Monday, March 28, 2005

The Summer of Love arrives in MidEast politics


What in hippie times in San Fransisco, and forever after in American histories of its manners and morals, was a phenom known as "the Summer of Love"; this phenom by all reports has arrived in Tehehran, Bogdude, Damselcause, and Baberoute. Yes, the young femmes fatales in tight skirts and the bawdy boys with long hair are partying in public and blasting party music and cuddling and violating the sanctimonious politicians who pretend to have nothing but sanctities on their minds. The lid has been kept on so tight for so long in these Islamic cities of repression - save only perhaps now in Baghdad!, but we shall see in due course - that many of the young want to play the Arabic musical video clips saturating the whole region and play them anywhere they can, in part to celebrate their sexuality (not fornication!, necessarily) and to flaunt their realities in the face of the denial-ridden and denial-imposing Satraps of Sorrow. In the West, you can violate in the public square my and the Christian community's desire for solemnity during Lent and the Easter season, but in the MidEast the Satraps can violoate everyone's pursuit of any expression of joy at any time or season of year. The one "out" from all this, until quite recently, has been the Arabic music videos. Of them, the Financial Times wrote recently, "Music videos are now the only uncensored mass cultural form in the Arab world." Here's what Steven Vincent says on the subject in National Review:

Lately, though, these cracks in the wall of Muslim Puritanism have taken on more serious dimensions. Sex and charismatic women have long formed a part of Arabic folklore — from The Arabian Nights to the proverbial belly dancer — but not until music videos did the Middle East, and more particularly, the region's teenagers, see such overt displays of female sexual power on their TV sets. At the same time, the U.S-led invasion of Iraq and the Orange and Cedar Revolutions in the Ukraine and Lebanon have created a cascade of reports depicting young people, particularly women, swept up in a kind of democratic fervor. Forget yesterday's banners of militant socialism, Arab nationalism, or pan-Islamism — today's hip images are a smiling woman with an ink-stained fingertip or a buxom beauty leaning out of a car, arms outstretched, Lebanese flag streaming overhead. Conveyed by the international media, the Internet, and SMS devices, these pictures combine concepts of women's liberation, social interaction between the sexes, and political freedom. The result is a potent new idea that goes beyond anything America "neoconservatives" could have hoped for: Democracy is exciting, it's cool — and most explosive of all, it's sexy.


Some time back, a brilliant ethical thinker and historian, Crane Brinton, wrote a book, A History of Western Morals in which he documented the pendular swings in the West, not least of all in the British culutral-zone inclusive of the USA, bewteen "puritans" and "libertines." The pendulum does not move as rapidly in the MidEast but it seems to have arrived at a still point in the puritanic extreme (as it had under the Taliban in Afganistan); but now with a vengence it is shuddering on its shaft and seems to want to swing wildly down to its bottom and then way up the other side to its most polar opposite extreme. I hope not, I pray not. I doubt that it could. I think the realities of family and good order will assuage those motions and temper those emotions that anything goes. I hope some of the horrible outcomes of the Free Love movement that hurt so many in the US and Britain don't get visited upon the now-exhilarated Persian and Arab youth shrugging off their chadors and strictures of puritoMuslim restraint in public. An outcome where there was less rape behind all that veiling would be sufficient. But as to the general mood of openness and willingness to be touched and to touch, how could I deny these exuberant youth those experiences during this Summer of Love, however short it may be? - Owlb


Link

Tuesday, March 22, 2005

Darfur's Black Muslims get to the heart of Arab racism


The Black militias of the Darfur rebellion in Sudan have finally socked it to the their Arab Muslim overlords who are so racist behind their ideology of "panArabism" that they can't even work to solve a conflict between the long-oppressed, enslaved, and raped Black Muslims the Western region and the Arab Muslim central government and its Janjaweed irregular army of oppression.

