Canadian polygamists will probably be supported by all the "Gay marriage" forces as well. And the Canadian courts as well, which are steeped in ACLU-type jurisprudence doctrine. Obviously as well, all is not well.

No one should be deceived by the little charade going on in regard to the the Supreme Court of Canada. Paul Martin promised to have an open process of appointing Supreme Court judges (the process could hardly be conducted by the Canadian Senate, as in the US, because the entirety of the Canadian Senate is appointed by the Prime Minister); but the deceit of Martin and his Minister of Injustice, Irwin Cottler, quickly became obvious when they appointed two new judges and had a mockery of plubic involvement that involved a presentation, rather than a hearing where the appointments were scrutinized with questions by someone other than the governments' own minions. So, to the Court, Martin/Cottler elevated judges already known for their alignment with the demotion of the traditional legal definition of marriage. Then they petitioned the court they had just stacked, for a ruling on whether Federal approval of "Gay marriage" was okay (since the Supreme Courts of several provinces and territories had already ruled in favour in their jurisdictions with no provincial parliamentary votes). The Canadian Supreme Court, canny old wags that they be, shocked Martin by saying Parliament had to decide the matter for itself. Only afterward, could a wrong decision by Parliament be contested before the illustrious Supremes, and thus only afterward could the Supreme Court take on the issue to over-rule parliament, and only then could it fill in the dots and fulfill the task for which it was stacked in the first place.

Hey, everybody, polygamy is on its way to legitimation in Canada. But maybe not in the USA.

In the US, ACLU will get the run of its polygamous life. A whole new constellation of organizations voicing the legal concerns of the disenfranchised in the country, have arisen, mostly from within the Christian communities. Perhaps now the foremost of these organizations, fiting to maintain a balance against the encroachments of judicial activism and ACLU's brand of fundamentalism that favours the exploitation of women and children thru polygamy, is the ADF, the Alliance Defense Fund. Canada seems to have no lawyer group commensurate to ADF.

Alliance Defense Fund - some cases won as reported by National Public Radio

Friday, June 24, 2005

China: Economic relations with US D.J. McGuire takes on National Review's economist Lawrence Kudlow on Communist China


National Review

wrong on China/USA economics



by D. J. McGuire



Normally, I would spare Lawrence Kudlow’s defense of Communist China’s deliberately devalued currency (and his opposition to a currency-corrective tariff) my vitriol until the next News of the Day [a regular feature on McQuire's free email newsletter, China e-Lobby< - Owlb]. However, since the next NOTD is likely coming on Monday – and the weekend will almost certainly provide some news that will overshadow this – I feel compelled to give his atrocious column in National Review Online the rhetorical double-barrel today. Additionally, there are plenty of economists all across the political spectrum that agree with Kudlow on this issue, so I thought it would be helpful to debunk his column, piece by piece.

Although my opinions on purely domestic issues normally have no relevance here, I should note that I usually agree with Kudlow; in part, that’s what makes his column so utterly maddening [today]. Kudlow makes the mistake nearly every economist makes regarding trade with Communist China: he assumes it can be treated just like any other nation. In fact, we can’t – and we mustn’t – treat the regime so.

The first manifestation of Kudlow’s folly – well, one that isn’t a flowery rhetorical device – comes in his third paragraph:

China’s economy continues to climb near a 10 percent rate, with the heretofore impoverished Chinese population slowly but surely entering the modern realm of rising global prosperity.


Putting aside the highly questionable validity of Communist statistics in general, how can Kudlow possibly believe the growth he touts will reach the Chinese people? Given the heavy reliance on prison labor, the lack of independent unions, and the corruption that is shot through the Chinese Communist Party, Kudlow should be a lot more cautious before writing blasé assertions that the Chinese people are “slowly but surely entering the modern realm of rising global prosperity.”

Kudlow then puts up what in this corner (though admittedly, not in others) is a straw man: the belief “that a higher yuan would narrow the trade deficit.” Kudlow then cites Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan’s insistence of “no credible evidence that supports such a conclusion.” I know there are many folks in support of the tariff who would disagree, but Kudlow’s point is valid. Unfortunately, he misses the larger issue. Communist China’s currency peg has not only hurt American firms, but several Asian nations as well, particularly Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Imports from any and all of these nations would be far preferable to imports from Communist China from a national security perspective – but Kudlow’s vision is stunningly deficient on national security, as I point out further down in this vent.

Things quickly get worse:

But the common link between the two (currencies) has given the yuan global financial confidence while at the same time giving the U.S. enormous leverage over the Chinese economy. What’s wrong with that? We buy their goods and they invest in our country through the purchase of Treasury bonds and more recently through direct investment in large U.S-based corporations (like Maytag and Unocal).


Last I checked, there was something very wrong with having the Communist-owned China National Offshore Oil Corporation acquire a major American oil firm. How Kudlow cannot see the danger of Communist China having direct control of a major player in American energy baffles – until you see the next paragraph:

Unlike the sale of defense-related technologies there’s no national security problem here. American firms like Anheuser-Busch, the Bank of America, and numerous tech firms are all investing in China. This is free and open trade for the mutual benefit of both nations. Trade and monetary cooperation also provide the basis for national security cooperation, especially in the areas of stopping nuclear proliferation in North Korea and protecting a free Taiwan. (emphasis added)


This is where Kudlow reveals himself to be a complete babe in the woods on national security. How can he possibly believe Communist China would do anything cooperative on “protecting a free Taiwan”? Communist China’s primary short-term foreign policy objective is the conquest of the island democracy. We already know they’re preparing for an invasion by – at the latest – 2012. As for “stopping nuclear proliferation in North Korea,” did Kudlow not notice the fact that Communist China sold its satellite state twenty tons of tributyl phosphate, a chemical that helps weaponize uranium and plutonium? Or should I simply revert to the question I have asked every time a leading official or pundit grasps the Pollyannaish notion that Communist China will help us disarm its own ally and puppet state? Namely, will they never learn?

Kudlow’s stunning naivete comes from a simple, and wrong, assumption: Communist China is not an enemy of the United States. No wonder Kudlow thinks “numerous tech firms . . . investing in China” is “for the mutual benefit of both nations.” Perhaps if he was aware how Communist China has helped al Qaeda launder money, aided Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons, and sold Saddam Hussein weapons components for oil-for-food vouchers, he might be a little less sanguine about this.

Kudlow then falls into the usual traps: “China is not perfect, though it has reduced government ownership of the economy from 90 percent twenty years ago to about 30 percent today.” Sure, that sounds nice, until we remember that the private “owners” are Communist officials themselves, their relatives, or their lackeys. Here’s another one: “according to a recent study by the Council on Foreign Relations, China has also changed 2,600 legal statutes to comply with World Trade Organization rules.” Kudlow may not realize this, but Communist China has passed a whole slew of laws that are essentially meaningless and cosmetic. The more important issue is the rule of law, i.e., if and how those laws are followed, on which Communist China’s record is disastrous.

Kudlow finishes with trite rhetoric that must be challenged: “Open trade and currency stability enormously benefit both the U.S. and China and may well lead to improved international relations.” Is that so? Then why didn’t we try that with the Soviet Union? Wait a minute, we did try that in the 1970s as part of “détente.” The result was the rise of Communist regimes in Angola, Nicaragua, Laos, Cambodia, and Afghanistan – the last of these came before the Soviet invasion of 1979, which was done to stop the home-grown Afghan Communists from pulling a Central Asian Tito and reaching out to the West.

