Monday, November 09, 2009
Friday, November 06, 2009
Sunday, November 01, 2009
The Right of Self-Defense
In what is sure to become an annual Dia de Los Muertes ritual, I unwrapped the remaining Halloween candy and threw it one by one into the garbage disposal. After a couple of pounds of little snickers bars (Lambeau Field booing the return of long-time Packers quarterback Bret Favre - in a Vikings uniform. Boooooo!) KitKats, and Reese's peanut butter cups, the disposal began malfunctioning.
The repair guy fiddled with it a while and said it is overweight and pre-diabetic. He suggested running it more often and for longer and grinding up celery and carrots.
The repair guy fiddled with it a while and said it is overweight and pre-diabetic. He suggested running it more often and for longer and grinding up celery and carrots.
An editorial ...
[Prime Minister Netanyahu and Secretary Clinton]click on photo to enlarge
Unlike written editorials which are supposed to be labeled as such, this photographic expression of disdain for the two subjects is presented as news.
Just as the internet is awash with spam presented as email, this is propaganda presented as photography.
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Saturday, October 31, 2009
More Gaza
[Hamas members in Gaza set fire to a coffin with pictures of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas]From today's New York Times -
[Notice that though Hamas got its head handed to them by the IDF in January, they nevertheless assume they can dictate transparently disingenuous terms. Revealingly, they forever refer to everyone but themselves as "arrogant".].
As with their wars with Israel, Muslims never accept that they have lost. So nothing is ever settled until one side or the other is dead, all of them. And both sides know that. Which is why their politics are so violent. An awful lot of Muslim Brotherhood people wound up very dead in Egyptian jails as a result.
So the terrible suffering in Gaza caused by the embargo is as much a product of the Egyptian embargo as of the Israeli embargo? That is poignant in several ways.
One is that the Egyptians, unlike the Jews, are the Palestinians' Arab and Muslim brothers. Another is that Egypt has imposed its embargo without years of rocket bombardment of Egyptian civilians from Gaza.
A third poignancy is that the Arabs, the UN, the Euro-left, the various American Israel-bashers, the Norwegians, the Rachel Corries of the world, the J Street liars, have all forgotten to condemn Egypt for its half of the embargo. No UN resolutions, no marches, no university boycotts, no divestment campaigns, no thundering from protestant pulpits. Not a peep.
Which leads to the fourth poignancy - that the Israel-bashers don't care about the embargo or the people of Gaza the least little bit, whether they live or die. They care only about the Gazans as they are able to use them to attack Israel. If they cared about Gaza they would oppose the Egyptian embargo and they don't. What does that leave?
Which leads to the fifth and final poignancy, the ironic one. It is that the enemies of Israel are thus using the people of Gaza collectively as a political human shield, just as Hamas uses them individually as military human shields, as human sacrifices.
An aptly ghoulish thought for Halloween Eve.
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A three-year-old embargo on Hamas imposed by Israel and Egypt keeps nearly all factories shut and supplies away. Eighty percent of the population gets some form of assistance.Wait, Israel AND Egypt? Why Egypt?
Israel wants to isolate Hamas because the group rejects Israel’s existence. As Ayman Taha, a Hamas movement spokesman, said in an interview, “Our long-term strategy is the liberation of all of Palestine, but we would agree to a temporary solution involving a state in the 1967 borders with a truce of about 10 years, depending on the conditions of the truce.”Well, yeah, that and years of bombarding Israeli civilians with thhousands of rockets.
[Notice that though Hamas got its head handed to them by the IDF in January, they nevertheless assume they can dictate transparently disingenuous terms. Revealingly, they forever refer to everyone but themselves as "arrogant".].
Egypt rejects Hamas because of its affiliation with the Cairo-based Muslim Brotherhood.Which assassinated Anwar Sadat for making peace with Israel. The Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is the Palestinian branch, also fought a lengthy and bloody terrorist campaign against the Egyptian regime for its corruption and secularism. At times this came close to civil war. The Mubarak regime won.
