Ben Stein, on the big lie of Hurricane Katrina, in The American Spectator:

JOSEPH Goebbels would have been happy with much of the mainstream media . . . since Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. Goebbels, for those of you too young to know, was Hitler's propaganda minister. He is credited with creating the concept of The Big Lie. The idea was that if you tell a lie big enough often enough, people will believe it. The big lie of the Hurricane Katrina story is that it reveals deep and hateful racism in America, that blacks were treated worse than other people because they were black.

Here's the truth. Many black people were harmed by Katrina because of where they lived relative to the path of the hurricane and the location of their neighbourhoods below sea level and their refusal or inability to obey the mandatory evacuation orders for New Orleans. This is not racism . . . Oh, and also by the way, the nation's churches and synagogues opened their hearts to the evacuees . . . I did not see too many help centres run by the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union). It is . . . evil to try to divide the nation – especially in time of war – with false cries of racism.

September 28, 2005

Ivory Cower

University presidents have lost their dignity.

by Victor Davis Hanson
Claremont Review of Books

http://victorhanson.com/articles/hanson092805.html

Whether or not you agreed with them, university presidents used to be
dignified figures on the American scene. They often were distinguished
scholars, capable of bringing their own brand of independent thinking to
bear on the operation and reform of their institutions. Above all, they took
seriously the university's mission to seek and transmit the Truth, and
thereby to strengthen the free society that made such inquiry possible.

But it has been a long time since Woodrow Wilson (at Princeton), Robert
Hutchins (at Chicago) or James Bryant Conant (at Harvard) set the tone for
American campuses. Over the past year, four university presidents have been
in the news - from Harvard; the University of California, Santa Cruz; the
University of Colorado; and the University of California, Berkeley. In each
case, the curtains have briefly parted, allowing the public to glimpse the
campus wizards working the levers behind the scenes, and confirming that
something has gone terribly wrong at our best public and private
universities.

Hypocrisy, faddishness, arrogance and intellectual cowardice are among the
ailments of the American university today, and it is hard to say whether
even a great president could save higher education from its now
institutionalized vices. Amid the variety of scandals afflicting the
campuses, the one constant is how the rhetoric of "diversity" trumps almost
all other considerations - and how race and gender can be manipulated by
either the college president or the faculty in ways that have nothing to do
with educating America's youth, but everything to do with personal
aggrandizement in an increasingly archaic and unexamined enclave.

* * *

At Harvard University, beleaguered President Lawrence Summers challenged
notions of "diversity" and paid a steep price. He suggested - off the
record, at a conference of the National Bureau of Economic Research - that
factors other than institutional prejudice and cultural pressure might help
explain the relative dearth of women faculty in the hard sciences at Harvard
and other elite universities. If the intent of that mildly provocative,
off-the-cuff exegesis was to jumpstart debate among serious thinkers, it
proved a big mistake. Within seconds, one tough-minded feminist was reduced
to bouts of nausea and swooning, and within hours many were calling for Mr.
Summers to apologize, if not resign.

As the country soon learned, Mr. Summers had touched the live wire of the
contemporary campus by hinting that inequality of result might be due to
something other than invidious and institutional discrimination. Mr. Summers
fell back limp from that high-voltage jolt; only massive and repeated doses
of self-abasement could resuscitate him. Accordingly, he quickly renounced
and denounced his own musings, promising task forces, "independent
listeners," investigations, committees and ample largesse (including $50
million from Harvard's own bulging coffers) to be distributed to the
purported victims of his insensitivity - who are in fact some of the most
educated, privileged and upscale women on the planet.

But to save Mr. Summers's job it will probably cost much more than his
pledge of $5 million a year for a decade. His special task force already has
urged the appointment of a senior "vice provost for diversity and faculty
development," along with improved recruitment and the "mentoring" of junior
faculty members. According to a communiqué from his office, the members of
his task force "propose a series of reforms and enhancements to the way
women pursuing science and engineering are treated at every point along the
'pipeline,' from undergraduates, to graduate students, to post-doctoral
fellows, to the faculty ranks." And lest we think $50 million is too much,
Mr. Summers's statement also added that it is merely a down payment: "There
is no doubt that these initiatives will require significant additional
expenditures. But we want to make clear at the outset that this is a serious
effort calling for a serious commitment of resources."

Somehow the former secretary of the Treasury, who once helped manage the
Byzantine world of global commerce, failed to realize that the entire campus
industry of mandated retroactive compensation - targeted fellowships,
release time (i.e., excusing teachers from teaching), ideological curricula,
favorable hiring and promotion considerations, tenure decisions based on
criteria other than merit, and other forms of recompense that Mr. Summers in
fact scrambled to grant - would be imperiled by a few politically incorrect
syllables. Perhaps Mr. Summers naively thought that Harvard was about free
speech and unfettered discourse - its motto, after all, is Veritas, "Truth."
In any event, he quickly recovered, winning back through penance,
self-censorship, and spoils a job that he had almost forfeited in a passing
moment of intellectual curiosity.

* * *

One of President Summers's chief critics, Denice Denton, the newly appointed
chancellor of the University of California, Santa Cruz, heralded Mr.
Summers's public humiliation as a "teachable moment." As one president to
another, she objected: "Here was this economist lecturing pompously [to]
this room full of the country's most accomplished scholars on women's issues
in science and engineering, and he kept saying things we had refuted in the
first half of the day."

But Chancellor Denton has her own shortcomings. They do not revolve around
mere impromptu remarks, nor have they been trailed by public apologies and
task forces. Yet in its own way her controversy goes to the heart of the
same contemporary race-and-gender credo that governs the university,
enjoying exemption from normal scrutiny and simple logic.

Before her arrival, Ms. Denton arranged the creation of a special billet -
ad hoc, unannounced and closed to all applicants but one: Ms. Denton's
live-in girlfriend of seven years, Gretchen Kalonji. Most recognize this as
the sort of personal accommodation--old-boy networking, really - that Ms.
Denton presumably wishes to replace with affirmative action, thus ending
backroom deals and crass nepotism.

But if race and gender - what we now refer to as "diversity" - are to be
taken seriously, one wonders whether there was not a qualified
African-American or Latina woman who could at least have been interviewed
for the lucrative UC position. After all, Chancellor Denton herself praised
UC Santa Cruz for its "celebration of diversity." And earlier, she insisted
that "it is really shocking to hear the president of Harvard make statements
like that," i.e., statements that ever so gently questioned the diversity
shibboleth. Consider the reaction had President Summers arrived at a public,
tax-supported university and arranged for his live-in girlfriend to have
lifelong employment in a specially created job, complete with a subsidized
move into a rent-free home.

And a six-figure salary: Gretchen Kalonji's unusual position pays $192,000 a
year. Now, it happens that Chancellor Denton - whose salary is $275,000 -
was granted $68,750 to subsidize the move into the rent-free University
President's House. But Ms. Kalonji, too, received a grant for expenses
incurred during her "transition" to the Santa Cruz campus--$50,000, in fact.

The decision to pay $120,000 in public money for moving expenses to a couple
with a combined salary of $467,000 can be defended, perhaps, but one group
was certainly outraged: the university's maintenance staff, secretaries, and
blue-collar workers. UC Santa Cruz's workers had not received a raise in
three years. Yet in response to questions about her controversial partner
accommodation - and the message that it sent to less-fortunate others on the
campus - Chancellor Denton did not sound like a woman of the Left. "It's a
typical practice," she explained in an interview with the local Santa Cruz
Sentinel, "in the corporate world or academia." As if turning for support to
the suspect world of capitalism was not enough, Ms. Denton also sought the
sanctuary of victimhood, of someone at the mercy of red-state yahoos: "We
got caught in the middle of national forces, gay marriage,
red-state/blue-state issues and a state ruling. It's a hot item right now,
and it heightened the tension. I was kind of surprised at the San Francisco
Chronicle coverage saying 'lesbian lover.' It seemed more like a tabloid
headline."

It proved impossible for a white male like Larry Summers to find shelter
from the storm. But a gay woman had simply to ignore questions of social
equity by playing the diversity card herself - in addition to claiming
corporate precedents for her own unusual perks. Aware of the growing
controversy over the hire, Ms. Denton returned to the mantra of diversity to
explain her own decision to come to Santa Cruz. "The focus on diversity and
social justice is important to me," she emphasized to the Sentinel,
recalling how she had spoken out against Mr. Summers's remarks: "We need to
address the issue of equity and access. It requires a cultural change and
university presidents have to provide leadership."

Gretchen Kalonji certainly had "access," and Ms. Denton certainly provided
"leadership" in assuring "equity" to her partner. Perhaps Ms. Kalonji's
hiring even resulted in the desired "cultural change." But it is fortunate
for Chancellor Denton that she does not share the politics of, say, Rep. Tom
DeLay, who endured far more obloquy for hiring his wife, for far less money,
to work on his congressional campaigns.

* * *

Now we come to the third case: University of Colorado President Elizabeth
Hoffman. She recently resigned, ostensibly following athletic scandals, but
more likely as a result of the uproar over Ward Churchill. We remember him
now as the strange professor who compared the 3,000 murdered in the Twin
Towers and Pentagon to "Little Eichmanns," supposed cogs in the
military-industrial wheel who deserved their fate. The public grudgingly
accepted that Mr. Churchill's wartime praise for the 9/11 murderers ("combat
teams" rightfully avenging America's murder of "500,000 Iraqi children") is
protected free speech. But it could not quite fathom why Mr. Churchill was
not summarily dismissed for other sins.

And they were legion. He had fabricated a Native American heritage, lying on
affidavits about his ethnic identity to help make up for his lack of
credentials and suspect work. Mr. Churchill had been promoted to full
professor at a major research university without the requisite Ph.D. degree,
enjoying apparent ethnic immunity from a series of old allegations involving
theft of intellectual property, plagiarism and academic misrepresentation.
Most people outside the university were amazed not so much that Mr.
Churchill was not immediately terminated as that he had been hired and
promoted in the first place. To them he seemed like a swerving drunk driver,
who when pulled over is found to have a long rap sheet. Yet how many others
like the $112,000-a-year, department-chairing Mr. Churchill scramble about
in the unexamined sanctuaries of the modern university, parlaying real or
imagined victim status into lucrative careers?

President Hoffman did her best to deflect attention from the Churchill mess
by a now-familiar victimization gambit. The scandal was not Mr. Churchill
and his remarks but the reaction to them: academic freedom was under assault
from - what else? - "a New McCarthyism." At the barricades, as it were, she
boasted to her faculty senate that "I was a tiger about speech. There was no
way I was going to touch speech." She went on, "We are in dangerous times.
I'm very concerned. . . . It's looking a lot like [former CU president]
George Norlin being asked to fire all the Catholics and Jews or the McCarthy
era. We need to make sure we don't let ourselves go down that path, no
matter how much shouting there is from the outside. There are forces that
would push us down that path if we let them."

Meanwhile, the media-savvy Mr. Churchill - replete with long gray locks,
beaded headband, shades, buckskin and the Native American name Keezjunnahbeh®
(which means "kind-hearted man"; Ward Churchill is his "colonial" name) -
was determined to capitalize on his windfall fame. Indeed, he was
undoubtedly grateful, after years of toiling in painful obscurity, that the
media had at long last noticed his outrageous behavior. He grasped that he
was already eligible for lucrative retirement benefits, which now could be
enhanced by a generous golden parachute from the University of Colorado,
eager to avoid millions of dollars in lawsuits and more bad press.

So Mr. Churchill keeps on touring and speaking to audiences about American
culpability for September 11, praising those who murder Americans and vowing
hostility to the very idea of America. President Hoffman announced her
resignation in March, and Mr. Churchill's lawyer now negotiates the promised
buyout with her successor.

* * *

Finally, there is Robert J. Birgeneau, the new chancellor of the University
of California, Berkeley. Upon arriving in the Bay Area, he quickly vowed to
solve the problems he had found. Surprisingly, these had nothing to do with
a decline in academic standards, deterioration in the quality of Berkeley's
key departments, or a state-funding crisis. Instead, the chancellor
complained that Berkeley has fewer Native American, Hispanic, and
African-American students enrolled than it should - the campus was only 3%
black, 9.5% Hispanic, and 0.4% Native American, in contrast with about 45%
Asian-American and about 33% white. (The California population comprises
6.5% blacks, 33% Hispanics, 0.92% Native Americans, 11% Asian-Americans, and
45% whites.) Mr. Birgeneau is obsessed with racial diversity, as determined
by percentages and quotas. But as we shall see, the numbers, under closer
examination, may make him regret pandering to the diversity industry.

Chancellor Birgeneau blames the apparent statistical injustices on
Proposition 209, the 1996 California ballot initiative that forbids the use
of racial criteria in state hiring; it passed with the support of 55% of the
electorate. In his view, however, democracy ought to defer to elite opinion;
thus, to this Canadian academic the state's voters were obviously misguided:
"I personally don't believe that most of the people who voted for 209
intended this consequence."

One can learn a lot about the pathologies of the contemporary university
from what its presidents say - and don't say. A close look at the data
suggests a different picture from the one implied by Mr. Birgeneau's
gratuitous lamentations about the lack of diversity. Whites, for instance,
are underenrolled at Berkeley: They amount to around 35% of undergraduates
versus 45% of the state's population. Given this fact, why doesn't the
Chancellor complain about the shortage of whites on campus?

He is oddly quiet, too, about the more explosive issue of the Asian-American
presence. This group constitutes almost half the Berkeley student
population, even though Asians make up only about 11% of California
residents and 4% of the general U.S. population. Why doesn't Mr. Birgeneau
admit that achieving his racial utopia would require deliberately reducing
the enrollment of Asian-American students - presumably by discounting
meritocratic criteria and test scores and instead emphasizing "community
service" or other nebulous standards designed to circumvent Proposition 209?
But because the new chancellor is obviously a sensitive sort, he cannot say
what he apparently means: something like, "We have too many Asians, almost
five times too many, and I am here to impose a quota on them and other
suspect races." Instead, he worries about "underrepresentation" of some,
while denying the logical corollary of "overrepresentation" of others. The
same logic applies to gender, by the way. UC campuses enroll thousands more
women than men, very much out of proportion to the general population, and
yet Mr. Birgeneau does not decry the "overabundance" of women.

Remember, too, that Asians have suffered a particularly long history of
discrimination in California. Despite everything from immigration quotas to
forced internment during World War II, they have the highest high-school
graduation rates in the state, while blacks and Hispanics suffer the lowest.
What, then, could we learn from the Asian-American experience that seems to
render past hurdles to achievement irrelevant to present academic
performance? Don't expect Chancellor Birgeneau to take the lead in asking
this question.

There is enormous intellectual arrogance on the campus these days,
manifested in condescension towards the average taxpaying citizen. We sense
such haughtiness when for the last 30 years the rate of tuition increases
has exceeded inflation, without either much worry or accountability from
university administrators. They assume that the public has no business
questioning whether tenure, release time, research perks, top-heavy
administration, and therapeutic programs constitute a wise use of education
funds.

Instead, Mr. Birgeneau declares that he intends to reopen the question of
Proposition 209, to begin a scholarly and, ultimately, popular campaign for
its repeal or effective repeal. He refuses to concede the wisdom, much less
the justice, of the voters' deliberate endorsement of it. This unfortunate
outcome, he argues, could have been reversed by a change of just five
percentage points - what he calls a "quite small percentage of the
population." But he is blind to the fact that Proposition 209, far from
being an aberration or exception, was part of the deliberate, continuing
public disapproval of tribal and ethnic separatism and of deviations from
traditional respect for legality, merit selection and national unity - as
manifested, for instance, in opposition to bilingualism in schools and to
illegal immigration.

Nor does the chancellor entertain the possibility that racial rubrics
themselves are increasingly irrelevant, especially in California, where
exogamy (marriage proper and cohabitation) among the Asian and Hispanic
population runs between 25% and 50% in the younger cohorts. Any faculty
member in the California State University system can attest that it is now
nearly the norm to teach students who are, to take a few examples,
one-quarter Asian, one-half Hispanic, or three-quarters white, many of whom
decline to list themselves as official minorities of any sort on state
forms.

We are quickly reaching the stage where the chancellor's pie graphs evoke
the racial categories of the Old Confederacy, as he tries to ascertain
whether Jason Martinez, one-fourth Hispanic, or Na Wilson, half Cambodian,
should be counted as a minority.

* * *

Then there is the matter of hypocrisy. As we have seen with Colorado's
Chancellor Hoffman, there is one standard for some and another for the
anointed. And as we know from Mr. Birgeneau's rhetoric, racial and ethnic
symbolism is paramount; so if there is a statewide imbalance in the number
of UC administrators of color, then his own presence is palpably a
contribution to it. One of the reasons the people turned against affirmative
action in the first place was that they tired of the preening of
opportunistic senior white males, who adopted an après moi le deluge
attitude toward the younger generation: remonstrating about the need for
punitive hiring criteria that they almost certainly never applied to
themselves.

For some two decades, I often watched entire departments of 50-something
white male philosophy and English professors, themselves often hired ABD
("all but dissertation": a graduate student who hasn't finished his thesis)
in the booming job markets of the 1960s - and who subsequently became mostly
unpublished and undistinguished classroom teachers - take it upon themselves
to hire only minorities and women, lecturing passed-over young white males
about the need for diversity. These entrenched and often mediocre senior
professors did everything for the cause except take early retirement, though
many advised the perennially exploited part-time instructors to "move on" or
"get a life."

In the chancellor's defense, it might be said that he realized the liability
of being a white-male-Canadian-physicist in the racial cauldron of
Berkeley - and grasped that he was hired precisely because he was known as a
"diversity" president back at the University of Toronto, one prone to giving
soapbox lectures with the same mind-numbing slogans and clichés he tried out
right away at Berkeley.

Mr. Birgeneau urges "equity" and "access," but does not apply those
inflexible, numbers-based egalitarian strictures to himself. Chancellor
Denton, even worse, adopted the very kind of discriminatory insider-dealing
policies she denounced in her praise of diversity and its handmaiden,
affirmative-action hiring. Prof. Churchill wishes to revolt against our
capitalist system but does not reject its furnishing of his ample salary;
his deer-in-the-headlights president doesn't know what to do except retreat
to the easy slurs of "McCarthyism." And Harvard's President Summers learned
the hard way that today's campus gender autocrats will aggressively put down
any attempts to question the unfortunate status quo.

No wonder that Mr. Summers's brand of candid common sense - Are race
policies what we want? What does account for student success? Do public
administrators have any responsibility toward the taxpayers who fund them? -
is in short supply, even with Mr. Summers himself. Administrative failure or
success is not measured by keeping tuition increases within moderate limits
or turning out better-educated graduates, but by conspicuous concern for
racial and sexual agendas. Those who pay them lip service, such as Denice
Denton, have plenty of leeway in other areas. Those who don't, like poor
Larry Summers, do not.

* * *

In the end, why should we care about a few high-flying administrators who
feel that diversity is the engine that runs the university? Because the U.S.
is struggling in an increasingly competitive world in which Europe, China,
Japan and India vie for global talent and national advantage through
merit-based higher education. They don't care about the racial make-up of
the teams that create breakthrough gene therapies or software programs, but
only whether such innovations are valuable and superior to the competition.

As our own industrial, agricultural and manufacturing sectors decline, and
as we suffer from increasing national debt, trade deficits, energy dilemmas
and weak currency, Americans have maintained relative parity largely through
information-based technology and superior research - all predicated on a
superb system of higher education. At some point, Mr. Summers, Ms. Denton,
Ms. Hoffman and Mr. Birgeneau might have wondered what precisely was the
system that produced their lavish salaries and great campuses - and what
protocols of merit, transparency, intellectual honesty and scholarly rigor
were necessary to maintain them.

More importantly, we have lost sight of what university presidents are
supposed to be. Their first allegiance ought to be to honesty and truth, not
campus orthodoxy masquerading as intellectual bravery amid a supposedly
reactionary society. In a world of intellectual integrity, Robert Birgeneau
would ask, "Why are Asians excelling, and what can Berkeley do to encourage
emulation of their success by other ethnic groups?" Denice Denton might
wonder whether open hiring, monitored by affirmative action officers,
applies to university staff or only those who are not associates of the
president. President Hoffman would decry Ward Churchill's crass behavior and
order a complete review of affirmative action and the politicized nature of
hiring, retention, and tenure practices at Colorado. And Larry Summers? In
the old world of the campus, he would defend free inquiry and expression,
and remind faculty that all questions are up for discussion at Harvard. And
if self-appointed censors wished to fire him for that, then he would dare
them to go ahead and try.

The signs of erosion on our campuses are undeniable, whether we examine
declining test scores, spiraling costs, or college graduates' ignorance of
basic facts and ideas. In response, our academic leadership is not talking
about a more competitive curriculum, higher standards of academic
accomplishment, or the critical need freely to debate important issues.
Instead, it remains obsessed with a racial, ideological, and sexual spoils
system called "diversity." Even as the airline industry was deregulated in
the 1970s, and Wall Street now has come under long-overdue scrutiny, it is
time for Americans, if we are to ensure our privileged future, to re-examine
our era's politicized university.

Fw from a rtd U Mass prof active on
science/society issues, this msg brings echoes of
what seemed at the time like a main movement
arising in the latter half of the 1960s. The
first to identify its dissipation was - oddly
- H S Thompson.

The term 'second Vietnam War' is news to
me; can someone refer us to an essay explaining
it (by e.g David Horowitz)?

I look fw to discussing with those who
lived thru the late 1960s at Berkeley or similar
centres of 'counter-culture' what movements -
if any - came out of that period.

R

From:
Oaxaca, Saturday May 21, 2005

One of the most beautiful people I've ever met
was a biologist and peacenik, George Wald. His
guest lecture, "A better world for children" to
my Science for Humane Survival class in 1993,
when he was 86, was an unforgettable experience
for me, and, Iím sure, for the students. Wald
explained that he chose that title because he
wanted something short enough to go on a button -
buttons were in vogue - everyone, it seemed, was
a walking propagandist with buttons proclaiming
his or her favorite causes. It was not only
short, but inclusive, he explained, because "a
better world for children" meant a better world
for everyone.

During the "first" Vietnam War (we're now in the
"second") Wald gave a talk, "A generation in
search of a future" which the Boston Globe
printed in full with the following preface:

The crowd of 1200 at M.I.T.'s Kresge Auditorium
[Massachusetts Institute of Technology] last
Tuesday was shifting and restless when Harvard
biologist George Wald rose to speak. Students
and professors there as a part of the "Mar. 4
movement" protesting the misuse of science were
disturbed at the lack of focus in the day's
numerous panel discussions and speeches. The
1967 Nobel prize winner in physiology or medicine
provided a focus. As in his popular lectures at
Harvard, Wald talked extemporaneously, his head
back, his eyes almost closed. His words had an
electric effect. A hush fell over the audience,
broken just once by sustained applause midway in
the speech, and climaxed by a prolonged standing
ovation at its conclusion. It may be the most
important speech given in our time.

Wald's [March 4th?] 1969 talk , as reported in the Boston Globe, began:

"All of you know that in the last couple of years
there has been student unrest breaking at times
into violence in many parts of the world: in
England, Germany, Italy, Spain, Mexico and
needless to say, in many parts of this country.
There has been a great deal of discussion as to
what it all means. Perfectly clearly it means
something different in Mexico from what it does
in France, and something different in France from
what it does in Tokyo, and something different in
Tokyo from what it does in this country. Yet
unless we are to assume that students have gone
crazy all over the world, or that they have just
decided that it's the thing to do, there must be
some common meaning.

"I don't need to go so far afield to look for
that meaning. I am a teacher, and at Harvard, I
have a class of about 350 students - most of them
freshmen and sophomores. Over these past few
years I have felt increasingly that something is
terribly wrong and this year ever so much more
than last. Something has gone sour, in teaching
and in learning. It's almost as though there were
a widesread feeling that education has become
irrelevant.

"A lecture is much more of a dialogue than many
of you probably appreciate. As you lecture, you
keep watching the faces; and information keeps
coming back to you all the time. I began to feel,
particularly this year, that I was missing much
of what was coming back. I tried asking the
students, but they didn't or couldn't help me
very much.

"But I think I know what's the matter, even a
little better than they do. I think that this
whole generation of students is beset with a
profound uneasiness. I don't think that they
have yet quite defined its source, I think I
understand the reasons for their uneasiness even
better than they do. What is more, I share their
uneasiness.

"What's bothering those students? Some of them
tell you it's the Vietnam War. I think the
Vietnam War is the most shameful episode in the
whole of American history. The concept of War
Crimes is an American invention. We've committed
many War Crimes in Vietnam; but I'll tell you
something interesting about that. We were
committing War Crimes in World War II, even
before Nuremberg trials were held and the
principle of war crimes started. The saturation
bombing of German cities was a War Crime and if
we had lost the war, some of our leaders might
have had to answer for it.

"I've gone through all of that history lately,
and I find that there's a gimmick in it. It
isn't written out, but I think we established it
by precedent. That gimmick is that if one can
allege that one is repelling or retaliating for
an aggression after that everything goes. And
you see we are living in a world in which all
wars are wars of defense. All War Departments are
now Defense Departments. This is all part of the
double talk of our time. The aggressor is always
on the other side. And I suppose this is why our
ex-Secretary of State, Dean Rusk a man in whom
repetition takes the place of reason, and
stubbornness takes the place of character went
to such pains to insist, as he still insists,
that in Vietnam we are repelling an aggression.
And if that's what we are doing so runs the
doctrine anything goes. ... {END QUOTE}

- and Salzman recommends

[1] http://www.truthout.com/
[2] http://www.counterpunch.com/
[3] http://www.counterpunch.com/cockburn05142005.html
[4] http://narconews.com/
[5] http://narconews.com/Issue37/article1277.html

All comments and criticisms are welcome.

September, 2005 / Online Edition: Index

Fight in California over privatization of public sector:
It's what's happening across America

By Steven Miller

One hundred years ago, this month, in 1905, the hottest book in America was "The Jungle," by Upton Sinclair. This book described, in terrible and shocking detail, the squalor of the Chicago Stockyards, where America's meat was produced. The public was horrified at a system of exploitation that drove workers so fast that their severed fingers and hands fell into giant vats of meat.

The huge outcry at adulterated meat was only half the story. The public was outraged at the picture of absolute corporate dominance of society, where every decision about community life was made by the so-called private sector. Few people recognized that government had any responsibility for the public welfare.
America in that era was, in fact, almost completely privatized. Wealth was highly polarized. If you didn't pay for it, you couldn't get it.

By next June, 1906, a startled government was stumbling to respond to an outraged public. The federal government was forced to pass one of the very first laws acknowledging that the public had any voice in anything at all. They quickly passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, which acknowledged that public rights over health issues were superior to corporate rights. This was the beginning of the powerful push for public rights that was known as the Progressive Era, where public regulation of corporations was first asserted.

In California, this movement was guided by a vision of "public works, public schools, public land, public rights and public access." Unlike the East Coast, for example, beaches could no longer be privatized. This impulse consciously tried to extend the idea of "The Public" to its greatest limits.

[but The Jungle didn't provoke any nationalisation that I know of; only govt regulation of private enterprise - RM]

Fast Forward to 2005

Under the mantra of "free trade," corporations are once again pushing a hidden agenda to turn public property into private property. Free trade, of course, means that Mom and Pop stores are "free" to go head to head with WalMart any time they want.

Corporations around the world are forcing local governments into privatizing their functions, especially the pro-people functions. The result is that billions of dollars in public money becomes privatized - perhaps the largest transfer of wealth from the public to corporate hands in history.

The whole push is to maximize the rights of corporations over our lives. The goal is to make the idea of "The Public" extinct, driven over the brink by hoards of corporate lawyers with a Mission.

The same agenda is being played out at every level of government and in every state: corporate taxes are frozen and then cut. Suddenly governments face bankruptcy. The cry goes out to privatize all human services (even though the cost of corporate pollution, for example, is supposed to be born by the public). This is what the capitalist pundit, Grover Norquist, means when he says it is now time to drown governments like a baby in a bathtub.

Nowhere in the country is this process being driven faster than in California, led by the Governator.

California is on the brink of the most important election in the state's history. Schwarzenegger is forcing the state to spend at least $100 million on an election that the public doesn't want.

Last year, Arnold changed the Constitution to all but eliminate Workmans' Comp and end the state's responsibility to provide medical care to injured workers. Then he tried to privatize the state's pensions for teachers, nurses, fire fighters, police and state workers. Massive public outrage forced him to temporarily abandon this one.

The Corporate Agenda

Arnold's special election hosts a variety of "Constitutional Amendments" that paves the way to further privatization of state services:

Prop 74 - Raises the time necessary for teacher tenure from two to five years
Tenure is simply the right to due process and freedom of speech. How exactly does amending the state constitution address the financial crisis? Bill Hauck, president of the California Business Roundtable, who also chairs Arnold's election campaign, states, "Ideally we would have no tenure and no collective bargaining."

Prop 75 - The so-called "Paycheck Protection" Amendment
This one requires unions to get permission from every single member to spend one cent of union money in a political campaign. This, of course, prevents unions from mounting a campaign, as did the Nurses, to force the Governator's hands off the pensions. In California, corporations outspend unions 24 to 1 in political campaigns. Nobody requires their workers to give their permission first.

Prop 76 - The so-called "Live Within Our Means" Amendment
This guts the floor for guaranteed state spending on public education established in 1988. As the state's schools fell from first to worst, the people amended the constitution to give investing in children and the future the highest priority. It also allows any governor to make unilateral cuts in the budget four times a year whenever there is a "financial crisis."

Prop 77 - Redraws the state congressional districts next year, five years ahead of the usual date.

It also takes this power from the Legislature and gives it to a panel of three retired judges. Karl Rove has stated that the best thing Republicans can do to win in 2008 is to redistrict Texas, Florida and California.

Dueling Visions

Arnold is right about one thing: the system is not working. But the so-called budget crisis is carefully manufactured. What else can you call it when insurance corporations pay Zero (that's $000.00) income tax in the state? The Governator says he won't raise taxes (certainly not on corporations) yet California is the only energy producing state without an excise tax! This is a tax on companies that extract natural resources that can never be replaced again, like oil, gas or coal.

There's plenty of money, but it is being redirected away from anything that benefits the public. Privatizing Social Security, public pensions, public water and public schools is now routinely discussed. These steps are promoted as positive reforms, yet they really represent attacks on public power. No one should forget how ENRON and other energy companies looted the state for $40 billion by deregulating public control of California's electricity.

The real fight is the fight for which direction society will take. The resources of the world will increasingly be directed to become corporate holdings. Or we can rally around a vision of a new world where the public has universal access to housing, culture, income, quality medical care and education. It's either private, corporate property or it's public property.

Steve Miller is available to speak through Speakers for a New America. Call 800-691-6888 or email sandy@speakersforanewamerica.com.

(From the Los Gatos guy...Michael finally went to the fat farm to take some of the pressure off his brain.)

[NB: this email racked up the record achievement of provoking a brain blowout in a Los Gatos electronics executive. It is thought that if he'd been somewhat fitter, and not let the traitor get to him, he'd have survived the distasteful experience; but as it turned out, he was found at his kompughter frothing at the mouth, gabbling incoherently.]

A Letter to All Who Voted for George W. Bush from Michael Moore

To All My Fellow Americans Who Voted for George W. Bush:

On this, the fourth anniversary of 9/11, I'm just curious, how does it feel?

How does it feel to know that the man you elected to lead us after we were attacked went ahead and put a guy in charge of FEMA whose main qualification was that he ran horse shows?

That's right. Horse shows.

I really want to know -- and I ask you this in all sincerity and with all due respect -- how do you feel about the utter contempt Mr. Bush has shown for your safety? C'mon, give me just a moment of honesty. Don't start ranting on about how this disaster in New Orleans was the fault of one of the poorest cities in America. Put aside your hatred of Democrats and liberals and anyone with the last name of Clinton. Just look me in the eye and tell me our President did the right thing after 9/11 by naming a horse show runner as the top man to protect us in case of an emergency or catastrophe.

I want you to put aside your self-affixed label of Republican/conservative/born-again/capitalist/ditto-head/right-winger and just talk to me as an American, on the common ground we both call America.

Are we safer now than before 9/11? When you learn that behind the horse show runner, the #2 and #3 men in charge of emergency preparedness have zero experience in emergency preparedness, do you think we are safer?

When you look at Michael Chertoff, the head of Homeland Security, a man with little experience in national security, do you feel secure?

When men who never served in the military and have never seen young men die in battle send our young people off to war, do you think they know how to conduct a war? Do they know what it means to have your legs blown off for a threat that was never there?

Do you really believe that turning over important government services to private corporations has resulted in better services for the people?

Why do you hate our federal government so much? You have voted for politicians for the past 25 years whose main goal has been to de-fund the federal government. Do you think that cutting federal programs like FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers has been good or bad for America? GOOD OR BAD?

With the nation's debt at an all-time high, do you think tax cuts for the rich are still a good idea? Will you give yours back so hundreds of thousands of homeless in New Orleans can have a home?

Do you believe in Jesus? Really? Didn't he say that we would be judged by how we treat the least among us? Hurricane Katrina came in and blew off the facade that we were a nation with liberty and justice for all. The wind howled and the water rose and what was revealed was that the poor in America shall be left to suffer and die while the President of the United States fiddles and tells them to eat cake.

That's not a joke. The day the hurricane hit and the levees broke, Mr. Bush, John McCain and their rich pals were stuffing themselves with cake. A full day after the levees broke (the same levees whose repair funding he had cut), Mr. Bush was playing a guitar some country singer gave him. All this while New Orleans sank under water.

It would take ANOTHER day before the President would do a flyover in his jumbo jet, peeking out the window at the misery 2500 feet below him as he flew back to his second home in DC. It would then be TWO MORE DAYS before a trickle of federal aid and troops would arrive. This was no seven minutes in a sitting trance while children read "My Pet Goat" to him. This was FOUR DAYS of doing nothing other than saying "Brownie (FEMA director Michael Brown), you're doing a heck of a job!"

My Republican friends, does it bother you that we are the laughing stock of the world?

And on this sacred day of remembrance, do you think we honor or shame those who died on 9/11/01? If we learned nothing and find ourselves today every bit as vulnerable and unprepared as we were on that bright sunny morning, then did the 3,000 die in vain?

Our vulnerability is not just about dealing with terrorists or natural disasters. We are vulnerable and unsafe because we allow one in eight Americans to live in horrible poverty. We accept an education system where one in six children never graduate and most of those who do can't string a coherent sentence together. The middle class can't pay the mortgage or the hospital bills and 45 million have no health coverage whatsoever.

Are we safe? Do you really feel safe? You can only move so far out and build so many gated communities before the fruit of what you've sown will be crashing through your walls and demanding retribution. Do you really want to wait until that happens? Or is it your hope that if they are left alone long enough to soil themselves and shoot themselves and drown in the filth that fills the street that maybe the problem will somehow go away?

I know you know better. You gave the country and the world a man who wasn't up for the job and all he does is hire people who aren't up for the job. You did this to us, to the world, to the people of New Orleans. Please fix it. Bush is yours. And you know, for our peace and safety and security, this has to be fixed. What do you propose?

I have an idea, and it isn't a horse show.

Yours,

Michael Moore
www.michaelmoore.com
mmflint@aol.com

From: "Maxim Institute"
Subject: Maxim Institute - real issues - No 175

When the tail wags the dog
Law already operates to shut down "hate speech"
Speculation underway on the special votes

When the tail wags the dog
Germany also went to the polls on the weekend. The results generated some striking similarities with New Zealand. This is not surprising as New Zealand's Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) electoral system is modelled on the MMP system used in Germany.

Although MMP allows a greater number of parties to be represented in Parliament, the problem often arises that there is not a clear winner and parties must negotiate to form a government. Since the minor parties reflect a number of sectional interests, this makes the task a lot trickier.

Both the New Zealand and German campaigns were fiercely fought between the major parties on the left and the right. In Germany, these were the incumbent Social Democrats (SPD), led by Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, and Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats (CDU). Although the CDU led in the polls, hard campaigning by Schröder saw the final difference between the two major parties at only one percent on election night (CDU 35 percent, SPD 34 percent), the same as the difference between Labour and National. The result is just as inconclusive as New Zealand's, since both Merkel and Schröder have claimed they can form the next government.

Although the CDU has the largest number of seats in the German Parliament, it will be difficult for Merkel to stitch together a coalition because none of the minor parties (the Greens, the Left party or the Liberals) want to work with each other in a coalition government, much like the situation in New Zealand. The election results in both countries showed decreasing support for a red-green government.

As in New Zealand, German politicians are trying to negotiate an agreement. However, their options appear even more limited than those available to Helen Clark or Don Brash. New Zealand's situation is not as dire, but both elections show that the political dynamic created by MMP must be consensual before it can be strong or stable, as Helen Clark and Gerhard Schröder claim. The government 'the people' finally end up with may not bear close relation to the votes cast, as small parties can end up having an influence disproportionate to their size.
To read an article on MMP by Maxim researcher Steve Thomas, featured in the winter issue of Evidence, please visit;

http://www.maxim.org.nz/evidence/evidence05_winter_thomas.html

Law already operates to shut down "hate speech"

A man who sent offensive letters containing slices of pork to Muslims has been jailed for six months for criminal harassment under the Harassment Act 1997. The man had randomly selected Muslim names out of a phone book because he was angry at the September 11 terrorist attack and the Bali bombing.

This latest sentence shows that the law already operates to prohibit certain speech that could be deemed hateful or insulting and that further laws restricting "hate speech" may be unwarranted.

The Harassment Act is one of six pieces of legislation that prohibit speech that has the potential to cause offence, harm or ridicule. Words that are likely to "excite hostility or bring into contempt" any group on the grounds of colour, race or origin are prohibited under the Human Rights Act, and words that are intended to "threaten, alarm or insult" are prohibited under the Summary Offences Act.

The Government Administration Committee has, over the past year, conducted an inquiry into whether New Zealand should have laws banning so called "hate speech", but has not yet reported back to Parliament. This latest court sentence makes it clear that further restriction on freedom of expression to control so called "hate speech" is not warranted, and would be an unjustified limitation on our freedom of expression affirmed by the New Zealand Bill of Rights 1990.

To read Maxim Institute's submission on the Inquiry into "hate speech" from May 2005, please click here: http://www.maxim.org.nz/ri/HateSpeechSubmission.pdf

Speculation underway on the special votes

With the Election result in the balance, much is going to depend on the 218,000 special votes still being counted. In the past, these have tended to favour Labour and the Greens. However, past years may not necessarily be a good guide for estimating their impact this time round.

In previous years, up to 25 percent of special votes have been disallowed. The discard rate was at its lowest in 2002, when 93 percent of party votes were valid. If we take 90 percent as being a likely percentage this time, that leaves the parties fighting over approximately 196,000 valid votes.

On the Election night count, the overall vote for centre-left parties, including the Maori Party, dropped from 51 percent to 49 percent. The centre-right (defined broadly to include New Zealand First and United Future) climbed from 47 percent to 50 percent. Labour, with 41 percent of the party vote on Saturday night, currently has 50 seats. National is currently 1 percent behind, with 49 seats.

Based on the approximation above, to remain at 5 percent, the Greens would need 8,350 of the special votes, or 4 percent; less than that, and they would fall below the threshold of 5 percent of the party vote and lose all their seats in Parliament. This would have implications for coalitions, and possibly determine who forms the next government.

In the previous two elections, the Greens have done well in the specials, possibly because they were held during the university holidays. If students were registered in the electorate where they were studying, many would have cast a special vote. This year there are not likely to be as many students who registered special votes, but the Greens are still unlikely to fall below the threshold. This scenario illustrates how under MMP, smaller parties may be very influential in determining the final outcome of an election.

This was my first theological paper -
as Mort put it immediately after helping me a
good deal with its writing. (Not many have such
distinguished help.)

Unfortunately it's in a 'counterattack'
mode, but I did work in a lot of substance - so
it may even be worthy of the mighty kuratrading®
webpage ...

Real World (U. of Auckland chaplains' magazine) 3 1993

A NOTE ON FEMINISM & CHRISTIANITY

Robert Mann

'God-Talk and the Liberation of Women', Susana Carryer's feminist article in Real World2, deserves some comments. Of Ms Carryer's key statements I quote and comment briefly upon a half-dozen. Then, I offer a glimpse of useful literature on 'the liberation of women'.

(1) "Biblical images of God as a mother . . . point to Mother as a viable and biblically correct option as a name for God."

If that is so, should not a scholarly article give references to those biblical images? Readers who do not know their Bible well enough, such as myself, cannot readily find these neglected passages. This comment is no mere pedantry; readers are entitled to wonder whether the Bible does actually contain passages to the effect (when read in context, as we would all like to do) claimed by Ms Carryer.

(2) " . . . the association of God with Father has become normative in our tradition . . . a cycle that is very difficult to break out of".

In one of God's central disclosures to us about his nature and how we should behave toward him, he has instructed us to address him as "Our Father". That key revelation of the Bible is of course reinforced by many others. This instruction presumably implies that, insofar as our feeble human minds can grasp and briefly refer in human terms to our relationship with God, it is most like that of a human child (male or female) with its father. Calling God 'Father' is no fleeting fashion or mere social construction; ironically, calling him anything else is.

(3) "the maleness of Christ has been converted from an historical accident . . . to being an ontological necessity".

Why God chose to reveal himself in a male rather than a female human constitutes something of a mystery which we may think about (while not hoping to understand fully). But the fact that he did thus choose remains a sheer fact.

To read into this historical given a universal ontological necessity that Christ (or any adequate manifestation of God) had to be masculine would be to go further than the Church has ever officially sought to. But to go to the other extreme and term it a mere accident entails an arrogant posture toward God of criticism which I, for one, find preposterous. God's choice within his creative process to make Jesus male really is a God-given factnot up for questioning. If the world is as God made it, trammelled by us sinners, we are faced with the sufficiently large task of discerning truly what are the facts of providence; speculation about whether Jesus could have been female seems, at best, peculiarly vacuous and evasive of reality.

Any thinking of God as personal entails the model of the human species, which happens to be male or female, as the only mode in which we can understand personality. To abandon gender must mean all too soon to lose personality. Doubtless God is unimaginably more than personal; but in our human apprehending he must be at least personal. The pronoun It would leave him sub-personal, no more to be found responding to us as I to Thou.

But the colossal recent mistake has been to think of sexuality as the primary and divisive category among us. We are first of all human. It is out of our humanity and His that we acclaim in Christ the human being to gather up and re-present before theFather a whole redeemed humanity.

(4) "Terms promoting a linear rather than hierarchical relationship need to take their rightful place alongside the others . . ."

That Nature is inherently thoroughly and profoundly hierarchical has been detailed in Goldsmith's recent magnum opus 'The Way'. As well speak of an animal body without organs, or a cell without organelles, as babble of a non-hierarchical ecosystem or society. It is vacuous, futile, and confusing.

A further criticism, on the level of logic: to present "linear" and hierarchical as tolerantly co-existing characteristics is woolly-minded. Even if we were not stuck by providence with inherently hierarchical biology and society - that is, if we had a real possibility of supplanting hierarchy with "linearity" - it would indeed be a supplanting that Ms Carryer promotes. Any impression that she is advocating kindly addition 'alongside', not replacement, is at best confused.

(5) "Female images of God . . . are necessary to affirm the goodness and legitimacy of female sexuality and identity." [my emphasis]

I hope the falsity of this assertion will need little exposition. Goodness and legitimacy abound in many aspects of humanity without any necessity of being projected onto God himself. Female sexuality has been affirmed as not merely good but glorious in a colossal mass of literature, song, and art; female images of God have evidently not been necessary for the production of these affirmations.

(6) " . . . women are [represented as] the descendants of Eve, the cause of all the evil in the world . . ."

For many years, readers of the Listener were subjected to endless weekly accusations by feminist Marilyn Waring to the effect that men are to blame for the world's ills. The interpretation of Genesis of which Ms Carryer complains has, I submit, had far less (relatively negligible) influence during the past half-century at least.

Having pointed out these rather obvious comments, one can nevertheless expect that they will be ignored by the political ideology of wimmin's lib, which diligently avoids critical discussion. Christians should be clear-eyed about the nature of this irrational political trend which has already made severe inroads on language, reasoning, politics and religion. (The extent of the latter inroads is glimpsed in the very fact that the article on which I have commented was accepted for publication.) Feminists, while differing amongst many sundering camps, are generally gaining political power (overtly or deviously) on the basis of misrepresentations of providence. I wish therefore to take this opportunity to point out some cogent facts about the way God has actually set up the world. Similar summaries have appeared elsewhere.

Ms Carryer, like most if not all feminists, complains repeatedly about patriarchy as if it were obviously evil and as if social rearrangements can do away with it. The book (Goldberg 1979) which first summarised the findings in the societies that have been studied on the subject of male dominance tells us that in all 1400 societies, men occupy the positions of apparent power. (The Amazons turn out to be a forgery.) Similarly, Keesing's (1976) textbook on cultural anthropology, in its section "womens' worlds", says:-

As 16 women social anthropologists compellingly argue in'Woman, Culture, and Society' (Rosaldo & Lamphere 1974), there is no evidence that matriarchal societies have ever existed. The apparent universality of male dominance - at least in public and political realms - must be a starting point for an anthropology of women.

The second edition of this book enlarges in very helpful ways, emphasising the need for both empathy and some measure of detached judgement regarding inferences of 'exploitation'.

Confusion often arises among people who have not looked up the meaning of the term patriarchy. Its characteristics relate merely to the formal, public arenas and social hierarchies, in which men brandish weapons, sometimes use them, march around in uniform, deliver loudly the decisions of society, defend and enforce them, etc. The very different forms of power exerted by women, mostly in private, in the formation of those decisions, are by their nature far less amenable to historical research; but it is a serious error to claim that patriarchy entails a lack of power for women. A particular case is that of many Maori women who are content not to speak on the marae because they do in fact speak through their menfolk, more effectively.

The latest and in many ways the best relevant textbook is Dr Anne Moir's 'Brain Sex' (1989). Like her predecessor Goldberg, Moir is rigorously blacked out, as is Illich's key book 'Gender', by feminist "scholar"s, of whom Margarita Levin (1986) makes some stinging criticisms.

Lisa Tuttle's 'Encyclopedia of Feminism' (1987) records the universality of patriarchy but asserts "alternatives to patriarchy may at least be imagined". I however contend that no such fantasy has actually been formulated, and that we cannot regenerate community on the basis of the erroneous notion - the axiom of feminism - that closely similar ways of life should be led by women and men. That such a notion needs to be pointed out as not onlyunrealistic but also highly undesirable illustrates how many have strayed, especially during this last quarter-century, from well-founded traditional understandings of gender.

Paul's words about the subjection of women (1 Cor. 7; 1 Tim. 2,8ff.) have not endeared that apostle to radical feminists. To be reconciled with Paul's whole evident position, those passages need to be understood as contingent upon and conditioned by the society Paul lived in. We need the same understanding of Jesus' oft-cited decision to enlist no women in the intimate fellowship of the Twelve. In his human life Jesus, with his disciples, was a Jew faithful in daily matters to the social perceptions of his culture and time. Over and over again in his ministry we find Jesus following these, working "with the grain". Only thus could his mission be accomplished among the people into whom (very oddly as the rhymster says) God chose to become incarnate.

If we want to find Paul's convictions on the plane that counts eternally, we must go to the splendid Gal. iii28-9: "There is no such thing as Jew and Greek, slave and freeman, male and female, for you are all one person in Christ Jesus". Through the centuries this has been the normative text of conduct for any society to be called decently Christian. The firstcouple - Jew and Gentile - was given recognition in Christian practice during the first century; 'bond and free' took longer, until the 19th century. Let us work to see that 'male and female' become reconciled in the full Galatians sense in our time. Feminism is, on the whole, antagonistic to that Christian challenge.

Much more needs to be written about this important topic. To my mind the real question is, what is the appropriate division of labour between men and women? What, especially, is the meaning for today's men and women of the Bible's first three chapters? Have readers of Real Worldsome thoughtful suggestions on that?

SOME GOOD SOURCES

Goldberg S (1979) 'Male Dominance: the Inevitability of Patriarchy'. Abacus
Goldsmith E R D (1992) 'The Way'. Century
Greer G (1983) 'Sex & Destiny'. Secker & Warburg
Illich I (1982) 'Gender'. Pantheon
Keesing R M (1976; 1981) 'Cultural Anthropology'. Holt Rinehart
Levin M (1986) 'Caring New World: Feminism and Science' Amer. Scholar 57(winter) 100-106
Lyndon N (1992) 'No More Sex War'. Sinclair-Stevenson
Moir A, Jessel D (1989) 'Brain Sex: the real difference between men and women'. Michael Joseph; see also the epilogue to the American edition (Lyle Stuart 1991).
Tuttle L (1987) 'Encyclopedia of Feminism'. London: Arrow

[ the then editor Rev Calum Gilmour printed this - with an ill grace. The only response was from some harpie purporting to complain at my failure to cite any reference for my statement that God had instructed us to address him as 'Our Father'. Calum printed that. ]

Almost three years old but still one of the very best analyses in under 3,000 words of the Islam/West confrontation.
R

Retreats into fantasy

David Pryce-Jones
The New Criterion Vol. 21, No. 3, November 2002
http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/21/nov02/davidpj.htm

Returning home from a journey to Arabia in the latter part of the eighteenth century, the explorer and historian Carsten Niebuhr put in at Alexandria. Once ashore, he used an instrument for surveying the landscape. Some intrigued Egyptians asked to handle it. What they then saw through the lenses was incomprehensibly upside down. Niebuhr was thrown into prison for sorcery. Some decades later, the great Richard Burton, disguised as Haj Ibrahim, was on the pilgrimage to Mecca, a city forbidden to all except Muslims to this very day. In his baggage was a compass which he hardly dared use, living in fear that its discovery would lead to his murder. Stories of the kind encapsulate what was already by then the unequal relationship between the world of Islam and the West.

Islam in the years of its triumph had conquered and colonized from Morocco to Indonesia, from Central Asia down to sub-Saharan Africa. Caliphs, sultans, emirs, khans had ruled diverse empires whose monuments were often splendid, and whose achievements in various branches of learning were lasting. In practice Muslims might war with each other, but the faithful were held to comprise a community. Precluding any possibility of power-sharing, this amalgamation of mosque and state ensured absolutism and placed all minorities, whether schismatics or infidels, in a precarious position. Christians and Jews had their place in classical Muslim society as dhimmi, subjects protected by law but under a special regime of prohibitions and taxes: in modern parlance second-class citizens. In the rightful ordering of the world, Muslims could take their own supremacy for granted. They saw themselves standing against the West and its Crusades; they imagined that unbelievers were conspiring in an unrelieved hostility to Islam. Whatever Christians or Jews might actually be doing in faraway lands was of no concern. Out of predilection, pride, prejudice, ignorance, Muslims were condemning themselves to remaining outside the main intellectual developments of the rest of the world. Unawares, they would be losing control of their own history.

Niebuhr's Egyptians were still able to feel uncritical confidence in themselves and their civilization. A few years later, Napoleon landed at Alexandria, and soon afterwards Nelson and the British sailed in pursuit. The West had arrived on Muslim soil. One or two Egyptian contemporaries chronicled these unprecedented invasions. As Bernard Lewis describes it, they showed no concern about the internal history of France or the rest of Europe. “The French had come, they stayed a while, they did various things, and they left. No one cared to ask, let alone to ascertain, why they had come and why they had left. The coming of the infidel was seen as a kind of natural disaster."

A sequence of events was under way in which the strength of the infidels, the Europeans, generically Westerners, came to match ever more starkly the corresponding weakness of the faithful, generically Muslims. The nineteenth century was a catastrophe for Muslims. By the end of the First World War, the last two Muslim empires were shadows of themselves. Persia was a hapless pawn between Russia and Britain. Turkey managed to fight for survival in its heartland, but its former European provinces were lost and its former Arab provinces were at the disposition of the British and French, even the Italians in Libya. Of Muslim countries, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia alone remained nominally independent.

What was to be done about this state of affairs? Born in 1838, a Shia from Persia, and an adventurer and intriguer who worked his way into several royal courts, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani believed that he had discovered the secret of European supremacy. Muslims, he did not hesitate to say, were backward. The self-pity came from the heart. But the Europeans were nothing in themselves. In his view, “Rather it is science that everywhere manifests its greatness and power." Acquiring science, the Muslims could catch up. Afghani captured it in a phrase: “It is amazing that it is precisely the Christians who invented Krupp's cannons and the machine gun before the Muslims." The analysis was incomplete: the invention of such weaponry had nothing to do with the supposed Christianity of the inventors. Science grew out of a civilization, and was not some commodity to be readily imported. But the implied course of action was clear. Afghani hoped that Islamic society would “succeed some day in breaking its bonds and marching resolutely in the path of civilization, after the manner of Western society."

Some Muslim leaders, like the Emir Abdel Kadir in Algeria, or some of the Central Asian and Indian rulers, had organized armed resistance, but initially the masses felt strikingly little resentment at the encroachment on their society of Westerners. They seemed to have accepted that these Westerners had come, were staying a while, and were doing various things. Many fought in British or French uniforms, and sometimes against other Muslims. But it was Westerners themselves who began to insist that there was something disgraceful in their own presence in the Muslim world. This was imperialism. This was colonialism. This was exploitation. Lenin and Trotsky said so, and so did the leftists J. A. Hobson and Bernard Shaw and the Fabians, and the rightist Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, and increasingly countless academics in countless universities, and increasingly countless commentators in print. If the opinion- makers of the day saw Muslims as hapless pawns in the hands of greedy and powerful foreigners, how was a Muslim to react? Many could not help internalizing what they heard, and feeling ashamed. An enormous literature reveals how painful it was for Muslims to learn that in the eyes of influential Westerners they were held in contempt, and were apparently impotent to do anything about it.

The reality was complex. No doubt some Westerners, for instance soldiers in garrisons, were insular and even racist, but many more were concerned to restore an equal relationship between Muslims and Westerners. Still others were at pains to understand the people and the culture they encountered. Much Western scholarship has explored and vivified Islam. Another large literature describes qualities which Westerners particularly admired among Muslims, their human warmth, humor, poetry, manners, sense of family, respect for the old, and not least their history and religion.

From the days of Homer’s Greeks and Trojans onwards, shame has been the forerunner of hate and violence. In what anthropologists call a shame society, the acquisition of honor and its converse, the avoidance of shame, are the keys to motivation. A man cannot be reasoned out of shame; it becomes a passion which burns and consumes until such time as it is avenged. Nationalist movements were built upon this passion. British policemen used to report with surprise that nationalist demonstrators wept tears of rage, or fell down in what appeared to be fainting fits. The age of colonialism contained a guaranteed expiration date, and the Second World War brought it forward. Europeans evidently could hardly rule themselves, let alone others, and their moral authority was lost. By the middle of the twentieth century, in one Muslim country after another, nationalist leaders and movements had coalesced with the promise of regaining independence.

In the superficial sense that they seized power and initiated regimes, the nationalist leaders of the 1950s and 1960s succeeded. In some countries, for example in Indonesia, Malaysia, and sub-Saharan Africa, they seemed to have restored the rightful sense of dignity to their people. In the Arab countries, however, independence has brought neither freedom nor dignity but one-man rule secured by a single party and the military and secret police apparatus. The archetypal Arab leader remains Gamal Abdul Nasser, the undisputed leader of Egypt from 1953 till his death in 1970. What he claimed to be building was Arab socialism. What in fact he built was a second-hand totalitarian state with neither human rights, nor respect for life and property. Other Arab countries, even those that were nominally monarchies, imitated the model or deferred to it, also relying on the military and secret police apparatus. All have acquired the range of modern externals from fly-overs to weaponry, but none have thereby satisfied Afghani’s ambition to march in the path of civilization “after the manner of Western society." The seeds of disappointment and hate are planted in the tyranny of the Arab and Muslim order.

What is the cause of this massive political and social failure? It is in part that Arab nationalism and socialism are alien ideologies internalized from European Nazism and Communism, and therefore repeats of models as bankrupt as they were violent. It is also in part because democracy and free elections and the rule of law carried the taint of the colonial powers which had introduced these novelties in the first place. And in part it is due to the Islamic tradition of absolutism now perpetuated in contemporary garb.

The United States’ involvement in the Middle East began as colonialism was ending. Its realpolitik interest lay in securing oil supplies through the “twin pillars" of Iran and Saudi Arabia. The United States had no objection to Arab nationalism or socialism - and at the time no real understanding of the movements. Nasser and his equivalents in Syria and Iraq were initially seen with approval as “officers in a hurry," the assumption being that they were getting on with the necessary job of modernizing somehow “after the manner of Western society."

Coming into existence in 1948, the state of Israel has defied regular attempts by its Arab neighbors to destroy it. Arab nationalist rulers from Nasser onwards were willing to become Soviet proxies, if that was the price to be paid for the destruction of Israel. The Middle East therefore became a prime arena of the cold war. The United States shared Israel’s human and democratic values. Without American support, Israel would still have won its wars, but at a higher cost. Victorious round after round, Israel exposed the pretensions of Arab nationalism and socialism to be maximizing power in a new glorious age. The Arab world is in an uncomfortable bind, obliging Israel to fight for survival, and then having to accept defeat on the battlefield. Centuries of Muslim stereotyping affirm that the despised and numerically insignificant Jews could never achieve such a thing on their own. To explain away the unbearable humiliation of it, a view has taken hold of the Arab and Muslim imagination that there is a malign American-Israeli imperialist nexus, nothing less than a conspiracy which represents everything to be hated and feared about the West.

The failure of Arab nationalism and socialism opened the way to political Islam. In the past, charismatic leaders have often arisen with a mission to redeem or purify Islam. In Egypt in 1928 Hassan al-Banna, a schoolmaster, founded the Muslim Brotherhood. According to the official account, some Egyptians said to him, “We are weary of this life of humiliation and restriction. Lo, we see that the Arabs and the Muslims have no status and no dignity." Islam was the solution. The Western way of life, al-Banna asserted, might be founded on practical and technical knowledge but it “has remained incapable of offering to men’s minds a flicker of light, a ray of hope, a grain of faith." More dire still, the West, or as he called it, “religious and cultural imperialism," deliberately conspired to destroy Islam. Political idiom drawn from current European ideologies fused with stereotypes set in place in the long-ago battles against Crusaders.

Another Egyptian, Sayyid Qutb, has popularized and glossed the mindset. Born in Cairo in 1906, he studied literature and was familiar with the English language. From 1948 to 1950 he was on a government grant to study education in the United States. As a result of this experience, he concluded that America was the source of all evil. Christianity with its notion of sin and redemption made no sense. Capitalism was “predicated on monopoly and interest-taking, money-grubbing and exploitation." American individualism lacked “any sense of solidarity other than that laid down by the law." Relations between the sexes particularly shocked him, and he attacked “that animal freedom which is called permissiveness." Muslims who allowed themselves any truck with Western ideas and practices he considered were in a state of jahiliyya, that is to say, the pagan ignorance prevailing before the Prophet Muhammad’s divine revelation. Rebellion was their religious duty. He put this militancy into practice in Egypt, and Nasser duly had him hanged in 1966.

The clash between Arab nationalism and socialism on the one hand and political Islam on the other was bound to result in tests of strength between them, and some of these—in Egypt, in Syria, in Algeria - have been murderous on a large scale. What was essentially an issue for Arabs and Muslims to resolve among themselves became international after 1979, when Ayatollah Khomeini seized power in Iran, and political Islam at last could operate at the level of a nation-state among other nation-states. Only about one in ten Muslims are Shia, and historical experience at the hands of Sunnis has reinforced their minority status and a resulting sense of persecution. Combining absolute political and religious authority, Khomeini did everything in his power to gain acceptance for the belief that America was conspiring with other unbelievers to destroy Muslims and their heritage. Quite why America would entertain so wanton and pointless an aim never concerned him. In his emotive image, the Great Satan needed no other motive but wickedness. Muslims now had official sanction to hate the United States. Islamist rhetoric raised the level of violence. One Muslim country after another sponsored terrorist groups, and several went on to develop weapons of mass destruction. Jamal al-Din al-Afghani would have appreciated that Pakistan brandishes what it likes to call “the Islamic nuclear bomb."

The United States today is a spectacle of success and power, and the Muslim reaction to it certainly contains admiration for its achievements, its medicine and its education, and of course its freedoms. Themselves living in tyrannies, Arabs and almost all Muslims are unable to enjoy such benefits unless they are fortunate enough to acquire the talisman of the green card and can emigrate. Into the complicated emotion of hate are woven strands of envy, impotence, shame, and self-pity. Failure is increasingly and inescapably oppressive to the Muslim order. To blame others for the ills one has brought down on oneself is only human. Self-pity is always easier than self-criticism. The retreat into fantasy and conspiracy consoles, and also mobilizes.

So Osama bin Laden is able to recruit tens of thousands of Islamist volunteers, and to order a series of murders including the attacks of September 11. For this he becomes a genuine hero in his native Saudi Arabia, and crowds dance in his honor in Arab and Pakistani cities, while at the very same time the rumor spreads that Jews perpetrated the attacks to discredit Muslims. So the Sheikh of Al-Azhar, the leading Sunni authority, can describe suicide bombing as “a legitimate act according to religious law, and an Islamic commandment." So a Lebanese intellectual proudly tells a Western reporter, “We could provide a million suicide bombers in 24 hours." Prince Sultan bin Abdel Aziz, a leading member of the Saudi ruling dynasty and father of the Saudi ambassador to Washington, is able to say to a newspaper, “It is enough to see a number of congressmen wearing Jewish yarmulkes to explain the allegations against us." The leader of the terrorist group Hezbollah asserts that “The Jews want to be a world power" and organizes terrorist means to attack them, while Ali Khamenei, President of Iran, calls the United States “the biggest bully in the world," and his newspaper adds that “Bush’s culture is Hitler’s culture." The Palestinian Sheikh Ahmad Yassin of Hamas, the Islamist terror organization, promises to eliminate Israel from the Middle East, and extremists claim that one day the United States will live under Islamic law. For an unquantifiable number of Muslims, these fantasies and conspiracies - these set-backs and putative glories - have become an identity, and their voices are now so many trumpet calls.

Merging at the emotional level as they do, Arab nationalist-socialists and Islamists generate a climate that encourages the spread of violence to everyone within reach, of all religious faiths and cultures including their own. In their origins, both ideologies purported to regain power, but in practice they have served to condemn Muslims to live outside the creativity of today’s world and so consummate loss of control over their own history. By virtue of its current political and economic pre-eminence, the United States is a symbol simultaneously of the success of people deemed to be unworthy, and of the standing failure of those held to be deserving; and so becomes the prime target of violence. To those afflicted by the haunting sense of their own limitations, the United States offers temptation and frustration in a blend which can only arouse confusion and anger. Once more, here is an incomplete analysis of reality, another failure of intellect, and it impedes all concerned from meeting on terms of equality, as though time had stood still from the day when those Egyptians had looked into Niebuhr's surveying instrument and found that the landscape was the wrong way up.

>I'm not sure why you think that Keith Locke and the Greens would not
>stand up for religiously oppressed people in China, or anywhere else.

Because I've never noticed them doing anything of the kind -
and Locke's long adherence to Communism is likely to distort his
judgement of the Chinese govt.

Actually I believe you were reasonably sure of that before
you were told. This po-faced innocent act wouldn't fool many.

And of course, the question I sent remains ignored.

R

>
>Tim Hannah
>Executive Assistant to Keith Locke MP
>13.07 Bowen House
>Parliament
>Wellington
>Phone 04 470 6709
>Fax 04 472 7116
>Keep up to date with Green issues. Register at:
>
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Robt Mann [mailto:robtm@xtra.co.nz]
>Sent: Wednesday, 7 September 2005 07:34 p.m.
>To: Recipient List Suppressed
>Subject: Here's one for W Peters MP, K Locke list-MP, etc
>
>
>
>What would New Zealand do with the Chinese Christian? K
>Locke list-MP's extreme solicitude on behalf of the muslim A Zaoui
>esq would, I fear, not extend to this refugee from victimisation of
>Christianity who is not alleged to be a terrorist or other enemy of
>civil order, whereas Zaoui is.
>
>R

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ctmag/features/issues/ethics.html

Also I attach two from the mag - inferior copies, but URLs on them if you want to fetch suaver copies. The 'Techno Sapiens' one is a useful commentary on the 'nanotek' fad.

R

A Manufactured Womb of One's Own

The commodification of children, and an admission of stem-cell hype.
by Nigel M. de S. Cameron |posted 09/08/2005 09:00 a.m.

The techno-womb: coming soon

The depth of the challenge presented by new biotechnologies could hardly be better illustrated than in the prospect of an artificial womb. According to The Times of London, the hopes and fears of generations of researchers are moving toward some kind of conclusion in the next couple of decades. Motives, of course, may be good: With a mechanical womb we could rescue preemies at any age at all. And, if they wished, women could "terminate" pregnancies without terminating their unborn children—the fetus could be transplanted to the techno-womb and raised to term. So, having established both medical benefits and "pro-life" benefits, is our next step to lobby Congress to speed up the process?

Japanese experiments, it seems, have brought mouse embryos almost all the way to term outside the mouse womb (though they died). Goat fetuses have been raised to term in a "uterine tank" after removal from their mother's womb. Human embryos have been persuaded to "implant" on uterine cells in vitro.

The Times also raises concerns about artificial wombs. For one thing, the techno-womb would make it much easier for scientists to engage in cloning experiments without the need for surrogate mothers. Moreover, it's hard to doubt that couples would soon be pressing to use this technology to avoid the need for the labor of child-bearing, and at the same time get rid of the ambiguities of using a surrogate mother. What kind of bonding would result? Would they view them as commodities? The Times quotes Dr. Richard Ashcroft, a reader in medical ethics at London's Imperial College: "Is creating children with artificial wombs having children at all, or is it a kind of manufacturing of children? It is deeply dangerous."

Here is the point: A technology that may have benefits sets up a new situation, in which its perils are also open to us. The world changes when something as radical as in vitro fertilization, or sex selection, or—down the line—techno-wombs, becomes available.

And we shall be tempted (a good word to use here) to slide downhill into the commodification of our children just because technology has made it possible. At least, we shall if we can't get some radical Christian thinking done about these things ahead of time.

Don't read this unless you have a strong stomach

In fact there has been a long and sorry history of using not mouse and goats but humans for this kind of research. I pulled together some of the references for an essay in my book Medicine in Crisis: a Christian Response nearly 20 years ago. Humans at various stages of gestation were immersed in tanks under pressure. Take a deep breath and listen to this (from the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, July 1, 1963): "During the first 30 minutes of immersion the temperature … was raised from 15 to 30 C, and the oxygen pressure to 250 pounds per square inch. At intervals of 11 hours the chamber was decompressed … until it was down at least to 15 pounds per square inch, before opening to see whether any animals had survived. … No fetus was living after a third period of immersion of 11 hours." They varied in age from 9 to 24 weeks. (Italics are mine: Note that when they start being killed in experiments, humans get called "animals.")

The technology presses ahead

Readers of Slate will have read Will Saletan's gripping five-part series on "The case for harvesting older human embryos," in which he reviews the science and policy debates that have begun to press far beyond the question of embryos just a few days old. He cites Dr. Helen Liu's work at Harvard, who "has grown human embryos to 10 days in artificial wombs, and the only reason she stopped at that point was to comply with the 14-day rule [which most pro-embryo-research people say should be the limit]. That was four years ago, before she grew mice nearly to term. … Now we can push the line forward, and maybe get rid of it."

