WAR MAKES FASCISTS OF US ALL

“War Makes Fascists of Us All”
by Mark Grimsley


Nine years ago I gave an impromptu talk to about twenty-five West Point cadets. The previous day their instructors and I had taken them on a staff ride of the Antietam battlefield; that evening most of them attended a showing of the just released film, Starship Troopers. I put the two experiences together to create Starship Troopers, Civic Virtue, and the American Civil War, which I subsequently gave as a lecture in a military history class and posted online as a web presentation.

In the presentation, I maintained, “Critics thoughtlessly consider Starship Troopers to be a novel about fascism. It is not. It is about classical republicanism as expounded by the Renaissance political thinker Niccolo Machiavelli.” That’s true of the novel, I think. But it isn’t true of the film, as I discovered while listening to the director’s commentary on the DVD.

At the outset of the commentary, director Peter Verhoeven and screenwriter Ed Neumeier quote part of the TIME magazine review of Starship Troopers by critic Richard Schickel. Here’s the relevant passage from the review:

Starship Troopers contains an unexplored premise. There are two classes in this futureworld: civilians, who have sacrificed voting privileges for material ease, and warriors, who earn the right to rule by their willingness to die for the state. In short, we’re looking at a happily fascist world. Maybe that’s the movie’s final, deadpan joke. Maybe it’s saying that war inevitably makes fascists of us all. Or — best guess — maybe the filmmakers are so lost in their slambang visual effects that they don’t give a hoot about the movie’s scariest implications.

Verhoeven and Neumeier chuckle derisively at that, because for them, fascism is the exact theme of the film. Regarding the genesis of Starship Troopers, Neumeier remarks that he thought that a lot of action films were implicitly fascist anyway, so why not do an action film that hit the concept head on? And lest anyone suppose that Verhoeven and Neumeier liked the idea of fascism, Verhoeven notes that anytime the viewer sees something in the film that looks fascist and finds it disquieting, the viewer should know that the film makers share that sense of disquiet — they think it’s “Bad! BAD!” as Verheoven says at numerous points throughout the rest of the commentary.


Watching the film again, and having recently attended a forum on church and state in Ohio’s electoral politics, I was reminded of an article by Chris Hedges that appeared early last year in the New York Times (January 6, 2005). In it, Hedges reported:

Fritz Stern, a refugee from Hitler’s Germany and a leading scholar of European history, startled serveral of his listeners when he warned in a speech about the danger posed in this country by the rise of the Christian right. In his address in November, just after he received a prize presented by the German foreign minister, he told his audience that Hitler saw himself as “an instrument of providence” and fused his “racial dogma with a Germanic Christianity.”

“Some people recognized the moral perils of mixing religion and politics,” he said of prewar Germany, “but many others were seduced by it. It was the pseudo-religious transformation of politics that largely ensured his success, notably in Protestant areas.”

. . . [Stern] stops short of calling the Christian right fascist but his decision to draw parallels, especially in the uses of propaganda, was controversial.

“When I saw the speech my eyes lit up,” said John R. MacArthur, whose book “Second Front” examines wartime propaganda. “The comparsion between the propagandistic manipulation and uses of Christianity, then and now, is hidden in plain sight. No one will talk about it. No one wants to look at it.”

* * *

[Stern] warns of the danger in an open society of “mass manipulation of public opinion, often mixed with mendacity and forms of intimidation.” He is a passionate defender of liberalism as “manifested in the spirit of the Enlightenment and the early years of the American republic.”

“The radical right and the radical left see liberalism’s appeal to reason and tolerance as the denial of their uniform ideology,” he said. “Every democracy needs a liberal fundament, a Bill of Rights enshrined in law and spirit, for this alone gives democracy the chance for self-correction and reform. Without it, the survival of democracy is at risk. Every genuine conservative knows this.”

In reflecting on Stern’s remarks, I feel pulled in a couple of directions. On the one hand, the linkage between Christianity and patriotism is nothing new in the United States. Americans have long conflated the two as part of the country’s “civil religion.” In the nineteenth century the linkage was quite explicitly between (evangelical Protestant) Christianity and patriotism. In the twentieth, this expanded to include what is generally called “Judeo Christian values.” But even in the twenty-first, there is a widespread sense that other faith traditions are alien to what is truly American, and the notion that an atheist might be patriotic still seems close to a contradiction in terms.

My point is that “mixing religion and politics,” in some ways, is an old story in American life. If it didn’t lead to fascism in the darkest days of the Cold War, which most Americans understood as a contest between a Judeo Christian-based democracy and “godless Communism,” then it seems unlikely that it would do so today.

On the other hand, I have never never in my lifetime seen a large segment of American Christians so actively engaged in partisan politics, nor a major political party so dependent on that segment as an indispensable part of its base, nor a national political establishment so riven by interparty hostility as I do today. And “today” happens to come five years into a “Global War on Terror” that only two days ago saw the President sign into a law the Military Commissions Act of 2006 that, among other things, nullifies the legal principle of habeas corpus for anyone the executive defines as an “unlawful enemy combatant,” including, apparently, American citizens.

In a television interview Tuesday evening, constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley commented:

People have no idea how significant this is. Really a time of shame this is for the American system. The strange thing is that we have become sort of constitutional couch potatoes. The Congress just gave the President despotic powers and you could hear the yawn across the country as people turned to Dancing With the Stars. It’s otherworldly. . . . People clearly don’t realize what a fundamental change it is about who we are as a country. What happened today changed us. And I’m not too sure we’re gonna change back anytime soon.

A few points about Turley’s remarks. First, I think he’s dead right about the apathy or sheer ignorance of most of the American public — a confirmation, to my mind, of Machiavelli and Heinlein’s emphasis on the importance of civic virtue to a healthy republic and the dangers that arise when civic virtue is lacking. Agree or disagree with the necessity of the Military Commissions Act, it remains incontestable that this legislation has major implications for basic American civil rights to which most of us are oblivious. That’s a serious query against a citizenship bestowed without meaningful cost on the part of its recipients.

Second, although most Democrats voted against the bill (see here and here), I have so far not seen them give it anywhere near the public attention it deserves. They seem to have found their courage when it comes to the Iraq War — now that over 60 percent of Americans are unhappy with how that conflict is going — but remain cowed when it comes to the “Global War on Terror.” Which didn’t stop House Speaker Dennis Hastert from accusing them of placing “their liberal agenda ahead of the security of America,” adding that Democrats “would gingerly pamper the terrorists who plan to destroy innocent Americans’ lives [and create] new rights for terrorists.”

Third, a bill like this could never have passed in peacetime. It passed now because most Americans a) accept the idea that we are indeed engaged in a war on terrorism; and b) view the terrorists as little different from the Bugs depicted in Starship Troopers — that is to say, it’s next to impossible to view them as human beings to whom “inalienable rights” apply, regardless of personal merit. We have already, in effect, decided as a society that the struggle against an enemy trumps the considerations enshrined in the Bill of Rights. We’ve abandoned important checks and balances that are vital if one assumes, as did the Founders, that concentrated power is always a danger. Those are two significant steps in the direction of fascism. The only steps that really remain are the celebration of struggle as an intrinsic good and the open bestowal upon the president of the unimpeded powers we have already given him tacitly.

In that sense, the future of Starship Troopers — the film, not the novel — may be closer than we think.

CARLOS CASTANEDA

Carlos Castaneda (1925?-1998)
"All paths are the same: they lead nowhere."
---Don Juan

Carlos Castaneda was a best-selling author of a number of books centering on a Mexican Yaqui shaman's pharmacologically induced visions. He called the shaman Don Juan Matus. Castaneda claimed he was doing anthropology, that his books were not fiction. He was granted a Ph.D. by the UCLA Anthropology Department in 1973 for his third book, Journey to Ixtlan. Critics say the work is not ethnographically accurate and is a work of fiction.

Castaneda's books are full of stories of magic, sorcery, and out-of-body experiences. His first books hit the market during the late 1960s when LSD guru Timothy Leary was advising the world to "turn on, tune in, drop out." The LSD gurus believe that the chemical changes in their brains, which cause them to perceive the world differently and to perceive different worlds, bring them into a divine realm. Getting high meant opening the doors of perception to a higher reality. Castaneda could not have had better timing for his books.

Castaneda claims that he met Don Juan in 1960 at a bus station in Nogales, Arizona. At the time, Castaneda was a graduate student in anthropology doing research on medicinal plants used by Indians of the Southwest. He claims that Don Juan made him a sorcerer's apprentice and introduced him to the world of peyote and visions. It is unlikely that a great shaman would pick someone up at a bus stop and make him a disciple, but we'll never know since no one but Castaneda ever met Don Juan. [I should have known that now that Castaneda is dead, others would claim Don Juan for their own. One such is a fellow who calls himself Ken Eagle Feather. Unfortunately, Mr. Eagle Feather doesn't have any photos of his master, either. You'll just have take his word for it that he did a ten-year apprenticeship with Don Juan Matus.] Was Don Juan a hoax? Probably. Yet Castaneda's books have sold over eight million copies. I guess that was all the inspiration Mr. Eagle Feather needed.

Castaneda obviously filled a need. He told good stories and gave enigmatic advice. He gave people hope, especially those who believe that the more modern civilization has become, the further it has driven human beings from their spiritual or true nature. The old shamans know the way. They know truths the modern scientist has not even dreamed of. They do hallucinogenic drugs, too. Maybe that is why they thought they could fly and transmogrify into birds and other animals.

In his later years, Castaneda introduced a new way to get high: Tensegrity. It involves meditation, exercises, a luminous egg, an assemblage point, depersonalization, dreaming, and other New Age magic. Tensegrity allegedly leads to the perception of "pure energy," breaking down the barriers to higher consciousness. It is supposed to be based on some ancient magic, known to Indian shamans centuries ago. Sounds familiar.

THERE WILL BE BLOOD

There Will Be Blood (2007)NYT Critics' Pick This movie has been designated a Critic's Pick by the film reviewers of The Times.
François Duhamel/Paramount Vantage
"There Will Be Blood" with Dillon Freasier, left, and Daniel Day-Lewis, opens on Wednesday.

December 26, 2007
An American Primitive, Forged in a Crucible of Blood and Oil
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By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: December 26, 2007

“There Will Be Blood,” Paul Thomas Anderson’s epic American nightmare, arrives belching fire and brimstone and damnation to Hell. Set against the backdrop of the Southern California oil boom of the late-19th and early-20th centuries, it tells a story of greed and envy of biblical proportions — reverberating with Old Testament sound and fury and New Testament evangelicalism — which Mr. Anderson has mined from Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel “Oil!” There is no God but money in this oil-rich desert and his messenger is Daniel Plainview, a petroleum speculator played by a monstrous and shattering Daniel Day-Lewis.


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Plainview is an American primitive. He’s more articulate and civilized than the crude, brutal title character in Frank Norris’s 1899 novel “McTeague,” and Erich von Stroheim’s masterly version of the same, “Greed.” But the two characters are brothers under the hide, coarse and animalistic, sentimental in matters of love and ruthless in matters of avarice. Mr. Anderson opens his story in 1898, closer to Norris’s novel than Sinclair’s, which begins in the years leading up to World War I. And the film’s opener is a stunner — spooky and strange, blanketed in shadows and nearly wordless. Inside a deep, dark hole, a man pickaxes the hard-packed soil like a bug gnawing through dirt. This is the earth mover, the ground shaker: Plainview.



Over the next two and a half mesmerizing hours Plainview will strike oil, then strike it rich and transform a bootstrapper’s dream into a terrifying prophecy about the coming American century. It’s a century he plunges into slicked in oil, dabbed with blood and accompanied by H. W. (eventually played by the newcomer Dillon Freasier), the child who enters his life in 1902 after he makes his first strike and seems to have burbled from the ground like the liquid itself. The brief scenes of Plainview’s first tender, awkward moments with H. W. will haunt the story. In one of the most quietly lovely images in a film of boisterous beauty, he gazes at the tiny, pale toddler, chucking him under the chin as they sit on a train very much alone.



“There Will Be Blood” involves a tangle of relationships, mainly intersecting sets of fathers and sons and pairs of brothers. (Like most of the finest American directors working now, Mr. Anderson makes little on-screen time for women.) But it is Plainview’s intense, needful bond with H. W. that raises the stakes and gives enormous emotional force to this expansively imagined period story with its pictorial and historical sweep, its raging fires, geysers of oil and inevitable blood. (Rarely has a film’s title seemed so ominous.) By the time H. W. is about 10, he has become a kind of partner to his father, at once a child and a sober little man with a jacket and neatly combed hair who dutifully stands by Plainview’s side as quiet as his conscience.



A large swath of the story takes place in 1911, by which point Plainview has become a successful oilman with his own fast-growing company. Flanked by the watchful H. W., he storms through California, sniffing out prospects and trying to persuade frenzied men and women to lease their land for drilling. (H. W. gives Plainview his human mask: “I’m a family man,” he proclaims to perspective leasers.) One day a gangling, unsmiling young man, Paul Sunday (Paul Dano), arrives with news that oil is seeping out of the ground at his family’s ranch. The stranger sells this information to Plainview, who promptly sets off with H. W. to a stretch of California desert where oil puddles the ground among the cactus, scrub and human misery.



Not long afterward oil is gushing out of that desert. The eruption rattles both the earth and the local population, whom Plainview soothes with promises. Poor, isolated, thirsting for water (they don’t have enough even to grow wheat), the dazed inhabitants gaze at the oilman like hungry baby birds. (Their barren town is oddly named Little Boston.) He promises schools, roads and water, delivering his sermon with a carefully enunciated, sepulchral voice that Mr. Day-Lewis seems to have largely borrowed from the director John Huston. Plainview is preaching a new gospel, though one soon challenged by another salesman, Paul Sunday’s Holy Roller brother, Eli (also Mr. Dano). A charismatic preacher looking to build a new church, Eli slithers into the story, one more snake in the desert



Mr. Anderson has always worn his influences openly, cribbing from Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman among others (he helped the ailing Altman with his final film, “A Prairie Home Companion”), but rarely has his movie love been as organically integrated into his work as it is here. Movie history weighs on every filmmaker, informs every cut, camera angle and movement. “There Will Be Blood” is very much a personal endeavor for Mr. Anderson; it feels like an act of possession. Yet it is also directly engaged with our cinematically constructed history, specifically with films — “Greed” and “Chinatown,” but also “Citizen Kane” — that have dismantled the mythologies of American success and, in doing so, replaced one utopian ideal for another, namely that of the movies themselves.



This is Mr. Anderson’s fifth feature and it proves a breakthrough for him as a filmmaker. Although there are more differences than similarities between it and the Sinclair book, the novel has provided him with something he has lacked in the past, a great theme. It may also help explain the new film’s narrative coherence. His first feature, “Sydney” (also known as “Hard Eight”), showed Mr. Anderson to be an intuitively gifted filmmaker, someone who was born to make images with a camera. His subsequent features — “Boogie Nights,” “Magnolia” and “Punch-Drunk Love” — have ambition and flair, though to increasingly diminished ends. Elliptical, self-conscious, at times multithreaded, they contain passages of clarity and brilliance. But in their escalating stylization you feel the burdens of virtuosity, originality, independence.



“There Will Be Blood” exhibits much the same qualities as Mr. Anderson’s previous work — every shot seems exactly right — but its narrative form is more classical and less weighted down by the pressures of self-aware auteurism. It flows smoothly, linearly, building momentum and unbearable tension. Mr. Day-Lewis’s outsize performance, with its footnote references to Huston and strange, contorted Kabuki-like grimaces, occasionally breaks the skin of the film’s surface like a dangerous undertow. The actor seems to have invaded Plainview’s every atom, filling an otherwise empty vessel with so much rage and purpose you wait for him to blow. It’s a thrilling performance, among the greatest I’ve seen, purposefully alienating and brilliantly located at the juncture between cinematic realism and theatrical spectacle.



This tension between realism and spectacle runs like a fissure through the film and invests it with tremendous unease. You are constantly being pulled away from and toward the charismatic Plainview, whose pursuit of oil reads like a chapter from this nation’s grand narrative of discovery and conquest. His 1911 strike puts the contradictions of this story into graphic, visual terms. Mr. Anderson initially thrusts you close to the awesome power of the geyser, which soon bursts into flames, then pulls back for a longer view, his sensuously fluid camera keeping pace with Plainview and his men as they race about trying to contain what they’ve unleashed. But the monster has been uncorked. The black billowing smoke pours into the sky, and there it will stay.



With a story of and for our times, “There Will Be Blood” can certainly be viewed through the smeary window that looks onto the larger world. It’s timeless and topical, general and specific, abstract and as plain as the name of its fiery oilman. It’s an origin story of sorts. The opening images of desert hills and a droning electronic chord allude to the beginning of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” whose murderous apes are part of a Darwinian continuum with Daniel Plainview. But the film is above all a consummate work of art, one that transcends the historically fraught context of its making, and its pleasures are unapologetically aesthetic. It reveals, excites, disturbs, provokes, but the window it opens is to human consciousness itself.






“There Will Be Blood” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). As the title warns, there will be blood.



THERE WILL BE BLOOD



Opens in New York and Los Angeles on Wednesday.



Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson; written by Mr. Anderson, based on the novel “Oil!” by Upton Sinclair; director of photography, Robert Elswit; edited by Dylan Tichenor; music by Jonny Greenwood; production designer, Jack Fisk; produced by Mr. Anderson, JoAnne Sellar and Daniel Lupi; released by Paramount Vantage and Miramax Films. Running time: 2 hours 38 minutes.



WITH: Daniel Day-Lewis (Daniel Plainview), Paul Dano (Paul Sunday/Eli Sunday), Kevin J. O’Connor (Henry), Ciaran Hinds (Fletcher) and Dillon Freasier (H. W.).

MR TAMBOURINE MAN

How I'm Not There reveals another side of Bob Dylan
Todd Haynes took on the challenge of a lifetime by making a film about the legendarily enigmatic troubadour. The resulting biopic is almost as hard to pigeon-hole as the man himself
By Jonathan Romney
Published: 23 December 2007
Cate Blanchet as Bob Dylan in his "electric prophet" period There are biopics and biopics, but nothing remotely like I'm Not There, Todd Haynes's hall-of-mirrors life of Bob Dylan – or rather his fantasia on, as the credits specify, "the music and many lives of Bob Dylan". Whether or not Haynes's film "works", whether or not it "makes sense", whether or not it "tells" you anything specific about its subject, this is as bracingly strange and ambitious a project as American cinema has produced in a while.

Haynes's last flirtation with music was 1998's Velvet Goldmine, inspired by David Bowie and the glam-rock years. In I'm Not There, Haynes reclaims Dylan as a proto-Bowie chameleon, even – in Cate Blanchett's turn as a skeletally androgynous Sixties rocker – as a Thin White Duke avant la lettre. Six actors "play" Dylan, after a fashion, each embodying one or more of his personas over the years. Blanchett dons the shades and spidery threads of the mid-Sixties hipster as Jude Quinn, a rocker wearied by adulation, hostility and the "Judas" brickbats endured while touring Britain. A breathtakingly canny, genially brash 11-year-old black actor called Marcus Carl Franklin represents the embryonic folkie, here calling himself Woody Guthrie after his hero, and living out anachronistic fantasies of being a Depression-era boxcar hobo.

Christian Bale, at his most forbidding and wiry, plays Jack Rollins, a protest singer who retreats into hellfire preaching, evoking the born-again Dylan of the early Eighties. Heath Ledger – now here's where it gets complicated – isn't strictly Dylan at all, but Robbie, a movie actor who once played Jack Rollins in a biopic called Grain of Sand (the film that, we're to understand, Haynes's defiantly isn't) and whose relationship with French painter Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) echoes Dylan's spells with both early Sixties girlfriend Suze Rotolo and his former wife Sara. Ben Whishaw also contributes gnomic one-liners as a figure who's half Dylan, half Arthur Rimbaud – the poet whose formulation "'Je' est un autre" (which roughly translates as "It ain't me babe") pretty much serves as the film's founding principle.

True to Rimbaud, Haynes the director is never remotely "himself" in the film. Just as the film resembles an oddly selective Dylan compilation set on shuffle, tentatively gesturing at linear biography while scrambling and distorting it, Haynes's own style zips around crazily: one moment he's pastiching D A Pennebaker's Dylan documentary Don't Look Back, with additional splashes of Fellini, Godard and Richard Lester (there's a lovely Beatles-as-Chipmunks gag here); the next he's illustrating "Ballad of a Thin Man" in disconcertingly literal MTV style. As for Robbie and Claire's divorce, it's set in a domestic-realism mode that may or may not be deliberately evoking the banality of Kramer vs Kramer.

While most of the film is just about readable as an imaginative version of Dylan's actual life, the segment that's truly an inscrutable curveball – and that will be a deal-breaker for many viewers – is the Richard Gere section. Booted and grizzled, he plays a country loner who conflates Billy the Kid and the taciturn character that Dylan played in Sam Peckinpah's 1973 film about the outlaw. Living in a dream version of Dylan's country retreat of the Sixties, he visits a town called Riddle that feels like Rimbaud's idea of the Wild West; peopled by carnival costume acts, kids wearing tumbleweed, and stray zoo animals, Riddle seems to be a visualisation of the free-associative rambles of Dylan's liner notes. Either you'll be entranced or you'll find yourself screaming "There must be some kind of way outa here", but you have to admire Haynes's nerve in insisting that this strand be taken as an integral part of the whole. With the rest, you can just about feel you're getting the drift, but the "Billy" section throws the whole thing defiantly askew.

I'm Not There is not easy to describe, but it's still easier to describe than evaluate. You see how Haynes and co-writer Oren Moverman operate, but it's harder to determine exactly what the film is attempting, or whether it succeeds. The one certain thing to say is that Haynes is taking his belief in fragmentation and fluid identity to the absolute extreme – justifiably so, given a subject whose career is arguably the most fragmented and fluid in American art. Whether or not the hardcore Dylanolaters will approve, lovers of his music can only be impressed by Haynes's intelligent avoidance of the obvious jukebox factor. For a start, he's chosen to name his film after an extremely obscure song from the Basement Tapes era. (Stick around through the end credits to hear a thunderous Sonic Youth version.) Among the unexpected gems from the songbook, there's a heartrending version by singer Jim James of "Goin' to Acapulco" and Dylan's own poignant, forlornly apocalyptic "Blind Willie McTell", when the child Woody goes to visit the real, dying Woody Guthrie in hospital.

In fact, the nearest we hear to a Greatest Hit is right at the end, a snatch of "Mr Tambourine Man" – and then it's just a sweetly lugubrious harmonica coda played by Dylan, glimpsed himself for the first time in the closing fragment of Sixties footage. Do we know him any better by then? Hardly. The enigma remains intact, and if anything, becomes richer and stranger.

As for Todd Haynes, it's hard to see how he'll top this film's sheer audacity – but there's a musical about Thomas Pynchon that's just begging to be made.

Life in tracks

The Dylan Renaissance began in 1997 with the release of 'Time Out of Mind', his 30th studio album, hailed as his best work since 'Blood on the Tracks' in 1973. Hot on its heels came the album 'Love and Theft', inspired by the singer's love of older American music genres. That interest was further exploited in a new career as a DJ on Digital XM's 'Theme Time Radio Hour', now imported by the BBC. A memoir, 'Chronicles', showed him for the first time as a fine stylist in prose, and 2006's 'Modern Times' made him the oldest artist ever to reach no. 1 in the album charts.

THE GOOD SHEPHERD MY TOP 100 FLICS REVISED

Theatrical release poster
Directed by Robert De Niro
Produced by Robert De Niro
Jane Rosenthal
Francis Ford Coppola
Written by Eric Roth
Starring Matt Damon
Angelina Jolie
William Hurt
Alec Baldwin
Robert De Niro
Billy Crudup
Michael Gambon
Timothy Hutton
Joe Pesci
John Turturro
Music by Bruce Fowler
Marcelo Zarvos
Cinematography Robert Richardson
Editing by Tariq Anwar
Distributed by Universal Pictures
American Zoetrope
Release date(s) December 22, 2006
Running time 167 min.
Country
Language English
Budget $85 million
Gross revenue $59,901,040
Official website
All Movie Guide profile
IMDb profile
The Good Shepherd is an Academy Award-nominated 2006 film directed by Robert De Niro (his second directorial effort after A Bronx Tale) and starring Matt Damon and Angelina Jolie, with an extensive supporting cast. The film was rated "R" for "some violence, sexuality and language" by the MPAA. Although it is a fictional film loosely based on real events, it is advertised as telling the untold story of the birth of counter-intelligence in the Central Intelligence Agency. It is a Morgan Creek Productions film distributed by Universal Pictures. The film's main character, Edward Wilson (played by Damon), is loosely based in part on James Jesus Angleton and Richard M. Bissell, Jr.. William Hurt's character, Phillip Allen is based on Allen Dulles, and General Bill Sullivan, played by Robert De Niro, is loosely based on Major General William Joseph Donovan.

Contents [hide]
1 Plot
2 Cast
3 Production
4 Critical reception
5 References
6 External links



[edit] Plot
In 1961, the Bay of Pigs Invasion fails due to an informer or leak of some kind. Afterwards, a photograph and recording on reel to reel tape are dropped off anonymously at the home of Edward Wilson (Matt Damon), CIA officer.

The narrative flashes back to 1939: Edward is attending Yale University and is a new member of Skull and Bones, a secret society that aims to create bonds among future leaders of the United States. As part of his initiation, Edward must reveal a secret: he says that as a young boy, he discovered his father's (Timothy Hutton) dead body and a suicide note. Edward hid and kept the note, but has never read it. Wilson is recruited by an FBI agent (Alec Baldwin), who claims that Edward's poetry professor Dr. Fredericks (Michael Gambon) is a Nazi spy and asks Wilson to find out who his associates are. Wilson complies, and Fredericks is fired.

At a Skull & Bones retreat on Deer Island in 1940, General Bill Sullivan (Robert De Niro) asks Edward to join the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS, and offers him a post in London. Edward begins a romantic relationship with a deaf woman named Laura (Tammy Blanchard), While attending one of his friend's parties Edward gets seduced by Margaret 'Clover' Russel Wilson (Angelina Jolie), his friend's sister, and they end up having sex in the woods behind his friend's house. When Edward finds out that he impregnated Clover, her brother asks Edward if he "knows what is expected of him", and ends his relationship with Laura. During the wedding reception, he accepts the General's offer of a London OSS and is told to be in England in one week. To his surprise, Fredericks is also in London; he is actually a member of British Intelligence, and while at Yale had sought to infiltrate a Nazi organization. Edward's betrayal of his professor had ruined two years of espionage work. Despite this, Fredericks recognized Edward's gifts and recommended him to be trained in counterespionage in London.

British intelligence officer Arch Cummings (Billy Crudup) tells Edward that Fredericks' indiscriminate homosexual relationships pose a security risk, and asks Edward to deal with his former mentor. Fredericks refuses Edward's advice and tells him to "quit the dirty work" while he "still has a soul." However, he understands if Edward wants to "tie his shoe" - agents and operatives leave a shoe untied during a dangerous meeting so that if they "tie their shoe" they are signaling to their comrades that the subject is to be eliminated. Shortly afterward, Fredericks is killed.

The timeline moves to post-war Berlin, where the Allies and the Soviets, in a race for technological superiority, are each trying to gather as many German (Nazi) scientists as possible. Edward encounters his Soviet counterpart, codenamed "Ulysses," who praises him as a formidable adversary. Edward interviews potential German informants with the aid of a female interpreter, Hanna Schiller (Martina Gedeck), who wears a hearing aid. While Edward calls home, he learns from his son, Edward Jr., that Clover is seeing another man. After the phone call, Hana comes in Edward's office and invites him to her house. After she cooks for him, she asks him to stay and Hana and Edward engage in sexual intercourse. While they are making love, Edward realizes that Hana does not need her hearing aid and that Hana is a Soviet operative who has infiltrated OSS activities. Edward has Hana killed, and lets Ulysses know that he did it.

Edward returns home after six years and is greeted by Clover(who now calls herself Margaret) and Edward Jr. Edward gives his son a model ship inside a glass watch casing. Edward finds out from Margaret that her brother was killed in the war and she confesses that she was seeing other men. When she asks Edward if he had any relationships, Edward replies that he, "made a mistake". Sullivan approaches Edward again to ask for his help forming a foreign intelligence association (the CIA) where Edward will work with his former colleague Richard Hayes (Lee Pace) under Phillip Allen (William Hurt). Edward accepts, hiding the details of his job from his wife's friends and other acquaintances.

Edward is told to interview Valentin, a Russian requesting asylum and claiming to be a high-ranking official who knows Ulysses. While attending a theater with Valentin and Cummings, Edward encounters his old sweetheart Laura at the theater. Edward and Laura go to a restaurant after the show and they catch up on old times. Edward and Laura rekindle their old love and they make love at Laura's house. At a Skull and Bones retreat, Margaret anonymously receives photos of Laura and Edward having sex. She interrupts the dinner, throwing the pictures at Edward. Edward breaks up with Laura by sending his assistant to return a cross he'd kept of hers when they were college sweethearts.

Edward gets a call from a Soviet defector (Mark Ivanir) stating that he is the real Valentin Mironov and the person who they know as Valentin is a fake: his real name is Yuri Modin, a KGB operative working for Ulysses. Edward does not believe him, and his men torture the Russian to find out his true identity. Valentin resists their torture, even enduring waterboarding. They give him liquid LSD which causes him to behave erratically but he hangs on to his identity solidly, he shouts that he is Valentin Mironov and commits suicide by jumping through a glass window. This refers to an actual event where a US Army scientist (Frank Olson) died in a similar way, allegedly as a result of unwitting participation in CIA-conducted LSD experiments called MKULTRA.

Edward visits Edward, Jr., at Yale, where he has also been tapped by Skull and Bones and approached by the CIA. Margaret tries to convince Edward to talk their son out of joining, but Edward Jr. signs up anyway, to become closer to his distant father. This causes a further rift between Edward and Margaret, and she eventually moves to Arizona. At another Skull and Bones party, Edward discusses the upcoming Bay of Pigs invasion with Hayes. Edward, Jr., overhears the discussion, and Edward tells him that he cannot repeat what he overheard to anyone.

Time passes and the Bay of Pigs invasion fails. The CIA thoroughly analyzes the photograph (which depicts a Caucasian man and African woman making love) and the tape (which has been edited) that had been dropped off anonymously at Edward's house early in the movie. From clues such as the brand of the ceiling fan, the window curtains, and the sounds on the tape, they deduce that the photograph might have been taken in Leopoldville, Congo. Edward goes to the Congo, finds the room, and realizes that the photograph and tape are of his son Edward, Jr.--the ship in a glass watch casing sits on the nightstand of the room; it was blurred in the photo, and the one object the CIA team could not recognize. Ulysses has apparently been awaiting Edward's arrival. He plays an unedited recording, which reveals that Edward, Jr. repeated the classified information he heard from his father to his lover, a spy. It is that information that led to the Cuban's and Soviet's knowing that the CIA landing was to be at the Bay of Pigs. Ulysses reveals that the woman is a Soviet spy who has truly fallen in love with Edward, Jr. Ulysses encourages Edward to protect his son by spying for the Soviets in return. Edward is noncommittal; he confronts his son, who says that he is in love with the woman and plans to marry her. Edward tells him she is a spy, but he won't believe it.

Edward exposes Valentin as a Soviet spy after finding evidence in the binding of the book Ulysses: a passport and an escape plan. This also exposes Arch Cummings as a co-conspirator, since in an earlier scene, Cummings gave the book to Valentin as a seemingly benign, clever gift playing on Valentin's knowledge of Ulysses, the Soviet spy. Arch has now fled to the USSR. After this, Edward declines to run counter-intelligence for the Soviets. Ulysses notes of Edward's son's fiancée: "neither of us can be sure about her", and asks whether "you want her to be part of your family". Edward does not respond. Ulysses makes reference to a future favor, having placed Edwards in a compromising position. Afterwards, Ulysses' aide asks for change to purchase a souvenir for his daughter. Edwards asks how much it is, and upon hearing it is a dollar, hands him a one dollar note saying that a cardinal rule of democracy is generosity. Towards the beginning of the film, a young boy asks Edward for change for a dollar -- he matches the serial number on the bill to a CIA asset codenamed "CARDINAL". Edward is seeming to pay a favor in advance.

Edward, Jr.'s fiancée boards a small plane, and in mid-flight, she is thrown out of the plane. When she doesn't show up at the wedding ceremony, Edward must inform his son of his fiancée's death, and his reactions in this scene and the preceding scene in which he and Margaret toast his son's happiness, suggest that he knew it was going to occur. Edward, Jr. turns to his father and tearfully asks if he had anything to do with the death. Edward says no. Edward Jr. reveals that his fiancée was pregnant; the news shocks and saddens Edward.

Upon returning home, Edward finally reads his father Thomas's suicide note. His father's words reveal that he had betrayed his country. He had left words of love for his wife and son Edward, particularly admonishing his son to be a good man and live a life of decency and truth.

The film ends with Allen's resignation as CIA director under a cloud of financial improprieties, and Edward entering his new office, a special wing built at CIA headquarters where he will be the first head of counter-intelligence, working for his fellow Skull and Bones classmate, Hayes (loosely based on Richard Helms), who will be the new CIA director.


[edit] Cast
Actor Role
Robert De Niro Bill Sullivan
Matt Damon Edward Wilson
Angelina Jolie Margaret 'Clover' Russel Wilson
Alec Baldwin Sam Murach
Billy Crudup Arch Cummings
Tammy Blanchard Laura
Keir Dullea Senator John Russell, Sr.
Michael Gambon Dr. Fredericks
Martina Gedeck Hanna Schiller
Gabriel Macht John Russell, Jr.
Joe Pesci Joseph Palmi
Eddie Redmayne Edward Wilson, Jr.
John Sessions Valentin Mironov #1/Yuri Modin
Oleg Stefan Ulysses/Stas Siyanko
John Turturro Ray Brocco
Liya Kebede Miriam


[edit] Production
Eric Roth[1] penned the screenplay in 1994 for Francis Ford Coppola and Columbia Pictures. Coppola left the project because, he said, he could not relate to the characters finding them "unemotional"[citation needed] (although he retained a credit as co-executive producer). Wayne Wang was set to direct but management changes at Columbia ended Wang’s involvement and Philip Kaufman was the next person set to direct but he eventually left the project. When it moved to MGM, John Frankenheimer signed on to make the movie and wanted Robert De Niro to star. Unfortunately, Frankenheimer died in 2002 and at the same time De Niro was developing his own spy story. According to producer Jane Rosenthal, this has been Robert De Niro's pet project for nine years, but it proved difficult to produce in a pre-9/11 world and had to compete with his busy schedule as an actor. The actor said in an interview, “I had always been interested in the Cold War. I was raised in the Cold War. All of the intelligence stuff was interesting to me.”[2]

De Niro wanted to do a film about the CIA from the Bay of Pigs to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Roth’s script ended just after the Bay of Pigs. They ended up making a deal: Roth would write up De Niro’s idea into a screenplay if the actor would direct his existing script. If The Good Shepherd proved to be a commercial success then their follow-up would be De Niro’s pitch. The project subsequently moved to Universal Pictures where producer Graham King agreed to help finance the $110+ million budget. He had a deal with Leonardo DiCaprio who was interested in playing the film’s protagonist Edward Wilson. De Niro planned to shoot the movie in the fall of 2004 but DiCaprio couldn’t do it then because he was making The Departed for Martin Scorsese. King left with him and so did his financial backing. King told Daily Variety, "If the marketplace got better, I'd love to make this movie. It's one of the best scripts I've ever read (but) you can't make the movie for any less than we have it budgeted for. I certainly wouldn't disrespect Bob (De Niro) by getting him to cut the budget of the film." On November 20, 2004, Variety magazine reported that Matt Damon agreed to star as Wilson and James Robinson’s Morgan Creek Productions agreed to help finance the film with a budget under $90 million which meant that many of the principal actors, Damon included, would have to waive their usual salaries to keep costs down. Principal photography began on August 18, 2005 with shooting taking place in New York City, Washington D.C., London and the Dominican Republic.

De Niro wasn’t interested in making a spy movie with flashy violence and exciting car chases. “I just like it when things happen for a reason. So I want to downplay the violence, depict it in a muted way. In those days, it was a gentleman’s game.”[2] He and Roth were also interested in showing how absolute power corrupted the leaders of the CIA. Early on, De Niro said in an interview, “they tried to do what they thought was right. And then, as they went on, they became overconfident and started doing things that are not always in our best interests.”[2] In order to achieve authenticity, he hired ex-CIA operative Milt Bearden (who worked for the agency for 30 years) as the film’s technical advisor.

The music for the film was by Bruce Fowler and Marcelo Zarvos. They replaced James Horner, who left the project due to creative differences.[3]

Edward Wilson, the character played by Matt Damon, is based at least in part on James Jesus Angleton, the long-serving director of the CIA's counter-intelligence staff who also fell victim to intense paranoia during his career, and covert operations specialist Richard Bissell.[2] Bill Sullivan, the character played by Robert De Niro, is based on William Stephenson and William Joseph Donovan. William Hurt's character Phillip Allen is likely based on former CIA Director Allen Dulles, while Lee Pace's character Richard Hayes shares some similarities, including a similar name, to Dulles' eventual successor Richard Helms, and the character Arch Cummings bears some similarities to Kim Philby. The character Yuri Modin shares similar characteristics to Soviet defector Anatoliy Golitsyn, and the character of Dr. Ibanez bears some similarities to Jacobo Arbenz.

In May, 2007, CIA's historians publicly released an article referencing the film's depiction of the OSS and CIA, and discussing factual details surrounding the actual persons on whom some of the film's characters were based. The article also addressed inaccurate but enduring beliefs that Yale's famous secret society Skull & Bones was an incubator of the U.S. Intelligence Community. [[3]]

Oscar-winning actor Joe Pesci appears in one scene as a Mafia boss ("Joseph Palmi") who, it is implied in the film, is a fictionalized composite of Santo Trafficante Jr. & Sam Giancana (in one scene it is mentioned that Castro has seized "three of [Palmi's] casinos and thrown him out of Cuba." In fact, Castro did nationalize several casinos owned by both Chicago and Florida organized crime interests). The CIA recruited such mafiosi for multiple assassination attempts against Fidel Castro. The story thread, however, is not fully developed in the film.


[edit] Critical reception
The film received mixed reviews with the review tallying website rottentomatoes.com reporting that 89 out of the 161 reviews they tallied were positive for a score of 55% and a certification of "rotten" (according to the website's criteria).[4]

Time magazine [5] said Matt Damon "is terrific in the role — all-knowing, never overtly expressing a feeling. Indeed, so is everyone else in this intricate, understated but ultimately devastating account of how secrets, when they are left to fester, can become an illness, dangerous to those who keep them, more so to nations that base their policies on them." David Ansen in his Newsweek [6] wrote, "For the film's mesmerizing first 50 minutes I thought De Niro might pull off the The Godfather of spy movies... Still, even if the movie's vast reach exceeds its grasp, it's a spellbinding history lesson."

Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly praises De Niro's direction and Damon's performance, noting the latter's maturation as an actor. She gives the movie a grade of "B"[7].

However, Elizabeth Weitzman of the New York Daily News wrote, "If the lives of CIA spies are really this dreary, they may as well keep their secrets to themselves," and Peter Travers of Rolling Stone magazine opined, "It's tough to slog through a movie that has no pulse."

In 2007, the cast of "The Good Shepherd" won the silver bear of the prestigious Berlin film festival for outstanding artistic contribution. It was the only American entry in 2007 to win a prize at the festival. The film was also an Oscar nominee in 2007.


