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The neocons now want to claim the Republican Party for Ronald Reagan

Man has never been short on ideas. Some ideas, once adopted, made a positive statement to the world. Some did not.  But what kind of a statement would claiming the Republican party for Ronald Reagan make?

Would it make the statement that “government selling of cocaine is ok – if done in minority neighborhoods”?  Should selling the illegal drug cocaine be something that a political party should embrace. Should Christian America embrace the selling of illegal drugs to its own people by a legitimate American political party?

No, the devil did not make them do it(sell cocaine). The neocons sold the illicit drug cocaine to American citizens in order to fund a war in the jungles of South America.  Neocons love wars. Wars are destructive and that is in line with the kind of work the neocons do – even when they are attempting to do something constructive.

Now the neocons want the Republican conservatives to de-emphasize the party that did not sell  cocaine to its citizens and emphasize the party that did sell cocaine to its citizens.

A fool and his country are soon parted

A young man on the street was gracious enough to share his opinions regarding India:

“Corruption is endemic here. Let’s say, for example, I get stopped by the police. I jumped a red light. Now I can either take the ticket, around Rs. 1000 or so, or I can simply bribe the policeman, say Rs. 200. Who, I ask you, would prefer to pay the ticket? 99.9% of us will just give the bribe and  be done with it. That sort of thing simply cannot happen in America.”

“Oh yes, income inequality is still huge, still a major problem, but I think there is reason to believe it is getting better. If you came here, say, 10 years ago, you would have seen it a lot worse. Come in another 10 years or so, and you’ll likely see it less. Can poverty ever be truly eradicated here? Probably not. The rich are getting a lot richer in this country; they have been for the past two decades. The poor have not seen anything like that; life for the bottom has continued in much the same way.”

“Pollution… well, what can you say about a people who throw their trash on the ground and then blithely forget it? These are cultural problems, but they are also political problems. You think there isn’t enough money to make it so that people don’t have to beg? You think we lack the knowledge and manpower – I mean, you think it’s beyond us to construct a decent municipal trash system, to make sure the sewer reaches all areas of the city, to make regularized trash pickup a basic right? Of course it isn’t, but the political will to enact such programs just isn’t there. The vested interests who run our political system would rather see our resources to go different ends. Their ends. Look at New York City – every vehicle has a catalytic converter, trash is superbly managed – hell, there’s a trash can on every street corner. We’re a long way from that.”

“In fact, I would say we in India are about 100 years behind the West.”

(At this, I demurred.)

“No, certainly we are! The things you take for granted there – social security, regularized pensions, food banks, homeless shelters, scrupulous policeman; we have none of those here. P. Sainath said that all the judges and magistrates in India don’t have the power of a single police constable, and he said it right. We hardly even have a sense of ourselves as a nation, as such. We would much rather identify with smaller communal structures: Religion, race, caste, social status, and so forth. What do the Indian billionaires really have in common with the destitute on the street? Not a damn thing.”

“But – and here is the rub – we are all implicated! Take the example of the policeman. Who will say they have never given a bribe?  I know I have. Our politicians – we say they are corrupt, we complain and moan, but in the end who elected them? We did. It is a vicious circle, without a beginning or end.”

“Perhaps I misspoke, however. If I could point to a beginning of the circle, it would surely be the population. All of our problems stem from that. But again, it is a cultural problem. Everyone gets married here; it is basically a law. And if you get married and don’t have kids, people will immediately assume something is wrong. The gossip one hears! ‘Cheh, did you hear so-and-so still hasn’t had a child? They’ve been married for more than a year! I think his wife may be infertile. Such a shame, such a shame!” One cannot escape talk like that, and one cannot, I think, live with it for more than a short time. So we are compelled to have children by a thousand different pressures. And one is not enough, you must have at least two! And woe unto you if they turn out to be girls, especially if you’re poor! In that case the dominant strategy is to just keep having children until a boy turns up. What can you do in the face of that? We distribute condoms, but nobody uses them – we hold sessions on family planning, but no one shows up.”