As I said at the beginning, I actually think Kudlow is a good economist, but this entire column suffers from one fatal flaw – a complete lack of understanding of the Chinese Communist Party, its plans for the world, and its animus toward the United States. The CCP is not a reforming regime modernizing its country; it is a tyrannical, criminal enterprise that considers us the enemy. The sooner Lawrence Kudlow understands this, the less frequently he’ll be writing columns that force me to rip him so.

Kowtow to China, Fed Reserve's Greenspan craves

Sri Lanka: Tsunami Recovery A friend reports on his inter-faith project in Batticaloa

Butterfly Peace Garden of Batticaloa - Tsunami Report No. 8

The Garden Path Sadhana
Monkey Arrives

We have long dreamed about creating a Batticaloa-based centre of education and active research in response to the many requests that come to us from people in Sri Lanka and abroad. This will be a place where we can unpack and elucidate the process and poiesis of the Garden Path for everyday understanding and application. In some measure it will answer the long-standing riddle of Butterfly Garden replicability. As of the beginning of this month we took possession of an old Batti house at number 37 Pioneer Road. With imagination, commitment, hard work and grace this house may become the centre about which we have been dreaming: The Monkey’s Tale Centre for Contemplative Art and Narration.

We like the name of the street where the Monkey’s Tale begins to unwind because we feel we are pioneering something by bringing art into the nation’s peace and reconciliation process as a sustained practice, not a one-off monument, painting, sculpture or gallery exhibition. We have been engaged in contemplative art and play as a healing strategy for ten years at the Butterfly Garden. Now we juggle the terms of reference a little so that more adults and youth can join in. Basically we will be doing much the same as we have been doing in the Garden all these years, but on another level. This is what makes it new and why we can justify calling ourselves pioneers – though that may just be a conceit, the convenient excuse we have at hand when things run amuck, as almost inevitably, they will.

The cards are always stacked against us here. You have to carry yourself “like an egg”, that is, carefully. You are an egg filled with light and love. At any moment you may crack open and be born into the world, a solar hero; at any moment you may crack and die, the reviled spawn of some enemy ‘other’, solar slime.

The axis mundi of the Butterfly Peace Garden is a venerable old mango tree. A bucket sways awkwardly in its branches. The bucket has several holes in it, holes plastered over with duct tape and goop. It hangs there to remind us that that Garden is like a bucket with holes: the holes of indifference, neglect, dishonesty, selfishness, lack of energy, commitment, imagination, humor. We have to work very hard simply to be able to offer the children the best of our dubious selves. This is how I thought when I first started working at the Garden. Later I came to believe that it is impossible to successfully fill all the bucket’s holes due to structural poverty, violence, social alienation and the general brutality of life in a war zone like Batticaloa. No sooner had you plugged one hole but another appeared. Since the tsunami I see that this entire metaphor needs revision, or perhaps, replacement.

Batticaloa these days, and the Garden itself, is not a bucket with holes in it. It is a hole, a black hole, with pin-prick buckets of light pouring their contents into the void. These are the people who keep it from completely imploding. Among them are the stars whose energy and light guide the Garden and its children on their perilous journey. This journey which they have chosen to make is a “sadhana”, a practice which allows them to constantly renew themselves so that the children may realize they truly have a home here - the home they find in their own breath, being and creative imagination. That may be the only home they have. They will have to endure many hardships during the full span of their years but they will always remember how to come home to themselves.

In the meantime, the numbers seem to be running in our favor. There is a strong tendency in Battticaloa toward numerological propriety and the address of Monkey’s Tale Centre is as proper as it gets: No.37 Pioneer Road. 3 + 7 = 10. 1+ 0 =1. We are infants again at the Monkey Tale, babies, toddlers just learning to walk; little voices heretofore unheard in the crass cacaphony of brass bands, bullets, bullies, and blood feuds. Here we stand, wobbly and unsure, about to utter our first word. The symbology of these numbers is easy enough to comprehend but the way forward remains dark and fearful. How can we say anything intelligible, let alone intelligent? We are called upon to listen deeply and attend mindfully at this moment of opening and utterance.

Monkey Unpacks

We have started to paint, decorate and renovate the Monkey’s Tale centre according to our dreams and inspirations. The frescoes which adorn the parapet wall facing the Superintendent of Police Office and the Divisional Forestry Department, contain the splintered ends of astral entities encountered during our Kovil Kulupam Neram workshop last month in the Garden. Through a process of splitting and stretching the criss-cross geometries of stars created by the animators in the final meeting of this workshop, Kularaj, our artistic mentor, devised rectangular signboard icons in bold green, gold, terracotta, pink and grey hues. When you see them inscribed on the walls at Monkey’s Tale you may think of Mahdya Pradeshi, Kwa Ndebele or Arabian graphics from the Rijal Alma or Asir region of that peninsula. The signage is bold and distinctive, but not of this world - nothing in these parts prepares you for it. The fact is, however, that these diamonds were found in the dust of the Butterfly Garden. They are as indigenous to Mattakalappu, indeed to the Garden, as the children’s smiles.

Programs at The Monkey’s Tale Centre are scheduled to begin by mid-August 2005. Initially we envisage working with a group of 10-20 youth comprised of alumni of our YEP programs and youth from local tsunami resettlement camps. The program goal is to encourage creative capacity and imagination in these youth, stimulating them to think in terms of a vision which will inspire their involvement in the arts, community development, peace and environmental action for the rest of their lives.

We also hope to provide programs in creative animation for people already working in the psycho-social arena who are currently pre-occupied with the needs of resettlement camps in and around Batticaloa and with new communities such as those being developed at Katharavelai in Vacharai, Pasakuddah / Kalkudah and the Thiraimahdu (Lighthouse) area of Batticaloa where transitional communities are currently being built for survivors of the tsunami by various local and international NGOs.

There are plans afloat for the Butterfly Garden, through funds donated by War Child Canada, to build study halls and provide desks and tutorship for children in the town-based tsunami resettlement camps at the Paddy Marketing Board and Sinhala Mahavidayalayam where, due to cramped conditions, noise, and the general prevailing chaos, conditions are unfavorable for home study. This project would be monitored through Monkeys’ Tale with the study shed sometimes doubling as a space for Butterflly Garden clown theatre (Komali Kuthu) and community entertainment.

The core curriculum of the Monkey’s Tale has five integrated components which we call the Five Motivating Measures to Restore Creative Imagination, Health and Well-being. Where there is systemic poverty, political paralysis, and serial traumatization, as there is everywhere in Batticaloa and throughout Sri Lanka, it is difficult to know where and how to begin living a ‘normal’ life again. The anarchy of the situation militates against simple self-motivation, with people abandoning hope for the return of even a modicum of civil sanity. Their lives, for all intents and purposes, are completely out of their control.

Garden Path centers such as Monkey’s Tale open a neutral space and offer a catalytic process for healing and renewal with like-minded people from all constituencies. The focus of these centers is ultimately the innocent children of the community but their immediate objective is to educate youth in the use of techniques honed over years of animator training in the Butterfly Peace Garden of Batticaloa. Youth trained at the Monkey’s Tale later will be supported in taking the practice of poiesis as they come to know and understand it to their own villages, resettlement camps and transitional community sites.

