The European Commission Announces Euro-English

Euro-English

(Hmmm...Ahnold speak... and after all of those damned French classes too.)

The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility.

As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5-year phase-in plan that would become known as "Euro-English".

In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy.

The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of "k". This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter.

There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with "f". This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter.

In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible.

Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling.

Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent "e" in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away.

By the 4th yer people wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v".

During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensi bl riten styl.

Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru.

Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas.

Originally posted by: Il_Bagattel -- Friday, 24 March 2006, 12:24 p.m. at:
http://www.surfingtheapocalypse.net/cgi-bin/forum.cgi?read=131561

Does Objective Reality Exist?

The Holographic Universe
By Michael Talbot
3-12-6

In 1982 a remarkable event took place. At the University of Paris a research team led by physicist Alain Aspect performed what may turn out to be one of the most important experiments of the 20th century. You did not hear about it on the evening news. In fact, unless you are in the habit of reading scientific journals you probably have never even heard Aspect's name, though there are some who believe his discovery may change the face of science.

Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn't matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart.

Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing. The problem with this feat is that it violates Einstein's long-held tenet that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light. Since traveling faster than the speed of light is tantamount to breaking the time barrier, this daunting prospect has caused some physicists to try to come up with elaborate ways to explain away Aspect's findings. But it has inspired others to offer even more radical explanations.

University of London physicist David Bohm, for example, believes Aspect's findings imply that objective reality does not exist, that despite its apparent solidity the universe is at heart a phantasm, a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram.

To understand why Bohm makes this startling assertion, one must first understand a little about holograms. A hologram is a three- dimensional photograph made with the aid of a laser.

To make a hologram, the object to be photographed is first bathed in the light of a laser beam. Then a second laser beam is bounced off the reflected light of the first and the resulting interference pattern (the area where the two laser beams commingle) is captured on film.

When the film is developed, it looks like a meaningless swirl of light and dark lines. But as soon as the developed film is illuminated by another laser beam, a three-dimensional image of the original object appears.

The three-dimensionality of such images is not the only remarkable characteristic of holograms. If a hologram of a rose is cut in half and then illuminated by a laser, each half will still be found to contain the entire image of the rose.

Indeed, even if the halves are divided again, each snippet of film will always be found to contain a smaller but intact version of the original image. Unlike normal photographs, every part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole.

The "whole in every part" nature of a hologram provides us with an entirely new way of understanding organization and order. For most of its history, Western science has labored under the bias that the best way to understand a physical phenomenon, whether a frog or an atom, is to dissect it and study its respective parts.

A hologram teaches us that some things in the universe may not lend themselves to this approach. If we try to take apart something constructed holographically, we will not get the pieces of which it is made, we will only get smaller wholes.

This insight suggested to Bohm another way of understanding Aspect's discovery. Bohm believes the reason subatomic particles are able to remain in contact with one another regardless of the distance separating them is not because they are sending some sort of mysterious signal back and forth, but because their separateness is an illusion. He argues that at some deeper level of reality such particles are not individual entities, but are actually extensions of the same fundamental something.

To enable people to better visualize what he means, Bohm offers the following illustration.

Imagine an aquarium containing a fish. Imagine also that you are unable to see the aquarium directly and your knowledge about it and what it contains comes from two television cameras, one directed at the aquarium's front and the other directed at its side.

As you stare at the two television monitors, you might assume that the fish on each of the screens are separate entities. After all, because the cameras are set at different angles, each of the images will be slightly different. But as you continue to watch the two fish, you will eventually become aware that there is a certain relationship between them.

When one turns, the other also makes a slightly different but corresponding turn; when one faces the front, the other always faces toward the side. If you remain unaware of the full scope of the situation, you might even conclude that the fish must be instantaneously communicating with one another, but this is clearly not the case.

This, says Bohm, is precisely what is going on between the subatomic particles in Aspect's experiment.

According to Bohm, the apparent faster-than-light connection between subatomic particles is really telling us that there is a deeper level of reality we are not privy to, a more complex dimension beyond our own that is analogous to the aquarium. And, he adds, we view objects such as subatomic particles as separate from one another because we are seeing only a portion of their reality.

Such particles are not separate "parts", but facets of a deeper and more underlying unity that is ultimately as holographic and indivisible as the previously mentioned rose. And since everything in physical reality is comprised of these "eidolons", the universe is itself a projection, a hologram.

In addition to its phantomlike nature, such a universe would possess other rather startling features. If the apparent separateness of subatomic particles is illusory, it means that at a deeper level of reality all things in the universe are infinitely interconnected.

The electrons in a carbon atom in the human brain are connected to the subatomic particles that comprise every salmon that swims, every heart that beats, and every star that shimmers in the sky.

Everything interpenetrates everything, and although human nature may seek to categorize and pigeonhole and subdivide, the various phenomena of the universe, all apportionments are of necessity artificial and all of nature is ultimately a seamless web.

In a holographic universe, even time and space could no longer be viewed as fundamentals. Because concepts such as location break down in a universe in which nothing is truly separate from anything else, time and three-dimensional space, like the images of the fish on the TV monitors, would also have to be viewed as projections of this deeper order.

At its deeper level reality is a sort of superhologram in which the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously. This suggests that given the proper tools it might even be possible to someday reach into the superholographic level of reality and pluck out scenes from the long-forgotten past.

What else the superhologram contains is an open-ended question. Allowing, for the sake of argument, that the superhologram is the matrix that has given birth to everything in our universe, at the very least it contains every subatomic particle that has been or will be -- every configuration of matter and energy that is possible, from snowflakes to quasars, from blue whales to gamma rays. It must be seen as a sort of cosmic storehouse of "All That Is."

Although Bohm concedes that we have no way of knowing what else might lie hidden in the superhologram, he does venture to say that we have no reason to assume it does not contain more. Or as he puts it, perhaps the superholographic level of reality is a "mere stage" beyond which lies "an infinity of further development".

Bohm is not the only researcher who has found evidence that the universe is a hologram. Working independently in the field of brain research, Standford neurophysiologist Karl Pribram has also become persuaded of the holographic nature of reality.

Pribram was drawn to the holographic model by the puzzle of how and where memories are stored in the brain. For decades numerous studies have shown that rather than being confined to a specific location, memories are dispersed throughout the brain.

In a series of landmark experiments in the 1920s, brain scientist Karl Lashley found that no matter what portion of a rat's brain he removed he was unable to eradicate its memory of how to perform complex tasks it had learned prior to surgery. The only problem was that no one was able to come up with a mechanism that might explain this curious "whole in every part" nature of memory storage.

Then in the 1960s Pribram encountered the concept of holography and realized he had found the explanation brain scientists had been looking for. Pribram believes memories are encoded not in neurons, or small groupings of neurons, but in patterns of nerve impulses that crisscross the entire brain in the same way that patterns of laser light interference crisscross the entire area of a piece of film containing a holographic image. In other words, Pribram believes the brain is itself a hologram.

