SA Perspectives: Okay, We Give Up
Scientific American April 2005

There's no easy way to admit this. For years, helpful letter writers
told us to stick to science. They pointed out that science and politics
don't mix. They said we should be more balanced in our presentation of
such issues as creationism, missile defense and global warming. We
resisted their advice and pretended not to be stung by the accusations that
the magazine should be renamed Unscientific American, or Scientific
Unamerican, or even Unscientific Unamerican. But spring is in the air, and
all of nature is turning over a new leaf, so there's no better time to say:
you were right, and we were wrong.

In retrospect, this magazine's coverage of so called evolution has been
hideously one-sided. For decades, we published articles in every issue
that endorsed the ideas of Charles Darwin and his cronies. True, the
theory of common descent through natural selection has been called the
unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific
ideas of all time, but that was no excuse to be fanatics about it.

Where were the answering articles presenting the powerful case for
scientific creationism? Why were we so unwilling to suggest that dinosaurs
lived 6,000 years ago or that a cataclysmic flood carved the Grand Canyon?
Blame the scientists. They dazzled us with their fancy fossils, their
radiocarbon dating and their tens of thousands of peer-reviewed journal
articles. As editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of
evidence.

Moreover, we shamefully mistreated the Intelligent Design (ID) theorists
by lumping them in with creationists. Creationists believe that God
designed all life, and that's a somewhat religious idea. But ID theorists
think that at unspecified times some unnamed superpowerful entity designed
life, or maybe just some species, or maybe just some of the stuff in cells.
That's what makes ID a superior scientific theory: it doesn't get bogged
down in details.

Good journalism values balance above all else. We owe it to our readers
to present everybody's ideas equally and not to ignore or discredit
theories simply because they lack scientifically credible arguments or
facts. Nor should we succumb to the easy mistake of thinking that
scientists understand their fields better than, say, U.S. senators or
best-selling novelists do. Indeed, if politicians or special-interest
groups say things that seem untrue or misleading, our duty as journalists
is to quote them without comment or contradiction. To do otherwise would
be elitist and therefore wrong. In that spirit, we will end the practice
of expressing our own views in this space: an editorial page is no place
for opinions.

Get ready for a new Scientific American. No more discussions of how
science should inform policy. If the government commits blindly to
building an anti-ICBM defense system that can't work as promised, that will
waste tens of billions of taxpayers' dollars and imperil national security,
you won't hear about it from us. If studies suggest that the
administration's antipollution measures would actually increase the
dangerous particulates that people breathe during the next two decades,
that's not our concern. No more discussions of how policies affect science
either - so what if the budget for the National Science Foundation is
slashed? This magazine will be dedicated purely to science, fair and
balanced science, and not just the science that scientists say is science.
And it will start on April Fools' Day.

Okay, We Give Up

MATT COLLINS
THE EDITORS editors@sciam.com

EPA To Drop 'E,' 'P' From Name

WASHINGTON, DC - Days after unveiling new power-plant pollution
regulations that rely on an industry-favored market-trading approach to
cutting mercury emissions, EPA Acting Administrator Stephen Johnson
announced that the agency will remove the "E" and "P" from its name.
"We're not really 'environmental' anymore, and we certainly aren't
'protecting' anything," Johnson said. "'The Agency' is a name that
reflects our current agenda and encapsulates our new function as a
government-funded body devoted to handling documents, scheduling meetings,
and fielding phone calls."

The change comes on the heels of the Department of Health and Human
Services' January decision to shorten its name to the Department of
Services.

Geo-Greening by Example

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

NYT March 27, 2005

How will future historians explain it? How will they possibly explain why
President George W. Bush decided to ignore the energy crisis staring us in
the face and chose instead to spend all his electoral capital on a
futile effort to undo the New Deal, by partially privatizing Social
Security? We are, quite simply, witnessing one of the greatest examples of
misplaced priorities in the history of the U.S. presidency.

"Ah, Friedman, but you overstate the case." No, I understate it. Look at
the opportunities our country is missing - and the risks we are assuming -
by having a president and vice president who refuse to lift a finger
to put together a "geo-green" strategy that would marry geopolitics, energy
policy and environmentalism.

By doing nothing to lower U.S. oil consumption, we are financing both sides
in the war on terrorism and strengthening the worst governments in the
world. That is, we are financing the U.S. military with our tax dollars
and we are financing the jihadists - and the Saudi, Sudanese and Iranian
mosques and charities that support them - through our gasoline purchases.
The oil boom is also entrenching the autocrats in Russia and Venezuela,
which is becoming Castro's Cuba with oil. By doing nothing to reduce U.S.
oil consumption we are also setting up a global competition with China for
energy resources, including right on our doorstep in Canada and Venezuela.
Don't kid yourself: China's foreign policy today is very simple - holding
on to Taiwan and looking for oil.

Finally, by doing nothing to reduce U.S. oil consumption we are only
hastening the climate change crisis, and the Bush officials who scoff at
the science around this should hang their heads in shame. And it is only
going to get worse the longer we do nothing. Wired magazine did an
excellent piece in its April issue about hybrid cars, which get 40 to 50
miles to the gallon with very low emissions. One paragraph jumped out at
me: "Right now, there are about 800 million cars in active use. By 2050,
as cars become ubiquitous in China and India, it'll be 3.25 billion. That
increase represents ... an almost unimaginable threat to our environment.
Quadruple the cars means quadruple the carbon dioxide emissions - unless
cleaner, less gas-hungry vehicles become the norm."

All the elements of what I like to call a geo-green strategy are known:-
We need a gasoline tax that would keep pump prices fixed at $4 a
gallon, even if crude oil prices go down. At $4 a gallon (premium gasoline
averages about $6 a gallon in Europe), we could change the car-buying
habits of a large segment of the U.S. public, which would make it
profitable for the car companies to convert more of their fleets to hybrid
or ethanol engines, which over time could sharply reduce our oil
consumption.

We need to start building nuclear power plants again. The new
nuclear technology is safer and cleaner than ever. "The risks of climate
change by continuing to rely on hydrocarbons are much greater than the
risks of nuclear power," said Peter Schwartz, chairman of Global Business
Network, a leading energy and strategy consulting firm. "Climate change is
real and it poses a civilizational threat that [could] transform the
carrying capacity of the entire planet."

And we need some kind of carbon tax that would move more industries
from coal to wind, hydro and solar power, or other, cleaner fuels. The
revenue from these taxes would go to pay down the deficit and the reduction
in oil imports would help to strengthen the dollar and defuse competition
for energy with China.

It's smart geopolitics. It's smart fiscal policy. It is smart climate
policy. Most of all - it's smart politics! Even evangelicals are speaking
out about our need to protect God's green earth. "The Republican Party is
much greener than George Bush or Dick Cheney," remarked Mr. Schwartz.
"There is now a near convergence of support on the environmental issue.
Look at how popular [Arnold] Schwarzenegger, a green Republican, is
becoming because of what he has done on the environment in California."

Imagine if George Bush declared that he was getting rid of his limousine
for an armor-plated Ford Escape hybrid, adopting a geo-green strategy and
building an alliance of neocons, evangelicals and greens to sustain
it. His popularity at home - and abroad - would soar. The country is
dying to be led on this. Instead, he prefers to squander his personal
energy trying to take apart the New Deal and throwing red meat to
right-to-life fanatics. What a waste of a presidency. How will future
historians explain it?

Editor's Introduction
- by K. Lauren de Boer:

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has a passionate desire for a sustainable future.
The economic, the political, and the personal worlds are all part of this
evolving vision. So too, is our spiritual life. Kennedy views the
corporate assault on the environment as "a moral assault on future
generations." And he has worked tirelessly to defend and preserve the
common ecological birthright of our children.

In the 1990s, Kennedy helped lead the fight to turn back the
anti-environmental legislation during the 104th Congress. The New York
Watershed Agreement, which he negotiated on behalf of environmentalists and
New York City watershed consumers, is regarded as an international model in
stakeholder consensus negotiations and sustainable development. Currently,
he acts as Chief Prosecuting Attorney for Riverkeepers, Senior Attorney for
the Natural Resources Defense Council, and President of the Waterkeeper
Alliance. In addition to work on environmental issues across the
continent, Kennedy has assisted several indigenous tribes in Latin America
and Canada in successfully negotiating treaties protecting traditional
homelands.

In this article, the author warns us of the attack underway on our natural
heritage, of the dangers of domination of the government by large
corporations, and of the spiritual implications of our plunder of the
Earth.

Published in the Winter 2005 issue of EarthLight

For the Sake of Our Children

by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

I have been an environmental advocate for twenty years, and I've been
disciplined during that period about being nonpartisan in my approach to
this issue. The worst thing that can happen to the environment is if it
becomes the province of a single political party. Most of the
environmental leaders in our country agree with me. Five years ago, if you
asked the leaders of the major environmental groups in America, What's the
gravest threat to the global environment?, they would have given you a
range of answers: overpopulation, habitat destruction, global warming.
Today, they will all tell you one thing: it's George W. Bush. This is the
worst environmental president that we have ever had. You simply cannot
speak honestly about the environment in any context today without speaking
critically about this president. If you go to the Natural Resources
Defense Council's web site you will see over 400 major environmental
rollbacks that have been promoted by this administration over the last
three and half years. It is a concerted, deliberate attempt to eviscerate
thirty years of environmental law. It is a stealth attack, one that's been
hidden from the public.

We found, in 2003, a memo from Frank Luntz, the president's pollster, to
the president saying that if you go through with the evisceration of
America's environmental law, you are going to alienate not just Democrats
but the Republican rank and file. Eighty-one percent in both parties want
clean air, they want stronger environmental laws and they want them
strictly enforced. Luntz said that to the president, and he said, if we do
this we have to do a stealth attack. He recommended using Orwellian
rhetoric to mask this radical agenda: They want to destroy the forest, they
call it the Healthy Forest Act, they want to destroy the air they call it
the Clear Skies Act. Most insidiously, they have installed the worst, most
irresponsible polluters in America, and the lobbyists from those companies,
as the heads of virtually all the agencies and sub-secretariats and even
Cabinet positions that regulate or oversee our environment. The head of the
Forest Service is a timber industry lobbyist who is probably the most
rapacious timber industry lobbyist in American history. The head of public
lands is a mining industry lobbyist who believes that public lands are
unconstitutional. The head of the Air Division at the EPA is a utility
lobbyist who has represented the worst polluters in America for twenty
years. The head of Superfund is a woman whose former job was advising
companies how to evade Superfund. The second in command of EPA is a
Monsanto lobbyist - these are not exceptions, these are the rules across
the agencies. I think it's a good idea to bring business people into
government, to bring that experience and expertise.

These individuals did not enter government service for the purpose of
promoting the public interest, but in each of these cases, rather to
subvert the very laws that they are now charged with enforcing. We are
seeing the impacts of this already. This year, for the first year on
record, the EPA announced that the dead zone in Lake Erie - you remember
Lake Erie was declared dead prior to Earth Day 1970 - is growing. Our
water in this country, according to EPA, is getting dirty for the first
time since the Clean Water Act was passed.

The rollbacks from the Bush administration have affected the lives of
millions and millions of Americans adversely. Consider just one industry:
the coal-burning utilities. One out of every four black children in New
York now has asthma. I have three sons who have asthma. We don't know why
we have this epidemic of pediatric asthma, but we do know that asthma
attacks are caused primarily by two components of air pollution: ozone and
particulates. In the Los Angeles Times recently there was a description of
a study that's about to be published in the New England Journal of Medicine
that shows that even small amounts of ozone pollution do permanent damage
to children's lungs. In San Bernardino, for example, ten percent of the
children have lungs that are permanently damaged, that will never recover;
and that lung injury precipitates in human beings a whole host of other
diseases throughout their lifetime.

We know that the principal source of ozone and particulates in our air is
coming from 1,100 coal-burning power plants that are burning coal
illegally. They were supposed to install controls over fifteen years ago.
The Clinton administration was prosecuting 75 of the worst of those plants.
But this industry gave $48 million to President Bush during the 2000
campaign, and they've contributed $58 million since. One of the first
things that President Bush did when he came to office was to order the
Justice Department to drop all 75 of those suits. The Justice Department
lawyers were shocked. This has never happened in our history before, where
somebody running as a presidential candidate accepts money from a criminal
and then lets that criminal off the hook. Many of you remember what
happened when President Clinton pardoned Mark Rich and how indignant the
press and the public was at that action. But Mark Rich was one person, and
he never killed anybody. According to EPA, these 75 plants, just the
criminal exceedences from these plants, kill 5,500 Americans every year.
After letting these criminals off the hook, the president then went and
rewrote the Clean Air Act, illegally we believe. We're suing him, we'll
win the suit, but it may take ten years, and in the meantime they'll
discharge what they want.

I live in New York State. Most of the fish in New York are now unsafe to
eat from mercury contamination. I live two miles from the state of
Connecticut; in Connecticut every freshwater fish is now unsafe to eat.
Last week, the Fish and Wildlife Service announced that in 19 states it is
unsafe to regularly eat any freshwater fish, and in 48 states at least some
fish are unsafe to eat. The mercury is coming, largely, from those same
1,100 coal-burning power plants. We know a lot about mercury that we
didn't know five or ten years ago. We know that one out of every six
American women of childbearing years now has so much mercury in her womb
that her children are at risk for a grim inventory of diseases: cognitive
impairment; mental retardation; autism; blindness; kidney, liver or heart
disease. I have so much mercury in my body, I was told by Dr. David
Carpenter, who is the national authority on mercury contamination, that if
I were a woman of childbearing years and produced a child, that the child
would have cognitive impairment, and, he estimated, a permanent IQ loss of
five to seven points. There are 630,000 children born in this country
every year who have been exposed to dangerous levels of mercury in the
womb.

Recognizing this threat to the American public, the Clinton administration
reclassified mercury as a hazardous pollutant under the Clean Air Act; that
triggered the requirement that those companies remove 90 percent of that
mercury within three and a half years. It would have cost, according to
EPA, less than one percent of the revenues of those plants for them to do
that. That's a great deal for the American people, but it's still billions
of dollars for that industry. Eight weeks ago, Bush announced that he was
scrapping the Clinton-era rules and substituting, instead, rules that were
written by the industry's lobbying firm Latham & Watkins. On their face,
they say that they have to clean up, within fifteen years, 50 percent of
the mercury. But they've woven so many loopholes into the new rule that
they will literally never have to clean up. The chief lobbyist for the
firm who wrote it is now the head of the Air Division at EPA.

We are living today in a science fiction nightmare, a world where, because
somebody gave money to a politician, our children are brought into a world
where the air is too poisonous for them to breathe. This is a world where,
because somebody gave money to a politician, my children and the children
of millions of other Americans can no longer enjoy the seminal, primal
activities of their youth - which is to go fishing with their father or
mother and come home and eat the fish. I live two hours south of the
Adirondack Mountains. This is the oldest protected wilderness area on the
face of the Earth; it's been protected since the 1880s. Today, one-fifth
of the lakes in the Adirondacks are sterilized from acid rain which is
coming from those same coal-burning power plants, and this president has
put the brakes on the statutory requirement that those companies remove the
materials that are causing the acid rain.

I flew recently over the coalfields of the Appalachians. I saw something
that if the American people could see there would be a revolution in this
country. We are cutting down the mountains, literally cutting them down.
The coal companies blow off the tops of the mountains, using 2,500 tons of
dynamite in West Virginia alone every year. They fire the workers: When
my father was fighting strip mining in West Virginia in 1968 there were
114,000 coal miners digging coal out of West Virginia. He told me that
strip mining was not only going to destroy the economy of West Virginia in
the long term but it was designed to destroy the jobs so that they didn't
have to employ union labor. Now, there are only 12,000 miners left to get
the same amount of coal. They do it by blowing off the tops of the
mountains, and they take that rubble and they dump it into the adjacent
river valley. They've already covered up 1,200 miles of our streams. We
are destroying, flattening this landscape that is a part of American
history. It's the source of our values, our virtues, our character as a
people; the landscapes, the mountains where Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone
roamed, and we are cutting them to the ground. Of course it's illegal, you
cannot take rubble and debris and toxic waste and dump it into a river
without a Clean Water Act permit, and the Clean Water Act could never let
you get a permit to do that. So we sued. Joe Lovett, the attorney from West
Virginia, sued the Bush administration and the Army Corps of Engineers for
allowing this practice to happen. We won the lawsuit, and the judge
enjoined all mountain top mining. Two days from that victory, the Bush
administration rewrote the Clean Water Act to allow mountain top mining to
continue forever; not only that, but changed the structure of the act so
that anybody can dump rubble and debris simply by getting a rubber stamp
permit from the Corps of Engineers.

If you ask the people in the White House who are promoting this
legislation, Why are you doing this?, what they'll say is: We have to
choose between economic prosperity and environmental protection - that is a
false choice. In 100 percent of the situations, good environmental policy
is identical to good economic policy. We want to measure our economy based
upon how it produces jobs and how it preserves the value of the assets of
our community. If, on the other hand, we want to do what the Bush
administration has been urging us to do, which is to treat the planet as if
it were a business in liquidation, to convert our natural resources to cash
as quickly as possible, to have a few years of pollution-based prosperity,
we can generate an instantaneous cash flow and the illusion of a prosperous
economy. But our children are going to pay for our joy ride. They are going
to pay for it with denuded landscapes and poor health and huge cleanup
costs that are going to amplify over time and that they are never going to
be able to pay. Environmental injury is deficit spending. It's a way of
loading the costs of our generation's prosperity onto the backs of our
children.

There is no stronger advocate for free-market capitalism than myself. The
free market spawns efficiency, and efficiency means the elimination of
waste. Waste is pollution, so in a true free-market economy you would
eliminate, as nearly as you can, pollution. In a true free-market economy
you can't make yourself rich without making your neighbors rich and without
enriching your community. Polluters make themselves rich by making
everybody else poor. They raise standards of living for themselves by
lowering the quality of life for everybody else, and they do that by
escaping the discipline of the free market and forcing the public to pay
their production cost. You show me a polluter, I'll show you a subsidy.
Corporations are externalizing machines; they are constantly trying to
figure out a way to avoid their own costs and foist it out on the public.

I'll give you an example. When the coal companies, the utilities, discharge
mercury into the air they are avoiding one of the costs of bringing their
products to market, which is the cost of properly disposing of a dangerous
processed chemical. When they avoid the costs they can out-compete their
competitors, they can out-compete gas and oil and wind power. But the costs
don't disappear. They go into the fish, they make children sick, they
permanently injure children's lungs, they put people out of work, they
acidify the lakes in the Adirondacks and they've destroyed the forest cover
of the Appalachian Mountains all the way >from Georgia up into Quebec.
Those impacts impose costs on the rest of us that should be reflected in
the price of that product. All of the federal environmental laws are meant
to restore free-market capitalism in America. I don't even consider myself
an environmentalist anymore. I'm a free marketeer. I go out into the
marketplace, I track down the polluters and I say to them, We are going to
force you to internalize your costs the same way that you're internalizing
your profits. Americans have to understand that there is a huge difference
between free-market capitalism which democratizes our country, that brings
us prosperity and efficiency, and the kind of corporate crony capitalism
which is as antithetical to democracy in America as it is in Nigeria.

I work a lot with farmers trying to fight industrial hog meat production,
which is not only one of the primary threats to the American environment
but also one of the primary threats to the American worker. It's allowing
a few monopolies to control our food supply and to put farmers out of
business. Fifteen years ago there were 27,000 independent hog farmers in
North Carolina, today there are none. They have been replaced completely by
2,200 hog factories, 1,600 owned or controlled by Smithfield Foods, one
large corporation. They produce such huge amounts of waste they have to
dispose of it illegally, and so they have to corrupt political officials in
order to continue operating.

I gave a speech a group of 1,200 farmers in Clear Lake, Iowa, and I said
that I am more frightened of these large multinationals than I am of Osama
bin Laden. I got a standing ovation from all the farmers in the room, but
I got six months of abuse from the farm bureau. I stand by what I said.
It's the same thing that Teddy Roosevelt said, that our country was too
strong and too committed to ever be destroyed by a foreign enemy, but our
democratic institutions would be subverted by what he called "malefactors
of great wealth," who would destroy them from within. Another great
Republican, Abraham Lincoln, during the heat of the Civil War in 1863,
said, I have the South in front of me, and the bankers behind me and for my
country, I fear the bankers more.

From the beginning of American history our greatest political leaders -
Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, John Adams and Andrew Jackson - have
warned America against allowing large corporations to dominate our
political systems and our lives. Another Republican, Dwight Eisenhower,
the most famous speech he made was warning America against the domination
by the military-industrial complex. Franklin Roosevelt said that the
domination of our nation by large corporations is the definition of
fascism. I have an American Heritage Dictionary, and the definition, if
you look up fascism, says, "the domination of government by large
corporations driven by right-wing ideology and bellicose nationalism" -
that's getting to look pretty familiar. The problem with letting large
corporations dominate our government is that it erodes democracy, it erodes
our capacity to participate in public life, our capacity for dignity, and
it allows these entities to squander resources that belong to our children.
But the thing that we've squandered worst of all is our natural heritage:
the air that we breathe, the water that we drink, the wildlife, the lands -
all these things that make us proud to be American. This administration has
taken the conserve out of conservatism. They claim to like the free market,
but what they are really embracing is corporate welfare capitalism,
socialism for the rich. They claim to love property rights, but only when
it's the right of a polluter to use his property to destroy his neighbor's
property or to destroy the public property. They claim to like law and
order, but they are the first ones to let the large corporations and their
corporate contributors violate the law at public expense. They claim to
love local control and states' rights, but it's only in those instances
when they're taking down the barriers to large corporations.

They claim to embrace Christianity while violating the manifold mandates of
Christianity: that we are stewards of the land, and that we are meant to
care for nature. They have embraced this Christian heresy of dominion
theology, which James Watt was the first to enunciate when he told the
Senate, I don't think that there is any point in protecting the public
lands because we don't how long the world is going to last before the Lord
returns. The woman he mentored for twenty years, Gale Norton, is running
the Department of the Interior.

The reason that we protect nature is because it enriches us. It enriches us
economically, yes, the base of our economy, and we ignore that at our
peril. But it also enriches us aesthetically and recreationally,
culturally and historically, and spiritually. Human beings have other
appetites besides money, and if we don't feed them we're not going to
become the kind of beings that our Creator intended. When we destroy
nature we impoverish ourselves, we diminish ourselves and we impoverish our
children. We're not protecting those ancient forests in the Pacific
Northwest, as Rush Limbaugh loves to say, for the sake of a spotted owl.
We are protecting those forests because we believe that the trees have more
value to humanity standing than they would have if we cut them down. I'm
not fighting for the Hudson for the sake of the shad or the sturgeon or the
stripped bass but because I believe my life will be richer; my children, my
community will be richer if we live in a world where there are shad and
sturgeon and striped bass in the Hudson. Commercial fishing on the Hudson
is 350 years old. Many of these people come from Dutch families that
learned the same fishing methods that they're using today from the
Algonquin Indians during the Dutch colonial period. I want my children to
be able to touch them when they come to shore to repair their nets or wait
out the tides, and in doing that, connect themselves to New York history
and understand that they are part of something larger than themselves. I
don't want my children to grow up in a world where it's all Unilever and
400-ton factory trolleys 100 miles offshore strip mining the ocean with no
interface with humanity, and where we have no family farmers left in
America; where we've driven the final nail into the coffin of Thomas
Jefferson's vision of an American democracy rooted in tens of thousands of
freeholds owned by family farmers, each with a stake in our democracy. I
don't want a world where we've lost touch with the seasons and the tides
and the things that connect us to the ten thousand generations of human
beings that were here before there were laptops, and that connect us
ultimately to God.

I don't believe that nature is God or that we ought to be worshiping it as
God, but I do believe that it's the way that God talks to us most clearly.
God talks to human beings through many vectors: through each other, through
organized religion, through the great books of those religions, through
wise people, through art, literature, music and poetry - but nowhere with
such clarity, texture, grace and joy as through Creation. We don't know
Michelangelo by looking at his biography, we know him by looking at the
ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. We know our Creator best by studying
Creation, which all of the religious texts mandate us to do. If you look
at all of the great, central epiphany in every religious tradition in
mankind's history, the revelation always occurs in the wilderness. Buddha
had to go into the wilderness to experience self-realization. Mohamed had
to go to the wilderness of Mount Hira in 629 and wrestle an angel in the
middle of the night to have the Koran squeezed out of him. Moses had to go
onto the wilderness of Mount Sinai to get the Commandments. The Jews had
to spend 40 years in the wilderness to purge themselves of the 400 years of
slavery in Egypt. Christ had to spend 40 days in the wilderness to
discover his divinity. His mentor was John the Baptist, a man of the
wilderness who lived in a cave in the Jordan Valley and dressed in the
skins of wild animals. All of Christ's parables are taken from nature: I
am the vine; you are the branch; The Mustard Seed; the little swallows the
scattering, the seeds on fallow ground. He called himself a fisherman, a
farmer, a vineyard keeper, a shepherd. That's how he stayed in touch with
the people. He was saying things to them that contradicted everything that
they had heard from the literate, sophisticated people of their time. They
would have dismissed him as a quack but they were able to confirm the
wisdom of his parables about the fishes and the birds through their own
observations of the natural world. They were able to say: He's not telling
us something new, he's simply illuminating something that's very, very old.

When we destroy these things, we're cutting ourselves off from the very
things that make us human, that give us a spiritual life. And for these
people on Capitol Hill to be saying that they are following the mandate of
Christ by liquidating our public assets, what they are really doing is a
moral affront to the next generation. That's why we preserve nature. Not
for our sake, but for the sake of the future. That obligation is expressed
by the term sustainability. All that word means is that God wants us to
use the things we've been given, to enrich ourselves, to improve our
quality of life, to serve others - but we can't use them up. We can't sell
the farm piece by piece in order to pay for the groceries; we can't drain
the pond to catch the fish. We can't cut down the mountain to get at the
coal. We can live off the interest; we can't go into the capital that
belongs to our children.

What you can do: To track the Bush record on the environment, go to
www.nrdc.org/bushrecord at the website for the Natural Resources Defense
Council, where you will also find alerts, updates on victories, and
opportunities for action.

Ref:

No. 18 Easter 2005
p. 3

Several pages of _Anglican Taonga_ have been lately given over to inveighings
(e.g. by Bishop Bluck)
[this bit in brackets censored]
against supposed victimisation of homosexuals within the Anglican church.

I suggest this is almost a non-issue. I have not been aware of
even a single example. The homosexuals I know in our church are fully
welcome and treated as full members.

To go on about this alleged victimisation is a decoy from the live
issues of the day regarding homosexuality among Anglicans: whether to
ordain known homosexuals, and whether to 'bless' civil unions. Let us have
some well-informed articles on these actual debates.

yrs etc

Robert Mann
Remuera

I was pretty confident you'd know a lot about this case.

> Flight 800 was shot down by, or at least with the full knowledge -- and even
>fuller cooperation of -- the United States "Powers That Be". Call it
>"Government" if you must.
>
>The motive was the same as Oklahoma City, World Trade Center, and all the
>other highly-suspicious "terror" acts of recent history; namely to scare the
>crap out of Americans (and others) so that they would not only accept the
>ever-accelerating pace of destruction of human rights, but would welcome it;
>and not only welcome it, but DEMAND it.

> the attack on the World Trade Center was very
>carefully contrived and planned in such a way as to MINIMIZE casualties.

I agree with that last point. Why has it been so little mentioned?

>If Teri Shiavo is murdered, the Right To Life, the most fundamental of all
>God-given human rights, and the underlying basis of all the others, will
>informally cease.

That case is one of the more wonky recent USA aberrations. I
cannot admire Dubya's role in it.

> The Abortion Holocaust (to borrow a phrase of Randall
>Terry of Operation Rescue) has already technically destroyed the
>right-to-life, and the "assisted suicide" antics of Kevorkian has extended
>that destruction into the realm of mature adults. The Teri Shiavo case, if
>it goes to completion, will prove that the sexual and financial desires of
>any disgruntled spouse (with money, of course) are more important than the
>life of a human being whose continued existence is deemed "inconvenient".

It would appear to be a v bold leap "forward" in several ways. The
fact that the spouse has been living with, and had a couple children with,
another woman ...

>Hey, I've got a great idea: We can vastly reduce the Public Health Expense
>by rounding up all the menal defectives whom no one wants anyway, put them
>in the back of a large truck, pretend to take them for a Sunday Drive, and
>divert the exhaust into the passenger compartment.. Who cares what happens
>to a bunch of cripples anyway? After that we can get to work on the niggers
>and the Jews.......

You've got that out of sequence. The method you describe was used
by the Einsatzgruppen to kill thousands of Jews e.g in the Baltic states.

>As for Flight 800, the missile was seen and reported by numerous
>eyewitnesses. Lies? You decide. I've seen pictures of the exhaust trail
>left by the missile. More lies? Who can say?

There is the v inconvenient problem that, for the past half-decade
at least, forgery of such images has been all too easy. To see such an
image is not to experience what used to be called 'photographic evidence';
the term has lost almost all its formerly powerful meaning.

Even accepting your general inference about USA authorities'
motives, that doesn't prove they actually did the shootdown. They may
welcome the result, but the act may have been done by others.

That latter possibility includes several sub-options e.g FBI knew
some gang was plotting the caper and stood by or even indirectly helped
them.

>The proof that the thing was nothing but a farce was the billion-dollar scam
>of retrieving the entire airplane, piece-by-piece, and painstakingly
>reassembling it in a huge hanger specially designed for this pointless but
>colorful endeavor. What a joke. They did this to demonstrate the great
>depth of their compassion for the slain, and the great magnitude of their
>determination to solve the mystery of Who or What caused that which they
>themselves so carefully contrived.
>
>We are standing on the brink of complete fulfillment of Biblical prophecy.
>It is indeed a privilege to be living in these times. Good luck.

I'm glad you can take it so optimistically.

cheers

R

>> AN INVESTIGATOR'S THOUGHTS ON TWA 800
>>
>> SAM SMITH
>> Undernews
>> March 23, 2005
>>
>> [Hugh Sprunt, intrepid independent investigator of the Clinton years, has
>> some cogent comments concerning TWA 800 on a bulletin board that still goes
>> under the name of Clinton Administration Scandals]
>>
>> HIGH SPRUNT - George Stephanopolous and Kerry have both stated (with no
>> follow-up from the mainstream media, real time or later) that the loss of
>> TWA 800 was not an accident. I recently learned that Dick Morris has
>> stated that the loss of TWA 800 was due to an "attack."
>>
>> Two things, among a great many, that indicate to me that TWA 800 was no
>> accident:
>>
>> 1. If the government claim about an electrical spark in the center wing
>> tank triggering the loss is correct, why has the government given the
>> airlines so many years to fix the problem (with at least one official
>> delay, I think the fix is now not required until 2012 or so). If frayed
>> insulation was an issue, wouldn't one expect more and more problems as
>> 747s aged?
>>
>> Indeed, if the government's finding on the TWA 800 loss was correct, one
>> could make a pretty good argument that 747s should have been grounded by
>> the FAA and the problem fixed immediately. I infer from this that the
>> airlines know the government finding is bogus and are complaisant at least
>> in part because the required fix will probably never take place (earlier
>> model 747s retire before the fix is required).
>>
>> 2. If there is a problem with an electrical spark detonating residual fuel
>> in the 747 [center wing tank] when the temperature at the departure airport
>> is hot, then why aren't 747s leaving from "hot" airports (such as in the
>> Middle East) blowing up?. . .
>>
>> When I did several segments of live commentary on TWA 800 (on FOX TV in
>> Dallas), starting the night of the crash and spanning about three days I
>> mentioned three possibilities for the loss:
>>
>> 1. Bomb
>> 2. Missile
>> 3. Mechanical/Electrical/etc., failure or an accident of some kind.
>>
>> Arguing against bomb was the fact that the aircraft had not been in the air
>> very long when it crashed. The plane was going to Paris and, normally, a
>> bomb would be timed to go off when the plane was well away from the airport
>> (of course, the Lockerbie Pan Am crash took place over Scotland but that
>> plane had been in the air for quite some time; ditto the Air India crash).
>>
>> Arguing against missile was the fact that the size of the plane and its
>> altitude (around 13,800 feet as it turned out) meant that it was unlikely
>> that one hit from a Stinger type missile did the job --- the range was long
>> (but possible) for such a missile if it were fired at exactly the right
>> time from an ideal position on the surface in relation to the plane's
>> flight path, but the warhead is so small that it could not be expected to
>> bring down a 747. (Many two engine corporate jets have been hit by such
>> missiles in Africa; they typically lose an engine but fly on for some
>> distance to the nearest airport).
>>
>> Of course, a "lucky hit" is always possible. A somewhat larger missile
>> (pedestal mounted SAM for example) was a possibility, but there aren't many
>> of those floating around the world in the hands of the bad guys (compared
>> to Stingers and the Soviet equivalent, the Strela, etc.).
>>
>> Arguing against some sort of accident or mechanical failure is the fact
>> that large modern airliners (not taking off and not landing) in good
>> weather (too clear for a mid air collision to be even normally unlikely)
>> just do not blow up on their own, especially airplane types that have been
>> in service for a number of years and have a track record of not
>> spontaneously blowing up in flight, especially in calm weather and not
>> maneuvering.
>>
>> Early on I thought the odds favored bomb, missile, and finally
>> mechanical/electrical/accident of some kind in that order.
>>
>> As the data has come in after the crash, I have come to believe missile and
>> the scenario in Jack Cashill's book [see below] is the best and most
>> complete I have seen in terms of taking into account all the data
>> (including witness data). That said, it is likely not totally correct in
>> every detail, just the best I've seen.
>>
>> Unlike the official findings in the Foster case, it would not surprise me
>> to have "the truth" about TWA 800 be admitted in an on-the-record way in
>> the next 5-10 years. Containment is getting tougher and there are a lot of
>> people pursuing this (FOIA, etc.).
>>
>> With any luck, I'll live long enough to read a reasonably accurate history
>> of the U.S. Government between 1992-2000.
>>
>> FIRST STRIKE:
>> TWA FLIGHT 800 AND THE ATTACK ON AMERICA
>> Jack Cashill, James Sanders
>>
>http://www
>>.amazon.com/exec/obidos/isbn=0785263543/progressivereviea/
>>
>> PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY For conspiracy buffs and skeptics alike, Cashill and
>> Sanders' reconstruction of the investigation into the July 1996 explosion
>> of TWA Flight 800 is a real page-turner. The authors. . . contend that the
>> U.S. government, from the White House to the NTSB, FBI and CIA,
>> systematically tried to obscure the real cause of the explosion with a
>> false theory of mechanical failure. The cover-up, the authors maintain,
>> was motivated by then-incumbent President Clinton, who decided that "only a
>> catastrophe. . . could prevent his reelection in November. He would not
>> let Flight 800 be that catastrophe."
>>
>> Cashill and Sanders make use of evidence from FBI witness summaries,
>> transcripts of agency meetings and reports, conflicting press coverage,
>> scientific data and their own interviews with witnesses and experts to
>> conclude that TWA Flight 800 was brought down by a Navy missile, whose
>> intended target was a terrorist plane on a collision course with the
>> passenger aircraft.

This is from the same AP that just got Natl Geog environmental news to
launder that propaganda in favour of GM-food.

I fear the real story here is a sustained attempt to inculcate defeatism in
the public mind - 'the gene-jiggering bastards have foisted so much of
the muck on us, one way & another, that we may as well give up trying to
control their rorts thru legal procedures. They've got the political
authorities so corrupted that we may as well admit defeat'.

One implication of that strategy is to invite more direct action ...

R

Farmers Inadvertently Receive Biotech Corn

By PAUL ELIAS, AP Biotechnology Writer [via Yahoo News]

SAN FRANCISCO - Swiss biotechnology company Syngenta AG said Tuesday it
mistakenly sold to farmers an experimental corn seed genetically engineered
to resist bugs that was never approved by U.S. regulators, bolstering
critics' claims that the industry needs tighter government scrutiny.

Hundreds of tons of the genetically engineered seeds and resulting corn
crop were shipped in the United States and overseas between 2001 and 2004.
Federal investigators said there was no health or environmental risk
because of the seed's similarity to another Syngenta product already
approved for sale and consumption.

"While there are no safety concerns, the regulatory agencies are conducting
investigations to determine the circumstances surrounding and extent of any
violations of relevant laws and regulations," said Cynthia Bergman, an
Environmental Protection Agency (news - web sites) spokeswoman. "The U.S.
government is also communicating with our major trading partners to ensure
they understand there are no food safety or environmental concerns that
could affect trade."

The Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration (news -
web sites) are also investigating, and the company faces a fine of up to
$500,000, USDA spokesman Jim Rogers said.

In trading Tuesday, U.S.-traded Syngenta shares fell 39 cents, or 1.8
percent, to close at $21.45 on the New York Stock Exchange (news - web
sites). The stock has traded in a 52-week range of $13.93 to $23.26.
Biotechnology critics say the fact that hundreds of tons of unapproved corn
were planted in open fields for four years before Syngenta acknowledged the
mistake shows that regulators and the industry can't now be trusted to keep
genetically engineered organisms from contaminating the food supply.
They also complain that current government regulations are particularly lax
once a genetically engineered crop has been approved for consumption.
Nearly half the nation's corn approved for market by the Department of
Agriculture is genetically modified, but many consumers want their
groceries to be biotechnology-free, and are willing to pay a premium for
food they trust to be organic.

Syngenta also acknowledged Tuesday that some of the unapproved corn may
have been shipped overseas to countries that allow imports of either the
genetically engineered seed or of products made with the genetically
modified corn.

The United States and the European Union (news - web sites) are in a bitter
trade dispute over how strictly to regulate U.S. biotechnology imports.
Syngenta spokeswoman Sarah Hull would not say whether EU countries have
received the unapproved corn.

"Instead of building international confidence in genetic engineering, the
industry continues to shoot itself in the foot," said Greg Jaffe, biotech
director for the nonprofit Center for Science in the Public Interest in
Washington D.C. "It proves this technology is hard to control and we have
an industry that is not as diligent as we would like."

The corn in question is spliced with bacteria genes to resist bugs without
the need for pesticides. It differs from Syngenta's approved seeds only in
terms of where the foreign genetic material is placed in the plant's
genome, said Jeff Stein, head of Syngenta's U.S. regulatory affairs.
Syngenta also did not say where in the United States the corn was grown,
other than to say it sprouted on a total of 37,000 acres in four states -
representing less than 1 percent of all U.S. corn. Still, the mislabeled
corn amounted to several hundred tons shipped over the last four years.
In 2000, the inadvertent planting and distributing of genetically
engineered corn not approved for human consumption - so-called StarLink -
cost the food industry an estimated $1 billion in recalled products.
No recalls for this wrongly shipped corn are planned, Hull said, because
the government has declared the corn poses no health or environmental
risks. But all unapproved plants and seeds Syngenta still had have been
destroyed, she said. She declined to say how much the incident might cost
the company.

Hull said the Swiss-based company discovered the mistake in mid-December
and reported it immediately as required by law to federal authorities.
Syngenta and the USDA said they didn't publicize the situation because of
the ongoing investigation. The science journal Nature first reported the
mishap on its Web site Tuesday.

-----

From: "Jeanette Fitzsimons"

24 March 2005
Syngenta stuff-up raises troubling GE questions for NZ

Today's revelations about Syngenta, the supplier at the centre of the
Corngate affair, illustrate the pitfalls of a GE-monitoring system that
takes seed manufacturers at their word, the Greens say.

"If seed companies are so careless or dishonest that we can't trust that
the seed they're supplying is what they say it is, then our entire
GE-monitoring system is called into question," Green Co-Leader Jeanette
Fitzsimons said.

Syngenta has admitted to US authorities that for three years it sold
genetically-engineered corn seed that hadn't been approved for sale, and
Ms Fitzsimons said it was time for governments around the world to stand
up to the seed manufacturer and demanded it mend its socially
irresponsible ways.

"Syngenta has developed a reputation for thinking it is above the law, and
for refusing to provide regulatory bodies with information that is needed
to assess whether its activities are in the public interest. It's time
our government told Syngenta that if it doesn't make itself more
transparent, trustworthy and accountable, it is not welcome in New Zealand.

"The select committee inquiry into Corngate failed to get to the bottom of
that matter because Syngenta refused to allow our Parliament to see lab
records or talk to the company who did the testing that showed Bt
contamination. Now, they are similarly refusing information to the US
authorities. They won't say which countries they have exported this
contaminated corn to. Surely the unsuspecting farmers and consumers who
have been misled about what they are planting or eating have a right to
know?"

Ms Fitzsimons said the Syngenta revelations were one more good reason not
to allow the growing of GE crops here.

"It's bad enough if you get the GE crop you think you're ordering, but it
now seems you may get something illegal instead. This case illustrates
how illegal seed, which hasn't gone through proper safety checks, can get
into the food chain. Syngenta did not discover the error itself - a seed
breeder did. It makes you wonder how many other mistakes they have made
which are still undetected.

"The US Government claim that this corn is 'safe' is ridiculous. There
has been no time for any safety testing since the error was discovered.
It is clearly different from the approved corn and no-one has investigated
whether the genetic differences might cause harm to health.

"New Zealand's food safety regulatory body - FSANZ - uses the same
criteria as the US Food and Drug Administration to decide whether a food
is "safe". We must stop relying on slack procedures and false assurances of
safety from the US."

ROBIN HAGEY
Los Angels Times
March 19, 2005

In a speech last month to the National Governors Assn., Bill Gates
proclaimed that our high schools are "obsolete," and he produced a list of
solutions to bring them into the 21st century --- among them, offering kids
a challenging college prep curriculum, ensuring that courses and projects
relate to their lives and making sure adults are around, pushing these kids
to succeed. Not the imaginative thinking one would expect from the man who
built one of the world's largest and most successful companies.

While Gates rightly focuses needed attention on minority and economically
disadvantaged students, he's completely missing the point when he spews
platitudes about improving our educational system. Our children are
failing across the board: minority students, poor students, middle- and
upper-class students. A significant contributor to that failure is the
very thing that has made Gates a rich man: the personal computer.

Now don't get me wrong. I'm not a Luddite, out to ban technology. Writing
this article was infinitely easier with the Internet at my fingertips, and
I can't imagine a world without e-mail. But watch teenagers and chances
are if they're doing homework, they're also sitting in front of a computer,
instant-messaging friends or playing a mind-numbing computer game.

In fact, a study of media habits of eight to 18-year-olds released this
month by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation found that homework has
become "a magnet for multi-tasking, with many young people failing to
devote the kind of single-minded attention for which their teachers might
hope."

According to the study, 61% of the youngsters surveyed said they do
something else, some or most of the time, while doing their homework.
There's nothing wrong with doing research online, but it makes kids lazy.
Do research at the library? Why bother when you can access dozens of
sources without moving from your desk? Copy notes on index cards?

What's wrong with cutting and pasting into a Microsoft Word document -
other than the fact that plagiarism has become a rampant problem on
campuses? And, BTW, LOL, why write in full sentences when the language of
instant-messaging will do?

Then there are those computer games. According to the Entertainment
Software Assn., U.S. computer and video game software sales grew four
percent in 2004 to $7.3 billion, more than doubling industry software sales
since 1996. In 2004, more than 248 million computer and video games were
sold, almost two games for every American household.

We're raising a generation of computer and computer game addicts who are
doomed to fail in school, not because the system is obsolete but simply
because it's a lot more fun, and a lot easier, to hang out on the computer
than it is to read "A Tale of Two Cities."

If Gates had been brought up in this kind of environment, what are the
chances he'd have had the focus and creativity to build a company like
Microsoft?

