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And a different perspective on that theme:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5066475
EMFP Enters into Distribution Agreements with Nine International Distributors
Emergency Filtration Products Enters into Distribution Agreements with Nine International Distributors
Tuesday December 20, 2:42 pm ET
HENDERSON, Nev.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 20, 2005--Emergency Filtration Products Inc. (EFP) (OTCBB: EMFP - News) today announced that it has entered into distribution agreements with nine international distributors operating in the following countries: Australia, Canada, Denmark, New Zealand, Pakistan, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden and Thailand. The company is also at an advanced stage of negotiations to sign additional distributors in a number of other countries.
The international distributors signed to date have agreed to order a minimum of 550,000 NanoMasks and 7,250,000 NanoMask filters over the next two years. The current delivery schedule -- which is based on the company's production capacity -- calls for approximately 225,000 NanoMasks and 3,000,000 NanoMask filters to be delivered in equal allotments over the course of 2006. In 2007, deliveries to these distributors are currently scheduled to reach 325,000 NanoMasks and 4,250,000 NanoMask filters. Following the delivery plan for 2006, deliveries are currently scheduled to be made in equal numbers over the course of the year. These schedules could be either accelerated and/or increased should EFP's production capabilities permit and at the distributors' requests.
"We are well under way to getting our Nogales plant operational in the near future, a development which has enabled us to sign a number of distributors in some important international markets," said Douglas K. Beplate, president and CEO, EFP. "The task before us is to rapidly ramp up production to meet demand for our NanoMask and NanoMask filters, which continues to increase. Towards that end, we regard the Nogales plant to be crucial to the future success of our company. We intend to not only manufacture NanoMasks and NanoMask filters in Nogales, but to also manufacture some, if not all of our other products there as well."
Beplate went on to say, "Our Henderson plant will remain operational as well, although it may be expanded to accommodate a fulfillment and distribution center to better serve our customers. Once our Nogales plant is up and running, we plan to concentrate on winning new business from some large national and international companies who have expressed an interest in our products."
About the NanoMask
EFP's 2H Nano-Enhanced Environmental Mask, the NanoMask, relies on the company's core 2H Technology(TM) filtration system, which utilizes a combination of hydrophobic and hydrophilic filters able to capture and isolate bacterial and viral microorganisms with efficiencies of 99.9%. The environmental mask utilizes the company's patented 2H Technology(TM) and nanotechnology to enhance the capture-and-isolation characteristics of the filter media.
About Emergency Filtration Products (http://www.emergencyfiltration.com/)
EFP is an air filtration products manufacturer whose patented 2H Technology(TM) filter system has produced filtration efficiencies of "greater than 99.99%" at a particulate size of 0.027 microns. Its initial products were developed for the medical market: the Vapor Isolation Valve(TM) and RespAide® CPR Isolation Mask used for resuscitation of respiratory/cardiac arrest cases; and the 2H Breathing Circuit Filter for ventilators, respirators and anesthesia circuitry. Each has received FDA approval. The company also markets an Automated External Defibrillator Prep Kit featuring RespAide; and the NanoMask®, a nanotechnology enhanced environmental mask. In addition to filtration products, the company supplies Superstat®, a modified hemostatic collagen, to the U.S. military for surgery and extreme wound care.
Safe Harbor Statement
This release may contain statements that are forward looking. Such statements are made based upon current expectations that are subject to risk and uncertainty. EFP does not undertake to update forward-looking statements in this news release to reflect actual results of and changes in assumptions or changes in other factors affecting such forward-looking information. The actual future results of the company could differ significantly from such forward-looking statements. Sales may be dependent on the success of future marketing campaigns, the signing of definitive agreements with additional distributors, and both the perceived need for EFP's products and the competitive performance of such products in the marketplace.
Contact:
Emergency Filtration Products Inc., Henderson
Douglas K. Beplate, 702-558-5164
Fax: 702-567-1893
contactus@emergencyfiltration.com
www.emergencyfiltration.com
or
PAN Consultants Ltd. (Investor Relations)
Philippe Niemetz, 800-477-7570, 212-344-6464
Fax: 212-6181276
p.niemetz@panconsultants.com
Since I’ve been very preoccupied with travels and other concerns the last 2-3 months I’ve hardly posted here at all, but when I have, I make perfectly valid comments, as valid as anyone’s, although I do enjoy attaching a little zinger aimed at tinman ever since he lost my respect, forever and ever, when he rather arbitrarily censured one of my posts and then blatantly misrepresented (sometimes referred to as “lying”) the nature of that post. I like to remind him that not everyone thinks he’s as witty and wise as he thinks he is. As far as anyone being able to paste good posts here . . . the fact is I spend a lot more time seeking intelligent opinion about a diversity of subjects than the average joe, I like to think, and I am actually less interested in spending my time espousing my opinions . . . so when I carefully and selectively choose which articles to paste here, they are usually fresh approaches to some of the issues discussed here, and contain the less than predictable opinions that are otherwise often posted here.
I would like to interject, however, that I think echos and threes and swanlinbar (I think) are to be commended for their insights and also their patience in expressing them, and for their general contributions towards uplifting the level of discourse here. Also, it’s been my intention for some time to go into more detail about this, and perhaps soon I will, but I would like to state again that Rogue Dolphin’s positions, for all their far-reaching and extreme conclusions, are far less removed from reality than are otcbargain’s.
So, perhaps I will start posting more regularly here again, and you can count that along with my insights, I will be attaching raspberries to tinman. Actually, I'd like to rust his joints.
As a matter of fact, I see that in another response to echos he again uses statistics to justify the suspension of habeas corpus. Just a little bit of fascism is okay, as long as it doesn’t effect me. Cheeses. Len, what if someone like me, someone who didn’t like you, got into position to decide who might be a threat to natl security? Just a lttle bit of water-boarding would be all right, right, Len?
k(I AM A MORON)suave
Ah, the old "you are a moron" argument. At least we've shed the all-caps.
I have a confession to make: I disagree with lentinman; I AM A MORON.
Thanks echos . . . if one person is exempt from consitutional protections than all people are exempt from them. What if someone less honorable and rational than, say, lentiman (chuckle chuckle) were in a position to decide who should be investigated? It would be like living under Saddam and his sons, and good Americans, like their German counterparts, would welcome it if it were justified under "homeland security."
I just finished reading Philip Roth's most recent book, "The Plot Against America," a brilliant piece of fantastical history where it's illustrated how easily the US might have slipped to the Axis'side in WWII, and then Lentinman just steps right up and proves it could have been so. As His Majesty Gee Whiz Bush points out, it's a dangerous world out there, but not all the evil men speak with foreign accents. Some have apple pie crumbs on their lips.
EVERYBODY’S AN EXPERT
Putting predictions to the test.
by LOUIS MENAND
The New Yorker
Issue of 2005-12-05
Prediction is one of the pleasures of life. Conversation would wither without it. “It won’t last. She’ll dump him in a month.” If you’re wrong, no one will call you on it, because being right or wrong isn’t really the point. The point is that you think he’s not worthy of her, and the prediction is just a way of enhancing your judgment with a pleasant prevision of doom. Unless you’re putting money on it, nothing is at stake except your reputation for wisdom in matters of the heart. If a month goes by and they’re still together, the deadline can be extended without penalty. “She’ll leave him, trust me. It’s only a matter of time.” They get married: “Funny things happen. You never know.” You still weren’t wrong. Either the marriage is a bad one—you erred in the right direction—or you got beaten by a low-probability outcome.
It is the somewhat gratifying lesson of Philip Tetlock’s new book, “Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?” (Princeton; $35), that people who make prediction their business—people who appear as experts on television, get quoted in newspaper articles, advise governments and businesses, and participate in punditry roundtables—are no better than the rest of us. When they’re wrong, they’re rarely held accountable, and they rarely admit it, either. They insist that they were just off on timing, or blindsided by an improbable event, or almost right, or wrong for the right reasons. They have the same repertoire of self-justifications that everyone has, and are no more inclined than anyone else to revise their beliefs about the way the world works, or ought to work, just because they made a mistake. No one is paying you for your gratuitous opinions about other people, but the experts are being paid, and Tetlock claims that the better known and more frequently quoted they are, the less reliable their guesses about the future are likely to be. The accuracy of an expert’s predictions actually has an inverse relationship to his or her self-confidence, renown, and, beyond a certain point, depth of knowledge. People who follow current events by reading the papers and newsmagazines regularly can guess what is likely to happen about as accurately as the specialists whom the papers quote. Our system of expertise is completely inside out: it rewards bad judgments over good ones.
“Expert Political Judgment” is not a work of media criticism. Tetlock is a psychologist—he teaches at Berkeley—and his conclusions are based on a long-term study that he began twenty years ago. He picked two hundred and eighty-four people who made their living “commenting or offering advice on political and economic trends,” and he started asking them to assess the probability that various things would or would not come to pass, both in the areas of the world in which they specialized and in areas about which they were not expert. Would there be a nonviolent end to apartheid in South Africa? Would Gorbachev be ousted in a coup? Would the United States go to war in the Persian Gulf? Would Canada disintegrate? (Many experts believed that it would, on the ground that Quebec would succeed in seceding.) And so on. By the end of the study, in 2003, the experts had made 82,361 forecasts. Tetlock also asked questions designed to determine how they reached their judgments, how they reacted when their predictions proved to be wrong, how they evaluated new information that did not support their views, and how they assessed the probability that rival theories and predictions were accurate.