And we need to remember that the law in one state, New Jersey, specifically protects the development of cloned embryos all the way to live birth. The law actually defined cloning as the birth of the cloned child. This law was passed just two years ago, and it was endorsed by the biotech industry.

The Tree of Knowledge

It hasn't yet made the headlines, but the revolution unleashed by our new knowledge of genetics has already gone further than most of us realize. Fans of the movie Gattaca will remember the futuristic society in which there is routine use of genetic tests, as strands of hair and the saliva left on an envelope or glass of water are used for DNA screenings. But the future is now, and to show how far we have gone you can buy it on Amazon.com. While our energies have been focused on embryo stem-cell research and cloning, enterprising scientists have brought one of the key features of the Brave New World into our mailboxes.

According to a report in Wired, Amazon.com is now selling a British company's $30 DNA kits, "which come with a cheek swab and a storage tin. For an extra $110, users can send for an identifying code extracted from their DNA profile and an analysis of how their genes stack up to those of the world's various races." Comments quoted range from people worried about privacy issues to one that notes you can store genetic information by keeping hair strands. However, while the genealogical data may represent marketing scam more than anything else, the principle of home-based gene tests—mail-ordered, cheap, and uncontrolled—suggests a fateful step towards the Gattaca society—where you check out your prospective girl/boyfriends, and employees, without their knowledge; and then make decisions about them that depend on how much you like their genes (eugenics).

Why are in vitro babies taller?

According to a report in the Australian newspaper The Age, in vitro babies are taller, by around four centimeters. No one yet knows why, though it could result from abnormalities in the gene expression. It seems that in vitro animals sometimes grow very big, and this could be the human counterpart of the same process. This demonstrates how technologies that take a generation to work and involve human beings are uniquely problematic. Getting the sperm to fertilize the egg in vitro seemed to be the key, but as this and other reports have shown, we have yet to fully understand the implications of what we have done to scores of thousands of children fertilized in vitro.

Stem-cell hype and arrogance: official

One of the U.K.'s most famous names is Lord Winston, the chief British in vitro doctor and a flamboyant character (I debated him on BBC radio 20 years ago). Winston is current president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. He is far from being a conservative on bioethics.

So his latest speech makes interesting reading. According to the BBC, he has been using strong words:

The potential benefits of embryonic stem-cell research have probably been oversold to the public, fertility expert Lord Winston says. He fears a backlash if science fails to deliver on some of the "hype" around the cells—as he believes may happen. He says the notion that a host of cures for serious, degenerative disorders are just around the corner is fanciful.

He is concerned that lawmakers "have been convinced that it was just a matter of a few years before we would be able to transplant stem cells and cure a lot of neurological disorders" like Alzheimer's disease. Lord Winston says Alzheimer's "is going to be a hugely difficult problem and probably completely insoluble by stem cells."

Three cheers for Lord Winston's candor. Any other honest men and women around?

It's also interesting to note that even in the U.K., where the blitzed "stem-cell cures" hype has been closest to that in the U.S., someone has the courage to break rank and say the emperor has no clothes. Winston is concerned that failure to deliver will give credibility to pro-lifers (he says as much in his speech, even though the pro-life movement in the U.K. is a lot weaker than it is in the U.S.).

At the same time, Winston is speaking in Europe, where the genetically modified food (GMO) debate has cast a shadow over every technology. For better or for worse, European nations have generally rejected GMO foods, in a backlash that cost billions for (mainly American) companies and has illustrated the power of consumers to reject what science and business think is "good for them." Here in the U.S., critique of GMOs has been limited, and scandals (such as the mixing of GMO corn approved only for animal feed into the human food supply) have not taken off in the way they did in Europe.

========================

The Techno Sapiens Are Coming

When God fashioned man and woman, he called his creation very good. Transhumanists say that, by manipulating our bodies with microscopic tools, we can do better. Are we ready for the great debate?

By C. Christopher Hook | posted 12/19/2003

Eradicate cancer. Retain and recall everything you can find on the Internet. Give your child a high IQ. Drastically reduce fatalities of U.S. soldiers involved in wars. Give sight to the blind. * Soon, you won't have to be God to fulfill this wish list. But you may not be human, either. * Such is the promise and peril of nanotechnology. First defined by engineer and scientist K. Eric Drexler in the '80s and '90s, nanotechnology uses tools that operate on the "nano" scale. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter in length. The DNA molecule is 2.3 nanometers wide. * Nanotechnology, then, deals with the manipulation of matter at the atomic or molecular level. * While an average layperson may have seen some depictions of this technology, few know what its current and future applications are. Fewer yet can wrap their minds around nanotechnology's ethical implications.

Nanotechnology is developing in two ways. The "top-down" approach creates microscopic machines or delivery systems. The "bottom up" approach harnesses the biological world. For example, the ribosome, present in every cell, is an amazing nanoscale factory—it takes RNA, a long strand of translated genetic information, and turns it into a protein that can then serve as an enzyme. In either case, nanotechnology makes the stuff of miracles possible.

Oncologists use a biological nanomachine—antibodies attached to ball-shaped molecules—to deliver the radiation drug Zevalin to the cells specifically affected by lymphoma, which saves healthy tissue from exposure to radiation.

Wired magazine reported in September 2002 that the Dobelle bionic eye system enables the blind to see. And Optobionics Corporation in Naperville, Illinois, has so far successfully tested its artificial silicon retina—a 2 millimeter-wide chip with 5,000 photodiodes—on patients with damaged retinal cells.

In my practice as a hematologist, I may soon deal with bioengineered blood cells. They could serve as a blood alternative to carry oxygen, and help us avoid many risks and liabilities of blood transfusions.

Other future applications include devices that would: (1) generate and lay down new connective tissue to heal arthritic joints and torn ligaments; (2) dissolve plaque in heart and brain blood vessels; (3) manufacture and deliver certain drugs in the body, such as insulin; and (4) replace or repair damaged brain cells in people with disorders such as Parkinson's or Alzheimer's disease.

When you combine nanotechnology with cyborg technology (interfacing living nervous tissue with electronic devices), the results are breathtaking. Researchers in Georgia are helping people stricken with a horrible disorder called the locked-in syndrome. Its sufferers appear to be in a persistent vegetative state, but are in fact completely aware of their surroundings. Via electrodes implanted near the motor regions of these patients' brains, they have been taught to control the cursor on a computer screen by their thoughts. This means they essentially type with their thoughts, and thus can communicate with others.

It's not hard to imagine that such tools will move beyond therapy into augmentation, or enhancement, of "normal" individuals—or what is more objectively called "bioengineering."

Direct neural interfacing with computer systems would be attractive to people who need to have access to lots of information. Centers such as MIT, Stanford, and the University of Toronto have programs in developing "wearable computers," devices that seamlessly become part of our day-to-day apparel, yet allow 24/7 connection to the Internet and other computer databases. The interface uses optical projectors in specially engineered glasses, and a small handheld module. Hitachi and Charmed Technologies are already marketing such devices. We're very close to taking the ultimate step toward "seamless" interfacing by direct brain implants.

Astronomer and physicist Robert Jastrow, for example, envisions this in his 1983 book The Enchanted Loom: "A bold scientist will be able to tap the contents of his mind and transfer them into the metallic lattices of a computer… . It can be said that this scientist has entered the computer and now dwells in it. At last the human brain, ensconced in a computer, has been liberated from the weakness of the mortal flesh… . It is in control of its own destiny … housed in indestructible lattices of silicone, and no longer constrained in its span of years … such a life could live forever." Well, at least as long as one can supply the needed batteries or power.

Many scholars are anticipating cyborg and nanotech enhancements as means of forestalling aging, or even pursuing immortality. The possibilities belong mostly in the realm of science fiction right now, but they seem less and less improbable as the years go by.

Join the Dinosaurs!

The ethical implications of nanotechnology are great, but even more troubling is the philosophy of some of its proponents, who subscribe to transhumanism. This is the belief that someday we will re-engineer our natures to such an extent that a posthuman species, or several new species, will be created that are "superior" to homo sapiens.

That we are biological creatures is simply our current status, transhumanists believe, but it is not necessary for defining who we are or who we should be. Bart Kosko, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California, puts it more bluntly in his book Heaven in a Chip (2002): "Biology is not destiny. It was never more than tendency. It was just nature's first quick and dirty way to compute with meat. Chips are destiny."

British roboticist Kevin Warwick put it this way: "I was born human. But this was an accident of fate—a condition merely of time and place." This sounds startingly reminiscent of what nihilist Frederick Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spake Zarathustra: "I teach you the overman. Man is something to be overcome."

Transhumanism is in some ways a new incarnation of gnosticism. It sees the body as simply the first prosthesis we all learn to manipulate. As Christians, we have long rejected the gnostic claims that the human body is evil. Embodiment is fundamental to our identity, designed by God, and sanctified by the Incarnation and bodily resurrection of our Lord. Unlike gnostics, transhumanists reject the notion of the soul and substitute for it the idea of an information pattern.

Katherine Hayles, a professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, says in How We Became Posthuman (1999) that "in the posthuman, there are no essential differences, or absolute demarcations, between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot technology and human goals." She concludes her book with a warning: "Humans can either go gently into that good night, joining the dinosaurs as a species that once ruled the earth but is now obsolete, or hang on for a while longer by becoming machines themselves. In either case … the age of the human is drawing to a close."

Are these ideas the musings of a small band of harmless techno geeks? Unfortunately not. Two summers ago, the National Science Foundation, the National Science and Technology Council, and the Department of Commerce published the proceedings of a December 2001 conference on "Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance." This seminal document is a manifesto for government sponsorship of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science/cybernetics to enhance human beings.

The report sporadically acknowledges that there may be ethical and social concerns with implementing these goals and technologies, yet nowhere does it specifically articulate them. It assumes that ethicists, when involved at all, will simply provide pragmatic justification for the plan, rather than actually raising substantive questions about the underlying philosophy behind the program. On December 2, 2003, President Bush signed into law the 21st Century Nanotechnology Research and Development Act. The bill, as nano news site reported, gives nanotech "a permanent home in the federal government" and assigns nearly $3.7 billion over four years for nano research and development programs.

My hope is that those involved in this research will heed the wisdom of the report of The President's Council on Bioethics released last October, which examines the ethical and social meanings of using biotechnologies for purposes "beyond therapy." It is a statement appropriately skeptical of transhumanist and scientific utopianism. "In wanting to become more than we are, and in sometimes acting as if we were already superhuman or divine, we risk despising what we are and neglecting what we have," the Council admonishes. "In wanting to improve our bodies and our minds using new tools to enhance their performance, we risk making our bodies and minds little different from our tools, in the process also compromising the distinctly human character of our agency and activity. In seeking by these means to be better than we are or to like ourselves better than we do, we risk 'turning into someone else,' confounding the identity we have acquired through natural gift cultivated by genuinely lived experiences, alone and with others. In seeking brighter outlooks, reliable contentment, and dependable feelings of self-esteem in ways that bypass their usual natural sources, we risk flattening our souls, lowering our aspirations, and weakening our loves and attachments." (Read the entire report).

We're All Enhanced
But is there really anything wrong with enhancing our attributes? Each of us engages in various forms of augmentation. We go to school. We train to improve our endurance and agility. We take vitamins. We use corrective lenses, false teeth, and hearing aids.

True. But none of these items and activities seeks to transcend our species' normal capabilities. They are accepted because they merely optimize performance within the natural constraints of homo sapiens.

How about calculators and computers? They augment our ability to obtain, store, retrieve, and process vast amounts of information, more than our brains ever could. But having access to technologies that are separate from ourselves and that we can turn off is quite different from permanent implants, or structural or genetic modifications that can potentially be passed on to subsequent generations.

There are several key questions that our churches and theologians will have to address. Is it appropriate for members of the Body of Christ to engage in alterations that go beyond therapy and are irreversible? Is it just to do so in a world already deeply marked by inequities? What does it mean that our Lord healed and restored in his ministry—never enhanced? Is it significant that the gifts of the Holy Spirit—wisdom, love, patience, kindness—cannot be manufactured by technology? How would the transformation from homo sapiens to techno sapiens affect our identity as bearers of the image of God? If Christians should conclude that such enhancements are not appropriate for them to receive, should they oppose their use by others?

If we do, we can expect severe rejection. Embryonic stem-cell research and cloning exploit other helpless human beings, so they become an ethical problem to many more people. But enhancement technologies may seem unquestionably beneficent since they are used only by those who chose to use them. You cannot deprive people of their right to "better" themselves, especially if it affects only them, right?

The military feels a moral imperative to do whatever is necessary to make sure that each soldier comes home alive and well. If it takes genetic, cybernetic, or nanotechnological modifications to do that, so be it. After all, how could we deny our soldiers the greatest chance of survival?

Market forces will likely push people to undergo enhancements to be competitive in the marketplace. It's already happening. Those with faulty vision cannot be a Navy Seal—unless they undergo irreversible and still risky LASIK eye surgery. It's only a matter of time before members of the armed forces will be required to undergo other forms of augmentation.

Many things are being sold to the public in the name of compassion—but at what price? A quick look at the history of technology shows that for almost every technological "fix," myriad other problems arise. Nuclear power is but one example.

The human lifespan may be expanded, but at what cost to social structures? What will be the effect on employment and retirement? If we alter our bodies with stronger components, what is the cost to our humanity? Although we may not understand the value of our weaknesses, Paul says, even our imperfections give us opportunities (2 Cor. 12:9, Phil. 4:11).

Nano-engineered cybernetic implants may provide us access to vast amounts of information, but will they lead to increased wisdom or knowledge of the Lord?

Cyber connections in the brain are going to be two-way means of communication. This means that the last bastion of privacy—our minds—may no longer be secure. Will such implanted mechanisms force us to be exposed to unwanted images and ideas? We can't even control spam in our current computer networks. Imagine computer viruses that could be engineered to injure brain cells through cybernetic implants!

Remember Sin
Transhumanist philosophy claims that technology can correct the fundamental problems of humankind. As Christians, we know that our elemental problems arise from the corruption of the human heart (Mark 7:21–23).

Sin is real, observable, and unexplained by empirical tools. All technological innovations will not only fail to produce true happiness but also will be corrupted intrinsically by sin. Tools offered to produce liberation will also be used to further tyranny. It has always been so.

But Christians must not become techno-dystopians, suspicious of all new technologies. While technology is not our salvation, neither is it intrinsically evil. Technology has enhanced our ability to show compassion and to spread the gospel. Christians need to be techno-realists, recognizing the potential goods of innovation, but realistically anticipating and restricting its potential harms. This requires a correct understanding of human nature and of God's ultimate plans for our species that only the gospel can provide. Christians must boldly engage in the discussion of these issues, both among themselves and in the public square.

Government policies to deal with the ethical and social consequences of bioengineering do not now exist. But this isn't stopping the researchers or the government. As of the end of October, Congress was estimating that the government would have to spend about $4 billion for nano research over the next four years.

Woody Allen once quipped, "More than at any time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction. Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly."

It is my prayer that the body of Christ, inspired by the Holy Spirit and the gospel's perfect vision for human flourishing, can help us avoid either path. Instead, I pray that we will be able to guide our surrounding culture to a truly human future.

C. Christopher Hook is a hematologist, director of bioethics education for the Mayo Graduate School of Medicine, and chairman of the Mayo Clinical Ethics Council. Hook's comments are solely his own and do not necessarily represent the views of the Mayo Clinic.

Recommended Reading

Bio Engagement: Making a Christian Difference Through Bioethics Today (Eerdmans, 2002) edited by Nigel M. de S. Cameron, Scott E. Daniels, and Barbara J. White

Cutting-Edge Bioethics: A Christian Exploration of Technologies and Trends (Eerdmans, 2002) edited by John F. Kilner, C. Christopher Hook, Diann B. Uustal

Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (Times Books, 2003) by Bill McKibben

Habits of the High Tech Heart: Living Virtuously in the Information Age (Baker, 2002) by Quentin J. Schultze

In Our Image: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Spirit (Fortress, 2002) by Noreen L. Herzfeld

Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (Farrar, Straus, and Giraux, 2002) by Francis Fukuyama

TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information (Three Rivers, 1999) by Erik Davis

Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences (Knopf, 1996) by Edward Tenner

NanoEthics on the Web

www.betterhumans.com

"Connecting people to the future so that they can create it, we explore and advocate the use of science and technology for furthering human progress."

www.bioethics.com
Global information source on bioethics.

www.bioethics.gov/topics/beyond_index.html
"Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness" report by The President's Council on Bioethics.

www.thecbc.org
The Center for Bioethics and Culture.

www.cbhd.org
The Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity.

www.ctns.org
The Center for Theology and Natural Sciences.

www.foresight.org
The home of Foresight Institute whose mission is "preparing for nanotechnology."

www.smalltimes.com
"Big news in small tech." A news magazine.

Copyright © 2003 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.
January 2004, Vol. 48, No. 1, Page 36

From a USA nonconformist who recently visited NZ - here commenting on the article below.

My heart and prayers go out to you and your "soul" mates. I am an outsider looking in, but I have some damaged friends in the ECUSA fiasco, so I need to say something.

Kiwi Anglican "patriots" are clinging tenaciously to a structure that has been horribly undermined. In our (your) minds eye, you recall a more conservative time when things were more as they should be, and then the piece below explained what happened. As I noted to friends the other day, as an outsider, the structure of the Anglican Church seems to prevent needed changes (to appeal to changing demographics) and protects unwanted changes (the rot within). For literally hundreds of years the Anglican church carried on with business as usual until they noticed the falloff in the crowd and membership.

We are admonished that we are not of this world; however, the fatal and very human mistake in trying to deal with this issue was to become more like this world. Again, the results are so sickeningly stated below. It was like a snowball rolling down hill. With a stroke, we wake up and suddenly do not recognize it even as a church any longer.

As a parallel circumstance, there seems to be a repugnance associated with the evangelical movement. Certainly, it is laced with bad seeds (as well).

Nonetheless, it is tremendously dynamic and somewhat self-cleansing AND it is probably the best tool we have in this country (USA) against the demonic spread of secularism, atheism, communism, you name it.

My wonderful world would be a conservative Anglican Church with many conservative traditions and rituals, but with a very strong evangelical heart.

Now it seems to be filled with Screwtape clones in the hierarchy leaving the laity to fend for themselves. What a waste ... what a waste ...


Feature Article
Farewell, Church of England?
By Peter Mullen

As we prepare for our Harvest Festival Services, we see that what's left of the English Church is indistinguishable from a lunatic asylum. Everywhere you peer inside this once refined and educated, lovely and lovable national institution, there is only a mania for self-destruction. How else can you account for church services that compete with pantomime for dramatized idiocy? For example, I recently attended a conference for clergy at a beautiful medieval church in Oxford. It was supposed to be a choral Eucharist but there was no organ music -- only some plinky-plonky stuff on an out-of-tune piano and mindless choruses in the Jesus Goes to Toytown fashion: interminable glum repetition of what was not worth singing once.

Then the Bishop came on and told us that at the laughably misnamed riot called "The Peace" he didn't want us merely to shake hands but to "hug one another"--and not just to hug one another, but to put our arms on our neighbour's shoulders and say three times, "You are everlastingly loved." When, with varying degrees of squeamishness, grown men fawned on one another in this way, the Bishop came on again in full pantomime mode and said, "Not loud enough! Again--louder!" Not one word from the Book of Common Prayer throughout the three-day conference or indeed from any source that might be identified as religious in the traditional sense. And that Bishop is now Archbishop of York.

They have thrown out the Book of Common Prayer and The Authorized Version of the Bible and substituted dumbed-down, politically correct prayers which sound as if they were written by a committee made up of Tony Blair, Karl Marx, and Noddy. I was at a synod for all the London clergy in All Souls, Langham Place. When it was time for the prayers, a female crooner came on the stage. Stage? Stage? But you thought this was supposed to be the church? Don't ask! She warbled syrupy phrases about "race relations" and "those who seek to bring signs of enrichment." Between each petition was the soporific chorus, "Remember, remember." That excruciating service was no anomaly. This is how it is almost everywhere you go in today's Church of England. But are we supposed to turn to these fools for spiritual guidance? And don't look to the next generation either: the giggling theological colleges are run like children's television.

When it comes to Christenings, Weddings, and Funerals, the Church has given up talking to grown-ups and instead produces the sort of touchy-feely guff used in adverts directed at moony adolescents. At the Wedding, for instance, the new official book for every parish, Common Worship, makes the priest pray, "Let them be tender with each other's dreams." I think there should be a rubric in the margin saying, "At this point the congregation shall throw up -- bride's family's side first." At Christenings they have dropped the renunciation of "the devil and all his works" and there is barely a mention of sin. So what is Holy Baptism for ? Only a sentimental prelude to the booze-up and the cake.

No "vile bodies" or "worms" are allowed to contaminate the new, euphemistic funerals. And instead of "Jesus wept" we are given, "Jesus was moved to tears" -- as if he'd just watched the lovers going down in the film Titanic for the umpteenth time. None of this mealy-mouthed, evasive schmaltz is the slightest use to the bereaved, of course. Blessed are they that mourn--but not here. And where the traditional Prayer Book's Holy Communion used to say those unbearably moving holy words "In the same night that he was betrayed," the new book says, "He had supper with his friends." I am not making this up. You couldn't make it up. This is the official worship book of the Church of England. In the face of such blasphemous idiocy, mere satire becomes impossible.
[where does that leave the Kiwi "bible" of the stand-up comic?]

Unbelievably it is supposed that congregations might experience difficulties in comprehending even this sort of baby talk. So the Archbishop's Council has produced an idiots' Guide to Common Worship which enables us to dumb down even lower than Saturday evenings on BBC1. "Compline" becomes "Night Prayer." In case we cannot understand, "O Lord, open thou our lips," the Guide suggests we print at the start of the service, "We say hello!" And "Confession" is retitled, "Doing the dirt on ourselves."

The way modern preachers talk down to congregations is bum-clenchingly embarrassing. Last Christmas I heard one say, "Like us, Mary had to accept that her son would grow up." Is this insight, wisdom, or Woman's Hour? Recently at our church of St. Michael, for the City Service, we had three hundred senior bankers, liverymen, and the Lord Mayor of London in the congregation. Here was a wonderful opportunity for our distinguished visiting preacher to say something inspiring to the movers and shakers in the financial heartlands. All he could come up with was the usual, economically-holier-than-thou politics of envy combined with a vast ignorance of what actually goes on in the Square Mile.

He said, "Money is important--but it's not all-important." Really, the men were too polite to stand up and jeer: their eyes merely glassed over and they dozed for the duration. Afterwards a Master of one of the top twelve liveries came up to me and spoke vehemently, "We know that ! Why didn't he take the trouble to find out that we spend twopercent of our income on wining and dining and the rest of our time in boring meetings deciding how we're going to give the other 98 percent away?"

The whole institution is like a psychotic kindergarten. To this is added a myopic, self-righteous arrogance which allows modern clergy to mistake their failed parroting of 1960s corporatism -- taxation, intervention, regulation -- for prophecy. When they get the opportunity to broadcast, the result is flabbergasting: the other week a Christian minister devoted the whole three minutes of his Thought for the Day to a defense of voodooism. Thought for the Day is regularly used by Anglican bishops and parsons to denigrate the very tradition that has given them their status.

As might be expected of an institution that is intellectually catatonic, its practical policies aren't up to much either. So the CofE. is on the verge of bankruptcy and can no longer afford to pay clergy housing costs. It's well known that the Church Commissioners lost £800 million at the end of the 1980s, but even that was only part of a far greater loss. A generation ago, the Diocesan Boards of Finance were given permission by the Commissioners to sell off thousands of fine old vicarages -- many of these in extensive grounds -- at the bottom of the property market and to re-house the parochial clergy in inferior houses on the new estates of the Seventies and Eighties. The result, of course, is a huge devaluation of the Church's property portfolio. This squandering of historic resources amounts to colossal mismanagement and a betrayal of trust.

On the back, as it were, of this theological, liturgical, spiritual, moral, and financial dereliction, church leaders still contrive to offer us political guidance. I was at a clergy gathering on September 11, 2001, standing in front of a huge TV screen and watching the horror unfold. One senior clergyman turned to me and said, "I hope Bush doesn't retaliate. The West has brought this judgment on itself." I have since met hundreds of clergy who share this misperception, this knee-jerk condemnation of the civilization which has been the cradle of Christian culture for two thousand years. And now Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, effectually blames the West for the attack on New York: "We have something of the freedom to consider whether or not we turn to violence and so are rather different from those who experience their world as leaving no other option." We have heard the same excuses made by senior clergymen after the London tube bombings.

How did this falling off occur? In the early 1960s when I was a young man and a candidate for Ordination, the Church was enjoying something of a revival. The figures for Baptism and Confirmation were all rising steadily along with Sunday congregations. There were more men offering themselves for the priesthood than at any time since before the First World War. So how did the rot set in? There were three main causes: theological, liturgical, and social.

First, the 1960s saw the popularization of radical theology largely through the media of paperback books and television documentary programmes. The biblical
criticism of nineteenth-century theologians such as Strauss and Bauer and the more sensational "demythologizing" method of Rudolf Bultmann were widely disseminated through the popular paperbacks Honest to God, Soundings, Objections to Christian Belief and The Secular Meaning of the Gospel.

Bishop John Robinson previewed his book Honest to God in a front-page article in The Observer newspaper entitled Our Image of God Must Go. Robinson said, "In place of a God who was literally and physically 'up there,' we have substituted a God who is metaphysically 'out there.'" And so the cat was out of the bag -- the idea was put about that traditional belief was no longer possible. God in the secular age was past his sell-by date. Rudolf Bultmann wrote, "It is impossible to believe the miracles and the resurrection in an age of electric light and the wireless." Few seemed to ask, "Why?" -- preferring the radical chic of secular Christianity, a demythologized creed and what Paul Van Buren and Thomas J. J. Altizer described as "the gospel of Christian atheism."

These innovations and fashions may be seen as part of the general sloughing off of traditional habits and ways that characterized the 1960s. The flashy consumerism of the post-war boom at its height -- the Prime Minister's assertion, "You've never had it so good" -- and the widespread contempt for anything that was seen to belong to the old order of deference, respect, hierarchy, and authority--spread into the churches too. The anti-doctrinal, anti-metaphysical mood extended to Christian moral teaching, and the Ten Commandments were derogated as out of date in the climate of act utilitarianism, or "situation ethics," in which it was declared that "All you need is love"--which by coincidence was just what the Beatles were singing in 1963.

The liturgy was next to suffer. W. H. Auden referred to the Book of Common Prayer as the "good luck" of the Church of England and, in the face of its sidelining, asked, "Why spit on our luck?" But spit the authorities did, introducing new rites and ceremonies wholesale. This is not the place for a detailed criticism of the new services, except to draw attention to their main result: they were so many and various that soon no one knew any prayers by heart. The luck of the Church had meant that Anglo-Catholics such as Newman and Pusey, evangelicals and low churchmen like Kingsley and Charles Simeon and the broad churchmen Maurice and Inge had all been happy to use the Book of Common Prayer. At a stroke this cornerstone of Anglican devotion was removed and usage in the Church came to resemble a new Babel. Suddenly there were four or five versions of the Lord's Prayer. The result for Christian education, particularly of the young, was catastrophic.

Finally, the Church accepted wholesale the new social agenda of permissiveness. The Bishops supported the lifting of the ban on Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover. Bishops and other leading churchmen urged their congregations to give support to the proposed new Parliamentary Bills to liberalize abortion, divorce, and homosexuality. In all these cases the coercive procedure adopted was the same: a perceived evil was identified, the "reforming" Bill was declared to be the remedy, and the predicted consequences were promised to be rosy. It is important to understand that here again were the same situation ethics which had lately become the moral code of the Established Church. The old belief that certain actions were prohibited by God's Commandments was simply passé -- something that "modern man come of age" could safely leave behind.

In the case of the legalization of abortion it was argued that this would put an end to the sordid, life-threatening operations described as "back street." What was not envisaged -- or at least left undeclared -- was that the legalization and medicalization of abortion would lead to today's figure of 190,000 embryos, in Britain alone, ripped untimely from the womb merely as a form of contraception. Homosexual law reform was said to be humane and necessary in order to prevent the criminalization and blackmail of men who shared a bed. The terms of the Act decriminalized homosexual practices "between consenting adults in private." "Between" meant two; "adults" meant twenty-one; "private" meant behind locked doors. It did not mean what it means now: hordes of screaming sexual exhibitionists with painted faces parading their sexuality like a carnival, homosexual "activists" themselves doing the blackmailing by attempting to "out" public figures -- including a former Archbishop of York; the love that once dared not speak its name is now yelling at the top of its voice in high camp in the main parts of British towns and cities.

The depth of the pit into which the C. of E. has fallen is revealed in the fact that most Anglican lay people no longer recognize the modern Church as bearing any resemblance to the institution in which they were brought up. But the people in the pews are powerless against the torrent of ignorant and arrogant "modernization" thrust upon them by the uneducated new generation of clergy who are in thrall to the most tawdry aspects of popular culture.

Perhaps it is not altogether too late? The Church has been at death's door before. And the Lord did say that the gates of hell would not prevail. The gates of hell are having a damned good try. But it will take a miracle to revive the Church now. Perhaps at the Harvest Festival we might implore in the words of the Psalm, Let God arise and let his enemies be scattered.
Always remembering that the enemies are within.

Peter Mullen, Rector of St. Michael's, Cornhill, is Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.

Men

Skyplane will catch fire over Los Gatos Canyon when The Costa Mesa Conservative Keeud reads this. Flames will burst up thru the roof of his house and ignite a passing load of deportees. Not only will we have boilover - we will have ignition!

Just make sure the Harley isn't damaged. :-]

R

Friday, September 2nd, 2005

Dear Mr. Bush:

Any idea where all our helicopters are? It's Day 5 of Hurricane Katrina and
thousands remain stranded in New Orleans and need to be airlifted. Where on
earth could you have misplaced all our military choppers? Do you need help
finding them? I once lost my car in a Sears parking lot. Man, was that a
drag.

Also, any idea where all our national guard soldiers are? We could really
use them right now for the type of thing they signed up to do like helping
with national disasters. How come they weren't there to begin with?

Last Thursday I was in south Florida and sat outside while the eye of
Hurricane Katrina passed over my head. It was only a Category 1 then but it
was pretty nasty. Eleven people died and, as of today, there were still
homes without power. That night the weatherman said this storm was on its
way to New Orleans. That was Thursday! Did anybody tell you? I know you
didn't want to interrupt your vacation and I know how you don't like to get
bad news. Plus, you had fundraisers to go to and mothers of dead soldiers to
ignore and smear. You sure showed her!

I especially like how, the day after the hurricane, instead of flying to
Louisiana, you flew to San Diego to party with your business peeps. Don't
let people criticize you for this -- after all, the hurricane was over and
what the heck could you do, put your finger in the dike?

And don't listen to those who, in the coming days, will reveal how you
specifically reduced the Army Corps of Engineers' budget for New Orleans
this summer for the third year in a row. You just tell them that even if you
hadn't cut the money to fix those levees, there weren't going to be any Army
engineers to fix them anyway because you had a much more important
construction job for them -- BUILDING DEMOCRACY IN IRAQ!

On Day 3, when you finally left your vacation home, I have to say I was
moved by how you had your Air Force One pilot descend from the clouds as you
flew over New Orleans so you could catch a quick look of the disaster. Hey,
I know you couldn't stop and grab a bullhorn and stand on some rubble and
act like a commander in chief. Been there done that.

There will be those who will try to politicize this tragedy and try to use
it against you. Just have your people keep pointing that out. Respond to
nothing. Even those pesky scientists who predicted this would happen because
the water in the Gulf of Mexico is getting hotter and hotter making a storm
like this inevitable. Ignore them and all their global warming Chicken
Littles. There is nothing unusual about a hurricane that was so wide it
would be like having one F-4 tornado that stretched from New York to
Cleveland.

No, Mr. Bush, you just stay the course. It's not your fault that 30 percent
of New Orleans lives in poverty or that tens of thousands had no
transportation to get out of town. C'mon, they're black! I mean, it's not
like this happened to Kennebunkport. Can you imagine leaving white people on
their roofs for five days? Don't make me laugh! Race has nothing -- NOTHING
-- to do with this!

You hang in there, Mr. Bush. Just try to find a few of our Army helicopters
and send them there. Pretend the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast
are near Tikrit.

Yours,

Michael Moore

New Orleans: another Bush victim

The tragedy of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was both a huge natural disaster, and a product of poverty, racism and imperialism. The answer is a new American revolution

Around the world people gazed in astonishment. At first it was at the force of nature. But then something even more incredible became clear. The world's richest and most powerful state had been unable to evacuate the population of New Orleans, or to come to their rescue. People were told to go to the Superdome, but they found no food, no water, no sanitation.

Broadcasters described scenes "like something in the Third world". One American reporter said: "a foreign dictator would have responded better". Cuba, a tiny and poor country by comparison, was hit by category five Hurricane Ivan last year but 1.3 million people were evacuated with no loss of life. In the United States ten thousand people may have lost their lives. How was t his possible?

The answer is class and race: and behind them both - capitalism.

New Orleans is a city with a population of 500,000 of which 67 per cent are black and 30 per cent live below the poverty line. The 100,000 residents trapped in the city were almost entirely African Americans, who had no way of leaving.

The government and the authorities called on people to leave but then left it to those with cars to do so. The bus station was closed. They could have used the rail system and the school buses to evacuate the poor. In fact, it took five days for any serious supplies to arrive in the city and transport sufficient to start moving out survivors.

Racism and private property

Two days after the hurricane, the press was filled with stories of looting. "Forget survivors, shoot the looters" the Daily Express headlined it. Fifteen hundred police were re-directed from rescue operations to anti-looting. Private property was more important tha n the lives of tens of thousands of poor Americans.

Images were repeated over and over of young black people, emerging from flood- damaged stores, goods in hand. Did it not occur to them that these people "looting" were often getting food and water? Where else should they find them?

The hysteria whipped up by the media served to stigmatise the victims of the disaster as somehow undeserving, thus covering the Bush administration's woefully inadequate response.

Unsurprisingly, many poor black people, with no water and no food, armed themselves before setting out to find some, To the racist white police force any black person in an abandoned shop would automatically be deemed a looter and shot. An unknown number were.

War on Iraq

Plans have been drawn up to strengthen the defences of the New Orleans and the Gulf coast since Hurricane Betsy struck in 1965. But successive governments refused to spend the money required.

A hurricane of simi lar strength to Katrina had been expected for the past three years. In 2004, the army, which maintains the flood defences, requested $11 million for hurricane protection in the New Orleans area. It was allotted $5.5 million. In 2005, it requested $22.5 million, and received $5.7 million. For 2006, the Bush administration offered just $2.9 million.

Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, said in June 2004: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq."

Meanwhile, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has been systematically downgraded, and resources shifted to the "war on terrorism". The security of Americans in their own homeland was sacrificed to robbing Iraqis of any security in theirs.

Congress has promised $10.5 billion, but this only covers emergency relief. There is nothing for the rebuilding of any of the storm-devastated region, an area lar ger than Britain. The US meanwhile spends on average $5.4 billion a month on the war in Iraq.

Global Warming

A special posting on Time magazine website just before the arrival of the hurricane said the following:

"From 1995 to 1999, a record 33 hurricanes struck the Atlantic basinŠOne especially sobering study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that hurricane wind speeds have increased about 50 per cent in the past 50 years. And since warm oceans are such a critical ingredient in hurricane formation, anything that gets the water warming more could get the storms growing worse. Global warming, in theory at least, would be more than sufficient to do that. While the people of New Orleans may not see another hurricane for years, the next one they do see could make even Katrina look mild."

In fact the BBC reports that it will take eight months to fully restore the levees in New Orleans and other cities and two further hurricanes are very p ossible within the next four months.

George Bush is not only the president who slashed state spending on flood defences, not only the man who is spending billions on Iraq, he is also the man who refused to ratify the Kyoto agreement to cut carbon emissions, and vetoed any serious discussion of it at the G8 in Gleneagles

- -
Whangarei Peace and Justice Newsgroup
George Skuse

KATRINA ROTTEN TO THE CORP.

EVAN JINES, COUNTERPOUNCH: The overnight transformation of a vibrant social ecology that was New Orleans into a post-historic wasteland has led to an explosion of opinion. Could it have been prevented, or at least the damage inhibited?

It transpires that there were fears of the prospect of this event and that there were attempts to head it off by preventative action. But the necessary funds had been cut, siphoned off to pay for the spreading of freedom and democracy in Iraq.

Most of us discover for the first time under what makeshift conditions the fabulous city of New Orleans had carved out its pulsating livelihood. A city sitting below sea level, hemmed in by Old Man Mississippi and the higher Lake Pontchartrain (still in the lingo of the impecunious French from whom the Yanks picked up a bargain after 1803 for a mere $15 million) on the other side.
This is a story of the confluence of some gargantuan currents. The long term victory of man over nature; the short term arrogance, criminality and criminal neglicence of a junta in office, and the long term revenge of nature over man.
In the US, the long term ascendancy of man over nature is embodied in one institution in particular --- the US Army Corps of Engineers. This body keeps appearing in the stories.

In short, the Army Corps asked for some dough to patch up a city under obvious threat, and Washington deemed that there were higher priorities.

But who or what is this thing called the Army Corps of Engineers? Below I reproduce a potted history, written some years ago for the edification of American engineering students.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is an institution unique in American history. The Corps is of interest not merely because of its size (it is the largest engineering and construction organization in the world), but because it presents a significant anomaly --- how could a country pervaded by a culture of 'free enterprise' and civic autonomy sustain an arm of the military with substantial domestic responsibilities for activities of a social and economic character? The history of the Corps provides a 'window' into the complex development of the US itself.

The United States Army Corps of Engineers had its origins in 1775 as a vehicle for erecting the physical infrastructure of war. It was permanently organized in 1802 to provide such facilities on a continuing basis. After 1824, the Corps' role gradually expanded into civil works projects. Internal waterways were the arteries of domestic commerce. Their spatial expanse and the multiplicity of their functions and associated problems gave them an intrinsically public character.

Population growth and economic development meant an inevitable expansion of government involvement, and gradually the federal government assumed greater responsibilities. As early as 1824, the Supreme Court declared that federal authority to regulate commerce extended to interstate navigation. The Corps was assigned responsibility for waterway management as a matter of course. The young country was similar to that of France, whose corps of engineers developed military and civic infrastructure as a matter of public duty.

The U.S. Corps and West Point (from whose top graduates Corps personnel have been sourced) were both started with the assistance of French engineers. Much early American engineering was 'French' both in its conceptual orientation and highly theoretical training, and in its culture of civil works being overseen by state officials for the broader public good.

The massive Mississippi system presented the major problems and the major arena of activity, and of conflict over the Corps' role. Few non-engineers have ever confronted the scale and complexity of the technical problems that had to be solved to 'tame' the Mississippi system for large-scale navigation and dense settlement of its hinterland.

The Corps' monopoly on advice and management of water resources was increasingly challenged in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The number of educational institutions increased dramatically, and the number of formally-trained engineers grew exponentially. Rapid industrial development fostered a growing private demand for engineers, a demand that was partly met by engineers with a British-style 'learning on the job' training.

Yet a steady stream of legislation decreed continuing public involvement in water management. Congress also dictated that the Corps continue to be the central instrument for this process. After 1910, the Corps was permitted to hire civilians to manage its growing list of projects, but the strong culture (born of an elitism and meritocratic hiring practices) was carried over from its military ancestry.

Initially concerned primarily with survey work, the central formal responsibility of the Corps became the 'navigability' of waterways. Inevitably, multiple inter-related responsibilities were acquired. With each step of the federal government's pragmatic acquisition of greater influence over the nation's economic life, the Corp's enhanced role followed.

Important steps in this process were the post-Civil War Republican Party's assertive action on civil works programs to hasten industrial development; the influence of turn-of-the-century Progressive Movement politics that stimulated 'multi-purpose' waterway policies (flood control, hydropower, water supply, etc.); the post-World War I demand for electric generating capacity; and the 1930s propensity for public
works projects for unemployment relief, as on the massive Tennessee
Valley Authority hydroelectric scheme.

The threat of total war resulted in the Corps being handed the organisational responsibility for development of the atomic bomb. The Corp's Brigadier-General Leslie Groves was put in charge of the Manhattan Project, dictating deadlines to the physicist geniuses underneath him.

Inevitably, because of its size, experience and military roots, the Corps also became an instrument of U.S. foreign economic policy, designing and overseeing construction projects overseas --- involvement in the construction of the Panama Canal was symbolic of this role.

In spite of this expansion, flood control came to be the Corps' dominant domestic responsibility. Expanded responsibility often came after a major disaster (as in 1927 and 1935), which stimulated a pragmatic Congressional response. By the 1940s, multi-purpose dam construction came to be a major part of Corps activity.

Nevertheless, the Corps generally remained narrowly focused on projects --- ports, bridges, dams, etc. Even in terms of flood control, the Corps long remained attached to levee construction and opposed to dams as the preferable form of control.

The Corps has survived the criticisms of regional planners, who claimed that river basins were an arbitrary basis for infrastructure development, of social planners who wanted to incorporate social indicators into development planning, of economists who wanted more rigorous cost-benefit evaluations of the planning process, and of political scientists who wanted to imposes rigorous rational methods of administration. The continuity in the Corps' focus is probably driven by a deeply entrenched 'engineering' culture, but it has also been facilitated by a utopian dimension in the ambitions of its critics.

Post-World War II population growth meant continuing demand for Corps projects, and Congress used the Corps for developmental purposes. By the 1970s, Corps activity had been slowed --- by procedural changes in project planning, by federal budgetary constraints that led to impasses over cost-sharing, and by community opposition to Corps priorities.

There had always been community conflicts over land use, but environmental concerns now loomed large on the political agenda. Symbolic of the era was the 1969 National Environmental Policy Act, which among other things required all federal agencies to consider the environmental implications
of their activities.

The Corps revised its decision-making and consultative processes and its project evaluation techniques. Ironically, the Corps itself became a key instrument in the furthering of environmental concerns. The River and Harbor Act of 1899 (the 'Refuse Act') gave discretion to the Secretary of the Army (effectively the Corps) over the discharge or deposit of refuse.

The Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972 reinforced this role; and several judicial decisions in the early 1970s effectively gave the Corps jurisdiction over the entire water mass of the United States, placing wetlands protection within the ambit of the Corps' responsibilities.

The use and control of water resources has been an essential part of
American economic life and the Corps of Engineers has taken a central role in the development and management of those resources. In a country so profoundly imbued with an ethos of 'free enterprise,' it is salutary to discover that an arm of government has played such an important role in American development. That role has continued because governments and communities have continued to designate key resources as possessing a public or social character. The Corps as a public institution has retained legitimacy as a vehicle to develop and manage such resources.

That was then; this is now.
The Army Corps of Engineers is the quintessential embodiment of its time. And that time may have been extended with the judicious allocation of resources to continue the project in this most vulnerable of human settlements. But judiciousness is a non-existent commodity in the current administration. As a consequence, the Army Corps of Engineers' time has come.

The history of the Corps is invaluable because it brings out a salient feature --- the entire river system, a mighty edifice, has been cajoled against its will into serving its ravenous human overlords. The catastrophe at the mouth of the system is a symptom of the intolerable pressures on the system in its entirety.
One statistic stands out above the details of the human suffering. The water temperature in the Gulf of Mexico is reported as being 30 degrees Centigrade. This is the mark of nature's long term revenge over man. [ September 2, 2005 ]

From: act@parliament.govt.nz

What is Cultural Liberalism?

Address To Barnardos Forum, Wellington, 15 October 2001
Tuesday 19 Feb 2002
Stephen Franks
Speeches -- Governance & Constitution -- The Liberal Project
(view HTML version at: http://www.act.org.nz/item.jsp?id=22253 )

This could be about an Arts Policy for ACT. We could discuss lots of
interesting questions. Such as was the virgin in a condom art? What
is the role of the State in relation to people just out to shock? Is
the `artists on the dole' scheme a vital plank in nation building?
Should artists who can't persuade anyone to pay for their work, get
something from every worker for time in the sun to establish our
national identity?

Those questions are about the froth of culture and that is not the
subject of this address. Culture determines whether we want to live
here or not, whether this is Godzone, or another Argentina. It
determines whether we are rich or poor. In the longer run it will
determine whether we have to guard our borders against clamouring
migrants, or try a `Berlin wall' to keep our valuable people in.

Cultures are not all equally valuable to those who live them. They
are not all equally deserving of respect. Continual judgment of
cultural attributes is vital. Any vibrant people should be vigorously
debating changes and trying to promote or stop changes in their
cultures. They must have competing visions of how best to behave.

If we are lucky the competition to influence culture will be courteous
and reasoned. Normally it will be passionate and often illogical. In
a cursed or decaying country the cultural contest will be suppressed,
or conducted by force through grabs for the coercive powers of the
State.

I believe we are presently cursed by acquiescence in cultural
engineering. And cultural relativism puts us at serious risk of
decaying.

Aggressive cultural relativism is the mischief. It tells us we are
deeply and inherently strangers to each other, but not permitted to
act as strangers prudently do with each other.

It is not just a fashionable refusal to make comparative judgments.
Anti-discrimination law may punish those who risk giving practical
effect to adverse views of another's culture. Political correctness
is enforced by the power to give or withhold promotion and State
patronage. Normal debate over culture is suppressed. Our traditions
of incorruptible secular government are threatened. Our rule of law
is undermined, and with it security of person and property. And by
telling us we are strangers to each other state enforced race
consciousness diminishes our wish and our capacity to trust and feel
for each other. Instead of debating to persuade, we now fight for
control of State power, to decree a respect that is not earned.

To see how far we have sunk in a few years we must explore values at
the very core of New Zealand's inheritance of liberty. I will argue a
paradox. I want to persuade you that the liberal state has to be
tolerant, yet as true or classical liberals we must be more
intolerant. Liberty is state tolerance and that liberty is eroding
with political correctness. Worse, political correctness, having
stolen the clothes of liberalism, is now forcing us to tolerate the
intolerable. The very cause of tolerance - of liberty, is destroyed
when private individuals are prohibited from discriminating against
what they believe to be falsehood and evil.
* If tolerance means a child can be beaten for years, in the end to
death, without an absolute determination to hold accountable those
who do that, the liberal society loses its claim to superiority
over a society that will punish those responsible for such crime.
* If we only switch channels on a story of public funds going to
political cronies or clients of a ruling elite in the name of
"redressing inequality", core political virtue is in peril -
honest stewardship becomes a mug's game.
* When we tolerate a welfare system that makes bludging a better
choice than working, indifferent to whether the beneficiary is a
decent person down on his luck, or a vicious predator on the
community, liberal concern for the poor becomes a vice.

This lecture is about the values that are at the root of our culture's
most remarkable achievement. Freedom under the rule of law. Freedom
with responsibility under law that protects ordinary people from abuse
of power by rulers.

This lecture has to explore the values that sustain freedom. Freedom
was so radical and rare and eventually powerful it became a brand
worth trying to steal. The few peoples and nations who developed that
brand ended up building our world, achieving more than humans had ever
achieved before or even dreamed of achieving.

But freedom was always counter-intuitive. It offends the
father/family model of the tribe or state. For most of humanity, for
nearly all of time, it has been a moral right if not a duty for a
virtuous ruler to use his power to compel his followers to be virtuous
as he sees it. Now once again that view prevails. Freedom is
mistaken for licence by both its supporters and it enemies. ACT has
to talk of `choice' because political reactions tell us the word
freedom scarcely means anything any more. It just a blurred sound in
the phrase "freedom and democracy". Both words have just become
synonyms for "things we like".

Our respect for the individual free will underlies individual rights
and more importantly insistence on individual responsibilities. They
are ACT's intellectual inheritance. I want to reconnect us to the
true power and meaning of the word "liberal". I want to contrast that
with the forces moving within the cloak of "identity" politics. These
forces grope for the levers of political power claiming authority as
representatives of races, or minority groups, or classes.

If I could I would drive out the squatters who have usurped that word
`liberal' and made it a synonym for `collectivist'. They want to rule
by separation, building the pressures that divide, by getting people
to see themselves as victims, put upon groups deprived of
entitlements. They promise privilege, setting old against young,
women against men, Maori against pakeha, and poor against rich. They
create guilt then trade on it, turning against them the decency and
tolerance of those who meet the cost of these privileges.

What Did Liberalism Mean?

So unadorned `liberal' has gone. It has been stolen. I am not going
to spend time arguing derivations or legitimacy. It doesn't matter
now whether the takeover by the collectivists is unfair.

We can add `classical' to distinguish the liberals whose principles
and beliefs and policies cherish freedom, from those who trample it.

So this lecture will canvass three things, first what liberal meant
classically, secondly what has happened to it, and thirdly what we
need to do to reassert the principles it stood for. What `liberal'
meant, and what is has become will be explored together by reference
to current events.

You can think of this section of this address as a sort of bleary
survey of the morning after Woodstock. Perhaps a more apt image would
be wondering how to clean up Moutua Gardens while the tangata whenua
are still camping there.

President Bush recited liberalism's creed in his January "Axis of
Evil" State of the Union address. He described certain "non
negotiable demands of human dignity" "The rule of law, limits on the
power of the State, respect for women, private property, free speech,
equal justice and religious tolerance." Pretty much the same list as
was described at greater length and more elegantly nearly two
centuries ago by John Stuart Mill.

All (other than equal justice) are primarily to protect and require
tolerance. And all those were aimed at the State, against the
likelihood of intolerance by people wielding the police powers of the
State. The architects of our freedom did not expect or require or
even want compulsory tolerance from others. They just wanted the rule
of a tolerant law. The law would protect everyone from violent
coercion and expropriation.

The Rule of Law

The rule of law seems so elementary. Yet most of us, including
lawyers, have forgotten what it is. Younger lawyers have never
learnt. Many think it means making sure everyone obeys the rules. In
practice it may have come to mean the rule of lawyers.

The essence was once not that the people must obey rules, but that
rulers must obey rules. Rulers could not do anything using their
powers that was not expressly authorised. The rule of law tradition
inherited from England had clear distinctions between law and
morality. The State could enforce rules designed to stop people
harming others, but it could not and should not try to demand that
they respect others. The law was to protect individual person and
property, but not their feelings; nor was it to try to protect them
from their own foolishness.

This was axiomatic, for freedom means nothing if it is not freedom to
do things the majority consider wrongheaded or undesirable, so the
classical liberal inheritance was of a rule of law that necessarily
leaves a large realm for the operation of competing custom, morality,
etiquette and courtesy. Without these supplements to law, liberty
would become intolerable licence.

Liberals were free traders, believing it was wrong to expropriate the
fruits of toil by preventing adults contracting as they wish. They
believed in the sanctity or security of contract.

The "market place of ideas" was a natural phrase for our forebears to
describe the competition between cultures, they saw cultures as
distinguished by good ideas or bad, or good and better.

For New Zealanders the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990 embodies
many of these fundamental elements of classical liberalism and the
rule of law.

Property Rights

But NZBORA had one great and telling omission. The drafters funked on
property rights. This is telling because it shows what an empty husk
was the understanding of liberty of Sir Geoffrey Palmer and the New
Zealand parliamentarians who proclaimed it as a Bill of Rights. There
are no conceptions of classical liberalism or even fundamental rights
from our forbears, which omitted rights to hold and enjoy private
property. Liberty does not work if the State or your neighbours can
enter your property, or take your property or your use of your
property whenever they feel their interests are more pressing than
yours.

When the Treaty of Waitangi was signed, the Englishman's home was his
castle. For Maori this was a primary reason to sign, to secure
enforcement of rights of property as an end to a ghastly era of civil
war. The war had extended for 30 years. Probably one third of the
population had been slaughtered, many in circumstances far more
dreadful than anything we have seen in Bosnia or Rwanda. Land title
was needed for trade.

Tino rangatiratanga, assured in the Treaty was, I believe, no more and
no less than a description of the sovereignty each property owner
exercised over his own land and property under English law.

The Treaty underscored that its tino rangatiratanga were for "the
chiefs, the sub-tribes, and all the people of New Zealand".
Accordingly it is wrong to see property rights as reserving the
existing sovereignty of the chiefs. Tino rangatiratanga was assured
to all Maori. It was a description of English views of property
rights, protecting equally the ploughman in his field and the lord in
his castle.

Perhaps all New Zealanders could regain this assurance if Maori
enforce it as a Treaty right. But until we repeal the RMA's contempt
for property rights our land tenure is a kind of serfdom to the petty
tyrants who use local politics and the levers of local government to
satisfy their urges to tell others what to do with their land.

Property rights were bounded of course. Maori knew that tribal
warfare would be suppressed, though one chief was disappointed four
years later when Governor Gray did not answer his call to help him put
down and recapture rebellious and escaping slaves. Comments at the
time show they knew the English legal system would supersede their
authority but uphold property rights.

Equality before the Law

Equality before the law was and is fundamental. Despite equality as a
slogan in the laws left across Europe by Napoleon, embedded equality
before the law was a distinctive achievement of English law. The law
that Maori were offered and accepted was expressly to treat them the
same as all other British subjects. There was an internal conflict in
the Treaty with the Crown's pre-emptive rights to buy land. This
exception was a mixed blessing, urged by missionaries to prevent
unscrupulous traders, and rapacious chiefs from depriving people of
their land. But later it meant Maori could not realise the premium
they should have received in direct sales to settlers.

Equality is now unblushingly treated by the current Government as
negotiable. When Annette King's new political District Health Boards
were told by their Bill to give priority status to Maori, both in
governance and in rights to treatment I was reminded of how far we've
come since Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice reminder of our common
humanity. Shylock's defence said it all about race discrimination in
health.

"Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions,
senses, affections, passions, fed with the same food, hurt with the
same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means,
warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is?
If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh?
If you poison us, do we not die?"

Continuing domination of nurse education by `cultural safety'
commissars has scandalised the public. There are racists in
Government who do not care if Maori are treated by witch doctors not
real doctors.

Last year the Justice and Electoral Select Committee considered a bill
to give racially segregated electoral rolls and racial voting in the
Bay of Plenty regional council. Only two local authorities made
submissions against it. Local Government New Zealand and the Society
of Local Government Managers told us the paramount consideration for
elections was the Treaty of Waitangi.

Can you believe this? The peak body of our elected local government,
and their senior executives, telling us the Treaty prevailed over
considerations such as ensuring a free and fair ballot, one person one
vote and even integrity and secrecy of the ballot. When questioned as
to what their statement meant they could not tell us.

Canterbury can be proud of Sir Kerry Burke. He appeared before our
Select Committee with strong and principled opposition. The only
other Council with the courage to dissent from sickly establishment
obeisance to racism was the Southland District Council.

Now the segregation proposed by that Bill is in the Local Government
Reform Bill, to be extended throughout the country. The most common
rationale is that without a race-defined electoral roll Maori cannot
be guaranteed representation, if elected Maori councillors offend
pakeha voters. The counter argument seems to cut no ice - that one
function of democracy is to find candidates who must maintain a
sufficiently broad appeal to maintain a majority vote.

The rationale that most shocked me in 2001 came from Manu Paul of the
New Zealand Maori Council. Supported by a prominent Rotorua Maori
leader they argued that Maori had to be around the Council table, when
contracts were being let. They saw Council membership as vital to
getting a share of the spoils of government for Maori contractors.

I could understand better the other thrust of their submission, that
council decisions were devaluing Maori land. Maori were the biggest
landholders in the region. They argued that they needed to be at the
Council in order to protect their interest as landholders when Council
was making land use decisions.

If only they had instead tried to uphold their Treaty rights to
private property ownership and enjoyment. They would have been
serving the interests of us all, Maori and pakeha.

The Local Government Reform Bill requires Local Authorities to have a
plan for remitting rates for Maori. In effect of course this means a
plan for spreading the share of taxes for people with Maori genes onto
their non-Maori neighbours. Only in Christchurch does there appear to
have been any public debate on this matter. Thanks to Denis Hampton
and to some other vigilant people at least the Letters column in the
Press has shown that there is an appreciation of the principles at
stake.

Criminal Justice

There is one dreadful kind of race equality before the law. Maori
numbers in prison equal the numbers of offenders from all other ethnic
backgrounds. Last year a Christchurch resident called to tell me how
sick he felt attending the opening of a new prison unit. Most of the
proceedings were conducted in Maori but one elder offered English
words along the lines "Thank you for inviting us here. It is good to
know our mokopuna are going to feel comfortable here".

Should they not have been appalled by the invitation - ashamed? They
should have wanted their mokopuna to hate the place, to want to be out
and never come back.

The role of tikanga Maori in our Corrections system is one of the
unexplored hypocrisies with which justice is now riddled, as a result
of Treaty worship. The Corrections Department is rolling out what it
calls Integrated Offender Management. Every prisoner will eventually
be assessed for a personally tailored programme of "researched"
rehabilitative or reintegrative measures.

Meanwhile Maori focus units are opening in prisons throughout New
Zealand.

I have no doubt that many of them do excellent work. Where they are
established by charismatic and inspiring people with a commitment to
transforming wasted lives, the inspiration works. But these are not
"researched" techniques. No work has been done to establish that
there is anything particular about Maori culture or training in Maori
martial arts that is likely to reduce offending over the longer term.
Experienced Prison and Probation Service officers and others have to
pay lip service to the view that there is something transcendent about
Maori culture. Ordinary rules and tests and requirements are
suspended.

This is not an idle concern. At one level I can say "whatever works,
lets welcome it". But if we are dishonest about what it is that is
working we head for disaster. We will try to duplicate the results
and fail.

The risks have started to mature. We are really depending on the
efforts of outstanding people, while pretending that there is
something intrinsic in the culture being embedded in these offenders.

In December last year a prison officer in the Waikeria Prison Maori
Focus Unit was worried about a proposed 6 prisoner dive trip. They
were to go hundreds of kilometres to a seaside marae to collect the
Unit's Christmas kai moana. Some were seriously violent criminals.
He was concerned that the marae was at the centre of a large dope
growing area, that one of the people on the escapade was the son of a
marae leader of doubtful role model value, and that the supervision
could not enforce the Focus Unit rule that prisoners stay clear of
drugs and alcohol.

What did the Unit boss do? She called off the trip, telling the
inmate rünanga (committee) in writing that the officer's objection was
the reason and that he had said the Marae elder concerned as "a
drunk".

The responsible officer's career may be over. There is thought to be
a contract out on him.

Why did the manager give copies of the statement to the inmate
rünanga? It seems it was to curry favour. They are running the
`asylum'.

Freedom of Religion

Religious toleration was not long established in the middle of the
19th century. It was not recorded in the Treaty, but Governor Hobson
gave an express assurance of toleration, to the fury of some of the
missionaries. Signing the Treaty was halted by Maori at the urging of
Bishop Pompallier, until Hobson had indicated whether Roman
Catholicism would be suppressed. He undertook that Maori "ritenga" or
rites were to be equally "protected" along with Wesleyan and Roman
beliefs.

The question of whether we would have an established church was then
resolved in New Zealand by the Church Extension Ordinance of the
British Secretary of State for the Colonies in 1843. We started out
with a State that was at least tolerant in matters of religion even if
it was not secular. But we did not have the explicit separation
stipulated by that marvellous reflection of liberalism, the US
Constitution.

Even so, tension between Catholicism and Protestantism gave us a range
of protections for secularism. In provisions that seem quaint now,
free and secular education was made part of the law, by strict
patrolling of rules that prevented sectarianism and political bias in
the State education system.

This does mean that religious tolerance has gone unthreatened. Here
in Christchurch the Salvation Army was harried in the 19th century
under bylaws passed expressly for that purpose. In the 1960s there
was a serious attempt to ban Scientology. There are relics of the
implicit assumption that New Zealand is a Christian state, for example
in the prayer with which the Speaker begins the Parliamentary sessions
every day.

Today, however, a sinister cult of "partnership worship" has infected
many organs, government, schools, universities, and even hospitals.

Belief in the cult is enough to excuse superstition, cronyism,
aristocracy, abuse of office, and incompetence. Though the cult has
been given the backing of the coercive powers of the State, and local
authorities must also support it, its beliefs and purposes have never
been openly debated in Parliament or even on state radio.

The cult believes that "partnership" rights and duties trump all
traditional civic virtues. After conversion to the cult certain
principles become outdated, such as - one person one vote,
appointments on merit instead of status or identity or connections,
and rules against nepotism and exploitation of office. They are seen
as mere evidence of mono-cultural arrogance.

Notions of a secular state, rules against conflicts of interest,
respect for private property and equality before the law, even
individual accountability are treated as quaint relics of a fuddy
duddy era.

The cult obliges people to pretend to have faith. They must pretend
to knowledge no one has. I believe more than 80 statutes require
adherence to principles of the Treaty of Waitangi. There is no
legislative statement of what those principles are.

Innumerable Government publications refer to them. Yet when the Prime
Minister was asked for a statement of the principles in Parliament on
two separate days in February, after 4 hours of prior notice, she was
unable to point to any. She offered a statement of principles for
settling Treaty claims, but was at pains to say that was not the same
thing as a statement of the principles of the Treaty.

She was stunned the first day when I produced a copy of a document
called "Principles for Crown Action on the Treaty of Waitangi"
published by the Labour Government in 1989.

No answer could be provided when the question was repeated the next
day. But the 1989 statement was then mocked as "something produced by
Lange".

Great leaps of faith are required to understand how these unknowable
principles come to mean a duty on the Crown to actively subsidise and
promote Maori broadcasting, or a right for Maori to claim ownership
(and naturally royalty entitlements) in respect of plants and bugs
which have been in New Zealand for millennia before Maori and which
will no doubt be in New Zealand for millennia after we have all passed
on.

The cult has a tap into the Treasury. It pays its priests well, so
well that many otherwise productive people are drawn into developing
the beliefs of this cult - inventing onerous new obligations and way
of showing piety as they go.

Last year we had the spectacle of the New Zealand Government solemnly
lifting tapu to exorcise evil spirits in our embassies around the
world.

The Royal Commission on Genetic Modification reverentially went about
New Zealand holding hui. The subject was science so recent and so
arcane that few scientists have a confident grasp of it. In truly
laughable passages the Commission solemnly recorded the signs and
portents of these hui, including a bird flitting from rafter to
rafter, as showing special significance. They urged the Government to
make all haste in ensuring Maori were put in a position where they
could exercise their special guardianship and express their exclusive
spirituality in relation to indigenous flora and fauna. Apparently
these cultural requirements will be satisfied by conferring modern
entitlement to lucrative property ownership.

So New Zealanders, without knowing it, last year saw a new religion
growing. When the Royal Commission set out, few Maori had heard of
genetic modification. By the time they had finished it had become an
article of faith, asserted especially by those to whom there will be
political profit in it, that Maori spirituality was outraged by the
prospect of mixing genes.

There could be perhaps some slight consistency at least in the minds
of the watching world, with the beliefs from which this has
developed. Development of an emergency supply of water for Auckland
from the Waikato has been delayed. Some Maori professed alarm about
the effect of mixing the life spirit in Waikato water discharged after
it has passed through the filters and processes and bodies of
Aucklanders, with the life spirit of the water of Manukau Harbour.

This latest manifestation of our new State religion involves human
sacrifice (not extending to martyrdom of the anointed leaders of
course). Maori are represented as wanting to forego the benefits of
genetic engineering - leaving Maori diabetics among the first
casualties, given that diabetes seems likely to be one of the first
diseases to be tackled by genetic engineering.

And this month Canterbury people would have seen the forthright
comments of Judge Treadwell, fighting a rather lonely battle to keep
the Resource Management Act from becoming a subject of even more
mockery. He reproached the Maori objectors who wanted him to block a
subdivision because of the death curse that would follow interference
with sacred site objects. They were so secret the objectors could not
disclose anything about them including where they were. Yet the RMA
forces the judge, and councils to blow other people's time and money
taking this twaddle seriously.

Two Governments, National then Labour held up an important trademark
reform, to introduce a regime by which Maori who assert they are
culturally offended by a mark can require the registrar to cancel
registration, without compensation to the owners.

Nothing in the Bill protects trademark owners against cultural offence
mysteriously induced by greed.

Cowardice and Venality

Our social and political immune system should have been activated
against the cult. Instead it is knotted in confusion. With literally
scores of euphemisms those who should be the guardians of our
political culture tip toe around the edges of the septic spots. When
journalists, academics and elected leaders are feeling particularly
frank they talk delicately about "Treaty issues", or "ethnic
tensions".

Ordinary New Zealanders, in private, or at least unpublished by the
self-censoring media, express themselves much more frankly. They
intuitively understand what race discrimination is. They don't buy
the rationalisations and the hypocrisy.

We must continue to be tolerant. We must be tolerant of much that we
abhor. If we are true liberals we will be humble, aware of how little
knowledge is certain. We will be charitable, knowing how hard it is
to understand a person until we have walked in their shoes. Ours is
the tolerance that says "I accept your right to hold those views, to
live like that, to look like that, to do things I abhor. But that
does not mean I must agree, or decline to judge, or tacitly support
you". It does not mean we must agree to our taxes going to support
conduct that we believe damages our society including Maori.

We allow Ministers to support law breaking. We tolerate official
cowardice. We have tolerated, for example, unlawful occupations of
public and private land. We have seen farmers intimidated from their
land. We have seen a system shutting its eyes to child abuse and
incest while parroting patent untruths about the special regard that
the so called clients of the welfare system who were Maori, had for
their children as taonga.

This is not to say that child abuse, torture and murder is any more
prevalent among Maori than among other debauched products of the
welfare system, matched on an age, education and economic status
basis. But if we had not been cravenly tolerant we would have
objected when the law gave a status to whänau, and the importance of
maintaining ownership of children by Maori families that was patently
not justified by any objective assessment of the interests of the
children.

We have been betraying our own values of integrity in public
administration and in application of the law when endemic venality is
tolerated in bodies now benefiting from the millions of dollars
sprayed around in "capacity building".

We know what happens to people corrupted by prospect of unearned
wealth. It doesn't matter whether you are Maori or pakeha, it is very
hard to transmit the values of diligence, thrift, honesty and respect
for education. The third generation of a wealthy family rarely keeps
that culture intact. Wealth is a corrupter of such values. Yet we
are pretending that Maoridom will be uplifted by distribution of more
unearned money to families which have not known wealth for 3
generations. A calculating government is spraying out money for
"capacity building". There is no structure in place to measure or
require anything substantive in return, or even any intention to
demand performance.

We have tolerated warped priorities such as that which is currently
seeing DOC spend millions to build banks around Ruapehu to prevent a
sulphurous overflow from the crater lake reaching Lake Taupo and
poisoning it for decades. The simple and cheap course was simply to
lower the ice dam which raises the level of the lake. A small
bulldozer could do it as annual maintenance. That was blocked by a
credulous minister acceding to some assertion of cultural or spiritual
offence by a Maori splinter group.

The left in particular has been corrupted by its vote buying
conversion to support inherited aristocracy and tribalism.

The left are successors to a noble tradition of opposition to
inherited privilege of all kinds. We can thank the left for some of
the institutions that support meritocracy. The constructive left saw
egalitarianism in terms of equality of opportunity.

How can their successors have any integrity when they support
undemocratic tribal structures? Such pakeha are complicit in driving
enterprising Maori to escape to Australia.

A Shared Problem

This sickly tolerance is not confined to pakeha. I saw this in the
meeting house at Waitangi on Waitangi day. Clean and neatly dressed
elders, many lean from a life time of work, tolerated rancid slobs
with matted hair wiping their filthy feet on a defaced New Zealand
flag. Interruptions to Richard Prebble's courteous address might have
been part of the reasons why the slobs attracted my attention. The
spectacle made it hard to take seriously the oratory about Maori mana.

