letters

Mostly strange letters to the editor this time

Why people park everywhere

Well, I have some theories about why the Panamanians like to park their cars almost anywhere:

1. They are too lazy to walk

2. They are scared to death a thug will rob them or even kill them, or because of vandalism.

3. They don't want to pay for public parking fees or meters.

4. They don't want to be late for work since it is common in Panama.

5. They just don't care since they have "padrinos" in the government who can write off their fines for traffic violations.

name withheld

A charming note from someone just out of prison

Editor's note: The following was sent to The Panama News advertisers, by an old acquaintance:

China ordination raises tensions with Vatican

You can't bargain with the devil! This should be clearly understood by Vatican officials who persist in establishing, at all costs, improved relations with communist China. The Chinese government will never openly accept the Catholic Church. It will never recognize anything other than state-back churches with bishops sympathetic to the communist regime. Essentially, the true Catholic Church must remain an underground institution in China.

Chinese Catholics have been recently encouraged by some Vatican officials to seek government recognition as members of the "official" or "open" church, a step that would require them to join the government-run Catholic Patriotic Association. This has emboldened authorities in Beijing to appoint bishops without papal approval, and has managed to sway many Chinese Catholics to the government's side. This strategy of compromise is of a piece with the old "Ostpolitik" --- Pope Paul VI's controversial policy of accommodating Communist governments in an attempt to obtain better conditions for Catholics behind the Iron Curtain during the 1960s and 70s. This policy of compromise failed in Russia just as it is failing today in China.

The church is called to evangelize and so it must try to work with the world's governments and with various peoples and those of different faiths. Nonetheless, Pope John Paul II reminds us that "In matters of faith, compromise is in contradiction with God who is Truth" (Ut Unum Sint 18). In the Gospel of Life (82) he further states: In the proclamation of this Gospel, we must not fear hostility or unpopularity, and we must refuse any compromise or ambiguity which might conform us to the world's way of thinking (cf. Rom 12:2).

Canadian health professionals support Flotilla 2

The undersigned Canadian health professionals join with people from across Canada in support of Flotilla II, the fleet of boats carrying over one thousand courageous people aiming to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza. This year, the generosity of the Canadian public has made it possible for the Canadian Boat to Gaza, the Tahrir, to join this international convoy. The international civilian initiative is undertaken in the face of intractable political impasse.

The sailing of Flotilla II could not be more timely. The level of abject poverty among the Palestinians of Gaza has tripled since the imposition of the blockade in 2007 on an already impoverished and traumatized civilian population. At present, 61% of households do not have enough food and the allocation of potable water is far below the World Health Organization minimum standard of 100 liters/day. The World Food Program, the Food and Agricultural Organization, and UN Development Program all report dire conditions of malnutrition and untreated health problems. Children who comprise over 50 percent of the population suffer from micronutrient malnutrition, lack of access to health service and education, death and disability from war and ongoing psychological trauma. Many have known no other life.

There is ample will to help, so ending the blockade is crucial. We call on our government to do its part: to stand up for the boats' safe passage to Gaza, and to demand the immediate end of this punishing, criminal blockade.

Abortionists are criminals

How do you make abortion laws?

How is it possible that, with such evidence as there is, there are still people who say that human life can be undone in the womb? Is it possible that there are governments in the XXI century, that support such aberration and tyranny?

Dr. Nathanson, in his book "The Hand of God" published by Palabra, makes a review of his life. It is an impressive testimony of a man who has gone from being one of the fiercest abortion doctors in the world, after his conversion to Catholicism; he becomes a hard defender of human life.

He said that to make abortion legal in the United States was crucial manipulate of the media, all coming together in a historic moment as the convulsive decades of the 60s and 70s. For that is necessary to have a figure or institution about to be downloaded on the wrath of those people who sought to deny any order established in nature, and that institution was the Catholic Church. Manipulating the history of the Church and its true message of salvation was the perfect scapegoat. The maximum to be acted was Machiavelli: "Nothing is more difficult to control, more dangerous to carry or more uncertain of success, to take the lead in introducing a new order of things."

But there's more: Maurice Caillet, in his autobiography "I was a Mason," describes his tenure in the French Masonry. As Nathanson, also a doctor, and has been threatened with death for his "former brethren of the lodges." Well, as everyone knows, Freemasonry seeks to destroy human beings, so its objective is going directly to the institution that defends the human being: the Catholic Church. So, as said Caillet, abortion laws in France were made in the Masonic lodges, as many of the French political leaders were Masons.