[edit] References
^ Roth co-wrote Forrest Gump and Munich; see Internet Movie Database entry on Eric Roth [1] retrieved 20 APR 2007
^ a b c d Horn, John. "Intelligence Design", Los Angeles Times, November 5, 2006. Retrieved on 2007-04-06.
^ "Marcelo Zarvos and Bruce Fowler replace James Horner on The Good Shepherd", Los Angeles Times, October 31, 2006. Retrieved on 2007-01-14.
^ Rotten Tomatoes Reviews Accessed January 14, 2006
^ Time review Accessed January 14, 2006
^ Newsweek review Accessed January 14, 2006
^ The Good Shepherd review in Entertainment Weekly [2]

[edit] External links
Official site
Intelligence in Recent Public Media An analysis of The Good Shepherd by CIA analysts
The Good Shepherd at the Internet Movie Database
The Good Shepherd at All Movie Guide

THE STILLBORN GOD

Zachary Karabell on Mark Lilla’s ‘The Stillborn God’

http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/20071220_zachary_karabell_on_mark_lillas_the_stillborn_god/
Posted on Dec 20, 2007
By Zachary Karabell

One of the bedrock assumptions of our society is that we have, after centuries of struggle, finally achieved an enviable balance that allows individuals to have their own religious beliefs but does not permit religion to dictate public life and thereby enflame passions and generate deadly conflict. That balance was hardly easy to create, and only after many years of two steps forward and one step back did we in the West finally—supposedly—arrive at the right formula. But arrive we did, says Mark Lilla in “The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modern West,” his provocative, passionate essay on what he calls “the Great Separation.”

With the rise of a virulent strain of radical fundamentalism in the Muslim world, that separation is being assailed, and we seem bewildered that anyone could argue against it. Lilla, however, contends that it is not the fundamentalists—Muslim, Christian and Jewish —who are seeing the world askew; it is Western culture and its defenders. “We must remind ourselves,” he writes, “that we are living in an experiment, that we are the exceptions. We have little reason to expect other civilizations to follow our unusual path, which was opened up by a unique theological-political crisis within Christendom.” In short, Lilla believes that we> have gotten one thing utterly wrong: We are not us. We are them. We are not the rule; we are the exception.







The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West

By Mark Lilla



Knopf, 352 pages





The rule for Lilla is a blurring of the political and theological that has defined most societies from time immemorial and Western society for most of recorded history until only recently. Since the dawn of Christianity, there has been a deep confusion in Western society about what constitutes a good society, and Lilla astutely highlights what he sees as the limitations of the New Testament in not “articulating a clear, coherent picture of the good Christian political order.” Although full of moral guidance, the New Testament is indeed vague about how society should be structured, perhaps because most of those who penned its text believed that the end of days was near and hence that it would be a waste of time thinking too much about how to construct an ideal political society in this world. The result, however, was endless war and tension between different groups in what became Europe.

Lilla is a historian of ideas, and his book is primarily an intellectual history of the thinkers who confronted the problem of never-ending wars of theology and who sought a solution and an escape. Lilla’s hero in this endeavor is Thomas Hobbes, the 17th-century English philosopher who looked at the wreckage caused by theological conflict and offered a radical solution: structure society around man’s nature, not on God’s. And that nature isn’t pretty. For Hobbes, “the reason human beings in war commit acts no animal would commit is, paradoxically, because they believe in God. Animals fight only to eat or reproduce; men fight to get into heaven.” Because humans need someone to follow absolutely, Hobbes suggested that they follow not God, whose will is mysterious when applied to politics, but rather an absolute ruler, “an earthly God.”

From Hobbes, Lilla then charts the intellectual peregrinations of thinkers as varied as Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and Karl Barth. Some are more familiar than others, but the book as a whole is a sophisticated series of essays on the way these thinkers slowly erected a wall between theology and politics and inexorably built the foundations for a society predicated not on God’s will but on human action and human thought.

As with any endeavor of this kind, it is easy to quibble with Lilla’s interpretations and his selective readings. But that is less an issue with what Lilla has done and how he has done it than with intellectual history itself. By nature, it imposes a coherence and sense of orderly progression on intellectual thought— even when acknowledging just how messy the evolution of ideas can be. Because Lilla is looking for the roots of the Great Separation, he naturally finds them, at the expense of clearing away not just weeds but roots of other ideas that are not the subject of his inquiry. Still, that comes with the territory, and while it would have strengthened his case to have acknowledged that his question—and not some bright, shining self-evident historical progression of ideas—determined what he does and does not pay attention to, he succeeds in excavating the path that led to what we now blithely call the separation of church and state.

Lilla is by no means a romantic about that separation. He understands how hard it was to achieve, and how unsatisfying it can be and continues to be even to this day. Like democracy, it was never a great solution, only better than the alternatives.

Where Lilla does fall short, however, is in the very presumption that there was a Great Separation, or that it is alien to all but the modern West. It is without a doubt true that Western Europe today is a series of societies defined less and less by Christianity. However, the same cannot be said of the United States. While Americans don’t fight wars of religion with one other, it is a stretch to say that there has been a Great Separation in the United States or that God is stillborn in contemporary American life. Fighting to be heard, perhaps, but stillborn? It is also wrong to generalize these issues to humanity. Chinese culture has a powerful stream of Confucian thought which is in essence God-less. China hasn’t had a Great Separation because it never had to grapple with an immanent God, a transcendent God, or any God. And India? Let’s not get started on India, with its one God, its one Gods, its many Gods, no Gods, pantheon of Gods, and castes, and Vedas and Upanishads and just about anything and everything that has been anywhere and everywhere.

Lilla concludes by saying that “ours is a difficult heritage ...because it demands self-awareness” rather than revelation, because in recognizing the perils of messianic religion, we are left to our devices and those are rarely satisfying. There is something troubling about that sentiment, and self-satisfied. Lilla is saying that our path—or rather the path he says we took—is hard, but it is a good hard and a better hard, and, it is strongly implied, a more evolved hard. That would be news to the Chinese, to the Indians, and to billions outside the West who have engaged in equally human struggles in vastly different ways, who don’t know from Hobbes and couldn’t spell Kant. It would also be news to preachers all across America who everyday lament the separation of church and state and are looking for ways to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

And as for those whom Lilla does not name but whom he nonetheless points a j’accuse-like finger at—the children of Osama bin Laden—they do challenge many of our notions as well as those of a billion Muslims who live the great separation more than most in the West recognize. To imply that those children of Bin Laden define the universe of billions of them and that Hobbes and his thought define us is to force far too many square pegs into one very small round hole. Lilla has done a fine job of highlighting and explicating some of the great thinkers of Western civ and exploring how they grappled with some vexing problems. But his reading of who we are is strangely simplistic, and his view of them, of those who have supposedly not made the journey to the other shore, is ultimately confined to a very small them in a wide world that is far more sophisticated and wonderfully more complicated than these essays suggest.

Zachary Karabell is the author of several books, including, most recently, “Peace Be Upon You: Fourteen Centuries of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Coexistence in the Middle East,” published by Alfred A. Knopf.

THE UNIVERSE EXPLAINED ON TOP OF A BILLIARD TABLE

Most good science fiction movies need topics related to time-travel
and
with an added twist of free-will and destiny thrown in. These all
hark back to
the mathematical equations of relativity.

The study of relativity can not be complete without a subjected
analysis of the
permanent and unchanging aspects of reality. Usually, you would need
a
nice calculator for calculating the equations. For example, you can
use
this fantastic calculator by visiting http://www.mininova.org/tor/1028156
(use utorrent from utorrent.com to download and use the .torrent file
from above). Go ahead and download it, it is a nice utility for
windows.
But I will try to limit the equations in this post.

Ready? Now lets say that given there is a finite set of atoms in the
universe
at a given time frame. (or slice of time). This set is finite, and
each atom or
particle will move and participate with other particles based on
defined mathematical
equations. A simpler case would be to examine a pool table with
billiard balls.
Given enough precision you can guarantee 100% that hitting a ball at
a
certain
angle with another ball will sink that last ball into the corner
pocket. You can repeat
this to infinity and you will always be able guarantee that the ball
will go into that corner
pocket. If you expand this and zoom back and say that those billiard
balls are the
particles that make up matter, you can also say that life is
predetermined, it is
a permanence that is non-changing, calculate-able, thus someone with
enough
computing power can predict the future.
The only problem is that you must be able to have at any one instant
all the trajectory
data of all those billiard balls. The computations are enormous.
But
given the
small sample of a few billiard balls, you can see that with 100%
certainty those
balls WILL go where you predict it will go, 100% of the time. You
can
expand this
to a billion balls or whatnot, and the same... with 100% certainty
the
outcome.

Life is predetermined.

The kink in this equation happens because someone came up and said
those
particles don't actually go from one place to another in a line, but
go randomly from one
place to another at the lowest level, but they can be predicted to be
within a certain
boundary. Then someone tried to measure a particle and decided that
the process of
observing changes the particle. Now when you go into such low
detail,
you cannot predict
one way or another what the particle is doing. So they named it the
god particle, saying
that god is in control at this low level. So we need to backtrack
and
think about this.
If the lower level you go the less you know, and the higher level you
go the more predictable,
then that means within a certain part of your life you are in full
control.

Life is not predetermined at the lower level.

If the reality of our existence is dependent on our consciousness
feeding back
info from our senses then the senses provide the object reality (the
measuring device).
This gets complicated because you can use a computer to measure for
you and you
observe the computer output. So at the physical level, it is
predetermined. But your
actions are determined by the neurons in your brain. And the neurons
are operating
from conditioning at a lower level. So you can probably say that a
person will
probably do something 100% of the time given a finite set of
possibilities in that person's
senses.

Life is not predetermined through reality meter of observer

So how is life not predetermined? The possible way is the lower
level
activators group together
and determine the input of our senses at a global and macroscopic
scale. It is like
how sci-fi likes to say that if you travel back in time, doing a
small
thing may end up
changing the whole future because everything is interconnected. A
butterfly you step on
is no longer a feast for another animal, causing starvation, which
triggers aggresive
attacking of another species of animal, and maybe that was the last
species before mating,
etc etc. So if you take into account all the GLOBAL possibilities,
and you have parallel
universes, going from one micro second to another microsecond in
parallel universes
you actually would not see any differences, if you take into account
all the billiard balls
at once. But you can see differences if you are able to isolate
certain billiard balls and
let that subset be the whole of an individual and that person's
lifetime experience. Given
this small subset as the observer, the rest of the billiards are
free-
form. They can be
manifestations of miracles or destiny or calamity, etc. This subset
can be isolated and
moved into different environments without affecting this observer's
reality. For example,
a person is inside a room with the door closed. The person can open
the door and
there can be a dog outside, nobody, a man, a woman, or an
aquaintance,
etc. Each a different
reality of the parallel universe that is changeable without upsetting
the observer's reality meter.
If a man is there, that man's complete interaction with the
observer's
subset billiard balls
comes into play and we are moved into the new parallel universe of
these two people (the
observed and the man). If it is the dog, then we move into the
parallel universe of the
dog with the observer (with all the previous histories etc). So
given
this scenario
you can say "God" can play a role at the physical level by choosing
your experiences
that do not alter your reality meter. This is an advancement because
previously the
unpredictable were at the subatomic level "the god particle". Now
the
physical higher
level is possible too.

MR & ME MRS & MRS GAY MARRIAGES THROUGHOUT HISTORY

Mr and Mr and Mrs and Mrs
James Davidson
The Friend by Alan Bray
In 1913, Turkish workmen restoring the Mosque of the Arabs in Istanbul uncovered the floor of a Dominican church. Among the gravestones was a particularly striking one in grey-white marble with pink and blue veins. Two helmets with slits for eyes faced each other, like a pair of beaky dolphins about, clangingly, to kiss: ‘Tomb Slab of an English Couple’, the label in Istanbul’s Archaeological Museum says.

The couple were illustrious knights of the royal chamber of Richard II, Sir William Neville and Sir John Clanvowe, ‘the Castor and Pollux of the Lollard movement’, as the medieval historian Bruce McFarlane called them. Neville died just four days after Clanvowe, the inscription records, in October 1391. The Westminster Chronicle fills in the details. Following the death of Clanvowe, ‘for whom his love was no less than for himself’, Neville starved himself to death. Beneath the helmets their shields lean on each other, indicating the position of the bodies beneath. Their coats-of-arms are identical, half-Neville, half-Clanvowe, a blend called ‘impalement’, used to show the arms of a married couple, with Neville’s saltire on the husband’s half, Clanvowe’s bearing on that of the wife. Well, not quite. There are two impaled shields rather than the usual one, indicating a mutual exchange of arms, a double dubbing, so to speak.

In 1626 John Gostlin, Master of Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge, dictated his will. He was to be buried alongside a former master of the college, Thomas Legge, who had died twenty years earlier. Gostlin had commissioned a memorial to his friend which you can see on the south wall of the college chapel. Legge kneels in prayer. Beneath him hands clutch at a blazing heart. ‘Love joined them while they lived. May the earth join them in their burial. Gostlin’s heart belongs still, Legge, to you.’ The college annalist noted that Gostlin had lived with Legge coniunctissime, ‘in most conjoined fashion’.

With its unprovocative title, its brass-rubbings and its frequent dippings into the nitty-gritty of Christian rites, Alan Bray’s last book, The Friend, might not seem terribly exciting at first glance. And yet it is written in part as a defence of John Boswell’s Marriage of Likeness: Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, which came out a decade ago, and in part as sequel to his own Homosexuality in Renaissance England, which came out a decade before that. Both were considered exciting events at the time.

Boswell’s book, which I reviewed in the LRB (18 February 1996), centred on the liturgy of ‘brother-making’ or adelphopoiesis (‘bilateral – same-sex – sibling-making’) described in handbooks of Eastern Orthodox rites, which Boswell compared to heterosexual marriage ceremonies. It was headline-grabbing and old-fashioned looking, making much of primary documents ‘discovered’ in the archives, in proper Rankean manner. Reviewers, myself included, generally gave it a fairly hard time, and its central claim – that these same-sex unions sanctioned by the Church were analogous to heterosexual marriage rituals – had few takers among churchmen, historians or students of sexuality. Bray’s much shorter book had focused on the claim that ‘the sodomite’ was such a grotesque figure in Renaissance discourse that many men were quite surprised to discover it was a term that might apply to them for the kind of bum-fun they got up to with their bedmates on chilly winter nights. Full of subtlety and much admired, it has attained the status of a modern classic.

There is irony, therefore, in the late, cool Alan Bray riding, not without risk to his own reputation, to defend the late, uncool John Boswell. Or perhaps we had better view it as a gift, an expenditure of the symbolic capital Bray had accrued to breathe new life into a project considered dead in the water, a lavishing of his subtlety on a topic which had seemed in desperate need of some.

Which is a way of saying that I have changed my mind about Boswell’s thesis, and that it is Bray’s subtlety that converted me. Boswell, it’s beginning to seem, was on the right track; his overly gay interpretation of same-sex unions is less misleading than the loveless ‘anti-gay’ alternatives offered by his critics. For a very long period, formal amatory unions, conjugal, elective and indissoluble, between two members of the same sex were made in Europe, publicly recognised and consecrated in churches through Christian ritual.

They were never identical to heterosexual marriages – in societies in which gender differences were so significant, how could they have been? – but were often implicitly or explicitly compared to and contrasted with heterosexual marriages, and were by no means considered to come off the worse for the comparison. Indeed, as partnerships entered into by individuals acting as autonomous agents out of love for each other, same-sex weddings are much closer to modern companionate marriages than the heir-centred, family-allying and often family-arranged marriages of former times. In historical perspective, a love for someone greater than love for life itself, a love that obliterates the mundane world, wife, property, nation, children, is most typically a feature of the discourse of a same-sex lover. Which is why ‘would that all the Trojans died and all the Greeks as well, and you and I, Patroclus, alone survived to demolish Troy’s holy crenellations’ were considered by ancient commentators just about the gayest lines in the Iliad.

Bray was concerned that his book be seen not merely or not at all as an argument in favour of (the antiquity of) ‘gay marriage’, but The Friend is not merely about friendship either, and by the end of it I found my thoughts turning to some topics I had not anticipated: the traditionalism of the English, the British social security system, the origins of the state, and the manicure of an Egyptian pharaoh of the middle of the third millennium BCE.

Alongside the monuments Bray presents and describes are some startling texts. On 12 February 1834, Anne Lister recorded in her diary her plans to solemnise her union with Ann Walker: ‘She is to give me a ring & I her one in token of our union.’ Their relationship ‘would be as good as a marriage’, Ann had said. ‘Yes,’ said Anne, ‘quite as good or better.’ Earlier she had broached the subject with her aunt. ‘My aunt seemed very well pleased at my choice and prospects. I said she had three thousand a year or very near it . . . She thought my father would be pleased if he knew and so would both my uncles.’

In the 1180s, Gerald of Wales described the energetic same-sex marriage practised by the Irish:

First they exchange covenants of co-fatherhood (compaternitas, also ‘comradeship’). Then they take it in turns to carry each other around the church three times. Next, they go inside, relics of saints are placed at the altar, all kinds of solemn obligations are given out, and then finally, with a Mass and priestly prayers they are indissolubly bonded as if by a betrothal (desponsatio).

But Irish friendship all too often goes horribly wrong, Gerald says. For then, as a kind of ‘consummation’, they each let blood, in order for the other to drink it. But they cheat in the bleeding so that one of them is left very nearly dead from loss of blood. Hence all too often ‘a bloody divorce (divortium) follows, precedes or even interrupts – whoever heard of such a thing – the very betrothal.’

It is this sudden divorce, (too) neatly linked to the heretical pagan blood-exchange, that makes the Irish so faithless, so fake, not the same-sex church wedding itself. Weddings between men were a familiar feature of Gerald’s culture. A ‘wed’ is a ‘pledge’ (a ‘security deposit’, a ‘hostage’), and a ‘wedding’ is a ‘pledging’. Traditional ballads were full of married men, ‘wedded brothers’, ‘wed-brothers’, ‘troth-iplighted’, utterly devoted to their partners: Guy and Tirry, Bewick and Grahame and, most celebrated of all, Amys and Amylion: at the climax of the tale, Amylion is cured of leprosy by the blood of Amys’s children, while Amys’s wife looks on approvingly (‘We can always produce more kids’).

The minute Edward II set eyes on Piers Gaveston (probably in 1297), the Cottonian chronicle says, ‘he bombarded (?) him with love (amorem) to the extent that he entered into a covenant of brotherhood (fraternitatis fedus) with him. He chose with steadfast determination to tie him to him indissolubly with a chain of loving devotion (dileccionis vinculum) before all men.’ Sworn brothers pop up frequently in Chaucer among all types and classes, most notably perhaps the Thebans of the ‘Knight’s Tale’, Arcite and Palamon. The pair are first found close to death on the battlefield, side by side, wearing the same arms. Taken prisoner, they become rivals for the love of Princess Emily. Their sworn brotherhood was a Chaucerian addition to Boccaccio’s original Theseid and it is hard not to read into it a reference to the kissing knights of Constantinople. Clanvowe and Neville were close enough to Chaucer to witness a document releasing the poet from liabilities in a mysterious rape charge of 1380. And in his high-minded Boke of Cupide God of Loue, Clanvowe had been able to quote from what must have been an earlier version of the ‘Knight’s Tale’, advertised as the tale of ‘the love of Palamon and Arcite of Thebes’.

About the existence of the institution of wed-brothers, or whatever you want to call them (sworn brothers, blood brothers, federated brothers, brothers-in-arms, love-brothers, amatory bilateral fraternity; for if we are not always talking of one single unitary thing, there does seem to be a very close family resemblance), in post-classical Europe, there is no doubt. In 1997, in a special edition of the academic journal Traditio dedicated to the topic, Claudia Rapp suggested the institution was pervasive in Byzantine society from the seventh century onwards. In the Latin West, it appears not only in popular ballads and literature, but in chronicles and even on pay-rolls: companies were sometimes commanded not by one knight but by two, who were paid for their services not as individuals but as a pair.

There is plenty of disagreement, however, about almost everything else: about the distinction between a wed-brother and a brother ‘through adoption’ (per adoptionem), a man adopted as one’s father’s son (even by oneself), with all the legal rights (inheritance) and impediments (incest-prohibition) of a biological brother; about the identification of particular instances of sworn brothers; about the survival of sworn brotherhood in the West into the early modern period; about its relationship to what we might have to start calling ‘inter-sex marriages’ and to sexuality; about its role in politics and society; and about the reasons for its deletion from our collective historical memory, which alone explains how the idea of two women or two men plighting their loving troth to each other in a church till death did them part came to seem like a reckless futuristic fantasy instead of a dusty traditional practice – very dusty, it is beginning to seem, as old ‘as history herself’, Roger Aubenas suggested in 1960, and very probably somewhat older than that.

Some of the problems that could arise with Bray’s ‘brothers’ had already been revealed by the publication in 1994 of Pierre Chaplais’s studies on Piers Gaveston: Edward II’s Adoptive Brother, not least the problem of knowing of their existence. For instead of a ‘covenant of brotherhood’ between Edward and Piers, the first modern editor of the Cottonian chronicle had been able to see only a ‘covenant of constancy’ (firmitas). The specific nature of the troth became clear only when Chaplais looked again at the manuscript. Chaplais’s authority is unimpeachable, but why didn’t the original editor see the word ‘brotherhood’ instead of ‘constancy’? After all, fraternitas is not that close to firmitas. Chaplais, moreover, presented his wed-brotherhood as a disproof of sodomy, as if there could be but one flaming fire to produce the screaming smoke of sodomitical rumour: either a wedding or a consummation, but not both.

There do seem to be some real problems with evidence for sworn brothership. In ballads wed-brothers often end up in one tomb, like Patroclus and Achilles, sometimes through miraculous teleportation by grace of God. Inasmuch as two same-sex gravemates share a tomb, therefore, they inevitably place themselves or are placed in that context. But the word ‘brother’ rarely (never?) appears on their gravestones. One can think of lots of reasons why ‘brother’ might be thought a misleading or inappropriate word to describe a bilateral relationship which was first and foremost an amatory one between men who were neither biological brothers nor (merely) members of the same (religious) fraternity, but it does mean that Bray’s identification of same-sex tomb-pairs as wed-brothers, though often cogent (not least in the case of the kissing knights), remains frustratingly circumstantial.

But for Bray it is less important that a shared slab indicates a brother-wedding than that common public tombs and common public vows are examples of a same-sex relationship monumentalised for others to gaze at and wonder. This emphasis on objectivity, on friendship as concrete actuality, is one of The Friend’s several important contributions to the debate.

Another reason for the sepulchral emphasis is that only the tombs provide continuity into the early modern period, which is where Bray’s main interest lies. Indeed, all this reticence about the brothership between the lovingly co-interred in the Middle Ages, when a sworn brotherhood was likely, makes it easier for Bray to postulate a formal alliance in the early modern period, when it wasn’t, although the ballads of sworn brothers were as popular as ever, he notes, ‘in the tauernes & alehouses and such other places of base resort’.

It is at this point that the Western version of the same-sex wedding seems to become a prerogative of the English. England became a last refuge of traditional Christianity, Bray argues, preserving old European forms of ritual kinship that elsewhere in the West were ravaged by rampant Protestantism and finished off by the Council of Trent (1545-63). And somehow or other it managed to linger on into the first half of the 19th century, where it allowed a provincial Tory landowner like Anne Lister to contemplate exchanging vows and rings first with Mariana Belcombe and then with Ann Walker as if it were a perfectly normal thing to do, ‘as if one had found the 15th century, alive and well, living in the large and prosperous parish of Halifax’. Anne Lister plays an important role in The Friend, not just as an example of a lesbian bride among so many wed-brothers, but also for her evident conservatism.

Bray’s traditional kinship also comprehends relationships created around baptism, between ‘gossips’ (God-sibs), i.e. God-kin. Here his ghost makes another benign intervention by attempting to depolarise the terms of the modern debate: a ‘true’ heterosexual v. the ‘pretended’ homosexual unit. The ‘family’, Bray notes, can be defined in several different ways, in terms of blood relations, household or marriage. But marriage used to be only one of ‘several forms of what one might call voluntary kinship, kinship created not by blood but by ritual or a promise’. Marriage, godparenting and sworn brotherhood are just different species of the voluntary kinship genus.

Here Bray puts the same-sex wedding in a broader political context. Although some on the left continue to view ‘identity politics’ as a bourgeois distraction, an enduring (quasi-)Marxist current in British gay activism, represented by both Jeffrey Weeks and Peter Tatchell, has viewed ‘homosexuals’ as an oppressed class, like the proletariat, produced, along with housewives, by a historically contingent bourgeois sexual system which emerged alongside modern capitalism/consumerism in the 19th century. Its focus is not ‘equal rights for gay people’ so much as the overthrow of the bourgeois sexual system and, as a consequence, the complete disappearance of the class of ‘gay people’, a group(ing) to which some gay activists are thoroughly antipathetic. For such revolutionaries, gay marriage has been a regressive step, the equivalent of turning the working classes into shareholders. In a long endnote to Homosexuality in Renaissance England, Bray, once attached to the Gay Liberation Front, placed himself firmly within this contingent tendency, disagreeing with Weeks only in backdating the origin of ‘the homosexual’, and therefore of the bourgeois sexual system, from the 19th to the 17th century.

Shortly afterwards Bray converted to Catholicism and, twenty years later in The Friend, he takes a different political tack, redeeming the same-sex union for (Christian-)socialist politics, by viewing it as one element in a broad network of social relations subsidised by practical ethics in pursuit of social harmony, deploying the ‘traditional Christian faith that took it as axiomatic that the point of religion – what it did for a living – was that it was an instrument by which neighbours, kin and friends could succeed in living in peace with each other’.

Many historians would be happy to accept that links through baptism were of great importance in the past, and that both sworn brotherhood and inter-sex marriage need to be seen in the context of a much broader network of made kinships, which often overlapped and reinforced one another. Writing of Byzantium, Claudia Rapp felt confident enough to sort such kinships into a hierarchy of consequentiality on a priori grounds, with sworn brotherhood at the bottom (no children, no consequences), godparenthood in the middle, and heterosexual marriage at the top. This is clearly an ‘anti-gay’ rebuff, an attempt to place Boswell’s same-sex unions on a level as far removed from marriage as possible. Bray, on the other hand, sometimes seems to suggest that ‘traditional kinships’ do not just frequently overlap but are all much of a social muchness, eliding the exceptional and peculiar and, in some contexts, rather antisocial nature of same-sex weddings on which his sources seem to insist: all-male ‘betrothals’, male ‘wives’, tombs of Mr and Mr and Mrs and Mrs.

What needs to be confronted is not so much the juxtaposition of intra-sex with inter-sex pairings – an inevitable juxtaposition it seems to me, pace Bray, Rapp et al, whenever such pairs occur – but the imposition of the homophobic (properly speaking) notion that the one is an imposture – a threatening parody – of the other, Black Odile distracting the Prince from White Odette, a ‘pretended family relationship’ in the words of Section 28, which undermines the authentic coinage. In case that seems like homophobophobia on my part, let us remember what Norman Stone foresaw for Denmark when it legalised gay marriage in 1989: ‘Its population will consist of golden oldies watching porn videos. The only people to get married will be the gays, and the only people to have children will be the Kurdish immigrants.’ No wonder American voters were so worried about gay marriage. The Kurds are coming! Remember the Danes!

Considering wed-brotherhood in relation to its other Other, biological brotherhood, anthropologists have long been aware of the dangers of the notion of ‘pretended family relationships’. Instead of a ‘pseudo’, ‘fictive’, ‘spurious’ or ‘artificial’ kinship, such fraternising is now described in more positive terms as ‘ritual kinship’ or ‘voluntary kinship’. At this point, same-sex weddings become enmeshed in a far grander epic than the mere history of the British family and the development of Western capitalism: the story of the origins of the state.

In the 19th century, Darwinian theorists created an evolutionary narrative of the ascent of homo politicus. This ran from nature to law, from savage groups based on biological kinship, ‘clans’ and ‘bands’ to central government based on institutions. Historians of the British state, such as Maitland and Pollock, bought into this narrative big-time: ‘Step by step, as the power of the state waxes . . . kindred wanes.’ This is not, however, as Bray implies, an old-fashioned, now obsolete narrative, but one that was revived almost unchanged in the postwar period. Such teleological tales of the ascent of the state, and/or of civilisation itself, remain a vital element in the more panoramic political theorising.

‘Pseudo-kinship’ had an important role to play in the earliest stages of this narrative, a simple-minded way for simple-minded people to conceive of ties to other members of their tribe to whom they were not in truth related, a quintessentially primitive type of relationship, no matter at what point in the history of a state it appeared. When false relations popped up in later periods in the form of blood brothers and godfathers (not excluding the Mafia kind), they were an indication of an archaic or primitive throwback, a state in deformation, or a fringe phenomenon belonging to the borderlands where the state began to fray. Fake relationships were to be found once more at the scene of the state’s non-composition, just like the fake/gay marriages in Stone’s Denmark.

Hence in his contribution to the Traditio volume, the Roman historian Brent Shaw suggested:

Artificial brotherhoods were formed for the purposes of protection, defence and armed aggression in a disintegrated social order in which the threat of violence and physical force was a real and ever present danger . . . The reasons for the formation of the bonds of artificial kinship were connected with the prevalence of primal forms of social organisation in the face of the weakness of effective central state power.

This kind of thinking has led to a fashionable view of the same-sex wedding of brothers-in-love quite contrary to the hyperbolic romanticism of the sources and to Boswell’s wishful thinking. Why would a guy want to marry a guy? In the hope that he might think twice before shafting him.

Against this, Bray draws attention not only to the reams of lovey-dovey discourse, which the ‘dread-brother’ theory must discount, but to the elective nature of the partnerships and to the central role played by such relations (on some occasions) in central admin: ‘Two sworn brothers like Neville and Clanvowe were not its unruly opponents: they were part of it . . . If Edward II had been seeking a sworn brother of the kind Brent Shaw conjectures, he would have sought it among the magnates who were threatening him and not in an intimate who could act for him like Piers Gaveston.’ That a heterosexual marriage alliance might be used to bring potential enemies together, as indeed it often was, does not mean that marriage in general is essentially a form of truce. The evidence insists that same-sex weddings were alliances of exceptional love and devotion. If some individuals tried to use some of that fairy-dust to counteract (potential) hostility, or as a wicked, treacherous feint, it does not mean the loviness is inherently specious.

Above all, historians need to remember that the information we have was preserved for a reason, and Shaw, at least, parenthesises his conclusions accordingly. Using chronicles to get an overview of sworn friendship is like using the Sun to get an overview of the state of marital fidelity. It is precisely because the love-brotherhood between the Dukes of Burgundy and Orléans was followed by murder that their wedding was recorded by Juvénal des Ursins. The ritual of troth-plighting, the loving words and gestures described in ironic detail, these are what made the murder so outrageous: that is, so worthy of recording.

This is another reason for Bray’s emphasis on tombs. They show how the friends wanted to see themselves, and they reflect a sincere ethics of friendship continuing beyond our mundane insecurities and worldly interests. They are not unmotivated, of course, or a representative cross-section, but they provide a corrective perspective on same-sex friendship, more peaceful and enduring than the chroniclers, less businesslike than the accountants and the jurists, more realistic than the balladeers.

But what we really want to know is whether love-brothers, or ‘most coupled’ friends, or same-sex grave-mates, had sex. Montaigne recorded a famous incident: a group of Portuguese men gathered together at the church of San Giovanni a Porta Latina in Rome (where Jesus’ ‘beloved disciple’ had nearly been martyred), to get married. By this time, the late 16th century, the ceremony could be viewed as an oddity: ‘une étrange confrérie’, Montaigne says, ‘their’ version of ‘our’ heterosexual nuptials (‘mesmes serimonies que nous faisons’); or, according to the Venetian ambassador, an attack on marriage (‘bruttando il nome sacrosancto di matrimonio’). After the ceremony, according to Montaigne, the Portuguese men went to bed together. Roman experts told him that the men had thought that, since a conjunction between male and female was legitimate only in marriage, ‘this other activity would become equally righteous, once it had been authorised by church ceremonies and mysteries.’ The Roman authorities quickly rounded them up and burned them alive.

What we have in these weddings is a violent collision between two epochs: one in which exchanging vows with a loved friend in church was perfectly traditional, and another in which it was viewed as a wicked innovation, a threatening forgery of what was now the only true marriage, that between a man and wife. But was the notion of a wedding night a traditional feature of love-brother-weddings, even if only revealed, like the secrets of ancient mystery religions, at the moment of their obsolescence? In that respect, were the Portuguese being traditional or modern? Or were they a bit confused?

Most medievalists, if not Pierre Chaplais, accept that the wed-brothers Piers Gaveston and Edward did it in the 14th century. Edward ‘was excessively fond of the sodomitical vice’, according to the chronicle of Meaux, ‘a work of outstanding scholarship’, according to Bray. I don’t really see what scholarship has to do with it, but I note with interest the chronicler’s qualification, ‘excessively’ (nimium) – twice nightly, twice monthly, twice yearly, twice? But Canute and Edmund Ironside? Were they at it like rabbits the night after they exchanged vows? The Dukes of Burgundy and of Orléans? King Malcolm and Earl Tostig? Probably not, but who knows? At the other end of the timescale, Anne Lister certainly did do it with the woman she exchanged rings with, as previously with her intended from whom she caught a venereal disease: gotcha!

Returning to the theme of his previous book, Bray draws attention to the gulf he observed in Renaissance England between the unearthly discourses of apocalyptic sodomy and the earthy sex that men had with each other nevertheless. One Venetian diarist recorded hearing a ‘good sermon’ against the plague-bringing ‘societies of sodomy’. The diarist, Marin Sanuto, was known to the Mantuan ambassador as a famous sodomite who had had sexual relations with his servants and was so forward as to give Frankie Howerd a run for his money: ‘When he has spoken with one a few times he comes upon one as if to impale one.’ Bray’s argument at this point is supported by several studies of early modern inquisitorial records which came out in the wake of Homosexuality in Renaissance England, confirming its conclusions with knobs on: notably Michael Rocke’s investigation of sodomy in Florence, Forbidden Friendships, which gives the impression that Michelangelo’s male contemporaries were all at it, most of the time, despite all the sermons, and quite oblivious to sexual orientation (which hadn’t been invented yet). The Church was officially opposed to same-sex sex; but the Church was officially opposed to sex before marriage, too, and this injunction was certainly ‘widely disregarded’.

Bray leaves most of this sex stuff until the end of the book. Those who don’t read that far could well come away from The Friend with the impression that he is playing down or even denying sexualness, while playing up the ordinary physical intimacies of friendship: ‘Those who have written of the apparently openly “homosexual” nature’ of Marlowe’s Edward II ‘have not grasped its irony or that the intense emotion, the passionate language, and the embraces we see between these two men have ready parallels in Elizabethan England in the daily conventions of friendship without being signs of a sodomitical relationship’. Alongside friendship-in-fact are acts-of-friendship-in-fact – kisses, embraces – which means that when old texts in many languages refer to ‘intercourse’, ‘confederation’, ‘making love’, ‘embracing’, ‘mingling’, ‘going with’, ‘being with’, it is often impossible to know whether they are talking of physical contact or not, or of sex or not, or indeed of same-sex marriage: ‘coupling’.

Bray’s argument that sodomy is not necessarily an element in intense homosexual relationships, even the most passionate and affectionate, and not necessarily the critical diagnostic even of the sexual ones, that friendship is not a euphemism for, or a second-rate alternative to, the real sexual thing, but has a facticity all its own, is a direct challenge to the foundations of much work on the history of sexuality, which has merely substituted for an essentialism of orientation – is so-and-so essentially homosexual? – an essentialism of sex: is such and such a relationship, is such and such an institution (‘Greek Love’, love-brotherhood) essentially homosexual, i.e. sodomitical? Is there penetration in this word – ‘wickedness’, ‘eros’, ‘brother’, ‘embrace’? Is there homosex in this text?

The Friend politely ravages the territory of the history of homosexuality, pillaging many of its materials and handing them over to the history of same-sex loving coupledom, which comes to seem like an alternative and more coherent field of research. For in The Friend the probably sodomitical and the probably non-sodomitical but (nevertheless) devoted pairs sit very happily side by side, looking for all the world as if they are part of one story.

The sex-obsessed historians of sexuality, by contrast, seem now to have been writing perverse histories, separating the sodomitical relationships of ancient Greek men, for instance, from the passionate pairings of Sappho’s Lesbos or the relationship of Achilles and Patroclus in the Iliad, whose (apparently) non-sodomitical same-sex love was deleted from the history of ‘Greek homosexuality’ by Kenneth Dover and David Halperin, as if the fact that a spectacularly homosexualising culture produced some of the most spectacular (but non-sodomitical) lesbian love poetry and has a spectacular (but non-sodomitical) homosexual relationship at the centre of its foundational epic is simply a rather amazing coincidence.

If we discount sodomitical essentialism, a path is opened up from the same-sex couples of Bray’s England, and indeed from the corpus of troth-plighted brothers in European history, all the way back to ‘Greek homosexuality’, the omission of which from these histories of same-sex unions, with the notable exception of Boswell’s, seems tendentious. For Bray’s loving coupledom is something with a proper historical backbone, with substance and form, something that you can trace over time, visible and archaeologicable.

To begin with, there is more than one cultural tradition flowing into the river of same-sex unions in the British Isles. Elizabeth Brown in the Traditio volume suggests that the distribution of wed-brothers in (the chronicles of) Norman lands may imply a powerful Scandinavian tradition. Brent Shaw cites an account of Celtic homosexual marriage, overlooked by Boswell, preserved by Eusebius in the fourth century CE. Among the Celts, we are told, young men contract marriage alliances (gamountai) with complete freedom, and, it seems, no sexual inhibitions either. Aristotle shows that the Celts acquired a reputation for ‘publicly honouring’ man-to-man coupling (‘society’, ‘intercourse’) almost as soon as they arrived on the pages of history, 650 years before Eusebius.

Similar practices are attested for the Franks and the Taifali, who were so vicious, according to a Roman historian of the fourth century CE, that ‘mature men couple up with males,’ the wedding (foedus) involving some unmentionable sexual intercourse. These barbarian same-sex unions seem to have left traces in the archaeological record. Among the Bog People of Northern Europe is a pair found in 1904 in Holland in a carefully arranged and well-preserved, if soggy, 2000-year-old embrace. They were immediately nicknamed ‘Darby and Joan’, until closer examination revealed that Joan had a beard, and they were renamed ‘Darby and John’.

The main current, however, seems to run through Rome. In the lands of the eastern Roman Empire, the same Christian(ised) institution of sworn brotherhood is well documented from the seventh century CE. But even before the empire Christianised and split, love-brotherhood played a crucial role in Diocletian’s pagan arrangements to stick it back together again after the briefer disintegrations of the third century. For Diocletian entered into a relationship of brotherhood with his fellow emperor Maximianus (frater adscitus). The evidence for this is decisive, as Brent Shaw notes, although most scholars have ignored it.

The ancient Greeks had other terms to refer to same-sex couples, without recourse to the language of kinship. For although classicists have made great efforts to marginalise homosexual relationships, permanent and formalised same-sex unions are attested for nearly all the major communities in mainland Greece. For Athens, we have Thucydides, who notes, in his account of the two ‘tyrant-slayers’ who prepared the way for the democracy, that Aristogiton was not just Harmodius’ admirer (erastes) but ‘had him’: a technical term, my dictionary notes, for ‘have to wife, or as husband’; translators prefer the less matrimonial ‘possessed’. In Sparta, Thessaly and Crete there were odd-sounding technical terms for each partner in such arrangements.

We have a full description of how the Cretans went about these things. Announced at least three days in advance, there was a public tug-of-war over the prospective boy (usually assumed, for various reasons, to be in his late teens), with the boy’s fan-club (‘the friends’) on one side and the suitor on the other, and much anxiety about the appropriateness of the match, a matter on which the rest of the community could have made their feelings known with cheers and boos. If the suitor was considered suitable he was allowed to drag the boy to his ‘men’s house’. Next, the whole party went hunting for up to two months, with extraordinary licence to hunt anywhere in the land (chora) they wished, although modern commentators, following their own script, prefer to banish the happy couple, minus ‘the friends’, into marginal land or ‘the bush’, for which no marriage licence would be necessary.

