New Year: 2006: A time to celebrate, and to consider the vows by which you gude your life

Anno Domini

2006 AD

Yes, indeed! party thru the nite, and also I'd recommend each of us take time to meditate upon and renew every serious appropriate vow by which you've promised the Lord to live your life, mindful of the Coming of God's Kingdom on Earth as in Heaven.

Visual from a Christianbooks.com email shoppingletter.

China: Canada: Stockwell Day, former Bad Boy now Tory critic for Foreign Affairs wins praise from China e-Lobby

D.J. McGuire that inveterate, exacting China-watcher has picked up on, and strongly praised, a speech given at the University of Toronto recently, by none other than Stockwell Day. For a brief period, Day led the opposition Reform Party / Canadian Alliance in the House of Commons, having had no previous Federal political experience. He proved himself to be in well-over his head. Since that time, however, and since the merging of RP / CA with the Progressive Conservative Party, the united party led by Stephen Harper with Day now also in the larger grouping, he seems to have grown in stature over the years with his portfolio in the Opposition's shadow cabinet.

McGuire cawt onto the picture of Day's growth as an articulator of alternative foreign policy via Canadian blog Between Heaven and Earth which I'm just now checking out, produced by MaKina, a China Human Rights activist based in Victoria, British Columbia, and deserving of high praise in her own right. Summing up Day's day at the U of T:

The Canada file: ...Between Heaven and Earth does the blogosphere a tremendous service by reprinting in full Conservative MP Stockwell Day's excellent speech on Communist China at the University of Toronto. That the Conservatives had the wisdom to appoint Day their foreign policy critic (i.e., shadow foreign minister) was the tipping point behind our endorsement of them in next month's Canadian election. This speech is a must read. Between Heaven and Earth also has a speech by David Kilgour, a retiring MP who bolted the governing Liberal Party in disgust this year, on the value of democracy in the modern world.

Stockwell Day is notable also, despite any flaws exhibited earlier on the Federal level, for being a forthright evangelical Christian.

As a matter of fact, the news media and state-supported comedy shows on CBC had constantly mingled Day's presumed flaws otherwise, with his evangelical Christian faith, which somehow was made out to be even more offensive because he had connections with the Pentecostal wing of Canadian Evangelicalism. The Christianophobia deployed by Liberals and the media has been presented in refWrite blog entries before. Day's was such a case earlier, and I'm bracing myself for the phase of the current Federal election campaign when outgoing Prime Minister Paul Martin begins desperately an all-out demonize-&-smear phase of the Lib campaign beyond even its present tactics. Martin may be expected to wrap himself in the Charter of Rights in the gelatin of goo-words recently used to demote traditional marriage to a generic business arrangement only, while playing with the other side of his mouth the Abortion card as well.

Lookout for, I would suggest, for the campaign vicissitudes the Martinites may visit upon Member of Parliament, Cheryl Gallant, who represents most fully the Pro-Life prioritizers in the Tory camp, and lookout for Stockwell Day who represents the diplomacy-for-democracy forces among the Tories. Both these candidates may be vulnerable, along with the Party, to an avalanche of subtly-advanced religious bigoty by the Liberal campaign.

We need someone as Minister of Foreign Affairs who will put the plight of millions of house-church Christians, papacy-aligned Catholics, Falun Gong practioners, unregistered Buddhist groupings, and persecuted Uigher Muslims (falsely painted as terrorists because of their grumbling for the liberation of now Communist China-controlled East Turkmenistan): we need someone who will put rights at the top of the priority list in dealing with the slave-state capitalist government of mainland China. We need a Foreign Affairs Minister, sitting in the Commons, to defend a diplomacy of democratization for China; and in the Ministry, working out the patient but telling practice of such a diplomacy that would bring it up to the level of Taiwan, a Chinese democratic republic. We need someone strong enuff to take the project of the re-direction of the Foreign Service diplomats and bureaucrats - among whom are well-nested incorrigible Pearsonians who pretend that 9/11 never happened and is not relevant to Canada, more concerned to back up Martin's constant bitching at the USA in regard to softwood lumber. Next to that, we need such a Foreign Affairs Minister who is savvy to the security-jeapardy to all of us as a consequence of China's aggressive efforts to purchase Canadian corporations and natural resources, while engaging in shakey business practices detrimental to Canadian investors who followed Martin to get themselves cawt in the labyrinth of the tidal wave of corruption bedevilling China's industrial establishment, with no free trade union movements.

If Stockwell Day does become Minister of Foreign Affairs (should he be re-elected) in consequence of a Conservative Party elevated to govern as a minority (majority governments may be a thing of the past in Canada), his China policy should have a strong backup of experts on the financial side - and, fortunately, Day himself has experience in the field as former Finance Minister of the Province of Alberta. Oil is a key issue for both Alberta (revenues) and China (fuelling its slave-state capitalist empire and voraciously manoeuvering to wedge into the Canadian industry). - Politicarp

Semiotics: Experiment#1: Plus more all > aka > + more all

The above work of digital semiotic art is its own title; overdetermined and overly fluid at the same time, it retains its redolence while being mentioned as at home in the poetics of the )wlbirdbet. Albert Gedraitis©Dec29,2k5 on OmniGrapple, Grab, GraphicConverter, Firefox, MacOSX3.9, iMac(summer2000), 6.5gigabytes, 350Herz. Dissemination: Anaximaximum / book notes & ye(a)s(t)s / Christian Homomemo / Orthography

Health: Medicine: The debate over Evolutionism vs Intelligent Design, new level

Don't miss the latest twist in the Evoism/ID debate, with startling visuals to carry the argument!

Hat Tip to Steve Bishop at An Accidental Blog - )wlb

Urban Life: Govern city space: Scholar tries to unravel maze of metro connections, governance

Professor of political theory, Jonathan Chaplin, in a major theory-piece in Comment, seeks to give readers a glimpse of what public justice could and, in some respects, should look like in a great contemporary metropolis. Like, of course, Toronto.

Chaplin helps us distinguish the governance function that aims to achieve public justice for the myriad of interacting non-government societal spheres, institutions, associations, groupings, both formal and informal, civic amenities (and lack thereof), while pausing to lay out how City (with a capital 'C' to distinguish the public-justice goveranance from the city in toto in the multiformity of its overall populace - in every other respect than that of public-justice governance as such). The professor at the Institute for Christian Studies also deftly factors in the issue of how City finds its best jurisdictional zone of competence and responsibility in relation to State (or, in Canada, Province and Territory) and, it may be added, in relation to the Federal public-justice zone of competence.

In other words, in a brief article, Dr Chaplin puts forward a schematics to take forward the evalution of problems in our urban living that seem sometimes to fall between levels of government. Push-off problems; but also the grab-up opportunities for tier self-aggrandizement over against the other tiers of government. Again, for instance, let's refer to Toronto, with its two government-supported school systems (the secularist govt-controlled schools and the Roman Catholic Church-guided schools). At one point, if I may add to the schooling example cited by Prof Chaplin, yet a second example from the sphere of schooling where, once upon a time, neither the City nor the Province of Ontario set the amount of school taxes, nor determined how the resultant revenues were to be spent. Instead, it was the then-five Toronto-area secularist Boards of Education which set their tax-amounts, budgets, and expenditures; while the Catholic School Board, overlapping the geogrpahy of all five of the secularist boards, set its amounts, budgets, and expenditures (classically, these amounts were lower than the secularist Boards because the Catholic educational system was not fully supported thru grade 12 and because orders of nuns pledged to poverty staffed many Catholic institutions - schools, hospitals, orphanages, etc.).

What was the state's role?, I mean the City's public-justice role? It was to maintain the list of Catholic School Board voters and ensure that their tax-payments for education went to the Catholic Board of Education. Some people who were not Catholics had themselves so listed in order to support that system, so dismayed were they with the secularist system.

Needless to say, government couldn't stand to see a thorougly organized societal sphere financially independent and responsible, quite aside from the ruling party's determinations. In the name of simplicity, not the City, but the Province took over the taxing authority, budgeting, and expenditures of both school systems. It was part of the Province's move toward 'efficiencies' which, of course, would include the closing of many older schools, and the massing of students in ever-more-huge institutions where the main lesson is clique-exostemce, stardom for a few, anomymity for many, and isolation for at least a few of the students bewildered and lost in the mass phenomena of contemporary schooling (among the worst educational phenomena of our times in North America). Parents, parents associations, communities associated around a specific educational philosophy and curriculum, and other arrangements to increase educational diversity were less and less countenanced by the state - no matter how many tiers of government there were, no matter how many struggling alternative schools outside government and Church control.

At present, Ontario has been found guilty of religious discrimination by permitting just two religions - those of secularism and Catholicism - to receive support by taxation, found guilty by a UN Human Rights Commission. An otherwise mean-spirited Conservative Party won my support on the sole issue of its plan (delayed to the bitter end of its time in office) to allocate some educational dollars to parents who could show they schooled their children in one of several smaller third-alternative schools. The Liberal Party in the province won an election in considerable part by refusing to pay-out the monies promised, instead promising to discriminate against third-alternative schooling and the parents who chose it or would choose it had they they means to do so. This effectively disenfranchises Christian parents in poverty from securing a Christian education for their children in Ontario, in Toronto particularly where the immigrant portion of the population is a relatively high percentage.

The irony is that the Liberal Party's leader and head of government was himself a supporter of the tax-supported Catholic school system; had been educated with all his sibs in Catholic schools; and has children of his own these days in those schools. Yet, he decided against equity, and instead of solving the probelm of the UN charge of religious discrimination against Ontario, forthrightly determined to practice it. This bigotry continues to this day.

