I'm not at all sure how the estimate below was arrived at, but if it's
accurate that the EU would lose $79 billion by agreeing to a slightly more
equitable system of sharing benefits from life patents, then the total raid
on the genetic commons is indeed enormous. Add the U.S., Japan and other
developed countries into the equation, then divide by the fractional
difference between the proposed ABS system and full real benefits and the
total valuation of this intellectual property is in the $trillion range.
This is a subsidy to multinationals. The PRI study argues that a partial
reversal of that subsidy would be "equivalent to a long-run tax on
biotechnological and pharmaceutical research." Talk about feeling
"entitled."

- Jim Diamong
Sierra Club GE committee

TITLE: European Union to Lose US$79 Billion if New U.N. Regulatory System
Created
AUTHOR: Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy
PUBLICATION: press release via PR Newswire
DATE: 25 May 2005
URL:
http://www.mysan.de/article113706.html
NOTE: This follows right on the heels of a report from the Australian APEC
Study Centre, flagged earlier on BIO-IPR, which also tried to argue that
private contracts and unfettered property rights defined by national law
are better than putting conditions on the grant of patents over
biodiversity and traditional knowledge under international law.
____________

PRI News Release | 25 May 2005

EUROPEAN UNION TO LOSE US$79 BILLION IF NEW U.N. REGULATORY SYSTEM CREATED

A newly released study by the California-based Pacific Research Institute
for Public Policy (PRI) reveals startling economic impacts for the European
Union if a proposed international regime to govern access- and
benefit-sharing (ABS) of genetic resources takes effect. The creation of a
patent-based ABS regime will be discussed by world diplomats and policy
experts in Geneva on June 6-10 at a meeting of the World Intellectual
Property Organization (WIPO).

BRUSSELS, Belgium, May 25, PRNewswire -- A newly released study by the
California-based Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy (PRI) reveals
startling economic impacts for the European Union if a proposed
international regime to govern access- and benefit-sharing (ABS) of genetic
resources takes effect. The creation of a patent-based ABS regime will be
discussed by world diplomats and policy experts in Geneva on June 6-10 at a
meeting of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).

"Analytically, the new ABS regime would be equivalent to a long-run tax on
biotechnological and pharmaceutical research," said study co-author
Benjamin Zycher, a Senior Fellow at PRI. "Naturally, such a measure would
have significant economic consequences." In the EU alone, Zycher's findings
predict a loss of US$79 billion.

The ABS regime has been proposed by representatives of nations in the
17-member Like Minded Mega-diverse Countries (LMMC) who argue that the
international patent system needs to be further regulated to prevent
biopiracy and to reach the goals of the U.N. Convention on Biological
Diversity (CBD), adopted by the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. The

17 countries, led by Brazil, would also like to see further redistribution
of the profits created when genetic resources are turned into modern
medicine by pharmaceutical and biotech companies located primarily in the
Western world.

"The mega-diverse countries claim that patent regulations are necessary to
protect the world's biodiversity," said Zycher. "The fact is that the new
ABS regime would undermine the current contract-based system that will
protect research and development much more successfully."

Under current international law, governed by the WIPO and the World Trade
Organization (WTO), biotech companies are free to make contracts with
individual countries, obtaining the right to use genetic resources from
such biodiverse areas as the Brazilian rain forest, and to use these
resources in their product development. The LMMC proposal would limit the
freedom to make contracts by making it more difficult to protect patents
and by imposing unpredictable obligations on biotech companies to share
their future profits.

The PRI study predicts that the proposed ABS regime will have significant
economic impacts on countries in the developed world. Using a careful
methodology that transforms biotechnological and pharmaceutical research
and development into capital stocks, the detailed study finds that the
cumulative loss to the EU15 countries would be US$79 billion between now
and year 2025. By comparison the United States stands to lose much less --
US$21.6 billion.

"The bottom line is that the best way to protect the world's biodiversity
is to give research-based biotech companies negotiated property rights to
invest in bio-diverse areas," said the study's other co-author Timothy A.
Wolfe. "Without property rights and contracts enforced under law, the
Brazilian rain forest will be left in the hands of lumberjacks and farmers
who need more open land for their cattle."

ABOUT PRI

For 26 years, the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy (PRI) has
championed freedom, opportunity, and personal responsibility by advancing
free-market policy solutions. PRI is a non-profit, non-partisan educational
organization based in San Francisco, California.

Web site: http://www.pacificresearch.org

(Ed. Note: Blogged with protest)

No where is it more obvious than in the USA that the dichotomy of the
political left and right is a complete sham, just two sides to the same
coin. The politicians there are so used to a soporific population
delivered to them by the spy-riddled, oil-soaked monopoly media, that
there ís hardly any pretence of conflict in matters that count. Utterly
compromised and embalmed in lies they wallow in polite meaningless
debate around the edges while pretending there is no elephant in the
room. In their arrogance they don't expect anyone with any standing to
call it for what it is, a conspiracy supported by a proven pack of
manipulative lies disseminated by a corrupt media and so many "think
tanks", no theory required.

Last Tuesday into this scene rides a gallant George Galloway, maverick
member of the British Parliament, out to clear is name before the
powerful US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, who the
week before had released documents that it said showed Saddam
personally granted Galloway the rights to export 20 million barrels of
oil under the now-defunct U.N. oil-for-food humanitarian program. He
was accused of both receiving and giving money to Saddam Hussein's
regime.

They are so used to being able to walk around with no clothes on that
they werenít prepared for the blistering head-on rebuttal they got. In
a rare event the American people actually saw broadcast into their
homes a well spoken contrary opinion taking on their own lying,
murderous political establishment. They took on the wrong dude and were
confronted over the lies spread about the reasons for war with Iraq,
the oil for food agreement and the failure of US lawmakers to do their
own job when it comes to the rule of law. He demonstrated that the
panelís so-called investigation is merely another attempt to justify
Americaís illegal war of aggression against Iraq and smear those who
have opposed it.

It was a remarkable performance by any measure and while I have little
knowledge of George Gallowayís personal ambitions and agenda, he said
what no other politician has had the guts to say and delivered it
directly into belly of the Neocon gangís lair, or was it the colon
where things turn to shit?

What the press has been saying:

Financial Times: As he emerged triumphant from his showdown with the
Senate committee on Tuesday, George Galloway told reporters: "I'm a
politician that pleads guilty to using events like these for political
purposes." By most reckoning the British MP, an outspoken leftwinger
who has campaigned in the UK against Iraqís occupation, stole the
show.

BBC: "Get a ringside seat," was his advice to journalists. Mr Galloway
has said the Senate investigative committee's report is "full of holes,
full of falsehoods". ìI am not expecting any justice from the innards
of the US government but I want to appear not as the accused but as the
accuser. They seem blissfully unaware that for people in the rest of
the world the villains in the piece in Iraq are them.

George Galloway had vowed to give US senators "both barrels" and after
sitting - coiled - through an hour-and-half of testimony against him,
he unloaded all his ammunition. Far from displaying the
forelock-tugging deference to which senators are accustomed, Mr
Galloway went on the attack.

He rubbished committee chairman Norm Coleman's dossier of evidence and
stared him in the eye. "Now I know that standards have slipped over the
last few years in Washington, but for a lawyer, you are remarkably
cavalier with any idea of justice," the MP declared.

the Independent: Within a moment he had found his rhythm and his
well-practised descriptive powers were flowing. The people he was about
to confront were "neo-cons", "pro-Israel", "pro-war". They were trying
to "distract" attention from an illegal war. Their so-called "evidence"
amounted to nothing more than a "schoolboy dossier". Before turning
heel and marching into the committee room ready to deliver a
tongue-lashing, he added one more verbal blast for good measure.
"Lickspittle."

choice bits: "Now, Senator, I gave my heart and soul to oppose the
policy that you promoted. I gave my political life's blood to try to
stop the mass killing of Iraqis by the sanctions on Iraq which killed
one million Iraqis, most of them children, most of them died before
they even knew that they were Iraqis, but they died for no other reason
other than that they were Iraqis with the misfortune to born at that
time. I gave my heart and soul to stop you committing the disaster that
you did commit in invading Iraq. And I told the world that your case
for the war was a pack of lies. I told the world that Iraq, contrary to
your claims did not have weapons of mass destruction.

"I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection
to al-Qaeda. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had
no connection to the atrocity on 9/11 2001. I told the world, contrary
to your claims, that the Iraqi people would resist a British and
American invasion of their country and that the fall of Baghdad would
not be the beginning of the end, but merely the end of the beginning.

"Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and
you turned out to be wrong and 100,000 people paid with their lives;
1600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies;
15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of
lies."

the Guardian: Surrounded by journalists and politics students, Respected
MP turns Washington hearing into an indictment of the invasion of Iraq.

"The courtroom became a vaudeville theatre, as the MP lampooned his
interrogators, accusing them of making "schoolboy howler" mistakes. Mr
Galloway insisted that he was entirely innocent. "Senator, I am not now
nor have I ever been an oil trader and neither has anyone on my
behalf," he declared, in language that deliberately echoed that of Joe
McCarthy's anti-communist witch-hunt conducted half a century ago just
metres from the chamber used for yesterday's hearingÖ

The wide, wood-panelled room was packed with journalists and
spectators. Witnesses in this august setting, a little below and
surrounded by the horseshoe bench of powerful senators, are usually
awed and almost always on the defensive. Mr Galloway was on the attack from the first moment.

He entered the hearing room with guns blazing, telling journalists his
inquisitors were "crazed", "pro-war", "lickspittles" of the president,
and predicting he would turn the tables on them. "I want to put these
people on trial. This group of neo-cons is involved in the mother of
smokescreens," he said. That was the common theme in a feat of
bare-knuckled rhetoric not often witnessed by the senators, who are
accustomed to considerably more reverence for their positions.

CNN called it a "blistering attack on senators rarely heard or seen on
Capitol Hill". Mr Galloway deflected every charge against him and flung
it back at the Bush administration and the US congress. The senators
mostly soaked up the punches, reserving judgment until a press
conference later, when Mr Coleman claimed Mr Galloway's credibility was
"very, very suspect". In the hearing, however, the senators struggled
to pin Mr Galloway down with Iraqi oil sales documents with his name on
them. "What counts is not the names on the paper; what counts is where
is the money, senator?" Mr Galloway said. "Who paid me hundreds of
thousands of dollars of money? The answer to that is nobody. And if
you had anybody who ever paid me a penny, you would have produced them
here today."

A jubilant Mr Galloway later told an American television interviewer
that it marked a victory for the "British parliamentary style" over the
more sedate senate. Mr Galloway used anti-war rhetoric far more raw
than most politicians are accustomed to in America, where shared
patriotism normally trumps outrage. He said that 100,000 people had paid
with their lives for false assumptions on Iraq, ì1,600 of them American
soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies; 15,000 of them
wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies.

The minuet of exchanges played on for another few minutes before the
senators gave up frustrated. They had come equipped for a trial and
found themselves in the role of stooges for a man accustomed to playing
to the gallery.

This is what you get from a parliamentary system with a daily question
period. Imagine George Bush having to stand up in Congress every single
day and answer up to 200 Galloways, all with pointed questions. In some
way it helps to make up for Kelly who was killed for telling the truth.
For FBI agent Sibel Edmunds who was gagged, canned and threatened with
death for telling the truth. For Hans Blix who told the truth. For
O'Neill and Clarke who told the truth. For Scott Ritter who told the
truth.

Interestingly the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government
Affairs has no testimony from UK MP George Galloway on its website. All
other witness testimonies for the hearings on the Oil for Food scandal
are available on the Committee's website in PDF form. But Galloway's
testimony is the only document not on the site.

-------------------------------------------

A transcript of Gallowayís entire speech here:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1616578,00.html

Link to full video here:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/may2005/180505gallowayvideo.htm

A comprehensive collection of other links here:
http://www.rense.com/Datapages/gallo.htm

May 2005

Which aspects of the theory of evolution are in dispute? A
thickening fog of verbiage now makes it harder than ever for students to
discover fact, and to understand theory, regarding evolution.

A few hundred words can, I hope, do some justice to the urgent task
of clarifying "the" theory of evolution. (I've written a few thousand
words elsewhere - some at my page
http://www.kuratrading.com/HTMLArticles/writings.htm )

1. Fact as distinct from Theory

The term 'evolution' means the appearance over time (Margulis &
Schwartz 199 of new life-forms - new species, and larger taxa (genus,
family, order, class, phylum, kingdom). Science has inferred from a large
body of observations that life appeared on our planet as blue-green algae 4
x 10^9 year BP; later emergences include complex animals 1 x 10^9 y,
mammals 2 x 10^8 y, and man somewhere in the region 10^6 -10^5 y BP. Thus,
insofar as facts can ever be confirmed regarding pre-human processes,
evolution is a fact - in the sense that new life-forms have appeared over
billions of years. Most species were created much later than the first.

However, evidence for change in descent from one to another has
been difficult to come by and is sparser, at least to date, than sometimes
assumed.

2. Theory

To explain evolution, as to explain any process in nature, all
categories of cause will be required. The 4 categories of cause,
originally defined by Aristotle, hold key potential for improving evolution
theory. The recent restricting by e.g. Dawkins of causality in evolution
theory to only 2 categories of cause is a main confusion in evolution
theory.

The biologist John Morton (1972 Ch.1), noting that at Aristotle's
period in the development of science he was in no position to understand
chemical process, offered a more modern version of the 4 causes which I
précis and commend for wide spreading:

* * *

What are the causes of the bottle of claret I'm now decanting?
The *material* causes include the grape juice and the yeast,
materials transformed by the efficient cause into this peculiar substance
claret.

The *efficient* cause, as in Aristotle's prototypical example 'the
making of a statue', is the action of the yeast on the grape sugars and
some minor components, a process resulting in aqueous ethanol and some
minor chemicals characteristic of claret.

But my bottle of claret has also a *final* cause: a person (named
Babich) willed to organise suitable vessels & conditions for the substances
which are the material cause, and planned a sequence of operations, for the
purpose of making claret by maximising the likelihood that the efficient
cause for claret would operate i.e. the particular biochemical action of
the yeast on the grape juice leading to claret.

Aristotle's *formal* cause is in this example the 'claret idea' in
Babich's mind.

* * *

Some rationalisation for the label 'final' is offered by Temple (1923):
This is the essence of "intellection" or science, that it
asks "why" perpetually; as soon as it is answered, it asks "Why?" again
... But if from some other department of Mind's activity an answer is
suggested, the intellect (if not impeded by "intellectualist" dogmatism)
will gladly accept it. And Mind does accept as final an explanation in
terms of Purpose and Will; for this (and, so far as our experience goes,
this alone) combines efficient and final causation. "Why is this canvas
covered with paint?" "Because I painted it." "Why did you do that?"
"Because I hoped to create a thing of beauty for the delight of myself and
others."

I believe this Categories of Cause concept - surely one of the
most important ideas in the whole of philosophy - is the lever to break
the confused logjam of "creationist"® fundamentalism, IDT®, and
neoDarwinism.

NeoDarwinism, the current mainstream scientific theory, explains
change in descent by mutation (usually said to be random) followed by
natural selection which narrows the variance among the mutants by selecting
against the less fit. Those processes, involving only material causes and
efficient causes, are necessary, but not sufficient, to explain evolution.

What can be said to explain - ascribe all the causes of - an
organism and its evolution? DNA is a material cause of all (so far as is
known) organisms, and operates as parts of efficient causes through the
several types of RNA and the many enzymes essential for biosynthesis of
proteins & other biochemicals; but DNA is surely not a Final cause. As
Morton has recently put it, DNA is not the kind of thing that can cause
other things as if paints could leap from tubes to create a Turner, or
vibrations & percussions form themselves into a work of Mozart. A person
implementing a plan - a final cause - is a prerequisite for such things
to come into existence. This is a clearer way of putting the point which
IDT® emphasizes. No amount of explanation in the categories of material &
efficient causes can suffice to explain life.

Technology - and more widely, all human acts willed to modify the
universe - cannot be explained without using the concept Final Cause.
The only type of final cause - person acting with a purpose - is, in
the militant atheist Dawkins' approach, human will. Thus "who designed
this watch?" would be an allowed question, but "who designed this frog?"
disallowed - as an assumption of atheism. But ecology, and evolution of
ecosystems, are purposeful, and Dawkins' descriptions of evolution are
always laden with the language of purpose.

How is a modern biology to deal with Final cause?

A conservative answer today could be to continue the methodological
convention that science will pursue only efficient (and material) causes,
but also to advocate that science should be taught & practised in a context
of philosophy acknowledging all the categories of Causes. This can be
readily done consistent with the USA constitutional amendment so
misrepresented by USA courts this past half-century; there need be no
tendency to establish any church with legal privileges.

If science consists in discovering materials (e.g. chemical
elements & compounds), energies (so far just 4), and forms (e.g. species
of organism) and elucidating qualitatively & quantitatively the processes
- including energy conversions - which result in new physical
situations, then material and efficient causes are the only causes science
can study. But this methodological restriction in the scope of scientific
theory does not constitute any reason to say that no final causes operate
in evolution. How much science can hint about these final causes remains
to be seen, but will not amount to much; natural theology - the study of
nature with intent to infer who created it, without recourse to revelation
- is only a small part of comprehensive theology. Philosophy and theology
will have to revive for the metaphysics needed to study final and formal
causes in evolution.

The mainstream Christian doctrine is that evolution is God's
process for creating new types of organism. Recent, and eccentric, is the
fundamentalist claim that evolution is refuted by Genesis 1-3 & 8-9. These
very figurative sections are among the most myth-laden biblical texts and
were written long before science. Their theological wealth is neglected by
the novel mischievous pretence ("creationism") to understand them as
literally contradicting science.

Discussion of final cause in biology may well begin with Hume's
quip "[t]his world, for aught [any man] knows, is very faulty and imperfect
compared to a superior standard; and was only the first rude essay of some
infant deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame
performance." As a Christian, I'm willing to discuss starting as far back
as that sceptical position. But anyhow, let's go forward, shall we,
IDTers? And I challenge Dawkins to a public debate about his depauperate
2-causes philosophy.

= = =

Readings

Broom, N., 1998. How Blind is The Watchmaker? Aldershot: Ashgate ; rev edn
IVP 2001.
Flew, A., 1989. Introduction to Western Philosophy p.159 London: Thames &
Hudson.
Margulis, L. & Schwartz, K. V., 1998. Five Kingdoms New York: Freeman.
Morton, J., 1972. Man, Science and God Auckland & London: Collins.
Temple, W., 1923 . Mens Creatrix - an essay Macmillan.
Temple, W., 1934 . Nature, Man and God Macmillan.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Protected/Articles/000/000/005/565uukdg.asp?pg=1
The Islamization of French Schools
A disturbing report is leaked.

by Olivier Guitta
The Weekly Standard
9 May 2005 V.10 (32 )

AN OFFICIAL REPORT DEALING WITH religious expression in French schools
has become a must read for anyone interested in the Islamization of
France. Written under the auspices of the top national education
official, Jean-Pierre Obin, the report was not initially released by the
Ministry of Education. But it was leaked on the Internet in March and
now can be found in its entirety at www.proche-orient.info and other
websites.

The 37-page report is the product of a study carried out between October
2003 and May 2004 by a team of 10 inspectors, including Obin. In
addition to examining the recent literature on religion and schools in
France, they visited 61 academic and vocational high schools in 24
départements, chosen not as a cross-section of public schools, but
rather as schools typical of those where religious expression has become
a problem because of the high concentration of ethnic and religious
minorities. Many are located in ethnically segregated neighborhoods now
often referred to, the report says, "by analogy with the United States,
as 'ghettos.'"

In each school, inspectors interviewed the management team, staff, and
teachers, as well as lay people from the community, including parents,
social workers, and elected officials. In addition, regional education
officials were asked to submit accounts of their experiences in primary
schools.

Amid much diversity--some of the schools were rural, some urban; some
had fairly homogeneous student populations, others immigrants from many
different countries--the inspectors report two consistent findings: a
marked increase in religious expression, especially Muslim expression,
in schools; and denial on the part of officials at all levels--from the
classroom, to the principal's office, to the regional
administration--that this phenomenon is occurring.

The researchers began by studying the neighborhoods surrounding the
schools. Mostly, these were depressed areas abandoned by anyone with a
secure income. The report describes the flight of "French" residents and
"European" shops--sometimes after they have been the targets of
violence--in tandem with the arrival of immigrants and the collapse of
real estate values.

Scores of informants told the Obin team that these neighborhoods were
undergoing a "rapid and recent swing" toward Islamization, thanks to the
growing influence of religious activists. These young men, intense and
highly intellectual in their piety, are sometimes former residents of
the neighborhood who have been to prison, where they were converted to
Islam. More often, however, they are educated men with degrees from
universities in France, North Africa, or the Middle East. They have come
to be known as "bearded ones" (distinctive beards are a marker of Muslim
purists and extremists--think of bin Laden) or "big brothers" (a name
evocative of the worldwide jihadist movement's Muslim Brotherhood), and
they offer young people a proud identity--Muslim--in place of the dismal
identity of unassimilated immigrant.

The biggest social change entailed by this Islamization, Obin reports,
is a deterioration in the position of females. Teenage girls are
forbidden to play sports and are constantly watched by an informal
religious police made up of young men, sometimes their own younger
brothers. Makeup, skirts, and form-fitting dresses are forbidden; dark,
loose trousers are the strongly recommended attire. To go to the
blackboard in front of a class, some Muslim girls put on long coats.
Often, they are forced to wear the headscarf, or hijab, and forbidden to
frequent coed movie theaters, community centers, and gyms, or even to go
out at all on weekends. Lots of young women were afraid to tell the Obin
team what punishments are in store for them if they disobey. Not only
female students but also female teachers, Muslim and non-Muslim alike,
are frequently subjected to sexist remarks by male teenagers.

In primary schools, the report cites instances of first grade boys'
refusing to participate in coed activities and Muslim children's
refusing to sing, dance, or draw a face. In one school, restrooms were
segregated: some for Muslim students and some for "French." Some
lunchrooms were segregated, by section or table. Some students required
halal meat; at one school, the principal provided only halal meat for
everyone.

With Muslim proselytizing on the rise, the report states that students
are under pressure to observe Ramadan, the annual month during which
Muslims fast during the day. In some high schools, it is simply
impossible for Muslim kids not to join in, whether they like it or not.
Obin cites one student who tried to commit suicide because of
intimidation and threats from other kids over this issue. Obin also
emphasizes that many conversions to Islam are taking place under duress.

Inevitably, the report records rampant "Judeophobia," to use the term in
vogue in France. Among even the youngest students, the term "Jew" has
become the all-purpose insult. Obin deplores the fact that principals
and teachers do not strenuously object to this, treating it simply as
part of the youth culture. Even more serious is the increase in assaults
on Jews or those presumed to be Jewish. Usually the assailants are
Muslim students. Sometimes the victims are, too: One Turkish high-school
girl was relentlessly harassed and bullied at school because her country
is an ally of Israel. The section of the report on anti-Semitism winds
up with this sad conclusion: In France today, Jewish kids are not
welcome at every school. Many are forced to switch schools or even
conceal their identity to escape anti-Semitism.

According to the report, Muslim students perceive a large gap between
the French and themselves. Even though most of the Muslim kids are
actually French citizens, they see themselves as Muslims first, and more
and more of them hail Osama bin Laden as their hero. In their eyes, he
represents a victorious Islam triumphing over the West.

FINALLY, THE REPORT DISCUSSES a host of difficulties teachers encounter
in dealing with specific subjects in the classroom. Most Muslim kids
refuse to participate in sports or swimming, the girls out of modesty,
the boys because they do not want to swim in "girls' water" or
"non-Muslim water." When it comes to literature, French philosophers
such as Voltaire and Rousseau are very often boycotted because of their
supposed Islamophobia. Molière, the father of French satiric comedy, is
among the writers most often boycotted.

As for history, Muslim students object to its Judeo-Christian bias and
blatant falsehood. They loudly protest the Crusades, and commonly deny
the Holocaust. Under the circumstances, many teachers censor their own
material, often skipping entire topics, like the history of Israel or of
Christianity. The report cites one teacher who keeps a Koran on his desk
for reference whenever a thorny issue arises. It cites Muslim students
who refuse to use the plus sign in mathematics because it looks like a
cross. Field trips, especially to churches, cathedrals, and monasteries,
are boycotted.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, these pathologies are now present
across France. Muslim "ghettos" are found not only in the suburbs of
major cities but in towns and villages as well. Obin describes them as
islands of counterculture, sealed off and opposed to modern democratic
society.

Summing up, Obin explains his disturbing findings as the result
primarily of indoctrination orchestrated over years by international
Muslim organizations. From an early age, students are taught what to
think, what to believe, and to regard their school teachers as liars.
The goal of the radical groups seeking to segregate Muslim communities
and denouncing integration as oppression, Obin writes, is to take the
Muslim residents of France out of the French nation and make them think
of themselves as part of the international Muslim community.

In a particularly interesting observation, Obin notes that it is the
schools that have reached accommodations with the extremists that are
most plagued by violence against girls, Jews, and teachers. Schools that
refuse to tolerate the intolerable have coped much better with the
problems described in the report. As a result, Obin calls for a policy
of no compromise with Islamist demands.

Still unclear is how French educators can be expected to hang tough
while their government refuses to own up to the problem--as demonstrated
by its failure to make public the Obin report. With the Muslim share of
the French population already over 10 percent and growing, the schools
are only the tip of the iceberg.

Olivier Guitta is a freelance writer specializing in the Middle East and
Europe.

. . . AND THEN THERE WAS ONE !!!

ART BUCHWALD
Washington Post
1977

Editors Note: In 1977 Washington Post columnist, political commentator and
humorist Art Buchwald fashioned a scenario in one of his columns whereby
two corporations --- Samson Securities and Delilah Company --- sought
permission from the U.S Department of Justice's Antitrust Division to
merge.

At the time Samson owned everything east of the Mississippi River and
Delilah owned everything west of the great river. Initially the DofJ
expressed reservations about allowing the only two corporations left in the
U.S. to merge.

Buchwald continues:

"`Our department,' he said, `will take a close look at this proposed
merger. It is our job to further competition in private business and
industry, and if we allow Samson and Delilah to merge we may be doing the
consumer a disservice.'

"The chairman of Samson protested vigorously that merging with Delilah
would not stifle competition, but would help it. `The public will be the
true beneficiary of this merger,' he said. `The larger we are, the more
services we can perform, and the lower prices we can charge.'

"The president of Delilah backed him up. `In the Communist system the
people don't have a choice. They must buy from the state. In our
capitalistic society the people can buy from either the Samson Company or
the Delilah Company.'

"`But if merge,' someone pointed out, `there will be only one company left
in the United States.'

"`Exactly,' said the president of Delilah. `Thank God for the free
enterprise system.'

"The Antitrust Division of the Justice Department studied the merger for
months. Finally the Attorney General made his ruling. `While we find
drawbacks to only one company being left in the United Sates, we feel the
advantages to the public far outweigh the disadvantages.'

"`Therefore, we're making an exception in this case and allowing Samson and
Delilah to merge.'

"`I would also like to announce that the Samson and Delilah Company is now
negotiating at the White House with the President to buy the United States.
The Justice Department will naturally study this merger to see if it
violates any of our strong antitrust laws.'"

