Monday, January 19, 2004
'We can't reunite thousands of mothers with children wrongly taken from them'
Thousands of parents who had children taken away from them on the evidence of the controversial paediatrician Professor Sir Roy Meadow will not have them returned.
Ministers are to review as many as 5,000 civil cases of families affected over the past 15 years by Prof Meadow's now-discredited theory of Munchausen Syndrome By Proxy. This accused mothers of harming their children to draw attention to themselves.
Many mothers say that they have been vindicated in their insistence that they were wrongly accused and now want their children back. However, Margaret Hodge, the minister for children, has ruled out any widespread return.
In an interview with The Telegraph, Mrs Hodge said that it would be wrong to raise the hopes of the families torn apart by the doctor's theory. It was called into question following three major miscarriages of criminal justice and is being investigated by the General Medical Council.
Mrs Hodge said that the exact number of civil cases where Prof Meadow's theory had been used to remove children from mothers was unknown, but could run into "thousands or even tens of thousands".
She added, however: "If a miscarriage of justice was made 10 or 15 years ago, what is in the child's interest now? If the adoption order was made on the back of Meadow's evidence and that was 10 years ago, what is in the real interest of the child? If they were taken as babies the only parent they know is the adopted one. It is incredibly difficult. It is a really tough call to make.
"The sort of families that are coming forward are heartbroken families. But if the child was adopted at birth the sensible thing to do is to let it stay. As children's minister my prime interest has to be the interests of the child."...
...Prof Meadow's theory was discredited following the cases of three mothers who were wrongly accused of killing their children on his evidence. Sally Clark was cleared on appeal, Trupti Patel was acquitted and Angela Cannings, who was jailed in 2002 for murdering her two baby sons, had the conviction quashed last December. On that occasion, three High Court judges said some of the professor's evidence was "simply wrong".
The Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, is examining a further 250 criminal trials involving Munchausen's Syndrome By Proxy, to see whether more mothers imprisoned for murdering their babies might be innocent.
Mrs Hodge is likely to ask local authorities to search through their records to find all family law cases involving Meadow. Some campaigners estimate that 5,000 children were taken into care because of Prof Meadow.
In these civil cases, children were taken from their mothers on a balance of probability that they were harming them or might harm them in the future. In criminal cases, harm has to be proved beyond reasonable doubt.
Another option being considered by Mrs Hodge is to appoint a judge to trawl through the records of each authority to identify possible miscarriages of justice, but this would prove costly....
Blood on the virtual carpet: tempers flare as 'editor' is thrown out of online town with 80,000 inhabitants
Peter Ludlow is not just a computer gaming enthusiast. He's also a philosophy professor, with an abiding interest in the relationship between the real and the virtual worlds. So when the world's most successful virtual-reality game, the Sims, launched an online version just over a year ago, he didn't just join in for fun; he also decided that he could carry out research for his next book.
And that was where the trouble started. Alphaville, the game's fictional city, could have gone in any number of directions, depending on the arbitrary decisions of the online game players who make up its people through their chosen "avatars", or game characters.
Alphaville could have become a socialist utopia, a grand experiment in free-market capitalism or simply a reflection of the allure and the pitfalls of any real Western city.
As it was, Alphaville quickly turned into a hellhole of scam-artists, crime syndicates, mafia extortion artists and teenage girls turning tricks to make ends meet. It became a breeding ground for the very worst in human nature - a benign-sounding granny, for example, who specialised in taking new players into her confidence, then showered them in abuse. Then there was the scam-artist known as Evangeline, who started out equally friendly and then stole new players' money.
Professor Ludlow, who teaches at the University of Michigan, decided he would chronicle Alphaville's seamy reality by setting up a newspaper,The Alphaville Herald, run by his game alter-ego. He reported on the scams and the prostitution rings, and also interviewed the protagonists. (Evangeline, his most intriguing source, turned out, in real life, to be a spectacularly warped teenage boy.)
But that was before his dispassionate academic inquiry ran smack into the authoritarian brick wall of the game's manufacturer and controller, the California gaming company Electronic Arts.
The Alphaville Herald was closed down and Professor Ludlow's avatar, Urizenus, was kicked out of town. "While we regret it," Electronic Arts told him in a letter, "we feel it is necessary for the good of the game and its community."
Officially, the reason for Professor Ludlow's expulsion was that he included links in his inside-the-game newspaper to outside websites, including one that gave players instructions on how to cheat. What Professor Ludlow and a growing band of academics and sympathisers believe, however, is that his efforts to publicise the tawdry fantasy activities of real-life teenagers were becoming simply too uncomfortable for Electronic Arts to stomach....
No blister agent' in Iraq shells
Three dozen mortar shells uncovered in Iraq earlier this month had no chemical agents, the Danish army says....
23 Killed (2 Americans), 130 Injured (including 6 Americans) in Baghdad Car Bombing
...When, 9 or 10 months after an army conquers a place, its HQ is not safe from attack, this is always a bad sign. For those who keep making Germany and Japan analogies, I ask you if MacArthur's HQ was getting blown up in Tokyo in April of 1946.
Friday, January 16, 2004
God Hates Unmarried Losers
It's BushCo's $1.5 bil plan to let the homophobic Christian Right dictate love. Whee!
By Mark Morford
Man, those inner-city poor people sure are dumb.
Just look at 'em, popping out babies like crazy and draining the welfare system like there's no tomorrow, all while remaining completely unable to either get or stay married in their sad, un-Christian, gangsta-rap lives. Pathetic.
And oh my God, those damnable gays. Would you just look at them, fighting for basic human rights, whining about wanting to get married, as if they knew anything about God's manly, flag-waving, 100 percent heterosexual love?
Clearly it's some sort of flaming pagan sorcery those gays used to persuade all those misguided states to suddenly begin to offer more and more rights to gay couples, granting civil unions and nearly full benefits and allowing them to copulate and hold hands in public and sodomize each other with strange phallic-shaped devices in the privacy of their own homes, even in Texas.
I mean, what the hell is the world coming to? And what, pray tell, is a self-righteous, homophobic, God-thumping, conservative administration that constantly kowtows to the preening Christian Right to do about all this?
Why, hurl $1.5 billion of your tax dollars at the problem, that's what. Educate them dumb poor people on how to fly right and learn more "interpersonal skills" so they can get married -- you know, just like their much happier and more heavily narcotized, sanctimonious, Botoxed, Zolofted, blank-eyed Republican masters -- er, fellow citizens....
...Or maybe "healthy" marriage is when your miserable GOP wife stays home and raises the disgruntled kids and keeps her big trap shut like a good wife should, and, as a reward, she gets all the Botox and therapy and Nordstrom shopping sprees your credit card can handle. Yes. That must be it. Isn't that right, senator?
Interesting, really, how difficult it is to track down one pure example of a healthy and beautiful and communicative Christian marriage -- isn't it, Dubya? We could ask Laura, but it looks like she's busy being a nice GOP token wife, smiling that perpetual wooden-mannequin smile off in a corner somewhere, reading books to baffled children, harmless as a sterile bunny. ...
"The Bible Alone"? Not for John Calvin!
When we seek answers to churchly and societal issues in the Bible alone, citing the Reformation principle of sola scriptura, we are actually contradicting the Reformers.
By Chris Armstrong | posted 01/16/2004
There's no question that the Bible is at the very center of conservative Christianity in America. When tough legislation limited access to the Bible in our public schools, Christians sought creative ways around the wall, legal prosecution notwithstanding. When translators set out to "modernize" the Bible's gender language, conservatives kicked up a storm. When lawmakers removed a Ten Commandments monument from a courthouse, Christian protesters mobbed the scene.
All of this activity hearkens back to the Reformation tradition of Sola Scriptura—the belief that the Bible should be the ultimate authority for the church, trumping all human traditions. For many conservatives, this authority is not only unquestioned within the church, but extended beyond the church to society at large. The dream of some evangelicals is a country—perhaps some day even a world—where every moral and political question is submitted to the Bible, which will provide answers both obvious and immediately applicable.
Worth asking, however, is whether we really understand what Sola Scriptura means within the church itself. Does this Reformation principle mean that the Bible yields up obvious answers to all our questions? That we need not turn to any interpretation of Scripture other than the conclusions each of us draws from our own common-sense interaction with Scripture? That the great teachers in the church's earlier eras—the "church fathers"—should have nothing to say to us today, for they represent nothing but "human traditions"?
Clearly even the most conservative believers have never been able to live as if they are not influenced by the teachings of other people—past and present—on how to interpret their Bibles. Everybody reads through a set of lenses created by the church, the family, and the schools that have shaped them.
Of course, evangelicals have expended tremendous resources of scholarship on trying to determine the most basic, literal meanings of any given Bible passage. They have rejected outright the fanciful, allegorical interpretations of many medieval exegetes.
But there come issues—more numerous than some are willing to admit—where the Bible yields its direction more reluctantly. For faithfully biblical answers to these questions, we are thrown back on the resources of church tradition....
Islamophobia
...It has become increasingly clear since 9/11 that western intelligence agencies have completely failed to understand or to penetrate the networks of Islamist ultra-radicalism. No intelligence agency predicted the attacks on New York or Washington, DC. Nor were there any warnings of the attacks since then in Kenya, Bali or Morocco. Intelligence briefings linking Saddam Hussein to anthrax attacks in the US, or to a nuclear and chemical weapons programme in Iraq, have all proved wildly inaccurate or, as in the case of the documents detailing Saddam's search for nuclear materials in Niger, they were simply made up.
