EVOLUTION WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

Evolution - what YOU need to know
? Over the years I have discussed evolution and creationism with a number of theists, and they often have many misconceptions about exactly what evolution is. I would like to try to set the record straight here, as well as provide a useful introduction to the theory of evolution.


"Hey, it's only a theory..."
Human beings are not the ultimate result of evolution
Human beings are not descended from gorillas or chimpanzees
Doesn't "Survival of the fittest" mean it's good for the strong to destroy the weak?
Creatures do not decide how to evolve
Species do not spontaneously change into new species
Complex organs such as eyes can evolve gradually
Creatures are not colourful just to please God
Don't I have to give up belief in God if I accept evolution?
Further reading

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So it's a "theory" - so what?
theory - an explanation or system of anything.
Many anti-evolutionists will say "Yes, but it's only a theory, it's not real is it?"
People who say this are confused about what a theory, in the scientific sense, actually is. From my emails I know that the single most common misconception about evolution is to confuse the fact and the theory.

Evolution is a fact. Shocking and controversial this might sound, but bear with me. I'm not talking about Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. I'm talking about the changes in the gene pools of all species that occur every single day due to births and deaths. If you accept that most members of a species do not all have the exact same DNA (which is easily demonstrated), and you accept that sexual reproduction combines the DNA of two parents to form a slightly different combination of genes, and you accept that not all creatures survive long enough to be able to reproduce, then....

You have accepted that evolution is an observed, natural fact. That's all it is. A change in the genes over time. Evolution happens. Things evolve. That's what it means. There is no debate in the scientific community as to whether or not evolution is a fact. It is a fact of nature, just like gravity.

The theory of evolution, on the other hand, is an attempt to describe what is happening, how and why. The theory describes the facts and the evidence. The theory comes after observation of the facts. The theory of evolution may be hopelessly wrong (although it has stood the test of time for 150 years already), but that would not change the fact that evolution occurs - we would just have to find a new and better theory for explaining it.

A good theory can also be used to produce predictions about future observations based on the known facts and evidence. A theory should also be falsifiable - this means that it should be possible to think of an experiment that would prove the theory wrong if it is not sound. One of the big problems with creationist hypotheses is that they are not open to refutation - any possible set of evidence can be explained away with some variation on "God did it, for Mysterious Reasons".

"Theory" as used by scientists has a quite different meaning to "theory" as used by a bloke you met in the pub. A theory is an attempt to explain a observed phenomenon using evidence and experiment, not a wild guess or something that just popped into your head a moment ago.

For example, aerodynamics theory allows us to build large passenger aircraft. Tons of metal that flies because theory predicted that the wings would suck it up into the sky. Sounds unlikely, but it works. Would you refuse to get on board a 747 because it was designed by theorists?

Theories are often used to explain "laws". The Law Of Gravity is fairly obvious - drop an apple and it will fall onto the head of any scientists sitting below. (Slightly more precisely, objects are attracted to each other by the force of gravity). The theory of gravitation attempts to explain the law of gravity in detail; how it works, and what causes it. The theory of evolution, likewise, attempts to describe and explain the observed fact of evolution. Evolution happens. It can be seen, measured and experimented with. The theory of evolution describes the facts of evolution. Even if the theory of evolution turns out to be completely wrong, that won't alter the fact that evolution still actually happens - we'll just need a better explanation (one which will not only explain everything that the theory of evolution did, but it would also have to explain why the theory of evolution worked so well for so long).

Evolutionary theory is still being debated. The underlying principles are very well understood and agreed upon, but there is still disagreement over many of the fine details. This does not mean that it should be discarded, or that it is simply wrong. It just needs more work. You can test your theories of aerodynamics in a wind-tunnel in just a few hours. To properly test evolution, you really need a test-tube the size of a planet and a few billion years (but for now, we'll just have to settle for creating new species in labs).

If good, solid evidence is produced that contradicts the theory of evolution, then (as with all theories) it will have to be either radically modified to fit the new evidence, or abandoned if that is not possible. Nobody has yet managed to produce such evidence...

One of the problems with developing evolutionary theory is that large changes happen over a very long period of time. Small-scale evolutionary changes can be done today - dog-breeding, myxamatosis-resistant rabbits in Australia, the Goatsbeard flower in America, fruit-flies in laboratories, antibiotic resistant bacteria. Evolution is happening, and to deny that is foolish. To say "It's only a theory, so it doesn't mean anything." is also foolish. It is a theory supported by overwhelming, freely available evidence, with just a few details to iron out. I think many creationists realise this, which is why they are trying to demolish the theory by ridicule and misinformation (if you came here thinking it's "just a theory, just a wild guess" then you have fallen victim to their campaign) or prevent it from being taught in schools. If they are so sure it is wrong, all they have to do is disprove it by normal, rational, scientific means. They're not having much luck so far, which is why they rely on misrepresentation of the facts.

Think about the theories that keep your plane in the air, next time you go to the airport. Would you refuse to board it because it was designed using "just" the theories of aerodynamicists and engineers?

(For more about what is and is not a theory, check the Infidels library. )

This section is expanded upon further in Fact AND Theory.



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Human beings are not the ultimate result of evolution
Some people think that eventually all species will evolve into human beings - that we are somehow the ultimate creature, that we are the best there can be, that the evolution of all organisms is striving to converge on the human being. The analogy is that evolution is a sort of ladder, with each rung representing a higher level of "perfectness". Naturally, we humans are right at the top of this ladder.
This is a complete fallacy.

Crocodiles, for instance, will never evolve into humans. Crocodiles haven't really changed much at all over the last hundred millions years or so. They are extremely well adapted to their environment, and there is little (if any) "evolutionary pressure" being exerted on them. What that means is that their environment is not changing in any drastic manner, and they have no predators preying on them. In order for them to change it would require some sort of external influence that affected their chances of living long enough to reproduce and pass on their genes to their children.

Humans may eventually evolve into something measurably different, though it takes a vast amount of time to do so. For the moment, we fit into the ecological niche that we suit best. Humans are not the most complex creatures ever to have lived. The only thing that sets us apart from other animals is our intelligence. Our bodies work in pretty much the same way as the bodies of other mammals. Our bones aren't tougher, our muscles aren't stronger, and our blood isn't better at carrying oxygen. Apart from our brains, we are quite unremarkable.

Where certain conditions exist, creatures most suited to those conditions will live and thrive there, slowly becoming extremely well adapted to those conditions. If the conditions change, the creatures less able to adapt will die out, being replaced by the offspring of the members of the population who were slightly more suitable. Those genes that helped the creatures survive to reproduce are passed on, increasing in number in the gene pool - those that prevented it from managing to reproduce are not passed on, decreasing in number in the gene pool. This is basically how evolution works.

If you imagine nature producing an environment which requires certain characteristics for survival (such as deep-ocean vents, or rainforest canopy, or hot deserts), it is likely that creatures will gradually evolve with those characteristics, to "fit the hole" that nature provides.

As a simple example, imagine a world that has deep oceans and warm, sunny beaches (much like ours). In the sea live some crabs. To begin with, these crabs can only survive in water a few feet deep. Their world ends where the tide washes up and down the shoreline - they can eat, live and breed only in the warm shallows. As there is more food in the warmer, sunnier waters near the beach, the crabs are driven there to feed. As the waves crash in and out, some will be washed up onto dry land, or stranded on a sand-bank as the tide goes out, and perish. Others might be able to survive just long enough to scuttle back into the sea. This creates what is called a "selective pressure" on the crabs - natural selection weeds out those individuals unable to tolerate being out of water for prolonged periods. Those who can will be able to spend much more time on the shoreline - they will get the richer pickings, and they will have a greater probability of breeding and passing on their genes. Some of their offspring might not be able to last as long out of water as the parents, but others might be able to tolerate it a little more. Again, these will have a slight advantage in terms of feeding, mating and survival (they might be able to escape marine predators by climbing onto a dry rock). It becomes a positive feedback loop. The genes of those who survived longest and generated the most offspring will become more abundant in the population as a whole. After many generations, the crabs will be scuttling around on the beach, foraging for food, no longer restricted to a purely marine lifestyle.

Over time, different evironmental conditions will shape different aspects of their bodies. They may come to rely on a particular type of food, or they shell may change in size and shape (to provide protection against the environment or predators). They will come to be radically different from their ancestors - a new species. They are, of course, still crabs - but they are a new type of crab, unable to breed with (or even meet) the species that they originated from. After a million years of separation and differing environmental conditions, these new crabs may have split further into a number of different, new species, or may have been changed into a type of creature that can no longer be called a crab.

Evolution is not a ladder - it's an enormous bush with millions of branches. We humans (and the chimps, gorillas and other apes) are just the current crop of leaves on part of the vertebrate/mammal/primate branch. As long as life exists on this planet, the bush will keep on spreading, and humans will be just one more branching-point with several new twigs growing from it.



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Human beings are not descended from gorillas or chimpanzees


This is a rather foolish idea that creationists like to use to discredit the theory of evolution. They say "Evolution teaches us that our great-great-great-grandparents were monkeys. How ridiculous. Ho ho ho". We are not descendants of apes - we are apes. If alien collectors came to Earth and beamed up a bunch of animals, they would put humans in the same collections as chimps and gorillas. In terms of taxonomy, we are just a strange type of big-brained, bald ape. Gorillas, chimps, orang-utans and humans are all part of the same section of the evolutionary hierarchy, just on different branches. We are not "higher" than gorillas; we have not evolved from them, but alongside them. We share a common ape-like ancestor with them (in the same way that we share a common ancestor with all primates, and then all mammals, and then all verterbrates and so on). That is the difference.
Again, creationists would still be unhappy at this idea. But hey, if we are not apes, then what are we? We are


Kingdom - Animal
Phylum - Chordata - have backbone
Class - Mammalia - females have mammary glands
Order - Primates - single pair of mammary glands
Family - Hominidae - erect, two-footed walk
Genus - Homo
Species - sapiens (Homo sapiens - You and me, friend).
and our DNA differs from that of the other Great Apes by only a fraction. Our skeletons, internal organs, nervous system and so on are almost identical to that of the other apes. We differ only in that we are less hairy and more intelligent ( usually :)
Some people still don't get it :
"We are Homo sapiens, you can consider yourself a primate, however I don't." - zoner, alt.atheism

If we are not apes, what are we? Fish? Fungi? How do we differ so much that we cannot be included in the same family as chimps and gorillas? How can we be distinct from chimps if we share 99% (approximately - some sources say it's about 98%, others go as high as 99.6%) of the same DNA, including pseudogenes ( "junk" DNA - see Further Reading section at the end).

For an interesting comparison of human, chimpanzee, and early hominid skulls, see You Figure It Out


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Doesn't "Survival of the fittest" mean it's good for the strong to destroy the weak?
The idea that the theory of evolution advocates racism is dealt with on my Evolution And Racism page.
Apart from that, it is a common misunderstanding that "survival of the fittest" means (in humans terms) survival of the biggest, strongest and most technologically advanced. Historically, this attitude has been used to justify the domination and destruction of technologically less advanced cultures ("Look, these people don't have locomotives! They are obviously sub-human beasts. We'd better slaughter them for the good of the species!").

"Fitness", in terms of evolution, simply means "best adapted to the environment". For example, if your environment contained a pack of hungry lions, yourself and a tortoise, the tortoise is a lot more likely to survive lion-attack than you are. You might be bigger, stronger, faster and brainier than the tortoise, but he's the one with retractable limbs and a hard, thick shell. Fitness does not refer to speed and strength, but the ability to live long enough to reproduce and pass on your genes to the next generation. (Further clarification on this)

As the environment changes, so to do the attributes that contribute to the fitness of a species. If the climate changes, or a food supply is lost, or a new predator comes along, then the fitness of the individual will be judged on how well it can cope with the new situation. It may be that fleetness of foot matters less, and thickness of fur matters more. Natural selection will either destroy the species or cause it to be changed over subsequent generations until it is "fit" once more.

Dangerous environments drive evolution (as mentioned above, crocodiles aren't in much danger from anything, which is why they haven't evolved greatly for a long time). Strong selective pressures cause a species to evolve rapidly. This is one of the reasons why hospitals are having trouble with anti-biotic resistant bacteria - if the drugs kill 99% of the bugs, that leaves the last 1% who are resistant to the drug. These are the ones that will create the next generation, naturally much more resistant to the same drugs. Some bacteria have even been found that actually feed on anti-biotics! From an evolutionary point of view, this is to be expected - it is inevitable.



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Creatures do not decide how to evolve


I spoke with someone once who thought that things evolved by deciding to, like this:
lungfish : Oh, I need to get further up the beach for food. I'd better grow stronger legs.
amphibian : What a nice beach, but now I'd like to climb that tree, I'd better evolve into a monkey.
monkey : If only I had a better brain...
Tinman : If I only had a heart... (sorry, couldn't resist that)
And so on.

This is obviously nonsense. Try it yourself. Tonight, will yourself to be able to see infra-red and see what your eyes are like in the morning.

This is the way it works:
In a population, there will be minor differences in all the creatures (unless they are all identical twins). These differences will give each creature minor advantages or disadvantages over other members of the population. When the environment around them changes (trees growing taller, introduction of predators, disease, whatever) some of the creatures will be better suited to those circumstances than others, increasing their own chances of survival and likelihood to successfully mate. (If this doesn't make sense, please let me know why not.)

Their offspring will inherit some of the characteristics of their parents, giving them a slight advantage over their peers. This is called evolution through natural selection. Survival of the fittest. It is a remarkably simple concept. (See the crab story, above)

Indivudal organisms DO NOT EVOLVE. I am not evolving, you are not evolving, your pet goldfish is not evolving. Your genetic makeup will remain as it was when you were born. However, the frequency of different genes in all members of species does change over time, with every single birth and death. Evolution applies to an entire species over many generations, but not to individual members. To use a rough analogy, think of the design of our vehicles. They have changed from horse-drawn carts, through the Ford "Model T", to our modern cars. Vehicle design has changed over time, but the individual vehicles themselves do not alter. A "Model T" will not slowly become a Pontiac Firebird if you leave it in the garage long enough, but as time goes by, the "species" of motor vehicles does change.



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Species do not spontaneously change into new species
Another method used to attempt to discredit evolution is the following:

"So, according to evolutionary theory, species keep changing from one to another? Whoever heard of a fish giving birth to a frog? Whoever heard of an frog giving birth to a monkey? How ridiculous! What nonsense it is!"
Well, that certainly is nonsense, and that idea is only ever used by creationists who either don't understand what they're talking about, or just want to heap ridicule on it by misrepresenting it. No evolutionist would even think about suggesting such a stupid idea. To say that one species suddenly starts giving birth to new animals is to demonstrate ignorance about the theory of evolution (or worse, misrepresentation of easily-understood science).

However, it is true to say that a creature may give birth to something that is 0.0001% closer to being a truly different species. After a few million years, and thousands and thousands of generations, a new species may well have evolved (ie. one that is measurably different to it's ancestors, and could not breed with members of the original species).



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Complex organs such as eyes can evolve gradually
Many creationists use the example of the human eye to debunk evolution. The argument goes like this:
The human eye is an extremely complex organ, with many parts working in unison for it to function - the lens, retina, iris, optic nerve, muscles etc. It would be impossible for such a thing to spontaneously pop into existence, and each of the individual parts are useless without the rest.
Well, I agree. That is a perfectly valid argument. However, no evolutionist would even consider suggesting that the eye simply appeared on some new-born primate a million years ago.

The eye evolved very slowly, over a long span of time, starting with a simple patch of light-sensitive cells, and evolving into it's present state. The following rough diagram illustrates the development:




The green represents the creature that is evolving, the pink represents light-sensitive cells. Imagine these changes happening over a period of two million years (which is a microscopic fraction of the history of the Earth), each generation of creatures only changing by a fraction of a percent).
A: The creature is blind. This has obvious disadvantages as it cannot see predators approaching, and has to rely on sound, smell etc.
B: A random mutation has given this creature a patch of light-sensitive cells (not a problem - see below). It can detect light and dark. A sudden change of light to dark could indicate a predator approaching, allowing the creature to defend itself (by fleeing, fighting etc.) and dramatically increase it's chances of surviving and reproducing. Which is more likely to survive long enough to reproduce - a creature that runs when a shadow passes over it, or one that stands still? Your skin is covered in cells/nerves that detect heat, pressure, taste, smell and so on. Light is not that much different (see below).

C: Two patches, one either side of the head have developed (no surprise, as symettrical mutations are very common). The creatures can now determine which side the shadow is approaching from, and run in the opposite direction (or it may distinguish open spaces from dark shelter, for instance). Again, a huge improvement in their chances of survival from a fairly small change in their body. Slugs and snails see like this (admittedly, they can't run very well, but who wants to eat a slug anyway?).

D: If the patch of cells becomes hollow, cup-shaped, it gives the ability to better determine the direction of light (a dome would work just as well, but would be easier to damage. Also, a hollow would help create greater contrast with well-defined shadows). One side of the cup will be better-lit than the other. This creature can therefore better determine the direction that a shadow is approaching from (or, again, find a dark shelter more easily).

E: The hollow deepens over time and starts to close in on itself. A photographer would recognise this a pin-hole camera. It will form a reasonable image on the cells (retina), allowing the creature to see shapes, not just differentiate between light and dark. The Nautilus (a marine mollusc) has eyes exactly like this.

F: A transparent membrane covers the pin-hole, forming a crude lens (alternatively, the eye may be filled with a transparent jelly). This will make the images formed on the retina much sharper as well as protecting the delicate surface from dirt and infections. The creature can see predators/prey much more clearly now.

G: Muscles around the lens develop, allowing the creature to alter the shape of the lens and change focus. Now it can clearly see objects close by or far away. This is how the eyes of most mammals (such as humans) function. The Chameleon's eyes are quite different - instead of changing the shape of the lens, muscles move the lens backwards and forwards to focus the image, in the same way that an auto-focus camera works.

Further incremental refinements include the iris (to restrict the amount of light), eyelids (to protect and clean the surface of the eye) and muscles to rotate the eyes.

This is not the way all eyes develop - there are thousands of different styles of eye in the world, all doing a similar job in different ways. Eyes do not develop quickly, but over thousands of generations (on the geological timescale, this is still just the blink of an eye. Ho ho!). To say that "half an eye is no use" is wrong. Half an eye (eg. example D) is much better than no eye at all.

Many creationists would say "But how did those first light-sensitive cells appear?". Well, your entire body is covered with light-sensitive cells. Your skin can detect heat radiation, can it not? What is this radiation? Infra-red light! It is easy to see how small mutations could lead infra-red sensitive cells to become more sensitive to shorter wavelengths of light, ie. "visible" light. Also, photons of certain wavelengths are absorbed by certain pigments/chemicals, affecting the chemistry of the cell in a manner that the brain may detect.

Remember, the creatures do not consciously attempt to grow eyes, and evolution does not drive them towards having any particular type of eye. Each new, tiny, random change will either increase or decrease that individual's chances of surviving to reproduce. Obviously, the ones that do manage to reproduce will pass on those characteristics that enabled them to do so.

Our eyes are allright, and serve us well, but there are creatures with far more complex optical systems than the human eye. Ours may evolve a bit more, but they do their job well enough for survival, which is what it's all about.

As an aside, it should be noted that the human eye is still quite badly "designed":

Your eye has a blind spot caused by the blood vessels that cover the surface of the retina converging on one point to exit the eye. If they were behind the retina it would be much better.
The optic cells (called rods and cones) are the wrong way round (the blood vessels come out into the eye rather than go out the back.
The number of people wearing glasses gives an idea of how imperfect human eyes are.
(Personally, I'd like a good zoom-lens and the ability to choose the wavelengths I can perceive. A God could have done a better job of it, but we're stuck with crappy old natural evolution. Oh well...)


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Creatures are not colourful just to please God
One of the more bizarre discussions I had on alt.atheism was about camouflage and dramatic colouration on various animals - stripes, spot, bright and shiny colours on animals, birds and fish.
The theist I was talking to believed that animals such as the Zebra could not possibly have arisen through evolution, and that their markings were decisive proof that God exists. He thought that the distinctive black and white stripes of the Zebra can have no other possible purpose than to be aesthetically pleasing to God.

I explained the purpose of such markings, and how they could quite easily arise through simple natural selection:
Individually, Zebra stripes make the animal stand out dramatically against any background, except for that of a herd of Zebra. When the herd is together, the stripes serve to break up the outline of individuals, making it harder for predators to select any individual. Even though Zebras that become seperated from the herd are much more likely to be killed and eaten, the ones in the herd will be safer.
The purpose of camouflage is to hide the creature using it, by breaking up it's outline and blending it in with it's background. In the case of the Zebra, the herd creates it's own background.

He didn't see it that way, though. The conversation changed from land animals to fish, as I have a couple of tropical fish tanks (I don't have any Zebras in the house) and could use them as examples. Small colourful fish, like the Neon Tetra, which swim in large shoals and have bright, colourful shiny scales are a good example.



A single Neon Tetra. Pretty, isn't it?
In the wild, the Neon Tetras in a shoal move together, presenting a mass of quickly changing, brightly coloured shapes to a potential predator. Each member of the shoal hides within the shoal itself. The chances of any one individual being killed are quite small, and the shoal itself will certainly survive. Again, fish that become seperated from the shoal have a slim chance of survival, as they are easy to spot, but within the ever-changing mass of the shoal, they should be much safer.



A whole bunch of them. But... Oh no! Where's the first one gone?!?
Again, my "adversary" could not see it that way. He did not think that any form of camouflage had any beneficial effects for any creature, predator (eg. tiger) or prey (eg. zebra). He had been pretty much backed into a corner by his own beliefs by now, under the relentless attack of logic and reason and factual example. So, as is too often the case when debating against theists, he opted for a pitiful cop-out.
I asked him what theory he had to explain why some creatures are killed and others are not, and what did he say?


"Guardian Angels"
- he thought that each fish in the river, each zebra in Africa, has it's own personal guardian angel to protect it from predators (they don't seem to be doing a very good job, otherwise there would be no lions), and that camouflage and colouration had absolutely no other purpose than to please God.
It is very difficult to argue against this sort of mind-set, but you can get some remarkable results if you persevere.



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Don't I have to give up belief in God if I accept evolution?
Some people feel that evolution pretty much does away with the need for a God. Others feel that evolution is one of the mechanisms that God uses to make things work. This response to a similar question from the talk.origins archive feedback section sums it up quite well :
from June 1998 feedback

"As a Christian who does accept evolution as a fact I also want to point out that as a Christian I am also a creationist, in that I believe that "In the Beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth." Far from being a religious belief that begins with "there is no God", evolution is simply one of the tools that God created to run His creation. Other tools include gravity, electromagnetism and the strong nuclear force. The Bible says that God holds all things together. Yet modern science tells us that the three forces I just mentioned are what hold all of matter together, from protons and neutrons all the way up collosal galactic clusters. In other words, God is not needed. Does this mean that those three forces are really religious beliefs that begin with "there is no God"? The Bible also says that God is the cause of all disease and the cure for all disease. Does this mean that the germ theory of disease and the immunological theory of disease resistance are beliefs that begin with "there is no God" because God is no longer needed to explain epidemeology?

It is certainly true that God transcends the natural universe and could have made it any way He wanted to. However, His creation -- the universe -- is by definition a natural phenomenon. It is controlled by naturalistic, mechanistic forces and what we can see of it appears to evolve over time. Unless God is trying to fool us, it would appear quite obvious that God indeed has used evolution to create and develop the modern universe.

For more information see the archive God and Evolution.

It is not necessary to abandon your beliefs because of evolution. Many theists find that it actually strengthens their faith as they can see and understand the processes used by their God.


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© Adrian Barnett 1998,1999
Last updated: 14th March 1999
Constructive criticism of this is always welcome. I'm a programmer, not a biologist. If I've screwed up somewhere, let me know.
!


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Richard Dawkins "The Blind Watchmaker"
Available on my Books page.

"A brilliant and controversial book which demonstrates that evolution by natural selection - the unconscious, automatic, blind yet essentially non-random process discovered by Darwin - is the only answer to the biggest question of all: why do we exist."
More information about Dawkins and his books can be found at the Unofficial Richard Dawkins Website.

Also online is Darwins Origin Of Species. The book that started all the trouble...


Evolve Or Die - "Horrible Science" fun, informative evolution book for kids. Available at Amazon and other online bookstores.

Evolution Education Resource Center - Excellent online introduction to evolution and the problems with creationism.
29 Evidences for Macroevolution - Scientific Evidences for the Theory of Common Descent with Gradual Modification
Where d'you get those peepers - Richard Dawkins on the evolution of the eye
Kent Hovind's Challenge To Evolutionists - "Dr. Dino" ("Dr." Kent Hovind) has a $250,000 prize for anyone who can prove evolution exists. Find out why this challenge is bogus and dishonest.
The Wild, Wild World Of Kent Hovind - more on Hovind, a fairly typical creationist.
Evolution for beginners - a thoughtfully written website, essential reading as an introduction to the subject.
Evidence for evolution - a summary. Brief and to the point.
http://www.NatCenSciEd.org/ - The National Center For Science Education
The Genus Homo - Human Evolution website
Jury-rigged design. Living things show little or no sign of "intelligent" design. This article lists a number of specific cases of dodgy "design", which make perfect sense in the light of evolution.
Only a theory by Bob Truett, Zoo Director emeritus, Birmingham (AL) Zoo.
Anti-biotic resistant bacteria - Scientific American
Plagiarized Errors and Molecular Genetics - Pseudogenes make (even more) nonsense of Creationism
You Figure It Out - An interesting comparison of human, chimpanzee, and early hominid skulls.
But it's "JUST a THEORY" by Ken Harding
There are various links to other sites that discuss evolution on my links page.


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FUCK THE SOUTH

also see: www.AnnotatedRant.com



Fuck the South. Fuck 'em. We should have let them go when they wanted to leave. But no, we had to kill half a million people so they'd stay part of our special Union. Fighting for the right to keep slaves - yeah, those are states we want to keep.

And now what do we get? We're the fucking Arrogant Northeast Liberal Elite? How about this for arrogant: the South is the Real America? The Authentic America. Really?

Cause we fucking founded this country, assholes. Those Founding Fathers you keep going on and on about? All that bullshit about what you think they meant by the Second Amendment giving you the right to keep your assault weapons in the glove compartment because you didn't bother to read the first half of the fucking sentence? Who do you think those wig-wearing lacy-shirt sporting revolutionaries were? They were fucking blue-staters, dickhead. Boston? Philadelphia? New York? Hello? Think there might be a reason all the fucking monuments are up here in our backyard?

No, No. Get the fuck out. We're not letting you visit the Liberty Bell and fucking Plymouth Rock anymore until you get over your real American selves and start respecting those other nine amendments. Who do you think those fucking stripes on the flag are for? Nine are for fucking blue states. And it would be 10 if those Vermonters had gotten their fucking Subarus together and broken off from New York a little earlier. Get it? We started this shit, so don't get all uppity about how real you are you Johnny-come-lately "Oooooh I've been a state for almost a hundred years" dickheads. Fuck off.

Arrogant? You wanna talk about us Northeasterners being fucking arrogant? What's more American than arrogance? Hmmm? Maybe horsies? I don't think so. Arrogance is the fucking cornerstone of what it means to be American. And I wouldn't be so fucking arrogant if I wasn't paying for your fucking bridges, bitch.

All those Federal taxes you love to hate? It all comes from us and goes to you, so shut up and enjoy your fucking Tennessee Valley Authority electricity and your fancy highways that we paid for. And the next time Florida gets hit by a hurricane you can come crying to us if you want to, but you're the ones who built on a fucking swamp. "Let the Spanish keep it, it’s a shithole," we said, but you had to have your fucking orange juice.

The next dickwad who says, "It’s your money, not the government's money" is gonna get their ass kicked. Nine of the ten states that get the most federal fucking dollars and pay the least... can you guess? Go on, guess. That’s right, motherfucker, they're red states. And eight of the ten states that receive the least and pay the most? It’s too easy, asshole, they’re blue states. It’s not your money, assholes, it’s fucking our money. What was that Real American Value you were spouting a minute ago? Self reliance? Try this for self reliance: buy your own fucking stop signs, assholes.

Let’s talk about those values for a fucking minute. You and your Southern values can bite my ass because the blue states got the values over you fucking Real Americans every day of the goddamn week. Which state do you think has the lowest divorce rate you marriage-hyping dickwads? Well? Can you guess? It’s fucking Massachusetts, the fucking center of the gay marriage universe. Yes, that’s right, the state you love to tie around the neck of anyone to the left of Strom Thurmond has the lowest divorce rate in the fucking nation. Think that’s just some aberration? How about this: 9 of the 10 lowest divorce rates are fucking blue states, asshole, and most are in the Northeast, where our values suck so bad. And where are the highest divorce rates? Care to fucking guess? 10 of the top 10 are fucking red-ass we're-so-fucking-moral states. And while Nevada is the worst, the Bible Belt is doing its fucking part.

But two guys making out is going to fucking ruin marriage for you? Yeah? Seems like you're ruining it pretty well on your own, you little bastards. Oh, but that's ok because you go to church, right? I mean you do, right? Cause we fucking get to hear about it every goddamn year at election time. Yes, we're fascinated by how you get up every Sunday morning and sing, and then you're fucking towers of moral superiority. Yeah, that's a workable formula. Maybe us fucking Northerners don't talk about religion as much as you because we're not so busy sinning, hmmm? Ever think of that, you self-righteous assholes? No, you're too busy erecting giant stone tablets of the Ten Commandments in buildings paid for by the fucking Northeast Liberal Elite. And who has the highest murder rates in the nation? It ain't us up here in the North, assholes.

Well this gravy train is fucking over. Take your liberal-bashing, federal-tax-leaching, confederate-flag-waving, holier-than-thou, hypocritical bullshit and shove it up your ass.

And no, you can't have your fucking convention in New York next time. Fuck off.



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IS WAR PHOTOGRPHY ART.....

Is War Photography Art?
Interview with legendary war photographer Philip Jones Griffiths
By Carmela Cruz
Published: Monday November 26th, 2007
Philip Jones Griffiths was born in Rhuddlan, Wales, in 1936. He studied pharmacy in Liverpool and worked in London as a part-time photographer for the Manchester Guardian. In 1961, he began freelancing for the Observer, moving to Central Africa and covering the Algerian war the following year. In 1966, he moved to Asia, where he photographed Vietnam until 1971. During this time Griffiths became involved with Magnum, a photographic co-operative owned by its photographer-members. In 1980, he moved to New York where he held the post of Magnum president from 1980 to 1985. Griffiths became famous for his 1971 book Vietnam Inc., which crystallized public opinion against the American war on Vietnam and prompted Henri-Cartier Bresson to call him the Goya of photojournalism. He has since published six books, including Agent Orange, which documents the effects of the eponymous chemical sprayed by the Americans on the children and grandchildren of Vietnamese and Cambodian farmers during the Vietnam War; and Dark Odyssey, a collection of his best work covering wars and conflicts in Africa, Asia, and Europe.

Carmela Cruz: Some of the photographs you took of war and imperialism can incite both revulsion and compassion. These images of barbarity and misguided benevolence that humans inflict on others are striking. Yet no sooner have viewers formed uncomfortable conclusions about the human race than your captions help them back to the surface – even to the hilarity of zero-sum exertions at, say, the cultural hegemony imposed by one country on another by way of religious or economic domination. What does this say about the way you look at things – at truth, ultimately?

Philip Jones Griffiths: I report on what I discover first hand. The great advantage of being a photographer is that second-hand impressions are avoided. While approaching subjects for the purpose of confirming preconceptions gains nothing, the fact remains that over time patterns do emerge.

Simply put, they are the “haves” exploiting the “have-nots.” Greed manifests itself as the great motivator in world events. Capturing the excesses is never easy, and revealing the underlying machinations even less so.

My photography, unlike say, police photography, relies on emotion. I need to make the viewer laugh or cry, and sometimes both. Statistics are important, but it’s a photograph of the anguish in the eyes of a starving child in Darfur that initiates the quest for a solution.

Cruz: You have covered more than 140 countries, their issues and peculiarities as well as their wars, conflicts and revolutions. Your friend of more than 30 years, New Yorker writer Murray Sayle, made an analogy between your childhood experience of seeing your native Wales violently altered with the onset of industrialization, and the United States’ war “on” Vietnam. These, he says, are both examples of how “a mechanized monster has despoiled an innocent landscape.” How did this affect the way you framed the news? In your long career as a photojournalist, did this vision ever change?

Griffiths: I’ve always acknowledged my childhood experience of hegemony, and it has certainly heightened my ability to detect it around the world. My collective observations and experiences have on the whole confirmed my worldview. Great powers, especially America, are following a simplistic agenda that is transparent to all those who have functioning eyes and brains.

Cruz: While Vietnam is one of the fastest growing economies among developing nations today, basic freedoms – of speech, religion, assembly – are still a dream for the majority of Vietnamese. Does this affect your views of Vietnam? Or, do you see it as the war carrying on, in a way, because of the deep, unhealed scars it has left on the land and its people?

Griffiths: Vietnam is complicated, and that is why my latest book on the country is over 300 pages long! The wartime destruction, the U.S. embargo, typhoons, and the cessation of aid from the collapsed Soviet Union have all contributed to what we find in the country today. Many aspects have caused Americans to declare that they won the war, because consumer capitalism reigns supreme. My observation is that some of the worse excesses are being ameliorated.

Cruz: Digital technology has sped up the process for visual journalism. What are the advantages on the part of the photojournalist, and on the public? Also, there’s something elemental and incontrovertible in black and white photographs; somehow, the truth does not seem as elusive as people often make it to be. Your book, Dark Odyssey, leaves little room for variegated confusions. In color, photographs become somewhat more complex; truth takes on layers. Your feature on the dumpsites in the Philippines, for example, could also be taken as a rebuke to unbridled consumerism, poor government, and irreparable destructions to the environment. Or is this just a matter of preference?

Griffiths: Digital photography has its pros and cons. Instead of shipping 100 rolls of film to an editor to select the few that will get published, the photographer becomes the one who decides what the magazine should see by transmitting only the most relevant images. The down side with digital capture is that there is no negative to refer to when proving the authenticity of a dubious image.

The other aspect of digital photography is the democratization of image-gathering, and uncontrolled dissemination, the Abu Ghraib pictures being a prime example. To counter this, the powers-that-be are submitting the world to a tsunami of images on the principle that they will learn nothing as they drown.

I believe that black-and-white photographs possess a profundity absent from color. Empirical proof of this can be seen on Madison Avenue, where advertisers resort to black-and-white images to promote ‘serious’ subjects. On a more practical level, tackling color detracts from what photography does best – capturing those revealing moments between people without having to deal with fluorescent shirts at the edge of frame!

Cruz: Recently in Burma, the military generals, who have ruled the country for 45 years, cracked down on street demonstrations led by monks and students calling for change. As the world condemned the arrests and killings of protesters, the junta restricted internet use, stemming the flow of information, videos and photographs to the outside world. With this example in mind, how important are photographs in shaping the opinion of the public and world leaders?

Griffiths: The ‘power elites’ of the world hate information they cannot control. In America, the media is owned by conglomerates that do the bidding of the government – with a few notable exceptions. Like other countries, Burma cannot control the outflow of information, so the behavior of its fascistic regime is revealed. Burma’s problem is that it has few friends; thus, it becomes fair game for self-righteous America, which condemns these atrocities while simultaneously welcoming to Washington the worst human rights violators on earth.

Cruz: Critics have elevated your best work to art. When do news photos become works of art, and the incongruous gain depth and the fleeting, timelessness?

Griffiths: Alas, nomenclature is sadly lacking in the field of ‘art’. Am I a news photographer? A press photographer? A photojournalist? An artist? I deplore the latter moniker because the word is so misused. For me, art is the melding of form and content, and as that is what I strive to do then perhaps ‘artist’ is correct. But I’m happy to be called a photojournalist!

Philip Jones Griffiths is a photojournalist and former head of the Magnum photo agency. Carmela Cruz is a freelance journalist based in Manila and a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus, where this article is republished from with permission.

http://gnn.tv/articles/3425/Is_War_Photography_Art

MONOTHEISM

Monotheism was a con from the beginning
Meet Akhenaten


It’s when you look at the birth-pangs of a religion that you can see most clearly how it was invented not by some mystical “God”, but by human beings – usually for cynical reasons.

Look, for example, at the inventor of monotheism. The man who introduced to humanity the idea that there was One God was Pharaoh Akhenaten, some thirty-three centuries ago. (I’ve been thinking about him because you can see his likeness for the next few months in the gaudy exhibition at the Millennium Dome, excavated from the tomb of his son Tutenkhamun). Akhenaten declared that the sun-god Aten was the only true deity, and all other Gods must be discredited and denied. It was a crucial moment in human history, a radical break by a “heretic Pharaoh” with all preceding superstitions. At that moment, he first formed the idea that was later refined by Moses and Mohammed and Maimonidies (and that’s just the ‘M’s) until it became humanity’s most successful superstition.

But it was a lie – a political trick to maximise his power. Many Egyptologists now believe that Akhenaten only gave birth to monotheism because the priesthood of the rival god Amun was becoming too strong for the comfort of the royal house. At the very moment of its birth, monotheism was made up for the political convenience of man.

This shouldn’t surprise us. (Especially not here in England, where our state religion is not Catholicism thanks to the fluke of a fat man wanting a divorce). At the birth of every religion, you can see this crude self-interested trickery. In Christopher Hitchens’ brilliant new book ‘God is Not Great’, the traces the preposterous invention of Mormonism. My favourite example of a religion blatantly invented as a con is Scientology. Its bare-faced Messiah was a huckster called L. Ron Hubbard, a compulsive liar who declared in the 1950s, “If a man really wanted to make a million dollars, the best way to do it would be to start his own religion.” And how – by 1982, he was raking in forty million dollars a year.

Hubbard’s religious “discoveries” strangely shifted to suit his needs and whims. After psychiatrists condemned his theories as “nonsense”, he announced that psychiatrists were the root of all evil, “not just on this planet but from time immemorial.” He “discovered” that psychiatrists existed at the start of the universe, and they actually invented evil.

The same make-it-up-as-you-go-along can be seen in the works of Jesus and the ‘Prophet’ Mohammed. Look at the affair of the ‘Satanic Verses’, which many people wrongly assume was invented by Salman Rushdie. The tale of the Satanic Verses is in fact a historical event, extensively documented by the earliest scholars of Islam.

When Mohamnmed was starting out in Mecca, he was finding it difficult to keep all his diffuse followers on side and retain good relations with his Arab kinsmen. Some of them were particularly attached to a few of the old deities, so they resisted the new-fangled ‘there is no God but God’ spiel at the heart of Islam’s message. So one day, Mohammed had a convenient ‘revelation’, delivered by the Archangel Gabriel. He announced that you could worship three of the old Gods after all! Everyone was a winner, and peace prevailed.

But a few of Mohammed’s followers were puzzled. They remembered him saying the complete opposite only a few months before. How could God, through his messenger the Archangel Gabriel, contradict himself? Didn’t you say he was all-perfect and all-knowing? Panicked, Mohammed suddenly announced that clearly Satan had impersonated the Archangel Gabriel and dictated false messages to him. The passages saying polytheism was okay after all were swiftly dubbed ‘Satanic Verses’ and scrubbed from the record.

At its very birth, montheism was a con. Until we start demanding basic rules of rationality in human belief – like asking ‘Where is the evidence for your claims?’ insistently – we will keep falling for the transparently absurd inventions of the Akhenatens and the Mohammeds and the Hubbards.

HOW TO BUILD A UNIVERSE

How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later
by Philip K. Dick, 1978

First, before I begin to bore you with the usual sort of things science fiction writers say in speeches, let me bring you official greetings from Disneyland. I consider myself a spokesperson for Disneyland because I live just a few miles from it—and, as if that were not enough, I once had the honor of being interviewed there by Paris TV.
For several weeks after the interview, I was really ill and confined to bed. I think it was the whirling teacups that did it. Elizabeth Antebi, who was the producer of the film, wanted to have me whirling around in one of the giant teacups while discussing the rise of fascism with Norman Spinrad... an old friend of mine who writes excellent science fiction. We also discussed Watergate, but we did that on the deck of Captain Hook's pirate ship. Little children wearing Mickey Mouse hats—those black hats with the ears—kept running up and bumping against us as the cameras whirred away, and Elizabeth asked unexpected questions. Norman and I, being preoccupied with tossing little children about, said some extraordinarly stupid things that day. Today, however, I will have to accept full blame for what I tell you, since none of you are wearing Mickey Mouse hats and trying to climb up on me under the impression that I am part of the rigging of a pirate ship.

Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful. A few years ago, no college or university would ever have considered inviting one of us to speak. We were mercifully confined to lurid pulp magazines, impressing no one. In those days, friends would say me, "But are you writing anything serious?" meaning "Are you writing anything other than science fiction?" We longed to be accepted. We yearned to be noticed. Then, suddenly, the academic world noticed us, we were invited to give speeches and appear on panels—and immediately we made idiots of ourselves. The problem is simply this: What does a science fiction writer know about? On what topic is he an authority?

It reminds me of a headline that appeared in a California newspaper just before I flew here. SCIENTISTS SAY THAT MICE CANNOT BE MADE TO LOOK LIKE HUMAN BEINGS. It was a federally funded research program, I suppose. Just think: Someone in this world is an authority on the topic of whether mice can or cannot put on two-tone shoes, derby hats, pinstriped shirts, and Dacron pants, and pass as humans.

Well, I will tell you what interests me, what I consider important. I can't claim to be an authority on anything, but I can honestly say that certain matters absolutely fascinate me, and that I write about them all the time. The two basic topics which fascinate me are "What is reality?" and "What constitutes the authentic human being?" Over the twenty-seven years in which I have published novels and stories I have investigated these two interrelated topics over and over again. I consider them important topics. What are we? What is it which surrounds us, that we call the not-me, or the empirical or phenomenal world?

