Doctor Jones ruminates...

The joke’s on you: How you’ve been duped by astrology and didn’t even know it…

nostrugglenoprogress@gmail.com (Doctor Jones) — Sat, 11 Sep 2010 19:17:00 -0700

I blogged a while back on the proliferation of errant beliefs in the information age in viral internet memes: Sticking My Finger in the Dike (many love it, and you might too).

I thought it was time to take a moment to briefly debunk astrology, that most repugnant of memes and pseudoscience adhered to by quite literally millions of Americans. According to Gallup in the fall of 2005, 25% of Americans and just as many Britons buy into the pseudoscience. That’s ONE IN FOUR OF us! At 300 million Americans, that’d be about 75 million Americans who virtually believe that THE EARTH IS FLAT!

I know! Completely inconceivable! Are you surprised really, given that 44% of Americans in 2008 said they believed God created man in his present form? It just goes to show you how grossly ignorant the average American is when it comes to science… Worse yet, in the Information Age, it could be argued there is no excuse for such glaring and gross ignorance, non? And willful ignorance is actually not ignorance, but stupidity…

A Brief History

The Zodiac comes to us by way of the Hellenistic Greeks (think Alexander the Great who combined Classical Greek, Macedonian, Egyptian, and Persian knowledge). In turn, its origin is from Babylon (the Chaldean period) in the middle first millennium BCE (BC).

To ancient stargazers and skywatchers in agrarian societies dependent upon predicting seasonality in order to plant and harvest, watching the skies was an imperative. Thousands of years of sky watching were common to all ancient early civilizations and human societies for very obvious and quite practical reasons. From Stonehenge to Teotihuacan to the Mayan calendars, knowing when to plant and harvest was imperative to the emergence of all prehistoric civilizations. From prehistoric Neolithic Agricultural Revolution Mesopotamia to Europe to the New World, the ability to be able to predict seasons and when to plant and harvest became specialized knowledge that was the basis of power for a priestly class, and, along with irrigation projects, is thought by anthropologists to be the origin of increasing human social stratification (class/castes).

In ancient European history, the Bronze Age Nebra sky disk and golden hats bear witness to the importance of this stargazing in semi-settled horticulturalist central Europe long before classical Greek civilization arose.

But it was important for other reasons too. As they looked around at the world around them, they sought explanations for calamities of all kinds—from human sickness to drought to infertility to land that would no longer produce due to over farming and salinization. Like all ancient peoples generally characterized by polytheism (belief in many deities) and animism (belief that everything, including animals, plants, and inanimate objects like rocks and beaches and phenomenon like rain, possesses a spirit), in the same way the ancient Greeks explained the movement of the sun across the sky daily through their God Apollo and imagining an invisible chariot pulled by horses, they also sought to explain the inexplicable by way of the heavens.

Ancient humans were also not too different from modern humans in their desire to not only understand the past, but, more importantly, to predict the future on the basis of it. As inanimate objects and materials and phenomenon in the natural world were imbued with supernatural powers influencing the lives of mortals, naturally, then, the planets and heavenly bodies naturally exerted past, present, and future influences over the births, lives, and events of people. Those influences must be examined and understood in order to understand past and present and to predict the future. In short, people are uncomfortable with- and fear the unknown and the uncertain. Astrology and the Zodiac, in the same way Marx would one day say religion is the opiate of the masses, proved a strong sedative for ancient peoples against the certainty of uncertainty, and, like all belief systems, created a framework for understanding supernatural, natural, and human events. In the same way pagan belief systems perpetuate a belief in magick as explanations for misfortune, the Zodiac served a similar function. Hexes, curses, and spells weren’t alone in explaining human suffering and misery. The planets and stars had their role too, and people offending the gods, spirits or heavenly bodies could likewise explain it… And human success could be explained by those who heeded the warnings given by the stars.

Of course there has always been a conflict of interest and profit motive on behalf of those who claim special, arcane, esoteric knowledge (as there is today amongst New Age practitioners from Quantum beliefs to Zeitgeist and its pseudohistoric/scientific sequels). There’s good money in fortune telling now as there was then… And how lucky for today’s practitioners that one in four of us don’t know any better…

Just imagine the bucks this guy is making preying off of the ignorant…

And so, ancient Babylonians (around 2,500 YBP) through stargazing developed a system of astrology to explain those influences during the Chaldean period, beliefs that were concurrent with the development of Zoroastrianism and Ahura Mazdaism in Persia (Iran). The Macedonian Alexander the Great’s conquering of Persia ensured the perpetuation of this meme from Babylon by way of the Greeks and Romans to modern Europe and America.

Why the Zodiac is unscientific

I’ll blog on another day when I have more time about the scientific studies that have been done concerning horoscopes and The Amazing Randi’s lovely debunking of astrology and horoscopes over his life. But I can’t resist sharing this tidbit at this moment because I find it entertaining… An astrologer gave James Randi a horoscope, and Discovery Magazine had a fun write up in response including some video…

You might enjoy this clip. Really, trust me. Watch it now.

But I’ll be brief. Muslim scientists by the second millennium CE had debunked and rejected astrology and diverged in their scientific study of the heavens in astronomy. Scientists have known since the Age of Reason/Enlightenment that astrology is bogus and unscientific; hence the divergence of astronomy and astrology.

In 2006, in response to rising pseudoscientific views of the United States public (sadly), the U.S. National Science Board issued a statement designating astrology as pseudoscientific. In 1975, The American Humanist Association essentially did the same in stating that there is no scientific basis for astrology. Karl Sagan felt astrology was invalid, but found this statement’s tone too authoritarian, preferring instead a statement that would reject the specific tenets of astrology. Two of our modern world’s most renown scientific minds, Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins have issued unequivocal statements that astrology is unscientific.

As a youth and young adult, I’d succumb to the popular superstition that is astrology myself, especially when so many so invested in the pseudoscience assured me that, yes, horoscopes are bogus and subject to confirmation bias, but sun sign astrology when given an accurate birth time are eerily accurate and precise and can be trusted. And, low and behold, when I had a birth chart done and such, it astounded me in its accuracy. It also seemed to be eerily accurate for those I also subjected to birth chart analysis. But there again, the same phenomenon in overly vague descriptions subject to one’s own confirmation bias applied.

There were two revelations I had that helped me to realize how bogus astrology was truly in every way.

Um, the earth is the center of the solar system/universe? The first was that the Zodiac was based upon a geocentric model of the universe. Cosmologists can demonstrate that, no matter where one is in the universe, it will always appear as if the location of the observer is at the center of it (see the illusion of space expansion).

In the same way the Church taught that the earth, with God’s penultimate, perfect creation in humankind, was the center of both the solar system and the universe, ancient Mesopotamian observers of the heavens were totally unaware that it was earth orbiting the sun, not the other way around. It is, in effect, an optical illusion, but still totally false. Knowing this, we also know that the system of observations upon which all of modern astrology depends is totally flawed in its perspective. In other words, believers in modern astrology are essentially little different than someone alive today who would posit that the earth is still flat. Believing in astrology is tantamount to superstition and little different than believing that sneezing is caused by demons trying to crawl into your body through your nose or that the bubonic plague could only be explained by Jews poisoning the village well.

Um, you mean to tell me I’m not the Zodiac sign I believe I am and have believed my entire life whenever I’ve read my horoscope? Second, and more importantly, I discovered that due in part to the precession of the equinoxes, and completely arbitrary and inaccurate division of the heavens into twelve neat 30° sections (360° ÷ 12 = 30°) that don’t actually correspond to the true constellation boundaries of the Zodiac and the tropical, or solar, year on the Gregorian calendar (and the exclusion of Ophiuchus), most of us aren’t even the birth sign that we think we are (some are still, others aren’t).

But this is hard to visualize for the layperson new to astronomy. As such, the video I’ve posted below does an excellent job of helping you visualize what we’re talking about when we say “sun sign,” or “birth sign,” astrology.

Let me verbally try to paint the picture, and then I’ll share the video. First, we’ve got to stupidly imagine that the earth is the center of the solar system, and the Sun a tether ball attached to the earth (the video actually correctly visualizes a helio-, or sun-, centered solar system). As you visualize the sun tethered to the earth and moving around it, visualize the string creating a plane that bisects the earth and the sun at the equator of the earth and the equator/center of the sun. This 2D plane is known as the ecliptic plane or ecliptical because if the moon comes between the earth and sun here, it causes a solar eclipse.

Now, if you drilled a hole through the center of the sun along this line, so you had a peep hole through the sun to the opposite side of the universe, as the point opposite the earth along this line of sight enters and exits the ecliptical plane constellations, this is how the 12 signs of the Zodiac are determined, along with their dates.

There’s one problem: the dates don’t actually match when this line enters and exits each constellation throughout the year. And we aren’t actually the birth signs we think we are… Sort of throws out astrology and the Zodiac altogether, doesn’t it?

First, the video (notice the earth at the bottom left, and the sun center; then draw the line from the earth to the sun and extend it out to visualize what we’re talking about when you hear “sun” or “birth” sign astrology)…

Second, now the reality. My friend’s date of birth is September 26. All of her life, she was told she was a Libra according to the Zodiac. In reality, it turns out, she’s a Virgo. Another friend’s date of birth is January 27. He thought he was an Aquarius. Now it turns out he’s actually a Capricorn. Chances are, you aren’t what you’ve thought you are, and you’ve spent your entire life reading the wrong horoscope. Consult the chart below I created using constellation boundaries from the 1930 International Astronomical Union to find out your REAL Zodiac sign.

And now that you know, knowing is half the battle… The other half is slaying these errant beliefs by confronting these superstitions wherever you find them.

And so that you can continue inoculating others to such inane beliefs, Michael Shermer of the Skeptic’s Society has a Baloney Detection kit for you to share with others…

And, in case you’re wondering why people believe strange things in the first place…

Michael Shermer explains here in his TED Talk (in which he announced he was recanting his anthropogenic climate change skepticism at its start to the world):

And in case you’d prefer to read about why…

You’d probably enjoy the blog I linked in the opening too if you enjoyed this one. And, remember, sharing is caring. We’ve got to get the right counter memes out there… Instead of being part of the problem, be part of the solution.

Signing off… Your friendly neighborhood Minister of Elucidation, Doctor Jones.

The Truth about the First Thanksgiving…

nostrugglenoprogress@gmail.com (Doctor Jones) — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 16:49:00 -0800

My annual re-post of one of my more popular blogs.

"Considering that virtually none of the standard fare surrounding Thanksgiving contains an ounce of authenticity, historical accuracy, or cross-cultural perception, why is it so apparently ingrained? Is it necessary to the American psyche to perpetually exploit and debase its victims in order to justify its history?" – Michael Dorris

Ah, our lovely annual turkey day celebration of one of the greatest ethnic cleansings in all of human history (caveat: by genocide, I refer not to population decimation by disease which was not deliberate save the single extant example of Lord Jeffrey Amherst, commander of British forces during the French-Indian War [and the image of U.S. Cavalry doing the same originates in Ward Churchill’s spurious scholarship and has been exposed as deceit], although the decimation wrought by disease was what informed Manifest Destiny), but instead the long history of exterminationist and assimiliationist policies of European conquerors in the New World from Requiermento to the present day.

I should first say that I'm not opposed to any holiday away from work for any reason, much less to spend time with and appreciate our families and things for which we are grateful (though such reflection should be constant, should it not?).

What I'm opposed to are:

the culturally insensitive stereotypes that pervade the holiday,
the fictions that surround the story of the First Thanksgiving and the revision of history it accomplishes in elementary aged school children,
the mythical/fictive (it is part of our national origin myth) event of the First Thanksgiving, and
the associated imagery that typify this mythical story (of Indians and Pilgrims joyfully coexisting in peace and harmony and coming as equal partners and contributors to a shared meal of thanksgiving, not a tradition authentic to the Wampanoags as a harvest festival going back into time immemorial [it was introduced by them and then coopted by the Pilgrims], but introduced by the Pilgrims as a mutual celebration of their "friendship"; some friendship) and dishonors the memory of the Pilgrim's victims, or the millions of indigenous peoples in the Americas decimated by European diseases and policies aimed at dealing with the original inhabitants of these continents

My son is still in grade school. Between his mother and I, he has 1/16 blood quantum (mixed between Anishinabeg/Ojibwe/Chippewa and an unknown nation believed to be Arapaho from my side), and his late grandfather was a Pueblo shaman's apprentice. Through me, he’ll inherit rights to an Eagle Feather.

In years past, I basically shared these same resources posted here with his Kindergarten teacher and his first grade teacher and explained how we were concerned about this holiday at his school and definitely did not want to see any Thanksgiving pageants, stereo-typed construction paper Indian headbands with feathers or anything of the sort, or other Thanksgiving instruction or paraphernalia that plays into the Thanksgiving lie.

It would have been one thing to us if they'd looked at the harvest festivals of New England's agricultural first nations, which are the true basis of the meal from which the story is derived, not this fictionalized event that has become part of our national memory and origin myth as a sort of postcolonial justification and whitewashing of genocide, history, and truth that seeks to justify an unjustifiable truth. But, of course, that is not the American tradition; the whitewashing is standard fare, of course. I received a reply from the principal and the teacher both promising me that they would be culturally sensitive and we had nothing to worry about. I even met with these two teachers.

Imagine my chagrin when Dylan started coming home with "Indian" necklaces and coloring book pages of stylized "Indians," when I'd specifically mentioned such things as things that were objectionable. His teacher resentfully shared that she loves to do a unit on Squanto and didn't do it "because of us" (meaning our objections to the celebratory myth). I asked her to explain what she would have done. What she would have done would have been a celebration of Squanto and the initial amicable relations between the Pilgrims and Wampanoags (you know, very conciliatory and celebratory).

I told her I wouldn't have any problem with that so long as she explained that the reason Squanto was helping the pilgrims is that Squanto's entire family and Patuxet tribe was wiped out by an early European epidemic of smallpox (he was the sole survivor) and that the only reason he knew English is that the English had sold him into slavery (twice) and he learned the language consequentially. The Pilgrims would not have made it through the first winter were it not for the charity of the Wampanoags. Every last one of them would have died a miserable death.

Well, how did the Pilgrims show their Thanksgiving? By robbing Wampanoag burial grounds within six months and illegally selling their lands and children into slavery within six years. Now that's something worth celebrating, wouldn't you say? And who brought most of the food at the First Thanksgiving? The Wampanoags (all of the traditional Thanksgiving foods in the cornucopia are indigenous ones) furnished the fare, of course. The Pilgrims would have been eating their clothing to survive and would have died in the cold starving winter. One of my favorite shirts is a cartoon of a line of pilgrims standing in line to be served by the Wampanoags. The caption reads "America's first welfare line."

And then, what more, but this teacher who thought she was being so culturally sensitive has them learning about "Indians." It's like SOOOO multicultural. Like, OMG. But not in exposing them to the incredible diversity amongst American Indian cultures or in indigenous cultures globally, but by presenting them with a very simple and stereotypical image of the plains Indian, not the first nations of the northeast culture area… You know, every single plains Indian tribe resents that, and most of the American Indians I know also resent that. So, thanks to her for her enlightened wisdom and conscientiousness.

