Three Wise Monkeys

I will start with something that made me chuckle — and then we move into Monkey Territory — see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil

Mel

Kansas Outlaws Practice Of Evolution
The Onion

In response to a Nov. 7 referendum, Kansas lawmakers passed emergency legislation outlawing evolution, the highly controversial process responsible for the development and diversity of species and the continued survival of all life.

Lawmakers decried spontaneous genetic mutations.

“From now on, the streets, forests, plains, and rivers of Kansas will be safe from the godless practice of evolution, and species will be able to procreate without deviating from God’s intended design,” said Bob Bethell, a member of the state House of Representatives. “This is about protecting the integrity of all creation.”

The sweeping new law prohibits all living beings within state borders from being born with random genetic mutations that could make them better suited to evade predators, secure a mate, or, adapt to a changing environment. In addition, it bars any sexual reproduction, battles for survival, or instances of pure happenstance that might lead, after several generations, to a more well-adapted species or subspecies.

Violators of the new law may face punishments that include jail time, stiff fines, and rehabilitative education and training to rid organisms suspected of evolutionary tendencies. Repeat offenders could face chemical sterilization.

To enforce the law, Kansas state police will be trained to investigate and apprehend organisms who exhibit suspected signs of evolutionary behavior, such as natural selection or speciation. Plans are underway to track and monitor DNA strands in every Kansan life form for even the slightest change in allele frequencies.

“Barn swallows that develop lighter, more streamlined builds to enable faster migration, for example, could live out the rest of their brief lives in prison,” said Indiana University chemist and pro-intelligent-design author Robert Hellenbaum, who helped compose the language of the law. “And butterflies who mimic the wing patterns and colors of other butterflies for an adaptive advantage, well, their days of flaunting God’s will are over.”

Human beings may be the species most deeply affected by the new legislation. Those whose cytochrome-c molecules vary less than 2 percent from those of chimpanzees will be in direct violation of the law.

Under particular scrutiny are single-cell microorganisms, with thousands of field labs being installed across the state to ensure that these self-replicating molecules, notorious for mutation, do not do so in a fashion benefitting their long-term survival.

Anti-evolutionists such as Hellenbaum have long accused microorganisms of popularizing “an otherwise obscure, agonizingly slow, and hard-to-understand” biological process. “These repeat offenders are at the root of the problem,” Hellenbaum said. “We have the fossil records to prove it.”

“No species is exempt,” said Marcus Holloway, a state police spokesman. “Whether you’re a human being or a fruit fly—if we detect one homologous chromosome trying to cross over during the process of meiosis, you will be punished to the full extent of the law.”

Although the full impact of the new law will likely not be felt for approximately 10 million years, most Kansans say they are relieved that the ban went into effect this week, claiming that evolution may have gone too far already.

“If Earth’s species were meant to change over successive generations through physical modifications resulting from the adaptation to environmental challenges, then God would have given them the genetic predisposition to select mates and reproduce based on their favorable heritable traits and their ability to thrive under changing conditions so that these advantageous qualities would be passed down and eventually encoded into the DNA of each generation of offspring,” Olathe public school teacher and creationist Joyce Eckhardt said. “It’s just not natural.”

Some warn that the strict wording of the law could have a deleterious effect on Kansas’ mostly agricultural economy, since it also prohibits all forms of man-made artificial selection, such as plant hybridization, genetic engineering, and animal husbandry. A police raid on an alleged artificial-insemination facility outside McPherson, KS on Friday resulted in the arrest of a farmer, a veterinarian, four assistants, one bull, and several dozen cows.

Agribusiness leaders, who rely on evolution science to genetically modify crops, have voiced concerns about doing business with Kansas farmers.

“If Kansans want to ban evolution, that is their right, but they must understand that we rely on a certain flexibility in the natural order of things to be able to deliver healthy food products to millions of Americans,” said Carl Casale, a vice president with the agricultural giant Monsanto. “We’re not talking about playing God here. We are talking about succeeding in the competitive veggie-burger market.” ++

Corruption: the ’second insurgency’ costing $4bn a year
The Guardian
Saturday December 2, 2006

The Iraqi government is in danger of being brought down by the wholesale smuggling of the nation’s oil and other forms of corruption that together represent a “second insurgency”, according to a senior US official. Stuart Bowen, who has been in charge of auditing Iraq’s faltering reconstruction since 2004, said corruption had reached such levels that it threatened the survival of the state.

