But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.

The Gospel According to Saint Luke
gutenberg.org

2:16 And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger.
2:17 And when they had seen it, they made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child.
2:18 And all they that heard it wondered at those things which were told them by the shepherds.
2:19 But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.
2:20 And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen, as it was told unto them.
2:21 And when eight days were accomplished for the circumcising of the child, his name was called JESUS, which was so named of the angel before he was conceived in the womb.

The LORD bless thee, and keep thee

The Fourth Book of Moses: Called Numbers

gutenberg.org
6:22 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying,
6:23 Speak unto Aaron and unto his sons, saying,
On this wise ye shall bless the children of Israel, saying unto them,
6:24 The LORD bless thee, and keep thee:
6:25 The LORD make his face shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee:
6:26 The LORD lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.

People of 2005

JPII
http://home.comcast.net/~jimsondergeld/JPII.jpg



Benedict XVI

http://www.diocesepembroke.ca/english/news/images/Habemus-Papam-Benedict-XVI.jpg


Earlier Iraq
Every voter had to dip a finger in ink in a bid to guard against multiple voting.

I don't suppose many will mourn my passing

His popularity may not be universal among cab drivers, but Reg Kermode says his work has always been about improving the taxi industry, writes Robert Wainwright.
"I enjoy it, but I don't suppose many will mourn my passing when it happens," he adds, sadly.

Isolationist Inquiry into the Administration's Intentions

Newspapers and security
Then:

"By coincidence, on the very day when this secret "October Estimate" of WPD was circulated among War Department officials, isolationists made known their own suspicions of the course of events.
To cope with this rumor the Chief of Staff issued a corrective statement affirming categorically: "There is no foundation whatsoever for the allegation or rumor that we are preparing troops for a possible expedition to Africa or other critical areas outside this hemisphere." Three weeks later, without preliminaries, certain newspapers printed an article questioning the accuracy of General Marshall's denial, and recording in some detail the Army's formulation of a program for American participation in the war on Germany.[77 Chicago Tribune, 4 Dec 41, and affiliated newspapers.]
The reference was unmistakably to the highly secret Victory Program and its accompanying strategic estimate, and there was concern in the Department both over public references to that document and over the imputation against General Marshall.
The gravity of the matter was obvious, although just how vital was military security was less apparent to the layman on 5 December than it was two days later. "

Now:
Justice Dept. Probing Domestic Spying Leak By Toni Locy - Associated Press Writer - Published December 30, 2005, 6:54 PM CST - Washington - The Justice Department has opened another investigation into leaks of classified information, this time to determine who divulged the existence of President Bush's secret domestic spying program.

[Another Day of Infamy to follow?]

Andrew Symonds - Third Wheel?

On whose selection? Dad's? Dave's?
Earlier Andrew Symonds
Earlier Cricket: As explained to a foreigner...

National licences in trades - Elizabeth Colman

December 30, 2005
A national licensing system for electricians, carpenters, plumbers and other tradespeople will replace state-based accreditation after federal and state governments reached a historic agreement to combat skills shortages.

The humanities have become full of ignorant specialists.

Gregory Melleuish: Experts ignore sweep of history
What is to be done? Obviously we need to look at how we educate historians. They need to have a much broader education. They need to be able to understand cultures other than their own, including languages other than their own. And one fears that there is a similar story to be told about all of the other areas of the humanities. The humanities have become full of ignorant specialists.

Framework Chapter 16 Conclusions

CHAPTER XVI Some Conclusions and Observations
Before it entered World War II, the United States had committed itself to defend or help defend the entire land area of the Western Hemisphere against military attack from the Old World. In the course of planning for this purpose, the United States Government had defined the hemisphere as including the land masses of North and South America plus Greenland, Bermuda, and the Falklands (but not Iceland or the Azores) in the Atlantic area, and all islands east of the 180th meridian and all of the Aleutians in the Pacific. The armed power of the United States did not prevent minor enemy operations on New World territory, as the Germans in Greenland and the Japanese in the Aleutians demonstrated, but its forces were strong enough by late 1941 to make any major attack on the hemisphere an unprofitable venture for the Axis Powers.
The focus of Army planning had begun to shift from hemisphere defense to future operations outside the hemisphere long before, in late 1940 and early 1941. During 1941 military men moved somewhat more slowly than political leaders toward the new strategy, partly because the former were more aware than the latter of minimum defense needs and partly because military leaders were painfully aware of the unreadiness of most of the Army until late 1941 for offensive action. Indeed there was a remarkable coincidence between the Army's readiness for limited offensive action and the outbreak of full-scale war. Enough forces were ready in December 1941 so that Army planning and action could turn quickly and naturally to launching operations overseas that would obviate the need for hemisphere defense at home.

Dingoes

Dingoes 'should be on banned list' - Asa Wahlquist
December 29, 2005
A decison allowing dingoes to be kept as pets has been blamed for the death of a two-year-old girl on the NSW south coast.
The toddler died after being mauled by her family's cross-bred dingo in her back yard near Eden on Monday.
Royal NSW Canine Council president Keith Irwin said yesterday dingo ownership should be restricted by a permit system that obliged owners to keep the dogs in child-proof enclosures and muzzled outside the yard.
"It is the same as the loss of Lindy Chamberlain's child," he said.
In 1980, nine-week-old Azaria Chamberlain disappeared from an Uluru camping site. Her mother, Lindy, insisted a dingo had taken her baby but she was convicted of the murder of Azaria in 1982. The conviction was quashed in 1988.
In 2001, dingoes killed a nine-year-old boy on Fraser Island.

Andrew Symonds bats and bowls

22 December 2005 Andrew Symonds. Why is this man still in the test team?
28 December 2005 Andrew Symonds bowls.
29 December 2005 Andrew Symonds bats and bowls.
The question is, why was the question asked, why is this man still in the test team?

Cricket: As explained to a foreigner...

Skepticism

Defined by m-w.com as "an attitude of doubt or a disposition to incredulity either in general or toward a particular object" which seems to be readers' opinion of newspapers today.

TimeLess of the Year

The gender gap on US college campuses

Melana Zyla Vickers Where The Boys Aren't
American colleges from Brown to Berkeley face a man shortage, and there's no end in sight.
While in Australia: Miranda Devine There's a tangled web turning our boys into angry young men

Kerry Francis Bullmore Packer. Reluctantly

http://www.smh.com.au 2912thucartoon_gallery
Kerry Packer From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Packer faced a 1991 Australian government inquiry into the print media industry with some reluctance, but great humour. When asked his name, he replied: "Kerry Francis Bullmore Packer. Reluctantly."

Framework Chapter V The Atlantic Crisis of 1941

The critical world situation confronting the United States in the spring of 1941 raised questions that were not answered by drafting long-range war plans. The most pressing of these questions was how to help insure the survival of Great Britain. Britain's weakness in early 1941 stemmed primarily from its increasingly critical shortage of merchant shipping. In March and April the British lost ships to Axis submarine, surface, and air attacks at an annual rate of about 7,300,000 gross tons; with a current British shipbuilding capacity of 1,250,000 tons, continuing losses at that rate would result in a net loss to Britain of about 6,000,000 tons a year, or about one fourth its available merchant fleet. The British Isles simply could not long survive continued losses of this magnitude. The shipping crisis had been the basis for Admiral Stark's prediction in December 1940 that Britain might not be able to hold out for more than six months. A month later Secretary Hull, in testimony before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs on the proposed Lend-Lease Act, asserted the necessity for control of the high seas by law-abiding nations and called such control "the key to the security of the Western Hemisphere. Enactment of the lend-lease bill on 11 March did not in itself furnish much relief for Britain's immediate plight. In fact, the great bulk of military material furnished to Great Britain during 1941 consisted of items ordered before the bill was passed. The Lend-Lease Act nevertheless had a very great significance in the evolution of American policy toward the war.