Of course, as a parent, it is my job to pull the plug on the computer.
It's something I do every day. But no matter what I do, my son and his
friends would sooner play a computer game than pick up a book or study.
So, Mr. Gates, instead of offering patently obvious solutions to our
educational system, how about encouraging our kids to shut off the computer
when they're supposed to be doing their homework? It might cost you ---
but I think you can afford it. I'm afraid our society can't afford the
price our kids are paying for this new lifestyle.

Robin Hagey is a writer in Thousand Oaks, California

AN INVESTIGATOR'S THOUGHTS ON TWA 800

SAM SMITH
Undernews
March 23, 2005

[Hugh Sprunt, intrepid independent investigator of the Clinton years, has
some cogent comments concerning TWA 800 on a bulletin board that still goes
under the name of Clinton Administration Scandals]

HIGH SPRUNT - George Stephanopolous and Kerry have both stated (with no
follow-up from the mainstream media, real time or later) that the loss of
TWA 800 was not an accident. I recently learned that Dick Morris has
stated that the loss of TWA 800 was due to an "attack."

Two things, among a great many, that indicate to me that TWA 800 was no
accident:

1. If the government claim about an electrical spark in the center wing
tank triggering the loss is correct, why has the government given the
airlines so many years to fix the problem (with at least one official
delay, I think the fix is now not required until 2012 or so). If frayed
insulation was an issue, wouldn't one expect more and more problems as 747s
aged?

Indeed, if the government's finding on the TWA 800 loss was correct, one
could make a pretty good argument that 747s should have been grounded by
the FAA and the problem fixed immediately. I infer from this that the
airlines know the government finding is bogus and are complaisant at least
in part because the required fix will probably never take place (earlier
model 747s retire before the fix is required).

2. If there is a problem with an electrical spark detonating residual fuel
in the 747 [center wing tank] when the temperature at the departure airport
is hot, then why aren't 747s leaving from "hot" airports (such as in the
Middle East) blowing up?. . .

When I did several segments of live commentary on TWA 800 (on FOX TV in
Dallas), starting the night of the crash and spanning about three days I
mentioned three possibilities for the loss:

1. Bomb
2. Missile
3. Mechanical/Electrical/etc., failure or an accident of some kind.

Arguing against bomb was the fact that the aircraft had not been in the air
very long when it crashed. The plane was going to Paris and, normally, a
bomb would be timed to go off when the plane was well away from the airport
(of course, the Lockerbie Pan Am crash took place over Scotland but that
plane had been in the air for quite some time; ditto the Air India crash).

Arguing against missile was the fact that the size of the plane and its
altitude (around 13,800 feet as it turned out) meant that it was unlikely
that one hit from a Stinger type missile did the job --- the range was long
(but possible) for such a missile if it were fired at exactly the right
time from an ideal position on the surface in relation to the plane's
flight path, but the warhead is so small that it could not be expected to
bring down a 747. (Many two engine corporate jets have been hit by such
missiles in Africa; they typically lose an engine but fly on for some
distance to the nearest airport).

Of course, a "lucky hit" is always possible. A somewhat larger missile
(pedestal mounted SAM for example) was a possibility, but there aren't many
of those floating around the world in the hands of the bad guys (compared
to Stingers and the Soviet equivalent, the Strela, etc.).

Arguing against some sort of accident or mechanical failure is the fact
that large modern airliners (not taking off and not landing) in good
weather (too clear for a mid air collision to be even normally unlikely)
just do not blow up on their own, especially airplane types that have been
in service for a number of years and have a track record of not
spontaneously blowing up in flight, especially in calm weather and not
maneuvering.

Early on I thought the odds favored bomb, missile, and finally
mechanical/electrical/accident of some kind in that order.

As the data has come in after the crash, I have come to believe missile and
the scenario in Jack Cashill's book [see below] is the best and most
complete I have seen in terms of taking into account all the data
(including witness data). That said, it is likely not totally correct in
every detail, just the best I've seen.

Unlike the official findings in the Foster case, it would not surprise me
to have "the truth" about TWA 800 be admitted in an on-the-record way in
the next 5-10 years. Containment is getting tougher and there are a lot of
people pursuing this (FOIA, etc.).

With any luck, I'll live long enough to read a reasonably accurate history
of the U.S. Government between 1992-2000.

FIRST STRIKE:
TWA FLIGHT 800 AND THE ATTACK ON AMERICA
Jack Cashill, James Sanders
http://www
.amazon.com/exec/obidos/isbn=0785263543/progressivereviea/

PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY For conspiracy buffs and skeptics alike, Cashill and
Sanders' reconstruction of the investigation into the July 1996 explosion
of TWA Flight 800 is a real page-turner. The authors. . . contend that the
U.S. government, from the White House to the NTSB, FBI and CIA,
systematically tried to obscure the real cause of the explosion with a
false theory of mechanical failure. The cover-up, the authors maintain,
was motivated by then-incumbent President Clinton, who decided that "only a
catastrophe. . . could prevent his reelection in November. He would not
let Flight 800 be that catastrophe."

Cashill and Sanders make use of evidence from FBI witness summaries,
transcripts of agency meetings and reports, conflicting press coverage,
scientific data and their own interviews with witnesses and experts to
conclude that TWA Flight 800 was brought down by a Navy missile, whose
intended target was a terrorist plane on a collision course with the
passenger aircraft.

NADER IN SCATHING CRITIQUE OF BUSH ADMINISTRATION'S POLICIES ON IRAQ
BRIAN FALER
Washington Post
February 25, 2005

Former presidential candidate Ralph Nader stepped back into the public
spotlight yesterday to deliver a scathing critique of the Bush
administration's Iraq policies, demand a quick end to the American
occupation there and call on antiwar activists to take their case to their
representatives in Congress.

Nader, the longtime consumer activist who has kept a low profile since the
November election, accused the White House of a number of missteps in Iraq,
including tolerating corruption in the occupation's administration.

He also reiterated his long-standing call for withdrawal of U.S. troops
from Iraq within six months. Nader proposed substituting soldiers from
neighboring Arab countries, invalidating the recent elections there ---
which he dismissed as a "farce" --- and holding a new round of balloting
monitored by international observers.

"It's really not a very complicated withdrawal strategy. It has a lot of
common sense behind it. I think the American people would overwhelmingly
support this six-month withdrawal strategy," Nader said. "It's very
important to also note the Iraqis resent enormously the takeover of their
economy."

It was similar to the message he delivered around the country for much of
last year, during what was his third presidential campaign. His independent
bid netted just 463,647 votes, which amounted to less than one percent of
the more than 122 million ballots casts.

Moreover, while recent polls suggest that a majority of Americans believe
the Iraq war was not worth the costs, they also indicate that the public is
divided over whether the Bush administration ought to bring home the troops
before Iraq is stabilized. Nader expressed confidence, though, that his
views would find a much broader audience.

"The organized antiwar movement took the year off in 2004 out of deference
to John Kerry. It didn't want to upset his freedom to mimic Bush, as he
became more of a hawk on the Iraq war. We'd go around the country,
hammering on the war, with a withdrawal strategy, and there was no
resonance," he said. "The whole antiwar movement is [now] coming back into
action."

Nader's attempt to jump-start a movement comes as lawmakers from both sides
of the aisle have turned their attention to Bush's proposed Social Security
revision. Nader mocked the president's plan, saying it stands little
chance of becoming law and amounts to little more than a distraction from
Iraq.

"This is part of Bush's tactics," Nader said. "If he can't shift attention
from domestic issues by starting a war, another war, he does it by pushing
for changes which will never see the light of day."

Nader also blasted newly elected Democratic National Committee Chairman
Howard Dean for not pressing the Iraq issue more forcefully. "The Democrats
have not learned anything from the campaign," he said. "They have not
learned to stand on their own feet and to speak their own mind. They have
not learned to make public their private criticisms of the war, which pour
out like Niagara Falls when you talk to them privately."

"So the difference between the private opinions of these Democrats and
their public opinions is a measure of their political cowardliness and a
measure of how they're going to continue to lose in the future to the
Republicans," Nader said.

"With all due respect to Mr. Nader, Democrats vigorously criticized Bush's
foreign policy during 2004 and came within 60,000 votes of winning the
White House," DNC spokesman Jano Cabrera said. "Mr. Nader, on the other
hand, made his case and garnered slightly more than one-third of one
percent of the vote."

Nader's antiwar organization, Democracy Rising, released a report accusing
members of the president's immediate family of profiteering from the Iraq
occupation.

http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/1530.html

'The Donkey'

When fishes flew and forests walked
And figs grew upon thorn,
Some moment when the moon was blood
Then surely I was born;

With monstrous head and sickening cry
And ears like errant wings,
The devil's walking parody
On all four-footed things.

The tattered outlaw of the earth,
Of ancient crooked will;
Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,
I keep my secret still.

Fools! For I also had my hour;
One far fierce hour and sweet:
There was a shout about my ears,
And palms before my feet.

-- G. K. Chesterton

NYT March 19, 2005

The fight over evolution has reached the big, big screen.

Several Imax theaters, including some in science museums, are refusing to
show movies that mention the subject - or the Big Bang or the geology of
the earth - fearing protests from people who object to films that
contradict biblical descriptions of the origin of Earth and its creatures.

The number of theaters rejecting such films is small, people in the
industry say - perhaps a dozen or fewer, most in the South. But because
only a few dozen Imax theaters routinely show science documentaries, the
decisions of a few can have a big impact on a film's bottom line - or a
producer's decision to make a documentary in the first place.

People who follow trends at commercial and institutional Imax theaters say
that in recent years, religious controversy has adversely affected the
distribution of a number of films, including "Cosmic Voyage", which depicts
the universe in dimensions running from the scale of subatomic particles to
clusters of galaxies; "Galapagos", about the islands where Darwin theorized
about evolution; and "Volcanoes of the Deep Sea", an underwater epic about
the bizarre creatures that flourish in the hot, sulfurous emanations from
vents in the ocean floor.

"Volcanoes", released in 2003 and sponsored in part by the National Science
Foundation and Rutgers University, has been turned down at about a dozen
science centers, mostly in the South, said Dr. Richard Lutz, the Rutgers
oceanographer who was chief scientist for the film. He said theater
officials rejected the film because of its brief references to evolution,
in particular to the possibility that life on Earth originated at the
undersea vents.

Carol Murray, director of marketing for the Fort Worth Museum of Science
and History, said the museum decided not to offer the movie after showing
it to a sample audience, a practice often followed by managers of Imax
theaters. Ms. Murray said 137 people participated in the survey, and while
some thought it was well done, "some people said it was blasphemous."

In their written comments, she explained, they made statements like "I
really hate it when the theory of evolution is presented as fact," or "I
don't agree with their presentation of human existence."

On other criteria, like narration and music, the film did not score as well
as other films, Ms. Murray said, and over all, it did not receive high
marks, so she recommended that the museum pass.

"If it's not going to draw a crowd and it is going to create controversy,"
she said, "from a marketing standpoint I cannot make a recommendation" to
show it.

In interviews, officials at other Imax theaters said they had similarly
decided against the film for fear of offending some audiences.

"We have definitely a lot more creation public than evolution public," said
Lisa Buzzelli, who directs the Charleston Imax Theater in South Carolina, a
commercial theater next to the Charleston Aquarium. Her theater had not
ruled out ever showing "Volcanoes", Ms. Buzzelli said, "but being in the
Bible Belt, the movie does have a lot to do with evolution, and we weigh
that carefully."

Pietro Serapiglia, who handles distribution for the producer Stephen Low of
Montreal, whose company made the film, said officials at other theaters
told him they could not book the movie "for religious reasons," because it
had "evolutionary overtones" or "would not go well with the Christian
community" or because "the evolution stuff is a problem."

Hyman Field, who as a science foundation official had a role in the
financing of "Volcanoes", said he understood that theaters must be
responsive to their audiences. But Dr. Field he said he was "furious" that
a science museum would decide not to show a scientifically accurate
documentary like "Volcanoes" because it mentioned evolution.

"It's very alarming," he said, "all of this pressure being put on a lot of
the public institutions by the fundamentalists."

On education, terror, W, press rights, CBS, men, etc.

Ross Mackenzie
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/rossmackenzie/rm20050318.shtml

March 18, 2005

Quotations ripe for picking in a garden of topical items

Brookings Institution education researcher Tom Loveless, on why U.S.
students show gains on math performance tests while faring poorly in
international comparisons:

(U.S. standardized tests in math are) far too easy. We have downplayed
arithmetic. By and large, American students don't know how to work with
fractions very well and don't know how to work with decimals. This
handicaps their performance internationally.

John Scieszka, author of "The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid
Tales," on the literacy crisis facing boys:

Part of it is biological and part of it is sociological, but boys are
definitely drifting down. We've been testing kids in America for the
last 25 years and finding out that boys are doing worse than girls. But
we don't do enough to change that.

Today's most influential living economist, Nobel Prize winner Milton
Friedman:

After World War II, opinion was socialist while practice was free
market; currently, opinion is free market while practice is heavily
socialist. We (free-marketers) have largely won the battle of ideas
(though no such battle is ever won permanently); we have succeeded in
stalling the progress of socialism, but we have not succeeded in
reversing its course. We are still far from bringing practice into
conformity with opinion.

Yale professor David Gelernter:

The plain-spoken moralist for whom religion matters greatly, the common
man who seems too small for the presidency but is confronted in office
by a cataclysm that re-creates him; who rises to the challenge and
transcends it; who faces a tough re-election battle and wins it; who
redefines the nation's mission in the world and emerges a hero - that is
a traditional American story. It is Lincoln's story. . . . No president
matches Lincoln's greatness, but in modern times this was Harry Truman's
story; and today it is George W. Bush's also.

Actress Nicole Kidman, on why she isn't changing her affectional
preference:

Oh, I wish I loved women, but I don't. I mean, I love them, but
physically, chemically, they just don't do it for me. I love the way a
man thinks. I love the way a man smells. I love the way men look.

Edward Luttwak, senior fellow at Georgetown's Center for Strategic and
International Studies:

At present (Army soldiers) are so few, it is pointed out, that not
enough troops can be sent to Iraq to contain the insurgency - and even
this insufficient number requires excessively long tours of duty, repeat
deployments to Iraq without a decent interval at home, and the
mobilization of too many National Guard and Reserve personnel for too
long. These contentions are valid and the consequences are serious
indeed.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, on threats to the modern world:

Terrorism is among them, and it is no less dangerous and cunning than
fascism.

Norma McCorvey, the formerly pro-abortion "Jane Roe" of the 1973 Roe v.
Wade case striking down many state laws against abortion - who turned
against abortion after working in abortion clinics:

I don't want any more women to be injured by abortion. . . . I plead
with all that I am for the Supreme Court to take Roe v. Wade and reverse
it.

National taxpayer advocate Nina Olson, in her annual report to Congress,
on waning taxpayer compliance:

Without a doubt, the only meaningful way to reduce the compliance
burdens (on taxpayers) is to simplify the tax code enormously.

Van Gordon Sauter, president of CBS News 25 years ago, on CBS News
today:

For one thing, it has no credibility. And no audience, no morale, no
long-term emblematic anchorman, and no cohesive management structure.
Outside those annoyances, it shouldn't be that hard to fix. . . . I
stopped watching it some time ago. The unremitting liberal orientation
finally became too much for me.

University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone, author of "Perilous
Times: Free Speech in Wartime":

It is a well-settled principle of First Amendment doctrine that a
reporter ordinarily may not violate a law of general application merely
because it has an incidental effect on her ability to report more
effectively. A reporter does not have a First Amendment right to violate
the law against burglary in order to steal a document from someone's
office. She has no First Amendment right to violate the law against
wiretapping in order to overhear a bribe. . . . By similar reasoning the
(Supreme) Court held in 1972 (Branzburg v. Hayes) that a reporter has no
First Amendment right to refuse to answer otherwise lawful questions
from a federal prosecutor engaged in a legitimate law-enforcement
investigation, even though answering such questions might make her job
more difficult. Having said this, I have to say that I agree with The
New York Times that the Supreme Court erred in Branzburg.

29 September 2004

SUBMISSION OF MARK ROWLEY ON INQUIRY INTO HATE SPEECH

The Chairperson,
Government Administration Committee
Parliament Buildings, Wellington

If the Committee were to hold hearings in Auckland, I should like to present these submissions orally, to expand on them and answer any related questions.

1 This submission is made on the basis that the Inquiry is not into Hate Crime, though clearly there can be considerable overlap. I would expect Parliament would need to consult afresh, and indeed probably present a Bill or at least terms of reference that included matters such as sentencing differentials, reference to specific defences and so on.

2 In summary, and this goes to the first term of reference especially, I regard further legislation that prohibited or restrained hate speech as unwarranted, not just because the criminal law and other laws already in force can deal with much of it, but because, given how bodies and individuals have acted in this area in the recent past, the public could have little confidence that any such law change could be drawn up and administered fairly, consistently and without discrimination. As well, and this goes especially to the third term of reference, it is very difficult to get a community consensus on what constitutes harm, and what constitutes hate speech The examples that follow illustrate these points.

3 On 4 December 2003 Race Relations Commissioner Joris de Bres in a speech compared cultural vandalism of the Taleban regime in Afghanistan, with the colonisation of New Zealand, which he said was a "sorry litany of cultural vandalism". MP Murray McCully complained to the Human Rights Review Tribunal about the speech, which he said was racially insulting and likely to offend some non-Maori New Zealanders. Mr de Bres denied it was insulting and initially, on the advice of Crown lawyers, claimed immunity by virtue of his office.

4 Chris Lawrence, then Proceedings Commissioner for the Human Rights Commission, interviewed by Kim Hill the morning after the Living Word judgement, when asked by her: “These videos, would you consider incite people to hate gay people?” replied “I think they probably do…” 1 In this he was doing no more than echoing the original Board of Review that had banned them. Significantly, none of the Appeal judges regarded them as hateful, and Thomas J described them as “essentially political tracts”.2

5 Just prior to the Living Word case, MP Tim Barnett, a prominent advocate for law change in this area in a radio interview called opponents of the Matrimonial Property Bill as “moral right homophobes”.3 I suggest that under any hate speech regime the term homophobe would be subject to complaint

6 The Human Rights Commission Annual Report for 1998, in making several points for women’s rights, contained four cartoons that were sexist, arguably hateful, and stereotypical of men (pages 27, 33, 39, 60) 4 This from the body currently administering much of the related law in this area.

7 Ironically, given the terms of reference to this Inquiry, page 8 of that same publication featured Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (194:

“Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. This right includes freedom to change their [sic] religion or belief and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or in private, to manifest their [sic] religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.” This has profound implications for any law change.

8 The lead article of the 22 September 2004 issue of the gay fortnightly, express, was headlined “Known Homophobe Attends Gay Function” in relation to Auckland City Councillor David Hay’s attendance at a mayoral debate organised by the Gay Auckland Business Association (p.3) 5 A law change would jeopardise robust debate in such publications, and as much as David Hay may be able to shrug off such labels they could well be hurtful to other recipients.

9 Adding to the idea that Hate Speech legislation can be a two-edged sword, we have the statements of Amir Butler, outspoken Executive Director of the Australian Muslim Public Affairs Committee, who noted that, following the yet-to-be-decided case between the Islamic Council of Victoria and the Catch the Fire Ministries (brought under the Victorian Racial and Religious Vilification Act 2001): (and touching the fifth term of reference)

“At every major Islamic lecture I have attended since litigation began against Catch the Fire Ministries, there have been small groups of evangelical Christians – armed with notepads and pens – jotting down any comment that might later be used as evidence in the present case or presumably future cases…. The problem is that as long as religions articulate a sense of what is right, they cannot avoid also defining – whether explicitly or implicitly – what is wrong…

“If we love God, then it requires us to hate idolatry. If we believe there is such a thing as goodness, then we must also recognise the presence of evil. If we believe our religion is the only way to Heaven, then we must also affirm that all other paths lead to Hell. If we believe our religion is true, then it requires us to believe others are false.

“Yet this is exactly what this law [and I fear what he says could hold true for New Zealand – MR] serves to outlaw and curtail: the right of believers of one faith to passionately argue against or warn against the beliefs of another…

“The idea that such speech - regardless of how wrong-headed or offensive it might appear - must be banned to protect these religious communities is a furphy: discrimination on the basis of religion was already outlawed; incitement to commit violence was already illegal; and slander was already covered by existing legal instruments.

“All these anti-vilification laws have achieved is to provide a legalistic weapon by which religious groups can silence their ideological opponents, rather than engaging in debate and discussion.

“In doing so, people who otherwise might have been ignored as on the fringes of reality will be made martyrs, and their ideas given an airing far beyond anything they might have hoped for. And at the same time as extremist ideas are strengthened and given legitimacy by attempts to silence them, the position in our society of the religions themselves is weakened and undermined.” 6

This from a man who had initially been a passionate advocate of the Victorian vilification law.

10 Butler is of course touching on a vital issue: whether we go the way of countries such as Canada and Sweden which are applying hate speech laws in ways that are discriminatory to people of faith while ostensibly protecting people vilified because of sexual orientation. The question is sometimes asked, would not such changes in the law be also welcomed by Christians and others subject to religious vilification? Examples spring to mind of the art exhibits “Piss Christ” and “Virgin in a Condom”, and the play “Corpus Christie”. The answer might increasingly be no, not if it limits the adherents of such religions in the teachings and practice of their faiths, which they perhaps naively believed were already sufficiently protected in that regard under Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (cited above in Para. 7).

11 A commonly advanced variation on the slippery slope argument is that existing criminal law is insufficient to deal with incidences of hate speech for a very good reason. Human Rights Proceedings Commissioner Chris Lawrence the day after the Living Word decision made the point

“I would add that violence against vulnerable groups whether they are defined by race or religion or sexual orientation begins with propaganda. It proceeds incrementally. Propaganda operates drip by drip to produce hatred. Hatred in the end results in violence...”

He then compared the risk to gays of ignoring hate speech with the plight of the Jews in 1930s Europe.

“…do you think that ten years of hate propaganda by Hitler and Goebbels contributed to the atmosphere in which the Holocaust subsequently took place?” 7

12 Paradoxically the answer to this rather melodramatic question is provided by law professor Mari Matsuda and philosopher Herbert Marcuse. The latter argued in the 1960s for the idea of a “repressive” and a “liberating” tolerance

“Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left… The Left has no equal voice, no equal access to the mass media and their public facilities - not because a conspiracy excludes it, but because, in good old capitalist fashion, it does not have the re¬quired purchasing power. And the Left does not have the purchasing power because it is the Left. These conditions impose upon the radical minorities a strategy which is in essence a refusal to allow the continuous functioning of allegedly indiscriminate but in fact discriminate tolerance, for example, a strategy of protesting against the alternate matching of a spokesman for the Right (or Center) with one for the Left. Not ‘equal’ but more representation of the Left would be equalization of the prevailing inequality…

“Given this situation, I suggested in ‘Repressive Tolerance’ the practice of discriminating tolerance in an inverse direction, as a means of shifting the balance between Right and Left by restraining the liberty of the Right, thus counteracting the pervasive inequality of freedom (unequal opportunity of access to the means of democratic persuasion) and strength¬ening the oppressed against the oppressed. Tolerance would be restricted with respect to movements of a demonstrably aggressive or destructive character (destructive of the prospects for peace, justice, and freedom for all). Such discrimination would also be applied to movements opposing the extension of social legislation to the poor, weak, disabled. As against the virulent denunciations that such a policy would do away with the sacred liberalistic principle of equality for ‘the other side’, I maintain that there are issues where either there is no ‘other side’ in any more than a formalistic sense, or where ‘the other side’ is demonstrably ‘regressive’ and impedes pos¬sible improvement of the human condition. To toler¬ate propaganda for inhumanity vitiates the goals not only of liberalism but of every progressive political philosophy.” 8

13 Clearly, in 2004, Marcuse is hopelessly wrong - the minorities, especially in relation to sexual orientation, do have power, media access, a range of legal redress and a standing only dreamed of in the 1960s. Matsuda, implicitly supporting Marcuse, would deny, at least on questions of race hate speech, legal remedies to vilified and offended majorities subject to hate speech from minorities precisely because they were so powerful and hegemonic. 9

Hopefully this government will not institute a Marcusian “Repressive Tolerance” regime, however good the misguided intentions. Times have changed, power is much more evenly shared. Hitler is not the Prime Minister of New Zealand, and the cheeky Paul Holmes is not Goebbels.

References:

1 Chris Lawrence, interviewed with Paul Rishworth, by Kim Hill, National Programme, Friday 1st September 2000

2 Living Word Distributors v Human Rights Action Group NZ Court of Appeal 31 August 2000 CA58/00 Thomas J at para 82

3 Tim Barnett, interviewed on the G & T Show, Access Radio Auckland 25 May 2000

4 Report of the Human Rights Commission for the Year Ended 30 June 1998

5 express, issue of 22 September 2004 (Auckland)

6 Amir Butler “Why I've changed my mind on vilification laws” The Age 4 June 2004

7 Chris Lawrence cited supra

8 Herbert Marcuse “Repressive Tolerance” 1965, in A Critique of Pure Tolerance Beacon Press Boston 1969 (includes the Marcuse 1968 “Postscript”)

9 Mari Matsuda Legal storytelling: public response to racist speech: considering the victim's story 87 Michigan Law Review 2320 August, 1989

Mark Rowley

17 Yattendon Rd
St Heliers
Auckland

W. 09 4895 417
M 027 2922 422

How Bush and Monsanto manufacture black support

------

The Uncle Tom Award
Jonathan Matthews
Freezerbox magazine, 14 March 2005
http://www.freezerbox.com/archive/article.asp?id=337

*Meet the civil rights group whose rhetoric comes from Wise Use, whose
support comes from Monsanto, and whose agenda coincides precisely with that
of George W. Bush*

A couple of years back I wrote a piece called 'The Fake Parade'. It was
about a march at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in
Johannesburg that had been widely reported as a protest by poor Third World
farmers in support of GMOs. A leading light of the Biotechnology Industry
Organisation declared the march "a turning point" because "real, live,
developing-world farmers" had begun "speaking for themselves". What they
had to say seemed pretty unpalatable to the environmental and development
NGOs that have raised concerns over GM crops. A commentary on the march in
The (London) Times was headlined, "I do not need white NGOs to speak for
me" while, during the march itself, a "Bullshit award" was presented to the
Indian environmentalist Vandana Shiva for being "a mouthpiece of western
eco-imperialism".

'The Fake Parade' showed the march was a charade. For instance, the main
"developing-world farmer" quoted by the man from BIO turned out never to
have farmed in his life. Instead, Chengal Reddy headed a lobby for big
commercial farmers in Andhra Pradesh that aspired to becoming the
operational arm of the trade association for the agrochemical companies
active in India. Similarly, the "media contact" for the march and for the
"Bullshit award" was the daughter of a US lumber industrialist, who had
worked out of various free market NGOs, such as the Washington-based
Competitive Enterprise Institute. Her specialty was "counter protest".

Of course, such attempts to position biotech's soap box behind a black
man's face neither began nor ended in Johannesburg. In late 1999, for
instance, a street protest against genetic engineering in Washington DC was
disrupted by a group of African-Americans bearing placards such as "Biotech
saves children's lives." A Baptist Church from a poor neighborhood had,
the New York Times revealed, been paid by Monsanto's PR firm to bus in the
counter-demonstrators. But Johannesburg does seem to have been a kind of
watershed. Since then, Monsanto's fake parade has really begun to hit its
stride. And from US administration platforms to UN headquarters, from
Capitol Hill to the European Parliament, we've been treated to a veritable
minstrelsy of lobbying.

Let's pick up the trail amidst the Martin Luther King Day observances in
New York City this January. That was when the Congress of Racial Equality
(CORE) invited some 700 diplomats, scientists, journalists, and Gotham
high-school students to come and consider the "implications and reality" of
biotechnology at UN headquarters. CORE's "World Conference" was presided
over by His Excellency, Aminu Bashir Wali, the Ambassador of Nigeria, and
after lunch came the premiere of the film "Voices from Africa", showcasing
the results of "CORE's fact-finding trip to Africa". The film opened and
closed with comments by CORE's National Chairman, Roy Innis, who explained
that it was his concern about hunger in Africa that led him to go there to
see for himself and to investigate the potential for biotechnology. The
film concluded with Innis saying, "We have to do everything possible to
ensure that the African farmer has access to this new technology which
potentially can do so much to improve his quality of life."

In a talk on biotechnology at the Natural History Museum in London in May
2003, the world-renowned American botanist, Dr Peter Raven, noted CORE's
strong concern about the obstruction of technological advancement. "Last
month, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), one of America's most
venerable and respected civil rights groups, confronted Greenpeace at a
public event and accused it of 'eco-manslaughter' through its support of
international policies limiting development and the expansion of technology
to the developing world's poor."

CORE's national spokesman, Niger Innis, described that counter-protest as
"just the first step in bringing justice to the Third World." And so it
proved. In September 2003, CORE's national spokesman presided over a mock
awards ceremony at the World Trade Organization meeting in the Mexican
resort of Cancun. The ceremony included participants carrying "Save the
Children" placards while the awards went to those Innis termed advocates of
"lethal eco-imperialism." "Their opposition to genetically engineered
foods, pesticides and energy development," Innis explained, "devastates
families and communities and kills millions every year". Cyril Boynes Jr.,
the director of international affairs for CORE, said the ceremony was
important "to draw attention to the destructive and murderous policies of
these eco-terrorists". Four months later CORE organised a "Teach-In" in New
York entitled, "Eco-Imperialism: The global green movement's war on the
developing world's poor". In a press release CORE's Niger Innis said that
after the teach-in "eco-imperialism'" would be a household word, adding,
"We intend to stop this callous eco-manslaughter".

CORE's rhetoric has been shaped by PR man Paul Driessen, CORE's white
Senior Policy Advisor, who moderated two of the panels at its "UN World
Conference" on biotech. Driessen is the author of "Eco-Imperialism: Green
Power - Black Death". The book, which has a foreword by Niger Innis, lays
at the door of the environmental movement "the hunger and suffering of
millions of the world's poor who are denied the benefits of genetically
engineered food." Driessen and Innis are also listed as Directors of the
Economic Human Rights Project - "an initiative of the Center for the
Defense of Free Enterprise, in cooperation with the Congress of Racial
Equality", which aims to "correct prevalent environmental myths and
misguided policies that help perpetuate poverty, misery, disease and early
death in developing countries."

Driessen's book is published by the Free Enterprise Press, the publishing
arm of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, where Driessen is a
Senior Fellow. According to a review of Driessen's book on CDFE's website,
it helps the reader "understand why the environmental movement is engaged
in the most appalling example of genocide the world has ever known!" CDFE
is led by Alan Merril Gottlieb and Ron Arnold, who founded the
anti-environmental Wise Use movement. Arnold was once a consultant for Dow
Chemical, as well as Head of the Washington State chapter of the American
Freedom Coalition, the political arm of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's
Unification Church (which has also shared offices with CDFE). In 1991
Arnold told the New York Times, "We [CDFE] created a sector of public
opinion that didn't used to exist. No one was aware that environmentalism
was a problem until we came along." CDFE's previous main focus had been
opposing gun controls. According to the Times, Gottlieb shifted the
organization?s focus when he realized the fundraising potential of opposing
environmentalism: "For us, the environmental movement has become the
perfect bogeyman." Gottlieb, who describes himself as "the premiere
anti-communist, free-enterprise, laissez-faire capitalist" and who has
spent time in jail for tax-evasion, also says, "Facts don't really matter.
In politics, perception is reality." [this last slogan was also propounded
by NZ Prime Minister Ms Jenny Shipley]

The night before CORE's UN biotech conference this January, the
organisation hosted a reception at the New York Hilton to honor, amongst
others, Karl Rove - the Bush election strategist widely credited with
having overseen black voter disenfranchisment in Florida and Ohio. This
might seem a curious way of marking the MLK holiday, particularly for an
organisation that features on its website images of murdered freedom riders
killed during the drive for black voter registration in the Civil Rights
Summer of 1964. Recently, however, those images were joined by Monsanto?s
logo. The organisation now styles Monsanto, which also sponsored its film
"Voices from Africa", "CORE's corporate partner".

CORE took its "first step in bringing justice to the Third World" on May 8
2003. Just under a fortnight later George W. Bush accused Europe of
undercutting efforts to feed starving Africans by blocking genetically
modified crops because of "unfounded, unscientific fears." Bush also
called on European governments to "join - not hinder - the great cause of
ending hunger in Africa". The following day, the Bush administration
announced plans to sue the European Union at the World Trade Organisation
unless it opened up its markets to American GM products.

The WTO case was filed by the US in the name of Africa, although Egypt -
the only African country which could be persuaded to sign up in support -
promptly disassociated itself from the US action. Egypt's defection
prompted American retaliation: the US withdrew from planned bilateral trade
talks. At the press conference at which the WTO case was announced, the US
Trade Representative, Robert B. Zoellick, introduced a number of people of
color who expressed their support for the lawsuit. One was a South African
farmer, TJ Buthelezi, who is exceptionally well travelled. In the last
couple of years Buthelezi has been brought not just to Washington but to
Brussels, Pretoria, St Louis, Philadelphia and London for GM promotionals.
He was also at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg,
where he took part in the fake parade.

Unlike Chengal Reddy, Buthelezi is a real farmer - just not the kind of
farmer he is made out to be. Buthelezi is exhibited as a "small farmer"
leading a "hand-to-mouth existence", or a "small farmer struggling just at
the subsistence level," as the head of USAID put it when introducing him to
US congressmen. In fact, with two wives and more than 66 acres, Buthelezi
is one of the largest and wealthiest farmers in his area, and Aaron
deGrassi of the Institute of Development Studies suggests Buthelezi's
accounts of his experiences with GM cotton might be embellished, since they
are suspiciously similar to Monsanto press releases. "These South African
farmers," DeGrassi says, "are plucked from South Africa, wined and dined,
and given scripted statements about the benefits of GM... Critics have
coined the nickname 'Bt Buthelezi', to illustrate this farmer's
unconditional support to Bt cotton: during a trip to Monsanto's
headquarters in St. Louis, Buthelezi was quoted as saying, '
I
wouldn't care if it were from the devil himself.'"

The "principal orator" at Zoellick's press conference was CS Prakash, a
biotech professor of Indian origin at Tuskegee University in Alabama.
Prakash travels the world promoting GM crops on behalf of the U.S. State
Department. He also serves as the principal investigator of a USAID
project "to promote biotechnology awareness in Africa". But he is best
known for his AgBioWorld campaign, under whose banner he has sent a stream
of petitions and press releases in support of GM crops to international
bodies and meetings, as well as to science journals and the media.
AgBioWorld presents itself as a mainstream science campaign "that has
emerged from academic roots and values" but its co-founder and "Deputy
President" is Greg Conko of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, whose
multi-million dollar budget comes from corporations like Monsanto, Dow
Chemical and Exxon/Mobil. CEI was among the organisers of the Cancun event
where CORE's Niger Innis handed out awards to the advocates of "lethal
eco-imperialism". Conko was also an invited guest at Zoellick's press
conference.

Conspicuous in its absence from Zoellick's guest list was the corporation
that stood to gain most from the WTO action. But when it came to honoring
Bush's election strategist at CORE's celebratory dinner at the New York
Hilton, Monsanto was certainly no ghost at the feast. Hugh Grant - not the
actor but the CEO of Monsanto - presided as chairman of the occasion. A
little black-washing at an MLK event was a PR opportunity too good to pass
up, particularly in light of other recent events. Only days before Grant's
appearance, news had broken that his company was to pay $1.5 million in
penalties under US anti-bribery laws, for passing $50,000 to a senior
Indonesian environmental official in an unsuccessful bid to amend or repeal
the requirement for an environmental impact statement on new crop
varieties. The bribe in question was just the tip of the iceberg: Monsanto
has admitted to paying over $700,000 in bribes to more than a hundred
officials over a five year period. The Monsanto executive in charge of
Indonesia at the time the bribery got underway was none other than Hugh
Grant.

Grant and Rove were far from the only controversial invitees to CORE's King
Day celebrations. Others have included the Austrian politician and
Nazi-sympathizer Jorg Haider, and the right-wing radio host Bob Grant, who
once called Martin Luther King a "scumbag". But CORE itself has become
increasingly controversial - and in some ways downright strange - since Roy
Innis took its helm. Innis once branded opponents of racial segregation in
the US as "house niggers", and dismissed the struggle against Apartheid as
"a vicarious, romantic adventure" with "no honest base". When asked in
1973 why CORE supported Idi Amin despite the Ugandan president's hatred of
Jewish people and praise of Hitler, Innis is reported to have said, "we
have no records to prove if Hitler was a friend or an enemy of black
people."

Innis has had no corresponding difficulty working out the enemy of black
people when it comes to biotech. At Cancun his son Niger, a protege of
Armstrong Williams, handed out "lethal eco-imperialism" awards to the
European Union and Greenpeace. But there was another award - an "Uncle
Tom" award, presented in front of an audience of grinning corporate
lobbyists and libertarians to the Malaysia-based Pesticide Action Network
Asia and the Pacific. PANAP is an organisation that works with small-scale
and family farmers, peasants' movements, indigenous people, landless
laborers and women in countries throughout the Asia-Pacific region. Innis
denounced PANAP for "selling out its own people". Their crime? Opposing
pesticides and biotechnology in exchange, Innis claimed, for funding from
wealthy foundations.

CORE, by contrast, supports pesticides and biotechnology in exchange for
funding from its wealthy "corporate partner". As to "selling out" the
people of the developing world, it's worth recalling Monsanto's history in
Indonesia. So strong was the popular opposition to genetically modified
crops in Indonesia that Monsanto decided to bring its GM seed into the
country under armed guard. The farmers who bought into the company's
promises and grew that seed did a lot less well from it than the officials
who took the bribes. The GM cotton crop succumbed to drought and a pest
population explosion that bypassed other cotton varieties. When the crop
failed to produce the results Monsanto had boasted about, the farmers found
that their poor yields had trapped them in a debt cycle, leading one farmer
to comment, "The company didn't give the farmer any choice, they never
intended to improve our well being, they just put us in a debt circle, took
away our independence and made us their slave forever." This is not an
unknown situation: sales of GM seeds, which are more expensive, are often
supported in the developing world with special credit arrangements. In TJ
Buthelezi's South Africa, for instance, farmer indebtedness has sharply
escalated in the area where GM cotton has been introduced. In Indonesia,
Monsanto's GM cotton proved so unsuccessful that within two years the
Indonesian Minister of Agriculture was announcing that the company had
pulled its GM seed out of the country. The company's legacy there is
broken promises and systematic illegality.

That's not, of course, the kind of story detailed in CORE's "Voices from
Africa," where GM crops are presented as the only hope of salvation for
resource poor farmers. Nor is it the kind of story told by CORE's Paul
Driessen in his syndicated op-ed pieces, which were timed to coincide with
CORE's UN "World Conference". Driessen informed his readers that "these
safe, delicious foods" were vital for Africa because they could "replace
staples devastated by disease - including Kenyan sweet potatoes".
Interestingly, just a week or so before Driessen made that claim, the
Kenyan journalist Gatonye Gathura received a Kalam award for journalistic
excellence for his article on the sweet potato project, "GM Technology
fails local potatoes." Gathura's piece blew the whistle on the abject
failure of Monsanto's showcase project in Africa - a project that had
garnered literally thousands of column inches of positive press.

Aaron deGrassi, in a detailed analysis* of such projects, confirms that the
benefits from GM crops are much lower than can be obtained "with either
conventional breeding or agro-ecology-based techniques" - both of which
require just a fraction of the investment in research that GM does. He
notes, for instance, that conventional sweet potato breeding in Uganda was
able - in a much shorter time and with a small budget - to develop a
well-liked, virus-resistant variety that had yield gains of nearly 100
percent. Any excitement over GM crops in the developing world, deGrassi
argues, stems largely from the biotech industry's PR campaign, which is
designed to increase GM's public legitimacy, and to reduce trade
restrictions, biosafety controls, and monopoly regulations.

Near the end of "Voices from Africa" there's a telling moment. Over the
image of a woman menacingly beating a club in the palm of her hand someone
says, "We cannot just harshly or violently oppose this technology". The
film presents no evidence of violent opposition to GMOs in Africa, and in
truth there has been none, only courage and resilience. But then, as Paul
Driessen's boss at CDFE reminds us, "Facts don't really matter. In
politics, perception is reality."

* Genetically Modified Crops and Sustainable Poverty Alleviation in
Sub-Saharan Africa: An Assessment of Current Evidence by Aaron deGrassi,
published by Third World Network, Africa.
http://www.twnafrica.org/docs/GMCropsAfrica.pdf

MORE BY JONATHAN MATTHEWS
The Fake Parade
Under the banner of populist protest, multinational corporations
manufacture the poor.
ENVIRONMENT 12.3.2002
http://www.freezerbox.com/archive/article.asp?id=254

NewScrewtape®: PR spin-reversal coup

14-3-05

To: young twisters managing S. Pac. gene-jockeys & GM-PR agents.


Note the main streaks of PR twisting in this classic caper, a model
of its type.

Nigel Kirkpatrick, head of the Crown Research Inst 'Industrial
Research®' and chmn CRIs assn, tells the nation that if New Zealand wants
to get a biotek (he means gene-jiggering) industry established here the
govt should give a further $75M which it has just cruelly withheld from
promising drug developments.

Much more time is given by Radio NZ to this complaint than the
immediate prior news item, viz. a new subsidised $150M consortium, to
follow so many subsidies down the unproductive GM gurgler in attempt to
start a biotek® industry here. The fact is not alluded to that successive
govts over 3 decades have poured hundreds of millions of public dollars
into ill-conceived gene-jiggering capers, some of them dangerous, in
attempt to start a biotek (i.e gene-tampering) industry here. Yet Radio
NZ will convey the 'wounded victim' role for this collossally subsidised
set of rackets. The sheer childish thrill of promulgating deceit is
increasingly ruling the behavior of Radio NZ operatives.

This double-whammy or 'old 1-2' spin-reversal PR stunt must surely
be a contender for 'PR spin of the year'. The bad news of the $150M
further, umpteenth subsidy granted to a grotesquely unproductive set of
'technologies' is immediately followed by a much longer, more emotive
'item' bemoaning govt's withholding of a supposed further $75M. In the
annals of PR this spin-reversal 'pair' must be worth a mention. Score a
huge further subsidy, and then promptly wallow in the victim role. Good
one, twisters! Clear thought, let alone justice, will be hampered by such
mind-buggering stunts.

Mind you, AgResearch® is one entity listed as forming the new $150M
fund, so to try & trace the peas under the walnut shells would be idle.
Indeed, I may do Mr Maharey (new Minister of Research Sc & Tech) an
injustice; perhaps only a little govt money will actually have to go in to
the new consortium. What us devils most desire is the implied endorsement
of dangerous, useless, and sometimes cruel expts on many spp. Somebody has
to produce the awful trials that are to precede the end of history;
Screwtape's promotion to comptroller of GM-PR carries a fair chance of
generating some nasty epidemics of humans & other spp, and is diverting
science into a murky confusion that only us temptors can fully relish. The
code of truthfulness which, even far beyond those scientists who were
Christians, promoted truth is now pretty shattered - and in the service
of not only our old ally Mammon but also, more gratifyingly, human desire
pitted against the Will of the Enemy. Genesis 3 continues to be re-enacted
in novel forms!

I intend to point out to their Depthednesses how it is impressive
style - Him Kill will probably praise this caper as 'good style, good
style'.

Our front-stooges in GM by now take it as likely that disclosure of
a big new subsidy for yet more gene-jiggering will provoke protests in NZ.
(Indeed, formidably low ranks of devils are preparing for the coming
underground, bootleg, gangster era in the deployment of GM, with early
out-of-town tryouts in poor countries already.) Therefore we had to
arrange some distraction from the announcement of the $150M handout. The
'2nd barrel' of the Radio NZ caper made all the deceitful difference and
should serve as a prime example.

