Tuesday, December 16, 2003
Senators were told Iraqi weapons could hit U.S.
Nelson said claim made during classified briefing
By John McCarthy
12/15/03: (FLORIDA TODAY) U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson said Monday the Bush administration last year told him and other senators that Iraq not only had weapons of mass destruction, but they had the means to deliver them to East Coast cities.
Nelson, D-Tallahassee, said about 75 senators got that news during a classified briefing before last October's congressional vote authorizing the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein from power. Nelson voted in favor of using military force.
Nelson said he couldn't reveal who in the administration gave the briefing.
The White House directed questions about the matter to the Department of Defense. Defense officials had no comment on Nelson's claim.
Nelson said the senators were told Iraq had both biological and chemical weapons, notably anthrax, and it could deliver them to cities along the Eastern seaboard via unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly known as drones.
"They have not found anything that resembles an UAV that has that capability," Nelson said. ...
The evangelicals who like to giftwrap Islamophobia
The world's largest children's Christmas project has a toxic agenda
Giles Fraser
The Rev Dr Giles Fraser is vicar of Putney and lecturer in philosophy at Wadham College, Oxford
...Ironically, it is the story of the good Samaritan that provides one of the most effective put-downs to precisely the sort of Islamophobia displayed by Christian fundamentalists such as Graham. Jesus is asked: "Who is my neighbour?" The moral of the story he tells in response - at least the one most people remember from Sunday school - is that it is the man who is beaten up and left for dead that Jesus points to as our neighbour. Conclusion: we must help those in need.
But that's not the story at all. A man is mugged in the Wadi Qelt between Jerusalem and Jericho. Whereas the religious pass by and do nothing, it is the Samaritan who offers care. Those listening to the story would have despised Samaritans. The words "good" and "Samaritan" just didn't go together. Indeed, theirs would have been the General Boykin reaction: that Samaritans worshipped the idol of a false god. Therefore, in casting the Samaritan as the only passer-by with compassion, Jesus is making an all-out assault on the prejudices of his listeners.
If the story was just about helping the needy, whoever they are, it would have been sufficient to cast the Samaritan as the victim and a Jewish layperson as the person who helped. Crucially, however, the hated Samaritan is held up as the moral exemplar. Conclusion: we must overcome religious bigotry.
The story of the good Samaritan, in the hands of Franklin Graham, is conscripted as propaganda for the superiority of Christian compassion to the brutal indifference of other religions - almost the opposite of the purpose of the story.
What is astonishing is that Christian fundamentalists have managed to persuade millions that their warped version of Christianity is the real thing and that mainstream churches have sold out to the secular spirit of the age. The truth is quite the reverse.
US evangelicals employ a selective biblical literalism to support a theology that systematically confuses the kingdom of God with the US's burgeoning empire. It is no coincidence that the mission fields most favoured by US evangelicals are also the targets of neo-conservative military ambition. To use Jesus as the rallying cry for a new imperialism is the most shameful reversal of all, for he was murdered by the forces of empire. The cross spoke of Roman power in just the way Black Hawk helicopters speak today of US power. ...
Tony the flight attendant
...Over the coming pages, we'll learn more about who was taken and who was left behind. This is the great privilege for writers of fiction set in the afterlife. It's a tradition that goes back at least to Dante, who settled political scores by writing his opponents into Hell....
The Hypothetical Bus
I don't remember much of Donald W. Thompson's series of rapture movies from when I saw them back in middle school at Hydewood Park Baptist Church....
...Thompson's films used the threat of the rapture as a surrogate for the threat of death. Like the evangelist warning of imminent, diesel-powered doom, he was trying to scare his audience into heaven. In its own way, A Thief in the Night is an old-fashioned fire-and-brimstone sermon -- Thompson's version of "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God."
I expected Left Behind to take a similar course, to invoke the apocalypse as a cosmic version of the Hypothetical Bus, urging sinners to repent because the end is near.
But that's not LaHaye and Jenkins' agenda. Jonathan Edwards famously wrote of the fires of Hell as a warning. L&J write of the Tribulation as a vindication, a confirmation of their own rightness and righteousness.