What has long been happening in Darfur, where the US Congress sees genocide and the UN sees only a very bad situation (because acknowledgement of genocide would commit the UN to real action by its own statutes), has also been happening in other ways and by other means in just about every Arab-dominated country in the world. Now, the rebels of Darfur, organized in the their militias, have developed a savvy political initiative that is taking the battle to the heart of Arab-state ideology,

"We are calling on the Arab leaders at the Arab summit in Algeria to pass a resolution to respect the rights of non-Arabs in Arab countries," Khalil Ibrahim, a leader of the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), told Reuters from the Eritrean capital Asmara," reported the Reuters news agency yesterday.

To put teeth into that call, another leader of the rebels, this time Abdel Wahed Muhamed al-Nur of the likewise Black Muslim rebel group, Sudan Liberation Army, declared that SLA requires "the Arab states to back the recommendations of a UN-appointed inquiry commission that suspected Darfur war criminals be put on trial at the International Criminal Court.."

So many precedents have been set in this move to strike at Arab collective presumption in regard to other Muslims, that the potential impact in the longrun is incalculable. An historic first has taken place.

A summit of Arab leaders will be convoked in Algeria today.


Link

Sunday, March 20, 2005

Iraq ancient Christian community appeals to UN for intervention


The Iraqi ethnic community whose main instiution is the Church of Assyria and whose language is Aramaic, the same as that of Jesus Christ, has appealed to the UN. It wants the UN to notice the precarious existence of the 1 million to 1 1/2 million members of this community in Iraq today. The Assyrians fear that while the Muslims - Shi'ites, Arab Sunnis, and Kurd Sunnis - are squabbling among themselves, their own minority has fallen between the cracks.


Humanitarian aid from abroad is not reaching their villages, towns, and urban enclaves.


What's worse, says Andy Darmoo, an expatriate Assyrian Iraqi living now in Kent, England, his people have become objects of "a quiet campaign of ethnic cleansing." Darmoo says "Assyrians were excluded from the January election, they had no say in the drafting of Iraq's new constitution, and that people from other parts of Iraq as well as foreigners were flocking to the north, trying to force them from their villages," according to a Reuters report yesterday of an Assyrian plea at the United Nations headquarters in New York.


A British member of the European Parliament representing Tony Blair's Labour Party has taken up the Assyrian Christian community's cause, "Save the Assyrians," headed by Darmoo.


In another ray of hope, the man expected to become Iraq's new President, Jalai Talani, said recently that Iraq's smaller non-Muslim minorities like the Assyrians, would have a role in Constitutional developments. Talabani is a prominent leader of the Kurds.



Link

Sunday, March 13, 2005

Democrats all-out costly campaign via media ads to scuttle Social Security reform


Democrats in Congress are unanimous in their effort to scuttle Social Security reform. They need a victory over something, but mostly over Bush, to stop their zero record so far. To their good fortune, they have amassed many millions of dollars for a meida advertizing, TV included, to blare their program to block any serious change, so that Social Security may survive and do its job in the future, but on a new more stable fiscal foundation. In this effort to freeze Social Security into the pattern that will ensure its crisis and collapse in the calculable future, the Democrats in the House and the Senate have found a massive ally in the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP- I went to their website but after viewing many pages, I could not once find their name spelled out ... as I was wondering if its "Persons" or "People" - AG).

AARP is a Leftist organization that has built up its mass following among Seniors by offering discounts on all sorts of goods and services, knowing that Seniors are looking for deals to make their dollars stretch (and that in itself is, of course, not a bad goal). But piggybacking on these cheap goods and services is the negative Leftist ideology of AARP that depends on distorting the "facts" it ladles out in mischievously meagre quantities accompanied by a blizzard of twisted words to its members, hoping to confuse them about its own AARP goals on all sorts of political matters. Fortunately, another

