REPORT ON THE RELIEF WORK IN INDONESIA

From one of my Australian correspondents in Indonesia:

New Year's eve in Jakarta was very humble with the locals doing more praying than partying. However it is hard to believe it has been only 10 days since the disasters. President ad V-P Kalla have each made two trips to Aceh (Jakarta-Aceh is like Canberra-Cairns) as have most of the cabinet. Aceh has already been opened up to foreign aid agencies (50 of them so far!), foreign journalists and even the Australian air force and US marines are on the ground. The Aceh provincial government was virtually wiped out so too the local administrations of Bandah Aceh and the West coast regencies, the regional police lost half their men (and families) and old-time control freaks in the central government and army are, momentarily, sidelined.

Australia and the US are controlling air traffic at Banda Aceh airport, trucks are moving in from Medan and the east coast ports are chockers. Unfortunately the earthquake/tsunamis double whack destroyed roads and bridges into the west side where all the suffering is. What this means is there are mighty log jams which are preventing even more aid and personnel being shifted around quickly at this stage. Despite the cruelty of the thought, transportation and engineering specialists are needed first. Once the logistics are sorted out over the next few days I am sure the medical people will be streaming in. I am more concerned with the long-term capacity problem of local, useful institutions like the Indonesian Red Cross (which is getting a pittance of the charity money raised world wide) once the internationals move on to the next big show (or abuse their welcome) . and also the, to date unaddressed, need to get thousands of Acehnese out of the province until infrastructure can be restored (as done in Darwin in 1974).

Everyone is aware of the swift Australian support and our defence force team in Aceh is doing a great job in transportation and infrastructure. The latest news from the Australian Government of an extra $500 million to help rebuild the devastated areas is amazing.

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THE HOLY TRINITY

The blogosphere is an amazing place. Over at Maverick Philosopher there has been an extensive discussion going on about the doctrine of the holy Trinity! Generally sympathetic to Christianity though I am, I cannot see that particular doctrine as anything but the most awful load of codswallop. It is a self-contradictory formulation that arose out of the controversy among early Christians about whether Christ was God or not. They thought he was but, if so, how come he himself constantly referred to God as separate from himself (e.g. John 14:28)? Were there two Gods, Jesus plus his "Father" in heaven or was there only the one God of Judaism?

There was one logical group in all this -- the Arians -- who said that there was only one God and he was separate from Christ so therefore Christ was not God. This did however stir up enormous fights among the early Christians and the Arians ended up getting the boot. So we ended up with the present ridiculous doctrine that there are three gods (Jesus plus God the Father plus the Holy Ghost) but there is still also only one God. It is conventional to describe the doctrine as a mystery but it is no such thing. It is just a theological compromise that sacrifices logic for the sake of keeping all parties to the debate happy. How anybody can take it seriously is beyond me. If you regard Christ's own words as being the ultimate authority, the Arians have the argument won hands down. In Matthew 16: 16,17 he makes it as clear as he possibly could that he is the son of God, not God himself. Ain't theology wonderful?

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ELSEWHERE

Hilarious! "Gene Expression" have up a post on Jared Diamond, the biologist who claims that race is a myth and that there is no genetic difference between the Western European whites who created the modern world and anybody else. All those "dead white males" did so well purely by accident, apparently. The "Gene Expression" post however reprints one of Diamond's scientific papers from the days before he had hopped onto the politically correct bandwagon -- a paper in which Diamond shows important inherited differences between the races! That blogospheric fact-checking sure is pesky for frauds!

My controversy with Jason Soon continues over at Majority Rights. Great fun! Jason does seem to be a bit of a dipstick. Maybe he should be renamed Jason Late! I see that he has however deleted his original defamatory post so I guess I have had a victory in the midst of having fun! Taking me on in my own area of academic specialization (political psychology) was certainly not wise of him.

A step forward: "The Bush administration is focusing on a Social Security proposal that would allow younger workers to invest up to 4 percent of their payroll taxes in private accounts, with contributions limited to about $1,000 to $1,300 a year, an official said Tuesday." [Australia has been doing much the same sort of thing for years, of course, only on a rather bigger scale]

A good article here on how the aging population problem is going to hit Europe a lot harder than the USA.

David Limbaugh: "When you look at the Left's rush to judgment against the Bush administration for not reacting precisely according to its expectations (demands) concerning the tsunami disaster, you just have to wonder what kind of psychological forces motivate this group. It's instructive that the very people who constantly call for a spirit of collegiality and bipartisanship have somehow managed to politicize the most apolitical of all events.... one is entitled to question whether people are truly motivated by compassion when they feel the need to conspicuously parade their philanthropy like an obscene badge of self-congratulatory honor."

Tom Barrett has a pretty good coverage and refutation of the lies and deceit coming from Leftists about the tsunami relief operation.

An Iraqi speaks up about how un-humanitarian are the so-called "humanitarians" of the Western Left in Iraq.

More evidence of heavy Leftist bias among journalists here

The latest posting on MarxWords shows that, like modern-day Leftist elitists, Engels thought that country people (the "Rednecks" of his day) were stupid.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions.

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