Eugenie Scott & others have complained that this paper, refereed in
the normal way, has been pubd. I see no justification in that complaint.
I welcome the paper.

Increasingly clear is the diversity within ID. From the almost
purely polemical Johnson, thru the narrow evasiveness & unnecessary
neologisms of Dembski, to the dishonesty of Wells, the category 'IDT'
covers quite a range. What they have in common includes a stolid
insistence on making too much of the lack of proposed mechanisms for
evolution of e.g the bacterial flagellum. ID as exemplified by Behe &
Dembski is essentially 'God of the gaps' reasoning. Failure to propose a
scheme for evolution of the bacterial flagellum is a logical but possibly
evanescent basis for argument.

Anyhow, the insistent focus on arcance phemomena that cannot be
understood without education, and instruments such as electron microscopes,
as modern 'Paley timepieces' is obscurantist, compared with arguing from
macroscopic ecology.

Also, the methods of ID are not those of normal scientific
discussion. The ISCID editor Micah Sparacio refuses to ackn email from me;
Dembski does ackn, but then refuses to allow on the ISCID website anything
from me.

ID is unwisely narrow, and not quite straight.

I continue to urge revival of Aristotle's Four Causes (only 2 of
which are acknowledged by typical neoDarwinists e.g Dawkins) as the
framework for discussion of causes in biology (seemy paper of that title at
http://www.spc.org.nz/Science.asp#6.pdf )..

R

http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=2177&program=C
SC%20-%20Scientific%20Research%20and%20Scholarship%20-%20Science

The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories
By: Stephen C. Meyer
Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington
September 15, 2004

On August 4th, 2004 an extensive review essay by Dr. Stephen C. Meyer,
Director of Discovery Institute's Center for Science & Culture appeared in
the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington (volume 117, no. 2,
pp. 213-239).

The Proceedings is a peer-reviewed biology journal published at the
National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution in
Washington D.C.

In the article, entitled "The Origin of Biological Information and the
Higher Taxonomic Categories", Dr. Meyer argues that no current
materialistic theory of evolution can account for the origin of the
information necessary to build novel animal forms. He proposes intelligent
design as an alternative explanation for the origin of biological
information and the higher taxa.

Due to an unusual number of inquiries about the article and because the
article is presently not available on line elsewhere, Dr. Meyer, the
copyright holder, has decided to make the article available now in HTML
format on this website. (Off prints are also available from Discovery
Institute by writing to Keith Pennock at Kpennock@discovery.org).

PROCEEDINGS OF THE BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON
117(2):213-239. 2004

The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic categories
Stephen C. Meyer

Introduction

In a recent volume of the Vienna Series in a Theoretical Biology (2003),
Gerd B. Muller and Stuart Newman argue that what they call the "origination
of organismal form" remains an unsolved problem. In making this claim,
Muller and Newman (2003:3-10) distinguish two distinct issues, namely, (1)
the causes of form generation in the individual organism during
embryological development and (2) the causes responsible for the production
of novel organismal forms in the first place during the history of life. To
distinguish the latter case (phylogeny) from the former (ontogeny), Muller
and Newman use the term
"origination" to designate the causal processes by which biological form
first arose during the evolution of life. They insist that "the molecular
mechanisms that bring about biological form in modern day embryos should
not be confused" with the causes responsible for the origin (or
"origination") of novel biological forms during the history of life (p.3).
They further argue that we know more about the causes of ontogenesis, due
to advances in molecular biology, molecular genetics and developmental
biology, than we do about the causes of phylogenesis--the ultimate
origination of new biological forms during the remote past.

In making this claim, Muller and Newman are careful to affirm that
evolutionary biology has succeeded in explaining how preexisting forms
diversify under the twin influences of natural selection and variation of
genetic traits. Sophisticated mathematically-based models of population
genetics have proven adequate for mapping and understanding quantitative
variability and populational changes in organisms. Yet Muller and Newman
insist that population genetics, and thus evolutionary biology, has not
identified a specifically causal explanation for the origin of true
morphological novelty during the history of life. Central to their concern
is what they see as the inadequacy of the variation of genetic traits as a
source of new form and structure. They note, following Darwin himself,
that the sources of new form and structure must precede the action of
natural selection (2003:3)--that selection must act on what already exists.
Yet, in their view, the "genocentricity" and "incrementalism" of the
neo-Darwinian mechanism has meant that an adequate source of new form and
structure has yet to be identified by theoretical biologists. Instead,
Muller and Newman see the need to identify epigenetic sources of
morphological innovation during the evolution of life. In the meantime,
however, they insist neo-Darwinism lacks any "theory of the
generative" (p. 7).

As it happens, Muller and Newman are not alone in this judgment. In the
last decade or so a host of scientific essays and books have questioned the
efficacy of selection and mutation as a mechanism for generating
morphological novelty, as even a brief literature survey will establish.
Thomson (1992:107) expressed doubt that large-scale morphological changes
could accumulate via minor phenotypic changes at the population genetic
level. Miklos (1993:29) argued that neo-Darwinism fails to provide a
mechanism that can produce large-scale innovations in form and complexity.
Gilbert et al. (1996) attempted to develop a new theory of evolutionary
mechanisms to supplement classical neo-Darwinism, which, they argued, could
not adequately explain macroevolution. As they put it in a memorable
summary of the situation: "starting in the 1970s, many biologists began
questioning its (neo-Darwinism's) adequacy in explaining evolution.
Genetics might be adequate for explaining microevolution, but
microevolutionary changes in gene frequency were not seen as able to turn a
reptile into a mammal or to convert a fish into an amphibian.
Microevolution looks at adaptations that concern the survival of the
fittest, not the arrival of the fittest. As Goodwin (1995) points out,
'the origin of species--Darwin's problem--remains unsolved'" (p. 361).
Though Gilbert et al. (1996) attempted to solve the problem of the origin
of form by proposing a greater role for developmental genetics within an
otherwise neo-Darwinian framework,1 numerous recent authors have continued
to raise questions about the adequacy of that
framework itself or about the problem of the origination of form generally
(Webster & Goodwin 1996; Shubin & Marshall 2000; Erwin 2000; Conway Morris
2000, 2003b; Carroll 2000; Wagner 2001; Becker & Lonnig 2001; Stadler et
al. 2001; Lonnig & Saedler 2002; Wagner & Stadler 2003; Valentine
2004:189-194).

What lies behind this skepticism? Is it warranted? Is a new and
specifically causal theory needed to explain the origination of biological
form?

This review will address these questions. It will do so by analyzing the
problem of the origination of organismal form (and the corresponding
emergence of higher taxa) from a particular theoretical standpoint.
Specifically, it will treat the problem of the origination of the higher
taxonomic groups as a manifestation of a deeper problem, namely, the
problem of the origin of the information (whether genetic or epigenetic)
that, as it will be argued, is necessary to generate morphological novelty.

In order to perform this analysis, and to make it relevant and tractable to
systematists and paleontologists, this paper will examine a paradigmatic
example of the origin of biological form and information during the history
of life: the Cambrian explosion. During the Cambrian, many novel animal
forms and body plans (representing new phyla, subphyla and classes) arose
in a geologically brief period of time. The following information-based
analysis of the Cambrian explosion will support the claim
of recent authors such as Muller and Newman that the mechanism of selection
and genetic mutation does not constitute an adequate causal explanation of
the origination of biological form in the higher taxonomic groups. It will
also suggest the need to explore other possible causal factors for the
origin of form and information during the evolution of life and will
examine some other possibilities that have been proposed.

The Cambrian Explosion

The "Cambrian explosion" refers to the geologically sudden appearance of
many new animal body plans about 530 million years ago. At this time, at
least nineteen, and perhaps as many as thirty-five phyla of forty total
(Meyer et al. 2003), made their first appearance on earth within a narrow
five- to ten-million-year window of geologic time (Bowring et al. 1993,
1998a:1, 1998b:40; Kerr 1993; Monastersky 1993; Aris-Brosou & Yang 2003).
Many new subphyla, between 32 and 48 of 56 total (Meyer et al. 2003), and
classes of animals also arose at this time with representatives of these
new higher taxa manifesting significant morphological innovations. The
Cambrian explosion thus marked a major episode of morphogenesis in which
many new and disparate organismal forms arose in a geologically brief
period of time.

To say that the fauna of the Cambrian period appeared in a geologically
sudden manner also implies the absence of clear transitional intermediate
forms connecting Cambrian animals with simpler pre-Cambrian forms. And,
indeed, in almost all cases, the Cambrian animals have no clear
morphological antecedents in earlier Vendian or Precambrian fauna (Miklos
1993, Erwin et al. 1997:132, Steiner & Reitner 2001, Conway Morris
2003b:510, Valentine et al. 2003:519-520). Further, several recent
discoveries and analyses suggest that these morphological gaps may not be
merely an artifact of incomplete sampling of
the fossil record (Foote 1997, Foote et al. 1999, Benton & Ayala 2003,
Meyer et al. 2003), suggesting that the fossil record is at least
approximately reliable (Conway Morris 2003b:505).

As a result, debate now exists about the extent to which this pattern of
evidence comports with a strictly monophyletic view of evolution (Conway
Morris 1998a, 2003a, 2003b:510; Willmer 1990, 2003). Further, among those
who accept a monophyletic view of the history of life, debate exists about
whether to privilege fossil or molecular data and analyses. Those who
think the fossil data provide a more reliable picture of the origin of the
Metazoan tend to think these animals arose relatively quickly--that the
Cambrian explosion had a "short fuse." (Conway Morris 2003b:505-506,
Valentine & Jablonski 2003). Some (Wray et al. 1996), but not all (Ayala et
al. 199, who think that molecular phylogenies establish reliable
divergence times from pre-Cambrian ancestors think that the Cambrian
animals evolved over a very long period of time--that the Cambrian
explosion had a "long fuse." This review will not address these questions
of historical pattern. Instead, it will analyze whether the neo-Darwinian
process of mutation and selection, or other processes of evolutionary
change, can generate the form and
information necessary to produce the animals that arise in the Cambrian.
This analysis will, for the most part, 2 therefore, not depend upon
assumptions of either a long or short fuse for the Cambrian explosion, or
upon a monophyletic or polyphyletic view of the early history of life.

Defining Biological Form and Information

Form, like life itself, is easy to recognize but often hard to define
precisely. Yet, a reasonable working definition of form will suffice for
our present purposes. Form can be defined as the four-dimensional
topological relations of anatomical parts. This means that one can
understand form as a unified arrangement of body parts or material
components in a distinct shape or pattern (topology)--one that exists in
three spatial dimensions and which arises in time during ontogeny.

Insofar as any particular biological form constitutes something like a
distinct arrangement of constituent body parts, form can be seen as arising
from constraints that limit the possible arrangements of matter.
Specifically, organismal form arises (both in phylogeny and ontogeny) as
possible arrangements of material parts are constrained to establish a
specific or particular arrangement with an identifiable three dimensional
topography--one that we would recognize as a particular protein, cell type,
organ, body plan or organism. A particular "form," therefore, represents a
highly specific and constrained arrangement of material components (among a
much larger set of possible arrangements).

Understanding form in this way suggests a connection to the notion of
information in its most theoretically general sense. When Shannon (194
first developed a mathematical theory of information he equated the amount
of information transmitted with the amount of uncertainty reduced or
eliminated in a series of symbols or characters. Information, in Shannon's
theory, is thus imparted as some options are excluded and others are
actualized. The greater the number of options excluded, the greater the
amount of information conveyed. Further, constraining a set of possible
material arrangements by whatever process or means involves excluding some
options and actualizing others. Thus, to constrain a set of possible
material states is to generate information in Shannon's sense. It follows
that the constraints that produce biological form also imparted
information. Or conversely, one might say that producing organismal form
by definition requires the generation of information.

In classical Shannon information theory, the amount of information in a
system is also inversely related to the probability of the arrangement of
constituents in a system or the characters along a communication channel
(Shannon 194. The more improbable (or complex) the arrangement, the more
Shannon information, or information-carrying capacity, a string or system
possesses.

Since the 1960s, mathematical biologists have realized that Shannon's
theory could be applied to the analysis of DNA and proteins to measure the
information-carrying capacity of these macromolecules. Since DNA contains
the assembly instructions for building proteins, the information-processing
system in the cell represents a kind of communication channel (Yockey
1992:110). Further, DNA conveys information via specifically arranged
sequences of nucleotide bases. Since each of the four bases has a roughly
equal chance of occurring at each site along the spine of the DNA molecule,
biologists can calculate the probability, and thus the information-carrying
capacity, of any particular sequence n bases long.

The ease with which information theory applies to molecular biology has
created confusion about the type of information that DNA and proteins
possess. Sequences of nucleotide bases in DNA, or amino acids in a
protein, are highly improbable and thus have large information-carrying
capacities. But, like meaningful sentences or lines of computer code,
genes and proteins are also specified with respect to function. Just as
the meaning of a sentence depends upon the specific arrangement of the
letters in a sentence, so too does the function of a gene sequence depend
upon the specific arrangement of the nucleotide bases in a gene.
Thus, molecular biologists beginning with Crick equated information not
only with complexity but also with "specificity," where "specificity" or
"specified" has meant "necessary to function" (Crick 1958:144, 153; Sarkar,
1996:191).3 Molecular biologists such as Monod and Crick understood
biological information--the information stored in DNA and proteins--as
something more than mere complexity (or improbability). Their notion of
information associated both biochemical contingency and combinatorial
complexity with DNA sequences (allowing DNA's carrying capacity to be
calculated), but it also affirmed that sequences of nucleotides and amino
acids in functioning macromolecules possessed a high degree of specificity
relative to the maintenance of cellular function.

The ease with which information theory applies to molecular biology has
also created confusion about the location of information in organisms.
Perhaps because the information carrying capacity of the gene could be so
easily measured, it has been easy to treat DNA, RNA and proteins as the
sole repositories of biological information. Neo-Darwinists in particular
have assumed that the origination of biological form could be explained by
recourse to processes of genetic variation and mutation alone (Levinton
1988:485). Yet if one understands organismal form as resulting from
constraints on the possible arrangements of matter at many levels in the
biological hierarchy--from genes and proteins to cell types and tissues to
organs and body plans--then clearly biological organisms exhibit many
levels of information-rich structure.

Thus, we can pose a question, not only about the origin of genetic
information, but also about the origin of the information necessary to
generate form and structure at levels higher than that present in
individual proteins. We must also ask about the origin of the "specified
complexity," as opposed to mere complexity, that characterizes the new
genes, proteins, cell types and body plans that arose in the Cambrian
explosion. Dembski (2002) has used the term "complex specified
information" (CSI) as a synonym for "specified complexity" to help
distinguish functional biological information from mere Shannon
information--that is, specified complexity from mere complexity. This
review will use this term as well.

The Cambrian Information Explosion

The Cambrian explosion represents a remarkable jump in the specified
complexity or "complex specified information" (CSI) of the biological
world. For over three billions years, the biological realm included little
more than bacteria and algae (Brocks et al. 1999). Then, beginning about
570-565 million years ago (mya), the first complex multicellular organisms
appeared in the rock strata, including sponges, cnidarians, and the
peculiar Ediacaran biota (Grotzinger et al. 1995). Forty million years
later, the Cambrian explosion occurred (Bowring et al. 1993). The emergence
of the Ediacaran biota (570 mya), and then to a much greater extent the
Cambrian explosion (530 mya), represented steep climbs up the biological
complexity gradient.

One way to estimate the amount of new CSI that appeared with the Cambrian
animals is to count the number of new cell types that emerged with them
(Valentine 1995:91-93). Studies of modern animals suggest that the sponges
that appeared in the late Precambrian, for example, would have required
five cell types, whereas the more complex animals that appeared in the
Cambrian (e.g., arthropods) would have required fifty or more cell types.
Functionally more complex animals require more cell types to perform their
more diverse functions. New cell types require many new and specialized
proteins. New proteins, in turn, require new genetic information. Thus an
increase in the number of cell types implies (at a minimum) a considerable
increase in the amount of specified genetic information. Molecular
biologists have recently estimated that a minimally complex single-celled
organism would require between 318 and 562 kilobase pairs of DNA to produce
the proteins necessary to maintain life (Koonin 2000). More complex single
cells might require upward of a million base pairs. Yet to build the
proteins necessary to sustain a complex arthropod such as a trilobite would
require orders of magnitude more coding instructions. The genome size of a
modern arthropod, the fruitfly Drosophila melanogaster, is approximately
180 million base pairs (Gerhart & Kirschner 1997:121, Adams et al. 2000).
Transitions from a single cell to colonies of cells to complex animals
represent significant (and, in principle, measurable) increases in CSI.

Building a new animal from a single-celled organism requires a vast amount
of new genetic information. It also requires a way of arranging gene
products--proteins--into higher levels of organization. New proteins are
required to service new cell types. But new proteins must be organized
into new systems within the cell; new cell types must be organized into new
tissues, organs, and body parts. These, in turn, must be organized to form
body plans. New animals, therefore, embody hierarchically organized
systems of lower-level parts within a functional whole. Such hierarchical
organization itself represents a type of information, since body plans
comprise both highly improbable and functionally specified arrangements of
lower-level parts.
The specified complexity of new body plans requires explanation in any
account of the Cambrian explosion.
Can neo-Darwinism explain the discontinuous increase in CSI that appears in
the Cambrian explosion--either in the form of new genetic information or in
the form of hierarchically organized systems of parts? We will now examine
the two parts of this question.

Novel Genes and Proteins

Many scientists and mathematicians have questioned the ability of mutation
and selection to generate information in the form of novel genes and
proteins. Such skepticism often derives from consideration of the extreme
improbability (and specificity) of functional genes and proteins.

A typical gene contains over one thousand precisely arranged bases. For
any specific arrangement of four nucleotide bases of length n, there is a
corresponding number of possible arrangements of bases, 4^n. For any
protein, there are 20^n possible arrangements of protein-forming amino
acids. A gene 999 bases in length represents one of 4^999 possible
nucleotide sequences; a protein of 333 amino acids is one of 20^333
possibilities.

Since the 1960s, some biologists have thought functional proteins to be
rare among the set of possible amino acid sequences. Some have used an
analogy with human language to illustrate why this should be the case.
Denton (1986, 309-311), for example, has shown that meaningful words and
sentences are extremely rare among the set of possible combinations of
English letters, especially as sequence length grows. (The ratio of
meaningful 12-letter words to 12-letter sequences is 1/1014, the ratio of
100-letter sentences to possible 100-letter strings is 1/10100.) Further,
Denton shows that most meaningful sentences are highly isolated from one
another in the space of possible combinations, so that random substitutions
of letters will, after a very few changes, inevitably degrade meaning.
Apart from a few closely clustered sentences accessible by random
substitution, the overwhelming majority of meaningful sentences lie,
probabilistically speaking, beyond the reach of random search.

Denton (1986:301-324) and others have argued that similar constraints apply
to genes and proteins. They have questioned whether an undirected search
via mutation and selection would have a reasonable chance of locating new
islands of function--representing fundamentally new genes or
proteins--within the time available (Eden 1967, Shutzenberger 1967, Lovtrup
1979). Some have also argued that alterations in sequencing would likely
result in loss of protein function before fundamentally new function could
arise (Eden 1967, Denton 1986). Nevertheless, neither the extent to which
genes and proteins are sensitive to functional loss as a result of sequence
change, nor the extent to which functional proteins are isolated within
sequence space, has been fully known.

Recently, experiments in molecular biology have shed light on these
questions. A variety of mutagenesis techniques have shown that proteins
(and thus the genes that produce them) are indeed highly specified relative
to biological function (Bowie & Sauer 1989, Reidhaar-Olson & Sauer 1990,
Taylor et al. 2001). Mutagenesis research tests the sensitivity of proteins
(and, by implication, DNA) to functional loss as a result of alterations in
sequencing. Studies of proteins have long shown that amino acid residues
at many active positions cannot vary without functional loss (Perutz &
Lehmann 196. More recent protein studies (often using mutagenesis
experiments) have shown that functional requirements place significant
constraints on sequencing even at non-active site positions (Bowie & Sauer
1989, Reidhaar-Olson & Sauer 1990, Chothia et al. 1998, Axe 2000, Taylor et
al. 2001). In particular, Axe (2000) has shown that multiple as opposed to
single position amino acid substitutions inevitably result in loss of
protein function, even when these changes occur at sites that allow
variation when altered in isolation. Cumulatively, these constraints imply
that proteins are highly sensitive to functional loss as a result of
alterations in sequencing, and that functional proteins represent highly
isolated and improbable arrangements of amino acids - arrangements that are
far more improbable, in fact, than would be likely to arise by chance alone
in the time available (Reidhaar-Olson & Sauer 1990; Behe 1992; Kauffman
1995:44; Dembski 1998:175-223; Axe 2000, 2004). (See below the discussion
of the neutral theory of evolution for a precise quantitative assessment.)

Of course, neo-Darwinists do not envision a completely random search
through the set of all possible nucleotide sequences--so-called "sequence
space." They envision natural selection acting to preserve small
advantageous variations in genetic sequences and their corresponding
protein products. Dawkins (1996), for example, likens an organism to a
high mountain peak. He compares climbing the sheer precipice up the front
side of the mountain to building a new organism by chance. He acknowledges
that his approach up "Mount Improbable" will not succeed. Nevertheless, he
suggests that there is a gradual
slope up the backside of the mountain that could be climbed in small
incremental steps. In his analogy, the backside climb up "Mount
Improbable" corresponds to the process of natural selection acting on
random changes in the genetic text. What chance alone cannot accomplish
blindly or in one leap, selection (acting on mutations) can accomplish
through the cumulative effect of many slight successive steps.

Yet the extreme specificity and complexity of proteins presents a
difficulty, not only for the chance origin of specified biological
information (i.e., for random mutations acting alone), but also for
selection and mutation acting in concert. Indeed, mutagenesis experiments
cast doubt on each of the two scenarios by which neo-Darwinists envisioned
new information arising from the mutation/selection mechanism (for review,
see Lonnig 2001). For neo-Darwinism, new functional genes either arise
from non-coding sections in the genome or from preexisting genes. Both
scenarios are problematic.

In the first scenario, neo-Darwinists envision new genetic information
arising from those sections of the genetic text that can presumably vary
freely without consequence to the organism. According to this scenario,
non-coding sections of the genome, or duplicated sections of coding
regions, can experience a protracted period of "neutral evolution" (Kimura
1983) during which alterations in nucleotide sequences have no discernible
effect on the function of the organism. Eventually, however, a new gene
sequence will arise that can code for a novel protein. At that point,
natural selection can favor the new gene and its functional protein
product, thus securing the preservation and heritability of both.

This scenario has the advantage of allowing the genome to vary through many
generations, as mutations "search" the space of possible base sequences.
The scenario has an overriding problem, however: the size of the
combinatorial space (i.e., the number of possible amino acid sequences) and
the extreme rarity and isolation of the functional sequences within that
space of possibilities. Since natural selection can do nothing to help
generate new functional sequences, but rather can only preserve such
sequences once they have arisen, chance alone--random variation--must do
the work of information generation--that is,
of finding the exceedingly rare functional sequences within the set of
combinatorial possibilities. Yet the probability of randomly assembling
(or "finding," in the previous sense) a functional sequence is extremely
small.

Cassette mutagenesis experiments performed during the early 1990s suggest
that the probability of attaining (at random) the correct sequencing for a
short protein 100 amino acids long is about 1 in 10^65 (Reidhaar-Olson &
Sauer 1990, Behe 1992:65-69). This result agreed closely with earlier
calculations that Yockey (197 had performed based upon the known sequence
variability of cytochrome c in different species and other theoretical
considerations. More recent mutagenesis research has provided additional
support for the conclusion that functional proteins are exceedingly rare
among possible amino
acid sequences (Axe 2000, 2004). Axe (2004) has performed site directed
mutagenesis experiments on a 150-residue protein-folding domain within a
B-lactamase enzyme. His experimental method improves upon earlier
mutagenesis techniques and corrects for several sources of possible
estimation error inherent in them. On the basis of these experiments, Axe
has estimated the ratio of
(a) proteins of typical size (150 residues) that perform a specified
function via any folded structure to
(b) the whole set of possible amino acids sequences of that size. Based on
his experiments, Axe has estimated his ratio to be 1 to 10^77. Thus, the
probability of finding a functional protein among the possible amino acid
sequences corresponding to a 150-residue protein is similarly 1 in 10^77.

Other considerations imply additional improbabilities. First, new Cambrian
animals would require proteins much longer than 100 residues to perform
many necessary specialized functions. Ohno (1996) has noted that Cambrian
animals would have required complex proteins such as lysyl oxidase in order
to support their stout body structures. Lysyl oxidase molecules in extant
organisms comprise over 400 amino acids. These molecules are both highly
complex (non-repetitive) and functionally specified. Reasonable
extrapolation from mutagenesis experiments done on shorter protein
molecules suggests that the probability of producing functionally sequenced
proteins of this length at random is so small as to make appeals to chance
absurd, even granting the duration of the entire universe. (See Dembski
1998:175-223 for a rigorous calculation of this "Universal Probability
Bound"; See also Axe 2004.) Yet, second, fossil data (Bowring et al. 1993,
1998a:1, 1998b:40; Kerr 1993; Monatersky 1993), and even molecular analyses
supporting deep divergence (Wray et al. 1996), suggest that the duration of
the Cambrian explosion (between 5-10 x 10^6 and, at most, 7 x 10^7 years)
is far smaller than that of the entire universe (1.3-2 x 10^10 years).

[I cannot forebear to remark that this is a peculiar way of putting
it, implying a certain laxity in the editor, let alone the author - RM]

Third, DNA mutation rates are far too low to generate the novel genes and
proteins necessary to building the Cambrian animals, given the most
probable duration of the explosion as determined by fossil studies (Conway
Morris 1998b). As Ohno (1996:8475) notes, even a mutation rate of 10^-9
per base pair per year results in only a 1% change in the sequence of a
given section of DNA in 10 million years. Thus, he argues that mutational
divergence of preexisting genes cannot explain the origin of the Cambrian
forms in that time.4

The selection/mutation mechanism faces another probabilistic obstacle. The
animals that arise in the Cambrian exhibit structures that would have
required many new types of cells, each of which would have required many
novel proteins to perform their specialized functions. Further, new cell
types require systems of proteins that must, as a condition of functioning,
act in close coordination with one another. The unit of selection in such
systems ascends to the system as a whole. Natural selection selects for
functional advantage. But new cell types require whole systems of proteins
to perform their distinctive functions. In such cases, natural selection
cannot contribute to the process of information generation until after the
information necessary to build the requisite system of proteins has arisen.
Thus random variations must, again, do the work of information
generation--and now not simply for one protein, but for many proteins
arising at nearly the same time. Yet the odds of this occurring by chance
alone are, of course, far smaller than the odds of the chance origin of a
single gene or protein--so small in fact as to render the chance origin of
the genetic information necessary to build a new cell type (a necessary but
not sufficient condition of building a new body plan) problematic given
even the most optimistic estimates for the duration of the Cambrian
explosion.

Dawkins (1986:139) has noted that scientific theories can rely on only so
much "luck" before they cease to be credible. The neutral theory of
evolution, which, by its own logic, prevents natural selection from playing
a role in generating genetic information until after the fact, relies on
entirely too much luck. The sensitivity of proteins to functional loss,
the need for long proteins to build new cell types and animals, the need
for whole new systems of proteins to service new cell types, the probable
brevity of the Cambrian explosion relative to mutation rates--all suggest
the immense improbability (and implausibility) of any scenario for the
origination of Cambrian genetic information that relies upon random
variation alone unassisted by natural selection.