Pribram's theory also explains how the human brain can store so many memories in so little space. It has been estimated that the human brain has the capacity to memorize something on the order of 10 billion bits of information during the average human lifetime (or roughly the same amount of information contained in five sets of the Encyclopaedia Britannica).

Similarly, it has been discovered that in addition to their other capabilities, holograms possess an astounding capacity for information storage--simply by changing the angle at which the two lasers strike a piece of photographic film, it is possible to record many different images on the same surface. It has been demonstrated that one cubic centimeter of film can hold as many as 10 billion bits of information.

Our uncanny ability to quickly retrieve whatever information we need from the enormous store of our memories becomes more understandable if the brain functions according to holographic principles. If a friend asks you to tell him what comes to mind when he says the word "zebra", you do not have to clumsily sort back through some gigantic and cerebral alphabetic file to arrive at an answer. Instead, associations like "striped", "horselike", and "animal native to Africa" all pop into your head instantly.

Indeed, one of the most amazing things about the human thinking process is that every piece of information seems instantly cross- correlated with every other piece of information--another feature intrinsic to the hologram. Because every portion of a hologram is infinitely interconnected with ever other portion, it is perhaps nature's supreme example of a cross-correlated system.

The storage of memory is not the only neurophysiological puzzle that becomes more tractable in light of Pribram's holographic model of the brain. Another is how the brain is able to translate the avalanche of frequencies it receives via the senses (light frequencies, sound frequencies, and so on) into the concrete world of our perceptions. Encoding and decoding frequencies is precisely what a hologram does best. Just as a hologram functions as a sort of lens, a translating device able to convert an apparently meaningless blur of frequencies into a coherent image, Pribram believes the brain also comprises a lens and uses holographic principles to mathematically convert the frequencies it receives through the senses into the inner world of our perceptions.

An impressive body of evidence suggests that the brain uses holographic principles to perform its operations. Pribram's theory, in fact, has gained increasing support among neurophysiologists.

Argentinian-Italian researcher Hugo Zucarelli recently extended the holographic model into the world of acoustic phenomena. Puzzled by the fact that humans can locate the source of sounds without moving their heads, even if they only possess hearing in one ear, Zucarelli discovered that holographic principles can explain this ability.

Zucarelli has also developed the technology of holophonic sound, a recording technique able to reproduce acoustic situations with an almost uncanny realism.

Pribram's belief that our brains mathematically construct "hard" reality by relying on input from a frequency domain has also received a good deal of experimental support.

It has been found that each of our senses is sensitive to a much broader range of frequencies than was previously suspected.

Researchers have discovered, for instance, that our visual systems are sensitive to sound frequencies, that our sense of smell is in part dependent on what are now called "cosmic frequencies", and that even the cells in our bodies are sensitive to a broad range of frequencies. Such findings suggest that it is only in the holographic domain of consciousness that such frequencies are sorted out and divided up into conventional perceptions.

But the most mind-boggling aspect of Pribram's holographic model of the brain is what happens when it is put together with Bohm's theory. For if the concreteness of the world is but a secondary reality and what is "there" is actually a holographic blur of frequencies, and if the brain is also a hologram and only selects some of the frequencies out of this blur and mathematically transforms them into sensory perceptions, what becomes of objective reality?

Put quite simply, it ceases to exist. As the religions of the East have long upheld, the material world is Maya, an illusion, and although we may think we are physical beings moving through a physical world, this too is an illusion.

We are really "receivers" floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of frequency, and what we extract from this sea and transmogrify into physical reality is but one channel from many extracted out of the superhologram.

This striking new picture of reality, the synthesis of Bohm and Pribram's views, has come to be called the holographic paradigm, and although many scientists have greeted it with skepticism, it has galvanized others. A small but growing group of researchers believe it may be the most accurate model of reality science has arrived at thus far. More than that, some believe it may solve some mysteries that have never before been explainable by science and even establish the paranormal as a part of nature.

Numerous researchers, including Bohm and Pribram, have noted that many para-psychological phenomena become much more understandable in terms of the holographic paradigm.

In a universe in which individual brains are actually indivisible portions of the greater hologram and everything is infinitely interconnected, telepathy may merely be the accessing of the holographic level.

It is obviously much easier to understand how information can travel from the mind of individual 'A' to that of individual 'B' at a far distance point and helps to understand a number of unsolved puzzles in psychology. In particular, Grof feels the holographic paradigm offers a model for understanding many of the baffling phenomena experienced by individuals during altered states of consciousness.

Bird Flu: Is It Really A Serious Threat?

Bird Flu to Hit U.S. Within 3 Weeks

March 13, 2006
By Shawn McGinnis, KTLA News

Washington, D.C. — The bird flu is coming to the U.S. and experts say there is no way to stop it. In fact, scientists say wild birds infected with the deadly virus could reach Alaska within the next few weeks.

Spy satellites are being used to track the infected flocks on their route from Asia to Alaska. The migratory birds are expected to mingle with North American flocks in Alaska and move on to the lower 48 states as early as August.


But don't count on having a vaccine available that soon. Federal health officials say it will take at least six months after a pandemic breaks out to produce a bird flu vaccine.

Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt says that's because the virus is mutating and there is no way to know in advance which strain might become capable of human to human transmission.

Once the particular strain is identified, Leavitt says it will take time to ensure that a vaccine is safe and to mass-produce it. Until then, it will be up to traditional public health measures to contain the outbreak.

There is no direct evidence that the current strains of bird flu can be transmitted from person to person. To date, people have only been infected after close contact with sick birds.

Copyright © 2006, KTLA0104.html

http://ktla.trb.com/news/ktla-shawnalaskabirdflu,0,1046423.story?coll=ktla-news-1

Renowned Bird Flu Expert Warns: Be Prepared

There are "about even odds" that the virus could mutate to an easily transmitted form

March 14, 2006
By JIM AVILA and MEREDITH RAMSEY
ABC

Robert G. Webster is one of the few bird flu experts confident enough to answer the key question: Will the avian flu switch from posing a terrible hazard to birds to becoming a real threat to humans?

There are "about even odds at this time for the virus to learn how to transmit human to human," he told ABC's "World News Tonight." Webster, the Rosemary Thomas Chair at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., is credited with being the first scientist to find the link between human flu and bird flu.

Webster and his team of scientists are working to find a way to beat the virus if it morphs. He has even been dubbed the Flu Hunter.

Right now, H5N1, a type of avian influenza virus, has confined itself to birds. It can be transmitted from bird to human but only by direct contact with the droppings and excretions of infected birds.

But viruses mutate, and the big fear among the world's scientists is that the bird flu virus will join the human flu virus, change its genetic code and emerge as a new and deadly flu that can spread through the air from human to human.

If the virus does mutate, it does not necessarily mean it will be as deadly to people as it is to birds. But experts such as Webster say they must prepare for the worst.