The boy was showered with expensive gifts to which ‘the friends’ were obliged to contribute. Finally, one of the gifts, a valuable ox, was sacrificed at a homecoming feast hosted by the boy, during which he consented (or not) to his abduction after the fact, and to the relationship (homilia) thus established. The boy now received the title ‘famous’, while his abductor became ‘the friend’ (philetor). The boy received the right to wear a mysterious ‘costume of military character’ given him by his partner, and to wear another distinctive costume when he was eventually initiated into full adult citizenship at 20. It seems likely the abductees also had a military role, forming a battalion of beauties who performed a sacrifice to the god Eros before battle. Where men marry men, to modify Aristotle, Mars and Venus are not strangers.

As Boswell saw, you could not get a better example of a same-sex wedding, but classicists have, almost without demur, preferred to see an ordinary ritual of initiation into adulthood (a possibility the source explicitly excludes; in Crete, the mass-marriage of the entire graduating class of new men to prepubescent girls fulfilled that function), to which they add a large dose of initiatory sodomy, about which the sources say nothing.

The other city for which there is good evidence for the rituals of same-sex pairing is Thebes, home to the ‘army of lovers’, the Sacred Band of three hundred champions, organised in love-couples. Predictably, the existence of the Sacred Band has been questioned on a priori grounds by David Leitao. Such an army would break all the rules of Greek homosexuality (notably its supposedly transitory and initiatory character). The evidence he must discount, however, much of it from contemporaries, is overwhelming. Xenophon claimed that in Boeotian Thebes, ‘man and boy live together, like married people,’ in E.C. Marchant’s Loeb translation, or, more pedantically, Boeotian men ‘form relationships (homilousi) once they have been conjugally yoked (syzygentes) as man and boy’; the ‘like’ is Marchant’s addition.

If the evidence for an army of lovers is plentiful and consistent, it is hard at first to imagine how it worked in practice – boyfriends clutching marriage certificates as they presented themselves as couples for recruitment; an army officer going round the barracks and pairing people up – but the detailed account of the Cretan ritual shows that same-sex yokings could be elaborate public affairs, and that, despite the emphasis on voluntary election, the community might be able to contribute to the selection of a group of men on whom its safety depended. The yoke-pair exchanged vows at the tomb of Hercules’ boyfriend, Iolaus. Plutarch adds the information that a Theban erastes gave his boyfriend arms when he entered the ranks of men. It would not be completely astonishing to discover that the equipment donated by the erastes carried his own insignia, which would make the composition of the army of lovers immediately visible to anyone drawn up against them.

Bray thinks that by making the Thebans of the ‘Knight’s Tale’, Palamon and Arcite, sworn brothers with identical arms, Chaucer was imposing on his couple the forms of 14th-century England. But Chaucer, as we can see, may have been rather better informed. At any rate, the choice of Thebes as the homeland for them is unlikely to have been a coincidence, and read against the background of the city’s ancient reputation, the love-brothers’ rivalry over Princess Emily looks like a self-conscious heterosexual triangulising of a notoriously homosexual relationship, as happened most spectacularly with the story of Troilus (lusted after and nearly raped by Achilles in the ancient version) and Cressida. Among Theban men, Cicero blabbed to anyone prepared to pick up on it, ‘lust has unfettered licence.’

Among their Aeolic cousins on the island of Lesbos, Sappho uses the same conjugal term, ‘yokemate’ (synzygos), for women’s partnerships, although most have ignored the Italian scholar Bruno Gentili, who concluded decades ago that this can only mean that among the women ‘of archaic Lesbos there were liaisons of an “official” character, which could involve a genuinely matrimonial type of relationship’. Around 520 BCE, the poet Anacreon explained why his interest in one girl wasn’t reciprocated: ‘For she is from Lesbos . . . and is gaping at another of her sex.’ Commentators have tied themselves in knots trying to escape the implications of Anacreon’s facetious jest. How could all the women on an island be homosexual? How would a foreigner know? It was the institution of the amorous yoke-pairing of women, something visible and archaeologicable, something celebrated by Sappho, and, in this part of Greece, something unique, that explains how the women of Lesbos acquired such a reputation. In exactly the same way, eight hundred years later, Eusebius could see in Celtic same-sex unions evidence for homosexual personalities among Celtic men.

There was nothing marginal about these ancient same-sex unions. A monument was erected to Harmodius and Aristogiton with a unique double statue, uniquely situated at the heart of Athens, in the agora, a model of a heroic death-transcending love-bond in opposition to the perversion of monarchical rule. The Famed of Crete, with their distinctive costume and their special places in dances and races, represented a spectacular cross-section of a community, transcending divisions of clan and house. So too the Theban army of lovers, which was properly called the Battalion of the Polis. Pericles provided one of the earliest examples of the state conceived as an independent abstract entity when he suggested that citizen-soldiers should behave towards Athens like boyfriends, erastai: i.e. love the city without calculation, more than life itself. Love’s outrageousness, its ability to transgress social, political and party political boundaries, makes it a particularly useful relationship in the formation of so socially outrageous an entity as the state.

Doubtless there is a play-off in human societies between the security guaranteed by personal pledges and the security guaranteed by the institutions of an effective state, especially if those institutions insist on overriding personal pledges and thereby undermining them, which is why the campaign for gay marriage is a campaign for state recognition: i.e. for the state to cease undermining homosexual relationships by imposing its own rules on next-of-kinship. But the same-sex troth-plighted love-pair, whether explicitly sexual, explicitly asexual, as you will or undecided, has a very long history in Europe, and has played an important role in a variety of political organisations, kingdoms, empires, democracies, ancient, medieval, modern, on the borderlands and on the citadel, in war and peace, in documents and in rather a lot of songs.

It isn’t a uniquely European phenomenon. The oldest same-sex couple that I know of is the one (probably) monumentalised in an Egyptian tomb constructed during the fifth dynasty of the Old Kingdom in the middle of the third millennium BCE. When it was discovered in 1964, archaeologists were surprised to find it was the tomb of two men, shown more than once in murals either leading each other by the hand or face to face in profile, exactly like the kissing knights of Constantinople, their hieroglyphs entwined. They were assumed to be twins, until Greg Reeder suggested they were more likely to have been a conjugal same-sex couple. His case was subliminally helped, no doubt, by the fact that they both rejoiced in the title of ‘Manicurist to the King, and Inspector of the Manicurists’.

Bray would have liked his book to help resolve the ‘conflict between homosexual people and the Christian Church’, without it being seen as an intervention on either side. There can be little hope for reconciliation if the Church is not first prepared to confess the crimes it has committed against homosexual humanity, crimes that Bray (like Boswell) plays down, most conspicuously by eliding the tragedy, so relevant to his theme, of the poor Portuguese martyrs who had the misfortune of marrying in the church at the Latin Gate.

The long-lost history of same-sex couples, both pagan and Christian, constantly holding up a mirror to one another, across millennia and across miles, ancient Thebes, medieval Constantinople, 19th-century Halifax and Lesbos 600 BCE, often barely understanding what it is that is being reflected, puts the modern gay-marriage conflict in a slightly different light, if not quite transforming it into a little local difficulty. Modern same-sex couples have a treasure-house of traditions to draw on, of which the Christian rite is only one. If your priest proves recalcitrant, just get your intended’s exes together on the pavement outside a gay bar, and have yourselves a tug-of-war. You don’t have to have sex with your partner, you don’t necessarily have to fancy them, you don’t even need to be that way inclined, but you really shouldn’t do it unless you are prepared to go all the way with them, till death do you two part.

Bray made a great contribution in helping to bring this long history to light, not just because the material he gathered for love-couples on these islands makes the evidence for same-sex unions elsewhere a priori less hard to believe, and not just because his thoughtfulness and subtlety show what can (and cannot) be done with those materials, but because of his extraordinary ability to question the questions we ask of the past and to rethink the issues in a way that does less violence to the traces the friends have left behind.

AFRIKANERS SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST

Afrikaner Survival
Under Black Rule (Part I)
Will the ANC dissolve a nation even the British Empire could not destroy?

by Dan Roodt

Southern Africa is the most acute and dramatic example of the worldwide struggle of white resistance against dispossession. What does the future hold for white South Africans, specifically for the Afrikaners? Their ancestors built South Africa; they are rooted to the land, and cannot easily leave it as the British and other whites do. In this extraordinary two-part essay, an Afrikaner weeps for the land and people he loves.

Who are the Afrikaners, or Boers as they are often called? A hundred years ago, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the popular British writer of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, asked much the same question in his book The Great Boer War:


The Voortrekker monument:
Is another Blood River in the making?

“Look at the map of South Africa, and there, in the very centre of the British possessions, like the stone in a peach, lies the great stretch of the two republics, a mighty domain for so small a people. How came they there? Who are these Teutonic folk who have burrowed so deeply into Africa?”

Elsewhere in the same book he answered his own question:

“Take a community of Dutchmen of the type of those who defended themselves for fifty years against all the power of Spain at a time when Spain was the greatest power in the world. Intermix with them a strain of those inflexible French Huguenots who gave up home and fortune and left their country for ever at the time of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The product must obviously be one of the most rugged, virile, unconquerable races ever seen upon earth. Take this formidable people and train them for seven generations in constant warfare against savage men and ferocious beasts, in circumstances under which no weakling could survive, place them so that they acquire exceptional skill with weapons and in horsemanship, give them a country which is eminently suited to the tactics of the huntsman, the marksman, and the rider. Then, finally, put a finer temper upon their military qualities by a dour fatalistic Old Testament religion and an ardent and consuming patriotism. Combine all these qualities and all these impulses in one individual, and you have the modern Boer—the most formidable antagonist who ever crossed the path of Imperial Britain.”

There is no white nation in South Africa, only the Afrikaner nation.

A hundred years later, there is still a grain of truth in this description. Afrikaners still hunt; many accountants, lawyers and businessmen would rather buy a game farm than a yacht. They may collect antiques or rare books, but also rhinoceri, African buffalo and other game. They still go on treks to tame large stretches of African bush single-handedly.

It was these qualities that gave rise to a multifaceted agriculture in one of the driest countries in the world, where only six percent of the land is arable. In the Karoo, for example, which is similar to the Arizona desert, Afrikaners raise sheep on land most people would consider worthless. Blacks have never settled in the Karoo because they would not survive.

Afrikaners are a strong people, physically as large as most Dutch or North Germans, and resilient in the face of many hardships, such as the periodic droughts that wrack the country and ruin their crops. During the Angolan war in the 1980s, a force of never more than 3,000 white South African soldiers commanded by a few stern but charismatic Afrikaner generals stopped an army of 45,000 Angolans, Russians and Cubans at the Namibian border. Because of the Western arms boycott against South Africa, the Russians even had air superiority, but a small Boer force held them off through sheer courage and creative battle plans. Casualty figures now emerging from that war, cross-checked against numbers from Havana and Moscow, show an almost unbelievable number of enemy killed for every South African who fell. It is with the same grim determination that they now bury the dead in what amounts to an undeclared race war waged against them on farms, street corners, and in their suburban homes, where they are robbed, raped and killed.


Charlize Theron: a Boer beauty.
The English South African novelist and 1991 Nobel prize winner Nadine Gordimer made a career out of caricaturing Afrikaners as oafish racists living out on farms, where they drink brandy, torture natives, and practice incest. In at least one respect she was right. Like the patricians of republican Rome or the peasant famers of Western Europe from whom they sprang, the Boers derive their strength from the land. The word “Boer” means farmer. The stoic values praised by Vergil in his so-called bucolic poetry are much the same as Afrikaner values, a sort of pious conservatism that obeys God, respects work, and embraces nature.

A number of Afrikaners have made their mark outside Africa: Oscar-winning Hollywood actress Charlize Theron, international models like Minki van der Westhuizen, whose pin-ups graced the US tanks in Iraq, and opera singer Mimi Coertse, who was the lead soprano for the Viennese State Opera for 20 years in the 1950s and ‘60s. Johan Botha, the current male lead of the Viennese Opera, is booked out years in advance in all the major operatic centers. The physical beauty of many Afrikaner women is a constant source of wonder to many. Even Miss Gordimer has admitted as much.

Back in South Africa, President Thabo Mbeki once famously referred to the country as “two nations—the one rich and white, and the other black and poor.” He was not entirely correct. There is no such thing as a white nation in South Africa, only the Afrikaner nation, along with a motley collection of English-speakers, Portuguese, Greeks, Jews, Germans, Italians, and the like. Under the old, so-called apartheid government, all young white men did military service, during which they were trained not only to be soldiers, but also in Afrikaans and patriotism; there was then a kind of white nation in the making. Now, the dominant blacks have adopted English, and are actively trying to undermine Afrikaans and the nation it represents.

The Afrikaner Nation

The sense of community one experiences among Afrikaners, at their schools, churches, cultural societies, arts festivals and concerts, is completely different from that among the English whites. The English South African, apart from the sizeable number who have intermarried with Afrikaners or been integrated to the point of becoming Afrikaners themselves, is an atomised individual, linked by his language and outlook not to Africa but to that powerful Anglo-American civilization that still radiates its influence from across the oceans. As such, he is fascinated by the model of the sovereign individual who wants to get rich quickly, and buy a better house with better security in a more lavish gated community. He is essentially apolitical and adapts to circumstances. He thinks he can outwit the black government in a double game in which he pretends to be in favor of affirmative action. He will play the game, get a black partner to stay in business, and mouth the multicultural clichés of his English newspaper that already has a black editor, while privately voicing his misgivings and making sure his passport is ready for a quick exit in case things go wrong.

In the rest of Africa, including the ex-Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), which once had a white community of 300,000, the sovereign individual model has not worked. One has only to read V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River, set in the Congo, to get a feel for the vulnerability of atomized expatriots to the radical caprice of African politics.

Afrikaners are not sovereign individuals, generally speaking. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they went through a great Romantic movement, a flowering of literature, translations, music and historical reflection that bound them into a nation of the European type, a cultural nation or kultuurvolk as they like to call themselves.

This explains the extraordinary level of Afrikaner cohesion in the face of intense official hostility. In South Africa today, it is virtually illegal to maintain or run any institution except a private family without it being, in official parlance, “demographically representative.” The ANC hires thousands of inspectors to harass schools, universities, businesses—even family businesses—sports clubs, trade unions, newspapers, radio stations, hospitals and clinics about their racial composition. Strictly speaking, it is illegal to employ whites unless they make up less than 10 percent of the payroll. An Afrikaans-language radio station, Radio Pretoria, lost its license because it employed only whites, and is now in a major legal battle to survive.

One should not underestimate the thousand little resistances carried out every day.

Yet one should not underestimate the thousand little resistances carried out every day, in schools, companies, hospitals and elsewhere. Whole suburbs in Pretoria are policed not by the South African Police Department—completely black, with corrupt cops and hardened criminals in its ranks—but by an all-white private security company consisting, as one satisfied female resident put it, of “handsome young Boers.” Their patrols ensure a level of security unheard-of in crime-ridden South Africa.

Despite the laws and harassment, many people get away with running ethnic Afrikaner or white businesses. Suburban houses often shelter thriving companies employing up to a dozen white people who ply their trades, unbeknown to inspectors. Every remaining Afrikaans school outside the Cape Province with its large Afrikaans-speaking Coloured population is still 99 percent white, as are the Afrikaans classes at bilingual schools. Government incompetence, predictable in most African countries, makes for a less than perfect system. To police a white population of six million people actively going about their daily business is an arduous task, especially when two thirds of them enjoy a distinct culture the government can penetrate only with difficulty.

There are other bastions of Afrikanerdom. On Easter Friday last year, I took my children to a church service, accompanied by a classical music program. The Reformed Church on the outskirts of Pretoria was packed to capacity with about 1,500 people—not a single black face among them. According to the mores of the new South Africa, where mixing is de rigeur and legally enforced, this gathering was scandalous. Afterwards people drank tea or coffee and had melktert [milk tarts] and koeksisters [a fried dough dessert], Boer delicacies found everywhere in South Africa.

My children’s school still bears some of the marks of nationhood. It used to be known as a laerskool, the equivalent of grade school, and instruction was exclusively in Afrikaans. Under official threat, it has now become a “parallel medium” school, and a third of the children take classes in English. During the prize-giving ceremony, the names are called from the Afrikaans-speaking class, with the children standing on stage in a neat row in their school uniforms. The surnames are all familiar Afrikaner ones, deriving from our Dutch, French Huguenot, German and Scottish forebears. Further examination of the fresh young faces and healthy bodies shows that at least half if not more of the children are blond. An extraordinarily high number have sparkling blue eyes. In fact, standing next to the English-medium class in the same age group, they seem almost like a caricature of the Aryan ideal.


Their language protects them.
When the “English” names are called out, a multicultural array of children saunters onto the stage, some of them white English-speakers, others Africans with names that are difficult for their white teacher to pronounce, a few Indians and mixed-race Coloreds, a Portuguese or a Greek, as well as a few Afrikaner children whose parents have put them in the English-speaking class because they have succumbed to the fallacy that “the future is English.” The ceremony is punctuated by performances provided almost exclusively by the Afrikaner children, including a piece by Bach for piano and cello, played faultlessly by further caricatures of the Aryan ideal.

It is hard not to smile at some of the South African realities known only to the Afrikaner. The results of the matric examination, our equivalent of the high school diploma, were published at the end of December 2003. On the front pages of the English-language newspapers there were photographs of smiling black students celebrating their successes. One African girl in Gauteng province, which surrounds Johannesburg, received distinction—meaning marks of above 80 percent—in five subjects. In fact, standards have been lowered to the point that it is almost impossible for anyone who takes the trouble to write the examination to fail the matric, and getting a “distinction” is not what it used to be. Still, reading the Johannesburg Star, one would think the province teems with black geniuses, all personally congratulated by the provincial Minister of Education. One wonders what happened to all those Afrikaner children.

Then you buy the Afrikaans-language Beeld, and the truth emerges. Here there are rankings and statistics, and more pictures, this time of a youngster named Riaan Swanepoel from the Menlopark Hoërskool in Pretoria who got not five, not 10, but 19 distinctions. Of the 10 children in Gauteng province who got the highest overall marks in the matric exam, seven are Afrikaners from Afrikaans-language schools. Afrikaners probably represent 10 percent or fewer of the children in the province, yet won 70 percent of the top academic honors.

One discovers that the government’s game of subverting education so that just about everyone can pass, has started a new game among the highly competitive Afrikaans high schools of Pretoria: making the bright children take not just the six mandatory subjects, but 10, 15 or even 20 to see if they can shoot the lights out by getting more than 80 percent in all of them.


Another white bastion.
Of course, eventually the South African government will abolish exams and grades entirely, as they have already done for younger children. Afrikaans schools are now developing an underground system of traditional teaching methods, including grades, while keeping the official paperwork for “outcomes-based education” and “continuous assessment,” as if the schools were really following official edicts. At one major high school in Pretoria, the teachers recently had to work through the night to prepare phony paperwork for a government inspection. The officials left none the wiser, unaware that the infernal system that produces straight-A students who play chess, the piano, and that “aggressive, white male-dominated, racist sport, rugby” continues unabated.

But can this game of hide-and-seek continue? At the start of the 2004 academic year, there were more attempts to swamp the remaining Afrikaans-language schools with black students demanding instruction in English, even at schools with no space for them. It may be that in a few years’ time, Afrikaners will have to take their children out of school altogether; many already prefer home schooling or private microschools where technology is used to teach in innovative ways.

Language

Like so many nations, Afrikaners are bound together by their language, Afrikaans. The old South Africa was a bilingual country with English dominant in business, and Afrikaans used in government, in parliament, the military, the police and the education system. Afrikaners had firmly-established Afrikaans-speaking institutions at all levels. Now, because race-mixing and the Africanisation of the national culture—if such a thing exists—are official policy, breaking down the Afrikaner identity is a top priority. Government spokesmen rage that Afrikaans “is a barrier,” and they are right.

Although English is spoken as a mother tongue by only three million people (including more than one million Indians) out of 46 million, it is the official medium of “nation-building,” that forlorn dream of every African government since the 1950s. Afrikaans is widely spoken as a lingua franca by about 15 million people in South Africa and Namibia, especially outside the major cities, but it does not attract Africans, who see English as the instrument of power and prestige. Most South African blacks are so bewitched by the alleged power of English that when they visit Europe for the first time they are surprised to find that the people of France, Germany or Italy speak their own languages, not English.



The presence of an imperial language like English, with its global Hollywood culture appealing to the multicultural masses, sets the Afrikaners apart. Blacks avoid Afrikaans institutions, which they see as ethnically exclusive. Most of the black elite that rule in Pretoria prefer to commute from houses in Johannesburg 25 miles away, since they still think of the capital as an unwelcoming, Afrikaner city. The black attraction to English is driving some English-speaking whites to Afrikaans. In some towns on the East Rand, where middle class English-speaking whites cannot afford private schools, they have started sending their children to Afrikaans government schools to escape from their own English-speaking schools, which have been swamped by blacks.

(The same thing is happening in Brussels, where French-speaking Walloons have traditionally looked down on the Flemish, but now send their children to Dutch-language schools where they can still get a European education. The French-speaking schools have been taken over by North and West African immigrants, who want to learn an imperial language rather than Dutch. White-minority languages may become a haven for maintaining Western identities and education standards, both in Europe and in South Africa.)

Afrikaans may be a barrier to blacks, but there are also racial barriers and divisions within Afrikaans. Eighty percent of the four million mixed-race Coloureds speak Afrikaans, sometimes very beautifully in rural areas, but since 1994 the government has pushed for the Creolization of Afrikaans. For the government and media, speaking or writing “proper Afrikaans,” the standard, white, Germanic version of the language, is a sign of political conservatism and opposition to race mixing.

The new model is a debased version spoken by urban Coloreds, mixed with English words and expressions. Subverting Afrikaans and turning it into a Creole language would facilitate the linguistic and racial assimilation of the Afrikaners themselves. English, too, is changing quickly, and is no longer subject to what used to be the British norms; in many parts of the country it is also being Creolized, mixed with African words, the grammar and pronunciation losing their rigor.

At first, the official push toward Creolization met with little resistance, and was even welcomed in liberal or left-wing circles. Recently, however, there has been a backlash against non-standard forms of Afrikaans, as well as mixing the language with English. A broad front of Afrikaner authors and intellectuals, including homosexual and left-wing writers, now vehemently opposes any form of mixing or denaturing. This has drawn a new racial line in the sand, because Afrikaans-speaking Colored journalists and intellectuals instinctively lean toward a Creolized language, and eschew any form of purity, whether linguistic or racial.

Currently, Afrikanerdom is being scandalized by a novel that captures the ambiguities of even those Afrikaners who appear to have thrown over everything their ancestors stood for. The novel is Kontrei, published in 2003 by a 47-year old Bohemian living in one of the Johannesburg areas called Yeoville that has been taken over by blacks in the last five years. Once a Jewish quarter with synagogues and beautiful apartment buildings designed by famous South African architects, Yeoville is now a crime- and drug-ridden slum, lorded over by Nigerian and Congolese gangsters.


The Lord’s prayer in Africkaans.
Writing under the pseudonym of Kleinboer (Little Boer), the author describes his life as probably the last white person left in Yeoville. He lives with an HIV-positive Zulu woman and her mixed-race child by a Portuguese man; he also regularly visits black prostitutes from all over Africa in the many brothels in adjacent Hillbrow, an area known as the Manhattan of Africa when whites still lived there, as recently as 15 years ago.

Academic studies show that it takes a prostitute in Johannesburg an average of six weeks to become infected with HIV. Although Kleinboer has, by his own admission, slept with over 400 black prostitutes, and though he lives with someone who is HIV-positive, he is a healthy man. He has a science degree, and is fanatical about wearing condoms. Despite free condoms and hundreds of millions of dollars for advertising campaigns by government, few blacks manage to practice so-called “safe sex.”

Kleinboer enjoys the rush of black life: sex at ten dollars a throw, the adrenaline of watching gang members kill each other, the free availability of drugs, in which he occasionally indulges. But he also answers the door with a machete, and sleeps with a loaded revolver under his pillow. During one of his forays into white society, Kleinboer tells his suburban host, “It is so nice to visit white people for a change that I wouldn’t mind paying you for the privilege. I could never leave my cellphone or car keys lying about in Yeoville as I do here, not even in my own home.”

Despite his almost incalculable distance from the Afrikaner society of Easter Friday services and school awards ceremonies, Kleinboer practises condom apartheid, and would probably never father a child with a black woman. Thus he hardly represents the model for the métissage or generalized race-mixing so often preached by visiting Westerners to South Africa, and who want to see whites cease to exist as a distinct racial and cultural group.

Even a racial Bohemian like Kleinboer writes in the white form of Afrikaans, his book is read by whites, and he knows how to participate in a Caucasian high culture that utterly excludes those around him. His live-in Zulu lover will never read what he has written, because she does not understand Afrikaans, and is unaware that she has become a household name among white Afrikaners who find their own dark suspicions about black life confirmed by Kleinboer’s humorous, decadent tale. Perhaps even for Kleinboer, the struggle for Afrikaans is emblematic of that wider resistance to being racially assimilated by the African masses.

This resistance becomes increasingly necessary and difficult. The radical Indian minister of education, Kader Asmal, stated last year that there were no longer any Afrikaans universities—even though great institutions like Stellenbosch, Bloemfontein, Potchefstoom, Pretoria and the Rand Afrikaans University (RAU) were built up by Afrikaners over more than a century. From now on they belong to the black state, which will turn them into English-language, multicultural institutions.

Intellectual Slaves

The demographic weight of the black majority, the reality of black power, and the persistant racial gap in skills and ability have put the Afrikaner in a strange position of servitude. White South Africans, particularly Afrikaners with their idealistic disposition and lingering patriotic feelings over a South Africa that no longer belongs to them, are in danger of becoming the intellectual slaves of blacks, much like the Greeks of Rome who educated Roman children and managed their masters’ households, estates, and businesses.


Kleinboer’s neighbors.
South Africa is creating a new kind of cognitive and racial hierarchy never seen in the world before. Since 1994, at least in government service, there exists a kind of caste system in which the top echelons are filled by blacks who occupy all the prestigious jobs with high salaries and perks. Just below are Indians or left-wing English-speaking whites being rewarded for loyalty to the black cause. Middle and lower management, as well as technical jobs such as accountant or computer expert, are filled by Afrikaners who will never be promoted beyond a certain level because of their ethnic origin. At the most basic clerical level again, huge numbers of blacks are employed for the simple tasks of filing, answering the phone, or handing things over a counter.

This same pattern is being repeated in the private sector, where hard-core intellectual and technical skills are provided by whites paid low wages. In private business, black managers who are appointed to fill race quotas are typically paid 50 percent more than their white counterparts, as the number who can hold down a job semi-functionally is so small that companies constantly bid up their services, using head-hunters and search agencies. These pampered black “executives” hop from job to job at ever-higher salaries, while whitey makes sure the work gets done.

Many South African blacks have intuitively understood that whites have handy skills and abilities. A white brain stuffed with mathematics, accounting, and organizational skills, as well as a Teutonic work ethic, can be very useful. Not so long ago, Mathata Tsedu, the black editor of the Sunday Times, South Africa’s largest-circulation weekly, wrote: “It pains me to say this, but my African colleagues who manage large companies or government departments tell me that to get a job done, you usually have to employ a white.”


Thabo Mbeki: “Suck the whites dry.”
Few blacks ever pass science and mathematics at school; according to official statistics, a white high-school student is 100 times more likely to pass mathematics at the higher grade required for university study than his black counterpart. This is despite the extra five percent “adjustment” in grades all blacks receive for studying in a supposedly second language, English. Although they are showered with corporate scholarships and money from foreign agencies and governments, almost no blacks get qualifications in rigorous intellectual fields like engineering, science, accounting and, until recently, medicine.

When bonds were still traded on a floor in Johannesburg, 80 percent of the traders taking risks on their own account were Afrikaner men. Probably more than half of stockbrokers are still Afrikaners. According to one expert on the South African software industry, as many as 80 percent of the computer programmers are young Afrikaner men. No one else can match them in sticking to tight deadlines, working through nights and weekends if necessary, and finding the most creative solutions to programming problems. Despite affirmative action, high-tech companies still employ them. In these companies, even among military suppliers, Afrikaans is usually the language most likely to be spoken around the water cooler.

In at least one government department it was found that none of the top black managers was fit for the job. In a race-neutral environment they would be fired. However, in South Africa blacks are never fired, even for gross incompetence, especially in a bureaucracy. The solution was to a create a series of new posts reserved for whites, who would report to their black heads. The whites would essentially do the jobs of their black bosses, except they would be at a subordinate level, a kind of intellectual slave. They would stay in the background and not detract from the prestige of their black masters. In the same department, the average black academic qualification is a grade ten, two years short of a high school diploma, while the average white has a post-graduate degree. Management tells whites they must get a master’s or doctoral degree if they want to keep their jobs, while they promise blacks a promotion if they manage to get a high school equivalency diploma.

Throughout the country, highly qualified whites often work for blacks with low qualifications and skills. They have to correct their grammar and spelling, and do simple calculations for them, while paying them obeisance and responding to their every whim. Blacks have conquered, not by the sword nor by the intellect, but by the womb, and constantly refer to themselves as “the majority.”

In South Africa, property is more and more defined as something a black person owns. A black may own a piece of land or a business outright, whereas a white may own it only in partnership with a black, or subject to conditions such as black empowerment or training for blacks so they can eventually take it over. There are many cases in which white intellectual slaves working for the government or major corporations must train up black replacements, after which they are fired because of their race.

Increasingly, whites are economic slaves as well. They pay 80 percent of personal taxes, despite earning only 50 percent of total salaries. Afrikaners as a group pay the highest portion of overall tax in South Africa—36 percent—while white English-speakers pay 32 percent. When he was in exile in Britain, Mr. Mbeki is reputed to have said, “We will suck the whites dry,” and that is essentially what is happening. South Africa is like a small, first-world economy similar to that of Denmark or Norway, still run by whites, but which must support a welfare state for 40 million blacks and Coloreds.

In their treatment of whites, however, blacks suffer from an internal conflict that often produces contradictory behavior. Rationally, they should continue their domination, keeping white taxpayers and intellectual slaves within the system. In practice, blacks often veer toward irrationality by excluding whites purely on racial grounds, just as Robert Mugabe has done in Zimbabwe by driving white farmers off the land, only to trigger an economic and food crisis to be cleaned up by other white people working for the UN and international aid agencies.


When the remaining white officers in the South African army arrived back from their summer vacation in December last year, they found themselves fired for the following official reason: “whites lack credibility in Africa, and we sometimes have to engage in peace-keeping operations elsewhere on the continent.” Rumor has it that the South African army is already in dire straits, with 60 percent of its black troops suffering from AIDS. Alcoholism and indiscipline are rife. Firing the last remaining white officers will probably lead to the complete collapse of South Africa’s armed forces.

Exclusion on racial grounds is often absolute. Liberal and left-wing whites, especially communists, have been the staunchest allies of South African blacks. Yet after 1994, even Helena Dolny, the widow of Communist Party leader Joe Slovo, who had dedicated her life to the black cause, was fired and humiliated on racial grounds.

Many former liberals have simply run away since the advent of black rule, no longer able to stand the crime and the collapse of public institutions. One is the widow of liberal author Alan Paton, who stated upon her departure, “Our president has called those who leave the country cowards. I have to confess that I am now about to join the number of those cowards who are streaming out of the country.” Nadine Gordimer’s daughter finds it safer to live in the south of France than in South Africa.

Liberal and especially foreign whites, such as tourists, are usually the first victims of crime, as they lack vigilance, and trust black strangers more than they should. Anti-white racism and crime alienate even those whites who would otherwise serve blacks. Of course, when commentators do refer to the vicious outbreak of violence that has characterised the so-called new South Africa under black rule, it has mostly been to blame apartheid for the violence, forgetting that most of the young black perpetrators grew up under black rule.

So what are the prospects for an Afrikaner nation? A less peace-loving, pragmatic people would by this time surely have come out in violent revolt, if its children were virtually banned from the most sought-after medical and law schools, and excluded from jobs in government or major corporations on the grounds of race and language.

I suppose the real test of a nation is whether it can survive bad leadership and defeat. Afrikaners today suffer a domination almost as intense as that of the Greeks under 400 years of Turkish rule, during which Christianity and the Greek language were banned, and people had to keep the Bible and Greek books in secret recesses in their houses. Many people in South Africa, notably the anglophone intellectuals with their radical chic and admiration for everything African, have already pronounced the Afrikaner nation dead.

Yet a people who fought wars for two centuries, both against black tribes and the greatest empire of the time, who produced the finest body of literature on the African continent, a philosophy, and a highly intellectualized Calvinist theology, and that enjoys its own cuisine, customs and folk culture, does not one day cease to exist just because Nelson Mandela smiles into the cameras and declares the birth of a new nation on these shores.


Danie Theron, a hero of the Boer War.
It is somehow hard to believe that Thabo Mbeki’s African Empire will succeed where the British Empire failed, by eradicating, as Lord Alfred Milner put it around 1900, “the last vestiges of Afrikanerism from South Africa.” The ham-fisted way the South African government is trying to suppress the Afrikaner identity in favor of an imported quasi-American multiculturalism mixed with warmed-over pan-Africanism, is bound to provoke the slumbering Afrikaner spirit of resistance. The dogged Afrikaner nationalism of the 20th century that transformed the entire country must count as one of the most powerful movements ever to arise in Africa. To this day, South Africa is littered with the monuments and buildings erected during that flowering of nationalism, of which the majestic art déco of the Voortrekker Monument on a hill overlooking Pretoria is the most visible.

On 16 December last, the Afrikaners commemorated their victory over the Zulus at the Battle of Blood River in 1838—known as the Day of the Covenant, but ridiculously rechristened “Reconciliation Day” by the new government. While tens of thousands of Afrikaners gathered in typical fashion all over the country at their own expense to affirm their traditional vow to be true to their God and their people, Mr. Mbeki and his cohorts organized a grand gathering on the lawns of the Union Buildings in Pretoria, spending two million dollars of taxpayer money on free food in the hope of attracting 20,000 people. However, only 2,000 of Mr. Mbeki’s followers showed up, and truck-loads of food went to waste, while at least 5,000 Afrikaners attended a ceremony a few kilometers away at the Voortrekker Monument.

Reflect upon it: Afrikaner patriotism and national sentiment are derided by the media, both locally and internationally, as right-wing racism, and their language and identity are officially suppressed. At the same time, Mr. Mbeki’s brand of multicultural, Afro-nationalism and black pride is propagated by the state and embellished by the media and dozens of conformist commentators. One then realises that perhaps the weakness lies not so much with the downtrodden “white tribe of Africa” whom the world sees as backward hillbillies, but possibly with South Africa’s radiantly confident rulers whose power is literally skin-deep, founded as it is on a late 20th century fashion for the color black.

Afrikaner Weaknesses

And yet, despite their obvious strengths and courage, Afrikaners suffer from several weaknesses characteristic of Western man. Most are practising Christians, endowed with a sense of altruism that may yet prove fatal. The three mainstream Afrikaans churches already encourage their members to look after AIDS babies abandoned by black mothers. Afrikaans newspapers carry stories about the selfless devotion of adoptive parents who are raising children of the race that is oppressing and killing them.

As for the non-Afrikaner churches, both the Church of England and the Catholic Church have been thoroughly infiltrated by Africans. The Anglican Church in South Africa is now a black church with a black archbishop who preaches white surrender and black entitlement. Protestant churches everywhere in the West have become hotbeds of capitulationist thinking, and welcome Third-World immigration into even the most ancient white homelands.

In The World and the West, Arnold Toynbee wrote that “technology is, of course, only a long Greek name for a bag of tools … But all tools are not of the material kind; there are spiritual tools as well, and these are the most potent that Man has made.” Just as communism used to be a Western weapon in the hands of Russia, as Toynbee remarked in the 1950s, so Christianity has become a piece of occidental technology in the hands of today’s Africans.

Another major Afrikaner weakness is dependence on cheap labor. There have long been warnings about this, but to no avail. At a time when race relations were more natural, black labor was satisfactory to black and white alike. Even today, apart from the super-rich nomenklatura connected to the state and big business, black South Africa consists of a slave class that would not survive without white masters.

One could do a whole linguistic analysis of all the words in Afrikaans that have to do with “master” or baas, which literally means “boss.” There is oubaas, old master, an endearing term for an elderly white person, the white patriarch who provides jobs. When a friend visits her land holdings, the remaining blacks in the area lament the death of the oubaas, and the good times when there was a white provider who could train them, employ them and look after them. Then there is kleinbaas or young master, the son in the household, who would eventually fulfill that role and is therefore already worthy of respect.


Paul Kruger.
Not long ago, as part of the government’s meddling in land ownership, a large white farm was bought out and turned over to more than 1,000 blacks as part of their “liberation.” Soon a deputation visited one of the white agricultural unions that usually spends its time defending its members’ remaining property against spurious black land claims. The new black farmers asked for a baas to come and tell them what to do and to stop the infighting. I do not know if they got their baas, but when the famous citrus farm, Zebedelia, was facing bankruptcy after being handed over to blacks, it got a white baas. Within a year or two, Zebedelia was again exporting oranges to the rest of the world.

However, in most cases such racial patronage is no longer possible, and whites cannot freely harness the labor of blacks the way blacks harness the brains of whites. The Orania experiment next to the Orange River in the remote Northern Cape shows that Afrikaners do not need black labor. Foreign journalists flock to Orania as if to some exotic zoo to see 800 white Afrikaners living self-sufficiently and in peace, without crime and drugs, digging their own ditches, laying their own bricks. If the Oranians can do without servants, gardeners and the plethora of glorified beggars who clutter our lives for a few rand a day, so can the rest of us. Ever since the founding of Cape Town by Jan van Riebeeck in 1652, white reluctance to do manual labour when thousands of natives were prepared to work for a pittance has been the downfall of any attempt to set up an autonomous and self-sufficient white society.

In the 1880s, President Paul Kruger ordered that white farmers were to have no more than five black families on their land; the law was widely ignored. By some estimates, at that time the Boers formed an absolute majority in the two northern republics [the Orange Free State, now Free State province, and the Transvaal, now broken up into Gauteng, North West, and Northern provinces], but a century of black population growth aided by Western medicine and nutrition has reduced Afrikaners to a tiny and oppressed minority in their own country.

And yet, even in dispossession, the Afrikaner retains much of his traditional nature. Blacks, as recipients of affirmative action largesse and handouts from government and the private sector, have experienced breathtaking social mobility never before seen in the history of black people anywhere. The typical image of the South African black today is sitting behind the steering wheel of a Mercedes convertible or a BMW SUV. That is, apart from the millions who subsist in shanty towns that the vast government housing projects never seem to clear away.

By contrast, the typical Afrikaner probably still drives a pick-up truck. In fact, the market for these utilitarian vehicles, called bakkies in South Africa, is still 60 percent Afrikaans, even though Afrikaners represent only five percent of the population. Makers of German luxury vehicles have long forsaken Afrikaners for the new breed of well-heeled government official or corporate mogul produced by the system of so-called black economic empowerment.

Dr. Roodt holds degrees from the University of the Witwatersrand and Université de Paris VIII (Vincennes/St. Denis). He is a well-known novelist and Afrikaner commentator who has played a leading role in what has become known over the past four years as the “Third Afrikaans Language Struggle.” Like his ancestors, he is forced to live in a laager, a Johannesburg security village surrounded by an electrified fence and cameras, and patrolled by armed guards. His article will conclude in the next issue.