“About the future, I am not too optimistic. Our pollution corresponds directly with our need for an “affluent lifestyle”, and there is no getting away from it. We rely on coal to an alarming extent. Our population keeps growing and there seems no power strong enough to check it. 40% of our population is under the age of 30, but that is both a blessing and a curse. What will we do in ten years when they all start to want families?”

I’m seriously stunned at how myopic our politicians are! Our country is going through one of its worst phases with uncontrolled food prices, terrorism, inflation, economic slowdown, etc. and all we are worried about is something which happened more than 10 years back? Yes, I’m talking about one of the darkest days in the history of this country. The Babri Masjid demolition.

When we finally seemed to have buried the past and moved on, all of sudden comes a report leak and the opposition starts shouting and disrupting the Parliament session and development and other vital issues take a back seat. Largest democracy in the world eh?

Anyway, I somehow feel our political parties need to come to terms with the changing political scenario of this country. Most of these disruptions nowadays are telecast live on news channels, and it really makes me sad. These are the people we send to the Parliament for voicing our needs and here they are doing everything else apart from that!

Hope some sense prevails.

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Length: 19:51

Liberal Party of Canada website

Related: Political Party; Ideology; NDP Federal Leadership Race (2003)

Length: 3:48

NDP website

Related: Political Party; Ideology; Liberal Party of Canada Leadership Race (2006)

“Oh, you can’t trust the Muslims,” a coworker of mine informed me, “They follow their own rules. They act as one. I mean, look at their religion! No morality whatsoever! If you want to have five wives, well, go right ahead. If you want to blow yourself up, just be sure to shout ‘Allahu Akbar’ beforehand.”

He continued: “We Hindus, on the other hand, when can you point to a single instance of violence originating from us? Where can you point to a single Hindu trying to convert someone by force?”

Meekly, (for I knew how hot emotions run during times such as these) I mentioned the Partition Riots that took place in 1947, or the periodic bouts of ‘communal violence’ which seem to crop up every two years or so.

“The communal riots, that’s something totally different!” he barked, “Those are usually started by the other side anyway. Are you saying we shouldn’t defend ourselves? Anyway, can you point to a single Hindu suicide bomber?”

I could not. Yet it seemed pointless to mention at that time the danger of the views he espoused, that by perpetuating the “Us vs. Them” mentality he did damage of a far more insidious sort than quite a lot of suicide bombers together.

I mention this episode because it was so similar in nature to many other conversations I have had with Hindus regarding Hindu-Muslim relations. Perhaps it is a symptom of the unspoken segregation that exists in India that I have not yet had the chance to get a Muslim view on the subject, though I suspect such a conversation would go quite the same, only in favor of their “side”.

Unspoken though it may be, Hindu-Musilm segregation is quite real, and it stands apparent even to a foreigner such as myself. The city in which I stay, Hyderabad, is famous for the peace with which its population lives, despite being an almost fully hybrid city. Hindu temples dot the sidewalks in one district, and merely a few kilometers away one can hear the local Mosque’s ringing call to prayer. Yet one sees very little commingling between Hindus and Muslims. The city is pocked with Hindu or Muslim enclaves, and their residents rarely venture to the other side. And it is an undeniable fact that the Muslim neighborhoods are worse off in almost every respect to the Hindu boroughs. The few Muslim neighborhoods I visited were crowded labyrinths of squeezed-together houses and suffered from a lack of fresh water, lack of access to sewage systems, poor and irregular food delivery and almost no sanitation to speak of, while the neighborhoods I saw with all the ‘modern amenities’ were populated almost exclusively by Hindus.