In 1951, when I sold my first story, I had no idea that such fundamental issues could be pursued in the science fiction field. I began to pursue them unconsciously. My first story had to do with a dog who imagined that the garbagemen who came every Friday morning were stealing valuable food which the family had carefully stored away in a safe metal container. Every day, members of the family carried out paper sacks of nice ripe food, stuffed them into the metal container, shut the lid tightly—and when the container was full, these dreadful-looking creatures came and stole everything but the can.

Finally, in the story, the dog begins to imagine that someday the garbagemen will eat the people in the house, as well as stealing their food. Of course, the dog is wrong about this. We all know that garbagemen do not eat people. But the dog's extrapolation was in a sense logical—given the facts at his disposal. The story was about a real dog, and I used to watch him and try to get inside his head and imagine how he saw the world. Certainly, I decided, that dog sees the world quite differently than I do, or any humans do. And then I began to think, Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world, a world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. And that led me wonder, If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn't we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe, it's as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can't explain his to us, and we can't explain ours to him. The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too diffrently, there occurs a breakdown of communication... and there is the real illness.

I once wrote a story about a man who was injured and taken to a hospital. When they began surgery on him, they discovered that he was an android, not a human, but that he did not know it. They had to break the news to him. Almost at once, Mr. Garson Poole discovered that his reality consisted of punched tape passing from reel to reel in his chest. Fascinated, he began to fill in some of the punched holes and add new ones. Immediately, his world changed. A flock of ducks flew through the room when he punched one new hole in the tape. Finally he cut the tape entirely, whereupon the world disappeared. However, it also disappeared for the other characters in the story... which makes no sense, if you think about it. Unless the other characters were figments of his punched-tape fantasy. Which I guess is what they were.

It was always my hope, in writing novels and stories which asked the question "What is reality?", to someday get an answer. This was the hope of most of my readers, too. Years passed. I wrote over thirty novels and over a hundred stories, and still I could not figure out what was real. One day a girl college student in Canada asked me to define reality for her, for a paper she was writing for her philosophy class. She wanted a one-sentence answer. I thought about it and finally said, "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." That's all I could come up with. That was back in 1972. Since then I haven't been able to define reality any more lucidly.

But the problem is a real one, not a mere intellectual game. Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups—and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into the heads of the reader, the viewer, the listener. Sometimes when I watch my eleven-year-old daughter watch TV, I wonder what she is being taught. The problem of miscuing; consider that. A TV program produced for adults is viewed by a small child. Half of what is said and done in the TV drama is probably misunderstood by the child. Maybe it's all misunderstood. And the thing is, Just how authentic is the information anyhow, even if the child correctly understood it? What is the relationship between the average TV situation comedy to reality? What about the cop shows? Cars are continually swerving out of control, crashing, and catching fire. The police are always good and they always win. Do not ignore that point: The police always win. What a lesson that is. You should not fight authority, and even if you do, you will lose. The message here is, Be passive. And—cooperate. If Officer Baretta asks you for information, give it to him, because Officer Beratta is a good man and to be trusted. He loves you, and you should love him.

So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe—and I am dead serious when I say this—do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.

Of course, I would say this, because I live near Disneyland, and they are always adding new rides and destroying old ones. Disneyland is an evolving organism. For years they had the Lincoln Simulacrum, like Lincoln himself, was only a temporary form which matter and energy take and then lose. The same is true of each of us, like it or not.

The pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Parmenides taught that the only things that are real are things which never change... and the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus taught that everything changes. If you superimpose their two views, you get this result: Nothing is real. There is a fascinating next step to this line of thinking: Parmenides could never have existed because he grew old and died and disappeared, so, according to his own philosophy, he did not exist. And Heraclitus may have been right—let's not forget that; so if Heraclitus was right, then Parmenides did exist, and therefore, according to Heraclitus' philosophy, perhaps Parmenides was right, since Parmenides fulfilled the conditions, the criteria, by which Heraclitus judged things real.

I offer this merely to show that as soon as you begin to ask what is ultimately real, you right away begin talk nonsense. Zeno proved that motion was impossible (actually he only imagined that he had proved this; what he lacked was what technically is called the "theory of limits"). David Hume, the greatest skeptic of them all, once remarked that after a gathering of skeptics met to proclaim the veracity of skepticism as a philosophy, all of the members of the gathering nonetheless left by the door rather than the window. I see Hume's point. It was all just talk. The solemn philosophers weren't taking what they said seriously.

But I consider that the matter of defining what is real—that is a serious topic, even a vital topic. And in there somewhere is the other topic, the definition of the authentic human. Because the bombardment of pseudo-realities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly, spurious humans—as fake as the data pressing at them from all sides. My two topics are really one topic; they unite at this point. Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves. So we wind up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake humans. It is just a very large version of Disneyland. You can have the Pirate Ride or the Lincoln Simulacrum or Mr. Toad's Wild Ride—you can have all of them, but none is true.

In my writing I got so interested in fakes that I finally came up with the concept of fake fakes. For example, in Disneyland there are fake birds worked by electric motors which emit caws and shrieks as you pass by them. Suppose some night all of us sneaked into the park with real birds and substituted them for the artificial ones. Imagine the horror the Disneyland officials would feel when they discovered the cruel hoax. Real birds! And perhaps someday even real hippos and lions. Consternation. The park being cunningly transmuted from the unreal to the real, by sinister forces. For instance, suppose the Matterhorn turned into a genuine snow-covered mountain? What if the entire place, by a miracle of God's power and wisdom, was changed, in a moment, in the blink of an eye, into something incorruptible? They would have to close down.

In Plato's Timaeus, God does not create the universe, as does the Christian God; He simply finds it one day. It is in a state of total chaos. God sets to work to transform the chaos into order. That idea appeals to me, and I have adapted it to fit my own intellectual needs: What if our universe started out as not quite real, a sort of illusion, as the Hindu religion teaches, and God, out of love and kindness for us, is slowly transmuting it, slowly and secretly, into something real?

We would not be aware of this tranformation, since we were not aware that our world was an illusion in the first place. This technically is a Gnostic idea. Gnosticism is a religion which embraced Jews, Christians, and pagans for several centuries. I have been accused of holding Gnostic ideas. I guess I do. At one time I would have been burned. But some of their ideas intrigue me. One time, when I was researching Gnosticism in the Britannica, I came across mention of a Gnostic codex called The Unreal God and the Aspects of His Nonexistent Universe, an idea which reduced me to helpless laughter. What kind of person would write about something that he knows doesn't exist, and how can something that doesn't exist have aspects? But then I realized that I'd been writing about these matters for over twenty-five years. I guess there is a lot of latitude in what you can say when writing about a topic that does not exist. A friend of mine once published a book called Snakes of Hawaii. A number of libraries wrote him ordering copies. Well, there are no snakes in Hawaii. All the pages of his book were blank.

Of course, in science fiction no pretense is made that the worlds described are real. This is why we call it fiction. The reader is warned in advance not to believe what he is about to read. Equally true, the visitors to Disneyland understand that Mr. Toad does not really exist and that the pirates are animated by motors and servo-assist mechanisms, relays and electronic circuits. So no deception is taking place.

And yet the strange thing is, in some way, some real way, much of what appears under the title "science fiction" is true. It may not be literally true, I suppose. We have not really been invaded by creatures from another star system, as depicted in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The producers of that film never intended for us to believe it. Or did they?

And, more important, if they did intend to state this, is it actually true? That is the issue: not, Does the author or producer believe it, but—Is it true? Because, quite by accident, in the pursuit of a good yarn, a science fiction author or producer or scriptwriter might stumble onto the truth... and only later on realize it.

The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words. George Orwell made this clear in his novel 1984. But another way to control the minds of people is to control their perceptions. If you can get them to see the world as you do, they will think as you do. Comprehension follows perception. How do you get them to see the reality you see? After all, it is only one reality out of many. Images are a basic constituent: pictures. This is why the power of TV to influence young minds is so staggeringly vast. Words and pictures are synchronized. The possibility of total control of the viewer exists, especially the young viewer. TV viewing is a kind of sleep-learning. An EEG of a person watching TV shows that after about half an hour the brain decides that nothing is happening, and it goes into a hypnoidal twilight state, emitting alpha waves. This is because there is such little eye motion. In addition, much of the information is graphic and therefore passes into the right hemisphere of the brain, rather than being processed by the left, where the conscious personality is located. Recent experiments indicate that much of what we see on the TV screen is received on a subliminal basis. We only imagine that we consciously see what is there. The bulk of the messages elude our attention; literally, after a few hours of TV watching, we do not know what we have seen. Our memories are spurious, like our memories of dreams; the blank are filled in retrospectively. And falsified. We have participated unknowingly in the creation of a spurious reality, and then we have obligingly fed it to ourselves. We have colluded in our own doom.

And—and I say this as a professional fiction writer—the producers, scriptwriters, and directors who create these video/audio worlds do not know how much of their content is true. In other words, they are victims of their own product, along with us. Speaking for myself, I do not know how much of my writing is true, or which parts (if any) are true. This is a potentially lethal situation. We have fiction mimicking truth, and truth mimicking fiction. We have a dangerous overlap, a dangerous blur. And in all probability it is not deliberate. In fact, that is part of the problem. You cannot legislate an author into correctly labelling his product, like a can of pudding whose ingredients are listed on the label... you cannot compel him to declare what part is true and what isn't if he himself does not know.

It is an eerie experience to write something into a novel, believing it is pure fiction, and to learn later on—perhaps years later—that it is true. I would like to give you an example. It is something that I do not understand. Perhaps you can come up with a theory. I can't.

In 1970 I wrote a novel called Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. One of the characters is a nineteen-year-old girl named Kathy. Her husband's name is Jack. Kathy appears to work for the criminal underground, but later, as we read deeper into the novel, we discover that actually she is working for the police. She has a relationship going on with a police inspector. The character is pure fiction. Or at least I thought it was.

Anyhow, on Christmas Day of 1970, I met a girl named Kathy—this was after I had finished the novel, you understand. She was nineteen years old. Her boyfriend was named Jack. I soon learned that Kathy was a drug dealer. I spent months trying to get her to give up dealing drugs; I kept warning her again and again that she would get caught. Then, one evening as we were entering a restauant together, Kathy stopped short and said, "I can't go in." Seated in the restaurant was a police inspector whom I knew. "I have to tell you the truth," Kathy said. "I have a relationship with him."

Certainly, these are odd coincidences. Perhaps I have precognition. But the mystery becomes even more perplexing; the next stage totally baffles me. It has for four years.

In 1974 the novel was published by Doubleday. One afternoon I was talking to my priest—I am an Episcopalian—and I happened to mention to him an important scene near the end of the novel in which the character Felix Buckman meets a black stranger at an all-night gas station, and they begin to talk. As I described the scene in more and more detail, my priest became progressively more agitated. At last he said, "That is a scene from the Book of Acts, from the Bible! In Acts, the person who meets the black man on the road is named Philip—your name." Father Rasch was so upset by the resemblance that he could not even locate the scene in his Bible. "Read Acts," he instructed me. "And you'll agree. It's the same down to specific details."

I went home and read the scene in Acts. Yes, Father Rasch was right; the scene in my novel was an obvious retelling of the scene in Acts... and I had never read Acts, I must admit. But again the puzzle became deeper. In Acts, the high Roman official who arrests and interrogates Saint Paul is named Felix—the same name as my character. And my character Felix Buckman is a high-ranking police general; in fact, in my novel he holds the same office as Felix in the Book of Acts: the final authority. There is a conversation in my novel which very closely resembles a conversation between Felix and Paul.

Well, I decided to try for any further resemblances. The main character in my novel is named Jason. I got an index to the Bible and looked to see if anyone named Jason appears anywhere in the Bible. I couldn't remember any. Well, a man named Jason appears once and only once in the Bible. It is in the Book of Acts. And, as if to plague me further with coincidences, in my novel Jason is fleeing from the authorities and takes refuge in a person's house, and in Acts the man named Jason shelters a fugitive from the law in his house—an exact inversion of the situation in my novel, as if the mysterious Spirit responsible for all this was having a sort of laugh about the whole thing.

Felix, Jason, and the meeting on the road with the black man who is a complete stranger. In Acts, the disciple Philip baptizes the black man, who then goes away rejoicing. In my novel, Felix Buckman reaches out to the black stranger for emotional support, because Felix Buckman's sister has just died and he is falling apart psychologically. The black man stirs up Buckman's spirits and althought Buckman does not go away rejoicing, at least his tears have stopped falling. He had been flying home, weeping over the death of his sister, and had to reach out to someone, anyone, even a total stranger. It is an encounter between two strangers on the road which changes the life of one of them—both in my novel and in Acts. And one final quirk by the mysterious Spirit at work: the name Felix is the Latin word for "happy." Which I did not know when I wrote the novel.

A careful study of my novel shows that for reasons which I cannot even begin to explain I had managed to retell several of the basic incidents from a particular book of the Bible, and even had the right names. What could explain this? That was four years ago that I discovered all this. For four years I have tried to come up with a theory and I have not. I doubt if I ever will.

But the mystery had not ended there, as I had imagined. Two months ago I was walking up to the mailbox late at night to mail off a letter, and also to enjoy the sight of Saint Joseph's Church, which sits opposite my apartment building. I noticed a man loitering suspiciously by a parked car. It looked as if he was attempting to steal the car, or maybe something from it; as I returned from the mailbox, the man hid behind a tree. On impulse I walked up to him and asked, "Is anything the mattter?"

"I'm out of gas," the man said. "And I have no money."

Incredibly, because I have never done this before, I got out my wallet, took all the money from it, and handed the money to him. He then shook hands with me and asked where I lived, so that he could later pay the money back. I returned to my apartment, and then I realized that the money would do him no good, since there was no gas station within walking distance. So I returned, in my car. The man had a metal gas can in the trunk of his car, and, together, we drove in my car to an all-night gas station. Soon we were standing there, two strangers, as the pump jockey filled the metal gas can. Suddenly I realized that this was the scene in my novel—the novel written eight years before. The all-night gas station was exactly as I had envisioned it in my inner eye when I wrote the scene—the glaring white light, the pump jockey—and now I saw something which I had not seen before. The stranger who I was helping was black.

We drove back to his stalled car with the gas, shook hands, and then I returned to my apartment building. I never saw him again. He could not pay me back because I had not told him which of the many apartments was mine or what my name was. I was terribly shaken up by this experience. I had literally lived out a scene completely as it had appeared in my novel. Which is to say, I had lived out a sort of replica of the scene in Acts where Philip encounters the black man on the road.

What could explain all this?

The answer I have come up with may not be correct, but it is the only answer I have. It has to do with time. My theory is this: In some certain important sense, time is not real. Or perhaps it is real, but not as we experience it to be or imagine it to be. I had the acute, overwhelming certitude (and still have) that despite all the change we see, a specific permanent landscape underlies the world of change: and that this invisible underlying landscape is that of the Bible; it, specifically, is the period immediately following the death and resurrection of Christ; it is, in other words, the time period of the Book of Acts.

Parmenides would be proud of me. I have gazed at a constantly changing world and declared that underneath it lies the eternal, the unchanging, the absolutely real. but how has this come about? If the real time is circa A.D. 50, then why do we see A.D. 1978? And if we are really living in the Roman Empire, somewhere in Syria, why do we see the United States?

During the Middle Ages, a curious theory arose, which I will now present to you for what it is worth. It is the theory that the Evil One—Satan—is the "Ape of God." That he creates spurious imitations of creation, of God's authentic creation, and then interpolates them for that authentic creation. Does this odd theory help explain my experience? Are we to believe that we are occluded, that we are deceived, that it is not 1978 but A.D. 50... and Satan has spun a counterfeit reality to wither our faith in the return of Christ?

I can just picture myself being examined by a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist says, "What year is it?" And I reply, "A.D. 50." The psychiatrist blinks and then asks, "And where are you?" I reply, "In Judaea." "Where the heck is that?" the psychiatrist asks. "It's part of the Roman Empire," I would have to answer. "Do you know who is President?" the psychiatrist would ask, and I would answer, "The Procurator Felix." "You're pretty sure about this?" the psychiatrist would ask, meanwhile giving a covert signal to two very large psych techs. "Yep," I'd replay. "Unless Felix has stepped down and had been replaced by the Procurator Festus. You see, Saint Paul was held by Felix for—" "Who told you all this?" the psychiatrist would break in, irritably, and I would reply, "The Holy Spirit." And after that I'd be in the rubber room, inside gazing out, and knowing exactly how come I was there.

Everything in that conversation would be true, in a sense, although palpably not true in another. I know perfectly well that the date is 1978 and that Jimmy Carter is President and that I live in Santa Ana, California, in the United States. I even know how to get from my apartment to Disneyland, a fact I can't seem to forget. And surely no Disneyland existed back at the time of Saint Paul.

So, if I force myself to be very rational and reasonable, and all those other good things, I must admit that the existence of Disneyland (which I know is real) proves that we are not living in Judaea in A.D. 50. The idea of Saint Paul whirling around in the giant teacups while composing First Corinthians, as Paris TV films him with a telephoto lens—that just can't be. Saint Paul would never go near Disneyland. Only children, tourists, and visiting Soviet high officials ever go to Disneyland. Saints do not.

But somehow that biblical material snared my unconscious and crept into my novel, and equally true, for some reason in 1978 I relived a scene which I described back in 1970. What I am saying is this: There is internal evidence in at least one of my novels that another reality, an unchanging one, exactly as Parmenides and Plato suspected, underlies the visible phenomenal world of change, and somehow, in some way, perhaps to our surprise, we can cut through to it. Or rather, a mysterious Spirit can put us in touch with it, if it wishes us to see this permanent other landscape. Time passes, thousands of years pass, but at the same instant that we see this contemporary world, the ancient world, the world of the Bible, is concealed beneath it, still there and still real. Eternally so.

Shall I go for broke and tell you the rest of this peculiar story? I'll do so, having gone this far already. My novel Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said was released by Doubleday in February of 1974. The week after it was released, I had two impacted wisdom teeth removed, under sodium pentathol. Later that day I found myself in intense pain. My wife phoned the oral surgeon and he phoned a pharmacy. Half an hour later there was a knock at my door: the delivery person from the pharmacy with the pain medication. Although I was bleeding and sick and weak, I felt the need to answer the knock on the door myself. When I opened the door, I found myself facing a young woman—who wore a shining gold necklace in the center of which was a gleaming gold fish. For some reason I was hypnotized by the gleaming golden fish; I forgot my pain, forgot the medication, forgot why the girl was there. I just kept staring at the fish sign.

"What does that mean?" I asked her.

The girl touched the glimmering golden fish with her hand and said, "This is a sign worn by the early Christians." She then gave me the package of medication.

In that instant, as I stared at the gleaming fish sign and heard her words, I suddenly experienced what I later learned is called anamnesis—a Greek word meaning, literally, "loss of forgetfulness." I remembered who I was and where I was. In an instant, in the twinkling of an eye, it all came back to me. And not only could I remember it but I could see it. The girl was a secret Christian and so was I. We lived in fear of detection by the Romans. We had to communicate with cryptic signs. She had just told me all this, and it was true.

For a short time, as hard as this is to believe or explain, I saw fading into view the black prison-like contours of hateful Rome. But, of much more importance, I remembered Jesus, who had just recently been with us, and had gone temporarily away, and would very soon return. My emotion was one of joy. We were secretly preparing to welcome Him back. It would not be long. And the Romans did not know. They thought He was dead, forever dead. That was our great secret, our joyous knowledge. Despite all appearances, Christ was going to return, and our delight and anticipation was boundless.

Isn't it odd that this strange event, this recovery of lost memory, occured only a week after Flow My Tears was released? And it is Flow My Tears which contains the replication of people and events from the Book of Acts, which is set at the precise moment in time—just after Jesus' death and resurrection—that I remembered, by means of the golden fish sign, as having just taken place?

If you were me, and had this happen to you, I'm sure you wouldn't be able to leave it alone. You would seek a theory that would account for it. For over four years now, I have been trying one theory after another: circular time, frozen time, timeless time, what is called "sacred" as contrasted to "mundane" time... I can't count the theories I've tried out. One constant has prevailed, though, throughout all theories. There must indeed be a mysterious Holy Spirit which has an exact and intimate relation to Christ, which can indwell in human minds, guide and inform them, and even express itself through those humans, even without their awareness.

In the writing of Flow My Tears, back in 1970, there was one unusual event which I realized at the time was not ordinary, was not a part of the regular writing process. I had a dream one night, an especially vivid dream. And when I awoke I found myself under the compulsion—the absolute necessity—of getting the dream into the text of the novel precisely as I had dreamed it. In getting the dream exactly right, I had to do eleven drafts of the final part of the manuscript, until I was satisfied.

I will now quote from the novel, as it appeared in the final, published form. See if this dream reminds you of anything.


The countryside, brown and dry, in summer, where he had lived as a child. He rode a horse, and approaching him on his left a squad of horses nearing slowly. On the horses rode men in shining robes, each a different color; each wore a pointed helmet that sparkled in the sunlight. The slow, solemn knights passed him and as they traveled by he made out the face of one: an ancient marble face, a terribly old man with rippling cascades of white beard. What a strong nose he had. What noble features. So tired, so serious, so far beyond ordinary men. Evidently he was a king.
Felix Buckman let them pass; he did not speak to them and they said nothing to him. Together, they all moved toward the house from which he had come. A man had sealed himself up inside the house, a man alone, Jason Taverner, in the silence and darkness, without windows, by himself from now on into eternity. Sitting, merely existing, inert. Felix Buckman continued on, out into the open countryside. And then he heard from behind him one dreadful single shriek. They had killed Taverner, and seeing them enter, sensing them in the shadows around him, knowing what they intended to do with him, Taverner had shrieked.

Within himself Felix Buckman felt absolute and utter desolate grief. But in the dream he did not go back nor look back. There was nothing that could be done. No one could have stopped the posse of varicolored men in robes; they could not have been said no to. Anyhow, it was over. Taverner was dead.

This passage probably does not suggest any particular thing to you, except a law posse exacting judgment on someone either guilty or considered guilty. It is not clear whether Taverner has in fact committed some crime or is merely believed to have committed some crime. I had the impression that he was guilty, but that it was a tragedy that he had to be killed, a terribly sad tragedy. In the novel, this dream causes Felix Buckman to begin to cry, and therefore he seeks out the black man at the all-night gas station.

Months after the novel was published, I found the section in the Bible to which this dream refers. It is Daniel, 7:9:


Thrones were set in place and one ancient in years took his seat. His robe was white as snow and the hair of his head like cleanest wool. Flames of fire were his throne and its wheels blazing fire; a flowing river of fire streamed out before him. Thousands upon thousands served him and myriads upon myriads attended his presence. The court sat, and the book were opened.
The white-haired old man appears again in Revelation, 1:13:


I saw... one like a son of man, robed down to his feet, with a golden girdle round his breast. The hair of his head was white as snow-white wool, and his eyes flamed like fire; his feet gleamed like burnished brass refined in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of rushing waters.
And then 1:17:


When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. But he laid his right hand upon me and said, "Do not be afraid. I am the first and the last, and I am the living one, for I was dead and now I am alive for evermore, and I hold the keys of Death and Death's domain. Write down therefore what you have seen, what is now, and what will be hereafter."
And, like John of Patmos, I faithfully wrote down what I saw and put in my novel. And it was true, although at the time I did not know who was meant by this description:


...he made out the face of one: an ancient marble face, a terribly old man with rippling cascades of white beard. What a strong nose he had. What noble features. So tired, so serious, so far beyond ordinary men. Evidently he was a king.
Indeed he was a king. He is Christ Himself returned, to pass judgment. And this is what he does in my novel: He passes judgment on the man sealed up in darkness. The man sealed up in darkness must be the Prince of Evil, the Force of Darkness. Call it whatever you wish, its time had come. It was judged and condemned. Felix Buckman could weep at the sadness of it, but he knew that the verdict could not be disputed. And so he rode on, without turning or looking back, hearing only the shriek of fear and defeat: the cry of evil destroyed.

So my novel contained material from other parts of the Bible, as well as the sections from Acts. Deciphered, my novel tells a quite different story from the surface story (which we need not go into here). The real story is simply this: the return of Christ, now king rather than suffering servant. Judge rather than victim of unfair judgment. Everything is reversed. The core message of my novel, without my knowing it, was a warning to the powerful: You will shortly be judged and condemned. Who, specifically, did it refer to? Well, I can't really say; or rather would prefer not to say. I have no certain knowledge, only an intuition. And that is not enough to go on, so I will keep my thoghts to myself. But you might ask yourselves what political events took place in this country between February 1974 and August 1974. Ask yourself who was judged and condemned, and fell like a flaming star into ruin and disgrace. The most powerful man in the world. And I feel as sorry for him now as I did when I dreamed that dream. "That poor poor man," I said once to my wife, with tears in my eyes. "Shut up in the darkness, playing the piano in the night to himself, alone and afraid, knowing what's to come." For God's sake, let us forgive him, finally. But what was done to him and all his men—"all the President's men," as it's put—had to be done. But it is over, and he should be let out into the sunlight again; no creature, no person, should be shut up in darkness forever, in fear. It is not humane.

Just about the time that Supreme Court was ruling that the Nixon tapes had to be turned over to the special prosecutor, I was eating at a Chinese restaurant in Yorba Linda, the town in California where Nixon went to school—where he grew up, worked at a grocery store, where there is a park named after him, and of course the Nixon house, simple clapboard and all that. In my fortune cookie, I got the following fortune:


DEEDS DONE IN SECRET HAVE A
WAY OF BECOMING FOUND OUT.

I mailed the slip of paper to the White House, mentioning that the Chinese restaurant was located within a mile of Nixon's original house, and I said, "I think a mistake has been made; by accident I got Mr. Nixon's fortune. Does he have mine?" The White House did not answer.

Well, as I said earlier, an author of a work supposed fiction might write the truth and not know it. To quote Xenophanes, another pre-Socratic: "Even if a man should chance to speak the most complete truth, yet he himself does not know it; all things are wrapped in appearances" (Fragment 34). And Heraclitus added to this: "The nature of things is in the habit of concealing itself" (Fragment 54). W. S. Gilbert, of Gilbert and Sullivan, put it: "Things are seldom what they seem; skim milk masquerades as cream." The point of all that is that we cannot trust our senses and probably not even our a priori reasoning. As to our senses, I understand that people who have been blind from birth and are suddenly given sight are amazed to discover that objects appear to get smaller and smaller as they get farther away. Logically, there is no reason for this. We, of course, have come to accept this, because we are use to it. We see objects get smaller, but we know that in actuality they remain the same size. So even the common everyday pragmatic person utilizes a certain amount of sophisticated discounting of what his eyes and ears tell him.

Little of what Heraclitus wrote has survived, and what we do have is obscure, but Fragment 54 is lucid and important: "Latent structure is master of obvious structure." This means that Heraclitus believed that a veil lay over the true landscape. He also may have suspected that time was somehow not what it seemed, because in Fragment 52 he said: "Time is a child at play, playing draughts; a child's is the kingdom." This is indeed cryptic. But he also said, in Fragment 18: "If one does not expect it, one will not find out the unexpected; it is not to be tracked down and no path leads us to it." Edward Hussey, in his scholarly book The Pre-Socratics, says:


If Heraclitus is to be so insistent on the lack of understanding shown by most men, it would seem only reasonable that he should offer further instructions for penetrating to the truth. The talk of riddle-guessing suggests that some kind of revelation, beyond human control, is necessary... The true wisdom, as has been seen, is closely associated with God, which suggests further that in advancing wisdom a man becomes like, or a part of, God.
This quote is not from a religious book or a book on theology; it is an analysis of the earliest philosophers by a Lecturer in Ancient Philosophy at the University of Oxford. Hussey makes it clear that to these early philosophers there was no distinction between philosophy and religion. The first great quantum leap in Greek theology was by Xenophanes of Colophon, born in the mid-sixth century B.C. Xenophanes, without resorting to any authority except that of his own mind, says:


One god there is, in no way like mortal creatures either in bodily form or in the thought of his mind. The whole of him sees, the whole of him thinks, the whole of him hears. He stays always motionless in the same place; it is not fitting that he should move about now this way, now that.
This is a subtle and advanced concept of God, evidently without precedent among the Greek thinkers. "The arguments of Parmenides seemed to show that all reality must indeed be a mind," Hussey writes, "or an object of thought in a mind." Regarding Heraclitus specifically, he says, "In Heraclitus it is difficult to tell how far the designs in God's mind are distinguished from the execution in the world, or indeed how far God's mind is distinguished from the world." The further leap by Anaxagoras has always fascinated me. "Anaxagoras had been driven to a theory of the microstructure of matter which made it, to some extent, mysterious to human reason." Anaxagoras believed that everything was determined by Mind. These were not childish thinkers, nor primitives. They debated serious issues and studied one another's views with deft insight. It was not until the time of Aristotle that their views got reduced to what we can neatly—but wrongly—classify as crude. The summation of much pre-Socratic theology and philosophy can be stated as follows: The kosmos is not as it appears to be, and what it probably is, at its deepest level, is exactly that which the human being is at his deepest level—call it mind or soul, it is something unitary which lives and thinks, and only appears to be plural and material. Much of this view reaches us through the Logos doctrine regarding Christ. The Logos was both that which thought, and the thing which it thought: thinker and thought together. The universe, then, is thinker and thought, and since we are part of it, we as humans are, in the final analysis, thoughts of and thinkers of those thoughts.

Thus if God thinks about Rome circa A.D. 50, then Rome circa A.D. 50 is. The universe is not a windup clock and God the hand that winds it. The universe is not a battery-powered watch and God the battery. Spinoza believed that the universe is the body of God extensive in space. But long before Spinoza—two thousand years before him—Xenophanes had said, "Effortlessly, he wields all things by the thought of his mind" (Fragment 25).

If any of you have read my novel Ubik, you know that the mysterious entity or mind or force called Ubik starts out as a series of cheap and vulgar commercials and winds up saying:


I am Ubik. Before the universe was I am. I made the suns. I made the worlds. I created the lives and the places they inhabit; I move them here, I put them there. They go as I say, they do as I tell them. I am the word and my name is never spoken, the name which no one knows. I am called Ubik but that is not my name. I am. I shall always be.
It is obvious from this who and what Ubik is; it specifically says that it is the word, which is to say, the Logos. In the German translation, there is one of the most wonderful lapses of correct understanding that I have ever come across; God help us if the man who translated my novel Ubik into German were to do a translation from the koine Greek into German of the New Testament. He did all right until he got to the sentence "I am the word." That puzzled him. What can the author mean by that? he must have asked himself, obviously never having come across the Logos doctrine. So he did as good a job of translation as possible. In the German edition, the Absolute Entity which made the suns, made the worlds, created the lives and the places they inhabit, says of itself:


I am the brand name.
Had he translated the Gospel according to Saint John, I suppose it would have come out as:


When all things began, the brand name already was. The brand name dwelt with God, and what God was, the brand name was.
It would seem that I not only bring you greetings from Disneyland but from Mortimer Snerd. Such is the fate of an author who hoped to include theological themes in his writing. "The brand name, then, was with God at the beginning, and through him all things came to be; no single thing was created without him." So it goes with noble ambitions. Let's hope God has a sense of humor.

Or should I say, Let's hope the brand name has a sense of humor.

As I said to you earlier, my two preoccupations in my writing are "What is reality?" and "What is the authentic human?" I'm sure you can see by now that I have not been able to answer the first question. I have an abiding intuition that somehow the world of the Bible is a literally real but veiled landscape, never changing, hidden from our sight, but available to us by revelation. That is all I can come up with—a mixture of mystical experience, reasoning, and faith. I would like to say something about the traits of the authentic human, though; in this quest I have had more plausible answers.

The authentic human being is one of us who instinctively knows what he should not do, and, in addition, he will balk at doing it. He will refuse to do it, even if this brings down dread consequences to him and to those whom he loves. This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance. Their deeds may be small, and almost always unnoticed, unmarked by history. Their names are not remembered, nor did these authentic humans expect their names to be remembered. I see their authenticity in an odd way: not in their willingness to perform great heroic deeds but in their quiet refusals. In essence, they cannot be compelled to be what they are not.

The power of spurious realities battering at us today—these deliberately manufactured fakes never penetrate to the heart of true human beings. I watch the children watching TV and at first I am afraid of what they are being taught, and then I realize, They can't be corrupted or destroyed. They watch, they listen, they understand, and, then, where and when it is necessary, they reject. There is something enormously powerful in a child's ability to withstand the fraudulent. A child has the clearest eye, the steadiest hand. The hucksters, the promoters, are appealing for the allegiance of these small people in vain. True, the cereal companies may be able to market huge quantities of junk breakfasts; the hamburger and hot dog chains may sell endless numbers of unreal fast-food items to the children, but the deep heart beats firmly, unreached and unreasoned with. A child of today can detect a lie quicker than the wisest adult of two decades ago. When I want to know what is true, I ask my children. They do not ask me; I turn to them.

One day while my son Christopher, who is four, was playing in front of me and his mother, we two adults began discussing the figure of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels. Christopher turned toward us for an instant and said, "I am a fisherman. I fish for fish." He was playing with a metal lantern which someone had given me, which I had nevel used... and suddenly I realized that the lantern was shaped like a fish. I wonder what thoughts were being placed in my little boy's soul at that moment—and not placed there by cereal merchants or candy peddlers. "I am a fisherman. I fish for fish." Christopher, at four, had found the sign I did not find until I was forty-five years old.

Time is speeding up. And to what end? Maybe we were told that two thousand years ago. Or maybe it wasn't really that long ago; maybe it is a delusion that so much time has passed. Maybe it was a week ago, or even earlier today. Perhaps time is not only speeding up; perhaps, in addition, it is going to end.

And if it does, the rides at Disneyland are never going to be the same again. Because when time ends, the birds and hippos and lions and deer at Disneyland will no longer be simulations, and, for the first time, a real bird will sing.

Thank you.

MY TOP 10 SF NOVELS OF ALL TIME

Top Ten Science Fiction Novels



“A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.” - Roberston Davies

Here is a list of my top 10 Science Fiction Novels. It’s purely subjective, based on what I have enjoyed most over the years. These are the ones that stand out for me as all time classics, that are worth reading and re-reading. In fact each time I read them, I discover something new.

Good SF, I believe, requires 3 factors to be present:

1. Ideas - SF is primarily the literature of ideas. They don’t have to be completely original (though it helps), but they must be well thought through.

2. Characters - no different from any other fiction, strong characterisation is a pre-requisite for readable fiction, in my book (as it were!)

3. Good writing - again, just like in any other form of fiction, decent prose is essential, to hold the interest of an intelligent, literate readership (such as you good people reading this!)

You’ve got to have all 3. If you’ve just got No. 2 and 3 without 1 it’s just not SF. If you’ve got No. 1 without 2 and 3 you’ve just got crap SF - the kind that gives the whole genre a bad name (and there’s plenty of it out there, I’m afraid).

The following books do satisfy all of these conditions and in spades. I make no claims that this list is exhaustive or that it offers a representative sample of the genre. They’re just great books that I happen to like at this moment in time, early in the 21st century. Next century I may feel differently.

In no particular order then, here they are:

> Dune, by Frank Herbert

> The Left Hand Of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin

> Helliconia Spring, by Brian Aldiss

> Tschai, by Jack Vance

> Neuromancer, by William Gibson

> Red Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson

> The Man In The High Castle, by Philip K. Dick

> The Book of The New Sun, by Gene Wolfe

> Pavane, by Keith Roberts

> The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman


1. Dune, by Frank Herbert
> top of page

Buy from Amazon

Space Opera on a grand scale. Herbert mixes politics, religion and ecology of the far future with great aplomb. Set in a feudally run universe, where the balance of power between emperor, nobles and other factions is all important. Technology is strictly constrained and thinking machines are anathema, as a result of an ancient abortive takeover bid by the computers. To compensate, human beings are trained to maximise their potential in various way by the different factions and power groups ( e.g. the all-female Bene Gesserit, The Spacing Guild, The Tleilaxu genetic engineers etc.)

On the desert planet of Arrakis, a duke’s son, is forced to flee and take refuge with the tribal Fremen. The novel describes how he rises to their leadership and launches a holy war or jihad, on the established powers of the imperium. This campaign is greatly assisted by their control of the one substance upon which space travel (and therefore the cohesion of the human empire) depends - known as Spice.

The novel is full of great original ideas, for example:

Giant sandworms, which can be ridden by those bold and skilled enough to dare;
Personal shield generators which protect the wearer against projectile weapons but allow slower objects to penetrate, thereby reintroducing the arts of sword and knife play as essential skills for the up and coming survival oriented aristocrat.
Mentats, or human computers, people trained from birth to perform calculations and analyses at speeds approaching those of computers, aided by drugs. Every Duke should have one (and does!).
None of this would be worth a hill of sandworm poo, of course, if there wasn’t a decent plot. But there is. The writing is mature, fluent and complex. He gets you hooked from page one and won’t let you go until hundreds of pages later.

There were several sequels which Herbert continued writing up to the end of his life (Dune Messiah, Children Of Dune etc.) of which the earlier ones were very strong, but to my mind none of them matched the stunning achievement of Dune itself.

If some of the ideas in Dune seem familiar these days, it is because huge chunks of them were lifted and recycled into the Star Wars films (Space Empire, desert planets, Imperial Stormtroopers etc.)

Also, writing back in the early 1960s, Herbert anticipated the modern day rise of Islam. The Fremen (”Zensunni wanderers”, persecuted religious fundamentalists) wage a jihad (not a word as widely known then as it is now) against the Empire (= The West), aided by their control over a vital commodity Spice (=Oil). The Fremen language is heavily influenced by Arabic (while the imperialists speak an Anglo-Slavic derivative). And of course Herbert also pioneered the concept of Ecology in his fiction. A man ahead of his time.

The depth of the universe he created is virtually unparalleled, in terms of its history, languages and religions - you get a sense of a huge amount of background existing only in the author’s mind. The only similar example I can think of, though totally different in origin and feel, is Tolkien’s self created “Mythology For the English”.

I like this book, as you might have gathered by now! Essential reading for anyone who considers themselves a Science Fiction enthusiast.


2. The Left Hand Of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin
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This story is set on the planet Gethen, aka Winter, during an ice age. An envoy from Earth is the narrator and he describes the people and societies he meets.

The people are more or less human, distant cousins of ours, but with one important exception. Instead of being either male and female as we are, they are neuter for most of the time, except for a short period each ‘month’ when they go into ‘kemmer’ and differentiate into sexes on an arbitrary basis, for procreation and/or fun. The arbitrary nature of the change means that one person can be the father of some children and the mother of others.

Naturally, this means that their societies are organized on a totally different basis than ours, and the resulting implications are what Le Guin explores.

Le Guin herself is the daughter of two eminent anthropologists, and her work often seems to have a strong anthropological feel to it. Another of her recurring themes is Taoism – the tension and mutual dependence of opposites, again very strongly represented here (”Light is the left hand of darkness”).

Of course, it’s much more than an essay about what if …. This is a well crafted and moving story of a person on a strange world trying to come to terms with its ways, and about all the adventures, hardships and dangers he experiences. Rich characterisation, fully imagined cultures and some profound thinking about what it is to be human, make this book special for me.


3. Helliconia Spring, by Brian Aldiss
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Again, the first book in a series (the other two being Helliconia Summer and Helliconia Winter – what happened to autumn? I don’t know).

British author Aldiss, creates a planet where, due to its orbital periods round a multiple star system, the seasons last for hundreds of years.

There are two dominant species – humans and phagors (or ancipitals). Humans dominate the planet in the summer centuries, Phagors in the winter. Unfortunately for the humans, the civilisations they painstakingly build up every spring and summer, collapse during the harsh era of winter, allowing the less technologically advanced but physically tougher phagors to take over.

The books are essentially the story of the planet itself, very much influenced by the Gaia theory. It’s history, geography, flora, fauna and over all ecology are what gives rise to the events which unfold. This is SF in which the Science is very much to the fore. Which is not to say that it’s not a great and highly entertaining story, full of wit and invention.


4. Tschai, by Jack Vance
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Jack Vance is one of my favourite writers of all time. It’s very difficult to select just one of his works, but I’ll go his Tschai series. It was originally published as four separate books, under the appallingly banal heading “Planet Of Adventure” (his publishers neither knew nor cared about the true quality of his work).

A shipwrecked earthman lands on the planet Tschai, where he encounters four rival alien races: The ape-like Chasch, the amphibian Wankh (rather unfortunately named, but then Vance is American and wouldn’t know any better!), the cheetah-like Dirdir and the insectoid Pnume. There are also humans present, but the alien races are vastly technologically superior and lord it over them.

The earthman Reith, teams up with a pair of disparate characters, the nomad boy Traz Onmale and Ankhe at Afram Anacho, a Dirdirman (each of he alien races maintains its own client race of modified humans), and sets off to find some way of building or acquiring a spaceship to take him back to earth.

As with much of Vance’s work, a rambling picaresque series of adventures follows, where the dialogue and the descriptions of the many weird and wonderful societies encountered along the way, are entertaining as the story itself, or possibly more so. A wry and subtle humour pervades what is essentially a series of travellers’ tales, with almost an eighteenth century feel to them. The language is erudite and expansive, and no-one can approach Vance for the sheer exuberance and creativity of his imagination when it comes to inventing bizarre yet internally self consistent human and/or alien cultures. On the surface they can appear totally absurd, yet you come away feeling that our own world would probably appear just as arbitrary and ritualised to an offplanet visitor.

Vance is a true magician with words, he make you laugh, makes you think and entertains you at the same time. Future generations, less hidebound by the literary conventions of mainstream vs genre fiction, will recognise him for the true genius that he is.

Side note: Jack Vance was a good friend of Dune author Frank Herbert. They once built a houseboat together, which promptly sank!


5. Neuromancer, by William Gibson
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Bill Gibson invented the whole “Cyberpunk” subgenre with this book, first published in the mid eighties.