So we have established the reason for this diabolical plot: You can only explain this atrocity taking into account the existence of the demon, who is a murderer from the beginning. Nathanson says it all: his abortion clinic was a gang of professional criminals.

"Conspiracy Theory"

While we were not watching, conspiracy theory has undergone Orwellian redefinition.

A "conspiracy theory" no longer means an event explained by a conspiracy. Instead, it now means any explanation, or even a fact, that is out of step with the government's explanation and that of its media pimps.

See http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=25339

Editor's note: In the Anglo-American Common Law, "conspiracy" is an agreement among two or more persons to do an illegal act, with the crime consummated by any tangible action to carry out the agreement. It can be a government provocateur getting a bunch of folks with addled brains to talk about illegal things, with some innocuous act that falls well short of putting the people who are the targets actually carrying out the proposed illegal act. A conspiracy can be the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, wherein a group of religious fanatics loyal to Osama bin Laden carefully prepared a series of suicide attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people, mostly civilians, some of them even devout Muslims.

There is a lot of crime in the world, much of it carried out by groups of people according to some common agreement. However, the notion of an overarching, long-running plot that would require many people to be in on it and none of them to reveal it is generally an example of paranoiac ideation.

There is, of course, the true exception. For millennia the world has been run by an oligarchy of incompetents, the Negligentsia. They are forever messing up. But the world would muddle through anyway, were there not a secret cabal within the Negligentsia, the Obliterati. It's hard to call the Obliterati "evil" --- they're just blasted out of their gourds on one substance or another all of the time and with the reins of state power in their hands they are far more dangerous than any drunk driver.

Does the above sound ridiculous? Not as ridiculous as the stuff about the Jewish conspiracy behind 9/11, or freemasonry's purpose to "destroy human beings," or the Illuminati. People who make these sorts of extraordinary claims need to show some proof to be credible, but what they usually do is connect random facts, often with a few bits of fiction in the chain, to come up with conclusions that don't logically follow. Those who report the news can't be so cavalier with the facts.

Yes, there are people with individual and group interests that are not always disclosed, who act to further these interests. Sometimes they use underhanded tactics. Sometimes they dominate governments. If they are of any significance, they can rarely keep their games secret for very long.

And what if powerful people seek to do evil things and keep them hidden from the public? That describes a pathology that crops up from time to time in every sort of government, and forms the basis of one of the best arguments for freedom of the press.

And the problem with "the media?" First, remember proper English: one medium, several media. Second, understand that due to economic forces the major news organizations are concentrated in ever fewer hands, which generally belong to people of a narrow social segment of the very wealthy, and which are subject to pressures from wealthy advertisers.

What's a person who wants to know what's going on in the world to do? First, don't rely on one news source or one narrow segment of sources. Read, watch and listen to things by people with whom you disagree, and things by people with whom you tend to agree with a critical mind. Don't let some company, or some celebrity, do your thinking for you.

If you do all this and still feel uneasy about powerful forces working behind the scenes against your interests, don't aggravate the situation by numbing your mind to the point that it doesn't matter. Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that they're not out to get you.

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Also in this section:
Editorials: Lunatic land grab, and US war powers
APEDE, The Torre Financiera
Baucus, The US-Panama Free Trade Agreement
AFL-CIO, US-Panama FTA not the answer to the jobs crisis
Arghiris, Defending the Tabasara River
Bernal, The "dialogue" about freedom of expression
Smyth, Oakland journalist's murderers convicted
Amnesty International, Bahraini woman gets a year in prison for reading a poem
Toensing, Washington still hasn't learned about brutal and repressive governments
Acosta, Funes's broken promises
Boff, Sustainability: adjective or noun?
Burggraf, Peru and genetically modified crops
Via Campesina, Against rich nations' food grabs
Greenpeace, Italy says yes to a nuclear-free future
Birns & Soltis, Brazil vs. the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights
Hightower, The GOP's Medicare lies
MacAuley, Blowing the whistle
Jackson, Martinelli violates the dictatorship's guarantee
Sirias, Goodbye to teaching (for now)
Letters to the editor

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