Monkey Meditates

Five Motivating Measures to Restore Creative Imagination, Health and Well-being

Meditation – encourages the motivation to connect with sacred reality within. The Garden Path teaches a form of centering meditation which is ecumenical and respectful of all faith traditions. We emphasize the cultivation of relationship on four levels: relationship to one-self which is self-affirming; relationship to one’s neighbour which is mutually empowering; relationship to the planet which emphasizes our interconnectedness to all elements in the biosphere; relationship to the sacred (God, the Great Mystery, the Divine) in complete surrender. It is an important feature of the Garden Path vision however that, as an intermediating secular structure, it secures and empties a space where people from all faith traditions (or none whatsoever) can meet to cultivate relationships which foster the possibility of individual and collective growth and healing.
Mystery Painting – encourages the motivation to see ourselves more clearly in relationship to both inner and outer processes and to stretch our imaginations through practices that draw on both image cultivation and image relinquishment, allowing creation and its discourse to unfold in a completely natural way.
Mythography – encourages the motivation to create, remember and tell stories, to narrate the sadhana - the journey - we are undertaking as we re-connect, re-member and re-story our lives. Narrative connections move us from the purely personal to the shared space of community.
MettaMapping – encourages the motivation to connect as a community with the sacred in all beings, at all times, by means of a process of exploration of the universal unconscious using images collected from various cultures around the world, in many different times and places. The process moves through four stages ultimately to arrive at a completely original action plan for renewing and regenerating hope in the defeated imagination of any given community. The four stages of MettaMapping include (i) research into the proposed journey to be made; (ii) mapping of the journey; (iii) finding the right path, and (iv) making the journey. Since MettaMapping is site-specific, it motivates a community to find symbols, images and protocols which specifically address the collective malaise and through compassionate and creative intervention, initiate a healing process.
Marketing – encourages the motivation to share the fruits of discovery by bringing the harvest to market, setting up a stall and offering the goods to others. There is no use in hording the treasures discovered on this healing journey. Nor is there any use in trying to cash in on them, for the souvenirs of this journey are simply too silly and too sacred to sell. Who would want to buy them? That’s Monkey’s business and he’s busy drawing up a wish list and making a business plan. At Monkeys’ Tale we will make medicine bundles inside of which are wrapped healing toys for the gods. Then we will give them away to the children. Monkey considers this a suitable strategy for straddling heaven and earth and not falling headlong into the abyss of global consumerism.

Monkey Dreams On

If you catch hold of Monkey’s tale he might squeal in protest and offer serious physical opposition to being pinned down. So let’s not pin him down. Let’s indulge him and learn to dream. Monkey seldom uses words, though, images, dreams and visions continuously flood through his imagination. That is why he is sometimes celebrated as the Monkey God, Hanuman, an archetypal symbol of the restlessness of creative genius, the trickster. We will simply have to learn to dream along with Monkey and see what happens.

The dreams Monkey has are as lucid and clear as the mirror-like surface of a Himalayan lake. If he looks at the lake he sees the sky. If he looks at the sky he sees the lake. Little people in stone canoes glide across its icy azure depths. They come from the great granite shield north of Lake Superior in Canada but they are here in Sri Lanka now. There are here in Monkey’s mirror. Other canoe people went under with the tsunami, those who lived in Navaladi, Mutur, Kalmunai, Kirinda, Galle. They have joined the stone canoe people and are now communicate in dreams.

The stone boat people are accomplished dreamers but, unlike Monkey, they are intensely shy. You must never look upon them directly or, if you do, you must pretend you have not noticed their presence. They will of course know that they have been touched, for human gaze is utterly excoriating – always wanting, always needing, always seeking containment, closure, control. Monkey is completely one with the stone boat people. They share a common dream: the dream of dreaming and of teaching people to dream, so that their hearts may open and life may flourish.

For Monkey dreaming is not a matter of falling asleep and watching inscrutable movies in the cipher cineplex our supine corpse. Rather, it is something you simultaneously do and have done to you. It is impossible to know where the dreaming begins or ends. Like breathing. Like making love. When Martin Luther King Jr. said, “I have a dream” - his of justice and freedom for all men - he was dreaming the way Monkey dreams.

There is a way of learning Monkey dream poiesis which depends strictly depends on creative imagination. It is essential to practice and cultivate the arts and, in the beginning it helps to learn and, and to begin seriously to practice Five Motivating Measures to Restore Creative Imagination, Health and Well-being. This is where the Monkey’s Tale begins.

Often, in precious idle moments, Monkey sees a big bunch of bananas dangling from the moon. He likes to reach out and pluck them one by one. He peels them carefully. His breathing slows, his eyes roll around in their sockets, he shudders, he bites, he chews, he savors each morsel and swallows. With one bite he built the Great Wall of China. With another he threw up the Pyramids in Egypt. Another bite brought on Michelangelo and the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel. Then there was Aku Aku, the aeroplane, Bollywood and the Internet. Some say he’s losing his touch.

Oh Monkey, Monkey, never mind all those bananas! You must get busy now and make our dreams come true. That big bunch of bananas hanging from the moon is only your wish list. There is so much work to be done.

There are big wishes and little wishes and some that should ideally happen before others. Monkey knows the steps to making any wish come true. First you have to hold a clear picture of what it is you wish to accomplish firmly in mind. But that picture is only a seed image. An image is a static category like a photo or a painting. You need to animate it with breath and concentration, and you must practice this round the clock until you don’t know whether you going forwards, going backwards or standing still. At this point you transcend yourself and all your suffering and doubt. You have become a dreamer. With dreaming the images develop a life of there own; they begin to resonate and move with primordial energy. Finally with vision - which you in no way possess but which thoroughly possesses you - these seed images come fully to life. Some call this “make believe”. When Monkey goes bananas he makes himself believe. Once he believes the deed is already done. What he dreams comes true. This, of course is a double edged talent. Sometimes Monkey gets it all wrong.

The Monkey’s Tale Centre for Contemplative Art and Narration, given plenty of time, loving care, imagination and competent organzational management will become an urban ashram known locally and internationally for its practice of healing broken dreams (and dreamers) and restoring creative imagination to children and young people suffering from the brutality of war and the sterile monoculture of consumer salvation now being served up by the neo-liberal global fundamentalists who control the planet as the answer to all the world’s ills. Monkey’s not so sure. Monkey dreams on.

Paul Hogan
Batticaloa Sri Lanka
Poson Poya 21/06/05







Link

Wednesday, June 22, 2005

Mexico/US: Border war coming? Mex Spec Forces renegades carve out own principality at border, drugs cartel

The US may soon be forced into a border war with Mexico where a drug-cartel Army has taken control of the Mexican sister city of Loredo, Texas. Nuevo Loredo is the headquarters of a renegade army drawn from Mexican Special Forces. They're called the Zetas. They've modelled themselves after the terrorist Zapatistas in Mexico's south who have for a time set up socialist communes to make demands on the Mex Fed govt. What's little reported about the Zapatista is how they have exacerbated religious differences in the small towns, because the growing numbers of Evangelicals who introduce a new work ethic and entrepreneurial spirit in the towns are hated by the local dependency-culture which shuns the Evangelicals at the instigation of anti-ecumenical Catholic activists, apparently with the complicity of local priests. The intertwinement of these forces in a common anti-Evangelcal alliance is little reported by the mainsteam press in North America. But the gains of the Zapatistas have had a great impact and provided a precedent for the Zeta drug-backed principality in the Free Trade Zone on the Mexican side.