Yet the neutral theory requires novel genes and proteins to
arise--essentially--by random mutation alone. Adaptive advantage accrues
after the generation of new functional genes and proteins. Thus, natural
selection cannot play a role until new information-bearing molecules have
independently arisen. Thus neutral theorists envisioned the need to scale
the steep face of a Dawkins-style precipice of which there is no gradually
sloping backside--a situation that, by Dawkins' own logic, is
probabilistically untenable.

In the second scenario, neo-Darwinists envisioned novel genes and proteins
arising by numerous successive mutations in the preexisting genetic text
that codes for proteins. To adapt Dawkins's metaphor, this scenario
envisions gradually climbing down one functional peak and then ascending
another. Yet mutagenesis experiments again suggest a difficulty. Recent
experiments show that, even when exploring a region of sequence space
populated by proteins of a single fold and function, most multiple-position
changes quickly lead to loss of function (Axe 2000). Yet to turn one
protein into another with a completely novel structure and function
requires specified changes at many sites. Indeed, the number of changes
necessary to produce a new protein greatly exceeds the number of changes
that will typically produce functional losses. Given this, the probability
of escaping total functional loss during a random search for the changes
needed to produce a new function is extremely small--and this probability
diminishes exponentially with each additional requisite change (Axe 2000).
Thus, Axe's results imply that, in all probability, random searches for
novel proteins (through sequence space) will result in functional loss long
before any novel functional protein will emerge.

Blanco et al. have come to a similar conclusion. Using directed
mutagenesis, they have determined that residues in both the hydrophobic
core and on the surface of the protein play essential roles in determining
protein structure. By sampling intermediate sequences between two
naturally occurring sequences that adopt different folds, they found that
the intermediate sequences "lack a well defined three-dimensional
structure." Thus, they conclude that it is unlikely that a new protein
fold via a series of folded intermediates sequences (Blanco et al.
1999:741).

Thus, although this second neo-Darwinian scenario has the advantage of
starting with functional genes and proteins, it also has a lethal
disadvantage: any process of random mutation or rearrangement in the genome
would in all probability generate nonfunctional intermediate sequences
before fundamentally new functional genes or proteins would arise.
Clearly, nonfunctional intermediate sequences confer no survival advantage
on their host organisms. Natural selection favors only functional
advantage. It cannot select or favor nucleotide sequences or polypeptide
chains that do not yet perform biological functions, and still less will it
favor sequences that efface or destroy preexisting function.

Evolving genes and proteins will range through a series of nonfunctional
intermediate sequences that natural selection will not favor or preserve
but will, in all probability, eliminate (Blanco et al. 1999, Axe 2000).
When this happens, selection-driven evolution will cease. At this point,
neutral evolution of the genome (unhinged from selective pressure) may
ensue, but, as we have seen, such a process must overcome immense
probabilistic hurdles, even granting cosmic time.

Thus, whether one envisions the evolutionary process beginning with a
noncoding region of the genome or a preexisting functional gene, the
functional specificity and complexity of proteins impose very stringent
limitations on the efficacy of mutation and selection. In the first case,
function must arise first, before natural selection can act to favor a
novel variation. In the second case, function must be continuously
maintained in order to prevent deleterious (or lethal) consequences to the
organism and to allow further evolution. Yet the complexity and functional
specificity of proteins implies that both these
conditions will be extremely difficult to meet. Therefore, the
neo-Darwinian mechanism appears to be inadequate to generate the new
information present in the novel genes and proteins that arise with the
Cambrian animals.

Novel Body Plans

The problems with the neo-Darwinian mechanism run deeper still. In order
to explain the origin of the Cambrian animals, one must account not only
for new proteins and cell types, but also for the origin of new body plans.
Within the past decade, developmental biology has dramatically advanced our
understanding of how body plans are built during ontogeny. In the process,
it has also uncovered a profound difficulty for neo-Darwinism.

Significant morphological change in organisms requires attention to timing.
Mutations in genes that are expressed late in the development of an
organism will not affect the body plan. Mutations expressed early in
development, however, could conceivably produce significant morphological
change (Arthur 1997:21). Thus, events expressed early in the development of
organisms have the only realistic chance of producing large-scale
macroevolutionary change (Thomson 1992). As John and Miklos (1988:309)
explain, macroevolutionary change requires alterations in the very early
stages of ontogenesis.

Yet recent studies in developmental biology make clear that mutations
expressed early in development typically have deleterious effects (Arthur
1997:21). For example, when early-acting body plan molecules, or
morphogens such as bicoid (which helps to set up the anterior-posterior
head-to-tail axis in Drosophila), are perturbed, development shuts down
(Nusslein-Volhard & Wieschaus 1980, Lawrence & Struhl 1996, Muller & Newman
2003).5 The resulting embryos die. Moreover, there is a good reason for
this. If an engineer modifies the length of the piston rods in an internal
combustion engine without modifying the crankshaft accordingly, the engine
won't start. Similarly, processes of development are tightly integrated
spatially and temporally such that changes early in development will
require a host of other coordinated changes in separate but functionally
interrelated developmental processes downstream. For this reason,
mutations will be much more likely to be deadly if they disrupt a
functionally deeply-embedded structure such as a spinal column than if they
affect more isolated anatomical features such as fingers (Kauffman
1995:200).

This problem has led to what McDonald (1983) has called "a great Darwinian
paradox" (p. 93). McDonald notes that genes that are observed to vary
within natural populations do not lead to major adaptive changes, while
genes that could cause major changes--the very stuff of
macroevolution--apparently do not vary. In other words, mutations of the
kind that macroevolution doesn't need (namely, viable genetic mutations in
DNA expressed late in development) do occur, but those that it does need
(namely, beneficial body plan mutations expressed early in development)
apparently don't occur.6 According to Darwin
(1859:10 natural selection cannot act until favorable variations arise in
a population. Yet there is no evidence from developmental genetics that
the kind of variations required by neo-Darwinism--namely, favorable body
plan mutations--ever occur.

Developmental biology has raised another formidable problem for the
mutation/selection mechanism. Embryological evidence has long shown that
DNA does not wholly determine morphological form (Goodwin 1985, Nijhout
1990, Sapp 1987, Muller & Newman 2003), suggesting that mutations in DNA
alone cannot account for the morphological changes required to build a new
body plan.

DNA helps direct protein synthesis.7 It also helps to regulate the timing
and expression of the synthesis of various proteins within cells. Yet, DNA
alone does not determine how individual proteins assemble themselves into
larger systems of proteins; still less does it solely determine how cell
types, tissue types, and organs arrange themselves into body plans (Harold
1995:2774, Moss 2004). Instead, other factors--such as the
three-dimensional structure and organization of the cell membrane and
cytoskeleton and the spatial architecture of the fertilized egg--play
important roles in determining body plan formation during embryogenesis.

For example, the structure and location of the cytoskeleton influence the
patterning of embryos. Arrays of microtubules help to distribute the
essential proteins used during development to their correct locations in
the cell. Of course, microtubules themselves are made of many protein
subunits. Nevertheless, like bricks that can be used to assemble many
different structures, the tubulin subunits in the cell's microtubules are
identical to one another. Thus, neither the tubulin subunits nor the genes
that produce them account for the different shape of microtubule arrays
that distinguish different kinds of embryos and
developmental pathways. Instead, the structure of the microtubule array
itself is determined by the location and arrangement of its subunits, not
the properties of the subunits themselves. For this reason, it is not
possible to predict the structure of the cytoskeleton of the cell from the
characteristics of the protein constituents that form that structure
(Harold 2001:125).

Two analogies may help further clarify the point. At a building site,
builders will make use of many materials: lumber, wires, nails, drywall,
piping, and windows. Yet building materials do not determine the floor
plan of the house, or the arrangement of houses in a neighborhood.

[Broom's Stately Mansion should be quoted instead]

Similarly, electronic circuits are composed of many components, such as
resistors, capacitors, and
transistors. But such lower-level components do not determine their own
arrangement in an integrated circuit. Biological symptoms also depend on
hierarchical arrangements of parts. Genes and proteins are made from
simple building blocks--nucleotide bases and amino acids--arranged in
specific ways. Cell types are made of, among other things, systems of
specialized proteins. Organs are made of specialized arrangements of cell
types and tissues. And body plans comprise specific arrangements of
specialized organs. Yet, clearly, the properties of individual proteins
(or, indeed, the lower-level parts in the
hierarchy generally) do not fully determine the organization of the
higher-level structures and organizational patterns (Harold 2001:125). It
follows that the genetic information that codes for proteins does not
determine these higher-level structures either.

These considerations pose another challenge to the sufficiency of the
neo-Darwinian mechanism. Neo-Darwinism seeks to explain the origin of new
information, form, and structure as a result of selection acting on
randomly arising variation at a very low level within the biological
hierarchy, namely, within the genetic text. Yet major morphological
innovations depend on a specificity of arrangement at a much higher level
of the organizational hierarchy, a level that DNA alone does not determine.
Yet if DNA is not wholly responsible for body plan morphogenesis, then DNA
sequences can mutate indefinitely, without regard to realistic
probabilistic limits, and still not produce a new body plan. Thus, the
mechanism of natural selection acting on random mutations in DNA cannot in
principle generate novel body plans, including those that first arose in
the Cambrian explosion.

Of course, it could be argued that, while many single proteins do not by
themselves determine cellular structures and/or body plans, proteins acting
in concert with other proteins or suites of proteins could determine such
higher-level form. For example, it might be pointed out that the tubulin
subunits (cited above) are assembled by other helper proteins--gene
products--called Microtubule Associated Proteins (MAPS). This might seem
to suggest that genes and gene products alone do suffice to determine the
development of the three-dimensional structure of the cytoskeleton.

Yet MAPS, and indeed many other necessary proteins, are only part of the
story. The location of specified target sites on the interior of the cell
membrane also helps to determine the shape of the cytoskeleton. Similarly,
so does the position and structure of the centrosome which nucleates the
microtubules that form the cytoskeleton. While both the membrane targets
and the centrosomes are made of proteins, the location and form of these
structures is not wholly determined by the proteins that
form them. Indeed, centrosome structure and membrane patterns as a whole
convey three-dimensional structural information that helps determine the
structure of the cytoskeleton and the location of its subunits (McNiven &
Porter 1992:313-329).
Moreover, the centrioles that compose the centrosomes replicate
independently of DNA replication (Lange et al. 2000:235-249, Marshall &
Rosenbaum 2000:187-205). The daughter centriole receives its form from the
overall structure of the mother centriole, not from the individual gene
products that constitute it (Lange et al. 2000). In ciliates, microsurgery
on cell membranes can produce heritable changes in membrane patterns, even
though the DNA of the ciliates has not been altered (Sonneborn 1970:1-13,
Frankel 1980:607-623; Nanney 1983:163-170). This suggests that membrane
patterns (as opposed to
membrane constituents) are impressed directly on daughter cells. In both
cases, form is transmitted from parent three-dimensional structures to
daughter three-dimensional structures directly and is not wholly contained
in constituent proteins or genetic information (Moss 2004).

Thus, in each new generation, the form and structure of the cell arises as
the result of both gene products and preexisting three-dimensional
structure and organization. Cellular structures are built from proteins,
but proteins find their way to correct locations in part because of
preexisting three-dimensional patterns and organization inherent in
cellular structures. Preexisting three-dimensional form present in the
preceding generation (whether inherent in the cell membrane, the
centrosomes, the cytoskeleton or other features of the fertilized egg)
contributes to the production of form in the next generation. Neither
structural proteins alone, nor the genes that code for them, are sufficient
to determine the three-dimensional shape and structure of the entities they
form. Gene products provide necessary, but not sufficient conditions, for
the development of three-dimensional structure within cells, organs and
body plans (Harold 1995:2767). But if this is so, then natural selection
acting on genetic variation alone cannot produce the new forms that arise
in history of life.

Self-Organizational Models

Of course, neo-Darwinism is not the only evolutionary theory for explaining
the origin of novel biological form. Kauffman (1995) doubts the efficacy of
the mutation/selection mechanism. Nevertheless, he has advanced a
self-organizational theory to account for the emergence of new form, and
presumably the information necessary to generate it. Whereas neo-Darwinism
attempts to explain new form as the consequence of selection acting on
random mutation, Kauffman suggests that selection acts, not mainly on
random variations, but on emergent patterns of order that self-organize via
the laws of nature.

Kauffman (1995:47-92) illustrates how this might work with various model
systems in a computer environment. In one, he conceives a system of
buttons connected by strings. Buttons represent novel genes or gene
products; strings represent the law-like forces of interaction that obtain
between gene products-i.e., proteins. Kauffman suggests that when the
complexity of the system (as represented by the number of buttons and
strings) reaches a critical threshold, new modes of organization can arise
in the system "for free"--that is, naturally and spontaneously--after the
manner of a phase transition in chemistry.

Another model that Kauffman develops is a system of interconnected lights.
Each light can flash in a variety of states--on, off, twinkling, etc. Since
there is more than one possible state for each light, and many lights,
there are a vast number of possible states that the system can adopt.
Further, in his system, rules determine how past states will influence
future states. Kauffman asserts that, as a result of these rules, the
system will, if properly tuned, eventually produce a kind of order in which
a few basic patterns of light activity recur with greater-than-random
frequency. Since these actual patterns of light
activity represent a small portion of the total number of possible states
in which the system can reside, Kauffman seems to imply that
self-organizational laws might similarly result in highly improbable
biological outcomes--perhaps even sequences (of bases or amino acids)
within a much larger sequence space of possibilities.

Do these simulations of self-organizational processes accurately model the
origin of novel genetic information? It is hard to think so.

First, in both examples, Kauffman presupposes but does not explain
significant sources of preexisting information. In his buttons-and-strings
system, the buttons represent proteins, themselves packets of CSI, and the
result of preexisting genetic information. Where does this information
come from? Kauffman (1995) doesn't say, but the origin of such information
is an essential part of what needs to be explained in the history of life.
Similarly, in his light system, the order that allegedly arises for "for
free" actually arises only if the programmer of the model system "tunes" it
in such a way as to keep it from either
(a) generating an excessively rigid order or (b) developing into chaos (pp.
86-8. Yet this necessary tuning involves an intelligent programmer
selecting certain parameters and excluding others--that is, inputting
information.

Second, Kauffman's model systems are not constrained by functional
considerations and thus are not analogous to biological systems. A system
of interconnected lights governed by pre-programmed rules may well settle
into a small number of patterns within a much larger space of
possibilities. But because these patterns have no function, and need not
meet any functional requirements, they have no specificity analogous to
that present in actual organisms. Instead, examination of Kauffman's (1995)
model systems shows that they do not produce sequences or systems
characterized by specified complexity, but
instead by large amounts of symmetrical order or internal redundancy
interspersed with aperiodicity or (mere) complexity (pp. 53, 89, 102).
Getting a law-governed system to generate repetitive patterns of flashing
lights, even with a certain amount of variation, is clearly interesting,
but not biologically relevant. On the other hand, a system of lights
flashing the title of a Broadway play would model a biologically relevant
self-organizational process, at least if such a meaningful or functionally
specified sequence arose without intelligent agents previously programming
the system with equivalent amounts of CSI. In any case, Kauffman's systems
do not produce specified complexity, and thus do not offer promising models
for explaining the new genes and proteins that arose in the Cambrian.

Even so, Kauffman suggests that his self-organizational models can
specifically elucidate aspects of the Cambrian explosion. According to
Kauffman (1995:199-201), new Cambrian animals emerged as the result of
"long jump" mutations that established new body plans in a discrete rather
than gradual fashion. He also recognizes that mutations affecting early
development are almost inevitably harmful. Thus, he concludes that body
plans, once established, will not change, and that any subsequent evolution
must occur within an established body plan (Kauffman 1995:201). And indeed,
the fossil record does show
a curious (from a neo-Darwinian point of view) top-down pattern of
appearance, in which higher taxa (and the body plans they represent) appear
first, only later to be followed by the multiplication of lower taxa
representing variations within those original body designs (Erwin et al.
1987, Lewin 1988, Valentine & Jablonski 2003:51. Further, as Kauffman
expects, body plans appear suddenly and persist without significant
modification over time.

But here, again, Kauffman begs the most important question, which is: what
produces the new Cambrian body plans in the first place? Granted, he
invokes "long jump mutations" to explain this, but he identifies no
specific self-organizational process that can produce such mutations.
Moreover, he concedes a principle that undermines the plausibility of his
own proposal. Kauffman acknowledges that mutations that occur early in
development are almost inevitably deleterious. Yet developmental biologists
know that these are the only kind of mutations that have a realistic chance
of producing large-scale evolutionary change--i.e., the big jumps that
Kauffman invokes. Though Kauffman repudiates the neo-Darwinian reliance
upon random mutations in favor of self-organizing order, in the end, he
must invoke the most implausible kind of random mutation in order to
provide a self-organizational account of the new Cambrian body plans.
Clearly, his model is not sufficient.

Punctuated Equilibrium

Of course, still other causal explanations have been proposed. During the
1970s, the paleontologists Eldredge and Gould (1972) proposed the theory of
evolution by punctuated equilibrium in order to account for a pervasive
pattern of "sudden appearance" and "stasis" in the fossil record. Though
advocates of punctuated equilibrium were mainly seeking to describe the
fossil record more accurately than earlier gradualist neo-Darwinian models
had done, they did also propose a mechanism--known as species selection--by
which the large morphological jumps evident in fossil record might have
been produced. According to punctuationalists, natural selection functions
more as a mechanism for selecting the fittest species rather than the
most-fit individual among a species. Accordingly, on this model,
morphological change should occur in larger, more discrete intervals than
it would given a traditional neo-Darwinian understanding.

Despite its virtues as a descriptive model of the history of life,
punctuated equilibrium has been widely criticized for failing to provide a
mechanism sufficient to produce the novel form characteristic of higher
taxonomic groups. For one thing, critics have noted that the proposed
mechanism of punctuated evolutionary change simply lacked the raw material
upon which to work. As Valentine and Erwin (1987) note, the fossil record
fails to document a large pool of species prior to the Cambrian. Yet the
proposed mechanism of species selection requires just such a pool of
species upon which to act. Thus, they conclude that the mechanism of
species selection probably does not resolve the problem of the origin of
the higher taxonomic groups (p. 96).8 Further, punctuated equilibrium has
not addressed the more specific and fundamental problem of explaining the
origin of the new biological information (whether genetic or epigenetic)
necessary to produce novel biological form. Advocates of punctuated
equilibrium might assume that the new species (upon which natural selection
acts) arise by known microevolutionary processes of speciation (such as
founder effect, genetic drift or bottleneck effect) that do not necessarily
depend upon mutations to produce adaptive changes. But, in that case, the
theory lacks an account of how the specifically higher taxa arise. Species
selection will only produce more fit species. On the other hand, if
punctuationalists assume that processes of genetic mutation can produce
more fundamental morphological changes and variations, then their model
becomes subject to the same problems as
neo-Darwinism (see above). This dilemma is evident in Gould (2002:710)
insofar as his attempts to explain adaptive complexity inevitably employ
classical neo-Darwinian modes of explanation.9

Structuralism

Another attempt to explain the origin of form has been proposed by the
structuralists such as Gerry Webster and Brian Goodwin (1984, 1996). These
biologists, drawing on the earlier work of D'Arcy Thompson (1942), view
biological

http://www.counterpunch.org/estabrook09112004.html

Weekend Edition
September 11 / 12, 2004
A Review of The Final Frontier Indian Wars

By CARL G. ESTABROOK

An academic study published two years ago, about machinations in
post-World War One America, may have more to tell us about today's politics
than much of current journalism. Dominick Jenkins' THE FINAL FRONTIER;
AMERICA, SCIENCE, AND TERROR (Verso 2002) is an essay in American history,
the history of technology, and contemporary politics -- with observations,
mostly germane, on other matters. It is in the first place a detailed
attack on two myths about the history of the United States, viz.,

(1) that American foreign policy for a hundred years has been an
interaction between, on the one hand, unilateralism and isolationism,
traced back to Theodore Roosevelt and identified with the Republican party,
and on the other, multilateralism and engagement, ascribed to Woodrow
Wilson and the Democratic party; and

(2) that the US government's conjunction with science began with the
Manhattan Project (which during World War II built the first atomic bombs),
was necessitated by war-time conditions, and persisted during the Cold War
because of the need for "nuclear deterrence."

On the contrary, Jenkins argues that the federal government and "big
science" struck a malign bargain at the time of the First World War, to
their mutual enhancement and the growth of >"terror." Jenkins, a
researcher at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at
Cambridge University (UK), does not offer a concise definition of that last
term, but his book makes clear that he would not disagree with the
definition of terror quoted by Noam Chomsky from a US army manual: "the
calculated use of violence or threat of violence to attain goals that are
political, religious, or ideological in nature. This is done through
intimidation, coercion, or instilling fear."

Certainly our current usage would add a distinction that the army manual
rather disturbingly doesn't make -- that this violence is directed against
civilians. As Chomsky points out, it's difficult to craft a definition of
terror that doesn't also describe the foreign policy of the US for the past
century. THE FINAL FRONTIER examines how that came to be. The mating of
presidential authority and science in the rank sweat of the enseamed bed of
imperialism -- urged on by the class anxieties of the American elite --
produced the monstrous birth of 20th-century technological terror.

Jenkins begins with a striking illustration -- an article from a New York
newspaper describing an attack on that city: "The sun rose today on a city
whose tallest tower lay scattered in crumbled bits of stone ... The sun
saw, when its light penetrated the ruins, hordes of people on foot, working
their way very slowly and painfully up the island ... Rich and poor alike,
welded together in a real democracy of misery, headed northward."

Not a description of the attacks of 11 September 2001, those lines
appeared in the New York Herald for 30 July 1921 under the headline "City
in Theoretical Ruins from Air Raid." The article tells how "General Billy
Mitchell of the US Army Air Service had led a force of heavy bombers from
Virginia to New York ... in a simulated bombing raid." Eighty years before
9/11, the maverick military careerist was demonstrating how techniques
growing out of the late Great War would be employed in the next. The
Herald observed, "The majority had died swiftly of poison gas."

The book that begins with this signal introduction ("New York in Ruins")
has three parts. In the first, Jenkins relates what he calls the hitherto
"untold story of how America [in the wake of World War I] came to see
itself as the guardian of international law withthe right to use
high-technology terror to deal with outlaw states." If you think the sort
of fear whipped up amongst Americans by the government-media propaganda
campaign against Iraq in 2002 was fantastic -- Americans becoming the only
people in the world who were actually afraid of Saddam Hussein -- then read
about how the military and the chemical industry tried to convince
Americans after World War I that a defeated Germany represented a dire
threat to the US. (One can argue that even Nazi Germany did not represent
such a threat, twenty years later -- as is suggested by the facts that the
US didn't bother to declare war against Germany until the reverse occurred;
and that the Second World War was won in the East: even after Normandy,
until the end of the war, the large majority of German troops were engaged
against the Soviet Union.)

In the second part Jenkins considers the domestic political campaign at
the outset of the 20th century that made America's imperialist out-thrust
possible and in a sense necessary. He refers (without mentioning him) to
Frederick Jackson Turner's classic "frontier thesis" of the United States,
which suggests among other things that the "frontier" -- land taken in the
"Indian wars" (which to this day remain a model for the US military)--
acted as a safety valve for class antagonisms in the US, a safety valve
that was shut off with the closing of the continental frontier.First set
out in academic form in 1893, the idea was taken up by elite elements in
the US -- Jenkins illustrates it especially from the writings of the first
Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and the cabinet member and senator Elihu Root
(who in 1912 received the Nobel Peace Prize -- his being as sardonically
amusing as Henry Kissinger's). These "patrician reformers" proposed a
"final frontier" abroad for Americans, which they hoped would have the same
salutary social effect on the lower orders as Jackson Turner said the
continental frontier had had. It was "a diabolical deal," says Jenkins.
"In return for accepting elite rule and giving up Americans' struggle to
extend democracy within the United States, the elite would praise them as
heroes fighting to extend democracy throughout the world." This conscious
propaganda campaign at the beginning of the 20th century has obvious
parallels at the beginning of the 21st.

In the final part of the book, Jenkins "argue[s] against the idea that
science and technology must inevitably lead to new means for exercising
terror." He insists that citizens must instead exercise their democratic
rights "to intervene in decisions about the direction of scientific
research and technological development" and "decide in which direction new
scientific research and technological development should proceed." He
thinks that, since "we no longer have strong emotional investments in the
partisan disputes of this era" -- namely, World War I, the time of the
first marriage of imperial policy and technology -- the dangers will
perhaps be easier to discern than in our own.

His account of the era accurately reveals Roosevelt as a pompous fraud and
Wilson as a conniving racist, and how "military professionals" began the
militarization of the US a generation after Appomattox, when the social
advances of Reconstruction had been reversed and the revulsion against the
blood-letting of the Civil War had begun to ebb. (I think one of the things
that would astonish an American of a century ago, suddenly revived today
like the man in Edward Bellamy's LOOKING BACKWARD, would be how militarized
American society has become.) "In the light of Wilson's use of terror to
support the liberal capitalist world revolution," Jenkins writes, "it is
entirely appropriate that, as well as naming an aircraft carrier the
'Theodore Roosevelt,' the US Navy has named a ballistic missile submarine
the 'Woodrow Wilson.'"

Jenkins does not always avoid cliché, and there are some peculiar slips,
like the spelling of "Gettysburg" and the date of the Spanish-American War,
which may have to do with British proof-readers. But he's writing about
America, and some Briticisms actively work against him (e.g., "tabling" a
resolution means a different thing across the Atlantic). Of course, the
poets always get there first, and as I read Jenkins, I was constantly
reminded of the novels of Pat Barker, the British writer born during the
Second World War whose novels are haunted by the legacy of the First.

The Bush administration's lies in support of its invasion of Iraq
recapitulate the story that Jenkins tells. The neocon propaganda campaign,
commencing in earnest in September of 2002, depended on the parallel
between chemical and nuclear weapons. "Taking advantage of public fears of
the unknown, Iraq's chemical and biological weapons were equated with
nuclear weapons," Jenkins writes. "This was reinforced by the use of the
term 'weapons of mass destruction' which placed all three in the same
category, despite the fact that nuclear weapons are both vastly more
destructive and militarily more effective. This allowed Iraqi chemical and
biological weapons to be equated with America's nuclear weapons."

Unfortunately, the story has opened a new and even more dangerous chapter
at the turn of the 21st century. Current American governments, Republican
and Democrat, have plans to extend the dominance of technological terror
that he describes. Chomsky wrote recently in HEGEMONY OR SURVIVAL,

The basic rationale was explained in [the US Air Force] brochure "Vision
for 2020." The primary goal is announced prominently on the front cover:
"dominating the space dimension of military operations to protect US
interests and investment." This is the next phase of the historic task of
military forces. "During the westward expansion of the continental United
States, military outposts and the cavalry emerged to protect our wagon
trains, settlements, and railroads" ... And "nations built navies to
protect and enhance their commercial interests." The next logical step is
space forces to protect "U.S. National Interests [military and commercial]
and Investments." The US role in space should be comparable to that of
"navies protecting sea commerce," though now with a sole hegemon, far more
overwhelming than the British Navy in centuries past ... [That will
require] "Full Spectrum Dominance": overwhelming military dominance on
land, sea, and air as well as space, so that the US will be "preeminent in
any from of conflict," in peace or war. The need for such dominance will
mount as a result of the increasing "globalization of the economy," which
is expected to bring about "a widening between `haves' and `have-nots'," an
assessment shared by US intelligence in its projections for 2015..."

