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Wednesday, November 20, 2002
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Donivan Bessinger, MD writes: Which of the realities is true? Can each of them be true, depending entirely on the axis along which we view it? Is truth composite? As weird as all of the realities are, the one most inconsistent with the evidence is the idea that the world can be explained by our experience of ordinary objects. We live in a world, not of ordinary objects put together by "rules" of classic mechanics, but in a new reality which we don't entirely understand. We understand only that we must seek new ways of thinking. ... In the world today many worldviews live side by side. Each of us has a pet idea of reality, our own nugget of truth. Yet even a diamond nugget has many facets. It sparkles best when it is ground, then turned in the light and examined from many angles. One problem is that most of us generally have not been willing to turn the diamond. After all, our particular gem might not sparkle. However, if we are to acquire a satisfactory worldview, we must be prepared to expose reality itself to inquiry, reflection, and to testing. (11/20/02) | |
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Frida Berrigan reported one year ago: Congress is debating a Bush administration defense budget of $343.2 billion, an increase of $32.6 billion over last year. This increase would mean that military spending would account for more than half of all discretionary spending (money that Congress must allocate each year). This is good news to the weapons industry and while pink slips and hiring freezes are spreading like an epidemic from sector to sector, the top weapons manufacturers are awaiting new orders, holding job fairs, planning Initial Public Offerings, raising new capital and gaining new attention on the stock market. As Loren Thompson, a defense analyst with the Lexington Institute, remarked "the whole mind set of military spending changed on Sept. 11. The most fundamental thing about defense spending is that threats drive defense spending. It’s now going to be easier to fund almost anything". So, what better time to be Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman or even the beleaguered Boeing? The war in Afghanistan is an unequivocal success- despite friendly fire incidents, bombing accidents, mounting civilian casualties and the recent crash of a $280 million B-1 bomber- and the Bush administration is already listing new countries targeted for military action, with Somalia, Yemen and Iraq topping the list. It is a good time to be in the war business. (11/20/02) | |
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New York Times -- A broad coalition of religious groups is preparing a grass-roots campaign linking fuel efficiency to morality, with some ads going so far as to ask: "What Would Jesus Drive?" Leaders of the effort are coming to Detroit on Wednesday to meet with William Clay Ford Jr., the chairman and chief executive of the Ford Motor Company. They will also meet with executives at General Motors. "We are under a commandment to be faithful stewards of God's creation," said Paul Gorman, executive director of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment, an umbrella organization of Christian and Jewish groups. "This is a crisis in God's creation at the hands of God's children." Leaders of many groups within the partnership have signed a letter to the Big Three's chief executives asking for improvements in fuel economy. They say they have a biblical mandate to be good stewards of God's creation and a responsibility to the poor who are especially harmed by pollution. And they decry supporting "autocratic, corrupt and violent" governments that produce oil. "We write now to ask you in the automobile industry a more explicit question," the letter said, "what specific pledges — in volume, timing and commitments to marketing — will you make to produce automobiles, S.U.V.'s and pickup trucks with substantially greater fuel economy?" (11/20/02) | |
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New York Times -- The United States Senate voted today to reorganize elements of a scattered federal government around the intensely focused goal of combating terrorism, approving of the creation of a huge Department of Homeland Security that represents Washington's biggest transformation in 50 years. Ending months of rancorous debate on the new department, the Senate approved the bill on a 90-to-9 vote that disguised the deep misgivings many Democrats still harbor about President Bush's design for the agency. ... Not since the Truman Administration upended the nation's defense apparatus to fight the Cold War in 1949 has the government been reshaped so dramatically around a single purpose. Once the department goes into existence 60 days from Mr. Bush's signature, it will slowly begin to absorb 22 of Washington's signature functions, from immigration to border protection, from emergency management to intelligence analysis to the protection of the president himself. A department workforce that could eventually surpass 170,000 employees around the world will answer to a new cabinet secretary - almost certainly Tom Ridge, now the director of the White House Homeland Security office - and they will be required to discard their old departmental loyalties and begin a new cooperation to prevent terrorist attacks and respond to those that occur. (11/20/02) | |
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New York Times -- A stricken tanker carrying millions of gallons of oil split in two and was sinking off northwest Spain today, raising fears of an environmental disaster. The vessel was hit by a storm on Wednesday and began to leak oil. If it loses its entire cargo about 150 miles off the coast, experts say the economic and environmental damage could be greater than that caused by the Exxon Valdez when it spilled oil off Alaska in 1989. (11/20/02) | |
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The Center for Public Integrity -- Amid the global military downsizing and increasing number of small conflicts that followed the end of the Cold War, governments have turned increasingly to private military companies - a recently coined euphemism for mercenaries - to intervene on their behalf. A nearly two-year investigation by the Center for Public Integrity's International Consortium of Investigative Journalists has identified at least 90 such companies worldwide. The ICIJ investigation also uncovered a small group of individuals and companies with connections to governments, multinational corporations and, sometimes, criminal syndicates in the United States, Europe, Africa and the Middle East that have profited from war commerce. (11/20/02) | |
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5:35:33 AM 
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© TrustMark
2002
Timothy Wilken.
Last update:
12/3/2002; 8:09:17 AM.
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