The Zetas rule with fear, threatening police and city officials and extorting money from businesses, including restaurants, car dealerships and junkyards.

"They came and intimidated anyone who had influence or power in this city," said a businessman who asked not to be named for fear of reprisals. "They made it clear they owned the city."

They sometimes set up roadblocks to stop motorists when they suspected rivals were in the area, the businessman said.

Nuevo Laredo is the busiest trade area along the U.S.-Mexico border, with an average of 6,000 cargo trucks crossing daily into Texas carrying 40 percent of Mexico's exports.


This is what an unsigned report in CNN online tells us. It barely mentions how the Zetas have taken control of the steady flow of illegals across the same border all up and down the Rio Grande, the shallow river that serves as a natural but ineffective boundary. The Zetas control the smugglers, determining who can make what crossings with what number of souls. To maintain a human-smuggling business, or to start up a new one, the entrepreneur must petition the Zetas and pay a fee.

But the problem is not only one entity in one area, however hydra-headed in its facets as cartel, Zetas, and human-smugglers.

"In actuality, law enforcement in Mexico is all too often part of the problem rather than part of the solution," Anthony Placido, head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's intelligence unit, told a congressional committee last week.


Citizens of the border states of Arizon, New Mexico, and Texas, as well as Southern California are getting quite critical of the United States Federal government. The impact of the stream of illegals is extremely costly on local economies thru-out the region. Groups, call them self-defense border patrols or vigilantes or patriotic Minutemen, have attempted to grab illegals and their importers, detain them and turn them over to the Immigration Officials who don't want to be bothered, or haven't the money to do so. The President's plan for a re-structuring of the presence of illegals in the country has suffered because of the increase of illegals backed by the new private army that Mexico has neither the wit nor the will to stop cold in its tracks. This situation grows more grievous week by week except where the unofficial border patrols are active. Calls are now arising in Congress to send regular US army troops to defend the border against the Mexican Zetas and the torpor of Mexico's government - which cannot govern this sector of its own territory.

Anti-Illegal view. Plus: Link

Pollution: Ontario Pollution hypocrisy of Dalton McGuinty as bad as his furtherance of school inquality

Sorry, folks, but this time out my source of information and irritation is limited to an article in the French intellectual newspaper LeDevoir out of Montréal. I'll look for English-lang updates later.

My thorn for scorn is the report that Dalton McGuinty is supporting American states in suing the USA Federal government "in their judical combat against Washington and the main businesses that contribute to the smog shroud in the Northeast region" of the USA (which includes Ontario geographically). But as a PhD biologist reminds me, Toronto's smog, a daily assault on my lungs and his, is not due in the greatest part to climate change (science does not have evidence that humans are the main cause of climate change; look to the sun, O ideologue). Climate change and pollution are not identitical terms, by any means. I mean by pollution and by smog enshrouding Toronto the mainly auto, truck, bus, and plane exhaust that McGuinty simply will not address. He could cut Toronto's smog at least 70%, by outlawing obsolescently-fuelled vehicles in the metropolis. He could fire up the Ontario auto industry with multiplied thousands of new jobs were he to do the right thing and require systematic rapid change-over of vehichles otherwise fuelled, to non-pollutant motors, engines, and exhaust. This is his incredible hypocrisy - suing the US government over a small percentage of the pollutants that drift in from abroad, while at the same time having nothing programmatic to change over to life-saving alternatively-fuelled vehicles here in Ontario's great metropolis. Keep the polluting vehicles out of Metro! We have to live in auto/truck excrement, because he can't give leadership that is true to principle. We have to pay more and more for hospitalization of all whose lungs give out on them or freeze up, because he can't get his priorities strait.

This is a way of life with Dalton. He benefitted from a state-supported Catholic school-system education, one that since his day had been brawt to the level of equality, not by the Liberals who used to command "the Catholic vote," but by the daring changes of a previous non-Catholic non-Liberal Premier of the Province. McGuinty's kids and presumably those of his entire clan have benefitted from not just support but equalization of state-funding for the school system of their religious choice. But other people in the province get no such choice. Before the Guint came to power, the UN's Human Rights Commission sent a panel to the province upon the complaint of citizens belonging to other than the two established religions here - the secular Humanist school system, and the Roman Catholic school system. Other religions are discriminated against on a matter that becomes daily more urgent, and has been more urgent every day during the last three decades. I will only speak of Protestant Christians who feel their quality of life and spiritual existence is drastically diminished by not having recourse for their children to schools functioning according to a vision of life, values, and preparation for a vocation where those kids can grow up under a Protestant Christian educational option to serve God, nieghbours, and creation in a society where their kind of Christianity has free course in the public square just as much as the atheism that would sew their mouths shut unless they follow only secularist patterns of speech.

As said, a complaint was made to the UN Human Rights Commission, which has become in the meantime a sharp caricature of itself. Still, the ruling of some years back has not been rescinded, its arguments are solid, and religious discrimination is a structure of Ontario education as the UN panel decided and reported. Louise Arbour, a franco-Ontarienne borne in Montréal, once Justice of the Supreme Court of Ontario, once Chief Prosecutor for War Crimes in Rwanda, once Justice of Canada's Supreme Court, now UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, she knows all about this injustice to Protestant Christians, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, and many other communities who want, need, and are competent to operate schools of good will to all Canadian society, where their differing worldview (neither Catholic nor atheist Humanist), set the tone and guide the curriculum insofar as it varies from the provinicial. This Mdme. Arbour recently visited Catholic schools in Ontario, some of which are legally-provided as French-speaking. She had no difficulty in visiting these schools of religious discrimination without making public comment on their unfair privileged status, along with the atheist Humanist main system. I wonder if the Guint and Madame talked about the glaring injustice in Ontario education whereby the state here practices structural religious discrimination, as pinpointed sometime back, by the very UN Human Rights Commission she now heads? I'll bet not.

Where the Tories attempted to move in the direction of realizing educational equality for all qualified school systems of any religious commitment in harmony with peace and good order, McGuinty and the Liberal Party of Ontario to get elected, entered into an anti-democratic pact with the absolutist Teachers' Union to deny all sorts of other schools basic justice thru equal support. McGuintism led to the cancelling of the Tory law, which was about to come into effect at the time the McGuintLibs took over the province. The one good thing about the Provincial Tories of the time was squelched by the Libs hatred of other Christian schools and in order to buy votes, as the public is full of such unrestrained bigots. The new Tories under party leader John Tory display no interest whatsoever in restoring the justice his party offered at last, as they were being thrown out by Ontario's voters.

