The Natl Bus Rev pubd a shortened version.

LEGAL CONTROL OR WIMMINS' WHIMS ?

Robert Mann

The flurry of publicity over Lyprinol raised grave issues regarding
legal regulation of medicines.

Lyprinol is a new concentrated extract of unusual fatty acids from
the New Zealand green-lipped (also called green-shell) mussel. This
purported drug results from one simple type of biotechnology (not genetic
engineering, which is only one category within biotech.). It should not
be confused with the well-established capsules of freeze-dried mussel meat,
which have helped some arthritis sufferers and are at worst just good food.

What a coup for orchestrated public relations! The exclusive TV1
news story, emphasizing the 'natural' image of lyprinol purified by German
industry from our green-shell mussel, was carefully timed to sell 20,000
packets at $50 each.

The Cancer Society, and most notably its leading scientist Dr Bruce
Baguley, warn that this material has not been tested as medicines are
required to be tested - on animals and then on suitable human volunteers.
The Ministry of Health, which had not heard of any potential marketing of
lyprinol in our country, determined within days of the media splurge that
claims for lyprinol as a treatment of cancer, asthma, and arthritis were
being made on an internet website to which inquirers are directed by the
commercial label of lyprinol.

Many will be dismayed at this further use of our country for trials
by foreign drug or 'food supplement' companies. Already we have allowed a
large commercial experiment using TV advertisements manipulating obese
people to press their medicos for a prescription drug claimed to decrease
fatness.

The law controlling medicines is evidently under attack.

Things then got worse a fortnight after the Lyprinol caper as
hormone replacement therapy (HRT) was promoted on TV in the form of a
"natural" progesterone cream formulated by an Auckland pharmacist who was
also shown processing melatonin - a drug which had been announced as
banned from over-the-counter sale. It is impossible to tell from the
garbled TV report what may be meant in this context by the term 'natural'.

Now be afraid - be very afraid: the unquestioned TV authority on
the risks & benefits of hormone replacement therapy turns out to be Ms
Coney who had previously campaigned against HRT but now condemns this
over-the-counter cream version as terribly untested whereas she fully
understands, pros & cons, and is now apparently tolerating, the usual oral
HRT.

This "expert" gained power by posing as more expert than a
much-loved specialist in the medical school and the leading women's
teaching hospital. With Bunkle and Cartwright she advocated sampling
women's private parts for a test which was a notoriously poor predictor of
cancer. This Pap smear had been widely adopted already, and played some
part in diagnosis by specialists, but was not much use.

Now this weak test uses $6M/y [2004: >$35M/y] to reach, sometimes
by lay smear-takers, 90% of the relevant women. The death rate from cancer
of the cervix has been falling gradually for some decades; is now as low as
90 deaths each year; and has not been noticeably affected by the Pap smear
screening.

The Auckland medical school's contribution to this TV story was a
lecturer in women's health, who told women which symptom to allege if they
wanted her to help them get this drug-cream. She agreed there had been
only one study reported, but she did not appear to be undertaking any study
herself.

TV producers have thus presented as the medical authorities on this
HRT-cream one supplier, one promoter, and one disputer who is a known
unreliable judge of matters medical.

It's a wimminsLib cause - let women have what they want, intone
both the husband of the woman shown using the HRT-cream and the pharmacist
directly challenging the statutory regulation of medicines.

Medicines are supposed to be regulated by law for efficacy and
safety. To overthrow this protective system because maximising women's
choice is now a top ethical priority of our culture is to concede that
WimminsLib has taken over.

.....................................

Dr Mann, a biochemist, served on the Toxic Substances Board for its first
dozen years. In the University of Auckland he was senior lecturer in
Biochemistry and then the first (and last) senior lecturer in Environmental
Studies.

Kenneth my man,

With some hesitation I fw the anon item below. It came
to me from an old friend, but I don't know where he got it.

I've not looked into Pearl Harbor thoroughly, but what little I
know suggests Roosevelt knew it was coming and decided he needed such
losses to overwhelm the Lindberg isolationists. That all the aircraft
carriers were away at sea would fit this theory.

One theory I've not heard but which I consider credible is that
Stalin did believe the authoritative warnings (from Churchill and from
Richard Sorge) of the imminent German invasion in June 1941, but *wanted*
the enormous losses to weld the Soviet peoples together. On my theory, it
was *the* trap play of all history - and worked, resulting not only in
ejecting the Germans from the USSR but also the Red Army pressing far
across Europe and subjugating numerous nations for Stalinism.

Admittedly, neither Dubya nor anyone else I know of could rival
Stalin for the title 'history's most vicious paranoid'. But then, I have
not believed Dubya is running anything much - I take him for the bufoon
he appears to be. I could believe that the Dubya regime wanted 'a new
Pearl Harbor'.

BTW the sinking of the Lusitania was largely facilitated by
Churchill in a similar spirit. (Depite what Kissinger foolishly writes,
this did not work; the USA didn't join the war for over a year.)

Do you regard the anon below as useful?

cheers

R

http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2004/08/coincidence-theorists-guide-to-911.html

The Coincidence Theorist's Guide to 9/11

That governments have permitted terrorist acts against their own people,
and have even themselves been perpetrators in order to find strategic
advantage is quite likely true, but this is the United States we're talking
about.

That intelligence agencies, financiers, terrorists and narco-criminals have
a long history together is well established, but the Nugan Hand Bank, BCCI,
Banco Ambrosiano, the P2 Lodge, the CIA/Mafia anti-Castro/Kennedy alliance,
Iran/Contra and the rest were a long time ago, so there's no need to rehash
all that. That was then, this is now!

That Jonathan Bush's Riggs Bank has been found guilty of laundering
terrorist funds and fined a US-record $25 million must embarrass his nephew
George, but it's still no justification for leaping to paranoid conclusions.

That George Bush's brother Marvin sat on the board of the Kuwaiti-owned
company which provided electronic security to the World Trade Centre,
Dulles Airport and United Airlines means nothing more than you must admit
those Bush boys have done alright for themselves.

That George Bush found success as a businessman only after the investment
of Osama's brother Salem and reputed al Qaeda financier Khalid bin Mahfouz
is just one of those things - one of those crazy things.

That Osama bin Laden is known to have been an asset of US foreign policy in
no way implies he still is.

That al Qaeda was active in the Balkan conflict, fighting on the same side
as the US as recently as 1999, while the US protected its cells, is merely
one of history's little aberrations.

The claims of Michael Springman, State Department veteran of the Jeddah
visa bureau, that the CIA ran the office and issued visas to al Qaeda
members so they could receive training in the United States, sound like the
sour grapes of someone who was fired for making such wild accusations.

That one of George Bush's first acts as President, in January 2001, was to
end the two-year deployment of attack submarines which were positioned
within striking distance of al Qaeda's Afghanistan camps, even as the
group's guilt for the Cole bombing was established, proves that a
transition from one administration to the next is never an easy task.

That so many influential figures in and close to the Bush White House had
expressed, just a year before the attacks, the need for a "new Pearl
Harbor" before their militarist ambitions could be fulfilled, demonstrates
nothing more than the accidental virtue of being in the right place at the
right time.

That the company PTECH, founded by a Saudi financier placed on America's
Terrorist Watch List in October 2001, had access to the FAA's entire
computer system for two years before the 9/11 attack, means he must not
have been such a threat after all.

That whistleblower Indira Singh was told to keep her mouth shut and forget
what she learned when she took her concerns about PTECH to her employers
and federal authorities, suggests she lacked the big picture. And that the
Chief Auditor for J P Morgan Chase told Singh repeatedly, as she answered
questions about who supplied her with what information, that "that person
should be killed," suggests he should take an anger management seminar.

That on May 8, 2001, Dick Cheney took upon himself the job of co-ordinating
a response to domestic terror attacks even as he was crafting the
administration's energy policy which bore implications for America's
military, circumventing the established infrastructure and ignoring the
recommendations of the Hart-Rudman report, merely shows the VP to be
someone who finds it hard to delegate.

That the standing order which covered the shooting down of hijacked
aircraft was altered on June 1, 2001, taking discretion away from field
commanders and placing it solely in the hands of the Secretary of Defense,
is simply poor planning and unfortunate timing. Fortunately the error has
been corrected, as the order was rescinded shortly after 9/11.

That in the weeks before 9/11, FBI agent Colleen Rowley found her
investigation of Zacarias Moussaoui so perversely thwarted that her
colleagues joked that bin Laden had a mole at the FBI, proves the
stress-relieving virtue of humour in the workplace.

That Dave Frasca of the FBI's Radical Fundamentalist Unit received a
promotion after quashing multiple, urgent requests for investigations into
al Qaeda assets training at flight schools in the summer of 2001 does
appear on the surface odd, but undoubtedly there's a good reason for it,
quite possibly classified.

That FBI informant Randy Glass, working an undercover sting, was told by
Pakistani intelligence operatives that the World Trade Center towers were
coming down, and that his repeated warnings which continued until weeks
before the attacks, including the mention of planes used as weapons, were
ignored by federal authorities, is simply one of the many "What Ifs" of
that tragic day.

That over the summer of 2001 Washington received many urgent, senior-level
warnings from foreign intelligence agencies and governments - including
those of Germany, France, Great Britain, Russia, Egypt, Israel, Morocco,
Afghanistan and others - of impending terror attacks using hijacked
aircraft and did nothing, demonstrates the pressing need for a new
Intelligence Czar.

That John Ashcroft stopped flying on commercial aircraft in July 2001 on
account of security considerations had nothing to do with warnings
regarding September 11, because he said so to the 9/11 Commission.

That former lead counsel for the House David Schippers says heíd taken to
John Ashcroft's office specific warnings heíd learned from FBI agents in
New York of an impending attack - even naming the proposed dates, names of
the hijackers and the targets - and that the investigations had been
stymied and the agents threatened, proves nothing but David Schipperís
pathetic need for attention.

That Garth Nicolson received two warnings from contacts in the intelligence
community and one from a North African head of state, which included
specific site, date and source of the attacks, and passed the information
to the Defense Department and the National Security Council to evidently no
effect, clearly amounts to nothing, since virtually nobody has ever heard
of him.

That in the months prior to September 11, self-described US intelligence
operative Delmart Vreeland sought, from a Toronto jail cell, to get US and
Canadian authorities to heed his warning of his accidental discovery of
impending catastrophic attacks is worthless, since Vreeland was a dubious
character, notwithstanding the fact that many of his claims have since been
proven true.

That FBI Special Investigator Robert Wright claims that agents assigned to
intelligence operations actually protect terrorists from investigation and
prosecution, that the FBI shut down his probe into terrorist training
camps, and that he was removed from a money-laundering case that had a
direct link to terrorism, sounds like yet more sour grapes from a
disgruntled employee.

That George Bush had plans to invade Afghanistan on his desk before 9/11
demonstrates only the value of being prepared.

The suggestion that securing a pipeline across Afghanistan figured into the
White House's calculations is as ludicrous as the assertion that oil played
a part in determining war in Iraq.

That Afghanistan is once again the worldís principal heroin producer is an
unfortunate reality, but to claim the CIA is still actively involved in the
narcotics trade is to presume bad faith on the part of the agency.

Mahmood Ahmed, chief of Pakistanís ISI, must not have authorized an al
Qaeda payment of $100,000 to Mohammed Atta days before the attacks, and was
not meeting with senior Washington officials over the week of 9/11, because
I didn't read anything about him in the official report.

That Porter Goss met with Ahmed the morning of September 11 in his capacity
as Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence has no
bearing whatsoever upon his recent selection by the White House to head the
Central Intelligence Agency.

That Goss's congressional seat encompasses the 9/11 hijackers' Florida base
of operation, including their flight schools, is precisely the kind of
meaningless factoid a conspiracy theorist would bring up.

It's true that George HW Bush and Dick Cheney spent the evening of
September 10 alone in the Oval Office, but what's wrong with old colleagues
catching up? And it's true that George HW Bush and Shafig bin Laden,
Osama's brother, spent the morning of September 11 together at a board
meeting of the Carlyle Group, but the bin Ladens are a big family.

That FEMA arrived in New York on Sept 10 to prepare for a scheduled
biowarfare drill, and had a triage centre ready to go that was larger and
better equipped than the one that was lost in the collapse of WTC 7, was a
lucky twist of fate.

Newsweek's report that senior Pentagon officials cancelled flights on Sept
10 for the following day on account of security concerns is only newsworthy
because of what happened the following morning.

That George Bush's telephone logs for September 11 do not exist should
surprise no one, given the confusion of the day.

That Mohamed Atta attended the International Officer's School at Maxwell
Air Force Base, that Abdulaziz Alomari attended Brooks Air Force Base
Aerospace Medical School, that Saeed Alghamdi attended the Defense Language
Institute in Monterey merely shows it is a small world, after all.

That Lt Col Steve Butler, Vice Chancellor for student affairs of the
Defense Language Institute during Alghamdi's terms, was disciplined,
removed from his post and threatened with court martial when he wrote "Bush
knew of the impending attacks on America. He did nothing to warn the
American people because he needed this war on terrorism. What is ...
contemptible is the President of the United States not telling the American
people what he knows for political gain," is the least that should have
happened for such disrespect shown his Commander in Chief.

That Mohammed Atta dressed like a Mafioso, had a stripper girlfriend,
smuggled drugs, was already a licensed pilot when he entered the US,
enjoyed pork chops, drank to excess and did cocaine, was closer to
Europeans than Arabs in Florida, and included the names of defence
contractors on his email list, proves how dangerous the radical
fundamentalist Muslim can be.

That 43 lbs of heroin was found on board the Lear Jet owned by Wally
Hilliard, the owner of Atta's flight school, just three weeks after Atta
enrolled - the biggest seizure ever in Central Florida - was just bad luck.
That Hilliard was not charged shows how specious the claims for conspiracy
truly are.

That Hilliard's plane had made 30 round trips to Venezuela with the same
passengers who always paid cash, that the plane had been supplied by a pair
of drug smugglers who had also outfitted CIA drug runner Barry Seal, and
that 9/11 commissioner Richard ben-Veniste had been Seal's attorney before
Seal's murder, shows nothing but the lengths to which conspiracists will go
to draw sinister conclusions.

Reports of insider trading on 9/11 are false, because the SEC investigated
and found only respectable investors who will remain nameless involved, and
no terrorists, so the windfall profit-taking was merely, as ever,
coincidental.

That heightened security for the World Trade Centre was lifted immediately
prior to the attacks illustrates that it always happens when you least
expect it.

That Hani Hanjour, the pilot of Flight 77, was so incompetent he could not
fly a Cessna in August, but in September managed to fly a 767 at excessive
speed into a spiraling, 270-degree descent and a level impact of the first
floor of the Pentagon, on the only side that was virtually empty and had
been hardened to withstand a terrorist attack, merely demonstrates that
people can do almost anything once they set their minds to it.

That none of the flight data recorders were said to be recoverable even
though they were located in the tail sections, and that until 9/11, no
solid-state recorder in a catastrophic crash had been unrecoverable, shows
how there's a first time for everything.

That Mohammed Atta left a uniform, a will, a Koran, his driver's license
and a "how to fly planes" video in his rental car at the airport means he
had other things on his mind.

The mention of Israelis with links to military-intelligence having been
arrested on Sept 11 videotaping and celebrating the attacks, of an Israeli
espionage ring surveiling DEA and defense installations and trailing the
hijackers, and of a warning of impending attacks delivered to the Israeli
company Odigo two hours before the first plane hit, does not deserve a
response. That the stories also appeared in publications such as Ha'aretz
and Forward is a sad display of self-hatred among certain elements of the
Israeli media.

That multiple military wargames and simulations were underway the morning
of 9/11 - one simulating the crash of a plane into a building; another, a
live-fly simulation of multiple hijackings - and took many interceptors
away from the eastern seaboard and confused field commanders as to which
was a real hijacked aircraft and which was a hoax, was a bizarre
coincidence, but no less a coincidence.

That the National Military Command Center ops director asked a rookie
substitute to stand his watch at 8:30 am on Sept. 11 is nothing more than
bad timing.

That a recording made Sept 11 of air traffic controllers describing what
they had witnessed was destroyed by an FAA official who crushed it in his
hand, cut the tape into little pieces and dropped them in different trash
cans around the building, is something no doubt that overzealous official
wishes he could undo.

That the FBI knew precisely which Florida flight schools to descend upon
hours after the attacks should make every American feel safer knowing their
federal agents are on the ball.

That a former flight school executive believes the hijackers were "double
agents," and says about Atta and associates, "Early on I gleaned that these
guys had government protection. They were let into this country for a
specific purpose," and was visited by the FBI just four hours after the
attacks to intimidate him into silence, proves he's an unreliable witness,
for the simple reason there is no conspiracy.

That Jeb Bush was on board an aircraft that removed flight school records
to Washington in the middle of the night on Sept 12th demonstrates how
seriously the governor takes the issue of national security.

To insinuate evil motive from the mercy flights of bin Laden family members
and Saudi royals after 9/11 shows the sickness of the conspiratorial
mindset.

Le Figaro's report in October 2001, known to have originated with French
intelligence, that the CIA met Osama bin Laden in a Dubai hospital in July
2001, proves again the perfidy of the French.

That the tape in which bin Laden claims responsibility for the attacks was
released by the State Department after having been found providentially by
US forces in Afghanistan, and depicts a fattened Osama with a broader face
and a flatter nose, proves Osama, and Osama alone, masterminded 9/11.

That at the battle of Tora Bora, where bin Laden was surrounded on three
sides, Special Forces received no order to advance and capture him and were
forced to stand and watch as two Russian-made helicopters flew into the
area where bin Laden was believed hiding, loaded up passengers and returned
to Pakistan, demonstrates how confusing the modern battlefield can be.

That upon returning to Fort Bragg from Tora Bora, the same Special
Operations troops who had been stood down from capturing bin Laden,
suffered a unusual spree of murder/suicides, is nothing more than a series
of senseless tragedies.

Reports that bin Laden is currently receiving periodic dialysis treatment
in a Pakistani medical hospital are simply too incredible to be true.

That the White House went on Cipro September 11 shows the foresightedness
of America's emergency response.

That the anthrax was mailed to perceived liberal media and the Democratic
leadership demonstrates only the perversity of the terrorist psyche.

That the anthrax attacks appeared to silence opponents of the Patriot Act
shows only that appearances can be deceiving.

That the Ames-strain anthrax was found to have originated at Fort Detrick,
and was beyond the capability of all but a few labs to refine, underscores
the importance of allowing the investigation to continue without the
distraction of absurd conspiracy theories.

That Republican guru Grover Norquist has been found to have aided
financiers and supporters of Islamic terror to gain access to the Bush
White House, and is a founder of the Islamic Institute, which the Treasury
Department believes to be a source of funding for al Qaeda, suggests
Norquist is at worst naive, and at best, needs a wider circle of friends.

That the Department of Justice consistently chooses to see accused 9/11
plotters go free rather than permit the courtroom testimony of al Qaeda
leaders in American custody looks bad, but only because we don't have all
the facts.

That the White House balked at any inquiry into the events of 9/11, then
starved it of funds and stonewalled it, was unfortunate, but since the
commission didn't find for conspiracy it's all a non issue anyway.

That the 9/11 commission's executive director and "gatekeeper" Philip
Zelikow was so closely involved in the events under investigation that he
testified before the the commission as part of the inquiry, shows only an
apparent conflict of interest.

That commission chair Thomas Kean is, like George Bush, a Texas oil
executive who had business dealings with reputed al Qaeda financier Khalid
bin Mafouz, suggests Texas is smaller than they say it is.

That co-chair Lee Hamilton has a history as a Bush family "fixer",
including clearing Bush Sr of the claims arising from the 1980 "October
Surprise", is of no concern, since only conspiracists believe there was
such a thing as an October Surprise.

That FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds accuses the agency of intentionally
fudging specific pre-9/11 warnings and harboring a foreign espionage ring
in its translation department, and claims she witnessed evidence of the
semi-official infrastructure of money-laundering and narcotics trade behind
the attacks, is of no account, since John Ashcroft has gagged her with the
rare invocation of "State Secrets Privilege" and retroactively classified
her public testimony. For the sake of national security, let us speak no
more of her.

That, when commenting on Edmond's case, Daniel Ellsberg remarked that
Ashcroft could go to prison for his part in a cover-up, suggests Ellsberg
is giving comfort to the terrorists, and could, if he doesn't wise up, find
himself declared an enemy combatant.

I could go on. And on and on. But I trust you get the point. Which is
simply this: there are no secrets, an American government would never
accept civilian casualties for geostrategic gain, and conspiracies are for
the weak-minded and gullible.

Foreign Policy Research Institute
A Catalyst for Ideas
www.fpri.org

UNDERSTANDING ANTI-AMERICANISM
by Barry Rubin

August 20, 2004

Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in
International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and Senior Fellow of
FPRI. He is co-author, with Judith Colp Rubin, of the just-
published book "Hating America: A History" (Oxford
University Press). This essay is based on his FPRI BookTalk
on August 12, 2004.

UNDERSTANDING ANTI-AMERICANISM

by Barry Rubin

One of the most contentious issues of this presidential
election is the high level of anti-Americanism in the world
today. Is the problem due to an understandable reaction
against the policies of President George W. Bush or rather
the product of forces opposing freedom and democracy?

Like many partisan disputes, this debate misses the point
and mashes the facts to suit a predetermined objective:
whether Bush is the architect of hostility against the
United States or the champion of a free world against
totalitarians and whether Bush or Senator John Kerry would
be a better president.

If one examines anti-Americanism apart from these set
arguments, though, a much more accurate picture emerges.

Anti-Americanism is a phenomenon as old [as], actually even
older, than the United States itself. Although it has gone
through various periods and emphases, the main themes have
remained remarkably consistent, long predating either the
influence of Hollywood or America being a great power
internationally. Two of the most important are the vision of
the United States as a bad society, which threatens to
become the model for the whole world, and that of America as
seeking global conquest.

For example, the first clear statement of anti-Americanism
came from the French lawyer Simon Linguet in the 1780s. The
dregs of Europe, he warned, would build a dreadful society
in America, create a strong army, take over Europe, and
destroy civilization. If one were to be talking about the
spread of notions like democracy and liberty, Linguet's fear
was something of a personal premonition. A few years later,
he was guillotined by the French revolution.

Similarly, the first use of the word "Americanization" has
been traced to an 1867 article in a French journal which
warned that the import of American agricultural machinery
would end with the elimination of French culture. It is no
accident that France has long been the global capital of
anti-Americanism. Indeed, the level of hatred toward the
United States in the 1920s and 1930s, as well as other
decades, has been arguably higher than today.

In considering the roots of anti-Americanism, a dislike of
U.S. policies has often been set off against a disdain for
American values. Yet there are problems with both
explanations. Regarding values, withering criticism and even
hatred often arise among people who share those values in
broad terms. Europeans are also pro-democratic.

Sometimes, of course, criticism may be on target but what is
often being ejected so passionately is either the details
of how America interprets those values or a notion of
American life based on bizarre stereotypes. For instance,
America is seen as typified by capital punishment, yet most
states do not put people to death while many Americans
oppose this. Thus, capital punishment does not typify
America.

By the same token, Americans do not spend all their meals
eating pizza and hamburgers. There is a greater variety of
culinary experiences available in the United States than in
any other country, not to mention the high quality of food
that can be found. Another anti-American technique is to
compare the average or even lowest level of culture or
society in the United States with elite habits in Europe.
The average Frenchman does not spend his time reading
philosophy and eating haute cuisine.

Most important of all, however, may be the fact that the
United States has always been a symbol of modernity.
Whatever people did not like about the way the world was
heading -- urbanization, secularism, mass culture, and so on
-- was portrayed as a specifically American characteristic.
In the Middle East, the nature of American society is even
more distorted and misunderstood than in Europe.

The same basic points apply to U.S. policy. One can like or
dislike any given American action in the world but what
marks the difference between respectful criticism and
contorted, even murderous, hatred? If it is assumed that
American motives are evil (wanting to steal Iraq's oil and
rule the world), then obviously antagonism will prevail.

One question is whether actions are viewed as mistakes or
crimes proving the evil nature of America as imperialistic
and aggressive. Another is if a systematically negative
vision is portrayed, in which anything positive done by the
United States is deliberately ignored while other actions
are made to seem negative or worse than they are.

As to the timing of this particular wave of anti-Americanism
there are different causes. In the Cold War's aftermath, the
United States is the world's most powerful country whose
political, economic, and cultural influence seemed ever-
spreading. It is not surprising that many would perceive
that such a strong power was the great threat to their own
societies and countries. In a real sense, the current
situation is the realization of the two-centuries'-long
nightmare of anti-Americans.

In this context, Bush also seemed to fit long-standing anti-
American stereotypes in every detail of his life and
deportment. The negative image of America is closely tied up
with those who could be portrayed as cowboys, religious,
conservatives, and unintellectual. Being unpopular doesn't
mean being wrong, however, and only the American voters can
determine how they feel about his record and global image.

There is, however, one more extremely important factor that
is virtually always omitted in discussions of anti-
Americanism: self-interest. Those purveying anti-Americanism
have always been those who benefited from doing so, whether
promoting their material well-being or ideas.

Dictators use anti-Americanism to convince their subjects to
support them. Intellectuals and cultural figures have been
the main carriers of anti-Americanism as a weapon against a
country whose products compete with their work. Moreover,
the spread of the American model would greatly reduce their
power and prestige. For Europeans and Middle Easterners,
albeit in far different ways, anti-Americanism seems a good
slogan to unite around.

Come to think of it, the issue is often used similarly
within the United States, as a political tool or a partisan
bludgeon. Actually trying to understand the phenomenon in
its complexity, however, is the only way to respond
successfully to the very real problems it presents us with
today.