Tetlock got a statistical handle on his task by putting most of the forecasting questions into a “three possible futures” form. The respondents were asked to rate the probability of three alternative outcomes: the persistence of the status quo, more of something (political freedom, economic growth), or less of something (repression, recession). And he measured his experts on two dimensions: how good they were at guessing probabilities (did all the things they said had an x per cent chance of happening happen x per cent of the time?), and how accurate they were at predicting specific outcomes. The results were unimpressive. On the first scale, the experts performed worse than they would have if they had simply assigned an equal probability to all three outcomes—if they had given each possible future a thirty-three-per-cent chance of occurring. Human beings who spend their lives studying the state of the world, in other words, are poorer forecasters than dart-throwing monkeys, who would have distributed their picks evenly over the three choices.
Tetlock also found that specialists are not significantly more reliable than non-specialists in guessing what is going to happen in the region they study. Knowing a little might make someone a more reliable forecaster, but Tetlock found that knowing a lot can actually make a person less reliable. “We reach the point of diminishing marginal predictive returns for knowledge disconcertingly quickly,” he reports. “In this age of academic hyperspecialization, there is no reason for supposing that contributors to top journals—distinguished political scientists, area study specialists, economists, and so on—are any better than journalists or attentive readers of the New York Times in ‘reading’ emerging situations.” And the more famous the forecaster the more overblown the forecasts. “Experts in demand,” Tetlock says, “were more overconfident than their colleagues who eked out existences far from the limelight.”
People who are not experts in the psychology of expertise are likely (I predict) to find Tetlock’s results a surprise and a matter for concern. For psychologists, though, nothing could be less surprising. “Expert Political Judgment” is just one of more than a hundred studies that have pitted experts against statistical or actuarial formulas, and in almost all of those studies the people either do no better than the formulas or do worse. In one study, college counsellors were given information about a group of high-school students and asked to predict their freshman grades in college. The counsellors had access to test scores, grades, the results of personality and vocational tests, and personal statements from the students, whom they were also permitted to interview. Predictions that were produced by a formula using just test scores and grades were more accurate. There are also many studies showing that expertise and experience do not make someone a better reader of the evidence. In one, data from a test used to diagnose brain damage were given to a group of clinical psychologists and their secretaries. The psychologists’ diagnoses were no better than the secretaries’.
The experts’ trouble in Tetlock’s study is exactly the trouble that all human beings have: we fall in love with our hunches, and we really, really hate to be wrong. Tetlock describes an experiment that he witnessed thirty years ago in a Yale classroom. A rat was put in a T-shaped maze. Food was placed in either the right or the left transept of the T in a random sequence such that, over the long run, the food was on the left sixty per cent of the time and on the right forty per cent. Neither the students nor (needless to say) the rat was told these frequencies. The students were asked to predict on which side of the T the food would appear each time. The rat eventually figured out that the food was on the left side more often than the right, and it therefore nearly always went to the left, scoring roughly sixty per cent—D, but a passing grade. The students looked for patterns of left-right placement, and ended up scoring only fifty-two per cent, an F. The rat, having no reputation to begin with, was not embarrassed about being wrong two out of every five tries. But Yale students, who do have reputations, searched for a hidden order in the sequence. They couldn’t deal with forty-per-cent error, so they ended up with almost fifty-per-cent error.
The expert-prediction game is not much different. When television pundits make predictions, the more ingenious their forecasts the greater their cachet. An arresting new prediction means that the expert has discovered a set of interlocking causes that no one else has spotted, and that could lead to an outcome that the conventional wisdom is ignoring. On shows like “The McLaughlin Group,” these experts never lose their reputations, or their jobs, because long shots are their business. More serious commentators differ from the pundits only in the degree of showmanship. These serious experts—the think tankers and area-studies professors—are not entirely out to entertain, but they are a little out to entertain, and both their status as experts and their appeal as performers require them to predict futures that are not obvious to the viewer. The producer of the show does not want you and me to sit there listening to an expert and thinking, I could have said that. The expert also suffers from knowing too much: the more facts an expert has, the more information is available to be enlisted in support of his or her pet theories, and the more chains of causation he or she can find beguiling. This helps explain why specialists fail to outguess non-specialists. The odds tend to be with the obvious.
Tetlock’s experts were also no different from the rest of us when it came to learning from their mistakes. Most people tend to dismiss new information that doesn’t fit with what they already believe. Tetlock found that his experts used a double standard: they were much tougher in assessing the validity of information that undercut their theory than they were in crediting information that supported it. The same deficiency leads liberals to read only The Nation and conservatives to read only National Review. We are not natural falsificationists: we would rather find more reasons for believing what we already believe than look for reasons that we might be wrong. In the terms of Karl Popper’s famous example, to verify our intuition that all swans are white we look for lots more white swans, when what we should really be looking for is one black swan.
Also, people tend to see the future as indeterminate and the past as inevitable. If you look backward, the dots that lead up to Hitler or the fall of the Soviet Union or the attacks on September 11th all connect. If you look forward, it’s just a random scatter of dots, many potential chains of causation leading to many possible outcomes. We have no idea today how tomorrow’s invasion of a foreign land is going to go; after the invasion, we can actually persuade ourselves that we knew all along. The result seems inevitable, and therefore predictable. Tetlock found that, consistent with this asymmetry, experts routinely misremembered the degree of probability they had assigned to an event after it came to pass. They claimed to have predicted what happened with a higher degree of certainty than, according to the record, they really did. When this was pointed out to them, by Tetlock’s researchers, they sometimes became defensive.
And, like most of us, experts violate a fundamental rule of probabilities by tending to find scenarios with more variables more likely. If a prediction needs two independent things to happen in order for it to be true, its probability is the product of the probability of each of the things it depends on. If there is a one-in-three chance of x and a one-in-four chance of y, the probability of both x and y occurring is one in twelve. But we often feel instinctively that if the two events “fit together” in some scenario the chance of both is greater, not less. The classic “Linda problem” is an analogous case. In this experiment, subjects are told, “Linda is thirty-one years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice and also participated in antinuclear demonstrations.” They are then asked to rank the probability of several possible descriptions of Linda today. Two of them are “bank teller” and “bank teller and active in the feminist movement.” People rank the second description higher than the first, even though, logically, its likelihood is smaller, because it requires two things to be true—that Linda is a bank teller and that Linda is an active feminist—rather than one.
Plausible detail makes us believers. When subjects were given a choice between an insurance policy that covered hospitalization for any reason and a policy that covered hospitalization for all accidents and diseases, they were willing to pay a higher premium for the second policy, because the added detail gave them a more vivid picture of the circumstances in which it might be needed. In 1982, an experiment was done with professional forecasters and planners. One group was asked to assess the probability of “a complete suspension of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, sometime in 1983,” and another group was asked to assess the probability of “a Russian invasion of Poland, and a complete suspension of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, sometime in 1983.” The experts judged the second scenario more likely than the first, even though it required two separate events to occur. They were seduced by the detail.
It was no news to Tetlock, therefore, that experts got beaten by formulas. But he does believe that he discovered something about why some people make better forecasters than other people. It has to do not with what the experts believe but with the way they think. Tetlock uses Isaiah Berlin’s metaphor from Archilochus, from his essay on Tolstoy, “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” to illustrate the difference. He says:
Low scorers look like hedgehogs: thinkers who “know one big thing,” aggressively extend the explanatory reach of that one big thing into new domains, display bristly impatience with those who “do not get it,” and express considerable confidence that they are already pretty proficient forecasters, at least in the long term. High scorers look like foxes: thinkers who know many small things (tricks of their trade), are skeptical of grand schemes, see explanation and prediction not as deductive exercises but rather as exercises in flexible “ad hocery” that require stitching together diverse sources of information, and are rather diffident about their own forecasting prowess.
A hedgehog is a person who sees international affairs to be ultimately determined by a single bottom-line force: balance-of-power considerations, or the clash of civilizations, or globalization and the spread of free markets. A hedgehog is the kind of person who holds a great-man theory of history, according to which the Cold War does not end if there is no Ronald Reagan. Or he or she might adhere to the “actor-dispensability thesis,” according to which Soviet Communism was doomed no matter what. Whatever it is, the big idea, and that idea alone, dictates the probable outcome of events. For the hedgehog, therefore, predictions that fail are only “off on timing,” or are “almost right,” derailed by an unforeseeable accident. There are always little swerves in the short run, but the long run irons them out.
Foxes, on the other hand, don’t see a single determining explanation in history. They tend, Tetlock says, “to see the world as a shifting mixture of self-fulfilling and self-negating prophecies: self-fulfilling ones in which success breeds success, and failure, failure but only up to a point, and then self-negating prophecies kick in as people recognize that things have gone too far.”
Tetlock did not find, in his sample, any significant correlation between how experts think and what their politics are. His hedgehogs were liberal as well as conservative, and the same with his foxes. (Hedgehogs were, of course, more likely to be extreme politically, whether rightist or leftist.) He also did not find that his foxes scored higher because they were more cautious—that their appreciation of complexity made them less likely to offer firm predictions. Unlike hedgehogs, who actually performed worse in areas in which they specialized, foxes enjoyed a modest benefit from expertise. Hedgehogs routinely over-predicted: twenty per cent of the outcomes that hedgehogs claimed were impossible or nearly impossible came to pass, versus ten per cent for the foxes. More than thirty per cent of the outcomes that hedgehogs thought were sure or near-sure did not, against twenty per cent for foxes.
The upside of being a hedgehog, though, is that when you’re right you can be really and spectacularly right. Great scientists, for example, are often hedgehogs. They value parsimony, the simpler solution over the more complex. In world affairs, parsimony may be a liability—but, even there, there can be traps in the kind of highly integrative thinking that is characteristic of foxes. Elsewhere, Tetlock has published an analysis of the political reasoning of Winston Churchill. Churchill was not a man who let contradictory information interfere with his idées fixes. This led him to make the wrong prediction about Indian independence, which he opposed. But it led him to be right about Hitler. He was never distracted by the contingencies that might combine to make the elimination of Hitler unnecessary.