Two articles for your reading enjoyment:

For Indians, No Thanksgiving – Michael Dorris
The Truth About the First Thanksgiving – Excerpt from Chapter 3: “Red Eyes,” Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Lowen

1970 was the "350th" anniversary of thanksgiving, and became the first proclaimed national day of mourning for American Indians. State officials of Massachusetts asked Wampanoags to select a speaker to mark the 350th anniversary. They selected Frank B. James, President of the federated Eastern Indian League, to speak at the Thanksgiving celebration. First he had to submit a copy of his speech to state officials. When they saw what he had written, they would not allow him to speak. The speech he submitted read:

"Today is a time of celebrating for you… but it is not a time of celebrating for me. It is with heavy heart that I look back upon what happened to my people… The pilgrims had hardly explored the shores of Cape Cod… before they had robbed the graves of my ancestors, and stolen their corn, wheat, and beans… Massasoit, the great leader of the Wampanoag, knew these facts; yet he and his people welcomed and befriended the settlers…, little knowing that… before 50 years were to pass, the Wampanoags… and other Indians living near the settlers would be killed by their guns or dead from diseases that we caught from them… Although our way of life is almost gone and our language is almost extinct, we the Wampanoags still walk the lands of Massachusetts. What has happened cannot be changed, but today we work toward a better America, a more Indian America where people and nature once again are important."

Other germane quotes to properly remember history upon this holiday:

"What treaty have the Sioux made with the white man that we have broken? Not one. What treaty have the white man ever made with us that they have kept? Not one. When I was a boy the Sioux owned the world; the sun rose and set on their land; they sent ten thousand men to battle. Where are the warriors today? Who slew them? Where are our lands? Who owns them?....What law have I broken? Is it wrong for me to love my own? Is it wicked for me because my skin is red? Because I am a Sioux; because I was born where my father lived; because I would die for my people and my country?" - Sitting Bull of the Lakota

"They made us many promises, more than I can remember, but they never kept but one; they promised to take our land and they took it." – Chief Red Cloud of the Lakota

"Where today are the Pequot? Where are the Narragansett, the Mohican, the Pokanoket, and many other once powerful tribes of our people? They have vanished before the avarice and the oppression of the White Man, as snow before a summer sun. Will we let ourselves be destroyed in our turn without a struggle, give up our homes, our country bequeathed to us by the Great Spirit, the graves of our dead and everything that is dear and sacred to us? I know you will cry with me, 'Never! Never!'" – Tecumseh of the Shawnee

________________________________

THE TRUTH ABOUT THE FIRST THANKSGIVING

Monthly Review, November 1992, by James W. Loewen

Over the last few years, I have asked hundreds of college students, "When was the country we now know as the United States first settled?"

That is a generous way of putting the question. Surely "we now know as" implies that the original settlement happened before the United States. I had hoped that students would suggest 30,000 BC, or some other pre-Columbian date. They did not. Their consensus answer was "1620."

Part of the problem is the word "settle." "Settlers" were white. Indians did not settle. Nor are students the only people misled by "settle." One recent Thanksgiving weekend, I listened as a guide at the Statue of Liberty told about European immigrants "populating a wild East Coast." As we shall see, however, if Indians had not already settled New England, Europeans would have had a much tougher job of it.

Starting with the Pilgrims not only leaves out the Indians, but also the Spanish. In the summer of 1526 five hundred Spaniards and one hundred black slaves founded a town near the mouth of the Pedee River in what is now South Carolina. Disease and disputes with nearby Indians caused many deaths. Finally, in November the slaves rebelled, killed some of their masters, and escaped to the Indians. By now only 150 Spaniards survived, and they evacuated back to Haiti. The ex-slaves remained behind. So the first non-Native settlers in "the country we now know as the United States" were Africans.

The Spanish continued their settling in 1565, when they massacred a settlement of French Protestants at St. Augustine, Florida, and replaced it with their own fort. Some Spanish were pilgrims, seeking regions new to them to secure religious liberty: these were Spanish Jews, who settled in New Mexico in the late 1500s. Few Americans know that one third of the United States, from San Francisco to Arkansas to Natchez to Florida, has been Spanish longer than it has been "American." Moreover, Spanish culture left an indelible impact on the West. The Spanish introduced horses, cattle, sheep, pigs, and the basic elements of cowboy culture, including its vocabulary: mustang, bronco, rodeo, lariat, and so on.

Beginning with 1620 also omits the Dutch, who were living in what is now Albany by 1614. Indeed, 1620 is not even the date of the first permanent British settlement, for in 1607, the London Company sent settlers to Jamestown, Virginia. No matter. The mythic origin of "the country we now know as the United States" is at Plymouth Rock, and the year is 1620. My students are not at fault. The myth is what their textbooks and their culture have offered them. I examined how twelve textbooks used in high school American history classes teach Thanksgiving. Here is the version in one high school history book, THE AMERICAN TRADITION:

After some exploring, the Pilgrims chose the land around Plymouth Harbor for their settlement. Unfortunately, they had arrived in December and were not prepared for the New England winter. However, they were aided by friendly Indians, who gave them food and showed them how to grow corn. When warm weather came, the colonists planted, fished, hunted, and prepared themselves for the next winter. After harvesting their first crop, they and their Indian friends celebrated the first Thanksgiving.

My students also learned that the Pilgrims were persecuted in England for their religion, so they moved to Holland. They sailed on the Mayflower to America and wrote the Mayflower Compact. Times were rough, until they met Squanto. He taught them how to put fish in each corn hill, so they had a bountiful harvest.

But when I ask them about the plague, they stare back at me. "What plague? The Black Plague?" No, that was three centuries earlier, I sigh.

"THE WONDERFUL PLAGUE AMONG THE SAVAGES"

The Black Plague does provide a useful introduction, however. Black (or bubonic) Plague "was undoubtedly the worst disaster that has ever befallen mankind." In three years it killed 30 percent of the population of Europe. Catastrophic as it was, the disease itself comprised only part of the horror. Thinking the day of judgment was imminent, farmers failed to plant crops. Many people gave themselves over to alcohol. Civil and economic disruption may have caused as much death as the disease itself.

For a variety of reasons --- their probable migration through cleansing Alaskan ice fields, better hygiene, no livestock or livestock-borne microbes --- Americans were in Howard Simpson's assessment "a remarkable healthy race" before Columbus. Ironically, their very health now proved their undoing, for they had built up no resistance, genetically or through childhood diseases, to the microbes Europeans and Africans now brought them. In 1617, just before the Pilgrims landed, the process started in southern New England. A plague struck that made the Black Death pale by comparison.

Today we think it was the bubonic plague, although pox and influenza are also candidates. British fishermen had been fishing off Massachusetts for decades before the Pilgrims landed. After filling their hulls with cod, they would set forth on land to get firewood and fresh water and perhaps capture a few Indians to sell into slavery in Europe. On one of these expeditions they probably transmitted the illness to the people they met. Whatever it was, within three years this plague wiped out between 90 percent and 96 percent of the inhabitants of southern New England. The Indian societies lay devastated. Only "the twentieth person is scare left alive," wrote British eyewitness Robert Cushman, describing a death rate unknown in all previous human experience. Unable to cope with so many corpses, survivors fled to the next tribe, carrying the infestation with them, so that Indians died who had never seen a white person. Simpson tells what the Pilgrims saw:

The summer after the Pilgrims landed, they sent two envoys on a diplomatic mission to treat with Massasoit, a famous chief encamped some 40 miles away at what is now Warren, Rhode Island. The envoys discovered and described a scene of absolute havoc. Villages lay in ruins because there was no one to tend them. The ground was strewn with the skulls and the bones of thousands of Indians who had died and none was left to bury them.

During the next fifteen years, additional epidemics, most of which we know to have been smallpox, struck repeatedly. Europeans caught smallpox and the other maladies, to be sure, but most recovered, including, in a later century, the "heavily pockmarked George Washington." Indians usually died. Therefore, almost as profound as their effect on Indian demographics was the impact of the epidemics on the two cultures, European and Indian. The English Separatists, already seeing their lives as part of a divinely inspired morality play, inferred that they had God on their side. John Winthrop, Governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, called the plague "miraculous." To a friend in England in 1634, he wrote:

But for the natives in these parts, God hath so pursued them, as for 300 miles space the greatest part of them are swept away by the small pox which still continues among them. So as God hath thereby cleared our title to this place, those who remain in these parts, being in all not fifty, have put themselves under our protect....

Many Indians likewise inferred that their God had abandoned them. Cushman, our British eyewitness, reported that "those that are left, have their courage much abated, and their countenance is dejected, and they seem as a people affrighted." After all, neither they nor the Pilgrims had access to the germ theory of disease. Indian healers offered no cure, their religion no explanation. That of the whites did. Like the Europeans three centuries before them, many Indians surrendered to alcohol or began to listen to Christianity.

These epidemics constituted perhaps the most important single geopolitical event of the first third of the 1600s, anywhere on the planet. They meant that the British would face no real Indian challenge for their first fifty years in America. Indeed, the plague helped cause the legendary warm reception Plymouth enjoyed in its first formative years from the Wampanoags. Massasoit needed to ally with the Pilgrims because the plague had so weakened his villages that he feared the Narragansetts to the west.

Moreover, the New England plagues exemplify a process which antedated the Pilgrims and endures to this day. In 1492, more than 3,000,000 Indians lived on the island of Haiti. Forty years later, fewer than 300 remained. The earliest Portuguese found that Labrador teemed with hospitable Indians who could easily be enslaved. It teems no more. In about 1780, smallpox reduced the Mandans of North Dakota from nine villages to two; then in 1837, a second smallpox epidemic reduced them from 1600 persons to just 31. The pestilence continues; a fourth of the Yanomamos of northern Brazil and southern Venezuela died in the year prior to my writing this sentence.

Europeans were never able to "settle" China, India, Indonesia, Japan, or most of Africa because too many people already lived there. Advantages in military and social technology would have enabled Europeans to dominate the Americas, as they eventually dominated China and Africa, but not to "settle" the New World. For that, the plague was required. Thus, except for the European (and African) invasion itself, the pestilence was surely the most important event in the history of America.

What do we learn of all this in the twelve histories I studied? Three offer some treatment of Indian disease as a factor in European colonization. LIFE AND LIBERTY does quite a good job. AMERICA PAST AND PRESENT supplies a fine analysis of the general impact of Indian disease in American history, though it leaves out the plague at Plymouth. THE AMERICAN WAY is the only text to draw the appropriate geopolitical inference about the importance of the Plymouth outbreak, but it never discuses Indian plagues anywhere else. Unfortunately, the remaining nine books offer almost nothing. Two totally omit the subject. Each of the other seven furnishes only a fragment of a paragraph that does not even make it into the index, let alone into students' minds.

Everyone knew all about the plague in colonial America. Even before the Mayflower sailed, King James of England gave thanks to "Almighty God in his great goodness and bounty towards us," for sending "this wonderful plague among the savages." Today it is no surprise that not one in a hundred of my college students has ever heard of the plague. Unless they read LIFE AND LIBERTY or PAST AND PRESENT, no student can come away from these books thinking of Indians as people who made an impact on North America, who lived here in considerable numbers, who settled, in short, and were then killed by disease or arms.

ERRAND INTO THE WILDERNESS

Instead of the plague, our schoolbooks present the story of the Pilgrims as a heroic myth. Referring to "the little party" in their "small, storm-battered English vessel," their story line follows Perry Miller's use of a Puritan sermon title, ERRAND INTO THE WILDERNESS. AMERICAN ADVENTURES even titles its chapter about British settlement in North America "Opening the Wilderness." The imagery is right out of Star Trek: "to go boldly where none dared go before."

The Pilgrims had intended to go to Virginia, where there already was a British settlement, according to the texts, but "violent storms blew their ship off course," according to some texts, or else an "error in navigation" caused them to end up hundreds of miles to the north. In fact, we are not sure where the Pilgrims planned to go. According to George Willison, Pilgrim leaders never intended to settle in Virginia. They had debated the relative merits of Guiana versus Massachusetts precisely because they wanted to be far from Anglican control in Virginia. They knew quite a bit about Massachusetts, from Cape Cod's fine fishing to that "wonderful plague." They brought with them maps drawn by Samuel Champlain when he toured the area in 1605 and a guidebook by John Smith, who had named it "New England" when he visited in 1614. One text, LAND OF PROMISE, follows Willison, pointing out that Pilgrims numbered only about thirty-five of the 102 settlers aboard the Mayflower. The rest were ordinary folk seeking their fortunes in the new Virginia colony. "The New England landing came as a rude surprise for the bedraggled and tired [non-Pilgrim] majority on board the Mayflower," says Promise. "Rumors of mutiny spread quickly." Promise then ties this unrest to the Mayflower Compact, giving its readers a uniquely fresh interpretation as to why the colonists adopted it.

Each text offers just one of three reasons---storm, pilot error, or managerial hijacking--to explain how the Pilgrims ended up in Massachusetts. Neither here nor in any other historical controversy after 1620 can any of the twelve bear to admit that it does not know the answer---that studying history is not just learning answers--that history contains debates. Thus each book shuts students out from the intellectual excitement of the discipline.

Instead, textbooks parade ethnocentric assertions about the Pilgrims as a flawless unprecedented band laying the foundations of our democracy. John Garraty presents the Compact this way in AMERICAN HISTORY: "So far as any record shows, this was the first time in human history that a group of people consciously created a government where none had existed before." Such accounts deny students the opportunity to see the Pilgrims as anything other than pious stereotypes.

"IT WAS WITH GOD'S HELP...FOR HOW ELSE COULD WE HAVE DONE IT?"

Settlement proceeded, not with God's help but with the Indians'. The Pilgrims chose Plymouth because of its cleared fields, recently planted in corn, "and a brook of fresh water [that] flowed into the harbor," in the words of TRIUMPH OF THE AMERICAN NATION. It was a lovely site for a town. Indeed, until the plague, it had been a town. Everywhere in the hemisphere, Europeans pitched camp right in the middle of native populations---Cuzco, Mexico City, Natchez, Chicago. Throughout New England, colonists appropriated Indian cornfields, which explains why so many town names---Marshfield, Springfield, Deerfield--end in "field".

Inadvertent Indian assistance started on the Pilgrims' second full day in Massachusetts. A colonist's journal tells us:

We marched to the place we called Cornhill, where we had found the corn before. At another place we had seen before, we dug and found some more corn, two or three baskets full, and a bag of beans. ..In all we had about ten bushels, which will be enough for seed. It was with God's help that we found this corn, for how else could we have done it, without meeting some Indians who might trouble us. ...The next morning, we found a place like a grave. We decided to dig it up. We found first a mat, and under that a fine bow...We also found bowls , trays, dishes, and things like that. We took several of the prettiest things to carry away with us, and covered the body up again.

A place "like a grave!"

More help came from an alive Indian, Squanto. Here my students are on familiar turf, for they have all learned the Squanto legend. LAND OF PROMISE provides an archetypal account"

Squanto had learned their language, he explained, from English fishermen who ventured into the New England waters each summer. Squanto taught the Pilgrims how to plant corn, squash, and pumpkins. Would the small band of settlers have survived without Squanto's help? We cannot say. But by the fall of 1621, colonists and Indians could sit down to several days of feast and thanksgiving to God (later celebrated as the first Thanksgiving).

