DogfightAtBankstown

star-trekking across the blogiverse

Always amuses me how people categorize me and my blog.  I have such a collection of boxes now, a clown in every one.

The latest from Ken Parish at Club Troppo:

Saint in a Straitjacket is a pugnacious blogger who writes from a right wing christian perspective

Translation:

Saint believes Gaia is not god and Al is not her prophet.  (Al is, however, looking a bit like a fat Buddha lately.)

(Image: TechLuver)

The force be with you Obey One Kenobi.

an update

On Sayed Parwez Kambakhsh, the Afghani journalist who has been sentenced to death for, nothing really; at worst, practising his profession.  Most likely, a bad mix of provincial politics and religion.

He has been transferred to Kabul where an appeals court will hear his case today. 

One should be thankful for such small mercies but he is still fighting an uphill battle: while he finally got access to legal counsel, more than 10 lawyers who were initially willing to take on the case later changed their minds, and his current lawyer had not yet seen the case file.

The entire situation surrounding Kambakhsh is an outrage.  If he is not acquitted - and as Karzai has said, justice done "in the right way" - then it would show that Afghanistan doesn't just continue to have a serious problem on its hands with its fledgling justice system; it would show rather, that Afghanistan has gone backwards.

doing god. seriously.

Boris Johnson, the new mayor of London, gets religion.

Johnson was baptised a Catholic but admits he has a fluctuating faith. “I suppose my own [faith] is a bit like trying to get Virgin Radio when you’re driving through the Chilterns. It sort of comes and goes.”

He added: “Sometimes the signal is strong and then sometimes, I’m afraid, it just vanishes. And then it comes back again. That’s where I am.”

I'm not just talking Boris getting religous again, but Boris gets religion, and the important role it plays in public life:

BORIS JOHNSON, the new mayor of London, has claimed that evangelical faith communities are being shunned in modern society.

In an interview with ReligiousIntelligence.com, he said that the good work done by many Christian and evangelical groups is often just ignored and derided. “I think there is a culture now in our society where if something is even vaguely Christian, if there is a whiff of evangelical fervour about it then it’s almost somehow verboten to fund it,” he told the paper at a hustings event in the lead-up to the election.

He continued: “I think that’s quite wrong because if you look at the good that these groups do and you look at the way we’re going to transform society and undo the breakdown that we’ve seen in family life, the growing-up of kids without boundaries and all the rest of the things we’ve been talking about in this campaign, the Christian groups are essential.”

He also told us that he wanted to be a “mayor who campaigns for all Londoners and Londoners of all faiths”.

He added that he would not be campaigning for a “narrow Christian agenda” but did believe that his message was “appealing to Christians”. He also noted the good works done by the growing faith-based voluntary sector. “Everywhere I go in London -- and I go to boxing clubs, reading groups, Ray Lewis’ Eastside young leaders -- I see people who have faith who are transforming kids, steering them away from crime.”

Sometimes, even an atheist writing in The Guardian can get it too, even in the face of an anaemic church, and even if, oh so dimly. 

Against this must be set the example of St Martin's, repeated in microcosm across Britain. Whenever I have visited poor places - such as Salford, St Paul's in Bristol, or London's Poplar - and wondered to whom the desperate turn in time of need, the finger points to the church. Of all voluntary institutions those based on religion are the most present and the most committed. One reason is that the parish priest is the last profession that still rates it essential to live among its clients. All the others have fled.

At the rear of most churches you will find old Georgian charity boards recording bequests of pounds, shillings and pence "in perpetuity for the relief of the poor of the parish". Most of these bequests were converted in the 19th century into vestry funds, and then subsumed in the coffers of local councils. They vanished in the mass nationalisation of the voluntary sector that is the rarely told story of the welfare state.

I remain unconvinced that the shift from local to central in the delivery of social services was either necessary or beneficial to a welfare state. Fairness could be achieved (as elsewhere in Europe) through redistributing taxes, without dismantling the historic institutions of local charity. This dismantling removed the link between giver and receiver and knocked the stuffing out of local leadership and charitable giving. In much of Britain it reduced welfare to an alien and bureaucratic wasteland.

I am told that the Church of England reckons it saves the taxpayer some £5bn in unpaid social work. The same presumably goes for other denominations. By being parochial and personal, this must also be the most efficiently distributed welfare in the country. The fact that churches are so heavily involved in social work indicates how many people still fall through the net of the welfare state.

There is no reason why voluntary social service need be motivated by religion. There is a myriad of other organisations helping to relieve the suffering of their fellow citizens. They too deserve thanks - and might well take possession of those failing churches whose dismal features litter urban Britain.

But St Martin's is emphatically a church, and its revival is a salutary tale of our times. It has raised its own money to beautify the city as well as to assist the homeless. We may choose to leave the faith out of it, but we can yet marvel at the mission.

