Rupert Cornwell: Obama's choice of VP reveals much about himself

Sunday, 24 August 2008

With Hillary Clinton never seriously in the running, Joe Biden has always been the best option on Barack Obama's vice-presidential shortlist. True, the presence of this 35-year Senate veteran on the Democratic ticket undercuts Mr Obama's claim to be offering a fresh "non-Washington" approach to the country's problems. Nor does Mr Biden bring a trove of electoral college votes. His tiny home state of Delaware offers only three and, with or without him, was already a certainty for the Democrats.

But the pluses far outweigh the minuses. As chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Mr Biden offers the foreign policy heft Mr Obama lacks. The absence of that has been especially visible during the Russia/Georgia crisis – one reason for John McCain's comeback in the polls. But even if Georgia hadn't erupted, another global flashpoint would have done before the election, focusing attention on the Illinois senator's lack of experience. With Mr Biden he can fend off such criticism far more convincingly.

In other ways, too, the direct, outspoken – if sometimes garrulous – Mr Biden complements the more detached and cerebral Mr Obama. Mr Biden is not just a foreign policy specialist. He is a northeastern Catholic of populist bent who grew up in blue-collar Pennsylvania. As such he should help Mr Obama to connect with the white working-class voters in key swing states such as Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan who went for Hillary Clinton during the primaries, and may be sorely tempted by Mr McCain in the election.

read more at The Independent 

From the New York Times

In February, the Florida Department of Education modified its standards to explicitly require, for the first time, the state’s public schools to teach evolution, calling it “the organizing principle of life science.” Spurred in part by legal rulings against school districts seeking to favor religious versions of natural history, over a dozen other states have also given more emphasis in recent years to what has long been the scientific consensus: that all of the diverse life forms on Earth descended from a common ancestor, through a process of mutation and natural selection, over billions of years.

But in a nation where evangelical Protestantism and other religious traditions stress a literal reading of the biblical description of God’s individually creating each species, students often arrive at school fearing that evolution, and perhaps science itself, is hostile to their faith.

Some come armed with “Ten questions to ask your biology teacher about evolution,” a document circulated on the Internet that highlights supposed weaknesses in evolutionary theory. Others scrawl their opposition on homework assignments. Many just tune out.

With a mandate to teach evolution but little guidance as to how, science teachers are contriving their own ways to turn a culture war into a lesson plan. How they fare may bear on whether a new generation of Americans embraces scientific evidence alongside religious belief.

“If you see something you don’t understand, you have to ask ‘why?’ or ‘how?’ ” Mr. Campbell often admonished his students at Ridgeview High School.

Yet their abiding mistrust in evolution, he feared, jeopardized their belief in the basic power of science to explain the natural world — and their ability to make sense of it themselves.

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From Philip Adams

Optimists, particularly to be found among the theologians of AI, propose that the spread of intelligence throughout the cosmos may triumph over the Second Law – that our collective wisdom, multiplied by our technologies, will stop the Law’s merciless clock and rewind it. Their argument goes like this: that while God didn’t exist and doesn’t exist, we’re bringing him into existence. They predict a vast effulgence of thought spreading from our planet throughout the galaxies, the ultimate techno-fix. While Douglas Adams laughed about things like this, I’ve encountered many who take it (and themselves) very seriously.

Let there be light! Verily the geeks say unto us – the light of our intellects will flood the darkness of space! The suns and planets and galaxies, and anyone or anything that dwells therein, will be part of it. A collective consciousness far larger than the one proposed in my first paragraph is being formed. It is being googled into existence.

We have, of course, been inventing gods for thousands of years. We needed them to solve the puzzle, to soothe the fears. Tribespeople moulded their gods from mud, carved them from wood or painted them in caves. Soon civilisation would cast them in bronze or make them glow with gold. The museums are full of them – the gods that died. Egyptian, Assyrian, Roman, Greek, Aztec, Mayan, Norse, all long past their use-by dates and toppled from their pedestals. Found in dunes and jungles, retrieved from tombs or hauled encrusted with shellfish from the Mediterranean. Once worshipped by vast populations, they are now reduced to tourist attractions. Dim memories in marble.

This new-model god is just the latest.


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Template for peace is inclusion

Paul Keating
August 25, 2008

We are living through one of those rare yet transforming events in history, a shift in the power in the world from West to East. For 500 years Europe dominated the world; now for all its wealth and population it is drifting into relative decline.

Will our understanding of this transformation, and our acceptance of its equity for the greater reaches of mankind, lead us to a position of general preparedness of its inevitability, or will we cavil at it in much the same way as Europe resisted the rise of Bismarck's creation at the end of the 19th century?

We can see, with this the 29th Olympiad, the questioning of China and the resentment at its pretensions about being one of us. Even becoming one of us!

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Gus: I would say we're facing a major turning point in the progression of humanity. Sure, there has been turning points or change points always about for a zillion years, but some twists and turns are more important than others and in my humble opinion, in the next five years, the impact of our decisions are going to be crucially holistic.

We're about to decide what to do with our energy and food supplies, our climate control policies, our social constructs including the financial values of what we want and need. As well we are about to bring a bit more dimensions to our supply and demand market forces by coming to terms with the finite concept inherent to the size of this planet. Thus we will need to readjust our illusions of the international pecking order without destroying the concept of comfort for all. All this at a faster pace and greater importance than ever before, with less and less leeway ever. We need more co-operation and better relationships without trying to "control".

When WWII broke out nearly 70 years ago, there was a bit more than 2 billions humans living on earth. We are now approaching 7 billions. In order to supply this swarm of people, we overtake the habitats of other species and we wipe out the existence of some at a rate of knots. We need to be more careful. We need to be more precious about our wild fellow travellers. Not just by providing zoos that are the disguised epitome of breeding death camps, but by allowing them greater space, free from human intrusion.