Tetlock also has an unscientific point to make, which is that “we as a society would be better off if participants in policy debates stated their beliefs in testable forms”—that is, as probabilities—“monitored their forecasting performance, and honored their reputational bets.” He thinks that we’re suffering from our primitive attraction to deterministic, overconfident hedgehogs. It’s true that the only thing the electronic media like better than a hedgehog is two hedgehogs who don’t agree. Tetlock notes, sadly, a point that Richard Posner has made about these kinds of public intellectuals, which is that most of them are dealing in “solidarity” goods, not “credence” goods. Their analyses and predictions are tailored to make their ideological brethren feel good—more white swans for the white-swan camp. A prediction, in this context, is just an exclamation point added to an analysis. Liberals want to hear that whatever conservatives are up to is bound to go badly; when the argument gets more nuanced, they change the channel. On radio and television and the editorial page, the line between expertise and advocacy is very blurry, and pundits behave exactly the way Tetlock says they will. Bush Administration loyalists say that their predictions about postwar Iraq were correct, just a little off on timing; pro-invasion liberals who are now trying to dissociate themselves from an adventure gone bad insist that though they may have sounded a false alarm, they erred “in the right direction”—not really a mistake at all.
The same blurring characterizes professional forecasters as well. The predictions on cable news commentary shows do not have life-and-death side effects, but the predictions of people in the C.I.A. and the Pentagon plainly do. It’s possible that the psychologists have something to teach those people, and, no doubt, psychologists are consulted. Still, the suggestion that we can improve expert judgment by applying the lessons of cognitive science and probability theory belongs to the abiding modern American faith in expertise. As a professional, Tetlock is, after all, an expert, and he would like to believe in expertise. So he is distressed that political forecasters turn out to be as unreliable as the psychological literature predicted, but heartened to think that there might be a way of raising the standard. The hope for a little more accountability is hard to dissent from. It would be nice if there were fewer partisans on television disguised as “analysts” and “experts” (and who would not want to see more foxes?). But the best lesson of Tetlock’s book may be the one that he seems most reluctant to draw: Think for yourself.
Looks that way, and, oh, by the way, I'll take them.
ACHI -- My streamer shows it up .376 pre-market, to .42.
!!
This may be my greatest if-only-I'd-held stock of all times. Pass the cyanide, please.
Decoding Mr. Bush's Denials
November 15, 2005
Editorial, MY Times
To avoid having to account for his administration's misleading statements before the war with Iraq, President Bush has tried denial, saying he did not skew the intelligence. He's tried to share the blame, claiming that Congress had the same intelligence he had, as well as President Bill Clinton. He's tried to pass the buck and blame the C.I.A. Lately, he's gone on the attack, accusing Democrats in Congress of aiding the terrorists.
Yesterday in Alaska, Mr. Bush trotted out the same tedious deflection on Iraq that he usually attempts when his back is against the wall: he claims that questioning his actions three years ago is a betrayal of the troops in battle today.
It all amounts to one energetic effort at avoidance. But like the W.M.D. reports that started the whole thing, the only problem is that none of it has been true.
•
Mr. Bush says everyone had the same intelligence he had - Mr. Clinton and his advisers, foreign governments, and members of Congress - and that all of them reached the same conclusions. The only part that is true is that Mr. Bush was working off the same intelligence Mr. Clinton had. But that is scary, not reassuring. The reports about Saddam Hussein's weapons were old, some more than 10 years old. Nothing was fresher than about five years, except reports that later proved to be fanciful.
Foreign intelligence services did not have full access to American intelligence. But some had dissenting opinions that were ignored or not shown to top American officials. Congress had nothing close to the president's access to intelligence. The National Intelligence Estimate presented to Congress a few days before the vote on war was sanitized to remove dissent and make conjecture seem like fact.
It's hard to imagine what Mr. Bush means when he says everyone reached the same conclusion. There was indeed a widespread belief that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons. But Mr. Clinton looked at the data and concluded that inspections and pressure were working - a view we now know was accurate. France, Russia and Germany said war was not justified. Even Britain admitted later that there had been no new evidence about Iraq, just new politics.
The administration had little company in saying that Iraq was actively trying to build a nuclear weapon. The evidence for this claim was a dubious report about an attempt in 1999 to buy uranium from Niger, later shown to be false, and the infamous aluminum tubes story. That was dismissed at the time by analysts with real expertise.
The Bush administration was also alone in making the absurd claim that Iraq was in league with Al Qaeda and somehow connected to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. That was based on two false tales. One was the supposed trip to Prague by Mohamed Atta, a report that was disputed before the war and came from an unreliable drunk. The other was that Iraq trained Qaeda members in the use of chemical and biological weapons. Before the war, the Defense Intelligence Agency concluded that this was a deliberate fabrication by an informer.
Mr. Bush has said in recent days that the first phase of the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation on Iraq found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence. That is true only in the very narrow way the Republicans on the committee insisted on defining pressure: as direct pressure from senior officials to change intelligence. Instead, the Bush administration made what it wanted to hear crystal clear and kept sending reports back to be redone until it got those answers.
Richard Kerr, a former deputy director of central intelligence, said in 2003 that there was "significant pressure on the intelligence community to find evidence that supported a connection" between Iraq and Al Qaeda. The C.I.A. ombudsman told the Senate Intelligence Committee that the administration's "hammering" on Iraq intelligence was harder than he had seen in his 32 years at the agency.
Mr. Bush and other administration officials say they faithfully reported what they had read. But Vice President Dick Cheney presented the Prague meeting as a fact when even the most supportive analysts considered it highly dubious. The administration has still not acknowledged that tales of Iraq coaching Al Qaeda on chemical warfare were considered false, even at the time they were circulated.
Mr. Cheney was not alone. Remember Condoleezza Rice's infamous "mushroom cloud" comment? And Secretary of State Colin Powell in January 2003, when the rich and powerful met in Davos, Switzerland, and he said, "Why is Iraq still trying to procure uranium and the special equipment needed to transform it into material for nuclear weapons?" Mr. Powell ought to have known the report on "special equipment"' - the aluminum tubes - was false. And the uranium story was four years old.
•
The president and his top advisers may very well have sincerely believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. But they did not allow the American people, or even Congress, to have the information necessary to make reasoned judgments of their own. It's obvious that the Bush administration misled Americans about Mr. Hussein's weapons and his terrorist connections. We need to know how that happened and why.
Mr. Bush said last Friday that he welcomed debate, even in a time of war, but that "it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began." We agree, but it is Mr. Bush and his team who are rewriting history.
I have every intention to watching the JFK film, Rogue, but I haven't had time yet. I have been and continue to be very busy for a while as I have a lot to do before I make a trip next week to Europe. Will definitely watch it, and when things clear up a bit for me, I do have some commentary I wish to add here.
ksuave
Excellent excellent excellent post, Rogue!
(referrring to post #950)
Revision Thing
A history of the Iraq war, told entirely in lies
Posted on Monday, November 7, 2005. All text is verbatim from senior Bush Administration officials and advisers. In places, tenses have been changed for clarity. Originally from Harper's Magazine, October 2003. By Sam Smith.
Sources
Once again, we were defending both ourselves and the safety and survival of civilization itself. September 11 signaled the arrival of an entirely different era. We faced perils we had never thought about, perils we had never seen before. For decades, terrorists had waged war against this country. Now, under the leadership of President Bush, America would wage war against them. It was a struggle between good and it was a struggle between evil.
It was absolutely clear that the number-one threat facing America was from Saddam Hussein. We know that Iraq and Al Qaeda had high-level contacts that went back a decade. We learned that Iraq had trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and deadly gases. The regime had long-standing and continuing ties to terrorist organizations. Iraq and Al Qaeda had discussed safe-haven opportunities in Iraq. Iraqi officials denied accusations of ties with Al Qaeda. These denials simply were not credible. You couldn't distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talked about the war on terror.
The fundamental question was, did Saddam Hussein have a weapons program? And the answer was, absolutely. His regime had large, unaccounted-for stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons--including VX, sarin, cyclosarin, and mustard gas, anthrax, botulism, and possibly smallpox. Our conservative estimate was that Iraq then had a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical-weapons agent. That was enough agent to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets. We had sources that told us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons--the very weapons the dictator told the world he did not have. And according to the British government, the Iraqi regime could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as forty-five minutes after the orders were given. There could be no doubt that Saddam Hussein had biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more.
Iraq possessed ballistic missiles with a likely range of hundreds of miles--far enough to strike Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey, and other nations. We also discovered through intelligence that Iraq had a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas. We were concerned that Iraq was exploring ways of using UAVs for missions targeting the United States.
* * *
Saddam Hussein was determined to get his hands on a nuclear bomb. We knew he'd been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons, and we believed he had, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons. The British government learned that Saddam Hussein had recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources told us that he had attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear-weapons production. When the inspectors first went into Iraq and were denied-finally denied access, a report came out of the [International Atomic Energy Agency] that they were six months away from developing a weapon. I didn't know what more evidence we needed.
Facing clear evidence of peril, we could not wait for the final proof that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud. The Iraqi dictator could not be permitted to threaten America and the world with horrible poisons and diseases and gases and atomic weapons. Inspections would not work. We gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in. The burden was on those people who thought he didn't have weapons of mass destruction to tell the world where they were.
We waged a war to save civilization itself. We did not seek it, but we fought it, and we prevailed. We fought them and imposed our will on them and we captured or, if necessary, killed them until we had imposed law and order. The Iraqi people were well on their way to freedom. The scenes of free Iraqis celebrating in the streets, riding American tanks, tearing down the statues of Saddam Hussein in the center of Baghdad were breathtaking. Watching them, one could not help but think of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Iron Curtain.
It was entirely possible that in Iraq you had the most pro-American population that could be found anywhere in the Arab world. If you were looking for a historical analogy, it was probably closer to post-liberation France. We had the overwhelming support of the Iraqi people. Once we won, we got great support from everywhere.