TRAVIS WALTON FIRE IN THE SKY

Travis Walton


Biography

Name: Travis Walton

Born: April 20, 1957

Abduction

Status: Single Abducteee
First Abd Date: November 5, 1975
Location: Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest, Arizona
Taken from: Woodlands
Abductor: Greys
Artifact(s): None
Media
Book: The Walton Experience (1978),
republished as Fire in the Sky (1993)
Film: Fire in the Sky (1993)
Travis Walton (April 20, 1957), claims to have been abducted by a UFO on November 5, 1975, while working on a logging crew in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest in Arizona. Walton could not be found, but reappeared after five days of intensive searches.

The Walton case received considerable mainstream publicity, and remains one of the best-known instances of alleged alien abduction. Jerome Clark writes that "Few abduction reports have generated as much controversy" as the Walton case[1] It is furthermore one of the very few alien abduction cases with corroborative eyewitnesses, and one of few abduction cases where the time allegedly spent in the custody of aliens plays a rather minor role in the overall account.

Randles and Hough write that "Neither before or since has an abduction story" begun in the manner related by Walton and his coworkers. Furthermore, the Walton case is singular in that "the victim vanished for days on end with police squads out searching ... it is an atypical CE4 ... which bucks the trend so much that it worried some investigators; others defend it staunchly." (Randles and Hough, 186)

Supporters argue it is an important and persuasive case, because of the number of corroborative eyewitnesses (the vast majority of alien abduction reports are based on a single individual's testimony), the fact that witnesses passed polygraph exams in support of their accounts, and because in the more than thirty years since the event happened, none of the witnesses have changed their accounts, in spite of at least one cash offer to do so.

Skeptics note that Walton failed his initial polygraph examination (and also argue there were problems with some of the other polygraph exams which call their reliability into question), speculate that the disappearance was a moneymaking scheme, and argue there are troubling inconsistencies and problems with the tale that raise significant doubts as to its veracity.

Contents [hide]
1 Background
1.1 The encounter
1.2 The search
2 Publicity
3 Polygraph
3.1 Gallery
4 Walton’s return
5 The "medical" exam
6 Travis’s return makes the news
7 Travis in the UFO
8 Suppressed polygraph exam and controversy
9 Aftermath
10 Fire in the Sky
11 An independent witness?
12 Sources
12.1 Footnotes
12.2 Books
13 External links



[edit] Background
The case began on a Wednesday, November 5, 1975. Walton was employed by Mike Rogers, who had for some nine years contracted with the United States Forest Service for various duties. Rogers and Walton were close friends; Travis was dating Rogers's sister Dana, whom he would later marry. The other men on the crew were Ken Peterson, John Goulette, Steve Pierce, Allen Dallis and Dwayne Smith; they all lived in the small town of Snowflake, Arizona.

Rogers was hired to thin out scrub brush and other undergrowth from a large area (Over 1200 acres) near Turkey Springs, Arizona. The job was the most lucrative contract Rogers had received from the Forest Service, but his crew was behind schedule. As a result, they were working long shifts to fulfill the contract, typically from 6.00am until sunset.


[edit] The encounter
A little after 6.00pm on the evening of November 5, Rogers and his crew finished their work for the day and piled into Rogers’s truck for the drive back to Snowflake.

Shortly after beginning the drive home, the crew reported that they saw a bright light from behind an upcoming hill. They drove closer, and say they saw a large silvery disc hovering above a clearing and shining brightly. It was around eight feet high and twenty feet in diameter.

Rogers slowed the truck to a stop, and then they claimed Walton leapt from the truck and ran towards the disc. The other men say they shouted at Walton to come back, but he continued towards the disc. He was nearly below the object, when the men in the truck reported that the disc began making noises similar to a very loud turbine. The disc then began to wobble from side to side, and Walton began to walk away from the object.

Jerome Clark writes that just after Walton moved away from the disc, the others insist they saw a beam of blue-green light emanate from the disc and “strike Travis”. Clark goes on to write that Travis "rose a foot into the air, his arms and legs outstretched, and shot back stiffly some 10 feet, all the while caught in the glow of the light. His right shoulder hit the earth, and his body sprawled limply over the ground.” (Clark, 628-629)

Rogers later says he was convinced Walton was dead, so he drove away very quickly over the rough road, afraid that the disc was chasing the truck. After about a quarter mile, the truck skidded off the road and Rogers stopped. After some discussion, the crew claim they decided to go back to the site and find Walton.

The disc was gone, and his coworkers said they searched for Walton for twenty minutes, but found no sign of him.


[edit] The search
At about 7.30pm, Peterson called police from Heber, Arizona, near Snowflake. Deputy Sheriff Chuck Ellison answered the telephone call; Peterson initially reported only that one of a logging crew was missing. Ellison then met the crew at a shopping center. They related the tale to him — all the men distraught, two of them in tears — and though he was somewhat skeptical of the fantastic account, Ellison would later reflect "that if they were acting, they were awfully good at it.” (Clark, 629)

Ellison notified his superior — Sheriff Marlin Gillespie — who told Ellison to keep the crew in Heber until he could arrive with Officer Ken Coplan to interview the men. In less than an hour, Gillespie and Coplan arrived, and heard the tale from the crew. Rogers insisted on returning to the scene immediately to search for Walton, with tracking dogs, if possible. No dogs were available, but the police and some of the crew returned to the scene. (Crew members Smith, Pierce and Goulette were too upset to be of much help in a search, so they elected to return to Snowflake and relate the bad news to friends and family.)

Back at the scene, the law enforcement officers became suspicious of the story related by the crew, mainly because there was nothing in the way of physical evidence to back up the account. Though more police and volunteers arrived to search the area, they found not a trace of Walton. Winter nights could be bitterly cold in the mountains, and Walton had worn only jeans, a denim jacket and a shirt; police were worried that Walton could fall victim to hypothermia if he were lost.

Rogers and Sheriff Coplan went to tell the news to Walton's mother, Mary Walton Kellett, who lived on a small ranch at Bear Creek, some ten miles from Snowflake. Rogers told her what had happened, and she asked him to repeat the account. She then asked calmly if anyone other than the police and the eyewitnesses had heard the story. Coplan thought her reserved response was odd; this factor contributed to the growing suspicion among police that something other than a UFO was responsible for Walton’s absence. On the other hand, Clark notes that Kellett was known as being generally guarded, and had furthermore raised six children largely by herself under often trying circumstances, which "had long since taught her to not to fly to pieces in the face of crises and tragedies. Yet in the days ahead, as events overwhelmed her, she would show emotion before friends, acquaintances and strangers alike — a fact that would go unmentioned in debunking treatments of the Walton episode." (Clark, 631)

At about 3:00am, Kellett telephoned Duane Walton, her second oldest child. He quickly left his home in Glendale, Arizona and drove to Snowflake.

By the morning of November 6, many officials and volunteers had scoured the area around the scene where Travis went missing. Still no trace of him was discovered, and police suspicions were growing that the UFO tale was concocted to cover up an accident or homicide. Saturday morning, Rogers and Duane Walton arrived at Sheriff Gillespie’s office "explosively angry" because they had returned to the scene and found no police there. By that afternoon, police were searching for Travis with helicopters, horse-mounted officers, and jeeps. (Clark, 361)


[edit] Publicity
Additionally by Saturday, word of Walton's disappearance had spread internationally. News reporters, ufologists and the curious began travelling to Snowflake. Travis Walton’s family and friends began receiving all manner of prank telephone calls regarding the case.

Among the visitors was Fred Sylvanus, a Phoenix UFO investigator, who interviewed Rogers and Duane Walton on Saturday, November 8. While repeatedly expressing worry for Travis’s well-being (and criticizing what they saw as a halfhearted search effort by police), both men would make statements that would return to haunt them, when seized upon by critics.

On the recordings made by Sylvanus, Rogers noted that because of Travis’s disappearance and the subsequent search, he would be unable to complete his contract with the Forest Service, and he hoped the search for his missing friend would mitigate the situation. Duane Walton reported he and Travis were quite interested in UFOs, and that some twelve years earlier, Duane had witnessed a UFO similar to the one witnessed by the logging crew. Duane reported that he and Travis had both decided that if they had a chance, they would get as close as possible to any UFO they might see. Duane also suggested that Travis would not be injured by the aliens, because "they don’t harm people." (Clark, 631) Without intending to do so, Rogers and Duane Walton had laid "the foundations for an alternative interpretation of the case" with their statements. (Clark, 632) Travis would later report that he never had a "keen" interest in UFOs, even after his supposed abduction, but the tape recorded statement of his brother Duane while Travis was still missing runs contrary to Travis's statements. [2]

Shortly after the Sylvanus interview, Snowflake Town Marshall Sanford Flake announced that the entire affair was a prank engineered by Duane and Travis. They had fooled the logging crew by lighting a balloon and "releasing it at the appropriate time." Flake’s wife disagreed, suggesting that her husband’s story was "just as farfetched as Duane Walton's." (Clark, 632)

In the meantime, Police officers were making repeated visits to Kellett’s home; Duane once returned there to find her in tears as she was being questioned in her living room. Duane told the police to leave unless they had something new to relate, or to ask. Duane suggested that she speak with police only on the front porch, which would allow her to end the interview anytime she chose by simply going inside. She did exactly that after Marshal Flake arrived to relate a message, which Clark notes, contributed to the feeling among skeptics that Kellett was "hiding something. Or someone." (Clark, 632)

Duane also spoke with William H. Spaulding of Ground Saucer Watch. Spaulding suggested that if Travis ever returned, GSW could provide a doctor to examine him in confidence. Spaulding also suggested that if Travis returned, he should save his first urination after returning so it could be tested.


[edit] Polygraph
On Monday, November 10, all of Rogers’s crew (except Walton, of course) took polygraph examinations administered by Cy Gilson, an Arizona Department of Public Safety employee. His questions asked if any of the men caused harm to Travis (or knew who had caused Travis harm), if they knew where Travis’s body was buried, and if they told the truth about seeing a UFO. The men all denied harming Travis (or knowing who had harmed him), denied knowing where his body was, and insisted they had indeed seen a UFO.

Excepting Dallis (who had not completed his exam, thus rendering it invalid), Gilson concluded that all the men were truthful, and the exam results were conclusive. Clark quotes from Gilson’s official report: "These polygraph examinations prove that these five men did see some object they believed to be a UFO, and that Travis Walton was not injured or murdered by any of these men on that Wednesday." If the UFO was hoaxed, Gilson thought, “five of these men had no prior knowledge of a hoax.” (Clark, 633)

Dallis later admitted that he'd concealed a criminal record to obtain his job with Rogers, and fear of this lie being exposed was why he'd walked out of the polygraph exam.

Following the polygraph tests, Sheriff Gillespie announced that he accepted the UFO story, saying "There’s no doubt they’re telling the truth." (Clark, 633)

Flake was unpersuaded; he once appeared at Kellett’s home with a television camera crew, hoping to discover Travis hiding there.


[edit] Gallery
Results of the polygraph test (page 1)

Results of the polygraph test (page 2)




[edit] Walton’s return
Just before midnight on Monday, November 10, Grant Neff reported that he answered his home telephone in Taylor, Arizona, a few miles from Snowflake (Neff was married to Travis’s sister Alison). The caller said, "This is Travis. I’m at a phone booth at the Heber gas station, and I need help. Come and get me."

Initially, Neff says he thought the caller was another prankster. Before Neff could hang up the telephone, however, the caller spoke again, nearly hysterical and screaming, “It’s me, Grant ... I’m hurt, and I need help badly. You come and get me.” (ibid.) Neff reconsidered the caller’s identity: his panic seemed genuine to Neff, so he and Duane Walton drove to the gas station.

They reported they found Travis there, collapsed in the second of three telephone booths. He wore the same clothing as when he’d disappeared — still inadequate, the temperature was about 20 degrees Fahrenheit — and he seemed thinner and to have not shaved in the time he was absent.

On the drive back to Snowflake, Travis seemed afraid, and repeatedly mumbled on about beings with terrifying eyes. He thought he’d been gone only a few hours; when he learned that he’d been absent nearly a week, Walton seemed stunned, and stopped speaking at all.

Duane Walton says he decided not to reveal Travis’s return immediately, out of concern for his brother’s apparently fragile condition. By not notifying authorities, however, Duane would face charges that he was complicit in a cover up of evidence he or Travis might not want police to see.

At his mother’s house, Travis says he bathed and tried to eat, but was unable to keep from vomiting even after eating mild foods. As Spaulding had suggested, Duane told Travis to keep a sample of his first urination following his return.

Following a tip from a telephone company employee at about 2.30am, police learned that someone had called the Neff family from a pay phone at the Heber gas station. Gillespie sent two Deputies to dust the booths for fingerprints, but as near as the deputies could tell in the dark, none of the prints were Travis's. This fact would be noted by critics who thought the entire affair was a hoax, while supporters argued that a fingerprint examination carried out in the dark, early morning hours by two sheriffs wielding flashlights was hardly ideal and by no means exhaustive.


[edit] The "medical" exam
Duane remembered Spaulding's promise of a confidential medical examination. Without having notified authorities of Travis's return, Duane drove him to Phoenix, Arizona, late Tuesday morning, where they were to meet with Dr. Lester Steward.

The Waltons reported that they were disappointed to learn that Steward was not a medical doctor as Spaulding had promised, but a hypnotherapist. Spaulding and Steward would later report that the Waltons had stayed with them for over two hours, while the Waltons insist they were at Steward’s office for, at most, 45 minutes, most of which was occupied with trying to determine the nature of Steward’s qualifications (Clark, 635). The precise time spent with Steward would later become an issue in the case.


[edit] Travis’s return makes the news
By afternoon Tuesday, word of Travis’s return had leaked out to the public. Duane took a telephone call from Spaulding, and told Spaulding not to bother the family again. Clark writes that after this telephone call, "Spaulding became a sworn enemy in the case." (Clark 363)

Among the other telephone calls after news of Travis’s return was one from Coral Lorenzen of APRO, a civilian UFO research group. She promised Duane that she could arrange an examination for Travis by two medical doctors — general practitioner Joseph Saults and pediatrician Howard Kandell — at Duane's home. Duane agreed, and the exam began at about 3:30pm Tuesday.

Clark writes that "between Lorenzen’s call and the physicians’ examination, another party would enter, and hugely complicate, the story." (Clark, 636) Lorenzen was telephoned by an employee of the National Enquirer, an American tabloid newspaper known for its sensationalistic tone. The Enquirer employee promised to finance APRO’s investigation, in exchange for APRO’s "cooperation and access to the Waltons." Since the Enquirer’s financial resources were far more vast than APRO’s, Lorenzen agreed to the arrangement. (Clark, 363)

The medical examination revealed that Travis was essentially in good health, but they did note two unusual features:

A small red spot at the crease of Travis’s right elbow that was consistent with a hypodermic injection, but the doctors also noted that the spot was not near a vein;
Analysis of Travis’s urine revealed a lack of acetones. This was unusual, given that if Travis had indeed been gone for five days with little or no food as he insisted (and as his weight loss suggested), his body should have begun breaking down fats in order to survive, and this should have led to very high levels of acetone in his urine. Critics would argue this inconsistency is evidence against Travis's story.
Travis would later speculate that he’d gotten the mark on his elbow in the course of his logging work; critics would speculate that the mark showed where Travis (or someone else) had injected drugs into his system. Clark dismisses this possibility of drugging as most unlikely, given that the medical doctors found no sign of it, but he also notes that perhaps "more difficult to explain is the absence of bruises, which one might expect in the wake of Travis’s alleged beam-driven collision with the ground." (Clark 637) Travis later noted that he’d been an amateur boxer and had rarely bruised even after rough matches; he also noted that in his logging duties, he and others had taken some painful bumps and falls which had not left significant marks. This, of course, may raise an inconsistency in that Travis suspects that a minor puncture wound could still be visible after five days, while he simultaneously insists that being roughly tossed some ten feet would leave no bruise or abrasion.

When Sheriff Gillespie learned of Travis’s return through the mass media, he was angered. Gillespie thought that he had demonstrated his belief in the UFO story with his announcement following the polygraph exams. Duane, however, was still bitter over what he saw as the lackadaisical search effort during Travis’s absence.

Travis then told Gillespie what had happened during the five days he'd been gone. It was the first time he’d told anyone the tale, other than his family or close friends.


[edit] Travis in the UFO
In his survey of UFO abduction literature, Terry Matheson writes that "Walton’s experience stands out by virtue of its not being particularly bizarre as far as abduction accounts go." (Matheson, 111-112)

Travis reported that after approaching the UFO near the work site, the last thing he remembered was being struck by the beam of light. When he woke, Travis said he was on a reclined bed. A bright light shone above him, and the air was heavy and wet. He was in pain, and had some trouble breathing, but his first thought was that he was in a normal hospital.

As his faculties returned, Travis says he realized he was surrounded by three figures, each wearing a sort of orange jumpsuit. The figures were not human; Travis described them as similar to the so-called Greys which feature in some abduction accounts: "shorter than five feet, and they had bald heads, no hair. Their heads were domed, very large. They looked like fetuses ... They had large eyes — enormous eyes — almost all brown, without much white in them. The creepiest thing about them were those eyes ... they just stared through me." Their ears, noses and mouths "seemed real small, maybe just because their eyes were so huge." (Clark, 646)

Afraid for his safety, Travis says he got to his feet, and shouted at the creatures to stay away. He grabbed a glasslike cylinder from a nearby shelf and tried to break its tip to create a makeshift knife, but found the object unbreakable, so instead waved it at the creatures as a weapon. The trio of creatures left him in the room.

Matheson finds this portion of the narrative troublingly inconsistent, noting that "despite his 'weakened' condition, 'aching body' and 'splitting pain in his skull', maladies for which no cause is suggested, he has no trouble jumping up from his operating table, seizing a conveniently placed glasslike rod, and, assuming a karate 'fighting stance', frightened them with this display of macho aggression, enough at least to cause them to run away." (Matheson, 110) However, if one accepts Travis's story, an adrenaline rush might account for his quick recovery from his pains.

Travis then left this "exam room" via a hallway, which led to a round, spherical room with only a high-backed chair placed in the room's center. Though he was afraid there might be someone seated in the chair, Travis says he walked towards it. As he did, lights began to appear in the room. The chair was empty, so Travis says he sat in it. When he did, the room was filled with lights, similar to stars projected on a round planetarium ceiling.

The chair was equipped on the left arm with a single short thick lever with an oddly shaped molded handle atop some dark brown material. On the right arm, there was an illuminated, lime-green screen about five inches square with black lines intersected at all angles.[3]

When Travis pushed the lever, he reported that the stars rotated around him slowly. When he released the lever, the stars remained at their new position. He decided to stop manipulating the lever, since he had no idea what it might do.

He left the chair, and the stars disappeared. Travis thought he had seen a rectangular outline on the rounded wall — perhaps a door — and went to look for it.

Just then, Travis heard a sound behind him. He turned, expecting more of the short, large eyed creatures, but was pleasantly surprised to see a tall human figure wearing blue coveralls with a glassy helmet. At the time, Travis said, he did not realize how odd the man's eyes were: larger than normal, and a bright gold color.

Travis says he then asked the man a number of questions, but the man only grinned and motioned for Travis to follow him. Travis also said that because of the man’s helmet he might have been unable to hear him, so he followed the man down a hallway which led to door and a steep ramp down to a large room Travis described as similar to an aircraft hangar. Travis says he realized he’d just left a disc-shaped craft similar to the one he’d seen in the forest just before he’d been struck by the bluish light, but the craft was perhaps twice as large.

In the hangar-like room, Travis reported seeing other disc-shaped craft. The man led him to another room, containing three more humans — a woman and two men — resembling the helmeted man. These people did not wear helmets, so Travis says he began asking questions of them. They responded with the same dull grin, and led him by his arm to a small table.

Once he was seated on the table, Travis says he realized the woman held a device like an oxygen mask, which she placed on his face. Before he could fight back, Travis says he passed out.

When he woke again, Travis says he was outside the gas station in Heber, Arizona. One of the disc-shaped craft was hovering just above the highway. After a moment, the craft shot away, and Travis stumbled to the telephones and called his brother in law, Grant Neff. He thought that only a few hours had passed.

After hearing Travis’s story, Gillespie speculated that Travis may have been hit on the head and drugged, then taken to a normal hospital where he had confused the details of a routine exam with something more spectacular. Travis dismissed this, noting that the medical examination had found no trace of head trauma or drugs in his system. Travis told Sheriff Gillespie that he was willing to take a polygraph, a truth serum, or undergo hypnosis to support his account. Gillespie said that a polygraph would suffice, and he promised to arrange one in secret to avoid the growing media circus.

Duane and Travis then drove to Scottsdale, Arizona, where a meeting with APRO consultant James A. Harder had been arranged. Harder hypnotized Travis, hoping to uncover more details of the missing five days. Clark writes that "Unlike many other abductees, however, Walton’s conscious recall and unconscious 'memory' were the same, and he could account for only a maximum of two hours, and perhaps less, of his missing five days. Curiously ... Walton encountered an impenetrable mental block and expressed the view that he would 'die' if the regression continued." (Clark, 637)


[edit] Suppressed polygraph exam and controversy
In the meantime, Spaulding had announced to the press that he and "Dr." Steward had questioned Walton for two hours, and had uncovered inconsistencies in Walton’s account that would "Blow this story out". (Clark, 637) The Phoenix Gazette ran a story about Steward, who related his claims that the "Waltons fear exposure" of a carefully-crafted lie. (Clark, 638)

Sheriff Gillespie arranged for a polygraph, but when word of the exam was leaked to the press, Duane canceled it, thinking that Gillespie had broken his promise to keep the test a secret. Gillespie would later insist he had not leaked word of the polygraph, and that the case had become too sensationalistic to keep anything secret for long.

The National Enquirer wanted Travis to take a polygraph as soon as possible, and arranged for one, after Duane insisted that he and Travis have the power to veto any public disclosure of the test results. Harder thought that Travis was too distraught to take a polygraph, but the examiner — John J McCarthy, of the Arizona Polygraph Laboratory — said he could take Travis’s nervous state into consideration.

In interviewing Travis before the exam began, McCarthy extracted two admissions from him: First, that he had smoked marijuana a few times, but had never used the drug regularly, and secondly, that he and Mike Rogers’s younger brother had committed check fraud a few years earlier by altering payroll checks. It was his only serious brush with the law -- Travis completed two years probation without further incident -- but Travis remained deeply embarrassed about the check fraud episode. (Incidentally, Philip J. Klass notes that Travis once claimed to have been jailed for this crime, though he actually received two years' probation as a first-time offender.[4])

McCarthy then administered the polygraph, which remains mired in controversy. Travis asserts McCarthy behaved unprofessionally, while McCarthy insists Travis both failed the polygraph and tried to cheat. At one point, says Travis, McCarthy asked if Travis had "colluded" with anyone to perpetrate a hoax. Travis said he was unfamiliar with the word, and Travis reported that McCarthy replied, in a confrontative and aggressive manner, that collusion was planning or conspiring with another, just as Travis had colluded to steal and forge payroll checks.

After completing the exam, McCarthy determined that Travis was lying. Clark quotes from McCarthy’s official report: "Based on his reaction on all charts, it is the opinion of this examiner that Walton, in concert with others, is attempting to perpetrate a UFO hoax, and that he has not been on any spacecraft." (Clark, 640) Later, McCarthy would assert that "sometimes Travis would hold his breath, in an effort to 'beat the machine."[2]

The Waltons, APRO and the National Enquirer then agreed to keep the results of this polygraph a secret, due in large part, they insisted, to doubts about McCarthy’s methods and objectivity. Eight months later, when word of this decision was made public, there would be more charges of deception and cover up. Travis would later take and pass two additional polygraph exams, though the suppressed results of the first exam would shadow him and earn mention in nearly every discussion of the case to the present.

Once word of the suppressed polygraph was made public by Klass, many who had thought Travis had related a true account (or at least what he thought was a true account) reconsidered the case with a more skeptical eye. Travis, Duane and APRO members argued that McCarthy was biased, and had asked Travis embarrassing, irrelevant questions in an effort to create turbulent conditions more likely to produce a negative result. According to Clark,[5] the opinions of recognized polygraph experts were divided about the propriety of McCarthy's exam: Harry Reed supported the validity of McCarthy's exam, while psychologist David Raskin of the University of Utah asserted that McCarthy's method was "more than 30 years out of date."

Philip J. Klass — an aviation journalist by profession, but also a well-known UFO debunker — launched a concerted, sustained critique against Travis's claims, arguing especially that there was a strong financial motive to the entire affair.[2] Rogers knew he would be unable to complete his contract with the Forest Service, argued Klass, and concocted a scheme to invoke the contract’s act of God clause, thus dissolving the contract without fault.[2] Others argued against this idea[6], noting that defaulting on a Forest Service contract was not necessarily the catastrophe Klass implied: Rogers had failed to complete two of his many earlier Forest Service contracts, yet had been rehired without apparent prejudice. Furthermore, despite his anxiety over the contract, Rogers never invoked or tried to invoke the "act of God" clause in the aftermath of Travis’s disappearance.[2]

Klass and others also noted that The UFO Incident was broadcast on NBC just a few weeks before Travis’s disappearance.[2] This made-for-television film was a fictionalized account of the Hill Abduction, the first widely-publicised case of alien abduction.[2] Klass and others speculated that Walton had been inspired by the program.[2] Walton denied that he had watched the program, but Klass notes that Mike Rogers watched at least a portion of the program. Clark argues that Walton’s account of his time on the UFO is quite different from the Hill account, and that furthermore, "there is not a great deal of similarity between Walton’s and any other abduction narrative" publicly discussed as of November, 1975. (Clark, 649)


[edit] Aftermath
In 1978 Walton published The Walton Experience, in which he outlined his own narrative of the event and its aftermath. The same year, Bill Barry published The Ultimate Encounter, in which he argues that the various debunkers, especially Klass, did not make persuasive cases, and that Walton and others claiming similar experiences expressed events more or less as they believed they’d happened.

Matheson argues that Walton's book makes a few fundamental errors that severely harm his case. While Travis "proclaims self-righteously" that he intends only to relate events and not "interpret" them, Matheson writes that "the reader will see almost immediately that large sections of the book are nothing more than highly speculative, purely imaginative recreations on his part." (Matheson, 109) For example, after he is zapped by the blue beam and knocked unconscious, Walton offers precise, novelistic dialogue describing the conversations of his fellow crew workers after they drove away in a panic. Yet Walton never mentions if he is paraphrasing their words based on what they related to him, if he interviewed the others to determine who said what, or if he simply assumed what they said. Matheson argues this represents a "lack of concern for literal accuracy that the reader cannot help but suspect is characteristic of the entire work." (Matheson, 110)

After the initial furor subsided, Walton remained in Snowflake and eventually became the foreman at a lumber mill; he married Dana Rogers and they had several children. Beyond the film based on his encounter, Travis has occasionally appeared at UFO conventions or on television specials.


[edit] Fire in the Sky
In 1993, Walton’s book was adapted into a film, Fire in the Sky, directed by Robert Lieberman and staring D.B. Sweeney as Travis Walton and Robert Patrick as Mike Rogers. Clark writes that the film found "Moderate success, mixed reviews, and ufologists’ complaints about its inaccuracies and exaggerations." (Clark, 650) Especially inaccurate was the portion of the film detailing his time on the UFO; it bears almost no resemblance to the original narrative. Screenwriter Tracy Torme even sent letters to many ufologists, claiming that the changes were requested by studio officials, and apologizing for making such substantial alterations to Walton 's narrative. (Randles and Hough, 188)

Walton and Mike Rogers made a few promotional appearances to support the film; they debated Klass on Larry King Live; at one point, Klass lost his temper and called Rogers a "goddamned liar." (Clark, 650) It's worth noting that Klass and Jerome Clark have butted heads occasionally, and that in his book, Clark does not offer any background context to explain Klass's remark on Larry King.

In the renewed publicity generated by the motion picture, Walton, Mike Rogers and Allen Dallis agreed to take polygraph examinations at the behest of "a skeptical ufologist, Jerry Black." (Clark, 650) Again, the tests were conducted by Cy Gilson, and the men all asserted that the events as they related them were true. Gilson concluded that all three men were truthful in regards to their responses about the events of November 5, 1975.

At the time of the film's release, Walton re-issued The Walton Experience under the same title as the film; expanding it to include text rebutting Klass's commentary.


[edit] An independent witness?
A curious episode occurred in the early stages of publicity for the film.[7] Walton was contacted by a man who claimed to have been hunting with his wife in the same area where Walton saw the UFO. The man reported that they had seen a disc which shot a beam of blue light, then flown off into the sky. As an active military intelligence officer, the man said he had reported the sighting to his superiors, who told him to keep quiet unless Walton's coworkers were actually charged with a crime related to the disappearance.

Travis judged the man's story plausible, and notified Tracy Torme, who had written the screenplay for Fire In The Sky. Torme arranged for the man to undergo a polygraph administered by Cy Gilson, who had conducted the polygraphs on the logging crew nearly twenty years before.

Gilson asked the man two sets of questions: The first regarding the UFO sighting and the man's claims to being a Military Intelligence officer; the second set of questions asked if the man was colluding with anyone (specifically Klass and/or the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal) in order to discredit Travis, and if a military superior had indeed ordered the man to keep quiet about the UFO report. The man insisted his account was truthful.

Gilson decided that the man was lying about all of his claims, and furthermore, that he deliberately tried to mislead Gilson and fool the polygraph. Walton speculated that if the man had passed Gilson's exam, his presumable associates would have stepped to the fore with evidence to discredit Gilson's polygraph methods, and thus discredit the loggers who had early been deemed truthful following Gilson’s exams. There was some precedent for suspicon due to Project Alpha, a 1979 effort by James Randi to use stage magicians to demonstrate that parapsychologists could be fooled by sleight of hand. However, in Project Alpha, the undercover magicians were instructed to admit to the plan if asked directly if they were faking; this contrasts with the Walton case "eyewitness" who stuck to his story even when directly asked if he was lying.

Walton named Klass as a suspect in arranging the seemingly phony eyewitness, but Klass denied the charge: "I WOULD NEVER ENGAGE IN SUCH TRICKERY, KNOWING THAT IF IT WERE EXPOSED THIS WOULD RUIN MY REPUTATION AS A TECHNICAL JOURNALIST AND AS A UFO RESEARCHER. Nor would CSICOP." (text reprinted in all-caps as in original) [2]


[edit] Sources

[edit] Footnotes
^ Jerome Clark. The UFO Book: Encyclopedia of the Extraterrestrial. Visible Ink, 1998 ISBN 1-57859-029-9 Page 527
^ a b c d e f g h i Klass, Philip. "Walton Claims He Is Afraid To Recall What Occurred Aboard UFO", "The Skeptics UFO Newsletter" archived by Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, March 1998. Retrieved on 2006-11-18.
^ http://www.travis-walton.com/human.html
^ Klass, Philip J. "Travis Walton Fact Sheet" Aug 16 1993; URL accessed 22 June 2007
^ Clark, Jerome, "Phil Klass vs. The 'UFO Promoters'" from Fate 1981; URL accessed 22 June 2007
^ see Clark, 1998
^ see Clark, 1998 for further information

[edit] Books
Jerome Clark; The UFO Book: Encyclopedia of the Extraterrestrial; Visible Ink, 1998; ISBN 1-57859-029-9
Terry Matheson; Alien Abduction: Creating A Modern Phenomenon; Prometheus Books, 1998; ISBN 1-57392-244-7
Jenny Randles and Peter Houghe; The Complete Book of UFOs: An Investigation into Alien Contact and Encounters; Sterling Publishing Co, Inc, 1994; ISBN 0-8069-8132-6
The Klass Files #50
Travis Walton Fact Sheet, by Philip Klass
1993 Lie detector test shows Travis Walton spoke the truth - conducted during preparation for the 1993 film adaptation of Walton's experiences, also titled Fire in the Sky.

[edit] External links
Walton's Official Site
The Travis Walton Abduction Case, by Geoff Price
The Selling of the Travis Walton "Abduction" Story, by Robert Shaeffer

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF THE FRENCH RESISTANCE

This Day in the History of French Resistance


On this day in 1942, the French Navy at Toulon scuttled nearly all its ships and submarines to keep them out of the hands of the Nazis, who had conquered France two and a half years earlier, but had allowed, for a while, the semblance of a French government, called the Vichy government. The Vichy French controlled the modern and deadly French Fleet, as long as they didn't leave port. There are few nations with a longer, more glorious history of destroying their equipment to keep it out of enemy hands than France.



I am also getting a little sick of hearing about the heroic French Resistance during WWII. Between the period June, 1940 to April, 1945, far more French men and women collaborated with and even joined up to fight along side the Germans than fought against them in the Resistance. Indeed, more people 'joined' the Resistance after May 8, 1945 than had joined it before then. Still, there were brave French men and women, mainly men, who suffered and died fighting the Bosch after their country's defeat and the ruining of the French Navy was in a certain light another such heroic act. Viva la France!
UPDATE: I got the date wrong. The end of open collaboration and the real start of nearly everyone being in the Resistance was in September, 1944, when we liberated Paris and then kicked the Germans out of the rest of France. My mistake.
Labels: WWII history; European theater



# posted by Roger Fraley @ 7:06 AM
Comments:
If we're going to talk about the courageous actions of the French Navy in WWII, it would be uncharitable not to mention Mers el Kebir. The French fought a battle there to keep their fleet out of enemy hands. Of course, the battle was against their putative erstwhile allies, the British, but with the French you have to take your small points of light where you can find them.

Had the French not fought so earnestly on behalf of their German allies (at Mers el Kebir and during Torch) and had the French not been so diligent in their aid to the "Final Solution", I'd be more willing to credit them with the actions of a few (very few) members of the Resistance. As it is, I'm afraid that the graveyards in Poland and Germany and Morocco and Algeria filled with men killed by the French offer too much of a counterargument.

The French aren't bad allies, but that's because they aren't allies at all.
# posted by Doug Sundseth : 10:24 AM
I sort of agree and your last line made me laugh. But I thought their 'fight' at Mers el Kebir consisted of them taking fire from the Brits without any effective counterfire. I am willing to be wrong on that.
# posted by Roger Fraley : 10:50 AM
Excerpts from the Wikipedia article on the battle:

"The French fleet was not prepared for battle and was anchored in a narrow harbour. The main armament of the Dunkerque and Strasbourg was grouped on their bows and could not immediately be brought to bear."

"The French eventually replied but ineffectively."

"After some thirty salvos, the French ships stopped firing. Meanwhile, the British force altered their course to avoid fire from the French coastal forts."

"That night, French bombers carried out a retaliatory raid against the British fleet at Gibraltar to no great effect."

As at the Battle of the Nile, the French fleet was caught at anchor and unready for a fight. They didn't put up much of a fight (I'm shocked, shocked), but they did what little they could to kill British sailors.
# posted by Doug Sundseth : 11:43 AM
I know you righties seem to take an almost pornographic joy in trashing the French, but let's not forget that they were basically bled white during their WWI campaigns, and in WWII they obviously got their asses kicked, but let's also remember that the British Expeditionary Force essentially gave up on them after the first week of the campaign and the German Army was a force unlike anyone had ever seen.

Also, the French resistance was a pretty important factor in the Normandy Campaign. Many French citizens collaborated with the occupation, but I would be willing to bet that under the threat of death or torture that Americans would comply with the Nazis if we were in their shoes.

I know that the French did not support our "War of Iraqi Liberation" (based on the correct observation that the Iraqis did not have weapons of mass destruction), but the French have been fighting and winning a lot of wars for a hell of a long time.
# posted by Anonymous : 5:29 PM
I think it might be worthwhile to take a longer-term look at French actions. I'll start with the 30-Years war, largely because I know the history from that period forward reasonably well, but also because prior to that period France was so politically fragmented as to make comparisons less useful.

30-Years War - France begins the war as an ally of Spain and the Catholic German states. When it became apparent that there was advantage to be gained by switching sides, the French allied with the Protestants against their erstwhile allies.

Franco-Dutch War - Previous alliance with France was no protection when the French decided to take Dutch territory.

War of the Grand Alliance & War of the Spanish Succession - As should be expected, this was about opportunism. France tried again to grab Dutch territory and seated a Bourbon on the Spanish throne.

War of the Austrian Succession - France signed the Pragmatic Sanction, guaranteeing Austrian territorial integrity upon the death of Charles VI. Within two years, France had attacked Austria in an opportunistic attempt to grab territory.

7-Years War - The War of the Austrian Succession ended in 1748. By 1756, France had abandoned its previous alliance with Prussia, and allied with Austria to fight Prussia.

Revolutionary War/AWI - Studiedly neutral at the start (aid to the incipient US was illegal), the French saw the opportunity to discomfit their old enemy (England) and entered the war on the side of the US. By the end of the war, the French tried very hard to betray the US during the peace negotiations. (As a result, though fighting ended in 1781, the peace treaty wasn't signed until 1783.)

Quasi War - Though France had been a defacto ally of the US during much of the AWI, and though the US had been an ally of France during the French Revolution, by 1798, the French had begun capturing US merchant ships, which led to a two-year naval war between the two countries.

Napoleonic Wars - France vs. all of Europe (most of which had been allied with France at some point) except Spain. France (of course) betrayed Spain in the middle of the wars. (So much for the Bourbons.)

Franco-Prussian War - Characterized by extensive French incompetence, I don't actually know of any active French betrayals in this war. The lack of allies for France would have, of course, made betrayal difficult.

WWI - It's not clear which side had the moral advantage in this war, though of course the allies were the first to break the treaty on the use of poison gas. (The Germans were the first to use poison gas, but they used it within the treaty constraints.) The peace treaty, of course, was a disaster, and that disaster can be laid directly at the feet of France.

WWII - Previously discussed (at tedious length).

Cold War - France, being protected by default by other NATO forces, repudiated their military participation in the NATO treaty. Why bother to contribute when you can get someone else to defend your country without actually helping them? (And let's not even discuss Viet Nam.)

GWoT - Discussed at tedious length. Direct French abrogation of NATO treaty obligations has been rampant. (Oh, and the French believed that the Iraqis had WMD programs, just like the rest of the west. Their decision was based on short-term advantage, not superior intelligence.)

French faithlessness has not by any means been unique to the US/French relationship.
# posted by Doug Sundseth : 10:41 AM
Thanks, Doug, excellent analysis, as usual. Anon, I'm not sure disdain of the French is more concentrated on the right than on the left, but if it is, it is because we right wingers apparently have clearer historical knowledge. As to how many Americans would have supported the Nazis under the same circumstances that existed in 1940-1944 France, difficult to prove or disprove. French people did not join or help the Gestapo or join the French SS Division because of a threat of death or torture. I'm sure there are weak people who support our mortal enemies now but you probably don't want to ask what political leanings they have, the answer might be painful to you.
# posted by Roger Fraley : 12:00 PM
You know what you would call French Resistance members now don't you? Insurgents if you are being nice. Terrorists if you being Republicans.
# posted by Praguetwin : 12:17 PM
Indeed, they would be insurgents, though mostly not terrorists, since they were engaging military targets. And as illegal combatants (lacking recognizable signs of membership in a military force among other things) they were properly not subject to Geneva Convention and Hague Convention protections.

Note further that they did not expect such protections, nor did their allies expect them to be afforded such protections.

KEN MAYNARD COWBOY STAR HALL OF FAME

Hall of Fame of Western Film & TV Stars
Ken Maynard
Born: Kenneth Olin Maynard, July 21 1895, Vevay, Indiana. Died: March 23, 1973, Woodland Hills, CA.

If any authority on movies were asked to compile a list of the ten greatest cowboy stars of all time, be would most certainly have to include Ken Maynard. One of the most popular of all sagebrush heroes, Ken starred in over 125 pictures during a career that spanned almost twenty years.

Ken Maynard was the son of Mr. and Mrs. William H. Maynard. At the tender age of fourteen, he ran away from home to join a traveling medicine show, only to find the going real rough on his own. When he returned home, his angry father enrolled him at the Virginia Military Institute in order that he learn discipline. Ken buckled down in his studies while learning engineering and entered the U.S. Army during World War I as the youngest engineer in the service.