Given Boris' own journalistic background, he also gets how the media gets religion.  Writing in 2005, Boris said:

Among the disasters of my early journalistic career was the time I was sent by the newsdesk to Walsingham in Norfolk, to report on what was promised to be a major religious bust-up. There were these Anglo-Catholics, the news editor explained, and they wanted to march with an image of the Virgin towards a shrine; and then there were these evangelical Protestants. It was gonna be a real ding-dong, said the news editor. He wanted action, colour, quotes, personality. He wanted ecclesiastical fisticuffs with lashings of sectarian abuse. He wanted the Gaza Strip comes to Norfolk.

Answer? Not every well:

As far as I can remember, the clash of denominations was a bit disappointing. It was steaming hot, and the evangelicals obliged by shouting a few anti-papist slogans, while the Anglo-Catholics psalmed away sweetly. And then God caused the whole lot of us - just and unjust alike - to be drenched in a summer downpour, and I fled to a café to phone over my account; and no sooner did it hit the apathetic streets of Britain than the protests began.

Boris also got, the religious public reaction:

In thrashing my brains to think of a way of describing the image of Our Lady of Walsingham, I had come up with the phrase "bobbing doll". This seemed fair, because the statuette had lovely rosy porcelain cheeks, and she did indeed bob as she was carried on the shoulders of the celebrants.

But according to the many people who rang and wrote in, these were very far from the mots justes. I was told that I was crass, idiotic, grossly insensitive and mortally offensive. One man managed to find me in the phone book late at night and gave me such an ear-wigging that I almost felt like making my own pilgrimage to the shrine, on my knees, and scourging myself with a copy of the offending piece.

Which served him well, with all sorts of religious members of the public:

And yet when I look back now, the remarkable thing is not how much fuss they made, but how little, especially if you think what we have come to expect from some Muslims. I have in mind not just the murders of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh, but the trembling refusal of a noted Koranic scholar to write an article for The Spectator. "You don't understand," he said. "These people will kill me if I say what I really think. I mean kill me."

He gets what being British and religious means:

That is why we need to begin the re-Britannification I mentioned last week; and part of being British is recognising that this is a free country, in which people can have frank views about religion. Militant Islam has been shielded from proper discussion by cowardice, political correctness and a racist assumption that we should privilege the beliefs of a minority, even when they appear to be mediaeval. It is time the discussion was opened up not just to reason, but to reason's greatest ally, humour. Instead of banning the discussion of the 72 virgins of paradise, the alleged meed of the suicide bomber, would it not be much more efficient to make fun of this ludicrous claim?

When is Little Britain going to do a sketch, starring Matt Lucas as one of the virgins? Islam will only be truly acculturated to our way of life when you could expect a Bradford audience to roll in the aisles at Monty Python's Life of Mohammed; and when an unintentionally offensive newspaper article about Islam is requited not with death threats but with the exasperated but essentially kindly letters one might expect from Christians.

We have a long way to go, but the first step is to stop treating this subject as so terrifying that it cannot be satirised. Some things may be sacred, but they are no less sacred for being made the object of good-natured humour; and if that is frivolity, it is frivolity with a deeply serious intent.

Meaning, the mayor of Londoners of all faiths is going to have to have some seriously less than frivolous intents for his all-inclusive vision.

There's hope. More recently, he showed his own razor wit about matters religious, isn't frivolous, but seriously informed:

Poor old Boris Johnson made a couple of jokes after his election as mayor of London that were mistaken by commentators for learned showing-off. "I am just totally fed up with this artificial distinction … this sort of Arian controversy about the old Boris and the new," he had declared. "There is no distinction between the old Boris and the new Boris. They are indivisible, co-eternal … consubstantial."

Boris Johnson does the Trinity.  That sent the press into a spin:

The Evening Standard was still quoting him on Tuesday as talking about an "Aryan" controversy, as if it were about racial theory. It was certainly "Arian", for all he meant was that such distinctions were, as the cliché puts it, "theological". Mr Johnson prefers avoiding clichés by making them concrete. So he jokingly pretended that his interlocutors were familiar with the Arian controversies of the fourth century.

But for once, someone in the press, who may just still be presuming too little of Boris,  finally got religion:

I suspect that he [Boris] himself is more familiar with Edward Gibbon's account of the heresy promoted by the Egyptian bishop Arius, rather than with recent theological studies of Arianism. "The post-war period has been astonishingly fertile in Arius scholarship," writes Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in his controversial book Arius: Heresy and Tradition. I say "controversial", but the book was published by Dr Williams before homosexuality and sharia distracted the world's attention from almost anything else he said.

Gibbon's endeavour in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire had been to show that the whole controversy was ludicrous. His motive was hatred for the Christianity against which he had turned after a youthful period of devotion.

In recounting the fortunes of the Arians, Gibbon mocked the terminology in which theologians of the time were entangled. "I cannot forbear reminding the reader," he remarks in a mischievous footnote, "that the difference between the homoousion and homoiousion, is almost invisible to the nicest theological eye."