The people of Iraq knew that every effort was made to spare innocent life, and to help Iraq recover from three decades of totalitarian rule. And plans were in place to provide Iraqis with massive amounts of food, as well as medicine and other essential supplies. The U.S. devoted unprecedented attention to humanitarian relief and the prevention of excessive damage to infrastructure and to unnecessary casualties.
The United States approached its postwar work with a two-part resolve: a commitment to stay and a commitment to leave. The United States had no intention of determining the precise form of Iraq's new government. That choice belonged to the Iraqi people. We have never been a colonial power. We do not leave behind occupying armies. We leave behind constitutions and parliaments. We don't take our force and go around the world and try to take other people's real estate or other people's resources, their oil. We never have and we never will.
The United States was not interested in the oil in that region. We were intent on ensuring that Iraq's oil resources remained under national Iraqi control, with the proceeds made available to support Iraqis in all parts of the country. The oil fields belonged to the people of Iraq, the government of Iraq, all of Iraq. We estimated that the potential income to the Iraqi people as a result of their oil could be somewhere in the $20 [billion] to $30 billion a year [range], and obviously, that would be money that would be used for their well-being. In other words, all of Iraq's oil belonged to all the people of Iraq.
* * *
We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories. And we found more weapons as time went on. I never believed that we'd just tumble over weapons of mass destruction in that country. But for those who said we hadn't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they were wrong, we found them. We knew where they were.
We changed the regime of Iraq for the good of the Iraqi people. We didn't want to occupy Iraq. War is a terrible thing. We've tried every other means to achieve objectives without a war because we understood what the price of a war can be and what it is. We sought peace. We strove for peace. Nobody, but nobody, was more reluctant to go to war than President Bush.
It is not right to assume that any current problems in Iraq can be attributed to poor planning. The number of U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf region dropped as a result of Operation Iraqi Freedom. This nation acted to a threat from the dictator of Iraq. There is a lot of revisionist history now going on, but one thing is certain--he is no longer a threat to the free world, and the people of Iraq are free. There's no doubt in my mind when it's all said and done, the facts will show the world the truth. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind.
About the Author
Sam Smith is the author of four books, the latest of which is Why Bother?: Getting a Life in a Locked Down Land. He is the editor of The Progressive Review.
This is Revision Thing, a feature, originally from October 2003, published Monday, November 7, 2005. It is part of Features, which is part of Harpers.org.
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Just a number I read today. I forget where.
Nixon hit 29%.
Zogby poll: Majority of likely voters support considering impeachment over Iraq, 51-45 percent
John Byrne and Miriam Raftery
Impeachment support is greater among all adults than likely voters
A new poll of likely voters by Zogby International has found that a majority of Americans support Congress considering the impeachment of President Bush if he “did not tell the truth about his reasons for going to war with Iraq,” RAW STORY has learned.
The poll, to be released this afternoon, finds that 51 percent of likely voters want Congress to eye impeachment, while 45 percent do not. It was commissioned by AfterDowningStreet.org, a coalition of progressive groups seeking a Congressional investigation of the events leading up to war in Iraq.
Among all adults surveyed, the numbers were higher: 53 percent supported impeachment, while 42 percent did not. The poll, which has a +/- 2.9% margin of error, interviewed 1,200 U.S. adults from Oct. 29 through Nov. 2.
Not surprisingly, Democrats supported the consideration of impeachment by a broad margin (76 percent) while Republicans opposed (66 percent). However, 29 percent of Republicans told Zogby pollsters that they supported Congress examining impeachment over Iraq.
"These results are stunning," AfterDowningStreet.org co-founder Bob Fertik said in a statement. "A clear majority of Americans now supports President Bush's impeachment if he lied about the war. This should send shock waves through the White House - and a wake-up call to Democrats and Republicans in Congress, who have sole power under the Constitution to impeach President Bush."
Whites were more likely to oppose impeachment proceedings, while Hispanics and African Americans supported them. Asians who took the poll were more likely to oppose impeachment, though only 21 answered questions about their views.
Also notable: 46 percent of those who considered themselves "born again" said they would support Congress considering impeachment.
The House of Representatives has the sole authority to impeach a president. Democrats, however, have not touched the issue, and they do not constitute a majority in the chamber.
Zogby last polled likely voters on impeachment in June. At that time, 42 percent supported considering impeachment, while 50 percent opposed.
Another poll of American adults conducted in early October by Ipsos, the agency used by the Associated Press, found that 50 percent supported Congress examining the issue, while 42 percent opposed.
RAW STORY placed calls to some of the more liberal members of the House, among them Reps. Maxine Waters (D-CA), Lynn Woolsey (D-CA), Bob Filner (D-CA), John Conyers (D-MI) and Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). None of the offices returned calls for comment.
Fertik, who also runs Democrats.com, has also set up ImpeachPAC, a political action committee aimed at supporting Democrats who say they will seek impeachment.
There are some charts at the website of this article:
http://rawstory.com/news/2005/Zogby_Americans_support_consideration_of_impeachment_1104.html
ORFR seems poised for a spike to me because it doesn't take much attention to make it do so considering the samll float. Check out last December, on 100k shares.
http://bigcharts.marketwatch.com/quickchart/quickchart.asp?symb=orfr&sid=0&o_symb=orfr&f...
ORFR -- I mentioned 6 mil outstanding but there are only 2 mil in the float. This WILL spike tomorrow, and it remains a good long term value micro cap.
ORFR -- Only 6m shares out, earning .18 per, over $2m in cash, announces after market close a deal totaling app $4m
http://www.marketwatch.com/tools/quotes/newsarticle.asp?siteid=bigcharts&sid=42332&guid=%7BF...
How about a poll re: Plamegate.
Anyone, it said anyone who, etc. It was directed to anyone.
By 2004, anyone could have seen the writing on the wall. Anyone who voted for Bush in 2004 is in no position to be acting indignant and self-righteous now. You can't disassociate yourself from blame so easily; you empowered him.
GNBT -- I'm out, and I owe rrufff a ssteakkk.
The way that Houston beat St. Louis makes it hard to completely count them out, but you're right . . . the Sox have the mojo right now. I bet we see at least a few more good games before the series is over.
GNBT up sharply on sudden volume and no news. Whassup?
Interview w/Gore Vidal, relevant to previous discussion here:
posted October 20, 2005
Gore Vidal, Octocontrarian
by
Marc Cooper
Gore Vidal remains one of the more prolific contemporary American writers and certainly one of the most politically outspoken. Shortly after his recent 80th-birthday celebration, Nation contributing editor Marc Cooper interviewed him in his Hollywood home. Herewith, a condensed version of that conversation. . --The Editors
Q:In the introduction to your new book, Imperial America, you begin by saying that the four sweetest words in the American lexicon are "I told you so." What were you gloating about?
A:Oh, everything. The principal bit of wisdom that I had to purvey, which I got from Thomas Jefferson and he got from Montesquieu, is that you cannot maintain a republic and empire simultaneously. The Romans couldn't do it. The Brits could only manage it up to a certain point, but then ended up going broke. The Venetians were an empire, and the United States. And in each case the republics were lost. Starting with our war against Mexico in 1846, which was to acquire California, we've been in a serious, naked grab, grab, grab imperial mood.
Q:In that respect, how different is the Bush Administration? Anything new here, or part of that same historical arc?
A:Well, a lot is different. The machinery is all changed. Nuclear and bacteriological weapons exist. We can kill a lot more people. But there have been things unimaginable to me and most Americans--that we would have a government that is absolutely in your face to every country on earth. We have insulted everybody.
Q:We now see that House majority leader Tom DeLay has been indicted. The Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, is under investigation by the SEC. We've seen the debacle around Michael "Brownie" Brown and FEMA. Is this Administration finally collapsing under its own weight?
A:"Under its own lack of weight" [laughing], I think, is the phrase you are searching for.
Q:Sort of the unbearable lightness?
A:Yes, the unbearable lightness. Or here DeLay--gone tomorrow. Yes, I do believe it is breaking up. And the indictment of DeLay would not have happened had there not been two hurricanes, which dramatized to everybody in the United States that we don't have a government. And to the extent we do have one it is not only corrupt but a menace to other countries, to our liberties, to our Bill of Rights.
Q:If, indeed, this Administration is collapsing for lack of weight, what comes after it?
A:Martial law, that's next. Bush is like a plane of glass. You can see all the worms turning around in his head at any moment. The first giveaway of what's on his mind--or the junta's mind.
Q:The junta being...?
A:Cheney, who runs everything, I suspect. And a few other serious operators. Anyway, I first noticed this was on their mind when Bush finally woke up to the fact that the hurricanes were not going to be good PR for him. And he starts to think friends of his are going to be running in '08. So what's the first thing he does? The first thing on the mind of a dictator? He gets the National Guard away from the governors. The Guard is under the governors, but Bush is always saying, Let's turn it over to the military. This is what's on their mind. Under military control.
Q:Are you predicting a coming military dictatorship? And that the American people would stand for that?
A:They'll stand for anything. And they will stand for nothing. I deal with a lot of European journalists who are very well versed in American politics. But they will ask me silly questions like, "So, Kerry didn't turn out very well. So who's the next leader of the opposition who can become President?" I answer, Well, first the New York Times won't interview him. He won't get on prime-time television if he looks like a winner. That's out. Or he will be made a fool of, like they did with Howard Dean when they amplified his famous cry. That was all done at CBS to make him look like a maniac. They are very resourceful! So if you have a media that is completely controlled by corporate America--or whatever phrase you want to use to describe our rulers--no information is getting through that is useful to the public. No White Knight is going to be acknowledged in the press or seen on television. He would have no way of connecting with the people. And this a permanent fact in our situation.... If there could be a viable opposition to the oil and gas junta that has seized power--all three branches of government, I think--it will have to be at the grassroots. Then you will have to find a way of publicizing through the Internet the White Knight--or the Black Knight, whoever comes along to save us.
