Politics: US/UN: John Bolton, President Bush's nominee for UN Ambassador ready & fit

John Bolton, originally uploaded by Anaximaximumphotographics.

The hi drama of Bush appointments has been resisted by recalcitrant leftwing Senators, and their obstruction will continue into next week, as long as they can possibly drag things out.

Meanwhile, the ringleaders of the Dems No-voters have been turned down by Prez Bush in refusing their efforts to blackmail classified documents (emails and such) composed by Ambassador Bolton. The President insisted that delivery of these materials to the leaders of the two parties on the Senate subcommittee on Intelligence was sufficient, and they haven't put out a general alarm calling upon the whole Senate to see these. So be it. - Owlb
Bush won't give whole Senate classified docs

semiotics: digital artpoem: Picture at the Well

Picture at the Well, originally uploaded by Anaximaximumphotographics.

This little poem of semiotic overlay of a prefab image (courtesy of ImageWell) and a bubble device with the option of inserting text (ImageWell again) brawt up as a .tiff pix, and then the insertion of my own text (closely relevant to image but producing a characterizing and semantic load to intensify unity) results in a semiotic poem of image in relation to text with semantic overload (poiesis):then the digi-art semiotic whole is converted using Graphic Converter to a .jpg format, uploaded to Flickr then finally from there re-uploaded to my Blogger blog refWrite. That's the technique used to craft up the found artistic intention of the poem, using and experimenting with the techniques to find the poem itself by this very means. It poses the puzzle of my meaning to the viewer / reader. And I shouldn't go further in trying to translate it, as that would alter its meaning and make it imagery/text itself stale. - Owlb

Missiology: MidEast Iraq: Report from Christians on the Frontlines after Foreign Missions Influx then Exflux

An agency that supports indigenous missions in difficult places around the world, and which reports on conditions in many countries where Christian missionary work is seriously blocked or totally surpressed, sends this report in its most recent email newsletter:

A Christian ministry leader of Muslim background who has traveled in Iraq four times in the last year told Christian Aid, "Despite everything, the churches in Iraq are growing." The news comes as a surprise amid reports of a virtual Christian exodus from the country. Muslim extremists have attacked churches and threatened, kidnapped or murdered Christians, driving thousands of Iraqi believers into neighboring countries for safety.

Yet according to this mission leader, whose name is withheld for security reasons, Christians who are staying are seeing their churches grow. He believes the sudden influx and subsequent withdrawal of many foreign missionary agencies following the toppling of Saddam Hussein contributed to this growth. "I have never seen so many foreign groups coming into one place [after Saddam Hussein's government was overthrown]," he says. "But, as soon as things started to get difficult, many of them pulled out, leaving only the Iraqi Christians to do the work."

Iraqi believers have stepped up efforts to spread the gospel to their countrymen even though some of them are in grave danger from insurgents fighting in the name of Islam. Through his visits with families in Iraq, the native mission leader learned of a disturbing tactic being used by insurgents to maintain their ranks: fighters have been going house to house in certain areas, demanding a child from each family. Those who refuse are threatened with death; those who go with the insurgents are "trained" for several months for suicide bombing missions.

"Though many Iraqis were glad to be rid of Saddam and glad for the Americans' help, they live in such fear because of these things," he said.

In this atmosphere, Iraqi believers know that the need for Christ's gospel of peace is stronger than ever, and they are determined to spread it.

This force of native Iraqi missionaries, the mission leader says, points to a change that ought to take place in missions across the board. "Churches in America need to change their ideas about missions," the leader declared. "They need to trust the natives' vision to reach their own people and get behind them with support."

Please lend prayer support to Iraqi Christians courageously spreading the gospel in an extremely volatile situation. For more information, write insider at christianaid dot org and put MI-619 444-WMN on the subject line.

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If you email or clickup the Christian Aid website, you may want to ask for their Report on the South African Land Crisis, and the difficulties of a just solution (white farmers have been murdered off systematically by certain forces, for instance); Christain Aid has its Report available on PDF.

Cut-&-paste URL for Christain Aid USA website: http://www.christianaid.org/home.asp

Politics: USA/UN: FiliBLUSTERing UN Ambassador Reprise & Update of earlier refWrite entries.

Update, May 27: Demcrats dashed the good feelings of the up-and-down vote agreement, without filibusterations, by refusing to proceed with such in regard to the Bolton nomination to the UN Ambassadorship. Delaying once more they have pushed the vote to next week, presumably not longer.

May 26: The Democrats, having given up on blustering filibust of Priscilla Owen, newly confirmed after four years of being put on filibluster hold by Democrat Senators, are now renewing their promise to talk to death the nomination of John Bolton to become US's UN Ambassador. All the trumped up and hypostasized charges they've dredged up so far, just haven't worked as the Republicans have dismantled them for the meanspirited and fear-mongering canards that they were. Now, the Dems and Republican Sen George Voinovich want to go fishing further in certain documents, much of which they've already seen. Sen. Christopher J. Dodd, Connecticut Democrat, and Sen. Joseph Biden are leading the filithreatening charge, according to Stephen Dinan in today's Washington Times. Dodd and Biden, both on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee

are seeking e-mails and other documents that would answer whether Mr. Bolton tried to influence intelligence analysts who were working on congressional testimony about Syria's weapons programs. ¶ "Did Bolton attempt to badger or change the views of intelligence officers relating to whether or not Syria had WMD at a critical juncture when you all were writing, and we were asking, is Syria next?" Mr. Biden told reporters. ¶ Mr. Biden also wants to have access to unredacted versions of 10 intercepted foreign communications that name Americans, since Mr. Bolton sought the identities of the Americans named, and the Democrats say it could have been part of an attempt to bully intelligence analysts. ¶ Mr. Biden said the administration has not provided any other reason for refusing to turn over the administration other than to say it's not relevant to the investigation. ¶ Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Tennessee Republican, forwarded the requests to the administration as a matter of courtesy, according to a spokesman, but Senate Republicans and the White House said enough information has already been given. ¶ "We've provided the Senate with the information they need to do their job," said Erin Healy, a White House spokeswoman. "John Bolton testified [before the Foreign Relations Committee] for more than eight hours, responded in writing to many additional questions, and the State Department has worked to provide the Senate with many additional documents as well." ¶ The intelligence intercepts already were provided to the top Republican and Democrat on the intelligence committee, though with the names redacted. ¶ Sen. Pat Roberts, Kansas Republican and chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said the redacted documents show no indication of anything untoward, and that he didn't think the unredacted documents would show anything more.

I've no idea whether or not the Dems have the strength to filibuster this nomination to death. The policy that won the day for Priscilla Owen was one that applied only to nominees for offices as justices (judgeships); ambassadors were not covered. But Sen. Majority Leader, Bill Frist, seems to regard his policy of a straight-up-down vote after thoro debate on each nominee for whatever office, is sufficient and that what he calls "the constiutional option" just described simply must prevail, or he will move forthwith to have the Senate Rules changed. Will we see filibuster or flibluster? And how long will the debate on Bolton drag on?

May 25: Today the Bolton debate has started, quick on the heels of the Senate's confirmation of Justice Priscilla Owens, held up for four years. The Republican Party leadership in the USA said all the cloud of gnats adduced as arguments against John R. Bolton as Ambassador to the UN, had been exhausted and did not stand. The AP's Ann Gearan put it this way, "Exhaustive investigations turned up nothing to disqualify John R. Bolton from becoming U.N. ambassador, and he should be quickly given the post," Richard Lugar (Republican of Indian and chair of the Senate's Foreign Relations Committee) "said Wednesday as the Senate opened debate on the long-delayed nomination."
Bolton debate starts

May 23 [?]: Speaking of rightwing views on Bolton, here's one that will motivate many of those predisposed to chortling at France's diplomatic didos, when one is not simply annoyed with Chirac et al. WND's headline for this one by analyst Dr Jack Wheeler, "Bolton to shake France's cage - Bush nominee will seek ouster of Paris from Security Council." Actually, what is envisioned is the creation of one seat on the Security Council for the European Union, while maintaining a separate seat for Britain and expanding to a few other seats with no veto. But all this is speculative murk, if only because France presently has vero-power. And Japan's bid to become a member of the SC, with or without the veto, is sure to be thwarted by Communist China, already a Permanent Member which also has the veto.

