The French Socialist Party seems to be in terminal decline, more focused on ridding itself of serious politicians such as Jack Lang rather than re-inventing itself as a serious factor in politics.
The German SPD is currently involved in politically cleansing itself, the Nordrhein-Westfalen Party Board having voted to strip Wolfgang Clement of his party membership. This is big. Stupidly big.
Wolfgang Clement is the former Premier of Nordrhein-Westfalen, one of the largest states in the German Federal Republic. During the second Schroeder Government he was minister of Labour and Economic Affairs. This is not someone you kick out of your Party lightly.
So what horrendous crime did Clement commit? He spoke out against alliances with the Left Party - former communists, quite a number of whom are still starry-eyed when the Berlin Wall is mentioned. And for saying alternative sources of energy are never going to replace conventional way of generating electricity.
This makes sence. Think German Industry. Think Volkswagen, think AEG, think Thyssen-Krupp. Now think a wind turbine on a languid summer day.
It doesn`t fly exactly, does it?
In saying this he directly opposes the proposed energy policies of the SPD, who have apparently taking leave of their sense after waving Gerhard Schroeder goodbye. If an economical authority like Clement says something, anything, a reasonable group of people would give him a hearing. In the world of the German Left, you shoot the messenger.
The expulsion of Clement will now go to the Federal Party Board. If they're so stupid as to ratify the expulsion what would the consequences be?
In the very least, the Christian Democrat Union will be proven right when they say - in the words of the CDU's Wolfgang Bosbach - that "His expulsion will be a symbol that those who tend towards a sober, realist and economically sound (“wirtschaftsfreundlich") course in the SPD, no longer have a political home.“ A lot of people will be turned off by the SDP and throw themselves into the waiting arms of Christian Democracy.
A worst-case scenario? It's quite possible that the 60-or so Seeheimer Kreis members, traditionally the 'right'-wing in the German Social Democrat Faction are not going to stand by idly as people like Wolfgang Clement are cast out into the wilderness. Possibly, a split within the party itself would be on the cards.
European Social Democratic Parties have shed their ideological colours in the advent of Third Way Politics. The Third Way having now come and gone have left these parties with very little to fall back on. The mistake of the third-way is thinking you can have non-ideological politics. Talk about non-ideological politics is however, as sensible as talking about 'neutral values' or 'square circles'. Having convinced themselves that they are beyond ideology has robbed social democracy of talking reasonably about politics. No longer being able to use the theoretical ('ideological') terms also divorces politicians from political realities, because ideologies are exactly that: ways of trying to make theoretical sense of a social and political landscape. In lieu of an ideology, you get slogans, you get neurotic insistencing on shibboleths. In lieu of ideological debate, you have political trials where people are punished for thought-crimes. In lieu of ethical policies, you get politically-correct posturing. It is clear that European Social Democrats no longer know what they're there for. And apparently the European electorates have not heaped enough misery on them to make them snap out of it.
I have put off writing about PZ Myers, an assistant-professor of Biology at a university in Minnesota (I confess I had to look up where in the US Minnesota is located again) and blogger who has of late acquired considerable notoriety with his antics.
He had publicly solicited for consecrated wafers in order to perpetrate an act of blasphemy, to be broadcasted live on the Internet.
All for the amusement of the Dawkins-crowd, I presume. For good measure, he pretended to 'desecrate' a Qur'an as well. From the images I have seen he has ripped out a page from an English-language Penguin edition of the Qur'an, thereby advertising his religious illiteracy, as only Arabic Qur'ans are regarded as sacred objects and whatever ripping up a vernacular translation of the Qur'an is (the word 'disrespectful' comes to mind) it isn`t 'desecration'.
He did, however, pierce the - presumedly - consecrated host with a rusty nail before tipping it into his wheelie-bin.
To begin with, I doubt whether the wafer he was sent was consecrated. Unconsecrated wafers are easy to come by and attempting to make off with a consecrated wafer during Mass would draw attention to one. Furthermore it is impossible to tell the empirical difference as Transsubstantiation of bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ is a transformation of the substance, the underlying reality, rather than the accidents of bread and wine, which remain. In that respect, I hope for dr.Myers' sake that the host was unconsecrated.
That being said, Myers' obviously believing that the host was consecrated acted with complete intent to perpetrate an act of blasphemy. This act that he may have failed to complete, but the utter malice as testified by the symbolic act of desecrating the host with a rusty nail in mockery of the Crucifixion, and his glee in the supposed completion of it, are testimony to a deep hatred by which he lives. No man in which even a remnant of benevolence remained would advertise the completion of his desperate task with the words 'It is Finished', the next to last of the Seven Words of Christ on the Cross.