After leaving the Army, Ken toured the country as a rodeo rider and, in 1920, won the National Trick Riding Championship. Three years later, he was a featured performer for the Ringling Bros. Circus when a movie talent scout spotted him during a performance. Arranging an exhibition, Ken did his tricks before such distinguished personalities as Tom Mix, Dustin Famum and several film producers who sent him to Hollywood.

In 1924, Ken played his first screen role when he portrayed Paul Revere in Janice Meredith, a part that earned him the lead in his next film, $50,000 Reward. During the next two years, he made a series of cheaply-produced Westerns for the Davis Film Corporation, which landed him a contract with First National Studios in 1926. Having graduated to pictures with higher production value, he soon became one of the leading stars in Westerns. Imitating the grand style of Tom Mix, Ken played his heroes with much bravado, making certain to show off his excellent ability as a horseman. When it came to excitement and hair-raising thrills, his pictures offered large quantities of both. By 1930, he was producing his own features and releasing them under the Universal title.

Ken was one of the few stars who had little difficulty making the change from silent movies to talkies. In the early 1930's, he was making Westerns for major companies like Universal and Columbia, besides appearing in independent productions for Spectrum, Victory and Tiffany. As far as his own productions, he was kept active serving as producer, director, star and sometimes writer. He and two other cowboy stars, Hoot Gibson and Tim McCoy, were the only sagebrush heroes that managed to make pictures for both the major and independent studios at the same time.

It was Ken who first laid the groundwork for the musical Western. Many times, he included scenes in his pictures where he would personally vocalize a tune or feature a singing group of cowboys in order to break up the constant diet of action. Although these short musical interruptions were of minor importance, they did serve as a link to the singing cowboy craze. When Gene Autry and his pal, Smiley Burnette, first made their debuts in Ken's Mystery Mountain and In Old Santa Fe, the craze was definitely on its way to success.

Among the best performers in Ken Maynard's pictures was his famous horse, "Tarzan." To the audience, the handsome Palomino was as much a part of the plot as any of the human actors and Ken always made certain to include some scenes in which Tarzan could show off his bag of tricks. Unfortunately, Ken was indifferent when it came to his pictures. Admittedly, he made Westerns for the sole purpose of reaping a profit at the box-office and lacked the desire to even try to produce films that were true to the real West. In many cases, he substituted quantity for quality in spite of the fact that he had the means of turning out some first-grade films that would have compared with those of Tom Mix, Buck Jones and Harry Carey. Instead, he chose to make a parade of quickie, streamlined horse-operas patterned in the style of Hoot Gibson's Westerns. Nevertheless, some of Ken's films ranked high among the best Westerns ever made as far as real production value was concerned.

To take advantage of his immense popularity, Ken organized his Diamond K Ranch Wild West Show in 1936 with plans of touring the nation. Unfortunately, he failed to obtain proper financial backing and the show never left its home quarters. In less than a month, Ken was forced to abandon the idea. Returning to pictures, he starred in another chain of action Westerns until he temporarily retired from the screen in 1938.

By the early 1940's, two types of Westerns were enjoying great popularity, the musical horse-operas and the cowboy "trios." In the first group, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Tex Ritter and many other singers were at the top of the heap. In the second group, Westerns featuring three main characters were very popular-The Three Mesquiteers, The Rough Riders, The Range Busters and the Hopalong Cassidy series. In 1941, Monogram Pictures decided to add another trio to the competition when Hoot Gibson, Ken Maynard and Bob Steele made their bow as the "Trail Blazers." Having arrived somewhat late, the series lasted until 1943 when Monogram decided to cease production.

After that, Ken made only one more picture, The White Stallion in 1946, before he left the screen permanently. Four years later he was in England, appearing in television while campaigning for the British Labor Party and taking part in the first televised general election in the British Isles. Returning to California, he made a tour with the Cole Bros. Circus and has since been active in personal appearances at rodeos and Wild West shows and also an occasional spot on TV.

Ken was married to Bertha Rowland Denham October 22, 1940 and lasted until her her death in 1968. He has a younger brother, Kermit, who was also a popular cowboy star.

EMMA GOLDMAN WOMAN SUFFRAGE 1917

Emma Goldman: Woman Suffrage

From the 1917 edition of Emma Goldman's Anarchism and Other Essays
This selection and the essays below are from Anarchism and Other Essays by Emma Goldman, originally published as a collection in 1917.

• Table of Contents
• Biographic Sketch
• Preface
• Anarchism: What It Really Stands For
• Minorities Versus Majorities
• The Psychology of Political Violence
• Prisons: A Social Crime and Failure
• Patriotism: A Menace to Liberty
• Francisco Ferrer and The Modern School
• The Hypocrisy of Puritanism
• The Traffic in Women
• Woman Suffrage
• The Tragedy of Woman's Emancipation
• Marriage and Love
• The Drama: A Powerful Disseminator of Radical Thought

Also on this site:
• Emma Goldman - biography
• Emma Goldman Links
• Emma Goldman & Alexander Berkman, 1917 - photo
• Emma Goldman 1934 - photo
• Emma Goldman Writings Online
• Emma Goldman Quotations
• Emma Goldman: Too Radical for 2003?



We boast of the age of advancement, of science, and progress. Is it not strange, then, that we still believe in fetich [sic] worship? True, our fetiches have different form and substance, yet in their power over the human mind they are still as disastrous as were those of old.

Our modern fetich is universal suffrage. Those who have not yet achieved that goal fight bloody revolutions to obtain it, and those who have enjoyed its reign bring heavy sacrifice to the altar of this omnipotent deity. Woe to the heretic who dare question that divinity!

Woman, even more than man, is a fetich worshipper, and though her idols may change, she is ever on her knees, ever holding up her hands, ever blind to the fact that her god has feet of clay. Thus woman has been the greatest supporter of all deities from time immemorial. Thus, too, she has had to pay the price that only gods can exact,--her freedom, her heart's blood, her very life.

Nietzsche's memorable maxim, "When you go to woman, take the whip along," is considered very brutal, yet Nietzsche expressed in one sentence the attitude of woman towards her gods.

Religion, especially the Christian religion, has condemned woman to the life of an inferior, a slave. It has thwarted her nature and fettered her soul, yet the Christian religion has no greater supporter, none more devout, than woman. Indeed, it is safe to say that religion would have long ceased to be a factor in the lives of the people, if it were not for the support it receives from woman. The most ardent churchworkers, the most tireless missionaries the world over, are women, always sacrificing on the altar of the gods that have chained her spirit and enslaved her body.

The insatiable monster, war, robs woman of all that is dear and precious to her. It exacts her brothers, lovers, sons, and in return gives her a life of loneliness and despair. Yet the greatest supporter and worshiper of war is woman. She it is who instills the love of conquest and power into her children; she it is who whispers the glories of war into the ears of her little ones, and who rocks her baby to sleep with the tunes of trumpets and the noise of guns. It is woman, too, who crowns the victor on his return from the battlefield. Yes, it is woman who pays the highest price to that insatiable monster, war.

Then there is the home. What a terrible fetich it is! How it saps the very life-energy of woman,--this modern prison with golden bars. Its shining aspect blinds woman to the price she would have to pay as wife, mother, and housekeeper. Yet woman clings tenaciously to the home, to the power that holds her in bondage.

It may be said that because woman recognizes the awful toll she is made to pay to the Church, State, and the home, she wants suffrage to set herself free. That may be true of the few; the majority of suffragists repudiate utterly such blasphemy. On the contrary, they insist always that it is woman suffrage which will make her a better Christian and homekeeper, a staunch citizen of the State. Thus suffrage is only a means of strengthening the omnipotence of the very Gods that woman has served from time immemorial.

What wonder, then, that she should be just as devout, just as zealous, just as prostrate before the new idol, woman suffrage. As of old, she endures persecution, imprisonment, torture, and all forms of condemnation, with a smile on her face. As of old, the most enlightened, even, hope for a miracle from the twentieth century deity,--suffrage. Life, happiness, joy, freedom, independence,--all that, and more, is to spring from suffrage. In her blind devotion woman does not see what people of intellect perceived fifty years ago: that suffrage is an evil, that it has only helped to enslave people, that it has but closed their eyes that they may not see how craftily they were made to submit.

Woman's demand for equal suffrage is based largely on the contention that woman must have the equal right in all affairs of society. No one could, possibly, refute that, if suffrage were a right. Alas, for the ignorance of the human mind, which can see a right in an imposition. Or is it not the most brutal imposition for one set of people to make laws that another set is coerced by force to obey? Yet woman clamors for that "golden opportunity" that has wrought so much misery in the world, and robbed man of his integrity and self-reliance; an imposition which has thoroughly corrupted the people, and made them absolute prey in the hands of unscrupulous politicians.

The poor, stupid, free American citizen! Free to starve, free to tramp the highways of this great country, he enjoys universal suffrage, and, by that right, he has forged chains about his limbs. The reward that he receives is stringent labor laws prohibiting the right of boycott, of picketing, in fact, of everything, except the right to be robbed of the fruits of his labor. Yet all these disastrous results of the twentieth century fetich have taught woman nothing. But, then, woman will purify politics, we are assured.

Needless to say, I am not opposed to woman suffrage on the conventional ground that she is not equal to it. I see neither physical, psychological, nor mental reasons why woman should not have the equal right to vote with man. But that can not possibly blind me to the absurd notion that woman will accomplish that wherein man has failed. If she would not make things worse, she certainly could not make them better. To assume, therefore, that she would succeed in purifying something which is not susceptible of purification, is to credit her with supernatural powers. Since woman's greatest misfortune has been that she was looked upon as either angel or devil, her true salvation lies in being placed on earth; namely, in being considered human, and therefore subject to all human follies and mistakes. Are we, then, to believe that two errors will make a right? Are we to assume that the poison already inherent in politics will be decreased, if women were to enter the political arena? The most ardent suffragists would hardly maintain such a folly.

As a matter of fact, the most advanced students of universal suffrage have come to realize that all existing systems of political power are absurd, and are completely inadequate to meet the pressing issues of life. This view is also borne out by a statement of one who is herself an ardent believer in woman suffrage, Dr. Helen L. Sumner. In her able work on EQUAL SUFFRAGE, she says: "In Colorado, we find that equal suffrage serves to show in the most striking way the essential rottenness and degrading character of the existing system." Of course, Dr. Sumner has in mind a particular system of voting, but the same applies with equal force to the entire machinery of the representative system. With such a basis, it is difficult to understand how woman, as a political factor, would benefit either herself or the rest of mankind.

But, say our suffrage devotees, look at the countries and States where female suffrage exists. See what woman has accomplished--in Australia, New Zealand, Finland, the Scandinavian countries, and in our own four States, Idaho, Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah. Distance lends enchantment--or, to quote a Polish formula--"it is well where we are not." Thus one would assume that those countries and States are unlike other countries or States, that they have greater freedom, greater social and economic equality, a finer appreciation of human life, deeper understanding of the great social struggle, with all the vital questions it involves for the human race.

The women of Australia and New Zealand can vote, and help make the laws. Are the labor conditions better there than they are in England, where the suffragettes are making such a heroic struggle? Does there exist a greater motherhood, happier and freer children than in England? Is woman there no longer considered a mere sex commodity? Has she emancipated herself from the Puritanical double standard of morality for men and women? Certainly none but the ordinary female stump politician will dare answer these questions in the affirmative. If that be so, it seems ridiculous to point to Australia and New Zealand as the Mecca of equal suffrage accomplishments.

On the other hand, it is a fact to those who know the real political conditions in Australia, that politics have gagged labor by enacting the most stringent labor laws, making strikes without the sanction of an arbitration committee a crime equal to treason.

Not for a moment do I mean to imply that woman suffrage is responsible for this state of affairs. I do mean, however, that there is no reason to point to Australia as a wonder-worker of woman's accomplishment, since her influence has been unable to free labor from the thralldom of political bossism.

Finland has given woman equal suffrage; nay, even the right to sit in Parliament. Has that helped to develop a greater heroism, an intenser zeal than that of the women of Russia? Finland, like Russia, smarts under the terrible whip of the bloody Tsar. Where are the Finnish Perovskaias, Spiridonovas, Figners, Breshkovskaias? Where are the countless numbers of Finnish young girls who cheerfully go to Siberia for their cause? Finland is sadly in need of heroic liberators. Why has the ballot not created them? The only Finnish avenger of his people was a man, not a woman, and he used a more effective weapon than the ballot.

As to our own States where women vote, and which are constantly being pointed out as examples of marvels, what has been accomplished there through the ballot that women do not to a large extent enjoy in other States; or that they could not achieve through energetic efforts without the ballot?

True, in the suffrage States women are guaranteed equal rights to property; but of what avail is that right to the mass of women without property, the thousands of wage workers, who live from hand to mouth? That equal suffrage did not, and cannot, affect their condition is admitted even by Dr. Sumner, who certainly is in a position to know. As an ardent suffragist, and having been sent to Colorado by the Collegiate Equal Suffrage League of New York State to collect material in favor of suffrage, she would be the last to say anything derogatory; yet we are informed that "equal suffrage has but slightly affected the economic conditions of women. That women do not receive equal pay for equal work, and that, though woman in Colorado has enjoyed school suffrage since 1876, women teachers are paid less than in California." On the other hand, Miss Sumner fails to account for the fact that although women have had school suffrage for thirty-four years, and equal suffrage since 1894, the census in Denver alone a few months ago disclosed the fact of fifteen thousand defective school children. And that, too, with mostly women in the educational department, and also notwithstanding that women in Colorado have passed the "most stringent laws for child and animal protection." The women of Colorado "have taken great interest in the State institutions for the care of dependent, defective, and delinquent children." What a horrible indictment against woman's care and interest, if one city has fifteen thousand defective children. What about the glory of woman suffrage, since it has failed utterly in the most important social issue, the child? And where is the superior sense of justice that woman was to bring into the political field? Where was it in 1903, when the mine owners waged a guerilla war against the Western Miners' Union; when General Bell established a reign of terror, pulling men out of beds at night, kidnapping them across the border line, throwing them into bull pens, declaring "to hell with the Constitution, the club is the Constitution"? Where were the women politicians then, and why did they not exercise the power of their vote? But they did. They helped to defeat the most fair-minded and liberal man, Governor Waite. The latter had to make way for the tool of the mine kings, Governor Peabody, the enemy of labor, the Tsar of Colorado. "Certainly male suffrage could have done nothing worse." Granted. Wherein, then, are the advantages to woman and society from woman suffrage? The oft-repeated assertion that woman will purify politics is also but a myth. It is not borne out by the people who know the political conditions of Idaho, Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah.

Woman, essentially a purist, is naturally bigotted and relentless in her effort to make others as good as she thinks they ought to be. Thus, in Idaho, she has disfranchised her sister of the street, and declared all women of "lewd character" unfit to vote. "Lewd" not being interpreted, of course, as prostitution IN marriage. It goes without saying that illegal prostitution and gambling have been prohibited. In this regard the law must needs be of feminine nature: it always prohibits. Therein all laws are wonderful. They go no further, but their very tendencies open all the floodgates of hell. Prostitution and gambling have never done a more flourishing business than since the law has been set against them.

In Colorado, the Puritanism of woman has expressed itself in a more drastic form. "Men of notoriously unclean lives, and men connected with saloons, have been dropped from politics since women have the vote."* Could brother Comstock do more? Could all the Puritan fathers have done more? I wonder how many women realize the gravity of this would-be feat. I wonder if they understand that it is the very thing which, instead of elevating woman, has made her a political spy, a contemptible pry into the private affairs of people, not so much for the good of the cause, but because, as a Colorado woman said, "they like to get into houses they have never been in, and find out all they can, politically and otherwise."** Yes, and into the human soul and its minutest nooks and corners. For nothing satisfies the craving of most women so much as scandal. And when did she ever enjoy such opportunities as are hers, the politician's? Note: * EQUAL SUFFRAGE. Dr. Helen Sumner. ** EQUAL SUFFRAGE.

"Notoriously unclean lives, and men connected with the saloons." Certainly, the lady vote gatherers can not be accused of much sense of proportion. Granting even that these busybodies can decide whose lives are clean enough for that eminently clean atmosphere, politics, must it follow that saloon-keepers belong to the same category? Unless it be American hypocrisy and bigotry, so manifest in the principle of Prohibition, which sanctions the spread of drunkenness among men and women of the rich class, yet keeps vigilant watch on the only place left to the poor man. If no other reason, woman's narrow and purist attitude toward life makes her a greater danger to liberty wherever she has political power. Man has long overcome the superstitions that still engulf woman. In the economic competitive field, man has been compelled to exercise efficiency, judgment, ability, competency. He therefore had neither time nor inclination to measure everyone's morality with a Puritanic yardstick. In his political activities, too, he has not gone about blindfolded. He knows that quantity and not quality is the material for the political grinding mill, and, unless he is a sentimental reformer or an old fossil, he knows that politics can never be anything but a swamp.

Women who are at all conversant with the process of politics, know the nature of the beast, but in their self-sufficiency and egotism they make themselves believe that they have but to pet the beast, and he will become as gentle as a lamb, sweet and pure. As if women have not sold their votes, as if women politicians can not be bought! If her body can be bought in return for material consideration, why not her vote? That it is being done in Colorado and in other States, is not denied even by those in favor of woman suffrage.

As I have said before, woman's narrow view of human affairs is not the only argument against her as a politician superior to man. There are others. Her life-long economic parasitism has utterly blurred her conception of the meaning of equality. She clamors for equal rights with men, yet we learn that "few women care to canvas in undesirable districts."* How little equality means to them compared with the Russian women, who face hell itself for their ideal! Note: * Dr. Helen A. Sumner.

Woman demands the same rights as man, yet she is indignant that her presence does not strike him dead: he smokes, keeps his hat on, and does not jump from his seat like a flunkey. These may be trivial things, but they are nevertheless the key to the nature of American suffragists. To be sure, their English sisters have outgrown these silly notions. They have shown themselves equal to the greatest demands on their character and power of endurance. All honor to the heroism and sturdiness of the English suffragettes. Thanks to their energetic, aggressive methods, they have proved an inspiration to some of our own lifeless and spineless ladies. But after all, the suffragettes, too, are still lacking in appreciation of real equality. Else how is one to account for the tremendous, truly gigantic effort set in motion by those valiant fighters for a wretched little bill which will benefit a handful of propertied ladies, with absolutely no provision for the vast mass of workingwomen? True, as politicians they must be opportunists, must take half measures if they can not get all. But as intelligent and liberal women they ought to realize that if the ballot is a weapon, the disinherited need it more than the economically superior class, and that the latter already enjoy too much power by virtue of their economic superiority.

The brilliant leader of the English suffragettes, Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst, herself admitted, when on her American lecture tour, that there can be no equality between political superiors and inferiors. If so, how will the workingwoman of England, already inferior economically to the ladies who are benefited by the Shackleton bill,* be able to work with their political superiors, should the bill pass? Is it not probable that the class of Annie Keeney, so full of zeal, devotion, and martyrdom, will be compelled to carry on their backs their female political bosses, even as they are carrying their economic masters. They would still have to do it, were universal suffrage for men and women established in England. No matter what the workers do, they are made to pay, always. Still, those who believe in the power of the vote show little sense of justice when they concern themselves not at all with those whom, as they claim, it might serve most. Note: * Mr. Shackleton was a labor leader. It is therefore self-evident that he should introduce a bill excluding his own constituents. The English Parliament is full of such Judases.

The American suffrage movement has been, until very recently, altogether a parlor affair, absolutely detached from the economic needs of the people. Thus Susan B. Anthony, no doubt an exceptional type of woman, was not only indifferent but antagonistic to labor; nor did she hesitate to manifest her antagonism when, in 1869, she advised women to take the places of striking printers in New York.* I do not know whether her attitude had changed before her death. Note: * EQUAL SUFFRAGE. Dr. Helen A. Sumner.

There are, of course, some suffragists who are affiliated with workingwomen--the Women's Trade Union League, for instance; but they are a small minority, and their activities are essentially economic. The rest look upon toil as a just provision of Providence. What would become of the rich, if not for the poor? What would become of these idle, parasitic ladies, who squander more in a week than their victims earn in a year, if not for the eighty million wage workers? Equality, who ever heard of such a thing?

Few countries have produced such arrogance and snobbishness as America. Particularly this is true of the American woman of the middle class. She not only considers herself the equal of man, but his superior, especially in her purity, goodness, and morality. Small wonder that the American suffragist claims for her vote the most miraculous powers. In her exalted conceit she does not see how truly enslaved she is, not so much by man, as by her own silly notions and traditions. Suffrage can not ameliorate that sad fact; it can only accentuate it, as indeed it does.

One of the great American women leaders claims that woman is entitled not only to equal pay, but that she ought to be legally entitled even to the pay of her husband. Failing to support her, he should be put in convict stripes, and his earnings in prison be collected by his equal wife. Does not another brilliant exponent of the cause claim for woman that her vote will abolish the social evil, which has been fought in vain by the collective efforts of the most illustrious minds the world over? It is indeed to be regretted that the alleged creator of the universe has already presented us with his wonderful scheme of things, else woman suffrage would surely enable woman to outdo him completely.

Nothing is so dangerous as the dissection of a fetich. If we have outlived the time when such heresy was punishable at the stake, we have not outlived the narrow spirit of condemnation of those who dare differ with accepted notions. Therefore I shall probably be put down as an opponent of woman. But that can not deter me from looking the question squarely in the face. I repeat what I have said in the beginning: I do not believe that woman will make politics worse; nor can I believe that she could make it better. If, then, she cannot improve on man's mistakes, why perpetuate the latter?

History may be a compilation of lies; nevertheless, it contains a few truths, and they are the only guide we have for the future. The history of the political activities of men proves that they have given him absolutely nothing that he could not have achieved in a more direct, less costly, and more lasting manner. As a matter of fact, every inch of ground he has gained has been through a constant fight, a ceaseless struggle for self-assertion, and not through suffrage. There is no reason whatever to assume that woman, in her climb to emancipation, has been, or will be, helped by the ballot.

In the darkest of all countries, Russia, with her absolute despotism, woman has become man's equal, not through the ballot, but by her will to be and to do. Not only has she conquered for herself every avenue of learning and vocation, but she has won man's esteem, his respect, his comradeship; aye, even more than that: she has gained the admiration, the respect of the whole world. That, too, not through suffrage, but by her wonderful heroism, her fortitude, her ability, will power, and her endurance in the struggle for liberty. Where are the women in any suffrage country or State that can lay claim to such a victory? When we consider the accomplishments of woman in America, we find also that something deeper and more powerful than suffrage has helped her in the march to emancipation.

It is just sixty-two years ago since a handful of women at the Seneca Falls Convention set forth a few demands for their right to equal education with men, and access to the various professions, trades, etc. What wonderful accomplishment, what wonderful triumphs! Who but the most ignorant dare speak of woman as a mere domestic drudge? Who dare suggest that this or that profession should not be open to her? For over sixty years she has molded a new atmosphere and a new life for herself. She has become a world power in every domain of human thought and activity. And all that without suffrage, without the right to make laws, without the "privilege" of becoming a judge, a jailer, or an executioner.

Yes, I may be considered an enemy of woman; but if I can help her see the light, I shall not complain.

The misfortune of woman is not that she is unable to do the work of man, but that she is wasting her life force to outdo him, with a tradition of centuries which has left her physically incapable of keeping pace with him. Oh, I know some have succeeded, but at what cost, at what terrific cost! The import is not the kind of work woman does, but rather the quality of the work she furnishes. She can give suffrage or the ballot no new quality, nor can she receive anything from it that will enhance her own quality. Her development, her freedom, her independence, must come from and through herself. First, by asserting herself as a personality, and not as a sex commodity. Second, by refusing the right to anyone over her body; by refusing to bear children, unless she wants them; by refusing to be a servant to God, the State, society, the husband, the family, etc.; by making her life simpler, but deeper and richer. That is, by trying to learn the meaning and substance of life in all its complexities, by freeing herself from the fear of public opinion and public condemnation. Only that, and not the ballot, will set woman free, will make her a force hitherto unknown in the world, a force for real love, for peace, for harmony; a force of divine fire, of life giving; a creator of free men and women.



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FOX TV AND THE APOLLO MOON HOAX

Fox TV and the Apollo Moon Hoax
(February 13, 2001)



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On Thursday, February 15th 2001 (and replayed on March 19), the Fox TV network aired a program called ``Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?'', hosted by X-Files actor Mitch Pileggi. The program was an hour long, and featured interviews with a series of people who believe that NASA faked the Apollo Moon landings in the 1960s and 1970s. The biggest voice in this is Bill Kaysing, who claims to have all sorts of hoax evidence, including pictures taken by the astronauts, engineering details, discussions of physics and even some testimony by astronauts themselves. The program's conclusion was that the whole thing was faked in the Nevada desert (in Area 51, of course!). According to them, NASA did not have the technical capability of going to the Moon, but pressure due to the Cold War with the Soviet Union forced them to fake it.

Sound ridiculous? Of course it does! It is. So let me get this straight right from the start: this program is an hour long piece of junk.

From the very first moment to the very last, the program is loaded with bad thinking, ridiculous suppositions and utterly wrong science. I was able to get a copy of the show in advance, and although I was expecting it to be bad, I was still surprised and how awful it was. I took four pages of notes. I won't subject you to all of that here; it would take hours to write. I'll only go over some of the major points of the show, and explain briefly why they are wrong. In the near future, hopefully by the end of the summer, I will have a much more detailed series of pages taking on each of the points made by the Hoax Believers (whom I will call HBs).
So let's take a look at the ``evidence'' brought out by the show. To make this easier, below is a table with links to the specific arguments.


Disclaimer 20% believe in the hoax? The Capricorn 1 tie-in
No stars in pictures No blast crater Dust around the lander
Deep, dark shadows Non-parallel shadows Identical backgrounds
More identical backgrounds Lander unable to balance itself No flames from lunar launch
Astronauts footage shot in slow-motion The waving flag Why was every picture perfect?
Missing crosshairs in photos The deadly radiation of space Did NASA murder its astronauts?
CONCLUSION LINKS FALLOUT



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Bad: Right at the beginning, they have a disclaimer:

The following program deals with a controversial subject. The theories expressed are not the only possible explanation. Viewers are invited to make a judgment based on all available information.
Good: The last thing the writers of this program want the viewers to do is make an informed decision. If they did, they would have given equal time to both sides of this controversy. Instead, the vast majority of the time is given to the HBs, with only scattered (and very vague) dismissive statements by skeptics. So the available information is really only what they tell you. Of course, there are a lot of websites talking about this. I have a list of them on my own site.



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Bad: The show claims that 20% of Americans have doubts that we went to the Moon.

Good: That number is a bit misleading. A 1999 Gallup poll showed it was more like 6%, a number which agrees with a poll taken in 1995 by Time/CNN. The Gallup website [note added Feb. 19, 2007: The Gallup site has been rearranged, and though I can no longer find this quotation, it still jibes with what is on the site now] also says:

Although, if taken literally, 6% translates into millions of individuals, it is not unusual to find about that many people in the typical poll agreeing with almost any question that is asked of them -- so the best interpretation is that this particular conspiracy theory is not widespread.
It also depends on what you mean by ``doubts''. Does that mean someone who truly doesn't believe man ever went to the Moon, or just that it's remotely possible that NASA faked it? Those are very different things. Not only does the program not say, but they don't say where they found the statistic they quote either.


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Bad: The program talks about the movie ``Capricorn 1'', an entertaining if ultimately silly movie about how NASA must fake a manned Mars expedition. The program says ``The Apollo footage [from the surface of the Moon] is strikingly similar to the scenes in ``Capricorn 1''.

Good: Is it just an amazing coincidence that the actual Moon images look like the movie, or is it evidence of conspiracy? Neither! The movie was filmed in 1978, many years after the last man walked on the Moon. The movie was made to look like the real thing! This statement by the program is particularly ludicrous, and indicates just how far the producers were willing to go to make a sensational program.



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Bad: The first bit of actual evidence brought up is the lack of stars in the pictures taken by the Apollo astronauts from the surface of the Moon. Without air, the sky is black, so where are the stars?

Good: The stars are there! They're just too faint to be seen.

This is usually the first thing HBs talk about when discussing the Hoax. That amazes me, as it's the silliest assertion they make. However, it appeals to our common sense: when the sky is black here on Earth, we see stars. Therefore we should see them from the Moon as well.

I'll say this here now, and return to it many times: the Moon is not the Earth. Conditions there are weird, and our common sense is likely to fail us.

The Moon's surface is airless. On Earth, our thick atmosphere scatters sunlight, spreading it out over the whole sky. That's why the sky is bright during the day. Without sunlight, the air is dark at night, allowing us to see stars.

On the Moon, the lack of air means that the sky is dark. Even when the Sun is high off the horizon during full day, the sky near it will be black. If you were standing on the Moon, you would indeed see stars, even during the day.

So why aren't they in the Apollo pictures? Pretend for a moment you are an astronaut on the surface of the Moon. You want to take a picture of your fellow space traveler. The Sun is low off the horizon, since all the lunar landings were done at local morning. How do you set your camera? The lunar landscape is brightly lit by the Sun, of course, and your friend is wearing a white spacesuit also brilliantly lit by the Sun. To take a picture of a bright object with a bright background, you need to set the exposure time to be fast, and close down the aperture setting too; that's like the pupil in your eye constricting to let less light in when you walk outside on a sunny day.

So the picture you take is set for bright objects. Stars are faint objects! In the fast exposure, they simply do not have time to register on the film. It has nothing to do with the sky being black or the lack of air, it's just a matter of exposure time. If you were to go outside here on Earth on the darkest night imaginable and take a picture with the exact same camera settings the astronauts used, you won't see any stars!

It's that simple. Remember, this the usually the first and strongest argument the HBs use, and it was that easy to show wrong. Their arguments get worse from here.



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Bad: In the pictures taken of the lunar lander by the astronauts, the TV show continues, there is no blast crater. A rocket capable of landing on the Moon should have burned out a huge crater on the surface, yet there is nothing there.

Good: When someone driving a car pulls into a parking spot, do they do it at 100 kilometers per hour? Of course not. They slow down first, easing off the accelerator. The astronauts did the same thing. Sure, the rocket on the lander was capable of 10,000 pounds of thrust, but they had a throttle. They fired the rocket hard to deorbit and slow enough to land on the Moon, but they didn't need to thrust that hard as they approached the lunar surface; they throttled down to about 3000 pounds of thrust.

Now here comes a little bit of math: the engine nozzle was about 54 inches across (from the Encyclopaedia Astronautica), which means it had an area of 2300 square inches. That in turn means that the thrust generated a pressure of only about 1.5 pounds per square inch! That's not a lot of pressure. Moreover, in a vacuum, the exhaust from a rocket spreads out very rapidly. On Earth, the air in our atmosphere constrains the thrust of a rocket into a narrow column, which is why you get long flames and columns of smoke from the back of a rocket. In a vacuum, no air means the exhaust spreads out even more, lowering the pressure. That's why there's no blast crater! Three thousand pounds of thrust sounds like a lot, but it was so spread out it was actually rather gentle.

[Note added December 6, 2001: Originally in this section I said that the engines also cut off early, before the moment of touchdown, to prevent dust from getting blown around and disturbing the astronauts' view of the surface. This was an incorrect assertion; it was known that dust would blow around before the missions were launched, and steps were taken to make sure the astronauts knew their height above the surface. Anyway, the incorrect section has been removed.]



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Bad: The next argument presented on the show deals with the lunar dust. As the lander descended, we clearly see dust getting blown away by the rocket. The exhaust should have blown all the dust away, yet we can clearly see the astronauts' footprints in the dust mere meters from the lander. Obviously, when NASA faked this they messed it up.

Good: Once again, the weird alien environment of the Moon comes to play. Imagine taking a bag of flour and dumping it onto your kitchen floor (kids: ask your folks first!). Now bend over the pile, take a deep breath, and blow into it as hard as you can. Poof! Flour goes everywhere. Why? Because the momentum of your breath goes into the flour, which makes it move. But note that the flour goes up, and sideways, and aloft into the air. If you blow hard enough, you might see little curlicues of air lifting the flour farther than your breath alone could have, and doing so to dust well outside of where your breath actually blew.

That's the heart of this problem. We are used to air helping us blow things around. The air itself is displaced by your breath, which pushed on more air, and so on. On the Earth, your breath might blow flour that was dozens of centimeters away, even though your actual breath didn't reach that far. On the Moon, there is no air. The only dust that gets blown around by the exhaust of the rocket (which, remember, isn't nearly as strong as the HBs claim) is the dust physically touched by the exhaust, or dust hit by other bits of flying dust. In the end, only the dust directly under or a bit around the rocket was blown out by the exhaust. The rest was left where it was. Ironically, the dust around the landing site was probably a bit thicker than before, since the dust blown out would have piled up there.

I can't resist: another Hoax Believer argument bites the dust.



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Bad: The next evidence also involves pictures. In all the pictures taken by the astronauts, the shadows are not black. Objects in shadow can be seen, sometimes fairly clearly, including a plaque on the side of the lander that can be read easily. If the Sun is the only source of light on the Moon, the HBs say, and there is no air to scatter that light, shadows should be utterly black.

Good: This is one of my favorite HB claims. They give you the answer in the claim itself: "...if the Sun is the only source of light..." It isn't. Initially, I thought the Earth was bright enough to fill in the shadows, but subsequently realized that cannot be the case. The Earth is a fraction of the brightness of the Sun, not nearly enough to fill in the shadows. So then what is that other light source?

The answer is: The Moon itself. Surprise! The lunar dust has a peculiar property: it tends to reflect light back in the direction from where it came. So if you were to stand on the Moon and shine a flashlight at the surface, you would see a very bright spot where the light hits the ground, but, oddly, someone standing a bit to the side would hardly see it at all. The light is preferentially reflected back toward the flashlight (and therefore you), and not the person on the side.

Now think about the sunlight. Let's say the sun is off to the right in a picture. It is illuminating the right side of the lander, and the left is in shadow. However, the sunlight falling beyond the lander on the left is being reflected back toward the Sun. That light hits the surface and reflects to the right and up, directly onto the shadowed part of the lander. In other words, the lunar surface is so bright that it easily lights up the shadows of vertical surfaces.

This effect is called heiligenschein (the German word for halo). You can find some neat images of it at here, for example. This also explains another HB claim, that many times the astronauts appear to be standing in a spotlight. This is a natural effect of heiligenschein. You can reproduce this effect yourself; wet grass on a cool morning will do it. Face away from the Sun and look at the shadow of your head. There will be a halo around it. The effect is also very strong in fine, disturbed dust like that in a baseball diamond infield. Or, of course, on the Moon.

[Note added June 29, 2001: A nifty demonstration of the shadow filling was done by Ian Goddard and can be found here. His demos are great, and really drive the point home.



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Bad: Another argument by the HBs deals with shadows. Several photos from the Moon are shown where objects on the lunar landscape have long shadows. If the Sun were the only light source, the program claims, the shadows should be parallel. The shadows are not parallel, and therefore the images are fake.

Good: This is an interesting claim on the part of the HBs, because on the surface (haha) it seems to make sense. However, let's assume the shadows are not parallel. One explanation is that there are (at least) two light sources, and that is certainly what many HBs are trying to imply. So if there are multiple light sources, where are the multiple shadows? Each object casts one shadow, so there can only be one light source.

Another explanation is that the light source is close to the objects; then it would also cast non-parallel shadows. However, a distant source can as well! In this case, the Sun really is the only source of light. The shadows are not parallel in the images because of perspective. Remember, you are looking at a three-dimensional scene, projected on a two-dimensional photograph. That causes distortions. When the Sun is low and shadows are long, objects at different distance do indeed appear to cast non-parallel shadows, even here on Earth. An example of that can be found at another debunking site. The scene (near the bottom of the above-linked page) shows objects with non-parallel shadows, distorted by perspective. If seen from above, all the shadows in the Apollo images would indeed look parallel. You can experience this for yourself; go outside on a clear day when the Sun is low in the sky and compare the direction of the shadows of near and far objects. You'll see that they appear to diverge. Here is a major claim of the HBs that you can disprove all by yourself! Don't take my word for it, go out and try!

Incidentally, the bright Earth in the sky will also cast shadows, but those would be very faint compared to the ones made by the Sun. So in a sense there are multiple shadows, but like not being able to see stars, the shadows are too faint to be seen against the very bright lunar surface. Again, you can test this yourself: go outside during full Moon and you'll see your shadow. Then walk over to a streetlamp. The light from the streetlamp will wash out the shadow cast by the Moon. You might still be able to see it faintly, but it would difficult against the much brighter landscape.

[Note added June 29, 2001: Again, check out Ian Goddard's work for more about this.



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Bad: The program has two segments dealing with what they call ``identical backgrounds''. In one, they show the lunar lander with a mountain in the background. They then show another picture of the same mountain, but no lander in the foreground at all. The astronauts could not have taken either picture before landing, of course, and after it lifts off the lander leaves the bottom section behind. Therefore, there would have been something in the second image no matter what, and the foreground could not be empty. Obviously, the mountain background is a fake set, and was reused by NASA for another shot.

Good: Actually, the pictures are real, of course. As always, repeat after me: the Moon is not the Earth. On the Earth, distant objects are obscured a bit by haze in the air, and we use that to mentally gauge distances. However, with no air, an object can be very far away on the Moon and still be crisp and sharp to the eye. You can't tell if a boulder is a meter across and 100 meters away, or 100 meters across and 10 kilometers away!

That's what's going on here. The lander is close to the astronaut in the first picture, perhaps a 20 or 30 meters away. The mountain is kilometers away. For the second picture, the astronaut merely moved a few hundred meters to the side. The lander was then out of the picture, but the mountain hardly moved at all! If you look at the scene carefully, you'll see that all the rocks and craters in the foreground changes between the two pictures, just as you'd expect if the astronaut had moved to the side a ways between the two shots. It's not fraud, it's parallax!

Another example of the difficulty in estimating distance is due to the shapes of the rocks on the Moon. A rock small enough to sit down on doesn't look fundamentally different from one bigger than your house. Humans also judge distance by using the relative sizes of objects. We know how big a person is, or a tree, so the apparent size of the object can be used to estimate the distance. If we don't know how big the object is, we can be fooled about its distance.

For an outstanding example of this, take a look at video taken during Apollo 16. There is a boulder in the background that looks to be about 3 or 4 meters (10-13 feet) high. About 3/4 of the way through the segment the astronauts walk over to it. Amazingly, that boulder is the size of a large house! Without knowing how big the rock was when we first see it, we have no way to judge distances. That huge rock looks like a medium sized one until we have some way to directly judge its size; in this case, by looking at the tiny astronauts next to it. [My thanks to Bad Reader Martin Michalak for bringing this video to my attention. My very special thanks goes to Charlie Duke (yes, the Charlie Duke, Apollo astronaut and lunar lander pilot) who emailed me (!) about the difficulty in judging distances due to not knowing the sizes of rocks.]

I will admit the Fox program had me for a while on this one; I couldn't figure it out. But then I got a note from Bad Reader David Bailey, who set me straight. However, the producers of the show should have talked to some real experts before saying such a silly thing as this. If they had checked with the folks who run the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal, for example, they would have been set straight too.

NEW! (February 19, 2001): I found a site that has an animation where the two images of the mountain are superimposed. You need Flash for it, but it's a great animation. The beauty of it is that you can see changes in the mountain range due to parallax!. In other words, this animation is support that the images are real and are not using a fake backdrop. The real beauty of this animation is that the person who put it together is an HB. I like the irony of linking to that animation and using it to show that it is indeed evidence that Apollo did go to the Moon. I love the web!



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Bad: The other ``identical background'' segment shows an astronaut on a hilltop. A second video shows two astronauts on the same hill (and this time it really is the same hill), and claims that NASA itself says these two videos were taken on two different hills separated by many kilometers. How can this be? They are obviously the same hill, so NASA must be lying!