May 21: Back on April 19, the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, by which the whole Senate fulfills its duty to the President by advising and consenting to his conduct of foreign relations, including consent to the appointment of ambassadors to represent the government the President leads, a number of these "ladies and gentlemen" decided to go another merry-go-round on the nomination by George W. Bush of John R. Bolton as US Ambassador to the UN. I won't describe the merry-go-round to which the committee devolved, delaying again its decision-making process, and setting the avid committee staff members under the behest of the Democratice faction of the committee. to dig up as much dirt against the nominee as possible.

Three weeks elapsed in which this cadre looked everywhere for some scrap of valid evidence to back up the earlier tantrums of its behesters - Boxer, Kennedy, and Schumer in particular. Red-faced, they came up empty-handed and evidence-less.

So, on May 12, the redoubtable leftwing daily the Washington Post (affectionately known to its readership as WaPo), surprisingly published an editorial, that declared, "The committee ought to give Mr. Bolton a vote today. Ours would be an unethusiastic deference-to-the-president yes." Paroxysms of shock circled out to less-responsible deep sectors of the Left. The editorial continued with an observation that in the circumstances was most astute, "What emerges from the interviews conducted by committee staffers [out to get the nominee trashed] is how intensely policy-driven, as opposed to personal, were most of Mr. Bolton's clashes in the State Department, during President Bush's first term, under Secretary of State Colin L. Powell."

A certain Lawrence B. Wilkerson from within the Powell-led State Department issued lengthy whines against the President's nominee, but when being interviewed a week before the WaPo editorial, gee-willikers, the fellow "was unable to provide any fresh examples of misbehavior [such as the committee's left research-cadre craved] by Mr. Bolton. Instead he complained about policy differences: Mr. Bolton was too eager to sanction Chinese companies that violated the nonproliferation regime, thereby making diplomacy more difficult. He was too zealous in carrying out his mission to persuade other countries to exempt U.S. soldiers from the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. When Mr. Bolton delivered a speech vilifying North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, "Rich was very angry" -- that would be former deputy secretary Richard L. Armitage -- but, Mr. Wilkerson acknowledged, he was angry because the [Bolton] speech had been cleared by the assistant secretary for Asia, a Powell ally." Need it be said that Wilkerson was Powell's chief of staff?

After WaPo honestly outlines why its editors and the Left generally fears the Bush policy in regard to the UN, as would be administered by a man who understands it and has the fortitude to develop it daily in the General Assembly, the Secuirty Council, and among his own staff; WaPo's editorialists conclude, "The nominee is intelligent and qualified; we still see no compelling reason to deny the president his choice."

Undoubtedly, however, others on the monomaniacal Left will have since found what to them are "compelling reasons," as they act and think more from compulsions in this generation than from well-thawt policy standards that engage the times creatively. They seem as a lot to have no interest in reforming the UN. That's the biggest problem. They want pragmatists committed in advance to accrediting every crazy gambit put forward by a restive rogue régime on any of the UN's commissions. Unless the UN is reformed, it will not last. Bush is committed to making a persistent and systematic effort to rescue the UN from itself (its packs of factions and deal-makers, many of them hoping to line their own pockets as the Oil-for-Food Program has shown).

Of course, there's little chance that Bolton will be consented by the Senate. And the implicit advice will be: find us someone else to trash.

In the meantime, those on the far Right, like the organizers behind MoveAmericaForward.com which duns for advertizing funds to raise the question of UN irresponsiblity in the most vivid way possible, may have some tipping influence on whether Bolton's candidacy for the ambassadorship goes thru. But, MAF still will not own Bolton, as they would try to suggest were he to wiggle thru the Senate Dem's blockade, reinforced by a few tepid Republican Senators. The MAF folk may applaud some of Bolton's moves were he to get into the office for which the Prez has nominated him; but the MAFies are just as likely to whack Bolton with words akin to the verb "betray." MAF may end up equally disappointed with the Presiden'ts UN policy as brawt into action by his nominee Bolton, should the diplomat get the Senate's nod after all.

This MAF outfit in particular is led by people who have a far different agenda for the US than that of President Bush; they love to bad-mouth, as I have come to know by monitoring the radiocasts on the Internet by one of the ringleaders. But that's neither here nor there. I just hope the TV ads they are sponsoring are accurate and fair in their critique of an institution that just isn't all its cracked-up to be, and can't be; while it could be a whole lot less self-aggrandizing and helpful in the world. Everyday the UN does something somewhere in the world that is good and bettering for this or that zone; but everyday somewhere among its its agencies, agents and leadership and armed forces are doing something execrable as well (like the persistent pattern of rape by the UN forces in the Congo).

The UN needs an inner reformation, a reorientation to plausible and realistic goals, an attitude that doesn't assume to tell member states with heavy responsiblities in the world what to do about problems they are already dealing with (as in the case of the enormously-salaried Danish head of the Humanitarian Aid Commission who spouted off presumptively during the fund-raising for Tsunami Relief, trying to put the other enormously-salaried UN bureaucrats at the hub of everything, all with a certain air of entitlement, to say next to nothing about hubris). - Owlb

The earlier entries have been deleted as of today

Arts: Poetry "The Waste Land," great early poem by T. S. Eliot now super-annotated as noted in The New Criterion

For those esoteric lit buffs who would enjoy a thoro annotation (not directly a commentary, not directly a literary critique, mind you) of one of Modernist poetry's greatest achievements in the English lanuage, I find myself delited to be able to pass on to you a note on the work of Lawrence Rainey's new scholarly edition of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, a long poem published often nowadays as a free standing book in itself––together "with Eliot's Contemporary Prose." I take that to mean TSE's prose written around the time of composition of the long poem cited. The title of Rainey's work, unremarkably, now: The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot's Contempory Prose. Not directly and not directly, as said, but still in the value of the achieved content, still it is a remarkable work of litcrit broadly construed, on a great poem broadly admired despite its difficulty, written in a broadly modernist vein with its very own Eliot-composed annotations! So what do we call Rainey's? Meta-annotations? Supplementary annotations? And as to the poem itself, it is also modernist not just as to technique, but also as to worldview, since this poem was composed before Eliot's conversion Christian faith and his taking up the post of warden in a hi-Anglocatholic church in Lodon. It's a work of literary art in the modernist secular humanist vein as the Christain philosopher, Herman Dooyeweerd would define "humanist" technically, in terms of the Nature/Freedom dualism of ultimate Western values since the Enlightenment, a worldview hegemonic in our culture, but not totally determinative everywhere in everything cultural. The poet of The Waste Land became also the Christian poet of the Four Quartets (also often published a free-standing book of the four inter-related poems).

I found reference to the Rainey work on Eliot and his poem in The New Criterion, in an item by Adam Kirsch, entitled "Travels in the Waste Land." NC supplies an excerpt from Kirsch's review, but darng! that I can't find the whole litcrit piece from which the Kirsch excerpt is presented. Maybe you'll have better luck at the NC website for their April 2005 edition online. Meantime, here's the excerpt, as a kind of teaser, to be sure:

Here is a book of 260 pages built on a poem of 433 lines—a text-to-commentary ratio appropriate to the Bible or the Greek classics. More than any previous editor, Rainey provides the reader with every resource that might help explain the genesis and significance of the poem. He offers a chronology of its composition, from Eliot’s first passing reference to “a poem that I have in mind,” in November 1919, through its simultaneous publication in The Criterion and The Dial in October 1922. He offers notes on the verse and notes on the notes, including full English quotations of the sources Eliot alludes to or leaves untranslated.

