Civil War (n): Something that is absolutely not, Not, NOT happening in Iraq. (but something Fox News apparently wants desperately to happen in the US) Civil war is a conflict in which groups within a single country fight for separation, dominance or control from or of said nation. Iraq is merely in the grip of a faith-based inter-sectarian violent contention of differing opinions involving or impacting on a mere 99% of the country. By this same definition, World War II was simply an uncommonly open and widespread exchange of divergent and asymmetrical geopolitical views.

Ass (n): In Biblical terms, a donkey, as in: “…and Mary rode Joseph’s ass all the way to Jerusalem.” (which may also be the first recorded example of PMS) In Right Wing Republican politician terms, that upon which everyone has sat, except a man.

Army (n): A large group of armed men and women that President George W. Bush once swore, in April of 1999, “ought not to be used for what’s called nation-building.” And they weren’t. They were used to destroy one instead. The Army’s recruiting slogan has been, for some time, “Be all you can be.” In the wake of the Pat Tillerman and Jessica Lynch debacles, it has been suggested that this catchphrase be altered to read: “Be all you can be; we’ll invent the rest.”

Here are some facts for you to masticate, unless you’re one of probably 65 to 70% of those Americans who don’t know what that word means.
Almost half of Americans believe that Christianity is older than Judaism. As Bill Maher once observed, they were confronted with the Bible containing the Old Testament and the New Testament and couldn’t figure out which one came first.
24% of Americans can’t name the country the US fought against during the Revolutionary War.
A full 2/3rds of Yanks don’t know what Rove v. Wade refers to.
Another 2/3rds haven’t a clue what the Food and Drug Administration does.
Almost half of Americans polled don’t know that each state has two Senators and most couldn’t name any of their own Congressmen.
Many Americans think that foreign aid consumes almost a quarter of the Federal budget. (Hint: it is around 1%)
A staggering 18% think that the sun revolves around the earth.
2/3rds of Americans can’t tell you when the Civil War took place.
42% can’t name a single country in Asia.
A third of the nation thinks that Franklin Roosevelt was president during the Viet Nam war.
And let’s not forget the number of people who don’t want a public option for health care because that would be “socialism” while simultaneously using the services of Medicare and the Veteran’s Administration, both of which are run by the government, or that 49% of those who bothered to vote, actually voted for George W. Bush twice.
A Creation Museum in Ohio which opened in 2007 actually has animatronic dinosaurs and children playing together. According to the museum, dinosaurs survived the Great Flood and were around until relatively recently. Although the word ‘dinosaur’ wasn’t coined until 1841, prior to that these creatures were referred to as ‘dragons.’ How, asked Alec Russel, a reporter for the Daily Telegraph, were such enormous creatures able to be crammed into Noah’s Ark? Says museum guide Ken Ham, “They only took young dinosaurs on board.”

So here’s my question. Why are some Americans so staggeringly stupid?

And before you accuse me of whipping unseemly on Americans, let me be the first to point out that you’re not alone. Pervev
Hoodbhoy, professor of physics at Quaid-e-Azem University in Islamabad, wrote the following in the Washington Post in 2002:

“A former chairman of my physics department in Islamabad has calculated the speed of heaven. He maintains it is receding from earth at one centimetre per second less than the speed of light. His ingenious method relies upon a verse in the Islamic holy book which says that worship on the night on which the book was revealed is worth a thousand nights of ordinary worship. He states that this amounts to a time-dialation factor of 1000, which he puts into a formula of Einstein’s theory of special relativity.
One of the two Pakistani nuclear engineers who was recently arrested on suspicion of passing nuclear secrets to the Taliban had earlier proposed to solve Pakistan’s energy problems by harnessing the power of genies. He relied on the Islamic belief that God created man from clay, and angels and genies from fire, so this high-placed engineer proposed to capture the genies and extract their energy.”

The French feminist critic, Luce Irigaray, has proclaimed Einstein’s E=Mc2 equation to be a “sexed equation” because it “privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us.” She has suggested that pure mathematics is biased due to its inherent “sexist” concern with closed spaces rather than the “partially open” structures apparently only visible to the subtler female mind.