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Today's Headlines
ENN DAILY NEWS

Public schools improve nutrition
- On this week's radio program Beyond Organic, join host Jerry Kay -
publisher of the Environmental News Network (ENN.com) - to find out how
public schools are improving nutrition by using fresh and organic produce
and connecting farms to schools.
http://www.enn.com/news/2004-08-19/s_26590.asp

When I arr at Khandallah School in Sep 1946 I found extensive
gardens, next to the main bldg and on the SW hillside toward Clark St.
Within a few y these were bitumen'd over - increasing the scope for the
Traveller Top (probably my first invention) which I welcomed at the time,
but I was wrong; in my opinion of the past quarter-century destroying the
gardens was a bad move.

I think not only gardens but also beehives should be widespread in
schools. Fantasies of 'improved' species, some of them dangerous, will not
be competently appraised by a citizenry unfamiliar with the facts of life.
School gardens are an important part of what to do instead of GMOs.

R

Here is the full text of a new leaflet from the Catholic Institute for
International Relations entitled 'What's wrong with GM?'

One can also download it from:
http://www.ciir.org/content/news/documents/GM_leaflet.pdf

----------------------------------------------------------

WHAT'S WRONG WITH GM?
Why genetically modified crops are bad for people and bad for the environment

Why should we care?

Genetic engineering of crops is a complex and controversial issue. It is also
an issue with far-reaching implications for the environment and for people,
for the way crops are produced and the world s people are fed.

As an agency working for sustainable international development, CIIR is
especially concerned about the impact of genetically modified (GM) crops in
developing countries. We believe that the introduction of GM crops in these
countries will endanger small farmers' livelihoods, undermine poor people's
ability to feed themselves, and increase the pressures on already damaged and
vulnerable environments.

We believe that an alternative approach to agriculture that is
environmentally, economically, culturally and socially sustainable will help
reduce poverty and help protect the environment. In contrast, growing GM
crops will do the opposite.

What are GM crops?

People have been selectively breeding or cross-breeding plants for centuries Â
for example, to adapt them to a particular climate or improve their yield.
What makes genetic engineering radically different from traditional breeding
methods is that genes are transferred between completely unrelated species.
For instance, animal genes are transferred into plants and bacteria genes are
moved across to food crops.

Two main types of GM crops are:

* insecticide crops: these have had genes transferred from a natural bacterium
so that they can act like insecticide plants and kill the pests that eat them
* roundup-ready crops: these have been made tolerant to specific herbicides,
so that when these herbicides are applied only weeds and other plants are
destroyed ("roundup" is a herbicide originally developed by the biotechnology
corporation Monsanto).

Other GM crops include those that have been made resistant to fungal
infections and those that have had their nutritional properties enhanced
(such as "golden rice" which contains vitamin A).

What's wrong with them?

Advocates of GM crops argue that GM crops are good for the environment since
they will reduce the amount of agrochemicals (pesticides and herbicides) that
need to be used in crop production.

However, opponents of GM crops believe that these crops are a threat to the
environment. The claim that GM crops require fewer herbicides and pesticides
has been proved wrong. They require fewer chemicals than conventional crops
in the short term but gradually they need significantly more.(1)

Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) threaten plant biodiversity. Planting GM
crops is not a question of choice: once they are planted somewhere, crops
elsewhere become contaminated by them. This could be especially disastrous
for organic farmers.

For example, although it is illegal to grow GM maize in Mexico, in 2001
researchers found that traditional maize varieties grown by farmers in two
remote Mexican states had been contaminated with GMOs from GM maize.(2)
There are thousands of varieties of maize in Mexico. If contaminated by
GMOs, these precious indigenous varieties could be irretrievably lost.

Some farmers whose conventional crops have been contaminated by GM material
have found themselves obliged to pay fees to biotech corporations (which have
patented the GM material) or face legal action. In the words of a US farmer:
"Farmers are being sued for having GMOs on their property that they did not
buy, do not want, will not use and cannot sell".(3)

GM crops are produced for corporate profit. Seeds, and the chemicals that are
required to grow them, must be bought from the multinational biotech
corporations. Farmers are prohibited from saving and sharing seeds: every
year they must buy more seeds and the associated agrochemicals from the
corporations.

The majority of farmers in developing countries struggle to afford even the
most basic inputs (seeds, fertilisers, etc). Their survival depends on the
age-old practices of selecting, saving and sharing seeds from one year to the
next. GM crops do not allow farmers to do this.

By patenting GM seeds and their associated technologies, biotech corporations
will consolidate their already worrying control over the world food market.
They will exercise a monopoly over what we eat and what we plant, with
devastating effects, particularly in developing countries, for food security
(people's ability to have access to safe and nutritious food at all times).

REFS:

1 Charles M Benbrook, BioTech InfoNet, Technical Paper Number 6, November
2003.
2 See ' Mexico confirms GM maize contamination' on the Science and
Development
Network website www.scidev.net/news.
3 Tom Wiley, a farmer in North Dakota, quoted in Seeds of doubt: North
American farmers - experiences of GM crops by Hugh Warwick and Gundula Meziani
(Soil Association, 2002).

Resistance to GMOs

Biotech corporations have faced resistance to the introduction of GMOs in
Europe from faith groups, consumers, environmentalists, non-governmental
organisations and MPs.

In the South, several developing countries, such as Angola, India, Sudan,
Zambia and Malawi, have said no to GM crops. They have also resisted GM
foods as food aid. USAID, the US international agency, has exerted enormous
pressure through the United Nations World Food Programme, effectively telling
countries that they have no choice: accept GM food, or get no food aid at
all.

In May 2004, more than 60 groups from 15 African countries, including
environmental and development organisations and farmer and consumer groups,
wrote an open letter to the World Food Programme denouncing the way in which
hunger is being cynically used to impose GM crops and food on developing
countries.

Biotech corporations and the US government present GM crops as the solution to
world hunger. The reality is that there is enough food in the world to feed
all of us. People experience hunger because they have no money to buy the
food that is available, or because they have no means to grow this food. The
real causes of hunger and poverty are social and economic inequalities that
will not be fixed by biotechnology. Instead, GM crops will make these
inequalities worse.

What is the alternative?

Agroecology or sustainable agriculture is an approach to agriculture that is
environmentally, economically, culturally and socially sustainable. It
emphasises crop diversity and rotation, conserves natural resources, and
favours small and medium-sized farming rather than agribusinesses and large
corporations.

Moreover, it focuses on food security (ensuring there is enough food for
people to eat) and thus prioritises the production of staple crops (rather
than cash crops for export). It is a key livelihood strategy for poor farmers
in Latin America and the Caribbean, who have recognised that their best hope
for a sustainable future is to nurture and protect the environment.

How can we promote sustainable agriculture?

We need to:

* use aid to maximise the potential of sustainable agriculture to reduce
poverty in developing countries
* change international trade rules so that they do not force developing
countries to  liberalise  their economies  instead, we ought to enable
these
countries to invest in sustainable agriculture and rural development
* free the poorest countries from the crushing burden of debt, which forces
them to focus on export-led development, over-exploit their natural
resources, and neglect their most vulnerable people.

What can you do?

Find out more:
www.gmwatch.org
www.soilassociation.org
www.abcinformation.org (website set up by biotech corporations)
www.nuffieldbioethics.org (see www.gmwatch.org for counter comments on the
Nuffield Council for Bioethics)
Write to your MP to:
*express concerns about the forceful introduction of GM crops and food in
developing countries and its implications for the food security of poor
farmers
*ask him/her to urge the UK Department for International Development (DFID) to
prioritise research on the potential of low-cost sustainable agriculture
methods to reduce poverty in developing countries, instead of unsustainable
and unsafe technologies such as GM. [Find details of local MPs at
www.locata.co.uk/commons]

If you are a Catholic:
*write a personal letter to the Vatican expressing concerns about GM crops and
the way in which biotech corporations are actively seeking the endorsement of
the church. [For a sample letter visit www.ciir.org or write to CIIR
Environmental Action at the address below]

© CIIR 2004 Catholic Institute for International Relations (CIIR) Unit 3,
Canonbury Yard 190a New North Road London N1 7BJ Charity reg no 294329
Company reg no 2002500
In some countries CIIR is known as International Cooperation for Development
(ICD)

Design: Twenty-Five Educational. Printed on 100% chlorine-free recycled paper
by APG (APG holds ISO14001 accreditation for international environmental
standards).

Produced with the financial assistance of the European Commission. The views
expressed herein are those of CIIR and can therefore in no way be taken to
reflect the official opinion of the European Commission.

www.ciir.org

INTERNET NEWS
Google bans Christian ad over alleged 'hate' content
Stand to Reason's site includes posts arguing against homosexuality

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Posted: August 17, 2004
1:00 a.m. Eastern

By Ron Strom
© 2004 WorldNetDaily.com

Google has banned a Christian organization's advertisements promoting its
stance against homosexuality, saying the group promotes "hate."

Stand to Reason, a nonprofit apologetics organization, says its "AdWord"
advertisement on Google recently was pulled down. Specific AdWord ads are
listed in the right-hand margin of search results on the popular site when
key words an advertiser submits match with those put in by a Net user. A
company promoting hats, for example, could have their site displayed when a
user searches for information about hats.

Melinda Penner, director of operations for Stand to Reason, says the
organization placed four ads on Google. Three of the ads remain on the
system, but one leading Net surfers to a Q&A about same-sex marriage was
taken down after running for two or three weeks.

"Google's objections had to do with other articles on our website
pertaining to homosexuality," Penner told WND. "They claimed that their
specialist had deemed us a hate site and that their policies didn't allow
people to have ads that discriminated against certain groups, which include
sexual orientation."

Penner said she asked Google what specifically it thought was "hate speech."

"The things they cited were all moral judgments from our religious
perspective about homosexuality, that it's wrong," she explained.

"The irony is that in one of the articles they cited, we have an admonition
that of our moral perspective is that we treat homosexuals respectfully and
kindly."

The Stand to Reason website has a special page with articles on
homosexuality issues.

Penner says she has asked Google for its definition of "hate," saying Stand
to Reason's positions are not hateful based on dictionary definitions.

When it comes to "discrimination," she says, it is actually Google that is
discriminating by disallowing Stand to Reason's ads.

An e-mail Penner received from "Kristie" at Google used the "H" word,
saying, "Google AdWords policy never permits ads or keywords promoting
hate, violence, or crimes toward any organization, person or group
protected by law," including those distinguished by their "sexual
orientation/gender identity."

Penner countered via e-mail: "Your suspension of our advertisement
illegitimately excludes one side of the [same-sex marriage] debate. If you
deem the issue itself off limits, then consistency would require you to
suspend all searches of the issue. Instead, your search criteria return
links to sites strongly advocating same-sex marriage. Ö"

Kristie responded by reiterating the company's verdict that the Stand to
Reason website includes "unacceptable content." In the same e-mail, she
said, "Google believes strongly in freedom of expression. We therefore
offer broad access to content across the Web without censoring results.
Please note that the decisions we make concerning advertising in no way
affect the search results we deliver."

Penner noted that Google, which is in the midst of an IPO, or Initial
Public Offering of stock, takes pride in its company motto: "Don't be
evil."

"If that's your company motto then there must be some things that you don't
want to do," she told WND, "and if your definition of 'hate' is calling
something 'evil,' then aren't you a hate group?"

According to Penner, no anti-homosexuality ads currently are coming up in
the right-hand ads; they are all pro-homosexual.

"I'm sure there must be some homosexual advocacy groups behind this," she
said.

Penner says she contacted a religious legal group and was told because
Google is a private organization, there is really no legal action that can
be taken.

The other three Stand to Reason ads that are still running on Google have
to do with evolution, Christian apologetics and abortion.

Though the organization's pro-life ad is still running on Google, another
advertiser's pro-life ad was removed.

In June, Google took down pro-life T-shirt ads a clothing company, Run2316,
had run for a time in 2003 without a problem, the firm's operations
administrator, Christopher Clay, says.

In an e-mail to Clay, Google said, "At this time, Google policy does not
permit the advertisement of websites that contain 'religion and abortion or
contraceptive content.' As noted in our advertising terms and conditions,
we reserve the right to exercise editorial discretion when it comes to the
advertising we accept on our site."

Clay believes Google's IPO has caused the company to clamp down on
advertising it finds distasteful. Google might begin trading its stocks as
early as tomorrow on Nasdaq, according to news reports.

A spokesman from Google was reluctant to go on the record with WND either
about the specific instances mentioned or the company's "hate speech"
policy.

He explained that the company does not allow advertising from organizations
that speak negatively of a so-called "protected group."

The spokesman would not talk about the pro-life issue or the reason one
group's pro-life ad might be acceptable and another group's ad would not.

Google's online guidelines for AdWord advertisers say nothing about
homosexuality or protected classes of people. It does have, however,
include a prohibition against advertising for casinos.

So is Google becoming more aggressive combating "hate speech" to coordinate
with its IPO? Since the company is in a "quiet period" in conjunction with
the public offering, the spokesman could not address the issue.

>The Chavez law transferred only fields from the giant haciendas which had
>been left unused and abandoned.

It is not widely enough known that similar reforms were attempted
by the democratically elected President Arbenz of Guatemala. Compo for
nationalisation of lands owned but not used by United Fruit Corp (and I
believe some other similar corporations) was to be paid at the
corporations' own valuations declared in their tax returns. The govt said
it could not pay even those amounts in cash but could offer only govt
bonds. The result was invasion of Guatemala (1954, or '57, was it?) by
CIA-fronts. Some of the aircraft used resembled those used in Kennedy's
feeble support of the Bay of Pigs invasion - B26s.

The director of the CIA was Allen Dulles; he & his brother J F
Dulles, USA minister of foreign affairs at the time, were major
stockholders in United Fruit.

I would be glad to learn of the most recent book(s) on this classic
which I first heard recounted on KPFA in 1969.

> This land reform, by the way, was promoted to Venezuela in the 1960s by
>that Lefty radical John F. Kennedy.

If so, it would imply the USA had learned something, if only
embarrassment, from such publicity as there had been of the overthrow of
the Arbenz govt. I conclude these rackets are always to be publicised as
examples of a very nasty side of capitalism - illustrations of how, in
the mouths of govts representing over-wealthy large corporations,
'democracy' is a word not sincerely used.

R

This gives us some idea of what we're up against at the moment.
One reason not to be too soft on Islam is that it tends to be used by
atheists as a purported example of 'religion in general' or at least
'monotheism in general'. A main answer to that line is the opposite of the
Bahai 'all religions are equivalent': there is only one satisfactory
religion, and altho' others contain good to various extents, Christianity
cannot be logically blamed for Islam or any other religion.

R

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-op-harris15aug15,1,5191577,pri
nt.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions

Holy Terror

Religion isn't the solution -- it's the problem

By Sam Harris

Sam Harris is the author of "The End of Faith: Religion,
Terror, and the Future of Reason," published this month. He can be reached
at www.samharris.org

August 15, 2004

President Bush and the Republicans in the Senate have failed for the
moment to bring the Constitution into conformity with Judeo-Christian
teachings. But even if they had passed a bill calling for a constitutional
ban on gay marriage, that would have been only a beginning. Leviticus
20:13 and the New Testament book of Romans reveal that the God of the Bible
doesn't merely disapprove of homosexuality; he specifically says
homosexuals should be killed: "If a man lies with a male as with a woman,
both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death."

God also instructs us to murder people who work on the Sabbath, along with
adulterers and children who curse their parents. While they're at it,
members of Congress might want to reconsider the 13th Amendment, because it
turns out that God approves of slavery unless a master beats his slave
so severely that he loses an eye or teeth, in which case Exodus 21 tells us
he must be freed.

What should we conclude from all this? That whatever their import to
people of faith, ancient religious texts shouldn't form the basis of social
policy in the 21st century. The Bible was written at a time when people
thought the Earth was flat, when the wheelbarrow was high tech. Are its
teachings applicable to the challenges we now face as a global
civilization?

Consider the subject of stem-cell research. Many religious people,
drawing from what they've heard from the pulpit, believe that 3-day-old
embryos which are microscopic collections of 150 cells the size of a
pinhead are fully endowed with human souls and, therefore, must be
protected as people. But if we know anything at all about the neurology of
sensory perception, we know that there is no reason to believe that embryos
at this stage of development have the capacity to sense pain, to suffer or
to experience death in any way at all. (There are, for comparison's sake,
100,000 cells in the brain of a fly.)

These facts notwithstanding, our president and our leaders in Congress,
many of them citing religious teachings, have decided to put the rights of
undifferentiated cells before those of men and women suffering from spinal
cord injuries, full-body burns, diabetes and Parkinson's disease.

Of course, the Bible is not the only ancient text that casts a shadow over
the present. A social policy based on the Koran poses even greater dangers.
Koran 9:123 tells us it is the duty of every Muslim man to "make war on the
infidels who dwell around you." Osama bin Laden may be despicable, but it
is hard to argue that he isn't acting in accord with at least some of the
teachings of the Koran. It is true that most Muslims seem inclined to
ignore the Koran's solicitations to martyrdom and jihad, but we cannot
overlook the fact that some are not so inclined and that some of them
murder innocent people for religious reasons.

The phrase "the war on terrorism" is a dangerous euphemism that obscures
the true cause of our troubles, because we are currently at war with
precisely a vision of life presented to Muslims in the Koran. Anyone who
reads this text will find non-Muslims vilified on nearly every page. How
can we possibly expect devout Muslims to happily share power with "the
friends of Satan"? Why did 19 well-educated, middle-class men trade their
lives for the privilege of killing thousands of our neighbors? Because
they believed, on the authority of the Koran, that they would go straight
to paradise for doing so. It is rare to find the behavior of human beings
so easily explained. And yet, many of us are reluctant to accept this
explanation.

Religious faith is always, and everywhere, exonerated. It is now taboo in
every corner of our culture to criticize a person's religious beliefs.
Consequently, we are unable to even name, much less oppose, one of the most
pervasive causes of human conflict. And the fact that there are very real
and consequential differences between the major religious traditions is
simply never discussed.

Anyone who thinks that terrestrial concerns are the principal source of
Muslim violence must explain why there are no Palestinian Christian suicide
bombers. They too suffer the daily indignity of the Israeli occupation.
Where, for that matter, are the Tibetan Buddhist suicide bombers? The
Tibetans have suffered an occupation far more brutal. Where are the
throngs of Tibetans ready to perpetrate suicidal atrocities against the
Chinese? They do not exist. What is the difference that makes the
difference? The difference lies in the specific tenets of Islam versus
those of Buddhism and Christianity.

There are now more people in our country who believe that the universe was
created in six solar days than there were in Europe in the 14th century.
In the eyes of most of the civilized world, the United States is now a
rogue power imperialist, inarticulate and retrograde in its religiosity.
Our erstwhile allies are right not to trust our judgment. We elect leaders
who squander time and money on issues like gay marriage, Janet Jackson's
anatomy, Howard Stern's obscenities, marijuana use and a dozen other
trifles lying at the heart of the Christian social agenda, while
potentially catastrophic problems like nuclear proliferation and climate
change go unresolved.

We elected a president who believes the jury is still out on evolution and
who rejects sound, scientific judgments on the environment, on medical
research, on family planning and on HIV/AIDS prevention in the developing
world. The consequence, as we saw in recent elections in Spain, is that
people who feel misled and entrapped by our dogmatic and peremptory
approach to foreign policy will be unable to recognize a common enemy, even
when that enemy massacres hundreds of people in their nation's capital.

It is time we recognize that religious beliefs have consequences. As a
man believes, so he will act. Believe that you are a member of a chosen
people, awash in the salacious exports of an evil culture that is turning
your children away from God, believe that you will be rewarded with an
eternity of unimaginable delights by dealing death to these infidels - and
flying a plane into a building is only a matter of being asked to do it.
Believe that "life starts at the moment of conception" and you will happily
stand in the way of medical research that could alleviate the suffering of
millions of your fellow human beings. Believe that there is a God who sees
and knows all things, and yet remains so provincial a creature as to be
scandalized by certain sexual acts between consenting adults, and you will
think it ethical to punish people for engaging in private behavior that
harms no one.

Now that our elected leaders have grown entranced by pseudo-problems like
gay marriage, even while the genuine enemies of civilization hurl
themselves at our gates, perhaps it is time we subjected our religious
beliefs to the same standards of evidence we require in every other sphere
of our lives. Perhaps it is time for us to realize, at the dawn of this
perilous century, that we are paying too high a price to maintain the
iconography of our ignorance.

If you want other stories on this topic, search the Archives at
latimes.com/archives.

Article licensing and reprint options

Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

The End of Faith

Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason

By Sam Harris

NORTON; 336 PAGES; $32

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sam Harris is tired of being nice to religious people. Why, he wonders,
should we be expected to respect individuals who in the year 2004 still
believe in virgin birth? And Christians rarely return the favor.
Instead, they're down in Washington holding prayer breakfasts and
smiting "sinners" through mandatory drug sentences, intrusive sex laws
and prohibitions against stem cell research.

If Harris mistrusts Christians, he's openly mocking of Muslims, whose
beliefs, he suggests, "belong on the same shelf with Batman." In fact,
he doesn't like any religion much at all. As he points out in "The End
of Faith," believers of every denomination constantly engage in civil
wars. They are also responsible for such historical lows as the
Inquisition, witch hunts and the sustained anti-Semitism that eased the
way for the Nazis.

What most annoys Harris, however, is that the faithful are averse to
development and change. Fixated on ancient scriptures, they ignore the
accumulating insights that have transformed the world. Every other field
redefines its positions in the light of fresh data. Only religion takes
increasing pride in being backward.

There, indeed, exist moderate clergy and flocks who try to accommodate
their faith to the times. Harris, however, dismisses such people as
decoys who distract our gaze from their dangerous brethren. The true
believers are the fundamentalists, and they want to turn the clock back
2,000 years.

At this point, the reader's eyes may begin to glaze. Writers have been
arraigning religion for 300 years, and much of this has been said
already. Never before, however, have weapons of mass destruction been so
available. For Harris, the apocalypse arrived on the morning of Sept.
11, 2001, which he believes commentators misunderstood. "The evil that
has finally reached our shores is not merely the evil of terrorism. It
is the evil of religious faith at the moment of its political ascendancy."

The point for Harris is that religious people mean exactly what they
say, and this does not bode well for the rest of us. Curiously,
principles of faith are often discounted by political observers, who
ascribe the deeds of religious people to any motive but religion itself.
The rebellions of fundamentalist Christians are often treated as
reactions of the disenfranchised. Islam-inspired terrorist groups are
seen as acting out of political grievance. Harris takes fundamentalists
at their word. "The men who committed the atrocities of September 11
were ... men of faith -- perfect faith, as it turns out -- and this, it
must finally be acknowledged, is a terrible thing to be."

Under pressure, Harris reveals ideological biases that will trouble some
readers. He has nothing but good to say of Samuel P. Huntington's
notorious "The Clash of Civilizations." He quotes with approval a
rhapsodizing comment about Israel's treatment of Palestinians, even
though one might think that religion plays a role in that country's
troubles, too. He seems to loathe Islam with a fury the more surprising
because he doesn't seem to know much about it. (His quotes on the
subject stem mostly from the works of Bernard Lewis and a university Web
site.)

Harris is also wont to speak with a dogmatism that suggests that he
might be a person of faith himself. The reader may be startled when he
announces, "It is time we recognized that belief is not a private
matter." Pat Robertson and the ayatollahs might have said the same.

How, then, does Harris distinguish himself from the competition? In
later chapters he argues that Hindu and Buddhist meditation practices,
when stripped of their metaphysical overtones, offer measurable insights
that can underpin ethics. In short, his view has a scientific
justification that no theologian can match. This is a clever tactic, but
there is a difference between entertaining a hypothesis and proving it.
Scientists have begun to explore the claims of meditation, and perhaps
someday they will bear out Harris' belief to the letter. But until "the
science of good and evil" regularly appears on the biology syllabus, his
claims will appear more wishful thinking than accomplished fact.

"The End of Faith" offers something to offend everyone and is certainly
not for those who read only what they agree with. Yet, despite its
polemic edge, this is a happy book -- Harris is obviously tickled by his
own intelligence -- and he writes with such verve and frequent insight
that even skeptical readers will find it hard to put down.

Besides, we might all check our belief systems for deadwood. Because it
touches a nerve, "The End of Faith" is a good place to begin. The
fundamentalists' greatest asset is that they believe what they say. If
Harris is right, the rest of us will be sitting ducks unless we discover
-- and then live -- what we really believe as well.

Daniel Blue is a New York writer.

Page M - 3
URL:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/08/15/RVG4U82SE81.DTL

hangenode;dir=nation;dir=specials;dir=science;dir=climatechange;page=article;kw=
;ad=ss;pos=ad28;sz=160x600;tile=50;abr=!ie;ord=1092630505603?>

SCIENCE

Notebook

Monday, August 16, 2004; Page A05

Plan to Limit Emissions Of Carbon Dioxide Mapped


The United States could keep carbon dioxide emissions from rising
over the next 50 years by using several existing technologies, according to
a paper published by two Princeton University professors in Friday's
edition of Science.

Stephen W. Pacala and Robert H. Socolow identified 15 technologies
that could be used to curb pollution, including wind-powered generation of
electricity, conversion of 1,400 coal-fired plants to natural gas,
capturing and storing emissions from 800 coal-powered plants, and doubling
global nuclear power plant capacity to replace coal-based electricity.
Carbon dioxide, much of it produced from fossil fuels such as coal, is
thought to be a major contributor to global warming.

"There's lots you can do," said Socolow, who teaches in the
department of mechanical and aerospace engineering. "You will not need
magic bullets that you don't have at the present time."

At present, 7 billion tons of carbon are emitted into the atmosphere
annually, which is more than twice the amount that can be absorbed by
oceans and forests. This amount is expected to double over the next
half-century. Under the Princeton scenario, emissions would stay constant,
with a goal of reducing the total to 3 billion tons a year in 100 years.

If governments fail to act, Socolow said, the concentration of carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere will triple in 50 years. "Keeping it below
doubling is a heroic task," he said.

The scientists did not estimate how much it would cost to implement
their proposal, though they said it would produce some economic benefits by
creating new industries and reducing American dependence on foreign oil.