At your junior levels of deployment guiding gene-jockeys and media
operatives, your immediate general orders are:
* keep spreading paranoia by overblown pseudo-hazards, using up the
limited wellsprings of credence - 'cry wolf' is your watchword;
* foster assertiveness in the usurper pseudo-experts e.g Ms Claire 'GE
Free NZ' Bleakley, Susan Kitschley list-MP, Jeanette list-MP, etc. Could
Fiddler Bunkum disgraced-MP be encouraged to make a new bid for attention,
now that she's returned from Mongolia? We could supply a 'leaked' fake
scare ...

S. Pac deployment of GM has been especially useful as a vehicle for
some important PR-exercises, e.g 'corngate' where we took in Hager etc
nicely and put everyone on notice that truth is inaccessible, Ministers of
the Crown such as Marian Hobbs are incompetent & unreliable, and GM will
not be explained to ordinary citizens.

Kiwis' advanced embracing of wimminsLib has facilitated deployment
of GM - experts critical of GM have been almost completely shunned by
media publicising instead PowerHarpies Fiddler Bunkum etc. We have
succeeded rather well in protracting the image that GM is supported by
almost all respectable scientists & medicos; our media stooges have been
able to maintain the pretence that only fringe figures think gene-tampering
dangerous. Stupendous lack of product is not counted as a disadvantage.
Unfulfilled promises are the order of the day. We have succeeded in
keeping the picture thoroughly confused.

This last achievement allows us to leverage many other lies in
unrelated dimensions of society. Those who embrace one big lie are from
then on generally much easier to seduce into others.

Do keep those church leaders confused & ignorant - they have been
little problem so far, except a brief period of clarity from Bishop Tom
Brown of Wellington. Media should be encouraged to rely on Bp Randerson of
Auckland - a gratifyingly useless 'ethicist' on that excellently corrupt
Royal Commission.

Good synergism has been developed between our tripartite PC
ideological Axis - wimminsLib, neoRacism, and militant homosexualism -
and the vigorous spreading of lies & dishonesty by the gene-jockey fad.

The Church having largely ceded its position of moral authority,
and science having failed to develop any code of ethics, gene-tampering is
flowering fetidly, its stench attracting venture capital liars, a new order
of lying scientist/PR agents, and even within the churches some keen
advocates. The lust for falsehood festers with gratifying obscenity!

Postmodernism is one of our greatest successes of this past few
decades. Those who pretend there's no such thing as a fact, and no such
thing as right or wrong, usually make out that the values of the PC Axis
are, on the contrary, real. This blatant hypocrisy suits us fine,
undermining public confidence in justice. When its exponents are forcibly
promoted in e.g universities, the status of fact and of morals is handily
degraded. The Enemy's appeals to reason, and incessant attempts to convey
clear ideas, are nicely undermined by this most mischievous PoMo triumph.
In many overdeveloped countries the universities have been largely taken
over by PoMo crusaders, who certainly place a high value on their own
power, while pretending to believe there are no values. This is
wonderfully totalitarian, without attracting the attention and resistance
of our cruder earlier expts in Fascism. It is one mess of
intershambolising ideologies that, for a decade or so, operates with many
foulups to destroy morality. Once a subject embraces the basic Big Lie of
postmodernism, there's no telling which others s/he will soon try also to
obey. The incoherence of PC is a main reason why madness is on the
increase - at least some varieties. In this superbly confused mess,
which even highly educated men refuse to ackn, our forces of evil make
great gains - and in such good style. Fortunately G K Chesterton has no
modern-day counterpart to refute modernism; and postmodernism, going almost
unchallenged, is much more crippling to reason.

R

http://207.44.245.159/article8210.htm

Land of 'Murka'

An Inside Look at George W. Bush's 'Murka'

By Manuel Valenzuela

Decline and Decrepitude

03/07/05 "Information Clearing House" - -

From the highest mountains to the lowest valleys a great energy has
gone missing from the land once known as America, its pulsating and
vibrant warmth no longer felt as the enveloping mist of the last four
years spreads far and wide, from sea to shining sea, penetrating every
porous cavity of escape. An energy of positive realms and humanist
inclinations has been imprisoned, wasting away in the dungeons of human
malice, replaced with the negative manifestation of an alternate
universe devoid of light, spawned by miscreants hijacking the idea and
principles of what the land once known as America was.

From clear-cut forests to urban jungles, from golden prairies to
steel-glass canyons, from arid deserts to honeycomb-looking,
cookie-cutter suburbs, the winds of parallel worlds blow, causing
drought throughout, poisoning lands once bountiful, bringing communal
sickness to millions of citizens. In their surreal manifestations and
hypocritical inclinations swaying and tilting the lone superpower into
dimensions of lunacy, hatred and decrepitude, the winds of alternate
universes have collided with those of normalcy, love and prosperity,
transforming, for the worst, a nation and those residing inside it,
creating a schism where non existed, helping send humanity on a
collision course with itself, its most dangerous and formidable enemy.

Come inside the belly of the beast, journeying outside the box of
conditioned realities, venturing into new realms of thought, acquiring
open minds and nascent understandings, willing to question what is
thought to be known and what has been learned, no longer blind to new
ways of seeing the world and no longer deaf to the wailing truth of a
nation in utter pain and mental anguish.

Inside the belly of the beast the world presently finds itself trapped
in, exploring through polluted bowels birthing malignant cancers spread
by corporate indifference, continuing into diseased and enlarged
entrails of gluttonous addictions, traversing black-blood veins soaked
in oil, peering into the empty brain cavity of empire exhibiting
corrosive mental disorders created by society itself, showcasing
non-existent attention spans, Alzheimer's-like amnesia, medicated
chemical imbalances laced with conditioned fear and insecurity, and the
remnants of anti-depressant, hyperactivity sequestering cocktails
eating away the minds, imaginations and futures of youth.

Inside the belly of the beast will we venture into, witnessing the
overflowing testosterone of the human animal, the hate-filled,
violence-seeking, fear controlled and deranged xenophobia of half the
population, the ignorance fed by gutted educations and dumbed-down
televised fictions, the castrated courage of the sane half of its
citizenship, the silent acquiescence by the citizenry to mass murder
and war crimes, the government and corporate controlled minds of people
turned sheeple and the wisdom-lacking behaviors of so-called
leadership.

Let us observe a youthful empire in freefall, a nation in decadent
decline, collapsing under its own weight and its own self-induced
ignorance and unenlightenment, drunk off its arrogance and
self-proclaimed aggrandizements of magnificence and manifest destiny.
Let us be witness to a land in disrepair, a population in mental
anguish. Let us examine a country decrepit in true moral values,
empathy and wisdom, a nation quick to rise and fast to fall, lacking
the experience of history and the wisdom of time.

The Land of ëMurkaí awaits, George W. Bush's America, opening its
realities and its gates, showing us its pariah lands, polluted
environs, corrupted capitals, unenlightened communities and deluded
citizenship. Let us look inside the window of reality, beyond the veil
of delusion and deception, for history, it seems, is once more upon us,
begging to be studied and learned, fearful of again being ignored, for
we are witness to the rapid decline of one of the shortest empires to
ever befall mankind, a second rate attempt at imperial hegemony that
fails to stand side by side with the great Empires of history.

The end of Empire is near, a matter of mere decades. The symptoms of
decline are all-encompassing, a manifestation of growing too fast and
learning too slow, of basking in the glow of superfluous narcissism and
embracing the delusion of grandeur, of succumbing to the demons of
greed, power and wealth, of allowing the population to rot in the
stupor of unenlightenment, of misallocating treasure and plundering
budgets, of seeking hegemony and finding acrimony, of arrogantly
calling for preemption and finding only overextension, of allowing the
addictions and demons of capitalism to corrupt society, leadership and
collective thought.

The foundations of an empire absorbed in megalomania are crumbling,
slowly but surely rotting to the core, a victim of its own hubris,
indifference and complacency, in time to fall with the tremors of an
earthquake of its own creation. This the Land of Murka cannot stop, for
its inertia has been set in motion, its momentum into self-implosion
has been accelerated by its own hand of decadence. Though full of
talent, ability and millions of good, decent people, the lessons of
history has it yet again failed to learn nonetheless, and so is reaping
what it has sown, yielding a rotten harvest made barren by the fruits
of its actions and the drought wrought by consequences it fails to
understand.

The faster they rise the quicker they fall, products of their own
self-implosion, like an immature, overgrown and undisciplined child,
tied to the comatose grip of mind-altering and numbing prescription
pills, orphaned and lacking parental oversight, never allowed to grown
up and mature, failing to understand human society or civilization,
failing to learn the behaviors and interactions of man, the lessons of
history and the humbleness of greatness. Never suffering like all
peoples before, never experiencing the growing pains of empire, never
understanding the wisdom that comes with history, never learning the
pitfalls of imperial aspirations, the empire only 200 years old cannot
see its inevitable decline, preferring the comfort of denial and a life
living in delusion to the unpleasantness of truth and the sobering
truth of reality.

In the end, whether the Pax Amerikana fall fast or falls slowly,
history tells us in a most certain way that it will most certainly
fall. Humankind will only benefit to this reality, ridding itself of
yet one more embryonic wannabe in a long line of often failed and
seldom succeeded attempts at long-lasting empire building. The Pax
Amerikana, a mere uncomfortable digestive gas movement in the long
history of man, is not the first empire to rise, and will certainly not
be the last. In time, this most uncomfortable gas, which continues to
stink up much of the planet, becoming a festering nuisance to billions
suffering under its wicked grip, will inevitably come out the sphincter
of humanity, disappearing into thin air, carried away by the winds of
history and bringing relief to a constipated world.

Its usefulness did have its merits, however, leaving behind a certain
legacy, just as all imperial systems are want to do. Yet it will also
leave its dangerous downside, its most ignoble contributions to
humanity, embedding in civilization corruptions, exploitations,
behaviors and decadence that will not readily be fixed, helping bring
us closer to self-destruction. It served its purpose, coming along
according to our path of development, contributing to our progressing
evolution as a civilization. In time humanity will seek greener
pastures, desiring to leave archaic and primitive empires behind,
instead pursuing systems and leaders in tune to our evolving mental and
civilizational growth. New players are already lining up to take its
place and in time it might be wise to teach our progeny Mandarin,
Cantonese, Hindi or Portuguese.


This Land of Murka

Inside the Land of Murka do we find ourselves residing in, the land of
greed and the home of the slave, where eagles no longer soar, where
long held principles have been disappeared and where dreams have turned
into hollow fantasies. Murka is the land where nightmares become
reality, where fantasy is turned to truth, where delusion and deception
become principle, where lies are forever believed, where parallel
universes and alternate worlds exist, where Pandora's Box is alive and
well and where vicious cycles perpetuate their destructive forces upon
the lower castes of society.

Murka is the land of profit over people, revenues over integrity,
corporations over citizens, pollution over environment, the bottom line
over universal principles of humanity, injustice and inequality over
justice and equality, greed over reason, and the addiction to wealth
over the virtue of moderation. The principles of Murka reward pursuit
of materialistic wealth over pursuit of happiness, the love of the
individual over that of the entirety, the addiction to labor over the
love of life and the love of money over the love of family.

The religion of millions of Murkans is the Almighty Dollar; their god
is greed; their temple of worship the television monitor sitting in the
center of family affairs, like an idol being adored and venerated for
hours at a time, its commands being obeyed, its lies and deceptions
being absorbed just as its fictions manipulate human brains, rewiring
minds and conceptions of a real world that will never attain the
perfection seen on the monitor, sending reality spiraling into the
vortex of psychological confusion and mental unhappiness.

It is here, in this land of surreal belongings and parallel dimensions,
inside a nation of depraved delusion and unenlightened ignorance, that
criminals and murderers and manipulators and exploiters of human flesh
are rewarded, protected and extolled, elected to higher office,
promoted in business, enriched with treasure and power, and given the
bonuses that come with expanding the bottom line and the wealth of the
Establishment. Whereas good, honorable and virtuous citizens, and there
are tens of millions of you out there, are walked over and trampled,
becoming the kicking dog of the alpha males and females, forever kept
oppressed and subjugated, those lacking in honor and integrity, full of
selfishness and apathy, willing to ruin lives and sell their souls to
the demons of greed for a climb up the hierarchical pyramid, are
rewarded throughout life, thriving in their wealth born in sin and in
their power accumulated over years of flattening the best society has
to offer.

Only in Murka do laws, rules and regulations defend and protect
corporations, entities exhibiting actions of a psychopath along with
the tendencies of psychopathic behavior. Hiding behind the laws they
create, mold and help birth, these psychopaths kill tens of thousands
of guinea pigs/people each year through their actions, behaviors,
disregard for the environment and by the vast assortment of
cancer-causing, disease-forming, chemically-manipulated, toxic-infested
products they shove down our throats. In another world, in another
time, if corporations were human beings, they would be sitting,
cowering in shame, chained in their cells on Texas' death row, awaiting
execution by barbaric means for the mass murder of tens of thousands of
human beings that have perished and been made to suffer thanks to their
products and actions.

In Murkan society, however, vice is given precedence over virtue,
immorality is rewarded over integrity, acquiescence is chosen over
dissent, submission to authority is sought over the protesting of
wrong, and callous indifference to the plight of others is smiled upon
over concern for anything that does not expand the bank accounts of the
Establishment. Indifference, cold-blooded disregard for human life,
deranged motivations empowered by greed and actions and products that
befall toxic fates and lifeless futures onto the population are
cherished and acceptable principles running in the veins of corporate
miscreants, lackeys and shills. It is in Murka, after all, where
malfeasance is seen as virtuous, a highly praised human "trait" that,
although condemning millions of humans, generates billions of dollars
in profits. In a land where money is king and greed is an omnipotent
addiction, vice becomes virtue just as morals become extinct.

The virtues of Murka are taught at schools and universities, forming
the minds of future criminals and murderers and exploiters of human
flesh, bombarding the mind with the need to expand revenues and
profits, brainwashing youth to follow the dictates of corrupt
capitalism, making its principles sacrosanct, holier than thou relics
thriving off the behaviors and emotions of the human animal. Many
schools of higher education help cement the idea of prolonged and
ceaseless labor, of cutthroat competition, of individual glory and of
the virtue of sacrificing life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to
suit the interests of the Establishment, planting in the thoughts of
sponge-like, developing brains the subservience to authority that will
last an entire lifetime, slowly laying the groundwork for perpetual
loyalty not to humanity, but to the corporation and the elite that owns
it.


Where the Few Prosper and the Many Serve

Within the boundaries of Murka crony and corrupt capitalism thrive,
becoming the frontier of exploitation and indifference, where the few
elite prosper while the masses flounder. It is a place where the bright
rays of sunshine fall warmly on those at the top, though forever
blocked from reaching the many below by the omnipresent shadow of greed
and love for the Almighty Dollar. In this land the crimes of the
Establishment get rewarded with the fruits of enrichment and protected
through laws enacted while the small breaches of the masses result in
lifelong oppression through the whips of control.

Murka is the epitome of human wickedness disguised as American corrupt
capitalism, where working and middle class citizens are exploited for
their valuable blood, sweat and tears by the few whose wealth and power
only continues to grow with each new day of hard labor millions of
people are forced to endure. Having precious energy squeezed from their
weak bodies day in and day out, millions of workers struggle to survive
on a daily basis, living paycheck to paycheck, meal to meal,
perpetually looking over their shoulders for the next massive layoff,
downsize or outsource that might further plunge them into the abyss of
subsistence.

In Murka unemployment grows, employment declines, wages fall, prices go
up, hours increase, exploitation continues, deficits skyrocket, budgets
expand, the surplus erodes, debt increases, slave jobs rise, meaningful
jobs disappear, the dollar plummets, the economy implodes,
unenlightenment festers, tax cuts to the rich few continue, the poor
are made poorer while the rich are made wealthier, uncertainty
prospers, fear is conditioned, insecurity expands and the mental health
of average citizens continues to plummet with the onslaught of economic
rape, the pillage of national treasure, the fraud of corporate
profiteering and the corruption of government institutions, all
benefiting the corporate Leviathan and the Establishment that runs it.

The population residing in Murka has as destiny a life working like a
slave, imprisoned like a serf, bound to the dictates of an employer and
the commands of a system that see but an automaton in the factory and
not a living spirit of humanity; indebted to a society that shackles us
from cradle to grave, making us lifelong servants trained to produce
and consume, robbing us of life, energy, precious time, family and
happiness; forced to return our living wages to the same feudal masters
we work for in order to feed, clothe and shelter ourselves; and forever
destined to be trapped in a purposefully conditioned vicious cycle of
materialism, consumerism and ever-exceeding unsustainability that is
robbing our humanity, destroying our planet, and condemning our progeny
to a future that gets more dangerous by the day.

Meanwhile, basking in the spoils of human exploitation the
Establishment's power increases exponentially through the pilfering of
our treasure, the vast control of government, the systematic -- and
quite purposeful -- eruption of the budget deficit, the lowering of
taxes paid by the elite minority, the evasion of taxes by the corporate
world and the destruction of the nation's social programs. The middle
class is being ripped apart, slowly gutted through methodical policies
designed to increase the gap between the lower strata and upper castes.
The nation's social programs are being eviscerated under the rubric of
fighting the mushrooming deficit created by Republicans while the rich
minority makes billions of dollars in exploited energies and untaxed
wealth while sacrificing little to the common good.

Like the good moralist, virtue-emulating and Jesus following clan they
claim to be, conservatives have, since 2001, and like the good
hypocrites they are, declared class warfare against the lower, working
and middle castes, reducing expenditures on welfare programs affecting
the poor, including those offering medicine, shelter and food to
children. To the followers of Christ, it seems, the poor are "lazy" and
"lesser humans," thereby deserving the life they have in a world of
"survival of the fittest." Lack of compassion and empathy go hand in
hand with burgeoning ignorance, racist inclinations, delusional theory
and callous, elitist indifference, after all.

In Murka, the richest and most prosperous nation the planet has ever
seen, a land of unsurpassed wealth and comfort, hovering in resplendent
abundance, forty million citizens live life without health insurance;
millions go to bed hungry every night; millions of children living in
indigence suffer malnourishment and uncovered health problems; millions
have been or soon will be fired from their jobs, outsourced by
companies to protect the bottom line, moving jobs across the ocean to
the next bottom dwelling slave nation to offer cheap human
exploitation; employment benefits to millions of unemployed do little
to nothing to comfort insecurity and fear of tomorrow; homelessness
only increases, growing daily along with poverty and mentally maimed
Iraq war veterans; tens of millions live paycheck to paycheck, making
nothing more than the slave payment called minimum wage; millions more
are and will forever be indebted to their credit card lenders who
charge criminally malfeasant interest rates; education budgets are
being eroded at all levels, and the attempt is being made, rather
successfully, to prevent the lower castes from ever advancing forward
and never setting foot inside a bastion of higher education.


The Control of Education

The Establishment of Murka, as well as those in any other nation,
understands perfectly well that in order to eviscerate the middle
class, in order to increase the lower castes of the nation, the masses
must be reduced to pebbles in a vast ocean. The easiest way to achieve
this goal is by destroying the education, and by consequence the
thinking mind thus created, that a population receives. Starting from
the cradle, in those early years of utmost importance in brain
development, the Establishment of Murka is purposefully failing to fund
many aspects of infant and child education.

These policy decisions affect lower and middle class toddlers
exclusively, most of whom are forced to attend unequal, unjust,
unfunded and devastatingly unprepared educational districts from birth,
segregated by racist policies, socioeconomic status of families and by
the social engineering tendencies of the Establishment. As those
children of the wealthy never need the assistance of government for
education, it is easy to see who is targeted and who pays the ultimate
price in assuring the continued hegemony of today's stratified
society.

Already behind their rich counterparts, and falling behind more and
more each year of schooling, the majority of Murka's children, slowly
growing up, living in both rural pockets of isolated backwardness and
urban reservations of decrepit underdevelopment, will be subjected to
education systems disgraceful in their socioeconomically engineered
segregation and in their abandonment to and failures in the priorities
of our progeny's future. When the Establishment needs massive slave
labor to exploit for years to come, assembly-line and burger flipper
serfs to abuse into perpetuity and military conscripts turned cannon
fodder to help wage the wars of profitable conquest and imperial
aspirations, one can see, quite readily in fact, the ultimate purpose
behind the deliberate dumbing down of Murka's children, most of whom
have had their fates sealed long before they become a sparkle in their
parents' twinkling eyes.

The dumbing down of Murka's future continues until the end of high
school, by which time it is hoped the child has either dropped out of
school completely, thereby beginning a life of servitude or
imprisonment, or will become a victim of environmental circumstance,
meaning the now young adolescent is woefully unprepared for higher
education and decides instead to pursue a life either relegated to the
lower strata of society or decides to "voluntarily" caste draft himself
into a military serving the interests of corporate and elitist power,
becoming the cannon fodder of profit and the tool needed to expand the
wealth of the elite.

The Establishment hopes that by this age dreams have been dashed,
negativity has flourished, the pursuit of a prosperous future has been
eroded, positivism and idealism have been extinguished, and the
fatalistic assumptions of a defeated mind have set in. This way, the
decades remaining in the life of the socio-engineered citizen will be
used to further enrich the elite, with the person forced to work at the
margins of society until the end of her working days, performing low
paying yet arduous jobs while being exploited until old age, with her
capitalist employers maximizing and squeezing from her every last ounce
of energy she is capable of producing revenue and profit, and milking
the newly minted automaton/slave for everything she has.

When multiplied by hundreds of millions of citizens, calculating the
unimaginable profits of exacting prolonged hours of labor paying
minimal amounts of wages while offering token benefits and non-existent
political power, one can surmise how much the Establishment benefits
from investing heavily in the formation of a dumbed down, defeated and
unenlightened citizenry, each of whom will toil in burdened purgatory
for decades at a time, living paycheck to paycheck, never rising above
the caste chosen for them, born to enrich and empower their feudal
masters.

This extinguishing of lives, ruination of futures and predestined
selection into castes has resulted in innumerable millions having their
abilities, talents and natural rights to opportunity quashed, never to
escape the dungeons of oppression and exploitation, never to tap into
the vastness of their potential and always to waste away in a life
created, from the first gasps of air to the last dying breath of life,
serving the elite minority in the historically perpetual hierarchical
saga of the human condition that is the powerful few exploiting the
weak majority.

Branded, rebranded and marketed again and again throughout the Ages by
those in power, the perpetual exploitation of the masses, whether
existing under the term slavery, manorialism, feudalism or capitalism,
the concept remains the same, changing in name only and in the slight
increase in freedom granted the masses. Repackaged and relabeled, as if
to create illusions of rights and charades of freedoms, exploitation,
subjugation and oppression of the lower strata of humanity by those at
the top has never ceased to exist, giving the appearance of extinction,
only to extend its devastating tentacles once more, this time born
again under different circumstances, conditions, eras and level of
human progress, claiming change yet delivering only a more refined and
clandestinely oppressive system than before, as always evolved to
further increase the power, control and wealth of the Establishment.

With the birth of a new being the same vicious cycle will once more
renew itself, embedding the demon of predestined engineered fates into
each new generation born into the lower castes of Murka, making of
human energies nothing more than exploited and easily replaceable
armies of production, consumption and war molded to suit the needs and
interests of the Establishment. Through the assembly line called human
procreation, manufacturing billions of entities worthy of exploitation,
the Establishment has more than enough conduits of energy to exploit.
With so many of us caught in the same vicious cycle, with millions
needing to work for survival, seeking a low supply of jobs, the
Establishment can do with us as they wish, paying low, asking for
prolonged hours of sweat and toil, more easily controlling the masses,
making us defeated drones never to stir the pot of discontent. We are
easily replaceable, after all, for behind us stand thousands more eager
to take our place if we happen to deviate away from the automaton/slave
role designated us.


Control Through Television

Furthermore, the evisceration of education fuses with the dumbed down
escapism and fictions of television to create a population addiction to
and reliant on modern civilizationís new drug of choice. In television
the Establishment and the government it owns have found the most
powerful tool at their disposal to control, condition and manipulate a
population to the dictates of power. Simply put, the television has
become, in the span of a few decades, the fireworks erupting in the wet
dreams of every Joseph Goebbels alive today, a propagandistís manna
from heaven and the Establishmentís weapon of choice in the pursuit of
mind control and thought manipulation.

Television has become the heroin of the masses, a powerful escapist
drug deviating stressed psychologies away from reality. For hours at a
time, the human mind, never before bombarded with the stresses
experienced today, can relieve pressure and relax to the tunes of a
fictional world of beauty, perfection and orchestrated wonderment, a
world that the natural human condition can never duplicate or achieve.
Lost in fantasy and entertainment, the mind travels to locations far
and wide, surfing the waves of channels in search of the greatest
pleasure, and the most comfortable escape.

Today, the experiment of television has been a rousing success as
subsequent generations of citizenís fall prey to the heroin inside
their homes. Never before a part of human evolution, the television
suddenly appeared without study or research into its effects on the
human brain, captivating millions of citizens half a century ago. For
over fifty years entire generations of children have been subjected to
the now known damages of television, creating in the population of
Murka, a group that watches by far the most hours of television in the
world, a series of behavioral, emotional and psychological anomalies
that no human society has ever had to confront.

The children of days long gone are now baby boomers, and today their
children and grandchildren are succumbing to the catastrophe that is
the television. From a young age blitzkrieged with the repetitive,
rapid and throbbing images of fictionalized entertainment, made privy
to stimuli never before experienced by the young, developing human
mind, toddlers, and later children, undergo a rewiring of their brains
and a systemic manipulation of behaviors and emotions associated with
an internal confrontation between the reality of life and the
fictionalized fantasy they watch on the monitor.

After years of incessant television watching in youth, with the monitor
having become parent, teacher, role model and trusted friend, with
primate minds now under the spell of fictionalized conditioning and
brainwashing, the adult citizen easily falls prey to the deceptions,
manipulations and dictates of the Establishment. Using highly addictive
and much needed escapist television programming as the hook and drug
used to captivate and capture the attention of the masses, those in
power fill the airwaves with the subtle yet powerful mechanisms of
control, conditioning the masses to the direction they want society to
take.

Through their advertisements the corporate world indoctrinates the
masses with the products to be used in our daily lives. This way, we
are introduced to products and ideas we have no choice but to purchase
and incorporate. Using deceptive images of fantasy and perfection
marketed to us, designed through methodical psychological research
whose results yield the best way to manipulate the human mind, we are
made to believe that if we purchase the products and services we see we
will invariably achieve the perfection we see and the fantastical life
we become enraptured with.

Using our fragile egos against ourselves, the Establishment succeeds in
conditioning us to make a necessity out of purchasing their goods and
services. Never mind that the human condition will never achieve the
perfection of body, mind and lifestyle we see, nor that we can ever
hope of becoming the characters, and the fictionalized modes and
behaviors, the television monitor regurgitates into our homes.

Through the television the Establishment not only controls what it
wants us to buy and how it wants society to evolve but our subservience
and acquiescence to the system as well. When it wants war it bombards
the channels of propaganda with the images and pundits that will best
mobilize an entire nation. Corporate media will distort, deceive and
manipulate so-called news to suit the needs of a government and
corporate world trying to convince a mostly placid citizenry of the
significant need for war. Taking the form of blatant propaganda, the
Establishment formulates a cocktail of lies, fantasy,
emotionally-charged and psychologically-manipulative jingoism, over a
period of time pushing the right buttons that will mutate a drone-like
population, concerned only for their daily lives, into a reincarnated
manifestation of past generations, creating a frenzied, rabid,
blood-thirsty, scapegoat-searching war culture under the hypnotized
grip of the television and the powers that control it.

Using fear and the threat of insecurity to manipulate the people,
corporate media, in bed with government, over the years having become
the mouthpiece of government control, unleashes a barrage of
propaganda, in images and pro-war commentators, to arouse in the
population the false sense of security that justifies military action.
This way, debate is silenced and dissent is disappeared on the airwaves
as once again the corporate media, the gatekeepers of information,
allow us only to see and hear the point of view they want us to
incorporate into our psyche. Voices of reason and of intelligence are
ignored, banished from imparting important thoughts of wisdom, thus
making it virtually impossible for the population to ever know there
are other options besides the horror of war.

With corporate anchors, journalists, reporters, commentators and
executives pushing into our monitors an exclusively pro-war, jingoistic
viewpoint, blitzkrieging us with their propaganda-laced images and
opinion, over months of constant threats of fear and insecurity,
denying the public from ever seeing or hearing truths and realities, it
therefore becomes rather easy, with a population addicted to television
viewing, to mobilize a nation for war. With the marriage of government
and corporate power, truth disappears just as much as falsity prospers.
With both entities profiting from the spoils of war, it is in each
otherís best interest to work together to disseminate the seeds that
will invariably spawn the rebirth of a dormant war culture.

Once again the system is at work, knowing how easy it is to control the
minds of a dumbed down population that has been well trained, and some
might say socially engineered, to never question authority, never think
outside the box, never seek accountability and never think for itself.
Easily manipulated, millions of Murkans are conditioned to believe,
from a very early age, that anything emanating from television is
sacrosanct. Thus, everything they watch is reality and anything they
hear is truth. Anchors and reporters become trusted personalities
voicing reticent opinions whose veracity are seldom, if ever,
questioned.

Never do millions of Murkans stop to think of the many vested interests
in corporate media, of the intricacies of profit and revenue, of the
need to expand shareholder wealth, of the purposeful demonization of
Arab peoples and the sugarcoating of anything Israel, of just why there
is such an imbalance in the coverage and commentary of the
Israeli-Palestinian issue, of why exactly there is such protection of
and propaganda for the present administration. In reality, this failure
of the population to ever question the interests of television, both
clandestine and made public, is a symptom of the system at work, where
children are brainwashed and conditioned so that as adults they will be
easier to manipulate and control.

Whomever controls television controls the masses, along with whatever
interpretation of reality is created for our consumption, and this
certainty can best be seen in the Land of Murka, where the system
serves to keep truths hidden and realities far removed from public
discourse, where the media, acting in concert with government,
whitewashes, omits and sugarcoats vital information the population is
never allowed to receive, where, using the formula of constant
repetition, the corporate media succeeds in planting that information
into the public mind that will best serve both the interests of its
parent companies and the Establishment.

Murka has become a nation addicted to its heroin, fed to us by the drug
dealer called the Establishment, perpetually keeping us in the escapist
world of television. The heroin injected into our homes distracts us
from ever seeing reality. It is designed to manipulate and control at
once, transforming the population into a sedentary herd of sheeple who
never question what is told them. Over the years millions of citizens
have used this most dangerous drug to escape lives of frustration,
unhappiness, desperation, depression and loneliness, never realizing
that with every hour they watch, with every show they are glued to,
with every channel they surf their minds are turned to mush, becoming
conduits of ignorance, molded into muscles in desperate need of gossip
and sensationalism, no longer thinking for itself.

The Establishment has perfected its machination of propaganda, creating
the realities it wants into society, forming whatever truth that will
be of the greatest benefit, not to society, but to itself. Whatever
reality it wants to create and disseminate is quickly absorbed by a
population eager to feed off the mammary glands of television. The
Establishment, the corporate world and government have for years told
us how and what to think, how to act, who to obey and where to follow,
condemning our minds to obedience, our lives to conformism and silent
acquiescence.

We have been made sheep, one and all, some more than others, becoming,
over years of conditioned receptivity, members of the army of fantasy,
unknowingly conscripted from birth, our minds rewired through the tools
of the airwaves, made subservient creatures dumbed down by
Establishment created education and television, following the commands
of our masters, bowing in eternal submission to powers both known and
unknown, falling prey to their deceptions and manipulations, allowing
them to do with our minds as they please. For the elite, nothing has
ever been easier; nothing has ever been more successful. From cradle to
grave, our minds thus become their slaves.

Conclusion to 'Land of Murka' coming Thursday

Mr. Valenzuela's new novel is now on sale through Authorhouse.com at
Echoes in the Wind Sales Page. A philosophical, educational and
spiritual story on humanity and our civilization, as relevant as
today's headlines, this book is almost 600 pages in trade paperback
form on sale internationally through secure web page
transaction. Additionally, the novel is now available on Amazon.com and
barnesandnoble.com, as well as other online book sellers. If preferred,
the novel can also be ordered at any local brick and mortar bookstore
worldwide through the bookís ISBN number, 1418489905.

Manuel Valenzuela is social critic and commentator, international
affairs analyst, Internet columnist and author of Echoes in the Wind, a
novel now published by Authorhouse.com. A collection of essays, Beyond
the Smoking Mirror: Reflections on America and Humanity, will be
published in early 2005. His articles appear regularly on
www.informationclearinghouse.info . His unique style and powerful
writing is read internationally and seeks to expose truths and
realities confronting humanity today. Mr. Valenzuela welcomes comments
and can be reached at manuel@valenzuelas.net. A collection of his work
can be found visiting his archives and by searching the Internet.

It would appear that Darwin was not only troubled by the
probability that natural selection would be over-rated but also taken in
himself by the misinterpretations that still confuse Dawkins etc.

R

Robert,

Thank you for your e-mail.

The late Darwin confession was a hoax from around 1890. The person who
wrote the article was likely Elizabeth Reid Hope, whose husband wrote
religious tracts in the late 19th C. She was not a neighbor, and according
to the family who responded at the time and my looking at documents that
are at Cambridge, Darwin did not change his views late in his life. The
family was upset by the claim and pointed out that she did not visit
Darwin, and they did not know her.

I have unpublished Darwin letters written between 1879-1881 just before
his death, that show he did not believe in the Bible, felt it had nothing
to do with science, and did not accept Jesus as the son of god.

The topic was covered, rather poorly, by James Moore in a book titled the
Darwin Legend. He could not bring himself to discount the notion, because
she knew the design of the family wallpaper. However, images of the
drawing room (including the wallpaper) had been published in the London
press a few years earlier.

The hoax has been continued through the years by small tracts distributed
by a number of churches.

Beekeeping history is my current project. Sir Edmund and I have a may
have had a mutual friend. Quentin Keynes, who passed away a couple of
years ago. Keynes was the great grandson of Darwin.

I agree with the program you watched. It had many flaws, but that is what
happens when TV people get hold of things.

Cheers,
Gene Kritsky

Gene Kritsky, PhD
Editor
American Entomologist
and
Professor of Biology
Department of Biology
College of Mount St. Joseph
Cincinnati, OH 45248
513-244-4401
513-244-4961 (fax)

Prof G Kritsky
College of Mt St Joseph
9-3-05

Dear Prof Kritsky

I have just seen the History channel biographical programme on
Darwin featuring yourself. In some ways it is a terrible programme - the
commentary asserting that Darwin's idea of evolution meant the church's
authority was invalid.

However, my wife & I found the biographical aspects interesting.
Could I ask your help regarding one historical aspect?

Of the various informants I suppose you are as likely as any to
know about a peculiar 'loose end': the purported (possibly forged) letter
from his neighbour, a minor aristocrat, describing Darwin's recovery of
faith near his death. Have you come across this document, and more
importantly any appraisal of its authenticity?

Just to let you know what sort of effort you'd be assisting if you
reply, you can glimpse our local science/religion scene at
http://www.spc.org.nz/Science.asp . In case that doesn't work, I attach
my paper from that symposium, and a short newspaper item with my colleague
Neil Broom.

BTW I see where you're interested in beekeeping history, so you'll
know of our most famous Kiwi beekeeper Sir Edmund Hillary who lives a short
walk from me. I am a keen beekeeper and can show you some impressive bees
if you visit here.

With thanx for any help

UNITED KINGDOM

10 March 2005

BRITISH CONVERTS FROM ISLAM: CHRISTIAN LEADERS MUST SPEAK OUT

Some 3,000 Christians in the UK are in danger because they have chosen
to convert from Islam. Some are being actively harassed and
persecuted, but many church leaders seem more interested in defending
their attackers than in standing up for the rights of the converts.

Nissar Hussain, a Christian from Bradford, has suffered three years of
harassment, amounting effectively to persecution, from the local
Muslims in his neighbourhood. His car has been torched and rammed,
bricks have been thrown through his window on many occasions, there
have been threats to burn the house down, and much else besides. Mr
Hussain and his wife were originally Muslims, and this is the reason
for the treatment they are getting.

Though this may seem shocking, it should not be a surprise. From its
inception, Islam has rigorously sought to prevent its adherents from
choosing any other faith. Such apostates are regarded as traitors and
- according to shari'a (Islamic law) - should be executed.

There are many thousands of former Muslims, in scores of countries
around the world, who are suffering for their decision to follow
Christ. In countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran and Sudan the law of
the land specifies the death sentence for apostates from Islam, though
this is only rarely practised. What is more common is for those who
have left Islam to be persecuted in a multitude of other ways,
including imprisonment and torture. In countries where there is no law
against conversion, other laws may be used as a pretext, or
ìaccidentsî may be arranged. In addition, zealous individual Muslims
may take it on themselves to kill a convert. Those converts who do not
lose their lives may lose their spouse (through divorce), children,
inheritance, home and job.

As the case of Mr and Mrs Hussain shows, living in Britain does not
ensure full protection from persecution. Where a convert is the only
non-Muslim in their family, difficulties can be even more severe.
Converts from Islam in this country, especially young women, have been
rejected by their family and sometimes brutally assaulted; some have
been threatened with death [1].

NUMBERS AT RISK IN THE UK

The number of individuals at risk in the UK is substantial. It is
conservatively estimated that there are 1,500 to 2,000 Iranians,
approaching 1,000 Arabs, and some 150 Pakistanis and others living in
this country who have left Islam to become Christians. In round
figures there are 3,000 KNOWN converts, but there may also be many
more who are isolated from the various networks, and thus omitted from
the figures.

These converts face not only the possibility of hostility and
aggression from individuals within the Muslim community in Britain,
but also some are asylum-seekers who have fled much graver dangers in
their countries of origin. If such individuals are refused asylum and
sent home, they could face imprisonment, torture or death.

A number of senior British Muslims have recently acknowledged the
injustice of the Islamic apostasy law and the serious breach of human
rights and religious liberty which it entails, both in theory and in
practice in the modern world.

CHRISTIAN LEADERS MUST SPEAK OUT

It is essential that Christian leaders in the UK should affirm the
rights of those who have converted to Christianity from Islam. Sadly
such converts can often be marginalised by those to whom they turn for
help. Having been rejected by their own community, they find that the
Christian community fails to take their situation seriously. Three
years ago, when Mr Hussain was first attacked, most church leaders who
heard of his situation did nothing. As further attacks occurred, they
still seemed barely interested. Now that the plight of the Hussain
family has hit the national press, church leaders seem to be chiefly
concerned to absolve from blame the perpetrators of these crimes. Even
some in Bradford itself have sought to deny the link with Islam and
have attributed this sustained and vicious campaign to the pranks of
youngsters.

For Christian leadership to downplay the sufferings of converts is a
betrayal of those who have risked everything for Christ. But if
British Christian leaders were to stand up for converts, it could even
bring about change within Islam itself.

PRAYER ITEMS

* Please pray for the protection of all Christians in the UK who have
come from a Muslim background. Pray that they may also have peace in
their hearts and not give way to fear. Pray that their faithfulness to
Christ, despite great loss, pain and harassment, may speak powerfully
to others.

* Pray that British Church leaders may act with integrity and courage
to care for converts from Islam and to defend their rights and
freedoms.

* Pray that Muslim leaders will act to change the traditional apostasy
law within Islam and to allow Muslims freedom to choose their own
faith without fear of punishment.

LINKS

[1] - http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1470584,00.html

BARNABAS FUND E-MAIL NEWS SERVICE
Barnabas Fundís e-mail news service provides the media and our supporters
with urgent news briefs concerning suffering Christians around the world.

If you would like to receive news briefs from the Barnabas Fund please
contact us with your name, postal and e-mail addresses.

Further details, quotes and photos on this and other stories may be available
for news editors on request.

Barnabas Fund works to support Christian communities mainly, but not
exclusively, in the Islamic world where they are facing poverty and
persecution.

Barnabas Fund, The Old Rectory, River Street, PEWSEY, Wiltshire, SN9 5DB, UK.
Tel: +44(0)1672 564938, Fax: +44(0)1672 565030, E-mail: info@barnabasfund.org
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My wife & I attended the opening by the PoW of the new children's
educational garden within the Auckland Regional Authority's botanical
garden, Manurewa, 10-3-05, before the Prince departed for Fiji.

Such a children's educational garden may well be of more genuine
interest to Prince Charles than many things he is taken to see, as it is a
good attempt at education in ecology. (We can recommend it as a pleasant
picnic spot.)

We were permitted to park on a bus stop and it was an easy,
pleasant 5-min walk in to the children's garden. However, I could not help
noticing scores of cars parked very near the action - with tickets which
the Monarchist League had not been offered. In view of the insults to the
Ryans by Cartwright's staff, I do not assume this omission was mere
incompetence.

Hundreds attended, with no hint of strife or antagonism. I noted
surprisingly quite a few people of Asian extraction. People were calling
out "good luck for your wedding".

Knowing what I do about the Cartwright Travesty (a "judicial
inquiry" a couple decade ago which accelerated her steep upward climb to
power), I found it distasteful to see Cartwright in the company of HRH.
Worse, she was herself apeing him by meeting random members of the public
as if she were herself some admired figure. One pathetic man clapped when
she arrived. The applause soon afterwards for HRH was loud & long.

I know this will be hard to believe, but it is in line with the
staggering overconfidence of the Klark/Kartwright attacks on our monarchy:
Kartwright walked up to people who were displaying a NZ flag (between 2
slim poles so that it was fully spread despite lack of wind) and pretended
she thought it was an Australian flag, and then "realised" it was not. I
cannot believe this was anything better than an act - and a rotten one at
that. Will no-one rid us of this pesky poseuse?

The Prince did not make a speech upon unveiling the plaque to open
the garden. You can safely assume this lack of opportunity was the active
intention of Cartwright or her staff, or possibly the PM's ossif. This may
hint at the issue recently raised by the Monarchist League: the control of
Government House staff by Klark & Heather Simpson.

These disloyal creeps know full well that the world's senior
exponent of sustainable agriculture would love to speak to children - and
others - celebrating the opening of a garden for ecological education.
But no speech was arranged; hundreds of people could hear nothing from the
Prince.

The crowd was, however, told over a loudspeaker that Cartwright's
crony Sandra Coney was absent because of food poisoning (deemed by the
announcer 'unfortunate').

The Prince went out of his way to meet the people. It was good to
note how slim he keeps. He looked cheerful. His voice was strong. The
chmn Ak Regional Authority remarked to me how professional he is. I would
discourage this term; look up in the Oxford that cluster of entries
profession-professional etc - there's a thinly disguised overtone of
contempt, 'doing it for the money' which is exactly what Prince Charles is
not. Skilled, personable, alert, interested, cheerfully communicative,
spreading encouragement - he takes after his mother, which is no fluke!
But media operatives make bold to mock him for the size of his ears (which
I failed to notice). Wendy Petrie's "coverage" for TVNZ was vacuous -
mid-distance movement out of a car, etc.

The Spencer harpie's ring is gone; our prince is about to settle
down as we all wish he had done a couple decade ago, but better late than
never. We must redouble our efforts to publicize his merits, and most
importantly the unchallenged merits of our constitutional monarchy.

TVNZ staged a mischievous long 'debate' a few d before the Prince
was to arrive for this tour. As Ron Mark M.P rightly complained during the
show, it was in bad taste, indeed bad manners to raise - with mischievous
timing - the non-issue of our monarchy. I pointed out on behalf of the
Monarchist League that we have the finest monarch ever, and that her
heir-apparent is a widely experienced prince, a leading advocate &
practitioner of sustainable agriculture, and a most suitable leader above
politics.