Framework Chapter II - The Crisis of 1940

Germany broke the spell of the "phony war" on 9 April 1940 by invading Denmark and Norway. The United States by then had only partially completed its preparations under plans drafted in 1939 for maintaining American neutrality and at the same time forestalling military attack on the Western Hemisphere. In RAINBOW 1, the Army and Navy had an approved plan for hemisphere defense, but the ground forces and, even more seriously, the air forces, of the Army were still considerably below the strength needed to execute/missions under the plan. American naval power was concentrated in the Pacific with only enough vessels in the Atlantic to maintain the neutrality patrol, because the United States since September 1939 had counted on British and French naval power to provide the bulwark against any German thrust across the Atlantic. Assisted by the neutrality act of November 1939, the administration was encouraging the British and French to make "cash and carry" purchases of American arms, with the primary objective of building up a balance of military power in western Europe that would minimize the chances of involving the United States in the war.
The Defeat of France and Repercussions in America
Hitler loosed the full power of the German military machine against the West on 10 May 1940. When interviewed that day by newsmen, the President was no longer willing to say, as he had the preceding September, that he thought the United States could keep out of the war. Instead, he considered the chance of involvement to be "speculative."
Four days later the German Army crashed through the Sedan gap, and the outlook suddenly assumed an ominous cast for the United States as well as for France and Great Britain.
The British and French realized at once that the German breakthrough threatened their imminent defeat on the Continent, and they made immediate and urgent appeals to the United States for aid. On 15 May the new British Prime Minister, Winston S. Churchill, asked President Roosevelt to turn over to Britain thirty-five or more old-type destroyers, several hundred modern aircraft, and antiaircraft equipment and ammunition. He also wanted assurances that Great Britain could obtain American steel, and he requested that the United States dispatch naval forces to Irish ports and to the Singapore area. On the same day that the Prime Minister made his requests, he pledged that, regardless of what Germany did to England and France, England would never give up as long as he remained a power in public life, "even if England . . . burned to the ground." "Why," he added, "the Government will move to Canada and take the Fleet and fight on." President Roosevelt realized that compliance with these British requests would force the United States to shift from a policy of neutrality to one of nonbelligerency, if not open war. This he was unwilling to approve, though he and his advisers fully appreciated the gravity of the situation and prepared to meet it as best they could within limitations imposed by the existing military means of the United States and the state of public opinion.
Decisions on National Policy
With war plans in the making that took into account the new and grave turn in the war situation, the services felt the need of obtaining the President's decision on a number of broad questions of policy in national defense. President Roosevelt laid the groundwork for more detailed decisions in an address delivered at Charlottesville, Virginia, on 10 June 1940. After affirming that "overwhelmingly" the American people had now become "convinced that military and naval victory for the gods of force and hate would endanger the institutions of democracy in the western world," the President announced that henceforth the United States would pursue two "obvious and simultaneous" courses: "We will extend to the opponents of force the material resources of this nation; and at the same time we will harness and speed up the use of those resources in order that we ourselves in the Americas may have equipment and training equal to the task of any emergency and every defense." As the President subsequently pointed out, in June 1940 American industry was not yet geared to wartime production, and it would take industry time to change from a peace to war status. "To gain that time," he wrote, "it was necessary for Great Britain to maintain its defense, for if Britain were to fall it was clear that we would have to face the Nazis alone-and we were not physically prepared to do so." In a sense, the President's Charlottesville address constituted a public announcement of the impending shipment of large quantities of surplus Army stocks to the French and British.
When Hitler struck at western Europe in April 1940, the Regular Army, had an enlisted strength of 230,000, approximately that authorized the preceding September. Following the President's messages of 16 and 31 May, Congress in early June authorized an increase in Regular Army enlisted strength to 375,000. Until mid June the Army had planned to reach this strength as rapidly as possible through enlistment of volunteers rather than through adoption of a selective service system, but the French collapse convinced General Marshall that a selective service system must be adopted. Prompted by the urgings of a group of influential civilians (including Henry L. Stimson, soon to become Secretary of War), Senator Edward R. Burke and Representative James W. Wadsworth on 20 June introduced a bill proposing a selective service system similar to that embodied in current Army plans for rapid military expansion. On 24 June General Marshall and Admiral Stark recommended to President Roosevelt the "immediate enactment . . . of a Selective Service Law along the lines of existing plans, to be followed at once by complete military and naval mobilization." As noted previously, the President approved the recommendation in principle but objected to the system that the Army wanted to adopt. By the time that Secretary Stimson assumed his new office on 10 July, the President had yielded his objections to the selective service bill then under discussion in Congress, and General Marshall was able on 12 July to make a forthright statement in its favor and also one for the immediate induction of the National Guard into federal service. After extended debate, Congress on 27 August authorized the induction of the National Guard and the calling up of the Army's Organized Reserves. On 14 September it passed the Selective Service and Training Act. These measures, together with an additional authorized increase in Regular Army strength, were designed to produce a 1,000,000-man army by the beginning of 1941 and a 1,400,000-man army (200,000 larger than contemplated in the 30 June munitions program) by 1 July 1941.

Soviet Espionage and Manhattan Project

Soviet atomic bomb project
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Espionage
The project had the benefit of much espionage information gathered from the Manhattan Project in the United States and United Kingdom (which the Russians had code-named Enormoz) by the spies Alan Nunn May, Klaus Fuchs and Theodore Hall, among others. However, the information was not shared freely among the project's scientists, and was used by Beria as a "check" on the accuracy of the scientists. After the United States used its atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945, and published the Smyth Report outlining the basics of their wartime program, Beria had the scientists duplicate the American process as closely as possible in terms of development of resources and factories. The reason was expedience: the goal was to produce a working weapon as soon as possible, and after Hiroshima and Nagasaki they knew that the American design would work.
Scholar Alexei Kojevnikov has estimated, based on newly released Soviet documents, that the primary way in which the espionage may have sped up the Soviet project was that it allowed Khariton to avoid dangerous tests to determine the size of the critical mass ("tickling the dragon's tail," as they were called in the U.S., which consumed a good deal of time and claimed at least two lives).
Logistical problems the Soviets faced
The single largest problem during the early Soviet project was the procurement of uranium ore, as it had no known domestic sources at the beginning of the project. The first Soviet nuclear reactor was fueled using uranium confiscated from the remains of the German atomic bomb project. Eventually, however, large domestic sources were found, and mined using penal labor.

Communists can place no trust in bourgeois legality

History of Soviet espionage in the United States
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
In almost all the countries of Europe and America, the class struggle is entering the phase of civil war. In these conditions, Communists can place no trust in bourgeois legality. They must everywhere build up a parallel illegal organisation, which, at the decisive moment, will be in a position to help the Party fulfil its duty to the revolution., Comrade V.I.Lenin, July 1920.
Secret apparatus
In the 1930s CPUSA membership became largely native-born, and more educated people joined, including many scientific and technically trained professionals. American Communists considered the 'capitalist' corporations which employed them as morally illegitimate institutions. When Soviet intelligence officers approached and asked that the scientific secrets of these corporations be shared with the Soviet Union, few had moral objections.
Soviet recruitment of sources within American intelligence agencies, particularly within the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency was impressive. The highest ranking recruit was Duncan Lee, counsel to General William Donovan, OSS head. Lee, however, was extremely cautious and less productive than other OPGU sources, like Maurice Halperin, or Donald Wheeler, in the OSS Research and Analysis division. At least fifteen Soviet agents penetrated the OSS, with the actual number more likely around twenty.
The Soviets also developed about twenty sources within the U.S. State Department and other wartime foreign relations agencies. The two most senior Soviet operatives had been active in the 1930s, Alger Hiss and Laurence Duggan. A number of other Soviet infiltrators connections to American diplomacy have only been identified by code-names in the Venona project materials. Some of these identities have not been determined. Some most likely continued to operate in the post-war period. American counter-intelligence officials spent decades interviewing and examining the backgrounds of hundreds of American diplomatic personnel attempting to attach an identity to the code-name of many of these known operatives.
Infiltration
Infiltrating the United Nations organization became a priority in the wake of the disbanding of the Comintern, the death of Golos which led to the ultimate breakdown in security, and the end of the War. Hiss was influential in the employment of 494 persons by the United Nations on its initial staff.
Gradually it became apparent that the objectives of World War II for which the United States and others made tremendous sacrifices were not fully realized, and there remained in the world a force presenting even greater dangers to world peace than the Nazi militarists and Japanese warlords. Consequently, the United States made the decision in the Spring of 1947 to assist Greece and Turkey with a view to protecting their sovereignties, which were threatened by direct or instigated activities of the Soviet Union.

President Truman's Executive Order 9835 of 22 March 1947 tightened protections against subversive infiltration of the US Government, defining disloyalty as membership on a list of subversive organizations maintained by the Attorney General.

Truman’s denunciations of the charges against Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, and others, all of whom appear under covernames in decrypted messages translated before Truman left office, suggest that Truman was never briefed on the Venona program, or if he was briefed, did not grasp its significance. Truman insisted Republicans trumped up the loyalty issue, and that wartime espionage had been insignificant and well contained by counteritelligence agencies.

Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Chairman of the Moynihan Commission on Government Secrecy wrote in 1997, "President Truman was almost willfully obtuse as regards American Communism."