First, let’s define the genre. Ignorance is not stupidity, but simply a lack of knowledge. I myself am quite well informed on a number of subjects and almost frighteningly ignorant of others. However, I can ameliorate my ignorance by study. Stupidity is a different story. It is, in my opinion anyway, the willful ignorance of a subject, combined with the public espousal of opinions on that subject that are based on misinformation or outright bullshit. When a person rants at the public option in health care being socialism and in the next breath warns the president to keep his hands of his Medicare, that is outright stupidity. When someone shouts down a Congressman at a town meeting with outright falsehoods, proudly proclaiming that he got his information from that hemorrhoid of a man, Glenn Beck, that is blatant stupidity.
Stupidity requires that the facts be readily available but that the person in question is either too lazy to seek them out or doesn’t wish to have the facts confound his preconceived notions or prejudices of a subject. To have to reconcile the facts with misinformation or personal bigotries would require one to examine one’s own stance on a subject which would lead to the horror of abstract thought or the terrifying possibility that the Becks, Limbaughs and Hannities of the world have been lying to you which, to the average right-wing person of the Republican pursuation, would be anathema. Stupidity is the acceptance of an opinion as fact not because it is verifiable, but because of who said it. Most stupid people get their opinions off the rack rather than tailor them themselves. Now speaking personally, I would be disinclined to take the words out of anyone elses’ mouth. It’s very unsanitary and in the case of Limbaugh or Coulter, you can never know where they’ve been.
Unfortunately, America was saddled for eight years with a president who popularized stupidity, a man who was willfully ignorant and seemingly inordinately proud to be so. Dubya himself was not a mental defect - his SAT scores were quite high - in the upper ten percent. His ignorance was a choice because it was easier than becoming educated. This lead to such statements as the jury still “being out” on the subject of evolution.
What jury, where. The Scopes trial ended many decades ago…
Here we may make an excursus on the subject of religion. Religion is the faith in things unprovable and unseen, for which I have no particular axe to grind. However, Creationism is stupidity. This is because it claims to be a science without applying the scientific method to its assertions. In order to believe that the earth is between 6000 and 17,000 years of age, (as Sarah Palin claims) one must essentially discard the evidence to the contrary from biology, zoology, archeology, paleontology, geology, astronomy, physics, etc. One of the prime attributes of stupidity is that it cannot stand to be contradicted and insists, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that it is right.

“The earth was created in six days. God did it, end of story.”
“Where’s your proof, your empirical evidence of that claim?”
“God said so.”
“And where’s your proof that God even exists?”
“What are you? Some kind of Satanistic Liberal commie?”

Another feature of stupidity is that it seeks to prove its points by not simply ignoring but re-writing facts. The so-called “death panel” provision in HR 3200 is a case in point. Read the relevant section and you will find that it refers to living wills and the right of a person to leave instructions to not resuscitate or use extraordinary measures to prolong life if the person in question is in an irreversible coma or a vegetative state together with the physician’s responsibility to discuss such things with the families involved. Somehow this got translated into pulling the plug on granny. A recent Gallup poll showed that the largest number of opponents of health care reform come from the southern States which have the highest number of people uninsured. So we can see another function of stupidity - the ability to act against your own self-interests. But one might recall that these are also the same people that were bribed by the Bush administration into voting Republican by a $250 dollar tax rebate and ended up with two wars and the highest National Debt and deficit in history. It’s never amazing to realize that most people can be bribed, but just how low some people’s prices appear to be.

Everyone knows the term “functional illiteracy” and to what it refers. There’s another classification, “functional incompetency,” which is defined as the lack of knowledge of the forces, political, economic and otherwise, that directly impinge on a person’s day-to-day existence. When you get your news from Fox, you economic knowledge from Jim Cramer and your political opinions from Glenn Beck, then I would argue that you are functionally incompetent.

It is often said that stupidity is its own punishment and that people get the government they deserve. Well, nowadays, the US has finally gotten the government it not only deserves but desperately needs. And yet, there are many who are trying to return it to the days when America got the government the stupid deserved. The question now remains: are you going to let them?

