Wednesday, September 30, 2015

The true Pope appears


After he had left the U.S. it was revealed Francis 1 had met with the government clerk who would not marry gay people.
The pope tried to compare Kim Davis to a conscientious objector. He truly is a face in the crowd, not above it.
His advisers apparently had not explained to him what a conscientious objector was and how he/she acted.
Or the pope simply has been misleading the world since the days he cooperated with the murderous Argentinian military.
A conscientious objector was a draft-eligible soldier who was given a job that would not require firing a gun or otherwise harming the enemy.
Davis could have done that but refused. Not only wouldn’t she give up her job, she specifically said that any licenses issued without her name would not be legal.
The Roman Catholic church hasn’t changed, and the pope recently praised the same bishops who tolerated the sexual abuse of altar boys and others.
It is no surprise the pope met with Davis secretly, and word of the meeting was only revealed after he left the country. He also prayed with her.
This is likely to be a huge boost for gay haters.
http://insidethevatican.com/news/letter-38-2015-kim-and-francis
“Inside the Vatican” reported:
“Conscientious objection is a right that is a part of every human right. It is a right. And if a person does not allow others to be a conscientious objector, he denies a right. Conscientious objection must enter into every juridical structure because it is a right, a human right. Otherwise we would end up in a situation where we select what is a right, saying ‘this right that has merit, this one does not.’ It (conscientious objection) is a human right.”
“Would that include government officials as well?” “It is a human right and if a government official is a human person, he has that right. It is a human right.” 
No doubt the pope was ill-advised by Vatican staff who know little about American law. No one forced Davis to marry anyone. She could have quit. This is the exact opposite of being a conscientious objector. In such cases those who did not want to fight were not allowed to leave, but forced to do alternative work.
The irony is that conscientious objectors were detested, considered cowards,  in the Bible Belt where gays are so hated and Davis is so admired.
And in the case of Davis she sought the position she now finds anathema. Conscientious objectors were drafted. They had no choice. She created her own problem.
She knew that gay marriage was coming and it would create a conflict. She should have declared to the public that she would not be able to do her job if same-sex marriage became legal.
 





Monday, September 21, 2015

Refugees are not migrants


Twenty million people have fled their homes because of wars in the past decade, but many in the mainstream media choose to call them “migrants.”
The American idea of a migrant was defined in John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of  Wrath,” someone driven from the land by drought or some other economic disaster.
There was no war.
A migrant is “a person who moves regularly in order to find work especially in harvesting crops,” according to Merriam-Webster.
But the BBC and others have conflated the words migrant and refugee.
The BBC even defends its decision with a paragraph in each story: “A note on terminology: The BBC uses the term migrant to refer to all people on the move who have yet to complete the legal process of claiming asylum. This group includes people fleeing war-torn countries such as Syria, who are likely to be granted refugee status, as well as people who are seeking jobs and better lives, who governments are likely to rule are economic migrants.”
It is as if the many millions who have fled from Syria and Libya alone should have used their laptops and wifi to declare themselves asylum seekers.
It is possible it might be necessary to use two words, as much as editors like to keep things short: migrants and refugees.
The crisis is made even more complicated because terrorist groups like ISIS have declared they will infiltrate groups of refugees with their killers to spread their theology.
Technology is available to limit the effectiveness of such groups, such as ankle bracelets and chips inserted in bodies to track asylum seekers.
Instead on one side there are those who say we cannot allow refugees to enter because they will include terrorists and those who like ostriches hide their heads in the sand and refuse to discuss the threat.
Eleanor Acer, director of the refugee advocacy protection program at Human Rights First, this is the “largest refugee crisis since World War II.”
Were Israelis called migrants when they fought their way into Palestine?





Tuesday, September 15, 2015

Climate change: Fire and rain

Issac Cordal sculpture on politicians debating global warming
The Weather Channel admitted the wildfires, and now rain, that are plaguing the West are odd. Few in the mainstream media mentioned climate change.
Donald Trump would probably call it politically incorrect, if he had a teleprompter and read things he had thought about or his staff had thought about.
Critics say there has always been climate change, and global warming has occurred before. Does that mean it should be ignored, even if it makes humans disappear like dinosaurs?
This year a thousand homes have been burned in wildfires in California, Oregon and Washington, made more difficult to fight because of the driest weather in hundreds of years.
On Monday, heavy rain led to flooding on the Utah-Arizona border that claimed an undeterrmined number of lives on both sides of the states' border. Some media say 12 were dead and one missing.

Hildale Flood
Hildale Mayor Phillip Barlow said told the Salt Lake City Tribune the flood is "wakeup call for the community, that this is real.
Los Angeles picked up an inch of rain in 24 hours.
Meanwhile, the snowpack was at the lowest level in 500 years in California.
Heavy rains following wildfires frequently lead to mudslides.
The New York Times reported President Obama’s top climate change negotiator would meet with his Chinese counterpart Tuesday in Los Angeles. Industrial development has been linked to greenhouse gases.
Republicans remain skeptical of climate change and trying to block any deal, the Times reports.
In some Bible Belt states, dominated by Evangelical Christians, even the concept of evolution is considered unproven, Associated Press reported. AP said Alabama has decided to begin teaching about evolution and climate change. The state’s textbooks have said evolution is a “controversial theory.”
"Cooperation on climate change is not only critical to the future of our planet, but a major milestone in the U.S.-China relationship," Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said Monday, according to the Chinese news agency Xinhua.




Sunday, September 13, 2015

"Ignorati" report on Hillary's email


The cat is out of the bag in the Hillary Clinton email affair, though the information was never hidden.
Computer users with even a minimal knowledge of how they work know that deleting files does not remove them from devices.
All that Clinton’s staff ever said was that the emails had been deleted. Now the company that was keeping them has confirmed that the hard drive was never erased or purged.
"All the information we have is that the server wasn't wiped," spokesman Andy Boian told the Washington Post.
That probably means the emails can be retrieved. In fact, even when hard drives have been erased computer forensic experts are often able to restore much or even all of the data.
Asking Clinton, who obviously knows very little about such mundane matters, was a non-started. And many journalists are knowledgeable enough about computers from their own experience to know this search needed to go elsewhere.
Less than a minute’s search Google and other sites would make clear this was not a simple matter.
Even watching TV shows and movies should have made it clear data is almost never totally safe, even if its owners want it that way.
These same talking heads trashed President Obama's health care web site, saying the government couldn't handle something so complicated. Frequent hacks of confidential government web sites have been reported.
The Washington Post is reporting that the company had maintained the server Clinton used says it was never erased before it was handed over to the FBI.
According to the “ignorati” on Twitter and elsewhere, it is already known that the Chinese and Russians must have hacked into this server.
Perhaps it even led to Benghazi, or even Pearl Harbor.
Of course, the question is what was in the emails. The FBI and department of state have made clear no crimes were committed.
Now it should just be matter of time until the whole world can read thousands of them. Of course the second-party in such exchange, there always is more than one person, often several or more, already will have seen them.