“India will never solve its problems,” a pessimistic friend of mine once said, “because India will never get along with itself. If you had a stone in the middle of the road and were trying to organize people to help move it to the side, it just wouldn’t happen. One person will say we should move it to the right. The other person will insist on moving it to the left. They’ll form parties over the issue, hold elections, even. Whatever the outcome, no matter how well monitored, the losing side  will insist that it had been cheated, that the elections were fraudulent. Then there will be recounts, runoff elections. One faction of the ‘right side of the road’ party will splinter off, saying it is no longer represented by party leadership, and form its own party – say, the ‘further down the road’ coalition which states that the rock should neither be moved to the right nor left. Hindus will insist on taking leadership positions in the moving of the rock, Muslims will howl at the injustice of it all. Perhaps they’ll agitate for their own rock, to move in a fashion they see fit.”

At that point he ran out of examples, but I could continue for him if he wished: “Then, a language controversy would erupt. Marati speakers would insist on writing their language on the rock; Hindi speakers will make the same demands, and so will the Tamils. The lesser represented languages will join together in a coalition which, of course, will subsequently break apart.” And so forth.

This is a parody, but not a very gross one. “In such a country,” my friend concluded, “It’s impossible to believe that anything gets done.”

It is clear, however, that things are getting done, and one need look no further than India’s new crop of billionaires to see it.  But one wonders if India will ever move beyond its communal mentality, if it will ever see itself, and its problems, holistically. There is much evidence that this is already happening, however slowly.

On the other hand, I have even heard the overpopulation problem blamed on the Muslims.

Some months ago I was listening to a discussion on radio. An economist was required in an atmosphere of good humour to admit that he might not be impartial, that he might have an interest, that his views might be conditioned by personal circumstances. The suspicion? Well, that was the source of the humour. He had to come clean on his relationship to Mary O’Rourke, the popular Fianna Fáil politician; he admitted to being her nephew! Perhaps this was going too far but it is generally commendable that people who take part in public discussion be open and explicit about possible determinants of their views. We consider it normal, for example, to ask a member of a TV studio audience who offers an opinion, if he or she is a member of a political party. There is however one, glaring, secretive exception.

The topic which dominates political discussion in Ireland today is incomes policy, how much people can be paid in these straitened times. This breaks down into two themes: reducing wages to competitive levels and reducing public sector pay to reflect a greatly reduced tax take.

Many of those targeted for pay cuts say that they cannot afford any further reduction in pay. Most of those talking in the media about policy enjoy salaries that are multiples of the average wage. Unlike party membership or having a political auntie, salary is kept secret or not considered a possible determinant of argument, a vested interest. There has always been a quiet and polite reluctance to divulge or discuss a person’s income, the matter being considered strictly private. The history of political communication, democratization and progress itself can be traced through issues being dragged out of the private realm into the light of politics. It is time that public debate took another intrusive step.

Consider how newspapers frequently place a person’s age in brackets or how TV identifies, describes and classifies a contributor with an informative caption under their picture. Now, consider a debate about pay in which contributors’ incomes appeared in brackets and in captions. If Josephine Bloggs, Economist with A, Professor of B, Economics Editor at C, Director of D or CEO of E, appeared to argue pay policy with her salary clearly shown, a more open, honest debate could take place.

Length: 3:45

Related: NDP Federal Leadership Race (2003)

Gagnon, Alain-G. and A. Brian Tanguay (eds.). Canadian Parties in Transition (3rd ed.). Canada: Broadview, 2007.
Guy, James John. People, Government and Politics (2nd ed.). Canada: Collier MacMillan, 1990.
Thorburn Hugh G. and Alan Whitehorn (eds.). Party Politics in Canada (8th ed.). Canada: Pearson, 2001.

Naples, 10 Nov. (AKI) – An Italian government minister from the southern region of Campania is facing arrest for alleged collusion with the local mafia known as the Camorra. Nicola Cosentino is the deputy secretary for economy and finance, and regional coordinator of prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s People of Freedom party (PdL).

read the story 

Naples prosecutor Raffaele Piccirillo has authorised an arrest order for Cosentino which is expected to proceed to the lower house of parliament for authorisation on Tuesday.