But, the tremulous Tories aside, take a look at both these double-standard pusillanimous moves by Dalton McWimpy. He won't talk plainly about the effect of badly-engined cars and trucks, on our lungs every day. and he is more agreeable to paying a huge but far lesser amount to hospitals to save those who can be saved from this second-hand smoke (he lives, works, and drives in air-conditioning, I'd bet). He's benefitted, his kids have benefitted, and his grandchildren will benefit (if his offspring continue as Catholics) from a Catholic education. Kids living in poverty who have Catholic parents can get a Catholic education from Grade 1 to Grade 12. I'm all for this. But some Protestant Christians must break their backs trying to pay for 12 years of a Christian education in accord with the formation of conscience, knowledge, and values of art, literature, science, and philosophy they choose in community with like-minded Christians. Our kids in poverty can't go to Christian schools because the means are not there. We have the professoinal teaching corps. We have a much more integrated curriculum than you can find in state atheist schools. But once again, McWimpy has insufficient backbone to do justice, to drop the double-standard from which he and his family and his religion benefit, along with the atheist Humanist schools.

Taken together, his policy on pollution and education are double-minded, double-standard unprincipled game-playing: all to the loss of my lungs, of my mobility about the unbearably polluted city, and to my religious community's ability to educate its children according to our values. - Owlb

UN High Commissioner, Human Rights

Human Rights: Propaganda Mills Slamnesty Splinternational transformed into lie machine, gets Senator's backing, now backsoff

First, dear reader, click the blue title above and read Dr Ariel Cohen's article, "Gitmo is no Gulag." It should have the widest possible readership. I leave it to you to acquire for yourself a basic adequate concept of what the Lenin/Stalin Gulag was, and you mite note that at least one of the real things exists today - not at the US Marine Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; but in North Korea. If you understand Gulag, the Taliban in Afghanistan, and Saddam Hussein in Iraq, no propaganda mill is going to move you from the realities at work against America's efforts in the world today to make such wickedness less possible in human life.

Now, without repeating Dr Cohen's material, let's take up the new role Amnesty International has mandated for itself, to slam American efforts (flawed of course, but not anywhere near fatally so for the overall correctness, propriety, and justicial task they pursue in Gitmo and the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan) to create conditions of "liberty and justice for all." Amnesty has become part of the problem of lack of human rights in the world, not part of the solution. It has a large research and reporting staff; it has the intellectual brainpower to conduct a fair and honest comparison of Gitmo (while not knowing everything about it) with the Soviet Gulag, the North Korean Gulag, the prison systems of every Arab and other Muslim country, and damn near anything else it wants. It has chosen not to do so. It has prefabricated and prevaricated major verbal injustices to cast aspersion on American military justice and American soldiers giving their lives in the field of battle every day for the last two years.

Slamnesty has hit the height of hubris just once too often, and has unleashed words it can never take back, nor cover its trail, but has rather exposed itself as willing to make itself an instrument in the war against America. It is now chief propagandist for the miscreants - no soldiers they - who are held in privileged bondage at Gitmo because of their work to kill American soldiers assigned to liberate a country that was lost under the power of a terror régime and its foreign irregulars, the bloodthirsty minions of Al Quaeda. What has Amnesty produced that informs us systematically of what happens under Al Quaeda, the Taliban, Saddam Hussein and his recent terrorist re-incarnations in Iraq?, I wonder. Perhaps a little brochure, but so far nothing like Orpah's mag which carried an expansive article telling us about the 9/11er Mo Atta and all the troubles the lad had in his childhood. Maybe that will be Slam's next ploy, a tear-jerking book on the good little bad boys incarcerted at Gitmo. But when it comes to those dillettantes dining well at American expense in their confinement at Gitmo (I wish I had such fine meals during several years of my life), Slamnesty has found it fit to truck out of its rhetorical overload a truckload of fetid falsehoods that have no relation to fact, and do injustice to the real flaws and problems that may arise there from time to time.

One could say that hardcore propagandists gravitate to the ranks and leadership of organizations like Amnesty. After all, the organization has a track record of raising funds that has made them consistently operable over many years. As a result, it can provide a well-paying job to those so inclined, in which gradually they may raise the level of their rhetoric to conduct the anti-American war in which their real interest lies. However, we must remember, that Amnesty is one among a plethora of human-rights organizations that speak up for prisoners and prisoners of war (which latter those at Gitmo are not, in terms of the Geneva Convention). Those imprisoned and concentrated at Gitmo are simply a part of a fanatical murderous gang out to kill in order to control a country that wasn't theirs in the first place, as a stepping stone to world control. There are many, many organizations focused on human rights - so there is a ruthless competition to be number one. To be number one in fundraising and perpetuating the bureaucracy of the organization, and maintaining those salaries in the hi-ly competitive human-rights industry. To be number one in creating public spectacle by making outrageous statements in the media and getting its name bandied about. To be number one, in Slamnesty's case, in defaming America wherever it can suss out and dress up a problem or flaw by inflating it to proportions beyond all bounds. The goal is to make American policy and action look infinite, infinitely evil, the worst ever or ever will be. If Slamsty has a little something, doesn't really matter what, it can inflate it and inflame it with the most outrageously swollen rhetoric its researchers can find in the shallow infinity of their verbiage.

Amnesty has outdone itself this time around. It has splintered the human-rights community as never before; it has scandalized its own staff by making the organization look like a falsifier of human history regarding the Soviet Gulag, which at least approaches being on a par with the Holocaust. It has divided the igorant among its supporters and cheerers-on from the knowing, for its ignorant are trapped in that Amnesty-fostered ignorance and can do nothing but revile the Ameriucan government as a result of their dependnece upon such fast-and-loose play with the truth, just so the Amnasties can get its name to the forefront as the seeming boldest and best, when its tactic is really one of deep and cynical cowardice and self-service. May the Lord wither it on its vine, and leave it to the passersby as a monument of its betrayal of its own mission, cut down to a bare and shrivelled trunk by its spreading of hubritic falsehood. And may its competitors get the funds which will preserve the mission of serving as conscience regarding the major human-rights problems of the world today, while not functioning as betrayers of Western and American efforts to advance, however imperfectly, human rights everywhere in general but not in cases like those of the sworn human-rights enemies incarcerated at Gitmo. Slamnesty Splinternational has hurt the cause of human rights.

Now, the rhetoric of SlamSplinter quickly reproduced itself and magnified itself in media just looking for such fodder to feed into its stacks, which were as quickly blown. One medium occupied by the heinous spirit of SlamSplinter falsehood was a pompous hass-wit of a US Senator, so overwrawt with partisanship, that when he blew his stack and thereby polluted the airwaves and print media with a frag-bomb of lies, a good part of it was blown by the Wind right back in his ignominious face. I'm speaking of course, about a leading non-entity known only to some people in the great state of Illinois where he was elected a United States Senator, Richard Durbin - the press calls him "Dick" Durbin, so I too may point to the smallness of his brain and prickliness of his appendages otherwise. He is what you'd call "a dickhead." He has no sense of boundaries when comparing events, events of a historical character that have mired the souls of millions, which he purposely exploited (my opinion: if it wasn't on purpose, he is so totally ignorant that he is incompetent for his job; he should resign immediately).

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Update on Sen Dick Durbin: Blackfive records massive reaction to Dick's Dump on US interrogations at Gitmo
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But, really, were he not regularly such a dumb and vicious platitude himself, why mite he stoop to the tactic he used? I think it's near at hand: he's the senior Senator from Illinois, and he's in the shadow of the junior Senator, Baruch Obama, who was given a key role in the Democratic National Convention, was elected by Illlinois voters by a huge margin, and whose name has more vital recognition everywhere - compared to his shadow Durbin who was asked to apologize by none other than the Illinois Democrat kingpin, Mayor of Chicago, Richard Daly. Durbin has to make a noise, has to seize a moment, has to get out there with the most media-demanding sentences an Illinoisan can noise. And so it was. And so he did. It took him a week of denials, quasi-denials, supplementary self-interpretations (see Derrida on "the Supplement"), and re-selfinterpretations - all carefully made to the media, and not to the people and his colleagues on the floor of the Senate. The Majority Leader of said Chamber of the US Congress, demanded that Durbin get his ass in there, and get up on his hind-legs there, and make full apolgy there, thoroly and at once.

