LifeSiteNews.com - Monday July 11, 2005

* < #1>Abortion Pill RU-486 on Essential Drug List of World Health Organization
* < #2>Cardinal Archbishop Ouellet Primate of Canada to Defend Marriage Before Senate Committee
* < #3>Partial Birth Abortion Ban Ruling Upheld in Nebraska
* < #4>Darwinian Evolution Incompatible with Catholic Faith says Cardinal and Author of Catholic Catechism
* < #5>Vatican Document Forbidding Homosexuals to Priesthood Ready for Release says Vaticanologist
* < #6>B.C. Gay Couple Seeks Mandatory Homosexual School Curriculum Without Parental Op-Out
* < #7>Supporters of Anti-Family MP Comartin Walk Out Of Church
* < #8>LifeSiteNews.com NewsBytes

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Abortion Pill RU-486 on Essential Drug List of World Health Organization

LONDON, July 11, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The British Medical Journal reported Saturday that the World Health Organization (WHO) has approved the RU-486 chemical abortifacient as an “essential” medicine for inclusion in a list of medicines required to be available to physicians working in developing countries.

Arguing that the combination of mifepristone followed later by misoprostol is a safe alternative to surgical abortion in countries where abortion is often illegal, the WHO authorized inclusion of the drug as essential to combat what it terms back-alley “unsafe abortions.”

WHO director of medicines policy and standards and secretary of its essential medicines committee Hans Hogerzeil criticized the US, opposition to the inclusion of RU-486 as an “essential” medicine. The US did achieve one goal – the inclusion of a phrase in the essential drug list that reads, “Where permitted under national law and where culturally acceptable.”

The UK’s Society for the Protection of Unborn Children said it “hoped enough cultures rejected the drugs … as they would bring innocent life to an end,” as reported by the BMJ.

After news of the RU-486 inclusion by WHO, Planned Parenthood wrote to congratulate its members, saying, “More than 5,000 FreeChoiceSavesLives.org activists like you took action to protect these women by emailing Dr. Lee Jong-Wook at the World Health Organization (WHO).” Planned Parenthood congratulated its members for putting pressure on Jong-Wook to include RU-486. “Your emails urging him not to cave in to the inappropriate, ideologically-driven pressure it was receiving from the Bush administration's Department of Health and Human Services seem to have given the WHO the encouragement it needed to stop dragging its feet.”

Concerned Women for America (CWA) posted on its Web site in January public documents revealing approximately 600 serious complications suffered by women who used the abortion drug RU-486 in the US.

See related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:
Public Documents Reveal Numerous RU-486 Complications
http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2005/jan/05012403.html
Media Silent On Ru-486's Nazi Death Camp Pedigree
http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2000/oct/001004a.html

Cardinal Archbishop Ouellet Primate of Canada to Defend Marriage Before Senate Committee

OTTAWA, July 11, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A July 10 Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops release states that Canadian Catholic Prelate, Cardinal Marc Ouellet of Quebec City, will defend the traditional definition of marriage before a Senate committee deliberating over same-sex “marriage”Bill C-38.

The Senate Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs, chaired by Liberal Senator Ms. Lise Bacon, will hear the Cardinal along with Ms. Hélène Aubé, a lawyer and mother from Gatineau, Wednesday July 13.

On February 17, the day Canada’s parliament began debating Bill C-38, Cardinal Ouellet warned that Canada was toying with basic religious freedom and was falling into ‘juridical chaos’ in the determination to impose same sex ‘marriage.’ He said that the civil foundation of Canadian society was being undermined by ‘subjectivism,’ the idea that rights are not based on objective, external reality, but upon personal desires.

The basic fact of marriage, said Ouellet, is “that a man is a man and a woman is a woman, and their union is marriage.” He said, “If you take (conjugality) out, you don’t have marriage. You have something else. You have a generic sort of union, but you don't have marriage.”

Ouellet added a warning for religious freedom for Canadians. “It will divide the country deeply and for a long time, and it will put religious freedom under attack in the very near future,” he said. The law also makes no provision for lay religious citizens or groups that might fall afoul of the gay hate crime law as well. The Quebec Cardinal added, “There is a sort of abusive interpretation of discrimination and the fundamental right to marriage.”

“If they bring me to the court because I am teaching against homosexuality as part of the doctrine of the Catholic Church, I will be accused of homophobia,” the Cardinal said in comments made to the US bishops’ Catholic News Service. “Those things are very serious, and it's on the way. We are very concerned, very concerned with the future,” he said.

In an open letter to all Canadians in January, Cardinal Ouellet said that the proposed legislation to redefine marriage to include gay couples “is offensive to the moral and religious sensibility of a great number of citizens, both Catholic and non-Catholic.” The letter states that not only marriage, but also “the union of persons of the same sex”, is “morally unacceptable” to “many Christians and adherents of other religious traditions.”

See related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:
Quebec City Cardinal - Primate of Canada – Warns Gay ‘Marriage’ Will Lead to “Bitter” “Cultural Upheaval”
http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2005/jan/05012101.html
Cardinal of Quebec City Warns Same Sex Legislation’s Religious Protection a
http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2005/feb/05022303.html

ShamSee also LifeSiteNews.com's Defense of Marriage page
http://www.lifesite.net/features/marriage_defence/

Partial Birth Abortion Ban Ruling Upheld in Nebraska

LINCOLN, July 11, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A federal Court of Appeals has upheld a lower court ruling that the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act is unconstitutional.

Lincoln Nebraska U.S. District Judge Richard Kopf ruled in September that the law banning partial birth abortion is unconstitutional because it does not include an exception for the so-called health of the mother. The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis agreed with Kopf Friday that the grisly procedure should be allowed to continue.

“We believe when a lack of consensus exists in the medical community, the Constitution requires legislatures to err on the side of protecting women's health by including a health exception,” claimed 8th Circuit Judge Kermit Bye, as he wrote in his opinion, reported by the Seattle Post Intelligencer.

The Department of Justice appealed Kopf’s ruling, vowing to continue the fight to re-establish the law signed into existence by US President George W. Bush in 2003. The implementation of the President’s ban never happened, as three district courts immediately sided with a coalition of pro-abortion forces – including late-term abortionists and Planned Parenthood – introducing an injunction that prevented the ban from taking effect. The same courts – in New York, Lincoln, Nebraska, and San Francisco – later ruled the law “unconstitutional,” striking it down permanently. A Supreme Court appeal is expected.

The Department of Justice, in its defense of the bill, argued that the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act prohibited “one particular method of abortion that Congress, after nine years of hearings, found to be gruesome, inhumane, never necessary to preserve the health of women, and less safe than other readily available abortion methods.”

See related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:
Third Ruling Handed Down >from Nebraska Federal Court: Partial Birth Ban Unconstitutional

http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2004/sep/04090805.html

Vatican Document Forbidding Homosexuals to Priesthood Ready for Release says Vaticanologist

ROME, July 11, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) - One of the best known English-speaking Vatican reporters, John Allen, reports that the long-expected Vatican document calling attention to the fact that homosexual persons are not to be admitted to the priesthood is "now in the hands of Pope Benedict XVI". The document will come as no surprise to Vatican watchers since Rome has previously released two official documents barring homosexuals from the priesthood. As Allen puts it, with the new document, the teaching won't "change, but the level of authority and clarity" will, since the new document will be directly authorized by the Pope.

The former Church documents make it clear that not only men who have been sexually active as homosexuals but also those inclined to homosexual sex would be barred from the priesthood. A 1961 document produced by the Sacred Congregation for Religious states: "Those affected by the perverse inclination to homosexuality or pederasty should be excluded from religious vows and ordination," because priestly ministry would place such persons in "grave danger". (See coverage here: http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2002/mar/02032701.html )

In a 2002 statement, Cardinal Estevez of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments stated in answer to a question by a bishop: "Ordination to the deaconate and the priesthood of homosexual men or men with homosexual tendencies is absolutely inadvisable and imprudent and, from the pastoral point of view, very risky. A homosexual person, or one with a homosexual tendency is not, therefore, fit to receive the sacrament of Holy Orders." (see that full letter here: http://www.adoremus.org/Notitiae-Ordination.html )

However, Allen suggests that some American bishops are hoping the Vatican shelves the document since they contend it will "generate controversy and negative press".

Last month, as the US Conference of Catholic Bishops was meeting, Chicago Cardinal Francis George spoke on the subject. The Chicago Tribune quoted the Cardinal as saying, "Also, anyone who has been part of a gay subculture or who has lived promiscuously as a heterosexual would not be admitted ... no matter how many years in his background that might have occurred."

See John Allen's 'Word from Rome' column: http://www.nationalcatholicreporter.org/word/

jhw

B.C. Gay Couple Seeks Mandatory Homosexual School Curriculum Without Parental Op-Out

VANCOUVER, B.C. July 11, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal is preparing to hear what pro-family and religious groups are calling a truly frightening case. Murray and Peter Corren, a B.C. gay couple, filed a complaint against the B.C. Ministry of education in 1999 alleging that the Ministry’s curriculum didn’t adequately “address issues of sexual orientation.” That case is slated to be heard beginning today.

“Basically, there is systemic discrimination through omission and suppression of queer issues in the whole of the curriculum,” alleges Murray Corren, who is an elementary school teacher in Port Coquitlam.

What many are finding deeply disturbing, however, is that the Corren’s are not only seeking inclusion of explicitly homosexual material in the curriculum, promoting homosexuality as a normative and safe lifestyle option, but also that they wish to ensure that the material is mandatory.

If successful, the case will ensure that parents do not retain the right to choose to pull their children from the offensive portion of the curriculum and provide yet another extraordinary exception from normal rules because it has been insisted upon by gay activists. Homosexual activists have won exceptions >from laws regarding public nudity, sexual solicitation, public sex acts, group sex in their so-called "bath houses", normal medical safeguards to contain the transmission of dangerous communicable diseases, the posting of sexually explicit billboards and much more.

The gay couple’s legal council, Tim Timberg, said, “The second issue is there’s an opting-out provision in the curriculum that where a subject is deemed to be sensitive, the school teachers are under an obligation to in advance advise parents that they’ll be raising a sensitive issue in the classroom.” The Human Rights Complaint seeks to remove sexual orientation from the list of ‘sensitive’ issues.

“If we are going to be providing and promoting curriculum that treats homosexuality as just a normal thing that’s really no different than heterosexuality, we will be trampling on the religious freedoms of thousands of British Columbia families,” said Derek Rogusky, vice-president of family policy at Focus on the Family.

“Already what the schools are teaching and what’s going on in the schools are often in opposition to what parents are teaching at home and what they hold up as the ideal,” he said, “and this will just further that.”

Although the complaint was filed in 1999, the recent passing of Bill C-38 in the Canadian Parliament greatly increases the likelihood that the disturbing case will receive the ear of the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal.

JJ

Supporters of Anti-Family MP Comartin Walk Out Of Church
Comartin free to leave Church says prominent Canadian journalist and Catholic convert

WINDSOR, ON, July 11, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) – According to today’s Windsor Star, at one of this past Sunday’s Masses approximate thirty parishioners and supporters of NDP Windsor-Tecumseh MP Joe Comartin stood up and walked out of Holy Rosary Catholic Church in the London Diocese. Comartin himself was not in attendance at Mass said the report.

The cause of the unusual protest was the recent disciplining of Comartin by diocesan Bishop Fabbro for the Catholic MP’s public support of same-sex marriage in complete defiance of Catholic moral teaching. Last week Bishop Fabbro issued a letter to all the priests in his diocese informing them of his decision to forbid Comartin from acting as a Catholic marriage counselor in his diocese, as well as from acting in any other public Church capacity.

“I have decided that Mr. Comartin is not to give marriage preparation sessions within this diocese, and that he is not to engage in any liturgical ministries, for example, minister of the Eucharist or reader,” read Fabbro’s letter.

The bishop also instructed his priests to make public the contents of his letter to their parishioners at Sunday Masses. The protestors walked out during a public reading of that letter.

Since being informed of Fabbro’s decision Comartin has expressed disappointment saying that "the actions of Bishop Fabbro have deeply hurt and saddened myself and my family." He has not expressed any intention of honoring Catholic teaching by withdrawing his support for same-sex marriage in response to his bishop’s action.

“I hope Bishop Fabbro will reconsider his actions,” said Comartin.

However, David Warren, a prominent Canadian journalist and columnist, who recently became Roman Catholic, corresponded with LifeSiteNews.com, explaining the Church’s teaching on the matter, and pointing out that Comartin’s hope that Fabbro will “reconsider” is ill-informed.

“This is really simple stuff,” Warren explained. “[Comartin] was in open defiance of Church teaching, and he refused to be corrected, which left Bishop Fabbro with one, and only one choice, for what to do. Sack him as a Catholic Counsellor…The one thing [Comartin] can’t do is pretend to be speaking for the Catholic Church.”

The Catholic Catechism, which is the authoritative compilation of all of the fundamental teachings of the Catholic Church, states that "homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered. They are contrary to the natural law…Under no circumstances can they be approved.” (CCC. 2357)

“That he wants it both ways does not surprise me,” continued Warren. “That he can’t have it both ways, is something he just had to be taught. If he gets all upset, and threatens to leave the Church entirely, he’s free to go. Should he later grow up, he’ll be welcomed back. This is all up to him, not up to Bishop Fabbro.”

JJ

LifeSiteNews.com NewsBytes

Working women more likely to divorce
http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/07/11/ndiv11.xml

Santorum Takes On 'the Bigs'
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2005/7/10/175442.shtml

Citing Kids, N.J. Court Says No to Same-Sex ‘Marriage’
http://www.ncregister.com/current/0710lead1.htm

Hockey mom wants daughter allowed in boys' change room
http://www.canada.com/ottawa/ottawacitizen/news/story.html?id=2aa28604-33b0-4d73-951f-1e5d56eb62f4

One out of every three South African children having sex at age 10
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=15&art_id=vn20050710123619850C495299

Bush finds no friends at U.S. TV networks
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20050710-110047-2712r.htm

Will International Law Reign Supreme? Another concern about Supreme Court Appointment.

http://pop.org/main.cfm?id=243&r1=2.00&r2=1.50&r3=.04&r4=.00&level=3&eid=831

Canadian Media, led by Globe and Mail, two prominent gay MPs and women lawyers led drive for gay 'marriage' says Toronto Sun columnist

http://www.torontosun.com/News/Columnists/Fisher_Douglas/2005/07/10/1124672.html

Cardinal Distances Church from Evolution
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2005/7/10/112555.shtml

It’s the Birthrate, Stupid! Dangerous growing shortage of young people
http://pop.org/main.cfm?id=272&r1=1.00&r2=3.00&r3=93.00&r4=2.00&level=4&eid=832

Independent MP Cadman dies
http://www.cbc.ca/story/canada/national/2005/07/09/cadman-050709.html

Pakistan Govt will train 13,000 clerics on population issues
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/print.asp?page=story_9-7-2005_pg7_33&ndate=7/9/2005%206:00:01%20AM

Study Cites Drug Abuse 'Epidemic' Among Teens
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/07/AR2005070701180_pf.html

It would be worse than senseless for the president to appoint Gonzales to Supreme Court
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/whelan200507080800.asp

Liberal government considering proroguing parliament
http://www.canada.com/national/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=631b8ded-51ca-42aa-8d53-4c7d43d25d8a

The Bad Decision that Started It All
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/george_tubbs200507080813.asp

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From: act@parliament.govt.nz

What is Cultural Liberalism?

Address To Barnardos Forum, Wellington, 15 October 2001
Tuesday 19 Feb 2002
Stephen Franks
Speeches -- Governance & Constitution -- The Liberal Project
(view HTML version at: http://www.act.org.nz/item.jsp?id=22253 )

This could be about an Arts Policy for ACT. We could discuss lots of
interesting questions. Such as was the virgin in a condom art? What
is the role of the State in relation to people just out to shock? Is
the `artists on the dole' scheme a vital plank in nation building?
Should artists who can't persuade anyone to pay for their work, get
something from every worker for time in the sun to establish our
national identity?

Those questions are about the froth of culture and that is not the
subject of this address. Culture determines whether we want to live
here or not, whether this is Godzone, or another Argentina. It
determines whether we are rich or poor. In the longer run it will
determine whether we have to guard our borders against clamouring
migrants, or try a `Berlin wall' to keep our valuable people in.

Cultures are not all equally valuable to those who live them. They
are not all equally deserving of respect. Continual judgment of
cultural attributes is vital. Any vibrant people should be vigorously
debating changes and trying to promote or stop changes in their
cultures. They must have competing visions of how best to behave.

If we are lucky the competition to influence culture will be courteous
and reasoned. Normally it will be passionate and often illogical. In
a cursed or decaying country the cultural contest will be suppressed,
or conducted by force through grabs for the coercive powers of the
State.

I believe we are presently cursed by acquiescence in cultural
engineering. And cultural relativism puts us at serious risk of
decaying.

Aggressive cultural relativism is the mischief. It tells us we are
deeply and inherently strangers to each other, but not permitted to
act as strangers prudently do with each other.

It is not just a fashionable refusal to make comparative judgments.
Anti-discrimination law may punish those who risk giving practical
effect to adverse views of another's culture. Political correctness
is enforced by the power to give or withhold promotion and State
patronage. Normal debate over culture is suppressed. Our traditions
of incorruptible secular government are threatened. Our rule of law
is undermined, and with it security of person and property. And by
telling us we are strangers to each other state enforced race
consciousness diminishes our wish and our capacity to trust and feel
for each other. Instead of debating to persuade, we now fight for
control of State power, to decree a respect that is not earned.

To see how far we have sunk in a few years we must explore values at
the very core of New Zealand's inheritance of liberty. I will argue a
paradox. I want to persuade you that the liberal state has to be
tolerant, yet as true or classical liberals we must be more
intolerant. Liberty is state tolerance and that liberty is eroding
with political correctness. Worse, political correctness, having
stolen the clothes of liberalism, is now forcing us to tolerate the
intolerable. The very cause of tolerance - of liberty, is destroyed
when private individuals are prohibited from discriminating against
what they believe to be falsehood and evil.
* If tolerance means a child can be beaten for years, in the end to
death, without an absolute determination to hold accountable those
who do that, the liberal society loses its claim to superiority
over a society that will punish those responsible for such crime.
* If we only switch channels on a story of public funds going to
political cronies or clients of a ruling elite in the name of
"redressing inequality", core political virtue is in peril -
honest stewardship becomes a mug's game.
* When we tolerate a welfare system that makes bludging a better
choice than working, indifferent to whether the beneficiary is a
decent person down on his luck, or a vicious predator on the
community, liberal concern for the poor becomes a vice.

This lecture is about the values that are at the root of our culture's
most remarkable achievement. Freedom under the rule of law. Freedom
with responsibility under law that protects ordinary people from abuse
of power by rulers.

This lecture has to explore the values that sustain freedom. Freedom
was so radical and rare and eventually powerful it became a brand
worth trying to steal. The few peoples and nations who developed that
brand ended up building our world, achieving more than humans had ever
achieved before or even dreamed of achieving.

But freedom was always counter-intuitive. It offends the
father/family model of the tribe or state. For most of humanity, for
nearly all of time, it has been a moral right if not a duty for a
virtuous ruler to use his power to compel his followers to be virtuous
as he sees it. Now once again that view prevails. Freedom is
mistaken for licence by both its supporters and it enemies. ACT has
to talk of `choice' because political reactions tell us the word
freedom scarcely means anything any more. It just a blurred sound in
the phrase "freedom and democracy". Both words have just become
synonyms for "things we like".

Our respect for the individual free will underlies individual rights
and more importantly insistence on individual responsibilities. They
are ACT's intellectual inheritance. I want to reconnect us to the
true power and meaning of the word "liberal". I want to contrast that
with the forces moving within the cloak of "identity" politics. These
forces grope for the levers of political power claiming authority as
representatives of races, or minority groups, or classes.

If I could I would drive out the squatters who have usurped that word
`liberal' and made it a synonym for `collectivist'. They want to rule
by separation, building the pressures that divide, by getting people
to see themselves as victims, put upon groups deprived of
entitlements. They promise privilege, setting old against young,
women against men, Maori against pakeha, and poor against rich. They
create guilt then trade on it, turning against them the decency and
tolerance of those who meet the cost of these privileges.

What Did Liberalism Mean?

So unadorned `liberal' has gone. It has been stolen. I am not going
to spend time arguing derivations or legitimacy. It doesn't matter
now whether the takeover by the collectivists is unfair.

We can add `classical' to distinguish the liberals whose principles
and beliefs and policies cherish freedom, from those who trample it.

So this lecture will canvass three things, first what liberal meant
classically, secondly what has happened to it, and thirdly what we
need to do to reassert the principles it stood for. What `liberal'
meant, and what is has become will be explored together by reference
to current events.

You can think of this section of this address as a sort of bleary
survey of the morning after Woodstock. Perhaps a more apt image would
be wondering how to clean up Moutua Gardens while the tangata whenua
are still camping there.

President Bush recited liberalism's creed in his January "Axis of
Evil" State of the Union address. He described certain "non
negotiable demands of human dignity" "The rule of law, limits on the
power of the State, respect for women, private property, free speech,
equal justice and religious tolerance." Pretty much the same list as
was described at greater length and more elegantly nearly two
centuries ago by John Stuart Mill.

All (other than equal justice) are primarily to protect and require
tolerance. And all those were aimed at the State, against the
likelihood of intolerance by people wielding the police powers of the
State. The architects of our freedom did not expect or require or
even want compulsory tolerance from others. They just wanted the rule
of a tolerant law. The law would protect everyone from violent
coercion and expropriation.

The Rule of Law

The rule of law seems so elementary. Yet most of us, including
lawyers, have forgotten what it is. Younger lawyers have never
learnt. Many think it means making sure everyone obeys the rules. In
practice it may have come to mean the rule of lawyers.

The essence was once not that the people must obey rules, but that
rulers must obey rules. Rulers could not do anything using their
powers that was not expressly authorised. The rule of law tradition
inherited from England had clear distinctions between law and
morality. The State could enforce rules designed to stop people
harming others, but it could not and should not try to demand that
they respect others. The law was to protect individual person and
property, but not their feelings; nor was it to try to protect them
from their own foolishness.

This was axiomatic, for freedom means nothing if it is not freedom to
do things the majority consider wrongheaded or undesirable, so the
classical liberal inheritance was of a rule of law that necessarily
leaves a large realm for the operation of competing custom, morality,
etiquette and courtesy. Without these supplements to law, liberty
would become intolerable licence.

Liberals were free traders, believing it was wrong to expropriate the
fruits of toil by preventing adults contracting as they wish. They
believed in the sanctity or security of contract.

The "market place of ideas" was a natural phrase for our forebears to
describe the competition between cultures, they saw cultures as
distinguished by good ideas or bad, or good and better.

For New Zealanders the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990 embodies
many of these fundamental elements of classical liberalism and the
rule of law.

Property Rights

But NZBORA had one great and telling omission. The drafters funked on
property rights. This is telling because it shows what an empty husk
was the understanding of liberty of Sir Geoffrey Palmer and the New
Zealand parliamentarians who proclaimed it as a Bill of Rights. There
are no conceptions of classical liberalism or even fundamental rights
from our forbears, which omitted rights to hold and enjoy private
property. Liberty does not work if the State or your neighbours can
enter your property, or take your property or your use of your
property whenever they feel their interests are more pressing than
yours.

When the Treaty of Waitangi was signed, the Englishman's home was his
castle. For Maori this was a primary reason to sign, to secure
enforcement of rights of property as an end to a ghastly era of civil
war. The war had extended for 30 years. Probably one third of the
population had been slaughtered, many in circumstances far more
dreadful than anything we have seen in Bosnia or Rwanda. Land title
was needed for trade.

Tino rangatiratanga, assured in the Treaty was, I believe, no more and
no less than a description of the sovereignty each property owner
exercised over his own land and property under English law.

The Treaty underscored that its tino rangatiratanga were for "the
chiefs, the sub-tribes, and all the people of New Zealand".
Accordingly it is wrong to see property rights as reserving the
existing sovereignty of the chiefs. Tino rangatiratanga was assured
to all Maori. It was a description of English views of property
rights, protecting equally the ploughman in his field and the lord in
his castle.

Perhaps all New Zealanders could regain this assurance if Maori
enforce it as a Treaty right. But until we repeal the RMA's contempt
for property rights our land tenure is a kind of serfdom to the petty
tyrants who use local politics and the levers of local government to
satisfy their urges to tell others what to do with their land.

Property rights were bounded of course. Maori knew that tribal
warfare would be suppressed, though one chief was disappointed four
years later when Governor Gray did not answer his call to help him put
down and recapture rebellious and escaping slaves. Comments at the
time show they knew the English legal system would supersede their
authority but uphold property rights.

Equality before the Law

Equality before the law was and is fundamental. Despite equality as a
slogan in the laws left across Europe by Napoleon, embedded equality
before the law was a distinctive achievement of English law. The law
that Maori were offered and accepted was expressly to treat them the
same as all other British subjects. There was an internal conflict in
the Treaty with the Crown's pre-emptive rights to buy land. This
exception was a mixed blessing, urged by missionaries to prevent
unscrupulous traders, and rapacious chiefs from depriving people of
their land. But later it meant Maori could not realise the premium
they should have received in direct sales to settlers.

Equality is now unblushingly treated by the current Government as
negotiable. When Annette King's new political District Health Boards
were told by their Bill to give priority status to Maori, both in
governance and in rights to treatment I was reminded of how far we've
come since Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice reminder of our common
humanity. Shylock's defence said it all about race discrimination in
health.

"Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions,
senses, affections, passions, fed with the same food, hurt with the
same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means,
warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is?
If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh?
If you poison us, do we not die?"

Continuing domination of nurse education by `cultural safety'
commissars has scandalised the public. There are racists in
Government who do not care if Maori are treated by witch doctors not
real doctors.

Last year the Justice and Electoral Select Committee considered a bill
to give racially segregated electoral rolls and racial voting in the
Bay of Plenty regional council. Only two local authorities made
submissions against it. Local Government New Zealand and the Society
of Local Government Managers told us the paramount consideration for
elections was the Treaty of Waitangi.

Can you believe this? The peak body of our elected local government,
and their senior executives, telling us the Treaty prevailed over
considerations such as ensuring a free and fair ballot, one person one
vote and even integrity and secrecy of the ballot. When questioned as
to what their statement meant they could not tell us.

Canterbury can be proud of Sir Kerry Burke. He appeared before our
Select Committee with strong and principled opposition. The only
other Council with the courage to dissent from sickly establishment
obeisance to racism was the Southland District Council.

Now the segregation proposed by that Bill is in the Local Government
Reform Bill, to be extended throughout the country. The most common
rationale is that without a race-defined electoral roll Maori cannot
be guaranteed representation, if elected Maori councillors offend
pakeha voters. The counter argument seems to cut no ice - that one
function of democracy is to find candidates who must maintain a
sufficiently broad appeal to maintain a majority vote.

The rationale that most shocked me in 2001 came from Manu Paul of the
New Zealand Maori Council. Supported by a prominent Rotorua Maori
leader they argued that Maori had to be around the Council table, when
contracts were being let. They saw Council membership as vital to
getting a share of the spoils of government for Maori contractors.

I could understand better the other thrust of their submission, that
council decisions were devaluing Maori land. Maori were the biggest
landholders in the region. They argued that they needed to be at the
Council in order to protect their interest as landholders when Council
was making land use decisions.

If only they had instead tried to uphold their Treaty rights to
private property ownership and enjoyment. They would have been
serving the interests of us all, Maori and pakeha.

