(Ed. Note: Bush-Bomb Warning...)

The gene-tamperers continue to pose as
exponents & defenders of science, whereas in fact
their 'technology' is based on junk science. The
article below reminds us of the role of the evil
PR trade in such deceit - here, on climate
degradation & IDT® rather than gene-tampering,
but the cases are similar.

R

http://www.salon.com/books/review/2005/09/14/mooney/print.html

Books

The know-nothings

Pro-business Republicans and the religious right
have joined in a frighteningly successful
campaign to undermine the claims of science.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Andrew O'Hehir

Sept. 14, 2005

It took almost no time for the devastation of
New Orleans, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, to
become the newest beachhead in the science wars.
On the evening of Sept. 1, when the waters were
still rising and we had no idea how much worse
things were still going to get, Brit Hume devoted
an extended segment of his Fox News program to
interviewing Patrick J. Michaels, an
environmental scientist at the University of
Virginia.

Michaels' purpose, and Hume's, was to rebut a
widely circulated Op-Ed article by Ross Gelbspan
in the Boston Globe arguing that Katrina, and a
host of other natural disasters, had been caused
or exacerbated by the effects of global warming.
A likable, slightly acerbic fellow who refers to
himself as a "weather nerd," Michaels told the
Fox audience in judicious, neutral-sounding
language that there isn't much correlation
between global warming and hurricane strength --
and added, almost as an afterthought, that there
isn't much we can do about global warming anyway.

I don't know whether Chris Mooney, author of the
profoundly discouraging new book "The Republican
War on Science," watched Hume's broadcast.
Probably not -- Mooney grew up in New Orleans,
and one imagines he had other priorities that
night. But if he saw it, or heard about it
later, he could only have rolled his eyes, not in
surprise but in exasperation: Here we go again.
In fairness, Hume told his audience that Michaels
is a fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian
think tank. But he didn't tell them that
Michaels' work at Cato has been extensively
funded by oil and gas companies, or that he's
also affiliated with the George C. Marshall
Institute, an industry-supported, right-wing
think tank almost exclusively devoted to
debunking global warming concerns. Nor did he
mention that Michaels edits World Climate Report,
a newsletter (and now a blog) primarily funded by
the coal industry.

Even more to the point, Hume didn't reveal that
Gelbspan and Michaels are longtime adversaries in
the so-called global warming debate; their feud
goes back at least 10 years, to a Harper's
article in which Gelbspan outed Michaels as one
of the energy industry's favorite mouthpieces.
There are legitimate criticisms one could raise
about Gelbspan's melodramatic Globe Op-Ed: Nobody
can say, with any degree of scientific certainty,
that global warming caused Katrina (or the other
natural disasters he references). But in general
terms, Gelbspan's position reflects the consensus
view of climate scientists all over the world
that human activity is gradually raising global
temperatures and that the consequences may be
catastrophic. Michaels, on the other hand, is an
exceedingly well-compensated scientific
contrarian, a key player in one of the right
wing's biggest industries: the manufacture of
doubt.

"The Republican War on Science" is nothing short
of a landmark in contemporary political
reporting. Mooney compiles and presents an
extraordinary mountain of evidence, from several
different fields, to demonstrate that the
conservative wing of the Republican Party has
launched an unprecedented and highly successful
campaign to sow widespread confusion about the
conclusions of science and its usefulness in
political decision making. Using methods and
strategies pioneered under the Reagan
administration by the tobacco industry and
anti-environmental forces, an alliance of social
conservatives and corporate advocates has
paralyzed or obfuscated public discussion of
science on a whole range of issues. Not just
climate change but also stem cell research,
evolutionary biology, endangered-species
protection, diet and obesity, abortion and
contraception, and the effects of environmental
toxins have all become arenas of systematic and
deliberate bewilderment.

Mooney quotes an internal strategy document from
the tobacco company Brown and Williamson, written
around 1969: "Doubt is our product, since it is
the best means of competing with the 'body of
fact' that exists in the mind of the general
public. It is also the means of establishing a
controversy." B&W and the other tobacco giants
achieved no better than a stalemate in their long
battle against government regulation, but
whatever chain-smoking, skinny-tied executive
wrote that memo ought to be beatified by the
conservative movement. With those two sentences
he became its accidental Karl Marx, launching an
antiscientific counterrevolution that rages
around us today.

No matter how much you think you know about
Republican distortion and misuse of science,
Mooney's account will startle and perhaps terrify
you. Many conservatives, he argues, have stopped
regarding science as an objective search for
truth (conditional as that truth necessarily is).
Instead, they see it as just another realm of
naked power politics or, less cynically but more
ominously, as a contest between a
pseudo-socialistic, tree-hugging worldview and
one that is avowedly pro-Christian and
pro-capitalist. Furthermore, right-wingers have
mystified this conflict almost completely,
cloaking it in self-defined terms of "sound
science" (i.e., science that agrees with them, or
reaches no conclusions at all) versus "junk
science" (anything that might impinge on
corporate profits or conflict with the most
extreme version of Christian morality).

In several respects this book is a companion
piece to Thomas Frank's highly influential
"What's the Matter With Kansas?" Arguably, it
answers one of Frank's conundrums by providing
the philosophical glue that sticks together the
two halves of the GOP's unlikely post-1980
coalition. Affluent big-business conservatives
and pro-life "moral values" conservatives (mostly
middle class or working class) may have opposing
economic interests, as Frank would argue. But
they share an urgent desire to undermine public
confidence in science, if necessary by
manufacturing illegitimate doubt or creating, as
Mooney puts it, "a semblance of controversy where
it doesn't actually exist."

As he further explains, this campaign has been
buttressed by the numerous conservative think
tanks created in the past 30 years, by the
relentless spinning of the Sean Hannity-Rush
Limbaugh wing of the media and by an increasingly
powerful congressional oligarchy of pro-business,
anti-science Republicans. As Mooney documents
extensively, Capitol Hill's worst offenders are
probably Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe, a
self-anointed climate expert who has declared
global warming "the greatest hoax ever
perpetrated on the American people," and
Pennsylvania's pro-creationist Sen. Rick Santorum.

Perhaps most effectively of all, the right's war
on science has exploited the mainstream media's
fetish for journalistic "balance," regardless of
its relevance to reality. Despite the
overwhelming consensus of mainstream science on
global warming, newspaper articles and TV reports
still dutifully call upon the shrinking universe
of contrarians like Michaels. (Like most climate
change skeptics, Michaels has slowly retreated,
along with the polar icecaps. He used to claim
that global warming either wasn't happening or
wasn't caused by human activity; now he admits to
both, but argues that it can't be stopped and
that its potential effects have been exaggerated.)

Similarly, the media has passed along reports
emanating from the right-wing fringe suggesting a
link between abortion and breast cancer, although
virtually no mainstream scientists see any
evidence to support such a connection. News
accounts about the herbicide atrazine, which is
widely used by American corn growers and may be
connected to the worldwide decline of frogs and
other amphibians, have suggested that the issue
is muddled and controversial. If that's true,
it's only because the chemical industry and its
supporters have made it so: Research suggesting
that atrazine interferes with the endocrine
systems of amphibians has been published in major
peer-reviewed scientific journals, while
virtually all the conflicting studies have been
funded by Syngenta, the company that manufactures
atrazine.

If global warming remains the pro-business
conservatives' primary front in the science wars,
religious conservatives are more interested in
two other issues that have received wide
attention: embryonic stem cell research and the
teaching of evolution. As throughout "The
Republican War on Science," Mooney's reporting on
these issues is exemplary and his writing
admirably clear. But there isn't much surprising
new information here; if you've followed these
issues, you already know that the Bush
administration and its allies have managed to
alienate nearly the entire scientific
establishment. On one hand, there is the
substance of the policies: Bush has sharply
restricted federally funded stem cell research
and has endorsed the teaching of the
pseudo-creationist position called "intelligent
design."

Beyond that, the administration has tried to
mislead the public about the nature of its
decisions, pretending to embrace science while
adopting extreme antiscientific positions. George
W. Bush's August 2001 announcement that he would
freeze the number of stem cell lines eligible for
federal research included the claim that there
were more than 60 "genetically diverse" lines
available. That made the decision seem
scientifically palatable, but the number wasn't
real then and is less so now. (Again, this is
something the mainstream media took months to
figure out.) Mooney estimates that 22 stem cell
lines qualify for federal funding, and of those
only seven or eight may be scientifically useful.
Simply put, none of the potential benefits of
stem cell research -- therapies for Parkinson's
and Alzheimer's, transplantable tissues,
cutting-edge disease research -- is likely to be
realized by drawing on such a small pool of
genetic lines.

Bush's recent comment that intelligent design
should be taught in schools, alongside or in
addition to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution,
came after Mooney had finished his manuscript.
Again, he can't have been surprised, since
virtually the entire Christian right, a key
element of Bush's governing coalition, has lined
up behind intelligent design: Donald Wildmon's
American Family Association, James Dobson's Focus
on the Family, Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum,
the Concerned Women for America and so on. For
political leaders like Bush and Santorum, that
hasn't quite been enough. They have relied on
the idea that genuine scientific disagreement
exists over the validity of evolutionary theory,
and that schools need to "teach the controversy,"
as intelligent-design supporters put it.

As was recently reported in a New York Times
series on the battle over evolution, intelligent
design has been vigorously supported by the
Discovery Institute, a formerly moderate think
tank that has now become the intellectual home of
antievolutionism. In 2001, Discovery took out a
newspaper ad signed by roughly 70 scientists, who
declared that they were "skeptical of the claims
for the ability of random mutation and natural
selection to account for the complexity of life"
-- in other words, they rejected Darwinism.

This list has become Exhibit A in the argument
that genuine scientific controversy exists over
evolution, and to the layperson it certainly
looked impressive. Bush and Santorum are not
likely, however, to mention the National Center
for Science Education's hilarious response. The
NCSE began gathering names of scientists who
agreed that evolution was "a vital,
well-supported, unifying principle of the
biological sciences" -- but restricted membership
to those whose names were Steve, Stephanie or
some other variation of Stephen. As of Monday,
"Project Steve" -- named in honor of the late
Stephen Jay Gould -- had 600 signatories.

But while scientists, political junkies and lay
readers alike have been understandably mesmerized
by these moral-cum-theological crusades, the
corporate right has embarked on an immense
stealth campaign to undermine science as a
regulatory tool. The details of this clandestine
effort, conducted mainly in Washington backrooms
and the fine print of obscure legislation, are
not sexy or glamorous, but it's here that
Mooney's reporting reaches its most impressive
heights. As he demonstrates, a little-known
lobbyist named Jim J. Tozzi -- a former jazz
musician turned corporate hired gun -- got "two
sentences of legalese" stuck into a 2000
appropriations bill, and thereby handed big
business one of its largest legislative victories
in history.

Tozzi's bill, known as the Data Quality Act, has
done what Newt Gingrich's 1994 "Republican
Revolution" was unable to do: It has reformed the
regulatory process such that big money almost
always has the upper hand. As Mooney puts it,
the Bush administration has interpreted the act
as "an unprecedented and cumbersome process by
which government agencies must field complaints
over the data, studies and reports they release
to the public. It is a science abuser's dream
come true." Essentially, business interests are
now empowered not merely to challenge government
regulations (they could already do that) but to
challenge the value of "scientific information
that could potentially lead to regulation
somewhere down the road."

Any time a scientific study emerges that industry
doesn't like -- on the effects of secondhand
smoke, the link between atrazine and frog deaths,
the near extinction of an endangered fish in a
dammed river -- lawyers and lobbyists can now tie
the science in knots for years to come,
requesting reviews and re-reviews and even
challenging the findings in court. Aided by
friends like Fox News online columnist Steven
Milloy -- who seems to view all claims of
dangerous pollution or species endangerment as
"junk science" -- corporate advocates can
effectively swamp any potential regulation in a
mixture of public confusion and "paralysis by
analysis."

Mooney's litany of conservative assaults on
science goes well beyond a listing of interlinked
but essentially ad hoc right-wing positions.
Rather, this is a well-coordinated campaign,
perhaps most noteworthy for the canny and cynical
way it manipulates contemporary public doubt
about the meaning and value of science. As
Thomas Murray, president of the Hastings Center,
a bioethics think tank, puts it, "What's
intriguing about the Bush administration, given
their views on most issues, is that they have a
postmodern take on science. It's the first
postmodern science administration we've ever
known."

While Mooney explores this question with his
customary clarity and reasonableness, he doesn't
do quite as much with it as he could. Whether
knowingly or not, the Bush administration and its
allies have cashed in on the findings of the
contemporary academic field known as science and
technology studies (also as the history and/or
philosophy of science). Following such
philosophers as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Michel
Foucault and Paul Feyerabend, this field has
explored science as a cultural phenomenon,
arguing (for instance) that even when scientists
deal with near-certain facts, the understanding
of scientific knowledge and the social uses to
which it is put are always culturally specific.

It's impossible to say how much this arcane field
of inquiry has crept into the public
consciousness, but let's put it this way:
Ordinary people clearly don't trust science the
way they used to. Mooney, like Frank, points to
Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign,
with its contempt for the "pinhead intellectuals"
of the Eastern establishment, as the moment when
this meme was established in right-wing ideology.
At the time, moderate Republicans ridiculed this
tendency, worried that it would doom their party
to know-nothing irrelevance; little did they know
how dominant it would become.

One could argue, however, that the real roots of
science's contemporary dilemma run much deeper.
Conservative contempt for the intellectual and
scientific elite is closely akin to the
left-leaning, postmodernist spirit of science and
technology studies; both reflect the realization
that science is a human endeavor and as such
prone to errors, blind spots and both ideological
and economic manipulation. With Hiroshima, the
Holocaust and Chernobyl in the rear-view mirror,
the planet poisoned by toxic chemicals and a new
frontier of cloning and genetic engineering lying
just ahead, it's reasonable to view the
scientific project in toto as a morally cloudy
exercise.

Furthermore, doubt is an essential element of
scientific inquiry, as any honest scientist will
tell you. The great strength of the scientific
method lies in its production of testable and
falsifiable hypotheses, but it yields absolute
truth only gradually, if at all. If our
certainty about such things as heliocentrism and
the basic laws of earthbound physics now
approaches 100 percent, it's only because they
have survived decades or centuries of ruthless
inquiry and no better explanations have emerged.

Mooney is especially sensible in discussing the
questions that arise here. It is legitimate and
even necessary for scientists to challenge the
consensus views held by their colleagues.
Searching for flaws in widely accepted theories
and flying in the face of contemporary wisdom are
crucial elements in scientific progress. The
germ theory of disease and the idea of
continental drift (known today as plate
tectonics) were viewed as looney-tunes notions
when first proposed; now they are understood as
among the very greatest scientific discoveries.
We can't know right now which current scientific
belief will look stupid in the 22nd century, but
we can be pretty sure something will.

So isn't it legitimate for Michaels and the other
global warming skeptics to poke holes in the
dominant scientific paradigm? Of course it is.
Fewer and fewer scientists believe they're right,
which doesn't say much for their probability of
success -- but Michaels has his own
interpretation of the existing data and there's
no reason to doubt his intellectual honesty.
What isn't legitimate is for politicians like
Inhofe to stage pseudo-scientific show trials,
pitting one lonely contrarian against the
overwhelming weight of scientific opinion, and
then use the scintilla of doubt thereby created
as a reason to do nothing about global warming.

In the words of Rep. George Brown, a California
Democrat who has been a leading science watchdog
on Capitol Hill, congressional Republicans with
little or no scientific background seem to have
convinced themselves that "scientific truth is
more likely to be found at the fringes of science
than at the center." This is an ideological or
perhaps a theological view, but if science is to
have any validity in the formation of public
policy, then political leaders must understand
and respect the scientific consensus.

As historian of science Naomi Oreskes tells
Mooney, "Scientific knowledge is the intellectual
and social consensus of affiliated experts based
on the weight of available empirical evidence,
and evaluated according to accepted
methodologies." As noted above, scientists have
the freedom and indeed the responsibility to
challenge that consensus; with rare exceptions,
politicians and the rest of us lack the
vocabulary or authority to do so. (Inhofe's
self-administered curriculum in climate science
appears to have comprised only authors he already
knew he agreed with.)

That's not the same thing as saying that
politicians are bound to make their decisions
according to scientific consensus, another point
that Mooney makes clear. All we can require from
political leaders is honesty. If President Bush
had simply said he believed stem cell research
was immoral, or Inhofe had said that the economic
costs of responding to global warming were too
high, those would be legitimate pillars on which
to stand. (And others of course would be free to
disagree.) In fact, as Mooney notes, the Clinton
administration admitted that epidemiological
research suggested that needle exchange programs
would slow the spread of HIV, but rejected them
anyway.

But while science may in some ways have fallen
into disrepute, we still live in a scientific and
technological age. Conservatives and liberals
fly on the same aircraft and rely on the same
medical advances to save the lives of their loved
ones. So the right has found it necessary to
cloak its decisions in ever murkier versions of
science, where a more honest conservative
ideology might frame them as moral or economic
imperatives.

As Mooney puts it, the Bush-era right has pushed
the politicization of science to the point of
crisis, and not just political crisis. It's
really more like an epistemological crisis;
consider the legendary anecdote from Ron
Suskind's October 2004 New York Times Magazine
article, in which an unnamed administration
official referred mockingly to "the reality-based
community." Suskind writes: "I nodded and
murmured something about enlightenment principles
and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the
way the world really works anymore,' he
continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we
act, we create our own reality.'"

Mooney offers an epilogue in which he suggests
that a political alliance of Democrats,
independents and moderate Republicans horrified
by their own party's "systematic willingness to
misrepresent or even concoct its own 'science'"
can reverse the current trend. But within his
pages you won't find much reason for optimism. By
turning science into an endlessly fudgeable tool
of politics, and rejecting any notion of
scientific consensus in favor of a landscape
where all science is either liberal ("junk") or
conservative ("sound"), the American right has
fulfilled the darkest prognoses of postmodern
philosophy. In this view, science is indeed just
an artifact of culture; it has no more
objectivity than astrology or dowsing or medieval
Catholic theology.

From the point of view of intellectual history,
this is a fascinating turn of events. Unhappily,
it also has practical consequences. Harvard
physicist Lewis Branscomb has written that
science as an element of democratic governance,
formerly "a strong source of unity in the
electorate," has been fatally eroded.
"Policymaking by ideology requires that reality
be set aside," he goes on; "it can be maintained
only by moving towards ever more authoritarian
forms of government."

More concretely, and far more eerily, Mooney
writes in his introduction that the Bush
administration's refusal to consider mainstream
scientific opinion on global warming "could cost
our children dearly." He continues: "That
includes children not just in low-lying New
Orleans, where I myself grew up, but in low-lying
Bangladesh and other nations across the globe."
One imagines that the awful irony of this
sentence pains Mooney more every day: At least
Bangladeshi children have a government that still
belongs to the reality-based community.

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

Sydneysiders are reeling this morning over news that Al Qaeda has announced
Melbourne as a possible new target of their worldwide campaign to scare the
p*ss out of people.

This is being seen as a major snub in social and political circles of the
2000 Olympic City, and leading Sydneysiders are calling on Al Qaeda to
reconsider their choice of future targets.

The Al Qaeda announcement is also expected to make it even harder for
Sydney politicians to redirect millions of taxpayer dollars from spending
on education, child care and medicines for the elderly to buy CCTV cameras
and other anti-terror related security measures.

"It's terrible news," said one Sydney security specialist who has been
campaigning for the NSW government to spend $100 million on his line of
robot dogs that sniff out bombs concealed in the buttholes of Islamomaniac
poodles.

If Sydneysiders are disappointed by the Al Qaeda snub then Melbournians are
absolutely gloating at the news that hit front pages and headlines around
the world today.