Set in a seedy near future, with morally ambiguous characters more anti-hero than hero, Neuromancer tells the story of a computer hacker involved in crime against faceless mega-corporations in a world of globalised capitalism running out of control (so not too different to today’s world then!).

The ideas of cyberspace and the internet are anticipated here, rather strangely as Gibson is far from a techie, though he does appear to have an uncanny grasp of cultural trends and a talented SF writer’s gift for extrapolation.

In many ways, the book has the feel of Film Noir, and of Raymond Chandler detective novels from the 1940s. You could almost imagine Humphrey Bogart playing one of his characters – cynical, world weary, beaten down but still wisecracking.

In terms of the visuals, the film Blade Runner has got about right. Except that was a film of a completely different book – P.K.Dick’s Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, strangely enough!

Gibson has gone on to write sequels and many other excellent stories of near future free market dystopias, but this one is the original and the best.


6. Red Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson
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Robinson’s Mars trilogy consists of Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars. It describes the colonisation of the planet by humans and their efforts to terraform it over a period of some centuries.

It’s pretty much pure “Hard” SF, in that it’s very firmly based on the scientific knowledge we have at present (no FTL, no aliens, no as yet undiscovered laws of physics). On the other hand, his characters are well developed and he has a feel for alien landscapes combined with a sense of the sheer awe and wonder of actually being on another world.

Robinson interestingly bypasses the story of the first man on Mars, deciding instead to devote a long section at the start of Red Mars to describing the months long voyage of the first 100 explorers and settlers, sent there on a one way trip.

The story continues to describe how the initial camps then settlements are established, how air and water are imported over time via asteroids, how settlement from earth increases and new communities are established, how anti terraforming eco-terrorist resistance movements emerge, how a space elevator to Phobos is built, how conflict with the home planet Earth develops, and much more.

Excellent storytelling, firmly grounded in real science and real ideas. Groups throughout the world are already planning a lot of these ideas for potential Mars missions. Robinson researched a lot of this work by spending time in research stations in Antarctica, and it clearly paid off, resulting in the sense of realism he achieved here.

Marvellous books.


7. The Man In The High Castle, by Philip K. Dick
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Philip K. Dick was by and large totally underrated as a writer during his lifetime, his work treated by his publishers as cheap pulp trash. Nowadays, though, his work is much respected and several of his books have been made into films (Blade Runner, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly etc.)

This book is not really typical of his work (if any of it could be described as typical) but it’s my personal favourite.

It’s an alternative history novel, set in a world in which the Nazis and the Japanese won World War II. It is the 1960s and America is divided into three parts – the West Coast ruled by the Japanese, the East ruled by the Germans, and the Rocky Mountain states as a neutral buffer zone between the two.

The Nazis have reintroduced slavery, are practising genocide on a huge scale in Africa and have landed men on Mars. However consumer commodities are rare and most households do not possess a TV. The Japanese are slightly more restrained but practice their own caste system in their territories.

Frank Frink, the protagonist is a humble working man, of Jewish origins, pushed along by forces much larger than himself.

But there is a book within the book. A writer called Abendsen has written an illegal and subversive alternative history called “The Grasshopper Lies Heavy” in which the Allies win the war. A clever touch. But when we see glimpses of that imaginary volume, the events there are quite different from our own version of the Allied victory. Even more subtle!

Dick also makes a lot of use of the I Ching in this story, the ancient Chinese method of divination through hexagrams. Why I don’t know, but it just fits the reflective mood of the piece perfectly.

A very subtle book, there’s something I can’t quite grasp about it, but I keep returning to it time and time again.


8. The Book of The New Sun, by Gene Wolfe
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I’m cheating here again, just slightly, by including a series of 4 novels. But you can’t really separate them – it’s all or nothing, I’m afraid!

The 4 component novels are:

The Shadow Of The Torturer
The Claw Of The Conciliator
The Sword Of The Lictor
The Citadel Of The Autarch (once mistakenly listed by the publishers as “Castle Of The Otter“!)
This is Wolfe’s masterwork, epic and monumental, his Lord Of The Rings, his Dune.

Wolfe is supremely clever and a born trickster. The titles, covers, subject matter and style of these books fool you into thinking they are works of fantasy. (Perhaps there was more of a market for fantasy when they were published and it was a cynical ploy – but, no I’m sure it was much more than that!). They are not. It is pure SF. There is nothing magical or supernatural in them, everything has a rational, if speculative explanation.

It takes place on Urth in the far far distant future, when our sun is about to kick the bucket. Humanity clings on, having reverted to a more feudal and stratified society, in the last ‘civilised’ region known as The Commonwealth (thought to be located roughly where South America now lies).

The books follow the progress of a young apprentice of the Torturer’s Guild as he learns and then loses his trade. We follow him from the sprawling and ancient city of Nessus out into the countryside and the mountains, where eventually, after many adventures, he becomes involved in the never ending war against the communistic hordes of the Ascians.

The book reads as if it was written in an earlier century, with rich, dense, evocative prose. Wolfe heightens this effect by his use of archaic and obsolete words from the English language, instead of inventing new terms, to describe ‘posthistoric’ phenomena. For example – peltasts, armigers, exultants, optimates, autocthones, eclectics, pandours, cacogens, destriers and pelerines.

None of it is spelt out for you, you have to work it out as you go along. Or perhaps on a second or third reading, If ever a book demanded an intelligent readership this was it.

So I’m sure you good folks can handle it! If you haven’t yet visited Urth, I urge you to do so. I guarantee it will be like nowhere else you have ever been and you will emerge a changed person.


9. Pavane, by Keith Roberts
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Pavane is another work of alternate history. It is set in a version of England in the 20th century, but one in which the Spanish Armada succeeded in invading the country and restoring Catholicism as the state religion, both here and throughout Europe.

Roberts’ premise is that as a result, the growth of science and technology was stifled by the Church, and that the advances of the industrial revolution happened incredibly slowly, if at all. Thus the most advanced form of transport is the land train - pulled by steam powered traction engines. And state of the art communications are provided by semaphore towers, manually controlled mechanical devices on hill tops.

But gradually things are starting to change and “Rebellion was once more in the air”.

Marvellously atmospheric, the book captures the almost nostalgic feel of a lost age that never actually happened. It is set in the deep rural south of England, with much of the action around Corfe Castle in Dorset .

Roberts was one of the great writers of English science fiction, by which I mean the country itself plays an important part in his work. He was also one of the most underrated ones, in my opinion. His books are well worth seeking out.


10. The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman
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To a certain extent inspired by Haldeman’s experience of the Vietnam War, this is the story of a future space war of humanity vs aliens. The effects of time dilation due to travelling at relativistic speeds come very much into play here.

Each side does not know what technological advances will have been made by the other when they next meet, it will depend on how far each unit has travelled from its home world and at what speeds. Even returning to earth on leave can cause severe future shocks, as the conscripts find the world has changed drastically since they left.

I can’t say too much more about the plot without including spoilers. Suffice it to say that it’s beautifully written, well paced, filled with believable characters, plus a wealth of original and well thought out ideas. Exactly what decent science fiction should be like, in my opinion.

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Discussion
72 comments for “Top Ten Science Fiction Novels”
Hmm… my list is different:

1. The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
2. Dune by Herbert
3. Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
4. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
5. Armor by John Steakley
6. Alas Babylon by Pat Frank
7. The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
8. Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
9. Foundation by Isaac Asimov
10. When Gravity Fails by George Alec Effinger

Kmuzu


Posted by Kmuzu | November 17, 2007, 10:12 pm Anything by Robert Heinlein
Anything by Arthur C Clarke
Anything by Isaac Asimov
Anything by Vonnegut
Anything by Ray Bradbury
Anything by H.G. Wells
Anything by Jules Vern
Contact (If for no other reason than a message from God hidden in Pye)
Dune
Clockwork Orange
1984
Do Androids dream of electric sheep?
Day of the Triffids
Brave New World

(I could go on!)

Nope, sorry boys, but it is impossible to keep this list down to 10.


Posted by Allan W Janssen | November 17, 2007, 10:42 pm Okay, my top ten, though in no particular order:

1) Dune
2) Neuromancer
3) Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
4) The Mote in God’s Eye
5) 2001
6) Rendevous With Rama
7) Lord of Light
8) Brave New World
9) A Wrinkle in Time
10) Heavy Weather

Honorable Mention: The Difference Engine


Posted by Joseph Johaneman | November 18, 2007, 5:58 am Compelling list, never read any of them, have just ordered all on Amazon. Looking forward to some good reading in these coming winter months.

Thanks for the list


Posted by Milander | November 18, 2007, 2:08 pm I spent several hours with Phillip Dick in the late 60s during which he said he used the I Ching as a plotting device while writing the novel “Man in the High Castle.” (My personal favorite of his books is “Martian Time Slip”). His best books flowed like mescaline trips and needed no such devices.


Posted by Claudia | November 19, 2007, 1:01 am Time enough for love is all I gotta say


Posted by Anonymous | November 19, 2007, 2:13 am wheres Isaac Asimov
he defined sci-fi


Posted by Anonymous | November 19, 2007, 3:04 am I would add the Hyperion series by Dan Simmons and the Parable series by Octavia Butler. I, too, look forward to discovering the books on your list that I haven’t yet read.


Posted by Charlie | November 19, 2007, 3:20 am Anything by Heinlein
Any sf by Asimov
Any sf by Ellison
Anything by Stansilaw Lem
All of the Circus World series by Barry Longyear
The Norstrillia books by Cordwainer Bird
Dune series
Ringworld series
Bug Jack Barron!!!!!
Dangerous Visions series
I could keep going………….


Posted by Bruce | November 19, 2007, 3:24 am Have to add a few more!!! Thanx for reminding me of the late
Octavia Butler’s books, they’re all great!
Philip K. Dick
A Canticle for Liebowitz!!!
Charly
any of the Oz books!!
Some of August Derleth’s books (although most were horror!)
I better stop before I go into sf withdrawal……..


Posted by Bruce | November 19, 2007, 3:36 am Lovley list–
Mine has some similarities–
1. Earth- By David Brin
2. Foundation by Isaac Asimov
3. The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K Leguin
4. Dune by Frank Herbert
5. The Sheep look up by John Brunner
6. Farenhieght 451 by Robert Heinlien
7. Slaughter House Five by Kurt Vonnegut
8. 2001 A Space oddesy by Arthur C Clarke
9. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
10. Neuromancer William Gibson

Leaving this list at ten leaves me feeling empty inside as I have left off Bradbury, Niven, Silverberg, Chalker, Bova, Pohl, and many others of great importance.


Posted by Jon Duey | November 19, 2007, 3:37 am I think that a well written, fast moving or intgriguing story can be written even if the character depth isn’t perfect. I loved ‘Rendezvous with Rama’, but hated all the sequels. Sometimes characterization can become annoying detail that just turns a book into a soap-opera.

Characterization is important, but as with all story elements, sometimes deep-characterization can be traded off very effectively for other story elements.


Posted by Michael Tuchman | November 19, 2007, 3:49 am how come no one has mentioned Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card?


Posted by Dwayne | November 19, 2007, 4:25 am oh how i miss reading in high school


Posted by justin | November 19, 2007, 4:43 am this makes me happy


Posted by justin | November 19, 2007, 4:47 am I can’t believe no one mentioned Neal Stevenson’s “Snow Crash.” It’s the best Cyberpunk novel not written by William Gibson. It’s worth reading just for the fascinating conversations in cyberspace with the Librarian.

I would also endorse George Orwell’s “1984″ as well as “Animal Farm.” If both of these were required reading in high schools our government would be far less arrogant and condescending.

I definitely agree with your appreciation of Philip K. Dick, vastly underrated.

P.S. Mr. Duey, Ray Bradbury deserves the credit for “Farenheit 451.”


Posted by Butch | November 19, 2007, 9:51 am I cannot believe Ringworld by Larry Niven is absent from all your top 10s. “Known Space” and the evolution of earth society is the greatest concept I have read in Science Fiction


Posted by David | November 19, 2007, 10:20 am Finally! Somebody mentioned Ender’s Game. Great compilation btw..


Posted by Manish | November 19, 2007, 10:55 am Thanks for all the feedback, people. You’ve mentioned some great books in your lists. Plus some ones which are new to me but sound intriguing - I’ll have to check them out.

As I said before, lists like these are purely subjective and every true enthusiast will have their own strong ideas about what should be included. The arbitrary limit of 10 books forced me to leave out a lot of books and authors I love, but that’s the way of these things!

Claudia - I am highly honoured to hear from someone who actually met Phillip K. Dick. Many thanks for that fascinating piece of information.

I’ll be doing some more lists soon, but meanwhile thanks again everybody for all the great feedback.


Posted by Gordon | November 19, 2007, 12:26 pm It’s been ages since I’ve been able to find a good SF book that grabs me. Now I know what to look for (I already have DUNER, and am yet to read it –shame on me!) I would have included the last one I read: NIGHTFALL by Asimov. Any particular reason you didn’t include any of Asimov’s work in the list?


Posted by Juan Carlo Rodríguez | November 19, 2007, 4:07 pm You really though Neuromancer had decent characters? I couldn’t even finish it. I was over 100 pages in and I honestly did NOT care whatsoever about what might happen to ANYONE in that book, so I stopped. That and there was an overly graphic sex-scene within the first 50 pages. It isn’t that I’m touchy about stuff like that or it “offends” me, but it always make a book feel like a crappy Cinemax movie from the 80s or something. Maybe I should have stuck with it, though.


Posted by Matt | November 20, 2007, 2:18 pm What about This Perfect Day by Ira Levin?


Posted by SKD | November 20, 2007, 5:35 pm I was saddened that your list did not include Ender’s Game… then I saw it in the comments… at least someone else on this forum has some Sci-Fi taste. Sheesh… not even a nod to Starship Troopers (though I did see some mentions to Heinlein). Ender’s Game should be at the top of the list and anyone who says otherwise has never read the book… or they’re nazis… whatever.


Posted by Paul | November 20, 2007, 9:19 pm All a great read, but have any of you ever read Peter F. Hamilton? Although a prolific writer, my favorite is the
Nights Dawn Trilogy,The Reality Dysfunction (1996), The Neutronium Alchemist (1998) and The Naked God (2000).


Posted by Justin | November 21, 2007, 1:25 pm Have you completely ignored Robert Heinlein?!? Methusela’s Rising? Stranger in a Strange Land? Travesty my good man, travesty.


Posted by chip | November 21, 2007, 1:28 pm “Half of the people can be part right all of the time
Some of the people can be all right part of the time
But all of the people can’t be all right all of the time
I think Abraham Lincoln said that

I’ll let your book in my Top 10 SF list, if mine can be in yours”
I said that.

Bob Dylan

Thanks again for all the great feedback, folks!


Posted by Gordon | November 21, 2007, 2:43 pm Fantastic list, very interesting read. ty Gordon :)


Posted by victoria | November 21, 2007, 2:50 pm Actually, it’s a good list. I’ve already ordered The Forever War and it’s shipping as we speak. It sounded very intriguing; most of the books did. I think I might also order the Phillip K. Dick book.


Posted by SKD | November 21, 2007, 7:04 pm Good list - what about Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card? It’s an amazing book!


Posted by Mandi | November 22, 2007, 8:56 pm Not a single Philip José Farmer mention? blasphemy!


Posted by Orlando Alonzo | November 22, 2007, 9:07 pm Wow … you hit on 8 of my 10 best list. I’d drop the Vance (as wonderful as his works are) and the Roberts, adding Heinlein’s Moon is a Harsh Mistress and C.J.Cherryh’s Faded Sun trilogy (ok, it’s cheating, but the three original volumes are available in an omnibus) to replace them. But still, 8 of ten hits …

Ender’s Game would be in my top 20, so would Snow Crash (although I might replace that with the Crytonomicon), along with Greg Bear’s Eon, Asimov’s original Foundation trilogy, Farmer’s Riverworld … Triffid by John Wyndham, Ammonite by Nicola Griffith, Joanna Russ’ Female Man … but I digress :)

Great list, in my not particularly humble opinion!


Posted by Chardonnay | November 23, 2007, 12:22 am Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, along with the following series, has to be the greatest science fiction series I’ve ever read…It disappoints me that such a brilliant storyline didn’t make the list. Also, A Wrinkle in Time and its surrounding series has perfectly merged science fiction, theoretical physics, cosmology, and so many different different sciences and Religion, that an Atheist like me could completely appreciate it…

I do hope these two great classics simply slipped your mind at the time of this writing…;P


Posted by Milan Choroomi | November 23, 2007, 9:11 am A couple of my favourites:
- “Stranger in a Strange Land” by Robert A. Heinlein
- “This Perfect Day” by Ira Levin (especially the first half, didn’t care much for the action-packed other half)
- “Rendezvous with Rama” by Arthur C. Clarke


Posted by Jeroen Brattinga | November 23, 2007, 12:19 pm Jon Duey !
Farenheit 451 was written by Ray Bradbury, nor Robert Heinlein
- huge difference between those two guys - but both are
excellent !


Posted by Odd Brenden | November 23, 2007, 1:07 pm They are both excellent, but I found Fahrenheit 451 quite a let down. After hearing endlessy positive reviews, I just didn’t think it had enough depth to it to be a ‘classic’. Maybe that’s just me, but I was expecting a lot more.


Posted by Richard | November 23, 2007, 1:28 pm It looks as though most of us have the same relative ideas. There are so many amazing and forward thinking sci-fi writers out there; Herbert, Heinlen, Card, Asimov, Dick, it goes on - we all recognize this. The importance is that we can all dredge up relevant and inspirational sci-fi to share with others. Works that may have changed our lives in one way or another.

Continue to list your favorites and we will continue to read.

Mine?

Dune
Speaker for the Dead (better than, although immaterial without, Enders Game)
Day of the Triffids
Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, et al
The Left Hand of Darkness
Forever War
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
Martian Chronicles
Flatland
1984

And as an unofficial extra simply because of its classification as a short story: Harrison Bergeron


Posted by Elizabeth | November 24, 2007, 4:08 am You must read Julian May’s “Saga of the Pliocene Exile”. It consists of 4 books and is the best work on psychic abilities that I have ever read.It begins a century or so from now, but spends most of the time six million years ago. Alien races, psychic amplifiers, battles,…Come on, what else do you need?


Posted by benny | November 24, 2007, 10:49 am I would go with anything by Jack Womack as best cyberpunk not by Gibson.


Posted by five12 | November 24, 2007, 5:01 pm Reasonably good list, a great many of my faves included. Of course Dune should always be at the top of every list. Also, Ender’s Game is a serious omission.

I’d have liked to have some Iain M Banks in there, and Peter F Hamilton.

Coming into my top ten, very recently, is Market Forces by Richard Morgan. A tough read, very violent and chillingly near.


Posted by Murk | November 24, 2007, 5:24 pm In addition to Joe Haldeman and Ursula le Guin i’d also mention

Phillip Jose Farmer - “Riverworld”
James Blish - “A case of conscience”
at least the first part of the book is amazing…


Posted by Andrei | November 24, 2007, 9:56 pm I really like the inclusion of “The Left Hand of Darkness”, “The Man in the High Castle” and “The Forever War” but one novel that is missed when reading this list is “Solaris” by Stanislaw Lem. It is one of the most deep and philosophical pieces of science fiction ever written and I wouldn’t be the person that I am today without it.


Posted by David | November 24, 2007, 10:56 pm Like the list, however i was sad not to see Do Androids Dream of Electric sheep on there, also surprised not to see Brave New World ! Im currently doing a comparison of the two, focusing on dystopian societies, and our defenition of Humanity, both extremely deep novels. Those two books should be on any sci-fi list !


Posted by Taz | November 25, 2007, 1:27 am I think the idea was just to include authors once - but yeah, if it was up to me Androids would be up there instead of The Man in the High Castle.


Posted by Daniel | November 25, 2007, 1:46 am Consider Phlebas by Iain M Banks
Moving Mars by Greg Bear
Anything else by Greg Bear :-)


Posted by Simon | November 25, 2007, 3:02 am Oh, I forgot - The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. Because it’s comedy people tend to forget it’s science fiction, too


Posted by Simon | November 25, 2007, 3:04 am I have great respect for your list of great S.F. novels, but all short lists, by definition must miss selections that would appear on someone else’s list. Where are Asimov’s “Foundation” books, or Clarke’s “Rama” series? Anyone out there for the “Ringworld” books, “Tau Zero”, or “The Mote in God’s Eye”?


Posted by Ken | November 25, 2007, 3:14 am I too would toss in a vote for Heinlein, though it would be pointless for me to make a top-10 list, as five of them would be Heinlein books (Stranger in a Strange Land, Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Time Enough for Love, Have Spacesuit Will Travel, Citizen of the Galaxy). By the time I got done with the three Grand Masters (Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein), I don’t think I would have any room left in the top-10. If I did, Dune would be the first in.

I see someone mentioned 2001 by Clarke. I would disqualify that book, since it was written alongside the movie script. Decent book and movie, but they had some serious differences, all of which Clarke ignored in 2010 by using the movie rather than the book as the original source (ex. the book had Saturn, not Jupiter as the destination)

And before anyone says “just limit yourself to one book per author”… screw that!


Posted by Jeff | November 25, 2007, 5:29 am I think you are close in your definition of the elements of great sci-fi, but you do a bad job in matching those elements to the books you choose. The “ideas” you list for Dune, for example, are gimmicks at best. Yes, giant sandworms are an original idea — but so what? The sandworms, as important as they are to the Dune universe, are quite incidental to the events of the story. They could have been replaced by any number of simple plot devices and the story would have been just as great. And this is not to say that Dune doesn’t deserve the spot you gave it — it probably does. But not for your reasons.

Also…sadly…most great sci-fi does not have great characters. “The Man in the High Castle,” my 2nd favorite book of all time (next to VALIS, the much more deserving Dick novel that you ignored) has at best mediocre characters. Neuromancer has mediocre characters. Dune has good characters, but Dune also is nearly more fantasy than sci-fi, despite the fact that it’s set in a futuristic world (you won’t claim that Star Wars/Trek are great sci-fi, I hope, though they are set in futuristic worlds?).


Posted by Ryan | November 25, 2007, 8:56 am Someone above said that Cryptonomicon ranks higher than Snow Crash as a sci-fi novel. How? Cryptonomicon isn’t even real science fiction — it’s historical fiction. It’s a great book, but just because Barnes and Noble puts it on the science fiction shelf and it has a cool sciency-sounding name does not make it science fiction. Nothing about the book qualifies in that regard.


Posted by Ryan | November 25, 2007, 8:58 am Jeff, why would you disqualify 2001? If you disqualify the book from this list then you’d have to disqualify the film from any top sci-fi films list. Kubrick and Clarke made a script, then Kubrick directed a film and Clarke wrote a book at the same time. Both are fantastic and well worthy of a place in a top 10 list.


Posted by Richard | November 25, 2007, 10:32 am Subjective. Well thought and written. Damn you should be writing SF and people like me would be reading it. Good Job!


Posted by Ryan805 | November 25, 2007, 10:52 am Sorry forgot to put the comma after Damn. I’m not damning you in any way. Good analysis.


Posted by Ryan805 | November 25, 2007, 10:54 am Wow. I am happy to see a thread full of the joy and wonder that great SF can invoke. Wonderful!
When I get the chance to discuss SF with people who don’t read it I try to have them to think of it as ‘Speculative Fiction’ rather than just ‘Science Fiction’. Heinlein use that definition and it does seem to more aptly describe the greatest works.
My list? Well… first let me suggest that any ranking of great fiction says more about where we are in our lives when we read it and therefore how open we were to the ideas contained within each page than it does about the actual fiction itself.

I’m happy to be the first to include a title by Roger Zelazny. One of the best.

I would say that each book here explores it’s own particular theme as well as, and perhaps better than, any other work of fiction:
1. Speaker for the Dead - Orson Scott Card
2. Stranger in a Strange Land - Heinlein
3. The Mote in God’s Eye - Niven/Pournelle
4. The Road - Cormac McCarthy
5. The Persistence of Vision - John Varley
6. Childhood’s End - Arthur C. Clarke
7. Lord of Light - Roger Zelazny
8. Make Room! Make Room! - Harry Harrison
9. The Forever War - Joe Haldeman
10. The Time Machine - H G Wells


Posted by Tony | November 25, 2007, 11:45 am I agree with a few commenters, Ender’s Game would definitely be on my list. I read it when I was 15, and it remains one of the favorite sci-fi books I’ve ever read.


Posted by Joel | November 25, 2007, 2:26 pm These are all excellentlists. I don’t know if I could list 10 books ranked in prefered order. I can list 10 great sci-fi books or series of books that are all favorites of mine.

- Dune 5 book series by Frank Herbert (NOT by his idiot son)
- Foundation trilogy by Isaac Asimov
- Enders Game the entire series by Orson Scott Card
- The Postman by David Brin
- Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein
- King David’s Spaceship by Jerry Pournelle
- Saga of the Pliocene Exile by Julian May
- Island in the Sea of Time by SM Stirling
- Calculating God by Robert Sawyer
- Canticle for Liebowitz by Walter M. Miller


Posted by Jeffrey Eisenberg | November 25, 2007, 4:24 pm I’m sorry, but Orson Scott Card is a decent sci-fi writer, but far from being wirht of being on the top 10.

I would agree with many of the posters that the only thing the list lacks is something Asimov. I’m not exactly sure what I’d sacrifice to include Foundation… probably Helliconia Spring. Other than that, I think it’s an excellent list.

~JW


Posted by Josh Wright | November 25, 2007, 7:43 pm Interesting list…


Posted by Mikey Mc | November 25, 2007, 8:37 pm Good article. You’ve listed some great books, and I agree with your 3 points about what makes good sci-fi, except for one book, which would rank as my number one sci-fi novel, Star Maker, by Olaf Stapledon.

Star Maker is one of the most concept rich and mind-expanding books I have ever read. It’s not as much a character driven story as a hard fictional history of the universe. For a book written in 1937, it’s profoundly prescient.


Posted by Alex Young | November 25, 2007, 10:37 pm I’ve read Forever War but didn’t care much for it.


Posted by Hrrrm | November 26, 2007, 3:58 am I have to say that you seem very passionate about the books on your list, so much so in fact that I have bookmarked your page to come back when I have some spare cash to buy them.
I would have a couple of others in there though, in no particular order…
The End of Eternity - Isaac Asimov
Gravity - Tess Geritsen
Excession - Ian M. Banks
and though some may cringe,
The ‘Halo’ books, just the ones that aren’t the actual games, think thats just the ones by Alex Garland, they are good, easy on the brain pieces of scifi.


Posted by Gary | November 26, 2007, 4:12 am I couldn’t understand some parts of this article nnial 2007 - salvatore iaconesi - del.icio.us poetry, but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.


Posted by Daniel | November 26, 2007, 5:00 am Thanks Jeffery for mentioning A Canticle for Liebowitz by Walter M. Miller. I see you’ve also got Calculating God on that list; great choice. Even though its listed as general fiction, I’d also include the fabulist work by Gunter Grass, The Flounder.

A Canticle for Liebowitz, Walter M. Miller
Calculating God, Robert Sawyer
Enemy Mine, Barry Longyear
Years of Salt and Rice, Kim Stanley Robinson
The Flounder, Gunter Grass
Postman, David Brin
Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein
The Persistence of Vision, John Varley
Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams

And what for number ten? Banks, Baxter, Brin… there’s so much good stuff out there. Makes me wish I were younger so I could start all over again. Oh! Oh shoot!

Thanks All!


Posted by John | November 26, 2007, 6:43 am I’m glad a few people are saying A Canticle for leibowitz. I read that the other day and thought it was truly fantastic. Has anyone read Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse woman? Is it any good?


Posted by Richard | November 26, 2007, 9:25 am I thought long and hard about which Asimov book to include. Really hard. I thought and debated and made lists and scratched them out and started again, but each time it just seemed that no book belonged. Then I realized that I was mistaken. This list is a list of top ten speculative fiction BOOKS. In a top ten list of BOOKS, no Asimov title really belongs. At least not in my top ten. Were this a top ten series list, or top ten authors list, then undoubtedly Asimov would be there, maybe at the very top, but in a list for BOOKS, well, sorry.


Posted by Tony | November 26, 2007, 10:11 am To Richard,
I haven’t read Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman, but if the title is anything to go on, it sounds like a stinker.


Posted by Tony | November 26, 2007, 10:12 am I cant belive the forver war is 10.
should be 1 no doubt.


Posted by Rab | November 27, 2007, 6:45 pm Rab - they’re in no particular order. I think the numbers are just for neatness’ sake.


Posted by Daniel | November 27, 2007, 7:42 pm Forever War is an awesome book..


Posted by SKinnyg | November 28, 2007, 3:12 am Naw, naw…you missed:

Inferno, by Niven and Pournelle
To Your Scattered Bodies Go, by Farmer
Stranger in a Strange Land, by Heinlein
The Stainless Steel Rat, by Harrison
The Stars, My Destination, by Bester
The Dosadi Experiment, by Herbert
All My Sins, Remembered, by Haldeman
To Live Again, by Silverberg
Gateway, by Pohl
Titan, by Varley


Posted by ares8989 | November 28, 2007, 2:00 pm I agree with all your choices of book and author - but I like far too many books for far too many reasons to try to list a top 10. Here are a few of the other authors I’ve really enjoyed - so if you like Gordon’s list you’ll enjoy some of these guys’ books too, for their warm, human and intelligent insights and great stories:
Tim Powers. Christopher Rowley. Iain M. Banks. M.A.Foster. Elizabeth Moon. Ken McLeod. Ray Hammond. Sheri S Tepper.


Posted by Anonymous | November 28, 2007, 3:04 pm No Alfred Bester? Haven’t any of you read “Tiger, Tiger” (aka “The Stars My Destination”) or “The Demolished Man”? Shame on you!

Also, check out “Glasshouse” by Charles Stross (particularly if you like Iain M Banks or Alistair Reynolds novels).


Posted by Greg | November 28, 2007, 6:31 pm ares8989 - nice list. Stainless Steel Rat books are great fun, as is “Bill, the Galactic Hero”.


Posted by Greg | November 28, 2007, 6:33 pm Post a comment
Name

THE MATH JUST DONT JIVE

Noah’s Ark vs. Math. Math Kills Noah’s Ark (Math Wins).






According to Creationists, all the animals alive today are descended from the pairs of animals Noah brought onto the Ark before The Flood which supposedly happened 4,000 years ago. According to the first creation story in Genesis, animals were created by God according to their own “kind”. Noah was instructed by God to bring animals of each kind onto the ark, and the term kind still plays a big part in Creationist thinking today. The problem is that no one seems to know what a kind is.

Does it simply mean species? That would seem to me to be the most obvious and easy answer, except there’s no way that all the species of multicellular land organisms could fit onto Noah’s Ark. It must be something taxonomically higher. There are still too many genera of extant animals to fit into an Ark, so that’s ruled out. Could it possibly be roughly analagous to families of animals?

I have heard Creationists speculate something similar. Cats are of one kind; bears are of one kind; equines are of one kind. Those categories do correspond to taxonomic families: Felidae, Ursidae, and Equidae. The different species of bear we have today descended from one species of bear, but they are all still part of the created kind “bear”. This is what Creationists call “microevolution”, which they readily accept. What they oppose is the concept of “macroevolution”, which would be one created kind transitioning into another: Artiodactyls into Cetaceans, or dinosaurs into birds.

So I decided to conduct a thought experiment to actually quantify the implications of this. For the sake of simplicity, I am only including mammals in this exercise.

According to Mammal Species of the World there exist today 5,400 mammal species in 153 familes. If the created kind is analogous to the taxonomic family, then Noah would have brought 153 pairs of mammals onto the ark, which afterwards diversified, via microevolution, a concept undeniable even to Creationists, into the 5,400 extant species. Since The Flood supposedly occurred 4,000 years ago, this would have had to happen very quickly.

In fact, according to some simple division, there would have had to be an average of 1.31 new mammal species arising every year! Wow! Microevolution is exponentially faster than macroevolution!

Except, waitaminnitwhat??? One of the most repeated “arguments” Creationists use is that if evolution really happened, surely someone, somewhere, in all of human history would have witnessed it! Aside from the fact that we actually have witnessed it, both directly in bacteria, and indirectly through the fossil record, what about the ridiculous amount of microevolution that would have needed to occur since the Noahic Flood to account for the current amount of mammalian diversity? Surely someone, somewhere, in all of human history would have witnessed it. I mean, it happened 5,247 times in 4,000 years, and that’s completely ignoring the ridiculous amount of diversity found in birds, arthropods, amphibians, and reptiles. If that many new mammal species have arisen within the time span of recorded history, there would be a record of it.

So here’s the bottom line: If the created kind corresponds to anything lower than a family, there is simply no way representatives could of each kind could fit onto one boat. If the created kind corresponds to the taxonomic family or anything higher, there is simply no way to account for the current biodiversity we see in the natural world. There is no way the Genesis account of the Noahic Flood could have literally happened.

Sources:
http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v22/i3/ligers_wolphins.asp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammal
http://www.trueorigin.org/glossary.asp

Also special thanks to Ann K. and Jeremy B.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 16th, 2007 at 10:54 am and is filed under Evolution. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

46 Responses to “Noah’s Ark vs. Math. Math Kills Noah’s Ark (Math Wins).”
Walter Q. Mason Says:

November 16th, 2007 at 2:28 pm
God loves you anyways.

Jason Says:

November 17th, 2007 at 10:03 am
Thank you. I sincerely do appreciate that.

T. C. Says:

November 19th, 2007 at 1:56 pm
One of the many ways in which creationists (and fundamentalists in general) have gone horribly wrong is in their understanding of scripture. Scripture is “inerrant” or “infallible” insofar and ONLY insofar as it reveals the One True God, which is primarily accomplished in the record of the life of Person: Jesus Christ. The creation account mustnt be read as one would read a science textbook!

Stephen Wells Says:

November 26th, 2007 at 9:26 am
Have you considered the possibility that scripture is not inerrant or infallible at all, but rather a somewhat disjointed collection of folk-tales, political claims, mythology and philosophy?

Ashley Moore Says:

November 26th, 2007 at 9:57 am
Maybe speciation only happens when people aren’t looking?

CW Says:

November 26th, 2007 at 10:03 am
“The creation account mustnt be read as one would read a science textbook!”

Very true. It should be read as a typical early stab at explaining our existence, based on contemporary understanding of the world. Considering that the scholars who wrote it knew far less about the universe than a normal grade-schooler does today, it’s no surprise these old creation stories turned out so charmingly goofy;-)

alex Says:

November 26th, 2007 at 10:42 am
“Scripture is “inerrant” or “infallible” insofar and ONLY insofar as it reveals the One True God, which is primarily accomplished in the record of the life of Person: Jesus Christ.”

surely if the importance of Jesus’ life is reliant on the validity of the Old Testament (which a quick reading of the Bible will confirm) then the fact that the Old Testament is so obviously, demonstrably unreliable; untrue; immoral etc. should signal a few warning bells, no?

Jon Eccles Says:

November 26th, 2007 at 10:47 am
The creationist account from Genesis isn’t just poor science, it’s poor metaphor, mainly because it gets things in the wrong order. It has the sea, and even grass, herbs and fruits, being created before the stars. It makes the ‘light’ appear before the sun, which appears after all the other stars.

Because the account is so anthropomorphic, because it describes creation from the vantage point of human priorities, it actually radically undermines the whole idea that the Bible was written with inspiration from beyond our perception.

Dave S. Says:

November 26th, 2007 at 11:02 am
Birds: 227 families with some 10,000 species (at least this many, may be as many as 13,000 or more). That’s like 2.5 - 3 new bird species arising every year. They don’t believe in macroevolution, but they happily believe in rates of “microevolution“ that would stagger any evolutionary biologist. Rates that for some strange reason don`t seem to be measured in the present.

savagmickey Says:

November 26th, 2007 at 11:04 am
Of course there is another math problem with the whole story. How were these animals able to cover the distance to the ark and then spread themselves out afterwards? And how did all those marsupials get to Australia? But if you try to present these arguments to a true believer they will just shrug their shoulders and say that godditit. Morons.

Tim Says:

November 26th, 2007 at 11:08 am
Let’s not leave out fish! A world-wide flood would wipe out most freshwater fish because of the salt water contamination of their habitats. Most salt water fish would also die because of the diluting of seawater by the mixing of all fresh water, including that locked up in ice, and, of course, from 40 days and nights of rain.

Also, all terrestrial plant life would be wiped out from being submerged under water almost a year. Noah didn’t take any potted plants on board, did he?

Jason Says:

November 26th, 2007 at 11:10 am
Dave S.: The birds just flew the whole time. Duh.

Mrs Tilton Says:

November 26th, 2007 at 11:12 am
I don’t think T.C. deserves to be patronised. S/he is presumably one of those reasonable, non-fundamentalist, non-creationist Christians one is always hearing about; when one actually turns up, a bit less hostility might be in order. It sounds as though there is nothing about the bible with which T.C. and an atheist would disagree, except that bit about it revealing a One True God in the Person of JC.

That’s a fairly important bit, of course. But, unlike claims that the bible reveals the earth to be 6,000 years old, or rabbits to be ruminants, or pi to equal 3, it’s not a claim that denies the findings of science.

It is a claim that atheists believe wrong (or, as some might prefer, meaningless). But that’s OK. People can believe what they like, so long as they don’t insist I believe the same (or pass laws that require me to act as though I believed the same), and as long as they don’t argue that their theological beliefs entitle them to say anything about science. If all Christians were like T.C., other people would have less to complain about.

Jason Says:

November 26th, 2007 at 11:15 am
Tim: Obvy, they microevolved anadromy for the duration of the flood.

Bob Lane Says:

November 26th, 2007 at 11:19 am
It’s a myth. Myths are great. Here’s my interpretation:

“The book of Genesis is a collection of stories woven together by some unknown redactor. The work contains legend, poetry, fantasy, genealogy, short story, and other literary forms which are blended together to form a more or less coherent whole. Genesis is a kind of universal history; like other myths, it presents a story about what the beginning of time may have been like. It opens with two distinct creation myths: one emphasizing the transcendental nature of the creator god and the other emphasizing the human-like properties of the same creator god. The first god creates by fiat, by giving verbal commands; the second creates by breathing air into a lump of clay. The two may be different versions of the story by different poets, or they may be contrary projections of the complex human creation called god. The “third,” if the projection is read as a psychological ground, would be this: the verbal is the lump of clay. God speaks and the world begins. God speaks and life begins. The creative power of speech is celebrated in the beginning. Language with its formal aspects - its rules of syntax and semantics - is the perfect analog for creation itself, since language gives us the power to create order and meaning out of the chaos of experience.

The creation myth can be read as a description of any act of creation: first the intention, then the translation from mind to matter, and then the evaluation: “and it was good.” Professor Douwe Stuurman, who taught The Bible as Literature at the University of California in the nineteen sixties, pointed out in lectures that the creation myth, when read aloud, will be heard to be an accurate description of the completion of any creative act. He told us the story of his first wife, a blind poet, who had asked him to read Genesis 1 and 2 aloud to her and who when he finished said “that is precisely the feeling of creating a poem.” In writing a poem one starts with an idea and a blank and formless page. The creative act of beginning to “blow” life into that page and after some time (and with some luck) giving form to the stuff of the mind, transforming it into a new medium has formed a completed work. Human creation, like Eliot’s The Wasteland, is often a multi-staged affair with false starts, revisions, crumpled failed attempts tossed away, and a complex of discovery and creation. The poet does not know the poem until it is finished. And when finished the feeling is there to be expressed: “And it is good.”

Read this way `good’ is an aesthetic term, as in “Shane is a good movie” or “King Lear is Shakespeare’s best play.” Value terms are ambiguous in that sense, for we use many of the same words to describe both aesthetic and moral judgments, `good’ doing service in both categories of judgments. “And it was good” as used in Genesis is evaluative, but not in the moral sense. The story itself is silent on the moral status of the creation and therefore the puzzle of how evil can arise in a perfect creation arises only because of the confusion between aesthetic and moral uses of the word `good.’ `Is the universe and everything in it good?’ is the wrong question to ask when `good’ is used in the moral sense. Such a question gets currency only if one presupposes that the logically prior assertion `God is good’ is true, and that there is a perfect transfer from creator to creation. But in the creation myths in Genesis we have no argument to establish the truth of that claim, in fact, Genesis actually tells us very little about God. “In the beginning of creation, when God made heaven and earth…” presupposes the existence and nature of God and the reader has the task of creating God from the narrative stuff provided. From the first line of the book the main character is a given, yet a mystery, a term looking for a referent. Here again confusion arises when we fail to see that the particular kind of verbal act the writer uses in the story is not one to be evaluated by some correspondence theory of truth, but is rather a proclamation or statement in the sense that the Canadian Constitution is a proclamation or set of statements. If one says of a country’s constitution, `It is true’ what exactly is one saying? Constitutions constitute the rules of the game, and are, as we all know, subject to interpretation throughout time. The logical status of many statements in the Bible is similar to the logical status of rules of a game: `three strikes and you are out’ not only regulates the game of baseball, it also constitutes the game. “And it was good” is thus proclamation and aesthetic judgment. The priests who compose the account of the creation presuppose God, as an objective being. God, as a character in a narrative, is yet to be discovered.” [from Reading the Bible, p.47]

Jason Says:

November 26th, 2007 at 11:20 am
Thanks for saying that, Mrs. Tilton. TC is a good friend of mine who literally saved my life once. And I think you presume correctly about him. I wish there were more of us like him.

Ginger Yellow Says:

November 26th, 2007 at 12:10 pm
This is one of my favourite arguments to use against creationists. It’s extremely easy to lead them into a dead end by starting with the “Surely Noah couldn’t have fitted all the species on the ark”. Once they admit that, then it’s a short hop to getting them to argue in favour of evolution more dramatic and rapid than any biologist would propose. The moment when they realise what they’ve done is always priceless.