Jenkins' wide-ranging and important book sometimes shows evidence of
unassimilated scholarship, and he is perhaps too impressed with some
recently-fashionable "postmodern" critics -- from the quite interesting
Susan Buck-Morss to the largely forgettable Jean-Francois Lyotard. At one
point, Kenneth Grahame's children's classic, THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS (190
makes an unexpected appearance as a not-too-implausible allegory for the
imperialistic outlook of Grahame's friend, Theodore Roosevelt.

It's arguable that Jenkins has tried to do too much in a book that he says
was "many years in the making." In his final chapter, "Manifesto for a
Global Deep Science Movement," he spends three pages discussing the
atom-bombing of Hiroshima as an act of terror (as it surely was), followed
immediately by four pages on Immanuel Kant's 1795 essay, "Perpetual Peace:
A Philosophic Sketch," before getting around to explaining what he means by
"deep science" and setting out some maxims for it. (On the model of the
deep ecology movement, which "is committed to identifying and challenging
the fundamental causes of environmental destruction," deep science "is
committed to changing the direction of science and technology where, in
seeking to answer human needs or satisfy human curiosity, they are actually
leading to relations of control.")

But Jenkins does have a terrifying story to tell, possibly the most
important and dangerous of the last hundred years -- how the US government
has prepared for, threatened, and carried out technological mass murder,
with a bodyguard of lies to protect it from its greatest enemy, the US
public. It has been said that if Americans actually knew what was being
done in their name, they would be appalled. THE FINAL FRONTIER gives
substance to that charge.

Carl Estabrook is a Visiting Scholar University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign and a CounterPunch columnist. He can be reached at:
galliher@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu

This operative Kempster is one of the most thoroughly wimpish men
I've come across - dedicated primarily to wimminsLib. He was curate and
then asst vicar of my parish before being made vicar ot St Columba's, Gray
Lynn. He is essentially a front-wimp for the dreaded Roo ("Ree Boddé"), a
raving postmodern feminazi drongo. Once when I had asked to see him he
tried to sit me down in a room with the door open; I found the door to the
next room was open with Roo sitting there, so I quietly walked him across
the corridor into his ossif and closed the door.

What has been happening, or rather 'not happening', in the Anglican
church for many y now, is refusal to make progress toward any decision or
rule on the key issue whether to ordain known hx/lesbian/bisexuals.
Main tactics have been

1 keep definitions vague
2 evade the issue; when anyone tries to get on with the discussion of ordination, immediately go on about perverts as church members in general.
3 wallow in the victim role, in a v general fashion, making out vaguely that the church is bigotted, intolerant, etc.
4 of course make out that tolerance is the top virtue. Thus furtively cancel discrimination between sin and right action & thought; indeed, condemn 'discrimination' as a sin rather than a most important human faculty. Use the word 'discrimination' as if it replaces 'victimisation'. Such lies in the language have been crucial to the whole Goebbels approach to politics which has dominated democracy this past 6 decade. To find them active in the church is loathsome.

http://www.latimer.org.nz/issues.asp?NeID=411

Gay Marriage in the Auckland Diocese?

June 25, 2004

Hugh Kempster, vicar of Grey Lynn in the Diocese of Auckland,
openly admitted on National Radio this past Monday that he already conducts
same-sex relationship blessings. But he is determined to go further once
the Civil Union Bill is passed. He wants to be among the first to be
registered as a Civil Union Celebrant so that he might conduct the ceremony
at his church along with the blessing.

Surely this is the ugly face of liberalism. On all sides there
are calls for restraint, calls to listen to one another, calls for
dialogue. And usually these calls are directed towards those who hold an
orthodox view. Yet for Kempster, any debate is over. For him there is no
room for uncertainty. What need is there for listening? It is time to cast
off restraint!

However, what Kempster is proposing is nothing short of Gay
Marriage. Can it be anything else? For if it was a heterosexual couple
being joined in a Civil Union by a Priest who pronounces God's blessing
upon them, then surely it would be recognised as a 'marriage'. If that is
the case for a heterosexual couple, then it can not be any different for a
homosexual couple. It is Gay Marriage!

And without any need for synodial debate or reasoned argument,
Kempster is going to lead us into all truth. Why, its taken the ECUSA
Diocese of Vermont three years to edge towards such a position. They look
positively slow compared to the speed at which Kempster wishes to move.

And please, lets drop the pretence that somehow Civil Union is
different from Marriage. Despite the views of amateur theologian Helen
Clark, a mere label is not enough to distinguish a Civil Union from a
Marriage. Not that even Helen is dumb enough to believe that (see the
telling quote reported by the Maxim Institute).

But there is yet a wider significance to Hugh Kempster's
statements and actions. Has he considered the embarrassment he is causing
for his Bishop, John Paterson? Bishop John has the unenviable task of
participating on the Lambeth Commission. How can he do his task properly
while Priests holding his license are openly blessing same-sex
relationships and chaffing at the bit to perform Gay Marriages? You would
have thought that the clergy of Auckland would take some pride in the
contribution their bishop is making on the international scene and would
do nothing to undermine his voice in that important forum. How can Bishop
John speak when it turns out his own Diocese contains clergy as radicalised
as any within ECUSA or Canada?

Rev Malcolm Falloon
Warden

http://www.utopiasw.demon.co.uk/emoticon.html

Emoticons

An emoticon (also known as a "smiley") is a symbol composed of a few text
characters, and used as a kind of emotional shorthand to add meaning to a
message. For example, an emoticon may be used at the end of a comment to
indicate that the comment was not intended to be taken seriously. Most
emoticons are designed to be interpreted with the viewer's head tilted over
to the left.

A huge number of emoticons have been devised, but it is probably best to
keep to the first eight categories in the list shown below. The last three
emoticons in the list are just examples of some of the strange ones that
people have created.

EmoticonInterpretation

:-> :>

Smiling, happy faces;
showing happiness, or for comments not intended to be taken seriously.

:-< :<

Sad, disappointed faces.

;-> ;>

Winking happy faces; for comments said tongue-in-cheek.

:-p

Faces with tongues stuck out at you.

B-) B)

Smiling faces from someone who wears glasses or sunglasses,
or has a wide-eyed look.

The "glasses" can also be used in the emoticons: 8-( 8-p

>

A devil with a grin; for those devilish remarks.

O

An angel with a halo; for those innocent remarks.

<

Wearing a dunce's cap; for those stupid questions.

m(_ _)m

Deep bow used for apologizing or expressing thanks (viewed from the front).

<<<<(

The message is from a hat seller.

%-^

The message is from a Pablo Picasso fan.

Copyright © Richard Hanson, 1996-8

---

http://www.randomhouse.com/features/davebarry/emoticon.html

Using Internet "Shorthand"

How You Can Be Just As Original As Everybody Else

As a new person or "newbie" on the Internet, you'll probably be struck
by the fact that a lot of the messages contain odd-looking words and
punctuation. This is a kind of "shorthand" that Internet users have
developed so they can express certain thoughts and emotions without wasting
valuable time typing them out.

Emoticons are a very clever use of standard punctuation marks to express a
human emotion. Here's how they work.

Suppose you're typing a statement such as:

I am feeling happy

The problem with this is, the reader cannot be absolutely, 100 percent
sure what emotion you're feeling when you type this. So at the end of the
sentence, you type a colon ( followed by a closing parentheses ()). Now
your sentence looks like this:

I am feeling happy

See the difference?

USEFUL INTERNET EMOTICONS
EMOTICON MEANING
Happy person
Sad person
Happy person with a nose
Sad person with a nose
:---( Person who is sad because he or she has a large nose
Person who is sad because he or she has a large fish for a nose
Person laughing
* Person laughing so hard that he or she does not notice that a 5-legged spider is hanging from his or her lip
Person unsure of which long-distance company to choose
>-(&) Person just realizing that he or she has a tapeworm
Person winking
.-) Person who can still smile despite losing an eyeball
:-0WW Person vomiting a series of Slim Jims
:-Q Person who just had cybersex and is now enjoying a post-coital cybercigarette
>:-Q -... Person who was enjoying a post-coital cigarette until he suddenly noticed, to his alarm, that there is some kind of discharge dribbling from his cybermember
:-{8 Person who is unhappy with the results of her breast-enlargement surgery
:V Person who cannot figure out why nobody wants to talk to him or her, little suspecting that there is an alligator on his or her head
~oE] Fisherperson heading for market with a basket on his or her head containing a three-legged octopus that is giving off smell rays
>:-[ -{9 Person who is none too pleased to be giving birth to a squirrel

http://www.theadvertiser.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5936,10699918%255E421,00.html

Greer cheers divorcing women
By Amanda Banks
08sep04
news.com.au network

THE high rate of divorce should be celebrated as the major sign of
progress in the feminist movement, an ever-passionate Germaine Greer
said at the start of a national speaking tour.

A woman's refusal to remain in an unloving relationship, and a
description of soccer star David Beckham as an interesting but confusing
"boy", were among the many thoughts shared by the 65-year-old during a
seminar in Perth.

Greer said the main thing to have changed since her early feminist days
was the mass exodus of women walking out on their marriages.

"The big change is the divorce rate," she said.

"Exactly the thing that people tear their hair out about is exactly the
thing I am very proud of. But life for these women is very difficult.
The price of their liberty has been taking on a massive amount of toil.

"This is because women misunderstand the corporate world. They think you
are meant to work in the corporate world, when you are in fact meant to
take credit for other people's work."

More than three decades after shooting to fame with The Female Eunuch,
the controversial author left a 1000-strong, sell-out crowd with no
doubt about her continuing passion for feminism and the ills of
Australian culture.

The hour-long lecture on "Shakespeare and sexual difference" at the
University of Western Australia, prompted many of her devotees to rise
in a standing ovation.

Afterwards, she was quizzed about the future of feminism and was quick
to lament that the movement of the 60s had been largely generated by the
media and involved little direct action.

"We did not win things so much as they were given to us," Greer
announced.

A young fan's suggestion that English superstar David Beckham was a
metrosexual who could signal a return to the Elizabethan male was all
too much for Greer.

She confessed to being bemused by the interesting soccer star, but was
convinced he did not signify a major change in male sexuality.

But when it came to her provocative views on Australia as an Aboriginal
republic - first mooted in her essay White Fella Jump Up - Greer was
unwavering.

"For 200 years (Australia) has been going through the nightmare of
trying to be something it cannot be. It has developed itself for what?
For an economy valued at $800 billion on John Howard's assessment," she
said.

Scientists warn of DDT trap.

NZ Dairy Exporter
July 1999

The New Zealand dairy industry, in its enthusiasm to adopt biotechnology,
must be careful it doesn't fall into the same trap as the world did with
DDT.

That is because the introduction of genetically engineered products into
the agricultural environment is a "one-way street, but unlike DDT the
pollution from genetic engineering once introduced, will be
self-perpetuating in the soil, the plants, the animals and the rest of the
environment." This is the view of NZ and internationally recognised soil
scientists from Massey University, Dr Max Turner, a soil chemist, and Dr
Neil Macgregor, a soil microbiologist.

Both men consider' themselves objective scientists without anti-science
leanings, though they say that in questioning the value of GE crops and
foods they will probably be labelled 'luddites' by those promoting genetic
engineering, and its products, mainly for the 'profit of the promoters and
at a cost to the gullible'.

For dairyfarmers facing the prospect of genetic engineering of cows to
produce pharmaceuticals, and modification of crops like maize to resist
insect attack, there is a lack of information on potential risks involved,
the pair said in a recent joint interview.

Though there has been some debate on GMOs (genetically modified organisms)
and GMF (genetically modified food) issues in the press (mainly concerned
with human health and food safety issues), they said there was very little
research being done into the risk factors agriculture could face were
genetic engineering to be wholeheartedly embraced by NZ farmers.

"We believe," Dr Macgregor said, "the time has come for the technology to
be assessed on how safe it is for the environment and for sustainable
farming. The current research is not designed to evaluate risk, only to
find out how to make it work."

Dr Macgregor and Dr Turner feel that some NZ scientists could be dragged
into GE research and technology by non-scientists, amid the push for
profit-driven research funding. A giant company involved in genetic
engineering, like Monsanto, sees itself as a biotechnology company, but
they say GE issues embrace much wider parameters.

"The gains the corporates and their promoters are promising us from GE
will not solve any problems," Dr Macgregor said, "either from the view of
lowering costs or increasing production."

Citing USDA funded research through University of Wisconsin involving 5000
non-GE and 3000 GE soybean crops in 8 US states, he said it had been found
the GE modified crops yielded on average 6% to 8% less than non-modified
crops, and seed plus weed costs rose from around $20 to between $40 and
$00'acre. Less yield and higher costs of production for the GE crops was
not good news. In the United States, already more than 10 million acres
has been planted with GE crops, while research is just starting to assess
the environmental risks of the technology.

Broaden debate

For New Zealand, Dr Turner said, the only answer to the GE conundrum was
to broaden the debate and extend the research further from just food
safety aspects into the wider implications for land use and soils.

"Nobody has looked at the soil implications," Dr Turner said. "Most of the
current interest is in health and food safety issues, but no one has taken
into account that GE modified crops are likely to leave a genetic imprint
on land on which they are grown.

"For NZ this could mean that land on which these crops grow or on which GE
modified animals roam could lose value. The use of GE products could limit
the versatility of the land in a similar way to what DDT use on Canterbury
cropping and sheep farms has done; These farms have effectively been
devalued because they can no longer be used for dairying.

"No one has even thought of the implications of crop residues, from GE
crops, remaining in soils after the crops have been grown and harvested:'
he said.

Dr Macgregor and Dr Turner said they were speaking out on the GE issue
because they felt that some in the dairy industry hierarchy were pushing
GE solutions for problems which did not exist. They believed, as
Independent members of the academic community, it. was their duty to speak
out on controversial issues like GB when other scientists were not so free
to discuss these issues in public.

They said another problem with the GE debate to date was that anti-GE
arguments were labelled as 'emotive' when in their view the advocates of
GE technology were guilty of using emotive tags, such as solving the
world's food supply problem, to promote their stance.

"Being part of the global agricultural community" Dr Turner said, "we know
there are potential major risks associated with GE which are not being
properly recognised in NZ at the moment.

"The demand for NZ's produce is based on the perception of 'clean, green'
quality technology, and future profitability is likely to be tied to
servicing wealthy niche markets which may be put at risk forever by use of
GE products on our farms.

Two-edged sword

"From a farming point of view, farmers are in a bit of a cleft stick. They
are going to be told - they are being told - that GE will solve a myriad
of their problems. For that reason GE crops and products will offer
enormous appeal to them, but they must be made aware it is a double-edged
sword.

"For them it Is not so much the products that are the problems, but what
they could be doing to their land and to this nation's potential niche
markets.

Dr Turner and Dr Macgregor emphasised they were not just talking about the
on-farm risks to Individual farmers, but also for national trade reasons,
NZ's agricultural future, and possibly even the health of existing and
future citizens. Consumer perception, they said, was already turning
against GE products among the wealthy nations of the particularly in
Europe.

NZ farmers must realise and acknowledge this because their future wealth
generation was
probably not in commodity markets, because of the country's small size,
but lay within the rapidly growing wealthy niche markets, such as for
organic foods.

Noting that the British medical journal, the Lancet, had run articles
critical of the risks associated with GE modified food, they said they
felt the general trend in wealthy nations outside the United States would
be to be 'anti' these foods. They foresaw a time when in many markets
anti-GE sentiment could become more widespread, if not mainstream, as
consumers are more acquainted with the risks of GE technology. NZ farmers
should stay outside the GE trade war which they saw developing between the
US and the European community.

"The Europeans," Dr Macgregor said, "do not accept that GE foods have been
independently and adequately tested in the US, nor do they accept GE foods
on their supermarket shelves."

There was no necessity for them to accept them either, Dr Turner said. The
problems in world food production were not so much a general shortage of
food but where it was produced, how it was distributed, and at what price.
Dr Turner and Dr Macgregor predicted "GE is probably not the solution to
our agriculture, but could become the problem."

Dr Max Turner, a soil chemist, is a member of the Soil & Earth Sciences
Group within the institute of Natural Resources at Massey University, a
position he has held for almost 30 years. He obtained bachelor and masters
degrees in agricultural science at Massey and a PhD in soil science from
University of Minnesota. He held a postdoctoral position in the USDA Plant,
Soil & Nutrition Laboratory at Cornell University, New York, and has been
a visiting professor at University of Colorado in Fort Collins and
University of Wisconsin in Madison. He is a member of the American
Agronomy Society, the Soil Science Society of America, NZ Soil Science
Society, NZ Grasslands Association and NZ Agronomy Society. Dr Turner
teaches, or has taught, soil chemistry, soil fertility, fertiliser matters
to agricultural,
veterinary, degree and diploma students at graduate & postgraduate level.

Dr Neil Macgregor, a soil microbiologist, is an academic member of the
Soil & Earth Sciences group in the Institute of Natural Resources, Massey
University. He graduated BSc and MSc from University of Otago, and PhD
from Cornell University, New York. He has held faculty positions at
University of Arizona in Tucson and University of Wisconsin in Madison, and
research and technical advisory positions with Institute National Recherche
Agronomique, Montpellier, France, and International Atomic Energy Agency at
Vienna, Austria. A member of OPEG (Organic Producers Export Group) of
Tradenz, Dr Macgregor's primary lecturing and research activities are in
cell biology, soil biology and biochemistry (e.g., biological nitrogen
fixation), and microbiology, and co-ordinates the Organic Farming Systems
course.

Many of you will be familiar with many of the matters summarised
below - having seen larger versions from my list - and can therefore
form some judgement of the compiler's ability.

This bull series is compiled by a young man, Stuart Sontier, who
has no advanced education but is interested in computing. He is PC enough
never to cite me as any authority, nor to invite me when he has been able
to arrange a tour of Cohen's lab (Mt Albert); but the quality of his bulls
gives some hope that the relevant public can be educated on GM.

R

------------------------------------------------------------
THE GE INFORMATION BULLETIN

An independent digest of widely-sourced information relevant
to the GE debate
------------------------------------------------------------
No. 26 September 2004
------------------------------------------------------------

IN THIS ISSUE:
http://www.geinfo.org.nz/092004/bulletin26.html

> German Firm Cancels Thai Fruit Salad Over GMO Fears

> Public Concern Over GM Foods Increases

> Destruction Of Experimental GM Coffee

> Thai Cabinet Overturns GM Seed Approval

> Starlink Corn Settlement To Include Interest

> Monsanto Ripped Over Wheat Experiments

> WTO Ruling Delayed In Trans-Atlantic Food Row

> USDA "Highjacked" By Corporate Interests

> Greens' GE Corn Worries Spark Data Check

> Judge: Reveal Locations Of Biopharm Crops

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

Subscribe to the Bulletin, or download a PDF version of this Bulletin
at http://www.GEinfo.org.nz

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

Editorial

This month has seen Thailand in a state of flux on its GE status. Two
items tell of how the government lifted a ban on open-field trials,
to be greeted with protests and accusations that GE seed had escaped
>from existing trial areas. Then a German food distributor cancelled
orders, and the cabinet overturned the decision to lift the ban.
In Guyana an experimental crop of GE coffee, already in the ground
for four years, has been destroyed.

In New Zealand, concern has been raised over the approval of GE corn
in foods. In April, a French report noted irregularities in rat-
trials with the Monsanto corn. But the New Zealand regulator does not
appear to have addressed this.

Meanwhile the US Agriculture Department has been accused of
trumpeting GE food because of the corporate connections of its
officials.

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

GERMAN FIRM CANCELS THAI FRUIT SALAD OVER GMO FEARS
Agence France Presse, September 3, 2004 (Thailand)

A German food distributor has cancelled orders of Thai fruit cocktail
products out of fears they may contain genetically modified papaya.
The apparent stop order has hit as Thailand grapples with accusations
that government trials of genetically modified papaya have
contaminated northern farms and as the government backpedals over
plans to broaden trials of genetically modified organisms (GMOs).
"As far as I know one Thai company ... was facing a ban of its fruit
salad because it includes papaya, and papaya was one of the fruits
Thailand has been conducting GMO tests on," Wanlop Pichpongsa,
director of the Top Organic Product and Supply, told AFP. "I think
the ban was a precautionary measure by (the German) importers but it
took everybody by surprise as it came so suddenly," Wanlop, an
opponent of GMO production in Thailand, said.
Full item: http://www.GEinfo.org.nz/092004/01.html

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

PUBLIC CONCERN OVER GM FOODS INCREASES
Agence France Presse, September 3, 2004 (UK)

More and more Britons are worried about genetically modified foods, a
poll for a consumer rights magazine published suggests.

Sixty-one percent of those polled for Which? magazine said they were
concerned about the use of GM material in food production, up [from]
56 percent two years ago. The survey of almost 1,000 people saw a 13
percentage point rise in the number of people who said they tried to
avoid GM food and ingredients, up from 45 percent in 2002 to 58
percent.

Just over 25 percent backed the growing of GM crops in Britain, down
>from 32 percent two years ago. However, there was a rise, from 28
percent to 33 percent, in the number of people satisfied
manufacturers are removing GM from their food.
Full item: http://www.GEinfo.org.nz/092004/02.html

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

DESTRUCTION OF EXPERIMENTAL GM COFFEE
AFP, September 1, 2004 (Guyana) - translation

The only experimental culture of genetically modified coffee, planted
in Guyana, was destroyed by unknown individuals, as reported
Wednesday by the CIRAD (Center for international co-operation in
agronomic research for development).

The director of the CIRAD of Guyana, Philippe Godon, was quoted as
saying that "1,700 plants of coffee were destroyed on a 1.8 hectare
plot."

The experimental field has been planted for four years in the forest
of the Combi Point, in Sinnamary. Until now it had not been subject
to an action of this type. "It is a considerable loss because it was
first of its type worldwide", remarked Jacques Meunier, scientific
director of CIRAD.

This test was intended to study the resistance of the coffee
genetically modified to the "leaf miner", a parasite which is causing
increasing damage, especially in Brazil. Also being studied were
possible environmental impacts, such as the diffusion of pollen, or
the impact on the bees and their honey.

Full item: http://www.GEinfo.org.nz/092004/03.html

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

THAI CABINET OVERTURNS GM SEED APPROVAL
Reuters, August 31, 2004 (Thailand)

Thailand's cabinet has upheld a ban on planting genetically modified
organism (GMO) crops, overturning a decision by a panel chaired by
Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra.

Eleven days ago, Thaksin's committee approved open-field trials of
genetically modified seed alongside non-GMO plants, effectively
lifting a three-year-old ban on such uses.

GM crops of papayas, chillies, and eggplants are currently planted in
isolated government fields, and imports of genetically modified
soybeans and maize are legal for animal feedstock and other
commercial uses, officials said.

Opponents have criticized the government's security on existing
fields, saying the strains of modified plants have spread outside the
test areas.

Full item: http://www.GEinfo.org.nz/092004/04.html

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

STARLINK CORN SETTLEMENT TO INCLUDE INTEREST
Associated Press, August 23, 2004 (USA)

US farmers will be paid interest on the $110 million settlement with
makers and distributors of genetically altered corn that was
mistakenly introduced into the food supply. Attorney General Jon
Bruning's office helped clarify that the settlement included 4%
interest after farmers expressed concern about delays in getting
their money. The interest began accruing on Sept. 24, 2002, Bruning
said.

Payments from the settlement could begin soon after a court hearing
on Sept. 2 for farmers who did not grow StarLink corn but suffered
>from a consumer backlash when it was revealed that it had gotten into
the food supply.

Full item: http://www.GEinfo.org.nz/092004/05.html

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

MONSANTO RIPPED OVER WHEAT EXPERIMENTS
CNews, August 17, 2004 (Canada)

Field trials of GM wheat are still being conducted in Canada by
multinational biotech giant Monsanto despite a pledge in May [to]
"discontinue breeding and field-level research" into wheat resistant
to the popular herbicide Roundup.

In a letter to Greenpeace, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency
confirmed that 16 Monsanto trials of Roundup Ready wheat are
continuing "to allow researchers to complete their research."
Greenpeace said Monsanto should have torn up the fields as it said it
would.

Full item: http://www.GEinfo.org.nz/092004/06.html

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

WTO RULING DELAYED IN TRANS-ATLANTIC FOOD ROW
Reuters, August 27, 2004 (Switzerland)

The World Trade Organization (WTO) has put off a decision on whether
the European Union broke trade rules by not allowing imports of
genetically modified foods.

WTO judges had initially been expected to issue a ruling in September
or October, but officials said that it had been pushed back until the
end of March to let the judges question scientists. [This] was seen
as a victory for the EU, which had pressed for their views to be
heard, while the US and its allies had argued this was unnecessary.
Full item: http://www.GEinfo.org.nz/092004/07.html

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

USDA "HIGHJACKED" BY CORPORATE INTERESTS
Associated Press, July 23, 2004 (USA)

The US Department of Agriculture has shifted from being a people's
agency to an agency for corporate agriculture, a new report by a
coalition of agriculture leaders charges.

The report, titled, "USDA Inc.: How Agribusiness has hijacked
regulatory policy at the US Department of Agriculture," was
commissioned by the Agribusiness Accountability Initiative, a network
of family farm and public interest groups.

The report calls the USDA "one of the strongest proponents" of GM
foods, even though many farmers have been vehement in their
opposition. The report charges that the USDA support can be directly
attributed to top-ranking USDA officials having ties to biotechnology
companies.

"These industry-linked appointees have helped to implement policies
that undermine the regulatory mission of USDA in favor of the bottom-
line interests of a few economically powerful companies," the report
states.

Full item: http://www.GEinfo.org.nz/092004/08.html

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

GREENS' GE CORN WORRIES SPARK DATA CHECK
NZ Herald, September 3, 2004 (New Zealand)

Green Party safety concerns have prompted Transtasman food regulator
Food Standards Australia New Zealand to check the original data from
a trial conducted on GE corn it approved last year for consumption.
French newspaper Le Monde reported in April that a 90-day feeding
trial by Monsanto showed differences in rats fed MON863, compared
with those fed conventional corn. They included [a] significant rise
in males' white blood cells [and] in blood sugar in females, [and]
more abnormalities such as degeneration or inflammation in male rat
kidneys.

A spokesman for the French agency Commission du Genie Biomoleculaire
(which) turned down approval, told Le Monde: "What struck me in this
file is the number of abnormalities." Its decision was subsequently
overturned by the European Food Safety Authority.

Full item: http://www.GEinfo.org.nz/092004/09.html

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

JUDGE: REVEAL LOCATIONS OF BIOPHARM CROPS
ENS, August 6, 2004 (Hawaii)

The US Agriculture Department must disclose the locations of
experimental crops genetically modified to grow pharmaceuticals.
Chief Judge David Ezra agreed with the plaintiff, Center for Food
Safety, represented by the public interest law firm Earthjustice,
that the locations of the biopharm crops is not confidential
proprietary business information.

Hawaii has more than 4,000 field test sites for GE crops, more than
anywhere else in the world, including more than two dozen tests of
biopharm crops, Earthjustice says.

Earthjustice argued that none of these biopharm crops has been
approved for human or animal consumption, or even for general release
into the environment. Yet the USDA allows these tests to be conducted
in open fields, conceals the trials' locations from the public, and
in most cases refuses to disclose the substances being grown.