Meanwhile, Tony Blair's neoconservative chums in Washington, immune to the justifiable fears of the Muslim world, talk blithely of moving on from Iraq next year to attack Iran and Syria. They have also invited Franklin Graham, the Christian evangelist who has branded Islam a "very wicked and evil" religion, to be the official speaker at the Pentagon's annual service - and this immediately prior to his departure for Iraq to attempt to convert the people of Baghdad to Christianity.
All the while, the paranoia and bottled-up rage in the Muslim world grows more uncontrollable, and the attacks by Islamic militants gather pace, gaining ever wider global reach and sophistication. As long as British Muslims remain at the receiving end of our rampant Islamophobia, and remain excluded from the mainstream of British life, we can expect only still greater numbers of disenfranchised Muslims in the UK to turn their back on Britain and rally to the extremists.
As Jason Burke points out at the end of his excellent book Al-Qaeda, "The greatest weapon in the war on terrorism is the courage, decency, humour and integrity of the vast proportion of the world's 1.2 billion Muslims. It is this that is restricting the spread of al-Qaeda, not the activities of counter-terrorism experts. Without it, we are lost. There is indeed a battle between the west and men like Bin Laden. But it is not a battle for global supremacy. It is a battle for hearts and minds. And it is a battle that we, and our allies in the Muslim world, are currently losing."
This month's upsurge of rampant Islamophobia in Britain, widely reported in Muslim countries, is the last thing we need in such a desperately volatile climate....
Practice to Deceive
Chaos in the Middle East is not the Bush hawks' nightmare scenario--it's their plan.
By Joshua Micah Marshall
Imagine it's six months from now. The Iraq war is over. After an initial burst of joy and gratitude at being liberated from Saddam's rule, the people of Iraq are watching, and waiting, and beginning to chafe under American occupation. Across the border, in Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, our conquering presence has brought street protests and escalating violence. The United Nations and NATO are in disarray, so America is pretty much on its own. Hemmed in by budget deficits at home and limited financial assistance from allies, the Bush administration is talking again about tapping Iraq's oil reserves to offset some of the costs of the American presence--talk that is further inflaming the region. Meanwhile, U.S. intelligence has discovered fresh evidence that, prior to the war, Saddam moved quantities of biological and chemical weapons to Syria. When Syria denies having such weapons, the administration starts massing troops on the Syrian border. But as they begin to move, there is an explosion: Hezbollah terrorists from southern Lebanon blow themselves up in a Baghdad restaurant, killing dozens of Western aid workers and journalists. Knowing that Hezbollah has cells in America, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge puts the nation back on Orange Alert. FBI agents start sweeping through mosques, with a new round of arrests of Saudis, Pakistanis, Palestinians, and Yemenis.
To most Americans, this would sound like a frightening state of affairs, the kind that would lead them to wonder how and why we had got ourselves into this mess in the first place. But to the Bush administration hawks who are guiding American foreign policy, this isn't the nightmare scenario. It's everything going as anticipated. ...
Thursday, January 15, 2004
The New Mainstream
Two Worlds, Two Cultures
Two worlds. Two cultures. Two markets. Two mainstreams. This is what has become of Christian enterprise in America: a $4.2 billion industry committed to putting out records, books and entertainment with a message that according to Bill Anderson, president of the CBA, formerly known as the Christian Booksellers Association, “aligns with Scripture.”
One has to wonder, however, how all of that $4.2 billion in merchandise could possibly be scripturally sound. Is scriptural integrity the primary motivation for this market or is it something else? My limited understanding of economics is that the primary motivation for any market is usually profit. Secondarily might be the spread of the gospel or the dissemination of the word of God, but I don’t think either of these can account for $4.2 billion of success. There’s something bigger here driving this machine, and I would suggest that it is primarily the fear factor, and the resulting protection that a Christian industry provides a worried and nervous clientele.
Many Christians find the world to be a frightening place, viewing secular culture as hedonistic, vulgar and even demonic. Parents naturally fear for their kids. How will they make it in such a world? What Christian parent wouldn’t acculturate their children in Christian education and alternative entertainment if these were made available to them?
One can see how any environment that provides a safe haven against a perceived hostile world would be very appealing among those who share this view. With a media and entertainment saturated culture, there is no end to what can be opted for in a Christian version, providing a more desirable, worry-free alternative to what is viewed as increasingly offensive and dangerous.
Up until now, I have been calling these two markets “Christian” and “mainstream.” It was a way in which to avoid the less desirable term “secular,” but this is no longer accurate, because "Christian" now can be considered as having its own mainstream. What we have are two very powerful markets operating side by side, utilizing the same principles of business and marketing while claiming to have radically different messages and worldviews. (I personally think these differences are debatable and not as great as touted, but that is for another discussion.)...
...But those outside the Christian culture are just as wary, in like manner, of the Christian label due in part to the political influence of many Christian groups and the aggressive stance taken on cultural issues that conflict with those who have a different worldview. Many in the world have developed a kind of allergic reaction to anything Christian because of this. Bottom line is: we’re afraid of them and they’re afraid of us. Is this what Paul meant by being separate from the world? I wonder.....
Tests Show No Agent in Iraq Mortar Shells
CAMP EDEN, Iraq (AP) - U.S. tests on mortar shells found in Iraq and suspected of containing blister agents have turned up negative, though further tests will be conducted, a Danish army spokesman said Wednesday.
The 36 shells, discovered last week by Danish troops, are believed to be from the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.
Four initial tests by British and Danish experts came up positive for blister agents, Danish spokesman, Capt. Kim Vibe Michelsen, told The Associated Press.
But later tests by U.S. experts from the Iraq Survey Group on five of the shells have shown no trace of chemical weapons, the Danish military said. ...
When Does Politics Become Treason?
"Congressmen who willfully take actions during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled or hanged" - that's what President Abraham Lincoln said during the War Between the States. While none have suggested such extreme measures in the midst of the war on terrorism, Lincoln's approach illustrates the deadly seriousness of political responsibility in wartime and draws a fine line between legitimate political dissent and aiding the enemy. The Supreme Court eventually stopped Lincoln's policy of having treasonous lawmakers arrested and tried before military tribunals, but for decades after the war the late president's Republican Party successfully tagged the Democrats as the "party of treason."
Today's very different Democratic Party is said to be playing with treason - even by outraged leaders within its ranks - to destroy the nation's wartime Republican president. Critics aren't using that word lightly. But with many liberal politicians having cut their teeth in the protest movement against the war in Vietnam - a movement characterized by militant displays of support for the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese enemy - treason is something to be taken lightly. But two important political commentators with large national audiences recently have compiled damning indictments: Mona Charen in her best-selling Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First (Regnery), and Ann Coulter in her blockbuster Treason: Liberal Treachery From the Cold War to the War on Terrorism (Crown/Forum). The main difference from Lincoln's day is that the president's enemies are attacking him in the name of "supporting our troops."...
...A top figure in the national-security community fumes, "Some Democrat leaders are flirting with treason while the Republicans are acting like a bunch of sissies." But it isn't just Senate Republicans, the official concedes. "Where's the fight back from the White House?" Senators and congressmen have been reprimanded, censured, expelled, even put on trial for less. In some of Capitol Hill's pubs wags are urging, tongue in cheek, for Republicans to play hardball the way President Lincoln did. Shortly after signing the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, Lincoln spoke forcefully of the need to arrest, convict and, if necessary, execute congressmen who by word or deed undermined the war effort. At least one congressman was exiled and another awaited the gallows.
"Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier-boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a wily agitator who induces him to desert? This is none the less injurious when effected by getting a father, or brother, or friend, into a public meeting, and there working upon his feelings till he is persuaded to write the soldier-boy that he is fighting in a bad cause, for a wicked Administration of a contemptible Government, too weak to arrest and punish him if he shall desert. I think that in such a case to silence the agitator and save the boy is not only constitutional, but withal a great mercy," Lincoln wrote in June 1863, after the arrest of Rep. Clement L. Vallandigham (D-Ohio)....
Saddam Warned Baathists against Cooperating with Radical Islamists
The New York Times revealed on Wednesday via a leaked document found with Saddam Hussein that the Iraqi dictator forbade his followers in recent months from cooperating with foreign radical Islamist fighters who had infiltrated the country. Saddam appears to have seen the resistance as a way for the Baath to return to power, and feared that the jihadis had different ideas.
Well, folks, if Saddam wouldn't cooperate with the al-Qaeda and other radical Islamists when he was reduced to hiding in a spider hole, he sure as hell wasn't going to give them WMD when he was in his palace in Baghdad! ...
Wednesday, January 14, 2004
Does God exist? What are the odds?
Isn't the divine purely the purview of faith? No multiplication required?
Yes and no, Stephen Unwin, this very nice, surprisingly funny and extremely patient physicist, was explaining to me the other day.
Unwin, 47, is the author of the aforementioned book, The Probability of God: A Simple Calculation That Proves the Ultimate Truth. He's originally from Manchester, England, and was a technical attache to the U.S. Energy Department before becoming a risk analyst for things like nuclear power plants, and then turning his expertise on the Almighty.
