Whats The Story With Atheism

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Is atheism the new opiate of the masses? The momentum for this question had begun long before the new Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, this week answered the BBC Radio 5 Live question, “Do you believe in God?”, with a simple: “No.” It was already under way before everyone forgot to feel affronted by the influx of seasonal e-cards wishing us all a Happy Holiday, and then comprehensively failed to notice that the mighty M&S had left out Jesus from its 2007 Christmas card collection.

The traditional Christmas school holiday period had already morphed into “Winterval” in an increasing number of Scottish local authorities.

Earlier this month, a survey commissioned by the public theology think-tank Theos revealed that more than one-quarter of British adults could not identify Bethlehem as Jesus’s birthplace, guessing Nazareth or Jerusalem instead. Only 12% could answer all four questions about the Christmas story correctly.

The Theos survey followed an earlier Sunday newspaper revelation that only one in five schools planned to perform a Nativity play this year. The apparent de-Christianising of modern multicultural Britain compelled at least one commentator yesterday to describe 2007 as the year “the swelling tide of unbelief crashed further through the structures of our cultural architecture”.

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Economic Collapse – Crisis May Make 1929 Look Like A Walk In The Park

As central banks continue to splash their cash over the system, so far to little effect, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard argues things are rapidly spiralling out of their control.

Twenty billion dollars here, $20bn there, and a lush half-trillion from the European Central Bank at give-away rates for Christmas. Buckets of liquidity are being splashed over the North Atlantic banking system, so far with meagre or fleeting effects.

As the credit paralysis stretches through its fifth month, a chorus of economists has begun to warn that the world’s central banks are fighting the wrong war, and perhaps risk a policy error of epochal proportions.

“Liquidity doesn’t do anything in this situation,” says Anna Schwartz, the doyenne of US monetarism and life-time student (with Milton Friedman) of the Great Depression.

“It cannot deal with the underlying fear that lots of firms are going bankrupt. The banks and the hedge funds have not fully acknowledged who is in trouble. That is the critical issue,” she adds.

Lenders are hoarding the cash, shunning peers as if all were sub-prime lepers. Spreads on three-month Euribor and Libor – the interbank rates used to price contracts and Club Med mortgages – are stuck at 80 basis points even after the latest blitz. The monetary screw has tightened by default.

York professor Peter Spencer, chief economist for the ITEM Club, says the global authorities have just weeks to get this right, or trigger disaster.

“The central banks are rapidly losing control. By not cutting interest rates nearly far enough or fast enough, they are allowing the money markets to dictate policy. We are long past worrying about moral hazard,” he says.

“They still have another couple of months before this starts imploding. Things are very unstable and can move incredibly fast. I don’t think the central banks are going to make a major policy error, but if they do, this could make 1929 look like a walk in the park,” he adds.

The Bank of England knows the risk. Markets director Paul Tucker says the crisis has moved beyond the collapse of mortgage securities, and is now eating into the bedrock of banking capital. “We must try to avoid the vicious circle in which tighter liquidity conditions, lower asset values, impaired capital resources, reduced credit supply, and slower aggregate demand feed back on each other,” he says.

New York’s Federal Reserve chief Tim Geithner echoed the words, warning of an “adverse self-reinforcing dynamic”, banker-speak for a downward spiral. The Fed has broken decades of practice by inviting all US depositary banks to its lending window, bringing dodgy mortgage securities as collateral.

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Ex-CIA Official: Israel Will Attack Iran On It’s Own

I came back from a trip to Israel in November convinced that Israel would attack Iran,” Bruce Riedel, a former CIA official and senior adviser to three US presidents, George W. Bush among them, told the American Newsweek magazine in an article published Friday.

Citing conversations he had in Israel with officials in Mossad and the Israeli defense establishment, Riedel concluded that “Israel is not going to allow its nuclear monopoly to be threatened.”

While some US experts doubt Israel’s ability to tackle Iran alone, David Albright, of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington, was quoted by Newsweek as saying that although information on the exact location of Iran’s nuclear facility is incomplete, Israel’s air strike on an alleged Syrian nuclear facility on September 6, widely discussed in foreign media outlets, could be seen as a test run for any future strike on Iran’s facilities, as well as a direct warning to Teheran.

