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Science is rational; scientists are not
...I bring this up because many scientists believe that because science is such a superior method of extracting information about the world around us, and constructing predictive models which have been shown to have great utility, that that means that they as scientists can simply transfer their godlike powers to other domains with the greatest of ease. But as the above should make clear I believe this is a false perception, because the power of science arises from the intersection of the communal wisdom of tens of thousands of individuals over decades with the nature of the subject at hand. Granted, there are individual geniuses of great brilliance such as the great Isaac Newton, but the outcomes of his dabbling in alchemy and scriptural hermeneutics should go to illustrate that cognition applied to a fool's errand only results in glorious foolery....

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Poll shows support for torture among Southern evangelicals
WASHINGTON -- A new poll released Thursday (Sept. 11) finds that nearly six in 10 white Southern evangelicals believe torture is justified, but their views can shift when they consider the Christian principle of the golden rule.

The poll, commissioned by Faith in Public Life and Mercer University, found that 57 percent of respondents said torture can be often or sometimes justified to gain important information from suspected terrorists. Thirty-eight percent said it was never or rarely justified....

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Our Trillion-Dollar War
No, it’s not the War in Iraq—it’s the War on Poverty. Incredible as it may seem, Americans transfer more than a trillion dollars each year to low-income families through a bewildering variety of programs, all in the name of fighting poverty and inequality. That’s about seven times the cost of the Iraq war....

...It’s about ten times as much as we spent on redistributive policies in the 1950s (in inflation-adjusted dollars).

It’s equal to the total before-tax cash income of middle-income households. That’s right, we transfer to the low-income population an amount equal to the entire income of middle-income households, that is, households in the middle fifth (40th to 60th percentile) of the American income distribution.

If a trillion dollars were simply given to those counted as poor by the federal government (37 million in 2005), it would amount to $27,000 per person. That’s $81,000 for a family of three, higher than the median income of all American families, and far greater than the poverty threshold of $15,577. ...

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Massive police raids on suspected protesters in Minneapolis
Protesters here in Minneapolis have been targeted by a series of highly intimidating, sweeping police raids across the city, involving teams of 25-30 officers in riot gear, with semi-automatic weapons drawn, entering homes of those suspected of planning protests, handcuffing and forcing them to lay on the floor, while law enforcement officers searched the homes, seizing computers, journals, and political pamphlets. Last night, members of the St. Paul police department and the Ramsey County sheriff's department handcuffed, photographed and detained dozens of people meeting at a public venue to plan a demonstration, charging them with no crime other than "fire code violations," and early this morning, the Sheriff's department sent teams of officers into at least four Minneapolis area homes where suspected protesters were staying....

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The Great Society: Not So Great
...The key things to remember here are the LBJ launched the Great Society in 1964, and Ronald Reagan was inaugurated in 1981. Policies tend to take a year or two to go into effect, so the earliest changes we could plausibly credit to LBJ and Reagan are those that occurred after 1965 and 1982, respectively.

So what I see in this data is a period of steadily falling policy that began long before the Great Society. Unfortunately, we don’t have comparable pre-1959 data, so we can’t see how things looked during the 1950s, but my understanding is that the poverty rate had been falling steadily for decades before the Great Society was inaugurated. But in any event, something was already causing poverty to fall before LBJ announced his Great Society, and the best we can say is that his programs may have slightly accelerated the process.

But the thing about this graph that really undermines Matt’s story is the 1980s. The poverty rate hit bottom in 1978, increased sharply between 1979 and 1982, and then declined steadily, if slowly, from 1983 to 1989. If we’re going to be assigning blame based on eyeballing graphs (and again, I’m skeptical), surely the blame for this particular spike goes to the Carter administration, not “12 years of conservative rule.” The poverty rate in 1982, the first year we can attribute to Reagan policies, was virtually identical to the poverty rate in 1993, the last year we can attribute to Bush....

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Socialism and Medicine, Part 2
...It is clear that economic calculation is much clearer and more exact if one is not depending on third parties for payment, so it is not surprising that when insurance companies and government officials realized they did not have bottomless pits of cash to pay to medical professionals, they began to limit what they were willing to pay. Despite the claims of economist Paul Krugman, who writes a column for the New York Times, and others who advocate socialist medical care, all third-party payers, be they insurance firms or governments, face cost constraints and have sought to limit their own exposure.

At the same time, the system has worked to make things more costly on the supply side. For example, state legislatures are fond of mandating new programs requiring all private insurers to provide certain benefits, such as yearly mammograms or mental-health coverage. Invariably, as health care becomes increasingly politicized, politicians seek to force insurers to carry the programs that are politically popular, even if they drive up costs and make insurance less affordable for private customers. ...

...The last statement will come as a shock to people who are convinced after reading Paul Krugman’s New York Times columns that medical care in this country is pure free enterprise and that it is free enterprise that is driving up the costs. In a recent column, Krugman declared that medical care in the United States is costly because of high-quality medical capital such as MRI and CAT scan devices. His reasoning goes as follows:

# Those devices are expensive.
# Doctors charge a lot for tests from those machines, since the devices are costly.
# Because the tests are expensive, they drive up health care costs.

If Krugman were not an economist, perhaps he could be forgiven for constructing such a faulty chain of economic logic. First, and most important, he is not examining what the CAT scan and MRI devices replace. They permit doctors to quickly engage in exploratory surgery in which they are able to quickly diagnose different disorders. Before the advent of these devices, doctors had to perform invasive procedures for which there was a recovery period; today, they are able to quickly diagnose problems at a fraction of the total costs that once were involved in such examinations. ...

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More Americans Question Religion's Role in Politics
Some Americans are having a change of heart about mixing religion and politics. A new survey finds a narrow majority of the public saying that churches and other houses of worship should keep out of political matters and not express their views on day-to-day social and political matters. For a decade, majorities of Americans had voiced support for religious institutions speaking out on such issues.

The new national survey by the Pew Research Center reveals that most of the reconsideration of the desirability of religious involvement in politics has occurred among conservatives. Four years ago, just 30% of conservatives believed that churches and other houses of worship should stay out of politics. Today, 50% of conservatives express this view.

As a result, conservatives' views on this issue are much more in line with the views of moderates and liberals than was previously the case. Similarly, the sharp divisions between Republicans and Democrats that previously existed on this issue have disappeared. ...

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Attention All "Evil-Doers": This Really is a Religious War
Like many a good oppressed American Christian, retired Lt. Gen. William "my God was bigger than his" Boykin has now written of his unbearable persecution and suffering in a book. As expected, Boykin, in Never Surrender: A Soldier's Journey to the Crossroads of Faith and Freedom, claims that the quotes from his evangelical pep rallies that caused him so much trouble were "ripped out of context" by the media. But, in explaining this alleged out of context quoting, Boykin himself resorts to ripping his own words out of context -- the only way he can make his backpedalling seem plausible.

I don't want to dwell on Boykin too much. In fact, I hadn't actually intended to write about Boykin at all. He is now retired, and, other than feeding the persecution complex enjoyed by so many other members of our country's oppressed majority religion, he can't do much further damage. What's of far greater concern is the number other military leaders and members of Congress -- in office now -- who have publicly made Boykin-like statements describing the current war as a religious one, a subject that I coincidentally happened to be writing about last week when I found out that Boykin's book was
being released.....

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Federal Worker Pay Blasts Off
The new data show that the 1.8 million federal civilian workers earned an average wage of $77,143 in 2007, which is 61 percent higher than the $48,035 average in the U.S. private sector. That 61 percent pay advantage has increased from a 34 percent advantage in 2000.

Looking at total compensation (wages plus benefits), federal workers earned an average $116,450 in 2007, which is more than double the $57,615 private sector average. The federal compensation advantage increased from 68 percent in 2000 to 102 percent today. Federal workers not only earn much more than private sector workers, their earnings advantage is getting more pronounced every year.

Federal compensation rose quickly during the 1990s, but even faster during the 2000s. I call this the “Bush Bounce” because it appears that the Bush administration has caved into federal union demands for expanded pay year after year. Between 2000 and 2007, average federal compensation increased at an annual average rate of 6.3 percent, which compares to the private sector increase of 3.5 percent. During the 1990s, average federal worker compensation increased at an average rate of 5.1 percent. The charts below illustate the “blast off” in federal wages and compensation. ...

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Cardinal George’s deposition
... In his deposition, George revealed under oath the steps, missteps and lies that led to McCormack’s tenure at St. Agatha years after initial allegations of misconduct surfaced during his seminary days. According to the document, as many as 23 people have alleged abuse by McCormack, who is now serving a 5-year prison sentence.

The allegations against McCormack spurred the archdiocese to commission an independent 2006 audit of what went wrong in the case. In the deposition, the cardinal also detailed church deception and coverup in the Bennett investigation—facts omitted from that audit.

Standing before television cameras Tuesday, the cardinal once again said he was sorry for not acting sooner and promised more transparency.

“In the sense I’m responsible for this archdiocese, I have to accept the blame,” George said.