What do the books leave out about Squanto? First, how he learned English. As a boy, along with four Penobscots, he was probably stolen by a British captain in about 1605 and taken to England. There he probably spent nine years, two in the employ of a Plymouth merchant who later helped finance the Mayflower. At length, the merchant helped him arrange passage back to Massachusetts. He was to enjoy home life for less than a year, however. In 1614, a British slave raider seized him and two dozen fellow Indians and sold them into slavery in Malaga, Spain. Squanto escaped from slavery, escaped from Spain, made his way back to England, and in 1619 talked a ship captain into taking him along on his next trip to Cape Cod.

It happens that Squanto's fabulous odyssey provides a "hook" into the plague story, a hook that our texts choose to ignore. For now Squanto walked to his home village, only to make the horrifying discovery that, in Simpson's words, "he was the sole member of his village still alive. All the others had perished in the epidemic two years before." No wonder he throws in his lot with the Pilgrims, who rename his village "Plymouth!" Now that is a story worth telling! Compare the pallid account in LAND OF PROMISE. "He had learned their language from English fishermen." What do we make of books that give us the unimportant details--Squanto's name, the occupation of his enslavers--while omitting not only his enslavement, but also the crucial fact of the plague? This is distortion on a grand scale.

William Bradford praised Squanto for many services, including his "bring[ing] them to unknown places for their profit." "Their profit" was the primary reason most Mayflower colonists made the trip. It too came from the Indians, from the fur trade; Plymouth would never have paid for itself without it. Europeans had neither the skill nor the desire to "go boldly where none dared go before.|" They went to the Indians.

"TRUTH SHOULD BE HELD SACRED, AT WHATEVER COST"

Should we teach these truths about Thanksgiving? Or, like our textbooks, should we look the other way? Again quoting LAND OF PROMISE. "By the fall of 1621, colonists and Indians could sit down to several days of feast and thanksgiving to God (later celebrated as the first Thanksgiving)." Throughout the nation, elementary school children still enact Thanksgiving every fall as our national origin myth, complete with Pilgrim hats made of construction paper and Indian braves with feathers in their hair. An early Massachusetts colonist, Colonel Thomas Aspinwall, advises us not to settle for this whitewash of feel - good - history.

"It is painful to advert to these things. But our forefathers, though wise, pious, and sincere, were nevertheless, in respect to Christian charity, under a cloud; and, in history, truth should be held sacred, at whatever cost."

Thanksgiving is full of embarrassing facts. The Pilgrims did not introduce the Native Americans to the tradition; Eastern Indians had observed autumnal harvest celebrations for centuries. Our modern celebrations date back only to 1863; not until the 1890s did the Pilgrims get included in the tradition; no one even called them "Pilgrims" until the 1870s. Plymouth Rock achieved ichnographic status only in the nineteenth century, when some enterprising residents of the town moved it down to the water so its significance as the "holy soil" the Pilgrims first touched might seem more plausible. The Rock has become a shrine, the Mayflower Compact a sacred text, and our textbooks play the same function as the Anglican BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER, teaching us the rudiments of the civil religion of Thanksgiving.

Indians are marginalized in this civic ritual. Our archetypal image of the first Thanksgiving portrays the groaning boards in the woods, with the Pilgrims in their starched Sunday best and the almost naked Indian guests. Thanksgiving silliness reaches some sort of zenith in the handouts that school children have carried home for decades, with captions like, "They served pumpkins and turkeys and corn and squash. The Indians had never seen such a feast!" When his son brought home this "information" from his New Hampshire elementary school, Native American novelist Michael Dorris pointed out "the Pilgrims had literally never seen `such a feast,' since all foods mentioned are exclusively indigenous to the Americas and had been provided by [or with the aid of] the local tribe."

Is Jesus the reason for the season?

nostrugglenoprogress@gmail.com (Doctor Jones) — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 15:12:00 -0800

I should share that I cling to aspects of my former fundamentalist Christian faith and highly admire Jesus Christ (and his philosophy and moral teachings) and all true Christians. A message of truly unconditional love; of pacifistic love for not only one's neighbor but one's enemies; of divine judgment but of earthly non-judgment of God's children by each other; of condemnation of outward religious displays, piety, and hypocrisy; and of the triumph of the meek and poor is one that I embrace.

I'm not anti-Christmas or anti-Christianity, just annoyed by those whom I think have perverted the message of Christ to suit their own ends. Please note what I'm NOT saying (I'm not saying that Christ's birthday is something that his followers should not celebrate).

The "War" on Christmas

Complaints regarding "the secular War on Christmas,” “the spiritual adultery of Christmas," and reminders that "Jesus is the reason for the season" increasingly bombard us ad nauseum during the holiday season. It might not be so annoying if, in fact, those reminders were actually historically valid or otherwise simply true. Of course I couldn't let this claim go unexamined, and I'm not the only one who ruminates on this topic annually.

I should note that I fully recognize that December 25 has been a Christian celebration of the birth of the Christ child for centuries, and am not opposed to the same, per se. I'm not at all opposed to celebrating Christ's birth, so long as it is celebrated honestly and without deceit.

I should share that I'm appalled by the increasing materialism and commercialism that now define this holiday and have usurped the "spirit of giving" or Christmas spirit deriving from St. Nicholas. What has earned my ire is the revisionist idea that underlies the maxim that "Jesus is the reason for the season," and the falsehood this slogan propagates.

“Therefore each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to his neighbor, for we are all members of one body,” (Ephesians 4:25)*. “Do not lie to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator,” (Colossians 3:9,10).*

*Unless you lie to promote the faith and save souls or battle Satan and his godless minions. In such instances, God will forgive you.

And there I go again thinking that lying is a sin. Silly me. Christians can lie to promote their faith, God doesn't mind... Really.

Why December 25?

Most rational and reasonable Christians will admit that December 25 was declared officially and somewhat arbitrarily with Pope Julius I in 350 CE, a theory that originates with Sextus Julius Africanus in 221 CE in his Chronographaia with the first Christmas feast documented at ca. 200 CE, its practice having really begun in 337 CE with the Roman Emperor Constantine's baptism and having spread to Egypt by 432 CE and then to England by the end of the Sixth Century CE.

Essentially, church fathers in the Fourth Century CE became concerned by the the rise of Mithraism in the Roman Empire and sought to co-opt, appropriate and associate festivals celebrating the birth of this sun god with the birth of the Christian Messiah.

Pagan festivals ranging from Mesopotamia throughout Europe celebrated the Winter Solstice (due to calendar slippage, the Romans set the winter solstice as Dec. 25, now occurring Dec. 21 or 22 but then occurring circa Dec. 25) as the rebirth of the sun or sun god (including the cult and festival of the Roman sun god Sol Invictus by Aurelian in 274 CE), and scholars believe the fall birth/New Year of Christ was manufactured to compete with the rise of these pagan traditions and in order to associate the annual rebirth of the sun or sun god with the birth of Christ (to analogize and co-opt pagan tradition into Christian tradition).

When was Jesus born if it wasn't Dec. 25?

And, of course, while scholars disagree about the time of year Christ was born (some preferring a fall birth, some preferring a spring birth), most agree that Christ was born between 6 and 4 BCE, during Herod's reign.

Shepherding in the spring

Most scholars actually believe today that Christ was born in the springtime, a belief that derives from Luke 2:8 (KJV): "And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night." Since the shepherds were still in the field at the time of Christ's birth, his birth could not have occurred in the fall or the winter as it was Judaic practice to send sheep into the deserts at Passover (beginning March 25) and return home at the commencement of the first rain, during which time the shepherds watched over their flocks day and night.

The Matthean "Star" of Bethlehem

Astronomer Michael Molnar has proposed a date of April 17, 6 BCE as the date of the birth of Christ given the Star of Bethlehem that appears in the Gospel of Matthew's account of the magi (wise men) observing the rise of the King's Star when they arrived in Herod's court. Molnar's interpretation differs from that of other scholars in that instead of being a literal star (a supernova, a comet, a planet, etc.), the Matthean star the magi refer to was instead a specific astrological event of tremendous significance that appears in the astrological charts of several first century astrological sources announcing the birth of a great king, a lunar occultation of Jupiter in the constellation of Aries coinciding with an alignment of the planets within this single constellation that occurred April 17, 6 BCE. Early Roman and Jewish sources do tend to support an earlier nativity than that often accepted by scholars circa (ca.) the year 4 BCE. His ground-breaking scholarship is probably the most widely accepted scholarly interpretation of the Matthean star to date, and is congruent with the scholarly consensus that Christ could not have been born in the fall or the winter given Luke's account of shepherds tending to their flocks by night discussed previously.

We may never know with certainty upon what date Christ was actually born. However, it appears that the best scholarly guess is in the spring, probably April 17, 6 BCE.

Problems with the biblical account of Christ's birth

A Census that never was (Luke's lie)

Likewise, others question the perfect synopticism and inerrancy of biblical gospels due to Luke's account of Joseph's need to travel to his ancestral home for the Census of Quirinius allegedly ordered by Emporer Augustus. There are three major problems with this account.

First, Joseph was not a Roman citizen. He was a provincial. All historians agree on this point. The Roman Census was conducted to determine representation in the Roman Senate (much in the same way modern American Censuses determine representation in the House of Representatives and provides data for the apportionment of tax resources), but it only counted Roman citizens. It NEVER counted provincials. Historians are absolutely certain on this fact. There wasn't one year where Quirinius broke rank and counted provincials, as the gospel of Luke claims. So why would Romans count a Hebrew? Answer: They wouldn't.
Second, the Roman census occurred in 8 BCE, not the Christian year 0 then-associated with Christ's birth to the gospel writers writing the gospels a generation after Christ's life and death (although as we see here, scholars tend to put Christ's birth around 6 BCE). Quirinius, governor of the Iudaea Province, ordered a more regular census in 6 or 7 BCE. In other words, the actual census of which we do have historical record did not occur when the gospel writers would have thought it did (which of course makes Luke's author even less credible).
Third, even if it did count non-citizens, it would not have required anyone to return to their ancestral home and would have counted them where they were.

Luke's non-sense. The inerrancy and synopticism claimed by hyperliteralists and biblical fundamentalists is certainly in question. This bears repeating because it simply makes no sense. Does the Census Bureau of the United States today require Americans to return to their birth cities to be counted? Of course not; to do so would not only be costly but patently absurd. Who would pay for these costs for the travel of millions of Americans to their birthplaces? Certainly not the federal government. Neither would Rome.

Besides, all it takes is a little common sense. What valid purpose or reason would be served by so doing? None. Just as today, we're a very mobile society, various push and pull factors in the Roman province led to human migration from one city to the next. To think that Romans would require every Roman citizen or even Roman provincials to return to their birthplace is patently absurd. So why then did Luke tell us they did when every bit of historical evidence stands to the contrary?

Why did Luke's author lie? Form or redaction criticism of the New Testament's canonical gospels known as the two-source hypothesis of the origin of the gospels reflects that the earliest gospel was Mark (ca. 70 CE) and that the three other canonical gospels (Matthew, Luke, and John, but definitely the former two) began using Mark and the Gospel of Q as a starting point. The gospel authors began with Mark and then, based upon the biases and prejudices of the author, redacted sections they considered incongruent with their interpretations or ideas of Christ, and added their own ideas to add peculiar emphases.

In this sense, the author of Luke (who, as a Gentile Christian, is also the likely the author of Acts) and an extremely well educated literate Christian, seems most to want to insinuate Jesus Christ as the fulfillment of messianic Old Testament biblical prophecy in his gospel. Hence, the Census of Quirinius fiction. Messianic prophecy said that the Messiah would be born to the line of David and in the city of David. Luke's account solves this conundrum by putting Christ's birth not in Joseph's native Nazareth, but claiming Joseph as being of the line of David and from the city of David, hence making Christ Jesus of Bethlehem instead of Jesus of Nazareth in transforming Christ into the unquestionable messiah. In other words, and said more simply, the author of Luke (who was not the apostle Luke; the gospels as we were falsely taught were not written by the apostles of the same name) lied in order to insinuate Jesus as the fulfillment of messianic prophecy, but, in so doing, exhibited his ignorance of Roman law, custom, and procedure which historians, Christian or not, cannot question.

Was Jesus really a virgin birth?

Likewise, the Roman philosopher Celsus's accusation that Christ's mother was a spinner who had been impregnated illegitimately by a Roman soldier named Panthera, was driven away by her husband and convicted of adultery stands in stark contrast to the biblical account (as preserved partially in Origen's response to Celsus in the Contra Celsum, all such early anti-Christian writings having been destroyed by the early church fathers). Indeed, some scholars speculate that Mary Magdalene is a construction of New Testament authors and early church fathers meant to obfuscate the fact that differing historical accounts supposed that Jesus's mother was a prostitute and that Jesus was sired by a Roman soldier name Panthera. Certainly fascinating...

Other (non-canonized, apocryphal, pseudo-apocrypha) gospels

The synoptic gospels (Mark [CE 40-70 CE], Matthew, Luke, and John) were authored between CE 65-95. We of course can look at the New Testament apocryphal works in general to see that the canonized, synoptic gospels weren't the only accounts of Jesus Christ. In fact, there were so many, doctrinal/sectional conflict led to the canonization of the four gospels most Christians are familiar with today: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John (which I'll remind my readers again were NOT written by the apostles of the same name as has been taught by the church for ages, but by unknown authors).

We may begin with the hypothetical/theoretical Gospel of Q [CE 40-70] or the Gospel of M [CE 30-50] as source materials for the synoptic gospels (see also: the two-source hypothesis). Biblical scholars can very clearly see that Mark is the starting point for Matthew and Luke, and for parts of John through careful examination. Given the nearly verbatim, word-for-word copying of specific scriptures from Mark embedded in Matthew and Luke, scholars have hypothesized older source material for Mark (Document Q), for Matthew (Document M), and perhaps even Luke (Document L).

Then we could examine the Gnostic gospels: the Gospel of Thomas [CE 60-140], the Gospel of Phillip [CE 150-300], the Gospel of Mary [contemporary with Christ - 2nd Century CE], the Gospel of Truth [CE 140-180], and the Gospel of Judas [CE 280 ± 60]), which certainly put the supposedly synoptic canonical gospels into question...

Around 2006, mainstream media coverage brought international attention to the re-discovery of the Gospel of Judas (written in the 2nd Century CE; carbon dated ca. 280 CE). Much attention was brought to the significance of its emphasis that Judas was, in fact, fulfilling God's will and his servant, not the pernicious betrayer of Christ. This is a not a fact lost on those who take a critical view of the bible as literature and history.

Problems with the canonized synoptic gospel accounts. In other words, not only do other Christian mystical texts contradict gospel accounts (which were canonized because of their agreement theologically in theme with each other, and the others rejected because of their disagreement with them), but so do remnants of existing Roman and Jewish anti-Christian writings.

Summing up the problems with canonized gospel accounts

It is presumed that in matters of historicity, the gospels are the authoritative source of Christ's nativity. In fact, they are only four accounts amongst many more that exist of Christ's birth, life, and death. And as an historian, it is invalid to consider these accounts in a vacuum without the contextualization and differing perspectives and accounts provided by these other sources.

Methodologically speaking, the same is tantamount to writing mythology, not history. To do the same would be akin to historians writing history based upon exclusively Nazi accounts of the Holocaust in excluding all other evidence and accounts... Inherent in the same is a glaring conflict of interest. Typically, the most dispassionate historical sources are considered to be those not written by adherents of a particular religious faith, but outsiders.