Update: March 14 - see the CBS report on Chile's Social Security investment accounts>

organization of Seniors has begun competing with AARP, and has pointed out the Left-political piggybacking AARP imposes on Seniors' backs to meet the AARP partisan political agenda. The alternative group is named USA Next, and in its fite to expose AARP, it has become embroiled in a dispute over AARP's partisan support of Gay Marriage and a photo that is part of the AARP campaign to that end. It's all ironically amusing, because as a homo myself, I see the AARP running a campaign with its members dues money, while its members have never authorized AARP to campaign for Gay Marriage (to which many dues paying members are opposed, as I also am opposed). All the while AARP distorts the Bush Social Security reform plan beyond recognition - as AARP disregards its members differences of opinion and backs up the Dems in their mindless blockage of Social Security reform.

What's happening is that the Dems and the AARP are blocking the only Social Security that has the potential to save the Social Security system, a system which won't last long enuff to help younger workers who are paying into it today. The Dems and their allied AARP are setting up a phoney hue-and-cry that under the Bush Plan, the "guaranteed benefits" of Social Security will disappear. The problem here is that there are no "guaranteed benefits" with Social Security. There is no monster-huge savings fund into which the SS deductions from paychecks are sent by employers. There's no fund in the Federal Treasury system collects the Social Security receipts and lets them sit there to guarantee that the money will be there when a person is old enuff to receive benefit checks. Rather, the money is spent, and always has been since it was established under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But with the younger age-group always expanding in relation to the older age-group of Seniors, presentday taxes of the larger group of workers coming up was able to payoff the costs of the benefits paid out to the smaller group, who were the retired Seniors with Social Security entitlements. This favourable balance for the entitled Seniors is decreasing every day. At some point it is going to tilt the other side of the scheme, perhaps when most of the Seniors of today already dead and gone. But if they live on and on, due to medical advances, then the tilt point will come sooner because more people will retire and come on line for benefits every day. In either case, the crisis is coming, and the Dems and the AARP has their heads in the sand, endangering the coming generations. Or, they just want to induce a crisis that could destroy the US economy. But we don't want to be cynical about their motives. God help us!

The Bush Plan attempts to add a new significant factor, by which those under 55 can have part of their paycheck deducations by their employers placed in a personally-owned Portfolio for low-risk investment in profit-making accounts that will give a good yield beginning at retirement, and offering some borrowing or cashing out possiblities in the interim. This would be in addition to the part of their deducations that go into the presentday Social Security arrangement. Whereas, the way things

Update: March 16: Byron York exposes Washington Post misleading public on public opinion hidden in its poll


are now, the money of a young worker that goes into Social Security today will be paid out tomorrow, the very next day!, to Seniors over 55 among whom are those Seniors who are letting AARP take hold of their noses, as it pulls them into conflict with their own children and grandchildren. There may be a decrease in benefits to presentday recipients over 55, as I understand the matter. That's because the new Investment accounts will divert a small proportion from the government's day to day expense account, which includes Social Security payments, to the personal Investment accounts of the younger generations, thru Social Security. There will be some cost to the contracted middlemen who manage those accounts, but those costs will be far less than what goes now into the Social Security and Treasury bureaucracy tending the same money in the federal payout system now.

What's more, Congress' role in the plan for the reformed Social Security system would be to monitor the contracted middlemen who manage the Investments, thus double ensuring that the workers get the best returns for the lowest risk on the portion of their SS payouts that are put in their personal Investment accounts. As it is, the workers have no "guarantied benefits," despite the use of this phrase as a hypnotizing mantra, by the Dems and AARP. The Supreme Court a few years back rulled that Social Security payments do not guarantee benefits at all. The money paid in is owned by the federal

Update: March 23: David C. John: Social Security is a slow march to insolvency, demographics tell the story

government, and that means it is owned by Congress which alone can allocate and does allocate it for all sorts of things, of which Social Security payouts to retired workers are released only on a day to day basis - there just is no stable massive fund of collected revenues earmarked for Social Security payouts to Seniors. It just doesn't exist. The only way one can impress the owners of this Social Security money (the House and Senate in their negotiated votes), impress them to be true to Seniors who are entirely dependent on Congress regarding benefits, is to vote them out of office in the next election. The Dems are not telling Seniors this is the only "guarantee" they've got - and its after the fact. The House and Congress can do nothing when the balance tilts, so that there just aren't any more day-to-day revenues to be payout for Senior's SS benefits. At some point, on the Dem basis, Congress will have to drastically reduce benefits, or let the whole damn system collapse. Only Bush has a plan to prevent this catastrophe, and to give those under 55 another option.