Pakeha ceremony is equally vulnerable to such disruption and
dissonance. We have lost the confidence as well as rights to be
intolerant as private citizens. So we have weak mechanisms for
maintaining dignity even on private but common property, such as a
marae or a school. A healthy marae might exercise enough social (or
physical) pressure to persuade such slobs to stay out of sight when
there is company visiting.

Much of the blame must go to the lawyers. They have cowed the
individuals who should be exercising private rights to sanction or
exclude those who offend them. Schools, for example, that wish to
enforce their rules are second guessed by judges. For State schools
there may be good arguments that this should be so. There should,
however, be no doubt whatsoever about the freedom of private bodies to
make and enforce whatever rules they wish. The Courts are imposing
public or administrative law burdens on private bodies. That treats
them as if they were wielding the coercive powers of the State,
burdening them with all the impoverishing paraphernalia of natural
justice.

Whose Solutions?

This sickly tolerance is not a Maori problem. Just exhorting Maori to
change, is not a solution, though there must be honest exhortation.
It is a New Zealand problem. All leaders should be held to account if
they fail to stand up for civic virtues.

If I were a young Maori I have no doubt I would be exploiting the
opportunities given by credulous and craven government, just as Maori
radicals have for the last 30 years. During young and irresponsible
years it would be as much fun as anything else going, to see how far
you could push, what indignity you could force on the establishment,
how ludicrous you could make your demand or request, before they would
jib and stand up for their own values.

Almost any of us could be seduced into accepting illegitimate
privilege, when it is offered by fawning twits in leadership
positions.

There are thousands of Maori whose feelings about disorder and insult
and bloated claims and fake spirituality will be stronger than that of
most pakeha. We have all been waiting for someone in authority to
assert the values we grew up with, as New Zealanders. Most of us want
the equality before the law promised by our cultural inheritance and
the Treaty.

It is discourteous to lampoon someone else's religious faith. Matters
of religion or faith are personal. Yet someone has to start mocking
ludicrous superstition. That is how we defeated many earlier
superstitions. The proponents are calling in the State to enforce
their beliefs. Being identified with laughable science should involve
cringing, and finding a way of disassociating oneself. Mockery is a
responsibility for everyone of intellectual integrity.

How did our inheritance of Liberalism let us get to this?

The Human Rights Act 1993 was pushed through by Sir Douglas Graham.
It reversed the common international pattern of human rights law.
Around the world human rights law is largely to ensure that the
coercive powers of the state cannot be used to oppress minorities.
Ours left the State free. It did not apply to the State, while it
imposed on private individuals liabilities for conduct toward each
other which breached no other law. The liability depends on whether
the conduct is motivated by a newly unlawful set of beliefs or
judgments about the other person.

Christchurch was the scene of one of the early tests. In the
Christian Forecourt Attendant case the Court held that it had become
illegal for a Christian garage owner to advertise for a forecourt
attendant who shared his beliefs. He could have achieved it
covertly. He could have discretely wasted the time of numerous
applicants until he found one espousing Christianity. But he was
naïve enough to be open.

The pilot for this approach to law was our Race Relations Act 1971.
We passed it to satisfy the requirements of a United Nations
Convention. At the time there was principled concern that it breached
important liberal safeguards, because it made your otherwise lawful
acts unlawful solely if you had the wrong motivation. Enforcement
difficulties that have always dogged such law. Cynicism grows when
only the foolish can't disguise their views enough to avoid getting
caught by these kinds of laws. But as those anxious in 1971 feared,
it has now been used as a precedent to create a vast new range of
privileges.

The acme of this foolishness has been reached. Age is now a
prohibited ground of discrimination. Perfectly competent adults are
no longer permitted to agree with each other that age is a relevant
factor in their relationships. Masquerading as a move to add dignity
to old age, it has an inevitable opposite effect. Retirement for age
was a near universal way of dealing with one of the knottiest problems
of any human organisation or society, how to ensure timely succession
without fighting.

Organisations have retiring ages so that they know that there will be
predictable room to introduce fresh blood. They have them because
capacities do change with age. They have them instead of individually
tailored agreements, because individual rules are expensive to
negotiate and administer. They have them because we all get old, and
the rules therefore affect all equally.

With retirement for age there is no necessity to prove that the aged
one has become incompetent. Accordingly all can depart with dignity.
And organisations can plan on perpetual renewal, knowing that while
age may not necessarily mean incompetence, freshness and renewal are
vital to every human endeavour. Only those willing to lie to
themselves deny that age is accompanied by some fading of powers, even
if wisdom is a compensation in many cases.

The rhetoric of liberty and tolerance were used and perverted when
this law was made. The argument was that Parliament should make it
illegal to have rules that assume characteristics of New Zealanders.
Everyone must be treated as an individual, not as a member of a
class. Perhaps there was a permissible argument to bind the State,
even a State that was busy erecting discriminations and privileges
based on race. But no Parliamentarian, or even as far as I can tell
any significant commentator, pointed out the civil liberties travesty
in including age as a ground of discrimination forbidden to private
individuals, even by fully informed and objectively rational consent
of competent adults.

No one even raised the practical own goal which has now put over 50's
among the hardest to place in employment. Two decades ago they were
among the least affected by long-term involuntary unemployment.

And at the same time our law has retreated from its respect for the
individual right to choose of even the most humble citizen, safety
liabilities have reinstated feudal responsibilities of masters for
their servants. Employers are made liable for injuries or losses they
often have no practical way of controlling, except with infinitely pin
pricking supervision and management.

Their only defence is to show they have insisted on absolutely rule
bound supervision. The law is making sure the jobs of subordinates
become less satisfying, that individual initiative is crushed. It is
also ensuring that we consume ever more resources in dispute
resolution and second guessing excesses of authority (in employment
law).

What Should We Do?

How should we express our intolerance of these assaults on
`enlightenment values'? The answer is simple. It is the law and the
State that must be tolerant. Not private individuals and companies.
They should be required only to obey sound law. Law which prevents
force and fraud in our attempts to persuade others. Law which
requires us to reimburse others for injury we cause to their property
or person. Private individuals and corporations cannot threaten
others with unlawful acts, to coerce others exercising their similar
freedoms. That is the beginning and the end of it.

Liberals can and should be intolerant of evil. They should express
their views strongly. They should try to persuade, to shun, and to
decline to employ or to support those whose values are antithetical to
their own.

It is the task of the law to ensure that does not step over the
boundary to become coercive by threatening violence to the person, or
injury to property. The State has the monopoly of that kind of
coercion.

The law and tax making and tax distributing powers, the coercive power
of the state must be confined so that the prejudices or religious or
other beliefs of rulers, or a ruling class, cannot be imposed on
others.

Liberalism's greatest achievement is tolerance. Tolerance is the
distinguishing badge, and the principle it must preserve at all
costs. Yet tolerance is also its Achilles heel.

Tolerance can be the same thing as indifference or apathy. Forced
tolerance of wrong is a weapon in the hands of the enemies of
freedom. If tolerance means you have to be non-judgmental, people
will excuse the inexcusable. If tolerance grows from a restriction on
interference by the law, into interference with otherwise lawful
actions, it can sustain not virtues, but vices. It is a vice not a
virtue to impose liability on private individuals who discriminate
against people they consider bad.

I would make an exception here for law against race discrimination,
simply because race hatreds come so easily to us. Forestalling
communal viciousness based on colour has been such a hard and endless
task in every society.

And of course in distinguishing as I have, between Maori and pakeha as
if they were two peoples, I run the risk of allowing a victory to the
collectivists. Men and women of ill will on both sides want us to
fall into that trap.

That is seeing each other first as members of another race or culture,
and only then as fellow humans, or as neighbours, fellow sporting
fanatics, members of a school community, fellow worshippers, shoppers
- whatever.

Blurry inheritance of race as a qualification for state privilege
should be illegal. That is what we must not tolerate. For most New
Zealanders official identification by ethnicity is artificial,
irrelevant and offensive. As private individuals, of course we must
be free to identify in that way. There is no menace in a Maori All
Black team, or a Celtic Rugby club, or a Samoan Church. None of these
bodies are calling for the coercive powers of the State to grant them
privilege.

Our forbears who developed, fought for, and then defended ideals of
liberty in a hostile world knew these things about freedom and
tolerance well. As their successors, after five generations of
prosperity and domestic peace, we have forgotten much of the
background. We use the language of rights and of freedom like
children singing carols as a ritual, without any understanding of, let
alone belief in, angels or Father Christmas.

Restoring and protecting liberty is a matter of summoning memory, then
the energy and the courage. Because the formulae are already
available. We just look at our forebears' work to know what liberty
means and needs. We just need to clear away the rubbish that has
accumulated. Nearly all that is needed to restore liberalism's values
is to undo about 15 years of disreputable law.

The Treaty of Waitangi will be a vital element in restoring classical
liberal respect for property rights. If that can restore and protect
Maori property rights they will be protected for us all, because
Article 3 of the Treaty says we are all to be equal before the law.

Without the false, recently manufactured, and now mysteriously
unknowable principles the Treaty is a cultural treasure for us all.

The Tide is Turning

I believe the issues we are considering today will become major issues
in the coming election campaign. Winston Peters, despite his
sponsorship of the tight 5 warriors in the last Parliament, has now
reverted to his earlier mode. In 1990, as a National Minister, he
described the partnership description of the Treaty as a myth. He
will campaign against the Treaty cult this year.

In Parliament last year, every fortnight for months, we had genuine
debates about whether voting separatism was racist or just a Treaty
obligation, or simple a way of advancing the interests of a group who
would otherwise be submerged. Very little of that debate was
reported. Ordinary New Zealanders who feel there is a vast media
conspiracy to ignore their alarm would have been reassured had they
heard that at last the politicians were getting the courage to debate.

There are many Maori leaders we classical liberals should honour, for
they show liberal values in action. Sir Tipene O'Regan with his
respect for property rights. Alan Duff for his willingness to attack
the warrior mentality, the women who established Köhanga Reo in
despair at where the state education system was taking their children,
the hundreds of dedicated Maori wardens (and Maori Women's Welfare
League people) who attend gatherings to help make sure bullies and
vandals and thieves and drunks and people who abandon their kids don't
spoil life for the rest of us. They are not resting on complaints
that the police cannot do it all - on whining for more law.

It is the chemical fertiliser of government patronage allocated
according to race or other class identity that is making it worth
focussing on what divides us rather than what unites. That is the
dioxin in the government spray. When consultation powers and veto
rights and educational and health privileges, and excuses before the
justice system can turn on asserting some inherited racial identity we
can expect to feel poison in the system.

As liberals, we are the trustees of the ideals that generated the US
Constitution, the United Nations Charter, the Bill of Rights, and the
enormous liberation of human enterprise that came with freedom and
property rights. We do not need to apologise to anyone for opposing
racial identity politics, the false new privileges that hitch hike on
and ultimately debase the language of rights.

We need to assert our values. We need to become intolerant of
government discrimination. We need to point out hypocrisy and
corruption. We need to mock pomposity and spurious religiosity
wherever we come across it. We need to encourage people to recognise
that the anointed are emperors without clothes, that they retain their
power to force piety only because there has been so much silence that
people do not realise how few actually believe the nonsense that is
mouthed so widely.

We need to recognise that as one people living in New Zealand with
streams of culture drawn from Europe, Polynesia and now Asia none
should have trump card status. We have to demand high standards of
all, and where there is failure, face it squarely. This cult rests on
intellectual bullying, and cowardice in the face of it. Streams of
money buys off those who are not cowed by social pressure.

We can fix some of this at an election. The rest we can fix only when
the cult has become discredited by New Zealanders generally.

For ACT as a political party this is straightforward but not
necessarily easy. It will be easy to mistake aggression for courage
or dogma for confidence. But the way is simple.

One colour blind state, where the law is tolerant, and prevents the
State from suppressing individual choice.

Equality of all before a tolerant law.

For more information visit ACT online at http://www.act.org.nz or
contact the ACT Parliamentary Office at act@parliament.govt.nz.

It is amazing how this disaster has been avidly seized upon by the ideologues of all stripes to push their agenda.

Coming out of the woodwork include Christian fundamentalists seeing it as a sign from God punishing a sinful city, black racists like Sharpton and Jackson seeing it as a plot by whites. Maureen "on her knees" Dowd of the NYT and many many others blaming Bush. Opponents of the welfare state blame the welfare-induced passivity of the remaining inhabitants. Greenies blame the refusal to sign Kyoto. Feds blame the State admin, the State admin blames the local admin. The locals blame everyone else.

Strange, we haven't yet heard from the feminists and gays.

Just give 'em time I guess.

The WSJ belatedly below attempts some objectivity, and those away from the ever-oversimplifying mind-numbing meanstream media will be aware of more major issues than finger-pointing, like the lessons of unpreparedness against major terrorist attacks on an American city, and the looming massive problems facing the USA having little human infrastructure in the foreseeable future around this major port, its major river goods-and-trade terminal and its major oil facilities.

R

James Taranto: Myths of Hurricane Katrina

September 06, 2005

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,16501147%5E7583,00.html

HURRICANE Katrina was a horrific natural disaster. To America's Angry Left it was yet another occasion to score political points against President George W. Bush. In the same spirit of opportunism that animated looters who stole television sets, Bush's political foes frantically sought to blame the devastation on him.

A measure of the anti-Bush Left's derangement is that it blames him for bad weather. "Complacency will no longer suffice, especially if experts are right in warning that global warming may increase the intensity of future hurricanes," The New York Times editorialised on Thursday. "But since this administration won't acknowledge that global warming exists, the chances of leadership seem minimal."
Whether global warming exists or not, it did not cause Katrina, at least according to a news story that had appeared in the Times two days earlier: "Because hurricanes form over warm ocean water, it is easy to assume that the recent rise in their number and ferocity is because of global warming. But that is not the case, scientists say. Instead, the severity of hurricane seasons changes with cycles of temperatures of several decades in the Atlantic Ocean."
Then we heard that the National Guard was unable to do its duty in the Gulf Coast because it had been "stretched thin" by deployment to Iraq; "deployed in a phony war", as former New York Times editor Howell Raines claimed in a particularly inflammatory article in The Sydney Morning Herald and several US papers at the weekend. But as James Robbins pointed out in National Review Online, only 10.2 per cent of the US Army, including the guard and reserves, is in Iraq; 74.2 per cent, or 751,000 soldiers, are stationed in the US. In any case, this argument died down as the troops arrived in great force late in the week.

The most pernicious myth the Angry Left propagated was that the storm victims were neglected because of their race. "I feel that, if it was in another area, with another economic strata and racial make-up, that President Bush would have run out of Crawford a lot quicker and FEMA [the Federal Emergency Management Agency] would have found its way in a lot sooner," said Al Sharpton, New York's premier racial arsonist.

In fact, Katrina was an equal-opportunity destroyer. The media's coverage of the disaster understandably centred on New Orleans, the biggest city in the region, which is two-thirds black. But the storm also devastated at least four suburban Louisiana parishes and three coastal Mississippi counties. All have white majorities, ranging from 69.8 per cent to 90.2 per cent. Appeals to race are especially dangerous when the US needs national solidarity. Special pleading on behalf of black victims may lead to special pleading on behalf of white victims. It may also reinforce ugly stereotypes. A USA Today editorial noted that most of the New Orleans victims were black, then added: "So are most of the looters." And there have been reports of criminality that goes far beyond looting, including rape and murder. Avarice and depravity are human failings, but race-obsessed liberals may be contributing to the notion that they are racial ones.

The Angry Left seems finally to have settled on the claim that the Bush administration was incompetent, its actions slow and inept.

There may turn out to be some truth to this, but it's far too early to apportion blame. Responding to a disaster of unprecedented proportions is a monumentally complicated task and it's likely that officials at all levels of government made mistakes. Further, even the best-run government cannot work miracles, and it's unclear how much better the response could have been.

In any case, deeming the Bush administration incompetent at this stage reflects nothing more than the prejudices of the administration's critics and in some cases a plain disregard for the facts.

Journalist and blogger Andrew Sullivan, for example, lashed FEMA director Michael Brown for saying he hadn't learned until Thursday that several thousand people needed help at the New Orleans Convention Centre. "Brown apparently doesn't get CNN," Sullivan sneered.

But CNN didn't report on the convention centre situation until Thursday and no other news organisation seems to have known before then that more than a handful of people were there.

The American people seem to be taking a fair-minded view of all this. An ABC News poll released yesterday found that 55 per cent of Americans didn't blame the President for Katrina's devastation. And while 67 per cent thought the federal Government wasn't adequately prepared, 75 per cent said the same of state and local government. As with all the previous efforts to discredit the Bush administration, this one seems likely to fail.

Besides, one claim no one has had the audacity to make is that John Kerry would have done better. President Kerry, after all, would have faced this disaster with a total of 7 1/2 months' administrative experience in his lifetime.

James Taranto is editor of OpinionJournal.com, the website of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page.

THE DOOMED CITIES
The heart of New Orleans.
by Michael A. Ledeen
NRO
September 1, 2005

As we mourn New Orleans, let us also celebrate it, as New Orleanians famously celebrate their own dead. The city has long been admired for its literary creativity, its exceptional food, and its wonderful music, and deplored — albeit also frequented - because of its legendary corruption and degradation. The possibility of its destruction no doubt played a role in the character of its people, and it is no accident that an annual bacchanal took place there, in the riotous celebrations of Mardi Gras. Death has always been omnipresent in the consciousness of the city; dancing in defiance of death was the city's trademark, and the spirited music that defined New Orleans for much of the world was played at the happiest occasions, and at the most famous funerals.

New Orleans is one of a handful of cities that are defined in large part by the recognition that it can all come to an end most any day. Joel Lockhart Dyer wrote that "New Orleans is North America's Venice; both cities are living on borrowed time." New Orleans and Venice are both subject to the vagaries of the water gods, and both have acted sporadically to fend off their seemingly inevitable fate. But their basic response to the looming disaster has been defiance, a ritual assertion of life in the face of the inevitable, and an embrace of human frailty that echoes the frailty of the city itself.

Carnival in Venice, albeit more so in the past than today, has much in common with Mardi Gras, including the use of masks by the celebrants, who thereby throw off their daily identities to participate anonymously in the licentious celebrations. Thomas Mann knew what he was doing when he wrote Death in Venice, in which a proper German professor (pointedly named Aschenbach, the stream of ashes) hurls himself into bawdy Venice to recover his repressed sexuality and creativity. Similar characters abound in the works of Tennessee Williams, who lived many years in New Orleans, the setting for both A Streetcar Named Desire and The Rose Tattoo. William Faulkner also found New Orleans a congenial place for his creative labors. And in both cities, the bacchanals are religious, celebrating both sin and the hope of redemption thereafter, as if a sinner were more attractive to the Almighty than a virtuous soul, at least on that day.
Moreover, Venice prefigured the most likely cultural and political destiny of New Orleans, no matter whether the long-anticipated catastrophe came or not: a slow slide into monotonous ritual, a city transformed into an historic theme park, more frequented by tourists than defined by the energy of its inhabitants, an anachronistic curiosity like Florence, where one focuses on things past, not present or future.

But there is much that separates them. Venice is a northern city, and New Orleans is profoundly southern. A German like Mann might find Venice to be incredibly warm and sunny, but no knowledgeable Italian would. And the presumed naturalness and spontaneity of Venetians could only be taken seriously by someone from even farther north. New Orleans, on the other hand, incarnates the south. New Orleanians are perversely proud of the slow tempo of their daily life, of the absence of industry, and of the fascinating spectacle of human foibles and failures that seems at one with the city. The Italian city that most closely matches New Orleans is Naples, not Venice. Naples also faces destruction — volcanic destruction, from "Vesuvius the Exterminator," as the poet Verga once wrote — and Naples, too, is noted for a lively, and often lawless style of life, along with great literature, art, cuisine and music. Unlike Venice, Naples is every bit as southern as New Orleans, and the European stereotype of the Neapolitan is very much like the American image of New Orleanians: lazy, happy, spontaneous, and unrepressed, slow-moving but quick-witted, and very happy with the food.

Naples and New Orleans also share a common affliction: disease. An enormous number of New Orleanians and Neapolitans have died of cholera; indeed, one of the best books on modern Naples is entitled Naples in the Age of Cholera. New Orleans had the additional scourge of Yellow Fever. In both cities, the effect of these epidemics and mass deaths meant, as Frederick Starr puts it in his excellent book on New Orleans, "death...was not merely a private drama occurring in the intimate circle of one's family, but a civic event, experienced by the entire community." Both cities have a highly developed culture of death. The dead are believed to be actively involved in daily life, busily haunting houses and even restaurants, sending dream messages to the living, and organizing good and bad fortune for those who have or lack proper respect for the inhabitants of the spiritual realm.
The dead themselves require special treatment, because both cities lack proper traditional burial grounds. New Orleans is below sea level, and the soil in Naples is very porous, so the dead are usually placed in tombs, not in the ground. In some Neapolitan churches, you can see skeletons in the walls, and local artists paint clothing around the skeletons. This sort of intimacy with the dead is unknown in most of the modern world.

The combination of a rich culture of death with the looming threat of catastrophe is an intoxicating mélange for the spirit, and it no doubt explains why so many great writers have been drawn to these two southern cities, both of which have developed a unique version of Catholicism, often to the consternation of Rome. As Starr observes of New Orleans (and it is equally true of Naples), "all this frivolity occurs in the very city which, for over two centuries, Death visited more ruthlessly than anywhere else on the continent."

Doomed cities with an intimate relationship with the dead are special places, incubators of exceptional qualities of spirit and thus of extraordinary inventiveness. If we have lost one of those cities to the forces of nature, it will impoverish our world far beyond the enormous human tragedy. Even if it was long foreseen.

http://www.benadorassociates.com/pf.php?id=18085

(Ed. Note: Posted with protest against a very sour and hysterical leftist such a Maureen Dowd. She has nothing good to say about anything...ever.)

- NZ TV3 (canadian owned) reported he never landed; this NYT heavy says otherwise.

Either way, it's not a good look for ace smirker Dubya.

R

UNITED STATES OF SHAME
MAUREEN DOWD
New York Times
September 3, 2005
Stuff happens.

And when you combine limited government with incompetent government, lethal
stuff happens.

America is once more plunged into a snake pit of anarchy, death, looting, raping, marauding thugs, suffering innocents, a shattered infrastructure, a gutted police force, insufficient troop levels and criminally negligent government planning. But this time it's happening in America.

W. drove his budget-cutting Chevy to the levee, and it wasn't dry. Bye, bye, American lives. "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees," he told Diane Sawyer.

Shirt-sleeves rolled up, W. finally landed in Hell yesterday and chuckled about his wild boozing days in "the great city" of N'Awlins. He was clearly moved. "You know, I'm going to fly out of here in a minute," he said on the runway at the New Orleans International Airport, "but I want you to know that I'm not going to forget what I've seen." Out of the cameras' range, and avoided by W., was a convoy of thousands of sick and dying people, some sprawled on the floor or dumped on baggage carousels at a makeshift M*A*S*H unit inside the terminal.
Why does this self-styled "can do" president always lapse into such lame "who could have known?" excuses.

Who on earth could have known that Osama bin Laden wanted to attack us by
flying planes into buildings? Any official who bothered to read the trellis of pre-September 11 intelligence briefs.

Who on earth could have known that an American invasion of Iraq would spawn
a brutal insurgency, terrorist recruiting boom and possible civil war? Any official who bothered to read the C.I.A.'s prewar reports.

Who on earth could have known that New Orleans's sinking levees were at risk
from a strong hurricane? Anybody who bothered to read the endless warnings
over the years about the Big Easy's uneasy fishbowl.

In June 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, fretted to The Times-Picayune in New Orleans: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."

Not only was the money depleted by the Bush folly in Iraq; 30% of the National Guard and about half its equipment are in Iraq.

Ron Fournier of The Associated Press reported that the Army Corps of Engineers asked for $105 million for hurricane and flood programs in New Orleans last year. The White House carved it to about $40 million. But President Bush and Congress agreed to a $286.4 billion pork-filled highway bill with 6,000 pet projects, including a $231 million bridge for a small, uninhabited Alaskan island.

Just last year, Federal Emergency Management Agency officials practiced how they would respond to a fake hurricane that caused floods and stranded New Orleans residents. Imagine the feeble FEMA's response to Katrina if they had not prepared.

Michael Brown, the blithering idiot in charge of FEMA --- a job he trained for by running something called the International Arabian Horse Association --- admitted he didn't know until Thursday that there were 15,000 desperate, dehydrated, hungry, angry, dying victims of Katrina in the New Orleans Convention Center.

Was he sacked instantly? No, our tone-deaf president hailed him in Mobile, Ala.bama yesterday: "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."

It would be one thing if President Bush and his inner circle --- Dick Cheney was vacationing in Wyoming; Condi Rice was shoe shopping at Ferragamo's on Fifth Avenue and attended "Spamalot" before bloggers chased her back to Washington; and Andy Card was off in Maine --- lacked empathy but could get the job done. But it is a chilling lack of empathy combined with a stunning lack of efficiency that could make this administration implode.

When the president and vice president rashly shook off our allies and our respect for international law to pursue a war built on lies, when they sanctioned torture, they shook the faith of the world in American ideals.
When they were deaf for so long to the horrific misery and cries for help of the victims in New Orleans - most of them poor and black, like those stuck at the back of the evacuation line yesterday while 700 guests and employees of the Hyatt Hotel were bused out first --- they shook the faith of all Americans in American ideals. And made us ashamed.

Who are we if we can't take care of our own?

http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/03/katrina.chertoff/index.html?section=cnn_latest

Chertoff: Katrina scenario did not exist
However, experts for years had warned of threat to New Orleans
Sunday, September 4, 2005

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Defending the U.S. government's response to Hurricane Katrina, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff argued Saturday that government planners did not predict such a disaster ever could occur.
But in fact, government officials, scientists and journalists have warned of such a scenario for years.

Chertoff, fielding questions from reporters, said government officials did not expect both a powerful hurricane and a breach of levees that would flood the city of New Orleans. (See the video on a local paper's prophetic warning -- 3:30 )

"That 'perfect storm' of a combination of catastrophes exceeded the foresight of the planners, and maybe anybody's foresight," Chertoff said.
He called the disaster "breathtaking in its surprise."

But engineers say the levees preventing this below-sea-level city from being turned into a swamp were built to withstand only Category 3 hurricanes. And officials have warned for years that a Category 4 could cause the levees to fail. (See video of why the levee's breech was devastating -- 1:53)
Katrina was a Category 4 hurricane when it struck the Gulf Coast on September 29.

Last week, Michael Brown, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, told CNN his agency had recently planned for a Category 5 hurricane hitting New Orleans.

Speaking to "Larry King Live" on August 31, in the wake of Katrina, Brown said, "That Category 4 hurricane caused the same kind of damage that we anticipated. So we planned for it two years ago. Last year, we exercised it. And unfortunately this year, we're implementing it."

Brown suggested FEMA -- part of the Department of Homeland Security -- was carrying out a prepared plan, rather than having to suddenly create a new one.
Chertoff argued that authorities actually had assumed that "there would be overflow from the levee, maybe a small break in the levee. The collapse of a significant portion of the levee leading to the very fast flooding of the city was not envisioned."

He added: "There will be plenty of time to go back and say we should hypothesize evermore apocalyptic combinations of catastrophes. Be that as it may, I'm telling you this is what the planners had in front of them. They were confronted with a second wave that they did not have built into the plan, but using the tools they had, we have to move forward and adapt."

But New Orleans, state and federal officials have long painted a very different picture.

"We certainly understood the potential impact of a Category 4 or 5 hurricane" on New Orleans, Lt. General Carl Strock, chief of engineers for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, said Thursday, Cox News Service reported.

Reuters reported that in 2004, more than 40 state, local and volunteer organizations practiced a scenario in which a massive hurricane struck and levees were breached, allowing water to flood New Orleans. Under the simulation, called "Hurricane Pam," the officials "had to deal with an imaginary storm that destroyed more than half a million buildings in New Orleans and forced the evacuation of a million residents," the Reuters report said.

In 2002 the New Orleans Times-Picayune ran a five-part series exploring the vulnerability of the city. The newspaper, and other news media as well, specifically addressed the possibility of massive floods drowning residents, destroying homes and releasing toxic chemicals throughout the city. (Read: "Times-Picayune" Special Report: Washing away)

Scientists long have discussed this possibility as a sort of doomsday scenario.

On Sunday, a day before Hurricane Katrina made landfall, Ivor van Heerden, director of the Louisiana State University Public Health Research Center in Baton Rouge, said, "This is what we've been saying has been going to happen for years."

"Unfortunately, it's coming true," he said, adding that New Orleans "is definitely going to flood."

Also on Sunday, Placquemines Parish Sheriff Jeff Hingle referred back to Hurricane Betsy -- a Category 2 hurricane that struck in 1965 -- and said, "After Betsy these levees were designed for a Category 3."
He added, "These levees will not hold the water back."
But Chertoff seemed unaware of all the warnings.

"This is really one which I think was breathtaking in its surprise," Chertoff said. "There has been, over the last few years, some specific planning for the possibility of a significant hurricane in New Orleans with a lot of rainfall, with water rising in the levees and water overflowing the levees," he told reporters Saturday.

That alone would be "a very catastrophic scenario," Chertoff said. "And although the planning was not complete, a lot of work had been done. But there were two problems here. First of all, it's as if someone took that plan and dropped an atomic bomb simply to make it more difficult. We didn't merely have the overflow, we actually had the break in the wall. And I will tell you that, really, that perfect storm of combination of catastrophes exceeded the foresight of the planners, and maybe anybody's foresight."

Chertoff also argued that authorities did not have much notice that the storm would be so powerful and could make a direct hit on New Orleans.

"It wasn't until comparatively late, shortly before -- a day, maybe a day and a half, before landfall -- that it became clear that this was going to be a Category 4 or 5 hurricane headed for the New Orleans area."

As far back as Friday, August 26, the National Hurricane Center was predicting the storm could be a Category 4 hurricane at landfall, with New Orleans directly in its path. Still, storms do change paths, so the possibility existed that it might not hit the city.

But the National Weather Service prediction proved almost perfect.
Katrina made landfall on Monday, August 29.

Tens of thousands of people in New Orleans who did not or could not heed the mandatory evacuation orders issued the day before the storm made landfall were left in dire straits.

"I think we have discovered over the last few days that with all the tremendous effort using the existing resources and the traditional frameworks of the National Guard, the unusual set of challenges of conducting a massive evacuation in the context of a still dangerous flood requires us to basically break the traditional model and create a new model -- one for what you might call kind of an ultracatastrophe," Chertoff said.

He vowed that the United States "is going to move heaven and earth" to rescue those in need.

(Ed. Note: And now from the hysteric left...)

http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2005/08/31/disaster_preparation/

"No one can say they didn't see it coming"

In 2001, FEMA warned that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S. But the Bush administration cut New Orleans flood control funding by 44 percent to pay for the Iraq war.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Sidney Blumenthal

Aug. 31, 2005 Biblical in its uncontrolled rage and scope, Hurricane Katrina has left millions of Americans to scavenge for food and shelter and hundreds to thousands reportedly dead. With its main levee broken, the evacuated city of New Orleans has become part of the Gulf of Mexico. But the damage wrought by the hurricane may not entirely be the result of an act of nature.

A year ago the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed to study how New Orleans could be protected from a catastrophic hurricane, but the Bush administration ordered that the research not be undertaken. After a flood killed six people in 1995, Congress created the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, in which the Corps of Engineers strengthened and renovated levees and pumping stations. In early 2001, the Federal Emergency Management Agency issued a report stating that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S., including a terrorist attack on New York City. But by 2003 the federal funding for the flood control project essentially dried up as it was drained into the Iraq war. In 2004, the Bush administration cut funding requested by the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for holding back the waters of Lake Pontchartrain by more than 80 percent. Additional cuts at the beginning of this year (for a total reduction in funding of 44.2 percent since 2001) forced the New Orleans district of the Corps to impose a hiring freeze. The Senate had debated adding funds for fixing New Orleans' levees, but it was too late.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune, which before the hurricane published a series on the federal funding problem, and whose presses are now underwater, reported online: "No one can say they didn't see it coming ... Now in the wake of one of the worst storms ever, serious questions are being asked about the lack of preparation."

The Bush administration's policy of turning over wetlands to developers almost certainly also contributed to the heightened level of the storm surge. In 1990, a federal task force began restoring lost wetlands surrounding New Orleans. Every two miles of wetland between the Crescent City and the Gulf reduces a surge by half a foot. Bush had promised "no net loss" of wetlands, a policy launched by his father's administration and bolstered by President Clinton. But he reversed his approach in 2003, unleashing the developers. The Army Corps of Engineers and the Environmental Protection Agency then announced they could no longer protect wetlands unless they were somehow related to interstate commerce.

In response to this potential crisis, four leading environmental groups conducted a joint expert study, concluding in 2004 that without wetlands protection New Orleans could be devastated by an ordinary, much less a Category 4 or 5, hurricane. "There's no way to describe how mindless a policy that is when it comes to wetlands protection," said one of the report's authors. The chairman of the White House's Council on Environmental Quality dismissed the study as "highly questionable," and boasted, "Everybody loves what we're doing."

"My administration's climate change policy will be science based," President Bush declared in June 2001. But in 2002, when the Environmental Protection Agency submitted a study on global warming to the United Nations reflecting its expert research, Bush derided it as "a report put out by a bureaucracy," and excised the climate change assessment from the agency's annual report. The next year, when the EPA issued its first comprehensive "Report on the Environment," stating, "Climate change has global consequences for human health and the environment," the White House simply demanded removal of the line and all similar conclusions. At the G-8 meeting in Scotland this year, Bush successfully stymied any common action on global warming. Scientists, meanwhile, have continued to accumulate impressive data on the rising temperature of the oceans, which has produced more severe hurricanes.

In February 2004, 60 of the nation's leading scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates, warned in a statement, "Restoring Scientific Integrity in Policymaking": "Successful application of science has played a large part in the policies that have made the United States of America the world's most powerful nation and its citizens increasingly prosperous and healthy ... Indeed, this principle has long been adhered to by presidents and administrations of both parties in forming and implementing policies. The administration of George W. Bush has, however, disregarded this principle ... The distortion of scientific knowledge for partisan political ends must cease." Bush completely ignored this statement.

In the two weeks preceding the storm in the Gulf, the trumping of science by ideology and expertise by special interests accelerated. The Federal Drug Administration announced that it was postponing sale of the morning-after contraceptive pill, despite overwhelming scientific evidence of its safety and its approval by the FDA's scientific advisory board. The United Nations special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa accused the Bush administration of responsibility for a condom shortage in Uganda -- the result of the administration's evangelical Christian agenda of "abstinence." When the chief of the Bureau of Justice Statistics in the Justice Department was ordered by the White House to delete its study that African-Americans and other minorities are subject to racial profiling in police traffic stops and he refused to buckle under, he was forced out of his job. When the Army Corps of Engineers' chief contracting oversight analyst objected to a $7 billion no-bid contract awarded for work in Iraq to Halliburton (the firm at which Vice President Cheney was formerly CEO), she was demoted despite her superior professional ratings. At the National Park Service, a former Cheney aide, a political appointee lacking professional background, drew up a plan to overturn past environmental practices and prohibit any mention of evolution while allowing sale of religious materials through the Park Service.

On the day the levees burst in New Orleans, Bush delivered a speech in California comparing the Iraq war to World War II and himself to Franklin D. Roosevelt: "And he knew that the best way to bring peace and stability to the region was by bringing freedom to Japan." Bush had boarded his very own "Streetcar Named Desire."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/02/opinion/02fischetti.html

September 2, 2005
They Saw It Coming
By MARK FISCHETTI

Lenox, Mass.

THE deaths caused by Hurricane Katrina are heart-rending. The suffering of survivors is wrenching. Property destruction is shocking. But perhaps the most agonizing part is that much of what happened in New Orleans this week might have been avoided.

Watching the TV images of the storm approaching the Mississippi Delta on Sunday, I was sick to my stomach. Not only because I knew the hell it could unleash (I wrote an article for Scientific American in 2001 that described the very situation that was unfolding) but because I knew that a large-scale engineering plan called Coast 2050 - developed in 1998 by scientists, Army engineers, metropolitan planners and Louisiana officials - might have helped save the city, but had gone unrealized.

The debate over New Orleans's vulnerability to hurricanes has raged for a century. By the late 1990's, scientists at Louisiana State University and the University of New Orleans had perfected computer models showing exactly how a sea surge would overwhelm the levee system, and had recommended a set of solutions. The Army Corps of Engineers, which built the levees, had proposed different projects.

Yet some scientists reflexively disregarded practical considerations pointed out by the Army engineers; more often, the engineers scoffed at scientific studies indicating that the basic facts of geology and hydrology meant that significant design changes were needed. Meanwhile, local politicians lobbied Congress for financing for myriad special interest groups, from oil companies to oyster farmers. Congress did not hear a unified voice, making it easier to turn a deaf ear.

Fed up with the splintered efforts, Len Bahr, then the head of the Louisiana Governor's Office of Coastal Activities, somehow dragged all the parties to one table in 1998 and got them to agree on a coordinated solution: Coast 2050. Completing every recommended project over a decade or more would have cost an estimated $14 billion, so Louisiana turned to the federal government. While this may seem an astronomical sum, it isn't in terms of large public works; in 2000 Congress began a $7 billion engineering program to refresh the dying Florida Everglades. But Congress had other priorities, Louisiana politicians had other priorities, and the magic moment of consensus was lost.

Thus, in true American fashion, we ignored an inevitable problem until disaster focused our attention. Fortunately, as we rebuild New Orleans, we can protect it - by engineering solutions that work with nature, not against it.

The conceit that we can control the natural world is what made New Orleans vulnerable. For more than a century the Army Corps, with Congress's blessing, leveed the Mississippi River to prevent its annual floods, so that farms and industries could expand along its banks. Those same floods, however, had dumped huge amounts of sediment and freshwater across the Mississippi Delta, rebuilding each year what gulf tides and storms had worn away and holding back infusions of saltwater that kill marsh vegetation. These vast delta wetlands created a lush, hardy buffer that could absorb sea surges and weaken high winds.

The flooding at the river's mouth also sent great volumes of sediment west and east into the Gulf of Mexico, to a string of barrier islands that cut down surges and waves, compensating for regular ocean erosion. Stopping the Mississippi's floods starved the wetlands and the islands; both are rapidly disintegrating, leaving the city naked against the sea.

What can we do to restore these natural protections? Although the parties that devised Coast 2050, and other independent scientists and engineers who have floated rival plans, may disagree on details, they do concur on several major initiatives that would shield New Orleans, reconstitute the delta and, as a side benefit, improve ports and shipping lanes for the oil and natural gas industries in the Gulf of Mexico.

Cut several channels in the levees on the Mississippi River's southern bank (the side that doesn't abut the city) and secure them with powerful floodgates that could be opened at certain times of the year to allow sediment and freshwater to flow down into the delta, re-establishing it.

Build a new navigation channel from the Gulf into the Mississippi, about 40 miles south of New Orleans, so ships don't have to enter the river at its three southernmost tips 30 miles further away. For decades the corps has dredged shipping channels along those final miles to keep them navigable, creating underwater chutes that propel river sediment out into the deep ocean. The dredging could then be stopped, the river mouth would fill in naturally, and sediment would again spill to the barrier islands, lengthening and widening them. Some planners also propose a modern port at the new access point that would replace those along the river that are too shallow to handle the huge new ships now being built worldwide.

Erect huge seagates across the pair of narrow straits that connect the eastern edge of Lake Pontchartrain, which lies north of the city, to the gulf. Now, any hurricane that blows in from the south will push a wall of water through these straits into the huge lake, which in turn will threaten to overflow into the city. That is what has filled the bowl that is New Orleans this week. But seagates at the straits can stop the wall of water from flowing in. The Netherlands has built similar gates to hold back the turbulent North Sea and they work splendidly.

Finally, and most obviously, raise, extend and strengthen the city's existing but aging levees, canal walls and pumping systems that worked so poorly in recent days.

It's hard to say how much of this work could have been completed by today had Coast 2050 become a reality. Certainly, the delta wetlands and barrier islands would not have rebounded substantially yet. But undoubtedly progress would have been made that would have spared someone's life, someone's home, some jazz club or gumbo joint, some city district, some part of the region's unique culture that the entire country revels in. And we would have been well on our way to a long-term solution. For there is one thing we know for sure: hurricanes will howl through the Mississippi Delta again.

Mark Fischetti is a contributing editor to Scientific American magazine.

The London Bombings
By David Horowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com
July 11, 2005

Of course everyone will take from the bombings in London the “lessons" they’re already seeking. The left claims that the bombings show the war in Iraq is producing the terror instead of fighting it, as though attacks on Muslims (so their logic goes) are of concern to the terrorists. Saddam and the terrorists have killed a hundred times more Muslims than American forces. Moreover, American forces have saved millions of Muslim lives in Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, Afghanistan and, yes, in Iraq. This is not a war about America’s treatment of Muslims and never was.

The left never understood the Iraq war in the first place, so it can’t really be expected to understand the war in Europe now. The Islamic jihad against the West, for which Iraq is but one very important battlefield, did not begin in 2003 with the toppling of Saddam. It is rooted in a radical movement that arose in Egypt in the 1920s - the creation of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose "little red book" was the Koran, as interpreted by by Hassan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb and eventually the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeni, the leader of the first revolutionary Islamic state.

The Islamic jihad against the West began in earnest in November, 1979 with the Islamic revolution in Iran, which climaxed with the taking of American hostages and a million fanatics in the streets of Teheran chanting “Death to America". One of the takers of those hostages and leaders of those chants is the newly elected “president" of revolutionary Iran. (This week they were chanting "Death to America" again.) The Iranian revolution created Hizbollah, the terrorist organization that blew up the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, in many ways the first terrorist attack of the modern war on us.

One can concede the left’s point that the American-supported war to liberate Afghanistan from Soviet occupation was another proving ground for the Islamic jihad. As it happens, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was launched the following month in December 1979 and, as leftists like to point out, it was the training war for Osama bin Laden and many of the Palestinians who went on to create al-Qaeda, Hamas and other Islamic terrorist groups.

Of course, the left isn’t interested in history, except to pluck out isolated facts it can twist to stick in America’s eye. Thus the left uses its Osama “fact" to claim that America created bin Laden and that we are responsible for the attacks on our homeland. (This is exactly what the terrorists claim too.) Inevitably, whatever facts it is interpreting, the left ends up demonstrating that it is at war with America. On the other hand, watch it scream “foul" when anyone points out this obvious truth. (Are you questioning my patriotism???!)

The left’s Afghanistan twist is several lies in one, but there is no need to disentangle them here. The left that makes this argument is uninterested in the history of our proxy war against the Soviet invaders because it basically supported the invading force. Just as radicals today like to think of themselves as “anti-anti-Saddam" so then they were anti-anti-Communist. In practice this meant they were the mainstay in the West for the Soviet empire and its expansion into vulnerable nations on its periphery like Afghanistan.

The United States provided training and arms for the Muslim mujahideen in Afghanistan because its conscience was roused by the Soviet invaders whose scorched earth policies killed a million defenseless Afghan civilians before the resistance, with America’s help, was able to stop them.

In making its argument, the left also ignores the momentous historical fact that the victory of the mujahideen, made possible by America's gift of missiles, not only defeated the Red Army, but triggered the chain of events which led to the fall of the Marxist empire. In other words, U.S. support for the mujahideen eventually liberated a billion people whom the Soviet comrades of American and European leftists had enslaved for fifty and seventy years.

In other words, America’s support for the Palestinian, Egyptian and Saudi terrorists (Osama among them) who flocked to the cause was a somewhat bad deed in the service of a very great good one. It was not as bad a deed for example as saving and arming their friend Joe Stalin and his Marxist butchers in order to defeat Hitler, but it was an equally good one. Consequently those Americans who are able to actually remember history are proud of what we did in Afghanistan and have no regrets.

When the left blames London on Iraq, as though Islamic jihad has been caused by Iraq, it ignores not only the rhetoric of the jihadists (America is the enemy, Zarqawi proclaimed in a fatwa last year, “as the bearer of the cross") but all the attacks on us that preceded Iraq: Mogadishu, the World Trade Center 1993, the barracks in Saudi Arabia, the US embassies in Africa, the USS Cole, the World Trade Center 2001, and all the failed strikes, from those planned on the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels to the millennium plot designed to kill hundreds of thousands. The left’s argument about Iraq also contradicts itself, since the case before London was that the war in Iraq is a distraction from the war on terror. Obviously the London terrorists don’t think so.

The Islamic jihad is not a response to the war in Iraq; it is a religious war whose armies began forming in 1979 in Iran and Afghanistan and the West Bank and Gaza. Because the jihad is not about Iraq, its agendas -- which the left that never bothers itself about -- will not be satisfied by an American withdrawal from Iraq or Afghanistan, or an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank. Instead it will be incited by them. Just as Arafat and the al-Aqsa murderers brigade were incited by the weakness shown by Clinton and Barak in offering concessions to people who want it all. When your enemy is determined to destroy you, an olive branch is seen as weakness, something we should have learned once at for all at Munich, but never have.

The radical Islamist jihad is at war with the democracies of the West in Europe and the Middle East and America, and there is no way out of the war but to win it.

The bombings in London show the folly of well-meaning liberals who think that tolerance of an enemy that lives within one’s country will persuade the enemy to change his mind and will produce beneficent results. The Islamic community in London produced more than one Mosque of hate preaching war against Britain. The haters were tolerated. The tolerance led to disaster.

The war in Iraq is an excuse for radicalism, not its cause; just as the war in Vietnam was an excuse for American radicals to conduct a war against America they already had in their hearts to fight. The radicals' war not only continues but has morphed into a massive effort to support the campaign of jihadists who want to kill us. An expert on suicide bombings analyzed 71 terrorist attacks between 1995 and 2004 and concluded from the pattern (in an article called, “Al-Qaeda’s Smart Bombs") that the immediate military goal of the jihadists was “to compel the United States and its Western allies to withdraw combat forces from the Arabian peninsula and other Muslim countries."

This is precisely what the left is demanding. It has opened a political front behind our lines. Note: This surrender is not what the Iraqis are demanding; it is not what the people of Afghanistan are demanding; it is not what the Saudis or the Lebanese are demanding. It is what the terrorists are demanding, and it is what the American left is demanding, and the British and European left as well.

The left preaches surrender in the war against the Islamists on all fronts: retreat from Iraq; retreat from Afghanistan; retreat (without a peace) from the territories in Gaza and the West Bank. In the name of ending the violence. But even one such retreat will produce infinitely more bloodshed at home and abroad than we are facing now. Why? Because we are tolerant and the enemy is ruthless; because we are compassionate and the enemy is savage; because we are merciful and the enemy is not. America’s defeat, Britain’s defeat, Israel’s defeat would produce slaughters to make 9/11 look tame.

The lesson of London, then, is to take seriously what your enemies say. For years Britain has tolerated Imams in its midst who are calling for war. Not because they don’t like this particular Tony Blair policy or that one, but because they hate the secular and Christian and Jewish West which in their fanatical imaginations belongs to the realm of Dar al-Harb, the realm of the unbelievers, the realm of the infidel and the damned. Dar al-Harb: in Arabic, it means the realm of WAR. Leftists obviously don’t understand this, don’t understand the mentality of the religious fanatics whose work they are doing. If the West surrenders, the left will undoubtedly be the first to be killed. (Has any leftist asked themselves why the terrorists would pick liberal, multicultural New York to attack?)

For years Britain has tolerated Imams who have preached hatred of Britain right in their midst. For years Britain has tolerated Imams who have celebrated the violence that Britain’s enemies promise and the violence Britain’s enemies deliver. And now they have paid the price for their tolerance. Or a price. Because the war in Europe is only beginning.

The lesson of London is that tolerance can kill you.

It is time for the West to begin to set limits to the suicidal softness it considers its soul. We can no longer afford to tolerate hate directed against us, particularly hate that emanates from religious pulpits and supports murder in God's name. We can no longer tolerate hate that is directed at us because we think we are powerful and the hate can’t hurt us.

The lesson of London is that it can.

The Imams of hate and their followers and their secular defenders in the West are self-declared enemies who need to be watched closely by all of us from now on. They need to be watched in their Mosques, and in their civil liberties fronts to defend their captured, and in the political groups that have declared we are the enemy and they are the victims. When these domestics step over the line, they need to be prosecuted. If they are aliens who hate us, they need to be deported.

A lesson of London for the British themselves is that they need a British Patriot Act. Their frontline protectors are as hamstrung as ours were before 9/11. The Patriot Act criminalizes not only terror but “material support for terror.” It allows the FBI to surveil not only groups that have committed a crime against us, but groups that have demonstrated the passion and the will to commit crimes against us. The Patriot Act allows law enforcement to surveil the threats that come from our enemies within. That is why the left is up in arms against the Patriot Act: They want to strike down the provisions that allow us to keep an eye on them.

The stakes are high. These homemade London bombs, apparently not the work of professionals, killed more than fifty people and injured more than seven hundred. A dirty nuclear bomb in an American city is not something we will be able to just take in stride.

Our internal problem from those who hate us is as big as Britain’s, perhaps even bigger. I am growing weary of watching American apologists for Islamic terror and opponents of our self-defenses treated as “liberals” and as though the most important thing for the rest of us to do, is avert our eyes from the malice in their hearts and pretend that it's American politics as usual. We are trained in complacency by the genius of our democratic political system. Though passions run high, the stakes in our elections are remarkably low. One side loses an election. No one dies. No one goes to jail. In America politics can seem like a game.

Friday night I was watching my friend Alan Colmes, who is a decent liberal but doesn’t like the war. The guest on Hannity & Colmes was Kevin Danaher, husband of Medea Benjamin and a leader of the indecent left that unlike Alan wants us to lose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Israel to the enemy force. Danaher and his wife who are leaders of Global Exchange and Code Pink and Iraq Occupation Watch, the campaign to dissuade American youngsters from serving in our country, are at work day and night to cripple our lines of homeland defense, from the protections afforded by the Patriot Act to the military forces who are keeping our enemies at bay in the field.

The discussion on Hannity & Colmes was about the violence of the anarcho-marxists who were raining rocks on the G8 meeting in Scotland which the terrorist bombs were designed to disrupt. In other words, they were conducting violence to parallel ends. The rocks they were throwing were large enough to kill a man. Danaher, who is a leader of the global anti-capitalist left that staged the attacks would not condemn the rock throwers but was smart enough to disapprove violence in the abstract - or the violence of “both sides” - which he knew meant nothing. It was his people who were attacking. To condemn those defending themselves in the same breath is to propose that they become defenseless, which is exactly his plan.

Colmes was frustrated because he understood that Danaher’s position, as he was arguing it, was suspect but since Danaher was against the war Alan wanted to coach him to do better. “Look,” Colmes began, “I agree with your agendas, but…”

No he doesn’t agree with Danaher's true agendas. Alan Colmes doesn’t have the foggiest notion of who Kevin Danaher is or what his malicious and deadly intentions really are. Liberals like Alan Colmes have up to now protected the anti-American left by pretending that it is all a game. People who denounce the President as Adolf Hitler and America as Hitler’s Germany are "foolish" and don’t really mean it. Well actually some are not so foolish and do.

This is the lesson of London: Take the hostile force within your country and within your political coalition seriously. It’s not a game anymore.

This is something I learned in my years on the left. All too often, people mean what they say. Make no mistake, those who talk revolution and war against our country are quite capable of acting on their talk – of aiding and abetting those who are already at war and want to kill us. When the day comes that they step over the line and translate their words into action, they will do it with the best of intentions: to make the world a better place. That is the reason they are so dangerous. Like Mohammed Atta who did it for Allah, they will do it for a noble cause.

Understand this, and you will understand that people who use the language of war need to be isolated and regarded with care.

Understand this, and you will understand that those who describe America as Hitler's Germany can be dangerous, and need to be watched.

I myself understand that this is a disturbing thought to any American. It is disturbing to me. But in the aftermath of London it would be foolish to deny that such a precaution is also a necessary one. The infamous Ward Churchill began by describing ordinary Americans as “little Eichmanns". He has already moved on to inciting military personnel to kill their officers. And to inciting college students to applaud military personnel who do. As a matter of progressive duty, mind you. Can anyone be confident that there are no Ward Churchill disciples listening to his words who might take them seriously and put them into practice? Anyone remember John Walker Lindh?

Nazi Germany is a symbol of evil. There is not a man or woman who calls himself “progressive" who does not also think of themselves as a person who would destroy evil if given the chance. The purpose of identifying America with Nazi Germany is to hate America. To hate us. The purpose of this hatred is to engage in the task of destroying the evil. In this case, that means us.

Yes, we have rights in this country that guarantee to radicals who want to destroy us the privilege to telegraph their homicidal agendas. But this does not deprive the rest of us of the right to defend ourselves as well.

The beginning of this defense is to take their words seriously, remember London, and understand that this is no longer a game.

Foreign Policy Research Institute
50 Years of Ideas in Service to Our Nation
1955-2005
www.fpri.org

E-Notes
Distributed Exclusively via Fax & Email

RETHINKING NUCLEAR SECURITY STRATEGY
by Rensselaer Lee

September 2, 2005

Editor's Note

As we go to press with our latest FPRI E-Note, it is
unthinkable to fail to note the devastation along the Gulf
coast of the United States. To assist the relief effort,
here is the URL for the American Red Cross: www.redcross.org

Dr. Lee is an FPRI Senior Fellow and the author of Smuggling
Armageddon: The Nuclear Black Market in the Former Soviet
Union and Europe (St. Martin's-Palgrave, 1999). This essay
is based on a talk delivered at the CATO Institute on June
29, 2005.

RETHINKING NUCLEAR SECURITY STRATEGY

by Rensselaer Lee

Nonproliferation is the pre-eminent national security issue
of our time, and there is probably no more important U.S.
foreign policy goal than keeping nuclear weapons and the
ingredients and know-how to make them out of the hands of
those who would do us harm. But our current policies appear
inadequate to this formidable task. A more comprehensive,
proactive, and intelligence-based approach is required.

The current U.S. nonproliferation strategy consists of three
main components. One is to secure nuclear materials and
warheads at the sites where they are stored. Many consider
protecting materials at the source the first line of defense
in containing the nuclear smuggling threat. The second line
of defense aims at improving border and cargo monitoring at
the frontier crossings and embarkation points most likely to
be used by smugglers. The idea is to intercept target
materials that have broken loose from authorized storage--
that is, filtered through the first line of defense. The
third strategy component is to contain the spread of nuclear
intelligence. The intent here is to create jobs and
financial security for displaced nuclear workers so that
they won't sell their expertise to Al Qaeda, Iran, or some
other hostile entity. While still focused mainly on former
Soviet countries, U.S. programs are now expanding farther
afield. The Department of Energy's (DOE) installation of
radiation detectors at several high-volume shipping hubs, or
megaports, is one case in point.

Considerable dedication, ingenuity, and scientific expertise
have gone into designing these programs, but whether the
programs can prevent nuclear terrorism is doubtful. It's a
lot easier to identify measures of performance--number of
tons of highly-enriched uranium (HEU) and plutonium secured,
number of customs posts outfitted with radiation monitors,
number of weapons scientists employed in civilian jobs--than
it is to find measures of effectiveness.

One encouraging sign is that no plutonium or HEU has
surfaced in international smuggling channels in recent
years, at least none that was officially reported. But this
hopeful trend can be interpreted several different ways. It
could mean that our nuclear containment policies in Russia
and the new states are working; that improving economic
conditions in Russia generally and in the nuclear complex
have diminished incentives to steal and sell nuclear goods;
that Russia's security services are exercising tighter
control over the country's far-flung nuclear complex than
they did in the past; or that observed data on trafficking
incidents is not representative of the wider universe of
nuclear smuggling, including sophisticated schemes that have
escaped detection in the West.

LIMITATIONS
More likely the various components of U.S. nonproliferation
strategy add up to just a partial defense against nuclear
terrorism. Our programs suffer from technical and physical
limitations that clever adversaries can easily exploit. Our
simplistic models of human motivation compound the risk of
failure. Finally, the proliferation window in Russia has
been open for some time, raising the ominous possibility
that our adversaries may already have obtained some of what
they want.

Lets start by looking at the first line of defense, securing
nuclear materials, which equates mostly to the Material
Protection, Control and Accounting Program funded by the DOE
and in which the DOD is also involved. Analysts such as
Harvard University's Graham Allison believe it is possible
to lock up 100 percent of Russia's nuclear stockpile,
according a Fort Knox "gold standard" of impermeability, so
that no leakage or disappearances of significance can
possibly occur.[1] But the main impediment here is the
complexity and unpredictability of the human element. The
new sensors and protective barriers that the U.S. is
installing are only as good as the diligence, competence,
and integrity of the persons tending them. The new
safeguards probably can defeat snatch-and-grab type theft
attempts by solitary employees, such as we saw in Russia in
the early to mid 1990s, but this isn't the principal threat
today. Today's threat comes from organized conspiracies of
well-placed insiders. The Russians will tell you that the
cooperation of just four or five employees is required to
pull off a successful theft, even at enterprises that have
received substantial infusions of MPC&A assistance from the
U.S.

Thefts organized by senior managers are probably the most
serious threat. Managers know precisely the sequence of
steps required to remove the desired material while
minimizing the risk of detection. They have the means to
order electronic surveillance systems to be disengaged. They
have the legal authority to create appropriate documentation
to conceal a diversion--for example, writing up a shipment
of HEU as some relatively innocuous substance such as
natural uranium or cesium.

To be fair, the MPC&A program don't exclude consideration of
the human factor in the nuclear workplace. Indeed, the new
nonproliferation buzzword is "nuclear security culture," and
DOE now has a National Program and Sustainability Initiative
that tries to incorporate this concept. But training nuclear
workers to obey norms and follow established procedures is
not quite the same as deterring corrupt acts by criminally
inclined insiders, although some overlap of course exists.

The DOE-supported second line of defense program, which
deploys technological monitoring equipment at key border
crossings for people and cargo, faces even more daunting
challenges. Russia has 12,500 miles of border with its
neighbors, far too many to monitor effectively. Smugglers
won't necessarily opt to move their wares through customs
posts equipped with radiation detectors, and detectors
themselves are subject to all the vulnerabilities associated
with corruption: they can be turned off, bypassed, or simply
ignored. A further significant problem is that most of the
equipment being installed at borders is not sensitive enough
to detect well-shielded HEU, which is the material most
likely to be used in a terrorist bomb.

Finally, programs such as DOE's Global Initiatives for
Proliferation Prevention, designed to prevent brain-drain
and leakage of nuclear secrets, are unlikely to achieve the
desired results. The military's scientific knowledge is
difficult to contain under the best of circumstances:
America could not keep its own closely guarded nuclear
secrets from gravitating to the Soviet Union in the 1940s
and probably to China in the 1990s. These days, information
can easily be transmitted through the Internet.

The motives to sell nuclear intelligence are complex.
Economic uncertainty and the need to make ends meet are
factors, but so are greed, resentment, and ideological
conviction. British nuclear physicist and Soviet master spy
Klaus Fuchs, who worked at the Manhattan Project and later
at Los Alamos, hardly fit the profile of an unemployed or
economically desperate scientist.

Our nuclear security programs are absolutely not designed to
prevent state-sponsored proliferation, in which high-ranking
officials deliberately arrange the sale of nuclear goods to
client states or groups. The underground network organized
by Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan, which peddled centrifuges
and nuclear bomb designs to states such as Libya and Iran,
is a latter-day model for this. According to the National
Council of Resistance of Iran, an exile group, the network
also transferred an undetermined quantity of HEU to Iran in
2001.[2] The Pakistani Atomic Energy Commission in July 2000
took out a full-page ad in a Pakistani newspaper offering
for export plutonium, enriched uranium, and other nuclear
materials. (The offer was rescinded under U.S. pressure)
[3]. Finally, U.S. officials have speculated that Russia's
technical cooperation agreements with Iran might provide a
convenient cover for clandestine transfers of nuclear
materials, components, and weapons-building intelligence to
that country. High-level diplomacy and concerted political
action are probably the only effective means of dealing with
this issue.

The goals of our nonproliferation programs are necessarily
long-term: lock down all nuclear weapons and materials by
2008, equip 330 border crossings and 24 megaports by 2012,
create 15,000 civilian jobs for weapons scientists by
2030.[4] But the threat from terrorists and outlaw nations
is immediate. So the more time our programs require, the
more problematic their strategic justification. We may be
locking the proverbial barn door after some of the horses
have already escaped. Looking back to the 1990s, the Russian
nuclear complex was then going through a period of deep
malaise. The loss of orders for nuclear goods, a
deteriorating security climate, unpaid wages, a fraying
social safety net, and spreading corruption put much of the
nuclear stockpile at risk. Former senator Sam Nunn, now the
CEO of Nuclear Threat Initiative, told a Senate hearing in
1995 that the collapse of the USSR had "let loose a vast
potential supermarket for nuclear weapons, weapons-grade
uranium and plutonium, and equally deadly chemical or
biological weapons."[5] Even allowing for some hyperbole, it
would be a miracle indeed if no leakage of significance had
taken place during this period.

The visible machinations of the nuclear black market provide
little clue as to what might have happened. All the fissile
material seized internationally since the early 1990s put
together is not enough to make a nuclear bomb. But consider
that sophisticated thieves and smugglers are a lot less
likely to get caught than the amateurs and solo opportunists
who dominate the known smuggling incidents. Indeed, nuclear
smugglers captured in Western Europe in the early to mid
1990s told authorities that significant quantities of HEU
and plutonium had already escaped government control and was
available for sale. Where this material is today is
anybody's guess. It could be buried somewhere in a birch
forest, stashed in someone's refrigerator, circling the
globe looking for potential buyers, or hidden in a cave in
remote eastern Afghanistan. And reports persist of extremely
corrupt practices by certain nuclear facilities, including
off-the-books processing of uranium for private commercial
clients and altered paperwork to conceal substitution of
dangerous substances in legal radioactive shipments.

INTELLIGENCE-BASED SECURITY
Certainly we should continue on the path of trying to make
nuclear materials as technically secure as possible as
quickly as possible. But we need in addition a proactive,
intelligence-based nuclear security policy that will enable
us and our allies to anticipate nuclear deals in the making
and to reduce the risk of consequential proliferation
episodes.

One is to construct a vulnerability profile of each nuclear
energy enterprise. This could be based on such factors as
economic conditions and wage scales, presence of organized
crime or terrorist groups in the neighborhood, past
histories of thefts or theft attempts, accessibility to
foreign visitors, and frequency of travel abroad by
enterprise scientists. It should also be possible to gauge
susceptibility of the nuclear workforce to bribes or
blackmail, and employees' propensity to engage in corrupt or
disloyal conduct.

Illicit drug use, gambling habits, major medical expenses,
and conspicuous consumption unrelated to income are obvious
warning signs. Post-employment screening techniques--
polygraphs, psychological testing, investigating of bank
records--can be powerful predictive tools. They also can
yield information on prior thefts, possibly leading to
recovery of stolen material that perpetrators have not yet
had the chance to export. Moreover, remote monitoring of
nuclear storage areas and guard posts from vantage points
inside and outside the facility could provide an additional
measure of security against insider thefts. Some of these
ideas are now being implemented in Russian enterprises, but
on nowhere near the scale contemplated here.

A second recommendation is to focus more international
intelligence and law enforcement resources on the demand
side of the proliferation equation. Not enough is known
about adversaries' procurement chains inside and outside the
former Soviet Union, how these are organized and financed,
what front companies and other intermediaries are used, who
their inside collaborators are, etc. Law enforcement sting
operations in which operatives pose as purveyors of HEU or
plutonium could play a big role in fleshing out buyer and
end-user networks and in shutting some of them down.

Third, and related to this, collaboration with Russia and
other former Soviet security organizations needs to be
strengthened, since these organizations do much of the heavy
lifting in containing nuclear theft and smuggling. In 1998
Russia's Federal Security Service foiled a plot to divert
18.5kg of radioactive materials from one of the nuclear
facilities of the Chelyabinsk region, probably the Snezhinsk
facility, almost enough for a bomb. Mechanisms for formal
and informal information sharing on smuggling incidents,
actors, and trends would be of great value in configuring
U.S. nonproliferation programs in the newly independent
states.

As should be obvious, the requirements of the United States'
nuclear security policy are ultimately inseparable from the
requirements of its global war against terrorism. Al Qaeda's
attempts to obtain nuclear materials and weapons have gone
on for well over a decade. A large penumbra of uncertainty
surrounds the extent of nuclear leakages from Russia and
other supplier states. We do not know how far Al Qaeda and
its affiliates may have proceeded toward building a bomb.
Hence, our very real progress toward closing the
proliferation window in Russia and elsewhere must be
combined with unremitting vigilance against threats that may
already be out there.

----------------------------------------------------------
Notes
[1] Graham Allison. Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate
Preventable Catastrophe (New York; Henry Holt, 2004), pp.
149-50

[2] Louis Charbonneau, "Pakistan's Khan Gave Iran Bomb-Grade
Uranium-Exiles," Reuters, Nov. 17, 2004.

[3] Stephen Fidler and Victoria Burnett, "Pakistan's 'rogue'
nuclear scientist: what did Pakistan's government know about
his deals?" Financial Times, Apr. 6, 2004.

[4] Kenneth Luongo and William Hoehn, "An Ounce of
Prevention," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist, Mar.-Apr.
2005.

[5] Cited in James L. Ford and C. Richard Schuller,
Controlling Threats to Nuclear Security, National Defense
University Center for Non-Proliferation Studies, 1997, p. 3

(Ed. Note: A communist appologist if ever there was one...)

How the Free Market Killed New Orleans

By Michael Parenti

The free market played a crucial role in the destruction of New Orleans
and the death of thousands of its residents. Armed with advanced warning
that a momentous (force 5) hurricane was going to hit that city and
surrounding areas, what did officials do? They played the free market.

They announced that everyone should evacuate. Everyone was expected to
devise their own way out of the disaster area by private means, just as
the free market dictates, just like people do when disaster hits
free-market Third World countries.

It is a beautiful thing this free market in which every individual
pursues his or her own personal interests and thereby effects an optimal
outcome for the entire society. This is the way the invisible hand works
its wonders.

There would be none of the collectivistic regimented evacuation as
occurred in Cuba. When an especially powerful hurricane hit that island
last year, the Castro government, abetted by neighborhood citizen
committees and local Communist party cadres, evacuated 1.3 million
people, more than 10 percent of the country's population, with not a
single life lost, a heartening feat that went largely unmentioned in the
U.S. press.

On Day One of the disaster caused by Hurricane Katrina, it was already
clear that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of American lives had been lost
in New Orleans. Many people had "refused" to evacuate, media reporters
explained, because they were just plain "stubborn."

It was not until Day Three that the relatively affluent telecasters
began to realize that tens of thousands of people had failed to flee
because they had nowhere to go and no means of getting there. With
hardly any cash at hand or no motor vehicle to call their own, they had
to sit tight and hope for the best. In the end, the free market did not
work so well for them.

Many of these people were low-income African Americans, along with fewer
numbers of poor whites. It should be remembered that most of them had
jobs before Katrina's lethal visit. That's what most poor people do in
this country: they work, usually quite hard at dismally paying jobs,
sometimes more than one job at a time. They are poor not because they're
lazy but because they have a hard time surviving on poverty wages while
burdened by high prices, high rents, and regressive taxes.