There are many less esoteric articles, essays, and items in NC, with which one may be buffed, buffetted, or buffoonerated to one's hearts content in literary niceties, with critical overcasts reflective of Eliot's call for "discrimination" in the appreciation of works of art. A call which I thawt I found expostulated in a review by Douglas Murray of an IRA drama around the deeply traumatic events of Bloody Sunday sometime back, in Northern Ireland (see my attempt to understand Murray in my May 15, 2005 entry in reWrite, "Arts: Brit critic castigates pro-IRA drama for 'complacent liberals'." I think both NC and Eliot would have recognized the finely-nuanced line of argumentation there, in regard to the art/morals interface in a would-be work of drama as a true artform and literary-artistic genre. - Owlb

Link

Science: Space Exploration: The border between Earth's Solar System and the awesome beyond called Intestellar Space

This morning in the wee hours way before dawn, I learned that there's a boundary zone interfacing between the planetary system of old Sol and that awesome otherness of the farflung Stars, er, at least of the galaxy of the Milky Way in which old Sol makes its home. That star-spangled otherness, at the center of which Aristotle thawt there sat (sort of) the Unmoved Mover to which the orbiting Stars were attracted but which they could never reach no matter how attracted, is everything of what we call Outer Space.

Well, you get my idea. I learned that Voyager I had achievewd a distance of 8.7 million miles from the sun and had just now "entered the heliosheath, a region beyond termination shock -- the critical boundary that marks the transition from the solar system into interstellar space." Heliosheath. That's the core concept, the term for the core concept that dawned in the pre-dawn darkness of my learning this infobit. Apparently, according to the CNN report, the sun emits a constant "solar wind," and at the very edge of interstellar space the wind gives out. "At the termination shock boundary, the solar wind dissipates and begins to give way to the interstellar medium -- the gases that float in the void between stars." I guess it's the sudden absence of the wind that constitutes the "termination shock."

Voyager I is expected to continue on, in the slower but denser medium of interstellar physical reality - until 2020, when radio contact will be lost, but apparently the space probe will just keep going until pulled into some magnetic attractor that burns it up, or .... - Owlb

Link

Politics: USA: Judge Priscilla Owens confirmed by Senate at end of protracted conflict

After four years in nomination limbo, a Texas Supreme Court justice Priscilla Owens, black female and conservative philosophically was named by a 55-43 vote in the 100-member Senate, to become seated on the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, which is headquartered in New Orleans, Louisana and holds jurisdiction over that state, Texas, and Mississippi. During the four years of waiting, President Bush consistently maintained his nomination of the Texan whom he had known for many years with deep appreciation. And just as persistently, the Leftwing battered this jurist with all sorts of distortions of her record, because of ideological resentment. Sen. Charles Schumer was the lead attacker who misrepresented the judge's record due to her penchant for a strict construction of the law as enacted. Owens was not among those who enjoyed judicial re-write of statues and codes, which brawt her into dissonance in regard to certain dominant opinions among her colleagues who think the poor should always win a case against a corporation, no matter what the legislature has written. But Owens equally stuck to the letter, spirit, and intent of law - even against the mitey in cases where they were on the wrong end of what justice demanded of a strict constructionist approach. - Owlb

Update May 26, 1:30 PM EST: In today's Washington Times (WaT), the real reason for the intensity of opposition to Justice Priscilla Owens, who won handily once the filidbuster tactic of the Democrats was defeated by the constitutional option of Sen Majority Leader, Bill Frist, the real reason comes to lite: Owens nomination by President Bush was resisted due to the Dem Sens applying the abortion litmus test. These guys/gals wanted Owens, who is a black female of conservative juridical philosophy, defeated; they wanted her defeated because she is not an all-out pro-abortionist. Charles Hurt reports in WaT:

"Priscilla Owen has voted against a woman's right to choose in every abortion-related opinion," said <Eleanor Smeal, president of Feminist Majority Foundation. ¶ "In particular, liberals oppose Justice Owen for declining in several cases to allow juveniles to bypass the Texas law requiring that minors notify their parents before undergoing an abortion."

Priscilla Owen's confirmation to the 5th Circuit Court's panel of justices was held up for four years because of this reason, apparently unmentioned in the Senate, or at least were it mentioned in all its vigor, yet not forcely brawt to the attention of the public by the news media. We almost lost a good judge in an important court - covering Federal matters in Missisippi, Louisiana, and Texas where abortion issues take a very different cast than in New York City and New England where even the self-identified Catholic politicos (and perhaps judges) have no other thawt in their head than an absolute rite of every women to choose to end a life in the womb under each and every possible circumstance. There's something horribly unnuanced in the jurisprudence for which Smeal and her Senate ally, Charles Schumer (Dem, NY), who kept this reason for his nonconfirmation vote quite hidden. There was no deference to the fact that millions of American women think his and her position are unconscionable. - Owlb

Link

Sports: USA: Lacrosse popularity surprises, contends with baseball for ratings

As hi school athletes slip into their straps this spring, that's in the Greater Philadelphia area at least, they're as much likely to be dressing up for lacrosse as for baseball. In lacrosse, the costume is much more extraterrestrial, and total-helmetted, and (I would hope, from seeing it on TV in the land from which it hails) much more thoroly padded. In baseball, you can get hurt; but in lacrosse you are likely to get whammoed in most games. Still, in and around Philly and in more and more locales around the USA, lacrosse's popularity increases in popularity by leaps and bounds, especially in the hi-school jock demographic mentioned. And as a spectator sport, its rapidly growing fanship seems to have something to do with the attraction of slammo blasto video games. But for the players, What is the attraction, compared to baseball with which it shares the season? Surely, it has its roots in the same increase of participation in extreme sports, both in real life and on TV reality shows. As fewer and fewer young male adults can even meet a military recruiter in their hi schools, colleges, and universities, where large activist groups disdain any form of respect for the warrior motivated by patriotism at arms, it would seem the most hily libidic of these guys are looking around for a way of doing what they're seeing in the videosports and on TV. Lacrosse appeals to an instinctive drive toward physical risk, tho channelled, like other such powerful drives that find some form of social acceptance, into the rules and goals of a very demainding sport. Baseball appeals to something else, where its rules and manner of scoring points renders it "the gentleman's sport."


Lacrosse History
Monthly Lacrosse Stats and News

Art: Iconography Soterios Panailidis, a master maker of rivetting images - but is it art?

I got an email from a list to which I subscribe. It proclaimed a father's delite in his daughter's Christian intellectual development and gave us all the route to her quite beautiful and thawtful website. There I also found a URL that took me to the True Fresco site; and, of course, I surfed the waves of curiosities breaking in as fresh webpages, finally dropping me off at a title on Byzantine Iconography. I was not prepared for the stimulating text, but even more so suprpised with my own delite upon viewing what the artist had there for his visitors regarding his faith and his artworks, goregeously accessible to my beauty-starved eyes.

Soeterios Panailidis has a brief essay at True Fresco that is accompanied by digitalized images of a selectoin of his iconography. The text raises the question about the whole Byzantine tradition of iconography - is it art or not? - Owlb

Panailidis - English & Greek site

War: Iraq Terrorists The Sunni Jordanian leading the slawter of Shi'ites in Iraq has been wounded

Abu Musab Zarqawi, the leader of the mass murders in Iraq, is said by his aide to have been definitely wounded when cawt in the crossfire of US Marines in a recent campaign to wipe out terrorist nests. Ellen Knickmeyer and Saad Sarhan report in the Washington Post today:

The U.S. military has said several Zarqawi associates have been captured in recent months, including a driver caught in February in western Iraq. The military described the incident as the closest it had come to apprehending Zarqawi, who escaped on foot but left behind his laptop computer and tens of thousands of dollars in cash.