"I personally believe it will happen and make personal preparations," said Webster, who has stored a three-month supply of food and water at his home in case of an outbreak.

FRIGHTENING WARNING

"Society just can't accept the idea that 50 percent of the population could die. And I think we have to face that possibility," Webster said. "I'm sorry if I'm making people a little frightened, but I feel it's my role."

Most scientists won't put it that bluntly, but many acknowledge that Webster could be right about the flu becoming transmissible among humans, even though they believe the 50 percent figure could be too high.

Researcher Dr. Anne Moscona at New York Weill Cornell Medical Center said that a human form may not mutate this year or next -- or ever -- but it would be foolish to ignore the dire consequences if it did.

"If bird flu becomes not bird flu but mutates into a form that can be transmitted between humans, we could then have a spread like wildfire across the globe," Moscona said.

No one knows how long or how many mutation changes it would take for bird flu to become a direct threat to humans.

"It may not do it. There may just be too many changes. The virus may not be able to be a human virus," Moscona said.

But that hasn't stopped Moscona from searching for new types of anti-viral treatments that both prevent and slow the spread of bird flu.

"I don't think that once we have human-to-human transmission, it's going to be possible to contain it," she said.

That is why nearly every viral scientist in America, perhaps the world, is waiting and watching the avian flu virus to see if it remains just a threat to birds or changes its genetic code and becomes a deadly threat to humans as well.

Copyright © 2006 ABC News Internet Ventures

ON THE OTHER HAND...

Avian Epidemics

International Medical Veritas Association

On February 27, 2006 the National Bird Flu Summit opened with the usual cast of characters in attendance, the U.N., the WHO, the CDC, and a parade of MD/PhD researchers. All ready to preach the word of doom, leading everyone in humanity to fear for their lives even though no human-to-human spread of any diseases has occurred.

A deadly bird flu pandemic will likely cause significant harm to the global economy with widespread disruptions in work places, trade and payment systems and could prompt a surge in demand for cash, the International Monetary Fund warned on Monday. (No mention of the dangerous multi trillion American debt, the ending of M3 international money supply reporting by the Federal Reserve, or the Iranian move to shortly start selling oil in Euro was made.)

The World Health Organization (WHO) confirmed on March
13, 2006 the 98th human death from the H5N1 strain of bird flu.


Professor Sir David King, chief scientific adviser to the British government and head of the Office of Science and Technology said "It is very important to keep things in proportion, and to make a distinction between the virus in birds and the virus in humans. "Your chances of winning the lottery are about one in 14 million. Your chances of catching bird flu are more like one in 100 million, even if we had H5N1 among the chicken population in Britain."

Way back in 1992 The Center for Disease Control (CDC) estimates that 9,000 Americans die each year from food borne illness, with others becoming ill from bacterial, chemical, and pesticide residues mostly found in foods of animal origin. The greatest danger to the consumer is salmonella poisoning, a leading cause of food borne sickness. In 1992, the USDA estimated that 40 percent of all poultry was contaminated with salmonella.

UN Senior Coordinator for Avian and Human Influenza, and special representative to the WHO Director General, Dr. David Nabarro, announced the arrival of the pandemic saying without hesitation, “Note that I said when, not if, the pandemic arrives.” Of course the disaster waiting to happen is making medical officials push for completion of “enforcement measures,” policies and procedures that would emphasize the use of quarantine, of force against populations. Medical officials are salivating discussing the need to have the police and the military available to control mass panic and the need for “incredibly efficient mass production” of a polyvalent influenza vaccines ready whether they work or not. Though medical officials at the conference indicated the necessity to “get people to understand the magnitude of the risk,” what the public needs to be warned about is what these officials are hiding and why.

The H5N1 virus remains mainly a virus of birds, but experts fear it could change into a form easily transmitted from person to person and sweep the world, killing millions within weeks or months. Is there any evidence that the bird flu is such a threat to humans? There is no solid or even semi solid science that indicates that what is happening with the birds is going to happen with humans but that is not stopping health officials from scaring the wits out of the public. Whether or not the bird flu will occur in humans remains completely unknown but officials want to prepare for the end of human freedom anyway, just in case.

There are no lab tests to confirm the
presence of the highly-pathogenic virus.
Dr. Anna Thorson

All we really have is a continuation of a fantasy about viruses that have never been proven to exist. Dr. Stefan Lanka, virologist and molecular biologist is just one of many voices that are smothered by the medical industrial establishment. There is one breathtaking fact for the public to deal with and that is the fact that not even one of the (medically relevant) viruses has ever been isolated; there is no proof of their existence. "So for a long time I studied virology, from the end to the beginning, from the beginning to the end, to be absolutely sure that there was no such thing as HIV. And it was easy for me to be sure about this because I realized that the whole group of viruses to which HIV is said to belong, the retroviruses -- as well as other viruses which are claimed to be very dangerous -- in fact do not exist at all," says Dr. Lanka.

Retroviruses are not living creatures but bits of
protein that attach themselves to living cells.

“For almost one year we have been asking authorities, politicians and medical institutes after the scientific evidence for the existence of such viruses that are said to cause disease and therefore require "immunization." After almost one year we have not received even one concrete answer which provides evidence for the existence of those "vaccination viruses," continues Lanka.

The Airborne Menace is circling the world and is about to land in your backyard. Lanka says, “We’re being asked to believe that migratory birds in Asia have been infected with an extremely dangerous, deadly virus. These mortally diseased birds then keep flying for weeks on end. They fly thousands of kilometres, and then in Romania, in Turkey, Greece and elsewhere infect hens, geese or other poultry, with which they have had no contact, and which within a very short time get diseased and die. But the migratory birds do not get diseased and do not die, but keep on flying, for weeks on end, thousands of kilometres. Anyone who believes this will also believe that babies are brought by the stork.”

Actually we are the most conditioned, programmed beings the world has ever known and believe just about anything fed to us through the media, especially in the area of medicine. Our thoughts and attitudes are continually being shaped and molded by people who do not care for anything but the truth of money and the security it provides. It is clear that most issues of conventional medical wisdom are scientifically implanted in the public consciousness by thousands of media clips each year.

Just think about how many times you've heard an evening news anchor spit out some variation on the phrase, "According to experts ...." and we are supposed to trust them, naturally, that’s what being an expert is all about, being trusted in ones individual field. In reality there are two kinds of "experts" in question -- the public relations spin doctors behind the scenes and the "independent" experts paraded before the public, scientists who have been hand-selected, cultivated, and paid handsomely to promote the views of corporations involved in controversial actions.

