There has  been a lot of debate about whether Bush and cronies should be prosecuted for serious crimes committed during there time in power. I have always been in favor of a full investigation followed by any prosecutions that are warrented. Obama and his people have repeatly agreed with this in a half-hearted way but then said something like “But we would rather look to the future”. Well, that is nice but all criminal prosecution “looks to the past.” They have also suggested that the Bush and crew had advice from lawyers that provided a legal basis for their actions. They thought they were doing the right thing, we were in a war, they told the Congress what they were doing etc.

I recently read an article that really laid it all out clearly. The US signed a treaty which has the force of US law which clearly states that torture will be prosecuted, period. Being in a war is not an excuse. Legal fig leaves are not an excuse. Follow orders is not an excuse.

As far as the defintion of torture, the US prosecuted enemy soldiers after World War Two for water boarding. They also prosecuted lawyers who gave legal opinions to support the crimes of the enemy soldiers.

Recent revelations make it clear that the orderd for US torture came from the White House. It seems pretty clear that a crime has been committed by Bush and his top advisors such as Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc. A Justice Department report has castigated John Yoo, one of the Bush lawyers, for giving legal advice that cited no previous case law or precedence.

The US MUST prosecute George W Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld for the crime of torture. If the Obama adminstration does not feel that we should “look back” and pursue these criminals, then they should stand back while they are prosecuted. Then Obama can pardon them and we can get on with our Democracy.

If this does not happen, then it will be proof that there are two systems of law in this country. One for the powerful and one for everyone else.

I recently read an article about potential relative influence of the father’s genes versus the mother’s genes on a developing embryo.

The theory held that the best outcome from the father’s point of view would be for the child to be as big as possible at birth to give it the best survival chance. The child’s personality should be demanding of the mother’s time and energy and not particular concerned with other children of the mother because they might not have the same father.

On the other hand, the mother’s best outcome would be for a lower birthweight baby which would have made less demands on the mother physically during the pregnancy. After birth the child should be less demanding on the mother’s time and energy and more sensitive to the needs of other children because they all have the same mother.

Taken to the extreme, the predominance of the father’s genes could potentially lead to autistic individuals who are oblivious to the social cues that signal needs and concerns of other. The extreme result of the mother’s genes could be schizophrenia where great sensitivity to the world overwhelms the individual.

I was fascinated by this conjuction of genetics, embryology, physiology, physchology, sociology and pathology.

Aside from the obvious problems with diet and health care, poverty is bad for your health.

Research shows that the greater the disparity between the rich and poor, the greater the disparity between life expectancy when other factors have been taken into account. The belief is that there is a pyschological burden in being very poor when there are very rich people around.

Apparently beauty can be beneficial to health. The rich can afford to surround themselve with beautiful objects but the poor must live in squalor. When they fall ill, their surroundings do not help them recover.

The rich can select their environment and insure that nothing noxious occurs there. The poor find themselves living next to factory smoke stacks, landfills, sewage plants, etc. These are bound to be bad for their health.

With all of this, the poor serve as a breeding ground for illness that may leap to more affluent populations. Without health insurance, they fill emergency rooms, increasing the burdent on an already collapsing health care system in our country.

And finally, when hope is gone and desparation the normal emotion, the poor also become a breeding ground for violence, crime, terrorism and revolution.

It is in the best self interest of us all to do what we can to allievate poverty least it bring down our civilization around our ears.

One of the problems that I have in understanding many religious traditions is that such a great gulf of time separates their origins from our present time. The people who witnessed the birth of an ancient religion saw the world very differently than we do. It is difficult for us to understand how they might have experienced the events that have come down to us through the centuries.

The idea that Jesus served as the scapegoat for the whole human race is the center piece of Christianity. What did this mean to the Jewish people of the 1st century?

The scapegoat was a Jewish tradition where they symbolically put the sins of the community on a young and innocent goat or lamb. Then they sacrificed the animal and offered the blood to Yahweh to wash away their sins. The story told in the Christian bible is that Jesus voluntarily went to the cross in sacrifice so his blood would atone for our sins.

In the early part of the 4th century CE, Arius, a presbyter from Alexandria promoted the idea that Jesus was human and was inhabited by the spirit of God. The spirit of God left him as he hung on the cross and he died as a man to atone for our sins. One of the things that Jesus is reported to have said on the cross is “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani” which is Aramaic for “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me.” This makes sense in the context of the scapegoat.

Arianism Read the rest of this entry »

We hear a lot these days about the fabulous growth of China, booming, bustling, shipping products to the world and building up a huge trade imbalance with the US. We see images of skyscrapers, factories, stock exchanges, restaurants, theaters, a vital middle class. We are told that they are beating us as our own game of manufacture and trade so we have to work harder, take wage cuts, etc. They are hosting the Olympics in 2008 and Beijing is getting a face lift for the occasion. We are warned that they are building their military machine and will be challenging our status as the only superpower soon.

What is not being so loudly trumpeted in the media is the downside of the Chinese Miracle. 17 out of the 20 most polluted cities in the world are in China. They are building coal fired power plants at the rate of two a week and the pollutions sometimes reaches all the way to our West Coast. Hundreds of thousands of people are dying each year because of pollution.

For every Chinese rising to the middle class there are tens of thousands still mired in poverty. In one recent year, millions of people took part in 80,000 protests, many of which turned violent. Money which should have gone to villagers in the countryside for rice is being diverted by the provincial governors for development projects, many of which drive the peasants off the land. People are being enslaved in the countryside to work in the mines. Corruption is rampant in the government and the people are well aware of it.

The infanticide of female babies because of the one child per family law has led to an imbalance in the birth rates of male and female children resulting in tens of thousands of poor men who have no hope of a wife and family. The teeming millions working the factories have little to no protection from job hazards, abuse, and exploitation.

The air pollution in Beijing is terrible and even shutting down manufacture and most transportation in Beijing for the Olympics may not do much to reduce it. One million peasants have been brought in to clean up Beijing for the Olympics and their working conditions are terrible.

The recent earthquake that devastated China brought demonstrations by distraught parents bitter about the substandard building practices that had contributed to the deaths of many children. And many of the dams that are damaged and threatening to burst were built over objections that they were sited in a seismically active area. The government is under heavy and much deserved criticism for these failures to protect the welfare of the people.

Mao came to power because he promised the peasants that they would have enough to eat and would be treated fairly. The current rulers of China could care less about ideology and they have broken Mao’s pledge to the peasants. China is going to have to pay some very heavy dues before they because a stable and prosperous society.