Fashionistas down south claim the Al Qaeda announcement is yet another sign
of just how "cool" Melbourne had become.

Bay Conservation Group Formed by Three Berkeley, California Women Hits 40

September 14, 2005 — By Denis Cuff, Contra Costa Times

BERKELEY, Calif. — Sylvia McLaughlin didn't need to look far from her living room window in the early 1960s to see that the Bay Area was losing its most scenic asset, the San Francisco Bay.

Trucks piled rocks and earth in the water to create several square miles of new land each year.

Garbage landfills on filled marshes caught fire and glowed red at night, reinforcing the image of the shoreline as a place to dump rather than recreate.

Berkeley proposed to double its size with a fill project, just one of several large ones in the Bay.

"This Bay is a national treasure, yet we were losing it," said McLaughlin, now 88, the wife of a mining company executive. "Our Bay was in danger of becoming a river. We decided something had to be done."

At a series of gatherings over tea, she and two other homemakers, Katherine Kerr and Esther Gulick, decided to organize.

Against all odds, the tea ladies of Berkeley ignited a pioneering environmental movement that helped change the way California and other states protect their shorelines.

They struck alliances with a business-friendly state senator, a wise-cracking radio DJ and thousands of letter-writing supporters to get state lawmakers to create the first regional commission in the nation to regulate shoreline development.

The San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, known as BCDC, celebrates its 40th anniversary Saturday.

The agency keeps a low profile these days, but it has left a big imprint.

It stopped the shrinking of the Bay, which by 1965 had lost about a third of its 787 square miles of surface area.

Since then, 13 square miles of diked land has been added back through environmental restoration projects.

The commission also opened the door for public access to the shoreline.

Four decades ago, all but four miles of shoreline was locked away from the public. Now more than 300 miles of shore is accessible through parks, trails and visitor use areas.

"The Bay would not look like it does today if not for these three wonderful ladies from the East Bay," said Joe Bodovitz, the first chief executive of the Bay commission who later served as chief executive for the California Coastal Commission, an agency modeled on the Bay commission.

"It's remarkable they succeeded," Bodovitz said. "It took perseverance, good fortune and a lot of unsung heroes."

McLaughlin and her friends took on powerful developers, investors and local leaders who viewed filling the Bay as a way to create new homes, businesses and tax revenues.

The women were disturbed nobody was tracking the cumulative impact of many fill projects virtually unregulated by the state.

California even aided the initial rush to fill the Bay.

In the 1850s, California sold underwater land by San Francisco to raise money for the new state government.

Much of San Francisco's financial district is built on fill, as is much of northern Contra Costa's industrial lands.

In the 1960s, developers sought to accelerate filling.

"I think the attitude all over the country at that time was that your bays and your marshes were dumping grounds. It was progress to fill them," McLaughlin said in an interview in her Berkeley home.

The Bay, about 14 feet deep on average, was a ripe target.

In 1959, the federal Army Corps of Engineers issued a report suggesting it was feasible to fill about 70 percent of the Bay.

One project, known as the Westbay development, called for lopping off the top of San Bruno Mountain to fill miles of Bay from San Mateo to Palo Alto. The plan also called for a new freeway. Bay supporters were appalled.

McLaughlin, wife of a UC Board of Regents member; Kerr, the wife of UC president Clark Kerr; and Gulick, the wife of an economics professor, called a meeting in Gulick's house on Grizzly Peak Road.

Conservation leaders who attended advised the woman to form a group, and get a state law passed.

"They told us what needed to be done and said, 'Good luck,'" McLaughlin recalled. "They were too busy saving the redwoods and saving the wilderness."

In 1961, the three woman formed the environmental group Save the Bay and signed up members for $1 a piece. They also recruited high-profile community leaders to serve on an advisory committee.

In 1964, Berkeley leaders scuttled their fill plan.

Save the Bay stepped up pressure to save the entire Bay with a state law.

They enlisted state Sen. Eugene McAteer of San Francisco, a war hero friendly to businesses, to lead the charge.

They also cornered scientists whose research suggested filling the Bay threatened to harm fisheries, increase smog and warm up the Bay climate.

The Legislature agreed to create a commission to look into the Bay's problems.

But when McAteer in 1965 proposed a bill to set up a 27-member commission to regulate Bay filling, developers resisted fiercely.

Builders argued that stopping filling would cripple the Bay Area economy.

Save the Bay supporters traveled to Sacramento hearings in buses and sent lawmakers sacks of dirt and sand with notes that read, "You'll wonder where the water went if you fill the Bay with sediment."

McAteer persuaded KSFO radio show host Don Sherwood to join the cause.

Sherwood, known for wacky jokes, rallied his morning listeners to write legislators. He chatted on air with McAteer about progress on the commission bill, named the McAteer-Petris Act, and once awakened Gov. Pat Brown with a call at home to talk on air about the bill.

The Bay commission bill squeaked by on a 6-5 vote.

The Legislature passed the bill, creating the commission and empowering it to regulate filling.

Another heated battle followed in 1969 before Gov. Ronald Reagan signed a bill to make the commission permanent. The bill affirmed commission authority to bar filling unless the public benefits of a project outweighed the environmental damage.

The regulation did not choke the economy, as some had predicted.

John Briscoe, a San Francisco attorney who represents shoreline property owners, said preserving the Bay was crucial to attracting workers and companies to the region.

"Without the Bay, this would be a much drearier place to do business," Briscoe said. "There are gripes (the commission's) permit process is to cumbersome, but overall, they have been good for the region."

These days, the trio that started the movement has handed off the torch.

Gulick has died. Kerr lives quietly in the East Bay hills.

McLaughlin has retired from the Save the Bay board, but she still is busy promoting shoreline parks and other Bay causes.

The Bay still faces threats from pollution, water pumping, invasive species and global warming, she said.

Pressures to fill the bay will pop up again as the state grows, she predicted.

"I think we showed citizens can make a difference in protecting the environment," McLaughlin said. "But we have to remain vigilant because there will always be a need to save the Bay."

SAVING THE BAY:

--1959: U.S. Army Corps of Engineer report suggests 70 percent of San Francisco Bay could be filled.

--1961: Save the Bay group founded.

--1964: Berkeley scuttles plans to double its size through Bay fill

--1964: California Legislature approves study commission to examine Bay fill problems.

--1965: Legislature passes McAteer-Petris Act to create Bay Conservation and Development Commission and put a moratorium on Bay fill.

--1969: Legislature makes commission permanent and empowers it to regulate development in 100-foot-wide shoreline ban, and to require public access to shoreline.

--1995: Gov. Pete Wilson proposes to strip Bay commission of funding, but drops plan after businesses and environmentalists protest.

To see more of the Contra Costa Times, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.bayarea.com.

Source: Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News

Natl Geog Nov 2004 pp. 2-35
cover story: Was Darwin Wrong?
David Quammen

review by L R B Mann


Was Darwin Wrong? No. The evidence for Evolution is overwhelming - so begins, in big letters, this big-pix major article.

Natural selection is asserted to be the mechanism of evolution. The 5pp. under this heading feature D Futuyma [sic], evolutionary biologist U Mich. who interprets as evidence for mouse/human homology the resemblance between the "30,000 genes" of the two respective spp. Existence of other ideas is merely hinted at - by a notice on a wall in DF's dept: "CREATION VS. EVOLUTION" - "something called the Origins Research Association ... at the local Baptist church." IDT is not mentioned, let alone theistic evolution which is the nearest thing so far to "scientific observation and careful thinking at its best" - what Quammen asserts 'evolution by natural selection' to be.

The status of evolution as a theory is properly defined, and immediately contrasted with "alarm at the thought that human descent from earlier primates contradicts a strict reading of the Book of Genesis" among "many fundamentalist Christians and ultra-orthodox Jews ... Islamic creationists ... Prabhupada of the Hare Krishna movement ... not just scriptural literalists ... Gallup poll 2001 45% of responding U.S. adults agreed 'God created human beings ... at one time within the last 10,000 years or so'." Thus the diabolical fallacy is perpetuated 'evolution or creation'. You'd never know Prof John Morton or Sir Alister Hardy, let alone Rupert Sheldrake or Neil Broom, had written a word. The very existence of theistic evolution is suppressed.

The mischievous Science Museum Kensington/Creationism® furphy is ruthlessly promoted: either creation or evolution. This false crippling axiom should be destroyed, but is instead embraced, assisting both camps Creationism® and atheistic neoDarwinism in their highly irrational non-debate.

Evidence for homology is adduced from domestic breeds' variations e.g pigeons, dogs; and from vestigial organs, male nipples, etc. Such microevolution is not, in this account, properly contrasted with the macroevolutionary discontinuities (saltations) which dominate the fossil record.

A whole p. is given over to the Science Museum, Kensington's 10-bp ball-&-stick model of a (asserted to be 'the') DNA 3° structure.

" The capacity for quick change among disease-causing microbes is what makes them so dangerous ... they leap from ... animals into humans, adapting ... The biologist Stephen Palumbi has calculated the cost of treating pencillin-resistant and methicillin-resistant staph infections, just in the USA, at 30 billion dollars a year." No mention is made of the propensity for GM-bastards to emanate novel pathogens. Even tho' Palumbi says "humans may be the world's dominant evolutionary force", devolution is not discussed.

You would never learn from this smug article that "evolution by natural selection" is a theory in crisis, let alone that the intimately-related broader scene within which gene-tampering wastes $10^10 (and rising) is an intellectual brothel.

You would certainly not be led to suspect that only 2 of the 4 categories of cause are alluded to by typical neoDarwinists.

Quammen's term 'strict reading of Genesis' is mischievous. What is purported by Creationism® is literal reading - which is actually infeasible, setting up the blatantly irrational mind-buggering totalitarian character of Creationism®. To imply that this represents the main opposition to the attempted hegemony of materialistic neoDarwinism (Dawkins, Gould, Wolpert, S Weinberg) is grossly misleading.

To me as a Christian it is despicable that Natl Geog should publish such a glib, smug, misleading article on this wonky scene. The opening question is itself not a main issue; what matters more today is whether neoDarwinism's intellectual swindles can be salvaged. Evolution as a fact is not open to reasonable dispute; but its mechanisms are scarcely illuminated by neoDarwinist theory (or by IDT). And the age of the Earth is a different question, less fundamental, than whether all spp were created at once.

It worries me deeply that scientific education has sunk so low as to allow such crap to be foisted slickly on readers of what used to be a generally good magazine.

They do usefully direct us to Darwin's books online http://pages.britishlibrary.net/charles.darwin
and "Coming soon" Darwin's letters http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/Departments/Darwin

Environmental Health Perspectives Volume 113, Number 8, August 2005 Focus

Genetically Modified Foods: Breeding Uncertainty

See: http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/members/2005/113-8/focus.html

Genetically Modified Foods: Breeding Uncertainty

Genetically modified (GM) crops first appeared commercially in the mid-1990s to what seemed a bright and promising future. Resistant to pests and the herbicides used to control weeds, these new crops were so popular with farmers that millions of acres were planted with them by the turn of the millennium. Today, GM crops are grown commercially by 8.25 million farmers on 200 million acres spread throughout 17 countries, reports the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications (ISAAA), an international nonprofit that advocates for the technology. The world’s top five producers--the United States, Argentina, Canada, Brazil, and China--account for 96% of global GM cultivation; of this, more than half is in the United States.

Yet these impressive numbers tell only part of the story. Fully as notable as the growth of GM agriculture is the relentless backlash that has developed against it. Although GM supporters insist the technology raises harvest yields, reduces agrochemical use, and will eventually even produce high-nutrition food that can grow in depleted soils, skeptics counter that the risks of GM foods--made with gene splicing methods from biotechnology--are unknown and poorly addressed by current testing methods. They also worry that the spread of GM crops, which are supplied mainly by a handful of multinational companies, fuels corporate ownership of the seed supply and threatens the purity of indigenous crops, with which GM varieties can breed by cross-pollination.

A Growing Backlash

The opposition’s attacks are generating sustained impacts. In April 2004, biotech companies including Novartis Seeds, Aventis CropScience, and Bayer CropScience abandoned GM field trials in England, citing challenges raised by British consumers. The next month, Monsanto dropped its new variety of herbicide-resistant wheat despite hundreds of millions reputedly spent on research and development. The product was shelved in part because of threatened boycotts by Europe and Japan, which together buy 45% of all U.S. wheat
exports, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service (UDSA/ERS). And in November 2004, the world’s largest agrochemical company, the Swiss-based Syngenta, moved its European GM field trials to the United States, also citing public resistance.

Europe itself, where commercial GM crops are grown only in Spain--and there in small amounts--is politically gridlocked over the issue, says Geoffrey Lean, environment editor for The Independent on Sunday, a British newspaper. The European Commission lifted a six-year moratorium on GM food in Europe last year, but even so, no new crops have been granted entry, he says. The commission, which favors the technology, wants to allow more GM imports. However, a number of opposing countries--notably Austria, France, Portugal, Greece, Denmark, and Luxembourg--have so far prevented this from happening. “As far as opinions in Europe go, the public is heavily against GM, the scientific community is for it, and governments are split down the middle,” Lean says.

Source: Center for Food Safety. April 2005. Available at: http://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/geneticall5.cfm.

Developing countries are also heavily divided, even though they could arguably benefit the most from the technology. Some stakeholders worry that the introduction of GM seed in developing countries could threaten the purity of conventional crops, thus posing a risk to food exports bound for markets that reject the technology.

Meanwhile, a slew of “GM-free zones,” where all transgenic organisms are banned (including fish, other animals, and plants used to make drugs), are cropping up around the world. Three are in the United States, all in California. More than 3,000 are found throughout Europe, with others in Canada, Australia, and the Philippines, says Renata Brillinger, director of the citizens group Californians for GE [genetically engineered]-Free Agriculture.

GM crops also suffer a poor reputation among the general public, in part because they are made in ways that can sound scary when described to consumers. Biotechnology allows scientists to combine genes from totally unrelated species of plants, microbes, and animals. How is this possible? There are several methods. In one, bacteria and viruses--which are naturally able to penetrate cells--are deployed as delivery vehicles to shuttle genes directly into plant cell genomes. In another, tiny particles coated with a gene are propelled at high speeds into cells to deliver the gene. In still another, electric shocks are used to destabilize cell membranes, making them permeable to delivered genes. These and several other methods enable scientists to evade natural barriers that cells use to protect themselves from foreign DNA.

Thus, genes from bacteria can be introduced into a plant--or, as in one instance, a fish gene can be introduced into a tomato. Monsanto has made pest-resistant varieties with a gene from Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), a bacterium that kills certain types of insects. The resultant varieties produce the Bt toxin, a protein that is lethal to these insects but safe for humans. DNA Plant Technology of Oakland, California (which has since gone out of business) was the company responsible for inserting a fish gene into a tomato. In that case, an “anti-freeze” gene that helps flounder survive frigid waters was spliced into tomato cells to enhance the plant’s resistance to cold. The fish-tomato didn’t swim, nor did it ever make it to market. But its memory lingers as a quintessential “frankenfood” that GM critics often refer to.

Dwindling Varieties

With growing opposition to GM crops has come a remarkable drop in new varieties being introduced by the agrobiotech industry. A 2 February 2005 report by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), an environmental group, observes that three-quarters of federal approvals for GM crops in the United States were obtained between 1995 and 1999.

According to Gregory Jaffe, director of the Project on Biotechnology at CSPI, most of the new crops that drive GM agriculture’s growth now are cookie-cutter varieties that merely recycle the same genes for pest and herbicide resistance already used in existing products. Indeed, virtually all the GM crops grown today are different varieties of the same four crops that became available before 2000, mainly pest- or herbicide-resistant varieties of corn, cotton, soybeans, and canola.

These crops were made for and marketed specifically to farmers, who make up the industry’s key buyers. Farmers have embraced GM technology because it saves them time and money. Monsanto’s Roundup Ready crops, for instance, are resistant to the glyphosate-based herbicide Roundup. Farmers can eliminate weeds with one or two sprayings of the wide-spectrum herbicide without harming their crops.

Rob Rose, a spokesman for the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, a nonprofit research facility funded partially by the agrobiotech industry, says companies barely considered the consumers who would buy and eat GM foods in their initial marketing efforts. This proved to be a mistake, he says. When the consumer backlash started, companies were caught off-guard. “Even now, as the backlash intensifies, they haven’t come up with an effective consumer marketing strategy,” Rose says.

Crops and cops. In Lincolnshire, England, a protester from the group Genetix Snowball digs up a GM sugar beet in protest as policemen intervene.
image: Andrew Testa/Panos Pictures

To improve its public image, the agrobiotech industry has more recently begun promoting the concept of extra-nutritious, environmentally resilient crops to fight world hunger. But so far, none of these so-called second-generation crops have entered the marketplace, anywhere in the world.

The second-generation crops that are in the pipeline seem to be stuck there, mainly because of market uncertainties, insiders say. For example, Monsanto is developing grains to make cooking oils with lower saturated fats and higher levels of omega-3 fatty acids, which are thought to protect against heart disease. But Christopher Horner, director of public affairs for Monsanto, acknowledges that these grains have distant and unknown release dates.

Universities and small research centers also develop second-generation GM crops, but they lack the resources necessary to put them on the market. The Danforth Center, for instance, has developed numerous such crops, including grains enriched with vitamin E and vegetables with enhanced folate levels, a nutrient that protects against neural tube defects in newborns as well as cancer and cardiovascular disease in adults. Center scientists have also developed a nutritionally enhanced variety of cassava, a root vegetable that is a dietary staple for hundreds of millions worldwide.

At the University of California, Berkeley, Peggy Lemaux, a faculty member in the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology, and her colleague Bob Buchanan recently helped create a type of GM wheat that people with wheat allergies might eat more safely. She and her colleagues at Berkeley are now working on enhancing sorghum, another staple of the world’s poor, to make it more nutritionally complete and calorie-rich.

“I want to help people,” Lemaux says. “I work for a land-grant university, and our charge is to develop varieties that help agriculture and consumers. If I can do this for countries that really need it, then that’s what I want to do.”

But Lemaux and Karel Schubert, a Danforth Center principle investigator, both acknowledge that despite the potential benefits, the commercial value of these crops is limited. Without significant financial backing, universities and research centers can’t fund the extensive regulatory and patent reviews needed to bring the products to market. But as consumers increasingly turn against GM food, Lemaux adds, industry and federal funds for second-generation crop research and development are drying up.

“Second generation crops are developed in universities, and then those projects die,” Lemaux says. “There’s a pall hanging over GM and its products, so many companies have stopped supporting fundamental research.” Her grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development has been cut from a three-year to a one-year commitment.

The Question of Health Risks

Despite public fears, the health risks of eating commercialized GM foods on the market now appear to be negligible, experts say. Nearly 45% of the corn and 85% of the soybeans grown in the United States are transgenic, according to the USDA/ERS. Consumers are eating these foods without any apparent health effects, although some stakeholders caution that greater postmarket surveillance is needed to confirm this.

As part of research and development, GM foods are tested for safety, specifically to ensure they don’t contain compounds that might cause allergic reactions among those who eat them. How might this happen? Consider how biotechnology works: Scientists take genes from one species and incorporate them into the genome of another. The modified genes in the transgenic hybrid are designed to make proteins that ideally will do something useful, like deter pests or boost nutrition. But these same proteins might also be allergenic; in fact, most known allergens are protein molecules.

The only way to confirm that a transgenic protein is or is not an allergen is to test it in large numbers of people. But of course, large-scale human testing isn’t practical or ethically possible. Therefore, scientists resort to surrogate tests to predict whether the transgenic protein will elicit a human allergic response.