Full item: http://www.GEinfo.org.nz/092004/10.html

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

The items in this Bulletin are excerpts from articles which remain
the copyright of the original owners. The material is edited for
brevity and published here for educational and public interest use
only.

Full items and web links to source where available, can be found at
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NEWS RELEASE

For Immediate Release

September 8, 2004

For more information, contact Warren Throckmorton, PhD (724) 458-3787;
(724) 967-5644

Documentary 'I Do Exist' To Premiere Nationwide October 8-11

Schools, colleges and churches all over the country will be showing a new
documentary that concerns transformation in the lives of people who have
gone from gay identified to straight during the weekend of October 8-11 in
response to National Coming Out Day activities on October 11.

"The documentary 'I Do Exist' features people who have a story to tell
that is not often heard. Many in our country are skeptical that people who
once identified as homosexual can make profound transformations. This
52-minute film introduces the audience to five such people along with
expert commentary," said producer Warren Throckmorton , Ph.D.

Also featured in the film is Dr. Robert Spitzer, from Columbia University.
Dr. Spitzer is well known for his research in diagnosis and sexual
orientation. Dr. Spitzer is also renowned for his role in removing
homosexuality from the list of disorders published by the American
Psychiatric Association in 1973.

One of the former homosexuals was once featured in an award winning film as
a gay man. Noe Gutierrez was in the video Itís Elementary explaining what
being gay was like to middle school children. Mr. Gutierrez has since
become heterosexual and talks about his process of transition on the video .

The purpose of the event is to raise awareness and encourage discussion
concerning the topic of change in sexual identity. October 11 is National
Coming Out Day when the gay political group, the Human Rights Campaign,
broadcasts the message that the only healthy response to same sex
attractions is to come out and identify as homosexual. The film I Do Exist
gives the narratives of five people who have chosen a different path, one
that involves a profound personal transformation. Reproducible materials
are available for those groups that use the contact information below to
request it.

The video is being shown in churches, libraries, colleges, and home
showings all over the country. "Currently, we have over 40 venues scheduled
and are adding more daily," said Throckmorton. Organizations and
individuals wanting to take part and host a showing are encouraged to
contact Dr. Throckmorton at ewthrockmorton@gcc.edu or 724-458-3787. For
more information on the video, I Do Exist, go to www.idoexist.net.

Warren Throckmorton, PhD
www.drthrockmorton.com
www.idoexist.net

The months ahead will be momentous.
by Victor Davis Hanson
NRO
September 2, 2004

The summer and fall have been and will be momentous: national political
conventions, elections slated in Afghanistan and here at home, the
Olympics, high gas prices, and near cultural hysteria, whether measured
by Fahrenheit 9/11 or the Swift-boat ads. But brace yourself - this is
only the beginning.

We should expect not only the dirtiest election in years, but also some
real challenges the United States has not experienced since 1941.

HYSTERIA
Almost every day, al Qaeda suspects or affiliated terrorists are
arrested somewhere in the world. Islamic fascists blow up Israelis,
behead Nepalese, murder Russians children in schools and on the street,
and kidnap French journalists (so much for appeasement). They want to
destroy trains in New York as they did in Madrid. They seek to ruin
democracy in Kabul and Baghdad and take down Russian airliners. Nearly
each week they are caught forming cells in Europe and the United States
- all akin in their desire for theocracy, incoherent demands, partiality
for barbarous methods of killing civilians, and hatred of Western-style
liberalism and freedom.

Now we learn that they may well turn their attention to targeted
assassinations here at home - in the manner in which Osama bin Laden
took out General Massoud of the Northern Alliance on the eve of the
September 11 attacks, and like the various efforts to incinerate General
Musharraf in Pakistan. The problem is not only that such efforts would
be aimed at short-circuiting the nerve center of the United States, but
also that previous reckless talk on the part of some cultural elites at
home would only accentuate the turmoil.

The 2002 winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Nicholson
Baker, is due out with Checkpoint - an extended dialogue on killing (in
a variety of strange ways) George Bush. Last year, comedian Rick Hall
played to full houses in the U.K., performing his newest composition,
"Let's Get Together and Kill George Bush." A so-called pacifist group
announced its sponsorship of a rather violent-sounding off-Broadway
"guerilla comedy" entitled, I'm Gonna Kill the President.

This is stupid - and dangerous. Al Qaeda has announced its intentions
play on perceptions of Western decadence and nihilism. Should the
terrorists strike at our leaders, there will be a national accounting
over the failure of those on the left to condemn such extremism. Alfred
A. Knopf, for example, is promoting Baker's book as a cris du coeur -
"in response to the powerless seething fury many Americans felt when
President Bush decided to take the nation to war."

"Seething"? The radical Left is courting disaster and threatens to
destroy the credibility of liberals who are apparently fearful of
condemning the madness in their midst — this "cry of the heart" to save
Saddam Hussein from the wrath of an imperialistic and bullying United
States. When upscale protestors swear at delegates and parade obscene
signs in New York while John Kerry goes windsurfing in shades and racing
gloves, you have a recipe for disaster for wannabe populists.

OIL

We should also accept that the terrorists have finally caught on to just
how fragile the world's oil supply is. The global economy is recovering.
India and China are becoming voracious energy importers. The United
States will neither tap all of its own ample reserves nor embark on a
new round of fuel-efficiency standards. Global speculators and investors
are hypersensitive to even the slightest disruption in supply.

Thus we see daily attacks on facilities near Basra and in Kurdistan. The
point of these bombings is not to shut down oil exportation altogether,
but to make it clear that petroleum demand and supply is a fragile
equation, requiring countries to pay exorbitant prices to unsavory
regimes and causes, and to embrace political concessions.

It would be naïve of us to think that a Venezuela, a Saudi Arabia, or an
Iran will ever unite with us to stop such terror, when the direct result
of such uncertainty is an enhanced position for their regimes and cash
windfalls in the tens of billions of dollars. We should assume instead
that within a year or two we may well see a series of coordinated
attacks on Russian or Middle Eastern petroleum facilities and tankers,
as well as efforts to knock out or flip over a large exporting country;
and we should plan right now for that eventuality. Greater fuel
efficiency of our cars coupled with careful drilling in the Arctic is
the obvious compromise, along with more nuclear power and continued work
on hybrid fuels.

NUCLEAR IRAN

Get ready for a nuclear Iran - and perhaps sooner than we think. Oil
exporters don't burn off their natural gas and then complain that they
need reactors to light their streets. Only Jimmy Carter believes that.
Indeed, an ideal storm has arisen that has given the Tehran theocracy
unforeseen opportunities to press ahead.

The ongoing fighting in southern Iraq - astutely aided and abetted by
the mullahs - gives the impression that the United States is not ready
or willing to pressure the Iranians to desist. Anti-war hysteria in the
United States, they assume, assures them of a temporary pass: A fragile
petroleum market cannot take another Middle East war. "Preemption" and
"unilateralism" are now no longer doctrines but caricatured profanities.
And a Europe that appeased Saddam for cash will be outright fawning when
faced with three-stage, nuclear-tipped rockets pointed at Brussels.

The furor over North Korea convinces Teheran of the attention - and
bribery - to be had by threatening to go nuclear. America will soon have
to face the fact that while we were hypnotized over Kerry's medals and
George Bush's National Guard service, Iran quietly and methodically
created and hid away enough bombs to threaten the world's oil supply and
much of the West itself. And the president who confronts a nuclear Iran
will be demonized by the global Left in a manner that makes the present
Bush-hatred look tame.

HE'S BACK

Michael Moore is only temporarily dormant, and, as we just saw, he is
starting to froth and rumble. It has been a little while since he was in
the spotlight with Fahrenheit 9/11 - a near-fatal quiet for an egomaniac
of his caliber. He inaugurated the present cycle of American viciousness
right after 9/11 (lamenting that Republicans were not more in evidence
at the 9/11 World Trade Center) and never really stopped - calling
Americans "stupid," praising the beheaders in Iraq as "Minutemen", and
slurring Bush as a "a drunk, a thief, a possible felon, an unconvicted
deserter, and a crybaby." For the moment his presence has been trumped
by the Swift-boat veterans, whose mainstream third-party ads have done
more harm to Kerry than Moore's creative slumming ever did to Bush.
But it is worse than that. Michael Moore is a greater albatross around
John Kerry than any Republican ever could have wished - providing
tit-for-tat exemption for outside groups on the right to emulate his
methodology, but without his counterproductive, buffoonish, and
repulsive antics. Moore is the Abbie Hoffman or Jerry Rubin of our
times, and thus might do for John Kerry what the latter two and their
followers did for Hubert Humphrey and George McGovern.

So get ready for another Moore belly-flop into the American political
cesspool. It is too late to make another propaganda film before the
elections, but we will see his hand in a variety of media, with his
characteristic allegiance to untruth, hysteria, and malice.

DEMOCRATIC IMPLOSION

Finally, this election promises to be a turning point in American
political history, but not in terms of the usual pundits' reckoning of a
red/blue standoff and the specter of a divided country's future once
more decided by the courts. The voting won't come to that, but may well
lead to a lopsided new division. The close presidential polls we see now
mask a larger trend that has been nearly unceasing the last 20 years:
the growing popularity of conservative thinking, which has been far more
successful than the boutique liberal ideology in capturing the
aspirations of working Americans.

The Democratic party of Harry Truman is moribund. We saw that all
through the primary and convention. Democratic "populism" now consists
of a screeching preppie Al Gore or Howard Dean, backed with money from
Hollywood and George Soros - or John Kerry skiing in Sun Valley or
windsurfing while resting up at one of his many homes. The result is
that, despite the controversy over the war, the post-9/11 jitters, and
the hysterical reactions to George Bush, most Americans tend to distrust
those who claim allegiance with "the people."

Thus if the Democrats lose the next election, they must confront the
bitter fact that the House, the Senate, the presidency, and soon the
Supreme Court are lost - and lost mostly to the dominant influence of
their most vocal and wealthy supporters in Hollywood, the universities,
the media, and the foundations who have privileged an agenda that is out
of touch with most of those whom they never see nor wish to see.

It might have been neat the last two years to read of Soros money
pouring into anti-Bush movements or the various theatrics of Answer, Not
In Our Name, and Moveon.org. But most Americans who channel-surfed their
televised rallies were disgusted by the hate and the weird fringe groups
that showed up to trash the United States. Witness the protests at the
recent convention in New York: Again, guerrilla street theater
juxtaposed with sailing off Nantucket are not the images Democrats wish
to convey while Islamofascists blow up and behead innocents in Russia,
Israel, Kabul, and Iraq.

The party hierarchy reflects only its accumulated years in law school -
the Clintons, Ted Kennedy, Al Gore, John Edwards, John Kerry - slicers
and dicers who redefine the word "is" and view the world in terms of
words rather than action. When a smug John Edwards flashed his smile and
thought he was reentering the televised courtroom to dissect the
president's use of "catastrophic," we knew that his old legalese, not
ideas about fighting terrorists, is about all he has to offer. But,
Senator Edwards, we are not a jury that can be talked into voting for
millions of dollars for you in claims. We are a people in a real war for
our very existence who want to be led to victory.

If Bush wins in November, and I think he will, then there will be
recriminations and fury of the like we have not seen since the Right
imploded after 1964. For many of us lifelong Democrats, the very sight
of Michael Moore perched next to Jimmy Carter at the convention in
Boston says it all - the sorry coming together of conspiratorial
anti-Americanism and self-righteous appeasement.

We are not at the end of history, but rather at its new beginning. All
the old truths — conventional warfare, the Atlantic alliance,
petroleum-based affluence, conventional political debate, etiquette,
principled disagreement, and the old populist Democratic party are
coming under question. And the only thing that is clear from what will
follow is that it will all be loud, messy, full of surprises - and
occasionally quite scary.

This item is available on the Benador Associates website, at
http://www.benadorassociates.com/article/7154

My friends the Whiteheads who have been conducting for a dozen years a quiet lay ministry for hx & lez who want to get out of those subcultures believe this is authentic. That will do me.

I realise this is disturbing material. If you are disturbed by it, over to you what to do about it.

But please don't blame the messenger. It will be best if we face up to this strategy, rather than playing ostrich. I commend, especially to those involved in bringing up children, understanding of this militant political ideology.

R

STRATEGIES OF THE HOMOSEXUAL MOVEMENT

(The following article called "The Overhauling of Straight
America'' was written by Marshall K. Kirk and Erastes Pill and
appeared in Guide Magazine, November 1987. As you read the
article, keep in mind it was printed that many years ago. Many of the
strategies have already been put into place and have achieved their
desired results.)


The first order of business is desensitization of the American
public concerning gays and gay rights. To desensitize the public
is to help it view homosexuality with indifference instead of with
keen emotion. Ideally, we would have straights register differences in sexual preference the way they register different tastes for ice cream or sports games: she likes strawberry and I like vanilla; he follows baseball and I follow football. No big deal.

At least in the beginning, we are seeking public desensitization
and nothing more. We do not need and cannot expect a full
"appreciation" or "understanding" of homosexuality from the
average American. You can forget about trying to persuade the
masses that homosexuality is a good thing. But if only you can get them to think that it is just another thing, with a shrug of their shoulders, then your battle for legal and social rights is virtually won. And to get to shoulder-shrug stage, gays as a class must cease to appear mysterious, alien, loathsome and contrary. A large-scale media campaign will be required in order to change the image of gays in America. And any campaign to accomplish this turnaround should do six things.

[1] TALK ABOUT GAYS AND GAYNESS AS LOUDLY AND
AS OFTEN AS POSSIBLE.

The principle behind this advice is simple: almost any behavior
begins to look normal if you are exposed to enough of it at close
quarters and among your acquaintances. The acceptability of the
new behavior will ultimately hinge on the number of one's fellows
doing it or accepting it. One may be offended by its novelty at
first--many, in times past, were momentarily scandalized by
"streaking,'' eating goldfish, and premarital sex. But as long as Joe
Six-pack feels little pressure to perform likewise, and as long as the
behavior in question presents little threat to his physical and financial
security, he soon gets used to it and life goes on. The skeptic may still
shake his head and think "people arc crazy these days," but over time
his objections are likely to become more reflective, more philosophical,
less emotional.

The way to benumb raw sensitivities about homosexuality is to
Have a lot of people talk a great deal about the subject in a neutral
or supportive way. Open and frank talk makes the subject seem
less furtive, alien, and sinful, more above-board. Constant talk
builds the impression that public opinion is at least divided on the
subject, and that a sizable segment accepts or even practices
homosexuality. Even rancorous debates between opponents and
defenders serve the purpose of desensitization so long as "respectable"
gays are front and center to make their own pitch. The main thing is to
talk about gayness until the issue becomes thoroughly tiresome.

And when we say talk about homosexuality, we mean just that. In
the early stages of any campaign to reach straight America, the
masses should not be shocked and repelled by premature exposure
to homosexual behavior itself. Instead, the imagery of sex should be
downplayed and gay rights should be reduced to an abstract social
question as much as possible. First let the camel get his nose
inside the tent -- only later his unsightly derriere!

"... In the early stages of any campaign to reach straight America,
the masses should not be shocked and repelled by premature exposure
to homosexul behavior itself."

Where we talk is important. The visual media, film and
television, are plainly the most powerful image-makers in Western
civilization. The average American household watches over seven hours of TV
daily. Those hours open up a gateway into the private world of
straights, through which a Trojan horse might be passed. As far
as desensitization is concerned, the medium is the message--of
normalcy. So far, gay Hollywood has provided our best covert
weapon in the battle to desensitize the mainstream. Bit by bit
over the past ten years, gay characters and gay themes have been
introduced into TV programs and films (though often this has been done to achieve comedic and ridiculous affects). On the whole the impact has been
encouraging. The prime-time presentation of Consenting Adults on
a major network in 1985 is but one high-water mark in favorable
media exposure of gay issues. But this should be just the
beginning of a major publicity blitz by gay America.

Would a desensitizing campaign of open and sustained talk about
gay issues reach every rabid opponent of homosexuality? Of course
not. While public opinion is one primary source of mainstream
values, religious authority is the other. When conservative
churches condemn gays, there are only two things we can do to
confound the homophobia of true believers. First, we can use talk
to muddy the moral waters. This means publicizing support for gays
by more moderate churches, raising theological objections of our own about
conservative interpretations of biblical teachings, and exposing hatred
and inconsistency. Second, we can undermine the moral authority of
homophobia churches by portraying them as antiquated backwaters,
badly out of step with the times and with the latest findings of
psychology. Against the mighty pull of institutional Religion one
must set the mightier draw of Science and Public Opinion (the
shield and sword of the accursed "secular humanism"'). Such an
unholy alliance has worked well against churches before, on such
topics as divorce and abortion. With enough open talk about the
prevalence and acceptability of homosexuality, that alliance can
work again here.

[2] PORTRAY GAYS AS VICTIMS, NOT AS AGGRESSIVE CHALLENGERS.

In any campaign to win over the public, gays must be cast as
victims in need of protection so that straights will be inclined
by reflex to assume the role of protector. If gays are presented,
instead, as a strong and prideful tribe promoting a rigidly
nonconformist and deviant lifestyle, they are more likely to be
seen as a public menace that justifies resistance and oppression. For
that reason, we must forego the temptation to strut our "gay pride"
publicly when it conflicts with the Gay Victim image. And we must
walk the fine line between impressing straights with our great
numbers, on the one hand, and sparking their hostile
paranoia - "They are all around us!" - on the other. A media
campaign to promote the Gay Victim image should make use of symbols which
reduce the mainstream's sense of threat, which lower its guard,
and which enhance the plausibility of victimization. In practical
terms, this means that jaunty mustachioed musclemen would keep very low
profile in gay commercials and other public presentations, while
sympathetic figures of nice young people, old people, and
attractive women would be featured. (It almost goes without
saying that groups on the farthest margin of acceptability such as
NAMBLA [Ed note -- North American Man-Boy Love Association] must
play no part at all in such a campaign: suspected child-molesters
will never look like victims.)

Now, there are two different messages about the Gay Victim that
arc worth communicating. First, the mainstream should be told
that gays arc victims of fate, in the sense that most never had a
choice to accept or eject their sexual preference. The message
must read: "As far as gays can tell, they were born gay, just as
you were born heterosexual or white or black or bright or
athletic. Nobody ever tricked or seduced them; they never made a choice,
and are not morally blameworthy. What they do isn't wilfully contrary
- it's only natural for them. This twist of fate could as easily have
happened to you!"

Straight viewers must be able to identify with gays as victims.
Mr and Mrs. Public must be given no extra excuses to say "they are
not like us." To this end, the persons featured in the public
campaign should be decent and upright, appealing and admirable by
straight standards, completely unexceptionable in appearance -- in
a word, they should be indistinguishable from the straights we would like
to reach. (To return to the terms we have used in previous articles,
spokemen for our cause must be R-type "straight gays" rather than
Q-type "homosexuals on display." ) Only under such conditions
will the message be read correctly: "These folks are victims of a fate
that could have happened to me."

By the way, we realize that many gays will question an
advertising technique which might threaten to make homosexuality look like
some dreadful disease which strikes fated "victims". But the
plain fact is that the gay community is weak, including the play for
sympathy. In any case, we compensate for the negative aspect of
this gay victim appeal under Principle 4 Below.

The second message would portray gays as victims of society. The
straight majority does not recognize the suffering it brings to
the lives of gays and must be shown: graphic pictures of
brutalized gays; dramatizations of job and housing insecurity,
loss of child custody, and public humiliation: and the dismal
list goes on.

"... In any campaign to win over the public, gays must be cast as victims in need of protection so that straights will be inclined by reflex to assume the role of protector."

[3] GIVE PROTECTORS A JUST CAUSE.

A media campaign that casts gays as society's victims and
encourages straights to be their protectors must make it easier
for those to respond to assert and explain their new
protectiveness. Few straight women, and even fewer straight men, wilt
want to defend homosexuality boldly as such. Most would rather attach
their awakened protective impulse to some principle of justice or law,
to some general desire for consistent and fair treatment in society. Our
campaign should not demand direct support for homosexual practices, but
should instead take anti-discrimination as its theme. The right to free
speech, freedom of beliefs, freedom of association, due process and equal
protection of laws--these should be the concerns brought to mind by our
campaign.

It is especially important for the gay movement to hitch its
cause to accepted standards of law and justice because its straight
supporters must have at hand a cogent reply to the moral
arguments of its enemies. The homophobes clothe their emotional revulsion
in the daunting robes of religious dogma, so defenders of gay rights
must be ready to counter dogma with principle.

[4] MAKE GAYS LOOK GOOD.

In order to make a Gay Victim sympathetic to straights you have
to portray him as Everyman. But an additional theme of the campaign
should be more aggressive and upbeat: to offset the increasingly
bad press that these times have brought to homosexual men and
women, the campaign should paint gays as superior pillars of
society. Yes, yes, we know--this trick is so old it creaks. Other
minorities use it all the time in ads that announce proudly, "Did
you know that this Great Man (or Woman) was _____?" But the message
is vital for all those straights who still picture gays as "queer"
people-- shadowy, lonesome, fail, drunken, suicidal, child-snatching misfits. The
honor roll of prominent gay or bisexual men and women is truly eyepopping.
From Socrates to Shakespeare, from Alexander the Great to Alexander
Hamilton, from Michelangelo to Walt Whitman, from Sappho to
Gertrude Stein, the list is old hat to us but shocking news to
heterosexual America. In no time, a skillful and clever media
campaign could have the gay community looking like the veritable
fairy godmother to Western Civilization.

Along the same lines, we shouldn't overlook the Celebrity Endorsement. The celebrities can be straight (God bless you, Ed Asner, wherever you are) or gay.

[5] MAKE THE VICTIMIZERS LOOK BAD.

At a later stage of the media campaign for gay rights-long after
other gay ads have become commonplace--it will be time to get
tough with remaining opponents. To be blunt, they must be
vilified. (This will be all the more necessary because, by that
time, the entrenched enemy will have quadrupled its output of
vitriol and disinformation.) Our goal here is twofold. First, we seek
to replace the mainstream's self-righteous pride about its homophobia
with shame and guilt. Second, we intend to make the antigays look so nasty
that average Americans will want to dissociate themselves from such types.

The public should be shown images of ranting homophobes whose
secondary traits and beliefs disgust middle America. These images
might include: the Ku Klux Klan demanding that gays be burned
alive or castrated; bigoted southern ministers drooling with hysterical hatred to a degree that looks both comical and deranged; menacing punks, thugs, and convicts speaking coolly about the "fags" they have killed or would like to kill; a tour of Nazi concentration camps where homoscxuals were tortured and gassed.

A campaign to vilify the victimizers is going to enrage our most fervid enemies, of course. But what else can we say? The shoe fits, and we should make them try it on for size, with all of America watching.

[6] SOLICIT FUNDS.

The buck stops here. Any massive campaign of this kind would
require unprecedented expenditures for months or even years--an
unprecedented fundraising drive.

Effective advertising is a costly proposition: several million
dollars would get the ball rolling. There are 10-15 million
primarily homosexual adults in this country: if each one of them
donated just two dollars to the campaign, its war chest would
actually rival that of its most vocal enemies. And because those
gays not supporting families usually have more discretionars income than
average, they could afford to contribute much more.

"... We intend to make the antigays look so nasty that average Americans will
want to dissociate themselves from such types."

But would they? Or is they, [sic] gay community as feckless,
selfish, uncommitted, and short-sighted as its critics claim? We
will never know unless the new campaign simultaneously launches a
concerted nationwide appeal for funding support from both known
and anorymous donors. The appeal should be directed both at gays and at
straights who care about social justice.

In the beginning, for reasons to be explained in a moment, the
appeal for funds may have to be launched exclusively through the
gay press--national magazines, local newspapers, flyers at bars,
notices in glossy skin magazines. Funds could also come through
the outreach of local gay organizations on campuses and in
metropolitan areas. Eventually, donations would be solicited directly
alongside advertisements in the major straight media.

There would be no parallel to such an effort in the history of
the gay community in America. It failed to generate the needed
capital to get started, there would be little hope for the campaign and l
little hope for major progress toward gay rights in the near
future. For the moment let us suppose that gays could see how
donations would greatly serve their long term interest, and that
sufficient funds could be raised. An heroic assumption.

GETTING ON THE AIR, OR, YOU CAN'T GET THERE FROM HERE.

Without access to TV, radio, and the mainstream press, there will
be no campaign. This is a tricky problem, because many impresarios
of the media simply refuse to accept what they call
"issue-advertising" -- persuasive advertising can provoke a storm
of resentment from the public and from sponsors, which is bad for
business. The courts have confirmed the broadcaster's right to
refuse any "issue advertising" he dislikes.

What exactly constitutes "issue advertising"? It evidently does
not include platitudinous appeals to the virtues of family unity
(courtesy of the Mormons) neither does it include tirades against
perfidious Albion courtesy of Lyndon LaRouche; neither does it
include reminders that a Mind-Is-a Terrible Thing to Waste
(courtesy of the United Negro College Fund); neither does it include
religious shows which condemn gay "sinners"; neither does it
include condemnations of nuclear war or race discrimination--at
least not in Massachusetts. Some guys get all the breaks.

What issue-advertising does include these days is almost any
communique presented openly by a homosexual organization. The
words "gay" and "homosexual"' arc considered controversial
whenever they appear.

Because most straightforward appeals are impossible, the National
Gay Task Force has had to cultivate quiet backroom liaisons with
broadcast companies and newsrooms in order to make sure that
issues important to the gay community receive some coverage; but
such an arrangement is hardly ideal, of course, because it means that
the gay community's image is controlled by the latest news event instead
of by careful design--and recently most of the news about gays has been
negative. So what can be done to crash the gates of the major media?
Several things, advanced in several stages.

START WITH THE FINE PRINT

Newspapers and magazines may very well be more hungry for gay
advertising dollars than television and radio arc. And the cost
of ads in print is generally lower. But remember that the press, for
the most part, is only read by better educated Americans, many of
whom arc already more accepting of homosexuality in any case. So
to get more impact for our dollars, we should skip the New Republic
and New Left Review readers and head for Time, People , and the
National Enquirer. (Of course, the gay community may have to
establish itself as a regular advertising presence in more sophisticated
forums first before it is accepted into the mass press. )

While we're storming the battlements with salvos of ink, we
should also warm the mainstream up a bit with a subtle national campaign
on highway billboards. In simple bold print on dark backgrounds,
a series of unobjectionable messages should be introduced:

IN RUSSIA, THEY TELL YOU WHAT TO BE. IN AMERICA WE HAVE THE FREEDOM T0 BE OURSELVES ... AND TO BE THE BEST.

or

PEOPLE HELPING INSTEAD OF HATING -- THAT 'S WHAT
AMERICA IS ALL ABOUT.

And so on. Each sign will tap patriotic sentiment, each message
will drill a seemingly agreeable proposition into mainstream
heads--a "public service message" suited to our purposes. And, if
their owners will permit it, each billboard w ill be signed, in
slightly smaller letters, "Courtesy of the National Gay Task
Force" -- to build positive associations and get the public used to
seeing such sponsorship.

VISUAL STAGE 1: YOU REALLY OUGHTA BE IN PICTURES

As for television and radio, a more elaborate plan may be needed
to break the ice. For openers, naturally, we must continue to
encourage the appearance of favorable gay characters in films and
TV shows. Daytime talk shows also remain a useful avenue for exposure.