“There is a huge smuggling problem. It is the No 1 issue,” Mr Bowen told the Guardian. The pipelines that are meant to take the oil north have been blown up, so the only way to export it is by road. “That leaves it vulnerable to smuggling,” he said, as truckers sell their cargoes on the black market.

Mr Bowen, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (Sigir), cites Iraqi figures showing that the “virtual pandemic” of corruption costs the country $4bn (£2.02bn) a year, and some of that money goes straight to the Iraqi government’s enemies. A US government report has concluded that oil smuggling abetted by corrupt Iraqi officials is netting insurgents $100m a year, helping to make them financially self-sustaining.

“Corruption is the second insurgency, and I use that metaphor to underline the seriousness of this issue,” Mr Bowen said. “The deputy prime minister, Barham Saleh, told Sigir this summer that it threatens the state. That speaks for itself.”

The Bush administration’s strategy in Iraq hinges on the survival of the government run by Nuri al-Maliki, despite US reservations about the prime minister’s readiness or ability to confront extremists in his own Shia community.

But Mr Bowen’s office has found that the insurgents and militias have also been abetted by US incompetence. A recent audit by his inspectors found that more than 14,000 guns paid for out of US reconstruction funds for Iraqi government use could not be accounted for. Many could be in the hands of insurgents or sectarian death squads, but it will be almost impossible to prove because when the US military handed out the guns it noted the serial numbers of only about 10,000 out of a total of 370,000 US-funded weapons, contrary to defence department regulations.

Jim Mitchell, a Sigir spokesman, said: “The practical effect is that when a weapons cache is found you’re deprived of the intelligence of knowing if they were US-provided, which might allow you to follow the trail to the bad guys.”

Mr Bowen’s inspectors are among the few US civilian officials who still venture beyond the fortified bounds of the Green Zone in Baghdad into the rest of Iraq, to see how $18bn of American taxpayers’ money is being spent. Much of the money has been wasted. Sigir officials have referred 25 cases of fraud to the justice department for criminal investigation, four of which have led to convictions, and about 90 more are under investigation.

A culture of waste, incompetence and fraud may be one legacy the occupiers have passed on to Iraq’s new rulers more or less intact. Mr Bowen’s office found that nearly $9bn in Iraqi oil revenues could not be accounted for. The cash was flown into the country in shrink-wrapped bundles on military transport planes and handed over by the ton to Iraqi ministries by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) run by Paul Bremer, a veteran diplomat. The money was meant to demonstrate the invaders’ good intentions and boost the Iraqi economy, which Mr Bremer later insisted had been “dead in the water”. But it also fuelled a cycle of corruption left over from Saddam Hussein’s rule.

“We know it got to the Iraqis, but we don’t know how it was used,” Mr Bowen later told Congress.

In the Hillah region a defence department contract employee and two lieutenant colonels were found to have steered $8m in contracts to a US contractor in return for bribes. The Pentagon contract employee, Robert Stein, pleaded guilty earlier this year, admitting he and his co-conspirators received more than $1m in cash, help with laundering the funds, jewellery, cars and sex with prostitutes. Stein also admitted that they simply stole $2m from the construction fund, accounting for the money with receipts from fictitious construction companies.

Hillah just happened to be the district Mr Bowen’s inspectors examined in depth. It is still far from clear how much reconstruction money has gone missing around the whole country.

A potentially far more serious problem has been the way the US government decided to give out reconstruction contracts. It split the economy into sectors and shared them out among nine big US corporations. In most cases the contracts were distributed without competition and on a cost-plus basis. In other words the contractors were guaranteed a profit margin calculated as a percentage of their costs, so the higher the costs, the higher the profits. In the rush to get work started the contracts were signed early in 2004. In many cases work did not get under way until the year was nearly over. In the months between, the contractors racked up huge bills on wages, hotel bills and restaurants.

According to a Sigir review published in October, Kellogg, Brown and Root (a subsidiary of Halliburton, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former company) was awarded an oil industry repair contract in February 2004 but “direct project activity” did not begin until November 19. In that time KBR’s overhead costs were nearly $53m. In fact more than half the company’s $300m project costs from 2004-06 went on overheads, the audit found.

Iraq also represented a grey zone beyond the reach of the US civil courts. KBR was found to have overcharged the US military about $60m for fuel deliveries, but that did not stop it winning more government contracts.