"I don't consider anything to be understood until numbers have been applied," Unwin said as I sat blinking silently on the other end of the phone one day last week. "Maybe that's just my bias, but that was the only way I could go about at least convincing myself."
Not me. Numbers bad.
"I understand that. My thinking was, I mean, that was very much the conclusion of what I did, that the faith part is not based on the reasoned assessment of the divine," he said. "I've always been very curious that some people are 100 percent certain that God exists and others are 100 percent certain that he doesn't, and yet we're all confronted with the same types of evidence."
Unwin didn't set out to answer in a deterministic, yes-or-no way the question of whether there is a God.
He just wanted to know what the odds were.
It's a compulsion surely Blaise Pascal, the 17th century French philosopher and mathematician, would understand. Pascal, in his famous "Wager," said, basically, it makes more sense to believe in the existence of a God because if you do, and there is no God, you lose nothing. But if you don't, and God does exist, you could be in deep doo-doo in the afterlife.
Is it audacious to think that the existence of a personal God -- and that is the definition of "God" that Unwin used, as opposed to a pantheistic idea of deity -- could be quantified in a number?
Not if you consider, as Unwin does, that every occurrence involves probability.
"Do you realize that there is some probability that before you complete this sentence, you will be hoofed insensible by a wayward, miniature Mediterranean ass?" he writes in the first line of Probability of God. (That's got to be the best opening line I've read recently outside of a Tom Robbins novel.)
But how do you figure the odds on God? You take Pascal's Wager and apply something called Bayes' Theorem.
Thomas Bayes was a Presbyterian minister in the early 1700s who had more than a passing interest in mathematics. His theorem, which is complicated -- I don't even think my keyboard has the capability of reproducing it, frankly, even if I were so inclined -- figures the relative likelihood that certain evidence will be produced if God exists or doesn't exist.
Starting with the assumption that the probability of whether God exists is a coin toss -- a 50-50 chance -- Unwin uses Bayes' Theorem and six areas of "evidence" to modify the probability.
(If your eyes are glazing over, keep reading. I'm about to wind this math business up. Promise.)
Each of the six areas of evidence -- including "the recognition of goodness," "the existence of evil" and "religious experience" -- is assigned a numeric value (through another mathematical equation I don't understand) and is applied to the original 50 percent, to produce the probability that God exists.
Which is 67 percent, apparently....
The Ethnocentricity of the American Church Growth Movement
by Michael Horton
In October of 1999, a group of missiologists, missionaries, and church leaders gathered in Brazil for an important event sponsored by the World Evangelical Fellowship, based in Singapore. These leaders from fifty-three countries, many of them from the two-thirds world, rallied to the cause of world mission--but with a somewhat surprising twist. As Christianity Today editor David Neff reported, attention came to focus on the criticism of North American paternalism (December 6, 1999). And the form of that paternalism? Pragmatic marketing paradigms, among others.
As Neff reports, Peruvian missiologist Samuel Escobar went after the "management missiology" whose "distinctive note ... is to reduce Christian mission to a manageable enterprise." "Escobar called this statistical approach 'anti-theological' and said it 'has no theological or pastoral resources to cope with the suffering and persecution involved because it is geared to provide guaranteed success.'" He was not alone, as Neff's report observes. "Joseph D'Souza, chair of the All India Christian Council, also indicted missiological trends that 'have tended to turn communication [of the Gospel] into a technique where we market a product called "salvation." The consumer is the sinner and the marketer is the missionary.'" Frustration was expressed concerning the obsession with quantifiable success, where crusades, marketing, and other campaign blitzes were expected to usher in the consummation by the year 2000. But American strategists are not apparently shaken in their confidence. Steve Hoke of Church Resource Ministries responded with a familiar refrain, "If all truth is God's truth, we can borrow principles from marketing. Jesus was very felt-need-oriented in his approach." ...
... Having been a part of a similar gathering of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, with similar concerns, issuing a similar statement (viz.., the 1996 Cambridge Declaration), I was particularly intrigued by the fact that two-thirds world missiological sentiment appears to be far more self-critical than North American Evangelicalism. Our concerns have been somewhat marginalized, while much of the same thinking appears to be emerging out of a quite different context. In my own limited missions experience and travel to two-thirds world churches, I have seen this played out time and time again, with the clear sentiment expressed, "Keep American pragmatism and consumerism out of our churches!"
All of this has led me increasingly to think that many of the movements in American Evangelicalism--especially those purporting to be multicultural and outreach-minded--are actually promoting and exporting a curiously sectarian and ethnocentric religion. No wonder my Reformed and Presbyterian brothers and sisters in rapidly growing churches in Nigeria, Brazil, and China complain of American paternalism. ...
...We must resist the logic, then, which suggests that we need to rid our churches of a substantially Word-and-Sacrament based ministry in order to be truly engaged in outreach, mission, and multicultural unity. A growing chorus of church growth "experts" encourages us to abandon even the sermon in favor of a more entertaining medium, despite the apostolic promise that "faith comes by preaching" --not only in "tradition-bound" churches, but "for the Jew first, and also to the Greek." Modern evangelicals in America have not given up being tradition-bound (as if anybody could), but are merely bound by a narrower, younger, ethnocentric tradition that is deeply indebted to the very worldliness it routinely decries. The logic that comes across in the church growth literature is not only market logic, it's the logic of white, upscale suburban marketing. Ever read a good book or know of a famous church whose goal is to show you how to build a megachurch in a depressed urban area? It's a religion of the mall, by the mall, and for the mall.
Furthermore, make of them what you will, the ancient creeds, confessions, and liturgies represent the most genuinely multicultural agenda. The Gospel preached has been "the power of God unto salvation" in every culture since Jesus issued his great commission....
...So what if Boomers are too lazy to listen to a sermon, participate in a liturgy, and sing the faith of generations that lived before we were graced with their appearance on the stage of human history? And why should a generation that has largely sacrificed little, prospered enormously, lost interest in God and truth, contributed self-esteem to philosophy, and the sit-com to cultural enrichment decide how much of Christianity we keep for the next generation? Are we going to abandon the "cloud of witnesses" across time and geography to satisfy the narcissism of a single generation in a single place? The day that "outreach" is set against God's ordained means of grace is the day that we cease to plant churches of Christ and instead open franchises of religious consumerism. Who feels more at home in the spiritual equivalent of a shopping mall than a middle-class American? Some multiculturalism, isn't it?
Our brothers and sisters gathered in Iguassu, Brazil, this past October might teach us a thing or two about what it really means to be multicultural.
Tuesday, January 13, 2004
Last Copter Out of Baghdad
George Bush is selling out Iraq. Gone are his hard-liners' dreams of setting up a peaceful, prosperous, and democratic republic, a light unto the Middle Eastern nations. The decision makers in the administration now realize these goals are unreachable. So they've set a new goal: to end the occupation by July 1, whether that occupation has accomplished anything valuable and lasting or not. Just declare victory and go home. The tyranny of Saddam Hussein will be over. But a new tyranny will likely take its place: the tyranny of civil war, as rival factions rush into the void. Such is the mess this president seems willing to leave behind in order to save his campaign.
"The Bush game plan is to have pictures of some U.S. troops leaving and the Iraqis opening their own government, the U.S. having presided over the birth of this new embryonic democracy," observes former Clinton White House adviser Sidney Blumenthal. The problem is, there will be no Iraqi democracy. There might not even be a viable Iraqi government. Instead, Baghdad will become Beirut: Iraq's three major religious and ethnic groups, the Sunnis, the Shiites, and the Kurds, will consolidate their respective positions in the center, south, and north of the country, recruit their militias, and get down to fighting for control of the power vacuum that is the post-war "peace."
Once again, as so often in these last few months, an analogy is Vietnam. And, as so often in the last three years, the analogous president is Nixon. ...
QUOTE OF THE DAY
Even when men are plotting to disturb the peace, it is merely to fashion a new peace nearer to the heart's desire....It is not that they love peace less, but that they love their kind of peace more....When [men] go to war, what they want is to impose on their enemies the victor's will and call it peace."
-- St. Augustine, The City of God
Church opens just for yuppies
The group of serious-looking twentysomethings and college students meeting in the ballroom of the Wyndham City Center Hotel near Dupont Circle does not look like a church in utero, but starting at 5 p.m. tomorrow, "Grace DC" becomes the District's newest church.
Its first official service — after several years of "unofficial" gatherings — will include a yuppie demographic that traditionally avoids religious commitment: the single and the metropolitan. Seventy percent of Grace's members are young professionals under 30.
Grace DC is part of an effort by an Atlanta-based Presbyterian denomination to begin a network of hip, theologically conservative churches for young urban professionals in the hearts of America's cities....
..."It's part of a movement to plant churches in cosmopolitan, world-class cities," said the Rev. Stephen Um, whose CityLife Church in Boston has 300 members after 23 months. "We reach out primarily to post-everything professional urbanites and bohemians." ...
The Year of the Fake
Don't think and drive.
That was the message sent out by the FBI to roughly 18,000 law enforcement agencies on Christmas Eve. The alert urged police pulling over drivers for traffic violations, and conducting other routine investigations, to keep their eyes open for people carrying almanacs. Why almanacs? Because they are filled with facts--population figures, weather predictions, diagrams of buildings and landmarks. And according to the FBI Intelligence Bulletin, facts are dangerous weapons in the hands of terrorists, who can use them to "to assist with target selection and pre-operational planning."
