Real Christian Values

I have blogged here before about the Anabaptists and their link to Anarchism. After the recent school shootings of Amish girls in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, that old Anabaptist community came together to practice a vital and real Christianity.

One that had inspired the anarchist Kropotkin to help them find their way to North America after their persecution in Europe for their belief in non-violence. And their actions say more about real Christian values than all the political pontifications of the fundamentalist right in North America.

The Amish protest against evil

Their faith in the power of forgiveness led them to invite the widow of the nonAmish killer, Charles Carl Roberts IV, to the funeral for four of the slain girls. One Amish woman told a reporter, "It's our Christian love to show to her we have not any grudges against her."

This isn't surprising. It is common for the Amish to invite car drivers who have killed one of their community members to the funeral. Such a compassionate response reveals a belief that each individual is responsible to counter violence by expressing comfort - a sort of prayer in action.

After Monday's killings, the grandfather of one of the slain girls went to the home of Roberts's father, consoling and hugging him, pouring forth a love and innocence of the kind remembered of the girls in the school. "He extended the hope of forgiveness that we all need these days," said a Roberts family spokesman, the Rev. Dwight Lefever of Living Faith Church of God. "'God met us in that kitchen."

Like everyone, the Amish also seek justice for a crime, even as they struggle to forgive. Even so, as Abraham Lincoln said, "I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice."


See:

Public Suicide




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Foley's Follies=Sexual Harassment

It appears ex-Congressman Mark Foley now admits his homosexuality. Too little too late. However as the sturm and drang continues over his inappropriate sexual communications with pages, and ex-pages, the question is was this pedophila.

Well no it wasn't actually since age of consent laws in Washington are 16 years old. Flordia has a more restrictive law dealing with age of consent. But that is not the issue either.

While Republican supporters who are outraged over this like Bay Buchanan on CNN today say it is not his homosexuality that is a problem but his being a "stalker" and "predator", she almost gets it right. First off of course its not his homosexuality that has to do with this at all.

This was sexual harassment. Would the Republican Congress have given him the nudge, nudge, wink, wink, if he had been harassing female pages or other female saff. This is after all the post -Thomas, post-Lewinsky Congress.The Repubicans claimed moral superiority in impeaching a Democratic president for moral turpitude and lying.

I suspect the old boys network in Congress will say they failed to see this as sexual harassment because it was an older man, whom his colleagues continued to pretend was straight, with younger male pages. Had it been a Congressman with female pages, it would have been blatant.

That being said the fact is that this was a clear cut case of sexual harassment, and the Republicans reacted by trying to cover it up. Period. All excuses in the world will not change the inappropriateness of their actions or inaction. And if they would cover up over this, how many other cases of sexual harrasment have they covered up over the last six years?

Congress has clear cut rules about that, rules that none of the Republicans informed of Foley's follies cared to do anything about. That is what makes House Speaker Hastert's protestations of innocence so disingenuous.

Ethical Issues Regarding Relationships With Interns in Congressional Offices
By clarifying that the purpose of the internship is educational and by specifying that sexual and romantic relationships between members of Congress, their staff, and interns who serve in their offices are prohibited, ethics committees would make a strong and essential step toward restoring the reputation of the internship process.

Only now is the house ethics committee investigating Foley, shutting the barn door after the horse has left. Of course the majority on the ethics comittee are Republicans. Which leads to another cliche about the fox guarding the chicken coop. Now who is guilty of moral tupitude? Shoe, fits, wear it.

See:

Foley

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We Are All Socialists

Rational self interest, pshaw. So much for that piece of conservative faith. Toss that idea out the window. Human beings will act based on a morality of soldiarity over so called self interest any day. Its the same logic as sacrificing the Queen in chess.

Sense of justice discovered in the brain

Neuroscientists locate the brain area that switches on when humans act against their own best interests to punish unfairness

using a tool called the “ultimatum game”, researchers have identified the part of the brain responsible for punishing unfairness. Subjects were put into anonymous pairs, and one person in each pair was given $20 and asked to share it with the other. They could choose to offer any amount – if the second partner accepted it, they both got to keep their share.