The household & functioning of the Queen's resident representative in New
Zealand should be autonomous at least to the extent of freedom from
Klark/Simpson control. 'Separation of powers' is a more audible phrase in
the USA, while we neglect it at our peril. The royal assent to Acts, and
some other monarchical powers delegated to the G-G, should be less open to
influence by political control of Government House from the PM's ossif.
Not that I particularly expect Kartwright to fall out with Klark - tho'
that flurry between Klark and Ms H Fletcher CJ did indicate thieves can
fall out ...

The Minister of Internal Affairs, Geo Hawkins M.P, was present today but
is unlikely to admit he organised this handicapped occasion which could
have been much better with a memorable speech of leadership in applied
ecology (a topic scarcely known to him & his fellow Olde Labour MPs).

I am sending this to quite a few media operatives challenging them
to truthfulness, loyalty for a proven superior system, and basic decency.
To discombooberate the most successful system of government is mischievous;
to campaign for overthrow of the best monarchy is nothing short of wicked,
when no path has been sketched to honour _te tiriti_ while abolishing the
monarchy under which the rights & duties of British law were granted {art.
3, not popular with republican seccessionist racists}. The descendants of
Maoris who thus acquired the rule of law sang 'For God, for King, and for
country' as they famously volunteered to defend it a century later. Dupes,
were they?

I attach the handout we used for the TVNZ 'debate' a week ago.

R

If It Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It

Why New Zealand Should Not become a Republic

The Monarchist League of NZ
72F Ladies Mile, Remuera, Auckland 1005

The Majority of New Zealanders Support Monarchy
The majority of New Zealanders support the monarchy, and oppose this country becoming a republic. Support for the monarchy has remained consistently over 60% even after a decade of destructive agitation by republicans including Prime Ministers Bolger & Clark. Mainstream public opinion favours our monarchy as the basis of our constitution.

It is the Will of the People
The very term Republic implies the will of the people (respublica means literally of the people). The people’s will is that New Zealand shall remain a monarchy. Not only is a monarchy compatible with democracy, but it is anti-democratic to try to force New Zealand to become a republic against the wishes of the majority. Many republicans seemingly subscribe to the anti-democratic notion that they can brainwash the public into thinking that a republic is inevitable, and bring about a republic against the will of most New Zealanders.

Crown and Maori
The Crown is the basis of our constitution; it represents and embodies the people as a whole, and provides constitutional legitimacy through e.g. the Treaty of Waitangi. To overthrow our monarchy would abolish our constitution- with no replacement suggested let alone feasible. Republicanism not merely ignorant - it is dangerous!

Coming together of Crown, Maori, and others

Maori and non-Maori citizens equal under the Crown - that is the basis of our constitutional structure and social compact. The removal of any one element from the three would destabilise the entire system.

The Queen is the Paramount Chief

The Queen fulfils very significant roles within Maori culture, both for her position, and as the descendant and representative of Queen Victoria. To many Maori the Queen is the paramount chief of all the tribes. The Queen is owed traditional allegiance. The loyalty of many Maori to the Crown is deep-seated, and fundamental to their view of our nation. Many Maori regard the Treaty of Waitangi as a compact directly between the Crown and Maori, and the Queen to be directly party to the treaty.

Monarchy Part of Our Culture

The monarchy is a fundamental element of the cultural and political inheritance of the people of New Zealand. It is as much a part of New Zealand’s identity as Maoritanga, rugby, and the English language. All New Zealanders may regard the monarchy as a shared heritage, whatever their ethnic or cultural background. It would be culturally unsafe to attack the monarchy, or remove it from its central place in our culture.

Natural form of government for New Zealand
New Zealand has always had a monarchical form of Government, a development of traditional Maori tribal governance. A republic is an alien concept. An attack on the monarchy can be seen as an attack on traditional concepts of authority, particularly those of Maori. The mana of the Crown is unsurpassed. Love for our monarch is very loyally maintained by most Maoris.

Immigrants chose to come to amonarchy

Immigrants have chosen to live in New Zealand. They chose this country because of its unique lifestyle, culture, system of government, and environment. The monarchy is a part of the system which they have chosen to embrace. They join existing New Zealanders in feeling pride in our constitutional monarchy. They could have chosen to live in a republic. They did not, and we can embrace them for that.

Constitutional arrangements should not be queried needlessly
The constitution of the most politically stable and democratic country in the world shouldn’t be tampered with without a very good reason. Our system of government works well. Too many countries have suffered from chronic political and economic instability after drastic changes to their constitutions.

Monarchy nurtures democracy

A constitutional monarchy is not inconsistent with democracy. In fact itwas the monarchy that created and sustained our democracy. With Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom we have the most democratic system of government in the world, largely owing to the moderating influence of the shared monarchy.

Protects the rights of the people against the abuses of politicians
The monarchy strengthens the democratic process by denying absolute power to politicians. Although neither the Queen nor the Governor-General exercises political power, they do have a significant role in the constitution. The strength of their position derives from the power they deny to others, rather than the power they exercise directly. A bitter lesson from most republics is that an executive president would be more likely to be a cause of abuse than a safeguard against abuse by others.

Protects against unelected elites who believe that they can speak for the nation
A military coup or social revolution is less likely in a monarchy where the military and police swear allegiance to the Crown than in a republic where they swear allegiance to either the state or the governing party. There are many instances of military forces or political factions in republics seizing power on the pretence of acting to defend the “Constitution”, or the “State”, or to protect the “People”. No such false claim to legitimacy can ever be raised in New Zealand. The Crown provides the constitutional continuity and authority. This is lacking in most republics.

Reinforces Links with Commonwealth

The monarchy is central to the Commonwealth grouping of nations. The Queen is Head of the Commonwealth, and has led and inspired its people for over 50 years. A decline to republican status denigrates the place of the Commonwealth, and the role of the Queen. It is a step towards isolationism and insularity. In a time of increasing internationalism we should be embracing cross-continental and cross-cultural links in the Commonwealth as well as further afield.

Absolutely No reason for a republic

Because the republicans have failed to give even one good reason for a republic. There are many reasons to retain the status quo - to be a monarchy, and not to become a republic. There are no good reasons for becoming a republic.

The Monarchy is not irrelevant

Those who suggest that the monarchy is irrelevant could not be more wrong. The Crown permeates New Zealand cultural life, a profound influence on the way this country has evolved and continues to grow.

A republic is more expensive

A republic is likely to be much more expensive to operate than the monarchy. If a president was directly elected by the people, the cost could be huge. The direct costs of the 2004 American presidential elections amounted to over three billion dollars. The process of trying to create a republic would be very costly. The newcourt being set up is to cost many millions of dollars - far more than the total costs to New Zealanders of the Privy Council appeals.

Monarchies generally better off than republics

An OECD survey has established that monarchies are on average wealthier, and more stable, than republics. The monarchy is better for the poor than a typical republic.

Furthermore the disruption caused by an attempt to change from a monarchy to a republic would cause adverse effects on trade, currency values, and overseas investment. The cost to New Zealand of a republic could be enormous. Of course several much nastier types of regime would become possible as hijackings of the attempt to create a republic.

Republicans hopelessly divided over options

There is no simple choice between monarchy and republic. If put to the public in a referendum the options would have to be -
the monarchy; OR an executive presidency; OR parliamentary government.

The 1999 referendum in Australia showed that the republicans cannot agree on a model, and could not get a majority for change to any new system.

We are not Australian Pawns

The major impetus for a republic appears to comes from the largely Australian-controlled media. The Murdoch and Fairfax media conglomerates have long led a campaign to overthrow Australia's monarchy, and are now using their media in this country to bolster republicanism. They are using the people of this country as unwitting pawns in their elitist campaign to force Australia to become a republic.

Choosing to remain Monarchy a sign of maturity

Many republicans say that New Zealand must abandon its links to the Crown in order to show that we are mature. Becoming a republic is no more a sign of national maturity than was abolishing democratic Electric Power Boards. We are the oldest democratic nation, and an independent state over a half-century. How we govern ourselves is our own business. We have sometimes shown the world a good example, and could again.

Republic not inevitable

Prime Minister Clark's chant "it's inevitable" is not an argument for ending the monarchy; indeed it is not an argument at all.

Many republicans are motivated by envy, old-fashioned class hostility, or anti-British sentiment

Many republican activists are seemingly motivated by intolerance, class-envy, or anti-British prejudice. These were features of the failed republican campaign in Australia. Many republican diatribes were marked bytheir viciousness, crudeness, rudeness, racism, and intolerance. There are already signs of this in New Zealand. Such elements must be strongly resisted in defence of our monarchy.

If It Ain't Broke, Don't "Fix" It

Of all the former colonies with a stone-age non-literate aboriginal people, New Zealand has the least unpleasant history. By mid-20th century it was famously defended by numerous volunteers who proudly, bravely sang that they fought "for God, for King and for country". Dupes, were they?

New Zealand has one of the very best systems of government, based on the monarch. We enjoy the enlightened leadership of the finest monarch ever. Her heir-apparent is a widely experienced prince, a leading advocate & practitioner of sustainable agriculture. The Prince's Trust in NZ has trained over 2700 young Kiwis to useful employment.

It is dangerous mischief to advocate overthrow of this monarchy.

March 02, 2005
Maclean's Magazine

Is America going broke?

Record deficits, colossal debt and no clear plan for digging itself
out.

If the U.S. sinks, it will take Canada down with it.

STEVE MAICH

David Walker can see the future, and it scares the hell out of him.

That wouldn't be terribly unusual if he were one of the thousands of
lobbyists, legislators and activists crawling all over Washington on any
given day, pontificating about the urgency of their pet issues. There
is a thriving industry here built on pushing policy prescriptions for every
ailment, real or imagined. But Walker isn't a lobbyist or an activist,
he's an accountant. His title is comptroller general of the United States,
which makes him the head auditor for the most important and powerful
government in the world. And he's desperately trying to get a message out
to anyone
who'll listen: the United States of America's public finances are a shambles.
They're getting rapidly worse. And if something major isn't done soon to
solve the country's intractable budget problems, the world will face an
economic shakeup unlike anything ever seen before.

Seated in his wood-panelled office in downtown Washington, Walker
measures his words, trying to walk the fine line between raising an alarm and
fostering panic. He cringes when he hears prominent economists warning
about a financial "Armageddon," but he makes no bones about the fact the
situation is dire. "I don't like using words that are overly inflammatory," he
says, leaning forward in his chair. "At the same time, I think it is
critically important that the American people, as well as their elected
representatives, get a better understanding of just how serious our
situation is."

THE NUMBERS are staggering -- a US$43-trillion hole in America's public
finances that's getting worse every day. And the stakes are almost
inconceivable for a generation of politicians and voters raised in
relative prosperity, who've never known severe economic hardship. But that
plush
North American lifestyle to which we've all grown accustomed has been
bought on credit, and the bill is rapidly nearing its due date. If the United
States can't find a way to pay up, the results will spill beyond
national borders, spreading economic misery far and wide. In Canada, the
country
whose financial well-being is most tightly tied to trade with the U.S.,
there wouldn't be a single region or industry left untouched by a fiscal
shock south of the border.

It's the looming presence of this potential crisis that brings Walker to
this office every day, through the doorway with the words "Honesty
Accountability Reliability" inscribed above, in hopes that someone will
listen and take up the challenge before it's too late. "The sooner we
start fixing this, the better," he says, "because right now the miracle of
compounding is working against us. Debt on debt is not good. We have to
first stop digging, and then figure out how we're going to fill the
hole."

HOW DID THE U.S. GET INTO THIS MESS?
In January 2001, George W. Bush took over leadership of a nation that
was on its most solid financial footing in decades, thanks to years of strong
economic growth and a booming stock market. That very month, the
Congressional Budget Office projected that the federal government could
expect US$5.6 trillion in surpluses over the coming 10 years. The key
political issue of the day was how to spend the windfall. Bush's team
was determined to return the money to the voters in the form of massive and
widespread tax relief. What the world didn't know was that this surplus
cash was largely illusory, the result of faulty bookkeeping.

The CBO's rosy outlook was based on a few deeply flawed assumptions, in
particular that most government spending would not exceed the pace of
inflation over the following decade, even though the rest of the
economy and tax revenues were projected to grow much faster. Laurence
Kotlikoff, a
professor of economics at Boston University and a prominent critic of
U.S. budgetary planning, released a paper that year drawing attention to
what he called the CBO's "fiscal fantasy." But his was a single, lonely voice,
and few on Capitol Hill were listening. The tax-cut agenda had taken hold,
and there would be no stopping it.

The CBO and other agencies have since gone back and found that a more
realistic surplus projection would have been US$2.2 trillion -- over 60
per cent less than initially thought. And that cushion quickly disappeared
as Bush whittled or eliminated one tax provision after another, from the
marriage tax and personal income tax rates to capital gains, gifts and
dividends. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington
think tank, estimates that between 2001 and 2004, federal tax revenue dropped
by some US$600 billion. Most of the tax cuts introduced so far are
temporary, but the Republicans have made it clear they intend to make the
reductions permanent before the end of the current term.

In the midst of this tax-relief bonanza, and nine months into the new
President's first mandate, came Sept. 11. The horror of the terrorist
attacks profoundly changed the American public's attitude toward
security and defence almost overnight. Within months, the U.S. military was on
the ground in Afghanistan attacking terrorist camps and overthrowing the
Taliban regime. From there, the troops moved on to Iraq. Between 2001 and
2004,
the annual budget for the Pentagon and domestic security rose by US$87.1
billion, an increase of 27.5 per cent in four years. In the process, a
budget that had a surplus of US$128 billion in 2001 crumbled into a
deficit of US$412 billion last year -- the biggest annual shortfall in United
States history.

But that's just one symptom of a much deeper fiscal problem. The U.S. is
heading for a massive demographic shift as baby boomers start retiring
in three years. As they do, the costs of providing social programs and
health care are going to soar. "It's not the deficits of today that are the big
problem," says Josh Bivens, an economist with the non-partisan Economic
Policy Institute in D.C. "It's that, if you make the Bush tax cuts
permanent, you're going to have deficits as far as the eye can see."

HOW BIG IS THE PROBLEM?
A trillion is a hard number to wrap your head around. Most people know
it's a thousand billion -- 12 zeroes -- but even that is difficult to fathom
in terms of value. So think of it like this: a trillion U.S. dollars is
roughly the size of the entire Canadian economy. The world's six biggest oil
companies had combined 2004 revenues just shy of US$1 trillion. And if
you piled a trillion dollars in $1,000 bills, the stack would be more than
109 km high.

As of February, the U.S. national debt stood at US$7.7 trillion. And
this year, the country is projecting another record deficit of US$427
billion, increasing its debt by about US$1.2 billion a day. Thanks to low
interest rates, the cost of borrowing all that money remains relatively low,
amounting to about 8.6 per cent of the federal budget for 2005. But when
rates rise, so will the cost of carrying that debt, and current White House
forecasts suggest that by 2010, those yearly costs will hit US$314
billion.

But even those projections don't adequately capture the depth of
America's financial hole. For one thing, current budget estimates do not
include
the costs of the ongoing military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, which
are expected to require an additional US$80 billion in funding over the next
year or so. The budget also does not factor in any costs associated
with the President's plan to reform Social Security, which would give
people the
option of diverting some of their tax contributions into private
retirement accounts they manage themselves. That plan will call for between
US$1
trillion and US$2 trillion in additional government borrowing over the
next decade. Bush has proposed cutting the budget deficit in half by 2010,
but that strategy doesn't take into account his pledges to make permanent
many of those temporary tax reductions introduced in 2001 and 2002, not to
mention other tax cuts promised but not yet implemented.

What's more, none of this even begins to deal with the most pressing
challenge of all: how to pay for the sunset years and medical costs of
about 77 million baby boomers getting set to retire. Walker refers to this as
a "demographic tidal wave" coming to swamp the country's finances. He
estimates that when you take into account the unfunded liabilities of
Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid -- programs that together comprise the
heart of the U.S. social safety net, paying pension and health-care costs for
the elderly, as well as providing medical coverage for the poor -- America's
long-term budget shortfall is approximately US$43 trillion, about four
times the size of the nation's economy, and more than 20 times the federal
government's annual tax revenues. And some actuaries think even that
number understates the size of the problem.

To most observers, it's becoming increasingly obvious that, within the
next 10 years, the U.S. government will simply not be able to borrow money
fast enough to keep up with its exploding expenses. That has huge
implications for everything Americans do, from funding the military to
protecting the
environment. The Economic Policy Institute recently projected that
under the current tax regime, by 2014 all government revenue would be
consumed by
four areas of spending: health care for the elderly and the poor, Social
Security for retirees, national defence and interest on the debt. There
will be
no money left for such fundamental initiatives as education,
transportation or justice, which means the government would be forced into
ever-escalating
borrowing to pay for basic programs. Walker's department projects that,
under the current tax rates, interest costs on the skyrocketing national
debt would be about half of all government tax revenues by 2031. Ten
years later, the cost of servicing the debt will exceed all government
revenues.

Laurence Kotlikoff described this burgeoning crisis four years ago in a
paper entitled "The Coming Generational Storm." Last year, he provided a
dark summary of the situation in a Fortune magazine article. "The U.S.
government is effectively bankrupt," he wrote. The available options to
close the fiscal gap? Hike income taxes by 78 per cent; slash Social
Security and Medicare benefits by more than half; or eliminate all other
discretionary spending. "That," he concludes, "is America's menu of
pain."

HOW MUCH LONGER CAN THIS SITUATION GO ON?
The United States is the world's best customer. It buys far more from
foreign countries than it sells to them, resulting in a sizable trade
deficit. It also spends more on public programs than it collects in tax
revenues. And to pay for all these outlays, the U.S. must attract
mountains of foreign capital each year, which essentially amounts to borrowing
from foreign governments and investors. This is commonly referred to as the
current accounts deficit -- which was running at US$665 billion last
year.

Those foreign countries don't lend out of the goodness of their hearts;
for the most part they lend because the U.S. uses that money to buy goods
from them and other nations. In many ways, the prosperity of the developed
world, including Canada, Europe and parts of Asia, has been financed over
several decades by America's rampant spending, says David Rosenberg, a
Canadian
who is chief North American economist for Merrill Lynch in New York. In
Canada's case, by year-end this country had sold $8.8 billion more in goods to
the U.S. than we bought from it -- despite the loonie's sharp rise against
the greenback that made Canadian exports less affordable to Americans.

But foreign investors cannot go on forever supporting U.S. spending. A
banker who holds your mortgage and car loan will get nervous if you keep
coming back to up the limit on your credit cards, and international debt
markets work in much the same way. The question becomes, how much longer
will those investors be willing to lend to the U.S., especially at the
current low interest rates, when the country appears to have no plan for
meeting its long-term funding needs? The issue is even more pressing
given the fact that the U.S. dollar has been falling for more than a year,
decimating returns for those foreigners who invest in U.S. bonds.

Stephen Roach, chief economist at Morgan Stanley, is an outspoken
critic of U.S. fiscal policy and has long warned that America's increasing
reliance on foreign lending puts it at risk of a major economic shock. A
sudden
drop in the dollar could trigger, among other things, a stock market crash, a
plunge in the real estate market, a deep recession, or all of the above.
"There's nothing stable about America's dependence on the kindness of
strangers,"
Roach wrote in a report last summer. "The funding of America is an
accident waiting to happen."

At a recent meeting with fund managers in Boston, Roach said he believes
there is a 90 per cent chance the country's rampant borrowing will
eventually lead to a disaster for the economy. Others, including former
U.S. treasury secretary Lawrence Summers and former president Bill Clinton,
use less inflammatory language but have also warned that the size of U.S.
deficits could compromise the nation's foreign policy and trade and
security goals. For example, how long can Washington stick to its
commitment to
defend Taiwan against Chinese aggression when it borrows so heavily from
China to support the American economy?

David Rosenberg scoffs at alarmists like Roach, but he does acknowledge
the current fiscal path is unsustainable. He quotes economist Herbert
Stein's old maxim: "Anything that cannot go on forever, will stop."

WHY SHOULD WE CARE?
History provides some harrowing examples of what happens when an economy
collapses under the weight of unsustainable debt. One of the most
chilling is Argentina in 2001. When the International Monetary Fund cut off its
support for the country's escalating debt, the effect was catastrophic:
the value of the national currency plunged, decimating the savings of
millions.
The resulting surge in inflation and sudden slowdown in consumer
spending put thousands of businesses into bankruptcy within weeks. That, in
turn, put further millions out of work and pushed one of South America's
biggest
economies into a punishing recession.

As unfathomable as it may seem, most economists think something like
that could happen in the United States. "If foreign investors look at the
long-run outlook for the federal budget and decide there is going to be
a crash, you get a financial panic," Bivens explains. "Interest rates
spike.
That causes a huge recession. You'll have the dollar falling fast, so
maybe inflation is sparked at the same time." And if interest rates spike,
that would squeeze millions of U.S. consumers who have taken out loans
against the rising value of their homes in recent years. A sudden hit to the
real estate market would further constrain consumers' wallets, leading to a
cycle of lower spending, and deeper recession, Bivens says.

Kotlikoff outlines a frighteningly similar scenario in his book The
Coming Generational Storm. In it, he describes America in 2030 hurting from
"unprecedented" tax levels, drastic reductions to social programs,
unsustainable borrowing, spiralling inflation and an explosion in tax
evasion. He compares the United States in 25 years to what Russia's
economy looked like at the the turn of the millennium.

When he considers the numbers, Bivens can't disagree with Kotlikoff's
forecast. "You've got all the ingredients for a pretty spectacular crash
that a country as rich as the U.S. should just never be even close to
flirting with," he says. "Another six or seven years along this path
and I think we'll really be flirting with it. It's rather insane."

And this insane behaviour is a huge problem for everyone else because of
America's importance to the world economy. Literally millions of
workers in Canada, the U.K., Germany, Japan and elsewhere are directly or
indirectly reliant on a healthy U.S. market for their jobs. "If suddenly
Americans
were unable to buy those goods from those countries, the countries would
have to very quickly figure out how to keep their people employed," Bivens
explains.
Accordingly, most economists agree that a severe downturn in the United
States would drag the rest of the world down with it. "If a country as
big as the U.S. gets sick, everybody's gonna get sick," says Bivens.

That is a reality Canadians don't seem to fully grasp. A recent
Maclean's/Rogers Media poll found only 41 per cent agree that the
domestic economy is closely tied to that of the U.S.; 11 per cent choose to
believe the two economies are not at all interrelated. In reality, virtually
every region of the country and every major industry -- forestry, energy,
mining, auto manufacturing, agriculture, technology -- depends on U.S. demand
for its prosperity. If American consumers are suffering under surging
unemployment, spiking interest rates, collapsing housing prices and
rising inflation, those same forces will inevitably spill over into Canada.

Rosenberg, for one, believes the U.S. will restructure its fiscal
policy to avoid a major crash -- but even such a process of reform is sure
to have
negative effects on trading partners like Canada. To close its fiscal
gap and reduce its need to borrow abroad, the U.S. must find ways to boost
its exports while slowing imports. In other words, it must make it more
difficult for other countries to sell into its market. This is what
economists refer to as a "beggar thy neighbour" policy. "For the world
economy, this means the free ride is over," Rosenberg says. "The days of
partying on the U.S.'s fiscal Ferris wheel are over. It's done."

HOW CAN AMERICA FIX THE PROBLEM?
On Nov. 1, 2000, as George W. Bush was campaigning for the White House,
he warned an audience in Minneapolis that the Democrats would lead the
nation into a future of higher taxes and slower economic growth that "could
mean an end to this nation's prosperity." Bush won the election in part by
portraying himself as an antidote to tax-and-spend liberals. Yet despite
this bold austerity rhetoric, discretionary spending rose 23 per cent in
Bush's first term. Just over four years after harping on the dangers of
fiscal irresponsibility, the President is on his way to making his own
warnings a reality.

Virtually every reputable independent observer who has looked at the
United States budget shortfall concludes that some combination of significant
tax increases and major spending cuts is unavoidable. But making those
reforms happen, and closing that budget gap, will require the kind of deft
touch
used to dismantle a bomb. The American currency must be slowly,
carefully managed lower to boost U.S. exports, but without triggering a sudden
plunge in the greenback that could spark a devastating jump in inflation.
Interest rates must gradually rise to ward off inflation and encourage
consumers
to save more of their earnings. Spending must be reined in, but not so
severely that it compromises U.S. security and other public priorities. And
taxes
must be raised, but not so drastically that they stunt economic growth.

In many ways, the U.S. must now emulate the program that Canada
instituted in the 1990s to bring its deficit spending and surging national
debt
under control. That was done with higher taxes, billions in spending cuts and
a sharp drop in the dollar's value, combined with healthy economic
growth. But south of the border the size of the challenge is much larger, the
stakes are higher, and it seems clear the standard of living that millions of
Americans have come to take for granted will have to change.

Walker stresses the need to make "tough decisions," and none will be
tougher than tackling the runaway costs of providing health-care coverage for
the elderly and the poor. Health spending in the U.S. is projected to jump
63 per cent by 2010, and to continue rising even faster after that. Most
analysts agree that, at some point, the government must find a way to
clamp down on those costs, yet any cuts in coverage are sure to raise an
outcry from the swelling ranks of senior citizens -- a highly influential
voting bloc.

Academics have proposed such reforms as a national retail sales tax, a
luxury tax and a rollback of all tax cuts enacted since 2001. Others are
calling for increased funding for the Internal Revenue Service to catch
tax cheaters. Many insist there must be increases to Medicare premiums, as
well as massive cutbacks in a wide range of social programs. But telling
voters that they will have to pay more in taxes for fewer services is not an
easy sell, and so far no politician has been willing to try it. In February,
Bush tabled a proposed budget that would eliminate or trim back 150
government programs, but even with that, the U.S. would be racking up deficits
well in excess of US$200 billion for years to come. "They're not being serious
about austerity at all," Bivens says. "They're talking about very big cuts to
very small programs. They mean a lot to the people getting them, but it's
pennies in the overall fiscal problem."

James Horney spent more than seven years as a staffer at the
Congressional Budget Office and now does analysis for the Center on Budget
and Policy
Priorities, a non-partisan think tank in Washington. He says the
solution to the debt problem can only emerge when both parties in Congress
and the
President sit down to work out a "grand bargain" that includes
concessions on both taxes and program spending, and a strategy for reassuring
international lenders. "It requires a deal in which everything is on the
table and everyone is at the table," Horney says. "One just hopes it
will happen before some major cataclysm."

Walker shares that hope, and clings to his own sense of optimism. He
says he has detected a noticeable shift in attitude just in the past few
months, as legislators slowly come to grips with the inevitable financial
reckoning.
But he acknowledges that, so far, there is little concrete progress to
show for his efforts. "The thing that is frustrating is that you can talk to
people and point to things, but that's all you can do," he says. "You
can lead them to water, but they have to drink. And they better start
drinking fast -- and soon."

To contact the writer, email: steve.maich@macleans.rogers.com

http://belmontclub.blogspot.com/

Saturday, February 26, 2005

The Denver Channel reports that 200 University of Colorado faculty members
have published a petition in a local newspaper asking that the
investigation against Ward Churchill be dropped.

The faculty members paid for the ad to run Monday in The
Boulder Daily Camera. The ad says the review of the professor, expected to
complete by the middle of March, should be stopped immediately. The ad says
the inquiry is the result of political pressure and not based on "any prior
formal complaint of specific professional or academic misconduct on his
part." ...

CU's Arts and Sciences Council passed a resolution Feb. 10
protesting the investigation, and said administrators should know that
faculty members are serious about their opposition to what some consider a
witch hunt. Margaret LeCompte, an education professor, said, "It is going
to be extremely difficult, if academic freedom is on the block, for us to
hire and keep good faculty members.' LeCompte and the other teachers who
signed the ad paid $1,600 to have it published. "We're all thinking twice
about what we're saying," LeCompte said, recalling the climate in the
McCarthy era when professors were fired for alleged communist ties.

The same story is being carried by the Rocky Mountain News on a feed from
the Associated Press. Some newspapers are connecting this 'witch hunt'
with the mandatory Loyalty Oaths the State of Colorado requires of teachers
at institutions of higher learning. According to the Denver Channel:

State law requires anybody who teaches at a higher education
institution to sign an oath affirming they will uphold the U.S. and
Colorado constitutions. University officials said somewhere between 80
percent and 90 percent of staff have signed loyalty oaths. Those who
haven't, will be required to do so. Churchill was among the minority that
hadn't before the controversy. But he subsequently has signed.

Dissent has long been described as a patriotic and legitimate activity and
Professor Churchill's patriotism is a thing to behold. A transcript of a
speech he gave on February 21, 2005 is provided by InfoshopOrg, an
anarchist website, from a Counterpunch source.

Ward Churchill: Hello my relatives; you humble me. Bill
Owens: do you get it now? [applause] If you can count on your toes, you'll
be able to count the percentage points of contribution to the budget the
University of Colorado you and your ilk have reduced the taxpayer
contribution to. It comes to seven. I do not work for the taxpayers of
the state of Colorado. I do not work for Bill Owens.....

Question #4: I'm glad I came here tonight; I've heard a lot
more than I heard on the average sound bytes we've been hearing on the
radio. I agree with some points, there are other points that I disagree
with, but I do believe you have a constitutional right to say what you have
to say. On the other hand, do you agree that the First Amendment rights
for the people marching in the Columbus Day parade should be taken away,
because that is their freedom of expression as well, and I'm one of those
people.

Ward Churchill: Let me answer the man. No, I don't believe
you have a First Amendment right because that bounces off against my Ninth
Amendment right. You know what my Ninth Amendment rights are? Do you know
what the Ninth Amendment says?

Question #4: No, sir.

Ward Churchill: Yeah. Do we have a law professor in here? I
think this is a lesson for law school, because I addressed another
university auditorium with about this many people in it last week, and I
posed the same question to the whole group. Professors, students,
townspeople and all, not a soul, including law professors, could tell me
what the damn Ninth Amendment said. [laughter] S'pose there might be a
reason for that?

Question #4: Sir, sir, sir does that negate the First Amendment?

Ward Churchill: No, no, wait a minute; let's get an answer to it.

Audience Member: Basically it says that whatever rights were
not given to federal government are given to the states.

Ward Churchill: Actually, wrong, beep. [laughter] What it
says, in very close paraphrase, is that all rights not otherwise enumerated
herein that are inherent in people are retained by them, OK? You can have
a real entertaining time looking at the nature of those rights as
articulated, and it can be rather nebulous and it can be debatable, but
I'll tell you one place you can look where it's not debatable at all and
that's in black letter legal articulation. That goes to human rights,
particularly the articulation of international human rights that take the
form of ratified treaties. Under Article Six of the Constitution of the
United States, those are the supreme law of the land, and among them, are
fundamental human dignity, OK? And celebration of the conditions that I
was describing as pertaining to native people as an outcome of the process
initiated by Christopher Columbus, celebrating that guy in any respect at
all is a celebration of those conditions. That's a denial of fundamental
human dignity, that's a denial of my Ninth Amendment rights and you don't
have a right to do that, and you know exactly what you're doing. [applause]

A Teaching Moment

University of Colorado officials are considering offering
Ward Churchill an early retirement package that could end an increasingly
uncomfortable standoff with the controversial professor. ... David Lane,
Churchill's attorney, said he has not been contacted about a buyout offer.
But, he said, while his primary focus is on protecting Churchill's
constitutional right to speak out, he would be willing to listen to a
university proposal. "If they offer $10 million, I would think about it.
If they offer him $10, I wouldn't," Lane said.

Freedom of speech is not priceless. It's worth ten million dollars and not
a penny less. This, according to the Denver Post, is preferred way to get
Professor Churchill off the campus. The alternative, it sources suggest, is
far worse.

Typically such dismissals - even if done by the book - result
in years of expensive lawsuits that Hoffman told legislators last week the
university would like to avoid. Sources involved in the talks said if an
arrangement could be made, it could get everyone off the hook, including
Churchill, the subject of daily press revelations. The latest controversy
is whether an artwork by Churchill titled "Winter Attack" was copied from a
1972 piece by Thomas Mails, "The Mystic Warriors of the Plains."

The Rocky Mountain News depicts the CU administration as practically
paralyzed with fear at the possible retaliation Churchill could visit on
them should theyattempt to chastise him.

University of Colorado President Betsy Hoffman had some
fairly strong words Tuesday for those who have argued that professor Ward
Churchill should be fired. "The more talk there is about the need to fire
him, the more difficult it becomes for us to do that, if that's what we
decide to do," she told Republican lawmakers, urging them not to join
calls for action. "If we approach this issue wrong," she said, "not only
will every regent be sued personally, but every administrator will be sued
personally and professor Churchill will win his lawsuit with triple damages
and be back on the faculty, a very wealthy man at our expense."

This fear, whether real or pretended, is an impressive demonstration of the
power of Political Correctness, a compound of legal menace, the threat of
extralegal action and of retaliatory vilification that is not some figure
of speech but an actual, material force. Even if Churchill is 'bought out'
at $10 million -- should he stoop to accept such a beggarly sum -- he will
have unambiguously demonstrated the value of leftist protection. That he
could have survived repeated exposure as an ethnic identity thief, academic
fraud and art forger; that he could have assaulted a newsman on television
and withstood the personal opprobrium of the Colorado Governor, only to
receive a fortune in compensation, can only add to his fame.

The perception of danger depends on one's perspective. Neville
Chamberlain's Foreign Minister, Lord Halifax, argued against opposing the
Nazi aggression by asking "was any useful purpose served by treading on the
landslide and being carried along with it"? Another Churchill, unrelated
to Ward, counterargued that the danger lay entirely the other way: that
capitulation mean stepping onto a "slippery slope" every bit as perilous as
Halifax's metaphorical landslide; how each moment of procrastination
increased the awfulness of the inevitable clash. The case, on smaller
scale, describes CU's dilemma. From Hoffman's point of view, it is
resisting Ward Churchill that is dangerous; from another standpoint it is
not resisting him that constitutes the threat.

posted by wretchard®

> Cato Inst Policy Report January/February 2005 Vol. XXVII No. 1

This is an interesting example of the intellectual-looking Noo
Right in the USA.

I interpolate some comments.

>the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness,
>or EEA ... loosely, was the Pleistocene, during which
>humans lived as hunter-gatherers from about
>1.6 million years ago up until the invention
>of agriculture about 10,000 years ago.

The question whether the human mind has rapidly evolved within
just the last few millennia or even centuries is not illuminated by highly
abstract hypotheses of

>distinct mental functions (e.g., perception, reading
>other people's intentions, responding emotionally
>to potential mates) underwritten
>by different neurological "circuits" or
>"modules," which can each be conceived as
>a mini computer program selected under
>environmental pressure to solve specific problems
>of survival and reproduction typical in
>the original setting of human evolution.

...

>Allocative hierarchies, on the other hand,
>exist mainly to transfer resources to the
>top. Aristocracies and dictatorships are
>extreme examples.

To assert, just by mentioning them together, that aristocracies are
all exploitative like dictatorships is a sneaky rhetorical trick. It is
false. Some aristocracies have successfully devoted themselves to net
wealth production & distribution without oppression. Many rural
squirearchies in England during the Edwardian era were the most decent
civilisations to survive the industrial revolution. Liars like Lenin, who
repeatedly promised to abolish the police, destructively claw down
hierarchies refined over centuries - to substitute far more harm.

In the same USA materialistic ideological bent, Wilkinson slickly
asserts

> modern positive-sum productive hierarchies,
>like corporations ... enterprises that tend
>to make everyone better off.

Your modern corporation is in some cases a gross asset-destroyer;
and even when it does net money for its owners, the externalities it
creates often make its net total effect enormously negative. Rio Tinto
would be a classic example. This is especially the fate of corporations
which do nothing worthwhile in the first place (damage side of ledger:
hefty ; benefits side of ledger: lite). Nominations are called for -
let me start with Homestake. Any informed citizen can add to the list.

>These features of human nature - that we
>are coalitional, hierarchical, and envious
>zero-sum thinkers - would seem to make liberal
>capitalism extremely unlikely. And it is.

How likely, on these criteria, is communism? Pretending
coalitionality and near-abolition of hierarchy with ostentatious
superficial chants 'comrade' etc while creating murderous exploitation such
as never before seen in modern times, and the 'totalitarian luxury'
glimpsed by Churchill in State Villa no. 9; exploiting envy for the new
elite characterised by Animal Farm, while promising to abolish the police;
purporting to re-create plant biology (Lysenko) if not human biology;
overthrowing a reforming prince to substitute the largest scale of state
terrorism ever ... and no, sorry, I can't agree that later experimenters
Mao, Hoxha, Kim etc did notably better.

> The human mind
>comprises many distinct, specialized functions
>and is not an all-purpose learning
>machine that can be reformatted at will to
>realize political dreams.

right on

> The shape of society
>is constrained by our evolved nature.
>Remaking humanity through politics is a
>biological impossibility on the order of curing
>cancer with pine needle tea.
...
>Evolutionary psychology, by helping us to
>better understand human nature, can aid us
>in cultivating social orders that do not
>foolishly attempt to cut against the grain of
>human nature.
...
>According to evolutionary psychologists,
>the basic constitution of the human mind
>hasn't changed appreciably for about 50,000
>years. Thus the evolutionary psychologist's
>slogan: modern skulls house Stone Age minds.

It is slightly eerie that some experts in evolution theory and
'cognitive psychology' now re-invent what Goldsmith has been saying for
several decades. He, and the re-inventors of his anthropological wheel,
tend to ignore the evident changes in the human mind over the past few
centuries.

That humans have lived 99.9% of their existence in tribes is NOT news.
The extent to which we have failed to improve our psychology to do better
in cities, corporations, and bureaucracies will be illuminated to only a
small extent by "evolutionary psychology", if it is subservient to
materialism, econowanking (of whatever variety), or other inferior
ideologies.

R

From: "Maxim Institute"
Subject: Maxim Institute - real issues - No 146

No. 146, 3 MARCH 2005

* < #1>Civil unions to be equivalent with marriage

* < #2>Child poverty a family problem

* < #3>Apprenticeships as valuable as tertiary training

* < #4>Hate speech not censored yet?

Civil unions to be equivalent with marriage

Proposed changes by the Justice and Electoral select committee to the
Relationships Bill highlight the primary goal of making civil unions
legally equivalent to marriage. 180 laws will be changed so that 'civil
union' and 'civil union partner' will be inserted after every reference to
marriage or married couples, with only one exception.

The Bill struck a lot more problems with regard to de facto relationships.
Many of the references to de facto partners have been removed, as the
committee has recognised the serious flaw in the idea that all
relationships are equal and must be treated equally. The committee deleted
references to de facto couples from many sections, facing the fact that
different relationships should be treated differently.

In an attempt to preserve the status of marriage and its distinction from
civil unions and de facto relationships in law, the committee recommends
protecting language associated with marriage. It recommends that the words
'spouse', 'husband', 'wife', 'widow', and 'widower' are only used in the
context of marriage. While this is a positive recommendation, it is ironic
that such a change aims to protect the uniqueness of marriage when the
overall intention of the Bill is relationship neutrality.

An important new provision in the Bill is an inclusion in the
Interpretation Act 1999 to apply the term 'step-parent' to civil union and
de facto couples. An additional requirement will be added that step-parents
share responsibility for the day-to-day care of the child with the parent
of a child.

The Relationships Bill is expected to be passed into law later this month,
prior to the Civil Union Act coming into force on 26 April. On its
introduction it was passed by 77 votes to 41.

To read the select committee report visit:

This is a contender for 'RSNZ gasser of the month'

*Items Web-mounted on Friday, 4 March 2005****


Hitler had atom bomb first, new book claims
Nazi scientists carried out tests of what would now be called a "dirty"
nuclear device in the waning days of World War II

- and Hinkler wouldn't use it in the Ardennes Bulge? What was
holding him up? Lash up a few kamikaze Hinkler Youth ... get the wind
right ...

Anyhow hevi-doodi dirtiness for 'dirty bomb' radioactive weapons
can be produced on a potentially war-winning scale only by fission. A
'fizzer' A-bomb is acually quite difficult to make.

These paranoid attempts to promote minor radiation weapons,
depleted uranium, etc to similar scare status as nuclear weapons are
regrettable.

-

Robt Mann
Mulgoon Professor emeritus of Environmental Studies, U of Auckland
consultant stirrer & motorcyclist
P O Box 28878, Remuera, Auckland 1005, New Zealand (9) 524 2949

The Wall Street Journal

March 3, 2005

COMMENTARY

Unruly Britannia

By RUSSELL LEWIS

March 3, 2005

Let's start with Britain's most popular game. In the 1930s, British
football crowds were as orderly as church congregations. Today our soccer
fans are a byword for aggressive violence. In the first-class matches in
1946-47 only 10 players were sent off. By the mid-'90s the total number of
red cards issued in a season had reached 451. Hooliganism is not confined
to our footballers and their supporters. In 2002, a survey by the travel
company Expedia of tourist offices in 17 countries found that, for
loutishness, British visitors were top of the league.

At home the yobbism of the football crowds is only magnified in the
incidence of violent crime, which rose from 4,221 in 1898 to 331,843 in
1998-99. Even adjusting for population growth, that amounts to a 47-fold
increase. The situation is actually worse than the numbers suggest, for
the laws and their enforcement were stricter a century ago. Indeed, as one
eminent authority, Professor Jose Harris, put it, "If Edwardian standards
were applied in the '90s, most of the youth of Britain would be in gaol."

But at least we Brits still love our children, don't we? Well, not, it
seems, in all cases. In recent times there has been a virtual epidemic of
child abuse. Prosecutions for cruelty or neglect of children in England
and Wales -- 228 in 1988 -- have since jumped more than threefold.

Drug use, once remarkably well-contained in this country, is now rife among
English teenagers. According to a 1999 European Union survey, 41% of
English youngsters between 15 and 16 years of age had tried cannabis -- the
highest rate in Europe. Alcohol abuse is also expanding merrily, and not
only among the lager louts in and out of the stadiums. When it comes to
tippling, British women are way ahead of their sisters on the European
mainland.

Dickens' Fagin would have found much to applaud in the activities of
present-day English juveniles. According to a speech by then-Education
Secretary Estelle Morris in April 2002, the proportion of all robberies
committed by 10- to 16-year-olds during school hours was as follows: street
robberies 40%; car thefts 33%; burglaries 25%; and criminal damage 20%.
After reading that, it isn't surprising to learn that 9.9% of all
schoolchildren skip class at least once a week.

Of course the ultimate source of these troubles is poor upbringing, fueled
in part by the rise of illegitimacy. Between 1900 and 1960 births outside
marriage averaged 4%-5% in the U.K. Today they are 40% of the total. This
flouting of societal norms appears to have stimulated a corrupt attitude
toward society's institutions: The Benefit Agency reports that over a
quarter of the people it serves were definitely or possibly guilty of false
claims -- not a very inspiring example to the offspring.

The reasons for this moral decline are as clear as the aforementioned
statistics are bleak. As James Bartholomew argues in his recent book "The
Welfare State We're In" (Politico's, 2004), the blame rests squarely on the
growth of the welfare state, which has removed personal responsibility in
large areas of people's lives and substituted dependency on the state and
the rule of the bureaucrat. The state is complicit in the breakdown of the
family; consider Mr. Bartholomew's example of how the state has promoted
single-parent families by taxing married couples -- and abolishing the
marriage allowance -- while giving increasing amounts of money to single
parents.

No wonder, then, that from 1972 to 1992 the proportion of children living
with a lone parent tripled to 21% from 7%. The link with rising crime is
reflected in one shaming statistic: One-third of the people in U.K. prisons
spent time in an orphanage at some time in their childhood. One prison
governor, on being asked how many of the inmates had formerly been taken
into foster care, replied: "Nearly all of them."

Indeed, the collapse of the traditional nuclear family has hit the poorest
classes quite disproportionately, with nearly a quarter of girls whose
fathers were unskilled workers becoming teenage mothers, mostly outside
marriage. Divorces have risen sevenfold since 1960, and these also have
been much more common among the poor.