The Local Government Reform Bill requires Local Authorities to have a
plan for remitting rates for Maori. In effect of course this means a
plan for spreading the share of taxes for people with Maori genes onto
their non-Maori neighbours. Only in Christchurch does there appear to
have been any public debate on this matter. Thanks to Denis Hampton
and to some other vigilant people at least the Letters column in the
Press has shown that there is an appreciation of the principles at
stake.

Criminal Justice

There is one dreadful kind of race equality before the law. Maori
numbers in prison equal the numbers of offenders from all other ethnic
backgrounds. Last year a Christchurch resident called to tell me how
sick he felt attending the opening of a new prison unit. Most of the
proceedings were conducted in Maori but one elder offered English
words along the lines "Thank you for inviting us here. It is good to
know our mokopuna are going to feel comfortable here".

Should they not have been appalled by the invitation - ashamed? They
should have wanted their mokopuna to hate the place, to want to be out
and never come back.

The role of tikanga Maori in our Corrections system is one of the
unexplored hypocrisies with which justice is now riddled, as a result
of Treaty worship. The Corrections Department is rolling out what it
calls Integrated Offender Management. Every prisoner will eventually
be assessed for a personally tailored programme of "researched"
rehabilitative or reintegrative measures.

Meanwhile Maori focus units are opening in prisons throughout New
Zealand.

I have no doubt that many of them do excellent work. Where they are
established by charismatic and inspiring people with a commitment to
transforming wasted lives, the inspiration works. But these are not
"researched" techniques. No work has been done to establish that
there is anything particular about Maori culture or training in Maori
martial arts that is likely to reduce offending over the longer term.
Experienced Prison and Probation Service officers and others have to
pay lip service to the view that there is something transcendent about
Maori culture. Ordinary rules and tests and requirements are
suspended.

This is not an idle concern. At one level I can say "whatever works,
lets welcome it". But if we are dishonest about what it is that is
working we head for disaster. We will try to duplicate the results
and fail.

The risks have started to mature. We are really depending on the
efforts of outstanding people, while pretending that there is
something intrinsic in the culture being embedded in these offenders.

In December last year a prison officer in the Waikeria Prison Maori
Focus Unit was worried about a proposed 6 prisoner dive trip. They
were to go hundreds of kilometres to a seaside marae to collect the
Unit's Christmas kai moana. Some were seriously violent criminals.
He was concerned that the marae was at the centre of a large dope
growing area, that one of the people on the escapade was the son of a
marae leader of doubtful role model value, and that the supervision
could not enforce the Focus Unit rule that prisoners stay clear of
drugs and alcohol.

What did the Unit boss do? She called off the trip, telling the
inmate rünanga (committee) in writing that the officer's objection was
the reason and that he had said the Marae elder concerned as "a
drunk".

The responsible officer's career may be over. There is thought to be
a contract out on him.

Why did the manager give copies of the statement to the inmate
rünanga? It seems it was to curry favour. They are running the
`asylum'.

Freedom of Religion

Religious toleration was not long established in the middle of the
19th century. It was not recorded in the Treaty, but Governor Hobson
gave an express assurance of toleration, to the fury of some of the
missionaries. Signing the Treaty was halted by Maori at the urging of
Bishop Pompallier, until Hobson had indicated whether Roman
Catholicism would be suppressed. He undertook that Maori "ritenga" or
rites were to be equally "protected" along with Wesleyan and Roman
beliefs.

The question of whether we would have an established church was then
resolved in New Zealand by the Church Extension Ordinance of the
British Secretary of State for the Colonies in 1843. We started out
with a State that was at least tolerant in matters of religion even if
it was not secular. But we did not have the explicit separation
stipulated by that marvellous reflection of liberalism, the US
Constitution.

Even so, tension between Catholicism and Protestantism gave us a range
of protections for secularism. In provisions that seem quaint now,
free and secular education was made part of the law, by strict
patrolling of rules that prevented sectarianism and political bias in
the State education system.

This does mean that religious tolerance has gone unthreatened. Here
in Christchurch the Salvation Army was harried in the 19th century
under bylaws passed expressly for that purpose. In the 1960s there
was a serious attempt to ban Scientology. There are relics of the
implicit assumption that New Zealand is a Christian state, for example
in the prayer with which the Speaker begins the Parliamentary sessions
every day.

Today, however, a sinister cult of "partnership worship" has infected
many organs, government, schools, universities, and even hospitals.

Belief in the cult is enough to excuse superstition, cronyism,
aristocracy, abuse of office, and incompetence. Though the cult has
been given the backing of the coercive powers of the State, and local
authorities must also support it, its beliefs and purposes have never
been openly debated in Parliament or even on state radio.

The cult believes that "partnership" rights and duties trump all
traditional civic virtues. After conversion to the cult certain
principles become outdated, such as - one person one vote,
appointments on merit instead of status or identity or connections,
and rules against nepotism and exploitation of office. They are seen
as mere evidence of mono-cultural arrogance.

Notions of a secular state, rules against conflicts of interest,
respect for private property and equality before the law, even
individual accountability are treated as quaint relics of a fuddy
duddy era.

The cult obliges people to pretend to have faith. They must pretend
to knowledge no one has. I believe more than 80 statutes require
adherence to principles of the Treaty of Waitangi. There is no
legislative statement of what those principles are.

Innumerable Government publications refer to them. Yet when the Prime
Minister was asked for a statement of the principles in Parliament on
two separate days in February, after 4 hours of prior notice, she was
unable to point to any. She offered a statement of principles for
settling Treaty claims, but was at pains to say that was not the same
thing as a statement of the principles of the Treaty.

She was stunned the first day when I produced a copy of a document
called "Principles for Crown Action on the Treaty of Waitangi"
published by the Labour Government in 1989.

No answer could be provided when the question was repeated the next
day. But the 1989 statement was then mocked as "something produced by
Lange".

Great leaps of faith are required to understand how these unknowable
principles come to mean a duty on the Crown to actively subsidise and
promote Maori broadcasting, or a right for Maori to claim ownership
(and naturally royalty entitlements) in respect of plants and bugs
which have been in New Zealand for millennia before Maori and which
will no doubt be in New Zealand for millennia after we have all passed
on.

The cult has a tap into the Treasury. It pays its priests well, so
well that many otherwise productive people are drawn into developing
the beliefs of this cult - inventing onerous new obligations and way
of showing piety as they go.

Last year we had the spectacle of the New Zealand Government solemnly
lifting tapu to exorcise evil spirits in our embassies around the
world.

The Royal Commission on Genetic Modification reverentially went about
New Zealand holding hui. The subject was science so recent and so
arcane that few scientists have a confident grasp of it. In truly
laughable passages the Commission solemnly recorded the signs and
portents of these hui, including a bird flitting from rafter to
rafter, as showing special significance. They urged the Government to
make all haste in ensuring Maori were put in a position where they
could exercise their special guardianship and express their exclusive
spirituality in relation to indigenous flora and fauna. Apparently
these cultural requirements will be satisfied by conferring modern
entitlement to lucrative property ownership.

So New Zealanders, without knowing it, last year saw a new religion
growing. When the Royal Commission set out, few Maori had heard of
genetic modification. By the time they had finished it had become an
article of faith, asserted especially by those to whom there will be
political profit in it, that Maori spirituality was outraged by the
prospect of mixing genes.

There could be perhaps some slight consistency at least in the minds
of the watching world, with the beliefs from which this has
developed. Development of an emergency supply of water for Auckland
from the Waikato has been delayed. Some Maori professed alarm about
the effect of mixing the life spirit in Waikato water discharged after
it has passed through the filters and processes and bodies of
Aucklanders, with the life spirit of the water of Manukau Harbour.

This latest manifestation of our new State religion involves human
sacrifice (not extending to martyrdom of the anointed leaders of
course). Maori are represented as wanting to forego the benefits of
genetic engineering - leaving Maori diabetics among the first
casualties, given that diabetes seems likely to be one of the first
diseases to be tackled by genetic engineering.

And this month Canterbury people would have seen the forthright
comments of Judge Treadwell, fighting a rather lonely battle to keep
the Resource Management Act from becoming a subject of even more
mockery. He reproached the Maori objectors who wanted him to block a
subdivision because of the death curse that would follow interference
with sacred site objects. They were so secret the objectors could not
disclose anything about them including where they were. Yet the RMA
forces the judge, and councils to blow other people's time and money
taking this twaddle seriously.

Two Governments, National then Labour held up an important trademark
reform, to introduce a regime by which Maori who assert they are
culturally offended by a mark can require the registrar to cancel
registration, without compensation to the owners.

Nothing in the Bill protects trademark owners against cultural offence
mysteriously induced by greed.

Cowardice and Venality

Our social and political immune system should have been activated
against the cult. Instead it is knotted in confusion. With literally
scores of euphemisms those who should be the guardians of our
political culture tip toe around the edges of the septic spots. When
journalists, academics and elected leaders are feeling particularly
frank they talk delicately about "Treaty issues", or "ethnic
tensions".

Ordinary New Zealanders, in private, or at least unpublished by the
self-censoring media, express themselves much more frankly. They
intuitively understand what race discrimination is. They don't buy
the rationalisations and the hypocrisy.

We must continue to be tolerant. We must be tolerant of much that we
abhor. If we are true liberals we will be humble, aware of how little
knowledge is certain. We will be charitable, knowing how hard it is
to understand a person until we have walked in their shoes. Ours is
the tolerance that says "I accept your right to hold those views, to
live like that, to look like that, to do things I abhor. But that
does not mean I must agree, or decline to judge, or tacitly support
you". It does not mean we must agree to our taxes going to support
conduct that we believe damages our society including Maori.

We allow Ministers to support law breaking. We tolerate official
cowardice. We have tolerated, for example, unlawful occupations of
public and private land. We have seen farmers intimidated from their
land. We have seen a system shutting its eyes to child abuse and
incest while parroting patent untruths about the special regard that
the so called clients of the welfare system who were Maori, had for
their children as taonga.

This is not to say that child abuse, torture and murder is any more
prevalent among Maori than among other debauched products of the
welfare system, matched on an age, education and economic status
basis. But if we had not been cravenly tolerant we would have
objected when the law gave a status to whänau, and the importance of
maintaining ownership of children by Maori families that was patently
not justified by any objective assessment of the interests of the
children.

We have been betraying our own values of integrity in public
administration and in application of the law when endemic venality is
tolerated in bodies now benefiting from the millions of dollars
sprayed around in "capacity building".

We know what happens to people corrupted by prospect of unearned
wealth. It doesn't matter whether you are Maori or pakeha, it is very
hard to transmit the values of diligence, thrift, honesty and respect
for education. The third generation of a wealthy family rarely keeps
that culture intact. Wealth is a corrupter of such values. Yet we
are pretending that Maoridom will be uplifted by distribution of more
unearned money to families which have not known wealth for 3
generations. A calculating government is spraying out money for
"capacity building". There is no structure in place to measure or
require anything substantive in return, or even any intention to
demand performance.

We have tolerated warped priorities such as that which is currently
seeing DOC spend millions to build banks around Ruapehu to prevent a
sulphurous overflow from the crater lake reaching Lake Taupo and
poisoning it for decades. The simple and cheap course was simply to
lower the ice dam which raises the level of the lake. A small
bulldozer could do it as annual maintenance. That was blocked by a
credulous minister acceding to some assertion of cultural or spiritual
offence by a Maori splinter group.

The left in particular has been corrupted by its vote buying
conversion to support inherited aristocracy and tribalism.

The left are successors to a noble tradition of opposition to
inherited privilege of all kinds. We can thank the left for some of
the institutions that support meritocracy. The constructive left saw
egalitarianism in terms of equality of opportunity.

How can their successors have any integrity when they support
undemocratic tribal structures? Such pakeha are complicit in driving
enterprising Maori to escape to Australia.

A Shared Problem

This sickly tolerance is not confined to pakeha. I saw this in the
meeting house at Waitangi on Waitangi day. Clean and neatly dressed
elders, many lean from a life time of work, tolerated rancid slobs
with matted hair wiping their filthy feet on a defaced New Zealand
flag. Interruptions to Richard Prebble's courteous address might have
been part of the reasons why the slobs attracted my attention. The
spectacle made it hard to take seriously the oratory about Maori mana.

Pakeha ceremony is equally vulnerable to such disruption and
dissonance. We have lost the confidence as well as rights to be
intolerant as private citizens. So we have weak mechanisms for
maintaining dignity even on private but common property, such as a
marae or a school. A healthy marae might exercise enough social (or
physical) pressure to persuade such slobs to stay out of sight when
there is company visiting.

Much of the blame must go to the lawyers. They have cowed the
individuals who should be exercising private rights to sanction or
exclude those who offend them. Schools, for example, that wish to
enforce their rules are second guessed by judges. For State schools
there may be good arguments that this should be so. There should,
however, be no doubt whatsoever about the freedom of private bodies to
make and enforce whatever rules they wish. The Courts are imposing
public or administrative law burdens on private bodies. That treats
them as if they were wielding the coercive powers of the State,
burdening them with all the impoverishing paraphernalia of natural
justice.

Whose Solutions?

This sickly tolerance is not a Maori problem. Just exhorting Maori to
change, is not a solution, though there must be honest exhortation.
It is a New Zealand problem. All leaders should be held to account if
they fail to stand up for civic virtues.

If I were a young Maori I have no doubt I would be exploiting the
opportunities given by credulous and craven government, just as Maori
radicals have for the last 30 years. During young and irresponsible
years it would be as much fun as anything else going, to see how far
you could push, what indignity you could force on the establishment,
how ludicrous you could make your demand or request, before they would
jib and stand up for their own values.

Almost any of us could be seduced into accepting illegitimate
privilege, when it is offered by fawning twits in leadership
positions.

There are thousands of Maori whose feelings about disorder and insult
and bloated claims and fake spirituality will be stronger than that of
most pakeha. We have all been waiting for someone in authority to
assert the values we grew up with, as New Zealanders. Most of us want
the equality before the law promised by our cultural inheritance and
the Treaty.

It is discourteous to lampoon someone else's religious faith. Matters
of religion or faith are personal. Yet someone has to start mocking
ludicrous superstition. That is how we defeated many earlier
superstitions. The proponents are calling in the State to enforce
their beliefs. Being identified with laughable science should involve
cringing, and finding a way of disassociating oneself. Mockery is a
responsibility for everyone of intellectual integrity.

How did our inheritance of Liberalism let us get to this?

The Human Rights Act 1993 was pushed through by Sir Douglas Graham.
It reversed the common international pattern of human rights law.
Around the world human rights law is largely to ensure that the
coercive powers of the state cannot be used to oppress minorities.
Ours left the State free. It did not apply to the State, while it
imposed on private individuals liabilities for conduct toward each
other which breached no other law. The liability depends on whether
the conduct is motivated by a newly unlawful set of beliefs or
judgments about the other person.

Christchurch was the scene of one of the early tests. In the
Christian Forecourt Attendant case the Court held that it had become
illegal for a Christian garage owner to advertise for a forecourt
attendant who shared his beliefs. He could have achieved it
covertly. He could have discretely wasted the time of numerous
applicants until he found one espousing Christianity. But he was
naïve enough to be open.

The pilot for this approach to law was our Race Relations Act 1971.
We passed it to satisfy the requirements of a United Nations
Convention. At the time there was principled concern that it breached
important liberal safeguards, because it made your otherwise lawful
acts unlawful solely if you had the wrong motivation. Enforcement
difficulties that have always dogged such law. Cynicism grows when
only the foolish can't disguise their views enough to avoid getting
caught by these kinds of laws. But as those anxious in 1971 feared,
it has now been used as a precedent to create a vast new range of
privileges.

The acme of this foolishness has been reached. Age is now a
prohibited ground of discrimination. Perfectly competent adults are
no longer permitted to agree with each other that age is a relevant
factor in their relationships. Masquerading as a move to add dignity
to old age, it has an inevitable opposite effect. Retirement for age
was a near universal way of dealing with one of the knottiest problems
of any human organisation or society, how to ensure timely succession
without fighting.

Organisations have retiring ages so that they know that there will be
predictable room to introduce fresh blood. They have them because
capacities do change with age. They have them instead of individually
tailored agreements, because individual rules are expensive to
negotiate and administer. They have them because we all get old, and
the rules therefore affect all equally.

With retirement for age there is no necessity to prove that the aged
one has become incompetent. Accordingly all can depart with dignity.
And organisations can plan on perpetual renewal, knowing that while
age may not necessarily mean incompetence, freshness and renewal are
vital to every human endeavour. Only those willing to lie to
themselves deny that age is accompanied by some fading of powers, even
if wisdom is a compensation in many cases.

The rhetoric of liberty and tolerance were used and perverted when
this law was made. The argument was that Parliament should make it
illegal to have rules that assume characteristics of New Zealanders.
Everyone must be treated as an individual, not as a member of a
class. Perhaps there was a permissible argument to bind the State,
even a State that was busy erecting discriminations and privileges
based on race. But no Parliamentarian, or even as far as I can tell
any significant commentator, pointed out the civil liberties travesty
in including age as a ground of discrimination forbidden to private
individuals, even by fully informed and objectively rational consent
of competent adults.

No one even raised the practical own goal which has now put over 50's
among the hardest to place in employment. Two decades ago they were
among the least affected by long-term involuntary unemployment.

And at the same time our law has retreated from its respect for the
individual right to choose of even the most humble citizen, safety
liabilities have reinstated feudal responsibilities of masters for
their servants. Employers are made liable for injuries or losses they
often have no practical way of controlling, except with infinitely pin
pricking supervision and management.

Their only defence is to show they have insisted on absolutely rule
bound supervision. The law is making sure the jobs of subordinates
become less satisfying, that individual initiative is crushed. It is
also ensuring that we consume ever more resources in dispute
resolution and second guessing excesses of authority (in employment
law).

What Should We Do?

How should we express our intolerance of these assaults on
`enlightenment values'? The answer is simple. It is the law and the
State that must be tolerant. Not private individuals and companies.
They should be required only to obey sound law. Law which prevents
force and fraud in our attempts to persuade others. Law which
requires us to reimburse others for injury we cause to their property
or person. Private individuals and corporations cannot threaten
others with unlawful acts, to coerce others exercising their similar
freedoms. That is the beginning and the end of it.

Liberals can and should be intolerant of evil. They should express
their views strongly. They should try to persuade, to shun, and to
decline to employ or to support those whose values are antithetical to
their own.

It is the task of the law to ensure that does not step over the
boundary to become coercive by threatening violence to the person, or
injury to property. The State has the monopoly of that kind of
coercion.

The law and tax making and tax distributing powers, the coercive power
of the state must be confined so that the prejudices or religious or
other beliefs of rulers, or a ruling class, cannot be imposed on
others.

Liberalism's greatest achievement is tolerance. Tolerance is the
distinguishing badge, and the principle it must preserve at all
costs. Yet tolerance is also its Achilles heel.

Tolerance can be the same thing as indifference or apathy. Forced
tolerance of wrong is a weapon in the hands of the enemies of
freedom. If tolerance means you have to be non-judgmental, people
will excuse the inexcusable. If tolerance grows from a restriction on
interference by the law, into interference with otherwise lawful
actions, it can sustain not virtues, but vices. It is a vice not a
virtue to impose liability on private individuals who discriminate
against people they consider bad.

I would make an exception here for law against race discrimination,
simply because race hatreds come so easily to us. Forestalling
communal viciousness based on colour has been such a hard and endless
task in every society.

And of course in distinguishing as I have, between Maori and pakeha as
if they were two peoples, I run the risk of allowing a victory to the
collectivists. Men and women of ill will on both sides want us to
fall into that trap.

That is seeing each other first as members of another race or culture,
and only then as fellow humans, or as neighbours, fellow sporting
fanatics, members of a school community, fellow worshippers, shoppers
- whatever.

Blurry inheritance of race as a qualification for state privilege
should be illegal. That is what we must not tolerate. For most New
Zealanders official identification by ethnicity is artificial,
irrelevant and offensive. As private individuals, of course we must
be free to identify in that way. There is no menace in a Maori All
Black team, or a Celtic Rugby club, or a Samoan Church. None of these
bodies are calling for the coercive powers of the State to grant them
privilege.

Our forbears who developed, fought for, and then defended ideals of
liberty in a hostile world knew these things about freedom and
tolerance well. As their successors, after five generations of
prosperity and domestic peace, we have forgotten much of the
background. We use the language of rights and of freedom like
children singing carols as a ritual, without any understanding of, let
alone belief in, angels or Father Christmas.

Restoring and protecting liberty is a matter of summoning memory, then
the energy and the courage. Because the formulae are already
available. We just look at our forebears' work to know what liberty
means and needs. We just need to clear away the rubbish that has
accumulated. Nearly all that is needed to restore liberalism's values
is to undo about 15 years of disreputable law.

The Treaty of Waitangi will be a vital element in restoring classical
liberal respect for property rights. If that can restore and protect
Maori property rights they will be protected for us all, because
Article 3 of the Treaty says we are all to be equal before the law.

Without the false, recently manufactured, and now mysteriously
unknowable principles the Treaty is a cultural treasure for us all.

The Tide is Turning

I believe the issues we are considering today will become major issues
in the coming election campaign. Winston Peters, despite his
sponsorship of the tight 5 warriors in the last Parliament, has now
reverted to his earlier mode. In 1990, as a National Minister, he
described the partnership description of the Treaty as a myth. He
will campaign against the Treaty cult this year.

In Parliament last year, every fortnight for months, we had genuine
debates about whether voting separatism was racist or just a Treaty
obligation, or simple a way of advancing the interests of a group who
would otherwise be submerged. Very little of that debate was
reported. Ordinary New Zealanders who feel there is a vast media
conspiracy to ignore their alarm would have been reassured had they
heard that at last the politicians were getting the courage to debate.

There are many Maori leaders we classical liberals should honour, for
they show liberal values in action. Sir Tipene O'Regan with his
respect for property rights. Alan Duff for his willingness to attack
the warrior mentality, the women who established Köhanga Reo in
despair at where the state education system was taking their children,
the hundreds of dedicated Maori wardens (and Maori Women's Welfare
League people) who attend gatherings to help make sure bullies and
vandals and thieves and drunks and people who abandon their kids don't
spoil life for the rest of us. They are not resting on complaints
that the police cannot do it all - on whining for more law.

It is the chemical fertiliser of government patronage allocated
according to race or other class identity that is making it worth
focussing on what divides us rather than what unites. That is the
dioxin in the government spray. When consultation powers and veto
rights and educational and health privileges, and excuses before the
justice system can turn on asserting some inherited racial identity we
can expect to feel poison in the system.

As liberals, we are the trustees of the ideals that generated the US
Constitution, the United Nations Charter, the Bill of Rights, and the
enormous liberation of human enterprise that came with freedom and
property rights. We do not need to apologise to anyone for opposing
racial identity politics, the false new privileges that hitch hike on
and ultimately debase the language of rights.

We need to assert our values. We need to become intolerant of
government discrimination. We need to point out hypocrisy and
corruption. We need to mock pomposity and spurious religiosity
wherever we come across it. We need to encourage people to recognise
that the anointed are emperors without clothes, that they retain their
power to force piety only because there has been so much silence that
people do not realise how few actually believe the nonsense that is
mouthed so widely.

We need to recognise that as one people living in New Zealand with
streams of culture drawn from Europe, Polynesia and now Asia none
should have trump card status. We have to demand high standards of
all, and where there is failure, face it squarely. This cult rests on
intellectual bullying, and cowardice in the face of it. Streams of
money buys off those who are not cowed by social pressure.

We can fix some of this at an election. The rest we can fix only when
the cult has become discredited by New Zealanders generally.

For ACT as a political party this is straightforward but not
necessarily easy. It will be easy to mistake aggression for courage
or dogma for confidence. But the way is simple.

One colour blind state, where the law is tolerant, and prevents the
State from suppressing individual choice.

Equality of all before a tolerant law.

For more information visit ACT online at http://www.act.org.nz or
contact the ACT Parliamentary Office at act@parliament.govt.nz.

It is amazing how this disaster has been avidly seized upon by the ideologues of all stripes to push their agenda.

Coming out of the woodwork include Christian fundamentalists seeing it as a sign from God punishing a sinful city, black racists like Sharpton and Jackson seeing it as a plot by whites. Maureen "on her knees" Dowd of the NYT and many many others blaming Bush. Opponents of the welfare state blame the welfare-induced passivity of the remaining inhabitants. Greenies blame the refusal to sign Kyoto. Feds blame the State admin, the State admin blames the local admin. The locals blame everyone else.

Strange, we haven't yet heard from the feminists and gays.

Just give 'em time I guess.

The WSJ belatedly below attempts some objectivity, and those away from the ever-oversimplifying mind-numbing meanstream media will be aware of more major issues than finger-pointing, like the lessons of unpreparedness against major terrorist attacks on an American city, and the looming massive problems facing the USA having little human infrastructure in the foreseeable future around this major port, its major river goods-and-trade terminal and its major oil facilities.

R

James Taranto: Myths of Hurricane Katrina

September 06, 2005

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,16501147%5E7583,00.html

HURRICANE Katrina was a horrific natural disaster. To America's Angry Left it was yet another occasion to score political points against President George W. Bush. In the same spirit of opportunism that animated looters who stole television sets, Bush's political foes frantically sought to blame the devastation on him.

A measure of the anti-Bush Left's derangement is that it blames him for bad weather. "Complacency will no longer suffice, especially if experts are right in warning that global warming may increase the intensity of future hurricanes," The New York Times editorialised on Thursday. "But since this administration won't acknowledge that global warming exists, the chances of leadership seem minimal."
Whether global warming exists or not, it did not cause Katrina, at least according to a news story that had appeared in the Times two days earlier: "Because hurricanes form over warm ocean water, it is easy to assume that the recent rise in their number and ferocity is because of global warming. But that is not the case, scientists say. Instead, the severity of hurricane seasons changes with cycles of temperatures of several decades in the Atlantic Ocean."
Then we heard that the National Guard was unable to do its duty in the Gulf Coast because it had been "stretched thin" by deployment to Iraq; "deployed in a phony war", as former New York Times editor Howell Raines claimed in a particularly inflammatory article in The Sydney Morning Herald and several US papers at the weekend. But as James Robbins pointed out in National Review Online, only 10.2 per cent of the US Army, including the guard and reserves, is in Iraq; 74.2 per cent, or 751,000 soldiers, are stationed in the US. In any case, this argument died down as the troops arrived in great force late in the week.

The most pernicious myth the Angry Left propagated was that the storm victims were neglected because of their race. "I feel that, if it was in another area, with another economic strata and racial make-up, that President Bush would have run out of Crawford a lot quicker and FEMA [the Federal Emergency Management Agency] would have found its way in a lot sooner," said Al Sharpton, New York's premier racial arsonist.

In fact, Katrina was an equal-opportunity destroyer. The media's coverage of the disaster understandably centred on New Orleans, the biggest city in the region, which is two-thirds black. But the storm also devastated at least four suburban Louisiana parishes and three coastal Mississippi counties. All have white majorities, ranging from 69.8 per cent to 90.2 per cent. Appeals to race are especially dangerous when the US needs national solidarity. Special pleading on behalf of black victims may lead to special pleading on behalf of white victims. It may also reinforce ugly stereotypes. A USA Today editorial noted that most of the New Orleans victims were black, then added: "So are most of the looters." And there have been reports of criminality that goes far beyond looting, including rape and murder. Avarice and depravity are human failings, but race-obsessed liberals may be contributing to the notion that they are racial ones.

The Angry Left seems finally to have settled on the claim that the Bush administration was incompetent, its actions slow and inept.