Their intended audience is people who, like them, already believe in premillennial dispensationalism. Their tone is the juvenile triumphalism of an adolescent semi-threatening suicide or running away: Just wait until I'm gone. Then you'll see. Then you'll be sorry.
There's a message here for "the unsaved," but it's not the message of salvation that Edwards and Thompson extended, however clumsily. It is not "get right with God, because time is short," but rather this: "Ha-ha! We were right and you were wrong! Have fun in Hell!"
I would suggest that this is not a very winsome or effective strategy for evangelism.
Not creepy enough
...Mennonite theologian Loren L. Johns identifies this "unadulterated triumphalism" as one of the most disturbingly unchristian aspects of the series:
... Fundamental to the spirit of the Left Behind series is the sense of vindication that "we" have been right all along. The not-so-subtle news headline that lies behind the entire series could well be, "Premillennial Dispensationalists Proved to Have Been Right All Along." The message of this series is unadulterated triumphalism. You can forget the business of Christians taking up the cross in this series!
Premillennial dispensationalists have admittedly gotten rough treatment in the modern world. From a modernist or secularist point of view, the claims of a pre-Tribulation rapture of the church, followed by seven years of Tribulation, followed by the thousand-year reign of Christ just seems too preposterous to be believed. Combine that with the fact that premillennial dispensationalists have been prone to set dates for the Second Coming of Christ -- and the fact that their batting average so far has been zero -- and that well-educated theologians as a whole tend to pooh-pooh their ideas, and you quickly come to a point of eschatological frustration with the way things are.
It is not the Lamb who has conquered in this series, but the premillennial dispensationalists! "We win!" Similarly, "You lose!"
Johns is astute in pointing out the transparent insecurity and frustration that are the source of this fictional vindication, and how it undermines the "taking up the cross" that is the literal crux of Christianity....
...Why expose myself and the readers of this blog to the potentially toxic foolishness of Left Behind?
Welcome to the Hellmouth
Because LB is more than simply a wretched novel. It is a wretched novel with serious consequences. It is, among other things, an assault on the central beliefs of the Christian faith, as Mennonite theologian Loren L. Johns writes:
At the end of the day, this series is ultimately a rejection of the good news of Jesus Christ. I say this because it rejects the way of the cross and Jesus' call to obedient discipleship and a new way of life. It celebrates the human will to power, putting evangelical Christians in the heroic role of God's Green Berets. In this story, premillennialist dispensationalism meets American survivalism. This is a story about so-called Christian men who never really grew up, who still love to play with toys and dominate others, and whose passions are still largely unredeemed. Love of enemies is treated as a misguided strategy associated not with the gospel, but with the Antichrist. Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins have the right to offer any kind of interpretation of Christianity and of the end times that they wish. Ultimately, it is not their interpretation of the end times that troubles me so much as their interpretation of Christianity. It is devoid of any real theology, or substantial Christology, or any ethics that are recognizably Christian. This is a vision of unredeemed Christianity....
Saddam Captured – Now What?
...In his great novel First Circle, Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn created a memorable portrait of the Soviet dictator Stalin during his final years at the pinnacle of supreme power. The man who was perhaps the most ruthless and powerful tyrant in the world was effectively confined to a small apartment of rooms in the Kremlin. Having wielded power ruthlessly for decades he had created innumerable enemies and could trust nobody. His food had to be tasted before he would touch it. He was constantly worried (and as it turns out, not without cause) that people were plotting against him. He had virtually no human companionship except a few servants. A victim of his own spite and plotting, he was almost somebody one could feel sorry for, if you could overlook the minor fact that he was responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent people.
When I read that years ago, I was struck by how empty is the promise of political power. Not every political leader suffers isolation and the inability to trust anyone, but most feel it to some degree. To gain political power is to relinquish almost everything that makes a decent person human, and it's true for democratic leaders as well as tyrants. A few thrive on it, but rare indeed is the political leader who doesn't wonder, some nights when sleep doesn't come easily, whether it was worth it. Not only do one's personal human relationships suffer, but whatever tattered remnant of a personal conscience a political leader cannot repress must deliver an unwelcome rebuke from time to time....