As with their wars with Israel, Muslims never accept that they have lost. So nothing is ever settled until one side or the other is dead, all of them. And both sides know that. Which is why their politics are so violent. An awful lot of Muslim Brotherhood people wound up very dead in Egyptian jails as a result.
So the terrible suffering in Gaza caused by the embargo is as much a product of the Egyptian embargo as of the Israeli embargo? That is poignant in several ways.
One is that the Egyptians, unlike the Jews, are the Palestinians' Arab and Muslim brothers. Another is that Egypt has imposed its embargo without years of rocket bombardment of Egyptian civilians from Gaza.
A third poignancy is that the Arabs, the UN, the Euro-left, the various American Israel-bashers, the Norwegians, the Rachel Corries of the world, the J Street liars, have all forgotten to condemn Egypt for its half of the embargo. No UN resolutions, no marches, no university boycotts, no divestment campaigns, no thundering from protestant pulpits. Not a peep.
Which leads to the fourth poignancy - that the Israel-bashers don't care about the embargo or the people of Gaza the least little bit, whether they live or die. They care only about the Gazans as they are able to use them to attack Israel. If they cared about Gaza they would oppose the Egyptian embargo and they don't. What does that leave?
Which leads to the fifth and final poignancy, the ironic one. It is that the enemies of Israel are thus using the people of Gaza collectively as a political human shield, just as Hamas uses them individually as military human shields, as human sacrifices.
An aptly ghoulish thought for Halloween Eve.
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Further Down the Page....
[the father of Moshe Nahari, with his daughters]From today's Wall Street Journal -
Then, on Dec. 11, a lone gunman shot dead Moshe Nahari, a father of nine and well-known figure in Raida's Jewish community [in Yemen]. Abdul-Aziz al-Abdi, a retired Air Force pilot, pumped several bullets into Mr. Nahari after the Hebrew teacher dismissed his demands that he convert to Islam. In June, the shooter was sentenced to death.
What risk of actual punishment does al-Abdi face from his fellow Muslims for murdering a Jew? The British government released one of the Lockerbie bombers in spite of his having murdered hundreds of people, many of them British subjects. What can we expect to happen to Abdul Aziz al-Abdi in Yemen? Not much.
Is it just me...?
['Enola Gay' returning to Tinian. Her sister ship was the B-29 'Necessary Evil']
I got a flu shot a week ago.Thursday evening during world series game 2 I got a bad sore throat which came on quickly. Friday it worsened and became a head cold. Saturday I was having difficulty breathing even with my mouth open. I dragged my broken body to a drugstore for patent medicines. One of which had no effect at all. (house brands not always a bargain?) and the other, an inhaler, worked but stung like a sonofabitch for half an hour. Between Friday afternoon and this Sunday morning I slept perhaps 30 hours.
The checker at the market where I got the inhaler said that she also got sick shortly after she got a flu shot.
Between me and the checker is just two incidents and may be coincidence. Has anyone else gotten sick after getting a flu shot? This was a regular flu shot, not swine flu.
Postnote Sunday AM -
A friend who works in a public health clinic agrees with Harvey that there is little likelihood the vector was the flu shot. Indeed it is most likely that I have the H1N1 virus, the swine flu.
Which is most disturbing. I thought there was a tacit understanding that it would only affect other people. It was supposed to be something that never really happens other than on television, like killer bees. And how unseemly is it for a Jew to have swine flu? They couldn't name it for some kosher animal? [schmucks]
Having H-anything N-anything is unnerving after seeing the 1918 graves in Sunset View Cemetery. Even in the dinky remote El Cerrito of 1918 large numbers of people died. Considering what happened in the less populous, less connected world of 1918, the effect of a similar outbreak now daunts the imagination.