Tho a Zarqawi aide says his chief is being treated by doctors, further word comes that a committee has been named to choose a successor. The committee includes three Saudis and one Iraqi - we are led to believe by Z's aide, Abu Karrar, who continues adeptly to use the Al Quaeda in Iraq group's media-manipulative expertise. The whole story may be a ruse to result in a story where Z survives and returns to action a hero to his Sunni following, mostly Wahhabist sectarians of the Al Quaeda stripe, except for their rabid anti-Shi'ite supertwist.

Were Zarqawi to croak, it could mean the reduction of his cabal's power, in part because he had ferociously insisted that the killing of innocents and noncombatants was a good practice, and wiping out members of the Shi'ite majority was an especially delicious prospect no matter how low a rank in society, no matter how female, and no matter how young. This degree of demonic terrorist ideology is now being questioned by many co-religionists of the Sunni 20% of Iraq, who of late have been regretting their boycott of the recent democratic national elections and lamenting the fact that they don't figure largely on the committee constructed to write Iraq's new constitution by August 15. "The extent of autonomy for regions such as the [Sunni majority] Kurdish-dominated north and the role of Islamic law in determining Iraqui statues," says the WaPo report. - Owlb

Link

Sports: Baseball: Phillies launch baseball season with 5 wins out of 7 games

The 2005 baseball season is looking really great for a Phillies fan like myself. Besides the 5 wins out of 7 games played, a good-go streak to be sure, there's that impressive win yesterday due in good part to the pitching of Cory Lidle (on whom the Phillies "bestowed a 2-year, $6.3 million contract extension after last season, despite the myriads of Naysayers"). Lidle opened lots of negative eyes yesterday when he had "a 99-pitch complete game over Baltimore," holding "the American League's best hitting team to six hits" in the Phillies 7-2 win in Baltimore's own Oriole Park at Camden Yards. So far this season, Lidle is "4-3 with a 3.75 earned run average," according to the Philadelphia Daily News sportswriter, Paul Hagen.

Also watch lead-off hitter, shortstop Jimmy Rollins. Lead-off hitting allows things to start well just by getting the player on first base. Then the second hitter has a chance to drive his predecessor forward, and even if the first guy gets bonked out between first and second, it keeps things busy for the opposing team's basemen, the shortstop, and the pitcher. So, at minimum, if there's any run at all, with someone again on first, your team has a similar chance to where you started. But, if your second hitter does better than a mere 1-base run, then you get a man each on second and third; with a 3-base run, a you get a man into homeplate and one onto third base. That's the math of the strategy of picking very wisely your lead-off hitter and I follow Hagen in saying these stats for Rollins warrant our keeping him in view when the game starts: "Over the last two seasons, the Phillies are 69-37 (.651) when he scores at least one run, and [only!] 33-58 (.363) when he doesn't."
Go figure!

Oh yeah, I've got some affinity for the Toronto Blue Jays too!- Owlb

Tonite & next 6 games: any momentum?

Science: Classics: Eureka! Archimedes texts being decoded by special X-rays and experts in ancient scripts

A collector bawt at auction a palimpsest with a painting superimposed on an older document inscribed onto goathide - for 2 million dollars. A palimpsest? Yes, as mentioned, is an old scroll or book where the pages are made of fine leather. Onto the scroll / book, there were inscribed in ink a text. That's the meaning of scroll or book for much of the ancient Western world (altho papyrus was another medium, a scroll or book made of reed fibres). A palimpsest is an inscribed text that has been layered over with another inscribed text, and in the case at hand, a painting as well. In 1998, the anonymous collector loaned out his mysterious acquisition to the Walter Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, donating additinal funds to see what would come up from the obviously older bottom layer of text.

The whole story told from the hypothesized beginning is that Archimedes, a Greek-speaking Sicilian scientist, wrote the originals (which we don't have in this case) and they or copies thereof hung around for a long time, until they were copied for the first or more times onto the goathide book we have today of some 174 pages of Archimedes' text.

Scholars believe the treatise was copied by a scribe in the 10th century from Archimedes' original Greek scrolls, written in the third century B.C.

It was erased about 200 years later by a monk who reused the parchment for a prayer book, creating a twice-used parchment book known as a "palimpsest." In the 12th century, parchment -- scraped and dried animal skins -- was rare and costly, and Archimedes' works were in less demand. {Not accurate to say "orginal" here; we can't possibly know that what the scribe used was the actual "autographa" written by the hand of Archimedes himself or by an amanuensis to whom he dictated his thawts.]

In any case, to enhance the prayer book, a painting was added, much like a cover illustration for a book today.

Also contrary to the impression given by the Associated Press, Newsday, and other reports regarding the value of the amazing scientific processes brawt to bear on the palimpsest, the Archimedes text cannot be read by the chemical and X-ray techniques themselves. It takes experts in classical Greek to interpret the brush strokes of the individual letters of the Greek alphabet to decide just what any one letter and letter-combinations (word) means And apparently, the prayerbook text on top of Greek is Latin.

Another error occurs in the statement Newsday attributes to Dr William Noel of the Palimpsest Project at the Walter Art Museum. Where Noel says, "It's the only one that contains diagrams that may bear any resemblance to the diagrams Archimedes himself drew in the sand in Syracuse 2000 years ago," the truth is that Archimedes lived about two hundred fifty years earlier than that (287 BC - 212 BC) - not around the time of Jesus. Noel is off by 10%, a terrible error of magnitude for dating Archimedes stunning scientific achievement, now known to be more stunning than ever.

What's important is that we have now "the only copy of the treatise Method of Mechanical Theorems, outlining the experimental procedures that helped the scientist think thru his math theories and formulate them more precisely. and "also the only source" we have so far "in the original Greek" language used by Archimedes - but not the original Greek autographa, an assumption impossible to make on the evidence at hand and highly improbable - for the treatise On Floating Bodies, in which Archimedes deals with the physics of flotation and gravity," according to the Associated Press report by Alex Dominquez, in Newsday online. - Owlb



Science Daily

Politics: Mideast: Sen Gordon Smith states the US policy situation clearly and leanly

A Republican Senator, speaking at the World Economic Forum (the outfit the sponsors the Davos, Switzerland assemblies for the glitterati and politicians who loke to be seen with them), but this time in Southern Shuneh, Jordan, made clear that American policy is n-o-t even-handed in regard to Israel and Palestine. Israel and the US have an ethical bond of inter-state friendship, I would add to Sen Gord Smith's remark. I agree with the Republican from Oregon that American policy is and should be, in the words of AP's reporter Mariam Fam, "security for Israel first and justice for Palestinians 'if possible.' "

Smith's other reported major points was simply that Arab countries have a pattern of neglect of their own horrendous internal strife, injustice, exploitation, and corruption. I make an exception of Iraq, for obvious reasons, tho the internal strife there is the most greivous of all, due to the failure of the Sunni minority to work creatively and positively with their distinctly minority situation, now that Saddam Hussein has been disengaged from his compulsive practice of genocide. In Iraq, Kurdish Sunnis on the other hand have been for some time functioning creatively and positively with their minority situation, and have found elbow room to contribute alongside the Shi'ite huge majority to make mutual contributions to the larger Federal democratic society.

Aside from Iraq, we don't see Arab countries doing much to move along to greater democracy, and social peace. Every Arab-dominated society has miinorities which are oppressed, according to the Muslims of Darfur who made a study to point out how the case of Black people there in Muslim Sudan is no different than anywhere else among members of the Organization of Arab States. In OAS countries the prevailing panArabist ideology's greatest internal contradiction from land to land is Muslim-against-Muslim racism.