But in a world filled with potentially lethal facts and figures, it seems unfair to single out almanac readers for police harassment. As the editor of The World Almanac and Book of Facts rightly points out, "The government is our biggest single supplier of information." Not to mention the local library: A cache of potentially dangerous information weaponry is housed at the center of almost every American town. The FBI, of course, is all over the library threat, seizing library records at will under the Patriot Act.
The blacklisting of the almanac was a fitting end for 2003, a year that waged open war on truth and facts and celebrated fakes and forgeries of all kinds. This was the year when fakeness ruled: fake rationales for war, a fake President dressed as a fake soldier declaring a fake end to combat and then holding up a fake turkey. An action movie star became governor and the government started making its own action movies, casting real soldiers like Jessica Lynch as fake combat heroes and dressing up embedded journalists as fake soldiers. Saddam Hussein even got a part in the big show: He played himself being captured by American troops. This is the fake of the year, if you believe the Sunday Herald in Scotland, as well as several other news agencies, which reported that he was actually captured by a Kurdish special forces unit. ...
The war of the Jesus fish is an ever escalating one
Brothers and sisters, there's a battle raging. It's not a battle fought with weapons of mass destruction, Lord save us, and it's not a battle fought in armored personnel carriers.
It is a battle, children, for the hearts -- yea, verily, for the everlasting souls -- of America's trunks and bumpers. It is a battle of words and wills, and fish. Lots and lots of fish.
Hallelujah! Can I get a witness?
"I had a graduate student mention a couple days ago that he'd seen a new one," said Dr. Tom Lessl, a professor of rhetoric at the University of Georgia. "He saw one with a Darwin fish committing a sexual act on a Jesus fish."
Have mercy! The battle, nay, the veritable Fish Wars, have escalated, have detonated, have conflagrated like a shiny metallic supernova. Now, friends, like exiles from the Garden, we long for those innocent days when it was just Jesus fish and Darwin fish....
What Is Anarchy?
...The late Robert LeFevre made one such effort to transcend the popular meaning of the word when he declared that "an anarchist is anyone who believes in less government than you do." But an even better understanding of the concept can be derived from the Greek origins of the word (anarkhos) which meant "without a ruler." It is this definition of the word that members of the political power structure (i.e., your "rulers") do not want you to consider. Far better that you fear the hidden monsters and hobgoblins who are just waiting to bring terror and havoc to your lives should efforts to increase police powers or budgets fail.
Are there murderers, kidnappers, rapists, and arsonists in our world? Of course there are, and there will always be, and they do not all work for the state. It is amazing that, with all the powers and money conferred upon the state to "protect" us from such threats, they continue to occur with a regularity that seems to have increased with the size of government! Even the current "mad cow disease" scare is being used, by the statists, as a reason for more government regulation, an effort that conveniently ignores the fact that the federal government has been closely regulating meat production for many decades.
Nor can we ignore the history of the state in visiting upon humanity the very death and destruction that its defenders insist upon as a rationale for political power. Those who condemn anarchy should engage in some quantitative analysis. In the twentieth century alone, governments managed to kill – through wars, genocides, and other deadly practices – some 200,000,000 men, women, and children. How many people were killed by anarchists during this period? Governments, not anarchists, have been the deadly "bomb-throwers" of human history!...
The Crumbling Case for War
It is a little frustrating to write that the main hope is that the American people will be more vigilant the next time a president and his administration put on a full court press on behalf of a dubious war. At this time, however, it is probably the best we can hope for. It is fine to entertain the distant hope that various scandals and evidence of untruths will lead to the downfall or even the widespread discrediting of the Bush administration and its decision to invade Iraq. It is more likely, however, that the effect will be more subtle and cumulative – and it might not happen at all.
Nonetheless, critics of the war on Iraq can be fairly comfortable in the knowledge that most of the criticisms of the decision-making processes leading up to the invasion of Iraq were seriously flawed and that the war was unjustified. Who says so? Most members of the administration now admit it, and a former member has come out (perhaps naively believing that his wealth will shield him from damage) with criticisms blazing. A new study published by the Army War College even concludes that the war in Iraq "was a war-of-choice distraction from the war of necessity against al Qaida."
THE VERDICT
The verdict is in. Weapons of mass destruction have not been found in Iraq. No clear (though perhaps a fuzzy and ambivalent) connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaida – before 9/11 – has been discovered. Evidence from inside the National Security Council has emerged that top Bush administration officials were determined to wage war on Iraq even before the terrorist attacks of 9/11. ...
...On Sunday, of course, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill made his splash, as the chief on-the-record source for a new book by former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty. "From the very beginning [of the administration, in January 2001, well before the terrorist attacks] there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go," Mr. O'Neill told "Sixty Minutes."
Specifically, Mr. O'Neill, who as Treasury Secretary was a permanent member of the national security Council, says that the topic of Saddam came up at the first NSC meeting he attended. "It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it," said O'Neill. "The president saying 'Go find me a way to do this.' For me the notion of pre-emption [a misnomer, I would argue], that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap."...
Monday, January 12, 2004
Voting as Christians
If a person is married, believes in God, goes to church, reads the Bible, and prays, chances are he will vote Republican—and he is a core member of the dreaded Religious Right. If a person is unmarried, never goes to church, never reads the Bible, and never prays, he will likely vote Democratic—and he belongs to the not-so-dreaded Secular Left. Certainly there are religious Democrats and irreligious Republicans, but according to the research of social scientists Louis Bolce and Gerald De Maio ("Our Secularist Democratic Party," Public Interest, Fall 2002), the Democratic Party has become the political home of unbelievers. (See Rod Dreher’s article in this issue.)...
...Is it a sin to vote Democratic? Usually yes, because a vote for a Democrat is a vote for a supporter of abortion or a vote that strengthens a party whose only sacred tenet is the right to unrestricted abortion. A vote for a pro-abortion Republican is usually also wrong, because a vote for any pro-abortion candidate is counted by politicians as support for abortion....
Study Published by Army Criticizes War on Terror's Scope
A scathing new report published by the Army War College broadly criticizes the Bush administration's handling of the war on terrorism, accusing it of taking a detour into an "unnecessary" war in Iraq and pursuing an "unrealistic" quest against terrorism that may lead to U.S. wars with states that pose no serious threat.
The report, by Jeffrey Record, a visiting professor at the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, warns that as a result of those mistakes, the Army is "near the breaking point."
It recommends, among other things, scaling back the scope of the "global war on terrorism" and instead focusing on the narrower threat posed by the al Qaeda terrorist network.
"[T]he global war on terrorism as currently defined and waged is dangerously indiscriminate and ambitious, and accordingly . . . its parameters should be readjusted," Record writes. Currently, he adds, the anti-terrorism campaign "is strategically unfocused, promises more than it can deliver, and threatens to dissipate U.S. military resources in an endless and hopeless search for absolute security."
Record, a veteran defense specialist and author of six books on military strategy and related issues, was an aide to then-Sen. Sam Nunn when the Georgia Democrat was chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. ...
Confessions of a White House Insider
A book about Treasury's Paul O'Neill paints a presidency where ideology and politics rule the day
...Now O'Neill is speaking with the same bracing style in a book written by Pulitzer prizewinning journalist Ron Suskind. The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House and the Education of Paul O'Neill traces the former Alcoa CEO's rise and fall through the Administration: from his return to Washington to work for his third President, whom he believed would govern from the sensible center, through O'Neill's disillusionment, to his firing, executed in a surreal conversation with Cheney, a man he once considered a fellow traveler. Suskind had access not only to O'Neill but also to the saddlebags he took with him when he left town, which included a minute-by-minute accounting of his 23 months in office and 19,000 pages of documents on CD-ROM.
So, what does O'Neill reveal? According to the book, ideology and electoral politics so dominated the domestic-policy process during his tenure that it was often impossible to have a rational exchange of ideas. The incurious President was so opaque on some important issues that top Cabinet officials were left guessing his mind even after face-to-face meetings. Cheney is portrayed as an unstoppable force, unbowed by inconvenient facts as he drives Administration policy toward his goals. ...
...But the book is blunt, and in person O'Neill can be even more so. Discussing the case for the Iraq war in an interview with TIME, O'Neill, who sat on the National Security Council, says the focus was on Saddam from the early days of the Administration. He offers the most skeptical view of the case for war ever put forward by a top Administration official. "In the 23 months I was there, I never saw anything that I would characterize as evidence of weapons of mass destruction," he told TIME. "There were allegations and assertions by people.
But I've been around a hell of a long time, and I know the difference between evidence and assertions and illusions or allusions and conclusions that one could draw from a set of assumptions. To me there is a difference between real evidence and everything else. And I never saw anything in the intelligence that I would characterize as real evidence." A top Administration official says of the wmd intelligence: "That information was on a need- to-know basis. He wouldn't have been in a position to see it."
From his first meeting with the President, O'Neill found Bush unengaged and inscrutable, an inside account far different from the shiny White House brochure version of an unfailing leader questioning aides with rapid-fire intensity....