These tests have evolved considerably since GM crops were first introduced. In the early 1990s, scientists would test transgenic proteins with serum obtained from people known to be allergic to the gene sources of the modified plant. If a protein reacted with a serum antibody called IgE--which plays a role in nearly all allergies--it was flagged as an allergen. In 1993, scientists using this approach detected allergenicity in a transgenic soybean containing a gene from Brazil nuts. This soybean--created by Pioneer, now a subsidiary of Dupont--was to be used as a nutrition-enhanced poultry feed (Brazil nuts are high in methionine, an essential amino acid that soybeans lack). If commercialized, it could have posed serious health risks to farmers working with the feed: Brazil nuts can be fatal if you’re allergic to them. But the transgenic protein tested positive in the serum assay, so the soybean was pulled during early development and destroyed.

The labeling dilemma. Some stakeholders claim that labeling of GM foods would go a long way toward assuring consumers that they have a choice in whether to consume such products, although studies have shown consumers are likely to avoid GM items labeled as such.

image: Philip Reynaers/Greenpeace

Steve Taylor, codirector of the Food Allergy Research and Resource Program at the University of Nebraska, discovered the soybean/Brazil nut problem while under contract to Pioneer. He says scientists took close note of the incident. Today, he adds, companies reduce the risk of similar problems by avoiding genes from known allergens, 90% of which are attributed to just eight foods (eggs, cow’s milk, peanuts, tree nuts, fish, shellfish, soybeans, and wheat).

The serum test would still be optimal for screening genes from known allergenic sources, Taylor says. But because no one uses genes from these sources anymore, the test is rarely used. Instead, companies now rely largely on initial screens that compare transgenic proteins to the structures and characteristics of known allergens.

In one such method, known as sequence homology, scientists compare a transgenic protein’s amino acid sequence with the sequences of known allergens in a database. If the protein shares a predetermined level of similarity with one or more allergens, then it is flagged for further study. Several databases have emerged to meet this need; one of these, developed by the Food Allergy Research and Resource Program, contains nearly 1,200 allergens and is growing steadily.

Another method exploits the fact that most allergens are large and resistant to stomach acids. Called the pepsin digestibility assay, this test exposes proteins to simulated stomach fluids for varying durations. Most allergens survive for up to an hour, whereas nonallergens degrade within 15-30 seconds.

If these initial screens suggest that a transgenic protein is allergenic, companies can use serum testing for further confirmation. If allergenicity is still indicated, then efforts to further develop the GM variety are typically abandoned.

Agronomists have long known that conventional plant breeding can produce allergenic compounds. For instance, the Chinese gooseberry, a small, somewhat bitter fruit, was conventionally modified in New Zealand to make kiwifruits, which produced allergic reactions among some consumers, although the modified fruits remain popular at produce markets. A key question is whether transgenic proteins have more allergenic potential than those produced by conventional plant breeding.

After more than a decade of testing and debate, the emerging consensus among scientists is that they do not. The National Academy of Sciences recently expressed this view in its 2004 report Safety of Genetically Engineered Foods: Approaches to Assessing Unintended Health Effects, which stated, “The process of genetic engineering has not been shown to be inherently dangerous but rather, evidence to date shows that any technique, including genetic engineering, carries the potential to result in unintended changes in the composition of the food.”

The U.S. Regulatory System

As far as U.S. regulatory agencies are concerned, agrobiotech companies need only demonstrate that--apart from the transgenic protein--a GM crop shares equivalent composition and nutritional status to its conventional counterpart. If this is shown to be the case, then the crop is said to be as safe as the conventional variety, and companies are free to sell it. Crops that contain a pesticidal protein such as Bt toxin must undergo mandatory allergenicity testing coordinated by the Environmental Protection Agency. All other GM traits are evaluated by voluntary consultations with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). During these consultations, FDA and company representatives discuss procedures, and the companies disclose data and describe testing methods and results. The FDA recently introduced draft guidance on testing that encourages companies to come in at the very early stages of the process, when they are still in planning stages.

GM opponents have long argued that FDA consultations should be mandatory. But Jason Dietz, a consumer safety officer at the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, says that in the administration’s view, the risks posed by transgenic crop breeding aren’t great enough to warrant mandatory testing. Moreover, he adds, companies are liable for the health risks of GM foods under the safety provisions of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.

Boon or bane? At the GMO Research Centre in Los Banos, Philippines, a scientist examines GM rice plants. New varieties of GM plants offer the promise of better yields and improved nutritional value; opponents contend that such benefits may come at too high a price. For example, Golden Rice (pictured above in two varieties, along with white conventional rice) could boost daily intakes of vitamin A and fight deficiency-related blindness and death. However, the activist organization Greenpeace protests that the rice hasn’t been adequately tested for potential adverse health and environmental effects.
images: Left to right: Heldur Netocny/Panos Pictures; Syngenta

The best way for companies to ensure their compliance with the act, Dietz says, is to undergo a premarket consultation with the FDA. “To our knowledge, all [GM] foods intended to be commercialized in the United States have been through the consultation procedure,” he says.

An important and unresolved question is whether current testing methods will be adequate for second-generation crops. All the pest- and herbicide-resistance traits used now are found at minute levels in the plants, far below those likely to produce allergic responses, according to Taylor. But in some second-generation varieties, GM traits are intentionally expressed at high levels that change the nature of the food.

Taylor suggests that uncertainties about second-generation crop testing exacerbate the agrobiotech industry’s reluctance to develop these markets further. “Because [the plant’s] composition is significantly altered, and components are expressed at high levels, second-generation crops will probably require more extensive safety evaluation,” he says. “One of the key issues is that there is no international agreement on what will be required. The uncertainty is considerable, and that creates hesitancy on the part of companies. Regulatory approvals will be less certain, consumer acceptance is a hurdle, and scientific uncertainty about how to proceed with safety assessment causes worry.”

The Labeling Scene

In many countries, debates over GM foods have been accompanied by growing demands for an international labeling scheme to segregate transgenic and conventionally grown products. Labeling isn’t required in the United States because regulatory agencies here don’t view commercialized GM food as materially different from conventional varieties. However, the European Union does require it, and countries including Australia, Japan, and New Zealand, among others, have either established labeling systems or are in the process of doing so.

GM labeling is a tricky proposition that U.S. companies would rather avoid. Some surveys have shown that consumers are less likely to buy foods that they know are GM. Not only does labeling threaten markets, it could also be hard to implement, says Alan McHughen, a biotech specialist and geneticist at the University of California, Riverside. With few exceptions, most commodity crops grown in the United States aren’t segregated once they reach the supply chain. Thus, both GM and conventionally grown nonorganic crops can wind up in the same containers as they make their way through distribution channels.

McHughen says the challenge is to somehow guarantee that GM labeling is accurate and credible, which is no easy task. “From the farmer, to the county elevator, to the rail or barge that carries bulked grain to terminals, to the retailers--every step [in the labeling process] would have to be monitored and verified,” he says.

Even so, labeling is necessary because food distribution is increasingly globalized, says Juan Lopez, international coordinator for biosafety with Friends of the Earth, a nongovernmental organization. The problem, he emphasizes, is that without a comprehensive labeling system, GM products can wind up in countries that don’t want them.

Some recent high-profile episodes have heightened these concerns. In late 2004, Syngenta announced it had accidentally put a controversial type of GM corn on the market in the United States and Europe during the previous four years. The corn, known as Bt10, differs from a similar variety called Bt11 by only a few nucleotides. But whereas Bt11 has been approved in Europe, Bt10 never underwent review and thus is considered illegal in Europe. The accident produced no known illnesses, but many seized on it as further justification for labeling. Syngenta’s woes with Bt10 have only continued: in early summer 2005, large commodity corn shipments in Japan were found to be comingled with Bt10, and a similar comingled shipment was intercepted in Ireland.

While Syngenta was grappling with its botched shipments, the 119 signatories of the United Nations Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety (a supplementary agreement of the Convention on Biological Diversity) were deciding whether to create documentation requirements for bulk shipping of “living modified organisms,” which are the live GM organisms such as seeds (rather than milled forms such as flour). But this initiative failed during last-minute negotiations at a meeting in Montréal on 3 June 2005. Protocol rules require consensus for passage, which couldn’t be reached because Brazil and New Zealand refused to sign on, claiming the paperwork would be excessive and costly. (The United States is not a party to the Convention on Biological Diversity and therefore cannot be a party to the Cartagena protocol.) The failure means the burden of proof for ensuring GM-free shipments remains with importers, Lopez says.

“This would have been the first time a global system for the identification of [GM organisms] would have been in place,” he adds. “But countries at the national and regional level are working to implement identification and labeling schemes anyway.”

The Future

Today, GM agriculture’s future seems hard to predict. Its growth is undeniable--ISAAA figures indicate that global acreage of GM crops increased by 20% in 2004 with no sign of slowing. But the vast majority of this growth occurred in just a handful of countries planting just a handful of crop varieties. The new second-generation crops that comprise the bulk of the industry’s consumer marketing efforts appear to be largely stalled, held at bay by market uncertainty and the voracious attacks of environmental groups.

Consider the plight of Golden Rice, the product of a largely humanitarian effort led by Syngenta and a consortium of nonprofit research groups. Golden Rice was meant as a means to boost daily intakes of vitamin A; deficiency-related blindness and death currently afflicts nearly 2 million people annually, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund. However, Golden Rice is under sustained assault by Greenpeace, which claims that health effects have not been sufficiently addressed, that the rice could breed with and contaminate wild varieties, and that the whole effort is merely a ploy to gain acceptance for GM food in developing countries. Jorge Mayer, manager of the Golden Rice Project at the University of Freiburg in Germany, as quoted in the 2 April 2005 New Scientist, countered that Greenpeace’s blanket opposition to Golden Rice is impeding the very trials that will provide the answers the group demands. “It’s a catch-22,” he said.

So what is the truth of the matter? A conclusive answer isn’t easy to find. Biotech companies claim GM technology will help feed the world’s poor, but how do they intend to protect intellectual property in developing markets? Despite repeated questioning, sources for this article could not provide a clear answer to that question. Companies have sued farmers for saving seeds from their GM varieties and planting them without payment for intellectual property; Monsanto has more than 100 such lawsuits ongoing in the United States today, says Horner. Will farmers in developing countries also have to pay for GM seeds, year after year? What will that mean for traditional agriculture, which depends on the age-old practice of saving seeds for future planting?

While these questions remain, studies show that GM technology can produce important benefits. Carl Pray, a professor of agriculture, food, and resource economics at Rutgers University, recently concluded a study showing that growing Bt rice in China reduced by half the number of chemical pesticide poisonings among farmers. His research also showed that farmers who planted the rice saved money with increased crop yields and reduced chemical pesticide use. His results are published in the 29 April 2005 issue of Science. “I’m convinced [the crops] are a positive development for China,” Pray says.

Other farmers who grow GM crops echo these sentiments. Given that GM agriculture is here to stay, the optimal scenario for the future--and the likely eventual outcome--is a dual supply chain, one that clearly distinguishes GM from non-GM products. In the meantime, the rhetoric and spin that surrounds this most heated of environmental battles will go on.

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

Charles W. Schmidt

The head of religious studies at St Peter's, a RC boys' HS in Ak, just wrote to me

I am on the DAN conference planning committee. (DAN stands for: Dialogue
Australasia Network of some 300 secondary schools in OZ and NZ.)
We are looking for a keynote speaker for the annual DAN conference, to be
held next April 19th - 21st, 2006, at King's College, Auckland.
The 2006 DAN Conference theme is "Educating beyond the Curriculum".
It has been suggested that we invite a well known speaker who can give a
balanced view, scientifically, philosophically and theologically, of the
current evolution-intelligent design debate. Someone who can present the
viewpoints of those for, and those against, both sides of the debate, by
providing a higher viewpoint, not an over-heated one.

Attached are the samples I've sent him - an 'old' paper I'm still content with, and a new unpubd which I hope will convince him to confirm me as the speaker he wants.

I'd be grateful for your prayerful support as I try to fulfil this mission to those who are confused by the cross-currents of mischievous misinformation on this topic.

It occurs to me also that this important gathering of youth could benefit from hearing the facts about same-sex unions ... ;-]


Clarifying "the" theory of evolution

L R B Mann


Which aspects of the theory of evolution are in dispute? A thickening fog of verbiage now makes it harder than ever for students to discover fact, and to understand theory, regarding evolution.

A few hundred words can, I hope, do some justice to the urgent task of clarifying "the" theory of evolution. (I've written a few thousand words elsewhere - some at my page www.kuratrading.com/HTMLArticles/writings.htm )

1. Fact as distinct from Theory

The term 'evolution' means the appearance over time (Margulis & Schwartz 199 of new life-forms - new species, and larger taxa (genus, family, order, class, phylum, kingdom). Science has inferred from a large body of observations that life appeared on our planet as blue-green algae 4 x 109 year BP; later emergences include complex animals 1 x 109 y, mammals 2 x 108 y, and man somewhere in the region 106 -104 y BP. Thus, insofar as facts can ever be confirmed regarding pre-human processes, evolution is a fact - in the sense that new life-forms have appeared over billions of years. Most species were created much later than the first.

However, evidence for change in descent from one to another has been difficult to come by and is sparser, at least to date, than sometimes assumed.

2. Theory

To explain evolution, as to explain any process in nature, all categories of cause will be required. The 4 categories of cause, originally defined by Aristotle, hold key potential for improving evolution theory. The recent restricting by e.g. Dawkins of causality in evolution theory to only 2 categories of cause is a main confusion in evolution theory.

The biologist John Morton (1972 Ch.1), noting that at Aristotle's period in the development of science he was in no position to understand chemical process, offered a more modern version of the 4 causes which I précis and commend for wide spreading:

* * *

What are the causes of the bottle of claret I'm now decanting?
The material causes include the grape juice and the yeast, materials transformed by the efficient cause into this peculiar substance claret.

The efficient cause, as in Aristotle's prototypical example 'the making of a statue', is the action of the yeast on the grape sugars and some minor components, a process resulting in aqueous ethanol and some minor chemicals characteristic of claret.

But my bottle of claret has also a final cause: a person (named Babich) willed to organise suitable vessels & conditions for the substances which are the material cause, and planned a sequence of operations, for the purpose of making claret by maximising the likelihood that the efficient cause for claret would operate i.e. the particular biochemical action of the yeast on the grape juice leading to claret.

Aristotle's formal cause is in this example the 'claret idea' in Babich's mind.

* * *

Some rationalisation for the label 'final' is offered by Temple (1923):

This is the essence of "intellection" or science, that it asks "why" perpetually; as soon as it is answered, it asks "Why?" again ... But if from some other department of Mind's activity an answer is suggested, the intellect (if not impeded by "intellectualist" dogmatism) will gladly accept it. And Mind does accept as final an explanation in terms of Purpose and Will; for this (and, so far as our experience goes, this alone) combines efficient and final causation. "Why is this canvas covered with paint?" "Because I painted it." "Why did you do that?" "Because I hoped to create a thing of beauty for the delight of myself and others."

I believe this Categories of Cause concept - surely one of the most important ideas in the whole of philosophy - is the lever to break the confused logjam of "creationist"® fundamentalism, 'intelligent design theory' IDT®, and neoDarwinism.

NeoDarwinism, the current mainstream scientific theory, explains change in descent by mutation (usually said to be random) followed by natural selection which narrows the variance among the mutants by selecting against the less fit. Those processes, involving only material causes and efficient causes, are necessary, but not sufficient, to explain evolution.

What can be said to explain - ascribe all the causes of - an organism and its evolution? DNA is a material cause of all (so far as is known) organisms, and operates as parts of efficient causes through the several types of RNA and the many enzymes essential for biosynthesis of proteins & other biochemicals; but DNA is surely not a Final cause. As Morton has recently put it, DNA is not the kind of thing that can cause other things as if paints could leap from tubes to create a Turner, or vibrations & percussions form themselves into a work of Mozart. A person implementing a plan - a final cause - is a prerequisite for such things to come into existence. This is a clearer way of putting the point which IDT® emphasizes. No amount of explanation in the categories of material & efficient causes can suffice to explain life. Similarly, megatime is no substitute for purpose in production of new species.

Technology - and more widely, all human acts willed to modify the universe - cannot be explained without using the concept Final Cause. The only type of final cause - person acting with a purpose - is, in the militant atheist Dawkins' approach, human will. Thus "who designed this watch?" would be an allowed question, but "who designed this frog?" disallowed - as an assumption of atheism. But ecology, and evolution of ecosystems, are purposeful, and Dawkins' descriptions of evolution turn out to be always laden with the language of purpose.

How is a modern biology to deal with Final cause? A conservative answer today could be to continue the methodological convention that science will pursue only efficient (and material) causes, but also to advocate that science should be taught & practised in a context of philosophy acknowledging all the categories of Causes. This can be readily done consistent with the USA constitutional amendment so misrepresented by USA courts this past half-century; there need be no tendency to establish any church with legal privileges.

If science consists in discovering materials (e.g. chemical elements & compounds), energies (so far just 4), and forms (e.g. species of organism) and elucidating qualitatively & quantitatively the processes - including energy conversions - which result in new physical situations, then material and efficient causes are the only causes science can study. But this methodological restriction in the scope of scientific theory does not constitute any reason to say that no final causes operate in evolution. How much science can hint about these final causes remains to be seen, but will not amount to much; natural theology - the study of nature with intent to infer who created it, without recourse to revelation - is only a small part of comprehensive theology. Philosophy and theology will have to revive for the metaphysics needed to study final and formal causes in evolution.

The mainstream Christian doctrine is that evolution is God's process for creating new types of organism. Recent, and eccentric, is the fundamentalist claim that evolution is refuted by Genesis 1-3 & 8-9. These very figurative sections are among the most myth-laden biblical texts and were written long before science. Their theological wealth is neglected by the novel mischievous pretence ("creationism") to understand them as literally contradicting science.

Discussion of final cause in biology may well begin with Hume's quip "[t]his world, for aught [any man] knows, is very faulty and imperfect compared to a superior standard; and was only the first rude essay of some infant deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance." As a Christian, I'm willing to discuss starting as far back as that sceptical position. But anyhow, let's go forward, shall we, IDTers? It is not realistic to stand pat on your one little Paley point waiting for Dawkins, Wolpert etc to concede its logic. And, as Don Nield points out, it is not a very strong point if only because it is in the category of 'god of the gaps' argumentation.

I would relish a public debate against Dawkins about his depauperate 2-causes philosophy.

= = =

Readings

Broom, N., 1998. How Blind is The Watchmaker? Aldershot: Ashgate ; rev edn IVP 2001.
Flew, A., 1989. Introduction to Western Philosophy p.159 London: Thames & Hudson.
Margulis, L. & Schwartz, K. V., 1998. Five Kingdoms New York: Freeman.
Morton, J., 1972. Man, Science and God Auckland & London: Collins.
Temple, W., 1923 . Mens Creatrix - an essay Macmillan.
Temple, W., 1934 . Nature, Man and God Macmillan.

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

Creationism v. evolution
but not
creation v. evolution

Robert Mann and Neil Broom
very slightly adapted from Stimulus 8 (2) 16-20 (May 2000)

Many Christians believe that the very idea of evolution – most crucially, the idea that the species Homo sapiens evolved from many previous species now extinct – entails denial of true religion. We wish to argue that there need be no real dispute. The fear appears to be that to admit evolution as a fact - i.e. admit to life unfolding over time with increasing complexity & variety - would bring one into a crisis of faith in Holy Scripture. Maintaining it is a misunderstanding we seek to resolve this apparent conflict in the present paper.

But before we delve into the theory of evolution we note that the facts in direct support of the specific idea of Homo sapiens evolving from ape-like ancestors are – as science now stands – very scanty. The old ‘missing link’ objection still holds good to a large extent regarding factual evidence of immediate human evolution. Indeed, the whole record of evolution is riddled with discontinuities, e.g. the frogs suddenly appear, not preceded by any proto-frogs. The main reason why almost all scientists believe in evolution is that it has been exceedingly successful as an integrating theory within biology.