It’s extremely rare that you can look at a nation that’s teetering on the verge of outright anarchy, whose infrastructure is in utter disarray, whose economy is in the toilet and whose people in despair and point to a single person as, if not the singular cause, at least the person who put the wheels of destruction in motion. When you look at the United States under Bush, you realize that Bush himself was not the sole motivator of the mess the Republicans are now doing their best to prevent President Obama from cleaning up but simply the facilitator. Behind him was a veritable cabal of venal bastards working late into the night to line the pockets of the rich and incorporate at the expense of nation. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove, LeMay, Wolfowitz, et al. Iraq is a different story.
Prior to the invasion, Iraq had a constitutional government since 1922, and its current Constitution was adopted in 1970, a full nine years before Saddam Hussein seized power. This constitution guarenteed freedom of religion, expression and association as well as equality before the law regardless of gender, religous affiliation, social status, etc. It also guaranteed free education up to and including a university education. It also guaranteed free access to all medical care. And it simply didn’t guarantee these things - it delivered them, even under the rule of Saddam. Before the first Gulf War in 1991, Iraq as a nation was ranked 15th out of 130 countries on the United Nations Human Development Index which stated that this was “a reflection of the Government’s continued investment in basic social services.” At that time, Iraq had the highest number of college-educated citizens in the entire Middle East. The World Health Organization noted that health care reached approximately 97% of the urban population and 78% of the rural population and also that 90% of its citizens had access to safe drinking water. Even after the depredations of 12 years of economic sanctions, even with a brutal tyrant as its head of state, Iraq was still managing to run its internal affairs in as much a business-as-usual manner as the sanctions would allow. This was pretty much entirely due to the fact that the various non-military agencies and government departments were being run by highly educated and experienced people.
Then came the war. Saddam was ousted - a good thing - and in came the US ProConsul, Paul Bremer, and everything went to hell in a handbag.
Bremer essentially overturned the existing government infrastructure and began restructuring the Iraqi economy, courts and constitution in a manner intended to turn Iraq into a market economy for the benefit of US corporations as soon as possible. To this end, Bremer began issuing Orders like someone who knew what they were doing.
Order #1, issued May 16th of 2003, required the “de-Ba’athification of Iraqi society.” All members of the Ba’ath party in the upper three levels of government institutions and corporations were immediately pink-slipped. Ostensibly, this was to purge all infulence of the Ba’ath party from government infrastrcture, sweeping away (they thought) Saddam party loyalists. Not once, its seems, did Bremer ever consider that membership in the Ba’ath party was mandatory in order to hold any position of authority in government or the civil service, in much the same way that membership in the Communist party was mandatory in order to hold similar positions in the old Soviet Union.
So, with the stroke of a pen, over 120,000 Iraqi civil servants, engineers, doctors, scientists, university professors, etceteras, were all removed from their positions - the very people who, by dint of their education and experience, were the ones who had previously been keeping the nation and its various institutions running.
After things fell all to hell, Bremer issued CPA Memorandum #8 which mandated a case-by-case review of those former job holders who wished to return to their positions, but the process was stymied by political nepotism and by that time, most of the people who had been fired had left the country to find work elsewhere. These included Iraq’s nuclear scientists, many of whom are now working for the very nations we really don’t want creating a viable nuclear program.

Order #2, issued May 23, 2003, dissolved the entire Iraqi army, including its intelligence services. This numbered almost half a million men who were now out of work, with no way to support their families, and all trained and armed. Lord knows how many joined the fledgling insurgency. The deputy Iraqi ambassador to the UN, Faisal al-Istrabadi, put it succinctly:
“I don’t understand why you took 400,000 men who are highly armed and trained and turn them into your enemies.”
Why indeed? The thing is that this wasn’t in the original game plan which had called for only around 9000 senior officers plus the Special Forces to be de-BA’athed. Bremer apparently took it upon himself to throw the entire army out into the street. When you consider the number of dependents involved, essentially Order #2 created 2.4 million enemies in a single day.

