NEWS FLASH: THE U.S. IS A THEOCRACY

   

     IT'S SUMMER, IT'S HOT, BUT WE STILL MUST stick selflessly to our post and attempt to define the larger picture. We'll be brief.
     My inclination in pursuit of this objective is mainly to ask questions, most of them related to the passing parade of news, large and small.

     FIRST QUESTION: NOW THAT HE'S AN OFFICIAL CANDIDATE,  will U.S. Republican presidential hopeful Willard Mitt Romney, a highly-ranked member of the Mormon church, disclose his intentions with respect to tithing -- a fundamental requirement of Mormonism -- should he win the presidency?
     Tithing: that's the word for turning over a tenth of one's income to the benefit of the church.
     
     ONE WONDERS WHETHER MOST AMERICANS -- especially including Republicans -- are aware of this Mormon rule. (I personally am aware, by the way, that tithing is a long-standing idea within mainstream Christianity, but few branches of the Christian church are so strict about it, in almost a cultish way, as the Church of Mormon.)
      Will this tithing principle of faith require Mr. Romney to somehow transfer the practise to his governmental duties, as president; in other words, to make branches of government tithe in some way?
     My reading of the U.S. Constitution says there's no way such a thing could happen because of the idea of separation of church and state. But that doesn't change the fact that the U.S. Constitution has been bent in the past in some very awkward ways (think slavery).

      THE U.S., IT APPEARS TO ME, IS A NEAR-THEOCRACY, if not wholly one. I mean, every candidate for political office in the U.S. (and this has been the case since the beginning of that nation) must express belief in "God" (and, mark my words, it's the Christian God, very heavily so) in order to have any chance of winning any elective office.
      At the Republican convention over recent days and nights, I didn't hear a single speaker of note who failed to finish his or her remarks with almost exactly the following words: "May God bless you all, and (speaker voice-volume goes up here strongly and so earnestly) may God bless the United States of America!" (Goodness me -- could you imagine some Canadian politician making it a habit to end every speech with "and may God bless Canada"? Well, actually, I guess one could, with PM Harper.)


       BUT WE MUST NOT ACCUSE the Republicans of being the only ones wearing their theology  on their sleeves. The Democrats, as you will clearly see when their convention comes up soon, will be doing just as much "God blessing" and "one-nation-under-God"-ing, and all the rest of it, as the Republicans.

       JUST AS A REMINDER,  I am obliged to state here that the American Constitution says no candidate for office shall be subject to a religious test. Unless I have mistaken the meaning of what sounds to me like extremely clear, plain constitutional language, it is my claim that  U.S. politicians violate their own constitution every time there is an electoral contest, and many times in-between.
       Here is what Article VI, paragraph 3, of the U.S. Constitution states:
       "The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial officers, both of the United States and the several states, shall be bound by oath or affirmation, to support this constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States." (My italics.)       
      Yet, almost without exception candidates are unable to escape the religious test, because each and every one of them must say "God Bless America." That is, if they wish to be elected.
       And that's, well, you know, kind of like a . . . theocracy.
     
     

       
   

BE READY FOR A MIDDLE EAST EXPLOSION

                                             
                                           
      BY GOLLY, YOU'VE GOT TO HAND IT to those Americans -- they sure know how to get your attention.
      And I'm not talking about the Olympic Games, in which Americans almost always shine, as they have done in the recent Games.
      No -- what I'm referring to is the U.S.A.'s military virtuosity.
      There's hardly a diabolical weapon of war known to humanity that successive American governments (and their military leaders) haven't found it necessary to pursue, including the chemical warfare variety.
      Please -- don't gasp. America has in fact pioneered chemical warfare. In their war against Vietnam some half-century ago the U.S. military used "Agent Orange," containing the super-toxic chemical dioxin, long before we'd even heard of the late Saddam Hussein and his use of chemical weapons in Iraq.
      Even in 2012, many Vietnamese civilians, and even their offspring, continue to suffer from the horrible health complications produced by the U.S. chemical industry-supplied, and U.S. military-delivered, Agent Orange. Even members of the U.S. military who handled this stuff were victims, too.
      (NOTE: By coincidence, I began preparing this piece in early August, and on Aug. 9 a new U.S. project was announced to "clean up" Agent Orange residue remaining at a former U.S. airbase in Vietnam. Half a century later? How generous, how filled with feelings for humanity is that!?)

      UNFORTUNATELY, THE DAY SEEMS to have passed when we worried about The Bomb,  presumably because no one appears terribly willing to actually use one.
      Nuclear arsenals have been reduced, down to a mere 19,000-23,000 warheads (who knows for certain just how many?) and tensions between the big powers have moderated. More or less.
       This shrunken arsenal of nukes, of course, is still much more than enough to destroy world civilizations several times over. And that once again raises a vital question: How can most ordinary citizens fail to suspect that the leaders of the nuclear nations, and of their supporter-nations -- including Canada, which backs the nuclear U.S. and U.K. all the way -- are severely deficient in mental health, and have been for a long time?
      But even if we grant that our leaders are "on top of" the nuclear problem and will do all they can to avoid any kind of nuclear conflict, those weapons still exist and most are "ready to go" into action. There is, of course, much more to the weapons story. "Nuclear" is only one of the armament problems facing the world. A perhaps more immediate danger is present in the most explosive non-nuclear, or "conventional," bomb ever known: The "Bunker Buster."