The free market played a role in other ways. Bush's agenda is to cut
government services to the bone and make people rely on the private
sector for the things they might need. So he sliced $71.2 million from
the budget of the New Orleans Corps of Engineers, a 44 percent
reduction. Plans to fortify New Orleans levees and upgrade the system of
pumping out water had to be shelved.

Bush took to the airways and said that no one could have foreseen this
disaster. Just another lie tumbling from his lips. All sorts of people
had been predicting disaster for New Orleans, pointing to the need to
strengthen the levees and the pumps, and fortify the coastlands.

In their campaign to starve out the public sector, the Bushite
reactionaries also allowed developers to drain vast areas of wetlands.
Again, that old invisible hand of the free market would take care of
things. The developers, pursuing their own private profit, would devise
outcomes that would benefit us all.

But wetlands served as a natural absorbent and barrier between New
Orleans and the storms riding in from across the sea. And for some years
now, the wetlands have been disappearing at a frightening pace on the
Gulf' coast. All this was of no concern to the reactionaries in the
White House.

As for the rescue operation, the free-marketeers like to say that relief
to the more unfortunate among us should be left to private charity. It
was a favorite preachment of President Ronald Reagan that "private
charity can do the job." And for the first few days that indeed seemed
to be the policy with the disaster caused by Hurricane Katrina.

The federal government was nowhere in sight but the Red Cross went into
action. Its message: "Don't send food or blankets; send money."
Meanwhile Pat Robertson and the Christian Broadcasting Network---taking
a moment off from God's work of pushing John Roberts nomination to the
Supreme Court---called for donations and announced "Operation Blessing"
which consisted of a highly-publicized but totally inadequate shipment
of canned goods and bibles.

By Day Three even the myopic media began to realize the immense failure
of the rescue operation. People were dying because relief had not
arrived. The authorities seemed more concerned with the looting than
with rescuing people. It was property before people, just like the free
marketeers always want.

But questions arose that the free market did not seem capable of
answering: Who was in charge of the rescue operation? Why so few
helicopters and just a scattering of Coast Guard rescuers? Why did it
take helicopters five hours to get six people out of one hospital? When
would the rescue operation gather some steam? Where were the feds? The
state troopers? The National Guard? Where were the buses and trucks? the
shelters and portable toilets? The medical supplies and water?

Where was Homeland Security? What has Homeland Security done with the
$33.8 billions allocated to it in fiscal 2005? Even ABC-TV evening news
(September 1, 2005) quoted local officials as saying that "the federal
government's response has been a national disgrace."

In a moment of delicious (and perhaps mischievous) irony, offers of
foreign aid were tendered by France, Germany and several other nations.
Russia offered to send two plane loads of food and other materials for
the victims. Predictably, all these proposals were quickly refused by
the White House. America the Beautiful and Powerful, America the Supreme
Rescuer and World Leader, America the Purveyor of Global Prosperity
could not accept foreign aid from others. That would be a most deflating
and insulting role reversal. Were the French looking for another punch
in the nose?

Besides, to have accepted foreign aid would have been to admit the
truth---that the Bushite reactionaries had neither the desire nor the
decency to provide for ordinary citizens, not even those in the most
extreme straits. Next thing you know, people would start thinking that
George W. Bush was really nothing more than a fulltime agent of
Corporate America.

-------
Michael Parenti's recent books include Superpatriotism (City Lights) and
The Assassination of Julius Caesar (New Press), both available in
paperback. His forthcoming The Culture Struggle (Seven Stories Press)
will be published in the fall. For more information visit:
www.michaelparenti.org.

California Senate Rejects Schwarzenegger's Air Board Chair

The California Senate on Thursday rejected Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's choice to head the state Air Resources Board, saying her close ties to the energy industry made her a bad fit for an agency with so much influence on the nation's clean-air laws.

September 2, 2005 Issue #69

"Sometimes an intended epithet can be turned to good advantage.
In the sole surviving issue of the Decatur, Texas TIMES, one finds
the way Populists not only accepted the label `calamity howler'
but insisted that they had ample reason to howl and would continue
to howl until their objectives had been attained."
- THE POPULIST MIND, edited by Norman Pollack
EDITOR\PUBLISHER; A.V. Krebs
E-MAIL: avkrebs@earthlink.net
TO RECEIVE: Send name and address

THE SECOND BATTLE OF NEW ORLEANS
SAM SMITH
Undernews
September 1, 2005

The second Battle of New Orleans is already underway: a struggle over how to respond to the greatest natural disaster of our history. It is far too early to draw conclusions but soon enough for a few questions:
* What will be the iconographic role of this disaster? Will it --- as it should --- eclipse 9/11 as the central moment of contemporary history, or will it be subtly reduced to second place so the business at hand in Washington --- i.e. whatever war it is conducting --- can continue to retain semiotic hegemony? What is the relative importance of 16 acres in New York City versus tens of thousands in Louisiana?
* How much will we be willing to pay to restore one of our major cities and its citizens compared to what we have paid to create a manmade disaster in Iraq or to end constitutional government in the wake of September 11 ?
* Will the meaning of this disaster, like Septemebr 11, be repeatedly distorted by various parties of interest in a manner that blasphemes the memory of its victims and perverts its history?
* What effect will the fact that many of the victims of September 11 were white and powerful while many of the victims of New Orleans' disaster were black and so poor they couldn't get out of town alter the story we come to tell of the event? Does the mayor's decision to remove police from search and rescue so they could fight looting suggest a demographic subtext? Is the marketplace worth more than life itself?
* In what ways would the response to this disaster have been different if it its major victims had been lighter and wealthier? If the stranded had been in Palm Beach, what would we have done?
* If FEMA put a Category 5 hurricane in New Orleans on the same level as a terrorist attack in New York City or an earthquake in San Francisco, why did the White House and the Department of Homeland Security only show substantial interest in, and fund remedies for, the New York version of potential catastrophe? Does this qualify as criminal negligence?
* If everyone knew that New Orleans was an accident waiting to happen why were so few precautions taken? As just one example, why were not residents encouraged to have or provided inflatable rafts and life jackets in their homes along with the sort of food supplies promoted following September 11 ?
* Why does the government and the media persist in the notion that a major disaster requires centralized control --- if not martial law --- imposed from Washington? It is clear already that the most competent response to this disaster came at the local and state level and that the feds weren't even able to provide food, water, shelter and other logistical supplies in a timely matter. Both common sense and the 10th Amendment dictate that in a major disaster control should devolve to the governors, not to some covertly selected cabal in Washington.

It is interesting to note that while FEMA and the Pentagon were still trying to get their act together, Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell called the governor of Mississippi to say that 2,500 of his National Guard troops were on their way. In other words, a Democratic and a GOP governor from vastly different states got matters coordinated even as the monolithically incompetent Bush regime was still figuring out what to do.

* What lessons can be learn from the fact that the Coast Guard was the best organized federal agency --- rescuing 2600 people in few days with only 4,000 personnel? As Jim Ridgeway notes in the Village Voice, "it was the Coast Guard commander in New York who organized one of the most extraordinary operations maritime rescues since Dunkirk on September 11, pulling together, ferries, tugs, yachts, and all sorts of other boats to evacuate half a million people from downtown New York."
One explanation: the Coast Guard is highly decentralized (like local fire departments) with a lot of authority vested at the local level. It also places a high emphasis on competence, again like fire departments. When you are in a disaster your best friends are highly qualified rescuers who can make decisions without waiting for headquarters to tell them what to do.
* Will we finally learn from this experience that we --- despite our invasions and our Ipods --- are still part of nature, and must respect and work with it rather than ignoring and exploiting it? Or will we continue to view nature as just another problem for FEMA and the Corps of Engineers to solve?
* Will we finally suppress the pathological arrogance that has gotten us into such trouble in recent years and try a little well-founded humility for a change?
* Will it matter? The first Battle of New Orleans was fought several weeks after the Treaty of Ghent was signed. Maybe this battle will prove too late as well.

WAITING FOR A LEADER
EDITOIRAL
New York Times
September 1, 2005

George W. Bush gave one of the worst speeches of his life yesterday, especially given the level of national distress and the need for words of consolation and wisdom. In what seems to be a ritual in this administration, the president appeared a day later than he was needed. He then read an address of a quality more appropriate for an Arbor Day celebration: a long laundry list of pounds of ice, generators and blankets delivered to the stricken Gulf Coast. He advised the public that anybody who wanted to help should send cash, grinned, and promised that everything would work out in the end.

We will, of course, endure, and the city of New Orleans must come back. But
looking at the pictures on television yesterday of a place abandoned to the forces of flood, fire and looting, it was hard not to wonder exactly how that is going to come to pass. Right now, hundreds of thousands of American refugees need our national concern and care.

Thousands of people still need to be rescued from imminent peril. Public health threats must be controlled in New Orleans and throughout southern Mississippi. Drivers must be given confidence that gasoline will be available, and profiteering must be brought under control at a moment when television has been showing long lines at some pumps and spot prices approaching $4 a gallon have been reported.

Sacrifices may be necessary to make sure that all these things happen in an orderly, efficient way. But this administration has never been one to counsel sacrifice. And nothing about the president's demeanor yesterday --- which seemed casual to the point of carelessness --- suggested that he understood the depth of the current crisis.

While our attention must now be on the Gulf Coast's most immediate needs, the nation will soon ask why New Orleans's levees remained so inadequate. Publications from the local newspaper to National Geographic have fulminated
about the bad state of flood protection in this beloved city, which is below sea level. Why were developers permitted to destroy wetlands and barrier islands that could have held back the hurricane's surge? Why was Congress, before it wandered off to vacation, engaged in slashing the budget for correcting some of the gaping holes in the area's flood protection?

It would be some comfort to think that, as Mr. Bush cheerily announced, America "will be a stronger place" for enduring this crisis. Complacency will no longer suffice, especially if experts are right in warning that global warming may increase the intensity of future hurricanes. But since this administration won't acknowledge that global warming exists, the chances of leadership seem minimal.

GREAT THOUGHTS OF G.W. BUSH
WHILE FLYING ABOVE NEW ORLEANS
"It's devastating," POTUS said as he watched, according to Scott McClellan.
"It's got to be doubly devastating on the ground."

WHY THE LEVEE BROKE
WILL BUNCH
Attyfood - Alternet
September 1, 2005

Even though Hurricane Katrina has moved well north of the city, the waters continued to rise in New Orleans on Wednesday. That's because Lake Pontchartrain continues to pour through a two-block-long break in the main levee, near the city's 17th Street Canal. With much of the Crescent City some ten feet below sea level, the rising tide may not stop until until it's level with the massive lake.
There have been numerous reports of bodies floating in the poorest neighborhoods of this poverty-plagued city, but the truth is that the death toll may not be known for days, because the conditions continue to frustrate rescue efforts.
New Orleans had long known it was highly vulnerable to flooding and a direct hit from a hurricane. In fact, the federal government has been working with state and local officials in the region since the late 1960s on major hurricane and flood relief efforts. When flooding from a massive rainstorm in May 1995 killed six people,
Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or SELA.
Over the next 10 years, the Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with carrying out SELA, spent $430 million on shoring up levees and building pumping stations, with $50 million in local aid. But at least $250 million in crucial projects remained, even as hurricane activity in the Atlantic Basin increased dramatically and the levees surrounding New Orleans continued to subside.

Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle. The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security --- coming at the same time as federal tax cuts --- was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and
2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars.

Newhouse News Service, in an article posted late Tuesday night at The Times-Picayune Web site, reported: "No one can say they didn't see it coming. ... Now in the wake of one of the worst storms ever, serious questions are being asked about the lack of preparation."

In early 2004, as the cost of the conflict in Iraq soared, President Bush proposed spending less than 20% of what the Corps said was needed for Lake Pontchartrain, according to this February 16, 2004, article, in New Orleans CityBusiness:
"The $750 million Lake Pontchartrain and Vicinity Hurricane Protection project is another major Corps project, which remains about 20% incomplete due to lack of funds, said Al Naomi, project manager. That project consists of building up levees and protection for pumping stations on the east bank of the Mississippi River in Orleans, St. Bernard, St. Charles and Jefferson parishes.
"The Lake Pontchartrain project is slated to receive $3.9 million in the president's 2005 budget. Naomi said about $20 million is needed.

"`The longer we wait without funding, the more we sink,' he said. `I've got at least six levee construction contracts that need to be done to raise the levee protection back to where it should be (because of settling). Right now I owe my contractors about $5 million. And we're going to have to pay them interest."
On June 8, 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, told the Times-Picayune: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be
finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."

That June, with the 2004 hurricane seasion starting, the Corps' Naomi went before a local agency, the East Jefferson Levee Authority, and essentially begged for $2 million for urgent work that Washington was now unable to pay for. From the June 18, 2004 Times-Picayune:

"The system is in great shape, but the levees are sinking. Everything is sinking, and if we don't get the money fast enough to raise them, then we can't stay ahead of the
settlement," he said. "The problem that we have isn't that the levee is low, but that the federal funds have dried up so that we can't raise them."
The panel authorized that money, and on July 1, 2004, it had to pony up another $250,000 when it learned that stretches of the levee in Metairie had sunk by four feet. The agency had to pay for the work with higher property taxes. The levee board noted in October 2004 that the feds were also now not paying for a hoped-for $15 million project to better shore up the banks of Lake Pontchartrain.
The 2004 hurricane season was the worst in decades. In spite of that, the federal government came back this spring with the steepest reduction in hurricane- and flood-control funding for New Orleans in history. Because of the proposed cuts, the Corps office there imposed a hiring freeze. Officials said that money targeted for the

SELA project --- $10.4 million, down from $36.5 million --- was not enough to start any new jobs. According to New Orleans CityBusiness this June 5:
'The district has identified $35 million in projects to build and improve levees, floodwalls and pumping stations in St. Bernard, Orleans, Jefferson and St. Charles
parishes. Those projects are included in a Corps line item called Lake Pontchartrain, where funding is scheduled to be cut from $5.7 million this year to $2.9 million in
2006. Naomi said it's enough to pay salaries but little else.

"`We'll do some design work. We'll design the contracts and get them ready to go if we get the money. But we don't have the money to put the work in the field, and that's the problem,' Naomi said."
There was, at the same time, a growing recognition that more research was needed to see what New Orleans must do to protect itself from a Category 4 or 5 hurricane. But once again, the money was not there. As the Times-Picayune reported last September 22:
"That second study would take about four years to complete and would cost about $4 million, said Army Corps of Engineers project manager Al Naomi. About $300,000 in federal money was proposed for the 2005 fiscal-year budget, and the state had agreed to match that amount.
"But the cost of the Iraq war forced the Bush administration to order the New Orleans district office not to begin any new studies, and the 2005 budget no
longer includes the needed money, he said.
[EDITOR'S NOTE: The U.S. war in Iraq now costs more per month than the average monthly cost of military operations in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, according to a report. The report, entitled "The Iraq Quagmire" from the Institute for Policy Studies and Foreign Policy in Focus, both liberal, anti-war organizations, put the cost of current operations in Iraq at $5.6 billion per month. This breaks down to almost $186 million a day - Huffington Post ]
The Senate was seeking to restore some of the SELA funding cuts for 2006. But now it's too late. One project that a contractor had been racing to finish this summer was a bridge and levee job right at the 17th Street Canal, site of the main breach on Monday. The levee failure appears to be causing a human tragedy of epic proportions: "We probably have 80% of our city under water; with some sections of our city the water is as deep as 20 feet. Both airports are underwater," Mayor Ray Nagin told a radio interviewer.

The Newhouse News Service article published Tuesday night observed, "The Louisiana congressional delegation urged Congress earlier this year to dedicate a stream of federal money to Louisiana's coast, only to be opposed by the White House. ... In its budget, the Bush administration proposed a significant reduction in funding for southeast Louisiana's chief hurricane protection project. Bush proposed $10.4 million, a sixth of what local officials say they need."

Washington knew that this day could come at any time, and it knew the things that needed to be done to protect the citizens of New Orleans. But in the tradition of the riverboat gambler, the Bush administration decided to roll the dice on its fool's errand in Iraq, and on a tax cut that mainly benefitted the rich. Now Bush has lost that gamble, big time.

The president told us that we needed to fight in Iraq to save lives here at home. Yet -- after moving billions of domestic dollars to the Persian Gulf --- there are bodies floating through the streets of Louisiana. What does George W. Bush have to say for himself now?

Will Bunch is a senior writer at the Philadelphia Daily News and author of the blog Attytood.

FOR THEY THAT SOW THE WIND
SHALL REAP THE WHIRLWIND
ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.
The Huffington Post
September 1, 2005

As Hurricane Katrina dismantles Mississippi's Gulf Coast, it's worth recalling the central role that Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour played in derailing the Kyoto Protocol and kiboshing President Bush's iron-clad campaign promise to regulate CO2.

In March of 2001, just two days after EPA Administrator Christie Todd Whitman's strong statement affirming Bush's CO2 promise former RNC Chief Barbour responded with an urgent memo to the White House.

Barbour, who had served as RNC Chair and Bush campaign strategist, was now
representing the president's major donors from the fossil fuel industry who had enlisted him to map a Bush energy policy that would be friendly to their interests. His credentials ensured the new administration's attention.
The document, titled "Bush-Cheney Energy Policy & CO2," was addressed to
Vice President Cheney, whose energy task force was then gearing up, and to
several high-ranking officials with strong connections to energy and automotive concerns keenly interested in the carbon dioxide issue, including Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, Interior Secretary Gale Norton, Commerce Secretary Don Evans, White House chief of staff Andy Card and legislative liaison Nick Calio. Barbour pointedly omitted the names of Whitman and Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, both of whom were on record supporting CO2 caps. Barbour's memo chided these administration insiders for trying to address global warming which Barbour dismissed as a radical fringe issue.

A moment of truth is arriving," Barbour wrote, "in the form of a decision whether this Administration's policy will be to regulate and/or tax CO2 as a pollutant. The question is whether environmental policy still prevails over energy policy with Bush-Cheney, as it did with Clinton-Gore." He derided the idea of regulating CO2 as
"eco-extremism," and chided them for allowing environmental concerns to "trump good energy policy, which the country has lacked for eight years."
The memo had impact. "It was terse and highly effective, written for people without much time by a person who controls the purse strings for the Republican Party," said John Walke, a high-ranking air quality official in the Clinton administration.

On March 13, Bush reversed his previous position, announcing he would not back a CO2 restriction using the language and rationale provided by Barbour. Echoing Barbour's memo, Bush said he opposed mandatory CO2 caps, due to "the incomplete state of scientific knowledge* about global climate change.

Well, the science is clear. This month, a study published in the journal Nature by a renowned MIT climatologist linked the increasing prevalence of destructive hurricanes to human-induced global warming.

Now we are all learning what it's like to reap the whirlwind of fossil fuel dependence which Barbour and his cronies have encouraged. Our destructive addiction has given us a catastrophic war in the Middle East and --- now --- Katrina is giving our nation a glimpse of the climate chaos we are bequeathing our children.

In 1998, Republican icon Pat Robertson warned that hurricanes were likely to
hit communities that offended God. Perhaps it was Barbour's memo that caused Katrina, at the last moment, to spare New Orleans and save its worst flailings for the Mississippi coast. [UPDATE: Alas, the reprieve for New Orleans was only temporary. But Haley Barbour still has much to answer for.]

TRAGEDY MAY NOT
BE SEASON FINALE,
HURRICANE PERIOD HAS
THREE MONTHS TO GO
KEAY DAVIDSON
San Francisco Chronicle
September 1, 2005
As bad as Hurricane Katrina is, it may not be the last such devastating storm of what promises to be a ferocious hurricane season through much of autumn, meteorologists say.

The Gulf, Florida and East coasts could also be in for a decade or more of similar coastline-battering storms, they say. And, according to some experts, global warming might be generating much more intense hurricanes than in the past.
In their seasonal hurricane forecast issued earlier this year, William Gray and his colleagues at Colorado State University estimated the odds were one-third higher than normal of a major hurricane making landfall on the Gulf Coast from Pensacola, Florida, to Brownsville, Texas.

To some, that forecast appears to have been grimly vindicated by this week's destruction and flooding of much of New Orleans and surrounding regions.

"This year, we were forecasting one of the most active seasons on record, " Gray's research associate Philip Klotzbach said in an e-mail. "So yes, I guess I would say that we are not surprised that there have been landfalling hurricanes so far this year. ... And the season is only about 40% done."

Other experts are more cautious. Chris Davis of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado said it was too early to say that Gray's team had forecast the New Orleans storm.

"A probabilistic forecast cannot be vindicated by a single event,'' Davis said. "The quality of Dr. Gray's prediction, when phrased in terms of probabilities, must be evaluated over many seasons."

Meteorologists say the kind of hurricanes that were common in the mid- 20th century appear to be reviving because of quasi-cyclical variations in the atmosphere or ocean, or both.

With fortunate simultaneity, their hurricane forecasts have improved during the same period. One advance is the discovery of subtle atmospheric relationships between the rate of Atlantic hurricane formation and the appearance or nonappearance of El Niño events, unusual oceanic warmings in the Pacific.
When El Niño events occur, few hurricanes strike, whereas hurricanes are more common when El Niño events are absent. This year, there has been an absence of El Niño.

Atlantic hurricanes are especially common when Atlantic waters are unusually warm, meteorologists also found. That also has been true this year.
Forecasters typically define "hurricane season" as June 1 to November 30.
Gray's predictions are significant because many scientists regard him as the leading hurricane forecaster.

His "forecasts have had the longest track record and been the most skillful," said Professor Lian Xie, a hurricane expert at North Carolina State University.
Still, hurricane forecasting remains a chancy business. Gray's forecasts "have been right in some years, but wrong in some other years," Xie said. But even Xie and his colleagues, as well as experts from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), forecast this year's rough hurricane season.
If their forecasts hold up, more trouble is ahead before this season ends. Experts expect one or two more hurricanes to make landfall on the East Coast, plus other hurricanes that will whiz by without touching the coastline.
Gray also fears that the current cycle of severe hurricanes will persist for a few decades. That's because, if past records of ocean temperature fluctuations are any guide, Atlantic waters will remain warm for a long time to come.
Kerry Emanuel, a hurricane specialist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, suspects that the revival of major, coastline-clobbering hurricanes in recent years is linked to human-caused global warming of the atmosphere.
In the Aug. 4 issue of the journal Nature, Emanuel reported an apparent 50% increase in the intensity of Atlantic and Pacific hurricanes (typhoons, as they are known in the Pacific) since the 1970s.

"My results," Emanuel said, "suggest that future warming may lead to an upward trend in (hurricanes') destructive potential, and --- taking into account an increasing coastal population --- a substantial increase in hurricane-related losses in the 21st century."

Gray and others have rejected this view, which has also been voiced by environmental activists. Still, Stephan P. Nelson, program director of physical and dynamic meteorology at the U.S. National Science Foundation, told The Chronicle on Wednesday that Emanuel has an excellent reputation. "His paper should and will be taken seriously by the research community," Nelson said.

One critic, Chris Landsea, a research meteorologist at NOAA, said there was no evidence that the hurricane activity of recent years was dramatically different from the last century.

"The last few years have been busy (with hurricanes), but the 1930s to 1960s were much more destructive (as measured by wind speeds) than the last ten years," Landsea said. "That points to the conclusion (that) we're not seeing more destructive hurricanes. I wouldn't claim there's no global warming influence on (hurricane) activity, but I would agree that any such global- warming influence will be pretty small in the future."

CONFRONTING TRAGEDY
My Life
My life is but a weaving
Between my God and me.
I may but choose the colors
He worketh steadily.
Full opt he weaveth sorrow
And I in foolish pride
Forget He sees the upper
And I the underside.
--- John Bannister Tabb, Confederate Army Chaplain

GLOBAL WARMING
LAWSUIT AGAINST U.S
AGENCIES PASSES COURT TEST
ENVIRONMENTAL NEWS SERVICE
August 25, 2005
A federal judge has decided that two environmental groups and four cities [Oakland
California, Boulder, Colorado plius two more] have the right to sue the federal government based on allegations that financial investments made by government
agencies may have harmed the United States by increasing the intensity of global warming.

The ruling Tuesday by Judge Jeffrey White of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California is the first time that a federal court has granted legal standing for a lawsuit exclusively alleging injury from global warming and challenging the federal
government's failure to evaluate the impacts of its actions on the Earth's climate and U.S. citizens.

The case, filed in August 2002 by Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, and four cities, charges that the Export-Import Bank (Ex-Im) and the Oversees Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) have provided financial assistance to oil and other fossil fuel projects without first evaluating the projects' global warming impacts to the United
States.

The unprecedented lawsuit alleges that OPIC and Ex-Im illegally provided over $32 billion in financing and insurance for oil fields, pipelines and coal-fired power plants over the past ten years without assessing their contribution to global warming, or their impact on the U.S. environment as required under the National Environmental
Policy Act (NEPA).
The cities of Oakland, Arcata, California and Santa Monica, California and
Boulder, Colorado are parties to the lawsuit that the judge ruled may now proceed.

OPIC, an independent government corporation, offers insurance and loan guarantees for projects in developing countries. Ex-Im, an independent governmental agency and wholly-owned government corporation, provides financing support for exports from the United States.

Many of the projects funded by OPIC and Ex-Im are power plants which emit greenhouses gases that the groups and cities allege cause global warming.
The cities and groups argued that the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires environmental assessments of proposed development projects in the United States, should apply to projects overseas financed by U.S. government agencies.
They contend that U.S. law should apply because those projects are producing greenhouse gases which add to global warming, contributing to the degradation of the U.S. environment and harming the members of Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth and residents of the four cities.

The judge denied the motion for summary judgement by OPIC President and CEO Peter Watson and then Ex-Im Vice Chairman and First Vice President Phillip Merrill, explaining that a summary judgment procedure is used to identify and dispose of factually unsupported claims. His ruling means that the environmental coalition's claims deserve to be heard in court and judged on their merits.

The government agencies' claims that the case should be dismissed because the Plaintiffs lack standing, because OPIC and Ex-Im have not taken any action subjecting them to judicial review, and that OPIC is exempt from complying with the National Environmental Policy Act were all rejected by the judge.

To show that Greenpeace deserves standing, which is the right to pursue a case before the court, Greenpeace member and employee Melanie Duchin of Anchorage, Alaska said in a declaration submitted to the court that the actions of OPIC and Ex-Im directly impact her life. Decisions of the agencies are responsible for climate change that contributed to massive fires across the state last summer, and melting of the Arctic ice that makes her biological work more dangerous, Duchin declared.

John Passacantando, executive director of Greenpeace, Inc., based in California and Washington, D.C., explained that his group's 250,000 members "seek to increase funding for projects that increase renewable energy deployment."
"Global warming is Greenpeace's ongoing priority campaign worldwide,"
Passacantando declared. "The current campaign is focused on monitoring accelerating capital investment in energy projects in developing countries."
Norman Dean, executive director of Washington, DC- based Friends of the Earth (FOE), explained in his declaration that together with the other member groups of Friends of the Earth International in 70 countries, his 300,000 member group works to focus the attention of the public, our members, and government decision makers on the government financing and subsidies provided to fossil fuel use and
combustion.

"These subsidies are often funded with the use of taxpayer funds, including those of our members," Dean stated to explain why his group should be granted the standing to pursue the lawsuit.

For the City of Arcata, California, Deputy Director of Environmental Services Mark Andre declared that over the period 1887 to 2000 temperatures monitored five miles south of the city increased "about 2.1 degrees Fahrenheit." Andre said annual rainfall amounts have decreased about ten percent between 1857 and 2000, but extreme wet weather events have become more frequent.

Andre declared that the sea level along the California coast has "risen by about four inches" and is projected to rise up to "3.5-35 inches between 1990 and 2100."

As the sea rises, Arcata's low-lying lands would be inundated with sea water, negatively affecting the city's wastewater treatment plant, storm water and sewage infrastructure and a wildlife refuge, Andre declared.

Judge White, who was appointed by President George W. Bush in 2002, concluded that evidence offered by the plaintiff groups and cities "is sufficient to demonstrate it is reasonably probable that emissions from projects supported by OPIC and Ex-Im ... will threaten Plaintiffs' concrete interests."

The judge highlighted evidence demonstrating that "projects supported by OPIC and Ex-Im are directly or indirectly responsible for approximately 1,911 million tonnes of carbon dioxide and methane emissions annually, which equals nearly eight percent of the world's emissions and is equivalent to one third of the total carbon emissions from the United States in 2003."

OPIC and Ex-Im argued that most large energy-related projects in which either agency is involved would proceed without their support. But the judge was persuaded by evidence submitted by the cities and groups demonstrating a stronger link between the agencies' assistance and the energy-related projects. "For example," he wrote, "Ex-Im has stated that it 'supports export sales that otherwise would not have gone forward.'"

"This ruling is a wake up call for the federal government to tackle the growing environmental and human impacts of global warming," said FOE's Dean.
"This case once again highlights the fact that global warming pollution doesn't recognize political borders," said Kert Davies, research director of Greenpeace. "The judge acknowledged that these taxpayer funded projects in other countries have impact back home in the United States."

Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown said, "Tragically, the federal government is violating federal law, which requires an assessment of cumulative impacts. This injures the citizens of Oakland, and every person in this country. We'll fight as long as it takes to get federal law properly enforced."

The government agencies do not comment on litigation while it is still before the courts. Phillip Merrill, who was Vice Chairman and First Vice President of the Export-Import Bank at the time the lawsuit was filed, rose to become President and Chairman of the Bank, and then stepped down from that position when his term ended on July 20, 2005.

The judge's decision is found online at:
http://www.climatelawsuit.org

WEAPONS SALES WORLDWIDE
RISE TO HIGHEST LEVELS SINCE
2000; U.S. LEADS RACE WITH
ONE-THIRD OF ALL SALES
THOM SHANKER
New York Times
August 30, 2005

WASHINGTON, Aug. 29 - The value of military weapons sales worldwide jumped
in 2004 to the highest level since 2000, driven by arms deals with developing nations, especially India, Saudi Arabia and China, according to a new Congressional study.

The total of arms sales and weapons transfer agreements to both industrialized and developing nations was nearly $37 billion in 2004, according to the study.
That total was the largest since 2000, when global arms sales reached $42.1 billion, and was far above the 2003 figure of $28.5 billion.

The United States once again dominated global weapons sales, signing deals worth $12.4 billion in 2004, or 33.5 percent of all contracts worldwide. But that was down from $15.1 billion in 2003.

The share of American arms contracts specifically with developing nations was $6.9 billion in 2004, or 31.6 percent of all such deals, up slightly from $6.5 billion in 2003.

Russia was second in global arms sales, with $6.1 billion in agreements, or 16.5 percent of all such contracts, a notable increase from its $4.4 billion in sales in 2003. In 2004, Russia signed arms transfer deals worth $5.9 billion with the developing world, 27.1 percent of the global total, up from $4.3 billion in 2003.
Britain was third in arms transfer agreements to the developing world in 2004, signing contracts worth $3.2 billion, while Israel ranked fourth, with deals worth $1.2 billion. France followed with $1 billion.

The report, "Conventional Arms Transfers to Developing Nations," is published by the Congressional Research Service, a division of the Library of Congress.
The annual study, which was delivered to Congress on Monday, is considered by academic experts to be the most thorough compilation of facts and figures on global weapons sales available in the public domain.

The study uses figures in 2004 dollars, with figures for other years adjusted to account for inflation.

The statistics in the report "illustrate how global patterns of conventional arms transfers have changed in the post-cold-war and post-Persian-Gulf-war years," Richard F. Grimmett, a specialist in national defense at the Congressional Research Service, wrote in the introduction to the study.

"Relationships between arms suppliers and recipients continue to evolve in response to changing political, military and economic circumstances," he said. "Nonetheless, the developing world continues to be the primary focus of foreign arms sales activity by conventional weapons suppliers."

The study found that arms sales to developing nations in 2004 totaled nearly $21.8 billion, a substantial increase over the $15.1 billion in 2003. That was 58.9 percent of all arms sales agreements worldwide for last year.

Over the last four years, China has purchased more weapons than any other nation in the developing world, signing $10.4 billion in deals from 2001 to 2004. Such statistics could be used by those in the United States government who have argued against any decision by the European Union to lift its arms embargo against China.

For that same four-year period, India ranked second, with $7.9 billion in arms purchases, and Egypt was third, with $6.5 billion in deals.

But India surpassed China in total purchases in 2004, agreeing to buy $5.7 billion in arms.

Saudi Arabia was second in signing arms deals last year, with contracts valued at $2.9 billion, and China was third in 2004, signing $2.2 billion in contracts for arms purchases.

"Presently, there appear to be fewer large weapons purchases being made by
developing nations in the Near East," Mr. Grimmett wrote, while relatively larger purchases are being made by developing nations in Asia, "led principally by China and India."

According to the study, the four major West European arms suppliers --- Britain, France, Germany and Italy --- significantly increased their collective share of arms sales with developing nations between 2003 and 2004, rising to $4.8 billion in 2004 from $830 million in 2003.

U.S POVERTY RATE
RISES TO 12.7%, UP ONE
MILLION PEOPLE FROM 2003
ASSOCIATED PRESS
August 30, 2005

The nation's poverty rate rose to 12.7% of the population last year, the fourth consecutive annual increase, the Census Bureau said Tuesday.
The percentage of people without health insurance didn't change.
Overall, there were 37 million people living in poverty, up 1.1 million people from 2003. Asians were the only ethnic group to show a decline in poverty --- from 11.8% in 2003 to 9.8% last year. The poverty rate among the elderly declined as well, from 10.2% in 2003 to 9.8% last year.

The last decline in overall poverty was in 2000, when 31.1 million people lived under the threshold --- 11.3% of the population.

The number of people without health insurance grew from 45 million to 45.8 million. At the same time, the number of people with health insurance coverage grew by two million last year.

Charles Nelson, an assistant division chief at the Census Bureau, said the percentage of uninsured remained steady because of an "increase in government coverage, notably Medicaid and the state children's health insurance program, that offset a decline in employment-based coverage."

The median household income, meanwhile, stood at $44,389, unchanged from 2003. Among racial and ethnic groups blacks had the lowest median income and Asians the highest. Median income refers to the point at which half of households earn more and half earn less.

Regionally, income declined only in the Midwest, down 2.8% to $44,657. The South was the poorest region and the Northeast and the West had the highest median incomes.

The increase in poverty came despite strong economic growth, which helped create 2.2 million jobs last year.

Sheldon Danziger, co-director of the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan, said the poverty number is still much better than the 1980s and early 1990s.

"The good news is that poverty is a lot lower than it was in 1993, but we went through a hell of an economic boom," Mr. Danziger said. "Nobody is predicting we're going to go through another economic boom like that."

The poverty threshold differs by the size and makeup of a household. For instance, a family of four with two children was considered living in poverty if income was $19,157 or less. For a family of two with no children, it was $12,649. For a person 65 and over living alone, it was 9,060.

The estimates on poverty, uninsured and income are based on supplements to the bureau's Current Population Survey, and are conducted over three months, beginning in February, at about 100,000 households nationwide.

The only city with a million or more residents that exhibited a significant change in poverty level last year was New York City, which saw the rate increase from 19% to 20.3%.

CORPORATE PROFITS
RISE SHARPLY DESPITE
MANUFACTURING SOFTNESS
JOE PRECIPHS
Wall Street Journal
September 1, 2005

Corporate profits are soaring despite sluggish growth in manufacturing and a slight slowdown in the U.S. economy.

Second-quarter corporate profits rose a sharp 6.9% from the first quarter, unadjusted for inflation and not annualized, as the gross domestic product posted a 3.3% increase, adjusted for inflation and at an annual rate, the Commerce Department said, following its initial estimate of 3.4%. Consumer spending, business investment and exports rose, contributing to the growth in GDP, while business-inventory investment fell.

Some analysts were encouraged by the report, anticipating robust economic growth in the third quarter, while others were somewhat muted in their response.
"Given the sharp swing in inventory accumulation, the composition of GDP in Q2 still supports the expectation of strong growth in Q3," Goldman Sachs economists said. "However, given fast-moving developments in the energy markets, the likely near-term disruptions from Hurricane Katrina, and the fact that the inventory swing was modestly smaller than first reported, our current estimate of 5% annualized growth looks a bit high."

Businesses cut inventories by $6.4 billion in the second quarter, which subtracted 1.99 percentage points from GDP, the Commerce Department said.
The Purchasing Management Association of Chicago also announced that its seasonally adjusted index of area business activity plummeted more than 14 points from July to August. The drop is considered a strong indicator of narrowed manufacturing activity in that part of the country. It also represents the first gloomy appraisal of economic conditions after more than two years of favorable reports, the association said. Although the Chicago index is considered to be somewhat erratic by some analysts, the drop was significant enough for many to take notice.

The increase in corporate profits has some economists speculating about how that good fortune will play out in the job market. The Commerce Department reported that second-quarter pretax corporate profits were up 17.7% from the year-earlier period, while after-tax profits were up 11.5% year-to-year.

Still, wages remain depressed and the cost of living for many workers continues to rise, due in part to soaring energy prices. The unemployment rate is holding steady at five percent.

A.V. Krebs contributes a regular column "Calamity Howler" to the bi-monthly The
Progressive Populist. Sample copies of the paper and subscriptions can be
obtained at P.O. Box 487, Storm Lake, Iowa 50588 or at
http://www.populist.com

"Britain" was revived to heal a fractured nation. An idea whose time has come?
By Charles Moore
27/08/2005
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2005/08/27/do2701.xml

Since four British citizens killed themselves and 52 others, mainly fellow citizens, on July 7, we have all been discussing Britishness. That must be a wholly good, if sadly belated thing. But I wish I knew what is meant by "British values".

It's a free-for-all, this "values" talk. One says "a sense of humour" is a great British value. Another says the same of our unsmiling reserve. A third points out that a sense of humour is scarcely unique to these islands. Each is right, but none gets us very far.

"Values" are symptoms more than causes. Freedom, tolerance, moderation are all good values in our culture (though not in our culture alone), but to identify them does not in itself explain them, protect them or advance them. It is as if, by pointing out all the signs of good health in the human body - lithe limbs, bright eyes - we thought we could guarantee its continuation.

Behind the "values" of a country lies its history. This is affected and dramatised by individuals, which is why it is good, 200 years on from Trafalgar, to be learning about Nelson once more. But even more important than single men and women are institutions. The history of the interaction of people and institutions tells us what Britishness has been, and therefore the basis for what it can become. That history is no longer taught or celebrated. Strange that a government that is always talking about the need for "a narrative" to explain its own policies fights shy of the narrative of the nation it governs. It is time to look at the history again.

Take sport. Isn't it rather interesting and important that most of the greatest sports in the world - soccer, rugby, golf, cricket, tennis, racing - began, or first took organised shape, in this country? This wasn't because the British were mysteriously physically better at playing games than other people. It was because their culture combined the freedom to play what you wanted with the civic sense that you would do this best if you agreed your rules and enforced them through your own clubs, rather than through state control.

Take the professions. The reason that our troops generally behave well in wars and usually win them is not because the British are ethnically, genetically braver than other people. It is because they have long developed a regimental system on land and a ship-based one at sea that cements loyalty and passes on experience across the generations. Something comparable happens at teaching hospitals, or with pupillage at the Bar.

Take the joint stock company, the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England, Oxford and Cambridge, the ancient universities in Scotland. Take Scouts and Guides, the Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme, mutual societies, charities, private clubs, trade unions, and residents' associations. Take the Church of England, the Church of Scotland, the Methodist Church, the Royal Society, the Royal Academy, the National Trust, the Hospice Movement, Battersea Dogs' Home and - for all I know - the Royal and Ancient Order of Buffaloes. There is almost no end to the list of British institutions, some of them so successful that they have gone global.

Or take the extra day we shall be enjoying (or, given traffic, enduring) this weekend. It was invented by a banker, Sir John Lubbock, in 1871. In his job, he observed that the health of bank clerks suffered from working too hard: they needed more time off than that provided by the existing religious holidays. He realised that no bank would close for a day unless all did, so he persuaded Parliament (he was also an MP) to legislate for it. "Rest is not idleness," he said, "and to lie sometimes on the grass under the trees on a summer's day is by no means a waste of time."

Lubbock certainly did not waste time. In fact, he is a case study of Britishness in its energetic Victorian version. He was slightly absurd in what his biographer called his "relentless optimism", even experimenting for three months to see if he could teach his poodle to read. But it says something for a culture that optimism can thrive. Tutored by Charles Darwin as a young man, Lubbock produced serious studies of ants, was the first to make the distinction between the palaeolithic and neolithic stages of human development, revolutionised the system of clearing cheques in banks, and published a very successful selection - the One Hundr ed Books that he thought necessary to read to be civilised: it included the Koran ("portions of"). When he was made a peer, he took the title of Avebury out of affection for the Druidic stone circle there which he had saved from destruction. In everything he did, he believed in a link between personal achievement and the wider public culture, confident that each helped the other.
Now that confidence is gone, weakened by Marxism, post-colonial guilt, two world wars, the European Union and much more. It is interesting to see our Government, which for years promoted the destruction of Britishness more assiduously than any of its predecessors, now fumbling its way back to it. How distant the Millennium Dome and the British Airways ethnic tailfins now seem. Here are a few ideas to help it on its journey.

1) Teach the English language. Language is, in a way, our best-shared, most flexible institution, containing what is common while enabling what is individual. Not to be able to speak English well is to be cut off from almost everything else that composes Britishness. David Cameron, who wants to be the next Conservative leader, made a good speech this week about Islamist terrorism, in which he pointed out that many of our citizens cannot speak it at all. He quoted a Home Office figure that only 26 per cent of Pakistanis and Bangladeshis here are fluent in English (the equivalent in America is 68 per cent). If that is true, it is terrifying.
2) Restore Parliament. The word itself derives from the French for speaking: Parliament is supposed to be the place where the language concentrates in public form for public purposes. But now the action happens elsewhere and so the speeches are not worth hearing. Ours is the first generation since the 17th century to hold Parliament in contempt. If that continues, political stability and national unity cannot last.
3) Look again at the word "Britain". Unlike England, Scotland or Wales, "Britain" is essentially a political word, originally revived more than 300 years ago to bind up a populated, multi-cultural space that was busy uniting first our crowns and, later, our parliaments. The figure of Britannia appeared on coins of some of the Roman emperors and then vanished for 1,200 years or so, until Charles II got a lady friend of his to model in the role for a copper coin of 1665. The idea was to dramatise a national political identity that needed forging after civil war. This month, Gordon Brown announced that he was removing Britannia from the back of the 50p piece and holding a competition for a design to "reflect Britain today".

Wouldn't he do better to learn from the history of the last time Britishness was an issue of life and death on our mainland - and leave her there?

Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

by Nicholas Ostler

This learned and entertaining book starts around 3,300 BC and works forwards. Given that it's a short history of the last 5,000 years, it is remarkably comprehensive as well as thought-provoking. For most people, learning a first language is so 'easy' you don't remember doing it and picking up others later on is a tedious chore.

It therefore seems reasonable that any time one group of people conquers another, the victors should impose their language, but historically, things haven't always worked like that. Nicholas Ostler's aim is to look at why some languages survive and spread, while others, for example the Aboriginal languages of Australia, fail.

He identifies three major paths to success: breed your way to majority status (like Chinese), spread by conquest (like Arabic) or give rise to a popular religion (like Sanskrit). But there is also another aspect contributing to the long-term survival of a language, which is to become classical.

We normally think of classics as 'Latin and Greek', but there have been a good few others. Sumerian outlived its political heyday by a millennium and half; I was pleased to discover that one of its leading writers was the world's first major poetess, Enheduanna, daughter of Sargon of Akka, in the 24th century BC.
There's an old linguist's joke that a language is a dialect with an army, but the material in this book suggests that the real key to survival is for a language to be a dialect with a civil service. A class of bureaucrats with the power to defend its monopoly can keep a language going for centuries, as can a set of scriptures, while conquerors come and go.

Once a particular language is universally used for an empire's laws, tax records and so forth, it takes a lot more than mere conquest to force a change. Whether incomers imposed their language or adopted that of their subjects usually relates to whether they wanted business - and taxpaying - to go on as before or whether they arrived equipped with pen-pushers of their own.

Consequently, German's inability to establish itself as a world language is less of a mystery than Ostler tries to make it. 'German conquerors' did not storm into the Roman world as monoglot speakers of Germanic dialects. Most were from tribes which had served Rome for generations and they arrived, in the main, with some official sanction and equipped with the functional Latin which they had learned as mercenaries. Because they wished the economy to go on working, they adopted the language common to both sides: Latin.

By contrast, in England, where the Roman state had stopped functioning, the Angles and Saxons displaced both Latin and British Celtic with remarkable thoroughness.

Ostler also enters on the vexed question of whether any special qualities in a particular language contribute to its success, beyond the good fortune of being attached to an convenient writing technology (it was the development of the first workable script of record, cuneiform, which ensured that after 2,000 years, Akkadian scribes were still using bits of Sumerian as shorthand, just as, equivalently, we use i.e. and e.g.).

Ostler is clearly carrying a torch for Sanskrit, perhaps the most self-conscious language which the world has ever produced. The argument he makes for its intrinsic lovableness is that 'because of its elaborated descriptions and analyses of itself, it could always demonstrate what was best and why it was best. It thereby made itself irresistibly attractive to upwardly mobile institutions. Being concretely defined in the grammar books, Sanskrit was eminently learnable'.

This is superficially attractive, but it is equally true of classical old Irish, a tongue which has been singularly unable to attract external devotees, though the Irish also had a sophisticated grammatical tradition and similarly lauded their language's comprehensiveness, beauty, and primacy over all others.
The worldwide success of English in the twentieth century is normally linked with American cultural and economic imperialism. Ostler, however, makes a provocative case that it actually builds on 19th-century British colonialism and is also strongly related to Britain's role in Europe, though the reasons why English has become the major working language of the EU may in itself have to do with the existence, offstage, of America. But it is worth observing that economic power in itself does not inevitably make a language attractive, if politics are against it. Despite the commercial success of post-war Japan, the 'Asian co-prosperity sphere' it tried to create has stoutly resisted Japanese.

If one asks whether Ostler successfully makes his case for a set of objective criteria why some languages have achieved global status, the answer has to be not quite. A language can experience favouring or unfavouring circumstances, but its actual fate involves a large measure of contingency.

As with the extinction of species, explanations can only be retrospective. There was nothing obviously wrong with blaauwbok or with Phoenician except that they died out, whereas their respective cousins, sable antelopes and Hebrew, survive and thrive.

Ostler is looking for universal theories of why languages succeed, but what the stories boil down to is: this is what happened. However, that doesn't prevent Ostler from using the final chapters to look at the future, on which his thoughts are iconoclastic. Again and again, as Ostler shows, writing technologies have survived the language which gave them birth and there is no reason to assume that the modern world will be any different in this respect.

English-language postings on the web have dropped below 50 per cent of total traffic and Spanish is now the majority language of the US. Habla usted español? If not, it might be wise to learn.

IN LANDMARK DECISION AGAINST BUSH ADMINISTRATION, FEDERAL COURT
RECOGNIZES HARM CAUSED BY GLOBAL WARMING

Lawsuit by Environmental Groups and Cities Goes Forward

SAN FRANCISCO -- A federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the
Northern District of California ruled yesterday against the Bush
Administration and allowed a groundbreaking global warming lawsuit to
proceed. The landmark decision is the first time that a federal court
has specifically granted legal standing for a lawsuit exclusively
alleging injury from global warming and challenging the federal
government's failure to evaluate the impacts of its actions on the
Earth's climate and U.S. citizens.

The judge's decision can be read at http://www.climatelawsuit.org.

The case, filed in August 2002 by Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, and
four cities, charges that the Export-Import Bank (Ex-Im) and the
Oversees Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) have provided financial
assistance to oil and other fossil fuel projects without first evaluating
the projects' global warming impacts to the United States. The cities of
Oakland, Arcata and Santa Monica, Calif. and Boulder, Colo. are parties
to the suit.

The judge concluded that the plaintiffs' "evidence is sufficient to
demonstrate it is reasonably probable that emissions from projects
supported by OPIC and Ex-Im . . . will threaten Plaintiffs' concrete
interests."

The judge also highlighted evidence demonstrating that:

"projects supported by OPIC and Ex-Im are directly or indirectly
responsible for approximately 1,911 million tonnes of carbon dioxide and
methane emissions annually, which equals nearly eight percent of the
world's emissions and is equivalent to one third of the total carbon
emissions from the United States in 2003."

"This ruling is a wake up call for the federal government to tackle
the growing environmental and human impacts of global warming," said
Norman L. Dean, Executive Director of Friends of the Earth.
"This case once again highlights the fact that global warming
pollution doesn't recognize political borders," said Kert Davies,
Research Director of Greenpeace. "The judge acknowledged that these
taxpayer-funded projects in other countries have impact back home in the
United States."

"Tragically, the federal government is violating federal law, which
requires an assessment of cumulative impacts. This injures the citizens
of Oakland, and every person in this country. We'll fight as long as it
takes to get federal law properly enforced," said Jerry Brown, Mayor of
the City of Oakland.

The excellent series SecretsOfWar.com on History Channel
features named rtd CIA & army intelligence officers saying to camera
that there may have been no more than some sonar operator
misinterpreting his instruments. The script, read richly by Charlton
Heston, states that every USS Maddox & C. Turner Joy crew member said
at debriefing that he had not heard any N.V.N fire.

Before then, unmarked US ships had been kidnapping,
sabotaging etc on N.V.N shores.

R

RadioNZ 'Checkpoint' 24-8-05
jottings by R Mann

Mary Wilson RadioNZ Carey College is a pvte school catering for about 50 children. We've just interviewed the principal; now the commissioner for children, Cindy Kiro.

MW You find this quite upsetting - but it isn't illegal is it?

CK not as far as I know - but it's irresponsible. The debate is borne out by the wording of the leaflet - using 'spanking' not 'smacking', and confusing 'hitting' with smacking*. It is a very unhelpful msg.

MW Not illegal for parents to hit their children.

CL I've spent time reviewing all the evidence - see report last year on our website. The evidence says overwhelmingly that what works is affirming good behaviour as in Little Angels programmes on TV. Do the best by positively affirming good behaviour. Focussing on negative behaviour
If you want children to develop moral conscience, behaving non-violently, model that.

MW But if parents think it can be done with love, anything you might do won't change their mind.

CK That is precisely why we're having a debate about repealling s59 Crimes Act.

MW Meanwhile can you do anything about the school?

CK Not entirely sure - but have written to the principal and intend to follow thru. It's wrong for the school sending out info on how to hit children. There's lots of people that can help.

* This rort is breathtaking in its Goebbelesque boldness. Kiro, S Bradford list-MP, and their allies, are the prime - indeed I suspect the only - offenders in exactly this regard, yet now CK has the gall to pose as complaining about exactly this confusing misuse of the word 'hitting'.

NZ Election 2005 - Actor Sam Neill's address to the Labour Launch

Sam Neill is a member of The Sustainability Council
------------------------------------------------------------------------

21 August 2005
Auckland Town Hall.

I just returned to New Zealand yesterday, and it's always
good to be home. I have to say, in a tense and anxious
world, this seems like a pretty sensible and sane place to
be. God bless these shores.

First of all an apology - As they say in Washington, I
misspoke! I've been quoted before as saying a Don Brash -
led government would put this country back 20 years. I was
wrong. It's more like 30 years.

Today I am here to support this government, this
fair-minded and sensible government. And I am here to
support Helen Clark. Because I believe that in this
country (which I love) we now recognise and hold to
certain principles. And these principles keep us secure
and define us as a people and a nation - and we must not
give them up.

We have come to recognize that we are people of the
Pacific Ocean. That the Pacific sustains us and demands
our protection and that no one has any business polluting
it, over exploiting it or testing their nuclear weapons in
it. And here I give thanks to Norman Kirk.

We have come to recognize and believe that our land and
our waters should be, and remain, nuclear free. And here I
give thanks to David Lange.

And we now recognise that we should never blindly follow
our friends and allies if the cause is not just, or the
reasoning is not wise. And here I give thanks to Helen
Clark

(Because make no mistake - this war in Iraq is a bloody
fiasco. It is cruel, misguided, counter productive,
illegal, and founded on lies, and if Don Brash had his way,
we'd be there by lunchtime.)

These are principles, by which we as New Zealanders know
ourselves, and by which we are known in the world, and in
which we rightly take pride.

And we should utterly condemn those who would sacrifice
our principles, our independence and our security, in the
vain quest for some kind of free trade agreement.
(Let me say - in my view there is NOTHING "free" about
today's "free trade".)

We also believe we need the best possible health services
and education. We must and will do better - it is the
measure of a good society how it cares for children, for
the old and the frail and the ill. But let us be clear:
only a fool or a fraudster would tell you that you can
have better health and education AND give more tax cuts to
the rich - it cannot be done!

And we have also come to understand and believe that this
country owes a fair deal to ALL New Zealanders - Maori,
Pakeha, Pacific Islander, immigrant, Asian, Muslim and so
on.

My own family is not untypical these days, and is a kind
of New Zealand story - we are Pakeha, Maori, Asian, even
African American. Some of us have been here 1000 years,
some 150, some are newly arrived. But we can't remember
which because we are together, we love each other, and we
love where we live. We are all New Zealanders. And when
people, as in this election, start Maori bashing, and
Asian bashing, and treaty bashing, and Muslim bashing, and
bashing single mums and so on - they're bashing my family,
and they're bashing my friends, and my neighbours, and my
society they are bashing New Zealand and I won't have it.

And that is why I support this government - a government
that is prepared to listen, to look for consensus, that
refuses to marginalize minorities, that seeks to bring us
together,

And take us forward to a peaceful and harmonious, secure
future.

Finally - the Prime Minister. I travel a great deal - but
you don't need to do that to know there are some dangerous
fools and scoundrels running the world today. And some
dangerous ideas.

It is to our great credit that we have a Prime Minister
that will stand up to these fools, and these ideas. When
she speaks she commands respect. She is a face and a voice
the world knows well. And the world respects New Zealand
in large part because of her.

And of course the team behind her. Ladies and gentlemen,
may I welcome onto the stage, Labour's senior team.

There are many things that give me pride in my country and
one of them is that we have a PM of the calibre of Helen
Clark.

She is a leader of courage and compassion, of strength and
vision of common sense and intelligence.

Ladies and gentlemen - accompanied by her husband Peter
Davis - the Prime Minister of New Zealand - Helen Clark..

PS. Feel free to flick this on,

This story is, on its face, a furphy - and an interesting specimen of how desperate the gene-tampering trade is to claim some success.

The losses poured down the GM-rathole in a couple decades approximate Gates' accumulated ill-gotten gains. (If only these two evil money-flows could somehow cancel each other!) Dozens of billions of dollars, and more seriously thousands of diverted scientific careers, have produced only a handful of saleable items made by gene-tampering. This latest cultured-cell skin 'graft' is not claimed to be one, according to any allegation in the actual story, yet some subeditor has been allowed to slip in, bold as brass, the first two words:

>Genetically engineered

The technique described is, if you like, biotech; but there's no hint of any splicing of synthetic DNA into any genome, and it is therefore not genetic engineering (GE) or genetic manipulation (GM). It looks to be a promising technique, and likely to be commercially deployed (if it passes suitable testing); but it is not gene-jiggering, and should not be claimed as a success of that disreputable 'technology'.

>The descendants of Goebbels are getting ever more numerous, and more brazen.

R

truthout http://www.truthout.org/issues_05/081805HB.shtml

original

http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=healthNews&storyID=2005-08-18T152036Z_01_SCH855222_RTRIDST_0_HEALTH-FETAL-SKIN-CELLS-DC.XML


Fetal Skin Cells Help Heal Burn Wounds in Children
By Karla Gale
Reuters

Thursday 18 August 2005

New York - Genetically engineered tissue dressings derived from fetal skin cells have been used successfully to treat second- and third-degree burns without scarring in pediatric patients, researchers in Switzerland report.

The use of fetal tissue in wound repair could avoid difficulties of tissue engineering, such as immune rejection, small growth capacity and incompatibility, Dr. Lee Ann Laurent-Applegate and colleagues note in their report, published online August 18 by The Lancet.

"The main advantage was that we could avoid a (skin graft) procedure in all cases," study co-author Dr. Patrick Hohlfeld told Reuters Health.

The research team, based at University Hospital of Lausanne, obtained a 4-cm skin donation from a 14-week aborted male fetus. Cells were expanded in culture and used to seed collagen sheets, and then grown for two more days before the sheets were applied to the burn wounds.

The fetal cells were used to treat eight children considered to be candidates for traditional skin grafting, approximately 10 days after their injury. As the cells biodegraded, they were replaced every three to four days.

"These cells stimulate spontaneous healing of the wound through secretion of multiple growth factors," Hohlfeld said. The average time to healing was 15.3 days after the first cell application.

The cosmetic and functional results "were excellent in all eight children," who had little degradation of the new skin with no retraction or breakdown of the healed surfaces, the research team reports. The one patient who had dark skin had recovery of skin pigmentation.

The researchers estimate that the one fetal skin donation could yield "several million" skin constructs. "We only need one very small biopsy once, giving us the potential to treat thousands of people," Hohlfeld pointed out. He considers it possible to obtain effective skin cells from miscarriages of second trimester fetuses.

And although fetal skin cells have not yet been used to treat adults, he expects that similar tissue dressing constructs will be successful in treating other types of wounds, such as bedsores and venous leg ulcers.

-------

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. t r u t h o u t has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is t r u t h o u t endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

Islam’s threat to democracy

Alexis Stuart

The recent fantasy tales in this newspaper have done nothing to convince me that terrorism and Islam are not connected. From the convoluted apologist Yvonne Ridley to the confused defence of Saddam Hussein by Richard Harman, the ‘moderate’ voice of Islam remains disturbingly restrained.

Ridley, who refuses to denounce suicide bombers, wants Donald Rumsfeld’s head on a plate and scolds British Muslims for not being radical enough. She dreams of the Queen crying out ‘Allah Akbar’ and has nothing to say about the shameless acts of violence done in the name of her religion.

Why are Muslims not screaming at the male supremacists, despots and bloodbath aficionados? Why no positive things to say about western religious freedom, separation of church and state and equality under the law?

In New Zealand we believe in progress so strongly we are blind and unprepared for the appalling contradiction of the barbaric rise and rise of Islamist terrorism. We can only shake our heads in disbelief.

Even before I was born in 1970 three planes were hijacked by Islamic terrorists. They demanded the release of Arab terrorists imprisoned in Switzerland, West Germany and Britain. The terrorists who assassinated Anwar el-Sadat in 1981 were supported by an influential Islamist philosopher, who influenced Osama bin Laden, Adbullah Assam. He sought one goal; the establishment of Allah’s rule on earth.

Christians are being slaughtered all around the world. Never in world history has there been so much widespread Christian persecution. Just a couple of weeks ago, in Bangladesh, two young Christian evangelists where stabbed to death after showing the Jesus film alongside health education films. I wish this scenario was rare but it isn’t.

Dare I mention what many in the faith do to Jews, female adulterers, homosexuals and female rape victims? A week before September 11 the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet reported that 65% of rapes on Norwegian women were committed by ‘non-western immigrants’ – a category in Norway that consists almost entirely of Muslims. Apparently, the problem is that Muslim men found the way Norwegian women dress provocative and therefore, argued the academics, the women had to take their share of the responsibility. The conclusion – Norwegian women must understand they live in a multicultural society and adapt themselves.

Secular multiculturalism has no way of resisting militants or discerning how they differ from moderate Islam. It allows Muslim communities to consolidate and create parallel societies. Winston Peters is right when he points out that it can also happen here. There is little doubt that the ultimate aim of many Muslims in Britain and in Europe is to govern their own affairs and then as a finishing touch everyone else’s as well. And before you think it would never happen here remember the Ministry of Women’s Affairs has long announced the need to relax our laws on polygamy in order to accommodate immigrants.

Islamism is now the dominant voice in contemporary Islam and the seedbed of radical movements. This is not understood by New Zealanders and it is obscured by a range of well meaning but confused political liberals.

The problem is profoundly ironic. Unable to any longer comprehend or accept the Judeo-Christian heritage and ethic we are at a loss to understand the implication of a theocratic and coercive religion which also controls the state.

Christchurch Islamacist, Dr Bill Shepherd’s claim that, “although Christians are under threat from Muslim extremists in some places, the Christian faith rarely comes under direct threat from Muslims” is outrageously wrong.

Western liberal democracies are in danger from Islam. Not only from terrorism but simply because immigration and population statistics are predicting Muslim majorities in some Western nations.

Islam has never known the separation of church and state which has shaped social and political development in the West. There is no concept of democracy or civil rights. Some Muslim countries have religious rulers, others have nationalist and secular rulers but all (with the possible exceptions of Turkey and Malaysia) are despotisms, in which the rule of law is a matter to be negotiated. Everywhere the secret police and the military are an ominous presence.

A question needs to be asked. Is there within Islam, a context in which politically alienated young men in particular, can be radicalised? Or in other words are thousands of young men fanatics because of some legitimate interpretation of Islam or are they politically alienated fanatics in spite of it?

And there is a follow up question. Is moderation in Islam a consequence of a deeper understanding of that faith or is it more the result of its modification by Western values of tolerance?

It is not xenophobic to wonder what the future holds for New Zealand with an increasing minority of Muslims. This should be a concern for Kiwi Muslims as much as it is for the rest of us.

The Press, Christchurch
Tuesday July 26 2005
Email copy may differ slightly from printed version
Qantas Media Awards - Social Issues Columnist of the Year.

Pretty much what fringe elements like me and the Commission for the Future were saying a quarter-century ago!

R

NS Essay - 'As oil ceases to be cheap and reserves start to deplete, we will be left with an enormous surplus population that the earth will not support'

James Howard Kunstler
Monday 1st August 2005

Somehow we have persuaded ourselves that fossil fuels will never run out. But they will, and much sooner than we think. In an extract from his chilling new book, James Howard Kunstler describes the long emergency that lies before us.

Carl Jung famously remarked that "people cannot stand too much reality". What follows may challenge your assumptions about the kind of world we live in, and especially the kind of world into which time and events are propelling us. We are in for a rough ride through uncharted territory.

Our war against militant Islamic fundamentalism is only one element among an array of events already under way that will alter our relations with the rest of the world, and compel us to live differently at home whether we like it or not. Above all, and most immediately, we face the end of the cheap fossil fuel era. It is no exaggeration to state that reliable supplies of cheap oil and natural gas underlie everything we identify as a benefit of modern life. All the necessities, comforts, luxuries and miracles of our time - central heating, air-conditioning, cars, airplanes, electric lighting, cheap clothing, recorded music, movies, supermarkets, power tools, hip replacement surgery, the national defences, you name it - owe their origins or continued existence in one way or another to cheap fossil fuels. Even our nuclear power plants ultimately depend on cheap oil and gas for the procedures of construction, maintenance, and extracting and processing nuclear fuels.

The blandishments of cheap oil and gas were so seductive, and induced such transports of mesmerising contentment, that we ceased paying attention to the essential nature of these miraculous gifts from the earth: that they exist in finite, non-renewable supplies, unevenly distributed around the world. To aggravate matters, the wonders of steady technological progress under the reign of oil have tricked us into a kind of "Jiminy Cricket syndrome", leading many to believe that anything we wish for hard enough can come true. These days, even people who ought to know better are wishing ardently that a smooth, seamless transition from fossil fuels to their putative replacements - hydrogen, solar power, whatever - lies just a few years ahead. This is a dangerous fantasy. The true best-case scenario may be that it will take decades to develop some of these technologies - meaning that we can expect an extremely turbulent interval between the end of cheap oil and whatever comes next. A more likely scenario is that new fuels and technologies may never replace fossil fuels at the rate, scale and manner that the world currently consumes them.

What is generally not comprehended is that the developed world will begin to suffer long before the oil and gas actually run out. The western way of life - which is now virtually synonymous with suburbia - can run only on reliable supplies of dependably cheap oil and gas. Even mild-to-moderate deviations in either price or supply will crush our economy and make the logistics of daily life impossible. Fossil fuel reserves are not scattered equally around the world. They tend to be concentrated in places where the native peoples don't like the west, places physically very remote, places where we exercise little control.

The decline of fossil fuels is certain to ignite chronic strife between nations contesting the remaining supplies. These resource wars have already begun. There will be more of them. They are likely to grind on for decades. They will only aggravate a situation that, in and of itself, could bring down civilisations. The extent of suffering in the west will certainly depend on how tenaciously we attempt to cling to obsolete habits, customs and assumptions - for instance, how fiercely we decide to fight to maintain suburban lifestyles which simply cannot be rationalised any longer.

It has been estimated that the world population stood at one billion around the early 1800s, which was roughly when industrialisation began to gain traction. It has been inferred from this that a billion people is about the limit that the planet Earth can support when it is run on a non-industrial basis. The world population is now past six and a half billion, having more than doubled since my childhood in the 1950s. The mid-20th century was a time of rising anxiety over the "population explosion". The marvellous technological victory over food shortages, including the "green revolution" in crop yields, accelerated the already robust leap in world population that had begun with modernity. Dramatic improvements in sanitation and medicine extended lives. Industry sopped up expanding populations and reassigned them from rural lands to work in the burgeoning cities. The perceived ability of the world to accommodate these newcomers and latecomers in a wholly new disposition of social and economic arrangements seemed to be the final nail in the coffin of Thomas Robert Malthus, the much-abused author of An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society (179.

Malthus (1766-1834), an English country clergyman, has been the whipping boy of idealists and technooptimists for 200 years. His famous essay proposed that human population, if unconstrained, would grow exponentially while food supplies grew only arithmetically, and that therefore population growth faced strict and inevitable natural limits. I would argue that Malthus was correct, but that cheap oil has skewed the equation over the past hundred years while the human race has enjoyed an unprecedented orgy of non-renewable condensed solar energy accumulated over aeons of prehistory. The "green revolution" in crop yields was minimally about scientific innovation in crop genetics and mostly about dumping huge amounts of fertilisers and pesticides made out of fossil fuels on to crops, as well as employing irrigation at a fantastic scale, made possible by abundant oil and gas. The cheap-oil age created an artificial bubble of plenitude for a period not much longer than a human lifetime, a century. Within that comfortable bubble the idea took hold that only grouches, spoilsports and godless maniacs considered population hypergrowth a problem, and that it was indecent even to raise the issue. I hazard to assert that as oil ceases to be cheap and world reserves move towards depletion, we will suddenly be left with an enormous surplus population that the ecology of Planet Earth will not support. No political program of birth control will avail. The people are already here.
The so-called global economy was not a permanent institution, as some seem to believe, but a set of transient circumstances peculiar to a certain time: the Indian summer of the fossil fuel era. What primarily made it possible was a world-scaled oil - market allocation system able to operate in an extraordinary sustained period of relative world peace. Cheap oil, available everywhere, along with ubiquitous machines for making other machines, neutralised many former comparative advantages, especially of geography, while creating new ones - hyper-cheap labour, for instance. It no longer mattered where a nation was situated, or whether it had any prior experience with manufacturing. Cheap oil brought electricity to distant parts of the world where ancient traditional societies had previously depended on renewables such as wood and dung, mainly for cooking. Factories could be started up in countries such as Sri Lanka and Malaysia, where swollen populations provided trainable workers willing to labour for much less than those in the United States or Europe. Products then moved around the globe in a highly rationalised system, not unlike the oil allocation system, using immense vessels, automated port facilities, and truck-scaled shipping containers at a minuscule cost-per-unit of whatever was made and transported. Shirts or coffee-makers manufactured 12,000 miles away could be shipped to Wal-Marts all over America and sold cheaply.