Well, at last he did that, or something like that. I'm not interested. His apology was and is necessary, but trivial reading. Because the offense is too profound to linger over. He can not be rehabilitated. And if Illinois re-elects him, so much the worst for the state's reputation, which is a very good one in American history. It was the home state of Abraham Lincoln, the leader of the Second American Revolution, and the source for the renewal of the Constitution. The man who gave us the phrase "one nation under God" which Dwight Eisenhowever had enshrined in the national pledge of allegiance to the flag. That's the legacy that the lies of ex-Sen Durbin defamed with his, among other things, extremely stupid remarks made in another hubritic moment alongside those of Slamnesty, for his own self-aggrandizement.

Sen. Richard J. Durbin yesterday said he was "sorry" after parsing words for a week about his remarks comparing U.S. interrogators at Guantanamo Bay to those of Nazi and Soviet regimes. He apologized on the Senate floor.
"I'm sorry if anything that I said caused any offense or pain to those who have such bitter memories of the Holocaust, the greatest moral tragedy of our time," said Mr. Durbin, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate.


As tho only sufferers of the Holocaust and their families and ethnic community are the only ones affected by the grossnes of false-phrase Durbin's historical falsification. Anyone affected by those régimes is scandalized by the inept comparison. Apparently, if your family or ethnicity were "merely" Russian, Lithuanian (like mine), Polish, Czech - but not Jewish - it's okay to offend with such excremental false comparisons. I hope Chicago with all its folk of these ethnicities shows Durbin where to go the next time he runs for office. Why are not all those who got after Trent Lott not now demanding that Durbin resign his role as Dem whip immediately? The Democratic double-standard regarding racial and ethnic injustice, as usual. How far this party has sunk!

"I'm also sorry if anything I said in any way cast a negative light on our fine men and women in the military. I went to Iraq just a few months ago," he said, pausing and appearing to tear up at one point during the five-minute speech. "When you look at the eyes of the soldiers you see your son and daughter. They are the best. I never, ever intended any disrespect for them. Some may believe that my remarks crossed the line. To them, I extend my heartfelt apologies."


But here's the phoniness of his slopology: he never admits he did indeed cross the line. If you think so, then you get a think-so apology, but what does Durbin himself think? No one's fooled by the rhetoric of this apology.

Of course, this exposure of - I can't believe it - the minority whip of Democrats in the Senate - is politically quite upsetting to those who want to interfere with the workings of military intelligence and military justice. Everything for them turns on the word "torture." But I keep saying, we need some comparative sense here. Torture of those who torture, behead, sew women into bags with only eye-slits for the rest of their lives (whether they enjoy it or not), deny them education, minimize their health care, force Wahhabist religion on a whole society, and on and on, should be understood as equivalent if and only if and when it is equivalent. Were there torture of some of these fiendish pariahs at Gitmo, it wasn't at all commensurate with the practices of Al Quaeda in Afghanistan and Iraq. And the drive of interrogators, if it did get out of hand at times at Gitmo, should be adjudicated by military justice, not civil justice which is incompetent to understand the circumstances or the consequences of not extracting information from the element in question. This element is not covered by the US's signature to the Geneva Convention. Neither the Senate Dem whip nor the House Dem leader, Nancy Pelosi, have the responsiblity to save American lives by extracting information from the well-fed non-Genevan cut-throats at sunny Gitmo. - Owlb


Durbin's Dumstrous Duplicity

Monday, June 20, 2005

Pop culture: Celebrity: Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt again, and again, and again and dangnabit! again

With the avalanche of fake news about celebrittles, we are introduced to the corresponding phenom of celebrobotism where the poor actors, the very rich poor actors, have to act everywhere at every moment about everything, even their fake romances. This is the conclusion that is rippling out from Tom Cruise's historionics not so long ago on Oprah's show. He sounds as tho he were on some drug at the time, or just plain stark fake, fake, fakin' it about this overwrawt new connection with whatshername. The public gets evermore skeptical about such actors - their romances, their religion, their politics, and whether they actually exist or not, since they are simple similitudes of scriptwriters/producers twisted imaginoria. We're getting more and more movies over-hyped and under-viewed by a movie-going audience that is shrinking as fast as mainline churches that now offer only a puddle in place of the Gospel. I'm always on the lookout for a good narrative, and I don't like actors so hackneyed in their authenticity that their very presence detracts from a good narrative flick, film, cinematic artwork. Tom and Brad have both slipped into that category. If they really want to get the audience, they should divorce their present romances (no matter whether they're reallty married or not) and, yes, go to a jurisdiction where they can marry one another. Tip off the press, and emerge to the poppin' paparazzi. It doesn't matter what their actual feelings are, how they regard one another, or what sexuality they prefer. They're just playing games and weddings and divorces, and they would improve their aging reputations if they would stop abusing now one woman and then another, and reciprocally abuse themselves instead. There's a marginal authenticity in the idea, as their AQs at present are as close to the bottom of the scale as they can go. They are jokes, bad jokes, not supremely bad jokes, just mediocre bad jokes, completely in accord with their acting. - Owlb


More Celebrobotics

Zimbabwe: dictatorship: Drive Out Trash!, says Mugabe in displacing 1.5 million poor

Operation Murambatsvina, which translates to "Drive Out Trash," is Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe's answer to the needs of the poor in his country. Sustained by parliamentary elections that were widely regarded as coercive and undemocratic, Mugabe has proceeded literally to drive out of their shanty-town dwellings a mass of Zimbabeweans and "may have left more than 1.5 million people without homes and livelihoods, according to United Nations officials."

Being a Catholic and being Jesuit-educated, Mugabe has become subject to the heavy criticism of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in his country.

"A whole nation has suffered because of recent and ongoing actions.

"Now, almost four weeks after the event, countless numbers of men, women with babies, children of school age, the old and the sick, continue to sleep in the open air at winter temperatures near to freezing." ....

"Any claim to justify this operation becomes totally groundless in view of the cruel and inhumane means that have been used," they said. "We condemn the gross injustice done to the poor."

The churchmen, led by Archbishop Robert Ndlovu of Harare and Archbishop Pius Ncube of Bulawayo, attacked self-styled Christians in the government who "lead a double way of life, one for Sunday services in church and another for public tasks, be they political, economic, social or any other kind".

President Mugabe, 81, regularly attends mass, but the pastoral letter did not mention the name of the Jesuit-educated leader. The Catholic leaders added: "Innate human dignity given to us by the Creator Himself was gravely violated by the ruthless manner in which the operation was conducted and... cries out for vengeance to God."