The 2004 Bruce Sterling State of the World Address
...I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people setting the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever
writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's no good reason to go there and live. It's ugly, it's inhospitable and there's no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it's so hard to reach.
On the other hand, there might really be some way to make living in the Gobi Desert pay. And if that were the case, and you really had communities making a nice cheerful go of daily life on arid, freezing, barren rock and sand, then a cultural transfer to Mars might make a certain sense....
Dieting for Jesus
...In the 1920s, conservative Protestants were on the margins of politics. Now they surround the president, as they did on 5th November 2003 when George W Bush signed a new law outlawing a surgical technique called (by its opponents) "partial-birth abortion." Such prominent conservative Christians as Falwell, Louis Sheldon, chairman of the traditional values coalition, Attorney General John Ashcroft, and Adrian Rogers, former head of the Southern Baptist Convention, were invited to the ceremony. People who once picketed the White House have a new home inside.
No wonder, then, that many Americans, and nearly all Europeans, believe that the Bush administration signals the arrival to power of people who are drowning in dogma, fundamentally intolerant, and at war with the modern world. It stands to reason that an administration beholden to people like Moore and Boykin would call the war against Islamic terror a "crusade," support so strongly a state of Israel that conservative Christians believe has to flourish for Christ to make his return to earth, seek to criminalise abortion, and tear down the wall separating church and state. After all, there is an election on the horizon - in America, there is always an election on the horizon - and to win it, the Bush administration must mobilise the huge base of conservative Christians for whom Moore, Boykin, and Falwell speak.
As persuasive as this picture of evangelical influence may seem, it is also significantly distorted. Moore, Boykin and Falwell, alas, are real. But they do not speak for nearly as many followers as most people, including even President Bush, believe. The demonstrators in the Alabama courthouse were small in number and quickly left when the statue was, in fact, removed. The truth is that they did not have all that much support. Southern Baptists, the largest denomination in the conservative Protestant camp, were founded on the principle of church-state separation and tend to view public displays such as Moore's as idolatry. Richard Cizik, vice-president of governmental affairs for the national association of evangelicals, an organisation that lobbies on behalf of America's born-again Christians, was one of many prominent evangelicals to view Moore's actions as embarrassing and irresponsible. "Most of the public knows how we feel about the role of God in public life," he said. "We have to substantiate that we are willing to work with non-Christians, secularists and others to achieve a common respect for each other."
Boykin's comments on the Muslim faith have not been similarly denounced by evangelical organisations. But nor do they capture the degree to which American evangelicals have moved in the direction of religious pluralism and toleration in the past few decades. Sociologist Christian Smith of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who has surveyed them extensively, finds that American evangelicals do believe in the idea of America as a "Christian nation," but when asked what that term means, 40 per cent said that America "was founded by people who sought religious liberty and worked to establish religious freedom." In addition, they are nearly unanimous in their conviction that evangelicals should not try to force their views on others. It remains the case that evangelicals are less tolerant than mainstream Protestants and Jews, but they are clearly more tolerant than the old-time fundamentalist religious movements out of which they emerged.
Smith's research is part of an ongoing effort to examine evangelicals themselves, rather than the activist clergy and ideologically-driven interest groups that speak in their name. What this research shows is that when religion and American culture come into conflict, as they often do, culture tends to shape religion far more than the other way around. And because US culture is individualistic, populist, entrepreneurial and experiential, old-time religions that stand for unchanging truths, rigid dogma, and strict conceptions of sin do not have much chance. ...
...Individuals associated with the Christian right want to believe that they can help save America from a slide into moral despondency. But in reality, Christians in America find themselves experiencing what I call "salvation inflation": the trend, very much like grade inflation, in which less is expected but more is rewarded. People whose taste for immediate gratification leads them to conclude that they can be saved just by pronouncing their faith in Jesus are unlikely to save themselves, let alone save their country.
...Evangelicals are certainly more prevalent in American society than they were decades ago. They have their man in the White House: President Bush, after all, is not an old-fashioned religious traditionalist but a born-again and recovered alcoholic who turns to Jesus not to wrestle with his soul, but to discover how right he has been all along. And they will, as democracy gives them every right to do, push for legislation that reflects their views on such issues as abortion or therapeutic cloning....
Sunday, January 11, 2004
Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, Bush Planned Invasion Within Days Of Inauguration
The Bush Administration began making plans for an invasion of Iraq, including the use of American troops, within days of President Bush's inauguration in January of 2001 -- not eight months later after the 9/11 attacks, as has been previously reported.
That's what former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill says in his first interview about his time as a White House insider. O'Neill talks to CBS News Correspondent Lesley Stahl in the interview, to be broadcast on 60 Minutes, Sunday, Jan. 11 at 7 p.m. ET/PT.
"From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go," he tells Stahl. "For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do is a really huge leap."
O'Neill, fired by the White House for his disagreement on tax cuts, is the main source for an upcoming book, "The Price of Loyalty," authored by Ron Suskind.
Suskind says O'Neill and other White House insiders he interviewed gave him documents that show that in the first three months of 2001, the administration was looking at military options for removing Saddam Hussein from power and planning for the aftermath of Saddam's downfall -- including post-war contingencies such as peacekeeping troops, war crimes tribunals and the future of Iraq's oil.
"There are memos," Suskind tells Stahl, "One of them marked 'secret' says 'Plan for Post-Saddam Iraq.'"...
Powell withdraws al-Qa'ida claim as hunt for Saddam's WMD flags
The faltering American and British case for war in Iraq has suffered another blow with an admission by the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, that there was no hard proof of links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qa'ida, contrary to his claims before the invasion.
"I have not seen smoking-gun, concrete evidence about the connection," Mr Powell said last week. Almost at the same moment, the assertion that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction - another crucial aspect of the Secretary of State's presentation to the UN Security Council last February - was being further discredited....
Friday, January 09, 2004
Inspectors looking for Iraqi arms sent home
The Bush administration has quietly withdrawn from Iraq a 400-member military team whose job was to scour the country for military equipment, according to senior government officials.
The step was described by some military officials as a sign that the administration might have lowered its sights and no longer expects to uncover the caches of chemical and biological weapons that the White House cited as a principal reason for going to war in March....
Spies, Lies, and Weapons: What Went Wrong
How could we have been so far off in our estimates of Saddam Hussein's weapons programs? A leading Iraq expert and intelligence analyst in the Clinton Administration—whose book The Threatening Storm proved deeply influential in the run-up to the war—gives a detailed account of how and why we erred
Let's start with one truth: last March, when the United States and its coalition partners invaded Iraq, the American public and much of the rest of the world believed that after Saddam Hussein's regime sank, a vast flotsam of weapons of mass destruction would bob to the surface. That, of course, has not been the case. In the words of David Kay, the principal adviser to the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), an organization created late last spring to search for prohibited weaponry, "I think all of us who entered Iraq expected the job of actually discovering deployed weapons to be easier than it has turned out to be." Many people are now asking very reasonable questions about why they were misled.
Democrats have typically accused the Bush Administration of exaggerating the threat posed by Iraq in order to justify an unnecessary war. Republicans have typically claimed that the fault lay with the CIA and the rest of the U.S. intelligence community, which they say overestimated the threat from Iraq—a claim that carries the unlikely implication that Bush's team might not have opted for war if it had understood that Saddam was not as dangerous as he seemed.
Both sides appear to be at least partly right. The intelligence community did overestimate the scope and progress of Iraq's WMD programs, although not to the extent that many people believe. The Administration stretched those estimates to make a case not only for going to war but for doing so at once, rather than taking the time to build regional and international support for military action. ...
Religious voting blocs appear to be shifting
Old allegiances no longer certain
CHICAGO - The growing influence of religion in American life is widely expected to shake up the 2004 presidential contest, realigning some traditional voting blocs in ways that might surprise both major parties, political pollsters and experts say.
Some Jewish and Muslim voters appear to be abandoning their past party affiliations and fewer evangelical Christians may go to the polls, adding to the volatility of the race.
The Bush administration's strategy to lure Jewish voters away from the Democratic Party seems to be working, said pollsters and Jewish leaders, who point to President Bush's support for Israel as one of the reasons for the shift....
...Some members of the Christian right, solid supporters of the president, may stay home on Election Day, confident that their man will win, said leaders of the Christian Coalition of America and experts who study voting patterns.
Also, a minority of Christian right voters may stay home for another reason: They are not convinced that Bush's religious rhetoric has translated into the social policies they were counting on, such as clear stands against homosexual marriage and all forms of abortion, analysts said....
Thursday, January 08, 2004
Oh .... my .... God ....
Worship Leader Magazine has announced the 2003 nominees for its 3rd Annual Praise Awards.
Iraqi Nuclear Site Is Found Looted
U.S. Team Unable to Determine Whether Deadly Materials Are Missing
NEAR KUT, Iraq, May 3 -- A specially trained Defense Department team, dispatched after a month of official indecision to survey a major Iraqi radioactive waste repository, today found the site heavily looted and said it was impossible to tell whether nuclear materials were missing.
The discovery at the Baghdad Nuclear Research Facility was the second since the end of the war in which a known nuclear cache was plundered extensively enough that authorities could not rule out the possibility that deadly materials had been stolen. The survey, conducted by a U.S. Special Forces detachment and eight nuclear experts from a Pentagon office called the Direct Support Team, appeared to offer fresh evidence that the war has dispersed the country's most dangerous technologies beyond anyone's knowledge or control. ...