Nevertheless, one must point out that the evidence is fairly conclusive that humans appeared only about a million years ago, certainly long after many species that have existed for hundreds of millions of years (in contrast to the face value of the story in Genesis 2). More importantly, we maintain that even if a seamless sequence of fossils were demonstrated with no missing links in human evolution, such a finding need have no theological significance regarding the central doctrines that man is created by God and made in the image of God.

Perhaps we should make clear at the start the perspective from which we attempt to contribute to this fraught arena of (sometimes intemperate) argumentation. We are scientists working on aspects of biology, and we are mainstream Christians who hold to traditional doctrines as summarised in the Apostles’ Creed. In other words, we find ourselves able to live by the belief that Christianity does not conflict with a science that is conducted with intellectual integrity - a science that acknowledges the finitude of all human knowing and therefore its inability to proclaim on ultimate issues save what is given by special revelation.

For many Christians the science/God debate automatically focuses on an attempted literal reading of the first two chapters of Genesis. Many assert, and quite strenuously, that Genesis outlines literally the actual history and scientific principles of creation, and any secular science that contradicts this ‘Bible science’ must be rejected outright.

In this literal interpretation of a particular part of Scripture, creation is believed to have taken place over six 24-hour days and perhaps no more than 10,000 years ago. ‘Creation science’ rejects any thought of an ancient earth spanning periods of geological time of many millions of years, and denies any gradual development or evolving of life forms. It is a philosophical position that rejects a huge amount of scientific evidence gathered by a vast community of scientists who hold a wide spectrum of religious (Christian and others) and non-religious viewpoints about the origin of life.

Our personal conviction is that ‘creation science’ is fighting the wrong battle. We say this for two important reasons. Firstly, it makes the dubious assumption that Genesis 1 & 2 must be read in a strictly literal sense if they are to be read in a God-honouring way. It is not at all clear to us that the narrative form of the early chapters of Genesis is literal or even remotely scientific in its intent. The creation texts contain a very simple storyline that is timeless and relevant for all people for all time. But is it science? Science as the modern discipline which gave rise to the creation/evolution discussion hadn’t evolved when the author(s) penned these narratives. The burning issues of the day were what we would call theological, not scientific. Who made the cosmos? Who is in charge of it? Who is to be worshipped? Were the people of God to place their faith in the many divinities of polytheism or in the one true God of the Israelites?

Despite the impact on contemporary culture of postmodernity’s disaffection with science, there is a significant continuing acceptance of 'old fashioned' modernism - scientific materialism and loss of a moral base. The full potential of Genesis 1-3 to help us address these issues will not be realised unless we shoulder the responsibility of interpretation with all the difficulties and even pitfalls that this may entail.

It seems to us that the main point of the creation narratives is to put nature – including mankind – fairly and squarely in its place as created, and thus as a consequence never to be accorded the status of divinity. No part of creation was to be the object of man’s worship. No part of creation was to shape the ultimate destiny of humanity, and this was to include the heavenly bodies. God alone was to be acknowledged as the source and sustainer of all created things.

We must discern very carefully the type of literary narrative being used in each part of scripture. It may be disastrous if we apply an interpretation not intended by the author. It seems to us that when we come to a central Christian truth such as the Resurrection the various accounts given in all four Gospels confront us with a flesh-and-blood, time-and-place narrative that almost ‘screams’ out to be read in a literal sense. Everything about the Resurrection narratives seems to insist we take them literally.

By contrast the early chapters of Genesis do not read in this same flesh-and-blood historic way. They have an entirely contrasting literary flavour. Their structure is much more stylised and poetic. The already-established 7-day Hebrew week is, in all probability, used as a means of systematically working through each realm of the created world with the very powerful pronouncement that all such realms and their inhabitants were the creation of God. What more powerful way to demolish for all time the pagan myth that within the world there were powers and forces that could hold sway over the destinies of people and enslave them in the vice of fear-ridden subservience?

The text reads much more like a series of epic declarations – that God is the supreme commander of the universe, and that all things large and small owe their existence to him. These are, perhaps, words that attempt to describe the indescribable – events of such cosmic proportions as to be literally beyond our understanding as created beings. The language is surely conveying what we would call religious, not scientific truth.

Clear evidence that the text is not meant to be read in a scientific sense is got by comparing the two different creation accounts contained in Genesis 1: 1-2:3 and 2: 4-25. As an obvious example of the author’s(s’) clear disregard for chronological accuracy, in the first account land animals are created before humans whereas in the second account animals are created after man. This apparent conflict is important only if we try to interpret the narratives in a narrow literal sense. Surely an important purpose of both accounts is to place humanity at the apex of creation, separate relationally from all that is beneath; for this theological point, timing is hardly relevant.

We hold that science in general and evolution in particular can offer no genuine conflict with Christianity. There are well-known general grounds for our attitude. The purview of science is restricted: it is as narrow as the physical realm of matter & energy (including living organisms), but no spiritual entities. The fact that science can study only this restricted realm (within which it has achieved very impressive discoveries) is no handicap; it is simply a fact that the scientific method applies only to energy & matter as defined by science, and when science attempts to pronounce on moral questions, let alone spiritual questions, it is a trespasser.

We can say that science is a human activity able to deal only with the lower levels of material cause and effect. By contrast, what we think of as ‘religion’ is concerned with the big picture, the ultimate issues concerning the cosmos and its relationship to the creator. The issues of governance, purpose and meaning are outside the scope of science. The material world operates as a subset within the much larger framework illuminated by revealed religion. In using the word ‘subset’ here we are attempting to stress the importance of not letting theology and science retreat to supposedly unconnected spheres. We wish to provoke renewed co-operation, rather than spurious conflict, between them.

We hope these generalities set the stage as we turn to particulars about the evolution of organisms and about, on the other hand, the vastly more important ‘why’ and ‘who’ questions which only revealed religion can tackle.

Outline of Evolutionary Theory

Modern science has existed for only a few centuries. Why it took so long to begin is discussed in Harold Turner’s recent book and in Renton Maclachlan’s thoughtful review of that book in this journal . Unfortunately that review complains at Rev Dr Turner’s ‘repeated, scathing dismissal of “creation science” without any justification whatsoever being given’. As friends of Harold Turner we are aware he reached the conclusion years ago that “creation science” is a waste of time. He does not bother in his book to expound his reasons for his dismissive attitude to it. Our purpose now is to assist readers by outlining how such a conclusion as Dr Turner’s is not merely reasonable but essential to the goal - dauntingly ambitious to some - of reconciling science and religion.

Since the originators Darwin and Wallace, biology has amassed a compelling body of evidence for organic evolution, i.e. evidence that life has unfolded over a long time, as a tree with many branches and many 'missing' branches, developing a generally more complex range of life-forms, with Homo sapiens appearing only recently. The facts gleaned from fossils, augmented recently by molecular details, strongly suggest that evolution has occurred. The body of evidence from which this deduction flows is so huge, so multi-faceted, and so coherent, that evolution is regarded as a fact by almost every scientist today.

The evidence for evolution, minimally mixed with neo-Darwinian theory, is interesting to review as it stood around the time when modern 'creationism' arose in the USA.

We immediately, emphatically add: how evolution has occurred is a different (and much more difficult) question from the simpler question of whether organisms have evolved. And Goldsmith has pointed out vigorously, in an exchange with the militant atheist Wolpert, that it is a mere assumption to say that evolution must have worked by the mechanism of natural selection.

Many readers will be aware of a supremely confident brand of scientific atheism that is currently fashionable, largely popularised by Oxford University’s Richard Dawkins. Dawkins contemptuously dismisses any suggestion that evolution requires anything more than the blind forces of physics. He says “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist”. Dawkins views Darwin’s idea of natural selection as providing an entirely material means by which the chance variations in an organism’s offspring are channelled in the direction of ‘evolving’ (read increasing) complexity. What is important is that evolution is viewed by Dawkins as an entirely mindless process; hence his confident atheistic stance.

We consider Dawkins in error at a fundamental conceptual level and wish to highlight this by reference to just one of the illustrations he employs to support his scientific atheism - namely the evolution of the eye as expounded in one of his recent books Climbing Mt. Improbable .

Dawkins likens the evolution of the eye to climbing a high mountain. In this scheme of things the evolution of biological novelty (i.e. reaching the summit of Mount Improbable) is achieved in the neo-Darwinian sense by gradual, almost imperceptible steps of improvement. In his metaphor we take a route up the gentle slopes rather than attempting to scale the impossibly steep cliffs and precipices. All that is required is that we head towards the summit.

The emphasis is on small, easy improvements in the organism rather than large leaps in sophistication. Like many of Dawkins’ illustrations, the mountain-climbing analogy seems, at least superficially, to make a lot of sense. It is common for technological advances to proceed in much the same gradual, bit-by-bit fashion.

But let’s look closely at the claimed connection between the development of an eye and Dawkins’ mountain-climbing metaphor.

We arrive at this most improbable structure - the fully functioning eye - by imperceptibly small steps in improvement. No big leaps of innovation, no wild attempts at scaling ‘steep cliffs or precipices’, just an easy meander up the gentle grassy slopes until the summit of optical sophistication is reached.

To support his case Dawkins describes in some detail a computer study conducted by Swedish biologists Dan Nilsson and Susanne Pelger. These scientists devised a computer program to simulate the evolution of what they describe as a simple eye representation. Remember, this is a virtual, not a real, eye.

They begin with a 2-dimensional picture of a flat layer of imaginary light-sensitive cells sandwiched between an imaginary transparent layer and an imaginary dark backing layer. The two biologists admit in their study that they don’t pretend to explain how the light-sensitive cells that their model commences with might have evolved. This is entirely understandable as the origin of the first living cell remains just one of the innumerable mysteries of the biological world, and how any became light-sensitive is also unknown.

The model works (and always in a virtual sense) by producing at random small percentage changes in the degree of curvature of the sandwich, in the diameter of a light-restricting aperture, in the thickness of the transparent layer, and in the local value of its refractive index (light-bending ability). The computer model is programmed to perform a simple calculation of the sandwich’s optical resolving power every time a change occurs at random in the three variables noted above. This is done by a simple ray-tracing procedure, one familiar to any physics student.

In a relatively small number of steps (1829 steps if each step involved a 1% change in any of the variables) the computer model is shown to transform the flat sandwich through continuous minor improvements into a configuration representing a virtual, focussed eye lens. Dawkins claims this transformation of the initially flat configuration into a focussed configuration by a series of tiny but connected steps is exactly analogous to climbing the mountain of biological complexity: “Going upwards means mutating, one small step at a time, and only accepting mutations that improve optical performance. So, where do we get to? Pleasingly, through a smooth upward pathway, starting from no proper eye at all, we reach a familiar fish eye, complete with lens.” (Climbing Mt. Improbable, p. 151.)

However, any careful reader will immediately see that Dawkins’ claim to explain eye evolution involves a most blatant transgression of the rules of his own materialistic science. Note how logic requires him to impose a highly artificial and purposeful constraint on the behaviour of the eye model: he inserts the crucial proviso of “only accepting mutations that improve optical performance”. In terms of his mountain-climbing analogy, one must “aim for the summit”. He has committed a cardinal breach by introducing a profoundly personal dimension into his scientific materialism: it is persons that have aims, with the foresight to discern whether an immediate change of no use in itself heads toward a distant co-ordinated usefulness.

Ask any serious mountaineer, ask one of New Zealand’s most famous citizens - Sir Edmund Hillary: high summits are conquered only because the mountaineer has a powerful desire to get to the top. The activity is loaded with purpose. The mountaineer is possessed of a burning obsession to achieve the very difficult. Ed Hillary and Norgay Tenzing reached the summit of Everest in 1953 because they really wanted to get there!

If Richard Dawkins is required to use a metaphor such as mountain-climbing to explain the role of ‘natural’ selection then this is surely the most bare-faced admission that he really does require more than a set of purely material mechanisms to explain the evolution of complexity in the living world. ‘Aiming for the top’ is to admit to a guiding principle that cannot be expressed in terms of the impersonal processes of physics and chemistry. For a much more detailed critique of Dawkins’ approach and of scientific materialism in general, the interested reader is referred to the book How Blind is the Watchmaker? Theism or atheism: should science decide? published recently by one of the present authors.

We do know – insofar as one could know about events in the distant past that cannot be directly observed or repeated – that evolution has occurred; but we have only vague ideas of its mechanisms. It is important to keep clearly distinguished these two distinct questions. In our opinion, the mechanism postulated by neo-Darwinism is very inadequate. We agree that mutations occur (more or less randomly), but we believe the notion of selection among those mutants by "the environment" which is said to be blind and purposeless, is no better than an intellectual con trick. This main axiom of neoDarwinism is a bald unsupported assumption that what Aristotle called final cause is absent from biology. That which is officially denied by Dawkins – purpose – is quietly admitted when he talks about “aiming for the summit”, the vital missing link in modern materialistic biology.

Most educated people are aware that as soon as Darwin announced his concept of the origin of species a heated dispute arose which has been raging fitfully ever since . Our contention is that this is a phoney dispute, a series of misunderstandings; and this leads us naturally to the topic of ‘creationism’.

Creationism

The basic assumption of ‘creationism’ is:-
either God has created and sustained the universe, including all life,

or organisms have evolved (as scientific evidence strongly suggests).
This axiom is – rather obviously – unsatisfactory; the two propositions are not logical alternatives but, from the viewpoint of scientifically informed Christians, both are true. We have every right – even (as we would argue) a duty – to study with our God-given faculties the world as we find it, including the evidence of its past changes; and when we do so, we find overwhelming evidence of evolution – a fact of little or no theological significance.

The body of evidence amassed by thousands of scientists – including no small number of Christians – fills many books. As against this there exists a tiny group of works maintaining a ‘young Earth’ theory and attempting to interpret the facts on the basis of the belief that all species were created within a very short time, relatively recently.

The first comment on this confrontation must be the general principle – which Christians, especially, should never forget – that truth is not decided by voting. The fact that “creation science” is propounded by only a very tiny minority of scientists is no proof of its unreliability; remind yourself of the long series of scientific theories that have been mocked and marginalised for a period after first challenging orthodoxy, but have later gained credence. For instance, Wegener’s continental drift hypothesis was, within living memory, dismissed by the leading biologists and (more persistently) geologists, but has now become standard theory. The history of science is not merely sprinkled with but largely consists of such revolutions in theory . And indeed the idea of evolution itself was, for a while, widely rejected. Today the resistance to it among scientists is down to an extremely tiny minority. But that does not tell us whether it is true.

We suggest to readers who are outside science that this ‘creation science’ does indeed deserve the inverted commas assigned to it by Renton Maclachlan. It is not real science but a form of pseudo-science within which the facts are selectively distorted or ignored for the purpose of forcing a conclusion that cannot follow from application of the scientific method to the full array of known facts.

‘Creationist’ fundamentalists insist that the first three chapters of the Bible must only be read in a strictly literal sense. On this axiom is built the fear that evolution threatens true faith by challenging the reliability of Scripture. This is the essential confusion in the ‘creationism’ position.

Reconciling science with Christianity will require, we suggest, nothing short of the abandonment of the fundamentalism which asserts that there is always a straightforward, clearly recognised, strictly literal, reading of texts and that such a reading is the only possible reading of Scripture. The attempt to understand the Scriptures without interpretation is impossible – all communication necessarily involves interpretation. The attempt to understand the Scriptures without interpretation is doomed to failure and should be abandoned. Only if we have faith that God does not play tricks on us, either in the Scriptures or in our observations of the world he has made and sustained, can we break through to the reconciliation which is sorely needed.

This may seem a daunting challenge to some devout Christians whose feelings we have no wish to bruise.

We are puzzled at the insistence of fundamentalists on literal reading of, especially, the first three chapters of Genesis while apparently accepting poetic language in, say, Ezekiel, and in the New Testament (to take one example out of many: John the Baptist hails ‘the lamb of God’ in an important metaphor which nobody tries to take literally). We see no reason to assume that just a few parts of the Bible are devoid of symbolism, figures of speech, even poetry; indeed, on the grand difficult topics of the origins and the nature and the fate of humans we would expect, if anything, unusual recourse to such devices of communication. In dealing with the issue of origins the biblical narrative is entering territory that must surely ultimately transcend what is accessible to the human mind, and especially the mind trained in the sciences. Indeed, the sciences themselves rely on model, metaphor, symbol and analogy to picture the objects of scientific inquiry. How much more will we need pictures and symbols to present reality that lies beyond normal experience, such as the origin of creation?! The language of imagery and symbolism (picture language really) must surely play a crucial role in communicating such cosmic truths to people of all ages and times. We think it is evident that only on such a basis can the creation stories of Genesis be understood at all.

One argument against a non-literal or symbolic reading of the early chapters of Genesis cites the several references to Adam and Eve, to Cain and Abel, and to Noah in both the Gospels and elsewhere in the NT. How can both Christ and Paul speak of real figures and we then deny their historical reality? Again we need not respond to this challenge by ‘accelerating straight down the road’ of panicky literalism. Theologically there is a recognised plasticity in the meaning of the word ‘Adam’; it is far from certain that it was used in Genesis to speak only of a single first man. The symbolic, representative meaning of Adam may be much more relevant to our deeper understanding of the Genesis narratives than the secular, literal approach with its necessary exclusion of sacred, symbolic content.

It may be helpful to remind ourselves that for most of the Christian era it has been held that the Scriptures should not be available outside a very small exclusive cadre. Those who first tried to make the Bible available to the masses were victimised severely. One reason for that punitive attitude was fear that the individual Christian left to interpret Scripture will fall into error. This fear has today been supplanted by faith that the Holy Spirit will guide our prayerful reading so that on the whole we shall be better off than if interpretation and even reading of Scripture had been reserved to an elite few.

The fundamentalist claim that holy Scripture can be read without interpretation – that the reader can, and should, refrain from interpreting what is read, but should instead somehow simply take it only at ‘face value’, whatever that might actually mean – resembles that earlier belief that ordinary people cannot be entrusted to read the Scriptures at all. Indeed it is worse, in that restriction of Scripture-reading was at the time more or less feasible (if not moral) whereas to read without interpreting is actually infeasible.

We suggest that the promulgation of lay reading of the Bible has been a glorious effort doing vastly more good than harm. The fact that some extremist sects have arisen during this era of vernacular Scripture-reading hardly begins to outweigh the magnificent achievements of the many campaigns to bring the gospel, in writing as well as orally, to every corner of this world in the spirit of the Great Commission.

The Reconciliation

The key theological doctrine which evolution does not, cannot touch, is that the human being is a special creation of God, destined for relationship with him and especially loved. (Christians do not have such clear beliefs about other species, although the Bible is clear that God is the creator of all things and will bring creation as a whole to its fulfilment under the headship of Christ.) In that theological setting, our argument against ‘creationism’ is: the physical series of events whereby the species Homo sapiens came to emerge is a matter for valid investigation by science, and has little if any theological significance.

In maintaining that the holy Scriptures are inspired we wish to suggest that the ‘interpret only literally’ recipe actually leads to an impoverished understanding of the intended meaning of certain texts. Are they to be understood literally? Is there not a deeper level of sacred truth conveyed by these words? This is surely the crucial issue facing any serious student of the Bible. Has not a slavish commitment to a superficial literalism - derived very largely from our secular scientific culture with its own slavish commitment to facts, numbers and data stripped of any symbolic sacred value - hampered the discovering of the sacred meaning of the text?

To those mostly modern Christians who have become habituated to the false antinomy ‘evolution or faith’ we pass the vision of leading scientists such as Professor Morton. Evolution is, as best we can make out the facts, evidently the method whereby God has brought into this world the wonderful range of species (approx. 9/10 of them now extinct). There seems to be no good reason to resist this conclusion drawn, we believe, from a dispassionate examination of the facts revealed by an enormous body of scientific investigation.