If the united panel of archbishops and bishops feel this way, why don't they now ex-communicate Mugabe? Attending mass is one thing, as I understand the matter, but taking Holy Communion in the Eucharistic Liturgy is another. If Mugabe's sin is so great, then the mere public ban on him receiving the sacrament may have the result of shaking his conscience alive again. As it is, he is a crusty old autocrat who imagines himself to be of such godlike powers, just short of his Maker, that the Church's intervention, denying him what Catholics consider the means of grace and the forgiveness of sins, seems the only pastoral remedy that has any chance, however small, of working to call this man back to his duties.

It won't do anything for the poor he has displaced, so world relief organizations will have to stand by, hoping someone has the guts to replace the tyrant and let them in to the country to assist yet another innocent circle of the damned in Africa. Mugabe has to go! - Owlb

Mugabe's wrecking crew hits urban areas of supporters of his opposition, Movement for Democratic Change

Workplace: Rights: Fed govt's Office of Special Counsel targetted by Gay self-interest group in anti-Catholic bigot move

I don't agree with the the Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church on "the consistent ethic of life," nor on the wholly negative posture it has taken on homos - while I do oppose any tampering with the traditional legal definition of marriage, as between 1woman1man. However, that doesn't solve every matter that comes along on related issues. Once again, I have to go on record against the behaviour of the Gay ideology, the Gay agenda, and Gay activists for their shrill and mean targetting of people and the shredding of due process of law. In that regard, I quote a lone tradition-minded Catholic voice who does support the Magisterium and has an eye for the kinds of Gay collective behaviours that drive me crazy with embarrassment. I take the liberty of quoting at length form Hudson Deal's email newsletter to get his word on this out (his email address is listed below):

Catholic Bush Appointee Attacked by Homosexual Activists

by Hudson Deal


Homosexual activists have a new target -- Scott Bloch. Bloch heads the Office of Special Counsel in Washington, D.C. Homosexual leaders, newspapers, and websites have repeatedly called upon the White House to give Bloch the heave-ho. Bloch's job as Special Counsel, among other things, is to investigate and prosecute officials in the federal executive branch for personnel violations and whistleblower complaints.

Why?

After taking office, Bloch, a native Kansan and a faithful Catholic, found that his predecessor -- Clinton appointee Elaine Kaplan -- used the [Federal government's Office of Special Counsel] to enforce a policy against bias in federal workplaces based on "sexual orientation," i.e., homosexuality.

Bloch, as Special Counsel, examined federal civil rights law and found that it doesn't list sexual orientation as a "protected class." Race, religion, sex, age, national origin, disability, and political affiliation are covered, but not sexual orientation.

As a result, Bloch removed information about discrimination based upon "sexual orientation" from the OSC website and printed materials to avoid public confusion about OSC's enforcement authority.

Attacks on Bloch soon followed, culminating in Bloch's May 24 testimony before a subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

The Log Cabin Republicans, a gay lobbying group, called upon "Mr. Bloch today to immediately restore protections for gay and lesbian federal employees" (March 18, 2004).

Federal GLOBE, an umbrella organization for gay, lesbian and bisexual federal employees, called for Bloch to be fired (October 7, 2004).

The Advocate, a D.C. gay newspaper, accused Bloch of trying "to ditch protections for gay federal employees" (April 12, 2005).

Bloch has consistently argued he is only acting within the parameters of the Congressional legislation he has sworn to uphold.

As Bloch explained to Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich) at the May 24 Senate hearing, "We are limited by our enforcement statutes as Congress gives them. The courts have specifically rejected sexual orientation as a class protection."

In other words, if Congress wants Bloch to treat homosexuals as a "protected class," it must pass the legislation to authorize this action.

Bloch's opponents have confused the situation by citing a 1998 executive order of President Clinton that prohibited discrimination based upon sexual orientation in the federal workplace.

What Bloch's critics fail to mention, however, is that the [Clinton] executive order does not provides any legal remedies for a violation. In other words, if Bloch tried to enforce the 1998 executive order he would be in violation of the order itself as well as his own enforcement statutes.

Bloch's predecessor admitted at the time that the executive order does not add "any new substantive legal rights" (Washington Blade, June 5, 1998). Kaplan reiterated this in a letter to Bloch, saying that the Clinton executive order is not enforceable by OSC, and is merely a "symbolic statement" for federal personnel policy.

In spite of all this, Ms. Kaplan interpreted OSC's federal civil laws to include sexual orientation as a protected class, even though the statutes fail to mention it. Kaplan evidently viewed her interpretation as policy rather law because she told Bloch that she does not dispute [Bloch's] right to "change her policy." In other words, she saw it as a changeable policy, not a requirement of law under OSC's enforcement statutes.

Bloch is not given the credit of having a simple difference of opinion with the Clinton appointee who preceded him. No, he is accused of refusing to treat homosexuals as a "protected class" because he is Catholic!



- from The Window, June 20, 2005. An email newsletter published by the Morley Institute for Church and Culture, edited and written by Deal Hudson. Email: thewindow at morleyicc dot com

There's more on the subject in Deal's one-item edition of the newsletter, but you'll have to email him to read the remainder.

Now, a comment or two by me: There's an injustice here. Homos should not experience discrimination on the basis of their sexual orientation in Federal employment. Of course, we all assume the observance of the appropriate workplace decorum obtains, and when it doesn't that's another matter, no matter what the violation. Likewise, the abuse of work assessments of subordinates, bosses, or colleagues - there's separate and distinct employment practices codes covering these work misbehaviours. So I repeat: Homos should not experience discrimination on the basis of their sexual orientation in Federal employment. But it's obvious that the place to rectify the injustice is not with incumbent head of the OSC, but with Congress which must legistlate to recognize the discrimination against these citizens and taxpayers otherwise fully-qualified for Federal employment as much as others who compete for those jobs.

However, the bigots of the Gay ideology in pushing their extra-legal agenda, no matter that an injustice exists which should be righted, reply by targetting, not Congress, but the incumbent heading the Office of Special Counsel and they do so by accusing him of being unfit to serve because he is a "devout Catholic," guility of discrimination and extremism, etc.

As long as the Gay movement is so curdled by presumption, deceit, and its own rather obvious bigotry, it's going to offend many homos and the diversity of the larger public. The Gay movement just doesn't have the creds to launch these special-interest targetted attacks which have no basis in law and unjustly bring a boss into false disrepute. They don't like it when it happens to them, yet they are the finest masters of this devilish art. Homos are not necessarily part of the Gay movement, nor ascribe to the contradiction-riddled Gay ideology which has proven itself to be disastrous for most of us homos too. Still, please don't think I am in any way endorsing the absolutism of the RC Magisterium or "the consistent ehtic of life." I'm Protestant and I do not accept any earthly authority as final, nor absolutes decreed by mere mortals. I do believe in norms, and these must be sussed out among the historical vicissitudes to the best of our ability, an enterprise in which Catholics have just as much right to participate as do homos, whatever their religion or dissent therefrom.

I fawlt Hudson Deal for using the mouthy terminology of "homosexual" inappropriately when he is referring to the Gay ideologues and their activism. Hence I have put cross-out marks thru it, to demonstrate my view that it is simply unacceptable. I have never read Deal to say a nice word about any homo, which begins to undermine my sense of his motive in regard to my person. - Owlb

Catholic News Agency, recommended by Hudson Deal

Economics: Africa: Update on Africa pre-Summit developments: World Bank's Wolfowitz says Yes, but private donors too

After completing his African tour (Nigeria, Burkina-Faso, Rwanda, South Africa) as the first exploratory-investigative mission of his new job, heading the World Bank, Paul Wolfowitz asks the US to bring its donor level up to the international standard of 0.7% of the US Gross Domestic Product, asks US to cut Federal agricultural subsidies to cotton farms against which African farmers can't compete on the global market, and seeks to engage massive private donations to turn the situation around for the transatlantic neighbouring continent.