There may turn out to be some truth to this, but it's far too early to apportion blame. Responding to a disaster of unprecedented proportions is a monumentally complicated task and it's likely that officials at all levels of government made mistakes. Further, even the best-run government cannot work miracles, and it's unclear how much better the response could have been.

In any case, deeming the Bush administration incompetent at this stage reflects nothing more than the prejudices of the administration's critics and in some cases a plain disregard for the facts.

Journalist and blogger Andrew Sullivan, for example, lashed FEMA director Michael Brown for saying he hadn't learned until Thursday that several thousand people needed help at the New Orleans Convention Centre. "Brown apparently doesn't get CNN," Sullivan sneered.

But CNN didn't report on the convention centre situation until Thursday and no other news organisation seems to have known before then that more than a handful of people were there.

The American people seem to be taking a fair-minded view of all this. An ABC News poll released yesterday found that 55 per cent of Americans didn't blame the President for Katrina's devastation. And while 67 per cent thought the federal Government wasn't adequately prepared, 75 per cent said the same of state and local government. As with all the previous efforts to discredit the Bush administration, this one seems likely to fail.

Besides, one claim no one has had the audacity to make is that John Kerry would have done better. President Kerry, after all, would have faced this disaster with a total of 7 1/2 months' administrative experience in his lifetime.

James Taranto is editor of OpinionJournal.com, the website of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/article310339.ece

Scientists guilty of 'hyping' benefits of gene research
By Steve Connor Science Editor, in Dublin
Published: 05 September 2005

The leading fertility scientist Lord Winston has hit out at senior
scientists, including two Nobel laureates, for making exaggerated
claims about the supposed benefits of scientific research, warning
they could trigger a public backlash.

Speaking on the eve of his presidential address to the annual
meeting o the British Association for the Advancement of Science
at Trinity College, Dublin, the former head of fertility medicine at the
Hammersmith Hospital in London also criticised the "hype" over
stem cells. He said stem cells are unlikely to be of much use for
many years.

Lord Winston called on his colleagues to use more moderate
language when describing scientific breakthroughs, singling out in
his speech senior scientists and naming two Nobel laureates for
making dangerously arrogant remarks.

"James Watson's assertion about the value of tampering with the
human germ-line are a pretty good example," he said. Professor
Watson, who won a Nobel prize for discovering the DNA double
helix with Francis Crick, has extolled the possibility of altering the
genes of germ-line sperm or egg cells to eradicate inherited
diseases.

Lord Winston also criticised the Nobel laureate David Baltimore for
claiming that the human genome offered the information needed to
create a human being. "We knew what he meant, of course, but
actually the sequencing brings us no nearer to the spectre of creating a human being whatsoever," he said.

He added that scientists risk a public backlash against their work if
their claims were shown to be extravagantly misleading.

For instance, Michael Dexter, the former chief executive of the
Wellcome Trust, said in 2001 that sequencing of the human genome was
an invention more important than the wheel. He also compared it to
the splitting of the atom. "Five years later, genetic medicine based on this work has had little impact on health care and it's unlikely to have much impact
for some years."

Embryonic stem cells offer great potential benefits but many of the
problems were glossed over when describing these benefits to the
public, he said.

"Of course, the study of stem cells is one of the most exciting areas
in biology but I think that it is unlikely that embryonic stem cells
are likely to be useful in health care for a long time," he said.

Stem cells from embryos can produce abnormal numbers of chromosomes
and there is a risk that rogue cells can cause random tumours in a
patient. "All these difficulties and many others may be overcome in
time. But during the political campaign to encourage the UK Parliament to accept
liberal legislation, some parliamentarians were clearly led to
believe that a major clinical application was just around the
corner," Lord Winston said.

"As disappointment sets in ... we can expect a massive backlash by
the right-to-life groups who are always ready to pounce when they
perceive a chink in our arguments," he said.

Lord Winston also criticised the trend towards commercialisation of
science, which he said increases secrecy and undermines its public
role. "Once the pursuit of science becomes heavily geared to profit,
which the public feels it is not sharing in any major way, scientists may be
compromised. They may be perceived as ... not working merely for the
public good," he told the conference.

Lord Winston's targets

JAMES WATSON

Nobel Prize winner in physiology and medicine in 1962. Discovered
the DNA double helix with Francis Crick.

Lord Winston said: "In recent years we have seen exaggerated claims
made by leading scientists that are sometimes patently fatuous. James
Watson's assertion about the value of tampering with the human
germline are a pretty good example."

DAVID BALTIMORE

Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine, 1975. President of Caltech,
won the prize for his work on virology.

On his claims that the human genome offered the information needed to
create a human being, Lord Winston said: "We knew what he meant, but
actually the sequencing brings us no nearer to the spectre of
creating a human being whatsoever."

The leading fertility scientist Lord Winston has hit out at senior
scientists, including two Nobel laureates, for making exaggerated
claims about the supposed benefits of scientific research, warning
they could trigger a public backlash.

Speaking on the eve of his presidential address to the annual meeting
of the British Association for the Advancement of Science at Trinity
College, Dublin, the former head of fertility medicine at the
Hammersmith Hospital in London also criticised the "hype" over stem
cells. He said stem cells are unlikely to be of much use for many
years.

Lord Winston called on his colleagues to use more moderate language
when describing scientific breakthroughs, singling out in his speech
senior scientists and naming two Nobel laureates for making
dangerously arrogant remarks.

"James Watson's assertion about the value of tampering with the human
germ-line are a pretty good example," he said. Professor Watson, who
won a Nobel prize for discovering the DNA double helix with Francis
Crick, has extolled the possibility of altering the genes of
germ-line sperm or egg cells to eradicate inherited diseases.

Lord Winston also criticised the Nobel laureate David Baltimore for
claiming that the human genome offered the information needed to
create a human being. "We knew what he meant, of course, but actually
the sequencing brings us no nearer to the spectre of creating a human
being whatsoever," he said.

He added that scientists risk a public backlash against their work if
their claims were shown to be extravagantly misleading.

For instance, Michael Dexter, the former chief executive of the
Wellcome Trust, said in 2001 that sequencing of the human genome was
an invention more important than the wheel. He also compared it to
the splitting of the atom. "Five years later, genetic medicine based on this work has had little impact on health care and it's unlikely to have much impact
for some years."

Embryonic stem cells offer great potential benefits but many of the
problems were glossed over when describing these benefits to the
public, he said.

"Of course, the study of stem cells is one of the most exciting areas
in biology but I think that it is unlikely that embryonic stem cells
are likely to be useful in health care for a long time," he said.

Stem cells from embryos can produce abnormal numbers of chromosomes
and there is a risk that rogue cells can cause random tumours in a
patient. "All these difficulties and many others may be overcome in
time. But during the political campaign to encourage the UK
Parliament to accept liberal legislation, some parliamentarians were
clearly led to believe that a major clinical application was just
around the corner," Lord Winston said.

"As disappointment sets in ... we can expect a massive backlash by
the right-to-life groups who are always ready to pounce when they
perceive a chink in our arguments," he said.

Lord Winston also criticised the trend towards commercialisation of
science, which he said increases secrecy and undermines its public
role. "Once the pursuit of science becomes heavily geared to profit,
which the public feels it is not sharing in any major way, scientists
may be compromised. They may be perceived as ... not working merely
for the public good," he told the conference.

THE DOOMED CITIES
The heart of New Orleans.
by Michael A. Ledeen
NRO
September 1, 2005

As we mourn New Orleans, let us also celebrate it, as New Orleanians famously celebrate their own dead. The city has long been admired for its literary creativity, its exceptional food, and its wonderful music, and deplored — albeit also frequented - because of its legendary corruption and degradation. The possibility of its destruction no doubt played a role in the character of its people, and it is no accident that an annual bacchanal took place there, in the riotous celebrations of Mardi Gras. Death has always been omnipresent in the consciousness of the city; dancing in defiance of death was the city's trademark, and the spirited music that defined New Orleans for much of the world was played at the happiest occasions, and at the most famous funerals.

New Orleans is one of a handful of cities that are defined in large part by the recognition that it can all come to an end most any day. Joel Lockhart Dyer wrote that "New Orleans is North America's Venice; both cities are living on borrowed time." New Orleans and Venice are both subject to the vagaries of the water gods, and both have acted sporadically to fend off their seemingly inevitable fate. But their basic response to the looming disaster has been defiance, a ritual assertion of life in the face of the inevitable, and an embrace of human frailty that echoes the frailty of the city itself.

Carnival in Venice, albeit more so in the past than today, has much in common with Mardi Gras, including the use of masks by the celebrants, who thereby throw off their daily identities to participate anonymously in the licentious celebrations. Thomas Mann knew what he was doing when he wrote Death in Venice, in which a proper German professor (pointedly named Aschenbach, the stream of ashes) hurls himself into bawdy Venice to recover his repressed sexuality and creativity. Similar characters abound in the works of Tennessee Williams, who lived many years in New Orleans, the setting for both A Streetcar Named Desire and The Rose Tattoo. William Faulkner also found New Orleans a congenial place for his creative labors. And in both cities, the bacchanals are religious, celebrating both sin and the hope of redemption thereafter, as if a sinner were more attractive to the Almighty than a virtuous soul, at least on that day.
Moreover, Venice prefigured the most likely cultural and political destiny of New Orleans, no matter whether the long-anticipated catastrophe came or not: a slow slide into monotonous ritual, a city transformed into an historic theme park, more frequented by tourists than defined by the energy of its inhabitants, an anachronistic curiosity like Florence, where one focuses on things past, not present or future.

But there is much that separates them. Venice is a northern city, and New Orleans is profoundly southern. A German like Mann might find Venice to be incredibly warm and sunny, but no knowledgeable Italian would. And the presumed naturalness and spontaneity of Venetians could only be taken seriously by someone from even farther north. New Orleans, on the other hand, incarnates the south. New Orleanians are perversely proud of the slow tempo of their daily life, of the absence of industry, and of the fascinating spectacle of human foibles and failures that seems at one with the city. The Italian city that most closely matches New Orleans is Naples, not Venice. Naples also faces destruction — volcanic destruction, from "Vesuvius the Exterminator," as the poet Verga once wrote — and Naples, too, is noted for a lively, and often lawless style of life, along with great literature, art, cuisine and music. Unlike Venice, Naples is every bit as southern as New Orleans, and the European stereotype of the Neapolitan is very much like the American image of New Orleanians: lazy, happy, spontaneous, and unrepressed, slow-moving but quick-witted, and very happy with the food.

Naples and New Orleans also share a common affliction: disease. An enormous number of New Orleanians and Neapolitans have died of cholera; indeed, one of the best books on modern Naples is entitled Naples in the Age of Cholera. New Orleans had the additional scourge of Yellow Fever. In both cities, the effect of these epidemics and mass deaths meant, as Frederick Starr puts it in his excellent book on New Orleans, "death...was not merely a private drama occurring in the intimate circle of one's family, but a civic event, experienced by the entire community." Both cities have a highly developed culture of death. The dead are believed to be actively involved in daily life, busily haunting houses and even restaurants, sending dream messages to the living, and organizing good and bad fortune for those who have or lack proper respect for the inhabitants of the spiritual realm.
The dead themselves require special treatment, because both cities lack proper traditional burial grounds. New Orleans is below sea level, and the soil in Naples is very porous, so the dead are usually placed in tombs, not in the ground. In some Neapolitan churches, you can see skeletons in the walls, and local artists paint clothing around the skeletons. This sort of intimacy with the dead is unknown in most of the modern world.

The combination of a rich culture of death with the looming threat of catastrophe is an intoxicating mélange for the spirit, and it no doubt explains why so many great writers have been drawn to these two southern cities, both of which have developed a unique version of Catholicism, often to the consternation of Rome. As Starr observes of New Orleans (and it is equally true of Naples), "all this frivolity occurs in the very city which, for over two centuries, Death visited more ruthlessly than anywhere else on the continent."

Doomed cities with an intimate relationship with the dead are special places, incubators of exceptional qualities of spirit and thus of extraordinary inventiveness. If we have lost one of those cities to the forces of nature, it will impoverish our world far beyond the enormous human tragedy. Even if it was long foreseen.

http://www.benadorassociates.com/pf.php?id=18085

Should we also have one for The Christian Crusader

There may have been a time - ca.7 centuries ago - when that quip would make some sense. It is not now a relevant comment.

and for the Zionist of Genesis 15:11-21?

I may as well confess to you that I wasn't familiar with this passage (I've not read many parts of the Bible).

Do modern Zionists rely much on this passage? If so, it would be an amusing parallel to the Muslim reliance on Mahomet's dream of a 'night flight' (the word Jerusalem not being mentioned). But it's an inexact parallel if only because this Abram dream is relatively specific.

I know little of Zionism. While a grad student in a USA lab dominated in more senses than one by men of Jewish extraction (most of them non-religious, I was pretty sure), I soon learned not to attempt any discussion relating to Israel. As soon as one made any remark, no matter how specific & careful, they would scream "Ve are fighting for our vechy SURVIVAL", to put me on notice that reasoning would not be available. I gave up.

What I did think, and still do, is that in such a complex long dispute what may matter most practically is: which party is in the more sturdy psychological condition to make a concessionary offer. It has usually appeared to me that the non-Israelis (not all of them Arabs!) happen to be in the more precarious psychological position and are therefore the better placed to be generous. By this comparison I do not mean to imply that the Zionists who scream as I've quoted are in any very robust psychological stance - only that the others are even less secure.

I have no opinion on what offer(s) the Zionists might best formulate; as I say, I gave up the attempt to reason on this ghastly imbroglio. I mean now only to make a suggestion on a different level, which I hope will be taken up sympathetically as it is meant.

The above 3 paras was cited by Stuart C Newman as his main reason for quitting the Science For The People email list.

R

If graphics do not show, revert to URL http://kiwijewpundit.blogspot.com/

The Toddler's Creed

If I want it, it's mine.

If I can take it away from you, it's mine.

If I had it a little while ago, it's mine.

If it looks like mine, it's mine.

If I give it to you and change my mind later, it's mine.

If we are building something together, all the pieces are mine.

If it's mine, it will never belong to anyone else. No matter what.

Waaaah! My toys! Mine! Give me! Waaaaah...


The Jihadi Creed

If I want it, it's Dar ul-Islam.

If I can take it away from you, it's Dar ul-Islam.

If I had it a little while ago, it's Dar ul-Islam.

If it looks like Dar ul-Islam, it's Dar ul-Islam.

If I give it to you and change my mind later, it's Dar ul-Islam.

If we are building something together, all the pieces are Dar ul-Islam.

If it's Dar ul-Islam, it will never belong to anyone else. No matter what.

Waaah, my land! Chechnya mine, Palestine mine, Andalus mine, give me!! Waaaah...

--

Jerry Ravetz
111 Victoria Road
Oxford OX2 7QG
+44 [0]1865 512247
Mobile 0790 535 2788
Website: www.jerryravetz.co.uk

Visiting Fellow, the James Martin Institute for Science and Civilization, Saïd Business School, Oxford University.

Files of my recent papers, available for downloading, can be found on the website www.nusap.net; on the Home Page see Tutorials - Post-Normal Science and NUSAP, and Sections - Reports, papers. See also www.postnormaltimes.net, edited by Sylvia Tognetti.

(Ed. Note: Posted with protest against a very sour and hysterical leftist such a Maureen Dowd. She has nothing good to say about anything...ever.)

- NZ TV3 (canadian owned) reported he never landed; this NYT heavy says otherwise.

Either way, it's not a good look for ace smirker Dubya.

R

UNITED STATES OF SHAME
MAUREEN DOWD
New York Times
September 3, 2005
Stuff happens.

And when you combine limited government with incompetent government, lethal
stuff happens.

America is once more plunged into a snake pit of anarchy, death, looting, raping, marauding thugs, suffering innocents, a shattered infrastructure, a gutted police force, insufficient troop levels and criminally negligent government planning. But this time it's happening in America.

W. drove his budget-cutting Chevy to the levee, and it wasn't dry. Bye, bye, American lives. "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees," he told Diane Sawyer.

Shirt-sleeves rolled up, W. finally landed in Hell yesterday and chuckled about his wild boozing days in "the great city" of N'Awlins. He was clearly moved. "You know, I'm going to fly out of here in a minute," he said on the runway at the New Orleans International Airport, "but I want you to know that I'm not going to forget what I've seen." Out of the cameras' range, and avoided by W., was a convoy of thousands of sick and dying people, some sprawled on the floor or dumped on baggage carousels at a makeshift M*A*S*H unit inside the terminal.
Why does this self-styled "can do" president always lapse into such lame "who could have known?" excuses.

Who on earth could have known that Osama bin Laden wanted to attack us by
flying planes into buildings? Any official who bothered to read the trellis of pre-September 11 intelligence briefs.

Who on earth could have known that an American invasion of Iraq would spawn
a brutal insurgency, terrorist recruiting boom and possible civil war? Any official who bothered to read the C.I.A.'s prewar reports.

Who on earth could have known that New Orleans's sinking levees were at risk
from a strong hurricane? Anybody who bothered to read the endless warnings
over the years about the Big Easy's uneasy fishbowl.

In June 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, fretted to The Times-Picayune in New Orleans: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."

Not only was the money depleted by the Bush folly in Iraq; 30% of the National Guard and about half its equipment are in Iraq.

Ron Fournier of The Associated Press reported that the Army Corps of Engineers asked for $105 million for hurricane and flood programs in New Orleans last year. The White House carved it to about $40 million. But President Bush and Congress agreed to a $286.4 billion pork-filled highway bill with 6,000 pet projects, including a $231 million bridge for a small, uninhabited Alaskan island.

Just last year, Federal Emergency Management Agency officials practiced how they would respond to a fake hurricane that caused floods and stranded New Orleans residents. Imagine the feeble FEMA's response to Katrina if they had not prepared.

Michael Brown, the blithering idiot in charge of FEMA --- a job he trained for by running something called the International Arabian Horse Association --- admitted he didn't know until Thursday that there were 15,000 desperate, dehydrated, hungry, angry, dying victims of Katrina in the New Orleans Convention Center.

Was he sacked instantly? No, our tone-deaf president hailed him in Mobile, Ala.bama yesterday: "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."

It would be one thing if President Bush and his inner circle --- Dick Cheney was vacationing in Wyoming; Condi Rice was shoe shopping at Ferragamo's on Fifth Avenue and attended "Spamalot" before bloggers chased her back to Washington; and Andy Card was off in Maine --- lacked empathy but could get the job done. But it is a chilling lack of empathy combined with a stunning lack of efficiency that could make this administration implode.

When the president and vice president rashly shook off our allies and our respect for international law to pursue a war built on lies, when they sanctioned torture, they shook the faith of the world in American ideals.
When they were deaf for so long to the horrific misery and cries for help of the victims in New Orleans - most of them poor and black, like those stuck at the back of the evacuation line yesterday while 700 guests and employees of the Hyatt Hotel were bused out first --- they shook the faith of all Americans in American ideals. And made us ashamed.

Who are we if we can't take care of our own?

New churches mainly drain the disenchanted from other churches. New church plantings have not increased overall membership in the Western "civilization" over the last 2 decades; they have, as it is sometimes described, merely rearranged the deck chairs on the Titanic.

- Ron Ashford

(Ron is a former Archdeacon of Wanganui, currently completing a MA (Bioethics) at the University of Otago)

>I concentrate on one aspect of this article:

An Unworkable Theology
Philip Turner

First Things 154 (June/July 2005): 10-12.

http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0506/opinion/turner.html

The Episcopal sermon, at its most fulsome, begins with a statement to the effect that the incarnation is to be understood as merely a manifestation of divine love. From this starting point, several conclusions are drawn. The first is that God is love pure and simple. Thus, one is to see in Christ’s death no judgment upon the human condition. Rather, one is to see an affirmation of creation and the persons we are. The life and death of Jesus reveal the fact that God accepts and affirms us.
...
It’s a theological chasm - one that separates those who hold a theology of divine acceptance from those who hold a theology of divine redemption.

The message, even when it comes from the mouths of its more sophisticated exponents, amounts to inclusion without qualification.

>A few years ago, Get Smart the then vicar of St Aidan's, Remuera, used to deliver sermons expounding Universalism - the idea that all are saved, the overwhelming love of God being such as to turn none away, whether Muslim or never heard the Gospel etc. I would then stand mute with nothing to add to the clear, vigorous remonstrations by a rtd judge as he waded into Get for this heresy. PC operatives like Get are however impervious to reason; he would repeat the offence a few months later.

Within a given diocese, almost any change in belief and practice can occur without penalty.

>Get is now collecting his pension from the church, but also billed in the media as acting dean of the cathedral. What stipend-boost is he pulling down for the latter work? What will he do if some PowerHarpie demands to take over the position?

Gareth my Californian man,

>You open up q's which interest me, tho' I don't know much about them.
I Cc some clerks in holy orders, and some other good churchfolk.

Our associate pastor gave the message today and discussed briefly his sabbatical which encompassed a study on church planting.

I haven't thought this through fully, but discussions afterward reinforced the e-mail Robert sent on the disintegration of the church, HOWEVER, our pastor indicated that new churches are sprouting up like crazy.

>They have been proliferating around here for a decade or so; I haven't up-to-date figures on recent developments. The whole trend I view with major suspicion to the extent that it's outside existing denominations. But then, I'm the sort of Clayton's Protestant who regrets the Reformation ... and who deplores the woolly-mindedness of Bahai & Quakers ... and who deplores the quiet omission of all creeds from many services ...

He gave one example of a Baptist sponsored church that was labeled Quaker, primarily because the building used was Quaker owned. The key was the gifted leadership moving it forward ... essentially casting off the trappings of old and even bathing in potentially misleading names, but moving forward with gusto.

>What counts as forward? A dozen watts, if thru efficient speakers, will give you a pretty solid drug effect for guitars, good singers etc to lead simple songs of devotion along the lines 'Jesus, you are the grooviest, altogether lovely, and wholly worthy, and I want to worship you'. Given also good preaching, members & spondulicks are likely to roll in. We are talking church growth here ...

The new 'church', or new congregation within an established church, can grow in numbers, turnover, and evident merit; yet it can simultaneously create a sort of cocoon ignoring key issues of the time. PC ideologies are white-anting the Church, esp Anglican: militant homosexualism is promoted by our diocesan & asst bishop & theol coll principals, who also devote themselves firmly to the other PC ideologies neoRacism and, most of all, wimminsLib. Am I to believe that novel 'planted' independent churches are doing less badly against these evil PC ideologies?

Direct missions by totally inexperienced congregation members get strong support, while proven accomplished missionaries e.g Dr Edric Baker are not supported in their routine enormous accomplishments. Am I to believe that novel 'planted' seedlings are more outward-looking? Who is studying these matters?

The general opinion was to allow the old structures to fall and let many new churches, anchored in the Bible, God, Christ, etc., flourish.

>What does this mean to you gents?

I can't help noticing the extreme lack of liturgy. I wonder whether keen new Christians really do need, or even want, this informal approach. I also feel the lack of disciplined connection to other churches is a crippling defect of this 'church planting' business outside of, say, Anglican, RC, Presby, Baptist, Metho ... and I frankly feel those last 2 or 3 have no valid future. But then, I stand ready to tolerate, indeed celebrate, the end of the Anglican church that has nurtured me from age 5 - if that end is an honourable healing of the non-schism with Rome. I would furthermore like to help in healing the real schism viz. W. - Orthodox, and we may be able to help there before we patch things up with the Vatican ...

There is a key to this AND it is not to support the existing structures OR to try to reform them from within, in my opinion.

>I wish I could see simple slogans like that as sufficiently reliable. I support existing structures in the sense of well-tested hierarchies persisting for centuries against many & various challenges. Bpp, at least 2 ranks of ordained, and perhaps some other lay offices, should therefore be conserved. I feel deeply nervous about the initiatives of pseudo-egalitarians e.g M Kelderman advocating abolition of clergy. What is of interest to me is how to influence the Bpp etc in favour of conserving the main doctrines & offices against Geering, Veitch, Thiering, Spong, etc.

your conservative bro in Christ

R

http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/03/katrina.chertoff/index.html?section=cnn_latest

Chertoff: Katrina scenario did not exist
However, experts for years had warned of threat to New Orleans
Sunday, September 4, 2005

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Defending the U.S. government's response to Hurricane Katrina, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff argued Saturday that government planners did not predict such a disaster ever could occur.
But in fact, government officials, scientists and journalists have warned of such a scenario for years.

Chertoff, fielding questions from reporters, said government officials did not expect both a powerful hurricane and a breach of levees that would flood the city of New Orleans. (See the video on a local paper's prophetic warning -- 3:30 )

"That 'perfect storm' of a combination of catastrophes exceeded the foresight of the planners, and maybe anybody's foresight," Chertoff said.
He called the disaster "breathtaking in its surprise."

But engineers say the levees preventing this below-sea-level city from being turned into a swamp were built to withstand only Category 3 hurricanes. And officials have warned for years that a Category 4 could cause the levees to fail. (See video of why the levee's breech was devastating -- 1:53)
Katrina was a Category 4 hurricane when it struck the Gulf Coast on September 29.

Last week, Michael Brown, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, told CNN his agency had recently planned for a Category 5 hurricane hitting New Orleans.

Speaking to "Larry King Live" on August 31, in the wake of Katrina, Brown said, "That Category 4 hurricane caused the same kind of damage that we anticipated. So we planned for it two years ago. Last year, we exercised it. And unfortunately this year, we're implementing it."

Brown suggested FEMA -- part of the Department of Homeland Security -- was carrying out a prepared plan, rather than having to suddenly create a new one.
Chertoff argued that authorities actually had assumed that "there would be overflow from the levee, maybe a small break in the levee. The collapse of a significant portion of the levee leading to the very fast flooding of the city was not envisioned."

He added: "There will be plenty of time to go back and say we should hypothesize evermore apocalyptic combinations of catastrophes. Be that as it may, I'm telling you this is what the planners had in front of them. They were confronted with a second wave that they did not have built into the plan, but using the tools they had, we have to move forward and adapt."

But New Orleans, state and federal officials have long painted a very different picture.

"We certainly understood the potential impact of a Category 4 or 5 hurricane" on New Orleans, Lt. General Carl Strock, chief of engineers for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, said Thursday, Cox News Service reported.

Reuters reported that in 2004, more than 40 state, local and volunteer organizations practiced a scenario in which a massive hurricane struck and levees were breached, allowing water to flood New Orleans. Under the simulation, called "Hurricane Pam," the officials "had to deal with an imaginary storm that destroyed more than half a million buildings in New Orleans and forced the evacuation of a million residents," the Reuters report said.

In 2002 the New Orleans Times-Picayune ran a five-part series exploring the vulnerability of the city. The newspaper, and other news media as well, specifically addressed the possibility of massive floods drowning residents, destroying homes and releasing toxic chemicals throughout the city. (Read: "Times-Picayune" Special Report: Washing away)

Scientists long have discussed this possibility as a sort of doomsday scenario.

On Sunday, a day before Hurricane Katrina made landfall, Ivor van Heerden, director of the Louisiana State University Public Health Research Center in Baton Rouge, said, "This is what we've been saying has been going to happen for years."

"Unfortunately, it's coming true," he said, adding that New Orleans "is definitely going to flood."

Also on Sunday, Placquemines Parish Sheriff Jeff Hingle referred back to Hurricane Betsy -- a Category 2 hurricane that struck in 1965 -- and said, "After Betsy these levees were designed for a Category 3."
He added, "These levees will not hold the water back."
But Chertoff seemed unaware of all the warnings.