Conclusion

I think it's very important to remember all of the same when this country's religious conservatives continually remind us disingenuously that "Jesus is the reason for the season." That, in truth, is a blatant deception. That's what I take issue with semantically. In a sense, it's a true statement when one looks at church history and celebration of Christ's nativity since the third century CE, but I hope to have provided a more nuanced distinction in sharing how Christmas is actually an amalgam of Christian and pagan tradition over centuries.

I hope you agree, and will share my blog post with your loved ones (forward as an email, repost as a bulletin or blog, etc.).

I've included some video shorts below for your educational edification on these matters. The first is highly recommended in exploring the roots of all of our Christmas traditions in an unmistakable pagan context.

Multimedia/video

The Origins of Christmas (1999, Canadian Learning Television, 45 minutes)

This 45 minute expose examines the true origins of Christmas in pagan tradition from Mesopotamia to Rome to Europe.

The Origins of Christmas

Argh... There were two short videos on the History Channel's website that they've since removed... Oh well...

The History Channel’s History of Christmas (they don’t apparently like bloggers to embed their video).

The real truth about 9/11…

nostrugglenoprogress@gmail.com (Doctor Jones) — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 23:32:00 -0700

Many conspiracy theories surround the events of September 11, 2001. Some are more plausible than others, but most seem far too fantastical and outlandish for belief by any educated and reasonable person. Most would logistically and logically require too much to be believable and smack of borderline psychotic paranoia.

For instance, the cultish Alex Jones Infowars/PrisonPlanet/911 Truther folks have repeated the teme (ad nauseum, ad infinitum, or proof by assertion or argument by repetition) that a plane never hit the Pentagon (or that passenger lists for the planes involved on 9/11 do not exist; see blog comments there for my debunking of that claim and provision of said lists). Of course the same people also claimed the collapse of the twin towers of the World Trade Center were a controlled demolition using thermite explosives amongst a host of other crazy notions without credible evidence. The whole host of crazy ideas that Alex Jones’s cultish millennialist followers convinced of President Obama’s identity as Anti-Christ and the figurehead of the coming New World Order are just asinine. I don’t drink the Kool-aid and hope you don’t either. I’ve debunked many of their crazy beliefs many times previously. Most reasonable people would not waste their time trying to prevent the viral spread of such truly crazy ideas, and I probably shouldn’t dignify them with my time (after all, I must be a shill of the New World Order or a Communist Jew or Mason for trying to deprogram them).

I think the most unfortunate thing is that they reference many of the same items I’ve included in this blog in so many of their articles and on so many of their websites. Please don’t presume guilt by association and dismiss the claims that I present for your consideration here out of hand because a few crazies happen to share an awareness of some of these indisputable facts. Subsequently, anyone wishing to verify the information I’ve contained here will stumble across lots of suspect paranoid conspiracy theory sites that might lead them to dismiss these claims out of hand as rubbish. It is for this reason that I have painstakingly sourced each and every claim to you to credible sources in the mainstream news media and provide links to more credible sources. Please ignore the crazies out there and understand there is much that smells rank.

As an historian, by nature, I am a skeptic. But unlike some historians, I am willing to at least consider allegations of conspiracy. It’s why, having thoroughly considered all of those theories surrounding JFK's assassination, and all of the evidence, I have come to believe that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman after all and that the Warren Commission's magic bullet was, in fact, magic (those shots have been reproduced successfully), and that there was not a second gunman on the grassy knoll (video and audio enhancement have proven there is no second gunman on the grassy knoll). While I found many of the conspiracy theories and arguments compelling, in the end, I side with the Warren Commission after much reading on the topic. That does not mean that the mafia was not somehow involved (given Jack Ruby’s assassination of Oswald and his connections to organized crime), nor the Soviets, nor even the CIA. But until compelling and irrefutable evidence is produced, I remain skeptical. Yet, simultaneously, I’m sufficiently open-minded to be open to the possibility.

So, I'm far from an uncritical, unthinking consumer of conspiracy theories, or one who presumes the truth of a conspiracy theory first and considers a lack of evidence against it evidence for its veracity (this is argument from ignorance). Nor am I a conspiracy theorist who perverts and distorts any bit of information to fit my delusions as most of these paranoid conspiracy nut jobs are. I'm skeptical by nature and begin with the premise that these theories presume far too much, selectively consider information, and the like. While I’m open to the possibility, my default position is one of skepticism.

When it comes to the question of 9/11, I've been highly skeptical of conspiracy theories. Unfortunately, I don't think any reasonable person can afford to remain as skeptical any longer that there is a lot about 9/11 that smells rank. It's taken me a long time to get to this point, but I don't believe that the intelligence errors or failures pointed to by official investigations (i.e. the 9/11 Commission’s hallowed “failure of imagination” explanation) are sufficient to explain the failure to prevent these terrorist attacks. The idea that nobody took these threats seriously because they thought them so outlandish and beyond imagination is, I think, a canard invented by those hoping to absolve those who possess real culpability from any criminal responsibility. Please give me the chance to explain.

After much reading, I've arrived at the conclusion that this administration deliberately ignored intelligence that would have and could have prevented 9/11. In this blog, I explain why. The rationale I posit here and the sources I provide are far from radical fringe publications.

“Documentaries” like Loose Change and Zeitgeist, agitprop films furthering the conspiracy theory view of 9/11, rely heavily on suspect media accounts in the fringe press. Loose Change, for instance, heavily quotes from AmericanFreePress.net, a site with connections to the Christian Identity Movement (far right anti-Semitic racist extremists). Frankly, I’m still dumbfounded that otherwise reasonable people still share these highly suspect agitprop films (that can hardly be legitimately labeled documentaries) with each other.

Unlike them, I use mainstream, major media sources to make my case. I still believe that many of the conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11 are incredible and outlandish concoctions of those who are psychotically paranoid. But on the question of intelligence that should have prevented 9/11, I don't think any reasonable person can seriously avoid the fact that this administration is either grossly and criminally negligent (even worse than incompetent) or perhaps was culpable to the extent that it deliberately ignored intelligence that would have prevented the terrorist attacks. And between either of those alternatives, I think that the more plausible explanation is that they deliberately ignored such intelligence. I explain why in this blog.

But at the present moment, I wanted to address the Zacarius Moussaoui case.

Given this background, I thought I'd note recent testimony in the sentencing of Zacarius Moussaoui. Essentially, the prosecutor argued that Moussaoui should have confessed (though the defense argues that Moussaoui, although a non-citizen [and not protected under case law deriving from challenges to the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act and Foreign Intelligence Security Act, or FISA], is protected by the Fifth Amendment [which protects us against self-incrimination]), and that if he had confessed, the plot could have been unraveled and 9/11 would not have occurred. Therefore, the prosecution argues, because Moussaoui did not confess (insinuating that if he had, 9/11 would have been prevented; after all, we discovered the identity of eleven of the hijackers through wire transfers involving Moussaoui after the terrorist attacks), he deserves to be executed.

Interestingly, during this phase of sentencing in haranguing over the question of the death penalty, prosecutors were stunned when the FBI arresting field agent they thought of as their star witness most likely to ensure Moussaoui got the death penalty instead took the stand against his FBI superiors for ignoring his urgent repeated requests to search his laptop and investigate him (see CBSnews.com: Agent: FBI Ignored Moussaoui Warnings: Testifies That Bureau Missed 'Serious Opportunity' To Stop 9/11 Attacks and LATimes.com: 9/11 Trial Reveals Troubles Then, and Ahead). The defense questioned why the FBI didn't launch a full criminal investigation of Moussaoui in August 2001 based on more than 70 appeals to Washington by arresting agent Harry Samit who warned that Moussaoui was a terrorist training to hijack an airliner. "The FBI has to have a confession ... before anybody listens?" MacMahon asked. Indeed. Stop and think about that.

More than 70 appeals from this arresting agent repeatedly warning that Moussaoui was a terrorist training to hijack an airliner were ignored by FBI headquarters. Is this truly euphemistically an intelligence failure? The very people tasked with investigating just such complaints ignored his repeated urgent requests seventy times because they had another seventy other investigations running so they couldn’t take it seriously from a green junior agent? Just stop right there and ponder this fact for a few minutes. Is it just that superiors at FBI headquarters didn't take the threat or the 70 appeals from the arresting agent seriously? I find that truly hard to believe. I mean, sure, one or two requests, but if Samit has documented more than 70 requests, including a 25-page memo, well, I just find that hard to believe. The FBI unit fielding those requests from Samit was the FBI unit specifically charged with investigating Islamist terrorism and domestic Al Qaeda operations. As an educator, if I spend my time showing non-curricular movies, I lose my job and am more than a tad incompetent. I hope you find this pill a little hard to swallow. If you don't yet, then I hope you'll let me try to convince you.

We should remember in spite of the FBI’s official explanations Coleen Rowley's memo (reprinted here at Time.com) in which she accuses headquarters of “almost deliberately thwarting the Minneapolis FBI agents' efforts” in the Moussaoui investigation. Seriously, take some time to read her entire memo. After all, this memo was the reason she was chosen as one of Time's three people of the year in 2002.

She is a whistleblower. She was involved with this investigation. She sacrificed her career and perhaps even her life in terms of future work so that the truth could be known by you. So I'd hope youd take the time to read her memo to FBI headquarters if you haven't already. It's well worth the read, and it sure makes one think about the events of September 11, 2001 and the events that have happened since. Plus, I think that her memo details a lot of the problems with the FBI's official excuses and provides ample reason to question the official accounts (including the 911 Commission's report), so its definitely worth the read in its entirety.

After 9/11, we also discovered that had the FBI searched Moussaoui's laptop, the entire plot could have been unraveled and 9/11 prevented. The official explanation from the FBI for why Moussaoui's laptop was not searched is that there was not enough evidence to search under the Foreign Intelligence Security Act. The evidence against Moussaoui was circumstantial, so they claimed there was not sufficient evidence to obtain a warrant to search his laptop.

But my problem from the beginning with this reasoning is that there was a vast body of case law that upheld the idea that foreign nationals are not subject to the protections of the Bill of Rights, especially when dealing with matters of national security. Any layperson could easily discover the case law that was produced in the late 90s from legal challenges to detainments of Islamic foreign nationals under the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act that upheld foreign nationals being denied due process, being held indefinitely based upon secret evidence, being denied access to attorneys, and the like. In 1999, Georgetown University Law Professor David Cole and Center for Democracy and Technology’s James Dempsey published the first edition of Terrorism and the Constitution: Sacrificing Civil Liberties in the Name of National Security. It decried those “secret evidence” detainments of mostly Islamist foreign nationals under the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act which was passed after the Oklahoma City Bombing and first Al Qaeda attempt on the World Trade Center as an erosion of the due process protections of the Bill of Rights. Fortunately, I’d read this book, cover to cover, by 9/11/2001, so the official explanation smelled rank to me from the get-go.

Let's make this clear here. Moussaoui was not an American citizen. He was a French Moroccan foreign national not under the legal protection of the Bill of Rights legally-speaking, or at least the FBI had every reason to believe the courts would uphold any warrant-less search given the case law I referred to previously. Hearsay and circumstantial evidence is enough to obtain a search warrant for a foreign national because the courts have agreed that they may be denied due process because they are not citizens protected by the Bill of Rights, so the official FBI line on why the laptop was not searched was specious in the beginning anyway.

Similarly, related to the Bush wire-tapping scandal (of American nationals living abroad without warrants), we know that under the Foreign Intelligence Security Act, retroactive warrants can be obtained (this is the problem with Bush's wiretapping; as such, they were illegal) so that if the matter is a pressing one involving our nation's security, they can act first and ask questions later and warrants can be obtained retroactively after the search is performed. The Bush administration defended that national security trumps civil liberties and that, sometimes, they have to act first and ask questions later. But that’s the problem. They had the authority to do just that; this was entirely different. Here, they were monitoring the phone calls of every American citizen who had made an international phone call, and that was expressly prohibited by federal law. It was what the courts have defined a fishing expedition. Bush Administration officials expressly authorized our intelligence agencies to violate federal law and criminally monitor these calls.

And I think with more than 70 requests from the arresting agent to FBI headquarters that it was clear this was a case that at the time was known to be one that involved a clear and present danger to national security. So why not perform a search of the laptop without a warrant and seek a retroactive warrant after the fact with the authority granted under FISA, right? I believe more than 70 appeals from the arresting FBI officer exhibited unmistakable reason to believe that Moussaoui presented a clear and present national security danger and an imminent threat to our national security. Wouldn't you? Seriously, can anyone construct a reasonable case for why 70 appeals from an arresting FBI agent could or should be ignored categorically?

Oh yes, I forgot. That was yet another intelligence 'failure.' Nobody is to blame. It was sheer bureaucratic ineptitude or incompetence. Oh yes, it was a 'failure of imagination.' Nobody in their wildest imaginations could have actually thought that Moussaoui could have posed the slightest threat, right, most especially those whose specific job was to assess and investigate such threats or spectors of, right? Oh, forget that pesky Samit guy. He was just a green FBI agent who was told he was getting all spun up about this guy. That he wanted to learn how to take off, but didn't need to learn how to land, that he wanted to learn about flight paths around D.C. and NYC, that he paid cash, and that he was a foreign national, and that an FBI agent making more than 70 appeals to you couldn't have possibly warranted a search of the laptop, right? Inconceivable!

Next, officials claim that neither our intelligence community nor the French intelligence community had any evidence linking Moussaoui to Al Qaeda. That is unequivocally not true. The Washington Post’s Dan Eggen parroted the official line in his January 31, 2002 article “Moussaoui Probe Pushed U.S. Limits: FBI Wanted to Deport Suspect to France to Access His Computer” (no longer available online) and suggested that the FBI was considering deporting Moussaoui to France so that his laptop could be searched under more relaxed French laws given the lack of evidence connecting Moussaoui to Al Qaeda.

I have a problem with the Post's characterizations because, first, with existing case law concerning similar issues, the same wasn't even necessary in the first place legally (American law and case law was already sufficiently relaxed so that a deportation was totally unnecessary). Second, it would seem to me that this is a very deliberate official red herring introduced to the media to distract the public from the fact that the same wasn't necessary in the first place (this official line about needing to deport Moussaoui to France). Third, we know that the French possessed evidence linking Moussaoui to Al Qaeda, and that the FBI acquired this evidence from the French Intelligence Service prior to September 11, 2001 so that there was no need to deport to France so that the laptop could have been searched in the first place.

These claims parroted by the Post are directly contradicted by Jean-Louis Bruguiere, a French judge representing the French Intelligence Service. In an interview with Bruguiere in May of 2002 on CBS's 60 Minutes, Bruguiere shares that:

the French Intelligence Service was contacted by the FBI prior to September 11, 2001, seeking sufficient evidence to obtain a search warrant to search the laptop under the Foreign Intelligence Security Act
they had ample evidence connecting Moussaoui to Al Qaeda (the evidence the FBI was seeking in contacting French intelligence so that they could search the laptop under FISA)
that while French law prohibits him from sharing what information/intelligence is shared between intelligence agency, it was France’s policy without exception to share everything and withhold nothing (“We gave them everything we had.”

So, according to the French Intelligence Service (Bruguiere), and in reading between the lines and making the inference Bruguiere intends for us to make from his 60 Minutes interview, we know that the French gave FBI headquarters the evidence they needed to search the laptop under FISA (the lack of which was the official rationale purported for why it wasn't searched before September 11, 2001).