The ability to globalise industrial manufacturing this way stimulated a worldwide movement to relax trade barriers that had existed previously to fortify earlier comparative advantages, which were now deemed obsolete. The idea was that a rising tide of increased world trade would lift all boats. The period (roughly 1980-2001) during which international treaties relaxing trade barriers were made - the General Agreements on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) - coincided with a steep and persistent drop in world oil and gas prices which occurred precisely because the oil crises of the 1970s had stimulated so much frantic drilling and extraction that a 20-year oil glut ensued. The glut, in turn, allowed world leaders to forget that the globalism they were engineering depended wholly on non-renewable fossil fuels and the fragile political arrangements which allowed their distribution. The silly idea took hold in the west that the 1970s oil crises had been fake emergencies, and that oil was now super-abundant. This was a misunderstanding of the fact that the North Sea and Alaskan North Slope oilfields had temporarily saved the industrial west when they became operative in the early 1980s, postponing the fossil fuel depletion towards which the world has been inexorably moving.

Meanwhile, among economists and government figures, globalism developed the sexy glow of an intellectual fad. Globalism allowed them to believe that burgeoning wealth in the developed countries, and the spread of industria1 activity to formerly primitive regions, was based on the potency of their own ideas and policies rather than on cheap oil. Margaret Thatcher's apparent success in turning around Britain's sclerotic economy was an advertisement for these policies, which included a heavy dose of privatisation and deregulation. What globalism overlooked, however, was that Thatcher's success in reviving Britain coincided with a fantastic new revenue stream from North Sea oil, as quaint old Britannia became energy-self-sufficient and a net energy-exporting nation for the first time since the heyday of coal. Then, when Ronald Reagan became US president in 1981, globalism infected America. Reagan's "supply-side" economic advisers sold a set of fiscal ideas that neatly fitted with the new notions about free trade and deregulation: chiefly that hugely reducing taxes would result in greater revenues as the greater aggregate of business activity generated a greater aggregate of taxes, even at lower rates. (What it actually generated was a huge government deficit.)

Globalism as we have known it is in the process of ending. Its demise will coincide with the end of the cheap-oil age. For better or worse, many of the circumstances we associate with globalism will be reversed. Markets will close as political turbulence and military mischief interrupt trade relations. Societies will turn increasingly to import replacement for economic survival. The cost of transport will no longer be negligible in a post-cheap-oil age. Many of our agricultural products will have to be produced closer to home, and probably by more intensive hand labour as oil and natural-gas supplies become increasingly unstable. The world will stop shrinking and become larger again. Virtually all the economic relationships among persons, nations and institutions, things that we have taken for granted, will radically change. Life will become intensely and increasingly local.

Much of the west finds itself nearing the end of the cheap-oil age having invested its wealth in a living arrangement - suburban sprawl - that has no future. When media commentators cast about struggling to explain what is happening economically, they uniformly overlook the colossal misinvestment that suburbia represents - a prodigious, unparalleled misallocation of resources. This is quite apart from its social, spiritual and ecological deficiencies as an everyday environment. We constructed an armature for daily living that simply won't work without liberal supplies of cheap oil, and very soon we will be without both the oil needed to run it and the wealth needed to replace it. Nor are we likely to come up with a miraculous energy replacement for oil that will allow us to run all this everyday infrastructure even remotely the same way.

The tragic truth is that much of suburbia is unreformable. It does not lend itself to being retrofitted in the kind of smaller-scaled, more finely grained, walkable environments that we will need to carry on daily life in the coming age of greatly reduced motoring. Nor is a Jolly Green Giant going to pick up the millions of suburban houses on their half-acre plots on cul-de-sac streets and set them back down closer together to make more civic environments. Instead, this suburban real estate, including the chipboard and vinyl McHouses, the strip malls, the office parks and all the other components, will enter a phase of rapid and cruel devaluation. Many suburban subdivisions will become the slums of the future.

As the suburbs disintegrate, we will be lucky if we can reconstitute our existing towns and cities brick by brick and street by street, painfully by hand. Our bigger cities will be in trouble, and some of them may not remain habitable - especially if the natural-gas supply problem proves to be as dire as it now appears and the electric power generation that depends on it becomes erratic. Skyscrapers will prove to be more experimental than we had come to think. In general, we will probably have to return to a settlement pattern of towns and small cities surrounded by intensively cultivated agricultural hinterlands. When that happens, we will be a far less affluent society and the amount, scale and increment of new building will seem very modest by current standards. We will have access to far fewer, if any, modular building systems. Construction will be much more dependent on traditional masonry, carpentry and other journeyman skills. Increasingly our building and zoning laws will be ignored. If we return to a human scale of building, there is a good chance that our new urban quarters will be more humane and beautiful. The automobile era proved that people easily tolerated ugly, utilitarian buildings and horrible streetscapes as long as they had the compensation of being able to escape quickly in cars appointed with the finest digital stereo sound, air- conditioning and cup holders for iced beverages. This will change radically. There will be far less motoring. The future will be much more about staying where you are than travelling incessantly from place to place.

We are about to enter an era of tremendous trauma for the human race. It is likely to entail political turbulence every bit as extreme as the economic conditions that prompt it. We will not believe that this is happening to us, that 200 years of modernity can be brought to its knees by a worldwide power shortage. The prospect will be so grim that many individuals, and even whole countries, may become suicidally depressed. The survivors will have to cultivate a religion of hope - that is, a deep and comprehensive belief that humanity is worth carrying on.

If it happens that the human race doesn't make it, then the fact that we were here once will not be altered: that once upon a time we peopled this astonishing blue planet, and wondered intelligently at everything about it and the other things that lived here with us on it; that we celebrated the beauty of it in music, art, architecture, literature and dance; that there were times when we approached something godlike in our abilities and aspirations. We emerged out of depthless mystery, and back into mystery we returned; and, in the end, the mystery is all there is.

This is an edited extract from ‘The Long Emergency: surviving the converging catastrophes of the 21st century’ published on 5 August by Atlantic Books
This article first appeared in the New Statesman

The content here is not greatly different from that delivered by the Melbourne-based Catch the Fire Ministries, where that organisation is now deciding whether to appeal the ruling against it under Victoria's religious vilification law.

It is a clear unambiguous statement, obviously actionable in Victoria, and possibly under the new law in Britian. I see it as a direct challenge to that law.

UK Muslims have Sookhdeo in their sights. He is not backing off. He preached at St Geo's Epsom a couple month ago and I spoke with him afterwards.
__________

THE ISLAMIZATION OF EUROPE

www.barnabasfund.org
Dr Patrick Sookhdeo
11 August 2005

On Friday 20th May 2005 a crowd of some 300 Muslims burned a wooden
cross outside the American embassy in London. This was part of a
protest against the rumoured desecration of a Qur'an by American
soldiers in Guantanamo Bay, during which British and American flags
were also burned. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this event
was that it was not deemed to be newsworthy, receiving little
attention in the national press.

The whole scenario is reminiscent of what happens in so many
Muslim-majority countries: a rumour of an insult to Islam, a violent
and blasphemous anti-Christian reaction, police watching idly, and a
complete lack of public interest let alone outrage. It could have
been Pakistan, Egypt, Indonesia or Northern Nigeria. But it was the
UK.

Europe is undergoing a rapid process of change as Muslims make their
presence felt in politics, economics, law, education and the media.
While there is a wide range of attitudes amongst Muslims in Europe,
with many who are broadly content with the status quo and just want to
live their lives peacefully, others are striving deliberately to drive
forward the changes. As a result of the efforts of the latter, Europe
is gradually being transformed into a society in which Islam takes its
place, not just as an equal alongside the many other faith
communities, but often as the dominant player. This is not purely, or
even primarily, a matter of numbers, but is more a matter of control
of the structures of society. It is not happening by chance but is
the result of a careful and deliberate strategy by certain Muslim
leaders.

Though the effects are only now becoming noticeable, the planning was
done decades ago. In 1980 the Islamic Council of Europe published a
book called Muslim Communities in Non-Muslim States which clearly
explained the Islamic agenda in Europe. When Muslims live as a
minority they face theological problems, because classical Islamic
teaching always presupposed a context of Islamic dominance; hence the
need for guidance on how to live in non-Muslim states. The
instructions given in the book told Muslims to get together and
organise themselves with the aim of establishing a viable Muslim
community based on Islamic principles. This is the duty of every
individual Muslim living within a non-Muslim political entity. They
should set up mosques, community centres and Islamic schools. At all
costs they must avoid being assimilated by the majority. In order to
resist assimilation, they must group themselves geographically,
forming areas of high Muslim concentration within the population as a
whole. Yet they must also interact with non-Muslims so as to share
the message of Islam with them. Every Muslim individual is required
to participate in the plan; it is not allowed for anyone simply to
live as a "good Muslim" without assisting the overall strategy. The
ultimate goal of this strategy is that the Muslims should become a
majority and the entire nation be governed according to Islam. (M.
Ali Kettani "The Problems of Muslim Minorities and their Solutions" in
Muslim Communities in Non-Muslim States (London: Islamic Council of
Europe, 1980) pp.96-105)

Not all Muslims would support this action plan. The more secularized
are happy to become integrated within the majority society. Even
amongst those who agree on the ultimate goal of creating an Islamic
state, there are differences about methodology i.e. whether this
should be a slow and peaceful transition, or whether it should be
hastened by means of political dominance or even - say some - by
violence.

Despite the variety of opinion amongst Muslims, it is not hard to
recognize the different stages of the Islamic Council of Europe's
strategy being put into practice within today's Europe. Muslims do
tend to live in tightly concentrated areas, and show little sign of
integrating into wider society. Saudi funding is paying for the
erection of large and beautiful mosques, staffed by imams brought over
to Europe from the "home countries". Sweden's third largest city,
Malmø, is effectively ruled by violent gangs of Muslims, and some of
the Muslim residents of the city still cannot read or write Swedish
though they have lived there for 20 years. Denmark has recently seen
the Nordgårdsskolen in Aarhus become the first school in the country
to have 100% Muslim pupils. Britain's Muslim population (variously
estimated at between 1.6 and 3 million) is concentrated in three
areas: north-west England, the midlands and London. In some of these
areas Muslims are now targeting the remaining Christian presence,
arsoning churches, physically attacking church leaders and their
property; the aim seems to be to "cleanse" these areas of non-Muslims.


European Muslims are Islamizing many aspects of life that also affect
non-Muslims. Spanish Muslims have expressed their desire to "regain"
the mosque of Cordoba. This building was originally a church, then
turned into a mosque, and then turned back into a place of Christian
worship. Halal meat is now routinely served in many British prisons,
schools and hospitals, sometimes to Muslim and non-Muslim alike, and
the hijab [Islamic headscarf] is worn in British schools. Muslims in
the London borough of Tower Hamlets have forced name-changes for
districts and local amenities if the existing name sounds too
Christian for their liking.

In the UK, where Islam is making its most rapid advance, Islamic law
(shari'a) is already practised unofficially, with shari'a councils and
shari'a courts giving judgments on Muslim family matters. In
education numerous concessions are being made to British Muslims,
Islam often being given more prominence and respect than other faiths
at state schools. An increasing number of university posts are being
funded from Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries on condition that
a certain line of thinking is promoted.

The ultimate goal of taking control of society, as depicted by the
Islamic Council of Europe in 1980, is clearly in the minds of at least
some Muslim leaders. A Dutch Imam has stated that Islamic law is
superior to other forms of legislation so there is no need to obey
other laws. Some Finnish imams preach on the Islamic duty to kill a
Muslim who converts to another faith, adding that it is difficult to
carry this out in Finland at present because Muslims do not yet "own
the state". Furthermore, the freedoms of European society are being
exploited by Islamic militants and their supporters to plan terrorist
activities around the world. London - or "Londonistan" as it is
becoming known - is one of the most important bases for Islamic
terrorism worldwide. This has been illustrated by the July bombings
in London itself.

Despite all these advances, Muslims still tend to portray themselves
as victims in European society, while the majority society in turn
struggles to affirm them and to avoid giving any accidental offence.

But this kind of reaction by non-Muslims can be seen as the typical
behaviour of dhimmi. In classical Islam, Christian and Jewish
minorities within an Islamic state were called dhimmi. They were free
to worship and live out their faith, but had to submit to a raft of
discriminatory and humiliating laws. They learned to be subservient,
and to consider the dominance of Muslims as normal as the Muslims
themselves did.

It is typical of dhimmi not to protest if a Christian cross is burned
by an angry crowd, nor even to feel that anything outrageous has
occurred. Likewise the Muslim scheme to turn the cathedral of Cordoba
back into a mosque has the backing of some Spanish government leaders
in the city.

At a political level, European countries are responding in different
ways to the challenge of Islam. France is determinedly protecting its
secularism, and has banned the hijab in school. The Netherlands have
recently swung from one extreme to the other, following the ritualized
killing of Dutch film director Theo van Gogh by a young Muslim in
November 2004; they are turning against multiculturalism and becoming
concerned to control immigration. The UK seems to be seeking to
replicate the segregation and communalism of the British Raj in India,
whereby the various religious communities were each given their own
laws. This policy would certainly mesh well with some Muslim leaders'
own plans for Britain. If Britain is to be sub-divided in this way,
perhaps geographically as well as legally, it raises the question of
how the Church would survive in areas of Islamic rule. What form
would Christian ministry be able to take in these areas?

Muslims are still a minority in numerical terms in Europe, with an
estimated 20 million living in the European Union. No country apart
from Albania has a Muslim community amounting to more than about 10%
of the population. However, demographic studies indicate that Muslim
populations are growing far faster than the non-Muslim populations.
This is due partly to continued immigration, partly to conversion, but
mainly to the larger number of children which Muslim families
typically have. The growing Muslim community is a mosaic of different
ethnic, linguistic, cultural, sectarian and geographical backgrounds,
and characterized by increasing internal tensions particularly over
how to relate to the host society.

Some Christians have decried as faithless pessimism those who predict
the Islamization of Europe before the end of the century. But it must
be remembered that the region which is now Pakistan and Afghanistan
was once Christian, as was North Africa. The Church was completely
eradicated from these areas by the advance of Islam. It would surely
be arrogant to think that this could never happen to the Church in
Europe.

As individual Christians we must love our Muslim neighbours and
forgive any wrongs done to us. But as a community the Church must
defend herself, as well as the Judaeo-Christian heritage with which
Europe is blessed. For this her leaders need great wisdom and
courage.

Homosexuality is becoming more prominent in Western nations, leading to growing pressure to accept the legitimacy of homosexual lifestyles in society and the churches. This biblical study of Romans 1:24-32 sees the issue as a symptom of the wider phenomenon of moral decline in societies and civilizations. Originally preached as a sermon at St Albans Presbyterian Church, Palmerston North, New Zealand, on 1 May 1994, it was published in a special insert on 'Homosexuality and the Church’, in Renewal News (Rotorua, New Zealand, Presbyterian Renewal Ministries), June 1996, pp. 4-6.

This passage is one of the darkest and most sordid in the whole Bible. But I make no apology for preaching about it. Paul has said that the Gospel is ‘the power of God for salvation’ (1:16 ) - God’s effective means of transforming people’s lives and conduct. Now he goes on to show what the Gospel saves people from - their sin and depravity. The Gospel is glorious. The sin from which it saves us is sordid.
Paul identifies three factors in the moral decline of societies and civilizations:

Its History

First of all, moral decline has a history, a progression. It starts with the denial of God, and leads on to the degrading of humanity. It begins with suppression of truth (18-23), and leads on to the corruption of morals (24-32). A Chinese proverb says: ‘A fish rots first in the head.’ To reject God, when God is plainly known from what he has made; to put idols in God’s place when so plainly they are not God - this involves a ‘darkening’ of the mind (21). It is something ‘foolish.’ To regard such things as ultimate is an expression not of wisdom, but of stupidity. But darkening of the mind leads on to a degrading of the body (24,26). Darkened thinking results in depraved behaviour. A society declines morally only because it has first deteriorated spiritually. The present moral state of New Zealand is the expression of an underlying spiritual deterioration in our nation.

Its Logic

Secondly, moral decline has a logic, a perverse but consistent logic. In one sense there is no logic in sin, because sin, by definition, has no place in God’s purpose for human life. God never intended us to sin. Our humanity and our humanness cannot be truly satisfied if we sin. But in another sense there is a certain perverse logic in sin: if we reject God, and want to be free of God, then logically we must reject everything that God has made, everything that God has given us, everything that reminds us of God. We must not only deny God, but deny the human nature created by God - including its sexual structure, physiology and orientation.

The philosopher Michael Polanyi calls this process ‘moral inversion.’ He sees the passionate espousal of immoral ends as a major phenomenon of our times. Today moral people have become afflicted with moral cowardice, while immoral people become have become imbued with moral passion. Through a reversal of moral terms (Paul calls it an ‘exchange’), good is called evil and evil is called good. ‘Fair is foul and foul is fair,’ as the witches say in the opening scene of Macbeth.
Moral inversion can be compared to the polarity of an electric motor: if it is reversed, the very same current drives it in the opposite direction. Similarly, says Paul, the moral decline of society involves an exchange, a reversal of polarity, the replacement of one set of conditions for its opposite:

‘The truth’ → ‘The lie’
‘The Creator’ → ‘The creature’
‘Natural relations’ ‘Unnatural relations’
→
(Heterosexual intercourse) (Homosexual intercourse)
‘The glory of the immortal God’ → ‘Shameful,’ ‘indecent’ and
‘degrading’ conduct’

In this inversion the truth about God is exchanged for ‘the lie’ (Paul uses the definite article, because the view that God does not exist and that human beings are not accountable to him for their actions is the ultimate untruth). When God is denied, created things are then worshipped or treated as ultimate in God’s place. Because created relationships cannot carry such ultimate significance, natural relationships break down and give way to relationships that are ‘unnatural’ or ‘contrary to nature.’ What is ennobling and enriching of life (‘The glory of the immortal God’) is replaced by depraved and indecent conduct. Thus the logic of sin leads from the denial of God to the degrading of humanity.

Its Pathology

Moral decline, thirdly, has a social pathology, a grim and sobering set of symptoms. Paul uses two significant terms to describe these outcomes:
Three times he uses the verb, ‘they exchanged.’ ‘They exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images’ (23). ‘They exchanged the truth of God for a lie’ (25). ‘They exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones’ (26). Depraved and perverted sexual conduct is not a simple matter of biological determinism, but an expression of free will and choice. What we do with our sexual condition, with our abilities or disabilities, with our life experiences, hinges on our own personal responsibility. ‘To exchange’ is to turn from one form of conduct to another, as a matter of deliberate volition and choice. This is particularly obvious today in the public flaunting of bisexuality and transvestism.
Also used three times by Paul is the phrase ‘God gave them over.’ ‘God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity’ (24). ‘God gave them over to shameful lusts’ (26). ‘God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done’ (28 ). If we persistently choose to live our life in defiance of God, God will ultimately give us over to the way of life we have chosen. C.S. Lewis says that the damned ‘enjoy forever the horrible freedom they have demanded.’ Or, as David Pawson puts it in his sermon on this passage: ‘If you don’t want God’s presence, you must forfeit God’s protection.’

God does not do this lightly. He does not give up on those who stumble temporarily then repent, but only on those who are persistently obdurate and defiant. God’s giving us over to our choices is something akin to what the Bible elsewhere calls the sin against the Holy Spirit. An example is Pharaoh, who persistently rejected offers of God’s grace and ten times closed his heart to God’s appeals, bringing down judgement on his nation. The phrase ‘God gave them over’ indicates a moral threshold, a critical magnitude below which people cease to be responsive to moral appeal and become reprobate. Just as water ceases to be fluid and becomes solid below freezing point, so too human beings, when they persistently lower their spiritual temperature, reach a point where they cease to be capable of repentance and moral change and become fixed in the lifestyle they have chosen.

A Symptomatic Sin

It is ominous when God gives up on a people; when a society, with its brakes off, begins to roll down hill on a disaster course of its own choosing. And it is significant that Paul mentions one form of sexual sin as indicating when a society is approaching this moral threshold. That symptomatic sin is homosexual conduct - the exchange of natural for unnatural sexual relationships (24, 26-27). It is not the only depravity listed here. Paul also mentions twenty four other forms of wickedness (28-32). Rather like the characters in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, who go beyond good and evil and defy every social norm, Paul speaks of those who commit ‘every kind of wickedness,’ who display overweening pride, insolence and rebelliousness, and who practice hatred, cruelty and heartlessness towards other human beings. But it is the public condoning of widespread homosexual practice that indicates a society which God is about to give up on - a civilization in the advanced stages of moral degeneration and decline.

Why is this so? It is because our sexual nature as male and female is at the very heart of our humanity as created by God. Sexual identity and practice touches something that goes to the very heart of human sensibility. In Genesis 1:26-27 there is a vision of human sexuality unparalleled in ancient or modern times: human beings are created in a co-humanity, male and female, in the likeness of a relational, triune God. Our sexual nature is God-given; it is an expression of God’s image in us; it is right at the heart of our human identity.

Thus, rejection of heterosexual intercourse strikes at the very core of our humanity. It is a flagrant rejection of the human nature that God has created - which includes the differentiation and physiology of the sexes. ‘They exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural,’ says Paul, or, as the Greek literally means, for relations that are ‘against nature’ or ‘contrary to nature’ (26). A skilled cabinetmaker works with the grain of the timber. To go against the grain is to foul it up. Similarly, our human physiology has been delicately designed for heterosexual rather than homosexual intercourse. The tissue of the female vagina is strong and lubricated, unlike the thin, easily ruptured lining of the rectum. Because male semen includes a powerful immune suppressant, necessary to penetrate the defences of the ovum for fertilization to occur, anal intercourse is not only a depraved but a highly dangerous practice. The resultant Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome corroborates Paul’s analysis exactly: ‘men received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion’ (27).

Disorientation and Defiance

For some, homosexual tendencies are the result of events or circumstances in their upbringing - the absence of a father figure, violation by a family member, teenage experimentation. For others, homosexual experience can be the pathetic expression of a confused and disoriented society that has lost its sexual moorings. Cat Stevens expressed this confusion in his 1970s song ‘Tuesday’s

Dead’:
What’s my sex?
What’s my name?
All in all
it’s all the same.
Everybody plays
a different game.
That is all.

But for others within the militant Gay community homosexual activity is an act of what the French existentialist philosopher Albert Camus has called ‘metaphysical rebellion’: rebellion against the human condition itself. To deny God completely, it is also necessary to repudiate every trace of God, including one’s God-given sexuality and physiology. Charles Colson, a man with a great deal of experience of criminal homosexuality through his work with Prison Fellowship, says of homosexual intercourse: ‘It is perhaps the most radical rebellion against God, the rudest rejection of God’s authority, the ugliest expression of the creation saying to the Creator: "Why did you make me like this?"’

History shows that widespread homosexuality shows up in the advanced stages of a society’s decline. It signals that God’s judgement is upon us (18, 32). One thinks of Pompeii and Herculaneum, of Sodom and Gomorrah. A Jewish tradition says that the generation of the Noahic Flood was wiped out because they wrote marriage contracts between males just as they did for heterosexual couples. The more homosexual behaviour is normalized, the more clearly those with eyes to see will recognize that our society’s destruction is at hand. There is no room for moral smugness or superiority on our part - Paul goes on to critique that in chapter 2. Rather, we must get on our knees to plead with God not to give us up, not take his hands off our society, not to abandon us to our own devices. May God have mercy upon us.

Rob Yule 1 May 1994

© 1994, St Albans Presbyterian Church, & 1996, Presbyterian Renewal Ministries

Submission on the Statutes Amendment (Relationships) Bill 2004

N.E.Whitehead
February 2005

From my knowledge of relevant scientific survey material I realise this bill will seriously disadvantage children involved in these new groupings as compared with those in traditional heterosexual families. It will lead to a kind of child abuse. It will also introduce a form of discrimination: selectively disadvantaging these children compared to others.

I am Neil Evan Whitehead (Ph.D.), consultant research scientist, previously with the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (NZ), the NZ Geological and Nuclear Sciences Crown Research Institute, and International Atomic Energy Agency (United Nations). My work as a Senior Research Fellow at Osaka University in biofilms research ended in March 2004, followed by recent work for the New Zealand Ministry of Research Science and Technology and my previous Crown Research Institute. From this October, I am Visiting Professor at Hiroshima University for six months. I have published over 110 refereed research papers on a very wide variety of subjects including survey techniques, and three books on homosexuality, arising out of about 14 years research in the subject. I have drawn heavily on my constant professional use of statistical techniques. For the homosexuality research I and my wife received a NARTH fellow award1 in 2002 (“In recognition for your outstanding contribution to the scientific literature”).

This is an independently motivated submission. However the facts I draw upon represent the mainstream literature of the international scientific community.

I am a member of various learned societies, including the International Twin Studies Association, the relevance of which will appear in the addendum.

The bill will lead to more social units headed by two people of the same sex, and more children in such units than currently exist. I submit those children will suffer for the following two reasons.

1. Break-up of relationships
Such a child can almost be guaranteed to suffer through what amounts to a divorce. The average longevity of a gay or lesbian couple relationship is 2-3 years, as established by numerous good quality sociological surveys3. A few relationships survive longer but they are statistical freaks, a small proportion of the total. This compares with at least 17 years for a heterosexual couple4. This means a child in such a novel grouping will be greatly distressed by a very predictable split-up.

This definitely also applies to lesbian relationships which surveys show are much less long-lasting than popularly thought5, the mean length being statistically indistinguishable from that of gay couples i.e. is also 2-3 years. Recent work by many of the same team3, 4 suggests that in large cities the length will be even less.

In New Zealand (and probably Australia as well) the most important factor leading to poverty for adults is relationship break-up8, which in a heterosexual context means solo parenthood. The equivalent in a homosexual context is also likely to seriously disadvantage such children.

A recent survey in the Netherlands10 might seem to indicate this danger might not be very great, but the authors concede their results may be deceptive. Since homosexual persons have been allowed to marry in that country records have been kept and the rate of breakup of homosexual couples was about equivalent to that of heterosexual couples for the same period. However the authors say that these couples had waited a long time to be allowed to “marry”, and were rather special cases. They were not typical of the average Netherlands gay couple for whom a median length of relationship in Amsterdam is 1.5 years9.

2. Poorer mental environment
Children will suffer through increased exposure to mentally unstable and alcoholic households. This second factor, as shown by a long NZ study and others6 is that gays and lesbians are approximately three times as likely to be involved in substance abuse or mental problems as heterosexuals. This is not caused by discrimination, because countries with widely different attitudes to homosexuality have about the same numerical factor. These problems will also disadvantage children involved in these relationships.

I have read most of the scientific literature (ca 50 studies) connected with children brought up by gay or lesbian parents. Most of the studies claim to show their abilities characteristics and achievements are about equivalent to those brought up by heterosexual parents, but they are very misleading, because in fact

1. The comparison (even if present) is usually to single-parent heterosexual families who are definitely worse off than traditional heterosexual families - the children are therefore somewhat disadvantaged7
2. The studies are poorly designed and usually do not have sufficient sample size to show any difference at all7
3. They were usually snapshots and could not take into account future deaths and break-ups in the relationships.

This last point is very significant. If during the course of a study of children with gay/lesbian caregivers there is a split-up, those subjects would have to be excluded from the study because the control group (usually solo heterosexual parents) could not have that happen to them. Thus virtually all studies are of pre-split-up situations, and not relevant.

The conclusion is that children brought up this way are likely to be seriously disadvantaged compared with those from heterosexual families.

If as a scientist, I proposed to my local ethics committee that I set up groupings of children and gay/lesbian permanent caregivers and gave the committee the above facts, they would turn down my application on the grounds that it would be too economically/socially risky and hence would be unethical. On what possible grounds can such an unethical situation be disregarded?

In this case it is chiefly the children, on whose behalf I appeal. This legislation would lead to increased child abuse. The rights of children should be more jealously guarded than those of adults who are much more able to defend and indulge themselves.

Addendum: Relative weak effects on sexual orientation
It may be alleged by some submissions to this committee that proposed novel social groupings may strongly affect the sexual orientation or the gender identity of these children. However any effect would be weak for the following reason.

Gay and lesbian people are not born that way. This is proved by twin studies. In the best of these studies2 (Australian) if one of an identical twin pair was gay, there was an 11% chance that the co-twin was gay. Within error the same percentage applied to lesbians. Identical twins have identical genes and essentially identical upbringing. In spite of this, surveys show they are almost always different. It is chiefly chance that is responsible.

I emphasise this 11% concordance includes all factors known and yet to be discovered, so the result cannot radically change in future. This statement represents the mainstream scientific conclusion – identical twin studies show that gay and lesbian status (and most other traits including those in children) is not innate in the sense of inescapable. Genes create a tendency not a tyranny. Children in these newer social groupings will not be greatly influenced except in the ways described in points 1-2 above.

Appendix

(1) NARTH is a 1500-strong professional group of North American psychology professionals involved with research and therapy among those with same sex attraction.
(2) Bailey,JM; Dunne,MP; Martin,NG (2000): Genetic and Environmental influences on sexual orientation and its correlates in an Australian twin sample. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 78, 524-536.
(3) The best data are from the very large Chicago study summarised in Michael,RT; Gagnon,JH; Laumann,EO; Kolata,G (1994): Sex in America. Little Brown, Boston. This gives a mean of 2.5 years, but at least another 7 studies confirm it. The figure may be considered robust. It tends to be 1.5 years in the large urban centres in the USA.
(4) Laumann,EO; Gagnon,JH; Michael,RT; Michaels,S (1994): The Social Organization of Sexuality. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
(5) Sarantakos,S (1996): Same-sex couples: problems and prospects. Journal of Family Studies 2, 147-163. This Australian study is typical of half a dozen others, and gave a mean of 2.6 years.
(6) Fergusson,DM; Horwood,LJ; Beautrais,AL (1999): Is sexual orientation related to mental health problems and suicidality in young people? Archives of General Psychiatry 56, 876-880. This showed that most study problems were ca 3x more prevalent in gays/lesbians. The numerical factor was similar in the Netherlands and USA, all with differing attitudes to homosexuality. The other two papers are respectively: Sandfort,T.G.M.; de Graaf,R.; Bijl,R.V.; Schnabel (2001): Same-sex sexual behavior and psychiatric disorders. Arch. Gen. Psychiatry. 58, 85-91. and Herrell,R.; Goldberg,J.; True,W.R.; Ramakrishnan,V.; Lyons,M.; Eisen,S.; Tsuang,M.T. (1999): Sexual orientation and suicidality: a co-twin control study in adult men. Archives of General Psychiatry 56, 867-874.
(7) Lerner,R; Nagai,AK (2001): No Basis: What the Studies Don't Tell Us About Same-Sex Parenting. Marriage Law Project, Washington, DC. 149 pages. A sociologically rigorous and critical examination.
( O’Donovan, B. (2005): What’s happening with wages? New Zealand Listener February 8-12, 16-19. The author is chief economist for Westpac.
(9) Xiridou , MA, Geskus, RA, de Wit, JAB, Coutinho, RAC, Kretzschmar, MD, (2003) The contribution of steady and casual partnerships to the incidence of HIV infection among homosexual me in Amsterdam. AIDS 17, 1029-1038.
(10) Sterling, T. (2005). Gay divorce rate in Holland comparable to those of heterosexuals. Associated Press release 4/4/5.

THE
CALAMITY HOWLER
August 9, 2005 Issue #65
EDITOR\PUBLISHER; A.V. Krebs
E-MAIL: avkrebs@earthlink.net
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COMMENTARY:
LEST WE FORGET !!!
Sixty years ago today at 11:02 a.m., under the guise of hastening the end of World War II and avoiding further U.S. blood shed by invading the home islands of Japan, a United States Air Force bomber --- "Bock's Car" --- dropped a plutonium bomb --- the Fat Boy --- on Nagasaki, killing about 80,000 people.

Nagasaki Mayor Itcho Ito recalls "in an instant, the resulting heat, blast and radiation descended upon Nagasaki and transformed the city into a hell on earth.".

While Hiroshima, where the first atomic bomb was dropped three days earlier, has over the years, received most of the attention, Nagasaki's loss of human life and long-term causalities is perhaps even more scandalous and an indelible stain on the American moral conscience.

For in 2003 alone Nagasaki added 2,692 people to a list of those who have died from aftereffects, bringing that city's count of the total number of bomb victims to 131,885 at that time.

If one ignores the growing body of historical evidence that the reason the U.S. dropped its two atomic bombs was to simply impress the Russians --- who in fact came into the war against Japan the day before the Nagasaki bombing --- and accepts the Truman rationale that we did it to frighten the Japanese into surrendering without invading their homeland, then the reasoning behind the Nagasaki bombing falls apart.

After the Hiroshima bomb was dropped on August 6 with a loss of life of 140,000 and a city left in ruins the Japanese high command in Tokyo still had not pieced together exactly what had happened in Hiroshima. In other words even before they were able to adequately assimilate what had happened in Hiroshima news of the Nagasaki fire and destruction reached them.

Thus, one can conclude that the U.S. determined after spending billions of dollars in developing, at the time, its two atomic bombs they were going to use them both, come hell or high water. In a perverse sort of way they got what they wished for -- a living "hell on earth" but for tens of thousands of innocent human beings and for the dubious distinction of our being the only nation in the history of warfare to ever use atomic weapons in anger.

One can only say in response:
"Vengeance is mine, sayth the Lord !!!"

DOROTHY DAY ON
THE ATOMIC BOMB
DOROTHY DAY
The Catholic Worker
September, 1945

Mr. Truman was jubilant. President Truman. True man; what a strange name, come to think of it. We refer to Jesus Christ as true God and true Man. Truman is a true man of his time in that he was jubilant. He was not a son of God, brother of Christ, brother of the Japanese, jubilating as he did. He went from table to table on the cruiser which was bringing him home from the Big Three conference, telling the great news; "jubilant" the newspapers said. Jubilate Deo. We have killed 318,000 Japanese.

That is, we hope we have killed them, the Associated Press, on page one, column one of the Herald Tribune says. The effect is hoped for, not known. It is to be hoped they are vaporized, our Japanese brothers, scattered, men, women and babies, to the four winds, over the seven seas. Perhaps we will breathe their dust into our nostrils, feel them in the fog of New York on our faces, feel them in the rain on the hills of Eaton.

Jubilate Deo. President Truman was jubilant. We have created. We have created destruction. We have created a new element, called Pluto. Nature had nothing to do with it.

The papers list the scientists (the murderers) who are credited with perfecting this new weapon. Scientists, army officers, great universities, and captains of industry-all are given credit lines in the press for their work of preparing the bomb-and other bombs, the President assures us, are in production now.

Everyone says, "I wonder what the Pope thinks of it?" How everyone turns to the Vatican for judgment, even though they do not seem to listen to the voice there! But our Lord Himself has already pronounced judgment on the atomic bomb. When James and John (John the beloved) wished to call down fire from heaven on their enemies, Jesus said:
"You know not of what spirit you are. The Son of Man came not to destroy souls but to save." He said also, "What you do unto the least of these my brethren, you do unto me.

HIROSHIMA
COVER-UP EXPOSED
GREG MITCHELL
Editor & Publisher
August 5, 2005

In the weeks following the atomic attacks on Japan almost 60 years ago, and then for decades afterward, the United States engaged in airtight suppression of all film shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombings. This included footage shot by U.S. military crews and Japanese newsreel teams. In addition, for many years all but a handful of newspaper photographs were seized or prohibited.

The public did not see any of the newsreel footage for 25 years, and the U.S. military film remained hidden for nearly four decades.

The full story of this atomic cover-up is told fully for the first time at Editor & Publisher, as the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombings approaches later this week. Some of the long-suppressed footage will be aired on television this Saturday.

Six weeks ago, E&P broke the story that articles written by famed Chicago Daily News war correspondent George Weller about the effects of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki were finally published, in Japan, almost six decades after they had been spiked by U.S. officials.

This drew national attention, but suppressing film footage shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was even more significant, as this country rushed into the nuclear age with its citizens having neither a true understanding of the effects of the bomb on human beings, nor why the atomic attacks drew condemnation around the world.

As editor of Nuclear Times magazine in the 1980s, I met Herbert Sussan, one of the members of the U.S. military film crew, and Erik Barnouw, the famed documentarian who first showed some of the Japanese footage on American TV in 1970. In fact, that newsreel footage might have disappeared forever if the Japanese filmmakers had not hidden one print from the Americans in a ceiling.
The color U.S. military footage would remain hidden until the early 1980s, and has never been fully aired. It rests today at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, in the form of 90,000 feet of raw footage labeled #342 USAF.

When that footage finally emerged, I corresponded and spoke with the man at the center of this drama: Lt. Col. (Ret.) Daniel A. McGovern, who directed the U.S. military filmmakers in 1945-1946, managed the Japanese footage, and then kept watch on all of the top-secret material for decades.
"I always had the sense," McGovern told me, "that people in the Atomic Energy Commission were sorry we had dropped the bomb. The Air Force --- it was also sorry. I was told by people in the Pentagon that they didn't want those [film] images out because they showed effects on man, woman and child. ... They didn't want the general public to know what their weapons had done --- at a time they were
planning on more bomb tests. We didn't want the material out because ... we were sorry for our sins."

Sussan, meanwhile, struggled for years to get some of the American footage aired on national TV, taking his request as high as President Truman, Robert F. Kennedy and Edward R. Murrow, to no avail.
More recently, McGovern declared that Americans should have seen the damage wrought by the bomb. "The main reason it was classified was ... because of the horror, the devastation," he said. Because the footage shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was hidden for so long, the atomic bombings quickly sank, unconfronted and unresolved, into the deeper recesses of American awareness, as a costly nuclear arms race, and nuclear proliferation, accelerated.

The atomic cover-up also reveals what can happen in any country that carries out deadly attacks on civilians in any war and then keeps images of what occurred from its own people.

Ten years ago, I co-authored (with Robert Jay Lifton) the book Hiroshima in America, and new material has emerged since. On August 6, and on following days, the Sundance cable channel will air "Original Child Bomb," a prize-winning documentary on which I worked. The film includes some of the once-censored footage --- along with home movies filmed by McGovern in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb over Hiroshima, killing at least 70,000 instantly and perhaps 50,000 more in the days and months to follow. Three days later, it exploded another atomic bomb over Nagasaki, slightly off target, killing 40,000 immediately and dooming tens of thousands of others. Within days, Japan had surrendered, and the U.S. readied plans for occupying the defeated country --- and documenting the first atomic catastrophe.

But the Japanese also wanted to study it. Within days of the second atomic attack, officials at the Tokyo-based newsreel company Nippon Eigasha discussed shooting film in the two stricken cities. In early September, just after the Japanese surrender, and as the American occupation began, director Sueo Ito set off for Nagasaki. There his crew filmed the utter destruction near ground zero and scenes in hospitals of the badly burned and those suffering from the lingering effects of radiation.
On September 15, another crew headed for Hiroshima. When the first rushes came back to Toyko, Akira Iwasaki, the chief producer, felt "every frame burned into my brain," he later said.

At this point, the American public knew little about conditions in the atomic cities beyond Japanese assertions that a mysterious affliction was attacking many of those who survived the initial blasts (claims that were largely taken to be propaganda). Newspaper photographs of victims were non-existent, or censored. Life magazine would later observe that for years "the world ... knew only the physical facts of atomic destruction."

Tens of thousands of American GIs occupied the two cities. Because of the alleged absence of residual radiation, no one was urged to take precautions.

Then, on October 24, 1945, a Japanese cameraman in Nagasaki was ordered to stop shooting by an American military policeman. His film, and then the rest of the 26,000 feet of Nippon Eisasha footage, was confiscated by the U.S. General Headquarters (GHQ). An order soon arrived banning all further filming. It was at this point that Lt. Daniel McGovern took charge.

In early September, 1945, less than a month after the two bombs fell, Lt. McGovern -- who as a member of Hollywood's famed First Motion Picture Unit shot some of the footage for William Wyler's "Memphis Belle" --- had become one of the first Americans to arrive in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was a director with the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, organized by the Army the previous November to study the effects of the air campaign against Germany, and now Japan.

As he made plans to shoot the official American record, McGovern learned about the seizure of the Japanese footage. He felt it wouldbe a waste to not take advantage of the newsreel footage, noting in a letter to his superiors that "the conditions under which it was taken will not be duplicated, until another atomic bomb is released under combat conditions."

McGovern proposed hiring some of the Japanese crew to edit and "caption" the material, so it would have "scientific value." He took charge of this effort in early January 1946, even as the Japanese feared that, when they were done, they would never see even a scrap of their film again.

At the same time, McGovern was ordered by General Douglas MacArthur on January 1, 1946 to document the results of the U.S. air campaign in more than 20 Japanese cities. His crew would shoot exclusively on color film, Kodachrome and Technicolor, rarely used at the time even in Hollywood. McGovern assembled a crew of eleven, including two civilians. Third in command was a young lieutenant from New York named Herbert Sussan.

The unit left Tokyo in a specially outfitted train, and made it to Nagasaki. "Nothing and no one had prepared me for the devastation I met there," Sussan later told me. "We were the only people with adequate ability and equipment to make a record of this holocaust. ... I felt that if we did not capture this horror on film, no one would ever really understand the dimensions of what had happened. At that time people back home had not seen anything but black and white pictures of blasted buildings or a mushroom cloud."

Along with the rest of McGovern's crew, Sussan documented the physical effects of the bomb, including the ghostly shadows of vaporized civilians burned into walls; and, most chillingly, dozens of people in hospitals who had survived (at least momentarily) and were asked to display their burns, scars, and other lingering effects for the camera as a warning to the world.

At the Red Cross Hospital in Hiroshima, a Japanese physician traced the hideous, bright red scars that covered several of the patients ---- and then took off his white doctor's shirt and displayed his own burns and cuts.

After sticking a camera on a rail car and building their own tracks through the ruins, the Americans filmed hair-raising tracking shots that could have been lifted right from a Hollywood movie. Their chief cameramen was a Japanese man, Harry Mimura, who in 1943 had shot "Sanshiro Sugata," the first feature film by a then-unknown Japanese director named Akira Kurosawa.

While all this was going on, the Japanese newsreel team was completing its work of editing and labeling all their black & white footage into a rough cut of just under three hours. At this point, several members of Japanese team took the courageous step of ordering from the lab a duplicate of the footage they had shot before the Americans took over the project.

Director Ito later said: "The four of us agreed to be ready for ten years of hard labor in the case of being discovered." One incomplete, silent print would reside in a ceiling until the Occupation ended.

The negative of the finished Japanese film, nearly 15,000 feet of footage on 19 reels, was sent off to the U.S. in early May 1946. The Japanese were also ordered to include in this shipment all photographs and related material. The footage would be labeled SECRET and not emerge from the shadows for more than 20 years.

The following month, McGovern was abruptly ordered to return to the U.S. He hauled the 90,000 feet of color footage, on dozens of reels in huge footlockers, to the Pentagon and turned it over to General Orvil Anderson. Locked up and declared top secret, it did not see the light of day for more than 30 years.

McGovern would be charged with watching over it. Sussan would become obsessed with finding it and getting it aired.

Fearful that his film might get "buried," McGovern stayed on at the Pentagon as an aide to Gen. Anderson, who was fascinated by the footage and had no qualms about showing it to the American people. "He was that kind of man, he didn't give a damn what people thought," McGovern told me. "He just wanted the story told."

In an article in his hometown Buffalo Evening News, McGovern said that he hoped that "this epic will be made available to the American public." He planned to call the edited movie "Japan in Defeat."
Once they eyeballed the footage, however, most of the top brass didn't want it widely shown and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was also opposed, according to McGovern. It nixed a Warner Brothers feature film project based on the footage that Anderson had negotiated, while paying another studio about $80,000 to help make four training films.

In a March 3, 1947 memo, Francis E. Rundell, a major in the Air Corps, explained that the film would be classified "secret." This was determined "after study of subject material, especially concerning footage taken at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is believed that the information contained in the films should be safeguarded until cleared by the Atomic Energy Commission." After the training films were completed, the status would be raised to "Top Secret" pending final classification by the AEC.

The color footage was shipped to the Wright-Patterson base in Ohio. McGovern went along after being told to put an I.D. number on the film "and not let anyone touch it --- and that's the way it stayed," as he put it. After cataloging it, he placed it in a vault in the top-secret area.
"Dan McGovern stayed with the film all the time," Sussan later said. "He told me they could not release the film [because] what it showed was too horrible."

Sussan wrote a letter to President Truman, suggesting that a film based on the footage "would vividly and clearly reveal the implications and effects of the weapons that confront us at this serious moment in our history." A reply from a Truman aide threw cold water on that idea, saying such a film would lack "wide public appeal."

McGovern, meanwhile, continued to "babysit" the film, now at Norton Air Force base in California. "It was never out of my control," he said later, but he couldn't make a film out of it any more than Sussan could (but unlike Herb, he at least knew where it was).

At the same time, McGovern was looking after the Japanese footage. Fearful that it might get lost forever in the military/government bureaucracy, he secretly made a 16 mm print and deposited it in the U.S. Air Force Central Film Depository at Wright-Patterson. There it remained out of sight, and generally out of mind. (The original negative and production materials remain missing, according to Abe Mark Nornes, who teaches at the University of Michigan and has researched the Japanese footage more than anyone.)

The Japanese government repeatedly asked the U.S. for the full footage of what was known in that country as "the film of illusion," to no avail. A rare article about what it called this "sensitive" dispute appeared in The New York Times on May 18, 1967, declaring right in its headline that the film had been "Suppressed by U.S. for 22 Years."

Surprisingly, it revealed that while some of the footage was already in Japan (likely a reference to the film hidden in the ceiling), the U.S. had put a "hold" on the Japanese using it --- even though the American control of that country had ceased many years earlier.

Despite rising nuclear fears in the 1960s, before and after the Cuban Missile Crisis, few in the U.S. challenged the consensus view that dropping the bomb on two Japanese cities was necessary. The United States maintained its "first-use" nuclear policy: Under certain circumstances it would strike first with the bomb and ask questions later. In other words, there was no real taboo against using the bomb. This notion of acceptability had started with Hiroshima. A firm line against using nuclear weapons had been drawn --- in the sand. The U.S., in fact, had threatened to use nuclear weapons during the Cuban Missile Crisis and on other occasions.

On Sept. 12, 1967, the Air Force transferred the Japanese footage to the National Archives Audio Visual Branch in Washington, with the film "not to be released without approval of DOD (Department of Defense)."

Then, one morning in the summer of 1968, Erik Barnouw, author of landmark histories of film and broadcasting, opened his mail to discover a clipping from a Tokyo newspaper sent by a friend. It indicated that the United States had finally shipped to Japan a copy of black & white newsreel footage shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Japanese had negotiated with the State Department for its return.

From the Pentagon, Barnouw learned in 1968 that the original nitrate film had been quietly turned over to the National Archives, so he went to take a look. Soon Barnouw realized that, despite its marginal film quality, "enough of the footage was unforgettable in its implications, and historic in its importance, to warrant duplicating all of it," he later wrote.

Attempting to create a subtle, quiet, even poetic, black and white film, he and his associates cut it from 160 to 16 minutes, with a montage of human effects clustered near the end for impact. Barnouw arranged a screening at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and invited the press. A throng turned out and sat in respectful silence at its finish.

(One can only imagine what impact the color footage with many more human effects would have had.) "Hiroshima-Nagasaki 1945" proved to be a sketchy but quite moving document of the aftermath of the bombing, captured in grainy but often startling black and white images: shadows of objects or people burned into walls, ruins of schools, miles of razed landscape viewed from the roof of a building.

In the weeks ahead, however, none of the (then) three TV networks expressed interest in airing it. "Only NBC thought it might use the film," Barnouw later wrote, "if it could find a 'news hook.' We dared not speculate what kind of event this might call for."

But then an article appeared in Parade magazine, and an editorial in the
Boston Globe blasted the networks, saying that everyone in the country should see this film: "Television has brought the sight of war into America's sitting rooms from Vietnam. Surely it can find 16 minutes of prime time to show Americans what the first A-bombs, puny by today's weapons, did to people and property 25 years ago."

This at last pushed public television into the void. What was then called National Educational Television (NET) agreed to show the documentary on August 3, 1970, to coincide with the 25th anniversary of dropping the bomb. "I feel that classifying all of this filmed material was a misuse of the secrecy system since none of it had any military or national security aspect at all," Barnouw told me. "The reason must have been--that if the public had seen it and Congressmen had seen it --- it would have been much harder to appropriate money for more bombs."

About a decade later, by pure chance, Herb Sussan would spark the emergence of the American footage, ending its decades in the dark.

In the mid-1970s, Japanese antinuclear activists, led by a Tokyo teacher named Tsutomu Iwakura, discovered that few pictures of the aftermath of the atomic bombings existed in their country. Many had been seized by the U.S. military after the war, they learned, and taken out of Japan. The Japanese had as little visual exposure to the true effects of the bomb as most Americans. Activists managed to track down hundreds of pictures in archives and private collections and published them in a popular book. In 1979 they mounted an exhibit at the United Nations in New York.

There, by chance, Iwakura met Sussan, who told him about the U.S. military footage.

Iwakura made a few calls and found that the color footage, recently declassified, might be at the National Archives. A trip to Washington, D.C. verified this. He found eighty reels of film, labeled #342 USAF, with the reels numbered 11000 to 11079. About one-fifth of the footage covered the atomic cities. According to a shot list, reel #11010 included, for example: "School, deaf and dumb, blast effect, damaged ... Commercial school demolished ... School, engineering, demolished. ... School, Shirayama elementary, demolished, blast effect ... Tenements, demolished."

The film had been quietly declassified a few years earlier, but no one in the outside world knew it. An archivist there told me at the time, "If no one knows about the film to ask forit, it's as closed as when it was classified."

Eventually 200,000 Japanese citizens contributed half a million dollars and Iwakura was able to buy the film. He then traveled around Japan filming survivors who had posed for Sussan and McGovern in 1946. Iwakura quickly completed a documentary called "Prophecy" and in late spring 1982 arranged for a New York premiere.

That fall a small part of the McGovern/Sussan footage turned up for the first time in an American film, one of the sensations of York Film Festival, called "Dark Circle." It's co-director, Chris Beaver, told me, "No wonder the government didn't want us to see it. I think they didn't want Americans to see themselves in that picture. It's one thing to know about that and another thing to see it."

Despite this exposure, not a single story had yet appeared in an American newspaper about the shooting of the footage, its suppression or release. And Sussan was now ill with a form of lymphoma doctors had found in soldiers exposed to radiation in atomic tests during the 1950s --- or in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In late 1982, editing Nuclear Times, I met Sussan and Erik Barnouw --- and talked on several occasions with Daniel McGovern, out in Northridge, California. "It would make a fine documentary even today," McGovern said of the color footage. "Wouldn't it be wonderful to have a movie of the burning of Atlanta?"

After he hauled the footage back to the Pentagon, McGovern said, he was told that under no circumstances would the footage be released for outside use. "They were fearful of it being circulated,"McGovern said. He confirmed that the color footage, like the black and white, had been declassified over time, taking it from top secret to "for public release" (but only if the public knew about it and asked for it).

Still, the question of precisely why the footage remained secret for so long lingered. Here McGovern added his considerable voice. "The main reason it was classified was...because of the horror, the devastation," he said. "The medical effects were pretty gory. ... The attitude was: do not show any medical effects. Don't make people sick."

But who was behind this? "I always had the sense," McGovern answered, "that people in the AEC were sorry they had dropped the bomb. The Air Force --- it was also sorry. I was told by people in the Pentagon that they didn't want those images out because they showed effects on man, woman and child. But the AEC, they were the ones that stopped it from coming out. They had power of God over everybody," he declared. "If it had anything to do with nukes, they had to see it. They were the ones who destroyed a lot of film and pictures of the first U.S. nuclear tests after the war."
Even so, McGovern believed, his footage might have surfaced "if someone had grabbed the ball and run with it but the AEC did not want it released."

As "Dark Circle" director Chris Beaver had said, "With the government trying to sell the public on a new civil defense program and Reagan arguing that a nuclear war is survivable, this footage could be awfully bad publicity."

In the summer of 1984, I made my own pilgrimage to the atomic cities, to walk in the footsteps of Dan McGovern and Herb Sussan, and meet some of the people they filmed in 1946. By then, the McGovern/ Sussan footage had turned up in several new documentaries. On September 2, 1985, however, Herb Sussan passed away. His final request to his children: Would they scatter his ashes at ground zero in Hiroshima?

In the mid-1990s, researching Hiroshima in America, a book I would write with Robert Jay Lifton, I discovered the deeper context for suppression of the U.S. Army film: it was part of a broad effort to suppress a wide range of material related to the atomic bombings, including photographs, newspaper reports on radiation effects, information about the decision to drop the bomb, even a Hollywood movie.

The 50th anniversary of the bombing drew extensive print and television coverage --- and wide use of excerpts from the McGovern/Sussan footage --- but no strong shift in American attitudes on the use of the bomb.

Then, in 2003, as adviser to a documentary film, "Original Child Bomb," I urged director Carey Schonegevel to draw on the atomic footage as much as possible. She not only did so but also obtained from McGovern's son copies of home movies he had shot in Japan while shooting the official film.
"Original Child Bomb" went on to debut at the 2004 Tribeca Film Festival, win a major documentary award, and this week, on August 6 and 7, it will debut on the Sundance cable channel. After 60 years at least a small portion of that footage will finally reach part of the American public in the unflinching and powerful form its creators intended.

Only then will the Americans who see it be able to fully judge for themselves what McGovern and Sussan were trying to accomplish in shooting the film, why the authorities felt they had to suppress it, and what impact their footage, if widely aired, might have had on the nuclear arms race --- and the nuclear proliferation that plagues, and endangers, us today.

THE MYTHS
OF HIROSHIMA
KAI BIRD AND MARTIN SHERWIN
Los Angeles Times
August 5, 2005

Sixty years ago tomorrow, an atomic bomb was dropped without warning on the center of the Japanese city of Hiroshima. One hundred and forty thousand people were killed, more than 95% of them women and children and other noncombatants. At least half of the victims died of radiation poisoning over the next few months. Three days after Hiroshima was obliterated, the city of Nagasaki suffered a similar fate.

The magnitude of death was enormous, but on August 14, 1945 --- just five days after the Nagasaki bombing --- Radio Tokyo announced that the Japanese emperor had accepted the U.S. terms for surrender. To many Americans at the time, and still for many today, it seemed clear that the bomb had ended the war, even "saving" a million lives that might have been lost if the U.S. had been required to invade mainland Japan.

This powerful narrative took root quickly and is now deeply embedded in our historical sense of who we are as a nation. A decade ago, on the 50th anniversary, this narrative was reinforced in an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution on the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the first bomb. The exhibit, which had been the subject of a bruising political battle, presented nearly 4 million Americans with an officially sanctioned view of the atomic bombings that again portrayed them as a necessary act in a just war.

But although patriotically correct, the exhibit and the narrative on which it was based were historically inaccurate. For one thing, the Smithsonian downplayed the casualties, saying only that the bombs "caused many tens of thousands of deaths" and that Hiroshima was "a definite military target."

Americans were also told that use of the bombs "led to the immediate surrender of Japan and made unnecessary the planned invasion of the Japanese home islands." But it's not that straightforward. As Tsuyoshi Hasegawa has shown definitively in his new book, Racing the Enemy --- and many other historians have long argued --- it was the Soviet Union's entry into the Pacific war on August 8, two days after the Hiroshima bombing, that provided the final "shock" that led to Japan's capitulation.

The Enola Gay exhibit also repeated such outright lies as the assertion that "special leaflets were dropped on Japanese cities" warning civilians to evacuate. The fact is that atomic bomb warning leaflets were dropped on Japanese cities, but only after Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been destroyed.
The hard truth is that the atomic bombings were unnecessary. A million lives were not saved. Indeed, McGeorge Bundy, the man who first popularized this figure, later confessed that he had pulled it out of thin air in order to justify the bombings in a 1947 Harper's magazine essay he had ghostwritten for Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson.

The bomb was dropped, as J. Robert Oppenheimer, scientific director of the Manhattan Project, said in November 1945, on "an essentially defeated enemy." President Truman and his closest advisor, Secretary of State James Byrnes, quite plainly used it primarily to prevent the Soviets from sharing in the occupation of Japan. And they used it on August 6 even though they had agreed among themselves as they returned home from the Potsdam Conference on Aug. 3 that the Japanese were looking for peace.

These unpleasant historical facts were censored from the 1995 Smithsonian exhibit, an action that should trouble every American. When a government substitutes an officially sanctioned view for publicly debated history, democracy is diminished. Today, in the post-September 11 era, it is critically important that the U.S. face the truth about the atomic bomb.

For one thing, the myths surrounding Hiroshima have made it possible for our defense establishment to argue that atomic bombs are legitimate weapons that belong in a democracy's arsenal. But if, as Oppenheimer said, "they are weapons of aggression, of surprise and of terror," how can a democracy rely on such weapons?

Oppenheimer understood very soon after Hiroshima that these weapons would ultimately threaten our very survival.

Presciently, he even warned us against what is now our worst national nightmare --- and Osama bin Laden's frequently voiced dream --- an atomic suitcase bomb smuggled into an American city: "Of course it could be done," Oppenheimer told a Senate committee, "and people could destroy New York."
Ironically, Hiroshima's myths are now motivating our enemies to attack us with the very weapon we invented. Bin Laden repeatedly refers to Hiroshima in his rambling speeches. It was, he believes, the atomic bombings that shocked the Japanese imperial government into an early surrender --- and, he says, he is planning an atomic attack on the U.S. that will similarly shock us into retreating from the Mideast.

Finally, Hiroshima's myths have gradually given rise to an American unilateralism born of atomic arrogance.

Oppenheimer warned against this "sleazy sense of omnipotence." He observed that "if you approach the problem and say, 'We know what is right and we would like to use the atomic bomb to persuade you to agree with us,' then you are in a very weak position and you will not succeed…. You will find yourselves attempting by force of arms to prevent a disaster."

HANFORD'S A-BOMB
BUILDERS FOCUS ON
THE LIVES THEY SAVED
ATHIMA CHANSANCHAI
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
August 8, 2005

No one at Hanford Engineer Works knew they were making history.
There were signs, but all told them to keep quiet. They were told they were serving their country and furthering the war effort.
But they were curious.

Why were they --- thousands of men and women --- converting an isolated Central Washington farming community into a bustling industrial complex, virtually overnight? Where were trucks and railcars filled with tons of precious steel and aluminum going? Why did they have to wear radiation meters?

What was so top secret?

The answer came on August 6, 1945. With the bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, the people of Hanford and Richland finally discovered what they had been working on for two years: the Manhattan Project's atomic bombs.

Later, those workers would find out it was their "Fat Man" bomb that devastated Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. Both bombs led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people through the initial blasts and subsequent radiation.

On August 14, 1945, headlines in a Richland newspaper blared: "PEACE! OUR BOMB CLINCHED IT!" in announcing the Japanese surrender.

Employees of the Hanford Engineer Works believed --- and still believe --- the end of the war justified the means. As part of the massive work force that made up the world's first plutonium producing plant, they carried the firm conviction that hundreds of thousands more would have perished had the bombs not been detonated. They also faced the stigma of being labeled as warmongers, or worse.

"It scared us to think of what we had made," said Larry Denton, 80 of Kennewick, about four hours east of Seattle. "Everyone was dubious as to whether it should have been done. But when you piece together all the American lives that would have been lost if we hadn't dropped the second bomb, I feel like it was worth it."

Denton was 18 when he followed his father --- a World War I Marine --- to Hanford to work on the project in September 1943. The younger Denton was 4F and denied military service. His older brother was stationed in England with the Air Corps; buddies from high school were also fighting abroad. The Idaho lumberjack started as a shipping clerk at Hanford, sharing a tent with three other men. He retired in 1987 as a manager of maintenance surveillance of all the reactors.

"I was destined to find something else where I could be used," Denton said.

Denton and his co-workers lived in a world in which the war was the No.1 priority. Rationing limited food and gas, newsreels played in-between feature films and it seemed like everyone had a loved one fighting Axis troops halfway across the globe or knew a boy who hadn't come home. By August 1945, more than 400,000 U.S. soldiers had been killed.

Patriotism was so strong that all 51,000 workers at Hanford donated a day's wages --- $300,000 --- to purchase the aptly named "Day's Pay" B-17 Seattle-built bomber for the war effort.

While the country celebrated the end of the war in Europe with V-E Day on May 8, 1945, reminders of the combat raging in the Pacific were everywhere.

Pearl Harbor had become lodged in the American psyche. Returning soldiers brought home stories of Japanese kamikaze pilots, hand-to-hand combat in the Pacific islands and the Bataan Death March. Hard-fought victories at Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima came at the cost of thousands of American lives, while stories circulated about how Japanese soldiers and civilians chose suicide rather than surrender. The idea that U.S. forces might have to invade Japan gained momentum. Under these conditions, Hanford support for President Truman's decision was nearly unanimous.

"They regret that Pearl Harbor was attacked. They regret that Hitler and Tojo and Mussolini came to power and ruined their youthful times by pulling them into war, absences from home, terror and exhaustion. They regret that they had to learn to kill, and to be thrust into terrible situations in combat and in manufacturing armaments," said Michele Gerber, a Richland-based historian and president of the B Reactor Museum Association, which is trying to preserve the world's first nuclear reactor in Hanford. "But the bombings they do not regret. They believe that the bombings ended all of this horror."

The U.S. government contracted DuPont to oversee the Hanford project, so employees came from all over the country, many of them employed by DuPont or its subsidiaries.

Hanford appealed to them because of the steady work (many still felt the sting of the Depression), plentiful subsidized meals, cheap housing and the chance to contribute to the war effort. The average age of the mostly male work force was 40 and those with families found the living camp at Hanford and the burgeoning town of Richland provided for all their needs: schools, all kinds of stores, post offices, fire stations, dog pounds, barber/beauty shops and even movie theaters.
Secrecy was sacrosanct. Signs posted throughout the facilities urged workers to shush. Husbands did not talk to their wives about work. Undercover agents looked out for loose lips. Most of the workers were isolated in their specific tasks; few could conceive of all the elements that went into building the atomic bomb.

But Roger Rohrbacher, 85, of Kennewick, said hints were all over the place. As a chemist and physicist -- jokingly called "peons with Ph.D's" -- he probably had an advantage over others. He noticed restricted supplies like aluminum and steel pouring into Hanford, and the presence of uranium was a dead giveaway.

Dee McCullough, 91, of Richland was fixing radios and movie projectors when he got to Hanford in January 1944. The Utah native was 30, a father of three and told his choice was either the Manhattan Project or the Army.

He became an instrument technician, installing and testing meters that measured neutron flux. He remembers wearing "pencils" --- radiation detectors. Later, he assisted the initial startup of B Reactor with Enrico Fermi, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and the leader of one of the Manhattan Project teams whose experiments led to in the first controlled nuclear chain reaction.
"Some people criticize us for making the bomb and killing so many people, but they don't realize how many people we saved," McCullough said. "Armies were ready to go to Japan."

Hanford's role in ending the war remains part of local lore in Richland and the surrounding area, where being "Proud of the Cloud" is a common saying and alums from Richland High School bristle at changing the school's mascot: The Bombers.

Shirley Gilson Schiller (Bomber class of 1947) of Tacoma was 14 when she followed her parents to Hanford. "We were really thrilled and happy to hear the war was over, but it was a terrible way to end it. We felt bad about that, but we rejoiced that more of our own people didn't have to die."
Virginia Miller, 74, of Richland (Bomber '49) still beams with pride when she talks about her father, Harry Miller, a works engineer who arrived in Hanford in 1943.

Miller said the children of those Hanford workers were always aware of their shared heritage.
"I'm very proud of living in history," Miller said. "We were making history."

BUILDING THE BOMB
Hanford Engineer Works (1943-45)
* Construction completed over 30 months at a cost of $230 million.
* 554 buildings spread over 640 square miles; 158 miles of railroad.
* 51,000 workers (only 4,000 women); seven-day workweeks.
* In one meal, employees consumed 2,500 pounds of pot roast; 18,000 pork chops; 900 pies; and 5,000 heads of lettuce.
* Three reactors built, including B Reactor, the world's first full-scale nuclear reactor.
"FAT MAN BOMB
For more information: www.b-reactor.org or www.hanford.gov/doe/history/?history=manhattan

* "Fat Man" bomb detonated at Nagasaki Aug. 9, 1945
* Weight: more than 10,000 pounds; a similar bomb is shown above.
* It was an implosion type of bomb with a plutonium core about the size of a tennis ball surrounded by more than 5,000 pounds of high explosives.
* Equivalent to a little more than 20,000 tons of TNT.

60 YEARS AFTER
A-BOMB, OLD FOES
MEET OVER A DEEP DIVIDE
ANTHONY FAIOLA
Washington Post
August 7, 2005

Sixty years ago today, the world went black for Keijiro Matsushima, then a 16-year-old Hiroshima schoolboy. He vividly recalled an airplane he now knows was the Enola Gay shimmering in the sky like a "flying Popsicle" before the great flash from the atomic bomb vaporized tens of thousands and left a ghostly parade of "the half-living covered in ash and burns" to die in the months ahead.
Since those days, Matsushima said he has felt a "deep if troubled" connection to this Pacific island, about the size of Manhattan, that housed the runways and staging area for the U.S. atomic strikes. The same can be said for Michael Kuryla, 79. He is among the few remaining survivors of the USS Indianapolis, sunk on July 30, 1945, by a Japanese submarine after delivering parts of the bomb to Tinian. Kuryla spent five days adrift before being rescued, watching scores of his fellow crewmen drown while others were devoured by sharks.

On opposite sides of the fateful mushroom cloud, Matsushima and Kuryla are bound by invisible links that drew them and 200 others this week to an extraordinary and controversial commemoration here. Few questions in modern history remain more divisive than whether the U.S. bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified. Six decades after the war, and with their countries now the closest of allies, no two groups remain more polarized on the issue than U.S. Pacific war veterans and Japanese survivors of the attacks.

At what most participants described as the last major gathering at this historic site for a vanishing generation of World War II vets, the local organizers did the once-unthinkable --- they brought the two sides together.

For some, like Kuryla, who raptly listened to Matsushima's accounts, the event became the final act of cleansing of a long-harbored hatred. The stocky Chicago resident staunchly believes that dropping the bombs saved countless lives by forcing Japan's early surrender. He gradually came to forgive, he said. And after hearing Matsushima's recollections in a conference room, Kuryla stood up in tears to offer his hand in friendship.

"Yes, it was a horrible thing," Kuryla said. "You suffered the bomb effects, and I wish we didn't have to do it. We feel sorry about that. Believe me. But it was war."

"I did not come here to blame," said Matsushima, a slight man with a strong command of English. "You veterans did your job. But at the same time, what you dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was very horrible. Now, if possible, please, just a drop of your tears, and a prayer that this never happens again."

The two men then embraced, taking one step toward a reconciliation that -- like the ultimate question of the bombings itself --- is not that simple. The unprecedented attempt had successes and failures. Most here reached their limits at agreeing to disagree.

The Japanese remain on a campaign to force the world --- and Americans in particular --- to remember and reflect on the horror of those bombings. But many no longer see merit in discussing it. Dozens of American veterans of the Pacific theater chose not to attend the event, including the surviving crew members of the Enola Gay and Bock's Car, which delivered the August 9, 1945, bomb on Nagasaki. Some cited ill health.