Well, if you read Prof Chaplin's article, you can sort out for yourself just what is going on in this tangle of misgovernance of tax-support for schools. I urge you to read it if you haven't already. But, I want to mention another issue that comes up for discussion within the parameters of Chaplin's advisory: the pollution of the metropolis of Toronto by our automobiles, the trucks from hither and yon, the buses, the airplanes coming and going from Pearson International Airport. The pollution is so thick, and it is so native, and it is accounted for so much by our own traffic (not manufacturers' smokestacks, as the government likes to pretend in order to blame some other country or level of government). Now, obviously, the City, that is Metro Toronto Council and its Health Department, have some authority to ban automobiles fuelled by polluting fuels. But a more final authority is reserved by the Province to itself or to the Ontario Municipal Board which the government appoints, and tho it perhaps would take a trajector of litgation all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada, such that Toronto could undo a reactionary move of the provinical Legistlative Assembly to stop a responsible Health Department and Metro Council in its tracks - no jurisdiction intevenes between exhaust pipes of all those vehicles and my lungs ... or yours. And, while there is much talk of a 'Christian' politics here, no Christian group has emerged to pioneer a path toward public justice against vehicle-pollution generators. Neither the rightwing Christian Heritage Party nor the leftwing Citizens for Public Justice has made so much as a peep to outlaw the tidal wave of polluted air the city generates each day.

The Liberal Party, the same party of bigotry that killed off the feeble last-minute Conservative move to establish equality of tax-support for all educational phliosophies and the various school systems now struggling without assistance (the parents of whose children neverthless pay the full amount in taxes), this same Liberal government sits supine in the face of the gravest crisis Toronto and much of the rest of the province has: clean fresh air. The Liberal Party can't take seriously the enormity of the problem, and so subsidizes foreign auto manufacturers to set up shop in the province, without any rules stipulating what kind of cars can be produced. The cars and trucks made in the province should be legislated to consist only of those free of pollution-driven engines. Instead, the province wants to blame other jurisdictions for a problem that is largely the creation of our own businesses (trucks, airplanes), citizenry (cars, motor bikes, boats, snow mobiles), and government (buses, trucks, cars, limos, snow plows, etc.). The mere transformation of City and Provincial vehicles, and taxicabs, to non-polluting fuels, would be a significant step at this stage to a betteer way of life, and greatly improved public justice in these matters.

With these two issues, a Christian politics active in Toronto for Toronto and all its peoples, would have its hands full for quite some time. - )wlb

Commerce: Consumers: Customers first! capitalism - tired of shoddy goods, inadequate services, and false advertizing

I join in the new surge of customers searching for a remedy to an inadequate place in the capitalist scheme of things, especially now that the Internet is in full function. Customer service has gone way down.

I also have special concerns as a Christian at all sorts of exclusions of markets and entry into them, as when something I need or want is piggy-backed on a salacious array of products so that dubious personal ads were appearing on my page at a photo site (no thanks Flickr!, no thanks GoogleAds!). The War on Christmas is another twist on this capito-problemo.

I also have special concerns as a user of a Bell telephone, where being listed in the directory means that I get interrupted by companies that I don't want to hear from - including Bell itself, The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, The Toronto Sun, and a dozen other outfits whose names I can't remember. I must find some other strategy than cursing my head off at them; but I've noticed that when you demand to speak to the supervisor of the poor chap or chapess on the other end of the line, the over-the-phone sales-person moves directly into a strategy to dump you. They don't want you to talk to a supervisor.

refWrite plans to give more attention to the plight of consumers in 2006.

In the meantime, click the headline of this blog entry, and take a look at "The Social Customer Manifesto." Hmmm, does the word "social" here betray a leftwing origin? If so, it should be out front - as say, "The Socialist Customer Manifesto." I shall attempt to be outfront in regard to the relation between my being a cranky customer and a well-meaning Christian. - Anaximaximum

Season's Greetings?: Happy Holidays? BAH! Humbug!

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Eritrea: Religious oppression: Laity of leading Christian Church implicated in far-reachng religius-rites violations - Part II

Previously, on December 11, 2005, refWrite carried the Intro to an Amnesty International document that pinpoints the widespread religious oppression of persons belonging faith-groups outside the mainstream of Eritrea-approved religions, both Christian and Muslim. We continue this series because of the specifics of the Eritrean situation, in which a member body of the World Council of Churches is implicated by its laity in a system violently repressive of specific other religious communities and supposedly faviouring the WCC member body.

The live-linked headline of this blog entry takes the reader to a new development in which an international court decision has ruled Eritrea to have started its war with Ethiopia in the 1990s, important because hostilities persist to the moment and have become more intense in recent days.

Eritrea broke law in border war

Eritrea triggered the border war with Ethiopia when it attacked its neighbour in May 1998, an international commission in the Hague has ruled. ¶ Since there was no armed attack against Eritrea, its attack on Ethiopia could not be justified as lawful self-defence under the United Nations charter. ¶ Eritrea is now liable to compensate Ethiopia for damages caused, it said. ¶ Tensions over the border have risen in recent months with both countries sending more troops there. ¶ Last week, Western UN staff in Eritrea left at the request of Eritrea.

What the connection may be between religious repression in Eritrea, its previous and current warlike actions, and the possibility of lay-Christian warlordism abusing even Eritrea's most ancient Christian Church, is a possible syndrome most important to monitor. Thanks to Amnesty International (sadly, not always a reliable source) for this good work. - Politicarp

2. Religions in Eritrea - background to arrests

Eritrea has a highly religious population, with some 98% of its 3.7 million people belonging to a long-established branch of a major world religion. Most Eritreans actively practice their faith, with only a small proportion being merely nominal members of their faith, and even fewer describing themselves as being of no faith at all. The Orthodox Church and Islam have been rooted in the region since the fourth and seventh centuries respectively. These two religions are practised by some 90% of the population, although there are no reliable statistics on which is the larger group. For historical reasons and due to its central position in the former Ethiopian Empire, the Orthodox Church is socially predominant.

Of the other Christian denominations, 5% of the population are Roman Catholics. About 2% are Protestants, of whom about half belong to a Lutheran church, and about half to smaller religious movements, such as the Jehovah's Witnesses and at least 36 evangelical and pentecostal churches. There are a few members of the Baha'i, Jewish, Hindu and Buddhist religions in the larger urban centres. Traditional religious practices continue among some members of Eritrea's nine ethnic groups (or "nationalities") in remoter areas. The central highlands and the majority Tigrinya ethnic group, are predominantly Orthodox, while the lowlands are predominantly Muslim, although most towns and rural areas contain places of worship and members of both of these religions.

All religions in Eritrea are nationally - organized faiths. Some are affiliated to international bodies. The four main "officially recognized" religions are:

1. The Eritrean Orthodox Church, which separated after independence from the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, part of the worldwide Coptic Orthodox Church of the eastern rite, and a member of the World Council of Churches.

2. Islam of the Sunni rite, represented by the Muslim Council of Eritrea with mosques throughout the country and predominant in the less developed eastern and western lowlands.

3. The Eritrean Catholic Church, part of the worldwide Roman Catholic movement.

4. The Evangelical Church of Eritrea (also known as the Lutheran Church, and before independence linked to the Ethiopian Evangelical Mekane Yesus Church), part of the Lutheran World Federation and a member of the World Council of Churches.


Other religious groups, which are not officially recognized and are not allowed to worship openly, comprise the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Baha'i religion, and an increasing diversity of evangelical, pentecostal, charismatic or "born again" Protestant churches, which are collectively called "evangelicals" (or sometimes "pentes", a pejorative term). These "minority religious groups"(6) had recognized places of worship in many towns until these were all closed down by the government in 2002.

Some of the Eritrean churches, as well as several international Christian and Muslim charities and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), run relief and humanitarian projects, although under government restrictions and subject to the May 2005 NGO Proclamation.

Inter-faith relations in Eritrea since independence have generally been good, with a history of tolerance between Christians and Muslims at both the national official level and in local communities. Christian and Muslim holidays are officially celebrated throughout Eritrea.

There is, however, some social intolerance from members of the main churches toward the Jehovah's Witnesses and evangelical churches. Faith relations have also been affected by the political orientations of the Eritrean independence war, and the conflict between the Marxist-Leninist Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF), which formed the independence government, and the Muslim-oriented Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF) and other linked groups, to whom the EPLF offered no reconciliation at independence. The post-independence exile opposition coalition contains Islamist groups, and consequently the government has frequently suspected Muslims in Eritrea of links with Sudan-based armed opposition groups.

Under Ethiopian rule before independence, all religions were heavily restricted by the marxist-leninist Dergue military government. In Ethiopia in 1979 the Patriarch of the Orthodox Church, Abune Tewoflos, and the Reverend Gudina Tumsa, head of the Ethiopian Evangelical Mekane Yesus Church, "disappeared" from detention and were extra-judicially executed by government agents. Members of Dergue detained in 1991 are currently still on trial in Addis Ababa for these and other crimes. In the 1980s there was also a fierce campaign of religious persecution against religious groups with perceived "imperialist" connections, such as US-connected evangelical and Baptist churches and the Beta Israel religion, also known as Ethiopian Jews or Falashas, as well as discrimination against Muslims.

The EPLF, while it was fighting the Ethiopian government for Eritrean independence, tolerated the main faiths but not the minority religions, and religious persecution was reportedly sometimes an issue. After independence, the EPLF government recognized the main four religions in state functions. Jehovah's Witnesses became a target of active repression in 1994, as a result of their opposition to military service when it was introduced, and their non-participation in the 1993 independence referendum.