So the question then becomes, if the FBI had sufficient evidence to search under FISA after approaching French intelligence and it was ostensibly given as Bruguiere suggests, which makes the official explanations about not having sufficient evidence to obtain a search warrant to search Moussaoui’s laptop (or legal authority, which I’ve already demonstrated was a canard), then why on earth didn't the FBI search the laptop? Indeed. And speculative answers here inherently possess terrifying implications.

Is it truly accurate to speak of these matters as intelligence failures? To do so is not only to euphemize, but to revise. It is to rewrite history and replace truth with fiction.

And then, we have Sibel Edmonds. Sibel Edmonds is a courageous former FBI translator who was fired for trying to expose a major cover-up of 9/11 evidence in the FBI. She has sought federal whistleblower protection. Read about her here on her own site. She basically alleges corruption and incompetence in the FBI's translation office and also that the FBI had foreknowledge of Al Qaeda's attacks against the World Trade Center. Evidence of the same was retroactively classified (Ashcroft's DOJ sought the same under the State Secrets Privilege), and her testimony was retroactively classified as TOP SECRET. The court has gagged her from letting us know what she has to share.

Likewise, she was barred from testifying (gagged) in the class action suit Burnett v. Al Baraka Investment & Dev. Corp., in which she was to testify as to her allegation that the FBI had foreknowledge of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. How do we know if her allegation is fallacious or valid if she has been barred (gagged) from testifying (from even telling the public in the first place why she believes this) and if any evidence she could provide of the same has been classified as TOP SECRET? The answer? We can’t. But I think it telling that Ashcroft's Department of Justice's motions invoked the State Secrets Privilege in the first place; is that not potentially an implicit admission that Edmond's testimony is valid?

Think this is a liberal conspiracy theory? Well, don't take it from liberals... Take it from Republican ex-governor of New Jersey Thomas Kean.

Even Kean in his role as chair of the 9/11 Comission publicly suggested that the White House had ample specific, actionable intelligence to have prevented 9/11 and failed to act (that 9/11 could have and should have been prevented although the final official 9/11 Commission Report stopped shy of making that statement). It appears the basis for his early conclusion is the August 6, 2001 President’s Daily Briefing (PDB) titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” that outlined seventy current F.B.I. investigations on U.S. soil into Al Qaeda operations here and suggested Al Qaeda was preparing for an attack involving the hijacking of planes or blowing buildings up using explosives (see below or SourceWatch.org’s entry). It is also based upon the July 10, 2001 F.B.I. “Phoenix Memo” in which FBI agent Kenneth Williams warned FBI headquarters about bin Laden disciples training at U.S. aviation facilities for future activities against civil aviation targets and he also speculated that Al Qaeda might be training to hi-jack planes to use them as missiles to fly into buildings. Condoleezza Rice and FBI Director Robert Mueller had both testified before Congress and the 9/11 Commission that there had been no specific, actionable intelligence that could have prevented the attacks.

The 9/11 Commission Report can be read or downloaded online in its entirety in PDF format.


The August 6, 2001 President’s Daily Briefing	The July 10, 2001 FBI “Phoenix Memo”

The Washington Post’s William Raspberry interviewed Ray McGovern, a 27 year veteran of the CIA and member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity whose wife’s cousin died in the World Trade Center, about his criticisms of the 9/11 Commission’s findings as a whitewash in his editorial “Failures of the Sept. 11 Commission.”

Even better, consider ex-FBI director Louis Freeh's opinion in The Wall Street Journal. Louis Freeh, ex-FBI director, hints that the 9-11 Commission is part of a massive cover-up about 9-11. And this isn't the fringe press either... It's The Wall Street Journal for heaven's sakes! Far from a liberal rag, this publication is known for its conservative perspective, even in its editorial section. Makes you at least think, huh? An Incomplete Investigation: Why did the 9/11 Commission ignore "Able Danger"? Indeed. Why did the 9/11 Commission ignore Able Danger? Another apt question... Able Danger is the official code name of the military intelligence operation of the surveillance of 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta who had been identified by name and in photographs by military experts. Those experts were prevented from sharing critical information with FBI agents although appointments had been made ostensibly for them to do so.

The implication is that the 9/11 investigation was a whitewash and was never intended to be anything but a whitewash. And this is the ex-FBI director making this allegation. Stop and consider that. Not exactly your Alex Jones or run-of-the-mill 9/11 Truther, is he?

Or consider Republican ex-Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neil's allegations in The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill about this administration's agenda regarding Iraq. He minces no words in sharing that from the moment the Bush Administration entered the White House, it was characterized by a preoccupation with Iraq and Saddam Hussein. He breaks his loyalty to his party by alleging that he was privy to conversations that document that President Bush had planned the invasion of Iraq prior to September 11, 2001.

Counter-terrorism public servant Richard Clarke who served under Republicans and Democrats, a self-identified Republican who served in the State Department under President Reagan and served as counter-terrorism czar under both President Clinton and President Bush, alleged in his memoir Against All Enemies and testified before the 9/11 Commission on May 24, 2004 that the Bush Administration was pre-occupied with Iraq and changing its regime in ousting Saddam Hussein both before and during the 9/11 crisis, ignoring his repeated warnings about the imminent Al Qaeda threat and distracting them from the real enemy. He reports that President Bush pulled him and two aides aside on September 12, 2001 and “testily” tasked him to try to find evidence connecting Saddam and Iraq to the terrorist attack. In response, Clarke prepared a report attesting that there was no evidence of Iraqi involvement and ensured all relevant agencies, including the F.B.I. and C.I.A., signed off on it. Clarke reports his report was hastily returned by a deputy with a note to “Please update and resubmit.” The Bush Administration initially denied the meeting ever took place and then then reversed its denial when other officials present at this meeting confirmed Clarke’s recollection of events. The Bush Administration embarked on a character assassination campaign to question Clarke’s motives, accusing him of self-interested profit motives, or being a political operative of the Kerry campaign. Clarke explained that his memoir, released two days before his testimony before the 9/11 Commission, could have been released much earlier, but the Bush Administration had withheld its publication for national security reasons until March 22, 2009.

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Investigative reporter Greg Palast won a 2001 Project Censored Award for his report FBI and US Spy Agents Say Bush Spiked Bin Laden Probes Before 9/11 for the BBC’s Newsnight that the Bush Administration obstructed justice and blocked C.I.A. and F.B.I. investigations into the Worldwide Association of Muslim Youth (WAMY), the bin Laden family, and other prominent Saudis suspected of financing Al Qaeda. This was ostensibly because of the Bush family’s substantive financial dealings with the Bin Laden family through Arbusto Oil and the Carlyle Group and their conflict of interest in investigating and prosecuting their business associates for suspected financing of Al Qaeda.

Conservative legal watchdog and public interest law firm Judicial Watch, who investigates and prosecutes corruption and abuse by public officials and spearheaded investigations into alleged wrongdoing by Bill and Hillary Clinton in the Whitewater real estate matter (they were cleared for the record), broke the story about the glaring conflict of interest on September 28, 2001 first suggested by Daniel Golden, James Bandler, and Marcus Walker writing for the The Wall Street Journal on September 27, 2001, “Bin Laden Family Could Profit From a Jump In Defense Spending Due to Ties to U.S. Bank.” Judicial Watch’s 9/28/01 report, “WALL STREET JOURNAL: BUSH SR. IN BUSINESS WITH BIN LADEN FAMILY CONGLOMERATE THROUGH CARLYLE GROUP: FAMILY HAD RENOUNCED TIES TO TERRORIST SON BUT FAMILY STILL UNDER FBI INVESTIGATION: FATHER OF PRESIDENT SHOULD PULL OUT OF INTERNATIONAL CONSULTING FIRM,” does outline the motive for the Bush Administration’s alleged obstruction of justice into the FBI and CIA investigations reported on by Palast.

This leaves us with the question of motive. If, as it appears clear, this administration deliberately thwarted investigations and deliberately ignored specific, actionable intelligence that should have prevented September 11, 2001, we must understand its motives.

But I'll briefly recount the rationale as I see it.

Number 1.

Iraq. I told everyone I knew prior to the 2000 election that if Bush was elected, we'd probably invade Iraq within one year. It’s because I had friends in foreign policy and international studies and we had been discussing how best to help the Iraqi people (sanctions, etc.). My timing was a bit off, and I had not a clue how a preemptive illegal act of aggression could be pulled off, but 9/11/01 presented "the Pearl-harbor like event" explicitly desired by the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). The PNAC is a hawkish neoconservative think tank made up of Dick Cheney, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz, amongst others, that sought in the mid-90s the specific policy objective of regime change in Iraq by force for our nation’s energy security and stated in policy documents submitted to President Clinton in 1998 that public sentiment for regime change in Iraq was unlikely to foment absent a "Pearl-habor like event.”

Whistleblower and decorated career Air Force and NSA Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski explains how discredited intelligence was distorted and repackaged to sell the case for war. She left Vice President Dick Cheney’s Office of Special Plans having observed Cheney meeting with oil company executives prior to the invasion of Iraq having discussed privatization of Iraqi oil long before the invasion had happened. She explains the motive and what she observed writing for Salon.com: The New Pentagon Papers. She also left with documents showing how Iraq would be used as a staging point for further operations against Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, and other oil-rich Arab nations.

I think there can be no doubt today that this administration deliberately distorted intelligence and lied to the American people and Congress in order to achieve an illegal preemptive act of aggression. Every allegation of this administration that suggested a legitimate clear and present danger to our national security in the form of weapons of mass destruction (and an imminent nuclear threat) was based upon intelligence that had been thoroughly discredited prior to the invasion but that the administration repeatedly argued (an argument by assertion and by repetition; argumentum ad nauseum/infinitum) as their rationale for invading: the aluminum tubes, the mobile weapons labs, the yellow cake, and the alleged connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam.

The idea that a lie oft repeated enough becomes truth originates in Adolph Hitler’s thoughts on propaganda and the art of lying in Mein Kampf:

"...all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands...But the most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly and with unflagging attention. It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.”

In formal studies of rhetoric, this fallacy is known as argument by assertion or argument by repetition. That, as of last December, according to a Harris poll for the Wall Street Journal, roughly a quarter of Americans continue to believe that Iraq had WMDs when the U.S. invaded and that some of the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqis, and that 22 percent of U.S. adults still think that Saddam Hussein "helped plan 9/11," evidences the effectiveness of this administration's repetition of these lies.

In order to understand how and why this administration might have deliberately distorted intelligence and lied to the American people in order to justify these military actions, one needs to understand the context of global peak oil and the coming inevitable resource wars anticipated by liberals and conservatives alike in order to understand the strategic importance of Iraq's oil particularly to Russia, Europe, and China, and of control over Iraq's oil and the price of oil to the United States in order to maintain our economic hegemony into the 21^st Century. Paul Roberts writes in “Over a Barrel” for Mother Jones, the fearless investigative magazine with a progressive bent, at great length about the crisis we face in global peak oil without presently available viable alternatives.

Likewise, read about the litany of Downing Street memos that prove that this sitting President lied to the American people and was “fixing intelligence” (in response to British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s objections about the shaky nature of the so-called evidence in regard to Iraq’s alleged and much-touted weapons of mass destruction) to meet the foregone foreign policy objective of the neoconservatives, and I don't think any reasonable person can suggest that this administration's case for war was valid any longer. Another of the top secret documents headings has Bush saying, “First Iraq, then Saudi,” bolstering Lt. Col. Kwiatkowski’s testimony about neoconservative plans to use Iraq as a staging point for further operations in the Middle East over control over Middle Eastern oil as we reach global peak oil.

Is it so hard to believe that an administration made up of people so devoted to a cause, so driven by ideology and means justified by ends, that they will deliberately fabricate a case for war and sell that lie to Congress, the public, and the world? It it so hard to believe that such neoconservative ideologues driven by their vision for America’s energy security would sacrifice the lives of innocent American civilians (in deliberately ignoring intelligence that could have prevented September 11, 2001) as means justified by an end? Privatization of Iraq's nationalized oil reserves was a goal that they would willingly sacrifice the blood and lives of thousands of our soldiers over and plunge our nation into hundreds of billions of dollars in debt over. In their minds, the end justified the means. Strategically, to them, these “costs” were justified by a cost-benefit analysis. The opportunity costs are justified to them. To the families of our injured and fallen soldiers and to Iraqis, I'm sure some would beg to differ with them. But to them, what they have done is utterly justified. They are ideologues driven by a cause; no different than the Islamist extremist terrorists who kill innocents.

But for those who think the same is truly unthinkable, consider for a moment the declassified military operation codenamed Operation Northwoods. The National Security Archives Project at George Washington University requested documents under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) that prove that the Joint Chiefs had drawn up plans for various “false flag” attacks against American soldiers and civilians to make it appear as Cuban terrorists had attacked us to support an invasion of Cuba following the Cuban Missile Crisis. It may not be so outlandish and unthinkable after all that some in our government might consider the spilling of American blood for a broader geopolitical policy objective a means justified by an end after all.

Furthermore, National Security Agency historian Robert J. Hanyock concluded in October 2005 that the NSA had deliberately distorted intelligence reports about the August 4, 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident to cover up honest intelligence errors (see NYTimes.com: Vietnam War Intelligence 'Deliberately Skewed,' Secret Study Says). In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson privately commented, “For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there.” On July 7, 1994 Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon wrote in Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting’s (FAIR) Media Beat’s “30-year Anniversary: Tonkin Gulf Lie Launched Vietnam War.”

It is true that just because we have valid historical examples of government officials deceiving the public for political ends and to justify some foreign policy objective does not mean that the Bush Administration deliberately ignored sufficient specific, actionable intelligence that ought to have prevented September 11, 2001, in order to provide a pretext for invading Iraq in order to ensure American energy security and economic hegemony into the 21st Century. But it does provide precedent for those skeptical of such Machievellian motives that those we elect and trust to protect and safeguard our interests are willing to lie and even sacrifice American lives for certain ends.

I think once someone has a solid handle on the fact of the matter that the Bush Administration absolutely, unequivocally fabricated the case for war, one can begin to see that the case that I lay out here is not entirely unthinkable.

A great place to start to understand that this is not a matter of opinion, but a matter of fact is the Robert Greenwald’s documentary Truth Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War.

After watching this video, I highly recommend checking out the Media Education Foundation’s Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear, and the Selling of American Empire (right-click and choose “Play”; NOTE: You must have RealPlayer installed on your computer for the plugin to recognize this embedded vido). I think it does an excellent job of contextualizing exactly how the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 were exploited by this administration to justify the invasion of Iraq.

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Finally, I’d recommend that you take a moment to watch Eugene Jarecki’s Why We Fight to further contextualize the hawkish neoconservatives and their connections to the military industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned Americans about. Is it any surprise these hawks drove us to war?

Incidentals (further motivations):

The National Opinion Research Center's analysis of over-votes (votes with two recorded votes for President) and under-votes (votes without a recorded vote for President) in Florida from the 2000 election debacle was supposed to be released on September 11, 2001. We know this because one of the New York Time's editors told us as much in an editorial on September 12, 2001, and the report's release was delayed due to 9/11. After 9/11, the spin and headlines read that, in most scenarios, Bush still won, but anyone who took enough time to read these articles knows that Gore won the state of Florida by more than sixty thousand votes statewide when over-votes where voter intent is clearly discernable (as required by Florida state law, these votes should have been counted, and were not) were counted, and therefore, the Presidency. The report would leave the public with no other conclusion than that George W. Bush became the forty-third President of our country not by being elected by a majority of Florida's electors and voters, but through voter fraud, voting rights abuses, and partisan judicial fiat. In short, this was not a legitimate presidency. And this is precisely why newspaper editors pulled the story just as it was about to go to press on September 12, 2001.