“Free-Speech Zone”
The administration quarantines dissent.
By James Bovard
...The Justice Department is now prosecuting Brett Bursey, who was arrested for holding a “No War for Oil” sign at a Bush visit to Columbia, S.C. Local police, acting under Secret Service orders, established a “free speech zone” half a mile from where Bush would speak. Bursey was standing amid hundreds of people carrying signs praising the president. Police told Bursey to remove himself to the “free speech zone.”
Bursey refused and was arrested. Bursey said that he asked the policeman if “it was the content of my sign, and he said, ‘Yes, sir, it’s the content of your sign that’s the problem.’” Bursey stated that he had already moved 200 yards from where Bush was supposed to speak. Bursey later complained, “The problem was, the restricted area kept moving. It was wherever I happened to be standing.”
Bursey was charged with trespassing. Five months later, the charge was dropped because South Carolina law prohibits arresting people for trespassing on public property. But the Justice Department—in the person of U.S. Attorney Strom Thurmond Jr.—quickly jumped in, charging Bursey with violating a rarely enforced federal law regarding “entering a restricted area around the President of the United States.” If convicted, Bursey faces a six-month trip up the river and a $5000 fine. Federal magistrate Bristow Marchant denied Bursey’s request for a jury trial because his violation is categorized as a “petty offense.” Some observers believe that the feds are seeking to set a precedent in a conservative state such as South Carolina that could then be used against protesters nationwide....
"Discourse on Voluntary Servitude"
Étienne La Boétie
Poor, wretched, and stupid peoples, nations determined on your own misfortune and blind to your own good! You let yourselves be deprived before your own eyes of the best part of your revenues; your fields are plundered, your homes robbed, your family heirlooms taken away. You live in such a way that you cannot claim a single thing as your own; and it would seem that you consider yourselves lucky to be loaned your property, your families, and your very lives. All this havoc, this misfortune, this ruin, descends upon you not from alien foes, but from the one enemy whom you yourselves render as powerful as he is, for whom you go bravely to war, for whose greatness you do not refuse to offer your own bodies unto death. He who thus domineers over you has only two eyes, only two hands, only one body, no more than is possessed by the least man among the infinite numbers dwelling in your cities; he has indeed nothing more than the power that you confer upon him to destroy you. Where has he acquired enough eyes to spy upon you, if you do not provide them yourselves? How can he have so many arms to beat you with, if he does not borrow them from you? The feet that trample down your cities, where does he get them if they are not your own? How does he have any power over you except through you? How would he dare assail you if he had no cooperation from you? What could he do to you if you yourselves did not connive with the thief who plunders you, if you were not accomplices of the murderer who kills you, if you were not traitors to yourselves? You sow your crops in order that he may ravage them, you install and furnish your homes to give him goods to pillage; you rear your daughters that he may gratify his lust; you bring up your children in order that he may confer upon them the greatest privilege he knows to be led into his battles, to be delivered to butchery, to be made the servants of his greed and the instruments of his vengeance; you yield your bodies unto hard labor in order that he may indulge in his delights and wallow in his filthy pleasures; you weaken yourselves in order to make him the stronger and the mightier to hold you in check. From all these indignities, such as the very beasts of the field would not endure, you can deliver yourselves if you try, not by taking action, but merely by willing to be free. Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces.
INVESTIGATIVE REPORT: The untold story of the Bush administration's penchant for secrecy
How the public's business gets done out of the public eye
...Beyond the well-publicized cases involving terrorism suspects, the administration is aggressively pursuing secrecy claims in the federal courts in ways little understood--even by some in the legal system. The administration is increasingly invoking a "state secrets" privilege that allows government lawyers to request that civil and criminal cases be effectively closed by asserting that national security would be compromised if they proceed....
Hiding Underground
..."Good riddance," [Bush] declared. "The world is better off without you, Mr Saddam Hussein. And I find it very interesting that when the heat got on, you dug yourself a hole and you crawled in it."