In 1995 restrictions were placed on all faiths by Proclamation Religious Organizations no.73/1995, which prohibited them from receiving international funds or engaging in political activities. Religious organizations were required to register with the authorities and provide details of their membership and assets, including foreign contacts and foreign funding. The four main religions were quickly registered but registration of minority religious groups was postponed. Since then, there has been a rapid growth of evangelical churches in Eritrea.

This has often been a source of tension between them and the three main Christian churches, which were losing members to them. They had different doctrines, forms of worship and weddings, and "fellowship" for prayer and study. They often proselytized (sought converts) or expressed their faith in new, "charismatic" ways in public places, which attracted some disapproval from members of the main religious groups - Orthodox, Catholic, Lutheran and Islam.

Watch for Part III of Amnesty's document on Eriteria; watch also for news of the war footing that Eritrea and Ethiopia have placed on their militaries and societies.

Societal philosophy: Everyday life: Can formal philosophy illuminate everyday life, your situation&position in society, options

Gideon Strauss, the premiere blogger in the stretch of Christian socially-concerned folk in North American that sometimes calls itself "Neo-Calvinist," also teaches a course on Social Philosophy. Recently, he disseminated a blog entry titled, "Questions while preparing to teach social philosophy."

I am teaching social philosophy again next term, and since I am completely redesigning the course, I have been asking myself many questions, starting out with two: (1) What are the social philosophical questions that a Christian perspective peculiarly brings to the fore? and (2) How should we go about considering the relationship between (a) questions proper to the philosophy of the social sciences (such as "What is 'social'?") and (b) questions proper to social ethics (such as "How can we live together without killing each other, given how deeply we differ?").

These are great questions to be asking, for young people to be asking in their college studies, and for all of us.

I think another good question is What is a society? In an admittedly "impressionistic" book some decades back Dr Martin Vrieze asked in his Unionville Lectures of the time, a number of questions related to the one I just cited. What is a nation, for instance, as against what is a contry perhaps. Now these questions are getting into some (quite useful) distinctions to be pursued after one has tentatively at least begun to provide oneself with a working defintion of what is 'social'? and what 'social ethical'?

For my part, in recent controversies I have been asking and proposing answers to the embattled issues of What is a marriage? What is an intimate union? and how many kinds of them exist, once we determine criteria (such as my candidates: intention of permanence, and exclusion of all other. From there we can go on to ask the further question whether state recognition of different kinds of intimate unions, sharpens the need to explain why the state may, or should or should not prioritize its recognition of one kind of intimate union in relation to the others, recognised (or not - an awkward situation for a state to know of different kinds but not even recognize their plurality with the slightest bit of formal write-up). All that aside, I am asking about the state's own interest in the recognition of 1woman1man intimate unions (whether formalized and legalized or not). Then the state's interestest in recognition, legalization, and prioritization.

For many, the prioritization of 1woman1man kind of intimate union has to do with the role of traditional marriage and the parallel "common law" status in regard to the healthy formation as much as possible of another societal sphere - family. Where a marriage involves a couple of adults, a family involves one or two parents, their child or children (whether consanguinously begot, or adopted, or blended from two sets of consanginuous from one or both of the adults before they united, formed their intimate union, and hopefully married. Yes, my prime selection of societal spheres to theorize upon these days has to do with public controversy that impinges upon me personally. But for sake of completeness, one must add to marriage (and all and any forms of intimate unions, with status of norms of intended permanence and exclusion), and to one's theoretically-enriched conceptualization of family (distinct from but interrelated to marriage / other intiamte union), also the societal sphere of friendship. This has been little explored by a social philosophy such as Gideon Strauss is pursuing, while mainstream sociology has given us quite a mixed bag of theories and analyses. Personally, I think there are numerous kinds of friendships, a good many of them distinguishable from one another as types. A field of sociological study worthy of a full-fledged typology - learning of which while in college can help a person understand what kind of relation one is forming, and what the relation of friendship might mean in the perception of the other person. This can be very helpful in wise friendship-formation.

But again, I am working with a pet set of examples. It just so happens I'm doing so because these three kinds of societal spheres (marriage / other intimate unions; family; and friendship) are all qualified-ethically (a statement that turns out to be a big claim, and a very important one for acquiring social wisdom). Social philosophy and social ethics must study these three kinds of societal spheres to deepen its grasp on the ethical aspect of all other kinds of societal spheres. So says André Troost the father of reformational Christian pursuit of the science of ethics, and his student James Olthuis.

Having said all the foregoing and having alluded already to the state, and adding in passing the whole question of world trade, industrial activity and organization, and labour unions, we come back to Gideon's question about "social ethics." I myself would prefer to ask about "societal ethics," since "social ethics" seems to designate a much more atomic set of relations that relate to the decorum to be observed in other spheres, the protocols, the forms of address and attire and all the niceties of functioning in each sphere appropriately. Good manners.

Before closing, we should note that the sphere-specificity (or, if you prefer, the older terminology "sphere sovereignty?) approach to ethics, because it is multi-modal, is quite different from the biotistic ethics upon which is built the Roman Catholic "consistent ethics of life" and its Magisterium-compliant societal doctrine of subsidiarity. PoliSci prof David Koyzis recently as re-stated his
problem with the Pro-Life position insofar as it is tied into the mentioned the "Consistent Ethic of Life" as an umbrella ethics for a very mixed bag of issues:

To be sure, I do not accept the reasoning of those who, following the late Joseph Cardinal Bernardin of Chicago, claim to adhere to a "seamless garment” approach linking together abortion, capital punishment, warfare and poverty as pro-life issues. Good people can disagree on the best way to address poverty, on whether to wage war in contingent circumstances, and on whether the death penalty is proper retribution for those who have taken innocent life. However, the abortion issue is qualitatively different. Here disagreement revolves around, not how best to protect the unborn child, but whether to do so at all. For this reason those attempting to tie such different issues together sow confusion.

I close with a quote and a Hat Tip to Steve Bishop, and to his source Paul Robinson for this blog entry:

Ethics: Person, Practices and Society

The Association for Reformational Philosophy in the Netherlands organised a conference on ethics during the summer of 2005. Some of the papers from the conference are now available for download (HT Paul Robinson).

These include papers from the panels: ethically relevant connections and practices and the workshops. There are papers by Andrew Basden, Doug Blomberg, Rudi Hayward (it's about time he started to blog - how about it Rudi?), Danie Strauss, Henk Stoker, Harry Cook, John Van Dyk, Uko Zylstra and many others.

A lot to chew over, especially now if you have a bit of extra time before you make any New Year's Resolutions. Just as we need to fite for public open celebration of Christmas in our pluralistic setting, we need to work for a Christian, Jewish, and Muslim tranformation of New Year's to a time for renewing our thawt on our ethical stance in all spheres of life, and perhaps making a manageable list of a few new moral projects for personal well-being and our societal functioning in 2006. - )wlb

Israel & Palestine: Simultaneous election campaigns: Two countries impact each other's internal political jockeying

A shootout in Jenin in the territory of the Palestinian Authority, resulted in the death of Zayid Khalil Moussa, head of Hamas' s terrorist wing in Jenin. Moussa was a commander in the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades, affiliated to the larger Hamas multi-program organization which is currently fielding candidates in the upcoming Palestinian Parliamentary elections in January. The model for the relation of the two bodies is ruffly comparable to the organizational sectioning off of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA; and the IRA military wing proper.

I got news of Moussa being put out of his misery by the Israelis today, at 15:71 GMT. About forty-five minutes later, I got the further word: the office of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, thru spokesman Raanan Gissin, said Israel "is concerned that the Palestinian militant group Hamas might gain power. " Hamas to become the governing party of the Palestinian Authority?

Israel enters PA territory, knocks off Moussa. Israel continues intense ongoing analyses about the growing strength of Hamas, which has won lots of seats on municipal councils not so long ago. And now Hamas seems to be on the verge of electing up to a possible one-third of the members of the new Palestinian Parliament on January 23, a development that could well nullify Israel's Barghouti Strategy against the Oldsters (not so much Abbas, but everyone around him, save one or two).

You can't help but sense that Sharon's government, he being up for re-election and favoured to replace himself when his new party "The Future" re-appoints "King Ariel" as Prime Minister against the new head of Likud, Binjamin Natanyahu (but as I write this very sentence I discover that earlier in the day, StrategyPages has predicted Sharon will lose on a no-confidence motion put up against him in the new Knesset; and that Netanyahu will be re-appointed Prime Minister, representing Likud): Sharon's government, I sense, is afraid of Hamas. If so, Netanyahu will smell it and wil go after Sharon, tooth and nail, during the election campaign in Israel. Anyone taking bets on this?

But what's going-on in the Palestinian Authority is an all-out competition within Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah Party, inherited from Yasser Arafat, and now busting apart into factions where the Young are contesting against the Old Party authorities. The Young want their people in a larger share of the candidate-slots that Fatah puts forward to be included on the ballot. Since the vote has already been postponed from July to January, a second delay in the elections would probably work against Fatah, against both its major factions.

Israel, however, has now threatened to postpone the Palestinian electionsfrom taking place in Jerusalem. (How they would accomplish this, were Abbas and the PA to demur, I can't imagine.) The Israelis, whether following Sharon or Netanyahu or the Labour Party leader Amir Peretz, "a fiery unionist," none of them like the head of steam that Hamas candidates have built up in campaigning against Fatah, the presently-divided Fatah. So, we must expect that there is heavy negotiating going on between Fatah's Young and Old. I think the Young will get more spots on the official Fatah candidate's list. Should these eventualities come about, then Marwan Barghouti, the leader of the Young, will have much more power in the Fatah party.