The eight-hour, 305-page transcript of George and Anderson taken in January displayed a wide range of emotions from remorse to defensiveness. In the sometimes confrontational exchange, the cardinal also blamed other institutions for allowing McCormack to go free, including police, prosecutors and child welfare officials.

He defended the archdiocese’s actions regarding the delayed removal of Bennett from Holy Ghost parish in South Holland in February 2006. Bennett’s removal was prompted by the widening McCormack scandal.

In the investigation of Bennett, the deposition finds the cardinal and church officials received four detailed allegations of sexual abuse dating back to 2002. But they did not act to remove Bennett from his church until 2006, despite two recommendations from the archdiocese review board months earlier, according to the deposition.

Instead, Bennett was placed under the supervision of a monitor, Rev. Leonard Dubi, who apparently was Bennett’s close friend. George disregarded a recommendation by an archdiocese review board to remove Bennett in October 2005 and again in November, attributing the delay to the priest’s lack of representation by a canon lawyer.

By the time he was removed, the deposition reveals, more than a dozen allegations had mounted against the priest—a fact the archdiocese failed to tell parishioners and the public....

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Videotape shows man beaten by Denver Police
...The Denver District Attorney's office has dropped its case against a man who was facing three years in prison for assault, after 9Wants to Know obtained and showed prosecutors a videotape of the man's arrest....

..."The thing that kind of made everybody gasp was when the officer took the back of the guy's head and shoved it to the ground on his face," said TV producer Greg Prinkey. "He was not resisting. It was totally uncalled for."

When Prinkey saw men beating Heaney, he ran in to stop the fight. The video shows that's when the officers yelled, "Hey, we're cops! Get the (expletive) out of here!"

Prinkey gave the videotape of the arrest to 9NEWS.

"Had I not been rolling the camera, and no one else was rolling the camera, it might have just been swept under the rug," Prinkey said. ..

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Governments caused the credit crisis, but capitalism gets the blame
..."One simply cannot ignore the number of indicators that are now simultaneously exhibiting marked deviations," concluded the BIS. That was in June 2005.

Regrettably, governments did exactly that. They ignored manifest risks. Real interest rates were held near or below zero in the US and a large arc of Europe until well into 2006....

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Did Bush manipulate the anthrax scare?
... Back in the autumn of 2001 the anthrax envelopes convinced millions of Americans

reeling from the collapse of the Trade Towers that Yes, this was war and Islam was the enemy. The crudely written notes accompanying the spores said "Death to America, Death to Israel, Allah is Great."

Within hours the Bush administration was leaking stories to the effect that analysis of the anthrax in the envelopes disclosed the presence of bentonite and this chemical footprint - so the anonymous sources insisted to their favoured outlet, Brian Ross of ABC News - was characteristic of products from the bio-terror labs of Saddam Hussein. ...

... As Greenwald writes this week, ABC News is not protecting sources. "The people who fed them the bentonite story aren't 'sources'. They're fabricators and liars who purposely used ABC News to disseminate to the American public an extremely consequential and damaging falsehood."

True enough. ABC News is clearly embarrassed by Greenwald's soundly-based charges. Will Ross 'fess up to who fed him the stories? I doubt it. He's been a useful conduit for government leaks on matters such as the utility of water-boarding as a vital weapon in the war on terror. He'll keep his mouth shut, even as public cynicism about Bush and Cheney, and the press, soar to new highs.

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Starbucks and the socialism of fools
When is the loss of 12,600 jobs a cause for celebration? When those 12,600 workers are mere Starbucks baristas, young men and women in green aprons who use annoying words like ‘venti’ and ‘wet’ (what drink isn’t wet?) while serving overpriced coffee to harried young professionals. Who cares if these workers – many of whom work at Starbucks to finance their studies – are stripped of their livelihoods and forced to peruse the ads in soulless Job Centres? Serves them right for getting a job with the Evil Corporate Coffee Empire in the first place.

At least, that is the implicit message of much of the whooping and cheering that has greeted Starbucks’ economic turmoil. Since the Seattle-based coffee-serving corporation announced that it was closing 600 stores in the US and 61 in Australia – with the disgraceful cutting of up to 12,000 jobs in America and 685 Down Under – commentators have been quaffing some no doubt ethically sourced champagne to celebrate. At last, the corporation - which, as one British journalist wrote yesterday, has ‘earned VIP status at the top table of brands that anti-globalisation activists love to hate’ - is closing outlets rather than opening new ones. ...

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Where's the beef?
...A Southern Baptist by birth, and still a self-described evangelical, Wicker decided to investigate conventional wisdom about the numerical strength of America's moral majority. What she found should embarrass the secular media almost as much as it should evangelical leaders. The National Association of Evangelical's claim to represent 30 million souls? Wicker says the actual number is closer to 4.5 million. The Southern Baptist's Convention's estimate of 16 million members? Try a quarter of that number. ...

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Numbers racket
Religion: Survey results on megachurch growth do not add up

...While the new lists correct sorting and ranking errors, they do not revise the erroneous information given to the magazine by the churches themselves. Dan Gilgoff covers the evangelical movement for U.S. News & World Report and is the author of The Jesus Machine. He told WORLD that in his experience, megachurch pastors "notoriously inflate membership" numbers. The reasons? "Media attention, political influence, and money," Gilgoff said....

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What are the odds that we’re baking the planet?
For some years now, governments, industry, and private citizens have been regularly chastised by environmental activists for not doing more to limit greenhouse gases, the presumed cause of global warming. But lately a far more serious charge has been made. In June, the oft-quoted NASA climate scientist James Hansen appeared before a United States congressional committee. He said that the directors of fossil-fuel companies ‘should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature’ (1).

But these people shouldn’t be prosecuted just for producing fossil fuels. Hansen thinks they should also be prosecuted because, as he wrote in the UK Guardian: ‘Instead of moving heavily into renewable energies, fossil companies choose to spread doubt about global warming, as tobacco companies discredited the smoking-cancer link.’ (2)

In other words, fossil fuel company directors should be prosecuted for what they say, as well as for what they do.

It’s a common type of argument, familiar to anyone acquainted with totalitarian regimes: the nation (or revolution, race, class, etc) is in grave peril from (fill in the blank). But there are traitors among us who spread lies, seeking to weaken our resolve. They must be restrained (temporarily, of course) for the good of us all.

But there’s no reason this policy should only be applied to peddlers of coal and oil. Anyone who casts doubt on the reality of global warming would be equally guilty of imperilling the entire Earth. In the face of the imminent and overwhelming threat of catastrophic climate change, strict measures would (regrettably) have to be taken. ...

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Too young for the No. 1 job?
...Many on the legal left these days advocate purposive, pragmatic interpretation of the Constitution. The idea is you look behind the text to see what function it played for the framers and you then translate the text so it will play that same function for us today. What does this mean for the presidential age qualification?

In 1789, the average life expectancy of a newborn was about 40 years, compared with about 78 today. A lot of this was because of infant mortality, but in 1789, even the average life expectancy of every man who reached age 18 was only about 47. This suggests that at best a 35-year-old age limit in 1789 might have functioned then about the way a 55- or 60-year-old age qualification would function today. On this account Obama may be old enough to drive and buy a glass of white wine, but he has a way to go before he can run for president.

Others on the legal left, such as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, argue that in choosing between different interpretations of the Constitution, we should select the one that will produce the best consequences. This method too suggests that Obama should be understood to be constitutionally barred from serving as president by reason of his age. We have had three presidents out of 43 who were younger when they took office than Obama would be on Jan. 20, 2009: Bill Clinton, John F. Kennedy and Theodore Roosevelt. All of them committed serious rookie blunders because they were too young....

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A dash of lime -- a new twist that may cut CO2 levels back to pre-industrial levels
Scientists say they have found a workable way of reducing CO2 levels in the atmosphere by adding lime to seawater. And they think it has the potential to dramatically reverse CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere, reports Cath O'Driscoll in SCI's Chemistry & Industry magazine published today.

Shell is so impressed with the new approach that it is funding an investigation into its economic feasibility. 'We think it's a promising idea,' says Shell's Gilles Bertherin, a coordinator on the project. 'There are potentially huge environmental benefits from addressing climate change – and adding calcium hydroxide to seawater will also mitigate the effects of ocean acidification, so it should have a positive impact on the marine environment.'

Adding lime to seawater increases alkalinity, boosting seawater's ability to absorb CO2 from air and reducing the tendency to release it back again.

However, the idea, which has been bandied about for years, was thought unworkable because of the expense of obtaining lime from limestone and the amount of CO2 released in the process.

Tim Kruger, a management consultant at London firm Corven is the brains behind the plan to resurrect the lime process. He argues that it could be made workable by locating it in regions that have a combination of low-cost 'stranded' energy considered too remote to be economically viable to exploit – like flared natural gas or solar energy in deserts – and that are rich in limestone, making it feasible for calcination to take place on site.

Kruger says: 'There are many such places – for example, Australia's Nullarbor Plain would be a prime location for this process, as it has 10 000km3 of limestone and soaks up roughly 20MJ/m2 of solar irradiation every day.' ...