In purely economic terms, the second partner should never reject an offer, even a really low one, such as $1, as they are still $1 better off than if they rejected it. Most people offered half of the money. But in cases where only a very small share was offered, the vast majority of "receivers" spitefully rejected the offer, ensuring that neither partner got paid.

"Self interest is one important motive in every human," says Fehr, "but there are also fairness concerns in most people."

"In other words, this is the part of the brain dealing with morality," says Herb Gintis, an economist at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, US. "[It] is involved in comparing the costs and benefits of the material in terms of its fairness. It represses the basic instincts."

Psychologist Laurie Santos, at Yale University in Connecticut, US, comments: "This form of spite is a bit of an evolutionary puzzle. There are few examples in the animal kingdom." The new finding is really exciting, Santos says, as the DLPFC brain area is expanded only in humans, and it could explain why this type of behaviour exists only in humans.

So there goes a whole school of psuedo academia around Rational Choice studies in economics, sociology, politics,etc. Of course these are liberals who tried to embrace conservative ideologies after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Same folks who brought you the myth of market-socialism.

Adam Smith posited that rational self interest was in our best interest then he posited that economic relationships were not rational but based on the interferance of the invisible hand of the market, the consipracy of cartels and business to monopolize the market. The self interest we share to see justice done against the invisble hand is not always rational, but it is just.

Its about fairness. And fairness is not always in our selfish interests, but it is in our communal self interest.

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Play Nice

Rice To Iraq: Settle Differences Ohh, that's talking tough. Play nice says Condi.

However as Rice in her splendid isolation inside the Green Zone has tea with the Iraqi leadership the streets of Baghad run red with blood.


The heavily fortified Green Zone in Baghdad, from where the United States indirectly administers most things Iraqi, seems to have caught the fancy of the Bush administration. It seems to be repeating in the rest of the Middle East the same isolation from its surroundings practiced in Iraq. This is evident in this week's trip to the region by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who appears to be pursuing a fanciful strategy based on unrealistic American hopes rather than actual realities in the region.The troubling Green Zones of the U.S. mind

One hunderd people are killed daily. That means by the end of the year in Baghdad alone 36, 500 Iraqi's will have died. In July and August the UN reported the death toll in Baghad alone was 5,100 Iraqi civilians.

There is a civil war going on, fueled by the political decisions of the American Occupying forces by whom they support and don't support amongst the Shia and Sunni. And in their failure to organize a secular police force. 1,200 Iraqi cops suspended for suspected links to death squads

The only folks who are in denial over the Civil War in Iraq are the Americans. The insurrection is over, it succeeded in driving the Occupying Army out of Anbar province. US intel report: Iraq's Anbar province 'politically lost'

All other attacks now are sectarian violence aided and abetted by the American puppet regime in Government.

A prime minister dependent on Shia radicals hesitates to control them
The dead are presumed to be the victims of sectarian death squads, most of which are linked to Shia militia groups, such as the Mahdi Army, but some to the Sunni insurgents. The victims are abducted from their homes or snatched at improvised checkpoints and frequently tortured (electric drills are supposed to be a trademark of the Shia groups). Sometimes a ransom is demanded but more often these days the kidnapped are murdered, either as part of a tit-for-tat cycle of vengeance or to drive away members of the other sect from contested areas. Slaughter in Baghdad

How many freelance militias are there in Baghdad? The answer is "23" according to a "senior [US] military official" in Baghdad - so write Richard A Oppel Jr and Hosham Hussein in the New York Times; but according to US National Public Radio, the answer is "at least 23". Antonio Castaneda of the Associated Press says there are 23 "known" militias. However you figure it, that's a staggering number of militias, mainly Shi'ite, but some Sunni, for one large city. Twenty-one reasons why Iraq is not working

Civilians in Baghadad cannot leave their homes. It doesn't matter if you build schools and hospitals if the population is too afraid to use them.