Others bitterly opposed the mayor of Tinian's proposal to turn this commemoration into a "peace conference" by inviting the Japanese delegation. It included Japanese veterans who fought here and on nearby Saipan --- Tinian's sister island in the U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands.

Those who did come, including 38 U.S. vets involved in some way with the atomic bomb missions, mostly welcomed the chance to engage the Japanese. But U.S. military authorities did not attend. One poll by a Saipan newspaper indicated that only one in three island residents supported the event, some claiming it would dishonor the memory of American veterans.

"This was not easy for us to pull off --- a lot of people were against this idea," confessed Francisco M. Borja, mayor of Tinian, a lush island with 4,500 residents. His mission is to create a museum here "that will tell both sides" of the atomic legacy, he said.

That legacy remains the last major sore spot in the extraordinary peacetime relationship of the United States and Japan. As the 60th anniversary of World War II's end in the Pacific is marked on August 15, Japan is still struggling to mend fences with China and South Korea over charges that the Japanese have yet to fully atone for wartime atrocities.

In stark contrast, the United States and Japan are jointly developing a missile defense system and beefing up strategic cooperation with the long-term goal of serving as a counterbalance to China's growing might. Japan, which has embraced pacifism since the bombings, now seeks to play a major role on the world stage. The government is moving toward changing its constitution, which renounces war, and hopes to gain a permanent seat on the United Nation Security Council.

Yet the atomic bombs --- which killed about 140,000 in Hiroshima and about 80,000 in Nagasaki while leaving tens of thousands survivors maimed or plagued by radiation sickness --- still haunt the United States and Japan. A joint poll last month by the Associated Press and Japan's Kyodo News Service found 75% of Japanese still feel the bombings were unnecessary, while 68% of Americans called them unavoidable.

Matsushima said many in Hiroshima were also opposed to his visit. But he said he thought it was a chance to share his story with American vets and "see this place in honor of the bomb's victims."
He and Kiyoshi Nishida, a 76-year-old Nagasaki survivor, were driven by event organizers to the now-overgrown runways where the U.S. B-29s carrying the bombs took off. They stoically studied the condition and quality of what in 1945 was the world's largest airfield. But at the now glass-encased pits that had stored Little Boy, the bomb that hit Hiroshima, and Fat Man, which hit Nagasaki, their reserve shattered.

"So this is where it came from. Somehow, I am glad to have seen it with my own eyes," Matsushima said, softly crying and clutching a bracelet of wooden Buddhist prayer beads. "This is what human did. So many dead. Maybe they were doing their jobs, but for us, it was hell."

Matsushima later participated in a panel discussion with one of the best-known American vets here, Harold Agnew, 84, who measured the yield of the Hiroshima bomb while in flight alongside the Enola Gay. During the 1970s, he was director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the bombs were developed.

"So, you saw the mushroom cloud. I was underneath it," Matsushima said.
"Yes, you're lucky to be here," Agnew said.
Agnew nodded in agreement when Matsushima seemed to concede that the bomb, at least, had helped shorten the war. Last month, Agnew was flown by a Tokyo television station to Hiroshima, where he held a discussion with bomb survivors who had demanded an apology. Agnew, a tall, blunt man, had stood up in disgust and proclaimed "Remember Pearl Harbor!" The discussion abruptly ended.
"There is nothing to apologize for," Agnew later said in an interview. "This is exactly why the Chinese are still upset with them. Many Japanese still refuse to take responsibility for what they did, for starting that war. They can point at us. But believe me, they did some awful bad things. We saved Japanese lives with those bombs -- an invasion would have been worse."

Such tensions rarely flared at this reunion, perhaps because the organizers divided the Japanese and Americans into different dining times and distinct tours. There were carefully arranged encounters between both sides -- but many impromptu ones, too.

Fumiyaki Kajiya, 66, who saw his three-year-old sister impaled by searing steel in Hiroshima, was visiting the pit where Little Boy was stored when he came across Leon Smith, the weapon's test officer who had been in charge of maintaining the bomb in Tinian. The men struck up a conversation through interpreters about the horror of the victims, the American rationale for dropping the bomb, and the paradox of Japan's ongoing protection under the U.S. nuclear umbrella. Beside the atomic pit, the two shook hands.

"This is not something that can be resolved or agreed upon," Kajiya said. "But I feel that we've achieved something very important. We've finally started talking."
Special correspondent Taeko Kawamura contributed to this report

HIROSHIMA MARKS
ATOMIC BOMB ANNIVERSARY
ASSOCIATED PRESS
August 6, 2005

Hiroshima marked the 60th anniversary of the first atomic bomb attack Saturday with prayers and water for the dead and a call by the mayor for nuclear powers to abandon their arsenals and stop "jeopardizing human survival."

At 8:15 a.m., the instant of the blast, the city's trolleys stopped and more than 55,000 people at Peace Memorial Park observed a moment of silence that was broken only by the ringing of a bronze bell.

A flock of doves was released into the sky. Then wreaths and ladles of water --- symbolizing the suffering of those who died in the atomic inferno --- were offered at a simple, arch-shaped stone monument at the center of the park.

Outside the nearby A-Bomb Dome, one of the few buildings left standing after the blast, peace activists held a "die-in" --- falling to the ground to dramatize the toll from a bombing that turned life to death for more than 140,000 and forever changed the face of war.

Thousands of paper lanterns symbolizing the souls of the dead were to be floated in a river next to the park.

Fumie Yoshida was just 16 when Hiroshima was bombed. She survived but lost her father, brother and sister. On Saturday, she chose not to attend the formal memorial, but paid her respects privately with a small group of friends in the peace park.

"My father's remains have never been found," she said. "Those of us who went through this all know that we must never repeat this tragedy. But I think many Japanese today are forgetting."

In a "Peace Declaration," Hiroshima's outspoken Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba vowed to never allow a repeat of the tragedy and gave an impassioned plea for the abolition of nuclear weapons, saying the United States, Russia and other members of the nuclear club are "jeopardizing human survival."

"Many people around the world have succumbed to the feeling that there is nothing we can do," he said. "Within the United Nations, nuclear club members use their veto power to override the global majority and pursue their selfish objectives."

In a more subdued speech, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi offered condolences for the dead.
"I offer deep prayers from my heart to those who were killed," he said, vowing that Japan would be a leader in the international movement against nuclear proliferation.

Though Hiroshima has risen from the rubble to become a thriving city of 3 million, most of whom were born after the war, the anniversary underscores its ongoing tragedy.

Officials estimate that about 140,000 people were killed instantly or died within a few months after the Enola Gay dropped its deadly payload over the city, which then had a population of about 350,000.

Three days later, another U.S. bomber, Bock's Car, dropped a plutonium bomb on the Japanese city of Nagasaki, killing about 80,000 people. Japan surrendered on August 15, 1945, ending World War II.
Including those initially listed as missing or who died afterward from a loosely defined set of bomb-related ailments, including cancers, Hiroshima officials now put the total number of dead in this city alone at 242,437.

This year, 5,373 more names were added to the list.

In central London, more than 200 anti-nuclear activists and others gathered at Tavistock Square, where a cherry tree was planted in 1967 in memory of the victims of the Hiroshima bombing.
Jeremy Corbyn, a lawmaker in the governing Labour Party and vocal anti-war campaigner, urged people to remember the "unique horror" of what happened in 1945.

CONSEQUENCES OF
HIROSHIMA YET UNSEEN
TED VAN DYK
Seattle Post-Intelligencer Columnist
August 4, 2005

On Saturday, we will observe the 60th anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. Seattle, in 1945 as now, was enjoying glorious summer weather. After Hiroshima, and the strike three days later against Nagasaki, sunsets here and across the Pacific became vividly red.

War in Europe had ended, but war with Japan had not. Many local families' kids had been killed or wounded in the fierce Okinawa and Iwo Jima battles just completed. Heavy bombing raids over Japan were exacting a frightful toll. Yet Japanese resistance remained stiff. It generally was estimated that a million casualties would result when U.S. and allied troops mounted an invasion of the Japanese homeland.

Only a few in the U.S. government and scientific communities knew nuclear weapons were being developed. Thousands were laboring at the secret Hanford Works in the Eastern Washington desert. President Harry Truman, when he assumed office in April 1945, after President Franklin Roosevelt's death, was briefed for the first time on the weapons and their potential.

Three years ago I wrote a column questioning the rightness of Truman's decision to drop nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Most readers responding argued that Truman had no choice. A land invasion of Japan would have taken far more lives. The use of the bombs shortened and ended the war.
Yet there were other options. The prevailing mind-set prevented their serious discussion at the time.

A blockade of the home islands would have cut off Japan's depleted petroleum and other vital supplies and ended its war-making capability. A nuclear weapon dropped on a lightly inhabited northern Japanese island could have demonstrated dramatically to Emperor Hirohito and his government the weapons' potential for destruction and led to peace negotiations.

There also is a legitimate question as to why the Nagasaki bomb was dropped so soon after the one on Hiroshima. The Japanese government needed time after the first bomb to absorb its implications and reach an obvious decision to sue for peace. The Nagasaki strike simply took additional lives without reason. Some 120,000 mostly civilian lives were claimed immediately in the two strikes. A larger number died later, sometimes years later, from the effects of radiation.

The main thrust of U.S. thinking was that nuclear weapons were like other weapons --- only more powerful. During the Cold War period, school kids practiced "duck-and-cover" drills in anticipation of Soviet nuclear attacks on the United States. Gen. Douglas MacArthur urged use of nuclear weapons against North Korean and Chinese targets in the Korean War. Vice President Richard Nixon unsuccessfully lobbied President Eisenhower for their use to bail out French colonial forces at the decisive Indochinese battle of Dienbienphu.

Doing reserve duty as an Army intelligence analyst, I helped prepare a1960 report on the anticipated effects of nuclear attacks on U.S. regions and metropolitan areas. It found that only Oregon and northern Maine would be spared from both blast and lethal fallout. Neither contained a target or would be swept by prevailing radioactive winds. Post-attack aerial photos of Seattle would have resembled those of Hiroshima.

Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy in his 1960 campaign charged the Eisenhower administration with dereliction in allowing Soviet ICBM production to exceed our own. (As it turned out, this "missile gap" charge was false.) Then, in 1961, while serving at the Pentagon during the Berlin Crisis --- when the Soviet Union erected a wall between East and West Berlin --- I took part in planning based on the presumption that a Soviet/Warsaw Pact invasion of Western Europe could be stopped only with tactical nuclear weapons. Use of the weapons would have devastated Germany. It also could have led to an exchange of intercontinental ballistic missiles. The Cuban Missile Crisis, in 1962, again almost resulted in use of nuclear weapons.

Since those years, we have been leaders in trying to limit nuclear weapons proliferation and risk. Yet, because technology cannot be contained, additional countries continue to acquire the weapons. Most of the new and aspiring nuclear powers --- countries such as North Korea and Iran --- hold the view that we once held: Namely, that nukes are like other weapons, only more powerful. Al-Qaida and other groups want them not only to terrorize the West but to exert leverage on behalf of their political aims.

There is menacing news: Sixty years into the nuclear age, we and others not only have been left with self-inflicted wounds of nuclear contamination, we also must face the reality that the nuclear-weapons genie is not in its bottle, after all. The danger that nuclear weapons will be used is again growing, not receding.

Our conventional bombing attacks on Japan killed far more civilians in 1945 than did the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. Yet, in deciding to use them, we set in motion later consequences not yet fully seen. Saturday will be not be a time for celebration.

Ted Van Dyk has been involved in national policy and politics since 1960

We could not imagine . . .

In her characteristic sharp wit, Rosemary McLeod wrote a stinging attack on the current moral situation in New Zealand, highlighting the effects that “tolerance” has had on women and children. McLeod, one of the founders of the wimminsLib newssheet BroadSheet, continues to hold many "feminist" ideals and beliefs. Yet over time, she has become increasingly concerned with many of the doctrinaire positions and attitudes of this movement; she is now an outspoken critic of a number of its excesses. McLeod repeatedly writes that “we did not foresee . . .” the teleological ends of exalting tolerance, especially in the area of “sexual morality” correctly termed sexual licentiousness.

I can’t remember the last time I was well and truly shocked . . . [we weren’t shocked when we learned that] Bert Potter’s commune at Centrepoint the children naturally watched adults going at it like rabbits in the dormitories. We did not foresee the court cases that would follow, involving sexual abuse of children by Potter and other commune men . . . [nor were we shocked when] Alister Taylor published Down Under the Plum Trees, accounts of the first sexual experiences of young people . . . We did not foresee that the book would become a manual for paedophiles.
We should have abortion on demand . . . we would not have believed how the abortion rate would soar – up to 18,200 in the past year . . . We could not imagine that babies would become a mere unwelcome side-effect of sex, that sex itself would become so divorced from procreation that heterosexual intercourse wouldn’t rate in hardcore porn by 2005. Porn stars prefer to ejaculate on to women’s faces. Vaginas are out of style . . . The Helen Clark Labour-led government may well be remembered best for its legalisation of prostitution and its introduction of civil unions, effectively gay marriages . . . [yet] we did not seem free to discuss openly for fear – once again – of seeming pathetically uncool . . . Lesbians and gays – yesterday’s deviants – can get state-funded artificial insemination, and adopt children. Whoring is a valid career choice.

Gay sex has been normalized and sodomy and fellatio, formerly considered to be homosexual acts, now star in heterosexual porn. The cult of the body beautiful and of serial sexual partners, long mainstream in gay culture, is increasingly a heterosexual obsession. Even the All Blacks are presented as gay eye candy . . . We thought gays wanted to be like us, with marriage-like commitments, but only 54 civil unions have been recorded, not all of them between gays. It’s families that are newly marginalized – solo mothers struggling in poverty, middle-income earners no better off working than they would be on welfare . . . So what’s shocking now? If [Sue] Kedgley is any guide, it’s the state of strawberries and meningococcal vaccines. And battery hens.

=====

Sue Kedgley is a Green Party List MP.
Rosemary McLeod, “Hell in a Handcart?” in: Sunday Star Times, 7 August 2005, p C3+4. (author’s bolding)

Katherine Ernst
Screwy NARAL
What do feminists really want? | 14 July 2005

If the militant feminist, pro-choice movement is known for anything, a sense of warmth is not it. These are the women—excuse me, womyn—who will happily follow lefty Hollywood hack Whoopi Goldberg on a march through Washington, the “Keep the U.S. Off My Uterus” crowd, the Bush-hating, humorless bunch who might flatten a man should he attempt to open a car door for one of them. So when part of the gang has a night of feminist fun, rest assured it’s not dinner and a movie topped off with a swell game of Parcheesi.

No: tonight the Washington state chapter of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League (NARAL) has planned what promises to be an unforgettable evening of pro-choice ecstasy—the “Screw Abstinence Party”—and they want you to be a part of it! Please, dear citizen, “PRINT OUT FLYER AND BRING ALL YOUR FRIENDS!” so you can watch while Seattle’s “hottest sketch comedy group [perform] a sex ed class for adults” (Edgy!), while “sex-positive purveyors of adult toys offer tips on ‘Sexy Safer Sex’” (Ooh . . . Dirty!), and you can listen to Lady Jane DJ spin “the latest in Hip-Hop and R&B.”

But don’t dare get your knickers in a twist, fellow Conservative, or you’ll be snapping at some not-so-ingenious bait. With the exception of Planned Parenthood, perhaps no other liberal organization has been as dangerously effective with pro-abortion demagoguery as NARAL. As any judicial scholar worth his or her salt will tell you, Roe v. Wade is the Adam and Eve of modern-day judicial activism—a case where seven liberal justices, fueled by ideology and emotion, found a constitutional right to a procedure that, oddly enough, the Constitution is silent on. And yet, NARAL has successfully shifted the debate from the legal merit of the Court’s opinion, states’ rights, and the rugged terrain of bioethics to the creation of a faux-threat: the Right-Wing-Christian-Boogeyman who aims to eliminate “women’s rights”—even in cases of rape and incest (as NARAL’s broken-record scare talk wrongly claims). Indeed, the Washington branch of NARAL’s website has a picture of the current Supreme Court: those Justices who would uphold Roe have halos over their heads, while Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas model devil horns. The group even wrote a mock want-ad for the current Supreme Court vacancy: “Seeking a right-wing yes man. . . . Narrow mindedness and interest in turning back the clock on women’s rights a plus.” So clever!

Hence, the “Screw Abstinence” trap. The organizers would love for the Right to rise up, put on their stuffiest shirts, and flood the media with Sodom and Gomorrah-style sound bites (the party is for those age 21 and older); such a stark juxtaposition allows NARAL to avoid making any intellectual defense of their hyper-abortion platform and paints Conservatives as out-of-touch prudish, Scarlet Letter Salemites. If NARAL can get a Conservative offended at the prospect of those over the drinking age not abstaining from sex, they have reached the pot of gold at the end of their liberal rainbow: proof that what abortion foes really seek is to make everyone save it for marriage—or even for procreation in marriage. But it’s not the prospect of young adults engaging in sexual relations that should give anyone pause, but rather NARAL’s implication, in this party invite, that abortion is their favorite form of birth control. “Let them know you keep it real when it comes to your sexual health and decision-making,” the online invitation boasts. “Keep it real?” Is this their wimpy attempt at appealing to the MTV generation, or is P. Diddy writing their press releases? “Come laugh, learn, socialize and buck the system,” they add. “Buck the system?” Cuban or Iranian dissidents “buck the system”; 20-something Seattleites (complete with thrift-store T-shirts and iPods full of Tori Amos tunes) at a liberal party are not exactly “bucking the system,” but acting as cliché as they can. This is NARAL gratifying itself by playing smoking-in-the-girls-room on a political stage; a way to feel cool and rebellious against Principal Bush and Dean Conservative. It deserves not fear but only a raised-eyebrow sneer.

Those on the Right cannot be blamed for feeling a little Schadenfreude in all this, either; Justice O’Connor’s retirement, coupled with Bush’s soon-to-be-tested resolve in picking an originalist nominee, is causing a near crack-up in Liberalville—as illustrated by “Screw Abstinence.” Despite the tired, old mantra that liberals want abortions to be “safe, legal, and rare,” the pro-choicers’ actions are demonstrating otherwise. (“Screw[ing] Abstinence” doesn’t exactly help the “rare” part.) And selling “I Had An Abortion” T-shirts (Planned Parenthood) or “I ♥ Pro-Choice Boys/Girls” wear (NARAL), and fighting common-sense parental-notification laws (which, polls show, a vast majority of Americans favor) won’t help to win many people over, either. NARAL and its ilk have become politically tone deaf. The lack of public support for their militant abortion-on-demand fantasy-land, plus the weakness of their legal argument, has made them intellectually lazy: they have been reduced to flippant T-shirt vendors and feminist yentas armed with placards and coat-hangers.

So fret not the end of civilized society when the guys and gals of NARAL throw their party tonight. “Screw Abstinence” is, after all, a last gasp for air; a way to attract the young and hang on to relevancy as the rest of America continues to erode out of their kooky hands.

Unfranked 6 Aug 05

Taking the Law Into Your Own Hands

Last Sunday if you read Deborah Coddington's column in the Herald on Sunday you'll know part of a story about a man who caught a would-be burglar and called the police to come and collect him. This Sunday evening, if you watch TV One's Sunday program you'll get an update.

Deborah told about Michael Vaimauga a 24-year-old father of four who works as a dispatcher and lives next to the Guthrie Bowron store in Panmure. "Vaimauga woke at 4.30am last February to the sound of three guys smashing their way into the store. Did our hero go back to bed, ignore a crime taking place under his nose, and bury his head under the pillow muttering 'not my problem'? No. He phoned the police, grabbed his baseball bat and shouted at the would-be thieves to stop. When they took off, he chased one, whereupon he was attacked. Vaimauga responded in kind with his baseball bat and felled the attacker with a blow to the shin. He then dragged him down the road to the service station and waited for the police".

The police duly arrived, talked to both men, then arrested Vaimauga for assault and sent the other guy to hospital. After losing time off work for at least five court appearances this young man with no previous convictions was discharged without conviction, but the judge ordered him to pay $150 to a charity. She told him he must not take the law into his own hands. The would-be burglar was never charged.

The man should have got a medal. His legal aid lawyer was paid $910. With four kids the days off work hit Michael and his family hard. I've sent him my own practical medal - a small contribution toward the costs of those days off work.

Do watch the programme on Sunday. If you too think Michael needs such a medal send me a cheque made out to him, and I'll ensure he gets them. Letters can be addressed to me without postage at Parliament Buildings, Wellington.

The TV programme will reveal a lot about the attitudes of the police, and judges - the insiders of our criminal justice system. But there is a lot TV won't have time to include.

As soon as I heard about the case I sought access to the court file. That was over a month ago and still I have not seen it.

I've explained to the court that I do not like to propose changes to the law, or criticise decisions, without knowing as much as I can find out. I got Vaimauga's consent to disclosure, and the court now has it in writing.

First, a court clerk referred my request to the Minister for Courts for vetting. I went to the court office. I've now heard from the Chief District Court Judge, Judge Mathers, and the Minister, that the court clerk was mistaken in telling me there was a protocol requiring such referral, and that the decision is for the judge alone. I have not heard what they are going to do to shore up understanding in the Registrar's office of the concept of judicial independence from the Executive.

I suspect that this is another case where the justice system has stolen a precious right from the man charged. The judge told Michael that he should not take the law into his own hands.

But the law was already in his hands, and in our hands, and it always has been. It does not belong to the system insiders - the judges, police and the lawyers. The Crimes Act is clear about citizen's arrest immunities. Judicial carping at people who take the law into their own hands is now common but that does not make it lawful. The justice insiders may think that citizens arrest provisions are old-fashioned. They may want to confine enforcement decisions and powers exclusively to themselves, but sections 35 to 39 of the Crimes Act have not been repealed. Punishing people who uphold the law is stealing rights from us all. Do you find the following obscure?

"35 Arrest of persons found committing certain crimes. Every one is justified and arresting without warrant any person whom he finds by night committing any offence against this Act.

'39 Force used in executing process or in arrest. Where any person is justified or protected from criminal responsibility Š in making Š any arrest, that justification or protection shall extend and apply to the use by him of such force as may be necessary to overcome any force used in resisting such execution or arrest, unless the Š arrest [can be] made by reasonable means in a less violent manner".

Every controversial prosecution in effect narrows these provisions. Why prosecute? It might be different if the police could even credibly pretend to be able to stop such burglaries. When the state can't protect people and their property it has no right to stop the brave volunteers who try. This is not a call for vigilantes. Michael did not set out to punish the offenders. He tried to bring them to justice.

I am campaigning for the right of individuals and the community to defend themselves. It is a campaign for existing rights, and for restoration of rights lost to politically correct practice only in the last 25 years. New Zealand will never re-attain the low violent crime we enjoyed until 30 years ago until we have restored the routine expectation that people will defend themselves and others against criminality. This campaign is a call for the courts and the police to uphold the law themselves, even if they don't approve of it.

Dr Martin Lally of Victoria University read last Sunday's Herald and copied to me his letter to the Minister for Courts. You can see the message he has taken from the case in these excerpts:

"1. The fact that the police were unable to locate the victim of the assault is rather disturbing. Obviously, he is entitled to compensation (and should probably get it if he can secure appropriate legal services at the taxpayer's expense). I trust you will spare no expense in attempting to locate him for this purpose, and institute procedural changes to ensure that these sorts of errors do not recur. Š
3. The fact that the Judge ordered Mr Vaimauga to pay $150 to a charity is rather disturbing. I thought our courts had got well past the point of compelling anyone to do anything. Of course, the circumstances were exceptional (taking the law into one's own hands in defense of private property is obviously serious stuff) and she doubtless took this into account in departing from the accepted practice.
4. It is commendable that Judge Mather asserted that taking the law into one's own hands is unacceptable. However, she should have added that there are NO exceptions to this general principle. Some misguided members of the public might, for example, feel that had Mr Vaimauga witnessed rape, it would have been acceptable for him to confront the assailant and strike him on the shin with a baseball bat. Of course, as we both know, the right course of action here would be to ring the police and patiently await their arrival (and this would remain true even if the call did not get through, or the location was misunderstood by the dispatcher, or a taxi sent in substitution)."

Here are some recent Ministerial questions. A lot more in this genre will be posted on the ACT website. To me the answers are contemptuous of the public. What do you think?

Questions for Written Answer
Received 4th August 2005

Question: 08412 (2005) Published - Police - Corrected Reply

Portfolio: Police
Minister: Hon George Hawkins
Date Lodged: 20/07/2005
Date Received: 03/08/2005

Question: What steps, if any, has he taken to encourage people to oppose crime and apprehend offenders using the rights set out in sections 34 to 48 of the Crimes Act; and if none why?

Answer: I have not considered it necessary to encourage people to exercise the rights set out in sections 34 to 48 of the Crime Act, as the public continues to assist Police in the prevention of crime and apprehension of offenders.

Question: 08421 (2005) Published - Police - Corrected Reply

Question: Does he think the police should issue statements criticising as foolhardy the actions of people who actively oppose criminal actions, or attempt to apprehend offenders?
Answer: I agree with the advice given by Police and Neighbourhood Support New Zealand cautioning members of the public to act within the law and to not take unnecessary risks when confronted by criminal offending.

Question: 08404 (2005) Published - Police - Corrected Reply

Question: Is there a police or government policy preference to press charges so that the court can decide whether the use of force was justified in defence of self or another or in attempting to stop offences by another, instead of exercising the discretion not to prosecute even where the police consider that conviction is less than likely, and if so what does the Minister think of that policy?

Answer: There is no Police or Government policy preference to press charges so that the court can decide whether the use of force was justified in defence of self or another or in attempting to stop offences by another. I am advised that the outcome of the Police's exercise of its prosecutorial discretion depends on the circumstances of individual cases and the Solicitor-General's prosecution guidelines. This response also answers parliamentary question for written answer No. 8410 (2005).

Question: 08410 (2005) Published - Police - Corrected Reply

Question: What weight do the police give to their effect on public willingness to help prevent crime or to apprehend offenders, before prosecuting people who have acted with such motives?

Answer: I refer the Member to my response to parliamentary question for written answer No. 8404 (2005).

Question: 08414 (2005) Published - Police - Normal Reply

Question: To what extent, if any, does he consider that police should have special powers or privileges not available to ordinary citizens?

Answer: All New Zealanders are bound by the laws of New Zealand. This response also answers parliamentary questions for written answer No. 4815, 8416, 8417, 8418, 8419, 8423, 8424, 8425, 8426, 8427, 8428, 8429, 8430 (2005).

Question: 08430 (2005) Published - Police - Normal Reply

Question: Does he think members of the public should attempt to apprehend offenders, beyond taking details and reporting to the police; and if not why not?
Answer: I refer the Member to my response to parliamentary question for written answer No. 8414 (2005

Question: 08429 (2005) Published - Police - Normal Reply

Question: Does he think members of the public should intervene to stop crime while it is underway, beyond taking details and calling the police; and if not why not?
Answer: I refer the Member to my response to parliamentary question for written answer No. 8414 (2005).

Question: 08426 (2005) Published - Police - Normal Reply

Question: In what manner if any, has the Minister ever raised with the Commissioner of Police the question whether prosecution of people whose offending may be characterised as "taking the law into their own hands" discourages public assistance in combating crime, or discourages exercise of the rights reflected in sections 34 to 48 of the Crimes Act; and if it was raised what was the result?
Answer: I refer the Member to my response to parliamentary question for written answer No. 8414 (2005).

Question: 08423 (2005) Published - Police - Normal Reply

Question: What guidance is available to police exercising the prosecution discretion, on distinguishing between "taking the law into your own hands" and exercise of the rights reflected in sections 34 to 48 of the Crimes Act, and what does it say?
Answer: I refer the Member to my response to parliamentary question for written answer No. 8414 (2005).

Question: 08425 (2005) Published - Police - Normal Reply

Question: In what manner, if any, has the Minister ever raised with the Attorney General or the Crown Law Office the question whether prosecutions for "taking the law into their own hands" may be discouraging public assistance in combating crime, or discouraging exercise of the rights reflected in sections 34 to 48 of the Crimes Act; and if it was raised what was the result?
Answer: I refer the Member to my response to parliamentary question for written answer No. 8414 (2005).

Question: 08419 (2005) Published - Police - Normal Reply

Question: To what extent, if any, does he disagree with Sir Robert Peel's seventh principle of policing: "To maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen, in the interests of community welfare and existence"?
Answer: I refer the Member to my response to parliamentary question for written answer No. 8414 (2005).

Question: 08417 (2005) Published - Police - Normal Reply

Question: To what extent, if any, does he disagree with Sir Robert Peel's fourth principle of policing "To recognize always that the extent to which the cooperation of the public can be secured diminishes, proportionately, the necessity of the use of physical force and compulsion for achieving police objectives"?
Answer: I refer the Member to my response to parliamentary question for written answer No. 8414 (2005).

Question: 1021

Portfolio: Police
Minister: Hon George Hawkins
Date Lodged 15/02/2005
Date Received: 02/03/2005

Question: What policies or written material are readily available to guide Police asked to advise the public about their exercise of rights of citizens' arrest?

Answer I refer the Member to my response to parliamentary question for written answer No.1011 (2005).

Police are guided by sections 48 and 52 to 56 of the Crimes Act 1961. Because each situation is different, and because "reasonable force" and "necessary" have a legal meaning, police are in a position to dispense very general advice only. However, it is the role of the police to enforce the law, not to provide detailed legal advice.

[Note that those sections have nothing whatsoever to do with the citizens arrest immunities]

Question: 1022

Portfolio: Police
Minister: Hon George Hawkins
Date Lodged: 15/02/2005
Date Received: 02/03/2005

Question: How do Police ensure they give accurate advice when asked to explain to the public the nature or limits on rights of defence of home, person or property?

Answer I refer the Member to my response to parliamentary question for written answer No.1011 (2005).

Police are guided by sections 48 and 52 to 56 of the Crimes Act 1961. Because each situation is different, and because "reasonable force" and "necessary" have a legal meaning, police are in a position to dispense very general advice only. However, it is the role of the police to enforce the law, not to provide detailed legal advice.

Question: 1027

Portfolio: Police
Minister: Hon George Hawkins
Date Lodged 15/02/2005
Date Received: 02/03/2005

Question: Have Police any survey or other information that would indicate the views of "frontline" officers on the clarity or practical comprehensibility of the law governing self defence of home or property, and if so, what does it say?
Answer Police are guided by sections 48 and 52 to 56 of the Crimes Act 1961. Because each situation is different, and because "reasonable force" and "necessary" have a legal meaning, police are in a position to dispense very general advice only. However, it is the role of the police to enforce the law, not to provide detailed legal advice.

Portfolio: Police
Minister: Hon George Hawkins
Date Lodged: 15/02/2005
Date Received: 03/03/2005

Question: Is it the Police view that property owners who warn off intruders increase their risk of injury if they carry a weapon when they do it, and if so, on what information is that view based?

Answer I have been advised that the Police view, which is shared by many groups including Victim Support New Zealand, is that property owners who warn off intruders increase their risk of injury if they carry a weapon. There have been too many instances of people taking the law into their own hands and getting injured or killed. Police consider that the best option is to call the police.

Contact Us
Daniel McCaffrey
Executive Secretary to Stephen Franks MP
Telephone: 04 470 6636
Fax: 04 473 3532
E-mail: daniel.mccaffrey@parliament.govt.nz
Web: http://www.act.org.nz

I insert a few comments in this recent PR from Dick Matthews' wayward daughter.

R


This is the final speech made by a Green Party MP for this Parliamentary term. It reflects on many of our significant achievements over the last three years - and touches on areas that you have expressed an interest in.

Adjournment Debate - Wednesday 3 August 2005
Sue Bradford - Green Party

Madam Speaker,

As we reach the end of this term of Parliament, the second in which the Green Party is represented here in our own right, we face an absolutely critical election in a volatile environment, locally and internationally.

Overseas, wars in Iraq and elsewhere simmer and burn; millions live in poverty and continue to die of starvation, AIDS & other diseases; the planet keeps getting hotter; and our ability to depend on fossil fuels as our main source of energy is starting to decline rapidly.

Here in Aotearoa New Zealand


we ignore all of that at our peril. The general election, in just over six weeks' time, pales into insignificance when put up against those global concerns, yet, as always, it is in our own place that we can all try to make our primary contribution to improving the state of the world.

I hope our next Government will be one that prefers peace to war, that does not chase slavishly after American neo conservative ambitions, and which continues to increase our own small contributions to helping to deal with desperate poverty and environmental degradation in the world out there.

< Are those last 2 words anything better than annoying?

We have in front of us a stark choice in this election between a Government lead by Don Brash and backed mainly by NZ First, and one lead by Helen Clark and backed primarily by the Green Party.

< If that is so, it is stark indeed for those concerned to defend the family from the highly destructive PC sabotages wrought by the Clark regime. Mss Fitzsimons, Bradford, Locke etc have largely supported the sneaky attacks on marriage. If the attached page from the Green Party's website reflects anything near their current attitude (and I've not heard of any resiling), we must conclude that the Green party has been for years the party of sexual deviance, as well as PC racism & sexism. If they had maintained down to the election the 10% party poll reported before the diabolical Corngate® PR stunt, the next half-dozen on their list would have become MPs - I call them the mod squad as they were nearly all sexual deviants (Meriel Watts etc). Bradford introduced, and dishonestly promoted, a bill to criminalise smacking - see attached - a viciously antisocial move.

These two possibilities present very different outcomes, and I hope people will consider quite deeply which kind of future they prefer.
Unlike some others of the smaller parties, we in the Greens have made it quite clear where we stand. We will not support a National lead

< someone should teach her the word 'led'

Government post election under any circumstances, and I'm sure National feels pretty much the same way about any possibility of an arrangement with us.

However, we will be open to negotiating an agreement with Labour should it be open to that possibility. Indications so far are that it might well be.
We nine Green MPs stand on our record through the last two terms of Parliament, and believe we have a lot to offer should the voters give us - and Labour - the possibility and opportunity to work together in the next Government.

The Green Party brings a kaupapa of environmental nurturing, social justice, non-violence and participatory democracy to the table.

We have no bottom lines.

< This is a startling statement. It recalls Minister of Foreign Affairs Goff saying in Parlt soon after '9/11' "these terrorists have no bottom lines".

Through both the Values Party and the Green Party we have maintained our principles for three decades despite the oft times derision and contempt of our political opponents, and now we believe we have reached the point that we are ready to give Government a go.

Labour needs us too, it is not a one-way street. It needs our commitment to a sustainable future and a fairer society and our many ideas about solutions to environmental and social problems. A Labour - New Zealand First Government would look very different from a Green - Labour one. One only has to look at Winston Peters' approach to immigrants and refugees or outright support for forced work for the dole to see in what direction he'd like to quickly take the country.

While over the last three years of this parliamentary term the Greens have basically been an opposition party giving support to Government when we've seen fit, within this we have brought a voice and a vision to Parliament and public discourse that would not otherwise be heard or visible.
Our achievements in the last couple of years include our private members' bills, among them Sue Kedgley's bill promoting flexible working hours, and now my own bill aims to repeal section 59 of the Crimes Act. Both of these are now before Select Committees.

Our MPs also had a major input into the development of the Land Transport Management Act. We foiled the Government's plans to set up a trans Tasman regulatory authority based in Canberra, helped to stop Project Aqua on the Waitaki, put animal welfare, food safety and waste reduction firmly on the political agenda, and supported civil unions

< see what I mean ?

, Maori Television and the clean slate legislation.

< Tandoori's greatest hit ...

We have played a key role in the two-year campaign to get Ahmed Zaoui out of jail.

< How many NZers think that was good?

We have kept child - and adult - poverty on the political agenda, negotiated a Government commitment to an independent prison inspectorate, instigated an inquiry into cannabis and catalysed party pill legislation.

We have kept pressing for the reduction of the student debt burden and a universal living allowance for students. We have supported Labour on all its reforming legislation around ACC and workers' rights and conditions.

We have consistently opposed the Foreshore and Seabed legislation and got the Government to adopt a proposal for a community-driven national dialogue on the Treaty

< oh? community-driven, not Govt website-driven Claudia Orange propaganda? Pray tell more.

, and taken a leadership role on issues of human rights and peace.

< These have now become PC code-terms.

There is still no commercial release of GE into the environment of this country. A new monitoring programme for GE in food has begun after years of Green lobbying.

Green - Government cooperation on transport issues has assisted in achieving the buyback of the track, action on vehicles emissions screening, and a big boost to Auckland rail and bus services, including bus and cycle lanes.

Our MPs have continued, as we did in our first term here, to take a principled stand on issues, and not trade between them. Nor do we get into personal stoushes here in the House.

We are here to make a serious contribution and that is what we've done, and will continue to do after September 17.

There is a lot of unfinished business. Just in my portfolio areas alone I am aware of legislation like the Residential Tenancies Amendment Bill, which would reform and improve the law for people living in boarding houses, but which has sadly lingered on the order paper for years and still hasn't seen the light of day in this House for reasons unknown to me.

The NZ Sign Language Bill and the Disabled Persons Employment Promotion Repeal Bill also languish on the order paper and I'm sorry that these two bills, both of which are geared to improving the situation for big groups of people within the disabilities sector have not quite made it out of the gate.

As with the three bills I have just named, my own bill to repeal Section 59 and remove the defence of 'reasonable force' which allows parents to seriously beat their children and get away with it, legitimised by the State, will only survive if we end up with a new Parliament which supports continuing with such legislation.

This year the Green Party is campaigning hard for the return of political parties to this Parliament who can work together in a cooperative and consultative way for the common good.

Our kaupapa and our people can help give Labour the heart, soul and spine it needs not only push through some of this legislation which has been left half done, but also to instigate a whole lot of new and positive progress on social, economic and environmental issues.

We would like the opportunity to do more to protect our native plants and animals, and to restrict the sale of high country land and coastal property to NZ citizens and residents.

It is critical that we speed up progress on protecting our marine environment and nurture our coastal fisheries so that anyone can go out and catch a fish for dinner again.

We must prepare for the end of cheap oil by future-proofing New Zealand against the shocks to come, through our energy, transport and housing strategies.

The Green Party is committed to doing everything we can to bring an end to endemic child poverty. The legacy of the last two decades, which still affects over 20% of our country's children, even after five and a half year's of a Labour Government. The minimum wage should be put up to $12 an hour immediately; we would very much like to introduce a Universal Child Benefit like the old family benefit; and our income support system should be enough for people to actually live on without going endlessly into deeper and deeper debt.

We will continue to oppose GE food and GE release into our environment.

We will do everything we can to protect and nurture taonga Maori including the foreshore and seabed, including from inappropriate mining. Our waterways should be safe for swimming and collecting kai for the whanau.

The food our children eat should be fresh and healthy, and so much more.

The Green Party stands here in Parliament to give a voice to those who haven't often had a voice in this place - children, people who've had mental illness or suffer from physical or intellectual disability; those who've been abused or raped. We stand here for prisoners, refugees, migrants, unemployed workers, beneficiaries and also for the non-human lives of our world, which are totally defenceless here unless we give them expression.

The Greens can and will add enormous value to the next Government. We intend to be back here very shortly - bigger, bolder and stronger and ready to continue our work for a future that will work for all of us here in this land, and for all the species that share it with us.

======================

http://www.greens.org.nz/docs/policy/rainbow.htm

[Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand] Party Policy


Celebrating a Rainbow Nation

The Green Party Sexual Orientation Policy

Launched 8 June 1999
For further information contact: Richard Davies & Rosemary Segedin.
To propose amendments contact: Roland Sapsford, National
Policy Convenor, for details.

Summary of Main Points

The Green Party supports:

* celebration of diversity and encouragement of
appreciation between groups
* elimination of legislative barriers to full
participation in society
* elimination of institutional discrimination
* education in school, workplace and the community about
sexual orientation
* fostering enduring, cohesive and participatory
communities through well resourced social services
* research into issues confronting the "rainbow"
communities holistic health services accessible to all

Green Values

The human family encompasses a rich diversity of ages,
genders, ethnicities, abilities and sexual orientations.
Upbringing, education and circumstance further add to our
diversity. The Green Party embraces this human diversity.
New Zealand society is enhanced by each step it takes along
the path from prejudice to appreciation to celebration of
diversity.

This policy is derived from the Green Party's principles of
social justice and appropriate decision-making. We recognise
an intimate connection between our rights as individuals and
our responsibilities to our neighbours, our communities and
the Earth. Much remains to be done in many areas to provide
a decent and secure life for everyone. A sense of balance
between our rights and responsibilities grows from
participation in the decisions that affect all aspects of
our lives.

Policy Statement

New Zealanders with a sexual orientation or gender identity
different from that of the majority include people who
identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, transgender,
intersex, takataapui and fa'fafine. These New Zealanders are
a significant group in our society which has been
marginalised through legislative barriers, institutional
discrimination and casual prejudice. Some research suggests
that these groups together constitute anything between 4 and
10% of the total population.

In this policy document we will use rainbow as an inclusive
term to describe any person (or community) who is not
predominantly heterosexual, or has an identity that is not
their assigned gender role, or anyone questioning their
gender or sexuality, or experiencing same sex love or
attraction.

The Green Party encourages social cohesion and acceptance
within New Zealand. People of differing sexual orientations
or gender identity should treat each other with courtesy,
respect and appreciation. The "rainbow" communities are a
minority that crosses social, educational and economic
boundaries. As a result they are natural champions of
diversity that has the potential to enrich us all. The Green
Party's fundamental values lead us to promote an inclusive
society in which each minority group feels at home. We count
the "rainbow" communities as our colleagues in this
significant social task.

Specific Policies

To this end we will use our influence to advance the
following specific policies:

1. "Rainbow" communities are entitled to equal
opportunities in law and in practice. We support making
the government comply fully with the Human Rights Act
1993. We support workplace programmes in the public and
private sector to eliminate prejudice, discrimination
and harassment. The Consistency 2000 programme will be
pursued to its completion.

2. "Rainbow" and heterosexual partnerships are equally
entitled to respect and support. We support extending
the option of legal partnership arrangements and rights
to same-sex couples.

3. Parenting skills are distinct from sexual orientation
or gender identity. We support equal criteria for both
"rainbow" and heterosexual couples in their assessment
for suitability and eligibility for parenting.

4. Community development is crucial for the empowerment of
"rainbow" communities. We encourage the development of
adequately resourced community centres, outreach
programmes and events and the creative self-expression
of people with "rainbow" identities through drama and
literature and the arts.

5. "Rainbow" communities have special health needs. The
Green Party supports a holistic approach to health that
acknowledges the relationships between human rights and
health and encompasses physical, mental, social and
spiritual aspects within the wider context of the
environment in which we live, work and play. We support
the development of specific programmes, including
professional education, in partnership with "rainbow"
communities. All people, including those with HIV/AIDS,
have the right to adequate medical care and protection
from discrimination within the health services.

6. The interests and identity of "rainbow" students in
schools and tertiary institutions need to be protected.
We support the creation of safe and supportive
educational environments. We support human rights
education as a core part of the curriculum. We support
a partnership with schools and "rainbow" youth
organisations to reduce the unacceptably high level of
suicide and drug abuse among youth. We will ensure that
teachers are adequately trained in educating for
diversity through the inclusion of sexual orientation
in teacher training and development.

7. "Rainbow" communities are entitled to fair and just
treatment in their dealings with police, penal
institutions, courts, and the military. We support
initiatives to educate all these institutions in sexual
orientation and gender identity issues.

8. There has been little research on issues confronting
"rainbow" communities. We encourage research to help
identify discriminatory workplace and institutional
practices. We also support participatory research into
individual life experience to identify ways to
encourage "rainbow" communities' physical and mental
health and safety.

9. New Zealand has a proud tradition in international
human rights advocacy. We support New Zealand taking an
active role within the international community to
promote human rights issues in relation to sexual
orientation.

[Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand - Quality of Life]

-------------------------------------------------------------
Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand > Green Library > Party
Policy
http://www.greens.org.nz/docs/policy/rainbow.htm

======================

WHAT THEY DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW

RAINBOW YOUTH IS B-A-D FOR YOUTH

“RAINBOW YOUTH IS ABOUT YOUTH SAYING
‘F . . . OFF! I AM WHO I AM!!!’”

(According to Aaron Hockly, ex-Rainbow Youth male chairperson –1)

The official opening of Rainbow Youth House, next to the Methodist Wesley Care Centre in Mount Eden Road, Auckland on 17th September 2001, sees a giant step being taken by this homosexual political lobby group. From being a mere referral group it now moves into the area of being a service provider, of accommodation and support services. Ostensibly it is for those aged 17 years and under who are homosexual, bi-sexual, transgendered, or who “identify” as any of these, and who have been “kicked” out of home, are involved in under-aged prostitution, “at risk” re drink, drugs, suicide, etc. or who are just generally “queer” and homeless.

However, the house is also to serve as the administrative centre and base for Rainbow Youth and its political activism. Therefore it should be remembered that behind this new, apparently benevolent, benign and respectable facade as a caring service provider it is still, nevertheless, ideologically driven, and with a decidedly anti-social, atheistic bias to its seemingly humanitarian activities. Ironically, the house is owned by the Methodist Mission!

What is Rainbow Youth? Originally Auckland Lesbian Gay Youth (ALGY), it began following the Easter 1989 Auckland homosexual conference, and was for high school and older teenagers. The aim was always to become politically active in the schools, and to this end it has been ably assisted by other homosexual political groups and individuals. Back in 1993 they sought to run school workshops on “ ‘Coming Out’ at high school”; “dealing with your parents”; “Christianity and ‘gay’ youth” etc.

Since the mid-1990’s the group has reinvented its image to the more positive and politically neutral-sounding Rainbow Youth. Its politics and its morally corrupting influences remain, however, albeit skilfully disguised behind concerns for “homophobia”, homeless “queer” youth, “unsafe” environments, “safe sex” etc..

Take, for example, the words of Aaron Hockly, a former Rainbow Youth male chairperson : “Rainbow Youth is about youth saying ‘F... off, I am who I am’!”(1) Or the activities and attitudes of ex-male chairperson Steven Oates, one of the personnel who now “educates” on “homophobia” in some schools on behalf of the group. He is known as well as drag queen “Jewellry Sparkle”, and also fronts the Auckland homosexual “Around The Bend” Sunday night programme on 95b FM.

On 21st March 1999 he coolly and unabashedly conducted a 45 minute conversation with ex-male prostitute and sadomasochist “Master Martin”, a bondage and discipline “practitioner”. Oates matter-of-factly allowed disgusting and horrific details of such perversions to be spelt out on air, and this, to a youth-oriented audience. Nor did Oates even demur or question this guest when he pointed out what a good money earner it would be for study fees!

Such people as Hockly and Oates are increasingly gaining access to unsuspecting and trusting youngsters through the N.Z. school system, under the pretext of concern for “queer” youth, “homophobia”, “hate” speech, etc. Then, if current plans are successful to amend New Zealand’s Human Rights Act (as instigated by homosexual M.P. Tim Barnett) a bevy of “human rights” lawyers will be on hand to help school students bring pressure to bear in the form of litigation against schools which allegedly fail to keep them “safe” from “homophobia” etc., and even win massive payouts in some cases, as is occurring overseas.

Indeed there could be vast numbers eligible and tempted to sue, judging by the arbitrary, loose and preposterous definition of “homophobia” (“The creation of a feeling of uncomfortableness” ) being used by Rainbow Youth’s current male chairperson Brent Carey, and accepted without question by sycophantic Radio N.Z. “Whenua” host, and fellow homosexual, Henare Te Ua. (Inter alia, he had unctuously observed to the group’s ex-chairperson Amy Churchouse that the early predecessors of Rainbow Youth “Must have been very brave...to go into schools” etc..)(2)

Rainbow Youth House will provide ideal facilities for such indoctrination of youngsters into the homosexual “culture”, and with funding for it anticipated to be coming from the taxpayers and the corporate sector. COGS and Lottery Youth have obliged up until now, and already the Department of Child Youth and their Families is assisting also. They envisage needing $300,000.00 per year to keep operating. If YOU oppose public funding for this project, protest to your M.P. and others.

Massive trickery lies behind homosexual political activism. Because of almost blanket media manipulation of the facts, vast sectors of the populace accept political advances by the homosexual lobby simply as being good and necessary in a “tolerant” society. Ironically this lobby speaks for very few homosexuals because very very few ever become politically involved. Moreover there are even non-political homosexuals who vehemently oppose and decry such political zealotry – broadcaster Lindsay Perigo, for just one.(3)

“10%” lie. A major part of this trickery is the dishonest repeating of the “10% of the population” figure. Based upon unscientific and now-discredited Kinsey research, even some of the more honest homosexual political activists themselves now acknowledge this. One, prominent writer Edmund White : “I honestly believe ‘gays’ only represent about 3%....so we’re really only a tiny minority.”(4)

“No link between homosexuality and paedophilia” lie. Dictionaries themselves put a lie to this fiction, such as in Collins Concise (198. While “paedophilia” is defined only loosely as “The condition of being sexually attracted to children”, under “paederasty” it is far more precise : “Homosexual relations between men and boys”. However, with even political lobbies pursuing paedophile/paederast “rights”, and acknowledging their homosexual membership, (5) still the lie persists that children are never at risk from homosexuals. Yet, even if they do not prey on youngsters sexually, they can and often do so politically, as shown above.

“All born that way”. A further key piece of homosexual political propaganda, and essential in order to try and justify placing themselves on apar with racial, ethnic, religious and women’s groups, the disabled etc. in the field of human rights, but fraudulent for all that. For example, when it suits, when they seek to recruit to boost their political numbers, they even exclaim “You can choose to be ‘gay’!”(6)

The wider picture. Such insidious political chicanery is better understood when seen as part of the wider gender war. There we see undeniable evidence of cunning and unscrupulous operators in their pursuit of the radical homosexual political agenda. Twenty years ago they were at least open and honest enough to name their “enemy” : capitalism, and the Christian “patriarchy”. In the 1980’s, however, a cunning plan was hatched to camouflage the ideological nature of the struggle.

In their article “The Overhauling of Straight America”, in Guide Magazine, November 1987, Marshall K. Kirk and Erastes Pill solemnly reasoned : “If you can only get (people)to think that (homosexuality) is just another thing, with a shrug of their shoulders, then your battle for legal and social rights is virtually won. And to get to that stage, ‘gays’ as a class must cease to appear mysterious, alien, loathsome and contrary.” The writers explained that a large scale media campaign would be required “to change the image of ‘gays’ in America....It should do six things, which briefly, are :-

1. Talk about ‘gays’ and ‘gayness’ as loudly and as often as possible. 2. Portray ‘gays’ as victims.....of fate (‘born that way’) and of society (suffering from ‘hate’ crimes, ‘homophobia’ etc.). 3. Give protectors a just cause (‘anti-discrimination’ campaigns). 4. Make ‘gays’ look good. 5. Make the ‘victimisers’ look bad. 6. Solicit funds.

By 1990 Kirk, along with Hunter Madsen, had written “After The Ball : How America will conquer its fear and hatred of ‘Gays’ in the 90’s” (Plume). The success of this drastic and deeply deceitful shift in political strategy is now evident for all to see, stretching as it does far beyond the U.S.A.

Cultural battle for hearts and minds. In the general quagmire of confused thinking associated with the homosexual lobby - false information, mixed messages about values, and general political manipulation of youth - it is ironical that this same lobby has obsessively sought to prove a link between “homophobia” and youth suicide, but in vain. The grim reality, surely, could far more likely be the very opposite. Some youngsters could well become suicidal after being so caught up in this social/psychological tug-of-war being so cruelly exerted for their hearts and minds. This fits well with some quotes from two angry, English, heterosexual teenage girls:-

“We read a directive to communists in Florida : ‘Corrupt youth, alienate it from religion, direct its interest to sex, let it become superficial, destroy its idealism, use every means to bring about the collapse of moral virtues, honesty, purity, temperance and trust in the given word.’” Also : “Lenin once said, ‘If we want to destroy a nation we must first destroy its morals. Then that nation will fall into our lap like ripe fruit.’”(7)

1.Express 31st August 2000; 2. Radio N.Z. 13th Sept. 2001; 3. Further details from Credo Society; 4“This Way Out”, Planet 104.6FM Auckland, 10th March 2001; 5. For one, the now defunct Aotearoa Man-Boy Love Assn.(AMBLA) on Radio GALA, Access Radio Auckland, 7th April 1991; 6. As did two lesbians from the National Gay Rights Coalition (N.Z.) on Radio Pacific Auckland, 20th May 1979; also lesbian activist Jenny Rankine : “A lesbian is a woman who CHOOSES to call herself a lesbian!” – G & T Show, Planet 104.6FM, 26th July 2001; 7. Anne-Louise de Verteuil & Nicola Brooks : Teenage Marketplace, (Methuen PB 1975)

Compiled 14th September 2001 by Credo Society Inc. P.O.Box 105-105, AUCKLAND, N.Z.
Phone/Fax 09-480-9995 (all times) e-mail : credo@surfer.co.nz
(Credo, established in 1981, is a service organisation with no political or religious affiliations, aiming for a more informed public on issues of vital concern)

============================

SHOULD SPANKING BE PROHIBITED ?
Robert Mann

expanded from NZ Herald 5-11-97

The media on June 2 2004 gave extensive, uncritical coverage to yet another bout of advocacy that a new criminal offence be created - smacking your own child in your own home - by repeal of s.59 of the Crimes Act.

The excuse for this largely one-sided publicity was a claim by a Professor Anne Smith of Otago that she was going - in a week or two - to publish some account of research in many countries, said to show that smacking children causes long-term harm. The Commissioner for Children, Ms Cindy Kiro, appeared to have provided funding for Prof. Smith, and weighed in with the particular opinion that there is no threshold for this harm - any smacking will damage the child, later.

This is only the latest of several attempts to ban spanking.

In order to appraise this advocacy, we rely on beliefs about nothing less important than human nature. One young neighbour of mine, a doting first-time parent, gushed to me "a child comes into the world perfect, and our duty is not to interfere with its blossoming". Stan Freberg spoofed this attitude in his song 'That's My Boy' - remember the cooing line "look at him load that gun!" ? Whatever else you may think of Freud, I hope you will prefer his more realistic slogan: "the arrival of a baby in a household constitutes a barbarian invasion". A little child is purely selfish and therefore needs to be taught societal rules of behaviour.

If you see your toddler across the room about to electrocute or scald itself, too far away for you to restrain the child physically, do you or do you not want the child to obey your command at a distance? If that child is to act safely (contrary to its own ignorant inquisitive impulse at the time), it will have to freeze or take evasive action in direct, blind, trusting obedience to your order. A clear example of such a life-saving relationship is recounted by Catherine Caughey in her autobiography 'World Wanderer'. Her sister when 3 was ordered at a distance to freeze, so that a deadly snake glided on past the child rather than attacking as movement would probably have provoked.

I contend that adults owe children such previous conditioning as will cause obedience in such emergencies.

What background must have been established between you and the child in order for that obedience to be forthcoming when required? In general, the previous history of the child will have included many probings of limits, which were of course met in the first instance by verbal prohibitions. Indeed, the selfish (if not barbarian!) will of the child is asserted long before it can understand or utter language; this early period is a window of opportunity for parents to link their verbal tone with physical penalties.

As the child escalated defiance on previous occasions, after one or two stages of to-&-fro a stage arrived when the parent (or guardian) either used physical force on the child to assert due authority or allowed the child's will to prevail. If the child has always been allowed the last word or action, then the child will likely assume the emergency sketched above to be just another opportunity for assertiveness, just another verbal joust in which s/he can expect to "win". Unless a few previous experiences have convinced the child that an extreme 'emergency command' tone must be obeyed, the child will likely go ahead and maim or kill itself. Mere previous verbal exchanges will not have ensured the needed obedience.

The parent will thus have failed the child by failing to insist that the basis of running the world is the superior knowledge & wisdom which adults do, by & large, accumulate.

The criterion of the child's personal safety, which I have relied upon in the above example, is of course not the whole story; other criteria also apply. A child's desires cannot be allowed to prevail always over the legitimate needs & desires of adults. I contend that adults owe children guidance on the limits of behaviour which constitute civilisation. Today over-indulged wilful children are hampering education by sabotaging schoolroom work just for 'fun', and the teachers no longer have available to them the recourse of corporal punishment to curb serious persistent antisocial behaviour. This is bad for the offenders, sooner or later, as well as everyone else involved.

Worse, Jane Ritchie has for many years been advocating the creation of a new crime: corporal punishment on your own child in your own home. Since starting this campaign, she has stated on national radio that she does not envisage any actual prosecutions if this crime were to get inserted on the statute book. She thus reveals a confused, if sincere, attitude to the law. It is no proper function of Parliament to pass laws which are not intended to be enforced.

Obviously, excessive force - let alone habitual brutality without any pretence at justice, as forced upon the child Kipling - must be deterred and punished where possible. But a reasonably considered smack is not at all like those excesses. It is the minimal pain which will prevent later, much worse, violence - some of it on innocent third parties such as those maimed in road crashes by selfish young drivers.

I emphasize the concept of minimising violence, as opposed to the stupid doomed trend to attempt abolition of violence. It does seem to me that the best we can hope for is to optimise violence. Actually, smacking as I define it is not violence at all - not being intended or likely to injure.

To assist choices between types of punishment, let us augment the proverb "sticks & stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me" with the wisdom of the (originally Samoan) proverb "the thrust of the spear may be parried but the hurtful word cuts to the bone".

Unfortunately these choices are being steadily restricted, even warped, by the gender war. By & large, a woman cannot prevail against a man in a physical fight, especially if in domestic circumstances and without weapons. The political ideology WimminsLib (misleadingly called 'feminism') has therefore pretended that justice will be served by exaggerating men's domestic violence (e.g. the biased 'Hitting Home' propaganda from the Ministry of Justice) and by purporting that verbal punishments can serve as the final enforcement mechanism for domestic order, instead of the sting of a few smacks.

Those who claim that smacking is immoral routinely allege that alternative punishments exist. They usually fail to specify any; but one sometimes mentioned is euphemistically termed "time out" - more honestly called solitary confinement. The cruel mental effects of this unusual punishment are rarely discussed.

On the traditional approach, the typical child's upbringing will require a few well-chosen careful smacks which will cause no injury. These must be such that the child will understand (insofar as it is able) the justice involved, and will be treated throughout with evident stern love. Many of my friends agree that this type of upbringing served them very well; and they thank, rather than resent, their parents & teachers for it.

The Swedish blunder of prohibiting corporal punishment even in the home must not be copied here. And I urge that suitable arrangements be restored for teachers to use this method of discipline.

For those who have come this far with my argument, the question arises: what are the WimminsLib ideologues hoping to achieve by their campaign to ban smacking? This intriguing puzzle invites some speculation.

Firstly, if interpersonal conflict gets confined to verbal methods, physical impact having been banned, women will tend to gain power because women tend to more unrestrained brutality in vocal conflict. Second, if men are not allowed ever to hit women, it will become prohibited for a husband to sober up his wife by a sharp smack when she is going hysterically irrational. This particular action is, in my opinion, very important for social stability - nothing less than a main basis for social order. I have seen a wife pleading for such action when she was going out of control.

Those who join the fray against the campaign to ban smacking should keep in mind that we are up against radical dishonesty in some of its main promotors. Dirty tricks are frequent e.g. defining smacking in the same single category as physical abuse; misusing the term 'violence'; withholding the Smith/Kiro 'report' while using its claimed conclusions for political purposes; etc etc. We are up against radical dishonesty bent on misleading. It will be best if we treat it as such, not as if it were an honest, merely misconceived, campaign.

THE CALAMITY HOWLER
August 4, 2005 Issue #64
EDITOR\PUBLISHER; A.V. Krebs
E-MAIL: avkrebs@earthlink.net

LIVING WITH THE BOMB
RICHARD RHODES
National Geographic
August, 2005

Sixty years ago, on a stormy night in 1945, the charismatic American Physicist Robert Oppenheimer mounted the stage of a movie theater in the secret city of Los Alamos, New Mexico. Lean and intense, he was there to address hundreds of scientists --- the men and women who built the first atomic bombs under his direction.

Exploded over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945, those bombs had just ended the most destructive war in human history --- and changed the face of war forever.

The world would soon learn what they already knew, Oppenheimer warned: Nuclear weapons were surprisingly cheap and easy to make, once you understood how. Soon, he said, other countries would be making them, too.

Their power of destruction --- "already incomparably greater than that of any other weapon" --- will grow, he declared. Despite these unsettling predictions, Oppenheimer found positive benefit in the breakthrough, calling nuclear weapons "not only a great peril, but a great hope."

What was Oppenheimer thinking ? The peril was obvious: Hiroshima and Nagasaki lay in ruins, with tens of thousands killed and thousands more seriously injured. What "great hope" nuclear weapons might offer was hard to imagine, even in victory. Sixty years later it still is.

Today eight countries brandish known nuclear arsenals, while approximately 20 others possess the technology and materials to go nuclear in a year or so if they choose. And nations are only part of the story.

The breakup of the Soviet Union put a vast array of Nuclear weapons and materials at risk of theft or clandestine sale to non-state actors, either terrorist groups or criminal networks. Expertise too is in demand.

The so-called father of the Pakistani bomb, Abdul Qadeer Khan, is reported to have passed nuclear secrets, weapons production technology and bomb designs to Libya, North Korea and Iran; some fear his network may have passed secrets to others as well.

Since the mid-1990's Osama bin Laden and his followers have dreamed of acquiring nuclear devices to use in devastating attacks on the United States. No one knows whether terrorists are closing in on a radiological dirty bomb or even a nuclear weapon . . . . .

"Living With the Bomb" continues along with a number of companion features in the August, 2005 issue of National Geographic.

SHOCKWAVE: COUNTDOWN TO HIROSHIMA
DENNIS DRABELLE
Washington Post
July 31, 2005;

Those who revere John Hersey's Hiroshima as a classic piece of reporting about an act unprecedented in human history --- the instantaneous annihilation of tens of thousands of civilians by human agency-- may approach a new book on the subject with lowered expectations. But in Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima (HarperCollins, $26.95), Stephen Walker has painted on a larger canvas, beginning this tale of both ghastly destruction and a gamble to end a protracted war by visiting the site in the New Mexico desert where the atomic bomb was first tested.

From then on, he switches back and forth from the United States to the doomed Japanese city, from the Imperial Palace in Tokyo to the so-called "Little White House" near Potsdam, Germany, where President Harry Truman got a briefing on the new weapon's progress in late July 1945.

In Hiroshima, Walker zeroes in on the experience of a soldier named Toshiaki Tanaka. Separated from his wife and child by his military duties when the bomb fell, Tanaka went searching for them the next day but knew there was no hope once he found a neighbor, recognizable only by a telltale belt buckle he had worn. Then Tanaka saw "two figures, like charcoal sticks, fused together on the ground, facing what was once the doorway [to the family-owned liquor store]. One of the figures was much smaller than the other, a tiny, shapeless bundle pressed against the other's back, as if somehow clinging to it. He knew immediately this was his wife and baby daughter.

"He stood perfectly still, staring at them. Despite the terrible burns their bones stood out. They were extraordinarily white. He could not understand how it was possible they were so white. He bent down beside them. Then he picked up the bones, placing them one by one in his handkerchief. . . . He walked out into the street that no longer existed and took the bones of his wife and child all the way back to the barracks in Ujina. There he placed them, still in their handkerchief, on a shelf above his bed in his quarters. It was the only home he had left."

HIROSHIMA BOMB MAY HAVE CARRIED HIDDEN AGENDA
ROB EDWARDS
New Scientist
July 21, 2005

The U.S. decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 was meant to kick-start the Cold War rather than end the Second World War, according to two nuclear historians who say they have new evidence backing the controversial theory.

Causing a fission reaction in several kilograms of uranium and plutonium and killing over 200,000 people 60 years ago was done more to impress the Soviet Union than to cow Japan, they say. And the U.S. President who took the decision, Harry Truman, was culpable, they add.

"He knew he was beginning the process of annihilation of the species," says Peter Kuznick, director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University in Washington DC, U.S.

"It was not just a war crime; it was a crime against humanity."
According to the official U.S. version of history, an A-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6 1945, and another on Nagasaki three days later, to force Japan to surrender. The destruction was necessary to bring a rapid end to the war without the need for a costly U.S. invasion.

But this is disputed by Kuznick and Mark Selden, a historian from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, U.S.. They are presenting their evidence at a meeting in London on Thursday organised by Greenpeace and others to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the bombings.

New studies of the U.S., Japanese and Soviet diplomatic archives suggest that Truman's main motive was to limit Soviet expansion in Asia, Kuznick claims. Japan surrendered because the Soviet Union began an invasion a few days after the Hiroshima bombing, not because of the atomic bombs themselves, he says.

According to an account by Walter Brown, assistant to then-U.S. secretary of state James Byrnes, Truman agreed at a meeting three days before the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima that Japan was "looking for peace". Truman was told by his army generals, Douglas Macarthur and Dwight Eisenhower, and his naval chief of staff, William Leahy, that there was no military need to use the bomb.

"Impressing Russia was more important than ending the war in Japan," says Selden. Truman was also worried that he would be accused of wasting money on the Manhattan Project to build the first nuclear bombs, if the bomb was not used, he adds.

Kuznick and Selden's arguments, however, were dismissed as "discredited" by Lawrence Freedman, a war expert from King's College London, UK. He says that Truman's decision to bomb Hiroshima was "understandable in the circumstances".
Truman's main aim had been to end the war with Japan, Freedman says, but adds that, with the wisdom of hindsight, the bombing may not have been militarily justified. Some people assumed that the U.S. always had "a malicious and nasty motive", he says, "but it ain't necessarily so."

GOD, BUSH AND THE BOMB
PAUL CANTOR
Syndicated Columnist

"Thank God for the atom bomb," wrote William Manchester in a memoir recounting his service as a marine during World War II Sixty years ago, on August 6 and August 9, 1945, atom bombs killed over 100,000 people and destroyed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Consequently, according to the widely held view echoed by Manchester, they forced Japan to surrender on August 14 and thereby obviated the need for an invasion that would have cost even more lives. The United States Strategic Bombing Survey, on the other hand, concluded that "even without the atomic bombing attacks, air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion."

Even given the Survey’s conclusion, however, many think we should still "thank God for the atom bomb." The bomb, they reason, made it clear there would be no victors in a nuclear confrontation.

Consequently there has never been a World War III.

This is an argument favored by the neo conservatives in the Bush administration. It implies that by maintaining its preeminent nuclear arsenal the United States prevents other nuclear nations from attacking it or its allies. But if that is the case then there is no need to worry about nuclear proliferation and there was no need to attack Iraq.

Indeed, the fact that Bush invaded Iraq under his "preemptive war" doctrine
indicates that either he doesn’t really believe that simply maintaining the world’s preeminent nuclear arsenal is enough to keep the peace or that he lied about the real reason for the invasion.

The truth, of course, is that the bomb does not keep the peace. Rather in the sixty years since Hiroshima and Nagasaki in which we have been steadily upgrading our nuclear arsenal we have been involved in major wars in Korea, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf and Iraq. Furthermore, during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis we almost went to war with the Soviet Union.

Nor can it be said that our preeminent nuclear arsenal has made us safer. Rather it has led other nations to intensify their efforts to obtain or upgrade their own nuclear arsenals while doing nothing to discourage terrorist attacks against us.