One level on which the issue should not be decided is one’s subjective, aesthetic reactions to the two approaches. Nevertheless, we would like to say that, to our mind, the marvellous panoply of unfolding creation over aeons is surely tribute to a Creator who operates on a scale of time that hints at the eternal. Rocks as old as 3,500 million years contain evidence of organisms similar to the photosynthetic blue-green algae still functioning on earth today.

The earliest fossilised animals have been found in a complex of sedimentary rocks that stretch back more than 600 million years. These were first discovered in Australia, and have subsequently been found in South Africa, England, Siberia, and Newfoundland, and form what is called the Ediacara fossil complex. The challenge to us today is to avoid the secular temptation to pit the prescientific, religious Genesis narrative against the hard-won picture that science has unfolded during the past couple of centuries. The narrative reading of the early chapters of Genesis and the narrative reading of a genuinely-conducted science must surely speak from different vantage points. The task before us today is to interpret the Creation narratives of Genesis in the light of what has been discovered within the past couple of centuries. We beseech our fellow Christians to do so in faith that God will not let us down or play tricks with our reasoning. The truth – and only the truth – is consistent. Those who adopt the spurious axiom of Creationism (as discussed above – the assumption that one can believe in either creation or evolution but not both) are risking severe cognitive dissonance. It is a false statement which if adopted must lead to contradictions and endless trouble.

We must object to Renton Maclachlan’s attempt to enlist on the side of modern fundamentalism the great scientists Maxwell and Faraday. It is hypothetical in the worst sense to say ‘if these two were alive today they would be numbered firmly among those holding to . . . "creation science" '. This is a completely untestable, almost meaningless assertion. There can be – short of a miracle – no such thing as Faraday alive today in a position to consider the evidence now available. It is simply impossible to know how that devout (though very nonconformist) Christian would have viewed the issue as it now stands. All one can say is that, as one of the three greatest scientists of all history, Faraday earned a most illustrious reputation for honouring the facts observed by science, and did not allow interpretation of them (as they then stood) to be warped by sectarian dogma.

Ecclesiastical and Political Implications

Those who persist in ‘creationism’ often project it into civil life in objectionable ways. Militant ‘creationist’ campaigns (emanating, so far as we have traced them, out of Lubbock, Tex. and Orange County, Calif.) have attempted to purge library holdings and to censor school science curricula to protect pupils from the teaching of evolution. This is a tragic, and even menacing, confusion. Only if evolution gets taught with the false overlay of suggesting that it contradicts or weakens Christianity should it be interfered with. This is certainly the case with the materialistic explanation for evolution, i.e. neo-Darwinism, but it is certainly not so if we view evolution as the means by which God has unfolded the splendour of his creation. The compromise is readily available for secular public schools to teach evolution as science but without metaphysical comment of any sort. We Christians of course regard such a compromise as unsatisfactory.

There are, however, some leaders who wish to protract the phoney conflict. Psychologically, this mistaken approach tends to consolidate their followers by the well-known mechanism of focussing on the need for solidarity against an external enemy. But science practised with integrity is not an enemy of Christianity, and the sooner this is realised the better. The phoney war makes for bad science and for distorted religion.

Conclusion

The real intellectual battle today is scientific atheism versus biblical theism, not evolution ‘versus ‘ creation. The creation ‘versus ‘ evolution wrangle serves only to channel valuable human energy into a futile side-issue that the secular world assumes to be the defining issue upon which Christianity stands or falls. Scientific atheism (read in part, neo-Darwinism) then rides on in a posture of uncriticised intellectual triumph, gathering apparent strength in the eyes of our materialistic, irreligious culture for having exposed the absurdity of a simplistic ‘creation science’ without having its own absurd assumptions challenged.

Christians are confronted with more than enough genuine tasks to keep us busy in the service of the Lord. Billions of people around the world have never heard the Word, and about one billion are malnourished, often ill-clad and ill-housed. The church cannot justify the dedication of books, rhetoric and misdirected work in the cause of “creation science”. It is not real science, and its theological motives are confused. Let us move beyond this distraction.

Neil Broom is associate professor of Engineering, and Robert Mann was until retirement senior lecturer in Environmental Studies, in the University of Auckland.

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

Retreats into fantasy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Photo cannot be shown)

Attached closeup is courtesy Tim Vallings of Maungakaramea who has made the latest solar hot water heater of the type I reported on a decade ago.

Tim praises the simplicity of design, ease of construction and low investment involved. This would be correct The whole plurry thang is built in situ on the rafters, and is the roof for its area. I wouldn't bother in general with an area less than 6 sq m, having made a few that size, and intend to try even bigger. The marginal costs are far smaller than in e.g covering a whole roof at Camp Adair with dozens of factory-made SWH panels at a few grand each (latest EECA mag).

This pic shows new 20mm quasi-soft copper pipe stuck on the copper collector sheet by the glue I've tested (hi-T Araldite® 1 vol : washed ironsand 6 vol). As usual for a first SWH, some scraps of the black glue have found their way onto small areas of pipe; I doubt these matter much at all. Note the loops of copper wire, tightened with pliers - cheaper than copper saddles to clamp the pipe onto the sheet.

Normal retail for new copper sheet is liable to cost you ca.$700 for 6 sq m, cf. scrap copper HW cyls opened out ¾ $170 total. And of course you can sometimes get them free - but will usually have then to dispose of junk galvanised cladding & insulation.

Furthermore the new sheet has to be painted black (using e.g Wattyl epoxy matt black as Tim has chosen) whereas a mature HW cyl has a free matt black coating on the inside surface. This is not only free but also extremely tightly bonded to the copper - chemically bonded, as it is copper sulfide formed by slow corrosion over decades; good stuff ! Furthermore, there's a suspicion it may be a somewhat selective surface i.e of a thickness to impede emission of IR radiation when the metal has become hot from the trapped solar energy.

Selective matt black paint has been available, for spraying with a compressed-air gun, as reported in my Ag Eng'g Aus 1994 paper. This is not generally difficult to do in the course of constructing the SWH, but when you've got only the pipe to paint on account you've used pre-blacked sheet which certainly needs no painting, it's easier & economic to use an aerosol spray of motorcycle exhaust-pipe matt black paint. A spray-tin ca.$16 will do several big collectors. Spray so thin that you can just see a 'distant' copper gleam thru it; this will then be a more or less selective surface.

The bends in the single pipe, forming a 'zig-zag' from one bottom corner of the collector, can be made in situ using Ballingers' superb aluminium bender. A suitable hole in a hardwood 4 x 2 can also do it, with practice. The tighter the bends the more pipe will there be on the collector - a good thing - but manual bending can't readily make a much lower-radius bend than the mighty Ballinger bender. Two or more parallel pipes could conceivably be slapped onto the one collector sheet, but this hasn't been tried let alone assessed by measurements.

I intend to sell my IP in this SWH to an experienced installer of factory-made SWH. But of course no-one will get any exclusive rights to it. It's the cheapest SWH I know of except lo-efficiency 'plastic piping lying on roof' , and AFAIK no less efficient than SWH costing several times as much.

R

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

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

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

And of course, the question I sent remains ignored.

R

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

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

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

R

A Manufactured Womb of One's Own

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

The techno-womb: coming soon

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

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

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

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

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

Don't read this unless you have a strong stomach

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

The technology presses ahead

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

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

The Tree of Knowledge

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

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

Why are in vitro babies taller?

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

Stem-cell hype and arrogance: official

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Techno Sapiens Are Coming

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Join the Dinosaurs!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recommended Reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NanoEthics on the Web

www.betterhumans.com

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

www.bioethics.com
Global information source on bioethics.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Feature Article
Farewell, Church of England?
By Peter Mullen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Men

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

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

R

Friday, September 2nd, 2005

Dear Mr. Bush:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yours,

Michael Moore

New Orleans: another Bush victim

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

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

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

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

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

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

Racism and private property

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

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

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

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

War on Iraq

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

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

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

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

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

Global Warming

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

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

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

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

- -
Whangarei Peace and Justice Newsgroup
George Skuse

A Proposal For An Experiment

Let's look bluntly (I'm not sure how you look bluntly, but I'm
going to have at it) at whether women should be permitted in
ground combat. And then I will make a splendid and fair-minded
proposal, which will be applauded by radical feminists
everywhere. My guess is that I'll be awarded life membership
in the National Organization for Women.

Should women be in ground combat? Good lord no. Females have
no place in the infantry, artillery, or armor. They are too
weak, too delicate, and too small. They fade after about a day
of heavy marching and lifting. They just get in the way. They
will get men killed. The idea is bad, everyone who has been in
the military understands it, but no one has the moxie to tell
feminists "No."

Maybe you haven't been afoot in a war zone. I have. In the
mid-Sixties I was in armor in Viet Nam with the Marine Corps,
spent a fair amount of time carrying a rifle, went through
infantry training in Camp Geiger, which you don't want to try
unless you are one healthy young buck. Let me tell you some
things about ground life in war zones.

It's brutally physical. Try unloading a truck carrying mortar
rounds. Hump sixty pounds uphill in Asian heat for an hour.
When I was a Marine a flame-thrower weighed, if memory serves,
seventy-five pounds. Try humping that sucker up hills of
greasy North Carolina clay when you slide back almost as much
as you go forward and your lungs are burning till you can
hardly breathe. Try breaking track on armor when a platoon in
trouble needs fire support right now. Don't talk about it.
Don't theorize. Try it. In Lejeune we force-marched day after
day, on three and a half hours sleep. No, that's not
exaggeration. Try it.

OK. Go to your local gym. If you aren't a member, pay the ten
bucks for a day pass, and watch. Stand around for a couple of
hours, and watch what men lift. Watch what women lift. See
whether you can detect a pattern.

Women don't lift slightly less than men, and aren't slightly
weaker. They lift enormously less. They are catastrophically
weaker.

Don't take my word. Go. Look.

I'm 53, five-feet-ten, 180, in better shape than average for
my size and age, but nothing spectacular. I never amounted to
much as an athlete. I go to the gym to stay strong enough to
carry my scuba tanks. If I walked into a Marine gym and said I
was the strongest guy there, the Corps would have to be
disbanded, because you can't fight while uncontrollably
laughing.

But I'm far and away the strongest woman I've seen at Gold's
in ten years of membership.

For example, I do fifteen sloppy reps on the bench machine
with 250, and fifteen reps with 200 on the lat pull-down
machine (the chin-up machine, if you will). It's respectable.
That's all it is. There are guys there who could lift that
much with me sitting on top of it.

I've never seen a woman bench more than eighty (which is real
rare, but not even warm-up weight for a man). I don't think
I've ever seen a woman pull eighty on the lat machine. Twenty
to forty is normal for them.

Don't call me sexist. Don't tell me I'm trying to be "macho."
(Or do: I don't care.) Go look.

Want documentation? There is a branch of research called
exercise physiology, which has studied the physical capacities
of men and women in near-infinite detail (largely to help in
training athletes.) Check relative cardiac capacity,
erythrocyte counts, muscle-mass-to-body-mass. I'm not making
wild assertions. You can find all of this in any university
library.

Now, what do these physical differences mean for society
outside of the military? Almost nothing. A woman doesn't need
strength to be a surgeon, professor, senator, journalist, or
CEO. But weak women will get men killed in war. I've seen
wars. I've been on casualty wards. So have a lot of men. For
us, war isn't abstract, and getting men killed to appease
feminists isn't cute.

I promised to make a splendid proposal. Here it is. Let's take
100 males just out of basic training, and 100 females, chosen
at random. Let's take them all to Camp Lejeune, North
Carolina, in a rainy October. We'll put sixty-pound packs on
them, give them rifles and a full load-out of ammo.

Then we'll force-march them, at a fast pace set by an infantry
sergeant, until they drop. I mean literally drop: can't stand
up any longer. No stress time-outs, no little green cards to
wave, no trucks to carry their gear, no slowing down. Hump
till they fall. This is what happens in combat: grim,
unremitting physical effort with no sleep. Maybe it's humping
with rifles and seven-eighty-two gear, maybe it's breaking
track on a P-5, maybe it's unloading those miserable six-bys.
It's physical.

If the women keep up, I'll shut up. If they keep up, all
critics of putting women in the infantry will have to shut up.
Here is a wonderful opportunity for radical feminists
everywhere. But know what? I'll get a lot of screeching and
howling because of this column, accusing me of sexism and
patriarchy. What I won't get is a call by feminists to make
the test. They know what would happen.

©Fred Reed. All rights reserved.

-- and rightly so too

Cooking with the Heat of the Sun
For some people, the concept called solar cooking is a hobby. For others, it's a lifestyle change. Solar cooking uses sunlight-generated heat to prepare food.

Many solar cookers are made from household materials, such as cardboard and aluminum foil. Most are fairly inexpensive and can be made at home.

Greetings

I'm sending this request for info to members, past & present, of the hairem which contributes to supporting Dr Edric Baker CNZM, and a few others who may be interested in parts of this msg.

For those who've not seen my jottings from Edric's recent furlough, I copy them below and invite contributions. The Anglican board of missions paid for his fares, but gives no routine support and just now tells me they hang on to 4% of anything they receive for Ed. (Any who can influence that board to help more, please do.) Donations are best sent direct c/ J V T Baker, 6 Washer Ave., Whakatane. And I continue to expand my fund-raising for this hero.

I'd be grateful for any insights on the otherwise good Ms Stuart in the last para of the excerpt below. The widespread furphy that short hair on women signals lesbianism has never been true, and I think it's important not to cede the territory. It has always seemed to me that some hetX women, at some times of their lives, look best with short hairstyles, and it's unfair for ideological lesbians to take over this dimension of appearance as a political signal both unreliable & illegitimate. For instance, the excellent constable who (with her male partner) arrested me a couple month ago complained that many people assume she's a lesbian just because she has (very pretty) short hair amounting to out-Audreying Audrey.

Some ideological signals are far less objectionable. Those who intone 'Maadi' are not robbing anybody much - the famous camp near Cairo can stand the stupidity - they simply signal to each other, and to the rest of us if we pay attention, that they are ideologues of the new racism.

But to hijack a whole category of appearance - wouldn't that in fact inflate the percentage to an extent Kinsey would have admired? And it's cleverer than Kinsey in that it involves no argumentation, no grammar, no figures, nothing much that could be refuted. Goebbels would have conceded at least grudging admiration for such a furphy.

I realise some who've been kind enough to read this far will think the topic is far less important than I do. This is no surprise, and I respect of course any who make no reply. But I'd be grateful for any considered opinions.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/thepress/0,2106,3127301a4621,00.html

Bitter feminist hissy fit
15 June 2005

Alexis Stuart

God does not think like MP John Tamihere and feminism hasn't gone far enough. Men don't wake up in the morning to give power away.

One can only assume that these claims from the Wellington Town Hall explain why Telecom and Westpac chose to sponsor the 2005 Women's Convention, from June 3 to 7, their banners dwarfed by ``Lesbian Nation''.

The sponsorship from five government departments was predictable: the Ministry of Women's Affairs, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Ministry for the Environment, Statistics New Zealand and the Ministry of Health.

The Ministry of Women's Affairs armed everyone with a copy of the Action Plan for New Zealand Women, and I heard ``two ticks for Labour'' more than I care to remem ber. The conference was to have an influence on government policy, but the decisions were already made. The ideologues could then talk to themselves via the authority of a public convention.

You probably didn't know it was on. The average suburban mum wouldn't have had a clue and men weren't invited. The convention's advertising was non-advertising. It was to be an exclusive crowd.

Looking Back Moving Forward was an anniversary meeting 30 years since the 1975 United Women's Convention. Of the 550 women who attended, barely 50 were under 30. It was grey hair, expanded waistlines and short haircuts. Many of the most powerful women in the country addressed the conference: Dame Silvia Cart wright, Margaret Wilson, Dame Catherine Tizard, Margaret Shields, Marilyn Waring, Marian Hobbs and Kerry Prendergast.
...
=====

Professor Bob Elliott & I have recently been privileged to host briefly Dr Edric Baker CNZM on furlough from Bangla Desh. The said Ed is a radical pioneer of Third World rural medicine for the past 4 decade, in Viet Nam, Africa and now Bangla Desh.

Ed has declared autonomous - no longer reliant on him after 2 decades - his pioneering 'project' the Thanarbaid medical centre and is now applying all the lessons learned in his newer rural hospital & outpatients service at Kailakuri in the same district.

A seminar at N. Shore hospital impressed some medicos. Here are key figures that contribute to that effect.

BANGLA DESH 2004

150M 1/5 NZ land area 30M hard-core poor
(< U$60/mo)
Projected diabetics in 2025 500,000
In the capital Dakha is a top diabetics' hospital of the whole Muslim world - overwhelmed by the epidemic but able to supply cheap insulin to Kailakuri which is extremely helpful.

KAILAKURI 2004
Ann spend $72,000 = 24 NZ public hospital inpatients @ 3 d ea.
Staff ca50 - none paid as much as poverty defn U$60/mo
Inpatients 530
Outpatient consultations 12,000
Antenatal consultations 700
Babies delivered 110
Postnatal consultations incl nutr 1000
TB cases 100 cure rate ca90%
diabetic patients 700

There is only the one medico. Nearly all the work is done by the poor - primary school graduates, no high-school graduates - for the poor.

Edric is grappling with an epidemic of diabetes. Many cases are of a different kind than we see in NZ - not obese but emaciated adults. One diabetic of 18 could get in the Guinness Book of Records with a BMI of 9; Ed can close his thumb & finger around his biceps. We are hoping to get prominent diabetes researcher Prof Elliott over there to cooperate with the diabetics experts in that special hospital. Zinc deficiency is a possible cause, which would not be v difficult to counter.

You will have the thrill of involvement, if only marginal, in illegality: the said Ed has given up on applying for permits from the exceedingly corrupt Bangla Desh govt, so his hospitals have been illegal for some y. They don't directly harass him, but e.g when he applies for an *exit* visa to come home on furlough they delay for months hoping for bribes that are never forthcoming.

I rate the said Ed as a top Kiwi, and indeed I strongly suspect he is one of the most advanced Third World medicos of all history. Surrounded overwhelmingly by Muslims, whom he mainly serves, this saintly bachelor organises formidable medical services on precious little money. He sings the praises of dung-mud floors as against concrete. Electricity is absent. Roofs have been thatch till recently, but now thatch-growing land has been converted to cassava and pineapple to such an extent that tin is no more expensive. This is good news in the sense that a tin roof is the biggest component of my solar airconditioning & cosmic cooling system which I hope to slap on at least the main hospital bldg, to give inpatients cooled, insect-free air at night. The requisite 0.1kW of electricity should be affordable from photovoltaic panels & storage-batteries; we may as well add a few electric lights while we're about it. My solar water-heater, which is particularly cheap, would also be a boon as all hot water at Kailakuri is now heated on pots over open fires.

If you have any possible influence with the Anglican Board of Missions, please exert it. They should be supporting Ed more.

A govt subsidy via Christian World Service was for a fixed half-decade term, and of course a senior admired male medico will - in the Cartwright era - be severely handicapped for further NZ govt help. It is appalling that this world-leading medical missionary gets no routine money from our govt.

The hand-to-mouth existence Edric has led for 2 decades should be relieved by a medium-term grant from some suitable NZ govt agency. But in the short run money should be sent in care of his father the former govt dept head J V T Baker, 6 Washer Ave., Whakatane.

Edric is taking the spirit of Samuel Marsden back to the world - into a mission field which is in some ways harder than what Sam found in 1814. Please do all you can to help.
--

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 Robt Mann
http://www.kuratrading.com/HTMLArticles/writings.htm

Somalian arrives in Manukau City as a new immigrant to New Zealand.

He stops the first person he sees walking down the street and says,

"Thank you Mr. NewZealandman for letting me in this country!"