Order #12, issued June 7, 2003, created a “Trade Liberalization Policy.” At least that’s what Bremer called it. I call it “Iraq is Now Our Bitch Policy.” This order, in its own words, suspended “all tariffs, customs duties, import taxes, licensing fees and similar surcharges for goods entering or leaving Iraq.” Essentially all protective barriers designed to shield domestically produced goods, including food, were torn down overnight, leaving Iraqi business to compete with cheap (or not-so-cheap) foreign imports.
This was particularly devastating to Iraqi farmers. Although Iraq hasn’t been self-sufficient in food production since the ’50’s, Iraqi farmers had a competitive leg-up due to the government subsidizing agriculture. Crucial articles such as seeds and fertilizer, farm machinery, etc, was subsidized often at up to one fourth the open market price. The government had also leased land to farmers, if you’ll excuse the pun, dirt cheap, often as low as one cent per six-tenths of an acre for a year. The government also ran a guaranteed food program that included monthly family packages of flour, sugar, etc.
No more, Jack. The Bremer regime considered subsidized farming “all wrong.” If you merely educated the farmers (who have been farming this region for untold generations) and provided them with the technology, “the market will take care of the rest.”
Well, when cheap, untaxed goods start to flood the market and local farmers can’t compete and start going under, you might notice two things. First, since they’re having a hard time making a living since the only way they can compete with the cheaper goods is to undercut them in price, they can’t afford the technology they’re being offered at regular market price. And when people can’t afford to buy, especially with unemployment at an historic high and prices of certain commodities much higher than pre-invasion, the sacred free market pretty much falls to hell and is replaced by an underground economy.

Order #17, revised on June 27, 2004, is nothing short of hideous. Essentially, this grants full immunity from prosecution in an Iraqi court of law to all members of the Coalition forces and all foreign contractors including scum like Blackwater. This order basically declared open season on Iraqi citizens - military forces and private security companies could literally commit murder and have done so. Contractors could pollute and do third-rate work that would never pass muster in their home countries. Oh, but if any Iraqi has a legitimate grievance, they can always seek justice in the courts of the offending person’s nationality.
Right … that’ll happen. Ask any North American Indian what it’s like to use the white man’s legal system to prove that the lands he stole from you don’t belong to him. Adam Price, a British MP put it another way:
“How is anyone in Iraq expected to bring a case in the British courts? It is taking the idea of diplomatic immunity and applying it to 130,000 troops. There is a danger that you are actually going from immunity to being able to act with impunity.”
That’s exactly what it was and still is to this day because Bremer specifically excluded Order 17 from being rescinded by Iraqi PM Iyad Allawi when power was supposedly handed over to an equally supposedly democratically elected government.

Order #37, issued Sept. 19, 2003, completed ammended Iraqs’ previous tax code. Prior to the invasion, corporate tax could be as high as 40%. With Order 37, this dropped to 15%. In fact, it created a flat tax of 15% that was applied across the board. The guy who buses tables at the Baghdad Holiday Inn pays exactly the same rate as the Prime Minister. The Yanks couldn’t get away with this in their own country so they decided to inflict it on Iraq.

Order #39, issued Sept. 19, 2003, mandated the privatization of all formerly nationally owned businesses, together with 100% foreign ownership of said businesses with no preferential treatment of domestic businesses over foreign ones. It also provided for unrestricted, tax-free remittance of all profits and other funds. It further mandated 40-year leasing periods and the right to move legal disputes out of Iraqi jurisdiction and into international tribunes. Basically, this order created a corporate tax haven and, for all intents and purposes, relegated Iraq to the status of the Caymans and Sechelles. It created a back door to the whore house Bremer was constructing; a veritable free-market capitalist’s wet dream.
Although this order specifically excluded oil extraction and processing from privatization, it does allow for the privatization of things formerly guaranteed by the Iraqi constitution prior to the invasion, specifically Articles 11, 27 and 33 which guarantee maternal, child and medical care and free education. Problem is that violating these articles is specifically forbidden under the Hague Reulations. Fortunately for Iraqis, the Bush administration was a staunch believer in upholding international agreements to which they’d previously been signatories…
And of course, Bremer himself, apparently a fan of irony, had gone on record in November of 2001 as stating “Privatization of basic services, for example, almost always lead to price increases for those services which in turn often lead to protests or even physical violence against the operator.” Or, Paul, its nearest surrogate or enabler, in this case, the US and Coalition forces.

Order #40, issued Sept. 19, 2003, and then amended to Order #94 (June 6, 2004) essentially created a whore house of the Iraqi banking system by spreading its knees to foreign ownership. Under Order 40, the percentage of an Iraqi bank and the number of banks that could be owned by foreign institutions was limited to 50% and 6. No more. Now it became 100%. Nor could the Iraqi government require a certain number of financial institutions be owned by Iraqis. Consumer protection such as exists in the US through legislation such as the Truth in Lending Act, or the Community Reinvestment Act are totally lacking. As a result, individuals and small businesses are getting screwed on loans - if they get them at all.