It is no exaggeration to say that a recurrence of a disease like the Spanish Influenza of 1918 is a vastly greater danger to the human race than all our nuclear weapons combined. Nuclear weapons kill people where they are dropped. The Spanish Influenza killed a varying fraction of the population everywhere in the world.
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Monday, October 26, 2009
Feminist Suspicions
[funeral in Baghdad for victim of yesterday's truck bombings]Is it possible that crowds like this would be less prone to hysteria and violence if there were women among them?
(Wait Mahmoud. We can't go burn down the embassy. We have to be at my sister's by five and we have to shop for pita and a goat first.)
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Sunday, October 25, 2009
Plans for the Future
[two energy solutions]This is in response to an article in the Seattle Times about the Puget Sound area having been chosen for the introduction of a network of electric car recharging stations. Ford has devised a hybrid car that will drive 40 miles on battery before resorting to its gas engine. Used carefully it might never use gasoline.
The author points out neatly why the Puget Sound area was chosen. After some local pride about how hip everybody in the Seattle area is, he mentions the real reasons, availability of hydroelectric power and mild climate (to minimize use of both power-draining air conditioning and battery-killing sub-zero temperatures). Of these the power issue is the more important one.
There are two important effects of electric cars - one is that they raise the efficiency of power generation by centralizing it from millions of small engines to one large power station. And the other is that they reduce emissions by doing so.
But ordinarily, though they change the locus and efficiency of power generation, in the great majority of cases, power is still generated by the combustion of fossil fuels. In the case of coal-fired plants burning high-sulfur coal (as is still done in China and such places), the net pollution may rival or even exceed that of the automobile gas engines replaced.
The problem is thus not only how much energy do cars use, but where do they get it.
For this reason I have long been an advocate of nuclear power plants. Though endlessly decried for their production of nuclear wastes as though that were an insoluble problem, they power the electric grids of France, Japan, and many other countries. The populations of which have somehow not become extinct.
Of late however, I am beginning to rethink the problem. Widespread use of nuclear reactors contemplates widespread use of Uranium-235, a rare substance and expensive to separate from Uranium-238, a reasonably common one. (This is what the whole fight about Iranian centrifuges is about) One solution is that, once one has reactors available, as we have had since the 1950's, one can use them to irradiate Uranium-238 with neutrons, transmuting it to Plutonium-239. These are the so-called breeder reactors which generate more nuclear fuel than they use. Breeder reactors provide a pathway to the future with effectively unlimited energy resources.
The problem is that it brings lots of plutonium into the world, which scarcely exists in nature. Pu-239 is the deadliest substance imaginable. It is far easier to make into a nuclear weapon and requires smaller quantities for a nuclear weapon than U-238 (it is said to be "more fissile").
A few pounds of plutonium were delivered to the people of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945 killing 39,000 of them. We are used to thinking of it as a bomb, B-29's, the Manhattan Project, the wrath of the United States over Pearl Harbor. But in the end it was a few pounds of plutonium.
That is aside from the fact that it replaces calcium in the body and causes bone cancer upon ingestion of mere micrograms, making it one of the most toxic substances known. It is worth noting that the same amount of plutonium would likely have killed even more people in Nagasaki, albeit more slowly, had it been introduced into their water supply. It is fitting that it is named for the god of the underworld, the god of death.
An energy future based on reactors and Pu-239 would require that nowhere, in no country, for centuries to come, would any plutonium ever be diverted. Not even by governments wanting to achieve military nuclear power status quickly and cheaply.
Ours is a world with many contending sovereign governments, some of them dictatorships, some of them irrational. Others, including capitalist democracies, are merely venal and conscienceless. They are all too rational and too calculating, but only of short-term benefits. It is a world containing a billion or so Muslims whose religion teaches jihad. The prospect of this, our world, full of breeder reactors, is worse than the prospect of a world burning fossil fuels.