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The rise and rise of Climate Blasphemy
...You can say what you like about Jesus, Mary and Joseph, but say anything reviling, scurrilous or ludicrous about a climate change scientist and you will be punished. You won’t receive a literal lashing, but you will get a metaphorical one. Speak ill of a climate expert and you’re likely to be stuck in the stocks of the public media and branded as a fact-denying, truth-distorting threat to public morals.

Increasingly in the climate change debate, no dissent can be brooked. I mean none. That is why, from the thousands and thousands of hours of TV programming devoted to climate change issues last year – from news reports on the threat of global warming to the lifestyle makeover shows imploring us to Go Green – only one has been singled out for censure. The one that questioned whether climate change is occurring. The Great Global Warming Swindle by maverick filmmaker Martin Durkin.

Today, the Office of Communications (Ofcom) has published a lengthy document censuring Channel 4 for showing Durkin’s film on 8 March 2007. Yet what is striking about Ofcom’s ruling is that it slaps Channel 4’s wrists, not for any inaccuracies in Durkin’s film (of which, it is claimed, there are many), but for its ‘unfair treatment’ of climate change experts. ...

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‘The only certain thing is the science is uncertain’
...The subject of the discussion was Lawson’s book, An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming. In a cheeky introduction, the chairman of the discussion, Austin Williams, told the audience: ‘Nigel Lawson, Lord Lawson of Blaby, speaks from a position of eminent authority on the issue of carbon reduction. He was responsible for the biggest reduction in carbon emissions in this country when he presided over the slashing of the coal mining industry.’ Apart from raising laughter, the introduction was a pointed nod to the fact that the old lines of left and right in society have disappeared today, replaced by new divisions over climate change and the environment more broadly.

As a former finance minister, Lawson does not pretend to be an expert on the details of atmospheric physics. But, as he pointed out, many scientists and noisy commentators on the subject have no special expertise in the particular disciplines required to understand climate, either. More importantly, the politicians charged with making the big policy decisions on the subject must do so on the basis of limited knowledge, too.

‘The one thing that is absolutely clear about the science is that it isn’t certain, far from it’, began Lawson. That is not to say that there isn’t plenty of common ground between sceptics and mainstream views of the science, as Lawson pointed out. ‘Most people would agree there have been huge increases in concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere’; ‘there is no real argument that the major contributor to that has been man, through the burning of carbon’; and ‘there is no doubt there is such a thing as the greenhouse effect or that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas’.

For Lawson, the real uncertainty is around how big the effect of carbon dioxide will be on temperatures. While the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggests that most of the warming over the past 100 years has been due to human activity, Lawson argued that the consensus isn’t as complete as is usually suggested. He pointed to a survey conducted by the German climate scientist, Hans von Storch - someone who has supported the mainstream view of the science while being critical of much of the presentation of it in the media. The survey asked 500 climate scientists, under strict promise of anonymity, for their view on the debate. Of those surveyed, 70 per cent supported the view that global warming was mostly caused by humans; 30 per cent did not. While science should never be ‘conducted by a head count’, said Lawson, it is clear that the much-vaunted unanimity is absent. ...

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I Choose My Choice!
...But aren’t women at home subject to the oppression of their chauvinistic, soul-crushing husbands? As if a mere human could compete with clogged freeways and Sisyphean paper pushing (or its more up-to-date equivalent, paperless pushing) and burnt-coffee-laced afternoons counting the acoustic tiles in stale conference rooms, and the hours spent arguing over the wording of a memo that within minutes after its dissemination will be dragged into the now-two-dimensional circular file. Unless he’s an abusive alcoholic or something similar, to be more oppressive than a “real” job, a husband would have to possess tireless text-messaging thumbs: “Where’s my dry cleaning?” “Did you pick up my dry cleaning?” “Where are you shopping right now?” “No! No! I told you—no butter lettuce from Safeway, only Whole Foods!” (Come to think of it, this may be a fairly accurate bit of communication between a privileged mother and a micromanaged nanny.) Even providing a chilled martini at six o’clock and roast beef at seven to the legendary suburban alpha male of yore allowed most of one’s day to be fairly flexible. As for today’s poorer husbands, many of them are likely too tired from their job’s repetitious, socially invisible physical tasks—such as makin’ kahpies!—to continually oppress their wives....

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Lock and Load--It's the Law!
...Oddly enough, considering the endless political battling over gun rights, the nation’s highest court has only once before ruled on the citizens’ inherent right to bear arms, and this was in the Roosevelt era. Gun control was one of the prime goals of the New Deal, partly as a backlash from the Tommy Gun era of Prohibition and the roaring twenties; also because in those distant days there was a very large and militant left, of which FDR was afraid. The New Deal was a desperate attempt to stave off much more far-reaching challenges to business-as-usual.

Cunningly, FDR’s strategy was to attack gun rights not by a head-on assault on the Second Amendment but by the devious and always deadly route of taxation. Taking weapons across state lines and even transferring ownership became costly activities. The Supreme Court affirmed this in 1939 in US v. Miller, ( a decision set up by Roosevelt’s Justice Department), simultaneously emphasizing that the Amendment confirmed the collective rights of a militia, not individual citizens, and that the arms did not include sawn-off shot guns or assault weapons.

For the next half century, the gun controllers pushed steadily forward, given helpful shoves by the assassinations of the Sixties, Reagan’s narrow escape, and the crack wars of the Eighties. The Democratic Party, listening particularly to its liberal, urban and feminine base, made gun control a major plank. The recoil came in 2000, with Al Gore’s defeat at the hands of George Bush. Guns, not Nader, were a prime factor in that narrow loss. Gore’s endorsement of gun control cost the Democrats Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, Colorado and the mountain states. The Democrats began to sideline the issue. The gun lobby weathered the crises of school shootings at Columbine and Virginia Tech. The Bush presidencies saw membership of the U.S. Supreme Court swing steadily to the right.

Europeans, snootily aghast at America’s 50 million households holding about 250 million guns, usually miss two important points. “Home defense” is a phrase with profound reverberations, as Scalia emphasized strongly in such paragraphs as the one cited above. How much it all had to do with killing Indians is for you to decide. And the gun lobby has been successful in anchoring their cause in the notion of a basic “freedom,” in an era when Americans correctly feel that freedoms – against unreasonable searches and seizures, or to a speedy trial – are being relentlessly eroded by government. ...

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Myth of Consensus Explodes: APS Opens Global Warming Debate
The American Physical Society, an organization representing nearly 50,000 physicists, has reversed its stance on climate change and is now proclaiming that many of its members disbelieve in human-induced global warming. The APS is also sponsoring public debate on the validity of global warming science. The leadership of the society had previously called the evidence for global warming "incontrovertible."

In a posting to the APS forum, editor Jeffrey Marque explains,"There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution."

The APS is opening its debate with the publication of a paper by Lord Monckton of Brenchley, which concludes that climate sensitivity -- the rate of temperature change a given amount of greenhouse gas will cause -- has been grossly overstated by IPCC modeling. A low sensitivity implies additional atmospheric CO2 will have little effect on global climate.

Larry Gould, Professor of Physics at the University of Hartford and Chairman of the New England Section of the APS, called Monckton's paper an "expose of the IPCC that details numerous exaggerations and "extensive errors"...

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Atheist soldier sues Army for 'unconstitutional' discrimination
... His sudden lack of faith, he said, cost him his military career and put his life at risk. Hall said his life was threatened by other troops and the military assigned a full-time bodyguard to protect him out of fear for his safety. Video Watch why Hall says his lack of faith almost got him killed »

In March, Hall filed a federal lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Defense and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, among others. In the suit, Hall claims his rights to religious freedom under the First Amendment were violated and suggests that the United States military has become a Christian organization.

"I think it's utterly and totally wrong. Unconstitutional," Hall said.

Hall said there is a pattern of discrimination against non-Christians in the military.

Two years ago on Thanksgiving Day, after refusing to pray at his table, Hall said he was told to go sit somewhere else. In another incident, when he was nearly killed during an attack on his Humvee, he said another soldier asked him, "Do you believe in Jesus now?"

Hall isn't seeking compensation in his lawsuit -- just the guarantee of religious freedom in the military. Eventually, Hall was sent home early from Iraq and later returned to Fort Riley in Junction City, Kansas, to complete his tour of duty.

He also said he missed out on promotions because he is an atheist.

"I was told because I can't put my personal beliefs aside and pray with troops I wouldn't make a good leader," Hall said....

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Decades later, still asking: Would I pull that switch?
...Consider the psychologist Stanley Milgram's obedience studies of the early 1960s that together form one of the darkest mirrors the field has held up to the human face. In a series of about 20 experiments, hundreds of decent, well-intentioned people agreed to deliver what appeared to be increasingly painful electric shocks to another person, as part of what they thought was a learning experiment. The "learner" was in fact an actor, usually seated out of sight in an adjacent room, pretending to be zapped.

