Category: Current Affairs (Page 55 of 78)

That is a quote from Titus 1:9 – the name of the blog of the Reverend Canon Dr Kendall Harmon. Dr Harmon is a traditionalist Anglican (ie, he is one of the few who persists in believing the things the whole church believed until about twenty years ago). He has good political sense and writes well.

A few recent stories linked to from his blog:

A brief and interesting interview on the reason for the war in Afghanistan, and what needs to be done to make a long-lasting positive outcome more likely. From PBS’ s Religion and Ethics segment.

An editorial from The Tablet (UK), about the recent conviction of four young Britsh Muslims who had been plotting to blow up planes over the Atlantic. The editorial asks sensible questions about what the Islamic community could do to reduce the growth of radicalism and hatred of the West amongst its members, and about what the wider British community, and especially schools, can do to be more successful in teaching Western values.

And finally, from The Times, an article about a ‘secret annexe’ to this year’s International Atomic Energy Agency report on Iran. The annexe claims that Iran already has the information, materials and technology to build an atomic bomb.

The only thing that is in doubt, apparently, is whether they have the will to do it. Given Imanutjob’s rantings about how blasting the Zionist entity from the face of the Earth would be doing the world a favour, and big chief Ayatollah Ali Khomeni’s claim that an Iranian nuclear arsenal would ‘serve Iran as a deterrent in the hands of God’s soldiers,’  I do not find that doubt very encouraging.

More on this from John Robson, concluding with:

So let me translate those newspaper stories into real world language. The Iranian government is building nuclear weapons so it can blow the Jews off the face of the earth, and our leaders have neither the spine to act nor the wit to perceive their own shameful paralysis. It’s that bad.

The title of this post is a quote, not about Australia’s Liberal and National party leadership (though it could be – more about that later), but from an article about China’s official 60th birthday celebrations.

David Burchell, writing in The Australian, points out that there is something obscene about the massive self-congratulation going on in China.

A society that can only survive with the repression of minority religious and ethnic groups, constant and severe censorship of news and internet access, and the control of every part of its citizens’ lives, has no business congratulating itself on anything.

And then, 36 million Chinese died in the famine of 1959-61. This was not a natural disaster, but the result of deliberate and violently enforced policy to coerce millions out of traditional farming and small scale village industry into collective farms and factories. There is no acknowledgement of this man made disaster in official Chinese literature, or of other lives lost in similarly destructive and similarly enforced policies. Well, of course not. That would spoil the party.

What makes David Burchell’s article worth reading is not that he points these things out – they have been pointed out many times before – but this:

Imagining ourselves to be polite, we Westerners avert our eyes from it all. Yet this peculiar, tasteless spectacle of official China locked in joyless self-communion suits us fine. For in truth we’re no more inclined to be confronted with China’s dirty historical laundry than is the Chinese Communist Party itself.

We’re co-dependents, as the psychoanalysts might say. We belong on the same couch.

It is worth the wait through the annoying ads (and the slow download speed) for this interview between a swish CNN interviewer and a rural US car dealer.

Free AK47 with every truck.

Mr Muller, the dealer, is asked whether giving away AK47s is irresponsible. He talks about a family recently murdered by home invaders.

The interviewer talks about growing up as a teenager in rural America. Mr Muller points out that things have changed in the last 30 years (ouch) and his county has a major problem with meth addicts.

She asks why people cannot just rely on the police. He says the police are great, but the response time to his home is 15 minutes. His family could be dead by the time they got there.

She asks why Mr Muller mentions God in his company motto, and asks whether Jesus would wear a gun. He points out they didn’t have guns then.

The whole interview is brilliant. A clash of cleverness with common sense.

I cannot help wonder whether things might have turned out differently for this Australian family, three adults and two children, bludgeoned to death in their home yesterday, if they had been customers of Mr Muller.

Not in Iran, obviously, even though that election was almost certainly rigged, hundreds of protestors have been killed, arrested or simply ‘disappeared,’ and British embassy staff are to be tried on trumped up charges of stirring up revolt against the government, because the government of Iran is made up of nutjobs who simply refuse to believe that their own people would protest on their own intiative.

Well, why would you meddle ? Everything’s cool there. These are new times. We are speaking a new language of co-operation.  This is change you can believe in.

But get your meddling shoes on and head down to Honduras, baby, cause somethin’s going on down there.

Yes. What went on down there was that the process of law stopped a would be dictator from bending the rules to extend his power and time in office.

In other words, the processes of democracy and law worked.

It can’t be allowed. Something should be done. Or that’s what BO seems to think.