The Dems and AARP are using scare tactics. Bush is emphasizing the positives of his plan. But there are definitely scary prospects down the road unless the Dems in Congress become responsible, stop whipping up false hope for the present system, and come up with something positive. They acknowledge they have no plan, no positive plan to restructure Social Security onto a new sound fiscal basis given the structural change in the American population and the demographics of retirement under a SS system based on a completely different population, and demographic of retirees within it. The Dems have let it be known that they won't offer any alternative plan to Bush's at all. They smugly intend simply to scare the aged and everybody else they can.

So, my fellow Seniors in retirement, let's move on over to USA Next; it's said their menu of benefits and discount items are bigger, and their discounts are deeper. What's more they don't make you finance a political agenda, neither right nor left. But they do oppose the Dem and AARP progaganda designed to block Social Security reform. In the end, the Dems and AARP will make the lot of us Seniors worse than ever. - Owlb


Link: Social Security in Leading Media

Friday, March 04, 2005

Faith-Based Initiatives in Govt Help to Poor, Phase II


Stephen Lazarus of the Center for Public Justice in Washington DC just returned from the White House Conference on Faith-Based Initiatives by which faith organizations mobilize themselves and corps of local volunteers to help the poor and needy, the drug addicts and the prisoners, the single moms and their kids who require specialist assistance from stable local longterm agencies who can compete on the basis of their competence for government funding. In the old terms, it's welfare channeled thru organizations most likely to relate well to that group of people who need a specific kind of help in a specific local situation. Read Steve's encouraging and enlightening report online at Capital Commentary. Read this important one-page report.

Report

Wednesday, March 02, 2005

Hardcore rugger steams in the stands


Click the title of this blog entry and view the dynamo pic. I'd like to run it here and give it refWrite's Award for Sports Photo of the Year! New Zealand rugger fan, Mixed Bag, gives a steamy fistful of cheer. He's a well-known devotee of The Lions. But there's a further depth to his devotion which you can sample by clicking the additional link below

Matt Bartlett

Tuesday, March 01, 2005

Test to make PermaLink with HTML snippet


[Thanks to Jono and Inti for their linkable page of marvellous photos. Just click the title of this tech blogy-entry.}

Techno maestro, Mixed Bag, I've got three Qs about that HTML snippet you sent - for which many thanks also. Here they go:

Is this to enable me to PermaLink to the Other's blog by placing its clickable title in a row in the margin of my blog refWrite, along with additional link-ups to additional blogs that I also like? How would I do that?

Is it to enable me to link-up express to a specific article/webpage of theirs?

Or, and this is my priority of the moment, is it for my internal provisions for my own blog's Visitors/Readers who want to PermaLink to one (and just that one, at a time) blog entry (article) of mine that is of special interest to them? So that any of their Visitors/Readers can click up my blog article from their blog while while the Vistors are actually reading my blogging colleague's mere reference to my item, or digesting her comments, his spin, or someone's take-off into related or far-distant subject matter that may have come to them (her, him) via a reading of one of my blog's entries / article s/press releases. How do I provide a PermaLink to other bloggers who want to refer to a specific blogged entry or article of mine - and not get my whole blog where they'd have to go hunt the article down by scrolling or working thru my archive?

Not sure.

- Mixed Net ... because my HTML leaks like a sieve .... or should that be Mixed Nuts since my HTML is so crazy - Owlb

Mixed Bag
Test