Researchers, social commentators and armchair psychologists have pored through Milgram's data ever since, claiming psychological and cultural insights. Now, decades after the original work (Milgram died in 1984, at 51), two new papers illustrate the continuing power of the shock experiments — and the diverse interpretations they still inspire....

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Recession? Bring it on!
In the name of ‘saving the planet’, many in the chattering classes are praying for an economic slump.

...Although well-to-do commentators are the first to complain when inflation increases hit their mortgage rates and school fees, they don’t mind when they hit low-paid workers. In fact, many seem to hope that the economic slowdown will hit low-paid workers quite hard. A few years ago, for instance, when McDonald’s announced branch closures and subsequent redundancies, trendy, organic, celebrity chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall expressed delight that this might spell the end for McDonald’s, and presumably also for its gormless employees and awful customers (2).

Superficially at least, today’s ‘bring on the recession’ champions use environmentalist rhetoric to disguise their deep-seated disdain for the masses. In the US, economics writer Fion MacCloud recently penned an article demonstrating ‘Ten Ways Recession Can Help the Environment’ (3). MacCloud argued that economic recession would mean fewer people buying fewer mobile phones and fewer cars, and fewer people flying abroad on holiday – and therefore, enforced poverty should be welcomed. From this standpoint, perhaps we should champion complete economic collapse? After all, famine and disease would mean there are fewer and fewer people… and thus would reduce humanity’s CO2 emissions further.

Indeed, the Optimum Population Trust (OPT), which wants a world with fewer people, also believes that economic recession might be a very good thing. As spiked revealed in February this year, a spokesperson for the OPT believes that a recession will be positive since ‘if we keep on growing we’re doomed’ (see I agree with Ethan: bring on the recession!, by Brendan O’Neill).

Other environmentalists believe the coming recession has an ‘upside’ because it will force people to undertake more labour-intensive activities on a day-to-day basis. On the PlanetSave blog, one writer positively welcomes the recession because of ‘all the news stories about moms who now make their own laundry detergent and grow their own vegetables’ (4). How these developments can be considered positive is anyone’s guess. During the Western economic slump of the 1930s, and for much of the lifespan of the Soviet Union, such self-sufficiency was considered an embarrassing symbol of an inefficient and degenerate society. Now, in an historical period when a global division of labour is increasing productivity, rarely a week goes by without some broadsheet alluding to the ‘benefits’ of time-wasting self-sufficiency. ...

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Americans Oppose Income Redistribution to Fix Economy
PRINCETON, NJ -- When given a choice about how government should address the numerous economic difficulties facing today's consumer, Americans overwhelmingly -- by 84% to 13% -- prefer that the government focus on improving overall economic conditions and the jobs situation in the United States as opposed to taking steps to distribute wealth more evenly among Americans....

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The False Promise of Gun Control
...Alas, however well accepted, the conventional wisdom about guns and violence is mistaken. Guns don’t increase national rates of crime and violence—but the continued proliferation of gun-control laws almost certainly does. Current rates of crime and violence are a bit below the peaks of the late 1970s, but because of a slight oncoming bulge in the at-risk population of males aged fifteen to thirty-four, the crime rate will soon worsen. The rising generation of criminals will have no more difficulty than their elders did in obtaining the tools of their trade. Growing violence will lead to calls for laws still more severe. Each fresh round of legislation will be followed by renewed frustration.

Gun-control laws don’t work. What is worse, they act perversely. While legitimate users of firearms encounter intense regulation, scrutiny, and bureaucratic control, illicit markets easily adapt to whatever difficulties a free society throws in their way. Also, efforts to curtail the supply of firearms inflict collateral damage on freedom and privacy interests that have long been considered central to American public life. Thanks to the seemingly never-ending war on drugs and long experience attempting to suppress prostitution and pornography, we know a great deal about how illicit markets function and how costly to the public attempts to control them can be. It is essential that we make use of this experience in coming to grips with gun control. ...

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Our Infantile Search for Heroic Leaders
o you find yourself staring at the television and pining for a good leader — a person who will rise and make the world right again? Do you long for a Mandela, a Churchill, a Gandhi? Then grow up. Our political debate — what passes for it — increasingly focuses on a search for an elusive Messianic leader who will show us the way. This is the opposite of rational politics.

This search for leaders is based on a desire to return to childhood — to snuggle into the political cot and close our eyes, knowing daddy is outside watching over us. The highest compliment we pay to a politician is to call him “father of the nation”. I feel this urge too. It is difficult and disturbing to try to figure out what is wrong in the world, and how to put it right. How much more tempting to simply snuffle out somebody who you think is good and decent and kind, elect them, and assume they will sort it all out....

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Why Do People Vote? Genetic Variation In Political Participation
...“Although we are not the first to suggest a link between genes and political participation,” note the authors, “this study is the first attempt to test the idea empirically.” They do so by conducting three tests of the claim that part of the variation in political participation can be attributed to genetic factors.

The results suggest that individual genetic differences make up a large and significant portion of the variation in political participation, even after taking socialization and other environmental factors into account. They also suggest that, contrary to decades of conventional wisdom, family upbringing may have little or no effect on children’s future participatory behavior.

In conducting their study, the authors examine the turnout patterns of identical and non-identical twins—including 396 twins in Los Angeles County and 806 twins in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Their findings suggest that 53% of the variation in turnout can be accounted for by genetic effects in the former, with similar outcomes in the latter. Moreover, genetic-based differences extend to a broad class of acts of political participation, including donating to a campaign, contacting an official, running for office, and attending a rally. ...

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Taking More Risks Because You Feel Safe
...Trying to fix problems that affect vast numbers of people has an intuitive appeal that politicians and policymakers find irresistible, but several warehouses of research studies show that intuition is often a poor guide to fixing systemic problems. While it seems like common sense to pump money into an economy that is pulling the bedcovers over its head, the problem with most social interventions is that they target not robots and machines but human beings -- who regularly respond to interventions in contrarian, paradoxical and unpredictable ways.

"How well does government do in helping the market to improve what it does?" asked Clifford Winston, an economist at the Brookings Institution and the author of the 2006 book "Market Failure Versus Government Failure." "The research consistently finds that, in fact, government efforts to correct market failures have little effect, or actually make things worse."
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"There is a tendency for people to say, 'If things are safer, then I will take more risk,' " he added....

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Every Knee Shall Bow, Every Tongue Confess that the President “Is All That”
...In the 20th century, presidents — as well as candidates for that office from both parties — morphed into beings with a glory in their bosoms that transfigures you, me and the nation, or are at least have to affect being that to get votes. Such is the thesis of Gene Healy’s superb recent book, The Cult of the Presidency: America’s Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power. Therein Healy documents how George W. Bush’s presidency may have taken the Executive-cum-monarch-cum-Christ phenomenon to its (for now) apogee, but there is plenty of blame to go around; excessive expectations and veneration leading to Executive power-mongering goes back at least to Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, and the Progressive Era....

...“Progressives” need to examine their own forebears’ contributions to this evil. TR was a war-mongering member of their sect, declaring in 1897, as Healy notes: “In strict confidence, I should welcome almost any war, for this country needs one,” whereupon Teddy pushed for same and went off to lead the Rough Riders in the famous charge up San Juan Hill during the Spanish-American War....

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Put oil firm chiefs on trial, says leading climate change scientist
James Hansen, one of the world's leading climate scientists, will today call for the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature, accusing them of actively spreading doubt about global warming in the same way that tobacco companies blurred the links between smoking and cancer.

Hansen will use the symbolically charged 20th anniversary of his groundbreaking speech (pdf) to the US Congress - in which he was among the first to sound the alarm over the reality of global warming - to argue that radical steps need to be taken immediately if the "perfect storm" of irreversible climate change is not to become inevitable.

Speaking before Congress again, he will accuse the chief executive officers of companies such as ExxonMobil and Peabody Energy of being fully aware of the disinformation about climate change they are spreading. ...

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America's Berlin Wall
...Under the proposed legislation, expatriates surrendering their citizenship with a net worth of $2m or more, or a high income, will have to act as if they have sold all their worldwide assets at a fair market price. If the unrealised gains on these assets exceed $600,000, capital-gains tax will apply. A study by the Congressional Budget Office guesses that the new law will progressively net the government up to $286m over five years. It is unclear, however, why people would suffer the consequences if they did not expect to save money in the long run by escaping American taxes.

That expats want to leave at all is evidence of America's odd tax system. Along with citizens of North Korea and a few other countries, Americans are taxed based on their citizenship, rather than where they live. So they usually pay twice—to their host country and the Internal Revenue Service. As this makes citizenship less palatable, Congress has erected large barriers to stop them jumping ship. In 1996 it forced people who renounced citizenship to continue paying income taxes for an extra ten years. Theoretically, the new law allows for a cleaner break.

But even as the law tries to prevent people from renouncing their citizenship, it may have the opposite effect. Under the new structure, it would make financial sense for any young American working overseas with a promising career to renounce his citizenship as early as possible, before his assets accumulate. For everyone else, plunging stock and property prices mean now may be as good a time as any to hand back the passport, says Kurt Rademacher, a partner at Withers, a global tax-planning firm....

