Mom's Book

Last summer my mother and I worked on a collection of her writings, which include short stories, song lyrics, poems, and inspirational Bible Study pieces. She has written these over many years, for her church activities and other purposes.

The book also contains her sketches of us (her children) as young children and of herself and my father and other sketches and drawings she has preserved. On the cover and in the back pages are photographs of quilts made by my two grandmothers and my husband's grandmother.

This is a neat book, and I have enjoyed working on it. The book is Bits and Pieces and More by Helen Gobble.

Don't Like Spam

I like my blog, and it is great when friends (even those who do not agree) post comments. However, advertising spam is a pain. You have to be a real pest to do this kind of vandalism.

I am going to keep the only last two entries open to comments. If you want to comment on a previous entry, please use one of these two entries and let me know which of my posts you are commenting upon. Having fewer openings for spammers will reduce my time spent deleting.

No Crisis

About the Crisis in Social Security:

No "WMD," or "shortage in flu vaccine," or "terrorist attack on election day" either.

Social Security has financed itself and several other projects. If Social Security funds had not been used for other projects, the Baby Boomers would have paid for themselves -- or in my case, ourselves.

Crisis talk is another attempt to frighten Americans into accepting autocratic rule by big business interests represented well by George W. Bush. The proposed reform will take the money of small investors out of their pockets directly to the accounts of people wealthy enough to diversify, protect investments, capture markets, and manipulate stock prices.

Social Security Reform

Is it at all possible that President Bush has not noticed that anyone who has enough money can have a private investment retirement account already?

Social Security, on the other hand, is a fail-safe for retirement, a system whereby the nation (that's us) guarantees that we do not suffer from producing large numbers of impoverished seniors. It is security for our social system. It is not individual. That is the point. Social Security is how our social system saves for seniors. The size of the pool is its security. Think about it as something we all do that benefits all of us. Isn't that the concept?

Also, perhaps he has forgotten that the stock market is not a guaranteed investment. In fact, investment in the stock market is much more risky for the small investor than for the wealthy investor. If you are a small investor, which most of us would be, you can lose everything.

The proposed social security reform is a white-washed method of taking from the poor and giving to the rich, the latest of many George W. Bush "reverse Robin Hood" economic initiatives. It works with his philosophy that the poor are already poor, so a little more poverty won't make that much difference.

Where does the money go?

Quoted from The other tsunami, Cover story in The New Statesman by John Pilger, Monday 10th January 2005.

The west's crusaders, the United States and Britain, are giving less to help the tsunami victims than the cost of a Stealth bomber or a week's bloody occupation of Iraq. The bill for George Bush's coming inauguration party would rebuild much of the coastline of Sri Lanka. Bush and Blair increased their first driblets of "aid" only when it became clear that people all over the world were spontaneously giving millions and that a public relations problem beckoned. The Blair government's current "generous" contribution is one-sixteenth of the £800m it spent on bombing Iraq before the invasion and barely one-twentieth of a £1bn gift, known as a soft loan, to the Indonesian military so that it could acquire Hawk fighter-bombers.

On 24 November, one month before the tsunami struck, the Blair government gave its backing to an arms fair in Jakarta, "designed to meet an urgent need for the [Indonesian] armed forces to review its defence capabilities", reported the Jakarta Post. The Indonesian military, responsible for genocide in East Timor, has killed more than 20,000 civilians and "insurgents" in Aceh. Among the exhibitors at the arms fair was Rolls-Royce, manufacturer of engines for the Hawks, which, along with British-supplied Scorpion armoured vehicles, machine-guns and ammunition, were terrorising and killing people in Aceh up to the day the tsunami devastated the province.

The Australian government, currently covering itself in glory for its modest response to the historic disaster befallen its Asian neighbours, has secretly trained Indonesia's Kopassus special forces, whose atrocities in Aceh are well documented. This is in keeping with Australia's 40-year support for oppression in Indonesia, notably its devotion to the dictator Suharto while his troops slaughtered a third of the population of East Timor. The government of John Howard - notorious for its imprisonment of child asylum-seekers - is at present defying international maritime law by denying East Timor its due of oil and gas royalties worth some $8bn. Without this revenue, East Timor, the world's poorest country, cannot build schools, hospitals and roads or provide work for its young people, 90 per cent of whom are unemployed.

Gods and Governments

From the New York Times:

Evangelical Leader Threatens to Use His Political Muscle Against Some Democrats, January 1, 2005, By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

COLORADO SPRINGS - James C. Dobson, the nation's most influential evangelical leader, is threatening to put six potentially vulnerable Democratic senators "in the 'bull's-eye' " if they block conservative appointments to the Supreme Court.

In a letter his aides say is being sent to more than one million of his supporters, Dr. Dobson, the child psychologist and founder of the evangelical organization Focus on the Family, promises "a battle of enormous proportions from sea to shining sea" if President Bush fails to appoint "strict constructionist" jurists or if Democrats filibuster to block conservative nominees.

Dr. Dobson recalled the conservative efforts that helped in the November defeat of Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the Senate minority leader who led Democrats in using the filibuster to block 10 of Mr. Bush's judicial nominees.

Christianity developed from an oppressed people. The early Christians were hounded by Rome, which ruled that everyone had to accept that Caesar was divine. They were also oppressed by the Jews, who ruled that everyone had to subscribe to the ancient law and contribute to the ruling religious government. Both of these oppressors were empowered by divine right -- the Word of God to Moses and the word of the gods to Caesar.

America was founded upon an idea of representative government, not divine right or divine law. It was not even founded upon majority rule. Inherent in the system of representative government is tolerance for people of diverse faith, creed, color, and national origin. Democratic (representative) government protects the rights of the few against the oppression of the many. It assumes that all people have the rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." American Constitutional law protects the individual and the minority group -- whether minority due to race, creed, or national origin. We have freedom of religion, freedom of speech, the right to assemble, the right to vote. Two of the reasons for which the Constitution was established are to "promote the general welfare" and to "secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity."

Christianity was not an oppressive creed at its origin, but it became so when married to the authority of Rome and the royal families of Europe. The American Constitution broke this bond with separation of church and state, a constitutional rule against establishing a church as the state church. Most people today believe that this separation idea was incorporated as a protection for religion, so that people could worship freely. In fact, it was a protection for democracy, which cannot co-exist with divine right.

Neither Christianity nor its founder believed in civil government by the law of God or in the attachment of gods to nations:

• In Matthew 22:15-22 the oppressive Jewish leaders of the day, the Pharisees, knowing that Jesus taught there was only one God, challenged him regarding giving tribute to Caesar. After all, if you support Caesar, are you not acting against your own God? Jesus explained that the money was Caesar's money, and he answered "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's." (KJV) The modern translation gives his response as "Give the Emperor what belongs to him and give God what belongs to God." (CEV)
• In John 4:5-29 we have a story in which Jesus spoke with a woman of another nation and creed and explained to her that the true worship of God was not tied to a particular mountain or a particular city. He said: "...neither in this mountain nor at Jerusalem, worship the Father....God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth." (KJV) In modern translation: "...you won't worship the Father in this mountain or in Jerusalem.... God is Spirit, and those who worship God must be led by the Spirit to worship him according to the truth." (CEV)

Spirit and truth have no geography. God has no geography. The attachment of God to nations is a false claim and a power grab by human beings. Whether it is a claim of an Islamic fundamentalist or a claim of a Christian evangelical, it is false.