"This is really one which I think was breathtaking in its surprise," Chertoff said. "There has been, over the last few years, some specific planning for the possibility of a significant hurricane in New Orleans with a lot of rainfall, with water rising in the levees and water overflowing the levees," he told reporters Saturday.

That alone would be "a very catastrophic scenario," Chertoff said. "And although the planning was not complete, a lot of work had been done. But there were two problems here. First of all, it's as if someone took that plan and dropped an atomic bomb simply to make it more difficult. We didn't merely have the overflow, we actually had the break in the wall. And I will tell you that, really, that perfect storm of combination of catastrophes exceeded the foresight of the planners, and maybe anybody's foresight."

Chertoff also argued that authorities did not have much notice that the storm would be so powerful and could make a direct hit on New Orleans.

"It wasn't until comparatively late, shortly before -- a day, maybe a day and a half, before landfall -- that it became clear that this was going to be a Category 4 or 5 hurricane headed for the New Orleans area."

As far back as Friday, August 26, the National Hurricane Center was predicting the storm could be a Category 4 hurricane at landfall, with New Orleans directly in its path. Still, storms do change paths, so the possibility existed that it might not hit the city.

But the National Weather Service prediction proved almost perfect.
Katrina made landfall on Monday, August 29.

Tens of thousands of people in New Orleans who did not or could not heed the mandatory evacuation orders issued the day before the storm made landfall were left in dire straits.

"I think we have discovered over the last few days that with all the tremendous effort using the existing resources and the traditional frameworks of the National Guard, the unusual set of challenges of conducting a massive evacuation in the context of a still dangerous flood requires us to basically break the traditional model and create a new model -- one for what you might call kind of an ultracatastrophe," Chertoff said.

He vowed that the United States "is going to move heaven and earth" to rescue those in need.

LOOSE CANON
Canon G J A Hadlow
Rotorua Daily Post this week

Recent newspaper coverage has been given to a case before the courts where two young men captured a couple of cats and after dousing them with accelerants set them on fire. I have yet to see any comment on the issue by way of letters to editors. It was reported that the arresting officer of the two men had his own family's cat stolen. The severed body of the unfortunate animal was later found in the Police Station car park where he works, indicating that probably there are others also involved in this act of cruelty.

I suspect that the public in general is now beginning to exhibit signs of the onset of emotional fatigue. In the Army it used to be called "shell shock". I met many men of my father's generation from World War I who exhibited symptoms of psychological damage that took many forms. One of his friends found it almost impossible to laugh in a normal way. Instead he would get caught up in a fit of giggling that would then become hysterical.

The New Zealand public seems to have taken another road. That is turning one's psychological back on such horror in the hope that when they look again it will have gone away. It is either that or a reaction that finds total indifference another coping method.

A recent news announcement revealed that those charged with the responsibility of educating our young, were now required to teach "values" in the classroom. I raised the matter in a recent article. Since then several teachers have rung to discuss the issue. Their main complaint is that whereas teachers not all that long ago could rely on children arriving at school having normal physical skills and a developed understanding of fairly simple moral issues, such is not possible today. One or two teachers expressed real concern that a significant number of children when faced with quite simple moral examples just did not possess the mental equipment to understand the issues being presented. In short they could not distinguish between right and wrong. There is a growing alarm that teachers are being required to impart knowledge that is in normal circumstances absorbed as part of a child's subconscious pre-school learning. In short some of them verge on being ethical morons. The commonly expressed view that a child's mind is like a blank canvas is laughable.

Our inherited legal system is largely based on the Christian theology of an ability to live in peace and equity with one's neighbours. Of course that is a counsel of perfection and the fact that it does fail is not a reflection on the issue itself but a reminder that human relationships always call for sensitivity and sound common sense for their success.

One element that is beginning disappear however is the idea of the authority towards which most people react instinctively. To behave illegally is an offence. It is an offence against those who are hurt or damaged by the action but there was a time when it was also an offence against the Almighty. That is why each Parliamentary session begins with the Speaker's prayer. Cynics will ask why a prayer is necessary when Parliamentarians behave with impunity against its intention. If that prayer is removed to what authority is the whole business of Parliament addressed?

Again Christian theology is based on justice which is closely linked to love, not the love that is proffered so cheaply on our television sets but that which sees people reaching out to give aid to those who were inundated by the Boxing Day tsunami. Thousands of people with special expertise, some of them from our own city, went at just a few days notice to help in whatever way was appropriate in such a huge disaster. Doubtless many will repeat their actions in New Orleans and beyond.

The basic unit of all this activity lies with the human family. From each well-functioning and fundamental family unit spring those gifts that make democracy and open-handed generosity the gift that they are to the community. Without such families community falters and fails.

Actions by government agencies sometimes called "Social Engineering" that by default creates the undermining of the family bond if only by a view that any "relationship" is as valid as any other is a heresy that wreaks the destruction of human communities.

**********
THE REV. CANON G.J.J.A. HADLOW
25 Ann Street,
Utuhina,
Rotorua 3201,
NEW ZEALAND
Telephone (07) 348 9894
e-mail: ghadlow@clear.net.nz
***********

This man is now on the staff at Cal after some v
good writing on The New Yorker.

I think highly of him as a sc writer.

You'll notice near the end he mentions the
dreaded 'hi-fructose syrup' which you asked
about. I still think fructose is much less
harmful to the human than sucrose (the main sugar
of commerce, made from sugar cane or sugar beet).
But I can see I'll have to look into it.

R

http://www.newfarm.org/features/2005/0805/pollen/index.shtml

King Corn

The Paul Revere of industrial agriculture sounds the
alarm, but this time the invading enemy is not the
Redcoats, it’s that tassel-waving, husk-cloaked
“monstrous mutant grass Zea mays."

A speech by Michael Pollan

"Corn is, in America today, our biggest cash crop.
Actually in terms of cash, marijuana is a little bit
bigger - It’s our biggest legal cash crop. It now
covers an area of 80 million acres; that’s an area
twice the size of New York State. It’s vast. This huge
monoculture is covering most of the middle West and a
lot of the rest of the country like a second great
American lawn.

Who’d have thought it really? I mean,
this was of course the plant of the conquered people.
You would have guessed after 1492 that this plant,
like the people who grew it, would have been crushed.
But in fact, the conquered people’s plant has
conquered the conquerors. And I think it’s…the first
big irony about corn. From its humble beginnings in
Southern Mexico it has insinuated itself into our
landscapes, into our food system, into our government,
into our economy, and into our bodies."

"If you are what you eat, and especially but not
exclusively if you eat industrial food, like as we
understand 99 percent of Americans do, what you are is
corn. That carbon in your body, is corn upon corn upon
corn. All these products, as different as they appear,
consist of carbon that was fixed in a cornfield. The
sweetener in the soda, the meat in the Big Mac, but
also the corn syrup in the bread in the Big Mac and
the secret sauce which also has high fructose corn
syrup, that Slim Jim if you read the ingredients, is
full of high fructose corn syrup, dextrose, corn
starch, a great many additives, and the Lunchables
meal, for all of its four different fuels, all four of
them are essentially corn based. Even the French fries
are made from potatoes, it’s true, but odds are
they’re fried in corn oil, and that’s where 50 percent
of the calories in a McDonald’s box of French fries
come from, is the oil. So even there you’re getting
corn. Even in the salads at McDonald’s, you’re getting
corn…They’re full of high fructose corn syrup and
various thickeners that are made from corn. This is
not just an assertion, or it’s an assertion that’s
susceptible to scientific proof."

======

You can blow out a candle,
but you can't blow out a fire.
Once the flame begins to catch,
the wind will blow it higher.

-Peter Gabriel

http://carmeloruiz.blogspot.com/ Haciendo Punto en Otro Blog
http://bioseguridad.blogspot.com/ PROYECTO DE BIOSEGURIDAD

I don't rank “open communion for the non-baptized" as of greater concern than"the recent changes in moral teaching and practice", but it has concerned me.

R

An Unworkable Theology
Philip Turner

First Things 154 (June/July 2005): 10-12.

http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0506/opinion/turner.html

It is increasingly difficult to escape the fact that mainline Protestantism is in a state of disintegration. As attendance declines, internal divisions increase. Take, for instance, the situation of the Episcopal Church in the United States. The Episcopal Church’s problem is far more theological than it is moral - a theological poverty that is truly monumental and that stands behind the moral missteps recently taken by its governing bodies.

Every denomination has its theological articles and books of theology, its liturgies and confessional statements. Nonetheless, the contents of these documents do not necessarily control what we might call the “working theology" of a church. To find the working theology of a church one must review the resolutions passed at official gatherings and listen to what clergy say Sunday by Sunday from the pulpit. One must listen to the conversations that occur at clergy gatherings—and hear the advice clergy give troubled parishioners. The working theology of a church is, in short, best determined by becoming what social anthropologists call a “participant observer."

For thirty-five years, I have been such a participant observer in the Episcopal Church. After ten years as a missionary in Uganda, I returned to this country and began graduate work in Christian Ethics with Paul Ramsey at Princeton University. Three years later I took up a post at the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest. Full of excitement, I listened to my first student sermon—only to be taken aback by its vacuity. The student began with the wonderful question, “What is the Christian Gospel?" But his answer, through the course of an entire sermon, was merely: “God is love. God loves us. We, therefore, ought to love one another." I waited in vain for some word about the saving power of Christ’s cross or the declaration of God’s victory in Christ’s resurrection. I waited in vain for a promise of the Holy Spirit. I waited in vain also for an admonition to wait patiently and faithfully for the Lord’s return. I waited in vain for a call to repentance and amendment of life in accord with the pattern of Christ’s life.

The contents of the preaching I had heard for a decade from the pulpits of the Anglican Church of Uganda (and from other Christians throughout the continent of Africa) was simply not to be found. One could, of course, dismiss this instance of vacuous preaching as simply another example of the painful inadequacy of the preaching of most seminarians; but, over the years, I have heard the same sermon preached from pulpit after pulpit by experienced priests. The Episcopal sermon, at its most fulsome, begins with a statement to the effect that the incarnation is to be understood as merely a manifestation of divine love. From this starting point, several conclusions are drawn. The first is that God is love pure and simple. Thus, one is to see in Christ’s death no judgment upon the human condition. Rather, one is to see an affirmation of creation and the persons we are. The life and death of Jesus reveal the fact that God accepts and affirms us.

From this revelation, we can draw a further conclusion: God wants us to love one another, and such love requires of us both acceptance and affirmation of the other. From this point we can derive yet another: Accepting love requires a form of justice that is inclusive of all people, particularly those who in some way have been marginalized by oppressive social practice. The mission of the Church is, therefore, to see that those who have been rejected are included—for justice as inclusion defines public policy. The result is a practical equivalence between the Gospel of the Kingdom of God and a particular form of social justice.

For those who view the Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops and its General Convention from the outside, many of their recent actions may seem to represent a denial of something fundamental to the Christian way of life. But for many inside the Episcopal Church, the equation of the Gospel and social justice constitutes a primary expression of Christian truth. This isn’t an ethical divide about the rightness or wrongness of homosexuality and same-sex marriage. It’s a theological chasm - one that separates those who hold a theology of divine acceptance from those who hold a theology of divine redemption.

Look, for example, at the increasingly common practice of inviting non-baptized persons to share in the Holy Eucharist. The invitation is given in the name of “radical hospitality." It is like having a guest at the family meal, so its advocates claim: it is a way to invite people in and evangelize.

Within the Episcopal Church, a sure test of whether an idea is gaining favor is the appearance of a question about it on the general-ordination exam. Questions on divorce and remarriage, the ordination of women, sexual behavior, and abortion all preceded changes in the Episcopal Church’s teaching and practice. On a recent version of the exam, there appeared a question about “open communion for the non-baptized," which suggests that this is far more than a cloud on the horizon. It is, rather, a change in doctrine and practice that is fast becoming well established and perhaps should be of greater concern to the Anglican Communion’s ecumenical partners than the recent changes in moral teaching and practice.

Indeed, it is important to note when examining the working theology of the Episcopal Church that changes in belief and practice within the church are not made after prolonged investigation and theological debate. Rather, they are made by “prophetic actions" that give expression to the doctrine of radical inclusion. Such actions have become common partly because they carry no cost. Since the struggle over the ordination of women, the Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops has given up any attempt to act as a unified body or to discipline its membership. Within a given diocese, almost any change in belief and practice can occur without penalty.

Certain justifications are commonly named for such failure of discipline. The first is the claim of the prophet’s mantle by the innovators—often quickly followed by an assertion that the Holy Spirit Itself is doing this new thing, which need have no perceivable link to the past practice of the church. Backed by claims of prophetic and Spirit-filled insight, each diocese can then justify its action as a “local option,” which is the claimed right of each diocese or parish to go its own way if there seem to be strong enough internal reasons to do so.

All of these justifications are currently being offered for the practice of open communion - which is the clearest possible signal that it is an idea whose time has come in the Episcopal Church. But the deep roots of the idea are in the doctrine of radical inclusion. Once we have reduced the significance of Christ’s resurrection and downplayed holiness of life as a fundamental marker of Christian identity, the notion of radical inclusion produces the view that one need not come to the Father through the Son. Christ is a way, but not the way. The Holy Eucharist is a sign of acceptance on the part of God and God’s people, and so should be open to all - the invitation unaccompanied by a call to repentance and amendment of life.

This unofficial doctrine of radical inclusion, which is now the working theology of the Episcopal Church, plays out in two directions. In respect to God, it produces a quasi-deist theology that posits a benevolent God who favors love and justice as inclusion but acts neither to save us from our sins nor to raise us to new life after the pattern of Christ. In respect to human beings, it produces an ethic of tolerant affirmation that carries with it no call to conversion and radical holiness.

The Episcopal Church’s working theology is also congruent with a form of pastoral care designed to help people affirm themselves, face their difficulties, and adjust successfully to their particular circumstances. The primary (though not the sole) pastoral formation offered to the Episcopal Church’s prospective clergy has for a number of years been “Clinical Pastoral Education,” which takes the form of an internship at a hospital or some other care-giving institution. The focus tends to be the expressed needs of a “client,” the attitudes and contributions of a “counselor,” and the transference and countertransference that define their relationship. In its early days, the supervisors of Clinical Pastoral Education were heavily influenced by the client-centered therapy of Carl Rogers, but the theoretical framework employed today varies widely. A dominant assumption in all forms, however, is that the clients have, within themselves, the answer to their perplexities and conflicts. Access to personal resources and successful adjustment are what the pastor is to seek when offering pastoral care.

There may be some merit in putting new clergy in hospital settings, but this particular form does not lend itself easily to the sort of meeting with Christ that leads to faith, forgiveness, judgment, repentance, and amendment of life. The sort of confrontation often necessary to spark such a process is decidedly frowned upon. The theological stance associated with Clinical Pastoral Education is not one of challenge but one in which God is depicted as an accepting presence - not unlike that of the therapist or pastor.

But this should not be an unexpected development. In a theology dominated by radical inclusion, terms such as “faith,” “justification,” “repentance,” and “holiness of life” seem to belong to an antique vocabulary that must be outgrown or reinterpreted. So also does the notion that the Church is a community elected by God for the particular purpose of bearing witness to the saving event of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection.

It is this witness that defines the great tradition of the Church, but a theology of radical inclusion must trim such robust belief. To be true to itself it can find room for only one sort of witness: inclusion of the previously excluded. God has already included everybody, and now we ought to do the same. Salvation cannot be the issue. The theology of radical inclusion, as preached and practiced within the Episcopal Church, must define the central issue as moral rather than religious, since exclusion is in the end a moral issue even for God.

We must say this clearly: The Episcopal Church’s current working theology depends upon the obliteration of God’s difficult, redemptive love in the name of a new revelation. The message, even when it comes from the mouths of its more sophisticated exponents, amounts to inclusion without qualification.

Thinking back over my thirty-five years in the Episcopal Church, I was distressed to realize that this new revelation is little different from the basic message communicated to me during the course of my own theological education. Fortunately, in my case God provided an intervening event. I lived for about ten years among the Baganda, a people who dwell on the north shore of Lake Victoria. The Baganda have a proverb which, roughly translated, says, “A person who never travels always praises his own mother’s cooking.” Travel allowed me to taste something different. It was not until I had spent a long time abroad that I realized how far apart the American Episcopal Church stood from the basic content of “Nicene Christianity,” with its thick description of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, its richly developed Christology, and its compelling account of Christ’s call to holiness of life.

The future of Anglicanism as a communion of churches may depend upon the American Episcopal Church’s ability to find a way out of the terrible constraints forced upon it by its working theology. Much of the Anglican communion in Africa sees the problem. Can the Americans? It is not enough simply to refer to the Episcopal Church’s Book of Common Prayer and reply, “We are orthodox just like you: we affirm the two testaments as the word of God, we recite the classical creeds in our worship, we celebrate the dominical sacraments, and we hold to episcopal order." The challenge now being put to the Episcopal Church in the United States (and, by implication, to all liberal Protestantism) is not about official documents. It is about the church’s working theology - one which most Anglicans in the rest of the world no longer recognize as Christian.

Philip Turner is the former Dean of the Berkeley Divinity School at Yale. He currently serves as Vice President of the Anglican Communion Institute.

(Ed. Note: And now from the hysteric left...)

http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2005/08/31/disaster_preparation/

"No one can say they didn't see it coming"

In 2001, FEMA warned that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S. But the Bush administration cut New Orleans flood control funding by 44 percent to pay for the Iraq war.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Sidney Blumenthal

Aug. 31, 2005 Biblical in its uncontrolled rage and scope, Hurricane Katrina has left millions of Americans to scavenge for food and shelter and hundreds to thousands reportedly dead. With its main levee broken, the evacuated city of New Orleans has become part of the Gulf of Mexico. But the damage wrought by the hurricane may not entirely be the result of an act of nature.

A year ago the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed to study how New Orleans could be protected from a catastrophic hurricane, but the Bush administration ordered that the research not be undertaken. After a flood killed six people in 1995, Congress created the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, in which the Corps of Engineers strengthened and renovated levees and pumping stations. In early 2001, the Federal Emergency Management Agency issued a report stating that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S., including a terrorist attack on New York City. But by 2003 the federal funding for the flood control project essentially dried up as it was drained into the Iraq war. In 2004, the Bush administration cut funding requested by the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for holding back the waters of Lake Pontchartrain by more than 80 percent. Additional cuts at the beginning of this year (for a total reduction in funding of 44.2 percent since 2001) forced the New Orleans district of the Corps to impose a hiring freeze. The Senate had debated adding funds for fixing New Orleans' levees, but it was too late.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune, which before the hurricane published a series on the federal funding problem, and whose presses are now underwater, reported online: "No one can say they didn't see it coming ... Now in the wake of one of the worst storms ever, serious questions are being asked about the lack of preparation."

The Bush administration's policy of turning over wetlands to developers almost certainly also contributed to the heightened level of the storm surge. In 1990, a federal task force began restoring lost wetlands surrounding New Orleans. Every two miles of wetland between the Crescent City and the Gulf reduces a surge by half a foot. Bush had promised "no net loss" of wetlands, a policy launched by his father's administration and bolstered by President Clinton. But he reversed his approach in 2003, unleashing the developers. The Army Corps of Engineers and the Environmental Protection Agency then announced they could no longer protect wetlands unless they were somehow related to interstate commerce.

In response to this potential crisis, four leading environmental groups conducted a joint expert study, concluding in 2004 that without wetlands protection New Orleans could be devastated by an ordinary, much less a Category 4 or 5, hurricane. "There's no way to describe how mindless a policy that is when it comes to wetlands protection," said one of the report's authors. The chairman of the White House's Council on Environmental Quality dismissed the study as "highly questionable," and boasted, "Everybody loves what we're doing."

"My administration's climate change policy will be science based," President Bush declared in June 2001. But in 2002, when the Environmental Protection Agency submitted a study on global warming to the United Nations reflecting its expert research, Bush derided it as "a report put out by a bureaucracy," and excised the climate change assessment from the agency's annual report. The next year, when the EPA issued its first comprehensive "Report on the Environment," stating, "Climate change has global consequences for human health and the environment," the White House simply demanded removal of the line and all similar conclusions. At the G-8 meeting in Scotland this year, Bush successfully stymied any common action on global warming. Scientists, meanwhile, have continued to accumulate impressive data on the rising temperature of the oceans, which has produced more severe hurricanes.

In February 2004, 60 of the nation's leading scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates, warned in a statement, "Restoring Scientific Integrity in Policymaking": "Successful application of science has played a large part in the policies that have made the United States of America the world's most powerful nation and its citizens increasingly prosperous and healthy ... Indeed, this principle has long been adhered to by presidents and administrations of both parties in forming and implementing policies. The administration of George W. Bush has, however, disregarded this principle ... The distortion of scientific knowledge for partisan political ends must cease." Bush completely ignored this statement.

In the two weeks preceding the storm in the Gulf, the trumping of science by ideology and expertise by special interests accelerated. The Federal Drug Administration announced that it was postponing sale of the morning-after contraceptive pill, despite overwhelming scientific evidence of its safety and its approval by the FDA's scientific advisory board. The United Nations special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa accused the Bush administration of responsibility for a condom shortage in Uganda -- the result of the administration's evangelical Christian agenda of "abstinence." When the chief of the Bureau of Justice Statistics in the Justice Department was ordered by the White House to delete its study that African-Americans and other minorities are subject to racial profiling in police traffic stops and he refused to buckle under, he was forced out of his job. When the Army Corps of Engineers' chief contracting oversight analyst objected to a $7 billion no-bid contract awarded for work in Iraq to Halliburton (the firm at which Vice President Cheney was formerly CEO), she was demoted despite her superior professional ratings. At the National Park Service, a former Cheney aide, a political appointee lacking professional background, drew up a plan to overturn past environmental practices and prohibit any mention of evolution while allowing sale of religious materials through the Park Service.

On the day the levees burst in New Orleans, Bush delivered a speech in California comparing the Iraq war to World War II and himself to Franklin D. Roosevelt: "And he knew that the best way to bring peace and stability to the region was by bringing freedom to Japan." Bush had boarded his very own "Streetcar Named Desire."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/02/opinion/02fischetti.html

September 2, 2005
They Saw It Coming
By MARK FISCHETTI

Lenox, Mass.

THE deaths caused by Hurricane Katrina are heart-rending. The suffering of survivors is wrenching. Property destruction is shocking. But perhaps the most agonizing part is that much of what happened in New Orleans this week might have been avoided.

Watching the TV images of the storm approaching the Mississippi Delta on Sunday, I was sick to my stomach. Not only because I knew the hell it could unleash (I wrote an article for Scientific American in 2001 that described the very situation that was unfolding) but because I knew that a large-scale engineering plan called Coast 2050 - developed in 1998 by scientists, Army engineers, metropolitan planners and Louisiana officials - might have helped save the city, but had gone unrealized.

The debate over New Orleans's vulnerability to hurricanes has raged for a century. By the late 1990's, scientists at Louisiana State University and the University of New Orleans had perfected computer models showing exactly how a sea surge would overwhelm the levee system, and had recommended a set of solutions. The Army Corps of Engineers, which built the levees, had proposed different projects.

Yet some scientists reflexively disregarded practical considerations pointed out by the Army engineers; more often, the engineers scoffed at scientific studies indicating that the basic facts of geology and hydrology meant that significant design changes were needed. Meanwhile, local politicians lobbied Congress for financing for myriad special interest groups, from oil companies to oyster farmers. Congress did not hear a unified voice, making it easier to turn a deaf ear.

Fed up with the splintered efforts, Len Bahr, then the head of the Louisiana Governor's Office of Coastal Activities, somehow dragged all the parties to one table in 1998 and got them to agree on a coordinated solution: Coast 2050. Completing every recommended project over a decade or more would have cost an estimated $14 billion, so Louisiana turned to the federal government. While this may seem an astronomical sum, it isn't in terms of large public works; in 2000 Congress began a $7 billion engineering program to refresh the dying Florida Everglades. But Congress had other priorities, Louisiana politicians had other priorities, and the magic moment of consensus was lost.

Thus, in true American fashion, we ignored an inevitable problem until disaster focused our attention. Fortunately, as we rebuild New Orleans, we can protect it - by engineering solutions that work with nature, not against it.

The conceit that we can control the natural world is what made New Orleans vulnerable. For more than a century the Army Corps, with Congress's blessing, leveed the Mississippi River to prevent its annual floods, so that farms and industries could expand along its banks. Those same floods, however, had dumped huge amounts of sediment and freshwater across the Mississippi Delta, rebuilding each year what gulf tides and storms had worn away and holding back infusions of saltwater that kill marsh vegetation. These vast delta wetlands created a lush, hardy buffer that could absorb sea surges and weaken high winds.

The flooding at the river's mouth also sent great volumes of sediment west and east into the Gulf of Mexico, to a string of barrier islands that cut down surges and waves, compensating for regular ocean erosion. Stopping the Mississippi's floods starved the wetlands and the islands; both are rapidly disintegrating, leaving the city naked against the sea.

What can we do to restore these natural protections? Although the parties that devised Coast 2050, and other independent scientists and engineers who have floated rival plans, may disagree on details, they do concur on several major initiatives that would shield New Orleans, reconstitute the delta and, as a side benefit, improve ports and shipping lanes for the oil and natural gas industries in the Gulf of Mexico.

Cut several channels in the levees on the Mississippi River's southern bank (the side that doesn't abut the city) and secure them with powerful floodgates that could be opened at certain times of the year to allow sediment and freshwater to flow down into the delta, re-establishing it.

Build a new navigation channel from the Gulf into the Mississippi, about 40 miles south of New Orleans, so ships don't have to enter the river at its three southernmost tips 30 miles further away. For decades the corps has dredged shipping channels along those final miles to keep them navigable, creating underwater chutes that propel river sediment out into the deep ocean. The dredging could then be stopped, the river mouth would fill in naturally, and sediment would again spill to the barrier islands, lengthening and widening them. Some planners also propose a modern port at the new access point that would replace those along the river that are too shallow to handle the huge new ships now being built worldwide.

Erect huge seagates across the pair of narrow straits that connect the eastern edge of Lake Pontchartrain, which lies north of the city, to the gulf. Now, any hurricane that blows in from the south will push a wall of water through these straits into the huge lake, which in turn will threaten to overflow into the city. That is what has filled the bowl that is New Orleans this week. But seagates at the straits can stop the wall of water from flowing in. The Netherlands has built similar gates to hold back the turbulent North Sea and they work splendidly.

Finally, and most obviously, raise, extend and strengthen the city's existing but aging levees, canal walls and pumping systems that worked so poorly in recent days.

It's hard to say how much of this work could have been completed by today had Coast 2050 become a reality. Certainly, the delta wetlands and barrier islands would not have rebounded substantially yet. But undoubtedly progress would have been made that would have spared someone's life, someone's home, some jazz club or gumbo joint, some city district, some part of the region's unique culture that the entire country revels in. And we would have been well on our way to a long-term solution. For there is one thing we know for sure: hurricanes will howl through the Mississippi Delta again.

Mark Fischetti is a contributing editor to Scientific American magazine.

I fw this testimony by an Auckland engineer.

R

Testimony of Kees van den Bosch

The most searching question any person can ask himself is probably, "Why am
I here?" The first time I asked it was at a very early age, somewhere at ten
or eleven years old, a street urchin in Amsterdam under German occupation.
My father disappeared when the Dutch army capitulated in 1940. My mother
went "underground" and left us boys to fend for ourselves at ages six and
seven.

That question, however, had a habit of popping up at odd and frequent times
during my life. It manifested itself most prominently during my search for
an answer, because my mind would not accept that everything and that meant
I, would all end at my death.