IanR Says:

November 26th, 2007 at 12:14 pm
The second version of the flood story in Genesis says that seven of each clean animal were taken on board the ark. (Ignore the Yahwists, trust the Priests!) So for those groups, you need a much lower mutation rate, since the founding population was probably more genetically diverse.

Anyway, the reality is that Noah must have had some other way of preserving lineages…frozen embryos maybe? Although only Noah and his family got on the ark, Cain’s descendants show up after the flood. (Noah was descendant of Seth). If he was using frozen embryos, he only needed representatives who were closely enough related to serve as surrogate mothers. See…it isn’t so far-fetched an idea after all ;)

Salt in Water » Noah’s Ark has a math problem Says:

November 26th, 2007 at 12:16 pm
[…] Noah’s Ark vs. Math. Math Kills Noah’s Ark (Math Wins). […]

Jason Says:

November 26th, 2007 at 12:17 pm
“Anyway, the reality is that Noah must have had some other way of preserving lineages…frozen embryos maybe?”

If only InGen hadn’t paid off Dennis Nedry…

Jen Says:

November 26th, 2007 at 12:39 pm
When, as a child, I asked my mother about this, she made the ark out to be like the TARDIS. (You know, bigger on the inside.) Not very creative, but an easy out for her.

Cubist Says:

November 26th, 2007 at 1:12 pm
My favorite Gaping-Hole-The-Size-Of-Alaska in the Noah story: We are told that just a *whole* lot of water got injected into the oceans — “Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered.” (Gen 7:20). Okay, fine… but all that water is going to reduce the salinity of the oceans, in a *big* way. Why? Because rain (see also Gen 7:4: “I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights”) is *fresh* water. In particular, all that fresh water is getting deposited on the *surface* of the oceans.
How many plankton species can survive a sudden, massive reduction in the salinity of the water they live in?
Once the plankton goes away, how many *other* species, which formerly had plankton as the sole/major component of their diet, *also* go away?
In other words, Ye Floode scenario necessarily results in the eradication of what may be *the* single most vital component of the oceanic food-web. Lose plankton, and it won’t be more than a few centuries, at most, before the entire ocean goes sterile…

Doldrumms Says:

November 26th, 2007 at 1:23 pm
Frozen embryos, ha ha ha ha. How would he have retrieved those and and where exactly would he have gotten the liquid nitrogen to store them ?

eyelessgame Says:

November 26th, 2007 at 1:36 pm
Wandered here from pharyngula, hope I’m not intruding.

I always wondered what the predators all ate after getting off Ye Arke. After all, predator:prey ratio has to be something like 1:1000. The two big cats get off the ark, first thing they do is chase down and eat one of the gazelles — oops, no more gazelles.

Ditto regarding attitudes towards T.C. I’m married to one of them perfectly reasonable Christians myself.

But the bibliolaters have an answer to it, of course. Like they do for starlight — the speed of light exponentially decreased from the moment of creation until 1960, when we were first able to measure it precisely. From then on it’s been constant.

Or like continental drift. The continents were all joined as Pangaea until after the flood (so the animals could all walk from Ye Arke to their current habitats); then the continents split up and spread out really really fast — several miles per year — and just when we started being able to measure distances precisely, they slowed to their current rate.

Thus the same with evolutionary rates: they were enormously fast right up until we started carefully observing most species — then they slowed way down, so we can’t see speciation in real time anymore.

Seriously, this is what they’ll come up with. Just watch.

Drake Says:

November 26th, 2007 at 1:55 pm
Yes, yes. But this all assumes that mathematics is true.

me Says:

November 26th, 2007 at 2:38 pm
@eyeglassgame- It’s a trick they stole, this time from quantum mechanics–one can’t measure the rate of speciation that one can actually see occurring in much the same way one can’t measure both the position and momentum of subatomic particles.

mark Says:

November 26th, 2007 at 2:58 pm
You seem to rule out extinct animals being on the ark, yet wasn’t Noah told to bring 2(or 7) of all kinds of animals aboard? That’s why I can’t buy the “dinosaurs couldn’t swim, that’s why they’re extinct” argument. If Noah didn’t do as God told him, the ark would have hit an iceberg and all aboard would have drowned!

jpf Says:

November 26th, 2007 at 3:37 pm
“Yes, yes. But this all assumes that mathematics is true.”

Nail on the head, Drake.

You see, there are micromathematics and macromathematics. The number of species belongs to the micromathematics realm, whereas the number of families belongs to the realm of macromathematics. The mistake was blithely using division to combine these incompatible values. Instead, a special metamathematical function (which is too complex to belabor here) must be performed, which gives us the number of new species formed since the Flood as: 0. Thus all the created kinds could have fit on the Ark without any speciation occurring.

AnInGe Says:

November 26th, 2007 at 3:54 pm
If you are going to try to challenge the Noatic story using mathematics you are bound to loose. Any mathematician will tell you that when you draw a circle on a plane or a spherical shell in three dimensional space, it is quite arbitrary which area or volume you consider to be the inside and which the outside. After building the arc, Noah merely declared the exterior to be the inside (God chose him because of his mathematical acumen) and pairs of each species were automatically inside the arc. God the poured 15 cubits of water into the arc. Noah then merely had to train some bird to fly into the arcs window and not return. Notice that all the skeptics questions concerning the reasonableness of the story are resolved (although there might now be some new questions raised).

Monado Says:

November 26th, 2007 at 4:09 pm
T.C., that’s an interesting point. There’s poetry/psalms/proverbs, and then there’s important doctrine.

CJK Says:

November 26th, 2007 at 5:31 pm
Error in Noah’s Ark math thought experiment

Although I agree with Jeffthefish that the creationists do not have much of a grasp on reality I have to disagree with his use of math in this thought experiment.

Taking the amount of mammal species alive today and simply dividing that through the numbers of years since the “flood” (according to creationists) to give about 1.35 speciation events from the original 153 “kinds” on the Ark is erroneous (I will also assume that “kinds” are analogous to taxonomic families). This approach assumes that all speciation events (or should it be “kindification” events…!) occur sequentially, one after the other, and no simultaneous events occur.

If, however, one follows a more realistic cladistic approach then each mammal “kind” would diversify to two new “kinds”, and these two new “kinds” on their turn would give rise to four new “kinds”. In effect, starting with the original 153 “kinds” straight out of the Ark, we would get a sequence like this : 153 – 306 – 612 – 1224 – 2448 – 4896 – 9792. It is clear that should these events occur roughly simultaneously one would require slightly more than 5 mass or bulk speciation (“kindification” anyone?) events to reach the present 5400 species of mammals. Dividing these 5 events through 4000 years yields 5 periods of 800 years and then one would get that every 800 years there would be progressively more potentially observable speciation events. And the last 800 year period would have had potentially 4800+ events to observe. These 8 centuries also include the times when Linnaeus (1707 – 1778) - and those naturalists who preceded and followed him, until the present- were actively making rigorous scientific observations to come to grips with biological diversity.

Likewise birds with about 10 000 species within 227 families will give a sequence that also requires slightly more than five bulk events (227 – 454 – 908 – 1816 – 3632 – 7264 – 14528) with about 7200+ bird speciation events for Linnaeus & Co. to observe. More diverse animal groups such as insects, with a conservatively estimated 5 000 000 species within about 200 common families (“kinds”?), would actually require slightly more than 15 speciation events (200 – 400 – 800…..all the way to 3 276 800 – 6 553 600), or one bulk event every 267 years. This leaves Linnaeus & Co. with over 3 000 000 potentially observable insect speciation s events for the last 3 centuries.

So instead of just about 350 potentially observable mammal speciation events since Linnaeus we would actually have more than an order of magnitude more. And birds and bugs would blow these numbers completely out of the water.

But here I have to concur with Jeffthefish again. Creationists might whine that these speculative numbers are unrealistic but this caricature of speciation – or creationist “kindification” since the “flood” - flows directly from their initial flood apologetics. If the conclusion is unrealistic their initial argument and the storybook it is based on is equally unrealistic. Garbage in, garbage out.

Jon H Says:

November 26th, 2007 at 5:51 pm
alex wrote: “surely if the importance of Jesus’ life is reliant on the validity of the Old Testament (which a quick reading of the Bible will confirm) then the fact that the Old Testament is so obviously, demonstrably unreliable; untrue; immoral etc. should signal a few warning bells, no?”

Nah. The relevance of passages of the Old Testament to the Christ story is going to vary, obviously. Some bits are going to be fairly directly relevant. Others (Noah’s ark, etc) are pretty orthogonal.

Furthermore, one could assume that the New Testament, depicting events in periods of advanced cultural development, are likely to be more dependably recorded than events which are supposed to have happened much earlier and that were not recorded.

I think, rather than using the OT as a foundation on which to build the case for Christ, Christians should take Christ as the given, which lends credence to the OT, but does not require that everything be taken literally; the father the Bible strays from topics directly relevant to Christ, the more flexibly those parts can be interpreted.

Then again, I’m a slacker Buddhist, so what do I know.

darwinfinch Says:

November 26th, 2007 at 6:04 pm
Creationists don’t believe anything other than what is convenient for the lie they are in the process of uttering. This explains why the current Republican Party’s “base” is largely composed of creationists, since they share to a T the same disrepect of facts, truth, and those who refuse to massage their fear and self-loathing.

kay Says:

November 26th, 2007 at 6:42 pm
#5: “Maybe speciation only happens when people aren’t looking?”

I like where you’re going with this, kind of a Quantum interpretation. This way Noah doesn’t have to take all those animals on the ark, he can just take a single enitiy in a quantum superposition of all possible animals, whose decendants’ waveforms only collapse into discrete species when we observe them!

OK now I’m scaring myself.

rubberband Says:

November 26th, 2007 at 8:06 pm
This is a fun game (i.e. how might the flood work out logically)
I like the two entries that speculate on ways to make the volume of the ark larger, and I adore the ‘logic’ CJK used about the branching/doubling trick, as opposed to the sequential changes. And of course, the predator/prey ratios and lack of producers are obvious challenges.
One way around much of this, which may or may not be used by fundamentalists (I don’t talk to fundies often), is to say that the flood was actually a ‘local’ event, simply aimed at killing off the evil humans (who, obviously all lived in the vicinity of Noah), not all life on earth, and the creatures in the ark were only necessary for the human survivors to repopulate simply their familiar fauna in the aftermath. No need to worry about insects and fish. . .
I dunno. Whatever. It seems you really can make up anything you wish, if the laws of nature can be blithely suspended.

noodle-soup Says:

November 26th, 2007 at 10:44 pm
RE: “Then again, I’m a slacker Buddhist, so what do I know.”

Obviously, the OT must be interpreted as literally true since anyone who is guided by the Spirit knows that homosexuality is bad and the OT condemns homosexually. While the NT must be read as metaphor or allegory. For example, a true Christian (and all the Republican presidential candidates) supports torture particularly in the wildly fictitious “ticking timebomb” scenario and since this doesn’t fit with a literal interpretation of the NT hippie garbage about peace and love it must be interpreted within a historic and cultural context and not as literal truth. Finally, if you disagree with my assertion, then you are not a true Christian, are not properly guided by the Spirit, and are choosing the wrong parts of God’s Bible to interpret as symbolism, metaphor, or allegory.

autumn Says:

November 27th, 2007 at 1:18 am
To Jon H;
Actually, the Biblical evidence for the acceptance of Jesus as the foretold messiah is marginal at best, and utterly disingenuous at worst.
The Old Testament prophicies without fail identify the messiah with a warrior who would, in his lifetime, reunite Israel. There is also the fact of the later writings very obviously altering existing stories (Jesus rides into Jerusalem on an ass, no, wait, Jesus rides in on a mare. Dammitall, he rides in with both, and he straddles ‘em , thus fulfilling whichever damn prophecy whoever reads this crap will think applies). The overwhelming evidence of scriptures reliably dated to before the reign of Titus show that Jesus, as he is presented in the New Testament, can not possibly be the Messiah predicted by the Abrahmic prophecies.

DiscoveredJoys Says:

November 27th, 2007 at 6:33 am
Not only do the ‘kinds’ have to speciate in the limited time available, they all have to migrate (somehow) to their natural ranges whilst breeding like fury to make up today’s numbers.

Perhaps god commanded them to “f**k off”.

Jit Says:

November 27th, 2007 at 6:34 am
Jon H: Since Jesus is supposed to be the messiah prophecied in the OT, the OT is fundamental, no?

What I’d really like to know is - never mind that USS Enterprise couldn’t contain all the insect species, let alone all the other animals - where exactly did the flood water drain to?

Interestingly without plate tectonics to raise up the land, we’d all be under water to the tune of 3km or something. Plate tectonics works at the scale of cm/yr, so the timescales in the YEC manuals are just silly. But then we knew that already.

Billie Johnson Says:

November 27th, 2007 at 8:55 am
You think you’re better than us with all your match college boy?!?!?!11

May GOD forgive you

Randy Says:

November 27th, 2007 at 12:11 pm
Maybe a better question than why no one noticed all of this “micro-evolution” is why it stopped all of a sudden, or at least stopped occurring at the same rate that it had been taking place.

There should have been about 131 new mammalian species which evolved within the last century.

Where are they?

Will Says:

November 27th, 2007 at 12:33 pm
“You think you’re better than us with all your match college boy?!?!?!11

May GOD forgive you”

“Better”? That’s awfully subjective. More like “smarter” perhaps.
By the way it’s “math”. And it helps if you hold down the shift key until you’ve finished typing out your ridiculous number of exclamation points.
Which, I might add, are the only points in your comment.

baha'i' kid Says:

November 27th, 2007 at 1:25 pm
hey, a lot of the bible seems to be metaphorical, otherwise how can you explain that god creates everything on earth twice? in the first and second chapter he creates everything in a certain order then he re-creates it in a different order. if you take it metaphorically than he was describing an overview of existence on this earth and then he emphasized human importance in the second.
(i don’t have the book with me, so i cant look it up)
also, one big controversy is the whole “7 days” thing, how can we tell how he measures days? its quite possible that for god a “day” is 100,000 of our years, why not? metaphor and symbolism are abundant in older texts, and it would help someone remember the stories (the bible wasn’t written down for years and years after Jesus would have died.) so that passing it on by word of mouth was easier.
the flood could have been caused by a tidal wave that swept him away from his home town, the rain could have been caused by the ash from a volcano gathering water in the atmosphere, and in the end of it all, does it really matter if the flood never even happened? it was a story with a moral, that was its main purpose. moral: god uses nature to further his means, he used a natural disaster, he didn’t “smite” them. why break the laws of nature he supposedly created?

Chris Fox Says:

November 27th, 2007 at 2:34 pm
Good points made.
You also have to take account of the fact that a lot of animals were taken onto the ark not two each but seven each. Seven of all the , so called ‘clean animals’ were taken on board.
Just more overcrowding problems.
In addition to that, there is the small problem of there not being enough water in our earth’s system to cover it to the level of six feet over the top of mount everest.
Just try and imagine how much water would be needed to add the last three feet.

Thanks blogger person, for this interesting piece.
Keep on blogging!

Jason Says:

November 27th, 2007 at 2:46 pm
You’re welcome!

Neil Schipper Says:

November 27th, 2007 at 3:39 pm
Sorry, Jeffthefish, I have problems with your analysis, and cjk’s reformulation doesn’t quite do it for me either.

In the first few decades (or generations) after the flood, each of the 153 pairs could have easily produced many hundreds of in-kind individuals. Shortly after the first few such generations, young couples or small groups could have dispersed far and wide.

So the speciatin’ gets going pronto, and contrary to cjk’s doubling pattern, the micro-evolution towards the 5400 species is simultaneously underway in many different niche environments.

This allows around 4000 years for EACH species to evolve from its ancestral ark-rider, a far cry from jeff’s 1.3 species per year.

The question of polar bears and black bears and pandas micro-evolving from their common ancestral couple in 4000 years — the order of hundreds of generations — I’ll leave that to others.

I’m still working on my theory of Temporarily Vegetarian Lions, which I’ll be submitting for publication as soon as all the fine points are ironed out.

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ONLY IN THE SUNSHINE STATE

You May Be A Floridian If...
1. You have more than 20 C and D batteries in your kitchen drawer.

2. The freezer in your garage is full of homemade ice.

3. You flinch when you are introduced to a person named Wilma, Frances or Ivan.

4. You find yourself dropping words like "Millibar" and "Convection" into everyday conversation.

5. Your pantry contains more than 10 cans of Spaghetti O's.

6. Making coffee on your propane grill does not seem like an odd thing to do.

7. You are thinking of repainting your house to match the plywood covering your windows.

8. When describing your house to a prospective buyer, you say it has three bedrooms, two baths and one safe place.

9. You are on a first-name basis with the cashier at Home Depot.

10. You are delighted to pay $3 for a gallon of unleaded.

11. The road leading to your house has been declared a No-Wake Zone.

12. You decide that your patio furniture looks better on the bottom of the pool.

13. You have the number for FEMA on your speed dialer.

14. You own more than three large coolers.

15. You can wish that other people get hit by a hurricane and not feel the least bit guilty about it.

16. Three months ago you couldn't hang a shower curtain; today you can assemble a portable generator by candlelight.

17. You catch a 5-pound catfish... in your driveway.

18. You can recite from memory whole portions of your homeowner's insurance policy.

19. At parties, women are attracted to the guy with the biggest chainsaw.

20. You have had tuna fish more than 5 days in a row.

21. There is a roll of tar paper in your garage.

22. You can rattle off the names of three or more meteorologists who work at The Weather Channel.

22. Someone comes to your door to tell you they found your roof.

23. Ice is a valid topic of conversation.

24. Relocating to North Dakota does not seem like such a crazy idea.

BURNING THE BOOKS

Censorship Quotes
" If your library is not 'unsafe', it probably isn't doing its job."
-- John Berry, Iii, Library Journal, October 1999

"Without free speech no search for truth is possible... no discovery of truth is useful... Better a thousandfold abuse of free speech than denial of free speech. The abuse dies in a day, but the denial slays the life of the people, and entombs the hope of the race."
-- Charles Bradlaugh

"There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them. "
-- Joseph Alexandrovitch Brodsky, 1991, Russian-American poet, b. St. Petersburg and exiled 1972 (1940-1996)

"Everyone is in favor of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people's idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone else says anything back, that is an outrage."
-- Winston Churchill

"You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. Yet in their hearts there is unspoken - unspeakable! - fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts! Words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home, all the more powerful because they are forbidden. These terrify them. A little mouse - a little tiny mouse! -of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic."
-- Winston Churchill

"The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion..."
-- Henry Steel Commager

"Burning is no answer."
-- Camille Desmoulins' reply to Robespierre, January 7, 1794, on burning his newspaper, Le Vieux Cordelier

"If librarianship is the connecting of people to ideas – and I believe that is the truest definition of what we do – it is crucial to remember that we must keep and make available, not just good ideas and noble ideas, but bad ideas, silly ideas, and yes, even dangerous or wicked ideas."
-- Graceanne A. Decandido

"Don't join the book burners. Don't think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed."
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower, speech at Dartmouth College, June 14, 1953

"Every burned book enlightens the world."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"This is slavery, not to speak one's thought."
-- Euripides, Greek tragic poet (480 or 485 B.C. - 406 B.C)

"If the human body's obscene, complain to the manufacturer, not me."
-- Larry Flynt

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
-- Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759

"If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed."
-- Benjamin Franklin, 1730

"Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education."
-- Alfred Whitney Griswold, Essays on Education

"[O]ne man's vulgarity is another's lyric."
-- John Marshall Harlan, Supreme Court justice, 1971

"Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings."
-- Heinrich Heine

"I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions."
-- Lillian Hellman, subpoenaed to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee, 1952

"To prohibit the reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves."
-- Claude Adrien Helvetius, De l'Homme, Vol. I, sec. 4

"The sooner we all learn to make a decision between disapproval and censorship, the better off society will be... Censorship cannot get at the real evil, and it is an evil in itself."
-- Granville Hicks (1901-1982)

"Fear of corrupting the mind of the younger generation is the loftiest form of cowardice."
-- Holbrook Jackson

"Did you ever hear anyone say 'That work had better be banned because I might read it and it might be very damaging to me'?"
-- Joseph Henry Jackson

"Civil government cannot let any group ride roughshod over others simply because their consciences tell them to do so."
-- Robert H. Jackson

"Children deprived of words become school dropouts; dropouts deprived of hope behave delinquently. Amateur censors blame delinquency on reading immoral books and magazines, when in fact, the inability to read anything is the basic trouble."
-- Peter S. Jennison

"Books and ideas are the most effective weapons against intolerance and ignorance."
-- Lyndon Baines Johnson, February 11, 1964

"Dat veniam corvis, vexat censura columbas. - Censure acquits the raven, but pursues the dove."
-- Decimus Junius Juvenalis (Juvenal), Satires, II. 63. Roman rhetorician and satirical poet (1st to 2nd cent. A.D.)

"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? - Who will watch the watchers?"
-- Juvenal





"We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people."
-- John F. Kennedy

"The burning of an author's books, imprisonment for an opinion's sake, has always been the tribute that an ignorant age pays to the genius of its time."
-- Joseph Lewis, Voltaire: The Incomparable Infidel, 1929

"Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but unlike charity, it should end there."
-- Clare Booth Luce

"One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present."
-- Golda Meir, Israeli political leader (1898-1978)

"And yet on the other hand unless warinesse be us'd, as good almost kill a Man as kill a good Book; who kills a Man kills a reasonable creature, Gods Image, but hee who destroyes a good Booke, kills reason it selfe, kills the Image of God, as it were in the eye."
-- Milton, Areopagitica, 1644

"To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind for it."
-- Michel de Montaigne, Essays, 1559

"You have not converted a man because you have silenced him."
-- John Morley


"Senator Smoot (Republican, Ut.)
Is planning a ban on smut
Oh rooti-ti-toot for Smoot of Ut.
And his reverent occiput.
Smite. Smoot, smite for Ut.,
Grit your molars and do your dut.,
Gird up your l--ns,
Smite h-p and th-gh,
We'll all be Kansas
By and By."
-- Ogden Nash, "Invocation," 1931

"Censorship of anything, at any time, in any place, on whatever pretense, has always been and always be the last resort of the boob and the bigot."
-- Eugene Gladstone O'Neill, American playwright (1888-1953)

"All of us can think of a book... that we hope none of our children or any other children have taken off the shelf. But if I have the right to remove that book from the shelf - that work I abhor - then you also have exactly the same right and so does everyone else. And then we have no books left on the shelf for any of us."
-- Katherine Paterson, American author of childrens books (1932-)

"A censor is an expert in cutting remarks. A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to."
-- Dr. Laurence Peter, Peter's Quotations: Ideas for Our Time. New York: Morrow, 1977, p. 97

"Free societies...are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom's existence."
-- Salman Rushdie

"What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist."
-- Salman Rushdie

"Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads."
-- George Bernard Shaw, Irish playwright and critic (1856-1950)

"All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship."
-- George Bernard Shaw, Preface to Mrs. Warren's Profession

"Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself. It is the hallmark of an authoritarian regime..."
-- Justice Potter Stewart, dissenting Ginzberg v. United States, 383 U.S. 463 (1966)

"Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear."
-- Harry S. Truman, message to Congress, August 8, 1950

"Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it."
-- Mark Twain

"Adam was but human - this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple's sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent."
-- Mark Twain

"All these people talk so eloquently about getting back to good old-fashioned values. Well, as an old poop I can remember back to when we had those old-fashioned values, and I say let's get back to the good old-fashioned First Amendment of the good old-fashioned Constitution of the United States -- and to hell with the censors! Give me knowledge or give me death!"
-- Kurt Vonnegut, author

"The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book."
-- Walt Whitman

"There is no such thing as a moral book or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all."
-- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891

"The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame."
-- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891

"An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all."
-- Oscar Wilde

HAVE YOU FOUND JESUS

Don't like Religious Solicitation? Cutting your dog's nails in a white t-shirt will fix that!
Jun 14, 2007 at 3:41 PM 8 comments
I loved this story. I nearly got busted taking a mental break from work because I was laughing so much. I had to read it in sections. So amusing.

I stole it from craigslist here.



Door to door religious idiots
A local charismatic church has decided it's a good idea to send their families into the surrounding neighborhoods to "invite" people to their church. They do this on Saturdays, trying to get people to go to their church the next morning. The families dress up like they're going to a nice backyard party - the men in Dockers or Docker shorts with nice shirts, women in nice shorts (not too short now!) or dresses, girls in summer dresses, etc. They've bothered me the last several Saturdays, ignoring the large NO SOLICITING sign on the door which, as I explained to two groups of them already, goes for churches as far as I'm concerned regardless of the wording of the relevant city ordinance.

This past Saturday I decided to trim the dog's nails. I don't do this very often because I have to do it by myself and the dog hates it. She would rather be whipped with a bullwhip than have her nails trimmed. I don't know why...that's just one of her quirks. The dog is a min pin, black, and about 16 pounds of wiry frame and pure muscle. I start, as I always do, with trying to use treats to get her to comply. I take her into the bathroom and give her a treat. I put a treat in the bathtub and put her in there. So far so good. I tell her to sit and gave her a treat. Textbook...up until this point.

Now comes the fun part. The dog and I go through the sit - grab paw - stand game. The dog sits. I grab a paw and lift it up to try to trim the nails. The dog stands, which allows her to gain leverage to pull against me. I push her rear down and she sits again. Start over. The problem is that the dog has infinite time in which to play this game and I have other things to do. The offer of treats is irrelevant...the dog knows that if she complies the nails will get trimmed, which is tantamount to torture for some reason. Twenty minutes of this and it's time for plan B. Oh well, at least I can say I tried.

Plan B involves putting the dog in various wrestling holds that still allow me to hold each paw with one hand and trim the nails with the other. Unfortunately this has two drawbacks. One is that the dog can still twitch her legs enough to cause me to trim the nails either too close or not close enough. The other is that the newly trimmed nails are extremely sharp, so that the dog gains weaponry to use against me as the process continues.

After a wrestling/trimming session that could have headlined as a grudge match on any WWF program, the dog finally has trimmed nails. Unevenly trimmed, but trimmed none the less. At least one nail on each paw is trimmed too close, so during the match my white t-shirt has become covered in blood. My arms and legs are scratched up like I've been in a fight with a rabid bobcat, I'm covered in dog hair, and I'm sweating profusely. The dog is none the worse for wear except for the fact that she can now walk properly. I've had enough of her for the day, so I pick her up to take her out to the back yard. As I'm about to put her out, the doorbell rings, which causes her to start barking and writhing around in my arms, giving me a few extra scratches just for good measure. Out she goes.

I head back to the bathroom to start cleaning up, and the doorbell rings again. The dog starts barking and jumping on the back door, leaving bloody streaks in the process. Having already had enough of whoever is at the door, I decide to ignore it. The doorbell rings again. Fine. Anyone but Ed McMahon is going to be sorry.

Still out of breath from the fight, sweating, covered in scratches and blood and hair, and carrying a nail trimming tool in one hand, I fling open the door. The picture-perfect charismatic family has decided to let the little girl be the front man. She looks to be about eight years old. She's standing on the front porch, while Mom, Dad, and Little Brother - about five - are standing a few feet back on the walkway. I grit my teeth in my best Dirty Harry impression, look directly at the little girl, and say, "Yes?"

The boy isn't paying much attention, having found a stick with which to occupy himself, but the other three family members are frozen. The mom finally pulls the boy back against her leg, but they're too far from the girl to reach her without stepping closer themselves. The girl is unable to move. The dad, showing his true colors, is also petrified. The mom finally gives him an elbow and he tries to find his voice. I continue to stare at the little girl. "Yes, can I help you?"

The boy finally looks up and sees me. He starts with a low moaning noise and slowly works up to a scream. He scampers behind his mom and latches onto her leg so she can't easily move. Dad gets his voice back and says, "Mm-m-maybe this is a bad time, uh, Lindsay honey come on, let's go." Lindsay is as still as a stone. Still staring at the girl, I take a step forward onto the welcome mat. My jaw still locked, speaking through my teeth, I say, "Not at all. Would you like to come in?"

Lindsay's fight-or-flight instinct kicks in, except in her case it's fight-or-scream. She lets out a scream that would put Fay Wray to shame. Then another. And another. Dad, figuring he better do something, takes a careful step forward and pulls Lindsay back. She continues to stare at me and scream as he picks her up. Little brother is in full scream mode also, and attempts to climb up his mom's backside. She almost trips over him trying to get turned around, picks him up and starts trotting away. Dad follows with the girl. Bye now!

I go back in and close the door, then go to the window and watch. Mom and Dad do their best to jog all the way back to their minivan parked across the street a few houses down. Just as they get to the minivan, Lindsay, who is still looking back toward my house and screaming, pukes all down her dad's back. Mom tries to put the boy down, but he's clinging to her like a monkey. Dad fishes the keys out of his pocket and they all get in the van. After a minute Mom and Dad step back out. Mom's front is all wet. Apparently the boy peed all over her. Dad is covered in puke, and takes off his shirt and leaves it in the street. Mom and Dad finally get in the van and the family leaves.

I know what's coming, so I quickly go to the bathroom and jump in the tub where I was trimming the dog's nails. I turn on the shower and wash off all the blood and hair. I hide the wet clothes in the bottom of the hamper and put on an identical white shirt and similar shorts. My hair is very short, so it dries quickly with just a towel. I dry the bathtub with the towel as well. I then go to the back yard with a paper towel and wipe the blood off the back door. The dog has stopped bleeding by now. Perfect. Two minutes later the doorbell rings again.

"Yes officer?" I say after I open the door. "Can I help you?" He looks me up and down and says there's been a complaint of something strange going on in the house. He's being purposefully vague, so I ask for more details. He mentions a bloody shirt and points out the scratches on my arms and legs. "I just finished trimming the dog's nails and they're very sharp. We were playing afterwards and I got scratched up a little." I invite him in and he takes a look around. I take him to the back door and show him the dog. Then I say, "Oh, I know what they must have seen...come in here." We go to the kitchen and I pull the paper towel out of the trash can. "See? I got a couple of the dog's nails a little close, and I used this to stop the bleeding. I must have had it in my hand when I answered the door."

The officer asks if he can look around the house, and I say he can. He just kind of walks up the hallway and sticks his head in to give each room a cursory glance. Satisfied that he's seen enough, he starts to leave. I stop him and say, "By the way officer, I have a 'No Soliciting' sign, and although I'm aware that the city ordinance says it's for sales only, I have it there because I don't wish to be disturbed by anyone. I imagine other people with those signs feel the same way. Maybe you could say something to those people?" "Will do," he says as he leaves. "Thanks for your cooperation."

I watch out the window again as Mom and Dad, who have returned, gesture towards my house as the officer shakes his head. Dad starts to get a little hot, and the officer finally points his finger at him and says something. The officer then shakes his head as he gets in his car and leaves. It seems he has better things to do than field complaints from overreacting religious nuts. Mom and Dad get back in their minivan and leave, hopefully having learned their lesson.

So, if you've been bothered by people from this particular church the last few Saturdays, there's a good chance you won't be bothered any more.

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WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM ME FRIENDS

THE TOP 25 STORIES THAT WERE KEPT OUT OF THE NEWS

Top 25 Censored
news stories of 2007
#1 Future of Internet Debate Ignored by Media

#2 Halliburton Charged with Selling Nuclear Technologies to Iran

#3 Oceans of the World in Extreme Danger

#4 Hunger and Homelessness Increasing in the US

#5 High-Tech Genocide in Congo

#6 Federal Whistleblower Protection in Jeopardy

# 7 US Operatives Torture Detainees to Death in Afghanistan and Iraq

#8 Pentagon Exempt from Freedom of Information Act

#9 The World Bank Funds Israel-Palestine Wall

#10 Expanded Air War in Iraq Kills More Civilians

#11 Dangers of Genetically Modified Food Confirmed

#12 Pentagon Plans to Build New Landmines

#13 New Evidence Establishes Dangers of Roundup

#14 Homeland Security Contracts KBR to Build Detention Centers in the US

#15 Chemical Industry is EPA’s Primary Research Partner

#16 Ecuador and Mexico Defy US on International Criminal Court

#17 Iraq Invasion Promotes OPEC Agenda

#18 Physicist Challenges Official 9-11 Story

#19 Destruction of Rainforests Worst Ever

#20 Bottled Water: A Global Environmental Problem

#21 Gold Mining Threatens Ancient Andean Glaciers

#22 $Billions in Homeland Security Spending Undisclosed

#23 US Oil Targets Kyoto in Europe

#24 Cheney’s Halliburton Stock Rose Over 3000 Percent Last Year

#25 US Military in Paraguay Threatens Region






#1 Future of Internet Debate Ignored by Media
Sources:

Buzzflash.com, July 18, 2005
Title: “Web of Deceit: How Internet Freedom Got the Federal Ax, and Why Corporate News Censored the Story”
Author: Elliot D. Cohen, Ph.D.

Student Researchers: Lauren Powell, Brett Forest, and Zoe Huffman
Faculty Evaluator: Andrew Roth, Ph.D.

Throughout 2005 and 2006, a large underground debate raged regarding the future of the Internet. More recently referred to as “network neutrality,” the issue has become a tug of war with cable companies on the one hand and consumers and Internet service providers on the other. Yet despite important legislative proposals and Supreme Court decisions throughout 2005, the issue was almost completely ignored in the headlines until 2006.1 And, except for occasional coverage on CNBC’s Kudlow & Kramer, mainstream television remains hands-off to this day (June 2006).2
Most coverage of the issue framed it as an argument over regulation—but the term “regulation” in this case is somewhat misleading. Groups advocating for “net neutrality” are not promoting regulation of internet content. What they want is a legal mandate forcing cable companies to allow internet service providers (ISPs) free access to their cable lines (called a “common carriage” agreement). This was the model used for dial-up internet, and it is the way content providers want to keep it. They also want to make sure that cable companies cannot screen or interrupt internet content without a court order.

Those in favor of net neutrality say that lack of government regulation simply means that cable lines will be regulated by the cable companies themselves. ISPs will have to pay a hefty service fee for the right to use cable lines (making internet services more expensive). Those who could pay more would get better access; those who could not pay would be left behind. Cable companies could also decide to filter Internet content at will.

On the other side, cable company supporters say that a great deal of time and money was spent laying cable lines and expanding their speed and quality.3 They claim that allowing ISPs free access would deny cable companies the ability to recoup their investments, and maintain that cable providers should be allowed to charge. Not doing so, they predict, would discourage competition and innovation within the cable industry.

Cable supporters like the AT&T-sponsored Hands Off the Internet website assert that common carriage legislation would lead to higher prices and months of legal wrangling. They maintain that such legislation fixes a problem that doesn’t exist and scoff at concerns that phone and cable companies will use their position to limit access based on fees as groundless. Though cable companies deny plans to block content providers without cause, there are a number of examples of cable-initiated discrimination.

In March 2005, the FCC settled a case against a North Carolina-based telephone company that was blocking the ability of its customers to use voice-over-Internet calling services instead of (the more expensive) phone lines.4 In August 2005, a Canadian cable company blocked access to a site that supported the cable union in a labor dispute.5 In February 2006, Cox Communications denied customers access to the Craig’s List website. Though Cox claims that it was simply a security error, it was discovered that Cox ran a classified service that competes with Craig’s List.6
court decisions

In June of 1999, the Ninth District Court ruled that AT&T would have to open its cable network to ISPs (AT&T v. City of Portland). The court said that Internet transmissions, interactive, two-way exchanges, were telecommunication offerings, not a cable information service (like CNN) that sends data one way. This decision was overturned on appeal a year later.

Recent court decisions have extended the cable company agenda further. On June 27, 2005, The United States Supreme Court ruled that cable corporations like Comcast and Verizon were not required to share their lines with rival ISPs (National Cable & Telecommunications Association vs. Brand X Internet Services).7 Cable companies would not have to offer common carriage agreements for cable lines the way that telephone companies have for phone lines.
According to Dr. Elliot Cohen, the decision accepted the FCC assertion that cable modem service is not a two-way telecommunications offering, but a one-way information service, completely overturning the 1999 ruling. Meanwhile, telephone companies charge that such a decision gives an unfair advantage to cable companies and are requesting that they be released from their common carriage requirement as well.


Legislation
On June 8, the House rejected legislation (HR 5273) that would have prevented phone and cable companies from selling preferential treatment on their networks for delivery of video and other data-heavy applications. It also passed the Communications Opportunity, Promotion, and Enhancement (COPE) Act (HR 5252), which supporters said would encourage innovation and the construction of more high-speed Internet lines. Internet neutrality advocates say it will allow phone and cable companies to cherry-pick customers in wealthy neighborhoods while eliminating the current requirement demanded by most local governments that cable TV companies serve low-income and minority areas as well. 8

Comment: As of June 2006, the COPE Act is in the Senate. Supporters say the bill supports innovation and freedom of choice. Interet neutrality advocates say that its passage would forever compromise the Internet. Giant cable companies would attain a monopoly on high-speed, cable Internet. They would prevent poorer citizens from broadband access, while monitoring and controlling the content of information that can be accessed.

Notes
1. “Keeping a Democratic Web,” The New York Times, May 2, 2006.
2. Jim Goldman, Larry Kudlow, and Phil Lebeau, “Panelists Michael Powell, Mike Holland, Neil Weinberg, John Augustine and Pablo Perez-Fernandez discuss markets,” Kudlow & Company CNBC, March 6, 2006.
3. http://www.Handsofftheinternet.com.
4. Michael Geist, “Telus breaks Net Providers’ cardinal rule: Telecom company blocks access to site supporting union in labour dispute,” Ottawa Citizen, August 4, 2005.
5. Jonathan Krim, “Renewed Warning of Bandwidth Hoarding,” The Washington Post, November 24, 2005.
6. David A. Utter, “Craigslist Blocked By Cox Interactive,” http://www.Webpronews.com, June 7, 2006.
7. Yuki Noguchi, “Cable Firms Don’t Have to Share Networks, Court Rules,” Washington Post, June 28, 2005.
8. “Last week in Congress / How our representatives voted,” Buffalo News (New York), June 11, 2006.

UPDATE BY ELLIOT D. COHEN, PH.D.
Despite the fact that the Court’s decision in Brand X marks the beginning of the end for a robust, democratic Internet, there has been a virtual MSM blackout in covering it. As a result of this decision, the legal stage has been set for further corporate control. Currently pending in Congress is the “Communications Opportunity, Promotion, and Enhancement Act of 2006”(HR 5252), fueled by strong telecom corporative lobbies and introduced by Congressman Joe Barton (R-TX). This Act, which fails to adequately protect an open and neutral Internet, includes a “Title II—Enforcement of Broadband Policy Statement” that gives the FCC “exclusive authority to adjudicate any complaint alleging a violation of the broadband policy statement or the principles incorporated therein.” With the passage of this provision, courts will have scant authority to challenge and overturn FCC decisions regarding broadband. Since under current FCC Chair Kevin Martin, the FCC is moving toward still further deregulation of telecom and media companies, the likely consequence is the thickening of the plot to increase corporate control of the Internet. In particular, behemoth telecom corporations like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T want to set up toll booths on the Internet. If these companies get their way, content providers with deep pockets will be afforded optimum bandwidth while the rest of us will be left spinning in cyberspace. No longer will everyone enjoy an equal voice in the freest and most comprehensive democratic forum ever devised by humankind.

As might be expected, none of these new developments are being addressed by the MSM. Among media activist organizations attempting to stop the gutting of the free Internet is The Free Press (http://www.freepress.net/), which now has an aggressive “Save the Internet” campaign.



#2 Halliburton Charged with Selling Nuclear Technologies to Iran
Source:

Global Research.ca, August 5, 2005
Title: “Halliburton Secretly Doing Business With Key Member of Iran’s Nuclear Team”
Author: Jason Leopold

Faculty Evaluator: Catherine Nelson
Student Researchers: Kristine Medeiros and Pla Herr

According to journalist Jason Leopold, sources at former Cheney company Halliburton allege that, as recently as January of 2005, Halliburton sold key components for a nuclear reactor to an Iranian oil development company. Leopold says his Halliburton sources have intimate knowledge of the business dealings of both Halliburton and Oriental Oil Kish, one of Iran’s largest private oil companies.

Additionally, throughout 2004 and 2005, Halliburton worked closely with Cyrus Nasseri, the vice chairman of the board of directors of Iran-based Oriental Oil Kish, to develop oil projects in Iran. Nasseri is also a key member of Iran’s nuclear development team. Nasseri was interrogated by Iranian authorities in late July 2005 for allegedly providing Halliburton with Iran’s nuclear secrets. Iranian government officials charged Nasseri with accepting as much as $1 million in bribes from Halliburton for this information.

Oriental Oil Kish dealings with Halliburton first became public knowledge in January 2005 when the company announced that it had subcontracted parts of the South Pars gas-drilling project to Halliburton Products and Services, a subsidiary of Dallas-based Halliburton that is registered to the Cayman Islands. Following the announcement, Halliburton claimed that the South Pars gas field project in Tehran would be its last project in Iran. According to a BBC report, Halliburton, which took thirty to forty million dollars from its Iranian operations in 2003, “was winding down its work due to a poor business environment.”

However, Halliburton has a long history of doing business in Iran, starting as early as 1995, while Vice President Cheney was chief executive of the company. Leopold quotes a February 2001 report published in the Wall Street Journal, “Halliburton Products and Services Ltd., works behind an unmarked door on the ninth floor of a new north Tehran tower block. A brochure declares that the company was registered in 1975 in the Cayman Islands, is based in the Persian Gulf sheikdom of Dubai and is “non-American.” But like the sign over the receptionist’s head, the brochure bears the company’s name and red emblem, and offers services from Halliburton units around the world.” Moreover mail sent to the company’s offices in Tehran and the Cayman Islands is forwarded directly to its Dallas headquarters.

