The Da Vinci Code

Any story that attacks traditional Christianity is bound to cause hysteria. It is targetable theme. Basically like any other traditional religion, it does not take well open discussion. Many Christians including myself have managed to harmonize the fiction and the facts very well. People should take this film as it is:a story based on real institutions and legendary events some based on evidence and others simply raised. Why is it hard to allow for the possibility of different accounts regarding the life of Jesus and Christianity as a whole? Is Jesus' humanity not as important as his divinity?

I think many people, not just religious critics, missed one important point about this book. Dan Brown's re-emergence of the femininity theme and the ritual of the feminine goddesses during Paganism. The fact that our society consisted once of a balanced hierarchal structure. Unfortunately the most debated issue was the human condition of Jesus and the insinuation that he was married to Mary Magdalene and left a child. The sad thing is that the most fascinating piece of discussion was lost to the trivial debate of religious righteousness and heretic indictment. As inhabitants of this planet and its many cultures, the majority of us are not ready to experience the entire reality of our majestic existence and that is something worth pondering.

The Elephant may be snoozing but it is also alert

Why am I not surprised, with Congressional elections looming, to see republicans starting to sift through their agenda by playing the background music to their conservative base with issues such as gay-marriage and abortion right bans, security over privacy, tax exemptions, and so on. Just recently a Senate panel advanced a constitutional ban on same sex marriage and Congress managed to extent another tax exemption for the wealthy. Haven't we figured out their formula yet? This is a repetitive pattern that seems to go well with the Elephant in the room: legislative proposals that come to pass whenever the base is stimulated in the right places. Republicans have shown to be great strategists, there is no denying that, but are they great administrators? There is a reason why campaign strategists and analysts are dismantled once the elections are over, at the least in a transparent democracy they should be, there is little place for them in governance, otherwise the entire tenure will resemble an Elephant snoozing in the room while the rest are too fearful to move.

Airport security has a new name

Finally after four and half years of its creation the TSA has finally come up with a comprehensive program for detecting terrorist activities at airports. The program is called SPOT - Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques -a race-neutral profiling program designed to deter terrorist activities. The program will be tested out at JFK, LAX and O'Hare after sucessfully been tested at Logan Airport for the last three years. It has led to the arrest of 50 or so people guilty of having fake ID's, illegal documents and drug possession.

SPOT employees will be trained to observe human behavior for incongruities. Those identified as suspicious will be further examined and interviewed by local police and/or other officials.

I seem to recall an article I read a few years ago about the effectiveness of TSA when it was first created. Passengers were not allowed to carry lighters, scissors, and other instruments. But we had managed somehow to leave out the human element at the security checkpoints. As far as I am concerned, the human aspect is a critical aspect of intelligence gathering, and it ranks high within the CIA and the FBI. So we seemed to have left it out when the Department of Homeland Security created the Transportation Security Administration. The article said we needed to learn from Ben Gurion, Israel's international airport and the safest in the world, on how their security officers are efficiently trained to spot abnormal human behavior for the purposes of terrorists attacks and how they have managed to run an efficient and secure airport.

Finally we are learning something.

Democrats should be paying attention

As I was driving home today and listening to NPR's All things considered, I could not help but think how easily the Democrats can win Congress this November. The interview with Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kansas) could not have been more forthcoming in that aspect. His fumbling and incoherent explanation regarding the recent USA TODAY story on secret gathering of phone calls from Americans has put things into perspective for me. At the beginning, I thought the NSA spy program was not that bad of an idea, even with the illegalities in question, my first reaction was to actually give the President the benefit of the doubt. However, this interview has cleared my thinking on how ill-prepared these investigations are, especially because they do not actually explain how they are aiding the fight against terrorism. And that is exactly the problem with this Administration and congressmen like Sen. Roberts, who do not have a clear and coherent argument on how circumventing the laws is necessary and ultimately beneficial for us.