America’s Most Successful Communist - Pete Seeger

America’s Most Successful Communist by Howard Husock
One figure stands out in this enterprise: the now-86-year-old singer, songwriter, “folk music legend,” and onetime party stalwart, Pete Seeger. Given his decisive influence on the political direction of popular music, Seeger may have been the most effective American communist ever.

universal vouchers and systemic education reform

A Constrained Vision links to
The Father of Modern School Reform December 2005
Fifty years ago, Milton Friedman introduced the idea of school vouchers.
Now he looks back on his legacy.
Interviewed by Nick Gillespie gillespie@reason.com
In 1955 future Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman kick-started modern education reform with an article titled “The Role of Government in Education.”

[I went to a non-public school, as did both of my late parents. The school was there to teach students and not to employ teachers.]

A giant oak tree has crashed in our forest

Alan Jones - December 28, 2005
WHEN David Lloyd George died the day peace was declared at the end of World War II, the publisher, soon to be prime minister, Harold Macmillan wrote that to those who barely knew Lloyd George, his passing was the death of another statesman; but to those who knew him well, it was like a giant oak tree crashing in the forest.
A giant oak tree crashed in the Australian forest of great people with the passing of Kerry Packer.

An excellent year for conservatives and the country

JANET ALBRECHTSEN - December 28, 2005

PSSST. Keep this to yourself. John Howard will be with us for a very long time.

Kerry Packer, has died

Kerry Packer dead at age 68
From: AAP December 27, 2005
Today show announcer Richard Wilkins said he had just been handed official confirmation of Mr Packer's death at 68.
The statement from Tony Ritchie, Nine head of news, said: "Mrs Kerry Packer and her children James and Gretel sadly report the passing last evening of her husband and their father Kerry.
"He died peacefully at home with his family at his bedside.
Kerry Packer From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Kerry Francis Bullmore Packer (17 December 1937 – 26 December 2005) was an Australian publishing, media and gaming tycoon. In 2004 Business Review Weekly magazine estimated Packer's net worth at AUD$6500 million ($6.5 billion), an increase of $1 billion on the previous year.

[I remember cricket with boring Boycott, and the pittance paid to cricket players. Kerry Packer changed the style of cricket and the pay players received. The rest is history. What he did with his money was his business.]
Cricket: As explained to a foreigner...

Boxing Day Sail 2

blog from yacht

VegAgony and ecstasy defining 2005

It has been a year of upheaval in radio and one of the bloodiest in television. Sue Javes, Michael Idato and Greg Hassall list the 10 defining moments of 2005.
Podcasting changes the way we listen to radio, January 3
Seven, Nine and Ten unite for tsunami appeal, January 8
Seven topples Nine in the critical 6-7pm slot, January 29
Seven launches Desperate Housewives and Lost, January 31
Kyle Sandilands talks tough, April 18
Angela Catterns quits 702, June 17
The Surgeon Premieres On Ten, October 13
Foxtel turns 10, October 23
Nine airs half of CSI season finale, November 20
Vega gets the thumbs down, December 6
[see: Vega play boomer music not broadcast boomer talk ] Sydney's newest FM station was launched in August with a star cast including Angela Catterns and Wendy Harmer and promised to be all things to anyone aged between 40 and 60. However, the danger of trying to please everyone is satisfying no one and that's what seems to have happened. In December, their worst fears were realised when Vega rated a mere 1.8 per cent in its first survey, averaging just 10,000 listeners.

Disorder in the Court

Disorder in the Court by David Tell, for the Editors
Since shortly after September 11, 2001 - and under the terms of a formal order signed by the president of the United States sometime early the following year-the Pentagon's giant signals - intelligence division, the National Security Agency, has monitored "the international telephone calls and international email messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants." So reported the New York Times more than a week ago. Official Washington is appalled.
Sounds like it would have been a really, really good idea for NSA to have gone ahead and done this stuff back before 9/11. So why is it such an atrocity that President Bush has them doing it now?

Constitutional Spying

The solution to the FISA problem by Gary Schmitt
"Here we reach the nub of the matter: The Founders, in the words of The Federalist, did not think it was wise or even possible to set a "limitation of that authority which is to provide for the defense and protection of the community." At the end of the day, a government has to do what is necessary to protect itself and its people. Yet, at the same time, the Founders believed in limited government. How did they square the circle? When it comes to the conduct of war, the history is pretty clear: They expected presidents to do what was required to secure the country's safety. But they did anticipate that Congress would play the role of Monday--morning quarterback: exposing malfeasance when called for, adding or cutting off funds when necessary, passing laws to regularize the exercise of executive discretion without undermining it, and, in the face of truly egregious behavior, being ready to impeach a president.
Obviously there is no neat solution to the problem of power and responsibility. However, as Winston Churchill said about democracy itself, the system of discretion and oversight the Constitution establishes is the worst possible solution-except for all others that have been tried."
Gary Schmitt is director of the program on advanced strategic studies at the American Enterprise Institute and former executive director of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.

Devout Democracies

Self-rule in the Middle East will have a religious component, but that doesn't mean it won't work by Reuel Marc Gerecht
"Iraq and Afghanistan as liberal beacons in the region never really made much sense; as democracies in which devout Muslims wrestle through difficult questions about the proper relationship between God and man, they can have much more impact in the Middle East, where religion is like oxygen. Afghanistan and Iraq are at present the Muslim world's two most important democratic laboratories. They are not causes for despair. On the contrary, for devout Muslims who are trying to introduce concepts of popular sovereignty into political philosophy, both nations are - and the word is used correctly-progressive. This may be hard for many secularized or disbelieving Westerners and Middle Easterners to swallow - "We have gone to war for this?" - but in the context of Middle Eastern history, we should be both hopeful and proud. The real question for us now is the one posed to me in Kabul by an Italian officer, who despite his soft manner had the martial spirit of a U.S. Marine: "Will the United States run? If you do, we all will."
Reuel Marc Gerecht is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.

Boxing Day Sail

Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

[Photo: Taken and supplied by Brian Voon Yee Yap.]

The Sydney Hobart Yacht Race is hosted by the Cruising Yacht Club of Australia, starting in Sydney on Boxing Day and finishing in Hobart. The race distance is approximately 630 nautical miles. The race is run in co-operation with the Royal Yacht Club of Tasmania.

The race was initially planned to be a cruise, but has grown over the decades, since the inaugural race in 1945, to become one of the pre-eminent offshore yacht races in the world and it now attracts maxi yachts from North America and Europe. The 2004 race marked the 60th running of the event.

In 2005, 89 boats are registered to start. Boats from the United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden, Ireland, and four entries from New Zealand will compete with Australian boats from New South Wales, Tasmania, Queensland, South Australia, Victoria, Western Australia and the ACT. The start will be at 1:20 pm Australian Eastern Daylight Saving Time.

The Times They Are A-Changin'? Ken Auletta raises questions

Can Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., save the Times—and himself?
Can the Los Angeles Times survive its owners?

Too bad we have neither.

The Paranoid Style In American Liberalism by William Kristol
It would be good to have a responsible opposition party in the United States today. It would be good to have a serious mainstream media. Too bad we have neither.

"violence perpetrated by those we call terrorists"

Anthony McClellan: Documentary-makers think outside idiot box
The power of an idea should never be underestimated and neither should the power of the polemic. In the war on terror, which has been official probably only since September 2001, much of the debate has been centred on the obvious and shocking violence perpetrated by those we call terrorists. But has there been sufficient thought or public debate as to who it is we are fighting?
Adam Curtis is a BBC producer who has put together a three-part documentary series (The Power of Nightmares) that turns on their head many of the prevailing and dominant public perceptions about the HQ of Terrorism Inc, al-Qa'ida. SBS aired it earlier this month. It was a use of the visual medium to strongly argue a heretical perspective, similar to Michael Moore but much smarter.
In a nutshell, it argues that our political leaders have deliberately exaggerated the perceived threat from international terrorism.