The cultural war on Western civilization

Keith Windschuttle

New Criterion, January 2002
http://www.sydneyline.com/WaronWesterncivilization.htm

In the last week of September, shortly after the terrorist
assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the
Prime Minister of Italy, Silvio Berlusconi, made an
extraordinary statement. During a visit to Germany, he
declared Western civilization superior to Islam. He said:

We must be aware of the superiority of our civilization, a
system that has guaranteed well-being, respect for human
rights and - in contrast with Islamic countries - respect
for religious and political rights.

The minute he had uttered these words, a bevy of European
politicians rushed to denounce him. The Belgian Prime
Minister, Guy Verhofstadt, said: "I can hardly believe that
the Italian Prime Minister made such statements." Spokesman
for the European Commission, Jean-Christophe Filori, added:
"We certainly don't share the views expressed by Mr
Berlusconi." Italy's centre-left opposition spokesman
Giovanni Berlinguer called the words "eccentric and
dangerous". Within days, Berlusconi was forced to withdraw.

It is true that the statement could have been more
diplomatically timed, made as it was while American
officials were trying to put together an anti-terrorist
coalition of Islamic allies. But there is little doubt it
would have generated just as many denials no matter when it
was uttered. The statement was extraordinary because,
although Western superiority in every major area of human
endeavour, especially in political and individual liberty,
is patently obvious to everyone, it has become a truth that
must not be spoken.

The chief reason is the prevailing ideology of the Western
intelligentsia. For the past two decades and more, the
leading opinion makers in the media, the universities and
the churches have regarded Western superiority as, at best,
something to be ashamed of, and at worst, something to be
opposed. Until thirty years ago, when Western intellectuals
reflected on the long-term achievements of their culture,
they explained it in terms of its own evolution: the
inheritance of ancient Greece, Rome and Christianity,
tempered by the Renaissance, the Reformation, the
Enlightenment and the scientific and industrial revolutions.
Even a radical critique like Marxism was primarily an
internal affair, intent on fulfilling what it imagined to be
the destiny of the West, taking its history to what it
thought would be a higher level.

Today, however, such thinking is dismissed by the prevailing
intelligentsia as triumphalist. Western political and
economic dominance is more commonly explained not by its
internal dynamics but by its external behaviour, especially
its rivalry and aggression towards other cultures. Western
success has purportedly been at their expense. Instead of
pushing for internal reform or revolution, this new
radicalism constitutes an overwhelmingly negative critique
of Western civilization itself.

According to this ideology, instead of attempting to
globalise its values, the West should stay in its own
cultural backyard. Values like universal human rights,
individualism and liberalism are regarded merely as
ethnocentric products of Western history. The scientific
knowledge that the West has produced is simply one of many
"ways of knowing". In place of Western universalism, this
critique offers the relativism of multiculturalism, a
concept that regards the West not as the pinnacle of human
achievement to date, but as simply one of many equally valid
cultural systems.

Although originally designed to foster tolerance and respect
for other cultures, these sentiments were subsequently
captured by the radical left and manipulated to the point of
inconsistency. Their plea for acceptance and open-mindedness
does not extend to Western culture itself, whose history is
regarded as little more than a crime against the rest of
humanity. The West cannot judge other cultures but must
condemn its own.

Though commonly known as multiculturalism, this position is
defined by its supporters with a series of post prefixes:
postmodernism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism. However,
it is best understood as an anti phenomenon because it
defines itself not by what it is for but by what it is
against. It is entirely a negation of Western culture and
values: whatever the West supports, this anti-West rejects.

The aftermath to September 11 provided a stark illustration
of its values. Within days of the terrorist assault, a
number of influential Western intellectuals, including Noam
Chomsky, Susan Sontag and youthful counterparts such as
Naomi Klein of the anti-globalisation protest movement,
responded in ways that, morally and symbolically, were no
different to the celebrations of the crowds on the streets
of Palestine and Islamabad who cheered as they watched the
towers of the World Trade Center come crashing down.
Stripped of its obligatory jargon, their argument was
straightforward: America deserved what it got.

This intellectual response was not couched in terms of
Western humanist values. Instead, it represented a descent
into the kind of relativism not seen since the days of Lenin
and Hitler when class-based and race-based hatreds were
morally sanctioned by radical politics. The major difference
today is that this time it is not class or race but the
whole of Western society that has been relativised.

This anti-Western, multicultural, postcolonial intellectual
edifice constitutes a true ideology: it sees the world as an
arena of conflict and has a political program to change the
world for its own ends. It is formidable in its
comprehensiveness and in the number of intellectual fields
it encompasses. They include history, literature, the arts,
the social sciences, the physical sciences, and the law. It
is also formidable in the number of professional and public
institutions it has successfully captured and whose agenda
it now controls. With the demise of Marxism since the 1980s,
it has emerged as its major ideological successor. What
follows is a summary of the creed, coupled with some of the
more obvious objections to it.

Western culture was founded on aggression towards others:
Despite being employed for the purpose of transmitting
culture, most of the writers, editors and teachers who
advocate this cause are united in their hostility to the
cultural traditions that have nurtured them from birth. They
see the whole of Western culture since the ancient Greeks as
something to be disowned.

The person who did most to establish this interpretation was
Edward Said, the Arab-American literary critic employed by
Columbia University, New York, and a long-time activist for
the Palestinian cause. His influential 1978 book,
Orientalism, claimed that, from its classical origins,
Western culture had been defined not by its own internal
development, but by its long history of antagonism to "the
Other", that is, to non-Western cultures.

This motif persists, Said claims, from its origins in Homer
right down to the modern period. The desire to rule distant
peoples has had a "privileged status" in the West. There has
been "something systematic" about its imperial culture that
was not evident in other empires. Moreover, while Europe's
ability to take over and rule distant colonies might now be
a thing of the past, the imperialist imperative lives on
today in American foreign and economic policy, where it is
validated by Western culture and ideology. Said claims it is
still driven, as it was in the nineteenth century, by the
West's "untrammelled rapacity, greed and immorality".

In particular, he argues, Western oriental scholarship led
Europeans to see Islamic culture as static in both time and
place, as "eternal, uniform and incapable of defining
itself". This gave Europe a sense of its own cultural and
intellectual superiority. It consequently saw itself as a
dynamic, innovative, expanding culture and rationalised its
imperial ambition not as a form of conquest but as the
redemption of a degenerate world.

Said has spawned a school of followers from a variety of
intellectual disciplines. One of them is Richard Waswo, who,
in his 1997 book, The Founding Legend of Western
Civilization, traces the story of the fall of Troy and the
founding of Rome by the Trojan survivors to show how it has
been represented in Western literature ever since. He calls
the story a "legend of perpetual colonisation" that "became
the rationale for imperialist attitudes from ancient Rome to
Vietnam". He examines the legend from its first expression
in The Aeneid , to the Faerie Queene, to the fiction of
Joseph Conrad and E. M. Forster, and to its manifestations
in the films of John Ford, in the defoliation of Vietnam and
in the current policies of the World Bank.

Waswo is not an historian but is Professor of English at the
University of Geneva. This has not, however, prevented him
from receiving the endorsement of some of America's most
celebrated academic historians such as Hayden White, who
praises him for having written "a counter-history to the
official version, a complete re-reading of the Western
canon", and "an indictment of the whole of Western
civilization". This last phrase summarises the appeal of the
book, not only for aging radicals like White but also for a
younger generation of middle-class student protestors. The
most prominent among the student rioters against
globalisation in Seattle, Washington and Genoa in the past
two years were those who learnt their version of Western
cultural history at the feet of teachers inspired by authors
like Said, Waswo and White.

The claim that Western culture has always defined itself in
opposition to others is an assumption that usually goes
unquestioned in academic debate today. There is, however,
very little to recommend it. Although they have long
distinguished themselves from the Barbarians of the world,
Europeans do not primarily draw their identity from
comparisons with other cultures. Instead, identity comes
from their own heritage, from classical Greece, Rome and
Christianity. Western identity is overwhelmingly defined by
historical references to its earlier selves, rather than by
geographical comparisons with others. To claim otherwise is
to deny the central thrust of Western education for the past
one thousand years.

The argument also displays a highly selective view of
imperial history in that it ignores empires other than those
of Europe. The truth is that all great civilizations have
absorbed other peoples, sometimes in harmony, sometimes by
the sword. The Islamic world that this thesis defends is no
different. The Ottoman Turks ruled most of the Middle East
for a thousand years, largely with the concurrence of their
Arab subjects. The British and the French displaced them in
the nineteenth century, again with the approval of the
Arabs, who by then wanted liberation from Ottoman rule. The
Arabs themselves were not indigenous to most of the regions
they now populate. Before the Turks, they were an imperial
power who arose out of the Arabian Peninsula in the seventh
century to conquer the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia
and Southern Europe. None of this history provokes any
censure from the critics of imperialism today, who reserve
their reproaches exclusively for the European variety.

Western literature and arts endorse imperialism: Until the
last two decades, most people brought up within Western
culture believed that its literature, its art and its music
were among the glories of its civilization. Western literary
criticism once aimed to seek out the genius of its authors
and to extol their contribution to defining the human
condition. Today, much of the academic debate about the
Western literary heritage claims that it is politically
contaminated. Some of these charges have long been well
known because they offended against the post-1970s
ideological triumvirate of gender, race and class: Othello
is ethnocentric, Paradise Lost is a feminist tragedy, Jane
Eyre is both racist and sexist.
However, Western literature is today most severely rebuked
for its support of imperialism. The theorist making this
accusation is, again, Edward Said. He claims the flowering
of European literature since the sixteenth century either
directly endorsed or provided a supportive environment for
the expansion of Europe in the same period. Said draws on
the thesis of the French historical theorist, Michel
Foucault, that all knowledge serves the ends of power and
that all intellectual disciplines, including literary and
art criticism, are politically motivated.

Said argues this has been especially true of the novel, an
art form that originated in the eighteenth century when
European expansionism knew no boundaries. In his 1993 book
Culture and Imperialism he claims that, of all modern
literary forms, it is the novel that has been most culpable
in reproducing and advocating the power relations of empire.
His critique encompasses not only novels that are overtly
about imperial affairs, such as those of Joseph Conrad and
Rudyard Kipling, but even the work of such apparently
domestic writers as Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. One of
Jane Austen's characters in Mansfield Park, Sir Thomas
Bertram, owns a sugar plantation in the Caribbean, so this
implicates her in support of slavery, Said claims. In Great
Expectations, Charles Dickens despatches one of his
characters to Australia and another to Egypt, so this makes
him an imperialist author, too.

Said extends his critique to opera, which he describes as an
art form "that belongs equally to the history of culture and
the historical experience of overseas domination". Because
Giuseppe Verdi's Aida is set in ancient Egypt, Said claims
it fosters military aggression towards the Orient. It
contains "imperialist structures of attitude and reference"
that acts as an "anaesthetic" on European audiences, leading
them to ignore the brutality that accompanied their conquest
of other countries.

Equally culpable are European paintings of the Orient, even
those of Delacroix and Ingres, which critics once thought
portrayed the region in romantically admiring terms.
Instead, art critics who follow Said now use them as
examples of subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice
against Arabo-Islamic peoples and their culture. They
purportedly exhibit the aggressiveness necessitated by the
colonial expansion of the European powers. These paintings
are primarily a reflection of European arrogance and Western
prejudices: "the idea of Oriental decay, the subjection of
women, an unaccountable legal system - pictorial rhetoric
that served a subtle imperialistagenda".

Presented like this, stripped of their theoretical
obfuscation, the ideas are transparently crude. They
resemble the reductionism of one-time Marxist criticism,
which invariably saw Western art and literature as
expressions of "nothing but" the venal interests of the
ruling class, the bourgeoisie or some other culpable social
class. They also stretch interpretation beyond credulity.
The idea that, because Jane Austen presents one
plantation-owning character, of whom heroine, plot and
author all plainly disapprove, she thereby becomes a
handmaiden of imperialism and slavery, is to misunderstand
both the novel and the biography of its author, who was an
ardent opponent of the slave trade. Similarly, to argue that
because Charles Dickens uses some overseas locations as
convenient off-stage sites to advance his plots, he thereby
become an advocate of empire, is to give him attitudes he
never expressed. To claim that the art form of opera or the
romantic indulgence of the nineteenth century Orientalist
school of painting, derives from the European experience of
overseas domination is to make an ideological misreading of
them all.

Yet such is the authority of the dominant thesis that
contemporary writers rush to praise these kinds of
analytical crudities. "Readers accustomed to the precision
and elegance of Edward Said's analytical prowess," writes
the Nobel laureate, Toni Morrison, for the cover blurb of
Culture and Imperialism, "will not be disappointed." In
return, not surprisingly, Morrison herself earns equally
lavish compliments from the same school of criticism.

Of greater concern is the penetration this thesis has
achieved in the higher education system. Edward Said is the
immediate past president of the Modern Language Association,
the principal professional association for teachers of
literature at American universities. Publishers of books set
for these courses now routinely commission the advocates of
such theories to edit and introduce the literary texts that
students will study. Penguin Books, for instance, engaged
Said himself as editor of its latest edition of Rudyard
Kipling's masterpiece, Kim. A like-minded critic was also
commissioned to introduce the Penguin Classics edition of
Jane Austen's Mansfield Park and to endorse Said's thesis
that this quintessentially domestic author was implicated in
British imperial expansion.

The Western economic system exploits the rest of the world:
According to this ideology, Western prosperity is based on
ill-gotten gains. Globalisation, its adherents claim, is a
euphemism for American imperialism. The poverty of the Third
World is purportedly entrenched by debts from the
International Monetary Fund and the free market policies of
the World Trade Organisation. Hence, students and trade
unionists riot outside the meetings that decide these
policies, and church leaders sermonize us to forgive the
debt.

Some of this argument is made in historical terms. The
capital that funded the industrial revolution, some authors
claim, derived from the twin exploitations of colonialism
and slavery. Edward Said still cites the work of the
Trinidad Marxist Eric Williams, who argued in Capitalism
and Slavery (1944) that profits from the transport and sale
of slaves made a substantial contribution to financing the
industrial revolution in Britain. Hence, all those
subsequent generations of Europeans who have enjoyed the
standards of living provided by industrialism have done so
>from capital accumulated on the backs of black slave labour.

Another celebrated author in the same genre is Andre Gunder
Frank whose book ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age
(199 rejects the thesis that European entrepreneurship,
ingenuity and technological innovation were responsible for
the commercial and industrial revolutions between the
seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. "Europe did not pull
itself up by its own economic bootstraps," Frank writes,
"and it was certainly not thanks to any kind of European
'exceptionalism', of rationality, institutions,
entrepreneurship, technology, geniality, in a word - of
race". Instead, he claims: "Europe climbed up on the back of
Asia, then stood on Asian shoulders - temporarily."

Both these arguments, however, are untenable. Some
revisionist historians of British colonialism have recently
overturned them. In the newly published Oxford History of
the British Empire, for instance, David Richardson analyses
the contribution of the slave trade to the industrialism in
Britain and finds profits from slaving voyages contributed
less than one per cent of total domestic investment in
Britain at the time. In other words, slavery was irrelevant
to the industrial revolution.

Similarly, the profits from British investments in its
empire in the nineteenth century were not exploitative.
Historians such as P. J. Marshall, P. G. Cain and A. G.
Hopkins have shown British investment benefited India,
Africa and South America considerably. It provided the
infrastructure of ports, roads, railways and communications
that allowed them access to the modern world.

European imperialism ended in the 1940s and 1950s. The
non-West has now had half a century to try its own economic
prescriptions. The fact that many of these countries have
not progressed beyond the kickstart provided by European
colonial investment can no longer be blamed on the West.
Those who have chosen to emulate the Western model, such as
Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore, have shown that it
is possible to transform a backward Third World country into
a prosperous, modern, liberal democratic nation in as little
as two generations. In Japan's case, the model allowed it to
rise from the ashes of total defeat to become a world power
in less than forty years.

Those countries that still wallow in destitution and
underdevelopment do so not because of Western imperialism,
racism or oppression, but because of policies they have
largely chosen themselves. For example, after independence
in 1947, India's flirtation with the Soviet bloc and with
socialist economics needlessly condemned the country to
Third World status, and consigned much of its population to
humiliating poverty. Had India chosen the Japanese path, it
could have been by now a much greater power than China. It
is only in the past decade, with the partial adoption of the
liberal economic policies of the capitalist West, that its
fortunes have begun to turn around.

Elsewhere in the Third World, American policies of granting
and lending money, of setting up factories there and of
importing the goods they produce, cannot plausibly be
regarded as imperialist exploitation. If it were, the
countries involved would hardly be holding out their hands
for more. Nor would they be recording the economic growth
rates that are the envy of all those who lack the same
American investment.

Victimhood should prevail over individualism: Western
individualism is another of the targets of this ideology. It
regards individualism as both the cause and effect of
capitalism, which in its turn produced the imperialism that
now oppresses the wretched of the earth. Individualism is
also regarded as deriving from such ethnocentric
Enlightenment constructs as human rights. It is the one
great barrier to a collectivist solution for humankind. So
individualism has to go.

In its place, the creed offers victimhood. Its political
constituency comprises those it defines -- by whatever
stretch of the imagination this might take -- as the
underdogs and the marginals of society. Within Western
countries, this includes ethnic and racial minorities,
women, homosexuals, indigenous peoples, the exiled, the
poor, the incarcerated and the insane. Beyond Western
society, it includes the masses of the Third World.

It is in pursuit of this political objective that much of
the recent revision of the history curriculum has been done.
Western history is no longer to be judged by the record of
its achievements. Instead, it is to become a story of the
struggle of its victims against oppression and
discrimination, and of how they have risen to challenge
their exploiters. Consequently, the purpose of teaching
history becomes to "empower" its victims.
One of the key intellectual concepts of victimhood is that
of exile. As the number of refugees, asylum seekers and
illegal immigrants around the world mounts, so does the
number of exiles. In fact, this is one quality many Western
academics believe they have in common with those who now
crowd their borders. There are two dimensions to this
identification. On the one hand, these intellectuals assume
for themselves the role of spokesmen for the poor, the weak
and the disadvantaged. They denounce the governments and
powerful interests they claim have produced the desperation
of the exiles.

On the other hand, intellectuals can share their trauma
because, deep down, they are exiles too. Radical
intellectuals claim to know what it is like to be
psychically banished, to feel displaced, uncertain of their
identities, uncommitted to any location. These feelings even
extend to those who still live in the country of their birth
but who, because of their ethnic or sexual identity, sense
they do not quite belong. One fashionable feminist book
about a number of Australian women writers is entitled
Exiles at Home.

Edward Said claims exile is the real condition of the modern
intellectual. Indeed, he says, he knows it at first hand.
"My own experience of these matters," he says in
Orientalism, "are in part what made me write this book."
Like many of his kind, however, Said's claims are
self-indulgent fabrications. He is the son of a wealthy
Arab-American businessman, and grew up in Cairo in a
household with a butler, two drivers and a bevy of servants.
He spent his teenage years at an exclusive American private
boarding school. He later invented an identity as a
Palestinian refugee, a persona that allowed him full exile
status:


The life of an Arab Palestinian in the West, particularly in
America, is disheartening. There exists here an almost
unanimous consensus that politically he does not exist, and
when it is allowed that he does, it is either as a nuisance
or as an Oriental. The web of racism, cultural stereotypes,
political imperialism, dehumanising ideology holding in the
Arab or the Muslim is very strong indeed, and it is this web
which every Palestinian has come to feel as his uniquely
punishing destiny.

Similarly, the Parisian poststructuralist feminist
celebrity, Hélène Cixious, complains in a memoir about
her adolescent travails as an Algerian Jewish girl in the
French colony:

I saw how the white, superior, plutocratic, civilised world
funded its power on the repression of populations who had
suddenly become "invisible", like proletarians, immigrant
workers, minorities who are not the right "colour". Women.
Invisible as humans. I saw that the great, noble, "advanced"
countries established themselves by expelling what was
"strange".

Despite the discrimination and oppression Said and Cixious
claim to have suffered, they fail to mention that this same
white plutocracy gave both of them tenured university posts
that put them among the most materially and occupationally
privileged human beings on the planet. Nor do they
acknowledge that both enjoy the added indulgence of the
freedom to make whatever criticisms they fancy of the
countries that sustain them.

The careers of Said and Cixious demonstrate that, while it
is one thing for a Western academic to pretend to speak on
behalf of the wretched of the earth, it is an even smarter
tactic to claim to be one of the wretched yourself. This way
you not only become an articulate symbol of all that
suffering but you disarm your critics. Your words become
sacrosanct. Anyone who doubts you or dares to challenge your
claims thereby reveals himself as bigoted and uncaring. You
are beyond censure.

The West must be "provincialised": One of the most prominent
fields of study produced by this ideology is
postcolonialism. This is an intellectual movement focussed
primarily on the study of history and literature, although
it is usually conducted at such an arcane level of theory
that former students of either history or literature would
find their subjects unrecognisable. Postcolonial social
theorists and critics have gained a major foothold in
academic life in the United States.

One of the leading tendencies within postcolonialism is the
Subaltern group of Indian historians or, more accurately,
Indian theorists about history. In 1994, the American
Historical Review, the journal of the leading professional
association, devoted an issue to them. The Subalterns took
their name from a phrase coined by the Italian Marxist
theorist, Antonio Gramsci. Their Indian origins lay in the
1960s middle class Marxist movement, the Naxalites, who
emulated the Red Guards of Mao-tse-tung's China by
assassinating landlords and police in Bihar province and
West Bengal. A number of the movement's members subsequently
moved to America and Australia where they gained academic
positions teaching history.

Although they address historical topics, the Subalterns
offer a radical critique of the discipline, which they see
not as a methodology that can be applied to any society but
as an ethnocentric product of European culture. History,
they assert, is an artefact of the Western nation state.
Contesting the imperialism of the West involves contesting
its version of history as well. India, of course, gained its
independence fifty years ago so one might have thought there
has since been plenty of opportunity for its historians to
go their own way. The Subalterns insist, however, that they
still need to struggle to liberate themselves from European
modes of thought, especially English historiography.

Rather than arguing the point at home in India, these
theorists choose to do it in the Western education system.
Indeed, one reason why there are now so many Indian
academics employed in the humanities departments of American
universities is because of the network of influence provided
by the postcolonial movement.

The aim of their project is to use postmodernist and
poststructuralist literary analysis to deconstruct
historical documents to recover the voice of the colonial
oppressed who, because they were illiterate, left no
documents of their own. They want to recover the authentic
voice of Indian peasants, bandits and others of low caste
and to rewrite them into history. While English historians
have generally regarded Mahatma Ghandi and the Congress
Party as the leaders of the nationalist struggle against
British imperialism, postcolonial historians want to argue
that it was actually the work of the Indian lower orders.

In using postmodernism and poststructuralism, the
postcolonialists are adopting theoretical tools used by
other radical ideologues. The journal Postcolonial Studies
describes their political alliances and connections.

Postcolonialism has much in common with other related
critical endeavours -- such as women's studies and
gay/lesbian studies -- classified under the rubric of the
"new humanities". Marked by an underlying scepticism, these
closely aligned projects find their shared intellectual
vocation in a determined opposition to coercive knowledge
systems and, concomitantly, in a committed pursuit and
recovery of those ways of knowing which have been occluded
-- or, in Foucault's terminology "subjugated" -- by the
epistemic accidents of history. Given its particular
inheritance, postcolonialism has directed its own critical
antagonism toward the universalising knowledge claims of
"western civilization".

In other words, although it claims to eschew Western
culture, the methodology of the postcolonial critique
derives from one radical stream of the West itself. The
members of this movement want to reject the West but all
they are doing is choosing one aspect of its intellectual
culture, European poststructuralist theory, over another,
English historiography.
Some of them do recognise this dilemma. Dipesh Chakrabarty,
a Subaltern historian recently appointed to a personal chair
at the University of Chicago, has written a book called
Provincialising Europe (2000), whose title neatly summarises
the intellectual ambitions of the movement. Provincialising
means to "re-read the European philosophers of modernity in
order to show up the parochialism of their imagination".

Chakrabarty also wants to transcend the limits of the
methodological assumptions of European forms of
investigation. For instance, he wants to incorporate the
magical beliefs of traditional India into its history, not
as categories to be observed sceptically but as living
historical presences. However, he is too committed to the
modern intellect to believe in magic himself so the best he
can do is revert to the language of the German Nietzschean
philosopher, Martin Heidegger, and recommend his hermeneutic
analysis of "particular ways of being-in-the-world". In
short, Chakrabarty would rather withdraw into arcane and
largely irrelevant theoretical speculation than adopt the
contaminated tools of English historiography.

Despite the substantial academic and publishing resources
now being invested in it, and despite its claim to be
showing both Indians and other oppressed peoples how to
recover their own epistemological independence,
postcolonialism is a profoundly backward intellectual
movement. There is nothing about it that is innovatively
non-Western or, indeed, original in any way. To use a
favourite term of one of its other gurus, the University of
Chicago literary theorist Homi Bhabha, it is yet another
example of colonial "mimicry" of the West. Only, in this
case, it shuns the most positive aspects of the Western
intellectual tradition in order to mimic the worst.

Western values are culturally relative: In 1987, the
American philosopher Allan Bloom opened his withering
dissection of the faults of the higher education system, The
Closing of the American Mind, with the observation of the
triumph of relativism. "There is one thing a professor can
be absolutely certain of," he remarked, "almost every
student entering the university believes, or says he
believes, that truth is relative." In the face of the
various claims to truth and the divergent ways of life that
characterise modern society, higher education had responded,
Bloom argued, by promoting the idea that the real danger was
the true believer. This, he noted with bitter irony, was
"the great insight of our times".
The study of history and of culture teaches that all the
world was mad in the past; men always thought they were
right, and that led to wars, persecutions, slavery,
xenophobia, racism and chauvinism. The point is not to
correct the mistakes and really be right; rather it is not
to think you are right at all.

More than a decade on, Bloom's observation not only
continues to be confirmed but relativism has become
institutionalised in the higher education sector and is now
taught as a formal doctrine. This is accomplished both
through broad intellectual tendencies such as postmodernism
and poststructuralism as well as in particular curriculum
areas such as cultural studies, anthropology, literary
theory, women's studies, the sociology of science, and the
history and philosophy of science.

One of the intellectual devices by which this has been
accomplished is through a change in the meaning of the term
"culture". Until recent decades, this term was widely used
in the sense established by Matthew Arnold in his great
nineteenth century tract, Culture and Anarchy, where it
meant "the best that has been thought and said". His concept
of artistic excellence and of its critical appreciation by
an educated elite provided the principal rationale for the
teaching of the humanities for the first two-thirds of the
twentieth century.
At the same time, however, the discipline of anthropology
had its own meaning for the term. Anthropologists used
culture in the sense defined by the nineteenth century
German romantic movement, by which it meant the whole way of
life of a distinct people. As academic politics after the
1960s succumbed to a fierce kind of egalitarianism in which
excellence and elitism became pejorative terms, the
Arnoldian definition lost its position. The belief that all
cultures were equal took its place.