In an attempt to curtail Halliburton and other U.S. companies from engaging in business dealings with rogue nations such as Libya, Iran, and Syria, an amendment was approved in the Senate on July 26, 2005. The amendment, sponsored by Senator Susan Collins R-Maine, would penalize companies that continue to skirt U.S. law by setting up offshore subsidiaries as a way to legally conduct and avoid U.S. sanctions under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA).

A letter, drafted by trade groups representing corporate executives, vehemently objected to the amendment, saying it would lead to further hatred and perhaps incite terrorist attacks on the U.S. and “greatly strain relations with the United States primary trading partners.” The letter warned that, “Foreign governments view U.S. efforts to dictate their foreign and commercial policy as violations of sovereignty often leading them to adopt retaliatory measures more at odds with U.S. goals.”

Collins supports the legislation, stating, “It prevents U.S. corporations from creating a shell company somewhere else in order to do business with rogue, terror-sponsoring nations such as Syria and Iran. The bottom line is that if a U.S. company is evading sanctions to do business with one of these countries, they are helping to prop up countries that support terrorism—most often aimed against America.

UPDATE BY JASON LEOPOLD
During a trip to the Middle East in March 1996, Vice President Dick Cheney told a group of mostly U.S. businessmen that Congress should ease sanctions in Iran and Libya to foster better relationships, a statement that, in hindsight, is completely hypocritical considering the Bush administration’s foreign policy.

“Let me make a generalized statement about a trend I see in the U.S. Congress that I find disturbing, that applies not only with respect to the Iranian situation but a number of others as well,” Cheney said. “I think we Americans sometimes make mistakes . . . There seems to be an assumption that somehow we know what’s best for everybody else and that we are going to use our economic clout to get everybody else to live the way we would like.”

Cheney was the chief executive of Halliburton Corporation at the time he uttered those words. It was Cheney who directed Halliburton toward aggressive business dealings with Iran—in violation of U.S. law—in the mid-1990s, which continued through 2005 and is the reason Iran has the capability to enrich weapons-grade uranium.
It was Halliburton’s secret sale of centrifuges to Iran that helped get the uranium enrichment program off the ground, according to a three-year investigation that includes interviews conducted with more than a dozen current and former Halliburton employees.

If the U.S. ends up engaged in a war with Iran in the future, Cheney and Halliburton will bear the brunt of the blame.
But this shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone who has been following Halliburton’s business activities over the past decade. The company has a long, documented history of violating U.S. sanctions and conducting business with so-called rogue nations.

No, what’s disturbing about these facts is how little attention it has received from the mainstream media. But the public record speaks for itself, as do the thousands of pages of documents obtained by various federal agencies that show how Halliburton’s business dealings in Iran helped fund terrorist activities there—including the country’s nuclear enrichment program.

When I asked Wendy Hall, a spokeswoman for Halliburton, a couple of years ago if Halliburton would stop doing business with Iran because of concerns that the company helped fund terrorism she said, “No.” “We believe that decisions as to the nature of such governments and their actions are better made by governmental authorities and international entities such as the United Nations as opposed to individual persons or companies,” Hall said. “Putting politics aside, we and our affiliates operate in countries to the extent it is legally permissible, where our customers are active as they expect us to provide oilfield services support to their international operations. “We do not always agree with policies or actions of governments in every place that we do business and make no excuses for their behaviors. Due to the long-term nature of our business and the inevitability of political and social change, it is neither prudent nor appropriate for our company to establish our own country-by-country foreign policy.”

Halliburton first started doing business in Iran as early as 1995, while Vice President Cheney was chief executive of the company and in possible violation of U.S. sanctions.

An executive order signed by former President Bill Clinton in March 1995 prohibits “new investments (in Iran) by U.S. persons, including commitment of funds or other assets.” It also bars U.S. companies from performing services “that would benefit the Iranian oil industry” and provide Iran with the financial means to engage in terrorist activity.
When Bush and Cheney came into office in 2001, their administration decided it would not punish foreign oil and gas companies that invest in those countries. The sanctions imposed on countries like Iran and Libya before Bush became president were blasted by Cheney, who gave frequent speeches on the need for U.S. companies to compete with their foreign competitors, despite claims that those countries may have ties to terrorism.

“I think we’d be better off if we, in fact, backed off those sanctions (on Iran), didn’t try to impose secondary boycotts on companies . . . trying to do business over there . . . and instead started to rebuild those relationships,” Cheney said during a 1998 business trip to Sydney, Australia, according to Australia’s Illawarra Mercury newspaper.


#3 Oceans of the World in Extreme Danger
Source:

Mother Jones, March /April, 2006
Title: The Fate of the Ocean
Author: Julia Whitty

Faculty Evaluator: Dolly Freidel
Student Researcher: Charlene Jones

Oceanic problems once found on a local scale are now pandemic. Data from oceanography, marine biology, meteorology, fishery science, and glaciology reveal that the seas are changing in ominous ways. A vortex of cause and effect wrought by global environmental dilemmas is changing the ocean from a watery horizon with assorted regional troubles to a global system in alarming distress.

According to oceanographers the oceans are one, with currents linking the seas and regulating climate. Sea temperature and chemistry changes, along with contamination and reckless fishing practices, intertwine to imperil the world’s largest communal life source.

In 2005, researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory found clear evidence the ocean is quickly warming. They discovered that the top half-mile of the ocean has warmed dramatically in the past forty years as a result of human-induced greenhouse gases.

One manifestation of this warming is the melting of the Arctic. A shrinking ratio of ice to water has set off a feedback loop, accelerating the increase in water surfaces that promote further warming and melting. With polar waters growing fresher and tropical seas saltier, the cycle of evaporation and precipitation has quickened, further invigorating the greenhouse effect. The ocean’s currents are reacting to this freshening, causing a critical conveyor that carries warm upper waters into Europe’s northern latitudes to slow by one third since 1957, bolstering fears of a shut down and cataclysmic climate change. This accelerating cycle of cause and effect will be difficult, if not impossible, to reverse.
Atmospheric litter is also altering sea chemistry, as thousands of toxic compounds poison marine creatures and devastate propagation. The ocean has absorbed an estimated 118 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide since the onset of the Industrial Revolution, with 20 to 25 tons being added to the atmosphere daily. Increasing acidity from rising levels of CO2 is changing the ocean’s PH balance. Studies indicate that the shells and skeletons possessed by everything from reef-building corals to mollusks and plankton begin to dissolve within forty-eight hours of exposure to the acidity expected in the ocean by 2050. Coral reefs will almost certainly disappear and, even more worrisome, so will plankton. Phytoplankton absorb greenhouse gases, manufacture oxygen, and are the primary producers of the marine food web.
Mercury pollution enters the food web via coal and chemical industry waste, oxidizes in the atmosphere, and settles to the sea bottom. There it is consumed, delivering mercury to each subsequent link in the food chain, until predators such as tuna or whales carry levels of mercury as much as one million times that of the waters around them. The Gulf of Mexico has the highest mercury levels ever recorded, with an average of ten tons of mercury coming down the Mississippi River every year, and another ton added by offshore drilling.

Along with mercury, the Mississippi delivers nitrogen (often from fertilizers). Nitrogen stimulates plant and bacterial growth in the water that consume oxygen, creating a condition known as hypoxia, or dead zones. Dead zones occur wherever oceanic oxygen is depleted below the level necessary to sustain marine life. A sizable portion of the Gulf of Mexico has become a dead zone—the largest such area in the U.S. and the second largest on the planet, measuring nearly 8,000 square miles in 2001. It is no coincidence that almost all of the nearly 150 (and counting) dead zones on earth lay at the mouths of rivers. Nearly fifty fester off U.S. coasts. While most are caused by river-borne nitrogen, fossil fuel-burning plants help create this condition, as does phosphorous from human sewage and nitrogen emissions from auto exhaust.

Meanwhile, since its peak in 2000, the global wild fish harvest has begun a sharp decline despite progress in seagoing technologies and intensified fishing. So-called efficiencies in fishing have stimulated unprecedented decimation of sealife. Long-lining, in which a single boat sets line across sixty or more miles of ocean, each baited with up to 10,000 hooks, captures at least 25 percent unwanted catch. With an estimated 2 billion hooks set each year, as much as 88 billion pounds of life a year is thrown back to the ocean either dead or dying. Additionally, trawlers drag nets across every square inch of the continental shelves every two years. Fishing the sea floor like a bulldozer, they level an area 150 times larger than all forest clearcuts each year and destroy seafloor ecosystems. Aquaculture is no better, since three pounds of wild fish are caught to feed every pound of farmed salmon. A 2003 study out of Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia concluded, based on data dating from the 1950s, that in the wake of decades of such onslaught only 10 percent of all large fish (tuna, swordfish) and ground fish (cod, hake, flounder) are left anywhere in the ocean.

Other sea nurseries are also threatened. Fifteen percent of seagrass beds have disappeared in the last ten years, depriving juvenile fish, manatees, and sea turtles of critical habitats. Kelp beds are also dying at alarming rates.

While at no time in history has science taught more about how the earth’s life-support systems work, the maelstrom of human assault on the seas continues. If human failure in governance of the world’s largest public domain is not reversed quickly, the ocean will soon and surely reach a point of no return.

Comment:
After release of the Pew Oceans Commission report, U.S. media, most notably The Washington Post and National Public Radio in 2003 and 2004, covered several stories regarding impending threats to the ocean, recommendations for protection, and President Bush’s response. However, media treatment of the collective acceleration of ocean damage and cross-pollination of harm was left to Julia Whitty in her lengthy feature. In April of 2006, Time Magazine presented an in-depth article about earth at “the tipping point,” describing the planet as an overworked organism fighting the consequences of global climate change on shore and sea. In her Mother Jones article, Whitty presented a look at global illness by directly examining the ocean as earth’s circulatory, respiratory, and reproductive system.

Following up on “The Last Days of the Ocean,” Mother Jones has produced “Ocean Voyager,” an innovative web-based adventure that includes videos, audio interviews with key players, webcams, and links to informative web pages created by more than twenty organizations. The site is a tour of various ocean trouble spots around the world, which highlights solutions and suggests actions that can be taken to help make a difference.

UPDATE BY JULIA WHITTY
This story is awash with new developments. Scientists are currently publishing at an unprecedented rate their observations—not just predictions—on the rapid changes underway on our ocean planet. First and foremost, the year 2005 turned out to be the warmest year on record. This reinforces other data showing the earth has grown hotter in the past 400 years, and possibly in the past 2,000 years. A study out of the National Center for Atmospheric Research found ocean temperatures in the tropical North Atlantic in 2005 nearly two degrees Fahrenheit above normal; this turned out to be the predominant catalyst for the monstrous 2005 hurricane season—the most violent season ever seen.

The news from the polar ice is no better. A joint NASA/University of Kansas study in Science (02/06) reveals that Greenland’s glaciers are surging towards the sea and melting more than twice as fast as ten years ago. This further endangers the critical balance of the North Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, which holds our climate stable. Meanwhile, in March, the British Antarctic Survey announced their findings that the “global warming signature” of the Antarctic is three times larger than what we’re seeing elsewhere on Earth—the first proof of broadscale climate change across the southern continent.

Since “The Fate of the Ocean” went to press in Mother Jones magazine, evidence of the politicization of science in the global climate wars has also emerged. In January 2006 NASA’s top climate scientist, James Hansen, accused the agency of trying to censor his work. Four months later, Hansen’s accusations were echoed by scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, as well as by a U.S. Geological Survey scientist working at a NOAA lab, who claimed their work on global climate change was being censored by their departments, as part of a policy of intimidation by the anti-science Bush administration.

Problems for the ocean’s wildlife are escalating too. In 2005, biologists from the U.S. Minerals Management Service found polar bears drowned in the waters off Alaska, apparent victims of the disappearing ice. In 2006, U.S. Geological Survey Alaska Science Center researchers found polar bears killing and eating each other in areas where sea ice failed to form that year, leaving the bears bereft of food. In response, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources revised their Red List for polar bears—upgrading them from “conservation dependent” to “vulnerable.” In February, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced it would begin reviewing whether polar bears need protection under the Endangered Species Act.

Since my report, the leaders of two influential commissions—the Pew Oceans Commission and the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy—gave Congress, the Bush administration, and our nation’s governors a “D+” grade for not moving quickly enough to address their recommendations for restoring health to our nation’s oceans.

Most of these stories remain out of view, sunk with cement boots in the backwaters of scientific journals. The media remains unable to discern good science from bad, and gives equal credence to both, when they give any at all. The story of our declining ocean world, and our own future, develops beyond the ken of the public, who forge ahead without altering behavior or goals, and unimpeded by foresight.


#4 Hunger and Homelessness Increasing in the US
Sources:

The New Standard, December 2005
Title: “New Report Shows Increase in Urban Hunger, Homelessness”
Author: Brendan Coyne

OneWorld.net, March, 2006
Title: “US Plan to Eliminate Survey of Needy Families Draws Fire “
Author: Abid Aslam

Faculty Evaluator: Myrna Goodman
Student Researcher: Arlene Ward and Brett Forest

The number of hungry and homeless people in U.S. cities continued to grow in 2005, despite claims of an improved economy. Increased demand for vital services rose as needs of the most destitute went unmet, according to the annual U.S. Conference of Mayors Report, which has documented increasing need since its 1982 inception.

The study measures instances of emergency food and housing assistance in twenty-four U.S. cities and utilizes supplemental information from the U.S. Census and Department of Labor. More than three-quarters of cities surveyed reported increases in demand for food and housing, especially among families. Food aid requests expanded by 12 percent in 2005, while aid center and food bank resources grew by only 7 percent. Service providers estimated 18 percent of requests went unattended. Housing followed a similar trend, as a majority of cities reported an increase in demand for emergency shelter, often going unmet due to lack of resources.

As urban hunger and homelessness increases in America, the Bush administration is planning to eliminate a U.S. survey widely used to improve federal and state programs for low-income and retired Americans, reports Abid Aslam.
President Bush’s proposed budget for fiscal 2007, which begins October 2006, includes a Commerce Department plan to eliminate the Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). The proposal marks at least the third White House attempt in as many years to do away with federal data collection on politically prickly economic issues.
Founded in 1984, the Census Bureau survey follows American families for a number of years and monitors their use of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Social Security, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, child care, and other health, social service, and education programs.

Some 415 economists and social scientists signed a letter and sent it to Congress, shortly after the February release of Bush’s federal budget proposal, urging that the survey be fully funded as it “is the only large-scale survey explicitly designed to analyze the impact of a wide variety of government programs on the well being of American families.”
Heather Boushey, economist at the Washington, D.C.–based Center for Economic and Policy Research told Abid Aslam, “We need to know what the effects of these programs are on American families . . . SIPP is designed to do just that.” Boushey added that the survey has proved invaluable in tracking the effects of changes in government programs. So much so that the 1996 welfare reform law specifically mentioned the survey as the best means to evaluate the law’s effectiveness.

Supporters of the survey elimination say the program costs too much at $40 million per year. They would kill it in September and eventually replace it with a scaled-down version that would run to $9.2 million in development costs during the coming fiscal year. Actual data collection would begin in 2009.

Defenders of the survey counter that the cost is justified as SIPP “provides a constant stream of in-depth data that enables government, academic, and independent researchers to evaluate the effectiveness and improve the efficiency of several hundred billion dollars in spending on social programs,” including homeless shelters and emergency food aid.

UPDATE BY ABID ASLAM
As of the end of May 2006, hundreds of economists and social scientists remain engaged in a bid to save the U.S. Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). Ideologically diverse users describe the survey as pioneering and say it has helped to improve the uptake and performance of, and to gauge the effects on American families of changes in public provisions ranging from Medicaid to Temporary Assistance to Needy Families and school lunch programs.

A few journalists took notice because users of the data, including the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), which spearheaded the effort to save SIPP, chose to make some noise.By most accounts, the matter was a simple fight over money: the administration was out to cut any hint of flesh from bureaucratic budgets (perhaps to feed its foreign policy pursuits) but users of the survey wanted the money spent on SIPP because, in their view, the program is valuable and no feasible alternative exists or has been proposed.

That debate remains to be resolved. Lobbyists expect more legislative action in June and among them, CEPR remains available to provide updates.But is it just an isolated budget fight? This is the third time in as many years that the Bush administration has tried—and in the previous two cases, failed under pressure from users and advocates—to strip funding for awkward research. In 2003, it had tried to kill the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Mass Layoff Statistics report, which detailed where workplaces with more than fifty employees closed and what kinds of workers were affected. In 2004 and 2005, it had attempted to drop questions on the hiring and firing of women from employment data collected by the BLS. Hardly big-ticket items on the federal budget, the mass layoffs reports provided federal and state social service agencies with data crucial for planning even as it chronicled job losses and the so-called “jobless recovery.” The women’s questionnaire uncovered employment discrimination.

In other words, SIPP and the BLS programs are politically prickly. They highlight that, regardless of what some politicians and executives might say, economic and social problems persist and involve real people whose real needs remain to be met. This calls to mind the old line about there being three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics. To be convincing, they must be broadly consistent. If the numbers don’t support the narrative, something simply must give. With the livelihoods, life chances, and rights of millions of citizens at stake, these are more than stories about arcane budget wrangles.


#5 High-Tech Genocide in Congo
Sources:

The Taylor Report, March 28, 2005
Title: “The World’s Most Neglected Emergency: Phil Taylor talks to Keith Harmon Snow”

Earth First! Journal, August 2005
Title: “High-Tech Genocide”
Author: Sprocket

Z Magazine, March 1, 2006
Title: “Behind the Numbers: Untold Suffering in the Congo”
Authors: Keith Harmon Snow and David Barouski

Faculty Evaluator: Thom Lough
Student Researchers: Deyango Harris and Daniel Turner

The world’s most neglected emergency, according to the UN Emergency Relief Coordinator, is the ongoing tragedy of the Congo, where six to seven million have died since 1996 as a consequence of invasions and wars sponsored by western powers trying to gain control of the region’s mineral wealth. At stake is control of natural resources that are sought by U.S. corporations—diamonds, tin, copper, gold, and more significantly, coltan and niobium, two minerals necessary for production of cell phones and other high-tech electronics; and cobalt, an element essential to nuclear, chemical, aerospace, and defense industries.

Columbo-tantalite, i.e. coltan, is found in three-billion-year-old soils like those in the Rift Valley region of Africa. The tantalum extracted from the coltan ore is used to make tantalum capacitors, tiny components that are essential in managing the flow of current in electronic devices. Eighty percent of the world’s coltan reserves are found in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Niobium is another high-tech mineral with a similar story.

Sprocket reports that the high-tech boom of the 1990s caused the price of coltan to skyrocket to nearly $300 per pound. In 1996 U.S.-sponsored Rwandan and Ugandan forces entered eastern DRC. By 1998 they seized control and moved into strategic mining areas. The Rwandan Army was soon making $20 million or more a month from coltan mining. Though the price of coltan has fallen, Rwanda maintains its monopoly on coltan and the coltan trade in DRC. Reports of rampant human rights abuses pour out of this mining region.

Coltan makes its way out of the mines to trading posts where foreign traders buy the mineral and ship it abroad, mostly through Rwanda. Firms with the capability turn coltan into the coveted tantalum powder, and then sell the magic powder to Nokia, Motorola, Compaq, Sony, and other manufacturers for use in cell phones and other products.
Keith Harmon Snow emphasizes that any analysis of the geopolitics in the Congo, and the reasons for why the Congolese people have suffered a virtually unending war since 1996, requires an understanding of the organized crime perpetrated through multinational businesses. The tragedy of the Congo conflict has been instituted by invested corporations, their proxy armies, and the supra-governmental bodies that support them.

The process is tied to major multinational corporations at all levels. These include U.S.-based Cabot Corp. and OM Group; HC Starck of Germany; and Nigncxia of China—corporations that have been linked by a United Nations Panel of Experts to the atrocities in DRC. Extortion, rape, massacres, and bribery are all part of the criminal networks set up and maintained by huge multinational companies. Yet as mining in the Congo by western companies proceeds at an unprecedented rate—some $6 million in raw cobalt alone exiting DRC daily—multinational mining companies rarely get mentioned in human rights reports.
Sprocket notes that Sam Bodman, CEO of Cabot during the coltan boom, was appointed in December 2004 to serve as President Bush’s Secretary of Energy. Under Bodman’s leadership from 1987 to 2000, Cabot was one of the U.S.’s largest polluters, accounting for 60,000 tons of airborne toxic emissions annually. Snow adds that Sony’s current Executive Vice President and General Counsel Nicole Seligman was a former legal adviser for Bill Clinton. Many who held positions of power in the Clinton administration moved into high positions with Sony.

The article “Behind the Numbers,” coauthored by Snow and David Barouski, details a web of U.S. corruption and conflicts of interest between mining corporations such as Barrick Gold (see Story #21) and the U.S. government under George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, as well as U.S. arms dealers such as Simax; U.S. defense companies such as Lockheed Martin, Halliburton, Northrop Grumman, GE, Boeing, Raytheon, and Bechtel; “humanitarian” organizations such as CARE, funded by Lockheed Martin, and International Rescue Committee, whose Board of Overseers includes Henry Kissinger; “Conservation” interests that provide the vanguard for western penetration into Central Africa; and of course, PR firms and news outlets such as the New York Times.

Sprocket closes his article by noting that it’s not surprising this information isn’t included in the literature and manuals that come with your cell phones, pagers, computers, or diamond jewelry. Perhaps, he suggests, mobile phones should be outfitted with stickers that read: “Warning! This device was created with raw materials from central Africa. These materials are rare, nonrenewable, were sold to fund a bloody war of occupation, and have caused the virtual elimination of endangered species. Have a nice day.” People need to realize, he says, that there is a direct link between the gadgets that make our lives more convenient and sophisticated—and the reality of the violence, turmoil, and destruction that plague our world.

UPDATE BY SPROCKET
There are large fortunes to be made in the manufacturing of high-tech electronics and in selling convenience and entertainment to American consumers, but at what cost?

Conflicts in Africa are often shrouded with misinformation, while U.S. and other western interests are routinely downplayed or omitted by the corporate media. The June 5, 2006, cover story of Time, entitled “Congo: The Hidden Toll of the World’s Deadliest War,” was no exception. Although the article briefly mentioned coltan and its use in cell phones and other electronic devices, no mention was made of the pivotal role this and other raw materials found in the region play in the conflict. The story painted the ongoing war as a pitiable and horrible tragedy, avoiding the corporations and foreign governments that have created the framework for the violence and those which have strong financial and political interests in the conflict’s outcome.

In an article written by Johann Hari and published by The Hamilton Spectator on May 13, 2006, the corporate media took a step toward addressing the true reason for the tremendous body count that continues to pile up in the Democratic Republic of Congo: “The only change over the decades has been the resources snatched for Western consumption—rubber under the Belgians, diamonds under Mobutu, coltan and casterite today.”

Most disturbing is that in the corporate media, the effect of this conflict on nonhuman life is totally overlooked. Even with a high-profile endangered species like the Eastern lowland gorilla hanging in the balance, almost driven to extinction through poaching and habitat loss by displaced villagers and warring factions, the environmental angle of the story is rarely considered.

The next step in understanding the exploitation and violence wrought upon the inhabitants of central Africa, fueled by the hunger for high-tech toys in the U.S., is to expose corporations like Sony and Motorola. These corporations don’t want protest movements tarnishing their reputations. Nor do they want to call attention to all of the gorillas coltan kills, and the guerrillas it feeds.

It is time for our culture to start seeing more value in living beings, whether gorillas or humans, than in our disposable high-tech gadgets such as cell phones. It is time to steal back a more compassionate existence from the corporate plutocracy that creates destructive markets and from the media system that has manufactured our consent.

It is not just a question of giving up cell phones (though that would be a great start). We must question the appropriation of our planet in the form of a resource to be consumed, rather than as a home and community to be lived in.

“High-Tech Genocide” and other articles about cell phone technology are available by contacting the author: sprocket@riseup.net.

UPDATE BY KEITH HARMON SNOW
War for the control of the Democratic Republic of Congo—what should be the richest country in the world—began in Uganda in the 1980s, when now Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni shot his way to power with the backing of Buckingham Palace, the White House, and Tel Aviv behind him.

Paul Kagame, now president of Rwanda, served as Museveni’s Director of Military Intelligence. Kagame later trained at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, before the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF)—backed by Roger Winter, the U.S. Committee on Refugees, and the others above—invaded Rwanda. The RPF destabilized and then secured Rwanda. This coup d’etat is today misunderstood as the “Rwanda Genocide.” What played out in Rwanda in 1994 is now playing out in Darfur, Sudan; regime change is the goal, “genocide” is the tool of propaganda used to manipulate and disinform.

In 1996, Paul Kagame and Yoweri Museveni, with the Pentagon behind them, launched their covert war against Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko and his western backers. A decade later, there are 6 or 7 million dead, at the very least, and the war in Congo (Zaire) continues.

If you are reading the mainstream newspapers or listening to National Public Radio, you are contributing to your own mental illness, no matter how astute you believe yourself to be at “balancing” or “deciphering” the code.
News reports in Time Magazine (“The Deadliest War In The World,” June 6, 2006) and on CNN (“Rape, Brutality Ignored to Aid Congo Peace,” May 26, 2006) that appeared at the time of this writing are being interpreted by conscious people to be truth-telling at last. However, these are perfect examples filled with hidden deceptions and manipulations.
For accuracy and truth on Central Africa, look to people like Robin Philpot (Imperialism Dies Hard), Wayne Madsen (Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993–1999), Amos Wilson (The Falsification of Consciousness), Charles Onana (The Secrets of the Rwanda Genocide—Investigation on the Mysteries of a President), Antoine Lokongo (www.congopanorama.info), Phil Taylor (www.taylor-report.com), Christopher Black (“Racism, Murder and Lies in Rwanda”). World War 4 Report has published my reports, but they are inconsistent in their attention to accuracy, and would as quickly adopt the propaganda, and have done so at times.

It is possible to collect little fragments of truth here and there—never counting on the mainstream system for this—but one must beware the deceptions and bias. In this vein, the elite business journal Africa Confidential is often very revealing. Some facts can be gleaned from www.DigitalCongo.net and Africa Research Bulletin.

Professor David Gibb’s book The Political Economy of Third World Intervention: Case of the Congo Crises is an excellent backgrounder that identifies players still active today (especially Maurice Tempelsman and his diamonds interests connected to the Democratic Party). Ditto King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hocshchild, but—exemplifying the expedience of “interests”—remember that Hocshchild never tells you, the reader, that his father ran a mining company in Congo. Almost ALL reportage is expedient; one needs take care their propensity to be deceived.

Professor Ruth Mayer’s book Artificial Africas: Colonial Images in the Times of Globalization is a particularly poignant articulation of the means by which the “media” system distorts and manipulates all things African. And, never forget www.AllThingsPass.com.

Also hoping to correct the record and reveal the truth, the International Forum for Truth and Justice in the Great Lakes of Africa (www.veritasrwandaforum.org), based in Spain, and co-founded by Nobel Prize nominee Juan Carrero Seraleegui, is involved in a groundbreaking lawsuit charging massive crimes against humanity and acts of genocide were committed by the now government of Rwanda.


#6 Federal Whistleblower Protection in Jeopardy
Source:

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility website
Titles: “Whistleblowers Get Help from Bush Administration,” December 5, 2005
“Long-Delayed Investigation of Special Counsel Finally Begins,” October 18,2005
“Back Door Rollback of Federal Whistleblower Protections,” September 22, 2005
Author: Jeff Ruch

Faculty Evaluator: Barbara Bloom
Student Researchers: Caitlyn Peele and Sara-Joy Christienson

Special Counsel Scott Bloch, appointed by President Bush in 2004, is overseeing the virtual elimination of federal whistleblower rights in the U.S. government.

The U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC), the agency that is supposed to protect federal employees who blow the whistle on waste, fraud, and abuse is dismissing hundreds of cases while advancing almost none. According to the Annual Report for 2004 (which was not released until the end of first quarter fiscal year 2006) less than 1.5 percent of whistleblower claims were referred for investigation while more than 1000 reports were closed before they were even opened. Only eight claims were found to be substantiated, and one of those included the theft of a desk, while another included attendance violations. Favorable outcomes have declined 24 percent overall, and this is all in the first year that the new special counsel, Scott Bloch, has been in office.

Bloch, who has received numerous complaints since he took office, defends his first thirteen months in office by pointing to a decline in backlogged cases. Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) Executive Director Jeff Ruch says, “. . . backlogs and delays are bad, but they are not as bad as simply dumping the cases altogether.” According to figures released by Bloch in February of 2005 more than 470 claims of retaliation were dismissed, and not once had he affirmatively represented a whistleblower. In fact, in order to speed dismissals, Bloch instituted a rule forbidding his staff from contacting a whistleblower if their disclosure was deemed incomplete or ambiguous. Instead, the OSC would dismiss the matter. As a result, hundreds of whistleblowers never had a chance to justify their cases. Ruch notes that these numbers are limited to only the backlogged cases and do not include new ones.

On March 3, 2005, OSC staff members joined by a coalition of whistleblower protection and civil rights organizations filed a complaint against Bloch. His own employees accused him of violating the very rules he is supposed to be enforcing. The complaint specifies instances of illegal gag orders, cronyism, invidious discrimination, and retaliation by forcing the resignation of one-fifth of the OSC headquarters legal and investigative staff. The complaint was filed with the President’s Council on Integrity and Efficiency, which took no action on the case for seven months. PEER was one of the groups who co-filed the complaint against Bloch and Ruch wants to know, “Who watches the watchdogs?”

This is the third probe into Bloch’s operation in less than two years in office. Both the Government Accountability Office and a U.S. Senate subcommittee have ongoing investigations into mass dismissals of whistleblower cases, crony hires, and Bloch’s targeting of gay employees for removal while refusing to investigate cases involving discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

The Department of Labor has also gotten on board in a behind-the-scenes maneuver to cancel whistleblower protections. If it succeeds, the Labor Department will dismiss claims by federal workers who report violations under the Clean Air Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act. General Counsel for PEER, Richard Condit says, “Federal workers in agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency function as the public’s eyes and ears . . . the Labor Department is moving to shut down one of the few legal avenues left to whistleblowers.” The Labor Department is trying to invoke the ancient doctrine of sovereign immunity, which says that the government cannot be sued without its consent. The Secretary of Labor’s Administrative Review Board recently invited the EPA to raise a sovereign immunity defense in a case where a woman was trying to enforce earlier victories. Government Accountability Project General Counsel Joanne Royce sums up major concerns: “We do not want public servants wondering whether they will lose their jobs for acting against pollution violations of politically well-connected interests.”

UPDATE BY JEFF RUCH
With the decline in oversight by the U.S. Congress and the uneven quality of investigative journalism, outlets such as the U.S. Office of Special Counsel become even more important channels for governmental transparency. Unfortunately, under the Bush-appointed Special Counsel, this supposed haven for whistleblowers has become a beacon of false hope for thousands.

Each year, hundreds of civil servants who witness problems ranging from threats to public safety to waste of tax funds find that their reports of wrongdoing are stonewalled by the Office of Special Counsel (OSC). Consequently, these firsthand accounts of malfeasance are not investigated and almost uniformly never reach the public’s attention.
The importance of this state of affairs is that the actual workings of federal agencies are becoming more shrouded in secrecy and disinformation. Americans are less informed about their government and less able to be in connection with the people who actually work for them—the public servants.

In a recent development, employees within the OSC have filed a whistleblower complaint about the Special Counsel, the person who is supposed to be the chief whistleblower defender. After several months delay, the Bush White House assigned this complaint to the Inspector General for the Office of Personnel Management for review. This supposedly independent investigation has just begun in earnest, nearly one year after the complaint was filed.

Also, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report in May 2006 blasting the Bush-appointed Special Counsel for ignoring competitive bidding rules in handing out consultant contracts. GAO also recommended creating an independent channel whereby Office of Special Counsel employees can blow the whistle on further abuses by the Special Counsel.

In another recent development, PEER’s lawsuit against the Special Counsel to force release of documents concerning crony hires has produced more, heavily redacted documents showing that these sole source consultants apparently did no identifiable work. Ironically, the PEER suit was filed under the Freedom of Information Act, a law that the Special Counsel is also charged with policing.

And in a new annual report to Congress, OSC (stung by criticism about declining performance) has, for the first time, stopped disclosing the number of whistleblower cases where it obtained a favorable outcome. Consequently, it is impossible to tell if anyone is actually being helped by the agency.

PEER’s web page on the Office of Special Counsel has posted all developments since this story and also allows a reader to trace the story’s genesis.


# 7 US Operatives Torture Detainees to Death in Afghanistan and Iraq
Sources:

American Civil Liberties Website, October 24, 2005
Title: “US Operatives Killed Detainees During Interrogations in Afghanistan and Iraq”

Tom Dispatch.com, March 5, 2006
Title: “Tracing the Trail of Torture: Embedding Torture as Policy from Guantanamo to Iraq”
Author: Dahr Jamail

Faculty Evaluator: Rabi Michael Robinson
Student Researchers: Michael B Januleski Jr. and Jessica Rodas

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) released documents of forty-four autopsies held in Afghanistan and Iraq October 25, 2005. Twenty-one of those deaths were listed as homicides. The documents show that detainees died during and after interrogations by Navy SEALs, Military Intelligence, and Other Government Agency (OGA).
“These documents present irrefutable evidence that U.S. operatives tortured detainees to death during interrogation,” said Amrit Singh, an attorney with the ACLU. “The public has a right to know who authorized the use of torture techniques and why these deaths have been covered up.”

The Department of Defense released the autopsy reports in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Physicians for Human Rights, Veterans for Common Sense, and Veterans for Peace.

One of forty-four U.S. military autopsy reports reads as follows: “Final Autopsy Report: DOD 003164, (Detainee) Died as a result of asphyxia (lack of oxygen to the brain) due to strangulation as evidenced by the recently fractured hyoid bone in the neck and soft tissue hemorrhage extending downward to the level of the right thyroid cartilage. Autopsy revealed bone fracture, rib fractures, contusions in mid abdomen, back and buttocks extending to the left flank, abrasions, lateral buttocks. Contusions, back of legs and knees; abrasions on knees, left fingers and encircling to left wrist. Lacerations and superficial cuts, right 4th and 5th fingers. Also, blunt force injuries, predominately recent contusions (bruises) on the torso and lower extremities. Abrasions on left wrist are consistent with use of restraints. No evidence of defense injuries or natural disease. Manner of death is homicide. Whitehorse Detainment Facility, Nasiriyah, Iraq.”
Another report from the ACLU indicates: “a 27-year-old Iraqi male died while being interrogated by Navy Seals on April 5, 2004, in Mosul, Iraq. During his confinement he was hooded, flex-cuffed, sleep deprived and subjected to hot and cold environmental conditions, including the use of cold water on his body and head. The exact cause of death was ‘undetermined’ although the autopsy stated that hypothermia may have contributed to his death.”
An overwhelming majority of the so-called “natural deaths” covered in the autopsies were attributed to “arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease” (heart attack). Persons under extreme stress and pain may have heart attacks as a result of the circumstances of their detainments.

The Associated Press carried the story of the ACLU charges on their wire service. However, a thorough check of LexisNexis and ProQuest electronic data bases, using the keywords ACLU and autopsy, showed that at least 95 percent of the daily papers in the U.S. did not bother to pick up the story. The Los Angeles Times covered the story on page A4 with a 635-word report headlined “Autopsies Support Abuse Allegations.” Fewer than a dozen other daily newspapers including: Bangor Daily News, Maine, page 8; Telegraph-Herald, Dubuque, Iowa, page 6; Charleston Gazette, page 5; Advocate, Baton Rouge, page 11; and a half dozen others actually covered the story. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Seattle Times buried the story inside general Iraq news articles. USA Today posted the story on their website. MSNBC posted the story to their website, but apparently did not consider it newsworthy enough to air on television.
Janis Karpinski, U.S. Brigadier General Commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade, was in charge of seventeen prison facilities in Iraq during the Abu Ghraib scandal in 2003. Karpinski testified January 21, 2006 in New York City at the International Commission of Inquiry on Crimes against Humanity Committed by the Bush administration. Karpinski stated: “General [Ricardo] Sanchez [commander of coalition ground forces in Iraq] signed the eight-page memorandum authorizing a laundry list of harsh techniques in interrogations to include specific use of dogs and muzzled dogs with his specific permission.” Karpinski went on to claim that Major General Geoffrey Miller, who had been “specifically selected by the Secretary of Defense to go to Guantanamo Bay and run the interrogations operations,” was dispatched to Iraq by the Bush administration to “work with the military intelligence personnel to teach them new and improved interrogation techniques.” When asked how far up the chain of command responsibility for the torture orders for Abu Ghraib went, Karpinski said, “The Secretary of Defense would not have authorized without the approval of the Vice President.”

UPDATE BY DAHR JAMAIL
This story, published in March 2006, was merely a snapshot of the ongoing and worsening policy of the Bush administration regarding torture. And not just time, but places show snapshots of the criminal policy of the current administration—Iraq, like Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, and other “secret” U.S. military detention centers in Eastern European countries are physical examples of an ongoing policy which breaches both international law and our very constitution.

But breaking international and domestic law has not been a concern of an administration led by a “president” who has claimed “authority” to disobey over 750 laws passed by Congress. In fact, when this same individual does things like signing a secret order in 2002 which authorized the National Security Agency to violate the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by wiretapping the phones of U.S. citizens, and then goes on to allow the secret collection of the telephone records of tens of millions of Americans, torture is but one portion of this corrupted picture. This is a critical ongoing story, not just because it violates international and domestic law, but this state-sanctioned brutality, bankrupt of any morality and decency, is already coming back home to haunt Americans. When U.S. soldiers are captured in Iraq or another foreign country, what basis does the U.S. have now to ask for their fair and humane treatment? And with police brutality and draconian “security” measures becoming more real within the U.S. with each passing day, why wouldn’t these policies be visited upon U.S. citizens?

While torture is occasionally glimpsed by mainstream media outlets such as the Washington Post and Time Magazine, we must continue to rely on groups like the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International who cover the subject thoroughly, persistently, and unlike (of course) any corporate media outlets.
Since I wrote this story, there continues to be a deluge of information and proof of the Bush administration continuing and even widening their policy of torture, as well as their rendering prisoners to countries which have torturing human beings down to a science.

All of this, despite the fact that U.S. laws prohibit torture absolutely, clearly stating that torture is never, ever permitted, even in a time of war.

To stay current on this critical topic, please visit the following websites regularly:
http://www.amnesty.org/
http://www.hrw.org/
http://www.ccr-ny.org/v2/home.asp

#8 Pentagon Exempt from Freedom of Information Act
Sources:

New Standard, May 6, 2005
Title: “Pentagon Seeks Greater Immunity from Freedom of Information”
Author: Michelle Chen

Newspaper Association of America website, posted December 2005
Title: “FOIA Exemption Granted to Federal Agency”

Community Evaluator: Tim Ogburn
Student Researcher: Rachelle Cooper and Brian Murphy

The Department of Defense has been granted exemption from the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). In December 2005, Congress passed the 2006 Defense Authorization Act which renders Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) “operational files” fully immune to FOIA requests, the main mechanism by which watchdog groups, journalists and individuals can access federal documents. Of particular concern to critics of the Defense Authorization Act is the DIA’s new right to thwart access to files that may reveal human rights violations tied to ongoing “counterterrorism” efforts.
The rule could, for instance, frustrate the work of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other organizations that have relied on FOIA to uncover more than 30,000 documents on the U.S. military’s involvement in the torture and mistreatment of foreign detainees in Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, and Iraq—including the Abu Ghraib scandal.

Several key documents that have surfaced in the advocacy organization’s expansive research originate from DIA files, including a 2004 memorandum containing evidence that U.S. military interrogators brutalized detainees in Baghdad, as well as a report describing the abuse of Iraqi detainees as violations of international human rights law.

According to Jameel Jaffer, an ACLU attorney involved in the ongoing torture investigations, “If the Defense Intelligence Agency can rely on exception or exemption from the FOIA, then documents such as those that we obtained this last time around will not become public at all.” The end result of such an exemption, he told The New Standard, is that “abuse is much more likely to take place, because there’s not public oversight of Defense Intelligence Agency activity.”

Jaffer added that because the DIA conducts investigations relating to other national security-related agencies, documents covered by the exemption could contain critical evidence of how other parts of the military operate as well.


he ACLU recently battled the FOIA exemption rule of the CIA in a lawsuit over the agency’s attempt to withhold information concerning alleged abuse of Iraqi detainees. The CIA’s defense centered on the invocation of FOIA exemption, and although a federal judge ultimately overrode the rule, Jaffer cited the case as evidence of “exemption creep”—the gradual stretching of the law to further shield federal agencies from public scrutiny.

According to language in the Defense Authorization Act, an operational file can be any information related to “the conduct of foreign intelligence or counterintelligence operations or intelligence or security liaison arrangements or information exchanges with foreign governments or their intelligence or security services.”

Critics warn that such vague bureaucratic language is a green light for the DIA to thwart a wide array of legitimate information requests without proper justification. Steven Aftergood, director of the research organization Project on Government Secrecy, warns, “If it falls in the category of ‘operational files,’ it’s over before it begins.”

Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, adds, “These exemptions create a black hole into which the bureaucracy can drive just about any kind of information it wants to. And you can bet that Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib-style information is what DIA and others would want to hide.”

The Newspaper Association of America reports that, due to lobbying efforts of the Sunshine in Government Initiative and other open government advocates, congressional negotiators imposed an unprecedented two-year “sunset” date on the Pentagon’s FOIA exemption, ending in December 2007.

Update by Michelle Chen:
The Defense Intelligence Agency, the intelligence arm of the Department of Defense, has been a source for critical information on the Pentagon's foreign operations as well as the DIA's observations of the conduct of other branches of the military. Its request for immunity from the Freedom of Information Act last year was not the first attempt to shield its data from members of the public, but it did come at a time that the governent's anti-terror fervor was beginning to crest.