Of course there are many examples of children being well raised by a single
parent, but these are statistically dwarfed by the evidence that two-parent
families are more successful in teaching discipline and respect for
morality. With one parent -- most often the father -- missing from the
picture, it is not surprising that children are more apt to run wild.

Free state education was intended to civilize the poor and improve their
lot by fostering their intellectual and practical skills while also making
them good citizens. The reality is that, rather than making up for the
failures of a bad home background, schools in poor neighborhoods are
generally the worst -- characterized by lack of discipline, high rates of
bullying and crime, poor teaching, low grades and even unacceptably poor
basic skills such as reading, writing and counting.

Mr. Lewis is a former general director of the Institute of Economic Affairs.

Curious how so many WimminsLibbers, when crossed, turn into hysterical
harpies. Or delicate flowers, "forced" to black out or throw up at any
challenge, rather than responding with any facts or reasoning - which are
ruled out in their version of totalitarianism.

Consider the Los Angeles Times ...

This article is rubbish -GEA


Study Blames 20,000 Deaths a Year on Diesel Exhaust

WASHINGTON - Emissions from old diesel engines cause more than 20,000
Americans a year to die sooner than they would have otherwise, an
environmental group estimated Tuesday.

-----

That may be a reasonable estimate for the old ones. But the story
omits the worse aspects of the nooer ones!

The sub-micron particles from modern 'lo-smoke' EFI diesels are
ranked by some experts as _the_ under-rated public health problem in our
cities. Their astronomical surface area adsorbs carcinogens from the
exhaust vapours e.g polycyclic aromatics which are then delivered into the
deep lung, as protective cilia are paralysed.

Thus the aesthetic advance in eliminating visible black smoke has
almost certainly created a worse health risk.

The doyen of MIT engine-emissions control visited NZ ca.8y ago. I
put this picture to him, in a public lecture sponsored by the Inst of Prof
Engrs in NZ. He did not demur.

R

-------

Published Feb. 24, 2005

The Diesel Opportunity

The deadly effects of breathing diesel fumes came into sharp focus
this week when the Clean Air Task Force (CATF) released a report[1]
estimating that diesel fumes kill about 21,000 U.S. citizens each
year.

Furthermore, diesel fumes cause 27,000 nonfatal heart attacks and
410,000 asthma attacks in U.S. adults each year, plus roughly 12,000
cases of chronic bronchitis, 15,000 hospital admissions, 2.4 million
lost-work days, and 14 million restricted activity days.

And that is almost certainly not the worst of it. The Clean Air Task
Force report cites numerous studies revealing that diesel soot

degrades the immune system (the system that protects us all from
bacteria, viruses and cancers);

interferes with our hormones, reducing sperm production,
masculinizing female rats, altering the development of baby rats
(changing their bones, thymus, and nervous systems), modifying their
adrenal and reproductive hormones;

causes serious, permanent impairment of the nervous system in
diesel-exposed railroad workers;

induces allergic reactions, not limited to asthma, causing children
to miss thousands upon thousands of school-days -- a primary cause of
school dropout, consequent low self-esteem, and subsequent life-
failure.

The new report is based on the most recent available data from the
federal EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) combined with EPA risk
models, with calculations carried out by Abt Associates, a consulting
firm that frequently performs contract studies for the EPA.[2]

The key findings of the report should come as no surprise. The dangers
of breathing diesel fumes have been known for at least two decades.

More than 20 years ago, numerous researchers confirmed and reconfirmed
that they could cause lung cancer in laboratory animals breathing air
laced with diesel fumes.

To anyone taking a precautionary approach, this confirmed knowledge of
diesel's ill effects on animals would have jump-started a search for
alternative ways to power on-road and off-road machines, to phase out
diesel in an orderly step-wise fashion.

But the National Academy of Sciences did not take a precautionary
approach. The New York Times reported Dec. 23, 1981, that the Academy
acknowledged that diesel soot is known to contain suspected cancer-
causing substances. But the Academy said, "no convincing
epidemiological evidence exists" that there is "a connection between
diesel fumes and human cancer." In other words, let's not act on the
animal evidence -- let's hunker down and wait until we can line up the
dead humans. This is the risk-based approach to public health. It is
the opposite of a precautionary approach.

Twenty years ago, in the spring of 1985, the Natural Resources Defense
Council (NRDC) issued a scientific report about the dangers of diesel
fumes in New York. The New York Times reported May 18, 1985: "Diesel
emissions are probably the single most important air-quality threat in
New York City today," said Eric A. Goldstein, a lawyer for the
environmental group and an author of the report. "But city, state and
Federal agencies have not yet mounted a broad-based counterattack."
The Times reported then that a spokesperson for the New York State
Environmental Conservation Department acknowledged that diesel fumes
cause lung cancer in humans but, he said, the state was "not yet sure"
how big the problem was. The state had no plan for dealing with diesel
because "we have not identified the extent of the problem," he said.

This is a classic example of the risk-based approach. Ignore the
evidence so long as it is not 100% airtight. Use uncertainty as an
excuse to delay. Wait for the dead bodies to pile up, then slowly
acknowledge the need for action.

By 1985, there was no doubt that dead bodies were piling up. But the
exact number of corpses remained uncertain, so the risk-based approach
allowed "business as usual" to continue.

From a precautionary perspective, knowing that a technology causes
lung cancer, and knowing that hundreds of millions of people are
exposed to it, just naturally kicks off a search for less-harmful
alternatives. But no one in 1985 was taking a precautionary approach.

In 1988 the federal government's Robert A. Taft Laboratory in
Cincinnati published NIOSH report 88-116, officially confirming that
exposure to diesel fumes causes lung cancer in humans.

At this point the precautionary principle would insist that a search
for alternatives begin. Other fuels? Other kinds of engines? Filters
for trapping the fumes and soot? Innovative modes of transportation
for moving goods and people? Other ways of planning city growth, to
reduce reliance on trucks and buses? Electrified steel-rail mass
transit? Maglev trains? Hydrogen? Steam? Compressed air? The
alternatives are many.

A precautionary approach would focus attention on eliminating the
problem rather than arguing over the exact body count. Is a diesel-
free world possible? Working backward from the vision of a diesel-free
world, what steps could we be taking today to achieve the vision? That
is the essence of a precautionary approach.

But the risk-based approach serves the purposes of "business as
usual," and therefore has the backing of powerful special interests.
So long as the exact size of the problem is uncertain, risk assessors
can always call for delay and more study. And, since scientists-for-
hire can always reinterpret old data to cast doubt on the nature of
the problem, action can be stalled for decades. This is in fact what
has happened with diesel.

On May 2, 1995 the New York Times reported that researchers were
casting new doubts on the evidence that diesel fumes cause cancer in
humans. They acknowledged that diesel soot might endanger people by
aggravating conditions like asthma, chronic bronchitis and cystic
fibrosis, but lung cancer? Probably not, they said.

The Times reported then, "Studies in humans found that those with an
occupational exposure to diesel smoke had lung cancer rates 20 to 50
percent higher than other workers, but none of the studies were
precise about the level of exposures...." so the studies could not be
relied upon to tell us the true cancer danger among the general public
in places like New York City and Los Angeles.

Doubt is a powerful helpmate when your goal is to maintain "business
as usual." The risk-based approach waits for the holy grail of
scientific certainty to emerge from the data -- until then, just keep
on truckin'.

So now in 2005 we awake to learn that we have a public health disaster
on our hands, with at estimated 21,000 deaths each year caused by
diesel fumes, and more than 100 times that number made sick.

It is time to engage in an urgent search for a way out of this diesel
disaster. Every college and university that receives any public funds
(including tax exemptions for private institutions) could to commit to
doing something to solve this problem, engaging in a coordinated
effort to figure out how to make the U.S. "diesel-free or darn near"
within 15 years. Given that we have "risk assessed" our way into this
problem, we could refuse to wait for further study to determine the
exact placement of the decimal point. We could take precautionary
action now, aiming to ELIMINATE this problem.

But precaution is not (yet) fashionable. Risk-assessment is. So, for
example, in our home state of New Jersey (which likes to think of
itself as environmentally progressive), the state's Department of
Environmental Protection (DEP) has set a goal of reducing diesel
emissions by 20% over the next eight or nine years -- during which
time an additional 7 or 8 thousand citizens of New Jersey will have
been killed by diesel fumes with many times that number made sick.

But a recent study revealed that truck traffic in New Jersey is likely
to increase 80 percent (!) in the next 15 years,[3] so the DEP's plan
seems unlikely to make any real headway against the diesel deathtrap.
Their goal is too timid.

Something much larger is needed. Something bold, innovative,
aggressive and comprehensive. Something commensurate with the size and
urgency of the diesel menace.

Every state's colleges and universities that receive public subsidies
could focus enormous resources on this problem, to find solutions as
quickly as is humanly possible.

Diesel presents a conundrum for urban designers and planners, and for
those with urban transportation know-how. It is a complex engineering
problem, fraught with fundamental questions in several hard sciences.
It is an environmental problem, a medical/biological problem, a legal
problem, and a management problem. It is an enormous public health
problem. It is a problem of public administration and good government.
It is, above all else, an ethical problem, a problem of fairness and
justice -- those most harmed are those least able to defend
themselves, children of the urban poor. Philosophers, economists,
sociologists, psychologists, historians, writers, and all the
humanistic disciplines (arts, dance, theater, literature, film, and
music) could make important, unique contributions. Knowledge and
skills from business, labor, and decision-making are needed. Every
discipline could contribute because this diesel poses a fundamental
question for a self-governing people. In the original conception of
this country, how was democracy supposed to work? Who is supposed to
decide?

Because the diesel industry involves huge sums, diesel presents us
with a fundamental problem of democratic self-rule. Despite mounting
evidence of widespread harm, diesel has been maintained all these
years by corporations and their trade associations and lobbyists --
from Detroit and Houston to Washington and in every statehouse -- who
have run roughshod over the needs and interests of the American people
for the last half-century, a tiny few who wield life-and-death power
over the many -- harnessing governments to employ their risk-based
approach to deflect and stymie the search for least harmful
alternatives. (To learn more about this appalling story of corporate
crime against the people of the U.S., see Rachel's #439 at
www.rachel.org, and see the video, "Taken for a Ride," which tells the
story of a proven conspiracy between General Motors, Firestone Rubber,
and Standard Oil of California to buy up and destroy the streetcar
systems of 80 U.S. cities and replace them with diesel buses).[4]

At bottom, the diesel problem forces us to ask, What does our
democracy really mean? How can a tiny minority of powerful people keep
the multitudes locked into this deadly dead-end technology decade
after decade? Surely, another world is possible. The publicly-
subsidized institutions of higher learning in every state could help
us all visualize and then realize that better world.

The taxpayers of each state would feel well-served by a university
system that would mount a coordinated effort to solve complex and
pressing public problems, to help us preserve and enhance the common
wealth, like clean air and our right to breathe it.

Suddenly every state's very substantial brain trust within higher
education would take on new relevance to the lives of the taxpaying
public, and it would be appreciated and rewarded for its efforts. As a
result, educational funding would naturally rise -- a win-win for
higher education and for the citizenry.

In the process, the nation's colleges and universities could gain
experience working together to solve other deep problems facing us
all. With close guidance from citizens, they could develop a public-
interest research agenda and a modern capacity for precautionary
problem-solving. With such an effort, the U.S. might actually reverse
40 years of environmental destruction and urban deterioration and
finally turn the corner. That's the diesel opportunity.

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

A version of this essay first appeared in Garden State EnviroNews
February 23, 2005; http://www.gsenet.org.

[1] http://www.catf.us/publications/view.php?id=83

[2] http://www.catf.us/publications/view.php?id=84

[3] http://www.tstc.org/press/011205_NJtrucktraffic.html

[4] http://www.newday.com/films/Taken_for_a_Ride.html

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RACHEL'S ENVIRONMENT & HEALTH NEWS
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The end of ideology (as we know it)

Jonah Goldberg
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/jonahgoldberg/jg20050225.shtml
February 25, 2005

Maine State Rep. Brian Duprey introduced an unusual piece of legislation
this month. It's a pro-life bill designed to tighten protections for the
unborn. That's not the unusual part. That happens all the time. The
interesting part is that Duprey's bill is designed to protect gay
fetuses.

Rep. Duprey told a local paper, The Magic City Morning Star, that he'd
been listening to Rush Limbaugh's radio show when Limbaugh commented
that if scientists ever located the genetic cause for homosexuality -
the so-called "gay gene" - then homosexuals would become pro-life
"overnight."

"Most people would agree that to kill someone just because that person
might be gay would constitute a hate crime," Duprey said. "I have heard
from women who told me that if they found out that they were carrying a
child with the gay gene, then they would abort. I think this is wrong.
Those unborn children should be protected." That's why he introduced LD
908, "An Act to Protect Homosexuals from Discrimination."

Now, I don't know if Duprey's on the up-and-up with all of this. I don't
even know if he's against abortions for straight babies. I also doubt
that we'll ever find anything like a "gay gene." Still, this little
stunt ought to provoke some much-needed reflection about technology,
ideology and human society.

Just imagine, for the sake of argument, that Rep. Duprey is right - that
sometime in the near future women will be able to abort their
pregnancies solely to avoid giving birth to a gay kid. Would this
increase the number of pro-life gays and put pressure on the political
alliance between gay groups and pro-abortion groups? Probably (although
there are significant numbers of pro-life gays and lesbians already).

Nothing sharpens a man's mind as knowing he'll be hanged in the morning,
as the saying goes. Likewise, one may assume without fear of much
contradiction that homosexuals would greet the prospect of the quiet
annihilation of their culture with a special revulsion they do not (for
the most part) reserve for the consequences of abortion generally. (This
desire to protect an identity group culture is not unique to gays. For
example, some radical members of the deaf community oppose cochlear
implants and other remedies for deafness because they see it as
destructive to their unique culture.)

There is little chance that a law like Duprey's would be nationalized,
much less enforced ruthlessly. But what if it were? How could supporters
deny that gays weren't being granted "special rights" since
non-homosexual children would not have the same right to life? Faced
with this massive contradiction between banning the termination of gay
children but permitting women to abort all other children for any motive
under the sun - gender selection, disease, etc. - would pro-choicers
split apart? Would some on the right commit the horrid heresy of
endorsing abortion only for "undesirables" but not for others?

Heck, I don't know.

But let's leave aside abortion and imagine what I think is the more
possible - though not necessarily probable - scenario. Let's suppose
that homosexuality is derived not solely from genetic dispensation but
also from specific hormonal processes during gestation (as well as
cultural factors). Let's also suppose that a way was found to "remedy"
homosexuality in utero with a pill or an injection. The procedure might
be no more intrusive than taking prenatal vitamins.

Well, then, in the American context is it so outlandish to imagine that
the entire debate about the role of homosexuals in society would
disappear along with substantial numbers of homosexuals in successive
generations? The turbulent period from the Stonewall riots to gay
marriage would be just one fascinating but brief parentheses in the
history of the republic. And the "silent spring" of homosexuality would
open a completely unprecedented chapter in human history, since
homosexuality has always been with us. What would happen to the
ideological feuds that are currently fueled implicitly or explicitly by
homosexuality? What would happen to the culture and the economy? Again:
I dunno.

Now, please keep in mind I'm not advocating, or even remotely
enthusiastic about, these or any other similar prospects. The point is
not to wish for some abracadabra that would make homosexuals disappear.
Rather, it is to point out how profoundly transformative and corrosive
technology can be to our established concepts and institutions.

We have a tendency to assume that existing ideological categories are
permanent. History is the study of the repeated debunking of such
assumptions. The saddle, the stirrup, the moat, the locomotive, the
telephone, the atomic bomb, the car, the computer, the birth control
pill: All of these caused tectonic changes in ideological arrangements,
and all of them, save the last, were primarily innovations in
transportation, communication or war. The new earthquakes to come from
biotechnology - "cures" for homosexuality, unimaginable longevity, real
"happy pills" - could level all of the landmarks of our ideological
landscape, even redefining the first ideology, conservatism.

It's been said that conservatism can be defined as the idea that human
nature has no history. As we look around right now, that idea is on the
brink of oblivion.

Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online, a
Townhall.com member group.

I respond to the writers of this 'ETC' item, which has been fwd to me.
I am arguing that PR agents have just pulled off a 'draw play' or 'trap play'.

>Last week's massive global response to the news that the Canadian
>government was planning to force acceptance of Terminator seeds seems to
>have worked... for now.
>"Terminator" seeds have been genetically modified to produce crops that are
>sterile.

Now is that right? If such seeds had been procreated, and reported
even from lab-scale tests, don't you think independent scientists critical
of GM would have heard something about it? Do you really think Joe Cummins
could remain ignorant for long if any quasi-scientific paper had reported
Terminator performance? Don't you realise the hairtrigger readiness of
main PowerHarpies such as Mae-Wan Ho, Vandi, and Jeanette list-MP on leave,
to do media splurges if finally some evidence emerges of actual Terminator®
crops in field trials?

> Not only will

Sorry, young propagandists - another whistle stops play.
You illustrate - uninentionally - a distressingly common
blunder, almost subliminal in its harm. What you meant to say was that
Terminator® seeds, if ever they came into existence, *would* { ...etc.}
The tense is future conditional. IF the threat ever emerges in reality -
in that contingency - THEN such & such consequences WOULD be likely.

But instead, you used the simple future - it WILL happen. This
is defeatist, undermining our cause. If you speak against a potential
threat but using verbs implying that the threat will not be prevented from
materialising, you are contradicting yourself and confusing your audience,
weakening your impact. For PR operatives, that's not too shrewd ...

> they create total dependency on GM companies, but
>they can

again - wrong - you mean *could* or *presumably would*

>spread sterility to local crops and wild relatives, and pose a
>huge threat to food security and farmers' rights. Since 1998 an
>international ban has been in place

Now is that right? What kind of ban? Let us have chapter & verse,
and perhaps transcripts of key clauses, would you please?

>, however the GM industry's first
>attempt to push for acceptance took place last week, through the Canadian
>government's delegation at a UN meeting in Bangkok last week.
>
>But according to ETC Group, the NGO that originally alerted the world to
>leaked Canadian documents, the government was forced to soften its position
>after being swamped with emails and letters of protest. The
>New Zealand government, which supported the proposals, was also inundated
>with objections.
>
>Unsurprisingly, the draft text proposed by Canada looked like it had been
>written by the GM industry, and was strongly in favour of Genetic Use
>Restriction Technology (GURTs), known by many as Terminator. But
>objections from Norway, Sweden, Austria, the European Community, Cuba, Peru
>and Liberia, on behalf of the African Group meant that the worst wording
>was removed from the text, keeping the ban in place.

It'd be convenient to learn here how the NZ govt finally voted.
But we're just email fodder for your stunt - don't bother to help us with
any special info in your victory announcement, will youse?

>However, the text has been left in a way that opens the door for future
>debate about the ban. And we can be sure that the GM industry (and its
>friendly governments) will continue to push for Terminator's acceptance
>this year and beyond.
>
>What this means is that African governments considering opening up to GM
>must now realise that Terminator could in future be an unavoidable part of
>that package.

The loathsome threats entailed in the Terminator concepts have been
well enough explicated to justify banning the whole class of organisms.
This is why I'm ashamed that my govt's minister "for" the environment,
drongo Marian Hobbs, said in response to the bait hung out by this 'ETC'
stunt, that her usual mantra 'case by case' would apply. She is thus
needlessly provoked into hardening her govt's stance of tolerating
Terminator®. This is not progress, is it?

>Pat Mooney, ETC Group (Canada) etc@etcgroup.org:
>Hope Shand and Kathy Jo Wetter, ETC Group (USA) hope@etcgroup.org: 919
>960-5223
>Silvia Ribeiro, ETC Group (Mexico) silvia@etcgroup.org: 52 55 55 632 664
>Jim Thomas, ETC Group (UK) jim@etcgroup.org: 44 (0)7752 106806 (mobile)
>
>Note to Editors:
>
>Terminator technology was first developed by the US Department of
>Agriculture and the multinational seed industry to prevent farmers from
>replanting saved seed.

I have tried & tried to tell this RAFI-spinoff group that a patent
is not evidence that the concept(s) in the patent will work. A patent is
just words, and not evidence that "technology was first developed". It is
obnoxious that the kompuwankers, and to a lesser but gross extent the
gene-tamperers, are allowed to confuse fantasy with fact. Please do not
assist them.

>When it came to public light in 1998 massive
>public opposition forced Monsanto and Syngenta to disavow the
>technology.

The fact remains that this Canadian group distracted the anti-GM
world with an empty scare, most likely staged by PR agents working within
or with the Canadian govt delegation to that Bangkok confab, to "leak" an
especially fabricated instruction.

I have previously maintained that the "corngate" flurry about
marginally GM-contaminated corn was staged by "leaking" a suspiciously
complete file to N Hager. The support for the Green party halved in the
rest of that election campaign. It would appear quite easy to overtire the
limited public acceptance of obscure battles about unintelligible arcane
technology. It will therefore be arranged by the GM trade's PR operatives,
who are considerably cleverer than 'ETC', to deplete reserves of public
interest & concern by staging from time to time a flurry of alarm about
some concept the GM trade isn't ready to sell anyway.

Please do keep reading The Man Who Never Was.

Meanwhile perhaps you would at last read the main points of my note
which I copy below for your convenience.

------

MannGram®: latest 'Terminator®' scare
11-1-05

Open Letter to New Zealand cabinet ministers

I refer to the report glimpsed at the bottom of this msg and
ancillary posturings about 'Terminator' images.

The concept of 'mule' Terminator® plants is thoroughly obnoxious,
in principle, and should be strongly opposed.

However, let's not go overboard in assuming that the particular
GURT commonly called The Terminator is real. The Terminator has been
critiqued most thoroughly by Martha Crouch, assoc prof Indiana U. Her
analysis, admittedly several y ago, was of the quality UCS used to provide,
and showed it was far from reality. I too studied the main patent for it
and agreed the complex processes envisaged were far from practicality. I
found her discussion wholly convincing, as did Peter R Wills, one of my
most successful former students and closer to practising mol biol than I
now am. The concept of sterile GE plants exemplified by the 'Terminator'
image has not yet - AFAIK - been realised in practice and will be very
difficult to work.

I'm all for denouncing the immoral intention, but it's a
distraction to behave as if it's about to be deployed - if it still isn't
real.

I fear it's no fluke that the outfit raising this latest fuss is
the same as originally coined the cute name 'Terminator' for this type of
GURT concept. The desire to manipulate minds by PR tricks is not wholly
confined to Burpston Marseller, ERMA, Heather Simpson, etc.

Could this notorious 'Terminator' get anywhere near commercial
deployment without being detected by the many GM-sceptic scientists in many
lands? I don't think so.

I copy here a note I wrote during the penultimate flareup of this
Terminator® furphy.

> 27-11-98 J M Fitzsimons list MP has accused Monsanto and Hon. John
>'Satchmo jr' Luxton (Minister of Food Fibre & Furphies) of trying to import
>Terminator® seed which would cause difficulties for organic growers. Satch
>responds that market forces would allow organic horticulture to prosper
>notwithstanding availability of Terminator® seed. Monsanto Australasian
>PR chief Nik Tydens said two days earlier, but Radio NZ now excerpts the
>tape as if it were a response to Fitzimons' accusation today, that Terminator
>crops will simply be a 'single-use' item which nobody is forced to buy and
>which cannot biologically affect other crops.

>What nobody has mentioned in the media these few days - or any
>other time that I know of - is that the Terminator® patent does not entail
>any evidence that such a seed exists or could exist.

>Patents are granted without regard to whether the invention would work.
>My university classmate more recently the New Zealand Commissioner of
>Patents explained to me in person that, unless the application describes a
>blatant violation of scientific law - e.g. perpetual motion machines -
>a patent may be issued for what the examiner is convinced will not work.
>He showed me a few lulus, and I found a few more - patents for devices
>which, as a practical certainty, could never work. Most people are
>surprised when they learn this fact about patent law, but the reasons for
>it are not hard to see.

>It occurs to me that such criticisms could perhaps be levelled
>against some aspects of the Terminator patent. They may be no more than
>wishful thinking.

>If so, that of course has no bearing on the moral status of the Terminator
>concept.

>It does envisage a racket - but at the moment, so far as we know,
>it is only a vision. Sordid, warped, wicked - yes, all those, but if it
>is not real let us refrain from amplifying the paranoia which is all
>too readily generated around GE.

>To denounce the intention of the Terminator concept is a main
>duty; to warn that it might not work as tidily as claimed is also urgent;
>but to credit anyone with having it incipiently on sale is worse than
>saying Windows 98© really works as claimed. We must not accord power to
>lying creeps when they have not actually achieved what they desire and
>perhaps cannot. Let us not make them look more technically competent than
>they really are!

Today I would only add:-
1. Monsanto's PR image of abandoning The Terminator is not to be believed.
You can safely assume they're still pouring millions into trying to
procreate something commercial, or for a start something "terminating" when
treated with a Monsanto chemical. If they had succeeded, don't you think
we'd have heard of it?
2 The pollen from a "Terminator" tree could well be harmful in a variety
of ways including actively crossing with wild or cultivated relatives to
produce fertile progeny of unknown harmfulness, or novel pathogens. The
prospects for damage are so many, varied, and dismaying that no Minister
for the Environment should condone the notion of field-testing such a
rotten idea. The drongo Hobbs should be ashamed of her ignorant illogical
self.
3 It is tiresome that ignorant attention-cravers can draw attention aside
yet again to this receding monster mirage 'The Terminator' while some real,
genuinely menacing GM field trials, e.g with GM-pines, are actually being
done without proper regulatory oversight.
4 The overdeveloped world has already been largely taken over, for main
crops, by "hybridity" i.e. got hooked on buying annually Pioneer Hi-bred®
or similar corporate hybrid seed which grows into plants bearing seed that,
while not literally sterile, give such enormous variation that nobody tries
to get a crop from those F2 hybrid seed.

This, and much more, is brilliantly expounded by the famous Harvard
geneticist Richard Lewontin, with a French agresearch leader Berlan, in
.

Hobbs should be told to condemn not only The Terminator but also
all uncontained GMOs. New Zealand showed the world a good example in
excluding nuclear reactors; let us not only ban GMOs except in strict
containment, but also show the world again some moral leadership.

R

"Pope Calls Gay Marriage Part of 'Ideology of Evil'" February 22, 2005
ROME - Homosexual marriages are part of "a new ideology of evil" that is
insidiously threatening society, Pope John Paul says in a new book
published Tuesday.

Read more...

http ://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=564&ncid=564&e=3&u=/nm/20050222/ts_nm/pope_book_dc

Tillamook cooperative board of directors
24-2-05

Greetings

I congratulate you on your stand against rBGH. The attached
address to a diary-industry seminar a half-decade ago includes this section:

I excerpt from a recent summary by Samuel S. Epstein M.D., Professor of
Environmental Medicine, University of Illinois School of Public Health:
The GM milk hormone, rBST, is exclusively manufactured in Austria by
Biochemie Kundl, a Novartis plant under license to Monsanto; in 1998, over
100 million doses of the GM hormone were exported to the U.S.A. and also to
16 Third World Countries. While the administration of rBST to cows in
Europe was banned (very recently) on unarguable animal health and welfare
grounds, there are no restrictions yet on the import of GM dairy products,
nor any requirements for their being labelled GM. GM milk, produced by
injecting cows with the hormone rBST, is qualitatively and quantitatively
different from natural milk. These differences include:

contamination of milk by the GM hormone rBST;
contamination by pus and antibiotics resulting from the high incidence of
mastitis in rBST injected cows;
contamination with illegal antibiotics and drugs used to treat mastitis and
other rBST-induced disease;
increased concentration of the thyroid hormone enzyme
thyroxin-5'-monodeiodinase;
increased concentration of long-chain and decreased concentration of
short-chain fatty acids;
reduction in casein levels;
and major excess levels of Insulin-like Growth Factor, IGF-1, including its
highly potent variant, in the milk and, surprisingly, in the blood of
people who drink it. IGF-1 is under strong suspicion of causing cancer,
notably breast and prostate.

-------

I trust you stand strong in your rejection of this awful mistake rBGH.

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

GENETIC MODIFICATION AND THE DAIRY INDUSTRY

Robert Mann
NZ Dairy Expo
Hamilton 00-1-27

Introduction

Genetic modification (GM) or genetic engineering (GE) mean artificial transfer of genes to produce a transgenic organism, e.g. jellyfish genes into sugarcane or human genes into cows. The methods of artificially joining pieces of DNA from different organisms' genes were invented as recently as the mid-1970s and are collectively called recombinant-DNA technology.

The abbreviations are a poor choice between pairs of letters already taken by huge US corporations, but I'll use them interchangeably.

Genetic engineering no more entails a uniform degree of hazard than does nuclear science. As in nuclear technology, so with genetic engineering: the tag 'nuclear' does not necessarily connote any serious degree of hazard, and some versions of GE may well be quite OK.

But some versions are not OK. You do therefore have to perform sceptical analyses of GE proposals if you want to assess their hazards. This is one of many similarities between the two technologies. I wish to point out other similarities - and some differences.

Do not equate GE with the larger category 'biotechnology'. GE is one kind of biotechnology but there are others too.

Genetic engineering's brief two decades of history has been characterised by exaggerated claims of benefit, confusing hope with fact in attempt to allay natural fears (and to stimulate stock-market ramps). I am here to warn you to be very careful before you allow your land, skills and animals to be used in GE projects.

What can it do for you? Here's some typical PR hype:

"Multi-billion dollar new life science industry for the region
It was MAF men Keith Steele and Neil Richardson promoting cows "not as milk producers but as 'biological reactors' producing a vast range of products which could open up multibillion dollar international marketing opportunities for the benefit of the region and the country. Treatment for multiple sclerosis could be only a glass of special milk away. The Waikato is ideally situated as the centre for this unlimited new industry based around the world-famous Ruakura research centre and the excellent University [sic ]. . . . "

Technology using nuclear fission was procured by scientists. It was not requested by elected representatives. The technical enthusiasts procured the funding for A-bombs and the nuclear reactors which were first created for the sole purpose of making plutonium for A-bombs. Similarly, billions of dollars have been procured for gene splicing by enthusiasts who say they are going to produce organisms, improved on commercial criteria, which could not occur in nature. In our little country, around $100M so far - $18M/y lately - has been given by the government to subsidise a wide variety of GE which the public know little of. (This is one glimpse, by the way, of how sincere is the belief in leaving allocation of resources to 'market forces'.)

The monstrous blind alley of nuclear power stations should teach us how far astray society can be led by technical enthusiasts who act something like a priesthood presiding over an arcane speciality which they naturally don't want obstructed by any who don't understand the technical details.

Nuclear fission is scientifically understood, and we have the technology based on that science - nuclear power reactors - commercially mature. Electricity from nuclear power stations will be reliable, clean, and so cheap we often won't bother to meter it. Not one reputable scientist disputes these claims by the enthusiasts for this modern, hi-tech wonder technology.

Such euphoric claims went practically unchallenged for as long as a decade from the late 1950s. Then in the late 1960s a few scientists began to tell the public that nuclear reactors could devastate huge areas, and that even if nothing goes wrong at the reactor the spent fuel poses grave hazards. Fortunately for our little country, other sources of electricity (hydro and geothermal) were obviously cheaper so that it was not until the 1960s that our government's nuclear power programme began. The same New Zealand bureaucrats who in 1966 proudly paraded foreign experts planning a nuclear station at Baring Head (12 miles from Parliament) were by 1974 bitterly defensive when the Campaign for Non-nuclear Futures - a terminating ad hoc coalition - got going. By 1979 a Royal Commission had laid the programme gently to rest; nobody respectable has tried to revive it.

But let us never forget that several hundred nuclear power reactors were foisted on the world, and many thousands of people doomed by the 1986 Chernobyl accident, as a result of that disgraceful decade when sheer lack of interest among scientists, suppression of the few critics, and stunting of alternatives, left the public crucially ignorant.

I need hardly add that the media almost entirely failed to reveal any significant facts about the hazards of nuclear power, at least until the late 1970s. Today the media are failing in their duty, far more culpably in that they can easily find out the arguments for increased caution on GE but are nearly all too lazy &/or too craven to do so.

Today the smug status of genetic engineering eerily recalls that period in the early 1960s when nuclear reactors were "commercialised" on the basis of enthusiasts' claims of understanding & control. New ranks of enthusiastic experts now tell us there's no significant threat from artificial gene transfers: no great harm could result, and any minor mishaps are (they claim) so unlikely that you can forget the hypothetical notion. "The hazards imagined in the mid-'70s have turned out to be unreal" is a typical recent expert quote.

Alongside airy dismissal of the dangers, the promised benefits are wildly exaggerated - for example, millions of venture-capital dollars have been procured by claims of imminent production of "pharmaceutical proteins" which in truth are nowhere near medical use and can in one case be already obtained free! The actual list of real benefits from GE organisms is very short, after a quarter-century of 'jam tomorrow' hype thru the media. In our parliament MPs have given lists of what they believed to be actual accomplishements of GE which are however still not real.

The Doubts
Many scientific and moral leaders have queried GE. The very bases in science upon which GE technology is founded - neo-Darwinism and the 'master molekule' idol status for DNA - are under strenuous criticism from scientific thinkers. Genes are not passive Lego modules which can be blithely slotted into very different organisms free from unintended effects. Rogue diseases are a genuine concern arising from detailed, sceptical appraisal of some GE projects. But global ecological damage is the gravest threat.

One tawdry old argument we have heard since 1974 and can expect to hear again in all its flagrant deceit is the claim that gene transfers occur naturally so GE is only hastening them. This line of talk is a smoke-screen designed to obscure the fact that GE usually performs artificial transfers which are not believed to occur in nature. If we change the rates, or even worse the specificities, with which genes can jump around, we may wreak biological havoc on a global scale. Go back to Ovid's Metamorphoses to glimpse what might go wrong.

But the gene-jockeys claim they can, godlike, foresee the evolutionary results of their artificial transposings of human genes into sheep, bovine genes into tomatoes, etc. This is extreme, deluded arrogance; for the theologically inclined, I commend one chapter: Genesis 3.

The science these gamblers hawk is, on several levels, junk. I have no time today to detail this contention, only to mention one aspect of junkiness. Gene-jockeys often work on the assumption there are only 4 letters in the 'alphabet' of DNA (called for short G, C, T, and A), whereas it has been known for several decades that other 'letters' exist in DNA. The functions of the 'odd' bases are largely unknown, but that does not mean they're equivalent to 'The Big Four'. They are often ignored by genetic engineers. This is junk science.

The Commerce
Doubts have been swept aside by the thrust of transnational corporations funding university and 'crown' GE labs, as well as small groups of academics starting GE firms (a far cheaper image to erect than that of a nuclear reactor manufacturer).

A further subtle commercial lure is the relative difficulty of tracing the offender when the 'one in a million' mishap occurs. The Swedes in April 1986 only briefly thought the unusual radioactivity in one of their nuclear stations was from another of their own - it was traced to Chernobyl within days; but if an epidemic of this or that disease breaks out amongst cows or humans in the Hamilton district, the fact that the nearby government research station at Ruakura has been largely given over to GE for foreign purchasers will not suffice to sheet home any blame. Any ensuing inquiry would elicit much closing of ranks as most of the scientists able to understand such arcane matters covered up for each other. Ronald Reagan's favourite criterion - deniability - is all too easily arranged in the GE business.

How Much Harm; How Often?
In appraising dangerous technologies, it is best to estimate the hazard - the scale of harm in the event of a major mishap - as a separate question, and then analyse if possible the risk - the probability that the major mishap will occur. Much confusion between these two aspects of danger has been created by language-tampering, even in such formal arenas as the Journal of Risk Analysis. Some ERMA staff are trying to organise a pseudo-professional club on Risk Assessment to feed them what they want to hear for their purpose of rubber-stamping; they refused to invite any sceptical speaker for their Dec 13 inaugural meeting.

The hazards of GE rival even nuclear war. Biology is so much more complex than technology that we should not pretend we can imagine all the horror scenarios, but it is suspected that some artificial genetic manipulations create the potential to derange the biosphere for longer than any civilisation could survive. If only enthusiasts are consulted in appraisal of GE proposals, such scenarios will not be thought of.

The nuclear parallel is again cogent. Not until the 'Rasmussen/Levine' report of 1974 were sceptical analysts such as Kendall and Lovins asked for their opinions (and then they were ignored).

The hazard certainly includes some mortality: dozens of people were killed by impurities in tryptophan (a natural amino acid, sold as a 'dietary supplement' to avoid medicine regulations) made by Showa Denko using a GE'd microbial culture. By early 1991, Showa Denko had paid $4.6M in out-of-court settlements amongst lawsuits for over $810M. By now, the totals are roughly U$2,000,000,000 and 80 - 120 deaths. Thousands continue maimed. This actual damage by GE is one basis of the campaign for labelling as such any GE'd foods which may be permitted.

Who should bear the burden of proof in such a context of ignorance? How long must objectors continue to be mocked & marginalised?

The role of emotion is often misrepresented by enthusiasts for dangerous technologies. They decry as 'emotive' any argument or fact inconvenient to their cause, but their own enthusiasm does not count as undesirable emotion; indeed they pretend to be 'objective' - devoid of emotion - when in fact they're ruled by emotion, against reason.

Law
In the late 1970s, the N.Z. Association of Scientists proposed a ban on GE pending a full public inquiry. This policy, which is still regarded as correct for today, was taken up then, two decades ago, by a few politicians. But the genetic engineers had one or two rabid advocates, notably Bill Sutton, in Parliament and avoided hostile scrutiny. Only now, two decades later, the Royal Commission is to be formed next month; but how much GE can proceed during its inquiry remains to be determined.

Some regulations were drafted but stayed stuck on paper, recalling the 8 years of limbo between our Radiation Protection Act 1965 and the regulations required to give that act any real effect.

At last, a form of legal regulation of novel organisms emerged - the ERMA. This turns out to be a biased, secretive, even obstructive agency, which collects a lot of money from both the gene-jockeys and the government to maintain an expensive rubber-stamp. It is chaired by Mr W J Falconer, a main planner of the Mobil/Bechtel synfuels factory (at Motunui) which has not made any petrol for several years and was always a bad bet.

Having taught on environmental health hazards for many years in science & medical faculties, and having served as an adviser to successive Ministers of Health over a decade on the Toxic Substances Board, I know all too well how increasingly overloaded government staff, even when backed by statutory powers, get subverted by not only the specific claims but more importantly the whole value-system of the industries which they are supposed to regulate. The imbalance is particularly severe for such pathetic pretences as have been staged to regulate GE.

GE and the Dairy Industry
What then of the "multi-billion dollar new life science industry for the region" alleged by Keith Steele and Neil Richardson ?

You can reasonably assume that most of the $42B/y mirage projected for the NZ dairy industry relies on GE fantasies which are far from reality and may never be feasible let alone profitable. It is not extremely safe to assume they would all gain legal permission, after the Royal Commission on GE has performed the first sceptical investigation, by public hearings. There have been many flops in GE. Let me give a few examples of how dairy GE can go wrong.

A relatively early example was the mid-1990s attempt to make a human protein in goats' milk by Lincoln University biochemistry professor Bullock, funded by Genzyme Corp of Framingham, Massachusetts. This case came & went entirely within the never-never period when no legal regulatory regime existed in our country but Prof Petersen of Otago presided over a pseudo-regulatory Interim Assessment Group (IAG) administered by the Ministry for the Environment.

The project was to raise and study a herd of goats GEd to contain in their milk the human protein CFTR - cystic fibrosis transmembrane-conductance regulator . The professor's formal proposal was written, and ancillary mass-media propaganda has been slanted, so as to create the impression that the Genzyme/Lincoln work is based on some scientific hypothesis which could well lead to therapy for cystic fibrosis. This is a misleading impression. Even if it proves feasible to insert the gene for the human lung protein CFTR into goat embryos or zygotes, leading to goats' milk containing significant quantities of human CFTR, there will still remain the difficulty that no therapy is in prospect using any concentrated preparation of CFTR. Leading experts in paediatric biochemistry will confirm for you that pure CFTR has no foreseen use. The proposal's phrase "the drug produced" was therefore false and deceptive.

The leading medical experts on cystic fibrosis have found themselves in the unpleasant role of breaking the news to the parents of CF sufferers that, contrary to the Genzyme/Bullock image, no therapy is in prospect. It is cruel to raise hopes which must thus be dashed by others.

The public should also learn that permission was denied for Prof Bullock's conjoint proposal to produce similarly in goats' milk a second human protein, AAT, which has even less prospect of utility or market value but which he termed a "pharmaceutical protein" - of which more soon. The IAG, to its credit, recommended against the inclusion of AAT in this CFTR caper.

The results, reported in a couple of sentences by the Ministry for the Environment, were a complete flop, the goats were destroyed, what was done with their remains is unrecorded, and Prof. Bullock went overseas.

Which media were not too lazy or too craven to report this caper?

A more important and interesting example is the current attempt to genetically engineer that human protein called AAT in N.Z. sheep. A small Scottish company ("Pharmaceutical" Proteins Ltd - the 'Dolly' procreators & impresarios - financed by the large German multi-national Bayer) wanted to field-test in New Zealand ewes GE'd to make in their milk a human protein called by the unhelpful name alpha-1 antitrypsin (abbreviated AAT). The only reason stated for doing such experiments in N.Z. was this country's scrapie-free status. The Ministry for the Environment's Interim Assessment Group (IAG), although devoid of experts on prions (scrapie, BSE {mad cow disease}, etc.) and dominated by GE enthusiasts who appear to think that fears of GE are absurd, advised their Minister to refuse, which he did. Reasons, when reluctantly disclosed, turned out to be mere econobabble; prions were not mentioned.

Prevalent misinformation tending to favour the AAT project, due partly to an anonymous 'news' report in Science , requires correction in at least the following respects.

a) AAT-deficiency is equated with congenital emphysema, an unjustified jump beyond the evidence. Most of those born AAT-deficient do not develop lung disorders. Reports on N.Z. TV and in newspapers have credited AAT as a treatment for emphysema ; the public would take this to mean the common smoking-induced illness, greatly exaggerating the claim of usefulness. The congenital version is very much rarer, if a proper diagnostic category at all.

(b) AAT is asserted to be in use now to treat congenital emphysema, whereas such crude preliminary trials as have been done prove very little. In fact there exists no use, let alone a market, for genuine human AAT which is routinely purified as a by-product and discarded in standard blood-bank fractionations of pooled human plasma.

(c) AAT is implied to be very valuable, which factoid is then used to justify attempted production by genetic engineering ("U$100,000/y per ewe"). All this "future earnings" is intended to stimulate a stock-market ramp before anything saleable has actually been produced. That at least is the intention. But of course such a bubble must burst after enough time without selling anything. This is the fate of nearly all such ramps.

The Minister 'for' the Environment, ex-Rhodes Scholar & lawyer Mr Simon Upton, solicited a modified application, which was approved - on economic grounds.

Now the ERMA, flying in the face of the facts, has approved expansion of PPL's flock to 10,000. Nothing is to go offsite except the milk (for processing by a proposed Tainui enterprise). But then, the ERMA has never rejected a GE project. It stages some dramatic delays - on that I sympathise with the AgResearch would-be bovine gene-jockeys.

This particular caper is only one of many similar. The standards of truthfulness in the GE trade are reminiscent of those prevailing in the computer trade, with which it has intimate links.

That is the context in which the AgResearch group l'Huillier, Wells et al. claim they might make a cow whose milk could simply be drunk to treat the demylinating illness multiple sclerosis. There is some evidence this might work; but it could go badly wrong, in the people and perhaps in the cows. Demyelination can be induced by injecting the protein in question, and we know little about what it will do by mouth. The more likely motive for this project is to get patents on improved cloning techniques, as have just been issued to the 'Dolly' impresarios. The Waikato Times bills these enthusiasts as 'The Geniuses'.

