Don't fail the whales

Yes, it's an ad. So what? It's stunning.

Don't let the world turn into an epic fail whale.

Save the oceans.

Please.

Fires of hell

This 1988 classic by Oz's Midnight Oil seemed appropriate today:

HEALESVILLE, Australia – The high death toll from hundreds of wildfires across southeastern Australia has forced authorities to re-examine an accepted survival strategy when blazes threaten: Get out early or hunker down and fight.

Many people waited too long and perished as they tried to escape the weekend infernos.

"People need to understand that a late departure is the most deadly," fire chief Paul Rees said.

Recovery teams moving into burned out towns in Victoria state found charred bodies on roadsides and in wrecked cars – grim signs of futile attempts to flee the raging wildfires fed by 100 kilometres-an-hour winds, record heat and drought. The number of deaths was expected to surpass 200, and a few fires were still burning.

I saw a photo today that will forever haunt me. (It's here. Click if you can stand it.)

There's been talk that this terrible tragedy was caused by arson. The police are treating the area like a giant crime scene.

Maybe it's directly man-made, maybe it's climate change, maybe it's just bad luck.

Maybe it's time to give back the land to those who best managed it, the aboriginals.

Who knows?

But, according to these fet-o-philes, it's because God was angered by Victoria's recent relaxation of its abortion laws.

(Pastor Danny Nalliah) said these bushfires have come as a result of the incendiary abortion laws which decimate life in the womb.

Yesterday (Monday 9th February 2009), the front page of the Herald Sun newspaper reported “The Darkest hour for Victoria”.

A few months ago the news media should have reported “The darkest hour for the unborn” but unfortunately the “Decriminalization of Abortion bill” went through parliament and was passed, thus making many people call Victoria “the baby killing state of Australia”, Mr Nalliah said.

He said on November 7th last year we had sent out an email to our national network and a posting on our website carried an urgent post titled, ‘STOP PRESS. URGENT PRAYER NEEDED REGARDING AUSTRALIA, ESPECIALLY THE STATE OF VICTORIA’ following a dream he had on the 21st of October 2008, which he shared with his team on 22nd October.

Following is an excerpt from the dream which was published in the article:

“In my dream I saw fire everywhere with flames burning very high and uncontrollably. With this I woke up from my dream with the interpretation as the following words came to me in a flash from the Spirit of God. That His conditional protection has been removed from the nation of Australia, in particular Victoria, for approving the slaughter of innocent children in the womb.”

Interestingly enough, the church claiming this nonsense is called Catch the Fire Ministries.

Tip of the purple hat to Dammit Janet!

From gags to riches

Not much to add to today's treeware column about US President Barack Obama's repeal of the ''global gag rule'' except for some linky goodness and a repost (below) of a video from a blog entry last year:

Barely a week in the Oval Office, U.S. President Barack Obama announced some long-awaited measures that will make for a better country, if not planet.

The shutdown of the Guantanamo prison camp, new energy and environmental policies, initial passage of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and the Paycheck Fairness Act ... the list goes on.

But nothing he did was as world-changing as the repeal of the so-called "global gag rule,'' which made non-governmental organizations, or NGOs, certify that they "will not perform or actively promote abortion as a method of family planning" if they wanted funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development.

This Obama did last Friday, even as pro-forced-pregnancy types were in Washington protesting the 36th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court decision that gave women the right to control their bodies and destinies.

First enacted under Ronald Regan, who dropped it on the world in 1984 at a United Nations conference in Mexico City, and then briefly rescinded by Bill Clinton, the gag rule was re-enacted by George W. Bush on his very first day in office in 2001.

Since then, the UN, NGOs and international health experts estimate that this religion-fuelled act of censorship has, each and every year, contributed to the deaths of 70,000 women who have sought out back-alley abortions. What's more, it has resulted in the births of maybe millions of babies into disease, starvation and war.

They never had much of a chance at life anyway.

Many were the product of rape by marauding militants whose attacks on women left them incapable of caring for themselves, let alone their children.

Others were born to child brides, married or sold off to older men, and impregnated before their bodies were fully developed. As a result of this physical brutalization, these girls end up with horrible genital fistulas, which leave them completely – and I mean completely – incontinent. And so their husbands abandon them to their misery, and move on to other young wives.

According to World Vision, as many as one in four infants doesn't make it anyway. And, as other organizations, including the UN, report, every minute of every day, a woman dies in childbirth.

That's more than 500,000 a year.

What made the global gag rule especially cruel, not to mention unethical, was that it used American tax dollars – including those paid by proponents of reproductive rights – to dictate how foreign NGOs spent their own money.

If they wanted USAID funding, they could not even counsel a woman to get an abortion to save her own life. They could not refer a woman to a place where she might get such counselling – even if abortion was legal in her country.

Needless to say, this put health practitioners in ethical quandaries, restricting their medical options and rendering them unable to give patients the best treatment.

But who in the God-fearing, let's-bomb-children-in-Iraq Republican sphere cared about the lives of two-legged baby incubators?

Imagine the difference Obama's move will make to Mother Earth.

Because women around the world will now have access to better family planning, they will have fewer and healthier babies. This could lead, eventually, to less conflict over resources and land.

The planet will be less strained by overpopulation.

As for the women themselves, they may now have a chance for independence and education.

Half the world's brains and talent will not be sacrificed on the altar of anti-choice dogma. If women are not incapacitated by painful pregnancies, deadly deliveries and the unimaginable suffering in trying to protect and feed the children that do make it, they might move on to build businesses, schools, hospitals, orphanages – and a better world.

So when Obama promised hope and change, he made good in far more ways than most of us can ever imagine.

Oh wait, what am I talking about? Of course there's much to add, like reaction from the pro-forced pregnancy promoters who think life is all about having girls die. 

Anti-abortion groups were up in arms and vowed to fight the move.

"We were prepared for this and we will work very hard in Congress to see what we can do to get this overturned," Judie Brown, president of the American Life League, told AFP.

"I think it's a horrible tactic to take toward third world countries if the best we can do for them is provide organizations with the money needed to perform abortions on their children," she said.

Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council, said lifting the gag rule was tantamount to "exporting a culture of death," and House Republican Whip Eric Cantor said he was "saddened by this decision and the lives that will be lost because of it."

Oh and let's not forget what the woman-loving Vatican had to say:

“This deals a harsh blow not only to us Catholics but to all the people across the world who fight against the slaughter of innocents that is carried out with the abortion," Msgr. Sgreccia, told the ANSA news agency, according to the Associated Press. "Among the many good things that he could have done, Barack Obama instead chose the worst.”

Yeah. Gagging. The word is appropriate.

Mother Nature

At this time of year in Toronto, hundreds of starlings flock together at dusk in treetops and on phone lines all over town. The first time I saw this was just after I moved here in the fall of 1985. I was in the garden when I was aware of a kind of darkness that had settled all around me, and this incessant chirping. When I looked up, I had visions of a bloody-faced Suzanne Pleshette and a messed-up Tippi Hedren. This was my introduction to these garrulous birds.

Anyway, I just tripped over this video, shot in southern Scotland earlier this year. I find it utterly mesmerizing.

Keep an eye on the outer edge of the flock where a sparrow hawk is trying to pick off some dinner. It's very easy to miss that.

How they don't all go crashing into each other has to be one of the many many wonders of this beautiful world.