Order #62, issued Feb. 26, 2004, restricts Iraqis from running for public office locally, regionally or nationally, without first receiving the CPA’s imprimatur. This stamp of approval could be withheld if, for instance, one had publicly opposed the occupation. This order was rescinded prior to the handover of power to the newly elected government, presumably because Bremer didn’t want such authority to be transferred to the new Prime Minister.

And so on and so on. We won’t even go into Order #14 that defined “prohibited media activity” which essentially meant that any TV or radio station or any newspaper that had the temerity to criticize the occupation or the utterly corrupt and incompetent reconstruction would find its doors padlocked and, more often than not, their offices trashed. Or that 40% of Iraq’s professional class have fled the country, including on third of all its doctors,(or that since 2003, over 2000 doctors have been murdered) or that 1.6 million citizens have been displaced within Iraq or that 1.8 million have bugged out entirely, or that school attendance has dropped from its pre-invasion figure of almost 100% to 30%. We’ll just gloss over the fact that the over 620,000 who got sacked as a direct result of Orders 1 and 2 were receiving a CPA mandated “half-pay” at a time when other orders were causing inflation to rise at unprecedented rates (over 36% shortly after Bremer started issuing his encyclicals) and that any form of government-run safety net had been summarily terminated. Or that unemployment, depending on the industry in question, was running at between 50 and 70%. Or that in the capital city itself, electricity was only available for around three hours a day.

The CPA consisted of around 800 people, 17 of which actually spoke Arabic and only one of whom could have been considered an expert on Iraq, (hint: it wasn’t Bremer) all living in total isolation from the rest of the country, and apparently allowed by the Bush administration to run amok, issuing orders that totally destroyed a workable constitution and an entirely functional government infrastructure, created enemies of over 400,000 armed men and drove out almost every citizen with an education above a GED. Paul Bremer, more than anyone else (apart from Bush and the sleazy cabal that lied the nation into this utterly unnecessary war and totally incompetently run occupation) created the Iraq we see today, along with the suffering, death and deprivation inflicted on its citizens. I would even go so far as to say that his incompetence is responsible for a large portion of the US’s combat deaths and casualties.

So, naturally, President Bush bestowed upon him the Medal of Freedom.

Kind of wonder where the previous administration’s priorities lay, doesn’t it.

Or maybe not so much…

SIDWINDER, whose official name was “Chinese Intelligence Services and Triad Financial Links in Canada,” was a 1994-6 joint Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) - RCMP investigation into allegations of influence exerted on Canadian politicians by Chinese organized crime, specifically in the Canadian embassy in Hong Kong. This penetration and corruption was brought out in 1999 by forer Foreign Services officer, Brian McAdam. He was follwed by RCMP corporal Robert Read who eventually made the investigation public after becoming frustrated by what he described in a National Post interview with Anne Marie Owens as “…an obstruction of justice by my superiors.” The same article states “There were allegations that the staff at the High Commission accepted $10,000 bribes in exchange for approval to move to Canada, and that Asian gang members had compromised the embassy’s immigration computer system.”

Prior to its completion, the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) had the investigation shut down. Shortly after this, CSIS re-issued a watered-down version of the final report under the name ECHO. A subsequent investigation into SIDEWINDER by the Security Intelligence Review Committee was also de-railed.

The then-director of CSIS, Ward Elcock, in a 2001 interview with Jim Banskill of Southam News, claimed that the original report contained unsubstantiated “consiracy theories” and further, that SIDEWINDER was not really “an investigation,” but rather an analytical exercise.

That would have been news to the FBI who was conducting its own investigation at the time. Then-Director Robert Mueller, in his Congressional report of 2003 stated “Left unchecked, such a situation could greatly undermine US national security.”

Of course, this begs the question of why Prime Minister Chretien would have interfered with an investigation with such national security implications to both countries.

One of the chiefl individuals of teh SIDEWINDER probe was billionair Li Ka-Shing who owned a substantial part of Gordon Securities for who Chretien worked prior to taking ove the Federal Liberal Party.

According to an article by Ann Jane Grey in April-June 2003 edition of Watchdog, Gordon Securities itself was used in SIDEWINDER as a case study of companies whose links with China “were clearly worrying for Canada’s national security.” During his tenure with Gordon Securities, Chretien was made international relations adviser to a Calgary-based company, PetroKasakhstan, who was seeking to increase their exports to China.