What then should we do? There are four steps we should take immediately to begin to eliminate the threat of a nuclear confrontation.

First, we should apologize for dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As a nation we need to recognize that together these two acts were among the greatest atrocities of the 20th century.

Unfortunately we tend to think we occupy the moral high ground even though, as never before in our history, the rest of the world doesn’t see it that way. Today we have Abu Gharib to add to the slaughter of Indians, slavery, the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo, and the overthrow of democratic regimes in Chile, Guatemala, and Iran as a stain on our past.

Second, we should pull out of Iraq and renounce our unilateral preemptive war policy.

Third, we should pledge not to devote more resources to upgrading our nuclear arsenal with bunker busting bombs and other more devastating weapons.

Fourth we should announce our intention to work through the United Nations to bring all nuclear weapons under international control and then begin to eliminate them.

It is only by taking steps such as these that we can gain credibility as a nation committed to pursuing peace and justice in the world rather than our own selfish interests But of course none of these steps will be taken under the current administration. Therefore, it is not too soon to begin thinking about a change in
leadership.

WHY FEEL GUILTY ABOUT HIROSHIMA ???
MAX BOOT
Los Angeles Times
August 3, 2005

The 60th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, has not so far provoked the kind of anguished debate that accompanied the 50th anniversary. The lack of controversy is fitting because there wasn't much soul-searching at the time. In 1945, 85% of Americans approved of a step deemed necessary to end the war and head off a costly invasion of Japan.

Only with the Axis threat long vanquished have numerous historians and philosophers come forward to claim that the use of the A-bomb was unnecessary and an atrocity that blemishes American honor.

These criticisms rest, it seems to me, on a profoundly ahistorical assumption: that there was something unusual about what happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It's true that the atomic bombs were, by many orders of magnitude, the most powerful explosives ever employed. But the havoc they caused, with a combined death toll of over 100,000, was far from unprecedented.
By the time the Enola Gay took off, at least 600,000 Germans and 200,000 Japanese had already been killed in Allied air raids. Conventional explosives had reduced all of the major cities of both countries to rubble. In the end, no more than one-third of the total Japanese deaths from air raids --- and just 3.5% of the total land area destroyed --- could be attributed to Fat Man and Little Boy.

Far from being unusual, then, those two A-bombs merely marked the culmination of an already well-established principle: that urban areas were fair game for aerial attack. The first such raid occurred on August 30, 1914 --- less than 11 years after the Wright brothers' first flight --- when a flimsy German monoplane dropped five small bombs on Paris.

Britain and France quickly retaliated with their own raids on German soil. Though losses from aerial bombardment were minuscule during World War I (Germany suffered 1,900 killed and wounded), vast improvements in aircraft after 1918 ushered in an age of annihilation.

The Western democracies protested in 1937 when the German Condor Legion pounded Guernica and Japanese aircraft did the same to Shanghai, but it did not take long for them to emulate the enemy's example. Starting in 1940, the Royal Air Force unleashed bomber raids against German cities, to be joined in 1942 by American B-17s and B-24s.

Long-range B-29s (whose development cost more than the Manhattan Project) allowed Japan to be added to the target list in 1944.

To avoid the implication that they were guilty of "terror" bombing, Allied leaders claimed they were simply "de-housing" German workers or eliminating "cottage industries" that supported the Japanese war effort. But they knew perfectly well that bombing was so inaccurate that hitting anything, even a major war plant, required saturating a large area --- including plenty of civilians --- with high explosives or incendiaries.

Oh, how times change. Today we can put "smart" bombs through the window of an office building. Along with greater accuracy has come a growing impatience with "collateral damage." A bomb that goes astray and hits a foreign embassy or a wedding party now causes international outrage, whereas 60 years ago the destruction of an entire city was a frequent occurrence.

Does this make us more enlightened than the "greatest generation"? Perhaps. We certainly have the luxury of being more discriminating in the application of violence. But even today, there is cause to doubt whether more precision is always better.

During the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003, the U.S. was so sparing in its use of force that many Baathists never understood they were beaten. The butcher's bill we dodged early on is now being paid with compound interest.
It is hard to imagine how many more GIs and Tommies would have perished in 1944-45 had Anglo-American leaders flinched from using all the means at their disposal to hasten the end of the war. Indeed, if the U.S. had staged a blood-drenched invasion of Japan while holding back its atomic arsenal, President Truman would have been indicted for that decision too.

I can't claim to have worked out the moral calculus of bombing. I remain troubled by the deliberate killing of civilians, whether by the United States or by its enemies. But I don't think the atomic bombing of Japan was a uniquely reprehensible event. There is plenty of blame to go around for the horrors of World War II, and most of it belongs to the original "Axis of evil." In short, I refuse to participate in the self-indulgent second-guessing that has become a growth industry in the history profession.

Max Boot is Olin Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. He is also a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and a weekly columnist for the Los Angeles Times.

HIROSHIMA: BIRTH OF NUCLEAR WARFARE
JAMES STEMGOLD
San Francisco Chronicle
August 1, 2005

The atomic bombing of Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, was to change the course of history, but as Harold Agnew witnessed the flash that is estimated to have killed more than 100,000 people, he thought of just one thing --- destroying the enemy.
Agnew, then a frightened 24-year-old physicist flying in a plane alongside the Enola Gay bomber, was in charge of measuring the yield of a blast that burned hotter than the sun. He had helped design the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico. But for all the impact this unique new weapon would have on science, military planning and geopolitical rivalries, Agnew, now 84, said he and his colleagues saw the bomb in simpler terms, as an instrument of their anger at Japan for launching the war, and as a way of stopping the war.

"We all wanted to crush the Japanese," Agnew, who became director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the 1970s, said in an interview. "My only concern was winning the war. To say we were embittered would have been an understatement."

Within a few years, the full import of the 9,600-pound "Little Boy" warhead dropped on Hiroshima became clear. The technology spread, the arms race and Cold War with the Soviet Union revved up and immensely more powerful thermonuclear warheads were developed. An abstract and dangerous poker game was played by the superpowers in which the stakes were apocalyptic. But catastrophe seemed to grow increasingly remote because the feared war strategies involving the launching of thousands of missiles never took place.

Now a new, lower-profile arms race has started that, experts say, is far less abstract and could prove to be more dangerous. Six decades after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and 16 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, nuclear technology is proliferating among second-tier powers and, it's a possibility, among terrorist groups. The legacy of Hiroshima --- when the weapons were built not just to deter but to be used --- has painful new relevance.

It is almost as though history has come full circle. The concern now is not Cold War brinksmanship but the prospect, once again, that a single weapon detonated in anger could instantly send history in a violent new direction.

"Today, a single nuclear detonation in Detroit or New York City would dramatically change our society in every respect: our politics, our civil liberties, our relations with other states," said Steve Andreasen, a nuclear weapons expert in the Reagan, first Bush and Clinton administrations.
"During the Cold War, the idea of a single explosion was not seen as a credible issue," Andreasen said. "Now we're back again to the notion of small- scale use of a nuclear weapon, and the reality is that the effect would be as great as it was 60 years ago."

"The likelihood of a single attack in a single city is greater than ever, not the massive attacks we imagined in the Cold War," said Graham Allison, the director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and a senior Defense Department official in the Clinton administration.

Eugene Habiger, a retired Air Force general who during the 1990s led the U.S. Strategic Command, the military arm that prepares for and would manage a nuclear war, said a bomb would not even have to be used accurately.

"It would have a horrific impact by any measure," said Habiger, now a member of the board of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, an international nongovernmental group that is working to reduce nuclear stockpiles. "You might only kill 5,000 people or so, but you would change the society, the politics, the economics of the United States of America. That's what I call the greatest threat in the 21st century.

"It's no longer about large military forces fighting head to head," Habiger added. "It's what I call asymmetric warfare."

One of the few things President Bush and Sen. John Kerry agreed on in the 2004 presidential campaign was that nuclear terrorism was the single gravest threat the U.S. faces. The president has placed halting North Korea's and Iran's nuclear programs at the top of his policy agenda, and he has refused to rule out military strikes or war to stop them.

But many experts say the problem goes well beyond those countries, and some worry that Bush's nuclear policies are increasing the threat. The president has indicated he wants to replace the current aging stockpile with a new generation of more flexible warheads, which some experts say could make possession of the weapons appear even more essential and encourage other countries to ramp up their own efforts.

The president offered last month to provide India with commercial nuclear technology, abandoning a long-standing U.S. policy of not helping India so long as it remains outside the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the system for monitoring nuclear facilities and preventing the spread of weapons technology.

"How do you say India can and Iran can't?" said Sidney Drell, a longtime government nuclear policy adviser and a professor and deputy director emeritus at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. "I'm more than a little uncomfortable with our India policy. We're at a danger point as to maintaining a hold on the nonproliferation regime."

William Potter, who leads the nonproliferation program at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, said Bush is sending a mixed signal that might push some countries to consider the nuclear option.

"The Bush administration is really saying that some proliferation is bad and some is good," Potter said. "The president is working at odds with his own policy."
The current threat goes well beyond North Korea and Iran, said Allison, the former Clinton administration official.

"There could be a cascade of proliferation if North Korea and Iran both go nuclear," said Allison, who has written extensively on nuclear terrorism. "People take a false comfort from the Cold War experience. The strategic logic (now) is this: Nuclear weapons are the equalizer for the weak, not the stronger."
Three factors generally make the new arms race slowly taking shape more troubling than the Cold War version, experts said.

* First, only a tiny number of industrialized countries had the technological means to build warheads during the Cold War. Today, eight states possess the weapons, with North Korea possibly the ninth. But there are now dozens of countries that have developed the basic capability to enrich uranium or reprocess plutonium, the key to producing warheads.

Perhaps 40 countries now have such technical knowledge, Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said in an interview last year. Few are in fact enriching uranium, but ElBaradei said these efforts amount to "latent weapons programs."

Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and South Africa fall into this category.
* Second, with the dissemination of nuclear know-how to countries from Pakistan to Sweden to Brazil, shadowy nuclear technology rings have taken shape, making once forbidden equipment and expertise far more widely available to terrorists and other groups, as well as nations.

Concerns over such networks have grown sharply since Pakistan disclosed that the father of its weapons program, Abdul Qadeer Khan, had for years been illegally selling nuclear enrichment technology and even bomb plans to North Korea, Libya and, it is believed, Iran. He relied on a network that wove its way through Qatar, Malaysia and other countries.

* The third and perhaps most troubling aspect of the new arms race is the presence of terrorist groups like al Qaeda that are not bound by the discipline of self-preservation, which helped restrain the Soviets and the United States, as well as China, which has its own small nuclear arsenal, during the Cold War.
Groups that produce suicide bombers by the dozen are believed eager not just to obtain nuclear weapons but to use them, no matter the costs. They don't follow the logic of deterrence, so Cold War tactics don't apply; these groups rarely even have an easily identified headquarters to retaliate against.

Such groups would focus not on precision or maximum yield, just detonating a nuclear device in a populated area.

Theirs is not unlike the thinking behind the Hiroshima bombing, which, as Agnew recalled, was fraught with uncertainties. Agnew, who is retired and living near San Diego, said that while preparing for the Hiroshima blast he had been terrified that he might not survive it, that he might be on a suicide mission. No one knew how the bombers would be affected. He recorded only one thought, he recalled, in his flight log.

"Wow! It really went off," he said he wrote without acknowledgement of the broader meaning of the moment. "It really worked."

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, few expected a new arms race. There was widespread talk of weapons reductions, even disarmament, as one of the peace dividends Americans would enjoy. It now seems distant, but in 1995 an anti-nuclear organization, the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, won the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of the new tenor of the times.

The superpowers have made some strides in reducing their arsenals. The United States, which at its peak fielded more than 32,000 warheads, now has about 10,000; Russia has about 7,200. The two countries have deactivated 6,632 warheads and destroyed 582 intercontinental ballistic missiles, according to the Russian American Nuclear Security Advisory Council. Under the Moscow Treaty, each side has committed to reducing its arsenal to 2,200 or fewer deployed warheads by 2012.

The desire to prevent nuclear proliferation traces back to the months immediately following the horrifying bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

President Harry Truman always said he had no regrets about dropping the two atomic bombs on Japan to end World War II. But he did worry about the spread of the weapons.

"The hope of civilization lies in international arrangements looking, if possible, to the renunciation of the use and development of the atomic bomb," he wrote in a letter to Congress on October 3, 1945.

The next U.S. president, Dwight Eisenhower, proposed in his famous "Atoms for Peace" speech at the United Nations on December 8, 1953, that the United States and the Soviets scrap their warheads. He suggested that they hand over the secrets of the atom to a U.N. body that would share them for civilian purposes and produce an age of prosperity.

But neither side gave up its warheads, and the arms race roared on. Eisenhower's proposal fostered a system that provided training and civilian nuclear equipment to scientists around the world, unintentionally setting the stage for the proliferation of nuclear technology.

Superpower rivalries no longer drive the arms race, making the Cold War model all but irrelevant. Regional tensions that long predate that ideological conflict and far exceed its emotional content are the challenge now.

In their standoff, India and Pakistan have both developed and tested nuclear weapons.

Israel has built what is believed to be a large clandestine arsenal to fend off its neighbors, including Syria, Egypt and Iran.

If Iran succeeds in building warheads, it is expected to increase the pressure on Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Egypt to push forward with programs.

And similar friction has eastern Asia on edge as it watches American negotiators trying to force North Korea to abandon its weapons and extensive nuclear facilities.

Donald Gregg, president of the Korea Society in New York and a former senior CIA officer in Asia and ambassador to South Korea, said that if the United States fails, then Japan, South Korea and even Taiwan could consider building arsenals. They already have advanced nuclear capabilities.

"There is a sort of nuclear domino theory now," said Gregg, who traveled three times recently to North Korea. "If we can stop North Korea I think we can stop the region from going nuclear. This is our last best shot."

GREEN LIGHT
FOR BOMB BUILDERS
EDITORIAL
New York Times
July 22, 2005

The Bush administration is full of tough talk about opposing the spread of nuclear weapons. But it keeps undermining the world's most effective instrument for doing so: the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. In May, top administration officials stood aside as a crucial review conference meant to strengthen the treaty ended in a stalemate.

Now Washington wants to allow India an end run around the treaty's basic bargain - the one that rewards the countries that are willing to renounce nuclear weapons with the opportunity to import highly sensitive nuclear technology for power
reactors.

The strength of that bargain has dissuaded many countries that are capable of building or buying nuclear arms from doing so, including Brazil, South Africa, South Korea, Japan, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. The bargain's credibility has depended on the willingness of the major nuclear exporters to uphold it.
One of the most powerful examples of the price a nation would pay for ignoring the rules has been the nuclear export restrictions the United States has imposed on India for decades, ever since India declined to sign the treaty and tested a nuclear device, using materials and technology diverted from a civilian nuclear power program.

Lifting these restrictions would encourage other countries to follow New Delhi's dangerous example. It is now up to Congress and the other nuclear supplier nations to take back what President Bush has so carelessly given away.

India is a great nation with a great future and many common interests with the United States. But India is also one of only four countries in the world that does not abide by the nonproliferation treaty. Pakistan and Israel have also refused to sign it, and North Korea dropped out. None of these other holdouts are now eligible to buy the kind of sensitive nuclear technology being proposed for India.

Besides the four holdouts and the five established nuclear powers recognized under the treaty --- the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China --- no other nations are known to have nuclear weapons. Without the treaty, there
might now be as many as 20 or 25 nuclear weapons states.

The Bush administration is, of course, eager to stop governments it does not like from acquiring nuclear weapons. It regularly rattles military and diplomatic sabers at North Korea and Iran. But it seems to have almost as much contempt for international treaties as it has for rogue states.

Given the increasing accessibility of nuclear weapons technology and the growing number of potential governmental and nongovernmental suppliers of the needed materials and equipment, only a strengthened nonproliferation treaty, enforced without exceptions, stands any chance of slowing the spread of nuclear arsenals. A nonproliferation policy that is selective and unilateral is no policy at all.

NUCLEAR TEST FALL-OUT
KILLED THOUSANDS IN U.S.
ROB EDWARDS
New Scientist
March 1, 2002

Radioactive fall-out from the world's nuclear weapons tests during the Cold War has killed 11,000 Americans with cancer, according to a new report by US scientists. Experts say that many thousands more are likely to have died in other countries.

The report, prepared by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHSS) for Congress, is the first attempt to estimate the total number of cancers caused by the atmospheric testing programme. Between 1951 and 1963, 390 nuclear bombs were exploded above the ground, 205 by the US, 160 by the former Soviet Union, 21 by Britain and four by France.

The fall-out from these explosions circulated the globe and exposed the world's population to radioactivity. Scientists have long assumed that this would result in extra cancers, but until now no government has tried to estimate how many.
The new report concludes that the number of fatal cancers attributable to global fall-out amongst Americans alive between 1951 and 2000 is 11,000. This includes deaths from leukaemia caused by exposure to strontium 90 and from a host of other cancers triggered by other isotopes.

"This is a useful estimate of the long term effects of global fall-out on the population of the U.S., but it is only part of the story," says Dudley Goodhead, a leading radiation specialist with the Medical Research Council in Harwell, UK.
"Similar assumptions would lead to estimates of many thousands more cancers throughout the world because fall-out from the atmospheric tests was distributed globally," he notes.

The sites where bombs were exploded included the Nevada desert in the US, Pacific islands and sites in Kazakhstan and Russia. Atmospheric testing was outlawed by the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963, although dozens of atmospheric tests have since been conducted by France and China.

The DHSS report, which was obtained by U.S. senator Tom Harken, does not take fall-out from explosions since 1963 into account. Nor does it include fall-out from the seven atmospheric explosions detonated by the U.S. prior to 1951 such as Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

The estimate of 11,000 fatal cancers also does not include internal radiation exposure caused by the breathing in or swallowing of radioactive particles.

Because of this, the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, in Takoma Park, Maryland, argues that the actual number of fatal cancers could be 17,000.

The U.S. evidence is likely to provoke demands for other countries to face up to the death toll from nuclear tests. "It's a horrific legacy," says Sue Roff, a radiation researcher from the University of Dundee medical school. "The complacency of governments about acceptable levels of environmental radioactivity has been punctured by this authoritative report."

HANFORD LIKELY CAUSED
CANCER DOWNWIND, JURY DECIDES
WARREN CORNWALL
Seattle Times
May 20, 2005

A federal jury yesterday found that the Hanford factories that produced plutonium for the nation's nuclear arsenal probably caused cancer in two people living in nearby towns.

The decision by the jury in Spokane is a historic first for those who have accused the federal government and contractors of sickening people by secretly releasing radiation --- affirming the claims of at least some "downwinders." A jury has never before said a U.S. nuclear-bomb plant sickened citizens living downwind.

The 12-member jury found that thyroid cancer suffered by two plaintiffs more likely than not came from radiation that Hanford released, exposing them as children in the 1940s and early '50s.

But the jury rejected the claims of three others who suffered noncancerous thyroid diseases. And it deadlocked on the case of a woman with thyroid cancer who received a lower radiation dose than the other two plaintiffs with cancer.
The jury awarded one of the cancer victims, Steve Stanton of Walla Walla, $227,508 for economic losses and pain and suffering. The other, Gloria Wise of Kennewick, was awarded $317,251.

While the verdicts may bolster the cases of other downwinders with cancer and high radiation exposures, they also suggest those who don't have cancer --- many of the more than 2,300 plaintiffs in pending lawsuits --- may have a hard time convincing a jury that Hanford is to blame for their illnesses.

The trial pitted former Hanford neighbors against DuPont and General Electric, the companies that ran the Hanford site for the federal government. While the government wasn't a defendant, it's paying the bill for the defense --- at least $50 million so far --- and would have to pay any awards or settlements because it indemnified the contractors for their work there.

The two sides yesterday offered vastly different interpretations of what the verdict meant. Each declared victory in the cases, which are supposed to provide a precedent for any settlement talks involving the remaining plaintiffs.

While losing three of the cases was a disappointment, winning the two cancer cases against a government-funded defense team representing two powerful companies should force settlement talks, said Louise Roselle, lead counsel for the downwinders.

"The government and these defendants have an obligation to this community and it's time that they honor it. And that's what this jury is saying," Roselle said. "The implication is that the defendant and the government should sit down and talk settlement. We've shown them that we can win cases."

But Kevin Van Wart, the lead defense attorney, said the rejection of the noncancer cases and the size of the judgments posed major problems for the plaintiffs' attorneys. Thyroid-cancer claims make up around 250 of the 2,300 downwinder cases; most of the remaining cases involve noncancer thyroid disease or other types of cancer, he said.

"These are very small awards. And the cost of litigating these claims for the plaintiffs far exceeded the recoveries," Van Wart said. "At the end of the day it's unclear if they will recover a nickel even if these verdicts are upheld, just because of the expense of putting on this case."

Roselle, however, said yesterday's verdict doesn't erase the chances of people with noncancerous thyroid diseases.

"Just because we lost those cases with this jury doesn't say anything about what would happen with another jury," she said.

Meetings will be scheduled soon to determine what to do about the hung jury in the case of Shannon Rhodes, and how to deal with the others who have filed claims, U.S. District Judge William Fremming Nielsen said. Yesterday's decisions also could be appealed.

"I hope at this stage the parties give a good-faith effort to mediation," Nielsen said.

The Department of Energy, the federal agency that oversees Hanford, had little to say. The agency "was not party to the proceedings that have taken place and therefore it would be inappropriate for me to comment," a spokesman said.
The lawsuits stem from decades of operations at factories that were both the centerpiece of the nation's nuclear-weapons program and a source of radiation that spread across Eastern Washington.

Beginning in 1944, Hanford converted uranium into plutonium for the core of nuclear bombs. First built as part of the World War II-era Manhattan Project, it produced the plutonium for the first nuclear explosion during the Trinity test in New Mexico, and for the bomb dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki.

The factories also spewed radioactivity into the air and water. That included radioactive iodine, I-131, which is linked to increased risks of thyroid disease and thyroid cancer. The six cases before the jury involved people suffering thyroid problems who were children during the height of the iodine releases in the 1940s and early 1950s.

Hanford's plutonium-processing work stopped in the 1990s.
Stanton, a 60-year-old engineer, welcomed the verdict as a vindication of what he has believed all along --- that the thyroid cancer discovered in 1996 stemmed from radiation he absorbed growing up in Walla Walla. He said the jury award was fine.

"Money is an issue. But I think the principle of the thing is probably more important: that government and big business need to be more careful what they put out in the atmosphere that could hurt people," he said.

His case and the others, however, could continue to wend their way through the courts. Both sides have said they are considering appealing rulings by the judge that may have influenced the outcome.

Plaintiffs' attorneys said they are considering whether to seek a new trial for Rhodes, the woman with thyroid cancer whose case the jury couldn't agree on.

NUCLEAR WASTE
OUTPACES SOLUTION
RALPH VARTABEDIAN
Los Angeles Times
June 12, 2005

Along the headwaters of the Illinois River, engineers at the Dresden nuclear power station have erected two dozen steel and concrete silos that rise 20 feet above the Midwest plain.

The gray structures are unremarkable except for what is loaded inside: Each contains roughly 13 tons of high-level nuclear waste that has been accumulating at the plant since the Eisenhower administration. With nowhere to go, the waste will most likely remain in place for decades.

Dresden's reactors have produced one of the largest stockpiles --- 1,347 tons --- of civilian nuclear waste in the nation. With the plant churning out nearly 48 tons more waste each year, engineers are preparing to double the size of the outdoor storage pad this summer.

The plant has the same problem as nearly all of the nation's 103 commercial reactors: They were never designed to store waste long-term and are now forced to deal with large quantities of spent uranium fuel rods that produce high levels of radiation.

The problem reflects decades of miscalculations and missteps by the federal government, which promised at the dawn of the nuclear age to accept ownership of the waste. The plan to build a waste repository at Yucca Mountain in the Nevada desert has faced so many political, legal and technical problems that it's impossible to project when --- or even if --- it will be built.

As a result, the most lethal waste product of industrial society is being handled outside any federal policy and without any roadmap for how it will be managed in the future, according to industry officials, nuclear waste experts, lawyers and academicians.

"It is a statement of reality," acknowledges Clay Sell, deputy secretary of Energy. "Is it the right policy? No."

The deep storage pools traditionally used to safely keep nuclear waste are filling up at most plants. Utilities have turned to outdoor storage in so-called dry casks as the de facto standard for dealing with waste.

From California to South Carolina, utilities have loaded 700 of the steel and concrete casks, and scores of additional casks are scheduled to be filled this year.

It is a stopgap measure that has averted a shutdown of the nuclear power industry.

But it means leaving all of the roughly 50,000 tons of civilian nuclear waste spread across the nation for the next half-century or more. And storing the waste at power plant sites is creating significant economic, environmental, legal and security challenges --- including the potential for it to become a terrorist target.

A recent study by the National Academy of Sciences found that the waste stored in pools was most vulnerable, but the outdoor casks also were potential targets. Such an attack could trigger an environmental catastrophe.

"These are the ultimate dirty bombs," said Bob Alvarez, a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies and a former Energy Department official. "Let's not pretend the way we are storing this waste is safe and secure in an age of terrorism."

Utility executives and government officials sharply dispute such allegations, saying the plants have multiple layers of protection from any attack. Exelon Corp., the nation's largest nuclear utility, has erected heavy barriers and security towers at Dresden that are staffed around the clock by guards with automatic weapons.

Though the nuclear industry has a good record for preventing radiation leaks during normal operations and dry casks are widely regarded as safe, many outside experts say their biggest fear is that future generations may lack the willpower and financial capability to safeguard tons of radioactive waste dispersed across the nation. Waste is already stored in casks at five shuttered nuclear plant sites.

"We are muddling into an alternative plan by default," says Joe Egan, a longtime attorney for the nuclear industry who now represents Nevada in fighting Yucca Mountain.

Nuclear waste has also created a legal mess. The Energy Department is facing more than four dozen lawsuits by the utility industry for its failure to take the waste. Damages could reach $56 billion over the next three decades, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute, a powerful trade group for nuclear utilities.
At the Department of Energy, Sell argues that deep geologic storage of the waste at Yucca Mountain would be the best technical solution. He believes the project will eventually be completed. But the loss of a key court case last year and political resistance in Congress have put the dump at least 14 years behind schedule.

Without a dump, utilities have few options short of shutting down their reactors and eliminating 20% of the U.S. electricity supply that comes from nuclear power. And without a solution to waste, the proposal by President Bush to start a new era of nuclear plant construction could go nowhere.

Indefinite storage of nuclear waste at current reactor sites is a bitter pill for
many politicians, particularly those from environmentally fragile areas such as Lake Michigan, which is ringed by nuclear plants.

"I want the waste off the shores of Lake Michigan," said Rep. Fred Upton (Rep.-Michigan), whose district includes two nuclear plants built on the lake's eastern boundary. "Ultimately, there is a safety problem."

Nuclear waste at power plants will remain radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years. The fission of uranium inside reactors produces heat for electricity production. Afterward, the uranium fuel rods are far more radioactive than when they entered the reactor.

To maximize storage capacity for the spent fuel rods, the nuclear industry devised a way to pack them more closely in the 50-foot-deep storage pools than initially planned. Critics say this kind of dense packing poses a safety risk, however. If terrorists were to puncture the pool wall and drain the water, the rods could ignite and disperse lethal amounts of radiation, according to a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences.

Even with dense packing, the pools are running out of space. Twenty years ago, nuclear plants began removing the oldest fuel rods, which have radioactively decayed somewhat, and started storing them in massive outdoor storage casks like the ones at Dresden.

Officials at Nuclear Regulatory Commission "anticipate that there will be an increase in the number of casks being loaded over the next few years," said E. William Brach, director of the commission's spent fuel project office.

The logistics of nuclear waste ensure it will be around a long time. Even if the federal government gets a license to operate Yucca Mountain, the earliest it could accept waste shipments would be 2012. By that year, more than 60,000 tons of civilian nuclear waste would be spread across about three dozen states.
It would take about 50 years to work down the backlog, according to Frank von Hippel, a nuclear expert at Princeton University and former White House national security advisor. That's because under current plans Yucca could process a maximum of 3,000 tons of waste annually, while nuclear power plants would be generating 2,000 new tons of waste each year. That means a net reduction of just 1,000 tons each year, he said.

"We have to assume that these casks will be around for a very long time," Von Hippel said. "It will take quite a while to move them, even if we had someplace to send them today."

In any case, "on the day Yucca Mountain opens" it would be too small to handle all the waste, acknowledges Sell, the Energy Department official. There is no Plan B. Under federal law, the department can pursue only Yucca Mountain.
Further complicating matters are the divided lines of authority between the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Energy Department. The commission regulates waste at plant sites and authorizes dry cask storage but has no role in national policy for disposing of nuclear waste. That policy responsibility rests with the Energy Department, which has no voice or authority in the use of dry casks.
In the vacuum, a private consortium is planning to build an above-ground storage site for hundreds of casks on an Indian reservation in Utah. Despite state opposition, it is getting approval from the nuclear commission.

Meanwhile, utilities see dry cask storage as a cheap and safe, if not permanent, solution.

Holtec International, one of the leading suppliers, says its casks can safely store waste for at least 100 years without leaking, according to company marketing manager Joy Russell.

The regulatory commission typically licenses the casks for 20 years but last year renewed Dominion Electric's license for 40 years, another signal that the waste would remain in place for a long time.

Holtec's casks are constructed of two concentric rings of 1-inch-thick steel, separated by 27 inches of concrete that is poured at the power plant site. The casks sit on 2-foot-thick concrete pads, requiring no electricity, water or instrumentation. Inside, the spent fuel continues to radioactively decay, generating heat that is vented out the sides.

The only maintenance involves periodic painting and keeping up the radioactive warning labels on the steel shells.

On the inside of the casks, the waste is so radioactive it would deliver a fatal dose in minutes, but the outside can be touched.

"An individual can stand right next to the cask," Brach said. "There is a dose, but it is a minimal dose."

There have been some relatively minor accidents around the nation involving the casks, including one case in which a welding spark ignited hydrogen gas inside a cask. The ignition dislodged the cask's lid but did not cause other damage.

Antinuclear groups, such as the Washington-based Nuclear Information and Resource Service and the Chicago-based Nuclear Energy Information Service, say the casks should be better protected. In Germany, for example, the casks are inside hardened buildings.

Government tests at the Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland showed that a shoulder-fired missile could penetrate a cask wall, causing some radioactive fuel to disperse.

"We don't want this 10-pin bowling alley out in the open," said Dave Kraft, an antinuclear activist for more than 20 years. "Anybody with a shoulder-fired missile could hit one of these things from outside the plant."

Though utilities defend the safety of the casks, they also are demanding that the federal government take the waste.

Exelon, formerly Commonwealth Edison, filed one of the 56 suits against the Energy Department when the agency failed to meet its legal commitment to open Yucca Mountain by 1998. It is the only company to settle so far, accepting $600 million for its costs over the next ten years, according to Adam H. Levin, Exelon director of spent fuel.

"We expect at some time that the Energy Department will perform," he said.
Across the river from the Dresden plant in the Village of Channahon, a residential building boom is occurring, attracting people who make the hour-and-a-half commute to jobs in Chicago.

"You can see the nuclear waste right across the river," said Joe Petrovic, who lives in a subdivision near the plant and builds homes in the area for a living. "The plant hasn't scared anyone from buying a home there."

The plant is in Grundy County, which has three nuclear power plants as well as a large independent waste storage pool operated by General Electric Co. It probably has more nuclear waste than any county in the nation, though such statistics are not kept by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

"I don't see the casks as a problem," said Grundy County Administrator Alfred Bourdelais. "Maybe in 200 or 300 years, but today there isn't any more risk from those casks than there is from the plant, and it has a really low risk."

Such local acceptance of cask storage worries experts who say that in the future the casks will become a poor permanent solution.

Kevin Crowley, a nuclear expert at the National Academy of Sciences who helped guide an investigation into the vulnerability of spent fuel storage, said the casks would become a risky legacy if left in place too long.

"The major uncertainty," he said, "is in the confidence that future societies will continue to monitor and maintain such facilities."

A.V. Krebs contributes a regular column "Calamity Howler" to the bi-monthly The
Progressive Populist. Sample copies of the paper and subscriptions can be
obtained at P.O. Box 487, Storm Lake, Iowa 50588 or at
http://www.populist.com

From: Dick Ryan
To: ninetonoon@radionz.co.nz
Sent: Wednesday, August 03, 2005 9:56 AM
Subject: nuclear nonsense

Oh dear - political hypocrisy climbing steeply towards the election.
Labour trumpeting its ludicrous nuclear free act, which is no more innovative than its predecessor of twenty years, the treaty of Tlatalelco - a no smoking zone that only applies to non smokers, and this from the Party that has treasonably left us undefended in the air just as terrorism takes to it.

National tiptoeing around the nuclear eggs, unable to see that being in ANZUS (and even Lange was happy not to withdraw us from this Nuclear Pact) actually places us in the firing line of any conflict between the USA and - well, an Alliance has to be AGAINST somebody, and the USSR has collapsed so it will have to be China.

Yet the only argument we get is about the percentage possibility of nuclear ships melting down in NZ Ports.

Dick Ryan,
Democratic Party member.

Reitzig, Andreas M.A thesis 2005

P.15

> The Buchanan Affair

> To avoid a confrontation with Washington, Lange decided to negotiate with the American Government to send a vessel which was neither nuclear-powered nor like ly to be nuclear-armed.

Therefore, in November 1984 'the Prime Minister despatched the [Chief of Defence Staff] CDF, Ewan Jamieson, to Honolulu to discuss an acceptable ship.' 20 Together with U.S. Admiral Crowe, he decided on the 26-year-old USS Buchanan, a conventionally-powered guided missile destroyer which was extremely unlikely to have nuclear weapons on board. Jamieson found that the Buchanan was armed with anti-submarine rockets (ASROC) which were capable of being nuclear-armed. However, Jamieson discovered that the Buchanan's 'missiles had such a short range that any detonating nuclear warhead might well have seriously damaged the Buchanan and its crew.' 21 Moreover, 'while over 20,000 ASROC missiles had been produced, no more than 850 nuclear warheads existed.' 22 Nevertheless, because of the American NCND-policy it was impossible to tell with certainty that the Buchanan was not nuclear-armed.

This strikes me as wonky.
The ASROC is well known as one (the ship-to-sub type) of several interchangeable-warhead missiles adorning the USN. Rear-Adm LaRocque tells of a rather tense exercise in the Med - his squadron manoevring in the Med with various USSR vehicles in the offing etc, and in command of the squadron on the bridge of the capital ship Long Beach 1. Some prankster sent up onto the foredeck a pair of missiles with red warheads mounted. These are stored in a special rack below decks; the chemical explosive warheads are on a different rack and are not painted red.

This, the excellent adm later recounted in the Maclaurin Chapel hall, jolted him into realising that the USA had too many ill-controlled nuclear weapons. He founded & led The Center for Defense Information as a result.

The USN's tactical ship-to-air missiles with interchangeable nuclear & chemical warheads - now all said to be withdrawn from service - were believed by my cousin, a Fleet Air Arm pilot, to be the greatest bluff in the history of psychological warfare. Let off just one of those 'fleet umbrella' warheads 40 - 60 mi from your fleet and you will permanently disable all your modern electronics thru EMP. The RN had of course considered such weapons, and had rejected them as outstandingly useless. But I disagree with cousin Peter that they were mere psywar - I know too many of those who were involved in handling them. Stupid, yes; unreal, no.

Now, at that rate, you could begin to believe that the nuclear version of the ASROC warhead "might well have seriously damaged the Buchanan and its crew". But I doubt that even the Yanks could be so stupid as to organise 850 A-bombs for delivery by a rocket which could not take them beyond the radius for serious damage to the ship that launched them. The range of the ASROC rockets on USS Buchanan would be the same as any other ASROC; the image that she was an obsolescent oil-powered vehicle of no real importance will not stand examination. All USN vessels equipped to use nuclear weapons were, in 1985 and for some years afterwards, 'packing heat' ALL the time, including into Sasebo & Yokosuka in violation of the Japan-USA peace treaty (as attested by rtd US Ambassador to Japan Edwin O Reischauer and by some of the crews who were ashamed of this dishonesty).

New Zealand decided to renounce defence with nuclear weapons, and solid public opinion has forced their exclusion from our jurisdiction. There was every reason to believe the USS Buchanan would be packing heat on any NZ visit. It is misleading when Lange & Jamieson try to make out otherwise.

All the nuclear-propelled USN vessels were nuclear-armed, which was an 'icing on the cake' reason to exclude them.

It is now claimed that USN ships carry no nuclear weapons - routinely. I take it the 'igloos' in Hawaii are rather full. But the naval nuclear weapons can be re-deployed on short notice. I vividly recall Rear-Adm LaRocque telling his Ak audience every naval officer in the world knows which ships are carrying nuclear weapons. It remains fairly easy for the literate public to read Jane's etc. There is no actual confusion about the meaning of 'nuclear capable'. The extent of nuclear disarmament now enacted by the USA is welcome, and NZ can take much credit for it; but as long as the Yanks persist with their 'neither confirm nor deny' policy, we must assume that nuclear-capable ships are still nuclear-armed.

This thesis is a valuable account of its topic, and a credit to writer Andreas Reitzig and his supervisor Prof Hoadley. It is puzzling that the summary around p.27 of technical issues fails to mention what is also omitted from the reference list - the article 'Giants Can Fade' by Wills, Sinton & myself. This omission in turn makes it easier to omit the reactor meltdown in the nuclear-powered icebreaker Lenin, leaving such severe mishaps as a merely theoretical possibility. Andreas had this article early on, and the fact that Poletti said he wouldn't take any notice of it is surely no reason to outblack it. Frankly I think it has worn very well. You could tolerate, or accept in the political context, that W Creech would ignore this the best popular science on the subject of naval reactors; but omission from this thesis is much harder to explain.

R

1 (which later came to Ak - remember those huge 'billboard' radar antennae - and was farewelled on a beautiful calm morning by Barry Kirkwood & myself delivering harangues direct to the crew from a hi-power but mobile sound system parked at Mechanics Bay. We briefly told them why their ship had not been welcome here.)

The 2nd evg convened in Old St Mary's by Paters, Randers on
sexual deviance and the Eames report was billed as Science. It was
awful.

Val Grant, U of Ak psych dept:

I discovered dominant women more likely to bear sons.
Postulate extra testosterone in utero - either embryo's own or
maternal. Unproven. A rather unpopular view which I've had a hard
time expressing in jnls.

The gay community has had to make far more adjustments than
we have these past 4 decades.

Am Psych Assn defined homX path 1940; rescinded 1973.
1986 NZ decrim homX behaviour.
Slide of shrine - the Stonewall bar, invaded by police
27-6-69 (colour pic), some call start of gay pride, exuberance,
vitality, insisting not path nor evil.

1970-90 the world became largely persuaded homX not a disorder.
1980s AIDS.
Some brave scientists said maybe homX has biol basis. Simon
Le Gay _Science_ 1991 gay brain difference; he is probably gay.
Chandler Burr - I guess he's gay too - 'A Separate Creation'
describes Le Gay's measurements and adds some efforts to justify
beliefs. LeGay may not have been precisely right.

Dean Hamer [failed to suggest he too is homX] showed by a
beautiful method 64% of gay brothers share alleles on region Xq28".
Not so sure about his latest bk The God Gene.

I expected gays to welcome Hamer's genetic picture. But they
were forced into silence on it by Pat Robertson taunting 'gays will
go strongly pro-life' which was brutally logical & true.

Pre-implantation sexing feasible but banned in many
countries. May be used for selecting against homX or hetX if
identified by genetic analysis of cell from early embryo before
implantation.

_Nature_ 20-7-05: male-specific fruitfly protein FruM
correlated with sexual orientation as shown in mating behaviour.
{cue bonobos ... but Val missed this trick}

Ivanka Savic May 2005 [no jnl mentioned] MRI lights up in
part of all human brains examined when smell lavendar [sic] or cedar,
but only in hetX when smelling a testosterone-derived pheromone
[sic]. {at q time she added this work is v controversial, needs to
be repeated}

Burr analogises to LHedness.
John Manning finger lengths.
Otoacoustic emissions much more from les. Again postulate
prenatal androgens - foetal or maternal.

[No glimmer of correlation v. causation and if the latter in
which direction.]
>1, probably 4 or 5 genes or parts thereof.
Fraternal birth order strongly correl homX but not les.
Likely maternal but not understood.

Identical twins nearly 50% [number and terms vague].
Nobody hs found any social causes of homX.
The weight of scientific evidence is for a biological origin of homX.
Childhood gender nonconformity e.g boy playing with dolls as
if a girl [signif unstated].

Fa'afafine accepted e.g {pic} Linda E interview on web he/she
If we recognise orientation early and cater to it, it will
make for a very interesting society.
Approx 7% homX
How so const across time & cultures if genetic but don't
breed? [she didn't have the sense to allege teratogenesis, even tho'
it's her own favourite theory]
[prolonged applause]

Jonathan McKeown-Green, U of Ak philos dept:
Taking the science as Val states it, what are its ethical
implications? Nil.
{he said this over & over in different wording}

Not only science but also scripture, experiences of deviants,
power structures, promptings from the Holy Spirit.

Bible not clear on it.
Science doesn't have a casting vote.
We now think Newton's Laws of motion are wrong.
The key conjecture of science is tha A LOT of male homX is
genetic, and far less is upbringing. Sexual orientation not much
chosen or changeable.

But future tech could allow change. {speculated variously}
Science says genetics calls the shots.
But this is only a description.
Science can't tell us whether it's good or bad.
Paedophilic acts often regarded as immoral; but inevitable.
Value, worth, accepability not implied by inevitability.
Traits deemed bad if lead to pain, harm etc.
GM could be used to choose or manipulate sexuality.
[even longer applause]

In the q time at end, an endocrinologist from the dept of med
asked condordance of homX in identical twins raised apart. Grant
said she'd found no paper on that.

I stated my name and claimed to be a scientist of various
sorts. I commended the Whiteheads' bk My Genes Made Me Do It. Had
to contradict, from that book, Grant's claim 7 % homX - it's an
order of magnitude less (and bisexual men treble that prevalence,
which is an under-rated threat to public health). Congenital
(genetic or teratogenic) causes of homX orientation are minor -
it's mostly learned. You've got to be taught - but unfortunately
it's easy to teach. The news is far more cheerful than the
congenital doom picture - it is largely a matter of will. But this
does not mean it's easy to change. The Whiteheads have been
conducting for a dozen years a ministry for those who want to get out
of the homX or les subcultures. Their book gives the correct
science.

I think my voice sounded emotional, as I was feeling
quite disturbed at the systematic misrepresentations by Grant and
insulting time-wasting by Green.

Rev Bob 'The J'ville Kid' Scott asked that Te Plane Paa &
Paters state next week what role had been played in the Eames
commisison by the picture as presented by Grant & Green.

Discussion of the Eames report is not being informed by
science but by misrepresentation. The picture by Grant is grossly
misleading. She thinks she's helping a victimised minority, but as I
briefly remarked she isn't.

HarpAlert®: recent feminazism action
2005

A group formed a decade ago over a major
men's health issue. I joined early on as a life
member, and was soon startled to find the then
pres wouldn't agree to meet with me. Years
later, I offered to work on the cttee and was
elected at the AGM.

Current Mr Pres is a PR man. He moved at
the AGM to bring onto the cttee two young PR
women to fund-raise e.g from drug companies they
used to work for.

I asked to visit Mr Pres to discuss how I
might work under him. He acceded to a request
from another young PR woman who phoned in asking
to arrive a quarter-hour after I finally got to
talk with him. I emphasized the need for a
technical subcttee and offered to chair it. He
agreed.

My first cttee mtg (like most in this
organisation, a conference call) was more orderly
than I'd feared of that medium, but I was
surprised to hear Mr Pres ask for confirmation
that he too should be on the technical subcttee.
I heard nothing more of it.

One of the PR-women, Ms D, asked cttee
members by email for contacts with firms that
might help us financially. I sent her the name
of my wife's nephew, NZ chief of a successful
firm. Instead of looking up the firm's phone
number in the book, she demanded it of me. I
then looked it up for her but also commented:
>it has taken you more time & effort to insist
>that you should not look it up than actually to
>look it up yourself ... and you say you want
>to help us.
>What a world we now live in.

Mr Pres then emailed me that she had
taken offence, and he demanded that I apologise.
At no stage did he present me with a statement of
what should be apologised for. I told him of
course that it was she who had been uncooperative
in refusing to look up the firm's phone no. He
tried to avoid discussion with me of the alleged
offence, simply keeping on demanding, on behalf
of Ms D who'd not had to do any confrontation, an
apology to her. He finally slapped an ultimatum
on me so I had to spell out more clearly than
before my stand for justice.

Some features of this Ms D caper
illustrate widespread patterns in feminazi
actions:-
* Front-wimps are used wherever possible.
* Novel vague 'principles' of ethics & manners
are assumed - tho' never spelt out. Politeness
is thus furtively redefined, for the purpose of
* PC Commandment 9
>Pretend that political correctness is simply about politeness.
* While maintaining a pretence of scrupulous
concern for politeness, insults are issued at any
man who looks like doing good for men

The particular case may however be
unusual in some other respects. Abandonment of
normal manners, while claiming to be insisting on
'courtesy', is pretty radical, isn't it? In
particular, he implicitly, and explicitly,
insisted that the junior woman is equal to senior
men within the cttee.

Mr Pres staged a special nationwide
general mtg to form a new cttee without me.

A key disclosure was Mr Pres' saying (for
the first time, months after the events in
question) he'd been deeply disturbed by some of
my emails. This is a far more plausible reason
for his antagonism than any possible belief that
Ms D was offended. Probably what he alluded to
was my talk on Access Radio Auckland 8-12-97
which I copy here as I still think it's correct &
important. Mr Pres has not replied to requests
to say what has "deeply disturbed" him.

It would seem from these glimpses that
feminazis have been able to infiltrate & cripple
the nascent men's health movement.

Some evidence may be found in what
glimpses I got of Mr Pres's relationship with his
wife. I was visible outside the front door to
his wife who however didn't move to let me in -
he had to, after some delay, and to make the tea.
They have the same email address. My working
hypothesis is that he is a front-wimp for her.
He certainly is for young Ms D.

Importantly, we are reminded that the
viciously antisocial ideology WimminsLib, while
powered by man-hating lesbians, is mainly fronted
by wimps who act as a buffer zone doing the dirty
work for the feminazis.

R

===========

Access Radio Auckland 8-12-97

The Men's Hour has already featured that
peculiarly male organ the prostate gland, in my
interview with Dr Ronnie Cohen. Cancer of the
prostate kills 600 New Zealanders per year, but
research on causes & treatments is negligible.
This is the only fast-growing large category of
cancer in New Zealand lately, and is already far
more important than female genital cancers -
cancer of the cervix has been fairly steady,
killing about 90 per year. The cervical
screening programme of Mss Bunkle, Cartwright &
Coney , now reaching over 80% of the relevant
women with a so-called early warning test which
is of little or no use, actually causes indirect
harm, but continues to spend $6M/y nationwide -
about $2M/y in the Auckland region. Meanwhile, a
genuine early-warning test for cancer - of the
prostate - gets a subsidy of $0.038M/y for the
Auckland region, and even this paltry $38,000 has
been threatened with decrease.

The disparity of funding is one sure sign
among many of injustice to men.

North Shore MP Ian Revell convened (late
1997) a public meeting on health. Several Men's
Centre activists went along, and we asked a
better class of question even if I do say so. Mr
Revell turned out to know nothing much about
prostate illnesses, but undertook to look into it
for us.

Which is more than was done by his
unannounced sidekick Tuariki 'John' Delamere,
associate minister of health, who had nothing to
say on this aspect of men's health.

The Men's Centre will be pursuing this
important issue of prostate cancer. But most
common problems in men's waterworks are not
cancer at all - merely enlarged prostate tissue
obstructing flow. I have been personally
researching the operation commonly called a
'ream-out' or 'rebore'. The proper name for this
operation is trans-urethral resection of the
prostate - normally abbreviated so that my talk
this evening is called

ON THE TURPs .

Having now experienced an apparent rapid success
followed by a very trying setback, and discussed
with others their various experiences, my
perspective on the TURPs is I hope of some use to
those who may be contemplating this operation.
My conclusion is that the best current version of
the TURP is today rather highly refined. I urge
that fear should not be a reason to defer your
TURP if, on expert advice, you reach the
conclusion that the best way forward for you and
your prostate is to get on the TURP.

What is perhaps less well known is that
sometimes the operation achieves no benefit -
no change in the hydraulics. It would seem to
follow that, if your symptoms are not too severe,
the operation may be sensibly deferred. Such
decision cannot be properly reached without
careful examination by several painless methods.
If you have a severe problem in urinating, do not
delay expert examination.

There are indeed several versions of this
ream-out operation - thus the plural in my
title.

What I can be sure of is that the operation itself was painless.

A typical period in hospital for the
whole caper when it goes straightforwardly is 3
days but of course some will be unlucky and need
longer, while some will be home within 24h after
the operation.

You are vigorously urged to drink 2 - 3
litre/day straight after the op and indeed for a
week or more afterwards. My urologist slapped me
on a beer diet which he has overlooked to
withdraw; but there is some expert opinion that
beer contains something which irritates the
bladder, so be prepared to experiment with, if
not mix, your drinks.

My most urgent advice is to be aware of a
little-mentioned emergency which can become
serious within any hour during the recovery
period. Fragments of tissue, or clots, can block
the flow of urine. This constitutes *the*
emergency of male urology: an acute retention -
total blockage of urine flow - an urgent threat
to life, which must be relieved promptly. If
your bladder bursts into your abdomen it may well
kill you. I am sorry to say that there are
nurses who do not know this - "contact your GP"
one such nurse told me - so it is in practice up
to you to act on this basic rule. If you suffer
an acute retention, get hurtled to the urologist
immediately, unless you have made a careful prior
arrangement with your GP to fix it!

I am even sorrier to have to report that
there are nurses who do know what should be done
for this emergency, but withhold treatment -
presumably because they have really taken to
heart the slogan "all men are rapists" and
similar man-hating ideology. I strongly advise
men to stay out of the Auckland Public Hospital
emergency clinic, if suffering blockage of urine,
and out of that hostpital's urology ward
altogether.

Even if you are recovering in a good
private hospital, with a high ratio of qualified
nurses, you may be left in agony for an hour
while they refrain from helping you.

The practical advice therefore is: if you
suffer a complete blockage, get assertive - get
very assertive. You may have to insist with a
force outside your previous experience. You may
have to make more noise than would otherwise be
tolerable in a hospital. It may take such
unprecedented insistence to overcome this new,
wicked refusal of help.

And as you leave hospital make sure you
have a clear arrangement with your doctor to get
relief in the event of such a blockage.

To summarise: enlarged prostate glands
can be fixed by getting on the TURPs, an
operation which is itself simple & painless but
can lead to severe complications which some
nurses want you to suffer. So be in especially
close contact with your doc!

No. 166, 21 JULY 2005
Flagging interest in a republic

Interest in replacing the monarchy with a republic appears to be waning. A Fairfax New Zealand-AC Nielson poll last week surveyed 1055 people nationwide with the question, "Do you think that New Zealand should become a republic?". 27 percent of people surveyed said "yes" and 63 percent said "no", (10 percent "don't know").

A May 2004 poll showed 41 percent favoured a republic, while 50 percent wanted to retain the monarchy. Growing support for the status quo may be connected to the recent London bombings. The Queen has been visiting survivors in hospital, while Prince William made a hit with the New Zealand public on his recent high-profile tour.

The results coincided with news that Telecom and NZ Post, have withdrawn backing for a plan to mail a petition on changing the New Zealand flag to 1.4 million households. Telecom spokesman John Goultier admitted the company's support "flowed on" from chief executive Theresa Gattung's endorsement, while NZ Post's Ian Long said his company only become involved at the request of Telecom, one of its largest clients.

These related issues reveal important dynamics about the nature of social change. There is a big difference between groundswell evolution over a long period and intense lobbying to trump up demand for immediate change. The former gradually materialises among citizens, but the latter is driven by political agendas.
The Prime Minister has adopted a cautious approach on both matters, but has consistently said change is inevitable. Like all political leaders, however, if she sensed gain in championing either cause, we could expect casualness to give way to direct action. In the last term Labour has claimed a change in social attitudes as a basis for several new laws. This is a clever tactic because it implicitly shifts responsibility from the party onto the wider electorate, claiming change is "in line with modern trends".

--

Robt Mann
consultant ecologist
P O Box 28878 Remuera, Auckland 1005, New Zealand
(9) 524 2949

Riot control ray gun worries scientists

Published: July 20, 2005, 12:22 PM PDT By Reuters

Scientists are questioning the safety of a Star Wars-style riot control
ray gun due to be deployed in Iraq next year.

The Active Denial System weapon, classified as "less lethal" by the
Pentagon, fires a 95GHz microwave beam at rioters to cause heating and
intolerable pain in less than five seconds.

The discomfort is designed to prompt people caught in the microwave beam
to move away from it, thereby allowing riot-control personnel to break up
and manage a crowd.

But New Scientist magazine reported Wednesday that during tests carried out
at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico, participants playing the part of
rioters were told to remove glasses and contact lenses to protect their
eyes.

In another test they were also told to remove metal objects such as coins
>from their clothing to prevent local hot spots from developing on their
skin.

"What happens if someone in a crowd is unable for whatever reason to move
away from the beam?" asked Neil Davison, coordinator of the nonlethal
weapons research project at Britain's Bradford University.

"How do you ensure that the dose doesn't cross the threshold for permanent
damage? Does the weapon cut out to prevent overexposure?"

The magazine said a vehicle-mounted version of the weapon named Sheriff was
scheduled for service in Iraq in 2006 and that U.S. Marines and police were
both working on portable versions.

Foreign Policy Research Institute
50 Years of Ideas in Service to Our Nation
1955-2005
www.fpri.org

E-Notes
Distributed Exclusively via Fax & Email

THE RISE OF CHINA
by James Kurth

July 15, 2005

We print below the introduction to the Summer 2005 issue of
Orbis, a quarterly journal of world affairs published for
FPRI by Elsevier. In this introduction, James Kurth,
summarizes the contents of the issue, while offering some
thoughts on China's growing role in world affairs. A long-
time Senior Fellow of FPRI, Professor Kurth is editor of
Orbis, and chair, with Walter McDougall, of FPRI's Center
for the Study of America and the West. Dr. Kurth is also the
Claude Smith Professor of Political Science at Swarthmore
College.

Orbis is available electronically to subscribers to
Elsevier's Science Direct service at:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/00304387

Orbis is also available through standard subscription. For
subscription information, go to:
http://www.elsevier.com/locate/issn/00304387

FPRI members at the $125 level or above receive a
complimentary subscription to Orbis. For membership
information, contact Alan Luxenberg at lux@fpri.org.

THE RISE OF CHINA

By James Kurth

The current foreign-policy focus of most Americans is upon
the Middle East and more broadly upon the Muslim world.
Given the ongoing war in Iraq and the continuing threat from
Islamic terrorism, this is understandably so. However, the
region with the most dynamic growth today - and with the
greater potential weight in world politics in the future - is
East Asia. And the most dynamic and weighty country in that
region is China.

The extraordinary growth of the Chinese economy is
generating waves which have already reached other economies
at the farthest ends of the earth. In a way reminiscent of
the British economy in the nineteenth century and America's
in the twentieth, China in the twenty-first century has
become "the workshop of the world," the core of the global
manufacturing sector. In doing so, it has hollowed out and
flattened the economies of dozens of once-developing
countries and little workshops around the world. China is
now also rapidly expanding its workforce in the engineering
and information technology industries. Like America during
much of the twentieth century, China is driving toward
becoming the office complex of the world, the core of the
global information sector, as well. In doing so, it may
hollow out America itself.

Historically, the rapid growth of the economy of a great
country has often issued in enormous-and disruptive-changes
in that country's domestic politics, in its foreign
policies, and in its military power. This, in turn, has
produced realignments in regional politics and eventually in
world politics-most obviously, with the rapid rise of
German, American, and even Russian economic power a century
ago. The rise of German power forced the hegemonic global
power of the day, Britain, into new alliances that
represented radical departures from traditional British
foreign policy. The rise of American power provided a new
candidate to take Britain's place in the role of global
hegemon. And the rise of Russia, which by the early 1910s
was progressing even faster than that of Germany, propelled
the latter country toward a grand strategy of preventive
war, a path that ultimately ended in the First World War.
That war brought tremendous disruptions to Germany's economy
and devastated Russia's, but it propelled the American
economy to even greater heights. Later, the rapid recovery
and expansion of the German economy in the 1930s enabled and
also propelled (because of Germany's lack of industrial raw
materials) the Nazi territorial aggressions that led to the
Second World War. Similarly, the rapid recovery and
expansion of the Soviet economy in the 1950s enabled and
encouraged the confrontational Soviet policies that led to
some of the most dangerous times of the Cold War,
culminating in the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.

Of course, the leading policymakers of the leading powers
know this dismal history, and presumably they have drawn
lessons from it. For this reason, and for others as well,
China's rising economy and power do not have to end in some
kind of third world war or a new kind of cold war. But it is
almost certain to usher in enormous-and disruptive-changes
in China's domestic politics and its relations with the
other nations of East Asia, and in these nations' relations
and even realignments with each other.

This issue of Orbis focuses upon the new alignments and
realignments, both domestic and international, in East Asia.
Our articles discuss what is happening in China and also in
Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea.

The Chinese Communist Party has dominated the extraordinary
history of China for more than five decades, and it has led
China's extraordinary economic growth over the last two
decades. But, as Cheng Li, a Chinese scholar now teaching in
America, argues in his article, the CCP is now undergoing
its own transformation, with the beginnings of a division
not just into two conventional factions based upon personal
cliques, but into two competing alliances of different
social and economic interests. If this process continues and
is institutionalized, the course of Chinese party politics
in the future will bear some similarities to the course of
party politics in some Western countries in the past,
particularly during the nineteenth century.

Domestic political changes and conflicts usually produce
changes in foreign policy, and this will happen with China.
The most important changes will be in China's policy toward
the United States. Peter Hays Gries gives an informed and
revealing account of how China's leading foreign-policy
intellectuals and analysts now think about the United States
and about the agitated topic of hegemony in global politics.

The most dangerous point of conflict between an expanding
China and a hegemonic United States is, of course, Taiwan.
China's domestic politics will shape this issue, but so will
Taiwan's. As small as it is, Taiwan could be the Archimedian
lever that could one day move, or rather shake, the world.
Shelley Rigger, one of America's premier scholars of
Taiwanese politics, gives a thorough analysis of the
connection between Taiwan's party politics and its "external
relations" (which encompasses both cross-strait relations
with China and its relations with other nations). She shows
that despite the dramatic and heated rhetoric characteristic
of party politics in Taiwan, there is a persistent structure
and remarkable stability to its external relations.

In a contrasting dynamic, Japan in the last decade has
undergone great changes in both its party system and its
government structure (e.g., the increased role of the prime
minister in policymaking). The long-standing "system of
'55"-the hegemonic dominance of the Liberal Democratic Party
after 1955-collapsed in the early 1990s. Robert Pekkanen and
Ellis Krauss provide an insightful analysis of these changes
and their important consequences for Japan's security
policies-both foreign policy and internal security. The most
important consequence is an even closer alliance with the
United States. This includes support of the U.S. war in Iraq
and also a closer alignment with U.S. policy with respect to
Taiwan.

We are thus in a period when relations among Japan, China,
and Taiwan have assumed a character that is more complex
than it was in the several decades before. Tomohiko
Taniguchi, a prominent Japanese policy analyst, helps us to
interpret this new pattern, which he terms a "cold peace."
The pattern is distinguished by the odd conjunction of both
rapidly expanding Japanese-Chinese economic cooperation and
seriously deteriorating political attitudes between these
nations. Japan has arrived at a similarly complex
relationship with South Korea. On the one hand, the two
countries' economic and even cultural relations are closer
and more cooperative than at any time in their troubled
history during the twentieth century. On the other hand,
Korea's memory of Japan's occupation and conduct from 1910
to 1945 still ignites political demonstrations against Japan
and disrupts relations between the two nations. Michael
Auslin discusses the connections between these two
countries, which he terms "the new East Asian core."

Our ensemble of articles on East Asia concludes with a
review essay by Bruce Cumings, one of America's leading
historians of twentieth-century Northeast Asia. He discusses
several new books which try to discern the direction of
twenty-first century China. America did not have a very good
record of understanding and predicting China's behavior in
the twentieth century. That failure was one origin of the
Korean and Vietnam wars. Cumings is skeptical of the ability
of the American authors whom he reviews to understand and
predict the China of the future. He invites us, rather, to
try to understand China as the best of that country's
scholars do. America is now dealing with what is
simultaneously the oldest civilization, the most populous
country, the most dynamic economy, and potentially the most
weighty country in the world, and we can't afford to get it
wrong again.

This issue of Orbis also includes articles on two other
regions, Europe and Africa. The center of dynamic growth and
power politics a century ago, Europe is hardly that today.
There is, however, one part of Europe that is experiencing
dynamic growth in numbers and political importance: its
Muslim population. Zachary Shore depicts the current
conflicts between the growing community of ethnic Muslims
and the declining society of ethnic Europeans, and he
proposes possible ways to resolve them.

Frederic Pryor addresses a different current tension, that
between East Germans, the former citizens of a Marxist state
and socialist society, and the Germany of today, a
thoroughly liberal state and individualist society. As Pryor
shows, East Germans appreciate some of what they have
gained, but they also regret much of what they have lost;
the result is a Germany that remains rather less united in
fact and in spirit than it does in form and in law. The law
and spirit of the contemporary liberal German state is
examined in further detail by Paul Gottfried in his review
essay. Germany today is the complete opposite of Germany at
the beginning of the twentieth century, and most people will
think that this is a good thing. But one of the reasons for
this transformation, indeed revolution, is that the liberal
German establishment has worked so hard to suppress any
residue of the German past that it has obliterated any real
German national identity. In the process, it has instituted
a new sort of political authoritarianism-one that is,
however, liberal in name.

In contrast to East Asia and Europe, it might be thought
that Africa has never been a center of dynamic growth and
power politics, neither today nor in the past. This is not
really the case, however. Godfrey Uzoigwe, a Nigerian
scholar teaching in America, presents a sweeping overview of
African history from the beginning of the Islamic conquests
to the end of European colonialism, depicting the rise and
fall of economies and empires, of wealth and power. Africa
was the home of formidable indigenous empires and the
foundation for several European ones. But now, after more
than four decades of independence for most of Africa's some
forty states, there is no sign of dynamic growth. There is,
however, plenty of evidence of squalid abuse of power.
Herbert Werlin depicts the extent of corruption in Africa
and offers proposals for its correction. Until this
debilitating social disease is cured or contained, all the
current projects to increase foreign aid to Africa will come
to naught.

In the meantime, Americans are quite properly continuing to
concern themselves with the ongoing war in Iraq. Glenn
Kutler provides a retrospective of the first two years of
that war, with a particular focus upon the U.S. military
fatalities there. He discerns that there was a regular,
cyclical pattern to these fatalities. He also argues that
they had already affected voting behavior in the 2004
presidential election, reducing the votes for George Bush in
the home counties of the soldiers killed. If the war and
U.S. fatalities continue into the 2006 and 2008 elections,
it can be expected that they will impose a serious electoral
cost upon the Republican Party.

Hegemonic global powers do seem to have a propensity for
submerging themselves in dubious and fruitless little wars
in faraway lands; it goes with the territory, so to speak. A
century ago, Britain was preoccupied with the Boer War and
its aftermath. British governments believed they were
bringing liberalism to South Africa, much as the Bush
administration believes that it is bringing democracy to
Iraq. They also believed that the gold mines of the
Transvaal were crucial to the global economy of the time,
much as the Bush administration believes that the oil fields
of the Persian Gulf are crucial to today's global economy. A
century later, however, we know that the real and
fundamental task before Britain in the 1900s was to somehow
manage the rapid rise of German economic and military power.
The Boer War was at best a distraction and a diversion from
this, and in fact it even aggravated tensions between
Britain and Germany. In the end, Britain failed to rise to
its great task, and the First World War was the result.

How will the Iraq War be viewed a century from now, in
relation to the real and fundamental tasks before the United
States in the 2000s? Certainly, Islamic terrorism poses a
grave challenge to the United States, but by now the Iraq
War seems to be more part of the problem than part of the
solution. In this issue of Orbis, however, we have focused
upon the tasks presented by the rapid rise of Chinese
economic power and the likely rise in the future of Chinese
military power. The Iraq War seems to be at best a
distraction and a diversion from this, although it does not
appear to have aggravated tensions between the United States
and China. Perhaps the real danger of the Iraq War-U.S.
military fatalities and all-is that it will create an Iraq
syndrome that, like the Vietnam syndrome of the 1970s, will
cause the American people to withdraw from an active,
coherent, and sustained foreign policy. If so, among the
fatalities in the Iraq War will be any future U.S. policy
toward China and East Asia.

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JONATHAN CHAIT
Los Angeles Times
June 3, 2005

I try very, very hard not to think of the conservative movement as a gaggle
of thick-skulled fanatics. To help me along in this process, I seek out
well-reasoned commentary from conservative intellectuals such as Tod
Lindberg of the Washington Times and Ramesh Ponnuru of the National Review.

But my efforts at ideological toleration inevitably get spoiled when
something comes along like Human Events magazine's list of the "Ten Most
Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries."

Human Events is a conservative weekly that Ronald Reagan was known to
favor, and which the Wall Street Journal called a "bible of the right." It
compiled its list by polling a panel of conservative academics (such as
Robert George of Princeton University) and Washington think-tank types
(such as Fred Smith of the Competitive Enterprise Institute). As such, it
offers a fair window into the dementia of contemporary conservative
thinking.

One amusing thing about the list is its seeming inability to distinguish
between seminal works of social science and totalitarian manifestos. Marx,
Hitler and Chairman Mao sit alongside pragmatist philosopher John Dewey and
sex researcher Alfred Kinsey.

You'll be comforted to know that Mao, with 38 points and a No. 3 ranking,
edged out Kinsey, with 37 points. The Feminine Mystique, meanwhile, checks
in at No. 7, with 30 points, just behind Das Kapital, which totaled 31
points.

Harmful books that got honorable mentions but couldn't crack the top 10
include John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, Sigmund Freud's Introduction to
Psychoanalysis and Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man. Oh yes, and
Lenin's What Is to Be Done. (If you don't see the link between arguing for
individual rights, exploring scientific mysteries and constructing a
brutally repressive Bolshevik terror state, then clearly you're not
thinking like a conservative.)

Interestingly, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a czarist forgery that
incited countless massacres and inspires anti-Semites around the world to
this day, failed to rate a mention. On the other hand, Unsafe at Any Speed
and Silent Spring, which led to such horrors as seat belts and the Clean
Water Act, did. (Given that Unsafe at Any Speed launched the career of
Ralph Nader, who went on to put George W. Bush in the White House, I wonder
if conservatives might one day deem it one of the most helpful books of the
last two centuries.)

Possibly even more amusing are the explanations for each book's inclusion.
They read like 10th-grade book reports from some right-wing, bizarro world
high school. John Maynard Keynes' seminal The General Theory of Employment,
Interest and Money argued that during recessions governments should cut
interest rates, reduce taxes and increase spending, and during expansions
do the opposite.