One should mention, however, that Barghouti is serving multiple life-terms in an Israeli prison. Some say that the Israeli's have turned Barghouti to serve their own purposes, and that he is actually their candidate. Suggesting thereby that the Young Fatah faction is led by an Israeli puppet, and is displacing the Fatah Old. That sounds like a worthy effort on the part of Israeli intelligence, and it sounds too like a Graham Greene novel.

I'll wait and see, for a while - before I draw any conclusions, indeed before I have any sense of where all this may be going. Two elections being fawt out in the neighbouring contries. at the same time. I have the impression the Israelis will vote first (better check out this detail!). Then, the Palestinians will vote on January 23. In any event, fascinating. - Politicarp

Mexico: National Fury: US push for legal immgrtn only, provokes anti-American fit in Mexico

The continuous heavy influx of illegals over the US/Mexican border has sent Mexicans coursing thru-out the American West where an anti-illegals political sentiment has become the norm. Mexicans are often represented as feeling they have a right to broach the border and infiltrate the targetted society, if they wish and have the energy. Of course, they may die on the journey; some do. But the problem from the American side of the border is no longer deniable and the chief avenues of response is no longer arguable: a fence, wall, barbered-wire and all is desperately in need of construction so that the flood is brawt down to flow, then to a trickle, and at last to the occasional water drop thru the near-closed fawcet.

It's very sad to draw the conclusions, but all the fuming in Mexico cannot prevail against the demographic facts of the situation. Mexico holds back its own economic restructuring and bottles up creative entrepreneurship while sealing off new-tech investment from abroad searching for those creative entrepreneurs whose first language is Spanish. Mexico has an old, diplated and privileged capitalism that Vincent Fox represents. So, while the birthrate flows, the population overflows, and a sizable minority rabbits north, Mexico begets and begots and has more have-nots. Mexico must face the neo-Malthusian dynamics of its internal social structure (not benefitted by the Roman Catholic children-multiplying dogma, bereft of loving birth-control practices).

We need a wall separating the territory of the USA from that of Mexico, as that democgraphic avalanche cannot be allowed to displace the present American population and cultural mix in the entire Southwest. Then the US should get the Canucks to sit down together at a softwood table, of course, to determine how the same spirit along the Rio Grande should prevail at the northern border-crossings too - from Maine to BC. What about those stretches in the wild where an illegals-smuggler can drive along a road in Quebec or New Brunswick and where his passengers need only to cross a field, jump over a stone-fence meant to hold cows in or out, and voila!, you're standing in an American farmer's pasture or vegetable garden. Presto! You're an immigrant in America, and you demand your rights!

Forget it, Mexico. Forget it, Canada. There are rules, and the rules will get stricter because they have to. This isn't what America would prefer in a surrealist world of no heaven, no hell, and therefore nothing in between either, only the Beatles blasting everlastingly. But this wall to the south, and stricter policy to the north affecting me in Toronto, still are very sadly very very necessary. No-wall simply can no longer be afforded. Of course, damnit!, a wall cannot be constructed to cover the entirety of the problematic Canada/USA border, not by any means. But, at present, Canada doesn't recognize that the name of the game now is: Stop the uncontrolled flow in both directions, and filter as much of the problem group out of the flow and into outgoing ocean-crossing planes, or promptly into jails here.

Intelligent Design: Court: US judges substitute their own scientific presuppositions for those of parents, strike down ID

Today, I, along with many others, am licking my wounds inflicted by the decision of the Federal Appeals Court in the Dover, Pennsylvania, school board case that tried to determine whether Intelliegent Design could be tawt alongside Evolutionism based on the atheist hypothesis of so-called "Methodological Naturalism."




The recent winner of the 2005 Weblogs Award for Best Religious Blog, Evangelical Outpost, displays in a popularly-accessible way the inherent absurdities in the last-mentioned theory. But go the further step and clickup Macht's most recent blog entry on the same subject in his blog Prothesis, which finds Methodological Naturalism to be neither methodological nor natural" (as EO puts it).

Previous refWrite blog entries on ID:

List of earlier Prosthesis's excellent entries on Intelligent Design.

ID updates, includes notice of 1st scholarly debate ID vs Evolutionism as an ultimate value.

Intelligent Design: Science: The Wrath of NoGod (naturalistic religion + money + technique) = bigotry of scientific guilds
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Science: Prez as Christian science-layman: Bush lets his Christian-scientific values be known, wants free speech in science.

Science: Intelligent Design: Isaac Constantine puts Darwin under his lens, and finds neo-Darwinists wanting

Canada: Politics: Lameduck prime minister contradictionful in smear campaign vs Tory's Harper, re demotion of trad marriage

Once again, premiere Canadian blogger, Canadianna has fingered the abcess in Paul Martin's view of "Charter rights" and his Prime Ministerial responsiblity. The believability gap between Martin's rhetoric and his actual trade-offs with special interest groups to gain votes for a party that has proven its unworthiness, without the will to get rid of its outworn egomaniacal leader, a leftover from Jean Chretien's days, this believability gap has swollen to become an enormous pus-sack that grows wider and wider as the campagin proceeds.

Not only is there no "same-sex" marriage right in Canada's Charter of Rights, but Martin's present claim that members of his caucus not in the Cabinet are a-okay in not supporting this right (that he claims is absolute) and yet allowing them to retain their Lib party status in the House of Commons, most apparently even running again this time around, again for the Libs. (The New Democrats drove out the Member of Parliament from their ranks who violated totalitarian discipline to vote against Martin's Folly which thereby became also NDP leader Layton's Folly as well).

But this is not the only case where Martin has handed out cash and inflated rhetoric to buy votes from carefully-calculated select constituencies. It's the only one where he has wrapped himself in the absolutist rhetoric of absolute rights, while taking away the rights of those entering into or planning to enter into traditional marriages. Martin has broken all sense of the state's reasons for prioritizing 1woman1man intimate unions by levelling that relation to mere equality before the state with other kinds of intimate relations in which the state has no such of its own reasons for treating as equal, and the same. He's done this when he had an opportunity to recognize other kinds of intiamte unions, and to pass bread-and-butter measures in that direction. Rather, he demoted even his own marriage, not having a deep enuff philosophy of society to value what God has given him in his 1woman1man vowed intimate union.

He should be ashamed to call himself a Roman Catholic, and the RC Church in Canada should be ashamed to permmit him to partake in the Eurcharist. Martin's sex and generic marriage policy has hurt the kind of intimate union that the Canadian state should clearly prioritize. The inflated rhetoric of rights has advanced under Martin to the point of sickening many Canadians to that kind of rhetoric in its entirety. Martin is a rights-rhetoric abuser; and it's a homo who's saying so.

Burkean Conservative has also touched on the disease of rightsitis that has infected Canadian political thawt, both popular and hibrow, in Russ Kuykendall's "Why it's never enough for the hyper-rights crowd." However, I find that Russ would help us more if he could turn his powerful political-theory mind to the phenom of the inflation of rights rhetoric - as Martin has learned it, actually, from the schools of jurisprudence at Canadian universities. These are not pluralist institutions. How one ideology of rights took over the teaching of legal philosophy, history, and current practice in this country, is a tale waiting to be told. We dissenting bloggers should create a demand for the telling. - Owlb

USA: Polls: Bush popularity up strong rise, despite wire-taps, due to Iraq vote & US economy

The world-historical event constituted by Iraq's successful establishment of its democratic institutions last week, with the election of the first national Parliament directly under the Constitution drafted by the previous interim Parliament, rightly accrues to the author of the policy of overthrowing the Baathist regime and fostering an indigenous true democracy in Iraq. This Iraqi vote is the result, in significant part, of the Bush Doctrine in its second application, the first being Afghanistan. (See: America Unbound, the Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy by Daalders & Lindsey.)

Now, we learn of the partial Sunni shift toward support of the American presence in the country, for the time being. Sunnis ready to cooperate with US by Paul Martin, Washington Times, Dec18,2k5:

Key Sunni Muslim leaders in Iraq's violent Anbar province have concluded that their interests lie in cooperating with the United States, and they are seeking to extend a temporary truce honored by most insurgent groups for last week's elections.
But at the same time, they are demanding specific steps by the U.S. military, including a reduction in military raids and an increase in development projects for their vast desert province that stretches from the edge of Baghdad to the Syrian and Jordanian borders.

A shift that apparently includes release of some captured hi-level Sunnis from the old Baathist regime.

The purple-thumb vote is also a break-thru that has altered American military policy definitively, on the occasion where Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld announced that the forces had faced the reality of two recent phenom:

1.) the demand of US citizenry and media for involvement of the military in re-building the hurricance-ravaged communities of the US Gulf states, notably the metaphoric city of New Orleans, which amounts to enlistment of the US military in nation-building at home, under the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), of course;

while 2.) nation-(re-)building has been incipient in what American forces have been doing in Afghanistan and Iraq for some time now, but for which our forces have been severely criticized as not doing enuff. The problem for the military brass and their thinkers has been that, as large as has been the engagement in nation-building in both foreign countries during and following hostilities, such nation-building had been against stated policy as approved by previous interactions, not just with the Presidency, but with Congress. The tide has shifted, and the circumstances demand in the two recent cases, that the US forces instead always be trained and ready to swing into aggressive nation-building, even during hostilities. Rumsfeld, after surveying and consulting his generals and their advisors, has revised the official policy in this important direction. With it, a number of arch-conservatives have been left in the lurch, and Bush's incremental work toward a more "Compassionate Conservatism" has had an impact on military policy and the use of American armed forces.