A California company, Parsons, had its contract terminated this year after it was found to have finished only six of more than 140 primary healthcare centres it was supposed to build, after two years work and $500m spent. However, the contract was ended “for convenience”, meaning Parsons was paid in full. In a police college Parsons built for $75m in Baghdad the plumbing was so bad that urine and excrement rained down from the toilets on to the police cadets. Parsons left a sub-contractor to do repairs but in general there is little punitive action that can be taken for shoddy work.

Part of the reason big US contractors have been able to get away with so much is that there has been limited proper supervision. CPA employees were picked not for their financial expertise but for their political loyalty.

Mr Bowen would have passed the test. He campaigned for George Bush in Texas and was one of the small army of Republican lawyers called in to Florida in 2000 to oversee the vote recounts on Mr Bush’s behalf. When he started the job in March 2004 few expected he would do anything to embarrass the administration.

However, Mr Bowen has emerged as the scourge of the big corporations who are among the Republican party’s biggest donors. Earlier this year a clause extending his mandate was stripped from a military spending bill just before a vote. Sigir, however, seems to have been saved by the Democratic victory in last month’s elections.

Mr Bowen bristles at the suggestion that Mr Bush might have had a hand in the attempt to close his office. “I’m doing exactly what the president expects me to do,” he said. ++

Bush Changes Iraq Rhetoric Again; Still No Plan
Buzzflash
12/01/2006

President Bush’s press conference yesterday with Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki revealed a great deal about the Bush Administration’s failures and their continuing lack of a real strategy to redeploy our troops. The only substantive matter Bush discussed was his desire to “accelerate” Iraq’s ability to handle its own security problems:

“We talked today about accelerating authority to the Prime Minister”

“As opposed to saying, America, you go solve the problem, we have a Prime Minister who’s saying, stop holding me back, I want to solve the problem. And the meeting today was to accelerate his capacity to do so.”

“My plan, and his plan, is to accelerate the Iraqis’ responsibility. See, here’s a man who has been elected by the people; the people expect him to respond, and he doesn’t have the capacity to respond. And so we want to accelerate that capacity.”

“We made a step toward as soon as possible by transferring a — accelerating the transfer of authorities, military authorities to the Prime Minister.”

“Today we had a meeting that will accelerate the capacity for the Prime Minister to do the hard work necessary to help stop this violence.”

“And the reason I came today to be able to sit down with him is to hear the joint plans developed between the Iraqi government, the sovereign government of Iraq, and our government, to make sure that we accelerate the transfer of capacity to the Prime Minister.”

Looks like “accelerate” is Bush’s new buzzword. The obvious question we should demand is why - after nearly four years - the Administration is only now trying to expedite Iraqi self-sufficiency. If there is room to do more now, they should have been doing it from the beginning. (Of course, we know for a fact from congressional testimony that Bush and Rumsfeld ignored our generals on the ground about Iraq’s internal security concerns and took no action to rebuild Iraq ’s security forces)

But the implications of Bush’s words are equally ominous for the future. Bush has still refused to set any concrete goals in terms of timelines or objectives so that the Iraqis can better plan for autonomy (and so we can get our troops home). “All that does is set people up for unrealistic expectations,” Bush said yesterday.

Then why not simply set up a realistic timeline, George? Even Maliki was able to declare today that “Iraqi forces will be ready, fully ready” to take over by June. Should this prediction transpire, there is absolutely no reason why we will need today’s full coalition combat presence in July. Such a pullout would be in accordance with the pending recommendations of the Iraq Study Group to withdraw nearly all of our combat forces by early 2008.

But Bush will have none of this reasonability and is determined to stick to his plan (or lack thereof). “This business about graceful exit just simply has no realism to it at all,” Bush said. His rhetoric suggests that he believes he can not be blamed for failure in Iraq so long as the troops stay and the war remains pending when he leaves office in two years, and it all becomes someone else’s problem.

The reason for going into Iraq has changed a dozen times, and the rhetoric for staying there has changed even more. Logistically, let alone politically, it will take several weeks at the least to fully redeploy coalition troops. Let’s go on and make a real plan - an accelerated one. ++

Mideast allies near a state of panic
LA Times
December 3, 2006

President Bush and his top advisors fanned out across the troubled Middle East over the last week to showcase their diplomatic initiatives to restore strained relationships with traditional allies and forge new ones with leaders in Iraq.