This notion of cultural relativism entailed a radical
re-thinking of Western intellectual life. In aesthetic
criticism, it meant traditional standards had to be
jettisoned. Italian opera could no longer be regarded as
superior to Chinese opera. The theatre of Shakespeare was
not better than that of Kabuki, only different.

In political thought, the pursuit of universal values such
as human rights became suspect. Rather than principles that
were eternal or self-evident, cultural relativists said
these values were bound by their own time and space. They
were simply the ethno-centric products of the eighteenth
century European Enlightenment. Instead of human rights, the
fashionable term became social justice. Human rights not
only derive from the West but they have also been written
down in declarations and laws, so it is possible to check
what they mean. Social justice lacks these qualities but
this gives it the advantage of meaning whatever you want it
to. Moreover, there is no way of ever telling when it is
satisfied. Social justice thus offers an unlimited vista of
political appeal.

The major problems for the acceptance of cultural relativism
have come from its source in anthropology. Cultural
practices from which most Westerners instinctively shrink,
such as cannibalism, human sacrifice, the incineration of
widows and female genital mutilation, have had to be
accorded their own integrity, lest the culture that produced
them be demeaned.
This has not been easy but the feminist movement has been
the leader in coming to the rescue. Although they initially
found the overt misogyny of many tribal cultures
distasteful, feminists in recent years have come to respect
practices they once condemned. Feminist academics now deny
that sati is barbaric. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak gives it
an honourable place in Indian culture by comparing it to the
Christian tradition of martyrdom. Female genital mutilation
has been redefined as genital "cutting", which Germaine
Greer argues should be recognized as an authentic
manifestation of the culture of the Muslim women concerned.

Similarly, the Parisian literary theorist, Tzvetan Todorov,
in The Conquest of America (1985), compared cannibalism to
the Christian Eucharist, and the Australian postmodern
historian, Greg Dening, in Mr Bligh's Bad Language (1992),
declared human sacrifice to be the ritual equivalent of
capital punishment.

To any outside observer, something is obviously going
terribly wrong here. The logic of their relativism is taking
Western academics into dark waters. They are now prepared to
countenance practices that are obviously cruel, unnatural
and life-denying, that is, practices that offend against all
they claim to stand for.

The reality is that if all cultures are relative then we are
faced with moral nihilism. If values are always expressions
of something called culture, and there are no universal
moral principles, then no culture can itself be subjected to
any values, because there could be no trans-cultural values
to stand in judgement over any particular culture. Cultural
relativism, in short, approves any cultural practice at all,
no matter how barbaric. It is a philosophy of anything goes.

Moreover, cultural relativists are faced with two other
unresolvable dilemmas. They endorse as legitimate other
cultures that do not return the compliment. Some other
cultures, of which the best known is Islam, will have no
truck with relativism of any kind. The devout are totally
confident of the universalism of their own beliefs, which
derive from the dictates of God, an absolute authority who
is external to the world and its cultures. They regard a
position such as Western cultural relativism as profoundly
mistaken and, moreover, insulting. Relativism devalues their
faith because it reduces it to merely one of many equally
valid systems of meaning. So, entailed within cultural
relativism is, first, an endorsement of absolutisms that
deny it, and, second, a demeaning attitude to cultures it
claims to respect.

Western knowledge is culturally relative: Despite the
overwhelming success of the scientific methods developed in
Europe from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the
critics of Western culture still insist that truth is
relative. Western knowledge is only one kind of knowledge
and Western methodologies are only one of the "ways of
knowing".
There are a number of sources of this cognitive relativism
but the most popular is that of the French Nietzschean
theorist, Michael Foucault, who argues that truth and
objectivity are Western conceits. All knowledge is bound by
culture, he claims. Within each culture, knowledge is
generated for political purposes. Hence, Western knowledge
is politically beholden to the powerful. To signify this
interconnectivity, Foucault calls it "power/knowledge".

This is a congenial argument for postcolonial historians.
They believe that Western empirical methods were among the
forces that subjugated the Orient, so they regard empiricism
and its quest for objective knowledge as a form of
imperialism. This is why they are so enamoured of the
subjective hermeneutics, or literary interpretations, that
prevail in postmodernism and cultural studies. Objectivity
equals domination; subjectivism equals intercultural
equality and respect.

If taken seriously, this means that science can no longer be
regarded as a universal method for discovering truths.
Moreover, it means that any reasonably coherent doctrine or
body of beliefs can produce "truths" of its own. Science is
thus reduced to one belief system among many. This view is
especially popular within the fields of cultural studies and
the sociology of knowledge where science is invariably
termed "Western science", in order to differentiate it from
its ostensible competitors. As one of Australia's leading
academic sociologists, R. W. Connell, has put it:

The idea that Western rationality must produce universally
valid knowledge increasingly appears doubtful. It is, on the
face of it, ethnocentric. Certain Muslim philosophers point
to the possibility of grounding science in different
assumptions about the world, specifically those made by
Islam, and thus develop the concept of Islamic science.

This claim, however, is no different from some of the more
grotesque historical examples of relativism in science: for
instance, the conflict between "Aryan" and "Jewish physics",
which set back German science under the Nazi regime, and the
claims by the Marxist plant geneticist, T. D. Lysenko, to
have developed a "proletarian" approach to science, in
opposition to "bourgeois" science. The application of
Lysenko's methods to agriculture not only produced a series
of disastrous crop failures in the USSR in the 1930s and
1940s, but was partly responsible for the Chinese famine of
1958-62, the worst in human history, which caused the deaths
of between thirty and forty million people during the
so-called Great Leap Forward.

One can only wish that, instead of deploying armaments
produced by Western technology, the present armed forces and
terrorist cells of some Islamic countries heed the advice of
the postcolonial theorists and adopt the inventions of
Muslim science instead. The most recent Muslim innovation in
armaments was the Mameluke curved sabre of the fourteenth
century.

The truth is that the scientific method developed by the
West is a universal method and its success is sufficient to
refute any theory about the relativism of truth. Western
science makes genuine discoveries. Western knowledge works,
and none of the others do with remotely the same
effectiveness. To say this, however, is not to be
ethnocentric. Western knowledge has nothing whatever to do
with racism, or the elevation of one segment of humanity
over another. It endorses a style of knowledge and its
implementation, not any particular race of people or ethnic
group. This style of knowledge did, of course, have to
emerge somewhere and at some time, and to this extent it
certainly has links with the Western intellectual tradition.
It emerged in this social context, but it is clearly
accessible to people of any background. Far from being bound
by Western culture, Western science belongs to the whole of
humanity.

Culture prevails over civilization: When Silvio Berlusconi
spoke of Western civilization rather than Western culture,
he was reviving terminology that cultural relativism has
rendered uncomfortable. The term "civilization" is not
archaic but is actually a concept from the modern era. The
word did not come into use until the 1770s. The first time
it entered Dr Johnson's English dictionary was the fourth
edition of 1772, and it was only accepted by the dictionary
of the French Academy in 1798.

Civilization was a concept born in the European
Enlightenment and was identified principally with societies
that were based on reason, that were open to new ideas, and
that looked to the wider world for inspiration. In Germany
at the same time, the romantic movement arose in opposition
to this. Instead of reason as the basis of social
organization, romanticism emphasised organic connections to
the land and the virtues of closed rather than open
communities. Civilization implied there was a hierarchy of
human societies and that there were some who had not made
the grade. Civilization meant establishing a polity on
rational principles like liberalism and democracy whereas
romanticism emphasized the bloodlines of ethnicity and race.

"Civilization" was in common use for the next two centuries.
However, it became one of the first casualties of the
culture wars of the post-Vietnam War era. After the 1970s it
was widely regarded as politically incorrect. Subsequently,
it took on an embarrassed and apologetic demeanour and was
retained primarily as token usage.

In its place, the romantic concept of culture as a whole way
of life came to prevail. Such a view was a direct result of
the rise to intellectual prominence of the creed identified
here. Its version of culture recognises no hierarchies and
no excellence. Western civilization is just another culture.
Cultures are beyond good and evil. Accordingly, "cultural
studies" is the field that now dominates academic teaching
and research in the humanities, in triumph over its
adversary, the cultivation of civilization.

Ultimately, this is why Silvio Berlusconi's reference to the
superiority of "our civilization" was so shocking and why so
many of his European peers reacted in horror. He threw aside
the conceptual shroud that had smothered these issues for so
long. While Berlusconi's usage was striking, however, it was
not original. He was echoing words already used by the
American president. In the immediate aftermath of September
11, George W. Bush described the terrorist assaults as "an
attack on civilization". This instinctive response was the
real breakthrough, and is perhaps the one positive outcome
of those terrible events. The assaults left anyone who could
think for himself with a sudden clarity of vision about what
was at stake. This is why radicals like Susan Sontag went
out of their way to mock and subvert Bush's usage, by
putting terms like civilization and liberty within scare
quotes to undermine their authority, thereby trying,
unsuccessfully, to restore the ideological shroud.

We are fortunate there is still a generation that
understands the term civilization and is prepared to use it
in all its connotations. For it still signifies the yawning
chasm that exists between open societies based on universal
principles and closed, self-absorbed communities based on
relativist, tribal values. If the Western intellectual left
had its way, the word would be expunged from memory. If that
ever happened, it would be that much harder for the heirs of
Western civilization to appreciate all it has achieved and,
above all, to be prepared to defend it.

Liberal Fundamentalism
Who are the intolerant extremists?

Monday, May 16, 2005
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110006694

(Editor's note: The editorial appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Sept.
13, 1984.)

We have been following the extensive theological commentary in the press
on the subject of politics and religion in the current presidential
campaign. It might not otherwise have occurred to us that so many
editorialists and columnists harbored so many deep, pent-up opinions on
religious worship, voluntary school prayer or Christian fundamentalism.

What we have been looking for but have so far missed in this great
awakening of religious writing is a short sermon on the subject of
liberal fundamentalism. And so in the spirit of Samuel Johnson, who once
wrote homilies for his church pastor so as not to fall asleep during
Sunday services, we would like to offer a few thoughts on what has been
far and away the most messianic religion in America the past two
decades--liberal politics.

American liberalism has traditionally derived much of its energy from a
volatile mixture of emotion and moral superiority. The liberal belief
that one's policies would on balance accomplish something indisputably
good generally made opposing arguments about shortcomings, costs or
unintended consequences unpersuasive. Nonetheless, politics during the
presidencies of Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower was waged mainly as
politics and not as a kind of religious political crusade. Somehow that
changed during the Kennedy presidency.

Mr. Kennedy used the force of his personality to infuse his supporters
with a sense of transcendent mission--the New Frontier. The emotions
this movement inspired coincided with the one deeply moral political
phenomenon that postwar America has experienced--Martin Luther King's
civil-rights movement. The Rev. King's multiracial civil-rights marches
and their role in overturning de jure and de facto segregation in the
U.S. were a political and moral achievement.

In retrospect, it's clear that the moral clarity of the early
civil-rights movement was a political epiphany for many white liberals.
Some have since returned to traditional, private lives; others have
become neoconservatives. But many active liberals carried along their
newly found moral certitude and quasi-religious fervor into nearly every
major public-policy issue that has come along in the past 15 years. The
result has been liberal fundamentalism.

The Vietnam anti-war movement, the environmental movement, the
disarmament and nuclear-freeze movements, the anti-nuclear-power
movement, consumerism, the Third World movement, the limits-to-growth
movement. These have been the really active faiths in contemporary
America. Their adherents attended the anti-war march on Washington in
1970, locking arms and once again singing "We Shall Overcome." They
characterized the leader of their own country at the time as demonic.
More recently, they have held vigils outside nuclear power plants,
singing and holding lighted candles, while their lawyers filed
injunctions in friendly courtrooms. The Sierra Club and other
environmental groups transformed "the wilderness" into a vast,
pantheistic shrine, which they and fellow believers must defend against
the depredations of conservative developers. America's Roman Catholic
bishops denounced nuclear war and became revered figures in the
nuclear-freeze movement (but when they denounce abortion, they are
reviled).

_______

Not surprisingly, this evangelical liberalism produced a response.
Conservative groups--both secular and religious--were created, and they
quite obviously make the political success of their adversaries more
difficult. Liberals don't like that. So now, suddenly, we find all these
politicians and columnists who are afraid someone might want to impose a
particular point of view on them. "There is a long and unhappy history
of intolerance which still flourishes at the extremist fringe of
American politics," says Ted Kennedy, a fundamentalist liberal preacher
from eastern Massachusetts. Indeed there is. It greeted U.S. soldiers
returning to California from Vietnam with spit. It has characterized
people who work in the auto, drug and nuclear-power businesses as
criminally amoral. It turned the investigations of Anne Gorsuch, Les
Lenkowsky and Ed Meese into inquisitions.

If some liberals are now afraid that certain Christian fundamentalists
will reintroduce new forms of intolerance and excessive religious zeal
into American political life, perhaps we should concede the possibility
that they know what they're talking about. But they might also meditate
on the current election and why there has been an apparent rightward
shift in political sentiment in the U.S. It could be that a great many
voters have taken a good look at the fundamentalists on the religious
right and the fundamentalists on the political left and made up their
own minds about which pose the greater threat to their own private and
public values.

(Ed. Note: More leftist drivel)

A RADICAL IN THE WHITE HOUSE

BOB HERBERT
New York Times
April 18, 2005

Last week --- April 12, to be exact --- was the 60th anniversary of the
death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. "I have a terrific headache," he said
before collapsing at the Little White House in Warm Springs, Georgia. He
died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage on the 83rd day of his fourth term as
president. His hold on the nation was such that most Americans, stunned by
the announcement of his death that spring afternoon, reacted as though they
had lost a close relative.

That more wasn't made of this anniversary is not just a matter of time;
it's a measure of the distance the U.S.A has traveled from the egalitarian
ideals championed by F.D.R. His goal was "to make a country in which no
one is left out." That kind of thinking has long since been consigned to
the political dumpster. We're now in the age of Bush, Cheney and DeLay,
small men committed to the concentration of big bucks in the hands of the
fortunate few.

To get a sense of just how radical Roosevelt was (compared with the
politics of today), consider the State of the Union address he delivered
from the White House on Jan. 11, 1944. He was already in declining health
and, suffering from a cold, he gave the speech over the radio in the form
of a fireside chat.

After talking about the war, which was still being fought on two fronts,
the president offered what should have been recognized immediately for what
it was, nothing less than a blueprint for the future of the United States.
It was the clearest statement I've ever seen of the kind of nation the U.S.
could have become in the years between the end of World War II and now.

Roosevelt referred to his proposals in that speech as "a second Bill of
Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be
established for all regardless of station, race or creed."

Among these rights, he said, are:

" The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or
farms or mines of the nation.

" The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and
recreation.

" The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return
which will give him and his family a decent living.

" The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an
atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies
at home or abroad.

" The right of every family to a decent home.

" The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and
enjoy good health.

" The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age,
sickness, accident and unemployment.

" The right to a good education."

I mentioned this a few days ago to an acquaintance who is 30 years old.
She said, "Wow, I can't believe a president would say that."

Roosevelt's vision gave conservatives in both parties apoplexy in 1944 and
it would still drive them crazy today. But the truth is that during the
1950's and 60's the nation made substantial progress toward his wonderfully
admirable goals, before the momentum of liberal politics slowed with the
war in Vietnam and the election in 1968 of Richard Nixon.

It wouldn't be long before Ronald Reagan was, as the historian Robert
Dallek put it, attacking Medicare as "the advance wave of socialism" and
Dick Cheney, from a seat in Congress, was giving the thumbs down to Head
Start. Mr Cheney says he has since seen the light on Head Start.

But his real idea of a head start is to throw government money at people
who already have more cash than they know what to do with. He's one of the
leaders of the G.O.P. gang (the members should all wear masks) that has
executed a wholesale transfer of wealth via tax cuts from working people to
the very rich.

Roosevelt was far from a perfect president, but he gave hope and a sense of
the possible to a nation in dire need. And he famously warned against
giving in to fear.

The nation is now in the hands of leaders who are experts at exploiting
fear, and indifferent to the needs and hopes, even the suffering, of
ordinary people.

"The test of our progress," said Roosevelt, "is not whether we add more to
the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for
those who have too little."

Sixty years after his death we should be raising a toast to F.D.R. and his
progressive ideas. And we should take that opportunity to ask: How in the
world did we allow ourselves to get from there to here?

I insert some criticisms. As almost always in USA media, confusion is significant if not reigning.

R

WHERE ARE THE CHRISTIAN MODERATES?

SAM SMITH
Progressive® Review
May 9, 2005

The failure of Christian moderates to take on publicly religious extremists
who claim the same Bible and theology sadly brings to mind the failure of
liberals to take on Joseph McCarthy. As with McCarthyism, extremism
thrives in the valley of fear and silence.

In McCarthy's case it was some New England Republicans --- not liberals ---
who finally stood up effectively against McCarthy. They, like the
liberals, had kept silent too long, but at least they finally got the
courage to speak out.

Christian moderates need to look no further back than the civil rights
movement for a model of reaction. For it was some of the same sects ---
including the white southern Baptists --- who most fiercely opposed
desegregation. Judge Thomas P. Brady, a deacon and Sunday school teacher
at a Baptist church in Mississippi described the Supreme Court's
desegregation decision this way:

"Black Monday ranks in importance with July 4th, 1776.... May 17th, 1954 is
the date upon which the declaration of socialistic doctrine was officially
proclaimed throughout this nation. It was on Black Monday that the
judicial branch of our government usurped the sacred privilege and right of
the respective states of this union to educate their youth. This
usurpation constitutes the greatest travesty of the American Constitution
and jurisprudence in the history of this nation."

As late as 1997, Jim Wallis could write in Sojourners that:

"White evangelicalism simply has been wrong on the issue of race for a very
long time. Indeed, conservative white Christians have served as a bastion
of racial segregation and a bulwark against racial justice efforts for
decades, in the South and throughout the country.

"All during the civil rights struggle, the vast majority of white
evangelicals and their churches were on the wrong side --- the wrong side
of the truth, the Bible, and the gospel."

These are the same voices that have transferred their hatred and targets
for dominance from blacks to women and gays, who want their mean myopia to
be national policy, and who blaspheme the very icon they profess to worship
by their cruelty, prejudice and intolerance.

There are two big differences, however. The first is that the media refers
to and pictures these extremists not as bigots but as "people of faith."
To a remarkable degree, the press has accepted the virulent public policies
of the Christian right as worthy of respect and even admiration.

The second differences is that the voice of rational, moderate Christianity
is largely silent. Not only is there no Rev. Martin Luther King Jr
offering an appealing alternative to hate [I see - so Rev Al Sharplin etc
offer hate?] , but white bishops from the Episcopal Church are not being
pictured with locked arms walking with the weak towards freedom. There are
few coalitions of conscience in major cities and there is a lack of
sermons, donations, and activism.

By the 1960s, the reactionary religious right found itself with a vigorous
opponent helping to open the doors of hope it was blockading. Even the
Catholic Church was better known for its worker priests and liberation
theology than for its opposition to abortion. The secular and the
religious had joined in making America a better land. [NB - failure to
oppose abortion makes a better land, on the assumption of this Smith]

Nothing similar is happening now. This is not a sudden transition. The
observant have noted the retreat from progressive social action on the part
of moderate Christian churches over the past couple of decades. Just one
small example: how often have you seen a moderate Christian service or
commentator on television? [I see - so absence of a cause or viewpoint
from TV could not be a choice of the infotainment producers? Principled
informed objections to GM are absent from TV because I and other scientists
who agree with me lack courage to speak out??]

But, as with McCarthyism, it is better to be late than not to act at all.
Faced with the rise of the American Taliban [this is an outrageous
propagandistic term which almost alone would serve to condemn Smith as a
bigot], it is past time for moderate Christians to return their own faith
to honor and social good rather than to let it be defined by the tainted
turmoil of false prophets. Humanists and free thinkers can't do all the
work. These moderate Christians must stand up to our contemporary
religious bigots just as their predecessors did during the civil rights
struggle. And time is running out.

CORPORATIONS WEIGH SOCIAL ISSUES AGAINST BOTTOM LINE

TODD BISHOP AND DAN RICHMAN
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
April 28, 2005

The uproar over Microsoft Corp.'s change of position on Washington's gay
rights legislation is causing its top executives to ponder when --- and
whether --- a company should take official stands that go beyond the basic
business of making and selling products.

They aren't alone.

Experts in corporate citizenship say Microsoft's situation illustrates a
difficult question faced by many large companies --- especially on divisive
social issues where there is no consensus among employees, executives,
shareholders and customers.

It's a particularly thorny question for liberal-leaning Seattle
corporations whose stands on political issues might put them at odds with
customers in other parts of the country.

Judging by the range of approaches taken by different companies, there's no
universal answer. But one expert said the national spotlight now on
Microsoft should provide "a wake-up call" for other companies to consider
how to balance their support for social causes with the divergent
viewpoints of the people important to them.

"Increasingly, companies are going to be faced with issues like this," said
Bradley Googins, executive director of Boston College's Center for
Corporate Citizenship. "Most companies will look at this and say, 'I better
pay attention to this because we're going to be facing this same thing.'
And if they're not, they should."

The controversy began last week, when The Stranger, a Seattle alternative
weekly newspaper, reported that Microsoft had changed its position on the
gay rights legislation from support to neutrality and that the change came
under pressure from Pastor Ken Hutcherson of Antioch Bible Church in
Redmond. Hutcherson had threatened to organize a national boycott of
Microsoft products. [ bloody good idea anyhow]

Microsoft, which issued a letter last year supporting the legislation,
acknowledges that it decided to be neutral on the issue this year. But it
says it made the decision on its own, long before meeting with Hutcherson,
as part of an effort to narrow its focus for the legislative session to
issues more directly related to its business and industry.

Hutcherson disputes Microsoft's version of events, saying that the company
hadn't changed its position before he threatened a boycott during a
February meeting with Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith. In a segment
last night on ABC's World News Tonight, he called the company's statements
about the timing "an outright lie."

Microsoft reiterated its past statements. "At no point was our decision
influenced by external factors," company spokeswoman Tami Begasse said
yesterday.

But beyond the debate over Microsoft's shift in position, the controversy
raises a fundamental dilemma for the company.

Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer outlined that dilemma in an e-mail
message to employees last week. While he and company founder Bill Gates
both supported the legislation personally, Ballmer acknowledged that "many
employees and shareholders would not agree" with them.

"We are thinking hard about what is the right balance to strike --- when
should a public company take a position on a broader social issue, and when
should it not?" he wrote. "What message does the company taking a position
send to its employees who have strongly held beliefs on the opposite side
of the issue?"

For one answer to those questions, Microsoft need look no further than
Costco Wholesale Corp., the Issaquah-based wholesale-club giant.

Costco Chairman Jeff Brotman and Chief Executive Jim Sinegal are both major
contributors to the Democratic Party and other causes, but those are
personal contributions, Sinegal said yesterday. In general, he said, the
company itself doesn't back issues unless they're related to Costco's
business goals, such as land-use policy.

Sinegal said Costco doesn't consider it proper to spend shareholders' money
-- even in the form of employee or executive time --- supporting unrelated
political issues.

"As a company, we have people within our organization, we have shareholders
within our organization, who take both sides of almost every question, and
so we've stayed away from that." he said. "I'm happy to tell you how I
feel about some of those issues on a personal basis, but we just think it's
inappropriate to take a company stand on them."

But others say issues such as gay rights do relate to business interests.

"Microsoft absolutely should be backing anti-discrimination legislation
like this, because it's good for business," said George Cheung, executive
director of Equal Rights Washington, a group trying to end gender-based
discrimination. "That kind of law helps attract and retain top-quality
employees who may otherwise go to more tolerant states. And it's in
tolerant environments that workers are most productive, because they feel
most respected."

Since the controversy began last week, Microsoft has defended itself in
part by noting that it was among the first companies to offer benefits to
same-sex domestic partners and include sexual orientation in its corporate
non-discrimination policy.

Microsoft should be judged on the basis of "how we do our business, how we
treat our employees," company spokeswoman Begasse said. "We have had a
long and widely recognized record of promoting diversity, and we're going
to continue. Nothing's changed there."

On the recent legislation, however, Microsoft's behavior ran against the
grain in the business world, said Daryl Herrschaft, a deputy director of
the workplace project at the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest
gay rights group.

The Boeing Co., Nike Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co., Molson Coors Brewing Co.,
and Levi Strauss & Co. are among businesses that supported the Washington
state bill, which would have banned discrimination against homosexuals in
housing, employment and insurance. The legislation failed in the Senate
last week by one vote.

Asked why Hewlett-Packard supported it, John Hassell, the computer maker's
director of federal and state governmental affairs, said: "One word:
competitiveness." [ this word has superseded 'kmpetit'vty']

For some companies, the question of whether to take sides is even more
clear cut. Take Ben & Jerry's Homemade Inc., of Burlington, Vermont. The
650-person company, founded in 1978, has a three-part mission statement
addressing products, economic concerns and social matters. All three "must
thrive equally," the statement says.

Ben & Jerry's takes stances on issues having no direct relationship with
its business. Last week, it created a 1,400-pound baked Alaska in
Washington, D.C., and bused employees down to protest the planned drilling
in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge.

"That reinforced our message about halting global warming," spokeswoman
Chrystie Heimert explained.

In 2000, the company publicly urged Vermont's legislature to pass historic
legislation allowing civil unions to gay and lesbian couples. Since roughly
1987, when it went public, the company has offered the same benefits to
such couples as to heterosexual couples.

Ben & Jerry's is one of a number of U.S. companies that have taken stands
on sometimes-controversial social issues, then built their brand and
customer base around them, said David Batstone, a professor of social
ethics at the University of San Francisco.

Among those, he said, are Clif Bar Inc., a Berkeley, California maker of
energy bars; Seattle's Pura Vida Coffee; Stonyfield Farm, a yogurt and milk
producer in Londonderry, New Hampshire; and The Timberland Co., a Stratham,
New Hampshire, maker of apparel and footwear.

"These companies have really built their whole brand and ethos on their
values and then said, 'We're looking for customers who match our values,' "
said Batstone, who has written a book, Saving the Corporate Soul, on how
companies can restore their integrity.

In contrast, he said, by changing its position on the gay rights bill,
"Microsoft is saying, 'At the end of the day, we sell business software.'
Perhaps they try to sell the brand with more inventiveness and innovation,
but in terms of a set of social values, Microsoft has never been identified
with that way of acting or presenting itself."

More and more companies these days are shifting into the same neutral
stance Microsoft ultimately took, Batstone said.

"The trend is away from a company taking a political position that doesn't
directly relate to its own business interests," he said. "You're going to
have board members and shareholders make a passionate argument that that's
not what we're in business to do."

Excerpts from a February 2004 letter from Microsoft's manager of government
affairs in the state, DeLee Shoemaker, to Rep. Ed Murray:

"Our employees know that they will be treated fairly, without being subject
to prejudice or discrimination. An essential element of those policies
includes the company's anti-discrimination policy that expressly states
that it will not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation.

"Unfortunately, not all Americans experience this basic protection in their
employment. It remains legal in 38 states to fire someone because of their
sexual orientation. This is not only bad for business, it is bad for
America. House Bill 1809 would simply and fairly extend to Washingtonians
the fundamental right to be judged on one's own merits. And it does so
without any undue burden on our business environment.