So I have changed my mind. My new theory is reduced production of CO2 by green everything, and reforestation for increased CO2 uptake. That will leave us dependent on fossil fuels for a long time but sustainably so until they run out (a sustainable oxymoron).
The problem with ethanol from crops like corn and switchgrass is that it produces more CO2 than it saves. But that objection puts on corn ethanol the burden of solving two separate problems simultaneously. If one asks that it simply replace fossil fuels and finds a separate solution to CO2 emissions, it will work handily. Again reforestation is the leading way to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere.
I do not know enough about it to speak knowledgeably, but I am told that restoring the oceans to pre-industrial conditions would greatly enhance their ability to process CO2 to oxygen as well.
I have long intended to write either a long essay or a short book about reforestation baselines but I am forever stalled by my own inertia.
The author points out neatly why the Puget Sound area was chosen. After some local pride about how hip everybody in the Seattle area is, he mentions the real reasons, availability of hydroelectric power and mild climate (to minimize use of both power-draining air conditioning and battery-killing sub-zero temperatures). Of these the power issue is the more important one.
There are two important effects of electric cars - one is that they raise the efficiency of power generation by centralizing it from millions of small engines to one large power station. And the other is that they reduce emissions by doing so.
But ordinarily, though they change the locus and efficiency of power generation, in the great majority of cases, power is still generated by the combustion of fossil fuels. In the case of coal-fired plants burning high-sulfur coal (as is still done in China and such places), the net pollution may rival or even exceed that of the automobile gas engines replaced.
The problem is thus not only how much energy do cars use, but where do they get it.
For this reason I have long been an advocate of nuclear power plants. Though endlessly decried for their production of nuclear wastes as though that were an insoluble problem, they power the electric grids of France, Japan, and many other countries. The populations of which have somehow not become extinct.
Of late however, I am beginning to rethink the problem. Widespread use of nuclear reactors contemplates widespread use of Uranium-235, a rare substance and expensive to separate from Uranium-238, a reasonably common one. (This is what the whole fight about Iranian centrifuges is about) One solution is that, once one has reactors available, as we have had since the 1950's, one can use them to irradiate Uranium-238 with neutrons, transmuting it to Plutonium-239. These are the so-called breeder reactors which generate more nuclear fuel than they use. Breeder reactors provide a pathway to the future with effectively unlimited energy resources.
The problem is that it brings lots of plutonium into the world, which scarcely exists in nature. Pu-239 is the deadliest substance imaginable. It is far easier to make into a nuclear weapon and requires smaller quantities for a nuclear weapon than U-238 (it is said to be "more fissile").
A few pounds of plutonium were delivered to the people of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945 killing 39,000 of them. We are used to thinking of it as a bomb, B-29's, the Manhattan Project, the wrath of the United States over Pearl Harbor. But in the end it was a few pounds of plutonium.
That is aside from the fact that it replaces calcium in the body and causes bone cancer upon ingestion of mere micrograms, making it one of the most toxic substances known. It is worth noting that the same amount of plutonium would likely have killed even more people in Nagasaki, albeit more slowly, had it been introduced into their water supply. It is fitting that it is named for the god of the underworld, the god of death.
An energy future based on reactors and Pu-239 would require that nowhere, in no country, for centuries to come, would any plutonium ever be diverted. Not even by governments wanting to achieve military nuclear power status quickly and cheaply.
Ours is a world with many contending sovereign governments, some of them dictatorships, some of them irrational. Others, including capitalist democracies, are merely venal and conscienceless. They are all too rational and too calculating, but only of short-term benefits. It is a world containing a billion or so Muslims whose religion teaches jihad. The prospect of this, our world, full of breeder reactors, is worse than the prospect of a world burning fossil fuels.
So I have changed my mind. My new theory is reduced production of CO2 by green everything, and reforestation for increased CO2 uptake. That will leave us dependent on fossil fuels for a long time but sustainably so until they run out (a sustainable oxymoron).