Q:What are three or four main things the White Knight would have to say to motivate us, in your words, to keep the Republic?
A:First of all, we should be allowed to keep the money we earn. Because most of us are heavily taxed.
Q:That's what the Republicans say.
A:That's what they say, but they don't mean it. What they mean is, "We people who have money, we don't want our children to pay any inheritance tax. We don't want our huge incomes to be taxed. We don't want the profits of our big corporations ever to be taxed." And they've pulled all that off. When you run against them, you have to say the profits on corporations are going to be taxed. As they always were. The people understand this. And if they don't, you can explain it in ten minutes.
Q:What would the White Knight do with the military?
A:Cut its budget in half. That would save us a lot of money. We could rebuild a lot of levees. We don't need it.... We can't win a war anymore. They can't bring back the draft. We are at end times now for this regime. Just keep your fingers crossed we are not at end times for our country....
Q:One area where things seem to have improved in America concerns homophobia. Gay marriage can now be discussed in polite company.
A:I don't know that it much matters as a theme. Talk to anybody in the military and it's just as bad as when I spent three years in the Army during World War II and those suspected of same-sex activities were Section Eighted out or locked up. It was bad then, and it's bad now. An issue like gay marriage just keeps homophobia alive.
Q:So you're not an advocate of it?
A:No. I know to what purposes that issue is put.... You get an issue, like gay marriage, which doesn't concern 99.9 percent of the population, and you go on and on and on about it. Proving that the Democrats are all crazy, if not all queer. Someone wants to get married, fine. What's it to me?
Q:If we pick a point forty years ago, in the middle of the 1960s, when you were half your age, did you think then the United States would take the course it eventually did?
A:I never thought the President would dare to favor pre-emptive war. I never thought it would come to this, a sort of maniac for President who goes around attacking verbally and physically any country he wants. The ownership of this country has usually been pretty shrewd. They knew what they wanted. They don't want to pay taxes, certainly. They don't want people blowing them up in the night like 9/11. And if there ever was great cause for impeachment it would be over 9/11. Never been a case of negligence like that.
Q:You are not possibly suggesting that the Bush Administration allowed this attack to go ahead?
A:No. I'm not saying anything even close to it. If there had been some sort of wicked collusion between elements of our government and the 9/11 team from Saudi Arabia, in a country like ours, by now, at least two of them would have been on television talking to Barbara Walters. That's what kind of country we have. We can't keep secrets. No, it's unthinkable. Whatever was behind 9/11 was well worked out. And there isn't a brain in this Administration that could have worked out something like 9/11. Either to prevent it or to do it.
EMFP bouncing back from the negative (and erroneous) publicity. This will be a VMC after next earnings (if any of us are still here to enjoy it).
QMRK
'...Total Revenue Grew 29% and Profits Grew 56%
over the Prior Year Quarter...'
DENVER--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 25, 2005--
QualMark Corporation (OTCBB: QMRK), a world leader in designing,
manufacturing and marketing HALT (Highly Accelerated Life Testing),
HASS (Highly Accelerated Stress Screening) and electrodynamic systems,
today announced results for the third quarter and nine months ended
September 30, 2005.
For the quarter (three months ended September 30, 2005):
Revenue --
The Company reported revenue for the quarter of $3,509,000 versus
revenue of $2,717,000 from the third quarter of 2004. Charles
Johnston, President and CEO of QualMark, stated: "Our total revenue
grew 29% and core business revenue grew 13% as compared to the prior
year quarter, as prior period investments in marketing programs have
begun to materialize. This is outstanding as historically the third
quarter represents our slowest period." Mr. Johnston continued:
"During the quarter, we closed an order that approached $600,000,
which represented the largest single order the Company has ever
received. This order was in addition to multiple Typhoon chambers that
were purchased by the same customer throughout 2005. The sale
represents the growing importance and dependency of HALT and HASS
technology in the avionics industries. QualMark ACG revenue remained
consistent. We have implemented specific sales and marketing
initiatives that we expect to capitalize on in the fourth quarter of
this year in the ACG electrodynamic vibration market."
Net Income --
The Company reported a net income for the quarter of $331,000
versus a net income of $212,000 from the third quarter of 2004. "The
close of this quarter is significant for QualMark, as it marks the
ninth consecutive quarter of profitability. Our net income for the
quarter grew 56% as compared to a year ago due to our commitment to
business fundamentals," continued Mr. Johnston.
Earnings per share --
The Company reported diluted income per share for the quarter of
$0.03 as compared to diluted income per share of $0.02 for the third
quarter of 2004. The primary dilution for the Company is attributable
to certain financial securities that are convertible into common
stock.
For the year (nine months ended September 30, 2005):
Revenue --
The Company reported revenue for the year of $10,936,000 versus
revenue of $8,777,000 from 2004. Mr. Johnston stated, "Year to date,
we have grown 25% as compared to the prior year." According to Mr.
Johnston, "the primary drivers for our growth are attributed to our
dominant presence in the international marketplace, our ability to
penetrate new markets, both vertically and horizontally, and the
recurring revenue stream achieved through our QualMark ACG
subsidiary."
Net Income --
The Company reported a net income for the year of $984,000 versus
a net income of $808,000 from 2004. "We are delighted with the
continued growth and profitability of our business. Our net income for
the year grew 22% as compared to a year ago due to our commitment to
business fundamentals," Mr. Johnston concluded.
Earnings per share --
The Company reported diluted income per share for the year of
$0.12 as compared to diluted income per share of $0.09 from 2004. The
primary dilution for the Company is attributable to certain financial
securities that are convertible into common stock. The Company does
not anticipate any additional dilution at this time. However, the
Company may enter into financial transactions to assist with financing
additional acquisitions or provide capital for future growth, which
may further impact dilution.
QualMark's quarterly conference call to discuss third quarter 2005
results will be held today, October 25, 2005, at 11:00 a.m. Eastern
time.
To participate via conference call, dial 888-318-6430 (if calling
from within the U.S.) no later than 10:50 a.m. EDT on October 25. The
leader name is Charles Johnston. The QualMark security code to access
this earnings call is QUALMARK.
-0-
*T
Quarter to Date Year to Date
September 30, September 30,
2005 2004 2005 2004
-------------------------------------------------
Systems revenue $2,863,000 $2,422,000 $8,429,000 $7,841,000
ARTC service revenue 218,000 295,000 830,000 936,000
ACG revenue 428,000 -- 1,677,000 --
-------------------------------------------------
Total revenue 3,509,000 2,717,000 10,936,000 8,777,000
-------------------------------------------------
Gross profit 1,584,000 1,240,000 4,883,000 4,168,000
Gross profit margin 45.2% 45.6% 44.6% 47.5%
-------------------------------------------------
Income from
operations 379,000 235,000 1,111,000 886,000
Net income 331,000 212,000 984,000 808,000
=================================================
Earnings Per Share:
Basic:
Net income 331,000 212,000 984,000 808,000
Preferred stock
dividends (58,000) (54,000) (171,000) (158,000)
Accretion of
redeemable
preferred stock (127,000) (54,000) (227,000) (164,000)
-------------------------------------------------
Net income available
to common
shareholders 146,000 104,000 586,000 486,000
=================================================
Basic earnings per
share $0.03 $0.03 $0.14 $0.13
=================================================
Basic weighted
average shares
outstanding 4,344,000 3,610,000 4,216,000 3,610,000
=================================================
Diluted:
Net income available
to common
shareholders -
Diluted 166,000(a)(b) 158,000 1,044,000(a) 644,000
=================================================
Diluted earnings per
share $0.03 $0.02 $0.12 $0.09
=================================================
Diluted weighted
average shares
outstanding 5,188,000(c) 7,341,000 8,817,000 7,199,000
=================================================
(a) Includes adjustment for interest expense from convertible debt.
(b) Does not include adjustment for preferred stock dividends and
accretion, as the effect would be anti-dilutive for the quarter.
(c) Does not include common shares obtainable upon conversion of
preferred stock, as the effect would be anti-dilutive for the
quarter.
*T
QualMark Corporation, headquartered in Denver, Colorado, is the
leader in designing, marketing, and manufacturing accelerated
life-testing systems providing the world's largest corporations with
solutions that improve product reliability and allow them to get to
market faster. The Company has installed more than 600 of its
proprietary testing systems in 25 countries. The Company operates and
partners with ten testing facilities worldwide.
The Company also offers electrodynamic vibration solutions through
its subsidiary, QualMark ACG Corporation.
QualMark ACG Corporation, headquartered in West Haven,
Connecticut, is the leader in supplying electrodynamic systems,
components, and service to the worldwide vibration test equipment
market. For over 30 years, QualMark ACG (formerly ACG Dynamics, Inc.)
has been supplying quality replacement parts and field service for
most brands of vibration equipment.
The statements included in this press release concerning
predictions of economic performance and management's plans and
objectives constitute forward-looking statements made pursuant to the
safe harbor provisions of Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act
of 1934, as amended, and Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as
amended. These statements involve risks and uncertainties that could
cause actual results to differ materially from the forward-looking
statements. Factors which could cause or contribute to such
differences include, but are not limited to, factors detailed in the
Company's Securities and Exchange Commission filings; downturns in the
Company's primary markets; variability of order flow, future economic
conditions; competitive products and pricing; new product development;
disruptions in the Company's operations from acts of God or extended
maintenance; transportation difficulties; or the delivery of product
under existing contracts and other factors.
No, Lentiman can't handle the reality of other people. He will only participate in threads in which he is the moderator, which makes him uniquely unfit to be one. What a tiresome man.