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Global War Deaths Have Been Substantially Underestimated, Study Shows
Globally, war has killed three times more people than previously estimated, and there is no evidence to support claims of a recent decline in war deaths, concludes a study published on the British Medical Journal website....

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MORE PREY-ING AT MINISTRY OF LOVE?
A FORMER minister at a top Presbyterian church who admitted seducing one of his married parishioners may have chased after other women, according to court papers. A decision made public yesterday said officials at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church were told that the Rev. Thomas Tewell, 56, who counseled troubled spouses, "was preying on other women to whom he was providing marital counseling."...

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Parishioner Sues Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, Saying Pastor Seduced Wife
A jilted Long Island husband is suing his pastor, the Presbytery of New York City and one of its largest churches, saying that the pastor seduced his wife and destroyed his "faith and trust" in the church and in the institution of marriage.

The husband, Joseph Vione, 43, who had been living in Garden City, says in papers filed last week in State Supreme Court in Manhattan that the Rev. Thomas K. Tewell, 56, the senior pastor of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in Midtown Manhattan, used confidential information obtained during marriage counseling to seduce Mr. Vione's wife, Rachel, 42. Mr. Vione has filed for divorce.

To cover his tracks and to further his relationship with Ms. Vione, court papers say, Dr. Tewell encouraged the couple to join couples clubs and family ministries and attend marriage retreats that he presided over.

The suit also says that officials of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, which has nearly 4,000 members, knew of allegations from anonymous parishioners that Dr. Tewell had exploited his position at the church "to prey on" other women by engaging in illicit relationships with them, but did not investigate....

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Wall Street Lobbies to Protect Speculative Oil Trades
...In a pair of lengthy and sometimes testy closed-door sessions in the Senate last week, executives from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, two of Wall Street's largest investment banks, made the case that their multibillion-dollar investments in energy contracts have not led to higher oil prices. Rather, they told Democratic staff members of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee that the trades allow international markets to operate efficiently and that the run-up in oil prices results not from speculation but from actual imbalances of supply and demand.
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But the executives were met with skepticism and occasional hostility. "Spare us your lecture about supply and demand," one of the Democratic aides said, abruptly cutting off one of the executives, according to a staff member in the room.

Another aide at the meetings warned the executives that no matter what arguments they muster, it would be hard to prevent Congress from acting....

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Bibb Co. Minister Arrested in Child Rape case
Timothy Fulgham, 40, is charged with second-degree rape, second-degree sodomy, second-degree sexual abuse and enticing a child for immoral purposes....

...“Just believing that the truth will be revealed, and we believe in the system; we just don’t talk about it here. It’s not really relevant to us. The former pastor resigned. I just want to let everyone know in our community that our church is a great place to be. It’s a safe place to be,” said Brandon Morrison, current pastor of the River Life Church of God....

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Fort Worth pastor arrested on child sex charge
FORT WORTH, Texas — A pastor has been arrested on accusations that he sexually assaulted a teen girl who attends his church....

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Why We’re Going to Win on Global Warming
...As far as I can see, proponents of emissions reductions will respond with four arguments: (1) inflate the analyzed costs of global warming by claiming the science actually now says things will be even worse than we previously thought, (2) inflate the analyzed costs of global warming by embedding indefensible discount rate assumptions in the black box of econometric calculations used by economists to conduct the cost-benefit analysis, (3) deflate the analyzed costs of emissions mitigation by claiming a free lunch – that there is a cost-free or low-cost way to radically reduce emissions, and/or (4) turn this into a moral crusade asserting that we have a moral duty to the poor of the world because of our past sins of emission. I have laid out responses to each of these objections: 1, 2, 3 and 4. When considered carefully, emissions mitigation proponents have no persuasive arguments....

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The cops came, searched and left a mess for puzzled homeowner
Four young residents of a North Philadelphia house who circulated petitions questioning police-surveillance cameras were rousted from their home Friday and detained 12 hours without charges while police searched their house.

Daniel Moffat, 28, a co-owner of the house, said police had no warrant when they entered. The house was examined by officials from several government agencies and then shuttered by the city's Department of Licenses and Inspections.

"This leaves me homeless, without access to things I need. My whole life is disrupted," Moffat said yesterday.

The raid on the property on Ridge Avenue near Parrish Street was led by 9th District Police Capt. Dennis Wilson, who was quoted in an online story by the City Paper as saying of the residents: "They're a hate group. We're trying to drum up charges against them, but unfortunately we'll probably have to let them go."...

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Report: Exams prove abuse, torture in Iraq, Gitmo
WASHINGTON - Medical examinations of former terrorism suspects held by the U.S. military at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, found evidence of torture and other abuse that resulted in serious injuries and mental disorders, according to a human rights group.

For the most extensive medical study of former U.S. detainees published so far, Physicians for Human Rights had doctors and mental health professionals examine 11 former prisoners. The group alleges finding evidence of U.S. torture and war crimes and accuses U.S. military health professionals of allowing the abuse of detainees, denying them medical care and providing confidential medical information to interrogators that they then exploited....

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"Routine" Abuse At Bagram
Those who have cared enough to keep tabs on what the Bush administration has unleashed in terms of treatment of prisoners in the war on terror will not be surprised at the latest report from McClatchy on Bagram in Afghanistan. And the denialists - who include almost the entire GOP blogosphere - will simply turn the page. But the shame endures...

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The Shame Of Gitmo
An eight-month McClatchy investigation in 11 countries on three continents has found that Akhtiar was one of dozens of men — and, according to several officials, perhaps hundreds — whom the U.S. has wrongfully imprisoned in Afghanistan, Cuba and elsewhere on the basis of flimsy or fabricated evidence, old personal scores or bounty payments. McClatchy interviewed 66 released detainees, more than a dozen local officials — primarily in Afghanistan — and U.S. officials with intimate knowledge of the detention program. The investigation also reviewed thousands of pages of U.S. military tribunal documents and other records. This unprecedented compilation shows that most of the 66 were low-level Taliban grunts, innocent Afghan villagers or ordinary criminals.

At least seven had been working for the U.S.-backed Afghan government and had no ties to militants, according to Afghan local officials. ...

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Benedict, John Paul II, And Child Abuse
...The abuse-case that caused the Pope to lose his temper - to the point of a prissy smack - was Father Marcial Maciel. Until his death earlier this year, Maciel ran a large, far-right Catholic cult called the Legionaries of Christ. The Legionaries and their lay counterpart, Regnum Christi, are very powerful entities in the new Catholicism, given special protection by Pope John Paul II and much favor under his successor. And at the core of the Legionaries, like many religious cults, was a sexual abuse ring designed to please the founder. Secrecy was maintained by indoctrinating many members at a young age, and enforcing vows of silence on all topics related to Maciel. This cult-like stricture is still causing grief and suspicion in many parts of the Catholic world, most recently in the Baltimore archdiocese.

The reason I bring this up today is because journalist Jason Berry, of the Hartford Courant, has a new and gripping documentary on Maciel and the abusive cult-like practices he pioneered. It's called "Vows Of Silence" and it carefully exposes the appalling facts of the enmeshment of the last two Popes in covering up sexual abuse and protecting a serial predator. ...

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The Equal Sharing of Misery
Under current National Health Service (NHS) regulations, if a patient chooses to purchase expensive drug treatments not covered by the government, they forfeit the right to further state-funded treatment. Allowing citizens to purchase life-extending drugs not covered by the NHS would create, says Labour Health Minister Alan Johnson, a two-tiered system favoring the wealthy. Of course, Mr. Johnson's is demanding equality of grim outcomes and preventing patients from spending their after-tax income however they see fit. This would be less of a problem if the NHS actually had the money to cover £2,200 a month cancer drugs. The (London) Times fills in the details...

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Mother Jones Agrees: The Fourth Great Awakening is Dead
...Perhaps the best evidence that the evangelical phase of the Fourth Great Awakening is winding down is that large numbers of young Americans are falling away from organized religion, just as the country did in the period between the first two awakenings. In the 1970s, the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago found that between 5 percent and 7 percent of the public declared they were not religiously affiliated. By 2006 that figure had risen to 17 percent. The trend is especially apparent among younger Americans: In 2006 nearly a quarter (23 percent) of Americans in their 20s and almost as many (19 percent) of those in their 30s said they were nonaffiliated.

The Barna Group finds that only 60 percent of 16-to-29-year-olds identify themselves as Christians. By contrast, 77 percent of Americans over age 60 call themselves Christian. That is “a momentous shift,” the firm’s president told the Ventura County Star. “Each generation is becoming increasingly secular.”...

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Southern Baptists fret over decline as annual meeting begins
For most of four decades, Southern Baptists could boast of rising membership even as more moderate and liberal Protestant denominations lost members in droves.

But with membership slightly down last year, and flat for the past five, Southern Baptists face a growing anxiety about their future as they gather for their annual meeting Tuesday in Indianapolis.