Dan Riedinger, a spokesman for the Edison Electric Institute, said the
paper reflected a "pie in the sky" analysis. He said the recommendation
for retrofitting coal-fired plants did not take into account the fact that
the United States is already straining its existing natural gas reserves
and pipeline capacity. Such a switch would force the power sector to
monopolize the nation's domestic natural gas resources at the expense of
manufacturing, agriculture and home heating, he said.

"They're not factoring in the large-scale economic and political
obstacles in doing such a large-scale conversion," Riedinger said. "Our
economy could not absorb this kind of major shift."

-- Juliet Eilperin

An engineer died and ended up in Hell. He was not pleased with the
level of comfort in Hell, and began to redesign and build improvements.
After a while, they had toilets that flush, air conditioning, and
escalators. Everyone grew very fond of him. One day God called to Satan
to mock him, "So, how's it going down there in Hell?" Satan replied, "Hey,
things are great. We've got air conditioning and flush toilets and
escalators, and there's no telling what this engineer is going to come up
with next."

God was surprised, "What? You've got an engineer? That's a mistake. He
should never have gotten down there in the first place. Send him back up
here."

"No way," replied Satan. "I like having an engineer, and I'm keeping him."
God threatened, "Send him back up here now or I'll sue!" Satan laughed and
answered, "Yeah, right. And just where are YOU going to get a lawyer?

fw from a UK Anglican priest friend of mine Rev Bruce Kington who worked
in my parish recently.

Thanks for the report of the Australian parlt - to this, one might say
Hallelujah!

The Australian debate has been, it seems, shadowing a similar debate here,
which has proved inconclusive because of the Government's failure either to
understand, or to fail to define, Marriage. Our own Diocesan Bishop,
Michael Scott-Joynt (who is a profound biblical scholar and orthodox in
this Christian Faith) is the Church of England's spokesman on these matters
in the House of Lords. He wrote the following article concerning the
ongoing debate, which you might find interesting:

A PARTNERSHIP UNDERMINED?

The Civil Partnerships Bill that Lord Lester of Herne Hill brought before
the House of Lords in January 2002 was designed to put right a range of
widely perceived hardships and injustices suffered by people in both
same-sex and heterosexual couple relationships who did not possess the
responsibilities and privileges afforded by law to those who are married.

The present Bill with the same title, which completed its Report stage in
the Lords in circumstances of unprecedented procedural disorder on June 24,
is designed to attend only to the needs of "same-sex couples in supportive
relationships (who) cannot marry but deserve the opportunity of legal
recognition" (Baroness Scotland, The Minister of State, Home Office, June
24, 2004).

The Bill provides for same-sex couples who are not within the "prohibited
degrees of relationship" (closely similar to those that govern eligibility
for marriage) to register their relationship in a Register Office.

In its 254 clauses, 28 schedules and 382 pages the Bill closely replicates
for such Civil Partnerships (in England and Wales, Scotland and Northern
Ireland) virtually every provision in law that relates to Marriage – how a
Civil Partnership will be entered into, and how dissolved or declared null;
arrangements regarding property, finance, housing and tenancies;
responsibilities for children and provisions for adoption; questions
arising with regard to employment, social security and pensions; and muh
else.

The Bill offers no definition of a Civil Partnership; and even though it is
a condition that prospective partners must not be within the "prohibited
degrees", Ministers have consistently stated that the Bill does not assume
that the relationship for which it provides a legal framework is a sexual
one.

The Conservative Opposition in the Lords has generally welcomed the Bill,
like the Government allowing its supporters a free vote; for the Liberal
Democrats the Bill is a matter for the Whip. The Bill has the support of a
range of bodies such as the Solicitors’ Family Law Association, as well as
that of the major organisations supportive of same-sex relationships.

Both the Archbishops’ Council in its response to the Government's
consultation last year, and the General Synod this February, accepted that
there are significant issues of social justice, hardship and vulnerability
for this in same-sex (and in unmarried heterosexual) relationships that
need to be addressed, while (the following words are from the Synod
Resolution) "strongly reaffirm(ing) that marriage is central to the
stability and health of human society (and that it) warrants a unique place
in the law of this country".

The Archbishops' Council added: "We seriously question whether there will
in practice be a sufficient distinction in law between marriage and
registered same-sex partnerships, if the proposals outlined in the
consultation paper are implemented".

This same observation has been very clearly made by the Roman Catholic
Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales in its statement of April 23 this
year entitled "The Value of Marriage": "We accept that significant
problems are faced by people in a range of relationships, including both
same-sex couples (those affected by the Bill) and those in relationships
that are not of a sexual nature such as devoted brothers or sisters.
However, we believe these problems which are essentially associated with
financial and property matters could be remedied by legal changes other
than the introduction of formal civil partnerships which, in the case of
same-sex couples, is likely to be seen as a form of same-sex marriage with
almost the same rights as marriage itself.

"Whatever the intention of this proposed legislation there is a real danger
that the deeply rooted understanding of marriage as a permanent and
exclusive relationship between a woman and a man, and as the best context
for raising children, will be eroded".

For many members of the Church of England, too, for many other Christians
and for many people of other faiths or of none, this is (as the RC Bishops
go straight on to say) "a matter of conscience"; and the Bishop of
Rochester made this fundamental point about "the public doctrine of
marriage" in the Lords on June 24.

He was speaking in support of an amendment in the name of the Baroness
O'Cathain and others (of whom I was one) which sought to extend the
provisions of the Bill to couples (whether of the same sex or of opposite
sexes) who are within the "prohibited degrees" (e.g. two sisters, or a
father and daughter) and who have lived under the same roof for 12 years.
The Government, and the Liberal Democrats, opposed the amendment on the
ground that this extension was contrary to the Bill’s basic intention, and
some called it a "wrecking amendment"; the Conservative front-bench
speakers supported it, while also continuing to assert their support for
the main provisions of the Bill as a whole.

The amendment was carried by 148-130, with five bishops voting in favour
and one against.

After a break for food, the Government announced that the amendment had so
raducally altered the Bill's concept of a Civil Partnership that it was
unable to move its own (numerous and detailed) amendments or to respond to
those of others as long as Lady O'Cathain's amendment stood as part of the
Bill, it remains to be seen how Ministers decide to proceed with the Bill.

I agree with the Archbishops’ Council, the Roman Catholic bishops and the
General Synod - and with the Government - that people in same-sex
relationships can indeed face deeply distressing disadvantages and
injustices which it is right that the Government should seek to legislate
to rectify. But I deeply regret that the Government has set out to achieve
this necessary end by painstakingly, exhaustively replicating in this
legislation virtually every provision in law that affects marriage.

So the Civil Partnerships Bill seems to me to undermine the distinctiveness
and fundamental importance to society of marriage by effectively equating
same-sex relationships with it. The Bill is careful never to define the
character of these relationships - but they look very much like the
"same-sex marriage" that the Government keeps saying that it does not
support.

As I said at the end of this February's article on the Gender Recognition
Bill, "there are difficult times ahead".

Robt Mann wrote:

> Great news! At 5:45 in the Senate today (13 Aug 04) the Marriage Amendment
> Bill was passed (38 votes to 6). Once the Governor-General signs it,
> Marriage will be clearly defined in law as between a man and woman.

something I just browsed across - on alt. cures!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/news/story/0,12976,1275125,00.html

Warning to patients on cancer therapies

Alternative 'cures' on internet put thousands at risk, says scientist

Alok Jha, science correspondent
Tuesday August 3, 2004
The Guardian

Misleading advice on complementary therapy available on the internet is putting thousands of cancer patients at risk, according to a leading scientist.

Professor Edzard Ernst, of the Peninsula Medical School at Exeter University, holds the UK's only chair in complementary medicine. He told a press briefing yesterday that patients need to exercise more caution when looking for information on the web.

"If it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is," he said. "Don't believe ridiculous claims."

Prof Ernst said that there had even been cases reported of cancer patients
dying as a result of using complementary therapies promoted on the internet.

His team at Exeter analysed 32 of the most popular websites giving advice and information on a range of complementary therapies to treat cancer. Between them, they receive tens of thousands of hits a day. He concluded that a "significant proportion" of the sites were a risk to cancer patients. The study was published
recently in the Annals of Oncology.

"This was to us quite an eye-opener and pretty scary stuff," he said. "We found that between these 30-odd sites, 118 different cancer "cures" were recommended: complementary treatment which claimed to be able to cure cancer. None of these 118 can be demonstrated to cure cancer."

Three websites fell into the highest risk categories because they overtly discouraged patients from using conventional cancer treatments such as chemotherapy and radiotherapy.

The sites - heall.com and healthy.net, based in the USA, and worldwidehealthcenter.net, based in the UK and Cyprus, were judged to offer
advice potentially harmful to patients.

Heall.com offers customers a way of "balancing the human electrical system" by taking the nutritional supplements it sells. Yesterday at healthy.net, an article justifying the use of complementary techniques for cancer treatment said: "It is clear that humans are a complex interplay of physical and metaphysical forces.
As humans become more spiritual or metaphysical, we tend to transcend physical laws. Hence, the ultimate cancer cure may come from this relatively untapped area of healing."

Two examples of bogus cancer treatments were shark cartilage and laertrial, a chemical which can be made from almonds or the stones of apricots, cherries or peaches. Demand for ground-up shark fins has been so high as a result of its perceived health benefits that the trade has brought two species of shark close to extinction, said Prof Ernst. There was "not a shred of evidence" that it
helped cure patients.

Prof Ernst also says that the Gerson diet is "not supported by convincing evidence". Research comparing the retrospective survival rates of cancer patients on the diet - which involves eating lots of organic fruit and vegetables and having coffee enemas - apparently found that the Gerson dieters lived longer.
However, Prof Ernst said that the methodology was too flawed to allow any
firm conclusions.

"Not everything that is natural is risk-free," he said. "People should use their common sense and think twice about the motives of these websites."

Prof Ernst said that patients should ask complementary health practitioners for proof of their experience and find out whether they have insurance if should something go wrong.

He added that GPs were often uninformed about the potential risk of complementary treatments, especially with regard to their interaction with conventional medicines.

In a survey he conducted of 2,600 patients prescribed the blood-thinning drug warfarin, he found that 9%were also taking herbal medicines which could interfere with the drug.

GPs and pharmacists needed better training in complementary medicine, he said.

Prof Ernst said that the public needed to be made aware of the lack of scientific evidence to back up the claims of most complementary therapies. "One way forward would be to flag up these websites for patients, because how is a patient going to
know this is reliable and this is not reliable?" he said.

Government agencies or cancer organisations could even vet health sites to help patients.

What did you think of this article? Mail your responses to life@guardian.co.uk
and include your name and address.

Special reports Medicine and health

Useful links
British Medical Association
Department of Health
General Medical Council
Health on the Net Foundation
Institute of Cancer Research
Medical Research Council
NHS Direct
World Health Organisation

Neoliberalism and the Demise of Democracy: Resurrecting Hope in Dark Times

by Henry A. Giroux

www.dissidentvoice.org
August 7, 2004

http://www.dissidentvoice.or
g/Aug04/Giroux0807.htm

Neoliberalism has become one of the most pervasive, if not dangerous,
ideologies of the 21st century. It pervasiveness is evident not only by
its unparalleled influence on the global economy, but also by its power to
redefine the very nature of politics itself. Free market fundamentalism
rather than democratic idealism is now the driving force of economics and
politics in most of the world, and it is a market ideology driven not just
by profits but by an ability to reproduce itself with such success that, to
paraphrase Fred Jameson, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than
the end of neoliberal capitalism.

Wedded to the belief that the market should be the organizing principle
for all political, social, and economic decisions, neoliberalism wages an
incessant attack on democracy, public goods, the welfare state, and non-
commodified values. Under neoliberalism everything either is for sale or
is plundered for profit. Public lands are looted by logging companies and
corporate ranchers; politicians willingly hand the public’s airwaves over
to powerful broadcasters and large corporate interests without a dime going
into the public trust; Halliburton gives war profiteering a new meaning as
it is granted corporate contracts without any competitive bidding and then
bilks the U.S. government for millions; the environment is polluted and
despoiled in the name of profit-making just as the government passes
legislation to make it easier for corporations to do so; public services
are gutted in order to lower the taxes of major corporations; schools more
closely resemble either malls or jails, and teachers are forced to get
revenue for their school by hawking everything from hamburgers to pizza
parties. As markets are touted as the driving force of everyday life, big
government is disparaged as either incompetent or threatening to individual
freedom, suggesting that power should reside in markets and corporations
rather than in governments (except for their support for corporate
interests and national security) and citizens.

Under neoliberalism, the state now makes a grim alignment with
corporate capital and transnational corporations. Gone are the days when
the state “assumed responsibility for a range of social needs." > [1]

Instead, agencies of government now pursues a wide range of
"deregulations,’ privatizations, and abdications of responsibility to the
market and private philanthropy." [2]

Deregulation, in turn, promotes “widespread, systematic disinvestment in
the nation’s basic productive capacity." [3]

Flexible production encourages wage slavery and disposable populations at
home. And the search for ever greater profits leads to outsourcing which
accentuates the flight of capital and jobs abroad. Neoliberalism has now
become the prevailing logic in the United States, and according to Stanley
Aronowitz “...the neoliberal economic doctrine proclaiming the superiority
of free markets over public ownership, or even public regulation of private
economic activities, has become the conventional wisdom, not only among
conservatives but among social progressives." [4]

The ideology and power of neoliberalism also cuts across national
boundaries. Throughout the globe, the forces of neoliberalism are on the
march, dismantling the historically guaranteed social provisions provided
by the welfare state, defining profit-making as the essence of democracy,
and equating freedom with the unrestricted ability of markets to “govern
economic relations free of government regulation." [5]

Transnational in scope, neoliberalism now imposes its economic regime and
market values on developing and weaker nations through structural
adjustment policies enforced by powerful financial institutions such as the
World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade
Organization (WTO). Secure in its dystopian vision that there are no
alternatives, as England's former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once put
it, neoliberalism obviates issues of contingency, struggle, and social
agency by celebrating the inevitability of economic laws in which the
ethical ideal of intervening in the world gives way to the idea that we
“have no choice but to adapt both our hopes and our abilities to the new
global market." [6]

Coupled with a new culture of fear, market freedoms seem securely
grounded in a defense of national security, capital, and property rights.
When coupled with a media driven culture of fear and the everyday reality
of insecurity, public space becomes increasingly militarized as state
governments invest more in prison construction than in education. Prison
guards and security personnel in public schools are two of the fastest
growing professions.

In its capacity to dehistoricize and depoliticize society, as well as
in its aggressive attempts to destroy all of the public spheres necessary
for the defense of a genuine democracy, neoliberalism reproduces the
conditions for unleashing the most brutalizing forces of capitalism.
Social Darwinism has been resurrected from the ashes of the 19th century
sweatshops and can now be seen in full bloom in most reality TV programs
and in the unfettered self-interests that now drives popular culture. As
narcissism is replaced by unadulterated materialism, public concerns
collapse into utterly private considerations and where public space does
exist it is mainly used as a confessional for private woes, a cut throat
game of winner take all, or a advertisement for consumerism.

Neoliberal policies dominate the discourse of politics and use the
breathless rhetoric of the global victory of free-market rationality to cut
public expenditures and undermine those non-commodified public spheres that
serve as the repository for critical education, language, and public
intervention. Spewed forth by the mass media, right-wing intellectuals,
religious fanatics, and politicians, neoliberal ideology, with its ongoing
emphasis on deregulation and privatization, has found its material
expression in an all-out attack on democratic values and on the very notion
of the public sphere. Within the discourse of neoliberalism, the notion of
the public good is devalued and, where possible, eliminated as part of a
wider rationale for a handful of private interests to control as much of
social life as possible in order to maximize their personal profit. Public
services such as health care, child care, public assistance, education, and
transportation are now subject to the rules of the market. Construing the
public good as a private good and the needs of the corporate and private
sector as the only source of investment, neoliberal ideology produces,
legitimates, and exacerbates the existence of persistent poverty,
inadequate health care, racial apartheid in the inner cities, and the
growing inequalities between the rich and the poor." [7]

As Stanley Aronowitz points out, the Bush administration has made
neoliberal ideology the cornerstone of its program and has been in the
forefront in actively supporting and implementing the following policies:
[D]eregulation of business at all levels of enterprises and trade; tax
reduction for wealthy individuals and corporations; the revival of the
near- dormant nuclear energy industry; limitations and abrogation of
labor's right to organize and bargain collectively; a land policy favoring
commercial and industrial development at the expense of conservation and
other pro environment policies; elimination of income support to the
chronically unemployed; reduced federal aid to education and health;
privatization of the main federal pension programs, Social Security;
limitation on the right of aggrieved individuals to sue employers and
corporations who provide services; in addition, as social programs are
reduced, [Republicans] are joined by the Democrats in favoring increases in
the repressive functions of the state, expressed in the dubious drug wars
in the name of fighting crime, more funds for surveillance of ordinary
citizens, and the expansion of the federal and local police forces." [8]

Central to both neoliberal ideology and its implementation by the Bush
administration is the ongoing attempts by free-market fundamentalists and
right wing politicians to view government as the enemy of freedom (except
when it aids big business) and discount it as a guardian of the public
interest. The call to eliminate big government is neoliberalism's great
unifying idea and has broad popular appeal in the United States because it
is a principle deeply embedded in the country's history and tangled up with
its notion of political freedom. And yet, the right wing appropriation of
this tradition is racked with contradictions in terms of neoliberal
policies.

The advocates of neoliberalism have attacked what they call big
government when it has provided essential services such as crucial safety
nets for the less fortunate, but they have no qualms about using the
government to bailout the airline industry after the economic nosedive that
followed the 2000 election of George W. Bush and the events of 9/11. Nor
are there any expressions of outrage from the cheerleaders of neoliberalism
when the state engages in promoting various forms of corporate welfare by
providing billions of dollars in direct and indirect subsidies to
multinational corporations. In short, government bears no obligation for
either the poor and dispossessed or for the collective future of young
people.

As the laws of the market take precedence over the laws of the state as
guardians of the public good, the government increasingly offers little
help in mediating the interface between the advance of capital and its
rapacious commercial interests. Neither does it aid non-commodified
interests and non-market spheres that create the political, economic, and
social spaces and discursive conditions vital for critical citizenship and
democratic public life. Within the discourse of neoliberalism, it becomes
difficult for the average citizen to speak about political or social
transformation, or to even challenge, outside of a grudging nod toward
rampant corruption, the ruthless downsizing, the ongoing liquidation of job
security, or the elimination of benefits for people now hired on part-time.

The liberal democratic vocabulary of rights, entitlements, social
provisions, community, social responsibility, living wage, job security,
equality, and justice seem oddly out of place in a country where the
promise of democracy has been replaced by casino capitalism, a
winner-take-all philosophy, suited to lotto players and day traders alike.
As corporate culture extends even deeper into the basic institutions of
civil and political society, buttressed daily by a culture industry largely
in the hands of concentrated capital, it is reinforced even further by the
pervasive fear and insecurity of the public that the future holds nothing
beyond a watered down version of the present. As the prevailing discourse
of neoliberalism seizes the public imagination, there is no vocabulary for
progressive social change, democratically inspired visions, or critical
notions of social agency to expand the meaning and purpose of democratic
public life. Against the reality of low wage jobs, the erosion of social
provisions for a growing number of people and the expanding war against
young people of color at home and empire-building abroad, the market-driven
juggernaut of neoliberalism continues to mobilize desires in the interest
of producing market identities and market relationships that ultimately
sever the link between education and social change while reducing agency to
the obligations of consumerism. As neoliberal ideology and corporate
culture extend even deeper into the basic institutions of civil and
political society, there is a simultaneous diminishing of non-commodified
public spheres —those institutions such as public schools, independent
bookstores, churches, noncommercial public broadcasting stations,
libraries, trade unions and various voluntary institutions engaged in
dialogue, education, and learning–that address the relationship of the
individual to public life and foster social responsibility and provide a
robust vehicle for public participation and democratic citizenship. In the
vacuum left by diminishing democracy, religious zealotry, cultural
chauvinism, xenophobia, and racism have become the dominant tropes of
neoconservatives and other extremist groups eager to take advantage of the
growing insecurity, fear, and anxiety that result >from increased
joblessness, the war on terror, and the unraveling of communities. As a
result of the consolidated corporate attack on public life, the maintenance
of democratic public spheres from which to launch a moral vision or to
engage in a viable struggle over politics loses all credibility–not to
mention monetary support. As the alleged objectivity of neoliberal ideology
remains largely unchallenged within dominant public spheres, individual
critique and collective political struggles become more difficult. < \l >
[9] It gets worse. Dominated by extremists, the Bush administration is
driven by an arrogance of power and inflated sense of moral righteousness
mediated largely by a false sense of certitude and never ending posture of
triumphalism. As George Soros points out this rigid ideology and inflexible
sense of mission allows the Bush administration to believe that “because we
are stronger than others, we must know better and we must have right on our
side. This is where religious fundamentalism comes together with market
fundamentalism to form the ideology of American supremacy." [10]

As public space is increasingly commodified and the state becomes more
closely aligned with capital, politics is defined largely by its policing
functions rather than an agency for peace and social reform. As the state
abandons its social investments in health, education, and the public
welfare. It increasingly takes on the functions of an enhanced police or
security state, the signs of which are most visible in the increasing use
of the state apparatus to spy on and arrests its subjects, the
incarceration of individuals coincided disposable (primarily people of
color), and the ongoing criminalization of social policies. Examples of
the latter include anti-begging ordinances and anti-loitering that fine or
punish homeless people for sitting or lying down too long in public places.
" [11]

An even more despicable example of the barbaric nature of neoliberalism
with its emphasis on profits over people and its willingness to punish
rather than serve the poor and disenfranchised can be seen in the growing
tendency of many hospitals across the country to have patients arrested and
jailed if they cannot pay their medical bills. The policy, right out of
the pages of George Orwell’s 1984, represents a return to debtors prisons,
which is now chillingly called “body attachment", and is “ basically a
warrant for... the patient's arrest." [12]

Neoliberalism is not simply an economic policy designed to cut
government spending, pursue free trade policies, and free market forces
from government regulations; it is also a political philosophy and ideology
that effects every dimension of social life. Neoliberalism has heralded a
radical economic, political, and experiential shift that now largely
defines the citizen as a consumer, disbands the social contract in the
interests of privatized considerations, and separates capital from the
context of place. Under such circumstances, neoliberalism portends the
death of politics as we know it, strips the social of its democratic
values, and reconstructs agency in terms that are utterly privatized and
provides the conditions for an emerging form of proto-fascism that must be
resisted at all costs. Neoliberalism not only enshrines unbridled
individualism, it also destroys any vestige of democratic society by
undercutting its “moral, material, and regulatory moorings", [13] and in
doing so it offers no language for understanding how the future might be
grasped outside of the narrow logic of the market. But there is even more
at stake here than the obliteration of public concerns, the death of the
social, the emergence of a market-based fundamentalism that undercuts the
ability of people to understand how to translate the privately experienced
misery into collective action, and the elimination of the gains of the
welfare state. There is also the growing threat of displacing “political
sovereignty with the sovereignty of the market, as if the latter has a mind
and morality of its own". [14]

As democracy becomes a burden under the reign of neoliberalism, civic
discourse disappears and the reign of unfettered social Darwinism with its
survival-of-the-slickest philosophy emerges as the template for a new form
of proto-fascism. None of this will happen in the face of sufficient
resistance, nor is the increasing move toward proto- fascism inevitable,
but the conditions exist for democracy to lose all semblance of meaning in
the United States.

Educators, parents, activists, workers, and others can address this
challenge by building local and global alliances and engaging in struggles
that acknowledge and transcend national boundaries, but also engage in
modes of politics that connect with people's everyday lives. Democratic
struggles cannot under emphasize the special responsibility of
intellectuals to shatter the conventional wisdom and myths of neoliberalism
with its stunted definition of freedom and its depoliticized and
dehistoricized definition of its own alleged universality. As the late
Pierre Bourdieu argued, any viable politics that challenges neoliberalism
must refigure the role of the state in limiting the excesses of capital and
providing important social provisions." [15]

At the same time, social movements must address the crucial issue of
education as it develops throughout the cultural sphere because the “power
of the dominant order is not just economic, but intellectual–lying in the
realm of beliefs" and it is precisely within the domain of ideas that a
sense of utopian possibility can be restored to the public realm. [16]

Most specifically, democracy necessitates forms of education that provide
a new ethic of freedom and a reassertion of collective identity as central
preoccupations of a vibrant democratic culture and society. Such a task,
in part, suggests that intellectuals, artists, unions, and other
progressive movements create teach-ins all over the country in order to
name, critique, and connect the forces of market fundamentalism to the war
at home and abroad, the shameful tax cuts for the rich, the dismantling of
the welfare state, the attack on unions, the erosion of civil liberties,
the incarceration of a generation of young black and brown men, the attack
on public schools, and the growing militarization of public life. As
Bush’s credibility crisis is growing, the time has come to link the matters
of economics with the crisis of political culture, and to connect the
latter to the crisis of democracy itself. We need a new language for
politics, for analyzing where it can take place, and what it means to
mobilize alliances of workers, intellectuals, academics, journalists, youth
groups, and others to reclaim, as Cornel West has aptly put it, hope in
dark times.

Henry A. Giroux is the Global Television Network Chair Professor at
McMaster University in Canada. His most recent books include:
20/102-9926132-2124164> Take Back Higher Education: Race, Youth, and the
Crisis of Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Era (Palgrave, 2004);
20/102-4777967-2851306> Public Spaces, Private Lives: Democracy Beyond 9-11
(Rowman and Littlefield 2003);
20/102-4777967-2851306> The Abandoned Generation: Democracy Beyond the
Culture of Fear (Palgrave, 2003). He can be reached at:
hag5@psu.edu .

REFERENCES

1. George Steinmetz, ‘The State of Emergency and the Revival of American
Imperialism; Toward an Authoritarian Post-Fordism,” Public Culture 15:2
(Spring 2003), p. 337.

2. George Steinmetz, Ibid., ‘The State of Emergency and the Revival of
American Imperialism; Toward an Authoritarian Post-Fordism,” p. 337.

3. Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, The Deindustrialization of
America: Plant Closings, Community Abandonment and the Dismantling of Basic
Industry (New York: Basic Books, 1982), p. 6

4. Stanley Aronowitz, Ibid. How Class Works, p. 21.

5. Stanley Aronowitz, How Class Works (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2003), p. 101.

6. Stanley Aronowitz, “Introduction,” in Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom
(Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 199, p. 7

7. Doug Henwood, After the New Economy (New York: The New Press, 2003);
Kevin Phillips, Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American
Rich (New York: Broadway, 2003); Paul Krugman, The Great Unraveling: Losing
Our Way in the New Century (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003).

8. Stanley Aronowitz, How Class Works (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2003), p. 102.

9. Of course, there is widespread resistance to
neoliberalism and its institutional enforcers such as the WTO and IMF among
many intellectuals, students, and global justice movements, but this
resistance rarely gets aired in the dominant media and if it does it is
often dismissed as irrelevant or tainted by Marxist ideology.

10. George Soros, “ The US
is Now in the Hands of a Group of Extremists ,” The Guardian/UK (January
26, 2004).

11. Paul Tolme, “Criminalizing the Homeless,” In These Times (April 14,
2003), pp. 6-7.

12. Staff or Democracy Now,
“ Uncharitable Care:
How Hospitals are Gouging and Even Arresting the Uninsured ,” CommonDreams
(January 8, 2004).

13. John and Jean Comaroff, “Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a
Second Coming,” Public Culture 12:2 (2000), p. 332.

14. Comaroff, Ibid., (2000), p. 332.

15. Pierre Bourdieu, Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market
(New York: The New Press, 199.

16. Pierre Bourdieu and Gunter Grass, “The ‘Progressive’ Restoration: A
Franco-German Dialogue,” New Left Review 14 (march-April, 2003), p. 66.

Foreign Policy Research Institute
WATCH ON THE WEST
www.fpri.org

PRESIDENT NIXON'S HISTORICAL LEGACY
By Walter A. McDougall

Volume 5, Number 6
August 2004

Walter A. McDougall is Co-Chair, with James Kurth, of FPRI's
Center for the Study of America and the West. His latest
book is "Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American
History, 1585-1828."

PRESIDENT NIXON'S HISTORICAL LEGACY

By Walter A. McDougall

An address to the Richard M. Nixon Library and Birthplace
August 5, 2004, Yorba Linda, California
Commemorating the 30th Anniversary of President Nixon's resignation

To help my thinking about President Nixon's historical
legacy, I accessed the Nixon Library's excellent web site
and reread the eulogies made at the president's funeral. I
was stunned to realize it's been ten years already since
that sad and glorious day. Yet the fact that thirty years
have passed since Nixon's resignation does not surprise me.
The anxieties and crises of the 1970s seem distant because
so much transpired since. Americans overcame Vietnam and
Watergate, stagflation and oil shocks, Soviet threats and
hostages in Iran. In the 1980s we recovered our strength,
optimism, and prosperity, won the Cold War, and launched the
computer revolution. In the 1990s, America displayed
unprecedented might in the first Gulf War and rode the wave
of globalization to unparalleled wealth and cultural
influence. Finally, of course, 9/11 jolted America into a
new protracted conflict more terrifying and challenging in
some respects than the Cold War.

What connection, if any, remains between the Nixon
presidency and those subsequent events? Is Nixon rightly
viewed today as a period piece who left little legacy, and
that negative? Or did his career have a good deal to do
with later events, helping to shape the America and world we
live in today? There are, I believe, at least three answers
to those questions, suggesting that Nixon left a mighty
legacy, but also that decades may pass before scholars,
journalists, and politicians own up to the truth.

Just for fun, I pulled from my shelf some current textbooks
to see how their authors assess Nixon's importance in modern
history.

The best of the lot, Palmer & Coulton's History of the
Modern World, mentions Nixon just four times: for visiting
China; for Watergate and his resignation; for escalation in
Vietnam despite promising peace; and for teaming with
Kissinger for detente and arms control.

Prenctice-Hall's Western Civilization mentions Nixon three
times: for overthrowing Allende in Chile; for withdrawing
from Vietnam without victory or honor while spreading the
war to Laos and Cambodia; and for ending the military draft
to quiet protests.

The Western Heritage, also from Prentice-Hall, mentions
Nixon just twice, for Vietnamization and detente with
Moscow.

The Longman text, Civilization in the West, contains exactly
one mention of Nixon: his 1959 tour of Latin America, when
he was pelted with eggs and rocks!

Western Civilizations, published by Norton, mentions Nixon
for escalating the Vietnam war and provoking Hanoi's
counter-attack in 1972; for Watergate and resignation, and
for being the president under whom Kissinger achieved
detente.

The Western Perspective, a Harcourt-Brace textbook, makes no
mention of Nixon at all, while the Knopf text, The Western
Experience, mentions Nixon one time, in connection with--are
you ready?--Soviet grain purchases from the U.S.

So much for Nixon's place in world history in the views of
my colleagues. How would I assess Nixon's legacy?

First, I would argue that Nixon's politics and diplomacy
laid the foundations for victory in the Cold War. Nixon
extricated the U.S. from the exhausting, divisive commitment
of a half-million soldiers to a guerrilla land war in Asia.
And even though the Paris Accords failed, for reasons we can
debate, America's alliances and posture in the world
survived that defeat.

Indeed, Nixon left America in a far stronger geopolitical
position thanks to his strategic alignment with China, which
completed the encirclement of the Soviet Union and forced
Moscow to deploy millions of troops on its eastern front
even as it faced NATO in the West. The opening to China
also ensured that after the Soviet Union collapsed, the
result would not be new hot and cold wars in the
Asia/Pacific, but stability and prosperity throughout the
region.

Finally, Nixon transformed American politics by summoning to
life the Silent Majority and capturing the working class
vote for the Republican Party. Those patriotic, blue-
collar, Catholic or Southern voters gave him his landslide
in 1972, but more importantly, they formed the core of what
became known as the Reagan coalition that won back the White
House in 1980 and even the Congress by 1994.

To be sure, neither Nixon nor Kissinger could foresee that
future. As my friend Harvey Sicherman, an Alexander Haig
protege, puts it: statesmen tend always to back into the
future. But Nixon's maneuvers at home and abroad made the
best of a bad situation, and so helped to make possible the
later achievements of Reagan.

What of Nixon's policies, as opposed to his politics? In
1994 a liberal feminist, Joan Hoff Wilson, shocked her
fellow historians with Nixon Reconsidered. In that book
Wilson accorded Nixon strange new respect for his many
progressive policies. Under Nixon, Lyndon Johnson's Great
Society, including welfare and affirmative action, reached
its fullest extent. The Justice Department carried out
Court-ordered integration of schools and labor unions in the
North. The Office of Economic Opportunity was founded,
along with the Environmental Protection Agency and the
National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.
Eighteen-year-olds got the vote and military conscription
was abolished. The Supreme Court struck down state laws
banning abortion. The federal government imposed wage and
price controls to combat inflation. Not least, it was Nixon
who pulled the dollar off the gold standard established at
Bretton Woods in 1944.

Let me say a few words about that act of historic
importance. Ever since World War II, the world's leading
currencies had been pegged to the dollar, which in turn was
pegged to gold at $35 per ounce. But the dollar had not
really been good as gold at least since 1960, by which time
the dollar came under pressure because of a U.S. balance of
payments deficit caused by European and Japanese economic
recovery and by America's overseas military commitments.
The Kennedy and Johnson administrations were obsessed with
this balance of payments crisis, but did nothing about it,
even as foreign speculators made a killing by selling
dollars short and hoarding gold. It took Richard Nixon to
take responsibility and take the hit for facing up to
reality. In 1971 he suspended gold payments and let the
dollar float to its real value against the mark, yen, and
other currencies. In the short run he was roundly attacked
for economic nationalism. But in the long run his bold
action liberated exchange rates, released international
flows of capital, and laid the basis for the economic
globalization of the 1980s and nineties.

Needless to say, most liberals give Nixon no credit, even
for policies they applaud, while the best conservatives can
say is that Nixon gave in to the Democrats on domestic
issues so that he could pursue his ambitious foreign agenda.
Hence, Nixon's domestic achievements, whatever one thinks of
them, do his image no good.

What image will posterity nurture of Nixon? The best
analysis is David Greenberg's Nixon's Shadow, published last
year. Greenberg describes five Richard Nixons that beguile
and perplex the American people. First, Nixon the Villain,
Tricky Dick, the devious politician who ruined himself
through abuses of power. Second, Nixon the Victim, who won
a landslide re-election only to be toppled in a coup led by
liberals in the media and Congress. Having repudiated their
own Vietnam commitment, liberals held Nixon to peacetime
standards of ethics even though he was a war president.
Hence, behavior that had been excused when FDR or JFK were
in office was now judged an impeachable offense. Third,
there is the image of Nixon as brilliant Statesman,
maneuvering with Kissinger on the geopolitical stage.
Fourth, there is Nixon the Populist, who bestrode national
politics for a generation and ran on the Republican ticket
five times! Nixon the Populist is the Nixon of the Silent
Majority speech, Billy Graham rallies, and patriotic
demonstrations by hard-hats. Fifth, there is Nixon the
Liberal, as outlined above.

Which of these images best reflects his true legacy? All of
them, Greenberg concludes, because Nixon was a complex
personality leading a complex nation in a highly complex
era. But his guess is that Nixon's dominant image will
always be Nixon the Villain for the simple reason that he is
the only president obliged to resign the office.

I disagree--and not only because I believe Nixon's role in
U.S. and world politics stands on its own. I disagree
because I suspect even Watergate will someday be understood
as simply the most dramatic episode in a long-overdue
rebellion against what Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., called the
Imperial Presidency. The Democrats themselves forged the
imperial presidency from FDR in the Depression and World War
II, to Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson in the Cold War. But by
the late 1960s, Democrats such as Senators J. William
Fulbright, Wayne Morse, Frank Church, William Proxmire,
Eugene McCarthy, and George McGovern reached the conclusion
over these long emergencies that Congress had abdicated too
much power to the White House. Nixon's election in 1968 was
their moment to strike. Freed from having to support their
own president and war, Democrats began to hold hearings,
sponsor legislation, leak secrets, and spin the media, all
for the purpose of reining in the executive branch -- even, or
especially, in matters of national security. Between 1969
and 1980 a whole series of measures resulted, including the
War Powers Act, investigations and restrictions on the CIA's
covert activities, denials of executive privilege, cutoffs
of funding for military missions and foreign assistance,
sanctions against allies on human rights grounds, the
Jackson-Vanik Amendment, and Freedom of Information Act.
Someday, after all those with a psychological stake in
hating Nixon are dead, historians may come to see the
impeachment proceedings as the ultimate check on the power
of the president, indeed a president who had the audacity to
achieve peace in Vietnam and the world despite Congress,
then had the audacity to win 49 states.

Someday historians may also record that no president save
Lincoln and FDR took office in more trying times. Nixon
inherited a war his predecessor had no strategy for winning
or ending. Nixon inherited a embattled army of 540,000
demoralized troops increasingly vexed by drugs, racial
tension, and mutiny. Nixon faced a hostile Congress and
media. Nixon led a society rent asunder by violent riots
and protests. Nixon was obliged to call Americans to
discipline, patience, and sacrifice even as the baby-boomers
trumpeted civil disobedience, instant gratification, and all
manner of self-indulgence. Nixon inherited an economy
wounded by Johnson's guns-and-butter policies and surging
inflation. Nixon confronted a world in which the Soviet
Union boasted of nuclear parity, China was implacably
militant, the third world seemed ready to go communist, and
even America's allies had turned sullen or hostile. Indeed,
Nixon deserves enduring credit just for being willing to
serve as president in 1969, and enormous credit for
achieving as much as he did.

In the end, Nixon faltered. But few men have ever been
asked to carry so great a weight of responsibility, or for
so long. That is why his best epitaph may be Henry
Kissinger's in his book Diplomacy. In retrospect, he wrote,
the safest course of action for Nixon would have been to go
to the Congress, early in his first term, lay out his
strategy for de-escalating in Vietnam, and oblige members of
Congress either to endorse his strategy or liquidate the
war. But, Kissinger continues, Nixon rejected such advice
because he felt that history would never forgive the
appalling consequences of what he considered an abdication
of executive responsibility. It was an honorable, indeed, a
highly moral and intellectually correct, decision. But in
the American system of checks and balances, the burden Nixon
took on himself was not meant to be borne by just one man.

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From: "Maxim Institute"
Subject: Maxim Institute - real issues - No. 123

...

Hate Speech - The right not to be offended?

The launch of an inquiry into whether New Zealand should prohibit "hate
speech" might reveal our willingness to trade freedom of expression for
increasing state control of public conversation.

Freedom of speech is not absolute. Law and social stigma also play a role
in discouraging undesirable comments. And, of course, there remain the
necessary laws surrounding defamation.

Justice Minister Phil Goff has rightfully asserted that "the point of the
inquiry cannot be to stop expression of hateful opinion, even if we utterly
reject that opinion." Then he goes on to say, "It is when expression of
that opinion risks leading directly to harm to the group against which it
is directed that the law has a role to play." But should we hold someone
legally liable for another person's reaction to what he or she says?

When we use the law to inhibit what people say, we transfer power away from
the individual citizen, and their need to show personal responsibility, and
onto the state.

At the heart of any theory of policing "hate speech" is the concept of
thought control. It will intimidate all of us into particular ways of
thinking. It is a tool that can too easily be employed by any government
to silence those who express a contrary opinion.

The Government Administration committee intends to call for public
submissions on the inquiry and has set a closing date for submissions of
5.00 pm on Friday, 1 October 2004. For more information on the terms of
reference for the committee's inquiry visit:
http://www.clerk.parliament.govt.nz/Programme/Committees/PressReleases/6aug04.htm

Do not ride yr hawg within 2 h of reading this as you may go spinning out
of control :-}

Note allegation near end of a cunning stunt by Nixon; has this any
authentication?

R

NEW YORK LOCKDOWN
Cops plan zero tolerance for violent protests at the GOP Convention.
Militant groups plan to disrupt the city like never before. Welcome,
delegates!

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Michelle Goldberg

Aug. 11, 2004 | If you're a delegate attending the Republican
National Convention at Madison Square Garden later this month,
Jamie Moran knows where you're staying. He knows where you're
eating and what Broadway musical you plan on seeing. For the past
nine months, Moran has been living off savings earned as an office
manager at a nonprofit and working full-time to disrupt the RNC.

His small anarchist collective, RNCNotWelcome.org, runs a snitch
line and an e-mail account where disgruntled employees of New York
hotels, the Garden and the Republican Party itself can pass on
information about conventioneers. So far, the collective has
received dozens of phone calls and hundreds of e-mails with inside
dirt on GOP activities. Recently, a woman with a polished,
middle-aged sounding voice left a message saying, "For some
God-unknown reason I'm on the Republican mailing list, and they
sent me what they call a list of their inner-circle events." The
events hadn't been publicized elsewhere, she said, and she wanted
to fax the list to Moran.

Moran feeds information like this to a cadre of activists desperate
to unleash four years' worth of anger at the Bush administration.
By dogging the delegates wherever they go, RNC Not Welcome hopes to
make the Republicans' lives hell for as long as they're in New York.

"We want to make their stay here as miserable as possible," says
Moran, who has sandy hair, a snub nose and a goatee. The son of a
retired Queens cop, he's 30 but looks younger. "I'd like to see all
the Republican events -- teas, backslapping lunches -- disrupted.
I'd like to see people from other states following their delegates,
letting them know what they think about Republican policies. I'd
like to see impromptu street parties and marches. I'd like to see
corporations involved in the Iraq reconstruction get targeted --
anything from occupation to property destruction."

There's a showdown coming to Manhattan. Backed by the most intense
security the city has ever seen, the Republicans are about to turn
the blue-state bastion of New York City into the backdrop for
George Bush's coronation. The RNC chose New York because it was the
site of the Sept. 11 terror attacks, which to Bush's opponents and
even some ordinary New Yorkers seems a brazen provocation.

On one side are 36,000 cops -- a force that City Councilman Peter
Vallone Jr. calls "perhaps the world's tenth-largest standing
army." On the other side are at least 250,000 protesters expected
to converge on the city from all across the United States and
Canada -- a demonstration six times larger than the legendary
anti-globalization protests that rocked Seattle in 1999.

They're facing off at a time when police are increasingly adopting
military tactics in response to protest, and protesters are
responding likewise, conducting their own reconnaissance on
Republican plans and plotting actions designed to hit where the
cops are weakest. The police have infiltrated the protesters, but
the protesters have infiltrated the convention; according to
anti-RNC organizers, they have at least two moles working
undercover with volunteers the city has recruited to help makes
things run smoothly at Madison Square Garden.

Plans to oppose the convention are multiplying, suffusing activists
with a giddy, growing tension. Marches and rallies, legal and
illegal, are being planned for every day that the Republicans are
in New York. There will be street theater, including a Roman-style
vomitorium in the East Village a few days before the convention
starts, meant to signify Republican gluttony. Cheri Honkala, an
organizer from Philadelphia, is mobilizing homeless people, public
housing tenants and others for a big, illegal "poor peoples' march"
on Aug. 30. Activists are holding weekend workshops where
direct-action novices practice street blocking, and DIY medics
learn to treat victims of pepper spray and police violence.

No one knows where it's all going -- whether it will look like
Chicago '68 or Seattle '99 or something altogether new. But
activists see the coming conflict as history-making.

"I want to see something so gigantic that it can't be
misinterpreted," says Jason Flores-Williams, a political writer at
High Times Magazine, who's been playing a dual role as a journalist
covering the movement and an organizer shaping it. An intense man in
his 30s with a shaved head and silver earring, Flores-Williams
recently published the High Times Activist Guide to the Republican
National Convention, which is part primer and part call to arms. In
May, eager to kick off a summer of activism, he put together a small
early-morning protest near Rockefeller Center and was arrested along
with two others during a traffic-blocking die-in on Fifth Avenue.

For the RNC, he dreams of "a total expression of seething hatred
that will go down in history as a moment in time when people stood
up to the worst administration we've ever had."

Among other things, he envisions protesters locking down the streets
of New York by chaining their arms together inside metal tubes,
creating what's called a sleeping dragon. "You lock your arms in,"
he says. "When the cops come, they have to saw through these steel
tubes. You get 30 people and you lock down a street for six hours.
While this is happening, it gives other protesters a great
opportunity to make their statement, to be further disruptive. They
can lie down with these people, they can chant at the police, they
can sit down where they are and be arrested for that or block
further public space. They can disrupt the normal flow of society."

"It's coming together," he says with enthusiasm after a June meeting
of a hundred or so anti-RNC activists at an East Village church.
"Part of it is going to be fun and beautiful, but part of it has to
instill fear into the power structure."

That won't be easy. The last four years have given police plenty of
practice in instilling fear themselves. Relationships between cops
and protesters have rarely been warm, but since Sept. 11, they've
grown toxic, with law enforcement routinely denying march permits
and using overwhelming force against nonviolent demonstrators.

In 2000 at the Republican Convention in Philadelphia, police
infiltrated activist groups and made mass preemptive arrests. The
Democratic Convention in Los Angeles that year was little better.
"Even protests with the city's permission have been met by legions
of heavily armed police officers dressed in full riot gear," CNN
reported. The police fired tear gas and rubber bullets into crowds
of demonstrators, injuring protesters and journalists alike. "It
looked like a reenactment of a Civil War battle," said Al Crespo, a
photographer who was shot with a rubber bullet.

Since Sept. 11, things have only gotten worse. In the past three
years, protest in America has increasingly come to resemble that in
countries such as Egypt, where demonstrations are allowed only
within tightly controlled spaces and riot police rush in at the
first hint of spontaneity or disorder.

In April 2003, after the California Anti-Terrorism Information
Center issued a bulletin about the potential for terrorist violence
at an antiwar protest in Oakland, police opened fire on the peaceful
crowd with wooden pellets.

It later turned out there had been no real basis for the terrorism
warning. Mike Van Winkle, spokesman for the California
Anti-Terrorism Information Center, told the Oakland Tribune that it
was made because protest itself can be seen as a form of terrorism.
"You can make an easy kind of link that, if you have a protest
group protesting a war where the cause that's being fought against
is international terrorism, you might have terrorism at that
protest," he said. "You can almost argue that a protest against
that is a terrorist act."

Something similar happened in November, when some 10,000 union
members and retirees demonstrated at a free-trade summit in Miami.
They were met by 2,500 cops brandishing new crowd-control weaponry,
paid for in part by a little-noticed $8.5 million appropriation
tacked onto the Iraqi reconstruction bill. Videos taken at the
scene show nonviolent protesters being beaten with wooden clubs,
shocked with Taser guns, shot in the back with rubber bullets and
pepper-sprayed in the face.

"For a brief period in time, Miami lived under martial law,"
concluded a scathing report on police misconduct issued by a local
panel charged with investigating the debacle. "Civil rights were
trampled, and the sociopolitical values we hold most dear were
undermined."

Since the free-trade summit protests, activists have come to refer
to a militarized response to protest as the Miami model -- and it's
a model that other police forces have studied. Lt. Bill Schwartz, a
spokesman for the Miami Police Department, said that law
enforcement officials from Georgia and New York traveled to Miami
during the free-trade summit to learn tactics for dealing with
upcoming protests in their cities. Georgia was getting ready for
the G-8 summit in June, which brought together the leaders of
Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia. And New
York, of course, was preparing for the RNC.

Upon his return from Miami, Bill Hitchens, director of Georgia's
Department of Homeland Security, told the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution, "We need to do much the same as they did."

They certainly tried. In May, shortly before the G-8 economic summit
was scheduled to take place on Sea Island in Georgia, the state's
Republican governor declared a state of emergency, citing a danger
from "unlawful assemblages." That enabled him to call out the
National Guard, flooding the streets with soldiers in full
camouflage. Protesters who tried to attend a candlelight peace
vigil had to pass through a checkpoint manned by armed troops.

There probably won't be soldiers on the streets of New York,
although, according to a February New York Daily News story,
convention planners have discussed the possibility. But there will
be a massive police presence, with 8,000 officers providing
security around Madison Square at all times. According to Vallone,
the NYPD has received $50 million in federal money to prepare for
the convention, and $18 million is being used "for the latest in
crowd-control devices," including nonlethal weaponry and "high-tech
video surveillance devices."

Overseeing it all will be the Secret Service, which is in charge of
the convention site. Under Bush, the Secret Service has proved
particularly hostile to protest. They often set up "free-speech
zones" to corral demonstrators far from the president, and they ask
local police to arrest anyone who strays from the designated areas.

In October 2002, South Carolina activist Brett Bursey was arrested
for trespassing when he waded into a crowd of Bush supporters
waiting to greet the president and held up a "no war for oil" sign.
On July 4 this year, police say, the Secret Service directed them to
arrest a couple for wearing anti-Bush T-shirts at a presidential
speech in West Virginia -- despite the fact that the speech was
open to the public.

The NYPD doesn't need much encouragement to shunt protesters aside.
The department has attempted to control demonstrations against the
war in Iraq by using interlocking metal barriers to create pens
around groups of demonstrators, making it difficult to get in or
out. The New York Civil Liberties Union sued to stop the practice,
but on July 19 a federal judge ruled that police can continue to
use the pens as long as they make it easier for protesters to enter
and exit.

The city's security plan provides for a "designated protest area" on
the southwest corner of Madison Square Garden. Those who want to
protest the convention legally will be confined to this corner and
probably sealed off in pens flanked by deep walls of men in blue.
All of this has alarmed local Democratic politicians, many of whom
are planning to take to the streets with the demonstrators.

"I am very concerned that activities during the Republican
Convention will be silenced or pushed out of the way, supposedly
for the 'comfort' of those participating at the convention," State
Assemblyman Richard Gottfried said in a statement. "Our civil
rights cannot be sacrificed for political purposes."

Meanwhile, as protesters themselves feel squeezed, their urge to
rampage grows greater. "I think people will fight back if they're
provoked," Moran says. "Usually a riot is an explosion of energy
and anger at a situation. The cops create a situation where
peoples' desires are completely foiled, so they lash out. I don't
think that's unhealthy."

The city's reluctance to issue protest permits has engendered
especial bitterness. Groups that applied for permits to hold legal
marches during the convention were stalled for so long -- sometimes
more than a year -- that the Democrat-dominated City Council held
hearings to investigate whether the mayor and the police department
were deliberately stifling free speech. In July, the cops finally
relented and issued a few permits, but by then many activists had
given up on the system and resolved to break the law.

"In the last couple of months, the conversations have started
shifting toward direct action," Moran says. "People are like,
'We've voted, we've asked for permits, we've played nice.'"

The targets, Moran says, should be far from Madison Square Garden.
"Don't go where they're strongest," he says. "There's going to be a
ton of people who are going to want to go to Madison Square Garden,
they're going to want to yell at the building even though it's two
avenues away." The activists' strength, he says, "is our ability to
be creative and act in surprising ways."

Vallone concedes that with so many police deployed around the
convention, the force will be stretched thin in the rest of the
city. "There will be a drain of police officers from other areas,"
he says. "It will be difficult. But we have the best police force
in the world to deal with it."

And what, exactly, will they be dealing with? Moran bristles when
asked for specifics about the kind of actions New York is likely to
see. "There's such an over-concentration on that question," he says,
irritably. "It's really problematic. I don't want to be predictive."

Part of this is simple evasion. But Moran really doesn't know what
people are going to do with his group's information. Indeed, not
knowing is inherent in his anarchist model, which relies on
decentralized cells or "affinity groups" of five to 20 people who
dream up and carry out autonomous actions. When larger numbers are
called for, affinity groups temporarily team up, forming larger
units called "clusters," and then disband when the deed is done.

RNC Not Welcome gives them tools -- links to maps showing the
location of "war profiteers'" offices and delegates' hotels,
schedules of Republican events, instructions on protecting oneself
from pepper spray and tear gas, directions for occupying rooftops
and recipes for tofu cream pies to be thrown in the faces of
ideological enemies. The collective sends out e-mail bulletins
whenever they learn something new about the Republicans' plans.
What people do with it all is up to them.