Open-government groups warn that such an exemption from FOIA requests, which the Central Intelligene Agency already enjoys, would close off a major channel for information in a government bureaucracy already riddled with both formal and informal barriers of secrecy. The Pentagon's request alarmed groups like the ACLU, which has relied heavily on such data to build cases regarding torture and abuse of detainees in Iraq.
(http://www.aclu.org/torturefoia/released/042005/).

Since the article was published, the language proposed for the Defense Department budget for FY 2006 was adopted. (The public print of the bill can be read at the GPO website here, buried on page 472: http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=109_cong_bills&docid=f:s1042pp.txt.pdf.)

The bill specifically refers to the immunity of "operational files," though this is somewhat ambiguously defined.

Another development in this issue area over the past year is that secrecy and intelligence gathering have become intense domestic political issues. As a result, heightened public attention to the gradual rollback on open-government laws is beginning to stir some congressional action in the form of hearings and investigative reports, not just related to classified information per se but also the new quasi-classified categories that have cropped up since 9/11 (http://www.fas.org/sgp/congress/2006/index.html).

Earlier this year, the Pentagon initiatied a department-wide review of FOIA practices, though it is unlear whether this internal evaluation will lead to actual changes in how information is disclosed or withheld from public purview. (http://www.defenselink.mil/pubs/foi/DoD_FOIA_Review.pdf).

For more on this issue, see:
The Project on Government Secrecy, a watchdog group run by the American Federation of Scientists:
http://www.fas.org/sgp/congress/2006/index.html

The National Security Archives at George Washington University, which has an extensive collection of FOIA documents and has issued numerous reports and studies on government secrecy and FOIA policies:
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nsa/foia.html

#9 The World Bank Funds Israel-Palestine Wall
Sources:

Left Turn Issue #18
Title: “Cementing Israeli Apartheid: The Role of World Bank”
Author: Jamal Juma’

Al-Jazeerah, March 9, 2005
Title: “US Free Trade Agreements Split Arab Opinion”
Author: Linda Heard

Community Evaluator: April Hurley, MD
Student Researchers: Bailey Malone and Lisa Dobias

Despite the 2004 International Court of Justice (ICJ) decision that called for tearing down the Wall and compensating affected communities, construction of the Wall has accelerated. The route of the barrier runs deep into Palestinian territory, aiding the annexation of Israeli settlements and the breaking of Palestinian territorial continuity. The World Bank’s vision of “economic development,” however, evades any discussion of the Wall’s illegality.
The World Bank has meanwhile outlined the framework for a Palestinian Middle East Free Trade Area (MEFTA) policy in their most recent report on Palestine published in December of 2004, “Stagnation or Revival: Israeli Disengagement and Palestinian Economic Prospects.”
Central to World Bank proposals are the construction of massive industrial zones to be financed by the World Bank and other donors and controlled by the Israeli Occupation. Built on Palestinian land around the Wall, these industrial zones are envisaged as forming the basis of export-orientated economic development. Palestinians imprisoned by the Wall and dispossessed of land can be put to work for low wages.
The post-Wall MEFTA vision includes complete control over Palestinian movement. The report proposes high-tech military gates and checkpoints along the Wall, through which Palestinians and exports can be conveniently transported and controlled. A supplemental “transfer system” of walled roads and tunnels will allow Palestinian workers to be funneled to their jobs, while being simultaneously denied access to their land. Sweatshops will be one of very few possibilities of earning a living for Palestinians confined to disparate ghettos throughout the West Bank. The World Bank states:

“In an improved operating environment, Palestinian entrepreneurs and foreign investors will look for well-serviced industrial land and supporting infrastructure. They will also seek a regulatory regime with a minimum of ‘red tape’ and with clear procedures for conducting business. Industrial Estates (IEs), particularly those on the border between Palestinian and Israeli territory, can fulfill this need and thereby play an important role in supporting export based growth.”

Jamal Juma’ notes that the “red tape” which the World Bank refers to can be presumed to mean trade unions, a minimum wage, good working conditions, environmental protection, and other workers’ rights that will be more flexible than the ones in the “developed” world. The World Bank explicitly states that current wages of Palestinians are too high for the region and “compromise the international competitiveness” even though wages are only a quarter of the average in Israel. Juma’ warns that on top of a military occupation and forced expulsion, Palestinians are to be subjects of an economic colonialism.
These industrial zones will clearly benefit Israel abroad where goods “Made in Palestine” have more favorable trade conditions in international markets. IPS reporter Emad Mekay, in February 2005, revealed the World Bank’s plan to partially fund Palestinian MEFTA infrastructure with loans to Palestine. Israel is not eligible for World Bank lending because of its high per capita income, but Palestine is. Mekay quotes Terry Walz of the Washington-based Council for the National Interest, a group that monitors U.S. and international policy towards Israel and the Palestinians: “I must admit that making the Palestinians pay for the modernization of these checkpoints is an embarrassment, since they had nothing to do with the erection of the separation wall to begin with and in fact have protested it. I think the whole issue is extremely murky.”1
Mekay goes on to note that this is the first time the World Bank appears ready to get actively involved in the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land. Former World Bank president James Wolfensohn rejected this possibility last year. Neo-conservative Paul Wolfowitz was, however, confirmed as president of the World Bank on June 1, 2005.
In breach of the ICJ ruling, the U.S. has already contributed $50 million to construct gates along the Wall to “help serve the needs of Palestinians.”
Linda Heard reports for Al-Jazeerah that the U.S. is currently pushing for bilateral Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) with various Arab states, including members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), as part of a vision for a larger Middle East Free Trade Agreement. President Bush hopes the MEFTA will encompass some twenty regional countries, including Israel, and be fully consolidated by 2013.
Many in the region are suspicious of the divisive trend of bilateral agreements with the U.S. and worry that the GCC will end up with small, fragmented satellite economies without any leverage against world giants. Prince Saud Al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, stated, “It is alarming to see some members of the GCC enter into separate agreements with international powers . . . They diminish the collective bargaining power and weaken not only the solidarity of the GCC as a whole, but also each of its members.”

Note
1. Emad Mekay, “World Bank and U.S.: Palestinians Should Pay for Israeli Checkpoints,” IPS, February 25, 2005.

UPDATE BY JAMAL JUMA’
“ Cementing Israeli Apartheid: The Role of the World Bank” was written last summer as part of Stop the Wall’s campaign efforts to widen attention of those horrified by the construction of the 700 km long wall around Palestinian cities and villages. It aimed to expose the vicious mechanism of control, exploitation, and dispossession devised by the Occupation, but moreover the activities of the international community in safeguarding the Wall and making Palestinian ghettos sustainable.
It opens a chapter in a story that no one wants to hear: the globalization of apartheid in the Occupation of Palestine. Zionism has its own racist interest in ghettoizing 4 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and securing the judaization of Jerusalem. It ensures a Jewish demographic majority and ethnic supremacy over as much of Palestine as possible, working against all UN resolutions and the recent ICJ ruling on the Wall.
Within this project it finds allies in the international community keen to exploit cheap Palestinian labor locked behind Walls and gates. The degree to which Zionism and the international community—headed by the World Bank—work together with the aim of controlling every aspect of Palestinian life has become increasingly evident since the Left Turn article.
The Palestinian Authority’s (PA) role is reduced to the administrators of the Bantustans. The Palestinian people resoundingly said no to Bantustans at the ballot boxes last January.
While the Bank’s initial responsibility was to devise economic policies for the sustainability of a Palestinian Bantu-State, the institution is now facilitating efforts to ensure that Palestinians cannot interfere in the plans of the Occupation and the international community. The World Bank is gearing up to take over the payrolls of various Palestinian institutions, should the PA not comply with Zionist and global interests.
While global IFIs meticulously plan the financial and material survival and political control of the ghettos, Ehud Olmert offers the slogan of “Final Borders” to describe the project. In legitimizing the Wall, annexing Jerusalem, increasing the number of settlers, and denying the mere existence of the refugees, Olmert finds a willing accomplice in the Bank and its policy makers in Washington, who look to cash in on the Bantu-State.
The Palestinian people will never accept the plan, so it is hoped that they will be starved into it. But we will not kneel down. After dozens of massacres, killings, arrests, and almost sixty years of life in the Diaspora, surrender is too high a price to pay. We are not asking for outside institutions to provide us with bread, but to comply with their duties under international law and support our struggle for justice and liberation.
None of the horrific realities of life in Palestine are apparent in the headlines and doublespeak of mass media and international diplomacy, where our ghettoization is called “state-building.” International complicity with Israeli apartheid is dressed up as “humanitarian aid.” Palestinians are supposed to be grateful for gates in the Wall so they can be funneled between ghettos.
Just like Olmert’s schemes with the White House, the media shuns and neglects the rights and voices of Palestinians. Neither the daily killing of our people, nor the destruction of our homes, the dispossession of our farmers, or the sufferings of 6 million refugees make headlines. The consumers of mainstream media outlets are left to discuss the diatribe of “peace” and “borders,” disputed between the protagonists of our oppression, while the racism, ethnic cleansing, and ghettoization continue.

More information on the issue is to be found at our website: http://www.stopthewall.org


#10 Expanded Air War in Iraq Kills More Civilians
Sources:

The New Yorker, December 2005
Title: "Up in the Air"
Author: Seymour M. Hersh

Tomdispatch, December 2005
Title: "An Increasingly Aerial Occupation"
Author: Dahr Jamail

Community Evaluator: Robert Manning
Student Researcher: Brian Fuchs

There is widespread speculation that President Bush, confronted by diminishing approval ratings and dissent within his own party as well as within the military itself, will begin pulling American troops out of Iraq in 2006. A key element of the drawdown plans not mentioned in the President’s public statements, or in mainstream media for that matter, is that the departing American troops will be replaced by American airpower.

“We’re not planning to diminish the war,” Seymour Hersh quotes Patrick Clawson, the deputy director of the Washington Institute, whose views often mirror those of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. “We just want to change the mix of the forces doing the fighting—Iraqi infantry with American support and greater use of airpower.”

While battle fatigue increases among U.S. troops, the prospect of using airpower as a substitute for American troops on the ground has caused great unease within the military. Air Force commanders, in particular, have deep-seated objections to the possibility that Iraqis will eventually be responsible for target selection. Hersh quotes a senior military planner now on assignment in the Pentagon, “Will the Iraqis call in air strikes in order to snuff rivals, or other warlords, or to snuff members of their own sect and blame someone else? Will some Iraqis be targeting on behalf of al-Qaeda, or the insurgency, or the Iranians?”

Dahr Jamail reports that the statistics gleaned from U.S. Central Command Air Forces (CENTAF) indicate a massive rise in the number of U.S. air missions—996 sorties—in Iraq in the month of November 2005.
The size of this figure naturally begs the question, where are such missions being flown and what is their size and nature? It’s important to note as well that “air war” does not simply mean U.S. Air Force. Carrier-based Navy and Marine aircraft flew over 21,000 hours of missions and dropped over twenty-six tons of ordnance in Fallujah alone during the November 2004 siege of that city.

Visions of a frightful future in Iraq should not overshadow the devastation already caused by present levels of American air power loosed, in particular, on heavily populated urban areas of that country. The tactic of using massively powerful 500 and 1,000 pound bombs in urban areas to target small pockets of resistance fighters has, in fact, long been employed in Iraq. No intensification of the air war is necessary to make it commonplace. Jamail’s article provides a broad overview of the air power arsenals being used against the people of Iraq.

A serious study of violence to civilians in Iraq by a British medical journal, The Lancet, released in October 2004, estimated that 85 percent of all violent deaths in Iraq are generated by coalition forces (see Censored 2006, Story #2). 95 percent of reported killings (all attributed to U.S. forces by interviewees) were caused by helicopter gunships, rockets, or other forms of aerial weaponry.1 While no significant scientific inquiry has been carried out in Iraq recently, Iraqi medical personnel, working in areas where U.S. military operations continue, report that they feel the “vast majority” of civilian deaths are the result of actions by the occupation forces.

Given the U.S. air power already being applied largely in Iraq’s cities and towns, the prospect of increasing it is chilling indeed. As to how this might benefit the embattled Bush administration, Jamail quotes U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski:

“Shifting the mechanism of the destruction of Iraq from soldiers and Marines to distant and safer air power would be successful in several ways. It would reduce the negative publicity value of maimed American soldiers and Marines, would bring a portion of our troops home and give the Army a necessary operational break. It would increase Air Force and Naval budgets, and line defense contractor pockets. By the time we figure out that it isn’t working to make oil more secure or to allow Iraqis to rebuild a stable country, the Army will have recovered and can be redeployed in force.”

Note
1. Les Roberts, et al., “Mortality Before and After the 2003 Invasion of Iraq,” The Lancet, October 29, 2004.

UPDATE BY DAHR JAMAIL
Eleven days after this story about the lack of reportage in the corporate media about the U.S. military’s increasing use of air power in Iraq, the Washington Post ran a story about how U.S. air strikes were taking an increasing toll on civilians. Aside from that story, the Washington Post, along with the New York Times, remain largely mute on the issue, despite the fact that the U.S. use of air strikes in Iraq has now become the norm rather than being used in contingencies, as they were in the first year of the occupation. Needless to say, corporate media television coverage has remained the same as it did prior to the publishing of this story—they prefer to portray a U.S. occupation of Iraq sans warplanes dropping bombs in civilian neighborhoods.

This story remains a critical issue when one evaluates the occupation of Iraq, for the number of civilians dying, now possibly as high as 300,000 according to Les Roberts, one of the authors of the famous Lancet Report, only continues to escalate. This is, of course, due in large part to U.S. war planes and helicopters dropping bombs and missiles into urban areas in various Iraqi cities.

It is also important when one looks at the fact that more than 82 percent of Iraqis now vehemently oppose the occupation, because one of the biggest recruiting tools for the Iraqi resistance is U.S. bombs and missiles killing the innocent. Years from now when a corporate media outlet decides to break down and acknowledge that the level of anti-American sentiment in Iraq is as high (or higher) than it is anywhere in the world, and asks the mindless question, “Why do they hate us?” one will only need to look towards the indiscriminate use of air power on the Iraqi population.
This story was not difficult to write for two reasons: the first was that any reporter in Iraq with eyes and ears knows there is a vast amount of air power being projected by the U.S. military. Secondly, thanks to the Internet, statistics on sorties are readily available to anyone willing to look. Googling “CENTAF” brings up several “Air Power Summary” reports, where one is able to find how many missions, and what type, are being flown each month in Iraq, as well as other countries.

To monitor the number of Iraqi civilians being killed by these missions, along with other deaths caused by the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the Iraqi Mortality Survey published in the prestigious British Lancet medical journal, albeit eighteen months out of date and a highly conservative estimate by the authors admission, remains by far and away the most accurate to date.

One thing is for certain, and that is the longer the failed U.S. occupation of Iraq persists, the more U.S. air power will be used—a scenario that closely resembles that of the shameful Vietnam War.


#11 Dangers of Genetically Modified Food Confirmed
Sources:

Independent/UK, May 22, 2005
Title: Revealed: “Health Fears Over Secret Study in GM Food”
Author: Geoffrey Lean

Organic Consumers Association website, June 2,2005
Title: “Monsanto's GE Corn Experiments on Rats Continue to Generate Global Controversy”
Authors: GM Free Cymru

Independent/UK, January 8, 2006
Title: GM: New Study Shows Unborn Babies Could Be Harmed”
Author: Geoffrey Lean

Le Monde and Truthout, February 9, 2006
Title: “New Suspicions About GMOs”
Author: Herve Kempf

Faculty Evaluator: Michael Ezra
Student Researchers: Destiny Stone and Lani Ready

Several recent studies confirm fears that genetically modified (GM) foods damage human health. These studies were released as the World Trade Organization (WTO) moved toward upholding the ruling that the European Union has violated international trade rules by stopping importation of GM foods.

Research by the Russian Academy of Sciences released in December 2005 found that more than half of the offspring of rats fed GM soy died within the first three weeks of life, six times as many as those born to mothers fed on non-modified soy. Six times as many offspring fed GM soy were also severely underweight.
In November 2005, a private research institute in Australia, CSIRO Plant Industry, put a halt to further development of a GM pea cultivator when it was found to cause an immune response in laboratory mice.1
In the summer of 2005, an Italian research team led by a cellular biologist at the University of Urbino published confirmation that absorption of GM soy by mice causes development of misshapen liver cells, as well as other cellular anomalies.
In May of 2005 the review of a highly confidential and controversial Monsanto report on test results of corn modified with Monsanto MON863 was published in The Independent/UK.
Dr. Arpad Pusztai (see Censored 2001, Story #7), one of the few genuinely independent scientists specializing in plant genetics and animal feeding studies, was asked by the German authorities in the autumn of 2004 to examine Monsanto’s 1,139-page report on the feeding of MON863 to laboratory rats over a ninety-day period.

The study found “statistically significant” differences in kidney weights and certain blood parameters in the rats fed the GM corn as compared with the control groups. A number of scientists across Europe who saw the study (and heavily-censored summaries of it) expressed concerns about the health and safety implications if MON863 should ever enter the food chain. There was particular concern in France, where Professor Gilles-Eric Seralini of the University of Caen has been trying (without success) for almost eighteen months to obtain full disclosure of all documents relating to the MON863 study.

Dr. Pusztai was forced by the German authorities to sign a “declaration of secrecy” before he was allowed to see the Monsanto rat feeding study, on the grounds that the document is classified as “CBI” or “confidential business interest.” While Pusztai is still bound by the declaration of secrecy, Monsanto recently declared that it does not object to the widespread dissemination of the “Pusztai Report.”2

Monsanto GM soy and corn are widely consumed by Americans at a time when the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization has concluded, “In several cases, GMOs have been put on the market when safety issues are not clear.”

As GMO research is not encouraged by U.S. or European governments, the vast majority of toxicological studies are conducted by those companies producing and promoting consumption of GMOs. With motive and authenticity of results suspect in corporate testing, independent scientific research into the effects of GM foods is attracting increasing attention.

Comment: In May 2006 the WTO upheld a ruling that European countries broke international trade rules by stopping importation of GM foods. The WTO verdict found that the EU has had an effective ban on biotech foods since 1998 and sided with the U.S., Canada, and Argentina in a decision that the moratorium was illegal under WTO rules.3

Notes
1. “GM peas cause immune response–A gap in the approval process?” http://www.GMO-Compass.org, January 3, 2006.
2. Arpad Pusztai, “Mon863-Pusztai Report,” http://www.GMWatch.org, September 12, 2004.
3. Bradley S. Clapper, “WTO Faults EU for Blocking Modified Food,” Associated Press, May 11, 2006.


#12 Pentagon Plans to Build New Landmines
Source:

Inter Press Service, August 3, 2005
Title: “After 10-Year Hiatus, Pentagon Eyes New Landmine”
Author: Isaac Baker

Human Rights Watch website, August 2005
Title: “Development and Production of Landmines”

Faculty Evaluator: Scott Suneson
Student Researchers: Rachel Barry and Matt Frick

The Bush administration plans to resume production of antipersonnel landmine systems in a move that is at odds with both the international community and previous U.S. policy, according to the leading human rights organization, Human Rights Watch (HRW).

Nearly every nation has endorsed the goal of a global ban on antipersonnel mines. In 1994 the U.S. called for the “eventual elimination” of all such mines, and in 1996 President Bill Clinton said the U.S. would “seek a worldwide agreement as soon as possible to end the use of all antipersonnel mines.” The U.S. produced its last antipersonnel landmine in 1997. It had been the stated objective of the U.S. government to eventually join the 145 countries signatory to the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty, which bans the use, production, exporting, and stockpiling of antipersonnel landmines.
The Bush administration, however, made an about-face in U.S. antipersonnel landmine policy in February 2004, when it abandoned any plan to join the Mine Ban Treaty, also known as the Ottawa Convention. “The United States will not join the Ottawa Convention because its terms would have required us to give up a needed military capability,” the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Political-Military announced, summing up the administration’s new policy, “The United States will continue to develop non-persistent anti-personnel and anti-tank landmines.”

HRW reports that, “New U.S. landmines will have a variety of ways of being initiated, both command-detonation (that is, when a soldier decides when to explode the mine, sometimes called ‘man-in-the-loop’) and traditional victim-activation. A mine that is designed to be exploded by the presence, proximity, or contact of a person (i.e., victim-activation) is prohibited under the International Mine Ban Treaty.”

To sidestep international opposition, the Pentagon proposes development of the “Spider” system, which consists of a control unit capable of monitoring up to eighty-four hand-placed, unattended munitions that deploy a web of tripwires across an area. Once a wire is touched, a man-in-the-loop control system allows the operator to activate the devices.
The Spider, however, contains a “battlefield override” feature that allows for circumvention of the man-in-the-loop, and activation by the target (victim).

A Pentagon report to Congress stated, “Target Activation is a software feature that allows the man-in-the-loop to change the capability of a munition from requiring action by an operator prior to being detonated, to a munition that will be detonated by a target. The Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Service Chiefs, using best military judgment, feel that the man-in-the-loop system without this feature would be insufficient to meet tactical operational conditions and electronic countermeasures.”

The U.S. Army spent $135 million between fiscal years 1999 and 2004 to develop Spider and another $11 million has been requested to complete research and development. A total of $390 million is budgeted to produce 1,620 Spider systems and 186,300 munitions. According to budget documents released in February 2005, the Pentagon requested $688 million for research on and $1.08 billion for the production of new landmine systems between fiscal years 2006 and 2011.

Steven Goose, Director of HRW Arms Division, told Project Censored that Congress has required a report from the Pentagon on the humanitarian consequences of the “battlefield override” or victim-activated feature of these munitions for review before approving funds. Though production was set for December of 2005, Congress has not, as of June 2006, received this preliminary Pentagon report.

If the Spider or similar mine munitions systems move forward, a frightening precedence will be set. At best the 145 signatories to the Ottawa Convention will be beholden to the treaty, which forbids assistance in joint military operations where landmines are being used. At worst, U.S. production will legitimize international resumption of landmine proliferation.

Steven Goose warns, “If one doesn’t insist on a comprehensive ban on all types and uses of antipersonnel mines, each nation will be able to claim unique requirements and justifications.”

UPDATE BY ISAAC BAKER
Landmines are horrific weapons. And, naturally, news stories about the terror they inflict upon human beings—mainly civilians—are gritty and disturbing if they are truthful. Especially when it’s your own government that’s responsible.
And given the mainstream media’s typical service to power, this story didn’t make many headlines.

But the potential ramifications of the U.S. government resuming production of landmines are overwhelming. And since the average American can’t depend on many media to inform them of the horrific things their government is doing, concerned people must take it upon themselves to put their government in its place.

We all must ask ourselves: Do we want our government—the body that theoretically represents we, the people—spending millions upon millions of dollars on these destructive weapons? Are we comfortable with sitting back and letting our government produce weapons that kill and maim civilians?

Or will we coalesce and let the powerful know that we will not stand for this gross disregard for human life and international opinion?

It’s our responsibility to stop the abuses of power in our country. And if we do not confront our government on this issue, I believe, the blood of the innocents will be on all of our hands.

For more information on how to get involved please visit: http://www.hrw.org and http://www.banminesusa.org or http://www.icbl.org


#13 New Evidence Establishes Dangers of Roundup
Sources:

Third World Resurgence, No. 176, April 2005
Title: “New Evidence of Dangers of Roundup Weedkiller”
Author: Chee Yoke Heong

Faculty Evaluator: Jennifer While
Student Researchers: Peter McArthur and Lani Ready

New studies from both sides of the Atlantic reveal that Roundup, the most widely used weedkiller in the world, poses serious human health threats. More than 75 percent of genetically modified (GM) crops are engineered to tolerate the absorption of Roundup—it eliminates all plants that are not GM. Monsanto Inc., the major engineer of GM crops, is also the producer of Roundup. Thus, while Roundup was formulated as a weapon against weeds, it has become a prevalent ingredient in most of our food crops.

Three recent studies show that Roundup, which is used by farmers and home gardeners, is not the safe product we have been led to trust.

A group of scientists led by biochemist Professor Gilles-Eric Seralini from the University of Caen in France found that human placental cells are very sensitive to Roundup at concentrations lower than those currently used in agricultural application.

An epidemiological study of Ontario farming populations showed that exposure to glyphosate, the key ingredient in Roundup, nearly doubled the risk of late miscarriages. Seralini and his team decided to research the effects of the herbicide on human placenta cells. Their study confirmed the toxicity of glyphosate, as after eighteen hours of exposure at low concentrations, large proportions of human placenta began to die. Seralini suggests that this may explain the high levels of premature births and miscarriages observed among female farmers using glyphosate.

Seralini’s team further compared the toxic effects of the Roundup formula (the most common commercial formulation of glyphosate and chemical additives) to the isolated active ingredient, glyphosate. They found that the toxic effect increases in the presence of Roundup ‘adjuvants’ or additives. These additives thus have a facilitating role, rendering Roundup twice as toxic as its isolated active ingredient, glyphosate.

Another study, released in April 2005 by the University of Pittsburgh, suggests that Roundup is a danger to other life-forms and non-target organisms. Biologist Rick Relyea found that Roundup is extremely lethal to amphibians. In what is considered one of the most extensive studies on the effects of pesticides on nontarget organisms in a natural setting, Relyea found that Roundup caused a 70 percent decline in amphibian biodiversity and an 86 percent decline in the total mass of tadpoles. Leopard frog tadpoles and gray tree frog tadpoles were nearly eliminated.

In 2002, a scientific team led by Robert Belle of the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) biological station in Roscoff, France showed that Roundup activates one of the key stages of cellular division that can potentially lead to cancer. Belle and his team have been studying the impact of glyphosate formulations on sea urchin cells for several years. The team has recently demonstrated in Toxicological Science (December 2004) that a “control point” for DNA damage was affected by Roundup, while glyphosate alone had no effect. “We have shown that it’s a definite risk factor, but we have not evaluated the number of cancers potentially induced, nor the time frame within which they would declare themselves,” Belle acknowledges.

There is, indeed, direct evidence that glyphosate inhibits an important process called RNA transcription in animals, at a concentration well below the level that is recommended for commercial spray application.

There is also new research that shows that brief exposure to commercial glyphosate causes liver damage in rats, as indicated by the leakage of intracellular liver enzymes. The research indicates that glyphosate and its surfactant in Roundup were found to act in synergy to increase damage to the liver.

UPDATE BY CHEE YOKE HEONG
Roundup Ready weedkiller is one of the most widely used weedkillers in the world for crops and backyard gardens. Roundup, with its active ingredient glyphosate, has long been promoted as safe for humans and the environment while effective in killing weeds. It is therefore significant when recent studies show that Roundup is not as safe as its promoters claim.

This has major consequences as the bulk of commercially planted genetically modified crops are designed to tolerate glyphosate (and especially Roundup), and independent field data already shows a trend of increasing use of the herbicide. This goes against industry claims that herbicide use will drop and that these plants will thus be more “environment-friendly.” Now it has been found that there are serious health effects, too. My story therefore aimed to highlight these new findings and their implications to health and the environment.

Not surprisingly, Monsanto came out refuting some of the findings of the studies mentioned in the article. What ensued was an open exchange between Dr. Rick Relyea and Monsanto, whereby the former stood his grounds. Otherwise, to my knowledge, no studies have since emerged on Roundup.

For more information look to the following sources:
Professor Gilles-Eric, criigen@ibfa.unicaen.fr
Biosafety Information Center, http://www.biosafety-info.net
Institute of Science in Society, http://www.i-sis.org.uk


#14 Homeland Security Contracts KBR to Build Detention Centers in the US
Sources:
New America Media, January 31, 2006
Title: “Homeland Security Contracts for Vast New Detention Camps”
Author: Peter Dale Scott

New America Media, February 21, 2006
Title: “10-Year US Strategic Plan for Detention Camps Revives Proposals from Oliver North”
Author: Peter Dale Scott

Consortiium, February 21, 2006
Title: “Bush's Mysterious ‘New Programs’”
Author: Nat Parry

Buzzflash
Title: “Detention Camp Jitters”
Author: Maureen Farrell

Community Evaluator: Dr. Gary Evans
Student Researchers: Sean Hurley and Caitlyn Peele

Halliburton’s subsidiary KBR (formerly Kellogg, Brown and Root) announced on January 24, 2006 that it had been awarded a $385 million contingency contract by the Department of Homeland Security to build detention camps in the United States.

According to a press release posted on the Halliburton website, “The contract, which is effective immediately, provides for establishing temporary detention and processing capabilities to augment existing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Detention and Removal Operations (DRO) Program facilities in the event of an emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs. The contingency support contract provides for planning and, if required, initiation of specific engineering, construction and logistics support tasks to establish, operate and maintain one or more expansion facilities.”

What little coverage the announcement received focused on concerns about Halliburton’s reputation for overcharging U.S. taxpayers for substandard services.

Less attention was focused on the phrase “rapid development of new programs” or what type of programs might require a major expansion of detention centers, capable of holding 5,000 people each. Jamie Zuieback, spokeswoman for ICE, declined to elaborate on what these “new programs” might be.

Only a few independent journalists, such as Peter Dale Scott, Maureen Farrell, and Nat Parry have explored what the Bush administration might actually have in mind.

Scott speculates that the “detention centers could be used to detain American citizens if the Bush administration were to declare martial law.” He recalled that during the Reagan administration, National Security Council aide Oliver North organized the Rex-84 “readiness exercise,” which contemplated the Federal Emergency Management Agency rounding up and detaining 400,000 “refugees” in the event of “uncontrolled population movements” over the Mexican border into the U.S.

North’s exercise, which reportedly contemplated possible suspension of the Constitution, led to a line of questioning during the Iran-Contra Hearings concerning the idea that plans for expanded internment and detention facilities would not be confined to “refugees” alone.

It is relevant, says Scott, that in 2002 Attorney General John Ashcroft announced his desire to see camps for U.S. citizens deemed to be “enemy combatants.” On February 17, 2006, in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld spoke of the harm being done to the country’s security, not just by the enemy, but also by what he called “news informers” who needed to be combated in “a contest of wills.”

Since September 11 the Bush administration has implemented a number of interrelated programs that were planned in the 1980s under President Reagan. Continuity of Government (COG) proposals—a classified plan for keeping a secret “government-within-the-government” running during and after a nuclear disaster—included vastly expanded detention capabilities, warrantless eavesdropping, and preparations for greater use of martial law.

Scott points out that, while Oliver North represented a minority element in the Reagan administration, which soon distanced itself from both the man and his proposals, the minority associated with COG planning, which included Cheney and Rumsfeld, appear to be in control of the U.S. government today.

Farrell speculates that, because another terror attack is all but certain, it seems far more likely that the detention centers would be used for post-September 11-type detentions of rounded-up immigrants rather than for a sudden deluge of immigrants flooding across the border.

Vietnam-era whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg ventures, “Almost certainly this is preparation for a roundup after the next September 11 for Mid-Easterners, Muslims and possibly dissenters. They’ve already done this on a smaller scale, with the ‘special registration’ detentions of immigrant men from Muslim countries, and with Guantánamo.”

Parry notes that The Washington Post reported on February 15, 2006 that the National Counterterrorism Center’s (NCTC) central repository holds the names of 325,000 terrorist suspects, a fourfold increase since fall of 2003.
Asked whether the names in the repository were collected through the NSA’s domestic surveillance program, an NCTC official told the Post, “Our database includes names of known and suspected international terrorists provided by all intelligence community organizations, including NSA.”

As the administration scoops up more and more names, members of Congress have questioned the elasticity of Bush’s definitions for words like terrorist “affiliates,” used to justify wiretapping Americans allegedly in contact with such people or entities.

A Defense Department document, entitled the “Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support,” has set out a military strategy against terrorism that envisions an “active, layered defense” both inside and outside U.S. territory. In the document, the Pentagon pledges to “transform U.S. military forces to execute homeland defense missions in the . . . U.S. homeland.” The strategy calls for increased military reconnaissance and surveillance to “defeat potential challengers before they threaten the United States.” The plan “maximizes threat awareness and seizes the initiative from those who would harm us.”

But there are concerns, warns Parry, over how the Pentagon judges “threats” and who falls under the category of “those who would harm us.” A Pentagon official said the Counterintelligence Field Activity’s TALON program has amassed files on antiwar protesters.

In the view of some civil libertarians, a form of martial law already exists in the U.S. and has been in place since shortly after the September 11 attacks when Bush issued Military Order Number One, which empowered him to detain any noncitizen as an international terrorist or enemy combatant. Today that order extends to U.S. citizens as well.

Farrell ends her article with the conclusion that while much speculation has been generated by KBR’s contract to build huge detention centers within the U.S., “The truth is, we won’t know the real purpose of these centers unless ‘contingency plans are needed.’ And by then, it will be too late.”

UPDATE BY PETER DALE SCOTT
The contract of the Halliburton subsidiary KBR to build immigrant detention facilities is part of a longer-term Homeland Security plan titled ENDGAME, which sets as its goal the removal of “all removable aliens” and “potential terrorists.” In the 1980s Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld discussed similar emergency detention powers as part of a super-secret program of planning for what was euphemistically called “Continuity of Government” (COG) in the event of a nuclear disaster. At the time, Cheney was a Wyoming congressman, while Rumsfeld, who had been defense secretary under President Ford, was a businessman and CEO of the drug company G.D. Searle.

These men planned for suspension of the Constitution, not just after nuclear attack, but for any “national security emergency,” which they defined in Executive Order 12656 of 1988 as: “Any occurrence, including natural disaster, military attack, technological or other emergency, that seriously degrades or seriously threatens the national security of the United States.” Clearly September 11 would meet this definition, and did, for COG was instituted on that day. As the Washington Post later explained, the order “dispatched a shadow government of about 100 senior civilian managers to live and work secretly outside Washington, activating for the first time long-standing plans.”

What these managers in this shadow government worked on has never been reported. But it is significant that the group that prepared ENDGAME was, as the Homeland Security document puts it, “chartered in September 2001.” For ENDGAME’s goal of a capacious detention capability is remarkably similar to Oliver North’s controversial Rex-84 “readiness exercise” for COG in 1984. This called for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to round up and detain 400,000 imaginary “refugees,” in the context of “uncontrolled population movements” over the Mexican border into the United States.

UPDATE BY MAUREEN FARRELL
When the story about Kellogg, Brown and Root’s contract for emergency detention centers broke, immigration was not the hot button issue it is today. Given this, the language in Halliburton’s press release, stating that the centers would be built in the event of an “emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S.,” raised eyebrows, especially among those familiar with Rex-84 and other Reagan-era initiatives. FEMA’s former plans ‘for the detention of at least 21 million American Negroes in assembly centers or relocation camps’ added to the distrust, and the second stated reason for the KBR contract, “to support the rapid development of new programs,” sent imaginations reeling.

While few in the mainstream media made the connection between KBR’s contract and previous programs, Fox News eventually addressed this issue, pooh-poohing concerns as the province of “conspiracy theories” and “unfounded” fears. My article attempted to sift through the speculation, focusing on verifiable information found in declassified and leaked documents which proved that, in addition to drawing up contingency plans for martial law, the government has conducted military readiness exercises designed to round up and detain both illegal aliens and U.S. citizens.
How concerned should Americans be? Recent reports are conflicting and confusing:

In May, 2006, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) began “Operation Return to Sender,” which involved catching illegal immigrants and deporting them. In June, however, President Bush vowed that there would soon be “new infrastructures” including detention centers designed to put an end to such “catch and release” practices.
Though Bush said he was “working with Congress to increase the number of detention facilities along our borders,” Rep. Bennie Thompson, ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee, said he first learned about the KBR contract through newspaper reports.
Fox News recently quoted Pepperdine University professor Doug Kmiec, who deemed detention camp concerns “more paranoia than reality” and added that KBR’s contract is most likely “something related to (Hurricane) Katrina” or “a bird flu outbreak that could spur a mass quarantine of Americans.” The president’s stated desire for the U.S. military to take a more active role during natural disasters and to enforce quarantines in the event of a bird flu outbreak, however, have been roundly denounced.
Concern over an all-powerful federal government is not paranoia, but active citizenship. As Thomas Jefferson explained, “even under the best forms of government, those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.” From John Adams’s Alien and Sedition Acts to FDR’s internment of Japanese Americans, the land of the free has held many contradictions and ironies. Interestingly enough, Halliburton was at the center of another historical controversy, when Lyndon Johnson’s ties to a little-known company named Kellogg, Brown and Root caused a congressional commotion—particularly after the Halliburton subsidiary won enough wartime contracts to become one of the first protested symbols of the military-industrial complex. Back then they were known as the “Vietnam builders.” The question, of course, is what they’ll be known as next.

Additional links:
“ Reagan Aides and the Secret Government,” Miami Herald, July 5, 1987, http://fpiarticle.blogspot.com/2005/12/front-page-miami-herald-july-5-1987.html

“Foundations are in place for martial law in the US,” July 27, 2002, Sydney Morning Herald, smh.com.au/articles/2002/07/27/ 1027497418339.html

“Halliburton Deals Recall Vietnam-Era Controversy: Cheney’s Ties to Company Reminiscent of LBJ’s Relationships,” NPR, Dec. 24, 2003, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1569483

“Critics Fear Emergency Centers Could Be Used for Immigration Round-Ups,” Fox News, June 7, 2006, http://www.foxnews.com/ story/0,2933,198456,00.html

“U.S. officials nab 2,100 illegal immigrants in 3 weeks,” USA Today, June 14, 2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-06-14-immigration-arrests_x.htm


#15 Chemical Industry is EPA’s Primary Research Partner
Sources:
Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, October 5, 2005
Title: “Chemical Industry Is Now EPA’s Main Research Partner”
Author: Jeff Ruch

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, October 6, 2005
Title: “EPA Becoming Arm of Corporate R&D”
Author: Jeff Ruch

Community Evaluator: Tim Ogburn
Student Researcher: Lani Ready and Peter McArthur

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) research program is increasingly relying on corporate joint ventures, according to agency documents obtained by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). The American Chemical Council (ACC) is now EPA’s leading research partner and the EPA is diverting funds from basic health and environmental research towards research that addresses regulatory concerns of corporate funders.

Since the beginning of Bush’s first term in office, there has been a significant increase in cooperative research and development agreements (CRADAs) with individual corporations or industry associations. During Bush’s first four years EPA entered into fifty-seven corporate CRADAs, compared to thirty-four such agreements during Clinton’s second term.

EPA scientists claim that corporations are influencing the agency’s research agenda through financial inducements. One EPA scientist wrote, “Many of us in the labs feel like we work for contracts.” In April 2005, EPA’s Science Advisory Board warned that the agency was no longer funding credible public health research. It noted, for example, that the EPA was falling behind on issues such as intercontinental pollution transport and nanotechnology.

Furthermore, in April 2005, a study by the Government Accountability Office concluded that EPA lacks safeguards to “evaluate or manage potential conflicts of interest” in corporate research agreements, as they are taking money from companies and corporations that they are supposed to be regulating.

According to Rebecca Rose, the Program Director of PEER, “Under its current leadership, EPA is becoming an arm of corporate R&D.” She also notes that the number of corporate CRADAs under the Bush administration outnumbered those entered into with universities or local governments, adding, “Public health research needs should not have to depend upon corporate underwriting.”

In October 2005 President Bush nominated George Gray to serve as the Assistant Administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency Office of Research and Development (ORD). At that time George Gray ran a Center for Risk Analysis at Harvard University where the majority of the funding came from corporate sources. Gray indicated upon nomination that he intends to continue and expand his solicitation of corporate research funds in his position with ORD.
PEER’s Executive Director Jeff Ruch warns, “Injecting outside money into a public agency research program, especially when it is tied to particular projects, has a subtle but undeniable influence on not only what work gets done but also how that work is reported.” He adds, “As what was one of the top public health research programs slides toward dysfunction, nothing about the background, attitude or philosophy of Mr. Gray suggests that he is even remotely the right person for this job.”

In 2004 & 2005, EPA was plagued by reports of political suppression of scientific results on important health issues such as asbestos and mercury regulation (see Censored 2005, Story #3). In response ORD launched a public relations campaign, entitled “Science for You,” using agency research funds to clean up its image.

Comments: George M. Gray was sworn in as the Assistant Administrator of Research and Development at EPA on November 1, 2005, with unanimous consent of the U.S. Senate.

UPDATE BY JEFF RUCH
This story illustrates how key environmental research is being diverted away from public health priorities in order to meet a corporate regulatory agenda. By enticing EPA into partnerships, entities such as the American Chemical Council (ACC), which is now EPA’s leading research partner, can influence not only what EPA researches but how that research is conducted, as well.

For example, long-term health monitoring studies drop off EPA’s list of priority topics because industry has no interest in funding such vital work—if anything, industry has an incentive to prevent such research from being conducted. By the same token, the industry push to allow human subject experiments to test tolerance to pesticides and other commercial poisons is precisely the type of research the industry desires to entice EPA into conducting, and thus legitimizing, despite an array of unresolved ethical problems.

A few updates since October 2005 worthy of note: a) A leading proponent of industry research partnerships, George Gray, has been confirmed as EPA Assistant Administrator for Research & Development. b) President Bush has proposed further cuts to EPA’s already shrinking research budget. (see http://www.peer.org/news/ news_id.php?row_id=661). This growing penury makes EPA even more interested in using corporate dollars to supplement its tattered research program. c) EPA is in the first weeks of its human testing program. A specially convened Human Subjects Review Board is now struggling to approve industry and agency studies in which people were not given informed consent or were given harmful doses of chemicals.

The EPA page of our website has several updates on this and related issues.