I am not quite sure what, or who, it is he hates. The act itself would almost suggest a hatred of God Himself. He has gone well beyond anger, this is much more basic. Now, as St.Thomas Aquinas rightly says: it is impossible to hate God in his Divine Essence, but possible to hate God in his effects, or in his works. I would say that a deep and visceral hatred of the devotion to and adoration of the Blessed Sacrament by millions of Catholics, a deep and visceral hatred of the most cherished Sacrament of the One Fold of Christ, amounts to an odium Dei.
If this is so, things look very dire for dr. Myers. These kinds of things are not good for the welfare of your soul.
I am also puzzled as to what he hoped to achieve. I do not see how the case for the scientific method is in any way strengthened. He does not seem to me to be a disinterested observer and his rhetoric is so emotional and derisive as to make a mockery of his much-touted scientific credentials.
I can imagine his irritation at the dissimilitude practised by Intelligent-designists and Creationists but he only has his own ignorance to blame if he sees Roman Catholic theology behind the rantings of young-earth irrationalists.
By reputedly desecrating the Eucharistic Christ he has merited the loathing of millions of Catholics and will have achieved nothing, for evil acts never achieve their goal.
Dr. Myers himself is, I suppose, to be pitied. He is fifty-one, his goatee is greying, a glance at his CV tells us his academic career has been in horizontal mode for the past seventeen years, and he is stuck in Morris, Minnesota, which boasts 5,000 inhabitants and where the last reported exciting thing that happened was Minnesota's strongest earthquake (a whopping 4.6 on the Richter Schale) having its epicentre there back in 1975.
But in all seriousness, this is an act born out of despair. It is not given to us to know what lives in Myers' heart, but he does not strike me as a happy man.
This shenanigan is probably his last remaining possibility to garner a little attention to which he feels he is entitled.
At the same time he does seem to have garnered a little influence in the circles of radical Dawkinists (is 'radical Dawkinist' a tautology? I digress....) dr. Myers' weblog being prominently linked to from the main page of "richarddawkins.net". Dawkins himself is eerily silent on the matter, he does not want to seem to dissociate himself from Myers and that in itself tells us something about Dawkinism, and yes, it is disturbing.
Father, forgive dr. Myers, for he knows not what he does. He really doesn`t.
Orthodox provinces are setting up parallel jurisdictions, de facto separating themselves from US and Canadian Anglicans and - according to the Mail on Sunday - 1,300 members of the clergy of the CofE will be heading for the exit as soon as Synod makes provisions for women Bishops.
Of course the English debate makes very little sense. Once you have come to the conclusion - as a church - that you can validly ordain women to the priesthood it is quite inconsistent to bar them from becoming Bishops; the ordination of priests and consecration of bishops being no more than gradations of the same sacrament. However, this debate, as most debates in the CofE, has very little to do with consistency and very much with accomodation. Conservatives in the CofE, not having accepted the ordination of women, who are now accomodated by 'flying bishops' and for some reason this practice is set to end with the advent of women bishops.
Of course it is possible to create a parallel structure with non-geographical 'traditional' dioceses and leave the geographical dioceses to the womenfolk. Personally this would seem to me as the most agreeable solution; by opting for parallel structures, traditionalists implicitly concede the point that women will be consecrated as bishops in the near future. By opting for a parallel structure they also commit themselves to remaining in the CofE. By opting for a parallel structure the CofE would continue to recognize the presence of traditionalists in the CofE and - in so far as traditionalist opposition to women bishops is a matter of conscience - not force their consciences in one way or the other. Opposition to parallel structures (the 'swiss-cheese' model of episcopal supervision) comes mostly from those who find it 'inconsistent' . But as consistency has never been a CofE forte it would now seem the most disastrous time possible to insist on it.
Of course, should the CofE go whoring after the strange god 'Consistency' and the 1,300 clergy make good on their threat to move elsewhere, what would happen? It has been speculated that, as in `'94, the Church of Rome would receive quite a few of them - but many evangelical dissidents would not be interested in crossing the Tiber. Also, the Catholic Church in England and Wales being generally considered generally wishy-washy and a liturgical wasteland to boot I seriously wonder how happy those priests will be if they go from sonorous Book of Common Prayer to the dumbed-down ICEL Missal; from Stanford in A to 'a little bit of clay am I, Jesus raises us so high'.
Although I would, strictly speaking, approve of Anglicans coming back to the One Fold of Christ, I cannot but feel the circumstances in which this reunion would take place do little to improve anyone's spirits. All we can do is wait and see.
The answer is: eight months, if you're Rita Verdonk - ex Dutch Liberal Party (VVD) maverick and now Supreme Mistress and the She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed of the far-right batshit Proud of the Netherlands Party . After failing to take control of the (once respectable) Liberal Party she split off and formed her own grouplet. Even though that may be an incorrect monniker if you're a one-woman outfit, but I digress.