"We're trying to provide some sort of structure for people who are
only coming in for five days to plug into," Moran says.

Moran hasn't always been a radical. His introduction to activism was
as conventional as it gets. As a student at SUNY Buffalo surviving
on student loans, he joined student government and fought against
cuts in state funding for education. He got involved in militant
politics somewhat by accident, when he wandered drunk out of the
infamous Lower East Side nightclub Save the Robots and into
Blackout Books, an anarchist bookshop. He picked up a free copy of
Earth First! magazine and was intrigued enough by its combative
environmentalism to go to an Earth First! meeting a few weeks
later. That led to a 1997 trip to an Earth First! gathering in
Wisconsin. Afterward, he was arrested while protesting a proposed
mine in northern Wisconsin and spent five nights in jail. It was
the first of many arrests, including one for throwing a pie in the
face of a biotech CEO in Berkeley.

Moran calls himself an anarchist but is weary of the subcultural
poses adopted by so many of his young black-clad comrades.
Recently, he and the four other members of RNC Not Welcome put out
a "position paper" urging radicals to leave their black balaclavas
and facial piercings behind, and instead attempt to blend into
crowds.

"Outside of marches, all-black clothing is rather conspicuous, so
our dress code should be 'business casual," they wrote. "Sunglasses
are suggested, the bigger the hipper. And hats are always in. Would
you make the small sacrifice to cut your hair or take out your
septum ring to stay out of jail? Racial and political profiling are
commonly practiced here and we need you in the streets!"

Some are already adopting social camouflage. Upon learning that RNC
CEO Bill Harris was scheduled to woo local Hispanic business
leaders at a Harlem restaurant on June 22, two activists donned
white shirts, ties and slacks and sneaked in. They went unnoticed
as they replaced the Bush-Cheney stickers, posters and pamphlets
with their own agitprop and covered the bathroom in anti-RNC
stickers.

"The point was to let them know that yes, we are out there, and yes,
they are not welcome in our city," one of them wrote in an e-mail
account of the action.

For Moran, dressing like a moderate isn't to be confused with acting
like one. He has an almost Zen-like attitude toward the possibility
that property-destroying protesters could spark a brutal police
backlash, saying, "There's a certain empowerment that happens when
you shed your fear."

Most activists believe that if violence does break out, the city is
to blame. Mayor Bloomberg and the cops are "flirting with or
inviting chaos," says Bill Dobbs, the spokesman for United for
Peace and Justice, New York's largest antiwar organizing group.

There's pressure on UFPJ, as the most established of the anti-RNC
organizers, to condemn the tactics of activists like Moran,
especially when it comes to property destruction. Journalists, says
Dobbs, constantly call him and fish for negative quotes about
radicals planning illegal actions, seeking to create what he calls
a "good protester/bad protester" dichotomy. But right now,
activists from all parts of the movement are presenting a united
front. A memorandum is even circulating in which different types of
organizers -- mainstream and radical, those working within the law
and outside it -- promise not to undercut each other.

"We've each got our own approaches," Dobbs says. "We can still
support and stand in solidarity with each other generally amidst
individual differences in tactics." Moran, for his part, says,
"We're not dissing anyone for applying for permits."

As police pressure is ratcheted up, the lines between Dobbs'
approach and Moran's are starting to blur. On the evening of June
11, over 100 people gathered at Saint Marks Church for one of the
monthly No RNC Clearinghouse meetings, in which organizers plot
strategy and apprise each other of their progress. The room was
stifling and the meeting tedious until a strikingly pretty
dark-haired woman stood up and electrified the crowd with her call
to civil disobedience.

"The Republicans are coming," she began. "In a shameless effort to
exploit the tragedy of 9/11, they will craft an agenda that erodes
the very freedoms they claim to fight for.

"This is where we step in," she continued. "On Tuesday, Aug. 31, a
day of nonviolent civil disobedience and direct action will
commence." It will start, she says, with a shout. "As clocks strike
11 a.m., two days before the renomination of George W. Bush, the
people of the world will shout 'no' with one voice. From Brooklyn
to Baghdad to London to Lisbon, from Selma to Sao Paulo, we'll
raise our voices in this global expression of outrage ... Here in
New York we will converge on Madison Square Garden. We will sit
down in the streets and refuse to move ... We want more than
speeches and protest pens. We want change!"

The crowd erupted in cheers, whistles and applause.

It's telling that this woman was frustrated with protests as usual
because she's a colleague of Dobbs' at United for Peace and
Justice, a group whose raison d'etre is big, traditional marches.
UFPJ has nothing to do with the call to action issued at the
meeting. Indeed, it's premised on the notion that old-school
demonstrations are increasingly insufficient.

Few blame this on United for Peace and Justice, a group headed by
veteran organizer Leslie Cagan, a squat woman with short silver
hair who helped bring more than half a million people to Central
Park in 1982 for a record-setting disarmament rally. Cagan is a
radical, but she's also a professional, the kind of person who
knows her way around the permitting process and is willing to work
with police and city officials. Over the past year, though, the
NYPD has done much to undermine her and UFPJ.

United for Peace and Justice is planning another huge march on Aug.
29, the day before the convention begins. Cagan wanted to have the
protest culminate at Central Park's Great Lawn, but the Parks
Department refused to allow it on the grounds that attendees might
destroy the lawn's newly planted grass. UFPJ offered to put up a
bond to pay for potential damages, but the city hasn't relented. At
one point, a city official suggested that UFPJ hold the rally in
Queens instead. "The Parks Department slammed the door in our
face," she says.

In June, Cagan told a City Hall hearing that the NYPD was "creating
the potential for chaos" by refusing to let demonstrators use the
park. Bill Perkins, the Cty Council's deputy majority leader, had
convened the hearing to investigate the city's response to
convention protest plans. He was worried, he said, that
"overzealous antiterrorism policing is creating an unnecessary
burden on New Yorkers' rights to assemble." The city's refusal to
let protesters use the Great Lawn left him angry and incredulous.
"I am very concerned," he said at the hearing, "that we have such
high regard for the rights of grass."

So far, the rights of grass have prevailed. On July 21, UFPJ
reluctantly accepted the city's offer to allow a rally on the West
Side Highway, far from shops and foot traffic. UFPJ was told that
it had no other choice -- the city wouldn't negotiate. "This was
not a happy decision to make," says UFPJ spokesman Bill Dobbs. "It
reflects the bullying of Republican Mayor Bloomberg."

Among other problems, the West Side Highway site lacks shade and
access to places to buy drinking water. Because the site is so long
and narrow, the rally would have stretched along dozens of city
blocks, making projecting sound a challenge.

UFPJ's compromise enraged many activists. Posters on anarchist sites
like Indymedia.org condemned the group and promised to rally in
Central Park regardless. "Who asked UFP&J to play hall monitor?" an
activist from Philadelphia wrote.

"I'm almost glad the City has decided to deny us a permit for
Central Park and that UFPJ caved," wrote another. "Now, we will
take the Park in defiance of both the capitalist bosses and the
self-appointed leaders of the 'movement.'"

The reaction was so negative, in fact, that Tuesday UFPJ abandoned
its agreement with the city and announced that it will continue to
fight for the use of the park. "Part of organizing is listening to
what people are saying," says Dobbs. "We are indeed marching by
Madison Square Garden, and we are not, not going to that dreadful
West Side Highway."

UFPJ has reapplied for a permit to use the park but it seems
unlikely that the city will grant it. If denied, Dobbs says his
group might sue. And after that? "We'll cross that bridge when we
come to it."

Some are urging UFPJ to schedule the rally in the park without
waiting for a permit. "Note to UFPJ," said one Indymedia poster.
"If you abandon West Side Highway, and declare your intention to
rally in Central Park with or without a permit, you will regain
much of your credibility with the rank and file."

Right now, though, UFPJ isn't going that far, though Dobbs
acknowledges that many people will try to take the park regardless.
"The mayor has set up this volatility," he says.

Such volatility is good news for people like Flores-Williams, who
are eager to see widespread confrontations with police. "There
comes a time when you have to have an appropriate response," he
says. "If nothing happens and it's a gentle response, that's going
to be used as a sign of complicity and acceptance of the
Republicans' presence here."

Flores-Williams seems like he's been waiting for this moment all his
life. He was an expat in Prague in the early '90s, and after that a
writer of polymorphously perverse, William Vollmann-style fiction
in San Francisco. Now he talks as if he's standing on the precipice
of a new era. "I like what happened in Seattle. But the real vision
I have is what happened in Paris in 1968," he says, referring to
the student uprising and general strike that convulsed the city.
"In my opinion, chaos serves to energize the human spirit. I've
seen it. I lived in Eastern Europe when the walls were coming down.
It was a beautiful period when art flourished. It was like the
blinders came off."

Yes, the cops will be out in force. "But there will be so many
protests," he says, snapping his fingers. "Here 5,000, here 500.
Popping off in all these different places. The cops will be
stretched thin. Tempers will rise. All hell will break loose.
That's what everybody wants -- they just won't admit it."

That's not entirely true. Plenty of Bush opponents worry about what
this grand carnival of rejection, while cathartic for some, will
actually mean. There was nothing liberating, after all, about the
welts and bruises protesters sustained in Miami last fall. "Stark
brutality can paralyze people with fear," says Moran. "Miami hangs
like a black cloud."

So does the Chicago Democratic National Convention of 1968, where
Mayor Richard Daley took a hard line against demonstrations and the
cops clashed with protesters on the streets around the convention
center. Few doubt that the police, if provoked enough, will respond
with equal force this year.

This terrifies Bush opponents, who worry that violence on the
streets of New York will help the Republicans by making them look
like Middle American moderates besieged by nutty radicals. They
note that the Chicago '68 debacle helped cement Richard Nixon's
reputation as the law-and-order candidate.

"The wilder and more disreputable the demonstrators look, the better
for the Republicans," says Paul Berman, a former student organizer
and author of "A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the
Generation of 1968. "At the height of the antiwar movement, Nixon
specifically directed his motorcade to go through the middle of an
antiwar riot in California in order to have people throw rocks at
him or shout obscenities so that the TV would pose the question
that night to the American public: 'Whom do you prefer, President
Nixon, or a dope-smoking hippie communist rock thrower?' And the
country had no doubt. This was just genius on his part. If Bush
ends up winning the election, it will be because of this kind of
tactic."

Thirty-five years ago, Berman's generation was notorious for its
scornful dismissal of older, cautious liberals. Today, Moran sounds
like their rightful descendant, insisting that Berman's lesson
doesn't apply. Rather than being alienated by upheavals in
Manhattan's streets, he believes ordinary people will join in.

"I've heard some old-timers say, 'If you people riot it will hand
Bush the presidency,'" he says. "I think that's just lazy thinking.
Any situation where we are joined by regular New Yorkers in the
streets is a positive thing."

Besides, it's too late to hold back the protests now. "The last four
years definitely created a lot of rage in people," Moran says.
"People may decide to unleash that rage on war profiteers. Our
collective isn't going to condemn that. It's not our objective."

What is their objective? The Republicans should leave New York, he
says. "It was a really bad mistake to come here."

- - - - - - - - - - - -
About the writer
Michelle Goldberg is a senior writer for Salon based in New York.

Subject: Is opposing same sex marriage hate speech?

To view this item online, visit
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=37628

LAW OF THE LAND
Is opposing same-sex marriage 'hate speech'?
Suit claims 'family values' not 'homophobic'
WorldNetDaily.com

A U.S. district court ruled two employees of Oakland can go forward in
their case against city supervisors after they were barred from advertising
an informal group that respects "the natural family, marriage and family
values."

The city contended the bulletin-board flyer was "homophobic", although it
makes no mention of homosexuality.

The case is significant, because a decision against the employees could
result in silencing debate about homosexuality and related issues in the
state of California, says Richard Ackerman, whose public-interest law firm
is representing the two women.

"The court bordered on saying references to 'family values' could be hate
speech if it were to be proved those words were disruptive," Ackerman told
WorldNetDaily.

"If we are silenced on the issue of speaking out against same sex marriage,
it's all over," said Ackerman of Lively & Ackerman.

Regina Rederford and Robin Christy filed the suit in U.S. District Court in
Oakland last July against the city of Oakland and two city supervisors who
enforced a policy they insist is unconstitutional.

The judge dismissed claims against the city of Oakland but allowed the
claims to proceed against the supervisors, Joyce Hicks, deputy director of
the Community and Economic Development Agency, and then-City Manager Robert
Bobb.

On an employee bulletin board where a variety of political and sexually
oriented causes are promoted, Rederford posted a flyer Jan. 3, 2003,
titled, "Preserve Our Workplace With Integrity." The entire text said:

Good News Employee Associations is a forum for people of
Faith to express their views on the contemporary issues of the day. With
respect for the Natural Family, Marriage and Family values.

If you would like to be a part of preserving integrity in
the Workplace call Regina Rederford @xxx-xxxx or Robin Christy @xxx-xxxx

The flyer was removed the same day, however, by order of Hicks.

In a Feb. 20 memo announcing a newly revised workplace anti-discrimination
policy, Hicks noted recent incidents of employees "inappropriately posting
materials" in violation of that policy.

"Specifically," she wrote according to a copy obtained by WND, "flyers were
placed in public view which contained statements of a homophobic nature and
were determined to promote sexual orientation-based harassment."

While a ruling against Rederford and Christy might restrict debate about
homosexuality, a decision in their favor could set a precedent that would
overturn anti-discrimination policies in the state.

Ackerman's firm said that could happen if the judge approaches this case as
a contest between the First Amendment and the anti-discrimination policy.

"This is one of the cleanest examples of blatant free-speech discrimination
that I've ever seen ñ the fact that the city actually acknowledged that
they were discriminating, based on content, in their own memo," said
attorney Scott Lively.

The state of California and many local jurisdictions have added sexual
orientation as a protected category in areas such as housing and employment
laws and school policies.

"Citizens should retain the right to criticize alternative sexual
lifestyles without fear of retaliation or retribution," Lively contends.

The complaint charges Hicks and Bobb violated their clients' constitutional
right to "to pray, associate, communicate religious ideas, and worship"
according to the U.S. Constitution and the laws and regulations of the city
of Oakland.

CANADIAN PROFESSOR CANNED FOR BEING NON-FEMINIST

LifeSite Daily News –- May 30, 2000
http://www.lifesite.net

WINNIPEG, May 30 (LSN.ca) - Dr. Henry Makow, PhD, 50, a former lecturer in the English department at the University of Winnipeg, has filed a complaint with the Manitoba Human Rights Commission alleging discrimination on the basis of his political beliefs, and his sexual orientation. He is heterosexual. Dr. Makow, the inventor of the popular board game Scruples, has been let go by the University of Winnipeg over being a "non-feminist." University President Constance Rooke, told him he was "anti feminist" and that "anti feminists are anti-women." Dr. Rooke informed Dr. Makow that his teaching services would not be retained next year. When Dr. Makow objected, raising the issue of academic freedom, Rooke scoffed: "We let you finish teaching the year, didn't we?"

Dr. Makow's punishment stems from complaints raised by four students in one of his two classes. In an anonymous letter, the four students told Dr. Makow that, "we have sensed your strong feeling that women should be submissive and docile." The feminists at the college became enraged because he expressed the view: "I don't believe being wives and mothers has oppressed women. They have been selected by nature for a task which is far more important than anything men do. It's time society, stopped devaluing the role of wife, mother, and homemaker." Dr. Makow believes that "a woman who puts husband and children before herself brings love into the world. More than any other, this is the way love is born."

The university took drastic action upon receipt of the letter despite the fact that the complaint was not even formal. Dr. Makow informed LifeSite that there was no investigation to determine whether the letter had any merit. When he responded that he had been misrepresented he was ignored, as were letters of support for his fairness submitted by other students and Dr. Makow's submission indicating support for his position in course materials. As well as deciding to release Dr. Makow from his teaching responsibilities the following year, the university decided another professor should grade the final papers and exams of the letter writers. The university gave them permission to cut his classes and even discussed providing these students with tutors.

Dr. Makow told LifeSite that the action was taken since the complaining students felt "uncomfortable," although radical feminist professors were not disciplined at all even though they would not give a passing grade to dissenting students. He provided the administration with proof that he had given A's to feminists. He lamented that the "university turns out women who hate men." He said that the radical feminists "have turned the university into an agency for their twisted social agenda."

Email your concerns to Dr. Rooke at:
c.rooke@uwinnipeg.ca
and to Vice President George Tomlinson
george.tomlinson@uwinnipeg.ca

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

American Communism And The Making Of Women's Liberation
By Henry Makow Ph.D. :Toogood Reports, 3 October 2001

http://www.toogoodreports.com/column/general/makow/100301.htm

"Rape is a violent expression of a pattern of male supremacy, an outgrowth of age-old economic, political and cultural exploitation of women by men. "Does this sound like the utterance of a radical feminist from the 1970's or 1980's? Guess again. It is taken from a pamphlet entitled "Woman Against Myth," by Betty Millard published in 1948 by CPUSA (the Communist Party of USA.)

In a new book, Red Feminism: American Communism and the Making of Women's Liberation, feminist historian Kate Weigand states: "ideas, activists and traditions that emanated from the Communist movement of the forties and fifties continued to shape the direction of the new women's movement of the 1960s and later."(154) Weigand, a professor at Smith College, writes, "second-wave feminism stands as an excellent example of a 1960's movement that blossomed from the seeds that Communist women germinated thirty years earlier." (156)

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0801864895/toogoodreports

In the late 1940's, CPUSA leaders realized that their primary constituency the labor movement was becoming increasingly hostile to Communism. They began to pin their survival on women and African Americans. They hoped that addressing the problems of "male supremacy" would "bring more women into the organization and into the fight against the domestic policies of the Cold War." (80)

Women Communists, who made up 40% of the party membership, had long complained that their domestic responsibilities prevented them from attending meetings. After the publication of "Women Against Myth" in 1948, the CPUSA began to address the problems of "male chauvinism" in the Communist Party. They initiated a process of "reeducating" men, that 50 years later, we recognize only too well.

Professor Weigand follows this process in the pages of the party newspaper The Daily Worker. Feminists began acampaign against "male chauvinism" and "sexism." For example, a Mrs. Kutzikfrom the Bronx complained that showing women in bathing suits was demeaning and racist. "What would we think if 90% of the pictures of Negroes in our newspaper showed them in zootsuits?" A writer was roundly criticized by woman readers for a story that suggested that his wife and four daughters spent much of their time worrying about their clothes: "The editors and the author owe the readers an apology and themselves a critical evaluation of their understanding of the woman question." (92) The captionof a photo of a man with a young child read, "Families are stronger and happier if the father knows how to fix the cereal, tie the bibs and take care of the youngsters." (127)

The Party disciplined men who didn't take the women's question seriously enough by ordering them to complete "control tasks involving study on the woman's question." In 1954 the Los Angeles branch disciplined men for "hogging discussion at club meetings, bypassing women comrades in leadership and making sex jokes degrading to women."(94)

The CPUSA tried to promote these values in the decadent capitalist culture. A film Salt of the Earth,* which Pauline Kael called "Communist propaganda", portrayed women taking a decisive role in their husbands' labor strike. "Against her husband's wishes, Esperanza became a leader in the strike and for the first time forged arole for herself outside of her household ... [her] political successes persuaded Ramon to accept a new model of family life." (132)

Portrayals of strong assertive successful women became as common in the Communist press and schools, as they are in the mass media today.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00000FZNE/toogoodreports

Communist women intellectuals formalized a Marxist analysis of the "women's question." The books In Women's Defense(1940) by Mary Inman, Century of Struggle (1954) by Eve Flexner and The Unfinished Revolution (1962) by Eve Merriam recorded the history of women's oppressionand decried the prevalence of sexism in traditional customs, mass culture and language. The founder of modern feminism, Betty Frieden relied on thesebooks when she advocated in The Feminine Mystique (1963)* that women make themselves and their career their first priority. With the exception of Inman (who left the Party over a doctrinal dispute) these women (including Frieden) all hid the fact that they were long time Communist activists. When their daughters ("red diaper babies") encountered "male chauvinism" in the New Left, they had everything they needed, including theexample of subterfuge, to start the Women's Liberation Movement.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0393322572/toogoodreports

Weigand has shown that modern feminism is a direct outgrowth of American Communism. There is nothing that feminists were saying and doing in the1960's-1980's that wasn't prefigured in the CPUSA in the 1940's and 1950's. Communists pioneered the political, economic and cultural analysis of woman's oppression. For example, in 1940, Mary Inman argued that child-rearing methods "manufacture femininity" and the "overemphasis on beauty" is used to keep women in subjection. Communists pioneered women's studies, and advocated public daycare, birth control, abortion and even children's rights. They originated key feminist concepts such as "the personal is the political" and techniques such as "consciousness raising." The main contribution modern feminism made was to try to eliminate heterosexuality and the nuclear family altogether. The CPUSA would never have tolerated the man-hatred and the homosexuality of second-wave feminism.

Feminism's roots in Marxist Communism explain a great deal about this curious but dangerous movement. It explains:

- Why the "woman's movement" hates femininity and is obsessed with forcing a political concept like "equality" on a personal, sexual and mystical relationship.

- Why the "women's movement" also embraces equality of race and class.

- Why they want revolution ("transformation") and have a messianic vision of a gender-less utopia.

- Why they believe human nature is infinitely malleable and can be shaped by indoctrination ("education") and coercion.

- Why they engage in interminable, mind-numbing theorizing, doctrinal disputes and factionalism.

- Why truth for them is a "socialconstruct" defined by whomever has power, and appearances are more important than reality.

- Why they reject God and nature and scientific evidence in favor of their political agenda.

- Why they don't believe in free speech, refuse to debate, and suppress dissenting views.

- Why they behave like a quasi-religious cult, or like the Red Guard.

It is hard to escape the conclusion that feminism is Communism by another name. Having failed to peddle class war, Communism morphed into a movement dedicated to gaining power by promoting gender conflict. The "diversity" and "multicultural" movements represent feminism's attempt to forge "allegiances" by empowering gays and "people of color." Thus, the original CPUSA trio of "race, gender and class" is very much intact but class conflict has never been a big seller. Feminists wish to destroy a Western Civilization that is dominated by white men who believe in genuine diversity (pluralism), individual libertyand equal opportunity (but not equal outcomes).

We have seen this destruction begin with the dismantling of the liberal arts curriculum and tradition of free speech and inquiry at all majoruniversities.

Many feminists are embarrassed to discover they are Communist dupes. They try to point out the differences between themselves and Marxists but these differences are matters of emphasis. Their embarrassment, however, is nothing compared to ours when we acknowledge that we have been subverted. They have gotten to our minds. Feminists dominate the mass media and the education systems (both primary and secondary).

They believe in using these for indoctrination. They have great power in the legal system, many parts of government, and are currently subverting the military.

The evidence is everywhere. The term "politically correct" originated in the Communist Party in Russia in the 1920's. We use it everyday to refer to adherence to feminist dogma. Recently here in Winnipeg, Betty Granger, aconservative school trustee running for national office, made a slip of the tongue. She talked about an increase in house prices in Vancouver due to "the Asian invasion." Granger was pilloried mercilessly in the press. People sent hate letters and dumped garbage on her lawn.

At a meeting of the School Board, it was acknowledged that she is not a racist. It was acknowledged that Asians have married into her family. Nonetheless, she was censured because, and I quote the Chairperson, "appearances are more important than reality." I was at the meeting and couldn't believe what I was witnessing. Betty Granger repented and voted in favor of her own censure. The atmosphere was charged. The people there were like a pack of wild dogs ready to set upon an injured rabbit. These were the champions of "tolerance." [Granger resigned from the election race but still got over 3000 votes.]

These rituals of denunciation and recantation, typical of Stalinist Russia or the Maoist Cultural Revolution, have become commonplace in America. They are "showpieces" designed to frighten everyone into conforming to political correctness. We have "diversity officers" and "human rights commissions" and "sensitivity training" all designed to uphold feminist shibboleths. They talk about "discrimination" but they freely discriminate against whomever they like. "Sexual harassment" is something they use to fetter male-female relations and to purge their enemies.

In 1988, three women started a feminist magazine in Leningrad. The KGB shutdown the magazine and the women were deported to West Germany. In the USSR, feminism had always been an export product. According to Professor Weigand, her "book provides evidence to support the belief that at least some Communists regarded the subversionof the gender system [in America] as an integral part of the larger fight to overturn capitalism."(6)

Last weekend, a Canadian feminist leader, Sunera Thobani advocated that women resist the war on terrorism. She said America has "more blood on its hands" than the terrorists. She is the former head of the government sponsored National Action Committee on the Status of Women. How nice of her to make my point. Can there be any doubt? Communism is alive and well and living under an assumed name.

-----------------------------

RECENT COLUMNS By Henry Makow:

09/27/01: The Love Of Power Against The Power Of Love
http://toogoodreports.com/column/general/makow/092701.htm

09/19/01: The Other Attack On Our Manhood
http://toogoodreports.com/column/general/makow/091901.htm

09/05/01: The Dawn Of The Feminist Police State
http://toogoodreports.com/column/general/makow/090501.htm

08/29/01: Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Straight Bashing"
http://toogoodreports.com/column/general/makow/082901.htm

08/22/01: Why "Hell Has No Wrath Like A Woman Scorned"
http://toogoodreports.com/column/general/makow/082201.htm

08/15/01: What Betty Friedan Didn't Want You To Know
http://toogoodreports.com/column/general/makow/081501.htm

08/08/01: How I Became A Mensch (After Feminism Stole My Identity)
http://toogoodreports.com/column/general/makow/080801.htm
---

Toogood Reports contributor Henry Makow Ph.D. is a student of gender. He is the inventor of the board game Scruples and the author of A Long Way to Gofor A Date. In the Philippines, he discovered a tropical paradise where women are still traditional and the husband is the head of the household. The book is Makow's candid and ironic account of his courtship and marriage to a young Filipina. It recounts his quest for love and masculine identity at a time when both are under siege in America. Visit his website or send him email at scruples@escape.ca.