Further, another area where miitary policy has been altered has to do with the Marines. The Marine Corps has added a fierce training in Mixed Martial Arts to their regimen, one that not every Marine can handle, but the program is so powerfully productive that the Navy and other forces have sent their own to the Marines to be trained, and Marines finishing the program have initiated ad hoc Matial Arts training in their units thru-out the Corps. This drastically increases the hand-to-hand combat capablities when rifles and greater armaments are ineffective or not at hand. The move retires another criticism often made of American military capablity on the ground.

Bush has turned out to be a Warrior President, and also a Builder President when we add to the military-policy redefinition under his purview, the present campaign to rebuild in the severely-struck Hurricane zones of the USA, and the general health of the economy with hi-er levels of employment - despite all the trade-offs.

These outstanding advances don't make the Bush Administration flawless. I for one must register my deep discontent with the failure of the Administration to go up against the gas/oil madness, to replace these killer fuels with a whole new turn of auto, truck, bus, and plane manufacture by means of state-of-the-art engineering that is integrated with planning for and reliance upon alternative fuels. At this point, this approach, the refWrite approach, targets only vehicle retooling and refuelling. It means the state in this critical time should give orders to the vehicle manufacturers, citing the desire of the US military for changing over its enitre fleet of every kind, and fuel producers. We are tied to oil-producing states too closely, and the must be phased down drastically, But more important: The smog in the cities and the pollution generally of American air, making it unbreathable and sickness-inducing, far outruns the non-vehicular industrial input to the problem. The center of the main problem is the American car owner.

Indeed, Conservatism is in large part gerry-rigged to exhale its own ideological smog of arguments and justifications for the terrible state of American air, buttressing an obsolesced technology of gas and oil that's killing us softly (in the background all too often and nowadays all too well hidden is the Randian atheist theory of industrialism, which promises a new invention that will integrate industrial/vehicular pollution into a glorious - cawff!- new - cawff! cawff! spit! - way of life. If only the President's low popularity numbers were about something as obvious as the national sickness-inducing car culture which needs to undergo a revolutionary transformation, even this untended disaster mite be cleared up with all deliberate speed. - Owlb

Australia: Policing racial tension: Slowly, anatomy of Australia's race tensions revealed, "Whites" vs "Mideasterners"

Australia's police are facing up to the fuller import of last week's race riots at Sydney's beaches, leading to a raid on the city's world-famous beaches, some say the finest anywhere.

Police in Sydney have seized weapons including swords, iron bars and petrol bombs in a major operation to prevent a repeat of last week's racial violence. "¶Residents largely stayed away from the city's famous beaches, as 2,000 police patrolled the areas in cars, boats, helicopters, on foot and on horseback. "¶Nearly 60 people have been arrested since Friday, and 100 charges laid. "¶Thousands of white men attacked people of Arabic and Mediterranean background on Cronulla Beach last Sunday. "¶The violence was apparently sparked by a recent attack on two lifeguards. "¶After last Sunday's assaults, groups described by police as having Middle Eastern or Mediterranean appearance were then involved in two nights of violence and vandalism. "¶Calm has been restored, but isolated incidents have continued."

refWrite's Australian Dossier:
UN stages rare Burma discussion, thanks to Aussies, Dec17,2k5.
Australian diplomacy seeks to stem repression of democracy in Burma, bring in China & India to help, Dec15,2k5.
Aussies experience White racist backlash against racial group assaulting lifeguards on beach, Dec13,2k5.

Economics: World Trade: Amidst street violence, WTO grabs small victory from defeat of proposal to end agri-subsidies worldwide

The World Trade Organization, meeting in Hong Kong, may have produced another chimera comparable to the Kyoto Accord. But it did agree on setting 2013 as the deadline for the termination of agricultural subsidies in rich countries, so that poor countries can compete with their products on a level-playing field in international trade.

Of course, this will tend to shrink the agricultural output in the rich countries (of which Canada and the US are, of course, two). Such shrinkage will mean huge readjustments in the agri-industry of the massive corporations, who may shift more and more production overseas - where Third World workers would work for wages for Europe / Canada / US- based agri-giants. But, it would also mean that the family farm would virtually disappear in Canada, it seems to me.

Nevertheless, I'm for the move. Third World countries that have the land and the animal care to produce for wider markets, indeed world markets, in various commodities absolutely must be permitted to earn their way. How a family-farm would get started or surivive in any of the Third World countries, is uncertain. How enuff internal capital could be concentrated in these various countries so that mid-size or lage corporations could plan and run operations on vialble land, worked by wage-earners, is also a question. So the most likely scenarios would be state-initiated and -operated corporations with viable land and schemes of land care assigned to them, or opening a country's doors to foreign agribusiness corporations.

Not all problems disappear around the setting of the 2013 deadline., even for the Third World countries who so desperately need to find ways to earn their own livings in a global ecnnomy.

As to Western countries ("rich countries"), there's a security issue at the edges of the new deadline that the press has not even mentioned. Not just security from poisoned food, carrying (say) bird flu, but security of a country's food supply in times of war. Canada, of course, never thinks in these terms. They've got the great Fortress of America to the south of them, which is expected to keep all wars from reaching these Canuck shores. But Americans have to think of the problem of becoming subject to labour unrest in lands that produce coffee, cheese, yak meat, sauerkraut, bananas, rice, soy, etc. Not only labour unrest, but drowt, grasshoppers, rain and floods. Not only labour unrest and natural disasters, but also political manipulation of the food supply by newly-empowered governments, playing international food trade as another pawn in the power games between nations.

With no guarantees of a sure-fire perfect outcome, it seems good that the WTO has a date around which to work, and it would do us all well to keep an eye on the additional plans that will be floated in the next month and year. - )wlb

Politics: Exclusion: Green Party excluded from leaders' debate by Canada's media bosses

Again, a sphere of society whose institutions (TV corporations and stations) have acquired the responsiblity to broadcast debates of political-party leaders in the course of national election campaigns for the Federal Parliament's House of Commons (the Senate of course is composed of appointees), has arbitrarily trimmed the list. A whole regiment of appointed Senators, an important Federal election for a new Commons, and still the media slice off a most important fringe party that could possibly win a seat somewhere for the first time, but even aside from that has the most important new ideas on a number of issues that no other party is willing to face up to. I should like a party with the guts to say the entire automative industry in Canada must gear over to making non-fossil fuelled vehicles, and none of the other kind can in future be imported here. The air quality, at least in the big cities, is murderous, mostly as a result of the pollution generated by our own vehicles. We spend all this money on health, but permit these hi levels of pollution that are the main cause of urban killer air.

The big media do not want even a small consistent voice cutting thru the cacophany of the four parties which still remain bedevilled by regionalism. Let me construct an extreme metaphor: A voter in Ontario or New Brunswick or Saint Boniface can't vote for the Bloc Quebecois - why not? We need voting on a national basis for every party that manages to get on the representation list. Proportional representation. In that case, watch the Green Party sprout up to a hefty 10% of the national vote with 10% of the seats in the Commons.

I like the ideas expressed by the Canadian Democratic Movement, whose site I stumbled upon and about which movement I otherwise know very little. But I indeed liked this thawt:

What could be healthier for this nation than to have more voices included? Make the debates longer in length. If people care, they will listen. The media and citizenry at large will have more to discuss and ponder that way.

The mainstream media is already doing a dreadful job this election as most elections on covering the other parties. This sets them behind the 8-ball every time. With parties like the Christian Heritage Party and the Canadian Action Party failing to meet the two-percent rule for [gain of] funding [from the Federal govt], national exposure would do so much for helping get their messages out to Canadians.

Canadians this election season will sadly be inundated with the same old same old. You will hear plenty about what Martin said of Harper, and of Harper about Layton etc., but what you won't hear is what 657,830 Canadians actually voted for (total votes for parties without seats).

Democracy is about participation, not exclusion. So let's hear from Fogal, Harris, Grey and the others. Is that too much to ask?

The Canadian Democratic Movement calls for an immediate overhaul of the broadcast consortium including the decision making process, and in the future allow Elections Canada to oversee the debates. As well, at minimum for this election, we call for equal debates to be held for the other registered federal political parties.

Strange to say, but Iraq now has a much more democratic electoral process for representation in its Parliament than does Canada. - Politicarp

Eritrea: Religious persecution severe: Eritrea mainstream repress religious belief & minorities' freedom of conscience

Eritrea Gov't Rejects Amnesty's Report on Religious Persecution
Thursday, Dec. 8, 2005 Posted: 3:35:17PM EST

Eritrea’s government sternly denied its engagement in religious persecution, rejecting the accusations appearing in the latest report from Amnesty International (AI).

On Wednesday, the leading human rights watchdog published a report entitled "Eritrea: Religious Persecution," which documented 44 incidents of religious persecution sponsored by the Eritrean authorities since 2003. While at least 26 pastors and priests, some 1,750 evangelical church members, have been detained by the government so far, the report warned that the persecution has intensified in 2005.

Eritrean Information Minister Ali Abdu promptly dismissed the report, criticizing it "unsubstantiated fabrications," according to Reuters.