Good: Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to a mistake. A videotape about Apollo 16 ironically titled ``Nothing So Hidden...'' released by NASA does indeed make that claim, but in this case it looks to me to be a simple error. I asked Eric Jones, who is the editor of the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal, and he told me those two clips were taken about three minutes apart. Eric's assistant, Ken Glover, uncovered this problem. He sent me this transcript (which I edited a bit to make links to the video clips) of the Fox show with his comments, which I will highlight in red:


Narrator: Background discrepancies are also apparent in the lunar video.
[...]

[Video showing John Young at Station 4 on EVA-2, with Fox caption "Day One". Click here for the transcript and here for the RealVideo clip.]

Narrator: This shot was taped in what was purported to be the first of Apollo 16's lunar excursions.

[Audio of John Young dubbed over clip: "Well, I couldn't pick a better spot", actual MET of 123:58:46]

[Next, video of John Young and Charlie Duke at Station 4, EVA-2. In reality, about three minutes after the first clip. Fox caption "Day Two". Click here for the transcript and here for the RealVideo clip.]

Narrator: And this video was from the next day, at a different location.

[Audio of Charlie Duke dubbed over clip: "That is the most beautiful sight!", actual MET of 124:03:01]

Narrator: NASA claims the second location was two-and-a-half miles away, but when one video was superimposed over the other the locations appear identical.

[Audio of John Young dubbed over "Day Two" video: " It's absolutely unreal!", actual MET 144:16:30]

Narrator: Conspiracy theorists claim that even closer examination of the photos suggest evidence of doctoring.

That last line is pretty funny. The audio you hear of the astronauts in those clips was actually all from different times than the video!

So that's why the hill looks the same. It's the same hill, and the two clips were not taken a day apart, but from three minutes apart or so. Again, had the program producers bothered to check their sources, they would have received a prompt answer. That's all I did: I emailed the editor of the ALSJ. It was pretty easy to do, and he answered me in minutes.



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Bad: Ralph Rene, a self-proclaimed physicist, claims that the astronauts shifting in the cabin would change the center of mass, throwing the lunar lander off balance. They couldn't compensate for this, which would have crashed the lander. Thus, the landing was faked.

Good: Rene is wrong. Evidently he doesn't know how the internet works either, because there is a website which describes how the attitude control was maintained on the lander during descent and ascent; it's the Apollo Saturn Reference page. There was a feedback control system on board the lander which determined if the axis were shifting. During descent, the engine nozzle could shift direction slightly to compensate for changes in the center of gravity of the lander (the technical term for this is gimbaling the nozzle). During ascent, the engine nozzle was fixed in position, so there was a series of smaller rockets which was used to maintain the proper attitude. Incidentally, every rocket needs to do this since fuel shifts the center of gravity as it is burned up by the rocket, yet Rene and the other HBs don't seem to doubt that rockets themselves work! So we have a case of selective thinking on the part of the HBs.

[Note (July 20, 2001): My thanks again to Apollo astronaut Charlie Duke for correcting a technical error in a previous version of this section. After describing the above scenario to me, he said the ascent stage of the lander was "a sporty ride".]




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Bad: The program claims that when the top half of the lander took off from the Moon to bring the astronauts back into orbit, there was no flame from the rocket. Obviously, every rocket has a visible flame, so the takeoff was faked.

Good: There is actually a simple reason why you cannot see the flame from the lander when it took off. The fuels they used produced no visible flame! The lander used a mix of hydrazine and dinitrogen tetroxide (an oxidizer). These two chemicals ignite upon contact and produce a product that is transparent. That's why you cannot see the flame. We expect to see a flame because of the usual drama of liftoff from the Earth; the flame and smoke we see from the Shuttle, for example, is because the solid rocket boosters do actually produce them, while the lunar lander did not. Here is a brief webpage describing this. Note too that fuels like this are still used today, and indeed rockets in space produce little or no visible flame.

I heard an account (sorry, no citation; the link has since gone dead) that the cameras used for the ascent of the lander were fairly primitive, even for that era (this is usually the case in space travel, where it takes extensive testing to make sure things work properly; during that time the state of the art advances). Even if it were visible, the flash of the exhaust may have easily been missed by those cameras.

[Note added April 9, 2001: My original assertion about not seeing the flame was because the Moon has no air, and we see flame from rockets on Earth because we have an atmosphere. This does have some effect (the pressure of air constrains the rocket exhaust and helps produce the effect we see) but the larger reason the flame is invisible is due to the fuel used. I gratefully thank the dozens of people who sent me email about this.]



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Bad: When the movies of the astronauts walking and driving the lunar rover are doubled in speed, they look just like they were filmed on Earth and slowed down. This is clearly how the movies were faked.

Good: This was the first new bit I have seen from the HBs, and it's funny. To me even when sped up, the images didn't look like they were filmed in Earth's gravity. The astronauts were sidling down a slope, and they looked weird to me, not at all like they would on Earth. I will admit that if wires were used, the astronauts' gait could be simulated.

However, not the rover! If you watch the clip, you will see dust thrown up by the wheels of the rover. The dust goes up in a perfect parabolic arc and falls back down to the surface. Again, the Moon isn't the Earth! If this were filmed on the Earth, which has air, the dust would have billowed up around the wheel and floated over the surface. This clearly does not happen in the video clips; the dust goes up and right back down. It's actually a beautiful demonstration of ballistic flight in a vacuum. Had NASA faked this shot, they would have had to have a whole set (which would have been very large) with all the air removed. We don't have this technology today!

This is another case of selective vision on the part of the HBs.



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Bad: When the astronauts are assembling the American flag, the flag waves. Kaysing says this must have been from an errant breeze on the set. A flag wouldn't wave in a vacuum.

Good: Of course a flag can wave in a vacuum. In the shot of the astronaut and the flag, the astronaut is rotating the pole on which the flag is mounted, trying to get it to stay up. The flag is mounted on one side on the pole, and along the top by another pole that sticks out to the side. In a vacuum or not, when you whip around the vertical pole, the flag will ``wave'', since it is attached at the top. The top will move first, then the cloth will follow along in a wave that moves down. This isn't air that is moving the flag, it's the cloth itself.

New stuff added March 1, 2001: Many HBs show a picture of an astronaut standing to one side of the flag, which still has a ripple in it (for example, see this famous image). The astronaut is not touching the flag, so how can it wave?

The answer is, it isn't waving. It looks like that because of the way the flag was deployed. The flag hangs from a horizontal rod which telescopes out from the vertical one. In Apollo 11, they couldn't get the rod to extend completely, so the flag didn't get stretched fully. It has a ripple in it, like a curtain that is not fully closed. In later flights, the astronauts didn't fully deploy it on purpose because they liked the way it looked. In other words, the flag looks like it is waving because the astronauts wanted it to look that way. Ironically, they did their job too well. It appears to have fooled a lot of people into thinking it waved.

This explanation comes from NASA's wonderful spaceflight web page. For those of you who are conspiracy minded, of course, this doesn't help because it comes from a NASA site. But it does explain why the flag looks as it does, and you will be hard pressed to find a video of the flag waving. And if it was a mistake caused by a breeze on the set where they faked this whole thing, don't you think the director would have tried for a second take? With all the money going to the hoax, they could afford the film!

Note added March 28, 2001: One more thing. Several readers have pointed out that if the flag is blowing in a breeze, why don't we see dust blowing around too? Somehow, the HBs' argument gets weaker the more you think about it.



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Bad: The program makes a big deal out of how well the pictures taken from the Moon were exposed and set. Every picture we see is just right, with the scene always centered perfectly. However, the cameras were mounted on the front of the astronauts' spacesuit, and there was no finder. They couldn't have taken perfect pictures every time!

Good ... and of course, no one claims they did. Thousands of pictures were taken on the Moon, and the ones you see will tend to be the good ones. If Buzz Aldrin accidentally cut off Neil Armstrong's head, you probably won't see that image in a magazine. Also, everything done on the Moon was practiced endlessly by the astronauts. The people working on the mission knew that these pictures would be some of the most important images ever taken, so they would have taken particular care in making sure the astronauts could do it cold. When fabled astronaut Story Musgrave replaced a camera on board the Hubble Space Telescope in 1993, someone commented that he made it look easy. "Sure," he replied, "I had practiced it thousands of times!"

The program goes farther than this, though: they actually contacted the man who designed the cameras for the astronauts. When they asked him why the pictures were always perfect, he hemmed and hawed, and finally admitted he had no answer for that. This is hardly evidence that NASA must have faked the missions. All it means is that he couldn't think of anything while sitting on camera! I think this is pretty evil of the program producers to do this; a bit of editing on their part makes it looks like they completely baffled an expert.



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Bad: Crosshairs were etched in the astronauts' cameras to better help measure objects in the pictures. However, in several images, it looks like the objects are actually in front of the crosshairs, which is impossible if the crosshairs were inside the camera! Therefore, the images were faked.

Good: This argument is pretty silly. Do the HBs think that NASA had painted crosshairs on the set behind the astronauts? I heard one HB claim the crosshairs were added later on, and NASA had messed up some of the imaging. That's ridiculous! Why add in crosshairs later? Cameras equipped with crosshairs have been used for a long time, and it would have been easy to simply use some to take pictures on the faked set. Clearly, the HBs are wrong here, but the images do look funny. What happened?

What happened becomes clearer when you look more closely at the images. The times it looks like an object is in front of the crosshair (because the crosshair looks blocked by the object) is when the object photographed is white. The crosshair is black. Have you ever taken an image that is overexposed? White parts bleed into the film around them, making them look white too. That's all that happened here; the white object in the image ``fills in'' the black crosshair. It's a matter of contrast: the crosshair becomes invisible because the white part overwhelms the film. This is basic photography.

[Note (added February 18, 2001): I have been informed by David Percy, a photographer quoted in the Fox show, that he does indeed believe that man went to the Moon, but he believes there are anomalies in the imagery taken which ``put into question many aspects of the missions'', which is a different matter. While I disagree that there are anomalies, I have edited out what is essentially a personal attack on Mr. Percy that I had here originally. It is an easy matter to let one's emotions get carried away when writing these essays, and I apologize to him and my readers for letting that get in. I make it a policy to correct Bad Astronomy based on facts, not personalities.]

[Note added June 29, 2001: Again, Ian Goddard's work has more about this, including images that show how crosshairs can fade out in a bright background.



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Bad: A big staple of the HBs is the claim that radiation in the van Allen Belts and in deep space would have killed the astronauts in minutes. They interview a Russian cosmonaut involved in the USSR Moon program, who says that they were worried about going in to the unknowns of space, and suspected that radiation would have penetrated the hull of the spacecraft.

Good: Kaysing's exact words in the program are ``Any human being traveling through the van Allen belt would have been rendered either extremely ill or actually killed by the radiation within a short time thereof.''

This is complete and utter nonsense. The van Allen belts are regions above the Earth's surface where the Earth's magnetic field has trapped particles of the solar wind. An unprotected man would indeed get a lethal dose of radiation, if he stayed there long enough. Actually, the spaceship traveled through the belts pretty quickly, getting past them in an hour or so. There simply wasn't enough time to get a lethal dose, and, as a matter of fact, the metal hull of the spaceship did indeed block most of the radiation. For a detailed explanation of all this, my fellow Mad Scientist William Wheaton has a page with the technical data about the doses received by the astronauts. Another excellent page about this, that also gives a history of NASA radiation testing, is from the Biomedical Results of Apollo site. An interesting read!

It was also disingenuous of the program to quote the Russian cosmonaut as well. Of course they were worried about radiation before men had gone into the van Allen belts! But tests done by NASA showed that it was possible to not only survive such a passage, but to not even get harmed much by it. It looks to me like another case of convenient editing by the producers of the program.



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Very, very Bad: Kaysing says that the Apollo 1 fire that killed Roger Chaffee, Ed White and Gus Grissom was no accident. Grissom was ready to talk to the press about the Moon hoax, so NASA killed him. Kaysing says NASA also killed other people who were about to blow the whistle as well.

This is so disgusting I have a hard time writing a coherent reply. Kaysing has no grasp of basic physics, photography or even common sense, but he accuses NASA of killing people to shut them up. That is a particularly loathsome accusation.



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The utter bilge pumped out in this program goes on and on, and indeed, if you go to the HBs websites you can read more than any brain can handle. I have read literally dozens of things that ``prove'' the landings were faked, and each one is rather easily shown to be wrong by anyone with experience in such things. I think the problem here is twofold: we tend to want to believe (or at least listen to) conspiracy theories, and this one is a whopper. Also, the evidence is presented in such a way that, if you are unfamiliar with the odd nature of the vacuum of space and of space travel, it sounds reasonable.

But it isn't reasonable. Their evidence is actually as tenuous as the vacuum of space itself. I find it amazing that they are so willing to scrutinize every available frame of data from the astronauts, yet miss the most obvious thing right in front of them. Fox television and the producers of this program should be ashamed of themselves. Even worse, the Fox Family Channel broadcast a show just last year that was skeptical and even handed about the Moon Hoax! Amazingly, Mitch Pileggi hosted that program as well.

I'll end this on one more bit the HBs don't talk about. When Jim Lovell, two time Apollo astronaut and commander of the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission, was told about Kaysing's claims, Lovell called him a kook. Kaysing, ever the rational thinker, sued Lovell for slander. Imagine: Kaysing, who says that NASA murdered three men outright and arranged for the murders of others, sued Commander James Lovell for slander! After some time, a judge wisely threw the case out of court.

There's still hope.



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Links

There are many websites about the Moon Hoax where you can read both the theories by the HBs themselves or what reality is like as told by people debunking the theory. I have a list of them on my Bad Misconceptions page.

[Note added February 23, 2001: the link for the USA Today article is now gone, so I have removed it.] Dan Vergano of USA Today had an article (with an interview of me) about the TV show on the USA Today website. The print version was in the Friday, February 16th 2001 edition.

Conspiracy Theorist Clyde Lewis has a website ready to believe you! But I wouldn't believe him.


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FALLOUT FROM THE SHOW
February 17, 2001:
Well, the Fox Apollo show has struck a chord, it appears. I am receiving a lot of email from people, both for and against. The most noteworthy support was quite a surprise: NASA itself! That explains why I am getting tens of thousands of hits to this site. Another site linking here is Ground Zero, a rather typical hoax and conspiracy site that calls me ``an annoyed scientist'' (true enough) and says that people call me a ``weapon for science''. I kinda like the sound of that one!
What's funny though is how that site pulls out the same tired arguments that are easy to show wrong, yet stands by them dogmatically. For example, Clyde Lewis, the webmaster of the site, shows a photo of the flag waving and asks how it can be waving; I already showed how it can appear to wave on this page earlier. In his image, the bottom corner of the flag is not flat, which is most likely simply residual rippling from the astronaut's twisting the pole. Remember, without air, there is nothing to dampen the rippling, so the flag actually can appear to wave as if from a breeze for a few moments.

This is hardly evidence of a hoax. Lewis goes on and on, bringing out the radiation arguments, the no stars arguments, on and on, like these are either new or damning, when they are neither.

Of course, I am trying to debunk the conspiracy theorists, but unlike them, I want people to look at their evidence rationally and critically, and not swallow it whole. It'll choke you if you do.

Finally, one last note: If I weren't a hard-headed scientist, I'd wonder if some cosmic force were at work sometimes. I went to a website that creates anagrams, that is, rearranges letters in a word to spell other words. I put in "The Bad Astronomer", and one of the anagrams was MOON TRASH DEBATER. I think that's pretty cool.
Note added June 17, 2004: a Bad Reader informed me that another anagram would be NOTED SHAM ABORTER. I think that's appropriate too.

HELLO - I'M YOUR LOCAL TALIBAN REP - VOTE FOR ME IN THE NEXT ELECTION AND I PROMISE NOT TO RAPE YOUR SEVEN YOUR OLD DAUGHTER

Northern Dis-Alliance


"Hello, I am Enrico Chavez and I am your new leader." The pimply Hispanic fifteen year old, the new representative of the Nation of Azatlan which had been emplaced as the new government by China, carried an AK-47 and a sack of meal. He was clearly illiterate, undersized from malnutrition and not joking. "I will be instructing you in all your day to day actions from here on out. You will conform to my orders or you will be shot. Now, line up your daughters; I'm going to pick my wives."

I personally would not want a pimply fifteen year old of an ethnic minority choosing my daughter for his "wife" whether she wanted it or not. Especially if it had been shoved down my throat by another country. In fact, you might say I would be "resistant" to that idea. And the majority of the Afghan people are going to actively resist having the Northern Alliance in charge.

The Northern Alliance is composed of three separate ethnic groups, Turkic, Uzbek and Tajik. (There are, by the way, at least fourteen "lingo-ethnic" groups in Afghanistan and hundreds of tribes.) Each of these ethnic groups is represented in Afghanistan but combined they do not equal the numbers, area of control or political power of the majority Pathan ethnicity. They are the remnants of three of the eight or so factions that fell out after the Soviet withdrawal and subsequent civil war. All of them have at one time or another fought each other, more often, in fact, than they fought the Taliban. And they have had their butts soundly kicked out of most of Afghanistan because they were lawless, looting, raping bastards. They also are from three minority groups in Afghanistan, and the Pathans consider anyone from a different tribe, much less another ethnic group, to be an enemy.

The Taliban, as an alternative, were composed of two groups, the majority Pathans and "religious students" (which is what Taliban means) from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and other Arab nations. The Taliban came to power in much the same way that the Nazis did. While the rest of these so-called "allies" were setting up checkpoints and raping any good looking women that came through, the Taliban was reestablishing order, "getting the trains running" and reducing the rate of looting, rape and forced marriages. They also had better discipline and, since they didn't loot as they went, were much better supported by the local populace. In other words, they won the "hearts and minds" of the Afghans. And especially of the Pathans. The battle-lines, to this day, run right on the borders of the primary ethnicity zones; Pathan in the south and Uzbek, Tajik and Turkic in the north.

Once they got into power, of course, they tended to get worse and worse. But the Taliban's atrocities pale in comparison to some of the horrors visited upon the Pathans by the Uzbeks.

Now, though, because we are unwilling (and arguably unable from a readiness and logistics standpoint) to put troops on the ground, we have chosen to support the Northern Alliance, to let them do the fighting and the "liberating" of Afghanistan. Do we think that the leopard has changed its spots? Do we think that some miraculous cure will occur, where the Afghans suddenly find peace and light and beauty? That the Pathans, one of the most notoriously warlike groups on earth, will simply roll over and bare its belly to the NLA because we want it to?

I do not know. All that I know is that the State Department is well aware of this and junior officers in the military are well aware of this. If we try to foist the NLA on the Afghans, we'll end up with an ongoing civil war, one that the NLA, for a variety of reasons, cannot win. I suspect that even the generals and senior policy advisors who dreamed up this Vietnamesque nightmare are aware of it. Why they are doing it is complicated to answer but I do know a couple more things.

We'll be responsible for pimpled fifteen year olds choosing their "brides" from among the Afghans.

And I, personally, would resist that sort of thing. Wouldn't you?

DARK MATTER - IS THIS THE "FORCE" THAT YODA TALKS ABOUT

7. Dark Matters
Astronomers unveil a new map of the mysterious invisible stuff that makes up 90 percent of the universe.
by Tim Folger


This magazine is made from some of the most exotic particles in the universe. So are you. The matter that makes up everything we can see or touch, either on Earth or beyond, is exceedingly rare, cosmically speaking. Most of the material in the universe is something called dark matter, mysterious stuff that doesn’t emit or reflect light and doesn’t interact with what we think of as ordinary matter. It reveals its presence only by its gravitational effects, guiding the evolution of the early universe and still affecting the motion of galaxies. Earth-based experiments have attempted to detect dark matter particles, but so far they have drawn a blank.

Astronomers, however, have had a better year, continuing to find evidence of the crucial role dark matter plays in shaping the visible cosmos. Thanks to about a thousand hours of observation by the Hubble Space Telescope, scientists have compiled a dark matter map of a tiny slice of the sky, about two square degrees of the entire sky’s 40,000-square-degree span. The map, which was published in the journal Nature last January, confirmed a central prediction of modern astrophysics: Galaxies formed in, and remain bound to, enormous clouds of dark matter.

In the early universe, astronomers believe, dark matter provided the gravitational scaffolding on which ordinary matter coalesced and grew into galaxies. According to these dark matter theories, as the visible galaxies formed, some of the matter surrounding them should have clumped together into hundreds of small satellite galaxies, most of which should survive today. But the observed number of satellite galaxies is only a fraction of what the theory predicts. “We should see about a hundred to a thousand, but up to 2005, there were only 12,” says Marla Geha, an astrophysicist at Yale University. Astronomers call it the missing satellite problem.


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Astronomers had speculated that the existence of small, dark matter–dominated satellite galaxies might solve the problem, but there was no evidence that any such galaxies existed.

Last spring, Geha and Josh Simon, a colleague at Caltech, used the 10-meter Keck II telescope on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea to study the mass of eight newly discovered satellite galaxies, detected over the last two years by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, an ongoing effort to make a detailed map of a million galaxies and quasars. Geha and Simon found that these satellite galaxies were much fainter and smaller in mass than the other known satellites—and 99 percent of their mass was in the form of dark matter. Given that the galaxies found by Geha and Simon have such high concentrations of dark matter, it’s likely that many other satellite galaxies could be 100 percent dark matter.

“We expect some to be undetectable, with no stars or gas,” says Geha. “There are indirect ways of finding the dark matter satellites, but it will take more work.”

Some astrophysicists believe that dark matter particles may occasionally annihilate each other, producing bursts of high-energy gamma rays. If the Milky Way has dark matter satellites, and if they do emit gamma rays, the Gamma-Ray Large Area Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in February, might detect them.

Dark matter may also be responsible for creating the most awesome objects in the universe: the enormous black holes believed to lurk in the center of nearly every large galaxy. Tom Theuns and Liang Gao, astronomers at Durham University in England, used a computer model last year to study how two types of dark matter, known as warm and cold, may have influenced the formation of the very first stars in the universe—and the first giant black holes.

In their simulations, Gao and Theuns found that within clumps of cold dark matter, single massive stars formed, but warm dark matter formed filaments about a quarter the width of the Milky Way, attracting enough ordinary matter to create some 10 million stars—and some of these very first stars could still be around. “You could potentially form low-mass stars,” says Theuns. “And they live very much longer. They could live for 13 billion years and could be in the Milky Way today. Maybe we’ve seen them already. Who knows?”

But the most unexpected result of the model was that the filaments could catastrophically collapse, warping space-time to form a huge black hole.

The model suggested that collapsing dark matter could warp space-time to form a huge black hole.“Even if only 1 percent of the mass in a filament takes part in the collapse, that’s already 100,000 times the mass of the sun, a very good start to making one of these supermassive black holes,” Theuns says. “We know that the formation of these supermassive black holes has to be very rapid because we can see very bright quasars very soon after the Big Bang, not much later than the epoch of the first star formation.”

Is there any chance that astronomers could detect an echo of the primordial cataclysms that birthed these black holes?

“You would think it’s such a violent process that something would be left over from that,” Theuns says. “I don’t have any predictions, but you would think there would be something.”

OCCAM'S RAZOR

HomeSkepticism

by Richard Rockley
Skeptics frequently talk about Occam's Razor. They use it to choose between alternative explanations for something, especially where no one alternative has been either proven or disproven. But what is it?

Many people will tell you it says, "Choose the simplest solution". But it doesn't say choose the simplest solution. Opponents of Occam complain that it will not necessarily help you choose the correct solution. But Occam's Razor does not pretend to choose the correct solution. So what is it and what is its point?

Occam's Razor actually says:

"Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate",
which is translated as

"plurality should not be posited without necessity."

The words are those of the medieval English philosopher and Franciscan monk William of Ockham (ca. 1285-1349).
The archaic English needs to be interpreted for modern times. What it means is this:

Do not invent unnecessary entities to explain something.
An example
Suppose I have a cat. One night, I leave out a saucer of milk, and in the morning the milk has gone. No one saw who or what drank the milk. Lets say there are two possibilities:

The cat drank it
or
The milk fairy drank it
Occam tells us to reject option 2. This is because option 2 requires us to invent an unnecessary entity - the milk fairy. It is an invention because we have no proof that the milk fairy exists. And it is unnecessary because there is a plausible explanation that does not require the milk fairy - the cat. (We know he exists.)
Note: we haven't proven that the cat drank the milk. Or disproven the milk fairy option. Strictly speaking, we keep an open mind about both options. But Occam says that if you insist it could be the milk fairy, you have invented an unnecessary entity. And why would you do that?

Note also that strictly speaking, both solutions are equally simple. The cat hypothesis is only simpler in that you haven't had to invent a new, unproven entity. Also note that there are additional options that we could choose if we abandon Occam. For example, it could have been ghosts, or aliens, or the boogieman or Santa Claus. Why choose one of these over the others when there is an equal lack of proof for any of them?

Occam Applied

Occam can be applied to a myriad of supposed paranormal events, including ghosts, psychics, UFOs, people who talk with the dead, reincarnation, the soul, spoon benders, near death and out of body experiences. Usually, the paranormal explanation for these phenomena cannot be disproven, and this is often given as the reason we should consider the paranormal explanation. But Occam says go with the natural explanation for now, until any new evidence challenges it. But if there is a natural explanation and you believe, without proof, that the paranormal one is possible, you are inventing the milk fairy.

THE RIGHTEOUS ONES ARE CRAWLING OUT OF THE WOODWORK

Guest Opinion: America's Best-Known Atheist Riffs On Golden Compass



A famous atheist says the Constitution has its own sort of Golden Compass.
Screenshot: New Line Cinema

Hollywood spent a mind-boggling $180 million to bring author Philip Pullman's celebrated anti-religious novel, The Golden Compass, to the silver screen, but essentially stripped the work of its devastating attack on organized religion.

On the eve of the film's release, we asked America's most famous atheist, Dr. Michael Newdow, how he feels about this. Dr. Newdow is a California attorney and physician best known for his efforts to ban schools from reciting the Pledge of Allegiance because of the phrase "under God."

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Michael Newdow talks to reporters outside his home in Sacramento, California, about his lawsuit that prompted a federal appeals court to declare school recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional.

Photo: Associate Press/Rich PedroncelliThe Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights has commented on the release of Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass. The final line is, "And remember, his twin goals are to promote atheism and denigrate Christianity." Accordingly, the League "wants Christians to stay away from this movie."

This is obviously different from when the Catholic League supported Mel Gibson's work, The Passion of Christ. The Passion, many would say, had similar twin goals: promoting Christianity and denigrating Judaism. Thus, we see what is not unexpected, especially when religion is at issue: People lend their support when their system of belief is advocated, and wish to do anything but when the advocacy is for the belief systems of others. That is what the free speech and free exercise clauses of the First Amendment absolutely protect. Accordingly, let the clamor continue, and let each of us weigh in (or simply listen) with whatever biases we bring to bear.

There is another clause in the First Amendment, however, which is quite different. That one is the establishment clause, which has nothing to do with expression by private actors, be they individuals, organizations or whatever. The establishment clause speaks only to what the government may say. In other words, we don't want the government getting involved in these arguments. As Justice Scalia has written, "The government may not … lend its power to one or the other side in controversies" of such a religious nature.

While the Catholic League maintains its animus towards The Golden Compass, one hopes that it will support this notion of government neutrality. Unfortunately, that seems unlikely. It was a Catholic organization, after all, that was the key group behind the 1954 alteration of the Pledge of Allegiance. In that year, the Knights of Columbus lobbied Congress to modify the words "one Nation indivisible" so that "one Nation under God, indivisible" (italics added) is what is now recited in our public schools. They still congratulate themselves over the change.

Interestingly, Catholics in the founding era were very much treated like the atheists of today. Our Founding Fathers literally hated the Catholics. Samuel Adams, for instance, wrote that "much more is to be dreaded from the growth of popery in America, than from the Stamp Act or any other acts destructive of civil rights." John Jay, the nation's first chief justice, attempted to have the right to the free exercise of religion open to all "except the professors of the religion of the Church of Rome." And when the Quebec Act was passed in support of the (Catholic) government in neighboring Canada, the Continental Congress wrote in protest to the people of Britain, complaining that Catholicism was "a religion that has deluged your island in blood, and dispersed impiety, bigotry, persecution, murder and rebellion through every part of the world."

This in not meant to single out Catholics. Protestants, Muslims, Jews, atheists, Buddhists and every other religious group is just as capable of being discriminated against, and of discriminating against others. It is just a call to exult in both of the religion clauses in our marvelous Constitution. While we all impart our views to the tapestry of opinion and celebrate not only the freedom of others to disagree, the muzzle that has been placed on government in this one subject area has been (and continues to be) responsible for so much animosity, suffering, cruelty and death.

The Golden Compass, situated in a different universe, is named for what is called an "alethiometer." Referred to as "a GPS device for locating the truth," it essentially reigns supreme in terms of value for that world's inhabitants. In religion, it seems there is only one truth: that we will never all agree. Whatever one's views on atheism or other religious belief, in this universe and on this world, the establishment clause of our First Amendment deserves the esteem of an alethiometer.

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The Rev. Dr. Michael Newdow is a minister in the First Atheist Church of True Science and the plaintiff in the case that went to the Supreme Court in 2004, challenging the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance. He requests that we disclose that he has yet to see the movie, The Golden Compass, which wasn't released to the public until Dec. 7.

NINE FUCKING THINGS THAT WILL KILL YOU IN A HEARTBEAT - IF THEY REALLY EXIST

No doubt you’ve heard of Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, but you may not have known that they belong to a class of creatures called cryptids. The technical definition is a creature that can’t be proved to exist, even though sightings of this “thing” may have occurred. The definition also includes sightings of creatures thought to be extinct.

Yeah, so that’s the “technical” definition. One that makes more sense to me is, “Creatures you might see featured in the Weekly World News.” Which is not to say that these creatures aren’t really lurking somewhere – in fact, some cryptids have been proven to exist. For example, the Kraken, a mythical sea monster, is now widely accepted as an early description of the giant squid, which does, in fact, inhabit the seas (although it’s hard to catch alive).

So, on the chance that some of these cryptids aren’t just local legend or mythological beings, here are nine to watch out for.

1. The Mongolian Death Worm
Even the name is terrifying. This two-to-four foot-long worm supposedly makes its home in the Gobi Desert. Locals refer to it as “allghoi”, which means “blood filled intestine worm”. Yummy. The allghoi’s might be able to kill you by secreting a yellow poison that kills on contact, but it probably doesn’t need to. It’s rumored that it can also kill from a distance by some sort of electrocution. Adventurers should definitely avoid the Gobi Desert in June and July, because that’s when the allghoi is the most active. Also, you’re going to want to avoid wearing your “When life gives you scurvy, make lemonade” shirt, because the Death Worm is attracted by the color yellow. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Note: Kinda reminds me of the sandworms from Beetlejuice.

2. The Beast of Bray Road
If you’re near Elkhorn, Wisconsin, and see something resembling Bigfoot or perhaps a large wolf walking on its hind legs, don’t stop to see if it’s friendly. The Beast of Bray Road might not actually kill you – so far the only suspicious activity chalked up to this maybe-werewolf is the slaughter of small game and deer. One Web site says it behaves aggressively, though, so I probably wouldn’t try its patience.

3. Beast of Gévaudan

While we’re talking about Beasts, we should discuss the Beast of Gévaudan. It’s a French cryptid that killed an estimated 60-100 people between 1764 and 1767. It must have been quite a peculiar-looking thing, because eyewitnesses describe it as being about the size of a cow with a long, lion-like tail, red fur and a head with small pointed ears and sharp fangs. King Louis XV sent acclaimed hunters after the beast, who successfully killed an abnormally large wolf in September of 1765. When more attacks occurred in December of the same year, it was concluded that the wolf that was killed was not the Beast in question. Another large creature was killed in June of 1767 – when they gutted it, the remains of a little girl were found inside. The deaths ended after that, so presumably the right thing was killed… the question remains, though, what was that thing?

4. The Brosno Dragon
If Nessie has a cousin, the Brosno Dragon could be it. He’s been lurking in Lake Brosno in the Russian city of Novgorod since the 13th century, according to one report. That’s when he ate some of Batu Kahn’s (grandson of Genghis Khan) soldiers and horses when they tried to let their horses drink from the lake. Supposedly Batu Khan and his soldiers were so scared that they turned tail and ran, leaving Novgorod in peace. Today, most people are understandably skeptic about the existence of the dragon and some seem to think it could be a mutant beaver… which really seems just as strange in my book, but whatever. One scientific approach suggests that gas bubbles up from the bottom of the lake and makes it look like something large is moving under the water.

5. The Jersey Devil
The Jersey Devil, AKA the Leeds Devil, supposedly came about in the 18th century when a woman had her 13th child. She was so sick of having children with her husband (whom she did not love) that she would rather have the Devil’s child than have one more child by her husband. Her wish was granted and the baby was born with claws, a tail and hooves. Ouch. It flew out the chimney and began to terrorize New Jersey, including some notable people like Napoleon Bonaparte’s brother and Commodore Stephen Decatur. There was a week in January of 1909 that the Devil seemed particularly bent on wreaking havoc – it was sighted every single day, attacking dogs and people. By Friday of that week, people were so scared that businesses and schools were actually shutting for the day out of fear.

6. Dobharchu
A traditional Irish ballad tells the tale of Grainne Ni Conalai on September 24, 1722. She went to Glenade Lake in County Leitrim to bathe and never came back. When her husband went to look for her, he found her mangled near the water with a huge beast, a cross between an otter and a dog, lying asleep on her. Her husband returned home and got his brother; together the two of them went back to the lake and used their horses as bait. When the dobharchu lunged at the horse, the brothers stabbed it in the heart. Some stories say they sliced its head off.

Before it died, though, let out a whistle to call its relatives to seek vengeance. It doesn’t look like there have been any sightings since, but just the same, I can’t imagine they get many skinny-dippers in Glenade Lake these days.

7. The Pope Lick Monster
With a name like that, you would expect the Pope Lick Monster to have a very odd story of origin. You might be disappointed to learn that it’s really just named for the creek/railroad trestle it was sighted at – Pope Lick Creek and trestle near Louisville, Kentucky. The half human, half goat kills people in one of two ways: he’s either so horrifying that when people encounter it near the trestle, they would rather jump off the bridge to their deaths than be near it, or he hypnotizes whoever he finds and tosses them off.

No matter what you believe, the fact remains that there is a relatively large number of accidental deaths at that very location.

8. Kikiyaon
The Kikiyaon gives a whole new meaning to Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. It lives in West Africa and looks kind of like an owl… an owl with razor-sharp talons and a deadly beak. You know it’s coming after you when you hear the strangled cry it makes, which turns into a scream that lingers in the air. One account says it’s similar someone being strangled very slowly. If you see it and escape, don’t start thanking your lucky stars just yet – you’ll probably die soon afterward anyway. It flies faster than a man can run, so most likely you’re doomed anyway… if it exists.

9. The Mothman
Our list concludes with a cryptid you might have heard of, especially if you saw the Richard Gere-Debra Messing movie The Mothman Prophecies. The Mothman is, as you would expect, a creature that looks like a human with giant wings on his back. Most descriptions say he has bug-like red eyes. He was first sighted in West Virginia by two couples who were out on a late night drive. For the next year he was sighted by numerous people, some claiming to be chased at more than 100 miles per hour. A little more than a year after the first sighting, the Silver Bridge collapsed into the Ohio River, killing 46 people. The Mothman wasn’t seen as much after that. So was the Mothman trying to warn locals about the impending doom? Or did he cause it? Either way, Point Pleasant, W.V. has become well-known as being the home of this cryptid and even embraces the fact: the town erected a 12-foot statue of the Mothman and just celebrated their sixth annual Mothman Festival in September.

Do you have any cryptids in your area, or know of some I didn’t cover here? Do tell. I love this stuff.

EVEN REPUBLICAN DRAG QUEENS HAVE THIER PROBLEMS

Even Republican Drag Queens Have Sex Scandals
Joseph Minton Amann and Tom Breuer | Bio


There's a saying among old-school political hacks that, "Only Nixon could go to China." It's a reference, of course, to how reputations often shape public perception more than actions, allowing some politicians to get away with things others never could.

It's an insidiously effective tactic, too. Today, thanks largely to Nixon's efforts in 1972, China's holding more dollars than Larry Craig at the Boise Man Hole Club, and we're all eagerly awaiting the Christmas release of Mattel's new Barbie Asbestos Dream House.

But the lesson the GOP learned back in the early '70s was certainly not about how constructive engagement might be a better strategy than knee-jerk Cold War saber-rattling; it was about distorting public perception through robust rhetoric that obscures one's true nature. Fast forward to 2007 and candidate Rudy Giuliani's oddly blasé reaction to the recent revelation that he was not just storing his love mutton in inappropriate places during his tenure as America's Mayor, but may have been doing so on the public dime.

Of course, for years Republicans and conservatives had relied on the perception of the Democrats as the party of libertine values to strengthen their own "family-friendly" bona fides. Then the dam burst, the GOP big-tent policy quickly became the GOP pants-tent policy, and venerable mainstream broadsheets like the New York Times suddenly became indistinguishable from the Commentary section of Barely Legal.

Truth is, while researching our latest book, The Brotherhood of the Disappearing Pants: A Field Guide to Conservative Sex Scandals, it seemed to us, in our wide-eyed Midwestern naivete, that Rudy's salacious past might actually make him unelectable.

It's not that Rudy was divorced. Twice. (Once from his second cousin.) Divorced Republicans--particularly Republican politicians--are certainly no rare breed. They've got money. They've got power. They've got eager young assistants who have not yet realized that, right about the time that dashing older gentleman they're bedding is ready to commit, he's going to look like one of Ed Gein's lamps and have a prostate the size of Tim Russert's head. No, it was the lurid details that we thought were sure to be off-putting to potential voters.

Not only was Rudy openly seeing his current wife, Judith Nathan, while still married to his second wife, Donna Hanover, but his announcement at a press conference that he was separating from Hanover reportedly took her by surprise. Also, at one point, during their marriage, Hanover refused to say if she would vote for her husband for mayor, prompting Rudy's lawyer to respond, "What kind of wife is that?"

His relationship with the rest of his family was also apparently strained. Rudy's son Andrew, best known as the kid who came moments away from getting tranqued by NYPD snipers during the mayor's inauguration speech several years back, told the New York Times in March that he would not campaign with his father, preferring to concentrate on his goal of becoming a professional golfer.

Then again, when it comes right down to it, Giuliani is actually something of a standard-bearer for GOP sexual ethics and family values.

Indeed, our book is stocked with more than 230 pages of conservative gross-outs stretching back decades, most of which make Giuliani's peccadilloes look downright quaint. Unfortunately, these scandals tend to come faster than Mark Foley at a spring line launch party for Underoos--and thus we've been forced to furiously post updates at the book's companion Web site, Conservativesexscandals.com.

But if Rudy's recent slip in the polls is any indication, voters might finally be realizing that, just because your party tries to make it look like it's above reproach, doesn't mean you're not sitting in a bathtub full of Mazola Corn Oil next to a rack of leather riding crops with the holiday issue of Torso at the ready. Of course, we've often been asked why, with a full chamber of political scoundrels to choose from, we've limited our criticism to the right side of the aisle.

Well, because Democratic scandals are kind of a snooze, aren't they? Did anyone really think Bill Clinton was going to keep it in his pants for eight years? If he'd shown up for his first State of the Union address in a red velvet robe and slippers, would anyone have even blinked?

No, those magic ingredients that make Republicans such artful dodgers and Democrats so dull by comparison are abundant hypocrisy and insufferable sanctimony.
Here's the difference:

1) Senator/Congressman/Governor (insert Democratic elected official) admits he's gay, acknowledges this has always been so, writes an annoyingly earnest book, and lands himself a guest spot on Oprah.