"We have peaked," Southern Baptist statistician Ed Stetzer wrote in an online commentary on the latest statistics from 2007. "...For now, Southern Baptists are a denomination in decline."

What worries Southern Baptist leaders even more than the membership numbers is a steady decline in the conversion ritual that gave their denomination its name — baptisms.

Annual rates of baptisms have steadily declined not only in recent years, but also during the past 35 years. In 2007, Southern Baptist churches reported 345,941 baptisms. That's down 12% from 2002 and 22% from 1972....

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The Myth of the Moral Majority
...Take that 40 percent church attendance stat. Looking around her half-empty Southern Baptist church outside Dallas, Christine Wicker had her doubts. Wicker, a veteran Texas newspaper reporter, was born again when she was nine but drifted away from her evangelical roots in adulthood. A few years ago, she returned to the Southern Baptist Church to both renew her faith and write The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, an insider's look at evangelicals' power, wading in where secular journalists feared to tread. When she started looking into the numbers on church attendance, she found that researchers could vouch for only 18 percent of Americans being regular churchgoers—less than half the accepted figure. That led her to wonder about the already widely reported claim that 25 percent of Americans are evangelicals; could the real number also be less than half that?

In size, only the Catholic Church dwarfs the Southern Baptist Church, the biggest evangelical denomination and by far the most organized and fastidious of the Protestant record keepers. But Wicker discovered that the numbers the Southern Baptist Convention (sbc) releases for public consumption tell a much different story than the ones it uses internally. The organization claims 16 million members, but as one reverend cracks, "the fbi couldn't find half of [them] if they had to." A 2006 sbc report states that only 11 million of its members live in the same area as their home church anymore; that number includes those who've been double- or even triple-counted elsewhere. It also includes perennial no-shows and those who attend services at "bedside Baptist" (they sleep in on Sunday but show up for Easter and Christmas). And that's not to mention those who've lost their religion or converted to another faith. If their names were ever on "the roll" at a Baptist church, they're probably inscribed there for life....

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Thou shalt not ask awkward questions
I might not know that much about climatology, but I know what I don’t like. And the things that I don’t like include the undermining of free speech, the railroading of opinion, the exploitation of science for political purposes, doom-mongering and misanthropic prejudice. All of these are, to one degree or another, fixtures of the strident crusade around man-made global warming. That is why I have always been instinctively, non-scientifically but seriously sceptical about many of the claims and demands made by the climate change crusaders. It is good to know that others who definitely do know a lot of climatology share some of that scepticism.

The Deniers grew out of Lawrence Solomon’s newspaper columns of the same name in Canada’s National Post. Solomon identifies authoritative but often little-known dissenters from various aspects of the climate change orthodoxy, and concisely summarises their research, arguments and qualifications. I will not attempt to summarise all of his summaries, but a couple of things stand out.

One is that, contrary to the caricature often drawn of scientific dissenters, these experts are quite prestigious and nobody’s idea of cranks....

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The Family
...Before the lights went out after midnight, they came together to pray for me, Jeff Connally's voice just above a whisper, asking God to "break" me. Dave, already broken, mumbled an amen.

* * *

Ivanwald, which sits at the end of Twenty-fourth Street North in Arlington, was known only to its residents and to the members and friends of the Family. The Family is in its own words an "invisible" association, though it has always been organized around public men. Senator Sam Brownback (R., Kansas), chair of a weekly, off - the- record meeting of religious right groups called the Values Action Team (VAT), is an active member, as is Representative Joe Pitts (R., Pennsylvania), an avuncular would-be theocrat who chairs the House version of the VAT. Others referred to as members include senators Jim DeMint of South Carolina, chairman of the Senate Steering Committee (the powerful conservative caucus co-founded back in 1974 by another Family associate, the late senator Carl Curtis of Nebraska); Pete Domenici of New Mexico (a Catholic and relatively moderate Republican; it's Domenici's status as one of the Senate's old lions that the Family covets, not his doctrinal purity); Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa); James Inhofe (R., Oklahoma); Tom Coburn (R., Oklahoma); John Thune (R., South Dakota); Mike Enzi (R., Wyoming); and John Ensign, the conservative casino heir elected to the Senate from Nevada, a brightly tanned, hapless figure who uses his Family connections to graft holiness to his gambling-fortune name. "Faith-based Democrats" Bill Nelson of Florida and Mark Pryor of Arkansas, sincere believers drawn rightward by their understanding of Christ's teachings, are members, and Family stalwarts in the House include Representatives Frank Wolf (R., Virginia), Zach Wamp (R., Tennessee), and Mike McIntyre, a North Carolina Democrat who believes that the Ten Commandments are "the fundamental legal code for the laws of the United States" and thus ought to be on display in schools and court houses.

The Family's historic roll call is even more striking: the late senator Strom Thurmond (R., South Carolina), who produced "confidential" reports on legislation for the Family's leadership, presided for a time over the Family's weekly Senate meeting, and the Dixie-crat senators Herman Talmadge of Georgia and Absalom Willis Robertson of Virginia—Pat Robertson's father—served on the behind-the-scenes board of the organization. In 1974, a Family prayer group of Republican congressmen and former secretary of defense Melvin Laird helped convince President Gerald Ford that Richard Nixon deserved not just Christian forgiveness but also a legal pardon. That same year, Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist led the Family's first weekly Bible study for federal judges.

"I wish I could say more about it," Ronald Reagan publicly demurred back in 1985, "but it's working precisely because it is private."

"We desire to see a leadership led by God," reads a confidential mission statement. "Leaders of all levels of society who direct projects as they are led by the spirit." Another principle expanded upon is stealthiness; members are instructed to pursue political jujitsu by making use of secular leaders "in the work of advancing His kingdom," and to avoid whenever possible the label Christian itself, lest they alert enemies to that advance. Regular prayer groups, or "cells" as they're often called, have met in the Pentagon and at the Department of Defense, and the Family has traditionally fostered strong ties with businessmen in the oil and aerospace industries.

The Family's use of the term "cell" long predates the word's current association with terrorism. Its roots are in the Cold War, when leaders of the Family deliberately emulated the organizing techniques of communism. In 1948, a group of Senate staffers met to discuss ways that the Family's "cell and leadership groups" could recruit elites unwilling to participate in the "mass meeting approach" of populist fundamentalism. Two years later, the Family declared that with democracy inadequate to the fight against godlessness, such cells should function to produce political "atomic energy"; that is, deals and alliances that could not be achieved through the clumsy machinations of legislative debate would instead radiate quietly out of political cells. More recently, Senator Sam Brownback told me that the privacy of Family cells makes them safe spaces for men of power—an appropriation of another term borrowed from an enemy, feminism.5 "In this closer relationship," a document for members reads, "God will give you more insight into your own geographical area and your sphere of influence." One's cell should become "an invisible ‘believing group' " out of which "agreements reached in faith and in prayer around the person of Jesus Christ" lead to action that will appear to the world to be unrelated to any centralized organization.

In 1979, the former Nixon aide and Watergate felon Charles W. Colson—born again through the guidance of the Family and the ministry of a CEO of arms manufacturer Raytheon—estimated the Family's strength at 20,000, although the number of dedicated "associates" around the globe is much smaller (around 350 as of 2006). The Family maintains a closely guarded database of associates, members, and "key men," but it issues no cards, collects no official dues. Members are asked not to speak about the group or its activities. ...

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Jesus Made Me Puke
...By the end of the weekend I realized how quaint was the mere suggestion that Christians of this type should learn to "be rational" or "set aside your religion" about such things as the Iraq War or other policy matters. Once you've made a journey like this — once you've gone this far — you are beyond suggestible. It's not merely the informational indoctrination, the constant belittling of homosexuals and atheists and Muslims and pacifists, etc., that's the issue. It's that once you've gotten to this place, you've left behind the mental process that a person would need to form an independent opinion about such things. You make this journey precisely to experience the ecstasy of beating to the same big gristly heart with a roomful of like-minded folks. Once you reach that place with them, you're thinking with muscles, not neurons.

By the end of that weekend, Phil Fortenberry could have told us that John Kerry was a demon with clawed feet, and not one person would have so much as blinked. Because none of that politics stuff matters anyway, once you've gotten this far. All that matters is being full of the Lord and empty of demons. And since everything that is not of God is demonic, asking these people to be objective about anything else is just absurd. There is no "anything else." All alternative points of view are nonstarters. There is this "our thing," a sort of Cosa Nostra of the soul, and then there are the fires of Hell. And that's all.

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Network news anchors praise the job they did in the run-up to the war
I was going to add this as an update to my prior post on Scott McClellan's extraordinary description of the media as "deferential, complicit enablers" of Bush administration "propaganda," but it should really stand on its own. Here is an absolutely amazing link to a video where the three network news anchors appeared jointly on The Today Show this morning and were forced by McClellan's book to address whether the media failed in its duties in the run-up to the war -- the first time, to my knowledge, that this topic has ever been broached by network news journalists (h/t Kitt). The fact that television news has blacked-out the whole issue until now is, by itself, rather amazing....