Then, there’s Chretien’s son-in-law, Andre Desmarais, whose company, PowerCorp, does a lot of business with China. So much so, that he (along with Li Ka-Shing) sit on the board of directors for China International Trust and Incestment Group Corp. (CITIC) The problem here is that CITIC has been identified by intelligence agencies as a front corporation for the Chinese military. Additionally, after having been appointed by CHina as the director of CITIC Pacific, Demarais was allowed to obtain 4.2% of the company’s shares.

According to a declassified CSIS report published in November of 2003, in order to become partially self-financing, the Chinese military was allowed to enter into buisness-for-profit enterprises in the late 1980’s. By the ’90’s the People’s Liberation Army, (PLA) had listed over 20,000 companies. In 1998 they began to divest, but many of these comapnies are still being run by people with direct or signficant ties to the PLA.

NORINCO is a case in point. A major supplier to WalMart of things like shoes, toys and auto parts, it also got slapped in May of 2003 with a two-year import ban by the US State Department for selling rocket fuel and missile components to the Shahid Hemmat Industrial Group of Iran.

Aslo according to the CSIS report, the Shandong Arts and Crafts Corp. was investigated for selling missile guidance components to Iraq as late as 2001.

Closer to home, a CanadaFreePress.com article by Judi McLeod on January 26th of 2005 reveals the Port of Vancouver as a gateway to COSCO, a Chinese state-owned shipping company that has been described by both Canadian and US military intelligence as the “Merchant Marine for China’s military.” The article stated that COSCO has been caught smuggling assault rifles into California (Bush’s Homeland Security making America safer…) and had also provided bio-chemical weapons components to North Korea, Pakistan, Iraq and Iran.

Since 1997, China has signed many bi-lateral agreements: the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Regulations on Export Control of Military Items, etc. However, it remains to be seen whether Beijing has the political will or even the ability to enforce them.

At the same time the PMO was interfering with SIDEWINDER, Prime Minister Chretien was preparing for his sixth trip to China in seven years. These trips culminated in the sale of two CANDU nuclear reactors to China by Atomic Energy Canada. Ottawa further sweetened the deal by changing legislation to provide China with a tax-payer funded $1.9 billion loan to purchase the reactors.

Surely it must not come as a shock to anyone that other nations conduct both military and industrial espionage in Canada. However, in a Reuters report in the Epoch Times International of June 24th, ‘06, the annual CSIS report to Parliament contained the following advisement: “Despite strong warnings from the government of Canada, certain countries continue to use their intelligence services to manipulate and exploit expatriate communities in Canada.” Furthermore, “Countires enlist or coerce the cooperation of their citizens visiting Canada such as students, scientists, exchange personnel, members of delegations … buisness people, etc.”

Beijing firmly denies this, of course. However, this wouldn’t explain a virtual how-to manual for just such spying uncovered by the Washington Post in 2000. The entire document, (translated into English) - SOURCES AND TECHNIQUES FOR OBTAINING NATIONAL DEFENSE SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY INTELLIGENCE is available online at www.fas.org/irp/world/china/docs/sources.html.

China is rapidly becoming the nation of choice for international arms sales. It’s especially popular among countries that either can’t afford high-priced items or, for political reasons, can no longer access former markets. Pakistan, for instance, recently bought the Chinese F-7 fighter because of the US arms embargo and also because Russia, its former supplier, is developing closer ties to India. This is an important distinction since China regards India as its main South Asian security threat. It therefore appears that Beijing uses the arms trade as leverage to obtain its security goals. It is also a fact that China itself has begun a significant program of re-arming, especially in the venue of nuclear hunter-killer and SLBM submarines and its first true ICBM program.

This fact doesnt’ sit well with CSIS, as evinced by a warning in their 2004 Parlimentary report which stated that China was becoming “most agressive” (note: not ‘more,’ but ‘most’) in obtaining Canadian technologies “putting at risk Canada’s national security.” It went on to specifically identify bio-technology, chemical and nuclear technology.

Recently, the mainstream press has briefly put its focus back on China in the wake of the anniversary of Tienanmin Square. However, in the light of China’s re-armament program and its ambitions for space, I would suggest that we might cast our eye on the Sleeping Dragon with a bit more vigilance.