Now, this generalization has some siginificant ameliorating conditions - for instance, Saudi Arabia just had (all-male) elections; and Kuwait just passed a law to enfranchise women for the first time. But, from the Berbers in North Africa to the Shi'ites Saudi Arabia and the Sunnis in Syria: the Mideast has a whole lot of countries whose first task is internal repair of decency, and creative development of democracy. Egypt, the Arab state of greatest population which the US has supported with billions annually has an extremely long way to go in getting past dictatorship, without allowing rabid extremists hidden within the Moslem Brotherhood to sweek into power with a vengence.

The Palestinian Aiuthority which, under President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia, has barely won a return to the truce in Gaza, where Hamas has been shelling Israeli settlements again, nevertheless have tolerated the publication on its webstie the hatemongering anti-Semitic screed, Protocols of the Elders of Zion. According to WorldNetDaily,

An official Palestinian Authority information website directly affiliated with President Mahmoud Abbas has published on its Arabic language section a copy of the ''Protocols of the Elders of Zion,'' a classic anti-Semitic forgery, while the English section does not contain the work, WND has learned.

Abbas recently had been credited by the U.S. and Israel for fighting anti-Israel incitement.

Al-Nakba.com, the official Internet website of the Palestinian State Information Service, SIS, published an Arabic translation to the ''Protocols,'' a notorious forgery authorized by the anti-Semetic Czarist police in early 20th-Century Russia that purports to be minutes of a meeting of top Jewish leaders plotting world domination.

So, at this point, Abbas and Quereia seem to be rather duplicitous. Nevertheless, deomocratic gains have been made in Palestine, since the death of Yasser Arafat, and Hamas and Hesbollah are formidable foes to the PA's Fatah leadership. Still, the PAers of whatever party have a long way to go before they make evident any strong possiblity to answer Sen Smith's "if possible." If and when, then I would advocate that the US gradually reduce its financial allocations to Israel, and increase allocations to Palestine. Palestinians, increasing in democratic practices and civil rights in relation to their own régime and terrorist factions, should be helped to develop the economic infrastructure for the young men (and women) who otherwise have a tiny chance of remunerative work, in comparison with the population of Israel which has been helped to develop by multiplied billions from the US government over the last 50 years. And let's see the world's millionaires of Palestinian origin start giving to and investing in the emerging Palestinian state's agricultural, industrial, and commercial infrastructure.

But, in any case, the USA and Israel have a special bond, again a longtime inter-state ethical relation. This bond does not rest either on the Holocaust of which the US is not a guilty party, nor on Christian Zionism which is an ideology of only some Christians among whom I am not one, nor on a Jewish-athiest or Judaicist Zionism, tho there are many varieties of such Zionisms among Americans. The US government as a heritage of a 50-year inter-state ethical bond with Israel, and that will stand when the US turns to increase its support of a Palestine that cleans up its own house "if possible." Thankyou, Senator Gord Smith, Republican, Oregon. - Owlb

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Personalia: Good existential writing by Christian translator for Truth & Reconciliation in South Africa

A guy named Gideon Strauss who grew up in a white Afrikaner family and church in South Africa, during Apartheid times, but who as a teenager moved away from those roots, first as a pacifist who performed civic alternative service, and then as a would-be challenger of the regime, tells in chaste discourse the story of his journey. It includes a number of years as a translator for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission made famous by Anglican Archbishop Tutu - until Gideon reached his burnout point; and then, at a loss, he emigrated. Here's his story. I recommend it. The lengthy piece includes some powerful images in ink jet print and mixed media by Scott Kolbo. These I strongly recommend also. - Owlb




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Politics: Canada: Opportunism Awards go this time round to politicos Stronach, Layton, Martin

A blogger who I admire, Gideon Strauss, just published a comment on a Canadian parliamentary member who yesterday crossed the floor from sitting with the Tories composing the "official Opposition," to arrive in the ranks of the governing minority party, the Liberals. The member in question, whose finesse of opportunism, Gideon notes, not only brawt her into the Liberal ranks but also elevated her to the rank of Minister of the Crown in charge of the Human Resources and Skills Development porfolio. Minister Belinda Stronach is a rookie poltician and heiress to the Stronach fortune, built on her billionaire father's Magna Corporation.

One commentator on Gideon's note, David Koyzis, himself noted that in contrast to Stronach's opportunism, a member of the Liberals' now unofficial coalition partner, the New Democratic Party, had given us a counter-example to Stronach's blatant action. The NDP's former leader, Ed Broadbent had made an extra effort at civility, seeing how a Parliament member of another party was ill and would not be on hand for the actual vote on the Budget. Broadbent announced that he would not voite, thereby evening out both parties chances on passage of the Budget and the Layton Amendment thereto.

But, as I wrote in my own comment on Gideon's note today (of which this is an expanded re-write), that doesn't remove the opportunism of the current NDP leader, Jack Layton, who was going to do all he could to bring down the Liberal minority government by rejecting its Feb 5 budget, for which prior to recent developments the Tories and Bloc Québecois were both announcing support.

Meanwhile the Tories and especially the Bloc Q were chafing with outrage over the Adscam revelations which continued daily, and the situation gets worse for Martin daily as slowly the existence of a crime-tainted parallel funding operation working in the Lib's favour emerges with implications far beyond a scam of a handful of bureaucrats and advertizers united to deprive Quebeckers of a clean vote in referenda past. But that latter point is most intensely repulsive to people who want a separate self-determined Québec state with some form of sovereignty. Nor should we forget either that the scammers mentioned made their own fortunes in "le scandal des commandites" (Adscam). Back to the Feb 5 budget.

Layton who saw his moment of opportunity clearly, realized that, with an extremely close-shave vote-count looming, the government needed the NDP to keep the Libs in power. What should the NDP demand in return? Layton drew up a Spend-and-Buy budget for Martin with a price tage of $4.5 billion, in full contradiction of the Feb 5 Budget that had been placed on the agenda some months back and which the PM and his Finance Minister had championed up to that point in the Adscam crisis. Consequently, together the Layton-Martin coalition amended Feb 5, so that now the Tories and presumably the Bloquistes will vote for the unamended version in a first poll of Parliament, and then reject the Layton-dictated Spend-and-Buy second budget - which will be voted upon as an amendment to the first, changing the 2005 Budget's character utterly - which I tend to think will pass by a hair's breadth. Jack has to get credit for his crack at it!

Belinda's move is perhaps the most personally dramatic opportunist gambit of recent times in Parliament, but it is just one of several opportunist moves by members and leaders in Parliament at the moment. In regard to the larger picture, I think that, for sheer craft and leverage of otherwise dubious assets at the precise moment, Layton deserves credit for outmanoeuvering everyone else, aside perhaps from the Prime Minister himself.

In keeping the Libs in power, both the Martinites in the Liberal Party and Layton also get their combined chance to keep the third reading of the proposed legislation regarding yet another matter on track. and their expected favourable vote on course toward detraditionalizing the legal definition of marriage, which of course, the Bloc will also support. Of the three parties that will vote to detraditionalize, only the Bloc will have a fully free vote on this measure, while Martin insists the members of his large Cabinet must vote with the government or face severe party discipline; and, worst of the lot, the NDP is allowing no dissent of any of its members. I don't see Broadbent speaking out against this unprincipled stance of his authoritarian party on a matter which should be one of conscience and not one of party discipline, since it deals with the legal definitions and dispositions of matters of personal intimacy and the form of their recognition or non-recognition by the Canadian State (the Courts have already imposed detraditionalization in 5 jurisdictions, and the Supreme Court of Canada is stacked in favour of detraditionalization, but the latter wisely and again opportunistically sent the matter back to Parliament which had, in typically Liberal fashion, evaded the issue in a display of craven uxoriousness over many years).