But instead of flaunting stronger ties and steadfast American influence, the president’s journey found friends both old and new near a state of panic. Mideast leaders expressed soaring concern over upheavals across the region that the United States helped ignite through its invasion of Iraq and push for democracy — and fear that the Bush administration may make things worse.

President Bush’s summit in Jordan with the Iraqi prime minister proved an awkward encounter that deepened doubts about the relationship. Vice President Dick Cheney’s stop in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, yielded a blunt warning from the kingdom’s leaders. And Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s swing through the West Bank and Israel, intended to build Arab support by showing a new U.S. push for peace, found little to work with.

In all, visits designed to show the American team in charge ended instead in diplomatic embarrassment and disappointment, with U.S. leaders rebuked and lectured by Arab counterparts. The trips demonstrated that U.S. allies in the region were struggling to understand what to make of the difficult relationship, and to figure whether, with a new Democratic majority taking over Congress, Bush even had control over his nation’s Mideast policy.

Arabs are “trying to figure out what the Americans are going to do, and trying develop their own plans,” said Sen. Jack Reed ( D-R.I.), one of his party’s point men on Iraq. “They’re trying to figure out their Plan B.”

The allies’ predicament was described by Jordan’s King Abdullah II last week, before Bush arrived in Amman, the capital. Abdullah, one of America’s steadiest friends in the region, warned that the Mideast faced the threat of three simultaneous civil wars — in Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories. And he made clear that the burden of dealing with it rested largely with the United States.

“Something dramatic” needed to come out of Bush’s meetings with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki to defuse the three-way threat, Abdullah said, because “I don’t think we’re in a position where we can come back and visit the problem in early 2007.”

The only regional leader to voice unqualified support for the Bush administration has been Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who has gone so far as to say that the Iraq invasion contributed to regional stability.

To Middle East observers, Bush can no longer speak for the United States as he did before because of the domestic pressure for a change of course in Iraq, said Nathan Brown, a specialist on Arab politics at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“He can talk all he wants about ’staying until the job is done,’ but these leaders can read about the American political scene and see that he may not be able to deliver that,” Brown said.

The Bush-Maliki meeting Thursday, closely watched around the world in anticipation of a possible change in U.S. strategy, produced no shift in declared aims. Rather, it resulted in diplomatic stumbles that seemed to belie the leaders’ claims that their relationship was intact.

On the eve of the summit, a leaked memo written by Bush’s national security advisor, Stephen Hadley, showed that U.S. officials questioned Maliki’s abilities. But the memo also was a reminder of dwindling U.S. influence over Iraq. Some of the steps that Hadley said the Iraqis should take, such as providing public services to Sunni Arabs as well as Shiites, were moves that the Americans had demanded for many months, without success.

The leak of the memo cast a shadow over the summit, and Maliki abruptly canceled the first scheduled meeting, a conversation among Bush, Maliki and Abdullah. White House aides insisted that the cancellation was not a snub.

One Middle East diplomat said later in an interview that Maliki had canceled the meeting to put distance between him and Bush at a time when Iraq’s Shiite lawmakers and Cabinet ministers with ties to militant cleric Muqtada Sadr had halted their participation in the government to protest the summit.

On Saturday, in his regular radio address, Bush said that his relationship with Maliki was, in fact, improving.

“With each meeting, I’m coming to know him better, and I’m becoming more impressed by his desire to make the difficult choices that will put his country on a better path,” Bush said.

During the trip, Bush was unable to distance himself from the fierce debate about Iraq policy back home. The president felt the need to respond to news accounts saying that an advisory panel on Iraq would urge a gradual withdrawal of combat troops from the region. He insisted that suggestions for such a “graceful exit” were not realistic.

Despite this, Bush repeated in his radio address that he intended to look for a bipartisan solution to the war, and would listen to the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, which is scheduled to present its findings Wednesday.He also said that his own internal review, coming from Pentagon and White House officials, among others, was near completion, suggesting that he may be discussing the options before him over the next several days.

“I want to hear all advice before I make any decisions about adjustments to our strategy in Iraq ,” Bush said.

Cheney’s trip to talk to Saudi King Abdullah was far less visible than Bush’s mission, but helped to make painfully clear the gap between U.S. goals and those of its Arab allies.U.S. officials said Cheney initiated the trip. But foreign diplomats said that Saudi leaders sought the visit to express their concern about the region, including fears of a U.S. departure and what they see as excessive American support for the Shiite faction in Iraq.