      THIS WEAPON, CLAIM U.S.  military leaders, will easily take out underground nuclear power-producing plants in places like Iran. Especially Iran, on which the U.S. has its sights aggressively set.
      The Bunker Buster cannot be classified anything but a Weapon of Mass Destruction, otherwise known as a WMD, right along with nuclear and chemical weapons.
      We all came across the initials WMD quite a lot during the U.S. war against Iraq, thanks to George Bush, Jr., whose political ideology sacrificed scores of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, and hundreds of American military lives as a result of his discredited and shameful claim that Iraq was armed with WMDs.

      JUST TO GIVE IT A BIT OF LOCAL perspective, we should realize that one of those massive Bunker Busters creates a blast probably big enough to destroy, say, most of Vancouver's downtown peninsula (if not more of the city) and most of the scores of thousands of people in it. So, really, with "conventional" bombs like these, who needs nuclear?
      I checked out the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, or MOP -- the U.S. classification of this bomb -- on the Web, and saw an entry for a video of an MOP test explosion, but when I clicked on that link all I got was was a tangle of garbled coding. Someone, I guess, had decided that such pictures would be too much for delicate civilian eyes, and killed the videos.
      At any rate, further research and development, more refinements and perfection of these awesome weapons, is ongoing within the mighty American military-industrial-financial complex (or is it "financial-military-industrial complex"?).
      About the only "good" side to this weapon is that it is so big and weighs so much (13.6 tonnes) that only the largest of military planes can carry one. That is, one bomb only, per huge plane. Which is probably something of a disappointment to the warriors who daily plan death and destruction from within the safety of the Pentagon.

       IF THESE BUNKER BUSTERS ARE USED TO take out buried and "hardened" Iranian nuclear power-production facilities, I wonder how many people would die from the blasts -- and, ultimately, from the resulting environmental radiation that would be released at those exploded nuclear-fuelled sites (declared by Iran to be for legitimate civilian power-production use only)?
       And, to get to the heart of this essay, I wonder how many scores of thousands would be likely to die in the Middle East war that would be inevitable in the wake of  such attacks? I ask further: Does anybody in the U.S. leadership really care? One continues to suspect that the western world's deep interest in Iran has something other than a military objective.
      It should be remembered that the International Atomic Energy Agency checked out Iran's nuclear program and found it to be non-military in nature and purpose. In light of this, one might conclude that the western world's fixation on Iran has an ultimate objective -- control of Iran's vast oil reserves. This can be achieved most efficiently through "regime change" (remember Iraq?) -- and that kind of change would be unlikely to come about without heavy loss of life, military and civilian, both Iranian and "western."

      SADLY, RECENT OMINOUS DEVELOPMENTS have taken place in the region. According to the Associated Press, a very reliable news agency, the U.S. Defense Department is making huge arms-sales deals with Arabian Gulf states with which it is allied (such as Qatar, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia). Involved are more than $11 billion in weapons. The deal, it is reported, will make the Arabian Gulf states part of U.S. efforts to "contain" Iran.
      And while the U.S. acknowledges that Iran's nuclear efforts so far are concentrating on civilian energy and medical uses, it appears to be worried that Iran could or might "eventually" develop nuclear weapons with its nuclear expertise.
      Sometimes it seems that no excuse is too weak for the U.S. Military-Industrial-Financial Complex to use as a cause for war. (Really, wars and preparations for wars make huge profits for the arms industries, which is why I have inserted the word "financial." It truly is a triple-complex.)

      THAT SOMETHING BIG IS BREWING in the Middle East appears undeniable, with the U.S. and its very close ally there, Israel, working on plans for action against Iran.
      It didn't get a great deal of notice at the time, but, at the beginning of August, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. Defence Secretary Leon Panetta, during a Panetta visit to Israel, made threatening statements against Iran.

      NETANYAHU WAS GUNG-HO FOR ATTACKING Iran, because it continues to develop nuclear power-producing plants, which he seems to feel can be quickly converted to the production of nuclear weapons.
      Israel, a nuclear power itself, will act on its own, said Netanyahu, if the U.S. takes too long to curb Iran. Time, he said, is running out, but failed to indicate how much time he was allowing the U.S. to come to a resolve over what to do about Iran. This is extremely tough talk which, in my view, borders on the maniacal. This is because other, bigger, nations most likely would be drawn in to such a Mideast conflict, and the world would face a war of possibly massive dimensions.
      The best Panetta seemed able to deliver under Netanyahu pressure was to vaguely pledge some form of "option" to proceed against Iran "if they make the decision to proceed with a nuclear weapon."
     
      THE REST OF THE WORLD CAN ONLY watch and worry, sensing that bad stuff is brewing. Syria, an ally of Iran, is deep in a civil war, said by some to be covertly promoted by "outside western forces and support." This fits in with the theory of a few analysts to the effect that Syria would have to be side-lined first, so as to clear the way for a "western" attack on Iran.

       THOSE OF US IN LANDS FAR AWAY from the Middle East hot spots (as I am here, on the Pacific coast of Canadian North America), can only hope that the religious, racial and real estate differences which divide and sub-divide nations and cultures in the Eastern Mediterranean region, can and will be overcome without the horrific human suffering that results from modern warfare.