Therefore we have reached a watershed point, though medical and health officials are scratching their heads wondering what is going on and spend most of their time worrying about the flu and other infectious diseases when it is the non-infectious diseases that are threatening to bring civilization down. At the end of 2004, Klaus Stohr, of the WHO Global Influenza Program, said "Even with the best case scenario, the most optimistic scenario, the pandemic will cause a public health emergency with estimates which will put the number of deaths in the range of two and seven million. There is no reason to believe that we are going to be spared. An influenza pandemic will spare nobody. Every country will be affected".[ii] Transpose these words to read, “The current nightmare with mercury and other chemicals in the environment will spare nobody, every country and every person will be affected” and you will have a better approximation of the truth.

There is another nightmare though that might blindside humanity. Dr. Leonard Horowitz essay The Avian Flu Fright: Politically Timed for Global “Iatrogenocide”[iii] offers a whole other view of what might be going on. Biotechnology in the service of bioterroism and biological warfare is able to take simple proteins and retroviruses and turn them into lethal life forms that threaten humanity. Are these health officials merely front men for sinister forces dedicated to forceful population reductions? In Horowitz’s essay it said America alone is "targeted" for a 50% population reduction. "Thus, the flu virus the world currently fears most is either: 1) now being prepared in labs paid by industrialists with massive wealth-building incentives to “accidentally” release the virus; or 2) has already been prepared in such labs to take advantage of this current fright and future sales following the virus’s release." It’s not only in the movies that dark forces rear up their incredible ugliness to face us with ourselves.

The repeated warnings of the United Nations and other authorities of an impending global epidemic of avian flu outbreaks have led over 60 countries to order large supplies of Tamiflu despite the fact that it has yet to prove its reliability at curing or stopping the H5N1 bird flu virus. This is good news for for U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who has already cleared over $5 million in capital gains by selling some shares in Gilead Sciences, the biotechnology firm that developed the drug Tamiflu, while he was serving as a board-member for that enterprise reports an article in the London Independent.

Dr. Lanka reminds us, “Those side effects which are noted on the instruction slips accompanying packages of Tamiflu are almost identical to the symptoms of serious influenza. Thus, on a large scale, medicines are now being stored which cause precisely the same symptoms as those which appear in an actual so-called influenza. If Tamiflu is administered to sick persons, then this is likely to cause far more serious symptoms than those of a serious influenza. If a pandemic is stated to exist, then many people will take this medicine at the same time. In that case we will actually have unequivocal symptoms of a Tamiflu epidemic. Then deaths caused by Tamiflu are to be expected, and this will then be presented as evidence of the dangerous nature of the bird flu.”

“Agribusiness companies stand to reap huge gains in the event that scientists at Cambridge University and elsewhere are able to replace the entire world chicken population with genetically-engineered chicks allegedly resistant to H5N1 virus. Little-noticed beneficiaries of the current Avian Flu scare, however, are the giant agribusiness chicken producers based in the United States, who claim ‘their’ chickens are safe. Their sales are booming and all indications are that Avian Flu, paradoxically, has come like a Godsend to their corporate balance sheets,” writes Global research Editor F. William Engdahl.

Factory farms are actually the cause of killer diseases.

The industrialization of chicken-raising and slaughtering in the USA, which is known as ‘factory farming’ is a process whose inner workings are unknown to most people. Better it remained so some say. Were we to know, we likely would never again eat chicken. Today, five giant multinational agribusiness companies dominate the production and processing of chicken meat in the United States, and, as things seem to be going, especially were the world to be looney enough to adopt genetically modified chickens supposedly resistant to Avian Flu virus, these five companies are about to dominate world chicken supply.

<<<<< Edited >>>>>

Since the late 19th century, diseases of poultry in mass animal farming have been observed: Blue coloring of the crest, decrease in egg laying performance, sagging of the feathers, and sometimes these animals die too. These diseases were called bird pest. Now it’s called bird flu! Animals respond the same way as humans do to being cooped up in concentration camps, they get sick and they die. Notice that health officials are not worried about animal concentration camps and all the health issues associated with them. Not a word is said about the obvious but waves of hysteria are created over small bits of protein that are not proven to be the actual root cause of what we are seeing.

So what did these 98 people die of? “Persons with symptoms of a cold, who then had the bad luck to fall into the hands of H5N1 hunters, were killed with enormous amounts of chemotherapy [chemical pharmaceuticals] supposed to restrain the phantom virus. Isolated in plastic tents, surrounded by madmen in space suits, they died, in panicky fear, from multiple organ failures,” writes Dr. Lanka. Certainly these patients are not being given the appropriate nutritional support to help them weather the storm.

What is being used to prove viral existence are
indirect test methods which tell absolutely nothing.
Dr. Stefan Lanka

The use of antibiotics continues to rise globally and use by poultry producers has risen by over 300% per bird since the 1980s. In the US alone, over 12,000 tons of antibiotics are used each year. With disease-causing organisms so prevalent on factory farms, it is not surprising that farmers have resorted to the widespread use of antibiotics. The routine use of antibiotics is particularly attractive to farmers as many of these substances have an as-yet poorly understood ability to promote the growth-rate of the animals to which they are administered. So farmers, in a desperate battle to contain the bug-explosion on factory farms, and in order to maximize profits by pushing growth rates ever faster and faster, are routinely dosing farm animals with a whole range of different types of antibiotics. But evidence is emerging that several of these antibiotics, used in vast quantities in farming, are jeopardizing the effectiveness of similar antibiotics vital in human medicine.

Just over a year ago the American Public Health Association called for a moratorium on the building of new industrial animal farms until more scientific data on their risks had been collected but world governments and health authorities focus only on H5N1 and its danger to humans without addressing in the least, the real source of the avian disease.

People tend to believe whatever they are told and that’s the way it has become in modern medicine where doctors believe in many great lies, which they give blind faith to. Western allopathic medicine is pathetic in its unsighted belief in the virus, its pet demonic threat that is always ready to come down and strike us to death. It’s the most successful scam in the history of the world, and they get eighty percent of the world to literally bow down, pull down their pants, and accept their immunization shots because they are the only solution to supposedly deadly viruses.

But you will never meet any person who can prove viruses to exist in dangerous forms, certainly not the retroviruses. Obviously something exists down on that level of reality. Protein bits, little junks of life, biological debris. “We live with an uncountable number of retroviruses. They're everywhere -- and they probably have been here as long as the human race,” says Dr. Kary Mullis. Dr. Lanka adds, “It is being maintained that these short pieces of genetic material, which in the sense of genetics are not complete and which do not even suffice for defining a gene, together would make up the entire gene substance of an influenza virus.”

<<<<< Edited >>>>>

In February 2006, southern Russia was hit by a second wave of bird flu that killed over a million birds. No human cases have been registered. Vaccination has begun in Daghestan and Stavropol Territory, another southern region, where about 260,000 fowls have already been inoculated. Some 8 million doses of the vaccine have been delivered to southern Russia. We read a report like this in a newspaper and take it as fact; bird flu is killing these birds but is it?