That brings us then to Martin's opportunism amidst the continuing Adscam revelations and the new edge in that matter which oversahdows all else in this round of minority government, a matter that now exposes itself as frawt with forensic traces of a crime-edged parallel funding operation for the Liberal Party as a regular practice extending back to the pre-Martin Liberal governement of Jean Chrétien at least. On top of that, the date that Martin had selected for facing up to the Adscam revelations, was one that would result in months of delay. He strenuously campaigned for delaying until the current Adscam investigation is completed in December of this year. But, now it's clear also, there will be no final report from Judge Gomery's Commission in December 2005. It's clear now that Martin will get his breathing space into 2006, and who knows?, perhaps into a completed term of 5-years wheedling and misdeedling. At the moment, were there an election in a month's time, the Bloc stands to deprive the Liberals of any Parliamentary seats in Québec. Martin loses no chance to demonize the Bloc, since they are "separatists"; nor any chance to demonize the Tories, since they are "extremists from the West." He will have little ammo left to berate the NDP as "socialists" once they've kept his minority government in office, perhaps for a full term. Speak of Teflon .... Marteflon?

So, Martin comes off as Top Scorer. Layton is Most Valuable Player. And Her Wealthiness Stronach gets credit for her Personal Best, her crossing the floor of Parliament in a party-switch which may perhaps be the one distinguishing feature of her political career, unless she can actually clean up the Ministry of Human Resources and Skills Development before the Auditor General makes another damning sweep into its inner recesses as happened during the reign there of Jane Nixon, former PM Chrétien's fall girl in that case of Liberal scandal. - Yours, Owlb


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Arts: Brit critic castigates pro-IRA drama for "complacent liberals"

Douglas Murray writes bestsellers in Britain, where his most recent will appear this summer under the title Neoconservatism. He's also a freelance journalist. Presumably in this capacity, he attended the huge inquiry of the British Government into one of the most dread events since the IRA took to bombing consumers in department stores like Harrod's. The event was this time however a massacre in which were killed 13 civilians, and the wounded amounted to another 13. That event has justly earned its appellationm Bloody Sunday, with apparently no competition. The event has in its latter day begotten not only this massive inquiry, but also a set of theatrics composed of thespian scenes called a "drama."

Murray attended the inquiries portrayed, not only on Star days when real-live terrorists like Martin McGuinness were summoned, but also on the days in 2003 when the press corps (with whom Murray commiserates) couldn't stand the complexity of issues, viewpoints, and technicalities involved in the British military's confrontation with the terrorists and their supporters, including the infamous Bernadette Devlin, in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, January 30, 1972. The Bloody Sunday Inquiry was set up by Prime Minister Tony Blair in 1998, a hearing which lasted a year, and Murray was there even when the press corps dwindled to three.

The hearings have ended; the final report is not yet published. But the play is a howling, snickering, laffing success of mindless insouciance. But you must read Murray's analysis of this entertainment for "complacent liberals" whose grannies weren't shredded in Harrod's and whose fathers, brothers, husbands and lovers weren't among the "668 British soldiers killed during the troubles." For these deaths, "only 81 people have ever been prosecuted – all now released." But the play goes on, and after its successful trials will have a long run in the future to provide a sector of the Brit public with the delicacies of "the threatre of moral corruption," according to Murray. - Owlb


The Troubles

Politics: UN: Clinton & other UN SecurityCouncil members 'fundamental mistake' in setting up Oil-for-Food program for Saddam

According to Sen Carl Levin (Democrat, Michigan) the Clinton Administration made a "fundamental mistake" in establishing the Oil-for-Food program when it allowed Iraq dictator and genocidist Saddam Hussein to parlay the distribution of oil contracts, and "allocations" of huge amounts of barrels of oil by vouchers he could issue to anyone he wanted to reward or buy, Washington Times tells us.

The two biggest politicians bawt by the Saddam's bestowal of vouchers went to a rightwing French cabinent minister and very close ally of French Prez, Jacques Chirac, Charles Pasqua; and to George Galloway, a Labour member of the British for a constituency in Glasgow, Scotland, and the most tireless and vociferous of Tony Blair's leading Britain into the War for Iraq's Liberation from Hussein. Pasqua is now a member of the French Senate. His genocide vouchers were squirreled thru a front company in Switzerland. Galloway was re-elected to Parliament after quitting the Labour Party, and presumably running as an independent in the May 5 election. Galloway won because he gained court judgments against the British Telegraph and the Christian Science Monitor for stories they ran that were apparently forgeries circulated by the named's friends. However, the new evidence that lead to the current revelations come from "findings being released today, [by] the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs permanent subcommittee on investigations ...." They charge that "former French Interior Minister Charles Pasqua and British Member of Parliament George Galloway each received the right to market more than 10 million barrels of cut-rate oil from dictator Saddam's Oil Ministry between 1999 and 2003," reports WT's David R. Sands.

UPDATE: Washington Times reporter David R. Sands reports that both Pasqua and Galloway have emphatically denied receiving any kind of negotiable vouchers from Saddam Hussein's scheme to subvert the UN's Oil-for-Food program. George Galloway (Ind MP, Glasgow, UK Parliament) has just announced he's flying to Washington DC from London to tell the US Senate's Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs permanent subcommittee on investigations that he's innocent of all charges.


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Politics: Canada: Prime Minister Paul Martin regarded as Canada's most dishonest political leader by 63 % polled

According to the most recent poll nationwide, sponsored by CTV and The Globe and Mail, taken on the telephone by The Strategy Counsel between May 2-8 (before yesterday's vote in the House of Commons), Martin has slid to the bottom of the pile.

CTV reports the details online:

The sponsorship scandal and negative commentary over Martin's recent efforts to strike deals to keep his party in power seems to have eaten away at his once-vaunted credibility. ¶ When asked to name which of the leaders is the most dishonest:

• 63 per cent of Canadians picked Martin;
• 20 per cent chose Harper;
• 5 per cent of respondents said NDP Leader Jack Layton; and
• 3 per cent named Bloc Quebecois Leader Gilles Duceppe.

The picture gets even bleaker for Martin: 61 per cent of Canadians say they believe he would lie if it would help him politically; 54 per cent call him hypocritical; while 47 percent say he's indecisive. ¶ "Paul Martin is looking like a caricature of a stereotypical politician -- a person who is prepared to lie, a person who is prepared to bribe people with their own money," Allan Gregg, chairman of The Strategic Counsel, told CTV News.

In the poll, it was the Adscam revelations at the Gomery Commission hearings where Liberals and their agents increasingly undermined their own chief, and Martin's shelving the budget of February 5 (which was supported by the Conservatives) to sign on instead a week ago to the New Democratic Party's budget, in exchange for the votes in the Commons needed to keep himself in power.

Dancing about desperately to avoid an outfront confidence vote, except on the NDP budget, Martin denied the opposition its usual days to set the agenda and thereby these days bring forward a Confidence on Adscam and the Gomery revelations, so the Opposition leader Stephen Harper had to attach a no-confidence clause to a committee referral motion on another matter. The vote was one in which the Government with its NDP allies and two independents (and two members missing) received 150, while the Conservatives and the separatist Bloc Québecois received 153.

The Liberals had lost!

But they marched out their Caucus whip and their strategists and their legal experts and every gun they could fire, including those members of the press who dote on them (especially in alliance with the NDP) - marched them all out to say the vote was on a procedural matter, so did not have the dignity or import of a Vote of Non-Confidence, which would obligate the Government to resign and go to the polls. One headline characterized this whole process as a Liberal attempt to "ignore" the non-confidence motion, but the whole ignoring ring protests too much. Martin, of course, realizes his stay in office this round has the slimmest of chances, but he clings to them, while yet readying himself and his party for the possiblity of losing the budget vote. He would prefer to lose on that issue rather than on the revelations of his role in the Adscam scam, now before the Gomery Commission.