Riedel told the magazine his impression that Israel would venture a strike on Iran on its own was formed before the publication of the joint US intelligence agencies’ report, the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE). “This [the NIE] makes it [a strike on Iran] even more likely,” he said.

Since the publication of the NIE, which reversed a previous American assessment by concluding that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003, leaders worldwide have been adjusting their publicly stated positions on the Iranian nuclear issue.

Even inside the US, President Bush attempted some damage control by stating a day after the report’s publication that “Iran was dangerous, Iran is dangerous and Iran will be dangerous.”

In Israel, responses to the report ranged from subtle criticism of the report’s conclusions to outright slamming of the US intelligence community’s capabilities, so much so that on last Sunday’s cabinet meeting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert instructed his ministers to refrain from commenting any further on the report.

In the international scene, Russia’s decision to renew fuel shipments to Iran main nuclear facility at Bushehr was interpreted by many anlysts as stemming directly from the NIE’s publication; another development possibly stemming from the report is Russia and China’s hardened position on further sanctions against Teheran.

In Teheran, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was quick to capitalize on the NIE, calling it an “Iranian victory” and demanding that the United States publicly apologize for its previous bellicose stance.

Uzi Arad, a former Mossad official and adviser to opposition leader Binyamin Netanyahu, told Newsweek that on a recent trip to Moscow, a Russian general poked fun at the naiveté of the NIE, commenting that if the Iranians had halted weapons development in 2003 it was partly because they were satisfied with progress there and wanted to devote investment to harder parts of the nuclear equation, like enrichment.

“The irony is that the effect of this report may be self-negating – by itself it will accelerate Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons,” Arad told the magazine.

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Israel Fears Clash With U.S. As Rice Applies Pressure Over Peace Talks

A senior adviser to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Israel may come into conflict with the United States over increased pressure by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to advance talks with the Palestinian Authority. Meanwhile, the Israeli and PA negotiating teams, headed by Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Ahmed Qureia, respectively, are to meet Sunday ahead of Tuesdays meeting between Olmert and PA President Mahmoud Abbas.

The U.S. might want to up the pressure on Israel to fulfil its obligations in the first stage of the road map, the adviser said in private conversations, particularly removing illegal outposts and freezing construction in the territories.

“Their demands from Israel will only increase and it is not certain that we can meet them under the circumstances,” he added.
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The adviser said that in Vice Premier Haim Ramons talks with American officials, he had gone “too far in promising them things to please them.”

Another senior government official involved in the talks also warned of expected crises with the Palestinians and the Americans.

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Russia’s Putin Named Time’s Person of The Year

Russian President Vladimir Putin was named Time’s “Person of the Year” for bringing his country “roaring back to the table of world power,” the magazine said on its Web site.

Putin, 55, who has said he may become Russia’s prime minister after stepping down as president next year, has helped lead the country back to stability “at significant cost to the principles and ideas that free nations prize,” Richard Stengel, the magazine’s managing editor, wrote in an article explaining the choice.

“With dauntless persistence, a sharp vision of what Russia should become and a sense that he embodied the spirit of Mother Russia, Putin has put his country back on the map,” Stengel wrote.

Time, owned by Time Warner Inc., started the annual “Person of the Year” cover story in 1927 with Charles Lindbergh, the aviator who made the first solo trans-Atlantic flight. Last year, Internet users behind the self-made content on Web sites such as Google Inc.’s YouTube.com won the honor.

Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, a Nobel Prize winner, “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling, Chinese President Hu Jintao and David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, were named runners-up, the magazine said.

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Israeli Minister Warns NIE Miscalculation Could Lead To War

A senior Israeli official has voiced the first open criticism of the U.S. intelligence assessment of Irans nuclear program.

Israeli Public Security Minister Avi Dichter warned that the United States underestimated Irans nuclear capabilities and intentions. Dichter said the National Intelligence Estimate, which asserted that Teheran abandoned its nuclear weapons program, could lead to a Middle East war.

“Something went wrong in the American blueprint for analyzing the severity of the Iranian nuclear threat,” Dichter, a former Israeli intelligence chief, said. “We have to hope that the United States will know to correct this. Israel and other states must help in any way including providing intelligence material so as to repair this miscalculation.”

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Priest Attacked, Hurt in Turkey

A Catholic priest was hospitalized Sunday after being stabbed, the Italian Embassy in Ankara said, in the latest in a string of attacks on Christians in Turkey. Police said they had detained the suspected attacker.