Palermo, 5 Nov. (AKI) – Italy’s interior minister Roberto Maroni, its justice minister Angelino Alfano and two judges have received a letter threatening reprisals over the restrictive measures imposed on jailed senior mafia members. “You will pay and there will be blood,” the letter reads.      

At times I find that I’m in a writing mood, yet I have nothing to write about. Tonight happens to be one of those.

My life isn’t particularly interesting—in fact I rarely, if ever, have anything worth sharing with other people, so a personal blog in my case is a fairly pointless investment, isn’t it? I don’t know a whole lot about the world. There is an infinite amount of information that can be acquired and I know only a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of it. How minuscule we are in relation to the world and history and time and space. I figure, though, that the existence of myself is something I’m actually well aware of and I am substantially familiar with my views, so because of my writing mood, that is what I will compose of this evening.

Today I took a sort of test that determined which of the two major political parties I belong to. The results? Republican. Moderately expressed, I suppose. Personally, though, I don’t want to be put into any civil group, as my views are subject to alteration, and because I feel that once one is labeled as such, one subconsciously strives to be as such. I want to remain as politically unbiased as I possibly can.

I believe many aspects of the American government (or rather, governments in general) are undesirable but I also believe that changing them would either be incredibly difficult or simply impossible. Idealistically speaking, governments would not be as corrupt or absolutely fucked up as the majority (if not all) of them are. Realistically speaking, governing a large body of persons is an impressively strenuous, complicated business that requires some grandiose goals and an absolutely ridiculous amount of money, which explains why America’s debt is so severely astronomical and why corruption and idiocy spread like cancer.

I do realize what the purposes of governments are, why it is entirely necessary to have one… But being the negative idealist I am, I constantly recognize my cognitive processes in respect to the government as being hypothetical and even somewhat pathetic, in that I am so unjustly pessimistic and utterly ignorant. This is why I end this here and move on. I’ll educate myself more in such matters before I get bashed for trying to develop my ideas now.

“Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.” -Gore Vidal

So Ed Tomlinson, a UK Church of England vicar, has been ripping in to secular funerals. He himself is looking forward to the “gorgeous liturgy of the requiem mass. . . . Whereas the best our secularist friends (and those they dupe) can hope for is a poem from nan combined with a saccharine message from a pop star before being popped in the oven with no hope of resurrection.”

The TimesOnline says Tomlinson is the “vicar of St Barnabas’s Church in Tunbridge Wells, a ‘Forward in Faith’ parish that rejects the ministry of women priests.”

Sour grapes

Sounds like sour grapes to me. Because he also laments that “priests are no longer in demand.” “It is another significant sign of how Britain is becoming an increasingly secular society.” Funerals are being placed “in the hands of humanist provider(s).”

He claims to see a positive side to this:

“And yet there is a positive side to this if I am honest. In the last few years it has become painfully obvious that many families I have conducted funerals for have absolutely no desire for any Christian content whatsoever. I have then stood at the Crem like a lemon, wondering why on earth I am present at the funeral of somebody led in by the tunes of Tina Turner, summed up in pithy platitudes of sentimental and secular poets and sent into the furnace with ‘I did it my way’ blaring out across the speakers! To be brutally honest I can think of a hundred better ways of spending my time as a priest on God’s earth. What is the point of my being present if spiritually unwanted?”

But he reveals what are probably the real reasons for his regrets – which are no doubt shared by others in his profession:

“I am saddened to discover yet another arena of life in which the church is moved from the centre to the margins. I am equally troubled that pastoral care is being left in the hands of those whose main aim is to make money. And I am further concerned that an opportunity for evangelism is slipping through our fingers.”

We want genuine funerals

Well, Ed, I think evangelism is one of the reason for the growing trend towards secular funerals. People have got fed up with ceremonies full of irrelevant supernatual mythology, paternalistic assumptions about the “faith” of the mourners (and the deceased) and the lack of any real concern or respect for the deceased. Today we want to have a genuine celebration of that life.