As well we need to deal with our self importance in the greater universe. We need to evolve our ability to balance our regulatory constructs with the real natural relative world of evolution — a world that we're destroying faster and faster — rather than using an iffy doomsday spiritual and moralistic prop. Why would a perfect god bother creating an undefined imperfect world just for a few insignificant imperfect creatures to do impertinent things in one of its smallest corners...? God, would she's be stupid mad!... No. We are born from 4 billion years of complex and accidental evolution on a small sidereal stone, itself an accidental structure born from 15 billion years of energy congealing according to its own flaws.

Let's not screw up the next fifty years.

"Change and Hope" has been the message of the Democrats in the USA, yet they still end up their vague message with a vibrant "God Bless America", annulling the best option of understanding the importance of our relative mechanical world. Evolution and science has to help us protect the planet from ourselves without impeding our desires of improvement.

Or we may not care. And it may not matter.

We might just carry on as usual... bickering, pushing, running out of space as we grow. hoping all is best in the best of the worlds, or believing in an almighty that we dare to imagine whether within or in the heavens, until we realise we are our own master of our undefined destiny, on this little insignificant planet...

Let's not screw up the next fifty years. Not so much for errant selves if we do not care... But for the other life-forms that are more perfect than we are, thus not searching for improvements in what they should be... They deserve this care from us, even if they do not expect it. We have the cognition and the ability to do so.

August 26, 2008
Democrats Try to Heal Bruises as Convention Kicks Off
By CARL HULSE [NYT]

DENVER — Democrats gaveled their national convention to order Monday afternoon with party leaders hoping the coming four days at the foot of the Rocky Mountains can inspire unity behind their new ticket and heal bruises from a contentious primary.

“During our national convention, we will demonstrate to all Americans why we need Barack Obama and Joe Biden in the White House,” Howard Dean, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said as he called to order an opening session that is scheduled to feature a speech by Michelle Obama and a tribute to ailing Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts. “Looking out from this podium tonight, I see this diverse assembly of Democrats as a testament to the strength and unity of our party and the fruition of our 50-state strategy.”

Yet even as he and other members of the party elite sought to downplay any party disputes and introduce the woman they hope is the next first lady to a national prime-time audience, they were finding it difficult to keep the focus off a former first lady – Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.

Mrs. Clinton, preparing for her own speech Tuesday night, appeared before emotional members of her home state delegation this morning. She urged the party to come together while taking a shot at new campaign commercials by Senator John McCain that seek to foster division between Clinton backers and those of Senator Barack Obama, the soon-to-be nominee.

“Let me state what I think about their tactics and these ads,” she said in an appearance at a downtown hotel. “I’m Hillary Rodham Clinton and I do not approve of that message.”

Still, leading Democrats found themselves peppered with questions about whether the convention in the capital of an increasingly important swing state could erase lingering wounds from the primary and join the party together for what figures to be a tough fight with Republicans who will hold their own convention next week in St. Paul, Minn.

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Read more at the NYT 

from Chris Flyod

Biden talked of a roughhewn upbringing among honest, hard-pressed working folk. Yes, this prince of the Senate -- 36 years of feeding at the public trough, of being wined and dined and coddled and bankrolled by some of the most powerful interests in the land -- dared hold himself out as a champion of the common people. This would be the same Joe Biden who spent year after year relentlessly pushing the creation of what I once called "the nuclear bomb of class warfare": the Bankruptcy Bill, which put a stranglehold on millions of Americans -- the weakest, the poorest, the sickest, the unlucky, the ripped-off, the young couples just starting out, the old people trying to hang on. Biden poured filth on them, he joined his campaign paymasters -- the hoggish credit-card conglomerates -- and his ideological soul-mates on the Republican side to drop this bomb on the hard-pressed working folk he was now claiming to roll up his shirt sleeves and go to work for. He was turned back many times (I first wrote about the bill back in 2002), but at last he locked arms with George W. Bush -- his partner in "financial services industry" grease -- got the bill passed in 2005.

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Some of what Chris had to say back in 2002:

Of course, in mediaspeak, "broad bipartisan support" usually just means that some shady outfit has been throwing ungodly amounts of money at the ever-eager courtesans in Washington. And there has sure enough been some money thrown here--as you'd expect, when it's bankers and credit-card companies coming to call.

The new bill--which was actually written by "financial services" lobbyists--would "protect" the little lambs of Wall Street from all the vicious single mothers, unemployed fathers, ghetto scum and trailer-park trash out there who have collapsed beneath the debt they've taken on at the frantic urging of, er, Wall Street. For years, the "financial services industry" has deliberately targeted the most vulnerable people in American society--those on the economic margins, young kids just starting out in life, working parents stretching to pay the bills, sick people laden with medical costs, the luckless, the desperate, the ill-educated, the naive--and plied them with promises of "instant credit" and "pre-approved loans" in slick advertising campaigns and junk-mail bombardments.

They operate like playground pushers: "Hey, kid, the first bag is free." Once the habit of life on credit is established, then the extortionate interest rates, the "late charges" and "rollovers" kick in. The promised good life is gone, siphoned away into the coffers of credit giants like MBNA Corporation of Delaware, the world's biggest peddler of plastic cash, and the great banking houses, who use the profits they've plucked from the broken backs of grubby proles to fuel their shell games with Enron, WorldCom, Harken and the boys.

read more of Chris Floyd (extremely relevant to these times when banks are now government protected species... because they've lost YOUR cash) and see toon at top...