Santa Claus (pn): AKA, Sinter Klaus, Father Christmas, Jolly Old Saint Nick, etceteras. A rotund gentleman with flowing white hair and beard, dressed in a red fur-trimmed suit who, on Christmas Eve, would fly around the world in a sleigh pulled by magical reindeer, delivering presents to good Christian boys and girls. Remember lying in bed as a child, listening for the sleigh bells and the sound of reindeer hooves on the roof? Remember when you were either told or reasoned for yourself that Santa Claus was simply a pleasant fiction? Now … how many of you understand that the same parents who told you about Santa Claus also told you about God…

There’s been a lot of ballyhooing about the famous Predator Drone, technically named the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle. Built by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems in San Diego, it’s a 27-foot long aircraft with a wingspan of 49 feet. It can be armed with the Hellfire missile and putts along at a staggering 84 miles an hour (less than a Cessna 170) and goes for over $25 million a pop. It was first used in Kosovo and was hailed by that stalwart bastion of veracity, Bill O’Reilly, as “Osama bin Laden’s worst mightmare.

Turns out, not so much. I was reading excerpts from a report penned by Mr. Thomas Christie, the Pentagon’s top systems analyst and testing officer who, as director of DOD’s Operational Test and Evaluation division, should, have a credible opinion of this terror of the skies. He does…

“The system’s limitations have a substantial negative impact on the Predator’s ability to conduct its missions,….(and that) poor target location accuracy, ineffective communications, and limits imposed by relatively benign weather, including rain, negatively impact missions such as strike support, combat search and rescue, area search and continuous coverage.”

Christie’s report concluded “The system is not operationally suitable becaues of the serious deficiencies in reliability, maintainability and human design factors.”

Selah…

This report was slipped under the sheets until finally uncovered by the Project on Government Oversight. There is also mention, from Air Force sources, that since 1995, 17 out of 50 Predators crashed during testing and another five are thought to have been shot down by enemy forces.

The problem with flying in the rain is that the drone apparently becomes disoriented which causes it to lock onto the wrong targets, and also temporarily stops talking to the ground computers that are supposed to be controlling its flight.

It’s also unstable in a stiff wind. How stiff a wind? The kind that’d take your hat off downtown or give minor inconveninece to a single-engine Piper Cub.

Even the Pentagon admits it’s also pretty much useless when flying at night, and, of course, since it flys low and slow, it can be shot down by small-arms fire. Here we have a $25 million-plus UAV that can be shot out of the air by some scruffy Talibanista with a 90-year old bolt-action Lee Enfield. Praise the Lord and pass the millions - your tax dollars at work making America safe.

So the next time you hear about a wedding party being obliterated or some other “collateral damage,” known in English as innocent civilians, being killed, see if a Predator drone was involved. Chances are good that there was.

One of the predominant characteristics of the Ultra-Right Wing that serves to put the “fun” back into fundamentalism is the way in which they promote violent behaviour in the name of the Prince of Peace, apparently harkening back to Luke 22:36 “He that hath no sword, let him sell his garment and buy one.” Although this conjures up a disturbing image of pallid, flabby Evangelicals flapping around in their birthday suits wielding cheap knock-offs from The Lord of the Rings, it’s not quite as amusing as the reality.

Christian Dominionists have marketed a video game called “Left Behind: Eternal Forces,” in which the player is a foot soldier in a paramilitary organization dedicated to remaking America as a Christian theocracy. To this end, the player must convert Catholics, Jews, Muslims, homosexuals and anyone who believes in the separation of church and state. In lieu of converting the aforementioned apostates, the player simply kills them, usually with the phrase “Praise the Lord” as bullets cut down the unrighteous and infidel.

This would seem to slot nicely into the philosophies of people such as Representative Robin Hayes who, while addressing a Rotary Club in Concord in 2006, noted that “stability in Iraq ultimately depends on spreading the message of Jesus Christ.” Whereas on the face of it, this as foreign policy might be considered as effective as spreading the message of the pork industry among Orthodox Jews, one has to admit that while the subtlety and nuance of the spoken word allows for ambiguity and misunderstanding, violence is truly a universal language. Whether one speaks Iraqi, Finnish or Choctaw, the intentions inherent in a baseball bat upside the head are unlikely to be misinterpreted by even the most abstracted or obtuse. Therefore, proponents of Christian Reconstruction or Dominionism may be commended for the clarity and uncommon forthrightness of their message.