That can hardly be a very honest judgment. There is only one letter's difference between the two Greek words, but so there is between the English food and wood, though the latter would be a disappointing dinner. All the marvels of computer science depend on the simple distinction between the two figures 0 and 1.

I don't want to spoil Boris Johnson's joke, but the question of whether Arius's followers had got it right is no trifling matter. On those obscure Greek words depends the answer as to who Jesus Christ is. That is the central point of the Christian religion.

One often hears people saying things like, "Jesus wasn't God. It says in the Bible he was only the Son of God." Yet to the Christians of the first centuries, it was vital to recognise the Son of God as fully God and fully man. That is why the framers of the Book of Common Prayer in 1662 included the Athanasian Creed in it.

In the 19th century there was a hot argument about whether this creed should be recited in church. (That is another story.) The Prayer Book directs that its should be recited on solemn days, such as Whitsun, which falls tomorrow. After some difficult-sounding statements about God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, the Creed says: "He therefore that will be saved must think thus of the Trinity."

It is no longer the style to claim that a specified faith is necessary to salvation (that is, going to heaven). Yet believers feel that they can pray more coherently if they have some idea of whom they are praying to when they say "Our Father", or when they hear a Collect in the Prayer Book end: "Through Jesus Christ our Lord".

The difficulty of saying anything true about God in limited human language is nothing new. St Augustine, the great north African bishop, wrote 1,600 years ago about the three-in-oneness of the God the Holy Trinity: "Three whats?" in God he asks. Human language can hardly express any answer. "One can reply, 'Three persons'," says Augustine, "less in order to say what is there than in order not to be reduced to silence."

Still, we do know a little about what a person is. We know something of the relationship that distinguishes Son from Father, and of the relationship between lover and beloved (which distinguishes the Holy Ghost).

If Boris Johnson can say of himself that he is the same person as he ever was, it is partly because theologians have sharpened the concept of what being a person means.

And got that Christianity at least, contributes more to the world than one giant inclusive soup kitchen, in lots of nice buildings with a few bits of Sufi-inspired installation art, as a multicultural paeon to the socialist vision of a welfare state.

And God knows, Britain really, really needs to get that.

real clear politics

Update: forget my post, read The Currency Lad instead.

I'm reading about the fall out from Bush's speech to the Knesset (PDF) in which he said:

Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: "Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided." We have an obligation to call this what it is – the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.

That senator was isolationist Sen. William Borah, a Republican from Idaho. 

And Bush was right.

Naturally, Obama who thinks the world revolves around him, thought it was about him.  I just saw a grab on PBS of him at a town hall meeting addressing this.  All this pre-emptive waffle before he just mentions Hamas, "a terrorist organisation", but without a clear unequivocal repudiation.  I wish I could find a transcript.  There was no mention of Obama in Bush's speech, but if the cap fits, why not make a song and dance about it, so news outlets can headline with  "Obama says Bush falsely accuses him of appeasement."

In a statement Obama released to the media,  Obama goes further by saying Bush's comments were:

"...exactly the kind of appalling attack that's divided our country and alienates us from the rest of the world."

Frankly, with the U.S. being such a key global player, Bush's comments give me cause to give thanks for the U.S.

The Obamanable Showman, however, keeps talking, oh, tough talk:

"It is time to turn the page on eight years of policies that have strengthened Iran and failed to secure America or our ally Israel," Obama said in his statement. "Instead of tough talk and no action, we need to do what (Presidents) Kennedy, Nixon and Reagan did and use all elements of American power—including tough, principled, and direct diplomacy—to pressure countries like Iran and Syria."

I'm sure some historians might want to analyse that. 

In any case, Obama's version of "tough, principled, and direct diplomacy" means meeting with anyone unconditionally, whereas the current U.S. policy is for diplomacy under certain pre-conditions - like ending attacks and recognizing Israel for Hamas - or diplomacy in order to find leverage, as is currently happening with low level meetings between Iranian and U.S. officials. 

This is why Hamas and other Islamist loonies love Obama.  Obama thinks you can reason with them, and that they can be friends. They operate under the principles of taqqiya and hudna.

If there is one thing we have learnt from Gulf II is the lesson we should have learnt by Gulf I: nothing less than unconditional surrender.

Obama is a useful idiot.

not a problem, of course not

Never going to happen, no, no.  Just hysteria.

A LEADING scientist has warned a new species of "humanzee," created from breeding apes with humans, could become a reality unless the government acts to stop scientists experimenting.

In an interview with The Scotsman, Dr Calum MacKellar, director of research at the Scottish Council on Human Bioethics, warned the controversial draft Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill did not prevent human sperm being inseminated into animals.

He said if a female chimpanzee was inseminated with human sperm the two species would be closely enough related that a hybrid could be born.

He said scientists could possibly try to develop the new species to fill the demand for organ donors.

Given the hysteria already building up about organ donation in Britain, he's right.  Besides, if it's OK to kill unborn kids, or even the old and infirm, why should anyone have to face the possibility of dying of natural causes?