The depraved trade of mercenary deception, commonly called PR, has enormous influence in the suppression and distortion of information about GE. This has come about largely because the NZ media have almost totally failed to tell key facts about GE. The NZ Herald's Yoke Har Lee, for instance, has largely just laundered PR claims from the gene-jockeys, with no balancing comment from critics.

Global Reach
Today New Zealand is reduced to the status of 'the Liberia of genetic engineering' as transnational corporations conduct here some field tests which their home governments would probably not permit. Government, gutted & starved by the ideological hatred of public enterprise (Rogernomics, Ruthanasia, and then Jenocide - our versions of Thatcherism), is largely warped to the commercial service of foreign corporations, and is almost totally unable, so far, to regulate GE. The charade of pseudoregulation - the expensive rubber stamp called ERMA, and the even less regulatory ANZFA - fails to control anything much, even labels.

The gene-jockeys, and ignorant executives, are trying to sell your industry to foreigners who will thus pay for more GE. I advise you to stop the 'megamerger' which is one stage in that plan.

GE Products
A few biochemicals are being made commercially by GE in microbes. The one which most obviously affects you is Monsanto's recombinant bovine growth hormone, also known as bovine somatotropin. Canada rejected this, mainly because it is cruel to the cows. But there are other drawbacks.

I excerpt from a recent summary by Samuel S. Epstein M.D., Professor of
Environmental Medicine, University of Illinois School of Public Health:
The GM milk hormone, rBST, is exclusively manufactured in Austria by Biochemie Kundl, a Novartis plant under license to Monsanto; in 1998, over 100 million doses of the GM hormone were exported to the U.S. and also to 16 Third World Countries. While the administration of rBST to cows in Europe was banned (very recently) on unarguable animal health and welfare grounds, there are no restrictions yet on the import of GM dairy products, nor any requirements for their being labelled GM. GM milk, produced by injecting cows with the hormone rBST, is qualitatively and quantitatively different from natural milk. These differences include:
contamination of milk by the GM hormone rBST;
contamination by pus and antibiotics resulting from the high incidence of mastitis in rBST injected cows;
contamination with illegal antibiotics and drugs used to treat mastitis and other rBST-induced disease;
increased concentration of the thyroid hormone enzyme thyroxin-5'-monodeiodinase;
increased concentration of long-chain and decreased concentration of short-chain fatty acids;
reduction in casein levels;
and major excess levels of Insulin-like Growth Factor, IGF-1, including its highly potent variant, in the milk and, surprisingly, in the blood of people who drink it. IGF-1 is under strong suspicion of causing cancer, notably breast and prostate.

Monsanto have tried to register their Posilac® rBGH in this country, but late last year the impression emerged that this had been rejected. Its exact legal status should be clearly known to you.

Wake Up!
It is now a quarter-century since genetic engineering was identified in the same league as nuclear weapons among major threats to the biosphere. During this period, market forces have prevailed instead of informed democracy.

Genetic engineering is by now more popular - more widely practised - than dangerous versions of nuclear science ever were. But it is in general profoundly wrong.

Misallocation of money, and more importantly of scientific talent seduced by GE, are among the reasons why the duty to care for natural ecosystems is so disgracefully neglected. Greedy nerds applying the hacker mentality to life itself is the ultimate decadent technomania. The prostitution of science is most complete and most dangerous in the selfish commercial gene. When will we muster the ethical power to wake up from this sleepwalking?

What should we advocate? In October 1998 I renewed the NZ Association of Scientists policy from two decades ago: a full public inquiry, rather like the Royal Commission on Nuclear Power which proved so useful and fairly cheap.

That Royal Commission is now being formed by negotiations amongst the peculiar elected structure thrown up by the MMP electoral system. As the Royal Society of NZ fronts for the GE industry, touring Dr Richard Bellamy & Professor Sir John Scott to say there's little to worry about, it is surely obvious that the public will have severe difficulties in discerning right from wrong. Nothing will serve to clarify the issue for the purposes of democracy short of a Royal Commission equipped with its own expert staff. I note the new Prime Minister already talking about the payments for expert advice from outside the government. The word 'consultant' has lost much gloss during this period of sabotaging public enterprise, so I wonder who is to be hired for what.

How much GE should be allowed to continue during this inquiry? I suggest
1 do not permit new field trials
2 shut down existing field trials
3 review laboratory GE precautions
4 of course, receive no applications for release of any GM organisms.
5 abolish the "Independent" Biotechnology Advisory Council which was set up by the previous government with several gung-ho GE advocates but no known critic.

What To Do Instead of GE
We did not just campaign against nuclear power. People want to know what to do instead. The Campaign for Non-nuclear Futures took every opportunity to point out better technology & ideas.

Instead of GE, and agribusiness more generally, the only real hope for feeding the world is organic agriculture. If we can do it with apples, as is being achieved in NZ now, we can do it much more generally. The lower costs more than compensate for the cases of slightly lower yields; in general the yields of organic gardening are several times those achieved in agribusiness.

The Dairy Board chief of PR, Mr Neville Martin, is right to emphasise on National Radio (19-12-99) that organic dairy production is not yet organised in NZ; but it does exist - organic milk is in my supermarket - and can be greatly expanded. Organic intensive dairying may be difficult, but Jamie Tait-Jamieson is doing OK and so are some others. I urge dairy farmers to move in the direction of sustainability. Decreasing inputs, especially exotic chemicals, is a wise trend. Synthetic urea should be much more sparingly used than the Think Big urea factory would imply. All too often an industry can get caught up in an irrational game originated by a technology in search of a use. That is the case, in spades, for the dairy industry today as it tries to grapple with the seductive PR images put forth by the gene-jockeys. I'm here to tell you to be extremely cautious about their claims.

* * * *

The two best websites on GE are:
www.ucsusa.org
www.psrast.org

* Dr Mann was Senior Lecturer in Biochemistry in the University of Auckland and then became its first (and last) Senior Lecturer in Environmental Studies. In retirement he works mainly on solar-thermal and motorcycling inventions, as well as helping to bring recombinant DNA under control.

I'm forwarding this from another list. It deals with life patent
issues and, given some attention to all the acronyms, it gives a pretty
clear picture of how the life patents issue is playing out.

I've got to say, it makes me enormously grateful to those few who
haven't been co-opted by this dysesthetic diplomatic process and, at the
same time, angry to see the blades of raw economic power grinding up good
people and good ideas so that they can be spread thin.

CBD: Convention on Biological Diversity. The USA never ratified it.
ABS: Access and Benefit Sharing (i.e., of biodiversity and genetic
resources).
TRIPS: Trade Related aspects of Intellectual Property (negotiated under
WTO with a very big push from the US).
WIPO: World Intellectual Property Organization.
TK: Traditional Knowledge.
UNEP: United Nations Environmental Program.

Jim Diamond, M.D.
chmn Sierra Club Genetic Engineering Committee

*********

One of the liveliest exchanges that occurred at the recent CBD meeting
on Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS-3) in Bangkok had to do with
intellectual property rights. Chee Yoke Ling of the Third World Network
wrote about the exchange for the South-North Monitor and shares below a
special version of her report:

*********

Lively debate on IPRs at UN access and benefit sharing negotiations

by Chee Yoke Ling
Third World Network
22 February 2005

The issue of intellectual property rights became one of the most
controversial and heatedly discussed topics at a meeting on access and
benefit sharing under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD)
held in Bangkok on 14-18 February.

The relationship between the CBD and the World Trade Organization's
(WTO) Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property
Rights (TRIPS) figured prominently in the intergovernmental discussions
that took place at the meeting of the CBD Working Group on Access and
Benefit Sharing (ABS).

The lengthy and lively debate on this topic was first sparked by an
opening statement of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) that
highlighted "real contradictions" between the CBD and the WTO's TRIPS
agreement. Throughout the rest of the week, there were sharp
differences in positions between developing and developed countries on
this issue and how it should be dealt with.

In the opening plenary session on 14 February, UNEP's representative,
speaking on behalf of the Executive Director, Klaus Topfer, said:
"There are real contradictions in essential points between TRIPS and
the CBD, which must be resolved."

"IPRs applied to life forms under TRIPS runs counter to, and do not
support the objectives of the CBD particularly on such aspects:
* IPRs will prevent the CBD from realising the full and practical
meaning of Article 3 on national sovereignty (which is supposed to
regulate access to genetic resources) and Article 8(j) on the farmers'
Rights;
* Conservation of biological diversity as called for by the CBD is not
possible under a global regime of private monopoly rights. Conservation
of biological resources implies enormous responsibility that TRIPS does not
allocate to those who will benefit from ownership rights to these
resources".

The UNEP executive director's statement went on to say that "the
private property regime established by the TRIPS will undermine the
benefit sharing provisions of the CBD. Private monopoly can only begin
where national or community sovereignty has been effectively suspended.

"Therefore, under TRIPS, the very genetic resources which nations and
communities are supposed to control access to, will be under the
control of IPR holders. Governments and communities will have no means
of regulating access or demanding a share of the benefits because they
will be subject to private ownership, contrary to the objectives of the
CBD."

The UNEP statement pointed out that "many developing countries have not
yet been able to develop national strategies on biotechnology, but must
nonetheless implement new IPR regimes to conform to the terms of the
TRIPS Agreement."

The statement marked the first time that UNEP had taken such a clear
position on the issue of the relationship between the CBD and the TRIPS
agreement, and it set the tone for subsequent discussions.

Throughout the week, a number of developing countries also raised their
concerns about the conflicts between IPRs and the CBD objectives.
However, the UNEP statement displeased developed countries and this was
clearly made known by them at the closing plenary session on the
afternoon of 18 February during the adoption of the Working Group
report.

The Netherlands, speaking on behalf of the European Union, said that
the EU did not agree with the statement of UNEP. As Parties to both the
CBD and TRIPS, mutual supportiveness was ensured and there was no
conflict.

Australia expressed "serious concerns" over the statement and
questioned "the appropriateness of UNEP" in making the statement that
TRIPS will undermine access and benefit sharing under the CBD.
Australia also said that the two agreements are mutually supportive.

Ethiopia, speaking on behalf of the African Group, said that the
relevant paragraph in the report of the Working Group described what
had happened: that the two agreements are inherently contradictory, and
"no amount of wishful thinking will make them mutually supportive".

The Ethiopian delegate, Dr. Tewolde Egziabher, who has been a veteran
negotiator at the CBD since its inception, said that this issue was
debated before and will be debated as long as the rules of TRIPS
prevail. "The agreements will be mutually supportive only when the
TRIPS Agreement is amended to take care of the needs of indigenous and
local communities," he said.

Brazil said that the report conveyed the speech by the UNEP Executive
Director and requested the UNEP representative to convey to the
Executive Director that Brazil is looking towards resolving the
contradiction between the TRIPS agreement and the CBD.
Switzerland saw no contradiction between the two agreements.

The United States said that the UNEP statement was "beyond the mandate
of UNEP" and that “UNEP had no competence to deal with IPRs”.

Hartmut Meyer of the German NGO Forum for Environment and Development,
speaking on behalf of a number of NGOs at the meeting, said that for
many years thousands of civil society organizations have come to the
same conclusion: that IPRs and TRIPS are in conflict with the CBD
objectives.

UNEP representative Margaret Oduk stressed that the main message of
UNEP's opening statement was the need for mutual supportiveness between
multilateral environmental agreements. She said that views expressed at
the plenary were duly taken, and reiterated UNEP's role in the access
and benefit-sharing process that had been outlined at the opening
plenary session.

While UNEP unexpectedly gained attention, the issue of "mutual
supportiveness" between the CBD and TRIPS, and between the CBD and
WIPO, was questioned by many developing country delegations throughout
the week's discussions.

The Philippines said that the CBD is the primary framework to address
ABS issues and that it is necessary to address the conflicts between
TRIPS and the CBD.

Ethiopia, on behalf of the African Group, said that while WIPO may be
asked to provide inputs, the CBD Parties have the ultimate say on
issues under the CBD.

South Korea said that the international regime on ABS should be based
on the voluntary Bonn Guidelines and be consistent with developments
under WIPO, TRIPS, the WTO and FAO (the International Treaty on Plant
Genetic Resources).

Many developing country delegates and observers from NGOs and
indigenous peoples’ organizations welcomed the UNEP statement, and said
that it “squarely addressed the fundamental contradiction between TRIPS
and the CBD.”

In a well-attended side event during the week on developments at the
WTO-TRIPS, WIPO and CBD, Egyptian delegate Ahmed Abdel Latif shared his
personal views after 4 years as a negotiator at the WTO TRIPS Council
and WIPO (where he was the African Group coordinator until December
2004).

He underlined that the notion of "mutual supportiveness" between
international for a can lend itself to different interpretations. He d
emphasized, in this regard, that, from the perspective of developing
countries, this notion meant that TRIPS and WIPO should be made
supportive of the CBD objectives and principles. There are important
flaws and contradictions in TRIPS, such as the requirement to patent
some biological resources without requiring compliance with the CBD
obligations of prior informed consent and equitable benefit sharing, he
added.

The detailed proposals by the Africa Group and developing countries
including Brazil, Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, India, Peru, Thailand and
Venezuela, for amendments to the TRIPS Agreement at the TRIPS Council
reflect the need to address the contradictions of TRIPS in relation to
the CBD.

He added that the trilateral relationship between the CBD, TRIPS, and
WIPO is becoming an integral and critical part of the way that the
misappropriation of genetic resources and traditional knowledge are
addressed. Developing countries thus need to coordinate nationally and
internationally to develop a comprehensive approach.

He said that the three institutions have very different mandates. The
TRIPS Council has been instructed by the Doha Ministerial Declaration
to examine the TRIPS-CBD relationship in accordance with Article 7 and
8 of TRIPS (on objectives and principles) and taking full account of
the development dimension, with many developing countries taking a
pro-active role in the last few years.

WIPO's mandate, however, is to promote patents and other IPRs, and thus
normative work in WIPO to ‘protect traditional knowledge’ should be
closely followed in particular in relation to ideas to "protect" TK in
a similar way as for other conventional intellectual property rights.
Indigenous peoples' perspectives and the development dimension, not
just users' interests (i. e. intellectual property holders), should
shape any normative work in this field, said Ahmed Abdel Latif.

The Proposal for establishing a Development Agenda for WIPO that was
submitted by 14 developing countries, and adopted at the 2004 WIPO
General Assembly was a significant step forward in working towards
integrating the development dimension in all aspects of WIPO's work, in
particular standard setting. .

With respect to the 2004 invitation of the 7th meeting of the CBD
Conference of the Parties to WIPO to work on disclosure of
source/country of origin in IPR applications, Ahmed Abdel Latif said
that developing countries at the WIPO General Assembly had initiated a
mechanism that involves more country participation in preparing a
response to the CBD. He stressed that CBD Parties must maintain, assert
and retain the CBD's own distinctive views and perspectives.

In the opening plenary of the Working Group, a representative of the
Third World Network (TWN) said that it is important for the CBD to be
the primary framework in dealing with ABS issues. Thus any move to
ensure "mutual supportiveness" must be guided by the CBD objectives and
principles.

In supporting the statements by UNEP and a number of delegations, TWN
drew attention to an important development in the US where excessively
broad claims or claims that have deficiencies have been accepted in
patent applications, with undesirable effects. The TWN representative
cited a recent article by a US patent lawyer in Nature Biotechnology
(Volume 23 No. 2 February 2005 page 245-247): "In view of the damage
caused by questionable patents and the limited options available for
challenging their validity, there is widespread belief that a better
system is needed".

Three new reports by the US Patents and Trademarks Office, the Federal
Trade Commission and the National Academy of Sciences recommend reforms
to make challenges to patent validity more rapid, effective and less
expensive. A bill (Patent Quality Assurance Act) has been introduced in
the US Congress recently for this purpose.

However, according to TWN, this does not go far enough as the extension
of the scope of patents to cover life forms contradict the CBD
objectives. TWN called for a roll back in patentability, and an ABS
regime under the CBD should be an alternative. Delegates were also
urged to consider the proposals by developing countries at the TRIPS
Council relating to the CBD-TRIPS relationship and the protection of
traditional knowledge.

The adverse impact of patents in particular on biodiversity
conservation and use of biological resources, as well as on the rights
of indigenous peoples and local communities to their resources and
knowledge has increasingly raised concerns among scientists, civil
society and many governments.

These concerns were present already at the time of the CBD negotiations
but developed countries resisted any language that might infer that
IPRs can be negative. Although the CBD compromise language is that
"patents and other IPRs may have an influence on the implementation" of
the CBD, Article 16{5) obliges Parties to ensure that IPRs "are
supportive of and do not run counter" to the objectives of the CBD.

During the Bangkok meeting, some developing countries included, as one
of the elements listed in Annex 1 of the decision on the International
Regime on Access and Benefit Sharing, "Measures to ensure that IPRs do
not undermine the international regime".

At the meeting, while developed countries spoke of mutual
supportiveness, there was strong resistance by many of them to any
substantive link with the work of the TRIPS Council. This took place
when the issue of compliance with prior informed consent and mutually
agreed terms for access and benefit sharing was being discussed at a
sub-working group.

Many developed countries argued that work on disclosure of
origin/source/legal provenance of genetic resources and associated
traditional knowledge in applications for IPRs should primarily be done
by WIPO.

However, many developing countries countered by saying that the ABS
Working Group of the CBD had the mandate to examine this issue, and the
inputs that WIPO and other institutions were invited to provide would
be part of the analysis to be considered by the Working Group.

The developing countries also argued that the work at the TRIPS Council
has an important link to the CBD, since it is specifically addressing
the TRIPS-CBD relationship and there was active discussion and
proposals in the Council on disclosure requirements and patentability
over life forms. In turn, the outputs of the ABS Working Group should
also be transmitted to those institutions and processes.

Brazil, Colombia, Egypt, Malaysia, Liberia and Ethiopia, the
Netherlands (EU), Canada, Australia and Switzerland were invited to
form the Friends of the co-Chairs to resolve their differences.

After a long night's work, it was finally agreed that the results of
the examination by the Working Group on this issue are to be
transmitted to "WIPO and other relevant fora such as FAO, UNCTAD, UNEP,
UPOV, WTO".

The listing of so many other international organizations was due to the
desire of the developed countries to not single out the TRIPS Council.

In the compliance decision, the Executive Secretary of the CBD is also
requested to compile pertinent documentation, in particular, recent
proposals submitted by Parties to the CBD "in the following
international organizations listed in alphabetical order: FAO, UNCTAD,
UNEP, UPOV, WIPO and the WTO TRIPS Council". The documentation is to be
made available on the clearing house mechanism of the CBD and to the
next meeting of the ABS Working Group.

The original proposal was submitted by Brazil, and supported by Egypt,
Colombia, Malaysia, and the African Group, to refer to the positions
taken by many developing countries in the TRIPS Council, relating to
the review of the TRIPS agreement on the issue of patenting of life
forms (Article 27.3. b) and the TRIPS-CBD relationship. The advanced
stage of these discussions and the detailed proposals particularly by a
group of developing countries (on disclosure requirements) and the
African Group (on prohibition of patents on life forms) in the TRIPS
Council was seen as mutually supportive of the work of developing
countries in the CBD.

Panelists Decry Bush Science Policies

WASHINGTON -- The voice of science is being stifled in the Bush
administration, with fewer scientists heard in policy discussions and money
for research and advanced training being cut, according to panelists at a
national science meeting.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1419841,00.html

A bitter harvest

Europe's bureaucrats have caved in to American pressure over GM, but the
decision can be overturned argue Sue Mayer and Robin Grove-White

Tuesday February 22, 2005
The Guardian

The final act of a controversy over GM crops that sets America against
Europe unfolds today in Geneva. The World Trade Organisation will hear the
closing arguments in a case where the public authority of both the European
commission and the WTO is at stake.

In May 2003 the US, Argentina and Canada, urged on by their industry
lobbies, complained to the WTO about Europe's moratorium on GM approvals,
imposed in October 1998. As the biggest producers of GM crops, they felt the
European position was damaging their trade interests and argued that it
could not be scientifically justified.

Throughout the European Union there has been extensive concern about GM
crops. Among the public's fears is the potential for long-term harm to the
environment - for example through the increased use of herbicides and the
gene flow to wild species - and to human health, should new allergens
appear. In a wider context of uncertainties about the future of agriculture
and of a pervasive lack of confidence in official approaches to the handling
of technological risk, consumer rejection of GM has been widespread.

In response to these worries, the EU revised its regulatory framework to
include wider issues such as traceablility, labelling and impacts on
farmland wildlife. This process is still under way, with countries
developing national plans on how, if GM crops are grown, to limit
contamination of non-GM crops, and how to ascribe liability should harm
result.

The EU's initial submissions to the WTO dispute panel argued that its
approach was necessarily "prudent and precautionary". It emphasised that the
US, Canada and Argentina were challenging the right of countries to
establish levels of protection from the risks of GM appropriate to their
circumstances - and that the risks and uncertainties were complex and
serious. The outcome of the case would be of enormous significance
worldwide.

Last summer, however, while arguments were still being put, the European
commission awarded the first marketing approvals since October 1998. The
awards - for importing two varieties of GM maize, for food and feed - ended
the de facto Europe-wide moratorium, but the commission had to use
provisions designed for when the council of ministers is unable to reach
agreement. In effect, the bureaucracy stepped in and forced through a
particular outcome, despite continuing political disagreement across the EU.
This now looks set to become a growing pattern.

Significantly, the commission has also shifted its defence in the WTO case
in a way that suggests a direct link with this new tactic on GM approvals.
The commission is unwilling to publish its recent submissions to the dispute
panel (despite requests from Friends of the Earth under freedom of
information rules), but it is clear from the US's response, which has been
made public, that the commission now wants the dispute to be ruled "moot"
because GM approvals have started. In other words, it has caved in to US
pressure and is rearranging the pieces.

The commission is playing a dangerous game. Member states and their
populations are divided even on whether the two varieties of GM maize
recently approved satisfy the EU's own regulatory criteria. However, the
commission appears to have decided that satisfying the US is more important
than respecting the continuing concern among the people and governments of
member states. It is a course of action that could have reverberations for
the European project as a whole.

The GM dispute has been unfolding at a time when the future of the EU is a
fraught political question in the UK and elsewhere in Europe. Here,
referendums on the currency and EU constitution are looming. A key Euro-
sceptic weapon is to whip up fear of a remote unaccountable bureaucracy.
When the commission acts, as in this case, in a fashion so strongly at odds
with the EU's citizens and their political representatives, the result can
only be further cynicism and hostility.

The new commission, which came into being last November, has a chance to
reconsider the matter anew. Bearing in mind the broader implications of the
case for its own future standing, it should look again at the GM approvals
granted by its predecessor.

It is not only Europe's institutions that are being tested by the GM
dispute. The already tattered credibility of the WTO itself is also at
stake.

On both sides of the Atlantic, the US challenge to Europe's initial stance
has attracted exceptional interest from civil society groups - to the point
where several international coalitions have submitted amicus curiae briefs
directly to the panel. All these point to the need for the WTO to rely on
more enlightened approaches to risk assessment, respecting the different
cultural and environmental circumstances of individual countries. Insistence
on a one-size-fits-all approach tailored to US norms - to which Europe now
risks deferring - is undermining the WTO's authority. If successive crises
of the GM kind are to be avoided, the WTO needs to change - and fast.
Peter Mandelson, the EU's trade commissioner, can play a key role. The
outcome of this dispute will affect the basis on which countries can make
decisions relevant to their particular environmental, social and cultural
needs in today's free-trade world. For the sake of Europe as much as the
WTO, he should move to ensure that the commission stands firm on its initial
position in the dispute and offers no further hostages to fortune.

· Dr Sue Mayer is director of GeneWatch UK; Robin Grove-White is a professor
at the Institute for Environment, Philosophy and Public Policy at Lancaster
University

BRITISH HUMORIST JOHN
CLEESE OUTLINES 14-POINT
PLAN FOR REVOCATION OF
THE COLONIES INDEPENDENCE

JOHN CLEESE
True Blue

To the citizens of the United States of America, in light of your failure
to elect a competent President of the USA and thus to govern yourselves, we
hereby give notice of the revocation of your independence, effective today.

Her Sovereign Majesty Queen Elizabeth II resumes monarchical duties over
all states, commonwealths and other territories. Except Utah, which she
does not fancy.

Your new prime minister (The Right Honourable Tony Blair, MP for the 97.8%
of you who have, until now, been unaware there's a world outside your
borders) will appoint a Minister for America. Congress and the Senate are
disbanded. A questionnaire circulated next year will determine whether any
of you noticed.

To aid your transition to a British Crown Dependency, the following rules
are introduced with immediate effect:

1. Look up "revocation" in the Oxford English Dictionary. Check "aluminium"
in the pronunciation guide. You will be amazed at just how wrongly you
pronounce it. The letter 'U' will be reinstated in words such as 'favour'
and 'neighbour'. Likewise you will learn to spell 'doughnut' without
skipping half the letters. Generally, you should raise your vocabulary to
acceptable levels. Look up "vocabulary."

Using the same twenty seven words interspersed with filler noises such as
"like" and "you know" is an unacceptable and inefficient form of
communication. Look up "interspersed." There will be no more 'bleeps' in
the Jerry Springer show. If you're not old enough to cope with bad language
then you should not have chat shows.

2. There is no such thing as "U.S. English." We'll let Microsoft know on
your behalf. The Microsoft spell-checker will be adjusted to take account
of the reinstated letter 'u'.

3. You should learn to distinguish English and Australian accents. It
really isn't that hard. English accents are not limited to cockney,
upper-class twit or Mancunian (Daphne in Frasier). Scottish dramas such as
'Taggart' will no longer be broadcast with subtitles.You must learn that
there is no such place as Devonshire in England. The name of the county is
"Devon." If you persist in calling it Devonshire, all American States will
become "shires" e.g. Texasshire Floridashire, Louisianashire.

4. You should relearn your original national anthem, "God Save The Queen",
but only after fully carrying out task 1.

5. You should stop playing American "football." There's only one kind of
football. What you call American "football" is not a very good game. The
2.1% of you aware there is a world outside your borders may have noticed no
one else plays "American" football. You should instead play proper
football. Initially, it would be best if you played with the girls. Those
of you brave enough will, in time, be allowed to play rugby (which is
similar to American "football", but does not involve stopping for a rest
every twenty seconds or wearing full kevlar body armour like nancies).

You should stop playing baseball. It's not reasonable to host an event
called the 'World Series' for a game which is not played outside of
America. Instead of baseball, you will be allowed to play a girls' game
called "rounders," which is baseball without fancy team stripe, oversized
gloves, collector cards or hotdogs.

6. You will no longer be allowed to own or carry guns, or anything more
dangerous in public than a vegetable peeler. Because you are not sensible
enough to handle potentially dangerous items, you need a permit to carry a
vegetable peeler.

7. July 4th is no longer a public holiday. November 2nd will be a new
national holiday. It will be called "Indecisive Day."

8. All American cars are hereby banned. They are crap and it is for your
own good. When we show you German cars, you will understand what we mean.
All road intersections will be replaced with roundabouts, and you will
start driving on the left. At the same time, you will go metric without the
benefit of conversion tables. Roundabouts and metrication will help you
understand the British sense of humour.

9. Learn to make real chips. Those things you call French fries are not
real chips. Fries aren't French, they're Belgian though 97.8% of you
(including the guy who discovered fries while in Europe) are not aware of a
country called Belgium. Potato chips are properly called "crisps." Real
chips are thick cut and fried in animal fat. The traditional accompaniment
to chips is beer which should be served warm and flat.

10. The cold tasteless stuff you call beer is actually lager. Only proper
British Bitter will be referred to as "beer." Substances once known as
"American Beer" will henceforth be referred to as "Near-Frozen Gnat's
Urine," except for the product of the American Budweiser company which will
be called "Weak Near-Frozen Gnat's Urine." This will allow true Budweiser
(as manufactured for the last 1000 years in Pilsen, Czech Republic) to be
sold without risk of confusion.

11. The UK will harmonise petrol prices (or "Gasoline," as you will be
permitted to keep calling it) for those of the former USA, adopting UK
petrol prices (roughly $6/US gallon, get used to it).

12. Learn to resolve personal issues without guns, lawyers or therapists.
That you need many lawyers and therapists shows you're not adult enough to
be independent. If you're not adult enough to sort things out without suing
someone or speaking to a therapist, you're not grown up enough to handle a
gun.

13. Please tell us who killed JFK. It's been driving us crazy.

14. Tax collectors from Her Majesty's Government will be with you shortly
to ensure the acquisition of all revenues due (backdated to 1776).

Thank you for your co-operation.

* John Cleese

[Basil Fawlty, Fawlty Towers, Torquay, Devon, England

Liberal feeling vs. Judeo-Christian values: Part VI
Dennis Prager
townhall.com
February 22, 2005

With the decline of the authority of Judeo-Christian values in the West,
many people stopped looking to external sources of moral standards in
order to decide what is right and wrong. Instead of being guided by God,
the Bible and religion, great numbers -- in Western Europe, the great
majority -- have looked elsewhere for moral and social guidelines.

For many millions in the twentieth century, those guidelines were
provided by Marxism, Communism, Fascism or Nazism. For many millions
today, those guidelines are feelings. With the ascendancy of leftist
values that has followed the decline of Judeo-Christian religion,
personal feelings have supplanted universal standards. In fact, feelings
are the major unifying characteristic among contemporary liberal
positions.

Aside from reliance on feelings, how else can one explain a person who
believes, let alone proudly announces on a bumper sticker, that "War is
not the answer"? I know of no comparable conservative bumper sticker
that is so demonstrably false and morally ignorant. Almost every great
evil has been solved by war -- from slavery in America to the Holocaust
in Europe. Auschwitz was liberated by soldiers making war, not by
pacifists who would have allowed the Nazis to murder every Jew in
Europe.

The entire edifice of moral relativism, a foundation of leftist
ideology, is built on the notion of feelings deciding right and wrong.
One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.

The animals-and-humans-are-equivalent movement is based entirely on
feelings. People see chickens killed and lobsters boiled, feel for the
animals, and shortly thereafter abandon thought completely, and equate
chicken and lobster suffering to that of a person under the same
circumstances.

The unprecedented support of liberals for radically redefining the
basic institution of society, marriage and the family is another a
product of feelings -- sympathy for homosexuals. Thinking through the
effects of such a radical redefinition on society and its children is
not a liberal concern.

The "self-esteem movement" -- now conceded to have been a great
producer of mediocrity and narcissism -- was entirely a liberal
invention based on feelings for kids.

The liberal preoccupation with whether America is loved or hated is
also entirely feelings-based. The Left wants to be loved; the
conservative wants to do what is right and deems world opinion fickle at
best and immoral at worst.

Sexual harassment laws have created a feelings-industrial complex. The
entire concept of "hostile work environment" is feelings based. If one
woman resents a swimsuit calendar on a co-worker's desk, laws have now
been passed whose sole purpose is to protect her from having
uncomfortable feelings.

For liberals, the entire worth of the human fetus is determined by the
mother's feelings. If she feels the nascent human life she is carrying
is worth nothing, it is worth nothing. If she feels it is infinitely
precious, it is infinitely precious.

Almost everything is affected by liberal feelings. For example, liberal
opposition to calling a Christmas party by its rightful name is based on
liberals' concern that non-Christians will feel bad. And for those
liberals, nothing else matters -- not the legitimate desire of the vast
majority of Americans to celebrate their holiday, let alone the
narcissism of those non-Christians "offended" by a Christmas party.

And why do liberals continue to endorse race-based affirmative action
at universities despite the mounting evidence that it hurts blacks more
than it helps? Again, a major reason is feelings -- sympathy for blacks
and the historic racism African-Americans have endured.

Very often, liberals are far more concerned with purity of motive than
with moral results. That's why so many liberals still oppose the
liberation of Iraq -- so what if Iraqis risk their lives to vote? It's
George W. Bush's motives that liberals care about, not spreading liberty
in the Arab world.

Elevating motives above results is a significant part of liberalism.
What matters is believing that one is well intentioned -- that one cares
for the poor, hates racism, loathes inequality and loves peace.
Bi-lingual education hurts Latino children. But as a compassionate
person -- and "compassionate" is the self-definition of most liberals --
that is not the liberal's real concern. His concern is with an immigrant
child's uncomfortable feelings when first immersed in English.

Reliance on feelings in determining one's political and social
positions is the major reason young people tend to have liberal/left
positions -- they feel passionately but do not have the maturity to
question those passions. It is also one reason women, especially single
women, are more liberal than men -- it is women's nature to rely on
emotions when making decisions. (For those unused to anything but
adulation directed at the female of the human species, let me make it
clear that men, too, cannot rely on their nature, which leans toward
settling differences through raw physical power. Both sexes have a lot
of self-correcting to do.)

To be fair, feelings also play a major role in many conservatives'
beliefs. Patriotism is largely a feeling; religious faith is filled with
emotion, and religion has too often been dictated by emotion. But far
more conservative positions are based on "What is right?" rather than on
"How do I feel?" That is why a religious woman who is pregnant but does
not wish to be is far less likely to have an abortion than a secular
woman in the same circumstances. Her values are higher than her
feelings. And that, in a nutshell, is what our culture war is about --
Judeo-Christian values versus liberal/leftist feelings.

from: avkrebs@earthlink.net
WEB SITE:

MONSANTO THREATENS TILLAMOOK,
SEEKS TO "FOREVER PROHIBIT" DAIRY
BOARD FROM "REGULATING ANY
FDA APPROVED PHARMACEUTICAL"

RICK NORTH, OREGON PHYSICIANS FOR SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY: KGW TV reporter
Vince Patton uncovered Monsanto's plans to reverse the Tillamook board's
decision to disallow the use of rBGH, as reported on Friday night's 6:00 pm
news

He discovered that "Two of its (Monsanto's) representatives came to
Tillamook County accompanied by lawyer James Miller from Monsanto's law
firm, King & Spalding in Washington, DC." Farmers reported that Miller
drafted a petition that would go beyond reversing the rBGH decision. It
would "forever prohibit the Tillamook Creamery board from ever regulating
any FDA approved pharmaceutical."

Even with all this evidence, Monsanto Director of Public Affairs Jennifer
Garrett said that Monsanto was not involved in instigating a petition. Even
more incredibly, Patton reported that neither Monsanto nor the farmers said
they paid the lawyer. If not, I have to believe he was paid by King &
Spalding, who receive money from Monsanto, of course, to represent them.
Either that or he was doing this as a volunteer. (No comment)

Early this morning, the Oregonian reported that Tillamook had put out a
news release asserting "Tillamook County Creamery Association is facing an
aggressive intrusion by Monsanto into the association's decision-making
process."

We will fight back.. I'm gathering input now and will be back in touch
with you no later than tomorrow with contact information and suggestions
on how to make your feelings known. Many of you have already signed up as
volunteers, but even if you haven't , the time is now to step forward and
do something directly to stopMonsanto's efforts.

The Tillamook vote may be shaping up as a referendum on which way dairies
across the nation will go. Will they listen to their consumers or be
intimidated by Monsanto? It's up to us to make our voices heard.

Finally, one misconception --- Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility
is not asking for a ban on rBGH. Our goal is to discontinue the production
of dairy products in Oregon using rBGH. A ban is an official policy against
doing something. We are not going through the legislature to get a law
passed or anything like it. We are simply doing a public education campaign
to better inform the public and allow them to "vote with their dollars." In
addition, we are actively contacting the dairies to ask them not to use
rBGH. This is all voluntary, which we think is the best way to go. I'm
asking Vince Patton to correct this misconception.
[ February 19, 2005 ]

COMMENTARY by A V Krebs:
IT'S AS YOGI ONCE SAID:
"IT'S DEJA VU ALL OVER AGAIN !!!"

Once again a strong-arm tactic by the Monsanto Co. has shown itself.

After the Great Pacific Northwest' Tillamook Creamery decided to prohibit
any of its147 dairy farmers from using the genetically engineered rBGH
(bovine growth hormone) in its cows (see stories below) Monsanto, the
manufacturer, sought a petition to "forever prohibit the Tillamook Creamery
board from ever regulating any FDA approved pharmaceutical"

Vince Patton, a reporter for the Portland, Oregon station KGW-TV, first
reported the story and in relating the background behind Tillamook's
decision told how one of its dairy farmers Dick Heathershaw decided to try
the synthetic hormone four years ago.

"The biotech giant Monsanto wanted him to add "Posilac" to his cows'
routine: a bi-weekly syringe full of the genetically engineered growth
hormone. Heathershaw says, `They (Monsanto) were just really relentless in
pushing it, you know. They'd visit you continually.'"

Patton told Rick North of the Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility
that he has NEVER had a story in Portland reviewed so thoroughly by station
lawyers --- no surprise there!

But unlike Florida's WTVT/FOX13, the Portland TV station aired its two-part
story on the pros and cons of rBGH and the Tillamook decision. For their
rBGH expose the WTVT/FOX13 husband-wife investigative reporting team Jane
Akre and Steve Wilson were fired from the station.

Later, after a jury trial, Akre was awarded a $425,000 verdict as she
charged she was pressured by FOX Television management and lawyers to air
what she knew and documented to be false information concerning the
widespread use of the Monsanto manufactured hormone.

While the Florida jurors concluded she was pressured by FOX lawyers and
managers to broadcast what the jury agreed was "a false, distorted or
slanted story" and was subsequently fired for threatening to blow the
whistle, that decision was reversed on a legal technicality when a higher
court agreed with FOX that it is technically not against any law, rule or
regulation to air "a false, distorted or slanted story"

In setting the jury verdict aside, the appeals court ruled that in order to
be protected by Florida’s Whistleblower Act, the alleged misconduct must
violate a written law. The court said the Federal Communication's
Commission (FCC) prohibition against news distortion was merely a policy.

In a companion decision the Court also ruled that Akre and her journalist
husband Steve likewise had to pay the legal costs and fees the broadcaster
incurred defending itself in the case. The couple appealed the latter
ruling.

In August, 2004, Florida Judge Vivian Maye denied FOX's motion that would
have forced Akre and Wilson to pay nearly $2 million in legal fees and
court costs the broadcaster spent to defend itself at trial. In her ruling
Judge Maye cited previous court decisions that allow judicial discretion in
deciding whether whistleblowers must reimburse defense costs if they
ultimately lose.

Akre and Wilson had prepared their WTVT/FOX13 documentary on how Florida
dairymen had been secretly injecting the genetically engineered rBGH into
their cows and how Florida supermarkets quietly reneged on promises not to
sell milk from treated cows until the hormone gained widespread acceptance
by consumers.

In their subsequent law suit the reporters charged in detail FOX Television
--- the "fair and balanced" network owned by Rupert Murdoch's
multi-national News Corp, was strongly pressured by Monsanto.

"In essence," Akre points out " FOX argued the First Amendment gives
broadcasters the right to even lie or deliberately distort news reports on
the public airwaves."

Akre recalls: " Prior to our dismissal, Station Manager Dave Boylan, a
career salesman without any roots in journalism and seemingly lacking the
devotion to serve the public interest that motivates all good investigative
reporting, had flaunted the company's wealth in an attempt to make us back
down. `We paid $3 billion for these stations,' he told us on one occasion.
`We'll tell you what the news is. The news is what we say it is!'"

Not only did FOX manage to get away with their Florida scam, but they got
an able assist from both the mainstream and liberal media in the fact that
the entire case received nary a mention in this nation's major and
alternative news outlets.

Thus, one can only wonder when Monsanto gets through with the Tillamook
board --- and all the pressure it can muster on the dairy farmers which
supply the creamery to ignore the recent ban --- whether it will then
attempt to intimidate the Oregon media in much the same underhanded way it
made a corporate prostitute of WTVT/FOX 13.

This author is now on the staff at Berkeley. He wrote the landmark expose
of GM 'Playing God in the Garden' in the New Yorker. Here he is exposing
the feedlot racket. Our then Commissioner for the Environment failed to
expose its generic defects in her "assessment" of the huge lot near
Ashburton.

R

Discover How Your Beef is Really Raised

By Michael Pollan

Garden City, Kansas, missed out on the suburban building boom of the
postwar years. What it got instead were sprawling subdivisions of cattle.

These feedlots -- the nation's first -- began rising on the high plains of
western Kansas in the 50's, and by now developments catering to cows are
far more common here than developments catering to people.

You'll be speeding down one of Finney County's ramrod roads when the empty,
dun-colored prairie suddenly turns black and geometric, an urban grid of
steel-fenced rectangles as far as the eye can see -- which in Kansas is
really far.

I say ''suddenly,'' but in fact a swiftly intensifying odor (an aroma whose
Proustian echoes are more bus-station-men's-room than cow-in-the-country)
heralds the approach of a feedlot for more than a mile.

Then it's upon you: Poky Feeders, population 37,000. Cattle pens stretch
to the horizon, each one home to 150 animals standing dully or lying around
in a grayish mud that it eventually dawns on you isn't mud at all.

The pens line a network of unpaved roads that loop around vast waste
lagoons on their way to the feedlot's beating heart: a chugging, silvery
feed mill that soars like an industrial cathedral over this teeming
metropolis of meat.

I traveled to Poky early in January with the slightly improbable notion of
visiting one particular resident: a young black steer that I'd met in the
fall on a ranch in Vale, S.D. The steer, in fact, belonged to me.

I'd purchased him as an 8-month-old calf from the Blair brothers, Ed and
Rich, for $598. I was paying Poky Feeders $1.60 a day for his room, board
and meds and hoped to sell him at a profit after he was fattened.

My interest in the steer was not strictly financial, however, or even
gustatory, though I plan to retrieve some steaks from the Kansas packing
plant where No. 534, as he is known, has an appointment with the stunner in
June.

No, my primary interest in this animal was educational. I wanted to find
out how a modern, industrial steak is produced in America these days, from
insemination to slaughter.

Eating meat, something I have always enjoyed doing, has become problematic
in recent years. Though beef consumption spiked upward during the flush
90's, the longer-term trend is down, and many people will tell you they no
longer eat the stuff.

Inevitably they'll bring up mad-cow disease (and the accompanying
revelation that industrial agriculture has transformed these ruminants into
carnivores -- indeed, into cannibals).

They might mention their concerns about E. coli contamination or
antibiotics in the feed. Then there are the many environmental problems,
like groundwater pollution, associated with ''Concentrated Animal Feeding
Operations.''

(The word ''farm'' no longer applies.) And of course there are questions of
animal welfare. How are we treating the animals we eat while they're
alive, and then how humanely are we ''dispatching'' them, to borrow an
industry euphemism?

Meat-eating has always been a messy business, shadowed by the shame of
killing and, since Upton Sinclair's writing of ''The Jungle,'' by questions
about what we're really eating when we eat meat.

Forgetting, or willed ignorance, is the preferred strategy of many beef
eaters, a strategy abetted by the industry. (What grocery-store item is
more silent about its origins than a shrink-wrapped steak?)

Yet I recently began to feel that ignorance was no longer tenable. If I was
going to continue to eat red meat, then I owed it to myself, as well as to
the animals, to take more responsibility for the invisible but crucial
transaction between ourselves and the animals we eat. I'd try to own it,
in other words.

So this is the biography of my cow.

The Blair brothers ranch occupies 11,500 acres of short-grass prairie a few
miles outside Sturgis, S.D., directly in the shadow of Bear Butte. In
November, when I visited, the turf forms a luxuriant pelt of grass
oscillating yellow and gold in the constant wind and sprinkled with
perambulating black dots: Angus cows and calves grazing.

Ed and Rich Blair run what's called a ''cow-calf'' operation, the first
stage of beef production, and the stage least changed by the modern
industrialization of meat.