Wednesday, January 07, 2004
Transparent lives by Eugene H. Peterson
Forty years ago, I found myself distracted. I was living 20 miles northeast of Baltimore in a small town that was fast becoming a suburb. Assigned there by my denomination to start a new congregation, I started out with a fair amount of confidence and energy, and with strong personal, organizational and financial support. But as time went on, I found myself increasingly at odds with my advisers on the means and methods used for ensuring the numerical and financial viability of the congregation.
It wasn't long before I was in crisis. A deep chasm had opened up between what I was preaching and the way I was leading our congregational development. My attitude toward the men and women I was gathering in the congregation was silently shaped by how I was planning to use them to succeed, with little thought to feeding their souls with the bread of life. I found myself thinking competitively about the other churches in town, about how I could beat them at the numbers game.
I never wavered in my theological convictions, but I had to get a church up and running, and I was ready to use any means to do it: appeal to people's consumer instincts, use abstract principles to unify enthusiasm, shape goals through catchy slogans, create publicity images to provide ego enhancement.
Then one day my wife and I attended a lecture by Paul Tournier, who showed me another way of being. Given my distracted condition, the timing was just right. The lecture provided a fine image, shaping my life personally as a follower of Jesus, and vocationally as a companion to other followers of Jesus, in the role of pastor and writer. ...
On a wing and thousands of prayers
WASHINGTON - Meagan Gillan quotes a line from the Bible when asked what motivates her to spend every working day praying for George W. Bush.
"It's in First Timothy 2. It says 'pray for the kings and all those in authority,' " explains the 50-year-old Arizona writer and editor.
So that is exactly what she does. Working from a small office suite in suburban Tucson, Ms. Gillan leads the five-person staff of the Presidential Prayer Team, a group trying to marshal millions of Americans in the cause of praying daily for their commander in chief. By using the Internet as their pulpit, Ms. Gillan and her associates claim to have enlisted 2.8 million people -- about 1% of the U.S. population -- since the group's launch in 2001.
The Presidential Prayer Team is the most ambitious of a bevy of prayer groups, predominantly Christian and evangelical, that have sprung up in the United States since Mr. Bush's election in 2000....
...Democrats criticize the faith-based initiatives as a dangerous blurring of the division between Church and state.
Other critics recoil at prayer sites that heap praise of Biblical proportions on Mr. Bush. One site compares him to King David and calls him a "merciful gift from the Lord to an undeserving people."
Perhaps not surprisingly, political support for Mr. Bush is sharply higher among U.S. churchgoers.
A poll conducted in November by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found 63% of voters who regularly attend religious services support Mr. Bush. Among non-churchgoers, 62% oppose Mr. Bush....
Iraq's Arsenal Was Only on Paper
Since Gulf War, Nonconventional Weapons Never Got Past the Planning Stage
...But investigators have found no support for the two main fears expressed in London and Washington before the war: that Iraq had a hidden arsenal of old weapons and built advanced programs for new ones. In public statements and unauthorized interviews, investigators said they have discovered no work on former germ-warfare agents such as anthrax bacteria, and no work on a new designer pathogen -- combining pox virus and snake venom -- that led U.S. scientists on a highly classified hunt for several months. The investigators assess that Iraq did not, as charged in London and Washington, resume production of its most lethal nerve agent, VX, or learn to make it last longer in storage. And they have found the former nuclear weapons program, described as a "grave and gathering danger" by President Bush and a "mortal threat" by Vice President Cheney, in much the same shattered state left by U.N. inspectors in the 1990s.
A review of available evidence, including some not known to coalition investigators and some they have not made public, portrays a nonconventional arms establishment that was far less capable than U.S. analysts judged before the war. Leading figures in Iraqi science and industry, supported by observations on the ground, described factories and institutes that were thoroughly beaten down by 12 years of conflict, arms embargo and strangling economic sanctions. The remnants of Iraq's biological, chemical and missile infrastructures were riven by internal strife, bled by schemes for personal gain and handicapped by deceit up and down lines of command. The broad picture emerging from the investigation to date suggests that, whatever its desire, Iraq did not possess the wherewithal to build a forbidden armory on anything like the scale it had before the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
David Kay, who directs the weapons hunt on behalf of the Bush administration, reported no discoveries last year of finished weapons, bulk agents or ready-to-start production lines. Members of his Iraq Survey Group, in unauthorized interviews, said the group holds out little prospect now of such a find. Kay and his spokesman, who report to Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet, declined to be interviewed...
...The most significant point in Amin's letter, U.S. and European experts said, is his unambiguous report that Iraq destroyed its entire inventory of biological weapons. Amin reminded Qusay Hussein of the government's claim that it possessed no such arms after 1990, then wrote that in truth "destruction of the biological weapons agents took place in the summer of 1991."
It was those weapons to which Secretary of State Colin L. Powell referred in the Security Council on Feb. 5 when he said, for example, that Iraq still had an estimated 8,500 to 25,000 liters of anthrax bacteria. ...
Jailing the Innocent
by Paul Craig Roberts
Every day many Americans commit crimes of which they are unaware. Many of the crimes with which Americans are charged are absurd.
One recent case brought to light by Ellen Podgor and Paul Rosenzweig is that of three Americans sentenced in federal court to eight years in prison for importing lobster tails from Honduras in plastic bags instead of cardboard boxes. Why this matters, no one knows. Moreover the importers of the lobster tails have no responsibility for how the seafood was packed in Honduras.
Federal prosecutors decided that Honduran law was violated by the shipment because a few tails (3% of the shipment) were less than 5.5 inches in length.
The Honduran government objects to this interpretation of its law and filed a brief in behalf of the defendants, but federal judges nevertheless convicted their fellow citizens for violating the Lacey Act by importing "fish or wildlife taken, possessed, transported, or sold in violation of any foreign law."
To insure a harsh sentence the prosecutors loaded up charges against the defendants by bringing indictments for smuggling, money laundering and conspiracy. Smuggling is inferred from a few of the tails allegedly being undersized and illegal. Money laundering is charged because the lobster purchase and sale required money to be deposited in a bank. Conspiracy is charged on the basis that more than one person was involved.
In other words, these are totally trumped-up crimes.
The upshot is that three Americans have had their lives ruined by federal prosecutors and judges for violating a Honduran law that the Honduran president, attorney general and embassy say is not on their country’s statute books.
For reasons no one knows, federal prosecutors spent six months trying to find reasons in Honduran law to indict the American importers of the lobster tails. If it took federal prosecutors six months to find something in foreign law that they could allege the importers to have violated, how could the importers possibly have known that they could be imprisoned for the ordinary everyday business of importing lobster tails for restaurants?...
Tuesday, January 06, 2004
America's Christian Zionists take Israel by storm
U.S. evangelical Christians have become influential supporters of the Jewish state
HERZLIYA, Israel -- Christian evangelist Pat Robertson had them in the palm of his hand.
No matter that his audience wasn't predominantly Christian. When the founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network culminated his give-no-ground speech to the elite of Israel's political and military establishment with the ringing declaration, "Be strong! Be strong!" many of his listeners jumped to their feet to give him a boisterous round of applause.
The rapturous response to Robertson in Israel last month is just one example of how a large and growing group of conservative American Christians has entered the Jewish state's political scene with startling vigor, even as the Holy Land's indigenous Arab Christian communities wither because of violence and a dying economy.
Calling themselves Christian Zionists, the evangelicals are increasingly viewed as a political lifeline by influential Israelis who are eager for allies to fight what they see as a rising global tide of enmity aimed at Israel and to blunt suggestions that Israel is the main culprit in the Israeli-Palestinian morass.
They provide not only moral support but also substantial funds to Israel's sputtering economy, and they've proven their political clout in the Bush White House.
Fueling the movement's growth is the belief that a great religious struggle is convulsing the world, one in which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the main, but not only, battleground.
At stake, Robertson and other Christian Zionists have said, is who has the greater god: Jews and Christians on the one hand, or Muslims on the other. ...
Monday, January 05, 2004
The Myth of National Defense
...More than 200 years after the Declaration of Independence, it seems appropriate to raise the question whether governments have in fact done what they were designed to do, or if experience or theory has provided us with grounds to consider other possibly more effective guards for our future security.
The present volume aims to provide an answer to this fundamental question.
In fact, this question has recently assumed new urgency through the events of September 11, 2001. Governments are supposed to protect us from terrorism. Yet what has been the U.S. government’s role in the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon?
The U.S. government commands a "defense" budget of $400 billion per annum, a sum equal to the combined annual defense budgets of the next 24 biggest government spenders. It employs a worldwide network of spies and informants. However, it was unable to prevent commercial airliners from being hijacked and used as missiles against prominent civilian and military targets.
Worse, the U.S. government did not only fail to prevent the disaster of September 11, it actually contributed to the likelihood of such an event. In pursuing an interventionist foreign policy (taking the form of economic sanctions, troops stationed in more than 100 countries, relentless bombings, propping up despotic regimes, taking sides in irresolvable land and ethnic disputes, and otherwise attempting political and military management of whole areas of the globe), the government provided the very motivation for foreign terrorists and made the U.S. their prime target.