<<<<< Edited >>>>>

Almost all of us believe in the terror of viruses and buy into the fear the medical industrial complex insists we should have about them. If they say so it must be so. When it comes to avian flu we have a massive cover up of a food production system that rivals in every way the death camps of Nazi Germany. We are merely witnessing the beginning of the end of a way of life that insults life. One way or another we will pay dearly for our mistakes and nowhere is this more true than when it comes to what we are doing with the food supply. We are allowing industry to poison us but are being mislead to fear something else. The simple fact that health officials are not warning us of the real danger speaks miles about the trust we should put in them about their warning of viral infections.

Mark Sircus Ac., OMD
Director International Medical Veritas Association
http://www.MagnesiumForLife.com
http://www.imva.info
http://www.detoxchelationclinic.com
http://www.worldpsychology.net
+55-83-3252-2195
www.skype.com ID: marksircus

International Medical Veritas Association
Copyright 2006 All rights reserved.

IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: The communication in this email is intended for informational purposes only. Nothing in this email is intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice.

References:

Mother Earth News. Issue # 159 - December/January 1993

[ii] CNN News

[iii] www.prisonplanet.com/articles/october2005/161005avian_flu.htm

Will Bush Be Turned Out Of Office Soon?

Conservatives Are Jumping Ship:
Bush Is Going Down

By Bernard Weiner
Co-Editor, The Crisis Papers

March 7, 2006

I'm more and more convinced that it will be Republicans, many of them of the true conservative and realist kind, who effectively will do in the Bush Administration.

In this, I am reminded of the behavior of Richard Nixon when he realized that he was fast losing his middle-class, bourgeois base: He called it quits on the Vietnam War, and likewise on his presidency after his crimes were exposed.

But unlike Nixon's crew, Bush&Co. seem willing to take the country down with them, so desperate are they to hold onto power, deplete the treasury, pay off their corporate friends, carry out their ideological revolution -- and keep themselves out of the federal slammer.

The crimes of the Bush Administration are so many and varied that none of us should be surprised by anything that might happen in the coming weeks and months: Bin Laden captured or reported killed, a U.S.-Israeli air assault on Iran's nuclear facilities, a major terrorist attack inside the U.S. to be followed by martial law, the announcement of a bird-flu outbreak with the military placed in charge. I'm pretty level-headed and don't usually think in these dire terms, but these guys have backed themselves into a tight political corner and are desperate -- and dangerous.

THE IMPLODING SCANDALS

Bush is at 34% approval rating (Cheney is at 18!), and their scandals are blowing up in their faces: Katrina lies and incompetence; Iraq lies and incompetence; the Dubai Ports deal and incompetence; GOP bribery and corruption; Libby under indictment and Rove apparently about to be; Bush claiming authority to authorize torture, spy on millions of American citizens and violate the law whenever he incants the magic words "national security"; Congress rebelling at being frozen out of decision-making, etc. etc. But in the face of all that, the Roveian M.O. is always to attack their foes and to hype the fright quotient.

The Administration didn't have to consider the most extreme options until recently, when the wheels started falling off the Bush bus. The attacks were no longer coming mostly from liberals and Democrats; more and more, they were coming from loyal conservative Republicans, who, cognizant of the sinking poll numbers, saw the handwriting on the wall: They realized they could well lose their majorities in the House and Senate -- in other words, severed from their jobs and access to the spoils of power -- and they started distancing themselves from the Administration.

So, rather than beating my usual drum here denouncing the high crimes and misdemeanors of the Bush Administration, I thought I'd just lay out the comments of those conservatives and let them speak for themselves. (My late friend Emile de Antonio, the documentary filmmaker, taught me a good lesson; it's always better, he pointed out, to quote what the Wall Street Journal is saying rather than quoting a hippie or left-activist making the same point. When your own posse smells the moral rot up top, the end is near.)

The quotes here are on Iraq and the neo-con ideologues who took this country to war, though currently the flak is also coming hot and heavy from the Right on both the domestic spying and Dubai ports scandals. (Even conservative Republican Senator Richard Shelby says Bush broke the law in the way he handled the Dubai ports contract, and neo-con leader Bill Kristol suggests the other "i" word ("incompetent") in describing how Bush&Co. stumble around trying to govern: "I think it's become in people's minds an emblem of the administration that just isn't as serious about the competent execution of the functions of government as it should be."

THE NEO-CONS BEHIND THE WAR

Let's begin with a reminder that the conservative establishment didn't agree from the very beginning with Bush's neo-con obsession to invade Iraq. President George H.W. Bush, who successfully organized a massive coalition to push Iraq's army out of Kuwait in the first Gulf War, warned his son privately and through his spokesmen of the dangerous consequences both of invading and occupying Iraq and of doing so without wide international support. As he said of Iraq in "A World Transformed" (written with Gen. Brent Scowcroft): "Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different -- and perhaps barren -- outcome."

Fast forward to the present, when so many Republican stalwarts are saying, in effect, that they backed the wrong horse. Their party was taken over by rightwing extremists, incompetent at that, whose reckless neo-con policies are doing great danger to the country and to the future of the once-great GOP. Here's Melinda Pillsbury-Foster, chair of the Arthur C. Pillsbury Foundation, going even beyond the war into the deeper crimes being committed against Americans' freedoms:

"Most Americans do not yet realize that a war is being waged -- not against Iraq but against each of us. It is not the Republican Party that is charge in this administration but a small cadre who seized executive branch power and converted it to their own uses. Most Republicans are experiencing a deer-in-the-headlights moment right now. Their Party has been hijacked, their president has been hijacked, and they do not know what to do. I remain a registered Republican working for an effective coalition. The attack on us and on our rights has hardly begun. You don't go to the trouble of setting up this degree of control without having made plans to use it."

NEO-CON FUKUYAMA HAS SECOND THOUGHTS

Or try this out. Francis Fukuyama, who wrote the 1992 neo-con best-seller "The End of History," is exhibiting some serious recantation these days in interviews and in his new book, "America at the Crossroads."

He now says that neo-conservatism has "evolved into something I can no longer support," and should be tossed onto history's pile of discredited ideologies. The doctrine, which has demonstrated "the danger of good intentions carried to extremes...is now in shambles," and needs to be replaced by a more realistic foreign policy.

For example, though he once supported regime change in Iraq, he now believes the war there is the wrong sort of war, in the wrong place at the wrong time. "The most basic misjudgment was an overestimation of the threat facing the United States from radical Islamism. Although the new and ominous possibility of undeterrable terrorists armed with weapons of mass destruction did indeed present itself, advocates of the war wrongly conflated this with the threat presented by Iraq and with the rogue state/proliferation problem more generally...

"By definition, outsiders can't 'impose' democracy on a country that doesn't want it; demand for democracy and reform must be domestic. Democracy promotion is therefore a long-term and opportunistic process that has to await the gradual ripening of political and economic conditions to be effective."

THE CHENEY-RUMSFELD CABAL

Then we go to a long-time Administration stalwart who couldn't take it any more: Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired U.S. Army colonel who was chief of staff for Secretary of State Colin Powell.