#16 Ecuador and Mexico Defy US on International Criminal Court
Sources:
Agence France Press News (School of the Americas Watch), June 22, 2005
Title: “Ecuador Refuses to Sign ICC Immunity Deal for US Citizens”
Author: Alexander Martinez

Inter Press Service, November 2, 2005
Title: “Mexico Defies Washington on the International Criminal Court”
Author: Katherine Stapp

Faculty Evaluator: Elizabeth Martinez
Student Researchers: Jessica Rodas, David Abbott, and Charlene Jones

Ecuador and Mexico have refused to sign bilateral immunity agreements (BIA) with the U.S., in ratification of the International Criminal Court (ICC) treaty. Despite the Bush administration’s threat to withhold economic aid, both countries confirmed allegiance to the ICC, the international body established to try individuals accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

On June 22, 2005 Ecuador’s president, Alfredo Palacios, vocalized emphatic refusal to sign a BIA (also known as an Article 98 agreement to the Rome Statute of the ICC) in spite of Washington’s threat to withhold $70 million a year in military aid.

Mexico, having signed the Rome Statute, which established the ICC in 2000, formally ratified the treaty on October 28, 2005, making it the 100th nation to join the ICC. As a consequence of ratifying the ICC without a U.S. immunity agreement, Mexico stands to lose millions of dollars in U.S. aid—including $11.5 million to fight drug trafficking.
On September 29, 2005 the U.S. State Department reported that it had secured 100 “immunity agreements,” although less than a third have been ratified.

“Our ultimate goal is to conclude Article 98 agreements with every country in the world, regardless of whether they have signed or ratified the ICC, regardless of whether they intend to in the future,” said John Bolton, former U.S. Undersecretary for Arms Control and current U.S. ambassador to the United Nations—and one of the ICC’s staunchest opponents.

The U.S. effort to undermine the ICC was given teeth in 2002, when the U.S. Congress adopted the American Servicemembers’ Protection Act (ASPA), which contains provisions restricting U.S. cooperation with the ICC by making U.S. support of UN peacekeeping missions largely contingent on achieving impunity for all U.S. personnel.
The ASPA prohibits U.S. military assistance to ICC member states that have not signed a BIA.

Legislation far more wide-reaching, however, was signed into law by President Bush on December 2004. The Nethercutt Amendment authorizes the loss of Economic Support Funds (ESF) to countries, including many key U.S. allies, that have not signed a BIA. Threatened under the Nethercutt Amendment are: funds for international security and counterterrorism efforts, peace process programs, antidrug-trafficking initiatives, truth and reconciliation commissions, wheelchair distribution, human rights programs, economic and democratic development, and HIV/Aids education, among others. The Nethercutt Amendment was readopted by the U.S. Congress in November 2005.1

In spite of severe U.S. pressure, fifty-three members of the ICC have refused to sign BIAs.

Katherine Stapp asserts that if Washington follows through on threats to slash aid to ICC member states, it risks further alienating key U.S. allies and drawing attention to its own increasingly shaky human rights record. “There will be a price to be paid by the U.S. government in terms of its credibility,” Richard Dicker, director of Human Rights Watch’s International Justice Program, told IPS.\But criticism of the administration’s hard line has also come from unlikely quarters.

Testifying before Congress in March, Gen. Bantz J. Craddock, the commander of U.S. military forces in Latin America, complained that the sanctions had excluded Latin American officers from U.S. training programs and could allow China, which has been seeking military ties with Latin America, to fill the void.

“We now risk losing contact and interoperability with a generation of military classmates in many nations of the region, including several leading countries,” Craddock told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Experts say it is particularly notable that Mexico, which sells 88 percent of its exports in the U.S. market, is defying pressure from Washington.

“It’s exactly because of the geographic and trade proximity between Mexico and the United States that Mexico’s ratification takes on greater significance in terms of how isolated the U.S. government is in its attitude toward the ICC,” Dicker told IPS.

Notes
1. “Overview of the United States’ Opposition to the International Criminal Court,” http://www.iccnow.org.

UPDATE BY KATHERINE STAPP
As noted by Amnesty International, the United States is the only nation in the world that is actively opposed to the International Criminal Court (ICC). However, more and more countries appear to be resisting pressure to exempt U.S. nationals from the court’s jurisdiction. Since the time of my writing, the number of “bilateral immunity agreements,” or BIAs, garnered by Washington has remained the same: 100, of which only twenty-one have been ratified by parliaments, while another eighteen are considered “executive agreements” that purportedly do not require ratification. Only thirteen states parties to the ICC (out of 100) have ratified BIAs with the United States, while eight others have reportedly entered into executive agreements. In the past two years, only four countries in Latin America and the Caribbean have signed BIAs, also known as Article 98 agreements.

Some key figures in the Bush administration have recently expressed doubts about the wisdom of withholding aid from friendly countries that refuse to sign. At a March 10 briefing, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice likened the BIAs to “sort of the same as shooting ourselves in the foot . . . by having to put off aid to countries with which we have important counter-terrorism or counter-drug or in some cases, in some of our allies, it’s even been cooperation in places like Afghanistan and Iraq.”

Bantz Craddock, head of the U.S. Southern Command, remains a vocal critic of the American Servicemembers’ Protection Act (ASPA) sanctions, noting in testimony before the House Armed Services Committee on March 16 that eleven Latin American nations have now been barred under ASPA from receiving International Military Education and Training funds. These include Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Mexico.

“Decreasing engagement opens the door for competing nations and outside political actors who may not share our democratic principles to increase interaction and influence within the region,” he noted.

And in the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review Report published on February 6, the Defense Department said it will consider whether ASPA restrictions on “foreign assistance programs pertaining to security and the war on terror necessitate adjustment as we continue to advance the aims of the ASPA.”

Meanwhile, a May 11 poll by the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes found that a bipartisan majority of the U.S. public (69 percent) believes that the U.S. should not be given special exceptions when it becomes a party to human rights treaties. 60 percent explicitly support U.S. participation in the ICC.

Mexico has stood firm in its refusal to sign a BIA, with the Mexican Parliament’s Lower Chamber stating that immunity is not allowed under the Rome Statute that establishes the ICC. As a result, $3.6 million in military aid has been frozen, and further International Military Exchange Training aid cut to zero in the administration’s proposed 2007 budget request. The country also stands to lose more than $11 million from the Economic Support Fund (ESF).

Other countries currently threatened with aid cuts include Bolivia, which could lose 96 percent of its U.S. military aid, and Kenya, which could lose $8 million in ESF aid.

More information can be found at:
Citizens for Global Solutions (http://www.globalsolutions.org/programs/law_justice/icc/icc_home.html); Coalition for the International Criminal Court (http://www.iccnow.org/?mod=bia); The American Non-Governmental Organisations Coalition for the International Criminal Court (http://www.amicc.org/); Washington Working Group on the International Criminal Court (http://www.usaforicc.org/wicc/)


#17 Iraq Invasion Promotes OPEC Agenda
Sources:
Harper’s in coordination with BBC Television Newsnight, October 24, 2005
Title: “OPEC and the economic conquest of Iraq”
Author: Greg Palast

The Guardian March 20, 2006
“ Bush Didn’t Bungle Iraq, You Fools: The Mission Was Indeed Accomplished”
Author: Greg Palast

Faculty Evaluator: David McCuan
Student Researcher: Isaac Dolido

According to a report from journalist, Greg Palast, the U.S. invasion of Iraq was indeed about the oil. However, it wasn’t to destroy OPEC, as claimed by neoconservatives in the administration, but to take part in it.

The U.S. strategic occupation of Iraq has been an effective means of acquiring access to the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). As long as the interim government adheres to the production caps set by the organization, the U.S. will ensure profits to the international oil companies (IOCs), the OPEC cartel, and Russia.

With the prolonged insurgency following the invasion, along with internal corruption and pipeline destruction, hard line neoconservative plans for a completely privatized Iraq were dashed. According to some administration insiders, the idea of a laissez-faire, free-market reconstruction of Iraq was never a serious consideration. One oil industry consultant to Iraq told Palast he was amused by “the obsession of neoconservative writers on ways to undermine OPEC.”

In December 2003, says Palast, the State Department drafted a 323-page plan entitled “Options for Developing a Long Term Sustainable Iraqi Oil Industry.” This plan directs the Iraqis to maintain an oil quota system that will enhance its relationship with OPEC. It describes several possible state-owned options that range from the Saudi Aramco model (in which the government owns the whole operation) to the Azerbaijan model (in which the system is almost entirely operated by the International Oil Companies).

Implementation of the plan was guided by a handful of oil industry consultants, promoting an OPEC-friendly policy but preferring the Azerbaijan model to the “self-financing” system of the Saudi Aramco, as it grants operation and control to the foreign oil companies (the 2003 report warns Iraqis against cutting into IOC profits). Once the contracts are granted, these companies then manage, fund, and equip crude extraction in exchange for a percentage of the sales. Given the way in which the interests of OPEC and those of the IOCs are so closely aligned, it is certainly understandable why smashing OPEC’s oil cartel might not appeal to certain elements of the Bush administration.

According to the drafters and promoters of the plan, dismantling OPEC would be a catastrophe. The last thing they want is the privatization of Iraq’s oil fields and the specter of competition maximizing production. Pumping more oil per day than the OPEC regulated quota of almost 4 million, would quickly bring down Iraq’s economy and compromise the U.S. position in the global market.

Since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, profits have shot up for oil companies. In 2004, the major U.S. oil companies posted record or near record profits. In 2005 profits for the five largest oil companies increased to $113 billion. In February 2006, ConocoPhillips reported a doubling of its quarterly profits from the previous year, which itself had been a company record. Shell posted a record breaking $4.48 billion in fourth-quarter earnings—and in 2005, ExxonMobil reported the largest one-year operating profit of any corporation in U.S. history.


#18 Physicist Challenges Official 9-11 Story
Sources:
Deseret Morning News, November 10, 2005
Title: “Y. Professor Thinks Bombs, Not Planes, Toppled WTC”
Author: Elaine Jarvik

Brigham Young University website, Winter 2005
Title: “Why Indeed Did the WTC Buildings Collapse?”
Author: Steven E. Jones

Deseret Morning News, January 26, 2006
Title: “BYU professor's group accuses U.S. officials of lying about 9/11”
Author: Elaine Jarvik

Faculty Evaluator: John Kramer
Student Researchers: David Abbott and Courtney Wilcox

Research into the events of September 11 by Brigham Young University physics professor, Steven E. Jones, concludes that the official explanation for the collapse of the World Trade Center (WTC) buildings is implausible according to laws of physics. Jones is calling for an independent, international scientific investigation “guided not by politicized notions and constraints but rather by observations and calculations.”

In debunking the official explanation of the collapse of the three WTC buildings, Jones cites the complete, rapid, and symmetrical collapse of the buildings; the horizontal explosions (squibs) evidenced in films of the collapses; the fact that the antenna dropped first in the North Tower, suggesting the use of explosives in the core columns; and the large pools of molten metal observed in the basement areas of both towers.

Jones also investigated the collapse of WTC 7, a forty-seven-story building that was not hit by planes, yet dropped in its own “footprint,” in the same manner as a controlled demolition. WTC 7 housed the U.S. Secret Service, the Department of Defense, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the Mayor’s Office of Emergency Management, the Internal Revenue Service Regional Council, and the Central Intelligence Agency. Many of the records from the Enron accounting scandal were destroyed when the building came down.

Jones claims that the National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST) ignored the physics and chemistry of what happened on September 11 and even manipulated its testing in order to get a computer-generated hypothesis that fit the end result of collapse, and did not even attempt to investigate the possibility of controlled demolition. He also questions the investigations conducted by FEMA and the 9/11 Commission.

Among the report’s other findings:

No steel-frame building, before or after the WTC buildings, has ever collapsed due to fire. But explosives can effectively sever steel columns.
WTC 7, which was not hit by hijacked planes, collapsed in 6.6 seconds, just .6 of a second longer than it would take an object dropped from the roof to hit the ground. “Where is the delay that must be expected due to conservation of momentum, one of the foundational laws of physics?” Jones asks. “That is, as upper-falling floors strike lower floors—and intact steel support columns—the fall must be significantly impeded by the impacted mass.
How do the upper floors fall so quickly, then, and still conserve momentum in the collapsing buildings?” The paradox, he says, “is easily resolved by the explosive demolition hypothesis, whereby explosives quickly removed lower-floor material, including steel support columns, and allow near free-fall-speed collapses.” These observations were not analyzed by FEMA, NIST, or the 9/11 Commission.
With non-explosive-caused collapse there would typically be a piling up of shattered concrete. But most of the material in the towers was converted to flour-like powder while the buildings were falling. “How can we understand this strange behavior, without explosives? Remarkable, amazing—and demanding scrutiny since the U.S. government-funded reports failed to analyze this phenomenon."
Steel supports were “partly evaporated,” but it would require temperatures near 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit to evaporate steel—and neither office materials nor diesel fuel can generate temperatures that hot. Fires caused by jet fuel from the hijacked planes lasted at most a few minutes, and office material fires would burn out within about twenty minutes in any given location.
Molten metal found in the debris of the WTC may have been the result of a high-temperature reaction of a commonly used explosive such as thermite. Buildings not felled by explosives “have insufficient directed energy to result in melting of large quantities of metal,” Jones says.
Multiple loud explosions in rapid sequence were reported by numerous observers in and near the towers, and these explosions occurred far below the region where the planes struck.
In January 2006 Jones, along with a group calling themselves “Scholars for 9/11 Truth,” called for an international investigation into the attacks and are going so far as to accuse the U.S. government of a massive cover-up.
“We believe that senior government officials have covered up crucial facts about what really happened on September 11,” the group said in a statement. “We believe these events may have been orchestrated by the administration in order to manipulate the American people into supporting policies at home and abroad.”

The group is headed by Jones and Jim Fetzer, University of Minnesota Duluth distinguished McKnight professor of philosophy, and is made up of fifty academicians and experts including Robert M. Bowman, former director of the U.S. “Star Wars” space defense program, and Morgan Reynolds, former chief economist for the Department of Labor in President George W. Bush’s first term.

http://www.scholarsfor911truth.org/WhyIndeedDidtheWorldTradeCenterBuildingsCompletelyCollapse.pdf



#19 Destruction of Rainforests Worst Ever
Source:
The Independent/UK, October 21, 2005
Title: “Revealed: the True Devastation of the Rainforest
Author: Steve Connor

Faculty Evaluator: Myrna Goodman
Student Researcher: Courtney Wilcox and Deanna Haddock

New developments in satellite imaging technology reveal that the Amazon rainforest is being destroyed twice as quickly as previously estimated due to the surreptitious practice of selective logging.

A survey published in the October 21 issue of the journal Science is based on images made possible by a new, ultra-high-resolution satellite-imaging technique developed by scientists affiliated with the Carnegie Institution and Stanford University.

“With this new technology, we are able to detect openings in the forest canopy down to just one or two individual trees,” says Carnegie scientist Gregory Asner, lead author of the Science study and assistant professor of Geological and Environmental Sciences at Stanford University. “People have been monitoring large-scale deforestation in the Amazon with satellites for more than two decades, but selective logging has been mostly invisible until now.” While clear-cuts and burn-offs are readily detectable by conventional satellite analysis, selective logging is masked by the Amazon’s extremely dense forest canopy.

Stanford University’s website reports that by late 2004, the Carnegie research team had refined its imaging technique into a sophisticated remote-sensing technology called the Carnegie Landsat Analysis System (CLAS), which processes data from three NASA satellites—Landsat 7, Terra and Earth Observing 1—through a powerful supercomputer equipped with new pattern-recognition approaches designed by Asner and his staff.1

“Each pixel of information obtained by the satellites contains detailed spectral data about the forest,” Asner explains. “For example, the signals tell us how much green vegetation is in the canopy, how much dead material is on the forest floor and how much bare soil there is.”

For the Science study, the researchers conducted their first basin-wide analysis of the Amazon from 1999 to 2002. The results of the four-year survey revealed a problem that is widespread and vastly underestimated, “We found much more selective logging than we or anyone else had expected—between 4,600 and 8,000 square miles every year of forest spread across five Brazilian states,” Asner said.

Selective logging—the practice of removing one or two trees and leaving the rest intact— is often considered a sustainable alternative to clear-cutting. Left unregulated, however, the practice has proven to be extremely destructive.
A large mahogany tree can fetch hundreds of dollars at the sawmill, making it a tempting target in a country where one in five lives in poverty. “People go in and remove just the merchantable species from the forest,” Asner says. “Mahogany is the one everybody knows about, but in the Amazon, there are at least thirty-five marketable hardwood species, and the damage that occurs from taking out just a few trees at a time is enormous. On average, for every tree removed, up to thirty more can be severely damaged by the timber harvesting operation itself. That’s because when trees are cut down, the vines that connect them pull down the neighboring trees.

“Logged forests are areas of extraordinary damage. A tree crown can be twenty-five meters. When you knock down a tree it causes a lot of damage in the understory.” Light penetrates to the understory and dries out the forest floor, making it much more susceptible to burning. “That’s probably the biggest environmental concern,” Asner explains. “But selective logging also involves the use of tractors and skidders that rip up the soil and the forest floor. Loggers also build makeshift dirt roads to get in, and study after study has shown that those frontier roads become larger and larger as more people move in, and that feeds the deforestation process. Think of logging as the first land-use change.”

Another serious environmental concern is that while an estimated 400 million tons of carbon enter the atmosphere every year as a result of traditional deforestation in the Amazon, Asner and his colleagues estimate that an additional 100 million tons is produced by selective logging. “That means up to 25 percent more greenhouse gas is entering the atmosphere than was previously assumed,” Asner explains, a finding that could alter climate change forecasts on a global scale.

Notes
1. Mark Shwartz, “Selective logging causes widespread destruction, study finds,” Stanford University website, October 21, 2005.


#20 Bottled Water: A Global Environmental Problem
Source:
OneWorld.net, February 5, 2006
Title: “Bottled Water: Nectar of the Frauds?”
Author: Abid Aslam

Faculty Evaluator: Liz Close
Student Researchers: Heidi Miller and Sean Hurley

Consumers spend a collective $100 billion every year on bottled water in the belief—often mistaken—that it is better for us than what flows from our taps. Worldwide, bottled water consumption surged to 41 billion gallons in 2004, up 57 percent since 1999.

“Even in areas where tap water is safe to drink, demand for bottled water is increasing—producing unnecessary garbage and consuming vast quantities of energy,” reports Earth Policy Institute researcher Emily Arnold. Although in much of the world, including Europe and the U.S., more regulations govern the quality of tap water than bottled water, bottled water can cost up to 10,000 times more. At up to $10 per gallon, bottled water costs more than gasoline in the United States.
“There is no question that clean, affordable drinking water is essential to the health of our global community,” Arnold asserts, “But bottled water is not the answer in the developed world, nor does it solve problems for the 1.1 billion people who lack a secure water supply. Improving and expanding existing water treatment and sanitation systems is more likely to provide safe and sustainable sources of water over the long term.” Members of the United Nations have agreed to halve the proportion of people who lack reliable and lasting access to safe drinking water by the year 2015. To meet this goal, they would have to double the $15 billion spent every year on water supply and sanitation. While this amount may seem large, it pales in comparison to the estimated $100 billion spent each year on bottled water.

Tap water comes to us through an energy-efficient infrastructure whereas bottled water is transported long distances—often across national borders—by boat, train, airplane, and truck. This involves burning massive quantities of fossil fuels.

For example, in 2004 alone a Helsinki company shipped 1.4 million bottles of Finnish tap water 2,700 miles to Saudi Arabia. And although 94 percent of the bottled water sold in the U.S. is produced domestically, many Americans import water shipped some 9,000 kilometers from Fiji and other faraway places to satisfy demand for what Arnold terms “chic and exotic bottled water.”

More fossil fuels are used in packaging the water. Most water bottles are made with polyethylene terephthalate, a plastic derived from crude oil. “Making bottles to meet Americans’ demand alone requires more than 1.5 million barrels of oil annually, enough to fuel some 100,000 U.S. cars for a year,” Arnold notes.

Once it has been emptied, the bottle must be dumped. According to the Container Recycling Institute, 86 percent of plastic water bottles used in the United States become garbage or litter. Incinerating used bottles produces toxic byproducts such as chlorine gas and ash containing heavy metals tied to a host of human and animal health problems. Buried water bottles can take up to 1,000 years to biodegrade.

Worldwide, some 2.7 million tons of plastic are used to bottle water each year. Of the bottles deposited for recycling in 2004, the U.S. exported roughly 40 percent to destinations as far away as China, requiring yet more fossil fuel.
Meanwhile, communities where the water originates risk their sources running dry. More than fifty Indian villages have complained of water shortages after bottlers began extracting water for sale under the Coca-Cola Corporation’s Dasani label. Similar problems have been reported in Texas and in the Great Lakes region of North America, where farmers, fishers, and others who depend on water for their livelihoods are suffering from concentrated water extraction as water tables drop quickly.

While Americans consume the most bottled water per capita, some of the fastest collective growth in consumption is in the giant populations of Mexico, India, and China. As a whole, India’s consumption of bottled water increased threefold from 1999 to 2004, while China’s more than doubled.

While private companies’ profits rise from selling bottled water of questionable quality at more than $100 billion per year—more efficiently regulated, waste-free municipal systems could be implemented for distribution of safe drinking water for all the peoples of the world—at a small fraction of the price.

UPDATE BY ABID ASLAM
Consumer stories are a staple of the media diet. This article spawned coverage by numerous public broadcasters and appeared to do the rounds in cyberspace. Perhaps what seized imaginations was our affinity for the subject: apparently we and our planet’s surface are made up mostly of water and without it, we would perish. In any case, most of the discussion of the issues raised by the source—a research paper from a Washington, D.C.–based environmental think tank—focused mainly on consumer elements (the price, taste, and consequences for human health of bottled and tap water), as I had anticipated when I decided to storify the Environmental Policy Institute (EPI) paper (in honesty, that is pretty much all I did, adding minimal context and background). However, a good deal of reader attention also focused on the environmental and regulatory aspects.

Further information on these can be obtained from the EPI, a host of environmental and consumer groups, and from the relevant government agencies: the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for tap water and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for bottled water.

Differences in the ways these regulators (indeed, regulators in general) operate and are structured and funded deserve a great deal more attention, as does the unequal protection of citizens that results.

Numerous other questions raised in the article deserve further examination. Would improved waste disposal and recycling address the researcher’s concerns about resources being consumed to get rid of empty water bottles? If public water systems can deliver a more reliable product to more people at a lower cost, as the EPI paper says, then what are the obstacles to the necessary investment in the U.S. and in poor countries, and how can citizens here and there overcome those obstacles?

Some of these questions may strike general readers or certain media gatekeepers as esoteric. Then again, we all drink the stuff.


#21 Gold Mining Threatens Ancient Andean Glaciers
Source:
CorpWatch.com, June 20, 2005
Title: “Barrick Gold Strikes Opposition in South”
Author: Glenn Walker

InterPress Service, February 15, 2006
Title: “Chile: Yes, to Gold Mine But Don’t Touch the Glaciers”
Author: Daniela Estrda

Faculty Evaluator: Andy Roth
Student Researcher: Michelle Salvail

Barrick Gold, a powerful multinational gold mining company, planned to melt three Andean glaciers in order to access gold deposits through open pit mining. The water from the glaciers would have been held for refreezing in the following winters. Opposition to the mine because of destruction to water sources for Andean farmers was widespread in Chile and the rest of the world. Barrick Gold’s Pascua Lama project represents one of the largest foreign investments in Chile in recent years, totaling $1.5 billion. However, some 70,000 downstream farmers backed by international environmental organizations and activists around the world waged a campaign against the proposed mine.

In the fall of 2005, environmental activists dumped crushed ice outside the local headquarter of Barrick Gold in Santiago. Thousands had marched earlier in the year shouting slogans such as, “We are not a North American colony,” and handing out nuggets of fool’s gold emblazoned with the words oro sucio—“dirty gold.”

In February 2006, Chile’s Regional Environment Commission (COREMA) gave permission for Barrick Gold to begin the project, but did not approve the relocation of the three glaciers.

“The mine will cause severe damage to the local ecosystem because it will pollute the Huasco River as well as underground water sources,” said Antonia Fortt, an environmental engineer with the Oceana Ecological Organization.
The Pascua Lama deposits are considered one of the world’s largest untapped sources of gold ore, with a potential yield of 17.5 billion ounces of gold. Barrick’s removal of the gold will employ cyanide leaching for on-site processing of the ore. Cyanide is a chemical compound that is extremely toxic to humans and other life forms. Environmentalists are worried that the cyanide will leach into the water systems and contaminate entire ecosystems downstream. Construction of the mine will begin in 2006 and begin full operations in 2009.

Barrick Gold also succeeded in convincing both the Chilean and Argentine governments to sign a binational mining treaty, which allows the unrestricted flow of machinery, ore, and personnel across the border. Lawsuits against the treaty are pending in Chilean courts.

Barrick Gold has been accused of burying fifty miners alive in Tanzania and blatantly disregarding environmental concerns in operations all over he world. George H. W. Bush, from 1995 to 1999, was the “Honorary Chairman” of Barrick’s international Advisory Board.

Barrick Gold is the third largest gold mining company in the world, with a portfolio of twenty-seven mining operations in five continents. Gold sales in 2005 were $2.3 billion.

The company is based in Canada, but U.S. directors include: Donald Carty, CEO of AMR Corp and American Airlines, Dallas, Texas; J. Brett Harvey, CEO CONSOL Energy Inc., Venitia, Pennsylvania; Angus MacNaughton, President of Genstar Investment Inc., Danville, California; and Steven Shapiro, VP Burlington Resources, Inc., Houston,Texas.


#22 $Billions in Homeland Security Spending Undisclosed
Source:
Congressional Quarterly, June 22, 2005.
Title: “Billions in States’ Homeland Purchases Kept in the Dark”
Author: Eileen Sullivan

Faculty Evaluator: Noel Byrne
Student Researchers: Monica Moura and Gary Phillips

More than $8 billion in Homeland Security funds has been doled out to states since the September 11, 2001 attacks, but the public has little chance of knowing how this money is being spent.

Of the thirty-four states that responded to Congressional Quarterly’s inquiries on Homeland Security spending, twelve have laws or policies that preclude public disclosure of details on Homeland Security purchases. Many states have adopted relevant nondisclosure clauses to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The reason, state officials say, is that the information could be useful to terrorists.

Further hindering public demand for accountability, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson Marc Short confirms, DHS will not release its records on state spending of funds.

“These non-disclosure policies are troubling,” Steven Aftergood, director of the research organization Project on Government Secrecy, warns in an interview with CQ. “Accountability is the price we pay. We’re giving away the ability to hold public officials accountable. More than we value public oversight, we fear a nebulous terrorist threat, and this is changing the character of American political life.”

New York is one of many states that will disclose broad categories of purchases, such as personal protective gear, but will not specify type of equipment, which company makes it, how much it costs, or where it is going.
Roger Shatzkin, CQ’s interviewee on the subject of New Jersey’s policy on Homeland Security spending disclosure, offered this example: “If there was a potential flaw in equipment, that could be exploited [by terrorists], so the state would not want that information to become public.”

Aftergood counters that taxpayers have the right to know if law enforcement is using defective equipment: “One of the things that happens when you restrict information is that you reduce the motivation to fix problems and correct weaknesses.”

Colorado’s secrecy provision was enacted in 2003, but State Senator Bob Hagedorn says the law has been misinterpreted, authorizing automatic denial of access to any and all information regarding Homeland Security. Hagedorn told CQ that this broad application had never been his intention when sponsoring the bill. He warned against the shroud of secrecy as, in early 2005, state lawmakers discovered that Colorado did not have a Homeland Security plan, yet had spent $130 million in Homeland Security funds. “How the hell do you spend $130 million for homeland security when you don’t have a damn plan?” Hagedorn asked. “At this point, the public still does not have an official answer to that question,” he added.

CQ investigators confirm that federal lawmakers want to know more about how states are spending Homeland Security funds.

“There’s a delicate balance that needs to be struck between ensuring our security and not advertising our vulnerabilities, but also ensuring how our security money is being spent,” said a staff member for the House Homeland Security Committee who requested anonymity. “We’re spending billions of dollars every year on grants to state and local governments . . . there should be some expectation [of] accountability.”


#23 US Oil Targets Kyoto in Europe
Sources:
The Guardian UK, December 8, 2005
Title: “Oil Industry Targets EU Climate Policy
Author: David Adam

The Independent UK, December 8, 2005
Title: “How America Plotted to Stop Kyoto Deal”
Author: Andrew Buncombe

Faculty Evaluator: Ervand Peterson
Student Researcher: Christy Baird

Lobbyists funded by the U.S. oil industry have launched a campaign in Europe aimed at derailing efforts to tackle greenhouse gas pollution and climate change.

Documents obtained by Greenpeace reveal a systematic plan to persuade European business, politicians and the media that the European Union should abandon its commitments under the Kyoto protocol, the international agreement that aims to reduce emissions that lead to global warming.

The documents, an email and a PowerPoint presentation, describe efforts to establish a European coalition to “challenge the course of the EU’s post-2012 agenda.” They were written by Chris Horner, a Washington D.C. lawyer and senior fellow at the rightwing think tank the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which has received more than $1.3 million funding from the U.S. oil giant ExxonMobil. Horner also acts for the Cooler Heads Coalition, a group set up “to dispel the myth of global warming.”

The PowerPoint document sets out plans to establish a group called the European Sound Climate Policy Coalition. It says: “In the U.S. an informal coalition has helped successfully to avert adoption of a Kyoto-style program. This model should be emulated, as appropriate, to guide similar efforts in Europe.”

During the 1990s U.S. oil companies and other corporations funded a group called the Global Climate Coalition, which emphasized uncertainties in climate science and disputed the need to take action. It was disbanded when President Bush pulled the U.S. out of the Kyoto process. The group’s website now says: “The industry voice on climate change has served its purpose by contributing to a new national approach to global warming.”

Countries signed up to the Kyoto process have legal commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Oil and energy companies would be affected by these cuts because burning their products produces the most emissions.

The PowerPoint document written by Horner appears to be aimed at getting RWE, the German utility company, to join a European coalition of companies to act against Kyoto. Horner is convinced that, with Europe’s weakening economy, companies are likely to be increasingly ill at ease with the costs of meeting Kyoto mandates and thus could be successfully influenced to pressure their government to reject Kyoto standards, as the U.S. government has. Horner’s audiences have included several significant companies including Ford Europe, Lufthansa, and Exxon.

The document says: “The current political realities in Brussels open a window of opportunity to challenge the course of the EU’s post-2012 agenda.” It adds: “Brussels must openly acknowledge and address them willingly or through third party pressure.”

It says industry associations are the “wrong way to do this” but suggests that a cross-industry coalition, of up to six companies, could “counter the commission’s Kyoto agenda.” Such a coalition are advised to steer debate by targeting journalists and bloggers, as well as attending environmental group meetings and events to “share information on opposing viewpoints and tactics.”


#24 Cheney’s Halliburton Stock Rose Over 3000 Percent Last Year
Sources:
Raw Story, October 2005
Title: “Cheney’s Halliburton Stock Options Rose 3,281 Percent Last Year, Senator Finds”
Author: John Byrne

Senator Frank Lautenberg’s website
Title: “Cheney’s Halliburton Stock Options Soar to $9.2 Million”

Faculty Evaluator: Phil Beard
Student Researchers: Matthew Beavers and Willie Martin

Vice President Dick Cheney’s stock options in Halliburton rose from $241,498 in 2004 to over $8 million in 2005, an increase of more than 3,000 percent, as Halliburton continues to rake in billions of dollars from no-bid/no-audit government contracts.

An analysis released by Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) reveals that as Halliburton’s fortunes rise, so do the Vice President’s. Halliburton has already taken more than $10 billion from the Bush-Cheney administration for work in Iraq. They were also awarded many of the unaccountable post-Katrina government contracts, as off-shore subsidiaries of Halliburton quietly worked around U.S. sanctions to conduct very questionable business with Iran (See Story #2). “It is unseemly,” notes Lautenberg, “for the Vice President to continue to benefit from this company at the same time his administration funnels billions of dollars to it.”

According to the Vice President’s Federal Financial Disclosure forms, he holds the following Halliburton stock options:

100,000 shares at $54.5000 (vested), expire December 3, 2007
33,333 shares at $28.1250 (vested), expire December 2, 2008
300,000 shares at $39.5000 (vested), expire December 2, 2009

The Vice President has attempted to fend off criticism by signing an agreement to donate the after-tax profits from these stock options to charities of his choice, and his lawyer has said he will not take any tax deduction for the donations. However, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) concluded in September 2003 that holding stock options while in elective office does constitute a “financial interest” regardless of whether the holder of the options will donate proceeds to charities. Valued at over $9 million, the Vice President could exercise his stock options for a substantial windfall, not only benefiting his designated charities, but also providing Halliburton with a tax deduction.

CRS also found that receiving deferred compensation is a financial interest. The Vice President continues to receive deferred salary from Halliburton. While in office, he has received the following salary payments from Halliburton:

Deferred salary paid by Halliburton to Vice President Cheney in 2001: $205,298
Deferred salary paid by Halliburton to Vice President Cheney in 2002: $162,392
Deferred salary paid by Halliburton to Vice President Cheney in 2003: $178,437
Deferred salary paid by Halliburton to Vice President Cheney in 2004: $194,852

(The CRS report can be downloaded at: http://lautenberg.senate.gov/Report.pdf)

These CRS findings contradict Vice President Cheney’s puzzling view that he does not have a financial interest in Halliburton. On the September 14, 2003 edition of Meet the Press in response to questions regarding his relationship with Halliburton, where from 1995 to 2000 he was employed as CEO, Vice President Cheney said, “Since I left Halliburton to become George Bush’s vice president, I’ve severed all my ties with the company, gotten rid of all my financial interest. I have no financial interest in Halliburton of any kind and haven’t had, now, for over three years.”

Comment: A similar undercovered story of conflicting interest and disaster profiteering by those in the top echelon of the U.S. Government is of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s connections to Gilead Sciences, the biotech company that owns the rights to Tamiflu—the influenza remedy that is now the most-sought after drug in the world. This story was brought forward by Fortune senior writer, Nelson D. Schwartz, on October 31, 2005 in an article titled “Rumsfeld’s growing stake in Tamiflu,” and by F. William Engdahl for GlobalResearch, on October 30, 2005, in an article titled “Is avian flu another Pentagon hoax?”

Rumsfeld served as Gilead’s chairman from 1997 until he joined the Bush administration in 2001, and he still holds a Gilead stake valued at between $5 million and $25 million, according to Federal Financial Disclosures filed by Rumsfeld.
The forms don’t reveal the exact number of shares Rumsfeld owns, but whipped up fears of an avian flu pandemic and the ensuing scramble for Tamiflu sent Gilead’s stock from $35 to $47 in 2005, making the Pentagon chief, already one of the wealthiest members of the Bush cabinet, at least $1 million richer.

What’s more, the federal government is emerging as one of the world’s biggest customers for Tamiflu. In July 2005, the Pentagon ordered $58 million worth of the treatment for U.S. troops around the world, and Congress is considering a multibillion dollar purchase. Roche expects 2005 sales for Tamiflu to total at about $1 billion, compared with $258 million in 2004.

UPDATE BY JOHN BYRNE
The media has routinely downplayed Cheney’s involvement and financial investment in Halliburton, one of the largest U.S. defense contractors that received supersized no-bid contracts in Iraq. Ultimately, the importance of the story is that the Vice President of the U.S. is able to use his position of power to reap rewards for his former company in which he has a financial investment. Halliburton may also benefit from a chilling effect in which the Pentagon is more likely to favor Cheney’s firm to seek favor with the White House.

Cheney continues to hold 433,333 Halliburton stock options, and receives a deferred salary of about $200,000 a year. According to Cheney’s most recent tax returns, he held $2.5 million in retirement accounts, much of which likely came from his former defense firm.

Cheney recently filed disclosure reports that show he is valued at $94 million.

Senator Lautenberg’s disclosure, brought forward by Raw Story, received no mainstream coverage. While the press has often noted that Cheney was formerly Halliburton’s CEO, they routinely fail to mention how much money he accrued from the firm during his service there. They also fail to mention that he continues to receive a pension.

RawStory.com regularly reports on Halliburton and contracts awarded to the company. SourceWatch.org also has a good library of resources on Halliburton and other defense contractors as well as the Vice President.Another way to get involved is to contact your local senator or representatives about your concerns, and to ask them to push the Vice President to sell his stock options in Halliburton.


#25 US Military in Paraguay Threatens Region
Sources:
Upside Down World, October 5, 2005
Title: “Fears mount as US opens new military installation in Paraguay”
Author: Benjamin Dangl

Foreign Policy in Focus, November 21, 2005
Title: “Dark Armies, Secret Bases, and Rummy, Oh My!”
By Conn Hallinan

International Relations Center, December 14, 2005
Title: US Military Moves in Paraguay Rattle Regional Relations”
Sam Logan and Matthew Flynn

Faculty Evaluator: Patricia Kim-Ragal
Student Researchers: Nick Ramirez and Deyango Harris

Five hundred U.S. troops arrived in Paraguay with planes, weapons, and ammunition in July 2005, shortly after the Paraguayan Senate granted U.S. troops immunity from national and International Criminal Court (ICC) jurisdiction. Neighboring countries and human rights organizations are concerned that the massive air base at Mariscal Estigarribia, Paraguay is potential real estate for the U.S. military.

While U.S. and Paraguayan officials vehemently deny ambitions to establish a U.S. military base at Mariscal Estigarribia, the ICC immunity agreement and U.S. counterterrorism training exercises have increased suspicions that the U.S. is building a stronghold in a region that is strategic to resource and military interests.

The Mariscal Estigarribia air base is within 124 miles of Bolivia and Argentina, and 200 miles from Brazil, near the Triple Frontier where Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina meet. Bolivia’s natural gas reserves are the second largest in South America, while the Triple Frontier region is home to the Guarani Aquifer, one of the world’s largest fresh water sources. (See Story #20.)

Not surprisingly, U.S. rhetoric is building about terrorist threats in the triborder region. Dangl reports claims by Defense officials that Hezbollah and Hamas, radical Islamic groups from the Middle East, receive significant funding from the Triple Frontier, and that growing unrest in this region could leave a political “black hole” that would erode other democratic efforts. Dangl notes that in spite of frequent attempts to link terror networks to the triborder area, there is little evidence of a connection.

The base’s proximity to Bolivia may cause even more concern. Bolivia has a long history of popular protest against U.S. exploitation of its vast natural gas reserves. But the resulting election of leftist President Evo Morales, who on May 1, 2006 signed a decree nationalizing all of Bolivia’s gas reserves, has certainly intensified hostilities with the U.S.1
When Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld visited Paraguay in August of 2005, he told reporters that, “there certainly is evidence that both Cuba and Venezuela have been involved in the situation in Bolivia in unhelpful ways.”
Military analysts from Uruguay and Bolivia maintain that the threat of terrorism is often used by the U.S. as an excuse for military intervention and the monopolization of natural resources.

A journalist writing for the Argentinian newspaper, Clarin, visited the base at Mariscal Estigarribia and reported it to be in perfect condition. Capable of handling large military planes, it is oversized for the Paraguayan air force, which only has a handful of small aircraft. The base is capable of housing 16,000 troops, has an enormous radar system, huge hangars, and an air traffic control tower. The airstrip itself is larger than the one at the international airport in Asuncion, Paraguay’s capital. Near the base is a military camp that has recently grown in size.

Hallinan notes that Paraguay’s neighbors are very skeptical of the situation, as there is a disturbing resemblance between U.S. denials about Mariscal Estigarribia and the disclaimers made by the Pentagon about Eloy Alfaro airbase in Manta, Ecuador. The U.S. claimed the Manta base was a “dirt strip” used for weather surveillance. When local journalists revealed its size, however, the U.S. admitted the base harbored thousands of mercenaries and hundreds of U.S. troops, and Washington had signed a ten-year basing agreement with Ecuador. (See Chapter 2, Story #17, for similarities between the Manta air base in Ecuador, and the current situation unfolding in Paraguay.)

As Paraguay breaks ranks with her neighbors by allowing the U.S. to carry out military operations in the heart of South America, Logan and Flynn report that nongovernmental organizations in Paraguay are protesting the new U.S. military presence in their country, warning that recent moves could be laying the foundation for increasing U.S. presence and influence over the entire region. Perhaps the strongest words come from the director of the Paraguayan human rights organization Peace and Justice Service, Orlando Castillo, who claims that the U.S. aspires to turn Paraguay into a “second Panama for its troops, and it is not far from achieving its objective to control the Southern Cone and extend the Colombian War.”

Note
1. “Bolivian Gas War,” http://www.Wikipedia.org, May 2006.

UPDATE BY BENJAMIN DANGL
The election of Evo Morales in Bolivia in December of 2005 brought more attention to the U.S. military presence in neighboring Paraguay. Since his election, Morales has nationalized the country’s gas reserves and strengthened ties with Cuba and Venezuela to build a more sustainable economy. Such policies have not been warmly received in Washington. Responding to this progressive trend, on May 22, 2006 George Bush said he was “concerned about the erosion of democracy” in Venezuela and Bolivia.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, himself a victim of a U.S.-backed coup, said Bush’s comments mean, “He’s already given the green light to start conspiring against the democratic government of Bolivia.” U.S. troops stationed in Paraguay may be poised for such an intervention. However, human rights reports suggest the U.S. military presence has already resulted in bloodshed.

Paraguay is the fourth largest producer of soy in the world. As this industry expands, poor farmers are being forced off their lands. These farmers have organized protests, road blockades and land occupations against this displacement and have faced subsequent repression from military, police, and paramilitary forces.

Investigations by Servicio Paz y Justicia (Serpaj), a human rights group in Paraguay, report that the worst cases of repression against farmers took place in areas with the highest concentration of U.S. troops. This violence resulted in the deaths of forty-one farmers in three separate areas.

“The U.S. military is advising the Paraguayan police and military about how to deal with these farmer groups,” Orlando Castillo of Serpaj told me over the phone. He explained that U.S. troops monitor farmers to find information about union organizations and leaders, then tell Paraguayan officials how to proceed. “The numbers from our study show what this U.S. presence is doing,” Castillo said.