Where was Bush and Cheney and the rest of them on 9/11?
Underground. In hiding. ...
Monday, December 15, 2003
Methodists Vote to Install Obese Bishop
INDIANAPOLIS, IN – In a highly controversial vote that may divide the denomination, the Free Methodist Church of North America voted today to install Dr. Jack Harvey, an openly obese man, as the bishop of the western conference of the church. Harvey is the first admitted obese person to have been installed as a bishop in the FM Church. The vote, which came after several hours of intense debate at the annual Free Methodist General Conference, fell in Harvey's favor by a margin of 421-385.
Harvey, who at six feet tall tips the scales at 389 pounds, declined to stir the controversy further, offering only a succinct statement at the press conference following the vote. "I'd like to thank my supporters for their confidence in my depth of faith and servant's heart. And I'd like to extend an olive branch to the thin community and let them know I'm their bishop, too. I will work tirelessly to oversee the western conference and care for our wonderful pastors, regardless of their race, gender, or body mass. Thank you." Harvey refused to answer questions from the press, noting with a chuckle that he had to get home in time for dinner with his family.
Opponents of the decision turn to the Bible for support. Roger Greenwood, president of Frees Against Gluttony, an internal group organized to oppose Harvey's election, says the group cites "no less than sixty direct references to the avoidance of gluttony and the type of binging so commonly practiced within the obese community." Such passages include Philippians 3:18-19, which Greenwood claims describes obese persons as "enemies of the cross of Christ. Their destiny is destruction, their god is their stomach, and their glory is in their shame. Their mind is on earthly things." Greenwood also referred to the famous passage in 1 Corinthians that describes the body as a temple: "That passage is obviously about smoking, but we think it also applies to one's body weight. What kind of Christian would dump two or three cheeseburgers a day into a temple of the Holy Spirit?"
Greenwood also announced the launch of his organization's Web site, www.godhatesfat.com....
Left Behind: Pretrib Porno
Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth's Last Days, by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. Tyndale House Publishers, 1995.
Pages 1-3.
The first words of Left Behind are "Rayford Steele," the protagonist's name.
It sounds like a porn star's name -- and in a sense it is. The Left Behind series is dispensational porno,...
...Our porn star hero, Rayford Steele, interacts with women just like any porn star does -- minus, of course, the sex. It's all about dominance, exploitation, titillation and the stroking of -- in this case -- egos.
The character Rayford Steele is, like the authors, no longer a young man. Younger authors might not have been compelled to give their protagonists names -- "Steele" and "Buck" -- that seem such a blatant assertion of male virility. Bev is apparently not the only LaHaye who seems oblivious to phallic imagery.
If you're thinking I'm reading too much into all this, that this theme isn't really as present in the text as I'm making it out to be, consider the opening lines:
Rayford Steele's mind was on a woman he had never touched. With his fully loaded 747 on autopilot ...
That's more than just subtext....
I kind of feel the terrorists have won by making me write this, since it ought to be obvious to any idiot, but yes, I’m quite pleased that a monstrous mass murderer (though a former ally to Messrs. Reagan, Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld) will be brought to justice and will not be able to threaten anyone ever again. However, just as obviously, it does little to justify what remains a dishonest, self-destructive, hubristic adventure that continues to undermine our security and the stability of the region with each passing day, but there it is....
U.S. Secretly Urging Afghan Rebels to Quit
Some who are fighting for a fugitive warlord have been prodded to set up democratic parties.
By Paul Watson
Times Staff Writer
December 9, 2003
KABUL, Afghanistan - In a series of secret gatherings, senior U.S. and other Western diplomats have met commanders of an Afghan faction that is attacking U.S.-led troops, urging the militants to dump their leader, disarm and form democratic parties.
The most recent talks, with four top commanders who fight for fugitive warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, were held in Western embassies and the presidential palace here in the last week in November, a source familiar with the talks said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
U.S. forces have tried to kill Hekmatyar with at least two airstrikes, but he escaped and is waging a self-declared holy war against U.S. troops. He openly supports Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Hekmatyar's Hizb-i-Islami, or Islamic Party, is on the State Department's list of terrorist groups.