I will NEVER relent and let the nutjobs have the podium all to themeselves. I will die before I capitulate to letting people (nut jobs) post anywhere that I visit about hurricanes getting created and steered by Japanese mafia (or whoever), missile hitting the Pentagon instead of a plane, grand schemes to take over main street USA by putting an Army guy on every corner, stocks to go up when Mars is aligned with Uranus (or whatever) or anything else that oozes out of that 1% nut job part of our society.
You can take it to the bank that I will NEVER stop a full-frontal assault on such stupidity!
I AM intolerant of nutjob stupidity. That is a fact. I AM intolerant because a real threat to our society is if these nut jobs get a foothold.
There are only four things blah blah blah blah.
otc -- I had forgotten you can't pm. I only pm'ed so as not clutter the board about baseball. Despite my location, I was born on the southside of Chicago, as were both of my parents, and my daughter attended U of C where I visited her often, and would always attend Comisky when I did. Actually, El Paso High School football, UTEP basketball and the Chi-Town Pale Hose are the only sports teams I care about (and then only when they're doing well). It's the first time I've been able to flex my White Sox muscles since the 6th grade.
Like everyone else on this planet, you live in a subjective reality, Tinman. You believe what you must.
There used to be something in the United States called the National Guard. It was like a state militia, a volunteer, citizens militia – a posse of sorts – much like what was proposed in the 2nd Amendment. It was not under the authority of the Pentagon, and it was often used precisely to help deal with natural disasters within its own state. It had never been used for the purpose of invading another nation (much less one that posed no threat to us) until the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfield-et. al. cabal commandeered it for its own purposes. Had the Louisiana National Guard not been in Iraq, it would have been ideal candidate to do what needed to be done in N.O., and it should not be the object of ridicule that you made it out to be in your note. It is in stark contrast to the traditions and ideals of the United States that the federal army be used as a policing authority within our own borders, against our own citizens, as both Rogue and the scholar you so intolerantly dismissed pointed out.
You in fact are a very intolerant man, Len. You shout down people who disagree with you and you call them nut-jobs. And then you call yourself a Christian. You told Rogue that he was insane (and you did so in all caps) when I can guarantee you that there is far greater likelihood that the US government can affect the weather than there is that Jesus Christ is going to return to earth and give eternal life to everyone who believes that the last time He visited, He died for our sins, whatever the hell that means. Have you ever considered therapy, Len, or at least a little soul-searching.
ksuave
PS -- I notice that you edited your last post well after the fifteen minutes most people have to edit their posts. Would you ever have the courage to engage in debate on a thread in which you are not the moderator?
Dear Len,
It must be wonderful to be so certain that you're always completely right about everything, but it must be so lonely for you to live in a world where everyone is dumber than you. I think the lonliness explains a lot.
Sincerely,
ksuave
Why the Military Shouldn't Take Charge in Emergencies
By John Barnhill
Mr. Barnhill is an independent historian in Houston, Tex., and a writer for the History News Service.
A majority of Americans in a recent poll expressed support for the use of our military as part of law enforcement during domestic emergencies. President Bush evidently shares this view, for he proposed using the military to enforce the law in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. He suggested as well that the military might be best qualified to quarantine sections of the United States in the event of a bird flu epidemic. He has proposed that the Department of Defense, not a civilian agency, receive $5 billion to stockpile flu vaccines.
It's hard to think of a stance more antithetical to the political convictions of our founders. "No standing armies" was one of the rallying cries of the American Revolution. This strong historical distrust of the military later found expression in the Posse Comitatus law of 1878, still in force.
Archaic as the title of that law sounds, the principle is as relevant today as it was more than a hundred years ago. Martial law is not to be imposed lightly. Recovering an understanding of why the Founders feared the domestic use of the military will be essential if we are to block this new threat to our republic.
The Posse Comitatus law was carefully observed for nearly 80 years, but in 1957 President Eisenhower sent the military to Little Rock, Ark., to quell anti-integration protests, and President Kennedy sent troops to Mississippi and Alabama in the 1960s. In the 1980s and 1990s the erosion of the restrictions on the use of the military accelerated. Under President Reagan, Congress authorized the use of the military's air and sea power in efforts to control drug smuggling. The Coast Guard served aboard Navy ships to handle the actual boarding and arrest, while the Navy provided intelligence, surveillance and other facilities.
The military later became involved in immigration control, tariff enforcement, civil disturbance riot control, national disasters and crowd control, as in the deployment of 10,000 troops to the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. Coincidentally, perhaps, public esteem for the military rose from a mid-70s low of 25 percent to a peak of 75 percent in 2000. Even after the prison scandals at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, the military remained in 2005 the most respected institution in the United States.
Not so two hundred years ago. The framers of the U.S. Constitution remembered how British soldiers served as police in 1770. Untrained in police work, the soldiers lost their discipline and fired into a crowd in an incident that came to be called the Boston Massacre. The framers also remembered military abuses such as quartering, which occasionally put British eavesdroppers into the homes of colonial patriots.
Contemporaries then, as now, realized that sometimes upholding the law required more than the local constable. Sometimes the sheriff needed a posse comitatus, or posse, as they say in Western movies. Always, though, the posse was composed of civilians. When the sheriff wanted people with military experience, he called on the militia, weekend warriors as it were, not the full-time military.
When the militia, later the National Guard, served as a posse comitatus it was under civilian authorities, obligated to uphold the Constitution. For 70 years, troops served in police roles, including monitoring the polls to keep drunks and women and other unauthorized voters from voting illegally.
The lead-up to the Posse Comitatus law began in 1854 when Attorney General Caleb Cushing ruled that the soldiers could legitimately serve, and in a military, not a civilian, capacity. After Cushing's ruling, throughout the Civil War and Reconstruction the Army, not the militia, served as a peacekeeping force in both the West and the South.
The West was short of law enforcers but well stocked with Indians and outlaws. The West was also too far away from Washington, D.C., military headquarters for post commanders to wait for permission to respond to an Indian attack or an outlaw's rampage. Necessity led military commanders to take the law into their own hands, sometimes at the expense of constitutional niceties. Although justified by exigency, the use of the military as police threatened the Constitution.
The extensive use of the military to quell disturbances and enforce anti-Confederate, pro-black laws in the Reconstruction South was offensive to Southerners who had just lost a war to that same army. Offense became outrage in 1876 when it seemed that Republican Rutherford B. Hayes won the presidency in part because federal troops controlling the polls had rejected likely Democratic voters.
Reacting to the use of the military for partisan political purposes, the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives passed the Posse Comitatus Act. Rejecting 70 years of tradition that allowed troops to be used in civilian roles if they were under civilian authority, the Posse Comitatus Act defined the use of troops as the equivalent of martial law.
Posse Comitatus applied to the Army, Navy and Marines (the Air Force was covered after World War II), and the Reserves. The Coast Guard is exempt, as is the National Guard. The Coast Guard is not under the Department of Defense. The National Guard is historically a state force, similar to the old-time militias, unless federalized by the president. Violation of the Posse Comitatus Act is subject to a fine up to $10,000 and/or up to two years in prison.
Each exemption from the Posse Comitatus Act -- like the ones proposed now -- potentially makes martial law easier to accept. This is especially the case when the public trusts no other institution as much as its military. Martial law suspends civil rights and liberties guaranteed by the Constitution. A military commander may declare that civil courts and police are not functioning and impose military law. The commander may order curfews, seize private property and prohibit constitutionally guaranteed rights to speech and assembly. Those charged will lack due process guarantees such as the right to appeal when tried and are imprisoned under the military rather than the civilian court system. Just such abuses led to the enactment of Posse Comitatus.
Although Congress must prescribe what the military can be used for, the president may override restrictions in event of war, insurrection or "other serious emergency."
With a president who seems to prefer using the military rather than any other arm of the executive, regardless of circumstance, we need protection from military interference today as much as ever. With all due respect, the president and those who support using the army in time of domestic disturbance like that of the Gulf Coast last month are wrong.
This piece was distributed for non-exclusive use by the History News Service, an informal syndicate of professional historians who seek to improve the public's understanding of current events by setting these events in their historical contexts. The article may be republished as long as both the author and the History News Service are clearly credited.
http://hnn.us/articles/16937.html
EMFP makers of nano-masks marketed as protection from avian flu has just filled a gap it had left on it recent rise from about .40 to about 1.10. Currently at .85, half hour before the start of its annual shareholders' meting in beautuful Las Vegas. Place your bets . . .
Careful, Rogue, a litle hysteria is good for my portfolio.
SEHO-- It can change your zipcode, and then protect it:
http://www.smallcapnetwork.net/archive/listserv/20051019-1.html
GSHF -- volume and price rising.
(Sold motg yesterday morn at .06 for very short-term 50% gain, thx.)
The Christian Paradox
How a faithful nation gets Jesus wrong (Including you OTC)
Posted on Thursday, September 15, 2005. What it means to be Christian in America. An excerpt from this report appeared in August 2005. The complete text appears below. Originally from August 2005. By Bill McKibben.
Only 40 percent of Americans can name more than four of the Ten Commandments, and a scant half can cite any of the four authors of the Gospels. Twelve percent believe Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife. This failure to recall the specifics of our Christian heritage may be further evidence of our nation’s educational decline, but it probably doesn’t matter all that much in spiritual or political terms. Here is a statistic that does matter: Three quarters of Americans believe the Bible teaches that “God helps those who help themselves.” That is, three out of four Americans believe that this uber-American idea, a notion at the core of our current individualist politics and culture, which was in fact uttered by Ben Franklin, actually appears in Holy Scripture. The thing is, not only is Franklin’s wisdom not biblical; it’s counter-biblical. Few ideas could be further from the gospel message, with its radical summons to love of neighbor. On this essential matter, most Americans—most American Christians—are simply wrong, as if 75 percent of American scientists believed that Newton proved gravity causes apples to fly up.