Leading scientists say there is no reason why the two species could not breed, although they question why anyone would want to try such a technique.

Morbid fascination, ego, fifteen minutes of fame. 

Other hybrid species already created include crossed tigers and lions and sheep and goats.

Dr MacKellar said he feared the consequences if scientists made a concerted effort to cross humans with chimpanzees. He said: "Nobody knows what they would get if they tried hard enough. The insemination of animals with human sperm should be prohibited.

"The Human Fertilisation and Embryo Bill prohibits the placement of animal sperm into a woman The reverse is not prohibited. It's not even mentioned. This should not be the case."

He said if the process was not banned, scientists would be "very likely" to try it, and it would be likely humans and chimps could successfully reproduce.

"If you put human sperm into a frog it would probably create an embryo, but it probably wouldn't go very far," he said.

"But if you do it with a non-human primate it's not beyond the realms of possibility that it could be born alive."

Dr MacKellar said the resulting creature could raise ethical dilemmas, such as whether it would be treated as human or animal, and what rights it would have.

"If it was never able to be self-aware or self-conscious it would probably be considered an animal," he said. "However, if there was a possibility of humanzees developing a conscience, you have a far more difficult dilemma on your hands."

He said fascination would be enough of a motive for scientists to try crossing the two species.

Too right it would be. 

But he also said there was a small chance of scientists using the method to "humanise" organs for transplant into humans. "There's a desperate need for organs. One of the solutions that has been looked at is using animal organs, but because there's a very serious risk of rejection using animal organs in humans they are already trying to humanise these organs.

"If they could create these humanzees who are substantially human but are not considered as humans in law , we could have a large provision of organs."

He wrote to the Department of Health to ask that the gap in the draft legislation be addressed.

The department confirmed that the bill "does not cover the artificial insemination of an animal with human sperm".

It said: "Owing to the significant differences between human and animal genomes, they are incompatible and the development of a foetus or progeny is impossible.

"Therefore such activity would have no rational scientific justification, as there would be no measurable outcome."

Morbid fascination, ego, fifteen minutes of fame.  It's there on our TVs every night on Big Brother. You reckon rational scientific justification is going to stop people?   Just watch how such articles alone will get all the luvvies out debating earnestly about how good that would be (while simultaneously in the next post, hyperventilating about Gaia being not too happy about people getting into her space).

Dr MacKellar disagrees. He said: "The chromosomal difference between a goat and a sheep is greater than between humans and chimpanzees."

Professor Bob Millar, director of the Medical Research Council Human Reproductive Sciences Unit, based in Edinburgh, agreed viable offspring would be possible. He said: "Donkeys can mate with horses and create infertile offspring; maybe that could happen with chimpanzees."

But he said he would oppose any such attempt. "It's unnecessary and ridiculous and no serious scientist would consider such a thing. Ethically, it's not appropriate.

"It's also completely impractical. Chimps would never be a source of organs for humans because of the viruses they carry and the low numbers."

So why not ban it outright with a heavy penalty - like life imprisonment - especially given the morally blind and ethically challenged.  Like this one:

Professor Hugh McLachlan, professor of applied philosophy at Glasgow Caledonian University's School of Law and Applied Sciences, said although the idea was "troublesome", he could see no ethical objections to the creation of humanzees.

"Any species came to be what it is now because of all sorts of interaction in the past," he said.

"If it turns out in the future there was fertilisation between a human animal and a non-human animal, it's an idea that is troublesome, but in terms of what particular ethical principle is breached it's not clear to me.

"I share their squeamishness and unease, but I'm not sure that unease can be expressed in terms of an ethical principle."

Not to mention vapid public servants:

A Department of Health spokeswoman said: "It's just not a problem. If you inseminate an animal with human sperm, scientifically nothing happens. The species barriers are too great."

"Scientifically nothing happens"?  Is that all there is to worry about? Hec, why not just decriminalize and promote bestiality and be done with it?

joseph bottum

On words that sound true:

Grammarians may have a technical term for these words that sound true, though I've never come across quite what I'm looking for. Homological, maybe? Autological? Ipsoverific? In a logical sense, of course, some words are literally true or false when applied to themselves. Words about words, typically: Noun is a noun, though verb is not a verb. Poly- syllabic is self-true, and monosyllabic is not. And this logical notion of autology can be extended. If short seems a short word, true of itself, then the shorter long must be false of itself.

But what about jab or fluffy or sneer, each of them true in a way that goes beyond logic? Verbose has always struck me as a strangely verbose word. Peppy has that perky, energetic, spry sound it needs. And was there ever a more supercilious word than supercilious? Or one more lethargic than lethargic?