After the meeting with Cheney, Saudi officials released an unusual statement pointedly highlighting American responsibility for deterioration of stability in the region. The Saudi officials cited “the direct influence of … the United States on the issues of the region” and said it was important for U.S. influence “to be in accord with the region’s actual condition and its historical equilibrium,” an apparent reference to the Sunni-Shiite balance.

The Saudi statement also said the U.S. in the Middle East should “pursue equitable means that contribute to ending its conflicts,” pointing to the Israeli-Palestinian situation.

The statement “came pretty close to a rebuke, by Saudi standards,” said Charles W. Freeman Jr., a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia. “It said, in effect, that the United States needs to behave responsibly.”

There have been other signals of Saudi anxiety recently.On Wednesday, an advisor to the Saudi government wrote in the Washington Post that if the United States pulled out of Iraq, “massive Saudi intervention” would ensue to protect Sunnis from Shiite militias.

The Saudi ambassador to the United States , Prince Turki al Faisal, warned in a speech in October against an American withdrawal, saying that “since the United States came into Iraq uninvited, it should not leave Iraq uninvited.”

Rice encountered the limits of U.S. influence when she visited Jerusalem and the West Bank town of Jericho last week, trying to entice Arab confidence by displaying a renewed interest in Israeli-Palestinian peace.

But Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was gloomy about the prospects for a deal between his Fatah party and the militant group Hamas that would allow formation of a nonsectarian government and open the way for increased aid and, potentially, peace talks with Israel.

Rice said afterward that the administration “cannot create the circumstances” for peace.

“This is the kind of thing that takes time,” she said. “You don’t expect great leaps forward.”

Expressing deeper unhappiness with the United States, leaders from Jordan, Egypt and Persian Gulf countries told Rice during her trip to an economic development conference in Jordan on Friday that the U.S. had a responsibility to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which they and many analysts viewed as the key to regional stability.

Amr Moussa, secretary-general of the Arab League, urged greater U.S. action, warning that the Middle East was becoming “an abyss…. The region is facing real failure.” ++

Beirut protests keep pressure on
BBC
3 December 2006

Lebanon ’s political crisis is continuing as demonstrators remain camped in the centre of Beirut in an attempt to bring down the government.

Thousands of supporters of Hezbollah and its pro-Syrian allies are on the streets calling for Prime Minister Fouad Siniora’s government to go.

Mr Siniora is refusing to step down to make way for a government that would include more of Hezbollah’s allies.

Arab countries are stepping up their efforts to help resolve the crisis.

The head of the Arab League, Amr Musa, is visiting Beirut to offer to mediate between the government and the opposition, and envoys from the United Arab Emirates , Bahrain and Tunisia are offering their help.

Cabinet seats

Protesters, led mainly by the Shia militant political movement Hezbollah and its Christian allies, have been camping out in Beirut close to the prime minister’s office since a huge anti-government rally on Friday.

They accuse Mr Siniora of being too pro-Western and anti-Syrian and of failing the Lebanese people.

The current crisis was sparked last month when five Shia ministers and a Christian ally quit the government.

Hezbollah had asked for cabinet seats that would give it and its allies power of veto but the majority group in parliament refused.

The political tension was increased two weeks later with the assassination of a leading anti-Syrian minister, Pierre Gemayel.

Marathon

Despite the protests, several hundred runners took to the streets of Beirut for Lebanon ’s annual marathon.

The organisers said the route had been changed slightly, and police and soldiers were deployed along the route.

While the demonstrations have had the good nature of a pop concert or festival, this is an extremely serious crisis for Lebanon, says the BBC’s Jon Leyne in Beirut .

International concern has been growing. On Saturday, the UK Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett and German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier were in the Lebanese capital to express their support for Mr Siniora and his government.

Mr Siniora has said he will not be forced from office by mass protests and has vowed to stand firm against what he has called an attempted coup.

The US has denounced what it described as “threats of intimidation violence” in Lebanon and accused Syria and Iran of instigating the protests to try to topple the democratically-elected government.

The government came to office last year in the first election held after the withdrawal of Syrian troops originally stationed in Lebanon during the civil war.

Syria was forced to withdraw its military presence after massive street protests and international pressure, triggered by the February 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

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