The Tories (as the Conservatives are nicknamed) have declared, in the words their House Leader Jay Hill, "We believe that Parliament is finished."

One prospect daunts analysts. Martin could call for a vote on the budget and win. Or, he could call for a vote on the budget and somehow lose, in which case he could go to the polls and come out with another leading minority vote that would put him back in power until December when the full Report of the Gomery Commission is expected. If the Gomery Commission doesn't give Martin a clean bill of health, which seems hi-ly unlikely, then Martin is committed to resigning. And in that case, Canadians would be back at the polls for the third round.

Martin should resign now. He's failed.

Tory says Libs offered him ambassadorship to prop up Martin's government

Holocaust: Remembrance Yom HaShoah 2005 - Jews remember, Neo-Nazis react

Thursday, May 5, was the annual observance of Holocaust Remembrance Day. "Jews across the globe Thursday observed Yom HaShoah, the day commemorating the deaths of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust during World War II." Many outside the Jewish community commemorate or otherwise take note of the day, and its significance for Jewish, for European, and for world history. The level of decimation, amounting to genocide, has its macabre cousins in other lands as well, but the story of the European Jews set upon by Hitler and his minions, pushed out of view by the continent's majority of Humanists and Christians alike, has been told so far and so wide, that continued denial becomes more and more difficult. It would seem. One would like to think.

This year in Israel, as each year, a siren brawt the citizenry to standstill in silence, while the nation's political leader, Ariel Sharon made a trip to Poland where he delivered a solemn address at the site of the former Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, a unique kind of concentration constructed by the Nazis to destroy the bodily evidence of the death of the destruction of Jews by gassing and burning. Hence the idea of burnt sacrifice that hovers about the concept of Holocaust; but in its main meaning now this was no voluntary offering in the ancient Temple of an animal substitute, the proverbial sacrificial lamb. Instead, this Holocaust burnt up a human population in their generations according to a Nazi design and apparatus built for genocide. CNN reports on the speech of Israel's Prime Minister, the text of which is now on the official website of Sharon's office:

Accompanied by a delegation that included Holocaust survivors, [Sharon] described them as 'men and women who survived persecution, torture, mental and physical degradation; true heroes who experienced the death marches, the deportations and searches, who survived ghettos, Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, valleys of death, and concentration and death camps whose monstrous names are carved in blood in the history of our people.' ¶ 'Do not forget how millions of Jews were marched to their deaths while the world stood silent; how thousands of Jews floundered in stormy waters searching in vain for sanctuary while the world stood silent; how the borders were closed and how the Jews were herded again behind barbed-wire fences -- into detention camps in Cyprus.' ¶ He added: "I am certain that all my colleagues -- world leaders -- remember how the world stood by in silence. Do not let them forget -- remember the silence of the world."

Of course, there is no disconnecting the aspirations of most Jews for the Israeili State from the politics of Israel's survival surrounded by a huge majority of Arab peoples, including those who want to return to their abandoned homes and gardens. But this year the current-political dimension of Holocaust Remembrance also brawt another pheonomenon into the overall picture in Israel. The memorial to the Righteous Gentiles who hid Jews from the Gestapo and helped in other life-saving ways, Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, was marred with graffitti accusing Sharon of being himself a Nazi, equating him with Adolf Hitler. This kind of use of Sharon's name has been stock-in-trade for certain of the settlers who face removal this year from Gaza and West Bank settlements.

In another development, the commemorations in the last few days in Germany, were confronted with a planned March by several hundred neo-Nazis on the 60th Anniversary of Germany's surrender to the Allies. Pre-empting those plans, many thousands of Berliners and Germans from all over the country conducted a vigil stretching from the distant west of the city to its centre at the Brandenburg Gate, thru which the Nazis had applied to march tne next day, on their way past the national memorail to the Holocaust. The courts did not permit that symbolic move, but the Nazis under the name of the National Democratic Party were permitted to march, while far-left groups prepared to put their own stamp on the stream of events by means of violent interference with the NDP march. According to Erik Kirschenbaum, reporting for Reuters, Berlin's Mayor took a strong position:

"We want to stand up to these incorrigible people who even today are denying what happened under the Nazi rule," said Berlin Mayor Klaus Wowereit at the start of two days of "festival for democracy" events around the Brandenburg Gate. ¶ "May 8, 1945 was a day of liberation for Berlin, Germany and Europe from Nazi dictatorship," he added. "This date has a lasting meaning for history -- never again terror, war and genocide. We must remain vigilant." ¶ On Sunday, President Horst Koehler will speak to a special assembly of both houses of parliament in a solemn address of remembrance for the Nazis' victims. It will also be broadcast on giant screens at the Brandenburg Gate a few hundred meters away.

Even the commenoration of so greivous a historical period of desolation, the Second World War, including its epitomizing process of extermination of a people the Jews in the Holocaust, and of the Gypsies (Roma people) and numerous other communities and leaderships and ordinary people, does not prevent the infusion of current discontents into a mass psychic delusion such as neo-Nazism into a political party like the National Democrats (NDP) today.

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War: Remembrance: Victory in Europe commemorations, and the peripatetic diplomacy of President Bush

During the continent-wide European commemorations of the victory and losses of World War II, commemorations that observed 60 years of peace, recovery, and mourning, the relationship between the war-active states of North America and those of Europe was celebrated and re-sorted by diplomatic sorties, some painfully public, some more deft and inter-personal.

Of the North Americans, the Canadian government almost made, or didn't quite make, the main event scheduled for it. But thousands of Canadian veterans of the key battle for the liberation of the Netherlands did. And the love of the Dutch was signified to the entire Canadian community by television, where the CBC, Global and other networks competed to outdo one another for English-speaking viewers. Young Canadians at home seemed bewildered that young Dutch should bestow so much praise, honour, and joy on the Canadian old-timers visiting across the Atlantic. As Canadian historians noted over the weeekend, young Canadians have little sense of sacrifice for freedom, little knowledge of war history, and little knowledge of history whatsoever. The substitute for all this is the pervasive anti-Americanism exuded by teachers in the government schools and shapers of their curricula.

As to the Canadian government, it almost missed the events entirely, if we look at the Prime Minister and leaders of the other political parties. For the events of Canada's greatest scandal--"le scandal des commandites" or "Adscam"-- finally began to touch the Prime Minister's Office itself, even His Nibs, Paul Martin, the Liberal Party leader and the minority government's Prime Minister in the House of Commons. All sorts of rumours surfaced because of the closeness of the projected parliamentary vote on a motion of No Confidence in the Government! A few opposition members claimed they were offered patronage bribes in the form sinecures and otherwise plush posts abroad. Every absent opposition vote would count in favour of the govt! The two parties remaining in opposition, the Conservatives and the Bloc Québecois counted their ill members, calculating the likelihood of getting them into the Chamber of the Commons even if in wheelchairs. The New Democratic Party, on the other hand, deserted the opposition and negotiated a major change of the Liberal govt's forthcoming Budget; whereas the Conservatives had supported the previous Budget tabled in February, as passable. The NDP's realignment would thus cause the Conservatives to reject the revised Budget of the the new NDP-Liberal coalition. But the Conservatives with the Bloc Québecois had other very good reasons to welcome the realignment, because the financial scandal had turned off the citizenry--except in the major province of Ontario and much of the Atlantic Provinces.

All this complexity brawt the nose-counting to the point where no leader was prepared to be absent from the Commons day by day, even if it meant they and the Prime Minister himself would miss the transatlantic communal commemorations of WWII, the dead, and the surviving Vets, which all centered for Canada in the Netherlands. It seemed the Vets and their friends would have to do it, with the help of Canada's honourific but actual Head of State, the Governor General Adrienne Clarkson herself. Martin arrived a day late, and seemed quite superfluous, just as previously the Canadian Ministers to represent the Dominion at the funeral of Yasser Arafat, made it there ... a day late, in all their robust superfluity.