While the pork and chicken industries have consolidated the entire life
cycles of those animals under a single roof, beef cattle are still born on
thousands of independently owned ranches. Although four giant meatpacking
companies (Tyson's subsidiary IBP, Monfort, Excel and National) now
slaughter and market more than 80 percent of the beef cattle born in this
country, that concentration represents the narrow end of a funnel that
starts out as wide as the great plains.

The Blairs have been in the cattle business for four generations. Although
there are new wrinkles to the process -- artificial insemination to improve
genetics, for example -- producing beef calves goes pretty much as it
always has, just faster.

Calving season begins in late winter, a succession of subzero nights spent
yanking breeched babies out of their bellowing mothers. In April comes the
first spring roundup to work the newborn calves (branding, vaccination,
castration); then more roundups in early summer to inseminate the cows ($15
mail-order straws of elite bull semen have pretty much put the resident
stud out of work); and weaning in the fall. If all goes well, your herd of
850 cattle has increased to 1,600 by the end of the year.

My steer spent his first six months in these lush pastures alongside his
mother, No. 9,534. His father was a registered Angus named GAR Precision
1,680, a bull distinguished by the size and marbling of his offspring's
rib-eye steaks.

Born last March 13 in a birthing shed across the road, No. 534 was turned
out on pasture with his mother as soon as the 80-pound calf stood up and
began nursing. After a few weeks, the calf began supplementing his
mother's milk by nibbling on a salad bar of mostly native grasses: western
wheatgrass, little bluestem, green needlegrass.

Apart >from the trauma of the April day when he was branded and castrated,
you could easily imagine No. 534 looking back on those six months grazing
at his mother's side as the good old days -- if, that is, cows do look
back.

(''They do not know what is meant by yesterday or today,'' Friedrich
Nietzsche wrote, with a note of envy, of grazing cattle, ''fettered to the
moment and its pleasure or displeasure, and thus neither melancholy or
bored.'' Nietzsche clearly had never seen a feedlot.)

It may be foolish to presume to know what a cow experiences, yet we can say
that a cow grazing on grass is at least doing what he has been splendidly
molded by evolution to do. Which isn't a bad definition of animal
happiness.

Eating grass, however, is something that, after October, my steer would
never do again.

Although the modern cattle industry all but ignores it, the reciprocal
relationship between cows and grass is one of nature's underappreciated
wonders.

For the grasses, the cow maintains their habitat by preventing trees and
shrubs from gaining a foothold; the animal also spreads grass seed,
planting it with its hoofs and fertilizing it. In exchange for these
services, the grasses offer the ruminants a plentiful, exclusive meal.

For cows, sheep and other grazers have the unique ability to convert grass
-- which single-stomached creatures like us can't digest -- into
high-quality protein. They can do this because they possess a rumen, a
45-gallon fermentation tank in which a resident population of bacteria
turns grass into metabolically useful organic acids and protein.

This is an excellent system for all concerned: for the grasses, for the
animals and for us. What's more, growing meat on grass can make superb
ecological sense: so long as the rancher practices rotational grazing, it
is a sustainable, solar-powered system for producing food on land too arid
or hilly to grow anything else.

So if this system is so ideal, why is it that my cow hasn't tasted a blade
of grass since October?

Speed, in a word.

Cows raised on grass simply take longer to reach slaughter weight than cows
raised on a richer diet, and the modern meat industry has devoted itself to
shortening a beef calf's allotted time on earth. '

'In my grandfather's day, steers were 4 or 5 years old at slaughter,''
explained Rich Blair, who, at 45, is the younger of the brothers by four
years. ''In the 50's, when my father was ranching, it was 2 or 3.

"Now we get there at 14 to 16 months.''

Fast food indeed.

What gets a beef calf from 80 to 1,200 pounds in 14 months are enormous
quantities of corn, protein supplements -- and drugs, including growth
hormones. These ''efficiencies,'' all of which come at a price, have
transformed raising cattle into a high-volume, low-margin business. Not
everybody is convinced that this is progress. ''Hell,'' Ed Blair told me,
''my dad made more money on 250 head than we do on 850.''

Weaning marks the fateful moment when the natural, evolutionary logic
represented by a ruminant grazing on grass bumps up against the industrial
logic that, with stunning speed, turns that animal into a box of beef.
This industrial logic is rational and even irresistible -- after all, it
has succeeded in transforming beef from a luxury item into everyday fare
for millions of people. And yet the further you follow it, the more likely
you are to wonder if that rational logic might not also be completely
insane.

In early October, a few weeks before I met him, No. 534 was weaned from his
mother. Weaning is perhaps the most traumatic time on a ranch for animals
and ranchers alike; cows separated from their calves will mope and bellow
for days, and the calves themselves, stressed by the change in circumstance
and diet, are prone to get sick.

On many ranches, weaned calves go directly from the pasture to the sale
barn, where they're sold at auction, by the pound, to feedlots. The Blairs
prefer to own their steers straight through to slaughter and to keep them
on the ranch for a couple of months of ''backgrounding'' before sending
them on the 500-mile trip to Poky Feeders.

Think of backgrounding as prep school for feedlot life: the animals are
confined in a pen, ''bunk broken'' -- taught to eat from a trough -- and
gradually accustomed to eating a new, unnatural diet of grain. (Grazing
cows encounter only tiny amounts of grain, in the form of grass seeds.)

It was in the backgrounding pen that I first met No. 534 on an unseasonably
warm afternoon in November. I'd told the Blairs I wanted to follow one of
their steers through the life cycle; Ed, 49, suggested I might as well buy
a steer, as a way to really understand the daunting economics of modern
ranching.

Ed and Rich told me what to look for: a broad, straight back and thick
hindquarters. Basically, you want a strong frame on which to hang a lot of
meat. I was also looking for a memorable face in this Black Angus sea, one
that would stand out in the feedlot crowd.

Rich said he would calculate the total amount I owed the next time No. 534
got weighed but that the price would be $98 a hundredweight for an animal
of this quality. He would then bill me for all expenses (feed, shots, et
cetera) and, beginning in January, start passing on the weekly ''hotel
charges'' from Poky Feeders.

In June we'd find out from the packing plant how well my investment had
panned out: I would receive a payment for No. 534 based on his carcass
weight, plus a premium if he earned a U.S.D.A. grade of choice or prime.
''And if you're worried about the cattle market,'' Rich said jokingly,
referring to its post-Sept. 11 slide, ''I can sell you an option too.''
Option insurance has become increasingly popular among cattlemen in the
wake of mad-cow and foot-and-mouth disease.

Hadrick and I squeezed into the heated cab of a huge swivel-hipped tractor
hooked up to a feed mixer: basically, a dump truck with a giant screw
through the middle to blend ingredients.

First stop was a hopper filled with Rumensin, a powerful antibiotic that
No. 534 will consume with his feed every day for the rest of his life.
Calves have no need of regular medication while on grass, but as soon as
they're placed in the backgrounding pen, they're apt to get sick.

Why?

The stress of weaning is a factor, but the main culprit is the feed. The
shift to a ''hot ration'' of grain can so disturb the cow's digestive
process -- its rumen, in particular -- that it can kill the animal if not
managed carefully and accompanied by antibiotics.

After we'd scooped the ingredients into the hopper and turned on the mixer,
Hadrick deftly sidled the tractor alongside the pen and flipped a switch to
release a dusty tan stream of feed in a long, even line. No. 534 was one of
the first animals to belly up to the rail for breakfast. He was heftier
than his pen mates and, I decided, sparkier too. That morning, Hadrick and
I gave each calf six pounds of corn mixed with seven pounds of ground
alfalfa hay and a quarter-pound of Rumensin. Soon after my visit, this
ration would be cranked up to 14 pounds of corn and 6 pounds of hay -- and
added two and a half pounds every day to No. 534.

While I was on the ranch, I didn't talk to No. 534, pet him or otherwise
try to form a connection. I also decided not to give him a name, even
though my son proposed a pretty good one after seeing a snapshot.
(''Night.'') My intention, after all, is to send this animal to slaughter
and then eat some of him. No. 534 is not a pet, and I certainly don't want
to end up with an ox in my backyard because I suddenly got sentimental.

As fall turned into winter, Hadrick sent me regular e-mail messages
apprising me of my steer's progress. On Nov. 13 he weighed 650 pounds; by
Christmas he was up to 798, making him the seventh-heaviest steer in his
pen, an achievement in which I, idiotically, took a measure of pride.
Between Nov. 13 and Jan. 4, the day he boarded the truck for Kansas, No.
534 put away 706 pounds of corn and 336 pounds of alfalfa hay, bringing his
total living expenses for that period to $61.13. I was into this deal now
for $659.

Hadrick's e-mail updates grew chattier as time went on, cracking a window
on the rancher's life and outlook. I was especially struck by his
relationship to the animals, how it manages to be at once intimate and
unsentimental. One day Hadrick is tenderly nursing a newborn at 3 a.m., the
next he's ''having a big prairie oyster feed'' after castrating a pen of
bull calves.

Hadrick wrote empathetically about weaning (''It's like packing up and
leaving the house when you are 18 and knowing you will never see your
parents again'') and with restrained indignation about ''animal activists
and city people'' who don't understand the first thing about a rancher's
relationship to his cattle. Which, as Hadrick put it, is simply this: ''If
we don't take care of these animals, they won't take care of us.''

''Everyone hears about the bad stuff,'' Hadrick wrote, ''but they don't
ever see you give C.P.R. to a newborn calf that was born backward or
bringing them into your house and trying to warm them up on your kitchen
floor because they were born on a minus-20-degree night. Those are the
kinds of things ranchers will do for their livestock. They take precedence
over most everything in your life. Sorry for the sermon.''

To travel from the ranch to the feedlot, as No. 534 and I both did (in
separate vehicles) the first week in January, feels a lot like going from
the country to the big city. Indeed, a cattle feedlot is a kind of city,
populated by as many as 100,000 animals. It is very much a premodern city,
however -- crowded, filthy and stinking, with open sewers, unpaved roads
and choking air.

The urbanization of the world's livestock is a fairly recent historical
development, so it makes a certain sense that cow towns like Poky Feeders
would recall human cities several centuries ago. As in 14th-century London,
the metropolitan digestion remains vividly on display: the foodstuffs
coming in, the waste streaming out. Similarly, there is the crowding
together of recent arrivals from who knows where, combined with a lack of
modern sanitation.

This combination has always been a recipe for disease; the only reason
contemporary animal cities aren't as plague-ridden as their medieval
counterparts is a single historical anomaly: the modern antibiotic.

I spent the better part of a day walking around Poky Feeders, trying to
understand how its various parts fit together. In any city, it's easy to
lose track of nature -- of the connections between various species and the
land on which everything ultimately depends.

The feedlot's ecosystem, I could see, revolves around corn.

But its food chain doesn't end there, because the corn itself grows
somewhere else, where it is implicated in a whole other set of ecological
relationships. Growing the vast quantities of corn used to feed livestock
in this country takes vast quantities of chemical fertilizer, which in turn
takes vast quantities of oil -- 1.2 gallons for every bushel. So the modern
feedlot is really a city floating on a sea of oil.

I started my tour at the feed mill, the yard's thundering hub, where three
meals a day for 37,000 animals are designed and mixed by computer.

A million pounds of feed passes through the mill each day.

Every hour of every day, a tractor-trailer pulls up to disgorge another 25
tons of corn. Around the other side of the mill, tanker trucks back up to
silo-shaped tanks, into which they pump thousands of gallons of liquefied
fat and protein supplement.

In a shed attached to the mill sit vats of liquid vitamins and synthetic
estrogen; next to these are pallets stacked with 50-pound sacks of Rumensin
and tylosin, another antibiotic. Along with alfalfa hay and corn silage for
roughage, all these ingredients are blended and then piped into the dump
trucks that keep Poky's eight and a half miles of trough filled.

The feed mill's great din is made by two giant steel rollers turning
against each other 12 hours a day, crushing steamed corn kernels into
flakes. This was the only feed ingredient I tasted, and it wasn't half bad;
not as crisp as Kellogg's, but with a cornier flavor. I passed, however, on
the protein supplement, a sticky brown goop consisting of molasses and
urea.

Corn is a mainstay of livestock diets because there is no other feed quite
as cheap or plentiful: thanks to federal subsidies and ever-growing
surpluses, the price of corn ($2.25 a bushel) is 50 cents less than the
cost of growing it.

The rise of the modern factory farm is a direct result of these surpluses,
which soared in the years following World War II, when petrochemical
fertilizers came into widespread use. Ever since, the U.S.D.A.'s policy has
been to help farmers dispose of surplus corn by passing as much of it as
possible through the digestive tracts of food animals, converting it into
protein.

Compared with grass or hay, corn is a compact and portable foodstuff,
making it possible to feed tens of thousands of animals on small plots of
land.

Without cheap corn, the modern urbanization of livestock would probably
never have occurred.

We have come to think of ''cornfed'' as some kind of old-fashioned virtue;
we shouldn't. Granted, a cornfed cow develops well-marbled flesh, giving it
a taste and texture American consumers have learned to like. Yet this meat
is demonstrably less healthy to eat, since it contains more saturated fat.

A recent study in The European Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that the
meat of grass-fed livestock not only had substantially less fat than
grain-fed meat but that the type of fats found in grass-fed meat were much
healthier. (Grass-fed meat has more omega 3 fatty acids and fewer omega 6,
which is believed to promote heart disease; it also contains betacarotine
and CLA, another ''good'' fat.)

A growing body of research suggests that many of the health problems
associated with eating beef are really problems with cornfed beef. In the
same way ruminants have not evolved to eat grain, humans may not be well
adapted to eating grain-fed animals. Yet the USDA's grading system
continues to reward marbling -- that is, intermuscular fat -- and thus the
feeding of corn to cows.

The economic logic behind corn is unassailable, and on a factory farm,
there is no other kind. Calories are calories, and corn is the cheapest,
most convenient source of calories. Of course the identical industrial
logic -- protein is protein -- led to the feeding of rendered cow parts
back to cows, a practice the F.D.A. banned in 1997 after scientists
realized it was spreading mad-cow disease.

Make that mostly banned. The F.D.A.'s rules against feeding ruminant
protein to ruminants make exceptions for ''blood products'' (even though
they contain protein) and fat. Indeed, my steer has probably dined on beef
tallow recycled from the very slaughterhouse he's heading to in June. ''Fat
is fat,'' the feedlot manager shrugged when I raised an eyebrow.

FDA rules still permit feedlots to feed nonruminant animal protein to cows.
Feather meal is an accepted cattle feed, as are pig and fish protein and
chicken manure.

Some public-health advocates worry that since the bovine meat and bone meal
that cows used to eat is now being fed to chickens, pigs and fish,
infectious prions could find their way back into cattle when they eat the
protein of the animals that have been eating them. To close this biological
loophole, the FDA is now considering tightening its feed rules.

Until mad-cow disease, remarkably few people in the cattle business, let
alone the general public, comprehended the strange semicircular food chain
that industrial agriculture had devised for cattle (and, in turn, for us).
When I mentioned to Rich Blair that I'd been surprised to learn that cows
were eating cows, he said, ''To tell the truth, it was kind of a shock to
me too.''

Yet even today, ranchers don't ask many questions about feedlot menus. Not
that the answers are so easy to come by. When I asked Poky's feedlot
manager what exactly was in the protein supplement, he couldn't say. ''When
we buy supplement, the supplier says it's 40 percent protein, but they
don't specify beyond that.'' When I called the supplier, it wouldn't
divulge all its ''proprietary ingredients'' but promised that animal parts
weren't among them. Protein is pretty much still protein.

Compared with ground-up cow bones, corn seems positively wholesome. Yet it
wreaks considerable havoc on bovine digestion. During my day at Poky, I
spent an hour or two driving around the yard with Dr. Mel Metzen, the staff
veterinarian. Metzen, a 1997 graduate of Kansas State's vet school,
oversees a team of eight cowboys who spend their days riding the yard,
spotting sick cows and bringing them in for treatment.

A great many of their health problems can be traced to their diet.
''They're made to eat forage,'' Metzen said, ''and we're making them eat
grain.''

Perhaps the most serious thing that can go wrong with a ruminant on corn is
feedlot bloat. The rumen is always producing copious amounts of gas, which
is normally expelled by belching during rumination.

But when the diet contains too much starch and too little roughage,
rumination all but stops, and a layer of foamy slime that can trap gas
forms in the rumen. The rumen inflates like a balloon, pressing against the
animal's lungs. Unless action is promptly taken to relieve the pressure
(usually by forcing a hose down the animal's esophagus), the cow
suffocates.

A corn diet can also give a cow acidosis. Unlike that in our own highly
acidic stomachs, the normal pH of a rumen is neutral. Corn makes it
unnaturally acidic, however, causing a kind of bovine heartburn, which in
some cases can kill the animal but usually just makes it sick.

Acidotic animals go off their feed, pant and salivate excessively, paw at
their bellies and eat dirt. The condition can lead to diarrhea, ulcers,
bloat, liver disease and a general weakening of the immune system that
leaves the animal vulnerable to everything from pneumonia to feedlot polio.

Cows rarely live on feedlot diets for more than six months, which might be
about as much as their digestive systems can tolerate. ''I don't know how
long you could feed this ration before you'd see problems,'' Metzen said;
another vet said that a sustained feedlot diet would eventually ''blow out
their livers'' and kill them. As the acids eat away at the rumen wall,
bacteria enter the bloodstream and collect in the liver. More than 13
percent of feedlot cattle are found at slaughter to have abscessed livers.

What keeps a feedlot animal healthy -- or healthy enough -- are
antibiotics. Rumensin inhibits gas production in the rumen, helping to
prevent bloat; tylosin reduces the incidence of liver infection. Most of
the antibiotics sold in America end up in animal feed -- a practice that,
it is now generally acknowledged, leads directly to the evolution of new
antibiotic-resistant ''superbugs.''

In the debate over the use of antibiotics in agriculture, a distinction is
usually made between clinical and nonclinical uses. Public-health advocates
don't object to treating sick animals with antibiotics; they just don't
want to see the drugs lose their efficacy because factory farms are feeding
them to healthy animals to promote growth.

But the use of antibiotics in feedlot cattle confounds this distinction.
Here the drugs are plainly being used to treat sick animals, yet the
animals probably wouldn't be sick if not for what we feed them.

I asked Metzen what would happen if antibiotics were banned from cattle
feed. ''We just couldn't feed them as hard,'' he said. ''Or we'd have a
higher death loss.'' (Less than 3 percent of cattle die on the feedlot.)
The price of beef would rise, he said, since the whole system would have to
slow down.

''Hell, if you gave them lots of grass and space,'' he concluded dryly, ''I
wouldn't have a job.''

Before heading over to Pen 43 for my reunion with No. 534, I stopped by the
shed where recent arrivals receive their hormone implants. The calves are
funneled into a chute, herded along by a ranch hand wielding an electric
prod, then clutched in a restrainer just long enough for another hand to
inject a slow-release pellet of Revlar, a synthetic estrogen, in the back
of the ear.

The Blairs' pen had not yet been implanted, and I was still struggling with
the decision of whether to forgo what is virtually a universal practice in
the cattle industry in the United States. (It has been banned in the
European Union.)

American regulators permit hormone implants on the grounds that no risk to
human health has been proved, even though measurable hormone residues do
turn up in the meat we eat. These contribute to the buildup of estrogenic
compounds in the environment, which some scientists believe may explain
falling sperm counts and premature maturation in girls.

Recent studies have also found elevated levels of synthetic growth hormones
in feedlot wastes; these persistent chemicals eventually wind up in the
waterways downstream of feedlots, where scientists have found fish
exhibiting abnormal sex characteristics.

The F.D.A. is opening an inquiry into the problem, but for now, implanting
hormones in beef cattle is legal and financially irresistible: an implant
costs $1.50 and adds between 40 and 50 pounds to the weight of a steer at
slaughter, for a return of at least $25.

That could easily make the difference between profit and loss on my
investment in No. 534. Thinking like a parent, I like the idea of feeding
my son hamburgers free of synthetic hormones. But thinking like a
cattleman, there was really no decision to make.

I asked Rich Blair what he thought. ''I'd love to give up hormones,'' he
said. ''If the consumer said, We don't want hormones, we'd stop in a
second. The cattle could get along better without them. But the market
signal's not there, and as long as my competitor's doing it, I've got to do
it, too.''

Around lunch time, Metzen and I finally arrived at No. 534's pen. My first
impression was that my steer had landed himself a decent piece of real
estate. The pen is far enough from the feed mill to be fairly quiet, and it
has a water view -- of what I initially thought was a reservoir, until I
noticed the brown scum.

The pen itself is surprisingly spacious, slightly bigger than a basketball
court, with a concrete feed bunk out front and a freshwater trough in the
back. I climbed over the railing and joined the 90 steers, which, en masse,
retreated a few steps, then paused.

I had on the same carrot-colored sweater I'd worn to the ranch in South
Dakota, hoping to jog my steer's memory. Way off in the back, I spotted him
-- those three white blazes. As I gingerly stepped toward him, the quietly
shuffling mass of black cowhide between us parted, and there No. 534 and I
stood, staring dumbly at each other.

Glint of recognition? None whatsoever. I told myself not to take it
personally. No. 534 had been bred for his marbling, after all, not his
intellect.

I don't know enough about the emotional life of cows to say with any
confidence if No. 534 was miserable, bored or melancholy, but I would not
say he looked happy. I noticed that his eyes looked a little bloodshot.
Some animals are irritated by the fecal dust that floats in the feedlot
air; maybe that explained the sullen gaze with which he fixed me.

Unhappy or not, though, No. 534 had clearly been eating well. My animal had
put on a couple hundred pounds since we'd last met, and he looked it:
thicker across the shoulders and round as a barrel through the middle. He
carried himself more like a steer now than a calf, even though he was still
less than a year old. Metzen complimented me on his size and conformation.
''That's a handsome looking beef you've got there.''

Staring at No. 534, I could picture the white lines of the butcher's chart
dissecting his black hide: rump roast, flank steak, standing rib, brisket.
One way of looking at No. 534 -- the industrial way -- was as an efficient
machine for turning feed corn into beef.

Every day between now and his slaughter date in June, No. 534 will convert
32 pounds of feed (25 of them corn) into another three and a half pounds of
flesh. Poky is indeed a factory, transforming cheap raw materials into a
less-cheap finished product, as fast as bovinely possible.

Yet the factory metaphor obscures as much as it reveals about the creature
that stood before me. For this steer was not a machine in a factory but an
animal in a web of relationships that link him to certain other animals,
plants and microbes, as well as to the earth.

And one of those other animals is us.

The unnaturally rich diet of corn that has compromised No. 534's health is
fattening his flesh in a way that in turn may compromise the health of the
humans who will eat him. The antibiotics he's consuming with his corn were
at that very moment selecting, in his gut and wherever else in the
environment they wind up, for bacteria that could someday infect us and
resist the drugs we depend on. We inhabit the same microbial ecosystem as
the animals we eat, and whatever happens to it also happens to us.

I thought about the deep pile of manure that No. 534 and I were standing
in. We don't know much about the hormones in it -- where they will end up
or what they might do once they get there -- but we do know something about
the bacteria. One particularly lethal bug most probably resided in the
manure beneath my feet.

Escherichia coli 0157 is a relatively new strain of a common intestinal
bacteria (it was first isolated in the 1980's) that is common in feedlot
cattle, more than half of whom carry it in their guts. Ingesting as few as
10 of these microbes can cause a fatal infection.

Most of the microbes that reside in the gut of a cow and find their way
into our food get killed off by the acids in our stomachs, since they
originally adapted to live in a neutral-pH environment. But the digestive
tract of the modern feedlot cow is closer in acidity to our own, and in
this new, manmade environment acid-resistant strains of E. coli have
developed that can survive our stomach acids -- and go on to kill us.

By acidifying a cow's gut with corn, we have broken down one of our food
chain's barriers to infection. Yet this process can be reversed: James
Russell, a U.S.D.A. microbiologist, has discovered that switching a cow's
diet from corn to hay in the final days before slaughter reduces the
population of E. coli 0157 in its manure by as much as 70 percent. Such a
change, however, is considered wildly impractical by the cattle industry.

So much comes back to corn, this cheap feed that turns out in so many ways
to be not cheap at all. While I stood in No. 534's pen, a dump truck
pulled up alongside the feed bunk and released a golden stream of feed.

The animals stepped up to the bunk for their lunch. The $1.60 a day I'm
paying for three giant meals is a bargain only by the narrowest of
calculations. It doesn't take into account, for example, the cost to the
public health of antibiotic resistance or food poisoning by E. coli or all
the environmental costs associated with industrial corn.

For if you follow the corn from this bunk back to the fields where it
grows, you will find an 80-million-acre monoculture that consumes more
chemical herbicide and fertilizer than any other crop.

Keep going and you can trace the nitrogen runoff from that crop all the way
down the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico, where it has created (if that
is the right word) a 12,000-square-mile ''dead zone.''

But you can go farther still, and follow the fertilizer needed to grow that
corn all the way to the oil fields of the Persian Gulf. No. 534 started
life as part of a food chain that derived all its energy from the sun; now
that corn constitutes such an important link in his food chain, he is the
product of an industrial system powered by fossil fuel.
(And in turn, defended by the military -- another uncounted cost of
''cheap'' food.) I asked David Pimentel, a Cornell ecologist who
specializes in agriculture and energy, if it might be possible to calculate
precisely how much oil it will take to grow my steer to slaughter weight.

Assuming No. 534 continues to eat 25 pounds of corn a day and reaches a
weight of 1,250 pounds, he will have consumed in his lifetime roughly 284
gallons of oil. We have succeeded in industrializing the beef calf,
transforming what was once a solar-powered ruminant into the very last
thing we need: another fossil-fuel machine.

Sometime in June, No. 534 will be ready for slaughter. Though only 14
months old, my steer will weigh more than 1,200 pounds and will move with
the lumbering deliberateness of the obese. One morning, a cattle trailer
from the National Beef plant in Liberal, Kan., will pull in to Poky
Feeders, drop a ramp and load No. 534 along with 35 of his pen mates.

The 100-mile trip south to Liberal is a straight shot on Route 83, a
two-lane highway on which most of the traffic consists of speeding
tractor-trailers carrying either cattle or corn. The National Beef plant is
a sprawling gray-and-white complex in a neighborhood of trailer homes and
tiny houses a notch up from shanty.

These are, presumably, the homes of the Mexican and Asian immigrants who
make up a large portion of the plant's work force. The meat business has
made southwestern Kansas an unexpectedly diverse corner of the country.

A few hours after their arrival in the holding pens outside the factory, a
plant worker will open a gate and herd No. 534 and his pen mates into an
alley that makes a couple of turns before narrowing down to a single-file
chute. The chute becomes a ramp that leads the animals up to a second-story
platform and then disappears through a blue door.

That door is as close to the kill floor as the plant managers were prepared
to let me go.

I could see whatever I wanted to farther on -- the cold room where
carcasses are graded, the food-safety lab, the fabrication room where the
carcasses are broken down into cuts -- on the condition that I didn't take
pictures or talk to employees. But the stunning, bleeding and evisceration
process was off limits to a journalist, even a cattleman-journalist like
myself.

What I know about what happens on the far side of the blue door comes
mostly from Temple Grandin, who has been on the other side and, in fact,
helped to design it. Grandin, an assistant professor of animal science at
Colorado State, is one of the most influential people in the United States
cattle industry.

She has devoted herself to making cattle slaughter less stressful and
therefore more humane by designing an ingenious series of cattle
restraints, chutes, ramps and stunning systems. Grandin is autistic, a
condition she says has allowed her to see the world from the cow's point of
view.

The industry has embraced Grandin's work because animals under stress are
not only more difficult to handle but also less valuable: panicked cows
produce a surge of adrenaline that turns their meat dark and unappetizing.
''Dark cutters,'' as they're called, sell at a deep discount.

Grandin designed the double-rail conveyor system in use at the National
Beef plant; she has also audited the plant's killing process for
McDonald's.

Stories about cattle ''waking up'' after stunning only to be skinned alive
prompted McDonald's to audit its suppliers in a program that is credited
with substantial improvements since its inception in 1999. Grandin says
that in cattle slaughter ''there is the pre-McDonald's era and the
post-McDonald's era -- it's night and day.''

Grandin recently described to me what will happen to No. 534 after he
passes through the blue door. ''The animal goes into the chute single
file,'' she began. ''The sides are high enough so all he sees is the butt
of the animal in front of him. As he walks through the chute, he passes
over a metal bar, with his feet on either side. While he's straddling the
bar, the ramp begins to decline at a 25-degree angle, and before he knows
it, his feet are off the ground and he's being carried along on a conveyor
belt. We put in a false floor so he can't look down and see he's off the
ground. That would panic him.''

Listening to Grandin's rather clinical account, I couldn't help wondering
what No. 534 would be feeling as he approached his end. Would he have any
inkling -- a scent of blood, a sound of terror from up the line -- that
this was no ordinary day?

Grandin anticipated my question: ''Does the animal know it's going to get
slaughtered? I used to wonder that. So I watched them, going into the
squeeze chute on the feedlot, getting their shots and going up the ramp at
a slaughter plant. No difference. If they knew they were going to die,
you'd see much more agitated behavior.

''Anyway, the conveyor is moving along at roughly the speed of a moving
sidewalk. On a catwalk above stands the stunner. The stunner has a
pneumatic-powered 'gun' that fires a steel bolt about seven inches long and
the diameter of a fat pencil. He leans over and puts it smack in the middle
of the forehead. When it's done correctly, it will kill the animal on the
first shot.''

For a plant to pass a McDonald's audit, the stunner needs to render animals
''insensible'' on the first shot 95 percent of the time. A second shot is
allowed, but should that one fail, the plant flunks.

At the line speeds at which meatpacking plants in the United States operate
-- 390 animals are slaughtered every hour at National, which is not unusual
-- mistakes would seem inevitable, but Grandin insists that only rarely
does the process break down.

''After the animal is shot while he's riding along, a worker wraps a chain
around his foot and hooks it to an overhead trolley. Hanging upside down by
one leg, he's carried by the trolley into the bleeding area, where the
bleeder cuts his throat.

Animal rights people say they're cutting live animals, but that's because
there's a lot of reflex kicking.'' This is one of the reasons a job at a
slaughter plant is the most dangerous in America. ''What I look for is, Is
the head dead? It should be flopping like a rag, with the tongue hanging
out. He'd better not be trying to hold it up -- then you've got a live one
on the rail.'' Just in case, Grandin said, ''they have another hand stunner
in the bleed area.''

Much of what happens next -- the de-hiding of the animal, the tying off of
its rectum before evisceration -- is designed to keep the animal's feces
from coming into contact with its meat. This is by no means easy to do, not
when the animals enter the kill floor smeared with manure and 390 of them
are eviscerated every hour.

(Partly for this reason, European plants operate at much slower line
speeds.) But since that manure is apt to contain lethal pathogens like E.
coli 0157, and since the process of grinding together hamburger from
hundreds of different carcasses can easily spread those pathogens across
millions of burgers, packing plants now spend millions on ''food safety''
-- which is to say, on the problem of manure in meat.

Most of these efforts are reactive: it's accepted that the animals will
enter the kill floor caked with feedlot manure that has been rendered
lethal by the feedlot diet.

Rather than try to alter that diet or keep the animals from living in their
waste or slow the line speed -- all changes regarded as impractical -- the
industry focuses on disinfecting the manure that will inevitably find its
way into the meat. This is the purpose of irradiation (which the industry
prefers to call ''cold pasteurization''). It is also the reason that
carcasses pass through a hot steam cabinet and get sprayed with an
antimicrobial solution before being hung in the cooler at the National Beef
plant.

It wasn't until after the carcasses emerged from the cooler, 36 hours
later, that I was allowed to catch up with them, in the grading room. I
entered a huge arctic space resembling a monstrous dry cleaner's, with a
seemingly endless overhead track conveying thousands of red-and-white
carcasses.

I quickly learned that you had to move smartly through this room or else be
tackled by a 350-pound side of beef. The carcasses felt cool to the touch,
no longer animals but meat.

Two by two, the sides of beef traveled swiftly down the rails, six pairs
every minute, to a station where two workers -- one wielding a small power
saw, the other a long knife -- made a single six-inch cut between the 12th
and 13th ribs, opening a window on the meat inside.

The carcasses continued on to another station, where a U.S.D.A. inspector
holding a round blue stamp glanced at the exposed rib eye and stamped the
carcass's creamy white fat once, twice or -- very rarely -- three times:
select, choice, prime.

For the Blair brothers, and for me, this is the moment of truth, for that
stamp will determine exactly how much the packing plant will pay for each
animal and whether the 14 months of effort and expense will yield a profit.

Unless the cattle market collapses between now and June (always a worry
these days), I stand to make a modest profit on No. 534. In February, the
feedlot took a sonogram of his rib eye and ran the data through a computer
program.

The projections are encouraging: a live slaughter weight of 1,250, a
carcass weight of 787 pounds and a grade at the upper end of choice, making
him eligible to be sold at a premium as Certified Angus Beef. Based on the
June futures price, No. 534 should be worth $944. (Should he grade prime,
that would add another $75.)

I paid $598 for No. 534 in November; his living expenses since then come to
$61 on the ranch and $258 for 160 days at the feedlot (including implant),
for a total investment of $917, leaving a profit of $27. It's a razor-thin
margin, and it could easily vanish should the price of corn rise or No. 534
fail to make the predicted weight or grade -- say, if he gets sick and goes
off his feed.

Without the corn, without the antibiotics, without the hormone implant, my
brief career as a cattleman would end in failure.

The Blairs and I are doing better than most. According to Cattle-Fax, a
market-research firm, the return on an animal coming out of a feedlot has
averaged just $3 per head over the last 20 years.

''Some pens you make money, some pens you lose,'' Rich Blair said when I
called to commiserate. ''You try to average it out over time, limit the
losses and hopefully make a little profit.'' He reminded me that a lot of
ranchers are in the business ''for emotional reasons -- you can't be in it
just for the money.''

Now you tell me.

The manager of the packing plant has offered to pull a box of steaks from
No. 534 before his carcass disappears into the trackless stream of
commodity beef fanning out to America's supermarkets and restaurants this
June.

From what I can see, the Blair brothers, with the help of Poky Feeders, are
producing meat as good as any you can find in an American supermarket. And
yet there's no reason to think this steak will taste any different from the
other high-end industrial meat I've ever eaten.

While waiting for my box of meat to arrive from Kansas, I've explored some
alternatives to the industrial product. Nowadays you can find hormone- and
antibiotic-free beef as well as organic beef, fed only grain grown without
chemicals.

This meat, which is often quite good, is typically produced using more
grass and less grain (and so makes for healthier animals). Yet it doesn't
fundamentally challenge the corn-feedlot system, and I'm not sure that an
''organic feedlot'' isn't, ecologically speaking, an oxymoron. What I
really wanted to taste is the sort of preindustrial beef my grandparents
ate -- from animals that have lived most of their full-length lives on
grass.

Eventually I found a farmer in the Hudson Valley who sold me a quarter of a
grass-fed Angus steer that is now occupying most of my freezer. I also
found ranchers selling grass-fed beef on the Web;

I discovered that grass-fed meat is more expensive than supermarket beef.
Whatever else you can say about industrial beef, it is remarkably cheap,
and any argument for changing the system runs smack into the industry's
populist arguments.

Put the animals back on grass, it is said, and prices will soar; it takes
too long to raise beef on grass, and there's not enough grass to raise them
on, since the Western range lands aren't big enough to sustain America's
100 million head of cattle.

And besides, Americans have learned to love cornfed beef. Feedlot meat is
also more consistent in both taste and supply and can be harvested 12
months a year. (Grass-fed cattle tend to be harvested in the fall, since
they stop gaining weight over the winter, when the grasses go dormant.)

All of this is true. The economic logic behind the feedlot system is hard
to refute. And yet so is the ecological logic behind a ruminant grazing on
grass. Think what would happen if we restored a portion of the Corn Belt to
the tall grass prairie it once was and grazed cattle on it.

No more petrochemical fertilizer, no more herbicide, no more nitrogen
runoff. Yes, beef would probably be more expensive than it is now, but
would that necessarily be a bad thing? Eating beef every day might not be
such a smart idea anyway -- for our health, for the environment.

And how cheap, really, is cheap feedlot beef? Not cheap at all, when you
add in the invisible costs: of antibiotic resistance, environmental
degradation, heart disease, E. coli poisoning, corn subsidies, imported oil
and so on. All these are costs that grass-fed beef does not incur.

So how does grass-fed beef taste?

Uneven, just as you might expect the meat of a nonindustrial animal to
taste. One grass-fed tenderloin from Argentina that I sampled turned out
to be the best steak I've ever eaten. But unless the meat is carefully
aged, grass-fed beef can be tougher than feedlot beef -- not surprisingly,
since a grazing animal, which moves around in search of its food, develops
more muscle and less fat.

Yet even when the meat was tougher, its flavor, to my mind, was much more
interesting. And specific, for the taste of every grass-fed animal is
inflected by the place where it lived. Maybe it's just my imagination, but
nowadays when I eat a feedlot steak, I can taste the corn and the fat, and
I can see the view from No. 534's pen. I can't taste the oil, obviously, or
the drugs, yet now I know they're there.

A considerably different picture comes to mind while chewing (and, O.K.,
chewing) a grass-fed steak: a picture of a cow outside in a pasture eating
the grass that has eaten the sunlight.

Meat-eating may have become an act riddled with moral and ethical
ambiguities, but eating a steak at the end of a short, primordial food
chain comprising nothing more than ruminants and grass and light is
something I'm happy to do and defend. We are what we eat, it is often said,
but of course that's only part of the story. We are what what we eat eats
too.

Dr. Mercola's Comment:

When I first became aware of grass-fed beef, I was only superficially aware
of the importance of omega-3 oils. I have now grown to appreciate that
balancing the optimum amount of omega-3 oils is one of the most important
things you can do to stay healthy.

If you are not yet familiar with the benefits of omega-3 oils, please
review my recent
article on the cardiovascular actions of omega-3 oils.

Most nutritionist don't yet realize that it not only the amount, but the
ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 oils that controls much of our disease and
health outcomes.

That is why it is so important to consume animals that are primarily eating
grass. These animals will have far lower levels of the potentially
dangerous omega-6 oils that nearly all of us have a surplus of.

The practical way to do this is to consume free-range chickens and turkeys
and pasture or grass-fed beef. Unfortunately, you cannot buy this grass-fed
beef at your local grocery store.

Obtaining free range poultry is relatively straight forward but you must be
careful regarding the beef. Many stores will advertise grass-fed beef but
it really isn't. They do this as ALL cattle are grass fed, but the key is
what they are fed the months prior to being processed.

As this wonderful article explains most all cattle are shipped to giant
feed lots and fed corn to fatten them up. I knew this before reading this
incredible story, but I now have a far better understanding of the process.

You will need to call the person who actually grew the beef, NOT the store
manager, to find out the truth.

The least expensive way to obtain authentic grass fed beef would be to find
a farmer who is growing the beef who you can trust and buy a half a side of
beef from him. This way you save the shipping and also receive a reduced
rate on the meat.

An inexpensive, yet effective way to determine if the meat is really from a
grass fed animal is to purchase the ground beef. Slowly cook the beef till
done and drain and collect all the fat. Grass fed beef is very high in
omega-3 fats and will be relatively thin compared to traditionally prepared
ground beef.

It will also be a liquid at room temperature as it has very few saturated
fats which are mostly solid at room temperature.

However, most of us live in large urban areas and do not have the time for
this process. Just as it would be ideal to have an organic garden and grow
your own vegetables, most of us elect not to do that for time or space
reasons.

I used to have an organic garden, but my schedule just would not allow me
to have that luxury anymore. So, if you are convinced, like I am, that
grass-fed beef is better for you and you would like the convenience of
being able to order it over the Net, you can buy grass-fed beef online,
shipped overnight to your door, at Grassfed Organics.

http://www.mercola.com/2002/apr/17/cattle1.htm

The report they're understandably getting (according to this
article) tired of should be named after its chmn, (Abp) Eames. I didn't
notice how the name of the royal family got appropriated for it, but I urge
that it not be so called.

It may not be widely known that of the 17 Eames Commission members,
2 were NZers - Abp Paterson + Ms J Plane te Paa. They admitted to their
mtg in the Ak cathedral after the Report that no support for their
'position' had been found in any of the submissions to the Commission, nor
in any of the supplementary submissions they'd then solicited.

R

The following article is located at:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2005/107/52.0.html
CHRISTIAN HISTORY CORNER
Still Fighting Over Nicaea
The Anglican Communion dusts off and debates some of the Council of Nicaea's forgotten canons.
By Ted Olsen | posted 02/18/2005 09:30 a.m.

The 38 provincial heads of the Anglican Communion meet next week in Northern Ireland for "careful study of the Windsor Report," the recommendations issued last October on the future of Anglican unity amid deep divisions over theology, ethics, and practice. Anglicans and religion journalists, however, are getting tired. The resolution of each meeting of Anglican leaders seems to be, "just wait until the next meeting." Though some orthodox and conservative Anglicans are hopeful that leaders from southern provinces, especially in Africa, will stand firmly against North American theological liberalism and sexual libertinism, few are expecting anything decisive. This isn't being billed as the Anglican Council of Nicaea.

Not that the Council of Nicaea was as decisive as it is usually billed, either. It took almost 60 years for Nicaea's influence to solidify. In the meantime, the main heresy condemned at the council, Arianism, became ascendant and almost triumphed over orthodoxy. Even the Nicene Creed recited today wasn't really adopted until 381, 56 years after the council ended.

The Council of Nicaea was not, as Da Vinci Code novelist Dan Brown has convinced scores of readers, the place where the church made up the ideas of Jesus' divinity and the infallibility of Scripture, but it still stands as one of the biggest moments in church history (which is why Christian History & Biography has devoted its next issue to the council; click here if you don't already subscribe).
A few Anglican leaders have made a habit of systematically denying each line of the Nicene Creed, but most Anglicans revere the council as authoritative. So it was no throwaway comment when the Windsor Report made direct reference to the council's canons (rules or standards) in issuing its evaluation. But the Lambeth Commission on Communion, which issued the Windsor Report, didn't invoke Nicaea to talk about heretical priests and bishops in the West. Instead, the canons appeared in a discussion of how some orthodox parishes have responded to their own apostate leaders by seeking outside oversight:
Some Archbishops from elsewhere in the Communion have, both by taking initiatives, and by responding to invitations from clergy purporting to place themselves under their jurisdictions, entered parts of the Episcopal Church (USA) and the Anglican Church of Canada and exercised episcopal functions without the consent of the relevant diocesan bishop. This goes not only against traditional and often-repeated Anglican practice … but also against some of the longest-standing regulations of the early undivided church (Canon 8 of Nicaea). These actions are not purely reactions to recent events, though that has been their main character. In some cases they build on earlier attempts at unilateral action against bishops whose theology and/or practice was perceived to be out of line with traditional Anglican and Christian teaching, or even to set up would-be "orthodox" structures or "mission churches" for their own sake, e.g. the Anglican Mission in America (AMiA).

Conservatives were aghast that the Lambeth Commission treated orthodox leaders offering "alternative oversight" as akin to blessing same-sex unions and ordaining actively homosexual bishops in terms of disrupting church unity. But even the evangelicals on the commission stood by the claim.

Bishop of Durham N.T. Wright, whose orthodox credentials are impeccable, told Christianity Today: The important thing to say is that border crossings are disruptive. Not only are they against the spirit and the letter of Anglican formularies, they are against one of the decrees of the Council of Nicaea, as we point out. And I think not a lot of people know this, but it's important to say this was a question that the early fathers faced at the same time as they were hammering out the doctrine of the person of Jesus Christ, and that they gave it their time to say people should not do this because that's not how episcopacy works.