But the passer-by says "You are mistaken, I am a Pakistani".

The man goes on and encounters another passer-by.

"Thank you for having such a beautiful country here in New Zealand!"

The person says "I noKiwi. I flom Hong Kong"

The new arrival walks further, and the next person he sees he stops, shakes

his hand and says

"Thank you for the wonderful Kiwiland!"

That person puts up his hand and says "I am from Iran, I am not Kiwi!"

He finally sees a nice lady and asks suspiciously,

"Are you a New Zealand citizen?"

She says, "No, I from Tonga!"

So he is puzzled, and asks her,

"Where are all the New Zealanders?"

The Tongan lady looks at her watch, shrugs, and says...

"Probably at work."

I had heard Colt was in a bit of financial trouble with share prices down, didnt know sales were down so low, with 300million population about 10% gay and stupid and judging by the level of retail advertising the other 70% must be just stupid, it seems entirely logical that 20% need protection.

[name withheld to protect the guilty]

Original Message:
On 9/8/05, Robt Mann wrote:

Please send news releases, etc to:

*Items Web-mounted on Wednesday, 7 September 2005****


Study: 1.7 million children in US live in homes with loaded guns
The first comprehensive survey of gun storage in US homes has
been published in the journal Paediatrics

My first theology paper - with no less of a secret coach than Professor J E Morton

Also a glimpse of what I soon had to deal with after returning to regular church participation. These are in the much-superior WP program that was widely used around academia worldwide, before Gates' ghastly pile of crap M$W 6 became a sort of de facto standard. Let me know if you can't crack 'em.

R

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

A NOTE ON FEMINISM AND CHRISTIANITY

Robert Mann

'God-Talk and the Liberation of Women', Susana Carryer's feminist article in Real World 2, deserves some comments. Of Ms Carryer's key statements I quote and comment briefly upon a half-dozen. Then, I offer a glimpse of useful literature on 'the liberation of women'.

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

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

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

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

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

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

To read into this historical given a universal ontological necessity that Christ (or any adequate manifestation of God) had to be masculine would be to go further than the Church has ever officially sought to. But to go to the other extreme and term it a mere accident entails an arrogant posture toward God of criticism which I, for one, find preposterous. God's choice within his creative process to make Jesus male really is a God-given fact not up for questioning. If the world is as God made it, trammelled by us sinners, we are faced with the sufficiently large task of discerning truly what are the facts of providence; speculation about whether Jesus could have been female seems, at best, peculiarly vacuous and evasive of reality.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If we want to find Paul's convictions on the plane that counts eternally, we must go to the splendid Gal. iii 28-9: "There is no such thing as Jew and Greek, slave and freeman, male and female, for you are all one person in Christ Jesus". Through the centuries this has been the normative text of conduct for any society to be called decently Christian. The first couple - Jew and Gentile - was given recognition in Christian practice during the first century; 'bond and free' took longer, until the 19th century. Let us work to see that 'male and female' become reconciled in the full Galatians sense in our time. Feminism is, on the whole, antagonistic to that Christian challenge.

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

SOME GOOD SOURCES

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

addendum 2003 :
Hosie, Dorothea 'Jesus and Woman'. Hodder & Stoughton 1946; rev. edn 1956.

34 Norana Ave.
Remuera, Auckland 5
17-5-93

Bishop Bruce Gilberd
Diocese of Auckland

Dear Bishop Gilberd,

I give below the full text of a letter which I wrote on 23-3-93 to A.D. News. The published version omitted the final paragraph of comments.

I dare say the editor (with whom I am, barely, acquainted) will say that shortage of space necessitated the deletion. I cannot fully assess any such claim, but I do think that if it were the case then I should have been asked to provide a briefer version. I confess to the suspicion that not space but ideology was the reason.

Editor
A.D. News
P O Box 37 242
Auckland

Dear Jill,

The Feb. 1993 A.D. News reproduced a cartoon, to illustrate the YWCA-distributed video "designed to give women increased confidence". The cartoon appears to depict an old woman brushing off a young male attacker who has approached her from behind. The attacker is flattened by a blow, with a stick, to the attacker's groin; the woman walks on.

The impression conveyed by the cartoon is that deft, almost casual, violent retaliation is likely to flatten the attacker and thus protect the woman from further attack. That depiction is, I believe, a gravely misleading fantasy. I am left wondering what sort of person would try to build confidence on such a misleading basis. The chances of crippling the attacker are poor (especially if the defender has such "increased confidence" as to refrain from even looking over her shoulder, as in the cartoon!). As a man who has been in a few fights, I believe that to attempt such a blow, so far from being likely to incapacitate temporarily, is more likely to provoke far worse violence.

The video which the cartoon apparently exemplifies is stated in your story to have been produced "with instructions from" a leader of the women's self-defence trade which has been reported on TV as teaching women to prepare for possible attacks by practising throws, holds etc. to the chant 'hate men'. Related slogans include 'women need men like [sic] fish need bicycles' and of course the matchlessly hateful 'all men are rapists'. That such a vicious deluded political trend could have hijacked the Young Women's Christian Association illustrates how many have strayed, especially during this last quarter-century, from well-founded traditional understandings of gender. Much more needs to be written about this important topic; meanwhile, I object to the printing of this mischievous cartoon in a church paper.

====

34 Norana Ave.
Remuera, Auckland 5
-7-93
Bishop Bruce Gilberd
Diocese of Auckland
P O Box 37 242
Auckland

Dear Bishop Gilberd,

I was disappointed and saddened by your reply of 22 June to my complaint about censorship in A.D. News. As with the original complaint, I regret bothering you; but I do think further reasoning is warranted by this little matter, and I hope to find from it some new line of contribution to the church.

I note that no justification whatever is offered for the censorship. Nevertheless you chose to endorse, ex post facto, the evident wrong done. I am afraid that the matter appears therefore to be a classic rubber-stamping by a senior officer, without any attempt to deal with the question of apparent injustice.

When I discussed with Jill Brewis my then-forthcoming letter for A.D. News, she asked whether I might write something on my experiences in returning to formal worship after a quarter-century (foolishly) out of it, I thus have to remind myself that it is capable of error - most frustratingly, gratuitous political compromise where vigorous resistance to political fashion is needed. The crazed political ideology which you have (innocently, I assume) gone along with in this case is thus shown to be even more influential than I had seen.

On the matter of "conspiracy theories", the latest Anti-Empire Report
of William Blum has a piece which I reproduce here.

LAUGHING OFF CONSPIRACY THEORIES

During the cold war when Washington was confronted with a charge of
covert American misbehavior abroad, it was common to imply that the Russkis
or some other nefarious commies were behind the spread of such tales; this
was usually enough to discredit the story in the mind of any right-thinking
American. Since that period, the standard defense against uncomfortable
accusations and questions has been a variation of: “Oh, that sounds like a
conspiracy theory." (Chuckle, chuckle) Every White House press secretary
learns that before his first day on the job.

I'm reminded of this because of the latest development in the
long-running case of the bombing of PanAm 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in
1988, which took the lives of 270 people. For well over a year afterward,
the US and the UK insisted that Iran, Syria, and a Palestinian organization
had been behind the bombing. Washington and London officials insisted they
were “confident", “totally satisfied", they had "hard evidence" ... until
the buildup to the Gulf War came along in 1990 and the support of Iran and
Syria was needed. Suddenly, in October 1990, the US declared that it was
Libya -- the Arab state least supportive of the US build-up to the Gulf War
and the sanctions imposed against Iraq -- that was behind the bombing after
all. Since then, those who have questioned this new official version have
been branded (choke, gasp) “conspiracy theorists".

Eventually, two Libyans were formally indicted in the US and Scotland,
tried in the Hague, with one, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi, being found
guilty in 2001 and sentenced to life in prison. The trial was a genuine
farce, which I’ve discussed in detail. (“I am absolutely astounded,
astonished," said the Scottish law professor who was the architect of the
trial. “I was extremely reluctant to believe that any Scottish judge would
convict anyone, even a Libyan, on the basis of such evidence."){6}

The key piece of evidence linking Libya to the crime was a tiny
fragment of circuit board, allegedly from a timing device or detonator,
which investigators just happened to find in a wooded area many miles from
Lockerbie some time after the atrocity. Now, a former Scottish police chief
has come forth and admitted that this evidence was fabricated. The CIA
planted it, he said. Morever, a key prosecution expert witness has been
called into question after it was reported that three other cases had been
quashed because his evidence had been discredited.{7} But anyone who’s
been following the Lockerbie case closely for years doesn’t need these new
revelations to make him seriously doubt the official version.

So the next time you hear an administration spokesperson chuckling
over someone questioning the government’s explanation for some complex
happening, keep in mind that the trivialization of conspiracy theories may
itself be a conspiracy.

Based on a careful search of the Lexis-Nexis database, it appears that
not one word of these new revelations has appeared in any American
newspaper. That’s not a conspiracy. But it does say something about the
way the American media works. Examples of widespread suppression in the
United States of important news stories originating abroad are numerous and
almost always involve matters which reflect negatively on American foreign
policy; the recent flap about the Downing Street
Memos is another case in point.

Postscript: It’s most ironic that for 15 years the United States has
in effect been shielding Iran as the mastermind behind the PanAm bombing.
It’s difficult to see how Washington can ever admit to this particular lie
that it’s been living, but I imagine that at the appropriate moment
something will be “discovered", like the fragment of circuit board.

And by the way, Libya has never confessed to having carried out the
act. They’ve only taken “responsibility", in the hope of getting various
sanctions against them ended.

-------------------------------------------
William Blum is the author of:
Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2
Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower
West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir
Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire

Previous Anti-Empire Reports can be read at this website.
To add yourself to this mailing list simply send an email to
with "add" in the subject line. I'd like your name and city
in the message, but that's optional. I ask for your city only in case I'll
be speaking in your area.
Or put "remove" in the subject line to do the opposite.
Any part of this report may be disseminated without permission. I'd
appreciate it if the website were mentioned.
-------------------------------------------

A couple useful comments from the (generally weak) Science For the People list:

Geo wrote:
>dismissing "conspiracy theorists" as crackpots is precisely
>what the corporate media and the government "spokespersons" -- the hired
>professional liars -- do in their efforts to legitimize the totally
>illegitimate dominant power structures.

Right on Geo.

It's an odd fad of the last few decades to sneer at any hint of
conspiracy, as tho' all conspiracies are known to be now extinct and
therefore any suggestion of a conspiracy operating these days must
automatically be false. This fad is very widespread & influential.

The generally dubious Sagan rose above himself in the section on
this topic in his The Dragons of Eden (1978 I think). He said that in
times of political ferment conspiracies are observed to occur - more of
the right than of the left, to judge by recent USA experience, he bravely
added.

An example he then cited was the first USA Secretary of Defense,
James Forrestal, who was committed as insane on account of his persistent
belief that he was being followed everywhere by agents. He went to his
death out a 9th-floor window of Walter Reed Army Hospital, in somewhat
mysterious circumstances. It was soon afterwards found that he had indeed
been followed everywhere by Israeli agents (who feared he might attempt
secret agreements with Arab agents). Sagan coyly adds that Forrestal had
'other problems' but his mental health was not aided by the
characterisation of his valid perceptions as insane.

Then Sagan's amusing punchline: a psychiatrist friend of his was
wont to quip at dinner parties "in America today, if you're not a little
paranoid you're out of your mind".

It is ridiculous to insinuate that no conspiracies now occur.
Anybody who pulls this stunt is at least grossly ignorant - or worse.

R

=====

May I rehearse a few truisms on conspiracy theories?

In the sense of believing that powerful groups do some very sinister
things secretly, we must all be conpiracy theorists. Some of the
sinister things are nutty and screwball --like the President of the
US conspiring with the CIA, drug lords, government agencies of Iran
& Israel, and Iranian arms smugglers to arm counter-revolutionaries
-- what could be nuttier? -- so we must all be believers in nutty,
screwball conspiracies. Not being nutty ourselves, we must keep in
mind that most of the time we DON'T KNOW WHICH sinister things the
conspirators are doing. Not being hostile to logic and science, we
must disbelieve those conspiracy theories that are SELF-CONTRADICTORY
or physically impossible, but we can't tell which nutty theories to
discount by the degree of NUTTINESS. This is the Oliver North Law.
Only, please -- the evil forces are not doing ALL the sinister things
that they are evil enough to do; only some of them; we have to try
to watch them and figure out which ones. A little bit of Occam's
Razor may help.
Chandler Davis

This might be of interest. If you want to sign up for the newsletter or see back issues, go to the website.
http://www.tyndale.cam.ac.uk/Tyndale/TTech.htm
______________

Read Tyndale library books online

The Tyndale Library catalogue lists almost every Biblical Studies book worth reading.

Now you can read a large proportion of them online, thanks to Amazon and Google.
Just look up the book at www.TynCat.com and click on the link to read it online.
Passing on this news will transform you into an 'internet guru' in your community.

It is still easier and quicker to browse the books at Tyndale House Library, but until you can
come for a visit, we'll make sure you can read as many of our books as possible on your computer.

1) Reading books online at TynCat
2) How to use Amazon and Google online books
3) Google plans to scan 50,000,000 books!
4) Other sites with significant online books
1) Reading books online at TynCat
How many commentaries on Corinthians do you have in your office?
OK, too many. But often you don't have the one you need. So do the following:
- go to www.TynCat.com
- in "Title Keywords" type: Commentary Corinthians
- click on "Search TynCat"
- almost all of the commentaries listed on this page can be read online

Try the first, by Murray Harris (a former Warden of Tyndale House)
- the note on the left says it isn't at Amazon, so click on "Google"
- this finds it at Print.Google, along with several similar books
- click to read it! (we will see how to get the most out of Print.Google below)

Try the next, by Alan Johnson (a Tyndale Fellowship member)
- it is at Amazon, so click on the word "Amazon" (not on the picture)
- and there is the full text (we'll see how to get the most out of it below)

Try the next, by David Garland, and you find the problem
- when you click on Amazon you get an apology that they haven't added it yet
- this usually means the publisher has given permission, so it is worth trying later

The next one, by Frank Matera is there. And many more...

2) How to use Amazon and Google online books
You probably don't need these instructions, but they include some useful tips.

To see the pages at Amazon you need to sign up with them, with a credit card
- this doesn't mean that you will be charged anything, but they want to know that you could buy the book if you wanted to.

Try Frank Matera's commentary on Amazon
- when the cover displays, click on the right of it to 'turn the page over'
- turn over three pages till you get to the Contents page.
- let's look at the start of 2 Cor.4, which he titles "Paul's Apostolic Integrity" (p.97-)
- so type "Apostolic Integrity" into the search box right at the top of the page and click Go.
- this does a concordance search for every page using these words.
- look for p.97 (it is on the third page of results) and click on it.
- now that you are there, you can read forwards or backwards three pages
- if you want to go beyond this, look for a significant word on that page and search for it

Now try Murray Harris' book on Print.Google
- click on the cover at the top of the Google list, and you go to the Contents
- pick out the section you want and type significant words into the search box on the left
- you will have to sign on with a Google account to use this - but it is free
- like Amazon, you can turn over two leaves before you have to search again.

With both, you cannot print the pages, or save them, or read long stretches without interruption
- but you wouldn't want to read too much of the book on a computer screen anyway.
- if you find the book so useful that you get frustrated, you'll buy a copy.
- please use the price comparisons on the Tyndale site to search 1000+ outlets

3) Google plans to scan 50,000,000 books!

Google books come in three styles
1) Out of Copyright: 100% of the pages are scanned and readable
2) Copyrighted with Publisher's Donation: 90% of the pages are scanned and readable
- the other 10% are visible on Amazon, if they have scanned it, so always try them first
3) Copyrighted, with no permission from the publisher: only a few paragraphs are visible
- this is Google's interpretation of the legal term 'fair use', which has got the lawyers excited

Amazon wants to sell books, and Google wants to add material to their search engine.
But why would publishers and authors want to allow free copies of their books on the web?
They get free publicity and shelf-space in the largest bookshop on the planet - the web.
I always take a lot of trouble to put my books on the web, but for 6 months one publisher
forced me to remove a book, and the sales went down - till I put the book back on the web.
Many Christian publishers, such as Crossway now routinely give all their books to Google
(see Google's interesting page at https://print.google.com/publisher/crossway).

Google has plans to scan complete libraries and substantial collections from others
These include high-profile academic libraries and libraries in a number of countries, including
the whole of the University of Michigan Library, plus substantial collections from the
University libraries of Harvard, Stanford, Oxford (Bodleian) and the New York Public Library.

Students already do a lot of their research online. Now their legs could atrophy completely.

4) Other sites with significant online books
Google accepts books in French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch, and Portuguese
but they make up a small proportion of the total. In response to this:
France is imitating Google with their own scanning programme: see http://gallica.bnf.fr/.
German publishers are planning their own Volltextsuche Online (I haven't found it yet)

Google Scholar - http://scholar.google.com/ - finds results from scholarly sources only
- not another book collection, but a very useful service which filters out most rubbish

Project Guttenberg - most copyright-free books on the web: http://textual.net/access.gutenberg#E

For Biblical Studies, there are a few significant collections of free books. Links collected at
http://www.tyndale.cam.ac.uk/Tyndale/links_books.htm#OnlineBooks

Some commercial sources (pay per book or subscription)
Powells Books - general Christian eBooks http://www.powells.com/subsection/ChristianityeBooks.html
Questia - general college books with a good Religion section http://www.questia.com/library/religion/
EEBO - Virtually every English book from 1473-1700. http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home
Ebrary - a lot of CUP books and other publishers: http://shop.ebrary.com/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/feature/story/0,13026,1559743,00.html

One side can be wrong

Accepting 'intelligent design' in science classrooms would have disastrous consequences, warn Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne
Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne
Thursday September 1, 2005
The Grauniad

It sounds so reasonable, doesn't it? Such a modest proposal. Why not teach "both sides" and let the children decide for themselves? As President Bush said, "You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes." At first hearing, everything about the phrase "both sides" warms the hearts of educators like ourselves.

One of us spent years as an Oxford tutor and it was his habit to choose controversial topics for the students' weekly essays. They were required to go to the library, read about both sides of an argument, give a fair account of both, and then come to a balanced judgment in their essay. The call for balance, by the way, was always tempered by the maxim, "When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly half way between. It is possible for one side simply to be wrong."

As teachers, both of us have found that asking our students to analyse controversies is of enormous value to their education. What is wrong, then, with teaching both sides of the alleged controversy between evolution and creationism or "intelligent design" (ID)? And, by the way, don't be fooled by the disingenuous euphemism. There is nothing new about ID. It is simply creationism camouflaged with a new name to slip (with some success, thanks to loads of tax-free money and slick public-relations professionals) under the radar of the US Constitution's mandate for separation between church and state.

Why, then, would two lifelong educators and passionate advocates of the "both sides" style of teaching join with essentially all biologists in making an exception of the alleged controversy between creation and evolution? What is wrong with the apparently sweet reasonableness of "it is only fair to teach both sides"? The answer is simple. This is not a scientific controversy at all. And it is a time-wasting distraction because evolutionary science, perhaps more than any other major science, is bountifully endowed with genuine controversy.

Among the controversies that students of evolution commonly face, these are genuinely challenging and of great educational value: neutralism versus selectionism in molecular evolution; adaptationism; group selection; punctuated equilibrium; cladism; "evo-devo"; the "Cambrian Explosion"; mass extinctions; interspecies competition; sympatric speciation; sexual selection; the evolution of sex itself; evolutionary psychology; Darwinian medicine and so on. The point is that all these controversies, and many more, provide fodder for fascinating and lively argument, not just in essays but for student discussions late at night.