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Bush 'plans Iran air strike by August'
NEW YORK - The George W Bush administration plans to launch an air strike against Iran within the next two months, an informed source tells Asia Times Online, echoing other reports that have surfaced in the media in the United States recently. ...

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How the World's Richest Governments Starve the World's Poorest People
...Thus, almost all additional US corn production between 2004 and 2007, for instance, has been diverted to the production of ethanol, while the European ethanol production more than tripled during the same period. The increased use of grains for ethanol production has led to a fall in the supply of grains relative to overall demand during the last seven years (with the exception of 2006, which was compensated by the use of grain stocks, now at the lowest level globally in a quarter century). This situation is not, however, a natural market phenomenon, but the direct result of various government programs — usually in the world's most developed economies, although developing countries are catching up — that aim to promote more environmentally friendly energy technology or energy self-sufficiency by subsidizing and mandating the diversion of a growing percentage of agricultural commodities such as corn, sugar cane, wheat, and so on, to the production of bioethanol and biodiesel....

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Bush misled U.S. on Iraq, former aide says in new book
WASHINGTON — The White House called former press secretary Scott McClellan "disgruntled" after he wrote a blistering review of the administration and concluded that his longtime boss misled the nation into an unnecessary war in Iraq in a book due out Monday.

"History appears poised to confirm what most Americans today have decided — that the decision to invade Iraq was a serious strategic blunder," McClellan wrote in "What Happened," due out Monday. "No one, including me, can know with absolute certainty how the war will be viewed decades from now when we can more fully understand its impact."

"What I do know is that war should only be waged when necessary, and the Iraq war was not necessary," he wrote in the preface....

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Stafford minister jailed for sex with boy in '80s
A Stafford County minister went to jail yesterday after admitting that he molested a teenage boy more than 20 years ago.

The Rev. George O. Lowe, 71, pleaded guilty in Stafford Circuit Court to two counts of taking indecent liberties with a child. Seven other charges were dropped.

His bond was revoked and Lowe is expected to remain in jail at least until he is sentenced in August.

Lowe was the pastor at Mount Hope Baptist Church in Stafford for 43 years until he was removed after being indicted earlier this year.

According to prosecutor Eric Olsen, the molestation took place in 1984 and 1985 at the church. The boy, whose family attended Lowe's church, was supposed to be getting counseling from Lowe.

Olsen said Lowe repeatedly touched the boy's private parts and performed oral sex on him. The victim said the abuse occurred at least 20 times.

Olsen said the victim reported the incidents to his family and to a deacon in the church several years later, and a meeting with Lowe was arranged.

Lowe quoted Scripture during that meeting regarding Christians not taking other Christians to court, Olsen said....

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Police in Gun Searches Face Disbelief in Court
After listening carefully to the two policemen, the judge had a problem: He did not believe them.

The officers, who had stopped a man in the Bronx and found a .22-caliber pistol in his fanny pack, testified that they had several reasons to search him: He was loitering, sweating nervously and had a bulge under his jacket.

But the judge, John E. Sprizzo of United States District Court in Manhattan, concluded that the police had simply reached into the pack without cause, found the gun, then “tailored” testimony to justify the illegal search. “You can’t have open season on searches,” said Judge Sprizzo, who refused to allow the gun as evidence, prompting prosecutors to drop the case last May.

Yet for all his disapproval of what the police had done, the judge said he hated to make negative rulings about officers’ credibility. “I don’t like to jeopardize their career and all the rest of it,” he said.

He need not have worried. The Police Department never learned of his criticism, and the officers — like many others whose word has been called into question — faced no disciplinary action or inquiry.

Over the last six years, the police and prosecutors have cooperated in a broad effort that allows convicted felons found with a firearm to be tried in federal court, where sentences are much harsher than in state court. Officials say the initiative has taken hundreds of armed criminals off the street, mostly in the Bronx and Brooklyn, and turned some into informers who have helped solve more serious crimes.

But a closer look at those prosecutions reveals something that has not been trumpeted: more than 20 cases in which judges found police officers’ testimony to be unreliable, inconsistent, twisting the truth, or just plain false. The judges’ language was often withering: “patently incredible,” “riddled with exaggerations,” “unworthy of belief.”

The outrage usually stopped there. With few exceptions, judges did not ask prosecutors to determine whether the officers had broken the law, and prosecutors did not notify police authorities about the judges’ findings. The Police Department said it did not monitor the rulings and was aware of only one of them; after it learned about the cases recently from a reporter, a spokesman said the department would decide whether further review was needed....

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Wind ($23.37) v. Gas (25 Cents)
...An even better way to tell the story is by how much taxpayer money is dispensed per unit of energy, so the costs are standardized. For electricity generation, the EIA concludes that solar energy is subsidized to the tune of $24.34 per megawatt hour, wind $23.37 and "clean coal" $29.81. By contrast, normal coal receives 44 cents, natural gas a mere quarter, hydroelectric about 67 cents and nuclear power $1.59....

...The same study also looked at federal subsidies for non-electrical energy production, such as for fuel. It found that ethanol and biofuels receive $5.72 per British thermal unit of energy produced. That compares to $2.82 for solar and $1.35 for refined coal, but only three cents per BTU for natural gas and other petroleum liquids....

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Botched Paramilitary Police Raids
An interactive map of botched SWAT and paramilitary police raids, released in conjunction with the Cato policy paper "Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids," by Radley Balko....

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Fairness, idealism and other atrocities
..The Bible is very clear about one thing: Using politics to create fairness is a sin. Observe the Tenth Commandment. The first nine commandments concern theological principles and social law: Thou shalt not make graven images, steal, kill, et cetera. Fair enough. But then there's the tenth: "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor's."...

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Man Accused Of Providing Illegal Taxi Service
MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. -- A man who said he thought he was just helping a woman in need is accused of running an illegal taxi service.

Miami-Dade County's Consumer Services Department has slapped Rosco O'Neil with $2,000 worth of fines, but O'Neil claims he is falsely accused....

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Battle over eminent domain is another civil rights issue
Few policies have done more to destroy community and opportunity for minorities than eminent domain. Some 3 to 4 million Americans, most of them ethnic minorities, have been forcibly displaced from their homes as a result of urban renewal takings since World War II.

The fact is that eminent-domain abuse is a crucial constitutional rights issue. On Tuesday, the Alabama Advisory Committee of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights will hold a public forum at Birmingham’s historic Sixteenth Street Baptist church to address ongoing property seizures in the state. The church was not only a center of early civil rights action, but also, tragically, where four schoolgirls lost their lives in a bombing in 1963.

Current eminent domain horror stories in the South and elsewhere are not hard to find. At this writing, for example, the city of Clarksville, Tenn., is giving itself authority to seize more than 1,000 homes, businesses and churches and then resell much of the land to developers. Many who reside there are black, live on fixed incomes, and own well-maintained Victorian homes.

Eminent domain has always had an outsized impact on the constitutional rights of minorities, but most of the public didn’t notice until the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2005 ruling in Kelo v. City of New London. In Kelo, the Court endorsed the power of a local government to forcibly transfer private property to commercial interests for the purpose of “economic development.”

The Fifth Amendment requires that such seizures be for a “public use,” but that requirement can be satisfied, the Court ruled, by virtually any claim of some sort of public benefit. Many charge that Kelo gives governments a blank check to redistribute land from the poor and middle class to the wealthy.

Few protested the Kelo ruling more ardently than the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In an amicus brief filed in the case, it argued that “[t]he burden of eminent domain has and will continue to fall disproportionately upon racial and ethnic minorities, the elderly, and economically disadvantaged.” Unfettered eminent domain authority, the NAACP concluded, is a “license for government to coerce individuals on behalf of society’s strongest interests.”...

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Who Owns the Past?
... Most nation states have cultural property laws that restrict the international movement in archaeological artifacts found within their borders. But some antiquities are undocumented, lacking evidence of archaeological circumstances or removal. In the current debate over the acquisition of undocumented antiquities, the world’s archaeological community has allied with nationalistic programs of nation states.

Nations can and do bring charges of possession of, or conspiring to possess, stolen property against people and institutions holding objects covered by the relevant ownership laws, as seen with the Republic of Italy’s charges against the former J. Paul Getty Museum curator, Marion True, or Peru’s charges against Yale University with regard to contested Machu Picchu artifacts. More often than not, such laws are perceived as free of politics – the stuff of objective, reasoned best practice and indifferent government regulations

Nothing could be farther than the truth.

Government serves the interest of those in power. Once in power, with control over territory, governments breed loyalty among their citizens, often by promoting a particular identity and history. National culture – language and religion, patterns of behavior, dress and artistic production – is at once the means and manifestation of such beliefs, identity and loyalty, and serves to reinforce governments in power.

Governments can use antiquities – artifacts of cultures no longer extant and in every way different from the culture of the modern nation – to serve the government’s purpose. They attach identity with an extinct culture that only happened to have shared more or less the same stretch of the earth’s geography. The reason behind such claims is power.