Now, of course it's open to people to come back and say episcopacy has broken down because of this and this. But then the critical thing, and this is where it is very similar, is that we have mechanisms— they demand patience, of course, which many of us don't have in great supply.

The problem with the Windsor Report's reference to the canons of Nicaea, some conservatives have responded, is that it focuses on the wrong heretics. The Arians, who denied the full divinity of Christ, were spotlighted at the Council of Nicaea, and most of the council's work focused on accurately defining Jesus' nature. But the 20 canons adopted, in addition to setting the date of Easter and regulating aspects of church life, deal with two other heretical groups.

The first are the Cathari, or Novatians. (This is the group referenced in the eighth canon, which the Windsor Report references.) While condemned as heretics, followers of Novatian were doctrinally orthodox. Novatian, in fact, had written one of the church's important works on the Trinity. This, then, was a group that could say the Nicene Creed with pride.

Indeed, pride was the issue: Novatians were outraged at how easily those who had lapsed under persecution had been received back into the church once the pressure lifted. They were also upset with lax church attitudes toward the twice-married. The solution, as they saw it, was to appoint rival bishops to "compromised" sees, which earned them a reputation as schismatics condemned by the rest of the church. At Nicaea, the Novatian bishop Acesius was personally criticized by Emperor
Constantine, who had been more conciliatory with those who denied orthodox theology. If a Novatian wanted to return to the church's good graces, the Council of Nicaea ruled, all they had to do was to "profess in writing that they will observe and follow the dogmas of the Catholic and Apostolic Church." Novatian priests could stay priests. Novatian bishops had to be under the local orthodox bishop, but in many cases didn't even have to step down in rank (whether a Novatian bishop retained the title of bishop or became a priest was up to the local orthodox bishop). It's important that the ex-Novatian "be evidently seen to be of the clergy," the Council decided, so long as "there may not be two bishops in the city."

Canon 8, however was markedly different from the other one dealing with heretics: Canon 19, which addressed the Paulianists. These followed the bishop of Antioch, Paul of Samosata, who was known both for heresy and an opulent lifestyle. He expressly rejected the deity of Christ, whom he considered an "ordinary man" inspired by the Word of God.

A Paulianist returning to orthodoxy had to do much more than simply offer a letter professing fealty to the church. "They must by all means be rebaptized," the council declared. Even clergy "found blameless and without reproach" had to go through ordination again. Clergy found unfit were deposed.

Deaconesses were laicized. In short, they held a place between heretic and unbeliever. The church may have welcomed repentant Paulianists, but it was with a reluctant handshake, not with open arms.

So the question for today is applicability. Many orthodox Anglicans in the West see the Episcopal Church (USA) not just as wayward, but as apostate. Bishops who deny the authority of Scripture and declare that God has changed his mind on matters of sexual ethics, they say, are heretics, not just schismatics. The repentance of the Paulianists is in order, not the assurances of the Novatians.
Anglican liberals may find parallels between Novatian rigors on remarriage and today's conservative emphasis on sexual ethics, but that doesn't mean that the Anglican Mission in America or other groups offering "alternative oversight" are schismatics, let alone heretics.

The Windsor Report misses the real lessons of Nicaea, says Robert J. Sanders, associate rector of St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Jacksonville, Florida, in an online commentary. He writes, "What does Nicaea teach us? It teaches us that believers need to come under the oversight of bishops, that they cannot receive from heretical bishops, and therefore, orthodox bishops must officiate in dioceses headed by heretical bishops."

The 49-page Windsor Report has enough mystery and controversy in it to keep the Primates busy during their meeting. There's a good chance that a parenthetical aside referencing the Council of Nicaea won't even come up. But one hopes that some lessons of Nicaea won't be lost on the Anglican Communion. In 325, church leaders were willing to die to see that orthodox doctrine was upheld. It didn't come to that: Instead, orthodox Christians, despite "winning" at Nicaea, had to face decades of uncertainty and apparent defeat before the church got its act together. Boldness and patience will likely be needed again among Anglicans.

Ted Olsen is online managing editor for Christianity Today. More Christian history, including a list of events that occurred this week in the church's past, is available at ChristianHistory.net.

Copyright © 2005 Christianity Today.

MannGram®: The basic fallacy of GM

Feb 2005

A noted defector from the ranks of the gene-jockeys wrote to me:

>In discussions with colleagues in which I argue along the lines of Dr
>Schubert, I frequently encounter the rebuttal that these same concerns occur
>with traditional breeding only traditional breeding is likely to be more
>disruptive by virtue of the large amount of genetic exchange.
>I certainly recognize that two wrongs don't make a right; nevertheless
>it would be
>informative to know if there is a fundamentally greater risk of inadvertent
>deviant biochemistry with GM than traditionally-bred crops.

to which I replied:

As it happens, exactly this issue arose - again - in my public
debate against a card-carrying gene-jockey (Simon Deroles of 'Crop&Food'
CRI).

To my way of thinking, the main answer is in the fact that nature
is not random. The routine Conner claim that slapping in - randomly ! -
a few genes {what Conner calls "just one gene"} will have more predictable
effects than offering a whole genome of 10^5 genes in cross-pollination is
wrong for the main reason that it furtively assumes natural crosses to be
random or nearly so. The immediate response to this furphy is that there's
almost nothing random in nature. We know, admittedly, v little about the
natural barriers to error in traditional breeding; that does not prove
they're unreal.

The fundamental answer however is that nature is designed. If you
think biology is just the result of the outworkings of the laws of physics
& chemistry, then you could - with considerable sloppiness - assume
that even random insertion of synthetic DNA 'cassettes' to create
GM-bastards by illegitimate recombination would be no more likely than
traditional breeding to cause harm. If on the other hand you think (to
take specific cases) that

* a pear is not just a random collection of biochemicals but a creation of
a benign Creator, and
* Grandmother Smith in a Seedknee suburb was a humble alert agent of that
Creator (selecting a new mutant apple tree that had arrived according to
His rules), then you will contrast such natural processes with the overwhelming of
natural barriers by synthetic modified T-plasmids, biolistics, etc.

I tend to think it is on this basic level that the issue really turns.
For those who think so, re-reading of _Genesis 3_ will be salutory.

In a culture that has largely turned away from theology, this may
of course be a hard msg to get across. But it is not a contradiction of
any science-based reasoning; they reinforce each other.

Published on Tuesday, February 15, 2005 by the Los Angeles Times

White House Turns Tables on Former American POWs
Gulf War Pilots Tortured by Iraqis Fight the Bush Administration in
Trying to Collect Compensation

by David G. Savage

WASHINGTON -- The latest chapter in the legal history of torture is being
written by American pilots who were beaten and abused by Iraqis during
the 1991 Persian Gulf War. And it has taken a strange twist.

The Bush administration is fighting the former prisoners of war in
court, trying to prevent them from collecting nearly $1 billion from
Iraq that a federal judge awarded them as compensation for their torture
at the hands of Saddam Hussein's regime.

The rationale: Today's Iraqis are good guys, and they need the money.

The case abounds with ironies. It pits the U.S. government squarely
against its own war heroes and the Geneva Convention.

Many of the pilots were tortured in the same Iraqi prison, Abu Ghraib,
where American soldiers abused Iraqis 15 months ago. Those Iraqi
victims, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has said, deserve
compensation from the United States.

But the American victims of Iraqi torturers are not entitled to similar
payments from Iraq, the U.S. government says.

"It seems so strange to have our own country fighting us on this," said
retired Air Force Col. David W. Eberly, the senior officer among the
former POWs.

The case, now being appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, tests whether
"state sponsors of terrorism" can be sued in the U.S. courts for
torture, murder or hostage-taking. The court is expected to decide in
the next two months whether to hear the appeal.

Congress opened the door to such claims in 1996, when it lifted the
shield of sovereign immunity ó which basically prohibits lawsuits
against foreign governments ó for any nation that supports terrorism. At
that time, Iraq was one of seven nations identified by the State
Department as sponsoring terrorist activity. The 17 Gulf War POWs looked
to have a very strong case when they first filed suit in 2002. They had
been undeniably tortured by a tyrannical regime, one that had $1.7
billion of its assets frozen by the U.S. government.

The picture changed, however, when the United States invaded Iraq and
toppled Hussein from power nearly two years ago. On July 21, 2003, two
weeks after the Gulf War POWs won their court case in U.S. District
Court, the Bush administration intervened to argue that their claims
should be dismissed.

"No amount of money can truly compensate these brave men and women for
the suffering that they went through at the hands of this very brutal
regime and at the hands of Saddam Hussein," White House Press Secretary
Scott McClellan told reporters when asked about the case in November 2003.

Government lawyers have insisted, literally, on "no amount of money"
going to the Gulf War POWs. "These resources are required for the urgent
national security needs of rebuilding Iraq," McClellan said.

The case also tests a key provision of the Geneva Convention, the
international law that governs the treatment of prisoners of war. The
United States and other signers pledged never to "absolve" a state of
"any liability" for the torture of POWs.

Former military lawyers and a bipartisan group of lawmakers have been
among those who have urged the Supreme Court to take up the case and to
strengthen the law against torturers and tyrannical regimes.

"Our government is on the wrong side of this issue," said Jeffrey F.
Addicott, a former Army lawyer and director of the Center for Terrorism
Law at St. Mary's University in San Antonio. "A lot of Americans would
scratch their heads and ask why is our government taking the side of
Iraq against our POWs."

The POWs' journey through the court system began with the events of Jan.
17, 1991 - the first day of the Gulf War. In response to Hussein's
invasion of Kuwait five months earlier, the United States, as head of a
United Nations coalition, launched an air attack on Iraq, determined to
drive Iraqi forces from the oil-rich Gulf state. On the first day of the
fighting, a jet piloted by Marine Corps Lt. Col. Clifford Acree was
downed over Iraq by a surface-to-air missile. He suffered a neck injury
ejecting from the plane and was soon taken prisoner by the Iraqis.
Blindfolded and handcuffed, he was beaten until he lost consciousness.
His nose was broken, his skull was fractured, and he was threatened with
having his fingers cut off. He lost 30 pounds during his 47 days of
captivity.

Eberly was shot down two days later and lost 45 pounds during his
ordeal. He and several other U.S. service members were near starvation
when they were freed. Other POWs had their eardrums ruptured and were
urinated on during their captivity at Abu Ghraib.

All the while, their families thought they were dead because the Iraqis
did not notify the U.S. government of their capture.

In April 2002, the Washington law firm of Steptoe & Johnson filed suit
on behalf of the 17 former POWs and 37 of their family members. The
suit, Acree vs. Republic of Iraq, sought monetary damages for the "acts
of torture committed against them and for pain, suffering and severe
mental distress of their families."

Usually, foreign states have a sovereign immunity that shields them from
being sued. But in the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1996, Congress authorized
U.S. courts to award "money damages against a foreign state for
personal injury or death that was caused by an act of torture,
extrajudicial killing, aircraft sabotage [or] hostage taking."

This provision was "designed to hold terrorist nations accountable for
the torture of Americans and to deter rogue nations from engaging in
such actions in the future," Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and George
Allen (R-Va.) said last year in a letter to Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft
that urged him to support the POWs' claim.

The case came before U.S. District Judge Richard W. Roberts. There was
no trial; Hussein's regime ignored the suit, and the U.S. State
Department chose to take no part in the case.

On July 7, 2003, the judge handed down a long opinion that described the
abuse suffered by the Gulf War POWs, and he awarded them $653 million in
compensatory damages. He also assessed $306 million in punitive damages
against Iraq. Lawyers for the POWs asked him to put a hold on some of
Iraq's frozen assets.

No sooner had the POWs celebrated their victory than they came up
against a new roadblock: Bush administration lawyers argued that the
case should be thrown out of court on the grounds that Bush had voided
any such claims against Iraq, which was now under U.S. occupation. The
administration lawyers based their argument on language in an emergency
bill, passed shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, approving the
expenditure of $80 billion for military operations and reconstruction
efforts. One clause in the legislation authorized the president to
suspend the sanctions against Iraq that had been imposed as punishment
for the invasion of Kuwait more than a decade earlier.

The president's lawyers said this clause also allowed Bush to remove
Iraq from the State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism and
to set aside pending monetary judgments against Iraq.

When the POWs' case went before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the
District of Columbia Circuit,, the three-judge panel ruled unanimously
for the Bush administration and threw out the lawsuit.

"The United States possesses weighty foreign policy interests that are
clearly threatened by the entry of judgment for [the POWs] in this
case," the appeals court said.

The administration also succeeding in killing a congressional resolution
supporting the POWs' suit. "U.S. courts no longer have jurisdiction to
hear cases such as those filed by the Gulf War POWs," then-Deputy
Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage said in a letter to lawmakers.
"Moreover, the president has ordered the vesting of blocked Iraqi assets
for use by the Iraqi people and for reconstruction."

Already frustrated by the turn of events, the former POWs were startled
when Rumsfeld said he favored awarding compensation to the Iraqi
prisoners who were abused by the U.S. military at Abu Ghraib.

"I am seeking a way to provide appropriate compensation to those
detainees who suffered grievous and brutal abuse and cruelty at the
hands of a few members of the U.S. military. It is the right thing to
do," Rumsfeld told a Senate committee last year.

By contrast, the government's lawyers have refused to even discuss a
settlement in the POWs' case, say lawyers for the Gulf War veterans.
"They were willing to settle this for pennies on the dollar," said
Addicott, the former Army lawyer.

The last hope for the POWs rests with the Supreme Court. Their lawyers
petitioned the high court last month to hear the case. Significantly, it
has been renamed Acree vs. Iraq and the United States.

The POWs say the justices should decide the "important and recurring
question [of] whether U.S. citizens who are victims of state-sponsored
terrorism [may] seek redress against terrorist states in federal court."

This week, Justice Department lawyers are expected to file a brief
urging the court to turn away the appeal.

--
Beth Rosenberg, ScD, MPH
Assistant Professor
Dept of Public Health & Family Medicine
Tufts University School of Medicine
136 Harrison Avenue
Boston, MA 02111
Phone: 617/636-6651
Fax: 617/636-4017
Email: beth.rosenberg@tufts.edu

SNUBBING KYOTO:
OUR MONUMENTAL SHAME

LAURIE DAVID
Los Angeles Times
February 11, 2005

Next Wednesday, in the enormous glass-paneled European Union Parliament
building in Brussels, hundreds of men and women will gather to mark the
start of a new era. A similar celebration will be held in Toronto, another
in Casablanca and others in Tokyo, New Delhi, Rio de Janeiro, Paris,
Auckland and Mexico City, among other places.

In each of these cities, people will be celebrating an unprecedented
international treaty that's going into effect that day. It is the product
of eight years of work and it has brought 141 countries together. It
represents exactly the kind of broad global undertaking that idealists all
over the world have been striving for since the end of World War II: a
massive, worldwide plan to address a terribly pressing problem confronting
the entire planet.

The treaty is the Kyoto Protocol, a collective response to the greatest
security crisis in the world --- global warming.

But one country will not be celebrating. The United States. Even though
almost all European countries are on board, and even though Russia is on
board and even though China is on board, the United States, in an act of
supreme irresponsibility, is standing on the platform watching the train
leave the station. (The only other industrialized nations that have failed
to join the protocol are Monaco and Australia.)

This is particularly egregious when you consider that the United States
would be by far the most significant participant. That's because it is the
single biggest polluter on the planet, accounting for about one-quarter of
the world's greenhouse gases.

Why won't the United States take part? Because the Bush administration
refuses to believe in science and refuses to ask for responsible leadership
from its giant corporate backers. Instead, genuflecting to the coal, oil
and automobile lobbies, our country continues to act like a superpower
bully that does what it wants, when it wants and how it wants --- deadly
consequences be damned.

The rules that apply to the rest of the world, the administration in effect
is saying, need not apply to us. International agreements --- whether they
involve the International Criminal Court, the Kyoto Protocol or the Geneva
Convention --- should not be allowed to bind the hands of the most powerful
nation on Earth. On that point, at least, the U.S. is are consistent.

At a time when international cooperation is more important than ever, it's
hard to overstate just how out of step the United States is with the rest
of the world. Instead of providing leadership, we are standing in the
doorway of the future blocking an eminently reasonable attempt at
self-preservation.

Few people bother to deny the problem anymore. British Prime Minister Tony
Blair, for instance, noted the "emerging consensus" on climate change at
the Davos conference last month.

But the U.S. energy industry continues to spend millions on lobbyists and
propagandists in an effort to spread doubt and confusion on the subject.
The industry, instead of putting money into research and development to
come up with the renewable energy technologies desperately needed to secure
both our national security and its own economic future, has mounted a
relentless campaign to discredit the truth.

Of course, corporate America would not have the power to torpedo
common-sense solutions to an imminent threat were it not for the complicity
of our elected officials. Take Sen. James M. Inhofe (Rep.-Oklahoma),
chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee. He has been so
hypnotized by enormous campaign contributions from the energy industry that
he actually had the chutzpah to say that "global warming is the greatest
hoax ever perpetrated on the American people."

And what's Michael Crichton's excuse? His latest best-selling novel, State
of Fear, offers up the delusional notion that global warming is the
creation of environmental groups looking to boost their profile and fill
their coffers. This is like arguing that the link between smoking and
cancer was dreamed up by oncologists, radiologists and funeral home
directors. Unfortunately, Crichton's sophomoric fiction may be the only
thing many Americans read on global warming.

The truth is that the jury is no longer out; there is no more room or time
for confusion, doubt or skepticism. Global warming is real and rapidly
altering our weather, our economy and our world. The 1990s were the
hottest decade in the last 1,000 years, according to the Natural Resources
Defense Council. Nine of the 10 hottest years on record occurred after
1994, according to the United Nations' World Meteorological Organization.

The arctic ice sheet has shrunk 20% since 1979. And bears are coming out
of hibernation a month early, throwing off their entire life cycles.

The can't-do crowd in our industry and our government continues to claim
that anything we do to control emissions will hurt our economy
unacceptably. Get real!

The Kyoto Protocol is not the be-all to ending global warming, but it is an
important first step. And we are spitting in the eye of the rest of the
world by refusing to be part of it.

Laurie David is a trustee of the Natural Resources Defense Council and
co-founder of the Detroit Project, a not-for-profit campaign that pressures
automakers to produce fuel-efficient cars.

KYOTO PROTOCOL DEBUTS
SHOULD RELIGION HAVE A VOICE ???

SALLY BINGHAM
San Francisco Chronicle
February 16, 2005

Every mainstream religion has a mandate to care for creation. We were given
natural resources to sustain us, but we were also given the responsibility
to act as good stewards and preserve life for future generations.

Mounting scientific evidence suggests that we are damaging the earth and
that our continued inaction will disproportionately harm the poorest among
us. We have heard the scientists, whom we view as modern-day prophets, tell
us that excessive amounts of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels,
such as coal and oil, are the likely cause for the current changes in
climate. Even the Pentagon has called global warming a major threat to
global security, raising the specter of millions of climate refugees and
wars over water and other resources.

Yet, our dependency on foreign oil is increasing. Without cooperative
action around the world, scientists tell us that our rapidly changing
climate could create a global crisis. If the United States continues our
current "wait and see" approach, it will be far too late to take action.

The moral and ethical implications of these impending global changes are
not lost on the religious community. While our nation emits more greenhouse
gases than any other, we are also one of the only developed countries to
reject the Kyoto Protocol --- an international treaty designed to reduce
global-warming pollution. The Kyoto Treaty goes into effect today without
the participation of the United States. This is not a responsible position
for the world's richest nation and sole superpower.

It is particularly important for us to recognize that the poorest countries
will feel a disproportionate negative impact from global warming. Yet these
are the countries that can least handle disruptions to their food and water
supplies. And, unlike the wealthier nations, they are the least able to
pioneer solutions.

There is some good news, however. Six New England governors and five
premiers of eastern Canadian provinces signed a regional climate action
plan to reduce global warming emissions across the region. The governors of
California, Oregon and Washington are working on a plan for our region that
may include similar goals. A number of cities have set reduction goals for
themselves.

But there is bad news as well. In addition to not signing the Kyoto
Protocol, the United States has not shown any leadership in finding real
global solutions. Each passing day is jeopardizing our future.

If the United States had sent an interfaith coalition of clergy to the
Kyoto Protocol meetings to address global warming, we would be
participating in this historic treaty. Once the religious community became
aware of the dire global situation, we began collaborating. We have only
just begun to make our position known, but we are loud, active and
everywhere.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has written a statement on climate
change responding to Pope John Paul II's concerns that climate change will
adversely affect people.

His All Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, leader of the Greek
Orthodox Church, has declared environmental degradation a sin.

The Franciscan order of Roman Catholic priests has called for action on
global warming and the Anglican Church is writing a response to climate
change.

The Rev. Ted Haggard, president of the 30 million-member national
Association of Evangelicals said, "There are significant and compelling
theological reasons why environment should be a banner issue for the
Christian right."

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, recently announced that the
Church of England is embarking on a green revolution, rolling out
eco-friendly policies. One thousand clergy and congregational leaders in
35 states recently signed a statement that expressed disagreement with the
present position of our government on climate change.

The united voice of the faith community is heartening, as there are few
subjects where such a diverse group sings in unison. Our political leaders
should learn this hymn.

The Rev. Sally Bingham, an Episcopal priest at Grace Cathedral in San
Francisco, is executive director of the Regeneration Project
http://www.TheRegenerationProject.org

WORLD'S TOP TEN OIL COS.
SHOWED $100 BILLION
PROFIT IN 2004, MORE MONEY
THAN THEY CAN SPEND

JAD MOUAWAD
New York Times
February 12, 2005

Born from the megamergers of the 1990's, the world's giant oil companies
have delivered on their promise. They have cut costs, increased returns
and raised profits to records. Now, flush with cash, they find themselves
in a paradoxical position --- they are making more money than they can
comfortably spend.

Thanks to crude prices that averaged $41 a barrel in New York last year,
the world's ten biggest oil companies earned more than $100 billion in
2004, a windfall greater than the economic output of Malaysia. Together,
their sales are expected to exceed $1 trillion for 2004, which is more than
Canada's gross domestic product.

But even as fears of shortages grow throughout the world and prices remain
high, the cash-rich oil companies are not pouring a large portion of their
money into their basic business: drilling for oil. Indeed, oil executives,
in their second straight year of rising profits, are finding that too much
money is chasing too few oil fields. Instead, they are giving much of
their cash back to shareholders.

For example, Exxon Mobil, the world's largest publicly traded oil company,
earned more than $25 billion last year and spent $9.95 billion to buy back
its own stock; Royal Dutch/Shell Group, whose revisions to its oil reserves
have left many investors wary, pledged to hand out at least $10 billion as
dividends to shareholders this year.

And BP, which earned $16.2 billion in 2004, will return as much as $23
billion to its investors this year and next, mostly as dividends. At the
same time, it is cutting capital expenditure for the first time in at least
four years, to $14.1 billion in 2005 from $14.4 billion last year.

Other oil companies, like the French giant, Total, plan to report results
next week. Altogether, profits in 2004 for the top 10 companies jumped by
more than 30% from the previous year, when they totaled $80 billion.

Still, oil executives bristle at the suggestion that they are not investing
enough and point to new operations in places like Angola or Kazakhstan.
Exploration in those places underscores the trend of West Africa and the
Caspian Sea taking over from North America and the North Sea as a main
focus of exploration and growth for oil companies.

Executives also remember that only six years ago, crude oil futures were
trading below $15 a barrel --- a third of today's levels. That is a lesson
no one is ready to forget.

"We're a cyclical business," David J. O'Reilly, chief executive of
ChevronTexaco, the second-largest American oil company, said in a telephone
interview, "and at the high end of the cycle it makes sense to get the
company in good shape and strengthen our balance sheet.

"History tells us that what goes up also goes down."

Lord Browne, BP's chief executive, said oil companies were doing their job.
"Investment is going in, a lot of reserves are being developed," he said in
an interview in London. "Looking at the percentage of oil profits
reinvested, rather than the amount of cash invested, gives a skewed
perspective. I think you have to think of the dollar value."

One reason exploration spending is declining is quite simple --- there is
less oil left to drill for in places that are open for exploration, like
North America or the North Sea, while the bulk of the world's known
reserves, mainly in the Middle East, are mostly shut off to foreign
investors.

"If they had attractive things to invest in, they'd be investing their
little heads off," said Gerald Kepes, a managing director at PFC Energy, a
consultancy based in Washington. "Twenty-five years ago, if prices had
risen to $45 a barrel, you would have seen everyone in the United States
drop everything, jump in a pickup truck, and drill in their backyards. The
fact that you don't see this today says a lot. These kinds of easy
opportunities have largely dried up."

Last year, the larger integrated oil companies spent about 24% of their
cash on dividends, 12% on share buybacks, and 12% on paring debt, Mr. Kepes
said. Less than half of their cash, or 46%, went into capital spending.

As a share of exploration and production expenses, spending on exploration
has declined over the last decade, and now accounts for about 20% of the
total, compared with about 30% in 1991, according to PFC.

"The very easy money-making investments are gone," said Fatih Birol, the
chief economist at the Paris-based International Energy Agency. "The
problem isn't that there's not enough oil. It's there's not enough
opportunities to find oil."

Mr. Birol said that two-thirds of the wells drilled worldwide from 1997 to
2003 were in North America, where production is falling, while the Middle
East accounted for two percent of global investments.

Early successes in Alaska and in the British and Norwegian areas of the
North Sea, both regions developed in the late 1970's and 1980's, are giving
way to mature and declining operations in these areas as oil reserves
slowly dry up.

At the same time, the Persian Gulf region, which holds the bulk of the
world's proven reserves of conventional oil, remains mostly off limits to
international investors. In one way or another, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq,
Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates limit access to international
companies.

High oil prices are not a guaranteed boon for oil companies. When oil
prices are low, oil executives are courted by commodity-rich countries to
develop national resources. But when prices rise, governments have a
tendency to rethink their contracts and seek higher royalties.

That is happening in Venezuela, which is reviewing its operating agreements
with foreign oil companies; it is also happening in Russia, where the
government is assuming more control of the country's oil industry.

"The net effect of $50-a-barrel oil is to reduce opportunities," said Paul
Sankey, an analyst with Deutsche Bank in New York. "Large profits make
governments think that they're not taxing sufficiently enough."

For example, the Russian government collects most of the profits when oil
prices rise above $25 a barrel. Some countries --- including Kuwait, Angola
and Iran --- put limits on the gains foreign companies can make if prices
rise above a certain level. In many production-sharing agreements, for
example, oil companies agree to a revenue cap, so that when prices rise,
producers must reduce their volumes.

"The industry would much rather have lower oil prices and more stability
and a more sustainable environment," Mr. Sankey said. "Record prices mean
record revenue, but also too much attention for an industry that basically
likes to remain out of sight."

Heather Timmons contributed reporting from London for this article.

Subject: Maxim Institute - real issues - No 144
Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2005

Gender identity a legal fiction?

The Human Rights (Gender Identity) Amendment Bill, sponsored by Labour MP
Georgina Beyer, was introduced to parliament this week. The Bill provides
for "gender identity" to be included as one of the prohibited grounds of
discrimination in the Human Rights Act.

According to the Bill, "gender identity" is "the identification by a
person with a gender that is different from the birth gender of that
person..." The Human Rights Commission adds that "gender identity can be
broadly described as the sense of self associated with cultural definitions
of masculinity and femininity". [I]t has become increasingly possible for
both women and men in NZ to be 'feminine' and 'masculine' in ways that are
markedly different from the pattern of preceding generations" (Human Rights
in New Zealand Today, 2004).

Can people really change their sex? Can a male change to a female? Or
are we legislating protection for a legal fiction? Will this be the latest
victory of political correctness over biology? Under this Bill a person's
sex, indeed their identity becomes a matter of personal preference
reinforced by law, instead of being a matter of DNA and history. Parties
have yet to confirm whether they will treat this Bill as a conscience vote.

To read an article related to the issue of gender identity by Paul McHugh,
University Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins
University visit:


Following in Sweden's footsteps?

Prime Minister Helen Clark hosted the Swedish Prime Minister this week.
Ms Clark holds Sweden up as a country New Zealand should model itself on.
She has long admired Sweden's support for women and its family-friendly
policies, including universal child care and high rates of women's
participation in the workforce (75 percent).

The Prime Minister neglects to point out that these results come at a
price. Swedish people are amongst the most highly taxed in the world. The
average Swedish wage-earner sees well over 50 percent of their income
vanish in taxes (both national and regional). Nearly a third of GDP goes on
social welfare.

Sweden's marriage rate is remarkably low. Consequently, the proportion of
children born outside of marriage is one of the highest in the world;
during 2001 it rose to 55 percent (UN World Fertility Report 2003) compared
with 44 percent in New Zealand during the same year (Statistics New Zealand
Demographic Trends, 2004).

The Swedish economic miracle of the mid-1900s was admired around the
world. But in 30 years they have dropped from number four on the OECD
rankings of per capita income to number 17 last year, not a great deal
higher than New Zealand at 21. Following the Swedish model for social and
economic policy could indeed bring us a long winter night.

Gilbert K Chesterton 'Orthodoxy' 1908 ; Hodder & Stoughton 1996 pbk
'recommended by Philip Yancey' 240 pp.

Written a century ago as an explicit, vigorous reaction
against Modernism - a movement within the Roman Catholic church for more
adaption to social trends - this highly stimulating book addresses more
keenly than almost anything recent the problems generated by scientism
today (as manifested in e.g the gene-jiggering fad). The passage quoted
below might be very helpful to confused relativists, even offering a way
forward for hopelessly confused postmodernists.

G K devotes chapter 2 to madness, characterising its general nature
as excess narrow logic. Near the end of this insightful chapter he says
(pp. 30-31) it is possible to give a general answer ...

" ... touching what in actual human history keeps men sane.
Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health;
when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. The ordinary man has always
been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has
permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot on earth and the other
in fairyland. He has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but
(unlike the agnostic of today) free also to believe in them. He has always
cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that
seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the
contradiction along with them. His spiritual insight is stereoscopic,
like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet ses
all the better for that. Thus he has always believed that there was such a
thing as fate, but such a thing a free will also. Thus he believed that
chiuldren were indeed the kingdom of heaven, but nevertheles ought to be
obedient to the kingdom of earth. He admired youth because it was young
and age because it was not. It is exactly this balance of aparent
contradictions that has been the whole buoyancy of the healthy man. The
whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by
the help of what he does not understand. The morbid logician seeks to make
everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic
allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid. The
determinist makes the theory of causation quite clear, and then finds that
he cannot say "if you please" to the housemaid. The Christian permits free
will to remain a sacred mystery; but because of this his relations with the
housemaid become of a sparkling and crystal clearness. He puts the seed of
dogma in a central darkness; but it branches forth in all directions with
abounding natural health."

By now, the U of Oxford has allowed one of the original Megasoft
profiteers to endow a chair in The Public Understanding of Science for an
aggressive materialist (R Dawkins) who denies 2 of the 4 categories of
cause, ascribes such properties as intentionality to mere molecules e.g
DNA, and asserts that (neo)Darwinism makes it possible for an atheist to be
intellectually satisfied. Wolpert (London), S Weinberg (Texas), and P
Atkins (also Oxon - chemistry) are similar radically crude overconfident
materialists - all, like Dawkins, scientists by training but purporting
to simplify philosophy radically so as to obviate Formal Cause and Final
Cause. Determinism - attacked in a preliminary remark by G K above -
is boldly asserted by these confident New Fisofolers.

The fact that we have little if any idea, scientifically, of how
free will interfaces with the brain, let alone the external world, is no
excuse to ignore its primacy. It is the surest fact, apart from
"Descartes' fact" - surer than anything of the external world including
all science.

M I T cognitive expert Prof S Pinker says every mental process is
now known to have a physical correlate. This is a huge exaggeration beyond
what is actually known. He also says that, given such mapping of thoughts
to electrical &/or biochemical processes in the brain, we have no need of
the 'ghost in the machine'. His logic is faulty. Even if it were true
that all mental processes had been correlated with scientific measurements,
that correlation would not illuminate the question of whether there is a
person - roughly, that which departs at death - choosing to think this
way or that and causing the brain processes.

Your determinist will then say the belief in free will is a
delusion, a predetermined state of mind. I reply that its status is surer
than anything in the science which gave rise to the determinist mind-set in
e.g. Laplace - please, not Newton! - and Oxford physiology prof.
Colin Blakemore, and Pinker, who say each human is a computer programmed
for the mere delusion that s/he has free will.

A world in which determinism is respectable is a world in which
science, let alone morality, can make little headway. I believe G K
Chesterton could be very helpful in the counterattack on this bullshit.

R

Activists Put Kofi Annan on Notice

Kyoto: What's to Celebrate?

While many are celebrating the Kyoto Protocol's
entering into force this week, others are finding cause
for grave concern.

A coalition of NGOs, social and environmental
activists, communities, scientists and economists from
around the world concerned about the climate crisis,
the Durban Group, charged that the 1997 climate
treaty not only fails to cut greenhouse gas emissions
enough to avert climate catastrophe, but also steals
from the poor to give to the rich.

The Kyoto Protocol says that industrialized country
signatories mustreduce their emissions 5.2% below 1990
levels by 2008-2012. However, the group noted, the
scientific community has called for global reductions
of over 60% below 1990 levels by the year 2000.

What's more, the carbon trading promoted by the
Protocol hands Northern governments and corporations
lucrative tradable rights use the earth's natural
carbon-cycling capacity, effectively stealing a public
good away from most of the planet's inhabitants.

Just last month, Danish power utility Energi E2 sold
hundreds ofthousands of dollars of the rights it had
been granted free by its government to Shell after mild
temperatures kept the utility's carbon emissions below
expected levels. (1) No such free rights have
beengranted to ordinary citizens.

The Kyoto Protocol's attempt to create "carbon
dioxide-saving" projects in poorer countries is
meanwhile stirring protests from Brazil to South
Africa. Such projects - which include industrial tree
plantations and schemes to burn off landfill gas - are
designed to license big emitters in the rich North to
go on using fossil fuels. But they usurp land or water
ordinary people need for other purposes.(2)

"We're creating a sort of 'climate apartheid,' wherein
the poorest and darkest-skinned pay the highest
price - with their health,their land, and, in some
cases, with their lives - for continued carbon profligacy
by the rich," said Soumitra Ghosh of the National Forum
of Forest Peoples and Forest Workers in India.

Worse, such carbon projects don't work. "Even in
purely economic terms, a market in credits from
'carbon-saving' projects will fail," said Jutta Kill of
Sinkswatch, a British-based watchdog organization. "You
simply can't verify whether a power plant's emissions
can be 'compensated for' by a tree plantation or
other project. Ultimately investors are bound to lose
confidence in the credits they buy from such projects."

Kill noted that almost all of the methods proposed so
far for provinghow much carbon is saved by Kyoto's
"carbon-saving" projects have been rejected by the UN
itself. "People are beginning to realize that this is
ENRON accounting," she said.

Ricardo Carrere of the World Rainforest Movement added
that "so-called carbon sink plantations will result in
the further spread of monoculture tree plantations,
which are already having enormous impacts on people and
the environment". The Kyoto Protocol also allows
genetically engineered trees to be used in
carbon-absorbing plantations.

"This will open up a Pandora's box of impacts we can't
evenguess at," said Anne Petermann of Global Justice
Ecology Project inthe US.

One of the biggest promoters of the carbon market,
including "carbon-saving" projects in poor nations, is
the World Bank, ironically also a major financier of
fossil fuel developments.

"It's ridiculous that the Bank, which has a mission of
entrenchingthe fossil fuel industry, is now
advertising itself as solving the climate crisis," said
Nadia Martinez of the Sustainable Energy
andEnvironment Network in Washington. (3)

"If we are to avert a climate crisis, drastic
reductions in fossil fuel investment and use are
inescapable, as is the protection of remaining native
forests," confirmed Heidi Bachram of Carbon Trade
Watch. "We're joining many other movements of Northern
and Southern peoples to take the climate back into our
hands."


Members of the Durban Group are todaysending an open
letter to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan
excoriating the UN's failure to take constructive
action and giving notice of their intention to build
independent alliances to "press governments to limit
fossil fuel extraction and use while
supporting grassroots alliances struggling against
fossil fuel exploration, extraction and use and against
unjust 'climate mitigation' projects."


(To view the Kofi Annan open
letter
http://www.globaljusticeecology.org/index.php?set_table=content&articleID=303&pa
ge=getrees#articletop)

For further information/interviews:

Heidi Bachram (UK) +1 631 477
8653,heidi@carbontradewatch.org
http://www.carbontradewatch.org
andhttp://www.carbontradewatch.org/durban

Ricardo Carrere (Uruguay) +598 2 4100985 or4132989,
rcarrere@wrm.org.uy, http://www.wrm.org.uy

Soumitra Ghosh (India) +91 353 2661915,
nespon@sancharnet.in

Sajida Khan (South Africa) +27 31 208
9223,rafiquee@telkomsa.net

Jutta Kill (Germany/UK) +1 250 799
5888,jutta@fern.org, http://www.sinkswatch.org

Larry Lohmann (UK) 01258 473795 or
821218;larrylohmann@gn.apc.org,
http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk

Nadia Martinez (US) +1 202 234 9382, x208,
nmartinez@seen.org

Winnie Overbeek (Brazil) +55 27 33226330 or 32237436
winnie.fase@terra.com.br

Anne Petermann (US) +1 802 482
2689,globalecology@gmavt.net
http://www.globaljusticeecology.org

NOTES FOR EDITORS
1. Carbon Market Daily, 7 Feburary
2005,www.pointcarbon.com.
2. For interviews: Winnie Overbeek, Sajida Khan,
Soumitra Ghosh(above).
3. SEEN, Wrong Turn from Rio, www.seen.org.
__________
Global Justice Ecology Project
P.O. Box 412
Hinesburg, VT 05461
+1-802-482-2689 ph/fax
http://www.globaljusticeecology.org

The Hitch
Radical or neocon? Same old or sold out? Christopher Hitchens has things
both ways.
by John Giuffo
February 1st, 2005 3:12 PM

http://tinyurl.com/43msk

A lot of people are angry at Christopher Hitchens. Since his much
publicized split with his former comrades on the left, he's found
himself in roughly the same spot as Dylan when he went electric. Past
allies are now spitting mad, and like dilettante Mortal Kombat
contenders, most Hitchens haters come at him with a predictable series
of moves. There's the "he's a ranting drunkard" low kick, the "he's a
neo-neocon former-socialist sellout" punch, and the "he's just being
combative to make money on television" swing. He's been accused by Noam
Chomsky of "expressing racist contempt for the African victims of a
terrorist crime," namely the 1998 bombing of the al-Shifa pharmaceutical
plant in the Sudan (which Hitchens condemned forcefully), and Tariq Ali
wrote, "If Hitchens carries on in this vein, he'll soon find himself
addressing the same gatherings as his sparring partner, Henry
Kissinger." Knowing Hitchens's militant antagonism toward Kissinger,
Ali's swipe aims deeper than mere drunk jokes.

But Hitchens loves polemical combat with longtime foes and onetime
friends alike, and it's clear that he has a lot of fun picking fights.
Which leads to his inner conflict - an urge that had been growing stronger
in recent years, then was stifled in the wake of September 11: that he'd
rather put all the fighting aside and just write about books. "I was
getting exhausted with politicians and politics and it was getting
rather boring, and my plan was to focus on the essays," Hitchens tells
the /Voice/.

His newest collection, /Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays/
(Nation Books), encapsulates his conflicts, his literary admirations,
his considerations of his adopted Homeland, and his years of political
flux. As such, it's a three-act autobiography, a snapshot of who he is
now and how he has changed these past 12 years. For readers and former
admirers who wonder what led to his long-coming disassociation from
certain aspects of the left (mostly due to his opinions on the Iraq war,
Bush, Paul Wolfowitz, and Michael Moore, but really going back to Bosnia
and beyond), these pieces, in this order, help explain things.

The first part, on books and writers, is mostly recent /Atlantic/ pieces
and the introductions to reprints by authors like Graham Greene and
Evelyn Waugh. As a whole, it forms a remarkably coherent discourse - one
essay's ending makes a point about the following essay's subject, like a
semester's worth of a favorite literature professor's lecture notes.
Hitchens tends to choose contradiction-riddled authors (sound
familiar?), such as Rudyard Kipling, "A Man of Permanent
Contradictions"; Marcel Proust ("so perceptive and yet so innocent");
and Aldous Huxley, whom he calls "a reactionary modernist" (a
description he applies to Waugh in an earlier essay). "No one can not
have contradictions," he says. "It's just a matter of how you deal with
them."

It's hard not to find in his explanation of Huxley's irreconcilables a
way to come to grips with Hitchens's own: "One need not object to his
having things both ways, as long as one notices the trick being performed."

That's not to say he seems deceptive, but that he places the
emphasis - the /importance/ - elsewhere. "The question is: Will this war
secure these freedoms for millions of people in Iraq?" he says. And this
is the key to understanding Hitchens's apostasy, and his contradictions.
His is a Trotskyite's approach to international freedom (he writes of
Trotsky that "his most enduring and tenacious battle was against the
monstrous regime that had resulted from his earlier exertions"). Having
reached the conclusion that freedom even under occasionally brutal
American rule is better for the Iraqis than always brutal Baathist rule,
he has embraced the only viable way to achieve that freedom, former
comrades be damned. "What I want people to notice from this argument,
and my willingness to examine myself on it, is that a very interesting
thing has happened in the past decade, the rise of the status quo
leftópeople who are basically afraid of change," he says. But he later
admits, "I sometimes get more praise from right-wingers or Republicans
than I want."

Hitchens examines his adopted country in the "Americana" section of
/Love, Poverty, and War/, and this is where his journalistic and
rhetorical shortcomings are most visible. At one point in his showy road
piece "The Ballad of Route 66," he ruminates on the broadcast radio
wasteland ("it was a dismal day when the Federal Communications
Commission parceled out the airwaves to a rat pack of indistinguishable
cheapskates") but misses an opportunity to comment on the political
implicationsóand villainsóof radio deregulation. Similarly, in the
petulant "I Fought the Law in Bloomberg's New York," he takes on
hizzoner for the myriad "petty tyrannies" of quality-of-life regulations
that have changed New York's character, without ever attributing the
lion's share of those rules to Bloomberg's petty-crime-obsessed
predecessor. When asked about this imbalance in attention to issues of
foreign and domestic policy, he admits, "I know more about the former. I
think it's more important. If you ask me what I think about Social
Security reformóI'm not as interested in it as I should be."

In the last third of the collection, Hitchens's self-portrait snaps into
focus with a defense of his political evolution. "I deliberately put in
my earliest response to 9-11 because some people have accused me of
being inconsistent on this point," he says. "I printed my raw reaction."
He's attempting to explain the historical basis of his current political
convictions, drawing the line between how he sees Iraq and how he sees
the fight against "fascism with an Islamic face." One piece in
particular is invaluable in understanding his sympathies: "The Struggle
of the Kurds," a report from northern Iraq written for /National
Geographic/ in 1992. He traveled among these long-oppressed people for
months, and was won over by their history and struggle. How could he not
get their backs?

"An antique saying has it that a man's life is incomplete unless or
until he has tasted love, poverty, and war," he writes in the book's
introduction. He's not boasting a complete life, so much as presenting
the most complete self portrait possible from his essays and
journalistic dispatches.

"The most dismal test you can apply to a writer is to know what his
political allegiances are," he says, referring, ostensibly, to
Kipling - another British expat who saw the benefits and cruelties of
empire. It's not that Hitchens shies away from his political allies, but
just that he has a story he'd like to share about the time he sat down
with Jorge Luis Borges at his home in Buenos Aires in 1977, where he
shared "long, long sips" of Poe with the writer (who had been blind for
years) and discussed what "a true gentleman" Augusto Pinochet was.
Political allegiances, argues Hitchens, don't come close to telling the
complete story.