"Microsoft strongly supports passage of HB 1809 and the additional
protections it provides in our state's law against discrimination. The
principles it fosters are consistent with our corporate principles in
treating all employees with fairness and respect."

This report includes information from The Associated Press.

Do there exist today any special antennae for New Zealand (or any
other scale of society you care to specify) to tune-in the Holy Spirit? Or
is it just every man for himself?

The attached article is should remind us that conservation is no
mere fringe or luxury item. Humans are unnecessarily ruining the
biosphere. It will therefore be important to propagate the understanding
of nature from the leading biologists. I agree with John Morton that
Sheldrake is the greatest biologist since Darwin; indeed I rank Sheldrake
far ahead of Darwin. Yet New Zealand little uses this devout Christian
scholar. Mort himself became almost disused by the Anglicans a decade ago.
To take another case, a theologian concerned with origins & errors in
science, Harold Turner was considerably marginalised by his own
Presbyterians during his highly productive 'retirement'. David Young omits
all mention of my contributions to conservation in his book on the subject.
This trend is explainable, in part at least, by the ascendancy of PC rule
in NZ - the good I've done is evidently eclipsed, for the purpose of
ruling on my historical status, by my speaking out against PC ideologies
(especially within the church).

Carolyn King complains at my pointing out the marginalised status
of the Kiwi who makes bold to carry on dialectical realism and furthermore
to oppose PC ideologies which - to say the least - interfere with
evangelism. I hope my work on science & Christianity will suitably connect
to Mort's prophetic role; whether or not Ms King complains, I firmly intend
to keep on. The insistent call in the 1970s by Mort, myself, and some
others, to ecological education & policy seemed to the silent majority
'unrealistic', 'uneconomic' etc, but those were ignorant evasions. I'd
rank Mort as a main prophet of conservation. Yet the main recent
contribution allowed for Mort is a mere PR use for promotion of the key IDT
video. And the posture of ecoprophet is usurped by the atheist Geering and
others who latched onto conservation very late.

It is of some interest that Mort is largely blacked out
notwithstanding his being in some ways thoroughly PC e.g. instrumental in
procuring the ordination of women; my inference is that to be an
accomplished senior male is enough to bring punishment upon one from
feminazis and (especially) their front-wimps, even if one actually supports
PC.

I am claiming that the strand of prophetic warnings based in
applied ecology interpreted from an orthodox theological perspective is
suppressed to a large extent, for un-Christian reasons. Thus the human
duty as God's custodians of the biosphere is warped & hampered.

From the fringes of ancient Hebrew society prophets said from time
to time "our way of life is astray from God's plan" or words to that
effect. Some are still famous e.g Jeremiah; but they tended much more in
their own time to be infamous, ignored &/or vilified. This pattern
continues today; reasonable warnings & moral exhortations of prophetic
kinds are mocked & dismissed by the PC operatives who have to a large
extent seized power not only in the secular realm within the overdeveloped
world but also in the Church. Mort has moved from an influential position
to near-obscurity, at a time when his mind dwarfs almost all. Even the
publication of his landmark textbook, unprecedented in the history of
science, was almost outblacked by the PC media.

At this rate, I think the following recent USA piece applies to us.

your bro in Christ

R

=====

Passed along by The Word Warriorette
Contact: WordWarriorette-owner@yahoogroups.com

--------------------------------------
http://www.crossroad.to/Victory/stories/church-tolerant.htm

The Church of the Comfortable and Tolerant

By Jesse Morrell

---------------------------------------------------------------------

Once upon a time in the land called Feel Good there was a Church. This new
Church was called "The Church of the Comfortable and Tolerant". Very
recently this Church hired a new Pastor, Pastor Peace Keeper, who just
graduated from the Seminary of Smooth Talking.

The congregation "of the Comfortable and Tolerant" loved the new Pastor's
sermons. Some of their favorites were "God is happy with everyone",
"Everything is fine and dandy", and "There is nothing but good times
ahead".

Pastor Peace Keeper once made a terrible mistake. He wrongfully allowed
Mr. Conscience into the pulpit. Mr. Conscience did nothing but call human
mistakes "sins" and called the good folks of the congregation to "repent".
Mr Conscience had never been to the Seminary of Smooth Talking, and maybe
he should have before attempting to preach. The congregation of the
Comfortable and Tolerant were shocked at Mr. Consciences audacity and
arrogance. They said things among themselves like "who does this
self-righteous legalist think he is coming and talking to us like that!
Why should we allow this false preacher among us any longer to continue to
persecute us?"

Pastor Peace Keeper terribly regretted letting Mr. Conscience into the
pulpit. Mr Conscience has betrayed the trust he had with the Pastor. So
Pastor Peace Keeper asked Mr. Conscience to please leave the church, he was
not welcome there any longer. Everyone was happy that Mr. Conscience was
asked to leave, except one member called Holy Spirit. So Holy Spirit and
Mr. Conscience left together and after awhile nobody even noticed that they
were gone.

Once things were back to normal, the way they had always been, everyone was
happy once again in the land called Feel Good. Pastor Peace Keeper
continued to sugar coat sweet and wonderful lies that made everyone
comfortable in their sins and heavily guarded his pulpit from abrasive
truths. Who could blame him? You see, the Pastor loved his new home, his
new church, and of course he loved his new income. He couldn't put such
precious things on the line! So he absolutely guaranteed that "The Church
of the Comfortable and Tolerant" were as satisfied and as happy as they
possibly could be while they sat in their complacency.

They lived the rest of their days happily ever after - that is, until
they were finally cast into hell.

The point: Rather then preparing the way of the Lord and making His paths
straight, preachers are removing the bumps in the road to hell to make it
as comfortable as possible for those who travel on them. The backslidden
church utterly refused to remove the log out of her own eye and therefore
also utterly refuses to remove anything from anyone else's eye. She
vehemently opposes those who try to do so also. God help those who attempt
to clean up the church and the world! Joseph Parks said it best: "The man
whose little sermon is 'repent' sets himself against his age, and will ...
be battered mercilessly by the age whose moral tone he challenges. There
is but one end for such a man. 'Off with his head!" You had better not try
to preach repentance until you have pledged your head to heaven."

Learn more about Jesse and the ministry God has given him at his website:

http://www.newenglandoutreach.com/main2.html

RATHER TOO LITTLE DOOM SAID

L R B Mann
rejected without comment, The Ecologist

'It's Getting Late to Switch to a Viable World Economy' write Lester Brown, President of the Worldwatch Institute, and Christopher Flavin his V-P, in the International Herald Tribune, Paris (19-1-99). Their review of the state of the biosphere deserves the currency it achieved on e-mail, and much more. The Ecologist does well to reprint such competent reviews which summarise the ever-mounting evidence that the 'doomsayers' of the early 1970s - notably the founder and early editorial staff of this magazine - were right.

Indeed, many problems have worsened at an even faster rate than was expected a quarter-century ago by the few who were willing to face up to the already mounting scientific evidence that the biosphere was beset by unprecedented threats to civilisation and indeed to the continued existence of many species.

It is conventional to date the modern science-based conservation awareness from the landmark 1962 Carson book 'Silent Spring', but 1972 was annus mirabilis - Goldsmith et al. 'A Blueprint for Survival', Ehrlich & Ehrlich 'Population, Resources, Environment', several other good books, and the UN Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment.

The main problems came into focus in four categories:
• overpopulation
• depletion of resources
• multiple forms of pollution
• threats of wars of mass destruction.

The wave of ecological awareness which surged within that year 1972 expanded somewhat through that decade. A few changes poked a foothold into some educational institutions, but the principal planners of industry and governments have generally paid only lip service to the dangers pointed out by the marginalised 'stirrers' such as Goldsmith, and the past 15-20y has seen considerable losing of ground as the PR trade has refined the counterattacks on ecology.

One of the most respected living New Zealanders, Sir Edmund Hillary, has said lately "the world environment is still in a very critical state". His subtle one word "still" implies, correctly, that we have been some time in this dire state.

The Worldwatch Institute has been a top source for both reliable facts and reasonable interpretations, and it is undoubtedly correct in its key declaration that current trends cannot continue for many more years.

Yet I will argue that on the whole, the picture they present is less dismaying than the facts would suggest. The real story is even worse than the Worldwatch Institute claims.

The compromises selected by Brown for the purpose of retaining funding from US liberal wealth may well be as shrewd as could be; but independent intellectuals have a duty to present a less compromised picture. Therefore I interpolate my comments in what, I repeat, is a very good article.

>WASHINGTON - The bright promise of a new century is clouded by
>unprecedented threats to the stability of the natural world. Rapid
>deforestation, falling water tables and accelerating climate change could
>undermine economies around the world in the decades ahead.

These trends, and many others, not merely could but beyond any reasonable doubt WILL, within a few decades, wreak havoc on any national economy based to a large extent on natural resources - and many still are. To the extent that the New Four Horsemen are now steeply accelerating many types of harm in the biosphere, not only abstractions like 'economies' but most indices of biological welfare are doomed on current planning to get much worse within a decade or two.

> In the past 100 years, world population has increased by more than 4 billion
> - three times the number of people when the century began.

More striking primary facts are that the population net increase this year is around 90 million, taking us to 6 billion of whom at least one billion are desperately hungry.

>The use of
>energy and raw materials has grown [in the past century] more than 10 times. These trends cannot
>continue for many more years.

Goldsmith has reviewed from time to time during the period since 'A Blueprint for Survival' the trends in harm, and has not found an improving outlook. But always the challenge is to warn of impending disasters without losing too much credibility with those captains of industry who cling to the wilfully ignorant dream of expanding industrial activity when the only hope is to diminish throughputs several-fold.

One of the genuine handicaps for those who warn of ecological disaster has been to define what condition is being foreseen. Warnings of time limits such as 5000 days become meaningful only if an end-point constituting disaster has been defined, i.e. a state from which recovery is not foreseeable. Perhaps this review will stimulate clarification. Meanwhile, good old Richard Willson cartoons of the 'so far so good' variety deserve regular reprinting.

>The question is whether we can muster the will and ingenuity to change
>rapidly enough to stave off environmentally based economic decline.

Now that is an unfortunate phrase - "environmentally based economic decline". I am not so concerned about a decline in 'the economy' caused by environmental decay. What I care about is destruction of species, habitats, and ecochemical cycles; and it is worship of 'the economy' that has largely caused this lately.

Indeed, Brown & Flavin proceed immediately to refer to the other direction in the awful two-way vicious cycle between economism and ecodestruction:

>In their fascination with information technologies, many of today's thinkers
>seem to have forgotten that our modern civilization is entirely dependent
>on ecological foundations that the economy is now eroding.

well put!

>Since our emergence as a species, human societies have continually run up
>against local environmental limits that have caused them to collapse, as
>forests and cropland were overstressed. But the advances in technology that
>have allowed us to surmount these local limits have transferred the problem
>of environmental barriers to the global level, where human activities now
>threaten planetary systems. Among the problems we now face:
>
>•--World energy needs are projected to double in the next several decades,
>but no credible geologist foresees a doubling of world oil production,
>which is projected to peak within the next few decades.

A main reason why 'The Limits to Growth' is not listed with the top books of 1972 is that it erred on definitions of mineable resources, failing to appreciate that 'economic reserves' are only those judged by the accountant mentality to be worth proving to high confidence (by drilling) for a short time-scale, whereas for many resources such as natural gas there is strong evidence of much larger amounts which would be accessible when wanted. A much better understanding of definitions emerged in the Ehrlichs' new edition (with Holdren) titled 'Ecoscience' in 1977.

Thomas Gold's theory - see USGS prof. paper 1570 57-80 (1993) - presents very strong evidence of literally astronomical lodes of natural gas at depths around 10km in many parts of our planet. This is primordial, not fossil, hydrocarbon. Some gets elaborated by microbes in the Earth's crust to make the more superficial deposits of oil; some gets trapped in the near-surface gas domes now being depleted; and an under-noticed fraction emerges at the surface to contribute several dozens of times more powerfully, per molecule, than does carbon dioxide to the acceleration of the greenhouse effect.

Running out of hydrocarbon fuels is not an imminent prospect. By the way, Gold's theory of huge gas lodes under land would imply abandoning offshore drilling because the risk of marine devastation from blowouts is readily avoidable.

>•--Protein demands are also projected to double in the century ahead, but
>no respected marine biologist expects the oceanic fish catch, which has
>plateaued in the last decade, to double. The world's oceans are being
>pushed beyond the breaking point, due to a lethal combination of pollution
>and over-exploitation.
>
>•--Eleven of the 15 most important oceanic fisheries and 70 percent of the
>major fish species are now fully or over-exploited, according to experts.
>
>•--Increasing stress can be seen in the world's woodlands, where the
>clearing of tropical forests has contributed to unprecedented fires across
>large areas of Southeast Asia, the Amazon and Central America.
>
>•--Environmental deterioration is taking a growing toll on a wide range of
>living organisms. Of the 242,000 plant species surveyed by the World
>Conservation Union in 1997, some 33,000, or 14 percent, are threatened with
>extinction, mainly as a result of massive land clearing for housing, roads
>and industries. This mass extinction is disrupting nature's ability to
>provide essential ecosystem services, ranging from pollination to flood
>control.
>
>•--The atmosphere is under assault. The billions of tons of carbon that
>have been released since the Industrial Revolution have pushed atmospheric
>concentrations of carbon dioxide to their highest level in 160,000 years -
>a level that continues to rise each year. Temperatures are rising along
>with the concentration of carbon dioxide.
>
>•--The latest jump in 1998 left the global temperature at its highest
>level since record-keeping began in the mid-19th century. Higher
>temperatures may threaten

come, come - the brutal truth reads 'almost certainly will decrease'

>food supplies in the next century, while more
>severe storms cause further economic damage, and rising seas inundate
>coastal cities.
>
>We approach a new century with an economy that cannot take us where we
>want to go. Satisfying the projected needs of 8 billion or more people
>with the type of economy we now have is simply not possible. The Western
>industrial model - the fossil-fuel-based, automobile-centered, throw-away
>economy that so dramatically raised living standards in this century - is
>in trouble.
>
>The shift to an environmentally sustainable economy may be as profound a
>transition as the Industrial Revolution. But the broad outlines of a
>sustainable economic system that can meet the human needs of the next
>century are beginning to emerge.
>
>The foundation of such a system is a new design principle, one that shifts
>from the onetime depletion of natural resources to an economy based on
>renewable energy and which continually reuses and recycles materials. A
>sustainable economy will be a solar-powered, bicycle/rail-based,
>reuse/recycle economy, one that uses energy, water, land and materials
>much more efficiently and wisely than we do today. Building an
>environmentally sustainable world economy depends on a cooperative global
>effort. No country acting alone can protect the diversity of life on earth
>or the health of oceanic fisheries.
>
>So far, national governments have largely failed effectively to implement
>the last decade's landmark environmental treaties on climate change and
>biodiversity. One of the big challenges of the early 21st century will be to
>fulfill their ambitious promises to stabilize the climate and slow the
>destruction of species.
>
>Without a concerted effort by the wealthy to address the problems of
>poverty and deprivation, building a sustainable future may not be
>possible. Growing poverty, and the political and economic chaos that can
>be provoked by it, reverberate around the world, as was seen in 1998 with
>the Asian economic meltdown, which pushed tens of millions of people below
>the poverty line in just a few months. Meeting the needs of the more than
>a billion people now in poverty is essential to making the transition to
>an environmentally sustainable world economy.
>
>We will also need a new understanding and values to support a restructuring
>of the global economy. The 21st century will require a new ethic of
>sustainability. We will need a new set of human responsibilities - to the
>natural world and to future generations - to go with our newfound human
>rights.
>
>One key to reversing environmental degradation is to tax the activities
>that cause it. By putting a price on these activities, the market can be
>harnessed to spur progress. If coal burning is taxed, solar energy becomes
>more economically competitive. If auto emissions are taxed, cleaner forms
>of transportation become more affordable. The new German government has
>embarked on the world's most ambitious environmental tax reform, reducing
>taxes on wages by 2.4 percent while raising energy taxes by an identical
>amount. This is a landmark step that will push Europe's largest economy in
>an environmentally sustainable direction.
>
>Europe is also leading the way in some of the industries that are the
>foundations of a solar economy. For example, it has added 5,000 megawatts
>of wind power in the last five years, half of it in Germany, where
>Schleswig-Holstein gets 15 percent of its electricity from the wind. Wind
>power, now one of Europe's fastest growing manufacturing industries,
>employs thousands of workers. Sales of other new energy technologies are
>soaring as well. The production of solar photovoltaic cells has doubled in
>the last five years, propelled in part by the Japanese government's
>efforts to promote solar rooftops as a standard option for new suburban
>homes. Fuel cells that turn hydrogen into electricity, with water as the
>only by-product, are being spurred by billions of dollars of investment
>capital, as companies pursue them as a replacement for everything from the
>coal-fired power plant to the internal combustion engine.
>
>The effort to replace today's unsustainable economy with one suited to the
>demands of the 21st century will create some of the new century's largest
>investment opportunities. Bill Ford, incoming chairman of the Ford Motor
>Co., plans to increase profits by replacing the internal combustion
>engine that was at the center of his great-grandfather's success. ''Smart
>companies will get ahead of the wave,'' Mr. Ford says. ''Those that don't
>will be wiped out.''
>
>The challenge now is to mobilize public support for a fundamental economic
>transformation, a shift to a 21st century economy far less
>resource-intensive and polluting yet even more productive than today's.

This admirable article will, we must all hope, spread awareness of the need to curb industrial & economic activity. If even this relatively forthright review is (as I have argued) actually understated, let long-time activists gain from it renewed urgency & vigour.

``~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~``

Dr Robert Mann was Senior Lecturer in Environmental Studies at the
University of Auckland, and has been a conservation activist in several
organisations. He now works mainly on solar thermal and motorcycling inventions.

Is Robert Scheer the Biggest Ignoramus in American Journalism?

By David Horowitz and Ben Johnson
FrontPageMagazine.com | May 4, 2005


Robert Jensen vibrantly illustrated the mindset of America's fifth
column Left when he wrote, "The United States has lost the war in Iraq,
and that's a good thing." Jensen and his fellow ideologues do not wish for
"peace" but the triumph of America's enemies. Yesterday, L.A. Times
columnist Robert Scheer extended this animus 30 years into the past,
exulting over America's lone military defeat in South Vietnam. "Sometimes
it is better to lose," Scheer wrote in his latest broadside against reality
and human decency, entitled "Our Loss was Our Gain in Vietnam."

Reflecting that April 30 marked the 30th anniversary of the fall of
Saigon, Scheer claimed America has profited from normalized trade with
Vietnam, benefiting from that nation's cheap labor as we became
Vietnam's chief export market. He claims the modern Vietnamese economy,
which he describes as "a mix of Karl Marx and Adam Smith," provides
"renewed proof of the viability of Marx's labor theory of value."

But not even sophisticated Marxists believe in the labor theory of
value anymore. Our present peaceful coexistence with the regime that
tortured John McCain, executed 100,000 Vietnamese without trial after the
war, and submerged its economy in a Marxist depression for the next 30
years, in Scheer's mind, proves that anti-communists were wrong to have
opposed handing the country over to the Communists in the first place.

For Scheer, the Vietnam War had nothing to do with actual Communist
aggression but was entirely created by American Cold War paranoia, obsessed
by "the specter of a Communist movement with a timetable for the takeover
of the world." This is what Scheer was claiming 30 years ago, when he was
a member of the Red Sun Rising commune and a follower of Kim Il Sung.
Unfortunately for this thesis, many Vietnamese leaders have been
unburdening themselves of facts that refute these New Left fantasies.

When Lyndon Johnson issued a White Paper in 1964 saying the North
Vietnamese Communists were
infiltrating troops into South Vietnam with the intention of conquering it,
Scheer earned himself a little
notoriety on the Left by publishing a pamphlet snickering at the claims and
calling the president a liar. Now, we know from the mouths of North
Vietnamese leaders themselves that Johnson was telling the truth - and
greatly understating it. The Ho Chi Minh Trail was built so that the
Communist military could move into South Vietnam and subvert it, and by
1964 Hanoi had infiltrated a small army into South Vietnam and created a
phony "indigenous" guerilla movement called the "National Liberation Front
of South Vietnam" in order to fool credulous leftists like Scheer and
advance the Communist world revolution. But Scheer - who has apparently
been asleep for 30 years and missed these facts - still clings to the myths
he was spinning back in Berkeley.

According to Scheer, Ho Chi Minh - who spent 20 years in Paris as an
agent of Stalin's International - was just a "nationalist" and
"pragmatist." Apparently taking on the world's superpower and sacrificing
millions of his own people to realize the dreams of a German exile
rummaging in the British Museum a
hundred years before is just practical politics. So if we had just let the
nationalists and pragmatists do
their thing, we would have gotten the same result. As fellow L.A. Times
reporter David Lamb put it, "if you took away the still-ruling Communist
Party and discounted the perilous decade after the war, the Vietnam of
today is not much different from the country U.S. policymakers wanted to
create in the 1960s."

Ah, yes, the "perilous decade." What Lamb means (and Scheer omits)
is the decade when the Communist Party killed 100,000 Vietnamese and drove
a million boat people into exile (something that had not occurred in a
thousand years of Vietnamese history under many less brutal conquerors).
The antiwar movement that Scheer and his comrades launched successfully
forced America to abandon the people of South Vietnam and neighboring
Cambodia, which the Communist had used as an invasion route. This
abandonment resulted in the postwar slaughter of 2.5 million Indo-Chinese.
(The Khmer Rouge who cleaned up Cambodia were protégés of Hanoi and were
also advancing the "world revolution" and not, obviously, Cambodian
nationalism and pragmatism.) The Communists also liquidated 1.5 million
Laotians while they were at it.

Noticing the fact that Vietnam now trades with us, Scheer concludes
that they would have done so earlier if only we had stepped back and
allowed them to conquer South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos without
opposition. In fact, he claims, "Ike himself resisted committing
significant forces to the conflict." In part, that's because there was no
full-scale North-South Vietnamese conflict until March 1960, and the
Communist Party of North Vietnam did not call for deposing pro-American
South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem until the following September, as
lame duck Ike was nearly free to golf full-time. However, Eisenhower did
have a solution for Ho Chi Minh: in 1954, he approached the French and
British about conducting an air strike to save the French military
stationed at Dien Bien Phu. However, Churchill would not support military
action on behalf of the French empire as the sun was setting on his own;
and just a few months later, the French elected Radical-Socialist Pierre
Mendés-France both president and foreign minister. In true French fashion,
he fled the battlefield and left half the nation in the hands of a
dictator. (Ike also threatened to nuke China if Mao invaded the seemingly
inconsequential islands of Quemoy and Matsu; that's some peacenik.)

What made Vietnam's relationship with the United States possible is
the fact that, in the interim, the Soviet Union - the chief subsidizer of
Communist Vietnam - mercifully collapsed. The Soviet Union provided
Vietnam with a $1 billion annual subsidy and the vision of a future
dominated by Marxism-Leninism. If these pillars of Vietnam's Communist
faith were still present, Vietnam's economic wooing of the West would not
be taking place.

Notwithstanding the good news, North Vietnam even now has that little
problem of the "still ruling Communist Party" and consequently has shown no
concurrent improvement in its human rights record.

According to the State Department, this record has "remained poor" as
the nation "continued to commit serious abuses," including police beatings,
detentions, and disappearances. The knock-in-the-dead-of-night persists in
the land that Scheer's buddies Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda once referred to
as a "rice-roots democracy."

How can a man so innocent of the history of his own era and so
complicit in its crimes be a powerful
columnist at one of America's most important newspapers, not to mention a
professor at USC's Annenberg School of Communications? (And what does that
tell you about the times we live in?)

Scheer began his career with a 1961 book defending Fidel Castro and
was the Cuban dictator's chosen
publisher of Ché Guevara's diaries. Scheer's history of support for
Communist revolutionaries (not
nationalists or pragmatists) stretches back 40 years and began with his
Cuban romance. Cuba, of course, is the exemplar of Communism's imperial
ambitions - the very ambitions that Scheer pretends don't exist. In 1963,
Castro sent 22 tanks and more than 100 Cuban troops to the Algerian
National Liberation Front led by Ahmed ben Bella, ultimately giving two
billion francs to the Arab Marxists. Ché Guevara famously called for
radicals to "create two, threeŠmany Vietnams" - the title also of a book by
Ché wannabe Tom Hayden - and died trying to launch one in Bolivia. This
martyrdom inspired Ho Chi Minh's follower to host Raul Castro shortly after
the Fall of Saigon.

Castro reached his imperial apex when he sent 50,000 troops to aid
the Popular Movement for the
Liberation of Angola in its efforts to foist Leninism in the former
colonial nation. Cuban troops fought in the Congo well into the Reagan
administration and Fidel sent aid to the brutal "Red Rule" of Ethiopia's
Communists, architects of one of the worst politically devised famines in
world history. Castro's efforts to build an airport for Soviet bombers in
Grenada provoked Ronald Reagan to take defensive military action.

The Sandinista dictators were his personal protégés, trained in
Havana to spread Marxist police states throughout Central America. The
trainers of Nicaragua's secret police were Cubans loaned by Castro for that
very purpose.

So Scheer is well aware that Communism was a messianic creed and an
imperialist enterprise and one that the North Vietnamese Communists shared.
But acknowledging this would prevent him from writing yet another column
(he has written them before) on how it would be good thing for America to
lose its wars with totalitarian enemies. But this is the very column that
Scheer has been writing for the last three years about America's war
against the Islamic totalitarians in Iraq - another nation in which French
self-interest left the United States to take care of a murderous autocrat
they kept in power. Plus ça change Š.

DAVID HOROWITZ is a nationally known author and lifelong civil rights
activist. Since 1988 he had served as president of the Center for the Study
of Popular Culture. To access a complete bibliography of all his work,
please click here.

BEN JOHNSON is Associate Editor of FrontPage Magazine.

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0505/S00051.htm

Posting to Headlines Wire of Scoop®
Opinion: Robert Mann
Date: Wednesday, 4 May 2005

Euphoric Cornucopianism is Mischievous

by Robert Mann

Owen McShane tries (Owen McShane: If Stone Age had run out of
rocks... - 'NZ' Herald 15 April) to pour oil on the troubled
waters of energy policy, especially wishing to soothe fears of
the oil peak - the imminent maximum supply rate after which
oil production will decline.

Mr McShane avers "for the past few decades the world has enjoyed
incredibly cheap oil". True, bulk easily-extracted oil from
the middle east and Indonesia keeps the average price down to
a mere U$55 per barrel - so far; but averaged in are the 164
killed on the Piper Alpha platform in the North Sea. The margins
of oil exploitation have been for decades now dangerous and,
from time to time, severely polluting.

McShane says New Zealand sits in the middle of an "ocean" of
natural gas, including "frozen methane" offshore. It is wrong
to promote offshore exploration, with its dangers of marine blowouts,
while ignoring the deep gas theory of Professor Gold, which predicts
literally astronomical lodes of natural gas onshore in Taranaki
- but very deep (8-10 km).

McShane's "bunch of new technologies ... which delivers petrol
at about $2.50 a litre" does not exist, and the concepts he mentions
are mostly science fiction, especially his notions of GM-trees
and GM garden plants exuding hi-octane fuel from their roots.