Nobody wants to believe a sitting President could abuse the intelligence apparatus at his/her disposal for their partisan political purposes (cough, cough Watergate), but it is it implausible that this administration was fully aware of how the NORC analysis would prove this administration illegitimate and the Supreme Court decision as the most partisan decision in the court's history (especially given the engineered shutdown of recounts by the GOP and the felon purge, and their implicit knowledge that they had stolen the election already)? Terrorist attacks would incidentally provide a convenient and welcome red herring to distract Americans from the issues that cut to the core of our democracy involved in the 2000 Presidential election and might have torn our democracy asunder. And after September 11, 2001, the media's treatment of the NORC analysis was one of deference to an administration during wartime, and the spin was that Bush won the presidency legitimately. Not quite. September 11, 2001 revised history.

Next, over the Bush-Cheney Energy Plan, the Natural Resources Defense Council had sued the Department of Energy and the Department of the Interior as well as the White House under the Freedom of Information Act for records pertaining to the meetings that critics thought exhibited a gross conflict of interest in that the White House only cursorily met with environmental groups while permitting unobstructed access to big oil in producing an energy plan that cut the renewable energy research budget by 1/3 while calling for increased production of coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear energy (the Bush Administration paid for the printing of its energy plan on funds from the renewable energy research budget and announced its plans in front of redwood forests if that doesn’t make it Orwellian enough). ASIDE: Documents that escaped Enron shredders reflect that the Bush-Cheney Energy Plan, with little variance, was a facsimile of Enron's demands for our national energy policy. The General Accounting Office was looking at actions against the administration at the time 9/11/01 occurred, and the Senate (then controlled by Democrats after Jefford's defection) was looking at bringing both Bush and Cheney up on charges of Contempt of Congress. That would have literally been unprecedented in U.S. History. Yet one more reason that 9/11 was awfully convenient to the administration. This would have been unprecedented in all of American history.

So, yes, I believe that primarily due to the neoconservative agenda in the Middle East (and their hell bent endgame vision of energy security in the face of exponentially exploding population and global peak oil), but also due to these ancillary concerns (the NORC analysis that proved this administration a farce in the first place, and the fact that it was about to be brought up on charges of contempt of Congress which was unprecedented in American history) that this administration deliberately ignored intelligence that would have prevented 9/11 because they needed the Pearl Harbor-like event as a catalyst to bring about their foregone strategic objectives in the Middle East

This will sound like a bunch of hogwash unless you take the time to read all of the resources and articles I've linked here for you. I hope you'll take the time to do it. And once you do, I beg you to implore your friends to read this blog and the resources I've linked in it...

Sticking my finger in the dike…

nostrugglenoprogress@gmail.com (Doctor Jones) — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 18:05:00 -0700

Geese, get your heads out of the gutter. Sort of reminds me of when I updated my status on FB to say the stripper burnt holes in my arm. Clumsy wording, pun not intended... I meant the chemical stripper I was using to get the polyurethane or acrylic lacquer coat off of my mom’s beautiful wooden eaves so I could refinish them, of course. But funny mental image my friend Meg pointed out. Yes, the stripper burnt holes in my arm. Indeed.

Not that kind of dike people…

Besides, that kind is spelled dyke. And, by definition, I am male, so that just would not happen regardless because this stereotyped pejorative label is reserved for a particularly militant and masculine or “butch” lesbian. And by opening this blog with a little bit of off-color humor, I should emphatically state that I’m no enemy of dyke-dom or LGBT folks.

I love rainbows!

This kind… Perhaps it would be better if we referred to it as a levy. Given Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans, it might be a reference not lost upon so many Americans.

And, yes, my blog title is a very deliberate allusion to a meme popularized by Mary Maples Dodge in her 1865 novel Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates: A Story of Life in Holland, and, more specifically, the story most of us were exposed to in our grade school experiences or in American popular culture known as the legend of the Dutch boy and the dike. In the novel, Dodge titles the vignette “The Hero of Haarlem (you can read it here)”.

It’s said that 99% of Americans are familiar with this story and many American tourists to Holland (the Netherlands) left in disappointment because none of the Dutch could point out the dike to them or retell this supposedly authentic Dutch folktale. In response, the Dutch in 1950 responded by manufacturing memorials to a story that was American in origin, not Dutch (see the above image and the image of the statue at the end of this segment).

To refresh your memory, the meme is about the Dutch boy who discovers a leak in the dike after dark and spends the entire freezing night alone with his finger in the dike and thereby saves the entire city and its inhabitants from being swallowed by the ocean until the adults discover him in the morning and can make repairs. Phoebe Cary’s poem published posthumously in 1873 is probably the vehicle for popularization of this meme in being published widely in anthologies of children’s poetry and was the likely inspiration of the many children’s books that carried this story into the minds of both you and I. Dodge leaves little room for interpreting the moral of the story after its conclusion through the words of another character in the novel:

“True! Of course it is! [...] I have given you the story just as Mother told it to me, years ago. Why, there is not a child in Holland who does not know it. And [...] you may not think so, but that little boy represents the spirit of the whole country. Not a leak can show itself anywhere either in its politics, honor, or public safety, that a million fingers are not ready to stop it, at any cost.”

This is a story about courage and bravery—about initiative and agency—in the face of personal peril and danger. In two words, it’s about self sacrifice. It makes one think of what one might do if one came upon a woman being raped, a homeless person on the street begging for help, the scene of a bad accident, or someone screaming to be rescued from a burning building. Sadly, I think using Dodge’s explication of the story for us through the visage of this character and their words, the spirit of the American nation can tragically be characterized by cowardice, wanton hedonism, and selfishness these days. Don’t you? What nobility, virtue, or goodness can you note daily in your countrypersons?

A study in memetics: These women are proud to buy into their own sexual objectification and think that’s “sexy”???

I honestly think most Americans would just keep on without intervening. It’s simply not their problem. Someone else will take care of it. Besides, risking their lives and giving of their time to face a grave threat would interfere with their otherwise vapid materialistic and hedonistic pursuits.

Encyclopedia Mythica expounds on the narrative and its moral for American school children:

“This story is told to children to teach them that if they act quickly and in time, even they with their limited strength and resources can avert disasters. The fact that the Little Dutch Boy used his finger to stop the flow of water, is used as an illustration of self-sacrifice. The physical lesson is also taught: a small trickle of water soon becomes a stream and the stream a torrent and the torrent a flood sweeping all before it, Dyke material, roadways and cars, and even railway tracks and bridges and whole trains.”

I chose this metaphor to introduce this blog first because it is an apropos mental image of the execution of my duty to citizenship in the ephemeral electronic ether. It is an apt metaphor in three regards:

Night. First, I often wage war against asinine memes at night after my son goes to sleep.
Saving the world alone. Second, I feel like I’m alone in the still of the night sticking my finger in the dike (because I very rarely spy others doing the same because of pervasive apathy, ignorance, and idiocy [the private, individual person preoccupied with one’s own life and concerns] and because to so many not afflicted by those maladies, it seems like a lost cause and impossible to persuade others who are entrenched in their opinions) while, quite literally, everyone else slumbers. I feel like Chicken Little (another meme), except the sky really is falling, and I feel like one of the only ones who really see it.
An overwhelming threat. Third, it is an appropriate metaphor because being inundated by the sea is an ominously overwhelming threat and the expanse of ocean itself so vast and overwhelming. Similarly, the threats to our common future, the public interest, and all life in general as we know it are likewise overwhelming in both magnitude and number. But more importantly, inundation by the vast ocean represents the overwhelming magnitude and ubiquitous nature of the asinine memes that proliferate exponentially on the internet. Like an ocean ready to bear down and destroy a society, dangerous memes proliferate unchecked on the internet that truly threaten all of us in a very similar manner.

The secondary reason I chose this tale to introduce this blog is as a case study for this blog’s topic which is namely memes (and temes, in particular). In short, it superbly illustrates the mechanisms of proliferation and propagation of a meme that originated shortly after the American Civil War some 144 years ago and still pervades our collective psyche today.

What is all this business about memes? Just what the hell is a meme in the first place?

It might just be too simple for comprehension. Sometimes, the simplest things are most profound. First, for those unfamiliar with what a meme is, I’ll say shortly that a meme is, in its most denotative, etymological sense from the Greek mimema, as Susan Blackmore shares, simply something imitated. It’s something copied. We copy each other all the time. Think of the “I’m kind of a big deal” or “That’s how I roll” memes that have proliferated popular American culture that came from Will Farrell’s Anchorman.

The term was coined by brilliant but smug evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his seminal work, The Selfish Gene. In short, it’s something transmitted from one mind to another. Think fashion fads and rumors.

I like how Blackmore illustrates for the audience what a meme is by looking into the audience trying to find examples of memes such as an ear piercing or fashion. She asks the audience member if they came up with the idea of piercing their ear. What a silly idea, of course. Obligatorily, the audience member replies, “Of course not.” And therein we have an excellent illustration of what, precisely, a meme is. The bits of information that translate into learned behavior are likewise examples. Memes spread by replication or repetition. We can learn a meme by watching someone do something or by hearing something from a friend or loved one on the internet.

But I think Blackmore does an excellent job of describing for the uninitiated what a meme is and what memetics is as a science. More particularly, I like her distinction in coining the term teme for an internet meme.

First, a little background from TED talks on memeticist Susan Blackmore:

Susan Blackmore studies memes: ideas that replicate themselves from brain to brain like a virus. She makes a bold new argument: Humanity has spawned a new kind of meme, the teme, which spreads itself via technology -- and invents ways to keep itself alive. Susan Blackmore studies memes -- those self-replicating "life forms" that spread themselves via human consciousness. We're now headed, she believes, toward a new form of meme, spread by the technology we’ve created. Full bio and more links

I love how she frames memes in terms of “human cultural evolution” and it being “a dangerous child for any child to let loose on this planet:”

“By the time you realize what’s happening, the child is a toddler up and causing havoc and it’s too late to put it back. We humans are earth’s Pandoran species. We’re the ones who let the second replicator out of it’s box and we can’t push it back in. We’re seeing the consequences all around us. Now. That, I suggest is the view that comes out of taking memetics seriously. And it gives us a new way of thinking not only about what’s going on on our planet but what might be going on elsewhere in the cosmos.”

We can’t put the lid back on the box, and dangerous, viral memes continue to proliferate. Or, as Bill Maher puts it, errant bullshit or “no ideas so patently absurd they can’t catch on.”

Before I proceed to make my point, I wanted to lay out a little more background with Diane Benscoter’s talk contextualizing and framing extremist thought and mentalities as little more than particularly viral and dangerous memes.

From TED:

Diane Benscoter spent five years as a "Moonie." She shares an insider's perspective on the mind of a cult member, and proposes a new way to think about today's most troubling conflicts and extremist movements. Diane Benscoter, an ex-Moonie, is now invested in finding ways to battle extremist mentalities and their potentially deadly consequences. Full bio and more links

How refreshing to hear someone talking about the elephant in the closet! A former Moonie cult member correctly identifies cults and extremist mentalities as perfect studies in memology. I’ve long maintained (and even when I was a religious fanatic and believer in biblical inerrancy and hyperliteralism, I acknowledged the same) that mainstream religions sects are essentially little more than popular cults.

In all dictionaries, the denotative definitions come first. As words and language evolve over time, additional, more connotative meanings are added over time. Dictionary.com’s definitions (adapted from the Random House Dictionary) follow. Notice how definitions 1-5 would apply to every sect or denomination of any religion. In this sense, all religions are cults. Also, notice related words: craze, fad, furor, furore, rage.

cult –noun

1. a particular system of religious worship, esp. with reference to its rites and ceremonies.
2. an instance of great veneration of a person, ideal, or thing, esp. as manifested by a body of admirers: the physical fitness cult.
3. the object of such devotion.
4. a group or sect bound together by veneration of the same thing, person, ideal, etc.
5. Sociology. a group having a sacred ideology and a set of rites centering around their sacred symbols.
6. a religion or sect considered to be false, unorthodox, or extremist, with members often living outside of conventional society under the direction of a charismatic leader.
7. the members of such a religion or sect.
8. any system for treating human sickness that originated by a person usually claiming to have sole insight into the nature of disease, and that employs methods regarded as unorthodox or unscientific.

–adjective 9. of or pertaining to a cult.
10. of, for, or attracting a small group of devotees: a cult movie.

Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2009.

Indeed, religions are little more than popular memes that have achieved their popularity through meme transmission by repetition. Religions are simply large cults.

Finally, to contextualize this idea of temes and memology, I’d hoped to link video to Bill Maher’s hilarious “birthers rant.” I very well might have been at least one of the origins (or at least a replicator) of this teme when I was the first in my network of friends on Facebook to share the video (and they in turn, began doing the same). Unfortunately, it became such a viral teme itself that Youtube and others hosting the video threatened its posters with copyright violations and it has been removed from every location it had been hosted. I could not locate the video clip to share with you although I shared it just earlier this week (see YouTomb’s entry). In this rant, Bill Maher is reacting to the tiny fraction of right wing extremists who’ve challenged the legitimacy of Obama’s presidency on a legal technicality questioning his American citizenship (a requirement under the U.S. Constitution to hold the highest office in the land) and his birth certificate. The transcript can be found here.

But the section I found particularly spot on follows:

"...if you don't immediately kill errant bulls**t—no matter how ridiculous—it can grow and thrive like crabgrass or Cirque du Soleil. This birther stuff might be a deluded right-wing obsession, but so was Whitewater and look where that ended up…I'm telling you that in America there is no idea so patently absurd that it can't catch on. For example, have you ever met a Mormon? Or, more recently, we had the Swift Boat allegations against John Kerry, making him, a genuine war hero, a coward in a race against the guy who never left Texas. It was so stupid Kerry refused to even discuss it and we all know how well that worked out. Well, you may ask, how something as inane as Whitewater or Swift Boats or the birther-thing gains traction? Well I'll tell you how, the same way that the story of Elton John almost dying from ingesting too much of Rod Stewart's sperm gained traction in my high school, dummies talking to other dummies. It's just easier now because of the internet. And because our mainstream media does such a lousy job of talking truth to stupid. Lou Dobbs said recently, "People are asking a lot of questions about the birth certificate." Yes, the same people who want to know where the Sun goes at night and where to put the stamp on their e-mail. And Lou, you're their new king. Which is why it is so important that we, the few, the proud, the reality based, attack this stuff before it has a chance to fester and spread. This is not a case of Democrats versus Republicans. It's sentient beings versus the lizard people."

It’s strange that what Maher is talking about here is memetics, and he correctly identifies the mechanism at work here at play without referring to it by its formal name. Particularly, I find these statements not only hilarious but enlightening:

“…if you don't immediately kill errant bulls**t—no matter how ridiculous—it can grow and thrive like crabgrass…”
“I'm telling you that in America there is no idea so patently absurd that it can't catch on"
“Well, you may ask, how something as inane as Whitewater or Swift Boats or the birther-thing gains traction? Well I'll tell you how, the same way that the story of Elton John almost dying from ingesting too much of Rod Stewart's sperm gained traction in my high school, dummies talking to other dummies. It's just easier now because of the internet. And because our mainstream media does such a lousy job of talking truth to stupid…This is not a case of Democrats versus Republicans. It's sentient beings versus the lizard people.”