"What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made," Wilkerson said in a well-publicized speech at the New America Foundation last October. "And you've got a president who is not versed in international relations and not too much interested in them either."

Wilkerson has also focused attacks on the Bush administration for condoning torture, setting lax and ambiguous policies on treatment of detainees that inevitably led to the scandal of the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and elsewhere.

BUCKLEY BUCKLES TO REALITY

Onward to the intellectual godfather of the modern conservative movement, National Review founding editor William F. Buckley Jr., who concludes that what may have started as a decent move has evolved into disaster:

"One can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed. ... Our mission has failed because Iraqi animosities have proved uncontainable by an invading army of 130,000 Americans. The great human reserves that call for civil life haven't proved strong enough. No doubt they are latently there, but they have not been able to contend against the ice men who move about in the shadows with bombs and grenades and pistols. ... Mr. Bush has a very difficult internal problem here because to make the kind of concession that is strategically appropriate requires a mitigation of policies he has several times affirmed in high-flown pronouncements. His challenge is to persuade himself that he can submit to a historical reality without forswearing basic commitments in foreign policy. ... The kernel here is the acknowledgment of defeat."

THE TROOPS WANT OUT, SOON

Speaking of the troops in Iraq, recent polling reveals that nearly 3 out of 4 of U.S troops in Iraq think the U.S. should exit the country within the year, and more than one in four say the troops should leave immediately. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff admits also that the Iraqis want us to leave "as soon as possible."

Here are some pertinent comments by a U.S. soldier in Iraq, writing as "djtyg," about why the desire to leave that country:

"We need to get out because our military cannot take much more of this. We are stretched too thin and it's about to get worse. ... Soldiers are frustrated. Every soldier I have talked to says that they are getting out of the military when they get home. Every. One. Of. Them. Regardless of rank, experience, or time in, they all want out. There has not been a single Soldier I've talked to that says they want to stay in. This includes officers, NCOs, and rookies who are on their first tour of duty. We need to get out of Iraq because Iraq is the reason why the military is shrinking. We, like Cindy Sheehan, are curious as to what 'noble cause' we are fighting for. We can't seem to find one. This is weakening America. At the rate we are going, we are going to have a military that can't fight because it has old and broken down equipment, and no troops to fight a war with."

SEN. HAGEL LOWERS THE BOOM

Then there are key Republican senators who are willing to stick out their necks by talking truth to power about Iraq. For example, Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel, who said the U.S. is losing in Iraq and raised a parallel to an earlier conflict.

The Vietnam War, he said, "was a national tragedy partly because members of Congress failed their country, remained silent and lacked the courage to challenge the administrations in power until it was too late. To question your government is not unpatriotic -- to not question your government is unpatriotic," he said, arguing that 58,000 troops died in Vietnam because of silence by political leaders. "America owes its men and women in uniform a policy worthy of their sacrifices."

O'REILLY QUESTIONS STAYING IN IRAQ

So, let's see: Bush is losing old-money Republican conservatives, GOP senators, neo-con theorists outside the Cheney-Rumsfeld nexus, military insiders, troops under fire in Iraq -- who else can he lose? Would you believe the lunatic fringe, as symbolized by that raving Limbaugh wannabee Bill O'Reilly? The Fox News pundit, who usually is in lockstep with the Bush program and calls anybody who criticizes those policies idiots and worse, had this to say the other day about the need to get out of Iraq ASAP:

"[We need to] hand over everything to the Iraqis as fast as humanly possible [because] there are so many nuts in the country -- so many crazies -- that we can't control them."

GOP DISCONTENT ON NATIONAL SECURITY

Well, one could go on and on with the criticism coming from the Right -- conservative former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, former Reagan Administration official Paul Craig Roberts, Congressional Dem warhawk John Murtha, et al. The point is that the Republicans, formerly associated with a winning national-security message, are now regarded much differently by many GOP politicos and rank-and-file citizens.

Many Representatives and Senators also deeply resent the way the Congress has been frozen out of the power loop by the Bush Administration. "We simply want to participate and aren't going to be PR flacks when they need us," Florida's conservative GOP Congressman Mark Foley said. "We all have roles. We have oversight. When you can't answer your constituents when they have legitimate questions -- we can't simply do it on trust."

Scott Reed, who managed Robert Dole's 1996 presidential campaign, called the current low poll ratings for Bush and the GOP "pretty shattering," noting especially that Bush's support among Republicans fell from 83 percent to 72 percent. "The repetition of the news coming out of Iraq is wearing folks down," Reed said. "It started with women [voters] and it's spreading. It's just bad news after bad news after bad news, without any light at the end of the tunnel."

THE PRESIDENT AS DICTATOR

"Even if you're a Republican member of Congress, you don't buy the exaggerated view of the unified executive theory, in which the only part of the Constitution that matters is Article II," on presidential power, said James B. Steinberg, a dean at the University of Texas at Austin. "If you want them to be in on the landing, you have to have people there for the takeoff."

For example, two staunch conservative Southern Senators won't accept Bush's Unified Executive theory of governance. "I think the administration has looked at the legitimate power of the executive during a time of war and taken it to extremes," said Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. "[It's] to the point that we'd lose constitutional balance. Under their theory, there would be almost no role for the Congress or the courts." Mississippi's Sen. Trent Lott was even more blunt: "Don't put your fist in my face."

EVEN WALL ST. IS TALKING IMPEACHMENT

All those defections from the Bush orbit are doing great damage to the once-unified Bush&Co. juggernaut, but I've left out one key one: Wall Street. The titans of finance are agitated, to the point of raising the awareness of the possibility of impeachment or even urging serious consideration of Bush's removal.

The Wall Street Journal, alone among mainstream daily newspapers, has deigned to mention that there is a growing impeachment movement and an active PAC (impeachpac.org). And here's some of what Barron's Editorial Page Editor Thomas G. Donlan wrote in that establishment financial journal:

...The administration is saying the president has unlimited authority to order wiretaps in the pursuit of foreign terrorists, and that the Congress has no power to overrule him...Perhaps they were researched in a Star Chamber? Putting the president above the Congress is an invitation to tyranny. The president has no powers except those specified in the Constitution and those enacted by law. President Bush is stretching the power of commander-in-chief of the Army and Navy by indicating that he can order the military and its agencies, such as the National Security Agency, to do whatever furthers the defense of the country from terrorists, regardless of whether actual force is involved.

Willful disregard of a law is potentially an impeachable offense. It is at least as impeachable as having a sexual escapade under the Oval Office desk and lying about it later. The members of the House Judiciary Committee who staged the impeachment of President Clinton ought to be as outraged at this situation...

It is important to be clear that an impeachment case, if it comes to that, would not be about wiretapping, or about a possible Constitutional right not to be wiretapped. It would be about the power of Congress to set wiretapping rules by law, and it is about the obligation of the president to follow the rules in the Acts that he and his predecessors signed into law. ...