The assault on Italian priest Adriano Franchini was likely to add to concerns about whether the predominantly Muslim country — which is bidding for European Union membership — can protect its Christian community.

Franchini was stabbed after Sunday Mass at St. Anthony’s church in the port city of Izmir, said Simon Carta, the Italian consul there.

The priest is responsible for the Capucine order in Turkey and heads the Church of the Virgin Mary in Ephesus, Carta said. He said the priest was conscious when he was taken to a hospital.

The state-run Anatolia news agency said Franchini was stabbed in the stomach but his condition was not life-threatening.

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Natural Types The Spiritual – Wheat Supplies Disappearing Price Soaring

Wheat prices have soared above a record $10 a bushel Monday. The strong demand for the grain around the world has raised concerns over wheat shortage in the U.S. in 2008 as food prices surge to even higher levels.

The Chicago Board of Trade WH8 contract gained more than 3 percent to hit a record high of $10.09.

Partly due to a drought in Australia, wheat prices have increased twofold since last year. This has brought about fears of food price inflation in a global economic environment that is slowing.

“We think agricultural commodity prices are going to continue rising, (with the scale) depending on the climate and the state of the harvests,” said Moncef Kaabi, head of commodities research at French investment bank Natixis, reports BBC News.

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Russia Says Missiles Could Target US Shield

Russia’s nuclear weapons chief threatened Monday to target a planned US missile defense shield in central Europe if Washington fails to take into account Moscow’s worries, the Interfax news agency reported.

General Nikolai Solovtsov, head of strategic missile forces, said that such a decision could be taken if the US shield is seen to “undermine the Russian nuclear deterrent capability.”

In that case, “I do not exclude… the missile defense shield sites in Poland and the Czech Republic being chosen as targets for some of our intercontinental ballistic missiles,” Solovtsov said, according to Interfax.

Washington says the plans to install radar in the Czech Republic and 10 interceptor rockets in Poland would guard against theoretical missile strikes from “rogue” nations such as Iran, without denting Russia’s massive nuclear offensive arsenal. But Moscow claims the United States is exaggerating the threat from Iran and describes the shield as the thin end of a wedge aimed at changing the current balance of military power.

On Saturday, the Russian chief of staff, General Yury Baluyevsky, warned that the launch of US interceptor missiles could accidentally trigger a Russian retaliatory strike. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk denounced the comments as “unacceptable” and said that “no declaration of this kind will influence Polish-American negotiations.”

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Iran Receives Nuclear Fuel in Blow to U.S.

The United States lost a long battle when Russia, as it announced on Monday, delivered nuclear fuel to an Iranian power plant that is at the center of an international dispute over its nuclear program. Iran, for its part, confirmed on Monday plans to build a second such plant.

In announcing that it had delivered the first shipment of enriched-uranium fuel rods to the power plant, at Bushehr in southern Iran, on Sunday, Russian officials said that while the fuel was in Iran, it would be under the control of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the nuclear monitoring agency for the United Nations. Russia also said the Iranian government had guaranteed that the fuel would be used only for the power plant.

The Bush administration took pains not to criticize the Russian move publicly, even expressing support for outside supplies if that led Iran to suspend its nuclear enrichment program.

“If the Russians are willing to do that, which I support, then the Iranians do not need to learn how to enrich,” President Bush said Monday. “If the Iranians accept that uranium for a civilian nuclear power plant, then there’s no need for them to learn how to enrich.”

But from the American standpoint, the timing could not have been worse, coming just two weeks after the release of a United States intelligence estimate that concluded that Iran stopped its nuclear weapons program in 2003. The National Intelligence Estimate also concluded that Iran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007, undercutting a central tenet of the Bush administration’s basis for maintaining international pressure against Iran.

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U.S. Joins Rebuke of Israel

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice joined her counterparts in the international “Quartet for Middle East peace” yesterday in a rare formal rebuke of Israel for its plans to expand Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

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Seismologists Warn Of Looming Quake On Hayward Fault In San Francisco Bay Area

When geologists across the country observe the 140th anniversary of the 1868 Hayward earthquake next year on Oct. 21, they will have more than speeches and slideshows on their mind.

Seismologists at the American Geological Union’s meeting at the Moscone Center in San Francisco last week warned that the average interval between the past five earthquakes on the Hayward Fault was 140 years.