During my 42-year extensive search, most of the "Isms" one can bring
to mind got a shoo-in. Religionism, Buddhism, existentialism, nudism,
humanism et al. Humanism had the strongest attraction over me, because it
fitted in very well with my positive self-awareness, or ego.

Placing one (self) at the Center of the Universe has its attractions; but
that hole which needed filling in the Center of my being kept begging to be
filled with something more meaningful. Possessions didn't do it, once my
material needs were filled; more accumulations only became a pain in the
butt, taking up my precious time and thus, freedom. Chasing pleasure did not
do it, because I always came back to that question, what's next? Trying to
discuss these quandaries at social gatherings often tended to spoil the
party atmosphere and killed some party's stone dead, much to the horror of
my hosts.

One year into my second marriage in 1975, a series of events occurred which
completely changed my world. Out of love for my wife I was attending Church
on a regular basis and was invited to join our Church Choir. The choir was
practising for an Evangelical Outreach, which was a combined
interdenominational outreach of three churches. Then, I was just a "pew
warmer", a person without a meaningful belief in God, just going through the
motions of Church attendance and being nice to everybody whilst "fitting in".
I really had some problems with that, as in the past during my search I had
found "religion" to be phoney and something cooked up by a bunch of
hypocrites. And here I was, seemingly in agreement with it, and very much
aware of being such a hypocrite.

On the third day of the actual "outreach", the preacher read that passage of
Psalm 139: 13 - 18, which initiated a dialogue between my Creator and myself
which lasted for the period the preacher was preaching after this reading.
That unforgettable, beautiful voice, telling me facts about my life I
thought no one could know about me whilst scenes from my life were flashed
"on my Mind-Screen" in succession from the time I could first remember to
the present. He spoke phrases like "I shielded you there", "I send that man
to help you", "I closed that door to steer you in my direction" and many
more.

I knew I had met with God and felt so much Love flowing through me, that
tears of utter joy started to flow. When the preacher asked some time later
who wanted to commit himself to Jesus Christ, I went forward without
hesitation and became a re-born Christian that night.

Over the last twenty-nine years, I came to realise that being endowed with
the Holy Spirit is a full-on and full-time experience, influencing every
moment of our day and night. One fact I discovered quite early in my walk
was that with His input and if we are but willing to be receptive, we have
access to the greatest mind and fount of knowledge in existence. He is all
Knowing, All Seeing and All Present!

When we walk in harmony with the Holy Spirit, that aching hole in the Center
of one's being I mentioned, is completely gone and a "peace that passes our
normal understanding" surrounds us, even in the midst of turmoil.

Now, being a mere mortal still, I must confess this peace is not there one
hundred percent of the time even now. Because, although my Creator states in
His Word that "He created "man" (that includes me and you) in His Image, the
"free will" He created within me still rebels against him from time to time.
During periods of rebellion when I, through pride or sheer cussedness want
to pursue a course of action which I know does not have His approval, He
graciously withdraws and leaves me to it. After a, now usually short time,
that hole in the center of my being manifests itself again and prompts me
back onto that straight and narrow path He likes to walk with me.

In my opinion, the "creation of free will" in man and woman is the true
"Pinnacle of His Creation". By doing this, He created beings with the
potential to rise to that point which he talks about in His Word where He
says in Romans 8: 17; "And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and
joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be
also glorified together."

http://www.i-sis.org.uk/hybridSeed.phpISIS Press Release 02/09/05

Hybrid Seed

Hybrid seed was the first step whereby agribusiness corporations
wrested control of seed away from farmers Prof. Joe Cummins and Dr.
Mae-Wan Ho

A fully referenced version of this article is posted on ISIS members'
website. Details here

A brief history

Hybrid seed began with maize in the 1920s, and became extended to
vegetables and flowers; and more recently, rice and some forage
crops. Hybrid seeds are produced from naturally out-breeding crops,
from which inbred lines are produced by repeated self-pollination.
The established inbred lines are crossed to produce first generations
(F1) hybrid seeds. The hybrid seeds are prized because they produce
uniform plants benefiting from the effect called heterosis (hybrid
vigor). Heterosis can result in a large increase in yield over the
inbred lines or comparable lines that are out-crossing. The precise
basis of heterosis is still unclear, but epistasis and over-dominance
are thought to be involved. Epistasis is the interaction between
different genes, and over-dominance is a condition where the
heterozygotes (genes represented by two different versions) are
superior to either homozygotes (gene represented by the same
versions). The F1 hybrid seed is heterozygous in many genes.

Hybrid seed is planted to produce a crop that is harvested for use.
Saving seed from the crop and planting it is undesirable because the
two different versions of the genes in the F1 hybrid segregate out in
the offspring, producing an extremely variable progeny. In other
words, the superior qualities of the F1 hybrid will have all
disappeared. The hybrid is obtained by crossing the inbred lines,
which therefore, have to be separately maintained. Thus, only the
seed companies produce hybrid seeds, and farmers must buy those seeds
from the company every year.

Hybrid maize arose through the advocacy of a few influential
Americans. Foremost among the advocates was Henry A. Wallace, who
became vice-president of the United States.

Wallace graduated from University with an agriculture degree, and
studied statistics thereafter on his own. He later taught the subject
at Iowa State University and used his knowledge to develop the first
commercial hybrid maize. In 1926, he founded the Hi-Bred Corn company
(now Pioneer Hi-Bred Seed Company, a subsidiary of Dupont Chemical
Company), and later entered politics. He was made Secretary of
Agriculture before being elected vice-president of the United States.
Wallace was noted for his concern for the common man and envisioned
hybrid corn as a means of providing bountiful food at low prices for
the masses. The detailed history of hybrid corn and Wallace makes
fascinating reading [1-3].

The first corn hybrids were made by detasseling the plants of the
maternal inbred-line by removing the male flowers so that the female
flowers on the plants can only be fertilized by pollen produced from
plants of another, male line. The detasseling operation used to be
performed mainly by young girls employed during the summer months.
Later on, male-sterile lines were developed that did not produce
fertile male flowers or pollen. The male-sterile maternal lines were
fertilized with paternal lines that allowed the hybrid seed to
produce both male and female flowers. The male-sterile lines are most
frequently altered in the mitochondrial genome, leading to the
inhibition of male flower development [4]. A number of such lines are
now available.

Disaster struck

The early development of male-sterile lines led to disaster, however.
The primary line used in the 1960s contained the T (Texas) cytoplasm
male-sterility gene; and by 1970, over 85% of the commercial maize
planted contained that gene. The gene also caused a pleiotropic
(multiple effects due to a single gene) susceptibility to a fungus
disease. During a damp 1970 summer, the disease spread widely
particularly in the summer corn belt. The impact on maize production
was disastrous, leading to a return to hand-detasseling for a number
of years until alternate male-sterility lines could be developed [5].
The lesson that should have been learned was that the absence of
diversity is bound to lead to disastrous epidemics; but that lesson
tends to get ignored in favour of risky but profitable genetic
manipulations.

Hybrids galore

Rice hybrids have been produced using cytoplasmic male-sterility.
Over-dominance and epistatic genes were implicated as the basis for
heterosis (and inbreeding depression, a phenomenon in which inbred
lines suffer decreased yield) [6, 7]. Alfalfa interspecies hybrids
showed heterosis, interspecies hybrids are a little different from
those originating from inbred lines, but in general they act
similarly to inbred lines [8].

A large number of vegetable crops have been hybridized. Hybrid
cucumbers have been produced by hand pollination, removal of male
flowers, or gynoecy (property of producing only female flowers).
There does not seem to be an available male sterility gene (9). Hot
and sweet peppers have been hybridized. Both nuclear and cytoplasmic
sterility are used in some cases. Most hybrid-pepper seed production
is carried out in China, India or Thailand [10]. About two-thirds of
commercial onions are hybrids. These are produced using male
sterility lines [11]. Hybrid cabbage shows strong heterosis, and the
use of such hybrids is expanding. The seed is produced using male
sterile lines [12].

Most of the male sterile lines used commercially contain
mitochondrial genes, but such genes are not readily available in a
number of crops. Genetic engineers have developed a system of
male-sterility based on transformation of the chloroplast with a gene
for beta-ketothiolase that interferes with fatty acid synthesis,
leading to disrupted anther tissue and a failure to produce pollen.
The beta-ketothiolase gene is controlled by a light sensitive
promoter, so that male-fertility can be restored in hybrids using
several days of continual illumination [13, 14]. The system was
developed in tobacco but may be extended to food crops, barring
unforeseen complications.

Genetically modified male-sterility

A number of genetically modified (GM) male-sterile crops have been
developed and tested in the field. In Canada, a male-sterile
transgene was introduced into the nuclear gnome of canola, and that
construction was approved for, and has been in commercial production.
The transgenic construct included a barnase ribonuclease gene
controlled by a tapetum promoter. Barnase kills pollen cells thus
rendering the plant male-sterile. In the hybrid male fertility is
restored using the barstar inhibitor of barnase [15], although
barnase is well known to be toxic to animal cells. Development
continued, and the technology came to be used to protect GM traits
patented by agribusiness corporations such as herbicide tolerance
under the general rubric of genetic use restriction technology
(GURT). Such crops were extensively field tested in Europe; and we
have warned that the F1 hybrid grown in the field will actually
spread the barnase transgene as well as the herbicide tolerance gene
in pollen with potentially harmful ecological impacts ("Chronicle of
an ecological disaster foretold", SiS 1 [16]. Furthermore, the
toxin may well be carried over into the canola press cake used both
for both food and feed.

The development of hybrid seed had left seed production to seed
companies for the practical reason that it is the most economical way
to maintain appropriate inbred lines, and seed production can be
isolated from the food production areas of open pollinating crops.
But it had also prevented farmers from saving and replanting seeds,
making it necessary to purchase seeds every season.

Biotechnology has gone a step further and demanded that seed
production be restricted to companies even when there is no rational
basis for the restriction, other than corporate greed. Goeshl and
Swanson addressed the question of GURT based on the hybrid-crop
experience. They argued that developed countries could benefit from
the additional production supposedly to be gained by the technology,
while developing countries will suffer from their inability to afford
the high extra cost. They predict net deterioration in the developing
countries due to the widening gap in productivity [17]. These
predictions must be taken with a very large grain of salt. There is
at present no evidence that genetic use restriction technologies, or
indeed, any genetic modification technology have led to increase in
crop yield. Furthermore, both hybrids and GM crops lack the diversity
required for sustainability in the complex ecosystems of the
developing world. What is needed is seed production that takes into
account the unique requirements of developing countries, where the
farmers' rights to save, replant and exchange seeds are integral to
food sovereignty and food security ("SOS: Save our seeds", SiS27).

--
Robt Mann
consultant ecologist
P O Box 28878 Remuera, Auckland 1005, New Zealand
(9) 524 2949
http://www.kuratrading.com/HTMLArticles/writings.htm

August 30, 2005
Saskatoon, Sask. CANADA

Organic farmers granted leave to appeal class certification decision

Today the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal released Honourable Mr. Justice
Cameron's decision granting the certified organic farmers of Saskatchewan
leave to appeal the Court of Queen's Bench decision dated May 11, 2005
denying them class certification under Saskatchewan's Class Actions Act.
The farmers are seeking compensation for losses due to contamination of
organic fields and crops by Monsanto's and Bayer's genetically engineered
canolas.

Judge Cameron agreed that the issues raised by the plaintiffs should be
dealt with by the Appeal Court. He agreed that the questions of whether
Judge Smith erred in her finding of no cause of action - an error which
cascades through her decisions on the remaining four tests required to
grant class certification - and whether she applied an overly rigorous
standard for class certifications should be examined by the Appeal Court.

Justice Cameron stated, " I am satisfied the proposed appeal raises some
comparatively new and potentially controversial points of law, that it
transcends the particular in its implications, and that it is of sufficient
importance to the practice pertaining to this subject to warrant attention
by this Court. 

Plaintiff Larry Hoffman says he feels encouraged by the decision. "It
gives us a chance to argue how the Class Actions Act should be applied. The
spirit of the law is to even out the odds between the Davids and the
Goliaths in the world. The lower court decision made it too hard on us
Davids, and we think that's unfair. A farmer like me can't afford to take
on a big company like Monsanto when it threatens my livelihood and way of
life. But if we can join together in a class action, our combined strength
can make it possible to hold these companies accountable for their actions.

"This is great", says plaintiff Dale Beaudoin. "On behalf of 1000 plus
organic farmers we can continue to fight for our right to remain stewards
for sustainable agriculture. This is no minor issue. It is a matter of
independence and survival for all farmers world-wide. 

For more information please contact:
Arnold Taylor, Chair, OAPF Committee, phone: (306) 252-2783 or (306) 241-6125
Marc Loiselle, Research Director, OAPF Committee, phone (306) 258-2192 or
(306) 227-5825
For the decision and other details of the class action suit, please see
http://www.saskorganic.com

The London Bombings
By David Horowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com
July 11, 2005

Of course everyone will take from the bombings in London the “lessons" they’re already seeking. The left claims that the bombings show the war in Iraq is producing the terror instead of fighting it, as though attacks on Muslims (so their logic goes) are of concern to the terrorists. Saddam and the terrorists have killed a hundred times more Muslims than American forces. Moreover, American forces have saved millions of Muslim lives in Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, Afghanistan and, yes, in Iraq. This is not a war about America’s treatment of Muslims and never was.

The left never understood the Iraq war in the first place, so it can’t really be expected to understand the war in Europe now. The Islamic jihad against the West, for which Iraq is but one very important battlefield, did not begin in 2003 with the toppling of Saddam. It is rooted in a radical movement that arose in Egypt in the 1920s - the creation of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose "little red book" was the Koran, as interpreted by by Hassan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb and eventually the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeni, the leader of the first revolutionary Islamic state.

The Islamic jihad against the West began in earnest in November, 1979 with the Islamic revolution in Iran, which climaxed with the taking of American hostages and a million fanatics in the streets of Teheran chanting “Death to America". One of the takers of those hostages and leaders of those chants is the newly elected “president" of revolutionary Iran. (This week they were chanting "Death to America" again.) The Iranian revolution created Hizbollah, the terrorist organization that blew up the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, in many ways the first terrorist attack of the modern war on us.

One can concede the left’s point that the American-supported war to liberate Afghanistan from Soviet occupation was another proving ground for the Islamic jihad. As it happens, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was launched the following month in December 1979 and, as leftists like to point out, it was the training war for Osama bin Laden and many of the Palestinians who went on to create al-Qaeda, Hamas and other Islamic terrorist groups.

Of course, the left isn’t interested in history, except to pluck out isolated facts it can twist to stick in America’s eye. Thus the left uses its Osama “fact" to claim that America created bin Laden and that we are responsible for the attacks on our homeland. (This is exactly what the terrorists claim too.) Inevitably, whatever facts it is interpreting, the left ends up demonstrating that it is at war with America. On the other hand, watch it scream “foul" when anyone points out this obvious truth. (Are you questioning my patriotism???!)

The left’s Afghanistan twist is several lies in one, but there is no need to disentangle them here. The left that makes this argument is uninterested in the history of our proxy war against the Soviet invaders because it basically supported the invading force. Just as radicals today like to think of themselves as “anti-anti-Saddam" so then they were anti-anti-Communist. In practice this meant they were the mainstay in the West for the Soviet empire and its expansion into vulnerable nations on its periphery like Afghanistan.

The United States provided training and arms for the Muslim mujahideen in Afghanistan because its conscience was roused by the Soviet invaders whose scorched earth policies killed a million defenseless Afghan civilians before the resistance, with America’s help, was able to stop them.

In making its argument, the left also ignores the momentous historical fact that the victory of the mujahideen, made possible by America's gift of missiles, not only defeated the Red Army, but triggered the chain of events which led to the fall of the Marxist empire. In other words, U.S. support for the mujahideen eventually liberated a billion people whom the Soviet comrades of American and European leftists had enslaved for fifty and seventy years.

In other words, America’s support for the Palestinian, Egyptian and Saudi terrorists (Osama among them) who flocked to the cause was a somewhat bad deed in the service of a very great good one. It was not as bad a deed for example as saving and arming their friend Joe Stalin and his Marxist butchers in order to defeat Hitler, but it was an equally good one. Consequently those Americans who are able to actually remember history are proud of what we did in Afghanistan and have no regrets.

When the left blames London on Iraq, as though Islamic jihad has been caused by Iraq, it ignores not only the rhetoric of the jihadists (America is the enemy, Zarqawi proclaimed in a fatwa last year, “as the bearer of the cross") but all the attacks on us that preceded Iraq: Mogadishu, the World Trade Center 1993, the barracks in Saudi Arabia, the US embassies in Africa, the USS Cole, the World Trade Center 2001, and all the failed strikes, from those planned on the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels to the millennium plot designed to kill hundreds of thousands. The left’s argument about Iraq also contradicts itself, since the case before London was that the war in Iraq is a distraction from the war on terror. Obviously the London terrorists don’t think so.

The Islamic jihad is not a response to the war in Iraq; it is a religious war whose armies began forming in 1979 in Iran and Afghanistan and the West Bank and Gaza. Because the jihad is not about Iraq, its agendas -- which the left that never bothers itself about -- will not be satisfied by an American withdrawal from Iraq or Afghanistan, or an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank. Instead it will be incited by them. Just as Arafat and the al-Aqsa murderers brigade were incited by the weakness shown by Clinton and Barak in offering concessions to people who want it all. When your enemy is determined to destroy you, an olive branch is seen as weakness, something we should have learned once at for all at Munich, but never have.

The radical Islamist jihad is at war with the democracies of the West in Europe and the Middle East and America, and there is no way out of the war but to win it.

The bombings in London show the folly of well-meaning liberals who think that tolerance of an enemy that lives within one’s country will persuade the enemy to change his mind and will produce beneficent results. The Islamic community in London produced more than one Mosque of hate preaching war against Britain. The haters were tolerated. The tolerance led to disaster.

The war in Iraq is an excuse for radicalism, not its cause; just as the war in Vietnam was an excuse for American radicals to conduct a war against America they already had in their hearts to fight. The radicals' war not only continues but has morphed into a massive effort to support the campaign of jihadists who want to kill us. An expert on suicide bombings analyzed 71 terrorist attacks between 1995 and 2004 and concluded from the pattern (in an article called, “Al-Qaeda’s Smart Bombs") that the immediate military goal of the jihadists was “to compel the United States and its Western allies to withdraw combat forces from the Arabian peninsula and other Muslim countries."

This is precisely what the left is demanding. It has opened a political front behind our lines. Note: This surrender is not what the Iraqis are demanding; it is not what the people of Afghanistan are demanding; it is not what the Saudis or the Lebanese are demanding. It is what the terrorists are demanding, and it is what the American left is demanding, and the British and European left as well.

The left preaches surrender in the war against the Islamists on all fronts: retreat from Iraq; retreat from Afghanistan; retreat (without a peace) from the territories in Gaza and the West Bank. In the name of ending the violence. But even one such retreat will produce infinitely more bloodshed at home and abroad than we are facing now. Why? Because we are tolerant and the enemy is ruthless; because we are compassionate and the enemy is savage; because we are merciful and the enemy is not. America’s defeat, Britain’s defeat, Israel’s defeat would produce slaughters to make 9/11 look tame.

The lesson of London, then, is to take seriously what your enemies say. For years Britain has tolerated Imams in its midst who are calling for war. Not because they don’t like this particular Tony Blair policy or that one, but because they hate the secular and Christian and Jewish West which in their fanatical imaginations belongs to the realm of Dar al-Harb, the realm of the unbelievers, the realm of the infidel and the damned. Dar al-Harb: in Arabic, it means the realm of WAR. Leftists obviously don’t understand this, don’t understand the mentality of the religious fanatics whose work they are doing. If the West surrenders, the left will undoubtedly be the first to be killed. (Has any leftist asked themselves why the terrorists would pick liberal, multicultural New York to attack?)

For years Britain has tolerated Imams who have preached hatred of Britain right in their midst. For years Britain has tolerated Imams who have celebrated the violence that Britain’s enemies promise and the violence Britain’s enemies deliver. And now they have paid the price for their tolerance. Or a price. Because the war in Europe is only beginning.

The lesson of London is that tolerance can kill you.

It is time for the West to begin to set limits to the suicidal softness it considers its soul. We can no longer afford to tolerate hate directed against us, particularly hate that emanates from religious pulpits and supports murder in God's name. We can no longer tolerate hate that is directed at us because we think we are powerful and the hate can’t hurt us.

The lesson of London is that it can.

The Imams of hate and their followers and their secular defenders in the West are self-declared enemies who need to be watched closely by all of us from now on. They need to be watched in their Mosques, and in their civil liberties fronts to defend their captured, and in the political groups that have declared we are the enemy and they are the victims. When these domestics step over the line, they need to be prosecuted. If they are aliens who hate us, they need to be deported.

A lesson of London for the British themselves is that they need a British Patriot Act. Their frontline protectors are as hamstrung as ours were before 9/11. The Patriot Act criminalizes not only terror but “material support for terror.” It allows the FBI to surveil not only groups that have committed a crime against us, but groups that have demonstrated the passion and the will to commit crimes against us. The Patriot Act allows law enforcement to surveil the threats that come from our enemies within. That is why the left is up in arms against the Patriot Act: They want to strike down the provisions that allow us to keep an eye on them.

The stakes are high. These homemade London bombs, apparently not the work of professionals, killed more than fifty people and injured more than seven hundred. A dirty nuclear bomb in an American city is not something we will be able to just take in stride.

Our internal problem from those who hate us is as big as Britain’s, perhaps even bigger. I am growing weary of watching American apologists for Islamic terror and opponents of our self-defenses treated as “liberals” and as though the most important thing for the rest of us to do, is avert our eyes from the malice in their hearts and pretend that it's American politics as usual. We are trained in complacency by the genius of our democratic political system. Though passions run high, the stakes in our elections are remarkably low. One side loses an election. No one dies. No one goes to jail. In America politics can seem like a game.

Friday night I was watching my friend Alan Colmes, who is a decent liberal but doesn’t like the war. The guest on Hannity & Colmes was Kevin Danaher, husband of Medea Benjamin and a leader of the indecent left that unlike Alan wants us to lose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Israel to the enemy force. Danaher and his wife who are leaders of Global Exchange and Code Pink and Iraq Occupation Watch, the campaign to dissuade American youngsters from serving in our country, are at work day and night to cripple our lines of homeland defense, from the protections afforded by the Patriot Act to the military forces who are keeping our enemies at bay in the field.

The discussion on Hannity & Colmes was about the violence of the anarcho-marxists who were raining rocks on the G8 meeting in Scotland which the terrorist bombs were designed to disrupt. In other words, they were conducting violence to parallel ends. The rocks they were throwing were large enough to kill a man. Danaher, who is a leader of the global anti-capitalist left that staged the attacks would not condemn the rock throwers but was smart enough to disapprove violence in the abstract - or the violence of “both sides” - which he knew meant nothing. It was his people who were attacking. To condemn those defending themselves in the same breath is to propose that they become defenseless, which is exactly his plan.

Colmes was frustrated because he understood that Danaher’s position, as he was arguing it, was suspect but since Danaher was against the war Alan wanted to coach him to do better. “Look,” Colmes began, “I agree with your agendas, but…”

No he doesn’t agree with Danaher's true agendas. Alan Colmes doesn’t have the foggiest notion of who Kevin Danaher is or what his malicious and deadly intentions really are. Liberals like Alan Colmes have up to now protected the anti-American left by pretending that it is all a game. People who denounce the President as Adolf Hitler and America as Hitler’s Germany are "foolish" and don’t really mean it. Well actually some are not so foolish and do.

This is the lesson of London: Take the hostile force within your country and within your political coalition seriously. It’s not a game anymore.

This is something I learned in my years on the left. All too often, people mean what they say. Make no mistake, those who talk revolution and war against our country are quite capable of acting on their talk – of aiding and abetting those who are already at war and want to kill us. When the day comes that they step over the line and translate their words into action, they will do it with the best of intentions: to make the world a better place. That is the reason they are so dangerous. Like Mohammed Atta who did it for Allah, they will do it for a noble cause.

Understand this, and you will understand that people who use the language of war need to be isolated and regarded with care.

Understand this, and you will understand that those who describe America as Hitler's Germany can be dangerous, and need to be watched.

I myself understand that this is a disturbing thought to any American. It is disturbing to me. But in the aftermath of London it would be foolish to deny that such a precaution is also a necessary one. The infamous Ward Churchill began by describing ordinary Americans as “little Eichmanns". He has already moved on to inciting military personnel to kill their officers. And to inciting college students to applaud military personnel who do. As a matter of progressive duty, mind you. Can anyone be confident that there are no Ward Churchill disciples listening to his words who might take them seriously and put them into practice? Anyone remember John Walker Lindh?

Nazi Germany is a symbol of evil. There is not a man or woman who calls himself “progressive" who does not also think of themselves as a person who would destroy evil if given the chance. The purpose of identifying America with Nazi Germany is to hate America. To hate us. The purpose of this hatred is to engage in the task of destroying the evil. In this case, that means us.

Yes, we have rights in this country that guarantee to radicals who want to destroy us the privilege to telegraph their homicidal agendas. But this does not deprive the rest of us of the right to defend ourselves as well.

The beginning of this defense is to take their words seriously, remember London, and understand that this is no longer a game.

s m a c a
... a forum for progressive Christianity produced by St. Matthew-in-the-City Anglican Church Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand.

4th September 2005

"Smacking for Jesus"

- THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK (Theological Nonsense)
- FROM THE VICAR "Smacking for Jesus: Beating the Hell Out of Children"
- WEB LINKS Persepctives on Child Punishment
- MORE FROM THE VICAR "Five Courageous Women and the Miracle of 'Godness'"
- SMACAtoon (Missing the Point)
- DIALOGUE (Where you write in and tell us what you think)
- SMACA NewSpots (Hurricane Katrina, Star Wars and Fundamentalists)
- SMACA Prayer (A Prayer of Responsibility for Children)
- WHAT'S HAPPENING at St Matthew-in-the-City
- How to subscribe / unsubscribe from SMACA

Visit our web site! http://www.stmatthews.org.nz.

====================
THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK

"Let me state this boldly and succinctly: Jesus did not die for your sins or my sins. That proclamation is theological nonsense. It only breeds more violence as we seek to justify the negativity that religious people dump on others because we can no longer carry its load. We must rid ourselves of it. One can hardly refrain from exhorting parents not to spare the rod lest they spoil their child if the portrait of God at the heart of the Christian story is that of an angry parent who punishes the divine Son because he can take it and we cannot."
- John Shelby Spong
("The Sins of Scripture", HarperSanFrancisco, 2005)

====================
"Smacking for Jesus: Beating the Hell Out of Children"
by Glynn Cardy

It is not difficult to find Christian literature that justifies violence against children. Last week a private school in Auckland, Carey College, distributed such material to pupils’ parents.

“Children are not little bundles of innocence,” says one brochure, “they are little bundles of depravity.” This belief is grounded in their understanding of the mythological fall of Adam and Eve. Children are rebellious at heart, says the author, and need to be beaten in order to drive this rebelliousness out.

Quoting the Book of Proverbs, parents are encouraged to use a rod on their child. “He who spares his rod hates his son” [Proverbs 13:24]. In case you’re wondering there is nothing in the brochure suggesting girls should not be beaten.

In this brochure, parents are encouraged to begin hitting even before their children talk. “With infants and toddlers: a wee smack to the forearm or leg…” Does throwing baby rice from the highchair, after being told not to, constitute a rebellious and sinful act?

If none of the above scares you, then turn to the brochure’s last page: “If a child is angry after the smack (slamming doors, pouting, etc.) you have not smacked hard enough [and] you will have to administer another smack." This is encouragement to keep on hitting until the parent thinks the child is properly submissive.