Yes, Bill. Exactly. How does this errant bullshit end up being believed by people? Well, dummies talking to dummies. Is this a war of memes? Absolutely. It’s a war between sentient beings and the lizard people.

Memetics explained in sociological and psychological terms

It’s important to note that not all memes are errant bullshit spread by dummies talking to dummies although many are precisely just that (hold on, I’ll get to that). In fact, this blog, the talks contained in it, and the ideas contained in it are also examples of temes. That said, how do memes explain paranoid conspiracy theories, proliferation of strategically-framed canards (a canard is a deliberately false story; e.g. The Welfare Queen, The Death Tax) and falsehoods introduced deliberately by politicos who are intellectually bankrupt, and both cults and religions then?

I think here it’s important to understand Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. After our physical needs are met, humans have a deep need for security and safety which often dovetails with the next level of needs of love and belonging, both of which are met through our social relationships with others.

Humans are social animals. Our safety/security needs and love/belonging needs are met by our social relationships with other people. Developmental psychologist Erik Erickson reflected the importance of these relationships in adolescence in his developmental stage of Identity versus Role Confusion in which we define ourselves in relationship to our peers. One need only visit any school to observe a teacher give complex instructions and subsequently watch all of the students conspicuously (once you’re paying attention to see it) watching their neighbors to make sure they understood the instructions and comparing/contrasting their own actions to their neighbors. Adolescents are constantly doing this which is why adolescence is a time to be cool, to fit in, and follow fashion fads and trends.

Sociologists and social psychologists often refer to normative social influence or social comparison theory or false consensus effect as explanations for shifting mores and human behavior. Psychologists have long studied what is otherwise known as the “herding instinct” or “mob mentality” or “groupthink.” All of these labels describe the basic phenomenon through which we seek validation in our thoughts, feelings, and actions through comparison to others.

It explains why your tween daugther wants to wear a thong and simultaneously explains why you want an iPhone and cult members are brainwashed. Seriously! It also explains why persons who were kind to you when others were not looking conformed to the social expectations of others and victimized you in grade school when everyone else was (what some call the pecking order).

Think of the mass suicide in the Heaven’s Gate Cult, the mass homicide/suicide of Jim Jones’s Peoples’ Temple in Guyana (South America), or Charlie Manson’s Family and their commitment of the Tate-LaBianca homicides. Or in terms of the Ku Klux Klan or Army of God (abortion clinic bombers; domestic terrorists) or even Al Qaeda or Catholicism or Mormonism. Think of any extremist vantage, and you’ll find lonely people longing to be accepted and belong. Or in terms of political parties even… Do you not see the same phenomenon involved in people wanting to belong so badly that they’ll adopt fanatical religious devotion and fervor to the point of irrationality and needing to be de-programmed?

How many times have you, upon confronting someone with a bit of misinformation or correcting them in their misinformation, heard the vehement and defensive reply that, “Well, that’s what I heard?’ Case in point. Memes, man, memes.

It also explains the proliferation of viral temes and memes in general. When I was in the sixth grade, a rumor went around that a certain girl whom we will call Suzy was having sex with the school bully, and it wasn’t a good thing. The emotive disapproval expressed nonverbally by my peers and repeated with each new person who repeated the rumor carried with it a loud and implicit message. During an observation in Denver at a middle school, my mentor teacher showed me a note he caught sixth grade girls having passed to each other about having had group sex the prior weekend (that was later verified as actually having had happened). The times, they are a changing… And memetics explain how we go from a point that a woman who was promiscuous was a slut to a point to where women internalize sexually objectifying views of themselves and other women and see the adoption of traditionally harmful masculine views of sexuality as empowering and see prudishness as a worse thing than being perceived as a slut. It explains why thousands of college-aged women across this country clamor to show their breasts or be recorded on video in various sexual acts drunkenly as the Girls Gone Wild bus visits college campuses across the country. In a word, it’s become the norm. It’s harmful and risky behavior that has become normalized and popularized through social comparison theory and proliferation by repetition in a hypersexualized popular culture. This brings me to my next point.

Memes spread by repetition

A quote apocryphally attributed to Joseph Goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister, reads, “A lie oft-repeated becomes truth.” Nowhere did Goebbels actually utter these words. His fuehrer, Adolph Hitler, did equivocate this idea repetitively in Mein Kampf:

“The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands...” p. 180-181
“But the most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly and with unflagging attention. It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.” p. 184

Simple slogans harped on until the masses understand and a few points repeated over and over about sum up Nazi theory on propaganda save “the big lie” theory of propaganda, and both ideas originate with Hitler, not Goebbels.

Hitler elucidates his idea that if one tells a lie so “colossal” that no one would believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously” it will be easily be believed in chapter ten of Mein Kampf:

“All this was inspired by the principle--which is quite true in itself--that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.”

Goebbels later echoed Hitler’s words when he wrote in an article in 1941 titled “From Churchill’s Lie Factory”:

“That is of course rather painful for those involved. One should not as a rule reveal one's secrets, since one does not know if and when one may need them again. The essential English leadership secret does not depend on particular intelligence. Rather, it depends on a remarkably stupid thick-headedness. The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.”

Goebell’s words about “…when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it,” has become indelibly associated with the “Big Lie” technique of propaganda.

I might argue that a number of politicos trained in the strategic framing of issues and manipulation through language are students of Hitler’s.

Think about some of the things you’ve heard over this last year.

Barack “Hussein” Obama won’t wear an American flag lapel pin
Barack “Hussein” Obama won’t put his hand over his heart for the Star Spangled Banner (there is a photo on the primary trail where he did not, but there is plenty of evidence that he has regularly in other venues and locations)
Barack “Hussein” Obama was educated at an extremist madrassah in Indonesia (thanks Fox News)
Barack “Hussein” Obama is a Muslim (he’s a Christian)
Barack “Hussein” Obama will swear into office on the Quran (he took his oath of office on Abraham Lincoln’s Holy Bible)
Barack “Hussein” Obama’s healthcare plan will socialize medicine (of course most of us know it only includes a private option which some ultraconservatives claim will lead gradually and incrementally to socialized medicine; of course we have many socialized things already like Medicare)
Barack Obama is the Anti-Christ

It’s rather sickening if you ask me. And I don’t even love Obama and have been a critic of Obama-mania for some time now. But, be honest people…

Like Maher says, it’s dummies talking to dummies. And his cautionary tale is correct. If we don’t stand against this errant bullshit, it will continue to proliferate. John Kerry refused to dignify such errant bullshit in the 2004 election with a comment, and he lost the election because of it. We cannot afford to sit back on our laurels now. The opposition, for all of its moralism, lacks any semblance of sportsmanship or ethics in their demagoguery and they are well-financed, motivated, and organized.

And believe me, as one Dutch boy who puts his finger in the dike—er levy—regularly, man, there is some serious crap that people believe. In the arena of global warming, I regularly hear that we only have a temperature record for the last 150 years in spite of the fact that ice cores and deep sea ocean cores give us an indisputable record of global temperatures and carbon emissions going back a million years (a few times longer than we’ve been on this planet in our present form as a species) and tens of millions of years, respectively. And that’s if you’re talking to someone fairly reasonable who has bought someone else’s errant disinformation sponsored by petro interests…

If you talk to less reasonable persons, you will discover that global warming is a Jewish Communist conspiracy at worst or leftist hoax at best, and these people really believe it too. That’s the scary part.

With the subprime lending crisis, hate crimes against Chicanos and Jews are way up. The internet is aflame with memes that the Jewish banking hegemony caused the subprime lending crisis to cause a complete global economic collapse in order to cause civil unrest and bring about martial law and the unveiling of their much-feared New World Order. Conservative radio commentators have blamed the subprime lending crisis upon legal and illegal Mexican immigrants who defaulted on their home loans.

ADL: ADL Reports Surge in Anti-Semitic Messages on Online Finance Sites in Response To Money Crisis

ADL: Financial Crisis Sparks Wave of Internet Anti-Semitism

Southern Poverty Law Center: Minority Meltdown: Immigrants Blamed for Mortgage Crisis

In addition to hate crimes and hate groups themselves spreading virally through the internet in their temes, millennialism is also spreading rampantly. Aww, come on. Ain’t you heared? The Mayan calendar says the world is going to end December 21, 2012. The planets will align and NASA images and calculations prove it and that had nothing to do with the fact that the Mayan calendar is based upon millennia of celestial observation and the revolutions of planets around our sun and the changes in the positions of the stars caused by the same. It’s because they were right! Never mind that nowhere in Mayan writings do we see this end of the long count represented as a cataclysmic event, but instead simply as a transition from one age or era to another marked by a celestial event. It’s why there is no other possibility on the face of the planet other than Obama as the fulfillment of prophecy as the Anti-Christ!!!

I mean then you’ve got your paranoid conspiracy theories in general about the New World Order (and the Masons, and Jews, and Illuminati, and the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Bilderberg Group, and the Trilateral Commission). I’m telling you that some people who are otherwise honest, hard-working, intelligent people believe some pretty unbelievable stuff.

On that note, I’ll admonish you to read Skeptic’s Society Founder Michael Shermer’s Why People Believe Weird Things and watch his TED Talk by the same title.

The next time you hear, “I heard that…” or “Someone told me…” or “It is said that…” check your bullshit detector, please… And quit being so damn lazy and take some time to ferret out the truth of something for yourself than accepting anyone’s secondhand opinion…. Think: It’s patriotic.

Until next time, this is your favorite Dutch boy sticking his finger in the dike and admonishing you:

Don’t drink the kool-aid!!!

del.icio.us Tags: false consensus effect,teme,meme,memetics,memology,birthers,Bill Maher,Susan Blackmore,Diane Benscoter,false consensus bias,social comparison theory,social reinforcement,normative social influence,social impact theory,paranoid conspiracy theories,New World Order,Council on Foreign Relations,Bilderberg Group,Illuminati,John Birch Society,United Nations,black helicopters,martial law,civil unrest,Anti-Christ,Obama,Jewish banking hegemony

Lincoln Reconsidered (and he's still one of my heroes)...

nostrugglenoprogress@gmail.com (Doctor Jones) — Thu, 9 Jul 2009 16:07:00 -0700

Abraham Lincoln is consistently ranked as one of our nation's "best" presidents in the eyes of scholars and historians. Polls of Americans will also reveal that he is one of our most beloved leaders.

In January 2009, Barack Obama insisted upon being sworn into office on Lincoln's bible and has tried through transfer fallacy (glory by association) to insinuate himself as a sort of modern day Lincoln or at least the fulfillment of Lincoln's promise in the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment that ended slavery in being the first African-American American President (although his father was Kenyan and he is not descended from slaves).

I think regardless of our political views, those of us with any intellect at all threw up in our mouths a little through such brazen plainsfolk demagoguery and logical fallacy... But I suppose it got the last president elected, so I suppose this is the bread and circuses necessity of any contender for the highest office in the land in 21st Century America, and a fact of life for us today...

It's interesting that the personage of Lincoln bears such an indelible mark on American history regardless. Some question counterfactually if Lincoln would be remembered in the way he is if he was not martyred in his assassination by John Wilkes Booth with his imortal words "Sic semper tyrannis!" (thus always to tyrants).

Traditional treatments of Lincoln following the Civil War well into the 20th Century often portrayed Lincoln as "The Great Emancipator," and treated the Civil War as the war to end slavery. A good deal of scholarship in the late 20th Century emerged with new interpretations that sort of de-elevated Lincoln from nearly a level of deity in the origin myth that had become our national pageant to the level of a consummate politician whose motivations were just as noble but also less so than most of our treatments in history texts or classrooms might have suggested. Permit me to explain.

He was definitely a moderate on the issue of slavery. The famous Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 between Stephen A. Douglas and Abraham Lincoln for one of Illinois' two U.S. Senate seats underscore this point. My first exposure to this extremely valid revisionistic history on the basis of these debates comes in one of my history classes in college and references to a collection of essays titled, "Lincoln Reconsidered."

My first exposure to any suggestion that Lincoln was not the great emancipator he'd been painted to be in my grade school and junior high experiences and history text books were these juxtapositions of quotations from him in one of my college level history classes. The first was an excerpt from the August 21, 1858 debate at Ottawa, Illinois:

"I agree with Judge Douglas he [the black man] is not my equal in many respects-certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man."

Or, again, this quote from the September 18, 1858 Charleston, IL Lincoln-Douglas debate:

"I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race. I say upon this occasion I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position the negro should be denied everything. I do not understand that because I do not want a negro woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife. My understanding is that I can just let her alone."

This quote was contrasted against Lincoln's assertion that Jefferson's words in the Declaration of Independence applied to blacks ("We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable [sic] rights, amongst them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.") and his June 16, 1858 Springfield, IL "House Divided" Speech, in which he said, "I believe this government cannot endure permanently half Slave and half Free." It was also contextualized by his unequivocal remarks about expansion of slavery to the new territories in the same August 21, 1858 Ottawa, IL debate:

"This declared indifference, but, as I must think, covert real zeal for the spread of slavery, I cannot but hate. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world-enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites-causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity, and especially because it forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty-criticizing the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest."

So, this juxtaposition from the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 (after which the individual values debate format American high schoolers participate in across America annually derives its namesake) does a good job of starting to reveal the truth of the claim that Lincoln was not the abolitionist many Southerners and even his contender for the Illinois Senate seat sought to portray him to be and further illuminates that his views were truly moderate for his day. He disappointed slavers and abolitionists alike in his stance for compensated emancipation and his initial anti-expansionist approach (he thought his power to end slavery was limited by the Constitution so he sought the gradual extinction of slavery expected by our founding fathers by prohibiting expansion of slavery to new territories and supporting compensated emancipation [in which the federal government would compensate states monetarily for outlawing slavery in their state], which would hopefully make slavery less economical) which were seen as far too moderate by both sides. Both Douglas and Lincoln tried desperately to portray the other as an extremist on this issue in these debates, and they present a fascinating case study of the evolution of ideas in the minds of our greatest leaders and in the study of rhetoric and persuasion of public opinion. The timeless aphorism that you can't please everyone seems fitting here. The political genius of a moderate who understood well the issues of his day also comes into view more the more that we actually try to analyze Lincoln's true feelings and motivations.

Then it seems common fare for historians to obligatorily explain that the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863 (announced on September 22, 1862) did not free slaves in the Union border slave states that had not seceded (KY, MO, MD, DE; also, TN, WV, and 13 parishes of Louisianna and New Orleans were also exempted), and only freed them in Confederate States (areas not already under Union control). So, contary to conventional wisdom, it did not free the slaves, and only the 13th Amendment did so. It would seem then that abolishing slavery in Confederate states became an express war objective after the first of January in 1863 for two reasons: (a) the Union could cripple Confederate supply lines by offering freedom to the slaves that were critical to them, and (b) the Union could simultaneously add critical manpower and increase their already superior numerical advantage. Passage of the Emancipation Proclamation shows that Lincoln had the support of Congress in freeing the slaves of the rebels. Many white northerners were afraid that masses of freed slaves would invade the North and take their jobs; other feared violent slave rebellions in the south and murders of their former masters. Union soldier primary sources suggest a continuum that ran from celebration to outright outrage amongst Union soldiers who did not wish to fight alongside 'niggers' and were risking their lives to save the union, not to 'free niggers.'