But to speed things up we might consider a bold stratagem to gain
media attention. The scheme we have in mind would require careful
preparations, yet it would save expense even while it elevated
the visibility and stature of the gay movement overnight. Well before
the next elections for national office, we might lay careful plans
to run symbolic gay candidates for every high political office in
this country. (Such plans would have to deal somehow with the
tricky problem of inducing gays and straights to sign enough endorsement
petitions to get us on the ballot.) Our 50-250 candidates would participate
in such debates as they could, run gay-themed advertisements coordinated
at our national headquarters, and demand equal time on the air. They could
then graciously pull out of the races before the actual elections, while
formally endorsing more viable straight contenders. (With malicious humor,
perhaps, in some states we could endorse our most rabid opponents.) It
is essential not to ask people actually to vote Yea or Nay on the gay
issue at this early stage: such action would end up committing most to
the Nay position and would only tally huge and visible defeats for our
cause.

Through such a political campaign, the mainstream would get over the initial shock of seeing gay ads, and the acceptability of such ads would be fortified by the most creditable context possible; and all this would be accomplished before non-electoral advertising was attempted by the gay community. During the campaign all hell would break loose, but if we behaved courageously and respectable our drive would gain legitimacy in and case and might even become a cause celebre.

If all went as planned, the somewhat desensitized public and the
major networks themselves would be readied for the next step of
our program.

VISUAL STAGE 2: PEEKABOO ADVERTISING

At this point the gay community has its foot in the door, and it
is time to ask the networks to accept gay sponsorship of certain
ads and shows. Timing is critical: The request must be made
immediately after our national political ads disappear. Failing
that, we should request sponsorship the next time one of the
networks struts its broad- mindedness by televising a film or show
with gay characters or themes. If they wish to look consistent instead
of hypocritical, we'll have them on the spot.

But the networks would still be forced to say No unless we made
their resistance look patently unreasonable, and possibly illegal.
We'd do just that by proposing "gay ads" patterned exactly after
those currently sponsored by the Mormons and others. As usual,
viewers would be treated to squeak-clean skits on the importance
of family harmony and understanding --this time the narrator
would end by saying, "This message was brought to you by --the National
Gay Task Force." All very quiet and subdued. Remember: exposure is
everything, and the medium is the message.

"... Exposure is everything and the medium is the message."

The gay community should join forces with other civil liberties groups of respectable cast to promote bland messages about America the Melting Pot, always ending with an explicit reference to the Task Force of some other gay organization. Making the best of a bad situation, we can also propose sympathetic media appeals for gifts and donations to fund AIDS research--if Jerry Lewis and the March of Dimes can do it, so can we. Our next indirect step will be to advertise locally on behalf of support groups peripheral to the gay community: frowzy straight moms and dads announcing phone numbers and meeting times for "Parents of Gays" or similar gatherings. Can't you just see such ads now, presented between messages from the Disabled Vets and the Postal Workers Union?

VISUAL STAGE 3: ROLL OUT THE BIG GUNS

By this point, our salami tactics will have carved out, slice by
slice, a large portion of access to the mainstream media. So what
then? It would finally be time to bring gay ads out of the closet.
The messages of such ads should directly address lingering public
fears about homosexuals as loathsome and contrary aliens. For
examples, the following are possible formats for TV or radio
commercials designed to chip away at chronic misperceptions.

Format A for Familiarization: The Testimonial.

To make gays seem less mysterious, present a series of short
spots featuring the boy- or girl-next- door. fresh and appealing, or
warm and lovable grandma grandpa types. Seated in homey
surroundings, they respond to an offcamera interviewer with
assurance, good nature, and charm. Their comments bring out three
social facts:

( 1 ) There is someone special in their life, a long-term relationship
(to stress gay stability, monogamy, commitment);

(2) Their families are very important to them, and are supportive
of them (to stress that gays are not "anti-family," and that
families need not be anti-gay.)

(3) As far as they can remember the! have always been gay, and
were probably born gay; they certainly never decided on a preference
one way or the other (stressing that gays are doing what is
natural for them, and are not being wilfully contrary).

The subjects should be interviewed alone, not with their lovers
or children, for to include others in the picture would unwisely
raise disturbing questions about the complexities of gay social
relations, which these commercials could not explain. It is best
instead to take one thing at a time.

Format B for Positive associations: The Celebrity Spot.

While it might be useful to present celebrity endorsement by
currently popular gay figures and straight sympathizers (Johnny
Mathis? Marlo Thomas?), the homophobia climate of America would
make such brash endorsements unlikely in the near future. So early
celebrity spots will instead identify historical gay or bisexual
personalities who are illustrious and dignified...and dead. The
ads could be sardonic and indirect. For example, over regal music
and a portrait or two, a narrator might announce simply:

William Shakespeare--the greatest playwright in the history of
the English language. Yet, if he were alive today, some people
wouldn't let him teach a high school English class. Now isn't
that a shame?

The rhetorical question forces the viewer to answer Yes. And to
explain the Bard's failing, the ad would end simply: "A message
from the National Gay Task Force." Similar commercials could
feature Michelangelo (an art class), Tchaikovsky (a music class),
Tennessee Williams (a drama class), etc.

Format C for Victim Sympathy: Our Campaign to Stop Child Abuse.

As we said earlier, there arc many ways to portray gays as
victims of discrimination: images of brutality, tales of job loss and
family separation, and so on. But we think something like the
following 30-sccond commercials would get to the heart of the
matter best of all.

The camera slowly moves in on a middle-class teenager, sitting
alone in his semi-darkened bedroom. The boy is pleasing and
unexceptional in appearance, except that he has been roughed up
and is starring silently, pensively, with evident distress. As
the camera gradually focuses in on his face, a narrator comments:

It will happen to one in every ten sons. As he grows up. he will realize
that he feels differently about things than most of his friends. If he
lets it show, he'll be an outsider made fun of, humiliated, attacked.
If he confides in his parents, they may throw him out of the house, onto
the streets. Some will say he is "anti-family." Nobody will let him be
himself. So he will have to hide. From his friends, his family. And that's
hard. It's tough enough to be a kid these days, but to be the one in
ten... A message from the National Gay Task Force.

What is nice about such an ad is that it would economically portray gays as innocent and vulnerable, victimized and misunderstood, surprisingly numerous yet not menacing. It also
renders the "anti-family" charge absurd and hypocritical.

Format D for Identification with Victims: The Old Switcheroo.

The mainstream will identify better with the plight of gays if straights can, once in a while, walk a mile in gay shoes. A humorous television or radio ad to help them do this might involve a brief animated or dramatized scenario, as follows.

The camera approaches the mighty oak door of the boss's office, which swings open, and the camera (which represents you the viewer) enters the room. Behind the oversized desk sits a fat and scowling old curmudgeon chomping on a cigar. He looks up at the camera (i.e. at the viewer) and snarls, " So it's you, Smithers. Well You're fired!" The voice of a younger man is heard to reply with astonishment, "But-but--Mr. Thomburg, I've been with your company for ten years. I thought you liked my work." The boss responds, with a tone of disgust, "Yes, yes, Smithers your work is quite adequate. But I've heard rumors that you've been seen around town with some kind of girlfriend. A girlfriend! Frankly I'm shocked. We're not about to start hiring any heterosexuals in this company. Now get out." The younger man speaks once more: "But boss, that's just not fair! What if it were you?" The boss glowers back as the camera pulls quickly out of the room and the big door slams shut. Printed on the door: "A message from the National Gay Task Force."

One can easily imagine similar episodes involving housing or other discrimination.

Format E for Vilification of Victimizers: Damn the Torpedoes.

We have already indicated some of the images which might be
damaging to the homophobic vendetta: ranting and hateful
religious extremists neo-Nazis, and Ku Klux Klansmen made to look
evil and ridiculous (hardly a difficult task).

These images should be combined with those of their gay victims
By a method propagandists call the "bracket technique." For example,
for a few seconds an unctuous beady-eyed Southern preacher is
seen pounding the pulpit in rage about "those sick, abominable
creatures." While his tirade continues over the soundtrack,. the
picture switches to pathetic photos of gays who look decent,
harmless, and likable; and then we cut back to the poisonous face
of the preacher, and so forth. The contrast speaks for itself. The effect
is devastating.

"...it would portray gays as innocent and vulnerable, victimized and
misunderstood, surprisingly numerous, yet not menacing."

Format F for Funds: S.O.S.

Alongside or during these other persuasive advertisements, we
would have to solicit donations so that the campaign might
continue. Direct appeals from celebrities (preferable living
ones, thank you) might be useful here. All appeals must stress that
money can be given anonymously (e.g. via money orders) and that all
donations are confidential. "We can't help unless you help," and all that.

The Time Is Now

We have sketched out here a blueprint for transforming the social
values of straight America At the core of our program is a media
campaign to change the way the average citizens view homosexuality. It is
quite easy to find fault with such a campaign. We have tried to be practical
and specific here, but the proposals may still have a visionary sheen.

There are one hundred reasons why the campaign could not be done
or would be risky. But there are at least 20 million good reasons
why some such program must be tried in the coming years: the
welfare and happiness of every gay man and woman in this country
demand it. As the last large, legally oppressed minority in
American society, it is high time that gays took effective measures
to rejoin the mainstream in pride and strength. We believe that, like
it or not, such a campaign is the only way of doing so anytime soon.

And, let us repeat, time may be running out. The AIDS epidemic is
sparking anger and fear in the heartland of straight America. As
the virus leaks out of homosexual circles and into the rest of
society, we need have no illusions about who is receiving the
blame. The ten years ahead may decide for the next forty whether
gays claim their liberty and equality or are driven back, once
again, as America's caste of detested untouchables. It’s more than
a quip: speak now or forever hold your peace.

****

(Keep in mind this article was published in 1987. Since that time
homosexual activists have made remarkable progress in their media
campaign. Just look at TV programs like Roseanne, Melrose Place,
Picket Fences, and Northern Exposure, where homosexuality is presented
as normal, natural behavior on a regular basis. NBC News did a three-day
series on "Gays in America" in September that had no opposing view, other
than one brief statement by Dr. Paul Cameron. There's a proliferation
of "gay" propaganda being shoved down our throats in movies like "The
Crying Game", "Philadelphia", "Priscilla, Queen of the Desert", "Go Fish",
and many more.

"... Hollywood is coming out of the closet, and
homosexual activists are jumping up and down for joy."

Hollywood is indeed coming, out a of the closet, and homosexual activists are jumping up and down for joy. Why? Because they know Americans flock to the movie theaters in droves, and that gradually the message of accepting homosexuality as a normal variant of human sexuality is getting through to people-minds are being
changed.

For those of you who want to investigate more about the homosexual agenda and various strategies I recommend the book After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear & Hatred of Gays in the 90’s by Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen [Plume 1989]. [] Both authors are Harvard grads -- Kirk is a researcher in neuropsychiatry, while Madsen is "an expert on public persuasion tactics and social marketing." The book is an expansion of the above article complete with sample print ads to use, as well as suggestions for radio, TV spots.)

mailto:comments@sphi.com

Copyright 1998 by SPHI. All Rights Reserved.

MannGram®:
The fine-sounding slogan "look at the evidence" Sep 2004

The item below from within a recent email by Friends of the Earth NZ Ltd
stimulates me to try to crystallize a worrying thought about GM.

------

"Some debating techniques
That are seriously flawed enough to justify the title 'propaganda'".
http://my.voyager.net/~jayjo/propagan.htm

*Recourse to authority*
I heard a sermon on the radio a few months ago in which the minister
made a number of claims that were highly questionable. He preceded every
one with a statement such as, "Dr Jones, the world's leading expert on
...". He must have cited a dozen people in a row as the "world's leading
expert" on one subject or another. I found myself asking, What makes
these people the world's leading experts on these subjects? Was there a
contest that they won, or is that just your opinion? Or do you just call
them that because they happen to agree with you?

One should always be suspicious of an argument whose weight relies on
the fact that some authoritative person said so. Even if it is someone
who deserves great respect, he could be wrong. Let's look at the
evidence, not the speaker.

-----------

This is a sound, workable approach for many issues. But for GM it
is scarcely workable. The trouble is that the main concepts in the
technology are too far from ordinary education & experience. The
fine-sounding slogan "look at the evidence" cannot be acted upon by those
who have not learned the meanings of the main terms in which the evidence
must be stated. In GM, many of the main concepts are built on pyramids of
arcane scientific terms which are not understood by anyone who has not
studied the relevant science.

Take a simple example. One of the main political users of the GM
issue for political attention-getting received (along with many others
including media) a note of mine concerning plant GM using synthetic DNA.
The gene-tamperer in question had reported using (like most such
experimenters) different but synonymous codons selected to be more suitable
for the host plant, instead of the codons actually used in the bacterial
gene for the desired toxin. The politician replied "what is a codon?".
She is among the more intelligent politicians, and has a degree - but in
French & Music. Such a person would require at least some hours to grasp
minimally the concept 'codon'. Even if she could then pass a simple exam
to check her understanding of the term, she would still be far from able to
appraise the significance of synthesising a gene with not the original
codons but generally different ones (for the purpose of getting higher
yields of the desired protein in the target cell - 'better expression',
as the gene-tamperers say). What differences might conceivably be implied
by imposing in a foreign gene codon 'weightings' it did not originally
have? Unfortunately, only very limited thinking about such subtle
questions can be done by those who have no understanding of the biochemical
context in which 'codons function - let alone those who have only just
got a superficial definition of 'codon'.

Therefore the public wishing to form opinions on GM will be forced
to have recourse to authority - rely on the advice of scientists who have
the education & experience to understand details of GM. The question then
becomes, which scientists. Among Monsanto's dozens of PR agents are some
with Ph.Ds in gene-jiggering technology, who have the education to
understand their employers' gene-tampering projects. Some of these are
used by the BBC as if they were independent experts. This is obviously
unethical journalism, especially when no other authority is used in the
particular broadcast.

But what about the mirror-image unethical journalism - presenting
to the public, as pretender experts critical of GM, politicians who don't
know a protein from a nucleic acid?

An example of the politics of ignorance was a Sunday media stunt
by the then NZ Minister of Consumer Affairs, the dreadful Fiddler Bunkum
list-MP. She announced that thousands of aged electricity meters had
become inaccurate and had never been checked. This revelation was worded
to imply that she was exposing a wrongful handicap for consumers, against
which she was bravely speaking out. The media failed to query whether, as
a mains meter ages, it can run fast. The truth is it can only run slow,
which favours the consumer who may be getting, say, 10 kWh of energy while
the meter records only 9 kWh. This is a very simple example of a technical
issue exploited for political deceit thru media that are too biased, or
just too lazy, to examine the propaganda sceptically.

If that simple error could go unchallenged, what chance is there
that politicians such as Bunkum will give the public reliable facts, let
alone interpretations, on GM which they cannot comprehend? Why then are
she (and her successors) persistently presented to the public as experts
commenting on GM?

The answer is that the media are primarily committed to PC
propaganda - putting favourable spin on the ruling PC Axis {wimminsLib,
neoRacism & hxism}. The media use the GM issue as a vehicle for
publicizing politicians whose primary motivation in politics is what they
call "feminism", or promoting woolly-minded white shame, or implementing
the 1987 Kirk/Pill hx political programme (or two, or all three, of those
ideologies). The only actual expert they ever consult - and that not
often - is Dr Peter R Wills, a practitioner in molecular biology, OK by
media because he's a staunch declared supporter of PC. He served for a
period some y ago as ghost-writer for the babbling airhead Susan Kitschley
list-MP; as a result, her TV appearances would begin with a rote-learned
insightful (& grammatically complex) statement about GM, but she was not
capable of discussing the subject. It is, I think, quite common for the PC
politicians to have such 'back room boys'; but that scarcely equips the
politicians to answer questions let alone to debate judgements about this
or that GM technique.

I have little or no expertise, and must therefore have recourse to
authorities, in many areas of technology and science, and other types of
knowledge - just a quick list that first comes to mind - electronics,
metallurgy, Russian, Greek, calculus, relativity, civil engineering ...
When I need some facts or interpretation in any of these fields, I resort
to qualified experts. Because of my lifelong involvement in academe, I can
find out relatively readily who are proven experts. I would not take
notice of a politician posing in the media as expert in civil engineering
but actually unqualified in this discipline. I would rely on known
authorities.

But the public cannot readily get reliable info on GM if actual
experts happen to be PinC and are therefore blacked out by the media.

The biased promotional role of the RS, RSNZ and USNAS must be
particularly deplored. These bodies have drastically failed to tell the
public the truth about GM. They have uncritically laundered claims of
benefit, denied hazards of GM, and vilified independent scientists such as
Pusztai who report harm from GM. They thus radically degrade the status
of science, as many citizens detect how misleading are their utterances.
And then they (thru e.g the appalling R Winston) moan that the status of
science has declined!

The information sources arrayed in the media are thus almost
entirely spurious:
1 PR agents for commercial GM, some of them scientists (e.g some Monsanto
PR staff; entrepreneur scientists like James D Watson jr)
2 Ostensibly independent ancillary PR operatives e.g V Moses of CropGen®,
Roger Morton of CSIRO, R Roush, J Rafe Blanchfield, I Prigogine, James D
Watson sr, Geo Petersen, M Berridge, Dan Cohen, Tony Conner, etc.
3 Anti-GM enthusiasts primarily concerned to promote PC ideologies and
therefore able to get media attention by posing as experts on GM which they
are incapable of explaining to the public.

Meanwhile, genuine independent experts who are critical of GM are
blacked out by the media - e.g Prof Pat Brown of UC Davis, Prof David
Schubert, Prof David S Williams, Drs Margaret Mellon & Jane Rissler of UCS,
Prof Joe Cummins, Dr Elvira Domisse (formerly a NZ CRI gene-jockey), and
myself.

In this wildly distorted infoscene, the public have little help to
"look at the evidence" on GM. It then becomes crucial that inquiring
citizens be pointed in the direction of key sources, notably
http://www.psrast.org , http://www.ucsusa.org .

R

Among the many sneaky underminings of our monarchy by the republicans in the present govt, disrespect for our flag is lately increasing.

The website 'New Zealand Flag Institute', founded & maintained by main
Monarchist League man John Cox, has quite a lot of resources, including
links, glossary, and articles. Please bookmark the URL, and visit the
website when you have the time. Contributions are always welcome.

http://geocities.com/nzflaginstitute/

FYI. In case you don't get Heterodox. A quote from the accompanying
item:-

" This organization (homosexual Log Cabin Republicans) has just
released a TV ad in which they invoke images of Ronald Reagan and claim
that those Republicans who oppose their radical agenda are engaging
in "intolerance" and "hate". The ad likens those Republicans to the
extremists who carry signs claiming that "God Hates Fags". The ad is so
controversial that CNN has refused to air it.

Barbara
-----------------------

http://www.searclub.com/?page=news-article&id=914

Kolbe's Log Cabin Republican Group Runs Offensive Ads; SEAR Club President
Demands Answers from the Kolbe Campaign

Todd Evans - South East Arizona Republican Club
9.1.2004

The Log Cabin Republicans are at the Republican National Convention doing everything they can to disrupt the efforts of mainstream members of the party who support, along with President Bush, defense of traditional marriage and protection of the unborn. The Log Cabin Republicans have stated that they are unlikely to endorse President Bush unless he and other convention speakers support their radical gay agenda.

Now, the radical group has released a TV ad in which they invoke images of Ronald Reagan and then claim that Republicans who oppose same-sex marriage and abortion are engaging in "hate" and "intolerance". At the end of the TV ad, so offensive that CNN refused to air it, they liken conservative Republicans to extremists who carry signs stating the "God Hates Fags".

Once married, now openly gay, Rep. Kolbe serves on the National Advisory Board of the Log Cabin Republicans. He was a keynote speaker at one of their conventions, appears regularly at their events in and around Washington, D.C., and is a hero to them. He has accepted thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from this radical organization.

Now, this organization is attacking the President, the mainstream of the Republican Party, and the Republican Party platform. They are accusing most Republicans of engaging in "hate" and "intolerance" and are likening them to extremists who believe that "God hates fags".

It is an outrage that this radical organization would engage in this
offensive behavior and make such insulting statements. It is a further outrage that Rep. Kolbe is a significant part of this organization and its agenda.

I've sent the following questions to the Kolbe campaign and I demand answers:

The Log Cabin Republicans organization has stated that they will not endorse President George W. Bush unless he and other Convention speakers support their radical agenda.

This organization has just released a TV ad in which they invoke images of Ronald Reagan and claim that those Republicans who oppose their radical agenda are engaging in "intolerance" and "hate". The ad likens those Republicans to the extremists who carry signs claiming that "God Hates Fags". The ad is so controversial that CNN has refused to air it.

According to the Log Cabin Republican website, Rep. Jim Kolbe serves on the Log Cabin Republicans National Advisory Board.

# Does Rep. Kolbe, a member of their National Advisory Board, support the position that the Log Cabin Republicans have taken in that they will not endorse President Bush unless he and other Convention speakers support their widely unpopular and radical agenda?

# Does Rep. Kolbe, a member of their National Advisory Board, agree with the message of the Log Cabin Republicans TV ad that those Republicans who wish to defend traditional marriage and protect the innocent unborn are engaging in "hate" and "intolerance" and that they are similar to the extremists who carry signs that say "God Hates Fags"? (The ad can be seen at www.logcabin.org.)

# Will Rep. Kolbe denounce the offensive actions of and statements by the Log Cabin Republicans and condemn the TV ad and its extremist and insulting message?
Additionally, will Rep. Kolbe return campaign contributions he has received from this organization and resign from his position on the Log Cabin Republicans National Advisory Board? Or will he continue, with his association with this
radical organization, to support their extreme agenda?

I called the Kolbe campaign for answers and his press secretary had no response. She did not even know that Kolbe was on the National Advisory Board of the Log Cabin Republicans, didn't know about the ad nor the LCR's position on President Bush and the GOP platform. She promised that if I emailed her the questions that I would receive a response. I'm still waiting.

Todd Evans is the President of the South East Arizona Republican Club. He can be reached at todd.evans@searclub.com.

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http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=40244

Wednesday, September 1, 2004

---------------------------------------------------------------
If all else fails, silence them!

By Robert Knight
---------------------------------------------------------------
© 2004 WorldNetDaily.com

How's this for chutzpah? The homosexual activist group Human Rights
Campaign, which has endorsed John Kerry for president, is demanding the
Republican Party suppress any speeches or performances at the GOP
convention by people they don't like.

That's right. Republican strategists are supposed to take advice from a
lobby group that calls the Defense Of Marriage Act "hate-filled"
legislation, even though both houses of Congress passed it overwhelmingly
in 1996 and it was signed by Bill Clinton. HRC also contends that ordinary
people, such as the 71 percent of Missourians who voted to pass a state
constitutional amendment to protect marriage, are bigots.

If the Republicans actually listen to HRC, then they've been drinking too
long at the wet bar of their own homosexual activist group, Log Cabin
Republicans, which is dedicated to making the GOP safe for sodomy.

HRC says in a press release that the GOP specifically should muzzle
Christian entertainer Donnie McClurkin, Mormon book publisher Sheri Dew and
Michigan pastor Bishop Keith Butler because of their "inflammatory"
comments about "GLBT Americans" in other venues. GLBT stands for gay,
lesbian, bisexual and transgendered.

We don't recall HRC having any problem with the lineup at the Democratic
convention a few weeks ago. They didn't even mind hearing from the Rev. Al
Sharpton, who incited a race riot in Crown Heights, N.Y., that left a young
Jewish man dead, and concocted the fraudulent Tawana Brawley "rape" story
that a court ruled had slandered innocent men.. Sharpton, you see, is for
"gay marriage," so he's apparently a fine addition to any podium.

HRC condemns Mr. McClurkin, Ms. Dew and Bishop Butler for the sin of
publicly laying out the threat that the homosexual agenda poses to families
and children.

Ms. Dew was taken to task for supposedly comparing homosexuals to Hitler.
But Ms. Dew did not do that. In a speech about several threats to family
life, she compared Americans who fail to defend the family with indifferent
Germans who failed to oppose Hitler's rise to power. Her point is not that
"gays" are like Nazis, but that complacency invites defeat and the middle
ground is disappearing. They took her out of context, and removed her
caveat, "at first it may seem a bit extreme to imply a comparison between
the atrocities of Hitler and what is happening now in terms of contemporary
threats against the family - but maybe not." She undoubtedly should have
elaborated to make sure she would not be misconstrued. But the description
of her comparing "a group of Americans to Hitler" does her a grave
disservice.

But what really sticks in homosexual activists' craw is Donnie McClurkin,
who, they say, on "The 700 Club" "has accused gay Americans of trying to
kill our children." Mr. McClurkin, an accomplished gospel singer and
author, overcame homosexuality himself. He knows firsthand the devastation,
especially among young men, of homosexual sex. So he's more than mildly
alarmed at the prospect of activists in schools presenting homosexuality as
a normal, healthy activity. Hundreds of thousands of young men have died
and many are now taking dozens of pills daily to stave off the effects of
HIV-AIDS, hepatitis and other sexually transmitted diseases.

McClurkin's own story is worth hearing. Molested by an uncle when he was a
youngster, McClurkin fell into homosexual behavior, but was delivered of
this temptation by the grace of God.

Here's the synopsis from McClurkin's book, "Eternal Victim / Eternal Victor":

Remembering and recounting the ordeals of his early childhood, Donnie
McClurkin resurrects feelings of hurt and pain that had long been
forgotten. He causes himself to reveal the scars of healed wounds, explain
how it happened, how he endured and how he and his family came out
delivered and victorious. This truly personal testimony by one of Gospel
music's favorite artists, shares his tremendous compassion for those who
have not received their healing for their hurts, as well as those who are
still in the midst of their personal struggles - especially the children.

From the moment he neglected watching his 2-year-old brother only to see
him toddle into the street and be tragically killed by a speeding car, to
the extreme sexual violation of an uncle who took advantage of his
childhood innocence, to his bout with homosexuality, McClurkin candidly
recounts the steps he took to turn his life from a victim to a victor.

Better shut him up, all right. And anyone else who dares to challenge the
idea that homosexuality is as normal, healthy and good as apple pie.

Homosexual activists cannot win the theological debate, nor will medical
science, biology, history or common sense support their deadly, tragic and
changeable behavior. So they are reduced to accusing their opponents of
"hatred" and silencing those brave enough to speak about the consequences
of sexual anarchy on children, the family and society.

Their latest gambit is a federal "hate crimes" bill, passed recently by the
Senate, in which 18 Republicans joined the Democrats. The Hate Crimes
Prevention Act, sponsored by Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., and Gordon Smith,
R-Ore., was an amendment to the Defense Authorization bill, which passed
the House without any "hate crimes" language in it.

The word on the Hill is that as soon as conferees are appointed to
reconcile differences in the two versions, pro-homosexual Congressmen will
introduce a motion in the House to instruct the conferees to accept the
Senate "hate crimes" language. Even if the House were foolish enough to
pass such a measure, the conferees still could leave the "hate crimes"
amendment out of the final version. But homosexual activists could crow
that the centerpiece of their campaign had reached critical mass in the
U.S. Congress.

If Americans don't want to see "thought crime" invade the nation's legal
system, they had better get on the phones to members of Congress. This
kind of dangerous bill succeeds when cowardly congressmen think nobody is
looking.

The only way homosexual activists can persuade America to validate and
enforce their agenda is to suppress the truth about homosexuality. The Rev.
Earle Fox, who himself was silenced at the Episcopal ceremony at which
openly homosexual bishop Gene Robinson was consecrated, put it this way in
a recent letter to the Washington Times:

Honest science and godly love are at one with each other. The aim of
homosexual-rights advocates has nothing to do with honest love - it is the
public justification and total acceptance of homosexual behavior. If
possible, they will coerce this acceptance by so-called hate-crime laws.