Interspersed amongst the violence there are admonitions for parents to pray for and cuddle their children. This is almost scarier than the beatings. The one being hit by the rod is meant to understand it as an act of love, be grateful for it, and cuddle the hitter afterwards. Sounds like serious mind games to me.

If polls are to be believed, however, there are a majority of New Zealanders who see nothing wrong in hitting a child. They seem to think that whilst it is not right or legal to hit an adult, it is right and should remain legal to hit a child. Children need to be physically disciplined they say. Yet what about an adult, who has not learnt compliance? Should he or she should be physically disciplined too? Should we bring back public whippings perhaps?

Conversely, if it is never okay to hit a man or a woman (save in self-defence), why is it okay to hit those who are young and vulnerable? There is something grossly bizarre about hitting someone because they don’t think like we do, can’t hit back, or talk back, or even vote back. We usually call this behaviour for what it is; bullying.

Every year many adults damage children physically and emotionally. These adults beat with rods, beat girls and boys, beat infants, and beat until they feel like stopping, in the sure and certain belief that they are justified. A number of the children die.

Sue Bradford is the Green Party MP who is trying to remove the words “reasonable force” from section 59 of the New Zealand Crimes Act. The current law allows juries to acquit parents who have beaten their children, despite a number of cases where the children have sustained significant injuries.

On commenting upon the Carey College brochure Ms Bradford said, “It’s based in the Old Testament. I think it is a real pity that a Christian school isn’t following the Christian principles of compassion and love for children rather than advocating physical discipline at this level.”

Sue has a progressive heart, but I suspect she hasn’t read too much theology. You can’t easily cut the Bible in two - saying the Old Testament is about laws and punishment and the New is about Jesus and love. It is better to say that both progressive Jews and Christians struggle with the violence within their scriptures and tradition seeking to 're-image' God as compassionate and loving.

The hard truth is that throughout most of the Bible God is portrayed as righteously pure and righteously punishing. Human beings in contrast are fallen sinful creatures, prone to rebellion. The whole salvific enterprise, as understood by most Christian theology and history, has Jesus dying in order to atone for humanity’s sinfulness.

Beating sin out of people has a long and sad history in the Church. It is based on humans’ erroneous understandings of psychology and sexuality. It is based on the notion of a violent God, who encourages more violence.

This understanding of God, humanity, and Jesus is anathema to many of us. Human beings are not born sinful. Rebellion is often a good thing. We all make mistakes and need to learn to forgive ourselves and put things right. We don’t need someone to die for us; we need someone to inspire us. We don’t believe in a God who punishes and is appeased by blood sacrifice. Rather we believe in a God who is a loving grace-filled energy calling and encouraging us to live loving grace-filled lives.

It is an urgent task of the Church to banish this violent God, consigning it to the pages of a never-to-be-read-again fairy tale, before any more violence is inflicted on our children. It’s the least we owe to the children who have suffered and died at the hands of their 'righteous' parents.

Glynn Cardy
Vicar, St Matthew-in-the-City

====================

WEB LINKS

"Children's voices on physical punishment"
What do children think about physical punishment? There has only been limited consultation with children and young people on this matter. Children's views on the use of physical punishment are essential to the debate on its use.

http://www.community.nsw.gov.au/documents/accan/papers/3S3J-1.pdf

"Epoch New Zealand"
EPOCH New Zealand Inc is a charitable trust with the following aims:
- to end physical punishment of children;
- to educate parents and others about the dangers and disadvantages of physical punishment of children;
- to promote alternative non-violent ways of helping children behave well;
- to promote law reform that supports these aims.
http://www.epochnz.org.nz

"The Sins of Scipture: Exposing the Bible's Texts of Hate to Reveal the God of Love"
This new book from progressive Anglican author John Spong devotes a chapter to breaking through the biblical view of God as a punishing parent, so often cited as justification for physical discipline of children. Read some sample pages at this link.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060762055/qid=1125617944/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-0309888-3273627?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

Foreign Policy Research Institute
50 Years of Ideas in Service to Our Nation
1955-2005
www.fpri.org

E-Notes
Distributed Exclusively via Fax & Email

RETHINKING NUCLEAR SECURITY STRATEGY
by Rensselaer Lee

September 2, 2005

Editor's Note

As we go to press with our latest FPRI E-Note, it is
unthinkable to fail to note the devastation along the Gulf
coast of the United States. To assist the relief effort,
here is the URL for the American Red Cross: www.redcross.org

Dr. Lee is an FPRI Senior Fellow and the author of Smuggling
Armageddon: The Nuclear Black Market in the Former Soviet
Union and Europe (St. Martin's-Palgrave, 1999). This essay
is based on a talk delivered at the CATO Institute on June
29, 2005.

RETHINKING NUCLEAR SECURITY STRATEGY

by Rensselaer Lee

Nonproliferation is the pre-eminent national security issue
of our time, and there is probably no more important U.S.
foreign policy goal than keeping nuclear weapons and the
ingredients and know-how to make them out of the hands of
those who would do us harm. But our current policies appear
inadequate to this formidable task. A more comprehensive,
proactive, and intelligence-based approach is required.

The current U.S. nonproliferation strategy consists of three
main components. One is to secure nuclear materials and
warheads at the sites where they are stored. Many consider
protecting materials at the source the first line of defense
in containing the nuclear smuggling threat. The second line
of defense aims at improving border and cargo monitoring at
the frontier crossings and embarkation points most likely to
be used by smugglers. The idea is to intercept target
materials that have broken loose from authorized storage--
that is, filtered through the first line of defense. The
third strategy component is to contain the spread of nuclear
intelligence. The intent here is to create jobs and
financial security for displaced nuclear workers so that
they won't sell their expertise to Al Qaeda, Iran, or some
other hostile entity. While still focused mainly on former
Soviet countries, U.S. programs are now expanding farther
afield. The Department of Energy's (DOE) installation of
radiation detectors at several high-volume shipping hubs, or
megaports, is one case in point.

Considerable dedication, ingenuity, and scientific expertise
have gone into designing these programs, but whether the
programs can prevent nuclear terrorism is doubtful. It's a
lot easier to identify measures of performance--number of
tons of highly-enriched uranium (HEU) and plutonium secured,
number of customs posts outfitted with radiation monitors,
number of weapons scientists employed in civilian jobs--than
it is to find measures of effectiveness.

One encouraging sign is that no plutonium or HEU has
surfaced in international smuggling channels in recent
years, at least none that was officially reported. But this
hopeful trend can be interpreted several different ways. It
could mean that our nuclear containment policies in Russia
and the new states are working; that improving economic
conditions in Russia generally and in the nuclear complex
have diminished incentives to steal and sell nuclear goods;
that Russia's security services are exercising tighter
control over the country's far-flung nuclear complex than
they did in the past; or that observed data on trafficking
incidents is not representative of the wider universe of
nuclear smuggling, including sophisticated schemes that have
escaped detection in the West.

LIMITATIONS
More likely the various components of U.S. nonproliferation
strategy add up to just a partial defense against nuclear
terrorism. Our programs suffer from technical and physical
limitations that clever adversaries can easily exploit. Our
simplistic models of human motivation compound the risk of
failure. Finally, the proliferation window in Russia has
been open for some time, raising the ominous possibility
that our adversaries may already have obtained some of what
they want.

Lets start by looking at the first line of defense, securing
nuclear materials, which equates mostly to the Material
Protection, Control and Accounting Program funded by the DOE
and in which the DOD is also involved. Analysts such as
Harvard University's Graham Allison believe it is possible
to lock up 100 percent of Russia's nuclear stockpile,
according a Fort Knox "gold standard" of impermeability, so
that no leakage or disappearances of significance can
possibly occur.[1] But the main impediment here is the
complexity and unpredictability of the human element. The
new sensors and protective barriers that the U.S. is
installing are only as good as the diligence, competence,
and integrity of the persons tending them. The new
safeguards probably can defeat snatch-and-grab type theft
attempts by solitary employees, such as we saw in Russia in
the early to mid 1990s, but this isn't the principal threat
today. Today's threat comes from organized conspiracies of
well-placed insiders. The Russians will tell you that the
cooperation of just four or five employees is required to
pull off a successful theft, even at enterprises that have
received substantial infusions of MPC&A assistance from the
U.S.

Thefts organized by senior managers are probably the most
serious threat. Managers know precisely the sequence of
steps required to remove the desired material while
minimizing the risk of detection. They have the means to
order electronic surveillance systems to be disengaged. They
have the legal authority to create appropriate documentation
to conceal a diversion--for example, writing up a shipment
of HEU as some relatively innocuous substance such as
natural uranium or cesium.

To be fair, the MPC&A program don't exclude consideration of
the human factor in the nuclear workplace. Indeed, the new
nonproliferation buzzword is "nuclear security culture," and
DOE now has a National Program and Sustainability Initiative
that tries to incorporate this concept. But training nuclear
workers to obey norms and follow established procedures is
not quite the same as deterring corrupt acts by criminally
inclined insiders, although some overlap of course exists.

The DOE-supported second line of defense program, which
deploys technological monitoring equipment at key border
crossings for people and cargo, faces even more daunting
challenges. Russia has 12,500 miles of border with its
neighbors, far too many to monitor effectively. Smugglers
won't necessarily opt to move their wares through customs
posts equipped with radiation detectors, and detectors
themselves are subject to all the vulnerabilities associated
with corruption: they can be turned off, bypassed, or simply
ignored. A further significant problem is that most of the
equipment being installed at borders is not sensitive enough
to detect well-shielded HEU, which is the material most
likely to be used in a terrorist bomb.

Finally, programs such as DOE's Global Initiatives for
Proliferation Prevention, designed to prevent brain-drain
and leakage of nuclear secrets, are unlikely to achieve the
desired results. The military's scientific knowledge is
difficult to contain under the best of circumstances:
America could not keep its own closely guarded nuclear
secrets from gravitating to the Soviet Union in the 1940s
and probably to China in the 1990s. These days, information
can easily be transmitted through the Internet.

The motives to sell nuclear intelligence are complex.
Economic uncertainty and the need to make ends meet are
factors, but so are greed, resentment, and ideological
conviction. British nuclear physicist and Soviet master spy
Klaus Fuchs, who worked at the Manhattan Project and later
at Los Alamos, hardly fit the profile of an unemployed or
economically desperate scientist.

Our nuclear security programs are absolutely not designed to
prevent state-sponsored proliferation, in which high-ranking
officials deliberately arrange the sale of nuclear goods to
client states or groups. The underground network organized
by Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan, which peddled centrifuges
and nuclear bomb designs to states such as Libya and Iran,
is a latter-day model for this. According to the National
Council of Resistance of Iran, an exile group, the network
also transferred an undetermined quantity of HEU to Iran in
2001.[2] The Pakistani Atomic Energy Commission in July 2000
took out a full-page ad in a Pakistani newspaper offering
for export plutonium, enriched uranium, and other nuclear
materials. (The offer was rescinded under U.S. pressure)
[3]. Finally, U.S. officials have speculated that Russia's
technical cooperation agreements with Iran might provide a
convenient cover for clandestine transfers of nuclear
materials, components, and weapons-building intelligence to
that country. High-level diplomacy and concerted political
action are probably the only effective means of dealing with
this issue.

The goals of our nonproliferation programs are necessarily
long-term: lock down all nuclear weapons and materials by
2008, equip 330 border crossings and 24 megaports by 2012,
create 15,000 civilian jobs for weapons scientists by
2030.[4] But the threat from terrorists and outlaw nations
is immediate. So the more time our programs require, the
more problematic their strategic justification. We may be
locking the proverbial barn door after some of the horses
have already escaped. Looking back to the 1990s, the Russian
nuclear complex was then going through a period of deep
malaise. The loss of orders for nuclear goods, a
deteriorating security climate, unpaid wages, a fraying
social safety net, and spreading corruption put much of the
nuclear stockpile at risk. Former senator Sam Nunn, now the
CEO of Nuclear Threat Initiative, told a Senate hearing in
1995 that the collapse of the USSR had "let loose a vast
potential supermarket for nuclear weapons, weapons-grade
uranium and plutonium, and equally deadly chemical or
biological weapons."[5] Even allowing for some hyperbole, it
would be a miracle indeed if no leakage of significance had
taken place during this period.

The visible machinations of the nuclear black market provide
little clue as to what might have happened. All the fissile
material seized internationally since the early 1990s put
together is not enough to make a nuclear bomb. But consider
that sophisticated thieves and smugglers are a lot less
likely to get caught than the amateurs and solo opportunists
who dominate the known smuggling incidents. Indeed, nuclear
smugglers captured in Western Europe in the early to mid
1990s told authorities that significant quantities of HEU
and plutonium had already escaped government control and was
available for sale. Where this material is today is
anybody's guess. It could be buried somewhere in a birch
forest, stashed in someone's refrigerator, circling the
globe looking for potential buyers, or hidden in a cave in
remote eastern Afghanistan. And reports persist of extremely
corrupt practices by certain nuclear facilities, including
off-the-books processing of uranium for private commercial
clients and altered paperwork to conceal substitution of
dangerous substances in legal radioactive shipments.

INTELLIGENCE-BASED SECURITY
Certainly we should continue on the path of trying to make
nuclear materials as technically secure as possible as
quickly as possible. But we need in addition a proactive,
intelligence-based nuclear security policy that will enable
us and our allies to anticipate nuclear deals in the making
and to reduce the risk of consequential proliferation
episodes.

One is to construct a vulnerability profile of each nuclear
energy enterprise. This could be based on such factors as
economic conditions and wage scales, presence of organized
crime or terrorist groups in the neighborhood, past
histories of thefts or theft attempts, accessibility to
foreign visitors, and frequency of travel abroad by
enterprise scientists. It should also be possible to gauge
susceptibility of the nuclear workforce to bribes or
blackmail, and employees' propensity to engage in corrupt or
disloyal conduct.

Illicit drug use, gambling habits, major medical expenses,
and conspicuous consumption unrelated to income are obvious
warning signs. Post-employment screening techniques--
polygraphs, psychological testing, investigating of bank
records--can be powerful predictive tools. They also can
yield information on prior thefts, possibly leading to
recovery of stolen material that perpetrators have not yet
had the chance to export. Moreover, remote monitoring of
nuclear storage areas and guard posts from vantage points
inside and outside the facility could provide an additional
measure of security against insider thefts. Some of these
ideas are now being implemented in Russian enterprises, but
on nowhere near the scale contemplated here.

A second recommendation is to focus more international
intelligence and law enforcement resources on the demand
side of the proliferation equation. Not enough is known
about adversaries' procurement chains inside and outside the
former Soviet Union, how these are organized and financed,
what front companies and other intermediaries are used, who
their inside collaborators are, etc. Law enforcement sting
operations in which operatives pose as purveyors of HEU or
plutonium could play a big role in fleshing out buyer and
end-user networks and in shutting some of them down.

Third, and related to this, collaboration with Russia and
other former Soviet security organizations needs to be
strengthened, since these organizations do much of the heavy
lifting in containing nuclear theft and smuggling. In 1998
Russia's Federal Security Service foiled a plot to divert
18.5kg of radioactive materials from one of the nuclear
facilities of the Chelyabinsk region, probably the Snezhinsk
facility, almost enough for a bomb. Mechanisms for formal
and informal information sharing on smuggling incidents,
actors, and trends would be of great value in configuring
U.S. nonproliferation programs in the newly independent
states.

As should be obvious, the requirements of the United States'
nuclear security policy are ultimately inseparable from the
requirements of its global war against terrorism. Al Qaeda's
attempts to obtain nuclear materials and weapons have gone
on for well over a decade. A large penumbra of uncertainty
surrounds the extent of nuclear leakages from Russia and
other supplier states. We do not know how far Al Qaeda and
its affiliates may have proceeded toward building a bomb.
Hence, our very real progress toward closing the
proliferation window in Russia and elsewhere must be
combined with unremitting vigilance against threats that may
already be out there.

----------------------------------------------------------
Notes
[1] Graham Allison. Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate
Preventable Catastrophe (New York; Henry Holt, 2004), pp.
149-50

[2] Louis Charbonneau, "Pakistan's Khan Gave Iran Bomb-Grade
Uranium-Exiles," Reuters, Nov. 17, 2004.

[3] Stephen Fidler and Victoria Burnett, "Pakistan's 'rogue'
nuclear scientist: what did Pakistan's government know about
his deals?" Financial Times, Apr. 6, 2004.

[4] Kenneth Luongo and William Hoehn, "An Ounce of
Prevention," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist, Mar.-Apr.
2005.

[5] Cited in James L. Ford and C. Richard Schuller,
Controlling Threats to Nuclear Security, National Defense
University Center for Non-Proliferation Studies, 1997, p. 3

(Ed. Note: A communist appologist if ever there was one...)

How the Free Market Killed New Orleans

By Michael Parenti

The free market played a crucial role in the destruction of New Orleans
and the death of thousands of its residents. Armed with advanced warning
that a momentous (force 5) hurricane was going to hit that city and
surrounding areas, what did officials do? They played the free market.

They announced that everyone should evacuate. Everyone was expected to
devise their own way out of the disaster area by private means, just as
the free market dictates, just like people do when disaster hits
free-market Third World countries.

It is a beautiful thing this free market in which every individual
pursues his or her own personal interests and thereby effects an optimal
outcome for the entire society. This is the way the invisible hand works
its wonders.

There would be none of the collectivistic regimented evacuation as
occurred in Cuba. When an especially powerful hurricane hit that island
last year, the Castro government, abetted by neighborhood citizen
committees and local Communist party cadres, evacuated 1.3 million
people, more than 10 percent of the country's population, with not a
single life lost, a heartening feat that went largely unmentioned in the
U.S. press.

On Day One of the disaster caused by Hurricane Katrina, it was already
clear that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of American lives had been lost
in New Orleans. Many people had "refused" to evacuate, media reporters
explained, because they were just plain "stubborn."

It was not until Day Three that the relatively affluent telecasters
began to realize that tens of thousands of people had failed to flee
because they had nowhere to go and no means of getting there. With
hardly any cash at hand or no motor vehicle to call their own, they had
to sit tight and hope for the best. In the end, the free market did not
work so well for them.

Many of these people were low-income African Americans, along with fewer
numbers of poor whites. It should be remembered that most of them had
jobs before Katrina's lethal visit. That's what most poor people do in
this country: they work, usually quite hard at dismally paying jobs,
sometimes more than one job at a time. They are poor not because they're
lazy but because they have a hard time surviving on poverty wages while
burdened by high prices, high rents, and regressive taxes.

The free market played a role in other ways. Bush's agenda is to cut
government services to the bone and make people rely on the private
sector for the things they might need. So he sliced $71.2 million from
the budget of the New Orleans Corps of Engineers, a 44 percent
reduction. Plans to fortify New Orleans levees and upgrade the system of
pumping out water had to be shelved.

Bush took to the airways and said that no one could have foreseen this
disaster. Just another lie tumbling from his lips. All sorts of people
had been predicting disaster for New Orleans, pointing to the need to
strengthen the levees and the pumps, and fortify the coastlands.

In their campaign to starve out the public sector, the Bushite
reactionaries also allowed developers to drain vast areas of wetlands.
Again, that old invisible hand of the free market would take care of
things. The developers, pursuing their own private profit, would devise
outcomes that would benefit us all.

But wetlands served as a natural absorbent and barrier between New
Orleans and the storms riding in from across the sea. And for some years
now, the wetlands have been disappearing at a frightening pace on the
Gulf' coast. All this was of no concern to the reactionaries in the
White House.

As for the rescue operation, the free-marketeers like to say that relief
to the more unfortunate among us should be left to private charity. It
was a favorite preachment of President Ronald Reagan that "private
charity can do the job." And for the first few days that indeed seemed
to be the policy with the disaster caused by Hurricane Katrina.

The federal government was nowhere in sight but the Red Cross went into
action. Its message: "Don't send food or blankets; send money."
Meanwhile Pat Robertson and the Christian Broadcasting Network---taking
a moment off from God's work of pushing John Roberts nomination to the
Supreme Court---called for donations and announced "Operation Blessing"
which consisted of a highly-publicized but totally inadequate shipment
of canned goods and bibles.

By Day Three even the myopic media began to realize the immense failure
of the rescue operation. People were dying because relief had not
arrived. The authorities seemed more concerned with the looting than
with rescuing people. It was property before people, just like the free
marketeers always want.

But questions arose that the free market did not seem capable of
answering: Who was in charge of the rescue operation? Why so few
helicopters and just a scattering of Coast Guard rescuers? Why did it
take helicopters five hours to get six people out of one hospital? When
would the rescue operation gather some steam? Where were the feds? The
state troopers? The National Guard? Where were the buses and trucks? the
shelters and portable toilets? The medical supplies and water?

Where was Homeland Security? What has Homeland Security done with the
$33.8 billions allocated to it in fiscal 2005? Even ABC-TV evening news
(September 1, 2005) quoted local officials as saying that "the federal
government's response has been a national disgrace."

In a moment of delicious (and perhaps mischievous) irony, offers of
foreign aid were tendered by France, Germany and several other nations.
Russia offered to send two plane loads of food and other materials for
the victims. Predictably, all these proposals were quickly refused by
the White House. America the Beautiful and Powerful, America the Supreme
Rescuer and World Leader, America the Purveyor of Global Prosperity
could not accept foreign aid from others. That would be a most deflating
and insulting role reversal. Were the French looking for another punch
in the nose?

Besides, to have accepted foreign aid would have been to admit the
truth---that the Bushite reactionaries had neither the desire nor the
decency to provide for ordinary citizens, not even those in the most
extreme straits. Next thing you know, people would start thinking that
George W. Bush was really nothing more than a fulltime agent of
Corporate America.

-------
Michael Parenti's recent books include Superpatriotism (City Lights) and
The Assassination of Julius Caesar (New Press), both available in
paperback. His forthcoming The Culture Struggle (Seven Stories Press)
will be published in the fall. For more information visit:
www.michaelparenti.org.

California Senate Rejects Schwarzenegger's Air Board Chair

The California Senate on Thursday rejected Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's choice to head the state Air Resources Board, saying her close ties to the energy industry made her a bad fit for an agency with so much influence on the nation's clean-air laws.

Theory an assault on faith
Graeme Finlay
NZ Horrid
02.09.05

Intelligent Design Theory (IDT) is bursting out everywhere. It has become part of the creed of many Christian churches.

United States President George W. Bush has given his blessing to it. A Dutch politician has suggested that IDT be aired in Europe. Time magazine is full of it. Science journals such as Nature and Science lament its influence. And it has landed in New Zealand.

IDT argues that complex biological structures could not have been assembled stepwise by an evolutionary mechanism.

Take out or alter just one component, so the argument goes, and the rest of the machinery falls apart. Therefore the structure must have been designed by some (non-specified) super-intelligence.

As a student of biology and a disciple of Jesus Christ, I am concerned that IDT is hostile to both science and biblical faith.

IDT is an assault on science because it is a cover-up for the rejection of evolution. This is stated explicitly by at least some IDT leaders, such as the lawyer Philip Johnson.

IDT thus has the same basic purpose as old style "Creationism".

IDT claims that evolution is "only a theory".

This confuses the sense in which "theory" is used.

Evolution is indeed a theory. This does not mean that it is a speculative hypothesis, but that it provides a theoretical framework for biology.

We are told that evolution is a religion and that it cannot be falsified.

This is untrue. Evolution is a scientific paradigm. Like all scientific paradigms, it contains a mass of established facts, working hypotheses, and creative speculations.

People engage in the universal methods of scientific research independently of their religious faiths. Science cannot be categorised into "atheistic", "Christian", "feminist" or particular ethnic varieties.

Someone of an atheistic religious perspective looks at the world that science discloses, accepts the exquisite order of nature as a brute fact, and believes that the evolutionary saga is a colossal accident.

Someone of a theistic perspective looks at the same world, accepts that its order comes from God, and believes that evolution reflects God's creative purpose.

Science can be enveloped in different metaphysical (religious) world views.

We must respect the difference between physics (and other branches of science) and metaphysics (such as atheism or theism).

IDT claims that there is no evidence for large-scale evolution. This is nonsense. Genomic science has provided conclusive evidence for human evolution. We share common ancestors with chimps, all other primates and other mammals. IDT denies evidence-based science.

IDT demands freedom to "teach the controversy". Promoters of IDT want to place stickers, indicating that evolution is controversial, in biology textbooks.

Just as the IDT lobby pleads that evolution is controversial, so the tobacco lobby claims that the smoking-cancer link is controversial, and the fossil fuel lobby denies anthropogenic global warming. But the overall evolutionary paradigm is overwhelmingly accepted by scholars.

Within all scientific fields, there is ongoing debate over the details of particular issues. The "teach the controversy" slogan fails to recognise that all human knowledge is provisional.

Indeed, the one place where the "controversy" is not taught seems to be among groups where "creationism' and IDT are accepted dogma.

IDT claims that complex structures (such as the bacterial flagellum) could not have been assembled stepwise by an evolutionary process.

In other words, the development of complex physical structures cannot in principle be described in terms of known (or as yet unknown) mechanistic principles.
IDT sets huge areas of biology off-limits to science. Biologists can pack up and go home. Science becomes impossible.

IDT is an assault also on biblical faith. It is a classic statement of the "god-of-the-gaps".

This is a god whose existence is postulated on the basis that there are natural phenomena that "science cannot explain". Our ignorance of the origin of the genetic code or of the bacterial flagellum is taken to mean that "God must have done it".

Such "faith" in God rests on an underlying faith that we will be ignorant in perpetuity about the genetic code and the flagellum (and implies that God is not responsible for phenomena that we can describe scientifically).

But science always advances and the stop-gap god always shrinks. An authentic faith in God must be based on a foundation other than our (current) ignorance of flagellar assembly.

IDT drives a wedge between design and evolution. IDT assumes that "evolution" stands for "non-design".

But it is a false antithesis to demand a choice between "design" and "evolution". Christian scientists perceive exquisite design in the process of evolution that has produced the wonder of humanity as the image of God.

IDT protagonists refuse to discuss the nature of the intelligence that they claim to have unearthed. IDT can point to only a remote impersonal deistic god.

Darwin (as a conservative English gentleman) believed in precisely this god. This god is a distant abstraction that is not personal, communicating, holy, loving, redeeming.

The deist god of 19th-century Europe is a stark alternative to the passionate God of the Bible who is revealed in Jesus. It is ironic that IDT rejects Darwin's science even as it settles for Darwin's god.

The faceless god of IDT can morph into to any number of idols. In the 18th century natural theology ("Enlightenment") sought a god who could be known by human intellect.

Human "reason" became the arbiter of what could be known of god. A god who was first sought by reason, then became limited and eventually defined by reason.

People believed of the deity only that which was common sense.

The IDT god is an Enlightenment god, a tidy flagellar draughtsman, an uncomplicated 21st-century technologist, devoid of biblical mystery. IDT is becoming dogma, the mark of true orthodoxy, for some Christians.

The triune God, revealed in Jesus of Nazareth who was resurrected from the dead, is not reducible to neat formulae.

IDT hoopla is making people forget the imperative that those who follow Jesus must proclaim his liberating work in the compassionate, sacrificial spirit of service demonstrated by their Master.

* Graeme Finlay, MSc PhD BTh, is a senior lecturer in general (scientific) pathology at the University of Auckland.