Let's coin a term for this kind of poetic, extralogical accuracy. Let's call it agenbite. That's a word Michael of Northgate cobbled up for his 1340 Remorse of Conscience--or Agenbite of Inwit, as he actually titled the book. English would later settle on the French-born word "remorse" to carry the sense of the Latin re-mordere, "to bite again." But Michael didn't know that at the time, and so he simply translated the word's parts: again-bite or (in the muddle of early English spelling) agenbite.

Mucilaginous. Piffle.  Ponnnnnnnnntificate.  Drone.  Bumptious.

What words sound true to you?

alcopops and pink fizz

Seems to be the new beer and chardonnay.

You'd never know it was an Aussie budget. 

the parody continues

There is so much I could write about the crack-up of the Anglican Communion but just a couple of observations for now.   

A short while back, I noted the joke appointment of Archdeacon Kay Goldsworthy as Australia's first Anglican woman bishop, and the stupidity of having a protocol offerring alternative episcopal oversight to those who do not think women should be bishops in a Christian church.

It seems like many of her sisters in the Church of England get the insult (even if they are stomping their kitten heels in the process).

In that same post, I pointed to the Über-Pussified-Episcopal-Church in the U.S.A - that's the fastest dwindling group of Anglicans in America.  Here's another highlight.

James (Jim) McGreevy was the Democrat governor of New Jersey. Raised Roman Catholic he openly opposed church teaching and as governor, proudly announced he would not take communion in a public church service.  Married with two children - one from his first marriage - he cheated on his wife: with another man, a state employee.  When the scandal finally broke out he 'came out' as gay and resigned.

Like all good Americans, he chose to write a book and tell Oprah about his sordid life; this wasn't a one off affair - his was a life of flouncing after lovers in bookstores and restrooms; he admitted using his second marriage as a means to climb the political ladder.  Having confessed to the high priestess of daytime TV, and now contesting his divorce in court, while still owing alimony to his first wife - he is crying poor, while presently shacked up with a (yes another) Aussie male lover - a financier - in a US $1.7 million dollar 17 room home. 

He doesn't want a job.  He wants, of course, to be a priest. 

He wants especially to be a youth worker.

Pity his daughters. One wonders how he is managing to pay for his 'priestly' studies given he can't pay alimony. Who, in their right mind, would want their teenager near him?  And which church in its right mind would even consider him of sufficient character and virtue to be a priest?

Hint: another part of the cult of upscale Western sodomites and their attendant fetishists (to use a Mark Steyn phrase).  That's right 'the gay church', home of queer theology: not the MCC, but the ECUSA.

i just thought you'd want to know

In case you missed it, that there is a blogging crisis.

election year in india

Alistair Scrutton has a brief look at the increasingly important role of caste consciousness in what in theory is modern secular India.

ready, set, go

Ben Meyers has a fun review of a fun book: Daniel Radosh's Rapture Ready! Adventures in the parallel universe of Christian pop culture

In the end, though, I just can’t share Radosh’s optimism about the future of Christian pop culture. Instead, my hope would be for the demise of this pop culture, and for the appearance instead of a church that knows its own identity – not an identity that can be bought and secured, but one that comes freely and without guarantees, only because it is sheer gift.

Yes please.  Make it go away.

yeah it's not friday

But the Religion of Perpetual Outrage is at it again.

Oh yes, and this was very likely to have been Presbyterians.

wenchuan

Earthquake

"Not one minute can be wasted," Mr Wen said as he visited a collapsed high school in Dujiangyan where 900 students were feared dead and rescuers were still trying to find survivors. "One minute, one second, could mean a child's life."

Tell that too, to the Burmese.

ahem

Didn't watch the Budget.

In fact no TV or radio at all. 

So I can't cast my pearls of wisdom before you.  For that you need the real tragics.

Mark at Larvy Prod provides narrative criticism on the fly while live blogging the Budget.

Tim Blair at his new digs bets on flying words and gives the linguistic analysis.

The Currency Lad goes socio-rhetorical.

John Quiggin provides instant economic noodles.

Peter Martin does the financial analysis ("I'll be the good guy while stuffing cash in my mattress and let the central bank be the bad guy").

I have one question on one of the oddest funding cuts: scrapping the Employment Entry Payment.

Did I hear that right? 

If so, how does that fit into the socio-rhetorical-linguistically-rich-economic-narrative of finances for working families under inflation?

P.S. No point reading Joshua Gans.  He was bored, dammit.

Update: Guy Beres rounds up the MSM commentariat and declares, it's a rabbit proof
fence.

i have absolutely no idea

Why the Sydney Morning Herald chose to publish this fluff piece about a porn king.  Are we supposed to feel sorry for him? Applaud him for being happy to be living back with "mum and dad"? 

What?

The guy has no remorse: he claims to have made his money legitimately but couldn't handle it. He has no regrets - having "lived 10 years at the top" - except for hurting a woman in a car accident.  Credits his family for being the reason for going off the heroin.

Well boo hoo Lasrado.   Maybe next time you tuck your daughter into bed, you can think about whether you would be happy to hock porn photos of her for a bit of fast cash.  Or if you would like to see her as a trollop for some other playboy. 