But they have sold the public a pig in a poke because they (very
understandably) do not want the public to see what it is buying. There has
never been a candid, mutually respectful public discussion of the real
issue ñ homosexual behavior ñ because homosexual advocates cannot afford to
discuss such self-destructive behavior in public, and conservatives are
almost universally too prudish to do so ...

When that discussion finally happens, as it will, the jig will be up for
public acceptance of homosexuality.

So it makes sense for "gay" activists to press for muzzling speakers who
might give America a glimpse of what their agenda is really all about. The
most invisible people in America are the people who have overcome
homosexuality. The "ex-gays" are such a threat to the false,
"born-that-way" paradigm that they must be kept off stage.

Sheri Dew and Bishop Keith Butler are threatening enough, but Donnie
McClurkin is living proof that lives can be reclaimed from tragic sexual
detours.

No wonder they are going to such lengths to keep him out of the limelight.

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

Robert Knight is director of the Culture and Family Institute, an affiliate
of Concerned Women for America, and a board member of Parents and Friends
Of Ex-Gays and Gays.

Howard Rheingold's Latest Connection

The tech guru sees a "new economic system" in the
unconscious cooperation embodied by Google links
and Amazon lists

Updated: 8:00 p.m. ET Aug. 11, 2004
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5671750

Howard Rheingold is on the hunt again. With his last
book, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, in 2001,
the longtime observer of technology trends made a
persuasive case that pervasive mobile communications,
combined with always-on Internet connections, will
produce new kinds of ad-hoc social groups. Now, he's
starting to take the leap beyond smart mobs, trying to
weave some threads out of such seemingly disparate
developments as Web logs, open-source software
development, and Google.

At the same time, Rheingold is worried that established
companies could quash such nascent innovations as file-
sharing -- and potentially put the U.S. at risk of
falling behind the rest of the world. He recently spoke
with Robert D. Hof, BusinessWeek's Silicon Valley bureau
chief. Here are excerpts from their conversation:

Q: Where do you see the social revolution you've been
talking about going next?

A: It's too early to say. The question is: What does it
point toward? Some kind of collective action...in which
the individuals aren't consciously cooperating. A market
is a great example as a mechanism for determining price
based on demand. People aren't saying, "I'm contributing
to the market," [they say they're] just selling
something. But it adds up.

Q: Can you give me some specific examples of what you
mean, beyond the market?

A: Google is based on the emergent choices of people who
link. Nobody is really thinking, "I'm now contributing
to Google's page rank." What they're thinking is, "This
link is something my readers would really be interested
in." They're making an individual judgment that, in the
aggregate, turns out to be a pretty good indicator of
what's the best source.

Then there's open source [software]. Steve Weber, a
political economist at UC Berkeley, sees open source as
an economic means of production that turns the free-
rider problem to its advantage. All the people who use
the resource but don't contribute to it just build up a
larger user base. And if a very tiny percentage of them
do anything at all -- like report a bug -- then those
free riders suddenly become an asset.

And maybe this isn't just in software production.
There's [the idea of] "open spectrum," coined by [Yale
law professor] Yochai Benkler. The dogma is that the two
major means of organizing for economic production are
the market and the firm. But Benkler uses open source as
an example of peer-to-peer production, which he thinks
may be pointing toward a third means of organizing for
production.

Then you look at Amazon (AMZN) and its recommendation
system, getting users to provide free reviews, users
sharing choices with their friends, users who make lists
of products. They get a lot of free advice that turns
out to be very useful in the aggregate. There's also
Wikipedia [the online encyclopedia written by
volunteers]. It has 500,000 articles in 50 languages at
virtually no cost, vs. Encyclopedia Britannica spending
millions of dollars and they have 50,000 articles.

Q: What will all those trends produce ultimately?

A: All these could dramatically transform not only the
way people do business, but economic production
altogether. We had markets, then we had capitalism, and
socialism was a reaction to industrial-era capitalism.
There's been an assumption that since communism failed,
capitalism is triumphant, therefore humans have stopped
evolving new systems for economic production.

But I think we're seeing hints, with all of these
examples, that the technology of the Internet,
reputation systems, online communities, mobile devices
-- these are all like those technologies...that made
capitalism possible. These may make some new economic
system possible.

Q: If so, it's a good bet not all companies will be
happy with the changes.

A: New digital technologies are creating a crisis in the
business models of the companies that depend on having a
monopoly on distribution. Look at MP3 blogs: We're now
seeing bands that are saying, "Please pirate my
material. Here it is." They make money from that. They
get bookings from that. They build an audience on that.

Q: Are there more such conflicts and opportunities to
come?

A: Assigning frequencies to license holders...is an old-
fashioned scheme...based on technologies of the 1920s.
We now have technologies that make it possible to use
the spectrum the way packets use the Internet. Instead
of having a circuit-switched analog system in which you
have to have an end-to-end connection, you just send
your packets out with their addresses through this
network and they find their way. It's much more
efficient. It makes for millions more broadcasters in
the Internet space. This is all pointing to a kind of
voluntary sharing of your property.

Q: Does the pushback by companies threatened by these
trends, such as the record and movie companies, threaten
innovation?

A: Yes. Never before in history have we been able to see
incumbent businesses protect business models based on
old technology against creative destruction by new
technologies. And they're doing it by manipulating the
political process. The telegraph didn't prevent the
telephone, the railroad didn't prevent the automobile.
But now, because of the immense amounts of money that
they're spending on lobbying and the need for immense
amounts of money for media, the political process is
being manipulated by incumbents.

Q: What might keep these powerful incumbents from
holding back this tide?

A: You've got to have some huge force outside of the
United States, where it's getting locked down. What if
China says, "The FCC doesn't rule us. We're going to
stop assigning frequencies within our borders. We're
going to regulate devices so that they play fair with
each other, and we're going to open up spectrum." That's
going to make the U.S. an economic and technological
backwater.

Then there's always the idea that maybe we're just
beginning to see disruptive technologies. Maybe
something is just going to blow it away. Certainly we've
seen that over and over again in recent decades.

Q: Where will we see that happen?

A: We now have a world out there where billions of
people have in their pockets technologies for innovation
that far surpass what entire industries had just a
couple decades ago. If you're talking about the
communications industry, your innovation is happening
with 15-year-old girls. That was where [Japanese
cellular network provider NTT] DoCoMo (DCM) won big. I
think the total number of text messages sent is
approaching 100 billion a month. Of course, the revenues
on that are only a fraction of a cent each, but multiply
a fraction of a cent by 100 billion, and it begins to
add up to real money.

You're seeing that now with the picturephones. People
are not using them the way it was predicted. They're
using them to share their days: Here's a picture of
somebody's haircut. Here's a picture of somebody's
melon. Look at this shoe in a store. It wasn't
determined by an expensive R&D lab. It was determined in
practice by young people who appropriate these devices
in unexpected ways. There's nothing more inventive than
a 15-year-old.

I don't think that's going away. If I was a Nokia (NOK)
or a Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), I would take a fraction of
what I'm spending on those buildings full of expensive
people and give out a whole bunch of prototypes to a
whole bunch of 15-year-olds and have contracts with them
where you can observe their behavior in an ethical way
and enable them to suggest innovations, and give them
some reasonable small reward for that. And once in a
while, you're going to make a billion dollars off it.

Q: A focus group on steroids.

A: This would be more like ethnography, where you let
them loose and watch what they do. If you want to think
out of the box about innovation, let's not put all of
our bets on 50-year-old PhDs in laboratories. We now
have dispersed the means of individual and collective
innovation throughout the world.

Here's where Wikipedia fits in. It used to be if you
were a kid in a village in India or a village in
northern Canada in the winter, maybe you could get to a
place where they have a few books once in a while. Now,
if you have a telephone, you can get a free
encyclopedia. You have access to the world's knowledge.
Knowing how to use that is a barrier. The divide
increasingly is not so much between those who have and
those who don't, but those who know how to use what they
have and those who don't.

Q: Some folks in the U.S. are worried about the
competition from overseas that comes from that dispersal
of knowledge.

A: We should have thought about it when we sold all
those computers and chips overseas. These aren't just
widgets. These are the building blocks of innovation.

Copyright (c) 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All
rights reserved.

Memo From Mexico, By Allan Wall

August 11, 2004

Bipartisan Spanish Doubletalk in The Skull And Bones Election

This year's presidential election pits incumbent Skull and Bonesman George
W. Bush against challenger Skull and Bonesman John Forbes Kerry.

Each candidate is eager to tell you how different he is from his opponent.

But on many issues, the differences are meaningless.

Bush and Kerry share

http://www.vdare.com/pb/contra_costa_times_article.htm>indistinguishable
platforms on the National Question. They both support mass immigration,
http://vdare.com/awall/oklahoma.htm>linguistic Balkanization,
http://www.vdare.com/sailer/balkans.htm>multiculturalism and
http://www.vdare.com/sutherland/home_front.htm>racial preferences. They
both encourage illegal
immigration and pander
shamelessly.

Both have pulled out the all the stops to attract the coveted Hispanic vote.

The $64,000 Question is, however, Do Hispanic Americans have different
interests than other Americans?

If the answer is NO, then whatís the big deal? Just treat Hispanics like
everybody else.

If the answer is YES, then somebody needs to explain what these differences
are. Because, just maybe, Americaís

http://www.vdare.com/sailer/market_dominant.htm>non-Hispanic majority
should still have some say in the nationís future.

But you wouldnít be alerted to that question from all the hoopla Bush and
Kerry have created over the
"http://www.vdare.com/sailer/bush_thinking.htm>Hispanic Vote," would you?

The growing use of Spanish in election campaigning is a sure sign of
America's Balkanization. (Read my description of bilingual doubletalk in
the 2002 Texas gubernatorial campaign.)

A common language is essential for society to function. We shouldnít be
ready to discard it so carelessly.

But the Skull and Bones candidates see it differently. They're using
Spanish to woo Hispanic voters while ignoring the need that all American
citizens should speak and understand English.

The Kerry-Edwards campaign just announced the "Largest Hispanic Ad Buy in
Presidential Campaign History". This million-dollar PR purchase includes
radio, TV and print ads, and a 30-second advertising spot titled "Honor".

"Honor" includes John Kerry informing us (in Spanish) that he approved this
ad, and John Kerry shouting "Si Se Puede!" [Watch]

The ad attempts to connect Latino voters with John Kerry, "a man of faith,
a man of family. A man of honor."

Kerry's Catholic faith is highlighted. But neither his support for
abortion on demand nor his position that homosexuality is not a sin is
mentioned even though it puts him at odds with Catholic doctrine.

Kerry's family is mentioned - but not his earlier divorce.

By promising to "reform our immigration laws" (political code speech for
amnesty), Kerry feeds red meat to the Hispanic Open Borders Lobby.

Remember that one of Kerryís campaign chairs is unrepentant MEChistA
Antonio Villaraigosa.

The Bush-Cheney camp, not to be outdone, produced the Spanish- language
advertisement ìCaosî [Listen here in

http://www.georgewbush.com/audio/havocsp_256k.mp3 MP3 format.] [Vdare.com
note: Caos is Spanish for chaos, a translation of Kerry's claim that the
campaign was "wreaking havoc" with his schedule.]

"Caos" bashes Kerry for missing the majority of his Senate votes. It does
point out, however, that the Massachusetts senator voted against the Laci
Peterson law, against parental notification for teen abortions, but for
birth control distribution in public schools. These, "Caos" tells us, are
Kerry's priorities. Then, the ad asks, "Are they yours?"

Bilingual politicking opens a new and distasteful can of worms. The end
result will be a fractious, balkanized society that invites even more
government control. These Bush spots, also presuming that Hispanic voters
are deeply orthodox Catholics do not help.

If I had my druthers, all campaign material in languages other than English
would be banned.

Both Bush and Kerry, in different ways, are appealing to the famed Hispanic
"Family Values". Kerry plays the Catholic card; Bush plays the pro-life
card. But neither is likely to win a significant amount of Hispanic
voters.

'Catholic Mexico' is one of those old stereotypes that die hard. In fact,
most Mexicans are not active Catholics. Abortion, prohibited by law but
widely practiced [NewYank for practised], is not a big political issue in
Mexico.

Mexican politics is much more secular than American politics. References
to God and faith are rare. One candidate was almost fined for saying
"Thank God". The Fox Administration tried to
http://www.allanwall.com/pasion.htm>prevent all teens under 18 >from
viewing 'The Passion of the Christ'.

Mexican immigrants are unlikely to jump on the Republican Social
Conservative bandwagon. Nor are they likely to care whether or not John
Kerry is Catholic.

As VDARE.COM's own Edwin Rubenstein has pointed out, American Hispanics
have 'family values' problems---but not the ones Bush and Kerry are
campaigning on. Mexican Americans have higher rates of illegitimacy, teen
pregnancy, abortion and HIV death rates than whites.

After all is said and done, the truth the GOP ignores is that most
Hispanics vote Democrat because they believe the Democratic Party is more
helpful to them. Since the Democratic Party favors Big Government more
than the GOP (but frankly, not much), it remains more attractive to the
majority of Hispanic voters. Thatís not

http://www.vdare.com/asp/mexicans.htm>likely to change in the near future.

Therefore, however much the GOP panders to Hispanics, the Democrats can
always out-do them. If the Republicans totally lose their principles (which
seems to have happened), it risks losing its conservative base.

And as for conservative Hispanics, what does Bush have to offer them?
Well, about as much as he has to offer to 'Non-Hispanic Whites', i.e. very
little.

For four years, Bush has pandered to Hispanics by groveling before Mexican
President Vicente Fox. Despite being the nationís chief law enforcement
officer, Bush has constantly
http://www.vdare.com/francis/bush_amnesty.htm>excused,
http://www.vdare.com/asp/deadbeat_dads.htm>justified and enabled illegal
immigration--all for the anticipated goal of getting the 'Hispanic vote'.

But despite it all, a recent Gallup poll announced that 'Bush Loses Support
Among Hispanics'. (David W. Moore, July 6th, 2004).

These results show where the candidates stand among Blacks, Hispanics, and
'Non-Hispanic Whites' (that negative term used to refer to the American
Majority population.) These results show Kerry beating Bush by 19 points
among Hispanics. Meanwhile, Bush only leads Kerry by 12 points among
Whites.

Yes, Bush and Kerry are both shameless panderers.

At least Kerry has something to show for it. We might call his pandering
'Profitable Pandering'.

Unlike Kerry, what does Bush have to show for it? He can't win over the
majority of Hispanics, and is in danger of losing his base. Perhaps they
might not vote.

Could it be time for Bush to switch to the 'Sailer Strategy'?

American citizen Allan Wall lives and works legally in Mexico, where he
holds an FM-2 residency and work permit, but serves six weeks a year with
the Texas Army National Guard, in a unit composed almost entirely of
Americans of Mexican ancestry. His VDARE.COM articles are archived here;
his FRONTPAGEMAG.COM articles are archived
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Authors.asp?ID=369 here; his website
is http://www.allanwall.com here.

Readers can contact Allan Wall at

http://www.vdare.com/awall/skull_and_bones.htm

Concerned Women for America (CWA) has just launched a new web page on
Alfred Kinsey.

"For more than 55 years, pioneer sex researcher Alfred C. Kinsey's work has
had a profound effect on American culture. Once a household name, Kinsey
is not known to most people under 40. Yet his studies in the late 1940s
and early 1950s, heralded as the first 'scientific' look at sex, became the
foundation of the sexual revolution that has rocked not only America but
the world.

Kinsey's relative anonymity will change in November, when the film Kinsey,
starring Liam Neeson, is slated for release. According to early reports,
the movie, directed by homosexual activist Bill Condon, glosses over the
stunning fact that much of Kinsey's work has been revealed as fraud, and
that he aided and abetted the molestation of hundreds of children in order
to obtain data on 'child sexuality.'"

FOR MORE, go to:

http://www.cwfa.org/kinsey.asp

The Prince and the great debate

The Grauniad Sunday May 21, 2000

Don't turn your back on science

An open letter from biologist Richard Dawkins to Prince Charles

Richard Dawkins


Your Royal Highness,

Your Reith lecture saddened me. I have deep sympathy for your aims, and
admiration for your sincerity. But your hostility to science will not
serve those aims; and your embracing of an ill-assorted jumble of mutually
contradictory alternatives will lose you the respect that I think you
deserve. I forget who it was who remarked: 'Of course we must be
open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.'

Let's look at some of the alternative philosophies which you seem to prefer
over scientific reason. First, intuition, the heart's wisdom 'rustling
like a breeze through the leaves'. Unfortunately, it depends whose
intuition you choose. Where aims (if not methods) are concerned, your own
intuitions coincide with mine. I wholeheartedly share your aim of
long-term stewardship of our planet, with its diverse and complex
biosphere.

But what about the instinctive wisdom in Saddam Hussein's black heart?
What price the Wagnerian wind that rustled Hitler's twisted leaves? The
Yorkshire Ripper heard religious voices in his head urging him to kill.
How do we decide which intuitive inner voices to heed?

This, it is important to say, is not a dilemma that science can solve. My
own passionate concern for world stewardship is as emotional as yours. But
where I allow feelings to influence my aims, when it comes to deciding the
best method of achieving them I'd rather think than feel. And thinking,
here, means scientific thinking. No more effective method exists. If it
did, science would incorporate it.

Next, Sir, I think you may have an exaggerated idea of the natural ness of
'traditional' or 'organic' agriculture. Agriculture has always been
unnatural. Our species began to depart from our natural hunter-gatherer
lifestyle as recently as 10,000 years ago - too short to measure on the
evolutionary timescale.

Wheat, be it ever so wholemeal and stoneground, is not a natural food for
Homo sapiens. Nor is milk, except for children. Almost every morsel of
our food is genetically modified - admittedly by artificial selection not
artificial mutation, but the end result is the same. A wheat grain is a
genetically modified grass seed, just as a pekinese is a genetically
modified wolf. Playing God? We've been playing God for centuries!

The large, anonymous crowds in which we now teem began with the
agricultural revolution, and without agriculture we could survive in only a
tiny fraction of our current numbers. Our high population is an
agricultural (and technological and medical) artifact. It is far more
unnatural than the population-limiting methods condemned as unnatural by
the Pope. Like it or not, we are stuck with agriculture, and agriculture -
all agriculture - is unnatural. We sold that pass 10,000 years ago.

Does that mean there's nothing to choose between different kinds of
agriculture when it comes to sustainable planetary welfare? Certainly
not. Some are much more damaging than others, but it's no use appealing to
'nature', or to 'instinct' in order to decide which ones. You have to
study the evidence, soberly and reasonably - scientifically. Slashing and
burning (incidentally, no agricultural system is closer to being
'traditional') destroys our ancient forests. Overgrazing (again, widely
practised by 'traditional' cultures) causes soil erosion and turns fertile
pasture into desert. Moving to our own modern tribe, monoculture, fed by
powdered fertilisers and poisons, is bad for the future; indiscriminate use
of antibiotics to promote livestock growth is worse.

Incidentally, one worrying aspect of the hysterical opposition to the
possible risks from GM crops is that it diverts attention from definite
dangers which are already well understood but largely ignored. The
evolution of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria is something that a
Darwinian might have foreseen from the day antibiotics were discovered.
Unfortunately the warning voices have been rather quiet, and now they are
drowned by the baying cacophony: 'GM GM GM GM GM GM!'

Moreover if, as I expect, the dire prophecies of GM doom fail to
materialise, the feeling of let-down may spill over into complacency about
real risks. Has it occurred to you that our present GM brouhaha may be a
terrible case of crying wolf?

Even if agriculture could be natural, and even if we could develop some
sort of instinctive rapport with the ways of nature, would nature be a good
role model? Here, we must think carefully. There really is a sense in
which ecosystems are balanced and harmonious, with some of their
constituent species becoming mutually dependent. This is one reason the
corporate thuggery that is destroying the rainforests is so criminal.

On the other hand, we must beware of a very common misunderstanding of
Darwinism. Tennyson was writing before Darwin but he got it right. Nature
really is red in tooth and claw. Much as we might like to believe
otherwise, natural selection, working within each species, does not favour
long-term stewardship. It favours short-term gain. Loggers, whalers, and
other profiteers who squander the future for present greed, are only doing
what all wild creatures have done for three billion years.

No wonder T.H. Huxley, Darwin's bulldog, founded his ethics on a
repudiation of Darwinism. Not a repudiation of Darwinism as science, of
course, for you cannot repudiate truth. But the very fact that Darwinism
is true makes it even more important for us to fight against the naturally
selfish and exploitative tendencies of nature. We can do it. Probably no
other species of animal or plant can. We can do it because our brains
(admittedly given to us by natural selection for reasons of short-term
Darwinian gain) are big enough to see into the future and plot long-term
consequences. Natural selection is like a robot that can only climb
uphill, even if this leaves it stuck on top of a measly hillock. There is
no mechanism for going downhill, for crossing the valley to the lower
slopes of the high mountain on the other side. There is no natural
foresight, no mechanism for warning that present selfish gains are leading
to species extinction - and indeed, 99 per cent of all species that have
ever lived are extinct.

The human brain, probably uniquely in the whole of evolutionary history,
can see across the valley and can plot a course away from extinction and
towards distant uplands. Long-term planning - and hence the very
possibility of stewardship - is something utterly new on the planet, even
alien. It exists only in human brains. The future is a new invention in
evolution. It is precious. And fragile. We must use all our scientific
artifice to protect it.

It may sound paradoxical, but if we want to sustain the planet into the
future, the first thing we must do is stop taking advice from nature.
Nature is a short-term Darwinian profiteer. Darwin himself said it: 'What
a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering,
low, and horridly cruel works of nature.'

Of course that's bleak, but there's no law saying the truth has to be
cheerful; no point shooting the messenger - science - and no sense in
preferring an alternative world view just because it feels more
comfortable. In any case, science isn't all bleak. Nor, by the way, is
science an arrogant know-all. Any scientist worthy of the name will warm
to your quotation from Socrates: 'Wisdom is knowing that you don't know.'
What else drives us to find out?

What saddens me most, Sir, is how much you will be missing if you turn your
back on science. I have tried to write about the poetic wonder of science
myself, but may I take the liberty of presenting you with a book by another
author? It is The Demon-Haunted World by the lamented Carl Sagan. I'd
call your attention especially to the subtitle: Science as a Candle in the
Dark .

• Richard Dawkins is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public
Understanding of Science at Oxford University. His latest book is
'Unweaving the Rainbow' .
---

In response to that, I sent the rag this:

SCIENCE AND ETHICS NEEDED TO APPRAISE GM

Robert Mann

The open letter (Guardian May 21) from biologist Richard Dawkins to Prince
Charles accuses HRH of 'hostility to science' and of 'embracing an
ill-assorted jumble of mutually contradictory alternatives' in his
reservations about genetic manipulation (GM).

The first distinction to make is that GM is technology, not science
- though it does rely on a version of science which I discuss briefly
below.

Dawkins thinks HRH "may have an exaggerated idea of the naturalness
of 'traditional' or 'organic' agriculture. Agriculture has always been
unnatural. . . . Wheat, be it ever so wholemeal and stoneground, is
not a natural food for Homo sapiens." In what sense could this be true?
Allowing tools as natural, so that milling wheat to flour counts as
natural, how is wheat not a natural food for us? Dawkins' explanation: "A
wheat grain is a genetically modified grass seed, just as a pekinese is a
genetically modified wolf. Almost every morsel of our food is genetically
modified - admittedly by artificial selection not artificial mutation, but
the end result is the same." This is perhaps the most stupendous falsehood
in the whole GM debate. GM inserts foreign genes by processes very
different from those that led from the wolf to the pekinese and those which
produced modern wheat strains. GM is nothing like mere speeded-up natural
processes. Indeed, its benefits are routinely claimed on just that basis
- that nature will never insert jellyfish genes into sugar-cane, for
example. But when drawbacks of GM are suggested, the proponents withdraw
po-faced behind this smokescreen of deceit 'we're not doing anything
unnatural'. A PR agent uttering this falsehood may just be too lazy to
have researched the truth first (bearing in mind that truth is not a PR
virtue); a biologist stating it is harder to forgive.

Dawkins says "the hysterical opposition to the possible risks from
GM crops" may divert attention from "definite dangers which are already
well understood but largely ignored. The evolution of antibiotic-resistant
strains of bacteria is something that a Darwinian might have foreseen from
the day antibiotics were discovered. Unfortunately the warning voices have
been rather quiet, and now they are drowned by the baying cacophony: 'GM GM
GM GM GM GM!' " That account is almost unrecognisable. In the late
1960s official advisors, led by Prof Wm Hayes FRS (doyen of British
microbial geneticists), pointed out that routine addition of antibiotics to
bulk agribusiness stockfeeds would select multiple drug-resistance transfer
factors which could then proliferate by bacterial promiscuity causing
severe hazards, at least in hospitals. This grave warning was ignored, and
the gamblers who have continued to do so should be blamed; but to the small
extent that some controls are just lately being imposed on this filthy
practice, some credit could be given to critics of GM who have lately been
pointing out the misuse of antibiotic-resistance genes in typical GM crops.
These recent complaints, far from drowning the mainstream scientists'
warnings on this hazard, have valuably augmented them.

Evolution includes "no natural foresight, no mechanism for warning
that present selfish gains are leading to species extinction" quoth
Dawkins. What is the evidence for his assertion? Only his further novel
claim "99 per cent of all species that have ever lived are extinct."
Experts do agree that most species have gone extinct (though 90% is the
usual estimate); but anyhow, why should any number of extinct species be
interpreted as evidence that evolution is blind? If it were as blind as
Dawkins so persistently asserts, how could any coherent ecology have
evolved let alone proliferated in variety & complexity over several billion
years?

In support of his own assertion "Nature is a short-term Darwinian
profiteer" Dawkins tries to adduce Darwin's exclamation 'What a book a
devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and
horridly cruel works of nature'. If that is an example of the superior
'scientific' reasoning which Dawkins says will endorse GM, we are in
trouble.

Dawkins rightly points out that long-term planning is precious and
fragile. He deduces "we must use all our scientific artifice to protect
it". Quite so; let us begin by understanding what travesties of science
are entailed in GM as now practised. Here are some of this trade's drastic
falsehoods:-

* They pretend the DNA alphabet has only 4 letters (G, C, A
& T) when it has been well known for decades that DNA also contains 'odd'
bases - methylC, methylG, and others - whose biological functions are
little understood.
* They pretend that the effects of gene-insertion by
radically unnatural methods are predictable, when they are known to be
extremely variable (usually lethal).
* They pretend that a cell surviving such gene-insertion
processes, and then selected on just one property - resistance to an
antibiotic - and then grown into a whole organism, e.g. a potato, will
have all properties at least as good as those of a normal organism.
Never since the Nazi attempts to legitimize racism has science been
so suddenly and severely degraded. Apologists for GM posing as defenders
of true science are taking up an untenable, indeed ludicrous, stance.

According to Dawkins, thinking "here, means scientific thinking.
No more effective method exists. If it did, science would incorporate it."
On the contrary, thinking about GM will require non-scientific ideas as
well as the valuable roles that scientific thinking will contribute. To
assess artificial movements of genes from humans to cows, we will need not
only a clear picture of the science involved but also a wider consideration
of questions beyond science - ethical questions. I for one would take my
lead from the Prince on ethical issues, rather than from one who keeps on
saying that there is no plan in evolution but only the blind outworkings of
the laws of chemistry through "selfish" genes.