A more restrained expression of disagreement from a former Old-Leftie
mate.

Reminds me of apostasy from Islam.

And Him Kill dropped Hitchens as a regular from her week-day morning
session like a hot rock when he started criticising Clinton even while
still writing for The Nation.

Beware the ice-pick, Christopher.

Gung-ho view distorts reality

Phillip Adams
03aug04
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/printpage/0,5942,10324149,00.html

DEAR Christopher,
Most of the time, on most issues, I'm on your side, three cheering your
devil's advocacy of the putative saint Mother Teresa (there were aspects
to Mother's myth that demanded debunking and you were at your forensic
best). Ditto in your response to the preposterous aftermath to the death
of Princess Di. (You and I were writing very similar columns and I'm
sure we both got swags of hate mail.) Your book on former US secretary
of state Henry Kissinger, where you demanded that he be charged as a war
criminal, was superb - and, ever since, Henry has been on the run.

Then there was your courageous expose of local government in Washington,
DC, worthy of comparison with the writings of your hero, George Orwell,
when he was down and out in Paris. And I think your magisterial review
of the writings of Anthony Powell is one of the best pieces of literary
criticism I've read.

But when you write about Iraq, we part company. George W. Bush says the
world changed on September 11. Certainly you did - though people who've
known you longer say that your enthusiasm for the war in Iraq had a
precedent in your support for Margaret Thatcher in her Falklands war.

The war that continues to divide Iraqis also divides Australia - though
not to the extent of the schism in the Britain of your birth and the
land of your adoption. Both of us know that the war has divided
organisations, publications and ended personal friendships. That's
something else we have in common -- both of us have lost friends because
of Iraq. Me because of my opposition to the war and you because of your
endorsement of it.

Yes, Christopher, you've got a lot of new friends -- becoming a pin-up
boy for neo-conservatives who, having wanted you lynched for your
attacks on Kissinger, now want you beatified for your backing of Bush.
Though, let it be said, they also enthusiastically approved your
detestation of Bill Clinton.

But like another old friend, Ralph Nader (and your recent savaging of
him was called for), you're bereft of friends on the Left. Your attacks
on erstwhile colleagues, and their retaliations, must have transformed
your personal landscape. Or at least your dinner invitations.

But in our last conversation -- one of the many we've had through the
years -- you were more concerned to paint an optimistic picture about
Iraq than rake over old arguments. But from the second you introduced
yourself to the listeners, there was a problem. You'd just returned from
touring Iraq. In Paul Wolfowitz's Black Hawk helicopter. With the US
Deputy Secretary of Defence. You don't get much more embedded than that
-- I suspect that's a privilege not even the most gung-ho reporters at
Fox News have enjoyed. You tried to make light of it by describing
yourself as Christopher "Black Hawk" Hitchens.

But, for many of us, it wasn't funny. It seemed that you had well and
truly crossed the line. And what you saw from Wolfowitz's Black Hawk
seemed extravagantly optimistic. Everything was going fine. According to
plan. Transformations verging on the miraculous could be seen
everywhere. The difference between what you were seeing and saying and,
for example, Robert Fisk, was incomprehensible.

You told me about dinners in Washington, before the war, with senior
members of the Iraqi diaspora whom you clearly regarded as courageous,
even heroic. And it seemed that, like Wolfowitz, like your Iraqi
friends, this was a war you'd been wanting for quite a while. Perhaps,
that's the problem. Your enthusiasm for the cause means you've spent
more time attacking film-maker Michael Moore than criticising the Bush
regime which, before September 11, you must have viewed with the sort of
repugnance you'd previously felt for the presidencies of Richard Nixon,
Ronald Reagan and Clinton.

These days you can still be moved to write that there were, indeed,
significant connections between Saddam Hussein and al-Qa'ida. If so, why
doesn't the bipartisan 9/11 Commission agree? Where the rest of the
world sees an Iraq in chaos, how can you share Wolfowitz's conviction
that everything is going according to plan? What plan? Oh, there were
plans on what should have happened after the invasion -- some of your
Iraqi friends helped prepare them. We've discussed them in detail on my
program Late Night Live. But as we both know, the plans were ignored by
US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in the triumphalism of "Mission
accomplished".

We're inviting you back on to Late Night Live but, before that
encounter, let me say that I did not absolve Saddam from guilt against
the Kurds or his people. I simply reported to Australians another of
Tony Blair's wild extrapolations from the facts. In this case not about
weapons of mass destruction but about mass graves. He has said, on more
than one occasion, that 400,000 corpses have been found in mass graves
since the war, whereas the figure is 395,000 less.

In response to inquiries from The Observer, No.10 has withdrawn the
claim. I also quoted from The Guardian, which suggested that Blair was
upping the ante on the body count because the other reasons (or excuses)
for the war were looking shaky. And I repeated what Human Rights Watch
had conceded -- that the West, like the organisation itself, might have
exaggerated the number of Saddam's victims. And if they were going to
nail Saddam on genocide, the courts would have to get the facts right.

That has always been my interest in this war. Reliable facts have been
few and far between. One thing we do know, however, is that we'd need a
very large mass grave to contain the Iraqis killed by the coalition of
the willing. And while regrets about Saddam's victims are deafening, we
hear very few expressing sorrow for those killed and maimed by the
coalition in their quest to get Saddam.

Regards, Phillip Adams

This article pubd a decade ago is by one of the leading scholars at
the science/Christianity interface.

For the past half-century or more, a bias has operated against
discussing science from an explicity Christian viewpoint. That bias is,
generally, unjustified. The code of ethics, system of law, and science
itself which modern atheists vaguely assume will carry on without the
religion that produced them are already crumbling all around us.

The movement to control GM swarms with those who chant 'Hare
Krishna' and levitate; and they're not much molested for inserting their
slogans. Christians also should mention from time to time how their
religion bears on the ethics, law and even science involved in GM.

R

Conservation and Christianity
by John E. Morton

based on a sermon broadcast by Radio NZ, Sept. 29 l99l.

published in _NZ Envir._ 68_ (Dec 1991)

On earth today there is the taint of evil that seems to us quite cosmic
in its extent. Since Chernobyl and certain nuclear explosions in the
Pacific, we already know there are small bits of the planet it will never
again be safe for humans to live upon. More recently we have seen that
evil of hundreds of fired oil wells belching flame and heavy smoke into the
atmosphere, and the evil of seas black with oil-slick that since the Gulf
War we have been taking for granted. There is the loss of the tropical
forests with threat of a new Sahara; and the ozone-layer depletion; and
rapid climate change from the greenhouse effect. "Naught for our comfort"
- it would seem - "save that the sky grows darker yet and the sea rises
higher".

Part of it - as we intuit today - must be the human evil of
hardness of heart and affluent greed and lust to dominate, to harness and
subdue nature, until we have severely harmed the planet itself and even its
destiny to survive .

Our global housekeeping, all that St Paul first spoke of as
"oikonomia" - meaning even "global housekeeping" in the Ephesians Letter
- all this flawing is so systematic and fundamental, it seems, that if
we'd had to invent a name for it we might have called it original sin.

It has all to be part of our theology, if we are to live responsibly
in this world, to understand its perils, and so begin to grapple with them.

From its beginnings, our Biblical imagery has been conjuring to
represent that cosmic evil reaching the world: using in the end - in the
Revelation - the image of the Dragon, vanquished in the highest places,
then thrown out to become, under his new title, the Prince of the Air. An
alternative imagery was St Peter's, portraying our evil adversary as a
lion.

There was a lion portrayed too in a modern allegory, a theological
thriller by Charles Williams, written 60 years ago, called The Place of
The Lion . The rampaging Lion, like Satan "that old serpent" that St
Michael the archangel fought against, ivanquished and threw out of Heaven,
is shown not as it was created by the divine author of the world.
Something has gone badly wrong. The Lion represents here the powers
bequeathed by the divine creator as arrogated by violent humanity to twist
created things into a wrong purpose. In creation there are forms and
energies that can evidently exist apart from the pure "intelligence" by
which they are known in Heaven. In the act of creation they are fleshed
out and given material substance. And by invoking the energies of
creation without intelligence or scruple, there can be Chernobyl,
Hiroshima, acid rain, precious soil lost, dark skies, and seas black with
oil.

So the dragon thrown out into the earth, the prowling lion
unleashed, could be not God's constructs but malign productions of our own.
They entail an abuse of the creation that Charles Williams was never to
live to know about as we can today

Williams was writing long before Hiroshima. And just after that new
global peril, an American theologian Jim Garrison was to write a startling
book called 'Theology After Hiroshima' . He argued that with the new force
unleashed in the atomic bomb, with the multiplying dangers of nuclear
proliferation, the world could be drawing very near an Armageddon - not
at all from the avenging wrath of God, but by our own actions, with our
technology so dangerously misusing nature. We could as a species opt for
Armageddon or drift into it by our human course.

Scripture never lets Christians believe that God's lordship of
creation is divided or imperfect. Or that there were independent forces
that could have finally disputed his power to create or to control his
creation.

There's the old question - the trump card of the sceptics - how
could God be all-loving and all-powerful, and yet allow evil to be? Here
must be the paradox: that evil could stem from that very all-lovingness of
God. His immeasurably loving design, we can believe, was to make creatures
with free wills, able in some measure to love Him in return. That could
involve God abdicating his power to force them to obedience. Surely, not
even God could make a world where his creatures were kept in strait-jackets
to stop them going astray and at the same time freely render him their love
in a world where there is suffering and thereby also fortitude, endurance,
sacrifice, and finally redemption.

At any event, we find ourselves not only in a world where there is
opportunity of straying away from God's purpose for the world, but in a
world where, day in and day out, we are constantly taking that opportunity.

It is as if Satan could truly have been cast out into the earth and
all his angels with him. For in today's crisis of the living planet we
feel we are somehow encountering darkness, evil far more than the personal
responsibility of you, me or any one of us could atone for or put right.
If we could, we'd most of us surely be prepared to give life itself to
uplift the shadow as we see cast upon the world.

So the ecologic crisis and the nuclear peril are forcing us to a new
realising of our own depth of responsibility for evil we have been calling
systematic or cosmic. Here is just why all our political decisions about
economics and resource use, about exploitative goals and growth, and about
what we put into (and leave out of) our budgets, must be deeply important
to our Christianity. They will be decisions Christ must care about.

For when our Christian hymns proclaim a battle to hold up Christ's
banner, and the saving Cross, we are concerned not only with our personal
selves, or even with human society. We are brought to face our whole
obligation to nature, and the battle to be waged for the created world.

In a short book, "Christ, Creation & the Environment", I said this
last estrangement is one we have been too slow to realise and loath to come
to terms with. It has involved our systematic apartheid from the whole of
God's non-human creation. Eric Mascall wrote of the huge misconception of
believing "that Jesus Christ is of immense significance to human beings,
but of no importance whatever to the rest of the universe. Almost the
standard traditional Christian belief, this view interprets Christianity
entirely in terms of personal relationships between human beings. It sees
great significance in the fact that we are members of the human community
but none in the fact that - in our bodily aspect - we are physical
objects, parts of the material world".

What sort of a victory do we look for? What sort of triumph in this
darkening of the world could it be? We look to the saving work of Christ;
and this will be saving work as Creation's Redeemer; but before its
Redeemer, first we see Christ as the creation's Author. In the
proclamation that opens St John's Gospel, He is proclaimed for us as the
WORD, "through whom everything was made and without whom northing was made
that was made".

The term LOGOS we use for Christ the Word revealed in Creation is the
same root from which all the reason and the reconciliation that we find
even in science (bio-logy, eco-logy) are understood. The logos teaches
us also of the intended HARMONY and rationality of the natural order.
Just as He is its Redeemer, Christ is nature's reason of being and the
Reason that holds the creation in all its beauty and order.

So the battles we're to be fighting, and of which our Christian hymns
are already singing the victory, could also be the battles and victories of
reason. And what we are battling against will be what someone memorably
called "present shock" to society and environment. Here is the
maelstrom, the frenetic and the hectic speed of human events, our
beguilement with unreasoning growth. In place of the exploitation of
nature that has made our ecology and economy into a senseless Babel, the
logos and the reason of Creation is bidding us towards a harmony with
nature and a biosphere allowed to realise itself. We could be coming into
something like the mighty storm on the waters in which Jesus' own followers
were bidden to be at peace ("Peace; be still, and know that I am God") -
yet a peace that is never still in the sense of static, but dynamic with
the ebb and flow, the pulsing dance of the organic world. Its very being
and order is a choreography.

And all this brings us is to know we are involved in a creation as
co-workers. We are stewards caught up in a creation of which we are
ourselves organically a part. And we can hold hope for the creation
because the Son of God who is Logos and creation's reason and redeemer has
entered into it among us and become himself part of it. So we are not
orphans here but as co-workers with a priesthood. In our humanity we are
Nature's priest as Christ is himself the Priest of human-kind. And by our
failing in our priesthood, we could be at once losing ourselves and
depriving the whole of the natural order of its proper destiny too.

For most of us, most of the time, our engagement in nature is heedless
and unreflecting. But then, and repeatedly, we find ourselves anguished,
asking why people and nature are being hurt so much. Isn't this what our
real humanity entails, with its cloud of unknowing and with the body that
is our prison, being part of the world and drinking its cup of bitterness
- but knowing that cup of bitterness, once and for all time and by One
that was human, has been drained too.

The modern allegory of the creation I like best is from long before
Charles Williams or Jim Garrison. It is G K Chesterton's The Man Who Was
Thursday . It is the story of an eventful pilgrimage with the man
Thursday personifying our own humanity - anxious, fearful, suffering, but
caught with a strange, elusive hope. And at the denouement, the very end
of the tale, with all his confederates seated around, Thursday breaks out
of his final reveries and turns wide-eyed and questioning to gaze at the
face that is Sunday who is the Peace of God:

"He had turned his eyes so as to see suddenly
the great face of Sunday, which wore a strange smile. "Have you", he cried
in a dreadful voice, "have you ever suffered?". As he gazed the great face
grew to an awful size, larger than the colossal mask of Memnon that had
made him scream as a child. It grew larger and larger, filling the whole
sky; then everything went black. Only in the darkness before it entirely
destroyed his brain he seemed to hear a distant voice saying a commonplace
text that he had heard somewhere, " CAN YE DRINK OF THE CUP THAT I DRINK
OF?"

Dr John Morton, emeritus professor of Zoology, is one of NZ's best-known
scientists and conservationists. He has written on reconciliation of
science and religion, e.g. Man, Science and God (Collins 1972).

In this issue of the Authentic Happiness Newsletter. . .
Choice and Happiness: Swarthmore Last Collection

Summary: Too much freedom can be bad for well-being. Why you should
limit your options, settle for good enough, and not try to always
make the best choice. Barry Schwartz, best-selling author of "The Paradox
of Choice", is our guest for this issue.

This is a free newsletter sent to everyone who registers at
www.authentichappiness.org. The
newsletter is intended as a periodic update about important new
findings and ideas in Positive Psychology.

This newsletter can also be found at
www.authentichappiness.org/news/news9.html.

Swarthmore Last Collection

By Barry Schwartz
May 29, 2004

[Author's note. Each year the graduating seniors at Swarthmore
College elect a member of the faculty to address them during
commencement weekend and give what is called the "Last Collection." I was
granted the honor at Commencement, 2004, and here is what I told the
graduates and their families.]

We Have Too Many Choices

About when you were born, Ronald Reagan ran for president asking
voters, "are you better off now than you were four years ago?"
That's the question I'm going to talk about today. Are you better
off now than you were four years ago? My answer is no and yes. I'm
going to suggest that your experience at Swarthmore has created or at
least exacerbated certain problems with living in modern society,
and, that it has given you the tools for coping with those problems.
So, to dredge up a slogan from the 60's, my answer to another
question: "is Swarthmore part of the solution or is it part of the
problem?" is "yes!" And I'm going to tell you why.

If there's a supreme value in American society it's freedom. The
political and cultural development of American society has seen an
almost unbroken increase in the amount of freedom, autonomy, and
self-determination people get to experience. And you are at the pinnacle
of this development. Never before have people been so free to determine
their own life course. Here at Swarthmore, you could study pretty much
anything you wanted. And now that you're graduating, what you buy, where
you live, what kind of work you do and when you do it, whether and how you
worship, how you look, whether and when you marry, whether and when you
have kids--each of these things will be up to you. We've nurtured the kind
of independence of mind and heart that will enable you to challenge social
norms or legal constraints that once operated to nudge or even push you in
one direction or another. When the Microsoft ad asks you "where do you
want to go today," you should know and feel that almost anything is
possible. You are the embodiment of an American success story.

So I want to talk to you today about autonomy, freedom, and choice.
I want to talk to you about these things because what we're
learning, as the experience of personal freedom continues to grow, is that
there can be too much of a good thing--that too much freedom can be bad
for well-being. For along with this growth of freedom has come
unprecedented unhappiness--clinical depression, suicide, and use of
psychological services and antidepressant drugs in alarming numbers.

Why should so much choice create a problem? After all, people who
don't want the myriad options that life presents can just ignore
them. If you're content with your Americano, you can pay no
attention to the hundred other options that Starbucks provides you. The
answer is that whereas it is logically true that people can ignore
unwanted options, it isn't psychologically true. As some of you
probably know, I recently published a book on this topic. It's
called The Paradox of Choice, and it tries to explain why more
choice can bring less satisfaction. I'm not going to summarize the
book for you. Go read it. What I will do is highlight some themes
from the book, in an effort to provide you with some advice to carry
out of here with your diplomas.

A wealth of options creates an opportunity, to be sure, but it also
creates a problem that has to be solved. It forces you to have to
put time and effort into decisions, even about trivial things. It causes
you to worry, if you choose without having explored all the possibilities,
that maybe you've made a mistake. It forces you to make tradeoffs, passing
up an option with one attractive feature to select a different option with
another attractive feature. It raises your expectations about just how
good the thing you finally choose will be. Expectations can get so high
that no result will meet them, no matter how good it is. And finally, it
induces you to blame yourself when the choice you make after lots of hand
wringing turns out to be less than perfect. Massive effort in making
decisions, passed-up attractive alternatives, disappointing results, and
self-blame. This is not a recipe for well-being. Yet it is a recipe that
more and more people seem compelled to follow.

Some of you newly minted college graduates may know what I'm talking
about, but some of you may be a little dubious that there could ever
be too much choice in life. You've coped, and you may have felt on
more than one occasion, that the choices offered by little Swarthmore are
too narrow--too constraining. "Bring them on," you may be thinking, as you
face the larger world. Perhaps. But your lives are about to get much more
complicated. Your parents, and then the College, have looked after
you--made countless decisions on your behalf so that day-to-day life runs
effortlessly in the background while you concentrate on what you care
about. That's about to change. Ask your parents how manageable life is
when you're deciding about raising kids, eating healthy, buying insurance,
renegotiating mortgages, investing for retirement, seeking adequate
medical care, helping ageing relatives, and so on. Ask them if they also
say "bring them on" whenever another cell phone plan promotion arrives in
the mail.

Maximizers Do Better, Satisficers Feel Better

Choice overload is a problem for everyone, but it's a special
problem for people who feel like they have to get the best when they
make decisions--the best college, the best job, the best romantic
partner, the best car, the best stereo, the best investment, and yes, the
best jeans. Andrew Ward and I call such people "maximizers." For people
like this, choice overload can be a nightmare, for the only way to know
you've got the best is by examining all the alternatives, by doing an
exhaustive, and exhausting, search. And the impossibility of doing such a
search almost guarantees that you'll regret decisions, even if they're
good. In contrast, people who are satisfied with a good enough option--we
call them "satisficers"--can stop looking as soon as they find one, and
relax.

Let me illustrate the problem with an example that might be
especially salient to you all right now--finding a job. With Sheena
Iyengar and Rachael Elwork, I just finished a study of 600 college seniors
throughout the year as they searched for jobs. Some of these students were
out for the best, whereas others were looking for a job that was good
enough. Think about the agony that job-hunting can be if you're trying to
find the best job. This job is in a great location, but that one
offers the most interesting work. And that other one offers the
highest starting salary. But still another one offers great
opportunities for advancement. Yet another will allow you to do
work that helps people. Another will afford you a great group of
colleagues. And finally, there's the one that's located in the same
city that your partner will be living in while she attends medical
school. Why can't there be a job that combines all these attractive
features? So you're disappointed before you've even had your first
interview.

Then the interview process begins, and the good news is that if
you're the sort of person who seeks the very best, you're likely to end
up with a better job than people who are satisfied with good enough. We
found that the starting salary of maximizers was $7,000 more than the
starting salary of satisficers. But…and it's a big but, maximizers
reported themselves to be more pessimistic, more stressed, more tired,
more anxious, more worried, more overwhelmed, more regretful, more
disappointed, more frustrated, and more depressed than satisficers were.
And, they were less satisfied with the jobs they ended up getting.
Maximizers did better, but they felt worse.

There's a simple lesson to draw. Don't be a maximizer. Learn that
"good enough" is good enough. You may end up with results of
decisions that are slightly less good, but you'll feel much better
about them. And you'll save yourself a great deal of time, worry,
and stress in the process of choosing.

I know this isn't easy advice to follow. The kinds of people who end
up coming to places like Swarthmore are not likely to be satisfied
with good enough, at least when it comes to the important things. There's
a good chance that many of you have gotten into the habit of seeking--even
demanding--the best, and of having the best demanded and expected of you.
And it isn't even the right advice. Sometimes, you should seek and
demand the best. Sometimes, that's important. I can't tell you when,
partly because I don't know and partly because it will be different
for each of you. So the advice I will offer is only be a maximizer
when it matters. Be deliberate and self-conscious about how you do
your decision making. Develop your standards wisely, using your
judgment--judgment that your Swarthmore education has helped to cultivate.
This is an example of what I meant when I said that Swarthmore is both
part of the problem and part of the solution. Swarthmore has surely
encouraged you to have very high standards, but it has also nurtured in
you the judgment to help you determine when those high standards should be
applied.

Good Enough Is Good Enough

I want to illustrate this recommendation--don't be a maximizer
unless it really matters--by discussing a part of life that's not an
issue for you now, but soon may be, at least for most of you. At
some point in the not-too-distant future, you will become parents. Whereas
it may be possible to settle for a good enough car, a good enough stereo,
a good enough 401(k), even a good enough job, have you ever heard anyone
say that "I only want what's 'good enough' for my kids"? I haven't. When
it comes to our kids, only the best will do.

A few years ago, as my daughter was anticipating the birth of her
first child, she asked my wife and me to help her shop for a
stroller. Based on my own child-rearing experiences, almost thirty years
ago, I didn't understand why buying a stroller needed to be a group
activity. Then we went to the store--and found dozens and dozens of
options. Combined stroller-car seats, combined stroller-carriages,
stand-alones, joggers, umbrella types, strollers that reclined to
horizontal, those that reclined to almost horizontal, strollers with heavy
duty wheels, strollers with lots of storage--on and on it went. Each type
had its plusses and minuses. Making a choice took several hours, and we
left feeling uncertain we had made the right one.

Thus was I introduced to parenting in modern America. Cribs,
highchairs, baby foods, diapers. Nursery schools and pediatricians.
Medical decisions when your pediatrician refuses to tell you what to do.
Breast or bottle feeding. Books, videos, TV shows. Private or public
school, and either way, which one. Academic enrichment after school, or
sports (which sport) or music (what instrument). Summer camp (which type),
when to permit ear-piercing, how to regulate internet access, what kind of
restrictions to place on TV-watching. As choices proliferate, parents have
a harder and harder time making decisions. And because even satisficers
are likely to be maximizers when it comes to their kids, the child-rearing
decisions they face will be nerve-wracking.

I believe that parents who put pressure on themselves to make the
best choices for their kids are making a mistake--an understandable
mistake, but a mistake nonetheless. They may end up with better
strollers, teachers, pediatricians, schools, and recreational
activities than satisficers do. But the burden they bear, and the price
they pay, will be reflected in their interaction with their kids. The time
parents spend finding the best stroller is time they will not be spending
playing with or talking to their child. The time they spend finding the
best books is time they will not spend reading to their child.

Beyond all this, the aspiring parent will provide the child with a
model of perfection, one that may well create a great deal of
stress, anxiety, indecision, and dissatisfaction in the child when she is
making her own choices. It may also induce parents to take too much
control over their children's lives. In efforts to provide their kids with
a wide array of the most exciting and educational activities, parents may
so overschedule their kids that the children have no time to be by
themselves--to imagine, to create, or just to hang out. Indeed, kids may
have no time to be themselves, or to figure out what kind of selves they
want to be.

I'm convinced that kids will be better served by good enough
strollers, and maybe even good enough teachers and pediatricians, and
relaxed, happy parents, than they will by the best strollers,
pediatricians, and teachers and anxious, unhappy parents. Though I'm sure
you'll find it impossible to settle for "good enough" in general when it
comes to your kids, you can try to develop the attitude that good enough
is good enough most of the time, and use the good judgment you've acquired
here at Swarthmore to know when to look for more than good enough. This
will help you to be much better than good enough at what matters
most--being engaged and energetic in your interactions with your kids.

Choose When to Choose

My second piece of advice related to the extraordinary freedom of
choice you have is that you choose when to choose. In the modern
world, the only way to have the time you want to devote to the
things that matter is to allow others to make decisions on your
behalf. Which others? Friends, family, doctors, financial advisors,
Consumer Reports. The list is long. What I'm telling you is that you
should rely on "experts"--people who know the domain in question,
and ideally people who know you--to take some of the burdens off
your shoulders.

Let's talk a little bit about trusting experts. In order for you to
trust experts, there must be experts. And in order for there to be
experts, there must be some body of knowledge--some set of
truths--for them to be expert about. It is intellectually
fashionable nowadays to attack the very notion of expertise--of
truth. You have your truth and I have mine. You have one truth today
but you may have a different one tomorrow. Everything is relative, a
matter of perspective. People who claim to know the "truth," are in
reality just using their positions of power and privilege in society
to shove their version of things down our throats.

