news of a non-geopolitical nature

[Thorngrub]

[Thorngrub]

She was the most kickass news columnist I read over the past few years.

If someone doesn't move in quick to fill her shoes . . . I'm afraid even earnest prayer for the human race will not suffice.

But here goes anyhow :

Molly:
May your spirit linger in the minds of Americans for generations to come.
May the works you diligently typed up reach fruition in the soil of our minds.
May their searing message finally be imprinted into the people they were
intended to reach, and may your legacy blossom open more fully after your death than
it did during your life.
Amen.

[phil]

Remembering Molly Ivins

A quick-witted Texas columnist who took on the most absurd Texan of all - George Bush - and still had enough left over for Tony Blair.

John Nichols


Tony Blair has long been the favourite international leader of a Texan named George Bush. But not all Texans have shared the sentiment. Indeed, the US is in mourning over the passing of a Texan who thought the British prime minister a bit too willing to play the poodle in his relationship with the American president.

Molly Ivins, the wisecracking veteran journalist from the Lone Star State and the most widely-circulated liberal columnist in the United States, succumbed Wednesday evening at age 62 to what she referred to as "a scorching case of cancer". That cancer silenced the Bush administration's sharpest critic at precisely the moment when the rest of the US media is finally rising from bended knee to challenge the president. It also removed from the American discourse one of the few popular commentators who regularly reported on - and frequently reported from - Britain.

Ivins, a small "r" republican, took her shots at regal Brits, just as she did regal Americans, in a column that appeared in almost 400 newspapers several times a week. But she was, like most American liberals, a bit of an anglophile. And she let it be known that she expected an Oxford-educated prime minister, especially one from the Labour Party, to give foreign policy cues to the untraveled and incurious president she anointed Shrub.

She would be disappointed. Aghast at the British leader's inexplicable willingness to go along with Bush's invasion and occupation of Iraq, Ivins labeled him "Tony Blair, the first casualty of the war". And as the full folly of that war became evident, and as Blair continued to follow Bush's march into the quagmire, Ivins took to teasing the isolated leaders as "the Axis of Feeble".

Ivins had expected more from Blair, who she assumed would recognize his American friend's frailties, even if the prime minister might have had a hard time comprehending what she referred to as her fellow Texan's "eccentric grasp of English". Reporting on the first 100 days of Bush's presidency, the columnist ticked off a long list of missteps and misdeeds - "gratuitously went out of his way to pronounce the Kyoto treaty dead," "needlessly and uselessly enraged the Chinese through ignorance of Taiwan policy" - and then noted: "On the plus side, after his first meeting with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Great Britain, Bush said, 'we both use Colgate toothpaste.' The Brits spent weeks trying to decipher the meaning of that remark."

When Bush finally began meeting with foreign leaders, Ivins informed her readers that there was "a joke making the rounds in Europe: Bush, Tony Blair, and Jacques Chirac are holding an economic summit. While Chirac maunders on about something, Bush leans over and says to Blair, 'The trouble with the French is that they have no word for entrepreneur.'" At the time, she assumed that Blair would gently set the president straight on such matters. Eventually, however, the caustic commentator came to the conclusion that the prime minister was aiding and abetting the president.

A respected journalist who worked for many years as a New York Times bureau chief - finally writing her way out of the job when she referred to a "community chicken-killing festival" in a small town as a "gang-pluck" - Ivins wrote columns that drew on the absurdities of politics in her native Texas. And when the most absurd Texan of all became president, she found that tens of millions of Americans wanted her take on the new commander-in-chief. She did so in the form of what remains the best biography of the president: Shrub: The Short But Happy Political Life of George W Bush (written with her friend Lou Dubose). She could have settled into an easy career of Bush bashing. Instead, frustrated by the a White House press corps that she said was characterized by "no principle, no guts, no grace", Ivins kept investigating and reporting - often, in the months after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, providing the only skeptical assessment of the president to appear in newspapers across the country.

Ivins traveled to Britain to find fodder for her columns, and she was the first prominent US journalist to write extensively and aggressively about the so-called Downing Street Memo. "I read some of the European press and most of the liberal publications in this country. I read the [New York] Times, the [Washington] Post, the Wall Street Journal and several Texas papers every day. It's my job," she informed readers. "But when I read the first Downing Street Memo, my eyes bugged out and my jaw fell open. I could not believe what I was reading."