On this basis he says household income may increase 20-fold
this century while oil supply decreases only enough to double
the price of petrol.

Compressed natural gas (CNG, for those who don't remember the
brief limited encouragement of this indigenous vehicle fuel)
should for several strong reasons be re-instated and extended.
The NZ CNG equipment industry is still turning over $6m/y -
all for export. The technical infrastructure for safe installations
has largely lapsed but can be revived in polytechs.

But the basic fact must be faced, the sooner the better: decreasing
consumption is in many ways better than trying to deplete resources
more rapidly. We must recover skills of consuming less while
enjoying it more. Decreasing waste has been clearly identified
for many years as the first step. Diverting to use resources
now going down a great variety of waste channels is the fastest,
cheapest way to decrease consumption of resources. Professor
D J Rose, MIT nuclear engineer, finished his review 'Nuclear
Eclectic Power' in Science 3 decades ago remarking that, to date,
increasing amounts of energy had been used mainly to turn resources
into junk. "What are we going to do now?" he finally asked.

So far, the governmental and corporate answers have been almost
entirely pathetic.

What is needed if we are to face up to the oil peak is not euphoric
cornucopianism but technologically informed planning such as
the Government abandoned in the 1980s. Oil supplies are liable
to be interrupted &/or made much more expensive by market forces;
there is no time to lose in making alternative arrangements for
transport fuels.

The attached Improving Tract was pubd by _Real World_ when the then
U of Ak chaplain Rev Dr Murray Rae was building that organ to a peak of
quality. I offer it for the current season of the church year.

I doubt it's a draft sermon; those like me & Mort who try to carry
on the Temple tradition of thought tend for some reason to assume that
entailed in that dialectical realism is sentence-length & complexity
tending to restrict utility in speech. But I hope sermons may be
influenced by the questions I raise.

I'd be glad to hear of any Gk expert who has chased up the query I
raise about 'the'. But this is a minor point.

My main point is that the Anglican church in my experience
under-emphasizes the Holy Spirit. I invite those of other denominations to
take stock of how they are organised to teach about, and to 'tune in', the
Holy Spirit. The only potential basis for a decent society is Christian
ethics, but if the religion that gave rise to Christian ethics is not
suitably active in politics then evil ideologies will gain power. This
issue of state/church relations is the issue addressed variously by
Marsden, Godley, Selwyn, etc. The Holy Spirit may have exerted maximal
political influence in Byzantium (before the women took too much political
power). Anyhow, we sure need more effective ways to tune-in the Spirit.

R

The Big Thing from small beginnings
- reflections on Pentecost

Robert Mann
slightly adapted from Real World 1998

Once Jesus had ascended back to heaven, the most important thing left for his faithful few was the Holy Spirit. That Spirit remains for us today The Big Thing - our most important asset, the continuing inspiration which we require to carry on proclaiming the Good News and living by it as best we can. But this important Third Person of the Holy Trinity became known to humanity through a quiet beginning.

On the festival of Pentecost, we celebrate the birth of the church as recounted in Acts 2 - a flamboyant occasion of doubtless crucial significance on that historic day and ever since. The so-called pentecostal sects emphasise visible direct operations of the spirit in group worship today, e.g. speaking in tongues.

Some more elderly congregations tend to prefer the name Whitsunday, and to read for that day's lesson John 20 19-23, a far quieter occasion. For those who have never spoken in tongues, let alone seen holy fire on each others' heads, that event at the closing of the first Easter Day is perhaps especially precious.

I would go so far as to suggest that, whatever Anglicans may think of 'pentecostal' tendencies, the Anglican church is open to the accusation of having gone too far the other way - too little emphasis on the Holy Spirit. In any case I wish to argue that a better understanding of the Holy Spirit will be encouraged if both John 20 19-23 and Acts 2 1-41 are embraced in preaching on Pentecost.

Jesus prefigured, with memorable if mysterious breath, a continuing spiritual presence, at his resurrected appearance amongst the disciples late in the evening of the day when Mary Magdalene had found the tomb empty. Translations typically quote him, having breathed upon them, "Receive the Holy Spirit". However, the Archbishop of Canterbury widely viewed as this century's most talented, William Temple, in his valuable book 'Readings in St. John's Gospel' (Macmillan 1938; reprinted through 1955) translates instead

"Receive holy spirit (or breath)".
Temple specifically insists on this wording by adding, in explanation,
not "the Holy Spirit" and goes on immediately to expound:

What is bestowed is not the Divine Person Himself but the power and energy of which He is the source. Earlier it had been said not yet was there spirit, because Jesus was not yet glorified (John 7, 39). But now that glorification is complete, and it is possible for the new divine energy, which operates through man's response to the manifested love of God, to begin its activity . . . only so far as the Church in and through its members fulfils the condition - Receive holy spirit - can it discharge this function.

The gospels were written in Greek. The word for spirit in the John 20 passage is simply the same as for breath (pneuma), the common word for spirit in the NT. The word paracletos appears in the NT only 5 times, all by St John (Jn 14:16, 14:26, 15:26, 16:7; 1Jn 2:1). It seems straightforwardly justified therefore to adopt Temple's reading of the John 20 passage, rather than the more popular translation which infers that the Holy Spirit was conferred on that occasion.

The persistence of the popular translation - as if omission of "the" in gospel Greek could be casual or alternatively from some pious tampering - I must leave to biblical scholars to review. It would appear, e.g. from the biography by Iremonger, and generally from his fluent & profound arguments using Greek throughout his works, that Temple was a better Greek scholar than most or all today. J B Phillips in the late 1950s simply concurred with Temple's translation, whereas the prolix Rudolph Schnackenberg (1990) ignores it. I find Temple's reading much the more convincing.

He was, in 1938, very quiet in mentioning the error; and he did not comment at all on its possible origins. One may infer that Temple thought it would be needlessly critical of highly respected authorities if he were to make any fuss of this correction. (Would that many a modern stirrer were so thoughtful & restrained! It is easy to point out defects in the powers that be; but unless we have a good purpose in view, we should not do so.)

Pious insertions have occurred in the fraught history of our precious scriptures, e.g. the minor confusion in 1 John 5 7-8 complained of by Sir Isaac Newton. Even the Great Commission (the final 3 verses of St Matthew's gospel) is suspected of being a later addition rather than actual words of Christ. It would appear that "Receive the Holy Spirit" is a comparable pious embellishment of the Lord's more subtle words "Receive holy spirit".

An interpretation thus seems open that the John 20 phrase is a gentle prefiguring - with memorable breath, but nevertheless gentle compared to the mighty wind when, 50 days later, the faithful few must have needed firmer reassurance. I do not dispute Temple's toning-down in 1938 of his correction, but I do suggest that today it is due for acceptance rather than continued ignore.

Temple's reading is consistent with the promise in Acts 1 "not many days after this you shall be baptised with the Holy Spirit", implied if not clearly presented as coming just before the Ascension, and certainly after Easter.

Within two months the few went through the agony & despair of Calvary; the eerie encouragement of the empty tomb; the quiet visitation later that day, unrecognised in that moment, on the road to Emmaeus; the Resurrected Lord that evening in the locked room conferring on the disciples awesome power after breathing holy spirit over them; other resurrection appearances, once to 500; the loss - if triumphant - of the Ascension; and then 50 days after Easter the overwhelming manifestations of the Holy Spirit. Evidently the emergence of the Paraclete in this world was a gradual process rather than sudden. (This should come as no surprise; Christ himself within his earthly life blossomed in a process of development - "day by day like us he grew".)

The question for us now is, therefore, what are we today doing to utilise and contribute to what Temple called the new divine energy, which operates through man's response to the manifested love of God. This two-way process empowers, if dauntingly, the human species of the Christian era. The Holy Spirit, though of simple beginnings in earthly emergence, has become The Big Thing for us today. Are we with it - availing ourselves of this power, and also contributing to its working? Let us pray, feeding on him in our heart with thanksgiving, for faith to do so - believing that one prayer which is always answered is the prayer for stronger faith.

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=44099

Tuesday, May 3, 2005

---------------------------------------------------------------------
BRAVE NEW SCHOOLS

Parents sue to block 'pro-gay' classes
Sex-ed curriculum 'hostile' to traditional Christian belief

---------------------------------------------------------------------
© 2005 WorldNetDaily.com

Two parent-backed groups filed a lawsuit against a Maryland school district
today to block a sex-ed curriculum that advocates homosexual behavior and
includes a video illustrating condom usage using a cucumber.

Citizens for a Responsible Curriculum and Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays
and Gays, or PFOX, complain the pilot program for 8th through 10th grade in
six Montgomery County Public Schools, scheduled to begin Thursday, presents
sexual variations and behaviors, including homosexuality, as morally
equivalent to traditionally accepted norms.

The curriculum never refers to husband and wife, but, instead, redefines
family as "two or more people who are joined together by emotional feelings
or who are related to one another."

Mathew D. Staver, president and general counsel of Liberty Counsel, which
represents PFOX and Citizens, said the school board "has been captured by
radical homosexual advocacy groups whose only agenda is to promote their
political goals without respect to the consequences."

"The homosexual sex-education curriculum is inaccurate and unashamedly
hostile to certain Christian views," Staver said. "When sexually
transmitted diseases are epidemic in some portions of the country,
especially among same-sex behavior, it is inconceivable that a school board
would promote such activity without presenting any associated medical
risk."

The instruction includes:

"Fact: Most experts in the field have concluded that sexual orientation is
not a choice."

"Fact: Sex play with friends of the same gender is not uncommon during
early adolescence and does not prove long-term sexual orientation."

"It is no more abnormal or sick to be homosexual than to be left-handed."

Many religious denominations do not believe that "loving people of the same
sex is immoral (sinful)."

"Heterosexual parents are consistently not found to be more loving or
caring than gay parents."

"Jesus said absolutely nothing at all about homosexuality."

"Religion has often been misused to justify hatred and oppression."

"One's sexual and emotional orientations are fixed at an early age ...
certainly by age five."

"Human sexuality is a continuum."

"Many homophobic responses are born out of a fear that one's own sexual
orientation may not be entirely heterosexual."

"It is perfectly natural to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, and/or transgender."

"[A]bstinence until marriage" is detrimental to "GLBT youth."
The curriculum also says it's OK to "question our definition of
"promiscuous.'" The material refers to "fundamentalists" and
"evangelicals" who mistakenly believe people overcome same-sex attraction.
The program thus encourages referral of these students to "sensitive
clergy" who can help them "reconcile their religious beliefs."

One video used in the program features a high school girl illustrating
condom usage with a cucumber, stating that condoms should be used for "any
oral, anal or vaginal sex."

As WorldNetDaily reported, Citizens for a Responsible Curriculum featured
an excerpt from the seven-and-a-half minute video on its website.

PFOX and Citizens said every teacher resource they proposed to the board
from an "ex-gay perspective" was rejected.

David Fishback, board chairman and chairman of the curriculum committee,
called reorientation therapy "dangerous," resulting in "extremely bad
outcomes."

Any discussion that homosexual preferences may change would "be
destructive," he said.

The two parents groups also argued that the curriculum's discussion of
dangerous sexual activity without any discussion of its health risks
violates the state law and school policies.

The board, the groups said, refused to include information regarding
sexually transmitted diseases arising from same-sex behavior, issued by the
Centers for Disease Control and the U.S. Surgeon General.

As WND reported, the Montgomery County board appointed an 11-year-old girl
to the panel charged with recommending a new sex-ed curriculum.

Parents must sign permission forms for their children to participate in the
sex-ed curriculum, which is part of a semester-long health education
program, the Washington Post reported. Families also have the option of
putting their children in an alternative, including an abstinence-only
program. But the opponents argue the opt-out provision discriminates
against these children because it forcibly segregates them.

>Buffets (Warren & Jimmy) Buy Pitcairn Island, Open Cheeseburger in
>Paradise Restaurant

>Written by stan [ one of R. Fl. Hudson's pro-Pitcairn email pals;
>a USN propulsion design engr]
>
>Jimmy Buffett serves the first burger from the Pitcairn Island
>Cheeseburger in Paradise restaurant to Warren Buffett. Special to the Wall
>Street Journal.

The world's second richest man, Warren Buffet - US$44B, announced the
opening of his latest acquisition, a new Cheeseburger in Paradise
Restaurant on Pitcairn Island (Mutiny on the Bounty), an island he recently
purchased from Britain for an estimated $26M, including all 40 residents.
He is the third American, along with Mel Gibson and Clark Gable, to
purchase islands in the area. His nephew, Jimmy, a self-admitted itinerant
beach bum tropical island balladeer will be "flipping the burgers" while
completing his night class, How to Play the Guitar 101, at the local
Pitcairn Island community college.

>The senior Buffet, 74, said this is all part of fulfilling his Pitcairn
>Island ancestor's (John Buffet's) dream. John Buffet was obsessed with a
>simple dream. He always wanted to move to a romantic remote South Pacific
>Island, among freewheeling sailor mutineer/pirates, open a burger stand
>and become the world's richest man. In 1823 he left his shipyard job and
>moved to Pitcairn Island. There he met his greatest challenge. The local
>Seventh Day Adventist Missionary refused to let John open his burger stand
>because of strict SDA dietary religious doctrine. After 33 years of
>fighting the church, John led all 161 residents to join him in 1856 in
>moving to another island, called Norfolk, so he could realize his dream.
>Sadly, John Buffet died before fulfilling his dream. Six generations
>later, that dream is still alive in his direct descendant Warren, and
>Jimmy Buffet his nephew.
>" I have now moved to Paradise Island and opened a burger joint, as
>PA-PA-PA-PA John wished, but I'm still not the world's richest man. I
>slaved and made $3B last year and Bill Gates, a computer programmer, lost
>$1.5B, but he still has $2.5B more than me ($46.5B)," he complained.
>When asked what he would do if the Cheeseburger in Paradise Restaurant on
>Pitcairn Island failed, he replied: "Simple. I'd sell Pitcairn Island to
>the French to be used in their Nuke test program. They've sunk all of the
>other islands around. It would only quadruple my investment, but business
>is business. How do you think I became the world's second richest man
>anyhow - by trying to de-bug Windows 98®?"

'Rush to exploit biotechnology' concerns Suzuki
Angela Hall
Saskatchewan News Network
April 26, 2005

REGINA -- High-profile scientist and broadcaster David Suzuki gave a boost
Monday to Saskatchewan organic farmers taking two multinational companies
to court over genetically modified organisms.

Suzuki, speaking before delivering a benefit lecture in Regina on Monday
evening, also raised his concerns over what he called the "rush to exploit
biotechnology" with no idea of the long-term consequences.

"I'm a geneticist so I'm very excited by what's going on in terms of
genetic engineering. I think we're seeing abilities now that I never
dreamed I would live to see in my lifetime," Suzuki told reporters at the
Regina International Airport.

"What bothers me is we have governments that are supposed to be looking out
for our health, for the safety of our environment, and they're acting like
cheerleaders for this technology, which . . . is in its infancy and we have
no idea what the technology is going to do."

Suzuki said he wanted to help raise money for the Saskatchewan farmers' bid
to launch a class action lawsuit against Monsanto and Bayer Crop Science.

"What organic farmers have said is genetically engineered organisms (GMOs)
represent a kind of technology we do not want to incorporate into our food
growing and I support that," Suzuki said.

The farmers, who have formed the Organic Agriculture Protection Fund
(OAPF), were in a Saskatoon courtroom last November to try and have their
case certified as a class action. The judge has yet to release a decision.

They ultimately want the court to rule on whether the companies are liable
for farmers' losses due to GMO contamination of certified organic canola
crops and farms.

The OAPF says the case could set a precedent establishing the liability of
companies for the spread of GMOs.

Suzuki said he thinks the technology is too young to tout "so-called
benefits" for agriculture, and it is also an experiment in food safety.

"Anyone that says, 'Oh, we know that this is perfectly safe,' I say is
either unbelievably stupid or deliberately lying. The reality is we don't
know. The experiments simply haven't been done and we now have become the
guinea pigs."

Suzuki said that what is being done is "not just a logical extension of
classical breeding" and the kind of agriculture that's been practised for
years.

"There may be benefits down the line, but this is a revolutionary
technology," he said.

Monsanto has called the farmers' lawsuit a platform for advancing the
anti-GMO position of various groups in a public arena.

© The StarPhoenix (Saskatoon) 2005

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,1474216,00.html

It's official: acupuncture really works

Study reveals health benefits of ancient healing art
Jo Revill, health editor

Observer
Sunday May 1, 2005

Judith Ritchie slowly eases a fine steel needle into the back of her
patient at a point marked out in felt-tip ink. As the needle is gently
tapped, Judith explains: 'This point lies over the organ I want to
strengthen, her liver. I want to improve the quality of her blood and her
yin, which affects the energy balance.'

Acupuncture relies on a different language and different tools from
Western medicine, but however strange it seems at first, this patient,
Louise Shelver, is a convert. For years she has had debilitating migraines
and pre-menstrual tension.

'The doctor told me that I could go on the Pill or have anti-depressants,'
said Shelver, from Reading, Berkshire, who is treated fortnightly. 'I
didn't want that, so I came here and it has totally altered my life.

'The migraines come maybe every three months now, but they are not so bad
and I feel like a different person. My husband has noticed a huge change
because I don't get so low. Some days I feel on top of the world.'

Controversy has raged for years over whether acupuncture has only a
placebo effect that makes people feel psychologically and physically better
but changes nothing physiologically.

However, this weekend a new study reveals for the first time that it
provokes a specific response in the brain, shedding light on how it might
affect the body's pain pathways. This helps to explain why both patients
and health professionals trained in Western medicine are increasingly
turning to this ancient form of Chinese healing.

Ritchie is a qualified children's nurse who has spent the last nine months
learning this complementary therapy.

'I began to realise acupuncture's use goes far beyond pain relief. In the
West you treat a disease. With acupuncture you're treating the whole
person - the root of the problems, not just the symptoms.

'I can spend an hour or more with a patient. In the NHS you never get that
time. Acupuncture can benefit so many adults and children.'

More than two million treatments will be given this year. Most
practitioners work in private clinics, charging around £30 a time.

Increasingly, however, acupuncture is becoming mainstream, and it is being
offered in the NHS because of patient demand. The profession is heading
towards self-regulation on the recommendation of a House of Lords
committee. This will protect patients more by preventing just anyone
calling themselves acupuncturists.

The latest study is from researchers at Southampton University and
University College London, who devised a clever trial to determine whether
acupuncture worked by carrying out brain scans on patients receiving it.

The patients, all with painful osteoarthritis in their thumbs, were
divided into three groups. The first group were touched by blunt needles
which did not pierce the skin and had no therapeutic value.

The second had 'sham acupuncture' they believed was real. Their scans
showed that one area of the brain associated with the production of natural
opiates lit up.

In the third group, who received real acupuncture, the scans showed that,
as well as the opiate centre, another region of the brain, the ipsilateral
insular, was activated. This region appears to be involved in pain
modulation.

Dr George Lewith, a research team member from Southampton, said: 'This
shows us that real acupuncture produces a demonstrable physiological effect
over and above a simple skin prick.

'We still don't fully understand how pain works, but we do know that after
patients receive acupuncture there are changes in the way they manage their
problems that last for up to two years.'

Acupuncturists believe there are 12 energy pathways in the body, each
associated with a different organ, and the treatment re-establishes the
energy balance in organs when it goes awry.

To treat an illness, practitioners take a full view of the patient, asking
how their body functions, about their character and even their childhood.
Treatment is varied accordingly. Fine needles are inserted into different
points, either to stimulate or reduce the flow of energy along pathways.

It is said to work for an increasing number of conditions. Its worth for
depression, migraines, chronic pain, rheumatism, eczema, multiple sclerosis
and high blood pressure has been subjected to clinical studies. Yet a
growing number of patients have it simply because they say that acupuncture
makes them feel happier and more fulfilled.

The patients' profile is also changing. Gwyneth Paltrow and Cherie Blair
are at the celebrity end of the scale, but such patients as retired
firefighter John Thurston show how widespread acceptance of the therapy has
become.

Thurston, at 79, is one of the oldest patients at the College of
Integrated Chinese Medicine in Reading, Berkshire, where he has been
treated fortnightly for several months.

A stroke last year left him with difficulty in walking, numbness in one
hand and unable to lift one of his arms. 'It has made a remarkable
difference,' said a delighted Thurston. 'I can dress myself now, whereas
after the stroke I couldn't do a button up. I used to find it hard to lift
my left leg up and I'm now walking more or less straight. I have got a lot
more movement back.

'When the doctors signed me off at the hospital, they said cheerio and
that was it. I did have a a bit of physiotherapy, but it's coming here that
has really helped. I wish everyone could have it. It's done me a world of
good.'

Pinpoint prowess

Researchers in Sweden have found that acupuncture is effective at
relieving pelvic pain, a common complaint during pregnancy. Another
clinical trial at Stanford University in the US showed it could help
alleviate depression in pregnant women.

A study in the British Medical Journal showed that patients with
osteoarthritis in the knee who received acupuncture a well as an
anti-inflammatory painkiller suffered less pain and stiffness than those
who received the drug plus sham acupuncture, where the needle did not
penetrate the skin.

Children with hay fever and nasal allergies had fewer sneezing bouts and
congestion after acupuncture compared with a placebo group, in research
carried out in Hong Kong.

A study of rats showed that acupuncture lowered their blood pressure by
as much as 50 per cent. Researchers in California are trying to establish
if the technique will have the same effect on humans.

WEEKLY WATCH number 121

NEW POPE CAUTIOUS ON BIOTECH
According to an article in The Times of Malta, the new Pope, Cardinal
Ratzinger, has spelt out what everybody should know: the development of
[bio]technology has far outstripped the development of the ethical
structure required to harness the new knowledge.
http://www.gmwatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=5146

GM LOBBY "UNBELIEVABLY STUPID OR DELIBERATELY LYING" - GENETICIST
"Anyone that says 'Oh, we know that this is perfectly safe,' I say is
either unbelievably stupid or deliberately lying. The reality is we don't
know. The experiments simply haven't been done and we now have become the
guinea pigs." - geneticist Dr David Suzuki
http://www.gmwatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=5163

... to my pleasant surprise, Scoop® publishes!

http://scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0504/S00284.htm

Thursday, 28 April 2005

Opinion: Robert Mann

OWNERSHIP MATTERS

The spectacular twentieth century was convulsed repeatedly by wars
over ownership. The first decade, known to us as the Edwardian period,
was generally peaceful & prosperous in the British Empire and many other
regions, but Communism got going in Russia and took advantage of WW1 to
seize dictatorial power for fanatical atheists in that large
industrial/peasant society. The fifth decade featured the most interesting
war I know of, in which Communism expanded its boundaries. In the early
1950s the Korean war limited the further expansion of militant
materialism, but the 'cold war' standoff between Capitalism and Communism
proceeded to absorb colossal resources in deterrence. And the attack on
Indochina by the USA + allies (including, disgracefully, our country)
soured politics in many nations as well as killing a few million more and
leaving awful toxic legacies.

Ownership was, in one sense or another, the issue in those
wars. Dozens of millions died over the question whether 'the means of
production, distribution and exchange' should be owned by the State, as
advocated and partly implemented by the first (1935) NZ Labour Government
and thoroughly imposed at one extreme of the L-R spectrum - in the USSR,
the People's Republic of China, Albania, etc.

At the far-R end of that ownership spectrum still operate
dictatorships, and pretend-democracies making the world safe for
capitalist investment - Haiti, Colombia etc.

But the last couple decades of C20 saw these strenuous
issues declared to be illusory. Today Maurice Williamson MP assures us it
doesn't matter who owns the railways etc - you won't be able to tell the
difference, he says, as long as they have suitable rules. How odd that
Churchill, Stalin, and many other leaders - not to mention the theorists
such as Marx and whoever you regard as an intellectual proponent of
capitalism - were all deluded. Maurice can now say, without apparent
dispute, that the issue of ownership which so preoccupied them as they
presided over wars killing millions, was just a temporary confusion.

Mind you, the same politicians who suggest that ownership
doesn't matter have generally been deeply involved in transferring
ownership of main public assets to a small group of robber barons (mostly
foreign). If you really believe it doesn't matter who owns these assets,
why bother to privatize them? The answer is evidently Maurice's slogan
(with several other NZ MPs e.g Prebble) "the govt cannot run any commercial
enterprise competently".

New Zealand insisted from early on until around 1980
that the main utilities will be democratically controlled, through
ownership: rail, road, airports, airlines, telephone system, electricity
generation & transmission, TV, most radio, most hospitals schools and
tertiary education, H.M mails, and many other services, were controlled
through government departments reporting to Parliament. Electricity
reticulation was by local consumers' cooperatives - elected directly as
power boards, or indirectly as municipal electricity departments. At the
same time, corporate enterprise was able to prosper in many productive &
distributive activities.

This mixed economy served what my friend Andrew Macfarlane
& I view as the finest modern civilisation.

Then Mulgoon set about alienating the railways and arranging for
foreign corporations to exploit main resources such as natural gas and
forests. The rush to privatisation accelerated hugely under the traitors
Lange, Douglas, Scott, etc; and Williamson's party gleefully continued it
with financial witch Ruth Richardson.

In 1992 the corporatised Electricorp - formerly the state
NZ Electricity Dept - staged a "shortage" of electricity. At the time they
had a huge surplus (ca. 1,000MW) of generating capacity, and their New
Plymouth 600MW gas-fired station ran below capacity throughout the
"shortage", but the media refused to report this. Approvals to build more
power stations were thus procured by false pretences - a faked need. In
2001 a more diabolical stunt was staged. Notwithstanding extra gas-burning
power stations commissioned in the intervening decade, images of southern
hydro lakes at low levels were arranged (by spilling huge amounts of water
in January & February) to imply that electricity might run short in late
winter. Loyal, trusting old folk were again asked to skimp, denying
themselves comfort which would, in the old dreaded State system, have been
available.

And this 'threat of shortage' was used to rook consumers
at prices many times the usual. Some major industrial electricity users
had to decrease production and lay off workers.

The front-man for the "competitivity" charade, Max
Bradford MP, who rammed through Parliament against all expert advice the
irrationally fragmented casinofied electricity system we now suffer under,
expressed himself satisfied with that winter's fiasco. The market is
working, he intoned. As long as the ownership is as he wishes, meeting his
economic ideals, he isn't concerned at the harm to people.

The experiment with "competition" was widely predicted to
be doomed because it was stupid and could not succeed even on its own
terms. It has now proven in practice to be a disaster, misallocating
resources on a large & damaging scale - as well as failing drastically to
deliver Bradford's "cheaper electricity".

The mixed economy I'm praising was essentially agreed
between the two main political parties. Sir John Marshall's autobiography
includes his main speeches at the start of his parliamentary career, which
espouse no notable difference from Walter Nash's insistence that the main
utilities should be publicly owned so as to be controlled by Parliament.
It may be difficult, but it would pay the nation handsomely to reverse the
wrongs done by Bradford and by his predecessors who "sold" the electricity
system away from democratic control. The main recipient, the traitor
Douglas's buddy Fernyhough who handed over on TV a fake "cheque" when given
the NZED for corporatization as Electricorp, has passed away. His fellow
wide-boy Gibbs lives largely overseas, as does another rakeoff artist M
Fay. Many parties have raked off millions of unearned profits from the
further fragmenting of ownership; the prices, and service, in the
casinofied system are notoriously worse, and transition to renewable energy
is scandalously neglected by the money-maniacs to whom the traitor Douglas
gave it. Shouldn't we explore how to restore the mixed economy?