This turn to relativism is in part a reflection of something good
and important that has happened to higher education and intellectual
inquiry in general. People have finally caught on to the fact that much of
what the intellectual elite thought was the truth was distorted by
limitations of perspective. Slowly the voices of the excluded have
been welcomed into the conversation. And their perspectives have
enriched our understanding enormously. But the reason they've
enriched our understanding is that they've given the rest of us an
important piece of the truth that was previously invisible to us. Not
their truth, but the truth. It is troubling to see how quickly an
appreciation that each of us can only attain a partial grasp of the
truth degrades into a view that there really isn't any truth out
there to be grasped.

This relativistic approach to inquiry has become so pervasive that
you've surely encountered it. And you may have found it extremely
seductive. It makes intellectual life a whole lot easier. When a
fellow student says something in class with which you disagree, you don't
need to worry about finding a way to challenge that view and make a case
for your own. There's no need to struggle through disagreements to
get to the bottom of things if there is no "bottom" of things.
Everyone's entitled to an opinion. It's the great democratization of
knowledge. Everyone's got it in equal amounts because there really
isn't, after all, any of "it" to have.

I think that this enthusiastic embrace of relativism is a moral and
practical disaster. Morally, an attitude like this chips away at our
most fundamental respect for one another as human beings. When people
have respect for the truth, they seek it and speak it in dialogue with one
another. Once truth becomes suspect, relations between people become
nothing more than efforts at manipulation. Instead of trying to
enlighten or persuade people by giving them reasons to see things as we
do, we can use any form of influence we think will work. In the absence of
respect for truth, all dialogue becomes a Nike ad. This is what "spin" is
all about in our modern political discourse. A few years ago I read an
interview with a senior advisor to several presidents. He objected to the
very idea that politicians "spin" anything, because, he said, there really
wasn't anything to be "spun." Spin was all there was. I'm reminded of a
cartoon that appeared in the New Yorker several years ago, in which
three fish are swimming along, one behind the other. The lead fish
is tiny, the middle one is medium sized, and the one in back is huge.
Each has a "thought bubble" above its head. "There is no justice in the
world," thinks the little fish, with a worried look on its face. "There is
some justice in the world," thinks the medium sized fish, as it pursues
the little fish with an open mouth. "The world is just," thinks the big
fish, with a casual, satisfied smirk on its face. Respect for truth means
a commitment to figuring out which of these fish has it right.

Now what about the practical consequences of relativism?

Practically, the great "democratization" of expertise makes the problem of
choice much worse than before. We now have two exploding social
institutions that embody the democratization of expertise--TV and radio
talk shows and the internet. If you think that in their present form, they
will help you make intelligent choices by giving you access to reams of
information, I fear that you're kidding yourselves. Which of these
self-proclaimed experts actually knows something? How do you begin to find
that out? These new modes of communication are the concrete embodiments of
the view that nobody knows anything since there's nothing to know so that
everyone's entitled to speak with equal authority. Instead of solving the
choice problem, this flood of so-called "information" only makes it worse.
So if you are going to relieve the burden you face of unending choices
among unending alternatives, you're going to have to face up to the idea
that there are things to be known and that some people actually know them.
And you're going to have to figure out who those people are.

Once again, your Swarthmore education has given you a problem by
making you suspicious of expertise. But on the other hand, your
education has also given you the tools--the judgment--to evaluate the
claims to expertise made by others so that you can determine which
"experts" you should actually be listening to. What I want to emphasize is
that the effort to find experts you can trust is worthwhile. You simply
won't be able to make all the decisions you have to make, and figure out
all you need to figure out, on your own.

Love Brings Happiness--and Contraints

If you're with me this far, and you're willing often to settle for
good enough and to choose when to choose, you're going to find that
you've got time on your hands. So what should you do with it? I'm
going to tell you. A great deal of research has been done on the
determinants of happiness, or well-being, or satisfaction with life, and a
few key results jump out at you again and again. The biggest single
contributor to happiness is close relations with other people--with
family, friends, romantic partners, community members. The richer and
deeper the social networks people have, the happier they are. So love
brings happiness.

I bet you knew this. But what I want you to think about is the
relation between close relationships with other people and freedom of
choice. Part of what it means to be close to friends, family, or lovers,
is that you have responsibilities, commitments, and obligations to other
people. You are not free to come and go as you please. The options you
consider are limited by the needs and desires of others. In other words,
close relations are constraints on freedom--they bind rather than
liberate; they reduce options rather than expanding them.

I used to think that the fact that close relationships required us
to give up some of our freedom was a testament to how important they
are. In other words, even though there was a significant price (in
freedom) to being close to others, it was a price worth paying. As I
thought more and more about freedom, choice, and well-being, I
gradually came to a different view. I now think that the constraints
imposed by close relations with others are not a cost; they are actually
part of the benefit. Knowing, for example, that you have to look for work
in Boston because your romantic partner will be going to school there is a
benefit, because it helps you to reduce the set of possibilities you'll
consider. Close relations provide the beginnings of an answer to
Microsoft's question--a question that you might otherwise spend the rest
of your life trying to answer.

Let me be clear about something here. I don't think the constraints
imposed by responsibilities to family and friends have always been a
benefit. In past times, when the options were fewer and the
responsibilities greater, such responsibilities may well have been
correctly perceived as an excessive burden--as too big an impediment to
being and doing what we want to be and do. But for most members modern
society, especially those of what's called the "knowledge class," having
something like commitment to others set limits on what's possible has
become a blessing.

Once again, Swarthmore has taught you something really important
about what to aspire to in "real life," and perhaps, how to achieve
it. You've had practice, here at Swarthmore, in caring for others.
And you've richly experienced what it feels like to be cared for by
others. The Swarthmore community is extraordinary for its kindness,
its empathy, it's humanity. You may be a little tired of seeing the
same old faces, but you'll be hard pressed to find or create a
community to match the Swarthmore community after you leave. If you bring
what Swarthmore has taught you into the world, you may be better able to
develop and sustain the close relations after you leave that are essential
for well being.

Having a Calling Satisfies--and Binds

Not far behind close relations with others as a significant source
of well-being is meaningful, satisfying work--work that challenges,
that stimulates, and that adds value to the world. Others have referred to
work like this as a "calling." For people with a calling it is the
concrete products of what they do, and not just personal advancement or
material reward, that provide satisfaction. People with a calling are
doing something that will not lose its value, even if they are stuck doing
it, with no prospects for advancement, for the next forty years.

To some degree, whether your work is a calling or not depends on the
work. But to a large degree, it depends on the person--on you.
Psychologist Amy Wrziesnewski did a lovely study of people who worked
as cleaners in hospitals. These people are at the very lowest rung of the
hospital's status (and pay) hierarchy. Nonetheless, Amy found that many of
the hospital cleaners thought of their work as challenging, highly
skilled, respected, and central to the hospital's mission. That's because
they saw their work not as mopping floors, but as doing whatever was
needed to contribute to the health, safety, and comfort of the patients.
And they thought their work was no less essential to achieving those goals
than the work of surgeons or nurses.

Swarthmore, I hope, has taught many of you what it's like to do
something that really matters. It has exposed you to many people who,
as they clean your rooms or wash your dirty dishes, feel and act as if
they are performing tasks that are essential to the College's mission. It
may even have taught you what it feels like to start each day looking
forward to the work you have to do. If it has, you will be better prepared
to find your calling, or to make your work a calling, than you otherwise
would. And I hope you all do.

But something to notice about work that is a calling is that like
close relations to other people, a calling binds and constrains
rather than liberating. People with callings are tied both to the people
they serve and to the people they work with. They are not free to leave
when the next good opportunity arises.

And beware. The problem with callings is that often, you can't make
work a calling all by yourself. Most of the time, for work to be a
calling, it needs to be supported by the right kind of institutional
structure. As a doctor, you may feel "called" to serve your patients in a
particular way, but in the modern world of medicine, you may find that
unless your practice generates adequate revenues, you won't be allowed to
do it the way you think you should. As a teacher, you may feel called to
excite and educate your students in a certain way, but if you are under
pressure from administrators to adhere to a rigid curriculum so that
scores on "big tests" will be good, you won't be able to teach the way you
think you should. You are going to be challenged to find work to do that
you regard as a calling, in a setting that will allow you to do that work
in the right way.

Have Reasonable Expectations

Let's review what I've said so far. Be satisfied with good enough,
choose when to choose, and seek out and welcome the constraints on
your freedom imposed by close relations with others and commitment to your
work. So far, so good. But there's another thing I want to tell you.
Make sure your expectations are reasonable. Don't ask me what
"reasonable" is because I don't know. All I can say is be on your
guard against excessively high expectations. In your work, in your love
life, with your friends, with your kids, don't expect perfection.

Here's why controlling expectations is so important. A major way we
evaluate how good things are is by comparing them to how good we
expect them to be. Was senior week fun? Was Swarthmore a good college
experience? Is this a good talk? We answer questions like these, in part,
by comparing results to expectations. If expectations are too high, then
the reality of the experience will suffer from the comparison. Exquisitely
good results are taken as disappointments if they don't live up to even
more exquisite expectations.

It's a real challenge to maintain reasonable expectations in the
modern world. The combination of material abundance, almost unlimited
freedom, and overwhelming choice conspire to create the highest of
expectations. I think that runaway expectations help explain the epidemic
of depression that I mentioned to you before. My guess is that along with
your increased ability to take control over your lives has come an even
greater increase in your expectations about what aspects of your lives you
should control, and what you should achieve with that control. Your
grandparents had different expectations. For them, not everything was
possible. For them, life was meant to be lived with and for others,
subject to many constraints. There's a New Yorker cartoon that captures
this idea. An old couple with weather-beaten scowls on their faces is
strolling arm-in-arm. The caption reads, "everything was better back when
everything was worse."

Here, alas, I think Swarthmore has contributed to the problem but
not to the solution. Swarthmore has encouraged you to have the
highest of expectations, and for the most part, it has met them. I hope
that the rest of your life is like this, but I wouldn't count on it.

Happiness Is Socially Responsible

But enough about you! All this talk focused on what you can do to
make your life happier seems out of place here at an outward
looking, socially responsible institution like Swarthmore. What
about the rest of the world? And what's so important about happiness
anyway? Surely it's better to have a few hundred miserable college
graduates improving the lives of millions than it is to have them
tending to their own gardens, with smiles on their faces, oblivious to the
suffering that's going on around them.

There are a three things I want to say about this. First, I readily
agree that happiness isn't everything. It isn't even the most
important thing. But all other things being equal, it's better to be happy
than not. And since nothing that I or anyone else says is going to stop
you from trying to be happy, you might as well know how to do it.

Second, there actually is something great about happiness. Despite
the romantic images we have of the suffering geniuses who have
enriched our civilization, creative by day and tormented by night,
there is a growing body of evidence that people think more
effectively and expansively when they're happy than when they're not.
Giving medical residents a little bag of candy unexpectedly before they
engage in a difficult differential diagnosis improves both the speed and
the accuracy of their diagnoses (you may want to keep this in mind the
next time you visit your doctor). And happy people are more energetic, and
physically healthier, than unhappy ones. As Andrew Ward pointed out on
this occasion last year, happiness adds about nine years to life
expectancy. So even if you don't think that happiness is such a big deal
in itself, it seems to serve a useful instrumental function. Happy people
are more likely to change the world in positive ways than unhappy ones.

But third, and perhaps most important, taking seriously some of the
suggestions I've given you will contribute not just to your well
being, but also to the well being of others. If you take some of my
advice, and agonize less about the many decisions you face, you can
use that time and energy instead getting to know and understand all
the people in your life--your lovers, your children, your parents,
your friends, your patients, your clients, your students. And that's
what you should do. The really, really hard thing in life is not
choosing the right cell phone plan or 401(k). It's getting it right
in your social interactions. The hard thing in life is knowing how
to balance honesty with kindness, courage with caution, encouragement with
criticism, empathy with detachment, paternalism with respect for autonomy.
In the course that Ken Sharpe and I teach on practical wisdom, the main
point we emphasize is that there are no rules or formulas that tell you
the right thing to do in all your social interactions. You have to figure
it out case by case--person by person. You have to use your judgment. You
have to be wise. And the only way to figure it out is by knowing the other
people involved well--by taking the time to listen to them, to imagine
what life is like through their eyes, and to be open to being
changed--even transformed--by them.

In a world that hurries by, forcing you to make decision after
decision, each involving almost unlimited options, it's hard to find
the needed time. Though you surely won't be doing it deliberately, your
effort to get the best car will interfere with your desire to be the best
friend. Your effort to get the best job will intrude on your desire to be
the best parent. And so, if the time you save by following some of my
suggestions is redirected, with wisdom, to the welfare of the other people
in your life, you will not only make yourself happier, you will improve
the lives of others as well. And you may have noticed, by the way, that
the very practical wisdom you will need to be a good lover, friend,
parent, doctor, or teacher, you will also need to know when to settle for
good enough, and when to trust experts.

Not Everyone Has Too Many Choices

One last thing. I have a specific political project that I'd like
you to work on. This talk has mostly been about the problem of too
much freedom of choice. You surely must have realized that this is not a
"problem" that everyone has. In the U.S., wealth is a pretty good proxy
for freedom of choice. So whereas the upper economic classes in the U.S.
may suffer from too much choice, there is little doubt that the
lower classes suffer from too little. I'd like you to work on fixing
this. I'd like you to work on reversing a thirty-year trend of
increases in wealth inequality that is being exacerbated, not
mitigated, by current economic policies. One could view the effort to
establish a living wage policy at Swarthmore as one small step in this
direction. The aim of the living wage movement, at least as I see it, is
to enable people to live dignified and balanced lives, with work that can
pay the bills and with time and energy left at the end of the day to
devote to the care and nurture of their loved ones and participation in
their communities. It is perhaps unrealistic to imagine a society in which
everyone has the opportunity to live the kind of life that you are
now equipped to live, but certainly, a commitment to making that
possibility available to more, not fewer, people is worth devoting
oneself to. And you can start on this political project by using
your newly attained power as alums to make your feelings known to your
alma mater.

Acts of Will Are Required

OK. It's just about time for dinner. Let me wrap this up. Some of
you may be leaving tomorrow a little disappointed with your
Swarthmore education--not because you didn't learn a lot, but because you
are less sure now of what you want to be and do than you were when you
started. What were these four years for? I'm reminded of a quote from Kurt
Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle:

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it,
and finds himself no wiser than before. He is full of murderous
resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their
ignorance the hard way.

I think you actually are wiser than before, even if you are
uncertain about what your future holds, and I have tried today to
offer a few tips for those of you who feel what Vonnegut was talking
about. There are those who, even if they agree with my analysis,
think that tips like mine are unnecessary. They view society as largely
self-correcting, and believe that it will essentially automatically
diagnose its mistakes and change accordingly. The cartoonist Jules Feiffer
captures this view. He has a cartoon in which a woman about my age is
speaking. "I hated the way I turned out," she says , "so everything my
mother did with me I have tried to do the opposite with Jennifer. Mother
was possessive. I encouraged independence. Mother was manipulative. I have
been direct. Mother was secretive. I have been open. Mother was evasive. I
have been decisive. Now my work is done. Jennifer is grown. The exact
image of my mother."

I don't believe that society, or individuals, automatically
self-correct. I think acts of will are required. And I have tried to
suggest several things that you should will for yourself and for others,
and work to achieve. I wish each of you a life in which good enough is
good enough--a life governed by reasonable expectations, and filled with
love and with work that is a calling. A life as part of a community that
listens to you just as you listen to it. And I thank you most sincerely
for honoring me with this invitation to speak to you. Congratulations to
you all and to your families.

For a related free e-mail newsletter with practical strategies for
integrating the principles of Authentic Happiness into your own life
and into the lives of others, please visit
www.authentichappinesscoaching.com/newsletter

http://www.opednews.com/wade_070404_hitchens.htm

How Many Lies Can Christopher Hitchens Tell?

By Anthony Wade

OpEdNews.com

I approach every article as a chance to learn, unfortunately what I
sometimes learn is that the writer has an agenda and the truth be damned,
that is what he/she will stick with. Such is the case of a “review" done by
Christopher Hitchens on June 21, 2004 of Michael Moore’s new movie,
Fahrenheit911. As I was reading this alleged review I realized that Mr.
Hitchens must have written it with a thesaurus handy, to throw in as many
big words as possible to confuse those who may be trying to actually
formulate an opinion.

The verbosity aside, please forgive me as this may be long, only because his
review was exceptionally long, justifying this response. To break up the
monotony, I will provide little breaks throughout to let you know what some
of the ridiculously obscure words are that Mr. Hitchens used.

Since I will be trying to respond to most of the criticism in his “review",
here is the link to it, so you can play along at home:

http://slate.msn.com/id/2102723/?GT1=3584

Fist off, I do want to give credit for his title, “Unfairenheit 911", very
creative. Now lets move on. Mr. Hitchens begins with an absolutely
ridiculous assertion that somehow the left has an image, even a self-image,
of being too boring, solemn, and mirthless (as well as other thesaurus
driven adjectives). Now, I am the first to say that Orinn Hatch must be a
blast to party with, but I am not ready to claim the left as the side of the
boring. I am sure that between covering up statues breasts and doing
karaoke, that John Ashcroft must be the life of any pro-life party, but I am
again not ready to claim the left as the party of the boring. Then
unfortunately Mr. Hitchens goes right off the deep end by stating, “Who will
be our Rush Limbaugh?" As if there are plotting Democrats somewhere trying
to figure out how to craft a Democratic blowhard who not only rationalizes
torture to the point of death, but makes it akin to a hazing ritual. Sorry
Mr. Hitchens, but I hope I speak on behalf of the ENTIRE left, when I say
that we do not ever want to be associated with a man who preaches about
putting drug abusers away while slamming OxyContin like Pez, and talks about
the lack of morality while filing for his third divorce. No thanks, next?

Thesaurus Break: Lugubrious = Mournful, dismal, or gloomy,
especially to an exaggerated or ludicrous degree.

Eventually, Mr. Hitchens actually gets to the movie he claims to be
reviewing, after just a few more lugubrious moments. He basically states
that the movie is beyond dishonest and then says it is a piece of crap, with
a caveat to cover himself from having called it a piece of crap. Well, I
guess we see where this review is heading, right down the toilet. Lets
proceed.

After telling us many things this movie can or cannot be called, he finally
summarizes it this way:

Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised
as an exercise in seriousness.

Wow, that’s a lot of words to basically say the following: I don’t like the
politics of this movie. Dissecting his summary we see he believes that the
movie is:

Sinister exercise = threatening evil
Moral frivolity = making a mockery of what is moral
Crudely disguised = pretending to be
Exercise in seriousness = serious

Sorry, using Dictionary.com, this is the best I can come up with. Somehow,
it is Mr. Hitchens conclusion that Mr. Moore has created an evil movie,
which takes liberties with what can be considered moral, while pretending to
be serious.

This not being enough, and quite frankly it was not; he continues to say
this movie is:

“a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration
of "dissenting" bravery."

Ahhh, I don't need Dictionary.com for this one. Basically, he is stating
that Mr. Moore is a political coward, by disguising himself as being brave
by daring to dissent from the mainstream. Unfortunately for Mr. Hitchens,
what he fails to recognize is that the majority of Americans do not agree
with this Administration about these wars, and even 9-11. So, the notion
that somehow Mr. Moore is pretending to be bravely dissenting is not
supported. By the way, even having the nerve to think about going against an
administration that outed Valerie Plame over the yellowcake in the Niger
clearly indicates that Mr. Moore is not a coward. Anyway, lets keep going
and see if he provides any proof, or if he just delves back into his
thesaurus.

Thesaurus Break: Turgid = Excessively ornate or complex in style or
language.

Hey! Mr. Hitchens is turgid! I get it! It is called projection Chris; check
the works of Sigmund Freud.

Okay, recapping we have used hundreds of words, some of which were used for
the sake of using them, to basically say that he thinks Mr. Moore is a
coward and that this movie is potentially evil. I can't wait for the proof
Chris.

He opens up by revisiting a debate he held with Mr. Moore, nearly two years
ago, where he expressed two things. First, that Bin Laden is innocent until
proven guilty. Considering that is the basis for all of our laws, I will
abide by that one. Secondly, that the Afghanistan war was unjustified.
Again, since we now know that this administration had actually planned to
invade Afghanistan well before 9-11, that the Taliban had indeed visited
Bush in Texas, and that they were promised to be buried under a “carpet of
bombs" for not complying with the pipeline dreams of the Neocons, well I am
afraid I have to give that one to Mr. Moore as well.

Mr. Hitchens then launches into his perceived points that Mr. Moore is
trying to make about Bin Laden and Afghanistan. Without knowing if he is
even accurate about Mr. Moore's desires:

1) The relationship between the Bin-Laden’s and the Bush empire, and the
Carlyle Group, are not “convoluted" Mr. Hitchens and they should be of grave
concern to any citizen. The fact that the Bin Laden's (supposedly minus
Osama the black sheep) were in the country on 9-11 and had to be flown out
of or around the country when there was a ban on air traffic looks, smells,
and is suspicious.

2) The amount of money going both ways between the Saudis and the US is
unsettling.

3) Do you honestly not find it interesting that Bush and the Neocons were
trying to negotiate with the Taliban for a pipeline before they changed
their minds and decided to bury them in the previously mentioned “carpet of
bombs?"

4) I can only assume that the inference Mr. Moore is making is that Bush
purposefully sent too few ground troops because he wanted Al Qaeda and the
Taliban to escape.

5) If the “Coalition of the Willing" is a farce, Americans should know about
it.

6) Mr. Hitchens, if our young people died in Afghanistan, to seal a business
deal gone bad, decided months before 9-11, and then blamed for 9-11, that
would mean their lives would have been wasted. Lastly, don't you dare make
light of Mr. Moore wanting to dedicate the film, to those who have made the
ultimate sacrifice for the most insidious of reasons. Even that is beneath
you, I hope.

Mr. Hitchens then tries to point to these facts together and say that they
are not cohesive, and therefore, they must be untrue. The truth of the
matter is that this is a documentary film Mr. Hitchens. It doesn't have a
plot that Mr. Moore can neatly tie together because it is all still
unfolding day after day. The truth is, we do not know what the Saudi money
connection might mean. The rest of this though makes cohesive sense. Let me
walk you through it:

A) Taliban meets in GW Bush run Texas with the Neocons about a pipeline
through their country. Taliban turns them down, they are promised to be
buried in a carpet of bombs.
B) 9-11 happens, and lo and behold the first country we invade is
Afghanistan, even though they had nothing to do with 9-11. We are told it is
the evil Taliban (the one we just met with folks for a business deal) that
we must get. We then proceed to bury them under a carpet of bombs.
C) Bush sends in enough troops to win, but not enough to actually capture
anyone significant, thus leading to speculation about if he wanted to
capture anyone. After all, Osama Bin Hiding is a lot scarier than Osama Bin
Captured. Without fear, Bush can't get elected again.
D) A liberated Afghanistan joins the Coalition of the Bribed, shocker.

That seems pretty cohesive to me. Then Mr. Hitchens apparently waxes
joyfully of the immense progress made in Afghanistan since the war, as a
justification of the war. Unfortunately, it is about as accurate as
everything else coming out of this administration. Allow David Corn to
enlighten you (from June 4, 2004 article):

Financial aid to Afghanistan has been paltry, despite Bush's earlier
promises. Measured per capita, financial assistance to Afghanistan has been
lower than for Kosovo, Palestine, Haiti, and Rwanda, according to the Center
on International Cooperation at New York University.

Opium poppy production is dramatically on the rise, and poppy harvests are
estimated to account for almost half of the gross domestic product. The
Washington Post recently reported that the residents of Wardak province,
which is near Kabul, have become resentful of the United States and the
Afghan government because of the ongoing (and not-too-successful) anti-poppy
efforts. "The government has taken away our guns, and now it is destroying
our livelihoods," one told the newspaper. "We have agreed to turn in our
weapons in the name of peace, but we don't have enough water to grow any
other crops but poppy. Why are they bringing this cruelty upon us?" The
White House Office of National Drug Control Policy estimates that area of
poppy cultivation in Afghanistan has grown from 1685 hectares in 2001 to
61,000 hectares in 2003.

Attacks from the Taliban are up. Aid workers have been targeted, and
nongovernmental organizations have pulled out of Afghanistan, slowing down
the already slow reconstruction efforts. After five men who worked for the
National Solidarity Programme, an NGO working southeast of Kabul, were
killed, the group ended its work in 72 areas in the country. Ihsanullah
Dileri, the organization's head of coordination, told The Independent of
London, "This is a very bad, very desperate situation. We had $60,000 to
spend on each of those 72 areas. Now this cannot be done. All these areas
are badly deprived, with poor people lacking basic facilities. But I am
afraid the security simply is not there for us to continue with our work. It
is too dangerous." Barbara Stapleton of the Agency Coordinating Body for
Afghan Relief, which represents 90 aid agencies in Afghanistan, said, "We
are very concerned about security and deterioration of the situation.
Impunity rules in the country. It's not just the NGO community, but the
Afghan people at large who are exposed to these levels of insecurity."

As for women's rights, Amnesty International reports, "two years after the
ending of the Taliban regime, the international community and the Afghan
transitional administration, led by President Karzai, have proved unable to
protect women. The risk of rape and sexual violence by members of armed
factions and former combatants is still high. Forced marriages, particularly
of girl children, and violence against women in the family are widespread in
many areas." After the war, a number of girls' schools opened (or reopened)
throughout the country. But since then, Islamic extremists have used
intimidation to shut down many.

Recent talks between Karzai and warlords have raised the
possibility of a power-sharing agreement between Karzai and these militia
leaders that could undermine the democratic elections scheduled for
September.

Drugs, warlordism, a surge in fundamentalism--Afghanistan remains an
unfinished, daunting and complicated challenge, as American GIs continue to
lose their lives fighting the Taliban remnants and searching for Osama bin
Laden. But Bush made it seem all is swell. What is it about him? Last fall,
he declared his administration had "put the Taliban out of business
forever." At that time, Taliban attacks were increasing, and US troops were
being killed in pursuit of the Taliban. Now Bush tells us things are going
fine in Afghanistan because there is a gleam in the eyes of Afghans. And, no
doubt, they are all humming, "The Future's So Bright I Got To Wear Shades."