This news story influences my emerging position on Africa immensely. How about you? Many are shifting, hopefully not to a mindlessly compassionism, but to a mindful authentic compasssion which may sense, as in my case, that the moment is now to take a chance - despite armies of con artists bilking the Live Aid idea for moti8ves other than love of Africa's poor. So, I gamble by altering my general political stance, and I hope but I still refuse to join the ranks of the stupid who make a business of advancing insane demands. As to the the Live Aid events, I expect the performers to blow all the goodwill being generated by Bob Geldof's, Bono's, and Richard Curtis' project and by Wolfowitiz's neo-conservative Africa policy (compassionate neo-conservatism at work).

However: Let's actually see the free concerts take collections of love-offerings from the assembled howling music audiences to startkick a massive public drive of corporations, institutions, and the ordinary citizenry to give out of their own pockets to help Africa. Let's stop this anonymous total reliance on the state, whether its the United States or the Principality of Monaco, lets get the casinos to give and the casino-goers, let's have the lotteries give all across Europe and North America. Let's see the black community in continental Europe, Britain, the USA, and Canada mobilize themselves to give to turn Africa around. This idea that the American Federal government is everyone's cash cow is no longer acceptable.

In another development, and we're still talking about Africa, but I'm going to call this development something of a Snowbell Effect, with all the implied irony intact, a group of half-a-dozen heads of African governments (including Nigeria which has a culture of corruption up to the eyeballs), have called for a total reduction of African debt.

But here's the real news:

Meanwhile, African countries also agreed to measures to improve governance as part of the plan to boost aid flows from richer nations. ¶ ...[P]rogress on good government and corruption is seen as essential if the West is to agree to increased aid. ¶ Now some 23 African countries have agreed to a system of review to monitor their own political and economic performance.


Well, then, which African countries haven't joined to support this system of review called the African Peer Review Mechansim (APRM)? Should they also get their debts cancelled? I have to accept in good faith what this APRM system offers in good faith as a measurement of levels of corruption for public notice. But once a country shows itself again to be incapable of democratic processes and stopping the culture of corruption that swallows aid from abroad so that it never affects the infrastructure of African societies, the aid to such a specific country must stop immediately. The penalties have to be severe, or this APRM will turn out to be not a mechanism but a device for conning donor and former lender countries once again - to the hurt of their own populations. African political leadership has been the African people's worst enemy - along with drought. overpopulation, and AIDS. - Owlb


African Peer Review Mechanism

Sunday, June 19, 2005

Arts: Music & Politics Bush has anted up more $ for Africa than any US Prez, says Live 8's Geldof

The upcoming G8 Summit, the eight industrially most advanced countries plus Russia whose finance ministers have already agreed to remit all debt for 18 nations (mostly in Africa), is being upstaged by the petitioners who hope to mass with them multiplied millions as an audience for simultaneous live concerts in Europe and North America, all the while stroking the G8 summiteers to come thru with even more the first week in July. I'm not too hot on this. I did sign the petition, but the politics of the petition process so obstruded on even so simple a matter that I felt cheated. As soon as I signed, I got another message asking whether I wanted to send a copy of my particulars to the New Democrat Party. Now, how did they horn in on this? Were the petition circulators themselves up to the blatant dishonesty of giving a partisan twist to a campaign I thawt was to encourage Western governments like Canada's to come up in favour of debt remission for African countries? I doubt there's any really honest petition on such a mega-organized level; there's always an industry involved; there's always more motives moiling in the mix than a simple love for African people and wanting to help them out.

What's more, as soon as the G8 finance ministers made their agreement and announced on mostly-African debt remission, to a list of countries who had at the same time maintained democratic processes (Mugabe's Zimbabwe remains unlisted) and not aswim in massive corruption (Nigeria unlisted!), the Africa info service I receive by email, was all over me and hectoring me to send more insistent petitions to the Canuck guvs demanding more and more and more and more. My point is a simple one: we've seen these grandiose appeals and Trotskyist-style political demands that can't possibly be filled, so many times in my lifetime, that there's something that crawls into one's brain about the denial and dishonesty of pressing for ever more - when the finance ministers have come thru so postively. Just screaming for money because Africa is desperate, doesn't mean that, even were the money available, that I doubt Africa would benefit from this grandiose largesse but end up even worse off precisely because of its arrival.

We must not pour dollars on élites that will suck it into their own pockets as in most cases in the past (socialists excel at this seemingly capitalist game); we must not pour dollars that will encourage governments in economic lag-mode to generate ever larger populations with no infrastructure to educate and provide them jobs; we must not allow dictators to profit most from these gifts so that they can buy more and more armaments and conduct colonial wars against other African countries, and genocides against their own populations. All this is au courant in Africa in recent years and much of it right now.

Everyone assumes that there is a solution to Africa's over-all mess. I doubt it. I doubt there's any solution at all that could work effectvelyf here, for a very long time to come. Live Aid is putting out the figure that "50,000 Africans die every day of hunger." I don't doubt it; but I do doubt there is any real solution. There are millions of people in Africa desperate for food, as there are millions of people there desperate for sex on any given day or nite. The two facts are desperately related. How the infrastructures can be developed so that these grossly disproportionate numbers can be turned around, is a puzzlement to any one who cares more than actionism blame-ideologies permit. So much for all the actionistic philosophies and religions that think every problem is solvable wherever on the globe it is present in whatever scale of magnitude. I admire the people of compasssion who are indigenous to the countries of desperation and who come from afar to apply "bandaids" and who know that's what they're doing when they make their appeals year in and year out, day in and day out, here in North America. But where they honestly beg for help in applying their bandaids and oepning their feeding stations, is now debt remission and Live Aid visions of Europe/American govts whacking ever huger sums at the countries in jepopardy going to make the difference? Some difference, yes. But more largely, I don't think so. Rather, I think people who think so are part of the problem, especially those African intellectuals who detail and disseminate their theories about how everyone else, especially the Americans, are responsible for their woes.

However, I too wish it were otherwise. And every now and then, one momentarily junks a lifetime of analysis and reflection and petition signing into the void of impossiblity, and one feels a little surge of utopian hope, triggered by some inconsequential irrelevant detail. In my case, it's Geldof's appearance in France on behalf of the Paris Live Aid Concert coming up, insisting to the French in so many words, Look you lunkheads, Bush has gotten more funding for African needs than any American prez, and he's doing a hell of lot better than you Bush-hating chiraqoids and socialistas multipluralissimas. Geldof, Bono, and the filmaker Richard Curtis have united to do something audacious, in requiring cut the crap (LOL, guys) of the Bush-hating entertainers on stage, and thusly moving the hearts of Presidents and Prime Ministers to go against the rational weighing of the possiblities of a dollar-drop on Africa. That's not where change will come from, I know. But, why not give it a try, if Geldof tries his level best to keep the crap from flowing out of the crapmouths of the song business of the Western world. -Owlb


Interview with Live Aid II