THREE MORE YEARS?

So, friends, when we're down in the dumps, depressed by the fact that Bush&Co. are still in power even in the face of all their lies and bumblings and policies that result in thousands of people getting killed and maimed and tortured, let us consider that even their once-loyal rats are deserting the sinking ship of state.

The thought of nearly three more years of Bush&Co. misrule is too horrible to contemplate. So let's ratchet up the pressure, incorporate distressed GOP moderates and conservatives into the impeachment momentum, and send the Bush Bunker crew packing and return the country to reasonable people dedicated to a restoration of Constitutional rule of law and a realistic foreign policy. It's the least we can do for our country.

Bernard Weiner, Ph.D., has taught government & international relations at various universities, worked as a writer/editor with the San Francisco Chronicle, and currently co-edits The Crisis Papers (www.crisispapers.org). To comment, write >>crisispapers@comcast.net <<.

Copyright 2006, by Bernard Weiner

Hey There... Are We Having Fun Yet?

Saturday night was really a lot of fun here in Mazatlán! It was the first night of the really big party which brings thousands to the Malecon in the Olas Altas area of the old part of the city.


And, you certainly run into some real characters! Following, in no particular order are some portraits of some of the revelers who happened to be partying at the Hotel Siesta and who graciously invited me up in the midst of the goings-on. Fortunately, I had my trusty Canon camera with me and made the following images of these "anonymous" partygoers...








Hey, I had lots of fun taking these and hope you did too while looking at them. You just don't meet characters like these every day, you know! Viva Mazatlán y viva Mexico!!

Topolo... A Great New Restaurant

TOPOLO opened in late December of 2005 and was well worth the wait. It is a very “classy” new eatery located just a long block from the Plaza Machado on Constitution street at number 629 - at the corner of Constitution and Benito Juarez in the Centro Historico.


The proud owner, Manolo Cardona, has spent many months planning and working out the design and all the details of his new restaurant and has done a superb job. It has been a dream of his for many years. He is known around town as “Mané” and he speaks very good English.


In the picture above, you can see one of the rooms which can host a small private party, and below that is a picture of an area out in the courtyard which affords a chance to enjoy your meal and drinks out in the open atmosphere on a pleasant Mazatlán afternoon or evening. Closed Sundays.


The food is delicious, carefully prepared with fresh ingredients each day and consists of authentic Mexican dishes including soups, salads, appetizers, and main courses featuring a variety of steaks, chicken and seafood. My particular favorite is the Chimichanga, listed under appetizers, which comes with rice and refried beans and is a meal in itself! A full selection of drinks is also available including the locally brewed beer, Pacifico.

If you are just visiting in town or are a lucky, longtime resident of Mazatlán, it’s well worth a trip to Topolo. You won’t be disappointed!

Islam and Democracy

The synopsis of a weekend of study on Islam with the pope and his former theology students. With two conflicting versions of how Benedict XVI views the Muslim religion

by Sandro Magister

ROMA, January 23, 2006 – Joseph Ratzinger has written little on the topic of Islam over the years. But it is a topic very much on his mind, and all the more so since he became pope. Last September, at Castelgandolfo, Benedict XVI dedicated two days of study to Islam, behind closed doors, together with two experts in Islamic studies and a group of his former theology students.

The news of the meeting leaked out, but until last January 5 nothing was known about what was said there.

But on January 5, one of Ratzinger’s former students who participated in the meeting, American Jesuit Joseph Fessio, provost of Ave Maria University in Naples, Florida, and founder of the publishing house Ignatius Press, gave an ample account of the meeting during one of the most popular radio talk shows in the United States: the Hugh Hewitt Show.

During the interview, Fr. Fessio also reported the thoughts expressed by the pope in the course of the discussion. In Fessio’s view, Benedict XVI holds that Islam and democracy cannot be reconciled.

But one of the other participants at the meeting, Samir Khalil Samir, an Egyptian Jesuit and professor of Islamic studies at the Université Saint-Joseph in Beirut and at the Pontifical Oriental Institute in Rome, when consulted by www.chiesa, gave a different interpretation of the pope’s thought. In Fr. Samir’s view, Benedict XVI holds that it is very difficult, but not impossible, to reconcile Islam and democracy.

In his contribution to the discussion, the pope supposedly wanted to explain precisely the reasons for this difficulty.

* * * * * *

The meeting held last September in Castelgandolfo was the last in a series of annual meetings with Ratzinger and his former students.

The first were held when Ratzinger was a theology professor in Ratisbonne. When he became archbishop of Munich, they asked him to continue, and he accepted. The same thing happened when he moved to Rome as the prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The meetings lasted a weekend, and were usually held at a monastery. At the end of the meeting in 2004, the participants left with the topic for the following year already chosen: Islam, or more precisely the Islamic concept of God. The two experts who would introduce the discussion had also been selected: Fr. Samir Khalil Samir and another Jesuit scholar of Islamic studies, Christian Troll, from Germany.

In the spring of 2005 Ratzinger was elected pope and his former students thought the meetings would come to an end. But that didn’t happen. Benedict XVI told them that it was very important to him that they continue. And they do continue – the theme chosen for the meeting in 2006 is the relationship between Christianity and science.

* * * * * *

Here are the central passages of the transcript of Fr. Joseph Fessio’s radio interview with Hugh Hewitt:

JF: The main presentation by Father Troll was very interesting. He based it on a Pakistani Muslim scholar named Rashan, who was at the University of Chicago for many years, and Rashan's position was Islam can enter into dialogue with modernity, but only if it radically reinterprets the Koran, and takes the specific legislation of the Koran, like cutting off your hand if you're a thief, or being able to have four wives, or whatever, and takes the principles behind those specific pieces of legislation for the 7th century of Arabia, and now applies them, and modifies them, for a new society which women are now respected for their full dignity, where democracy's important, religious freedom's important, and so on. And if Islam does that, then it will be able to enter into real dialogue and live together with other religions and other kinds of cultures.

HH: Is he an optimist about that happening?

JF: He is, but interesting, you know, all the seminars I recall with Joseph Ratzinger, he'd always let the students speak. He'd wait until the end, and he would intervene. This is the first time I recall where he made an immediate statement. And I'm still struck by it, how powerful it was.

HH: And what did the pope say?