America's President Bush, on the other hand, kept strictly to his packed itinerary and accomplished much on the diplomatic front, from the American viewpoint. He joined in commemorations in the Netherlands along with the Dutch Queen and Prime Minister Peter Jan Balkende of the Christian Democratic party, an ally of the USA and the democratic governtment of Iraq. He visited the Baltic States, where he joined the lament over the Soviet takeover of Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia before WWII, the Nazi occupation during WWII, and the Soviet re-establishment in the painful "peace" of Communism and religous persecution that followed. Bush's public statements in respect of this commiseration with the Baltic peoples, came promptly to the attention of the Russian President, Vladimir Putin back in Moscow, who fired off his own volley of words in the media, that the Soviet's had never "taken over" the Baltics but those countries had embraced the Communist cause all on their own.

But, by the time the two leaders were face to face in Moscow among the gathering Heads of State from almost everywhere, and the aging Veterans of the Red Army paraded by, with the counts of their losses in the war against Hitler, and the counts of the civilian deaths and the mass murder of Soviet Jews all coming to remembrance in one massive communal conceptualization and hive of feelings, the two leaders joined in facing the huge legacy that the Soviets and now the Russians face together with the North Americans. I'm only guessing, because I've lost track of him, but I think Canada's Paul Martin showed up on time for this one. - Owlb

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Nigeria's Oil Delta - Chevron Texaco admits that its tribe-preferential aid policies at fault

Oil giant, ChevronTexaco, admits aid policies helped fuel violence [This report is authored by IRIN, a news agency sponsored by the UN, but does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

ChevronTexaco said in a statement on Tuesday that its system of investment in community development in the region that produces most of Nigeria’s oil, has been “inadequate, expensive and divisive,” and would be revamped.

One major source of conflict identified by the company is a longstanding policy by oil multinationals in Nigeria of designating communities closest to oil facilities as “host communities”, to qualify them for special attention in development assistance. “The system of designating some communities as host communities left those not so designated feeling alienated and underprivileged, inadvertently leading to or adding to the causes of conflicts among communities,” the company said.

During conflicts between rival ethnic groups and communities, projects built for beneficiary communities as such have become prime targets of attack and destruction, the company said, citing the pattern of destruction that followed a major outburst of violence between rival ethnic Ijaw, Itsekiri and Urhobo militias in March 2003. Due to that year’s violence, more than 40 percent of Nigeria’s daily oil exports of more than two million barrels were stopped for several weeks. Three years later, ChevronTexaco is just beginning to reopen six facilities producing 140,000 barrels a day, about a third of the output of the number three producer in Nigeria after Royal Dutch/Shell and ExxonMobil.

Apart from the deaths of employees killed in the conflict and lost output, the cost of repairing facilities damaged in the fighting exceed US $500 million, the company said.

Also considered a failure by ChevronTexaco is the widespread practice among oil multinationals in Nigeria of paying local troublemakers in the Niger Delta to protect their operations against disruptions. “Young, unemployed community men were being paid salaries as ghost workers for doing nothing at all, except that some are often found to be involved in threats, extortion and disruption of operations,” the company said. To replace such practices the oil giant is looking at a new system of development assistance that will target clusters of communities in its operational areas without distinction, the company said. This will be managed through “Regional Development Councils” that will include government, company and community representatives.

Instead of dealing with individuals and a few community leaders who control the benefits to the exclusion of the rest, as was the case in the past, ChevronTexaco will set up a system to “guarantee that all members of communities know what the leaders are doing” as well as project costs and expenditure.

Despite its oil wealth, the Niger Delta remains one of the most impoverished regions of Nigeria, with an overwhelming majority of its estimated 15 million inhabitants lacking access to basic amenities such as clean water, schools and clinics.
Resentment has deepened over the years against oil joint ventures run by oil multinationals in partnership with the Nigerian state, perceived by locals as cheating them out of their oil wealth, and is a major factor causing the region’s restiveness.

A study by international consultants in 2003 paid for by Shell also blamed some of the company’s policies for violence in the delta it estimated was claiming 1,000 lives every year. The study predicted that Shell might be forced to end onshore oil production in Nigeria by 2008 unless the issues underlying the region’s violence were urgently addressed.

IRIN = Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN) which are part of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. IRIN pioneered the use of e-mail and web technology to deliver and receive information to and from some of the most remote and underdeveloped places in Africa, cheaply and efficiently. Its reporting focuses on strengthening universal access to timely, strategic and non-partisan information so as to enhance the capacity of the humanitarian community to understand, respond to and avert emergencies. IRIN further supports efforts at conflict resolution and reconciliation by countering misinformation and propaganda. Nigeria/ChevronTexaco

Mistake to put freedom / tyranny collision of other country thru prism of left / right US politics

It's quite instructive when a leftwing activist leaves aside the herd pieties of political correctness, especially on the deafening silence of the Left in regard to today's beleaguered movement for democracy, both within mainland Communist China itself and in the Chinese diaspora around the world. Recently, the Houston Independent Media Center carried John Patrick's analysis of the mainstream and leftwing treatment of "the issue of China [which] has seemed to be distant, foggy, or [abandoned] to the China Support Network, which specializes in anti-communism and opposes the world's largest dictatorship [by identifying instead] with the Tiananmen Square dissidents. It has seemed not to fly on IndyMedia, maybe because anti-communism seems 'right wing,' associated with Ronald Reagan or such."

The activist is John Patrick and he is writing for a strictly leftwing website that "serves the anti-globalization mobilization, and good causes like the 9/11 truth movement, and those that seek truth about U.S. elections in 2000 and 2004, and truth about Oklahoma City, TWA flight 800, etc." This is even to the left of Howard Dean at his most screamingest. All this I cite to give a sense to you that lefties and righties and middies are slowly trending away from the trade-charade policy toward Communist China. And why?

One poignant part of the answer to that question is the spread of a Chinese language indictment of the Chinese Communist Party that is circulating thru-out the mainland in almost samizdat form. It's called simply "The Nine Commentaries on the CCP." This doc has had a tremendous effect in presenting systematically the actions against the Chinese citizenry on the part of the Party. And, more than that, the Nine Commentaries have triggered individual members of the CCP to resign, groups of members, recently a group of 60 or so medical professionals resigned together in a single action, until the number has just recently topped one million resignations from the Communist Party of China for the actions documented in the Nine Commentaries.

Contrary to this movement of the Chinese people, contrary the open-eyed China-democracy minorities of both the USA's Left and its Right, contrary to the work of the China Support Network and the China e-Lobby, are not just USA government policy but the whole solid Mainstream Media (MSM) and many rightwing publications too like the Washington Times, National Review, and the Wall Street Journals's Opinion Journal. No, we don't want to go head-to-head with Communist China, nor foot-to-mouth; but that government, against its own people in so many ways, has lately threatened Taiwan's independence by passing the famous "anti-secession law" (which I think should have received an immediate USA response of formal recognition of the statehood and UN eligibility of Taiwan), and then a little while after the contrived protests of all the Japan-hating elements in China in regard to a Japanese textbook that tawt a tiny percentage of Japanese school kids zero regarding Japanese atrocities in China during World War II (here again I'm a little off trend, in that I think there was a real positive side to the Chinese protesters' nastiness - namely, Japan's Prime Minister has finally made a formal public apology to China over this matter, this historical wound which ironically turns out to be much more important for the Japanese communal psyche than for that of the Chinese, I'd wager). Right now, the Chinese government's organized prostests aganst Japan are not on the mind of the Chinese population as is that government's excrable record in all facets of human rights and the most basic of democratic practices. - Owlb

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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


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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.


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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.



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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

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.

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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

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[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
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