Richard Dawkins boasts the title, as Guardian readers were told,
"the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science" at
Oxford University. Not all readers would realise this means Oxford has
accepted funding from one of the original Megasoft profiteers. The claim
that GM is based in good science is consistent with this commercial
connection.

---
Robt Mann
consultant ecologist
P O Box 28878 Remuera, Auckland 1005, New Zealand
(9) 524 2949

Home Gun owner stats - - - - compared to:

PHYSICIANS:
a. The number of physicians in the U.S. is 700,000.

b. Accidental deaths caused by Physicians per year are 120,000.

c. Accidental deaths per physician is 0.171.

(Statistics courtesy of U.S. Dept. of Health & Human Services)

Now think about this:

GUNS:

a. The number of gun owners in the U.S. is 80,000,000.

b. The number of accidental gun deaths per year (all age groups) is
1,500.

c. The number of accidental deaths per gun owner is 0.000188.

Statistically, doctors are 9,000 times more dangerous than gun owners.

Remember, "Guns don't kill people, doctors do"

FACT: NOT EVERYONE HAS A GUN, BUT
ALMOST EVERYONE HAS AT LEAST ONE DOCTOR.

Please alert your friends to this alarming threat. We must ban
doctors before this gets completely out of hand!!!!!

Out of concern for the public at large, I have withheld the statistics
on lawyers for fear the shock would cause people to panic and seek
medical attention.

http://www.benadorassociates.com/pf.php?id=6861

This item is available on the Benador Associates website, at
http://www.benadorassociates.com/article/6861

DEMOCRATS ASK: HOW CAN WE LOSE TO THIS IDIOT?

by Charles Krauthammer
Wall Street Journal
August 27, 2004

WASHINGTON -- Upon losing a game at the 1925 Baden-Baden tournament, Aaron
Nimzowitsch, the great chess theoretician and a superb player, knocked the
pieces off the board, jumped on the table and screamed, "How can I lose to
this idiot?"

Mr. Nimzowitsch may have lived decades ago in Denmark, but had the soul of
a modern American Democrat. After all, Democrats have been saying much the
same -- with similar body language -- ever since the erudite Adlai
Stevenson lost to the syntactically challenged Eisenhower in 1952. They
said it again when they lost to that supposed simpleton Reagan. Twice,
would you believe. With George W. Bush, they are at it again, and equally
apoplectic.

Actually, this time around, even more apoplectic. The Democrats' current
disdain for George Bush reminds me of another chess master, Efim
Bogoljubov, who once said, "When I am White, I win because I am White" --
White moves first and therefore has a distinct advantage -- "when I am
Black, I win because I am Bogoljubov." John Kerry is a man of similar
vanity -- intellectual and moral -- and that spirit thoroughly permeates
the Democratic Party.

Democrats feel a mixture of horror and contempt for the huddled masses --
so bovine, so benighted, so besotted with talk radio -- who made a king of
an empty-headed movie star (Reagan, long before Arnold) and inexplicably
want the Republicans' current nitwit leader to have a second term.

Historians will have a field day trying to fathom the depths of detestation
that the Democrats are carrying into this campaign. Vanity is only part of
it. What else is at play? First, and most obviously, revenge. Democrats
have convinced themselves that Mr. Bush stole the last election. They
cannot bear suffering not just a bad presidency but an illegitimate one.

Moreover, against all expectations, it turned out to be a consequential
presidency too. Mr. Bush was not the mild-mannered Gerald Ford-like
Republican he was expected to be -- transitional and minor. He turned out
to be quite the revolutionary, most especially in his radical reordering of
American foreign policy. A usurper is merely offensive; a consequential
usurper is intolerable.

But that is still not enough to account for the level of venom today. It is
not often that a losing presidential candidate (Al Gore) compares the man
who defeated him to both Hitler and Stalin. It is not often that a senior
party leader (Edward Kennedy) accuses a sitting president of starting a war
("cooked up in Texas") in order to gain political advantage for his
re-election.

The loathing goes far beyond the politicians. Liberals as a body have gone
quite around the twist. I count one all-star rock tour, three movies, four
current theatrical productions and five best sellers (a full one-third of
the New York Times list) variously devoted to ridiculing, denigrating,
attacking and devaluing this president, this presidency and all who might,
God knows why, support it.

How to explain? With apologies to Dr. Freud, I propose the Pressure Cooker
Theory of Hydraulic Release.

The hostility, resentment, envy and disdain, all superheated in Florida,
were not permitted their natural discharge. Came 9/11 and a lid was forced
down. How can you seek revenge for a stolen election by a nitwit usurper
when all of a sudden we are at war and the people, bless them, are rallying
around the flag and hailing the commander in chief? With Mr. Bush riding
high in the polls, with flags flying from pickup trucks (many of the flags,
according to Howard Dean, Confederate), the president was untouchable.

The Democrats fell unnaturally silent. For two long, agonizing years, they
had to stifle and suppress. It was the most serious case of repression
since Freud's Anna O. went limp. The forced deference nearly killed them.
And then, providentially, they were saved. The clouds parted and bad news
rained down like manna: WMDs, Abu Ghraib, Richard Clarke, Paul O'Neill, Joe
Wilson and, most important, continued fighting in Iraq.

Stripped of his halo, the president's ratings went down. The spell was
broken. He was finally once again human and vulnerable. With immense
relief, the critics let loose.

The result has been volcanic. The subject of one prominent new novel is
whether George W. Bush should be assassinated. This is all quite unhinged.
Good God. What if Bush is re-elected? If they lose to him again, Democrats
will need more than just consolation. They'll need therapy.

This item is available on the Benador Associates website, at
http://www.benadorassociates.com/
article/6861

Business Week
SEPTEMBER 6 [sic] 2004

Does It Pay To Buy Organic?

For pregnant women and children, the benefits are worth the higher price
Kim Dennis -- with her 2-, 4-, and 6-year-olds in tow -- looked over the
fruit at a Whole Foods Market in Atlanta. She picked up a pint of organic
blueberries selling for $5.99. Nearby, conventionally grown ones went for
$4.99. She put the organic berries in her basket.

"I think it's definitely worth paying more," she says. "If they sit there
and eat a whole pint of berries, that's a lot of pesticides for their
little bodies." With shoppers like Dennis willing to plunk down 10%, 20%,
sometimes even 100% more, organic food sales hit $10 billion in 2003, up
from $178 million in 1980. Responding to the growing demand, mainstream
grocers are stocking more organic produce, milk, baby food, and meats,
while healthy-food chains such as Whole Foods have opened dozens of stores
in the past five years. Food certified under U.S. Dept. of Agriculture
regulations as organic must be produced without most synthetic pesticides
and fertilizers. Antibiotics, growth hormones, and feed made from animal
parts are also banned.

Is organic worth the extra money? Research has yet to prove an adverse
health effect from consuming the low levels of pesticides commonly found in
U.S. food. But for the most vulnerable groups -- children and pregnant
women -- going organic whenever possible for fruits and vegetables that
carry the heaviest pesticide load makes sense. For organic meat, poultry,
eggs, and milk, the direct health
benefit is less clear. It might come down to your willingness to pay more
to avoid supporting certain agricultural practices, such as antibiotic use
in animals, which could promote resistant bacterial strains, or the use of
growth hormones, which could prematurely wear down the animal.

Even organic advocates say certain fruits and vegetables are probably not
worth the premium. For example, at the Atlanta Whole Foods, organic bananas
cost 78 cents a pound, 30 cents more than regular bananas. But there's
almost no health benefit to buying organic in this case, according to
Charles Benbrook, technical director of the nonprofit Organic Center for
Education & Promotion, founded with the support of the industry's Organic
Trade Assn. Any pesticide residue is probably discarded along with the
peel.

REPEAT OFFENDERS

Other produce contains several times the amount of pesticides as the
organic equivalents, and the residue can't be peeled or washed away. Some
98% of the peaches tested by the USDA in 2002 showed evidence of at least
one pesticide (www.ams.usda.gov/science/pdp). Other repeat offenders over
the years include apples, strawberries, and pears -- fruits children gobble
as finger food.

That's worrisome given that contaminants pose the biggest risk to children
and fetuses. Pesticides have been shown to cross the placenta during
pregnancy, and a recent study by scientists at the Columbia Center for
Children's Environmental Health in New York found a link between pesticide
use in New York apartments and impaired fetal growth. Another study, from
the University of Washington in Seattle, found that preschoolers fed
conventional diets had six times the level of certain pesticides in their
urine as those who ate organic foods. And a 2003 report from the Centers
for Disease Control & Prevention detected twice the level of some
pesticides in the urine of children as in that of adults.

Few doubt that high doses of pesticides can cause neurological or
reproductive damage. With infant reproductive organs still forming and the
brain developing through age 12, and with young livers and immune systems
less able to rid bodies of contaminants, eating organic is more important
for children and pregnant or breast-feeding women.

But even then, the argument for some foods is less compelling. While 47%
of the produce sampled by the USDA in 2002 had detectable pesticide
residues, only 16% of grains and 15% of meat tested did. Most of the
residues found in meat (almost always in the fat) were from long-banned
chemicals like DDT, which remain in the environment and is not a problem
organic farming methods can solve.

Widespread use of antibiotics and growth hormones is a larger issue for
those considering organic meat, poultry, eggs, and milk. Here, the major
health benefit to consumers is indirect. Antibiotic use in animals helps
promote antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria, explains Urvashi Rangan,
director of eco-labels.org, a site developed by Consumers Union, publisher
of Consumer Reports. And while the U.S. Food & Drug Administration says
the growth hormone used in cattle is virtually identical to what cows
naturally produce, consumer groups such as Consumers Union argue that milk
from treated cows has higher levels of a growth factor linked to increased
cancer risk.

With meat, a more recent concern is bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or
mad cow disease. The disease spreads when cows ingest animal feed made
with parts from dead animals. The human form of the illness,
Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease, is believed to be caused by eating contaminated
beef. It is always fatal. The risk of contracting the disease, however, is
low. The U.S. has had only one confirmed case of mad cow disease, and the
only American case of CJD involved a woman who contracted it in Great
Britain. Whether to shell out more for organic beef will depend on your
budget -- and how seriously you take the threat of mad cow disease.
Other ways to lower the odds include avoiding processed meats such as hot
dogs and preground hamburger that might contain bits of brain or spinal
cord and eschewing cuts sold with the bone, says Michael Hansen, a senior
research associate at Consumers Union.

The next product in line for organic certification is fish. The USDA is
studying what such certification would involve.

Remember that despite all the things you could worry about, America's food
supply is among the safest in the world. And organic or not, it's still
important for your children to eat their vegetables.

By Carol Marie Cropper

[plus color chart not reducible to ASCII 'Pick Your Produce' -
Some fruits & vegetables are more likely to have pesticide residues than
others ; less likely incl banana, & kiwi [sic - meaning 'kiwifruit', a PR
name for what is properly called Chinese gooseberry]

The headroom within which satire can operate is further decreased
by this couple Kräute.
Get in the mood and add further comments.

R

>INVESTING IN BIOTECH: HOW TO MAKE A FINANCIAL SUCCESS OF THE VENTURE
>
>Scientist Live
>December 2002
>
>http://www.scientistlive.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?id=2295
>
>In the cold current climate of fundraising - what does the dedicated biotech
>investor look for?
>
>Thomas Tscherning and Jesper Zeuthen report.
>
>The rising demand for both high-quality fundamentals - good products under
>development, for example

yes; what would be an example? From PPL's prdkt pipeline, for
example ... rhAAT, perhaps? Tell us about the FlavrSavr® - we've not
yet seen a scientific account of that good prdkt. Why was NuLeaf®
withdrawn?

> and fair valuations for biotech investment cases -

again, some mention of an actual case would be helpful; I don't
know of one

>has in turn put extra pressure on the biotech entrepreneur, who has to live
>up to a certain standard in order to receive financing.
> What does a dedicated
>biotech investor look for in a project?
>Key points are:
>* Focused R&D on products for human therapy (not selling 'informatics' or
>provide services).

why not? haven't they been about the only profitable (fringe)
aspect of the gene-jiggerer era?

>* Proof-of-principle in several animal experiments. Significance levels and
>prognosis of model for later human trials should be addressed.
>* A strong intellectual property position (freedom-to-operate, utility,
>uniqueness).
>* A market ('unfulfilled need') easily quantified and addressed/serviced.
>u A
>competitive edge over other players (positioning).
>* Development and risk is quantifiable and can be handled by small,
>incremental steps in a reasonable
>timescale at reasonable expense. Are fall-back options identified if
>projects
>fail. Can projects be out-licensed at many different phases (diversifies
>risk).
>* Step-up in valuation of the entity through time is fair and modest -
>then it is feasable to raise finance in the future in a sustained fashion.
>Does both the current owners and the future investors receive the same
>comparable return over time and adjusted for risk?
>* The most important: management has built successful companies before -
>and will do it again.
>Competencies needed are identified and connected to identified people (who
>does what and when with what degree of responsability/accountability).

>Venture investors live in a competitive world just like the entrepreneurs.

could have fooled me - they're all just pouring venture capital
to the computer trade, the kits mfrs, the instrument mfrs, etc.

>The investor must therefore become value-adding himself to be able to invest
>in the best biotech projects.

i.e just letting Gluckman, Marshall etc evaporate millions is not
generous enough - you got also to add value ...

> The essential characteristics of a competent venture investor are
>multi-faceted and a non-comprehensive list follows.
> He
>or she:
>* Builds operational milestones - in cooperation with the entrepreneur
>- that are achievable and will increase the value of the project in the eyes
>of other dedicated biotech investors.

nice hint there of Shipley's immortal "perception is reality"

>* Establishes strategic plans for each step of growth of the company
>(considers: patents, animal and clinical trials, licensing, exits).

let's hear more about that last category - please! It has been
very important but little reported. J Celera Venter could become the top
ace exiter soon; meanwhile the list could start with Ken Giles ...

>* Identifies and recruits competent board and management members.
>* Identifies and establishes financing syndicates for later financing.

pretty good trick if done before any evidence of anything saleable
... but, one infers, surprisingly routine. John Robinson's book 'Excess
Capital' was horribly true.

>* Monitors the competition.
>* Makes introductions to technology collaboration partners through network.

pidgin German, I take it

>All of the above is done at cost to the biotech venture investor

and how! The S Sea Bubble was tiny compared with this
hundreds-of-billions gene-tampering bubble

> but is performed to increase and
>leverage

I knew this OK-word would be along any time

> the value of a project. Thus, before an entrepreneur meets a
>possible biotech venture investor, the entrepreneur realistically identifies
>areas of weakness. And this is the opportunity for the investor to help in
>specific areas (other than just allocating capital).
>
>The Zeuthen-plan
>To bring together needs and resources, BBV invented (by the initiative of
>Professor
>Jesper Zeuthen) an instrument to
> a) focus the goals of the biotech project,
>b) give the entrepreneurs value when milestones were met, and
> c) lower the risk of the biotech venture investor.

wot no mission statements?

> This instrument is called the
>Zeuthen-plan (alternatively the option/milestone-plan) and has its source in
>an idea by Professor Roger Fisher of
> Harvard Business School

ah - this rot at the heart of the Ivy League is a source of much
bullshit, and if anything getting worse.

> which was to negotiate on the merits.

that would be a pleasant surprise; don't hold your breath.

> Instead of head-to.head negotiations about price,
>the discussions are focused on how to grow the project into a large company
>with products on the market.

i.e "let's not offrip each other - let's work out how to rook
third parties. Slap in a Waitangi Klaim - that should increase the
project turnover one or two orders of magnitude."

> The Zeuthen plan is best described by a simple
>example (Fig. 1). The entrepreneur needs cash and a detailed plan for
>developing value in the company without diluting his ownership to an
>unacceptable level.

one of the odder needs I've ever heard of

>The biotech venture investor needs return on the invested
>capital through time.

ditto

> The Zeuthen-plan brings these two issues together by
>initially letting the biotech investor invest a large sum at a small value of
>the project (the so-called pre-money value).

well that's mighty big of 'im

> But as time (and work) goes by,
>the entrepreneur can increase ownership by reaching milestones (using the
>financial resources and leveraging his own capabilities) thereby increasing
>the pre-money valuation as the 'proof-of-value' is presented.

wait till A Lovins hears of this - then there'll be a really
slick new future image

> The crucial
>issues are therefore the milestones. In the Zeuthen-plan, each milestone
>(typically 10 - encompassing all of a companies key R&D programs and
>corporate activities) is mutually agreed upon before the investment is done.

how dazzlingly novel, creative, lateral-thinking, and cosmic

>To be able to build these milestones and connect them to value (ownership) an
>exquisite know-how is needed.

far beyond most if not all of those who've cast themselves in the
roles these two are discussing

> And this can only be found in a merit-based
>discussion between the biotech entrepreneur and venture investor about the
>project and financial climate at hand. Possible areas from which milestones
>can be identified in a start-up biotech venture are as follows:
>* Affinity studies

nice OK-phrase, but vague

> and in vitro cell experiments

a card-carrying gasser; best I've heard, finally abolishing the
division live/dead. How frantically post-modern! Better electrocute
on-stage a green rabbit to celebrate this landmark.

>* Animal model (in several species) proof-of-principle.

any idea what that would cost? any idea how little it can mean?

>* ADMET data achieved.

>* Competent management recruited.

again, a blinding insight, breathtaking in its novelty

>* Financing from third party (large dedicated investor).

The Eartha Kitt recording could sell up large -
' but the music that excels is the sound of oil wells
As we add value by GE-ing '

>* Development/marketing
>agreement achieved with large pharmaceutical company entailing up-front
>milestones.

how many of those have been achieved? What is the ratio, to date,
of up-front to down-far-back milestones?

>How to approach a biotech venture investor
>How should a biotech entrepreneur behave when meeting a biotech venture
>investor?

try to keep a straight face, difficult tho' it may be; econobabble
in a soothing tone is the main requirement, sprinkled with a quasi-random
gene-jockey phrase combo, which can be programmed into your PalmPilot for
$999.95. Here's a time-destructing small sample of this value-adding
program FlameFront of Science®; to generate one OK phrase, pick one each at
random from each column:

biolistic genomic chimeraplasty
genomic DNA heterotomy
agrobactomic cassette penetrometry
proteomic kompughtomic biolistics
gene-gentling metabolomic prdktivity
...

>There are no
>simple answers

could have fooled me

>, but after reviewing 380 biotech projects

none of which has yet generated anything saleable

> during the past four
>years some advice can be given.
>These include:
>* Before any meeting with the
>investor, ask the investor what he believes is value in a biotech project -
>and then incorporate/address this in the business plan and presentation.

S/he will not notice you've fed back thus the same OK-phrase they'd
generated from their PalmPilot featuring FlameFront of Science®

>*After one week ask the investor if you could present the company during one
>hour only (you should be able to do it the way of the 'Silicon Valley
>elevator pitch').

- tho' this is only one option; the 'Mile High Club' could play a
crucial role too

> Send handouts of the presentation to the investor at least
>one week before the presentation takes place.
>* Show that you know each critical development stage for the company over
>the next three years - ie
>have a list of 10 crucial milestones ready.
>* List all competitors and describe why the project has a chance to
>succeed despite these threats (make
>a SWOT analysis).
>* Break down and show the value of the company - why is it
>worth EXm (pre-money value).
>* Discuss the future financing of the project -
>not only this round of financing . Be careful to describe exits (eg name
>potential acquirors).

We can dump this project onto Genesis® who can launder it offshore
and foist onto ...

>
>Conclusion
>A biotech entrepreneur should use the biotech
>venture investor as his personal management consultant to achieve the highest
>possible value in the shortest possible time for the project. This will only
>be achieved if truly value-adding products are being developed. To secure
>this, an intimate cooperation between the parties will have to be established
>and must be based on the merits of the project instead of focusing on the
>value alone.
>
>Enquiry No 95
>
>Thomas Tscherning and Jesper Zeuthen are with
>BankInvest Biomedical Venture, Copenhagen, Denmark. www.biventure.com

Wait till these two meet up with
Kieran Elborough & Zac Hanley
Consultants in Plant Biotechnology
New Zealand
Biotech@GreenGeNZ.com

These couples will leverage, rort, & quantify ...

R

When first 'fly-by-wire' (computer-control) airliners were mooted,
the union of flight engineers in NZ investigated thoroughly because their
jobs would evaporate to the extent that these types of airliner would be
deployed.

Perhaps the most amusing item they discovered was the description
of an event soon after the first computer-controlled Airbus entered into
routine service.

It was at an airport where taxiing is done not on the planes'
engines but by a special tow vehicle. The passengers were all loaded, the
doors closed, the motors idling, the checklists moving along calmly between
the two flight-deck crew.

The tow vehicle backed in and hooked onto the nose-wheel strut.
The plane's engines immediately roared up to full forward thrust,
accelerating the plane straight ahead, strewing ground-crew and the tow
aside (without serious injury, by good luck).

As the plane raced faster & faster across the field, the pilots
quickly confirmed that their 'throttle' T-handles were as if disconnected.
Evidently the computer control had over-ridden the pilots' normal control.
Perhaps the immortal sounds "I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that" echoed thru
their fevered minds.

The captain had only seconds to decide whether to try to take off
across the field - which might well have worked in that they might have
got off the ground, but perhaps at the price of damaging some tyres as they
drove across the edges of the runway & taxiways, and with the prospect of
flying around at full power until they consumed all the fuel - speeded
presumably by dumping fuel - and then glide in once the motors had
stopped (if they stopped simultaneously). It must have been an uninviting
prospect.

Fortunately the co-pilot extemporised a way to cut off the fuel
supply soon enough to allow them to brake before the far side of the
airfield.

The explanation turned out to be simple. The computer program had
a subroutine to detect the situation 'in the air and within 20kt of stall
speed' and when this condition arose, automatically slam the engines to full fw
in order to prevent stalling.

The definition of 'we're in the air' for the purpose of
this fail-safe automated safety subroutine was: no pressure on the
nosewheel strut. As the tow vehicle hooked on, it momentarily produced
that condition. And the airspeed was certainly below (stall speed + 20kt);
so the subroutine took over and prevented the "imminent stall" by slamming
the motors onto full power.

You may recall the mid-1988 crash of a similar Airbus at the Paris
air show. A senior test pilot instructed to carry out a simple, safe
manouevre to help sell billions of dollars' worth of airliners does not
crash the plane, but he was killed so it was convenient to blame him. I
have never believed he did anything wrong; I think some other subroutine
kicked in and over-rode the pilot's controls so that he could not gain
power to climb.

You may also recall that, soon after Boeing had gone the same way,
a near-new Lauda Air Boeing twin, climing thru about 30,000ft over Thailand
after takeoff from Bangkok, suddenly was destroyed because one engine was
slammed onto full REVERSE - a manoeuvre the pilots could not do even if
they wished. (I would be interested to know how this mishap was
characterised.)

Blind faith in komputink has worried me. Refusal to admit even
notorious frequent errors is a new kind of lying by those who feel their
future income somehow depends on such collaboration. I find such
corruption sad & worrying.

My further point is that what has so distressingly become
mainstream komputink, largely using Gates' appalling piles of junk, has now
become intimately interwoven with transgenic expts. The reliability of the
DNA & protein sequences read out from such komputink will be less than
supposed, won't it?

Dear Mr Prager,

I was especially impressed by your Aug 10 column about
misuse of the 12-y-old as a "source of wisdom".

As it happens, I have inveighed similarly, provoked by our Royal
Society of NZ (corresp roughly to your US NAS).

I think you'll find some interest, even some use, in this from a
couple y ago.

http://www.rsnz.org/news/index.php?view=searchdate&day=14&month=02&year=2002

Toddlers show adults do not always know best
14-month old kids don't always imitate adults

***

The full story is accessible for $60/y but I comment only on the
headline and its relation to the RSNZ's alleged summary. We are looking at
gutter journalism here - from an organisation which until recently would
not have issued such muck.

The reported fact is not worth reporting, since everyone knows
14-mo-olds sometimes exert their wills to act as no adult would. Why
pretend this is news?

But it is on the plane not of fact but of logic that this RSNZ item
most offends. What toddlers are claimed by the RSNZ to have proven is one
of the main PC lies. The pretence that adults do not generally know better
than children is closely linked to the campaign to create a new criminal
offence, corporal punishment on your own child in your own home. The
guidance children deserve & need from their parents is an enemy of
deviance. Lesbians & homosexuals will find recruiting the young to be
easier to the extent that parents fail to teach children which behaviours
are unhealthy, unhappy, and condemned by mainstream Christianity. Those
who dedicate themselves to lying are now trying to cover their tracks by
emitting blatant rubbish in the decadent confusing spirit of postmodernism.

The illogic of the RSNZ propaganda is breathtaking in its crudity:
the fact that 14-month old 'kids' don't always imitate adults is claimed to
imply that adults do not always know best. What a glaring departure from
reason.

A more subtle aspect is the RSNZ's implication that if a baby does
differently from an adult that must be a choice - and moreover it must be
a superior choice. The mere fact of its different behaviour proves it
knows better . . .

But then, postmodernism pretends that there's no such thing as a
fact, or morality, or standard human logic. Thus, any perversion is as
good as a healthy way of life; lying to the young is OK because you've
asserted there's no such thing as truth; and disoriented adolescents are
grist to the mill of being confused into sexual deviance.

This evil confusion is promulgated with the approval of many
high-school principals, who bring in ALGY (Auckland 'Gay' & Lesbian Youth)
aka Rainbow Youth, to indoctrinate children in sexual deviance (purporting
to satisfy the Ministry of Education's requirement for health eduction).
The main doctrines of these subsidised 'Rainbow' _Einsatzgruppen_ are all
lies:-

1 Sexual orientation is congenital, inborn, fixed at birth - not learned
2 Sexual orientation normally doesn't emerge until puberty
3 If around puberty you experience sexual attraction to one of the same
sex, that is the revelation to you of the fact that you were born that way.
4 There's nothing you can do to resist that orientation, so you should
indulge it by acting as either a lesbian or a homosexual, or a bisexual.
5 These deviant lifestyles are at least as healthy & happy as normal
heterosexuality.

These slogans are spread in a context of 'tolerance', 'diversity', and
similar postmodernism, pretending that anything goes, any way of life is as
wise as any other, and Christian traditions are of no special value. I am
staggered that parents fail to stop this indoctrination by the schools.

Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat its errors, and that
is one reason why our society is so wonky lately. But in addition to that
wisdom, we must recognise that today's important political ideologies,
while using some similar psychology to Goebbels', do run on novel slogans
which most citizens haven't even recognised yet, to promote a genuinely
novel "society" which cannot long cohere. The ideological context in which
WimminsLib, Angry Maadi, and the even more recent militant homosexuality,
have gained such extensive control of government as a Tripartite Axis is so
different from the fascist Axis that most don't recognise it. This wonky
set of slogans is so novel that many don't see it. Others do, but pretend
they don't see it - a pretty effective way to evade any call to discuss
their own ideological stance. Between them, these tolerant folks permit
recruiting in schools for sexual deviance.

Closely entwined with this campaign is the deluded attempt to
*abolish* violence. The NZ Foundation for Peace Studies, which has
honoured the poisonous man-hater Him Kill, has for years pushed its "Cool
Skools" indoctrination against physical combat of all kinds, pretending
that verbal resolutions are available for all disputes among children.
Senior high-school teachers have been taken in by the claim that bullying
is largely of children showing homosexual tendencies, and that if
homosexuality were totally accepted then youth suicide would largely cease.