And if you say no, then you're simply a hypocrite.  You're still a user.  And you're still too late. 

Because that is the question she will always ask herself when she grows up.   

That's your legacy and her unhappy memories.

unbelievable

The belligerence and inhumanity of Myanmar's junta is staggering.

This is the Myanmar Embassy in Canberra's email:
Mecanberra@bigpond.com

Tell them.

eek!

You Are a Colon

You are very orderly and fact driven. You aren't concerned much with theories or dreams... only what's true or untrue. You are brilliant and incredibly learned. Anything you know is well researched. You like to make lists and sort through things step by step. You aren't subject to whim or emotions. Your friends see you as a constant source of knowledge and advice. (But they are a little sick of you being right all of the time!) You excel in: Leadership positions You get along best with: The Semi-Colon

What Punctuation Mark Are You?

I'd rather bypass the euphemism and just be a dash.

lebanon

I haven't had time or energy to blog about the events in Lebanon in the past few days, not that the crisis is over.  Of the Lebanese bloggers I have referenced before - at least those writing in English - only Charles Malik has been updating recently - and his posts are worth a read.

From outside Lebanon, Beirut to the Beltway also comments.

One can only imagine what a difference it would have made if...

it's almost good news

The 'good news' being religious freedom, as in freedom to convert, and apostasize:

PENANG: The Syariah High Court here allowed an application by Muslim convert Siti Fatimah Tan Abdullah, 39, to renounce Islam and revert to her original faith.

The decision by Perlis Syariah Court chief judge Othman Ibrahim, who presided over the case when he was based in Penang earlier, makes this the first of its kind in the country where a living Muslim convert is allowed to renounce Islam since the Syariah Court Civil Procedure (State of Penang) Enactment 2004 came into force on Jan 1, 2006.

Almost.

The devil is always in the detail.

buddha's dead sea

The Schøyen Collection, in Oslo, Norway, perhaps the largest private collection of religious manuscripts in the world, is up for sale.  The owner of the collection, Mr. Martin Schøyen, hopes Norway's national government will purchase the collection for the National Library, and wants to donate the proceeds to a humanitarian fund named in his honour.

The collection includes important biblical manuscripts, one of which was recently sold to the Vatican.   But of considerable interest - at least to the press and also in terms of ethics - is a large collection of ancient Buddhist manuscripts smuggled out of Afghanistan in the aftermath of the Taliban's rise to power, sometimes dubbed Buddhism's "Dead Sea Scrolls". 

In a statement, the Schøyen Library points out that the Buddhist manuscripts are the only ones that do not come from old collections, “but were acquired to prevent destruction, after requests from Buddhists and scholars.” The statement goes on to address the question of whether these manuscripts should be returned to Afghanistan, “after they have been published, and if peace, order, religious tolerance and safe conditions have been established in that country.” But after analyzing the history of Afghanistan, the Schøyen Library concludes that it is “not the right and safe home for these manuscripts in the future.”

Bendik Rugaas, director of Norway’s National Library, has already welcomed Mr Schøyen’s proposal to sell his entire collection to the State. But even if the money is raised, and the sale goes ahead, this does not resolve the question of what should eventually happen to the Buddhist material. Although Mr Rugaas would be happy for the manuscripts to remain in Oslo, John Herstad, director of the National Archives, is among those who support the return of the manuscripts to Afghanistan when conditions are appropriate.

Yeah, that and the Elgin marbles.

Ain't gonna happen, so why the hand wringing I don't know.  Scholars will have more access to the manuscripts in Oslo, with or without the Taliban.

more on nargis

NYT

As we learn more and more of the impact of Nargis, the scale of the disaster becomes more difficult to fathom: perhaps up to 100,000 dead, millions affected.  And the Burmese junta continues to stand in the way of assistance, particularly from Western governments, but even from the ineffective U.N.

Indeed the U.N. itself has been all but whimpering and complicit in the face of such obstructionism.

Even an aid agency like World Vision, while being allowed access, having been present in Burma (Myanmar) for 30 years, has its hands tied.  Most its local workers are trained in development, not disaster relief; it needs to bring in outside help; it can't distribute the tiny, tiny trickle of aid that has already arrived. 

Burmese officials, ever the petty tyrants, have now resorted to deporting search and rescue teams.

For this reason the U.S.'s threats to drop aid by helicopter is not just welcome, but  should be encouraged.  They should just go ahead and coordinate their efforts with other countries trying to assist - in the manner we saw during the tsunami disaster with India, Japan, the U.S. and Australia taking a lead role in certain disaster areas.   Search, rescue, recovery, aid.  Do whatever it takes.

Burmese air capability is next to nothing.  Burmese military might is piffle. And if any of Burma's "friends" decide to take exception, they do so at the cost of condemnation by their own people for such inhumanity.

And where's Rudd? The "good neighbour"?  What are we doing?  What are we prepared to do?  What's $3 million gonna do?  It's not even going to upset China.