Asking Christians what Christ taught isn’t a trick. When we say we are a Christian nation—and, overwhelmingly, we do—it means something. People who go to church absorb lessons there and make real decisions based on those lessons; increasingly, these lessons inform their politics. (One poll found that 11 percent of U.S. churchgoers were urged by their clergy to vote in a particular way in the 2004 election, up from 6 percent in 2000.) When George Bush says that Jesus Christ is his favorite philosopher, he may or may not be sincere, but he is reflecting the sincere beliefs of the vast majority of Americans.
And therein is the paradox. America is simultaneously the most professedly Christian of the developed nations and the least Christian in its behavior. That paradox—more important, perhaps, than the much touted ability of French women to stay thin on a diet of chocolate and cheese—illuminates the hollow at the core of our boastful, careening culture.
* * *
Ours is among the most spiritually homogenous rich nations on earth. Depending on which poll you look at and how the question is asked, somewhere around 85 percent of us call ourselves Christian. Israel, by way of comparison, is 77 percent Jewish. It is true that a smaller number of Americans—about 75 percent—claim they actually pray to God on a daily basis, and only 33 percent say they manage to get to church every week. Still, even if that 85 percent overstates actual practice, it clearly represents aspiration. In fact, there is nothing else that unites more than four fifths of America. Every other statistic one can cite about American behavior is essentially also a measure of the behavior of professed Christians. That’s what America is: a place saturated in Christian identity.
But is it Christian? This is not a matter of angels dancing on the heads of pins. Christ was pretty specific about what he had in mind for his followers. What if we chose some simple criterion—say, giving aid to the poorest people—as a reasonable proxy for Christian behavior? After all, in the days before his crucifixion, when Jesus summed up his message for his disciples, he said the way you could tell the righteous from the damned was by whether they’d fed the hungry, slaked the thirsty, clothed the naked, welcomed the stranger, and visited the prisoner. What would we find then?
In 2004, as a share of our economy, we ranked second to last, after Italy, among developed countries in government foreign aid. Per capita we each provide fifteen cents a day in official development assistance to poor countries. And it’s not because we were giving to private charities for relief work instead. Such funding increases our average daily donation by just six pennies, to twenty-one cents. It’s also not because Americans were too busy taking care of their own; nearly 18 percent of American children lived in poverty (compared with, say, 8 percent in Sweden). In fact, by pretty much any measure of caring for the least among us you want to propose—childhood nutrition, infant mortality, access to preschool—we come in nearly last among the rich nations, and often by a wide margin. The point is not just that (as everyone already knows) the American nation trails badly in all these categories; it’s that the overwhelmingly Christian American nation trails badly in all these categories, categories to which Jesus paid particular attention. And it’s not as if the numbers are getting better: the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported last year that the number of households that were “food insecure with hunger” had climbed more than 26 percent between 1999 and 2003.
This Christian nation also tends to make personal, as opposed to political, choices that the Bible would seem to frown upon. Despite the Sixth Commandment, we are, of course, the most violent rich nation on earth, with a murder rate four or five times that of our European peers. We have prison populations greater by a factor of six or seven than other rich nations (which at least should give us plenty of opportunity for visiting the prisoners). Having been told to turn the other cheek, we’re the only Western democracy left that executes its citizens, mostly in those states where Christianity is theoretically strongest. Despite Jesus’ strong declarations against divorce, our marriages break up at a rate—just over half—that compares poorly with the European Union’s average of about four in ten. That average may be held down by the fact that Europeans marry less frequently, and by countries, like Italy, where divorce is difficult; still, compare our success with, say, that of the godless Dutch, whose divorce rate is just over 37 percent. Teenage pregnancy? We’re at the top of the charts. Personal self-discipline—like, say, keeping your weight under control? Buying on credit? Running government deficits? Do you need to ask?
* * *
Are Americans hypocrites? Of course they are. But most people (me, for instance) are hypocrites. The more troubling explanation for this disconnect between belief and action, I think, is that most Americans—which means most believers—have replaced the Christianity of the Bible, with its call for deep sharing and personal sacrifice, with a competing creed.
In fact, there may be several competing creeds. For many Christians, deciphering a few passages of the Bible to figure out the schedule for the End Times has become a central task. You can log on to RaptureReady.com for a taste of how some of these believers view the world—at this writing the Rapture Index had declined three points to 152 because, despite an increase in the number of U.S. pagans, “Wal-Mart is falling behind in its plan to bar code all products with radio tags.” Other End-Timers are more interested in forcing the issue—they’re convinced that the way to coax the Lord back to earth is to “Christianize” our nation and then the world. Consider House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. At church one day he listened as the pastor, urging his flock to support the administration, declared that “the war between America and Iraq is the gateway to the Apocalypse.” DeLay rose to speak, not only to the congregation but to 225 Christian TV and radio stations. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “what has been spoken here tonight is the truth of God.”
The apocalyptics may not be wrong. One could make a perfectly serious argument that the policies of Tom DeLay are in fact hastening the End Times. But there’s nothing particularly Christian about this hastening. The creed of Tom DeLay—of Tim LaHaye and his Left Behind books, of Pat Robertson’s “The Antichrist is probably a Jew alive in Israel today”—ripened out of the impossibly poetic imagery of the Book of Revelation. Imagine trying to build a theory of the Constitution by obsessively reading and rereading the Twenty-fifth Amendment, and you’ll get an idea of what an odd approach this is. You might be able to spin elaborate fantasies about presidential succession, but you’d have a hard time working backwards to “We the People.” This is the contemporary version of Archbishop Ussher’s seventeenth-century calculation that the world had been created on October 23, 4004 B.C., and that the ark touched down on Mount Ararat on May 5, 2348 B.C., a Wednesday. Interesting, but a distant distraction from the gospel message.
The apocalyptics, however, are the lesser problem. It is another competing (though sometimes overlapping) creed, this one straight from the sprawling megachurches of the new exurbs, that frightens me most. Its deviation is less obvious precisely because it looks so much like the rest of the culture. In fact, most of what gets preached in these palaces isn’t loony at all. It is disturbingly conventional. The pastors focus relentlessly on you and your individual needs. Their goal is to service consumers—not communities but individuals: “seekers” is the term of art, people who feel the need for some spirituality in their (or their children’s) lives but who aren’t tightly bound to any particular denomination or school of thought. The result is often a kind of soft-focus, comfortable, suburban faith.
A New York Times reporter visiting one booming megachurch outside Phoenix recently found the typical scene: a drive-through latte stand, Krispy Kreme doughnuts at every service, and sermons about “how to discipline your children, how to reach your professional goals, how to invest your money, how to reduce your debt.” On Sundays children played with church-distributed Xboxes, and many congregants had signed up for a twice-weekly aerobics class called Firm Believers. A list of bestsellers compiled monthly by the Christian Booksellers Association illuminates the creed. It includes texts like Your Best Life Now by Joel Osteen—pastor of a church so mega it recently leased a 16,000-seat sports arena in Houston for its services—which even the normally tolerant Publishers Weekly dismissed as “a treatise on how to get God to serve the demands of self-centered individuals.” Nearly as high is Beth Moore, with her Believing God—“Beth asks the tough questions concerning the fruit of our Christian lives,” such as “are we living as fully as we can?” Other titles include Humor for a Woman’s Heart, a collection of “humorous writings” designed to “lift a life above the stresses and strains of the day”; The Five Love Languages, in which Dr. Gary Chapman helps you figure out if you’re speaking in the same emotional dialect as your significant other; and Karol Ladd’s The Power of a Positive Woman. Ladd is the co-founder of USA Sonshine Girls—the “Son” in Sonshine, of course, is the son of God—and she is unremittingly upbeat in presenting her five-part plan for creating a life with “more calm, less stress.”
Not that any of this is so bad in itself. We do have stressful lives, humor does help, and you should pay attention to your own needs. Comfortable suburbanites watch their parents die, their kids implode. Clearly I need help with being positive. And I have no doubt that such texts have turned people into better parents, better spouses, better bosses. It’s just that these authors, in presenting their perfectly sensible advice, somehow manage to ignore Jesus’ radical and demanding focus on others. It may, in fact, be true that “God helps those who help themselves,” both financially and emotionally. (Certainly fortune does.) But if so it’s still a subsidiary, secondary truth, more Franklinity than Christianity. You could eliminate the scriptural references in most of these bestsellers and they would still make or not make the same amount of sense. Chicken Soup for the Zoroastrian Soul. It is a perfect mirror of the secular bestseller lists, indeed of the secular culture, with its American fixation on self-improvement, on self-esteem. On self. These similarities make it difficult (although not impossible) for the televangelists to posit themselves as embattled figures in a “culture war”— they offer too uncanny a reflection of the dominant culture, a culture of unrelenting self-obsession.
* * *
Who am I to criticize someone else’s religion? After all, if there is anything Americans agree on, it’s that we should tolerate everyone else’s religious expression. As a Newsweek writer put it some years ago at the end of his cover story on apocalyptic visions and the Book of Revelation, “Who’s to say that John’s mythic battle between Christ and Antichrist is not a valid insight into what the history of humankind is all about?” (Not Newsweek, that’s for sure; their religious covers are guaranteed big sellers.) To that I can only answer that I’m a . . . Christian.
Not a professional one; I’m an environmental writer mostly. I’ve never progressed further in the church hierarchy than Sunday school teacher at my backwoods Methodist church. But I’ve spent most of my Sunday mornings in a pew. I grew up in church youth groups and stayed active most of my adult life—started homeless shelters in church basements, served soup at the church food pantry, climbed to the top of the rickety ladder to put the star on the church Christmas tree. My work has been, at times, influenced by all that—I’ve written extensively about the Book of Job, which is to me the first great piece of nature writing in the Western tradition, and about the overlaps between Christianity and environmentalism. In fact, I imagine I’m one of a fairly small number of writers who have had cover stories in both the Christian Century, the magazine of liberal mainline Protestantism, and Christianity Today, which Billy Graham founded, not to mention articles in Sojourners, the magazine of the progressive evangelical community co-founded by Jim Wallis.