Intelligent design is not an argument of the same character as these controversies. It is not a scientific argument at all, but a religious one. It might be worth discussing in a class on the history of ideas, in a philosophy class on popular logical fallacies, or in a comparative religion class on origin myths from around the world. But it no more belongs in a biology class than alchemy belongs in a chemistry class, phlogiston in a physics class or the stork theory in a sex education class. In those cases, the demand for equal time for "both theories" would be ludicrous. Similarly, in a class on 20th-century European history, who would demand equal time for the theory that the Holocaust never happened?

So, why are we so sure that intelligent design is not a real scientific theory, worthy of "both sides" treatment? Isn't that just our personal opinion? It is an opinion shared by the vast majority of professional biologists, but of course science does not proceed by majority vote among scientists. Why isn't creationism (or its incarnation as intelligent design) just another scientific controversy, as worthy of scientific debate as the dozen essay topics we listed above? Here's why.

If ID really were a scientific theory, positive evidence for it, gathered through research, would fill peer-reviewed scientific journals. This doesn't happen. It isn't that editors refuse to publish ID research. There simply isn't any ID research to publish. Its advocates bypass normal scientific due process by appealing directly to the non-scientific public and - with great shrewdness - to the government officials they elect.

The argument the ID advocates put, such as it is, is always of the same character. Never do they offer positive evidence in favour of intelligent design. All we ever get is a list of alleged deficiencies in evolution. We are told of "gaps" in the fossil record. Or organs are stated, by fiat and without supporting evidence, to be "irreducibly complex": too complex to have evolved by natural selection.

In all cases there is a hidden (actually they scarcely even bother to hide it) "default" assumption that if Theory A has some difficulty in explaining Phenomenon X, we must automatically prefer Theory B without even asking whether Theory B (creationism in this case) is any better at explaining it. Note how unbalanced this is, and how it gives the lie to the apparent reasonableness of "let's teach both sides". One side is required to produce evidence, every step of the way. The other side is never required to produce one iota of evidence, but is deemed to have won automatically, the moment the first side encounters a difficulty - the sort of difficulty that all sciences encounter every day, and go to work to solve, with relish.

What, after all, is a gap in the fossil record? It is simply the absence of a fossil which would otherwise have documented a particular evolutionary transition. The gap means that we lack a complete cinematic record of every step in the evolutionary process. But how incredibly presumptuous to demand a complete record, given that only a minuscule proportion of deaths result in a fossil anyway.

The equivalent evidential demand of creationism would be a complete cinematic record of God's behaviour on the day that he went to work on, say, the mammalian ear bones or the bacterial flagellum - the small, hair-like organ that propels mobile bacteria. Not even the most ardent advocate of intelligent design claims that any such divine videotape will ever become available.

Biologists, on the other hand, can confidently claim the equivalent "cinematic" sequence of fossils for a very large number of evolutionary transitions. Not all, but very many, including our own descent from the bipedal ape Australopithecus. And - far more telling - not a single authentic fossil has ever been found in the "wrong" place in the evolutionary sequence. Such an anachronistic fossil, if one were ever unearthed, would blow evolution out of the water.

As the great biologist J B S Haldane growled, when asked what might disprove evolution: "Fossil rabbits in the pre-Cambrian." Evolution, like all good theories, makes itself vulnerable to disproof. Needless to say, it has always come through with flying colours.

Similarly, the claim that something - say the bacterial flagellum - is too complex to have evolved by natural selection is alleged, by a lamentably common but false syllogism, to support the "rival" intelligent design theory by default. This kind of default reasoning leaves completely open the possibility that, if the bacterial flagellum is too complex to have evolved, it might also be too complex to have been created. And indeed, a moment's thought shows that any God capable of creating a bacterial flagellum (to say nothing of a universe) would have to be a far more complex, and therefore statistically improbable, entity than the bacterial flagellum (or universe) itself - even more in need of an explanation than the object he is alleged to have created.

If complex organisms demand an explanation, so does a complex designer. And it's no solution to raise the theologian's plea that God (or the Intelligent Designer) is simply immune to the normal demands of scientific explanation. To do so would be to shoot yourself in the foot. You cannot have it both ways. Either ID belongs in the science classroom, in which case it must submit to the discipline required of a scientific hypothesis. Or it does not, in which case get it out of the science classroom and send it back into the church, where it belongs.

In fact, the bacterial flagellum is certainly not too complex to have evolved, nor is any other living structure that has ever been carefully studied. Biologists have located plausible series of intermediates, using ingredients to be found elsewhere in living systems. But even if some particular case were found for which biologists could offer no ready explanation, the important point is that the "default" logic of the creationists remains thoroughly rotten.

There is no evidence in favour of intelligent design: only alleged gaps in the completeness of the evolutionary account, coupled with the "default" fallacy we have identified. And, while it is inevitably true that there are incompletenesses in evolutionary science, the positive evidence for the fact of evolution is truly massive, made up of hundreds of thousands of mutually corroborating observations. These come from areas such as geology, paleontology, comparative anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, ethology, biogeography, embryology and - increasingly nowadays - molecular genetics.

The weight of the evidence has become so heavy that opposition to the fact of evolution is laughable to all who are acquainted with even a fraction of the published data. Evolution is a fact: as much a fact as plate tectonics or the heliocentric solar system.

Why, finally, does it matter whether these issues are discussed in science classes? There is a case for saying that it doesn't - that biologists shouldn't get so hot under the collar. Perhaps we should just accept the popular demand that we teach ID as well as evolution in science classes. It would, after all, take only about 10 minutes to exhaust the case for ID, then we could get back to teaching real science and genuine controversy.

Tempting as this is, a serious worry remains. The seductive "let's teach the controversy" language still conveys the false, and highly pernicious, idea that there really are two sides. This would distract students from the genuinely important and interesting controversies that enliven evolutionary discourse. Worse, it would hand creationism the only victory it realistically aspires to. Without needing to make a single good point in any argument, it would have won the right for a form of supernaturalism to be recognised as an authentic part of science. And that would be the end of science education in America.

Arguments worth having ...

The "Cambrian Explosion"

Although the fossil record shows that the first multicellular animals lived about 640m years ago, the diversity of species was low until about 530m years ago. At that time there was a sudden explosion of many diverse marine species, including the first appearance of molluscs, arthropods, echinoderms and vertebrates. "Sudden" here is used in the geological sense; the "explosion" occurred over a period of 10m to 30m years, which is, after all, comparable to the time taken to evolve most of the great radiations of mammals. This rapid diversification raises fascinating questions; explanations include the evolution of organisms with hard parts (which aid fossilisation), the evolutionary "discovery" of eyes, and the development of new genes that allowed parts of organisms to evolve independently.

The evolutionary basis of human behaviour

The field of evolutionary psychology (once called "sociobiology") maintains that many universal traits of human behaviour (especially sexual behaviour), as well as differences between individuals and between ethnic groups, have a genetic basis. These traits and differences are said to have evolved in our ancestors via natural selection. There is much controversy about these claims, largely because it is hard to reconstruct the evolutionary forces that acted on our ancestors, and it is unethical to do genetic experiments on modern humans.

Sexual versus natural selection

Although evolutionists agree that adaptations invariably result from natural selection, there are many traits, such as the elaborate plumage of male birds and size differences between the sexes in many species, that are better explained by "sexual selection": selection based on members of one sex (usually females) preferring to mate with members of the other sex that show certain desirable traits. Evolutionists debate how many features of animals have resulted from sexual as opposed to natural selection; some, like Darwin himself, feel that many physical features differentiating human "races" resulted from sexual selection.

The target of natural selection

Evolutionists agree that natural selection usually acts on genes in organisms - individuals carrying genes that give them a reproductive or survival advantage over others will leave more descendants, gradually changing the genetic composition of a species. This is called "individual selection". But some evolutionists have proposed that selection can act at higher levels as well: on populations (group selection), or even on species themselves (species selection). The relative importance of individual versus these higher order forms of selection is a topic of lively debate.

Natural selection versus genetic drift

Natural selection is a process that leads to the replacement of one gene by another in a predictable way. But there is also a "random" evolutionary process called genetic drift, which is the genetic equivalent of coin-tossing. Genetic drift leads to unpredictable changes in the frequencies of genes that don't make much difference to the adaptation of their carriers, and can cause evolution by changing the genetic composition of populations. Many features of DNA are said to have evolved by genetic drift. Evolutionary geneticists disagree about the importance of selection versus drift in explaining features of organisms and their DNA. All evolutionists agree that genetic drift can't explain adaptive evolution. But not all evolution is adaptive.

Further reading

www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc
User-friendly guide to evolution

www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/jacNR.pdf
Critique of Intelligent Design movement, published in New Republic

Climbing Mount Improbable
Richard Dawkins (illustrations by Lalla Ward), Penguin 1997

Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design
Barbara C Forrest and Paul R Gross, Oxford University Press, 2003

· Richard Dawkins is Charles Simonyi professor of the public understanding of science at Oxford University, and Jerry Coyne is a professor in the department of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago
Richard Dawkins' book 'The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life' is published by Phoenix in paperback today priced £9.99.

Dear Shareholder

For your interest, below is a copy of a media release which we issued today:

INSURERS TO PAY FOR WINDFLOW TURBINE DAMAGE

Windflow Technology's insurers will pay the full cost of reinstating its prototype turbine that was severely damaged by a freak wind shift in March. Insurers NZI are processing a progress payment of $395,000, and Windflow expects the final cost of reinstatement to exceed $500,000.

"Our insurer's decision is independent confirmation that a primary cause of failure was the extreme wind shift," said Windflow's Chief Executive Officer Geoff Henderson. "This decision is good news both technically and financially."

The company recognises that the wind shift which happened once, could happen again. "Consequently, we've redesigned our control system and made the joint that failed more robust, so that our turbine will survive similar freak conditions," Mr Henderson said. "We have not increased the weight of the turbine in solving the problem, so we still retain our competitive advantages over imported turbines."

Windflow has erected its redesigned prototype and is commissioning the new control system before recommencing its international testing and certification programme.

"We're back on track to complete the first turbines for the Te Rere Hau wind farm this summer," Mr Henderson said.

The Company's wholly owned subsidiary, NZ Windfarms has a resource consent to place 97 Windflow turbines on the Te Rere Hau wind farm near Palmerston North, and intends to release its Initial Public Offering later this year.

For further information please refer to the Company's Annual Report to June 2005 which was released today to the NZAX and is available on our website at http://www.windflow.co.nz/investorRelations/financialReports.html or contact:

Tim Armitage
tim@armi.co.nz
Phone 03 365 8960 ext 110

KATRINA ROTTEN TO THE CORP.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hello folks

Bring back the Cttee to Review Power Requirements®! Power Planning Cttee, come back - all is forgiven ...

Incompetent - considerably; furtive - to an extent obnoxious to Drs Court, O'Sullivan, Mann, etc; out of touch with independent experts, sure (esp if mere unambitious biochemists, physical chemists, etc); but at least they pubd annual graphs with specific figures in tables.

Today 'demand' growth 150 MW/y or 200 MW/y is 'forecast' with no author let alone disclosed model; Keith Turner continues NZED-type gigantism to get windpower a bad name; and many other aspects of grid management are lost from democratic contro. Actual load growth is not recently summarized in a way similar to my summary in Forest & Bird (attached) a decade ago;.

For several years I've been urging those best placed in Wellington to revise that 1,000-MW surplus capacity. In order to assess any claimed need for power stations, time-series graphs of facts and of projections must be interpreted. There is far more secrecy about these figures than the NZED's, compounded by a peculiar reluctance among conservationists to get a true picture.

I can't help wondering why those best placed to organise up-to-date figures have not done so. An obvious opportunity was to append recent figures to the report of Jeanette's parltry cttee relating to Project Aqua. And she could still get the figures fetched by parltry research staff. Perhaps one or two other MPs would join her in ordering the little project. Dr Williams the servant of Parlt might even get around to compiling such figures.

I've even rec'd a quip, from one of those refusing to compile the figures, that my F&B article is wrong about embodied energy in appliances that can be left in 'sleep' modes (TV sets, computers, etc). But when I ask where this 'correction' comes from, no ref is forthcoming.

Bring back the NZED! ... Reclaim Rutherford House! ... As a main critic of the 'Blakers sr.' era of the NZED, I of all people say
* the grid should be coherently managed,
* there should again be a man with a dirty big ammeter in a hi-security room and multimode links to order the power stations to prepare to come on line,
* there should again be readily pubd tables & graphs of electricity consumption & generation,
* additional generators on the grid should be planned, not left to market furphies,
* actual & surplus capacities should be widely known,
* grid instabilities should be a major R&D topic, with synchronous alternators in windmills playing a helpful role,
* any new generation should be windpower - for at least the next GW.

It has often fallen to me to point out a distressing or distasteful mess, and suggest ways to improve things. This role can be seen - with pioneer John Morton in mind - as a prophetic role. Our country has bungled, even sabotaged power planning. Blakers jr & I are in wide agreement. But the media carry little or nothing from proven independent experts on energy policy. In my case it's pretty clear that the blacklisting is mainly as punishment for my reasoned criticisms of WimminsLib; but also Molly, Mike O'Sullivan, Robin Court, and many other well-tested experts have been sidelined while Leyland plugs nuclear for Holmes® infotainment, and bad-mouths windpower atrociously.

This is not an easy undergrad project - awareness of net v. gross generation, and other EE issues such as power factor and frequency variation should be built soon into the rebuilt planning process. A Yank has been brought in to do it; how can us Kiwis help?

The incoherent set of new power stations that would result from the commercial ambitions of Leyland, Keith Turner, etc is much more likely to provoke cascading grid crashes than the NZED approach. While I'm about it, let me grieve in all seriousness that NZ is one of the very few developed countries now lacking a Ministry of Works. If Churchill could bring back Fisher, why couldn't Clark or Brash bring back Bob Norman?

I leave with all of youse who've been mullingit over this requirement for up-to-date figures on grid performance. I'm sure Forest & Bird would be glad to print the new picture.

Declaration: an ACT MP tried to work up an 'exposé' in a weekend newspaper by pointing out Jeanette is a major stockholder in Windflow Ltd. I'm not on the top twenty list like her and Goldsmith, but I am a founding stockholder. The world-leading windmill was never going to be an NZED project; Bradford's madhouse at least opens the opportunity to put my money where my mouth is, and I've been keen to sock both to Windflow Ltd. Yes, I have an interest in windpower. That fact does not affect my policy, which I held long before Windflow existed.

cheers

--

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

So you've discovered a power station proposed for your district. Your branch of Forest & Bird, along with any suitable partners in a coalition, should present to the relevant planning authorities, and to the public, your clear & vigorous assessment of the proposal.

Or, even if no power station threatens your locality, you've realised that stabilising the electricity industry is required for the nation's and even the planet's health.

Either way, this article will be useful to you. Your primary argument will be lack of need - no new power stations are justified in N.Z. We give here the main facts which prove that conclusion.

NO MORE POWER STATIONS !
Robert Mann
Forest & Bird Nov. 1994

The nation was presented on May 19 with a concerted PR thrust for new power stations. The corporatised NZ Electricity Dept, now called Electricorp or ECNZ, asserted we may need extra power equivalent to 7 or even possibly 15 Clyde dams within a few decades. Another report the same day similarly suggested we must pay billions of dollars to meet accelerating "demand" for new power stations.

This is the latest flurry in a peculiar game which goes back at least a quarter-century. It was a power station scheme, Manapouri, which provoked the modern era of conservation awareness and action in this country. By the late 1970s, as a result of public participation especially around the Royal Commission on Nuclear Power, scientists became able to advise constructively what to do instead of new power stations:
• economically harness now-wasted electricity;
• deploy small-scale energy systems to capture renewable (solar) energy. These preferable options still languish almost ignored. They are today even more potent because since the 1970s they have made considerable technical advances while big power stations have remained much the same dinosaurs. The above two principles were brought into focus in the late '70s, enunciated well in Amory Lovins' 'Soft Energy Paths' (1977), and remain correct but are still largely thwarted by those with vested interests in expanding mains electricity supply & consumption under the banner of economic growth. Any notion of saturation, or sufficiency, or limits to growth, seems beyond their ken.

Neglected too are tariff structures to discourage extravagant electricity consumption while allowing a reasonable amount at cheap rates.

In order to understand how we know that new power stations are the inferior path, we must be clear about a few words & numbers (see box).

================================================
{ BOX }
Energy is not Power

Power, an important technical term, is not the same as energy. Scientists & engineers use the word 'power' to mean instantaneous rate of flow of energy e.g. rate of doing work. The basic unit of power is the watt, but for many purposes the horsepower (746 W) or the kilowatt (kW) - 1,000 W - is a more convenient unit. A typical one-bar heater's rate of conversion of electrical energy to heat, that is its power, is 1 kW. One megawatt (MW) is one thousand kilowatts.

The most powerful station on the N.Z. grid, Huntly, can send into the grid almost 1,000 MW of electrical power.

The familiar metered unit of electrical energy is the kilowatt-hour (kWh); a one-bar heater through which flows a power of 1 kW thus uses 1 kWh of energy each hour it runs. That same amount of electricity could run a 100W light-bulb for 10 hours. This amount of energy is the "unit" of our electricity bills.

Electricity supplies are subject also to measures of quality. Reliable supply - rather than blackout or brownout (voltage drop) - is more important to most householders and industries than small differences in energy price. More subtle aspects of quality include requirements, for certain types of electronic device, that the frequency of the mains must not vary more than a few percent from the standard 50 cycles per second.

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

The N.Z. Electricity System

The central government's NZ Electricity Dept built up (mainly through the Ministry of Works) a co-ordinated system of 40 power stations feeding into a national grid of high-power transmission lines.

Some electricity distributor/retailers run their own grid-connected mini-stations, mostly to save paying Electricorp's peak prices. These amount to about 5% of the grid's installed capacity.

A few industries, notably the geothermally-powered Tasman pulp mill (Kawerau), not only generate much or all of the electricity they use, and run industrial processes with leftover heat, but also are connected to the grid with sales in either direction. Such 'co-generation' or 'total energy' systems, if prudently encouraged, could be installed in various parts of the country, substituting at least 100 MW now drawn from the grid, and decreasing transmission losses.

The two latest Electricorp annual reports, and the 12-months report to 31-3-94, contain figures which have not been drawn to public attention, and which the NZ Herald has refused to publish, giving the lie to claims that new power stations are needed.

The installed generating capacity - the maximum power that could be fed into the grid if the corresponding demand ever occurred and if all stations were flat-out - is measured in megawatts. With the Clyde dam it reached, in round figures, 7700 MW. The maximum power that has ever been generated into the grid is far less: 5500 MW.

The actual surplus capacity is however not as much as that 40% margin. Electricorp has expressed the desire that 'spinning reserve', normal maintenance shutdowns, and other operating requirements should total 23% (1200 MW) beyond their peak generated power. Allowing that reserve capacity, we still have 1000MW surplus generating capacity. The Centre for Advanced Engineering, University of Canterbury, published recently a big report on reliability of electricity supply which states "there is ample installed capacity in New Zealand to meet power system peaks".

The peak power demanded of Electricorp was essentially constant (5150 MW) for 4 winters 1989-92. For 1993 it was 5240 MW. Thus, over the past half-decade, annual increases in Electricorp's peak power have averaged 0.54%.

A grid, even if it has ample installed generating capacity (MW), can run short of energy to convert into electrical energy (MWh) on a time-scale of a year. This can happen through e.g. shortage of water, especially in a grid which is largely hydro-power like ours; or mismanagement such as selling fuel from stockpiles just before a dry winter; or breakdown of a large station for years (one of the many reasons to be glad we rejected nukes); or mothballing stations as if they were not needed (while also claiming that new ones are). We need therefore to arrange the capacity to supply not only peak power but also sufficient annual electrical energy.