Criticism and Responses
Responses
Various attacks have been made on the programme, its author, the BBC and the arguments presented. Curtis has responded to some of the criticism.
Criticism
The program misrepresents the past
The use of fear in politics is nothing new, dictators and democratic leaders throughout history have demonized opponents and enemies.
BBC contradictions
Critics of the programme assert that it is not consistent that the BBC News division has suggested recently that the bombings in London may be the work of al-Qaeda. Others point out, however, that the news division regularly speculates on the causes of events.
Previous groups who bombed people:
Communism From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Communism refers to a theoretical system of social organization and a political movement based on common ownership of the means of production. As a political movement, communism seeks to establish a classless society. A major force in world politics since the early 20th century, modern communism is generally associated with The Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, according to which the capitalist profit-based system of private ownership is replaced by a communist society in which the means of production are communally owned, such as through a gift economy. Often this process is said initiated by the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeoisie as advocated by Marxism, then passes through a transitional period marked by the preparatory stage of socialism as advocated by Leninism. Pure communism has never been implemented, it remains theoretical: communism is, in Marxist theory, the end-state, or the result of state-socialism. The word is now mainly understood to refer to the political, economic, and social theory of Marxist thinkers, or life under conditions of Communist party rule. There were also other thinkers, such as several anarchists who called themselves communist around in the 1800s, but had alternative methods to Marxism to reaching a classless society.
Nazism From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
The Nazis from the era of the Third Reich rarely referred to themselves as "Nazis", preferring the official term "National Socialists" instead. Nazi was most commonly used as a pejorative term; however, its use became so widespread that, currently, some Neo-Nazis also use it to describe themselves.
There is a very close relationship between Nazism and Fascism. Since the term Nazism is normally used to refer to the ideology and policies of Nazi Germany alone, while Fascism is used in a broader sense, to refer to a wider political movement that exists or existed in many countries, Nazism is often classified as a particular version of Fascism.
Fascism From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
There is little agreement among historians, political scientists, and other scholars concerning the exact nature of fascism. Most scholars hold that fascism as a social movement employs elements from the political left, but it eventually allies with the political right, especially after attaining state power.
There is also controversy surrounding the question of what political movements and governments belong to fascism. The most restrictive definitions of fascism include only one government - that of Benito Mussolini in Italy. The broadest definitions, on the other hand, may include every authoritarian state that has ever existed. Fascism is associated with one or more of the following characteristics: a very high degree of nationalism, economic corporatism, and, after attaining political control of a country, a powerful, dictatorial state that views the nation as superior to the individuals or groups composing it. Fascism also typically calls for the regeneration of the nation and uses populist appeals to unity. Mussolini defined fascism as being a right-wing ideology in opposition to socialism, liberalism, democracy and individualism.
Shinto From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
As time went on, Shinto was increasingly used in the advertising of nationalists popular sentiments. In 1890, the "Imperial Rescript on Education" was passed, and students were required to ritually recite its oath to "offer yourselves courageously to the State" as well as protect the Imperial family. The practice of Emperor worship was also further spread by distributing imperial portraits for esoteric veneration. All of these practices were used to fortify national solidarity through patriotic centralized observance at shrines. This use of Shinto gave to Japanese patriotism a special tint of mysticism and cultural introversion, which became more pronounced as time went on.
Such processes continued deepening until the Showa Period, before coming to an abrupt halt in August 1945. Somewhat ironically, the invasion by the West so feared at the start of the Meiji era had come at last, due at least in part, to the radicalization of Japan permitted by its religious solidarity.
Bushido From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Bushido ethics enjoyed a revival during World War II as a way to build up Japanese fighting spirit. It was particularly reinforced among the fighting forces as a means of portraying the value of self-sacrifice and loyalty, and reached its apotheosis with the self-sacrifice of the kamikaze pilots.
Maoism From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
From 1962 and onwards the challenge to the Soviet hegemony in the World Communist Movement made by the Chinese Communist Party resulted in various divisions in communist parties around the world.
Since the death of Mao and the reforms of Deng, most of these parties have disappeared, but various small communist groups around the world continue to advance Maoist ideas. These groups generally have the idea that Mao's ideas were betrayed before they could be fully or properly implemented.
As this article mentions: Only six nations have been unbroken independent democracies for the past 100 years: Australia, Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, the United States and the United Kingdom.
[The best defence against the various violent ideologies seems to be democracy. If people want to live in freedom they must be ready to defend it.]

The star in Fifth Ave

The star in Fifth Ave http://nojjong.blogspot.com

Pius XII The righteous Pope

David Dalin
In an article published in the February 26, 2001, issue of The Weekly Standard (published in the United States), Rabbi David Dalin called for Pius XII to be recognized as “righteous,” because of his efforts to save Jews from the Holocaust. We publish here excerpts from the article.
Even before Pius XII died in 1958, the charge that his papacy had been friendly to the Nazis was circulating in Europe, a piece of standard Communist agitprop against the West. It sank for a few years under the flood of tributes, from Jews and gentiles alike, that followed the Pope’s death, only to bubble up again with the 1963 debut of The Deputy, a play by a left-wing German writer (and former member of the Hitler Youth) named Rolf Hochhuth.
Still, it is the books vilifying the Pope that have received most of the attention. ...
Einstein, Golda Meir, Herzog…
Curiously, nearly everyone pressing this line today–from the ex-seminarians John Cornwell and Garry Wills to the ex-priest James Carroll–is a lapsed or angry Catholic. For Jewish leaders of a previous generation, the campaign against Pius XII would have been a source of shock.
“Spiritually Semites”
Any fair and thorough reading of the evidence demonstrates that Pius XII was a persistent critic of Nazism. Consider just a few highlights of his opposition before the war: of the forty-four speeches Pacelli gave in Germany as Papal Nuncio between 1917 and 1929, forty denounced some aspect of the emerging Nazi ideology.
The New York Times
His first encyclical, Summi Pontificatus, rushed out in 1939 to beg for peace, was in part a declaration that the proper role of the papacy was to plead to both warring sides rather than to blame one.
“Provoking suicide”
Holocaust survivors such as Marcus Melchior, the Chief Rabbi of Denmark, argued that “if the Pope had spoken out, Hitler would probably have massacred more than six million Jews and perhaps ten times ten million Catholics, if he had the power to do so.”
In Rome, 155 convents and monasteries sheltered some five thousand Jews. At least three thousand found refuge at the Pope’s summer residence at Castel Gandolfo.
Goodness and magnanimity
In 1955, when Italy celebrated the tenth anniversary of its liberation, the Union of Italian Jewish Communities proclaimed April 17 a “Day of Gratitude” for the Pope’s wartime assistance. ...
No other pope had been so widely praised by Jews–and they were not mistaken. Their gratitude, as well as that of the entire generation of Holocaust survivors, testifies that Pius XII was, genuinely and profoundly, a righteous gentile.

Germany: The first postwar Christmas

CHAPTER XXIII Winter The Season of Despair

[photo: FAMILY MEAL, mostly of potatoes.]

The first postwar Christmas, dismal though it was, was not quite as bad as it might have been. The worst specimen of a goose for the holiday dinner cost at least a thousand Reichsmarks, when one could be had at all; and one black marketeer made a huge profit selling cans of old Wehrmacht sauerkraut relabeled goulash. The Frankfurter Rundschau described the scene in that city:
A few stalls stand on the wet pavement of the main square in the midst of the ruins. Cards are for sale, also a few red and blue pencils, some cardboard toys, a few pitiful things made out of wood, and lots of trashy and expensive ornaments. The old Frankfurter Santa Claus and his arks full of wooden animals is distant as a dream.
In Stuttgart, the Christmas selection consisted mostly of small and expensive wooden toys and small quantities of powder, lipstick, and oilless face creams. A lighted Christmas tree atop the Stuttgarter Zeitung building, the first seen in the city since 1938, stood out painfully amidst the dark ruins.15 The weather, however, was warm and springlike. The Frankfurter Rundschau reminded its readers what such weather meant in terms of survival and recalled also that the previous year had been
different in two respects: the weather on 24 December had been cold and the sky clear, and a hail of bombs had fallen on the city. This year at least "no mother needs to pick up her child in haste and run to the cellar with it."
The holiday was, in fact, not completely barren. Third Army reported "a certain aura of good feeling" associated with the season, and the food offices released extra rations of sugar and flour. Throughout the zone, the troops gave Christmas parties for children. In Landkreis Wetzlar, for example, the local detachment and the occupation troops gave a bag of cookies and a candy bar to each of the several thousand school children. In Bad Aibling the officers and men of the guard for Prisoner of War Enclosure No. 26 distributed chocolate and candy in the town schools. In Heilbronn, the US soldiers furnished candy, the prisoners of war in the local stockade contributed handmade toys, and the military government detachment recorded with satisfaction "the presence of a traditional Christmas tree in even the humblest cellar home." Some detachments noted, however, that the Germans who came around to them with holiday greetings were often small-time Nazis hoping to ingratiate themselves, while those who had nothing to fear or nothing to gain stayed away.

twenty years for spreading rumors prejudicial

The Rhineland Campaign, 1945 The Hard Winter
The civilians' feeling of relief at being out of the war was beginning to give way under the hardships of the winter to a subdued resentment.
But the resentment was not at a level approaching resistance to the occupation. Of 487 cases tried in Ninth Army military government courts up to the end of January, three-quarters were for minor circulation and curfew violations. In the two most serious cases, one defendant got twenty years for spreading rumors prejudicial to Allied interests and the other got fifteen years and a 10,000 Reichsmark fine for disobedience to military government orders. The other cases were sometimes interesting but hardly evidence of a threat to military security. Even harboring German soldiers, a serious crime, usually turned out not to have been motivated by malice. In one instance a mother wanted to keep her son at home ; in another a homeowner needed someone to fix his house and the soldier was handy with tools ; and in a third a soldier turned himself in after a lovers' quarrel with the woman with whom he was living. He went to a prisoner of war camp, she to jail for fifteen months. In Schaffenberg, outside Aachen, a man was sentenced for holding a public meeting. He had hired a carpenter to repair his house and a crowd had gathered to watch the carpenter work. In Brand a summary military government court fined a civilian 100 marks for calling the Buergermeister a thief and a Nazi. The review board reversed the sentence on the ground that civilians should be encouraged to comment on public officials.