Attendance of patients to hospitals has dropped tremendously. Before the invasion, we used to see an average of 100 patients in our consultation clinic of rheumatology every single day. We don't see more than 20 nowadays. Don't ask me where the patients disappeared. Many are scared to leave their homes and go to the hospitals.

And that is the real terrorism. And it comes from the Americans destabilization of Iraq and their three year failure to create a new state.

-- The streets of Baghdad were mostly quiet Saturday, with the capital under total lockdown a day after U.S. troops arrested a bodyguard of a Sunni Arab political leader on suspicion of planning suicide bombings inside the fortified Green Zone.

The day-long curfew in this city of 7 million people was the first to ban both pedestrian and vehicle traffic since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, underscoring the security concerns enveloping Baghdad. It was requested by U.S. military officials concerned about the surge in suicide bombings and other violence since the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan began last weekend.Baghdad Under Curfew After Upturn in Attacks

Leaving one to ask if this war has really left anyone better off.It hasn't and it is making Iraqi'slong for the past when they had running water, lights, and peaceful neighbourhoods. Somthing Americans have in their suburbs.

But then again this was never about freeing the people of Iraq, it was about making America safe by having a war in the Middle East. After 9/11 America decided it would declare around the world so that it could remain safe and secure from being attacked on its shores. No matter the cost.... in other peoples lives.

Iraqis were far better off under Saddam Hussein’s government than under a violent imperialist Occupation, supplemented with Gestapo-like force of death squads and criminal militias, and a U.S.-imposed puppet government of jackals. Iraq was a sovereign state with a sovereign government capable of protecting its citizens and investing heavily in health, education and social programs which contributed to the improvement of the well-being of Iraqi society at large. Foreign military ‘Occupation is the highest form of dictatorship’; it is Fascism. The overwhelming majority of the Iraqi population are against the Occupation.
Resistance And Liberation


See:

Iraq




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Public Suicide

Suicide used to be a deeply personal act by an individual. It appears now that suicide has become a plural phenomena. As the recent school shootings in Canada and the U.S. andthe increase in work place violence with guns shows. It exposes the continuing failure to deal with mental illness and depression as a public health crisis.

And of course the failure of the media to report on the epidemic of suicides across North America, leads to these kinds of public suicides. A private suicide is a statistic, a plural mass killing which is a public suicide makes the news. And it results in more copy cat killings.


In 2001, 55% of suicides were committed with a firearm (Anderson and Smith 2003).

• Suicide is the eighth leading cause of death for all U.S. men (Anderson and Smith 2003).
• Males are four times more likely to die from suicide than females (CDC 2004).
• Suicide rates are highest among Whites and second highest among American Indian and Native Alaskan men (CDC 2004).
• Of the 24,672 suicide deaths reported among men in 2001, 60% involved the use of a firearm (Anderson and Smith 2003).

What would have been a private act has become a public act, thanks to the failure of the powers that be in society to publicly deal with issues of mental health. That is because we have that mythical compasionate conservative ideology that says mental health is your problem, not a social problem, and something that should be left up to the indvidual and their priest. They blame it on the evocatively amorphous euphimism "evil". In the extreme it says secular scoeity and public schools themselves are to blame.


Mental illness is not treated as a health problem, let alone a public health issue, like bird flu or SARS is. Yet its impact is just as serious as these diseases.

Mental health has been too often linked to questions of morality as well as being excused as an individual problem of their inability to cope with the stress of their lives. But that stress is a social phenomena of capitalist society. It is the physical reality of the alienation we experience in our daily lives.Workplace Shootings: Crazy Workers or Crazy Workplaces?

People create coping mechanisms to deal with this when those fail they become prey to the overwhelming sense of dread, panic, and powerlessness, that is not an illusion but the very reality of the authoritarian political economy of capitalist society. It is the emotional plague of capitalism written into our psyches and our bodies.

As usual councillors will be called to deal with the post crisis trauma, when in fact councelling should have been used with the mentally ill killers earlier.