September 2, 2005 Issue #69

"Sometimes an intended epithet can be turned to good advantage.
In the sole surviving issue of the Decatur, Texas TIMES, one finds
the way Populists not only accepted the label `calamity howler'
but insisted that they had ample reason to howl and would continue
to howl until their objectives had been attained."
- THE POPULIST MIND, edited by Norman Pollack
EDITOR\PUBLISHER; A.V. Krebs
E-MAIL: avkrebs@earthlink.net
TO RECEIVE: Send name and address

THE SECOND BATTLE OF NEW ORLEANS
SAM SMITH
Undernews
September 1, 2005

The second Battle of New Orleans is already underway: a struggle over how to respond to the greatest natural disaster of our history. It is far too early to draw conclusions but soon enough for a few questions:
* What will be the iconographic role of this disaster? Will it --- as it should --- eclipse 9/11 as the central moment of contemporary history, or will it be subtly reduced to second place so the business at hand in Washington --- i.e. whatever war it is conducting --- can continue to retain semiotic hegemony? What is the relative importance of 16 acres in New York City versus tens of thousands in Louisiana?
* How much will we be willing to pay to restore one of our major cities and its citizens compared to what we have paid to create a manmade disaster in Iraq or to end constitutional government in the wake of September 11 ?
* Will the meaning of this disaster, like Septemebr 11, be repeatedly distorted by various parties of interest in a manner that blasphemes the memory of its victims and perverts its history?
* What effect will the fact that many of the victims of September 11 were white and powerful while many of the victims of New Orleans' disaster were black and so poor they couldn't get out of town alter the story we come to tell of the event? Does the mayor's decision to remove police from search and rescue so they could fight looting suggest a demographic subtext? Is the marketplace worth more than life itself?
* In what ways would the response to this disaster have been different if it its major victims had been lighter and wealthier? If the stranded had been in Palm Beach, what would we have done?
* If FEMA put a Category 5 hurricane in New Orleans on the same level as a terrorist attack in New York City or an earthquake in San Francisco, why did the White House and the Department of Homeland Security only show substantial interest in, and fund remedies for, the New York version of potential catastrophe? Does this qualify as criminal negligence?
* If everyone knew that New Orleans was an accident waiting to happen why were so few precautions taken? As just one example, why were not residents encouraged to have or provided inflatable rafts and life jackets in their homes along with the sort of food supplies promoted following September 11 ?
* Why does the government and the media persist in the notion that a major disaster requires centralized control --- if not martial law --- imposed from Washington? It is clear already that the most competent response to this disaster came at the local and state level and that the feds weren't even able to provide food, water, shelter and other logistical supplies in a timely matter. Both common sense and the 10th Amendment dictate that in a major disaster control should devolve to the governors, not to some covertly selected cabal in Washington.

It is interesting to note that while FEMA and the Pentagon were still trying to get their act together, Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell called the governor of Mississippi to say that 2,500 of his National Guard troops were on their way. In other words, a Democratic and a GOP governor from vastly different states got matters coordinated even as the monolithically incompetent Bush regime was still figuring out what to do.

* What lessons can be learn from the fact that the Coast Guard was the best organized federal agency --- rescuing 2600 people in few days with only 4,000 personnel? As Jim Ridgeway notes in the Village Voice, "it was the Coast Guard commander in New York who organized one of the most extraordinary operations maritime rescues since Dunkirk on September 11, pulling together, ferries, tugs, yachts, and all sorts of other boats to evacuate half a million people from downtown New York."
One explanation: the Coast Guard is highly decentralized (like local fire departments) with a lot of authority vested at the local level. It also places a high emphasis on competence, again like fire departments. When you are in a disaster your best friends are highly qualified rescuers who can make decisions without waiting for headquarters to tell them what to do.
* Will we finally learn from this experience that we --- despite our invasions and our Ipods --- are still part of nature, and must respect and work with it rather than ignoring and exploiting it? Or will we continue to view nature as just another problem for FEMA and the Corps of Engineers to solve?
* Will we finally suppress the pathological arrogance that has gotten us into such trouble in recent years and try a little well-founded humility for a change?
* Will it matter? The first Battle of New Orleans was fought several weeks after the Treaty of Ghent was signed. Maybe this battle will prove too late as well.

WAITING FOR A LEADER
EDITOIRAL
New York Times
September 1, 2005

George W. Bush gave one of the worst speeches of his life yesterday, especially given the level of national distress and the need for words of consolation and wisdom. In what seems to be a ritual in this administration, the president appeared a day later than he was needed. He then read an address of a quality more appropriate for an Arbor Day celebration: a long laundry list of pounds of ice, generators and blankets delivered to the stricken Gulf Coast. He advised the public that anybody who wanted to help should send cash, grinned, and promised that everything would work out in the end.

We will, of course, endure, and the city of New Orleans must come back. But
looking at the pictures on television yesterday of a place abandoned to the forces of flood, fire and looting, it was hard not to wonder exactly how that is going to come to pass. Right now, hundreds of thousands of American refugees need our national concern and care.

Thousands of people still need to be rescued from imminent peril. Public health threats must be controlled in New Orleans and throughout southern Mississippi. Drivers must be given confidence that gasoline will be available, and profiteering must be brought under control at a moment when television has been showing long lines at some pumps and spot prices approaching $4 a gallon have been reported.

Sacrifices may be necessary to make sure that all these things happen in an orderly, efficient way. But this administration has never been one to counsel sacrifice. And nothing about the president's demeanor yesterday --- which seemed casual to the point of carelessness --- suggested that he understood the depth of the current crisis.

While our attention must now be on the Gulf Coast's most immediate needs, the nation will soon ask why New Orleans's levees remained so inadequate. Publications from the local newspaper to National Geographic have fulminated
about the bad state of flood protection in this beloved city, which is below sea level. Why were developers permitted to destroy wetlands and barrier islands that could have held back the hurricane's surge? Why was Congress, before it wandered off to vacation, engaged in slashing the budget for correcting some of the gaping holes in the area's flood protection?

It would be some comfort to think that, as Mr. Bush cheerily announced, America "will be a stronger place" for enduring this crisis. Complacency will no longer suffice, especially if experts are right in warning that global warming may increase the intensity of future hurricanes. But since this administration won't acknowledge that global warming exists, the chances of leadership seem minimal.

GREAT THOUGHTS OF G.W. BUSH
WHILE FLYING ABOVE NEW ORLEANS
"It's devastating," POTUS said as he watched, according to Scott McClellan.
"It's got to be doubly devastating on the ground."

WHY THE LEVEE BROKE
WILL BUNCH
Attyfood - Alternet
September 1, 2005

Even though Hurricane Katrina has moved well north of the city, the waters continued to rise in New Orleans on Wednesday. That's because Lake Pontchartrain continues to pour through a two-block-long break in the main levee, near the city's 17th Street Canal. With much of the Crescent City some ten feet below sea level, the rising tide may not stop until until it's level with the massive lake.
There have been numerous reports of bodies floating in the poorest neighborhoods of this poverty-plagued city, but the truth is that the death toll may not be known for days, because the conditions continue to frustrate rescue efforts.
New Orleans had long known it was highly vulnerable to flooding and a direct hit from a hurricane. In fact, the federal government has been working with state and local officials in the region since the late 1960s on major hurricane and flood relief efforts. When flooding from a massive rainstorm in May 1995 killed six people,
Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or SELA.
Over the next 10 years, the Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with carrying out SELA, spent $430 million on shoring up levees and building pumping stations, with $50 million in local aid. But at least $250 million in crucial projects remained, even as hurricane activity in the Atlantic Basin increased dramatically and the levees surrounding New Orleans continued to subside.

Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle. The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security --- coming at the same time as federal tax cuts --- was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and
2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars.

Newhouse News Service, in an article posted late Tuesday night at The Times-Picayune Web site, reported: "No one can say they didn't see it coming. ... Now in the wake of one of the worst storms ever, serious questions are being asked about the lack of preparation."

In early 2004, as the cost of the conflict in Iraq soared, President Bush proposed spending less than 20% of what the Corps said was needed for Lake Pontchartrain, according to this February 16, 2004, article, in New Orleans CityBusiness:
"The $750 million Lake Pontchartrain and Vicinity Hurricane Protection project is another major Corps project, which remains about 20% incomplete due to lack of funds, said Al Naomi, project manager. That project consists of building up levees and protection for pumping stations on the east bank of the Mississippi River in Orleans, St. Bernard, St. Charles and Jefferson parishes.
"The Lake Pontchartrain project is slated to receive $3.9 million in the president's 2005 budget. Naomi said about $20 million is needed.

"`The longer we wait without funding, the more we sink,' he said. `I've got at least six levee construction contracts that need to be done to raise the levee protection back to where it should be (because of settling). Right now I owe my contractors about $5 million. And we're going to have to pay them interest."
On June 8, 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, told the Times-Picayune: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be
finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."

That June, with the 2004 hurricane seasion starting, the Corps' Naomi went before a local agency, the East Jefferson Levee Authority, and essentially begged for $2 million for urgent work that Washington was now unable to pay for. From the June 18, 2004 Times-Picayune:

"The system is in great shape, but the levees are sinking. Everything is sinking, and if we don't get the money fast enough to raise them, then we can't stay ahead of the
settlement," he said. "The problem that we have isn't that the levee is low, but that the federal funds have dried up so that we can't raise them."
The panel authorized that money, and on July 1, 2004, it had to pony up another $250,000 when it learned that stretches of the levee in Metairie had sunk by four feet. The agency had to pay for the work with higher property taxes. The levee board noted in October 2004 that the feds were also now not paying for a hoped-for $15 million project to better shore up the banks of Lake Pontchartrain.
The 2004 hurricane season was the worst in decades. In spite of that, the federal government came back this spring with the steepest reduction in hurricane- and flood-control funding for New Orleans in history. Because of the proposed cuts, the Corps office there imposed a hiring freeze. Officials said that money targeted for the

SELA project --- $10.4 million, down from $36.5 million --- was not enough to start any new jobs. According to New Orleans CityBusiness this June 5:
'The district has identified $35 million in projects to build and improve levees, floodwalls and pumping stations in St. Bernard, Orleans, Jefferson and St. Charles
parishes. Those projects are included in a Corps line item called Lake Pontchartrain, where funding is scheduled to be cut from $5.7 million this year to $2.9 million in
2006. Naomi said it's enough to pay salaries but little else.

"`We'll do some design work. We'll design the contracts and get them ready to go if we get the money. But we don't have the money to put the work in the field, and that's the problem,' Naomi said."
There was, at the same time, a growing recognition that more research was needed to see what New Orleans must do to protect itself from a Category 4 or 5 hurricane. But once again, the money was not there. As the Times-Picayune reported last September 22:
"That second study would take about four years to complete and would cost about $4 million, said Army Corps of Engineers project manager Al Naomi. About $300,000 in federal money was proposed for the 2005 fiscal-year budget, and the state had agreed to match that amount.
"But the cost of the Iraq war forced the Bush administration to order the New Orleans district office not to begin any new studies, and the 2005 budget no
longer includes the needed money, he said.
[EDITOR'S NOTE: The U.S. war in Iraq now costs more per month than the average monthly cost of military operations in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, according to a report. The report, entitled "The Iraq Quagmire" from the Institute for Policy Studies and Foreign Policy in Focus, both liberal, anti-war organizations, put the cost of current operations in Iraq at $5.6 billion per month. This breaks down to almost $186 million a day - Huffington Post ]
The Senate was seeking to restore some of the SELA funding cuts for 2006. But now it's too late. One project that a contractor had been racing to finish this summer was a bridge and levee job right at the 17th Street Canal, site of the main breach on Monday. The levee failure appears to be causing a human tragedy of epic proportions: "We probably have 80% of our city under water; with some sections of our city the water is as deep as 20 feet. Both airports are underwater," Mayor Ray Nagin told a radio interviewer.

The Newhouse News Service article published Tuesday night observed, "The Louisiana congressional delegation urged Congress earlier this year to dedicate a stream of federal money to Louisiana's coast, only to be opposed by the White House. ... In its budget, the Bush administration proposed a significant reduction in funding for southeast Louisiana's chief hurricane protection project. Bush proposed $10.4 million, a sixth of what local officials say they need."

Washington knew that this day could come at any time, and it knew the things that needed to be done to protect the citizens of New Orleans. But in the tradition of the riverboat gambler, the Bush administration decided to roll the dice on its fool's errand in Iraq, and on a tax cut that mainly benefitted the rich. Now Bush has lost that gamble, big time.

The president told us that we needed to fight in Iraq to save lives here at home. Yet -- after moving billions of domestic dollars to the Persian Gulf --- there are bodies floating through the streets of Louisiana. What does George W. Bush have to say for himself now?

Will Bunch is a senior writer at the Philadelphia Daily News and author of the blog Attytood.

FOR THEY THAT SOW THE WIND
SHALL REAP THE WHIRLWIND
ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.
The Huffington Post
September 1, 2005

As Hurricane Katrina dismantles Mississippi's Gulf Coast, it's worth recalling the central role that Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour played in derailing the Kyoto Protocol and kiboshing President Bush's iron-clad campaign promise to regulate CO2.

In March of 2001, just two days after EPA Administrator Christie Todd Whitman's strong statement affirming Bush's CO2 promise former RNC Chief Barbour responded with an urgent memo to the White House.

Barbour, who had served as RNC Chair and Bush campaign strategist, was now
representing the president's major donors from the fossil fuel industry who had enlisted him to map a Bush energy policy that would be friendly to their interests. His credentials ensured the new administration's attention.
The document, titled "Bush-Cheney Energy Policy & CO2," was addressed to
Vice President Cheney, whose energy task force was then gearing up, and to
several high-ranking officials with strong connections to energy and automotive concerns keenly interested in the carbon dioxide issue, including Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, Interior Secretary Gale Norton, Commerce Secretary Don Evans, White House chief of staff Andy Card and legislative liaison Nick Calio. Barbour pointedly omitted the names of Whitman and Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, both of whom were on record supporting CO2 caps. Barbour's memo chided these administration insiders for trying to address global warming which Barbour dismissed as a radical fringe issue.

A moment of truth is arriving," Barbour wrote, "in the form of a decision whether this Administration's policy will be to regulate and/or tax CO2 as a pollutant. The question is whether environmental policy still prevails over energy policy with Bush-Cheney, as it did with Clinton-Gore." He derided the idea of regulating CO2 as
"eco-extremism," and chided them for allowing environmental concerns to "trump good energy policy, which the country has lacked for eight years."
The memo had impact. "It was terse and highly effective, written for people without much time by a person who controls the purse strings for the Republican Party," said John Walke, a high-ranking air quality official in the Clinton administration.

On March 13, Bush reversed his previous position, announcing he would not back a CO2 restriction using the language and rationale provided by Barbour. Echoing Barbour's memo, Bush said he opposed mandatory CO2 caps, due to "the incomplete state of scientific knowledge* about global climate change.

Well, the science is clear. This month, a study published in the journal Nature by a renowned MIT climatologist linked the increasing prevalence of destructive hurricanes to human-induced global warming.

Now we are all learning what it's like to reap the whirlwind of fossil fuel dependence which Barbour and his cronies have encouraged. Our destructive addiction has given us a catastrophic war in the Middle East and --- now --- Katrina is giving our nation a glimpse of the climate chaos we are bequeathing our children.

In 1998, Republican icon Pat Robertson warned that hurricanes were likely to
hit communities that offended God. Perhaps it was Barbour's memo that caused Katrina, at the last moment, to spare New Orleans and save its worst flailings for the Mississippi coast. [UPDATE: Alas, the reprieve for New Orleans was only temporary. But Haley Barbour still has much to answer for.]

TRAGEDY MAY NOT
BE SEASON FINALE,
HURRICANE PERIOD HAS
THREE MONTHS TO GO
KEAY DAVIDSON
San Francisco Chronicle
September 1, 2005
As bad as Hurricane Katrina is, it may not be the last such devastating storm of what promises to be a ferocious hurricane season through much of autumn, meteorologists say.

The Gulf, Florida and East coasts could also be in for a decade or more of similar coastline-battering storms, they say. And, according to some experts, global warming might be generating much more intense hurricanes than in the past.
In their seasonal hurricane forecast issued earlier this year, William Gray and his colleagues at Colorado State University estimated the odds were one-third higher than normal of a major hurricane making landfall on the Gulf Coast from Pensacola, Florida, to Brownsville, Texas.

To some, that forecast appears to have been grimly vindicated by this week's destruction and flooding of much of New Orleans and surrounding regions.

"This year, we were forecasting one of the most active seasons on record, " Gray's research associate Philip Klotzbach said in an e-mail. "So yes, I guess I would say that we are not surprised that there have been landfalling hurricanes so far this year. ... And the season is only about 40% done."

Other experts are more cautious. Chris Davis of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado said it was too early to say that Gray's team had forecast the New Orleans storm.

"A probabilistic forecast cannot be vindicated by a single event,'' Davis said. "The quality of Dr. Gray's prediction, when phrased in terms of probabilities, must be evaluated over many seasons."

Meteorologists say the kind of hurricanes that were common in the mid- 20th century appear to be reviving because of quasi-cyclical variations in the atmosphere or ocean, or both.

With fortunate simultaneity, their hurricane forecasts have improved during the same period. One advance is the discovery of subtle atmospheric relationships between the rate of Atlantic hurricane formation and the appearance or nonappearance of El Niño events, unusual oceanic warmings in the Pacific.
When El Niño events occur, few hurricanes strike, whereas hurricanes are more common when El Niño events are absent. This year, there has been an absence of El Niño.

Atlantic hurricanes are especially common when Atlantic waters are unusually warm, meteorologists also found. That also has been true this year.
Forecasters typically define "hurricane season" as June 1 to November 30.
Gray's predictions are significant because many scientists regard him as the leading hurricane forecaster.

His "forecasts have had the longest track record and been the most skillful," said Professor Lian Xie, a hurricane expert at North Carolina State University.
Still, hurricane forecasting remains a chancy business. Gray's forecasts "have been right in some years, but wrong in some other years," Xie said. But even Xie and his colleagues, as well as experts from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), forecast this year's rough hurricane season.
If their forecasts hold up, more trouble is ahead before this season ends. Experts expect one or two more hurricanes to make landfall on the East Coast, plus other hurricanes that will whiz by without touching the coastline.
Gray also fears that the current cycle of severe hurricanes will persist for a few decades. That's because, if past records of ocean temperature fluctuations are any guide, Atlantic waters will remain warm for a long time to come.
Kerry Emanuel, a hurricane specialist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, suspects that the revival of major, coastline-clobbering hurricanes in recent years is linked to human-caused global warming of the atmosphere.
In the Aug. 4 issue of the journal Nature, Emanuel reported an apparent 50% increase in the intensity of Atlantic and Pacific hurricanes (typhoons, as they are known in the Pacific) since the 1970s.

"My results," Emanuel said, "suggest that future warming may lead to an upward trend in (hurricanes') destructive potential, and --- taking into account an increasing coastal population --- a substantial increase in hurricane-related losses in the 21st century."

Gray and others have rejected this view, which has also been voiced by environmental activists. Still, Stephan P. Nelson, program director of physical and dynamic meteorology at the U.S. National Science Foundation, told The Chronicle on Wednesday that Emanuel has an excellent reputation. "His paper should and will be taken seriously by the research community," Nelson said.

One critic, Chris Landsea, a research meteorologist at NOAA, said there was no evidence that the hurricane activity of recent years was dramatically different from the last century.

"The last few years have been busy (with hurricanes), but the 1930s to 1960s were much more destructive (as measured by wind speeds) than the last ten years," Landsea said. "That points to the conclusion (that) we're not seeing more destructive hurricanes. I wouldn't claim there's no global warming influence on (hurricane) activity, but I would agree that any such global- warming influence will be pretty small in the future."

CONFRONTING TRAGEDY
My Life
My life is but a weaving
Between my God and me.
I may but choose the colors
He worketh steadily.
Full opt he weaveth sorrow
And I in foolish pride
Forget He sees the upper
And I the underside.
--- John Bannister Tabb, Confederate Army Chaplain

GLOBAL WARMING
LAWSUIT AGAINST U.S
AGENCIES PASSES COURT TEST
ENVIRONMENTAL NEWS SERVICE
August 25, 2005
A federal judge has decided that two environmental groups and four cities [Oakland
California, Boulder, Colorado plius two more] have the right to sue the federal government based on allegations that financial investments made by government
agencies may have harmed the United States by increasing the intensity of global warming.

The ruling Tuesday by Judge Jeffrey White of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California is the first time that a federal court has granted legal standing for a lawsuit exclusively alleging injury from global warming and challenging the federal
government's failure to evaluate the impacts of its actions on the Earth's climate and U.S. citizens.

The case, filed in August 2002 by Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, and four cities, charges that the Export-Import Bank (Ex-Im) and the Oversees Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) have provided financial assistance to oil and other fossil fuel projects without first evaluating the projects' global warming impacts to the United
States.

The unprecedented lawsuit alleges that OPIC and Ex-Im illegally provided over $32 billion in financing and insurance for oil fields, pipelines and coal-fired power plants over the past ten years without assessing their contribution to global warming, or their impact on the U.S. environment as required under the National Environmental
Policy Act (NEPA).
The cities of Oakland, Arcata, California and Santa Monica, California and
Boulder, Colorado are parties to the lawsuit that the judge ruled may now proceed.

OPIC, an independent government corporation, offers insurance and loan guarantees for projects in developing countries. Ex-Im, an independent governmental agency and wholly-owned government corporation, provides financing support for exports from the United States.

Many of the projects funded by OPIC and Ex-Im are power plants which emit greenhouses gases that the groups and cities allege cause global warming.
The cities and groups argued that the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires environmental assessments of proposed development projects in the United States, should apply to projects overseas financed by U.S. government agencies.
They contend that U.S. law should apply because those projects are producing greenhouse gases which add to global warming, contributing to the degradation of the U.S. environment and harming the members of Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth and residents of the four cities.

The judge denied the motion for summary judgement by OPIC President and CEO Peter Watson and then Ex-Im Vice Chairman and First Vice President Phillip Merrill, explaining that a summary judgment procedure is used to identify and dispose of factually unsupported claims. His ruling means that the environmental coalition's claims deserve to be heard in court and judged on their merits.

The government agencies' claims that the case should be dismissed because the Plaintiffs lack standing, because OPIC and Ex-Im have not taken any action subjecting them to judicial review, and that OPIC is exempt from complying with the National Environmental Policy Act were all rejected by the judge.

To show that Greenpeace deserves standing, which is the right to pursue a case before the court, Greenpeace member and employee Melanie Duchin of Anchorage, Alaska said in a declaration submitted to the court that the actions of OPIC and Ex-Im directly impact her life. Decisions of the agencies are responsible for climate change that contributed to massive fires across the state last summer, and melting of the Arctic ice that makes her biological work more dangerous, Duchin declared.

John Passacantando, executive director of Greenpeace, Inc., based in California and Washington, D.C., explained that his group's 250,000 members "seek to increase funding for projects that increase renewable energy deployment."
"Global warming is Greenpeace's ongoing priority campaign worldwide,"
Passacantando declared. "The current campaign is focused on monitoring accelerating capital investment in energy projects in developing countries."
Norman Dean, executive director of Washington, DC- based Friends of the Earth (FOE), explained in his declaration that together with the other member groups of Friends of the Earth International in 70 countries, his 300,000 member group works to focus the attention of the public, our members, and government decision makers on the government financing and subsidies provided to fossil fuel use and
combustion.

"These subsidies are often funded with the use of taxpayer funds, including those of our members," Dean stated to explain why his group should be granted the standing to pursue the lawsuit.

For the City of Arcata, California, Deputy Director of Environmental Services Mark Andre declared that over the period 1887 to 2000 temperatures monitored five miles south of the city increased "about 2.1 degrees Fahrenheit." Andre said annual rainfall amounts have decreased about ten percent between 1857 and 2000, but extreme wet weather events have become more frequent.

Andre declared that the sea level along the California coast has "risen by about four inches" and is projected to rise up to "3.5-35 inches between 1990 and 2100."

As the sea rises, Arcata's low-lying lands would be inundated with sea water, negatively affecting the city's wastewater treatment plant, storm water and sewage infrastructure and a wildlife refuge, Andre declared.

Judge White, who was appointed by President George W. Bush in 2002, concluded that evidence offered by the plaintiff groups and cities "is sufficient to demonstrate it is reasonably probable that emissions from projects supported by OPIC and Ex-Im ... will threaten Plaintiffs' concrete interests."

The judge highlighted evidence demonstrating that "projects supported by OPIC and Ex-Im are directly or indirectly responsible for approximately 1,911 million tonnes of carbon dioxide and methane emissions annually, which equals nearly eight percent of the world's emissions and is equivalent to one third of the total carbon emissions from the United States in 2003."

OPIC and Ex-Im argued that most large energy-related projects in which either agency is involved would proceed without their support. But the judge was persuaded by evidence submitted by the cities and groups demonstrating a stronger link between the agencies' assistance and the energy-related projects. "For example," he wrote, "Ex-Im has stated that it 'supports export sales that otherwise would not have gone forward.'"

"This ruling is a wake up call for the federal government to tackle the growing environmental and human impacts of global warming," said FOE's Dean.
"This case once again highlights the fact that global warming pollution doesn't recognize political borders," said Kert Davies, research director of Greenpeace. "The judge acknowledged that these taxpayer funded projects in other countries have impact back home in the United States."

Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown said, "Tragically, the federal government is violating federal law, which requires an assessment of cumulative impacts. This injures the citizens of Oakland, and every person in this country. We'll fight as long as it takes to get federal law properly enforced."

The government agencies do not comment on litigation while it is still before the courts. Phillip Merrill, who was Vice Chairman and First Vice President of the Export-Import Bank at the time the lawsuit was filed, rose to become President and Chairman of the Bank, and then stepped down from that position when his term ended on July 20, 2005.

The judge's decision is found online at:
http://www.climatelawsuit.org

WEAPONS SALES WORLDWIDE
RISE TO HIGHEST LEVELS SINCE
2000; U.S. LEADS RACE WITH
ONE-THIRD OF ALL SALES
THOM SHANKER
New York Times
August 30, 2005

WASHINGTON, Aug. 29 - The value of military weapons sales worldwide jumped
in 2004 to the highest level since 2000, driven by arms deals with developing nations, especially India, Saudi Arabia and China, according to a new Congressional study.

The total of arms sales and weapons transfer agreements to both industrialized and developing nations was nearly $37 billion in 2004, according to the study.
That total was the largest since 2000, when global arms sales reached $42.1 billion, and was far above the 2003 figure of $28.5 billion.

The United States once again dominated global weapons sales, signing deals worth $12.4 billion in 2004, or 33.5 percent of all contracts worldwide. But that was down from $15.1 billion in 2003.

The share of American arms contracts specifically with developing nations was $6.9 billion in 2004, or 31.6 percent of all such deals, up slightly from $6.5 billion in 2003.

Russia was second in global arms sales, with $6.1 billion in agreements, or 16.5 percent of all such contracts, a notable increase from its $4.4 billion in sales in 2003. In 2004, Russia signed arms transfer deals worth $5.9 billion with the developing world, 27.1 percent of the global total, up from $4.3 billion in 2003.
Britain was third in arms transfer agreements to the developing world in 2004, signing contracts worth $3.2 billion, while Israel ranked fourth, with deals worth $1.2 billion. France followed with $1 billion.

The report, "Conventional Arms Transfers to Developing Nations," is published by the Congressional Research Service, a division of the Library of Congress.
The annual study, which was delivered to Congress on Monday, is considered by academic experts to be the most thorough compilation of facts and figures on global weapons sales available in the public domain.

The study uses figures in 2004 dollars, with figures for other years adjusted to account for inflation.