That's how Christian Post's Eunice Or begins her fascinating and alarming article on religious persecution in Eritrea, a post-Marxist state that favours the mainstream of two religions only - the country's mainstream Islam and the country's ancient Christian Orthodox Church (which is of the Coptic Rites). We have the same thing in Ontario state-supported schools, two religions are established - the "neutralist" secularist-humanist religion, and the system for Roman Catholics and their brethren of affiliated rites. For instance, the Ukrainian Catholic Church follows the Byzantine Rite, and gets its own state-supported school/s thru the Roman Catholic school board. France has at least four such establishments as regards government-supported school sytems or networks. So, the situation of two privileged laities in Eritrea is remarkable only because one of the privileged two is Sunni Muslim, while the other Coptic Orthodox Christian (and torture, of course).

Torture?, for deviance of religious belief, not disruptive of the civil order in any way? Yes, torture enters the Eritrean picture quite seriously. Below is the opening section of the press release by Amnesty International regarding Eritrean religious persecution today.
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Severe religious persecution today in Eritrea

1. Introduction: basic human rights denied

Amnesty International has received disturbing reports of increasing violations in Eritrea of the right to freedom of religion, belief and conscience. While Jehovah's Witnesses have been subjected to severe persecution for the past decade on account of their religious beliefs, this report focuses on widespread detentions and other human rights violations of members of evangelical Christian churches in the past three years, intensifying in 2005. Since 2002, their churches have been shut down by the government and many members have been tortured in an attempt to force them to stop worshipping and to thereby abandon their faith. Members of new groups within the officially-permitted Orthodox Church and Islam have also been detained on account of their beliefs.

At least 26 pastors and priests, and over 1,750 church members, including children and 175 women, and some dozens of Muslims, are detained because of their religious beliefs. Amnesty International considers them to be prisoners of conscience.

Amnesty International is appealing to President Issayas Afewerki and the Eritrean government to end the government's policy of repression of religious belief and freedom of conscience, opinion and expression in general. Amnesty International calls on the international community to strengthen efforts to obtain and secure protection of religious freedom and basic human rights in Eritrea.

Human rights in Eritrea are systematically violated by President Issayas Afewerki's government, which has been in power since the country's independence from Ethiopia in 1991 after a 30-year liberation war.(1) The detentions of individuals solely because of their religious beliefs is part of the general denial of the rights to freedom of expression and association in Eritrea, as well as other grave violations of basic human rights. These violations of the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion are contrary to international law, as well as the Constitution of Eritrea (1997).

Torture has routinely been used as a punishment for critics of the government and members of minority faiths, as well as for offences committed by military conscripts. Arbitrary incommunicado detention "without charge or trial" is widespread and long-lasting - several prisoners of conscience have been held thus for over a decade - with many detainees are held in secret and their whereabouts not known.

Violations of the right to freedom of religion in Eritrea are indirectly linked to a far-reaching pattern of violations of the right to expression of non-violent political opinions and the right to association. Religious prisoners of conscience who have no connection with political opposition groups are subjected to the same torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and punishment, and the same arbitrary and incommunicado detention, as prisoners of conscience detained on account of their political opinions.

Any expression or suspicion of criticism of the government - impossible to express openly and publicly - is met with threats, arbitrary arrest and sometimes "disappearances", and indefinite, incommunicado detention, without any judicial oversight, and with a high risk of torture. The only permitted political party is President Issayas Afewerki's People's Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ), formerly the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF), which won the independence war and formed the new government.

The rule of law in Eritrea is severely undermined by the lack of an effective or independent judiciary. Lawyers do not dare to challenge the government in the courts. A Special Court sentences people for corruption without the right to defence or appeal. A secret security committee sentences some political and religious prisoners to prison terms without defence representation or appeal. Organizations who might potentially monitor human rights and press for remedies for human rights violations do not and cannot function inside Eritrea on account of the comprehensive denial of the right to freedom of expression of opinion. Human rights violations by members of the security forces are committed with total impunity.(2)

Non-government organisations (NGOs) are heavily restricted. International human rights organisations such as Amnesty International are denied entry. International humanitarian agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are restricted in their activities and travel, and the official US development agency, US-Agency for International Development, a major bilateral donor, was ordered to leave Eritrea in November 2005 without explanation. Under a new Proclamation in 2005(3), international NGOs, including faith-based agencies - of which only 14 are currently registered(4) - are limited to relief and rehabilitation activities and not permitted to work independently of the government with local communities.

Two thirds of the population are dependent on international emergency food aid since the 1998-2000 armed conflict with Ethiopia. This includes returnee refugees from Sudan and 70,000 internally displaced persons (IDP)(5)camp. Many donor governments have withdrawn development assistance on account of the government's failures in democratization and human rights.

Fears of new armed conflict with Ethiopia

There are rising fears in the international community (as of late November 2005) that armed conflict may break out again between Eritrea and Ethiopia. The UN Security Council has called on Ethiopia to implement its acceptance in principle of the International Boundary Commission's judgment regarding the border areas, particularly its allocation to Eritrea of Badme town, the flashpoint of war in 1998. Ethiopia refuses to allow border demarcation to proceed, instead calling for negotiation over certain issues. Eritrea demands UN implementation of the border judgment and UN action against Ethiopia to enforce it.

In October 2005, following earlier restrictions it had imposed on the 2,800 - personnel multi-national UN Military Mission for Eritrea and Ethiopia (UNMEE), which administers a "Temporary Security Zone" buffer-zone along the 1,000 km border with Ethiopia, Eritrea banned UN helicopter flights to the UN monitoring posts and imposed other restrictions which severely reduced the mission's ability to fulfil its mandate. Both sides have re-armed since 2000 and have recently deployed troops near the border.

On 23 November, UN Security Council resolution 1640 demanded that Eritrea should reserve the ban on helicopter flights and other restrictions imposed on the movement of the UNMEE force. It called on both parties to return to previous levels of military deployment within 30 days, to prevent aggravation of the situation. It demanded that Ethiopia allow border demarcation to start immediately within precondition.

Amnesty International, a non-political and impartial human rights organization working on human rights in all countries of the world, takes no position on the political issues of the border dispute. The organization is concerned that renewed armed conflict could lead to a repeat of grave violations of the Geneva Conventions (war crimes) such as were committed by both sides against prisoners of war and civilians, as well as violations of international human rights law in the 1998-2000 conflict. Furthermore, major humanitarian assistance by the international community might be needed to respond to emergency situations arising from the conflict in terms of destruction of livelihoods, internal displacement of people and out-flow of refugees to neighbouring and other countries.

Amnesty International believes that perceived threats to the security of the country and its borders should not be used by the Government of Eritrea as a pretext for committing human rights violations or as a justification for delaying action to protect human rights in the country.

refWrite hopes to publish more of the document in future. - Politicarp

Next: Religious Persecution - 2. Religions in Eritrea background to arrests

Iraq: Victory!: The 10 or 11 million voters of Iraq elect first Parliament under new Constitution: via Gideon Strauss

Gideon Strauss is singing O Happy Day today.

He and his wife are celebrating an anniversary.

The weather outside today is and remains at 3:21 pm, deliteful!

The simple musing concise appreciation of the hopeful news from Iraq wafts thru everything today as a subtext of hope for the world.

Clickup my headline above, read Gideon's brief summary of a day for him-and-his quite blessed. No less so because this day includes the news of what appears to me to be a world-historical event where the first Arab national democracy, all preliminaries observed, took its first steps in a country-wide vote. So, after reading Gideon, clickup the Comments for his blog-entry for today, and read my Comment offered to them as an anniversary present, in response to Gideon. - )wlb

Australia: Diplomacy: Australia backs Southeast Asia pressure on Myanmar (Burma)

Check out how the Aussies are leading the way in the Western critique of Burma's Buddhist genocidal general bullies (the gen-gen bullyboys of Rangoon). At last, some democratic state-power has come forward to maintain a focus in this particular cesspool of a dictatorship, one among the world's many.

The Aussies are backing up their press releases with at least strong diplomacy to bring China and India into the coalition to pressure the Buddho-Generals to begin the process of democratization.

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UPDATE, December 17, 2005:

UN stages rare Burma discussion
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At the same time, of coure, the Aussies are trying to damp down a race war in their own country among some "MiddleEasterns" aka "Lebanese," and on the other side, massively opposed by some "Whites," young males mostly all around. Australia's internal bloodshed. Echoes of France's riots, so recent. The French images with lots of fire and burning cars, but few deaths, has been translated in Australia's media as absorbed by the a sector of "White young males," sociologically speaking; "testosteroni's," psychologically speaking.

Simultaneous: the Prime Minister, John Howard, keeps Australian troops active in both Afghanistan and Iraq, where democracy has taken another giant step forward - this very day! Cross your fingers, say your prayers.

It seems that Howard has adopted the Bush Doctrine of spreading democracy globally, especially where repression is strongest, where genocide is the rule rather than the exception. Along those lines, it is important to note that yesterday or so, the Bush Doctrine was accompied by a Rumsfeld Doctrine, expanding the Bush Doctrine to redefine the mandate of the USA's Armed Forces. The task of "nation-buidling" will henceforth be integrated into the mandate of the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Coast Guard, and Air Force - most of which is the straitforward "deployment of weaponry and its use."

The US military, as this plan is put in place (amidst the ongoing tasks of nation-building that are going on now in Afghanistan and Iraq, but not as shrewdly as necessary), already is in the nation-building business. Now, it's official, policy papers can be produced, all sorts of people can come to Congressional Committees, and the military can now be held responsible of its sucess and failure in actual projects of nation-building. Australia helps us to see that Burma will need to get crackin, or find itself subject to sanctions - until the democratization process is clear and obvious to all, in substance, not simply appearances and cosmetic adjustments.