The posture of acting on behalf of children is lately struck by
some who aim to harm children. 'Keep the kids safe', they intone, as an
excuse for indoctrinating 6-y-old school pupils with explicit sexual
images, anatomical depictions, and monster images of the evil MEN who may
sexually molest them. What a filthy campaign! And all under the phony
banner of 'safety' for children.

The set of slogans from the ruling PC Axis are largely different
from the notorious slogans of historic totalitarian systems. The classic
Nazi slogan was 'the Slavs are sub-human'; closely similar in its blatant
falsehood and vicious slander is 'all men are rapists'. That is the nature
of modern totalitarian ideologies: if you want to be 'in with the in crowd'
you affirm slogans which are not subtly but blatantly false. You thus
declare to the world that you have turned off your God-given reason in
favour of blind loyalty to the leaders of a sect.

Girls can & should do anything; people of color must be promoted
regardless of proven ability; the police should & will be abolished (a
Lenin classic); homosexuals should be ordained; solo-mother households are
at least as good for children as normal households; same-sex couples should
gain the legal status of marriage and be allowed to adopt children;
Aotearoa is Maadi land; materialism is all you need; please add to this
sordid list, especially current models.

The Royal Society of NZ which sends such bull is also a main pusher
of lies about gene-tampering. Once one dedicates one's life to a big lie,
others are likely to get woven in; that is what has befallen our nation and
much of the overdeveloped world, so I suppose the govt-paid science
"academy" is unlikely to escape the main fads of the day.

Indeed, once a PC operative has gained a high rank s/he is likely
to emit smokescreens of postmodernism to hamper any pursuit by logical
scrutiny. So the RSNZ, a major source for years of a steady stream of lies
about gene-tampering, now wishes to misrepresent human psychology as well.
What a disgrace. Just as Newton & Banks must be spinning in their graves
at the drastic degradation of the RS by the gene-jiggering trade, so the
late Sir Charles Fleming FRSNZ and others would deplore the sordid state
into which the RSNZ has sunk within the past decade.
-
Robt Mann
consultant ecologist
P O Box 28878 Remuera, Auckland 1005, New Zealand
(9) 524 2949

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 a campaign against "male chauvinism" and
"sexism." For example, a Mrs. Kutzik from 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 zoot suits?"
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 caption
of 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 a role 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 oppression and decried the
prevalence of sexism in traditional customs, mass culture and language. The
founder of modern feminism, Betty Frieden relied on these books 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 longtime Communist activists. When their daughters
("red diaper babies") encountered "male chauvinism" in the New Left, they
had everything they needed, including the example 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 the
1960'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 "social construct" 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 liberty and 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 major
universities.

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, a
conservative 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 shut
down 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 subversion of 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
Go for 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 .

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

At this rate, those who admit realistically the actual power of WimminsLib
as a totalitarian ideology will not be surprised at this item:

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

This is about as far as I've looked into the current decline of
reason - apart from the main reason which of course is the outcrapping by
the church.

R

*Items Web-mounted on Thursday, 14 February 2002**


Toddlers show adults do not always know best
14-month old kids don't always imitate adults

*

The full story is accessible for $60/y but I comment only on the
headline and its relation to the RSNZ's alleged summary. We are looking at
gutter journalism here - from an organisation which until recently would
not have issued such muck.

The reported fact is not worth reporting, since everyone knows
14-mo-olds sometimes exert their wills to act as no adult would. Why
pretend this is news?

But it is on the plane not of fact but of logic that this RSNZ item
most offends. What toddlers are claimed by the RSNZ to have proven is one
of the main PC lies. The pretence that adults do not generally know better
than children is closely linked to the campaign to create a new criminal
offence, corporal punishment on your own child in your own home. The
guidance children deserve & need from their parents is an enemy of
deviance. Lesbians & homosexuals will find recruiting the young to be
easier to the extent that parents fail to teach children which behaviours
are unhealthy, unhappy, and condemned by mainstream Christianity. Those
who dedicate themselves to lying are now trying to cover their tracks by
emitting blatant rubbish in the decadent confusing spirit of postmodernism.

The illogic of the RSNZ propaganda is breathtaking in its crudity:
the fact that 14-month old 'kids' don't always imitate adults is claimed to
imply that adults do not always know best. What a glaring departure from
reason.

A more subtle aspect is the RSNZ's implication that if a baby does
differently from an adult that must be a choice - and moreover it must be
a superior choice. The mere fact of its different behaviour proves it
knows better . . .

But then, postmodernism pretends that there's no such thing as a
fact, or morality, or standard human logic. Thus, any perversion is as
good as a healthy way of life; lying to the young is OK because you've
asserted there's no such thing as truth; and disoriented adolescents are
grist to the mill of being confused into sexual deviance.

This evil confusion is promulgated with the approval of many
high-school principals, who bring in ALGY (Auckland 'Gay' & Lesbian Youth)
aka Rainbow Youth, to indoctrinate children in sexual deviance (purporting
to satisfy the Ministry of Education's requirement for health eduction).
The main doctrines of these subsidised 'Rainbow' _Einsatzgruppen_ are all
lies:-

1 Sexual orientation is congenital, inborn, fixed at birth - not learned
2 Sexual orientation normally doesn't emerge until puberty
3 If around puberty you experience sexual attraction to one of the same
sex, that is the revelation to you of the fact that you were born that way.
4 There's nothing you can do to resist that orientation, so you should
indulge it by acting as either a lesbian or a homosexual, or a bisexual.
5 These deviant lifestyles are at least as healthy & happy as normal
heterosexuality.

These slogans are spread in a context of 'tolerance', 'diversity', and
similar postmodernism, pretending that anything goes, any way of life is as
wise as any other, and Christian traditions are of no special value. I am
staggered that parents fail to stop this indoctrination by the schools.

Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat its errors, and that
is one reason why our society is so wonky lately. But in addition to that
wisdom, we must recognise that today's important political ideologies,
while using some similar psychology to Goebbels', do run on novel slogans
which most citizens haven't even recognised yet, to promote a genuinely
novel "society" which cannot long cohere. The ideological context in which
WimminsLib, Angry Maadi, and the even more recent militant homosexuality,
have gained such extensive control of government as a Tripartite Axis is so
different from the fascist Axis that most don't recognise it. This wonky
set of slogans is so novel that many don't see it. Others do, but pretend
they don't see it - a pretty effective way to evade any call to discuss
their own ideological stance. Between them, these tolerant folks permit
recruiting in schools for sexual deviance.

Closely entwined with this campaign is the deluded attempt to
*abolish* violence. The NZ Foundation for Peace Studies, which has
honoured the poisonous man-hater Him Kill, has for years pushed its "Cool
Skools" indoctrination against physical combat of all kinds, pretending
that verbal resolutions are available for all disputes among children.
Senior high-school teachers have been taken in by the claim that bullying
is largely of children showing homosexual tendencies, and that if
homosexuality were totally accepted then youth suicide would largely cease.

The posture of acting on behalf of children is lately struck by
some who aim to harm children. 'Keep the kids safe', they intone, as an
excuse for indoctrinating 6-y-old school pupils with explicit sexual
images, anatomical depictions, and monster images of the evil MEN who may
sexually molest them. What a filthy campaign! And all under the phony
banner of 'safety' for children.

The set of slogans from the ruling PC Axis are largely different
from the notorious slogans of historic totalitarian systems. The classic
Nazi slogan was 'the Slavs are sub-human'; closely similar in its blatant
falsehood and vicious slander is 'all men are rapists'. That is the nature
of modern totalitarian ideologies: if you want to be 'in with the in crowd'
you affirm slogans which are not subtly but blatantly false. You thus
declare to the world that you have turned off your God-given reason in
favour of blind loyalty to the leaders of a sect.

Girls can & should do anything; people of color must be promoted
regardless of proven ability; the police should & will be abolished (a
Lenin classic); homosexuals should be ordained; solo-mother households are
at least as good for children as normal households; same-sex couples should
gain the legal status of marriage and be allowed to adopt children;
Aotearoa is Maadi land; materialism is all you need; please add to this
sordid list, especially current models.

The Royal Society of NZ which sends such bull is also a main pusher
of lies about gene-tampering. Once one dedicates one's life to a big lie,
others are likely to get woven in; that is what has befallen our nation and
much of the overdeveloped world, so I suppose the govt-paid science
"academy" is unlikely to escape the main fads of the day.

Indeed, once a PC operative has gained a high rank s/he is likely
to emit smokescreens of postmodernism to hamper any pursuit by logical
scrutiny. So the RSNZ, a major source for years of a steady stream of lies
about gene-tampering, now wishes to misrepresent human psychology as well.
What a disgrace. Just as Newton & Banks must be spinning in their graves
at the drastic degradation of the RS by the gene-jiggering trade, so Sir
Charles Fleming and others would deplore the sordid state into which the
RSNZ has sunk within the past decade.

"From the Personal to the Political, What is the Women's Movement for?"

By Erin Pizzey
mailto: pizzey@cableinet.co.uk

December, 2000

One of the most interesting debates in the new century might well be
the question of how and why the women's movement in the Western world
was founded. Did it, as many of the women journalists explained,
rise from the needs of the oppressed women of the world? Or was it
manufactured by leftist women tired of being relegated to the role
of 'chief cook and bottle washer' in the kitchens of their
revolutionary lovers? According to Susan Brownmiller in her
excellent history of the women's movement, In Our Time Memoir of a
Revolution,1 the women's movement was founded in New York after many
of the female activists returned from Mississippi after attempting to
help black people register their votes. The men in the revolutionary
movements who expected them to take inferior roles hugely discouraged
the women activists. The famous quote from Stokely Carmichael when
asked about the position of women in the forthcoming revolution
was: "What is the position of women in SNCC (Student Non-violent Co-
ordination Committee)? The position of women in SNCC is prone.'
Thereby precipitating a revolution the outcome of which even the
most dedicated of Black Panthers would be unable to imagine.

I joined this amorphous movement in 1971 when Jill Tweedie and other
left-wing journalists were writing in newspapers and magazines that
what women needed were several very sensible demands. There was a
national sigh of relief from millions of women in Britain whose only
reading matter was filled with cooking and knitting patterns. With
the exception of SHE magazine which was run by the redoubtable
lesbian Nancy Spain, most of us were lectured on how to be perfect
housewives.

The Guardian gave details of how to contact this new, exciting,
liberation movement for women and I telephoned the main telephone
number in London and was directed to my local group in Chiswick. I
left my husband facing his first night of baby sitting the children
and set off for my meeting. I was less than impressed to find myself
in a very big house hosted by a small woman with a sharp tongue. If
I thought I was going to join a movement that was going to lessen my
isolation with my two small children I was wrong. 'Your problem is
not your isolation,' I was told. 'Your problem is your husband, he
opresses you.' I looked at the other white middle-class women in
the room with me and tried not to blush. We were also told that we
were to call ourselves a collective, to refer to each other
as 'comrades' and pay three pounds ten to join the Women's Liberation
Movement. There were posters of fierce women waving guns over their
head and a very large portrait of Chairman Mao on the wall. The
violence of the posters upset me and because I was a child born in
1939 - a child born into a terrible war.

I was born in China in 1939. My father was working in the Consular
Service. Both parents were friends of Chiang Kai Shek who was
exiled to Taiwan by the communists. My parents and my brother who
returned to China in 1942 were captured by the communists and put
under house arrest for several years. My twin sister and myself
believed them to be dead. My father's hatred and disgust for any
totalitarian regime left its mark on me and I was offended by what I
saw as a manipulative attempt for the local communist party to add my
three pounds ten shillings to their account.

Still I passionately believed that women in this country needed a
place to meet and to organize in their local areas. I was aware of a
huge group of isolated women many of whom had invaluable natural
gifts and some work experiences that we could use to work in our own
communities. I braved the hostility towards my high heels and my
makeup in the women's liberation office and took over the typing.

I didn't last long. What I saw happening were groups of left-leaning
white middle-class women gathering together to hate men. Their
slogan was 'make the personal political'. What I saw happening was
that the most vociferous and the most violent of the women took their
own personal damage, their anger against their fathers, and expanded
their rage to include all men. Many of these women were 'trust fund
bunnies' meaning that they lived off their rich father's money.

What made the movement so immediately violent was the fact that it
was founded in England by American women who were on the run from the
FBI. This was not the first time America exported its
revolutionaries. Trotsky was deported along with other
revolutionaries years before. Some went to Germany to join the
Badermeinhof group. Others went to Holland to join the Red Stockings,
and some chose to come to England. England seemed destined to become
the revolutionary hot bed for terrorists all over the world,
Beirut- by-Thames. I was at a BBC party when the taxpayers shelled out to
pay for all the famous revolutionaries to be flown in from across the
world to make a BBC programme. I watched 'Danny The Red' argue with
the sweating producer that he wanted bigger expenses and a more
comfortable hotel. Kenneth Tynan told me that we should take over
the BBC and launch the revolution ourselves. I was also forced to
attend a tedious lecture where Bernadette Devlin harangued us and
various black panthers gave salutes. A row of BBC would-be
revolutionaries raised their pallid fists in reply. In 1970
terrorist women from groups everywhere poured into London for the
first women's liberation March but by this time I was becoming far
more politically aware.

I stood up in many of the violent and threatening collectives to tell
the leaders of this movement that hating all men was not anything
that I wanted to be part of. I told them that I considered my life a
luxury. I had a husband who went to work and paid the mortgage so
that I could stay home with my two children. I reminded them that
most people were slaves. I reminded them of the murderous regimes of
Mao and of Stalin but of course many of those women were followers of
both Mao and Stalin. Their attitude was that if thirty million died
for the cause of the revolution so be it. I was hated with a passion
and finally, ironically, excluded from the liberation movement.


The Beginning Of The Women's Refuge Movement - and Its Capture

I left to open a small community centre for women and their children
based on my vision of the lessening of the isolation found in the
Western world due to the breaking down of the extended family. For
many months this little community centre for women and their children
attracted all sorts of women eager to have a place where they could
use their abilities and entertain their children. Very soon women
who avoided the statutory services came to us and we befriended
them. Then one day a woman came in to the little upstairs office and
took off her jersey. She her body was streaked with black and purple
bruising. 'My husband beats me,' she said. I took her home that
night rather than leave her on her own. However, from the very
beginning I was aware of the violence of some of the women coming
into my refuge. By this time I had attracted the two things the
women's movement wanted: a just cause to clothe their political
agenda and money to fund this agenda.

By 1972 the women's movement had run out of money.
Ordinary English women were far too intelligent and educated to want to
be included in a movement that so obviously desired to destroy the family
and men. Only the very isolated pockets of women living in areas like
grizzly Islington and Kew refused to let their boy children have any male
toys, and boasted that their husbands or lovers had now been changed overnight
into 'new men.' The rest of us accepted that men would always be men
and any help in the house was gratefully accepted.

While the bra-burning antics of the women's movement became a stock
joke of television and in newspapers, the movement slid into
obscurity except in certain newspapers and in the academic circles.
Here the misandry of the women's movement found its exponents amongst
untenured women professors. They created a whole new discipline
called 'Women's Studies' and brainwashed generations of young women
coming into universities.

I found schools filled with 'teachers' who were not teachers but
political activists. I went to universities to lecture and was
roundly berated when I pointed out that 62 of the first hundred women
who came into the refuge were as violent as the men they left. I
addressed public meetings and talked about 'battered men'.
Since 'Domestic Violence' was considered a 'female' issue it was
women journalists who covered the subject. If I tried to interest
newspapers in publish my views, I came up again the same problem. I
was in the hands of women editors who refused to allow me to air my
views. Things were no better in the publishing field; editors
routinely censor books, especially the radical lesbian editors. There
was, and still is, a strict censorship against anyone trying to break
the code of silence. No-one wants to acknowledge the extent of the
damage that the feminist movement has done to the family and to men
in the last thirty years.

Over the last thirty years I saw great corruption in the English
courts. I saw fathers of children denied their rights and
persecuted. I have seen our own government concur to a television
advertisement on Scottish television where children were advised to
contact a telephone number should their fathers shout at their
mothers. I had a very early memory of a small girl of my own age who
also lived in China during the time of the communist takeover: she
denounced her father who was taken from the family and tortured for
seven years. I watched as the 'consciousness raising groups', which
again reminded me of Mao's teachings, spread like a rash over the
Western world designed to brainwash women into believing that their
husbands were the enemy and must be eradicated from the family. I
saw the rise of the single parent mother glorified in the women's
sections of some newspapers. Four women journalists wrote about
their search for the right man to give them their children and the
four women promised their readers that the children would never even
know their fathers. I felt that these rich privileged women
journalists were acting irresponsibility. By now I was divorced from
my husband; I was a single parent mother and suffered the anxiety
and the loneliness of bringing up children on my own.

Most of all I saw feminist women teachers discriminate against the
boys in their classrooms. I saw the huge tide of women pouring into
the work force hungry for jobs and careers. Many had no choice.
Financial hardship made it imperative for both partners to work. In
spite of promises there was no national childcare plan, so illegal and
often dangerous attempts were made by other women to take in
children. Men, freed by the birth-control pill of any restraint, demanded sex
whenever they wanted it and then many ran away from the subsequent
pregnancies. London became not only the abortion capital of the
world but also had the highest level of teenage births in the West.
Men turned their backs on marriage and commitment many fearing quite
rightly, that whatever commitment they offered would end up with
women fleecing them for the rest of their lives.

Ostracism Around The Globe

In 1977 congresswoman Lindy Boggs and Congressman Newton-Steer
invited me to a luncheon of honour on Capitol Hill. I realized by
now that what I was going to say was going to make me deeply
unpopular. Everyone who came to meet me always assumed quite wrongly
that I was a 'feminist'. I was nothing of the sort. I have always
disbelieved in 'ists' of any sort and the only way I am willing to
define myself is as 'a lover of God in all his aspects'. By the end
of my speech everyone at the table was avoiding me and I fared no
better at the Press Club in Washington. The expression on the faces
of the hard-bitten women journalists was a source of amusement to
me. Many of my speaking engagements were cancelled especially in New
York and Boston. I spent a hilarious night with another member of
staff in a communal lesbian household of professors in Ann Arbor
but I was very glad indeed to be hosted in another city by a sweet
young wife and mother. I could see then that the feminist movement
everywhere had hi-jacked the whole issue of domestic violence to
fulfil their political ambitions and to fill their pockets. By now
feminists in America and other countries were redrafting the
law. 'In the past decade, feminist legal theory has become a
formidable presence in many of America's top law schools. Feminist
activism has also had a major impact on many areas of the law,
including rape, self-defense, domestic violence, and such new legal
categories as sexual harassment. However, the ideology of legal
feminism today goes far beyond the original and widely supported goal
of equal treatment for both sexes. The new agenda is to redistribute
power from the 'dominant class' (men) to the 'subordinate class'
(women), and such key concepts of Western jurisprudence as judicial
neutrality and individual rights are declared to be patriarchal
fictions designed to protect male privilege.'2

My sojourn in Germany at the invitation of the German Minister for
Sport was no different. I left some very grim-looking German refuge
workers at a dinner table because I could no longer bear the future
of what the refuges were to become. I watched the feminist movement
build its bastions of hatred against men. Fortresses where women
were to be taught that all men were 'rapists and bastards', and the
damage done to the children in the refuges who were to learn that men
were not to be trusted.

I was asked to visit New Zealand in 1978 and I'd hoped to be invited
to speak to groups of refuge in Australia. At that time New Zealand
hadn't yet fallen into the arms of the totalitarian women's movement
(it has now), but I was refused a visit to Australia because the
militant lesbian movement there had control of most of the refuges.
Since, as in many other countries, the Lesbian movement was in control
of most the financing, they merely instructed the Australian refuges
to withdraw their invitations.

To show how this movement had the power to censor information I will
quote one example amongst many. In 1984 I gave evidence in San
Antonio to The Texas Task Force on Family Violence. There was huge
trepidation in the minds of the various shelter groups who were
gathered there to give their testimony. Woman after woman gave her
personal evidence. In some cases the evidence was grim and
dreadful. Those were the genuine victims of their partners'
violence. However, many of the women giving evidence gave a bravura
performance which elicited much clapping from the audience of
excitable sisters but puzzled the members of the Attorney General's
Task Force. 'I understand your grief,' one of the women members said
to a particularly histrionic woman. 'But you said this happened to
you ten years ago? Don't you think it is time you moved on?' She
spoke for most of her task force who were very puzzled by what they
could see as a definite split between the women who were genuinely
giving evidence and the other who were violenc- prone women that were
not innocent victims of their partners' violence but violent
themselves. I gave my evidence about the differences between women
who were genuine battered women and those that were violent
themselves and needed treatment. The committee thanked me and I
received a standing ovation from the audience. When the report
arrived at my home in Santa Fe, it recorded one meaningless sentence
and referred to me as 'Erin Shapiro author' - even though my written
evidence was submitted in the name of Erin Pizzey and my standing as
the founder of the refuge movement was well known to everyone.

Women As Child-abusers

By this time I was working in Santa Fe, New Mexico on child abuse
cases and against pedophiles. Here is where I discovered that there
were just as many women pedophiles as there were men. Women go
undetected as usual. Working against pedophiles is a very dangerous
business. I rescued a little British girl from a female pedophile
in Britain while I was in New Mexico. It took three years of
fighting against the English courts to rescue her and return her to
her parents. When the official solicitor finally telephoned me and
said I was right all along, the child had been abused, I asked him if
he was going to prosecute the woman. 'No,' he said. Yet another
woman got away and is still getting away with abusing children.

During all these years that I worked and specialized in working with
violent women and their children, I could never come to terms with
the fear men had of violent women. I sat around dinner tables and in
sitting rooms, listening to the feminist women abusing the men they
lived with. I saw some women running what amounted to mini
concentration camps behind their front doors. I rarely saw a
father stand up to a violent wife or lover. I hardly ever saw a
father stop his wife abusing the children. They would come to me for
help but when faced with an angry and violent partner the men stayed
quiet and tolerated the violence. Even now people laugh when a man
says he has been abused. I don't find any sort of abuse to any
living thing a laughing matter. I do feel it is time that men
recognized that women in the last thirty years have made many
changes. They have become much more independent of men but men have
not yet made that step themselves. It is depressing when working
with men to find them running out of one violent relationship and
then immediately looking for another woman to 'look after' them. Men
have to get used to the idea that they can look after themselves.
The younger generations of men seem to be aware of this male
dependence upon women and can and do live by themselves.

When I was in Santa Fe a man came to see me who had lost his children
and everything he owned because his little daughter had accused him
of molesting her. I knew from the moment he confessed that he was a
womanizer that he wasn't a child molester. After seeing the mother
who was a violent and manipulative narcissistic exhibitionist, I
realized that she had instructed the child to name her father. I
could see from the behaviour of the child that she had indeed been
molested. Finally after three months of work with her she told me
that the molester was a man who lived across the road. This man was
a government official. When I took the evidence I had to the D.A's
office he refused to target the case. A state trooper who also tried
to get cases targeted told me the DA was divorced on grounds of
suspected child molestation so I had no chance anyway. I knocked on
all the doors of the private houses I could find around his house and
warned the neighbours. Many of them knew but were too frightened of
him to do anything. When I confronted him he told me he was safe
from prosecution because of his position and he would move his family
to Alaska were there was less chance of being convicted. He had,
like so many violent and dangerous men, married a bride from the
Philippines. She didn't dare say anything.

Another little girl told me that her father, his new wife,
and a neighbour raped her every Saturday afternoon during her access visit.
I asked what hurt her the most about the abuse and she said 'her nails -
they are very long and sharp in my ... and she pointed to her bottom.
Those are the terrible details that confirm horrible truths.

Part of the problem with men is that they do not want to accept that
women and particularly the women they have loved can be just as evil
as men can. And yet we know that women perpetrate 60 per cent of
all child abuse. According to research from the NSPCC:
'Over 75 per cent of perpetrators of child maltreatment were Parents,
and an additional ten per cent were other relatives of the Victim.
It is estimated that over 80 per cent of all perpetrators were under
age 40 and that almost two-thirds (62 per cent) were Females.'3

When I was in Canada for a 6-week lecture tour in 1999, I was
appalled at the fear I saw in men across this huge country. Sexual
harassment cases at work mean that there are virtually no more office
parties. I met a very fine professor who had been accused of sexual
abuse of two of his students. He said living in Canada was like
living in a totalitarian state. Indeed it was. I spoke to groups of
men and women all over the country. Men there were already feeling
the heavy hand of the state taking away their rights to their homes
and their children. Men told stories of leaving the house to go to
work and returning to find the woman had 'hoovered' the house which
means she had taken everything she could out of the house and
disappeared with the children into a refuge. The distraught fathers
were unable to find their wives & children because the refuges
refused to disclose any information. In some cases where the father
was very violent it is a necessary precaution but I never intended it
to become routine so that many delinquent women could use this
recourse against totally innocent men. For a woman declaring your
partner violent is a known fast track to a divorce; if that isn't
sufficient, women can now resort to what is called 'the silver
bullet.' This means that she accuses her partner of sexually
molesting the children. He then is cut off from his home and his
family immediately. I was speaking a to men's group in the West
Country recently. Two police officers were at the meeting. They
agreed when I asked them about the truth of false sexual abuse: they
were indeed forced to take a father away from his family even though
was no evidence. In this case a woman had accused the child's father
of having 'interfered' with her in her bath. She called the police
and he was taken away immediately. Later he was released for lack of
evidence. We should have a law that allows innocent victims of such
allegations to sue their attackers.

The Neglect Of Abused Men

I find that men will not help each other the way women do. Men have
had thousands of years of conditioning that enables them to work
together very successfully but when it comes to organising the same
sort of help over their personal lives, they fall apart. I saw this
happen when I tried to open a men's refuge almost immediately after I
bought the main Chiswick building for the women's refuge. I had seen
sufficient men who were horribly abused and needed somewhere to go.
What offended me was that even though the Greater London Council were
willing to give me an excellent building in North London, I could not
get one single fund-raiser to help me raise money for the men.

Now we do have men's groups running in most countries, but as yet
they have no funding when millions of pounds are given to the women's
refuges some of whom abuse the money they are given. We know we have
huge problems with our young men. For the last thirty years they
have been discriminated against in the media and in schools. These
young men have been fed a diet of feminist rhetoric that assures them
they are 'rapists' and 'batterers'. Those were the placards
that surrounded the Savoy Hotel when I was there for a luncheon and
the launch of my book Prone To Violence *3. This was my book that
catalogued my work with violence-prone women and their children. I
was used to the pickets because anywhere I spoke or appeared I was
followed by these hate-filled women. I was aware that they held
their secret conferences that excluded men all over the world. They
have infiltrated most large institutions and the UNO is filled with
women who are determined to destroy the family and marriage as an
institution. They want the family to be defined as women and children
only. Men are to be sidelined; their role as fathers is to be used
as sperm banks and wallets. Fortunately those of us who believe in
marriage and in the necessity of children having both biological
parents in their lives if at all possible have time on our side.
The women's movement is dying out as the elderly proponents now write
books recanting their misspent youth and totter to their graves.

---

1 Susan Brownmiller 'In Our Time Memoir of a Revolution' The Dial
Press, 1999

2 Michael Wiss and Cathy Young, Cato Institute police analysis paper
'Feminist Jurisprudence' 256.html>

3 Erin Pizzey and Jeff Shapiro 'Prone To Violence' Hamlyn Paperbacks
1982