The statistics in the report "illustrate how global patterns of conventional arms transfers have changed in the post-cold-war and post-Persian-Gulf-war years," Richard F. Grimmett, a specialist in national defense at the Congressional Research Service, wrote in the introduction to the study.

"Relationships between arms suppliers and recipients continue to evolve in response to changing political, military and economic circumstances," he said. "Nonetheless, the developing world continues to be the primary focus of foreign arms sales activity by conventional weapons suppliers."

The study found that arms sales to developing nations in 2004 totaled nearly $21.8 billion, a substantial increase over the $15.1 billion in 2003. That was 58.9 percent of all arms sales agreements worldwide for last year.

Over the last four years, China has purchased more weapons than any other nation in the developing world, signing $10.4 billion in deals from 2001 to 2004. Such statistics could be used by those in the United States government who have argued against any decision by the European Union to lift its arms embargo against China.

For that same four-year period, India ranked second, with $7.9 billion in arms purchases, and Egypt was third, with $6.5 billion in deals.

But India surpassed China in total purchases in 2004, agreeing to buy $5.7 billion in arms.

Saudi Arabia was second in signing arms deals last year, with contracts valued at $2.9 billion, and China was third in 2004, signing $2.2 billion in contracts for arms purchases.

"Presently, there appear to be fewer large weapons purchases being made by
developing nations in the Near East," Mr. Grimmett wrote, while relatively larger purchases are being made by developing nations in Asia, "led principally by China and India."

According to the study, the four major West European arms suppliers --- Britain, France, Germany and Italy --- significantly increased their collective share of arms sales with developing nations between 2003 and 2004, rising to $4.8 billion in 2004 from $830 million in 2003.

U.S POVERTY RATE
RISES TO 12.7%, UP ONE
MILLION PEOPLE FROM 2003
ASSOCIATED PRESS
August 30, 2005

The nation's poverty rate rose to 12.7% of the population last year, the fourth consecutive annual increase, the Census Bureau said Tuesday.
The percentage of people without health insurance didn't change.
Overall, there were 37 million people living in poverty, up 1.1 million people from 2003. Asians were the only ethnic group to show a decline in poverty --- from 11.8% in 2003 to 9.8% last year. The poverty rate among the elderly declined as well, from 10.2% in 2003 to 9.8% last year.

The last decline in overall poverty was in 2000, when 31.1 million people lived under the threshold --- 11.3% of the population.

The number of people without health insurance grew from 45 million to 45.8 million. At the same time, the number of people with health insurance coverage grew by two million last year.

Charles Nelson, an assistant division chief at the Census Bureau, said the percentage of uninsured remained steady because of an "increase in government coverage, notably Medicaid and the state children's health insurance program, that offset a decline in employment-based coverage."

The median household income, meanwhile, stood at $44,389, unchanged from 2003. Among racial and ethnic groups blacks had the lowest median income and Asians the highest. Median income refers to the point at which half of households earn more and half earn less.

Regionally, income declined only in the Midwest, down 2.8% to $44,657. The South was the poorest region and the Northeast and the West had the highest median incomes.

The increase in poverty came despite strong economic growth, which helped create 2.2 million jobs last year.

Sheldon Danziger, co-director of the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan, said the poverty number is still much better than the 1980s and early 1990s.

"The good news is that poverty is a lot lower than it was in 1993, but we went through a hell of an economic boom," Mr. Danziger said. "Nobody is predicting we're going to go through another economic boom like that."

The poverty threshold differs by the size and makeup of a household. For instance, a family of four with two children was considered living in poverty if income was $19,157 or less. For a family of two with no children, it was $12,649. For a person 65 and over living alone, it was 9,060.

The estimates on poverty, uninsured and income are based on supplements to the bureau's Current Population Survey, and are conducted over three months, beginning in February, at about 100,000 households nationwide.

The only city with a million or more residents that exhibited a significant change in poverty level last year was New York City, which saw the rate increase from 19% to 20.3%.

CORPORATE PROFITS
RISE SHARPLY DESPITE
MANUFACTURING SOFTNESS
JOE PRECIPHS
Wall Street Journal
September 1, 2005

Corporate profits are soaring despite sluggish growth in manufacturing and a slight slowdown in the U.S. economy.

Second-quarter corporate profits rose a sharp 6.9% from the first quarter, unadjusted for inflation and not annualized, as the gross domestic product posted a 3.3% increase, adjusted for inflation and at an annual rate, the Commerce Department said, following its initial estimate of 3.4%. Consumer spending, business investment and exports rose, contributing to the growth in GDP, while business-inventory investment fell.

Some analysts were encouraged by the report, anticipating robust economic growth in the third quarter, while others were somewhat muted in their response.
"Given the sharp swing in inventory accumulation, the composition of GDP in Q2 still supports the expectation of strong growth in Q3," Goldman Sachs economists said. "However, given fast-moving developments in the energy markets, the likely near-term disruptions from Hurricane Katrina, and the fact that the inventory swing was modestly smaller than first reported, our current estimate of 5% annualized growth looks a bit high."

Businesses cut inventories by $6.4 billion in the second quarter, which subtracted 1.99 percentage points from GDP, the Commerce Department said.
The Purchasing Management Association of Chicago also announced that its seasonally adjusted index of area business activity plummeted more than 14 points from July to August. The drop is considered a strong indicator of narrowed manufacturing activity in that part of the country. It also represents the first gloomy appraisal of economic conditions after more than two years of favorable reports, the association said. Although the Chicago index is considered to be somewhat erratic by some analysts, the drop was significant enough for many to take notice.

The increase in corporate profits has some economists speculating about how that good fortune will play out in the job market. The Commerce Department reported that second-quarter pretax corporate profits were up 17.7% from the year-earlier period, while after-tax profits were up 11.5% year-to-year.

Still, wages remain depressed and the cost of living for many workers continues to rise, due in part to soaring energy prices. The unemployment rate is holding steady at five percent.

A.V. Krebs contributes a regular column "Calamity Howler" to the bi-monthly The
Progressive Populist. Sample copies of the paper and subscriptions can be
obtained at P.O. Box 487, Storm Lake, Iowa 50588 or at
http://www.populist.com

This is good ammunition -- this is a case, or rather thousands of cases, where a genetically engineered product intended as a health supplement caused death and disease.

I will add one note about the eosinophil count -- this is part of the routine "CBC with diff" or complete blood count and is usually presented as a percentage of the total -- normal is under 5%. When counted in absolute numbers, the value is usually given per microliter, not per CC as assumed below, and the normal value is around 100 or 200 per microliter. This correction doesn't alter the arguments presented but may keep a few individuals who read this from worrying about their own lab values.

For those who are interested, I recommend following up the extensive material presented by Crist at the link given in Jeffrey's first paragraph below. And for a more compact presentation, "The Thalidomide of Genetic 'Engineering' " by L R B Mann, D Straton and W E Crist at http://www.connectotel.com/gmfood/trypto.html is excellent.

Jim Diamond, M.D.
Sierra Club Genetic Engineering Committee
jim.diamond@sierraclub.org

Spilling the Beans, August 2005

In my book Seeds of Deception, I bring out new information about the genetically engineered food supplement L-tryptophan, which was responsible for a deadly epidemic in the United States in the 1980s. Much of the research for the chapter came from the work of investigator William Crist. The book cited Crist's report, which was expected to have been posted on a website well in advance of my book's publication. Unfortunately, Crist was unable to update his report at that time. It is now available at www.seedsofdeception.com/Public/L-tryptophan/index.cfm and provides important new evidence, including ways in which the U.S. government apparently hid information in order to protect the biotech industry.

A Deadly Epidemic and the Attempt to Hide its Link to Genetic Engineering
By Jeffrey M. Smith

Author of the international bestseller Seeds of Deception

In October, 1989, 44-year old Kathy Lorio arrived in the medical office of Dr. Phil Hertzman in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Lorio, who had been healthy and active, was suddenly struck with severe pain and a host of debilitating symptoms. Blood tests revealed that her eosinophil count had skyrocketed. The normal concentration of this white blood cell is about 10 per CC. Allergies or asthma can make it rise to 500. Lorio's was over 10,000.

In a coincidence that was destined to save lives, Hertzman referred her to Santa Fe rheumatologist James Mayer, who happened to have recently seen another patient, Bonnie Bishop, with similar symptoms. Bishop was in severe pain, her arms and legs were filled with fluid, she had trouble breathing, and her muscles were so weak she couldn't even sit up. "She slumped like a rag doll."[1] And her eosinophil count was extremely high.

Patient histories revealed that both Bishop and Lorio were taking the food supplement L-tryptophan. Although it was the only supplement common to both patients, the doctors were hesitant to blame L-tryptophan for the disease. It is an essential amino acid, naturally found in turkey and milk, and in supplement form had been consumed safely for years as a treatment for stress, insomnia and depression.

Hertzman checked the literature on eosinophils. One author's name kept coming up-Dr. Gerald Gleich of the Mayo Clinic. Hertzman gave him a call. Gleich told him that two cases weren't enough to draw a conclusion about L-tryptophan. Better wait. They didn't wait long. That same day a third case, also linked to L-tryptophan, was reported in New Mexico. Gleich called the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta and told them about the cluster of patients in New Mexico and the possible link to L-tryptophan.

Within two weeks, three other patients checked into the Mayo Clinic with serious symptoms-one needed a respirator to breathe. All had taken L-tryptophan and they were from different parts of the country. Gleich called the CDC again. He told them it's not limited to New Mexico-it's out and it's deadly. An L-tryptophan alert went nationwide.

Articles began circulating about the mysterious disease. The Albuquerque Journal ran a series about it that eventually won the Pulitzer Prize. The New York Times covered it. As more articles appeared, the phone calls started coming in-first dozens, then hundreds, then thousands: individuals with incurable symptoms, doctors with incurable patients, and stories of horrific symptoms. Some had coughs, rashes, physical weakness, pneumonia, breathing difficulties, hardening of the skin, mouth ulcers, nausea, shortness of breath, muscle spasms, visual problems, hair loss, difficulty with concentration or memory, and paralysis. Not everyone had all the symptoms, but everyone seemed to be in pain-greater pain than doctors had seen before. The disease was named eosinophilia myalgia syndrome, or EMS-eosinophilia because of the high cell count, myalgia because of the muscle pain. In all, about 5,000 - 10,000 people got sick; some are permanently disabled. About 100 people died.

Disease Traced to Genetic Modification

The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) reported on July 11, 1990 that people only got EMS from pills made by Showa Denko, one of the six manufacturers whose L-tryptophan was imported into the U.S. from Japan. Showa Denko's pills had several unique contaminants that were likely to be responsible for the epidemic. Moreover, the manufacturer was genetically engineering bacteria to produce the L-tryptophan more economically. Genes had been inserted into bacteria's DNA in order to produce high concentrations of several enzymes used in its production.

Epidemiologist Michael Osterholm, who helped track the source of the epidemic, said in a Newsday article on August 14, "This obviously leads to that whole debate about genetic engineering." Two weeks later, FDA spokesperson Sam Page was quoted in Science magazine "blasting" Osterholm for raising the issue of genetic engineering, "especially given the impact on the industry."[2]
Diverting Blame

There are numerous ways in which genetically engineered bacteria might lead to unpredicted contaminants. For example:

1. The process of inserting genes can create significant changes in the expression of natural genes throughout the DNA, causing changes in proteins (including enzymes) and their interactions.
2. Genetic engineering can cause mutations and deletions in the DNA, altering its natural functioning and changing what is produced.
3. The bacteria were engineered to produce ingredients in larger concentrations than were normally part of the process to create L-tryptophan. These higher concentrations might interact in unpredictable ways to create new compounds.
4. The L-tryptophan is toxic to the bacteria that create it. As a means of self-preservation, the bacteria might have modified the L-tryptophan, itself, or its environment.

The press reported that Showa Denko had introduced a GM strain of bacteria at Christmas time in 1988. Soon after, they also reduced the amount of carbon in the filter of the manufacturing process from 20 kilos to 10. This change in the filter was just what the young and vulnerable biotech industry needed to protect its reputation. The alternative story diverted the blame away from genetic engineering. This explanation circulated around the world. "The change in the filter was responsible for the epidemic." Or more simply put, "It was bad manufacturing-not genetic engineering."

In 1996, writer William Crist began what would become an eight-year investigation into the cause of the EMS epidemic. He contacted the FDA's biotechnology coordinator, James Maryanski, who told him "We can not rule [genetic engineering] out. . . . However, we are aware of close to two dozen cases of L-tryptophan-linked EMS that occurred before Showa Denko began using their engineered strain. So, there would have to be a cause other than just the mere engineering of the strains. Now, I can't say that definitively because we don't have a lot of information on these earlier cases." Maryanski asserted that "either L-tryptophan itself, or L-tryptophan in combination with something that was the result of the purification process, was probably the more likely cause."[3]

Crist decided to track down the EMS cases that Maryanski described-those caused by L-tryptophan produced before the genetically altered bacterium was introduced in December 1988. He quickly discovered CDC studies that identified about 100 pre-epidemic cases, not two dozen. And since reported cases of EMS were far less than actual cases, the true number, using the CDC's estimated ratio for unreported incidents, was in the hundreds-all apparently from individuals who had ingested Showa Denko's pills manufactured before December 1988. This fact clearly dismantled the change-in-the-filter theory as the cause of the disease. But it didn't explain how the contaminants got into Showa Denko's L-tryptophan.
Crist spoke with several attorneys who represented EMS victims. They had gathered significant evidence for their lawsuits, which were eventually settled with Showa Denko for about $2 billion. In one company memo obtained by an attorney, Crist discovered a significant fact. The bacterium introduced in December 1988 was called Strain 5. The preceding three strains, introduced starting on October 22, 1984, were all genetically modified. This was a revelation. It countered the FDA's argument that illnesses "that occurred before Showa Denko began using their engineered strain" meant that "there would have to be a cause other than [genetic engineering]." But they were all engineered!

As he looked at the memo, Crist wondered why the FDA didn't know about the earlier GM strains. They had access to a lot more information he did. Then his eyes rose to the top of the document to see a fax imprint: "FDA September 17, 1990." It had been faxed by the FDA! They knew back in 1990 that the earlier strains were modified, but in 1996, the FDA's biotech coordinator James Maryanski was still claiming ignorance.

An even greater omission occurred when Douglas Archer, deputy director of the FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, testified before Congress in July 1991 about the epidemic. Not only did he not discuss the earlier bacterial strains, he never even mentioned genetic engineering. Instead, he blamed the disease on "the dangers inherent in the various health fraud schemes that are being perpetrated upon segments of the American public." The FDA used this logic to take all L-tryptophan, GM or not, off the market.

According to a 2000 article in the Rutgers Law Journal, "Political pressures have played a role in the FDA's decision to ban L-tryptophan as well as its desire to increase its regulatory power over dietary supplements."[4] In its FDA Dietary Supplement Task Force report on June 15, 1993, it states, "The Task Force considered various issues in its deliberations, including ... what steps are necessary to ensure that the existence of dietary supplements on the market does not act as a disincentive to drug development." According the Rutgersarticle, "This is a particularly disturbing issue," as it shows that developing FDA guidelines "has far more to do with eliminating competition in the pharmaceutical industry than preserving the public health." In the case of L-tryptophan, the FDA simultaneously protected prescription drugs for stress, insomnia and depression, as well as the entire biotech industry. In retrospect, when FDA's Sam Page told Science that it was better not to discuss genetic engineering, "especially given the impact on the industry," it turns out he was describing the motivation and strategy that would guide the agency for years.

Sobering Lessons Unheeded

Many studies have verified that the process of genetic engineering can produce unpredicted toxins or allergens. Nevertheless, the FDA does not require any additional safety testing for GM products, whether they are food crops or supplements. Thus, if that same deadly L-tryptophan were first introduced today, it would get on the market.

The EMS epidemic took years to identify and was almost missed. The only reason it was discovered was because the disease had three concurrent characteristics: it was rare, acute, and came on quickly. What would happen if all three characteristics had not been in place? What if it took 20 years for onset or only impacted the next generation? What if it produced only mild symptoms like frequent colds? What if it created serious diseases that were common, like cancer, heart-disease, obesity or diabetes? The epidemic might remain undiscovered for decades.

What then of the thousands of products currently being fed to US citizens that contain ingredients from genetic modification? Might they be creating problems that don't have all three characteristics? Are they contributing to the doubling of food-related illnesses in the United States between 1994 and 2001, corresponding to the time when many of these products were introduced? We don't know, because no one is looking. And even if we were, derivatives from the four major GM crops, soy, corn, cottonseed, and canola, are found in the majority of processed foods. Unlike L-tryptophan, if common food ingredients were creating health problems, identifying the source might be impossible.

In spite of these facts, and ignoring the thousands of victims of GM L-tryptophan, U.S. regulators continue to make the baseless statement that "millions of people have been eating genetically engineered products for years and no one has gotten hurt."

Dissatisfied with the way that the FDA is protecting their health, more and more people have chosen to protect themselves by avoiding GM foods altogether. Here too, the FDA stands in the way. More than 90 percent of Americans want GM foods labeled. Most industrialized nations require labeling. But the FDA has an official mandate to promote biotechnology. They know that more than half of those surveyed say they would avoid GM foods if they were labeled. To protect industry profits, the FDA ignores the desires of nine out of ten Americans.

There is no indication that another EMS epidemic will emerge from another GM food or supplement. But with obesity, diabetes, migraines, allergies, and many other ailments skyrocketing in the U.S., there is no guarantee that another GM-related epidemic is not already upon us.

To learn more about the potential dangers of GM foods, to find out how to shop GM-free, and to read the excellent report by William Crist, visit www.seedsofdeception.com/Public/L-tryptophan/index.cfm.

Spilling the Beans is a monthly column available at www.responsibletechnology.org. Publishers and webmasters may offer this article or monthly series to your readers at no charge, by emailing column@responsibletechnology.org. Individuals may read the column each month by subscribing to a free newsletter at www.responsibletechnology.org.
References
[1] Barbara Deane, "Anatomy of an Epidemic," Reader's Digest, April 1991
[2] P. Raphals, "Does medical mystery threaten biotech?" Science, vol. 249, no. 619, 1990
[3] William E. Crist, The Toxic L-Tryptophan Epidemic, see www.seedsofdeception.com/Public/L-tryptophan/index.cfm.
[4] Joshua H. Beisler, L-tryptophan Section from "Dietary Supplements and Their Discontents: FDA Regulation and the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994, Rutgers Law Journal, Winter 2000, see www.seedsofdeception.com/utility/showArticle/?objectID=263.

© Copyright 2005 by Jeffrey M. Smith. Permission is granted to reproduce this in whole or in part.

For Basra's Christians, Hussein era the good old days
Shiite-dominated city's minorities say repression on rise

- Timothy M. Phelps, Newsday
Sunday, August 28, 2005

Basra, Iraq -- For the Christians in Basra, the
downfall of Saddam Hussein has meant a terrible
loss of religious freedom.

The social club where Yousef Lyon and his
friends would gather in the evening to play
dominoes, where families danced or listened to
live music on holidays, is closed. Wedding
celebrations are held quietly at home.

"Of course, during the Saddam regime, it was
better," said Lyon, 40, a member of the city's
small Armenian community. "Now we are afraid from
the religious parties that maybe they will throw
a bomb at us."

Not just the Christians, but many of the city's
minorities -- from obscure sects like the ancient
Sabeans to the sizable Sunni Muslim community - -
live in fear of the hard-line Shiite religious
parties and their militias that now rule Iraq's
second-largest city.

Freedom has been curtailed for women, regardless
of their religion. Several decades ago, almost no
woman in Basra covered her head. Now, they all
do, under fear of harassment or worse.

Women working for foreign companies or
governments, and those considered to have loose
morals, have been marked for death by the
militants -- two Iraqi sisters who worked in the
laundry at the U.S. compound in Basra were
assassinated last year.

Basra is an ancient port city with a proud
cosmopolitan history, where Christians, Jews,
Sunnis, Shiites and many other groups lived in
relative peace for hundreds of years, according
to local historians. The Jews left en masse in
the years following the founding of Israel in
1948. Now, although no one keeps records or
statistics, other minorities are leaving as well.

"Saddam Hussein was a criminal and an oppressor.
Everybody knew that," said Majid, 45, a Sunni
taxi driver who said he was afraid to be
identified further. "These new parties cry for
society, but try to drink the blood of the
people."

Hussein murdered tens of thousands of Iraqis,
most of them Kurds in the north and Shiites in
the south. But he did not see other minorities as
a threat because of their smaller numbers and
because his regime was secular and not hostile to
other religions or the rights of women, unlike
some of Iraq's current officials.

"You can't say no to those people; they will
kill you," Majid said of the current leaders
here. "Even just if you have a different
viewpoint, you will have a problem."

Basra is a city of 2 million people,
predominantly Shiite. An estimated 200,000 to
300,000 Sunnis, and perhaps 5,000 or 6,000
Christians, live in the area.

On a recent Friday evening, about two dozen
Presbyterians gathered for a service designed for
those who must work on the Christian Sabbath.
Their pastor recently fled Basra in fear, so a
young, recent graduate in theology presided.

"At the beginning, we were very happy when the
British army came to Basra. Everything was
totally beautiful," said Zuhair Fathallah, a
plastic surgeon who is an elder of the National
Evangelical Presbyterian Church.

While most of Fathallah's fellow parishioners
disliked Hussein, they were free to practice
their faith. But a year after he was overthrown,
things began to change in Basra. In April 2004,
one of the Shiite militias revolted against the
British army. Christians who had been licensed to
sell alcohol under Hussein were attacked and
sometimes killed by the militants. The church
started to receive threatening letters intended
to extort money, Fathallah said.

"The fanatic people think that if you don't obey
(their) law, they will move against you," he
added.

Social activities have been curtailed. The
nursery school is closed. There is no more Sunday
school because of fear the school bus will be
attacked. The church had 300 mostly large
families during its heyday 30 or more years ago.
Now just 35 families belong -- a total of 150
people.

"If we can survive, we will be a good church,"
Fathallah said. "Basra is the best city, and we
are good survivors."

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/08/28/MNGS5EEJOM1.DTL
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
©2005 San Francisco Chronicle

IMPORTANT ALERT TO CALIFORNIANS!

Last year, Mendocino County California became the first county in the U.S.
to ban genetically engineered (GE) crops. Since then, two more California
counties and two cities have followed Mendocino's example, starting a
domino-effect of similar anti-GE ordinances across the nation. Fearing the
contagious spread of BioDemocracy in North America, the Biotech Bullies are
striking back. In the past several months, 14 U.S. states, prodded by
Monsanto and the Farm Bureau, have made it illegal for local communities to
ban GE crops. Two recently introduced bills (AB 1508 and SB 1056) in the
California legislature would make California the 15th state to eliminate
local communities' rights to ban or otherwise regulate genetically
engineered seeds. This "preemption" bill would overturn GE-Free
victories in Mendocino, Trinity, and Marin counties, as well as the cities
of Arcata and Point Arena, and prohibit local communities from banning or
regulating genetically engineered crops in the future. Take action today
to stop the Biotech Bullies from taking away our democratic rights in
California!

http://www.demaction.org/dia/organizations/oca/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=1139(
Sierra Club's Genetic Engineering Committee agrees with this action.)

PESTICIDES SPAWNING SUPERWEEDS

http://www.researchinformation.co.uk/pest/contents/01-Contents%20Aug%202005.pdf
study in the recent issue of the journal Outlooks on Pesticide Management
reports that there are now 15 weed species that have complete resistance
to the world's most widely used herbicide, Monsanto's glyphosate.
Researchers say most of these "superweeds" have developed resistance over
time, due to long-term overuse of the chemical. Glyphosate, most commonly
applied as Monsanto's Roundup, has been in heavy use globally for over
30 years. The study warns these superweeds pose "serious" problems to
farmers if new control strategies are not developed. Of course the best way
to avoid spawning superweeds is to ban genetically engineered crops and to
adopt organic farming practices.

http://www.organicconsumers.org/ge/superweed081905.cfm

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-brooks27aug27,0,6635626.story

Not your daddy's creationists
ROSA BROOKS

August 27, 2005

SOMETIMES IT seems like secular intellectuals just can't win. In the 1980s and '90s, they were attacked by the right for their "relativism" - an alleged refusal to accept the existence of absolute truth. Today, they're under attack once more, only this time the right is mad because secular intellectuals aren't relativist enough.

At any rate, that appears to be the charge put forward by conservatives who advocate the teaching of so-called intelligent design.

These are not your daddy's creationists. When scientists and other members of the reality-based community declare that evolution is the only valid and provable account of our planet's natural history, intelligent design boosters don't cite the Bible. Instead, they earnestly insist that no one ought to claim a monopoly on truth, and that in the interests of intellectual and moral pluralism, "alternatives" to evolution should get a fair hearing in schools.

This week, Arizona Sen. John McCain became the latest Republican politician to urge that "all points of view" be presented to students studying the origins of life. He joined President Bush and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), who argued recently that intelligent design should be taught alongside evolution because people in "a pluralistic society should have access to a broad range of fact, of science, including faith."

It's the new relativism: when scientific truth can't be squared with your religion or ideology, wax eloquent about the value of pluralism and intellectual diversity.

The new relativism marks quite a shift from the arguments normally employed by the right. Remember the "culture wars" of the late '80s and early '90s, when conservatives in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, such as William Bennett and Lynne Cheney, inveighed against the "relativism" that allegedly dominated the thinking of American intellectuals?

Their critique drew on the work of prominent conservatives in the academy, including the late University of Chicago philosopher Allan Bloom, who condemned multiculturalism, postmodernism and relativism in his influential 1987 book, "The Closing of the American Mind." And, speaking to American students in 1987, Pope John Paul II denounced academic pluralists who think that "ultimate questions about human life and destiny have no final answers or that all beliefs are of equal value."

In the United States, prominent evangelical Christian authors such as Frank Peretti and Chuck Colson also joined the chorus, warning that relativism would undermine American society.

So it's a tad ironic that conservatives and the religious right are now arguing that intelligent design should be taught on the grounds of intellectual pluralism. Needless to say, from the perspective of virtually all reputable scientists, evolution isn't just one theory among many, it's the only
scientifically proven
[sic]
account of the origin and development of life on Earth. Denying evolution isn't merely "another perspective." It's like insisting that the sun revolves around the Earth, or that the moon is inhabited by little green guys. Whatever happened to truth?

Of course, maybe we secular types are wrong to keep resisting the right's new relativism. What would happen if we embraced it? Sure, we'd have to tolerate a lot of claptrap about intelligent design in the classroom, but think of the potential benefits.

If the right is sincerely dedicated to supporting pluralism and openness, surely they'd have no further objection to sex education classes that urge condom use, for instance, as long as abstinence-only arguments get equal time. And presumably they wouldn't mind if teachers tell kids that homosexuality is a legitimate form of human behavior, as long as teachers also explain that some people consider it a sin. Nor would conservatives have any basis to object to education about abortion rights, as long as their perspective is also represented.

Granted, there are problems with this approach. For one thing, the school year would need to be lengthened to accommodate all the new curricular material. Because if intelligent design must be taught just because a few crackpot scientists are on board with it, we'll also have to teach about the UFO landings at Roswell and the numerous Elvis sightings that occur each year.

We also would have to brace ourselves for the long-term consequences of the free-for-all ushered in by the right's new relativism: the hospitals that would guarantee equal employment opportunities to faith-based cardiac surgeons who eschew anatomy classes for prayer, and the airlines that would allow faith-based aeronautics to replace modern physics during the design phase of their aircraft.

Never mind. For now, I'm going to stick with old-fashioned thinking. At least when it comes to science, there is such a thing as absolute truth.