To her, the evidence of collusion between the Bush administration and Blair's aides to assure that "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" of attacking Iraq was "the smoking gun" and she wrote the hell out of the story in a series of columns. For many Americans, living in communities where their local media reported little or nothing about the memo, Ivins's columns were revelations. As she noted, "The memo was a huge story in Britain, but is almost unreported here."

"I don't know if these memos represent an impeachable offense," she wrote. "But they strike me as a hell of lot worse than anything Richard Nixon ever contemplated. He used the government for petty political vindictiveness. Heck, I'd settle for that again, over what we're looking at now."

To be precise, Molly Ivins was referring to impeaching Bush, not Blair. She was, however, an equal opportunity pummeler of the powerful. And those Brits who have entertained the notion of pummeling their prime minister should know that Molly Ivins would have delighted in the process - especially if the pummeling came in debate. "As one of those slow-spoken Americans often out-tap-danced on panels by the nimble-tongued Brits," Ivins once observed, "I defensively assert they don't really think faster and better than we do - they just talk faster and better."

[rockysigman]

thorny said:

She was the most kickass news columnist I read over the past few years.

If someone doesn't move in quick to fill her shoes . . . I'm afraid even earnest prayer for the human race will not suffice.

But here goes anyhow :

Molly:
May your spirit linger in the minds of Americans for generations to come.
May the works you diligently typed up reach fruition in the soil of our minds.
May their searing message finally be imprinted into the people they were
intended to reach, and may your legacy blossom open more fully after your death than
it did during your life.
Amen.

That was beautiful.

[Thorngrub]

Thanks, Rocky

[sisyphus]

yeah. molly ivins did kick ass, and it was always so great reading her column and gratifying in the novelty her picture provided: that such brilliant liberal views spewed forth from the mind of such a cute little granny.

[Thorngrub]

haha, no doubt, my thoughts exactly.
She always kinda reminded me of my Mom...

[sisyphus]

your mom is so cute.

[dolly]

Bird flu virus is Asian strain

The avian flu which killed 2,600 turkeys at a Bernard Matthews farm in Suffolk has been confirmed as the Asian strain of the H5N1 virus.
The virus can be fatal if it is passed on to humans but experts said the outbreak was being contained and posed little danger to people's health.

The Veterinary Laboratories Agency carried out the tests which confirmed the outbreak in Holton.

The slaughter of nearly 160,000 turkeys has begun at the farm as a precaution.

The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said the flu is the "highly pathogenic" Asian strain, similar to a virus that was found in Hungary in January.

In that incident, the first time bird flu had reoccurred in the European Union since August 2006, a flock of 3,000 geese were killed when the strain was discovered on a farm in Szentes, southern Hungary.

A three-kilometre protection zone and a 10km surveillance zone have now been set up around Holton, which is approximately 27km south-west of Lowestoft.

A much wider restricted zone covering 2,090sqkm is bordered by the A140 to the west and the A47 to the north.

It is the first case on a UK commercial farm of an H5N1 infection.

The strain has killed 164 people worldwide - mainly in south-east Asia - since 2003.

However, the virus is not thought to be able to pass easily from human to human at present.

A spokesman for Bernard Matthews, which runs the farm in Holton, said none of the affected birds had entered the food chain and there was no risk to public health.

So far, all those who have been infected worldwide have come into intimate contact with infected birds.

Vaccinations

Fred Landeg, Britain's Deputy Chief Veterinary Officer, said an investigation was under way but the most likely source of the outbreak was wild birds.

He told BBC News that vaccinations for poultry were not currently being considered.

"There are a number of problems with vaccination in that it takes about three weeks to get immunity."

DEFRA CONTINGENCY PLAN

Mr Landeg said the turkeys at the farm had been too young to enter the food chain and no birds or produce had moved off the site.

Dr Maria Zambon, from the Health Protection Agency, said farm workers who had come into contact with infected birds, and those involved in the culling process, would be offered the anti-viral drug Tamiflu as a precaution.

She stressed that nobody had developed symptoms of bird flu following similar outbreaks among farm birds in continental Europe.