This question arises at a time when calls are rife for review
of our Constitution, mainly from racist secessionists and other
republicans. Among the many good reasons not to bother with such ideas is
that, if we detour into them, we will tend to overlook the need to recover
public assets for democratic control. Our system of government protects
democracy by an excellent monarchy; within that proven framework, let us
get on with restoring the mixed economy. Ownership does matter.

*****

Dr Mann is a retired academic (biochemistry, environmental studies)
active in renewable-energy inventions.

From: Mission America
Subject: New Jewish Group To Fight Anti-Christian Bias

To view the entire article, visit
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=43987

Wednesday, April 27, 2005
------------------------------------------------------------------
Jewish group fights anti-Christian bias
By Ron Strom
------------------------------------------------------------------

A longtime columnist and author has birthed a new organization made up of
Jews who are committed to battling anti-Christian bias and discrimination
in the culture.

Don Feder, a Boston Herald writer and syndicated columnist for 19 years, is
president of Jews Against Anti-Christian Defamation, or JAACD.

Members of the group's advisory board include rabbis, commentators,
academics, authors, activists, Zionist leaders and an entertainer.

"Members span the spectrum from Orthodox to secular, but are united in
their determination to support our beleaguered brothers and sisters in the
Christian community," a statement from the organization said.

Feder said for years he has written about incidents of anti-Christian
discrimination in the public square - from the prohibition of creches on
public land to the silencing prayer in the nation's schools.

Don Feder

"What I consider an epidemic of anti-Christian bigotry and persecution is
something that has concerned me for a long time," Feder told WND, noting
that in 1996 he wrote a book entitled "Who's Afraid of the Religious
Right?" which covers what he sees as the left's attack on traditional
Christians.

"Particularly pernicious is the leftist idea that it's legitimate to base
your politics on anything except religion," he said. "You can say that my
politics are based on the views of Karl Marx or Ayn Rand or Jane Fonda Ö
and that's OK, but as soon as you say your worldview is based on the Bible,
that's considered an illegitimate basis for embracing certain political
views."

Feder says about a year ago he decided there should be a distinctly Jewish
organization dealing with anti-Christian prejudice, which he considers a
"political pogrom."

"If a Jewish organization complains about these things," he explained, "no
one can accuse us of self-interest, because we're not Christians; we're
Jews."

Added Feder: "The fate of America hinges on whether or not Christians - I
mean authentic Christians - succeed in the political arena."

Feder credits Ted Baehr, founder of MovieGuide, with helping to get the
organization off the ground.

Speaking at a press conference announcing the new group were syndicated
columnist Mona Charen, Barry Farber, longtime New York City talk-show host,
and two rabbis - Joshua Haberman and Rabbi Yehuda Levin.

Others involved with the group include: David Horowitz (Center for the
Study of Popular Culture), Morton Klein (Zionist Organization of America),
Herb London (Hudson Institute), Bruce Herschensohn (professor, Pepperdine
University), Rabbi Daniel Lapin (Toward Tradition), syndicated talk-show
host Michael Medved, Rabbi Jacob Neusner (professor, Bard College) and
comedian Jackie Mason.

Drawing a connection between his faith and Christianity, Feder said,
"Christian morality comes from the Jewish Bible, hence the expression
'Judeo-Christian ethic.'"

The group, therefore, "is also standing up for the morality of the Torah."

Said Feder: "By maintaining their loyalty to the eternal values revealed at
Sinai, Christians have become pariahs in the eyes of the establishment, but
heroes in our eyes."

"Jews and Christians serve God differently. But our morality is the same,"
states promotional material for the group.

Feder says his group is in the process of setting up a website and will
work to educate Americans "on the toxic nature of what has been called the
last acceptable form or prejudice."

The organization's founder ridiculed the notion that religious Americans
want the nation ruled by a theocracy.

"It's just absurd," Feder said. "If what the left is talking about
constitutes a theocracy, then America was a theocracy in 1961.

"American had school prayer, in many states there was Bible reading in the
schools, public display of religious symbols, abortion was outlawed except
in rare instances, if anyone talked about same-sex marriage they would have
been met with derisive laughter," he noted. "I was alive in 1961; if we
were a theocracy then, somehow I missed it."

Feder's latest book, "The Tattered Flag: The Fight for America in the 21st
Century," will be released this year.

© 2005
------------------------------------------------------------------

Ron Strom is a news editor for WorldNetDaily.com.

------------------------------------------------------------------
Mail service for Mission America provided by American Family Online
www.afo.net

Mission America
www.missionamerica.com

My Berkeley student (tho' he was an undergrad) contemporary the Eton old
bwah Harry Frere recently rtd from a career with UPI.
He likes Dave Barry and particularly commends this:

>"If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an
>infant's life, she will choose to save the infant's life without even
>considering if there are men on base."

> UNCLE DICK AND PAPA
>
> MAUREEN DOWD
>
> New York Times
> April 23, 2005

She thinks she's smart doing a twofer like this. But she is
still for my money one of the worst three commentators in
recent years featured by the NYT. She may be the prettiest
(not hard, given the other two Anthony Lewis and Frank Rich)
but she is by far the silliest.

Her point on relativism and absolutism is bizarre.

Such haters of the western way of life disgust me.

I wonder how she would respond to the piece below?

===

The cultural war on Western civilization

Keith Windschuttle

New Criterion, January 2002
http://www.sydneyline.com/War on Western civilization.htm

In the last week of September, shortly after the terrorist
assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the
Prime Minister of Italy, Silvio Berlusconi, made an
extraordinary statement. During a visit to Germany, he
declared Western civilization superior to Islam. He said:

We must be aware of the superiority of our civilization, a
system that has guaranteed well-being, respect for human
rights and - in contrast with Islamic countries - respect
for religious and political rights.

The minute he had uttered these words, a bevy of European
politicians rushed to denounce him. The Belgian Prime
Minister, Guy Verhofstadt, said: "I can hardly believe that
the Italian Prime Minister made such statements." Spokesman
for the European Commission, Jean-Christophe Filori, added:
"We certainly don't share the views expressed by Mr
Berlusconi." Italy's centre-left opposition spokesman
Giovanni Berlinguer called the words "eccentric and
dangerous". Within days, Berlusconi was forced to withdraw.

It is true that the statement could have been more
diplomatically timed, made as it was while American
officials were trying to put together an anti-terrorist
coalition of Islamic allies. But there is little doubt it
would have generated just as many denials no matter when it
was uttered. The statement was extraordinary because,
although Western superiority in every major area of human
endeavour, especially in political and individual liberty,
is patently obvious to everyone, it has become a truth that
must not be spoken.

The chief reason is the prevailing ideology of the Western
intelligentsia. For the past two decades and more, the
leading opinion makers in the media, the universities and
the churches have regarded Western superiority as, at best,
something to be ashamed of, and at worst, something to be
opposed. Until thirty years ago, when Western intellectuals
reflected on the long-term achievements of their culture,
they explained it in terms of its own evolution: the
inheritance of ancient Greece, Rome and Christianity,
tempered by the Renaissance, the Reformation, the
Enlightenment and the scientific and industrial revolutions.
Even a radical critique like Marxism was primarily an
internal affair, intent on fulfilling what it imagined to be
the destiny of the West, taking its history to what it
thought would be a higher level.

Today, however, such thinking is dismissed by the prevailing
intelligentsia as triumphalist. Western political and
economic dominance is more commonly explained not by its
internal dynamics but by its external behaviour, especially
its rivalry and aggression towards other cultures. Western
success has purportedly been at their expense. Instead of
pushing for internal reform or revolution, this new
radicalism constitutes an overwhelmingly negative critique
of Western civilization itself.

According to this ideology, instead of attempting to
globalise its values, the West should stay in its own
cultural backyard. Values like universal human rights,
individualism and liberalism are regarded merely as
ethnocentric products of Western history. The scientific
knowledge that the West has produced is simply one of many
"ways of knowing". In place of Western universalism, this
critique offers the relativism of multiculturalism, a
concept that regards the West not as the pinnacle of human
achievement to date, but as simply one of many equally valid
cultural systems.

Although originally designed to foster tolerance and respect
for other cultures, these sentiments were subsequently
captured by the radical left and manipulated to the point of
inconsistency. Their plea for acceptance and open-mindedness
does not extend to Western culture itself, whose history is
regarded as little more than a crime against the rest of
humanity. The West cannot judge other cultures but must
condemn its own.

Though commonly known as multiculturalism, this position is
defined by its supporters with a series of post prefixes:
postmodernism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism. However,
it is best understood as an anti phenomenon because it
defines itself not by what it is for but by what it is
against. It is entirely a negation of Western culture and
values: whatever the West supports, this anti-West rejects.

The aftermath to September 11 provided a stark illustration
of its values. Within days of the terrorist assault, a
number of influential Western intellectuals, including Noam
Chomsky, Susan Sontag and youthful counterparts such as
Naomi Klein of the anti-globalisation protest movement,
responded in ways that, morally and symbolically, were no
different to the celebrations of the crowds on the streets
of Palestine and Islamabad who cheered as they watched the
towers of the World Trade Center come crashing down.
Stripped of its obligatory jargon, their argument was
straightforward: America deserved what it got.

This intellectual response was not couched in terms of
Western humanist values. Instead, it represented a descent
into the kind of relativism not seen since the days of Lenin
and Hitler when class-based and race-based hatreds were
morally sanctioned by radical politics. The major difference
today is that this time it is not class or race but the
whole of Western society that has been relativised.

This anti-Western, multicultural, postcolonial intellectual
edifice constitutes a true ideology: it sees the world as an
arena of conflict and has a political program to change the
world for its own ends. It is formidable in its
comprehensiveness and in the number of intellectual fields
it encompasses. They include history, literature, the arts,
the social sciences, the physical sciences, and the law. It
is also formidable in the number of professional and public
institutions it has successfully captured and whose agenda
it now controls. With the demise of Marxism since the 1980s,
it has emerged as its major ideological successor. What
follows is a summary of the creed, coupled with some of the
more obvious objections to it.

Western culture was founded on aggression towards others:
Despite being employed for the purpose of transmitting
culture, most of the writers, editors and teachers who
advocate this cause are united in their hostility to the
cultural traditions that have nurtured them from birth. They
see the whole of Western culture since the ancient Greeks as
something to be disowned.

The person who did most to establish this interpretation was
Edward Said, the Arab-American literary critic employed by
Columbia University, New York, and a long-time activist for
the Palestinian cause. His influential 1978 book,
Orientalism, claimed that, from its classical origins,
Western culture had been defined not by its own internal
development, but by its long history of antagonism to "the
Other", that is, to non-Western cultures.

This motif persists, Said claims, from its origins in Homer
right down to the modern period. The desire to rule distant
peoples has had a "privileged status" in the West. There has
been "something systematic" about its imperial culture that
was not evident in other empires. Moreover, while Europe's
ability to take over and rule distant colonies might now be
a thing of the past, the imperialist imperative lives on
today in American foreign and economic policy, where it is
validated by Western culture and ideology. Said claims it is
still driven, as it was in the nineteenth century, by the
West's "untrammelled rapacity, greed and immorality".

In particular, he argues, Western oriental scholarship led
Europeans to see Islamic culture as static in both time and
place, as "eternal, uniform and incapable of defining
itself". This gave Europe a sense of its own cultural and
intellectual superiority. It consequently saw itself as a
dynamic, innovative, expanding culture and rationalised its
imperial ambition not as a form of conquest but as the
redemption of a degenerate world.

Said has spawned a school of followers from a variety of
intellectual disciplines. One of them is Richard Waswo, who,
in his 1997 book, The Founding Legend of Western
Civilization, traces the story of the fall of Troy and the
founding of Rome by the Trojan survivors to show how it has
been represented in Western literature ever since. He calls
the story a "legend of perpetual colonisation" that "became
the rationale for imperialist attitudes from ancient Rome to
Vietnam". He examines the legend from its first expression
in The Aeneid , to the Faerie Queene, to the fiction of
Joseph Conrad and E. M. Forster, and to its manifestations
in the films of John Ford, in the defoliation of Vietnam and
in the current policies of the World Bank.

Waswo is not an historian but is Professor of English at the
University of Geneva. This has not, however, prevented him
>from receiving the endorsement of some of America's most
celebrated academic historians such as Hayden White, who
praises him for having written "a counter-history to the
official version, a complete re-reading of the Western
canon", and "an indictment of the whole of Western
civilization". This last phrase summarises the appeal of the
book, not only for aging radicals like White but also for a
younger generation of middle-class student protestors. The
most prominent among the student rioters against
globalisation in Seattle, Washington and Genoa in the past
two years were those who learnt their version of Western
cultural history at the feet of teachers inspired by authors
like Said, Waswo and White.

The claim that Western culture has always defined itself in
opposition to others is an assumption that usually goes
unquestioned in academic debate today. There is, however,
very little to recommend it. Although they have long
distinguished themselves from the Barbarians of the world,
Europeans do not primarily draw their identity from
comparisons with other cultures. Instead, identity comes
>from their own heritage, from classical Greece, Rome and
Christianity. Western identity is overwhelmingly defined by
historical references to its earlier selves, rather than by
geographical comparisons with others. To claim otherwise is
to deny the central thrust of Western education for the past
one thousand years.

The argument also displays a highly selective view of
imperial history in that it ignores empires other than those
of Europe. The truth is that all great civilizations have
absorbed other peoples, sometimes in harmony, sometimes by
the sword. The Islamic world that this thesis defends is no
different. The Ottoman Turks ruled most of the Middle East
for a thousand years, largely with the concurrence of their
Arab subjects. The British and the French displaced them in
the nineteenth century, again with the approval of the
Arabs, who by then wanted liberation from Ottoman rule. The
Arabs themselves were not indigenous to most of the regions
they now populate. Before the Turks, they were an imperial
power who arose out of the Arabian Peninsula in the seventh
century to conquer the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia
and Southern Europe. None of this history provokes any
censure from the critics of imperialism today, who reserve
their reproaches exclusively for the European variety.

Western literature and arts endorse imperialism: Until the
last two decades, most people brought up within Western
culture believed that its literature, its art and its music
were among the glories of its civilization. Western literary
criticism once aimed to seek out the genius of its authors
and to extol their contribution to defining the human
condition. Today, much of the academic debate about the
Western literary heritage claims that it is politically
contaminated. Some of these charges have long been well
known because they offended against the post-1970s
ideological triumvirate of gender, race and class: Othello
is ethnocentric, Paradise Lost is a feminist tragedy, Jane
Eyre is both racist and sexist.

However, Western literature is today most severely rebuked
for its support of imperialism. The theorist making this
accusation is, again, Edward Said. He claims the flowering
of European literature since the sixteenth century either
directly endorsed or provided a supportive environment for
the expansion of Europe in the same period. Said draws on
the thesis of the French historical theorist, Michel
Foucault, that all knowledge serves the ends of power and
that all intellectual disciplines, including literary and
art criticism, are politically motivated.

Said argues this has been especially true of the novel, an
art form that originated in the eighteenth century when
European expansionism knew no boundaries. In his 1993 book
Culture and Imperialism he claims that, of all modern
literary forms, it is the novel that has been most culpable
in reproducing and advocating the power relations of empire.
His critique encompasses not only novels that are overtly
about imperial affairs, such as those of Joseph Conrad and
Rudyard Kipling, but even the work of such apparently
domestic writers as Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. One of
Jane Austen's characters in Mansfield Park, Sir Thomas
Bertram, owns a sugar plantation in the Caribbean, so this
implicates her in support of slavery, Said claims. In Great
Expectations, Charles Dickens despatches one of his
characters to Australia and another to Egypt, so this makes
him an imperialist author, too.

Said extends his critique to opera, which he describes as an
art form "that belongs equally to the history of culture and
the historical experience of overseas domination". Because
Giuseppe Verdi's Aida is set in ancient Egypt, Said claims
it fosters military aggression towards the Orient. It
contains "imperialist structures of attitude and reference"
that acts as an "anaesthetic" on European audiences, leading
them to ignore the brutality that accompanied their conquest
of other countries.

Equally culpable are European paintings of the Orient, even
those of Delacroix and Ingres, which critics once thought
portrayed the region in romantically admiring terms.
Instead, art critics who follow Said now use them as
examples of subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice
against Arabo-Islamic peoples and their culture. They
purportedly exhibit the aggressiveness necessitated by the
colonial expansion of the European powers. These paintings
are primarily a reflection of European arrogance and Western
prejudices: "the idea of Oriental decay, the subjection of
women, an unaccountable legal system - pictorial rhetoric
that served a subtle imperialistagenda".

Presented like this, stripped of their theoretical
obfuscation, the ideas are transparently crude. They
resemble the reductionism of one-time Marxist criticism,
which invariably saw Western art and literature as
expressions of "nothing but" the venal interests of the
ruling class, the bourgeoisie or some other culpable social
class. They also stretch interpretation beyond credulity.
The idea that, because Jane Austen presents one
plantation-owning character, of whom heroine, plot and
author all plainly disapprove, she thereby becomes a
handmaiden of imperialism and slavery, is to misunderstand
both the novel and the biography of its author, who was an
ardent opponent of the slave trade. Similarly, to argue that
because Charles Dickens uses some overseas locations as
convenient off-stage sites to advance his plots, he thereby
become an advocate of empire, is to give him attitudes he
never expressed. To claim that the art form of opera or the
romantic indulgence of the nineteenth century Orientalist
school of painting, derives from the European experience of
overseas domination is to make an ideological misreading of
them all.

Yet such is the authority of the dominant thesis that
contemporary writers rush to praise these kinds of
analytical crudities. "Readers accustomed to the precision
and elegance of Edward Said's analytical prowess," writes
the Nobel laureate, Toni Morrison, for the cover blurb of
Culture and Imperialism, "will not be disappointed." In
return, not surprisingly, Morrison herself earns equally
lavish compliments from the same school of criticism.

Of greater concern is the penetration this thesis has
achieved in the higher education system. Edward Said is the
immediate past president of the Modern Language Association,
the principal professional association for teachers of
literature at American universities. Publishers of books set
for these courses now routinely commission the advocates of
such theories to edit and introduce the literary texts that
students will study. Penguin Books, for instance, engaged
Said himself as editor of its latest edition of Rudyard
Kipling's masterpiece, Kim. A like-minded critic was also
commissioned to introduce the Penguin Classics edition of
Jane Austen's Mansfield Park and to endorse Said's thesis
that this quintessentially domestic author was implicated in
British imperial expansion.

The Western economic system exploits the rest of the world:
According to this ideology, Western prosperity is based on
ill-gotten gains. Globalisation, its adherents claim, is a
euphemism for American imperialism. The poverty of the Third
World is purportedly entrenched by debts from the
International Monetary Fund and the free market policies of
the World Trade Organisation. Hence, students and trade
unionists riot outside the meetings that decide these
policies, and church leaders sermonize us to forgive the
debt.

Some of this argument is made in historical terms. The
capital that funded the industrial revolution, some authors
claim, derived from the twin exploitations of colonialism
and slavery. Edward Said still cites the work of the
Trinidad Marxist, Eric Williams, who argued in Capitalism
and Slavery (1944) that profits from the transport and sale
of slaves made a substantial contribution to financing the
industrial revolution in Britain. Hence, all those
subsequent generations of Europeans who have enjoyed the
standards of living provided by industrialism have done so
>from capital accumulated on the backs of black slave labour.

Another celebrated author in the same genre is Andre Gunder
Frank whose book ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age
(199 rejects the thesis that European entrepreneurship,
ingenuity and technological innovation were responsible for
the commercial and industrial revolutions between the
seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. "Europe did not pull
itself up by its own economic bootstraps," Frank writes,
"and it was certainly not thanks to any kind of European
'exceptionalism', of rationality, institutions,
entrepreneurship, technology, geniality, in a word - of
race". Instead, he claims: "Europe climbed up on the back of
Asia, then stood on Asian shoulders - temporarily."

Both these arguments, however, are untenable. Some
revisionist historians of British colonialism have recently
overturned them. In the newly published Oxford History of
the British Empire, for instance, David Richardson analyses
the contribution of the slave trade to the industrialism in
Britain and finds profits from slaving voyages contributed
less than one per cent of total domestic investment in
Britain at the time. In other words, slavery was irrelevant
to the industrial revolution.

Similarly, the profits from British investments in its
empire in the nineteenth century were not exploitative.
Historians such as P. J. Marshall, P. G. Cain and A. G.
Hopkins have shown British investment benefited India,
Africa and South America considerably. It provided the
infrastructure of ports, roads, railways and communications
that allowed them access to the modern world.

European imperialism ended in the 1940s and 1950s. The
non-West has now had half a century to try its own economic
prescriptions. The fact that many of these countries have
not progressed beyond the kickstart provided by European
colonial investment can no longer be blamed on the West.
Those who have chosen to emulate the Western model, such as
Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore, have shown that it
is possible to transform a backward Third World country into
a prosperous, modern, liberal democratic nation in as little
as two generations. In Japan's case, the model allowed it to
rise from the ashes of total defeat to become a world power
in less than forty years.

Those countries that still wallow in destitution and
underdevelopment do so not because of Western imperialism,
racism or oppression, but because of policies they have
largely chosen themselves. For example, after independence
in 1947, India's flirtation with the Soviet bloc and with
socialist economics needlessly condemned the country to
Third World status, and consigned much of its population to
humiliating poverty. Had India chosen the Japanese path, it
could have been by now a much greater power than China. It
is only in the past decade, with the partial adoption of the
liberal economic policies of the capitalist West, that its
fortunes have begun to turn around.

Elsewhere in the Third World, American policies of granting
and lending money, of setting up factories there and of
importing the goods they produce, cannot plausibly be
regarded as imperialist exploitation. If it were, the
countries involved would hardly be holding out their hands
for more. Nor would they be recording the economic growth
rates that are the envy of all those who lack the same
American investment.

Victimhood should prevail over individualism: Western
individualism is another of the targets of this ideology. It
regards individualism as both the cause and effect of
capitalism, which in its turn produced the imperialism that
now oppresses the wretched of the earth. Individualism is
also regarded as deriving from such ethnocentric
Enlightenment constructs as human rights. It is the one
great barrier to a collectivist solution for humankind. So
individualism has to go.

In its place, the creed offers victimhood. Its political
constituency comprises those it defines -- by whatever
stretch of the imagination this might take -- as the
underdogs and the marginals of society. Within Western
countries, this includes ethnic and racial minorities,
women, homosexuals, indigenous peoples, the exiled, the
poor, the incarcerated and the insane. Beyond Western
society, it includes the masses of the Third World.

It is in pursuit of this political objective that much of
the recent revision of the history curriculum has been done.
Western history is no longer to be judged by the record of
its achievements. Instead, it is to become a story of the
struggle of its victims against oppression and
discrimination, and of how they have risen to challenge
their exploiters. Consequently, the purpose of teaching
history becomes to "empower" its victims.
One of the key intellectual concepts of victimhood is that
of exile. As the number of refugees, asylum seekers and
illegal immigrants around the world mounts, so does the
number of exiles. In fact, this is one quality many Western
academics believe they have in common with those who now
crowd their borders. There are two dimensions to this
identification. On the one hand, these intellectuals assume
for themselves the role of spokesmen for the poor, the weak
and the disadvantaged. They denounce the governments and
powerful interests they claim have produced the desperation
of the exiles.

On the other hand, intellectuals can share their trauma
because, deep down, they are exiles too. Radical
intellectuals claim to know what it is like to be
psychically banished, to feel displaced, uncertain of their
identities, uncommitted to any location. These feelings even
extend to those who still live in the country of their birth
but who, because of their ethnic or sexual identity, sense
they do not quite belong. One fashionable feminist book
about a number of Australian women writers is entitled
Exiles at Home.

Edward Said claims exile is the real condition of the modern
intellectual. Indeed, he says, he knows it at first hand.
"My own experience of these matters," he says in
Orientalism, "are in part what made me write this book."
Like many of his kind, however, Said's claims are
self-indulgent fabrications. He is the son of a wealthy
Arab-American businessman, and grew up in Cairo in a
household with a butler, two drivers and a bevy of servants.
He spent his teenage years at an exclusive American private
boarding school. He later invented an identity as a
Palestinian refugee, a persona that allowed him full exile
status:

The life of an Arab Palestinian in the West, particularly in
America, is disheartening. There exists here an almost
unanimous consensus that politically he does not exist, and
when it is allowed that he does, it is either as a nuisance
or as an Oriental. The web of racism, cultural stereotypes,
political imperialism, dehumanising ideology holding in the
Arab or the Muslim is very strong indeed, and it is this web
which every Palestinian has come to feel as his uniquely
punishing destiny.

Similarly, the Parisian poststructuralist feminist
celebrity, Hélène Cixious, complains in a memoir about
her adolescent travails as an Algerian Jewish girl in the
French colony:

I saw how the white, superior, plutocratic, civilised world
funded its power on the repression of populations who had
suddenly become "invisible", like proletarians, immigrant
workers, minorities who are not the right "colour". Women.
Invisible as humans. I saw that the great, noble, "advanced"
countries established themselves by expelling what was
"strange".

Despite the discrimination and oppression Said and Cixious
claim to have suffered, they fail to mention that this same
white plutocracy gave both of them tenured university posts
that put them among the most materially and occupationally
privileged human beings on the planet. Nor do they
acknowledge that both enjoy the added indulgence of the
freedom to make whatever criticisms they fancy of the
countries that sustain them.

The careers of Said and Cixious demonstrate that, while it
is one thing for a Western academic to pretend to speak on
behalf of the wretched of the earth, it is an even smarter
tactic to claim to be one of the wretched yourself. This way
you not only become an articulate symbol of all that
suffering but you disarm your critics. Your words become
sacrosanct. Anyone who doubts you or dares to challenge your
claims thereby reveals himself as bigoted and uncaring. You
are beyond censure.

The West must be "provincialised": One of the most prominent
fields of study produced by this ideology is
postcolonialism. This is an intellectual movement focussed
primarily on the study of history and literature, although
it is usually conducted at such an arcane level of theory
that former students of either history or literature would
find their subjects unrecognisable. Postcolonial social
theorists and critics have gained a major foothold in
academic life in the United States.

One of the leading tendencies within postcolonialism is the
Subaltern group of Indian historians or, more accurately,
Indian theorists about history. In 1994, the American
Historical Review, the journal of the leading professional
association, devoted an issue to them. The Subalterns took
their name from a phrase coined by the Italian Marxist
theorist, Antonio Gramsci. Their Indian origins lay in the
1960s middle class Marxist movement, the Naxalites, who
emulated the Red Guards of Mao-tse-tung's China by
assassinating landlords and police in Bihar province and
West Bengal. A number of the movement's members subsequently
moved to America and Australia where they gained academic
positions teaching history.

