Original Face

Maybe we can sell them the Brooklyn Bridge too

    Drudge Report, which has gotten, if such a thing is possible, even more shrill recently, is running a red banner headline this afternoon that Abu Dahbi is buying the Chrysler Building for $800,000,000.  The implication made by Matt Drudge from his pea-sized understanding of finance, economics and simple geography, is that the nation is being sold off, bit by bit.  That America is going to Hell in a hand-basket.
    Of course, in the 1980s the same scaremongering occurred when the Japanese invasion occurred.  The fact that Japanese investors bought Rockefeller Center and Pebble Beach Country Club meant that the United States was just a step or two away from being a Ni-hon vassal state.  So, how did that work out for Japan?
    As far as I can tell, Abu Dahbi is planning on keeping the Chrysler Building right where it is in Manhattan.  New Yorkers will not lose its iconic building's silhouette from the skyline and Woody Allen can use it in any of his next umpteenth remakes of the same New York angst movie he has been peddling for the past couple of decades. 
    After all, who cares who owns it?  Do you know who owns it now?  What would it matter to you if it were owned by anyone other than Donald Trump (who would have the building's exterior changed to spell his name in lights)?  That's right. It wouldn't. 
    So good.  Let some rich oil guy have his overpriced penis replacement (oh, you know I am studying psychoanalysis. I have to use the phallic symbol imagery...).  It's nice to have the nearly billion dollars repatriated.  With luck Saudi Arabia might want the Grand Canyon too.

Kant believe it

    Language matters.  Any pollster will tell you that the results of any survey are dependent upon the language that is employed for the questions posed.  Nowhere in the political arena has this been borne out than in the issue of abortion.  I have long held that the biggest change in public opinion can be tied to the decision of the news-media to use the pro-life moniker rather than anti-abortion.  Now in this issue there are pro-choicers versus pro-lifers.  No one is "anti" anymore.
    Such is the case this past week. In the British parliament, where on a non-party line enforced vote where each member was free to vote his or her opinion, the House of Commons decided to over throw the Kantian "categorical imperative."
    You remember the Kant's "categorical imperative" from introductory philosophy, right?  One of Kant's major postulates is that the moral universe is governed by the rule that people are ends, not means.  The implications of the difference between ends and means are profound.  People are rights holders not property.  Their lives are their own, not at the disposal of others.
    Yet, the Britain is about to say that it is fine that humans could be born for the express purpose of being used for the betterment of another person.  That will be the reason they were conceived and that will be the reason that they are valued.  Not because their lives will be precious in and of themselves, but because their body parts will be useful for another person.
    How can this be in a civilized society?  How can such a law be passed overwhelmingly?  Because the term used by the proponents and the media has been "savior siblings."  They get to be modern Jesuses.  Unfortunately for them they haven't been given the choice as to whether or not they want this role.  Regardless of the fact that such children have no say as to whether one of their kidneys or another organ (or many organs...What's the reason to stop at one organ?)  gets ripped from their bodies, these babies are not called what they really are: "sacrificial siblings."   They really are more Issac than Jesus.
    They are to be conceived and born to be living warehouses of spare parts for the lives of others.  How will they feel when they get older (I am making the assumption that such children will be allowed to live, not killed when their utility has ceased.  This may not be a correct assumption, given the state of callousness of society.) to find out that they were not wanted for their own sake.  How will they deal with parents, siblings and a culture that can see them as commodities? 
    Who ever told you that sticks and stones will break your bones, but words will never hurt you, has never been a "savior sibling."

These are not merely statistics

    The latest estimate is that over 130,000 people have died in the Burmese delta and with another cyclone possible with the present weather pattern, the number could increase dramatically in the next several weeks.  The Red Cross also believes that there may be over 2,500,000 people without shelter, electricity, medical care and sufficient food and water.  If the weather does indeed turn serious, many of these at-risk people will also perish.
    Yet the junta continues to prevent aid convoys, flights and workers.  And the international community stands by and watches the tragic script unfold while the diplomats just talk.
    Winston Churchill was wrong.  Sometimes war-war is better than jaw-jaw.

Time's Up

    This week's Time magazine has an article advocating the use of force in Burma. Hooray! 
    Ok, Bush Administration?  Senators McCain, Obama and Clinton?  It is past time for all of you to weigh in.  People are dying by the hour.
    Keep those emails to your elected officials coming.  Write the presidential candidate of your choice and tell him or her to stand with the victims of the cyclone and a repressive regime.

Burma, si; Myanmar, no

    Why am I referring to the country devastated by the cyclone as Burma?  Because the military junta which has ruled that country for decades changed the nation's name by edict in 1989.  Since that time most of the international community has rejected this change.  The US, the EU as an entity as well as most of its constituent states and Japan refuse to use the term Myanmar when referring to that country.
    Burma is more than a good shave.  It is a country run by a junta which is now guilty of crimes against humanity.  Save Burma.