Officials of President Hamid Karzai's government, with the support of U.S. diplomats, are talking with some Taliban and other militant leaders Karzai considers moderate enough to participate in mainstream politics...
MISSION ACCOMPLISHEDER! THE WORLD SLEEPS SAFELY TONIGHT KNOWING A DELIRIOUS, NAPPY HAIRBALL LIVING IN A HOLE IS FINALLY IN REPUBLICAN CUSTODY
THE PRESIDENT: Good afternoon. Today I bring news of great consequence to all the pollsters of the world. Yesterday, December the 13th, at around 8:30 p.m. Baghdad time, former U.S. Department of Defense employee Saddam Hussein was captured alive. This man, the most powerful, diabolical evildoer ever to threaten humanity, was found in his hometown of Tikrit, beneath the dusty lean-to of a long-time supporter. In short, he was exactly where everyone thought he'd be. And today, I am proud to say that it only took us just shy of nine months from the day I gave him forty-eight hours to skedattle or be promptly administered a Texas Lead Enema.
Also as expected, Saddam was found presiding over operations at a state-of-the-art Weapons of Mass Destruction control panel with a retractable top, hot babes and heliport – albeit artfully camouflaged to resemble an unstaffed, vermin-infested hole in the ground. It was here, from this advanced, zillion dollar terror complex that he concocted and carefully managed execution of his countless nefarious schemes – most notably his powerful, intoxicating ability to make us forget all about the people who were actually behind 9/11 by impersonating a filthy piece of poor homeless trash. Well that was his last mistake. Little did he know that this administration is even quicker at taking down the poor than it is at nabbing evildoers!
Going forward, you will hear a great deal of talk in the news media about how Saddam did not fight to the death when finally seized by U.S. forces. You will hear that while he wore a diminutive, dirt-jammed sidearm, that he never fired a single shot while 600 burly leathernecks wielding personal howitzers closed in around him. You may wonder about the fixation on this seemingly irrelevant detail. Well, the reason for this is simple. This shows that Saddam is a pussy. A pink panty-wearing, prancing tooty-fruity wimp in a silken negligee, wanting nothing more than to be taken alive, stripped naked, and repeatedly subjected to Uncle Sam's notoriously thorough body cavity searches.
(Boos.)
Indeed. But in contrast to Saddam's totally embarrassing pussiness, I am a total stud – a veritable throbbing veiny staff of alpha-male triumph. And inasmuch as I am also the embodiment of the United States, all Americans are today infinitely more studly than they were yesterday. That is why, in celebration of our astonishing ability to evict a bewildered 66 year-old from a hole in the ground with only 400+ U.S. casualties, let all Americans follow my personal example, and demonstrate their patriotism by standing topless in front of a mirror, gritting their teeth, flexing their muscles and bellowing, "WHO'S THE FUCKING MAN? I'M THE FUCKING MAN! USA! USA! USA!" ...
Saddam’s Capture Means Trouble for U.S. Officials
by Jacob G. Hornberger, December 15, 2003
In his official statement celebrating the capture of Saddam Hussein, President Bush announced that “the former dictator of Iraq will face the justice he denied to millions.” Notably lacking from the president’s statement, however, was whether the U.S. government would agree to relinquish control over Hussein’s trial to the Iraqi government or to an international tribunal consisting of independent judges.
Why wouldn’t U.S. officials readily agree to relinquish jurisdiction over Hussein’s trial? Because of their need to closely guard the secrets that Saddam Hussein has in his possession — secrets that would cause no small amount of embarrassment to the U.S. government, including former president Ronald Reagan, former vice-president and former president George H.W. Bush (the president’s father), and Donald Rumsfeld, the president’s secretary of defense. ...
Power corrupts, PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
PowerPoint Makes You Dumb
By CLIVE THOMPSON
In August, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board at NASA released Volume 1 of its report on why the space shuttle crashed. As expected, the ship's foam insulation was the main cause of the disaster. But the board also fingered another unusual culprit: PowerPoint, Microsoft's well-known ''slideware'' program.