In an August 1862 reply to an editorial penned by influential newspaper editor Horace Greeley of the influential New York Tribune on the topic of emancipation, Lincoln said:

"I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be 'the Union as it was.' ... My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views. I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free."

Lastly, courtesy of Fritz Klein, who is a Lincoln impersonator, who visited Jackson, WY for a Teaching American History grant of which I'm a proud part, I learned about the Corwin Amendment, and Lincoln's advocacy of it.

On March 2, 1861, Congress (less the Southern Confederate states) passed with a 2/3 majority an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that read, "No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State."

In other words, it would have been amendment that could not have been repealed (legal scholars would question an amendment that limits the power to do the same in the future as guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution) and that would permanently grandfather and protect slavery in the United States. The amendment was a last-ditch effort to prevent the outbreak of Civil War between the secession crisis of November of 1860 and the bombardment of Fort Sumpter by the Confederacy that began the Civil War in April of 1861.

President Lincoln supported this amendment as evidenced by the discovery of a letter to Florida Governor Madison S. Perry by the Lehigh County Historical Society of Allentown, PA. Lincoln sent this form letter in his own hand to the governors of every state, including southern states that had already seceded from the Union in order to avert war and preserve the Union.

And this returns me to my original point about the Civil War not being a war fought to end slavery, but being a war fought to preserve the Union. I really came to appreciate over this spring and summer Lincoln's precarious position--one I doubt any of us would have envied. We have to remember that the Civil War began less than a century after the founding of our country, and amongst the intelligentsia of the old world, the American democratic experiment was something of a farce and a joke. Our founding father Alexander Hamilton's words might illuminate some of this sentiment:

"All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are rich and well born; the other, the mass of the people. The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the government. They will check the unsteadiness of the second; and as they cannot receive any advantage by change, they will therefore maintain good government."

We cannot forget that in much of the rest of the world, there were two classes of people: royalty/aristocracy/gentry versus serfs/peasants/vassals. Elitists saw their relative position as being either ordained by God or determined through Social Darwinism, and thought the idea of radical equality preposterous. This great democratic experiment that no one really took seriously and about which everyone really expected failure had inspired the French Revolution which had failed miserably to the pleasure of the European elitist establishment. The failure of the American experiment in republican self government was necessarily doomed to failure and European elites saw the writing on the wall in the Civil War. Lincoln feared (and probably correctly) that European powers looked upon the American Civil War as the ultimate demise of democracy, which explains his near desperation to do anything (including enshrining slavery permanently and irrevocably into the American Constitution) to preserve the union in order to vindicate the radical ideas of our founding fathers in radical equality and self government.

The Civil War for the Union was about protecting democracy, radical equality, and self government. Lincoln rightly feared that European powers, and particularly England would enter the war on the behalf of the Confederacy in order to finally squash the new nation in its infancy and serve a commeuppance on those upstart rebels who'd humiliated them with the French not a century earlier, and that is why Gettysburg is such an important battle as it delineates the turning point in the war and discourages England and other European powers from getting involved on the Confederacy's behalf to squash this democratic republican farce.

Nothing could be more revealing of Lincoln's motivations and thoughts than his succinct, eloquent, and erudite remarks at the Gettysburg address...

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate...we can not consecrate...we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government: of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

In this context, I cannot help but appreciate and understand the bloodiest war in American history more than I ever have. What might this world look like today without it? Might England have entered on behalf of the South? Might we see Jefferson Davis as we see George Washington today? Robert E. Lee as we see Ulysses S. Grant? Might you or I be slaves forever to an unjust and brutal master as the U.S. Constitution might forever enshrine and protect slavery instead of the 13th Amendment?

I will say in defense of Lincoln that although he supported Liberian re-colonization of Africa with freed slaves, after the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation, he vigorously and personally lobbied for the passage of the 13th Amendment. As an historian, I do believe by the end of his life, where he might have questioned or at least only reluctantly admitted the possibility that blacks and whites were truly equal, he had finally come to understand the evils of slavery and vehemently and vociferously became the champion of America's slaves. And for that, he does deserve to be remembered as their champion. He ultimately gave his life for them indirectly although his direct objective was to preserve the Union and protect and preserve this radical experiment that we know as America today. I can't disparage him for either.

An Anecdote (or Two...)

nostrugglenoprogress@gmail.com (Doctor Jones) — Wed, 27 May 2009 19:58:00 -0700

Laura prompted me to write this blog. I agree. It's interesting to hear personal stories and oral histories. As I read others relating their short anecdotes, I became painfully aware of just how abnormal most of the stories I could share are... But I won't be afraid to share my abnormal ones because they're the only stories I have to share.

The clichéd formulaic answer repeated ad nauseum to the question about whether or not one has any regrets that one doesn't regret anything because one's experiences made them who they are has always bothered me. While I reluctantly agree with hesitation, I think such statements rob the power of the past to teach.

Well, I have regrets. The story I'll relate here is about regret that I'll go to my grave lamenting.

I suppose I wanted to pick a story that taught me a lesson, and one I've never forgotten and am unwilling to ever forget.

First, the back story...

ANECDOTE 1: Explaining the Doctor

As many of you know, my cousin and I were born nine days apart. He was supposed to be the first grandchild, but while my mother was in Cheyenne testifying before the DEA in a futile attempt to elicit cooperation from the feds in trying to get my kidnapped cousins back from Colombia and Jaime Cordoba, an independent competitor of the Cali cartel (we could call them the Bogotá cartel). That's another tale for another day, and one I actually hope to write a book about one day should my family permit me to do the oral histories and write.

I think it originates with my mom and her sisters (my grandfather had four daughters in the attempt to have a son to carry on the family name which died with him and his childless nephew) and their competition in a home in which they were raised with fairly stoic and unaffectionate parents, but my mom and her sisters are and always have been hypercompetitive. When I have a significant other, I always have to warn that board games are blood sport in my family and that nobody is a good sport about it either.

In any event, my mother and my cousin Shane's mother decided somewhat subconsciously that it would be wise to start a cousin-rivalry (lacking siblings) between my cousin and I. Whose child was the strongest? The smartest? The best looking? Who could buy their child the bigger, better toy at our birthday-time (which was sometimes shared)? Whose child reached the developmental milestones first?

The tale told by silent 8 mm home video from the late 1970s tells the tale in moving pictures. Age 3 or 4. Shane's birthday party (a separate one from my own this year). I'm the happy giggly child who is getting all of the attention from everyone, including his own parents. He's the crying child in the corner who always is crying. I was the stronger child. I was the smarter child. And I was walking and potty trained by age one and the definition of an overachiever as such... I was a preemie (born six weeks premature; 4 lbs., 11 oz.), so I did have a lot to make up for after the incubator. I was the favored child and grandchild; no doubt about it.

Needless to say, my cousin grew up with a visceral and mortal hatred of me. I can’t say that I blame him.

Now, when it comes to the 'ideal' American aesthetic, most of us prefer blonde hair, blue eyes, symmetry, and slimness as generalizations. Much research has been done here to explain aesthetics in terms of evolutionary biology and before I digress on a discursive lecture about the problematic nature of ideas of 'beauty' and 'ugliness' (it is an error to think just because one person finds one attractive, others will, for instance; beauty is truly in the eye of the beholder so when we speak about the 'ideal' aesthetic, we're basically talking about the 'mean' preference only), I ought just say that I speak of this 'ideal' tongue-in-cheek. In any event, one study that I need to find the official reference to that I know has been reproduced involves kindergarteners. Evolutionary psychologists will expose one group of kindergarteners to a highly qualified teacher with a master's degree and years of experience while they expose the second group to a person they pulled off of the street with no formal education that happens to conform better to that 'ideal' aesthetic. Kindergarteners will consistently rank the 'better looking' teacher as the better teacher, irrespective of what assessment scores reveal about what students have actually learned and who is, in all actuality, the better teacher.

Well, my cousin skipped the Finnish genes and got his father's voracious metabolism. While I wasn't obese, I was husky growing up. He also got blonde hair and blue eyes. Go figure. HE was the boy all of the girls wanted to kiss when we played kiss chase on the playground in kindergarten and the first grade. Naturally, all of the boys hated him but also wanted to be his best friend. He became the most popular kid in my grade, and eventually in our elementary school. I'm sure you've predicted the outcome, non?

Of course he used his social power to make my life a living hell. I did have one friend in kindergarten from whom I was separated because our teacher told our moms we talked too much, but thanks to my cousin, I didn't have another single solitary lasting friend (there was Steve in the second grade for a month or two, but his parents moved; then there was Javier but his father was abusive and he was placed in foster care) until really the fifth grade. A few folks were friendly with me (thank you), but, mostly, nobody wanted to be my friend courtesy of my cousin Shane. And the irony is that the truly obese kids made fun of me for being fat. The glasses kids, the short kids, the poor hygiene kids, the poor kids, well, I suppose they were just glad it was someone else for a change. And there was no one lower on the pecking order, so I got it from everyone. My favorite taunts were Terrible Tits Thompson and Two Ton Tub of Lard.

I would complain to playground monitors, teachers, and principals, but was told that I'd better "get a thicker skin," because if they did anything, "it would just make it harder on me." My favorite childhood memory was going into the lunch room. Daily, I had learned my role was to sit at the least occupied table at the least occupied end of that table. When I would move toward that table, wherever it was, everyone without exception would get up and move to a different table. Daily, then, as if on cue, about half of the kids in the lunch room would find endless glee in acting as an earthquake had hit when I went to take a seat. Again, this was so ironic to me because I was hardly obese, and the truly obese kids were never made fun of for being fat. I'm sure they supped at the sublime table of my ridicule silently aware that I was nowhere near as fat as they.

And this is where I develop my overly and painfully cerebral identity and personality. Unlike most normal children, my joy in going to school was going into the library early to read books about the paranormal. Think male version of Mathilde without magical powers. And where my peers had stolen from me my dignity with words of verbal rape, the one thing I could feel good about myself was my intellect. Where others struggled in school, I excelled. I was the kid in the back of the class going, "Ooh, ooh, ooh! Pick me, pick me," because I always knew the answer. So, it was like, okay, so I'm fat and ugly and nobody wants me or likes me, but I'm smarter than you and I'm going to make sure you know it. I remember my sixth grade teacher teaching me how to finally fight back with words like, "You're just an obsequious sycophant with hanging participles." And so began the self-fulfilling prophecy of my social isolation.

Every poor decision I have made in my life is informed by a low self esteem and the basic human need to be loved and accepted and to belong--from smoking to the lovely choices I've made in romantic partners.

So my rambling point here is that I, of all people, should know how words can destroy someone.

Fast forward.

ANECDOTE TWO: THE KING OF HYPOCRISY

One day in the eighth grade, walking home from school toward Highland Park Cemetary, I was happy to see my friends. They were smoking cigarettes and I was about to light up too and to offer my mother's stolen cigarettes to my friends as the price of our friendship, but today from a distance, I could tell something was going on... I realize today we were America's slumdogs. They were in a circle around something. Thinking it was a fight, I picked up speed so I could try to put a stop to it. As I got closer, I realized it was a person.

As I got even closer, I recognized the person. It was Reeka. Nobody liked Reeka. She'd spontaneously urinate herself in the middle of class, and I think that was the primary basis of people's hatred of her. I remember people fighting over not sitting in the desk she'd peed earlier that day in Ms. Kaiser's classroom. The next year, she got caught with David outside of Ms. Stafford's room having sex.

As I came in proximity, I noticed that my friends were violently ripping magazines from her arms that were preciously clutching them as if they were some priceless treasure. They were spitting on her. The things they said to her were so vile that I cannot now for the life of me remember a single one. And for once in my life, I was just glad it wasn't me. I did something that I will go to my grave regretting. I joined them. I called her a loser. I told her that nobody liked her and that noboy wanted her. The only redeeming thing I saw from myself that afternoon is that I told my friends she had enough and to leave her alone. They did.

When I got home, I went to my room and cried and cried and cried for the words that left my mouth. I had to go and confess to my mother, a teacher at the very school both Reeka and I attended. I don't think I've ever seen my mother look more disappointed. I started crying again, and my mother made me promise to never tell anyone (sorry mom, I've got a big mouth) as she was breaking confidentiality by telling me, but she told me that the reason Reeka urinated herself in class is that she was repeatedly raped for years by her father. And those magazines she clutched like a treasure? Well, her family was too poor to afford any books growing up and she was learning how to read in junior high and Ms. Kaiser gave those magazines to her (I'm crying now; Reeka, I'm so sorry) so she could practice learning how to read.

I will never, ever forgive myself for what I did. As a young adult, the heavens gave me the opportunity to apologize. I ran into Reeka scheduling a child development screening for my son. In near tears, I had to apologize profusely to her.

I use this story to teach my kids why ridiculing, even in a joking way, is not acceptable in my classroom. What if my words were the last she needed to hear to end herself?

Americans have a lot of apologizing to do. And the sick and sad thing is most of the people who have apologizing they need to do are oblivious...

Klebold and Harris... "Where were their parents?!?" the sickening meme went... Excuse me, but where were the parents of the children who ridiculed them their entire lives and why can't they take any of the responsibility for raising such thoroughly heartless children? I'm not saying their actions were justified. To the contrary. But there was such an opportunity there to talk about something we as a culture have normalized as a "fact of life" or "rite of passage" that was squandered playing the blame game. I always like to remember that when one points one's finger, three of one's fingers point squarely back at the one doing the pointing.

Was the Pentagon hit by a plane on 9/11?

nostrugglenoprogress@gmail.com (Doctor Jones) — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 11:56:00 -0700

Loose Change and other films further the false idea that the Pentagon was not struck by a plane on 9/11. I think there's no question that it was. The 9/11 Truthers, PrisonPlanet/Infowars fringe folk I think really do unfortunately discredit by association the truly troubling facts of 9/11 (Moussoui, 8/27 President's Daily Briefing, Phoenix Memo, Coleen Rowley, Able Danger, Harry Samet, Sibel Edmunds) by their truly outlandish and suspect claims. I think like Keane said (Republican ex-governor of New Jersey and chair of the 9/11 Commission), if history is to be remembered correctly, then it must be said that this administration had sufficient specific, actionable intelligence to have prevented 9/11 and failed to act.

Save the bankers...

nostrugglenoprogress@gmail.com (Doctor Jones) — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 16:15:00 -0700

Worth a laugh...

Spoiled: Local and organic is so 2008...

nostrugglenoprogress@gmail.com (Doctor Jones) — Mon, 2 Mar 2009 21:50:00 -0800

I found this article very interesting and thought I'd share it.

MotherJones: Spoiled: Local and Organic is soo 2008.

Obama is the Anti-Christ AND/OR Hitler...

nostrugglenoprogress@gmail.com (Doctor Jones) — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 20:20:00 -0800

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Unusual Suspect

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Joke of the Day

Ayn Rand egoists eat boiled crow...

nostrugglenoprogress@gmail.com (Doctor Jones) — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 18:14:00 -0800

Scientific American: Forget Survival of the Fittest: It Is Kindness that Counts: A psychologist probes how altruism, Darwinism and neurobiology mean that we can succeed by not being cutthroat.

Coen brothers take on clean coal...

nostrugglenoprogress@gmail.com (Doctor Jones) — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 18:08:00 -0800