The new Latin American Populism has been split

First it was Chavez, the ex-military "caudillo" from the Venezuelan army, who took many by surprise when he was elected president in 1998. He led an attempted coup six years before being elected president but failed, was jailed, and later pardoned. He then came back, formed a political party, and was elected president in 1998, after growing and widespread poverty and plummeting confidence in the traditional political parties of Venezuela during the 1990's. Since then many other countries have followed similar political paths including Bolivia's Evo Morales, who has recently announced the government takeover of oil and gas industries. Peru's Ollata Humala has joined Bolivia's Morales in the standup against big business. But we also see it in Argentina and Brazil, and now Chile has elected a woman president, more aligned towards the left than the right, even though she supports the corporate environment in Chile.

Brazil's Lula da Silva has managed to play down Chavez's and Morales' influence in Latin American politics, mainly because they part from the same ideological framework. Lula da Silva has been the advocate for promoting political and economic alliances in the region. Even Chavez's "bolivarism" has not taken flight as expected. Brazil has been pushing for Mercusor and EU multilateral treaties and has made regional cooperation its top priority while Chavez prefers bilateral negotiations where Venezuela's involved and avoids making the rounds with countries that trade with the US.

It's amazing how not long ago regional cooperation was the main agenda for many of these leaders, it seems now that they are backstabbing each other and undermining a set of ideas that got them elected in the first place. With da Silva's term coming to an end and Chavez can certainly not govern forever, the Populist experiment in Latin American could be experiencing a bold makeover in the face of nationalism and global market influences.

Pentagon plane crash

The State Department has finally released a video capturing the crash of the American Airlines plane the morning of 9/11. However, the State Department has not yet released the videos recorded by other cameras in the perimeter of the Pentagon including Sheraton National Hotel, Nexcomm/Citgo gas station and the State of Virgina DOT cameras. A watchdog group called Judicial Watch has requested several times the release of these videos partly because there is a growing need to establish among the mainstream public what is speculation and what is reality. Sources said that the FBI had confiscated the videos back in 2002 and since then some conspiracy theories have been created by public opinion that the airplane was brought down by the military and that a missile instead crashed into the Pentagon.

I personally do not think this Administration could be that clever to pull such maneuver and keep it a secret for so long. We are taking about the most incompetent administration in the history of the U.S. Even if the threat was so critical that the only solution was to bring down the planes (Pentagon or Pennsylvania) to avoid a bigger catastrophe, this government still after 9/11 does not have the resourceful line of thought to coordinate such national security tactic.

Check out the video at

http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/05/16/pentagon.video/index.html

Foreign Policy Matters

Far from being an expert in US foreign policy, I strongly believe this Administration not only suffers from a bipolar posture in regards to foreign policy making; but their faith-based dogmatic practices have clearly polluted the reflective mirror that gives shape to our foreign policy. It seems obvious that under this Administration the faith-based factor has come to play a critical role in the decisions influencing our foreign affairs. The time has come for the US to redesign their ideological thinking in regards to Middle East foreign policy.

You see for many years the U.S. has taken pride, or better yet, a misplaced gratification in being a rational, secular and unequivocal world leader in global affairs. Unfortunately, this is a pretense we can no longer export, let alone demand. It is true, the world has changed since 9/11 or at least some aspects of our tenure as the dominant world power have changed, but as dogmatic as many members of this Administration are when it comes to the tactical aspects of Middle Eastern political affairs, the urgent need to reestablish a coherent ideological criterion for dealing with the Middle East under a long term commitment instead of short term undertakings should not be considered an extra-curricular activity.

Since the start of the war on terror, our foreign policy has been the target of outspoken global criticism from incoherent and argumentatively short-sided to ineffective and contradictive. Even our position in the UN Security Council is sometimes counterproductive when Russia and China play the balancing act in many Mid East conflict negotiations. By refusing to establish a more accessible line of communication with Iran, and with the rest of the fundamentalist governments, which is long overdue and ultimately in our best interest, this Administration is single handedly diminishing the diplomatic strength and reputation of US and the important role it can play in the political world stage.