NASA, the board argued, had become too reliant on presenting complex information via PowerPoint, instead of by means of traditional ink-and-paper technical reports. When NASA engineers assessed possible wing damage during the mission, they presented the findings in a confusing PowerPoint slide -- so crammed with nested bullet points and irregular short forms that it was nearly impossible to untangle. ''It is easy to understand how a senior manager might read this PowerPoint slide and not realize that it addresses a life-threatening situation,'' the board sternly noted.
PowerPoint is the world's most popular tool for presenting information. There are 400 million copies in circulation, and almost no corporate decision takes place without it. But what if PowerPoint is actually making us stupider? ...
Friday, December 12, 2003
Case Forged
No Amens Here for NR's 'Corner'
The advocates of war in the Middle East, now in panic mode, have resorted to concocting third-rate fiction to support the occupation of Iraq. Consider this email that National Review stalwart Cliff May claimed to have gotten from a real live Iraqi [who presumably reads NR for the stories and not the salacious pin-up stuff that I really don't want to mention in mixed company]....
Thursday, December 11, 2003
The Saudi Connection
How billions in oil money spawned a global terror network
By David E. Kaplan
The CIA's Illicit Transactions Group isn't listed in any phone book. There are no entries for it on any news database or Internet site. The ITG is one of those tidy little Washington secrets, a group of unsung heroes whose job is to keep track of smugglers, terrorists, and money launderers. In late 1998, officials from the White House's National Security Council called on the ITG to help them answer a couple of questions: How much money did Osama bin Laden have, and how did he move it around? The queries had a certain urgency. A cadre of bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorists had just destroyed two of America's embassies in East Africa. The NSC was determined to find a way to break the organization's back. Working with the Illicit Transactions Group, the NSC formed a task force to look at al Qaeda's finances. For months, members scoured every piece of data the U.S. intelligence community had on al Qaeda's cash. The team soon realized that its most basic assumptions about the source of bin Laden's money--his personal fortune and businesses in Sudan--were wrong. Dead wrong. Al Qaeda, says William Wechsler, the task force director, was "a constant fundraising machine." And where did it raise most of those funds? The evidence was indisputable: Saudi Arabia.
America's longtime ally and the world's largest oil producer had somehow become, as a senior Treasury Department official put it, "the epicenter" of terrorist financing. This didn't come entirely as a surprise to intelligence specialists. But until the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, U.S. officials did painfully little to confront the Saudis not only on financing terror but on backing fundamentalists and jihadists overseas. Over the past 25 years, the desert kingdom has been the single greatest force in spreading Islamic fundamentalism, while its huge, unregulated charities funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to jihad groups and al Qaeda cells around the world. Those findings are the result of a five-month investigation by U.S. News. The magazine's inquiry is based on a review of thousands of pages of court records, U.S. and foreign intelligence reports, and other documents....
... It didn't hurt that the Saudis had spread money around Washington by the millions. Vast sums from Saudi contracts have bought friends and influence here. In his recent book Sleeping With the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude, former CIA operative Bob Baer calls it "Washington's 401(k) Plan." "The Saudis put out the message," Baer wrote. "You play the game--keep your mouth shut about the kingdom--and we'll take care of you." The list of beneficiaries is impressive: former cabinet secretaries, ambassadors, and CIA station chiefs. Washington lobbyists, P.R. firms, and lawyers have also supped at the Saudi table, as have nonprofits from the Kennedy Center to presidential libraries. The high-flying Carlyle Group has made fortunes doing deals with the Saudis. Among Carlyle's top advisers have been former President George H.W. Bush; James Baker, his secretary of state; and Frank Carlucci, a former secretary of defense. If that wasn't enough, there was the staggering amount of Saudi investment in America--as much as $600 billion in U.S. banks and stock markets....