The U.S. government maintains the military exercises in Paraguay are humanitarian efforts. However, the deputy speaker of the Paraguayan parliament, Alejandro Velazquez Ugarte, said that of the thirteen exercises going on in the country, only two are of a civilian nature.

This presence is an example of the U.S. government’s “counter-insurgency” effort in Latin America. Such meddling has a long, bloody history in the region. Currently, the justification is the threat of terrorism instead of communism. As Latin America shifts further away from Washington’s interests, such militarization is only likely to increase.

Throughout these recent military operations, the U.S. corporate media, as well as Paraguayan media, have ignored the story. Soccer, not dead farmers or plans for a coup, has been the focus of most headlines.

For ongoing reports on the U.S. militarization of Paraguay and elsewhere visit www.UpsideDownWorld.org, a website on activism and politics in Latin America, and www.TowardFreedom.com. Benjamin Dangl’s book, The Price of Fire: Resource Wars and Social Movements in Bolivia (forthcoming from AK Press, January 2007), includes further investigations into the U.S. military operations in Paraguay.
Ideas for action include organizing protests and writing letters to the U.S. embassy in Paraguay (www.asuncion.usembassy.gov). For more information on international solidarity, email Orlando Castillo at Serpaj in Paraguay: desmilitarizacion@serpajpy.org.py

UPDATE BY CONN HALLINAN
My article was written in late November 2005 during the run-up to the Bolivian elections. That campaign featured indigenous leader Evo Morales, a fierce critic of Washington’s neoliberal, free trade policies that have impoverished tens of millions throughout Latin America. The Bush administration not only openly opposed Morales, it charged there was a growing “terrorism” problem in the region and began building up military forces in nearby Paraguay.

There have been a number of important developments since last fall. Morales won the election and nationalized Bolivia’s petrochemical industry. In the past, such an action might have triggered a U.S.-sponsored coup, or at least a crippling economic embargo. Foreign oil and gas companies immediately tried to drive a wedge between Bolivia and other nations in the region by threatening to halt investments or pull out entirely. This included companies partially owned by Brazil and Argentina.

But Latin America is a very different place these days. Three days after the May 1, 2005 nationalization, Argentine President Nestor Kirchner, Brazilian President Lula De Silva, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, and Morales met in Puerto Iguazu and worked out an agreement to help Bolivia develop its resources while preserving regional harmony. As a result, it is now likely that foreign petrochemical companies will remain in Bolivia, although they will pay up to four times as much as they did under the old agreements. And if they leave, the Chinese and Russians are waiting in the wings.

The situation is still delicate. U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld recently compared Chavez to Adolph Hitler and linked him to Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Morales. Aid is flowing to militaries in Colombia and Paraguay, and the White House continues to use private proxies to intervene in the Colombian civil war. While there is a growing solidarity among nations in the southern cone, some of their economies are delicate.

Ecuador is presently wracked by demonstrations demanding the expulsion of foreign oil companies and an end to free trade talks with the U.S. This is an ongoing story. While the alternative media continues to cover these developments, the mainstream media has largely ignored them.

A note on reading the mainstream: the Financial Times recently highlighted a Latinobarometro poll indicating that most countries in South America were rejecting “democracy” as a form of government. But since free markets and neoliberalism were sold as “democracy”—economic policies that most South Americans have overwhelmingly rejected—did the poll measure an embrace of authoritarianism or a rejection of failed economic policies? Tread carefully.

To stay informed of developments in this area visit websites of School of the Americas Watch: http://www.soaw.org/new/ and Global Exchange: http://www.globalexchange.org/ or contact Conn Hallinan at connm@ucsc.edu


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Today's featured truth teller - Bruce Brine
Uncovering kickbacks in Canadian ports.

Chief of Halifax ports police, Brine was fired from his job as chief of the Halifax ports police in 1995 after he made allegations that senior officials with the Canada ports police were getting kickbacks from the Hells Angels. The ports police were disbanded in 1998 and the ongoing investigations were abandoned — just as they were in Vancouver in 1997. Much of the material from the files of those investigations was listed as missing when Mounties began to pursue his obstruction complaint. The Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission awarded Brine a cash settlement, an apology and a letter of reference from the port authority.

http://fairwhistleblower.ca/wbers/canadian_wbs.html



Guantanamo document confirms psychological torture (view article)
Will the APA protest?

STEPHEN SOLDZ with JULIAN ASSANGE
2007-11-17 (Saturday)

On Wednesday November 7th of this year, the primary operations manual for running of the US detention facility in Guantanamo Bay was published by the government transparency group Wikileaks. After a press release from the group, Wired magazine and the Miami Herald published stories on the following Wednesday -- a day which which also saw the Pentagon demanding, without success, for the document to be censored. Reuters picked up on the leak Thursday, the New York Times and the Guardian on Friday. The following week saw reportage snowballing into over 160 press articles listed on the Google news index alone.








The Miami Herald describes the manual and its importance and gives a flavor of its bureaucratic contents:

"A how-to manual, it draws back a curtain on the secretive, isolated base in 2003, more than a year into operation of the Bush administration prison. And it lays out -- with typical military attention to detail -- everything from when to use pepper spray to who should witness a cavity search to how to dig a proper Muslim grave. It also offers the mundane details of what detainees were given at the open-air prison camp overlooking the Caribbean, where the Pentagon today holds about 300 war-on-terror captives at Guantanamo for possible interrogation and trial by Military Commission. No hair dye, it says on one page. But a double amputee got to keep a bucket in his cell, it says."
The manual is classified 'For Official Use Only' and access was "limited to those requiring operational and procedural knowledge in the direct performance of their duties as well as those directly associated with JTF-GTMO." The Department of Defense has attempted to avoid its release and has denied the American Civil Liberties Organization [ACLU] access under the Freedom of Information Act.

In addition to the mundane, but often chilling details - destruction of a Styrofoam cup was a punishable offense - of the running of this high security facility designed to facilitate interrogations and intelligence gathering, the manual contains two major revelations. The first of these revelations, which is the focus of both the Reuters and the New York Times reports, is that, despite claims to the contrary, the US was hiding detainees from the International Committee of the Red Cross [ICRC]. As Reuters puts it:

"The manual also indicates some prisoners were designated as off limits to visitors from the International Committee of the Red Cross, something the military has repeatedly denied."
Each detainee is assigned to one of four ICRC visitation levels. Level A is [p. 17.1]:

" No Access: No contact of any kind with the ICRC. This includes the
delivery of ICRC mail."
In fact, for only one of the four levels was the IRC allowed unrestricted access to ask the detainee whatever questions they deemed appropriate. The other levels allowed only visual access or questions about "health and welfare only." The camp commander seemed determined to prevent the ICRC from being able to obtain accurate information about detainee treatment.

Given the repeated denials that detainees were withheld from the ICRC, we have here additional evidence that, when it comes to what occurs in US detention facilities, no claims of the government should be taken as true without independent confirmatory evidence.

The second major revelation from the SOP, mentioned in passing by Reuters, concerns the routine use of isolation and sensory deprivation on Guantanamo detainees in order to weaken them and make them ready for interrogations. As Reuters reports:

"It says incoming prisoners are to be held in near-isolation for the first two weeks to foster dependence on interrogators and `enhance and exploit the disorientation and disorganization felt by a newly arrived detainee in the interrogation process.' Styrofoam cups must be confiscated if prisoners have written on them, apparently because prisoners have used cups to pass notes to other captives. `If the cup is damaged or destroyed, the detainee will be disciplined for destruction of government property,' the rules say."

Here is the actual language from the SOP [Section 4-20, p. 4.3] demonstrating the precision with which abuse was administered. In fact, it makes clear that Reuters got it partially wrong in that the "near-isolation" was to last at least four weeks, not two, and that it could be continued indefinitely, beyond the four-week (30 day):

a. Phase One Behavior Management Plan (First thirty days or as directed
by JIG [Joint Intelligence Group]). The purpose of the Behavior Management
Plan is to enhance and exploit the disorientation and disorganization felt
by a newly arrived detainee in the interrogation process. It concentrates
on isolating the detainee and fostering dependence of the detainee on his
interrogator. During the first two weeks at Camp Delta, classify the
detainees as Level 5 and house in a Maximum Security Unit (MSU) Block.
During this time, the following conditions will apply:

(1) Restricted contact: No ICRC or Chaplain contact
(2) No books or mail privileges
(3) MREs for all meals.
(4) Basic comfort items only:
(a) ISO Mat
(b) One blanket
(c) One towel
(d) Toothpaste/finger toothbrush
(e) One Styrofoam cup
(f) Bar of soap
(g) Camp Rules
(h) No Koran, prayer beads, prayer cap.
(5) Mail writing and delivery will be at the direction of the J-2.
b. Phase Two Behavior Management Plan. The two-week period following Phase
1 will continue the process of isolating the detainee and fostering
dependence on the interrogator. Until the JIG Commander changes his
classification, the detainee will remain a Level 5 with the following:
(1) Continued MSU
(2) Koran, prayer beads and prayer cap distributed by interrogator
(3) Contacts decided by interrogator
(4) Interrogator decides when to move the
detainee to general population.
Isolation has long been a preferred measure of abuse in US detentions. As Mark Benjamin pointed out last July in Salon, isolation and the associated sensory deprivation, not waterboarding or other more commonly discussed techniques, is the CIA's favorite form of torture. It has been know for years that isolation was authorized for use at Guantanamo, even after some of the harshest techniques used in 2002 and known to have been deployed against Mohammed al-Qahtani were stopped from routine use and restricted in 2003 to the so-called "varsity program." Isolation was one of the interrogations techniques authorized by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in his April 16, 2003 memo. However, that memo gives a sense that isolation is a severe, possibly illegal, technique:

"Caution: the use of isolation as an interrogation technique requires
detailed implementation instructions, including specific guidelines
regarding the length of isolation, medical and psychological review, and
approvals for extension of the length of by the appropriate level in the
chain of command. This technique is not know to have been generally used
for interrogation purposes for longer than 30 days. Those nations that
believe that detainees are subject to POW protections may view use of this
technique as inconsistent with the requirements of Geneva III, Article 13
which provides that POWs must be protected against acts of intimidation;
Article 14 which provides that POWs are entitled to respect for their
person; Article 34 which prohibits coercion and Article 126 which ensures
access and basic standards of treatment. Although the provisions of Geneva
are not applicable to the interrogation of unlawful combatants,
consideration should be given to these views prior to application of this
technique."
The Guantanmo SOP now provides official documentation that, at the time of the Rumsfeld memo and despite its warnings regarding the techniques' potential illegality and physical and psychological dangers, isolation was routinely used by the Defense Department at Guantanamo on all new detainees. The Rumsfeld memo complements the SOP in that it documents the central role of "medical and psychological review," and, thus, medical and psychological personnel in the administration of this technique.

Isolation is as damaging as other, more prominent, abusive interrogation techniques. The recent Physicians for Human Rights-Human Rights First report, Leave No Marks: Enhanced Interrogation Techniques and the Risk of Criminality, details the negative effects of isolation and sensory deprivation:

"People who are exposed to isolation for the first time develop a group of symptoms that include `bewilderment, anxiety, frustration, dejection, boredom, obsessive thoughts or ruminations, depression, and, in some cases, hallucination'....
Prolonged isolation has been demonstrated to result in increased stress, abnormal neuroendocrine function, changes in blood pressure and inflammatory stress responses....
Findings from clinical research performed by prominent psychologists such as Dr. Stuart Grassian and Dr. Craig Haney, highlight the destructive impact of solitary confinement. Effects include depression, anxiety, difficulties with concentration and memory, hypersensitivity to external stimuli, hallucination and perceptual distortions, paranoia, suicidal thoughts and behavior, and problems with impulse control" [p. 32].

These findings regarding negative effects make clear that attempts to prevent torture and detainee abuse need to curtail the use of isolation to an absolute minimum, only potentially acceptable when needed for temporary management of unruly or dangerous detainees. It should never be sanctioned as a routine tool for "fostering dependence on the interrogator." Such uses are immoral and are likely violations of the UN Convention Against Torture and the US Torture and War Crimes Acts. As thee PHR-HRF report argues:

"The medical impact of sensory deprivation and prolonged isolation supports the conclusion that both techniques of interrogation may be considered prosecutable acts of "torture"or "cruel or inhuman treatment"under the WCA or Torture Act because they cause "severe"and "serious" mental pain and suffering. The lasting depression and posttraumatic stress disorder that victims of isolation suffer constitute the prolonged and/or non-transitory mental harm required for mental pain to be considered severe or serious. Moreover, isolation and sensory deprivation in interrogations is likely calculated to "disrupt the senses or personality." "
Of relevance to those of us struggling to change American Psychological Association policy on psychologist participation in interrogations, the APA included clauses in its 2007 resolution against torture that allows continued participation in the use of isolation [and sensory deprivation] in certain circumstances:

"This unequivocal condemnation includes, but is by no means limited to, an absolute prohibition for psychologists against... the following used for the purposes of eliciting information in an interrogation process: ... isolation, sensory deprivation and over-stimulation and/or sleep deprivation used in a manner that represents significant pain or suffering or in a manner that a reasonable person would judge to cause lasting harm."
The APA inclusion of this carefully-qualified language led many APA critics, as well as certain reporters to wonder will psychologists still abet torture? It is therefore essential that the APA clarify the meaning of these apparent "loopholes. "

Recent attempts by the APA to address the meaning of these "loopholes" raise the possibility that APA leaders, reeling under the impact of massive protests among members and criticism in the press, are looking to resolve any ambiguities in the 2007 Resolution. But so far, the APA leadership have failed to make a clear, unequivocal statement that this use of isolation at Guantanamo is unethical. In a recent widely circulated letter by the APA Director of Ethics, he stated:

The third and final category of techniques consists of techniques that may not be "used in a manner that represents significant pain or suffering or in a manner that a reasonable person would judge to cause lasting harm." In my opinion, the description of these behaviors-isolation, sensory deprivation and over-stimulation, and sleep deprivation-suffered from not having adequate time to find wording that conveyed the authors' intention. As I'm sure you recall, the discussions focused on the definition of these words and precisely what the implications of an absolute prohibition would be. As an example, an individual in detention may be separated and placed in a cell in isolation, in order to prevent that individual from colluding with another detainee in formulating a story that is consistent between them. Likewise, the regimen of a camp may require that detainees begin their daily routines at a very early hour. I believe that everyone will agree neither example would constitute impermissible isolation or sleep deprivation, but it is important to find language that clearly separates what is permissible from what is impermissible.

If the APA really intended that the "loophole" clauses allowing isolation in certain circumstances, was just to cover routine uses of the kind here mentioned, the APA should have no difficulty stating clearly and unequivocally that the use of isolation described in the Guantanamo SOP is unethical and that psychologists participating in that use are engaging in unethical behavior. Further, the APA should have no trouble coming up with clear language making these crucial distinctions.

In considering the APA's positions, we should remember that the Chief Psychologist of the Guantanamo Joint Intelligence Group [JIG] at Guantanamo at the time of this SOP, was none other than Colonel Larry James, who the APA chose to introduce their 2007 Resolution on the Council floor. The SOP makes clear that the JIG was the military unit that decided how long isolation was used on each detainee to "enhance and exploit the disorientation and disorganization felt by a newly arrived detainee in the interrogation process" The Rumsfeld memo makes clear that "medical and psychological supervision" were essential elements of this decision-making process. It is thus likely that the JIG's psychological unit was involved in determining exactly how much of this abuse a given detainee could tolerate. It hardly inspires confidence in the APA's willingness to stand unequivocally against US torture and abuse that they selected this same Col. James to make the case for their carefully parsed and nuanced resolution. The APA has has ignored extensive evidence from official documents and press reports raising questions about the activities undertaken by the psychological component of the JIG command during the time [from January 2003 for a an unknown number of months] he was stationed there. The SOP provides additional evidence that Col. James' command was engaged in routine abuse of detainees. Due to secrecy, we do not know exactly what activities Col. James was involved in. But, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, should the APA have someone who was at Guantanamo during this time represent it's anti-torture positions? [For the record, Col. James denies that isolation was used for interrogation purposes.]

In any case, it is time for the APA to stop word parsing and make clear, unequivocal statements about what in their view is and is not ethical. I, for one, feel that the use of isolation, as described in the Guantanamo SOP is well over the line into unethical territory. Does APA agree?

Beyond the APA and the role of psychologists, we need for Congress to take up the entire range of abusive interrogation techniques, especially including isolation and sensory deprivation. By focusing upon waterboarding as the litmus test abusive technique, the Congress, the press, and some human rights activists are ignoring the extent to which abuse is endemic in the US' national security detentions. The CIA can continue its "enhanced techniques" without waterboarding; in fact reports say that they are already doing so. But to ban isolation and sensory deprivation would cut to the core of this country's abusive treatment of detainees. Until the United States government takes this step, the U.S. will remain a torturing society.

Stephen Soldz is a psychoanalyst, psychologist, public health researcher, and faculty member at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. He maintains the Psychoanalysts for Peace and Justice web site and the Psyche, Science, and Society blog. He is a founder of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology, one of the organizations leading the struggle to change American Psychological Association policy on participation in abusive interrogations.

FOX NEWS IS BUSH'S PROPAGANDA MACHINE

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A myth in the unmaking


Fox News's status as a politically impartial channel is at last being exposed as a fiction

Michael Tomasky
Monday November 19, 2007
The Guardian


Britons may be familiar with Rupert Murdoch, but I don't think the UK has a beast quite like the American Fox News Channel. Celebrating its 11th year on the air, Fox is a breathtaking institution. It is a lock, stock and barrel servant of the Republican party, devoted first and foremost to electing Republicans and defeating Democrats; it's even run by a man, Roger Ailes, who helped elect Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George Bush senior to the presidency. And yet, because it minimally adheres to certain superficial conventions, it can masquerade as a "news" outfit and enjoy all the rights that accrue to that.

Article continues

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Journalism with a point of view is a fine thing. It's what I do. The difference is that I say I'm a liberal journalist while Fox executives and "reporters" insist they play it straight. But everyone in the US knows that my description is true. This is precisely why its fans watch it. Walk into any bar, hair salon, gym or motel lobby in the country; if the TV is tuned to Fox rather than CNN, you know that the owner or clientele or both are Republican. It's a secret - although not actually secret any more - sign of fraternity among conservatives, the way a solid red tie worn by a single urban man used to signal to other urban men that the wearer was indeed "that way".
So everyone knows, but, because of the conventions of journalistic propriety, Fox can't admit that it's a Republican outfit. It would have no credibility with politicians if it did and would be too easily dismissed as "ideological media". To get around this problem, its marketers devised what must be the most deviously ingenious pair of advertising slogans of all time: "We report, you decide" and "Fair and balanced".

And so, for a decade and more, Fox has got away with an amazing thing: it can call itself a "straight" news channel even while everyone knows it's not. It's a great little racket. Every so often, a Toto comes along and tugs at the curtain - earlier this year, for instance, the Democratic presidential aspirants agreed that they would not participate in any debates hosted by Fox because there was no point in getting up there and being asked questions merely for the purpose of providing footage that the eventual Republican nominee could use against them. But these moments have been rare.

Last week brought an event with the potential to change all that. Judith Regan, a former Fox host perhaps best known in the UK as the, um, brains behind the OJ Simpson If I Did It mediapalooza, has sued her former employer for wrongful dismissal.

So what? So this. Regan spent some portion of the dawn of the 21st century having an affair with NYC's then police commissioner, Bernard Kerik. The commissioner was recently indicted by a federal prosecutor in New York for alleged misdeeds dating from his time as a public servant. Kerik is a very close associate of presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani - so close that Giuliani once recommended Kerik to President Bush as homeland security director.

The nomination advanced far enough for Bush to stand at Kerik's side at a press conference. But suddenly, the doors blew open and the allegations against Kerik - that he'd renovated his home with ill-gotten gains, and more distressingly that he had suspected connections to organised crime - ended his nomination quickly. Ever since then, the question has loomed over Giuliani: when did he know that the man he recommended to run America's security was alleged to have mob ties? (A now deceased investigator once suggested that he warned Giuliani, but Giuliani says he has no memory of this.)

Regan, naturally enough given her special knowledge of the man, was questioned about Kerik by federal investigators. And she now alleges that two executives of Fox News instructed her to "lie to, and withhold information from" the investigators about Kerik. Regan charges that Fox executives did this because they feared the inquiry into Kerik might singe Giuliani, whose presidential ambitions, her complaint charges, Fox has long been intent on "protecting".

Let's linger over that for a moment. Two executives of a major news organisation may have told a citizen to lie to federal investigators to protect a presidential candidate. It's a stunning charge. If proven someday, Fox will no longer be able to hide behind the fiction that it's a neutral news outfit.

In the meantime, Democrats should ratchet up their refusal to pretend that Fox bears any relationship to news. I've always felt they should just boycott the network en bloc. One can be pretty confident that if the situation were reversed - imagine a cable channel that was known as a Democratic house organ and run by, say, Bill Clinton adviser James Carville - Republicans would have done something like that long ago. I asked Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic speaker, about this last Friday, and she just replied wanly: "I think we have to reach out to all the viewers out there."

I guess I didn't really expect her to say more on the record. But if the day ever comes that Fox is no longer allowed to have it both ways, Democrats won't have to keep playing along with the rabbit-hole fiction that Fox is a genuine news-gathering operation.

· Michael Tomasky is editor of Guardian America
michael.tomasky@guardian.co.uk

MAGNA ON MANGA

A Comics Reader's Guide to Manga Scanlations
Written by Dirk Deppey

Article Index
A Comics Reader's Guide to Manga Scanlations


For followers of the concurrent boom in more literary American graphic novels, the biggest irony surrounding the popularity of English-language Japanese comics translations is that the manga such readers would be most interested in seeing are also the manga least likely to find its way into your local Barnes & Noble. Instead, bookstore shelves are filled with what seems like acre upon acre of translated manga meant to appeal to young adults. Thankfully, the people buying such books are not the full extent of Japanese comics fandom in this country. As noted in my essay from The Comics Journal #269, "Scanlation Nation," grassroots groups of enterprising and committed manga fans have spent the past few years producing what are known as scanlations, or amateur translations of manga not otherwise licensed for print by one of the many publishers bringing such works to market. These scanlation teams have unearthed and translated an immense number of interesting Asian comics and made them available free for download over the Internet, and it's because of them that manga readers aren't necessarily restricted in their reading habits by what some publisher or other thinks would sell to adolescents.


Astro Boy digs in, in this panel from Naoki Urasawa's revisionist adventure serial, Pluto.
There are any number of Japanese comics floating around in scanlated form that might well be appreciated by the more serious Western comics fan. How does one do that, and how would one know enough to find them and read them? It can be done; in preparation for TCJ #269's focus on shoujo manga, I spent the better part of a year getting acquainted with the scanlations scene, and while I won't pretend to be as familiar with it as your hardocre otaku, I did learn enough to navigate my way around, and I found a surprisingly rich variety of good, well-crafted manga. My intention in this essay, then, is to provide an introduction to how to read scanlations, where to find them, and what titles might interest readers accustomed to more esoteric fare.

There are two potential obstacles that newcomers to scanlations may have to overcome in order to read such things. The first, or course, is adjusting to the idea of reading comics on their computer monitors in the first place. Aside from the general strangeness of the concept, there's a technical aspect to it, in that scanlations come in a specific format and require specific software in order to read them. The format is easily explained: The overwhelming majority of scanlations are packaged as JPEG images packaged in ZIP or RAR compression files. It's sort of like a conceptual bag that keeps them all in one compact place. To read them, you'll need a comic-reader program that looks into the files without the need to decompress them. For the Windows operating system, the best such program is the CDisplay Comic Reader, while Mac users' best bet is a program called Comical. (If you're a Linux user, you don't really need me to tell you how to find and use software, now do you?) Both programs offer a relatively easy protocol for reading comics, and playing around with either program for a minute or two will teach you everything you need to know. They even allow you to print the comics out, if you're really dead set against reading such things on a monitor.


An invitation to tune into Reiichi Sugimoto & Shinkichi Katoh's four-volume novel, National Quiz.
Further, one should also note the obligatory warning for these sorts of things: These are "unflipped" comics, which means that the panels and pages read from right-to-left, as is the case in most Asian writing, rather than the more standard Western left-to-right fashion. It takes a bit of getting used to, but it's actually pretty easy once you get the hang of it.

The final potential difficulty isn't so easy to surmount. Comics fans looking to get their hands on the good stuff will likely have to learn to navigate one of the Internet's more finicky protocols: While Web-based archives and BitTorrent links can be found for some scanlations if one searches hard enough, the vast majority can only be found via Internet Relay Chat (IRC), a pre-WWW, command line-based protocol originally designed for conversation, with file-transfer tools seemingly tossed in after the fact. The simplest explanation of how to use IRC to download scanlations can be found at this link.

Assuming you can climb the learning curve, there's plenty of as-yet-unlicensed manga out there, much of it considerably off the beaten path of what you're used to reading -- and thankfully, some of it can be found without having to resort to IRC, as some scanlators do offer easy click-and-download links for their wares. There are an astonishing number of scanlation groups online, and you're not likely to have heard of many of the titles that they offer. What follows is a brief survey of translated manga offered by a relatively small number of groups, all things considered, but it's going to take a while to go through them all nonetheless, and along the way we'll get to know any number of potential candidates for good reading. Let's begin, shall we?



Your first stop should be Mangascreener, one of the oldest scanlation houses, and the one translating works closest to the modern, Western art-comics sensibility in terms of story and maturity. Originally dedicated to translating more popular, mainstream manga when first starting out -- their list of subsequently licensed manga includes such chart-toppers as Naruto and Love Hina -- Mangascreener has gradually moved towards more esoteric fare. As with almost anyone dealing with Japanese comics, there's still a fair amount of genre work in their catalog of offerings, but even here it's usually the quirkier, more individualistic works that come under their attention.

(A side note: I should mention that readers with an aversion to genre should either swallow their distaste or stay well away from the vast majority of manga to begin with. Unlike their Western counterparts, most Japanese comics fall into one genre or another, and while there is a sort of literary-comics movement in Japan, it's much smaller than the scenes in Europe or North America -- as strange as it sounds, art-comics are even more periphrial in Japan than they are in the United States, despite the overall industry being much, much larger. The reason for this has to do with the wider multiplicity of genres in Japan; there are everything from science-fiction and fight comics to comics about golf and mah-jongg. As an American manga-publishing professional once told me, the reason that so many manga cartoonists work in genre is that there are enough available genres (and audiences for same) that a talented cartoonist can find an agreeable topic that allows for individual voices to be heard while still earning something approaching a living without having to reinvent the wheel or restrict your output to small, self-published doujinshi.)

While Mangascreener are perhaps the finest scanlations group around today, there is a drawback to following their output: While the folks at Mangascreener do maintain a mirror page of HTTP downloads, most of their output is only available from their IRC channel (#mangascreener at irc.irchighway.net). In this case, though, there's plenty of material that's worth the hassle. For example:


Natural disasters will have far-reaching political repercussions in Kaiji Kawaguchi's A Spirit of the Sun.


A Spirit of the Sun: Kaiji Kawaguchi is perhaps best known for the multi-volume series Eagle and Silent Service, comics that tread a fine line between adventure, sophisticated political parable and outright Japan-first nationalist tracts. A Spirit of the Sun is no exception, as it follows the progress of a young boy seperated from his father by an earthquake that literally splits the Japanese mainland, leaving the homeland under international supervision and our hero raised in Taiwan, where he faces racism, gangsterism, and only his innate goodness and sense of identity keeps him alive. If you read either of the two above-quoted series in English translation, you can probably guess that taut storytelling and thoughtful, politically charged subtext is the order of the day here. (Mangascreener has also scanlated another Kawaguchi story, Confession, but I have yet to read it and thus can't offer a recommendation one way or the other.)


Panel from Iou Kuroda's Japan Tengu Party Illustrated.

Love, the beauty of rural life... and eggplants. Panel from Nasu.

Japan Tengu Party Illustrated and Nasu: I've already shared my love for the work of Iou Kuroda in TCJ #275's year-in-review section. A quick recap: Kuroda is one of Japan's more idiosyncratic manga storytellers, with a quirky sense of plot and character augmented by thick, impressionistic linework more reminiscent of sumi-e illustration than traditional manga art styles. The two works available here are emblematic of his output: Tengu depicts the trials and tribulations of an ancient race of bird-spirits, revered in olden days but reduced to scavenger status in modern-day Japan, as seen through the eyes of a self-centered, fledgling tengu girl who was abducted from her parents at a young age and replaced with a "mud doll" simalcrum to keep anyone from noticing her disappearance, which in turn becomes a character in its own right as the story progresses.

Nasu is a wide-ranging collection of short stories, ranging from rural slice-of-life to bicycle-racing adventure to monster/horror comics, all prominently featuring eggplants in one form or another. If that sounds a little too oddball, think of it as a writing exercise -- these stories never feel forced or contrived, and only prove that Iou Kuroda can make anything into grist for the storytelling mill. His sole English-language volume, Sexy Voice and Robo, was one of the most intriguing books produced by a manga-translation publisher in 2005; here's where you'll find more of the same. (There are also a number of miscellaneous Kuroda short stories floating around, including "My Teacher and I" and "Angel.")



Two robots ponder their fate in Naoki Urasawa's Pluto.


Pluto: Again, already reviewed in TCJ #275, this is suspense-manga master Naoki Urasawa's radical reinterpretation of the classic Tezuka Astro Boy story, "The Greatest Robot on Earth." While Urasawa's Monster and the forthcoming 20th Century Boys are rightly praised, Pluto is the hidden gem that every comics obscurantist seeks: a deceptively simple concept blown inside-out through sheer talent and ambition. Highly recommended. (You might also want to check out Happy!, a sports manga wherein a young tennis prodigy is given extra inducement to win by her brother's gambling debts, which have yakuza gangsters threatening to pimp her out as a prostitute if she fails to make his payments for him. It's an early work from Urasawa, but you can already see the seeds of the mature creator being sewn.)


Dirty girls and self-centered bastards abound in Naoki Yamamoto's 'Watching TV All the Time Makes You Stupid.'


"Watching TV All the Time Makes You Stupid": Anyone who's ever read the one available English-language work available from erotic cartoonist Naoki Yamamoto, Viz Comics' seven-volume Dance Till Tomorrow, will tell you that he (A) likes sex-filled comics and (B) seems to treasure an endless contempt for humanity, and not always in that order. In Yamamoto's world, any time someone isn't trying to screw you, he or she is trying to screw you over. Dance Till Tomorrow was the romance genre's deliciously misanthropic evil twin, right down to the "and they all lived sullenly ever after" ending -- self-centered pricks suffer the consequences of their lust and greed, fail to learn anything from the encounter, get back up and do it all over again (repeat until artist loses interest in making them suffer). "Watching TV All the Time Makes You Stupid" compresses Yamamoto's sexual and social philosophies into a short story so vicious and pristine that it's practically a manifesto. I tend to avoid people like these characters in real life, but damn if they don't make for fascinating reading. (Also available from Mangascreener: Yamamoto's two-volume novel Believers, which I really do plan on getting around to reading, one of these days.)


A Japanese minister gets right to the point in Reiichi Sugimoto & Shinkichi Katoh's wicked satire, National Quiz.


National Quiz: Imagine Terry Gilliam's film Brazil, restaged in a futuristic game show that rules all of Japan. Anything further I say about this series would just spoil it, so instead I'll merely note that Reiichi Sugimoto & Shinkichi Katoh's four-volume balls-to-the-wall satire of television, consumerism, politics and anything else they can think to include may well be the best bet for selling manga to art-comics fans this side of Kan Takahama, Yoshihiro Tatsumi or Yoshiharu Tsuge, if only some far-sighted publisher were to seek out the translation rights. I'd love to own an English-language set of these books, and I bet others would, too.

There's plenty of other treasures to be had in Mangascreener's back catalogue of amateur translations, from the Little Nemo-esque Coo's World, to a couple of short stories by Blue author Kiriko Nananan, to Matoko Yukimura's follow-up to his cult-favorite science-fiction epic Planetes, the Norse adventure fable Vinland Saga. Like I said, if you're an experienced comics reader, Mangascreener should be the first stop in your exploration of the world of scanlations. In a better world, some rich benefactor would give them a blank check and a kickass Japanese licensing agent and say, "Okay, now fill my bookshelf with the good stuff." I have no doubt that we'd all benefit from the results.



While not exactly a haven for literary comics as we've come to know them in the States, our next stop is notable for being an exacting and knowledgable source for a genre that's more fascinating than one might think at first glance: all-girl romance manga, as translated by the fine folks at Lililicious.

A fair amount of attention has been paid lately to the emergence of the boy-love genre, shounen-ai, and its more explicit cousin, yaoi. Slipping in under the radar, however has been the slow growth in interest over their all-girl equivalents, shoujo-ai and yuri. It's an interesting phenomenon, and while a gay man like myself probably isn't the best person to explain it, let's follow the "fools rush in" axiom and try anyway. Like the all-boy version, shoujo-ai and yuri are primarily girl-driven genres with heterosexual females a significant portion of the readership. One could drive oneself crazy examining all the possible reasons for this, but I tend to prefer an evolution-driven approach: Women have a greater capacity for emotional resonance, and thus, even straight women are more willing to explore love's various permutations in a fictional setting. You're not likely to see many straight men digging yaoi for the simple reason that such men tend to find male homosexuality distasteful, due in part to the monkey-brain notion that there's something beta-male (if not outright feminine) about the whole concept. While there's undoubtedly no shortage of heterosexual women who find lesbianism just as off-putting, it's less of a biological imperative than it is among men. (One could also note that there's mildly less cultural opprobrium associated with lesbianism than its male equivalent, at least in the West, if for no other reason than that guys find the former enough of a turn-on to ignore the same-sex implications -- the notion that one might be allowed to join in is presumably too enticing, and all that. How this measures against Japanese culture, of course, is not for me to say.)


A lesbian cartoonist ponders the risks of putting it all down on paper in Ebine Yamaji's Free Soul.

Because female sexuality affords a greater apetite for emotional and relationship-oriented components in erotic fantasy, as opposed to the nearly all-physical nature of male sexual fantasy, there's more room for character interaction and plot -- that is to say, literature -- in female-oriented romance comics. There are male-centric girl-girl manga available as well, but it tends towards more straightforward sexual encounters rather than relationship-oriented storytelling; the notorious semi-lolicon, all-girl hentai series Shoujo Sect being an excellent if socially problematic example. There's sex in yuri stories, of course, but as we'll see below, even the most explicit examples also feature an attention to character that goes beyond the simplistic, "she's the glasses girl, she's the wild one" two-dimensionality of most male readership-oriented hentai manga. That the all-girl setting and less than fully sexual themes of shoujo-ai allow heterosexual men to explore homosexual themes and issues without worrying about stumbling across boys kissing boys is probably worth mentioning, as well.

Lililicious is easily the foremost of scanlators dealing with the genres in question. Their attention to comics history is especially noteworthy: Starting with the gender confusion found in Osamu Tezuka's Princess Knight and Ikeda Riyoko's The Rose of Versailles and leading into the Forty-Niner stories and thereafter dealing with "intense friendships" among its female protagonists, shoujo manga has explored such themes from the beginning, and in ways not necessarily acceptable to some Western readers -- it's worth noting, for example, that some scenes in the animated version of the breakout hit Sailor Moon were edited for American cartoon release precisely because two of the principal female characters fell in love with one another.

Lililicious offers a wide array of manga offerings from past to present, and some of the signature works of the shoujo metagenre are included in their offerings. Further, one needn't brave the deep waters of IRC to acquire manga translated by the group, as direct HTTP downloads and BitTorrent streams are all accessible directly from the Lililicious projects page. So where should one begin? I'd recommend the following:


They're both proud women, actually. Page from Ikeda Riyoko's classic shoujo series, The Rose of Versailles. (Click image to enlarge.)


The Rose of Versailles, Claudine and Oniisama E: Ikeda Riyoko was a contemporary of the Magnificent Forty-Niners, if not a fellow traveler, and her Tezuka-esque Rose of Versailles was the first shoujo title by a female creator to hit it big with a readership of young girls. Her old-fashioned storytelling sensibilities has fallen out of favor in the decades that followed, but that hasn't dimmed her importance as the link between Tezuka's original girls'-manga template and the liberating release of genre and subject-matter personified by the Forty-Niners.


Guess which one's the suspicious lesbian? Sequence from Maya's Funeral Procession, a classic story by Yukari Ichijou.


Maya's Funeral Procession and Shiroi Heya no Futari: Like early gay-and-lesbian literature in the West, early stories involving gay themes tended to be written from a viewpoint of fear and social stigma, and Japanese comics were no exception in this regard. Both of Moto Hagio's earliest shounen-ai stories, November Gymnasium and The Heart of Thomas, were tragedies, as one boy's love for another was misunderstood both by the male object of desire and, ultimately, the culture surrounding them, in each case leading to poignant deaths. So too in shoujo-ai: Yukari Ichijou's Maya's Funeral Procession is actually a horror story, the lesbian invader a threatening and unwelcome presence striding a landscape of dead bodies. Ryouko Yamagishi's Shiroi Heya no Futari, by contrast, is a romance tragedy more along the lines of Radclyffe Hall's landmark lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness, with its affair between a rebellious young girl and her more sedate paramour ultimately unable to survive the heterosexual expectations of fate and the world around them. Again, these are well-told stories, but in the end they're more interesting as manga history than as honest depictions of lesbian desire.


Two lovers sit around talking about sex in Ebine Yamaji's sophisticated lesbian graphic novel, Indigo Blue.


Free Soul and Indigo Blue: For those seeking a more modern sensibility, Lililicious' greatest offering is undoubtedly the contemporary lesbian novels of creator Ebine Yamaji. While Yamaji's women must still deal with the uncertainty of what those around them may think, they're far less concerned with that than the contents of their own hearts, and there is no Cruel Fate waiting around the corner to ensure that social equilibrium is restored at story's end -- instead, their actions and motivations propel the story, and the chances for successful romance are balanced accordingly. Yamaji's linework is a treat, and her storytelling skills are first-rate, but more than that, she presents an honest and nuanced look at lesbian life in modern Japan that will resonate with the reader like few other cartoonists of any nationality. If you're looking for the Great Lesbian Graphic Novel, well, here are two ready for download. If they did nothing else, the amateur translators at Lililicious have done us all a great favor in bringing the work of Ebine Yamaji to Western readers.


Young love blooms in Erica Sakurazawa's romance story, Love Vibes.


Love Vibes: Readers who've wanted to see more comics from Erica Sakurazawa after the six volumes released by Tokyopop a few years back can take heart, as Lililicious has translated her recent graphic novel, Love Vibes. Unlike the subtle Fatal Attraction-like overtones of Sakurazawa's Between the Sheets, this book depicts a straightforward dawning of same-sex attraction in a young woman whose heterosexual affairs have always left something missing in her heart, a situation that presents almost as much of a challenge to her would-be paramour, who got over her own coming-out drama years ago and doesn't necessarily want to have to deal with it again by proxy. More adult romance literature by a master of the form.


Unrequited obsession burns in 'Kisses,' a short story from Kiriko Nananan's collection, Water.


Water: Kiriko Nananan's graphic novel Blue, about an intense friendship between two high-school girls that bordered on obsession, was something of a minor cult hit among indy-comics fans when translated and released by the cutting-edge collaborative team of Fanfare and Ponent Mon back in 2004, leading some to wonder if they'd ever get the chance to see more of Nananan's obsessive stories and sparse, elegant linework. Wait no more: Lililicious has generously supplied you with two short stories that provide further evidence of her mastery over the comics form. Like Blue, the stories found in Water deal with romantic obsession and its tortures, balanced with the hopeful longing that leads us ever onward into uncertainty.


Above and below-right: A less explicit sequence from Torajiro Kishi's erotic series Maka-Maka.


Maka-Maka: I mentioned earlier the difference between girl-oriented yuri and the more male-oriented girl-girl stories found in hentai manga. Sure, the former can get explicit, but while it exists to titillate its female readership, it also finds context for the relationships it depicts, and presents characters with more complex and nuanced personalities that the sex robots who frequently populate the latter. So is there a dividing line where the two sides meet? Or, as I hear my straight male readership asking, is there female-centric lesbian porn that's likely to appeal to male readers as well? Lililicious has heard you're cry, ladies and gentlemen, and Torajiro Kishi has indeed created a story that will appeal to both sets of readers. The brief erotic vignettes that make up Maka-Maka depict an increasingly intense "friendship with benefits" between two college girls, Jun and Nene. Drawn in full, sumptuous color, the stories herein begin like many treasured relationships, with relatively mild, teasing foreplay leading eventually to more intense erotic activities as the relationship moves forward.


I actually tried to sell this one to Eros Comix editor Michael Dowers some months back, giving him copies of the first dozen or so scanlations. He ultimately rejected it because the series didn't get explicit enough early on in the series. That changes later on, but I suspect male readers will likely see the opening chapters as more of a tease than will female readers -- I'm not sure I'd quite call Jun and Nene well-rounded characters per se (aside from the obvious physical sense), but their relationship nonetheless has non-sexual components, and Kishi does spend time in their development. It is a female-oriented sex comic, after all, but it's a sex comic all the same, and male readers willing to accept that instant gratification isn't always the best kind of gratification will nonetheless find much to enjoy in these pages.


Once again there's plenty more on offer (if you want to see two girls from Sailor Moon make out and stuff, the first story in this doujinshi is what you've been waiting for), and I haven't myself made even close to a thorough exploration of the site's contents, but I think you get the idea. While the all-male equivalent tends to be a mirror through which one gender can explore its fascination for the other -- while it does exist, actual gay-male manga is a fairly rarified genre in Japan, and hasn't really been explored by scanlators so far as I'm aware -- yuri is where reflection by Japanese women upon their own sexuality can be seen in its most concentrated form. It's also the most accessible outlet for first-person gay-themed cartooning in manga, though as we've noted, it's a form