Peter Singer: Germ of a new debate on the ethics of life

"But because fetuses, at least at the stage of development when most abortions are performed, have yet to develop any kind of consciousness, it seems reasonable to regard ending their lives as much less serious than killing a normal human being. If so, then this is all the more true of embryos."
Peter Singer is professor of bioethics at Princeton University. His recent books include Writings on an Ethical Life and One World. He is now completing a book on food and ethics."

[When as his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child of the Holy Ghost. 1:31 And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name JESUS.]

her firstborn son: and he called his name JESUS.

The Gospel According to Saint Matthew
1:22 Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, 1:23 Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us. 1:24 Then Joseph being raised from sleep did as the angel of the Lord had bidden him, and took unto him his wife: 1:25 And knew her not till she had brought forth her firstborn son: and he called his name JESUS.

For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.

The Gospel According to Saint Luke

2:6 And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered. 2:7 And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn. 2:8 And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. 2:9 And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. 2:10 And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. 2:11 For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.

media-presented spectacle of hurricane coverage

Jeff Masters

"It's an ingrained part of the media-presented spectacle of hurricane coverage: a wind-blown reporter struggles against stinging rain and buffeting winds to breathlessly deliver his or her dramatic story. It's been an integral part of hurricane reporting ever since Dan Rather first made a name for himself with his dramatic reporting from Galveston's seawall during Hurricane Carla in 1961--the first time that television news did live hurricane coverage. But with several reporters narrowly escaping serious injury during coverage of this year's hurricanes, a backlash against this type of reporting is starting to emerge. I, for one, am tired of seeing reporters foolishly risking their lives for a breathless sound bite. I would far prefer that they do their story from safe shelter. They could stick a long pole with a telephone book on it out into the wind and watch it get shredded for drama! Or chuck frisbees into the wind, or have wind up toys march into the tempest and get blown away, or a host of other creative things. Reporters need not be put at risk!" A December 18 article in the Miami Herald reported on the first case I've heard of where a complaint was filed to OSHA over reporters' safety during hurricane coverage.

For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.

The Gospel According to Saint Luke
2:1 And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed. 2:2 (And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.) 2:3 And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city. 2:4 And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David:) 2:5 To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child. 2:6 And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered. 2:7 And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn. 2:8 And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. 2:9 And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. 2:10 And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. 2:11 For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. 2:12 And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger. 2:13 And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, 2:14 Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men. 2:15 And it came to pass, as the angels were gone away from them into heaven, the shepherds said one to another, Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us. 2:16 And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger. 2:17 And when they had seen it, they made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child. 2:18 And all they that heard it wondered at those things which were told them by the shepherds. 2:19 But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart. 2:20 And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen, as it was told unto them.

And she shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name JESUS

The Gospel According to Saint Matthew
1:18 Now the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise: When as his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child of the Holy Ghost. 1:19 Then Joseph her husband, being a just man, and not willing to make her a publick example, was minded to put her away privily. 1:20 But while he thought on these things, behold, the angel of the LORD appeared unto him in a dream, saying, Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost. 1:21 And she shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name JESUS: for he shall save his people from their sins. 1:22 Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, 1:23 Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us. 1:24 Then Joseph being raised from sleep did as the angel of the Lord had bidden him, and took unto him his wife: 1:25 And knew her not till she had brought forth her firstborn son: and he called his name JESUS.

demonised and disaffected

Young Lebanese-Australians feel demonised and disaffected, writes
Neil McMahon
Bankstown railway seems to be populated by impolite young Mid East men, if they were more polite then non Mid East persons would be more understanding of the "demonised and disaffected."

Are we hearing the voice of the new Iraq?

Politics of Iraq in the US will not be dictated by Saddam

FRANK DEVINE

The man clearly and calmly in charge is the chief judge, Rizgar Mohammed Amin, a 47-year-old Kurd and the only member of a panel of five judges to allow his name to be made public and to appear on TV.
When, at the start of the trial, Saddam refused to give his name, the judge declared: "You are Saddam Hussein, former president of Iraq, and I think you know who I am." He ignored Saddam's instruction to identify himself formally. When Saddam absented himself from a session, Rizgar continued the hearing without him. When defence lawyers threatened to quit, he said he would appoint new ones.
Rizgar's deceptively mild manner has caused some to consider him too soft. But in an interview before the trial, he remarked: "One of the tasks of a judge is to preserve patience and good manners. Rudeness would be incompatible with the neutrality and esteem of the tribunal."
Are we hearing the voice of the new Iraq?

left-wing psyche

Liberalism as Socially Motivated Cognition - Dr Helen
Monday, November 28, 2005
A 2003 paper by Rutgers sociologist Ted Goertzel offers some interesting insight into the left-wing psyche:
In the 1970s, Stanley Rothman and Robert Lichter administered Thematic Apperception Tests to a large sample of "new left" radicals (Roots of Radicalism, 1982). They found that activists were characterized by weakened self-esteem, injured narcissism and paranoid tendencies. They were preoccupied with power and attracted to radical ideologies that offered clear and unambiguous answers to their questions.

Copperheads (politics)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
The Copperheads were a faction of Democrats in the North who opposed the American Civil War, wanting an immediate peace settlement with the Confederates. They were also called Peace Democrats. The most famous Copperhead was Ohio's Clement L. Vallandigham, who was a vehement opponent of Lincoln's policies.

The name Copperheads was given to them by Republicans, probably derived from the venomous snake (the Copperhead) that strikes without warning — Copperheads reinterpreted this insult as a term of honor, and wore copper liberty-head coins as badges. They were also called "butternuts".

Clement Vallandigham

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Vallandigham was tried by a military court 6-7 May, denied a writ of "habeas corpus", convicted by a military tribunal of "uttering disloyal sentiments" and attempting to hinder the prosecution of the war, and sentenced to 2 years' confinement in a military prison. A Federal circuit judge upheld Vallandigham's arrest and military trial as a valid exercise of the President's war powers and, in February 1864, the Supreme Court of the United States declined to hear the case. However, President Lincoln, who considered Vallandigham a "wily agitator" and was wary of making him a martyr to the Copperhead cause, ordered him sent through the lines to the Confederacy, and he was taken under guard to Tennessee.

Santa Never Made it into Darwin (Bill Cate)

Santa Never Made it into Darwin (Bill Cate)
On Christmas Eve of '74, a warning sounded out
On all the broadcast stations, a great storm was nearabout
The boys and girls all sleeping there, tomorrow was their day
The Mums and Dads all praying the storm would blow away
Chorus: Santa never made it into Darwin,
disaster struck at dawn on Christmas Day
Santa never made it into Darwin, a big wind came
and blew the town away Many boats set out to sea and very few returned
Most were foundered on the rocks, or in huge seas overturned
Australia was shocked and saddened as the news came through,
A devastated city that must be born anew
Chorus:
Santa never made it into Darwin, disaster struck at dawn on Christmas Day
Santa never made it into Darwin, a big wind came and blew the town away

Cyclone Tracy

photo above from wikipedia.org/wiki/Image

Cyclone Tracy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Cyclone Tracy was a tropical cyclone that devastated Darwin, Australia, from December 24 to December 25, 1974. It was recorded by The Age as being a "disaster of the first magnitude...without parallel in Australia's history." It killed 71 people -the official death toll was revised upwards from 65 to 71 in March 2005 - and destroyed over 70 percent of Darwin's buildings, leaving over 20,000 people homeless. Most of Darwin's population was evacuated to Adelaide, Whyalla, Alice Springs and Sydney, and many never returned to Darwin. The town was subsequently rebuilt with modern materials and techniques. Cyclone Tracy was at least a Category 4 storm, although there is evidence to suggest that it had reached Category 5 when it made landfall at Darwin.