The problem with ethanol from crops like corn and switchgrass is that it produces more CO2 than it saves. But that objection puts on corn ethanol the burden of solving two separate problems simultaneously. If one asks that it simply replace fossil fuels and finds a separate solution to CO2 emissions, it will work handily. Again reforestation is the leading way to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere.
I do not know enough about it to speak knowledgeably, but I am told that restoring the oceans to pre-industrial conditions would greatly enhance their ability to process CO2 to oxygen as well.
I have long intended to write either a long essay or a short book about reforestation baselines but I am forever stalled by my own inertia.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
If You Can't Beat 'Em....
Almost half the Anglicans in the world, some 40 million people, live in Nigeria. The primate of the Anglican church in both Nigeria and Africa generally is Archbishop Akinola of the See of Abuja.Scumbag Alert
I found small round holes in my porch which I suspect to be powder post beetle borings. I have finally gotten off my toukes and called some pest inspection places. Orkin advertises heavily so I started with them. With my usual imprudence I made an appointment for an inspection before thinking to check customer reviews. They are from all over the country. They are universally negative.
There are no end of complaints against them. The gravamen of the complaints is generally the same. High pressure sales followed by poor service followed by refusal to accept cancellation requests. Frequent billing for services not performed.
There were frequent complaints that infestations worsened after Orkin began its visits. Which means they are at least completely ineffective. Judging by how sleazy their other business practices are, it is not impossible the friendly Orkin man is actually planting roach infestations to keep the contract running indefinitely.
The Scenic Route Blog hereby awards Orkin its highest ripoff business accolade - the One Finger Salute with Both Hands. A handsome certificate suitable for framing is available for a slight additional charge.
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Goldstone Admits 'Goldstone Report' a Crock
GOLDSTONE BACKS AWAY FROM REPORT: THE TWO FACES OF AN INTERNATIONAL POSEUR
| Published in: The Jerusalem Post - Blog Central | October 15, 2009 |
http://cgis.jpost.com/Blogs/dershowitz/entry/goldstone_backs_away_from_report
With so much (though not all) of the civilized world justly condemning (or ignoring) the Goldstone Report for its distortion of the facts and its one-sided condemnation of Israel, Richard Goldstone himself now seems to be backing away from the report's conclusions - at least when he speaks to his Jewish audiences.
In an interview with The Jewish DailyForward, Goldstone denied that his group had conducted "an investigation." Instead, it was what he called a "fact-finding mission" based largely on the limited "material we had." Since this "material" was cherry-picked by Hamas guides and spokesmen, Goldstone acknowledged that "if this was a court of law, there would have been nothing proven." He emphasized to the Forward that the report was no more than "a road map" for real investigators and that it contained no actual "evidence," of wrongdoing by Israel.
"Nothing proven"! "No evidence"! Only a "road map"! You wouldn’t know any of that, of course, by reading the report itself or its accompanying media release. In the text of the report itself, Goldstone neither sought to clarify nor explain what he now claims is the limited scope and legal implications of the report. The report reads like a judicial decision, making findings of fact (nearly all wrong), stating conclusions of law (nearly all questionable) and making specific recommendations (nearly all one-sided). According to the Forward:
"the report itself is replete with bold and declarative legal conclusions seemingly at odds with the cautious and conditional explanations of its author. The report repeatedly refers, without qualification, to specific violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention committed by Israel and other breaches of international law. Citing particular cases, the report determines unequivocally that Israel 'violated the prohibition under customary international law' against targeting civilians. These violations, it declares, ‘constitute a grave breach’ of the convention."
It is as if there were two entirely different Goldstone Reports: the first submitted to the United Nations and the second to the Jewish community. In speaking so differently to different audiences, Goldstone is reminiscent of Yasser Arafat, who perfected the art of double-speak, using bellicose language when addressing Arab audiences and more accommodating language when addressing western audiences.