Moreover, how was it possible that men armed with no more than box cutters could inflict the terrible damage they did? Obviously, this was possible only because the government prohibited airlines and pilots from protecting their own property by force of arms, thus rendering every commercial airline vulnerable and unprotected against hijackers. A $50 pistol in the cockpit could have done what $400 billion in the hands of government were unable to do.
And what was the lesson drawn from such failures? In the aftermath of the events, the U.S. foreign policy became even more aggressively interventionist and threatening. The U.S. military overthrew the Afghani government that was said to be "harboring" the terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden. In the course of this, thousands of innocent civilians were killed as "collateral damage," but bin Laden has not been captured or punished to this day, almost two years after the attacks. And once a U.S. approved government had been installed in Afghanistan, the U.S. government turned its attention to wars against other enemy states, in particular Iraq with its huge oil reserves. The U.S. refused even to rule out the employment of nuclear weapons against enemy regimes. No doubt, this policy helped to further increase the number of recruits into the ranks of people willing to use extreme violence against the U.S. as a means of retribution.
At the same time, domestically the government used the crisis which it had helped to provoke to further increase its own power at the expense of the people’s liberty and property rights. Government spending, in particular on "defense," was vastly increased, and a new government department for "homeland security" was created. Airport security was taken over by the federal government and government bureaucrats, and decisive steps toward a complete electronic citizen surveillance were taken.
Truly, then, the current events cry out for a systematic rethinking of the issues of defense and security and the respective roles of government, the market, and society in providing them....
...Based on this definition of government as a compulsory territorial monopolist of protection and jurisdiction equipped with the power to tax without unanimous consent, the contributors to this volume argue that, regardless of whether such a government is a monarchy, a democracy, or a dictatorship, any notion of limiting its power and safeguarding individual life, liberty, and property must be deemed illusory. Under monopolistic auspices the price of justice and protection must rise and its quality must fall. A tax-funded protection agency, it is pointed out, is a contradiction in terms: it is an expropriating property protector and can only lead to ever more taxes and less protection. In fact, even if a state limited its activities exclusively to the protection of life, liberty, and property (as a protective state à la Jefferson would do), the further question of how much security to provide would arise. Motivated like everyone else by self-interest and the disutility of labor, but with the unique power to tax without consent, a government’s answer will always be the same: to maximize expenditures on protection—and almost all of a nation’s wealth can be consumed by the cost of protection—and at the same time to minimize the production of protection.
Furthermore, a monopoly of jurisdiction must lead to a deterioration in the quality of justice and protection. If one can appeal only to the State for justice and protection, justice and protection will be distorted in favor of government—constitutions and supreme courts notwithstanding. After all, constitutions and supreme courts are state constitutions and courts, and whatever limitations to government action they might contain is determined by agents of the very same institution. Accordingly, the definitions of life, liberty, and property and their protection will continually be altered and the range of jurisdiction expanded to the state’s advantage....
Books & Culture's Book of the Week: Moody, the Media, and the Birth of Modern Evangelism
A cautionary tale.
The death of D. L. Moody in 1899 was a headline story for the American press and the final installment in a 30-year symbiotic relationship between the evangelist and daily newspapers both in America and Great Britain. ...
...Moody and musician Ira Sankey arrived in Britain in 1873, unheralded by the press on either side of the Atlantic. Two years later Moody returned to New York as an international celebrity. With growing expertise in each successive city in Scotland, Ireland, and England, Moody had mastered a technique for drawing crowds by a rational process of uniting Protestants across denominational lines, using saturation publicity in both the secular and religious newspapers. The stir created by this skillful strategy attracted unbelievers who might otherwise never have attended a local church service....
...The nine-week campaign in Philadelphia was a greater success. The city's powerful business establishment—led by John Wanamaker, George Stuart, Anthony Drexel, and Jay Cooke—was firmly behind Moody. Wanamaker had 300 of his department store employees "volunteer" as ushers. Indeed, Wanamaker secretly owned the Grand Depot where the revival was held, and two months after Moody left, converted the tabernacle into a new location for his department store The campaign neatly coincided with the city's centennial, and President Grant and other national political figures attended while in town, further heightening the hype surrounding the revival.
In 1876 Moody went to New York City, transforming the newly bankrupt P. T. Barnum's Hippodrome into a tabernacle for revival. Again the barons of the Gilded Age, this time headed by J. Pierpont Morgan and Cornelius Vanderbilt, underwrote the campaign. Evenson admits their possibly mixed motives for such benefice. "Certainly they hoped for a spiritual revival in their city, and almost as decidedly did they pray that the excitement might overwhelm the public's growing disaffection with national scandal and depression."
Later that same year, Moody returned to Chicago, this time as a prophet with honor in his own land. The Chicago Tribune and rival papers boosted Moody's revival as a point of civic pride. The city, recently devastated by a horrendous fire—which destroyed Moody's first attempt at building a tabernacle—could not be outshone by east coast cities.
When the crowds faltered, Moody devised theme promotions to renew public interest. For instance, there was the special night for "fallen women," intended to attract prostitutes who worked less than a mile away. Evensen is coy about whether this was a crass publicity stunt to increase newspaper coverage, or a sincere outreach to suffering women. Even less clear is what welcome would later await the converts who went to the inquiry room in local churches....
...Moody used the press brilliantly. He placed reporters front and center at a reserved press table complete with inkwells, paper, candles, and press aides to whisper the names of pastors who led prayers. Reporters were even allowed to bring their girlfriends with them to sit in the choice seats. To accommodate the stenographers who struggled to keep up with his machine-gun delivery, Moody slowed his preaching to 220 words per minute. He held afternoon meetings with the press to share anecdotes for the evening press. (A daily schedule of events was an early form of the modern-day press release.) Moody said, "I don't know what will become of me if the newspapers continue to print all of my sermons"—while at the same time making every effort to continue to be front-page news....
Dean and Religion
...George Bush hasn't run into such problems. Is it because he is more knowledgeable about the scriptures and the Christian faith than Dean? I very much doubt it. But Bush has had exposure as an adult to an ongoing evangelical small group. He does demonstrate that he has picked up both the ethos and argot of that part of the Christian culture and he's quite effective in communicating to his "brothers" in the faith -- and I mean to limit it by gender -- that he's one of them. Add to that a speechwriter like Michael Gerson who really does know the Bible and evangelical theology, and an image of Bush is created that convinces evangelicals, especially male evangelicals, that they have one of their own in the White House. They don't expect Bush to have a thorough or sophisticated knowledge of the faith. His limitations in that regard make him more like them. As long as he talks the talk and occasionally shows the kind of emotions that men are encouraged to display in small group settings, he's golden....
Grass-Roots Resistance Keeps Third World Out Of The Missionary Position
...A more long-term strategy in the evangelicals' global battle plan can be found in their well-known objection to family planning programs in the Third World. (It's no secret that President Bush, a committed fundamentalist Christian himself, is openly critical of family planning.) According to the report, with their left hand, evangelicals "oppose all family planning programmes," and with their right, they "encourage their converts to have larger families to expand their flock." In Sri Lanka, "Buddhist activists have raised the cry that if this goes on, the offspring of procreating fundamentalists will swamp Buddhists altering Sri Lanka's demography and, in time, destroy its ancient Buddhist civilization."...
SOMETHING CONSERVATIVES MUST REMEMBER
A recent conversation with a friend on the abuse of ministers by people within their congregations turned my mind to the significant degree to which conservative religion draws to itself certain types of unbalanced and, often enough, genuinely pathological personalities. Our liberal counterparts are happy enough to point this out to us, particularly if they can manage to identify sick conservatism in their personal histories as part of their justification for departing orthodoxy.
If we who call ourselves conservative or orthodox, however, fail to take full and serious account of this phenomenon, we have failed to recognize the body of Christ for what it is, and to maintain it as we should, by permitting the church to take into itself the idolatries that can hide effectively under the cloak of orthodox religion.
When we allow those who love Jesus so much that they neglect or mistreat their spouses or children or subordinates in his name, or attempt to force their petty and unbiblical legalisms on the church, or glorify Ignorance as the handmaiden rather than the enemy of faith, or who use religion to deny the personhood of others, and the freedom, dignity, and responsibility this entails, or who use church structures, offices, or theological systems to control and manipulate, or who, in pointing out that liberals destroy orthodoxy and its practices in the name of love, reason, and kindness, justify their own defects in these qualities—when these are not properly dealt with by the churches, incalculable damage is done.
I used to think that much of this could be tolerated in the mindset of “erring on the side of conservatism.” But this is wrong, because too much of what passes for conservatism, and gets by with it in self-consciously conservative churches, is in fact evil.
Orthodox Christianity is dogmatic. In the face of every "liberal" attempt to emancipate it from this supposed bond, which in fact is the very form of its constitution, it is conservative in that it resolves to conserve, without change or deviation, the faith once delivered to the saints. There are to be no apologies for this, ever. But our faith cannot be maintained, the body and mind of Christ are not realized among us, unless our object, whatever our proclivities, is not to err at all. This means those of us who are not especially tempted by liberal religion need to be doubly on guard for sins against charity and reason that come among us wearing our dress, fluent in our dialect.