2) Senator/Congressman/Governor (insert Republican elected official, and make sure he buys you dinner first) shows up with a male prostitute at a seedy Vegas motel wearing a Little Dutch Boy outfit and carrying a steam trunk full of dildos and Portuguese horse tranquilizers--then, when later confronted by the media, insists he's not gay and that the six kilos of Mexican black tar heroin he purchased were not intended for personal use.

But for some reason many Republican politicians have still not figured it out. Their frequent pro-family posturing does not protect them when stuff like this happens, it only makes them look worse--and for his part, Rudy would be well advised to wipe that smug smirk off his face.

But can you really blame him? After all, this kind of sly sexual hubris has been widespread in conservative circles for years--from the caravans of hookers who show up for every Republican National Convention to Fox News, which might as well just go ahead and buy Victoria's Secret at this point as part of a vertical integration strategy.

Indeed, as we all learned during Bill Clinton's 12-month national time-out for playing with the neighbor girl's wee-wee, there were plenty of GOP bounders--many of whom were part of the House mob that would ultimately impeach him--who were slipping the holy spirit to someone other than their wives.

Even Newt Gingrich, who never missed a chance to scold the president or the Democrats on ethical grounds, was later revealed to be shtupping a woman not his wife. And as moral firebrand Bob Barr was acting as a House prosecutor in the Clinton impeachment, gadfly pornographer Larry Flynt produced an unflattering affidavit from the congressman's second wife. (It would be unseemly to go into all the details, but suffice to say the allegations had something to do with either an abortion or Rip Taylor's Guatemalan houseboy and a case of almond butter.)

But if you're still not convinced that the GOP's moral poses spring largely from black, bloodless, cynical hearts, we'd like to present another sort of question: Who would you rather party with: Larry Craig, Mark Foley, Bill O'Reilly, and Rudy Giuliani--or Bill Clinton?

We think our point is made.

YOU HAVE ME CONFUSED WITH SOMEONE WHO ACTUALLY GIVES A FUCK

Batten down the hatches, lock the doors: anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders wants to make a film! It's bound to feature the Qur'an in ways that few Muslims would approve of, to put it mildly. But, as British comedian Catherine Tate would say: look at my face, am I bothered?





Any up-and-coming Hollywood star will tell you that the world of cinema is an unforgiving one. Maybe it's shortsighted to rule out that there is a budding Scorsese or Coppola underneath that trademark hairdo. But still, I'd be surprised if Mr Wilders' stab at making art turns out any more gripping than watching paint dry.
Now if Wilders is in a way - as the French would say - 'de trop', as far as I'm concerned Sooreh Hera is the nose on the great Durante. She's an Iranian photographer working in the Netherlands, and a real professional too. Yet her works were withdrawn from an exhibition in The Hague last week, because the Municipal Museum considered them offensive.

Iranian homosexuals
The photographs show two Iranian homosexuals in a bedroom, wearing black-and-white masks to prevent recognition. The masks are of the prophet Muhammad and his son-in-law, Ali. Is that offensive? Oh, undoubtedly. Is it art? My answer would be 'yes'.

I like the way the mask's curvy lines emphasize the curved shoulder of the figure in the foreground, making him look unexpectedly feminine despite his bulging muscles. I like the way light and colour are used to capture the no man's land between shame and sensuality. It makes the photographs so much more than just a political pamphlet.

Outstanding photographer
Museum director Wim van Krimpen has acknowledged that Sooreh Hera is an outstanding photographer. But, he says, he won't show the photographs all the same... because he doesn't trust her intentions.

Excuse me? Since when does art have anything to do with trust? Do we know for instance what Rembrandt's intentions were when he painted the Nightwatch? Do we care if he was a penny-pinching fraud who secretly made fun of the dignitaries he portrayed? Surely Wim van Krimpen's job is to determine what is art and what isn't, not whether the artist is the kind of person you'd buy a second-hand car from.


It reminds me of Gerard Reve, long considered one of the Netherlands' greatest living writers and now one of our greatest dead ones. In what has come to be known as the
Gerard Reve in 1998. Photo: (c) ANP

'donkey trial', he had to defend himself in court for writing about a tryst with Jesus... reincarnated as a donkey... that Reve has sex with... not one but three times... and from behind, too... although I suppose that with a donkey there isn't much choice.
Anyway, after being gloriously acquitted by the High Court in 1968, Reve famously remarked that from that moment, the intentions of artists would be safe from over-interpreting and narrow-minded members of the public. Well, I'm glad he was better at writing literature than at making predictions...

Jesus the gay donkey
These days of course, we're more likely to get worked up about Muhammad the teddy bear than about Jesus the gay donkey. Although a new Hollywood film came in for a torrent of criticism from the Roman Catholic Church this week. The Golden Compass is based on an award winning children's book by British writer Philip Pullman, whose soft Oxford voice and gentle manners hide a fierce and uncompromising intelligence, as I found out when I interviewed him some years ago.

In his book, the Catholic Church and religious fanaticism are the bad guys. That's all been expertly neutralized in the film so as not to give offence. But Church leaders in the US were calling for a boycott anyway. Because, they said, after seeing the film children might just want to read the book...

And here I was thinking that any film that encourages children to read at all these days deserves a big fat prize! These are strange times indeed, when museum directors would rather not exhibit works of art and parents would rather not have their children discover the joys of reading.

Sooreh Hera may well be a pathological attention seeker, Philip Pullman an anti-religious bigot and Gerard Reve might have been a big fat pervert with a fetish for ungulates. All artists are liars anyway, and a fair few of them throughout history have been drunks, cheapskates and good-for-nothings. But art doesn't lie; it only asks that you judge for yourself.

SO WHAT'S THE DEAL HERE - DID GOD WRITE THE ST JAMES VERSION OF THE BIBLE IN ENGLISH AND TELL ALL THE CATHOLICS TO FUCK OFF AND DIE ?????

THE REAL BIBLE: WHO'S GOT IT?
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By Frank R. Zindler
May, 1986

Prologue On The Street

Evangelist: Brother, you're in trouble if you put your faith in science. Science can never give you absolute truth. Science is always having to correct its mistakes. Science can't save!

Heathen: You're probably right that science cannot give us absolute knowledge. But as long as it gives us information that is solid enough to stake our lives on, what more do we need? Anyhow, there doesn't seem to be any other source of information that's any more reliable — and lots that are much less reliable man science. As for saving, penicillin's record isn't too bad.

Evangelist: Friend, there is something more certain than science. There is a source of absolute, unfailing truth. You don't have to go with the guesses of science any more. You can go directly to the source of all knowledge.

Heathen: Really? What is it?

Evangelist: The Holy Bible, brother, the Book of Books!

Heathen: Which Bible is "the Holy Bible"? I mean, mere are lots of different Bibles floating around. There's the Koran —

Evangelist: Sinner, I'm talking about the Christian Bible, not the false Bibles of the superstitious heathens.

Heathen: Well, even if I admit that Christian Bibles are better than Muslim or Mormon Bibles, how do you know which Christian Bible is the correct one? The Catholic Bibles contain seventy-three books, the Protestant Bibles have only sixty-six.

Evangelist: The Catholics are in thrall to the Devil, brother. They have some false books along with the true ones. The true Bible is the King James Version — translated without error from the original tongues into God's own English. You don't think God would let the transmission of his own word to us fall into error, do you? The King James Version has been preserved inerrant to bring the message of salvation to sinners like us.

Heathen: No kidding? How do you account for the fact that some of "us" are Catholics? Why has god allowed the transmission of his word to Catholics to become corrupted? Why did god allow Protestants to be sold the first editions of the King James Version, which still contained all the seventy-three books found in the Catholic Bible?

Three Problems

True believers who wish to put all their faith in the Bible are faced with three problems: (1) How can one know which books are "inspired" and should be part of the scriptural canon? (2) How can one know which one — if any — of the existing contradictory manuscripts (MSS) of a given book preserves the "true" wording? (3) Assuming that one has the correct manuscript (MS) of a given book, how can one know what the particular Greek, Hebrew, or Aramaic words mean? As we shall see, there is no way these questions can be answered with absolute certainty. At best, believers must trust to the probabilities — not certainties — that arise from a scientific investigation of the facts surrounding the biblical texts and traditions. Believers will have to face the fact that there is no way at all to know which Bible to believe — let alone what to believe in it. Believers still have to put their "faith" in other human beings.

Which Books?

As just mentioned, the first problem believers have to face is the problem of which books belong in the Bible, which ones don't, and how to decide. Actually, it is extremely rare for individuals to decide these questions on their own. Usually they inherit a set of "holy books" from the families they are born into. Catholic children inherit a somewhat ampler number than do Protestant children, and Jewish children get still fewer — thirty-four less than the Catholic kids do. Shortest-changed of all are Samaritan kids. They only get Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, and — if they eat their lentils — Joshua. If to be "saved" one needs to have information found, say, in Revelation, 2 Paralipomenon, or Baruch, isn't it odd of god to let so many people be born into environments deficient in books needed for salvation?

How comes it then, that there is such diversity of opinion as to which books are "canonical," i.e., should be part of the official collection of "inspired" scripture? What divine principle has left the Samaritans with Bibles containing only five or six books, the Jews with thirty-nine, the Protestants with sixty-six, and the Catholics with seventy-three? Why did ancient Christians have even more books in their Bibles?

In the case of the Samaritans, the small number of books in their Bible reflects nothing more significant than the fact that the Samaritans, living in the northern part of Palestine, became split off from the main center of Jewish cultural evolution — the southern kingdom of Judah — before the prophets and other writings had come to be considered "scripture" by anyone.

To this day the pitiful remnant of believers calling themselves Samaritans claims all books outside the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible, the so-called Five Books of Moses) are uninspired and, therefore, uncanonical. A possible exception is the sixth book of the Bible, the Book of Joshua, which seems to be given quasi-scriptural status. Not only are the later books of the Jewish canon "unscriptural," in the Samaritan view even the Hebrew version of the Pentateuch (the "Masoretic Text," the so-called Textus Receptus or "received text" from which our King James (KJ) and later Bibles have been translated) is no good either. It differs from the Samaritan text in more than six thousand variant readings! But alas for the beliefs of the Samaritans and the Jews, the small size of the Samaritan Bible and the six thousand variant readings of the Masoretic Text are due to no discernibly divine principle of selection: They are merely accidents of political history — and warfare.

Throughout Jewish history up to the Council of Jamnia (held near the present-day city of Joppa, near the end of me first century A.D.), the list of books thought to "defile the hands" (i.e., were inspired) differed as a function of geography and political affiliation. By the time the Christian Church was formed, Greek-speaking Jews had accumulated quite a few more hand-defiling books than had their stay-at-home, Aramaic- or Hebrew-speaking cousins. When the Christians adopted the Greek "Old Testament" for their own (including the newfangled books that went with it), Palestinian Jews had to circle their wagons. At the Council of Jamnia, the Jews threw out such books as Baruch, Ecclesiasticus, and both Books of Maccabees. By a slender vote, they narrowly avoided throwing out Ezekiel, Proverbs, Esther, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon. In the case of the Book of Daniel, the Jews threw out the last two chapters, settling for an even dozen. (The Catholic Book of Daniel still contains fourteen chapters.)


Figure 1. A page from E Kaine Diatheke, a Greek New Testament published by The British and Foreign Bible Society (© 1958), showing the "preferred text" and "critical apparatus" for Matthew 1:11, 16, 18.

A. The traditional text of verse 16 reads: "And Jacob begat Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, the [one] called Christ."

B. The beginning of the variant readings for verse 16, with symbols for the various manuscripts followed by their different readings.

C. The symbol for the Syriac (sy) Sinaiticus (s) manuscript, a third to fourth century document reflecting the state of the biblical text in the second century, before believers in the virgin birth myth had succeeded in altering all the gospel texts.

D. The greatly abbreviated Greek reads: "And Joseph begat Jesus, the one called Christ."



Just as the list of holy books differed from Jewish community to Jewish community, so the list of books considered holy among the early Christians differed from church to church, although Christians generally preferred the larger Greek Old Testament to the smaller Hebrew one. In addition to the Jewish scriptures, each Christian community developed its own "New Testament" scriptures, creating more than a dozen different gospels and an uncertain number of epistles and apocalypses.

It comes as no surprise to learn that no "Church Father" is known, who drew the line of canonicity in the same way as does the Fire-Baptized Full-Gospel Pentecostal Holiness Church of God in Christ of today.

The illustrious Irenaeus (b. ca. A.D. 130), for example, considered the Shepherd of Hennas to be inspired, but rejected Hebrews, Jude, James, 2 Peter, and 3 John. Clement of Alexandria (ca. A.D. 150-213) included the Apocalypse of Peter, the Epistle of Barnabas, and the Shepherd of Hermas in his Bible. Tertullian (b. ca. A.D. 160) — best remembered for his dictum, Certum est, quia impossibile est ("I believe it because it's impossible") — threw out all the New Testament books except the four gospels, Acts, thirteen "Pauline" epistles, Revelation, and 1 John.

As certain churches (such as those at Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, and Constantinople) gained in political power, each made strenuous efforts to stamp out "heresy," and church councils were convened (often by the Roman Emperor rather than by popes or patriarchs) to vote on which books were canonical — and to anathematize those who could not buy enough votes to be on the winning side.

The history of these councils is both bewildering and abominable. The Council of Laodicea (A.D. 363) included Baruch in the Old Testament, but barred Revelation from the New. The Council of Carthage (ca. A.D. 397) included Ecclesiasticus, Wisdom, Tobit, Judith, and 1 and 2 Maccabees. The most recent infallible enumeration of the Catholic canon took place at the Council of Trent (A.D. 1563), in the midst of the German Reformation. The Greek Orthodox Church closed its canon sometime in the tenth century, when it finally admitted the Book of Revelation (although it still does not use quotations from this book in its lectionaries). The Syrian Orthodox Church grudgingly adopted Revelation a century later still.

Although not every church council debated which books belonged in the Bible, it is nevertheless true that issues decided by previous councils helped to shape the decisions that defined the canon. Contrary to the naive opinion that the deliberations of church councils were infused by the power of divine guidance, most of the councils — and their aftermaths — were pretty ghastly affairs.

The council of Nicaea, for example, was convened in A.D. 325 by the Roman emperor Constantine — the first Christian emperor. After being converted to Christianity, Constantine put to death his wife, his son, a nephew and his wife, and had Licinius (his coemperor) and his son strangled after promising them their lives. These chores out of the way, he convened the bishops and patriarchs of the realm to define the nature of the Trinity and decide which of the squabbling factions of believers should be given the royal patent for orthodoxy.


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The burning question of the council was the argument between Arius and Bishop Alexander of Alexandria. Arius claimed Jesus was essentially distinct from the Father, having been created ex nihilo by the latter. Alexander, however, claimed "as God is eternal, so is his Son — when the Father, then the Son — the Son is present in God without birth, ever-begotten, an unbegotten-begotten." By a packed vote, Arius was condemned as a heretic, excommunicated, and exiled. Three years later, however, Constantine went soft on heresy (or changed his mind as to who were the heretics) and recalled Arius to Constantinople. On the very day Arius was to reenter the Cathedral in triumph, his bowels suddenly burst out in a privy, obviating any need to redefine orthodoxy. The orthodox considered it a miracle; the Arians knew it was murder.


Figure 2. No virgin birth here! Part of the genealogy of Jesus in the Syriacus Sinaiticus manuscripts referred to in Fig. 1-C. (Printed text © 1894 by Agnes Smith Lewis, The Four Gospels in Syriac, Transcribed from the Sinaitic Palimpsest, Cambridge University Press).

Syriac reads from right to left. Asterisks mark the Syriac word 'wld, "begat." Underlines show names repeating in the formula: A begat B, B begat C, C begat D, etc. Verses fifteen to sixteen read: "Eliud begat Eleazar, Eleazar begat Matthan, Matthan begat Jacob, Jacob begat Joseph; Joseph, to whom was betrothed a young woman, Mary, begat Jesus [(l)yshw', the last name underlined] who is called Messiah."


Poison was not the only way to decide questions of theology. At the "Ecumenical" Council of Ephesus (A.D. 431), St. Cyril, the Pope of Alexandria, bribed enough bishops to be able to convene the Council before the arrival of the Patriarch of Antioch, whose opposition he feared. Without opposition from the delegation from Antioch it was a simple matter to condemn one Nestorius as a heretic, and to proclaim the Virgin Mary to be theotokos, or "mother of god."

At the Second Synod of Ephesus (A.D. 449), Dioscoros, the Pope of Alexandria (Cyril's successor), condemned Flavian, the Pope of Constantinople, and then kicked his rival in Christ so severely that he died three days later. Summoning a mob of monks and soldiers wielding staves, swords, and chains, Dioscoros convinced the bishops who had planned to vote for Flavian to vote "correctly."

Such were the means by which truth was determined in the orthodox Catholic Church. Among the Protestants it was every sinner for himself when it came to deciding which books belonged in the Bible.

Among the Protestant "reformers," opinions differing greatly from those held by Protestants today were common. Luther didn't think Esther belonged in the Bible, but he thought highly of 1 Maccabees and Sirach. He had a low opinion of Hebrews, and Revelation he thought to be of little value, being neither apostolic nor prophetic. The Epistle of James he termed "an epistle of straw."

The Swiss reformer Zwingli pronounced Revelation unbiblical. John Calvin denounced that book of ravings as unintelligible, and he forbade the pastors of Geneva to attempt to interpret it.

Which Manuscripts?

Even if we pretended that we could somehow know for certain that the Gospel of Matthew, say, is truly inspired and, thus, a legitimate book to be included in the canon, how could we tell if any one of the many extant MSS of Matthew contains the correct, inspired wording? Most true believers know nothing at all about this problem, because it is a well kept secret among Bible scholars that no two MSS of Matthew — or any other biblical book — are exactly alike.

Worse yet, for each book there exist different families of MS types, often of approximately equal antiquity, but differing from each other in characteristic ways. To try to keep track of all the different wordings in Matthew and other books of the Bible, scholarly editions of the Greek New Testament contain a so-called apparatus criticus, a complicated system of footnotes indicating the major variant readings for each passage in the "preferred text" [see Figs. 1 and 3].

Concerning the preferred text of the Greek Bible, readers may wonder just who decides — and how — what the preferred readings should be? Space does not permit a discussion of the scientific (and sometimes very un-scientific) principles involved. We can only observe that it is both laughable and sad to see the more intelligent fundamentalists diligently learning Greek in order to "read God's word in the original tongue." Little do they suspect, while staring at the nearly footnote-free pages of their Westcott-Hort Greek testaments, the thousands of scientific and not-so-scientific decisions underlying what they see — or don't see — on each page.

Bible apologists try to wave away the hundreds of thousands of variant readings in the extant MSS by saying that the differences are trivial and do not affect passages essential for Christian doctrine. "Merely spelling differences," they say. The falseness of this assertion can be seen not only in the examples given in Figs. 1-3 (variations affecting the doctrine of the virgin birth, as well as the doctrine that true disciples can drink poison and caress cobras), but also in passages striking at the heart of the doctrine of the Trinity.

When Erasmus of Rotterdam published Europe's first Greek New Testament in 1516 he omitted the Trinitarian proof-text, 1 John 5:7:

For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.
Needless to say, Erasmus was stoutly criticized for the omission. He defended himself by declaring that he would have included the verse (well-known in the Latin Bible) had he been able to find a single Greek MS that contained it. Soon thereafter Erasmus was presented a Greek Bible containing the verse!

Suspecting a fraud, but unable to prove it, Erasmus added the verse, to later editions of his Bible, the book destined to become the Textus Receptus — the book from which the King James translators would derive the "authorized" English version of 1611. Tough luck for the Trinity, Erasmus' intuition was correct. To this day no Greek MS older than the fifteenth to sixteenth century has ever been found to contain the passage. It is now known that the verse was a fourth-century Spanish invention, finally appearing in MSS of the Latin Vulgate (the official Bible of the Roman Catholic Church) around the year 800.

The discovery that the oldest Bibles omit 1 John 5:7 leaves Christians without biblical "proof of the Trinity". While there are still other verses that are compatible with trinitarian doctrine, none are proof of it. Unless Christian apologists consider the Trinity trivial, they must admit that the differences in MSS are important!

The magnitude of the differences between different MSS of the same book can be astonishing. One of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Jeremiah scroll 4QJer-b is one-eighth shorter than the Masoretic text of Jeremiah! Even in ancient times wild differences in MSS of individual books existed. The Church Father Irenaeus tells us that the MSS of Matthew's gospel used ca. A.D. 185 by the Ebionites (the original Jewish Christians of Jerusalem) lacked the first two chapters — the chapters containing the imaginary genealogy of Jesus, the - virgin birth story, the wise men, and Herod's slaughter of the innocents. Small wonder that the earliest Christians did not believe the story about Mary and the angel!


Figure 3. The end of the Gospel of Mark, from the Greek Bible used in Fig. 1, showing the state of total confusion in which the Gospel ends.

A. Latin text of a fourth to fifth century African Old Latin version manuscript, the Codex Bobbiensis (k) which adds to verse 3 of Mk. 16 the verses: "Suddenly at the third hour of the day there was darkness over the whole earth, and angels descended from heaven and stood up with the living god, [and] ascended [to heaven] along with him, and immediately there was light. Then they [women] approached the tomb."

B. Note saying that verse 8, as well as verses 9-20, are omitted by an early Egyptian Fayyumic (fa) manuscript.

C. Note saying that verse 8 is the concluding verse of the oldest and best manuscripts, including the famous Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Vaticanus, and the Syriacus Sinaiticus shown in Fig. 2. This means that all the post-Resurrection tales of the traditional "long ending" are absent, along with Mk. 16:18 — the passage so beloved of snake-handling, poison-drinking true believers in the South. The oldest manuscripts end their story with the women fleeing from the sepulchre, "for they were afraid."

Actually, the footnotes relating to the end of Mark continue for two more pages after the one shown. One of the later notes tells us that some manuscripts contain an alternative "short" ending to Mk. 16: 9-20 that reads: "But they reported briefly to Peter and those with him all that they had been told. And after this, Jesus himself sent out by means of them, from east to west, the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation."

Another footnote tells us that there are several manuscripts that include both endings!



We may note one other oddity concerning the "received text" used to produce the King James Bible: Because the Book of Revelation was never popular in the Greek Orthodox Church, it was hard for Erasmus to find Greek MSS of the book. Indeed, he could not find a single MS that contained the last six verses. Consequently, he had to make up his own Greek — translating the last six verses into Greek from the Latin Vulgate! To this day no Greek text has ever been found that reproduces Erasmus' version of the last six verses of me Bible, yet it is the source of the King James rendering.

While we are discussing the Book of Revelation — the book beloved of President Reagan and the gematriasts (biblical numerologists; the word rhymes with "pederasts") who advise him — we should note that "the number of the name of the beast" [Rev. 13: 18] may not be 666 after all. In some very ancient sources the number is 616! Doubtless to the dismay of the gematriasts, who seek to guide American nuclear foreign policy on the basis of biblical clues, neither singly nor in combination do the names "Madalyn," "Murray," or "O'Hair" total to 616 or 666 when written in the Greek alphabet. At 651, "Murray" comes closest to 666: close, but no cigar!

We shall end this discussion of variant MSS by considering the problem of translated versions of the Bible. The problem of knowing what meanings to give to words in foreign languages will be considered in the next section of this essay. What concerns us here is a problem of even greater concern to those who want to know what the "original text" of the Bible once said.

Between the third century B.C. and the first century A.D., Greek-speaking Jewish scholars in Alexandria and elsewhere translated the Hebrew scriptures into Greek, producing a series of editions of the Greek Old Testament known collectively as the Septuagint (abbreviated LXX). A comparison of the LXX with the Hebrew Masoretic Text shows fundamental differences in content — differences that cannot be waived as translation errors, but can be seen as evidence that the Hebrew text used by the translators differed profoundly from the Hebrew text known today. Among the many differences between the LXX and the Masoretic Text are the numerical discrepancies. Enoch was sixty-five years old when he begot Methuselah in Hebrew, but he was 165 when he did it in Greek. After the birth of Lamech, Methuselah lived 782 years in Hebrew, but 802 in Greek. Not only are there numerical differences between the Greek and Hebrew texts, verses and paragraphs are added or deleted and, in the case of Jeremiah, the individual prophesies are scattered around so differently in the two versions that it is very difficult to compare the two at at all.

The problem for true believers is this: The Greek version reflects a Hebrew text more than a thousand years older than the Hebrew text used as the standard for the King James. Shouldn't we follow the Greek — even if it is a translation — instead of the Hebrew? It should be noted that the authors of the New Testament, when citing the Old Testament, cited it in Greek resembling the LXX far more often than the Masoretic Textus Receptus. If the LXX was good enough for Jesus, shouldn't it be good enough for Presbyterians?

The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls has further confused the issue. These Hebrew and Aramaic scrolls date to a time almost as far back as the time at which the LXX translating began, and temporally overlap the period in which translation was completed. Do these scrolls settle the issue of which is better, LXX or Masoretic Text? Not on your life!

Some of the scrolls, such as the Great Isaiah Scroll, are extremely close to the Masoretic Text. This is why fundamentalists never seem to tire of telling us about this scroll and how it vindicates their Bible (they won't tell you about the Short Jeremiah Scroll, mentioned above, which resembles the LXX). In the case of Jeremiah, scrolls similar to both the LXX and Masoretic texts have been found. MSS of Exodus have been found that resemble not only LXX, but the Samaritan version also! Just for good measure, some scrolls reflect still other, hitherto unknown textual traditions.

Which is the correct MS? The question itself has become meaningless at this stage in the scientific understanding of the biblical texts. Different oral traditions gradually were reduced to writing at different times and in different places. Differing from each other at the moment they were committed to writing, the various written forms of a given story continued to diverge further as the individual texts were copied and recopied, and errors and "corrections" were made by the scribes. Periodically scribes discovered contradictory MSS dealing with the same story. Then the process of "harmonization" came into play — the scribe combining the contradictory texts into one "harmonious" narrative. An extreme example of this is seen in certain late MSS of the gospels of Matthew and Luke, where the two genealogies of Jesus — in the Textus Receptus they differ from each other almost totally — have been "harmonized" into one hundred percent identity!

After all their study, Bible scholars have come to a simple conclusion: Trying to find the "correct reading" of most biblical MSS is as hopeless — and as meaningless — as trying to find the "average voter"!

Which Dictionary To Use?

One of the most perplexing problems facing a believer is one almost never recognized even to exist: How can one know what a given word in an ancient MS means? It is not enough to have a good Greek or Hebrew dictionary. The most brilliant of dictionary writers cannot be certain of the meaning of every word as it is used in every culture and subculture, at every period in history. If we find the Hebrew word zabach, "sacrifice," for example, in an ancient sentence reading "King Ishkibibbel sacrificed much and Jahweh protected him and his chamber pots," does it mean the same thing as it does in a modern Jerusalem newspaper sentence reading, "Shmuel sacrificed a lot and got his kids through college"?

One need not go to ancient texts to see the magnitude of this problem. The plays of William Shakespeare (1564-1616) date from almost modem times — and they are in English. Yet it is often quite impossible to know for certain what Shakespeare intended certain lines to mean. In the third act of Hamlet, just after the famous "To be, or not to be" soliloquy, Hamlet says to Ophelia, "Get thee to a nunnery."

What could be simpler to understand?

It was quite a shock, thirty years ago, when I learned that the Elizabethan slang term for brothel was nunnery! In all the years since I have been unable to decide whether Hamlet wanted Ophelia to go to a convent or to a bordello. Either meaning fits the context. Hamlet could be worried that Ophelia was likely to become "a breeder of sinners" and should remove herself from the temptations of the world by withdrawing into religion. Or — considering the presence of words such as harlot, and bawd in the immediate context, and considering that Hamlet decries Ophelia's "wantonness" — it is plausible that Hamlet, in disgust, was telling Ophelia to join the world's oldest profession.

While the ambiguity of this passage is merely amusing or annoying, depending on how much one wishes to understand Shakespeare, the situation would be deadly serious if Hamlet were a book of scripture instead of a work of art. What if a true believer tried to imitate "St. Ophelia" and went to the wrong place? She could spend eternity in "the wrong place," indeed, if she went to a convent, say, instead of a cat-house!

Although it is often difficult to discern the meaning of words in Shakespeare's English writings, it can be quite literally impossible to know the meaning of certain words in ancient biblical MSS - In the New English Bible (NEB), a modem translation produced by an all-star panel of Oxford-Cambridge scholars, it is not at all rare to find pages with footnotes saying "Probable reading" or "Hebrew unintelligible," or with passages wildly different from those of the King James. In the King James translation of Job 39:13-14, for example, we read:

Gavest thou the goodly wings unto the peacocks? Or wings and feathers unto the ostrich? Which leaveth her eggs in the earth and warmeth them in dust...
In the New English Bible we read:

The wings of the ostrich are stunted;* her pinions and plumage are so scanty** that she abandons her eggs to the ground, letting them be kept warm by the sand.
The two associated footnotes read:

* are stunted: probable reading; Hebrew unintelligible. **Probable reading; Hebrew [means] godly or stork.
Although neither Oxford nor Cambridge was up to the problem of Job 39:13-14, the New International Version (NIV), a fundamentalist production, somehow decided to render our verse:

The wings of the ostrich flap joyfully, but they cannot compare with the pinions and feathers of the stork....
While the lack of footnotes might lead us to suppose that the fundamentalists are never in doubt as to what "the word of god" means, in the introduction to the New International Version we find the. admission,

As in other ancient documents, the precise meaning of the biblical texts is sometimes uncertain. This is more often the case with the Hebrew and Aramaic texts than with the Greek text. Although archaeological and linguistic discoveries in this century aid in understanding difficult passages, some uncertainties remain.... [Oxford New International Version Scofield Study Bible, E. Schuyler English, Chairman, Editorial Revision Committee, Oxford University Press, 1984, p. xix]
How can this be? Part of the problem derives from the fact that Hebrew and Aramaic arc written with a defective alphabet, i.e., an alphabet in which most vowels are not written. It was only very late in the history of Hebrew Bible-making (late fifth to ninth centuries) that vowel points (the so-called "jots and tittles") came to be added to the consonantal texts. Unfortunately, there is no way to know that the correct vowels were supplied. As a matter of fact, during the ninth and tenth centuries, there was a long-lived feud between two families of Jewish scholars, the ben Ashers and the ben Naphtalis, over the vocalization of the scriptures. Unfortunately, the ben Ashers beat out the ben Naphtalis so completely that almost all history of them has been expunged, and we are left with a false sense of security concerning the apparent uniformity of vowel points in the Hebrew text today.

It is easy to see what a mess we would have in English if we did not indicate vowels in writing. If we came across the two-letter word by, for example, how would we know if the word intended was "by," "bay," "boy," "buoy," "buy," or "obey"? Of course the context — if there were one — would help in figuring out vocalizations and meanings. But what if in the case of by, the real word intended were a rare word such as "bey"?

The difficulties caused by the lack of vowel letters in Hebrew are compounded by the unbelievable number of hapax legomena, words that occur only once in the entire Bible. A quick sampling of the Hebrew and Aramaic vocabulary of the Old Testament reveals that there are more than 1,500 words (approximately twenty percent of the entire Old Testament vocabulary!) used only once. These include the word dibyonim, rendered as "dove's dung" in the King James, but that Young's Analytical Concordance to the Bible assures us means "roasted chick pea" — even though the New English Bible translates it as "locust-beans," and the New International Version renders it "seed pods"!

Imagine the perplexity of a Bible scholar — to say nothing of a true believer — coming across a sentence such as "Unless thou puttest the shnurq upon the altar before thou givest up the shew-bread, thou shalt surely die." Assuming that the word shnurq appears in no other context, we can conclude only that a shnurq is probably something smaller than a hippopotamus. The frightful uncertainty resulting from not knowing what to put on the altar could force a true believer to give up giving up shew-bread altogether!

Why Bother?

Although we have only been able to discuss a few of the problems faced by persons wanting to believe in the Bible, it should be obvious that the problems are insurmountable. When the ballots were cast at the great ecclesiastical councils which settled the canon, what assurance do we have that Jahweh wasn't off somewhere counting fallen sparrows instead of counting ballots before they were cast — and seeing to it that the right bishops got the poison? What assurance do we have that the forger who slipped the Trinity into Erasmus' third edition did his forging under the inspiration of a triune contradiction in arithmetic? What assurance do we have that the people who write the dictionaries of biblical Greek and Hebrew know what definitions to put into them? How will we know if we are reading about chick-peas or dove's dung?

It is clearly futile to try to find the Bible in which to believe, and from which to obtain "truth." So why bother to try? The quest for absolute truth is childish, a holdover from a prescientific period of cultural evolution. Although the "truths" of science are not absolute, they do nicely in a pinch. And as for salvation, the track record of penicillin isn't too bad — even if it can cause hives!

HAS SF GONE BLIND - WHERE IS FLASH GORDON WHEN YOU REALLY NEED THE ASSHOLE

Is Science Fiction About to Go Blind?
Awed at the pace of technological advances, a faction of geeky writers believes our world is about to change so radically that envisioning what comes next is nearly impossible.




Fredrik Brodén










The starship Field Circus is racing through space on a seven-year journey to a brown dwarf three light-years from Earth and, if all goes well, a business meeting with an alien civilization from another universe. It’s around the year 2030, and there’s time to kill, so three crew members, Boris, Pierre and Su Ang, are sitting in the bar, a wood-paneled room modeled after a 300-year-old pub in Amsterdam. There’s a 16-page beer menu, but Boris has opted for a cocktail made of baby jellyfish. Pierre is angling for a sip when Donna the Journalist appears. She isn’t exactly welcome, but she sits down anyway, orders a bottle of German beer from the waiter, and asks the three if they believe in the Singularity. Ah yes, the Singularity. A very real term, although the scene above is taken from a soon-to-be-published novel, Accelerando, by British writer Charles Stross. The idea was conceived by Vernor Vinge, a computer scientist and science-fiction writer who’s now a professor emeritus at San Diego State University. We’re living through a period of unprecedented technological and scientific advances, Vinge says, and sometime soon the convergence of fields such as artificial intelligence and biotechnology will push humanity past a tipping point, ushering in a period of wrenching change. After that moment—the Singularity—the world will be as different from today’s world as this one is from the Stone Age.

Back on board the Field Circus, Donna the Journalist asks the crew members when they think the Singularity took place. “Four years ago,” Pierre suggests. Su Ang votes for 2016. But Boris, the jellyfish drinker, says the entire notion of a Singularity is silly. To him, there’s no such thing. Wait a minute, Su Ang responds. Here we are, traveling in a spaceship the size of a soda can. We’ve left our bodies behind to conserve space and energy so that the laser-sail-powered Field Circus can cruise faster. Our brains have been uploaded and are now running electronically within the tiny spaceship’s nanocomputers. The pub is “here,” along with other virtual environments, so that we don’t go into shock from sensory deprivation. “And you can tell me that the idea of a fundamental change in the human condition is nonsense?”

Accelerando is the story of three generations of a dysfunctional family living through the Singularity. What makes the novel unusual is not the size of the ship or the strange cocktails or even the sexual metaphors—a coital act culminates with the transfer of “source code”—but the fact that Stross is attempting to imagine the relatively near-term future. This is a strangely courageous act, because modern science fiction is facing a crisis of confidence. The recent crop of stories mostly take the form of fantasy (elves and wizards), alternate history (what if the Black Death had been deadlier?) and space operas about interstellar civilizations in the year 12,000 (which typically gloss over how those civilizations evolved from ours). Only a small cadre of technoprophets is attempting to extrapolate current trends and imagine what our world might look like in the next few decades. “We’re staring into a fogbank,” Stross says, “and we literally do not know where we’re going, only that we’re going there very fast.”


The science-fiction legends—Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein—still loom imperiously. Clarke pulled humanity’s technological reach to the heavens, with visions of communications satellites, space elevators and rotating space stations. Asimov changed our perspective here on Earth, filling our homes with robots that dust, cook—and sometimes turn against their owners [see “Could Robots Take Over the World?”]. And with his rollicking space adventures, Heinlein pushed us into distant galaxies and far-future civilizations. The golden age of science fiction (SF, to those in the know), which spanned the 1940s and ’50s, inspired generations of kids to become astronauts, physicists and engineers, to try to make at least some of the stories real. (And those kids remember their imaginative roots: NASA, for example, sometimes calls in SF writers as consultants.)

Wandering through the exhibition room at a science-fiction convention in Boston a few months ago, I saw plenty of reprints of golden-age SF classics for sale. But I also encountered paintings of half-naked people battling dragons, vendors hawking crystals and a folk musician warming up for a recital. Where is the science in science fiction? I wondered. Whatever happened to envisioning the future? Anthropologist Judith Berman, who recently surveyed a crop of science fiction published in 1999, has a grim answer: Many modern stories are nostalgic, wary of new technologies rather than enthusiastic about them.

Yet there’s plenty to get excited about: Vinge’s vision of the Singularity springs from his own field, computer science, but change is afoot throughout science and technology. Cosmology is undergoing fundamental revisions, genetics is giving researchers the tools to rejigger the building blocks of life, and nanotechnology has begun creeping from fantasy into reality. “Several lines of progress [are] converging,” says physicist Stanley Schmidt, editor of Analog magazine. “You can’t lock in on one field in isolation because you’ll miss how other fields affect it.”


Jonathan Worth

The bill is called the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 (H.R. 1955/S. 1959). The language in this bill is so maddeningly vague it could mean anything. It could therefore be tailored to attack any group opposing national and international policies that have the backing of the corporatist-governmental power system.
If anyone at the federal level except perhaps Ron Paul had read the bill, they would realize that by its very nature it is unconstitutional. Nothing in the Constitution authorizes our federal government to model policies on those of governments elsewhere in the world--or to conduct the kind of domestic infiltrations and surveillance this bill would require.
Sec. 899F is almost comical. Are you ready? Here it comes: "The Department of Homeland Security's efforts to prevent ideologically based violence and homegrown terrorism as described herein shall not violate the constitutional rights, civil rights, or civil liberties of United States citizens or lawful permanent residents."
George Orwell couldn't have said it better!
Here is the million dollar question: what prompted this bill? The only event in recent years that can be labeled `homegrown terrorism'--given the federal government's pronouncements as our only criterion--was the destruction of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The federal government executed Timothy McVeigh for that on July 14, 2001. Even in that case there are unanswered questions. But while Internet-based claims persist that McVeigh had accomplices other than Terry Nichols, none are officially recognized. Other attacks on U.S. soil (World Trade Center 1993 and, of course, the 9/11 attacks) are blamed on foreigners.
So again: what prompted this bill?

So I guess that I am a home grown radical and a terrorist.
So, Screw you George Bush and Dickhead Cheney. I just hope to god that I live long enough to see the both of you in prison. Dec 3, 6:52am
The nineteen men of 9/11, having washed, perfumed themselves and shaved their whole bodies in preparation for the martyr's paradise, believed they were performing the highest religious duty. By the lights of their religion they were as good as it is possible to be. They were not poor, downtrodden, oppressed or psychotic; they were well educated, sane and well balanced, and, as they thought, supremely good. But they were religious, and that provided all the justification they needed to murder and destroy. Their madrassas and their mullahs had given them good reason to think they were on a fast track to paradise.

Polls suggest that 13% of British Muslims regard the 7/7 London bombers as blessed martyrs. Neighbors and friends expressed bewilderment that such nice, gentle, kind, youth-clubbing, cricket-loving young men could do such terrible things. But once you understand what they truly and sincerely believed - that it was Allah's will that they blow up buses and subways - it becomes all too easy to understand.

It is easy for religious faith, even if it is irrational in itself, to lead a sane and decent person, by rational, logical steps, to do terrible things. There is a logical path from religious faith to evil deeds. There is no logical path from atheism to evil deeds. Of course, many evil deeds are done by individuals who happen to be atheists. But it can never be rational to say that, because of my nonbelief in religion, it would be good to be cruel, to murder, to oppress women, or to perpetrate any of the evils on the Hitchens list.