Katrina NHC errors - JeffMasters -

Katrina officially downgraded to a Category 3

Posted By: JeffMasters at 4:08 PM GMT on December 21, 2005
Updated: 4:31 PM GMT on December 21, 2005
"Today is winter solstice--the darkest day of the year--and an appropriate time to revisit America's other darkest day of the year, August 29. The National Hurricane Center (NHC) issued its official Tropical Cyclone Report for Katrina on Tuesday. Katrina officially made landfall as a Category 3 hurricane, not a Category 4. Ground-based and aircraft measurements only support 110 knot winds (127 mph) at Katrina's first landfall near Buras, Louisiana. Katrina weakened only slightly before her second landfall, and was still a Category 3 hurricane with 105 knot (121 mph) winds on the Mississippi coast. The NHC report also stated that the highest sustained winds over metropolitan New Orleans were only of Category 1 or 2 strength, although buildings over 25 stories high may have seen winds a full category higher.
Storm surge
To me, the biggest disappointment in the report came in the treatment of Katrina's storm surge. No storm surge data was presented for New Orleans.
Forecast accuracy
NHC gives themselves high marks for forecast accuracy for the 2 1/2 days prior to Katrina's landfall. Indeed, their landfall location forecasts had errors more than a factor of two better than average. These exceptionally accurate forecasts likely saved hundreds of lives. On the other hand, NHC intensity forecasts for Katrina were up to a factor of two worse than average, and perhaps more lives could have been saved had these intensity forecasts been better."
Jeff Masters

three minke whales - 84,000 abortions each year

Japanese ships ram protesters December 22, 2005
Japanese ships have rammed protesters attempting to stop the slaughter of whales in Australian territorial waters in the Antarctic. The fleet was in Australia's territorial waters and had killed at least three minke whales that morning.

84,000 abortions each year
The number of abortions carried out in Australia each year has been estimated at 84,218, Australia's leading health statistics group said.

[No protest for 84,000 dead babies]

NSW Police mixed messages

We hear that two NSW police officers PICked on Wrong side of the law
While we hear of Psych assessments for high risk police
and Gangsters' hold on Sydney is safe "When police arrived they were surrounded and intimidated by about 100 people. For two years they seemed incapable of solving the crime, despite at least 20 witnesses. Seven years later, the police are still running scared."

Gangsters' hold on Sydney is safe - December 22, 2005

"For too long our politicians and police have turned their backs on a festering problem" writes Miranda Devine.
"Rather than a problem of race, religion or multiculturalism, Sydney is suffering from a longstanding crime problem. It is a textbook case of how soft policing and lenient magistrates embolden successive waves of criminals, infecting other people who might otherwise have been law-abiding. That Iemma's electorate is at war with former premier Bob Carr's former electorate of Maroubra is a handy synchronicity. It highlights the ALP's long-term culpability in creating the monster that is plaguing the city, its history of ethnic branch-stacking and "whatever it takes" tactics to shore up support in the heartland electorates of the south-west, its policy of spin and cover-up which is at last coming undone.
As one passenger last week told taxi driver Adrian Neylan, who has chronicled the violence on his weblog, "the gangs have won".
Indeed they have, but the recent display of official cowardice in the face of the criminal gangs of Sydney's south-west is just a taste of the way Sydney has been run for a decade."

Mahdiyah destroyed the Sudanese economy

People claiming to be the Mahdi
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
There have been several personalities over time who have considered themselves the Mahdi prophesized in Islam. They are regarded as false by mainstream Muslims.

Muhammad Ahmad, who founded a short-lived empire in Sudan in the late 19th century made a claim of being the promised Mahdi. His troops laid siege to Khartoum starting on March 13, 1884 against the defenders led by British General Charles George Gordon. The heavily damaged city fell to the Mahdists on January 26, 1885. Omdurman, a suburb of Khartoum, was the scene of the bloody battle (September 2, 1898) in which British forces under Sirdar Horatio Kitchener defeated the Mahdist forces defending the city.

During their short reign, the Mahdiyah had destroyed the Sudanese economy, and about half of the population died due to famine, disease, persecution, and warfare. Their efforts to wipe out the former tribal differences left few loyalties intact, and internecine warfare was common. In general the country welcomed the fall of the Mahdiyah.

Vital Presidential Power

The Supreme Court has never ruled that the president does not ultimately have the authority to collect foreign intelligence - here and abroad - as he sees fit.
by William Kristol and Gary Schmitt
This is not an argument for an unfettered executive prerogative. Under our system of separated powers, Congress has the right and the ability to judge whether President Bush has in fact used his executive discretion soundly, and to hold him responsible if he hasn't. But to engage in demagogic rhetoric about "imperial" presidents and "monarchic" pretensions, with no evidence that the president has abused his discretion, is foolish and irresponsible.

William Kristol is editor of The Weekly Standard. Gary Schmitt is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. This piece originally appeared in the Washington Post.

[If Bush broke any law impeach him! Or is this just continuing the legislature, judicial and executive debate that began with Madison and Marbury and Marshall.]

Lincoln and Bush on vigilance and responsibility

War and Peace
Lincoln and Bush on vigilance and responsibility.
by Mackubin Thomas Owens
"Today, once again we face the perennial tension between vigilance and responsibility as the United States is the target of those who would destroy it. In all decisions involving tradeoffs between two things of value, the costs and benefits of one alternative must be measured against the costs and benefits of the other. At a time when the United States faces an adversary that wishes nothing less than America's destruction, President Bush is correctly taking his bearing from Lincoln, who understood that in time of war, prudence dictates that responsibility must trump vigilance. In response to criticism of his suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, Lincoln asked, ". . . are all the laws but one, to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?" Lincoln's point is as applicable today as it was during the Civil War. If those responsible for the preservation of the republic are not permitted the measures to save it, there will be nothing left to be vigilant about."
Mackubin Thomas Owens is professor of national security at the Naval War College.

New York Times - NSA - Captain Ed

Fit to Print?
"Neither the Bush administration nor the NSA broke the law, so why did the New York Times break the story? by Edward Morrissey
The timing and questionable news value of the story opens the question about the motivation of the Times's editors. Has the Times allowed its anti-Bush bias to warp its judgment so badly that it deliberately undermined a critical part of America's defenses against terrorist attack to try to damage the president?"
Edward Morrissey is a contributing writer to The Daily Standard and a contributor to the blog Captain's Quarters.

[When the next attack on the US occurs, the NYT will still be congratulating itself on the story they revealed. Midway followed Pearl Harbor but the old version of the NSA provided a warning. Another memory from WWII: “Loose lips sink ships.”]

Judge says atheistic evolution is not a belief?

US judge rejects intelligent design
"The judge repeatedly cited the 'religious" nature of intelligent design writings, and quoted a Discovery Institute document stating that intelligent designs governing goals are to 'defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural, and political legacies" and to 'replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God."

[God created some type of evolution. We do not know how he did it and we do not know how it works yet. It is not some accidental combination of molecules. Judge John E. Jones III seems to have some superhuman knowledge of biology.]

Then and Now - 1985 - 2005

The Myth of Moral Equivalence Jeane J. Kirkpatrick
"The Soviets have made extraordinarily great progress in extending their own influence and projecting their own semantic rules upon the rest of the world.
Another major dimension of the Soviet assault on our values takes place through the systematic redefinition of the terms of political discourse. George Orwell, as usual, has said it very well in his Epilogue to 1984. He said the purpose of "Newspeak" was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to devotees of "Ingsoc," but to make all other modes of thought impossible.
Terrorist groups do not violate human rights in the current vernacular; only governments violate human rights.
The semantics of human rights and national liberation movements are extraordinary. It is necessary only to look at the sober discussions of human rights in such places as the Amnesty International Reports or the Helsinki Watch discussions to see that those organizations and most of the people who discuss the subject today are using skewed vocabulary which guarantees the outcome of the investigation by definition. The "newspeak" of human rights morally invalidates the governments by definition and morally exculpates the guerillas by definition. The theft of words like genocide and the language which appears in documents like the United Nations Charter and the Geneva Convention are other examples of systematic comprehensive effort at semantic rectification."

Now Iraq democracy is being attacked by similar tactics both in Iraq and by "peace loving people of the world", the "perfect peace" of dictatorship, not the imperfect peace of democracy.