Burma has elected a parliamentary government; and yet the country's Prime Minister, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, still under house-arrest after all these years, it seems. Keeping that world-famous properly-elected Prime Minister under house arrest and the Parliament inactive, has implications too for Burma's relatively small Christian communities. While repressing the authentic Buddhist laity active conscientiously in democratic peaceful politics, the badboy Buddho-Generals are also trying to kill off the independent Christian communities that are meeting in homes and humble meeting places. At present they are being repressed and are suffering much." What could Aung San Suu Kyi, were she freed and restored to leadership, what could she mean for relief from the present burdens carried by the Christian minority too?

Myanmar / Burma needs democracy - and could they please have a vote to decide which name they really want to adopt. I always have liked "Burma," myself. I guess I have my own private Burma, housed in l'imaginaire, le mien, the sector/s of my brain where imaginings are fostered in the glue of all spheres of everyday life. That's one Burma, lush, wet, green, Rangoon a network of canals with lots of small boat travel. I guess it got this sense of the country from books, magazines, movies, and TV. The old media.

And then there's the Burma that Australia, China, and India may be able to nudge toward democratization - pretty dang fast! - Politicarp

Culture: Cable TV: A battle shapes up btwn TV cable consumers vs cable conglomerates, re Show Menu a la carte pricing USA

A tuff call from an editorial in a prominent daily newspaper ( Christian Science Monitor, Boston) for a tuff call to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC - USA) and the US Congress on behalf of empowering TV culture consumers to choose each particular program they want to pay for on the menu of available shows. Of course, the cable conglomerates, as the CSM calls them, will kill to prevent that freedom of broadcast-source choices to its customers. It wants to force viewers who don't want to be flooded with a sexed-up, cursing, gratuitious-violence driven mainstream prime time a single option to avoid the excreta-TV flood: pay extra for "a family package." Constructing such phoney choices, the cable entertainment/news distrubtion industry seems just not to get it. It doesn't understand its cusotmers as consumers who want an uncoerced real choice of all its viewing. You don't have to prefer the stereotypical "family package" to want to pick each and every particular show that you permit the congloms to pump into your home and machinery. This is the case also in Canada. We need to do some letter writing on both sides of the border. - Anaximaximum

Politics: Canada: Relative standing in the polls of pre-election Canadian political parties

The stats on the current polls looking toward the January 23 Federal election in Canada, are all succintly presented today on Burkean Canuck's blog.

Canadianna delivers her usual hi-ly unusual approach to the political news, forthrightness being her forte, to put the spotlite on would-be 2nd-term Prime Minister Paul Martin's campaign where he faltered by lamely trying to shift talk of his mean-natured attack on the US in regard to the environoment (Canada, sad to say, comes out much worse on a percentage basis), to more of his a-gnawing whine on softwood lumber. Yes, a NAFTA tribunal made a softwood decision to Matin's liking, but a WTO tribunal made a trumping decision on softwood not to Martin's liking. - Politicarp

Race: Australia: Violence swings back against few "MidEasterners," to rage en masse

I don't know how good my headline is journalistically (nor for attracting a "Direct Hit" from a new visitor - that would be (in my case particularly it would be in some very vague sense only: ) commercially. What I didn't have to mention in the cramped space for composing the headline, is simply that my idea's verbal line of thawt may be parsed out somewhat adequately in my wording of the headline; and rather, en reverso, the headline condenses this idea's full and complete ensentenced lingual articulation (sorry for the jargon, but a theory's peeping thru):

The longer version: A few people of a minority population committed a violent racist act, a group of young whites (ruffly speaking, of course, as who knows, there just may have been a Chinese person or Aborigine among the otherwise rather white, and White-minded, group which then went on the attack) replied with its own increasingly-massive racist attacks. Some White-ist cults gathered to this "action," coming from all over the continent, like flies to "the meat of the matter." Apparently, some of the minorities produced fiteback units of their own. Which happened first, I don't know - except that raw idea is mentioned without development of thawt in Mike Corder's Associated Press article, "Aussie police to get power to quell race riots," Dec14,2k5, Washington Times. For the detailed story, click my headline above this blog entry.

As to the pendular waves of the overall exfoliation, the developmental steps seem to have been these: A race-defined war between some "MiddleEasterners" (minjority) and some Whites (the total number of whom adds up to a small percentage from among the many-millions majority-racial demographic - White! - in Australia). But: It's actually a small percentage of all Australian whites that itself can aggregate to a much larger raw number than the number of those in the targetted "other-than-white" minoriy/ies involved. Certainly, the all-media news reportage, also in Australia, of the daily tides of the "MiddleEastern/NorthAfrican" rioters rampaging simultaneously in widely separate French cities and regions, all this en/im-mediation had it's effects and affects in the imaginary, (l'imaginaire, the French say of the whites gone wild - the news story, thus, and its visualities become an ordered and continuitive existence in the minds of many of these youths on both sides of the two-way-but-uneven violence. A-n-d, in the minds of some older eggers-on, I'm sure (speaking sociologically).

Oh hell!, Australia has had it smallest faultlines cracked open to confront it with the unconfrontable!

Politics: Iraq / US: Tomorrow's Election > What do Sunnis want?, asks Christian Science Monitor

Ilene R. Prush and Jill Carroll, reporting from Baghdad and Huseybah, Iraq, for The Christian Science Monitor, asked a few days ago, what Sunni voters want - that is, the reporters asked Sunni voters: What do you want?

Their reportage, "What Sunnis Want," (Dec14,2k5) is at least a well-wrawt rhetorical structure, verisimilitude-rich - O have I momentarily lost my hermeneutic of suspicion? - and, in any case, I do believe that Prush and Carroll have got their fingers on the pulse of reality regarding the Sunni mood just before the vote. Wishful thinking on my part, I guess. I realize that, in forming and deciding upon my foregoing judgment, their article rings true, I myself engage my mind in an act of journalism-reading imagination. I can and do imagine this article to be true in a general way. This is also an act of historical imagination on my part, in the which the historical imaginary in my brain, accepting the informal and anecdotal face-to-face live interview process of the survey of Sunni Iraqi opinion before tomorrow's election, becomes more than an interesting incident or episode. The Iraq War on Terrorism (not yet won) and on Baathist Genocide under Saddam Hussein (already won, but with one question-mark), just an interesting incident in current affairs?

More than keen observations on the structure of Sunni Interest Group party-formations and the coalition of three leading Sunni parties on the ballot. we have now to inquire how much and in what regards these too are each clericism-dominated. After all, there is a Sunni trend toward a favouring a secular structure for the government of a multi-Islamically framed society and culture, but accompanied - alongside Shia, Sunni Kurds, and Sunni Arabs - by some small but significant minorities, minorities as to religion. ethnicity, and language. The Sunni Kurds are part of the problem as the Sunni Arab Muslims of Iraq, see things.

Yesterday, 1,000 Sunni Arab clerics (Baathist and Hussein connections) issued a call to their adherents to get out and vote for the Sunni community's best interests by getting into the new Parliament and fiting for a favourable final settlement of the text of the new Iraqi Constitution (which authorized the present election of a fully-empowered new Parliament, truly representative of Iraq and all communities within the nation).

That is, if Sunnis in the new Parliament help bolster a federation with a strong central government, not just some 22 provinces in 3 irrelevant regions (and distinct from the leading Shia/Kurd plan for 3 strong regions where the central Sunni-strongest region is without benefit from the oilfields, etc.): then a more tolerant stance may come toward more marginal religio-ethnic (including heritage language and literature, not Arabic) communities (like Christians and Jews). Equally important, the Sunni pro-active presence at tomorrow's polls could add energy to a less Sharia-minded adjudication of civil affairs. The Shia, it's being reported elsewhere, are now divided, having got themselves a strong secular-emphasizing voting bloc or party or coalition or something, going up against the cause of a Shia-religion-dominant cabal in the "religious Shiite" parties, altho nothing I've seeen so far suggests that Imam al-Sistani himself encourages that direction. Rather, religio-Shia dominance is the direction that the huge espionage network paid-for and run be Iranian hardlining ayatollahs with their minions and mavericks (the current Prez), this spy system replete with paymasters is pushing among the Iraqi Shiite political parties for the formation of a religio-Shia government, allied to Iran.

A real contest is cresting at the moment among Shia, but also perhaps in the new Parliament at least some Sunnis and some Shia will unite against the Shia-dominant theocratic pseudo-democratic forces. All forces will have some representation; it will be interesting to see if some Christians get elected, and thru just what party/ies if they do get in. Are there any Christians named as candidates on the electoral list of any of the Shia parties? I think that happened in the last round, when the party most loyal to Imam al-Sistani carried with them into Parliament a Christian or two on their candidates list. On the basis of proportional representation, can a healthy Christian party function? I haven't been able to tract down this info.

In other words, the extent tomorrow of Sunni presence as voters at the polls matters. It matters also in regard to the interests of the United States in many aspects. It could even matter to Israel; and if the thousand Jews in Iraq, mostly elderly folk, have an easier life, the hoped-for Sunni shift matters to all Jews too. The election of an Iraqi Parliament where Shia leadership does not conform to the official anti-Semitism of the Iranian President is devoutly to be wished for.- Politicarp

Sudan: Darfur: UPDATE: SUDAN bars Darfur atrocity probe

UN list of Sudan genocidists

in Darfur Crisis

After reading the BBC article on the latest from the Sudan government on rejecting an investigation by the Prosecutors of the International Criminal Court into accusations against that government apparently guility of genocide ("crimes against humanity"), Human Rights Watch is circulating a preliminary list of alleged culprits. Here's the list that Human Rights Watch has documented and submitted to the UN, calling for an investigation by the International Criminal Court in regard to accusations of genocide:

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Partial list of individuals who should be investigated by the International Criminal Court:

This list is not a comprehensive list of all individuals potentially liable for crimes in Darfur. It is presented as a summary of those individuals named in this report and recommended for investigation by the ICC, but additional individuals not named in this report should also be investigated and prosecuted for crimes in Darfur.