Many of us now have a mature attitude towards death and find the appeals to a supernatural afterlife more disrespectful than comforting. I have certainly found today’s “secular” funerals far more genuine than the old religious ones. They provide more opportunity for the celebration of the life being remembered. And the ceremonies are therefore often more beautiful and moving for this.

It’s also a bit rich for Tomlinson to charge that humanist and other secular celebrants “main aim is to make money.” This coming from a representative of an institution that always has its hands out, that invents supernatural demands for their congregation to tithe and cynically claims tax exemption for their religious income and work.

My own funeral

Perhaps its a sign of age, but I have thought about what I would like for my own funeral. I have no objection to undertakers, caterers, etc. being paid appropriately. However, no priest or other religious official, or their church,  will get a cent from my estate. Nor will any political party. There will not be any official role for those organisations. I have no wish for such a cynical use of this occasion.

And, yes, I hope it will be beautiful and moving. I want the music to include pieces from Verdi’s Requium Mass. Sure, it has a religious content – but should we reject great music, operas, etc., because they are about fairy tales, the Greek gods, etc? It is beautiful music, part of a culture that belongs to all of us – religious and non-religious alike. Surely that is reinforced by the fact that Verdi himself was a non-believer.

And, perhaps I will even ask for it to be held in a beautiful building – like an old church. After all, I have helped to finance these building through my taxes over the years. And, again they are part of our culture.

See also:

Planning ahead
These posts from ed Tomlinson’s blog:
The death of death…
Clarification on funerals
Dealing with the press
A Humanist response: BHA defends humanist funerals

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Regina (Electoral Commission) v City of Westminster Magistrates’ Court (United Kingdom Independence Party intervening) [2009] EWCA Civ 1078; [2009] WLR (D) 299

CA: Waller, Goldring LJJ, Sir Paul Kennedy:
19 October 2009

It seems that the “face” of mainstream news sources has changed over the years. News sources, perhaps, have adapted to new realities. Perhaps the  public wants news, propaganda and a peek into the private life of public officials.

There was a time when news sources avoided targeting the personal lives of public officials. That changed, in my opinion, after a public official, whose personal life had been whispered about, “dared” the press to prove those whispers.

The press took the “dare” – found the targeted news information – and published  it. That public official, then running for public office – stopped running. I did not recall the name of the public official, so, once again I visited the still “FREE” Internet. And what I found “Jogged” my memory:

Blitzer listed three sex scandals: former President Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky (1998), former Sen. Gary Hart’s (D-CO) liaison with Donna Rice (1987), and former House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Wilbur Mills’ (D-AR) involvement with Fanne Foxe (1974). …

http://mediamatters.org/research/200705050002

The above excerpt came from a post by MEDIA MATTERS FOR AMERICA. Originally Wolf Blitzer via the CNN news source published a list of Washington sex scandals. But a reader of Mr. Blitzer’s post via CNN would think that Republicans actually adhered to a “FAMILY VALUES” theme from long ago.

However, MEDIAMATTERS filled a void left by Mr. Blitzer and CNN. For some reason, the Republican’s numerous sex scandals were not included in the post by Mr. Blitzer and CNN.

But the name I was trying to recall was, “ Gary Hart”.

But that list containing Gary Hart’s name seems to have been filtered by political party. News sources of today seem to be more political than yester-years news sources. A news source empire of today could possibly exert a great deal of political control over a targeted population if that population failed to properly “process” the input news information.

And news sources seems to have added a new news category – “sensationalism” while retaining the old categories of “inform” and “persuade”. Although journalism is parent of those two siblings, inform and persuade, one sometimes has to wonder how such dissimilar “siblings” could have the same parent – journalism.

So, as usual, the American ombudsmen(the American voters) should avoid taking “wooden” nickels.