This diplomatic influence has already suffered many drawbacks. Under this Administration, the U.S. has been guilty of violating more international laws than our European counterparts fighting the war on terror. According to some observers - violations that have occurred at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and Afghanistan, including the Eastern European countries acting as hosts for the CIA covert internment system that detains and possibly tortures terrorist suspects - we have overstepped the boundaries of the rule of law.

Three years after the U.S. invasion nobody raises the concern anymore that this might well be an illegal occupation under the tenets of international law as defined in the UN Charter. I can see now how Saddam might have been right about us, at least on legal grounds. Not only have we been accused of torture, unfair imprisonment and disrupting civil liberties under many international statutes including the UN Convention Against Torture, the International Covenant for Civil and Political Rights, and the UN Declaration of Human Rights; but what is more alarming is our reticence in admitting that as the number one world power, we continue to send mixed signals in regards to our actions and strategic interests only to naively expect that the Islamic states in the region follow our own failed guiding principles. Who are we fooling with our morality-heavy, faith-based policy making which has taken us deeper into a regional conflict that started as a game of parlor of political gains and has transcended into a conflict of political and ideological consequences?

Today many concerned Americans are struggling to understand the enormous price we are paying in lives, prosperity and national security in addition to our diminished diplomatic strength in the world community and the waves of resentment it has provoked even among our allies. The real consequence of our ignorant and misguided actions is the escalation of regional political unrest in an area plagued with religious and nationalistic sentiments that we are far from comprehending, unless we find a viable and realistic, long-term approach to Mid East foreign policy. Even more astounding is the direction our unilateral actions and extremist policies are taking us regarding the war on terror as evident in our negligence of multilateral commitments. Again, when it comes to foreign policy this Administration suffers from acute bipolarity and conflicting political principles. Let’s at least recognize that the cultural and religious framework we find ourselves in when it comes to the war on terror desperately needs rethinking.

Da Vinci Code

La reciente ola de controversia sobre el libro El Codigo Da Vinci ha provocado histeria en la comunidad religiosa, especialmente entre cristianos que temen que la historia expuesta en el libro comprometa el dogma establecido por la iglesia. Porque la histeria ha llegado tan lejos no sabemos todavía, pero lo que si demuestra es una avalancha de debates entre aquellos que se ven amenazados por tal “destructiva ficción” y aquellos que hacen de la ficción y de los hechos una armoniosa síntesis.

Si la ira causada por este libro afecta tanto a los fieles seguidores porque otros escandalos que si fueron hechos y siguen siendo noticias no reciben la misma consternación? La iglesia catolica por ejemplo ha recibido varios sacudiones en los ultimos años desde pedofilia entre sus lideres, indiferencia hacia ciertos traumas mundiales como genocidio y la ultima controversia frente al Sida y uso del preservativo. Entre las criticas del libro/película, los autores tambien son acusados de utilizar esta oportunidad para obtener ganancias monetarias, ya que cualquier libro o película que sea hostil hacia el Cristianismo tradicional es una gran oportunidad de mercadeo. Desde un punto de vista financiero, las dos partes han sido beneficiadas, porque muchos criticos por parte de la iglesia publicaron volúmenes de articulos y libros en respuesta a la publicación original contribuyendo a la ola de controversia.

La cuestion es la siguiente: En primer lugar comprender de una vez por todas que la iglesia no solo es una institución religiosa con asignación de fomentar la fe en los cristianos, sino tambien una empresa gigante con varios departamentos entre ellos el de mercadeo, con gran experiencia para modular cualquier controversia. En segundo lugar, comprender que el libro El Codigo Da Vinci es una publicación de ficción. Ha estado por 165 semanas consecutivas en la lista de ficciones mas vendidas del mundo. El libro esta basado en instituciones reales, y los eventos narrados son legendas algunas basadas en evidencias, otras expuestas por si solas. El autor nos otorga el libre albedrio para sacar conclusiones de lo que califica como ficcion.