On the theology of disasters: First Things reposts a March 2005 essay by Eastern Orthodox theologian, David Bentley Hart, written soon after the December 2004 tsunami disaster in the Indian Ocean: 

I do not believe we Christians are obliged — or even allowed — to look upon the devastation visited upon the coasts of the Indian Ocean and to console ourselves with vacuous cant about the mysterious course taken by God’s goodness in this world, or to assure others that some ultimate meaning or purpose resides in so much misery. Ours is, after all, a religion of salvation; our faith is in a God who has come to rescue His creation from the absurdity of sin and the emptiness of death, and so we are permitted to hate these things with a perfect hatred. For while Christ takes the suffering of his creatures up into his own, it is not because he or they had need of suffering, but because he would not abandon his creatures to the grave. And while we know that the victory over evil and death has been won, we know also that it is a victory yet to come, and that creation therefore, as Paul says, groans in expectation of the glory that will one day be revealed. Until then, the world remains a place of struggle between light and darkness, truth and falsehood, life and death; and, in such a world, our portion is charity.

As for comfort, when we seek it, I can imagine none greater than the happy knowledge that when I see the death of a child I do not see the face of God, but the face of His enemy. It is not a faith that would necessarily satisfy Ivan Karamazov, but neither is it one that his arguments can defeat: for it has set us free from optimism, and taught us hope instead. We can rejoice that we are saved not through the immanent mechanisms of history and nature, but by grace; that God will not unite all of history’s many strands in one great synthesis, but will judge much of history false and damnable; that He will not simply reveal the sublime logic of fallen nature, but will strike off the fetters in which creation languishes; and that, rather than showing us how the tears of a small girl suffering in the dark were necessary for the building of the Kingdom, He will instead raise her up and wipe away all tears from her eyes — and there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, nor any more pain, for the former things will have passed away, and He that sits upon the throne will say, “Behold, I make all things new.”

Hope, not vain optimism. 

Which is why in the face of suffering, we protest against those who do nothing, who abandon others to the grave.  For to do nothing is inhuman.

nargis

Nothing exposes the brutality and inhumanity of tinpot tyrants like a natural disaster.

As the death toll from Nargis  climbs to over 20,000, with tens of thousands missing and countless more thousands left homeless, Myanmar's junta is still piss-farting around placing all sorts of obstructions to those willing to provide aid - not even allowing foreign helicopters to use their airspace to assess damage, effect rescues, much less distribute aid.

The category 3 tropical storm, hit the southern coast of Myanmar on Saturday, sweeping away entire villages and leaving the region without electricity and running water; a state of emergency has been declared in the cities of Yangon, Irrawaddy, Pegu and in the Karen and Mon states.

Here's the sort of devastation we are talking about:

The image on the left taken in April 15 shows the Irrawaddy river flowing south and splitting into numerous distributaries. Rivers and lakes are sharply defined against a backdrop of vegetation and fallow agricultural land. The image on the right taken on May 5 shows the entire coastal plain is flooded after the area took a direct hit from the cyclone. The city of Yangon (located by the red rectangle) is almost completely surrounded by floods.  Images: NASA

Early reports suggested that the junta failed to give its people warning of the cyclone's approach or make any other preparations, despite knowing the storm was about to hit.  Today, media outlets are carrying reports that Indian meteorologists gave Myanmar warnings about the cyclone's impending landfall some 48 hours beforehand.

Other reports too, that the army was soon out on the streets of Yangon after the winds subsided to clean up: but that was only in the affluent areas of the ruling elite.  In the meantime  most Yangon residents have been without fresh water for three days.  Don't even ask what those in rural areas are sufferring.

Unable to cope with the emergency, the Naypydaw generals quietly asked Thailand for “food, medicine and building materials.”  The first shipment should have arrived yesterday. China sent a similar batch of supplies. The junta has also begrudgingly accepted assistance from international aid agencies, tending to favour the totally ineffective U.N.  And if assessment of needs is one problem, distribution is another problem.   This without the belligerence and obstructionist tactics of the xenophobic regime. 

No use sending cash to them. They are so isolated in the world's community they couldn't spend it, much less know how to spend it for their people's welfare, even if they are more likely to pocket it.

Besides, they do have a referendum to run.

Despicable.

i didn't realise

This was the reason it was called The Daily Terror.

because any stupid thing americans do

The Canadians can do better.

But I've already told you that.

obamanable showman

Rage boy.

There's a photoshop in that.

Next.

the silent scream of the asparagus

I kid you not:

You just knew it was coming: At the request of the Swiss government, an ethics panel has weighed in on the "dignity" of plants and opined that the arbitrary killing of flora is morally wrong. This is no hoax. The concept of what could be called "plant rights" is being seriously debated.

A few years ago the Swiss added to their national constitution a provision requiring "account to be taken of the dignity of creation when handling animals, plants and other organisms." No one knew exactly what it meant, so they asked the Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology to figure it out. The resulting report, "The Dignity of Living Beings with Regard to Plants," is enough to short circuit the brain.