Goldstone apparently lacked the courage to stand up to the other members and staffers of his commission and insist that his clarifying language be included in the report itself. Nor did he have the courage to file a dissenting or concurring statement. Instead, he spoke out of both sides of his mouth, sending one message to those who read the actual report and a very different message to those who read his words in the Jewish Forward (and The New York Times, for which he wrote a more ameliorative op ed on the day after the release of the Report). In doing so, he is trying to have it both ways.
Goldstone went so far as to tell the Forward that he himself "wouldn't consider it in any way embarrassing if many of the allegations turn out to be disproved." This is total nonsense. Goldstone has put his imprimatur - and his reputation - behind the reports' conclusions. The only reason anyone is paying any attention to yet another of the serial condemnatory reports by the United Nations Human Rights Council is because Richard Goldstone - a "distinguished" Jew - allegedly wrote it and signed on to its conclusions. If he really doesn't stand by its conclusions - if he doesn't care one way or another whether they are true or false, proven or unproven - then no extra weight should be given to its findings or conclusions because of the "distinguished" reputation of its Jewish chairman.
But weight is being given by some to its "unproven" and uninvestigated allegations, which Goldstone himself admits may be wrong. There have been calls for boycotts, divestments, war crime prosecutions and other forms of condemnation based on the conclusions reached (or not reached, depending on which side of Goldstone's mouth one is listening to) by the Report.
If Goldstone stands behind what he told the Forward, then he must come forward and condemn those who are treating his report as if the allegations were "proven" based on "evidence." Don't hold your breath, because such a statement would be heard by both of Goldstone's audiences at the same time.
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Speaking of Fossils
From today's Wired Science --A series of fossils unearthed in southwestern China has revealed the origins of complex life in unprecedented detail, and pushed its beginning back by at least 40 million years.
The specimens come from the Doushantuo formation, a layer of sediments deposited about 590 million years ago, just before the Ediacaran period’s primordial fauna gave way to the kaleidoscopically complex creatures of the Cambrian explosion.
During the Ediacaran, even the most structurally complicated animals had flat bodies with simple symmetry, like living quilts or mattresses. It was only during the Cambrian that animals developed what’s known as bilateral symmetry — a distinct front and back, top and bottom.
The Doushantuo fossils date to the cusp of this transition, and are so finely preserved that scientists can distinguish the structures of individual cells. The latest fossils, described Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, aren’t even fully formed animals, but embryos.
Using synchrotron radiation microtomography — a microscopy technique that combines thousands of of X-rays taken from different angles — researchers reconstructed the embryos in three-dimensional detail. They found that the embryos were bilaterally symmetrical, and were organized so differently that they belonged to two distinct taxonomic groups. For those groups to be so different, bilateral symmetry must have been around for a while. Some scientists have suspected as much, but without such solid evidence.
“These bilaterians had already diverged into distantly related groups at least 40 million years before the Cambrian radiation,” wrote the researchers. “The last common ancestor of the bilaterians lived much earlier than is usually thought.
Monday, October 19, 2009
My Sister Writes....
that she wants a "Manhattan Project" to develop nonfossil fuel cars.
You're too late on the Manhattan Project for non-fossil fuel cars. There was a fleet of fuel cell cars that drove from San Diego to Vancouver last summer using hydrogen as fuel. Their tail pipe emissions were water vapor.
http://www.hydrogenroadtour.com/participants
Participants were fuel cell cars from Daimler, GM, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Nissan, Toyota, and Volkswagen.
As far as I can tell the problem with adopting them is not with manufacturing the cars, nor with distributing the compressed hydrogen (It's flammable but far less so than gasoline.) The problem is getting the energy to produce the hydrogen fuel.