It makes the list because, Human Events explains, "FDR adopted the idea as
U.S. policy, and the U.S. government now has a $2.6-trillion annual budget
and an $8-trillion debt." (But didn't Keynesian policies help win World
War II and then produce 25 years of phenomenal prosperity? And wasn't that
debt less than a trillion dollars before Reagan took office?)

The squib on The Feminine Mystique begins with a fairly anodyne summary of
Betty Freidan's pioneering feminist tract. Rather than explain what's so
dangerous about allowing women the choice of having a career, though, Human
Events proceeds to quote a review that "Friedan was from her college days,
and until her mid-30s, a Stalinist Marxist." Not just a Stalinist, but a
Marxist to boot!

Personally, I fail to see how Friedan's communist past --- she was 42 when
she published The Feminine Mystique --- would discredit her insights about
the repressive nature of a world in which women were discriminated against
or barred outright from most professions and much of public life.
Especially because the conservative movement was itself heavily salted with
ex-communists. But then, my mind has already been poisoned by Dewey, Mill
and other liberal relativists.

NUMBER OF RICH PAYING NO FEDERAL INCOME TAX HITS 5650

New York Times
July 1, 2005

The number of affluent individuals and married couples who paid no federal
income taxes jumped more than 15% in 2002, to 5,650, new government data
showed yesterday.

The chances of having a large income but not paying taxes on any of it are
growing, according to the data, issued in the Internal Revenue Service's
annual reort to Congress on well-to-do Americans who live tax-free. About
one in every 436 high-income Americans paid no taxes in 2002, up from one
in 1,010 in 2000.

Overall, the top two percent of earners, the 2.5 million filers with income
of $200,000 or more, paid almost 27 cents in taxes for each dollar of
income reported in 2002, other IRS data showed. This group accounted for
53.5 percent of the income tax paid by all Americans.

Among that high-income group, however, almost 83,000, or one in 33, paid
less than a dime in taxes for every dollar of income. An additional 79,000
paid less than 15 cents. The average for all Americans was 13 cents.

Of the 5,650 individuals and couples who paid no income taxes to the United
States, only 728 paid any to a foreign government, while 4,922 lived
completely free of income tax. Many of those received money from sources
such as tax-exempt interest and Social Security benefits.

HISTORY, ACCORDING TO ROVE

EUGENE ROBINSON
Washington Post Writers Group
July 13, 2005

The Bush administration's relationship with the English language, I
confess, just drives me up the wall. How can these people be so comically
doofus with the language one minute and so brilliantly Orwellian the next?

President Bush's misadventures with the dictionary are legendary, and
they're the gift that keeps on giving. Perhaps my favorite classic came
while Bush was trying to sell his Social Security program in upstate New
York, and he uttered this timeless sentence: "See, in my line of work you
got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to
sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda."

The frightening thing is that we all understood what he meant. We even
understood him when he made his recent assertion about the imprisoned
evildoers at Guantanamo, that they are "people that had been trained, in
some instances, to disassemble." Before you could wonder where they were
getting their hands on the screwdrivers and wrenches, he added, "That means
not tell the truth."

No it doesn't, Mr. President. But never mind.

Of course, the president's father waged his own battle against the tyranny
of syntax and the dictatorship of grammar. His fumbles became a running
gag on "Saturday Night Live" and even prompted gentle gibes from his peers:
Once, the president of Uruguay welcomed George Bush the First to Montevideo
and, as the two leaders stood together, the Uruguayan told reporters he
would "answer any questions in my broken English, which is, of course, our
common language."

George W., however, makes his father sound like Seneca. He hasn't received
the same kind of ribbing from other world leaders, but maybe they're afraid
they might provoke an invasion or something.

Then there's Vice President Cheney, who suddenly has a different problem
with the language: He's taken to blurting out things that just manifestly
are not true.

The Iraq insurgency is in its "last throes"? In all the damage control
that followed that little outburst, functionaries found it hard to come up
with a defense that didn't begin, "What the vice president meant to say was
... "

Undaunted, Cheney then described the life of the hundreds of prisoners
being held at Guantanamo: "They're living in the tropics. They're well
fed. They've got everything they could possibly want." He made it sound
better than most of the vacations I've paid good money for, although as a
general rule I take a pass on constant interrogation and occasional abuse.

No, there's nothing sinister about Bush's fumbles; and yes, Cheney does
seem to genuinely believe the alternate reality he describes. But for an
example of truly Orwellian doublespeak, consider the following:

"Conservatives saw the savagery of September 11 and the attacks and
prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the September 11 attacks and
wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our
attackers."

That is what Karl Rove, the president's top political adviser, said to a
group of New York conservatives last month, and I don't know how to
describe it other than as a Big Lie that could have been ghostwritten by
Big Brother. Rove is making an outrageous attempt to rewrite history.
There was no "liberal" or "conservative" response to September 11, there
was an American response. Liberals and conservatives alike died in those
world-changing attacks; liberals and conservatives alike experienced the
horror of that September morning and resolved to take action.

There was support across the political spectrum for Bush's decision to go
into Afghanistan, destroy al Qaeda and capture or kill Osama bin Laden.
Karl Rove knows that, but he says otherwise.

A year later, yes, there was disagreement over whether the United States
should invade Iraq. Many people, including many liberals, believed there
was no evidence that Iraq had been involved in September 11 or that it
presented enough of a threat to the United States to divert attention from
the hunt for bin Laden.

"Liberals" were right, in my view. But even if the "liberal" view had
turned out to be wrong, Rove's charges still would be baseless and
libelous. That's like saying that "conservatives" favor bombing abortion
clinics, or that "conservatives" favor establishment of a state religion.

In his speech, Rove alternates his references to generic "liberals" with
mentions of MoveOn.org, Michael Moore and Howard Dean, as if they
represented a single view of the world; they don't. Since then, in
explaining --- but not retracting --- his remarks, he tosses in George
Soros as well.

He uses the language skillfully, all right. It's just that he seems to be
using it to compile his own growing list of Enemies of the People.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,1528336,00.html?gusrc=rss

Marx voted top thinker

Charlotte Higgins Thursday July 14, 2005
Guardian

In a shock result, Karl Marx has been voted the greatest ever philosopher
following a poll by Melvyn Bragg's Radio 4 show In Our Time
.

In the public's poll, which assessed 20 philosophers, Marx, author of the
Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital, got 27.93% of the 30,000 votes. In
second place came David Hume with 12.67%, followed by Ludwig Wittgenstein
with 6.8%. Plato trailed in fifth place and Socrates at eighth.

Andrew Chitty, who, at Sussex University, teaches the UK's only MA in
Marxist philosophy, said: "This shows that philosophy should take Marxism
seriously. It is possible he won because Marxists organised a mass vote;
they're much more organised than Hegelians, for instance.

"But I think it's more likely that people understand that in this
increasingly capitalist world Marx gives us the best vision with which to
understand that world. Marx talks about capital in a philosophical way -
he's unique in that."

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,9115,1528137,00.html
Comment
Kapital gain

Karl Marx is now the Home Counties' favourite
Mark Seddon Thursday July 14, 2005
Guardian

Karl Marx is the nation's most revered philosopher. No, this isn't old
Soviet agitprop, but the result of a Radio 4 listeners' poll organised by
the broadcaster Melvyn Bragg for his series In Our Time. The veteran
Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawm, thinks he knows why. His reasoning is as
contemporary as Marx's was visionary. "The Communist Manifesto," he says,
"contains a stunning prediction of the nature and effects of globalisation."

Taking 28% of the votes cast, the former down-at-heel Victorian gent, who
suffered appalling outbreaks of boils, beat the Economist magazine's
trumpeted candidate, David Hume, hands down. So with even the communist
daily Morning Star keeping tight-lipped, the strange exhumation of Marx can
only be attributed to thousands of Radio 4 listeners in the Home Counties.
This is clearly a very real middle-class conspiracy, designed to give those
ex-Marxists in the cabinet - John Reid and Charles Clarke among them -
sleepless nights.

But should we really be so surprised? Marx, now freed from his flawed
pupils, is as liberating as he was when he published the Communist
Manifesto 150 years ago. Re-visiting Marx's theories on historical and
dialectical materialism, it is possible to see a genius at work because, as
Bragg would have it, "everything can be explained".

But then, as the self deprecating Marx once argued: "The philosophers have
only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to
change it." Marx reaches through the centuries not only because he
understood how modern capitalism would exacerbate the divide between rich
and poor, but because he could see that, left to its own devices, it would
create monopoly and exploitation.

He could have left it there, but of course he believed that there had to
be an alternative. And in these dumbed down times where Lord Birt's
blue-sky thinking and management consultancy gobbledegook has our
technocratic political class in a vice-like grip, it is refreshing to
discover that thousands of Britons must believe that real change is
possible. Amazingly for the slayers of social democracy in New Labour, as
many of these people probably live in places like Esher and Surbiton as
they do in Oxford and Cambridge.

Market fundamentalism has now replaced Marxism and its many derivatives in
the west, as it has done in the east. Elsewhere, nationalism and religious
fundamentalism vie to fill a dangerous, illiberal void. It is as if the
age of enlightenment, of the Renaissance, had never happened. Marx spawned
some horrors, and the flight from him by the political class has been so
total that the gentler tradition of democratic socialism has been all but
lost.

Marx's mother despaired at the futility of it all. "I wish you could make
some capital rather than just writing about it," she once remonstrated.
Well, maybe his old bankroller, Friedrich Engels, might have agreed, but
Marx has left a rich intellectual inheritance. Before Gordon Brown has
another chance to say "No return to boom and bust", I heartily recommend to
him a few hours spent perusing Das Kapital.

· Mark Seddon is a member of Labour's national executive committee
seddonzq1@aol.com

The main thing about this joker is that he's one of he most aggressive
atheists lately.

His arguments here are loose, as usual with fanatics propounding some
conclusion; but his conclusions on these particular matters are IMHO most
plausible.

R

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000DA0E2-1E15-128A-9E1583414B7F0000&chanID=sa008

May 23, 2005
Fahrenheit 2777

9/11 has generated the mother of all conspiracy theories
By Michael Shermer

Noted French left-wing activist Thierry Meyssan's 9/11 conspiracy book,
L'Effroyable Imposture, became a best-seller in 2002. But I never imagined
such an "appalling deception" would ever find a voice in America. At a
recent public lecture I was buttonholed by a Michael Moore-wannabe
filmmaker who breathlessly explained that 9/11 was orchestrated by Bush,
Cheney, Rumsfeld and the Central Intelligence Agency as part of their plan
for global domination and a New World Order. That goal was to be financed
by G.O.D. (Gold, Oil, Drugs) and launched by a Pearl Harbor-like attack on
the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, thereby providing the
justification for war. The evidence was there in the details, he
explained, handing me a faux dollar bill (with "9-11" replacing the "1," a
picture of Bush supplanting that of Washington) chockablock with Web sites.

In fact, if you type "World Trade Center" and "conspiracy" into Google,
you'll get more than 250,000 hits. From these sites, you will discover
that some people think the Pentagon was hit by a missile; that U.S. Air
Force jets were ordered to "stand down" and not intercept Flights 11 and
175, the ones that struck the twin towers; that the towers themselves were
razed by demolition explosives timed to go off soon after the impact of the
planes; that a mysterious white jet shot down Flight 93 over Pennsylvania;
and that New York Jews were ordered to stay home that day (Zionists and
other pro-Israeli factions, of course, were involved). Books also abound,
including Inside Job, by Jim Marrs; The New Pearl Harbor, by David Ray
Griffin; and 9/11: The Great Illusion, by George Humphrey. The single best
debunking of this conspiratorial codswallop is in the March issue of
Popular Mechanics, which provides an exhaustive point-by-point analysis of
the most prevalent claims.

The mistaken belief that a handful of unexplained anomalies can
undermine a well-established theory lies at the heart of all conspiratorial
thinking (as well as creationism, Holocaust denial and the various crank
theories of physics). All the "evidence" for a 9/11 conspiracy falls under
the rubric of this fallacy. Such notions are easily refuted by noting that
scientific theories are not built on single facts alone but on a
convergence of evidence assembled from multiple lines of inquiry.

For example, according to www.911research.wtc7.net, steel melts at a
temperature of 2,777 degrees Fahrenheit, but jet fuel burns at only 1,517
degrees F. No melted steel, no collapsed towers. "The planes did not
bring those towers down; bombs did," says www.abovetopsecret.com. Wrong.
In an article in the Journal of the Minerals, Metals, and Materials Society
and in subsequent interviews, Thomas Eagar, an engineering professor at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explains why: steel loses 50 percent
of its strength at 1,200 degrees F; 90,000 liters of jet fuel ignited other
combustible materials such as rugs, curtains, furniture and paper, which
continued burning after the jet fuel was exhausted, raising temperatures
above 1,400 degrees F and spreading the inferno throughout each building.
Temperature differentials of hundreds of degrees across single steel
horizontal trusses caused them to sag--straining and then breaking the
angle clips that held the beams to the vertical columns. Once one truss
failed, others followed. When one floor collapsed onto the next floor
below, that floor subsequently gave way, creating a pancaking effect that
triggered each 500,000-ton structure to crumble. Conspiricists argue that
the buildings should have fallen over on their sides, but with 95 percent
of each building consisting of air, they could only have collapsed straight
down.

All the 9/11 conspiracy claims are this easily refuted. On the Pentagon
"missile strike," for example, I queried the would-be filmmaker about what
happened to Flight 77, which disappeared at the same time. "The plane was
destroyed, and the passengers were murdered by Bush operatives," he
solemnly revealed. "Do you mean to tell me that not one of the thousands
of conspirators needed to pull all this off," I retorted, "is a
whistle-blower who would go on TV or write a tell-all book?" My rejoinder
was met with the same grim response I get from UFOlogists when I ask them
for concrete evidence: Men in Black silence witnesses, and dead men tell no
tales.

This RC featured in Commonweal 35y ago but more recently has become
something of a favourite of the Noo Right. He was brought out here
several y ago by Keith Hay.

R

>http://www.nationalreview.com/novak/novak102802.asp
>October 28, 2002, 9:00 a.m.
>America’s Ten Commandments
>The ACLU’s mistake.
>
>After a weeklong trial, a federal court in Montgomery, Alabama, heard
>closing arguments last Wednesday (October 23) in yet one more effort by
>the American Civil Liberties Union to erase any recognition of God from
>public life in America -
>this time, to remove the Ten Commandments from a courthouse.
>
>All over the country, the ACLU has been filing suits like to one in
>Alabama, winning some, losing some. The oddest thing is, if the ACLU
>project of removing God from public testimony should win, their victory
>would hurt the ACLU most of all. For two reasons: The first reason is that
>a plurality of Americans holds that there are civil liberties because
>certain inalienable rights were endowed in us by our Creator. This belief
>was expressed by the Continental Congress in the carefully wrought words
>of the Declaration of Independence. Our Founders held that the same
>Creator Who gave the human race the inestimable gift of the Ten
>Commandments also gave human beings the freedom to follow them - or not.
>He also laid on them the burden of making an account to Him - and to no
>other - of how they did so.
>
>As Thomas Jefferson put it, "The God who gave us life gave us liberty at
>the same time." There are civil liberties because our Creator made us
>free. And also, responsible finally to Him.
>
>These words of Jefferson are particularly beautiful:
>Well aware that the opinions and belief of men depend not on their own
>will, but follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their own minds,
>that Almighty God hath created the mind free, and manifested his Supreme
>will that free it shall remain, by making it altogether insusceptible of
>restraint: That all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or
>burthens, or by civil incapacitations ...are a departure from the plan of
>the holy author of our religion, who being Lord both of body and mind, yet
>chose not to propagate it by either, as was in his Almighty power to do,
>but to extend it by its influence on reason alone... [A Bill for
>Establishing Religious Freedom]
>Why would the ACLU want to cut out of American consciousness the reason
>why, for a plurality of Americans, respect for civil liberties is a
>serious, even a sacred duty? Failure to observe is an offense against the
>Supreme will of God, and answerable on the last day before an undeceivable
>Judge?
>
>But the second reason why the ACLU is committing suicide runs even deeper.
>The reason why there is religious liberty, or at least the sole reason
>given by three crucial Founding documents on the subject — the Virginia
>Declaration of Rights, the Virginia Statute for the Establishment of
>Religious Liberty, and James Madison's famous and eloquent Remonstrance —
>is this rare and precious conception: That prior to any obligation to the
>state, prior even to any obligation to civil society (prior both in time
>and in degree of importance), is the inalienable communion between the
>individual and the Creator, to Whom the human being owes a duty precedent
>to any he owes state or civil society. This duty cannot be fulfilled by
>any other than each individual, one by one. For each person, it is
>inalienable.
>
>This inalienable relation between the individual and the Creator is the
>ground and foundation of the right to religious liberty, and through that
>first right, of all the other civil rights and liberties. From that
>human-divine relation emanates the spiritual power of the ACLU.
>
>A DEEPER, MORE SURPRISING TURN
>
>However, a deeper and more surprising turn in our reflections must now be
>taken. The conception of a Creator is specific only to a tiny handful of
>the world religions. The conception of a Creator Who demands to be
>recognized "in spirit and in truth," and not simply by outward actions
>(burning incense, bending the knee, reciting sacred formulae, performing
>certain ritual actions such as pilgrimages or prostrations, etc.) is
>specific to even fewer. The conception of a Creator Who, in addition, made
>every individual free, and glories in the friendship of free women and
>free men, seems in fact to be limited only to two: to Judaism and its
>offspring, Christianity.
>
>It is probably true that the Ten Commandments are, with due regard for a
>modest pluralism of nuance and emphasis and interpretation, universal and
>recognized among all peoples everywhere. Even more strikingly than that,
>all ten of them, especially the last five or six, appear to have been
>reached in many places by the exercise of reason itself, without
>revelation. That stealing, murder, lying, and bearing false witness, and
>acting out of covetousness are universally condemned in all world
>literatures is fairly obvious. But even the first three or four
>commandments have been arrived at by reason alone.
>
>Thus, for those who form a sufficiently high notion of God, it is also
>obvious that putting false idols in His place, worshiping as God something
>that is not God, or mocking and blaspheming Him or His name, are stupid
>acts of ignorance, arrogance, and pretension among mere mortals, who are
>like the grass of the fields, here today and tomorrow forgotten.
>
>Nonetheless, the particular relation between the Creator and the
>individual imagined by the American Founders, and by them made part of the
>narrative history within which the conception of rights gains traction in
>our daily lives, is special to Judaism and Christianity. Just possibly, it
>is also compatible with Islam, that other religion of an almighty, eternal
>Creator of all things. So far, however, no Muslim thinker has come forward
>to explain how Islam understands human liberty. And all the other civil,
>political, and religious rights embodied in the American way of life, and
>put into words in its Founding documents. How does Islam ground those
>rights, in a way comparable to the arguments put forward by George Mason,
>Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison mentioned above?
>
>According to our own documentary history, the American conception and
>practice of religious liberty (and the grounding of our other civil and
>political rights) depends upon the relation between the human individual,
>female and male, and the Creator of all things, as presented by the Jewish
>and Christian traditions, and by no other tradition in quite that same
>way. Not even Thomas Hobbes and John Locke ground their conceptions of
>natural right in quite the same way as Mason, Jefferson, and Madison do.
>True, these Americans, especially Jefferson, knew some of the works of
>Locke well, and learned many turns of thought and expression from him. And
>why not?
>
>Locke often expressed himself in the full-dress language of a believer in
>the Jewish and Christian traditions. Yet perhaps even more so than Locke,
>the innermost convictions of many if not most of the early American
>patriots were fired by religious conscience. The flames of revolt against
>kingly abusiveness were fed by the Puritan and evangelical preachers. For
>this reason, the American documents hewed even more closely than Locke to
>a Jewish-Christian conception of the main narrative line of human history:
>The Creator made humans to be free, and to make freedom prevail, against
>the many formidable obstacles it encounters in "the long course of human
>events."
>
>In this respect, James Madison's sketch of the relation between the
>individual and its Lord and Creator, in the inner arena of conscience,
>calls to mind the first two propositions of the Ten Commandments: "I am
>the Lord thy God." The individual needs for a moment to let that sink in.
>
>Then the next proposition follows ineluctably: "Thou shalt have no other
>gods before me."
>
>Contained in these two lines is the metaphysical narrative that undergirds
>the principle of limited government. No absolute power, or absolutist
>government, can be allowed to prevail. Any such pretense is an idol,
>usurping the place that belongs to God alone. To God alone, each
>individual owes the allegiance of an inalienable conscience, which can be
>exercised by no other person whatever (not by mother nor father, not by
>brother nor sister, but only by that individual alone). That duty to the
>Creator is precedent to any duty to the state or even to civil society. In
>short, our right to religious liberty cannot be abridged by any state or
>civil society or any other human power whatever. Here is how Madison
>expresses this truth:
>
>It is the duty of every man to render to the Creator such homage and such
>only as he believes to be acceptable to him. This duty is precedent, both
>in the order of time and in degree of obligation, to the claims of Civil
>Society. Before any man can be considered as a member of Civil Society, he
>must be considered as a subject of the Governour [sic] of the Universe.
>[Remonstrance, para.1].
>
>The next Commandment reads: "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven
>image." Benjamin Franklin gave this proposition a practical twist in his
>proposal for the official motto of the United States: "Rebellion to
>tyrants is obedience to God."
>
>The next is: "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain."
>Commander-in-chief George Washington issued as one of his first written
>orders to the Continental Army that there must not be any swearing or any
>blasphemy in the ranks, lest the Army's firm reliance on Divine Providence
>be compromised and the trust of the People in their Army scandalized. He
>also commanded his troops to begin every morning with a prayer, their
>officers present in formation, a chaplain having been assigned to each unit.
>
>After the war, Washington frequently drew attention to, and commended
>public gratitude for "the many signal interventions of Divine Providence"
>in the course of the war. Among these, ever fresh in his mind, were the
>seemingly miraculous turns on his behalf in the battles of Long Island and
>Monmouth.
>
>MEETING THREE CONDITIONS
>
>The singular advantage of the Jewish-Christian conception of the relation
>between the Creator and his human subjects is that it allows for three
>things at once: the freedom of the individual conscience; a freedom
>ordered to law ("Confirm thy soul in self-control/Thy liberty in law") and
>social unity; and, third, a comfortable pluralism, in which diverse
>communities live in unity, with the free exercise of conscience. This is
>an original conception, a new order without precedent on the face of the
>globe, as Madison justly observed in Federalist #14.
>Although this conception may be articulated and defended in more than one
>way, its particular historical origins in the specific religious
>traditions of early America, frequently recurred to, maintain a remarkable
>and continuing vitality. Furthermore, without requiring newcomers or
>imitators in other lands to become Jews or Christians, or to confess any
>one faith, these distinctive traditions open the blessings of liberty to
>all. We can pay homage to their specific origins without being forced to
>make a confession of faith in those traditions. Few are the historical
>conceptions so open to sharing their best fruits with others of different
>faiths.
>
>More impressively still, the early American religions and their attachment
>to common sense managed to launch a form of pluralism that does not depend
>upon relativism — "anything goes" and "all opinions are equally valid" —
>while still honoring freedom of conscience. They did so by recognizing
>that each soul is in a constant dialog with its Creator, learning and
>advancing by its own lights, in its own time. No one else has the right to
>intrude coercively into that sacred conversation. One keen reason for
>religious liberty is that every soul needs room for that wrestling match,
>that long journey.
>
>The texture of the American trust in the ultimate victory of liberty and
>the unshakeable foundation of our rights, from religious liberty to all
>the others, is knit through and through with the laws of the human
>universe announced by Governor of the Universe, and honored by our
>forebears throughout our history.
>
>DEFYING REASON
>
>Tearing the tangible recollection of these laws from our daily sight in
>courthouses and elsewhere is an act of unparalleled and suicidal
>blindness. It can be accounted for only by ideological rage, not by
>rational self interest.
>
>Even those who do not believe in God should be able to see that many of
>their fellow citizens do hold such a belief. Moreover, these others hold
>certain important political truths to be self evident because, in the
>context of their belief in a God Who offers them friendship, other truths
>about life and liberty become clear to them. To help these others to lose
>a vivid memory of this Source of their rights is to help them treat these
>rights as less than sacred, as mere ideological opinions like any others.
>
>Why would the ACLU desire an outcome like that?
>
>And why would they take a position so flatly contrary to that of George
>Mason, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and other Founders?
>The current tactics of the ACLU defy reason.
>
>http://www.nationalreview.com/novak/novak102802.asp

This just in as I acquire Rev Derrick Sherwin Bailey 'Homosexuality
and the Western Christian Tradition' (Longmans 1955, 180 pp.) . He had
then been for 4 y Central Lecturer for the Church of England Moral Welfare
Council. He says (p. xi)

" ... some have concluded that there exists a third type,
the so-called "bisexual"; but this is very doubtful. It seems to be an
inference from observations of sexual behaviour ... "

R

FAIR-L
Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting
Media analysis, critiques and activism

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2573

ACTION ALERT:
New York Times Suggests Bisexuals Are "Lying"
Paper fails to disclose study author's controversial history

July 8, 2005

In a lead article in the New York Times' July 5 Science section,
headlined, "Straight, Gay or Lying? Bisexuality Revisited,"
Times writer
Benedict Carey reported that an upcoming study "casts doubt on
whether true bisexuality exists, at least in men." In suggesting
that men who claim a bisexual sexual orientation are liars, the Times
relies heavily on a single study whose senior researcher has a career
marked by ethics controversies and eugenics proposals--facts that
were not presented to readers.

According to the Times, the study "lends support to those who have
long been skeptical that bisexuality is a distinct and stable sexual
orientation. People who claim bisexuality, according to these
critics, are usually homosexual, but are ambivalent about their
homosexuality or simply closeted. 'You're either gay, straight or
lying,' as some gay men have put it."

In leaping to dramatic conclusions from a single study with a small
population, Carey echoes the study's authors, who seem equally eager
to generalize from scant evidence--and to confuse the study's
assumptions with its conclusions. Carey quotes the study's senior
author, J. Michael Bailey of Northwestern University, who
acknowledges that bisexual behavior exists, but argues that "in men
there's no hint that true bisexual arousal exists, and that for men
arousal is orientation."

But that arousal equals orientation seems to be assumed, not proven.
The study measured men's self-identified orientation against their
physical arousal while watching various kinds of pornography;
bisexual men's self-identified orientation did not correspond with
their physical arousal, according to the study, with some being
aroused much more by on-screen men and a smaller group responding
much more to on-screen women.

This finding could just as easily be read as evidence that arousal in
bisexual men does *not* equal orientation--that simple measurement of
arousal does not predict people's behavior or identity. But the Times
reporter himself uses the phrase "true bisexuality," which suggests
that people with bisexual behavior and identity might still not
qualify as "true" bisexuals.

Well into Carey's piece, some cautionary or critical viewpoints were
aired. None of those viewpoints, however, gave readers any hint of
Bailey's controversial history. In 2001 Bailey co-authored an article
that argued that, if it became possible for parents to determine the
sexual orientation of their fetus, "selecting for heterosexuality
seems to be morally acceptable.... Selection for heterosexuality may
tangibly benefit parents, children and their families and seems to
have only a slight potential for any significant harm" (Archives of
Sexual Behavior, Vol. 30, No. 4, 2001). The fact that a researcher
has promoted the eugenic elimination of homosexuality would seem to
be relevant background for gauging the credibility of his studies of
bisexuality.

Bailey more recently came under fire for his 2003 book, "The Man Who
Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism,"
which defended the discredited theory that transsexual women are not
female-gendered people born with male bodies, but "are extremely
feminine gay men or are sexual fetishists who are 'erotically
obsessed with the image of themselves as women'" (Chronicle of Higher
Education, 12/10/04). Bailey profiled a handful of transsexual women
for his book, many of whom filed complaints against him for not
getting their consent to be studied (Times Higher Education
Supplement, 5/28/04).

The book shares remarkable similarities to Bailey's new study on
bisexuality: In both, the researcher denies people's own evaluation
of their identities, suggesting that bisexuals and transgender people
are lying about who they are.

In fact, the Times' headline could have been taken from the press
release for Bailey's book, which was headlined, "Gay, Straight, or
Lying? Science Has the Answer." A new study by the same author,
peddling a very similar theory, should have been a red flag to
journalists, and readers should have been informed of the author's
controversial history in order for them to better evaluate the study.

When the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation asked the Times to
retract its inflammatory headline, the paper argued that "gay,
straight or lying" is "a commonly used phrase among many gay people"
(GLAAD.org, 7/7/05). It's unclear why a derogatory stereotype about
one group--bisexuals--should be more acceptable in a headline because
it is attributed to another group--gay people.

ACTION: Please ask the Times' new public editor, Byron Calame, to
examine the Times' report on bisexuality, particularly the lack of
relevant information about the senior researcher's controversial
background and the headline's suggestion that an entire sexual
minority is "lying."

CONTACT:
New York Times
Byron Calame, Public Editor
mailto:public@nytimes.com
Phone: (212) 556-7652

As always, please remember that your comments have more impact if you
maintain a polite tone.

Read the Times article here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/05/health/05sex.html

The Independent
8 July 2005

If we are fighting insurgency in Iraq, what makes us think
insurgency won't come to us?

"If you bomb our cities," Osama bin Laden said in one of his
recent video tapes, "we will bomb yours." There you go, as they
say. It was crystal clear Britain would be a target ever since
Tony Blair decided to join George Bush's "war on terror" and his
invasion of Iraq. We had, as they say, been warned. The G8 summit
was obviously chosen, well in advance, as Attack Day.

And it's no use Mr Blair telling us yesterday that "they will
never succeed in destroying what we hold dear". "They" are not
trying to destroy "what we hold dear". They are trying to get
public opinion to force Blair to withdraw from Iraq, from his
alliance with the United States, and from his adherence to Bush's
policies in the Middle East. The Spanish paid the price for their
support for Bush - and Spain's subsequent retreat from Iraq proved
that the Madrid bombings achieved their objectives - while the
Australians were made to suffer in Bali.

It is easy for Tony Blair to call yesterdays bombings "barbaric" -
of course they were - but what were the civilian deaths of the
Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003, the children torn apart
by cluster bombs, the countless innocent Iraqis gunned down at
American military checkpoints? When they die, it is "collateral
damage"; when "we" die, it is "barbaric terrorism".

If we are fighting insurgency in Iraq, what makes us believe
insurgency won't come to us? One thing is certain: if Tony Blair
really believes that by "fighting terrorism" in Iraq we could more
efficiently protect Britain - fight them there rather than let
them come here, as Bush constantly says - this argument is no
longer valid.

To time these bombs with the G8 summit, when the world was
concentrating on Britain, was not a stroke of genius. You don't
need a PhD to choose another Bush-Blair handshake to close down a
capital city with explosives and massacre more than 30 of its
citizens. The G8 summit was announced so far in advance as to give
the bombers all the time they needed to prepare.

A co-ordinated system of attacks of the kind we saw yesterday
would have taken months to plan - to choose safe houses, prepare
explosives, identify targets, ensure security, choose the bombers,
the hour, the minute, to plan the communications (mobile phones
are giveaways). Co-ordination and sophisticated planning - and the
usual utter ruthlessness with regard to the lives of the innocent
- are characteristic of al-Qa'ida. And let us not use - as our
television colleagues did yesterday - "hallmarks", a word
identified with quality silver rather than base metal.

And now let us reflect on the fact that yesterday, the opening of
the G8, so critical a day, so bloody a day, represented a total
failure of our security services - the same intelligence "experts"
who claim there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq when
there were none, but who utterly failed to uncover a months-long
plot to kill Londoners.

Trains, planes, buses, cars, metros. Transportation appears to be
the science of al-Qa'ida's dark arts. No one can search three
million London commuters every day. No one can stop every tourist.
Some thought the Eurostar might have been an al-Qa'ida target - be
sure they have studied it - but why go for prestige when your
common or garden bus and Tube train are there for the taking.

And then come the Muslims of Britain, who have long been awaiting
this nightmare. Now every one of our Muslims becomes the "usual
suspect", the man or woman with brown eyes, the man with the
beard, the woman in the scarf, the boy with the worry beads, the
girl who says she's been racially abused.

I remember, crossing the Atlantic on 11 September 2001 - my plane
turned round off Ireland when the US closed its airspace - how the
aircraft purser and I toured the cabins to see if we could
identify any suspicious passengers. I found about a dozen, of
course, totally innocent men who had brown eyes or long beards or
who looked at me with "hostility". And sure enough, in just a few
seconds, Osama bin Laden turned nice, liberal, friendly Robert
into an anti-Arab racist.

And this is part of the point of yesterday's bombings: to divide
British Muslims from British non-Muslims (let us not mention the
name Christians), to encourage the very kind of racism that Tony
Blair claims to resent.

But here's the problem. To go on pretending that Britain's enemies
want to destroy "what we hold dear" encourages racism; what we are
confronting here is a specific, direct, centralised attack on
London as a result of a "war on terror" which Lord Blair of Kut
al-Amara has locked us into. Just before the US presidential
elections, Bin Laden asked: "Why do we not attack Sweden?"

Lucky Sweden. No Osama bin Laden there. And no Tony Blair

>Terrorism: When ends justify means.
>
>Perhaps only small differences determine whether a theology or ideology
>produces violence, corruption and tyranny, or produces instead, as Tony
>Blair called it last night, civilization's respect for the innocent.

You'd have got on well with those clever nuisances Hume and B
Russell. You may vaguely imagine some spectrum of merit in theologies &
ideologies, but that is abstract theorizing, contrary to fact.

Only one theology - Christianity - offers a basis for a decent
society, a kind of effortless byproduct of the work of the Holy Spirit in
building the Kingdom of God in the only biosphere we know of.

Far-sighted Christians, notably Prince Charles, build bridges to
those wings of Islam capable of civilised discussion. And the third main
monotheistic theology, Judaism, is also (we pray) to be in closer alliance
with Christianity. But the tolerance of Baha'i is far too excessive. Let
alone the many-gods of Hindu or diminished god of Buddhism.

Therefore a state that has organised to implement Christian ethics
thru a British-style legal system should conserve its crucial features -
as you have generally propounded in Parlt. But this cannot be done unless
the religion that gave rise to the system is suitably active in its
maintenance & revision.

The Marshall/Nash attempt to implement Christian ethics thru
secular law did well for a few decades but is now crumbling, assailed by
selfishness & greed (the forces accorded credit by the traitor Douglas for
powering successful markets and therefore good resource allocations). To
repair & renew the mixed economy will require more influence from church
leaders. As an Anglican in good standing I am embarrassed that Messrs
Tamaki inc get presented by the media as speaking for Christianity, when my
own bishop has far less to offer. But anyhow I am sure Christian revival
is needed for political progress.

I hope therefore that you will lay aside the Hume-type theorising
about bulk theologies & ideologies of similar merit. Reality is pleasantly
simpler. I attach some succint outlines.

cheers

R

Causes in Biology

L. R. B. Mann

Presented abbreviated as a lecture to the symposium 'Science and Christianity'
to honour Harold Turner & John Morton, Auckland 01-4-21.
pub. in L R B Mann (ed) 'Science & Christianity'

University of Auckland Centre for Continuing Education 2001

267p pbk, with 14 illustrations ISBN 0-86869-009-0
pp. 105 - 119

This paper has been written in cooperation with Neil Broom over the past several years, inspired by one small part of John Morton's 1972 book 'Man, Science and God' .

The four categories of cause, identified by Aristotle and little challenged for 2.3 millennia, have rarely been taught to science students. Two of the four are simply ignored today by the leading proponents of scientism such as Richard Dawkins, Lewis Wolpert, and Steven Weinberg. We suggest that Professor Morton's 1972 exposition of the 4 causes offers neglected potential to improve science and Christianity, e.g. by clarifying that murky, confused scene the theology of evolution.

The 'enlightenment' assumption that science can, and soon will, give an essentially complete description and explanation of the physical (including biological) world had become widely influential, though little discussed, when we were science students. Since then, the limits of science and its proper interactions with other domains of knowledge have continued to be widely ignored. And even within science, little attention is directed to the question of what the word 'explanation' means.

Scientism is thus crudely asserted by mere implication, but not discussed. Scientism - faith in science as the "only" way of knowledge - has been in the ascendant for most of the time since the early 18th C. and has lately dominated scientific education by default. It is this last-mentioned aspect to which we most strenuously object. To neglect all mention of final cause is not good education (nor good philosophy); but to do so without any discussion is downright crude if not dishonest.

The term 'evolution' means the appearance of new life-forms - new species and bigger categories genus, family, order, class, phylum, kingdom - over time . The idea that no new species have been created since the 6th day tends toward deism, which we reject in favour of theism. We believe God created the universe out of nothing but did not then cast it adrift like some wound-up clockwork toy; He also has sustained it from moment to moment over 1010y. Christians concentrate on the spiritual sustenance from God through prayer, sacraments, etc., but have accorded less attention to God's maintenance of the Garden for us to live in as His stewards while praising Him (that is what we are here for). One among the several senses in which John Morton's life has been dedicated & productive is his tireless advocacy that we conserve this, the only biosphere we know of, which God not only created & sustains but also lived in briefly as a man to inaugurate the Kingdom of God on Earth. The failure of modern man to conserve ecosystems remains one of the most distressing aspects of modern life, but somewhat less so for Mort's staunch advocacy of applied ecology.

Our care, or neglect, of the biosphere will depend on what we believe about how and why it came to be. What can be discerned about the process by which its creation has occurred over time? Fig. 1 shows its time-frame and main catastrophic ice-ages (which appear to have been usually followed by surges of new life-forms). Fig. 2 summarises the main facts of evolution as known from the fossil record .

Science has inferred from a large body of observations that life appeared on our planet as blue-green algae 3 x 109 year BC, complex animals 1 x 109y, mammals 2 x 108y, and man somewhere in the region 106 -105 y BC. Evolution has certainly occurred, in the sense that new life-forms have appeared (mostly in bursts) over billions of years. However, evidence for descent from one to another is much sparser than is often assumed, and is difficult to come by. Many links are missing from the fossil record found to date.

This proliferation of increasingly complex life-forms over time requires explanation - ascription of causes - beyond what has become standard evolution theory viz. random mutation, natural selection, genetics, and population dynamics - the four lines of scientific thinking which have been synthesised into neo-Darwinism. Dogged refusal to discuss is a main mark of ideologies as distinct from schools of thought. We fear that neo-Darwinism has degenerated to such an unfortunate dogmatic or ideological status. In our opinion, evolution theory deserves better.

We are here concerned with the causes of evolution. The evasion of final cause in biology is one explanation (in an age of trendy materialism) of the recent popularity of Richard Dawkins as a vigorous advocate of scientism. Broom has outlined objections to Dawkins’s approach.

Gradualism remains a dominant principle in orthodox Darwinism, although hardly a dominant characteristic of the actual record of evolution, which is mainly discontinuities or saltations.

We stress and deplore the fact that Dawkins attributes to molecules (DNA) the property of intentionality, even creativity in design - properties which, we suggest, cannot belong to molecules.

If evolution is so unplanned & meaningless as Dawkins claims, why does he never avoid goal-laden accounts of the process? Can evolution actually be described in purpose-free language? If not, that fact might suggest that evolution theory should include rather than ignore the concept of final cause.

That Dawkins could be so popular illustrates the need to clarify explanation and cause. What is to be explained in biology, and what will count as a thorough explanation i.e. a full attribution of causes?

In order to promote consideration of causes in biology, we go back to William Paley’s 1802 scenario of finding, during a stroll on a heath, a watch. Paley argued that the evident order of this mechanism would rightly force the finder who studied it to infer the existence of a purposive design, and therefore a purposeful designer. (This reasoning would seem especially warranted if the watch was running when found.) He then argued that the living mechanisms of nature - the complex machinery so evident in biology - must similarly be inferred to have been designed. We believe this argument has been unreasonably neglected and certainly not refuted. Megatime is no substitute for purpose in the creation of coordinated working ecological order.

In the course of advocating revival of Paley's argument, we attempt to bring up to date the definitions of causes.

A scholar of Greek philosophy discussing Aristotle's four causes remarked :-

The aim of wisdom, he says, is to arrive at knowledge of causes and principles. A 'cause' gives the answer to the question 'Why?'. Generally speaking, the cause of anything is the coming to be of a particular form in the appropriate matter: 'matter' and 'form' are then 'causes' of a thing's existence. But for a complete account of the reason why anything comes to be what it is, a further analysis of form is required, and the original two causes become four.

Aristotle's original statement (in his Metaphysics ) is translated in Flew’s textbook :-

Cause means:

(1) that from which, as its constitutive material, something comes, e.g. the bronze of the statue . . . ;
(2) the form or pattern, that is, the account of the-what-is-to-be . . . ;
(3) the source of the first beginning of change or rest, e.g. the man who resolves is a cause, . . . ; and
(4) the end, that for the sake of which, e.g. as health is of walking around. (‘Why is he walking around?’, we say; ‘In order to be healthy’, and having said this we think we have given the cause.) . . .

These are just about all the senses of the word cause, and since the term is multiply ambiguous there are regularly several causes of the same thing; for instance, the making of a statue and the bronze are causes of the statue . . . They are not, however, causes in the same sense, since the one is material and the other efficient.

Flew comments that in ordinary English the word 'cause' would, by someone quite untouched by Aristotelian influences, be applied only to the Efficient and Final causes (not, we may note, the pair favoured by the scientism that I'm criticising).

Two or three of the labels which have so long been standard are less than self-explanatory, or are even confusing - notably 'efficient' - but it is probably too late to change them.

The difference between #2 and #4, which have been termed respectively Formal and Efficient, is not - in these, Aristotle's original definitions - very clear, but it might be fair to define efficient cause as a process leading to a specific new state; and the concept of purpose is clearly discernible in Aristotle's original wording.

Before the more recent decline in philosophy of science, Professor Morton, using science as Aristotle of course could not, clarified the 4 categories of cause in his 1972 'claret cameo'1, which we here paraphrase.

What are the causes of my bottle of claret?

The material cause includes the grape juice and the yeast, materials transformed by the efficient cause into this peculiar substance claret. The efficient cause, as in Aristotle's prototypical example 'the making of a statue', is the action of the yeast on the grape sugars and some minor components, a process resulting in aqueous ethanol and some minor chemicals characteristic of claret.

But my bottle of claret has also a final cause: a person (named Babich) exerted his will to organise suitable vessels & conditions for the substances which are the material cause, and planned a sequence of operations for the purpose of making claret by maximising the likelihood that the efficient cause for claret would operate i.e. the particular biochemical action of the yeast on the grape juice leading to claret.

Aristotle's formal cause is the 'claret idea' in Babich's mind.

The improvement is that the example of efficient cause in Morton's claret cameo makes clearer in terms of chemistry (as the pre-science Aristotle could not) the concept of a process for a purpose. We propose, as a clarification for the age of science, to define the efficient cause of X as a process of change involving matter &/or energy leading characteristically to X.

What then can be said to explain - ascribe the causes of - an organism? The blueprints encoded in DNA are material causes, and operate as parts of efficient causes through the several types of RNA and the many enzymes essential for synthesis of proteins & other biochemicals; but DNA is certainly not a final cause. As Professor Morton has recently put it, DNA is not the kind of thing that can cause other things, as if paints could leap from tubes to create a Turner, or vibrations & percussions form themselves into a work of Mozart. A person implementing a plan - a final cause, like Aristotle's prototypical 'the man who resolves' - is the only way such things can come to be.

If science consists of discovering materials and forms (e.g. species of organism) and elucidating qualitatively & quantitatively the processes - including energy conversions - which result in new physical situations, then material and efficient causes are the only causes science can study.

But we have found no reason to say that no final cause operates in biology. The neo-Darwinist approach simply assumes that efficient causes (with of course the material causes needed for them to operate) suffice to explain evolution. Emergent properties are assumed to be entailed in the impersonal laws of nature, to whatever arbitrary extent may seem desirable in the attempt to evade final cause.

The main exception is obviously technology - and more widely, all human acts to modify the physical world. The only type of final cause - person acting to cause a change - is, in this 'Enlightenment' approach, human will. Thus ‘who designed this watch?’ is an allowed question, but ‘who designed this frog?’ not . This assumption - an implied denial, rather than any reasoning - appears not to have been subjected to much scrutiny.

One point not at issue is that emergent properties are real & important. As matter takes more complex forms, new properties emerge which are absent in the simpler forms. To take an extremely simple example, the molecular substance H2 (ordinary hydrogen) has more types of properties than does atomic hydrogen H, and science (mainly quantum mechanics) has gone some way toward explaining those emergent properties (e.g. vibrations & rotations seen by infra-red & Raman spectroscopy; nuclear magnetic resonance spectra; etc). But a phenomenon such as the emergence of the first seed-plant (a sequoia, 3 x 108y BC), with no known 'proto-sequoia' precursor, represents a scale & co-ordination of emergence requiring more detailed explanation. Science should continue to discover efficient causes in biology, but the working assumption that there are no final causes should not be viewed as a theological fact.

Perhaps the most advanced non-theological attempt to do justice to causes in biology is Waddington's concept, developed further by Sheldrake, of morphogenic fields. Sheldrake's ideas offer a main bridgehead for the re-connecting of science and religion; since we believe this to be a principal task facing today's world, we sketch Sheldrake's two key concepts here.

It is important to distinguish morphogenic fields, the basic contribution of Sheldrake, from his secondary, far less supported, concept 'morphic resonance' which involves changes in the fields.

Sheldrake's concept morphogenic field, directly treaceable to Waddington's concept 'chreode' , reminds us that the set of blueprints in DNA, a set specifying primary structures (i.e. sequences) for two great classes of macromolecules - nucleic acids and proteins - is not sufficient to specify life. Those linear listings may be necessary, but are not sufficient; the central biological problems of development and of adaptation have not been illuminated by hypothetical models, let alone facts, for how DNA sequences might co-ordinate these processes. The forming of an organism in development requires specifications for when, and where and how fast, to build from each respective DNA blueprint. Can, as a matter of logic, such a development plan be discovered by 'The Human Genome Project', which is only DNA sequencing? The chreode into which a fertilised frog egg grows, to become a frog rather than a dog, is a set of co-ordinating instructions which science has scarcely if at all begun to glimpse, and arguably cannot. It is, according to Sheldrake, a morphogenic field - a formative influence which pre-exists outside the physical universe. Sheldrake also ascribes reparative growth to morphogenic fields, e.g. regrowth of limbs by some animals after amputation. These fields seem to us wholly consistent with theism. We postulate that morphogenic fields are a means of God's action in biology - a means of creating, maintaining, & modifying species.

Sheldrake points out that the 'behaviour' of a TV set - the showing of homunculi on the screen - might well provoke one who had never seen such a thing to seek within the set those homunculi; but the search would reveal only components arranged to resonate with an electromagnetic field.

It may perhaps be not too loose to suggest that morphogenic fields are a means for God's formal causes (e.g. the 'frog plan') to get implemented in the physical world. I would like to suggest further that our formal causes (e.g. Babich's 'claret idea') get implemented as efficient causes by means which are essentially unknown but which may be some variety or analogue of morphogenic fields. How spirit moves matter is a question regarding not only divine action but also our immediate physiology.

The concept of morphogenic fields has stood for two decades as the only serious idea on offer for biologists who ask what is, so to speak, immediately behind the biological phenomena of metabolic maps, nucleic acid sequences, neuron pulses, muscle contractions, etc. Today many if not most scientists assume that nothing behind the superficial is needed - having never heard of half of Aristotle's 4 categories of cause. This is the stance of such main proponents of scientism as Dawkins. We believe Sheldrake has made good progress on integration of all 4 causes toward a more comprehensive theory of biology.

A decade after his original formulation of his secondary concept, morphic resonance, the empirical evidence for it summarised in Sheldrake's most recent book on his theory was still slight. The concept, evidently difficult to demonstrate, is that a given efficient cause becomes more likely to happen after it has occurred once, e.g. crystallisation of a novel organic chemical, because the earlier occurrences modify the relevant morphogenic field. The dearth of evidence does not prove that morphic resonance is unreal; it may just be inconveniently rare for controlled, systematically repeatable observation. The Flynn effect - the startling improvement in IQ test performances over a few decades - may well be an example of morphic resonance.

This postulated change-mechanism is to the fields themselves roughly as mutation is to routine accurate heredity. In each process the secondary phenomenon is much less readily observed even if provoked (e.g. by an artificial mutagen, in the case of mutations) let alone at minimal rates (e.g. caused by natural radiation or minimal irreducible error rates in DNA replication).

Sheldrake assumes, for simplicity, that morphogenic fields are not attenuated in time or space. This does seem a convenient provisional axiom, but refinements will presumably follow. As for numbers, the exposure of the 'hundredth monkey' myth as wishful thinking still leaves almost all relevant possibilities open. The power of groupthink, let alone prayer, is difficult to assess scientifically - but not therefore unreal.

Our main contention is that evolution cannot be explained by only material and efficient causes. They are necessary but not sufficient for the task. The chemical materials are necessary, as are the elaboratings of metabolic pathways within organisms and ecochemical cycles amongst them. But the patterns of evolution cannot have been produced by the mere outworkings of the laws of physics & chemistry. Ecological order, the grandest mechanism, implies design and therefore final cause. Consciousness is if anything even more glaringly not explained by mere efficient causes in biochemistry & biophysics .

We therefore return to Morton's exposition of the Four Causes: if the final cause - the person Babich - is required to explain the bottle of claret, mustn't we conclude that the living world is caused (in mysterious ways) by God's creative actions according to His plan? The efficient causes of organisms, seen in the record of evolution, require for explanation the final cause - God - working out his formal causes. (I recommend here, in passing, reflection on 'the Alpha and the Omega'; e.g. in The Millennium will formal cause have merged with efficient cause?)

I now proceed to interpret my original discipline, Biochemistry, on the understanding I just outlined.

A scientist contemplating any living organism can ask three types of question which may be vernacularly put:-

What's In There?

What's It Doing In There?

How Does It Know What to Do In There?

These three questions - historically, tackled in that order (with overlaps in time) - correspond respectively to Aristotle's material, efficient, and final causes.

1 'What's In There?'

The list of biochemicals, the material constituents of organisms, includes many minerals in various chemical states, but most famously compounds of the element carbon.

Scientists call compounds of carbon 'organic', and the branch of chemistry analysing & synthesising carbon compounds is called organic chemistry. Millions of organic compounds are theoretically possible, and about one million are known, most of them not believed to occur naturally. No other element than carbon exhibits anything like this complexity in its chemistry. Vague talk of alternative biochemistry based on silicon is low-grade science fiction. Biochemistry is aqueous organic chemistry.

Until the early 19th C. - well into the age of 'Enlightenment' - chemists generally accepted that, while organic compounds such as indigo were susceptible of analysis to discover their molecular structures, artificial synthesis of an organic compound was subject to a subtle quasi-religious aura of impossibility or, at least, peculiar extreme difficulties. By the first artificial test-tube synthesis of an organic compound Wöhler in 1828 broke down the mystique. He made urea, an organic compound having a simple 8-atom molecule, identical to the main nitrogenous organic component of the urine from many types of animal. Synthetic organic chemistry then flourished magnificently, earning many Nobel prizes; and today even modified genes get synthesised in the lab (but only with the crucial selective catalyses of enzymes biosynthesised by, and then separated from, living organisms).

There certainly are further biochemicals to be discovered, but by the early 20th C. the catalogue was beginning - rather like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle - to make enough sense to allow asking the next question.

2 'What's It Doing In There?'

Some sketchy list of biochemicals having been compiled in the heroic age of 'natural product' organic chemistry, it became practicable to begin the search for metabolic pathways - the network of chemical reactions which build up (anabolism) and break down (catabolism) biochemicals within living cells.

Another category of what's 'doing' in living organisms is electrical processes, notably in nerves. These are conventionally assumed to be reducible to biochemistry. Genes are assumed to encode the full instructions for macromolecules, importantly proteins but also nucleic acids (RNA & DNA), and bioelectricity is assumed to be caused by the cooperating behaviour of some of these macromolecules along with lipids (fatty compounds) and some carbohydrates, in membranes. Similarly analysed are other transductions e.g. of chemical energy to mechanical energy in muscles. The discipline of physiology deals with these electrical and mechanical aspects of life, but the assumption is prevalent that those phenomena can be reduced to biochemistry.

By the mid-1960s J D Watson could advance (in the first edition of his textbook Molecular Biology of the Gene ) some loose arguments that perhaps one-third of the metabolic pathways were known, for one species - a favourite subject of biochemists, the paradigmatic simple single-celled bacterium Escherichia coli. A vague feeling of quasi-completeness set in, at least for this and a few other relatively well-studied microbes. No longer did many biochemistry laboratories pursue discovery of further metabolic pathways; biochemists pressed on to the third category of biochemical question.

3 'How Does It Know What to Do In There?'

It is all very well to have a reasonably coherent picture of metabolic pathways - some idea of 'what's doing in there' - but how is this complex co-ordinated system unfolded as a frog zygote develops into a frog rather than a dog? This, the problem of development, had stimulated classical biologists to remarkable discoveries in embryology. The pattern of an organism's development as simply displayed within that species' life cycle had been investigated in some detail in a wide range of species. Restorative potentials were explored after various experimental ablations of anatomical or chemical parts. Patterns of biochemical coordination in time & space were explored in molecular detail, e.g. the biosynthesis of chlorophyll as a plant first meets light, or the biosynthesis of haemoglobin in mammalian cells specialised to produce this iron complex.

Development has been theorised as the successive expression of genes. The standard model has depicted the gene - in a cell nucleus or mitochondrion or chloroplast or plasmid or virus - as a stretch of DNA (or in some viruses RNA) constituting the linearly-encoded specifications to guide the synthesis of corresponding RNA, translated in most cases into corresponding protein molecules. Since the thousands of enzymes acting to catalyse their respective reactions within the metabolic pathways are proteins, the general model emerges that development is largely a matter of synthesising, at suitable places & times, the appropriate amounts of the proteins - more generally, the macromolecules - which function in timely coordination to cause the dynamic network of chemical, electrical & mechanical processes occurring in living organisms.

Our first question asked for a static list. The second question was in essence dynamical - what processes occur in life? The third question not only asks about changing rates of biochemical reactions but also leads us to distinguish the different kinds of causes operating in biology.

If to explain a bottle of claret requires a final cause, how can a frog be assumed not to have been designed?

Biochemistry & physiology fall entirely within the categories of material and efficient causes. Regarding ontogeny, and perhaps even more strongly regarding phylogeny, such explanations - no matter how complete in themselves - should not be deemed to constitute between them total explanation in biology.

The assumption to omit final cause in biological theory has been little discussed. This assumption is a most important aspect of the popular attitude scientific atheism. But is it better than mere question-begging? I conspue its furtive role as an unstated axiom of many modern scientists.

Here is the comment of a prominent (USA) intellectual regarding our basic argument.

My hunch is that complexity among organisms will gradually become understandable within a broadly Darwinian framework, just as Dawkins has proposed. It's always a mistake, I believe, to take the still-unsolved puzzles of the natural world as evidence that they require a creator; this has been disproved at every juncture, and I'm pretty sure the process of secularizing nature's mysteries will continue.

But do the laws of chemistry show much sign of explaining why the frog appeared in evolution? Is there even a glimpse of neo-Darwinian explanation why the type of algae known as diatoms do not appear in the fossil record until so recently as ca.150M year ago whereas the first algae were ca.3600M year ago? Can neo-Darwinism get far at all in explaining even simple organs in anatomy, let alone ecological behaviour such as migrations of eels or godwits? Sheldrake has argued that the popularisation of neo-Darwinist theory has amounted to little better than the issuing of an endless series of promissory notes. The actual achievements of scientific atheism in explaining life remain extremely slender.

It is not just that scientific atheism has made slower progress than it had hoped - though this sluggishness might be widely admitted. The inadequacy of explanation is not merely quantitative. The more important point is the qualitative distinction: no amount of explanation in the categories of material & efficient causes can suffice to explain life.

Biochemistry & physiology are rightly pursued on the working hypothesis that their discoveries will establish more & more facts in the categories of material & efficient causes; but non-existence of final cause is a working assumption for the purposes of scientific method, rather than a general philosophical axiom let alone a fact of biology.

Absence of final cause has been a most regrettable - crippling, I would argue - assumption in much recent philosophy of science, and in the actual teaching of science to students. This error has been an unadmitted ideological projection onto nature, much like the 'red in tooth & claw' canard - the idea that competition rather than co-operation is the main characteristic of ecosystems - which has been (as Goldsmith has argued in his magnum opus 'The Way') projected onto biology from the ideology known as economics.

I think what has essentially been going on since Darwin & Wallace presented their main idea is misuse of that idea as a weapon for atheists to club religion. The pretence that science can supplant religion, rather than cooperating with it, has been far too influential and should be promptly abandoned. The status of scientist confers no special authority in theology or even epistemology. Omitting half of the 4 causes is an axiom acquiring no valid augmentation of authority from Dawkins, Weinberg, Hawking, or any other scientist.

The end of 'creationism'

Morton brought up to date the 4 causes. We can now see that evolution, as a material process, is an array of efficient causes which cannot bear directly on the question of final causes (though it does give hints, explored in natural theology).

To admit evolution as a fact is not at all to deny creation but only to say that it has been more or less continuous. For a theist, as opposed to a deist, the concept of God's constant creative participation in the world is essential; the idea that novel species ceased to be created after the 6th day is more in the nature of deism and can hardly be claimed to give God more credit or respect.

The big bang and the subsequent workings of the laws of physics & chemistry - a dazzling set of efficient causes of the world we now live in - hardly begin to explain why organisms came into existence, or why they so marvellously cooperate in ecosystems.

The real issue is not the mischievous waste of time misleadingly called "creation science" which diverts thought into the phoney dispute 'evolution v. creation' . The real issue is realistic explanation v. invalid neglect of final cause.

---

Dr Don Nield: Again I have no question but a comment. I think Drs Broom & Mann should perhaps be a little more careful in their terminology in talking about neo-Darwinism. Both speakers introduced the idea quite correctly - it is just the combination of genetics, especially as developed 1920-50, with the natural selection proposed by Darwin. But in fact many of those who developed neo-Darwinism were Christians. Shouldn't we distinguish neo-Darwinism from Dawkinsism?

Mann: That's a fruitful suggestion - any contemptuous focussing on Dawkins is very welcome to me [laughter]. He's a disgrace to science [laughter]. I'm glad you can laugh at that - I can't. I'm worried when science is disgraced to the extent of his selling millions of books. There's something very wrong with the public status of science when that kind of rubbish can sell to that extent. Sheldrake, by contrast, is in a different class - he's getting down to business; he's acknowledging all 4 causes, whereas Dawkins (while of course not being so helpful as to say so) is flagging away 2 of the 4 causes. It's a travesty - a shocking bout of slum-dwelling in the history of intellectual activity.

Q: In the new age of quantum technology, when we find that time itself is a variable, might we not find in the future when the blinkers are taken from our eyes, maybe the Six Day notion is still on because Time itself changes in length? We all know that the atomic clock that goes from here to the moon & back runs slower than the one that stays on Earth.

Mann: I don't think that will get you very far at all in explaining the difference between 6 days and 6 billion years. The apparent variation in time to which you allude is not really cogent to anything I've discussed today. And here let me mention that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle which is intimately tied up with the realm of thinking you've referred to shows very little promise indeed regarding any of the questions I've touched on. It's essentially blind; it gives no hint of final or formal cause; it's just a source of randomness, which is not what we need to explain evolution.

Finlay: I see efficient and material causes as being rightly the subject matter of science. Final and formal causes are personal categories and therefore cannot ever be suitable for scientific investigation.

Mann: Yes!

Finlay: So it's not that formal & final causes can ever be biology; but the question is whether we add by faith personal causes to our biology or do we dismiss personal causes from our biology. The biology itself is the same.

Mann: Yes I think that's a very reasonable approach. Of course, it's always tempting to say the province of religion doesn't overlap with the province of science and therefore they can't come into conflict (let alone war according to A. D. White). There is some truth in that line, but it won't quite do; they do in fact overlap, and indeed we want them to overlap. We want a new biology to stop being so fixated by materialism and to explore seriously, as Sheldrake has led us to do, how biology could at last get interested anew in how final and formal causes are to be understood as affecting life. I don't want any more materialistic biology; I've pointed to main thinkers who are giving us some leads for re-integrating strictly 'scientific' biology with a much wider view. I commend especially Professor Morton's paper in the Festschrift which will give you more leadership than you've yet seen.

---

1 John Morton Man, Science and God pp14-17 Auckland & London: Collins 1972
2 e.g. Descartes to Mersenne 1632 "I expect soon to be able to calculate the position of every star"
3 L Margulis & K V Schwartz Five Kingdoms Freeman 1998
4 (compiled in collaboration with Mr Art Haughey and Assoc. Prof. Jack Grant-Mackie)
5 N D Broom Ecologist 28 (1) 23-28 (199; much more detail in idem 'How Blind is The Watchmaker?' Aldershot: Ashgate 1998; revised edn. 2001 Downers Grove: IVP
6 M E J Taylor Greek Philosophy - an introduction pp120-121 London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press 1924
7 A Flew Introduction to Western Philosophy p159 London: Thames & Hudson 1989
8 (but note that a person who tries to patent a transgenic organism is claiming to be a final cause)
9 It is possible to imagine reasons why Sheldrake normally inserts another syllable to say 'morphogenetic'.
10 C H Waddington Towards a Theoretical Biology 2 vols Edinburgh Univ. Press 1969
11 R Sheldrake The Rebirth of Nature pp88-90 Century 1990
12 J R Flynn 'Massive IQ gains in 14 nations: what IQ tests really measure' Psych. Bull. 101 171-191 1980
13 M Possel & R Amundson 'Senior Researcher Comments on the Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon in Japan', Skeptical Inquirer May/June 1996
14 I remark here that Heisenberg uncertainty is very unpromising as a source of free will, much as random mutation is a most unpromising source of order in ecology.
15 'Biochemical Pathways' wall-chart Mannheim: Boehringer Chemicals semi-annual
16 Robert Mann & Neil Broom 'Creationism v. evolution but not creation v. evolution'Stimulus 8 (2) 16-20 (2000)


The Big Thing from small beginnings
- reflections on Pentecost
Robert Mann
slightly adapted from Real World 1998

Once Jesus had ascended back to heaven, the most important thing left for his faithful few was the Holy Spirit. That Spirit remains for us today The Big Thing - our most important asset, the continuing inspiration which we require to carry on proclaiming the Good News and living by it as best we can. But this important Third Person of the Holy Trinity became known to humanity through a quiet beginning.

On the festival of Pentecost, we celebrate the birth of the church as recounted in Acts 2 - a flamboyant occasion of doubtless crucial significance on that historic day and ever since. The so-called pentecostal sects emphasise visible direct operations of the spirit in group worship today, e.g. speaking in tongues.

Some more elderly congregations tend to prefer the name Whitsunday, and to read for that day's lesson John 20 19-23, a far quieter occasion. For those who have never spoken in tongues, let alone seen holy fire on each others' heads, that event at the closing of the first Easter Day is perhaps especially precious.

I would go so far as to suggest that, whatever Anglicans may think of 'pentecostal' tendencies, the Anglican church is open to the accusation of having gone too far the other way - too little emphasis on the Holy Spirit. In any case I wish to argue that a better understanding of the Holy Spirit will be encouraged if both John 20 19-23 and Acts 2 1-41 are embraced in preaching on Pentecost.

Jesus prefigured, with memorable if mysterious breath, a continuing spiritual presence, at his resurrected appearance amongst the disciples late in the evening of the day when Mary Magdalene had found the tomb empty. Translations typically quote him, having breathed upon them, "Receive the Holy Spirit". However, the Archbishop of Canterbury widely viewed as this century's most talented, William Temple, in his valuable book 'Readings in St. John's Gospel' (Macmillan 1938; reprinted through 1955) translates instead

"Receive holy spirit (or breath)".
Temple specifically insists on this wording by adding, in explanation,
not "the Holy Spirit"
and goes on immediately to expound:
What is bestowed is not the Divine Person Himself but the power and energy of which He is the source. Earlier it had been said not yet was there spirit, because Jesus was not yet glorified (John 7, 39). But now that glorification is complete, and it is possible for the new divine energy, which operates through man's response to the manifested love of God, to begin its activity . . . only so far as the Church in and through its members fulfils the condition - Receive holy spirit - can it discharge this function.

The gospels were written in Greek. The word for spirit in the John 20 passage is simply the same as for breath (pneuma), the common word for spirit in the NT. The word paracletos appears in the NT only 5 times, all by St John (Jn 14:16, 14:26, 15:26, 16:7; 1Jn 2:1). It seems straightforwardly justified therefore to adopt Temple's reading of the John 20 passage, rather than the more popular translation which infers that the Holy Spirit was conferred on that occasion.

The persistence of the popular translation - as if omission of "the" in gospel Greek could be casual or alternatively from some pious tampering - I must leave to biblical scholars to review. It would appear, e.g. from the biography by Iremonger, and generally from his fluent & profound arguments using Greek throughout his works, that Temple was a better Greek scholar than most or all today. J B Phillips in the late 1950s simply concurred with Temple's translation, whereas the prolix Rudolph Schnackenberg (1990) ignores it. I find Temple's reading much the more convincing.

He was, in 1938, very quiet in mentioning the error; and he did not comment at all on its possible origins. One may infer that Temple thought it would be needlessly critical of highly respected authorities if he were to make any fuss of this correction. (Would that many a modern stirrer were so thoughtful & restrained! It is easy to point out defects in the powers that be; but unless we have a good purpose in view, and a better plan, we should not do so.)

Pious insertions have occurred in the fraught history of our precious scriptures, e.g. the minor confusion in 1 John 5 7-8 complained of by Sir Isaac Newton. Even the Great Commission (the final 3 verses of St Matthew's gospel) is suspected of being a later addition rather than actual words of Christ. It would appear that "Receive the Holy Spirit" is a comparable pious embellishment of the Lord's more subtle words "Receive holy spirit".

An interpretation thus seems open that the John 20 phrase is a gentle prefiguring - with memorable breath, but nevertheless gentle compared to the mighty wind when, 50 days later, the faithful few must have needed firmer reassurance. I do not dispute Temple's toning-down in 1938 of his correction, but I do suggest that today it is due for acceptance rather than continued ignore.

Temple's reading is consistent with the promise in Acts 1 "not many days after this you shall be baptised with the Holy Spirit", implied if not clearly presented as coming just before the Ascension, and certainly after Easter.

Within two months the few went through the agony & despair of Calvary; the eerie encouragement of the empty tomb; the quiet visitation later that day, unrecognised in that moment, on the road to Emmaeus; the Resurrected Lord that evening in the locked room conferring on the disciples awesome power after breathing holy spirit over them; other resurrection appearances, once to 500; the loss - if triumphant - of the Ascension; and then 50 days after Easter the overwhelming manifestations of the Holy Spirit. Evidently the emergence of the Paraclete in this world was a gradual process rather than sudden. (This should come as no surprise; Christ himself within his earthly life blossomed in a process of development - "day by day like us he grew".)

The question for us now is, therefore, what are we today doing to utilise and contribute to what Temple called the new divine energy, which operates through man's response to the manifested love of God. This two-way process empowers, if dauntingly, the human species of the Christian era. The Holy Spirit, though of simple beginnings in earthly emergence, has become The Big Thing for us today. Are we with it - availing ourselves of this power, and also contributing to its working? Let us pray, feeding on him in our heart with thanksgiving, for faith to do so - believing that one prayer which is always answered is the prayer for stronger faith.