The following quotation from the Nobel prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg has become well known, but it is so devastatingly true that it is worth quoting again and again: "With or without [religion] you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion."
newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/richard_dawkins/2007/10/for_good_people... [washingtonpost.com] StumbleUpon &187; wezersfairys web site reviews and blog
Dec 3, 6:15am 32 reviews stumblers • http://wezersfairy.stumbleupon.com/
His review of me...
"Another pinko from the "moveon.org"crowd. And teenagers are accused of being dis-respectful... This libby wrote the book."

Disrespectful? I read your pages kid. My advice to you pal is to go and read the Public and Private Papers by Thomas Jefferson. it is a sad reflection on the current state of education in this country when a seventeen year old doesn't have a clue about the principles that this country was founded on. Just more flotsam and jetsam from the right. Dec 3, 4:20am
This is for the anonymous patriotic vet who emailed me claiming that this story was not true. It's true pal.

Suicide Epidemic Among Veterans
A CBS News Investigation Uncovers A Suicide Rate For Veterans Twice That Of Other Americans
cbsnews.com/stories/2007/11/13/cbsnews_investigates/main3496471.shtml [cbsnews.com] http://www.warprofiteers.com/img/original/11-21-Homeland-Insecutiry.jpg
Dec 1, 8:45am 0 review homeland-security • http://www.warprofiteers.com/img/orig...

Nov 30, 6:12pm
George Bush is the perfect employee. I'm a manager. I have hired, trained, supervised, promoted, disciplined, counseled, suspended and terminated more people in the last thirty five years than I care to remember. I know people. I can read you like a book within five minutes of talking to you. And this is what I don't get. When I see Bush on TV, something just ain't right. There is something too stiff, to rehearsed, to coordinated. This man is too obscure in his intentions, too deliberate, too far beyond the pale in his drive and intent. Bush is no intellectual; he is neither scholarly nor erudite. He is the only president who has not published a book, a study, or academic paper, neither is he cultured in the finer points of history, philosophy, or sociology. He was a lower level academic in college and by his Commanders own admission, a mediocre pilot. He has revealed to us a disdain for science and critical thinking and prefers consorting with mystics and priests. He surrounds himself with people of less than dubious character as trusted allies (How many resigned under duress, are now under indictment, in prison, under investigation, or pardoned?) and has on numerous occasions displayed a duplicity in his loyalties that speaks clearly of his character. He is the purest representation of right wing demagoguery, the Republican Party, and the slow implosion of the neo-con vision. He is the perfect stooge for the cabal. He is, ironically, the perfect man for the job at hand, so far as the ones who are pulling the strings are concerned. He is, in a phrase, without qualification, and that makes him perfect for them. He is incurious, unable to think too far through, and has lived his life in an insulated bubble of convenience and comfort. What concern would he have for the common man? If he worked for me, I could make him do any god damned thing that I wanted. And that is what makes him the perfect employee. Nov 30, 7:31am
HAHAHAHAHA! I just can't stop laughing about this one.

Apparently god is one savvy attorney as well as an omniscient and all knowing creator. Given sufficient time to review the case against Roberts, god apparently decided Roberts lacked a plausible defense and forced him to resign.

I just love watching "fundies" use god to explain and justify their every action...whether it be good or bad. For those who haven't heard,Richard Roberts, the son of Oral Roberts, now reports that he resigned his position as President of Oral Roberts University because god told him he must (on Thanksgiving Day no less).

Apparently god wasn't speaking loud enough or Roberts was ignoring him while he and his family were milking the University to enable their lavish life of excess...or perhaps god was simply too busy at the time to tell him to stop. And by all means we can't have expected Roberts to do the right thing of his own accord. How would a man of god know the difference between right and wrong without proper consultation from the heavenly father? It just goes to show that heaven is understaffed and it's leading to all sorts of improprieties and numerous lost souls here on earth.

Richard Roberts told students at Oral Roberts University Wednesday that he did not want to resign as president of the scandal-plagued evangelical school, but he did so because God insisted.

Roberts told students in the university's chapel that God told him on Thanksgiving that he should resign the next day.

Roberts said he resisted the idea, and that "every ounce of my flesh said 'no,'" but he prayed over the decision with his wife, Lindsay Roberts, and his father, Oral Roberts, and decided to step down.

Roberts has previously said that God told him to deny the allegations. The week the lawsuit was filed, Richard Roberts said that God told: "We live in a litigious society. Anyone can get mad and file a lawsuit against another person whether they have a legitimate case or not. This lawsuit ... is about intimidation, blackmail and extortion."

My oh my. What a load of horse shit. Yeah, well god told me to go get a cup of coffee. Best photoshop of Bush Ive seen in a LONG time!
Nov 30, 6:09am 9 reviews politics • http://www.democraticunderground.com/...
George (Little Adolph) Bush
Nov 29, 6:49am
This one is for all of the Christians that may stumble this site.

Does god hate asexuals? (a general term or self-designation for people who do not exhibit sexual attraction, or who otherwise find sexual behavior unappealing)

I'm serious. Please let me know because if he does then I'll know that he is a fraud. If he doesnt then I'll know that he is a hypocrite. Nov 26, 1:28pm
George W. Bush is the imperial president that James Madison and other founders of this great republic warned us about. He lied the nation into precisely the "foreign entanglements" that George Washington feared would destroy our experiment in representative government, and he has championed a spurious notion of security over individual liberty, thus eschewing the alarms of Thomas Jefferson as to the deprivation of the inalienable rights of free citizens. But most important, he has used the sledgehammer of war to obliterate the separation of powers that James Madison enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.

With the "war on terror," Bush has asserted the right of the president to wage war anywhere and for any length of time, at his whim, because the "terrorists" will always provide a convenient shadowy target. That's just the "continual warfare" that Madison warned of in justifying the primary role of Congress in initiating and continuing to finance a war -- the very issue now at stake in Bush's battle with Congress.

But truly, in the long term, it's not ultimately Bush's fault. It's not any industrial-military complex. The fault entirely lays on the shoulders of every US citizen, myself included. The people have been warned of the necessity of being ever-vigilant, but election turnout suggests that they either weren't told or didn't care. The people have grown tolerant to the concept of an elected representative engaged in willful lying to his constituency. We may complain, but we never truly do anything about it, so our elected representatives continue to engage in shady business or act in ways which offend the sensibilities and moralities of the people.

Everyone is so blinded by the Democrat/Republican labels that they can't see that the labels increasingly refer to different piles of the same shit. In how many elections does the difference between dem or repub reflect the ideals of the politician versus it reflecting the party he believes gives the best chance of victory?

We absolutely must get to the point where we can actually trust the people we elect to lead and represent us. If we continue to allow our politicians to get away with anything, then that is precisely what they will do, and we're already seeing the effects of that.
lrs.moonstar.com/blog/2007/08/21/the-founders-warned-us-about-guys-like-gw-... [moonstar.com]

DATALORE - FROM WIL WHEATON - TWISTING HIS MELON

Datalore

My Datalore review is at TV Squad:

After a bit of exploring, they find themselves in the lab of Data's creator, Dr. Noonian Soong. Riker, Geordi, and Tasha all join forces to be sort of an Exposition Voltron, informing the audience that Noonian Soong was the Earth's foremost neuroscientist, until he tried to build Asimov's positronic brain and failed. Everyone thought he did the walk of shame off the planet, but it turns out he just moved to Omicron Theta to continue his work until he got it right. (Coincidentally, on Omicron Gamma, there's a group of former Microsoft employees still working on an MP3 player).

As I mentioned on Friday, this episode was a massive disappointment to me, because I had such fond memories of it as a child. I said, "I liked this episode a lot when it first aired, but watching it now, all I can see are gigantic plot holes and inconsistencies that never should have made it past the first draft." Well, I re-read the original script over the weekend, and it doesn't suck nearly as much as the final episode does, and I honestly can't figure out how they screwed it up so badly.

Well, actually, I have an idea: we shot several episodes in the first two years where the producers and writers were rewriting the script while we filmed it, and on some of those episodes we'd get new pages in the morning for a scene we were filming that afternoon, and then we'd get pages to replace those pages right after lunch. It's incredibly hard to keep any sense of continuity when we don't know what's going to happen before and after the scene we're working on, and it's equally difficult to turn in nuanced and well-prepared performances when we've only had a few hours with the material (that we haven't had much time to look at because we're shooting other scenes.) Despite this, I think the performances in Datalore are fine. In fact, Picard and Data's scene in Picard's ready room, where Data asks Picard to stop calling Lore "it" is a fantastic one, and shows depth from both actors that we hadn't really seen, yet. So the problem with Datalore isn't the acting. I'm biased, of course, but I believe now (and remember) that everyone did the very best they could with what they were given.

Maybe someone who was working on the show in a production capacity at the time -- Diane Duane, I'm looking in your direction -- can confirm or deny this, but it seems like there was fighting among the producers, and this episode got caught in the power struggle. I said this in fewer words in my bottom line:

The pitch was awesome: "We find Data's evil twin brother, who he never knew he had." Sure, there's nothing original about the evil twin story, but that doesn't mean that it can't be told again in an interesting way, especially with a cool character like Data, played by a great character actor like Brent Spiner supported by a brilliant dramatic actor like Patrick Stewart. How could they screw up this story this badly?

I think it comes down to lazy writing that has things happen because they're supposed to happen, rather than having them happen organically. The characters are credulous when they should be skeptical, the audience isn't surprised by anything after the second act, and there are story problems that should have never gotten past the first draft.

When you're getting lots of conflicting orders from different producers, and the big, ultimate boss (in this case, Gene) wants one particular thing to happen, I think you must end up writing like that, having things happen because they're supposed to happen, which is why this episode has so many holes in it.

I have a deadline chasing me like a pissed off Big Daddy in Rapture, but I'd love to hear your memories of this episode, or any comments you have on this review. I'll be checking in at TV Squad throughout the day, or until readers get bored and stop commenting.

Propel it!

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December 03, 2007 at 11:25 AM in Television | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Come sit with me at the Child's Play charity dinner!
I'm going up to Seattle in a couple weeks for the Child's Play dinner and auction, so I asked my friends at Penny Arcade if I could do something to contribute, other than my ticket and whatever I decide to buy in the auction.

"How about two seats at your table?"

Normally, this sort of thing never ends well for me, but that's because it often comes at the end of a long day at a Star Trek convention, and rather than hanging out with people, I really need to be recharging all by myself.

But this is different. I liked everyone I met at PAX, and had so much fun there, I thought that this was actually a great idea.

So if you are going to the Child's Play dinner, want to support the charity, and want to see what it's like to sit with me, Robert Khoo, and some awesome Penny Arcade people while we shove food in our faces, check out the auction and place your bid.

But do it soon, because the auction ends tomorrow night.

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December 01, 2007 at 03:36 PM in WWdN in Exile | Permalink | Comments (26) | TrackBack (0)
Mythology for kids
I read a post at GeekDad this morning about Beowulf and introducing mythology to kids. It reminded me of an an awesome book that I used to introduce Ryan and Nolan to mythology when they were in 3rd and 1st grade called Classic Myths to Read Aloud.

The book collects "Great stories of Greek and Roman mythology, specially arranged for children five and up by an educational expert" and divides them into two "listening levels" based on age (5 and older for Level 1, 8 and older for Level 2) which is quite handy for parents who are worried about holding their child's interest. The myths are all retold in a way that stays true to the story while making them appropriate for children -- there's no Disney-fying the myth of Hercules here, but Zeus isn't gong around nailing every nymph he sees, either.

The stories themselves are wonderful, but my favorite part of the book is a section called "a few words more" that goes with each myth. It gives the adult who's reading them something related to each myth to paraphrase for their child. I loved it, because I could make the myth I'd just read to my boys relevant to their lives (with the added bonus of appearing to possess vast and mysterious knowledge about everything from the origin of the word "capital" to why a marathon is 26.2 miles.)

The book made it easy to share some of my favorite myths with my kids while they discovered favorites of their own along the way. Ryan still talks about when I read him the stories of Theseus, and Nolan loved anything related to the Trojan war. In fact, at the end of the book, there are six stories in a row that tell the story of the Trojan War including the Judgement of Paris, the Trojan Horse, and Odysseus' journey back to Ithaca. I loved that they were serialized that way, because I could make it into a week-long event with my kids. I introduced them to the concept of a truly epic story, and they didn't even realize it!

This book, and its sequel, helpfully titled More Classic Myths to Read Aloud (which I couldn't find online, but have on my bookshelf, nyahh) make perfect bedtime stories for kids of all ages, and if you're lucky, will lead to your 13 year-old asking you if he can buy Edith Hamilton's Mythology, because "mythology is awesome."

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December 01, 2007 at 12:27 PM in Books | Permalink | Comments (20)
i am from space and the future
I'm putting the finishing touches on my long-overdue Datalore story for TV Squad. It's taken so long, because it just wasn't coming together the way I wanted it to, and I couldn't figure out why until this morning. I'd written some really funny raps for Picard, but they just didn't fit in with the rest of the story. It's funny, but it wasn't serving the larger piece, so it had to go.

Talk about killing your precious babies! This is part of what I sent upstate to live on a farm with other words:

I'm Jean-Luc Picard, I'm chillin' in my yard
Underneath my chrome dome in the ship I call my home
Kickin' it with Data, my homeboy, my brotha
I wanna get freaky with Wesley Crusher's motha!

It's hilarious to me, but that's probably because I can hear the music in my head (and other voices that want me to do bad things, but I won't! I'll show them! I'll show them all! HAHAHAHAHAAAAaa!!11)

Cutting out all the rapping let me write stuff that's far more amusing to me, like:

Riker looks around the bridge, sees all the commissioned officers he has available to him, does a quick scan of the ship's manifest to see who's on duty . . . and decides to send Wesley Freakin' Crusher to "discreetly" sneak a peek at Data. Worf says, "Uh, excuse me, Commander, but since I'm kind of in the security department and all, and I'm a big old Klingon, shouldn't maybe I go check this out?"

Riker replies, "I'm not going to lie to you, Worf: we all know that if there's anything funky going on down there, you're just going to get your ass kicked. So I'm sending the Boy Wonder and his giant brain instead."

Wesley jumps up from his console and shouts, "Wheee! I'm in Starfleet!" as he runs like a pixie to the turbolift.

Worf growls, but inside he's secretly grateful that he's staying safely on the bridge.

Lore, disguised as Data, is contacting the crystalline entity when Wesley shows up, and discreetly checks up on him thusly:

Wesley: Hi Data! Look at how totally in Starfleet I am!
Lore: Hello, Wesley! I am not Lore, I am Data! Look at Lore who is on the floor while I, Data, am standing here doing nothing suspicious!
Wesley: Wow, that sure does look like Lore! Neat! I'd better not call security or anything since nothing suspicious is going on here. Oh, before I leave, here are all the reasons I, and everyone else on the ship would suspect that you were actually Lore, disguised as Data, contacting the crystalline entity so it could come and eat our brains.
Lore: Hey, it's not unreasonable, I mean, it's not going to eat your eyes.
Wesley: Hey, did you know that I'm in Starfleet? I talk to the captain! I think I'll go talk to him now! Wheeee!
Lore: Thanks for dropping in and observing that there's nothing suspicious going on here. Run along now, you little scamp!
Wesley: Wheeee!

I also realized that my memory of Datalore is as divorced from reality as George W. Bush. I liked this episode a lot when it first aired, but watching it now, all I can see are gigantic plot holes and inconsistencies that never should have made it past the first draft. Gene is credited as the writer on this one, but it was done at a time when his health was rapidly failing, and I see Maurice Hurley's hacky fingerprints all over it.

I'm turning it in to my editor at TV Squad later today, and I'll link it when he pushes it live.


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November 30, 2007 at 12:47 PM in Television | Permalink | Comments (22) | TrackBack (1)
made of 100% win
One of Jonathan Coulton's fans sent him a French translation of RE: Your Brains. JoCo (which I suppose I need to call him now, since that's what his fans call him, and I'm quite obviously a fan) recorded the French version, and released it yesterday:

While recording I couldn’t help but notice an opportunity in the third verse for a reference to “Alouette,” that famous old French song about plucking feathers off a bird. My first ever joke in French! Vive me!

The result is this new version of Re: Your Brains for French speaking zombies everywhere (yes, even Canada). I hope zat you like eet.

Re: Vos Cerveaux

Freaking. Awesome. Please to be Propelling eet?

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November 30, 2007 at 09:11 AM in Music | Permalink | Comments (13) | TrackBack (0)
nearly all hardbacks have shipped
It's a strange day here in Los Angeles. It's cloudy and gray, and if you looked out a window you'd think there was a chill in the air.

But it's 78 degrees in my back yard right now, and tonight? It's forecast to get as low as 46, just in case anyone was delusional enough to think that Los Angeles is not in the middle of a desert.

Anyway, if you're in the 300, I thought you'd like to know that all the domestic hardbacks -- except a couple of eChecks that found their way into the wrong box and will ship tomorrow -- have just been dropped off at the post office.

International orders will start shipping ASAP. I'd hoped to have everything done by today, but with my writing deadline being moved up from mid-January to Tuesday, I sort of need to put as much of my time and energy as I can into finishing the story. Please accept my deepest apologies on the delays. I wish there was a simpler way to get the goddamn customs and postage done, but unless I'm willing to charge international customers an outrageous amount of shipping, this is the best I can do.


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November 28, 2007 at 03:22 PM in Books | Permalink | Comments (21) | TrackBack (0)
Can media conglomerates afford to pay the writers?
As someone who hopes to be in the WGA one day, and as a current SAG member (and former member of the Board of Directors) I am in complete and total solidarity with the Writer's Guild. It's quite heartening to me, also, to see that so many people refuse to be fooled by the lies that the six companies who control all of the media have been trying to spread.

The AMPTP has been successful (and helped by the news media they own) in spreading FUD about the things the writers are asking for. This post at United Hollywood puts some important numbers into perspective:

"But can the corporations really afford to pay you what you're asking for?"

Let's set aside for the moment the issue of what the congloms say in their press releases to us (which is basically "There's no money! Ever! And if there was, we spent it all on other projects that lost money so it's gone! Forever! We're broke! We're having to rent our yachts!") and focus on some hard numbers thoughtfully provided by Jonathan Handel on the Huffington Post yesterday.

He writes an excellent (I think) and even-handed analysis that takes into account the effect pattern bargaining will have in calculating real numbers of what we're asking for, and what it will cost the companies, individually, to pay us.

It comes, by his calculation, to $125 million per conglomerate per year -- if we got every single thing we're asking for.

That, by the way, is less than the $140 million Disney spent to fire Michael Ovitz for 15 months of work.

Also, Carson Daly is still an epic douche.

Also, also:


And finally, a meager contribution from the actor half of me:



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November 28, 2007 at 01:20 PM in Current Affairs, Film, Television | Permalink | Comments (32) | TrackBack (0)
MWM seeks SF Anthology for Casual Reading
I love SF novels, and count stories like The Forever War and The Ghost Brigades among my all-time favorites, but in the last year, I've grown very fond of the SF short story. Since an SF short story is what I hope to scrape out of my brains as my next writing project, I've been reading as many short stories as I can get my hands on, in places like Subterranean online, the Subterranean magazine, and in various anthologies.

I recently finished a great anthology called the Nebula Awards Showcase 2007, edited by Mike Resnick. In addition to some great SF from established writers, it included some fantasy (Kelly Link's Magic for Beginners was wonderful), some poetry, and a novellette from Harlan Ellison that, while not SF or Fantasy, was probably my favorite tale in the book.

Now that I'm done with it, I'm looking for a new SF anthology. I've spent some time in the bookstore and on the googles trying to pick out a new one, but it's tricky. Most anthologies are, by their nature, uneven, and some are downright garbage. I haven't red enough to know if there's one editor who I can rely upon more than another, of if there's one publisher who puts out books with pretty covers and not much else.

While I wait for my sample issues of F&SF to arrive, I'm looking for a new anthology that's not huge (some are over 800 pages, which is just too big for me to schlep around town) that focuses on speculative fiction.

Any suggestions?

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November 28, 2007 at 10:41 AM in Books | Permalink | Comments (71) | TrackBack (0)
oh my fucking god pictures from the set of watchmen
Apparently, I'm the last Watchmen geek on the planet to hear that Zack Snyder is keeping a rarely-updated blog during the film's production.

I discovered the blog on a good day, though, because today he posted some pictures from the set that gave me a serious geekgasm.

I have a lot of hope for this film, though I seriously doubt it's possible to make it into anything less than 12 hours long and truly do the book justice, because Zack Snyder managed to turn 300 into something not only watchable, but something that was a faithful adaptation of the graphic novel. When I saw these pictures this morning -- especially the ones that are almost 1:1 recreations of panels in the book -- I upgraded my condition from guarded to cautiously optimistic.

However, I am putting the studio on notice: if you pull any studiofuckery with Watchmen, you will see a rampaging horde of geek rage that will make The Phantom Menace look like a Fred Thompson campaign rally.

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November 27, 2007 at 03:00 PM in Film | Permalink | Comments (23) | TrackBack (0)
Tech Universe reviews Happiest Days
I promise this isn't going to turn into "The Happiest Days Reviews: in Exile." It's just that I needed to come up for air for a minute, and saw this review of Happiest Days at Tech Universe:

Reading the well-written Happiest Days was a fun experience, and you can't help but feel like Wheaton is telling you these stories himself . . .and these really are some happy and fun stories, including one about his love of Star Wars action figures, or his family run for the Susan G. Komen foundation, or his great poker game . . . or even his return to the stages that once housed Star Trek: The Next Generation, where he played Wesley Crusher.

I have to hand it to Wil, he brought back my own memories. I think he's around three years older than I am, and I fell in love with Star Wars figures at the same time; I was stuck wearing corduroys in the late 70s/early 80s (thank God they went out of style by the time my family moved to South Florida in 1984), and more.

Two themes are emerging in reviews and reader comments and e-mails: it feels like we're sitting together (possibly in a nice pub, having a few pints) while I tell you these stories myself, and the stories I tell are awakening shared memories from readers who, like me, are in Generation X.

Last night, I packaged the remaining hardcover book orders. I'll take all the domestic orders to the post office a little later today, and Anne and I will get started on the customs forms for the international orders just as soon as I get this writing assignment finished so I make my deadline a week from now. It's a cool fiction project that I should be able to talk about relatively soon, but at the moment I'm in a serious panic over it. Once again, I wish I could stop time, or at least slow it down.

(Speaking of stopping time, is anyone else totally over Heroes this season? I haven't been this disappointed by a series since the third season of Lost.)

THE WAR ON DRUGS - AFTER PABLO

How America Lost the War on Drugs
After Thirty-Five Years and $500 Billion, Drugs Are as Cheap and Plentiful as Ever: An Anatomy of a Failure.
Ben Wallace

Page 1 2 3 4 5 6

1. AFTER PABLO
On the day of his death, December 2nd, 1993, the Colombian billionaire drug kingpin Pablo Escobar was on the run and living in a small, tiled-roof house in a middle-class neighborhood of Medellín, close to the soccer stadium. He died, theatrically, ­ridiculously, gunned down by a Colombian police manhunt squad while he tried to flee across the barrio's rooftops, a fat, bearded man who had kicked off his flip-flops to try to outrun the bullets. The first thing the American drug agents who arrived on the scene wanted to do was to make sure that the corpse was actually Escobar's. The second thing was to check his house.

The last time Escobar had hastily fled one of his residences - la Catedral, the luxurious private prison he built for himself to avoid extradition to the United States - he had left behind bizarre, enchanting ­detritus, the raw stuff of what would ­become his own myth: the photos of ­himself dressed up as a Capone-era gangster with a Tommy gun, the odd collection of novels ranging from Graham Greene to the Austrian modernist Stefan Zweig. Agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration, arriving after the kingpin had fled, found neat shelves lined with loose-leaf binders, carefully organized by content. They were, says John Coleman, then the DEA's assistant administrator for operations, "filled with DEA reports" - internal documents that laid out, in extraordinary detail, the agency's repeated attempts to capture Escobar.

"He had shelves and shelves and shelves of these things," Coleman tells me. "It was stunning. A lot of the informants we had, he'd figured out who they were. All the agents we had chasing him - who we trusted in the Colombian police - it was right there. He knew so much more about what we were doing than we knew about what he was doing."

Coleman and other agents began to work deductively, backward. "We had always wondered why his guys, when we caught them, would always go to trial and risk lots of jail time, even when they would have saved themselves a lot of time if they'd just plead guilty," he says. "What we realized when we saw those binders was that they were doing a job. Their job was to stay on trial and have their lawyers use discovery to get all the information on DEA operations they could. Then they'd send copies back to Medellín, and Escobar would put it all together and figure out who we had tracking him."

The loose-leaf binders crammed in Escobar's office on the ground floor gave Coleman and his agents a sense of triumph: The whole mysterious drug trade had an organization, a structure and a brain, and they'd just removed it. In the thrill of the moment, clinking champagne glasses with officials from the Colombian police and taking congratulatory calls from Washington, the agents in Medellín believed the War on Drugs could finally be won. "We had an endgame," Coleman says. "We were literally making the greatest plans."

At the headquarters of the Office of National Drug Control Policy in Washington, staffers tacked up a poster with photographs of sixteen of its most wanted men, cartel leaders from across the Andes. Solemnly, ceremoniously, a staffer took a red magic marker and drew an X over Escobar's portrait. "We felt like it was one down, fifteen to go," recalls John Carnevale, the longtime budget director of the drug-control ­office. "There was this feeling that if we got all sixteen, it's not like the whole thing would be over, but that was a big part of how we would go about winning the War on Drugs."

Man by man, sixteen red X's eventually went up over the faces of the cartel leaders: KILLED. EXTRADITED. KILLED. José Santacruz Londoño, a leading drug trafficker, was gunned down by Colombian police in a shootout. The Rodríguez Orejuela brothers, the heads of the Cali cartel, were extradited after they got greedy and tried to keep running their organization from prison. Some U.S. drug warriors believed that the busts were largely public-relations events, a showy way for the Colombian government to look tough on the drug trade, but most were less cynical. The crack epidemic was over. Drug-related murders were in decline. Winning the War on Drugs didn't seem such a quixotic and open-ended mission, like the War on Poverty, but rather something tangible, a fat guy with a big organization and binders full of internal DEA reports, sixteen faces on a poster, a piñata you could reach out and smack. Richard Cañas, a veteran DEA official who headed counternarcotics efforts on the National Security Council under both George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, can still recall the euphoria of those days. "We were moving," he says, "from success to success."

This is the story of how that momentary success turned into one of the most sustained and costly defeats the United States has ever suffered. It is the story of how the most powerful country on Earth, sensing a piñata, swung to hit it and missed.

2. THE MAKING OF A TRAGEDY

For Cañas and other drug warriors, the death of Escobar had the feel of a real pivot, the end of one kind of battle against drugs and the beginning of another. The war itself had begun during the Nixon administration, when the White House began to get reports that a generation of soldiers was about to come back from Vietnam stoned, with habits weaned on the cheap marijuana and heroin of Southeast Asia and hothoused in the twitchy-fingered freakout of a jungle guerrilla war. For those in Washington, the problem of drugs was still so strange and new in the early Seventies that Nixon officials grappled with ideas that, by the standards of the later debate among politicians, were unthinkably radical: They appointed a panel that recommended the decriminalization of casual marijuana use and even considered buying up the world's entire supply of opium to prevent it from being converted into heroin. But Nixon was a law-and-order politician, an operator who understood very well the panic many Americans felt about the cities, the hippies and crime. Calling narcotics "public enemy number one in the United States," he used the issue to escalate the culture war that pitted Middle Americans against the radicals and the hippies, strengthening penalties for drug dealers and devoting federal funds to bolster prosecutions. In 1973, Nixon gave the job of policing these get-tough laws to the newly formed Drug Enforcement Administration.

By the mid-1980s, as crack leeched out from New York, Miami and Los Angeles into the American interior, the devastations inflicted by the drug were becoming more vivid and frightening. The Reagan White House seemed to capture the current of the moment: Nancy Reagan's plaintive urging to "just say no," and her husband's decision to hand police and prosecutors even greater powers to lock up street dealers, and to devote more resources to stop cocaine's production at the source, in the Andes. In 1986, trying to cope with crack's corrosive effects, Congress adopted mandatory-minimum laws, which hit inner-city crack users with penalties as severe as those levied on Wall Street brokers possessing 100 times more powder cocaine. Over the next two decades, hundreds of thousands of Americans would be locked up for drug offenses.

The War on Drugs became an actual war during the first Bush administration, when the bombastic conservative intellectual Bill Bennett was appointed drug czar. "Two words sum up my entire approach," Bennett declared, "consequences and confrontation." Bush and Bennett doubled annual spending on the drug war to $12 billion, devoting much of the money to expensive weaponry: fighter jets to take on the Colombian trafficking cartels, Navy submarines to chase cocaine-smuggling boats in the Caribbean. If narcotics were the enemy, America would vanquish its foe with torpedoes and F-16s - and throw an entire generation of drug users in jail.

Though many on the left suspected that things had gone seriously awry, drug policy under Reagan and Bush was largely conducted in a fog of ignorance. The kinds of long-term studies that policy-makers needed - those that would show what measures would actually reduce drug use and dampen its consequences - did not yet exist. When it came to research, there was "absolutely nothing" that examined "how each program was or wasn't working," says Peter Reuter, a drug scholar who founded the Drug Policy Research Center at the RAND Corp.

But after Escobar was killed in 1993 - and after U.S. drug agents began systematically busting up the Colombian cartels - doubt was replaced with hard data. Thanks to new research, U.S. policy-makers knew with increasing certainty what would work and what wouldn't. The tragedy of the War on Drugs is that this knowledge hasn't been heeded. We continue to treat marijuana as a major threat to public health, even though we know it isn't. We continue to lock up generations of teenage drug dealers, even though we know imprisonment does little to reduce the amount of drugs sold on the street. And we continue to spend billions to fight drugs abroad, even though we know that military efforts are an ineffective way to cut the supply of narcotics in America or raise the price.

All told, the United States has spent an estimated $500 billion to fight drugs - with very little to show for it. Cocaine is now as cheap as it was when Escobar died and more heavily used. Methamphetamine, barely a presence in 1993, is now used by 1.5 million Americans and may be more addictive than crack. We have nearly 500,000 people behind bars for drug crimes - a twelvefold increase since 1980 - with no discernible effect on the drug traffic. Virtually the only success the government can claim is the decline in the number of Americans who smoke marijuana - and even on that count, it is not clear that federal prevention programs are responsible. In the course of fighting this war, we have allowed our military to become pawns in a civil war in Colombia and our drug agents to be used by the cartels for their own ends. Those we are paying to wage the drug war have been accused of ­human-rights abuses in Peru, Bolivia and Colombia. In Mexico, we are now ­repeating many of the same mistakes we have made in the Andes.

"What we learned was that in drug work, nothing ever stands still," says Coleman, the former DEA official and current president of Drug Watch International, a law-and-order advocacy group. For every move the drug warriors made, the traffickers adapted. "The other guys were learning just as we were learning," Coleman says. "We had this hubris."

THE PIGS ARE IN A FEEDING FRENZY

Conservative, or Just Plain Corrupt?
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Posted on Nov 30, 2007
By David Sirota

Through their ethics scandals, Republicans in Washington long ago began making the word conservative synonymous with the term corrupt. Surprisingly, though, it is a group of Democrats that is cementing this definitional conversion for good.

In the midst of the housing crisis, a cadre of self-described “conservative” Democrats called the Blue Dog Coalition is demanding that congressional leaders delay legislation designed to help people trapped in high-interest loans stay in their homes and avoid foreclosure. The bill, House Resolution 3609, allows judges to ameliorate the terms of abusive “subprime” mortgages. Rep. Brad Miller, D-N.C., is championing it—a gutsy move for a lawmaker whose state domiciles major lenders.

The Blue Dogs say they oppose Miller’s initiative out of concern for the integrity of the 2005 bankruptcy bill—a telling justification. Under that odious law, millionaires can shield their mansions from creditors, and corporate executives (think: Enron guys) can prevent ripped-off shareholders and employees from seizing their holdings. Harvard’s Elizabeth Warren notes that the law also “permits people with vacation homes and investment property to rework their mortgages in bankruptcy.”

But regular homeowners? Sorry—without Miller’s legislation, judges are barred from defending you against the vultures.

Blue Dog Democrats cite the social conservatism of their rural and exurban districts as the reason for such high-profile stands against their party. Somehow, we are expected to believe that their constituents’ anti-abortion or pro-gun views mean those same constituents want Congress to help banks throw people out of their homes. But since when did any voters—conservative or otherwise—support that kind of thing?

Since never, of course. “Conservatism” is being used as the cover for corruption.

As National Journal reports, corporate lobbyists “knew exactly who to go to in order to stop the [foreclosure relief] bill in its tracks: the Blue Dog Coalition.” These lawmakers are the mercenaries’ go-to crew not because of any principled ideology, but because they have been big recipients of campaign cash from the finance and real estate industries.

Of course, this is only the most recent example of pay-to-play shenanigans on banking issues.

In 2005, 20 “New” Democrats—another group billed as conservative—signed a letter demanding the passage of the original bankruptcy bill. Those Democrats had pocketed a combined $750,000 from the financial industry.

That same year, the Senate cast a “conservative” vote defeating a bill limiting credit card interest rates to a whopping 30 percent—a modest measure to say the least. Eighteen Republican and Democratic lawmakers voting against the measure had previously voted for a tougher interest cap. What changed? They received about $2 million from the credit card and banking industries in the interim.

Still, this new Blue Dog letter takes the cake for sheer brazenness. Why? Because the current mortgage crisis is especially hitting the kinds of exurban and rural districts these “conservative” Democrats purport to speak for.

The Atlantic Monthly’s Matthew Yglesias recently reviewed foreclosure data and found that “the hardest-hit areas are the high-growth fringes of vibrant metro areas”—the exurbs that Blue Dog signatories like Illinois Democratic Rep. Melissa Bean represent.

Real Estate magazine reports, “In 500 rural counties, one-third or more of mortgage originations involved high-interest loans.” That could spell trouble for districts like the one represented by Rep. Jim Marshall, D-Ga.—another signer. His state has almost 30,000 homes financed by subprime loans.

So, will these faux conservatives win? Maybe in this battle over mortgage reform, and in some other upcoming skirmishes, like the brouhaha over taxes. The National Journal reports that this same group of Democrats is intent on “limiting the scope” of proposals to close the loophole letting billionaire hedge fund managers pay a lower tax rate than the janitors who clean their offices. Apparently, the Blue Dogs would have us believe conservative, working-class constituents are insisting their congressional representatives not only support bank foreclosures but also help Wall Street barons rob the federal treasury.

Nonetheless, over the long term, those like the Blue Dogs will have an increasingly difficult time succeeding—both legislatively and electorally. The more they attach their “conservative” label to such obscene corruption, the more that label will be indelibly tarnished. Aiding loan sharks and tax cheats may elicit campaign donations and smiles in Washington, but it is no way to win hearts and minds in the rest of America.

David Sirota is the bestselling author of “Hostile Takeover” (Crown, 2006). He is a senior fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future and a board member of the Progressive States Network, both nonpartisan research organizations. His daily blog can be found at www.credoaction.com/sirota.

Photo and image: Nails Art.

Photo and image: Nails Art.

THE MYSTERY OF THE MAP OF AMERICA

Map that named America is a puzzle for researchers By David Alexander




The only surviving copy of the 500-year-old map that first used the name America goes on permanent display this month at the Library of Congress, but even as it prepares for its debut, the 1507 Waldseemuller map remains a puzzle for researchers.

Why did the mapmaker name the territory America and then change his mind later? How was he able to draw South America so accurately? Why did he put a huge ocean west of America years before European explorers discovered the Pacific?

"That's the kind of conundrum, the question, that is still out there," said John Hebert, chief of the geography and map division of the Library of Congress.

The 12 sheets that make up the map, purchased from German Prince Johannes Waldburg-Wolfegg for $10 million in 2003, were mounted on Monday in a huge 6-foot by 9.5-foot (1.85 meter by 2.95 meter) display case machined from a single block of aluminum.

The case will be flooded with inert argon gas to prevent deterioration when it goes on public display December 13.

Researchers are hopeful that putting the rarely shown map on permanent display for the first time since it was discovered in the Waldburg-Wolfegg castle archives in 1901 may stimulate interest in finding out more about the documents used to produce it.

The map was created by the German monk Martin Waldseemuller. Thirteen years after Christopher Columbus first landed in the Western Hemisphere, the Duke of Lorraine brought Waldseemuller and a group of scholars together at a monastery in Saint-Die in France to create a new map of the world.

The result, published two years later, is stunningly accurate and surprisingly modern.

"The actual shape of South America is correct," said Hebert. "The width of South America at certain key points is correct within 70 miles of accuracy."

Given what Europeans are believed to have known about the world at the time, it should not have been possible for the mapmakers to produce it, he said.

The map gives a reasonably correct depiction of the west coast of South America. But according to history, Vasco Nunez de Balboa did not reach the Pacific by land until 1513, and Ferdinand Magellan did not round the southern tip of the continent until 1520.

"So this is a rather compelling map to say, 'How did they come to that conclusion,"' Hebert said.

The mapmakers say they based it on the 1,300-year-old works of the Egyptian geographer Ptolemy as well as letters Florentine navigator Amerigo Vespucci wrote describing his voyages to the new world. But Hebert said there must have been something more.

"From the writings of Vespucci you couldn't have prepared the map," Hebert said. "There had to be something cartographic with it."

MISGIVINGS ABOUT AMERICA

Waldseemuller made it clear he was naming the new land after Vespucci, describing how he came up with the name America based on the navigator's first name.

But he soon had misgivings about what he had done. An atlas Waldseemuller produced six years later shows only part of the east coast of the Americas, and refers to it as Terra Incognita -- unknown land.

"America has gone out of his lexicon," Hebert said. "(No) place in the atlas -- in the text or in the maps -- does the name America appear."

His 1516 mariner's map, on the same scale as the 1507 map, steps back even further, showing only parts of the new continents and reconnecting the north to Asia. South America is labeled Terra Nova -- New World -- and North America is labeled Terra de Cuba -- Land of Cuba.

"Essentially he's reconnecting North America to the Asian mainland, suggesting a continual world of land mass rather than separated by those bodies of water that separate us from Europe and Asia," Hebert said.

Why the rollback? No one knows.

In writings accompanying the 1516 map, Waldseemuller comes across as if he "has seen the better of his error and is now correcting it," Hebert said.

He speculated that power politics played a role. Spain and Portugal divided the globe between them in 1494, two years after Columbus, with territory to the east going to Portugal and land to the west to Spain.

That demarcation line is oddly absent from the 1507 Waldseemuller map, and flags marking territorial claims in South America suggest Portugal controls the region's southernmost land, even though it is in Spain's area of influence. On the later map, the southernmost flag is Spanish, Hebert said.

"It is possible one could say the 1507 map is influenced strongly by Portuguese sources and conceivably the 1516 map may be influenced more by Spanish sources," he said.

Although the map conceals many mysteries, one thing is clear: it represents a revolutionary shift in the way Europe viewed the world.

"This is ... essentially the beginning or first map of the modern age, and it's one that everything builds on from that point forward," Hebert said. "It becomes a keystone map."

(Editing by Eddie Evans)

JPHN UPDYKE ON DINOSAURS

Q & A Transcript
I am Jamie Shreeve, the science editor at National Geographic magazine. Our December cover story on Bizarre Dinosaurs features an introductory essay by John Updike. Mr. Updike has kindly invited us to his home to talk about writing, dinosaurs, and writing about dinosaurs.
Shreeve: Mr. Updike, National Geographic is a new and unusual venue for you and, of course, I was delighted that you agreed to write something for us. What enticed you to say yes?
Updike: Well, I had some feeling about dinosaurs being interesting, not that I am a student of paleontology, but the notion that once there were these enormous if