Although they address historical topics, the Subalterns
offer a radical critique of the discipline, which they see
not as a methodology that can be applied to any society but
as an ethnocentric product of European culture. History,
they assert, is an artefact of the Western nation state.
Contesting the imperialism of the West involves contesting
its version of history as well. India, of course, gained its
independence fifty years ago so one might have thought there
has since been plenty of opportunity for its historians to
go their own way. The Subalterns insist, however, that they
still need to struggle to liberate themselves from European
modes of thought, especially English historiography.

Rather than arguing the point at home in India, these
theorists choose to do it in the Western education system.
Indeed, one reason why there are now so many Indian
academics employed in the humanities departments of American
universities is because of the network of influence provided
by the postcolonial movement.

The aim of their project is to use postmodernist and
poststructuralist literary analysis to deconstruct
historical documents to recover the voice of the colonial
oppressed who, because they were illiterate, left no
documents of their own. They want to recover the authentic
voice of Indian peasants, bandits and others of low caste
and to rewrite them into history. While English historians
have generally regarded Mahatma Ghandi and the Congress
Party as the leaders of the nationalist struggle against
British imperialism, postcolonial historians want to argue
that it was actually the work of the Indian lower orders.

In using postmodernism and poststructuralism, the
postcolonialists are adopting theoretical tools used by
other radical ideologues. The journal Postcolonial Studies
describes their political alliances and connections.

Postcolonialism has much in common with other related
critical endeavours -- such as women's studies and
gay/lesbian studies -- classified under the rubric of the
"new humanities". Marked by an underlying scepticism, these
closely aligned projects find their shared intellectual
vocation in a determined opposition to coercive knowledge
systems and, concomitantly, in a committed pursuit and
recovery of those ways of knowing which have been occluded
-- or, in Foucault's terminology "subjugated" -- by the
epistemic accidents of history. Given its particular
inheritance, postcolonialism has directed its own critical
antagonism toward the universalising knowledge claims of
"western civilization".

In other words, although it claims to eschew Western
culture, the methodology of the postcolonial critique
derives from one radical stream of the West itself. The
members of this movement want to reject the West but all
they are doing is choosing one aspect of its intellectual
culture, European poststructuralist theory, over another,
English historiography.

Some of them do recognise this dilemma. Dipesh Chakrabarty,
a Subaltern historian recently appointed to a personal chair
at the University of Chicago, has written a book called
Provincialising Europe (2000), whose title neatly summarises
the intellectual ambitions of the movement. Provincialising
means to "re-read the European philosophers of modernity in
order to show up the parochialism of their imagination".

Chakrabarty also wants to transcend the limits of the
methodological assumptions of European forms of
investigation. For instance, he wants to incorporate the
magical beliefs of traditional India into its history, not
as categories to be observed sceptically but as living
historical presences. However, he is too committed to the
modern intellect to believe in magic himself so the best he
can do is revert to the language of the German Nietzschean
philosopher, Martin Heidegger, and recommend his hermeneutic
analysis of "particular ways of being-in-the-world". In
short, Chakrabarty would rather withdraw into arcane and
largely irrelevant theoretical speculation than adopt the
contaminated tools of English historiography.

Despite the substantial academic and publishing resources
now being invested in it, and despite its claim to be
showing both Indians and other oppressed peoples how to
recover their own epistemological independence,
postcolonialism is a profoundly backward intellectual
movement. There is nothing about it that is innovatively
non-Western or, indeed, original in any way. To use a
favourite term of one of its other gurus, the University of
Chicago literary theorist Homi Bhabha, it is yet another
example of colonial "mimicry" of the West. Only, in this
case, it shuns the most positive aspects of the Western
intellectual tradition in order to mimic the worst.

Western values are culturally relative: In 1987, the
American philosopher Allan Bloom opened his withering
dissection of the faults of the higher education system, The
Closing of the American Mind, with the observation of the
triumph of relativism. "There is one thing a professor can
be absolutely certain of," he remarked, "almost every
student entering the university believes, or says he
believes, that truth is relative." In the face of the
various claims to truth and the divergent ways of life that
characterise modern society, higher education had responded,
Bloom argued, by promoting the idea that the real danger was
the true believer. This, he noted with bitter irony, was
"the great insight of our times".
The study of history and of culture teaches that all the
world was mad in the past; men always thought they were
right, and that led to wars, persecutions, slavery,
xenophobia, racism and chauvinism. The point is not to
correct the mistakes and really be right; rather it is not
to think you are right at all.

More than a decade on, Bloom's observation not only
continues to be confirmed but relativism has become
institutionalised in the higher education sector and is now
taught as a formal doctrine. This is accomplished both
through broad intellectual tendencies such as postmodernism
and poststructuralism as well as in particular curriculum
areas such as cultural studies, anthropology, literary
theory, women's studies, the sociology of science, and the
history and philosophy of science.

One of the intellectual devices by which this has been
accomplished is through a change in the meaning of the term
"culture". Until recent decades, this term was widely used
in the sense established by Matthew Arnold in his great
nineteenth century tract, Culture and Anarchy, where it
meant "the best that has been thought and said". His concept
of artistic excellence and of its critical appreciation by
an educated elite provided the principal rationale for the
teaching of the humanities for the first two-thirds of the
twentieth century.

At the same time, however, the discipline of anthropology
had its own meaning for the term. Anthropologists used
culture in the sense defined by the nineteenth century
German romantic movement, by which it meant the whole way of
life of a distinct people. As academic politics after the
1960s succumbed to a fierce kind of egalitarianism in which
excellence and elitism became pejorative terms, the
Arnoldian definition lost its position. The belief that all
cultures were equal took its place.

This notion of cultural relativism entailed a radical
re-thinking of Western intellectual life. In aesthetic
criticism, it meant traditional standards had to be
jettisoned. Italian opera could no longer be regarded as
superior to Chinese opera. The theatre of Shakespeare was
not better than that of Kabuki, only different.

In political thought, the pursuit of universal values such
as human rights became suspect. Rather than principles that
were eternal or self-evident, cultural relativists said
these values were bound by their own time and space. They
were simply the ethno-centric products of the eighteenth
century European Enlightenment. Instead of human rights, the
fashionable term became social justice. Human rights not
only derive from the West but they have also been written
down in declarations and laws, so it is possible to check
what they mean. Social justice lacks these qualities but
this gives it the advantage of meaning whatever you want it
to. Moreover, there is no way of ever telling when it is
satisfied. Social justice thus offers an unlimited vista of
political appeal.

The major problems for the acceptance of cultural relativism
have come from its source in anthropology. Cultural
practices from which most Westerners instinctively shrink,
such as cannibalism, human sacrifice, the incineration of
widows and female genital mutilation, have had to be
accorded their own integrity, lest the culture that produced
them be demeaned.

This has not been easy but the feminist movement has been
the leader in coming to the rescue. Although they initially
found the overt misogyny of many tribal cultures
distasteful, feminists in recent years have come to respect
practices they once condemned. Feminist academics now deny
that sati is barbaric. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak gives it
an honourable place in Indian culture by comparing it to the
Christian tradition of martyrdom. Female genital mutilation
has been redefined as genital "cutting", which Germaine
Greer argues should be recognized as an authentic
manifestation of the culture of the Muslim women concerned.

Similarly, the Parisian literary theorist, Tzvetan Todorov,
in The Conquest of America (1985), compared cannibalism to
the Christian Eucharist, and the Australian postmodern
historian, Greg Dening, in Mr Bligh's Bad Language (1992),
declared human sacrifice to be the ritual equivalent of
capital punishment.

To any outside observer, something is obviously going
terribly wrong here. The logic of their relativism is taking
Western academics into dark waters. They are now prepared to
countenance practices that are obviously cruel, unnatural
and life-denying, that is, practices that offend against all
they claim to stand for.

The reality is that if all cultures are relative then we are
faced with moral nihilism. If values are always expressions
of something called culture, and there are no universal
moral principles, then no culture can itself be subjected to
any values, because there could be no trans-cultural values
to stand in judgement over any particular culture. Cultural
relativism, in short, approves any cultural practice at all,
no matter how barbaric. It is a philosophy of anything goes.

Moreover, cultural relativists are faced with two other
unresolvable dilemmas. They endorse as legitimate other
cultures that do not return the compliment. Some other
cultures, of which the best known is Islam, will have no
truck with relativism of any kind. The devout are totally
confident of the universalism of their own beliefs, which
derive from the dictates of God, an absolute authority who
is external to the world and its cultures. They regard a
position such as Western cultural relativism as profoundly
mistaken and, moreover, insulting. Relativism devalues their
faith because it reduces it to merely one of many equally
valid systems of meaning. So, entailed within cultural
relativism is, first, an endorsement of absolutisms that
deny it, and, second, a demeaning attitude to cultures it
claims to respect.

Western knowledge is culturally relative: Despite the
overwhelming success of the scientific methods developed in
Europe from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the
critics of Western culture still insist that truth is
relative. Western knowledge is only one kind of knowledge
and Western methodologies are only one of the "ways of
knowing".

There are a number of sources of this cognitive relativism
but the most popular is that of the French Nietzschean
theorist, Michael Foucault, who argues that truth and
objectivity are Western conceits. All knowledge is bound by
culture, he claims. Within each culture, knowledge is
generated for political purposes. Hence, Western knowledge
is politically beholden to the powerful. To signify this
interconnectivity, Foucault calls it "power/knowledge".

This is a congenial argument for postcolonial historians.
They believe that Western empirical methods were among the
forces that subjugated the Orient, so they regard empiricism
and its quest for objective knowledge as a form of
imperialism. This is why they are so enamoured of the
subjective hermeneutics, or literary interpretations, that
prevail in postmodernism and cultural studies. Objectivity
equals domination; subjectivism equals intercultural
equality and respect.

If taken seriously, this means that science can no longer be
regarded as a universal method for discovering truths.
Moreover, it means that any reasonably coherent doctrine or
body of beliefs can produce "truths" of its own. Science is
thus reduced to one belief system among many. This view is
especially popular within the fields of cultural studies and
the sociology of knowledge where science is invariably
termed "Western science", in order to differentiate it from
its ostensible competitors. As one of Australia's leading
academic sociologists, R. W. Connell, has put it:

The idea that Western rationality must produce universally
valid knowledge increasingly appears doubtful. It is, on the
face of it, ethnocentric. Certain Muslim philosophers point
to the possibility of grounding science in different
assumptions about the world, specifically those made by
Islam, and thus develop the concept of Islamic science.

This claim, however, is no different from some of the more
grotesque historical examples of relativism in science: for
instance, the conflict between "Aryan" and "Jewish physics",
which set back German science under the Nazi regime, and the
claims by the Marxist plant geneticist, T. D. Lysenko, to
have developed a "proletarian" approach to science, in
opposition to "bourgeois" science. The application of
Lysenko's methods to agriculture not only produced a series
of disastrous crop failures in the USSR in the 1930s and
1940s, but was partly responsible for the Chinese famine of
1958-62, the worst in human history, which caused the deaths
of between thirty and forty million people during the
so-called Great Leap Forward.

One can only wish that, instead of deploying armaments
produced by Western technology, the present armed forces and
terrorist cells of some Islamic countries heed the advice of
the postcolonial theorists and adopt the inventions of
Muslim science instead. The most recent Muslim innovation in
armaments was the Mameluke curved sabre of the fourteenth
century.

The truth is that the scientific method developed by the
West is a universal method and its success is sufficient to
refute any theory about the relativism of truth. Western
science makes genuine discoveries. Western knowledge works,
and none of the others do with remotely the same
effectiveness. To say this, however, is not to be
ethnocentric. Western knowledge has nothing whatever to do
with racism, or the elevation of one segment of humanity
over another. It endorses a style of knowledge and its
implementation, not any particular race of people or ethnic
group. This style of knowledge did, of course, have to
emerge somewhere and at some time, and to this extent it
certainly has links with the Western intellectual tradition.
It emerged in this social context, but it is clearly
accessible to people of any background. Far from being bound
by Western culture, Western science belongs to the whole of
humanity.

Culture prevails over civilization: When Silvio Berlusconi
spoke of Western civilization rather than Western culture,
he was reviving terminology that cultural relativism has
rendered uncomfortable. The term "civilization" is not
archaic but is actually a concept from the modern era. The
word did not come into use until the 1770s. The first time
it entered Dr Johnson's English dictionary was the fourth
edition of 1772, and it was only accepted by the dictionary
of the French Academy in 1798.

Civilization was a concept born in the European
Enlightenment and was identified principally with societies
that were based on reason, that were open to new ideas, and
that looked to the wider world for inspiration. In Germany
at the same time, the romantic movement arose in opposition
to this. Instead of reason as the basis of social
organization, romanticism emphasised organic connections to
the land and the virtues of closed rather than open
communities. Civilization implied there was a hierarchy of
human societies and that there were some who had not made
the grade. Civilization meant establishing a polity on
rational principles like liberalism and democracy whereas
romanticism emphasized the bloodlines of ethnicity and race.

"Civilization" was in common use for the next two centuries.
However, it became one of the first casualties of the
culture wars of the post-Vietnam War era. After the 1970s it
was widely regarded as politically incorrect. Subsequently,
it took on an embarrassed and apologetic demeanour and was
retained primarily as token usage.

In its place, the romantic concept of culture as a whole way
of life came to prevail. Such a view was a direct result of
the rise to intellectual prominence of the creed identified
here. Its version of culture recognises no hierarchies and
no excellence. Western civilization is just another culture.
Cultures are beyond good and evil. Accordingly, "cultural
studies" is the field that now dominates academic teaching
and research in the humanities, in triumph over its
adversary, the cultivation of civilization.

Ultimately, this is why Silvio Berlusconi's reference to the
superiority of "our civilization" was so shocking and why so
many of his European peers reacted in horror. He threw aside
the conceptual shroud that had smothered these issues for so
long. While Berlusconi's usage was striking, however, it was
not original. He was echoing words already used by the
American president. In the immediate aftermath of September
11, George W. Bush described the terrorist assaults as "an
attack on civilization". This instinctive response was the
real breakthrough, and is perhaps the one positive outcome
of those terrible events. The assaults left anyone who could
think for himself with a sudden clarity of vision about what
was at stake. This is why radicals like Susan Sontag went
out of their way to mock and subvert Bush's usage, by
putting terms like civilization and liberty within scare
quotes to undermine their authority, thereby trying,
unsuccessfully, to restore the ideological shroud.

We are fortunate there is still a generation that
understands the term civilization and is prepared to use it
in all its connotations. For it still signifies the yawning
chasm that exists between open societies based on universal
principles and closed, self-absorbed communities based on
relativist, tribal values. If the Western intellectual left
had its way, the word would be expunged from memory. If that
ever happened, it would be that much harder for the heirs of
Western civilization to appreciate all it has achieved and,
above all, to be prepared to defend it.

(Blogged under protest)

UNCLE DICK AND PAPA

MAUREEN DOWD

New York Times
April 23, 2005

It was a move so smooth and bold, accomplished with such backstage
bureaucratic finesse, that it was worthy of Dick Cheney himself.

The éminence grise who had long whispered in the ear of power and who had
helped oversee the selection process ended up selecting himself. In
Cheneyesque fashion, he searched far and wide for a pope by looking around
the room and swiftly deciding he was the best man for the job.

Just like Mr. Cheney, once the quintessentially deferential staff man with
the Secret Service code name "Back Seat," the self-effacing Cardinal Joseph
Ratzinger has clambered over the back seat to seize the wheel (or
Commonweal). Mr. Cheney played the tough cop to W.'s boyish, genial pol,
just as Cardinal Ratzinger played the tough cop to John Paul's gentle soul.

And just like the vice president, the new pope is a Jurassic
archconservative who disdains the "if it feels good do it" culture and the
revolutionary trends toward diversity and cultural openness since the 60's.

The two leaders are a match --- absolutists who view the world in stark
terms of good and evil, eager to prolong a patriarchal society that
prohibits gay marriage and slices up pro-choice U.S. Democratic candidates.

The two, from rural, conservative parts of their countries, want to turn
back the clock and exorcise New Age silliness. Mr. Cheney wants to
dismantle the New Deal and go back to 1937. Pope Benedict XVI wants to
dismantle Vatican II and go back to 1397. As a scholar, his specialty was
"patristics," the study of the key thinkers in the first eight centuries of
the church.

They are both old hands at operating in secrecy and using the levers of
power for ideological advantage. They want to enlist Catholics in the
conservative cause, turning confession boxes into ballot boxes with the
threat that a vote for a liberal Democrat could lead to eternal damnation.

Unlike Ronald Reagan and John Paul II, the vice president and the new pope
do not have large-scale charisma or sunny faces to soften their harsh "my
way or the highway" policies. Their gloomy world outlooks and bullying
roles earned them the nicknames Dr. No and Cardinal No. One is called
Washington's Darth Vader, the other the Vatican's Darth Vader.

W.'s Doberman and John Paul's "God's Rottweiler," as the new pope was
called, are both global enforcers with cult followings. Just as the vice
president acted to solidify the view of America as a hyperpower, so the new
pope views the Roman Catholic Church as the one true religion. He once
branded other faiths as deficient.

Both like to blame the media. Cardinal Ratzinger once accused the U.S.
press of overplaying the sex abuse scandal to hurt the church and keep the
story on the front pages.

Dr. No and Cardinal No parted ways on the war --- though Cardinal Ratzinger
did criticize the U.N. But they agree that stem cell research and cloning
must be curtailed. Cardinal Ratzinger once called cloning "more dangerous
than weapons of mass destruction."

As fundamentalism marches on --- even Bill Gates seems to have caved to a
preacher on gay rights legislation because of fear of a boycott --- U.S.
conservatives are thrilled about the choice of Cardinal Ratzinger, hoping
for an unholy alliance. They hope this pope --- who seems to want a
smaller, purer church --- encourages a militant role for Catholic bishops
and priests in the political process.

Cardinal Ratzinger did not shrink from advising American bishops in the
last presidential election on bringing Catholic elected officials to heel.
He warned that Catholics who deliberately voted for a candidate because of
a pro-choice position were guilty of cooperating in evil, and unworthy to
receive communion. Vote Democratic and lose your soul. "Panzerkardinal,"
as he was known, definitely isn't a man who could read Mario Cuomo's Notre
Dame speech urging that pro-choice politicians be allowed in the tent and
say, "He's got a point."

The Republicans can build their majority by bringing strict Catholics and
evangelicals --- once at odds --- together on what they call "culture of
life" issues.

But there's a risk, as with Tom DeLay, Dr. Bill Frist and other
Republicans, that if the new pope is too heavy-handed and too
fundamentalist, his approach may backfire.

Moral absolutism is relative, after all. As Bruce Landesman, a philosophy
professor at the University of Utah, pointed out in a letter to The Times:
"Those who hold 'liberal' views are not relativists. They simply disagree
with the conservatives about what is right and wrong."

HAS THE USA BECOME LIKE
ANCIENT ROME, IN LOVE
WITH COSTLY CONQUEST?

ROBERT SCHEER
Los Angeles Times
April 26, 2005

Notice the price of gasoline lately? Isn't it great that we have secured
Iraq's oil? And as Congress signs off on yet another huge supplementary
grant to supposedly protect U.S. interests in the Mideast, our president
pathetically begs his Saudi buddies for a price break. As the fall of Rome
showed, imperialism never pays.

Of course, back in 2003, conquering Iraq looked like a great package deal,
what with all that oil --- second only to Saudi Arabia --- and the
manufactured photo ops of cheering Iraqis. So what if those pesky weapons
of mass destruction weren't really there? So what if no solid links to Al
Qaeda are ever found? This was a win-win, as the corporate guys like to
say: Not only would we be able to conduct this operation for next to
nothing, we would be welcomed with flowers.

"There is a lot of money to pay for this. It doesn't have to be U.S.
taxpayer money," then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told Congress
days before the war, in testimony on the potential costs of invading Iraq.
"We are talking about a country that can finance its own reconstruction and
relatively soon." In the real world, however, this turned out to be utter
nonsense.

With approval of the latest spending bill, taxpayers will have been forced
to cough up more than $300 billion for the war to date --- above and beyond
the annual $400-billion Pentagon budget --- and tens of billions for a
bungled reconstruction.

Even if the United States can lower its troop commitment to 40,000 troops
in Iraq by 2010, as some Pentagon strategists optimistically anticipate,
the war could still end up costing U.S. taxpayers up to $646 billion by
2015, according to Rep. John Spratt of South Carolina, the ranking Democrat
on the House Budget Committee. If insurgency, corruption and incompetence
continue to plague the U.S. occupation as they have steadily for the last
two years, however, the number could surge to a trillion dollars or more.

We need to put such gargantuan numbers in some perspective. The emergency
funding that the Senate passed 99 to 0 last week gives the military roughly
$80 billion and pays for the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan only
through September. That is twice what President Bush insists he needs to
cut from the federal support for Medicaid over the next decade.

Already the red state of Missouri is set to end its Medicaid program
entirely within the next three years because of a lack of funds. As the
Los Angeles Times reported, that will save the state $5 billion, but at the
cost of ending healthcare for the more than one million Missourians
enrolled in the program.

That sum is less than half of what Halliburton, Vice President Dick
Cheney's old company, alone has been paid for reconstruction efforts in
Iraq, without much to show for it in terms of improving the Iraqis' quality
of life.

Similarly, with roughly ten percent of what we've spent in Iraq, we could
make up the $27-billion federal funding shortfall in paying for Bush's
controversial No Child Left Behind Act, which tells public schools that
they will be all but scrapped if they don't improve --- yet it doesn't
provide the means to do so. This number comes from a lawsuit filed by
school districts in Texas, Michigan and Vermont and the National Education
Assn., the nation's largest teachers organization.

Sadly, these domestic failures provide a far greater long-term threat to
our nation's security than the hyped-up claims surrounding our foreign
adventures. Abroad, we must "support our troops" at all costs --- even if
the cost is their lives --- while at home, the nation's leaders are all
about tough love.

"Government is not here to do everything for everybody," admonished
Missouri state Rep. Jodi Stefanick, a Republican representing suburban St.
Louis. "We have to draw the line somewhere." Just not in Iraq, apparently.

Welcome to late-era Rome, where mindless militaristic expansion is
considered patriotic and where demagogues who recklessly waste taxes and
young lives in empire-building are deemed valorous. Wolfowitz, for
example, has been rewarded for his ignorance and arrogance with the top job
at the World Bank.

It is not too late, however, for us to wake up and recall that, in the end,
once militarism trumped republicanism, the glory that was Rome proved to be
a hollow boast.

Flesh-eating deaths in Quebec, Manitoba

Last Updated Tue, 26 Apr 2005 CBC News

MONTREAL - Someone has died of flesh-eating disease in both Quebec and
Manitoba this week, health officials said. Quebec has had 61 known cases
of the disease so far this year.

Flesh-eating disease facts

Flesh-eating disease is an infection that works its way
rapidly through the layers of tissue (the fascia) that
surround muscles.

It is estimated that there are between 90 and 200 cases per year
in Canada, and about 20 to 30 per cent of these are fatal.

The symptoms of flesh-eating disease include a high fever, and a
red, severely painful swelling that feels hot and spreads rapidly.

Sometimes the swelling starts at the site of a minor injury,
such as a small cut or bruise, but in other cases there is no
obvious source of infection.

Health Canada emphasizes the disease is very rare.

Source: Health Canada

Flesh-eating disease is the common name for necrotizing fasciitis, a
disease caused by bacteria called group A streptococcus. They are found on
the skin, and are usually harmless.

* INDEPTH - Flesh-eating disease
In rare cases, the bacteria can cause an infection that can harm
flesh or can even kill a person in 12 to 24 hours.

A federal study and provincial data show that necrotizing fasciitis
from group A streptococcus occurs in about three to seven persons per one
million population per year.

While rare, necrotizing fasciitis is fatal in approximately 20 to 30
per cent of cases, according to the Public Health Agency of Canada's
website.

On the weekend, a man in St-Georges-de-Beauce, Que., died of the
disease, after being treated for a group A streptococcus infection.

His condition rapidly deteriorated early in the weekend and he died in
the intensive care ward Saturday.

Dr. Christian Fortin of the Centre hospitalier universitaire de Québec
notes that "these are all isolated cases that we have. They appear, here
and there, all over the country.

"And often, because it is a common bacterium, we cannot determine why
certain people get major symptoms from the bacterium, and others don't."

No one knows why cases are on the rise, but officials in Quebec say all
hygienic measures are being taken to ensure the bacterium did not spread
to other patients or hospital staff.

Risk of spreading the disease is considered low.

Meanwhile, doctors in Brandon, Man., have treated two patients for
flesh-eating disease in the past week.

One of them died, but it's not clear if the disease contributed to the
death. The other person is in stable condition.

Both male patients, one in his 40s and one in his 70s, are from the
Sioux Valley Dakota Nation, about 35 kilometres west of Brandon, a health
official said.

Municipal health officials declined to identify the patients or where
they live.

Headlines: Health & Science

* Web index tracks cancer care throughout Ontario
* Explorers match Peary's record time to North Pole
* School nurses to wield pill prescription pads
* Meteor sighting thrills Prairie astronomers
* 'Say no to pop,' Nunavut residents told
* City of Ottawa stymies federal emissions initiative
* Biofeedback therapy tested for kids with ADHD
* Privacy a barrier for residents in psychiatric hospitals
* City turns to goldfish to test water quality
* Canada adds help to contain Marburg virus outbreak

NecrotizingFasciitis/Myositis, PHAC

(Note: CBC does not endorse and is not responsible for the content
of external sites - links will open in new window)

Of Popes and Condoms

Rev Ron Ashford
Ap 2005

Gosh, I remember, in days of yore, how The Pill was promoted as 98.5%
effective while condoms were only 70% effective in preventing preggies
(over a year's use by a married couple).
Hooray for efficiency ! ! !

Amazing how The Condom, lately, has become so effective in stopping a virus
many times smaller than a sperm.

Wonders never cease ! ! !

"Virtue by Latex"

"Better living through Chemistry"

Ron

http ://www.washingtonpost.com/

Fla. Gun Law to Expand Leeway for Self-Defense
NRA to Promote Idea in Other States

By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 26, 2005; A01

MIAMI -- It is either a Wild West revival, a return to the days of "shoot
first and ask questions later," or a triumph for the "Castle Doctrine" --
the notion that enemies invade personal space at their peril.

Such dueling rhetoric marked the debate over a measure that Florida Gov.
Jeb Bush (R) could sign as early as Tuesday. The legislation passed so
emphatically that National Rifle Association backers plan to take it to
statehouses across the nation, including Virginia's, over the next year.
The law will let Floridians "meet force with force," erasing the "duty to
retreat" when they fear for their lives outside of their homes, in their
cars or businesses, or on the street.

NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre said in an interview that the
Florida measure is the "first step of a multi-state strategy" that he hopes
can capitalize on a political climate dominated by conservative opponents
of gun control at the state and national levels.

"There's a big tailwind we have, moving from state legislature to state
legislature," LaPierre said. "The South, the Midwest, everything they call
'flyover land' -- if John Kerry held a shotgun in that state, we can pass
this law in that state."

The Florida measure says any person "has the right to stand his or her
ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he or she
reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great
bodily harm."

Florida law already lets residents defend themselves against attackers if
they can prove they could not have escaped. The new law would allow them
to use deadly force even if they could have fled and says that prosecutors
must automatically presume that would-be victims feared for their lives if
attacked.