U.S.S. Pueblo - January 23, 1968

Following WWII, the peninsula of Korea was divided in two. The Soviet Union allied with the northern half, and the United States aligned with the southern half. For three years, 1950-1953, a war between the two Koreas raged, but ended inconclusively. The United States continued to support South Korea and garrisoned troops within the country. In the mid-1960s, following a period of relative peace, North Korea began aggressive activities toward the Republic of Korea.
In an effort to gather intelligence about North Korea’s intentions, the U.S. Navy began operational cruises with AGER ships outfitted with reconnaissance equipment. In 1967, the U.S.S. Banner, while in the Sea of Japan, had been harassed by Soviet and North Korean navies, but no attempts were made to stop its mission. In January 1968, the U.S.S. Pueblo began a similar mission following the same track as the Banner through the Sea of Japan.
On January 23, 1968, while in international waters off the Korean coast, the North Koreans attacked the Pueblo. One man was killed while destroying cryptologic materials and three men were wounded. The attack was swift, and the North Koreans boarded the ship, capturing it, the crew, and the materiel the crew had been unable to destroy.
The 82 crewmen were held for eleven months before being released. The capture of the ship, which remains in North Korea to this day, constituted the largest single loss of such sensitive material. It compromised a wide range of cryptologic and classified documents and equipment.

NSA - an earlier event

The Korean War: The SIGINT Background
ASA in the post-World War II period had broken messages used by the Soviet armed forces, police and industry, and was building a remarkably complete picture of the Soviet national security posture. It was a situation that compared favorably to the successes of World War II. Then, during 1948, in rapid succession, every one of these cipher systems went dark. Although the loss of these systems occurred over several months (and none happened at the end of a week), U.S. cryptanalysts tended to lump the disasters together under the dire designation "Black Friday."

Soviet intelligence had had an agent inside AFSA who had revealed the extent of U.S. penetration of Soviet cipher systems. This was William Weisband, who had been recruited by the KGB in 1934. During and after World War II, Weisband was involved in the U.S. COMINT efforts, working (as a native speaker of Russian) in the Russian section in ASA and, later, AFSA. Although in 1950 the FBI uncovered information alleging espionage activities by Weisband in the early 1940s, he was never charged with espionage - Weisband lost his job with AFSA and served a year in prison for contempt of a grand jury.[2]

2. Robert Louis Benson and Michael Warner, VENONA: Soviet Espionage and the American Response, 1939-1957 (NSA/CIA Publication, 1996).

Bill Weisband - National Security Act

Bill Weisband
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
William Weisband was born in Odessa Russia in 1908 of Russian parents, Weisband emigrated to America in the 1920s and became a US citizen in 1938. From 1941 to 1942 Weisband was the agent handler for Jones Orin York who worked in the Northrop Corporation. He joined the US Army Signals Intelligence Service (SIS) in 1942 and performed signals intelligence and communications security duties in North Africa and Italy, where he made some important friends before returning to Arlington Hall and joining its "Russian Section." Although not a cryptanalyst, as a "linguist adviser" who spoke fluent Russian, he was working closely with cryptographers. The gregarious and popular Weisband had access to all areas of Arlington Hall's Soviet work. Meredith Gardner recalled that Weisband had watched him extract the list of Western atomic scientists from the December 1944 KGB message mentioned earlier.
The Soviets apparently had monitored Arlington Hall's "Russian Section" since at least 1945, when Weisband joined the unit. Weisband's earliest reports on the work on Soviet diplomatic systems were probably sketchy and might not have provided clear warning to Moscow about the exploitability of the KGB messages. Weisband passed the information on to them in 1948, although he was not discovered by counterintelligence officers until 1950. Where Weisband had sketched the outlines of the cryptanalytic success, British liaison officer Kim Philby received actual translations and analyses on a regular basis after he arrived for duty in Washington in autumn 1949.
While suspended from SIS on suspicion of disloyalty, he skipped a federal grand jury hearing on CPUSA. As a result, in November 1950 Weisband was convicted of contempt and sentenced to a year in prison. Weisband was never prosecuted for espionage because under the 1947 National Security Act "sources and methods" by law cannot be revealed. He died suddenly of natural causes in 1967.

Google pretend greeting

Google pretend greeting

Media is the message: Death to Democracy

Ongoing battle for hearts and minds - Dec 21, 2005
JANET ALBRECHTSEN

"Unfortunately, though, the insurgents are working out the whole Western media gig. They have kept up a steady diet of media-worthy killings aimed at sapping the West's resolve. They know that the best weapon to stifle Iraqi people power is the Western press."
US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld recently told journalist Jim Lehrer of the American public broadcaster PBS: "We're up against an enemy that understands that they can't win anything in Iraq. They cannot win a battle. The only place they can win is in Washington, DC. And they know that."

Robert Dean Stethem shot - Hammadi flown to Lebanon

Germany has quietly released a Hizbollah member jailed for life for the murder of a U.S. Navy diver , disregarding Washington's desire that he either be extradited or remain behind bars, officials said on Tuesday. Sources in Berlin and Beirut said earlier that Mohammad Ali Hammadi, convicted of killing Navy diver Robert Dean Stethem in Beirut during the 1985 hijacking of a TWA flight and sentenced to life in prison, was flown back to Lebanon last week. Still, several diplomats said that if he could not be extradited, the Americans had wanted Hammadi to remain behind bars for the murder of Stethem, whose battered corpse was thrown out of the TWA plane by the hijackers after they had shot him.

[German justice]

"The Dismissal: The Real Truth of the Matter"

"The Dismissal: The Real Truth of the Matter" Speech by Sir David Smith at a Luncheon for Australians for Constitutional Monarchy, Parliament House, Sydney 11 November 2005

"Probably no event in Australia's political history has received as much coverage in the media and in the history books as has the dismissal of the Whitlam Government by the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, on 11 November 1975.
And certainly no event in Australia's political history has received so much inaccurate and misleading coverage.
There was no constitutional crisis:- It was a political crisis that the Parliament could not resolve, so the constitutional umpire - the Governor-Geneal be needed to do in order to be able to refer the issue to the ultimate umpire - the people - for resolution at a national election. During last year's federal election campaign, the media developed a great interest in truth in politics. My challenge to the media is that they should make this new-found interest in truth in politics retrospective, at least to 1975. They should invite Whitlam down from the pedestal on which they have placed him and call on him to explain the litany of lies, which he and his acolytes have spun about the dismissal."

Truman: You don't need to tell me anything else

Stimson asks Truman not to inquire into the nature of the Manhattan Project
Transcribed telephone conversation between the Secretary of War Stimson and Senator Truman (excerpt)
June 17, 1943
Sec: The other matter is a very different matter. It's connected with -- I think I've had a letter from Mr. Hally, I think, who is an assistant of Mr. Fulton of your office.
Truman: That's right.
Sec: In connection with the plant at Pasco, Washington.
Truman: That's right.
Sec: Now that's a matter which I know all about personally, and I am one of the group of two or three men in the whole world who know about it.
Truman: I see.
Sec: It's part of a very important secret development.
Truman: Well, all right then - - -
Sec: And I - -
Truman: I herewith see the situation, Mr. Secretary, and you won't have to say another word to me. Whenever you say that to me, that's all I want to hear.
Sec: All right.
Truman: Here is what caused that letter. There is a plant in Minneapolis that was constructed for a similar purpose and it had not been used, and we had been informed that they were taking the machinery out of that plant and using it at this other one for the same purpose, and we just couldn't understand that and that's the reason for the letter.
Sec: No, No, something - - -
Truman: You assure that this is for a specific purpose and you think it's all right; that's all I need to know.
Sec: Not only for a specific purpose, but a unique purpose.
Truman: All right, then.
Sec: Thank you very much.
Truman: You don't need to tell me anything else.
Sec: Well, I'm very much obliged.
Truman: Thank you very much.
Sec: Goodby.
Truman: Goodby.
Source: Michael B. Stoff, Manhattan Project: A Documentary History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), pp. 39-40.

White racists interfere with Mid East customs?

2GB radio report Tuesday, 20 December 2005: NSW Police are seeking assistance from two good Samaritans who helped a young lady who was being attended to by three mid eastern men, one had just started to get to know her, and the other had a knife to her throat. Police say the intervention prevented any further action by the trio.

Home is the sailor

Navy Seaman Missing from Pearl Harbor Attack is Identified
The Department of Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office (DPMO) announced today that the remains of a U.S. Navy seaman missing in action from the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor have been identified and will soon be returned to his family for burial with full military honors.
He is Seaman 2nd Class Warren P. Hickok of Kalamazoo, Mich. The family has not set a date for his burial.
Of the 88,000 unaccounted-for Americans from all conflicts, 78,000 are from World War II.