At the core of my argument against nationalist retentionist cultural property laws – those calling for the retention of cultural property within the jurisdiction of the nation state – is their basis in nationalist-identity politics and implications for inhibiting our regard for the rich diversity of the world’s culture as common legacy. They conspire against our appreciation of the nature of culture as an overlapping, dynamic force for uniting rather than dividing humankind. They reinforce the dangerous tendency to divide the world into irreconcilable sectarian or tribal entities. ...

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The Two-Income Tax Trap
...Ms. Warren and Ms. Tyagi compare two middle-class families: an average family in the 1970s versus the 2000s (all dollar values are inflation-adjusted). The typical 1970s family is headed by a working father and a stay-at-home mother with two children. The father's income is $38,700, out of which came $5,310 in mortgage payments, $5,140 a year on car expenses, $1,030 on health insurance, and income taxes "which claim 24% of [the father's] income," leaving $17,834, or about $1,500 per month in "discretionary income" for all other expenses, such as food, clothing, utilities and savings.

The typical 2000s family has two working parents and a higher income of $67,800, an increase of 75% over the 1970s family. But their expenses have also risen: The mortgage payment increases to $9,000, the additional car raises the family obligation to $8,000, and more expensive health insurance premiums cost $1,650. A new expense of full-time daycare so the mother can work is estimated at $9,670. Mother's income bumps the family into a higher tax bracket, so that "the government takes 33% of the family's money." In the end, despite the dramatic increase in family income, the family is left with $17,045 in "discretionary income," less than the earlier generation.

The authors present no explanation for why they present only the tax data in their two examples as percentages instead of dollars. Nor do they ever present the actual dollar value for taxes anywhere in the book. So to conduct an "apples to apples" comparison of all expenses, I converted the tax obligations in the example from percentages to actual dollars.

In fact, for the typical 1970s family, paying 24% of its income in taxes works out to be $9,288. And for the 2000s family, paying 33% of its income is $22,374.

Although income only rose 75%, and expenditures for the mortgage, car and health insurance rose by even less than that, the tax bill increased by $13,086 -- a whopping 140% increase. The percentage of family income dedicated to health insurance, mortgage and automobiles actually declined between the two periods.

During this period, the figures used by Ms. Warren and Ms. Tyagi indicate that annual mortgage obligations increased by $3,690, automobile obligations by $2,860 and health insurance payments by $620 (a total increase of $7,170). Those increases are not trivial -- but they are swamped by the increase in tax obligations. To put this in perspective, the increase in tax obligations is over three times as large as the increase in the mortgage payments and almost double the increase in the mortgage and automobile payments combined. Even the new expenditure on child care is about a quarter less than the increase in taxes.

Overall, the typical family in the 2000s pays substantially more in taxes than the combined expenses of their mortgage, automobile and health insurance. And the change in the tax obligation between the two periods is substantially greater than the change in mortgage, automobile expenses and health-insurance costs combined.

This suggests that the most important change in the balance sheets of middle-class households over the past three decades is a dramatically higher tax burden caused by the progressive nature of the American tax system....

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Judge sentences Snipes to 3 years for tax convictions
...But U.S. District Judge William Terrell Hodges said Snipes exhibited a "history of contempt over a period of time" for U.S. tax laws...

...Prosecutors said Snipes' case was important to send a message to would-be tax protesters not to test the government.

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The drug abuse of John F Kennedy
...In his riveting volume In Sickness and In Power, former Foreign Secretary and medic David Owen reviews the health and medication of leaders over the last century. The chapter on Kennedy is jaw-dropping.

Owen starts by convincingly asserting that Kennedy was much sicker than is commonly appreciated and certainly much sicker than was appreciated at the time. His Addison's disease was very debilitating and needed constant attention....

...Central to Owen's account is the idea that the administration of drugs to Kennedy for these various ailments was out of control.

In particular, without the knowledge of his other doctors and at the same time as they were giving him other drugs, he was being tended to by Max Jacobson, a doctor known as "Dr Feelgood" because of his reputation as a provider of amphetamines and pep pills. In time Jacobson's drug treatment became almost a recreational drug for Kennedy. Jacobson was later struck off.

Owen shows that is quite likely that Dr Feelgood, specially flown to Vienna, injected Kennedy with intravenous amphetamine just before he met Khrushchev....

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Understanding Privacy -- and the Real Threats to It
...Whether it is anti-privacy regulation, data collection required by all manner of government programs, or outright surveillance, the relationship of governments to privacy is typically antagonistic. Privacy thrives when aware and empowered citizens are able to exercise control of information about themselves. Thoughtful policymakers should recognize the detrimental effects many programs have on consumers' privacy and respond with proposals that reduce the role of government in individuals' lives.

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Cigarette tax hurts the poor, but it's justified
...And it is well-documented that cigarette taxes reduce disease and death by making smokes unaffordable to the poor. So we do this for their own good....

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The Most Expensive Ingredient in Cigarettes
...So a pack of cigarettes that would cost, say, $4 without taxes will cost New Yorkers more than $9, most of which will go into city, state, and federal coffers. In other words, the government will be taxing a product disproportionately consumed by poor people at an effective rate of more than 100 percent, reaping bigger profits than anyone else from a business it simultaneously condemns as the foremost threat to public health. It can get away with this punitive levy because the people it's bleeding are an unpopular minority with little political influence. And what do we call this policy? Progressive.

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Threat to Homeschooling
The cat is finally out of the bag. A California appellate court, ruling that parents have no constitutional right to homeschool their children, pinned its decision on this ominous quotation from a 47-year-old case, "A primary purpose of the educational system is to train schoolchildren in good citizenship, patriotism and loyalty to the state and the nation as a means of protecting the public welfare."...

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VA employees rack up $2.6 billion in credit card charges for veterans care
Veterans Affairs employees last year racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in government credit-card bills at casino and luxury hotels, movie theaters and high-end retailers such as Sharper Image and Franklin Covey — and government auditors are investigating, citing past spending abuses.

All told, VA staff charged $2.6 billion to their government credit cards.

The Associated Press, through a Freedom of Information request, obtained the VA list of 3.1 million purchases made in the 2007 budget year. The list offers a detailed look into the everyday spending at the government's second largest department....

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The Most Expensive Ingredient in Cigarettes
...So a pack of cigarettes that would cost, say, $4 without taxes will cost New Yorkers more than $9, most of which will go into city, state, and federal coffers. In other words, the government will be taxing a product disproportionately consumed by poor people at an effective rate of more than 100 percent, reaping bigger profits than anyone else from a business it simultaneously condemns as the foremost threat to public health. It can get away with this punitive levy because the people it's bleeding are an unpopular minority with little political influence. And what do we call this policy? Progressive.

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New Deal Nostalgia
...By 1880, a little over fifty percent of the U.S. population was farming, but the proportion declined to seventeen percent in 1940 and then to about two percent today. The decline to 17 percent in 1940 was largely due to New Deal policies to industrialize agriculture. What happened to those who would have become farmers? Were they no longer needed? Growing food remained and will remain a necessity, but large corporations took over the land and displaced individual farmers. Patriotism -- in the form of allegiance to a distant government, with its flag and other symbols, with its wars in distant lands -- has filled the black hole left by the loss of land and a way of life they loved. New Deal policies were themselves designed to end subsistence farming. Farmers could have survived with government assistance, but the New Deal allowed banks to foreclose and destroyed surplus food production to maintain high prices, while people were starving. The government could have bought and distributed the food they destroyed ("dumped in the ocean," my father used to say). Then the Dust Bowl refugees were put to work picking cotton and fruit for agribusiness in California, the Northwest, and Arizona, driving out the Mexican farm workers, until the United States entered World War II, and the Dust Bowl refugees went to work in the war industry. All those angry ex-farmers and wannabe farmers making bombs and fighter planes, whole new generations following in that nasty work, a good many other of them serving in the military, now a business, not a civic duty. They get to drop the bombs and man the guns on the tanks that the others manufacture. Subsistence farmers, small farmers, like peace -- not war that takes away their young sons, and now daughters. Getting rid of them, reducing them to a tiny minority, has made military recruitment and passive acceptance of war much easier than during World War I, when farmers rose up in rebellion, as did workers, against a "war for big business," which all modern wars are....

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The Nightmare of the New Deal
...Shlaes begins diabolically, telling the heart-wrenching story of a young teenager who killed himself so that the rest of his impoverished family might have a little more to eat. Naturally, the reader starts to think, “That miserable bum Hoover — why didn’t he do something to improve conditions in the country?!” Then Shlaes springs the surprise: the event actually took place in late 1937, after Roosevelt had been president for nearly five years. The little-known truth (although painfully evident at the time) is that economic conditions had improved only slightly during Roosevelt’s first term and took a nosedive in the latter half of 1937, giving the nation a depression within a depression. While the United States had suffered through recessions in the past (always, Murray Rothbard has shown, owing to monetary bungling by the government), not one had lasted more than two years. Instead of hastening the normal recovery, the efforts of Hoover and Roosevelt had managed only to deepen and lengthen the misery while transforming the nation in terrible ways....