The overwhelming vote margins and bipartisan support for the Florida gun
bill -- it passed unanimously in the state Senate and was approved 94 to 20
in the state House, with nearly a dozen Democratic co-sponsors -- have
alarmed some national gun-control advocates, who say a measure that made
headlines in Florida slipped beneath their radar.

"I am in absolute shock," Sarah Brady, chair of the Brady Center to Prevent
Gun Violence, said in an interview. "If I had known about it, I would have
been down there."

The lessons of history do not bode well for gun-control groups and their
leaders, such as Brady, who became a crusader after President Ronald Reagan
and her husband, then-White House press secretary James S. Brady, were
seriously wounded in a 1981 assassination attempt.

Florida has a track record as a gun-law trendsetter. In the mid-1980s, the
NRA chose Florida to launch a push for "conceal carry" or "right-to-carry"
laws, which allow states to issue permits for residents to carry firearms.
Democrat Bob Graham, who was then governor, vetoed the measure, but it was
resurrected after he left office and was signed in 1987 by Gov. Bob
Martinez, a Republican.

At the time, fewer than a dozen states had right-to-carry laws. Now there
are 38.

LaPierre thinks the new Florida measure -- nicknamed the "Castle Doctrine"
by its conceiver, Florida lobbyist Marion P. Hammer, a former NRA president
-- can create the same momentum.

Critics argue that the measure is so broad it will encourage fights between
neighbors, parents at soccer games or drinking buddies to escalate into
gunfights.

"It's almost like a duel clause," said state Rep. Dan Gelber, a Miami Beach
Democrat and former federal prosecutor whose wife is a state prosecutor.
"People ought to have to walk away if they can."

Gelber believes that Florida's major prosecutor groups, populated by state
attorneys who must run for reelection, stayed out of the fight and many
lawmakers supported the bill because they fear the NRA.

Law enforcement did not try to block the measure, siding with the NRA
rather than opposing the group, as many sheriffs and police officials had
done during the debate two decades earlier over right-to-carry.

Florida Attorney General Charlie Crist, a leading candidate for the
Republican governor's nomination in 2006, was among those who wrote letters
of support. With that kind of high-level backing, Rep. Dennis Baxley, a
Republican from Ocala who sponsored the House measure, could ridicule
critics as "hysterical."

"Disorder and chaos are always held in check by the law-abiding citizen,"
Baxley said.

As in the mid-1980s fights over the right-to-carry law, the state's big
newspapers have almost unanimously lined up against Baxley's measure,
although their outrage did little to stop its easy glide. South Florida
Sun-Sentinel columnist Howard Goodman said the state was "getting in touch
with its inner Dirty Harry." Martin Dyckman of the St. Petersburg Times
told tourists, indisputably a bedrock of the state's economy, to stay away:
"Lebanon might be safer."

Hammer, a 4-foot-11 dynamo with a national reputation for her persuasive
powers, dismissed the papers as "liberal, anti-gunners" and "Chicken
Littles." The current law unfairly forces Floridians to make split-second
decisions about a criminal's intent, she said, and NRA lobbyists like to
note that was deemed impossible generations ago by legendary Supreme Court
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. "Detached reflection," Holmes said in one
of his most oft-quoted pronouncements, "cannot be demanded in the presence
of an uplifted knife."

Hammer stresses that violent-crime rates in Florida have dropped since the
right-to-carry law was signed. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement
reports that violent crimes dropped from 1,136 per 100,00 residents in 1989
-- two years after the law went into effect -- to 727.7 per 100,000 in 2003.

Her opponents counter that Florida's drop is not tied to the gun law and
note that national violent-crime rates have been trending down. More
important, Gelber and others say, is that Florida still ranked second in
the nation, behind only South Carolina, in violent crime in 2003, according
to U.S. Census Bureau statistics.

Brady's best hope, as a national fight appears inevitable, is that there
will be a backlash -- much like the bounce that gun control got in Florida
in the 1980s when the loss on the right-to-carry law was followed by
victories on waiting periods and background checks.

"This," Brady says of the new Florida measure, "will be the thing that will
awaken the sleeping great number of Middle Americans who will think this is
so absurd."

But, for now, it is the thoughts of another group that really matter, the
ones with guns. In this state of 17 million people, permits to carry guns
have been issued more than 1 million times in the past 18 years.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/04/25/AR2005042501553.html?referrer=email&referrer=email

http://www.mitchellrepublic.com/main.asp?SectionID=2&SubSectionID=9&ArticleID=12696

New pope represents the wrath of God
Monday, April 25, 2005
By Bill O'Reilly, Syndicated Columnist

The elevation of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger to head the Roman Catholic
Church is a clear and concise message from the College of Cardinals: "We
are royally teed off."

Everybody knows that the new pontiff is a tough guy who will not only throw
the moneychangers out of the temple, he'll kick them in the behind as they
leave the building. Pope Benedict believes strongly in good and evil, and
heís not shy about pointing fingers. His letter to American bishops about
politicians and abortion cost John Kerry dearly in the last election.

The cardinals, of course, perfectly understand that Benedict is not exactly
a cuddly guy and will not be "reaching out," as they say in California.
But his hard-line theological approach appeals to church elders who have
had enough.

In the past three decades, church attendance in the USA and Western Europe
has dropped through the floor. Just 25 percent of American Catholics attend
mass weekly, and the number is in the single digits in longstanding
Catholic countries like France. Secularism now rules the western world,
and there are not enough priests to serve the remaining faithful. How do
you say things are not good in Latin?

In the face of this spiritual decline, the Catholic Church has decided to
make a stand. It will not compromise, and it will not pander. You either
toe the line or hit the bricks. Up to you.

As a lifelong Catholic, I don't like this approach, but I understand it.
The West is now besieged by forces that want to wipe spirituality
completely out of the public square. The American Civil Liberties Union
(ACLU) is the point organization in this effort. It supports all abortion
on demand, including late-term, no parental consent for minors having
abortions, euthanasia with consent, gay marriage and the free speech rights
of the North American Man-Boy Love Association, which has posted
instructions on how to rape children on its website.

The ACLU opposes public funding for the Boy Scouts because their oath
mentions God, the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools, public displays
of the baby Jesus at Christmas and any restraint on Internet pornography in
public libraries.

For the most part, the western media sympathizes with the ACLU and promotes
its point of view. Thus, the secular message is a constant in our society -
the hits just keep on coming.

And where is the opposing point of view? Well, there are a few media
outlets that give traditionalists a fair shake, but very few.

So the Catholic cardinals feel isolated and surrounded. They can preach to
the choir on Sunday but get battered by the news and entertainment media
the rest of the week. A strong papal voice countering that situation is
soothing. And thatís why Cardinal Ratzinger is now Pope Benedict XVI.

I believe organized religion can be a champion of human rights and provide
resistance to secular societies, which, if they progress much further, will
never be able to defeat the fanatical Islamic fundamentalists. The more
permissive the western world becomes, the more it rejects discipline and
avoids confronting evil, the greater the danger to freedom will be.

Pope Benedict is facing a rapidly changing world, and perhaps he will be a
strong and persuasive shepherd against evil. The danger is that he will be
so rigid that he will erode the spiritual core even further, thereby
helping the secularists.

But the new pope may have an epiphany and realize good people will rally
against evil if the case of clear and present danger is made rationally and
with compassion. I am praying that happens.

The other side is hoping it will not.

Thought for Today: "There are two great rules of life, the one general and
the other particular. The first is that everyone can, in the end, get what
he wants if he only tries. This is the general rule.

The particular rule is that every individual is more or less an exception
to the general rule."

- Samuel Butler, English author (1835-1902).

Unusually, I insert comments on Prof Cummins' comments.

This takes the form of an article recently sent (in no great
hopefulness) to the Churches' Agency on Social Issues which is a mouthpiece
for the 'interchurch bioethics "commission" ' a sandpit for minor
PowerHarpies.

The facts on "endogenous retrovirus" which I outline are
persistently ignored by the generally excellent Unca Joe Cummins. Perhaps
this is partly because of his alliance with Ho (one of the operatives I'm
referring to in the political comments which I add to the scientific facts).

Audrey Jarvis mentions, in her questions (Broadsheet, Ap 2005)
about xenotransplantation, experiments transplanting cultured pig pancreas
cells into diabetics, which are no longer allowed in New Zealand.

Half a decade on from her taking over 'interchurch' activities on
bioethics, Ms Jarvis is still mainly listing questions. By now some
answers are known, and I give below some which should be promulgated.

But I think also that this is a good occasion to look into the
context. In many important controversies today, media are presenting
pseudo-experts who lack the education &/or experience to qualify them as
experts. Individuals incapable of discussing or understanding complex
technologies are thus misinforming the public, while actual experts are
suppressed.

A current example is the victimisation of the much-respected
Professor R B Elliott whose treatment for Type 1 diabetes is being actively
pursued in several countries but is no longer allowed in New Zealand.

The government has persistently declared its belief that
biotechnology is a main aspect of what they call Knowledge Economy, Bright
Future, etc. Elliott's xenotransplants, developed further by his
company Diatranz, would appear to fit the bill - and do not entail any
gene-tampering.

In a decade of careful experimentation, this noted medical
researcher has developed a method of trickling insulin from cells, cultured
from pancreas cells of piglets, contained within a retrievable 'tea-bag'
floating in the diabetic's peritoneal liquid. The cells are coated to
prevent immune reactions, and the patients' immune systems are not
interfered with at all. It is misleading to talk about foreign cells
proliferating throughout the body - they cannot get out of the 'tea bag'
which itself can be removed altogether should any unforeseen trouble emerge.

Of the most recent 18 informed diabetic volunteers, 9 have
reported considerable
benefits from the current version of xenotransplants. Permission was
sought for a further 24 monitored patients to improve the treatment.

The obvious good question whether pig insulin is safe for humans
had been answered by decades of injecting millions of diabetics with pig
insulin (purified from pancreas byproduct of meatworks), which is a
slightly different chemical from human insulin. But there is a possible
hazard from these xenotransplants. I happened to be the scientist who
warned Elliott, a decade ago, of the need to monitor for novel viruses in
his volunteer xenotransplant recipients. Each of these patients is now
closely monitored by Auckland medical-school experts for any signs of such
problems. Both the monitoring and the measured health of the pig-pancreas
cells are widely agreed to be world-leading.

Why then have Diatranz's proposals for a further 24 patients been
blocked for years by Karen Poutasi M.B, director-general of health - most
recently through special legislation to abolish Diatranz's
normal legal rights to have such proposals considered? This victimising
legislative clause, slipped into a Bill on another subject (_viz_
gene-tampering), was approved by a parliamentary committee including Mss
Bunkle, Yates, and Fitzsimons, who were given full details by relevant
experts but persisted in the victimisation Poutasi had instigated.

In order to understand what has gone wrong, we must see an
important trend of the past decade or so: usurpation of expert status. The
persons who have forced Diatranz offshore have mostly been not experts but
political operatives.

Professor Roger Morris of the NZ veterinary school is a world
expert on transfer of animal viruses to humans - a main advisor to the UK
government on foot-&-mouth disease and to the Hong Kong government on duck
& hen infections jumping into humans. " It's riskier going to the zoo than
to have one of these pancreatic cell transplants" declares this expert -
adding "and I don't believe it's risky going to the zoo."

Morris conducted a thorough scientific review of the possibilities
for infections from the Diatranz pig cells, including pig endogenous
retrovirus (PERV). All mammals have many copies in their DNA of so-called
'endogenous retroviruses', which Morris views as probably a key to
mammalian pregnancy, instrumental in formation of the placenta. They are
called "endogenous" because they replicate only within a cell as nucleic
acid (DNA to RNA to DNA) but without ever forming a virus particle, and are
transmitted in the germline.

The name 'endogenous retrovirus' is regrettably misleading in much
the same way as 'carcinoma in situ' the misnomer for microscopic anomalies
of unknown significance in the cervix which are not carcinomas.

DNA sequences in the misnamed category 'endogenous retrovirus' make
up by enormous repetition several percent of typical mammalian genomes
(total equipage of DNA). The broad architecture of these DNA sequences is
similar across most organisms. Many classes of endogenous retrovirus are
known, but currently only two similar blocks of DNA, with other distinctive
genes, cause human disease through infectious retrovirus: HIV and HTLV-I &
its relatives.

There's no reason to believe that even if PERV got established &
multiplying in man it would cause disease. The most plausible fear is that
it might undergo mutation or recombination to generate a novel retrovirus
that might cross species barriers - as presumably HIV did. Retroviruses
are notably prone to recombination, though this has not been shown to occur
between the pig and the human. The patients are closely monitored for any
new viruses.

Infection of immune-intact humans or other mammals by anything
originating from genetically unaltered pig tissues has not been
demonstrated, despite thousands of attempts to do so over a dozen years.
The transplantation of enclosed porcine pancreatic islet cells is an
extremely low-risk procedure. Diabetics facing gangrene, blindness, etc
within a year or so are not concerned that cancer decades later has not
been ruled out - a risk limited to them, as cancer is non-infectious.

Poutasi has posed as ultra-precautionary on this project, while
cheerfully condoning far more dubious experiments in GM. This is a case of
what we in Australasia call the 'tall poppy syndrome'. But it is also
more, and worse, than that. This therapy is being misused as a lightning
rod for vague fears - an irrational over-reaction, making the government
look cautious while vastly more dangerous procedures go unchallenged.

New Zealand has been a leader in this promising treatment for a
nasty disease; we have the healthiest pigs as well as the best monitoring
technology. But now New Zealand diabetics will be going
overseas for these transplants, which are permitted in such advanced
countries as Switzerland, Sweden & the USA.

And all because political power-seekers have usurped expert status.
Their _modus operandi_ is pretty easy to identify, once you've seen
its main features. The "science" promoted by the usurpers consists of
simplistic slogans, easy to memorize but vague. The prototypical example
is "The 'Pap' smear is a good early warning test for cervical cancer" -
misleading but the basis for political careers by Bunkle, Coney, & Dame S
Cartwright who not merely contradicted but vilified leading experts. A
newer example is "Pig viruses might emerge from Diatranz xenotransplants
and become endemic in the human", presented repeatedly on TV by an
ambitious female politician with a degree in French & music. This saying
was, I believe, useful when I stated it a decade ago; but to present it
now, instead of expert comment in the light of all that has been found
meanwhile, is radically biased.

The science involved in such issues is, unfortunately but
incorrigibly, far beyond ordinary citizens' understanding. They cannot
make informed judgements on these arcane matters. They must therefore rely
on the judgements of the few specialists who do understand the meaning of
'retrovirus' etc. But the media have made hardly any effort to convey
expert judgements. Very important issues are thus cynically misused as
vehicles for self-publicity by pseudo-experts.

A culture dependent on dangerous technologies will quickly get in
trouble this way. (Complex technologies are not the only dangerous ones:
look what happens when people feed cows ground-up cow. )

Experts are those who have been stringently tested for knowledge &
judgement, not those who merely wish to hijack topics of public concern for
personal attention-getting.

This is the context within which the churches are almost comprehensively
failing to produce answers for concerned members and the wider public.

=====

Now here is the latest CumminsGram:

The main threat from such experiments as are described below is the
activation of endogenous retrovirus that make up around 1% of the genome
of humans or other mammals. The endogenous retrovirus "sleep" in the
genome. Many are capable of being activated to make new disease-causing
virus that have not been experienced by humans or animals and are thus a
deadly threat. For many years efforts have been made to transplant
humanized pig organs into humans but these experiments are terribly
dangerous because endogenous retroviruses (PERVs) are known to be
activated by mixing pig and human cells. To have farm animal-human
chimeras running around in the open seems a startlingly stupid thing
to do, and criminal if the experiments are not accompanied by looking
for escaping novel retroviruses.

washingtonpost.com
Of Mice, Men and In-Between
Scientists Debate Blending Of Human, Animal Forms
By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 20, 2004; Page A01

In Minnesota, pigs are being born with human blood in their veins.

In Nevada, there are sheep whose livers and hearts are largely human.

In California, mice peer from their cages with human brain cells firing
inside their skulls.

These are not outcasts from "The Island of Dr. Moreau," the 1896 novel
by H.G. Wells in which a rogue doctor develops creatures that are part
animal and part human. They are real creations of real scientists,
stretching the boundaries of stem cell research.

Biologists call these hybrid animals chimeras, after the mythical Greek
creature with a lion's head, a goat's body and a serpent's tail. They
are the products of experiments in which human stem cells were added to
developing animal fetuses.

Chimeras are allowing scientists to watch, for the first time, how
nascent human cells and organs mature and interact -- not in the cold
isolation of laboratory dishes but inside the bodies of living
creatures. Some are already revealing deep secrets of human biology and
pointing the way toward new medical treatments.

But with no federal guidelines in place, an awkward question hovers
above the work: How human must a chimera be before more stringent
research rules should kick in?

The National Academy of Sciences, which advises the federal government,
has been studying the issue and hopes to make recommendations by
February. Yet the range of opinions it has received so far suggests that
reaching consensus may be difficult.

During one recent meeting, scientists disagreed on such basic issues as
whether it would be unethical for a human embryo to begin its
development in an animal's womb, and whether a mouse would be better or
worse off with a brain made of human neurons.

"This is an area where we really need to come to a reasonable
consensus," said James Battey, chairman of the National Institutes of
Health's Stem Cell Task Force. "We need to establish some kind of
guidelines as to what the scientific community ought to do and ought not
to do."

Beyond Twins and Moms

Chimeras (ki-MER-ahs) -- meaning mixtures of two or more individuals in
a single body -- are not inherently unnatural. Most twins carry at least
a few cells from the sibling with whom they shared a womb, and most
mothers carry in their blood at least a few cells from each child they
have born.

Recipients of organ transplants are also chimeras, as are the many
people whose defective heart valves have been replaced with those from
pigs or cows. And scientists for years have added human genes to
bacteria and even to farm animals -- feats of genetic engineering that
allow those critters to make human proteins such as insulin for use as
medicines.

"Chimeras are not as strange and alien as at first blush they seem,"
said Henry Greely, a law professor and ethicist at Stanford University
who has reviewed proposals to create human-mouse chimeras there.

But chimerism becomes a more sensitive topic when it involves growing
entire human organs inside animals. And it becomes especially sensitive
when it deals in brain cells, the building blocks of the organ credited
with making humans human.

In experiments like those, Greely told the academy last month, "there is
a nontrivial risk of conferring some significant aspects of humanity" on
the animal.

Greely and his colleagues did not conclude that such experiments should
never be done. Indeed, he and many other philosophers have been
wrestling with the question of why so many people believe it is wrong to
breach the species barrier.

Does the repugnance reflect an understanding of an important natural
law? Or is it just another cultural bias, like the once widespread
rejection of interracial marriage?

Many turn to the Bible's repeated invocation that animals should
multiply "after their kind" as evidence that such experiments are wrong.
Others, however, have concluded that the core problem is not necessarily
the creation of chimeras but rather the way they are likely to be treated.

Imagine, said Robert Streiffer, a professor of philosophy and bioethics
at the University of Wisconsin, a human-chimpanzee chimera endowed with
speech and an enhanced potential to learn -- what some have called a
"humanzee."

"There's a knee-jerk reaction that enhancing the moral status of an
animal is bad," Streiffer said. "But if you did it, and you gave it the
protections it deserves, how could the animal complain?"

Unfortunately, said Harvard political philosopher Michael J. Sandel,
speaking last fall at a meeting of the President's Council on Bioethics,
such protections are unlikely.

"Chances are we would make them perform menial jobs or dangerous jobs,"
Sandel said. "That would be an objection."

A Research Breakthrough

The potential power of chimeras as research tools became clear about a
decade ago in a series of dramatic experiments by Evan Balaban, now at
McGill University in Montreal. Balaban took small sections of brain from
developing quails and transplanted them into the developing brains of
chickens.

The resulting chickens exhibited vocal trills and head bobs unique to
quails, proving that the transplanted parts of the brain contained the
neural circuitry for quail calls. It also offered astonishing proof that
complex behaviors could be transferred across species.

No one has proposed similar experiments between, say, humans and apes.
But the discovery of human embryonic stem cells in 1998 allowed
researchers to envision related experiments that might reveal a lot
about how embryos grow.

The cells, found in 5-day-old human embryos, multiply prolifically and
-- unlike adult cells -- have the potential to turn into any of the
body's 200 or so cell types.

Scientists hope to cultivate them in laboratory dishes and grow
replacement tissues for patients. But with those applications years
away, the cells are gaining in popularity for basic research.

The most radical experiment, still not conducted, would be to inject
human stem cells into an animal embryo and then transfer that chimeric
embryo into an animal's womb. Scientists suspect the proliferating human
cells would spread throughout the animal embryo as it matured into a
fetus and integrate themselves into every organ.

Such "humanized" animals could have countless uses. They would almost
certainly provide better ways to test a new drug's efficacy and
toxicity, for example, than the ordinary mice typically used today.

But few scientists are eager to do that experiment. The risk, they say,
is that some human cells will find their way to the developing testes or
ovaries, where they might grow into human sperm and eggs. If two such
chimeras -- say, mice -- were to mate, a human embryo might form,
trapped in a mouse.

Not everyone agrees that this would be a terrible result.

"What would be so dreadful?" asked Ann McLaren, a renowned developmental
biologist at the University of Cambridge in England. After all, she
said, no human embryo could develop successfully in a mouse womb. It
would simply die, she told the academy. No harm done.

But others disagree -- if only out of fear of a public backlash.

"Certainly you'd get a negative response from people to have a human
embryo trying to grow in the wrong place," said Cynthia B. Cohen, a
senior research fellow at Georgetown University's Kennedy Institute of
Ethics and a member of Canada's Stem Cell Oversight Committee, which
supported a ban on such experiments there.

How Human?

But what about experiments in which scientists add human stem cells not
to an animal embryo but to an animal fetus, which has already made its
eggs and sperm? Then the only question is how human a creature one dares
to make.

In one ongoing set of experiments, Jeffrey L. Platt at the Mayo Clinic
in Rochester, Minn., has created human-pig chimeras by adding
human-blood-forming stem cells to pig fetuses. The resulting pigs have
both pig and human blood in their vessels. And it's not just pig blood
cells being swept along with human blood cells; some of the cells
themselves have merged, creating hybrids.

It is important to have learned that human and pig cells can fuse, Platt
said, because he and others have been considering transplanting modified
pig organs into people and have been wondering if that might pose a risk
of pig viruses getting into patient's cells. Now scientists know the
risk is real, he said, because the viruses may gain access when the two
cells fuse.

In other experiments led by Esmail Zanjani, chairman of animal
biotechnology at the University of Nevada at Reno, scientists have been
adding human stem cells to sheep fetuses. The team now has sheep whose
livers are up to 80 percent human -- and make all the compounds human
livers make.

Zanjani's goal is to make the humanized livers available to people who
need transplants. The sheep portions will be rejected by the immune
system, he predicted, while the human part will take root.

"I don't see why anyone would raise objections to our work," Zanjani
said in an interview.

Immunity Advantages

Perhaps the most ambitious efforts to make use of chimeras come from
Irving Weissman, director of Stanford University's Institute of
Cancer/Stem Cell Biology and Medicine. Weissman helped make the first
mouse with a nearly complete human immune system -- an animal that has
proved invaluable for tests of new drugs against the AIDS virus, which
does not infect conventional mice.

More recently his team injected human neural stem cells into mouse
fetuses, creating mice whose brains are about 1 percent human. By
dissecting the mice at various stages, the researchers were able to see
how the added brain cells moved about as they multiplied and made
connections with mouse cells.

Already, he said, they have learned things they "never would have
learned had there been a bioethical ban."

Now he wants to add human brain stem cells that have the defects that
cause Parkinson's disease, Lou Gehrig's disease and other brain ailments
-- and study how those cells make connections.

Scientists suspect that these diseases, though they manifest themselves
in adulthood, begin when something goes wrong early in development. If
those errors can be found, researchers would have a much better chance
of designing useful drugs, Weissman said. And those drugs could be
tested in the chimeras in ways not possible in patients.

Now Weissman says he is thinking about making chimeric mice whose brains
are 100 percent human. He proposes keeping tabs on the mice as they
develop. If the brains look as if they are taking on a distinctly human
architecture -- a development that could hint at a glimmer of humanness
-- they could be killed, he said. If they look as if they are organizing
themselves in a mouse brain architecture, they could be used for research.

So far this is just a "thought experiment," Weissman said, but he asked
the university's ethics group for an opinion anyway.

"Everyone said the mice would be useful," he said. "But no one was sure
if it should be done."

Anzac Day 2005

Here is a tiny glimpse of the practical meaning of 'noblesse oblige'.

During a visit by H.M Q.E the Queen Mother - I've not looked up
the exact year but it was ca.1960 - Her Majesty drove in a Daimler from
Parliament past the Cenotaph. My father worked in the "tomato house" just
by the Cenotaph, and of course his govt ossif closed down for a while so
that all the workers could go out to the street to cheer this noble woman.

Dad wore for the occasion his Royal Flying Corps tie (with a
day-to-day lounge suit, and no medals or any other sign of his past). Even
then not many were entitled to wear the RFC tie (being as how the RFC went
out of existence in 1918 - unfortunately) - and not so many more could
recognise it. Being on the lookout for RFC ties would not have been a
significant aspect of H.M's preparation for the tour! But as H.M. drove
by, she identified it among the many hundreds of people at the kerb and
deliberately smiled straight at him. I was alongside him and can tell you
this tough old soldier who had killed many Germans was moved by this
gesture - so small yet so good, connoting in its little way the gratitude
of decent women to the men who gave so much to defend them and their way of
life.

This tiny incident suggests several aspects of our royal family.
So far from playboys & parasites, they are highly trained, disciplined
people, devoted to leadership of a kind that Kartwright would scarcely
understand let alone emulate. They are not just posing around, bored &
contemptuous, but devoted to recognising & upholding the best qualities of
our society. They would not walk up to a New Zealand flag and pretend they
thought it was an Australian flag as Kartwright recently did (during Prince
Charles's most recent public occasion in NZ). On Anzac Day I honour the
tradition of respect for, and participation in, the Armed Forces which that
wonderful daughter of the Earl of Strathmore exemplified. She was not just
grooving along admiring the Wellington scenery - she was on the job in
her role as a leader.

Isn't it a striking paradox that the general social conventions so
loathed by feminazis such as Klark & Kartwright produced refined, utterly
decent women at so many ranks including of course the very highest, our
monarch; whereas the dominant ideology of the past few decade, WimminsLib,
promotes radically vulgar & even crooked women to high rank.

Our nation had better face up pronto to the complex but systematic
downgrading of the Forces by the Klark regime. I need not detail in this
brief note - tho' I hope someone will before long - the variety of
degradations & insults to which the Forces, and their flag, have been
subjected.

I must add that this appalling trend began earlier - perhaps the
'start' could be taken as the stupid 1976 move by Cdre Saul to ram women
onto warships. Someone should urgently write a book - and I don't mean a
2nd-rater like M Wright - on this recent history.

The calculated undermining of our monarchy by the Klark/Kartwright
regime is, I suggest, all of a parcel with the sabotage of the Army, the
Navy, and the Air Force.

R