The annual electrical energy fed into our grid reached a total of 30 million MWh for the first time in 1991. The following year of the "shortage", the total was 2.6% lower. For the year ended 31-3-94, with unrestricted supply, generation was 31.2 M MWh, resulting for the half-decade in an average annual energy increase of 1.9%. During the "shortage" winter of 1992, the 580MW gas-fired New Plymouth station was run far below capacity, illustrating Electricorp's "economic limit": the fuel-fired stations are insinuated to be too expensive to run at design capacity, even when people and hot-water cylinders are freezing, and in spite of the allegedly dominant lust to get rid of the Maui gas by 2010. But Electricorp admits that the existing public supply system of N.Z. can generate 38M MWh even in a "1-in-60" dry year.

On both measures, then - peak power and annual energy - the country has a large surplus capacity, built at public expense of more than a billion dollars and causing serious ecological damage, e.g. confiscation of much of the Wanganui headwaters (still only partially restored). This overgrowth was perpetrated by a growthmaniac electricity-supply industry using phony projections ("forecasts") of what they were pleased to call "demand". Those projections were produced by methods kept obdurately secret in committees dominated by the electricity-supply industry. They typically asserted that power demand would double in only a decade (approx. 7% compound annual increase). On this basis the NZED annually gave Parliament a 15-year Power Plan envisaging many billions of dollars' worth of new stations, mostly thermal which would have wasted most of the energy from oil, gas, coal, and geothermal brines. The NZED launched a deluded nuclear programme, stopped by a half-decade of public outcry. Even after pruning of such grandiosities, the long-standing pattern remained that one-third of government capital expenditure, year after year, went into expanding the nation's capacity to generate & transmit electricity. The Clyde dam, not only unnecessary but even illegal (until a special Mulgoon-Beetham act of parliament overrode normal procedures), has become a nightmare of waste & danger. Electricorp say the cost of generating a kWh at Clyde is 12¢ whereas their average cost of generation is 1.17¢/kWh.

But today's system is even worse. No official power planning exists. Parliament no longer gets an annual Power Plan & "forecasts" open to democratic scrutiny. The modest-sounding 2 - 3% compound annual increases projected by the electricity industry (still by secret methods) correspond to roughly the same amount of extra generating capacity annually as the bigger percentages of two decades ago which procured today's overcapacity. Mr Barrie Leay's Electrical Supply Authorities Association solemnly projects 'demand' of 40M MWh in 2005, rising to 54M MWh in 2010. This means adding, in that half-decade, almost one-half of today's total electricity sales! We really have run out of reasonable dam sites; nevertheless, dozens of agencies are speculating money on possible power stations, mostly hydro, from which they feel they might make money. The fact that some very bad planning was done in the 1970s is supposed to justify the abolition of planning. Ideological hatred of public enterprise and of planning has turned the public electricity system, national and local, over to "the market" which is known to be even less capable of serving the public interest than was the old NZED/power boards system.

In order to generate electrical power at 1 MW (denoted 1 MWe), fuel-burning power stations have to produce thermal power at 2 - 5MWt , i.e. various types' efficiencies are in the range 50% - 20% ; most of the energy in the fuel is wasted. These thermal stations produce the corresponding notoriously large tonnages of carbon dioxide. Geothermal stations have yet worse efficiencies, and some also produce major carbon dioxide byproduct, for which no use or disposal is in sight. The growth fantasies glimpsed in the May 19th PR-flush are in the region of 75 - 300 MW extra capacity added each year. The financial and environmental costs of such expansion would be very severe. The image "15 Clyde dams" is proferred to 'monster' the nation into permitting and paying for the 2 or 3 which is probably about all that Electricorp think they could organise at once. It is essentially the same old game. The vague tacit threat "we will black you out if you don't indulge our growthmania" persists. Thus do beneficiaries pose as benefactors.

A regrettable variant is "we will get rid of the Maui gas by 2010, so we may as well have a new power station to burn it in". That line of course puts commercial arrangements ahead of planetary health, not to mention sustainability. Whether it will survive judicial examination of the proposed Stratford 400MWe gas-burner remains to be seen.

Compared with other forms of energy, electricity is inherently expensive; even the best (Huntly) of the NZED gas-fired stations is only 32% efficient. The combined-cycle station proposed for Stratford is claimed to be 50% efficient. Transpower's losses are stated to average about 6%; local low-voltage distribution entails losses which I would rank as the under-rated weakness of central electricity systems. Modern gas appliances produce as useful heat at least 80% of the energy in the gas. It is obviously better to promote direct gas use for low-temperature heat instead of the inherently wasteful & polluting indirect use through power stations.

Let us insist, in any case, on logic: only if a clear need had been proven should any new power station be permitted. A mere claim that some parties expect to profit can not justify the environmental damage entailed in such wasteful projects. One of the May 19th main advocates, PR'd as an expert on projecting "supply & demand" [ Bryan Leyland], has been for years himself centrally involved in the Auckland Electric Power Board's consultant-driven project to build a gas-fired power station at Southdown. The public will be better advised by independent experts who have no such conflict of interest.

But isn't some growth inevitable? No. Industrial activity is already excessive, if we hold the health of the biosphere as our prime criterion. We should plan to provide a steadily-decreasing supply of increasingly-reliable electricity, and get serious about sustainable energy systems. The Faust act has gone quite far enough. We have passed NZ's all-time peak of electricity consumption; now let's settle down and organise some stability.

Casinofication

Keeping the national grid available and meeting high standards of quality is a difficult operational task. This public service may be severely compromised by expensive attempts over the past several years, led by Mr Jim McLay and his longtime political colleague Mr Barrie Leay, to sketch a "wholesale [actually futures] electricity market". In the McLay/Leay notion, Electricorp would be split into several "competitive" corporations, and would split off the grid proper (i.e. the long-distance transmission system) as "independent" Transpower.

The vision then entails trading of electricity futures contracts between many companies daily. Submissions are specifically invited on whether the trading could be in half-hour blocks! Under cover of false or meaningless chants ('efficiency', 'competitivity', etc.), our grid is thus threatened with alienation to casino status, its major public resources degraded to mere gambling chips. If this were permitted, our electricity would become both less reliable and more expensive. Just the attempt to meter all the transfers involved would entail ridiculous costs, and opportunities for white-collar theft.

In the 1970s I was instrumental in pointing out why the NZED deserved the title "No. 1 Environmental Vandal" - confirmed publicly by the then Commissioner of Works, Mr R G Norman, who also claimed second place for his department; but it is a pleasure for me to record now that I would far rather deal with those agencies than with the robber barons to whom the traitor Douglas has given our main public assets. Public enterprise planned & created a system which now generates the very cheapest electricity in the world; how can we keep it that way?

Better Ideas

The fact that our electricity is generated very cheaply does not mean it should be sold cheaply. Tariffs should reflect the need for conservation {see box}. But lately, a major new barrier to conservation has been erected by Barry Brill & other power company executives who have imposed huge fixed charges. The effect is that the more electricity you save the more you pay per unit. It is right that there should be a small standing charge, because the energy retailer has sunk capital in the cables, meter etc, and has some running costs in reading the meter etc. What is not right is that huge fixed charges be levied for the purpose of guaranteeing profit, and with the perverse indirect effect of penalising conservation.

================================================
{ BOX }

INCREASING BLOCK TARIFFS Conservationists have been advocating for two decades, to little or no effect so far amongst the money-maniacs, that electricity should be retailed with pricing structures of this general form:

¢/kWh (at margin)
| | ---------------
| |
| |---------------|
| |
|-----|
|_________ kWh/month


The numerical details for a particular power board will take some working out. This process is not merely technical; it also inevitably entails value judgements. But it is certainly simpler, and actually worthwhile, compared with the protracted McLay/Leay casinofication attempt. If this type of tariff were instituted, direct gas and solar energy would be allowed to compete fairly. (Advanced Kiwi Conservation Club exercise: draw your household's electricity tariff as a graph on the above diagram.)

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

We are foisted with a new era of growthmania, not only at the national level (Electricorp) but especially among some of the distributing and retailing companies which were until recently municipal departments or consumers' co-operatives (power boards). We shall not shake free from this new mania until the nation at least creates an energy policy and a working mechanism for planning & stabilising - certainly not casinofying - the system. Under the Resource Management Act, a national energy policy could be stated; it should be. Meanwhile, as no additional power stations are to be planned, what should the Electricorp design staff do? They must be encouraged to meet the neglected challenges of providing higher reliability, and given resources to get serious about wind, especially to replace hydro (dams silt up within a half-century) and generating more electricity from the same water e.g. by cleaning out the existing Manapouri tailrace. Growthmania and monumentalism have already brought engineering into enough disrepute; let's see some eco-engineering!

================================================
{ BOX }
The Global Picture

Only this century, and only in some societies, have people become accustomed to abundant availability & use of energy. This is an anomaly, both historically and geographically. New Zealand's per capita annual consumption of traded energy is about 30,000 kWh, not very far short of the USA (74,000). Contrast these with Brazil & China (5,800), or India & the Philippines (2,200). We consume vastly more than our share. NZ's population is not increasing much, but global population growth is still as high as 1.7% p.a., adding thirty NZs each year. Diminishing resources of fuels and of ecologically acceptable hydro-power sites, and burgeoning pollution (notably atmospheric carbon dioxide), mean we have only one reasonable option: both using less and wasting less energy. The binge is over.

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

Electricity, no matter how generated, is always a relatively expensive form of energy, in money and in natural resources. A first principle of household energy planning is therefore to use electricity for only those functions which are inherently electrical (amplifiers & other electronics, certain tools and motors). Nevertheless, lighting & refrigeration are usually powered by electricity though gas-powered versions should be considered for remote locations.

The typical residence's energy consumption (averaging approx. 1 kW) is mostly for low-temperature heat. Direct solar-thermal conversions using your roof can be the principal supply for this: solar water-heating, and solar room-heating. These should be incorporated in new buildings and can usually be fitted into existing buildings. Compared with common heating systems which use entirely combustion (wood, coal or gas) or electrical heating, these buildings will use far less fuel, or fewer kWh; but some topping-up will generally be needed in cold weather.

Diverting energy which is now going to waste is your principal opportunity to save electricity promptly. Electricity is converted to low-temperature heat at 100% efficiency, e.g. in water- or room-heaters, but large losses of that heat then leak to waste through gaps and poor insulation. Ask your electricity retailer to help you assess your options and instal draught-proofing strips, foil or blanket insulation above ceilings, better insulation on hot water tanks, etc.

Conversion of electricity to light is generally inefficient. Ordinary light bulbs give out as heat, not light, about 9/10 of the electricity they consume! Modern fluorescent lights are several times more efficient. They are still so expensive that the savings take many years to pay off; but the main payoff is in rivers saved, less contaminated air & land, etc. And they do last 8 times longer than the disgraceful planned failure of modern ordinary bulbs. Major savings can also be achieved by up-to-date electric motors and controls.

Economical methods abound for diverting to use energy now wasted. These 'negawatts' are cheaper, sooner available, more reliably sustained, and far less damaging to nature, than any new power station. They can economically substitute for at least one quarter of the electricity used these days, according to several expert estimates. Electricorp, and energy retailers, should help to deploy these wiser solutions, rather than compounding our problems by threatening to build power stations.

================================================
{ BOX }

On balance, conservation is served (not to mention the eyesight of the workers assembling TV sets) by switching TV sets to 'warm standby' rather than off. The small electricity consumption on standby is not entirely waste, giving a trickle of warmth within a house. Much more importantly, the energy embodied in a TV set far exceeds its 'lifetime' operating consumption. (Even such a device as a car, made for the purpose of converting energy on a scale of scores of kW, embodies as much energy in its metals, tyres etc. as all the fuel it so powerfully consumes in its working lifetime.) A TV set's working life is shortened by cold starts. Most TV-set failures are in the power supply, a section of parts which last much longer if kept warm. Failure rates in picture tubes are also lowered. Junked TV tubes, like fluorescent tubes, are often smashed making sharp edges which are especially hazardous because the phosphors on the inside surface of the glass are poisonous, severely inhibiting healing of such wounds. As with any equipment relying on vacuum tubes (valves), leave it on 'warm standby' unless you foresee no use within a week. This example illustrates the fact that running costs are never the whole story in energy conservation; making equipment last longer is often more important.

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

Generally, of course, technical fixes for increased efficiency in consumption offer less value than the intelligent restraints of prudent lifestyles - turning off lights when not needed, putting on jerseys instead of heaters, turning hot-water thermostats down to 55°, etc. This second meaning of the term 'energy conservation' is routinely mocked as 'candles & caves'; but in truth, many modern end-uses of energy are careless, frivolous, or downright dangerous, and society will be happier when they are curbed. On this issue, ecology aligns with economy, justice, security, and even pleasure!

New Zealand's global role is to show the overdeveloped world an example of consuming less and enjoying it more. A main reason why F&B is so large & successful is that our advocacy is based in active nature-study. I would be happier about our nation's future if teachers were still being properly trained in Nature Study, and if the "Technology curriculum" were worthy of the name and competently organised. The skills needed to compile the main facts in this article are, evidently, lacking in mass media and in the staff of conservation groups today.

The quarter-century of energy/environment awareness has, unfortunately, stimulated considerable growth of perverted, sometimes pseudo-green, propagandists. Surely we conservationists can overtake and outmatch their analytical & communication abilities.

And how can we help to accelerate the deployment of technology & education for the transition to sustainable renewable-energy systems? Having answered the relatively easy question "are more power stations needed?", let us discuss these genuine problems.

Dr Mann, former Senior Lecturer in Environmental Studies, conducted (mainly with other University of Auckland staff) the Energy Project of the now-defunct Environmental Defence Society, 1973-83. He continues his work on energy/environment issues mainly with 'Forest & Bird', most recently for the Far North branch against the proposed Ngawha 8MWe geothermal power station.

From: Jakov Adler
To: jaadler@netvision.net.il
Sent: Tuesday, September 06, 2005 6:53 PM

A very often downplayed aspect of the Middle East conflict.

Best regards,
Jakov.

Communique: 6 September 2005
ANTI-CHRISTIAN POGROM
IN THE WEST BANK

Dear HonestReporting Subscriber,

For years, media outlets have largely refused to report one of the most troubling aspects of the Mideast conflict (Muslim intimidation and violence against Christians in Palestinian-controlled areas).

The latest shocking episode again made its way to very few news consumers: Late Saturday night (Sept. 3), hundreds of armed Palestinian Muslims crying 'Allahu Akbar' descended on the West Bank Christian city of Taibe. For the next few hours, the mob terrorized the community, setting sixteen homes and multiple businesses on fire, looting valuables from both, and destroying a statue of the Virgin Mary.

Said one eyewitness: 'It was like a war, they arrived in groups, and many of them were holding clubs.'

The mob's 'provocation'? A Muslim woman from their neighboring village had had a relationship with a Christian man from Taibe. The woman was poisoned to death by her own family in an 'honor killing', and soon after, the pogrom against Taibe commenced.

Something tells us this incident would have made international headlines had Jews been responsible for this type of violence.

HISTORY OF MUSLIM ABUSE, CHRISTIAN FLIGHT

Incidents such as this, largely ignored by the western media, have been the leading cause of massive Christian flight from the Holy Land over the past few years.

The historical Christian towns of Bethlehem and Nazereth, once home to large Christian populations, have seen that population flee en masse due to Muslim intimidation and violence. As HonestReporting has documented:

● Over 100 Palestinian terrorists took over the Church of the Nativity in 2002, using it as a fortress from which to fire upon Israeli troops, while holding nuns, priests and monks hostage, and looting or destroying virtually everything of value inside the building.

● During 2000-2002, the PA's Tanzim militia chose the Christian town of Beit Jala as a base for unprovoked shooting at Jerusalem. The Tanzim were specifically positioned in or near Christian homes, hotels, churches, and the Greek Orthodox club, knowing fully well that these sites would be hard-hit by Israeli return fire.

● In 1995, Bethlehem was 62% Christian, but today is less than 20% Christian. Before 1995, Bethlehem had a majority-Christian municipal council, but when the Palestinian Authority took over the town, Yassir Arafat replaced the municipal council with a predominately Muslim council, and Christian Arabs fled Bethlehem in droves after a radical Islamic wave began inciting against them.

● On February 6, 2002, the Boston Globe reported "a rampage of Palestinian Muslims against Christian shops and churches in Ramallah ... Police made no attempt to stop the mob, which besieged and damaged a widely respected youth center associated with the Boy Scouts of America after torching the Christian properties ... 'The truth is this is a problem between Christians and Muslims,' said one Christian businessman."

>The Associated Press
>
>Today is Thursday, June 2, the 153rd day of 2005. There are 212 days left in the year.
>
>Thought for Today: "Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn't." - Mark Twain (1835-1910).

This 'gram is largely mere Wittgenstein-type word-analysis, which is never very useful; but this may be about as useful as it gets.

Entailed in 'truth' is that it contains no impossibilities; it's all possible, else it couldn't exist.

One of the most worrying persistent fads handicapping British society for at least a couple century is lust for witty falsehood. G B Shaw exemplified this decadent trend with the quip that anyone who knows how to do anything goes & does it, but those who don't teach. As a lifelong teacher in several modes, I resent that lie. The superficial strand of truth in it nowhere near justifies the insult to a major avocation.

O Wilde ripped off a few hot ones; B Russell scored a couple; I think Whistler may have been in the same mode.

But this Twain rave lacks even a superficial strand of truth. Only possibilities comprise truth. Truth is all and nothing but things that are possible (and, in addition, have been realised in fact). That which is, must be possible.

Possibilities also exist for things not yet realised. Fiction always contains some truth, at some level; but fiction depicts an extent of IMpossibilities, and the difference matters.

A distinguishing feature of fiction is that it contains impossibilities to an extent more or less difficult to discern.

I diskard this Twain quip.

R

“Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might [he means 'may'] be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense - an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection - is not."

right on Schonie bwah - tell it LAHK EET EEEUZ

R

Darwinian Evolution Incompatible with Catholic Faith says Cardinal and Author of Catholic Catechism

NEW YORK, July 11, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) -- On July 7, after years of media-generated confusion, Christoph Cardinal Schonborn, a theologian who helped author the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church, wrote in the New York Times clarifying the Church’s understanding of human origins.

Since 1996, the world’s secular media have claimed that Pope John Paul II endorsed Darwinian evolution as being “more than a hypothesis.” The remark, taken out of context, established in some minds that the Catholic Church was ready to abandon its adherence to the notion of a personal God who created life, the universe and everything.

In his article, Schonborn said, that the “defenders of neo-Darwinian dogma have often invked the supposed acceptance - or at least acquiescence - of the Roman Catholic Church when they defend their theory as somehow compatible with Christian faith.”

“This,” the Cardinal says bluntly, “is not true.”

Schonborn unequivocally establishes that the Catholic Church does not endorse Darwinism. “Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense - an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection - is not."

Cardinal Schonborn, a close associate of both Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, continued, saying, “Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science."

The New York Times, never missing an opportunity to bash prominent Catholic prelates, has suggested that Schonborn has changed his tune regarding the legitimacy of Darwinian evolution. But Darwinism, the idea that life sprang and developed into its myriad forms by means of “an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection" has never been supported by Catholic teaching.

As early as 1950, Pope Pius XII wrote that it is Catholics teaching that all human beings in some way are biologically descended from a first man, Adam. “The faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all," Pius wrote in his encyclical Humani Generis.

Two days after the Cardinal’s article appeared, the New York Times followed up with an interview with Schonborn in which he reiterated that he had been encouraged by Pope Benedict XVI to continue to refine Catholic teaching on evolution.

Read Cardinal Schonborn’s essay:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/07/opinion/07schonborn.html
Read New York Times coverage of scientific reaction (free registration may be required):
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/09/science/09cardinal.html?pagewanted=2&adxnnl=1&incamp=article_popular_1&adxnnlx=1121101755-MdtG6nbBTT0N0JNQ0t8vjw