Because she is perceived by the rude & ignorant vulgar (mostly spewing their bile in the Telegraaf comment boards) as someone who'll whip the darkies in line she's done great in the polls. Would there have been elections a week ago, she would have scooped up a cool twenty seats. Needless to say, prospects like that prove irresistible to every chancer, gold-digger, egomaniac, intrigant and adventurer in my unhappy Kingdom. As flies are to excrement, shall we say.
No-one knows who finances the 'Pride' party, but shady real-estate dealers (who are mostly in the news either getting shot by the Mafia or bankrolling other interesting political ventures ) have surfaced. It was no more than poetic justice that the €150,000 promised to her by a Dutch tax-refugee sheltered by Dubai and spent on a lavish 'launch-party' in the Amsterdam Terminal never materialized. If only it had bankrupted her then.
From her time in the Liberal Party onwards her right hand man was a (bona fide) business man, Ed Sinke, who was pretty much her full-time manager and supporter from the first hour onwards. They have now fallen out, spectacularly so, with Verdonk accusing Sinke of helping himself to campaign funds, and Sinke saying as much that Verdonk can`t budget to save her (political) life and is an incompetent leader. Sinke pretty much proved his innocence by means of an accountants' report with Verdonk now claiming in public that that accountants' firm was, well, bought and the report is fraudulent and that she 'will be taking it to the courts'.
By all means, she must. Few have sued accountants and won. Without claiming that all accountants are by definition superior people to the rest of us, at least they tend to be extremely scrupulous when it comes to number-crunching. The chances that an accountants' firm will falsify a report over a five-figure sum is infinitesimal.
What can we conclude from this: she's as paranoid as can be, will alienate all well-wishers and supporters and every vote casted in support of 'Pride' will be wasted, as every vote once cast for the Pim Fortuyn Party was wasted. She is now in open rupture with her second-in-command, she's fighting it out in the glare of the Media (at least, Elsevier doesn`t seem to be writing about anyone else but Rita this week) and frankly, I think anyone interested in 'Pride' who has any sense will bail out while he still can.
And it's two more years before the next general election.
- Mood:
amused
The Belgian Army, it has emerged, has run out of bullets, with stocks having dwindled to four cartridges per soldier. (A quick glance at Wikipedia makes one infer that there are 100,000 bullets left)
Reason for the cock-up is a civil servant of the Belgian Treasury who stopped an order for 5,000,000 bullets going through because of minor administrative errors. The acute ammunition shortage is a headache for the three-hundred or so Belgian soldiers in Afghanistan who - apparently only have 200 rather than the regular 2,000 bullets available. (And the Afghan theatre thereby depletes the Belgian stock of bullets by another 60,000 - leaving a mere 40,000 bullets available for the defence of the Belgian chocolate-works, beer-breweries and everything EU-ish centred in Brussels.)
The Belgian Military High Command, in the meantime, strenuously denies that soldiers on excersise are made to cry 'bang bang' in lieu of firing any shots.
It's really not all that complicated:
Imagine that you have to find agreement between 27 parties. Utter and total agreement. No naysaying allowed. If it's 26-1 for the yays, the nayes have it. Imagine also that you are so much In Favour of Democracy that you want Referenda All Over. Let's assume also that the chances of each and every referendum passing are 90%, these are innings any politician would die for. (or in the very least sell his constituents into white slavery for).
The probability of all referenda passing in each and every country would be - under those very fortuitous circumstances - in fact less than six percent.
If the chance of a referendum passing in one country is 0.9 (90%) than the chance of it passing in two countries is 0.9 squared. The chance of all referenda passing in 27 countries is 0.9 to the power of 27 which, my calculator tells me, is 0.058149.... etc. 5.8% in other words. If you want the Lisbon Treaty derailed, the best thing would be to call for as many referenda as possible, there's always a chance some country somewhere is going to stick a spanner in the carefully calibrated works of European Government.
It's not that I`m personally enthusiastic about the proposed Lisbon Treaty , or whatever will be left of it after the Irish registered their discontent with the thing, but I believe that behind the call for referenda, under the convenient banner of 'democracy', lies not so much a desire for democracy as one for derailing.
To claim that the interestst of democracy are served only by referenda, and not by national parliaments, as some in the No-camp, seem to claim, is to undermine the very legitimacy of parliamentary government.
This, I think, is not something we should aspire to. Sometimes the best (direct democracy) is the enemy the good (representative government). Our vote should be one for parliamentary stability rather than for the vagaries of populism even, if I may add gleefully, the populists happen to be right for a change.
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