Hydrogen fuel stock is water. One needs energy to power the plants that will be dissociate water into hydrogen and oxygen. The energy that goes into the dissociation is the same energy that will come out when the fuel is oxidized back to water. Where will that energy come from? Getting it from oil, gas, or coal-powered generating plants doesn't solve anything - it just transfers the locus of the emissions. The only credible source (i.e. available on a big scale with current technology) of non-fossil fuel energy is nuclear power. But the green left is so dead set against it that no new nuclear power plants have been built in a generation because of the endless litigation and political resistance.
Many other countries run just fine on nuclear power. The power and light in France comes from nuclear power. The same is true for Japan and a number of other countries. Until we get over the principle that whoever yells the loudest on nuclear energy gets his way, wanting to be rid of fossil fuels is just something fun to say, not something one is serious about.
You're too late on the Manhattan Project for non-fossil fuel cars. There was a fleet of fuel cell cars that drove from San Diego to Vancouver last summer using hydrogen as fuel. Their tail pipe emissions were water vapor.
http://www.hydrogenroadtour.
Participants were fuel cell cars from Daimler, GM, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Nissan, Toyota, and Volkswagen.
As far as I can tell the problem with adopting them is not with manufacturing the cars, nor with distributing the compressed hydrogen (It's flammable but far less so than gasoline.) The problem is getting the energy to produce the hydrogen fuel.
Hydrogen fuel stock is water. One needs energy to power the plants that will be dissociate water into hydrogen and oxygen. The energy that goes into the dissociation is the same energy that will come out when the fuel is oxidized back to water. Where will that energy come from? Getting it from oil, gas, or coal-powered generating plants doesn't solve anything - it just transfers the locus of the emissions. The only credible source (i.e. available on a big scale with current technology) of non-fossil fuel energy is nuclear power. But the green left is so dead set against it that no new nuclear power plants have been built in a generation because of the endless litigation and political resistance.
Many other countries run just fine on nuclear power. The power and light in France comes from nuclear power. The same is true for Japan and a number of other countries. Until we get over the principle that whoever yells the loudest on nuclear energy gets his way, wanting to be rid of fossil fuels is just something fun to say, not something one is serious about.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Pompous Twits in the News
from an interview with Bloomberg.com"Francis Ford Coppola, who aside from his California winery has also been active in the publishing and hotel business, does not elaborate on future projects or say whether he plans to experiment in other industries. ... “I don’t make a living anymore, I don’t have a job, I’m not trying to have a career, I’m not trying to be rich, I’m just trying to learn,” he says."
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The Anglican church is suffering splits and defections now. They are fighting over the widespread ordination of women as priests in the US and Canada. And fighting over the investiture, in New Hampshire, of an openly gay bishop. (Giving a whole new meaning to "bishopric"?)
In an open attempt to woo wavering conservative Anglicans to convert to Roman Catholicism, the Catholic church has issued what it calls "an apostolic constitution". Under this constitution, married Anglican priests could remain priests. It would permit whole parishes, sees, and regions, to join the Catholic church yet retain autonomy within it.
One major obstacle to merging large sections of the Anglican church into the Roman one is the coolness of Archbishop Akinola to the idea. Akinola is low church and bible oriented. Benedict is an elitist who pursues the most refined and intellectual of high church theologies.
With my usual impeccable moral standards, I propose to resolve the question with bribery.
I wonder if making Archbishop Akinola a cardinal with the expectation that he would succeed the now 82 year old Benedict XVI as pontiff would help. Having an African pope would greatly enhance Catholic evangelism in Africa where Christianity often comes in a lame second to Islam. An African pope oriented to the Bible, as Archbishop Akinola is, would also be a sharp turnaround from Benedict XVI's elitist (some would say) emphasis on the the most refined and intellectual of theologies.
An African pope might energize the church, make it more inclusive, and make it more attractive to young people. There have been many African saints, maybe it is time for an African pope as well.
As pope, Archbishop Akinola might do for the Catholic church what Barack Obama has done for the Democratic Party and for the United States.