Criminality not Racism

Criminals caused the Cronulla riots, not failed multiculturalism, writes Gerard Henderson.

" Despite immigration and related issues spilling into the political debate on occasions, Australia has remained a tolerant and accepting society, compared with other nations. The recent events in Sydney are contemptible but, so far at least, they remain peculiar to Sydney. They turn on the criminality of a minority of young Australians of Muslim Lebanese background and the criminality of Australians of predominantly Anglo-Celtic background who attacked those whom they refer to as "Lebs" at Cronulla last Sunday week. The problems among the Lebanese were identified by Nadia Jamal in the Herald last Tuesday when she said that "some men of Australian Lebanese Muslim background seem to be so aggressive and violent … This has everything to do with culture and patriarchal attitude, and nothing to do with religion."
"It is unwise to draw Australia-wide conclusions from the social disorder in parts of Sydney. What is at issue here is criminality - not the existence of widescale racism or the failure of multiculturalism."

[Racism? Not in my multicultural neighbourhood.]

A real Iemma dilemma - Iemma in the middle

Piers Akerman

"On this day four years ago, the Carr-Iemma Labor Government attempted to address the obvious problems of Islamic anti-social behaviour in the wake of the terrorist attacks in the US. Yet, as he had personally launched the campaign to bring anti-social young Arabic-speaking individuals into some sort of order, he, above all other state politicians, should have been most aware of the threat posed to the wider community by the anti-social behaviour of young Arabic-speaking people.
Then again, in his electorate of Lakemba, there was an unemployment rate among Muslims of some 24.3 per cent, just a shade under a quarter of the Muslim population.
In his failure to adequately address this issue he may well have contributed to the greater security problem now facing all people in the state.
If your favourite beach was locked down last weekend, and may be again this weekend, let Mr Iemma know that he must shoulder a great portion of the blame. After all, he has had four years to deal with the problem."

[A real Iemma dilemma]

I did so in 2005, and I'm going to do so in 2006.

Press Conference of the President

"Now, if you don't think there's an enemy out there, then I can understand why you ought to say, just tell us all you know. I happen to know there's an enemy there. And the enemy wants to attack us. That is why I hope you can feel my passion about the Patriot Act. It is inexcusable to say to the American people, we're going to be tough on terror, but take away the very tools necessary to help fight these people. And by the way, the tools exist still to fight medical fraud, in some cases, or other -- drug dealers. But with the expiration of the Patriot Act, it prevents us from using them to fight the terrorists. Now, that is just unbelievable. And I'm going to continue talking about this issue and reminding the American people about the importance of the Patriot Act and how necessary it is for us in Washington, D.C. to do our job to protect you.
So I'm just going to keep doing my job. Maybe you can keep focusing on all these focus groups and polls, and all that business. My job is to lead, keep telling the American people what I believe, work to bring people together to achieve a common objective, stand on principle, and that's the way I'm going to lead. I did so in 2005, and I'm going to do so in 2006."

[When the next attack on the US occurs, the MSM and Dems will still be congratulating themselves on the low level of peril to the homeland. Midway followed Pearl Harbor but the old version of the NSA provided a warning.]

Extortion threat against power company

December 19, 2005 - 6:43PM
Photo: Glen McCurtayne
NSW's second-biggest power company, Delta Electricity, says it has been threatened with extortion. The Ten Network tonight reported the extortion demand was received by mail last week, and contained a threat to bomb one of the four plants.
[Of course last week we had Cronulla, no time for this, now Cronulla is quiet need to tell story to keep Cronulla story quiet.]

Biased Broadcasting Corporation - US President George W Bush

Biased Broadcasting Corporation
Story from BBC NEWS:
US President George W Bush has told Americans that Iraq is now a strong ally against terror and a force for democracy in the Middle East.
He went on prime-time TV to defend the continuing US role in Iraq, rejecting the view that the war there was "not worth another dime or another day".
A US military pullout now, he said, would "hand Iraq over to enemies".
He said Iraq's election was the start of constitutional democracy at the heart of the Middle East.
[BBC does believe this of course]
More than 2,100 US troops have been killed in Iraq since the end of the US-led invasion of April 2003, as well as more than 30,000 Iraqis.
[Must emphasise the negative]
Mr Bush insisted the war had helped stave off new terror attacks on the US since 9/11.
[BBC does believe this of course]
The BBC's James Coomarasamy reports from Washington that this is Mr Bush's fifth speech on Iraq in under three weeks.
[Less than three weeks five speeches, why this comment?]
In tone, he is more contrite than he has been in the past, more willing to admit mistakes and listen to what he calls his honest critics, but no less determined to stay the course, our correspondent says.
[BBC says Bush has much to be contrite about poor Saddam.]

Congress snatched defeat from the jaws of victory 1975

Melvin R. Laird
From Foreign Affairs, November/December 2005
previous mention: Foreign Affairs - Iraq: Learning the Lessons of Vietnam - Melvin R. Laird
Summary: During Richard Nixon's first term, when I served as secretary of defense, we withdrew most U.S. forces from Vietnam while building up the South's ability to defend itself. The result was a success -- until Congress snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by cutting off funding for our ally in 1975. Washington should follow a similar strategy now, but this time finish the job properly.
MELVIN R. LAIRD was Secretary of Defense from 1969 to 1973, Counselor to the President for Domestic Affairs from 1973 to 1974, and a member of the House of Representatives from 1952 to 1969. He currently serves as Senior Counselor for National and International Affairs at the Reader's Digest Association.

Cronulla: they thought they weren't allowed in there

People urged to steer clear of beaches
Friday Dec 16 16:12 AEDT
People are being urged to stay away from beaches in Sydney, Wollongong and Newcastle this weekend after police received credible threats of gang violence.
Police Commissioner Ken Moroney said visitors and locals would greatly help police by staying away from beaches in the areas.
Beaches become no-go zones Alyssa Braithwaite 16-12-2005 From: AAP
PEOPLE are being urged to stay away from beaches in Sydney, Wollongong, Newcastle and the Central Coast at the weekend after police received credible threats of gang violence and riots.
Beaches now safe: Iemma
Return to your beaches, NSW Premier Morris Iemma urged residents of southern Sydney and other NSW cities today. After asking people in NSW to stay away from some of the state's best known beaches at the weekend in case of violence, Mr Iemma today declared beaches safe and called on beachgoers to return to the sand.
At Fusion Nightclub in Cronulla mall, business was down 85 per cent during the weekend, owner Stephen Fleming said. It is usually his busiest time of the year.
Mr Fleming, who is also vice-president of the Cronulla Chamber of Commerce, said other local shopkeepers were also facing a bleak future for their tourist-dependent businesses.
"A lot of the traders said people weren't coming into Cronulla because they thought they weren't allowed in there," he said.

Now where would people get the idea "they weren't allowed in there." Ken Moroney?

The Times They Are A-Changin'

President's Address to the Nation
If you think the terrorists would become peaceful if only America would stop provoking them, then it might make sense to leave them alone.
This is not the threat I see. I see a global terrorist movement that exploits Islam in the service of radical political aims -- a vision in which books are burned, and women are oppressed, and all dissent is crushed. Terrorist operatives conduct their campaign of murder with a set of declared and specific goals -- to de-moralize free nations, to drive us out of the Middle East, to spread an empire of fear across that region, and to wage a perpetual war against America and our friends. These terrorists view the world as a giant battlefield -- and they seek to attack us wherever they can. This has attracted al Qaeda to Iraq, where they are attempting to frighten and intimidate America into a policy of retreat.
The terrorists do not merely object to American actions in Iraq and elsewhere, they object to our deepest values and our way of life. And if we were not fighting them in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Southeast Asia, and in other places, the terrorists would not be peaceful citizens, they would be on the offense, and headed our way.
Defeatism may have its partisan uses, but it is not justified by the facts. For every scene of destruction in Iraq, there are more scenes of rebuilding and hope. For every life lost, there are countless more lives reclaimed. And for every terrorist working to stop freedom in Iraq, there are many more Iraqis and Americans working to defeat them. My fellow citizens: Not only can we win the war in Iraq, we are winning the war in Iraq.
Next week, Americans will gather to celebrate Christmas and Hanukkah. Many families will be praying for loved ones spending this season far from home -- in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other dangerous places. Our nation joins in those prayers. We pray for the safety and strength of our troops. We trust, with them, in a love that conquers all fear, in a light that reaches the darkest corners of the Earth. And we remember the words of the Christmas carol, written during the Civil War: "God is not dead, nor [does] He sleep; the Wrong shall fail, the Right prevail, with peace on Earth, goodwill to men."