No, it's the product of short circuited brains and an impaired morality. 

Put aside your biases against the source and the author of this article, and start praying for your potted plants.  Because the Swiss have indeed gone potty. Due to concern over recent studies suggesting the pain experienced by fish, Swiss anglers are now subjected to a preparatory course on humane fishing.  So why not plants?

A "clear majority" of the panel adopted what it called a "biocentric" moral view, meaning that "living organisms should be considered morally for their own sake because they are alive." Thus, the panel determined that we cannot claim "absolute ownership" over plants and, moreover, that "individual plants have an inherent worth." This means that "we may not use them just as we please, even if the plant community is not in danger, or if our actions do not endanger the species, or if we are not acting arbitrarily."

The committee offered this illustration: A farmer mows his field (apparently an acceptable action, perhaps because the hay is intended to feed the farmer's herd--the report doesn't say). But then, while walking home, he casually "decapitates" some wildflowers with his scythe. The panel decries this act as immoral, though its members can't agree why. The report states, opaquely:

At this point it remains unclear whether this action is condemned because it expresses a particular moral stance of the farmer toward other organisms or because something bad is being done to the flowers themselves.

The matter of sacrificing unborn children to the god of inconvenience and I'm-just-not-ready is bye the bye.  As is killing off the elderly or infirm.  Just don't pick the daisies.

What is clear, however, is that Switzerland's enshrining of "plant dignity" is a symptom of a cultural disease that has infected Western civilization, causing us to lose the ability to think critically and distinguish serious from frivolous ethical concerns. It also reflects the triumph of a radical anthropomorphism that views elements of the natural world as morally equivalent to people.

Meaning theology matters. The god whom you worship matters.

Why is this happening? Our accelerating rejection of the Judeo-Christian world view, which upholds the unique dignity and moral worth of human beings, is driving us crazy. Once we knocked our species off its pedestal, it was only logical that we would come to see fauna and flora as entitled to rights.

The intellectual elites were the first to accept the notion of "species-ism," which condemns as invidious discrimination treating people differently from animals simply because they are human beings. Then ethical criteria were needed for assigning moral worth to individuals, be they human, animal, or now vegetable.

Rising to the task, leading bioethicists argue that for a human, value comes from possessing sufficient cognitive abilities to be deemed a "person." This excludes the unborn, the newborn, and those with significant cognitive impairments, who, personhood theorists believe, do not possess the right to life or bodily integrity. This thinking has led to the advocacy in prestigious medical and bioethical journals of using profoundly brain impaired patients in medical experimentation or as sources of organs.

The animal rights movement grew out of the same poisonous soil. Animal rights ideology holds that moral worth comes with sentience or the ability to suffer. Thus, since both animals and humans feel pain, animal rights advocates believe that what is done to an animal should be judged morally as if it were done to a human being. Some ideologues even compare the Nazi death camps to normal practices of animal husbandry. For example, Charles Patterson wrote in Eternal Treblinka--a book specifically endorsed by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals--that "the road to Auschwitz begins at the slaughterhouse."

Eschewing humans as the pinnacle of "creation" (to borrow the term used in the Swiss constitution) has caused environmentalism to mutate from conservationism--a concern to properly steward resources and protect pristine environs and endangered species--into a willingness to thwart human flourishing to "save the planet." Indeed, the most radical "deep ecologists" have grown so virulently misanthropic that Paul Watson, the head of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, called humans "the AIDS of the earth," requiring "radical invasive therapy" in order to reduce the population of the earth to under a billion.

 

why

Are we not listening to those who know

ABORIGINAL leaders have called for perpetrators of child sexual abuse in remote indigenous communities to be prosecuted through the criminal justice system, rather than be subject to traditional codes of punishment, while demanding police take action to stamp out the problem.

Leaders from the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara lands, in northwest South Australia, have claimed that in the past, police have been "reluctant" to pursue offenders.

Their position is outlined in a submission to the state's Mullighan inquiry into child sexual abuse, whose report on abuse in the APY lands will be tabled in the South Australian parliament this week.

Because we wait for the wheels to turn:

South Australian Police Minister Paul Holloway yesterday said he would not respond to a single submission to the Mullighan inquiry, as it was more important to respond to the inquiry's findings.

A spokesman for Police Commissioner Mal Hyde said police would take the APY submissions seriously.

In his first report, made public just over a month ago, Mr Mullighan revealed some of the allegations put to him about abuse of Aboriginal children.

And that is cold comfort for children in APY lands.

Holloway's response is disgraceful.

aussie blokes

Are turning into a bunch of pansies.

not sure

If I should be surprised that demented ideas such as these should emanate from the ACT or that they should be reported in The Age.

ooooooo, heathen alert!

SkepticLawyer and Legal Eagle have a duelling blog.

Lawyers.