JF: Well, the thesis that was proposed by Father Troll was that Islam can enter into the modern world if the Koran is reinterpreted by taking the specific legislation, and going back to the principles, and then adapting it to our times, especially with the dignity that we ascribe to women, which has come through Christianity, of course. And immediately, the Holy Father, in his beautiful calm but clear way, said well, there's a fundamental problem with that, because he said in the Islamic tradition God has given his word to Mohammed, but it's an eternal word. It's not Mohammed's word. It's there for eternity the way it is. There's no possibility of adapting it or interpreting it, whereas in Christianity, and Judaism, the dynamism's completely different, that God has worked through his creatures. And so, it is not just the word of God, it's the word of Isaiah, not just the word of God, but the word of Mark. He's used his human creatures, and inspired them to speak his word to the world, and therefore by establishing a Church in which he gives authority to his followers to carry on the tradition and interpret it, there's an inner logic to the Christian Bible, which permits it and requires it to be adapted and applied to new situations. I was... I mean, I wish I could say it as clearly and as beautifully as he did, but that's why he's pope and I'm not, okay? That's one of the reasons. One of others, but his seeing that distinction when the Koran, which is seen as something dropped out of heaven, which cannot be adapted or applied, even, and the Bible, which is a word of God that comes through a human community, it was stunning.

HH: And so, is it fair to describe him as a pessimist about the prospect of modernity truly engaging Islam in the way modernity has engaged Christianity?

JF: Well, the other way around.

HH: Yes. I meant that.

JF: Yeah, that Christianity can engage modernity just like it did... the Jews did to Egypt, or Christians did to Greece, because we can take what's good there, and we can elevate it through the revelation of Christ in the Bible. But Islam is stuck. It's stuck with a text that cannot be adapted, or even be interpreted properly.

HH: And so the pope is a pessimist about that changing, because it would require a radical reinterpretation of what the Koran is?

JF: Yeah, which is it's impossible, because it's against the very nature of the Koran, as it's understood by Muslims.

HH: And so, even the dialectic that was the Reformation is not possible within Islam?

JF: No. And then a second thing which he did not say, but which I would have said, I might have said at the time, is that... and this is from a Catholic point of view, there's no one to interpret the Koran officially. the Catholic Church has an official interpreter, which is the Holy Father with the bishops.

* * * * * *

So, according to Fr. Fessio’s account, Benedict XVI sees Islam as incompatible with democracy.

But according to another participant at the same meeting, Jesuit scholar of Islamic studies Samir Khalil Samir, the pope is less pessimistic. According to this account, the pope sees a meeting between Islam and democracy as possible, but “on the condition of a radical reinterpretation of the Koran and of the very conception of divine revelation.”

On the second day of the discussions in Castelgandolfo, speaking as an expert, Fr. Samir developed precisely this aspect of the question.

This is not a merely theoretical dispute. Each of these interpretations has significant geopolitical repercussions. America’s overall strategy in Iraq and the greater Middle East is founded precisely upon the possibility of democracy’s birth and growth in those Muslim regions.

It also involves the future of Muslim immigrants in Europe. An Islam reconciled with democracy would allow their integration. An Islam incapable of distinguishing between God and Caesar would trap them in a state of “alienation.”

This is what Ratzinger wrote some years ago in one of his rare comments on Islam, in three pages of the book-length interview “The Salt of the Earth,” published in Germany in 1996 and in the United States the following year, by Ignatius Press, the publishing house of Fr. Joseph Fessio.

It is the passage reproduced below. It should be read with the awareness that almost ten years, dense with events and further reflections, have passed since then.


”Shari’a shapes society from beginning to end...”

by Joseph Ratzinger

I think that first we must recognize that Islam is not a uniform thing. In fact, there is no single authority for all Muslims, and for this reason dialogue with Islam is always dialogue with certain groups. No one can speak for Islam as a whole; it has, as it were, no commonly regarded orthodoxy. And, to prescind from the schism between Sunnis and Shiites, it also exists in many varieties. There is a noble Islam, embodied, for example, by the King of Morocco, and there is also the extremist, terrorist Islam, which, again, one must not identify with Islam as a whole, which would do it an injustice.

An important point, however, is [...] that the interplay of society, politics, and religion has a completely difference structure in Islam as a whole. Today's discussion in the West about the possibility of Islamic theological faculties, or about the idea of Islam as a legal entity, presupposes that all religions have basically the same structure, that they all fit into a democratic system with its regulations and the possibilities provided by these regulations. In itself, however, this necessarily contradicts the essence of Islam, which simply does not have the separation of the political and religious sphere which Christianity has had from the beginning. The Koran is a total religious law, which regulates the whole of political and social life and insists that the whole order of life be Islamic. Sharia shapes society from beginning to end. In this sense, it can exploit such partial freedoms as our constitution gives, but it can't be its final goal to say: Yes, now we too are a body with rights, now we are present just like the Catholics and the Protestants. In such a situation, it would not achieve a status consistent with its inner nature; it would be in alienation from itself.

Islam has a total organization of life that is completely different from ours; it embraces simply everything. There is a very marked subordination of woman to man; there is a very tightly knit criminal law, indeed, a law regulating all areas of life, that is opposed to our modern ideas about society. One has to have a clear understanding that it is not simply a denomination that can be included in the free realm of a pluralistic society. When one represents the situation in those terms, as often happens today, Islam is defined according to the Christian model and is not seen as it really is in itself. In this sense, the question of dialogue with Islam is naturally much more complicated than, for example, an internal dialogue among Christians.

The consolidation of Islam worldwide is a multifaceted phenomenon. On the one hand, financial factors play a role here. The financial power that the Arab countries have attained and that allows them to build large Mosques everywhere, to guarantee a presence of Muslim cultural institutes and more things of that sort. But that is certainly only one factor. The other is an enhanced identity, a new self-consciousness.

In the cultural situation of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, until the 1960s, the superiority of the Christian countries was industrially, culturally, politically, and militarily so great that Islam was really forced into the second rank. Christianity – at any rate, civilizations with a Christian foundation – could present themselves as the victorious power in world history. But then the great moral crisis of the Western world, which appears to be the Christian world, broke out. In the face of the deep moral contradictions of the West and of its internal helplessness – which was suddenly opposed by a new economic power of the Arab countries – the Islamic soul reawakened. We are somebody too; we know who we are; our religion is holding its ground; you don't have one any longer.

This is actually the feeling today of the Muslim world: The Western countries are no longer capable of preaching a message of morality, but have only know-how to offer the world. The Christian religion has abdicated; it really no longer exists as a religion; the Christians no longer have a morality or a faith; all that's left are a few remains of some modern ideas of enlightenment; we have the religion that stands the test.

So the Muslims now have the consciousness that in reality Islam has remained in the end as the more vigorous religion and that they have something to say to the world, indeed, are the essential religious force of the future. Before, the shariah and all those things had already left the scene, in a sense; now there is a new pride. Thus a new zest, a new intensity about wanting to live Islam has awakened. This is its great power: We have a moral message that has existed without interruption since the prophets, and we will tell the world how to live it, whereas the Christians certainly can't. We must naturally come to terms with this inner power of Islam, which fascinates even academic circles.
__________

The book from which this selection was taken:

Joseph Ratzinger, “Salt of the Earth. The Church at the End of the Millennium,” an interview with Peter Seewald, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1997.

__________

The complete transcript of the radio interview with Fr. Joseph Fessio:
The Hugh Hewitt Show, January 5, 2006