Send in the marines

    It is time to retire the old satiric song of Tom Lehrer's that held to the cliche that the military's job is just to "kill people and break things."  It is time to recognize that there are times in which force is required, indeed, in which the lack of force is shameful for the commonweal.  This is one such time and Burma is one such place.
    It is just about a week out from the natural catastrophe that has destroyed a good part of the Burmese delta community.  The lowest estimate of dead, which, at the time of this writing, is already 72 hours old, is 40,000 with another 30,000 missing.  However, these numbers are, by all reasonable estimations, very, very conservative.  The real numbers approach 100,000 dead with untold hundreds of thousands stranded without potable water, shelter or electricity and with rotting corpses acting as perfect breeding grounds for a variety of infectious diseases.
    They need help, desperately.  The international community has been quick on the scene.  Having learned valuable lessons from the South Asian tsunami of a few years back, the United States, the European Community and other nations have assembled the necessary personnel and materials to begin to restore hope in the delta.
    There is a road-block, both metaphorically and physically.  The military junta that has ruled Burma for the past several decades has refused all but the smallest trickle of aid to enter its nation.  It has refused to issue visas for relief workers, including doctors and nurses.  Each request to help is encountered with neglect, red tape and, in almost all cases, denial.
    The reasons for the junta's pernicious disregard for the lives, safety and welfare of its citizens are long and, in the end, immaterial.  What is material is getting materiel to those who need it.
    It is time for the trucks and jets to be on their way.  If they encounter resistance from the junta's army, our military and those of allies should make it known in the most clear terms possible that such resistance will be futile and fatally counterproductive.  It is a task that the world's armed services could and would, if asked, perform with excellence.
    The ever cautious diplomats will counter this proposal with the threat of China, the junta's only friend, getting involved against us.  Let China try.  With the Olympics only a few short months away, China's intervention against assistance to an unimaginable number of dying people will sicken and disgust the international community and cause these Games, and their host nation, to become laughingstocks.
    Please, write your elected officials.  Do it now.  The Burmese people cannot wait any longer.

He has lost his mind

    The Archbishop of Canterbury is making himself a laughingstock.  But no one is laughing.  Today there was another gem from the addled brain of Dr. Rowan Williams:  teenagers join gangs only to "feel secure" from "older people."  I guess there must have been a great deal of gang activity during his time as a professor at Oxford University as he speaks as if he has real knowledge about gang members and their thinking.
    Unless Britain's gangs are profoundly different than what we have on this side of the Atlantic, it is the adult population which needs to feel secure from gang violence.  Gangs like the Crips and the Bloods are not made up of mama's boys who would otherwise be prey for those predatory "older people."  You know, those old ladies can really swing a mean handbag...especially when they don't want it snatched away.
    Would you just close your silly mouth, Archbishop?  Better yet, open it one more time--to say "I resign."

Where does it end?

    $27,000.  That is how much each person over 65 is given, on average, by the Federal Government each and every year.  It represents nearly a third of the entire Federal budget.  In 2002 it was $22,000.  And with the leading edge of the "Boomers" reaching the magic age, that number, and the percentage of the budget, will just skyrocket.
    $27,000.  The number is staggering.  It is almost indigestible. 
    How to get this number back to reality before it breaks this nation?  For starters, that magic age has to be raised.  Sixty-five has been the age since Social Security began over 50 years ago.  At that time the average age that a Social Security pensioner would live after starting to collect his or her checks was 11 months.  Now it is over a decade.  The lobbyists for seniors (it is remarkable that lobbyists are evil-incarnate unless they represent interests about which you or I care...) who are feared--yes, feared--on the Hill, will eviscerate any lawmaker who seriously entertains the idea of raising the retirement age. 
    Well, it is time for some legislators and presidential candidates to strap on a set and say forcefully that $27,000 is just too much.  That the age must be raised.  That it is immoral for seniors to take that much of the nation's resources for themselves.  And, no, they did not "save" that money, it is not in some account like a "Christmas Club" down at the savings bank, that it comes out of the general fund that present taxpayers fork over every year.  That at the rate we are going that the nation will be bankrupt in the not too distant future.
    Basta. Enough.

THIS is what evil does, in Canada

Aqsa Parvez, R.I.P.. 

The Toronto 16 year old was strangled by her own father for refusing to wear a hajib according to the local police.  Not wearing a piece of cloth constitutes sufficient grounds for an "honor killing" in a father's mind?  Lovely people, Islamofascists.

More bunkum from the usual "useful idiots"

Rowan "Archbishop Irrelevant" Williams has commented on the case of Gillian Gibbons who has just been released from a Sudanese prison.   He stated that he felt that Gibbon's punishment was "disproportionate."  Disproportionate???  Disproportionate???  I guess that means that His Grace <sic> believes that the British teacher deserved to BE punished for letting her class of seven year olds name their teddy bear after a boy in the class, who happened to have the name Mohammad.  Of course, we must remember from whom this comes.  This statement is from a man who believes that the raj and the treatment of native Africans in Rhodesia were a more moral set of actions than what America has done in Afghanistan and Iraq.  I think I finally understand the complaint of Henry II, won't someone get us rid of this turbulent priest?

Oh, before I forget.  The National Organization for Women has issued a press release saying that it wouldn't be appropriate for them to comment on the actions of the Sudanese government.  No, I suppose not.