Intrepid Antiwarriors of the Libertarian Right Stake Their Rightful Claim to Power
Looking into the endearing obsession known as Antiwar.com
Justin Raimondo is hunched in front of his computer, in the living room of his cramped one-bedroom Pacific Heights apartment, under a framed poster of the Ayn Rand commemorative postage stamp. A 52-year-old with the lithe body of a much younger man - the result of obsessive workouts -Raimondo has brown eyes cupped in dark circles, and a Vantage cigarette hangs from the corner of his scowling lips. It's his fifth in as many minutes. He throws back his head, lets out a stream of smoke, and howls, "Aaaaaaaagh!"
Raimondo is a libertarian political writer who pens a thrice-weekly column for Antiwar.com, an anti-U.S. foreign intervention Weblog he works on full time with his friend, Eric Garris. Raimondo's style is sarcastic and polemical; his targets are the evil "neocons" running the Bush administration - "Rummy," "Condi," and the rest, whose dastardly warmongering has led the country into blood-soaked ruin....
Remarks to the Commonwealth Club
by Michael Crichton
San Francisco
September 15, 2003
...I studied anthropology in college, and one of the things I learned was that certain human social structures always reappear. They can't be eliminated from society. One of those structures is religion. Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people---the best people, the most enlightened people---do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form. You can not believe in God, but you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.
Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it's a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.
There's an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there's a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.
Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday---these are deeply held mythic structures. They are profoundly conservative beliefs. They may even be hard-wired in the brain, for all I know. I certainly don't want to talk anybody out of them, as I don't want to talk anybody out of a belief that Jesus Christ is the son of God who rose from the dead. But the reason I don't want to talk anybody out of these beliefs is that I know that I can't talk anybody out of them. These are not facts that can be argued. These are issues of faith.
And so it is, sadly, with environmentalism. Increasingly it seems facts aren't necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief. It's about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved. Whether you are going to be one of the people on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom. Whether you are going to be one of us, or one of them. ...
...There is no Eden. There never was. What was that Eden of the wonderful mythic past? Is it the time when infant mortality was 80%, when four children in five died of disease before the age of five? When one woman in six died in childbirth? When the average lifespan was 40, as it was in America a century ago. When plagues swept across the planet, killing millions in a stroke. Was it when millions starved to death? Is that when it was Eden? ...
...So I can tell you some facts. I know you haven't read any of what I am about to tell you in the newspaper, because newspapers literally don't report them. I can tell you that DDT is not a carcinogen and did not cause birds to die and should never have been banned. I can tell you that the people who banned it knew that it wasn't carcinogenic and banned it anyway. I can tell you that the DDT ban has caused the deaths of tens of millions of poor people, mostly children, whose deaths are directly attributable to a callous, technologically advanced western society that promoted the new cause of environmentalism by pushing a fantasy about a pesticide, and thus irrevocably harmed the third world. Banning DDT is one of the most disgraceful episodes in the twentieth century history of America. We knew better, and we did it anyway, and we let people around the world die and didn't give a damn.
I can tell you that second hand smoke is not a health hazard to anyone and never was, and the EPA has always known it. I can tell you that the evidence for global warming is far weaker than its proponents would ever admit. ...
...There are two reasons why I think we all need to get rid of the religion of environmentalism.
First, we need an environmental movement, and such a movement is not very effective if it is conducted as a religion. We know from history that religions tend to kill people, and environmentalism has already killed somewhere between 10-30 million people since the 1970s. It's not a good record....
...The second reason to abandon environmental religion is more pressing. Religions think they know it all, but the unhappy truth of the environment is that we are dealing with incredibly complex, evolving systems, and we usually are not certain how best to proceed. Those who are certain are demonstrating their personality type, or their belief system, not the state of their knowledge. Our record in the past, for example managing national parks, is humiliating. Our fifty-year effort at forest-fire suppression is a well-intentioned disaster from which our forests will never recover. We need to be humble, deeply humble, in the face of what we are trying to accomplish. We need to be trying various methods of accomplishing things. We need to be open-minded about assessing results of our efforts, and we need to be flexible about balancing needs. Religions are good at none of these things. ...
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