So before you go and criticize Moore, realize that he chose to address the
realities, not the spin coming out of DC. Then, Mr. Hitchens uses the fact
that Richard Clarke assumed responsibility for flying out the Bin-Ladens, as
some kind of mea culpa by Moore that his logic is faulty when considering
the enormous impropriety of flying them out at all. Mr. Hitchens, does it
bother you at all that the Bin Laden family, who conveniently ousted Osama,
was in this country the day of the attacks? Does it bother you at all that
they were having meetings with this administration during this time? Does it
bother you at all that this administration actually denied this for months
until they were faced with the truth? If you answered no to those questions,
then there was no point in even watching the movie, as your mind has already
been firmly made up.

Thesaurus Break: Herbivorous = plant eating

Ahhh, ok where were we, that's right, Mr. Hitchens now begins to berate
without proof, stating that Mr. Moore has based this move on a big lie,
which “can only sustain itself by a dizzying succession of smaller
falsehoods, beefed up by wilder and (if possible) yet more-contradictory
claims. " Unfortunately, Mr. Hitchens does not provide us with the alleged
big lie, nor the little ones that support it. A statement for the sake of
making a statement does not make that statement fact. He then proceeds to
talk about how the film points out that Bush spent so much time on vacation,
as some kind of proof. The fact is that President bush spent approximately
48% of his first year, on vacation, while this nation was about to be
attacked. That should bother you.

As for the assertion of Bush making a boilerplate response to terrorism, and
then driving the golf ball, Mr. Hitchens is being disingenuous. This was not
a boilerplate response when the country is hanging on every word. It is
vital that we see that this President can feign sincerity and interest,
while all the time, just being fake. That is what that scene was about Mr.
Hitchens. Lastly, Clinton and FDR would not have done such a stupid thing.

Next up, we have the infamous non-reaction scene. The President is just told
that the nation is under attack. He doesn' t react at all Mr. Hitchens and
that is the damning part of this footage. He reacts as if he is merely being
told what he already knew was going to happen. He then proceeded to lie
about that reaction, more than once. This is not paranoia. The amount of
insider trad ing that occurred around 9-11 clearly indicates that this was a
known event. Mr. Hitchens is hoping that by just saying the word paranoid,
that [sic] people will associate any such theory in that light.
Unfortunately, as
the truth continues to come to light, we see that what was considered
conspiracy theory, is becoming all too real.

I realize this is dragging on, but it is only fair to respond to all of the
inanity from Mr. Hitchens. Next up, he decries the scenes from Iraq, as
being somehow fake. As if there are no children who played in Iraq. As if
the US has not killed thousands upon thousands of civilians, including
children. We have attacked weddings and communities and then claimed they
were safe houses, only to be proven wrong. These are the realities of war
Mr. Hitchens, and while I guess you would prefer your war in sound bites
such as “bring em on", I think you need to see the dead children who had
nothing to do with 9-11, and are now dead because of our policies. That is
not propaganda, it is reality.

Mr. Hitchens then continues to compare Saddam alleged atrocities from 20
years ago, as proof of his evil nature and thus justification for the
current war. Of course, the convenient truth is that back then, we actually
supported Saddam, under Republican regimes and sold him most of the weapons
we still cannot find. Either way, the issue is not whether Saddam housed
some terrorists in the 1980s, the issue is whether he did anything NOW that
justified this invasion. No WMD, means he actually had complied with the UN,
and that our war is based on lies. Then Hitchens refers to the “hideous
invasion of Kuwait" and the alleged attempt to take out Bush Senior as an
actual rationale for Bush to conduct this war. Are you serious? It is ok in
your mind to send American kids to die because someone may have tried to
construct an assassination plot against your father? Send your own kids Mr.
Hitchens; maybe then you can gain some perspective.

Next on the correction parade Mr. Hitchens, is that Iraq is not the only
country to publicly celebrate the 9-11 tragedy. Palestine and Saudi Arabia
did as well as most middle eastern countries. Considering our history with
these countries, you can’t really blame them. Then, is this inaccurate blurb
about “Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi moved from Afghanistan to Baghdad and began to
plan his now very open and lethal design for a holy and ethnic civil war."
This is apparently directly out of the Vice President’s book of lies and
half-truths. It is an established fact that Zarqawi is a loner, who does not
and did not work with Saddam, nor Iraq. Stop peddling this administration
lies Mr. Hitchens.

Mr. Hitchens then proceeds to make a conclusion, and apply it to Moore, by
saying that he is trying to say that Saddam was “no problem at all". No Mr.
Hitchens, that is not what he is saying. I don’t pretend to speak for Mr.
Moore, but I believe what he is saying is that when you look at the fact
that Saddam had NO working relationship with Bin Laden, or Al Qaeda, had no
WMD, and tried his best to avoid this conflict, what exactly are we there
for? Why do we see our kids die every day? President Bush stated it was
because of this insidious connection that now his own Republican led
commission concludes is simply not there.

On the subject of counter-terrorism, Mr. Hitchens yet again has missed the
point and tries to blur the lines. If the President has still not properly
funded first responders, AND issues too many vague “Magenta Alerts", those
are not competing prospects that cancel each other out. The fact is that
every time the President needs a boost in the polls, there is another
Lavender Alert to remind us that we need to remain properly scared, should
be pointed out. The fact that this President talks out of both sides of his
mouth and has not even finished paying New York the money promised after
9-11 needs to be told to the American people.

Now, in the next paragraph, he claims to “make these elementary points is to
collapse the whole pathetic edifice of the film's "theory." Unfortunately,
the points he makes have nothing to do with the majority of the film. He
asks questions about the Saudis again, as if their decision to not join the
coalition clearly vindicates the administration from being in bed with them.
Please. The fact that the Bush dynasty is in bed with the Saudis is not a
fact in dispute Mr. Hitchens, and has no relevance to the edifice of this
film’s “theory". This is the kind of misdirection that Mr. Hitchens hopes no
one will point out. Of course, by this time, most people who have survived
this far along in his article are very confused and are wondering what
sub-Brechtian could possibly mean…

Thesaurus Break: Sub-Brechtian = German poet and playwright who
developed “epic drama,” a style that relies on the audience's reflective
detachment rather than the production's atmosphere and action. His works
include The Threepenny Opera (192 and The Caucasian Chalk Circle (194.
The “sub” part obviously means beneath this.

Sorry, I digress. Back to the nonsense. At this point, Mr. Hitchens
apparently is gearing up for a big finish (God I hope so). He begins to
rattle off things that Moore points out, and downplays them so people can
think that they are common knowledge and thus, have no merit being
discussed. Unfortunately for Mr. Hitchens, I think they warrant being
discussed. I will respond to two of these lame points:

- “The capitalist nature of American society” – again, through
misdirection, Mr. Hitchens hopes you don’t realize that Moore is actually
talking about the capitalist nature of this administration, not the country.
It is ok for companies to want to make profit in the free marketplace. It is
not ok when the administration hands out billions in no-bid contracts to
companies he either used to work with, or have supported his campaign. That
is crony capitalism.
- “Poor people often volunteer to join the army, and some of them
are duskier than others.” – using a cute word, to describe minorities, Mr.
Hitchens again crosses the line. Yes, the poor are often the ones sent to
die, and minorities are often the poor. The point he doesn’t want you to see
is that the powerful and rich make policy to send kids to die, because it is
not their kids. Moore brings this point poignantly home.

He chooses at this point to belabor the racial overtone his article has now
taken. By brilliantly comparing black Americans who wanted the right to
fight in the Civil War, to the socioeconomic point that Moore is trying to
make. Good job Chris, so because black Americans wanted to fight in the
Civil War, they now get what they deserve? Once again, trying to dodge the
point, it is a statement that Moore is seeking to make. If there was an
equal draft, meaning that the rich couldn’t get deferred, than a lot of
these chickenhawks would be changing their minds if it was their children
going off to die for Halliburton.

Unfortunately, Hitchens was not done. He now switches to blaming Moore for
not discussing the bravery aboard the aircraft that crashed in Pennsylvania.
While I guess you can blame Moore for not including what you want to see in
this movie, he then goes further, to call Moore a “silly and shady man who
does not recognize courage of any sort even when he sees it because he
cannot summon it in himself." What has led our effusive reviewer to make
such an attack? Well, he states “The Pennsylvania drama also reminds one of
the self-evident fact that this war is not fought only "overseas" or in
uniform, but is being brought to our cities." Bravo Mr. Hitchens, you have
successfully supported Mr. Moore's effort. You see that is exactly the
point. If we are to believe the entire story from this administration then
we are to believe that 19 men, mostly from Saudi Arabia, hijacked four
airplanes and led them off course for over an hour and a half with no
response from Norad or this administration. During this time, the President
thought the best course of action would be to continue reading a book about
a pet goat. Then, after our crack intelligence community that couldn't
prevent the attacks, now knows exactly who the 19 people are, 9 of them are
proven to still be alive. After all of this, this administration decides the
prudent thing to do is start wars with two countries that HAD NOTHING TO DO
WITH THE ATTACKS, while handing out billions of dollars in no-bid contracts
to political friends. The point is Mr. Hitchens that this war was brought to
our shores, but not by the people we are currently killing.

Not satisfied with the attempted hatchet job thus far, Mr. Hitchens proceeds
to slam Moore for hiring people to protect him from attacks well, such as
this one. He correctly points out that Mr. Moore has threatened to sue, but
lies by saying “if anyone insults him or his pet." This is patently false.
He has threatened to sue if they make slanderous statements, as is his
right. As for the response team, you cant blame him when the Republican PR
machine that managed the recall Gray Davis efforts and the strong-arming to
get CBS to cancel the miniseries, The Reagans, started to target Moore with
their ridiculous moveamericabackwards website. He at least recognizes that
this right-wing, anti-bill of rights group is thuggish, but then states that
Moore's response, which is simply to protect himself, not to be an
aggressor, is equally thuggish in return. Please.

Hitchens then makes the most telling statement of this whole dissertation.
“I think we can agree that the film is so flat-out phony that
"fact-checking" is beside the point." We can agree? Based on what? The fact
that you have not bothered to mention the facts in this article? This sums
up his point perfectly. In his attack of Moore, he absolutely has not
bothered to check those annoying little facts.

It appears at this point that Mr. Hitchens has approached the end of his
thesaurus and needs to start wrapping it up (please, I pray). He waxes
prophetically about how Moore has betrayed his craft because he has no
objectivity and has lied, blah blah blah. Of course the problem with this
premise is that he hasn’t proven that Moore has said anything untrue. Thus I
have made this elementary point, collapsing the whole pathetic edifice of
this article’s "theory”.

He then concludes by trying to make Moore seem foolish by quoting Orwell
toward the end of the movie. His point is again a last ditch effort to
utilize his new thesaurus and leaves the reader going, what? He wraps up
that train of thought by derailing with his opinion that Moore has “engaged
in a sophomoric celluloid rewriting of recent history." Unfortunately, as
has been highlighted at many points in this article, Mr. Hitchens has not
proven anything other than his own pomposity and verbosity. Concluding with
more drivel that Moore would prefer that Milosevic would still be in power,
and Saddam would still own Kuwait, yada yada yada. To respond to this by
saying it is a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that
would never again rise above the excremental, to use his own words against
hi m. Unfortunately, Mr. Hitchens has proven beyond a doubt that he is a
lugubrious, turgid, herbivorous writer, who desperately needs to put his
thesaurus down, and back slowly away from his madness.

Anthony Wade is an independent writer from New York. Email to
karac1967@hotmail.com

ENDS

next item:

http://www.zmag.org/chomskyhitchens.htm

Chomsky Replies to Hitchens

By Noam Chomsky

Note: Christopher Hitchens wrote an essay in the Nation, and a subsequent
comment on the Nation web site…and among those he attacked in his
fulminations, was Noam Chomsky. Here, Chomsky replies...

I have been asked to respond to recent articles by Christopher Hitchens
(webpage, Sept. 24; _Nation_, Oct. , and after refusing several times,
will do so, though only partially, and reluctantly. The reason for the
reluctance is that Hitchens cannot mean what he is saying. For that reason
alone -- there are others that should be obvious -- this is no proper
context for addressing serious issues relating to the Sept. 11 atrocities.

That Hitchens cannot mean what he writes is clear, in the first place, from
his reference to the bombing of the Sudan. He must be unaware that he is
expressing such racist contempt for African victims of a terrorist crime,
and cannot intend what his words imply. This single atrocity destroyed half
the pharmaceutical supplies of a poor African country and the facilities for
replenishing them, with an enormous human toll. Hitchens is outraged that I
compared this atrocity to what I called "the wickedness and awesome cruelty"
of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 (quoting Robert Fisk), adding that the
actual toll in the Sudan case can only be surmised, because the US blocked
any UN inquiry and few were interested enough to pursue the matter. That the
toll is dreadful is hardly in doubt.

Hitchens is apparently referring to a response I wrote to several
journalists on Sept. 15, composite because inquiries were coming too fast
for individual response. This was apparently posted several times on the
web, as were other much more detailed subsequent responses. Assuming so, in
the brief message Hitchens may have seen, I did not elaborate, assuming --
correctly, judging by subsequent interchange -- that it was unnecessary: the
recipients would understand why the comparison is quite appropriate. I also
took for granted that they would understand a virtual truism: When we
estimate the human toll of a crime, we count not only those who were
literally murdered on the spot but those who died as a result, the course we
adopt reflexively, and properly, when we consider the crimes of official
enemies -- Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, to mention the most extreme cases. If we
are even pretending to be serious, we apply the same standards to ourselves:
in the case of the Sudan, we count the number who died as a direct
consequence of the crime, not just those killed by cruise missiles. Again, a
truism.

Since there is one person who does not appear to understand, I will add a
few quotes from the mainstream press, to clarify.

A year after the attack, "without the lifesaving medicine [the destroyed
facilities] produced, Sudan's death toll from the bombing has continued,
quietly, to rise... Thus, tens of thousands of people -- many of them
children -- have suffered and died from malaria, tuberculosis, and other
treatable diseases... [The factory] provided affordable medicine for humans
and all the locally available veterinary medicine in Sudan. It produced 90
percent of Sudan's major pharmaceutical products... Sanctions against Sudan
make it impossible to import adequate amounts of medicines required to cover
the serious gap left by the plant's destruction.... [T]he action taken by
Washington on Aug. 20, 1998, continues to deprive the people of Sudan of
needed medicine. Millions must wonder how the International Court of Justice
in The Hague will celebrate this anniversary" (Jonathan Belke, _Boston
Globe_, Aug. 22, 1999).

"[T]he loss of this factory is a tragedy for the rural communities who need
these medicines" (Tom Carnaffin, technical manager with "intimate knowledge"
of the destroyed plant, Ed Vulliamy et al., London _Observer_, 23 Aug.
199.

The plant "provided 50 percent of Sudan's medicines, and its destruction has
left the country with no supplies of choloroquine, the standard treatment
for malaria," but months later, the British Labour government refused
requests "to resupply chloroquine in emergency relief until such time as the
Sudanese can rebuild their pharmaceutical production" (Patrick Wintour,
_Observer_, 20 Dec. 199.

And much more.

Proportional to population, this is as if the bin Laden network, in a single
attack on the US, caused "hundreds of thousands of people -- many of them
children -- to suffer and die from easily treatable diseases," though the
analogy is unfair because a rich country, not under sanctions and denied
aid, can easily replenish its stocks and respond appropriately to such an
atrocity -- which, I presume, would not have passed so lightly. To regard
the comparison to Sept. 11 as outrageous is to express extraordinary racist
contempt for African victims of a shocking crime, which, to make it worse,
is one for which we are responsible: as taxpayers, for failing to provide
massive reparations, for granting refuge and immunity to the perpetrators,
and for allowing the terrible facts to be sunk so deep in the memory hole
that some, at least, seem unaware of them.

This only scratches the surface. The US bombing "appears to have shattered
the slowly evolving move towards compromise between Sudan's warring sides"
and terminated promising steps towards a peace agreement to end the civil
war that had left 1.5 million dead since 1981, which might have also led to
"peace in Uganda and the entire Nile Basin." The attack apparently
"shattered...the expected benefits of a political shift at the heart of
Sudan's Islamist government" towards a "pragmatic engagement with the
outside world," along with efforts to address Sudan's domestic crises," to
end support for terrorism, and to reduce the influence of radical Islamists
(Mark Huband, _Financial Times_, Sept. 8, 199.

In this respect, we may compare the crime in the Sudan to the assassination
of Lumumba, which helped plunge the Congo into decades of slaughter, still
continuing; or the overthrow of the democratic government of Guatemala in
1954, which led to 40 years of hideous atrocities; and all too many others
like it.

One can scarcely try to estimate the colossal toll of the Sudan bombing,
even apart from the probable tens of thousands of immediate Sudanese
victims. The complete toll is attributable to the single act of terror -- at
least, if we have the honesty to adopt the standards we properly apply to
official enemies.

Evidently, Hitchens cannot mean what he said about this topic. We can
therefore disregard it.

To take another example, Hitchens writes that "I referred to the "the whole
business [of the 1999 war] as a bullying persecution of - the Serbs!" As he
knows, this is sheer fabrication. The reasons for the war that I suggested
were quoted from the highest level US official justifications for it,
including National Security Adviser Sandy Berger and the final summary
presented to Congress by Secretary of Defense William Cohen. We can
therefore also disregard what Hitchens has to say about this topic.

As a final illustration, consider Hitchens's fury over the "masochistic
e-mail...circulating from the Chomsky-Zinn-Finkelstein quarter," who joined
such radical rags as the _Wall Street Journal_ in what he calls
"rationalizing" terror -- that is, considering the grievances expressed by
people of the Middle East region, rich to poor, secular to Islamist, the
course that would be followed by anyone who hopes to reduce the likelihood
of further atrocities rather than simply to escalate the cycle of violence,
in the familiar dynamics, leading to even greater catastrophes here and
elsewhere. This is an outrage, Hitchens explains, because "I know already"
about these concerns -- a comment that makes sense on precisely one
assumption: that the communications were addressed solely to Hitchens.
Without further comment, we can disregard his fulminations on these topics.

In one charge, Hitchens is correct. He writes that "The crime [in the Sudan]
was directly and sordidly linked to the effort by a crooked President to
avoid impeachment (a conclusion sedulously avoided by the Chomskys and
Husseinis of the time)." It's true that I have sedulously avoided this
speculation, and will continue to do so until some meaningful evidence is
provided; and have also sedulously avoided the entire obsession with
Clinton's sex life.

>From the rest, it may be possible to disentangle some intended line of
argument, but I'm not going to make the effort, and fail to see why others
should. Since Hitchens evidently does not take what he is writing seriously,
there is no reason for anyone else to do so. The fair and sensible reaction
is to treat all of this as some aberration, and to await the return of the
author to the important work that he has often done in the past.

In the background are issues worth addressing. But in some serious context,
not this one.

I add my 2 cents' worth at the end.

>From: Alan Creak

>A couple of weeks ago I had an exchange of communications with the
>NZ Herald. I think you might find it entertaining.
>
>EXCERPTS FROM an article in the New Zealand Herald on 2004 June 19 :
>
>== A TABLE ================================
>THE LEGS HAVE IT
>
> 4000 women surveyed Legs
> 700 heart disease 74.6cm to 75.3cm
> 3300 no heart disease 75.8cm to 76.0cm
>
>Conclusion: Risk decreases by an average of 16 per cent for every
>increase of 4.3cm in
> leg length.
>
>== EXCERPT FROM TEXT ================================
>Dr Lawlor and her colleagues measured the height, leg length, trunk
>length and weight of more than 4000 women between the ages of 60 and
>79 from 23 British towns.
>
>They also assessed how well their lungs worked, whether they were
>former or current smokers, and noted their social class.
>
>Of the 4000 surveyed, almost 700 had heart disease and 31 per cent
>of those had had heart attacks. Their leg lengths ranged from 74.6cm
>to 75.3cm.
>
>Women without any symptoms had legs ranging from 75.8 to 76.0cm.
>
>When all the risk factors were taken into account, the research
>concluded that leg length remained strongly linked to risk of heart
>disease.
>
>It showed risk fell by an average of 16 per cent for every extra
>4.3cm in leg length. - PA, REUTERS
>==================================
>
>There's some more, but that's the relevant part. ( The original
>might still be on the Herald's web site - there's a copy at
>www.creakings.net/alan/legsarticle.html. )
>
>I was moved to send the following E-mail to the editor :
>
>==================================
>Not Very Dear Editor :
>
>1. The ONLY reason we continue to subscribe to the Herald is that
>there is no practicable alternative. Around 80% of it typically goes
>straight into the recycling cupboard; another 15% goes in
>meaningless pictures. ( Yes, the numbers are guesswork; I can't
>support them with real measurements. I have intended to make such
>measurements for years, but I have always found better things to do.
>In the light of what follows, I point out that when I quote
>statistics I include an assessment of their reliability. ) We read
>the other 5% in the hope of finding some grains of news among the
>detritus of illiterate and innumerate drivel.
>
>2. And we find some. That's just as well, because the Herald is our
>only source of news. We gave up television many years ago because it
>was even worse and wasted far more time than we had to spare,
>largely because we couldn't skip over the drivel. Radio news is
>perhaps better, but takes longer, and comes at inconvenient times. I
>record that, despite my annoyance, the Herald has kept us pretty
>well informed. The material is there.
>
>3. That said, it seems to me that your quality is getting worse, and
>not slowly. The standard of English is deteriorating; many of your
>writers seem unable to manage elementary spelling and punctuation,
>and no one else notices. Worse, there is little evidence that anyone
>on your staff has any understanding at all of mathematical,
>scientific, or technological matters.
>
>4. - all of which is a prelude to my immediate concern, which is an
>article in today's "Weekend Herald". On page A18 you have printed a
>thing under the heading "The long and short of heart disease",
>accompanied by a totally irrelevant picture. It is an example of the
>"medical" "news" with which you frequently pad out your pages. This
>is usually material which I skip, but my wife is short in stature,
>so for once I thought there might be something interesting.
>
>5. The first part is plausible, if rather boring. In the last six
>paragraphs and the green panel, this changes dramatically. We learn
>that :
>
>- A survey covered 4000 women.
>
>- 700 had heart disease; ALL of these women's legs were between 74.6
>cm and 75.3 cm long.
>
>- ALL the legs of the other 3300 women were between 75.8 cm and 76.0 cm.
>
>6. Are we really to infer that :
>
>- Practically ALL British women's legs are between 74.6 cm and 76.0
>cm long ? There is no mention of any selection, so we must assume
>that the sample is random. ( NOTE : Perhaps that's why we settled in
>New Zealand. It is not clear precisely how the legs were measured,
>but my wife's legs appear to be less than 74.6 cm long, so she is
>clearly not an acceptable British woman. )
>
>- The legs of over 80% of British women are between 75.8 cm and 76.0
>cm in length - a range of just 2 mm ?
>
>- Despite the vast number in that range, there are NO women with
>legs between 75.3 cm and 75.8 cm in length ? That surely suggests
>two species.
>
>- The leg length is an absolute determinant of a British woman's
>destiny so far as heart disease is concerned ? Those with legs
>shorter than 75.3 cm in length are doomed !
>
>- Lung function, smoking, and social status have absolutely no
>bearing on the issue ? ( Yes, earlier in the article a correlation
>is suggested at the level of "more likely", but the correlation with
>leg length is presented as perfect. )
>
>7. No, we're not "really to infer that", though that's what your
>article implies. In the last paragraph, we learn that :
>
>- The risk falls by an average of 16% for every extra 4.3 cm in leg length.
>
>That's almost believable as a real, if oversimplified, result. Even
>so, the mention of 4.3 cm remains puzzling - as the overall range of
>women's leg lengths studied is 1.4 cm, how can they tell ?
>
>----------------
>
>Given such ridiculous material, it's easy to poke fun. The real
>question is why it should ever have been printed. Isn't it obviously
>so remarkable that it must be either nonsense or a new discovery
>that calls into question much of our current understanding of
>physiology ? Does no one on your staff have any responsibility for
>assessing the plausibility of your material ?
>
>I have wondered before, but this rather extreme example raises the
>question again. Some of the material you have printed about ( for
>example ) President Bush seems almost equally bizarre when assessed
>as probable behaviour of a world leader; can we discount that too ?
>Please ?
>
> Alan Creak.
>
>----------------------------
>
>P.S. : In the unlikely event that you want to print this, you're
>welcome, but I would much rather someone took some notice of it and
>did something about the problem.
>==================================
>
>They didn't print it. I did receive a polite reply, not exactly
>accepting my points, but not rejecting them either; the matter was
>to be discussed at a regular meeting.
>
> Alan
>
>Alan Creak,
>Computer Science Department,
>Auckland University,
>Private Bag 92019,
>Auckland,
>New Zealand.
>
>Room : 303.571, Mathematics and Physics building, City campus
> ( on the corner of Wellesley and Princes Streets ).
>
Private Bag 92019, Auckland, New Zealand

===========

further comment from RM:

>> Women without any symptoms had legs ranging from 75.8 to 76.0cm.

Unlike most people, I have been intimately involved in leg-length
measurements for 4 decade (because my legs became different in length after
a major mishap + surgery, and attempts at therapy have entailed numerous
measurements of length).

Everything I've experienced in this field of mensuration would lead
me to conclude that the "range" claimed here is spurious. The difference
between 75.8 cm and 76.0 cm is less than the uncertainty in measurement.
For a glimpse of why I say this, just try measuring several times the
lengths of your own legs, &/or anybody else's ...

So, the "range" at one extreme of this sample is just a point; i.e
the only women lacking symptoms altogether had the very shortest legs.
This could - as a matter of logic - be true, but I wonder. I
certainly wonder about the competence, or alternatively the motives, of
anybody that could create such a spurious impression of "range" when only
one number (with 2 significant figs) is the proven reality.