A conference on school safety will now be held at the White House to deal with the three school shootings in the past week. They will suggest more parental involvement, better security in schools, blah, blah blah. But they will miss the most important issue that underlies this, besides the question of mental health.

You can't make schools or the work place safer by ignoring the biggest source of violence, easily accessable guns. An issue blithly ignored by the MSM that wants this to be another isolated event, by an unstable person. Someone not like you or me.

Amish shootings colors House debate on gun violence

Can America Ever be Weaned off its Love Affair with Guns?

First-grader has loaded gun in school


The misogynist patriarchical culture of the so called moral majority, fails to see that it produces crimes against women because it is inherent in its belief system. It has nothing to do with the devil or evil it has to do with the belief system of Christianity. Women are moral failures, they are temptresses who are out to corrupt men. The three recent shooitngs in the U.S. were not only cases of public suicide, but of attacks on women.

And in Canada the moral majority is just as guilty of this kind of thinking that leads to crimes of violence against women.

In fact the whole of our culture is inundated with misogynist propaganda, so men acting out on it should come as no surprise, they feel society approves.



See:

Emotional Plague



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Gomperism

The essence of Sam Gompers politics, the President of the American Federation of Labour, was reward your friends and punish your enemies.

In Alberta the politically backward trades unions, those business unions who are chartered by the American AFL, have revived this dictum for the upcoming Tory leadership race. Traditionally the building trades membership, craft unions, have supported the Liberals in Alberta politics. Several sitting Liberal MLA's are members of the Building Trades unions.

Today they have moved to support aTory right winger who has fought the unionized public sector in this province.

Union Oberg backers buying Conservative memberships

Tactics anger Dinning leadership campaign, labour federation

The Alberta Building Trades Council, an umbrella group that includes 22 local unions, apparently plans to buy as many as 10,000 Tory memberships from the Oberg campaign to give away to its members, allowing each of them to vote for the party's new leader.

A separate union, the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, is giving away Tory memberships to its members as well as their families and friends. The only condition is that they support Oberg.

Typical of craft unions whose only interest is self interest, I got mine Jack. In this case as a former infrastructure minister Oberg is promising lots of construction jobs. The fact that he attacks public sector unions shows there is not solidarity in the house of labour in Alberta. Its each for their own. As AUPE proved successfully under former President Dan McLellan. He would approve this move.

The teachers union the ATA is also encouraging its members to flood the Tories with memberships.

Frank Bruseker, head of the Alberta Teachers Association
and a former Liberal MLA, has a PC membership card
and is urging his 33,000 members to buy one, too.

All aboard the gravy train. The reality is that of course this is the real election in Alberta since in a one party state the leadership race is the only time we get to choose our new leader. So shell out your five bucks and vote for our next Glorious Leader. But don't think that will save you from being screwed by the notorious anti-union government of Alberta.


See:

This is Class War

Unions

Alberta Democracy Tory Style

Alberta Lowers Voting Age

Alberta

One Party State

Klein

Democratic Deficit

Mormonism Cult of the Political Right

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Republicans Cover Up Sex Slavery

Another sex scandal cover up by the Republicans. This is a crime of historic proportions....once again the hypocrisy of patrirarchical family values show's its true face...those who claim we no longer have to fight for womens rights once again show their ignorance of the world they live in......

Cold Comfort: the Japan Lobby Blocks Resolution on WWII Sex Slaves

Even as top congressional Republicans were protecting Mark Foley from exposure for soliciting teen pages, they were simultaneously helping Japan cover up its past record of institutionalized rape and sexual enslavement of Asian women. The Japanese cause was greatly aided by Bob Michel, a highly paid lobbyist and former G.O.P. congressman with close ties to the party's leadership.

For the past seven years, a coalition of Korean-American human rights and religious groups have been pressuring congress to urge Japan to accept responsibility for forcing women and girls into sexual slavery during the World War II era. This shouldn't be terribly controversial, since the historical facts are clear.