“The 1868 earthquake was the first great ‘San Francisco earthquake,’ and one of the most destructive earthquakes in the nation’s history,” said Arthur Rodgers, a seismologist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).

“However it has always been eclipsed by the great 1906 quake. It’s important to know that if an earthquake of the same scale happens today on the Hayward Fault, its aftereffects will be devastating.”

Rodgers, along with Xiao-Bi Xie from the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at UC Santa Cruz and Anders Petersson from LLNL performed simulations of the 1995 Kobe earthquake on the Hayward Fault using reported finite rupture models from large strike-slip earthquakes under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy at Livermore lab.

“We wanted to calculate what the ground motions will be on a large earthquake on the Hayward Fault,” Rodgers said. “The results showed large damaging ground motion levels near the asperities along the fault. Very strong ground motions are predicted in the sedimentary basins, particularly the Evergreen, Cupertino, San Leandro, Livermore basins and San Pablo Bay. Moderate damage will also occur in Berkeley and Oakland.”

The 1868 earthquake—which took place at 7:53 a.m. with a magnitude of 7 on the Hayward Fault—stands as the country’s 12th deadliest quake.

The last of a decade-long sequence of earthquakes in the Bay Area, the Hayward Earthquake left 30 people dead and brought about an extensive loss of property.

According to a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) report, the damage was most severe in Hayward and the nearby towns of Alameda County. A town of about 500 residents back then, Hayward had almost every building either damaged or extensively wrecked.

San Leandro—with a population then of about 400—saw the second floor of the Alameda County courthouse collapse and other buildings destroyed.

Oakland, then a town of about 12,000 with predominantly wood frame buildings, sustained far less damage than either Hayward or San Leandro.

San Francisco, which was then the largest U.S. city on the West Coast with a population of 150,000, suffered damages to the Custom House and several other structures built on landfill reclaimed from the former Yerba Buena Cove (modern day Financial District).

The USGS report states that very little information is available on the 1868 earthquake because of a lack of funding from the state and the non-existence of seismographs during that time.

“The 1868 Hayward earthquake and more recent analogs such as the 1995 Kobe earthquake are stark reminders of the awesome energy waiting to be released from below the east side of the San Francisco Bay along the Hayward Fault,” said Tom Brocher, a seismologist with the USGS and one of the authors of the study, “The M7 Oct. 21, 1868 Hayward Earthquake, Northern California—140 Years Later.”

“The population at risk from a Hayward Fault earthquake is now 100 times larger than in 1868,” Brocher said. “The infrastructure in the San Francisco Bay Area has been tested only by the relatively remote 1989 magnitude 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake … We are not saying that an earthquake is going to happen next year but if it does, we are not going to have any warnings. We have to prepare now. Whatever we have during the quake, we will have the same during the next three days.”

To help attract public attention to future hazards, the 1868 Hayward Earthquake Alliance (www.1868alliance.org) was formed.

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The Coming Collapse Of The Modern Banking System

Most people have no idea how grave the present situation is or the disaster the country will face if trillions of dollars of over-leveraged bonds and equities begin to unwind. Theres a widespread belief that the stewards of the system Bernanke and Paulson can somehow steer the economy through this “rough patch” into calm waters.

But they cannot, and the presumption shows a basic misunderstanding of how markets work. The Fed has no magical powers and will not allow itself to be crushed by standing in the path of a market-avalanche. As foreclosures and bankruptcies increase; stocks will crash and the fed will step aside to safety.

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Russia Test-fires Intercontinental Missile

Russia successfully conducted a test launch on Monday of a new intercontinental ballistic missile, the navy said.

A statement said the missile was launched from the Tula nuclear powered submarine in the Barents Sea in the Arctic and hit a designated area in the Kura testing ground on the Kamchatka Peninsula on Russia’s Pacific coast.

“The launch was conducted from an underwater position as a part of training to test the readiness of the marine strategic nuclear forces,” the statement said.

A navy spokesman would not say what type of missile was tested. Itar-Tass news agency said the Tula submarine carried Sineva missiles commissioned by a decree from President Vladimir Putin in July.

Missile tests have become regular occurrences in the Russian armed forces in the past few years. They are viewed by Russia’s political and military leadership as evidence that they are reviving the country’s military might.

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