National Officials:

• President Omar El Bashir
• Second Vice-President Ali Osman Taha: Former First Vice-President until late 2005.
• Maj. Gen. Abduraheem M. Hussein: Former minister of the interior and representative of the president for Darfur, 2003-2004; now minister of defense.
• Maj. Gen. Bakri Hassan Salih: Former minister of defense; now minister for presidential affairs.
• Abbas Arabi: Chief of Staff of the Sudanese armed forces.
• Gen. Salah Abdallah Ghosh: Director of Security and Military Intelligence.
• Ahmed Haroun: Former state minister of the interior, responsible for Darfur portfolio within the Ministry of the Interior; now state minister for humanitarian affairs.
Current or former regional officials:

The individuals listed below are included because, as described in the text of the report, they are or were the senior government officials in their districts or states when crimes amounting to war crimes or crimes against humanity were committed by government forces.

• Al Tayeb Abdullah Torshain: Former commissioner of Mukjar, 2003-2005.
• Al Haj Attar Al Mannan Idris: Governor of South Darfur, mid-2004 to present.
• Ja’afar Abdel el Hakh: Commissioner of Garsila until April 2004; now governor of West Darfur.
• Maj. Gen. Adam Hamid Musa: Governor of South Darfur, 2003 to mid-2004.
• Maj. Gen. Abdallah Safi el Nour: Retired air force pilot and former governor of North Darfur, 2000-2001; and national minister in Khartoum 2003-2004. Allegedly involved in directing air operations and in the supply of arms to the militias.

Military commanders::

• Brig.-Gen. Ahmed Al Hajir Mohammed: Commander of the 16th Infantry Division forces used in the attacks on the villages of Marla, Ishma, and Labado in December 2004.
• Maj. Gen. Al Hadi Adam Hamid: Chief of “border guards”; key liaison to Janjaweed militias.
• Lt. Col. Abdul Wahid Said Ali Said: Commander of the 2nd Border Intelligence Brigade based in Misteriya, which supports military operations in and around Kebkabiya.
• Maj. Gaddal Fadlallah: Commander in Kutum whose forces are responsible for numerous attacks on civilians, destruction of villages, and looting of civilian property.

Militia leaders:
• “Abu Ashreen”: This is the nickname or nom de guerre of Abdullah Saleh Sabeel, a forty-eight-year-old Beni Hussein from Sareef, in the Kebkabiya area. He also occasionally uses the name Abdullah Dagash. He is related to Nazir El Ghadi Adam Hamid, the brother of Maj. Gen. Al Hadi Adam Hamid. He has the rank of either corporal (arif) or sergeant (raqib), and leads a militia based in Kebkabiya.
• Sheikh Musa Hilal: Numerous eyewitnesses place Hilal at the scene of different attacks in North Darfur in which serious crimes, including rape, murder and torture, were committed. Numerous eyewitnesses, including former members of the Sudanese armed forces, also identify Hilal as a key militia recruiter and coordinator.
• “Ali Kosheib”: This is the nickname or nom de guerre of Ali Mohammed Ali. He was one of the key leaders of the attacks on villages around Mukjar, Bindisi, and Garsila in 2003-2004. Several eyewitnesses recognized him as one of the commanders of the operations in March 2004, in which several hundred men were executed around Deleig, Garsila, and Mukjar.
• Mustapha Abu Nuba: Tribal leader of a Riziegat sub-clan in South Darfur. Allegedly responsible for numerous attacks on villages in South Darfur, including the attack on and looting of Kaila.
• Nazir Al Tijani Abdel Kadir: Tribal leader of the Misseriya militia based in Niteiga, South Darfur. Allegedly responsible for the attack on the village of Khor Abeche on April 7, 2005, and other attacks in the area.
• Mohammed Hamdan: Riziegat militia leader allegedly involved in Adwah attack and looting in November 2004.

Sudan: Darfur: Intrntnl military intervention needed to stop Sudan ongoing genocide, feed poor black Muslims of Darfur

The story below is republished from a recent release from Church-backed digital resource, AfricaFiles email newsletter. It's also on an affiliated website; just click the blue hot-linked title above. While the African Union has a small contingent of troops present in Sudan's western region of Darfur, along the border with Chad, funds have not allowed a massive intevention by black nations south of the Sahara, backed by sufficient black troops. Arab troops are out of the question in this situation of Muslim Arabs oppressing Muslim Blacks. Sudan does not want the number of black African troops increased significantly in number, as these additional forces could tip the power balance in western Sudan against the allies of the Federal Government. The situation is complex because recently Blacks from the south of Sudan, mostly Christians and animists, have been brawt into the Federal government. Another complex recent history, in itself. But the Darfur region and its suffering people need our attention, as the immiseration increases in duration and intensity. The Janjawid terrorists in the service of the Feds must be totally ineffectuated; the internicene conflict between the two Darfurian black rebel groups and their loyalists, must be ended. - Politicarp

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"There has been a huge increase in the number of attacks and robberies [on humanitarian workers]," said Mike McDonagh, senior humanitarian affairs officer at the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Khartoum, on Thursday. "Harassment is too weak a term," he added. "The physical danger aid workers have been exposed to over the last four months is a huge concern. We are very lucky that none of our staff has been killed so far."

On Saturday, Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and militia reportedly jointly attacked the villages of Hemmeda, Um Boru and Koka in the Um Nkunya area, approximately 40 km northeast of Nyala, the capital of South Darfur, the UN Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) reported. The fighting resulted in an unknown number of civilian casualties and displaced about 7,000 people. "The United Nations is concerned that the parties continue to violate the ceasefire agreement in what seems to be a resumption of the vicious circle of attacks and retaliation that we witnessed in earlier months," Radhia Achouri, UNMIS spokeswoman, told reporters in Khartoum on Wednesday.

According to reports, the attack on Saturday had been launched against the rebel Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A) in the area. In apparent retaliation the following day, the SLM/A attacked Donkey Dereisa, 60 km south of Nyala. Another attack occurred in West Darfur on Tuesday when Arab militia raided the town of Congo Harasa. They destroyed all the wells that had been constructed by the humanitarian workers to provide water to the local population. "The UN condemns these attacks that targeted the very livelihood of the people," Achouri said.

The ongoing deliberate destruction of farmland and crops was negatively affecting the optimistic agricultural output expected for this season, Achouri added. Redisplacements of large groups of civilians to settlements for internally displaced persons (IDPs) or to the outskirts of towns had also continued throughout Darfur. According to the Geneva Conventions, destroying or rendering useless items essential to the survival of civilian populations is a war crime.

Aid workers in the region had also faced increased violence, threats, beatings and harassment, both within and outside the camps, according to sources in Darfur. On 5 December, 13 international NGO* staff members in West Darfur were relocated with an African Union (AU) escort from Silea to the region’s capital, Geneina, due to insecurity in the area. Insecurity also forced the AU to airlift three international NGO staff from Kulbus to El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur State. Some local personnel remained behind to provide essential services.

*non-govermental organization

On 4 December, an international NGO compound was caught in the crossfire when fighting broke out between rebel groups and government forces near Masteri. A stray bullet hit a guard in the stomach. On 1 December, two unidentified gunmen shot and killed a Sudanese driver working for the Sudanese Red Crescent Society in that organisation'’s premises in Abu Shouk IDP camp on the outskirts of El Fasher. "The security situation in Abu Shouk is deteriorating each day," said a local source. "IDPs are reporting continuous military presence inside the camps during the nights with threats, detentions, harassment to the civil population and shootings."

Tension had also risen in IDP camps across Darfur due to the proliferation of people posing as community leaders and presenting inflated numbers of newly arrived IDPs to demand food and other relief items. "They are not just businessmen - they are a real mafia. They sold around 12,000 rations of food in front of our noses," one aid worker said. "This business is a time bomb for the stability of the camp," he added. "The [genuine community] leaders that try to collaborate [with us] are exhausted and very scared. All of us have been threatened many times."

The Darfur conflict erupted in February 2003 when the two main rebel groups, the SLM/A and the Justice and Equality Movement, took up arms to fight what they called the discrimination and oppression of the region by the Sudanese government. The government is accused of unleashing militia - known as the Janjawid - on civilians in an attempt to quash the rebellion. According to the UN, the conflict continues to affect some 3.4 million people, of whom 1.8 million are IDPs and 200,000 have fled to neighbouring Chad. 

USA: Culture Wars: War on Christmas taken up by the allegedly "neutral" ConsumerAffairs.com

Arrrrrfghghghghghghghghghgh!

I just read a secularist-humanist attack on the priority of Christmas in American public tradition, stinker of the worst order except cushioned in its acerbity by its commercialese, wherein its small postive value is overwhelmed by the hauteur of its self-narcissized enrapturement in its own little secularist mind-pattern substitute for a world where traditions are living creatures of their own sort.

I will have to unthread the above, parse and correct my meanings, which will necessitate perhaps a number of reformatulations and expansions to be made in upcpoming updates to this blog-entry.. Tune back-in to today's blog-entry on a farticle in ConsumerAffairs.com - one by James R. Hood of the secularist consumers' organization itself.

More later .... - )wlb

Previous refWrite blog-entry on The War on Christmas