Indeed, it was my work with religious environmentalists that first got me thinking along the lines of this essay. We were trying to get politicians to understand why the Bible actually mandated protecting the world around us (Noah: the first Green), work that I think is true and vital. But one day it occurred to me that the parts of the world where people actually had cut dramatically back on their carbon emissions, actually did live voluntarily in smaller homes and take public transit, were the same countries where people were giving aid to the poor and making sure everyone had health care—countries like Norway and Sweden, where religion was relatively unimportant. How could that be? For Christians there should be something at least a little scary in the notion that, absent the magical answers of religion, people might just get around to solving their problems and strengthening their communities in more straightforward ways.
But for me, in any event, the European success is less interesting than the American failure. Because we’re not going to be like them. Maybe we’d be better off if we abandoned religion for secular rationality, but we’re not going to; for the foreseeable future this will be a “Christian” nation. The question is, what kind of Christian nation?
* * *
The tendencies I’ve been describing—toward an apocalyptic End Times faith, toward a comfort-the-comfortable, personal-empowerment faith—veil the actual, and remarkable, message of the Gospels. When one of the Pharisees asked Jesus what the core of the law was, Jesus replied:
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.
Love your neighbor as yourself: although its rhetorical power has been dimmed by repetition, that is a radical notion, perhaps the most radical notion possible. Especially since Jesus, in all his teachings, made it very clear who the neighbor you were supposed to love was: the poor person, the sick person, the naked person, the hungry person. The last shall be made first; turn the other cheek; a rich person aiming for heaven is like a camel trying to walk through the eye of a needle. On and on and on—a call for nothing less than a radical, voluntary, and effective reordering of power relationships, based on the principle of love.
I confess, even as I write these words, to a feeling close to embarrassment. Because in public we tend not to talk about such things—my theory of what Jesus mostly meant seems like it should be left in church, or confined to some religious publication. But remember the overwhelming connection between America and Christianity; what Jesus meant is the most deeply potent political, cultural, social question. To ignore it, or leave it to the bullies and the salesmen of the televangelist sects, means to walk away from a central battle over American identity. At the moment, the idea of Jesus has been hijacked by people with a series of causes that do not reflect his teachings. The Bible is a long book, and even the Gospels have plenty in them, some of it seemingly contradictory and hard to puzzle out. But love your neighbor as yourself—not do unto others as you would have them do unto you, but love your neighbor as yourself—will suffice as a gloss. There is no disputing the centrality of this message, nor is there any disputing how easy it is to ignore that message. Because it is so counterintuitive, Christians have had to keep repeating it to themselves right from the start. Consider Paul, for instance, instructing the church at Galatea: “For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment,” he wrote. “‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”
American churches, by and large, have done a pretty good job of loving the neighbor in the next pew. A pastor can spend all Sunday talking about the Rapture Index, but if his congregation is thriving you can be assured he’s spending the other six days visiting people in the hospital, counseling couples, and sitting up with grieving widows. All this human connection is important. But if the theology makes it harder to love the neighbor a little farther away—particularly the poor and the weak—then it’s a problem. And the dominant theologies of the moment do just that. They undercut Jesus, muffle his hard words, deaden his call, and in the end silence him. In fact, the soft-focus consumer gospel of the suburban megachurches is a perfect match for emergent conservative economic notions about personal responsibility instead of collective action. Privatize Social Security? Keep health care for people who can afford it? File those under “God helps those who help themselves.”
Take Alabama as an example. In 2002, Bob Riley was elected governor of the state, where 90 percent of residents identify themselves as Christians. Riley could safely be called a conservative—right-wing majordomo Grover Norquist gave him a Friend of the Taxpayer Award every year he was in Congress, where he’d never voted for a tax increase. But when he took over Alabama, he found himself administering a tax code that dated to 1901. The richest Alabamians paid 3 percent of their income in taxes, and the poorest paid up to 12 percent; income taxes kicked in if a family of four made $4,600 (even in Mississippi the threshold was $19,000), while out-of-state timber companies paid $1.25 an acre in property taxes. Alabama was forty-eighth in total state and local taxes, and the largest proportion of that income came from sales tax—a super-regressive tax that in some counties reached into double digits. So Riley proposed a tax hike, partly to dig the state out of a fiscal crisis and partly to put more money into the state’s school system, routinely ranked near the worst in the nation. He argued that it was Christian duty to look after the poor more carefully.
Had the new law passed, the owner of a $250,000 home in Montgomery would have paid $1,432 in property taxes—we’re not talking Sweden here. But it didn’t pass. It was crushed by a factor of two to one. Sixty-eight percent of the state voted against it—meaning, of course, something like 68 percent of the Christians who voted. The opposition was led, in fact, not just by the state’s wealthiest interests but also by the Christian Coalition of Alabama. “You’ll find most Alabamians have got a charitable heart,” said John Giles, the group’s president. “They just don’t want it coming out of their pockets.” On its website, the group argued that taxing the rich at a higher rate than the poor “results in punishing success” and that “when an individual works for their income, that money belongs to the individual.” You might as well just cite chapter and verse from Poor Richard’s Almanack. And whatever the ideology, the results are clear. “I’m tired of Alabama being first in things that are bad,” said Governor Riley, “and last in things that are good.”
* * *
A rich man came to Jesus one day and asked what he should do to get into heaven. Jesus did not say he should invest, spend, and let the benefits trickle down; he said sell what you have, give the money to the poor, and follow me. Few plainer words have been spoken. And yet, for some reason, the Christian Coalition of America—founded in 1989 in order to “preserve, protect and defend the Judeo-Christian values that made this the greatest country in history”—proclaimed last year that its top legislative priority would be “making permanent President Bush’s 2001 federal tax cuts.”
Similarly, a furor erupted last spring when it emerged that a Colorado jury had consulted the Bible before sentencing a killer to death. Experts debated whether the (Christian) jurors should have used an outside authority in their deliberations, and of course the Christian right saw it as one more sign of a secular society devaluing religion. But a more interesting question would have been why the jurors fixated on Leviticus 24, with its call for an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. They had somehow missed Jesus’ explicit refutation in the New Testament: “You have heard that it was said, ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.”
And on and on. The power of the Christian right rests largely in the fact that they boldly claim religious authority, and by their very boldness convince the rest of us that they must know what they’re talking about. They’re like the guy who gives you directions with such loud confidence that you drive on even though the road appears to be turning into a faint, rutted track. But their theology is appealing for another reason too: it coincides with what we want to believe. How nice it would be if Jesus had declared that our income was ours to keep, instead of insisting that we had to share. How satisfying it would be if we were supposed to hate our enemies. Religious conservatives will always have a comparatively easy sell.
But straight is the path and narrow is the way. The gospel is too radical for any culture larger than the Amish to ever come close to realizing; in demanding a departure from selfishness it conflicts with all our current desires. Even the first time around, judging by the reaction, the Gospels were pretty unwelcome news to an awful lot of people. There is not going to be a modern-day return to the church of the early believers, holding all things in common—that’s not what I’m talking about. Taking seriously the actual message of Jesus, though, should serve at least to moderate the greed and violence that mark this culture. It’s hard to imagine a con much more audacious than making Christ the front man for a program of tax cuts for the rich or war in Iraq. If some modest part of the 85 percent of us who are Christians woke up to that fact, then the world might change.
It is possible, I think. Yes, the mainline Protestant churches that supported civil rights and opposed the war in Vietnam are mostly locked in a dreary decline as their congregations dwindle and their elders argue endlessly about gay clergy and same-sex unions. And the Catholic Church, for most of its American history a sturdy exponent of a “love your neighbor” theology, has been weakened, too, its hierarchy increasingly motivated by a single-issue focus on abortion. Plenty of vital congregations are doing great good works—they’re the ones that have nurtured me—but they aren’t where the challenge will arise; they’ve grown shy about talking about Jesus, more comfortable with the language of sociology and politics. More and more it’s Bible-quoting Christians, like Wallis’s Sojourners movement and that Baptist seminary graduate Bill Moyers, who are carrying the fight.
The best-selling of all Christian books in recent years, Rick Warren’s The Purpose-Driven Life, illustrates the possibilities. It has all the hallmarks of self-absorption (in one five-page chapter, I counted sixty-five uses of the word “you”), but it also makes a powerful case that we’re made for mission. What that mission is never becomes clear, but the thirst for it is real. And there’s no great need for Warren to state that purpose anyhow. For Christians, the plainspoken message of the Gospels is clear enough. If you have any doubts, read the Sermon on the Mount.
Admittedly, this is hope against hope; more likely the money changers and power brokers will remain ascendant in our “spiritual” life. Since the days of Constantine, emperors and rich men have sought to co-opt the teachings of Jesus. As in so many areas of our increasingly market-tested lives, the co-opters—the TV men, the politicians, the Christian “interest groups”—have found a way to make each of us complicit in that travesty, too. They have invited us to subvert the church of Jesus even as we celebrate it. With their help we have made golden calves of ourselves—become a nation of terrified, self-obsessed idols. It works, and it may well keep working for a long time to come. When Americans hunger for selfless love and are fed only love of self, they will remain hungry, and too often hungry people just come back for more of the same.
About the Author
Bill McKibben, a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College, is the author of many books, including The End of Nature and Wandering Home: A Long Walk Across America’s Most Hopeful Landscape. His last article for Harper’s Magazine, “The Cuba Diet,” appeared in the April 2005 issue.
Yeah, what THREES said.
What's your take on MOTG, rrufff? Will they get an 'E'? Will it matter? TIA . . .