Beginning in the 1930s, Japan rounded up as many as 200,000 women and girls, mostly from Korea, China, and the Philippines, and forced them to serve as prostitutes for its soldiers in order to increase troop “morale.” The Japanese called these sex slaves “comfort women”; many were raped and beaten, and some were killed after they acquired sexually-transmitted diseases or became “overworked.” Some of the women were so humiliated that they never returned to their homes after the war, and many of those who did kept quiet about their experiences.

Japan long insisted that the comfort women were willing prostitutes and only acknowledged the sex slavery system in 1993 after documents discovered in the Japanese Army archives proved its true nature. The Japanese government backed the establishment of the quasi-governmental Asian Comfort Woman Fund in the mid-1990s but it has refused to offer direct compensation. Many of the women and their families have refused to accept money from the fund because they say Japan has never taken responsibility for its actions.

Japan has always been able to block attempts to pass a congressional resolution on the exploitation of comfort women, partly because it runs a lavishly-funded Beltway lobbying operation. The Bush Administration has quietly assisted in attempts to block a resolution on comfort women. According to Mindy Kotler, the director of Asia Policy Point, a research center on Japan and northeast Asia, the Administration views Japan as the key regional bulwark against an emerging Chinese regime that may be hostile to the United States in the future. “The administration wants Japan to be a central part of America's Asian security architecture—above Australia, India, and the British Navy,” she said. “Any issue that the Japanese have defined as disturbing has been shunted aside to ensure that nothing upsets the alliance with Japan—and I mean nothing, whether it's a trade dispute or taking responsibility for the comfort women.”

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One Down Thousands to Go

Al-Qaeda in Iraq leader 'killed'

Maybe they did maybe they didn't get him .

US Military `Does Not Believe' Al-Masri Killed in Iraq Raid

But like like the death of al- Zarqawi this too is of little consequence.

The White House's War on Terror reminds me of the comic book Sg. Nick Fury of SHIELD and his arch- nemisis the original comic book terrorist organization HYDRA


(which had a pop-culture iconic influence on the SLA)

HYDRA's slogan was:

"Hail Hydra! Immortal Hydra! We shall never be destroyed."Cut off a limb and two more shall take its place."

In fact when Hercules attempted to kill the Hydra it was not limbs but two heads that appeared after he sliced off one.

A lesson the American Empire has failed to lean as it continues it mythic war on the hydra of international terrorism.

Do you think Rumsfeld sees Sgt. Fury when he looks in the mirror?


See:

Iraq



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Oaxaca-Mexican Revolution Continues

As I wrote here Mexico is currently in a pre-revolutionary political condition of dual power. Little reported in the MSM is the current crisis in Oaxaca province, where Vincente Fox has declared he intends to use military force to put down the popular uprising. Crisis Escalates as Marines Land in Oaxaca Guess he never watched Battleship Potemkin.

Canadian Solidarity With Oaxaca information can be found here.


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P3 Scandal Down Under

In a scenario that sounds like something one expects from the Alberta Government or their clones in Ottawa, Australians in Victoria have found out P3's are public funds paying for private profit.

And key to the scandal is the fact that P3's are neither accountable nor transparent. Gee just like here.

And the government has a problem underestimating its surpluses. Gee just like here.


Secret deals with private sector under fire

■ Melbourne's formula one Grand Prix posted a record loss this year, leaving state taxpayers with a $21 million bill.

■ Departing Auditor-General Wayne Cameron put himself at odds with Mr Brumby by insisting the Government's budget surplus was more than $3 billion above that reported this week.

■ An independent consultants' report said the EastLink tollway would boost Victoria's economy by $15 billion and provide thousands of jobs.

EastLink is among 16 public-private partnerships entered into by the Bracks Government since its election in 1999. Others include Southern Cross Station and the Melbourne Convention Centre redevelopment. But the process of attracting private investment to help pay for public infrastructure has prompted concerns.

The public accounts committee's final report, tabled in Parliament yesterday, found the Government's reliance on "commercial in confidence" to limit access to important information about PPPs had "diminished the accountability of government to the Parliament for substantial state expenditure".


See:

P3

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