Vets were called to the Bernard Matthews farm on Thursday night.

The company said it was confident the outbreak had been contained and there was no risk to consumers.

How bird flu became global

National Farmers Union president Peter Kendall told BBC News 24 the priority would be eradicating the outbreak.

"[We will be] making sure we get the message across about how well this will be managed and controlled.

"We're encouraging all farmers to be incredibly vigilant, look at their flocks carefully and we do need to reassure consumers that this is not an issue about the safety of poultry - it's completely safe to eat."

Defra has revoked the national general licence on bird gatherings and bird shows and pigeon racing will not be permitted.

Detergent

Professor John Oxford, a virologist at the London Queen Mary's School of Medicine and Dentistry, said he was confident the outbreak could be contained.

He said: "I don't think it has made any difference as a threat to the human population. The most likely explanation is that a small bird has come in through a ventilation shaft.

"One good thing about this virus is that it's easily destroyed. You can kill it with a bit of detergent."

Dr Oxford also said that while four strains of the H5N1 virus have been identified so far, all are deadly to birds and show potential of being harmful to humans.

[dolly]

Quite weird - we were only having a discussion in my A-Level Business class about crisis management and how the poultry farming industry would have coped had the bird flu threat been realised in this country.

Now here it is. Scary.

[Mary]

This is interesting:

Priests leave Pope's doctrines outside confessional


John Hooper in Rome
Wednesday January 31, 2007
The Guardian

A yawning gulf between the stern doctrines preached by Pope Benedict and the advice offered by ordinary Roman Catholic priests has been exposed by an Italian magazine which dispatched reporters to 24 churches around Italy where, in the confessional, they sought rulings on various moral dilemmas.

One reporter for L'espresso claimed to have let a doctor switch off the respirator that kept her father alive. "Don't think any more about it," she was told by a friar in Naples. "I myself, if I had a father, a wife or a child who had lived for years only because of artificial means, would pull out [the plug]."

Another journalist posed as a researcher who had received a lucrative offer to work abroad on embryonic stem cells. With the extra cash, he said, he and his wife could think about starting a family. So should he take up the post?

"Yes. Yes. Of course," came the reply.

The church's official teaching is that homosexuality is "disordered" and that homosexual behaviour is wrong. Yet a practising gay man in Rome was told: "Generally, the best attitude is to be yourself - what in English is called 'coming out'."

On one issue alone - abortion - the priests all stuck firmly to official doctrine. A reporter who said his wife had discovered their child would be born with Down's Syndrome, and that they were preparing to terminate her pregnancy, was told: "I swear to God: if you do it, you'll be a murderer."

But on other issues, that "moral relativism" so detested by Pope Benedict was the order of the day.

A journalist who said he was HIV-positive and used condoms to protect his partner was told it was "more of a personal problem, one of conscience".

****

M

[Rit]

why is that, Mary? wouldn't you have expected a wide latitude of interpretation on the ground?

moreover, the Catholic faith is undisputedly the de facto religion in Italy, not so much imposed upon the culture from the outside as organically a part of it for centuries upon centuries. Priests are only human afterall, men entering the seminary for various personal reasons, most prominent of which is likely to be a sense of communal service. The brighter among them will also tend to be only too happy to recognize and allow for diversity so long as the cultural bonds of the community are strengthened and kept strong.

[rockysigman]

So these reporters made up personal problems, and then went and told their fantasy stories to a priest in confessional in hopes of tripping him up into contradicting the Pope? That doesn't really sit right with me.

[phil]

The higher you go in the hierarchy, the more rigid and inflexable the discourse gets ...
The pope don't care much about your living condition, only your eternal soul !

Down in the real world, most priests I've know, except those from Africa,
are down-to-earth people whose preocupation is to help the people who need them ...

[phil]

It's a good thing people are more pragmatic and reasonable
when it comes to the dogmas imposed by the catholic church.

You don't see parishes going without fire insurance
or a creationist refusing modern antibiotics to battle
an evolving strain of bacterias ...

And every people I know would rather have medical coverage
instead of relying on faith healing ...

Have you ever heard of an amputee growing back an arm
after any kind of prayer session ... ??