—S. M. Hutchens
Saturday, January 03, 2004
Basra: Massive Drug, Petroleum smuggling; Christians, Musicians Harassed
Because the southern Iraqi city of Basra (1.3 million) is under British military occupation rather than American, it is little covered in the US press (does anybody else think this is odd?) There have been several British and Arab reports about the situation there recently. They indicate that although security has improved, property values are up, and people are again holding weddings and smiling, many serious problems remain. The rise of radical Shiite vigilanteism is among the grave new challenges to the development of Iraqi democracy.
Reuters reports (via ash-Sharq al-Awsat 12/31) that 400 shops owned by Christians, whom Saddam had permitted to sell liquor, have been forced to close since April, as the Shiites have come to power politically (see below). Stores have been firebombed, and some Christian shopkeepers have been shot, it is said by radical Shiite groups with names like "The Revenge of God, Hizbullah, and the Organization of Islamic Rules." Their members appoint themselves vigilantes, patrolling the streets armed in search of criminals and drug dealers, and executing them on the spot. These Shiite militias have supporters on the local councils Christians complain that they have been forced out of the liquor market, but that in many cases Muslim merchants have stepped into the breach, making inroads into what had been a Christian monopoly.
Steven Farrell reports in the London Times (12/30) of Basra: "Many of the theatres and music halls where [musicians] used to play have been shut, or converted for use by the many new Islamic parties that claim to represent Iraq's Shia Muslims, the overwhelming majority in Basra. While ice-cream and electronics stores thrive, the fundamentalists have shut down all alcohol shops, aided by rocket-propelled grenades and the summary killing of liquorsellers. Video and CD stores have been closed or had their wares heavily censored. In one CD shop in central Basra, posters of Britney Spears have been taken down. In their place are speeches of ayatollahs, to appease the self-appointed moral guardians." ...
Friday, January 02, 2004
The Three Postmodernisms: A short explanation
The first postmodernism is the one that modern people talk about a lot. It’s a big scary monster of nihilism and relativism and self-destruction that seeks to undo all that is good in modern Western civilization. This definition of postmodernism (it denies truth, denies reality, denies morality) is useful, I think, to scare people so they’ll stay loyal to their modern institutions, which, they are told, are the last bulwark against the chaos at the gate. This postmodernism is absurd: it says, “There is no truth,” which means that if the statement is true, it is also false. This first postmodernism probably doesn’t exist outside the imaginations of frightened modern people and those who seek to intimidate them – plus among some college freshmen who get carried away after drinking too much.
The second postmodernism is the closest reality to the first fantasy. It’s actually a kind of adolescent postmodernism. It’s the kind of postmodernism that some people like to declare as being “over” since September 11, or since 1990, or since I’m not sure what....
An Open Letter to Worship Songwriters
Brian McLaren
...One hears a lot of complaints about lame music, trite lyrics, theological shallowness, etc., etc., in the world of contemporary Christian music. Some of these complaints come from people who secretly wish we would go back to singing hymns, like they did back in the -50’s (18- or 19-, your pick). I am not interested in complaining, and I have little interest in the -50’s (except maybe the 2050’s).
No, here’s what I’m after: Many of us believe that we are entering (or well into) a significant theological/cultural/spiritual transition period, very possibly as significant historically as the reformation period, when the medieval world gave way to the modern world. Now, as the modern gives way to the postmodern world, we should expect to see a revolution in theology (in the end, helping us be more Biblical, more spiritual, more effective in our mission – and, please God, more clear about what our mission is). But here’s the rub.
In the modern world, theology was done by scholars, and was expressed in books and lectures. In the postmodern world, many of us believe that the theologians will have to leave the library more often and mix with the rest of us. And the best of them will join hands and hearts with the poets, musicians, filmmakers, actors, architects, interior and landscape designers, dancers, sculptors, painters, novelists, photographers, web designers, and every other artistic brother and sister possible … not only to communicate a postmodern, Christian theology … but also to discern it, discover it. Because one major shift of this transition is the shift from left-brain to whole-brain, from reductionistic, analytic rationalism to a broader theological holism – a theology that works in mind and heart, understanding and imagination, proposition and image, clarity and mystery, explanation and narrative, exposition and artistic expression.
Our songwriters could play a key spiritual role in the rooting of this more holistic theology in our people.
But sadly, as I have sat in scores of venues listening (and usually participating in) extended times of worship around the country, I have sensed that our song lyrics are too seldom leading us into this new territory. They are in some ways holding us back. Please, please, don’t hear this as criticism, but as a suggestion – a gentle but heartfelt request – for change....
An Open Letter to Chuck Colson
This letter was submitted to the Breakpoint website in early December. Because of the high volume of email Breakpoint receives, they were unable to reply.
...In your column, you pronounced “postmodernism” dead, or on life support, or at least losing strength. You’re kind of right, because the kind of postmodernism you describe – “the philosophy that claims there is no transcendent truth” - was never really alive. It’s a straw man, Chuck, a bugaboo not unlike Hillary Clinton’s “vast right-wing conspiracy,” used to create fear, galvanize sympathy and support, and perhaps raise money. (Everyone knows how a good enemy is a fundraiser’s best friend.)
What you describe as postmodernism – a claim that “there is no such thing as truth,” a rejection of all moral values, or their reduction to mere preferences – may have been purported by a few crazed graduate students for a few minutes at a late-night drinking party. But to paint the whole movement with that brush is inaccurate. ...
...I can agree with you that the “no transcendent truth” kind of postmodernism is dead, because as I said, it never was very alive. At most, it was an early, reactionary phase in a yet-embryonic movement that has much more mature, constructive, and positive voices emerging. Like you, I’ve spent a lot of time talking with college students and other thoughtful postmoderns. In fact, before entering pastoral ministry, I was a college English instructor – and as you know, English departments were the hotbed of postmodern thought back in the 70’s and 80’s. But I must tell you: I’ve never heard anyone articulate as their belief what you consistently assert that postmoderns believe. Sure, many college freshmen will resort to extreme statements when they’re approached by an angry Christian waving the sword of “absolute truth,” but if you (and George Barna and others) understood what they think you mean by “absolute truth,” you’d understand why they react as they do. Nobody likes having a sword waved at them!...
...But try to understand this parallel reality: In the late 20th century, postmodern thinkers looked back at regimes like Stalin’s and Hitler’s. (One must never forget how postmodern thought developed in the aftermath of the Holocaust, as deeply ethical European intellectuals like Michael Polanyi reflected on the atrocities their peers had perpetuated or acquiesced to.) Postmodern thinkers realized that these megalomaniacs used grand systems of belief to justify their atrocities. Those systems of belief – which the postmodern thinkers called “metanarratives,” but which also could have been called “world views” or “ideologies” – were so powerful they could transform good European intellectuals into killers or accomplices. They thought back over European history and realized (as C. S. Lewis did) that those who have passionate commitment to a system of belief will be most willing, not only to die for it, but to kill for it.
They looked at powerful belief systems of the twentieth century – world views (extreme Marxism is one such world view), grand stories (anti-Semitism is one such story, White Supremacy is another, American manifest destiny is another), ideologies (such as the industrialist ideology that the earth and its resources are not God’s creation deserving care through reverential stewardship, but rather, are simply natural resources there for the taking by secular industrialists), and they were horrified. These dominating belief systems were responsible for so many millions of deaths, so much torture, so much loss of freedom and dignity, so much damage to the planet, that they sought to undermine their dominance. They advocated incredulity or skepticism toward such stories or belief systems.
By the way, you repeatedly referred to 9/11 as a watershed in this regard, but it seems to me the “metanarrative” of the Taliban and radical Islamists simply adds another reason for incredulity or skepticism towards belief systems which seek control by force or intimidation, don’t you agree? And rightly or wrongly, the U.S. action in Iraq may convince many people around the world that we’re just another powerful elite bent on domination, coercion, and elimination of our opponents through a messianic metanarrative of American Empire. So 9/11 may not mark a return to the good old days of modernity after all, at least not outside our borders, and not for long.
Anyway, Chuck, you’re legitimately worried that “postmoderns” will use their relativism as an excuse to do anything they want. But they’re worried that you and other “moderns” will use your absolutism as an excuse to do anything you want. (If you can’t see any validity to their concern, then I’m truly speechless, and it’s hardly worth your reading the rest of my letter.) ...
Pat Robertson: God Says Bush Will Win in 2004
NORFOLK, Va. — Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson (search) said Friday he believes God has told him President Bush will be re-elected in a "blowout" in November.
"I think George Bush is going to win in a walk," Robertson said on his "700 Club" program on the Virginia Beach-based Christian Broadcasting Network (search), which he founded. "I really believe I'm hearing from the Lord it's going to be like a blowout election in 2004. It's shaping up that way."
Robertson told viewers he spent several days in prayer at the end of 2003.
"The Lord has just blessed him," Robertson said of Bush. "I mean, he could make terrible mistakes and comes out of it. It doesn't make any difference what he does, good or bad, God picks him up because he's a man of prayer and God's blessing him." ...
Thursday, January 01, 2004
Christian couple maintains abstinence through first two years of marriage
TOPEKA — Jon and Darla Nusbaum, who dutifully abstained from sex during their 14-month courtship, have remained abstinent after marriage and plan to do so indefinitely.
"If it was holy before, it must be double-holy afterwards," Darla says....
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)